A GIRL IN BLACK (To koritsi me ta mavra)

Critical Culture [Pacze Moj]

BBC Talking Movies [Scott Andrews]

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]

The New York Times (Dana Stevens) review

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo – film writer

A Scattered Homage to Guillermo Cabrera Infante Victor Fowler Calzada from Rouge

Cacoyannis, Michael

Cacoyannis, Michael from World Cinema

Greek Cypriot film director, also theatre director, editor and producer. After law studies in Britain, Cacoyannis became a producer for the BBC's wartime Greek-language broadcasts, simultaneously attending drama school and acting on stage. He went to Greece in 1952, where he directed his first feature, Kiriakatiko xipnima / Windfall in Athens (1954). He worked with facility in both the theatre and the cinema, directing critically acclaimed films such as Stella (1955) and To koritsi me ta mavra / The Girl in Black (1956). These films were distinguished by their sensitive treatment of contemporary Greek issues, use of authentic locations and promising new actors (Elli Lambeti, Giorgos Foundas, and Melina Mercouri, who made her screen debut in Stella). With those of Nikos Koundouros, Cacoyannis' films were the first independent Greek productions to attract international attention. In 1962 he directed Ilektra / Electra, the first of a trilogy of adaptations of Euripides tragedies, and in 1964 he achieved international fame with the US production of Zorba the Greek, starring Anthony Quinn and based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. Zorba the Greek remains his biggest success. His next film, The Day the Fish Came Out (1967), an international production, was by comparison an anti-climax. Cacoyannis returned to Greek productions without the results his early career had seemed to promise.

— Thomas Nedelkos, Encylopedia of European Cinema

STELLA

Greece (110 mi) 1955

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

Based on the play Stella with the Red Gloves by Iakovos Kambanellis, and noted as the first Greek film to gain international attention, Michael Cacoyannis' (Zorba The Greek) 1955 feature Stella follows the passions of a popular young bouzouki café performer who refuses her traditional role as a woman in Greek society.

We are introduced to the main character, Stella (Melina Mercouri), as a woman who enjoys the effect she has on men. Her opening scene displays a performance at the club where she works, as she prances about while singing a seductive song to the backing of a bouzouki ensemble. Her current boyfriend Aleko (Alekos Alexandrakis) is seen getting a warning from a young girl who objects to Stella's treatment of men—discarding them as she moves on to newer territories. Aleko will do anything for Stella, including buying her the piano she wants. When Aleko tries to get Stella to commit to him, she instead sets her sights on a soccer star name Milto (George Foundas—Never On Sunday, Zorba The Greek), spurning her lover's affections, and driving him to illness with tragic consequences.

As her heated relationship with Milto progresses, Stella eventually falls in love, but when faced with the ultimatum of a marriage proposal, she must decide between her love for Milto, the freedom she loves so much and the imprisonment she fears in marriage. Her decision ultimately seals the fate of both herself and her new lover, as the consequences of love, pride and freedom fall into place.

The film itself is frequented by high energy musical pieces, fueled by the frantic bouzouki music (written by Manos Hatzidakis) that provides much of the soundtrack. Shot in and around Athens, the Greek culture is infused in the film. It won a Golden Globe® for Best Foreign Picture in 1956.

This was Mercouri's (Never On Sunday) first feature film in an emotionally charged role written expressly for her. Following Oscar® and BAFTA nominations and the Cannes prize for Best Actress for her role in Pote tin Kyriaki (1960), Mercouri would go on to become the Greek Minister of Culture responsible for the return of artifacts to her homeland. Here we have her first screen appearance, that featured realistic and passionate love scenes that would have been highly controversial for their time.

A GIRL IN BLACK (To koritsi me ta mavra)

Greece (94 mi) 1956

Wade Major from Boxoffice magazine (link lost):

Best known for 1964's "Zorba The Greek," director Michael Cacoyannis stands tall among the many great European auteurs to emerge in wake of such seminal 1950s movements as the French New Wave and Italian Neo-realism. Clearly influenced by the likes of Truffaut and Rossellini, Cacoyannis' pastoral, character-driven glimpses into the lives and loves of average Greeks remain striking examples of a poetically realistic national cinema that sadly never failed to spark beyond the contributions of its most famous practitioner. Four of Cacoyannis' most renowned works comprise Winstar's "Michael Cacoyannis Collection" on DVD, beginning with 1955's strikingly realistic "Stella," the story of a fiercely independent singer and the two lovers who cannot live without her. In 1956, Cacoyannis' international reputation grew with "A Girl In Black," in which a hard-luck writer finds the small-town atmosphere on a small island to be markedly less than idyllic after he becomes involved with a scorned family. The myth of the wealthy Greek bourgeois is attacked in 1958's "A Matter of Dignity," in which the daughter of a wealthy industrialist finds herself forced to choose between status and love. Having made many of his films on a shoestring budget and with limited resources, Cacoyannis was well-suited to the demands of guerilla documentary filmmaking when, in 1974, he and a crew of two arrived on the island of Cyprus to document the Turkish invasion which resulted in the division that continues to this day. Many consider the resulting film, "Attilla '74: The Rape of Cyprus," to be Cacoyannis' most heartfelt and heart-breaking work. As a set, the four DVDs represent an important piece of post-war European cinema's complex tapestry of styles and subjects, all the more compelling in view of how few films from the period deal with Greek culture and politics in any way at all. In fact, choosing any single one of them for distinction is virtually impossible. Considering the age and condition of many of the original elements, all four films feature impressive sound and video, and should really be purchased and viewed as a set.

WINDFALL IN ATHENS (Kyriakatiko xypnima)

Greece (95 mi) 1955

from the New York Times (link lost):

If Saturday's new import at the Cameo is any criterion, Greek films have taken a decided turn for the better. At any rate, the pleasant, if trifling, little romantic comedy called "Windfall in Athens" deserves a polite welcome after a series of ragged eyesores.

The distributors, Arista Films, announce it as the first Greek entry ever accepted in a European screen festival. Even more interesting is the fact that a 29-year-old stripling named Michael Cacoyanis, who bears watching, both wrote and directed it.

Equipped with rather tentative English titles, the result is pretty reasonable lightweight fun. In a head-on dispute over a winning lottery ticket, a nice young girl and a young musician meet, square off and, to nobody's surprise, we hope, fall in love.

As the warring but smitten protagonists, Elli Lambetti and Dimitri Horn are natural and all too human. But it is the suave charm of Georges Pappas, as a lonely, middleaged lawyer infatuated with Miss Lambetti, that steadies the picture, and redeems some coy, dawdling stretches.

Even so, it's nice to have a good-natured Greek picture with a little technical finesse. Judging by the opening and closing scenes, Athenian sleepers certainly take their time about hitting the floor in the morning. But they do get up.

ELECTRA (Ilektra)

Greece USA (110 mi) 1962

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)

At long last, a worthy screen rendering of a classic Greek drama has been achieved in the film of Euripides' "Electra," which opened at the Beekman yesterday.

Indeed, this pictorial translation of one of the greatest Greek tragedies, produced and directed by Michael Cacoyannis in ancient dress and on locations in Greece, amounts to a brilliant utilization of the cinematic device to transmute the gold of verbal poetry from one to another art form.

Where previous attempts to make movies from the Greek classics have generally mired in the heavy going of too much declamation of the original poetic dialogue, this film avoids that dangerous pitfall by going to the other extreme and swinging wide of a form of presentation that is physically hitched to the structure of the stage.

Clearly, Mr. Cacoyannis knows you can't photograph words, that a medium as visual as motion pictures must not put too much dependence on the ear. Also, he sees that the contours of the drama in the Greek tragedies are so massive and elemental that they may be suggested and impressed upon the eye with a proper and tasteful presentation of graphic images.

Thus, he has made this "Electra" a powerful address to the eyes. He has taken his company outdoors and set it against the countryside, against great sweeping vistas of rugged landscape and eloquent stretches of sky.

The episode of Agamemnon's murder, engineered by his faithless wife in league with her lover, Aegisthus, is played beneath the great empty vault of heaven, so that base immensity of it is awesomely implied. And the torments of their daughter, Electra as she lives with the horror of this deed and her inevitable passion for vengeance, are graphically communicated in the harsh and barren aspects of her home in exile in a peasant's hut.

The inner fires of Electra are also made eloquent by the heroic appearance and performance of Irene Papas in this role. Seldom has a face or conveyance of the human figure so beautifully depicted the nature and the passion of a character as do Miss Papas here. Her eyes and the gestures say quite as much as the few words—the comparatively few words—she has to utter in expressing her grief and pain.

Aleka Catselli as Clytemnestra, the faithless mother, is a graphic figure of poetic contours, too—a glittering, soulless creature, who, in her confrontation scene with Electra, is a strong sense of frigid majesty. And Yannis Fertis, as Orestes, and others complete the superlative performance of the classic role.

A brilliant musical score by Mikis Catodorakis and the camera work of Walter Lassally contributes to what undoubtedly is to be a screen classic.

ZORBA THE GREEK (Alexis Zorbas)

Greece Great Britain USA (142 mi) 1964

Chicago Reader (capsule) Dave Kehr

Michael Cacoyannis's remake of Auntie Mame, played in Greek drag with Anthony Quinn as a peasant packed with Life Force and Alan Bates as the dried-up British intellectual who learns how to dance and drink ouzo. It's false art of the most deplorable kind, but it has a few fresh moments amid its fuzzy pretensions. Mikis Theodorakis's buzzy score is still a Muzak favorite. With Irene Papas and Lila Kedrova (1964).

How is it possible that Anthony Quinn is not really Greek? His performance in the title role here is iconic, and not just in movie terms—Zorba has become an emblem for all things Hellenic in many respects, the very personification of the modern Greek nation. That's quite a mantle for an actor of even Quinn's charisma to carry, and if Michael Cacoyannis's film of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel occasionally seems a little fleshy and overblown, at its heart is Quinn, in a career-defining role as a character who transcends the very movie in which he appears.

In many respects, Zorba the Greek is structured as a classic coming-of-age story, focusing on Basil, a young Englishman, a bookish sort, returning to his father's land in Crete, to set right the family business. On his journey from the mother country Basil meets up with Zorba, who lives hard and plays hard; Zorba convinces Basil to hire him on, and together they will undertake the business project of resurrecting the fallow logging business. You can probably figure out exactly where the relationship between these two is headed for the next two hours after just a couple of minutes—the buttoned-down younger man with literary aspirations and the earthy, slightly vulgar ethnic older man, close to the land, the free spirit, who will teach his protégé grand lessons about women, about work, about life. There's a certain amount of what Nabokov would summarily dismiss as poshlost, and you've got to have some tolerance for more than a little sentimentality to enjoy the movie.

But if you do, it's a fine old time, and not just because of Quinn. A young Alan Bates plays Basil, an underwritten part that's almost more type than human being; Bates invests him with a gentle soul. And let us not give short shrift to the women of the picture, either. Lila Kedrova is probably the most notable, as Madame Hortense, the patently absurd widow who has buried four husbands; she still holds out hope for love, for Zorba, and can preen a giggle like a coquette when overcome with emotion. Her clothes are ratty in a Blanche Du Bois sort of way and she's severely overrouged; it's easy to make fun of Madame Hortense, and many do. But there's something genuinely moving here, toward the end of the picture especially, and the character's last scenes may put you in mind of Falstaff, or Don Quixote, the comic figure confronting the great mystery of life.

Equally compelling, in a more understated and downright smoldering performance, is Irene Papas as the unnamed local widow, dangerously alluring to the men of the village, with a special energy between her and the young Englishman. With not many words or scenes, Papas conveys the emotional wounds of the character, in a performance in the manner of Anna Magnani. Zorba wants to school Basil in the lessons of courtship, and knows in his heart that the widow is the proper object of his student's amorous advances; no good comes of this, however, and we soon realize that we don't know very much about the ways of the village; neither does Basil; and, apparently, neither does Cacoyannis, which is a major deficiency in the filmmaking.

The man-as-force-of-nature thing is a favorite motif here (Zorba rails at the topography: "You bastard mountain!"), but it's forgivable if only for the spectacle of Zorba dancing. He's not graceful, exactly, but his dance is some sort of primal expression, combining athleticism, power, drive, sexuality, clumsiness. Zorba admits himself that there's nothing delicate about him, and there isn't much delicate about his movie, either—but when Quinn dances with ferocity, and even teaches the buttoned-down Bates some of his steps, the scenes can be transporting.

Reel.com DVD review [Kim Morgan]

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also seen here: Turner Classic Movies

eFilmCritic Reviews Slyder

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

DVD Verdict Bill Treadway

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Scott C

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

ATTILA ’74: THE RAPE OF CYPRUS (Attilas '74)

Greece (103 mi) 1975

Mini Reviews (July 2011) - Reviews by David Nusair - Reel Film Reviews

Director Michael Cacoyannis' documentary Attila '74: The Rape of Cyprus chronicles the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, facilitated in part by the military junta that came to power in the 1960's by exploiting many Cypriots' desire to unite with neighboring Greece. The film consists largely of interviews, oral history hot off the press—Cacoyannis rushed to Cyprus with a small crew (himself, a cameraman and a sound engineer) to record the immediate aftermath of the invasion. The film is in English and Greek with "burned-in" English subtitles (subject to occasional typographical errors) that can't be turned off.

Cacoyannis gained an impressive level of access to political figures for his film, who share their recollections of and theories about the invasion. Archbishop Makarios, onetime President of Cyprus, tells of the junta's efforts to reduce his influence by falsely announcing his death, and an interview with a member of the junta government poses some pointed questions. Political background is discussed—the junta apparently planned to split Cyprus with Turkey, and references are made to collusion by US CIA forces and Henry Kissinger, though these theories aren't explored deeply.

But the political aspects of the situation do not dominate Attila '74. This is an intensely personal documentary—native Cypriot Cacoyannis made it his mission to document the human cost of the brief war in his homeland. Unflinching interviews describe families destroyed and homes lost, and the camera records refugees' grief and desperate searches for lost and missing family members. Cyprus' cultural museum is shown with its glass cases empty, centuries of history lost or destroyed by the conflict that lost significant parts of Cyprus to Turkey. In one difficult-to-watch scene, a young boy recounts the fates of his siblings and parents, gradually losing his emotional composure as he relives an extremely traumatic experience.

As a documentary, Attila '74 provides enough historical background to set the stage, but its chief strength is its "you are there" quality. Shot while the tragedy was still unfolding, the film is free of academic distance, diagrams, and "expert" overanalysis. Instead, Cacoyannis provides a disturbing, vivid look at how one nation's politics nearly destroyed its own population and culture.

Tall Armenian Tale

Cadigan, John

PEOPLE SAY I’M CRAZY B 85

USA (84 mi) 2003

At the urging of his film-oriented sister, the director uses film as therapy to document his own attempts to recover from schizophrenia, including acute catatonic episodes where he is frozen and can’t move, too fearful of the paranoia which envelops him, rarely able to leave his own home. After several institutionalizations and unsuccessful electro-shock treatments, the realization that he may never recover and may have to spend the rest of his life in a dreary group home leaves him hopeless and emotionally devastated. We see sessions with his therapist, interactions with his brother and two sisters, as well as his mother, all of whom try to be supportive, but they can’t penetrate his wall of delusions where he constantly feels people are out to get him and do him harm. Despite moments of clarity where he happily works in an art studio, we see his horrible daily struggle of always believing the worst, filled with violent mental images that continuously haunt him, especially during his morning dread, where he feels he may lose the battle and may actually cause others harm, then tries to convince himself that what he’s thinking is not true, yet he feels exasperated and suicidal at what continually passes through his mind, worn down from the futility of trying to control these thoughts. His life improves somewhat with new medicine, which offers him small hopes, but he gains 100 pounds as a side effect. While the film is raw, amateurish, and cinematically uneven, sometimes feeling overly clinical, it does present an ultimately frank and honest portrait of living with schizophrenia, sharing views and experiences we don’t normally see, capturing some extraordinarily personal moments, where bleakness is balanced with upbeat, almost tribal music written by Evelyn Glennie that matches the imagery in some of his artwork.

Caetano, Israel Adrián

CHRONICLE OF AN ESCAPE (Crónica de una fuga) B+ 90

aka: Buenos Aires, 1977

Argentina (103 mi) 2006

Using oblique camera angles, bleached out colors, and extreme close ups to heighten the sense of disorientation, there is a documentary style gritty realism to this adaptation of the autobiographical novel, Pase Libre, which tells the real life story of the 1977-78 kidnapping and torture of Argentinean professional soccer goalie Claudio Tamburinni (played by Rodrigo De la Serna) by ultra-right Argentinean para-military troops that rounded up suspected leftist citizens, blindfolded and secretly shackled them in captivity for months at a time in urban detention centers, basically abandoned homes in out of the way locations, interrogating and torturing them in a brutal attempt to gain access to any opposition network.

Though not a political activist, Tamburinni was suspected and held captive anyway. The film is a searing depiction of the daily psychological trauma inflicted on these young lives, attempting to break them down into compliant confessors, promising if they cooperate they will be freed quickly, yet they are held for months at a time, then one by one, individuals are “transferred” to unspecified locations, and a new round of prisoners are brought in. Told they will be freed, we see lines of prisoners tied together who are given injections before they are led away to waiting cars never to be seen again. Some 30,000 citizens went missing during this time period, and most if not all were presumably killed.

We come to realize one house is filled with rooms of captives, each isolated and alone, until eventually all have been disposed of but four remaining prisoners. This film closely follows those four prisoners who were blindfolded, beaten, stripped naked and chained to beds, yet somehow managed to escape through a locked window, which, once opened, changes the entire texture of the film, creating an extreme degree of tautly constructed tension. To its credit, the film never shows acts of physical mutilation, but we see the cuts, burned scars and black marks that riddle their bodies, leaving them looking like near corpses when they finally run naked into the streets, where strangers peer at them like they’re the problem. The final images of the film are hauntingly beautiful, adding a poetic release to this pressurized, tightly constricted work, cinematography by Julián Apezteguia and music by Iván Wyszogrod. Three of these prisoners eventually testified in the 1985 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, which led to the sentencing of five retired generals and admirals to prison terms for human rights abuses committed during the so-called "Dirty War."

Chronicle of an Escape Nick Pinkerton from the Village Voice

A Soccer Player’s Ordeal in an Argentine Prison Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Cahill, Mike

ANOTHER EARTH B- 82

USA (92 mi) 2011

This is another example of once you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen too much, as nearly the entire story is revealed in a highly condensed two minutes, leaving little suspense left in the theater, as you already know what to expect. From the outset, however, it should be said that the high definition look leaves something to be desired, as the colors and focus aren’t there, while the jiggling camera movement suggests unsteady hands, all contributing to a grainy, somewhat washed out look of video, making it look very much like it was made on a shoestring budget of $150,000. However, it does try to make the most with the least, using a minimum of plot development, continually using the power of suggestion to keep the appetites whetted. Basically it’s a one note effort, as the entire film is about the initial premise, the mysterious arrival of an identical mirror planet Earth right next to our own, called Earth 2, where duplicate versions of ourselves live their lives exactly as we’ve lived our own, where they have the exact same thoughts and lives as we’ve had. While the story is slow getting started, and is a bit preposterous to buy into, knowing the gravitational effect that the moon has on our planet, so imagine the effects of a planet as large as our own staring back at us in the sky? Instead, the filmmaker shows multiple shots of people walking down the streets, or on the sidewalks in front of their homes, or next to the ocean, projecting Earth 2 in the sky as our constant companion. Often people stop and literally stare into the sky to express their newly discovered interest. Years after this happens, yes, one must repeat, as it takes literally years for the two planets to make contact and realize they are mirror planets, where another version of ourselves lives up there. One wonders if their lives are any better than our own?

There is a secondary story that is told simultaneously, one that involves actors instead of planets, where Brit Marling plays 17-year old Rhoda, a high school senior who has just been accepted into the M.I.T astrophysics program on the night the new planet is discovered, staring into the sky while driving, causing a horrific accident, killing a pregnant wife and her children, leaving the husband in a lengthy coma. Rather than go to college, Rhoda is sent to prison for 4 years, where our earth is just making contact with the new planet by the time she gets out. Instead of filling a position designed to utilize her attributes, Rhoda wants little social contact, where she is still burying her head in the sand after the accident, and decides to get a job working as the high school janitor. Again, where there would likely be close to a dozen janitors or more, this school only has two, where she can be seen hiding her face under her hood and wearing a wool cap, where one imagines she may be too attractive to fit the role, but she’s also a co-writer along with the director, so she can do what she wants with the part. She googles articles about the accident and learns the address of the surviving father, now out of his coma, and decides to confront him, expressing her sympathy for his loss, but instead offers herself as available maid service, showing up weekly to clean his house which is mostly filled with empty liquor bottles. What she expects to accomplish from this can’t lead to anything good, but that issue is set aside for nearly the entire film, just waiting to appear again at some point. So there is something of a cringe factor involved at seeing her return to the scene of the crime week after week and lie about her presence, becoming something of a stalker, taking advantage of a man she doesn’t even know.

Of course, the movie sees it somewhat differently, overlooking all of the previous history, including the jail time, where there are no therapists, no parole officers, no help offered from any source except a single corporation that is offering one lucky winner the chance to fly free to the other planet based on an essay contest. Rhoda, of course, sends in an essay before she ever meets John (William Mapither), who slowly takes an interest in his new maid, eventually sobering up and realizing she even has a name. Quite surprised at her intelligence, he immediately falls for her, no surprise there, yet she’s still the stalker woman lying about her reasons for being there, even after they enter into a sexual liaison, where for many in the audience, this has really gone on too far. The film seems to take pleasure in overlooking the credibility factor, thinking Marling can sell the story, which for the most part she does, as she’s excellent in the role, especially in the way she never comes to terms with this single event in her life, something perhaps many can relate to. She gets a lot of mileage with her hangdog, sheepish expression, using little dialogue, just solitary images of her with Earth 2 hovering just overhead. But it all has to come to a head some way, some day. There’s no way anyone could predict the outcome, as the multitude of possibilities coming in contact with a duplicate of everything that exists on Earth is simply mind boggling, so there’s a lot to play with. The film offers a series of radio and TV broadcasts announcing the latest developments with this new planet, where one wonders if Rhoda being offered the chance at a new life there would do her any good, as that’s a long way to go to run away from the problems that exist here, suggesting there’s a duality that exists in all our feelings, good and bad, where every impulse generates a little bit of both. All these questions and more are asked by the film which does a good job keeping the audience guessing. Perhaps the most positive effect is the upbeat electronic music from the electro-rock band Fall On Your Sword, which brings the end credits down in style.

It's certainly not difficult to envision certain viewers walking away from Another Earth frustrated and annoyed, as the movie, which is essentially being marketed as a sci-fi fantasy, primarily comes off as a low-key drama revolving around two thoroughly damaged characters. Brit Marling, in a revelatory performance, stars as Rhoda Williams, an aspiring scientist whose life changes drastically after she's sent to prison for vehicular manslaughter - with the film subsequently detailing Rhoda's efforts at atoning for the deaths by helping William Mapother's John Burroughs, who lost his wife and child in the crash, get his life back together. (There is, of course, also a subplot revolving around the discovery of a second, seemingly identical Earth in our atmosphere.) It's clear right from the outset that director Mike Cahill, working from a script co-written with Marling, has virtually no interest in exploring the narrative's science-fiction-oriented elements, as the filmmaker places a predominant (and continuous) emphasis on Rhoda's almost extraordinarily subdued exploits - from her day job as a high-school janitor to her ongoing visits with Mapother's unbalanced character. There's little doubt, then, that Another Earth owes its mild success primarily to the riveting performances from its two leads, as both Marling and Mapother manage to transform their admittedly familiar characters into fully-developed and consistently-compelling figures. The sporadic inclusion of otherworldly elements - eg an engrossing, goosebump-inducing sequence involving first contact with the title locale - goes a long way towards compensating for the screenplay's pervasively uneventful sensibilities, and though the payoff for the Earth 2 subplot is, to put it mildly, far from spectacular (ie what does that final shot mean, exactly?), Another Earth ultimately establishes itself as a perfectly watchable indie that benefits from the stellar efforts of its stars.

Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]

Another Earth poses a hypothetical with philosophical overtones. Suppose in the variety of universes that are theorized, there is one that has an Earth just like ours. Would things play out there the same way they have played out here? Would all things have evolved the same? Would all the decisions be made exactly the same? Basically, would the causes always bring the same effect? Is everything determined?

In the film Rhoda Williams has just finished high school and will be headed to MIT since she has always been fascinated with the heavens. While driving home after a night of partying she hears a report on the radio about the discovery of a new planet very close by. As she tries to locate it, she causes a terrible accident. In a moment her dreams are gone, and she has destroyed the life of John Burroughs, who survived the crash but lost his son and pregnant wife.

A few years later when Rhoda gets out of jail, she seeks out a life of solitude, taking a job as a school janitor. She lives joylessly, as if she had vowed to never let happiness into her life again. She seeks John out to apologize, but loses her courage and creates a story of providing a trial housecleaning. Soon she is cleaning his house each week, forming a relationship with him, but one that is built on a lie that she cannot reveal. There is a sense of penance in her work cleaning the mess of his house, even though she cannot clean up the mess she has made of his life.

In the meantime, it has become clear that this new planets—getting closer and closers—is another earth. When radio contact is made, the people who talk to each other have the same name and same life storys—down to minute details. So here is a world that is a mirror of our own. What would it be like to meet your counterpart on Earth 2? Would he/she be the same as you? Would they have made the same mistakes? Might Rhoda find some redemption if she could go to Earth 2? When a billionaire runs a contest for someone to be included on the first commercial trip to Earth 2, Rhoda enters.

While the film falls under the category of science fiction, it is much more about the relationship that develops between John and Rhoda. We know it is doomed because of the lie it is based on, but is there a way that these two broken lives can find healing? Will the possibility of a mirror world provide the deliverance they both so badly need?

This film is dark and brooding, reflecting what Rhoda's life has become. She is burdened by the weight of her mistake. She yearns for forgiveness, but may not believe it is really possible. Certainly she is unwilling to forgive herself, which may be one reason she is unwilling to tell John the truth. Maybe Earth 2 offers her a chance to run from the guilt, but if it is a mirror, will she discover that her Earth 2 self is just as broken as she is?

We are asked to consider some of the repercussions of having a mirror world. What happens when the two intersect? Does knowing there is a mirror world affect the two worlds the same? Plato's parable of the cave is referenced in the film as a warning, but is knowing the truth ever wrong? Is that the issue with Earth 2 or with John and Rhoda? The film works itself to a conclusion that creates more questions than answers. We are left with the freedom to consider what that conclusion means.

Another Earth | Captain America | Sarah's Key | Another Earth ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

If you want to be literal-minded about it—I don't—here's the most obvious problem with "Another Earth": The planet of the title, an apparent duplicate of our own, has suddenly appeared in the sky and just floats there serenely at a safe remove, as if the law of gravity had been repealed. Other far-fetched notions turn up regularly; this small-scale film has more outsize ideas than it could possibly manage. Yet Mike Cahill's debut feature exerts a gravitational pull out of proportion to its size through powerful performances, a lyrical spirit, a succession of arresting images and a depth of conviction that sweeps logic aside.

Exactly what that extraterrestrial Terra represents is hard to pin down—a way of looking at ourselves, a chance to rerun our lives with different outcomes. String theory suggests the existence of infinite numbers of movies inspired by the notion of alternate universes, and this is one of them. Still, the presence of what comes to be called Earth 2 is incidental to a human story that plays out on Earth 1, and the cosmic overtones are less impressive than the emergence of a startlingly fine young actress named Brit Marling.

Ms. Marling, who wrote the script with Mr. Cahill and served as one of the producers, has not been widely known on this planet until now, but that's about to change. She plays Rhoda Williams, a former student of great intelligence and boundless promise who buries herself in menial labor to atone for having done something dreadful and presumably irreversible. William Mapother—he made a relatively small role memorable in "In the Bedroom"—is John Burroughs, a composer whose life has been devastated by something dreadful and presumably irreversible. Does this sound dreadfully formulaic? It is, but it also isn't, because the actors and their director invest almost every moment with spellbinding urgency, even when Rhoda and John are having spontaneous fun—a lively interlude turns on video boxing—or starting to light up each others' lives.

Until now Mr. Cahill has been mainly a cinematographer on nature films and a director of documentaries. Like Ms. Marling, who has co-directed documentaries with him, he studied economics at Georgetown. (She was also an investment-banking analyst at Goldman Sachs, which proves the infinite unpredictability of career paths.) I don't know where either of them learned their spare, specific approach to drama, but it's a pleasure to see how the acting anchors a tale that might otherwise have spun off, weightless, into realms celebrated by Carl Sagan.

Take the scene in which Ms. Marling tells a story, in her musical voice, about a Russian cosmonaut. It's only a story, and a slender one at that, but it becomes a demonstration of the storyteller's art that starts slowly and intimately, pulls you in, picks up speed and ends in a blaze of elation. In one of Mr. Mapother's surprising turns, he plays a soul-filling solo on a musical saw. The tones may have been electronically enhanced, but the scene, like so many others, keeps you watching intently.

I don't want to oversell "Another Earth." A few passages, like one involving a venerable janitor, feel downright pretentious, while the mysterious apparition of Earth 2 promises a profundity that doesn't pay off. (And when Rhoda and John peer at the nearby planet through an amateur telescope, why in this world don't they open the window to see it more clearly?) All the same, a small, smart movie that keeps you watching intently is a big deal.

SBS Film [Michelle Orange]

Can Brit Marling Shine Bright Enough to Carry ... - Village Voice Karina Longworth

REVIEW: Another Earth Isn't One You'd Want to Visit | Movieline S.T. VanAirsdale from Movieline

Bitchin' Film Reviews [Blake Griffin]

The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]

FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [Kathryn Schroeder]

The Daily Rotation [Jeremy Lebens]

Another Earth Review | The Recipe to Getting Sundance to ... - Pajiba Seth Freilich at Sundance

Movie Review: Another Earth: Sister from Another ... - Time Magazine Mary Pols

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]

Fantasia 2011: ANOTHER EARTH Review Kurt Halfyard

GordonandtheWhale.com [Kate Erbland]

The MacGuffin [Brandi Sperry]

Another Earth : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Tyler Foster from DVD Talk

Film-Forward.com [Adam Schartoff]

DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]

exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

Movie Smackdown! [Eric Volkman]

notcoming.com | Another Earth - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Katherine Follett

Another Earth : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Brian Orndorf from DVD Talk

FlickDirect [Marco Chacon]

Cinema Verdict [Marco Duran] also seen here: The Critical Movie Critics [M. Duran]

Movie Review - Another Earth - eFilmCritic Jay Seaver

Spout [Christopher Campbell]

Quiet Earth

MovieBuzzers [Melissa Hanson]

Another Earth | Review | Screen John Hazelton from Screendaily

Another Earth — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Ray Greene

Twitch [Aaron Krasnov]

'Another Earth': A Thoughtful Sci-Fi Romance -- Without Aliens Leah Rozen from The Wrap

www.ology.com [Benny Gammerman]

A Short Synopsis of Film [Ron Shaker]

Variety Reviews - Another Earth - Film Reviews - - Review by ... Justin Chang

'Another Earth' review: Quiet film, big questions Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle

Another Earth Review | 'Another Earth': Review - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Another Earth - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

Another Earth - Movies - New York Times Manohla Dargis

How to Succeed in Hollywood Despite Being Really Beautiful Emma Rosemblum on actress Brit Marling from The New York Times, June 24, 2011

Callahan, Peter

AGAINST THE CURRENT B 87

USA Netherlands (99 mi) 2009 click here

A small little American indie film that’s a bit off the beaten track, that thrives in its own eccentricities, and that is ultimately a road journey with potentially exasperating consequences. With a notable cast that continually finds humor and something altogether refreshing in the poignancy of small moments, this might be described as the anti-Huck Finn adventure, as much of it is spent with two friends trailing in a boat behind a swimmer who is attempting to swim the length of the Hudson River from Troy to the New York City harbor. While his rationale eventually unfolds, initially Paul (Joseph Fiennes) convinces two friends in a bar that it would make a nice, picturesque vacation, from his bartender best friend Jeff, the phenomenal Justin Kirk, who sees it as an excuse to get away from his nagging wife, and Liz, Elizabeth Reaser, who simply happened to be sitting at the bar at the time, thinking it would be a good opportunity for all to visit her family for one evening along the way. Unlike David Lynch’s STRAIGHT STORY (1999) which taps into the unusual rhythms and patterns of ordinary life, offering wisdom through a myriad of diverse characters, for most of the way this film pretty much sticks with the three people, where over time we come to know them intimately.

Downbeat Joseph Fiennes couldn’t be more different than the enlivened and invigorated character he played in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998) where he was, well…in love and in the flush of life. Here he’s still immersed in the grief of losing his wife and child in an accident that occurred five years ago, where after indulging in shrinks and therapy and after the passage of time, he still feels mortified at the thought of losing them (Of note – the director lost the mother of his child the day after giving birth). Swimming the Hudson is a goal he always had in the back of his mind, but he approaches this as if it will be the major accomplishment of his life. Still, with little or no preparation, and a guy who continues to chain smoke throughout the ordeal, one might find some of this questionable. But their methods might surprise, as they spend the evenings on shore and occasionally take breaks, so it’s not a true marathon, extending the 150 miles to several weeks. The true hero of this trio appears to be Jeff, the wise-cracking friend who is just shockingly good in the role, a self-deprecating failed actor whose deep-seeded sarcasm offers up some of the best quips in the movie, a highly entertaining role that continually keeps the audience off guard. Liz on the other hand is quieter and more comforting, playing the nurturing female role in a much more indirect manner, but it’s her dysfunctional family that they eventually visit.

In her most exhilarating performance in decades, probably since her dour appearance in ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980), Mary Tyler Moore is off-the-wall hilarious in this film as Liz’s prying mother, who offers motherly advice to everyone while pointing out the scandalous gossip about all the people who live in the grand mansions they are passing on the drive to her home. Their dinner together is atypically brief, not a long drawn out affair, but what happens after dinner is when things start to get interesting. Michelle Trachtenberg’s little sister role is memorable, as her sardonically dry sense of humor seems to blend well with Jeff’s increasingly morose mood, a perfect compliment to Moore’s incredibly bubbly mood, where she’s like a wind up doll that’s continually wound up, cocktail in hand, always in such good spirits, even in the morning as she drives them back to the water. There’s a bit of goofball comedy here, but also a few quiet intimate moments that register with the audience, opening up a few doors of possibilities. Using a nice mixture of pathos and humor, the film dances around the big questions about friendship and love through evasion and dark humor, where the spaces between people (and the audience) can be a good thing or a weight crushing down, where sometimes it’s hard to gauge. This film seems to have found the right note.

Special Note – supporting actor Justin Kirk, supporting actress Mary Tyler Moore

User comments from indb Author: nhpbob from Kew Gardens, NY

This under-the-radar film about a guy who swims a good length of the Hudson River in NY State down to NYC, is one of those warm indie films that deftly balances drama with some humor. No surprise that it snagged actors like Joseph Fiennes, Elizabeth Reaser (adding another fine performance to her growing career since her debut in the great "SWEET LAND"), Justin Kirk, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Mary Tyler Moore in a notable supporting role.

The reason behind his swim I won't divulge here, but it makes for some powerful moments. As he swims, his 2 friends go along with him in a guide boat, and they come to shore for breaks, which leads to some great moments in the film. It's not all on the water. But when it is, it's riveting. As a viewer, I felt like I was swimming right there with him at times.

And the swimming scenes show off the wonderful Hudson Valley, and Joseph Fiennes looks like he really...um...took the plunge. That's really him in the water. Kudos to the filmmakers who must've been on the river an awful lot. (And to the camera people!) Hopefully this film finds its audience in other film festivals and in a future release.

Zoom-In Online [Jim Rohner] at Sundance

Everyone deals with grief differently. Responses are relative to the people who experience it: some people push through it, some people repress it, some people let it consume them, and some people, well, some people honor it. We may all have different views on which way is right and which ways are wrong and that's all well and good when it comes to how we respond when the grief hits us. But, what happens when we're just spectators? How are we supposed to respond when grief hits those closest to us and we find ourselves at odds with those we care about? Suddenly, that which we held to be true and immovable is shaken by the love and dedication we feel towards a friend who is in turn immovable. This is the dilemma that arises in Peter Callahan's Against the Current, the writer/director's second-time feature, which asks us how far our loyalties to our friends will go. Though the film deals with some dark subject matter, Callahan ensures that it never gets bogged down in melancholy or insensitivity. Instead, his luscious cinematography and the gallows humor enacted through leads Joseph Fiennes and Justin Kirk add an unexpected light-heartedness and tranquility to a film that would otherwise be irrevocably bleak and morally black and white.

Paul Thompson (Fiennes) has been struggling with the death of his wife and child for years, overcome with a grief he can't shake. Apathetic about his job and unable to feel anything but numb in relationships, he decides it's time to come to terms with his loss the only way he knows how. To honor and remember the five year anniversary of his wife's death, he decides to swim the length of the Hudson River, all 315 miles of it from Troy, New York to the New York Harbor, planning to reach his goal exactly five years to the day. To accomplish this task he enlists the help of his best friend Jeff Kane (Kirk), a bartender who'll take any excuse to get away from his crumbling marriage, and new friend Liz Clarke (Elizabeth Reaser), a school teacher looking to waste some time before the new semester starts. Purchasing a rickety boat, the three coast down the Hudson one day at a time, sleeping on the river's banks and trying to avoid the rain. Everything is going swimmingly, literally and figuratively, until Jeff suddenly remembers why Paul has chosen now to honor the death of his wife and Liz gradually begins to realize her feelings for him. As the journey commences, Jeff and Liz both attempt to re-convince Paul of the decision he has made, struggling to reconcile the idea that to love Paul is to both try and protect him and also to respect his decisions and appreciate his situation.

What kind of sacrifices would friends make for other friends? Would or should friends forego their own moral convictions to respect the wishes of someone they love so much? These are the questions that Against the Current poses and allows the audience to answer. Though the film presents one possible answer, Callahan avoids pretentious preachiness in favor of one viewpoint or another and this allows healthy discussion to flourish. Part of what makes the exploration of grief and tragedy a worthwhile one is the gallows humor within the script. Though the tone of the film is markedly mellow and often morose, the comedy neither detracts from nor interrupts the solemn meditation. Instead, it helps create a healthy rapport between the main characters, played to a dry perfection by both Fiennes and Kirk. Beneath the sarcastic banter and straight-faced quips is a rational dialogue about life and death that asks for nothing but an open and understanding ear from all listeners.

Tying the film and the cast together is the character that goes mostly unnamed, but cannot be ignored: the Hudson River. As diverse in landscape, scope, and aesthetics as the country in which it flows, the views from the river are breath-takingly beautiful. Whether at golden hour, brightest noon, or rainy morning, the cinematography of Sean Kirby is tranquil like the water and is celebratory of the beauty of the life that surrounds the characters, whether that beauty opens the eyes of those who have never noticed it before or acts as a welcome end note for those who have forgotten it.

Screen International review Tim Grierson

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Variety (Justin Chang) review

Camerini, Michael and Shari Robertson

LAST BEST CHANCE C 74

aka: The Senator’s Bargain

USA (100 mi) 2010 Official site

Part of a 12 segment piece of television journalism called How Democracy Works Now, this is a film largely for history buffs only, people who are interested in seeing the legislative process develop through a series of closed door, offscreen, backroom Senate sessions of supposedly bipartisan horse trading from the perspective of those who are just outside the legislative chambers, who spend all their time analyzing and evaluating discussions of which they were not a part, and then having to devise various national strategies on what to do next. As seen through the eyes of a group of lobbyists working to provide justice reforms for immigrants, who work closely with Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, this material is entirely outdated and consists exclusively of 4-year old news, following the proceedings of an attempt at Immigration reform in 2006 during the Bush Administration, where initially Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and Kennedy worked out a bipartisan outline of a restructuring of the Immigration Act, which was Senator Kennedy’s first piece of legislation that he helped pass during his initial year in the Senate in 1965, a reform that opened up the doors and allowed a much more diverse population to enter the country legally, mostly consisting of lower wage scale workers and their families. Since 9/11, however, the Bush Administration was pushing to shift the priorities to border enforcement, where more money would be spent to prevent immigrants from coming in and on deportation proceedings, while Kennedy was recognizing the worth of those 12 million working families who were undocumented, attempting to offer them a path to legalization, where they would not have to hide in the shadows any more subject to the wrenching family divisions where U.S. born children are separated from their undocumented parents, who could at any moment be whisked away on a plane out of the country. Many of these kinds of cases were making headlines as the Bush Administration was stepping up more raids both at places of employment and in the family homes, where getting tough on immigration was the latest Republican strategy.

Since all of this takes place four years before the film was released, there’s an odd sense of time displacement, as the shape of the world has changed considerably since this was filmed, even as it was being filmed, so while the issues being outlined are certainly relevant, the arguments have shifted away from Kennedy’s views, where since his death, there is no one left to champion his position. With a Democrat in the White House, the tone on Federal immigration raids is considerably more low key. However, when McCain chose to run for the White House in 2007, his views on Immigration became more partisan, all but taking the bill off the table. But the White House brought it back along with another Republican co-sponsor, the other Arizona Republican Senator, Jon Kyl, who pushed the border enforcement issue and also a radical change in the point system, where immigrants already speaking English were given as much as 5 times higher priority, basically excluding the African and Latin American populations, where the unspoken word of race creeps back into the picture. While the Latino leaders are eloquently seen attempting to raise the tone of the argument above racial divisions, they got hammered by the Republican right on Talk Radio and Fox News who labeled the path to citizenship amnesty, which they defined as a get out of jail free card. On Bill Reilly’s show, conservative pundit Ann Coulter could be seen leveling her denunciating claim: “Who cares if they’re living in the shadows? They’re illegal!!”

While the film does follow the behind-the-scenes actions of well intentioned people who are staunch admirers of Kennedy, who are visibly moved when he makes one of his great oratories on the floor of the Senate in support of the bill, resorting to his “Now is the time, this is the moment” theme, but even as he spoke, the mood of the nation was shifting farther and farther to the right, where non-English speaking immigrants were being associated with terrorists and derogatory stereotypes became the talking points of the Republican Party. The film all but ignores this changing face of Republicans, where Tea Party advocates don’t even exist yet, but xenophobia is rampant within the foul-mouthed bigots of the nation, heard daily spouting off their venom on Talk Radio, or even at Presidential candidate town hall meetings. Not to be ignored is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who continue to believe they are being outflanked by the right, and that’s because they are, as they continue to advocate for positions that have dried up long ago and where they simply don’t have the votes anymore even within their own party. When Kennedy attempts to navigate intact a compromise bill to passage by cutting off the debate, where those wishing to kill the bill keep offering amendments that are designed to strip the heart of the provisions, history always seems to have the last word. There’s something terribly sad about seeing Kennedy in such a deteriorating medical state in the latter stages of his life, as his death is not even mentioned. While the film wears its heart on its sleeve, barely ever enunciating opposing views, instead relying exclusively on advocates focusing on a very narrow field of what would today be seen as progressive social issues. The movie is depicted as an ascending picture of one more great climb of the mountain, where instead of reaching the mountain top, these little back door discussions that attempt to shape the social fabric of the nation are mere footnotes of an idealized dream that never happened.

The 9th Annual HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL Facets Multi Media

Last Best Chance brilliantly presents a political legend, Senator Edward Kennedy, in his final battle for comprehensive immigration reform in the US. Seeking legislation that he believes would best serve US interests and provide greater security and dignity to many of the 20 million people currently living in the shadows, Senator Kennedy joins forces with talented allies on the outside to marshal fellow Senators, including Obama, Clinton, and McCain toward a "Grand Bargain." However, below the level of strategy and protocol, we find a moral tale of modern American politics. Ted Kennedy, one of a handful of people who through his personal efforts truly changed the face of America, is forced to decide how much he wants this deal and what he is willing to trade for his greatest legacy.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2010: Last Best Chance Elise Nakhnikian from The House Next Door, also seen here at Girls Can Play, June 21, 2010: A Movie a Day, day 36: Last Best Chance

Another documentary about the foiled fight for U.S. immigration reform from How Democracy Works Now, Last Best Chance delivers the message that was missing from the other film from this series that's playing at the Human Rights Watch festival. Mountains and Clouds zooms in so tightly on the macro view of the fight to pass or derail a relatively small piece of legislation that we never learn what motivates the fighters, but Last Best Chance takes the wide-angle view.

Directors Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini and editor Jane Rizzo lay out the stakes this time with admirable clarity and impact, starting with a prologue that explains the need for immigration reform. The filmmakers aren't above using PowerPoint-style lists or that honeyed, voice-of-reason voiceover that I found so annoying in both films, but they don't resort to those often. For the most part, they stitch together powerful snippets of conversation, speeches, and lectures by eloquent and impassioned people.

The bill being debated this time around is the mother of them all: comprehensive immigration reform. The film starts with the debate over the film introduced by senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain in May 2007, then follows the fight as it gets really down and dirty after the right-wing Republican talk-radio and TV talking-points machine shreds its basic premises. (Sneering at the bill's effort to bring undocumented immigrants "out of the shadows" on Bill O'Reilly's show, Ann Coulter says: "Who cares if they're living in the shadows? They're illegal!")

We also hear from political heavy-hitters like then-Senator Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Lou Dobbs, and a kinder, gentler McCain, who reads from a newspaper account about the terrible deaths suffered by undocumented workers in the Arizona desert. But the star of this show is Kennedy. Visibly weakening as shooting progresses, though no mention is made of his illness, he's the white-haired knight credited with having "made us a multi-ethnic, multicultural society" with the immigration bill he championed in 1965, an effort he is determined to build on now.

Kennedy is everywhere, cajoling and praising his staff, telling them war stories, and explaining the art of riding the Senate's ever-changing political tides. He also makes some of the most stirring and eloquent speeches in a film that brims with heartfelt and moving oratory. The best is the one he reads on the Senate floor just before the bill goes up for a vote. Framing the fight for immigration reform as the latest great civil-rights issue, he reminds the Senate that this is about "the family values of people who want to work hard, men and women of faith, people that care about this country and want to be a part of the American dream...Now is the time, this is the place," he thunders. "Are we going to vote for our hopes or are we going to vote for our fears? Are we going to vote for our future or are we going to vote for our past?"

As in Mountains and Clouds, the filmmakers are good at detailing the politics involved, making even wonky stuff like cloture and "killer amendments" easy to understand. And once again, they get excellent access to key people, though only on the pro-immigration side. I got a little backstage thrill from listening to one of the activists, whose constituency gives him some clout, though he has no official role in the debate, telling Karl Rove "you have kicked our ass from one side of the room to the other" before trying to win back some of the ground the outnumbered Republicans have stolen out from under the Democrats. I'd say that's a pretty vivid lesson in how democracy works now.

They also capture a few small-scale moments that hint at the toll the fight takes on the people involved, like when one of the activists puts her very young-sounding daughter on speaker phone to talk about when she'll get home. "Um, well, there's another big vote at 7:30 tonight," says the mom. "Okay. Well, do you think you can maybe watch it from home?" asks the daughter, who's clearly an old hand at this negotiation. By this point in Last Best Chance, there's no question why a mother would sacrifice dinners with her daughters for the fight over immigration reform, which the filmmakers and their subjects see as nothing less than a fight for the soul and the future of our nation. The directors couldn't resist ending with one of their pious voiceover comments, but I think they could have ended with New York Senator Chuck Schumer. Speaking to the press after the bill was defeated, he says: "When you study why great countries fail, it's because they're unable to deal with the problems facing them. They devolve into petty little disputes and appeals to the lowest common denominator, and those prevail."

Cameron, James

The 'Amazing' James Cameron Page official website

All-Movie Guide bio from Nathan Southern

TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies

Film Reference profile by Chris Routledge

Academy of Achievement another brief profile

Optimus Films Profile yet another

Terminator's real daddy | Features | Guardian Unlimited Film a tribute to Stan Winston by James Cameron in the Guardian, November 17, 2006

Sigourney In 3-D | The New York Observer Sigourney in 3-D, by Sara Vilkomerson from The New York Observer, April 8, 2007

Cameron, James They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

New York Film Academy's 20 Great Movie Directors

Premiere's 10 Directors Who Changed Cinema

James Cameron Adrian Wootton interviews Cameron for the Guardian, April 13, 2003

James Cameron: part II Adrian Wootton interviews Cameron for the Guardian, April 13, 2003

Newsweek Interview (2007) by Sean Smith from Newsweek, January 12, 2007

THE TERMINATOR

USA Great Britain (108 mi) 1984

Chicago Reader on Film Dave Kehr (earlier version, now re-edited online)

A resourceful low-budget thriller, this 1984 film recalls the kind of canny exploitation work that came out of the old New World Pictures, and the director, James Cameron, is indeed a Roger Corman graduate (Piranha II). Arnold Schwarzenegger is an automated hit man of the future sent back to present-day Los Angeles to eliminate the future mother (Linda Hamilton) of a rebel leader; her only hope is a bashful guerrilla fighter (Michael Biehn) who has followed Schwarzenegger back through time. Cameron's direction of the ensuing chase owes a lot to George Miller and John Carpenter (not to mention Chuck Jones), yet the characterization of the violence has something agonizingly original about it: Schwarzenegger is presented as a lumbering slab of dumb, destructive strength--the image is more geological than human--and Cameron plays his crushing weightiness against the strangely light, almost graceful violence of the gunplay directed against him. The results have the air of a demented ballet. Unfortunately, Cameron is too eager to cover the holes in the script with camped-up line readings: every easy laugh he gets detracts from the project's overall effectiveness. And he doesn't display the sheer pleasure in plastic film technique that makes Miller's and Carpenter's work something more than bluntly visceral experiences. Still, as a souvenir of a kind of B-grade action cinema that has all but vanished, The Terminator should find a small place in the heart of every movie addict. With Paul Winfield. 108 min.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]

The Terminator takes the old paradox of what would happen if you could travel back in time and murder your own grandparents and gives it a new twist as Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in the title role as a cyborg sent back to kill the mother of an important resistance leader of the man-machine wars being fought in the future. Confused? Well even if you don't follow the plot you can marvel at the bravado of director James Cameron who creates an entirely believable, and yet utterly fantastic, battle for the survival of the human race.

As the mother, Linda Hamilton defines a new female film role model - strong, decisive and yet occasionally vulnerable. She is helped by a human sent back in time by the resistance to aid her (the dishy Michael Biehn) but even together they seem to be no match for the awesome killing machine portrayed by Arnie. He is perfectly suited to this role which requires him to be menacing, flex his muscles and say the occasional syllable.

Based (like Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys) on the short experimental film La Jetée, it is a warning to those in power today not to forget that our children will inherit our mistakes. It's also extremely good, testosterone-toting fun, as Arnie demolishes buildings etc. in his pursuit of Hamilton. More chillingly violent (as opposed to comic book - reflected in the film's rating) than its successor, including one gruesome home surgery tutorial, the film is liberally dashed with Cameron's audacious visual style, mixing a dark neo-gothic atmosphere with the bright lights of city life. Even if you think you've seen it before, not to be missed.

"A blazing, cinematic comic book, full of virtuoso moviemaking, terrific momentum, solid performances, and a compelling story" - Variety

Movie-Vault.com (John Ulmer)

Turner Classic Movies [Sean Axmaker]

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley)

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks)

DVD Journal Alexandra DuPont Special Edition

eFilmCritic.com (David Hollands)

CultureCartel.com (Daniel Briney)

filmcritic.com (Max Messier)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Kamera.co.uk John Atkinson

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) Special Edition

The Digital Bits Todd Doogan Special Edition

Sci-Fi Weekly John Sullivan Special Edition

DVD Verdict Mike Jackson Special Edition

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] Special Edition

Gods of Filmmaking

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

Classic Horror Nate Yapp

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) Blue-Ray

DVDBeaver - Blu-ray DVD review [Leonard Norwitz]

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

ALIENS

USA Great Britain (137 mi) 1986 director’s cut: (154 mi)

Chicago Reader On Line Dave Kehr

One sequel that surpasses the original. Director James Cameron dumps the decorative effects of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien in favor of some daring narrative strategies and a tight thematic focus (1986). Sigourney Weaver, the sole survivor of the first encounter, returns to the scene as an adviser to a military mission sent to exterminate the alien scourge. The first half of the film is virtually actionless, as Cameron audaciously draws out our anticipation by alluding to past horrors and building the threat of even more extreme developments; the second half is nonstop, driving action, constructed in a maniacal cliff-hanger style in which each apparently hopeless situation feeds immediately into something even wilder. At 137 minutes the film is a bit long, and Cameron does overplay his hand here and there, pushing things just a shade further than he should to maintain audience credibility. But unlike the original, the action is used to develop character, and the central image--the alien spores as a monstrous parody of human birth--finds an effective resonance in the plotline.

Everything a sequel should be, James Cameron took his slam-bang Aliens in an entirely different direction from Ridley Scott's moody 1979 chamber piece, Alien, with an amazingly simple idea: more aliens. Sigourney Weaver returns (and earned an Oscar nomination) as Ripley, who reluctantly agrees to consult on a new mission. This time, she rides with a band of gung-ho military nuts (Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, etc.) and a nerdy pencil pusher (Paul Reiser) with an alternate agenda. Lance Henriksen returns as the android Bishop. Cameron plays with several motherhood themes, showing the mother alien laying her eggs, while Ripley rescues a little girl, Newt (Carrie Henn), and becomes her surrogate mother. Cameron's dialogue has never been better, with plenty of snappy, quotable lines. The film was released in theaters in a 137-minute cut, but Cameron's preferred 154-minute director's cut is even better; he keeps the suspense slowly building until it becomes almost unbearable in the final, tense minutes, with Ripley racing against the clock to rescue Newt from the endless green-blue fortress. Aliens has a strange, mid-80s Rambo-like physicality to it, but it's couched in a reasonable and forgivable context. It's one of the best sequels ever made. Paxton, Goldstein and Henriksen reunited the following year in Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez, also reviewing the Quadrilogy with Jeremiah Kipp here: DVD Review: Alien Quadrilogy

After Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, James Cameron scored a major hit with the nihilist action flick The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and girl-power queen Linda Hamilton. It made sense then that Cameron was brought on to direct the sequel to Alien. Cruder than the original, Aliens is a distinctly greedy mega-production. There's only so many times you can tell the same story and rewrite the same set pieces. Because the film's human melodramas play second fiddle to the kick-ass action sequences, it's obvious that 20th Century Fox wanted to bank on the success of the original film. Some seven years after its release, Alien had developed a significant following in feminist circles. Back in film school, a professor frequently referenced the set design's phallic and vaginal imagery, but it's Ripley's battle to be heard by the film's alpha males and mother ship that truly resonates today. This mostly subtextual war of the sexes is on whorish display throughout Aliens: the mother alien is referred to as a "badass" by Bill Paxton's insufferable Hudson; Ripley's cigar-chomping sergeant doesn't think she can do anything; and the tough, eager-to-please Latina lesbian who calls Ripley "Snow White" is teased for looking like a man. After floating in space for 57 years, Ripley is picked up by a salvage ship and is treated like a rape victim by a money-minded conglomerate. After her feminine insight gets the better of everyone, she helps spearhead a mission back to the alien planet after the ship loses contact with its colonists. Logic betrays the film from the start (after 20 years on the alien planet, the colonists discover the aliens at the same time Ripley is rescued), as does the occasional plot hole, but more tragic is the sorry lot of archetypical characters a fierce Weaver has to rub shoulders with—you can tell exactly in what order everyone will die depending on how nondescript, polite, hysterical or evil the characterization. Aliens is a "guy movie" through and through, right down to the "get away from her, you bitch" female-on-female violence (Cameron, David Giler and Walter Hill must have been watching "Dynasty" while writing their screenplay). The Director's Cut of the film hauntingly amplifies Ripley's disconnect from her dead daughter and her relationship to the young Newt (essentially a substitute for her creepy pet cat). Otherwise, the film's human interactions are nowhere near as interesting as Cameron's deft direction of action and use of non-alien space (the "Remote Sentry Weapons" killing spree may be Cameron's finest moment).

DVD Times Review [Daniel Stephens]

James Cameron's "Aliens" is, in my humble opinion, the definitive Humans vs. Aliens movie. As far as I'm concern, every film that has come after "Aliens" are inferior clones. Even the animated "Final Fantasy", for all of its cinematic breakthroughs, was nothing more than a rich man's "Aliens." It's no surprise then that "Aliens" is the film by which I measure all Humans vs. Aliens movies.

What makes "Aliens" a classic is how it brilliantly lulls you into its world with a sense of security before assaulting your senses with a barrage of American firepower, acid-spewing aliens, and claustrophobic tension. In fact, the movie doesn't even kick into high gear until well after the 50-minute mark, but as soon as that happens, the film never relents. The way the film manages to sustain its high-octane power, while never compromising on its quiet, personal moments, is just incredible.

"Aliens" is James Cameron's sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 "Alien", a cerebral experience that attempted to scare with atmosphere and paranoia. "Aliens," on the other hand, is content to thrill with firepower. The film brings back Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the only survivor from the first film, who has been frozen in cryo sleep for the last half century or so. Awaken into a new world she is ill-prepared for, Ripley is informed that the alien planet where the alien creature that terrorized her commercial vessel (from the first film) came from has since been colonized by humans. Oh, and it just so happens that said colony has gone off the radar, and the colonists are believed...in trouble.

Ripley is asked to return to the alien planet as a guide to check up on the colonists. She is hesitant at first, but eventually agrees out of a need to resolve unfinished business (of the personal and alien-killing variety, natch). The bulk of the rescue crew consists of Marines, including the easygoing Hicks (Michael Biehn), the loudmouth Hudson (Bill Paxton), and the inexperienced commander, Gorman (William Hope). No sooner does the crew land on the planet that it becomes apparent things have gone terribly wrong. In fact the colonists are either all dead, fed on, or are being used as breeding apparatus by the aliens!

"Aliens" is the perfect title for this movie. Whereas part one was called "Alien", properly denoting the single alien creature in that movie, "Aliens" is literally crawling with the alien creatures. They are everywhere -- on the ceiling, along the walls, and in the shadows. Under Cameron's direction, the aliens are frighteningly real, physical, and in your face. They move with the speed of snakes and kills with the ferocity of tigers, but what really makes them a formidable foe is their cunning. These bastards are smart, has mastered organization, and there are a lot of them.

Once the first mini-gun opens fire, "Aliens" shifts into action mode. At nearly two hours and 20 minutes, the movie lives up to the original film and, in my opinion, surpasses it. This is no cerebral experience, this is full-tilt action at its finest. Best of all, Cameron and his crew has the cast and the budget to pull off everything they wanted. Even more impressive is that this is only Cameron's second movie, the first being "The Terminator". (Cameron actually shot, edited, and released "The Terminator" and "Aliens" back-to-back. He was also the writer of 1986's "First Blood," the first "Rambo" movie. How's that for a banner year?)

Besides making a star out of Sigourney Weaver as one of the first woman in cinematic history to kick ass and take names on an epic scale, the film features perhaps the finest and most memorable character to sci-fi fans everywhere. Bill Paxton ("Frailty") is Hudson, the loudmouth who utters some of the most memorable lines in all of sci-fi, including but not limited to his mantra of, "Game over, man! Game over!" after the alien army has all but destroyed his unit.

"Aliens" is good stuff. No, let me rephrase that. "Aliens" is great stuff.

Gods of Filmmaking

Turner Classic Movies Pablo Kjolseth

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Aliens Mother and the Teeming Hordes, by Jim Naureckas from Jump Cut

Conspicuous Force and Verminization Mark at K-Punk, August 2, 2006

Aliens: Vermin, always Vermin zunguzungu, October 20, 2008

Salon (Max Garrone)

Ted Prigge

George Chabot

eFilmCritic.com Slyder

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay)

Classic-Horror.com Brandt Sponseller

Classicscifi.com [John D'Amico]

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Jonny Lieberman

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg)

eFilmCritic.com ("Dr. Isaksson")

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) Director’s Cut

DVD Verdict - Collector's Edition Adam Arseneau

AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) including Special Edition review

Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley) Special Edition

DVD Times Alien Quadrilogy [Daniel Stephens]

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks reviews the Quadrilogy

Turner Classic Movies The Alien Saga from Scott McGee

DVD Town - Alien Quadrilogy [John J. Puccio]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] reviews the Quadrilogy

filmcritic.com [Blake French] reviews the Quadrilogy

Sci-Fi Weekly Victor Lucas reviews the Quadrilogy

The New York Times (Walter Goodman)

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

THE ABYSS

USA (146 mi) 1989 ‘Scope special edition (171 mi)

The Abyss Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

The third collaboration of writer-director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd (Aliens, the Terminator movies) is a big-budget action thriller about a group of underwater oil diggers who go looking for a lost nuclear submarine and wind up encountering extraterrestrials. Shot largely underwater and with direct sound, this has a visceral kick to it that enhances Cameron's flair for high-tech special effects and streamlined storytelling, but the attempt to extract the essences of several genres (cold-war submarine thriller, love story, Disney fantasy, pseudomystical SF in the Spielberg mode) and mix them together ultimately leads to giddy incoherence. Before the movie collapses, however, there are several highly effective suspense sequences, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is especially fine as the feisty, volatile heroine. With Ed Harris, Michael Biehn, Todd Graff, and John Bedford Lloyd. 140 min.

Inspired by the 1992 re-release of Blade Runner, which restored excised footage to Ridley Scott's groundbreaking 1982 film while eliminating additions dictated by Warner Bros., the early '90s saw a boom in "director's cut" re-releases, a trend that spotlighted the creative tension in big-budget filmmaking. The term quickly became meaningless—does a few extra seconds of nudity in Basic Instinct make a significant artistic difference?—but raised provocative questions. As revealing in its own way as Blade Runner and Brazil is the case of James Cameron's The Abyss, a strangely personal underwater adventure released in 1989 at 140 minutes, then reissued a few years later expanded by 31 minutes cut at the studio's suggestion for time considerations. What difference does half an hour make? A lot, and not always in ways that might be expected. In both versions, Ed Harris plays a deep-sea expert whose commercially employed drillers come to investigate a nuclear-sub accident. The mission reunites him with estranged wife Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and forces both to put their lives in danger to thwart a deranged nuclear-warhead-toting Navy SEAL (Michael Biehn) who threatens to destroy a recently unearthed species of intelligent extra-terrestrials. Almost every restoration can unreservedly be called an improvement upon the original—making the story more well-rounded, fleshing out the underwater environment, and better setting up the unexpectedly moving relationship between Harris and Mastrantonio—until a conclusion that relies on an audience's tolerance for a New Age by way of The Day The Earth Stood Still message of peace and love. All of which raises interesting questions: Who was right? Cameron's instincts seem dead-on for most of the picture, but they abandon him in the end. The clipped original ending may have been unsatisfying, but it at least seemed to match the rest of the picture. And what to make of the fact that Cameron himself doesn't seem particularly resistant to the changes? This new DVD edition presents both versions of the film, letting viewers judge for themselves and raising questions of its own. An hour-long making- of documentary, an array of behind-the-scenes details, and a running subtitled commentary reveal just how torturous the making of The Abyss—much of it done underwater for up to 12 hours at a time in an abandoned nuclear reactor—was for everyone involved. Which did that work better serve, a presentable commercial compromise or an ultimately wacky work of artistic integrity? Whatever the answer, this version of The Abyss presents an exciting, often beautiful film in the best possible setting, allowing a full examination of the paradox of attempting to make a blockbuster-sized film with vision.

Like the Titanic, "The Abyss" was a deluxe cruise till it went down. Deemed unsinkable, the undersea thriller had a budget that would choke a beluga. Director Jim Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd, creators of "The Terminator" and "Aliens," seemed unstoppable. And then they met their waterlulu.

The movie is a veritable chowder of chills. Like Red Lobster's seafood sampler, it offers a taste of everything from psychotic aquanauts to psychedelic jellyfish. When it comes to calamity, Cameron doesn't discriminate, confronting his heroic divers with marital problems, missile crises, leaky valves, WWIII and hurricanes. And then there are the NTIs (non-terrestrial intelligences), which "The Abyss" needs like a rowboat needs tires.

Nevertheless, it gets off to a quick start with the foundering of a nuclear submarine. Swept off course by some mysterious force, the sub comes to rest on the brink of the Cayman Trough, a four-mile-deep Caribbean canyon. A rowdy-but-lovable team of oil drillers stationed in Deepcore, a nearby underwater habitat, reluctantly joins a rescue mission led by a spit-and-polish team of Navy SEALs. As the clunky Deepcore, a claustrophobic's nightmare, is towed to the wreck, a hurricane cuts off its umbilical line to the mother ship and the roustabouts are as alone as newborn tadpoles.

Ed Harris plays Bud Brigman, the courageous rig foreman whose mellow style grates on Deepcore's project engineer -- Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as his almost ex-wife, Lindsey. Dubbed "the queen bitch of the universe," Lindsey is the terror of the tightly knit nine-person crew. Like Ripley in "Aliens," she is a Fembo, an unfeeling, and therefore unnatural, female.

She rebukes a colleague for calling her Mrs. Brigman. "I didn't like being called that even when it meant something." Like Scotty on the Starship Enterprise, she's always muttering and puttering about her habitat.

"I've got four years invested in this rig. And three in the marriage. You've got to have priorities," she says to the honey-cup Bud, who won't give up on love and still wears his wedding ring. Inevitably, close encounters and shared dangers will bring the couple back together (inevitably because the plot, with its deus ex machina, is laid out like Hansel and Gretel's bread-crumb trail).

The Brigmans must not only shore up the flooding Deepcore but also stave off Lt. Coffey (Michael Biehn), the SEAL leader who succumbs to PIP (pressure-induced psychosis), takes a ballistic missile from the downed sub and starts waving it around like a handgun. Then, mistaking the friendly NTIs for Russians, he decides to nuke 'em.

Torn between fantasy and fear-baiting, "The Abyss" flounders between the creepy corridors inside and the godlike critters -- "Cocoon" fledglings? -- outside in their giant Melmac saucer. (How many times can we be awestruck by Day-Glo Gumbies? And why do these creatures always travel with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?)

About 40 percent of the movie, persuasively soggy, was shot underwater. But to their credit, Cameron and Hurd (his producer and ex-wife) always focus on the humanity, not the hardware, wedding emotions and effects, tears and brine.

So the neatly designed Deepcore boasts an ingratiating crew, an eclectic platoon of scruffy guys and gal. Standouts are Hippy (Todd Graff), the clowning paranoid; Catfish (Leo Burmester), the countrified welder; and One Night (Kimberly Scott), the best dang submersible pilot in the whole dang ocean. You know them, you love them, they're gonna get killed.

Now for the acting: With cheekbones like oar blades, Harris is the handsomely chiseled hero with a heart of gold. He proves that he still has the right stuff for a romantic lead.

The naturally evocative Mastrantonio at first seems burdened by her cast-iron role but then pets an NTI and is transformed. When Coffey insists the NTI ship is a Russian bogy and Brigman seems persuaded, the former bitch queen coos, "He sees with hate and fear. You have to look with better eyes than that." Next thing you know she is plumb proud to be Mrs. Brigman.

Cameron says he thought the yarn up while attending high school in Niagara Falls. Is there any wonder that it's wet but not deep? "The Abyss" asks us to believe that the drowned return to life, that the comatose come to the rescue, that driven women become doting wives, that Neptune cares about landlubbers. I'd sooner believe that Moby Dick could swim up the drainpipe.

Cinepad (Jim Emerson)

Images Journal A.R. Ferguson

DVD Journal J. Jordan Burke

The Abyss Like a Fish Out of Water, Jody Lyle from Jump Cut, June 1993

The Abyss and Star Trek 4: With Friends Like These zunguzungu, November 3, 2008

Gods of Filmmaking review of The Abyss

Film Freak Central Bill Chambers

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

Movie Vault [Greg C.]

DVD Verdict Harold Gervais

George Chabot's Review of The Abyss

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez) Special Edition

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] Special Edition

The Fresh Films Review [Fredrik Fevang]

Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder)

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY

USA (137 mi) 1991 ‘Scope Director’s Cut: (154 mi) Special Edition (156 mi)

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

James Cameron's slam-bang 1991 sequel-cum-remake brings back Arnold Schwarzenegger as another killing machine from the future. This time his mission isn't to kill the heroine (Linda Hamilton) but to protect her son (Edward Furlong) from an even more high-tech killing machine (Robert Patrick). To spice things up, Schwarzenegger is dressed as a biker and Patrick as a cop, the latter displaying quicksilver capacities that hark back to the friendly alien force in The Abyss. All the virtues of the original--intelligent postmodernist irony, spiffy special effects, effective action, tons of destruction, and Schwarzenegger in the nonhuman role he was born to play--are present here, though when Cameron tries to milk some sentiment out of the "personality" and fate of his top machine he comes up flat and empty, and the other characters are scarcely more interesting. As a fancy mechanism fueled by the pleasure of watching legions of people and equipment being summarily destroyed, this is pretty hot stuff. Written by Cameron in collaboration with William Wisher. R, 136 min.

BeyondHollywood.com - Ultimate Edition Nix

It really is not possible to over exaggerate the importance of a movie like "Terminator 2" to action filmmaking, and just filmmaking in general. Besides pioneering cinematic morphing technology (the technique that mimics one character "changing" flawlessly into another before our eyes), "T2" remains the film to see for sheer excitement, tension, and suspense 12 years after its initial release. (Director James Cameron's other movie, "Aliens", ranks just slightly behind.) With the recent release of the "Ultimate Edition", "T2" is even more fleshed out than before, adding substance to the style, flash, and roller coaster ride that was the original.

Story-wise, "Terminator 2" picks up some 13 years after the events of the original, with Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) locked away in a mental institution and her son, future rebel leader John Connor (Edward Furlong) living unhappily with foster parents. Like before, the computer intelligence that is trying to exterminate humans in the future sends a Terminator, this one the advance T-1000 (Robert Patrick), back in time to kill young John. And just as before, the resistance is able to send back a protector -- a T-800 Terminator model (Arnold Schwarzenegger), which just happens to be identical to the Terminator originally sent back in time to kill Sarah.

What follows is two hours and 30 minutes of intense action and edge-of-your-seat tension as the seemingly unstoppable T-1000, made of "liquid metal" that allows it to morph into anyone and anything, relentlessly stalk John and his Terminator protector. After breaking Sarah out of the joint, the trio goes into hiding in Mexico; that is, until Sarah decides to take a shot at altering the future and heads off to kill Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the computer genius who will eventually give life to the killer computer intelligence. The film then enters an explosive finale that is really a 40-minute running gunbattle that demolishes everything in sight and sets a new bar for what constitutes ballsy action.

Director James Cameron ("True Lies") shows the uncanny eye for detail and film continuity here that he would eventually use on the mammoth "Titanic." Every background character, every gunshot, and every special effects is where they should be, timed perfectly for the best effect. While then-newcomer Edward Furlong is sometimes spotty as John Connor, Linda Hamilton's buff return as the slightly deranged and completely paranoid Sarah Connor more than makes up for it. The Big S. does his usual thing, which is look cool and throw people around without breaking a sweat. He's got that down to a science.

The DVD includes two versions of the full movie -- the one originally shown in theaters in 1991, and a special edition that features nearly 20 minutes of missing footages. The DVD itself features quite a bit of extras, but the only extra that should matter to fans is how much footage had been cut in 1991. The special edition returns the missing footages seamlessly into the flow of the movie, and if you hadn't seen the original version, you wouldn’t know they had been re-added at all.

Some of the re-added scenes are more important than others. Of note is a dream sequence that reunites Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor with Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), the hero from the first "Terminator." Another scene adds some "family time" for Dyson, but is not all that necessary. Other, more important scenes include a lengthy sequence where, after having escaped the T-1000 and saved Sarah from the mental institution, the Terminator is shut off, and Sarah nearly destroys his CPU after she removes it. The scene adds to the emotional gap between mother and son, and adds to Sarah's continued distrust of the Terminator, which is very justified after the events of the original movie.

Another scene, shorter in length and not completely necessary, shows the T-1000, after having killed John's foster parents, going outside to the family's barking dog and retrieving its collar. Here, the killer Terminator discovers that it had been tricked. (Remember when the Terminator, using John's voice, asked about the family dog using the wrong name, and the T-1000 didn't know any better?) There are also a couple of dream sequences that adds to Sarah's anxiety and helps to convince her that the right thing to do is to kill Dyson.

This Ultimate Edition of "Terminator 2" definitely earns its name and then some. The film has never looked better, and there are enough extras in the DVD to choke a dozen horses. (Extras include a host of commentaries, including one by co-writer/director James Cameron and another by the Big S. himself.) If you love the movie, the DVD is a worthy addition to your collection. It definitely makes a great movie even better, something 95% of the DVDs out there can't even think about saying, much less actually say.

James Cameron on Terminator 2 - Part 1

James Cameron's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" is a lustrous machine, all gleaming steel and burnished gunmetal, with state-of-the-art nuts and bolts. You relate to it the way you might relate to any overpowering machine, a little dispassionately but with a respect bordering on awe.

It's a tank of a movie, big, powerful and hard to resist. But it's a tank with lightning treads and jaguar agility. The stunning special effects show something that's rare these days -- technical stunts that evoke a true sense of wonder; it's real jaw-to-the-floor stuff.

As a sequel, "Terminator 2" is more imposing than its predecessor, and it lacks the B-movie modesty of the original. The original "Terminator" was science fiction with an element of shaggy poetry; this "Terminator" strives more for the mythic. It's heroic pulp.

The circumstances of the two are similar. Once again, two warriors have been beamed from the future back to our time, and once again, one warrior must protect the subject that the other was sent to destroy. In this case, the Terminator's mission is to kill John Connor (Edward Furlong), the young son of Sarah (Linda Hamilton), so that he cannot grow up to become the great leader of the resistance that he would after the world has been blown to bits in a nuclear conflagration. The boy's protector in this second film is another T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), like the cyborg that combined machine and living tissue that was sent to kill his mother 10 years ago.

The T-800's adversary this time out is a more sophisticated version of himself, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), which is made from a kind of liquid metal -- a "mimetic polyalloy," it's called -- that allows it to change shape at will and renders it virtually indestructible. The T-1000 is a sleeker, faster version of the earlier Terminator -- it plays cat to Schwarzenegger's raging bull -- but it has its predecessor's single-mindedness. The movie exists on a very basic level; it's one long chase in which the new Terminator tries to get the boy away from the older one.

The film sets up a monumental battle of the Titans, and it doesn't disappoint. The confrontations between these two unstoppable forces are thrilling death bouts between equally matched gladiators. As they hammer each other, the outcome of the fight seems genuinely uncertain.

But the film's real virtues emerge in its quieter moments when the characters are given a chance to interact. The subtext here is much richer than in the first; it's a movie about family and finding a father. When the Terminator is on the run with Sarah and John, he becomes the strong patriarchal figure at the center of their makeshift nuclear family. The roles in this family-during-wartime, though, are hilariously reversed. It's the kid who teaches the father how to cope in the world, how to use slang like "chill" and "no problemo," how to "give five" and, more important, how to feel.

John also teaches his surrogate dad a grudging respect for human life, which further contributes to the film's new age spirit. It's this element that is most unique and most satisfying -- that and the richness Schwarzenegger brings to his character. It's comical, perhaps, but Schwarzenegger expresses more of his own humanity when playing a machine than he does when playing real people. He's a hopelessly wooden actor, but that artificiality and his "Fun With Phonics" style of delivery is perfect for his character here, and perfect for the film's deadpan sense of humor. For once, he's ideally cast, and he brings the kind of delicacy of feeling that Boris Karloff showed as the Frankenstein monster. As a machine, he has soul.

Unfortunately, the other Terminator doesn't, and that's one of this movie's biggest problems. Unlike in the first film, there's no one to identify with on the other side. The effects for this character, however, are smashing too.

Cameron manages to create a neat balance between the technical and the human here; so much so that this surfaces as one of the movie's themes. Most of the actors make strong statements, including Hamilton, who's Nautilused herself into the form of a modern-day Diana, and Furlong, who gives one of the loosest performances for a child actor ever filmed. As the brain behind SkyNet, the computer that goes out of control and causes the nuclear nightmare, Joe Morton also makes the most of a few minutes on screen.

No one in the movies today can match Cameron's talent for this kind of hyperbolic, big-screen action. Cameron, who directed the first "Terminator" and "Aliens," doesn't just slam us over the head with the action. In staging the movie's gigantic set pieces, he has an eye for both grandeur and beauty; he possesses that rare director's gift for transforming the objects he shoots so that we see, for example, the lyrical muscularity of an 18-wheel truck. Because of Cameron, the movie is the opposite of its Terminator character; it's a machine with a human heart.

James Cameron on Terminator 2 - Part 2

Jeeem's Cinepad [Jim Emerson]

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks attention to detail

The City Review [Carter B. Horsley]

Ted Prigge

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon)

CultureCartel.com (Daniel Briney)

Apollo Movie Guide [Ryan Cracknell]

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Mike from Hobart

Movie Vault [The Moose]

Gods of Filmmaking

Salon (Bill Wyman)

filmcritic.com reaches Judgment Day Christopher Null

Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Sean Fitzgibbons from DVD Verdict

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay)

Reel.com DVD review [Marina Chavez] Ultimate Edition

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Ultimate Edition Mike Jackson from DVD Verdict

DVD Review: Terminator 2 - Ultimate Edition

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] Ultimate Edition

Digital Monkey Box DVD Review Paul, Ultimate Edition

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) Ultimate Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) Ultimate Edition

Movielocity Movie Reviews (Blake Kunisch) Ultimate Edition

Blogcritics - DVD review [Matt Paprocki] DTS ES Remix

DVDTalk - Blu-ray Review [Joshua Zyber]

DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) HD DVD Edition

DVDTown - HD-DVD Import Edition [John J. Puccio]

DVDTown - Ultimate HD DVD, German Import Edition [John J. Puccio]

Terminator 2: Judgment Day: Extreme Edition Elizabeth Skipper from DVD Verdict

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) Extreme Edition

Washington Post [Joe Brown]

DVDBeaver.com [Kevin Yip]

DVDBeaver - Blu-ray DVD review [Leonard Norwitz]

TITANIC C 75

USA (194 mi) 1997 ‘Scope

Waiting for the $1.50 show at the Davis, where the stench in the urinal was overwhelming, the odor of ammonia and bleach, and when I peed, it sizzled. I’ve never seen that before. There was little to no air-conditioning on a 96 degree day outside and the theater itself revealed a tiny little screen raised way up in the air. I found the only seat with no other seat in front of it, apparently for handicapped accessibility, 9 rows back. All the kids kept moving their parents closer to the front, carrying giant tubs of popcorn and large vats of pop, slurping and chomping continuously, eventually throwing their popcorn across rows, picking it up from the filthy, grimy, already sticky floor, then throwing it in the air and catching it with their mouths, where I heard various comments: “It’s a great love story...a terrific comedy...I’ve seen it six times...I’ve seen it seven times...Harriet had an operation on her left shoulder...Dad, I smell a cigarette...I want more popcorn...Hey bitch, gimme some gum...Have you ever tried cheese-flavored chocolate?” Then they turned on the music, “More Than a Heartache,” sounding like a car radio blasting. My chair was tilted a little to the left, the whole row seemed to be on a downward slant, so I already had the feeling of being on a boat. No one stopped talking when the film began, including parents that incessantly kept talking to their children. People just couldn’t keep still and constantly kept moving forward throughout the entire film.

But I digress, a lone woman’s voice opens the film as underwater cameras go snooping into the deep, searching the depths two and a half miles below the surface, scavenging the Titanic, considered the ship of dreams, until they find a safe, but no diamonds, only a nude drawing of a woman named Rose with the date 4-14-12. A woman watches herself being shown on TV and remarks, “I’ll be damned,” which begins a flashback to an arrogant class of rich who believed they and their ship were invincible. Thus begins the story of Jack and Rose, matinee idol Leonard DiCaprio and the sumptuous Kate Winslet, he won his 3^rd class passage in a poker game from a guy named Sven (“Where’s Sven?”) and is a penniless artist while she is engaged to one of the richest men on earth, but has doubts, feeling her life would be an endless parade of parties and cotillion and polo and yachts, the same mindless chatter, and no one would ever listen to her. Her mother forbids her from seeing Jack, but when did that ever stop anyone? A romance ensues.

Jack whisks her down to the lower decks which resembles an energetic, neverending party, dancing to bagpipe music. Jack tries to convince her that in a world full of stuffed shirts, they’d only be stifling her spirit. Later, in her private boudoir, she disrobes and asks him to draw her wearing only a 56 carat diamond, La Coeur de la Mer, the Heart of the Ocean, once owned by royalty, Louis XVI. As she describes this moment in voiceover 84 years later, she describes it as the most erotic moment of her life. Rose decides when the ship docks, she’ll be getting off with Jack, but of course, that is not to be, as the rest of the film turns into THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972), turning a barely breathing interior chamber drama into an overwrought romantic spectacle of special effects and computer graphics. Wowee Zowee. Well, there went all interest.

After the ship hits an iceberg, in what feels like an eternity, everyone continues to act like nothing happened, as the 5 lower decks slowly fill with water, supposedly building the tension until chaos ensues when it becomes apparent the ship is going down, when the lower decks are locked in order to escort the first class passengers to the lifeboats. There were only enough lifeboats for half the passengers, more would have cluttered the decks, so eventually in the melee that followed, the crew attempts to control the situation with threats and gunfire, eventually murdering several of the passengers. As the water level rises higher and higher, in slow motion, to strobe light effects, event torrents of floods, a string quartet plays a mournful adagio on the deck, while Jack and Rose promise to trust one another and never let go. But they do eventually let go, as the ocean is awash with floating bodies in a sea of ice, most all frozen corpses, where only 6 were captured from the sea. Rose was one of those 6, heard 84 years later to recall, “Jack exists now only in my memory.”

A sappy song plays over the credits, “My Heart Will Go On,” but of course, it is the credits that go on and on. The amount of people listed in the credits was obscene. When the film finally ended, there was a sound scrunch and the Coasters chimed in with “Yakety Yak, Don’t Talk Back,” and from behind a curtain, a garbage can on wheels was rolled down the aisles by one of the ushers. In a film marked by enormous excess and non-existent editing, where the depiction of the upper crust society couldn’t have been more artificial and uninspiring, Kate Winslet’s performance provided at least some level of fresh air in the central role, which held the audience’s attention up until the crash. Afterwards, the film was a repetitive, monotonous bore.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

It's nothing short of a religious paradox that a subculture so morally bereft and artistically exhausted and worshipful of nothing but capital...that Hollywood in the late 20th century could produce such a monumental and poetic testimony to love. The visuals are incredible, the textures and shapes and contrasts, the epic scale of mighty ship and sense of height involved throughout. The blue shading is beyond the potentialities of film; the purples, the rich turqoise, the aquas. Beyond that it must also be one of the greatest films in history for blind people, with the groaning engines and the splintering planks, running of feet along the deck, the rush of the water, the fireworks, the rollicking rhythm of a party in third class. The musical cards are beautiful and diverse, revealed spontaneously with a crazy gypsy genius. There's a fair share of Hollywood manipulation sure, but in circumstances of such grandeur these characteristics can only be considered additional virtues. Leonardo DiCaprio is a red-blooded American artist with an extraordinary sense of situational ethics who lives in the heartland of the garden of catalysis. Kate Winslet is nothing less than an existential heroine for the ages-flapping her butterfly wings with Promethean determination against the gravity of a fate more powerful than ten thousand suns. In a film shot on a boat what could happen when the magnetic poles of two such American characters finally touch and spark? Only one thing is possible: they do it in the backseat of a car. James Cameron gives us way too many memorable shots: Victor Garber as the ship's builder striding through the festive dining room, the only man on board aware that the ship is going down....Winslet's materialistic mother silently watching the Titanic go under from her seat on a lifeboat, she can only be wondering what kind of person she is that her daughter would rather go down with the ship than share her safety. Several of the secondary characters are perfect: Garber, Winslet's fiancee' Billy Zane is one of the biggest assholes in history-I know that I would have killed him; Jonathan Evans-Jones the bandleader. Bewitched's Dr. Bombay (Bernard Fox) may be the most sensible and philosophical of them all. As the boat goes under he refuses a life vest, but says he'll take a brandy.

Titanic (1997) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

From the underwater opening scenes, which are as neon-blue as anything from James Cameron's science fiction opus The Abyss, it's clear that Titanic will be a technophile's delight.

Oh, I suppose it's a historian's delight, too, with its labor-intensive recreations of the state rooms, hallways, dining halls and decks of that doomed ship. But it's the cash-intensive rendering of an impossible image -- the Titanic, full-size, setting sail from its dock with Leonardo DiCaprio the figurehead at its prow -- that makes this one for the history books. Titanic turns the ship itself into a gargantuan fetish object.

Those opening scenes (well, most of them) are deep-sea shots of the real Titanic, which Cameron insisted on photographing if the project were to proceed. Repeatedly throughout the film, Cameron offers match dissolves from Titanic's ghost-ship remains to his own shiny creation, as if the film's verisimillitude is somehow profound in itself. Accordingly, he is loath to simply photograph his actors walking on the deck of his scale recreation of the original boat. Rather, the camera must swoop backward alongside the railing, keeping the performers on one side of the widescreen frame while we see the ship's hull cutting through ocean water on the other. For the first half of the movie, every other shot seems giddy with the understandable satisfaction of depicting the impossible. It's like the Edwardian version of Jurassic Park.

Of course, the ship must be populated with people, and it's here that Cameron's vision falters. He's on solid ground when he envisions Titanic as a big, floating metaphor for the Edwardian class struggle (as the sinking began, the folks in the lower class accomodations were locked inside while the well-to-do boarded their lifeboats), but gets waterlogged as he uses the thinnest of characters and most routine of love stories to make his point and jerk his tears. OK -- point made, tears jerked. But it's fortunate for Cameron that the human story here has the weight of terrible history behind it, since it's lacking in all but the most rudimentary drama.

DiCaprio is Jack Dawson, a lovably scruffy American abroad who wins a steerage-class ticket back to his homeland in a poker game. Across a crowded boat, he spies Kate Winslet's very first-class Rose DeWitt Bukater. Even though Jack and Rose should, by all rights, never come into contact on Titanic (where classes of passengers are kept rigidly segregated), an odd turn of events results in Jack's saving Rose's life and thus being invited to dinner on the upper decks. Jack is revealed as a tasteful vulgarian who shares Rose's predilection for modern art (she brings aboard canvases by Monet and Picasso) and teaches her how to spit. Rose, meanwhile, is reluctantly betrothed to the snarling Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), an unremittingly villainous upper-cruster whose affection for her is based on vanity rather than on love. He's even got a callous henchman named Spicer Lovejoy (David Warner) to teach Jack a lesson in keeping his hands off what doesn't belong to him.

Although there are a wealth of stories on Titanic, it's this cobwebbed melodrama that Cameron has brushed off and made the narrative focus of his film. Ever the jaded critic, I found myself wincing at each mawkish plot twist -- this melodrama is as old as the ship itself. Even so, it would be churlish to claim that it doesn't work -- it works all right, just barely well enough for Cameron to draw his audience into and through the tragedy to come. But it's the easy way out, and the film suffers from a lack of narrative invention to match its visual wizardry. (The cloying score by James Horner, which rummages inexplicably through Enya's sad sack of new age tricks, doesn't help.)

And for a 195-minute film, Titanic seems awfully rushed, as though Cameron sat in the cutting room, jabbing the other film editors with a cattle prod. On those rare occasions when Cameron does finally strike a gold vein of pathos -- I'm thinking of the ship's stoic musicians, refusing to let silence have its way with the ongoing disaster, or the elderly couple who have returned to bed, holding one another as a river of sea water washes the world away beneath them -- he cuts away impatiently, his camera once again searching out the tedious melodrama of Jack, Rose and their tormentors. And lots of rushing water. In every aspect but the special effects, Titanic takes the easy way out. There are so many tales that can be told on this ship, but Cameron opts to concentrate -- almost exclusively -- on his star-crossed lovers.

So I reserve the right to interpret this pedestrian tale as a succession of missed opportunites, at least until Cameron gets the chance to trot out the inevitable "director's cut" on home video (he promised Charlie Rose a copy of the extended version on laserdisc). Such characters as Molly Brown (Kathie Bates), Captain E.J. Smith (Bernard Hill) and the ship's regretful designer, Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber), drift through the proceedings in what amount to little more than cameos, yet they add some welcome heft to the narrative. Meanwhile, Cameron deploys jokes and cliches like so many helium balloons. (Some of the dustiest lines are given to Gloria Stuart, the 82-year-old actress who gamely portrays the decagenarian Rose in an irritating framing device that pulls the action into the present day and keeps interrupting the movie's primary story with dopey narration.)

The biggest asset to the story, aside from the special effects, is no doubt DiCaprio, who is anachronistic as all get-out, but without whom the romance would be not only creaky but dull. And, miraculously, it's not dull. I never really got DiCaprio -- arguably the most potent young heartthrob in American movies today -- before Titanic. But in this film he rises to the occasion with potent charisma and enough charm to make these lines play leagues better than they must have read on paper. He and Cameron must be some kind of soul mates, because DiCaprio seems to understand instinctively exactly what the director is going for. Winslet, of whom I'm a big fan, fits snugly into her own role but never seems at ease. Inhabiting his character neatly, DiCaprio helps her out.

By the time Leo and Kate have made it in the back of an automobile in storage on the ship, you may be thinking, "Enough already." And sure enough, Cameron fails to disappoint -- how could the consummation of their affection not be a signal that something terrible is literally on the horizon?

Once the ship hits that iceberg, it becomes clear that Cameron is in his element, and not a moment too soon. More, there's our palpable fascination with a disaster in the making, especially one that unfolds at such a measured pace as the slow sinking of the biggest seagoing craft ever built. Cameron tightens the cinematic screws like the expert he is, and builds this disaster to a smashing, grinding climax. As the ship cracks in two and goes perpindicular before sinking below the water's surface, the ensuing apocalypse is one-of-a-kind. And when Cameron cuts away to a lifeboat full of survivors, giving us their vantage on the wreck (complete with roller-coaster-ride screaming and tiny bodies tumbling to their deaths like insects), it's a moment of flamboyant spectacle. It's hard to know whether to be thrilled, appalled, or merely appreciative of such an appropriately Grand Guignol vision. It's almost genius -- Cameron starts with a simplistic portrait of an Edwardian lovers' paradise, and transforms it with feverish, needling strokes into a circle of Hell populated by 1,500 frozen corpses and another 700 lost souls waiting in their half-empty lifeboats for what old Rose calls (gack) "an absolution that would never come." (As usual, Cameron feels the need to spell everything out for us. And for the purposes of this review, I won't tackle the utterly schmaltzy final shots.)

So here's the problem: every potentially stunning moment in Titanic is negated by another that's merely numbing; for every image that comes close to bearing the force of truth, there are a half-dozen more that are trite and self-conscious. Meaning is cluttered by explanation.

It adds up, I found, to a depressingly flat experience. Titanic the ship is exquisitely rendered, but Cameron didn't have such exacting blueprints for the human beings who go down with her, and the result is cardboard characters with bleakly formulaic lives -- certain lines of dialogue and twists of plot are such hokum that it's actually distracting. If only the damned ship weren't obviously so much more important to Titanic the film than were the people on board.

And the ship is inarguably alive and exciting. It pops off the screen. Through the magic of computer graphics, it's realer than real, a modern-day Lazarus roused from the dead by a SFX messiah. And that's at least part of the problem. The film's elaborate concentration on a picture-perfect Titanic can only draw attention to its status as artifice unless there's one hell of a storyline to entrance us. But the bulk of Titanic contains no surprises and few delights. Marooned in the here and now, it's impossible to forget that this is James Cameron's impossibly expansive Titanic, rather than the real thing.

Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell)

Alex Fung

Bright Lights Film Journal T.L. Putterman

Images (Gary Johnson)

AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna)

Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)

eFilmCritic.com Slyder

Serdar Yegulalp

Chicago NewCityNet (Ray Pride)

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis)

CultureCartel.com (Laurie Edwards)

The Onion A.V. Club [Maria Schneider]

Bright Lights Film Journal Robert Keser

The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani)

Gods of Filmmaking review of Titanic

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) also here: second look at Titanic and here: third look at Titanic, after its Oscar win for Best Picture

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray)

Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Chris Knox)

The Digital Bits Bill Hunt

Blogcritics - Collector's Edition DVD Review [Matt Paprocki]

Alex Ioshpe

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic] Cameron gives in to almost blinding pomposity

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) 10th Anniversary Edition

PopMatters (Jesse Hassenger) 10th Anniversary Edition

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus] 10th Anniversary Edition

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) Special Collector’s Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) Special Collector’s Edition

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) Special Collector’s Edition

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) Special Collector’s Edition

Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]

James Cameron on Titanic interview with the director by Rick Schultz

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) review [4.5/5]

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin

DVDBeaver Henrik Sylow

AVATAR 3D B 86

USA Great Britain (162 mi) 2009 Extended cut: (178 mi)

I didn’t sign up for this shit. —Trudy Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez)

Most of the 3D movies released this year were animated ventures, where at least in my view, CORALINE (2009) stood out above all others, not only because it had a knock out story, including a parallel universe with a monstrous evil villain, but because the use of 3D was clever, humorous, and always added a wonderment factor to an already richly imaginative children’s universe. But AVATAR is something else again, because like George Miller’s post-apocalyptic MAD MAX adventures from the late 70’s and early 80’s, this requires nothing less than the invention of an entirely new futuristic landscape that never existed before, that takes one’s breath away by the stunning originality of the concept. Ridley Scott also comes to mind with his brilliant set designs for futuristic films like ALIEN (1979) and BLADE RUNNER (1982). But none of these classic sci-fi films were shot in 3D, so while they remain etched in our imaginations for memorable visual designs, AVATAR brings to the table a futuristic sci-fi action adventure story shot using the most transforming 3D technology ever invented. That and a $230 million dollar budget, once more the largest for any film in history at the time it was made, suggest this is a film that offers a multitude of possibilities. And it delivers. While the early look of the film is a hi-tech computer universe that resembles Spielberg’s MINORITY REPORT (2002), where in the year 2154, instead of telepathic pre-cogs that remain submerged in a water tank transmitting the future, science has invented floating avatars in water tanks, genetically engineered humanoids that people can inhabit while plugged into think tanks, where their thoughts guide the avatars every move during waking hours, but no connection exists when they sleep. This takes on the idea similar to time traveling into different worlds, as once they step into the time machine, they are instantly transported to another world, in this case, the planet Pandora, where the title says it all, as it’s a planet just waiting for the disasters to be unleashed.

Much like Captain John Smith’s arrival to Terrence Malick’s THE NEW WORLD (2005), Pandora is a kind of planetary Eden, a lush, unspoiled tropical world filled with exotic plants, strange prehistoric looking creatures, and a race of 12-foot tall blue people called the Na’vi that resemble Native American Indians, as they live off the land, take only what they need, and have an intensely close cosmic relationship with the world they inhabit, where they have sacred grounds and refuse to create an imbalance on their planet. Enter the American business interests, where in a mission right out of ALIEN, a fleet of space cargo and military ships target a precious mineral that exists on the planet which they intend to harvest, with or without the Na’vi’s permission, so Stephen Lang is the gun ho ex-Marine military commander, Sigourney Weaver (amusingly, from ALIEN) is the science officer, and John Worthington as former Marine Jake Sulley steps in at the last minute to take the place of his recently deceased twin brother to complete a mission on the planet, using an avatar that was built for his brother, which fortunately matches his own DNA. Despite his lack of preparation or familiarity with the actual conditions on the planet, Sulley’s real motivation is to inhabit an avatar, which offers him full use of his extremities, as his own legs are paralyzed. The exhilaration he feels once he’s transported takes even himself by surprise, as his physical transformation leaves him liberated beyond belief. But being a Marine, he believes he has no limits, that his training allows him to adapt to anything. And immediately, on his first mission, he gets a chance to prove it, as he gets separated from his unit and has to spend a night alone on the planet, a sure death sentence, which turns into one of the better sequences in the film, as it’s impossible to anticipate what he’ll encounter next, where it’s like he was transported back to the island that King Kong inhabited.

At this point, once transported to the world of the planet, the look of the film is nothing less than spectacular. In fact it’s so extraordinary that we barely notice the story development as it takes on a mish-mosh of other familiar stories, where Sulley is saved inexplicably from savage beasts by a Na’vi woman Neytiri (Zoë Saldana), who could just as easily killed him as a foreign invader, a threat to her world, but she decides to bring this outsider home to her People and let them decide. As her parents are the King and Queen, they decide their daughter should train him in the ways of their People, which leads us to our first moral crisis, as the military wants to use Sulley as a spy before they move in for the kill, never for a moment doubting what their first priority of business is, which is to take what they came for. If Sulley can facilitate that mission, so much the better. But like DANCE WITH WOLVES (1990), he develops a romantic relationship with the King’s daughter, where Sulley eventually proves himself to be accepted by the Na’vi People. The flying sequence where he learns to fly on the back of a winged creature is among the most awe-inspiring in the film. But when the military moves in and starts destroying the planet surface in order to excavate what they’re looking for, the Na’vi feel betrayed by their new foreign brother. When the Army reduces a race of people to racist and derogatory insults before firing a single shot - - therein lies the problem. The people on this planet are perceived as backwards savages where a few casualties are within the acceptable guidelines. But when they realize Sulley has taken up their cause, it turns into Miyazaki’s PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997), where humans are waging a battle against the sacred forests, where the creatures of the forest must unite to stand their ground, where a half human, half animal (like an avatar), a human raised by wolves takes up their cause.

When it turns into an all out assault against the people and their planet, there is the spectacle of battle sequences in 3D, but this endless sense of waste and destruction destroys the purpose of the film. At some point, wouldn’t the corporate brass get the idea that perhaps this full blown invasion of the planet was unwise, as even the Star Trek TV series had a better reason for space exploration than planet invasion, which violates every known concept of the word justice? When did our mission in space change from discovering to destroying new worlds? This shift to planet destroyers should make the entire audience uncomfortable, as it doesn’t wash with our concept of Americans as bearers of peace and democracy. While this may have been designed to parallel the Bush invasion in Iraq, this is an entire planet we are destroying. Of course our sensibility is that of horror. But the death and destruction sequences turn into LORD OF THE RINGS (2001 – 2003), overlong and largely purposeless sequences that make the Americans look foolish and evil, as if crushing the enemy is all that matters, and who gives a damn about their primary mission? But by the time it all wraps up, the movie it most resembles is THE LION KING (1994), as young Simba has grown to discover he was lied to and misled by one of his own and eventually fights to save his people after the death of his father Mufasa (or the King of the Na’vi people) and all of the pride returns to their sacred grounds and celebrate the reclaiming of their kingdom in order to complete the Circle of Life. All of this feels much too simplistic, which is unfortunate, as the lame finale overwhelms the superb special effects which are perhaps the most spectacular ever conceived. None of the characters are memorable, but they are acceptable, yet the original concept of avatars and planet exploration in 3D is absolutely gorgeous until Cameron indulges in video game carnage, an extra hour of old-fashioned Army gadgetry and overly predictable violent mayhem that undermines the brilliance of his totally inspired, electrifying opening.

There is not a single frame in Avatar that doesn’t look stunning and authentic: from the heavily militarised human mining colony to the beautiful forest planet Pandora that contains a rare mineral that the humans want, to Pandora’s indigenous Na’vi population who aren’t too happy about the human’s presence. In order to better understand the Na’vi, the humans have developed the means to mentally occupy specially grown avatar bodies that look like the giant, wide-eyed, opaque-skinned Na’vi locals. Sam Worthington (Terminator Salvation) plays Jake Sully, a paraplegic marine who adopts one of the avatar bodies in order to infiltrate and gain the trust of the Na’vi.

Describing Avatar as “Pocahontas in Space” would not be too far off the mark as Jake’s relationship with the Na’vi people follows the white-man-assimilates-into-Native-American-Indian-culture narrative of many post-colonial films. However, Avatar is more in tune with Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) rather than films such as Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992) or Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005), which both contained a slightly more complex exploration of racial and cultural identity.

Avatar is still a white-man-saves-the-day film and it is occasionally guilty of some rather naff moments when depicting the Na’vi as noble-savage types. However, at the core of Avatar is a very simple yet sincere environmental and anti-colonial message that removes all doubt about the film’s good intentions. Besides, such gripes are just so incredibly minor compared to the sheer beauty and exhilarating visuals at the forefront of Avatar. The scenes depicting the forests and floating mountains of Pandora are truly wondrous, the Na’vi and the avatars look incredibly realistic, and the action is exactly the sort of thing audiences have come to expect from writer/director James Cameron.

Cameron has long been at the forefront of setting new standards for high quality spectacle cinema with films such as The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) rightly regarded as classics of the science-fiction/action genre. With Avatar Cameron not only sets new standards for the use of computer-generated imagery special effects but also the use of 3D photography, which has a full depth-of-field and is integral to the texture and sensory impact of Avatar. Cameron has made no compromises with Avatar from a technical point-of-view and in time it will come to be regarded as a benchmark film.

The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron's mega-3-D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I'm thinking: Metropolis!—and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of the year's best movies. Then the 3-D wears off, and the long second act kicks in.

Avatar is a technological wonder, 15 years percolating in King Cameron's imagination and inarguably the greatest 3-D cavalry western ever made. Too bad that western is Dances With Wolves. The movie opens brilliantly with an assembly line of weightless mercenaries disembarking at planet Pandora's earthling (that is, American) base—a fantastic military hustle, with the paraplegic volunteer Jake (Australian actor Sam Worthington) wheeling through a sea of Jeeps, trucks, and galumphing robots. Every shot is a fascinating study, thanks to the plethora of depth-complicated transparent monitors, Kindle-like devices, and rearview mirrors that Cameron has positioned throughout the frame.

The Sky People, as the native Pandorans or Na'vis call them, are on a mission to strip-mine this lushly verdant planet to save their own despoiled world. As preparation, the Sky People are attempting to infiltrate the Na'vis by linking human consciousness to Pandoran avatars. Thus, an all-American jarhead like Jake finds himself inside a 12-foot-tall, blue-striped, yellow-eyed, flat-nosed humanoid with an elegant tail and cute little goat ears—and he can walk!

Beside himself with joy, Jake bursts out of the hospital and, before too long, finds himself alone in a mad jungle surrounded by six-armed neon tetra lemurs, flying purple people eaters, hammer-headed triceratopses, and nasty leather demon dogs. Jake is saved by the jungle girl Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), known in pidgin English as Pocahontas, and brought back to the Na'vi village to meet her father, the king (full-blooded Cherokee Wes Studi, here playing a good Indian). The Na'vis think that investigating Jake will allow them to understand the Sky People. (Little do they know . . . heh, heh, heh.)

The Sky People are divided into hawks and doves, with Jake as a sort of double double-agent, simultaneously reporting back to the most militant Marine meanie (Stephen Lang) as well as the tough but tender biologist (Sigourney Weaver, in full Ripley mode). The former wants him to find out "what the blue monkeys want." The latter knows that the Na'vi are ultra-green—a New Age matriarchal eco-friendly culture spiritually connected to Every Living Thing. (This capacity is better imagined than demonstrated to judge from the mass swaying transubstantiation ceremony held several times beneath a cosmic weeping willow.)

Avatar seamlessly synthesizes live action, animation, performance-capture, and CGI to create what is essentially a non-participatory computer game: Jurassic Park's menagerie running wild in The Matrix's double eXistenZ. When, waking up back in the lab, Jake realizes that "out there is the true world and in here is the dream," you know that it's time for him to go native, complete with tender blue-monkey sex ("We are mated for life"). As in a Jack Kirby comic book, the muscular, coming-atcha visuals trump the movie's camp dialogue and corny conception, but only up to a point. Jake's initiation rites notwithstanding, Avatar itself doesn't reawaken until the bang-up final battle—aerial cavalry incinerating holy sites and bombing the bejesus out of the blue-monkey redskin slopes, Jake uniting the Na'vi clans with inspirational martial music. (The requisite Celtic keening is withheld until the end credits, accompanied by a Celine Dion clone singing in Na'vish.)

Long before the third act, however, the ideologically sensitive will realize that 20th Century Fox has taken a half-billion-dollar risk (counting PR) that perhaps only Rupert Murdoch's studio could afford to take. The rampaging Sky People are heavy-handedly associated with the Bush administration. They chortle over the failure of diplomacy, wage what is referred to as "some sort of shock-and-awe campaign" against the Na'vis, and goad each other with Cheney one-liners like, "We will blast a crater in their racial memory so deep they won't come within a thousand clicks of here ever again!" Worse, the viewer is encouraged to cheer when uniformed American soldiers are blown out of the sky and instead root for a bunch of naked, tree-hugging aborigines led by a renegade white man on a humongous orange polka-dot bat.

Let no one call so spectacular an instance of political correctness run amok "entertaining." I look forward to the Limbaugh-Hannity take on this grimly engaging development—which will perhaps be roguishly interpreted by Sarah Palin as the last stand of indigenous peoples (like Todd!) and women warriors against Washington bureaucrats. At least Avatar won't win James Cameron a Nobel Peace Prize—but, then again, it just might.

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

James Cameron's "Avatar" takes place on a planet called Pandora, where American corporations and their military mercenaries have set up bases to mine a surpassingly precious mineral called unobtanium. The vein of awe mined by the movie is nothing short of unbelievium. This is a new way of coming to your senses—put those 3-D glasses on your face and you come to a sense of delight that quickly gives way to a sense of astonishment. The planetary high doesn't last. The closer the story comes to a lumbering parable of colonialist aggression in the jungles of an extragalactic Vietnam, the more the enchantment fizzles. Much of the time, though, you're transfixed by the beauty of a spectacle that seems all of a piece. Special effects have been abolished, in effect, since the whole thing is so special.

The word "avatar" wasn't invented by Mr. Cameron, though everything else in the production seems to have been. (With the help, that is, of a few thousand colleagues around our own planet.) In Hindu myth, an avatar is a deity descended to earth in human form. In computer parlance it's an icon that represents a person in virtual reality or cyberspace. In the movie it's a manufactured body that's remotely controlled—not by some hand-held clicker but through brain waves generated by a human being who functions as the body's driver.

If this sounds technobabbly in the description, it's dazzling in the execution. The main driver-to-be—or, rather, animating spirit-to-be—is an ex-Marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) whose combat injuries have left him confined to a wheelchair. He's part of a scientific program run by a tough cookie named Grace Augustine; she's played by Sigourney Weaver. The program has begun to explore Pandora, whose atmosphere is toxic to earthlings, using avatars with recombinant DNA—part human, part alien—constructed along the lines of the planet's dominant species; they're very tall, very blue, Giacometti-slender and Superman-agile. The movie offers several lyrical passages, but one of the best belongs to Jake. It's when he inhabits his avatar for the first time and discovers that his new legs can take his lithe new body through some of the most sublime scenery on not-Earth.

No description of that scenery will spoil the experience of the 3-D process (which dispenses with the usual eye-catching tricks) or the seamless integration of live action, motion-capture, animation, computer-generated images and whatever other techniques went into the mix—maybe witchcraft or black magic. (I haven't seen the IMAX version; that's for my next viewing.) Some of the flora suggest an anhydrous Great Barrier Reef (airborne jellyfish, coral-colored conical plants that spiral down to almost-nothingness when touched) or, in the case of Pandora's floating mountains, represent an homage to the Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki. As for the fauna, they're not only prodigiously varied—flamboyant dragons, six-legged steeds, elephantine chargers with heads like battering rams, nature-blue in tooth and claw—but creatures with convincing lives of their own, unlike the cheerfully bizarre creations that filled the Mos Eisley cantina in "Star Wars."

Then there are the indigènes, the French term for natives being appropriate because Pandora evokes the Indochina that existed before France's doomed war against an indigenous insurgency, as well as the Vietnam that became a battleground for American troops. They're called the Na'vi, and to describe them as humanoid may be to defame them, inasmuch as they, unlike most of the film's Americans, revere their planet and live in harmony with their surroundings. The most beautiful of the Na'vis—at least the one with the most obvious star quality—is a female warrior named Neytiri. As most of our planet already knows from the publicity, Jake falls for her in a big but complicated way.

Big because Neytiri, as played by Zoë Saldana, is so alluring—cerulean-skinned, lemon-eyed, wasp-waisted, long-tailed, anvil-nosed, wiggly-eared (trust me, it's all seductive) and given to feral snarls in the heat of battle. But complicated because Jake is secretly working both sides of the jungle. He's in love with Neytiri, and soon embraces her people's values. (Yes, there's circumstantial evidence that Mr. Cameron knows about "Dances With Wolves," along with "Tarzan," "Green Mansions," "Frankenstein," "Princess Mononoke," "South Pacific," "Spartacus" and "Top Gun.") At the same time, Jake is spying for a gimlet-eyed military commander, Col. Miles Quaritch. (Stephen Lang proves that broad, cartoony acting can also be good acting.) The evil colonel has promised the ex-Marine a procedure that will restore the use of his paralyzed legs in exchange for information that will help chase the Na'vi from their sacred land, which happens to be the only place where unobtainium can be obtained.

It's no reflection on Mr. Worthington or Ms. Saldana, both of whom are impressive—though how, exactly, do you judge such high-tech hybrid performances?—that their interspecies love story lacks the heat of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet clinging to each other on the storm-swept decks of "Titanic." Teenage girls will not return to see this film half a dozen times or more unless they possess a rogue gene for wigglable ears. But then "Avatar" revises the relationship between everyone in the audience and the characters on screen. Actors have always been avatars; they've always represented our hopes and fears in the virtual reality of motion pictures. In much of this film, however, they've been transformed by technology into a new and ambiguous breed of entertainment icon—not the quasihuman denizens of "The Wizard of Oz," or the overgrown glove puppets of "The Polar Express," but nearly palpable fantasy figures that inhabit a world just beyond our reach.

The fantasy quotient of "Avatar" takes its first major hit when the Na'vi take their first hit from the American military. Mr. Cameron has devoted a significant chunk of his movie to a dark, didactic and altogether horrific evocation of Vietnam, complete with napalm, Agent Orange and helicopter gunships (one of which is named Valkyrie in a tip of the helmet to "Apocalypse Now.") Whatever one may think of the politics of this antiwar section, two things can be said with certainty: it provokes an adrenalin rush (what that says of our species is another matter), and it feels a lot better when it's over.

Other narrative problems intrude. For all its political correctness about the goodness of the Na'vis, "Avatar" lapses into lurid savage rituals, complete with jungle drums, that would not have seemed out of place in the first "King Kong." While Ms. Weaver's performance is a strong one, it isn't clear what her character is doing as an avatar, or how the Na'vi perceive her. What couldn't be clearer, though, is that Mr. Cameron's singular vision has upped the ante for filmed entertainment, and given us a travelogue unlike any other. I wouldn't want to live on Pandora, mainly because of the bad air, but I'm glad to have paid it a visit.

Going Na'vi: Why Avatar's politics are more revolutionary than its images Sam Adams from The Onion A.V. Club

Avatar and the American Man-child zunguzungu December 23, 2009

Avatar and American Imperialism zunguzungu January 4, 2010

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

The Auteurs [Glenn Kenny]

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

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

Avatar - Why all the hype? 2-part essay from Sci-Fi Movie, also from Fantastique: Avatar - To 3D or not to 3D?

Avatar - How They Did It 4-page essay from Fantastique

More photos (photo gallery # 1) from Sci-Fi Movie, and Part 2: Avatar photo gallery

fantastiqueZINE [James O'Ehley] (IMAX)

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B-]

n:zone [D.Kelly]

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [4/5]

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

Pajiba (Steven Lloyd Wilson) review

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

Slant Magazine review [2/4] Nick Schager

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [2/4]

The Onion A.V. Club review [C] Scott Tobias

About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [A]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [1/5]

Film School Rejects [Neil Miller]

The Cinema Source (Ryan Hamelin) review [A+]

CHUD.com (Nick Nunziata) review

theartsdesk.com [Jasper Rees]

Screen International (Mike Goodridge) review

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [C] also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]

AVATAR Ken Rudolph’s Movie Page

Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Andrew L. Urban + Louise Keller]

Screenjabber.com Justin Bateman

IFC.com [Alonso Duralde]

CNN Showbiz (Tom Charity) review

Twitch [Mike Sizemore]

Feo Amante [E.C. McMullen Jr.]

Gizmodo (Mark Wilson) review

Little White Lies [Limara Salt]

CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [B+]

Conservative backlash against "Avatar" Andrew Leonard from Salon, January 5, 2010

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Time Out London (Tom Huddleston) review [2/6]

The Guardian (Andrew Pulver) review

Peter Bradshaw reviews Avatar The Guardian, December 17, 2009

Avatar: review of reviews of James Cameron's 3D space opera Catherine Shoard from The Guardian, December 11, 2009

King of the world? David Thomson from The Guardian, December 17, 2009, also seen here: David Thomson on James Cameron

Avatar shows cinema's weakness, not its strength David Cox from The Guardian, December 21, 2009

The Daily Telegraph (Sukhdev Sandhu) review [3/5]

The Daily Telegraph (Mark Monahan) review [4/5]

James Cameron says Avatar a message to stop damaging environment brief comments from The Daily Telegraph, December 11, 2009

The Independent (Anna Keir) review [4/5]

Cameron sees metaphor for Earth in 'Avatar' a brief chat with the director from The Independent, December 11, 2009

Avatar: James Cameron's rhapsody in blue Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post, also seen here: Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

Sinking in $380 million on 'Titanic's' director Michael White from The Washington Post, December 18, 2009

Austin Chronicle review [4/5] Marc Savlov

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review December 18, 2009

Fan Fever Is Rising for Debut of ‘Avatar’ Michael Cieply from The New York Times, April 24, 2009

Blockbuster Trailer: The Selling of ‘Avatar’ Michael Cieply and Dave Itzkoff from The New York Times, August 21, 2009

The ‘Avatar’ Trailer: What Did We Just See? Dave Itzkoff from The New York Times, August 21, 2009

A Movie’s Budget Pops From the Screen Michael Cieply from The New York Times, November 8, 2009

Film: Alternate World, Alternate Technology John Anderson interviews the director from The New York Times, December 10, 2009

Video Game Review | 'Avatar: The Game': Fighting an Energy Crisis With Very Little Energy Seth Schiesel from The New York Times, December 17, 2009

David Brooks: The Messiah Complex David Brooks editorial from The New York Times, January 9, 2010

Campanella, Juan José

THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (El secreto de sus ojos) B 88

Argentina Spain (127 mi) 2009 ‘Scope Official Web Site

The Argentina that's coming isn't taught in Harvard. —Inspector Báez (José Luis Gioia)

Hard to fathom how any jury of film-goers would pick this film over the lyrical grace and sinister happenings in Michael Haneke’s chilling THE WHITE RIBBON, or the pulsating energy and ultimately transforming prison drama of Jacques Audiard’s intensely riveting THE PROPHET, or even the generational violence confronting mixed Arab and Jewish neighborhoods from Israel in Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani’s AJAMI, each of which addresses incendiary hot button issues with much more flair than this conventional DR. ZHIVAGO-like love story set against a police procedural murder investigation during the rise of the fascist military dictatorship in Argentina’s Dirty War in the mid 70’s, historical themes that barely scratch the surface and instead relies upon the familiarity of the viewer. It came as a complete surprise to me that the director of the Academy Award winning foreign film category this year had already directed 16 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on American television, paying his dues, so to speak, in the crime genre before adapting an Eduardo Sacheri novel and then directing, editing and even producing the film. Ricardo Darín plays Benjamín Espósito, a criminal investigator who works out of the office of the court rather than a police station, establishing the evidence needed for the district attorneys, but his position is viewed more like a legal aide or clerk, where there’s a distinctive social divide and pay scale between the two classes. Told through a series of flashbacks, the film moves back and forth in time from the present in 2000, where a retired Espósito is attempting to write a novel about an old murder case, to Buenos Aires in 1974 when it actually happened, filled with a murky backdrop of political corruption. The attorney he works for is Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), an American educated beauty who is part of the wealthy Argentinean aristocracy, and as such is off limits to Espósito, despite his immediate and everpresent fascination with her. The film is as much about exposing their undeclared love as it is about re-examining the implications of a decades-old murder case.

Espósito is at first staggered by the degree of brutality associated with a vicious rape and murder case of Liliana Coloto (Carla Quevedo), a young newlywed whose husband Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago) impresses him with his steadfast devotion, even after her death, as after the police beat the confessions out of a few innocent laborers, immediately exposed as fraudulent by Espósito himself who comes to blows with the judge on the case, the police simply drop their interest leaving the case unsolved and leaving Espósito and Morales alone as the only two in the world who still care. Espósito’s assistant, Pablo Sandoval, colorfully played by Guillermo Francella, spends more time in local bars than at his desk, but he and his drunkard associates have a brilliant breakthrough on the case which comes from understanding the nature of having an obsession. Suddenly the camera is whooshed into a giant soccer stadium, swooping in from on high with the stylish grandiosity of a Brian De Palma-like shot as Espósito is certain he’ll find his killer there, where miraculously, like finding a needle in a haystack, they do while the camera remains hot on his trail, chasing him through the innards of the stadium, all supposedly in the same unbroken shot where there’s admittedly an explosion of energy that is perhaps the highlight of the film. What follows, however, never lives up to that moment, relying instead on a theatrically induced confession, the kind that only happens in the world of television and the kind that would be inadmissable by any judge, but nonetheless Isidoro Gómez (Javier Godino) is sentenced to life imprisonment, an appropriate resolution for a country without the death penalty.

Soon afterwards, however, Gómez is seen free on the streets as part of the Presidential security detail, a stunning turn of events, released by the same judge Espósito fought with earlier in the film who reveals with blunt arrogance the new facts of life to an astonished Espósito, whose life is suddenly turned upside down by a miscarriage of justice on a national scale where sociopathic thugs and murderers are recruited by the secret police to do the nation’s dirty work in tracking down and interrogating suspected rebel terrorists, almost all of whom simply disappear without a trace. In the creepiest scene of the film, one right out of the horror genre, Gómez, brandishing his gun, gets on an elevator with Espósito and the district attorney, a scene that exposes just how vulnerable they are without protection and how impotent justice has become, a fitting metaphor for their extinguished romantic notions that play out like an old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama in a prolonged scene at the train station where parting is such sweet sorrow. People led such different lives then, so much so that now, when they look in the mirror at their reflection, they don’t recognize themselves anymore. It’s as if there was a memory fissure in their past reality that has never been put back into place properly, leaving them still with unanswered questions, wondering how it all could have happened in the first place, tacking on an optimistic ending to what was a particularly well edited, yet also formulaic film, where the romance was always yearned for, reduced to secondary consideration as reading between the lines becomes key, but somehow we’re to believe that it all rises into prominence again at the finish line—only in the movies. Shot on hi-def video, this unfortunately tends to wash out the colors and over-accentuates all the pores and crevices in the facial close-ups, which gives the appearance of wearing a rubber mask, all unintentional I’m sure, but hi-def video gives the picture such a low grade appearance. Since that’s the standard look of Hollywood films today, most viewers don’t give it a second look, but as this was awarded the Best Foreign Film of the year, it’s worth pointing out that the look is unexceptional.

SECRET IN THEIR EYES, THE (El secreto de sus ojos) (d. Juan José Campanella; Argentina) *** 3/4 Ken Rudolph’s Movie Site

A retired prosecutor revisits an unsatisfactorily closed 25 year old rape-murder case by writing a novel. This is the set-up for an intriguing cold case procedural which exposes layers of past Argentinian government corruption through flashbacks to the time of the case itself. This is another in a long series of great roles for star Ricardo Durín, who, with just a little make-up and subtle changes in posture, successfully plays his character at two different ages. It's an altogether fascinating puzzle of a film which kept me on tenterhooks throughout.

Time Out New York review [3/5] Keith Uhlich

Winner of the 2010 Best Foreign Film Oscar, this decade-hopping, tone-shifting mystery-thriller-romance from Argentina is about as deep as a kiddie pool, which isn’t to say it’s an unpleasant frolic. Separated by time and circumstance, retired criminal-court employee Benjamín Esposito (Darín) and his former-superior-cum-unrequited-love, Irene (Villamil), revisit an unresolved case from years before. It’s a lurid little tale of a beautiful woman raped and murdered, a doting husband (Rago) who wanted revenge and a killer (Godino) who went free thanks to the country’s tumultuous political climate.

Director Juan José Campanella—who recently put a butchtastic Kathy Griffin through her paces on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit—does yeoman’s work, save for a faux single-take in a packed sports stadium that’s clearly devised to impress. The camera swoops in from above, settles among the crowd, and switches points of view with “look, Ma, no hands!” effortlessness as Esposito chases down a suspect. But it’s so enamored with its own brilliance that the people get lost in the swirl.

Not that there’s much to these characters to begin with, since they bow to the story mechanics rather than drive them. Everyone is more or less defined by their hair…or lack of it. (There are fake baldpates in this film that would make Telly Savalas sue for defamation.) Darín and Villamil make for an attractive couple, no matter what age-aiding prosthetics the makeup department throws at them. And the resolution of the murder plot—part O. Henry, part EC Comics—is an ironic lip-smacker that concludes the mostly rote proceedings on a giddy high note.

The Onion A.V. Club review [B-] Scott Tobias

It was considered surprising when this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film went to the Argentinean thriller The Secret In Their Eyes, which bested the higher-profile likes of A Prophet and The White Ribbon. But Secret turns out to be exactly the type of film the Academy traditionally honors: intelligent but conventional, an actor’s showcase with glossy production values, and a little too polite. To be fair, The Secret In Their Eyes lands higher than most on the prestige-o-meter; it turns the mysteries surrounding a graphic rape and murder into an ambitious, gratifyingly adult puzzle about love and loss, the perversions of the justice system, and how memory can illuminate and distort the truth. What it lacks is the passion and vision to bring all those ideas across. The film sprawls across two decades and 127 minutes, but there isn’t a memorable image in it.

Based on the novel by Eduardo Sacheri, The Secret In Their Eyes opens with Ricardo Darín, a retired criminal-court employee, struck by a sudden compulsion to write a novel about an unsolved rape and murder from 20 years earlier. He enlists the help of former colleague (and now judge) Soledad Villamil, for whom he still harbors romantic feelings, though she isn’t entirely enthusiastic about the project. Flashing back to the late ’70s, when the crime was committed, the film details how Darín and co-worker Guillermo Francella were originally involved in the case, and how sweeping political changes at the time fatally corrupted the investigation.

Writer-director Juan José Campanella (Son Of The Bride) has a lot of experience helming American TV procedurals like House and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The Secret In Their Eyes wends smoothly through the complexities of the case and the political and romantic histories that inform it. Though unimpeachably intelligent and sophisticated, the film nonetheless has no grit under its fingernails: Here’s a story about a crime of passion, unrequited love, and political upheaval, yet Campanella keeps it all at arm’s length. Like his haunted lead character, he tries to tell a personal tale from a novelist’s distanced perspective, and in that, he’s successful to a fault.

The New Yorker (David Denby) review

An old Olivetti typewriter provides a running joke in "The Secret in Their Eyes," the Argentine drama that won a foreign-language Oscar last month—the machine can't type the letter 'A.' And the letter 'A' makes all the difference in the world when the hero inserts it in the middle of a one-word note, 'temo,' that he has written to himself. Then 'I fear' becomes 'I love you.' These are clever details in a drama that transcends cleverness. This beautiful film, directed with subtlety and grace by Juan José Campanella, really is about moving from fear to love.

The story begins in contemporary Buenos Aires, when Benjamin Espósito, a retired criminal investigator played by Ricardo Darín, decides to revisit a cold case—the brutal murder of a young woman—by writing a novel about it. In doing so he revisits his still-warm case of love for Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), a Cornell-educated lawyer, now a judge with a husband and children, who was a beautiful young prosecutor when they worked together a quarter of a century ago.

If you were diagramming the script, which the director and Eduardo Sacheri adapted from Mr. Sacheri's novel, you might divide it between these two elements, an unsolved murder and unresolved love. No movie in memory, though, is less schematic. Elements intertwine. Feelings emerge, recede, resurface. Wit and humor—and remnants of hope—sustain lives burdened with regret. The movie is very much a murder mystery, and very much a love story—in fact a pair of stories about obsessive love lived out by two men with ostensibly different attitudes toward the past, and very different outcomes. It's also a meditation on the passage of time and the uses of memory, an argument for never looking back—"You'll have a thousand pasts and no future," the murder victim's husband tells Benjamin (with what turns out to be startling irony)—and, in a romantic vein, an advertisement for acting on love at whatever time of life.

Exceptional movies are often about many things, and that's certainly the case with this one. I can't recall a more dramatic interrogation than the scene in which a suddenly ferocious Irene tries, to Benjamin's astonishment, to break an implacable suspect. Or a more engagingly odd couple than Benjamin and his colleague Sandoval, an investigator with a fondness for wry jokes and booze. Or a more poignant leave-taking, when Irene and Benjamin embrace but don't kiss, and fear trumps love. (All of it is enhanced by Félix Monti's burnished, sometimes brooding cinematography.)

Of the two previous films I've seen starring Ricardo Darín, "Son of the Bride," which was also directed by Mr. Campanella, is out of print on DVD—please, Sony Pictures Classics, reissue it—but "Nine Queens" remains available, and I've discussed it in more detail elsewhere on this page. A formidable actor with commanding star quality, Mr. Darín, who is in his sixties, plays Benjamin in his thirties persuasively—the actor's vitality is more important than his young-age makeup. In the present-day passages he makes the hero an aging sophisticate whose urbane demeanor conceals suppressed but far from extinguished passion. Ms. Villamil's Irene is quick-witted and alluring in the past and present alike. In a film of impeccable performances, three other standouts are Guillermo Francella, who plays Sandoval; Pablo Rago as Morales, the bereaved husband whose love was almost unfathomably pure; and Javier Godino as the prime suspect, Isidoro Gómez, a figure of pure malevolence at a time in the 1970s when Argentina's military dictatorship was bringing evil back into style.

In Buenos Aires in 1974, a criminal-court investigator, Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darín), arrives at a crime scene bantering and cursing with a colleague, and sees the naked corpse of a beautiful young woman. A conventional Argentine male with a passionate reverence for female splendor, he’s stunned into silence; he appears to take the woman’s violation (she has been raped, beaten, and murdered) as an affront to his personal sense of order. Not only does he relentlessly pursue the killer; he draws close to the woman’s husband, a bank employee named Morales (Pablo Rago), who remains obsessed with his dead wife for the rest of his life. “The Secret in Their Eyes,” which won the Oscar this year for best foreign-language film, is, I suppose, a legal thriller, but it’s powerfully and richly imagined: a genre-busting movie that successfully combines the utmost in romanticism with the utmost in realism—Espósito, it turns out, has a love of his own, which he’s too abashed to act on. A few scenes approach the melodramatic kitsch of a telenovela, but the writer-director, Juan José Campanella, working with the screenwriter and novelist Eduardo Sacheri, sends us deeper into mystery and passion; the movie presses forward with a rhapsodic urgency and with flashes of violence and pungent humor. “The Secret in Their Eyes” is a finely wrought, labyrinthine entertainment whose corners and passageways will be discussed by moviegoers for hours afterward as they exit into the cool night air.

The movie opens in 2000, and Espósito, gray-bearded, is at his desk, writing. It is twenty-five years after the murder, and the investigator, retired yet still fascinated by the case, is assembling his recollections of it. What he writes is played out by the actors, but he angrily throws away each recollection as an inadequate first draft, and that scene disappears from the screen. Campanella is seriously teasing us: Espósito may be dissatisfied with his prose, but what he depicts in these first-draft attempts actually happened (we see the scenes again later, in their proper place in the story). Back in 1974, Espósito chases the killer with the aid of his antic partner, Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), and their cautious superior, Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), a judge’s assistant. (In Argentina, judges act like D.A.s, investigating cases and indicting suspects.) Educated in the United States, Irene (as she’s referred to throughout) is a tall, brilliant upper-class beauty with a big head of black hair—think of a young South American Susan Sontag. She’s clearly on her way to the top (by 2000, she’s a powerful judge). Espósito is an intelligent man with penetrating dark eyes, but he’s not a lawyer, and the difference between them in income and status stops him from openly declaring his love for her, which she keeps hinting that she wants. Instead, he worries about Sandoval, an alcoholic genius who rises from the depths of a midday stupor in a bar and pulls together the clues that lead to the identity and the arrest of the murderer. Sandoval is a lovable mess, who, despite his gifts, can’t survive amid the chaos and the repression of Buenos Aires. The movie is haunted by missed opportunities and the meaningless, unhappy passage of time—the underside of obsession.

The murderer is a furtive creep named Gomez (Javier Godino), and what follows his capture is altogether startling. When Espósito, interrogating him, doesn’t get anywhere, Irene takes over. She turns the questioning into a sexual duel, taunting Gomez’s manhood, her words more wounding and more effective than a beating with brass knuckles. Campanella, who works in both the United States and Argentina, has directed numerous episodes of “Law & Order,” but what happens in this scene is not something you’ll see on American television. Irene understands the loathing of women at the heart of Argentine machismo; she plays a sarcastic bitch in order to provoke Gomez’s rage, and enjoys a triumph that pushes feminism beyond a critique of men—beyond ironic mockery, too—into a kind of legal-world performance art.

From scene to scene, the movie has an enormously vital swing to it. Espósito is a knight-errant of the law who seeks justice, and Sandoval is his Sancho Panza, while the judges (apart from Irene) are profane and corrupt political hacks; the back-and-forth among the court workers is juicy and explicit, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sinister, while the atmosphere outside the courts is savage. The dictator Juan Perón dies in 1974, and is succeeded by his wife, Isabel; it’s the time of the death squads, the disappearances, and legal anarchy. Gomez is freed by one of the judges and becomes a bully boy for the new fascist regime. He’s a serious threat to Espósito (Irene is protected by her wealthy family), and a provocation to Morales, the dead woman’s husband. Years go by, and, for most Argentineans, the time between the rule of the Peróns and the rise of democracy may be lost in a way that goes deeper than the lost love of two colleagues. Yet Campanella does no more than hint at the anguished political background of the story; he mostly sticks to his principal players, who are woven together in an increasingly intricate structure, revealed by an inventive and flexible camera. Campanella moves in for prolonged, emotionally wrenching closeups, as in a Garbo drama from the nineteen-thirties. He also does fluent and muscular sweeps: when Espósito and Sandoval first discover Gomez, in a soccer stadium, the camera, exploding with animal energy, pursues him, loses him as he ducks down a ramp, picks him up again. There may be no “signature” shot here, as in the work of an established auteur, but there’s an effortless mastery, from moment to moment, of whatever the dramatic situation requires.

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

Twitch [Todd Brown]

Slant Magazine [Aaron Cutler]

ScreenCrave [Tom von Logue Newth]

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3.5/4]

Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]

Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner) review [4/4]

Movies Kick Ass [Jose Solís]

The Oscar-Winning Ridiculousness of The Secret in Their Eyes Nicolas Rapold from The Village Voice

HollywoodChicago.com (Patrick McDonald) review [4.0/5]

Cole Smithey [Cole Smithey]

smartcine.com

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young, also seen here: Reuters [Deborah Young]

Variety (Jonathan Holland) review

The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [4/4]

Boston Globe (Wesley Morris) review [1.5/4]

Miami Herald [Rene Rodriguez]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

Dirty War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Argentina Dirty War 1976 - 1983 Global Security

The Dirty War in Argentina National Security Archive

Argentina: Secret U.S. Documents Declassified on Dirty War Atrocities National Security Archive

Campbell, Martin

BEYOND BORDERS C- 69

USA (127 mi) 2003

A film that supposedly travels into Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya can't be all bad, and there was a relevant story to be told about the difficulties of getting humanitarian aid to those that need it. Unfortunately, it's not told in this film, which is instead filled with too many clichés, sometimes resembling the Christian Missionary Television Network, with a truly bad performance by Angelina Jolie who just seemed too immature and way over her head in this film.

Beyond Borders David Denby from the New Yorker

High-minded romantic drama set against "strife-torn" (there is no other phrase) backgrounds. The sensationally charismatic Clive Owen is Nick Callahan, a fiery London doctor who devotes himself to the mangled poor in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya. Angelina Jolie, with a witchy drape of black hair surrounding her face, is Sarah Jordan, a married American who keeps leaving her husband (Linus Roache, in a pathetic role) and traipsing after the doctor, showing up with supplies and keen moral intuitions. They have stormy arguments that are, one supposes, a kind of relief workers' foreplay, and finally get passionate in various uncomfortable climes. The movie is not worthless—some of the backgrounds are vivid and scary—but it can't break free of its old-Hollywood silliness.

EDGE OF DARKNESS B 88

USA Great Britain (117 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

Like the recently released British TV drama, The Red Riding Trilogy (2009), which is a set of 3 movies written by the same man but directed by 3 different directors, all having a common serial killing storyline as well as corruption within the Yorkshire police force, this American film is based on a 6-part 1985 British TV mini-series, each just under an hour in length, where both just happen to be directed by the same man. This gives him particular insight into the material where he transplants British nuclear fears of the 80’s into the American present, using a murky governmental cover up to add special interest. This is like a trip into those 1970’s paranoid thrillers of THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975) or PARALLAX VIEW (1974) where high echelon elected representatives or uniquely specialized CIA agents cozy up to professional contract killers in order to protect the secrecy of their operations, which are usually lucrative defense contracts working on dangerous, top secret missions where there’s plenty of money involved and they don’t wish to disupt the cash pipeline. Closer to home would be SILKWOOD (1983), a fairly accurate accounting based on the true story about Karen Silkwood, a low level employee at a nuclear power plant who becomes aware of the power plant’s practice of exposing employees to dangerously high levels of radiation, who, on her way to spill the beans to a newspaper reporter, is suddenly killed in a car accident under suspicious circumstances that have yet to be solved. Similarly, a murky shadow of doubt hovers over the death of Amma Craven (Bojana Novakovic), the daughter of Boston Police detective Tommy Craven (Mel Gibson), gunned down at their front door. Initially suspecting the bullet was meant for him, his inquiries soon lead to a governmental cover up regarding his daughter, who was a research scientist at a private defense contractor called Northmoor, where she was killed before she could blow the whistle on some of the company’s illegal practices.

Of course, none of this is known right away, but takes extensive investigative visits to various people involved, some who fear for their lives, usually company employees, most of whom believe they are being followed or under surveillance, and the corporate executives (Danny Huston) who prefer lying to his face, hiding behind the ambigious phrase, “That’s classified information.” Risking his own life several times over, but hell bent on solving his daughter’s murder, he soon learns she was placed on a terrorist watch group, probably by the same company she worked for, making her an easy scapegoat in the event they incurred problems they couldn’t publicly explain. Making this even more murky are the Deep Throat visits to Craven by Ray Winstone, the burly, no nonsense professional fixer who was hired by the company (off the books) to sort this mess out. But interestingly, his allegiance is not necessarily with the company, as he’s a strange and mysterious figure who seems to operate under his own rules. The scenes between he and Gibson are among the best in the film due to their undisputed credibility for cutting through the bullshit. They are a pleasure to watch. But meanwhile, he discovers his daughter was poisoned by radioactive milk that’s been sitting in his refrigerator, probably infecting him as well. But since he doesn’t go see anyone about it, it’s an open question that is never really answered, because once the company senses the trouble he could cause them, they have their own way of dealing with it which is much more direct, and includes tasering him into a state of unconsciousness before locking him into a room blasted with toxic radiation. Knowing the limits this places on his life, his sense of urgency and desperation only grows greater, as he’s running out of time.

Mel Gibson in revenge fantasies have been poetry in motion since he broke into the business in MAD MAX (1975), and despite not having acted in a movie in 8 years, preferring instead to direct several controversial films, he hasn’t missed a beat. One of the visually spectacular images in this film is the picture of Northmoor itself, which like a planetarium is a concrete structure that noticeably sits atop a rolling, tree-lined hill overlooking a sleepy river that snakes its way through the Berkshires, where through the floor to ceiling glass windows of the building one can gaze at the pastoral beauty for miles in very direction. It’s curiously ironic that such a conspicuous modern architectural masterpiece would be the site of what are supposedly top secret operations. But those spectacular windows in particular hide the transparency they suggest, as the criminal protection racket they really operate actually takes place behind locked doors and could just as easily be an underground bunker. There’s an odd bit of whimsy in this film as well, as Mel routinely talks to the ghost of his dead daughter, which becomes a pronounced theme, including the use of flashback home movie images, all of which connects the dots between the living and the dead and the precarious position we face from our own impending mortality. In its own way, this movie suggests its our own future that lies in jeopardy unless we open our eyes to the masterful deception that is taking place in the dark corridors of our own government.

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [2/5]

We may have moved from veiled Cold War to explicit global terror in the 25 years since the excellent, UK-set nuclear conspiracy thriller ‘Edge of Darkness’ first aired on the BBC, directed by Martin Campbell (‘Casino Royale’) and written by Troy Kennedy Martin. It’s also been some eight, traumatic post-9/11 years since Mel Gibson’s last thespian outing in M Night Shyamalan’s ‘Signs’. But time seems to have stood still in Campbell’s drab remake for the big screen. With its nuclear concerns and old-fashioned heroics, it feels like a period piece.

In condensing the original mini-series into a conventional, two-hour package, scriptwriters William Monahan and Andrew Bovell have sadly sacrificed some of the original’s cultural specificity and its slow-burn quality. Moreover, in relocating from northern England to the US’s Eastern Seaboard, they have jettisoned much of the chilling atmospherics. Craven, the widowed police officer whose engineer daughter (Bojana Novakovic) is gunned down on a home visit, is now one of Boston PD’s finest; and if it’s true that Gibson, in the role, recalls the earnest intensity and investigative zeal of Bob Peck’s original performance, he also brings a lot of unwanted ‘Lethal Weapon’-era manic mannerisms to the part.

It’s basically a ‘little guy against the system’ movie, literally so in many of Campbell’s framings – for instance, where he miniaturises Gibson’s now slightly wizened figure against the looming bulk of Danny Huston’s smarmy corporate bad guy. However, Ray Winstone, as a boozy high-level fixer in pointed contrast to Craven’s ginger-ale-drinking sobriety, does offer good value in what is otherwise a surprisingly low-wattage and anonymously directed thriller.

The Onion A.V. Club review [C] Keith Phipps

Mel Gibson has been away from the cameras for a while, and he appears a little scuffed up in Edge Of Darkness, his first starring role since Signs in 2002. He looks greyer and craggier than before, and his stiff movements make it easy to forget his former athletic grace. Whatever the source of that wear and tear, it at least helps him look the part in this revenge thriller, which casts him as a Boston cop looking for answers after seeing his daughter (Bojana Novakovic) gunned down on his own front porch. Director Martin Campbell, adapting a well-regarded BBC miniseries he directed in 1985, goes further than merely failing to hide the ravages of time, trouble, and hard living. He puts his diminutive tough-guy star next to actors who tower over him, in shots that subtly drive home the same point: As often as we’ve seen Gibson get out of scrapes in the past, his odds don’t look so good this time.

Those choices serve the film, too, which compels Gibson—sporting a thick, occasionally believable Boston accent—to unravel a far-reaching conspiracy involving his daughter’s employer, a private industrial concern overseen by a silky, amoral Danny Huston, whose character needs only a mute Korean manservant to qualify him for a supervillain license. With each lead Gibson follows, he discovers he’s taken on not a dragon, but a many-headed hydra.

Edge Of Darkness gathers all the elements of a smart, politically resonant thriller, but leaves them only half-assembled. That might partly be due to the need to compress a sprawling plot into a two-hour frame; a pattern of investigation, interrogation, exposition, fisticuffs, and repetition takes over the movie after a while. But it’s mostly because Gibson crowds out anyone and anything competing with the displays of righteous fury he’s leaned on since Braveheart. In spite of attempts to make him seem vulnerable—which include a bunch of maudlin conversations with his character’s dead daughter—this is really a movie about the power, and grim pleasure, taken by a man building up a static charge of rage as he searches for the right target. Huston, Ray Winstone (playing a puppetmaster of puppetmasters), and other recognizable faces all do fine character work, but Edge Of Darkness quickly devolves into another showcase for Gibson’s snorting-bull act, a routine he could happily have shelved during his time off.

theartsdesk [Adam Sweeting]

If you were looking for a director for the movie version of Edge of Darkness, you'd have thought you couldn't do better than Martin Campbell, who made the original 1985 series for BBC television. He's now a bona fide Hollywood ace, with a string of major TV credits and hit movies like Casino Royale and the Zorro flicks to his name. But not even a Tinseltown budget can bribe lightning to strike twice, and whatever fortuitous combination of timing and subject matter turned the BBC series into an instant historic event, it's difficult to imagine that happening to its big-screen incarnation.

While Campbell and screenwriters William Monahan and Andrew Bovell have transplanted the action from Yorkshire to Boston, Massachusetts, they have at least stuck to the basic outlines of Troy Kennedy Martin's original. When his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is killed by a shotgun blast on the doorstep of his home, grief-stricken police detective Thomas Craven (a world-weary Mel Gibson) is naturally determined to track down her killer. Early assumptions that Craven himself was the hitman's intended target crumble as he unearths evidence that Emma was involved with an environmental group trying to expose a conspiracy involving illicit nuclear weapons at the Northmoor defence plant, where she was a low-level employee. Shadowy hitmen and intelligence figures start coming out of the woodwork to make sure Craven's discoveries never see the light of day. Craven goes into lone-wolf mode and makes it his mission to find answers and avenge his daughter.

The snag is, where the original Edge... brilliantly captured a mood of fear and dread about the nuclear industry, intensified by the authoritarian mood of the Thatcher-Reagan years, the course of events over the last 25 years mean that we've become woefully inured to the routine scale of corporate and governmental lies and deception (there's a televised inquiry currently in progress along these very lines). Indeed, the somewhat cursory manner in which the movie introduces us to a bent lawyer, a corrupt Senator and a murderous business executive, not to mention a far-from-upstanding Boston police officer, impart the dispiriting sense that the film-makers are suppressing a yawn and going through the motions. It's hardly surprising when, after two hours, you find you've just sat through a creakingly average conspiracy thriller, lacking a single character you could really care tuppence about. Not even Ray Winstone (pictured below) can kick much life into the vaguely-defined security fixer Darius Jedburgh.

The Kennedy Martin original was also distinctive in articulating a resounding ecological warning, setting up a confrontation between mankind's malign, misguided tinkering and the mythic power of Mother Nature. Hence he called his eco-activist group GAIA, referring to a hypothesis in which earth is its own living biosystem. In the movie the activists belong to something called Night Flower, and references to any kind of spiritual dimension have been reduced to Craven's imaginary conversations with his dead daughter.

You'd have to conclude that Campbell and his writers have missed a major trick here. James Cameron's Avatar may be simplistic, but vital to its huge success is surely its timely connection to issues of ecological awareness and protecting the environment. This might have been a major weapon in the Edge of Darkness locker too, but it makes no attempt to reach for anything beyond the literal surface of the action. The story's emotional force supposedly derives from a lonely man trying to deal with the aftermath of his much-loved daughter's murder, but Edge-the-movie settles instead into a routine shoot-'em-up where stone-faced Mel metes out comeuppance to the scumbags. While he's committed to avenging Emma's death, he shows no glimmer of comprehension of the issues that she considered important enough to risk her life for. As remakes go, file this alongside The Italian Job and Get Carter.

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Nick Pinkerton) review

"Did you shoot my daughtah?" is the question posed, in flat-voweled Bostonian, in the trailer for Edge of Darkness. And Mel Gibson, much-bereaved and much-vengeful, from Hamlet to Ransom to Revolutionary America, sets out to settle another score.

Gibson is Thomas Craven: veteran, homicide detective, lonesome widower. His daughter, a post-grad intern at a research and development firm in the Berkshires, is visiting home when somebody fires a gun in front of his house. Craven, left lonelier, wants to find out who did it, the first link in a long chain of whos and whys that leads him up the food chain. As in the film's predecessor—a Yorkshire-set 1985 BBC2 serial, with Bob Peck as Craven—the investigation of what's supposedly an open-and-shut botched payback killing by an old collar opens into something much bigger, revealing a sweaty commingling of private and public sectors.

Director Martin Campbell, most famous for James Bond relaunches, is revisiting old material—as a hot-handed U.K. TV director, he shot the original six-part, six-hour cult-classic miniseries from a Troy Kennedy Martin script. For the film, mysteries unspool more quickly, while peripheral characters and "color" scenes without expository purpose—Peck bawling on the M1, a Brit ballroom competition on TV—have disappeared.

What's left is propulsive and streamlined, with Craven more single-mindedly focused on finding and damning the guilty. When Peck went to question his daughter's boyfriend, it was a psychological duel, the uncomfortably intimate father-daughter relationship a jealous undercurrent. When Gibson makes the same visit, it's for a knife fight (his paternal love now purged of anything unseemly). This change in character may not have been intended—there have been rumors of reshoots to punch up the action at the studio's behest—but this Edge is a vigilante movie. Which isn't to say it's simply a downgrade from Anglo sophistication to Hollywood slam-bang. Given the film's focus on bereavement—it is haunted by the dead—bodies drop with actual weight here. And the culmination is that rare shootout that can truly be called cathartic.

Kennedy Martin's Darkness unfolded in the shadows of Cold War espionage and the arms race of the Reagan-Thatcher era. The 2010 incarnation is still political: Danny Huston's man-behind-the-curtain CEO disguises his rogue dealings in "jihadist dirty bombs" as experiments in clean, green energy. He has pictures of himself shaking hands with Bush II and Nancy Pelosi and, in what would have seemed a sci-fi touch a year ago, one of the implicated parties signing off on his private "security fiefdom" is a Republican senator from Massachusetts.

Some of the off-the-record Corridors of Power stuff is well done, but the scenes feel haphazardly placed, not quite of the same movie as the Gibson revenge flick. Ray Winstone's Jedburgh, a bon viveur government troubleshooter with ambiguous loyalties, who consults on and monitors Craven's investigation, never quite integrates either. The 1985 Jedburgh was a CIA good ol' boy in London—and while it's fun to watch Brit Winstone and Gibson trying to out-heavy one another, the transatlantic role-reversal doesn't quite work. Most Americans in 2010 don't fear the crown in the way the average Briton of '85 was concerned about American influence. At times it seems as if Jedburgh's sole mission is to deliver the script's more portentous lines: "We live awhile, and then we die sooner than we planned."

Gibson has been absent from the American screen since 2004. He's squandered his industry clout with risks both planned (The Passion of the Christ) and, assumedly, not (the passion for conspiracy theory). One wonders—certainly Warner Bros. suits will—if off-screen events have made it impossible for audiences to swallow him as a character. Yet Gibson still knows what he does best, as a star should, and creates tension just from never letting the tears poised in his eyes fall. Onscreen much of the time, thicker and more creased than you remember, he can make this rather unshapely movie seem taut.

Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [2/5] also seen here: DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3/4]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

Slant Magazine [Ryan Stewart]

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

Screen International (Mike Goodridge) review

Screenjabber review David Franklin

A Nutshell Review [Stefan S]

Eye for Film (Donald Munro) review [3/5]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]

Film Freak Central review Ian Pugh

DVD Talk (Tyler Foster) review [1/5]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [C] also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

Total Sci-Fi [Matt McAllister]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Andrew L. Urban + Louise Keller]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C]

RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [C-]

Little White Lies [Tom Seymour]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [2/4]

Frank's Reel Reviews review Loron Hays

FromTheBalcony [Bill Clark]

Mel Gibson: back with a vengeance John Hiscock interviews Mel Gibson from The Daily Telegraph, January 21, 2010

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman

The Hollywood Reporter review Michael Rechtshaffen

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [2/4]

The Daily Telegraph review [2/5] Tim Robey

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

Austin Chronicle review [2/5] Marc Savlov

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review also seen here: Los Angeles Times [Michael Phillips]

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review

1949 Living Room in the Berkshires on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

1940s Interiors - a set on Flickr

Grasshopper Chair by Saarinen - The Mid-Century Modernist

Campion, Jane

Campion, Jane Art and Culture

Jane Campion’s lush study of repression, "The Piano," contains an enduring image: high cliffs tower over a deserted beach, waves crashing and rolling upon the cold sand. Deposited in the tide is a black piano, a misplaced presence seemingly dropped from heaven. It is a solitary signifier of humanity in the wild heart of nature.

The film's story focuses on Ada (played by Holly Hunter), who arrives in New Zealand as a mail-order bride. Ada is mute, presumably stripped of her voice by the patriarchal forces of the Victorian era. The piano represents her sole means of expression: a symbol for freedom, sexuality, and the romantic vision of life.

Such are the symbols and characters typically explored by Campion, whose films address social pressures and the prisons of femininity. Her first feature, "Two Friends" (1986), tells the story of a pair of girls whose childhood bond is torn apart as they each adapt differently to imminent womanhood. One retains her prim and proper schoolgirl ways, while the other becomes a full-blown punk. The innocence of their friendship is destroyed by the external demands of gender and sexuality. "Sweetie," Campion's next film, explores similar tensions between two sisters, one of whom is "normal" but deeply insecure, while the other is outrageous, imperious, and mentally ill.

Perhaps Campion's most disturbing look at "abnormal" women comes in 1990's "An Angel at my Table," her film about the autobiographical writing of Janet Frame. Gifted but stigmatized by her impoverished upbringing and odd manners, Frame was diagnosed as schizophrenic and forcibly institutionalized for eight years. The film is terrifying in its portrayal of padded rooms, shock therapy, and the threat of lobotomy. Because she uses her art to retain her unique identity, Frame is the type of subject that attracts Campion.

Campion herself is no stranger to the pressure to conform: she knows the trials of being a female director in a field dominated by men. Yet even her more recent, big-budget projects persist in their focus on women's struggle for self-definition. "The Portrait of a Lady" (1996), adapted from the Henry James novel, asks us to identify with its heroine's efforts to break from a manipulative marriage.

And her efforts have been noticed: Campion was the first female director to receive the prized Palme d’Or at Cannes. She was originally given the award for her early short, "Peel," then won it again for "The Piano." "The Piano" also brought her an Academy Award for best original screenplay.

TCMDB profile from Turner Classic Movies

Along with Australian directors Gillian Armstrong, Jocelyn Moorhouse and Shirley Barrett, Jane Campion has emerged as a major feminist filmmaker. She has been responsible for some of the most acclaimed films to have originated from Down Under since the late 1980s. Her features all have one thing in common: a powerful, courageous woman as a central figure. From Genevieve Lemon's unhinged "Sweetie" (1989) to Kerry Fox's mentally troubled Janet Frame in "An Angel at My Table" (1990) to Holly Hunter's mute Ada in "The Piano" (1993) to Nicole Kidman's manipulated Isabel Archer in "The Portrait of a Lady" (1996), the lead in a Campion film provides a showcase for the actress and advances the director's desire to display private, often erotic, sides of women rarely portrayed in conventional Hollywood fodder. Although some critics have found her work self-conscious, the majority have praised her originality.

The roots of her skill can be traced to her upbringing and education. Born in Wellington, New Zealand to theatrical parents (her father was a director, her mother, an actress), Campion displayed an early interest in art; she was also an accomplished, but idiosyncratic artist, with an eye toward the unusual. (This would later manifest in her use of camera angles and in the set pieces she created in her films.) Although interested in acting, Campion studied anthropology in college and later ventured to Europe where she studied art in Venice. Migrating to London, she found work as an assistant to a director of commercials and documentaries before she moved to Australia. Enrolling in art school, Campion began to experiment with film and shot her first short, "Tissues", about a father who had been arrested for child molestation. Furthering her education at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Campion went on to complete several award-winning shorts, including "Peel" (1982), centering on a power struggle over discipline between a child and his father, and her thesis, "A Girl's Own Story" (1984), which introduced her themes of women, sexuality and rites of passage.

After marking time in the Women's Film Unit, a government-sponsored program for which she directed the short "After Hours" (1984), about sexual harassment, and a detour to TV with the longform "Two Friends" (1986), Campion made her feature debut with the darkly stylish "Sweetie" , a disturbing study of familial tensions brought about by a mentally unstable young woman. Acclaimed for its visual style, strong performances and comic originality, "Sweetie" earned prizes from the Film Critics Circle of Australia and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Campion's second feature "An Angel at My Table" was originally intended as a TV-movie. Working from a script by Laura Jones, adapted from the autobiography of New Zealand writer Janet Frame, the director fashioned a biopic that detailed an unconventional story. Tracing Frame from her awkward childhood through a nervous breakdown and stay in a mental institutions to her eventual fulfillment as a writer, Campion once again displayed a flair for observant detail and lush visuals. It is an intimate look at an atypical central figure, a shy, plain woman who defines herself through her writing.

In 1984, fresh out of film school, Campion began working on a screenplay about the colonial past of New Zealand. Over nearly a decade, she developed the project into what became her most acclaimed feature to date, "The Piano", an intensely erotic story told from the female perspective. The story is fairly simplistic: a mute woman (Holly Hunter) enters into an arranged marriage and moves halfway around the world with her illegitimate daughter (Anna Paquin) and her piano. Her new husband (Sam Neill) refuses to transport the instrument and sells it to a settler gone native (Harvey Keitel). The purchaser agrees to return the piano if the woman teaches him how to play. Again Campion's hallmarks of gorgeous photography (the landscape almost becomes another character) and strong performances align to produce a remarkably original Gothic drama. "The Piano" earned numerous awards, including the Palme d'Or at Cannes (the first for a woman director). Campion became only the second woman nominated for the Best Director Academy Award. Although she lost in that category, she did win for her screenplay, as did Hunter for Best Actress and Paquin for Best Supporting Actress.

Campion's long awaited follow-up was an adaptation of Henry James' novel "The Portrait of a Lady", written by Laura Jones and starring Nicole Kidman. Critics were divided; some found it static and miscast, while others praised its intelligence and the director's injection of sexual matters hinted at in the original. Next Campion and her sister Anna co-wrote the screenplay for her next directorial effort, "Holy Smoke" (1999), in which an Australian family hire a noted cult deprogrammer (Harvey Keitel) to retrieve and restore their errant daughter (Kate Winslet) from an Indian guru. Their subsequent battle of wills, which as in all Campion efforts also takes on an overpowering sexual component, drives the narrative, but while the film starts out extremely promising and Campion teamed with yet another actress as fearless as she is talented, the ultimate execution was flawed, murky and unsatisfying.

A planned reunion with Kidman was in store for Campion's next effort, "In the Cut" (2003), an adaptation of Susanna Moore's novel, but the ever-in-demand Kidman's schedule required her to cede the role to another actress (though Kidman stayed on a producer). Campion cast a maturing Meg Ryan, looking to break out of her sterotypical adorable parts, as a troubled New York writing professor who, after becoming involved in a crime, becomes embroiled in an erotic and dangerous affair with a police detective. Once again, Campion put the psycho-sexual politics of her characters in sharp relief and had a willing collaborator in Ryan, who agreed to a controversial full frontal nude scene, but again the outcome was uneven, with the director's singular vision bogged down by the conventional thriller elements grafted onto the story.

All-Movie Guide bio from Rebecca Flint Marx

Jane Campion Facts - Biography - YourDictionary

Cinema Nation Identity: Jane Campion. Department of Communication ... a nice, thorough biography

Film Reference profile by Rob Edelman

Jane Campion • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Fincina Hopgood from Senses of Cinema, October 4, 2002

Jane Campion | NZ On Screen biography

Directors: Jane Campion bio and brief film reviews by D.K. Holm from Cinemonkey

OZ CINEMA.com : People : Jane Campion a brief, early bio

Jane Campion | Biography (born 1954) bio and website

Jane Campion's Top 9 - The Criterion Collection

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

FILM / Piano Forte: A few years ago Jane Campion was an eternal ... A few years ago Jane Campion was an eternal student, turning out short films which even her tutors considered too offbeat. Now she is the winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and Harvey Keitel describes her as a goddess, by Quentin Curtis from The Independent, October 16, 1993

Passion in Perspective: The Films of Jane Campion — Filmmakers ... Richard Peña on a Retrospective: February 3–24, 1995

Jane Campion's Shining: Portrait of a Director - Film Comment Kathleen Murphy, November/December 1996

Jane Campion: a complete retrospective Peter Keough from the Boston Phoenix, January 28, 1999

Jane Campion: interviews Harriet Margolis on Virginia Wright Wexman’s book, Jane Campion: interviews, from Screening the Past, November 12, 1999, also seen here: Jane Campion: Interviews

kamera.co.uk - feature item - Jane Campion by Dana Polan Jane Campion, by Dana Polan, a book review by Jason Wood

Where the boys are - Salon.com Jessica Hundley from Salon, March 22, 2000

A Pleasure to Watch: Jane Campion's Narrative Cinema Sue Gillet from Screening the Past, March 2001

Where are the women? Jane Campion is the lone female director in ... Where are the women? Jane Campion is the lone female director in Cannes film project, International Herald Tribune, May 20, 2007

Jane Campion: 'Life isn't a career' | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver, May 12, 2014

Jan Chapman, producer of 'The Daughter' | The Saturday Paper Benjamin Law, March 19, 2016

BIOGRAPHY: Jane Campion - Film Director - The Heroine Collective Miranda Bain, September 2, 2016

Campion, Jane They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

BOMB Magazine — Jane Campion by Lynn Geller interview Winter 1990

New Again: Jane Campion - Page - Interview Magazine Michael Tabb and Katherine Dieckmann interview, January 1992

“We are all Isabel Archers” A “Bonne Femme” Conversation with Jane ... Sophie Menoux talks with the director November 25, 1998

Interview: Jane Campion Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V. Club, September 22, 2009

Jane Campion: 'Life isn't a career' | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver interview, May 12, 2014

Jane Campion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE – PEEL B+ 92

Australia (9 mi) 1982

This was my first film. I knew these people who all had red hair and were part of the family. They were also alike in character, extreme and stubborn. Their drive in the country begins an intrigue of awesome belligerence.

—Jane Campion

Recalling a 1984 interview by Mark Stiles, Jane Campion: Interviews - Page 5 - Google Books Result

The people at the AFTS loathed Peel when they saw a first cut of it. They told me not to bother finishing it. I was quite vain so I found that really upsetting, but it was good for me. I cut out everything that was remotely extraneous and made the film a lot better. The AFTS people thought I was arrogant and not particularly talented. There were people there more talented than I was, but my talent wasn't the kind they were ever going to understand, which was one of the luckiest things for me.

Peel, also known as An Exercise in Discipline — Peel, is a 1982 Australian short film directed by Jane Campion, described as an “Abrasive yet meditative study of the usual family road-trip misery.” Working for the first time with her longtime friend and cinematographer, Sally Bongers, a fellow student at the Australian Film and Television School, a father along with his son and sister are taking a road trip in the country, each with bright red hair, during which an orange peel has significance, where teaching a lesson has unforeseen consequences. As the youngest child grows bored, dropping pieces of an orange peel out the window, his father tells him to stop, but he intentionally disobeys, causing his father to stop the car, claiming they’re not going anywhere until he goes back and picks up all the pieces he dropped onto the side of the road. While his sister complains endlessly about how she can’t believe what a waste of time this is, extending an already long drive, claiming she has important things to do, growing more and more vehement, until the father pops out of the car as much to escape her as to find out what’s going on with his son. When they return, the sister has herself peeled an orange and left the peel on the ground next to the car. When both tell her to pick it up, with the kid apparently learning his lesson, she refuses, where once again stubbornness alters the power dynamic, leaving them all in a state of limbo, not going anywhere, where the final image is one of mayhem, with the sister assuming the role of the pouting, incalcitrant child, while the out-of-control kid is seen jumping up and down on top of the car.

The film went on to win the Short Film Palme d’Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival making Campion the first ever woman (and New Zealander) to win the award.

User Reviews from imdb Author: postmanwhoalwaysringstwice from usa

Jane Campion's 1982 short film "An Exercise in Discipline: Peel" is an interesting study of character, relationships, and to a degree the way that the camera can capture these elements. It follows three people traveling in a car along a small stretch of a country road. Indicated right away are the relationships of the people involved, who are said to be real people: a father, his son, and the father's sister. The bored son is goofing off by throwing orange peels out the window, and the father gets ticked off, and everything escalates from there. The film examines how inconsequential arguments leave us at a standstill. Ironically the resolution to the argument here is reached by ignoring it. At only nine minutes, Campion's short is to the point, and a near perfect expression.

User Reviews from imdb Author: krorie from Van Buren, Arkansas

This was New Zealand writer/director Jane Campion's first film, showing all the imaginative talent that would later garnish her an Oscar for the magnificent "The Piano" in 1993. Much is revealed in a short nine minute time span about an impatient man with a short fuse, a disenchanted, petulant woman, and a brat of a child. It is obvious that the man and boy are father and son (they even look alike). The woman seems out of place. She is listed in the credits as the man's sister, ergo the boy's aunt, yet she seems emotionally distant from the two.

"Peel" is an appropriate title, applying literally to the peeling of the orange that starts the commotion that leads to confrontation, and figuratively signifying the peeling away of the outer skins of the trio to lay bare the inner turmoil and conflict. The first phrase of the title, "An Exercise in Discipline," is used in a sardonic sense. There is little discipline involved in the battle among the three where emotions run amok and a ripple effect occurs from child to adults. What begins as a tussle between father and son for domination and control ends as a stalemate with father and son teaming up against the sister/aunt. To further emphasize the ignorance and stupidity exhibited, the entire show takes place along a busy public highway in broad daylight.

On a higher plane, Jane Campion indicates that major battles which may destroy individuals, families, and nations often begin over the silliest of occurrences, in this case the peeling of an orange and throwing the husk out a car window. The narrow minded among us can become so stubborn concerning minor infractions of rules and regulations that we forget how mundane and harmless such actions really are. The man decides this after much ado when the boy picks up all the pieces save one that have been strewn along the roadway. He surrenders to the boy's wishes and wistfully places the boy atop his shoulders to return to the parked car only to begin a new war with his sister, who is late for her destination as a result of the orange peels fiasco.

Color adds to the effectiveness of the allegory with the bright shades emphasizing the frayed emotions, lost tempers, and broken dreams. "Peel" is a much underrated short by a gifted artist.

Not Just Movies: Jane Campion's Short Films: Peel, Passionless ... Jake Cole

An Exercise in Discipline: Peel opens Jane Campion's career with a bang. It starts with an echoing tap eventually revealed to be an orange bouncing off a dashboard and proceeding in a series of quick cuts that allow no hint of coherence even as a title card establishes its trio's relation to each other. From there, it only gets stranger, using the vivid color of '80s clothes and the countryside around the stopped car to bring out the dysfunction of the family dynamic exhibited by the father, his son and the boy's aunt. The father chastises the boy for throwing his orange peel out the car window, even stopping to make the kid pick up the pieces along the road. The lad's defiance leads him to run away, but in quiet shame he starts collecting the peel long after getting out of eyesight. The woman, meanwhile, viciously berates the man for making them stop, already peeved that she had to spend the day driving with them when she had other plans.

The only thing clear-cut about this movie is the aforementioned card with its postmodern family tree, but even that triangle is problematic: by folding back in on itself, it lightly suggests incestuous relationship, an theme common to Campion's early work in both literal and psychologically figurative ways. Though one generally refers to the film by its subtitle, it is important to take note of the "Exercise in Discipline" tag. It speaks to the fractured narrative exercise: the man forces discipline upon his son, who then begins to order around the woman having no been conditioned into a harder adult male. But it also hints at the formal rigor of Campion's piece, which features segmenting and fragmenting angles, framing and focal lengths by cinematographer Sally Bongers to deepen the alienation and power dynamics of the family. It's bewildering to think that something so dense and fully formed was a student film, and much less surprising to note that it won the Short Film Palme D'Or at Cannes four years later. This is one of the best modern short films I've seen, and one can see Campion's gift for microcosmic, obsessive yet always playful characterization in its eight short minutes.

Curator's notes An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982) on ASO ... Kate Matthews

Peel is joyously experimental, infused with the stubbornness of its characters. Campion allows this shared trait to seep beyond the events of the story and into its very form. She emphasises the repetitive nature of their quarrels with a circular narrative structure and rhythmic editing and sound. She also has fun with the stereotypical connection between short tempers and red hair, making oranges, the fruit, trigger the family’s argument.

At the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, Campion won the short film Palme d’Or for Peel, made when she was a student at AFTRS in 1982. The film was apparently poorly received at the time by her teachers. 1986 was a big year at Cannes for Campion. Along with Peel’s win, her telefeature Two Friends (1986) and two more of her AFTRS shorts, Passionless Moments (1983) and A Girl’s Own Story (1983), screened in Un Certain Regard. Jane Campion’s later, landmark Palme d’Or win for The Piano (1993), remains at the time of writing the only occasion on which a female director has received the award for a feature film.

Campion’s student films tend to sidestep, or experiment with, conventional cinematic narrative categories and Peel toys with both narrative and documentary form. The Pyes, including fashion designer Katie Pye, are a real family and the opening credits announce 'a true story’ – but the action is staged.

These student works are enjoyable both as standalone films and as a retrospective insight into Campion’s early experimentation with the medium. They show the emergence of narrative and stylistic interests that she would develop through many of her later features. Peel shares a dry wit and a surreal visualisation of the ordinary with Sweetie (1989) and Passionless Moments (1983). In addition it shares an interest in the dynamics and powerplays of human relationships, both familial and romantic, seen in many of Campion’s later works, including Sweetie (1989), The Piano (1993) and A Girl’s Own Story (1983).

Campion completed degrees in anthropology and fine arts before attending film school and US Academic Kathleen McHugh has drawn attention to the influence of ethnography and surrealist art on Campion’s work. In Peel we see a direct manifestation of the two. The opening credits lay out the family relationship in an anthropological diagram (see clip one) and the film concerns itself, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, with plotting the nuances of this family dynamic. It does this through an at-times surreal visual and narrative focus on even the most mundane of details and moments, with particular emphasis on similarities and parallels.

Peel’s cinematographer was another AFTRS student, Sally Bongers, who later worked with Campion on A Girl’s Own Story (1983) and Sweetie (1989). These films share a similar visual sensibility. Each makes beautiful the ordinary and the drab through strikingly graphic compositions, visual matching and extremes of focus and framing.

Jane Campion's Breakout Short Film, “Peel" (1982) - Ezra Lunel

"This was my first film. I knew these people who all had red hair and were part of the family. They were also alike in character, extreme and stubborn. Their drive in the country begins an intrigue of awesome belligerence.”

—Jane Campion

In 1982, Jane Campion asked her friend Katie Pye to portray a version of herself in a short family drama she’d written called “Peel.” The screenplay peeled away appearances and showed the Pye family’s angry relationships with each other. Katie and her brother Tim laughed when they read it. “Yes, that’s us,” they told her.

At twenty-eight, Campion was a remarkably self-assured film student in Sydney; she’d already traveled through Europe and earned separate bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and painting. “As a young filmmaker, I was particularly committed to what was nasty, what isn’t spoken about in life,” she said. She admired Luis Buñuel and Australian director Peter Weir (“Picnic at Hanging Rock”) for his “sense of mystique, a depth, another layer. It’s good to work beyond what you know consciously. I do that,” she added.

“Peel” derives much of its power from being unafraid to upset us. Campion throws us into the middle of a particularly unattractive family spat, where the atmosphere is tense and aggressive; but we’re hooked by the prospect of something terrible happening: an accident, perhaps, or the characteristic violence of a dysfunctional family.

Her willingness to look nastiness straight in the eye is partly why “Peel” rankled its viewers. “The people at the AFTS [Australian Film and Television School] loathed ‘Peel’ when they saw a first cut of it. They told me not to bother finishing it.” The criticism hurt, but spurred her to cut the film down to its barest essentials. The result, “An Exercise in Discipline: Peel” ended up winning the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film at Cannes in 1986.

The film starts with an incessant pounding and the words “AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE” – a cryptic statement that poses as many questions as it answers. We are propelled forward, into split-second cuts of traffic rushing by and roadside signs registered from a vehicle traveling at dangerous speeds. Pounding, ‘exercise,’ ‘discipline,’ unsafe traffic, the title “Peel,” – jumbled audiovisual elements calculated to put us on edge. A triangular diagram clarifies – or confuses? – the relationships of the people we’re about to meet:

Observed (and not studied) only momentarily in the course of the narrative, the use of two titles for each character creates a sense of incestuous uneasiness, as though the brother and sister were also mother and father.

With the sound of radio stations being searched and the Doppler-effect whizzing of cars rushing by, Tim Pye is at the wheel, his son Ben beside him, pounding an orange against the windshield. Katie, Tim’s sister, is in the back seat, upset, speaking to the back of Tim’s head. The car space feels too small for the Pyes. Point-of-view camera perspectives place us deep in the psyche, and physical space, of each of these family members, as though we too, both issue and absorb the brunt of their psychological domestic abuse.

Violence. Tim grabs Ben’s hair and yanks his head back. The car screeches to a halt; Ben isn’t wearing a seatbelt and nearly smashes his head against the windshield. “Get out!” Tim says directly to the camera. But orange peel is organic waste; why should it matter that Ben throws it out on the country highway? “You throw ice cream out!” Ben tells his father. Doesn’t matter. Orders must be followed; balance of power maintained. Meanwhile, there’s an insurrection in the back seat: Katie blames Tim for their being late to their engagement. “Shit! You said we’d be back by five,” she says. “Jesus, you make me mad. I never would have come if I thought we’d be later than five.”

When Ben stands – Tiananmen Square-style – in front of the car, daring his father to do his worst, and aims and hurls the orange at the windshield, Tim is quick to anger; for a split second we feel his impulse to violence, his unconscious wish to run the boy over. He revs the engine, inches the car forward. “Can’t you just whip him? That’d be quicker,” Katie says. Instead, Tim jumps out of the car and chases Ben down the road.

Why does Campion make a point to show Katie crouched down in the field, swatting flies, rear end exposed as she urinates? What feels like a deliberate provocation of the audience is perhaps Campion reminding us of our own animal state, the primitive origins of the family unit. She may be underlining the sordid nature of the family drama playing out, urine, warts and all; asserting that events will be recounted, that the truth of this family, possibly all families, will be told.

Seated in the passenger seat next to Tim, cars scream loudly past them, mocking their stasis and threatening their safety. Tim checks the rearview mirror; Ben is completely out of sight. “Why the fuck did you send him off!” Katie says. Her vehement use of the word “fuck” is a patent shock to us. Is it because this is a narrative that features a child actor, or because the person hurling the vicious expletive is an adult woman attacking her adult brother for his poor parenting skills? Guilty, Tim exits, but takes the keys with him, thereby turning off the radio and punishing Katie for her reproach. “Well fuck you, can’t you leave the keys! What do you think I’m gonna do!” she shouts after him. As he saunters off, Katie gets out of the car, hands on her hips, and hollers after him, “YOU FUCKING PIG!!!” Everything that is wrong with this family (and by extension, many families) is present in this moment, this line, and this tit-for-tat exchange. Only a family can contain such poisonous rage between its members; even war is a less intensely personal form of conflict. In the fading shadow of the Feminist movement of the late 1970’s, “fucking pig” says a lot about how Katie feels toward her brother and the male/female power dynamic that binds them.

As Tim runs back along the road to find Ben, he looks down: the ground is littered with trash. Ben is crouched over, prostrate, forehead to the highway’s gravelly shoulder as cars continue to speed loudly by; it feels terribly dangerous. (Why he is in this position isn’t clear; it may simply be a psychologically astute conjecture of what a child of around ten might do in the circumstance. It may also signal Ben’s submission to his father’s authority.) Ben reveals to his father that he’s reconstituted nearly the entire orange peel and offers him the hollow shell. Tim lightens ups and walks back to the car carrying Ben on his shoulders, dancing all the way.

They arrive at the car to find Katie has been peeling an orange and dropped the peel on the ground. Now Tim feels obliged to face off with Katie; he orders her to pick up the peel. She ignores him. Campion shoots this is a profiled close up, the ultimate snub. Ben emulates his father and also orders his aunt to pick the peels up. The younger male has teamed up with the pack leader to discipline an errant female, even one considerably older than him.

The story ends with this stalemate. But it’s not the end of the film. After slapping the peeled orange from her hands, Ben invasively inspects Katie; he shunts his head and cocks it in front of her face. We see Katie’s eyes, nose and mouth, all in extreme close ups. It is disquietingly intimate.

Making his way to the Tim who is sitting on car’s back bumper, Ben inspects him as well, in the same series of too-close close ups. The soundtrack hums with a sharp tone. Bens shakes his father, as though to break the spell. It doesn’t work.

Sensing a complete breakdown of authority and the family structure, Ben is free to do as he pleases. The opportunity makes him unruly; he scrambles up to the roof of the car and uses it as a trampoline. Neither adult moves. The final shots of Ben jumping on the car, with Katie in the passenger’s seat and Tim sat on the bumper are shot from the objective view of cars racing past them on the road.

Discipline is an exercise of power; Campion’s “Exercise in Discipline” vividly illustrates Tim’s thwarted effort to exercise his power over his family.

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

Nick-Davis.com: Favorite Films: Peel: An Exercise in Discipline #35 on list of favorite films, from Nick’s Flick Picks

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: BEGINNINGS Timothy Brayton

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

Film's Female Powerhouses — Part 3: The International Cineastes ... Saidah Russell

Peel (film) - Wikipedia

Peel | Short Film | NZ On Screen

Peel (Jane Campion) on Vimeo (8:34)

PASSIONLESS MOMENTS B- 80

Australia (13 mi) 1983

Jane Campion: Interviews - Page 30 - Google Books Result Michel Ciment interview from Positif magazine, May 17, 1989

It was the result of a collaboration with one of my friends, Gerard Lee. It was his idea at the beginning and we wrote and directed the film together. Once we had the frame of the film — a series of playlets —, we tried to imagine the maximum number of stories that would be told with a certain ironic distance. We finally wrote ten of them. Gerard and I wanted to show sweet, ordinary people that you rarely see on the screen and who have more charm than better known actors. The film was shot in five days, two episodes per day. I was responsible for the photography and I realized the benefit of film school where in two hours I learned how to light and to exploit the possibilities of the camera.

A voice says, “There are 1,000,000 moments in your neighborhood; each has a fragile presence which fades almost as it forms.” Campion’s graduate diploma student film, co-written and co-directed by Gerald Lee, who had a brief romance with the director during film school, becoming a treatise on boredom, or drifting time, reflected by small innocuous moments that have little if any meaning, including reveries and daydreams that seem to go nowhere, yet comprise so much of our random time on earth, where as the saying goes, we forgot more than we ever knew. Narrated in a dry, emotionless voice, somewhat in the Greenaway tradition, recalling Buñuel’s travelogue-style narration in LAND WITHOUT BREAD (1932), only without the depictions of misery and degradation, shot in Black and White, the film captures ten moments, each titled, offering slight satiric information on each sequence, all happening on the same day, reflecting a kind of wry humor, yet none rise to the level of even being remotely interesting, however, that seems to be the point. We aren’t always our most captivating and wittiest versions of ourselves, as oftentimes we do the most ordinary things, where this film perfectly captures the things that people do when nobody else is in the room, especially out of sight from everyone else, where we are perhaps at our dullest expression when no one else is watching, as what this film amounts to is mental nose picking.

Passionless Moments (1983) - MUBI

Co-written and co-directed by Campion's boyfriend Gerald Lee, Passionless Moments consists of ten vignettes, accompanied by a pompous BBC-style narrator, in which various characters have individual moments of strange epiphany (or non-epiphany) in their mundane lives. Some critics have remarked on the influence of David Lynch on Campion's early work--an influence which she openly acknowledges--and it's especially evident here. The film won an award for Best Experimental Film at the 1984 Australian Film Awards.

User Reviews from imdb Author: postmanwhoalwaysringstwice from usa

Jane Campion's "Passionless Moments" is a short film containing ten short films. More than being simply short, they are tiny. The film deals with nonsense that goes through one's mind that no one dares share when asked "what are you thinking about". It's really a wonderful concept for a short film, and the result is a funny, touching piece of work. It would be impossible to pick a favorite bit, and truthfully it would do a disservice to the film itself to try and express the actual occurrences in each mini-short. It might be worth noting that Gerard Lee was indicated in the credits as ex-director. Perhaps that's why the finished product has far more visible passion than the sketches themselves, which comes straight from the filmmaker's chair.

User Reviews from imdb Author: bfinn from United Kingdom

A remarkable first short film by a student (or fresh out of film school) - as much for the script as anything else. I happened to see it on TV as a teenager and then made various other people watch it too when I spotted it coming round again.

The film simply shows a series of short quirky moments in people's everyday lives. For example, a man stretches his arm as he wanders out of his house, and this gesture is mistaken by a neighbour who thinks he's waving at him.

Quirky moments such as these have since become the stuff of observational comedy, except that the ones depicted here are so small that they would pass quite unnoticed if not isolated and commented on by this film.

Not Just Movies: Jane Campion's Short Films: Peel, Passionless ... Jake Cole

Continuing the splintered framing and behavioral observation of Peel, Passionless Moments shows how our attention focuses in and out constantly. Repetitive sounds, double-take glances and sudden bursts of memory cause people to randomly meditate and fixate on things they do not particularly care about but try to solve anyway. Campion then adds her focal aestheticism to the mix by messing with focal lengths to demonstrate how one's attention is always settling on one thing at the expense of the other, and that the vacillation between foci is random and, as the title lets on, passionless. Though Campion's next short would firmly align with a feminist perspective, it is this film's presentation of her minute detail as merely a series of shots she finds interesting at the moment until something else catches her eye, demystifying her approach even as she only furthers her mastery of the form. Though it's a step down from the fully contained bewilderment of Peel, Passionless Moments is no less vital in understanding Campion as a filmmaker. In fact, given how much more accessible it is, it mght be a better starting point.

Curator's notes Passionless Moments (1983) on ASO - Australia's ... Kate Matthews

Passionless Moments is a lighthearted series of vignettes sharing people’s fleeting thoughts. Jane Campion combines a serious documentary style with a whimsical look at the small moments people experience everyday.

This short film reveals a beautiful oddness in mundane situations. In a 1989 Positif interview with Michael Ciment, Jane Campion explained that she and co-writer Gerard Lee 'wanted to show sweet ordinary people that you rarely see on the screen and who have more charm than better known actors’. The film has a witty, detached ironic tone and a surreal focus on the ordinary detail of lives in suburbia. It plays with narrative point of view, suspending the audience between dispassionate observation and an intimate awareness of the characters’ subjective states.

Campion playfully borrows from the documentary genre. The full opening title reads 'Passionless Moments recorded in Sydney, Australia, Sunday October 2nd’. An authoritative sounding BBC ethnographer-style narrator uses phrases like ‘the filmmakers discovered …’ to suggest that the film is observational. This notion is beautifully absurd, as the narrator coolly reports on the characters’ interior monologues and unspoken, incidental thoughts. Nor is the camera simply observational, doing things like hiding under beds and illustrating what the characters see and think.

Passionless Moments won a 1984 AFI Award for Best Experimental Film. It was part of the group of films that marked Campion’s breakthrough at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986, screening in the Un Certain Regard section alongside A Girl’s Own Story (1983) and her ABC telemovie Two Friends (1986). In the same year An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982) won the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film.

Campion’s feature films include Sweetie (1989), The Piano (1993), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke! (1999), In the Cut (2003) and Bright Star (2009).

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: BEGINNINGS Timothy Brayton

"Ex-directed" by co-writer Gerard Lee, Campion's second student short is exactly what it says on the label: a series of tiny film-lets within an already slight 15-minute running time. Each of those tinier films is about one incident happening to one person on a certain day (October 2, 1982, in Melbourne, if my memory serves; but I didn't take notes, and part of the film's purpose is to show that those details which it provides at the start are completely meaningless). Each incident is given its own modestly amusing title, with the action narrated by an uncredited man, who I assume is likely Lee.

If "Passionless Moments" suffers in comparison to "Peel", it is for one predominant reason: the earlier film made a point of giving us nothing to work on besides individual pieces of fact, while the latter presents its theme unambiguously in both the title and the concluding narration (which observes that a million moments like these happen and die unobserved every day). The point is that at some point, hundreds of times, we all have a moment of realisation or speculation, something when our mind drifts out from under our direct control and just works over a problem that we weren't even aware we cared about. These moments of reflection are "passionless" because we really don't care about them enough to commit them to memory or follow these ideas to any conclusion; and yet, life is made up of virtually nothing but such moments.

Two films in, and it becomes clear that one of Campion's chief points of interest as a filmmaker is behavioral minutiae; by which I mean, she observes characters performing unexplained actions that are natural to them, and only "significant" because it is those moments that we in the audience are watching. If that's what connects "Peel" with "Passionless Moments", I think it's worth pointing out that this is the overall theme of "Passionless Moments" itself.

Visually, however, the two films are mostly distinct. Where "Peel" is in full, evocative color, "Passionless Moments" is in high-contrast black and white, full of lingering shots and very few cuts, although for that reason every cut that occurs is given the force of an atomic bomb. The chief relationship between the two, and I do think it's significant, is that she shows in both of them pieces of things, rather than whole things. There's one mini-story in the latter film that showcases this idea: a man sits on the bed, ignoring his lover, while trying to figure out why you can only focus on one plane at a time. The film then cuts to a POV shot of his thumb going out of focus while the back wall comes into focus. This idea that there will always be something you can't notice, at the exclusion of noticing something else - you can't be in more than one place at one time, taken to its ultimate extension - is perhaps the key unifying force between the two films. If you're looking at this, it is necessary that you are not looking at that. "Passionless Moments" serves to memorialise that fact while nothing, with some ironic melancholy, that even this lasts for such a brief duration that it does very little good to look at it in the first place.

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

Numéro Cinq at the Movies: Jane Campion's "Passionless Moments ... September 2011

Check Out 3 Student Shorts by Jane Campion - No Film School V. Renée

Passionless Moments (1983) directed by Jane Campion, Gerard Lee ... Letterboxd

Passionless Moments, a film by Jane Campion - John Coulthart

Passionless Moments - Wikipedia

Passionless Moments | Short Film | NZ On Screen (11:27)

Passionless Moments on Vimeo (11:08)

A GIRL’S OWN STORY A 96

Australia (27 mi) 1984

In this film I put together ideas about girlhood. I wanted to tell a few stories from those years, where family is strange, adulthood lonely, innocence perverse.

—Jane Campion

A gorgeously stark and eerie Black and White film that looks at the complicated lives of a group of girls, the intensity of their feelings, and their growing interest in sex and its consequences. Originally screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, Campion is back with Sally Bonger as her cinematographer, taking an acute interest in subjectivity, accented by extreme angles and framing, where it’s actually shot on 16mm much like a German Expressionist film, providing a refreshing look back at the 60’s and the Beatlemania craze, beautifully capturing the group mentality and quirky mannerisms of teen girls, a depiction of the passions and innocence of three young teenage girls, flooded with hormones and sexual images, yet it also shows how easily young girls are violated.

Opening with close-ups of girl’s faces, to the music box sounds of the love theme from DR. ZHIVAGO (1965), recalling a similar look in Cassavetes’ Faces (1968), the film begins with a medical book diagram of an erect penis, with the curiosity of girls using their fingers exploring the outline of the male anatomy, with the following inscription underneath: THIS SIGHT MAY SHOCK YOUNG GIRLS. With shrieking girls caught up in the hysteria of Beatlemania, three girls in identical school uniforms face the camera, using tennis rackets as guitars, innocently singing the Beatles song “I Should Have Known Better,” A Girl's Own Story (1983) clip 1 on ASO ... - Australian Screen (3:08), showing girls wearing Bobby socks dancing the twist before the nuns at Catholic school run them off. With the central character Pam (Gabrielle Shornegg) narrating her inner thoughts throughout, we enter her bedroom, lined with Barbie dolls, which is a shrine to the Beatles, where she and her school friend Stella (Geraldine Haywood) kiss photos of their heroes pasted to the walls before practicing on each other, with one wearing a Beatles mask, supposedly preparing for kissing boys. Dinner is a surreal experience in her home, as her mother suffers from depression, where Pam curiously tends to side with her father and blame her mother for her illness, even though her father (Paul Chubb) refuses to talk to her, but relays messages to his wife through his daughter, some overly personalized, which tends to erupt in an explosion of frayed nerves, while her father acts like nothing happened.

Elsewhere, another brother and sister are home alone and up to their old antics, Gloria (Marina Knight) and Graeme (John Godden), first seen behaving like dogs, then turning to seductive cats, where it’s easy to see these two are used to venturing into inappropriate territory, playing sex games with each other when their parents are away. But as her brother, all he can offer is sex without love, where she just lies still, like one of the dolls seen in the bedroom, as they don’t even kiss. In one of the strangest dream sequences, accompanied by a vividly provocative soundtrack, a young girl is walking down the street in boots and a raincoat, followed by a car that pulls up next to her, where the girl is transformed into Pam and back to a child again. The man in the car sounds like the voice of her father, holding a young kitten in his hands, drawing her attention, luring her into his car as they drive away. With the same music continuing into the next scene, Stella has turned on Pam, as they’re no longer friends, leaving her isolated and alone, but this time it’s Pam acting like nothing has happened, where in a locker room scene, surrounded by taunting girls, she’s surprised to learn Gloria is no longer in school, but is pregnant, sent away to a Catholic home for wayward girls. In a room with a crucifix looming on the wall, these girls commiserate with each other, while Graeme comes to visit, though this time it’s his turn to pretend like nothing has happened, yet Gloria is clearly showing signs of her pregnancy. Continuing on a theme of inappropriate male behavior, Pam’s Dad takes her out to dinner on her birthday, but brings along a girlfriend of his own, using the lame excuse that it’s a French restaurant and she can translate what’s on the menu. Later on, when his girlfriend calls his home, his wife freaks out, violently attacking her husband, who strangely starts kissing her instead, where the two retreat upstairs where they have sex in plain sight. Pam’s eyes follow their every move, exposed to something she probably shouldn’t see, where their sudden intimacy catches her off-guard.

At the end, over an image of a spinning ice-skater in white superimposed over a girl’s listless face, the three girls break out into song, “Feel the Cold,” expressing the feeling “I feel the cold/I feel the cold is here to stay/I feel the cold/I want to melt away.” (clip three, 3:11) Throughout the film there are images of space heaters, metaphors for the girls’ emotional isolation and a lack of human warmth, suggesting the world is a cold and unwelcoming place, with predatory men hanging around, lurking in the shadows, where the love and affection they crave is realized only in fantasies. The collective characterizations of these young girls reveal fresh insights, offering shades of the female experience rarely seen before, expressing a frank depiction of teenage sexual curiosity, but also the nightmarish places you could end up if you’re not careful, where it’s interesting that the Catholic church is not spared, exposed as the root of chauvinism in the Western world. It’s a non-traditional narrative, where the expressionist quality of the film is jarring to the senses, where the boldness of the film delights with cinematic flair, especially the play-acting of the girls, but on another level delves unsparingly into incest, voyeurism, infidelity, domestic violence, idolatry, and childish same sex experimentation. This is one of Campion’s most autobiographical offerings, as her mother suffered from depression, cleverly emphasizing isolation and awkwardness associated with that age, especially Pam’s inability to empathize with her mother’s illness, yet tends to accept her father’s philandering ways, revealing the anxieties associated with adolescent sex and family relationships. The music composed by fellow film student Alex Proyas is impressive, as it gloriously captures the dark mood of the film, filled with sudden departures into surreal and dreamlike moments, winning the 1984 Rouben Mamoulian Award at the Sydney Film Festival. Nicole Kidman admitted during an interview that at 14 she was cast as the lead in the film and turned it down because of her reluctance to kiss a girl and wear a shower cap.

User Reviews from imdb Author: postmanwhoalwaysringstwice from usa

Jane Campion's 1984 short film "A Girl's Own Story" is an overall stronger film than her previous work. It tells a far more cohesive story, has sharper camera work, and involves a better group of performers. It's tells an engaging story about a growing up a teenage girl in the 1960's with domestic squabbles, hormones and Beatlemania all running high. It is a very relate-able and moving film on many levels, and it impressively handles serious subject matter such as idolatry, infidelity, same sex experimentation, and incest. Unfortunately with a film that has so much going for it, the poor 1980's musical score and rather long ending keep it from being excellent.

A Girl's Own Story (1984) | danielleshortfilm

A Girl's Own Story is the most ambitious and emotionally complex of Campion's short films. Set in the early Sixties, it focuses on Pam, a young adolescent who is caught in the middle of Beatlemania, sexual yearning, and a tense family life. The camerawork often suggests her subjective experience of the world; in particular, one sequence where she floats up the stairs recalls German Expressionist cinema or possibly experimental cinema such as Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). The film is also noteworthy for the frankness with which it handles the emotional consequences of molestation and incest. Already, we can see how Jane Campion's directorial vision will develop into the richly eccentric and disturbing worlds of Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), and The Piano (1993).

This short by Australian director Jane Campion, part of the Films of Jane Campion, explores the story of three girls through their progression of becoming women in the time when Beatlemania ruled and the sixties were in high gear.

The film follows three friends Pam, Stella, and Gloria as they transition from childhood to teenagedom. Initially the girls were able to bond over their love of a little band (the Beatles!!) but when puberty hit – their friendship took a hit also. Pam is trapped in a household with parents who fight all of the time, Stella matured faster than the others and became one of the “it” girls at school and Gloria finds herself pregnant (with her brothers child) and forced to leave school.

In a way the film accurately shows that akward stage in our lives (we all have them) where in certain aspects we feel grown up, but in many ways we are still children. Campion capitalizes on the mindset that when you are a teenager you realize that your family is sort of strange, adulthood can be really lonely, and innocence is perverse.

Not Just Movies: Jane Campion's Short Films: Peel, Passionless ... Jake Cole

Jane Campion's work may be less openly confrontational than the work of Catherine Breillat, but I find her style to be far more combative and transgressive, particularly in her early work. Her fragmented, synecdochical framing eventually blossomed into full-on paranoia and schizophrenia in Sweetie and An Angel at My Table, respectively, but A Girl's Own Story, the longest and admittedly weakest of Campion's early films, shows that style being used to dive into the female perspective for the first time. A Girl's Own Story opens with girls looking in a medical book at a drawing of an erect penis, their hands curiously brushing along this 2D representation to get a feel for the material. At last their hands move down along the drawn legs to the bottom of the page, revealing a bit of text that warns "This sight may shock young girls."

But if a penis is shocking to these young women, Campion suggests that is only because of its power over these physically changing girls. From Beatles reenactments that have other girls in a Catholic school shrieking in quasi-homosexual frenzy to a boyfriend who convinces one girl to have unprotected sex (leading to pregnancy) without the two even sharing a kiss, men hold power over these confused and suddenly sexually appealing women. One shot, in a clinic where pregnant teens meet, frames these women under one of those garishly graphic crucifixes, tacitly pointing out the religious root of chauvinism in the Western world. For the first time, a slight surrealism enters Campion's frame, a tone she would carry out in fullest extent in Sweetie: one girl's parents have stopped speaking to each other and use their daughter to pass messages between them, only to have rough sex in front of their children. Later, the father joins the ranks of the other men circling around these women like sharks. Campion doesn't force any of these shots, and for the first time Campion demonstrates her ability to completely bewilder and stun with such subtlety that the cognitive disruption always seems to hit just after the tone switches once more, only widening the confusion.

Wellington Film Society - A GIRL'S OWN STORY Jocelyn Robson and Beverley Zalcock

The inimitable decentred visual style that so distinguishes Sweetie (1989) can be seen in the earlier Jane Campion film, A GIRL'S OWN STORY. In both films, the cinematography of Sally Bongers seems to capture visually the very texture of uncertainty and insecurity which is a feature of Campion's narratives, most particularly through the techniques of framing and composition. The lighting, decor and cinematic codes (camera angle, distance and movement) are, in A GIRL'S OWN STORY, perfectly attuned to the subject matter of the film which is about a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional family. This is a family which exudes repression... As a result, each family member inhabits her or his own private world. The domestic space which they occupy becomes a strange and alien place. The mother is virtually mute with depression, the father is in deep denial and the sisters are hostile and prickly...

Areas that Campion explores in Sweetie are touched on almost as a dress rehearsal in A GIRL'S OWN STORY. Subjects such as sibling incest, child abuse, clinical depression and obsessiveness are the staples of Campion's films. The family is represented as a site of moral danger and thwarted emotion; in A GIRL'S OWN STORY, the atmosphere is conveyed through the motif of cold (absence of warmth), with heaters that are never switched on. Characters speak in non-sequiturs and desire is clearly a sin. The convent, to which a girl made pregnant by her brother while they were playing 'cats' retreats, is a cold, bleak and secret place; these are the consequences of a Christian morality based on the 'word-of-the-father' and the admonition "thou shalt not."

The girls' friendships are perhaps the only positive thing about the situation they find themselves in and there are some strange moments which are both moving and amusing. For example, in the opening sequence of the film, four girls (with tennis racquets for guitars) sing the Beatles' song 'I Should Have Known Better', so encapsulating, in one brilliant visual stroke, both the mood and period of the film. Later, two of the friends practise kissing, in a heterosexual role play, one playing the boy and wearing a George or Ringo paper mask, the other lying on the bed passively, playing the girl. The implicit critique here of gender roles and gender positioning within the nexus of the family is a central concern of Campion's and one that returns in her subsequent feature films.

A Girl's Own Story (Jane Campion, 1984) • Senses of Cinema Anton De Ionno, July 2010

Jane Campion has been a dominant force in world cinema for nearly two decades. Shot delicately in black-and-white, A Girl’s Own Story is an early short film that traces the stories of three suburban teenage girls (Pam, Gloria and Stella) in 1960’s Australia. It deals with the difficulties of burgeoning sexuality, incest, friendship and family against the backdrop of Beatlemania and an era that valued the isolating notions of purity and wholesomeness over honesty and acceptance.

The film progresses through a collection of events – some humorous and sweet, others troubling and complex – which culminate in the final sequence, an expressionistic musical number in which our protagonist Pam (Gabrielle Shornegg) is joined by Gloria (Marina Knight) and Stella (Geraldine Haywood) to perform a haunting song entitled “I Feel the Cold”. The motif of “cold” runs through the entire film, with recurring references to heaters as a way for Campion to play gently with the subtext that she explores in this final sequence.

The sequence begins with Pam ascending the staircase in her house, escaping the distressing behaviour of her parents below, who are absorbed in a lustful embrace following a heated argument. When Pam reaches the top of the stairs, she stands in a doorway, dressed in a loose white nightgown that billows in an unheard wind. She begins to sing the refrain “I feel the cold” while images of ice-skating are projected over her body. She is joined by Gloria and Stella, dressed in white singlets, all three girls standing in ominous darkness while they sing. The sequence continues with images of each girl eerily waving her hands in front of an offscreen heater, their eyes sad and lost. At one point, the choral refrain subsides whilst Pam performs (in voice-over) a spoken word interlude. In a hushed voice, she asks “Will I melt away?”. As Pam’s spoken words are uttered, we are presented with shots of a man’s hand running along Pam’s arms and legs inter-cut with tight close-ups of Pam’s face, wary and frightened, as her voice-over continues: “It feels cold, this warmth.” These images, together with Pam’s voice-over, stitch together the conceptual fabric of young female sexuality and Pam’s carnal fears that underpin this haunting moment. The sequence concludes with the girls seated next to small heaters on a tiled floor, while the final lyric (“I want melt away”) is repeated ominously.

In this evocative sequence, Campion explores (so beautifully) new ways in which to express her characters’ fears and isolation. This moment hints towards ideas and styles Campion will later develop and explore, like the graceful femininity of the ice-skating she revisits in In the Cut (2003) or the emotional isolation of women and the historical perspective she utilises in An Angel at My Table (1990), The Piano (1993) and The Portrait of a Lady (1996). In this moment, Campion also finds one of her earliest platforms for experimenting with expressionistic conventions of cinema like the chiaroscuro-style lighting of Ingmar Bergman, the inky suburban subconscious of David Lynch and Peter Weir’s haunting images of lost girls.

Campion’s body of work is characterised by audacious honesty and creative integrity. In the intimate sexuality, recurring motifs and embedded humour, tenderness and pathos of the closing sequence of A Girl’s Own Story, the viewer is touched by an exquisite moment that is the mark of a visually profound auteur.

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

Curator's notes A Girl's Own Story (1983) on ASO - Australia's audio ... Kate Matthews

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: BEGINNINGS Timothy Brayton

Curator's notes A Girl's Own Story (1983) on ASO ... - Australian Screen

A Girl's Own Story - Review - Photos - Ozmovies

A Girl's Own Story - EPFC

A Girl's Own Story (1984) directed by Jane Campion • Reviews, film + ... Letterboxd

Best Short Narrative Films of All Time Gerald Peary

A Girl's Own Story - Wikipedia

A girl's own story on Vimeo (25:28) in English, subtitled in Spanish

TWO FRIENDS – made for TV A- 93

Australia (76 mi) 1986

She’s hardly a person anymore.
—Louise (Emma Coles), describing Kelly, her once inseparable best friend

Hard to believe this was made thirty years ago, yet this is an early, rarely-seen, first feature film by Jane Campion, screening at the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, originally made and broadcasted on Australian television in 1986, the same year CROCODILE DUNDEE rivalled TOP GUN for top grossing films of the year, Spike Lee made his first film SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, Mike Tyson became the youngest world heavyweight champion ever at the age of 20, Philippe Petit audaciously walked a tightrope hastily strung between the two twin towers of the World Trade Center in the early morning hours high above New York City, Cory Aquino was elected President of the Philippines, the first female President in Asia, toppling the 21-year authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos, where Time magazine named her “Woman of the Year,” but it was also the year the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff killing the crew of 7 astronauts, the worst disaster in the history of the American space program. An understated portrait of adolescence with complex and subtly developed relationships, a trademark of Campion’s defining works, the film portrays the decaying relationship between two 15-year old girls, the straight-laced Louise (Emma Coles) and her more rebellious, punk friend Kelly (Kris Bidenko). Focusing on small personal details contrasted against the authoritative influence of their parents, the story reflects the changing nature of their relationship, where the brilliance of the narrative is that it’s inventively told backwards, much like Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (Irréversible) (2002) and François Ozon’s 5 x 2 (2004), so as the film continues, they get younger, happier, and much closer together. The film wasn’t released in the United States until 1996, making critic Amy Taubin’s #6 film of the year, Amy Taubin's Top Ten Lists 1987-2005, yet it certainly exemplifies Campion’s typical fragmented structure, including language, which is often unintelligible at first and hard to follow, where the use of subtitles can be of considerable assistance to American audiences, while also presenting heroines that don’t conform to existing societal norms, often rebelling against male paternalism, where the childhood friends are mismatched, like the siblings in Sweetie (1989), yet the offbeat character of Kelly sets the precedent for the remarkable emotional range of mental disturbance expressed by Sweetie (Genevieve Lemon) in Campion’s next film.

Francois Ozon: Monsieur extreme | The Independent Jonathan Romney on Ozon’s film 5 x 2 from The Independent, March 12, 2005

Ozon was inspired by the realisation that he knew few people whose relationships had lasted more than five years. “I wanted to ask why people find it difficult to maintain a relationship for 10, 15 or 20 years, like our parents did. Because the story was about something ending, I wrote the end first. Then I realised that was the starting point.”

Telling the story in reverse order allowed Ozon to scatter clues to the marriage’s failure for us to collect backwards — like following a trail of pebbles in a forest, as he puts it. We’ve seen the reverse structure applied to the thriller (Memento) and, in Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, to the po-faced contention that “time destroys everything”; Ozon brings a simpler, though no less caustic touch to the technique. He acknowledges two models in particular: Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal and Jane Campion’s 1986 TV film Two Friends. Otherwise, his key references in diagnosing the conjugal malaise are Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and Maurice Pialat’s Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (We Won’t Grow Old Together); Ozon says he could easily have borrowed either title. “What I love about the Bergman film is that he conducts a sort of autopsy — he goes where it hurts.”

5 x 2 may be classical in tone, but it remains experimental in method. It was shot in reverse chronological order, and neither Ozon nor the actors knew where they were heading. He started by filming the first three sections, then stopped for four months to edit what he had and write the rest.

Written by Helen Garner, one of Australia’s greatest writers, showing enormous range in her work, utilizing what’s described as a savage honesty, where Australian literary critic Peter Craven writes that “Two Friends is arguably the most accomplished piece of screenwriting the country has seen and it is characterised by a total lack of condescension towards the teenage girls at its centre.” With an oblique, puzzling, and often abstract narrative at the outset, with characters that only slowly come into view, where a young girl’s funeral from an overdose draws together disparate forces, where the presence of punks in weird hairdo’s are hanging out alongside conservative establishment figures, each carefully avoiding the other, all contributing to a working class world of detachment and emotional discord. When we first meet the two girls, it’s in the past tense, as they are no longer friends and seem to be living entirely different lives, where Kelly’s name comes up in the form of friendly gossip, a girl that was once a fixture in their home, as suddenly the ears perk up for both Louise and her divorced mom Janet (Kris McQuade) who want to know all the details, which are decidedly slight, though rumors suggest she may be living a drug-addled life with friends in abandoned buildings. The funeral comes to represent the death of a close-knit relationship between two teenage girls, as the dire outcome foreshadows what possibly lies in store for Kelly. While Louise has a more supportive environment, she’s disciplined, conscientious, and self-aware, an obedient child that always makes sure she does her homework, while Kelly is a restless soul, rebellious and irresponsible, who impulsively can’t wait to stray into the world of sex, alcohol and drugs, often distancing herself from Louise in social circles, as she instead gravitates towards the boys. Campion has experiences of teenage girls cropping up throughout her films, as they are the formative years that have such a strong influence on the person they eventually become. Perhaps what draws these girls together initially is the shared experience of puberty, having a friend and ally to help you navigate your way through the social minefields. Unlike Louise, who has a relatively calm and unadventurous middle class life, Kelly’s home is an incendiary picture of working class discontent, with her mother (Debra May) remarrying an unsympathetic jerk named Malcolm (Peter Hehir), likely a former radical who is now disillusioned, whose self-righteous, authoritative manner and domineering presence controls their lives, never bothering to listen, but making judgments all the time, forcing others to live by his rules. As a result, Kelly spends plenty of sleepovers with Louise, where her less combative home is like a shelter from the storm.

As raw and graphic as Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001), Campion has a clever way of revealing the discord in the form of a letter Kelly sends to Louise on her birthday, where Kelly’s already left her home, living on the streets, where we hear Louise reading the contents, with her friend claiming “So far so good. I’m not yet a junkie or a prostitute.” But Louise grows distracted or loses interest and instead starts a mechanically repetitive piano lesson, where we hear Kelly’s voice continue reading the unfinished letter, yet can’t be heard over the clamor of the musical notes. This uncomfortable dissonance shows just how far they’ve grown apart. While much of the material is unveiled in a near documentary manner, it’s filled with ordinary moments where kids are being kids, seen gleefully going shopping or sprinting through the shopping malls, where every moment feels like an inspiration, while parents are always an awkward presence in their lives, where everything slows down and becomes dull to the senses, like something to be endured between the more exhilarating and ecstatic moments when kids simply run free. Each of the teenage girls seems to bring out something from the other, as they’re both obviously smart, where early on they both can’t wait to go to high school together, seen gabbing away in their drab school uniforms, where Kelly is every bit as smart as the more conventional Louise, but you’d never notice as she’s such a wild child. But Kelly’s dreams are obliterated by Malcolm, her stepfather, whose abusive treatment includes his refusal to allow her to go to the school of their choice, which is a school for gifted students that must pass an entrance exam. Claiming the school is reactionary and elitist (and it may be, but it also provides the most challenging student option), he infuriatedly expresses no wiggle room, where this turns out to be the single most drastic event that leads to their separation, as they end up at different schools. Moving backwards in time, the two become more and more alike, sharing the same dreams, as it seems the girls are inseparable, where Kelly is like a member of the family, with Campion shifting from social realism to more colorful fantasy sequences with the girls play acting their hopes and fears, using a variety of techniques, including speeding up the frames, using different film stocks, garish colors, animation, coloring within the frame, stop-motion photography, all of which add a jubilant spirit of childlike innocence and giddy exhilaration, a beautiful expression of childhood’s fleeting moments, yet it’s also a wonderful eruption of abstract cinematic expressionism. The tonal shift exerts its power on the viewers, causing a dizzying rush of euphoria, leaving the two in a freeze frame of unbridled joy, a celebratory moment when both have passed their entrance exams with the families gathered around drinking congratulatory champagne, capturing a remarkable moment where the future never looked brighter.

Two Friends, directed by Jane Campion | Film review - Time Out

The first feature-length film from Jane Campion; made for TV, like An Angel at My Table, and still a little unpolished, it is nevertheless a remarkable picture. It's the story of two inseparable schoolmates, Kelly and Louise (Bidenko and Coles), and how over the course of ten months they become, in fact, separated. Campion's films are acutely personal and absolutely distinctive. They combine an oblique, detached point of view with startling human insight. She has the knack of invading private space by standing back; a sort of estranged intimacy. Here, she tells this very simple story (written by Helen Garner) in reverse. It begins in July, cuts back to February, to January, December, and finally October. The effect is puzzling at first, but stimulating, and it ends appropriately on a note of unforeseen poignancy.

The Onion A.V. Club [John Gustafson]

Before Jane Campion began making lumbering big-budget films about mute pianists and Henry James heroines, she gained a well-deserved critical reputation for her complex character studies of troubled young women (Sweetie, An Angel At My Table). Two Friends, her 1986 debut, finally makes its video premiere, and it's one of the best examples of her early craft. It's the story of two young girls and their friendship's dissolution, told in a reverse chronology, from the last sputtering hope that the girls might reconcile to a dizzyingly happy moment in their lives nine months earlier. That's hardly a novel structure anymore, but Campion and screenwriter Helen Garner put it to surprisingly effective use here. Garner is smart enough to create a series of backwards episodes that focus on psychological continuity instead of plot threads; that's a choice that answers most of the important questions about who the characters are, while still leaving intriguing loose threads between episodes. And Campion is skillful enough to squeeze both realism and poignancy out of almost every scene with her strong ensemble of actors. Two Friends was originally produced for Australian television, presumably inexpensively, and although some restoration work has been conducted for its video release, the soundtrack is still far from ideal. Since this flaw is coupled with subtle dialogue spoken in Australian accents, some viewers may find Two Friends difficult to follow at times. But if you stick with it, it's well worth the effort.

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter] also seen here: Cinema Review - Tucson Weekly

THE FIRST FEATURE film by Jane Campion, director of The Piano, is scheduled to play this weekend at The Screening Room, and it's well worth taking a trip downtown to check it out. The 1986 film, Two Friends, has all the hallmarks of Campion's early work--it's subtle, offbeat and surprisingly funny, though the theme as a whole is one of sadness and loss.

Two Friends traces the friendship of two adolescent, Australian girls through several rocky months in their lives and relationship. Instead of progressing, the film follows the pattern of Pinter's Betrayal and tells the story by hopping backwards through time. At the beginning of the film, the friends Kelly (Kris Bidenko) and Louise (Emma Coles) couldn't seem more different. Louise is a rather straight-laced parochial schoolgirl concerned with getting her homework done; Kelly is a fuming punkette drop-out living on the beach with some guy. The two girls don't see each much of each other and their friendship seems to have broken down. Each time the story jumps back in time, we see a little bit of Kelly's dissolution undone until, at the end of the movie, she is as balanced and full of hope as Louise.

By moving back in time, Campion and Helen Garner, who wrote the screenplay, accentuate the sadness of Kelly's incremental loss of innocence. Sharper even than this loss is the sense that Kelly is being somehow broken by the adults around her, who refuse to notice she is clever and talented. Louise, by contrast, has much more supportive parents who worry about buying her a case for her French horn. One of the things that makes this film so good is how complex and layered the relationships between the characters are. Louise, for example, seems to feel guilty that her life is so much easier than Kelly's, and this drives the two even further apart.

Campion shows enormous sensitivity to the problems of girls in this film. Unlike American fantasy versions of female adolescence like Clueless, she takes the problems of girls very seriously, in a wider, social sense and also on a case-by-case basis. In other words, she treats them as whole people, complicated, worth watching, and not always agreeable. You practically have to see Two Friends to realize how rare this is, though Campion achieves a similar feat in Sweetie, and Anna Paquin's role in The Piano had something of this complexity about it too. At one point Kelly has been left alone at her father's house with one of his male friends, and for some reason she wanders into his room and curls up next to him in bed. The man begins making out with her; she responds for a minute, then jumps up and runs out into the street. It's a disturbing but perceptive depiction of a lonely adolescent girl testing out her new power of sexuality.

Campion achieves all this without much cinematic fanfare. In fact, her technique in Two Friends is fairly minimal, with mostly wide, stationary master shots. Campion seems more interested in the variety of human emotions in Two Friends than in telling a story in a conventionally cinematic way. Characters wander in and out of the frame at will, and it's pretty much up to the audience to decide which part of the story is significant. This is not the Jane Campion of The Piano; there's nothing operatic or overwrought about Two Friends. There are few beautiful, sweeping shots. Instead it's more reminiscent of her fabulous short Peel (which is out on videotape), a deadpan, uncannily funny little film about a family battling over a discarded orange rind.

The only problem with this technique is that without the lip-reading help of close-ups, it gets difficult at times to understand the Australian slang and accent of the girls, who nosh on "Vegemite" and describe undesirable boys as "daggy." Despite this, the performances of the young actors in this film are so natural, and Campion's style is so unadorned, that at times Two Friends begins to seem like a series of real-life vignettes, something almost unheard of in Hollywood movies. Bidenko, as the rebellious Kelly, is especially interesting to watch, not only because of her fine, low-key performance, but because she doesn't look like an actress at all. With her big legs, pink skin and unsympathetic face, she looks more like a bad-girl teen guest on Jenny Jones than someone who'd turn up on the silver screen. In such choices, Two Friends is always an unusual film.

Two Friends (1986) | PopMatters Elbert Ventura

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: 2 FRIENDS (1986) Tim Brayton

The Auteurs: Jane Campion | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, September 30, 2013

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

Two Friends : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Adam Tyner

dOc DVD Review: Two Friends (1986) - digitallyOBSESSED! Jeff Ulmer

Combustible Celluloid Review - Two Friends (1986), Helen Garner ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

Two Friends - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com

The 10 Best Movies That Use Reverse Chronology « Taste of Cinema ... #5, Two Friends, Alexandra Gandra, December 26, 2014

Amy Taubin's Top Ten Lists 1987-2005 #6 in the year 1996

Two Friends - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Two Friends - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Alison Macor

Lives Unfold in Campion's Debut Gem, 'Two Friends' - latimes Kevin Thomas

`Two Friends' Marks Turning Point For Girls, Director Campion ... Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) also seen here: Movie Review - - FILM REVIEW;Two Buddies Whose Family Life Is the ...

Two Friends (1986 film) - Wikipedia

SWEETIE A 96

Australia (97 mi) 1989

We had a tree in our yard with a palace in the branches. It was built for my sister and it had fairy lights that went on and off in a sequence. She was the princess; it was her tree; she wouldn’t let me up it. At night the darkness frightens me. Someone could be watching from behind them—someone who wishes you harm. I used to imagine the roots of that tree crawling, crawling right under the house, right under my bed. Maybe that’s why trees scare me. It’s like they have hidden powers.

— Kay (Karen Colsten), opening narration

It’s interesting to note that Jane Campion’s first feature premiered in competition at Cannes during the same year as the spat between Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Steven Soderbergh’s SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE, where Cannes Jury President Wim Wenders explained his controversial view that Mookie, the lead character in Lee’s film, did not act heroically, believing he did NOT do the right thing, so the film did not deserve to be recognized with an award. It generated all the headlines, as Lee’s film has had a profoundly greater effect on the cinematic and cultural landscape than Soderbergh’s film, the eventual winner of the Palme d’Or (1^st Prize). Lost beneath the glare of the bright lights is this contemporary and curiously challenging film from Jane Campion, one of the more original first features on record, something of a head-spinning experience, a surrealist glimpse into family dysfunction where the sheer oddness of the experience touches a special nerve that will continue to enlighten us well into the future. Strong on visual style, performances, and comic originality, part of the appeal upon its release was the ambiguity associated with the ferociously individualistic character known as Sweetie (Genevieve Lemon), a mentally-challenged, behaviorally stunted character who is so out of control that her family is paralyzed and has no idea how to handle her, so instead her father Gordon (Jon Darling) spoils her, coddles her with compliments, and filling her full of illusions while treating her like a budding rock star, where she’s led to believe she’s talented and uniquely special, though there’s little evidence to support this. But as a result, Sweetie terrorizes her family by doing pretty much whatever she pleases, whenever she pleases, always wanting to be the center of attention, going into violent, emotionally disturbing tantrums when she can’t get her way, all of which has a tantalizing effect on everyone else. While she is the titular character, she’s not introduced until nearly a half-hour into the film, as instead the focus is on her more straight-laced sister Kay (Karen Colsten), an overly repressed woman that feels uncomfortable in her own skin, who seems to have spent her life trying to get out from underneath the shadow of her more domineering sister, but who certainly has her own unique peculiarities, among which includes a petrifying fear of tree roots, imagining them coming up through the concrete or under her bed while she sleeps, where subconsciously she literally appears threatened by the effects of her own family tree. At least initially, without seeing Sweetie, the audience hasn’t a clue what to make of this, but as events proceed, viewers get a much more intimate glimpse of the family dynamic, where Sweetie is so much more than just the black sheep of the family, continually restrained and mistreated, where the sad truth of the matter is that society even today hasn’t found an answer of what to do with emotionally volatile, yet developmentally arrested children who suffer from a wide-ranging condition known as pervasive developmental disorder.

While Campion films are always rich in characterization, which is why performances are always dramatically powerful and memorable, yet the off-putting and oblique angle of every single shot of the film is remarkable, where framing is perhaps the single most defining characteristic of the film, shot by Sally Bongers, a fellow student who became friends with the director at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in the early 80’s, and the first female cinematographer to shoot a 35-millimeter feature in Australia. At the time the film was released, many HATED the look of the film, including some at Cannes who booed the film, while others thought it ruined the movie as they couldn’t put people in the center of the frame, where it was subject to a lot of male aggression responding negatively to women finally expressing themselves differently. To a large extent, much of this happened at film school, where they were competing with guys that were attracted to spectacular shots and hogged all of the equipment, leaving the few female students to fend for themselves, having to discover a witty and more original way to tell the story. What’s perhaps most significant is that Campion and Bongers, like David Lynch, were graduates of prestigious art schools before they became filmmakers, where Campion was a painter, influenced by surrealist painter Frida Kahlo and sculptor Joseph Beuys, but felt limited by the medium, turning instead to cinema as an artform. While they also collaborated on two of Campion’s film shorts that were made during film school, the film is also informed by the writing skills of Gerard Lee, who they also met at film school, with Campion involved in a brief romance, becoming an Australian novelist who co-wrote and co-directed another earlier Campion short, while co-writing this film with Campion as well as one of her later works, 2013 Top Ten List #9 Top of the Lake. Yet it’s the look of the film that viewers must learn to navigate, where there is a complete lack of camera movement, an intentional awkwardness within the frame, always pushing people to the outer extensions of each shot, where the style itself creates an inner tension, beautifully edited, as is the trailer, Sweetie (1989) - Trailer (1:45), with a great sense of rhythm, accentuating the idiosyncracies in us all. Looking back over the years, it was this choice that identifies a cinematic originality, as it was actually an act of liberation to be so wildly different, where there was no one on the set to boss them around or tell them what to do, using a largely female crew, many of them first-timers, which was unheard of at the time, as they were instead free to be very intuitive and create the look they wanted. As a result, objects such as cracked concrete, carpets, curtains, and wallpaper are sometimes as important as the characters, as it keeps the focus within the frame.

It’s interesting that Campion had already written a first draft of THE PIANO (1993), but set it aside as she had the foresight to make this smaller, quirkier film first, feeling it was much more personal, and that a low-budget, more experimental style of filmmaking would be harder to get funding for later on, claiming she was influenced by the more intimate filmmaking styles of David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch, yet also Luis Buñuel and Australian director Peter Weir, especially their ability “to work beyond what you know consciously.” Opening to the sounds of Café of the Gate of Salvation, a white a cappella gospel choir from Sydney that sings in the black gospel tradition, a group that had never been recorded, but can be viewed on YouTube here 25th Anniversary Concert 5.11.11, yet they provide spiritual inspiration before the film even begins. The uniqueness of the sound, however, adds to the flavor of cinematic liberation, as this is a film that took the world by storm. The first sister we are introduced to is Kay, describing her unnatural fear of trees in the opening narration, so she relies upon superstition to help her understand the ways of love, where she visits a psychic that does tea readings, predicting a man with a question mark on his face will make a difference in her life. Soon enough, that man appears in the form of Louis (Tom Lycos, who according to Campion is the spitting image of Gerard Lee), who is already engaged to somebody else. That is no barrier to fate, however, as she meets him clandestinely in an underground parking lot where she seduces him with this strange idea that they were destined to be together, convincing him with the flip of a coin that persistently comes up tails. While he’s a sensitive and moody guy who thought he wanted a normal girlfriend, both of them have their own share of eccentricities, reflected by his love of meditation, and her rising anxiety, where one night she yanks a plant out of the ground by its roots, despite being planted in honor of their relationship, fearing some harm could come. Not knowing what else to do with it, she throws it under the bed, where immediately the couple starts having sex issues, deciding to sleep in separate bedrooms. The film jumps ahead 13 months. Perhaps the most Lynchian moment is when Kay attends a meditation class and continually interrupts, claiming it’s not working, but the instructor calmly and succinctly repeats the exact same instructions each and every time, like a prayer mantra. When they decide to make an appointment for sex, this turns into another absurd moment, beautifully framed with their heads cut off, where the magic just isn’t working, where they feel more like siblings than lovers, so they decide they’re just going through a non-sex phase. One of the fun moments of the film is the kid next door, Clayton (Andre Pataczek), a 5-year old who loves to shout from the back yard into Kay’s kitchen window, where they have to duck down to avoid being induced into playing with him, where he has all his toy cars lined up, ready to go. One of the classic moments of the film, viewed from the kitchen window, comes when he runs out of a tent and jumps into a tiny wading pool, like its all part of a spectacular circus act, where there’s a viewer impulse to break out into applause.

Coming home one night, they find the house broken into and loud music playing, where Sweetie’s entrance is like a bolt of lightning, an unbridled force of nature with no boundaries and no inhibitions, where Kay’s so embarrassed by her half-naked presence she doesn’t know how to describe her, initially telling Louis, “She’s a friend of mine. She’s a bit mental.” By morning, however, he discovers this is her sister, turning up with her boyfriend, Bob (Michael Lake), supposedly her agent, ready to sign her at the first opportunity, but really he’s just some junkie amused by the show she continually puts on. Having to explain herself, Kay indicates, “She was just born — I don’t have anything to do with her.” One of the challenges of the film was finding the right actress to play Sweetie, where they didn’t want her to be perceived as threatening or overly aggressive, but she couldn’t have modesty issues. Campion had previously seen Genevieve Lemon perform onstage without a stitch of clothes on, while in this film her sexually indulgent behavior and constant need for attention reveals a character that is amoral, incredibly inappropriate, and knows no limits, unbounded in every way, given a rebellious Goth and punk look. She’s charming and adorable most of the time, and always interesting, but she’s a wild child who loves playing with Clayton next door, as they are both mentally about the same age. Kay, on the other hand, sulks in her presence, as she’s the sensible sister, tidy and well-organized, where Sweetie is a moving tornado who has a way of breaking things, including Kay’s favorite objects, a set of porcelain figurines of horses set in various poses, where she gives each of them a name, like Thunder, Blaze, and Blaze’s mother, Gypsy. They are like alter-egos of her repressed interior world, suggestive of the Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie, where the brooding sister witnesses them get smashed to pieces, ending up in Sweetie’s mouth when she sheepishly tries to hide the evidence. This incident mirrors a moment when Louis discovers the dead plant under their bed, feeling betrayed by his own, supposedly lucid wife. Sweetie’s innocence (and the film’s) is her greatest appeal, as she’s just a big kid that never grows up. When Gordon, her Dad arrives, having no place left to go, as he’s just been left by his wife Flo (Dorothy Barry), leaving him a week’s worth of prepared dinners on the way out, where they have no life together, as she’s tired of her husband always giving in to Sweetie, where she has him wrapped around her finger, so she disappears for a while, heading into the outlying territory. Having never established boundaries with his daughter, the most inappropriate scene of the film has Sweetie actually bathing her father in the tub, and probably not for the first time, which is suggestive to some of an incestual relationship, a view that surprised Campion, as that was not her intent, though it may rationally explain the family dynamic. Yet the real beauty of the film is that the inappropriate behavior is never explained, remaining ambiguous throughout. Like a kinetic force that never stops, Sweetie grows more and more out of control, testing the limits of everyone’s patience, with the family caught in a state of inertia, where they decide to take a road trip to visit Flo, but cruelly and deceptively leave Sweetie behind.

With music playing in the car as they head for the outback, Schnell Fenster :: Whisper [1988] (3:48), getting out into the open countryside is familiar territory in Jane Campion films, revealing the redemptive power of nature, as Flo is living with the jackaroos (young Australian cowboys), working as their cook, where this entire segment feels utterly surrealistic. Finding his wife surrounded by a multitude of young men at a dude ranch, it’s all too much for Gordon, who storms off in a huff, taking the car to pout alone, yet the others are immediately welcomed, where it’s like being stranded at a Foreign Legion outpost in a Claire Denis film, made a decade before Beau Travail (1999), where the film turns into a fantasia of cowboy paradise and infinite happiness, where there are no problems to be found, with handsome, well-groomed cowboys dancing with one another, or with chairs, as they grab Kay as a likely partner, with Flo breaking out into song, beautifully singing a gorgeous country ballad, There’s a Love that Waits for You, where there’s a feeling of romance wafting in the breeze, away from the stress of the world, that even greets Gordon as he graciously returns, eagerly dancing with his wife, as the jackaroos seem to be having a therapeutic effect on their marriage, with terrific music by Martin Armiger. On the drive back home, Gordon has another spell of regret, torn by their deceitful actions towards Sweetie, where he’s stymied by the idea they can’t all get along, stuck in his own delusion, which seems to be the curse they all have to bear, as Sweetie remains a walking time bomb that at any second can go off. By the time they get back home, with relationships seemingly reconciled, all is not as it seems, as Sweetie goes off the deep end again, this time with tragic consequences, stripped naked in her treehouse along with 5-year old Clayton (who curiously asked in person if she was really a grown-up), in full view of the neighbors, as she refuses to listen to reason and come down, where the dreams and the fantasy collide with reality in an instantaneous thud, a sad and regretful moment, a fall from grace, as they are simply unable to move her out of the spotlight, forever remaining the center of attention, even after she’s gone, with Kay finding her broken figurines meticulously reconstructed, with some obvious parts still missing. But there is no more haunting moment than a memory of Sweetie as a young girl all decked out in a cute little pink sparkle outfit singing a song, "Sweetie"song YouTube (1:17), an innocent plea for love from her father as if summoned from the grave, and a reminder of what she could never obtain, being accepted for who she was. As powerful and unique as this film may be, so much is still left off the screen and out of the film, where there are open spaces that make it sometimes feel more alienating and distant, as if set in a kind of detached coldness, offering a feeling as if characters are continually under a microscope being scientifically observed, where the entire film becomes a lost memory, like a photograph, retaining a quiet innocence that through the passing of the years is hard to find. It’s curious that Campion, who is actually a quite sunny person (displaying a flair for laughter, claiming it is never inappropriate), is drawn to making films of such tragedy, where her mother who suffers from depression attempted suicide near the end of shooting this film, with her sister forced to look after her full-time, allowing Campion time to complete the last ten days of shooting. As a result, the film is dedicated to her sister. But it’s apparent to Campion that illnesses are real, as they have a tragic effect on families, where the open ended, non-judgmental attitude of the film has an enormous impact on families dealing with a similar situation. Despite Campion’s growth as a filmmaker and the accolades she’s received, this daring early work arguably remains her best film.

Sweetie | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Those lucky enough to have seen Jane Campion's eccentric and engaging shorts had reason to expect her first feature to be a breakthrough for the Australian cinema. But nothing prepared one for the freshness and weirdness of this 1989 black comedy about two sisters (Genevieve Lemon and Karen Colston) locked in a deadly struggle. Practically every shot is unorthodox, unexpected, and poetically right, and the swerves of the plot are simultaneously smooth, logical, and so bizarre you'll probably wind up pondering them days later. The mad behavior of both sisters may make you squirm, and there are plenty of other things in this picture—including the other characters—to make you feel unbalanced, but Campion does so many beautiful, funny, and surprising things with our disquiet that you're likely to come out of this movie seeing the world quite differently. In short, this is definitely not to be missed. With Tom Lycos, Jon Darling, Dorothy Barry, and Michael Lake.

Sexual Discourse [THE PIANO] | Jonathan Rosenbaum

Both of Campion’s theatrical features are bold expressionist works about female sexual desire that make free and idiosyncratic use of central metaphors — though here their similarities end, and it will be interesting to see whether Campion’s next feature, an adaptation of Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady, bears any relationship at all to this pattern. In Sweetie, the principal drama is between two antagonistic sisters — one of them sexually repressed and neurotic, the other completely uninhibited and psychotic — and the central metaphor is trees. Though a couple of trees actually figure in the plot, Campion mainly uses trees as a poetic organizing image in the consciousness of Kay, the neurotic sister, who narrates the film: she gets us to think about family trees, planted and uprooted lives, unseen depths and giddy elevations, blooming versus dying, and various forms of encroachments and entanglements.

Sweetie, directed by Jane Campion | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrews

Kay (Colston) fears darkness and the secret, stifling power of plants; her teenage sister Dawn (Lemon) is crazy, throwing tantrums at all and sundry, and dreaming, unrealistically, of stardom. When the latter and her bombed-out boyfriend (Lake) arrive unannounced at the suburban home Kay shares with her equally loopy lover Lou (Lycos), all hell breaks loose. Tragedy looms. And all the aforementioned is played, partly, as comedy. Campion's first theatrical feature is a remarkable, risky exploration of the weird and wonderfully surreal undercurrents that can lie just beneath the surface of everyday suburban life, ordinary folk harbour dark, unfathomable obsessions, phobias and desires, and a familiar world is unsettlingly distorted by grotesque close-ups, harsh overhead angles and narrative ellipses. Amazingly, as she veers without warning from black comedy to bleak melodrama and back again, she manages to make us laugh at and like her confused, barely articulate characters, so that her dénouement is simultaneously ludicrous and deeply affecting. Sweetie confirms Campion as a highly original movie talent.

New Season Opens with Jane Campion’s Sweetie in 35mm Rebecca Hall from Chicago Northwest Film Society

The first feature film by director Jane Campion, Sweetie is the story of a family “falling apart like a wet paper bag.” On the advice of a tea-leaf reading psychic, Kay (Karen Colston) steals her presumed soul mate from the arms of a coworker. Soon Kay and Louis (Tom Lycos) are living the suburban dream outside Sydney, Australia, working nameless jobs and watching their sex life disappear into the candy-colored linoleum. Enter Dawn, a.k.a. Sweetie (Geneviève Lemon), Kay’s feral, sexually charged sister, and let the hair pulling and destruction of all things beloved commence. Perhaps Campion’s funniest film (with the exception of the unfairly maligned Holy Smoke!), Sweetie is a fever dream occupied by needy, selfish children being literally (thanks to cinematographer Sally Bongers) and figuratively backed into corners. Released four years before Campion became the first (and only, as of 2016) female filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes (for The Piano), it contains both the poetry and depravity that can be traced throughout her later work. Always ready and willing to treat seemingly mad and irrational characters with deadly sincerity, Campion makes no exception for neurotic, tree-fearing Kay, as we watch her demons made flesh in the film’s final scenes.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Kelly Steele/Cordelia Stephens]

Jane Campion's feature debut focuses on the lives of a dysfunctional family set against a backdrop of ordinary suburbia. Kay livens up an otherwise dull existence with an unhealthy interest in superstition. She pursues and wins the heart of Louis on the basis of a tea-leaf prediction., and they consequently move in together; sharing the same "spiritual plane".

The spell is broken when Kay tears out Louis' newly planted tree; relations start to rot as Kay changes overnight to an emotional and sexual invalid. Enter Sweetie, Kay's mentally ill sister. Arriving. out of the blue one night Sweetie suffers the deluded conviction that with Bob, her producer-cum-lover, she will "walk through doors" into the world of entertainment. She exults in her new-found freedom away from the family nest, whilst Kay refuses to entertain the notion of letting her stay, convinced that she is a "dark spirit" and thus the scene is set for conflict between two sibling opposites. Into this chaotic spectacle walks Dad, suffering woefully with the separation from his frustated wife who has gone into the bush to find herself amongst the jackaroos.

Sweetie is notable for the use of bizarre wide-angle shots in enclosed spaces, combined with lurid set colours - these contribute to the angst and tension within the family unit. The contrast of incongruous people, situations and events with ostensibly mundane environment hints at something more corrupt and sinister underlying the suburban dream.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

English Romantic poet John Keats, who's the subject of Jane Campion’s 2009 film BRIGHT STAR, once described a phenomenon he called “Negative Capability” as being “when a man is capable of... uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It’s no wonder, then, that Campion was drawn to Keats’ story, as that very philosophy likewise sums up the appeal and justifies the inscrutability of Campion’s motley oeuvre. Her first true feature, SWEETIE, is perhaps most emblematic of this concept, both as it applies to the subject of the film itself and its place within her output; it’s at once Campion’s most idiosyncratic feature and still a perfect example of her enigmatically alluring style, though it doubtless has more in common with her film school shorts than the more mature features that followed. Filmed in Australia from a script cowritten by Campion, SWEETIE is mostly about Kay, a shy and superstitious woman whose neuroses take the form of a toy horse collection and an elegiac fear of trees. She enters into a relationship with her coworker Louis at the beginning of the film, more or less stealing him from his fiancé after discovering that he fits a description given by a suburban fortune-teller. Thirteen months later, just as their sex life has stalled, Kay’s sister, from whom the film takes its name, comes to visit. Sweetie is everything Kay is not: brash, impulsive, shameless, and impetuously sexual. Their parents are similarly bizarre—their father coddled Sweetie at the expense of his marriage, and their mother, averse to Sweetie as she may be, is more like her wilder daughter than she thinks. This summary, however, is deceptively straightforward; just as it is difficult to describe a Keats poem, or an experimental film, it’s tough—and perhaps pointless—to blithely summarize any of Campion’s work. One might in fact describe SWEETIE as being experimental, it’s rather conventional themes deconstructed by Campion’s auteurist inclinations and cinematographer Sally Bongers’ singular aesthetic. The latter element is best characterized as quirky, a label that’s taken for granted in this era of contrived capriciousness. Similarly to how the motifs that span Campion’s filmography often go unexplained—engagement, for example, factors into several of her films—SWEETIE’s distinct visual style persists without explanation. Her fixation on female psychosexuality is less apparent in the film, however, though what focus there is on it is certainly reflective of Campion’s unique viewpoint on the subject. (Female sexuality is not just a throughline in her career, but also the subject towards which her “negative capability” is most applicable. In other words, it’s the “unknown known,” to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, that drives her art.) SWEETIE might not be her best film, or even her most experimental (IN THE CUT is the frontrunner for that distinction), but it could be her most mysterious in execution as well as intent.

Sweetie (1989) - The Criterion Collection

In "Sweetie," Jane Campion's unsettlingly original, macabrely funny first film, the camera seems to capture its images from never-before-seen angles. Everything in the universe Campion has created is just slightly off-kilter, as if the Earth had positioned itself awkwardly beneath your feet. The film's subject is family life, but voices seem to call down from the flowers on the wallpaper, and every crack in the sidewalk threatens danger. It's about family life as Kafka might have viewed it.

From its opening shots on, the film unfolds a mood of enveloping peculiarity. In essence, "Sweetie" is a horror movie; it's about the horror of having relatives who crowd in, wear your clothes, occupy your guest room and, without the slightest urging, attach their lives to yours.

Deeper down, though, there's another layer, and this is where Campion is happiest. She likes it when family turbulence is repressed and springs out in freaky new shapes. Campion's style isn't articulate; it's based, in fact, on inexpressiveness, on the thoughts that get tangled up and don't quite work themselves to the surface. Her jokes, too, hit you upside the head, like Freudian snowballs zinging in from nowhere.

The movie is slow to bring its own themes to the surface (it never fully does), busying itself instead with laying out its shadowy, suggestive atmosphere. The first section introduces us to a bony Australian named Kay (Karen Colston), who wears her dark hair in bangs that drop like a curtain just above her brow. Peeking out from underneath are a pair of huge, panicky eyes that appear to be on perpetual alert for signs of some invisible menace.

When we first see her, Kay is lounging on her bed above a floral-printed carpet, and the way Campion has shot it, the image might seem idyllic -- a sort of dreamy transcendence on a leafy bank of clouds -- if, on the soundtrack, she weren't talking about the hidden powers of trees and how, as a little girl, she was afraid that the big ones outside her house had sinister designs and were growing their roots out under the house to get her.

Campion, who comes from Australia, develops the film narrative according to its own dark, neurotic logic. After a visit to a fortuneteller who tells her she is to encounter a man "with a question mark on his face," Kay meets Louis (Tom Lycos), whose front forelock curls down to a mole on his forehead. Having decided that fate has played its hand, the couple immediately set up house, where things go along well enough until Louis plants a scraggly baby arbor in the back yard, rekindling Kay's childhood tree terrors.

The sapling, of course, cannot be allowed to survive, and there's an eerie hilarity in the way Kay yanks it out of the ground in the middle of the night and appears, ever so subtly, to strangle the life out of it. This "death" signals the end of the couple's sex life. Claiming that she has a cold, Kay moves into the room across the hall. But even after the cold has vanished she can't bring herself to move back. And though neither of them is particularly happy about it, every night, just before hitting the hay, the couple kiss good night, like brother and sister, and lock the doors to their separate bedrooms.

At this stage, with the arrival of Kay's sister, Dawn (Genevieve Lemon), the movie shifts gears. Nicknamed "Sweetie," Dawn is a well-upholstered nightmare with dyed jet-black hair, black fingernails and cradle-born dreams of a glamorous show-biz life. Materializing out of thin air with her boyfriend-producer, Bob (Michael Lake), an upright slug who's either a junkie or a narcoleptic, Sweetie seems to have only one purpose in life and that is to set Kay's teeth on edge. At first, Kay won't even claim her as family. "I didn't have anything to do with her. She was just ... born."

Like a child star gone to hideous seed, Sweetie is the most wholly unsympathetic screen creation since Dennis Hopper's Frank in "Blue Velvet." And while watching her, we're aware that Campion is intentionally taking us to the edge of revulsion, daring us to push her character away. Still, even after Gordon (Jon Darling), the girls' father, arrives, all forlorn because his wife has left him to work out West for a bunch of cowboys, and we see how sickly manipulative the family relationships are, our disgust becomes more complicated but perhaps even more urgent.

As skilled a creator of otherworldly moods as Campion is, "Sweetie" doesn't have much narrative drive, and I found it vastly more compelling in the beginning, when Kay was center stage, than after the destabilizing arrival of her sister.

Still, I loved the way Campion and cinematographer Sally Bongers make the natural and the unnatural (human) landscapes appear lush and supersaturated with color, but at the same time barren, minimalist. Also, a scene in which the jackaroos dance a dusty sunset waltz in the cowboy camp has an almost serene eccentricity. The images imprint themselves instantly into your memory. In making her first film, Campion has done thrillingly atmospheric work, and in the process, established herself as perhaps the most perversely gifted young filmmaker to rise up in years.

Sweetie: Jane Campion’s Experiment Criterion essay by Dana Polan, October 23, 2006

On the Road With Jane Campion video, September 30, 2009

Three Reasons: Sweetie video, May 24, 2011

12 Great Parting Shots photo gallery, July 16, 2012

More than Meets the Eye: The Mediation of Affects in Jane Campion's ... Sue Gillett from Senses of Cinema, December 5, 1999

Jane Campion • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Fincina Hopgood, October 2002

A Major Talent [on SWEETIE] | Jonathan Rosenbaum March 30, 1990

Sweetie | Foolish Human James Harmon

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: SWEETIE (1989) Tim Brayton

Sweetie | Cinelogue Matthew Mesaros, May 18, 2011

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

'Sweetie' Is Jane Campion's Stunning Freshman Effort | PopMatters W. Scott Poole

Michigan Quarterly Review|First Films: Jane Campion's “Sweetie” Eric McDowell from the Michigan Quarterly Review

Sweetie (Jane Campion) - Film Reviews - No Ripcord Gary Collins

The Auteurs: Jane Campion | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, September 30, 2013

Jane Campion - Director - Films as Director:, Other ... - Film Reference Rob Edelman

Sweetie | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Genn Heath

c/f movie review: Sweetie (1989 - dir. Jane Campion) - Clones / Fashions Matt Schimkowitz

Women's Pictures - Jane Campion's Sweetie - Blog - The Film ... Nathaniel Rogers from The Film Experience

"Sweetie" by Cook, Pam - Metro Magazine, Issue 181, Winter 2014 ...

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, also here: Turner Classic Movies

DVD Times Gary Couzens

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich]

DVD Verdict [Bill Gibron]

DVD Town [Christopher Long]

The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]

Jane Campion Essay - Critical Essays - eNotes.com

50 Essential Feminist Films – Flavorwire Sweetie #9

Sweetie rewatched – Jane Campion's beautifully strange film debut ... Luke Buckmaster from The Guardian

Sweetie Movie Review & Film Summary (1990) | Roger Ebert

MOVIE REVIEW : Family Unsettlingly Under Siege in 'Sweetie' From Australia Sheila Benson from The LA Times

'Sweetie': A Second Look - latimes Dennis Lim

Movie Review - - Film Festival;; 'Sweetie,' a Wry Comedy By New ... The New York Times

Sweetie Blu-ray - Jane Campion - DVDBeaver.com

Sweetie (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE – made for TV A 96

Australia New Zealand Great Britain USA (157 mi) 1990

Prospero:

My brave spirit!

Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil

Would not infect his reason?

Ariel:

Not a soul

But felt the fever of the mad and play'd

Some tricks of desperation.

—Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1 Scene 2, 1611 The Tempest - Page 397 - Google Books Result

Originally made as a three-part television series, Campion was initially reluctant to let it be released theatrically, eventually winning a handful of awards (seven) at the Venice Film Festival in 1990, yet this is one of the better biopic cinematic experiences, told in three parts, covering all three in a trilogy of autobiographical volumes by New Zealand writer Janet Frame, To the Is-land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985), and a film that defiantly probes underneath the surface of the lead female character. Given a more modernistic context in that the film, a collection of various fragments in her life, leads to a wholistic overall view, as the life of Janet Frame literally materializes before our eyes, filled with literary passages and extraordinarily subjective insight, where the film is a profoundly revelatory work that expresses something close to the depths of the writer’s soul. Reminiscent of an earlier portrayal of Hollywood actress Frances Farmer in Jessica Lange’s brilliant portrayal in FRANCES (1982), both women spent years confined to institutions for perceived mental health issues with a condition that was believed to be incurable, subject to electric shock treatments and targeted for a recommended lobotomy, which, viewed in historical hindsight, is one of the cruelest and most destructive medical procedures mankind ever invented, yet both of these women came frightfully close to having the procedure. It was her intimacy of the psychological terrors inflicted on patients during extensive hospital treatment that led the young artist to examine her life so closely, finding language for the darkest recesses of her imagination, exposing what amounts to hidden secrets to the world through an obsession with the healing power of literature. Arguably New Zealand’s most distinguished author, Campion, a fellow New Zealander, fills the screen with indelible images of her own homeland while scrutinizing Frame’s life with methodical precision. With a screenplay by Laura Jones, who also wrote the adaptation of the Henry James novel in Campion’s later film with Nicole Kidman in THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996), this film also has one of the best uses of music by Don McGlashan which couldn’t be more perfectly integrated throughout, creating a fragile, sensory experience that is unique to films. But first and foremost is the character of Janet Frame, played by three different actresses, Karen Fergusson as a child, Alexia Keogh as an adolescent, and Kerry Fox as an adult, where Fox, so brilliant in Patrice Chéreau’s INTIMACY (2001), offers the performance of her career in her very first role, yet another unique discovery by Campion, criminally overlooked by the Academy Awards, as she was not even nominated, yet unlike the character of Sweetie, whose fierce individuality may have been too toxic for some, Frame’s vulnerability invites the audience in, allowing us to feel her social anxiety, hiding recognizable fears and anxieties with an uncomfortable smile, caught out of sorts, like a deer in the headlights, almost entirely with looks and gestures, barely uttering a word, as she suffers from extreme sensitivity and acute shyness, offering an inner narration as a window to her soul where she becomes socially isolated at college, “Too shy to mix, too scared to enter the Union building, I was more and more alone, and my only romance was in poetry and literature.”

The author of twelve novels, three short story collections, one children’s book, two books of poetry (one published posthumously), and three volumes of autobiography, Frame grew up in the South Island of New Zealand in dire poverty, the second daughter in a family of four girls and a boy, where her father was a railroad engineer, and though he kept his job during the depression years of the 1930’s, the family had little money to spare. In the opening moments viewers are introduced to a young girl with an explosion of red/orange hair, like the Little Orphan Annie comic strip character, where it feels like a satiric reference to Campion’s first film short, AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE — PEEL (1982), where all three characters have bright red hair, yet there are none of the skewed angles and experimental shots on display here, instead it’s shot by Stuart Dryburgh in a much more conventional manner, featuring remarkable landscapes, where humans are dwarfed by green fields and the grandiosity of the land, made to resemble smaller creatures. Deprived of material possessions, there are many family songs in Janet’s childhood that recur later in the film as familiar musical motifs, such as “Duncan Gray,” a Scottish folk song heard throughout, an angel at my table YouTube (31 seconds), yet they play a role early on in contributing to family unity, as Janet seems content with her warm and loving family. Perhaps starved for friendship, she steals money to treat her classmates to gum, yet ends up being branded a thief, made to stand in front of the blackboard with her back to the class in utter humiliation, which becomes a personal catastrophe, especially when she’s separated from the rest of the class and placed with several obviously disabled kids. Scorned and humiliated, perhaps this is a hint of what’s to come. With four sisters to a single bed, seen amusingly practicing shifting together, all turning simultaneously, Janet has a close relationship with her sisters, reading vociferously, comparing her family to the Brontë sisters, while her brother developed epileptic seizures and was regularly beaten by her father. Meeting a friend outside the family was a revelation, a neighbor girl named Poppy, where the two playfully re-enacted various abuses they witnessed, violent fathers and puritanically strict teachers, An Angel at my table YouTube (4:02), yet the curious way the children are filmed feels almost magical, holding our spellbound interest with intoxicating musical selections, yet perhaps their closeness aroused fear in their parents, as Janet’s father forbid them from seeing one another again. Often framed in long walks down a lonely highway or through sheep-ridden acres of farmland, her awkwardness increased during puberty, becoming embarrassed by her unruly red hair and her decayed teeth. Things only got worse when her eldest sister Myrtle drowned in a local swimming pool, an event that was preceded by happy events, as the family took photographs on a family holiday, yet when looking at them afterwards, the view of Myrtle was blurred, where she is strangely missing from view, like an ominous omen announcing her fate.

But it wasn’t until Janet went off to college at the University of Dunedin, studying to be a teacher, that she found it painfully shy to interact with the other girls, afraid to enter the student common room, instead taking refuge in spending her time alone in her room, immersing herself in a world of imagination and literature in order to escape from reality, writing poems and short stories, many of which were published in school publications. Her sister Isabel joined her at school, yet they were eventually forced to separate, leading to an existential moment, “So this is how it was, face to face with the future, living apart from Isabel, pretending that I was not alone, and that teaching is what I’d longed to do all my life.” Astoundingly, her sister Isabel drowned shortly thereafter, creating yet another inexplicable personal loss. When the day arrived that she should finally stand before a group of young students as their teacher, with an administrator observing from the back of the classroom, she froze, once again standing with her back to the class, mirroring a childhood incident, where the camera’s focus is suddenly on the piece of chalk in her hand, as if time has stopped, yet the class becomes restless and uneasy, where she’s forced to excuse herself, leading to the most wondrous scene of the film, where the exquisite music of Kathleen Ferrier sings Schubert’s “An die Musik” an angel at my table YouTube (3:38), her favorite composer, as Janet runs away with tears streaming down her face, unable to contain herself, finding herself suddenly outside where she is filled with desperation and anxiety, having what amounts to a nervous breakdown, yet the transcendent voice of Ferrier, so quietly dramatic, registering such clarity, unmatched tonal richness, and emotional warmth, holds the screen. Frame’s interior world was collapsing, “I felt completely isolated. I knew no one to confide in, to get advice from; and there was nowhere I could go. What, in all the world, could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated.” It was her writing talent, however, that brought special attention to her personal life, as she acknowledges in one paper swallowing a handful of pills in what was probably a suicide attempt. It was this autobiographical observation that led one of her college professors to refer her for further psychiatric examinations where it’s revealed that she’s schizophrenic, perhaps the singlemost significant event in her life, as she spent the next eight years drowning in the as yet untold atrocities of the New Zealand mental institutions, including the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. What follows is an immersion into personal nightmares and horrors, as she’s thrown in with more seriously disturbed patients with little to no education, who literally can’t control themselves, where patients were beaten for bedwetting, who scream and cry out all hours of the day and night, yet she’s dumped into their presence for what was described as “a period of rest.” Viewers immediately recognize the shocking indignity of suddenly descending into barbaric conditions, yet she was forced to receive more than 200 electric shock treatments, “each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution.” One of the more ghoulish scenes of the film is a strange dance party taking place in the asylum, an unsettling moment that couldn’t feel more twisted.

Recalling in her autobiography, An Angel at My Table, An Angel at My Table: The Complete Autobiography:

The attitude of those in charge, who unfortunately wrote the reports and influenced the treatment, was that of reprimand and punishment, with certain forms of medical treatment being threatened as punishment for failure to ‘co-operate’ and where ‘not co-operate’ might mean a refusal to obey an order, say, to go to the doorless lavatories with six others and urinate in public while suffering verbal abuse by the nurse for being unwilling. ‘Too fussy are we? Well, Miss Educated, you’ll learn a thing or two here.

After eight years, with no signs of improvement, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy, as even her mother was persuaded to sign the permission documents, as we see a group of patients wearing head wraps, presumably those that survived the operation, with orderlies helping them walk the grounds, but she was only spared the operation at the last minute when her doctor happened to read in the newspaper that she won a national prize, the Hubert Church Memorial Award, for her book of short stories, The Lagoon and Other Stories. Astonishingly, at the age of 29, Frame emerged from this episode with her sanity intact, writing “It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life.” With the help of Frank Sargeson (Martyn Sanderson), a gay New Zealand writer of some repute and notoriety, he invited Frame to come live in a trailer on his grounds, allowing her to write in solitude, where she immediately set to work on Owls Do Cry, her first published novel in 1957, which surprised them both by being immediately published. Receiving a grant for her artistic work, she travels to London and Spain as a published author, yet her humility is at the heart of her appeal, described by Campion as “an unremarkable heroine who allowed people to experience their own vulnerability.” Through various travails, her reservation gets lost in the mail and she loses her luggage, among other things, yet she remains isolated, spending much of her time in her room, where the tone shifts from absurd comedy, especially in the form of Patrick (David Letch), a bigoted Irish tenant who tries to school her on the ways of the world, repeatedly asking if she’s “fancy-free,” still a virgin, thinking he’s being romantically protective, to the strangeness of the Spanish women who are forever scrubbing the floors and cleaning their building, surrounded by religious icons, while spreading gossip about this hopelessly “fallen” woman, to the inhibitions of free-wheeling 50’s tourists traveling through Europe, where she discovers her first love affair with an American history professor, taking a break from writing, where her passions are beautifully expressed by swimming nude in the open sea, but alas, he must return to America for the fall term once summer is over. While the film accentuates the romantic backdrop of a small, Spanish coastal town, it also addresses her very real fears when she’s left pregnant and alone, without the man ever knowing, where in an excruciatingly sad scene she loses the baby, adding a female dimension on the summer holiday that most films never explore. Elevated feelings of anxiety lead to a voluntary hospitalization in London, where she’s surprised to learn, “Finally it was discovered that I never suffered from schizophrenia. At first the truth seemed more terrifying than the lie. How could I now ask for help when there was nothing wrong with me?” What she was experiencing was the residual effects from the many years of electric shock treatments, as it takes years for the body to calm down afterwards. This stunning revelation of an earlier misdiagnosis seems to clear an open path for the rest of her life, where she was content to simply write. By the end of the film, she’s a notorious artist that the press wants to photograph and write stories about, a local celebrity when she returns to her hometown, and for a very brief moment, even dances the twist, An Angel At My Table End YouTube (2:14). It should be pointed out that Kerry Fox is simply phenomenal, onscreen for nearly every shot in the second half of the film, showing an emotional range that is quite simply breathtaking, where certainly part of Campion’s unique gift comes in her remarkable talent for casting. Sensitive and deeply moving, with only spare use of dialogue, this is a uniquely inventive character study that doubles as a living novel that develops before our eyes, something of a delight all the way through, where the uncredited music of a Schubert sonata, Alfred Brendel Schubert - Piano Sonata in B Flat Major, D. 960 Second Movement ... YouTube (9:38), plays throughout, heightening the gravity, as does that original folk theme played at the outset, An Angel At My Table (OST) by Don McGlashan on Spotify, adding a solemn grace to the outstanding artistry onscreen.

Monica Sullivan from Videohound’s Independent Film Guide:

Jane Campion’s AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE began life as a three-part series on New Zealand television, which (dare we say it?) is the best way to see this 157-minute movie. After all, it is based on three different autobiographical novels by Janet Frame, To the Island, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City. Kerry Fox plays Frame, who was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic and spent eight years in a mental institution receiving electroshock therapy before the error was corrected. Extremely well acted and directed, AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE is nonetheless very heavy going all at once – especially first thing in the morning, which is when most reviewers see new movies. This explains (if not excuses) all the bad tempers and bad manners one is likely to observe at press screenings. AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE won many awards over the world, but then so did BREAKING THE WAVES and any number of worthy candidates which are long, depressing, and make you feel like a heel for wanting to watch SULLIVANS TRAVELS instead.

An Angel at My Table, directed by Jane Campion | Film ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Though adapted for television from three volumes of autobiography by New Zealand writer Janet Frame, Campion's film is both wholly cinematic and true to her own preoccupations. Her subject is the privations and anxieties of childhood and adolescence, the weird absurdity of ordinary life, and the disconcertingly thin line between normality and madness, all depicted with an unsentimental honesty that veers abruptly (but never jarringly) between naturalism and surrealism, comedy and tragedy. As the introverted Frame - a plain, bubble-haired redhead born into a poor, close-knit family in 1924 - progresses through school, college and erroneously diagnosed schizophrenia towards final liberation as a respected writer, Campion deploys a wealth of economically observed details to explore her heroine's passionate, deceptively placid perceptions of the world. There are none of the usual artist-biopic clichés here. Frame, as embodied by three uncannily-matched actresses, is bright but intensely, awkwardly passive, and inhabits a chaotic, arbitrary universe. Watching her hard, slow struggle for self-respect, happiness and peace becomes a profoundly moving, strangely affirmative experience.

An Angel at My Table Terrence Rafferty from the New Yorker (link lost)

Based on the autobiography of the New Zealand novelist and poet Janet Frame. The film covers the first forty years or so of the writer's life—she was born in 1924—and takes close to three hours to tell the story. When it's all over, you feel that you know far too little about Janet Frame and far too much about the film's director, Jane Campion. The movie (which was made as a three-part miniseries for Australian television) is a succession of odd, mannered tableaux, more or less in the style of Campion's 1990 art-house hit, "Sweetie." The compositions emphasize the peculiarities of Janet's appearance, especially in her childhood and awkward adolescence: she has a stiff, frizzy mop of bright-orange hair, and her teeth are badly decayed. The Janet Frame we see in this film doesn't seem to have an inner life, and without that she has no life at all. Even the most dramatic events in her life are treated so flatly and elliptically that we're unable to respond; time after time, we find that we can't orient ourselves in crucial scenes, because the director hasn't bothered to establish the characters or the setting. Writers' lives are weird enough without being subjected to this sort of willful disruption of their emotional continuity. Campion's perverse exercise in biographical filmmaking deserves a new title: "My Incomprehensible Career." Janet is played by three actresses: as a child, by Alexia Keogh; as a young teen-ager, by Karen Fergusson; and, as an adult, by Kerry Fox. Screenplay by Laura Jones.

An Angel at My Table | Film Review | Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

Director Jane Campion initially conceived of her adaptation of poet/novelist Janet Frame’s series of autobiographies as a TV miniseries. Only into production did the New Zealand Film Commission suggest a theatrical release, apparently because the biopic is the singular genre that looks, feels, and acts like episodic television and still plays nominally well in movie theaters. An Angel at My Table, named from the volume of Frame’s memoirs that recounts her elongated residence in a psychiatric ward, is no doubt a heartfelt tribute to a soft-spoken, melancholic writer from a director who claims to cherish her work as being very important in her own development. And though it’s shackled to that unyielding, difficult narrative structure of most biopics, this quality also works to the film’s benefit as Frame’s life is unspooled with the same sort of scenes-as-brushstrokes impressionism of Im Kwon-taek’s Chihwaseon.

But whereas Chihwaseon becomes increasingly restless and elliptical as it goes on, culminating in one of the most poetic representations of an artist stepping into legend (via a kiln), An Angel at My Table begins at the height of Campion’s mottled isolationist whimsy—showing a baby Janet covering her face trying to deflect her approaching mother’s bosom, and then a credit card commercial panorama of the knobby-kneed pre-teen Forth against the rolling New Zealand landscape—and settles into the mundane chapter-and-book processional as it continues. Janet goes through her early childhood as an outcast at school. She’s from a poor family, has poor hygiene (later in her teens, she let her teeth rot brown), and when she offers her entire class chewing gum bought with money she stole from her father’s woolen pocket, her teacher reveals her thievery to the class who then sneers. To say nothing of the untamable patch of ginger cotton growing from her scalp, which remains a constant in her life as she moves from the university to the asylum to a successful writing career complete with grants to travel to Paris and Spain. Spanning over three decades, Frame is portrayed seamlessly by three different actresses (in order of age: Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, and, playing the adult Frame, Kerry Fox) whose remarkable resemblance to each other extends beyond their appearance and mannerisms. They pass the psychological baton and collectively sculpt a portrait of growth.

Campion’s knack for solitary yet paradoxically epic scope nibbles off Laura Jones’s bite-sized scene-sketches of loneliness and makes entire meals of them, swallowing cast and location up alike in an effort to centralize the three actresses playing Frame to the point that even the most major supporting characters (her older sister Myrtle in the film’s first hour, her American lover in Ibiza in the last) are delegated to the sidelines…which aren’t exactly as prodigious as they might be in a film conceived for the silver screen. In fact, with Frame’s wild crown of fuzz, the preponderance of close-ups turn the rectangular frame into an hourglass, suggesting (however inadvertently) the time she struggles to remember and catalogue in writing her own memoirs as well as the time she lost in a mental institution, the place where she no doubt lost some of those memories enduring no less than 200 odd electroshock treatments. Campion’s film comes up short, however, in never satisfactorily illustrating the importance or character of Frame’s writing, which, while lauded for its selflessness, can’t survive the director’s tightly honed individualist scrutiny without occasionally lapsing into solipsism.

Movie Review - Angel at My Table, An - eFilmCritic Dr. Isaksson

From the moment you set your eyes onto Jane Campion's "An Angel at My Table" you are completely swallowed into the film's overwhelming atmosphere. This is the film adaptation of renown New Zealand writer Janet Frame's own autobiographies. Spanning from Janet's magical childhood to her later, more challenging years, "An Angel at My Table" never softens it's brutal truth and never loses it's focus while depicting Janet Frame's amazing rise from a shy farm girl to a prize winning author.

From the outset of 1990's An Angel At My Table, we are led into the life of Janet Frame, visiting her as a child and seeing the goings on of her large but close knit family. We watch as the young, frizzy haired Janet discovers a life-long love for literature as steps awkwardly through the daily hardships of poverty and family troubles. These early scenes are filmed with such a childish honesty that you almost feel as if you are watching a documentary and not an acted film. As she reaches her teenage years, Janet Frame comes to a crossroad. She must become a teacher to make a living and in doing so, finds trouble in discarding her dreams of being a writer. (That dream being the strongest passion in her life.) As she reaches early adulthood, Janet's (played by the brilliant Kerry Fox) unhappiness and crippling shyness leads her down a path that noone could expect. So eager to trust others, Janet Frame stumbles into a dark realm of misery and hardship almost too horrific to describe. However, her years of suffering and uncertainy are just the beginning of the amazing journey she is set to make. And as that new course of life begins you realize that An Angel At My Table isn't just going to show you a life incomplete, but a life of the most unbelievable occurrences and of great joy and great accomplishment.

The most amazing aspect about An Angel At My Table is the uncompromising and heartfelt lead performance by Kerry Fox. When she is on the screen, she gives you Janet Frame, body, mind, heart and soul. I have rarely seen such impeccable acting in my life and feel all the more richer that I was given the chance to see Kerry Fox in all her glory. She is nothing short of a revelation. The other young women who portray Janet are almost equally great. Through her childhood years, Janet is played by a chubby little wonder named (Alexia Keough). Her face is charmingly captured by Jane Campion in an honest and no frills light that sets the film's truthful and strong beginning. As a teen Janet, the quality of acting continues as (Karen Fergusson) assumes the role. Amazingly, the actresses are so convincing and look so much alike that you can easily believe you are watching the same person.

As far as the look and feel of An Angel At My Table goes, Jane Campion's direction can be just as harsh and unbending as it is soft and beautifully stunning. She has an amazing knack for capturing the most unflinching scenes of human emotion and then can stun you with her jaw dropping shots of the glorious New Zealand landscapes. You KNOW full well that Campion truly loves her work and the subject she has taken the task to portray. The film is just brimming with love. The music score for the film by Don McGlashan is another absolutely gorgeous standout. Full of moody dark atmosphere as well as shining joy, McGlashan's music plays in your ear long after the film has ended. Wonderful!

For me to say that Kerry Fox and Jane Campion deserved Best Actress and Best Director Oscars for this film would be an understatement. They are FAR above the plastic praise Hollywood has to offer. Their work is a testament that truly great films can (and do) come in small, foreign packages.

It is almost impossible to go into elaborate details concerning An Angel At My Table becuase it is simply an all embracing look at a human's incredible life. Most surprising, in all this, as a viewer, you never lose sight of the film's ultimate aim. That even in the darkest hour, no matter what is stacked against you, one of the most glorious of all powers blessed inside the human frame is the unstoppable, unbreakable, spirit.

"An Angel At My Table" is simply a masterpiece. Showcasing one woman's journey through days of childish joy, fragile teenage uncertainty, harsh grown up reality, and ultimately the neverending quest for self-fulfillment.

An Angel at My Table: Alone, Naturally - The Criterion Collection Criterion essay by Amy Taubin, September 19, 2005

Jane Campion's Top 10 - Explore - The Criterion Collection

An Angel at My Table (1990) - The Criterion Collection

Angel from the Mirror City: Jane Campion's Janet Frame • Senses of ... Sue Gillett from Senses of Cinema, November 2000

Re-imag(in)ing the borderland through the work of Janet Frame a Writing in the Margins, Exploring the Borderland in the Work of Janet Frame and Jane Campion, 18-page essay by Anna Ball (University of Manchester) (pdf)

"Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table: As National, as Adaptation, as ... 5-page essay by David Callahan, 2002 (pdf)

Not Just Movies: An Angel at My Table Jake Cole, March 15, 2010

Past Perfect: Criterion Classics - Angel at My Table (1989) | PopMatters Bill Gibron

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1990) Timothy Brayton

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

An Angel At My Table | Foolish Human James Harmon, June 20, 2012

Nick's Flick Picks review of An Angel at My Table Nick Davis, February 1999

An Angel at My Table - Jane Campion - HOME Rachel Hatfield from Rachel Is a Critic

Women Writers on Film: "An Angel At My Table" 1990, Jane Campion Frances Hatherley, July 8. 2012

Bechdel Test Canon: An Angel At My Table | Bitch Media Alyx Vesey, January 25, 2012

Of Love and Other Demons: 'An Angel at My Table' (Jane Campion ... Justine A. Smith from Vague Visages, June 23, 2016

An Angel At My Table - TCM.com Margarita Landazuri

Women's Pictures - Jane Campion's An Angel at my Table - The Film ... Nathaniel Rogers from The Film Experience

An Angel at My Table - TCM.com Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection, also seen here: An Angel at My Table : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video

An Angel at My Table - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the ... Svet Atanasov

dOc DVD Review: An Angel at My Table (1989) - digitallyOBSESSED! Jeff Ullmer, Criterion Collection

Movie Reviews by Edwin Jahiel

Movie House Commentary Tuna

"Let's Not Talk About Movies": An Angel At My Table June 10, 2009

An Angel at My Table | Film | NZ On Screen

Jane Campion recalls her encounters with Janet Frame | Books | The ... Jane Campion from The Guardian, January 19, 2008

Washington Post [Jeanne Cooper]

'An Angel at My Table' - Washington Post

MOVIE REVIEW : A Disturbing but Uplifting 'Angel at My Table' - latimes

An Angel at My Table Movie Review (1991) | Roger Ebert

Siskel & Ebert (video)

Review/Film - 3 Novels Are Adapted For 'Angel at My Table' - NYTimes ... Vincent Canby, also seen here: NYT review - The New York Times

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Donald Brown]

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

An Angel at My Table - Wikipedia

Janet Frame - Wikipedia

Biography - Janet Frame Literary Trust

An Angel @ My Blog Janet Frame website

"Janet Frame, 79, Writer Who Explored Madness" Obituary by Douglas Martin from The New York Times, January 30, 2004

Obituary: Janet Frame | Books | The Guardian Michael King, January 30, 2004

Janet Frame - Telegraph Janet Frame obituary, January 30, 2004

A survivor against the odds—noted New Zealand writer Janet Frame ... Margaret Rees obituary from The World Socialist Web Site, March 2, 2004

Gavin Highly - The New Yorker Janet Frame short story, April 5, 2010

THE PIANO A- 94

Australia New Zealand France (121 mi) 1993 Official site

There is a silence where hath been no sound,

There is a silence where no sound may be,

In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea.

—first three lines of Silence, poem by Thomas Hood that both opens and closes the film, February, 1823, Silence by Thomas Hood | Poetry Foundation

There’s something to be said for silence. With time, I’m sure she’ll become affectionate.

—Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill)

A shared winner of the Palme d’Or (First prize) at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, with Ken Kaige’s FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE, Holly Hunter also won the Best Actress Award at the festival. The following year the film won three Academy Awards, Best Actress for Hunter, Best Supporting Actress for Anna Paquin, who at the age of 11 was the second youngest to win an Oscar, after Tatum O’Neil, who was ten, and Best Original Screenplay for writer/director Jane Campion. It is the most critically acclaimed of Campion’s films, the one that put her on the international map, as most only saw her earlier films “after” seeing THE PIANO. Campion began writing this film just after film school, setting it aside for her other films, creating a fairy tale for adults, a mythological study that examines how women’s voices were silenced during the Victorian era, where once again, the brilliance of Campion’s casting is nothing less than astonishing. Holly Hunter stunned the world with her muted performance as Ada McGrath, whose inner narrative speaks her thoughts briefly only at the beginning and end, “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice,” remaining completely silent in between, where the fierce, individualistic power of her performance is utterly captivating, frantically using sign language or facial expressions to emphatically get her point across. Hunter fought for the role, beating out Isabelle Huppert, of all people, who claims it’s one of the regrets of her life not getting that role. Now it’s hard to imagine anyone else as Ada, as Hunter turned it into the most significant role of her lifetime, and will forever be associated with this remarkable film.

I have not spoken since I was six years old. Lord knows why. Not even me. My father says it is a dark talent, and the day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last. Today he married me to a man I’ve not yet met. Soon, my daughter and I shall join him in his own country. My husband says my muteness does not bother him. He writes, and hark this, “God loves dumb creatures, so why not I!” ‘Twere good he had God’s patience, for silence affects everyone in the end. The strange thing is, I don’t think myself silent—that is, because of my piano. I will miss it on the journey.

Honestly, as far as accessibility, this may be one of Campion’s most conventional efforts, but it’s so confoundingly different that it still mesmerizes audiences and critics alike for its sheer originality. Otherworldly, ethereal, with a melancholic musical score by Michael Nyman, the film is guided by a line of dialogue late in the film describing Ada’s improvisatory piano playing (all played by Holly Hunter, by the way), claiming it’s different than what they’re used to hearing, normally utilizing sheet music, no doubt written by men, where Aunt Morag (Kerry Walker) suggests, “Her playing is strange, like a mood that passes through you.” There may be no better explanation for this film. An expression of repressed passion and sexuality, the film is set in the Gothic romanticism of the 1850’s and Emily Brontë, a time when the repression of women was standard, as they simply had no rights to speak of, opening with a blurred shot through Ada’s fingers, where the lines of her fingers resemble prison bars and are emblematic of the imprisoned life she leads, yet with no explanation, she’s shipped off halfway across the world from Scotland to New Zealand to be sold as a mail-order bride in an unknown country to a man she’s never met, bringing along her two most prized possessions, her young daughter Flora (Anna Paquin, utterly remarkable in the role) and her piano. Arriving to the shore from a heaving ocean that swells with volcanic force, their belongings are collected on the shoreline, but there is no one to meet them, as they are dropped off on their own, but we quickly learn this is no damsel in distress story, as the seamen ask if they wish to be transported to the nearest town, with Ada replying with emphatic hand gestures, while Flora accentuates her sarcasm, replying, “She says no. She says she’d rather be boiled alive by natives than get back in your stinkin’ tub!” The seaman looks ready to slap the youngster for indignation, but Ada quickly places herself in front, showing a spirited defiance right from the start. It also establishes Flora as her mother’s mouthpiece, as she’s a highly skilled communicator, including facial expressions, though prone to exaggerations of her own, especially any questions concerning her father, who the viewer learns virtually nothing about from the film, instead she makes up exotic stories that seem to please her instead. With nowhere else to go, the two spend a cold night on the beach, using the wire frame of her hoop skirt as a tent for shelter from the elements. With Victorian artifacts stranded on the beach, along with their elaborately decorative clothing, we see how out of place they are in the wilderness of New Zealand, where the setting is a place where two differing worlds collide.

The next morning, Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill, always clumsy and a bit awkward in his own skin) arrives out of the harshness of the wilds with a team of Māori tribesmen to help transport the young bride and all her belongings, where Stewart is an oddly shy and humorless man that his Māori helpers teasingly refer to as “old dry balls,” but they haven’t enough men to haul the piano, which they leave on the beach, despite the objections from Ada, who would rather they bring the piano than all of their clothes. Despite the fact she brought this all the way from Scotland, so it must have some significance, Stewart dismisses her request, claiming it is unreasonable, which is the first sign he’s an insensitive tyrant. The piano is everything to Ada, who uses it as a means to express herself, while being removed from it leaves her distraught, as one of the most haunting images is a shot of Ada standing high up on a grassy bluff overlooking the brown sand and grey water of the beach where far off in the distance, the piano lies abandoned in the surf, where the one object that defines her entire identity has been left to the elements. As they trek through the forests, their pathway is traversing through endless mud, as there are no roads leading into this new world, where land crossings are strenuously difficult. The dark and bleak weather sets an ominous tone for what follows, as they are pelted by torrents of rain throughout their journey, arriving finally in Stewart’s home, where he lives with his Aunt Morag (Kerry Walker) and her helper Nessie, Genevieve Lemon from Sweetie (1989), along with a few female Māori servants. Before they have time to rest, they jump back out into the downpour of rain to get married, including a wedding photograph, none of which looks remotely like anything resembling wedding bliss. On the contrary, their relationship is difficult at best, with Ada and Flora mostly keeping to themselves, ignoring Stewart, who sleeps in separate quarters, though Stewart is not sure what he’s purchased, observing Ada play the piano on an ordinary table, thinking she might be a bit touched in the head. When he leaves to take care of business, Ada and Flora immediately set out to the home of George Baines (Harvey Keitel, one of the more surprising roles of his career), an uneducated white man who has reportedly “gone native,” a former whaler who now lives among the Māori tribesmen, speaking both languages, with Māori markings on his face, working for Stewart as his work foreman. He initially refuses their request to collect the piano, but they sit silently outside his door until he reconsiders. When he agrees to take them to the beach, he’s surprised by the elation on her face when she plays, conveying emotions that convince him this is her missing voice, as it’s clearly a surreal moment, as this element of Western civilization simply doesn’t exist in the savage wilds, yet he agrees to swap 80 acres of land with Stewart for the rights to the piano, so long as Ada teaches him how to play. Stewart, of course, pounces on the opportunity, as the English colonizers to New Zealand were largely land grabbers. Thinking only of his own interests, he agrees to the deal without even consulting Ada, as after all, it would give her a chance to play. Ada, on the other hand, is insulted by the deal, as without question the piano is rightfully hers, but in this patriarchal society, women have no rights, so the piano goes to Baines, along with agreed upon lessons. This imbalance is at the heart of the film.

Jane Campion: I think that it’s a strange heritage that I have as a pakeha New Zealander, and I wanted to be in a position to touch or explore that. In contrast to the original people in New Zealand, the Māori people, who have such an attachment to history, we seem to have no history, or at least not the same tradition. This makes you start to ask, “Well, who are my ancestors?” My ancestors are English colonizers — the people who came out like Ada and Stewart and Baines.

While it’s a bit like Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), situated in a bleak natural environment where people are used to living in the mud and the rain, struggling to bring some semblance of civilization to the wilderness, in this case the European culture they left behind, there’s a curious example of this in a Christmas pageant staged that brings together the young and old, including Flora who wear’s angel’s wings, yet included in their presentation is a retelling of the French fairy tale Bluebeard, where a frighteningly ugly nobleman marries a series of beautiful women that all mysteriously disappear. When his next young female subject explores his luxurious estate, she’s curious what’s behind a locked door, discovering the missing corpses of his former brides, with their heads hanging from a hook. About to make her the next victim, told in shadows behind an illuminated curtain, he raises an axe to her head, where the Māori men watching this become highly agitated, with one of them leaping from his seat to attack Bluebeard, causing immediate panic in the room. This amusing scene recalls the origins of cinema when The Lumière Brothers in 1895 showed “Arrival of a Train” to similarly panicked audiences who jumped out of the way, thinking they would be run over by the train. It’s interesting how this play within a play comments on the final outcome of the film. What Campion has done is pit opposite forces against one another, as the sexually repressed Victorian era of the Europeans enter the realm of the Māori indigenous peoples, who are much more comfortable with expressing themselves sexually, often seen telling sexually provocative jokes, never covering up their entire bodies with clothing, showing a lack of inhibition, as they don’t shy away from a more healthy attitude about their bodies. While one can see evidence of colonial exploitation in the way Stewart is a white landowner, where Ada is an extension of his property, always accumulating more and more land that used to belong to the natives, using indigenous labor as his hired help, one time attempting to pay them with useless buttons, a sign of his arrogance, yet the film is subject to racist accusations, as the film is about the featured European whites, and doesn’t really explore the Māori culture or native people except to show them as uneducated simpletons, sitting around in their idle time playing games or telling jokes, never once viewed as individuals, though one shows homosexual tendencies, immediately chastised by an older Māori woman, claiming, “Balls were wasted on you,” while another time Flora is playing a sexually suggestive game with other native kids, but is scolded by Stewart and instructed never to do that again, as natives are considered ignorant and amoral, where the film does play into perceived dualities, whites and natives, educated and ignorant, civilized and savage, sexually restrained and sexually promiscuous, moral and amoral. While the blue-green look of the film is beautifully captured by the cinematography of Stuart Dryburgh, who also filmed An Angel at My Table (1990), eschewing artificial light, it accentuates a mythical wildness of the land, cultivating a stereotypical view of treating natives as natural exotics, much like Tarzan of the jungle, or King Kong (1933), where the colonial environment, typically seen in the heat, is also depicted through the scents of spices and exotic flowers, strange animals, and spectacular landscapes, all of which appeal to the senses, like a forbidden fruit. It is not by accident that this is the backdrop to Campion’s film, where the male dominated universe is turned on its axis.

One of the more notorious scenes is a view of the piano, finally situated inside Baines otherwise spare home, where he strips naked, with his backside present, as he touches it gently with his hands and fingers, like an exotic object, waiting for the genie to come out of the bottle and for the magic to appear. Clearly this would not happen in a male directed movie, but it’s an interesting symbol of what the piano represents. When Ada and Flora arrive for Baines first lesson, she intends to shrug him off, claiming the piano is out of tune, but is dumfounded to discover it’s been perfectly tuned, immediately sitting down and playing rapturously, where the piano is the key to unlocking her heart, opening a floodgate of pure emotions, something Baines finds hard to resist, content to listen to her play, as there’s nothing like it in his environment. Baines decides to up the ante, where he’s willing to return her rights of ownership to the piano, one key at a time, so long as she agrees to allow him to do things. Shocked, but also intrigued, her counter position is all the black keys, which are considerably less, to which he readily agrees. Under these conditions, Flora is kept outside, excluded from the privacy of the room, as little by little Baines bargains for more, being allowed to see and touch her arms, or the back of her neck, which are worth more keys, as there is a progression over time, not only to accumulate more keys, growing closer to ownership, but she also sheds more clothing, eventually lying naked beside him, which is worth five keys. The repressive European customs are represented by the tightly wound braiding of her hair, reflecting how bound and confined women are perceived, where Flora is a miniature version of her mother. When Ada unbuttons her dress, it literally releases the moral restrictions placed upon her, changing the rules of the game, at least for her. In short order, Baines chooses to return the piano to Ada with no more strings attached, a position that alarms Stewart, as he has no intention of returning the land, but Baines reassures him the deal is done, he’s simply giving it to her. Nonetheless, he holds his suspicions, as he’s still never consummated his marriage with Ada, who she views as a total stranger, retreating into the bedroom with Flora, where the two giggle and tickle each other, especially in his presence, no doubt a way to avoid contact with him, where he’s visibly annoyed at being so rudely shut out. Surprised that Baines never learned how to play, Flora offers her own bit of insight, “I know why Mr. Baines can’t play the piano. She never gives him a turn. She just plays whatever she pleases and sometimes she doesn’t play at all.” With the piano around, Ada never plays, but instead seems to be avoiding it altogether, instead heading back to Baines, acknowledging her affection, submitting herself to him, yet Stewart, suspecting something is up, walks by and can hear them making love, helplessly watching them through the cracks in the wall, where he can’t look away, pathetically fixed on the sight, seething with anger, yet also filled with self-loathing, incredulously hating the choice she made. Incensed and outraged to the core, he follows her the next day when she attempts to return and confronts her in the forest, attempting to force himself on her despite her violent resistance, but he’s only thwarted by Flora’s presence, eventually boarding her up inside his home, not allowing her any avenue of escape.

Perhaps the only other film with a self-imposed muteness that comes to mind is Bergman’s PERSONA (1966), a much more challenging and experimental film that actually features a psychological tightrope between two female characters, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, where the faces and personalities merge as one. On the other hand, Stewart and Baines are contrasting images of loneliness and masculinity, with a tamed Stewart living under the thumb of his suffocatingly restrictive aunt, abiding by her Puritanical rules and principles, deathly afraid of sex, despite the inappropriateness of his behavior, all wearing tightly buttoned-up clothes, while the more uninhibited Baines reflects his affinity with the Māori people, wearing much more colorful clothing, flamboyantly consorting with natives, unafraid to be seen naked or crude, where he exudes a wilder side. Shockingly, despite his advanced education, only one of them knows how to listen, and it’s not Stewart, who otherwise has all the advantages. Ada feigns affection with her husband for the first time while locked in, caressing him, but not allowing him to reciprocate and touch her, which only frustrates him more as she inevitably pulls away. But a growing trust allows him to remove the barriers, where he’s become a laughing stock to others for actually locking themselves inside, as that’s such a clear indication that something’s amiss in that household. Despite promising she won’t see Baines, she wraps a gift for him, as she’s heard he’s moving, offering him a single piano key with a personalized inscription that reveals her feelings for him, sending Flora. But by now Flora knows better, reminding her mother she’s not supposed to see him, and delivers the package to Stewart instead, who fumes with anger, becoming so enraged that he hacks off one of Ada’s fingers on a tree stump with an axe, a gut-wrenchingly painful scene to watch, mirroring the vicious brutality expressed in Bluebeard, sending Flora to deliver her wrapped finger instead, bellowing that if he ever sees her again, he’ll chop off another finger, and then another. Stewart inverses the civilized role where his savage brutality becomes even more cruel and sadistic when he attempts to rape her while she is lying unconscious. In contrast, one of the most powerful images of the film happens when Flora doesn’t return home, but spends the night with Baines, seen sleeping peacefully next to his side the next morning in an image of familial grace, providing the fatherly affection that Stewart never embraced. The violence inherent in the silencing of women is exposed for what it really is, as the film is notable for the degree of insanity on display at its most violent acts, where Stewart clearly sees himself in the right, believing strength of action is the appropriate and principled thing to do, but instead his actions are pathetic, as he’s viewed as fearful and insecure when he is incapable of having total and complete control over Ada. Oppression is shown to be just as detrimental to his own state of mind, where others view him in mockery for such a repugnant display of his weakness. Ada clearly rejects this imposed oppression, despite the devastating consequences, where we are reminded that it was only after Baines returned her piano and relinquished his power over her that she reciprocates his love. Loosening her ties to the piano, and to her former self, she liberates herself from society’s rules and imagines a different outcome for herself, even as fate is compelling her to be part of yet another existing reality, one that plunges her to the bottom of the sea. The film is a stunning mood piece about a woman's quest to control her own identity or destiny, ultimately providing multiple endings, which even in the eyes of the director have shifted over time, suggesting there will always be diverse outcomes, where each destiny will ambiguously be left open.

Jonathan Rosenbaum from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Sweetie (1989) and An Angel at My Table (1990) taught us to expect startling as well as beautiful things from Jane Campion, and this assured and provocative third feature offers yet another lush parable about the perils and paradoxes of female self-expression.

Set during the 19^th century, this original story by Campion – which evokes at times some of the romantic intensity of Emily Brontë – focuses on a Scottish widow (Holly Hunter) who hasn’t spoken since her childhood, presumably by choice, and whose main form of self-expression is her piano playing. She arrives with her nine-year old daughter (Anna Paquin) in the New Zealand wilds to enter into an arranged marriage, which gets off to an unhappy start when her husband-to-be (Sam Neill) refuses to transport her piano. A local white man living with the Maori natives (Harvey Keitel) buys the piano from him and, fascinated and attracted to the mute woman, agrees to “sell” it back to her a key at a time in exchange for lessons – lessons that have ultimately traumatic consequences.

Setting out to be politically correct, erotic, and romantic at the same time, The Piano inevitably bites off more than it can possibly chew, but winds up stimulating passionate feelings nonetheless.

The Piano, directed by Jane Campion | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Nineteenth century Scotland: Ada (Hunter) hasn't spoken since she was six. She communicates with hand signs, and doesn't consider herself silent, thanks to the joy she takes in playing her piano. But when she arrives in New Zealand for an arranged marriage, her husband (Neill) insists the piano is too unwieldy to be carried from the beach. So, when Baines (Keitel), a neighbouring settler turned half-Maori, buys it, Ada agrees to give him piano lessons, unaware that he intends eventually to give her the instrument in return for small but illicit sexual favours. Campion's Gothic romance is notable for its performances and Michael Nyman's score. The writer/director offers something more starkly, strangely beautiful than most costume dramas, and the whole film puts a fresh spin on the traditional love story. The characters are stubborn and inward-looking, and it's the refusal to sentimentalise that makes this harsh tale of obsession so moving. Campion never underestimates the power physical obsession exerts over human souls, and, for once, a modern film treats erotic passion honestly.

NYFF31: Jane Campion's "The Piano" | Film Society of Lincoln Center Clint Holloway

With The Piano, her third appearance at the NYFF, New Zealand auteur Jane Campion was catapulted into the realm of widespread visibility. The film garnered a variety of international acclaim, including Academy Awards for its screenplay and its two stars, Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin (who respectively won Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress), as well as sharing the Palm d'Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival with Farewell My Concubine (which also played at the NYFF31 in 1993), in addition to Hunter winning the Best Actress award there. The Piano will be screening tonight at 6:30pm as part of our 50 Years of the New York Film Festival series, followed by a Skype Q&A with Campion herself!

With a career spanning seven feature films so far, Campion has established herself as one of contemporary cinema’s most unique voices, crafting films that are as impressionistic as they are harshly honest. She has tackled a diverse array of settings and subjects, from the comedic dysnfunction of two Australian sisters in Sweetie to a shy school teacher navigating the psychosexual urban jungle of New York City in In The Cut to the 19th century English romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne in Bright Star, all of which evocatively explore the lives of women on the cusp of emotional discovery.

This thematic concern is at the forefront of The Piano. Set during the 1800s, the film follows a mute Scottish woman named Ada who, on behalf of an arrangement made by her father, travels with her daughter Flora to New Zealand to marry an affluent landowner named Alistair (played by Sam Neill.) Her only means of pleasure seems to come from playing her piano, which Alistair trades for land with Baines (Harvey Keitel), an eccentric fellow landowner. Baines makes a deal with Ada to eventually give the piano back to her in return for sexual favors. Ada’s relationship with Baines grows from purely physical to emotional, igniting a chain of events that jeopardize her marriage to Alistair and her most prized possession.

moviediva, for the last word on classic films

Director Jane Campion's model for The Piano was Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. But, one reviewer thought if nonsense poet Edward Lear dreamed of sex, it would have looked like this. Campion aims at a neglected aspect of the Victorian age, its surrealism. What other age was so excessively polite? Bronte had a passionate hatred of polite society and all forms of restraint. The Piano explores the Gothic, that romantic Victorian sensibility that masks passion with fear, mystery and the exotic.

Campion's films center on strong-willed women. Her first feature, Sweetie, is the almost unwatchable story of a family ruled by a self-destructive sister. Angel at my Table is a biography of author Janet Frame, wrongly committed to a mental institution. After The Piano, she directed the adaption of Portrait of a Lady, starring Nicole Kidman. The Piano is about control, not sex... pure will, not flirtatiousness; Ada is no passive doll. She identifies her needs and goes about satisfying them. Holly Hunter plays her without vanity: no dialogue, no make-up and greasy hair.Hunter saw the script and had to have it. Campion had envisioned Ada as tall, as an extraordinary beauty, but Hunter had one enormous advantage: she can really play the piano.

Composer Michael Nyman hesitantly met with her to see how well she could play, and then, relieved, was able to go ahead and write whatever music he wanted to write, confident she could realize it. He felt it had to be "possible" mid-19th century music, written by an amateur composer who had lived in Scotland and then New Zealand in the mid 1850s. He used Scottish folk and popular songs as the basis for the music, something that she had in her head and in her fingers. He felt there had to be a kind of modesty to it, although Holly Hunter played Ada playing the piano with enormous dedication and intensity.

Holly Hunter won an Oscar for best actress and young Anna Paquin's complex portrayal of Flora won for Best Supporting Actress. Jane Campion won for Best Original Screenplay. The film also won the grand prize at Cannes, and Hunter for Best Actress. The photography is by Stuart Dryburgh. His dramatic points of view, and the cool grey sweep of landscape contrasting with the warmth of the interiors contributes to the unforgettable look of the film.

Ada's music is filled with repressed longing. It is a siren song: her husband is deaf, but a more elemental man answers...Heathcliff, or Caliban?

The Past Recapsuled - Film Comment Harlan Jacobson, July/August 1993

Of the good, Campion and Avati were the early standouts. From its first showing, The Piano looked the surest cinch for Golden Palm since Padre Padrone. Indeed, the shimmering primitivism and power to new-mint emotion echo the 1977 Taviani film; and like the Tavianis, the Australian director uses a geohistorical terra incognita—the remote New Zealand bush in the 19th century—as a way to explore the present through a sense-awakening encounter with the past.

Campion’s beat is feminism, but of a thrillingly nonconformist sort. In Sweetie and An Angel at My Table, she gave us disturbed/dysfunctional heroines, women on the verge of a spiritual breakdown. But for them, as for The Piano’s mute, unmarried other from Scotland, Holly Hunter, who’s pushed into an arranged marriage with Antipodean colonist Sam Neill, an alienated vision is also an objectifying, truth-finding one. Hunter’s 19th century Miss, thrown onto what seems another planet, is given a shock education in Nature (jungly vistas), in Sex (gone-native neighbor Harvey Keitel), and in the untouchable sanctity of Art. Her beloved piano is first left abandoned on the seashore, then seized by Keitel and used as an amorous bargaining chip (he sells it back, one key per sexual favor), and finally thrown from the departure boat at Hunter’s wish, the last redundant ballast keeping her old life afloat.

Just as galvanic as the heroine’s clash with alien reality is the audience’s. We cross not just sea but a century. Campion, deconstructing the modern world by reconstructing a bygone one, unsettles all our “eternal verities” about sex, love, female identity by showing they’re not eternal at all. Other times, other truths. (Therefore, guard each advance we make.) In the disrupting process, Campion’s movie releases all the feral stylistics hinted at in her feature début, Sweetie. Early shots set in Scotland, plus literary voiceover, may threaten Masterpiece Theatre. But once our heroine is carried ashore in New Zealand—a black-dressed body borne above a dozen legs like a surf-borne spider—the past becomes more than just a foreign country. It becomes a wilderness, a bestiary, an Unpeaceable Kingdom. The Campion camera invents its own calligraphy. Shots swoop or arc like birds. Shots tell us that the human mind is a gateway to grace or chaos, as in the bizarre moment when the camera tracks in towards the heroine’s spinsterly hairknot and then rises up and onward into the anarchic forest.

The movie finds preposterous aesthetic rhymes, and each one works. The ribs of Hunter’s hoop skirt—portcullis to sex with Keitel—make harmony with the arching forest twigs she later crawls through in dismay and terror. A dog licks Sam Neill’s hand, producing a transferred shudder of disgust, as he spies on Keitel using his profaner tongue on Hunter. And there’s even a special, ancestral rhyme for movie buffs. Which of them, when Neill thwacks down on his wife’s pianistic hand with a nasty instrument, doesn’t see the ghost of James Mason smashing Ann Todd’s digits in The Seventh Veil? Footnote for certifiable film buffs: When Neill left New Zealand for his first Western acting role, it was James Mason who encouraged and recommended him.

The Piano uses past and present in rhyme and counterpoint to create a fugue between the familiar and the far-off or farouche.

The Piano | MostlyFilm Philip Concannon

The first image we see in The Piano is a close-up of Holly Hunter’s fingers as she holds her eyes in front of her face, allowing sunlight to filter through them. We hear her Scottish-accented voice on the soundtrack, but she tells us that “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice,” and throughout the film these fingers will be her prime means of communication. Her character, Ada McGrath, has not spoken since she was six years old, having apparently taken it into her head to simply stop doing so. She speaks through sign language, translated by her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), or by writing short notes on the pad she keeps hanging around her neck, but when Ada wishes to truly express what she is feeling, she does so through music. “The strange thing is, I don’t think myself silent because of my piano,” her voiceover tells us, “I shall miss it on the journey.”

The journey that Ada and Flora are embarking upon will take them to New Zealand, where she is to meet her new husband Mr Stewart (Sam Neill) for the very first time. They disembark in rough seas only to find that Stewart has been delayed, but Ada opts to stay on this cold and windswept beach rather than travel inland, camping overnight with Flora, her luggage and – of course – her beloved piano. Two men are subsequently introduced to Ada, and the manner in which they both react to her prized possession tells us a great deal about them. Her rather stiff and conservative husband Stewart can’t understand Ada’s attachment to this cumbersome instrument, and he insists on leaving it on the beach while they carry the rest of her belongings, causing the first schism in their nascent relationship. The other man is Baines (Harvey Keitel), an acquaintance of Stewart’s now living with the Maori, who is instantly intrigued by Ada and who sees the piano as the key to unlocking this enigmatic woman.

The Piano was Jane Campion’s third feature film, but it marked an audacious leap forward from the already impressive Sweetie and An Angel at My Table. Drawing inspiration from 19^th century romantic literature and New Zealand’s history and culture, Campion fashioned one of those rare films in which every single element just falls into place. The casting brought together a group of actors at exactly the right moment in their respective careers; Michael Nyman (inexplicably not one of the film’s Oscar nominees) came up with an inspired score that became an integral part of the film’s structure; and Campion found locations that gave her film the scale of an epic while simultaneously serving the narrative symbolically.

For example, the marital home that Stewart takes Ada to is situated in the middle of a dark forest, plagued by incessant rain, and with every footstep the characters sink into the thick mud. It’s all shot in dismal grey tones by Stuart Dryburgh and the effect is suffocating, with Ada’s thoughts constantly drifting back to her piano, which still sits on the beach. When she finally persuades Baines to escort her back to the beach so she can play, the film immediately brightens. Against an expansive backdrop of calm seas and bathed in a golden light, Ada plays freely and beautifully with a blissful smile on her face; in fact, it’s the first time in the movie that we see her typically fierce and cautious mask melt away.

The effect that the piano has on Ada is not lost on Baines. He takes possession of it and begins negotiating with Ada – a sexual favour for each key until she has eventually earned it back. Their arrangement begins on a small scale, with Ada removing items of clothing while she plays and exposing her arms or shoulders, but one such seemingly insignificant accession to Baines requests sends a shockwave through the film. While she plays, Baines asks Ada to lift her skirt so he can admire her legs, and when he spots a small hole in her stocking he delicately runs a finger over this tiny glimpse of white. At the point of contact, Ada immediately lifts her head and her expression suggests surprise, curiosity, puzzlement and pleasure all at once. This erotic encounter – perhaps the first she has ever experienced – is the turning point in Ada’s story, the moment in which she begins to explore and take command of her own body and sexual desire, freeing herself from the restrictive role of docile wife that Stewart expects her to be and becoming a person of her own making.

Although The Piano builds inexorably to a dramatic act of violence, there are no villains in Campion’s story, just a group of complicated characters facing emotions and situations that they have no experience of and are ill-prepared for. The director is constantly attuned to the shifting power dynamic and the fluctuating emotional tenor of the film, so much of which is captured in small glances and gestures between the characters, and each of the characters can be prickly, stubborn and unlikeable at various points in the story while also being capable of eliciting our sympathy.

At the time of writing, Jane Campion is heading the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, and her presence is a constant reminder that the Palme d’Or she shared for The Piano in 1993 is the only one that has ever been awarded to a female director. The film went onto gross over $140 million worldwide and took home three of its eight Oscar nominations the following year, but looking back from where we are now it’s hard to imagine how this particular film managed such a feat. Can you imagine a sexually frank drama about female desire making such an impact with mainstream filmgoers today? Instead of opening the floodgates for female directors or encouraging viewers to embrace adult, artistically daring films about love and sex, Campion’s film looks increasingly with every passing year like a strange but precious anomaly. The Piano has always been a film that seemed to exist out of time, and in many ways it feels like we are still trying to catch up to it.

"Like a Mood that Passes Into You": Amphibious Subjectivity in The ... Katrina Mann from Michigan Feminist Studies, 2001

Inhuman Love: Jane Campion's The Piano Academic paper by Samir Dayal, 2002

Romanticizing Colonialism: Power and Pleasure in Jane Campion's ... Reshela DuPuis (pdf)

Jane Campion - Assets - Cambridge - Cambridge University Press Harriet Margolis (pdf)

Boston Review: Jane Campion's The Piano (film review) Alan A. Stone

Sexual Discourse | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, December 9, 1993, also seen here: Sexual Discourse [THE PIANO] | Jonathan Rosenbaum

Campion, The Piano, and the Feminine Perspective as Feminist ... Dr. Cathy Hannabach, May 1, 2013, also seen here: Queer & Feminist Film Studies, Spring 2013

The Piano - Australasian Cinema Rachel Gordon

Film Criticism: The Piano (1993) | Dmitriy D Garanov

Portrait of a Girl: Reflections on the Role of Flora in Jane Campion's ... Rachael Johnson from Bitch Flicks

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: THE PIANO (1993) Timothy Brayton

Jane Campion's 'The Piano': An Inquisitive Study of Eroticism ... Cinephilia and Beyond

Surrender to the Void: The Piano Stephen Flores

Jane Campion's The Piano: A sensitive touch to a fairly selfish theme ... David Walsh from The World Socialist Web Site

Urban Cinefile MAKING OF: THE PIANO (1993) Andrew L. Urban

Jane Campion's Masterpiece, 'The Piano', Makes its High Definition ... Jose Solís from Pop Matters

The Piano - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Film Reference A. Pillai

The Noodle: Some useful notes on 'The Piano' by Jane Campion Nina Moore

The Piano by Caoimhe Duignan on Prezi December 11, 2012

Jane Campion's The Piano Eleanor Hogan book review of Jane Campion’s The Piano, edited by Harriet Margolis, from Screening the Past, November 1, 2000

Jane Campion website article based on a Campion interview by Helen Barlow

On The Issues Magazine: Summer 1994: Is The Piano A Feminist Film ... Rebecca Shugrue and Carolyn Gage, Summer 1994

Is 'The Piano' a Feminist Manifesto or a Masochistic Love Story ... Allyson Morgan from Outtake, August 29, 2016

The Piano Review by Linda Lopez McAlister.pdf - SCHS Literature (pdf)

Piano, The | Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Film Dunce: The Piano - Spectrum Culture Jake Cole

Review for The Piano (1993) - IMDb Scott Renshaw

Review for The Piano (1993) - IMDb Dragan Antulov

Background | The Piano | Film | NZ On Screen Catherine Bisley, January 3, 2009

Film @ The Digital Fix - The Piano Gary Couzens

Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]

DVDTalk.com - Blu-Ray [Jamie S. Rich]

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

High-Def Digest [M. Enois Duarte]

20 Things You Never Knew About THE PIANO - Miramax

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1993 [Erik Beck]

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Eleni Antonaropoulou]

Women's Pictures - Jane Campion's The Piano - Blog - The Film ... Nathaniel Rogers from The Film Experience

20 Years After 'The Piano,' We've All Failed Holly Hunter - The Atlantic Joe Reid, November 12, 2013

Jane Campion 'The Piano' Screening: Excellent Gothic ... - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares

Edward Copeland on Film

Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]

Analysis on Jane Campion's — The Piano – Medium Mary Strause, February 22, 2016

The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) The Gaze of Alisdair Stewart ... film discussion forum

Movie House Commentary hold the applause, from Tuna

Essay by bell hooks, Sexism and Misogyny: Who Takes the Rap? Misogyny, Gangsta Rap and The Piano, from Race and Ethnicity, March 9, 1994

Piano, The Movie a film website

Images for The Piano

The Piano | FilmGrab stills from the film

How we made: Michael Nyman and Jane Campion on The Piano ... Anna Tims interview from The Guardian, July 30 2012

The Piano | Variety David Stratton

Jane Campion wanted a bleaker ending for The Piano | Film | The ... Ben Child from The Guardian, July 8, 2013

FILM / Piano Forte: A few years ago Jane Campion was an eternal ... Quentin Curtis from The Independent, October 16, 1993

The Piano Movie Review & Film Summary (1993) | Roger Ebert

The Piano Marjorie Baugartner from The Austin Chonicle

FILM VIEW - Jane Campion Stirs Romance With Mystery - NYTimes.com Vincent Canby

Jane Campion's Lunatic Women - NYTimes.com - The New York Times

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)

The Piano - Wikipedia

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Great Britain USA (142 mi) 1996 ‘Scope

In Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman), upon coming into a sizable inheritance from her uncle, Mr. Touchett (John Gielgud), finds herself surrounded by men seeking to possess her. But she is, as her aunt (ShelleyWinters) observes, "too fond of [her] own ways," willful and eager to test her limits. Serena Merle (an excellent performance by Barbara Hershey) moves Isabel profoundly by her piano-playing (Schubert), sadness and elegance. And even though the thrust of the narrative is to set up Isabel with Serena's weasely dilettante of a friend, Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich), the deeper, lasting connection is between the women (and hence, the deeper betrayal lies in this relationship as well). Ironically, the film's obvious indictments of a cruelly elitist culture based on costumes and possessions, and of Gilbert, the supremely abusive husband, are less significant than its investigation of the women's relationship. Their mutual understanding — more strained than tender — is based on silence and willful blindness: in the end, Isabel and Serena have very few choices, despite their energy and passion for life.

Henry James' masterpiece has long been deemed impossible to translate successfully into film; Jane Campion and screenwriter Laura Jones have, however, produced an adaptation as cinematically intelligent as it is faithful to the original. Beginning, adventurously but wisely, with Isabel Archer (Kidman) rejecting Lord Warburton's proposal of marriage, the film charts the changes in its young American heroine's fortunes when, after inheriting a fortune put her way by ailing English cousin Ralph Touchett (Donovan), she travels to Italy, where she's introduced by her mentor Madame Merle (Hershey) to widowed aesthete Gilbert Osmond (Malkovich). Though a friend advises her to wed a long-time admirer who's followed her from America, and Ralph would prefer her to remain true to her free-spirited ideals, Isabel is tempted by Osmond's courtship. Besides the uniformly fine performances, what makes the film so rewarding - and challenging - is its refusal to soften or sentimentalise James' study of New World innocence unprotected against Old World experience. With Stuart Dryburgh's stunning 'Scope camerawork, and a number of audaciously imaginative sequences (notably Isabel's erotic fantasy, and a Dali-esque, b/w 'silent' short to evoke her Grand Tour), this is as far from heritage flummery as you can get.

Mike D'Angelo

I'm treading dangerous ground here: in the circles in which I travel, admitting that you prefer the populist literary adaptations of Merchant/Ivory to an austere, moody, Artistic-with-a-capital-"A" film like Jane Campion's version of Henry James' novel The Portrait of a Lady is tantamount to treason, if not heresy. I'm willing, however, to risk the righteous indignation of cinéastes everywhere by confessing that I had to struggle to stay awake while watching Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman), James' misguided heroine, stumble into the loveless, degrading web spun by evil aesthete Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich). James Ivory and Ismael Merchant (who have filmed two James adaptations -- neither of which I've seen -- and are reportedly currently working on a third) would undoubtedly have simplified and trivialized the source material, but they would also have found and preserved its pulse, skillfully or no; Campion, on the other hand, opted to chloroform the book and mount it on celluloid, so that the only possible response is a detached, mournful, "My, how beautiful." Soporifically paced and virtually opaque, The Portrait of a Lady comes to life only when Campion attempts to throw off the literary shackles imposed by James' novel (her interest in which seems entirely sociopolitical, judging by how little attention she and screenwriter Laura Jones pay to the characters' interior lives), as in a nifty black-and-white experimental film that anachronistically chronicles her whirlwind tour of the Mediterranean, two decades before Edison and/or the Lumière brothers invented the medium. The rest of the film, unfortunately, is a colossal bore, consisting almost entirely of conversations in monotone (the acclaim and awards allotted to Martin Donovan and Barbara Hershey, both of whom are merely adequate, baffles me; Hershey, in particular, seems to be doing little more than an impressive Genevieve Bujold impression) between people about whom we know virtually nothing and about whom I consequently cared little. Yes, it's a more ambitious approach than one usually sees with regard to film adaptations of great novels, but I'll take any five minutes of Anthony Hopkins' "conventional" performance in The Remains of the Day over this entire tedious specimen. Memo to Ms. Campion and Ms. Jones (An Angel at My Table): Please leave the lit films to people who can't write. You can.

Great and evident artistry shapes this film version of the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady. Yet the end result perplexes as much as it fascinates. Jane Campion, the much-lauded director of The Piano, and screenwriter Laura Jones (An Angel at My Table) bring their modern sensibilities to bear on this story of James’ 1870s heroine Isabel Archer, a young, sharp-minded, American woman abroad who inherits unexpected wealth and uses it to live as she likes, traveling and rejecting numerous suitors until she falls into an unwise marriage that nearly becomes her ruination. From the opening credits, Campion signals her intention to recontextualize this classic novel for modern times and feminist analysis. The sound and images behind the credits are those of contemporary young women talking of their feelings about love and first kisses. The movie then opens in apparent mid-scene with Isabel (Kidman) rejecting her first suitor, even though he offers her a choice of castles to live in. Campion and Jones add a psychosexual fervor to the story and include several Freudian fantasy sequences as Isabel makes her way through the world as a single woman. Yet, the movie only seems interested in this phase of Isabel’s life as a preliminary background to her unhappy marriage. Her broadening travels are depicted simply (and frugally) as a picture-postcard diorama. The movie focuses primarily on Isabel’s attraction to and near-undoing by the manipulative esthete Gilbert Osmond (Malkovich). Prior to this, we see too little of the searing intelligence that has earned Isabel so many admirers and, likewise, we also see too little of the internal fire that lures Isabel to the viperous Osmond. In a movie marked by outstanding performances, Malkovich is the one weak link. We’ve seen him vamp through these coyly sinister roles a few too many times, and his Osmond comes off like a creature left over from Dangerous Liaisons. Kidman does what she can to bring the movie’s opaque Isabel to life (though I seriously doubt the role will win her the Oscar that, rightly, should have been hers last year for her delicious work in To Die For). As her sickly cousin and biggest admirer, Hal Hartley regular Martin Donovan makes a strong impression, as do John Gielgud (especially in a memorable death scene) and Barbara Hershey. No small contribution to the film’s overall impact is made by the wonderfully rich and atmospheric work of cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh (Lone Star, Once Were Warriors, The Piano). Toward the end of The Portrait of a Lady, sequences and events have a hurried feel that not only contrasts sharply with the steady tone that preceded it but also packs too much subtle information into too little space. However, for all its misfirings The Portrait of a Lady paints a fascinating picture.

Jane Campion's Shining: Portrait of a Director - Film Comment Kathleen Murphy, November/December 1996

Only a filmmaker who possesses the hubris to imagine that art and moral adventure matter could have composed The Portrait of a Lady in the densely telling hues and uncompromising forms Jane Campion has achieved. To start with, the novel’s author has always been rated as a “hard read,” even in the days when reading wasn’t rare. Henry James works every word, every phrase, every description or discourse, so that you must travel his narrative attuned to the minute changes in social/spiritual weather and the moral and psychological reverberations of every bit of small talk. For lack of attention to dangerous undergrowth, a life, or a soul, can be shattered in his “civilized” minefields.

Campion’s Paradise Lost largely manages to recast James’s exquisitely wrought prose, his interior epiphanies and apocalypses, into dialogue, images, and performances that explode in slowest, utterly devastating motion. Like James’s hard reads, this brilliant, difficult film demands close concentration and committed effort on the viewer’s part. The novel’s central metaphors (sun and shadow, house and garden, nature and artifice), resonating dialogue, and actors—aspiring or fallen angels—are authentically animated, without cinematic disguise or distortion, on Campion’s canvas.

Campion chronicles the journeys of women into terra incognita with passionate conviction, making their quests as emblematic of the human condition as any Adam’s. In this, she’s been on the same track as Henry James, who loved to plunge (and vicariously plunge with) his brave Daisy Millers and Isabel Archers into refining—or fatal—“European” experience. Also in the Jamesian tradition, Campion’s heroines may be armed with self-destructive or even killing innocence. In The Piano, Holly Hunter’s silent émigré makes a kind of self-sufficient identity/sexuality of her speaking art. She’s not unaware that her singleminded consecration to her instrument is a come-on, separating the men from the boys, crudely speaking. When she’s brought to earth by Harvey Keitel’s half-Caliban (and symbolically castrated by her jealous husband), she lets her art drown and gets reborn as happy wife and piano-teacher.

An Angel at My Table, Campion’s adaptation of the autobiographies of author Janet Frame, begins by looking down on a fat baby girl lying on her back in the grass. Then we see her toddler’s feet, unsteadily navigating a meadow. Finally we wait—with the camera—for a chubby little girl topped by an explosion of frizzy red hair walking down a long road straight toward us. When Janet Frame arrives, she takes one look into the camera—the world? the future?—and, terrified, runs back the way she came. By the film’s end, when the Australian writer finally makes her way home again, she has bitten deep, often painfully, into life, the imagination, even madness. Campion’s camera puts a period to her journey by rounding the curved side of a very small, snug trailer to look in at Frame at rest and in virtual motion: writing, wombed in warm, golden light.

The hypnotic prelude to Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady begins in darkness, murmurous with the dreaming voices of young girls: “…the best part of a kiss is the moment just before…we become addicted to being intertwined…finding the clearest mirror, the most loyal mirror…when I love, I know he will shine that back to me.” Her camera gazes down into a grove where a sorority of lovely Mirandas lies about in innocent abandon, their bodies curved like silver fish in a sea of grass. Then, in a series of shots in black and white alternating with color, Campion’s hieratic virgins undulate slowly or stand still, always gazing out at us with the provocative serenity of brave new souls. These vestals in modern dress point the way—the film’s title is literally inscribed on the flesh of a woman’s hand—into the film proper, he 19^th century pilgrim’s progress of Isabel Archer, New World Candide.

Campion makes us see—with really stunning support from Nicole Kidman—Isabel Archer as both eligible virgin and the bright, double-faced spirit of idealism that humankind perennially projects. Narcissus as much as Diana, she embarks on a quest for her “most loyal mirror”—for wisdom as much as love—through four very different men of the world. Campion shows her as distaff knight, courageously tracking enlightenment, imagining life into art; as chaste voyeur blind to complexity, willing to be deflowered only by dead men; and as an Eve whose free will is illusory, a temporary luxury provided not by god but money.

Archer’s odyssey ranges from heaven to hell on earth, from a garden rich with summer’s green-gold promise into blighting experience and back again, to a white and frozen homebase, hard ground to cultivate. But, in perhaps the cruelest sense, nothing happens in The Portrait of a Lady. A woman’s world simply ends, winding down to wasteland: dead zero. Not by accident, as Portrait’s innocent abroad launches into her world tour, she pockets an ominous “ticket,” a scarp of paper on which is written NIHILISM.

Our first portrait of Isabel closes in on her fiercely blue eyes brimming with tears as she turns down a proposal from wealthy Lord Warburton (Richard Grant): “When I’m touched, it’s for life,” the young man vows feelingly. (Touch and the prelude to touching, nearness, verbally and visually implode throughout Portrait, tagging the courage of passionate proximity and stone-cold possession.) This eminently desirable young woman is a guest at Gardencourt, the exquisitely appointed and landscaped English estate that houses her aunt (Shelley Winters, surprisingly good) and uncle (John Gielgud), the Touchetts. Seated among lush green leaves and molten sunlight, red-haired Isabel seems herself a bright flower, one that shrinks from plucking. The curving limb hat embraces Isabel, now so much like an Edenic benison, becomes, by Portrait’s wintry end, a black, no-exit barrier.

Campion’s precisely right to open on Isabel’s laser-blue gaze, for this Eve is all eyes—they’re the loci of her appetite, her avid curiosity: “I want to get a general impression of life…there’s a light that has to dawn,” she tells her uncle, her bright face shining out of a frameful of darkness. It does not yet occur to Isabel, in the ruthless purity of her innocence, that epiphanies may cast terrible shadows.

In these early scenes, Isabel’s heartshaped, flyaway red hair recalls Janet Frame’s unbound coiffure, electrified by a passionate, open imagination. Later, as a member of Gilbert Osmund’s (John Malkovich) coven—with his mistress Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey) and Pansy (Valentina Cervic), the exotic Venus-flytrap Osmund and Merle have crossbred—Isabel’s hair, styled in complete coils, darkens, signifying her new grasp of artifice and the occult. In the barely illuminated airlessness of her Roman home, Isabel is expected to move to a puppetmaster’s design or be still, a rich object d’art useful as investment, décor, or sexual lore.

Referring to a feature of one of Lord Warburton’s many homes, Isabel’s “I adore a moat” are the first words we hear from a Miranda so jealous of her virgin zone she refuses every hands-on surveyor. She flees Warburton, through an arch of greenery, across a vast verdant lawn where the family sips ritual tea. As she passes, her consumptive cousin Ralph Touchett (finely expressed by Martin Donovan) takes her in, following her progress with intense interest. A little dog drags at her flying skirts, and as she catches it, the frame slants slightly so that her shadow, holding up the animal, falls on the green.

Much of Isabel’s itinerary and fate are foreshadowed—literally—in this English Eden, where nature as lush topiary art frames the Touchett’s quietly cultivated way of life. Taking flight from potential largesse—emotional and financial—Isabel imagines herself to be perfectly free to choose where and if she will touch down. Campion closes in on Isabel’s skirts again and again in the film, as incremental refrain, measuring the decline of these beating “wings” from strong purposeful motion into aimless, futile flight.

The little dog that nips at the beautiful dreamer’s heels at Gardencourt is animal life, energy from below that demands attention. Less positively, the dog prefigures Gilbert Osmund, Isabel’s “small,” bestial husband-no-to-be—variously hairy faced, braying ass and snouting pig, who makes Merle “how like a wolf” (though in fact her name’s a poetic form of “blackbird”). Osmund later shockingly humiliates the Eve he’s bell-jarred by deliberately tripping her up as she flees him, keeping her down by stepping on her skirts.

Tilting to frame that momentary stain on Gardencourt’s lawn, Campion’s camera signs the beginning of Isabel’s slow descent into an “unfathomable abyss,” inked in the blackness of Madame Merle’s gloved hand spidering obscenely over Pansy’s stomach; the grounded shadow of a parasol; during Osmund’s subterranean “rape” of Isabel; the line of shade that, by her father’s decree, bars Pansy from a a sunlit garden. Campion will later look down on Roman park studded with trees moated by colorful flowerbeds. AS animated aristos stroll the circular paths, shades of Joseph Cotton and Teresa Wright attend Isabel as she insists she hasn’t “the shadow of a doubt” about the probity of the serpent on her arm.

Caspar Goodwood (Viggo Mortenson) the American admirer who has pursued Isabel to Europe, comes from good adamic stock; sunny open ground, he’s physically passionate and singleminded in his affections. Down from the Touchett estate to London, in the first stage of Isabel’s descent from garden to prison, a fleeing glimpse of a corset hanging suggestively on the back door of our adventurer’s little bed-sitting room sets the tone for Goodwood’s visit. Crowding her into a corner, her least talkative lover braces his arms on the walls that hem her, hardly able to resist touching her. “You don’t fit in,” she cries. She thinks she means in some large social scheme, but it’s the plaint of a virgin, afraid of the pain—and pleasure—of penetration.

Every time Goodwood touches her, at almost ritual intervals throughout Portrait, Isabel recoils as if afraid she’ll catch fire. She can’t take this man in through her eyes, her mind alone; he is too large, too lively for her. As he leaves her room, rebuffed once more, he momentarily holds her chin in his palm. Afterwards, she touches herself in the same way and goes under, as though set off by some posthypnotic suggestion. Her eyes soft and unfocused, she rubs her face against the fringed hanging of her four-poster like a cat in heat. Wojiech Kilar’s sensual music pulses as she trances out in carnal pleasure; Warburton, Touchett, and Goodwood snake about her body, caressing her until, suddenly startled, she shakes the men off and they decorporealize. It’s a scene out of Coppola’s Dracula (scored by Kilar), but even in fantasy, Isabel remains in control and intact.

In James, American Adams transplanted into the hothouse of Europe often grow into passive voyeurs; the refined, sexless inertia of a Ralph Touchett or Gilbert Osmond may signal an aesthetic or diabolical bent. The Gardencourt invalid who registered Isabel’s frantic retreat from Warburton soon plays beneficent angel by “making” his young cousin, that is, by arranging for her to be rich enough to follow the “requirement of her imagination.” Ralph Touchett looks forward, he tells her, to “the thrill of seeing what a young lady does who has refused” an English lord.

Ralph might be James, loosing his engaging young heroine into the world, eager to see where she will take him and his novel. Isabel and her ironically named cousin are Portrait’s truest soulmates, Platonic lovers happy to see and imagine, to apprehend and chew over life as if it were a complex masterpiece to be appreciated by earnest digestion. Their Rear Window symbiosis combines stillness and motion, invalid impotence and unfettered action. Pumping a friend of Isabel’s about his cousin’s treatment of Caspar Goodwood, Ralph inquires hungrily, “Was she cruel?” Campion cuts to a chilling shot of this consumer’s nail clicking on a glass that imprisons a buzzing hornet.

Campion divides her Portrait with a superbly visualized scene between Ralph and Isabel, one that conjures up Buñuel’s Tristana and Belle de Jour, along with Hitchock’s Vertigo. Isabel enters, distractedly, at the bottom of the frame. Inclining up frame-left is a wall of arched, molteny yellow stable doors. Two great ebon horses stand against the slant of golden wood. The effect is surreal, a Buñuelian dream-image hot with sensual simile. But this Belle is blind; she does not blaze until she’s inside the dark stables, her red hair thinly haloed by filtered sun, her face and body shaded blue by tinted windowlight. Isabel has just engaged to marry Gilbert Osmond; her vibrant warmth and color is already contracting toward the cool, hard, still “marble” he will make of her. (Stone and porcelain simulacra amark Isabel’s descent into museumed life: lovers sleeping side by side on sarcaphogi; the chubby marble hand of her dead child; Pansy’s Rosier, verboten suitor, diminished to a little doll hidden harmlessly at her breast.)

In the stables, Ralph Touchett grieves for the bright bird, now tethered by a sterile collector, he has ridden with such vicarious pleasure: “You were not to come down so easily, so soon. It hurts me as if I’d fallen myself.” Isabel’s been his Madeleine, an ideal he can cherish and pursue in his imagination; like Hitchock’s Scotty in Vertigo, Ralph doesn’t want to “touchett,” has no taste for a flawed woman of flesh and blood. A vampire of small but fastidious appetite, he has “made” he Eve for something finer than Psmond’s debasement. As Isabel pleads her case against his “false idea,” Ralph and the camera recede from her. She grows smaller in our eyes, as though her image has been released from his focus, to fall away into a void.

Their reunion comes in the penultimate moments of the film, in Portrait’s single scene of something like sexual consummation. The woman we’ve seen only in postures of sexual passivity or flight climbs into bed with the dying Ralph, frantically caressing and kissing a body already going cold. Their climax is his death, signaled by his hand falling uselessly away from her cheek. As he passes, he admonishes her to keep him in her heart—“I’ll be nearer than I’ve ever been.” (In a preceding, twinning scene, Osmond has come at Isabel as she beats her forehead against a door in despair, brutally pinning her with his body and firmly holder her valuable face from harm: “You are nearer to me and I am nearer to you than ever,” gloats her curator.) In death, Ralph Touchett’s spirit finally enters his beloved’s body in perfect Platonic possession.

From the moment at Gardencourt where Madame Merle sirens Isabel down to her with voluptuous Chopin, images of the young woman who puts such arrogant faith in her islanded identity begin to be doubled, distorted, and dissolved. In her Dantean journey, Isabel’s eyes are opened to her own self-delusions, and to the ugly, convoluted reality behind the “vivid images” she has made of Merle and Osmond.

At the start of Campion’s superb concatenation of horror movie, fairly tale, and re-fashioning of Eve’s mythic Fall, Isabel winds down the stairs of an ancient Roman villa to fetch up in a round subterranean chamber—half mausoleum, half-museum. Set an intervals in this strange room’s ceiling are grilled openings; weak light falls through air dense with old debris, so that barred rectangles punctuate Isabel’s path. Osmond materializes out of the shadows, twirling the parasol she’s left behind. It snaps with unpleasant papery sounds, like the rushing of bats, and he uses it like Mesmer’s hypnotic wheel. The two circle each other, like wary animals maneuvering for better ground, but Isabel’s eyes are locked on his. We’ve seen him work Madame Merle with the most expert hand—“Every now and then I’m touched,” he mocks his earlier conquest as he brutally disengages: Isabel hasn’t a prayer against his snaky intensity. Much later, even as he lashes her with hateful verbal contempt, Isabel leans helplessly in toward his mouth, her eyes “stupefied” with longing.¹

As Osmond declares the precise nature of his love—“I offer nothing”—Campion’s camera rushes toward the couple around a curve of wall, past a skull set in old stone. The motion takes your breath away: something like death has passed. The frame tilts to show the shadow of Isabel’s parasol at the lovers’ feet. Osmond seals their unholy bargain with a Judas kiss, swallowing her mouth with a prostitute’s practiced, perfectly timed sensuality—and slides away into the dark. No Miltonic Satan vital with glamour and active evil, Isabel’s ravisher is a lesser devil, a cold collector of fortunes. He has seduced her into a world of pimps and promoters, where manipulation of bodies and souls is his vulgar art.

“I’d give a good deal to be your age again…my dreams were so great…the best part is gone…and for nothing,” confides Madame Merle, the dark sister who has precede Isabel into Gilbert Osmond’s soul-killing embrace. Nothing, out of James by way of Campion, is arrived through the profoundest of passions, an awful violence practiced as perfectly deliberate, often quite public atrocity. In Portrait’s last act, Campion frames Gardencourt in longshot, its beautiful stonework and ivy bleakly rimed in ice, as old Aunt Touchett creaks her way across the snowy lawn, clutching her walker. “Is there really no hope?” Isabel pleads, referring to Ralph’s illness. With grating, indifferent finality, Shelly Winters’s voice speaks a wider epitaph: “None whatsoever. There has never been.”

I haven’t said enough about the character of Madame Merle, played magnificently by that peerless Magdalene, Barbara Hershey. As the dark lady of Portrait, she is a truly tragic figure, because she has far more self-awareness and a larger vision than Isabel may ever attain—she chooses sin with her eyes open. Two images from the film, two sides of Merle: In the first, she and Isabel walk along a series of pedestals displaying classically monumental human parts in marble—a huge hand here, a gigantic foot there. Merle sits down in front of an heroic male torso, its genitalia backing her in the frame—as she unmasks for Isabel, confessing her role as procuress and trying to cozen Osmond’s wife into pandering for Madame Merle’s own daughter.

Later, at the dim convent where Osmond has locked Pansy up for being insufficiently commercial, Campion’s camera passes Isabel’s face in closeup, left of frame, to focus in on Madame Merle, who holds a little doll wrapped in waxed paper. Her glib social spiel, about paying a call on the lonely Pansy, stutters to a halt with her nearly whispered “a little dismal”—apt epigraph for her life and her child. This mater dolorosa is backed by a crucified Christ, painted on the wall ehind her, but Isabel can’t see that. Even in the rain outside, when a bedraggled Merle tries to touch her with “I know you are very unhappy, but I more so,” our unforgiving fundamentalist slides her carriage window shut between them, effectively making nothing of the woman who is perhaps her clearest mirror.

At film’s end, Campion reprises the circling dance in Osmond’s underground chamber, this time with Isabel and Caspar Goodwood, on the very site—now a wintry wasteland—where, as a green girl, she refused Warburton. But as the passionate Goodwood holds his upraised hands to either side of her face—as though afraid to catch hold of her—Isabel literally pants with fear, rounding against his offer of earthly happiness like a trapped animal. “Why go through this ghastly form?” her good angel cries out, referring to her marriage. “To get away from you,” comes her terrible, perverse reply.

Fleeing Goodwood, Isabel follows her earlier route, but now Gardencourt’s grounds are cold and unpromising. The whole weight of Portrait has slanted slowly, inexorably from summer down through seasons of dismal rain into this wintry whiteout, scrawled with the meaningless calligraphy of dead branches. We watch her dark skirts flash over the snow, as though Ralph Touchett’s once high-flying soul knew what significant South she was heading—but her advancement is herky-jerky, slowed by step-printing. Through the manor’s windows, we can see a warm haven of golden candlelight, the color of home in the final shot of An Angel at My Table. In closeup, Isabel’s hand turns on the doorknob. Then, her back to shelter, bleak landscape before her, our bright angel simply runs down, freeze-framed like some lost Galatea. In Portrait’s brave, hard-won ending, Campion’s eve—neither home nor exiled, but pinned in some deadly zone between—gazes out at nothing.

By means of a radical stylistic trope, Campion makes us see that the nature of Isabel’s stupefaction is sexual, moral, and aesthetic. The primitively shot and imagined silent movie—“My Journey”—that follows hard upon Osmond’s seduction is equal, lurid parts Son of the Sheik and Hitchock’s Spellbound, with a little Caligari thrown in for good measure. Jerkily, it segues from the comic, speeded-up motion of Isabel and her friend Henrietta sliding from side to side on the deck of a rocking ship; to Isabel costumed and veiled in Bedouin garb courtesy of a studio wardrobe department, abroad in exotic locales more back-projected than real; through the plateful of Daliesque beans that open like mouth or vaginas to groan Osmond’s “I love you absolutely”; to a climatic plunge down into feverdream and final swoon in sheikland. Flashing on her own eyes and mouth, the bearded orifice of her demon lover and his hand splayed on her naked stomach (as she’s seen Merle’s brand Pansy’s front), Isabel finally falls, naked, into the whirling wheel of a slideshow hypnotist. Is this Osmondian projection the “light that has to dawn” so anticipated by Isabel in the greenhouse of her imagination?

The Lady in the Frame: Two Portraits by Henry James and Jane Campion David Kelly from Senses of Cinema

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis

eFilmCritic Reviews Charles Tatum

New York Magazine (David Denby)

Peter Reiher

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Steve Baker: Barfly Magazine

Film Scouts (Leslie Rigoulot)

ToxicUniverse.com (Laurie Edwards) a surprisingly fixated one-note review

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough, including an interview with: Jane Campion and Nicole Kidman

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)

HOLY SMOKE B 88

USA Australia (114 mi) 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | Women Directors Special: Soul Survivor Kate Pullinger from Sight and Sound, October 1999 (excerpt)

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but some of the most audacious, controversial and imaginative films to premiere this year were directed by women. In this issue's special focus we highlight three of the best: Jane Campion's Holy Smoke, Catherine Breillat's Romance and newcomer Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher. Here, Kate Pullinger applauds as Campion loosens her period-dress stays and returns to present-day Australia to cast Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel in a war of wits, offering a rich meditation on belief, desire and novel uses for livestock

Philadelphia City Paper review by Sam Adams

Far from her suburban Sydney home, backpacker Ruth Barron (Winslet) is so touched by an Indian guru that even mum turning up with tales of dad's imminent demise can't lure her back. Ironically, mum's own asthmatic reaction to Delhi leads to Ruth escorting her to Oz, where awaits wizard 'cult exiter' PJ Waters (Keitel), hired by the family to rid Ruth of her plans to become one of her mentor's wives. His three-step process takes place in a cabin in the desert, a suitably scorched, remote arena for a blazing battle of wills that takes them beyond conventional power struggles into a heady realm of love, hate, doubt and desire. With its switches in tone, from searing psycho-drama to broad, exuberant comedy, its sometimes purposeful, sometimes meandering narrative and its bright hues, the film initially seems an efficient if uneven entertainment. As it progresses, however, with Ruth and PJ moving into ever murkier territory, it becomes easier to discern a thematic thread: how we're all conditioned, and how we must interrogate traditional assumptions to discover our real selves. It's brave, adventurous, refreshingly frank - qualities also marking the performances, particularly those of the leads.

Departing from her usually airless, overdetermined style, Jane Campion takes Holy Smoke into looser, more organic territory, at least until its disastrous final third. Kate Winslet plays Ruth, a headstrong Australian woman who’s convinced she’s found spiritual enlightenment in an Indian religious sect, only to have her parents trick her into coming home to be deprogrammed by unctuous, oily American "cult exiter" PJ (Harvey Keitel). When Campion (who co-wrote the script with sister Anna, based on the latter’s novel) keeps the focus wide, including Ruth’s deliberately vulgar family (caricatured in typically bigfoot Australian style), Holy Smoke ably balances boisterous humor with a more serious understanding of why Ruth decamped in the first place. (Yvonne Lee is particularly good as an innocently blowsy woman obsessed with bedding Keitel’s sleazeball.) The shot of a sari-clad Ruth belting out Alanis Morissette’s "You Oughta Know" as her car races across the outback is priceless: both expressive and perfectly ironic. But once Keitel and Winslet are cooped up in the "halfway hut" and the deprogramming begins, the movie turns self-serious and implodes almost immediately, instantly reverting to the fumble-fisted symbolism Campion is so fond of indulging. Once Keitel’s in a dress and Winslet has "Be Kind" written on her forehead, the movie has nothing left to do but pummel you with lines that are alternately obvious and opaque, and any prospect of enlightenment has long since passed.

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young)

Set to the full-throated, anthemic bombast of Neil Diamond's "Holly, Holy" (the live version), the delirious opening minutes of Jane Campion's Holy Smoke echo the singer's combustible mix of spirituality and kitsch, viewing a young woman's enlightenment as a sort of exotic pop adventure. Campion makes it easy to see how Kate Winslet, wonderful as an impetuous yet headstrong teenager, could fall for the Fruitopian vision of "absolute love" offered by an Indian guru named Baba. But the moment the song ends and her asthmatic mother wheezes through the Delhi streets, the film's peculiar spell is broken, its story splitting into two irreconcilable halves: one a fierce psychosexual melodrama similar to Campion's The Piano, the other a typically grotesque Australian comedy. Buried under all the clutter is a pointed theme about how society works to eradicate any unconventional belief system, no matter how much spiritual bliss it has to offer. Once Winslet makes the transition from rebellious and melancholic to peaceful and meditative, her parents are so alarmed that they force her back to Sydney and hire American "cult exiter" Harvey Keitel to snap her out of it. Their three-day deprogramming sessions, in the cramped space of an outback hut, are by far the most compelling material in Holy Smoke, as each angles for psychological advantage. Though the result of their tête-à-tête is predictable, especially for those familiar with Campion's torrid feminism, Winslet and Keitel attack and recede with almost primal intensity. But their palpable chemistry is continually undercut by her cartoonish extended family, whose flying toupees and distended bodies are meant to represent sickly, unnatural suburban life. It's a cheap point, made more effectively in fellow Aussie Nicolas Roeg's 1971 Walkabout, which deftly balanced natural beauty against the pollutants of urban life. For all its attractions, Holy Smoke is a tonal mess, too incoherent to get back in sync with Diamond's majestically trashy epiphanies.

Holy Smoke is typical Jane Campion - as with The Piano and Portrait of a Lady, there are plenty of ideas here, many of them remarkably good, many remarkably bad. Stitched together to form a feature film, the results are maddeningly uneven, but always worth seeing. Perhaps the problem is length - it may be no coincidence that Campion's most satisfying work to date remains her 1984 short, Passionless Moments.

The best thing about Holy Smoke is probably Kate Winslet. She works wonders with the central role of Ruth, who undergoes a spiritual transformation during a trip to India. Her family back home in Australia fear the worst and trick her into returning, whereupon she is made to undergo 'deprogramming' from a hired American expert, Harvey Keitel.

For most of its length, Holy Smoke is original, witty, skilfully made and extremely well acted. In the final 20 minutes or so, however, things go careering out of control as the claustrophobic battle of wills between Winslet and Keitel heads into bizarre psychological territories which Campion doesn't seem to have fully thought through. Compared with what has gone before, the final scenes simply fail to convince, and the film feels in dire need of at least one rewrite. It doesn't know what it wants to be, and the scenes concentrating on Winslet's boorish Aussie family, though marvellously entertaining, seem to have been spliced in from another movie altogether.

Campion seems determined to go her own way - but the danger is that she doesn't appear willing to learn from her past mistakes. It's impossible to fault the acting (though Pam Grier has zero to do in a curiously minor role) and Campion stages many scenes with terrific visual verve, but Holy Smoke provides proof, once again, that a half-baked script is always an impossible hurdle to overcome.

The Nation (Stuart Klawans)

There's reason for joy among feminists this morning, at least in the top film market citties such as Philadelphia where I am visiting at the moment. What is it? A new Jane Campion film has just opened. It's called " Holy Smoke" and you'll want to put it on your "must see" list when it comes to a theater near you. It is vintage Jane Camption. She has been, among other things, skewering the middle class Australian family since she was a kid (see "A Girl's Own Story" made when she was fifteen). The family in this film who live in a vast look-alike housing development called, with dripping irony, San Souci (the name of Frederick the Great's glorious palace outside Berlin). They could be the nextdoor neighbors to the dysfunctional family Campion created in her earlier film "Sweetie." Next to her siblings, Ruth (Kate Winslet) seems the most sane and reasonable of the lot. She and her sisters go off on a trip to India where Ruth falls under the spell of a holy man, experiences enlightenment, joins the ashram and burns her return ticket home.

When her family finds out, they're worried sick and her mother goes to India armed with lies about her father dying and then freaks out, forcing Ruth to accompany her on a hospital plane back to Sydney. Once she's there, the deprogrammer they have brought from America at great expense, P J Waters (Harvey Keitel), takes over, promising to return her to her family at the end of three days minus her dedication to the cult that has, in their eyes, captured her.

What happens out in "the half way hut" in the shadow of Ayres Rock is unlike anything you've ever seen at the movies before. It's sort of the Main Event in the battle of the sexes, with P J using his physical power, his tried and true deprogramming techniques, and his macho arrogance as his tools and Ruth using her faith, her knowledge that she has had a transforming spiritual experience, and her sexuality as hers. While he's trying to break her, she is slowly turning up the heat on him and eventually he can't control his desire for her. From there on in, she has him where she wants him. In a scene that women who believe that they should be in control of their own sexuality will marvel at, Ruth teaches P J how to make love to her on her terms, not his. Then, in a sequence that's reminiscent of the way Marlene Dietrich cruelly taunted and humiliated Emil Jannings in "The Blue Angel," Ruth puts lipstick and a dress on P J, and has sex with him her way for a change. She's gleeful because she has won the battle of wills, at least she thinks she has.

There's more, including a brief appearance by Pam Grier as Carol, P J's girlfriend from America but that's enough plot, find out yourself how it ends. Beware of young (and not so young) male reviewers writing about this film. They really get upset by it and some totally lose their sense of proportion about it and react hysterically (and I use that word advisedly). It's really the ultimate example of McAlister's Law; in this case it's not just getting kicked in the groin that makes them uncomfortable, it's a woman in controlling the sexual agenda, "emasculating" and humiliating the man and it's a real turn off for a lot of men (see, for example, the comments page on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144715/usercomments). But women viewers will understand that the deprogramming is going both ways here and Ruth may actually be doing P J a big favor. The epilogue shows that he is a changed man because something happened to him that night. Call it enlightenment if you will.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Holy Smoke (1999) Stella Bruzzi from Sight and Sound, April 2000

Never a Native: Holy Smoke Sue Gillett from Senses of Cinema

village voice > film > Jane and Anna Campion Make a Religious-Cult ... Fear and Desires, by Amy Taubin from The Village Voice

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

Salon.com [Mary Elizabeth Williams]

Nitrate Online (Sean Axmaker)

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Kate Sullivan

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)

PopMatters F.L. Carr

eFilmCritic Jack Sommersby

World Socialist Web Site Jason Nichols and David Walsh

AboutFilm Alison Tweedie-Perry

Raging Bull [Dan McGowan]

Kamera.co.uk Richard James Havis

Chris Dashiell at CineScene (down the page)

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Rob Nelson

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Film Journal International (David Noh)

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz)

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

Filmtracks (Christian Clemmensen) soundtrack review

7:30 Report interview with the participants by Maxine Mckew December 13, 1999

Wholly Jane: Jane Campion on her new movie and other mysteries Judith Lewis interview from LA Weekly, January 18, 2000

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

IN THE CUT A 95

USA Australia Great Britain (120 mi) 2003

Sumptuously photographed by Dion Beebe, filmed 100 % in New York City, this film has an incredibly sensuous and seamy style to it. Sex and violence are beautifully brought together here in a steamy erotic thriller where Jane Campion integrates the urban underbelly of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) with the growing female paranoia from Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941). Since becoming the first and only woman to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Piano (1993), a lush study of repression, Campion has garnered a reputation for making ardently feminist films featuring a powerful and courageous woman as a central figure. But that doesn’t suggest her films are easy to digest, as evidenced by the virile review of the film by New York film critic Armond White Porn Theater and In the Cut | NYPress.com - New York's essential ..., “Feminism has garnered more favor in the mainstream media than has gay rights. This has nothing to do with correct thinking or sensitivity. As Jane Campion’s movies demonstrate, it is the result of privileged insensitivity,” calling the filmmaker a “con-artist” whose film is “the latest example of the way she uses sexual paranoia to appeal to the weak-minded sympathies of feminist critics and audiences.” Lest we remember White also called Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami a “backward third-world esthete.” Part of the resentment seems to derive from women freely adapting noir urban thrillers, territory that has previously been considered an exclusive male domain. Campion’s interest within the genre is redefining the women’s role, taking that same exploitive melodramatic female hysteria of women caught up in trouble, but exploring the fractured, internalized world from a different perspective. All she’s really doing is balancing the playing field, turning the story on edge using instead a female protagonist. The film is an adaptation of the 2003 novel by Susanna Moore, an erotic mystery thriller starring Meg Ryan, who made a career in the late 80’s and 90’s making homogenized mainstream American comedies. Campion originally worked for five years developing the film with Nicole Kidman (who remained a producer), but she got caught up in a messy and heavily publicized divorce with über megastar actor Tom Cruise.

Given that the film’s aesthetic is saturated in a dreamlike, impressionistic allure of color, the realistic aspect of the story may seem a bit improbable, where the now fortyish Meg Ryan is Frannie, a New York high school teacher and amateur linguist with an interest in the origins of slang, who continuously allows herself to be put in harm's way, almost as if she was hypnotized. However, this adds sensuality to the developing suspense, where every male in her mind becomes increasingly suspect as she nearly sleepwalks through this role, such is the dreamlike quality of her performance, while her sister Pauline, stunningly played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, gives one of her best performances as well. Both are world weary, affectionately close, neither passing judgment on the others life. The love between the two is overwhelming, as is their incredible need for love and intimacy. It's that feeling, the need to be needed, that dominates this film, as the two sisters appear to be sadly out of kilter with the world around them, as if it has somehow passed them by and they are settling for the leftovers. Opening strangely with the oddly hypnotic Que Sera Sera -- Pink Martini - YouTube (3:01) as petals fall over the Manhattan skyline, we’re already somehow part of a young girl’s fantasy, where the film revolves around Frannie’s sexual awakening, seen early on witnessing a cop getting a blowjob in the darkened back regions of a seedy bar, where the girl seen ends up murdered, where a piece of her “disarticulated” corpse is discovered near Frannie’s apartment. Frannie is portrayed as a vaguely dissatisfied woman, divorced with few friends, where she’s drawn into the misogynistic, macho world of the police detective investigating the murder, Mark Ruffalo as Detective Malloy, where it makes no sense why Frannie would be attracted to this type of vulgar-mouthed police detective, but attracted she is, and who says desire has to make sense? Her sister Pauline evidently wrote the book on the subject, encouraging her to finally connect with someone.

Some of the more genuinely affecting scenes in the film come between the detective and his partner, Detective Rodriguez (Nick Damici), where the combative language and police jargon perfectly captures the street oriented racism that is etched into their equally sexist dialogue, where both of these guys exhibit a crudeness exclusively associated with the behavior of hardened cops. Frannie grows both attracted and repulsed by Malloy’s boorish sexual aggressiveness, exploring the ambivalent feelings of female desire and passion, where her discovery of sexual pleasure is expressed with an emphasis almost exclusively on the woman’s enjoyment. But this is quickly tempered with her growing suspicions that Malloy may be the murderer, as he has the same distinctive tattoo on his wrist that she observed on the cop last seen with the murder victim, where now there are others killed in the exact same manner, meaning there is a vicious serial killer on the loose. Campion creates an intoxicatingly sensuous atmosphere steeped in sexual paranoia and violence, where every male figure suddenly becomes suspect, including her stalker-like, brain-fried former lover John, creepily played by uncredited Kevin Bacon, and a particularly interested black student Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), the source of much of her information on slang who also makes a play for her. These competing interests are contrasted against a highly developed internalized portrait of a women continually beaten down by the wretched horrors of the world outside, where Frannie has every reason to be petrified with fear, as the killer appears to be closing in. Using a rich and expressive visual language, including a highly personalized film within a film, the story unfolds from Frannie’s perspective, growing ever more blurry and indefinable around the edges of the frame, matching her deteriorating mental outlook. Meg Ryan succeeds brilliantly here in a more mature and multi-dimensional role, including full frontal nudity, breaking free from her stereotypical adorable parts that defined her career. Claustrophobic, dark and noirish atmospheric, this is an exquisitely constructed impressionistic mood piece that somehow offers its own peculiar elegy to the mournful souls currently trying to reconstruct their lives in a post 9/11 world weary New York City.

Laurie Anderson put it neatly: 'I hate my dreams,' she said. 'They're so infantile.' Campion's film is being sold as an erotic thriller, but the director evidently approached it as a fantasy. Ryan (no longer cute, and more interesting for it) is Frannie, an English teacher at NYU, caught up in a murder case when a 'disarticulated' corpse shows up on her doorstep. Frannie watched the girl giving head to a guy just the day before, a guy with an uncanny resemblance to homicide cop Molloy. Campion and Susanna Moore have sliced and diced the latter's novel, chopping and doubling characters with schizoid abandon. Every male is suspect. As for Molloy, Ruffalo gives him colour and shading; it's not the actor's fault if the character makes no sense. There's a much better film going on at the same time. Frannie's frank, funny relationship with her half-sister Pauline (Leigh) is credible and touching; so too, for that matter, is the fearful desire that pulses through Fran's erotic relationship with Molloy. The film's strong on its blurry, jittery New York rhythms, and the rich, febrile atmospherics are laced with poetry and secret talismans. There's texture and subtext to spare, but when it comes to text, Campion's disinterest in genre is palpable.

Richard Porton from Cinema Scope, posted 09-13-2003 (link lost):

Jane Campion’s early shorts and features, notably Sweetie (1989) and An Angel at my Table (1990), were distinguished by a remarkable visual and narrative dexterity. Although her subsequent films have often seemed strained and schematic in comparison (her breakout hit, 1993’s The Piano is the most egregious example), they all combine a fiercely personal style with an undogmatic feminist sensibility. Some of Campion’s champions are inordinately dogmatic, however, and it is both amusing and disconcerting to observe how her work is frequently celebrated with a blend of misplaced reverence and academic cant. In his BFI monograph on Campion, Dana Polan recounts a conversation with a professor friend who “declared virulently that it was impossible and even malicious to imagine Jane Campion making a film” of Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut. Polan’s academic confidante views Moore’s heroine as something less than an exemplary independent woman, a curious objection given that Campion’s own female protagonists, who often fuse strength and vulnerability, are much too complex to be reduced to that stale cliché, “the strong woman.”

Unfortunately, Campion’s adaptation of In the Cut proves distressingly tame and, in the final analysis, is probably innocuous enough to please Polan’s censorious friend. (Since this “erotic thriller” opens with “Que Sera Sera” on the soundtrack, it becomes clear early on that subtlety will be in short supply.) Although the film version (co-written by Moore and Campion) almost slavishly reproduces the novel’s account of a hesitant sexual adventurer, other filmmakers – Catherine Breillat comes immediately to mind – have explored this terrain with less prevarication.

A whodunit with literary pretensions, the film revolves around the sexual awakening of Franny (Meg Ryan), a demure English professor. Once our heroine wanders into a New York City bar with a student and unwittingly observes a woman performing oral sex on a man she later encounters under much different circumstances, her life changes irrevocably. The man in question turns out to be Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), a macho New York police investigator who Franny finds simultaneously attractive and repellent. A string of plot contrivances lead to one overriding, yawn-inducing paradox: Franny’s sexual epiphany is inextricably tied to her affair with a man who may be either her redeemer or her potential murderer. Despite the au courant subject matter, Moore and Campion’s resolution of the mystery (suffice to say that Malloy is cleared of all culpability) is almost affirmative enough to fit into the middle-class, faux-feminist agenda of the Lifetime Channel.

Working for the first time in what might be termed genre territory, Campion does her best to imbue In the Cut with a noirish ambiance. She opts for an intriguingly brackish colour scheme, perilously low light levels, and jagged camera movements. In the end, these flourishes (the film benefits enormously from the contributions of the talented cinematographer Dion Beebe) are all more or less perfunctory – as are Campion’s attempts to give the thin material some psychological ballast by inserting flashbacks in which Franny’s emotional paralysis is traced to her mother’s decision to marry an unfaithful man. The locations are disappointingly lackluster as well, although New Yorkers might notice one odd bit of local colour – Franny’s sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), lives above an actual strip club, the Baby Doll Lounge.

Many will assume that the film’s doom was sealed with the casting of Meg Ryan in the part of Franny, a role originally designed for Nicole Kidman. But Ryan gamely assumes the glum demeanor required of her, and it would be unfair to blame her for the film’s anemia. Leigh plays her sister, an entirely superfluous role, as an almost Eve Arden-ish sidekick. Since she portrays this underdeveloped character with such panache, it seems preternaturally cruel to kill her off as the plot reaches its creaky crescendo.

In addition, the film’s by-the-numbers sex scenes are sadly lacking in brio. I couldn’t help but think of Vladimir Nabokov’s withering comments on the wan sexual escapades in Tony Richardson’s adaptation of his Laughter in the Dark (1969): “the blotchy male shoulder, the false howls of bliss, the four or five mingled feet…all of it primitive, commonplace, conventional.” Even the admittedly risible sexual hijinks between Harvey Keitel and Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke (1999) possessed more erotic spark than Ryan and Ruffalo’s passionless writhings.

When a film by a director of unquestionable talent misfires, it seems presumptuous, but unavoidable, to speculate on her intentions. Instead of the cheekily subversive project Campion presumably had in mind, she ended up making a retooled version of a cautionary tale – an odd mixture of a Nancy Drew mystery and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977).

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

The word around the block on Jane Campion's latest, In the Cut, has been dire. Even before its derisive premiere in Toronto, the buzz was centered squarely on star Meg Ryan's much-ballyhooed switcheroo from winsome America's Sweetheart to freaky-deaky troubled chick, going full frontal and miming ecstasy from a cunningulus session.

It's not surprising to see that the shrillest of negative reviews (calling the movie "tawdry," "an ugly mess," "dirty" and, oh the irony, "sexist") have been by male critics. Their tangible resentment derives undoubtedly from the fact that a woman director is taking a male genre (the urban thriller) and using it to explore a female character's psyche, without toning down the genre's "maleness" (its grim violence, its sense of paranoia). Campion's movie has, thus, been taken as a personal affront by a good deal of (male) critics, who use it as excuse to wonder whether she, a highly respected filmmaker (The Piano), isn't respected among the tastemakers just because... well, because she's a woman. Armond White, the NY Press' bellicosely "passionate" critic, epitomizes this foolishness by calling the film "the latest example of the way she uses sexual paranoia to appeal to the weak-minded sympathies of feminist critics and audiences." (The review, calling the director a "con-artist," comes all-too-obviously from the same sensibility that branded the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami a "backward third-world esthete.")

What is Campion's sin? Basically, to refuse to be defined exclusively in terms of gentility and passivity, terms that our society wants viewers to adopt as signifiers of "femininity." The opening credits -- petals gently falling in the Manhattan skyline as "Que Sera, Sera" plays discordantly -- use clichés of femininity to contrast vividly with the reality of a world where their romanticism has become absurdly debased. Frannie (Ryan) is a glum teacher who divides her time between writing a book on urban slang, snatching bits of poetry off subway placards, and visiting her strung-out half-sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh). When a cop named Malloy (Mark Ruffalo, all insinuating menace and That '70s Porn mustache) enters the picture to investigate the gruesome killings of young women around her area, Frannie finds herself falling into an affair with him. However, her attraction is fused with the fear that he may be the murderer himself.

The plot sounds like your slick, garden-variety serial killer thriller, and that's how the movie is being sold in the trailers. Seen from that angle, In the Cut cannot help but be a failure -- Campion has very little affinity for the streamlined clarity necessary for a Hollywood whodunit, and in that area the film comes off as rhythmless and redundant. Yet I doubt that a better-made version of the same plot (the term "better" here meant to mean "efficiently," in the anonymous and impersonal contemporary Hollywood manner) would have necessarily resulted in a better film. The richness of the movie is tied to its messiness, itself an essential part of Campion's thematic dynamics.

Campion has been a singularly restless talent, blessedly hard to pin down. Crudity and delicacy leak continuously into each other, lush Victorian romances and tragedies (The Piano, Portrait of a Lady) mixed with raucously disrespectful comedies (Sweetie, Holy Smoke!). Her films follow female misfits, or, more precisely, women who are labeled misfits by strict patriarchal societies for their "aberrant" behavior -- consequently, they are waist-deep in "madness," the obvious male explanation of their rebelliousness. Frannie in In the Cut isn't mad, but she is likewise against being frozen into established roles (always bearing down on her, like the huge flower arrangement marked "Mom" early in the subway). Her discovery of sexual pleasure with Malloy (and this is one of the only American movies I can think of where the emphasis in the sex scenes is exclusively on the woman's enjoyment) is tempered with anxiety over the violence that seems to be always intertwined with sex in the urban jungle of Manhattan -- here made as ominously mysterious and narcotizing as the dark jungles of Campion's native New Zealand.

The linking of sex and violence has been seen by some as reactionary, as if the director were saying one leads to the other. Far from it -- sex in Campion's films is almost always seen as liberating and expansive, an extension of natural expression for her heroines. What the picture attacks is not sex but its degradation (strip clubs, dark alley blowjobs) in the dank, urban environment. Its movement is less toward the uncovering of the real killer than toward the timid heroine's taking control of her sexuality, from masturbating to enjoying oral sex to actively, aggressively initiating intercourse. This is an unblushing, even invasively provocative look at a sexual odyssey, which critics are trying to palm off as a failed woman-in-peril shocker. In Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Quentin Tarantino radically challenges the conventions of a masculine cinema by empowering his heroine without sacrificing her femininity; in In the Cut, working with a similarly male genre, Campion navigates her heroine through the waters of female-victim ideology. Both are open to a feminist reading, as well as to misunderstanding by lazy, jaded viewers.

Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]

Jane Campion's astonishingly beautiful new film, "In the Cut," may be the most maddening and imperfect great movie of the year. Certainly it's the most difficult to cozy up to with its unnerving fusion of hot sex, icy sentiment and warm-running blood. The movie is being pitched as an erotic thriller, but despite a suspense subplot and the frisson that comes with watching professional cupcake Meg Ryan do the nasty, it plays far closer to an adults-only fairy tale — albeit one in which the happily-ever looks a lot like "Taxi Driver."

Think of it as the ultimate grim fairy tale: the story of a woman who, while wandering the streets of New York and the tangled wilds of her imagination meets not one but several big bad wolves. Hovering around age 40, Frannie (Ryan), a writing teacher and amateur linguist, lives alone in an apartment ornamented with words fixed to the walls. She's doing a study of contemporary slang and sometimes taps one of her students, Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), for the latest in street patois. She evinces a particular interest in sexual and violent colloquialisms, and indeed the film's title, which is taken from Susanna Moore's controversial 1995 novel, turns out to be an especially vulgar descriptor for intercourse.

Cornelius is one wolf on the prowl; a homicide detective named Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) is another. Malloy comes knocking on Frannie's door after an amputated female hand turns up in the teacher's back yard. A serial killer seems to be running amok in the city, chopping women into mincemeat. Neither surprised nor visibly disturbed by this grisly news (you'd think body parts littered her front door), Frannie agrees to meet Malloy for drinks. But put off by his boorish, epithet-spewing partner, Rodriguez (Nick Damici), she flees the date and runs straight into the arms of a would-be mugger. Eluding her attacker gives her an excuse to contact Malloy, ostensibly for some protective pointers. The detective plays along with this fantasy by roughly putting an arm around Frannie's neck and whispering dirty nothings in her ear.

Has Little Red Riding Hood jumped in bed with the wolf? That question drives "In the Cut," giving it a hum of nervous tension, but like all of Campion's features this is a movie that earns its thrills from two people circling each other and casual camera movements that catch moments of startling beauty. The film is filled with surreal, hothouse flourishes that tell the story as vividly and often more eloquently than either the plot mechanics or dialogue. In one scene, Frannie distractedly watches two women playing pool, one in a red dress, the other in green, a visual warning that she doesn't pick up on. Later, after telling the macabre story of her mother and father's courtship, she stands next to a blood-red wreath of flowers adorned with a banner reading "Mom."

At once dreamy and watchful, Frannie has the wounded mien of someone who's endured too many breakups. There's something disappointed about her but something angry, too. When Frannie and her sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), lounge around listening to love songs, the explicitness of their desire comes as a shock because it's so nakedly hurting. "What you need is a baby," Pauline coos, "and a man," echoing the words that reverberate through many women's heads whether they want them to or not. What Frannie really needs is something else, but when she first meets Malloy she looks at him as if he's stinking up the room. For his part, Ruffalo lets us know the cop doesn't care. "Tell me what you want me to be," Malloy tells Frannie, tracing tattoos of longing on her body.

Steeped in sexual paranoia and violence, Moore's novel is a chilly, self-conscious exercise in genre. It's a cheap shot of a book, but Campion has always enjoyed exploring the darker side of sex and power, so it's easy to see what attracted her to Frannie's strange adventure. The director handles the cop stuff effortlessly, nailing the hard precinct vibe and combative banter between Malloy and his partner, but she never satisfyingly integrates the story's thriller elements with the florid drama inside Frannie's noggin. The film mainly unfolds from Frannie's perspective and the images are often blurred around the edges to show just how little of the world she sees. But unlike the wife in Hitchcock's "Suspicion," the classic paranoid-woman movie, Frannie is also right to be scared.

Campion's visual language is richer, more expressive than Moore's prose, and in adapting the book she's appreciably warmed up the novel's characters, in particular Pauline, who looks as lush as overripe fruit and just as easy to bruise. Malloy gives off waves of heat, while Frannie's former lover, wittily played by Kevin Bacon, provides some humorous relief. But because Campion, unlike Moore's book, is fundamentally hopeful about men and women, there's something cockeyed about how the film ties up its loose genre threads. It's nice to see Ryan play a role without the usual ingratiation (there's always been a sour grimace lurking beneath that smile), but despite her best efforts it's difficult to accept where Frannie lands. Most of the film's last 30 minutes veer between the baffling and numbing, but just when you're ready to throw in the towel, Campion delivers a final grace note.

Although Campion isn't as strongly committed to surrealism as David Lynch, the final image of a slowly closing door in this film affirms that she's never been entirely in the grip of realism. A fever dream and a pitch-dark romance, "In the Cut" takes place as much in the realm of myth as on the downtown streets of New York; in each, women are either the heroines of their own stories or its victims. If nothing else, the film takes it on faith that the old storybook routines no longer apply, which helps explain why "Taxi Driver" — with its frenzied masculine violence and febrile vision of the city as a landscape of fear and desire — hangs over this movie so heavily. Once upon a time, Travis Bickle saved the girl, but then she grew up. Who saves her now?

BFI | Sight & Sound | Sex And Self-danger Graham Fuller from Sight and Sound, November 2003

Engaging Medusa: Competing Myths and Fairytales in In the Cut Sue Gillett from Senses of Cinema

If One Person is Strong, Must the Other Be Weak? Daniel Garrett from Offscreen, December 31, 2003

Sex and Violence as Phantasm: Eros and Thanatos in Campion's In the Cut Catherine Benoit from Offscreen, April 30, 2006

Making the Cut: Joy Press from the Village Voice

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

Jane Campion's IN THE CUT: Shadows from the Lighthouse M. Tamminga from A Journal of Film

Porn Theater and In the Cut | NYPress.com - New York's essential ... Armond White from NY Press

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis

ToxicUniverse.com (Tony Pellum)

In the Cut Leslie Felperin from Sight and Sound

d+kaz . intelligent movie reviews [Daniel Kasman]

In The Cut – Campion’s under-rated exploration of sexuality Zettel Film Reviews

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt)

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

"In the Cut" - Salon Stephanie Zacharek

About.com Rebecca Murray

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Kamera.co.uk John Atkinson

Nitrate Online (KJ Doughton)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp

Peter Sobczynski

Daniel Fienberg -- Epinions

Film Monthly (Hank Yuloff)

DVD Verdict - Uncut Director's Edition Elizabeth Skipper

Film Journal International (Maria Garcia)

Reel.com [Sarah Chauncey]

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

channel4.com/film [Jamie Russell]

CineScene.com (Les Phillips)

Movie Vault [Brian Andrews]

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday)

Sunday Online, Australia (Peter Thompson) including brief comments from Campion and the two leads

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

The New York Times (A.O. Scott)

Bookslut | In the Cut by Susanna Moore Gena Anderson book review from Bookslut

THE WATER DIARY

Australia (17 mi) (2006)

User reviews from imdb Author: Mozjoukine (Mozjoukine@yahoo.com.au) from Australia

Involving enough short film made as part of a UN Millennium Development Goals project about water and global warming.

In the Australian outback there is a protracted drought. Two young girls find themselves sharing bath water. The horses ("The only two things that I loved" Englert declares) have to go.

The area's alpha female plans playing violin at dusk when the brother says the skies are most likely to respond with rain from the clouds he studies. The kids have to bring and drink jars of water which contain at least one tear drop - no problem.

Not hard to see Campion in this female world, mixing mysticism with an Australian setting.

Get shorty | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks, May 25, 2006

It's usually first-time directors who make a splash at Cannes with their short films. But now, more established names are getting in on the act. Jane Campion tells Xan Brooks why small is beautiful

Cannes is the world of the brief encounter. For 10 days the place runs to a staccato rhythm of snatched conversations, bullet-point pitches, round-table junkets and business lunches. Away from the glare of the Palme d'Or competition, it has increasingly become the world of the brief film, too.

The short has always had its place at the Cannes film festival, with a number of programmes playing both in and out of competition. They provide a crucial platform for novice directors, the chance to show the industry what they are made of and - fingers crossed - drum up the funds for that all-important first feature.

But this year the balance has shifted, with these comparative ghettos of the schedule surprisingly gate-crashed by the rich and famous. The likes of Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries), Alexander Payne (Sideways), Alfonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and Gaspar Noe (Irréversible) would not look out of place in the main competition line-up. Jane Campion, Gus Van Sant and the Coen brothers are former Palme d'Or winners. All of them have short films in this year's event.

Campion's piece, The Water Diary, is a lyrical, child's-eye view of an Australian township paralysed by drought. It is the director's contribution to 8, a series of movies strung around a weighty brief: the United Nation's development project on millennium goals. "I told them I would do it if I was given complete control," she explains. "I could just imagine what hell it would be if everyone started getting involved and gave me suggestions. This was a good way for us all to be freed. It's my fault if I get it wrong. Blame the film-maker." The Water Diary took just six days to shoot. It was, she says, "a little holiday".

Campion admits that short films are often seen as the poor relations of cinema. "But they are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem. The great thing is that almost everyone ends up doing something creative with them, even those directors who then go on to make quite boring features."

You could say that The Water Diary has carried her full-circle. Campion first came to Cannes back in 1986 when her short piece, Peel, won a major prize at the festival. "I was so naïve back then," she says. "When they said they were putting my work in the programme I said, 'Oh, that's nice'. They said, 'Well, obviously you have to come' and I said, 'Oh no, I don't have that scheduled in my diary and I don't really enjoy that sort of thing anyway'. Fortunately they managed to convince me otherwise." Campion, of course, went on to further glory at Cannes when The Piano won the Palme d'Or at the 1993 festival.

This year she is keeping a lower profile, sheltering in the shade of a bar on the beach. She arrived with her daughter on the train from Rome, and has no particular thing that she needs to do. "It's nice coming here with a short film as opposed to a feature," she says. "It's a very relaxing way to see Cannes." Tonight she is planning catch a showing of Marie Antoinette. One senses that she is here as a tourist first and a film-maker second.

Described as "un film collectif", 8 points to a possible way forward for the short film. Evidence suggests that these bite-sized canapés traditionally struggle to connect with an audience accustomed to the banquet of the bona-fide feature. By grouping their work under a single thematic umbrella, the maker of short films is able to bypass such prejudices.

Playing further up the Croisette, Destricted boasts a rather different brief - a series of "responses to the theme of pornography by seven different artists". So far the tactic seems to be working. The queues go round the block while the mood in the cinema is festive, bordering on the bawdy. The tyro French director Gaspar Noe bounds up and down the aisle to greet the new arrivals. Larry Clark (of Kids and Bully fame) slopes to his seat with a furtive, watchful air. We learn that British artist Sam Taylor-Wood, who was also intending to be here to discuss her contribution, had to cancel because she's pregnant - that pesky consequence of actually having sex as opposed to filming it.

Destricted, inevitably, is a bit of a mixed bag. While some of the segments are genuine "responses to pornography", others are just pornography. Clark's film, Impaled, turns out to be one of the better efforts. The director interviews a gaggle of wannabe male porn stars, makes them strip for the camera and then abruptly introduces the winner to the woman he is supposed to have sex with. Elsewhere, Noe's film is a stroboscopic montage of brutish masturbation fantasies. Anyone who has caught his features (Irréversible, I Stand Alone) will know what to expect.

Like Campion, Noe won a short film prize at Cannes at the start of his career. Like her, he is drawn to the form for the freedom it provides. "With a short you are allowed to do whatever you want," he tells me afterwards. "It's like if you have a girlfriend and she tells you that you can do whatever you want. That's very exciting." He appears to be still stuck in steamy, Destricted mode.

The problem, explains Noe, is that the process of making a feature can be such a long and painful process. "It takes years out of your life. You get the green light and then it turns back to amber and you have to start all over again. Here you get the call and you have to come up with an idea and shoot it straight away. It feels so wonderfully fresh and liberating." For good measure, Noe also has a film about Aids, Sida, playing alongside Campion's in 8.

Finally we have Paris Je t'Aime, playing in the festival's Un Certain Regard section. It offers a sunnier, gentler example of the portmanteau movie: 18 five-minute love-letters to Paris, each one set in a different arrondissement. Its range of directors runs the gamut from Wes Craven to Gus Van Sant, Cuaron to the Coens.

At the Cannes press junket, the film-makers sit at a bank of round tables while the journalists bob between them like bees above a flowerbed. I speak to South African director Oliver Schmitz, who says that he found the format to be deceptively difficult, and that the act of boiling a life story down into one five-minute spell would be a challenge for anyone. Richard Lagravenese (who wrote The Fisher King and directed A Decade Under the Influence) suggests that we are entering a golden age for the short film, and that the internet provides the perfect platform for viewers who want entertainment in small doses.

Paris Je t'Aime is the brainchild of Marseilles-born Frederic Auburtin, who co-directs one segment alongside Gérard Depardieu. Apparently the original intention was to have 20 films in the collection. "Francis Coppola and Woody Allen were both very eager to get involved," Auburtin says. "They said yes straight away and stayed with the project for a long time. But in the end it didn't happen." Why was that? "They couldn't fit it in with their schedules," he says with a sigh. "They went off and made features instead." Amid all the generally positive talk, Auburtin strikes a rare downbeat note. For all its recent success, it seems that the short is not the new long after all - at least not quite yet.

Campion lured back to the lens - Film - Entertainment - smh.com.au Gary Maddox from The Sydney Morning Herald, October 20, 2005

Acclaimed filmmakers Jane Campion and Gaspar Noe focus on the ... United Nations Development Program, May 16, 2006

The Cannes Festival: Jane Campion, on drought and isolation ... Joan Dupont from the International Herald Tribune, May 31, 2006

BRIGHT STAR A- 93

Great Britain Australia (119 mi) 2009

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No, yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast —
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

—John Keats, from The Last Sonnet, 1819, 637. Last Sonnet. John Keats. The Oxford Book of English Verse

Thank God somebody still shoots on 35 mm and produces a “real” film that in every detail looks the way film is supposed to look, where color, detail, and art matter. A film laced with Campion themes and ideas, all beautifully rendered, where one especially admires the meticulous attention to minor details, this is a tormented love story between a sickly young poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw), unheralded at the time, and his inspiration, the object of his affection, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), who is consumed by his adoration. From start to finish this film is an idealization immersed in Romanticism that freely mixes speech and theatricality into cinema in an attempt to broaden the audience’s understanding of the period, from the composition of each shot, where each frame is a portrait in still life, to the extraordinary use of costumes, where actress Abbie Cornish is decorated throughout in simply outrageous, overly dressed outfits which seem to exist only in the movies, to moments where characters break out in a song or dance, and are encouraged by others to do so, usually met with applause, but most importantly with the reverential use of language, which is after all, what we have left from the writings of English poet John Keats, who died of tuberculosis when he was 25. Jane Campion has done something rarely seen in films without being pretentious (think of Sally Potter’s 2004 film YES which is spoken entirely in iambic pentameter), which is to create a literary language within the film language that interjects itself from time to time, like a film within a film, or a play within a play, where characters break out into lines of poetry, spoken to one another just like ordinary conversation, except the language itself is such a thing of beauty, including the perfectly exquisite way it’s being spoken, that it feels as if we’re being transported into an entirely new Shakespearean play of young lovers. This theatrical device increases the emotional intensity and saturates the screen with yet another layer of sensuousness on top of the luscious and inspired cinematography from Greig Fraser, not to mention the hauntingly lovely musical score from Mark Bradshaw.

Everything in this film points to sensuality, from the eloquent way they speak to one another, to the manner of her dress, to the intimately stylized way they’re being framed in close up, followed by idyllic, painterly long shots of her two younger siblings as portraits of innocence in a luscious, unspoiled landscape, always capturing the natural beauty of the world outdoors reminiscent of the cinematic poetry of Terrence Malick’s DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978). Written by Campion herself, seen through the eyes of Fanny Brawne, we are thrown into a period drama without any introduction or preface, where John Keats has already written his first book of Poems as well as his follow up Endymion, but he remains penniless and not yet a writer of repute, living nearby and supported by a friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), a somewhat rakish, ill-mannered gentleman who spends all of his time in the company of Keats, probably borrowing liberally from his writing methods, supposedly liberated fellows intent on writing poetry. Campion captures the irony of the Romantic era as a period of female acquiescence where Fanny’s quick tongue and self confidence immediately fascinates Keats with her beauty and outspoken candor, not to mention her new interest in his poetry. Interestingly, Fanny has a skill in clothing design and wears her stunning creations as if on parade throughout the film, where she can usually be seen sitting quietly in a chair with needle and thread. Keats is seen as reserved, isolated, and shy, well mannered, with a moral disposition and a keen awareness for language, while Fanny is still a teenager at the time and appears self-centered, a bit conceited in her dress and opinion of others, yet she’s also thoughtfully inquisitive, especially for things beyond her reach, like the world of poetry, which quickly becomes her latest curiosity. She is seen throughout accompanied by her younger brother and sister, as a “proper” lady never goes anywhere unaccompanied.

The initial signs of love are simply a ravenous desire to talk with and be in the company of one another, all of which couldn’t be more natural, even when moving into the theatrical language of the era, stealing moments while trying to elude the net that the possessive Mr. Brown surrounds Keats with, who’s probably of the opinion there’s money to be made from this young protégé. But the flowering of their love couldn’t be more exquisitely realized, especially with walks in the woods and the remarkably inspired butterfly scenes with her little sister Toots (Edie Martin), also a few shots of Fanny in the throes of love, laying on her bed as the curtains flutter in the breeze, or happily playing in a field exploding in the color of violet flowers with her precocious younger sister, actually projecting her love for Keats to her little sister and the rest of the world at the moment. But trouble ensues, as Keats tries to earn a living elsewhere, where the entire world stops during those anguishing absences until the next letter arrives, where his letters are all that matters in the world. But as Fanny’s mother, Kerry Fox from An Angel at My Table (1990) and INTIMACY (2001) points out, Keats does not have the financial means to marry, so Fanny’s family is concerned with this all consuming passion, as it prevents her from meeting more economically prosperous prospects. It is the era of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice where even strong, opinionated women have absolutely no opportunity in life other than to marry a rich husband. Other than that, they were viewed contemptuously by men thinking their opinion as pretty much worthless, which is exactly the way Fanny is viewed by Mr. Brown, so Campion really gets the tone of the era right. This social dilemma haunts the couple like a plague throughout their entire lives.

After Keats’ brother dies of tuberculosis, followed by his sudden fascination with Fanny Brawne, his poetry takes on an increasing complexity, intermingling the subjects of love and death, eventually falling victim to tuberculosis himself, soon having to come to terms with his own mortality, writing in one of his last letters: “How astonishing does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us.” Set in the poverty stricken, pre-industrial, pre-Victorian world of the 1820’s, there was no treatment for tuberculosis other than bed rest and moving to a more temperate climate, so his need to write, like Mozart on his death bed writing his own Requiem, becomes a race with time. When Keats moves to Italy during the winters, their love affair appears doomed, but Fanny’s hopes throughout will not be deterred. The blissful optimism of their budding love affair takes on darker, somber tones by the end, where much of the story is advanced through the reading of letters, as Cornish does an excellent job releasing her pent up anguish at the end where she lets out a ghastly death wail. The finale over the end credits was unnecessarily confusing, as Whishaw reads “Ode to a Nightingale” (Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats | Poetry Foundation) in its entirety while music plays over the credits all the way to the end, but theater patrons are gathering their coats, talking with one another, even starting cellphone conversations, all with noisy, typical end-of-film behavior, which for most patrons happens as soon as the credits roll, so the voice onscreen couldn’t really be heard over the commotion and just sounded like it went on and on endlessly. It’s an unfortunate finale, leaving some customers puzzled, as the rest of the film couldn’t have been more meticulously well-constructed, quiet, restrained, uncompromising, and well acted, always finding the right tone between the two characters, who could never marry or even consummate their love, as Keats was an English gentleman. Certainly the Romantics were fond of suffering, and the initial bliss of love in this relationship is replaced by a tortuous longing for which there is no release, not even after death. Such is the power of being in the everlasting grasp of love.

PAPERMAG: WORD UP!: Cinemaniac blog ["One of the Year's Best: Jane Campion's ___!"]

Opening this week is one of the year's best films, Bright Star. Jane Campion’s (The Piano) newest is an exquisitely constructed, lushly romantic tale of the passionate love between 23-year-old poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and the girl that lived next door to him while he was in London in 1818 -- Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Fanny, slavishly devoted to fashion, wit, and dances, was first put-off by the brooding, handsome, serious poet, but soon grows to adore him. It’s hard to explain to modern audiences this kind of chaste but powerful relationship -- made up of letters, stolen kisses, and lying in beds pining for one another with a wall separating the two. But then again, imagine with sadness a future movie about a love affair constructed from saved text-messages. Campion conjures on film the pleasures, excitements, and extravagant mysteries of words. Fanny is a perfect Campion heroine. Headstrong, secure in her own skin, but leading with her heart.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

A period piece typified by restraint, delicacy and the romantic spirit of its renowned subject, Jane Campion’s Bright Star details the amorous three-year affair of 19th-century poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Cornish). In keeping with Campion’s career-long interest in investigating and depicting the female perspective, the film sticks closely to Fanny, a young girl with a knack for sewing and, as she confesses to Keats early on, only an amateur knowledge of poetry. Fanny’s gumption, independence and beauty endear her to Keats, a struggling young writer living with poet and benefactor Charles Brown (an adept Paul Schneider), and their feelings blossom despite Keats’ unemployed, penniless condition, which – as Fanny’s mother regularly reminds her – makes him an unsuitable candidate for marriage. Both this obstacle and the jealous interference of Brown, whose fondness for Keats’ writing borders on the possessive, frustrate Keats and Fanny’s attempts to be together, with Campion’s clear-eyed, beautifully composed images (including a recurring one of the couple pressed up against opposite sides of the same wall) evoking the social structures that threaten to keep them apart. Whishaw’s reserved performance and Cornish’s sensitive turn work in tandem to create a poignant portrait of longing and (largely unconsummated) passion. Ultimately more moving, however, is the film’s deft evocation of Keats’ prose through both integrated spoken-word passages that feel both natural and reverent, as well as via seasonal snapshots of the verdant English countryside that (along with numerous images of caressing hands) have a potent tactility.

The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [3/4]

The girl is a mere teenager, and the young man will never grow old. He is fated to die, relatively unheralded, at 25, leaving his poems to endure and grow in stature, and eventually invite praise as the greatest since Shakespeare. She will marry another and, through the rest of her long life, remain secretive about their brief time together. Bright Star is the story of that time, a tale of first love between the belle damsel and the doomed genius. Fanny Brawne, meet John Keats.

In the gentle hands of Jane Campion, what a pure and poignant tale it is. The place is London circa 1820, although Campion takes admirable care not to “mount” the period piece, not to stick the Regency costumes and the attendant manners into a gilded frame. Instead, the modest houses seem lived in, the muddy streets look walked on, and the youthful principals appear refreshingly real. Especially Fanny (Abbie Cornish), who gives the film both its emotional power and its singular point of view. This may be a romance involving the greatest of the Romance poets, but the narrative unfolds not from the perspective of the famous man, but solely through the eyes of the obscure woman.

Immediately, we see those eyes at work, bent over the sewing of a colourful frock. Gaily turned out, Fanny is quite the fashion plate, but don't think any less of her. Keats makes that mistake when they initially meet, only to learn that her wit is as sharp as her needle. Pointing to her spools of thread, she smiles at the poet, who is already published yet still virtually penniless, and retorts, “But I can make money from this.” Bright star, indeed.

The verbal fencing over, her interest in him is sparked by the opening line of his Endymion : “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” (Here, and elsewhere, Campion stitches in the poetry seamlessly – she's no slouch with a needle herself.) Certainly, there's beauty in their budding relationship; however, the joy is restrained on all sides, not just by the proprieties of the time (their every move is chaperoned by Fanny's tagalong siblings), but more specifically by the particularities of Keats himself – by his failing health, by his empty wallet and, not least, by his best friend.

That would be Charles Brown (played with a deliciously rambunctious burr by Paul Schneider), who sort of triangulates the love affair. Revering Keats's work as he does, Brown regards Fanny as unworthy either of the poetry or the poet. That doesn't stop him from flirting openly with the girl, and the ensuing contrast – between Keats's high romance and Brown's lower lust – grounds the picture in an often-comic earthiness, the profane rubbing shoulders with the sacred.

Of course, it's love's sublimity, or at least its simple purity, that wins out and wins us over – all those gestures small and large, like Fanny tossing Keats a folded note through an open window, or his giving her his mother's ring, or the two leaning their heads against opposite sides of the wall that separates their adjoining homes. Yes, the barriers remain. Yet the very restraint that impedes the lovers is embraced by the director. Shooting with a classical reserve, Campion steadies her camera and calms her style, raising the lyrical volume only when the romance heats up over a short-lived summer. Then, she allows her lens to find a Keatsian enchantment in the wildflowers on the sun-dappled heath and the gentle breeze billowing a gossamer curtain.

Campion demands the same quiet restraint of her cast. As Keats, Ben Whishaw positions himself at the still point between sickness and health, sometimes amorously confused (“I'm not sure I have the right feelings towards women”) yet always artistically confident (“Poetry soothes and enables the soul to accept mystery”). Whishaw is just fine, but Cornish is superb. She's obliged to portray one of Campion's typical heroines – a strong and intelligent woman snared in the mores of her time – without recourse to any flamboyant theatrics. So her eyes alone speak eloquent volumes, seeing much, feeling much, even as Fanny is pushed by convention and circumstance to the margins of Keats's waning life – her love unconsummated and her anxieties unheard.

Admittedly, when the script does allow her emotions to surface, they can seem to grow out of rather thin dramatic soil – for instance, if her letters to him aren't quickly or lengthily answered, she weeps real tears. Consequently, on occasion, the film can feel too minimal and reserved, as lightweight as those gossamer curtains. Mainly, though, Cornish's performance and Campion's direction make for a beguiling marriage, never more so than during the tragic divorce of the climax. Then, in that tiny room above Rome's Spanish Steps, a young man meets his “easeful death,” leaving a younger woman hundreds of miles away to bear the news alone, her girlish tears displaced by a piercing howl that few would hear and most would ignore. Until now.

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

And then there’s this madness: Even movies that are about the women who love great men almost always end up being about the men anyway. I suppose that’s the point of telling the story of such women in the first place: they’re only worth talking about because the great men turned their gaze upon them for a time.

But not this movie. Not Bright Star. John Keats is the intruder into the story of Fanny Brawne, and if you didn’t already know that he turned out to be the renowed poet and she turned out to be “merely” the young woman who loved him, and was loved by him, and inspired some of his greatest poetry, you might be forgiven for assuming that she’s the one who surely washed up legendary years later, for how the film defies the convention of lavishing its focus not on him as the de facto presumptive natural center of attention, but on her.

The beautiful thing about that is that -- as with all expressions of honest feminism -- it ends up being as good for him as it does for her. Because screenwriter and director Jane Campion (In the Cut) has made her Fanny a true bright star for her John to orbit, has brought to breathtakingly lovely life not only the facts of their relationship but the spirit of the poetry that it inspired, and that made the poet the towering figure he is in our minds today. (The poem the film is named for is his ode to Fanny.) I’ve never actually been much of a fan of the Romantic poets, but everything I’ve ever been told about why they’re important and what their words say positively radiates off the screen: the impossibility of separating ourselves from nature, the importance of appreciating the experience of living, the pleasure we take in beauty being its own kind of beauty.

It’s there in the knowing dreaminess of Ben Wishaw’s (The International, Brideshead Revisited) John, who is moody and melancholy as he mopes around the rambling Hampstead houses and fields and woods that the film moves through, locations of expansive wistfulness perfectly suited to a poor poet who thinks of little but words and love and nesting in trees of an afternoon. It’s there in the steely certainty of Abbie Cornish’s (Stop-Loss, Elizabeth: The Golden Age) Fanny, as modern a girl as they come even today: 18 years old, consumed with fashion and creative about it (she makes all her own clothes, wonderful inventions that, you might have thought, were the reason she became famous, were you to suppose that she had), and positive that a poor poet is the man for her, even should he not be in a position to marry.

Marriage is the only option for a respectable, well-brought-up girl like Fanny, for it is 1818, and that’s just how things are. But these are not people who are living in a corseted theme-park version of the past: this is their real world, and the way things are is simply the way things are. They are modern people, as all people always are in their own times but as few films set in historical eras manage to capture. (It’s very much like Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice in that regard.) They don’t wear costumes but clothes -- John, especially, is so wonderfully unkempt half the time that he’s entirely the 1818 equivalent of a dude lounging around in old jeans and a torn T-shirt. And their feelings are shown to us by Campion in such a way as to almost make you gasp with recognition for their straightforward authenticity: as Fanny takes to moping over the impossibility of her love for John, she isn’t much unlike teenagers today. When Fanny’s little sister, Toots (the whip-snarky Edie Martin), announces to their mother (Kerry Fox) that “Fanny wants a knife... to kill herself...” well, there’s gentle humor in it -- it’s all lovestruck exaggeration -- but also an almost literally pointed reminder that, you know, heartbreak wasn’t invented by Elvis Presley.

There’s palpable anguish onscreen here, all around. Earlier, it’s in John’s bewilderment at finding himself in love with one such as Fanny, all brash daring and foolish (or so he deems it) frippery: he doesn’t know what to make of women at all, he acknowledges, and doesn’t know why he’s attracted to her. (Ah, that loveliest and most infuriating conundrum: why are we attracted to this person and not to that person?) It’s in Fanny’s wallowing in the wonderful misery of being in love. It’s in John’s best friend and fellow poet Charles Brown, a bulldog presence who resents Fanny’s intrusion into the relationship of two men. (Paul Schneider [Lars and the Real Girl, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford] as Brown is almost terrifyingly aggressive, though often amusingly so, too, as if Brown were as big a mystery to himself as he is to John and Fanny; Schneider is a just-right mirror image to Wishaw’s delicate passion and brooding consideredness.) It’s there later, when Fanny learns that she and John will never be together again, in a grief so powerful it stunned me into sharing it.

All of the zeal of the Romantics and everything that concerned them is here in the cosy domesticity of Fanny’s home and family and in how Campion presents it to us: the cat that’s always underfoot, even when it’s not wanted; the collection of buttleflies gathered by Fanny and Toots that, in perhaps the film’s most simply beautiful sequence, flitter about Fanny’s bedroom. It’s there in the ardor between Fanny and John, which, for all its chasteness, burns burns burns; Wishaw and Cornish smolder together in a way that we don’t often see onscreen because their characters can never quite give in to their desire for each other.

It’s not only the best possible ode to Keats’ work, this lovely gentle poetic film, it’s the best possible ode to Fanny, as well: If she made him feel the way this movie feels, that must have been a powerful love indeed.

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review September 16, 2009

John Keats was a Romantic poet. “Bright Star,” which tells the tale of Keats and Fanny Brawne, the love of his short life, is a romantic movie. The vernacular of popular culture and the somewhat specialized language of literary history assign different meanings to that word, but the achievement of Jane Campion’s learned and ravishing new film is to fuse them, to trace the comminglings and collisions of poetic creation and amatory passion.Skip to next paragraph

This is a risky project, not least because a bog of cliché and fallacy lies between the filmmaker and her goal. In the first decades of the 19th century, some poets may have been like movie stars, but the lives of the poets have been, in general, badly served on film, either neglected altogether or puffed up with sentiment and solemnity. The Regency period, moreover, serves too many lazy, prestige-minded directors as a convenient vintage clothing store. And there are times in “Bright Star” when Keats, played by the pale and skinny British actor Ben Whishaw (“Perfume,” “I’m Not There”), trembles on the edge of caricature. He broods; he coughs (signaling the tuberculosis that will soon kill him); he looks dreamily at flowers and trees and rocks.

But these moments, rather than feeling studied or obvious, arrive with startling keenness and disarming beauty, much in the way that Keats’s own lyrics do. His verses can at first seem ornate and sentimental, but on repeated readings, they have a way of gaining in force and freshness. The music is so intricate and artificial, even as the emotions it carries seem natural and spontaneous. And while no film can hope to take you inside the process by which these poems were made, Ms. Campion allows you to hear them spoken aloud as if for the first time. You will want to stay until the very last bit of the end credits, not necessarily to read the name of each gaffer and grip, but rather to savor every syllable of Mr. Whishaw’s recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Keats’s genius — underestimated by many of the critics of his time, championed by a loyal coterie of literary friends — is the fixed point around which “Bright Star” orbits. Its animating force, however, is the infatuation that envelops Keats and Brawne in their early meetings and grows, over the subsequent months, into a sustaining and tormenting love. Mr. Keats, as his lover decorously calls him, is diffident and uneasy at times, but also witty, sly and steadfast. The movie really belongs to Brawne, played with mesmerizing vitality and heart-stopping grace by Abbie Cornish.

Ms. Cornish, an Australian actress whose previous films include “Stop-Loss,” “Candy” and “Somersault,” has, at 27, achieved a mixture of unguardedness and self-control matched by few actresses of any age or nationality. She’s as good as Kate Winslet, which is about as good as it’s possible to be.

Fanny, the eldest daughter of a distracted widow (Kerry Fox), has some of the spirited cleverness of a Jane Austen heroine. A gifted seamstress, she prides herself on her forward-looking fashion sense and her independence. She is also vain, insecure and capable of throwing herself headlong into the apparent folly of adoring a dying and penniless poet, something no sensible Austen character would ever do.

If it were just the poet and his beloved, “Bright Star” might collapse in swooning and sighing, or into the static rhythms of a love poem. And while there are passages of extraordinary lyricism — butterflies, fields of flowers, fluttering hands and beseeching glances — these are balanced by a rough, energetic worldliness. Lovers, like poets, may create their own realms of feeling and significance, but they do so in contention with the same reality that the rest of us inhabit.

The film’s designated reality principle is Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’s friend, patron and collaborator and his main rival for Fanny’s attention. For Brown, Fanny is an irritant and a distraction, though the sarcastic intensity of their banter carries an interesting sexual charge of its own. In an Austen novel this friction would be resolved in matrimony, but “Bright Star,” following the crooked, shadowed path of biographical fact, has a different story to tell.

Brown and Keats are neighbors to the Brawne brood in Hampstead in 1818, when the story begins. In April of the following year the poets are occupying one-half of a house, with Fanny and her mother and siblings on the other side of the wall. After nine months Keats, in declining health, is dispatched to Italy by a committee of concerned friends, but until then he and Fanny consummate their love in every possible way except physically.

Ms. Campion is one of modern cinema’s great explorers of female sexuality, illuminating Sigmund Freud’s “dark continent” with skepticism, sympathy and occasional indignation. “Bright Star” could easily have become a dark, simple fable of repression, since modern audiences like nothing better than to be assured that our social order is freer and more enlightened than any that came before. But Fanny and Keats are modern too, and though the mores of their time constrain them, they nonetheless regard themselves as free.

The film is hardly blind to the sexual hypocrisy that surrounds them. Fanny can’t marry Keats because of his poverty, but Brown blithely crosses class lines to have some fun with (and impregnate) a naïve and illiterate young household servant (Antonia Campbell-Hughes). That Fanny and Keats must sublimate their longings in letters, poems and conversations seems cruel, but they make the best of it. As does Ms. Campion: a sequence in which, fully clothed, the couple trades stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in a half-darkened bedroom must surely count as one of the hottest sex scenes in recent cinema.

The heat of that moment and others like it deliver “Bright Star” from the tidy prison of period costume drama. Ms. Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word.

RealTime Arts - Magazine - issue 96 - campion's realm of the senses Kirsten Krauth

PopMatters (Renee Scolaro Mora) review

James Bowman review

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

Screen International (Allan Hunter) review at Cannes

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]

Jane Campion's Conspicuous Heroines Jessica Winter from Moving Image Source

Tim Hayes Critics Notebook

Campion’s Prudish “Star” Needs More Sizzle Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, May 15, 2009

Cannes '09: Day Three Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 15, 2009

Cannes contender Jane Campion gives clarion call to women directors Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian, May 15, 2009

Jane Campion, Where Have You Been? Eugene Hernandez at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 15, 2009

Melissa Anderson at Cannes from Artforum, May 15, 2009

Bright Star David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 15, 2009

Campion in Cannes Charles Ealy at Cannes from 360 Austin Movie Blog, May 15, 2009

Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter review Ray Bennett at Cannes, May 15, 2009

Todd McCarthy at Cannes from Variety, May 15, 2009

Time Out Online (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6] at Cannes

Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [2/6]

James Christopher Bright Star at the Cannes Film Festival, from The Times Online, May 16, 2009

The Daily Telegraph review [5/5] David Gritten at Cannes from The Telegraph, May 15, 2009

Cannes 2009: film charts John Keats' romance with Fanny Brawne - in Luton Anita Singh at Cannes from The Telegraph, May 15, 2009

Campion: Female directors need to be tough Anita Singh at Cannes from The Telegraph, May 16, 2009

Bright Star (Jane Campion) Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 15, 2009

Blog: Doomed love is in the air at Cannes Catherine Shoard from The Guardian Blog, May 15, 2009

Bright Star: at last a good film about poetry John Patterson from The Guardian, October 31, 2009

Cannes '09 Day 3: Rain, Romanticism Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 15, 2009

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [4/4]

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan] Turan talks with Campion at Cannes, May 18, 2009

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan] September 18, 2009

John Keats - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jane Campion Presents Another Resilient Heroine Joan Dupont at Cannes from The New York Times, May 15, 2009

Christopher Ricks book review on Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, by Stanley Plumly (392 pages), from The New York Review of Books

The Life and Work of John Keats (1795-1821)

John-Keats.com

Keats : Poetry of John Keats, at everypoet.com a selection of poems

John Keats a selection of sonnets

Poet: John Keats - All poems of John Keats

John Keats from Books and Writers

An Introduction to "Bright Star" an analysis of the poem

Romanticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

rom The Romantic Age, 1770 – 1870

TOP OF THE LAKE – made for TV A 95

Australia Great Britain (350 mi – 7 episodes) 2013

You can be very hard. And what I don't like is that you think it’s strength. — Robin’s mother Jude Griffin (Robyn Nevin)

There’s no match for the tremendous intelligence of the body. —GJ (Holly Hunter)

There has been a gradual introduction of movies made for television into film festivals, where the Melbourne and Telluride Film Festivals were among the first to program the three films in the RED RIDING TRILOGY (2009) made for British television, while the full-length, 5-hour French version of the Olivier Assayas film Carlos – made for French TV (2010) premiered at Cannes, and the Venice Festival premiered Todd Haynes’ MILDRED PIERCE (2011), all to critical acclaim. This year Jane Campion’s feminist noir TOP OF THE LAKE became the first television series to ever premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, later screening again at Berlin, a 6-hour jointly produced BBC and Sundance Channel film TV miniseries spread out over 7 episodes, though the pacing and burning intensity are much more effective when compressed into a single viewing, especially without having to undergo commercials and the repeating credit sequence. Since it had been four years since she made a film, Campion reveals her thoughts on finding more freedom working in television from the Hollywood Reporter, “Feature filmmaking is now quite conservative. The lack of restraints, the longer story arc: It's a luxury not there generally in film.” Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990) was originally produced as a New Zealand television miniseries, but was re-edited and released internationally as a film. Set in Laketop, a small town set on a gorgeous lake in a remote and mountainous area of New Zealand (actually shot by Adam Arkapaw at South Island’s Moke Lake and the cities of Queenstown and Glenorchy, including Lake Wakatipu seen here: 1,280 × 960 pixels), Elisabeth Moss plays Robin Griffin, a big city Australian police detective from Sydney with a specialty in child investigations, who happens to be visiting her mother who is stricken with cancer, but it’s also something of a coming home experience, as she grew up in the region as well. Called in for an emergency, the local police, under the command of Detective Sgt. Al Parker (David Wenham), have a pregnant 12-year old Thai girl named Tui Mitcham (newcomer Jacqueline Joe, supposedly discovered at an Auckland swimming pool), who may have been attempting a miscarriage or drowning herself in the lake. What’s immediately clear is not just the plight of the child, but the antiquated male-dominated police procedures where women continue to be leered at as sexual objects, routinely called sluts (or worse), and crimes against women are not really taken seriously by anyone in town, seen more as the usual sport between a man and a woman, so no one respects Robin’s authority on the case and can be heard making snickering comments on the side. No one, for instance, takes the crime of rape against a 12-year old girl seriously except Detective Griffin, where they all heartily agree to her face that she’s right but then make no effort whatsoever to find the rapist.

It’s no accident that the best episodes are directed by Campion herself, including the first, fourth, and final two episodes, feeling almost mythical, featuring some stunning performances, where the richly detailed pieces of information unraveling in the opening few minutes are nothing less than intoxicating, filled with the beauty of the landscape, local color and plenty of eccentric characters. Echoes of David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS (1990 – 1991) are evident, especially in the exotic setting, the small town mindset, a body washed ashore, the toxic effect of holding onto secrets, strangely offbeat characters, and the presence of an outsider, in each case an abnormally astute police detective. Like Laura Palmer, Tui is at the heart of the film, attractively appealing and the picture of innocence, as no one knows the truth about her, especially after she reveals the name of the father is literally “no one.” Through Tui, Campion seems to be suggesting that women’s behavior in particular is a product of family dynamics, the surrounding community values, and the random events that comprise our lives. What’s perhaps most frightening is the callously disturbing and pathological behavior of her father, Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan at his most sinister), the town’s drug lord whose two sons are equally psychopathic in carrying out his dirty business (where the patriarchal family circle is actually Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). We see evidence of their nonchalant brutality in an opening scene, where they haven’t an ounce of concern for human life, living in a heavily armed fortress compound protected by modern surveillance equipment and intentionally starved pitbulls that run rampant. When Tui quickly disappears, we begin to understand what it might be like as a girl growing up in this town. This exact same subject is then explored through black and white flashback sequences, as Robin suffered her own share of childhood trauma growing up in this town, where the parallel lives of Robin and Tui remain linked throughout the film. Interestingly, Elisabeth Moss was not the first choice for the film, as Campion offered the part to Anna Paquin, who declined due to her pregnancy, and when the part was offered to an American actress, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation pulled out of the project, insisting that it would only fund the film with an Australian or New Zealand lead actress. The choice of Moss is literally perfect in the role, where it’s hard to think of the film without her, largely because she never overacts or displays too much, and though she is deeply scarred, reminiscent of Jodie Foster’s tenuous predicament as Clarice Starling in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), she continues to be defined by her intelligence, constantly guarding her thoughts, where the impact of others can easily be read upon her face, an opaque presence that mirrors the world around her, remaining mysteriously vulnerable and even fragile while standing up to a dominating male presence.

What distinguishes this film is the densely plotted novelesque quality, where even comically drawn secondary characters are significant to the overall portrayal of humans desperately in need, where there’s an untapped ferocity of spirit seen in both Tui and Robin. Adding to this picture of a lone voice in the wilderness is an inspired idea to create a separatist women’s collective, a Greek chorus of damaged women living together in trucked-in shipping containers at a lakeside retreat called Paradise that sits on disputed land, as Matt claims they’re trespassing, a rag tag group of exiled women led by Holly Hunter as the dispassionate GJ, a guru-like presence in pants spouting Zen-like philosophic utterances, as if she can read each person’s future, but possessing the deranged personality of a social misfit herself, often seen pacing the grounds while off in the distance a few naked women are continually seen running free. The lustful nature of the women is part of the untold story, including the sexual promiscuity of several of the women living on the compound, including a memorable scene from Geneviève Lemon (the 7-minute woman) who played the lead role in Sweetie (1989), as the men in town are perceived as testosterone fueled adolescents, especially in the moments Robin spends enduring endlessly abusive taunting by men in bars, yet woman have to find their place in an existing contemporary landscape, including Robin’s own sexual desires, seen developing for Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), a childhood sweetheart and one of Matt’s offspring, a good son that rejects the maniacal nature of his tyrannical crime boss father. The two are a sexual force bonded together by her childhood trauma, where Johnno was her high school prom date and suspiciously absent afterwards on a night she was brutally gang raped by four drunken men. This trauma gives her all the more reason to protect Tui, even if the town has given up looking for her, suspecting she must be dead after the passage of two months. There’s an interesting thematic projection of men’s fears and limitations, expressed through the perceived effects of hostile elements, as no one thinks she could survive out there alone in the cold, while the repeated mention of the lethal quality of the water is always described as so cold that “no one could survive in that water.” Yet somehow, just when Robin is told her mother has terminal cancer, easily one of the key moments in the film, intimately captured with the camera holding completely onto Robin’s face, at that exact moment when all hope is lost, there is also a chance that Tui has somehow survived.

Tui’s absence changes the nature of the film, as her unseen presence, Robin’s own personal trauma, and her mother’s impending death all blend together and continually haunt Robin, who becomes the film’s dominant force, as events are continuously seen through her eyes. The on again and off again relationship with her boss, Al, always seems to be of secondary importance, part of the police procedural component of the film, as their presence together is usually mandatory. But his exclusively male take on events offers a differing viewpoint than her own, but Campion is careful not to make him one-dimensional, where he’s one of the more complexly drawn characters in the film, though never entirely likeable, especially as he’s seen to be in cahoots with Matt’s criminal empire, usually protecting him or tipping him off about upcoming police activities. But Robin doesn’t know this and continually exposes a vulnerable side to him, where her life is an open book while we know almost nothing about him. His extravagant home offers a clue, and is the setting for one of the more controversial events in the film, as he invites her over for dinner where she stupidly drinks too much and eventually passes out, waking up alone in his bedroom the next morning wearing one of his shirts. He reassures her that nothing happened, that she vomited all over her clothes, so he was forced to wash them, all of which sounds like a perfectly acceptable explanation. And that’s the problem with Al’s character, as his answers are too pat, sounding overly detached and too well reasoned ahead of time, never speaking passionately in the moment, where what comes across is an arrogant and pompous man that’s used to getting his way and never having to answer for it. Al typifies the male mentality of the town, even if Matt is the Alpha male, while he sits quietly lurking in the background collecting his cut of the overall operations, running a secret Ecstasy and amphetamine lab underneath Matt’s home. In contrast to Robin and Al, Matt has his own sexual experience with one of the women from the compound, Anita, Robyn Malcolm, who simply craves male companionship. Their hallucinogenic outdoor experience in the woods on Ecstasy is unusual for how it sensitively portrays a ruthless crime boss at his most vulnerable state, used much like the LSD cemetery sequence in Easy Rider (1969), where the dealers are seen under the influence of their own drugs, often haunted by impending thoughts of death and mortality.

At some point, and one barely realizes when it occurs, the focus shifts from the overly destructive and malicious behavior of the adults to the often misunderstood and more innocent motives of kids, where a strange young girl (Georgi Kay) dropped off at the women’s compound is continuously seen playing an electric guitar in various natural outdoor locations, NEW Ipswich- Georgi Kay (live) (4:50), offering voice to a new and different force that hasn’t been seen much or heard from, namely the next generation, Tui’s generation. Robin interrogates a young boy for shoplifting, Jamie (Luke Buchanon), seen crossing the lake in a kayak, suspected of bringing food to a drop site, significant as he’s one of Tui’s best friends, perhaps even the father. Jamie has the unusual habit of not speaking to adults, so Al tries to knock some sense into this kid, using decisively forceful measures until he’s thrown out of the interrogation room by Robin. The kid disappears the next day, along with all the food in the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets, leading to a kind of idyllic Lord of the Flies gathering of kids in the woods without the presence of a bullying leader, where we discover the re-emergence of Tui along with boatloads of friends. But Matt and his gang are soon on to them, forcing a very pregnant Tui and Jamie to escape, only to lead to certain tragedy, which has a horrific effect, especially within the women’s compound. The slowed pacing also reflects a kind of impasse, a turning in the tide, where some of the women are finally willing to stand up to these powerful men, refusing to be scared or intimidated by them. In a memorial sequence for one of the lost kids, Georgi Kay - Joga (Top of the Lake - Jamies memorial scene ... (2:40), featuring Mirrah Foulkes as the distraught mother, some may be shocked or confused at just how unmanly the women are, as they don’t go the Eastwood vigilante route and demand justice through the power of a gun or through brute strength, which is what movies have trained us to expect, but this psychological transformation has been slow in coming and continues to evolve at an excruciatingly slow pace, yet it’s among the more unique scenes in the film, as the women collectively express a quiet desperation without any hint of violence, viewed as an exclusively male domain.

The finale goes even further down that road, where the discovery of a date rape drug figures prominently into the tortured lives of teens, many of whom in the past have ended up dead under mysteriously unexplained circumstances. It’s all a bit alarming, but it also figures into Robin’s own past, where it doesn’t do her any good to dig too deeply into the heart of her own trauma, never wanting to meet the child she gave up for adoption as she never wanted to explain to a child that they were the product of a gang rape, thinking this revelation could induce suicidal thoughts of zero self-worth, deciding it’s better to “Fuck the truth,” where life is so much more complicated than we could ever imagine, where human behavior is simply too despicable. One theme Campion appears to be advocating is that the more attention paid to pain, the worse things often become. The movie can be shocking at times with its spurts of sudden violence, but in this film it’s not about women chasing after vengeance, where the obsession for justice only creates more injustice, as it’s so easy to lose sight of the arc of your own life, but it also shouldn’t be some inhumane evil that we continually answer to. In the end, the film veers into an ambiguously disturbing road movie, like a journey through an existential wasteland, actually discussed at great length in the women’s group talkathons, which are almost a parody of self-help groups, where GJ often berates their whining and moaning, claiming they’re “madder than ever,” saying she needs to “just get away from these crazy bitches,” getting as far away as she can, yet still taking us on an interior journey more self-reflective and psychologically complex than what we’re used to from crime dramas, like say the highly successful THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY (2009). Actually it’s more like the continuing arduousness of The Odyssey, a prolonged journey filled with epic challenges, where the hero survives only by extraordinary cunning and perseverance, where likewise the collective effect of this film is an assault on the senses, causing a shock to the system and a rewiring of the circuitry, finding oneself at the center of a great human tragedy, offering no societal cure or moral answers, nothing more than the brave choice of learning how to discover our own humanity, often the last one thing we pay any attention to as we’re so busy navigating our way through life. But in the end, eerily enough, someone, perhaps even Robin, is going to be in a position to help raise a child that is the product of gang rape, as the cycle of life continues where we’re continually forced to face our worst fears.

Law of the Father - Film Comment Amy Taubin, March/April 2013

Twin Peaks crossed with The Killing—and that isn’t the half of it: the seven-episode television series Top of the Lake is the toughest, wildest picture Jane Campion has ever made. Campion’s previous foray into television, An Angel at My Table, a four-part biopic about the writer Janet Frame, was focused on a single character, and though dramatically and psychologically compelling, it lacked the expressive visual style of Campion’s features. With the emotional intensity of its performances and the urgency of its drama scaled to match its vast, primal setting and six-hour length, Top of the Lake is something else again: series television as epic poem, the Trojan Wars recast as the gender war. Three women, each on her own journey, connect and bring the patriarchy to its knees. But that’s too bald a description.

Like Twin Peaks, Top of the Lake begins with the body of a woman come to grief. Twelve-year-old Tui (Jacqueline Joe) isn’t dead, merely five months pregnant. we first see her standing up to her chest in an icy lake, completely motionless. does she want to drown herself, or perhaps induce a miscarriage? she’s rescued by a passerby and brought to the police. Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss), a detective who has returned to the bleak rural New Zealand town where she grew up in order to spend time with her dying mother, is recruited by Det. Sgt. Al Parker (David Wenham), who comprises nearly the entirety of the area’s law enforcement, to investigate what is at the least a case of statutory rape. Tui refuses to disclose who got her pregnant, although eventually she writes “no one” on a slip of paper. There is no lack of suspects. Tui’s father, Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan, malign and absurdly attractive), runs a meth and ecstasy factory in his tumbledown fortress of a home and seems to have fathered nearly half a dozen children with various women, making incest as well as violence, past and present, Top of the Lake’s subtext of desire. he also seems to employ half the poverty-stricken town, providing a somewhat plausible explanation for why parker turns a blind eye to his activities. There are also Mitcham’s sullen, gun-toting sons, and a “foreign” teacher with a pedophile past. Tui disappears and Griffin steps up her investigation, determined to find her before the girl’s rapist kills her and the child she’s carrying, thus eliminating the DNA evidence of his paternity.

A stellar embodiment of “the law of the father,” Mitcham goes on the offensive when women challenge his rule. in addition to griffin’s “snooping,” he’s one-upped by GJ (holly hunter), who comes out of nowhere to buy the glorious lakefront property he presumes to be his by right. Rail thin, with gray hair to her waist, given to gnomic utterances and lengthy silences, GJ is guru to a community of women attempting to recover from lifetimes of abuse. Having installed her clan in shipping containers, she furthers the desecration by encouraging the anarchic behavior of her wild bunch, which consists largely of running around naked, showing off their post-menopausal bodies, and laughing loudly—damaged goods empowered by their own sense of comedy. Only Campion could have envisioned the scene in which Mitcham attempts to infiltrate the enemy camp by taking one of the crazy ladies on a date, dropping ecstasy with her and sharing an hour of overwhelming tenderness before things turn ugly.

Top of the Lake is a thrilling example of auteurist episodic television. Campion collaborated on the screenplay with Gerard Lee (the co-writer of her debut feature, Sweetie) and shared the directing duties with Garth Davis, a productive division of labor since he is very good at pushing the plot forward while she makes us aware of the abyss that lies beneath every action. The themes that underscore Campion’s films are all here, particularly the fear that bedevils female agency—of making bad, even deadly choices in matters of sex and love. Shooting with the Arri Alexa, cinematographer Adam Arkapaw turns a wilderness of water, deep forests, and jutting cliffs into a shaping force for narrative and character, while the editing scheme frequently juxtaposes huge landscapes with close-ups of Mullan, moss, and hunter’s faces—landscapes in their own right—the unblinking gaze of each fully alive, fired by thought, perception, and desire. The principal cast—which also includes Thomas M. Wright as Mitcham’s outcast son, whose renewed intimacy with Griffin brings her traumatic past to the fore and justifies her absolute need to rescue Tui—is superb. Despite a few too many plot turns and delays toward the end and a resolution that is a trifle too neat, Top of the Lake leaves one with a sense of uplift that’s close to sublime.

“No One Can Survive In That Water”: Jane Campion and Garth Davis’ Top of the Lake Michael Sicinski from Cinema Scope, also seen here: Cinema Scope [Michael Sicinski]

Although the new miniseries Top of the Lake had its world premiere this past January at the Sundance Film Festival, it is darkly fortuitous that it should have its television run two months later. March has seen the emergence of details from the rape of a young woman in Steubenville, Ohio, material so sickening that it almost—almost—beggars belief. Can a group of young white men truly be so completely at home in their own sense of entitlement that they not only see an unconscious underage girl as their plaything, but whip out a cellphone camera and perform their own prosecuting evidence as if they were doing comedy improv? The answer is a gruesome Yes, largely because these “men” are secure that a power structure exists around them, one that will do whatever it can to insulate them from any culpability or even recognition of wrongdoing. If we hadn’t seen it ourselves, our 2013 minds would refuse to process it; we are living in a jungle of patriarchy.

I fear that bringing this real-world heinousness into a discussion of fictional material may edge toward insensitivity. However, from its very opening episode, Top of the Lake, produced and co-directed by Jane Campion and Australian TV vet Garth Davis, presents an isolated New Zealand backwater that, purely in terms of textual construction and tone, seems almost like an allegory for a war between the sexes, if not one woman’s paranoid projection of all-enveloping male control. The community of Laketop is a universe in which men do as they please, the police look the other way (when they are not openly complicit), criminality and violence simply comprise the public sphere, and women understand that they must either make nice or suffer untold misery and humiliation.

Top of the Lake’s misogynist atmosphere is so flagrant that Campion essentially inscribes it onto the landscape. Not only is the lake itself a cold, deep gaping wound at the heart of the town—a vaguely feminine symbol which strikes fear and awe in most of the characters, who will navigate it with their yachts but insist that “no one can survive in that water”—but, surrounded as it is by high hills and thickets of uncleared Outback, it is also the area’s ultimate proving ground, a place where dominant men assert their will, make lesser men “disappear,” and still others hide away completely. In town, it’s all close-ups and medium shots, evenly lit and carefully organized. But the surrounding nature of Laketop serves as a kind of battery for the unconscious, a womblike Lacanian Real where patriarchs recharge their hatred of women and one another. We frequently see these hills in long shot, tiny cars and dwarfed figures moving through a landscape that will swallow them in time.

The battle lines of the sexes are embodied in characters and the land, far more successfully than in the narrative itself. The seven-part series is driven by the sudden pregnancy and subsequent disappearance of twelve-year-old Tui Mitcham (Jacqueline Joe), daughter of local strongman/drug kingpin Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan). Given the fact that the entire local police force is male, the detective in charge of the case, Al Parker (David Wenham), decides to call in Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss), an investigator who grew up in Laketop and is in town visiting her dying mother (Robyn Nevin). We learn that Robin left town shortly after having been gang-raped on her prom night; she was out with Matt’s son Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), who witnessed the rape but was too weak to stop it. Upon returning to town, Robin tentatively resumes her troubled relationship with Johnno; better him, one supposes, than his macho brothers Luke and Mark. (That’s right: Matt’s sons are Mark, Luke and John, and patriarchy is indeed gospel at Laketop.)

In what is probably Top of the Lake’s boldest narrative and stylistic move, it includes an honest-to-goodness female (if not feminist) separatist community in the form of Paradise, a collection of modified shipping containers on the edge of the lake where a group of women seeking refuge from various troubles have set up camp, seeking guidance from a teacher of sorts called GJ (Holly Hunter, whose long grey hair and severe gaze makes her resemble Campion herself). GJ functions as a kind of New Age Dr. Laura Schlessinger, mostly berating the women seeking her advice, and offering little aside from platitudes regarding “the wisdom of the body.” Of the women in GJ’s camp, one deals with her sexual addiction by going into the bar in town and offering any of the guys there $100 to fuck her. Another of the women takes up with Matt himself, who is very loving until the Ecstasy wears off, at which point he almost runs her down with his truck. Even Robin, our putative heroine, enjoys a liaison with Johnno that could be characterized as at least somewhat destructive. (At mid-series, she wonders just how innocent he was on that fateful night.)

So how “wise” are these bodies, exactly? In light of these women’s questionable choices, we can perhaps discern in Top of the Lake Campion’s rather unusual angle on contemporary feminism. In this pathologically phallocentric universe, the men are undoubtedly bullies and perpetrators, and they enjoy full rein of their privilege. However, the women are shown to be so thoroughly traumatized as to capitulate with their abusers in a kind of master-slave dialectic.

This is where Top of the Lake departs from a real-life example like Steubenville, where the victim has no part to play in her own abuse. As a work of art, the program can and should be able to theorize about human psychology, and how those of us in radically limited circumstances will inevitably identify, at least in part, with those who oppress us. This is one of Campion’s consistent concerns as a feminist artist, something she has explored not only in her most acclaimed film, The Piano (1993), but also in Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003), films that I find much more compelling precisely because their exploration of this dialectic is far messier and more emotionally reckless. (In fact—and this is actually something that has never occurred to me before now—the mutually assured destruction of the sexes as an ontological problem is a thematic that Campion shares, from a considerably different angle, with Lars von Trier.)

By comparison with Campion’s film work, however, Top of the Lake brings these issues to the fore only to wrap them up in frustratingly pat ways. One of the reasons I was keen to review Top of the Lake was that I wanted to see how it matched up against other recent auteurist TV/cinema hybrids, such as Olivier Assayas’ Carlos (2010) and Todd Haynes’ Mildred Pierce (2011). As it happens, Top of the Lake has much more in common with last year’s disappointing Kurosawa Kiyoshi miniseries Penance, a TV project through and through. Like Penance, Top of the Lake finds a major artist getting bogged down in genre rules, hurried plotting and clumsy editing.

But even more damagingly, Campion rolls out not only a narrative idea but a worldview—male dominance as a toxic force, strangling the world like kudzu in a garden—and sacrifices that vision to off-the-rails plot twists, character contrivance, and convenient episode-seven mopping up. This is a crying shame, as Top of the Lake’s initial episodes were fascinating precisely because they were tonally awkward and inconsistent. The world of Laketop was so openly hateful to the female sex that it hovered somewhere between documentary and science fiction, and in so doing reflected a fundamental crisis of our times. By the end, the show contents itself with fashionable cynicism, and that’s not enough. There’s way too much on the line.

“Episode One”/“Episode Two” | Top Of The Lake | TV ... - The AV Club Scott Tobias

“You’re a long way from any help,” says a concerned mother to Robin Griffin, a big-city cop who’s investigating a crime in an idyllic New Zealand backwater in Jane Campion’s mini-series Top Of The Lake. “I am the help,” she replies.

That little exchange captures both Robin’s predicament and the essence of who she is. In Campion’s feminist noir, which airs two of seven episodes tonight on the Sundance Channel, there’s a heightened awareness that Robin not only has the responsibility of taking lead on a rape/missing person case, but also has to navigate the world of men. That means getting second-guessed and mocked by local cops below her rank; intimidated and harassed by roughnecks who don’t respect her authority (or even the seriousness of crimes against women); and put under a level of scrutiny from all parties that would be unthinkable for a male detective. The closest cinematic antecedent may be Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence Of The Lambs, and so far, Campion’s point-of-view is similarly expansive, covering Robin, a 12-year-old victim, and an entire makeshift community of women—some fighting abuse, others withstanding it, still more seeking refuge.

Returning to the TV format for the first time since 1990’s An Angel At My Table, her superb autobiography of mental patient turned novelist Janet Frame, Campion and co-writer Gerard Lee borrow the basic framework of David Lynch’s cult classic Twin Peaks (lush setting, outsider detective, small town, big secrets, even a dead body lapped ashore), but makes it unmistakably her own. There’s no shortage of eccentric local color here, but it’s not of the abstracted Lynchian variety, save maybe for a colony of exiled women led by Holly Hunter’s ash-haired guru, who has a tendency to speak in odd philosophical aphorisms. In Queenstown, New Zealand, what passes for quirky passes also for hostile, like the victim’s sinister father, who lives in a surveilled fortress and has two of his three sons trained like famished pitbulls, or a bartender whose cabin is an apocalypse bunker of stockpiled rifles.

The haunting opening image of a young girl walking into the lake recalls Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho The Bailiff—and the connection is likely not a coincidence, given Mizoguchi’s career-long interest in the plight of women. In Sansho The Bailiff, the suicide ends the crushing despair and hopelessness of being sold into slavery; in Top Of The Lake, 12-year-old Tui (Jacqueline Joe) only gets shoulder-deep before turning back, but it’s not hard to imagine her being overcome by despair and hopelessness of another kind. After she’s rescued from the lake and taken back to school for an examination, the nurse discovers that Tui is pregnant, prompting a statutory rape investigation.

In town to care for her cancer-stricken mother, Robin (Elizabeth Moss) succeeds to a limited degree in getting Tui to open up and talk to her about what happened. But before she can follow up on the one literal scrap of information she could extract from the girl—a piece of notebook paper with the words “NO ONE” in response to a paternity question—Tui vanishes without a trace. Her father Matt Mitcham, played with chilling ferocity by Peter Mullan, emerges as the prime suspect, a drug dealer and small-time gangster who seems capable of any crime, given his hair-trigger temper and his casual disregard for human and animal life. In murder mysteries like Top Of The Lake, Matt would be the first one eliminated in the whodunit, because his guilt seems too obvious. The same, however, isn’t true of his two brutish sons, or a third, Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), who has a past with Robin.

Lately, the Mitchams’ ire has been raised mainly by the presence of strange women in “Paradise,” a slice of lakeside heaven that he claims to own. When GJ (Hunter) and a small cadre of middle-aged women set up a hippie shantytown of shipping containers on the property, Matt and sons first blame the local realtor who took Paradise out from under them, then on the women themselves, who are all seeking protection from just this sort of thuggery. In her own way, GJ seems as capable of dealing with the threat as Robin, but she goes about her business with a more Zen-like reserve. She wants to care for and protect her vulnerable charges, but Tui’s presence in her camp the night before her disappearance will certainly make that a challenge.

Wavering Kiwi accent aside, there’s no more ideal choice to play Robin than Elizabeth Moss, who knows well how to play an enterprising woman in a man’s world from her time at Sterling Cooper in Mad Men. Moss exudes more confidence here, in part because Top Of The Lake takes place in present-day and not the early ‘60s, and in part because Robin would be eaten alive if she failed to assert herself. Yet in both shows, Moss remains a fascinating enigma, driven by unseen forces and haunted by mysterious vulnerabilities. It would be easy enough for Campion to make Robin the noble feminine warrior in an arena thick with testosterone, but Moss has a talent for making herself sympathetic and strong while keeping the full scope of her feelings and motives under close guard. In other words, she’s the type of actress who can carry a TV show—be it six hours or six seasons.

Though it’s hard to make any firm statements about the plotting through two-sevenths of the story, Top Of The Lake is succeeding so far where Campion’s other attempt at genre subversion, 2003’s In The Cut, fell drastically short. Campion’s eagerness to attack a common format from a feminist angle—in that case, the sexy thriller made popular by Basic Instinct and its imitators—wasn’t matched by much care in the storytelling. There may be a whiff of conventionality to the central mystery in Top Of The Lake, but it appears much more sure-footed than In The Cut—to say nothing of the ongoing debacle that is AMC’s similar The Killing—and compelling even if Campion had nothing else in mind but an entertaining yarn. After all, in order to plumb the depths, she must first have the lake.

Stray observations:

I studiously avoided mentioning the identity of the body washed ashore. That would be Bob Platt, a realtor everyone in town appears to have hated, which gives the Mitchams some cover, along with the assumption that Platt drowned accidentally. The sequence where Platt drowns on a towline from the Mitchams' boat underlines Matt's reckless disregard for human life, even as later scenes make him seem genuinely incapable of doing his own daughter grievous harm.
Paradise looks to be a solid source of comic relief in a show that could use some. From Hunter's eccentric musings to scenes like the one where a woman offers cash to any barfly willing to have sex for seven minutes, the group's offbeat antics had a funny (or at least tragicomic) bent that holds the show's darker elements in balance.
Campion and Lee are wise to suggest trouble in Robin's past without getting into it too heavily in these early episodes. Such revelations stand to pay off more forcefully later, and they don't threaten to undermine the central mystery while it's being established.
I haven't said a word about David Wenham, despite his second billing in the cast. Despite having deer taxidermy mounted above his desk, Wenham's Al Parker seems more open to being a true partner to Robin and a promising sign that Campion intends to bring nuance to the men, too.
Matt's words about Tui's pregnancy are cold-blooded in the extreme, even before he calls her a “slut” like him. After he vows to take her to a clinic the next day, Robin informs him that the girl is four or five months along. His response: “I'll take her to Sydney.”
Robin's mother delivers my favorite lines of the two episodes: “You can be very hard. And what I don't like is that you think it's strength.”
Incredible scene in the second episode involving Bob Platt's dog. The alpha gesture of shooting the animal in Robin's presence, just to trigger fear and revulsion, is stunning—and an indicator of how Matt and his boys hold such criminal agency in the town.
And yet: “It's good what you're doing, you know? Helping out my daughter, she's in a tough spot. Just understand one thing: No one loves her more than me. No one.”
The need for helicopters on the hunt for Tui leads to some breathtaking overhead shots that emphasize the needle-in-a-haystack futility of a missing-persons search in this area.
“A sheep's vagina is the closest thing to a woman's vagina,” says the roughneck who has just mocked Robin as a feminist lesbian.

“Episode Three” | Top Of The Lake | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

Now that we’re past the two-part première and into the third of seven parts, the question remains: To what extent was Top Of The Lake conceived as seven distinct episodes of television and to what extent is it merely a seven-episode unfolding of one complete story? We can say for sure that casual viewers could not drop in on “Episode Three” and get a satisfying, coherent, standalone nugget of television. In that sense, it’s completely serialized. On the other hand, there are themes specific to tonight’s hour that set it apart from the two we’ve seen before. So while I’m mostly continuing to review the show in medias res, oblivious to how individual parts will fit into the completely whole, the third seventh does have a particular flavor.

The prevailing theme is one of self-loathing and self-abuse, and it makes partners out of our adversaries, Robin and Matt. Until now, Robin has been an intrepid pursuer of justice in a corrupt and hostile place, slashing through a thicket of male authority figures and local roughnecks to get to the bottom of a missing persons case. Sure, there’s a degree of selfishness to what she’s doing: She’s freaked out by having to care for her cancer-stricken mother and the case gives her an excellent reason to get out of it—and puts her on much surer ground to boot. But Robin feels, properly, that she can be an advocate for Tui where none exists and though she has a better feel for the culture than a true outsider, she’s constantly displaying bravery and resolve in moving the investigation forward.

And yet the feeling that she’s cast dangerously adrift comes through forcefully in “Episode Three.” Her flirty texts with “Steve,” her fiancé from Sydney, turn here into a tense phone call where he’s impatient and disbelieving of her rationalizations for continuing to stay there. We also learn her engagement to Steve is now over five years long and counting, which seems entirely due to foot-dragging on her part. But the true extent of her restlessness and self-destructive nature—qualities she shares with Elisabeth Moss’ character on Mad Men, e.g. her dalliance with Vincent Kartheiser’s Pete Campbell—really comes out in her renewed sexual relationship to Johnno, the son of her prime suspect. A session in a bar bathroom leads to a bedroom scene where Johnno asks Robin to keep her engagement ring on during sex—a form of territorial pissing that seems a bit much, frankly.

Meanwhile, Peter Mullan’s Matt continues to be a fascinatingly shifty character, with some moments of tenderness sneaking into a persona defined by anger, paranoia, and violence. Matt has some heat taken off him when Wolfie, the rifle-blasting bartender, is found hanging from a tree outside his cabin, with an apologetic suicide note on the inside table. Robin joins the rest of us in not believing Wolfie has any connection to Tui’s disappearance, particularly after a forest grave reveals a dead dog.

Episode three of Top Of The Lake is a reminder of Matt’s dark charisma, his ability to assert his will and forge relationships through qualities other than instilling fear in people. He and Al (David Wenham), for instance, have an arrangement that gives him the jump on Robin’s investigation, and he wields his charm again when he comes to Paradise bearing flowers. His intent is to ask questions of GJ, but as we see with Robin earlier (“How are your knees? You will go down hard—bang!”), she’s more inclined to ask questions and make prophetic statements than give out information. But he comes away with Anita (Robyn Malcolm), a Paradise resident who finds him alluring enough to look past his psychosis. She can do so no longer when Matt takes her to visit his mother’s grave, freaks out over her treading on it, and proceeds to flagellate himself with a belt.

In terms of the main investigation, Robin and Matt’s behavior suggest different things: Robin’s personal issues will be an obstacle in the investigation and Matt’s upset over his mother indicates that he really does care about his family as much as he says he does, even if his relationship with them is dangerously twisted. Overall, this third episode undermines that assumption that Robin and Matt, powerful as they are, exercise as much control over their lives as they seem to. Their weaknesses make them vulnerable, and each will likely be expert in sussing them out in the other.

Stray observations:

Some serious gallows humor at Paradise over a locked shipping container: “It’s where we keep all the dead children.”
Moss’ reaction to her mother’s news about being taken off chemo is a great piece of acting. Robin should understand right away that it’s bad news—that the treatments aren’t working and the cancer is terminal. But she doesn’t, so the news registers on Moss’ face in a wave of shock and despair.
Robin nearly stumbles onto Matt’s drug operation, tucked in a secret passageway beneath a bathroom shower. The sight of two women leaving the bathroom—and Matt’s hasty, none-too-convincing explanation—bring her back to it, however.
“Can we do a bit more of the wrong thing before we do the right thing?” If I had a problem with this episode, it’s that it could have been less explicit in parts. (See also: Sex with the engagement ring on.)
Tui’s “NO ONE” note appears to be the key piece of evidence. To be continued…

“Episode Four” | Top Of The Lake | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club Brandon Norwalk

“Episode Four” of Top Of The Lake is an unusually focused leg of the marathon, as everyone shines some light on Robin’s attack and rape by four drunk men on her way home after a dance 15 years ago. Al tells Robin how he and some others, including Matt, rounded up the criminals and punished them. Robin tells him about how she gave birth to Sarge’s child. Her mother announces that she wants to meet her grandchild even if Robin doesn’t. And Johnno nearly makes a confession so unbearable to Robin that she cuts him off.

The episode is constantly negotiating between knowledge and ignorance. Al doesn’t really want to know what happened to Bob Platt, Wolfgang Zanic, or a third case a pathologist can’t explain. Simone is afraid to know what’s going on with her son Jamie, who collects bones and doesn’t speak anymore. Most significantly, Robin does and doesn’t want to know what happened to her. In the first scene, she says, “Fuck the truth, Al,” although by the time it’s over, she and Al have filled in the aftermath for both the rapists and the victim. Before Johnno and Robin get too close to the trauma, he asks, “Are you up for it?” and she shakes her head no. At the end she stops him: “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me.”

Top Of The Lake is stylistically emphatic, but not in the comically overcast way of The Killing. And there’s certainly no lurid thrill to the crime. A prom photo takes us back to a faded brown dance, magical at the time maybe, but now only sickening. Some guys interrupt a dance, and Johnno leaves Robin alone and upset without an explanation; inexplicably, black balloons flank her as she stands in the doorway peering into the darkness. A foggy gray outdoor shot is marked by sudden headlights, failed communication, and a chain-link dog cage. It’s a sequence of pure helpless despair as we wait to see how far directors Garth Davis and Jane Campion will take us into the trauma.

An earlier scene is a much subtler window into what Cinemascope’s Michael Sicinski calls a jungle of patriarchy. After a drunken dinner with Al, Robin can barely stand up, so he takes her keys from her. The next morning, she wakes up in a quiet, anxious scene of worrisome details: She’s in Al’s bed; she’s wearing his shirt; he took off her pants; he’s already left for the office. And this isn’t even a Mitcham or one of the barflies. Top Of The Lake successfully if momentarily builds all this suspicion around Robin’s co-worker and boss. When she pushes him on the details of the evening, trying to catch him off-balance by alternating between questions about the night before and new evidence in the Tui disappearance, he answers well. “So why don’t I feel like saying thank you?” She can’t be sure, even with friendly Al.

The gender war really gets obvious with Matt. Anita again violates a sacred space for him, this time by curling up on Tui’s bed the morning after. It’s an unwelcome act of penetration, and if you really want to get symbolic, Matt also lashes out because Anita’s cup handles point inward. Matt always seems impotent when it comes to hands-on physical violence, though, asserting his will through his sons and motor vehicles. This time, he responds to Anita’s transgressions by flinging her to the ground with the force of his car when he rams the Paradise gate as she struggles to unlock it, haranguing the women about their menstrual waste saturating his land, and telling each of the women that she’s unfuckable.

The women in Top Of The Lake are bound by endurance, from Robin to her mother. Every encroachment on the Paradise community is met with a swirling mass of non-violently resisting bodies. The men are bound by power, from Al dragging his feet to Matt intimidating the town. Zanic pulls a gun on her even though he’s done nothing wrong. Even the friendliest faces adhere to the type: Johnno interrupts Robin’s interview of Tui’s mother. But Robin is cracking up. Al suggests she pull Sarge over for an auto violation and book him. “Okay,” she says with steel, “And after that can I kill him?” The line recalls the climax of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, another murder mystery about a sick patriarchy.

Later, on the heels of two other charmers, Sarge approaches Robin at the bar like he’s found his receptacle for the evening. She’s chuckling that he doesn’t remember her. It’s pitch black. “Did we fuck or something?” As soon as the words come out, Elisabeth Moss drops the smirk, darts right to his eyes, and holds. Just as suddenly, she breaks a bottle on the bar and stabs him with it, possibly more than once. He collapses to the ground (chuckling?) as Johnno carries her out the door into the night screaming, “Do you remember me now, asshole?”

From the moment Al tells Robin she’s too close to the case, “Episode Four” is tightly tethered to pulp convention. She goes reckless cop on Sarge. Al demands her badge and gun in a battle of one-shots. She keeps investigating Tui’s disappearance and all the other skeletons in Queenstown’s closet on her own. But the stabbing is also a masculine move, penetration, a claim for power, and it happens in the same episode Johnno is deprived of power, locked in a cage, helplessly forced to watch an assault on his date. In an episode where the female cop is getting so emotional that she gets lost in a cut from a placid golden forest to a windy stone shore, Robin and Johnno violate the show’s rigid gender divide.

So does Ian Fellows, the pathologist who calls Robin at her home, rescues her from the episode-long reminiscence of a horrific night. He’s recommended three cases that Al has refused to pursue: Bob Platt, Wolfgang Zanic, and a girl named April Stephens who was run over on a lake-view road with traces of cocaine in her vagina. “I had a daughter who overdosed, so for me, it’s emotional,” he says. For Robin, too.

Stray observations:

Thanks to Scott for letting me sub this week.

Turns out Zanic couldn’t be Tui’s rapist because he was out of town for dental surgery the month she got pregnant.
Loved the early abstract shot of Moss’ face barely perceptible in the clouds reflected on her car door.
Jamie, the bone collector, is the latest red herring. He runs through the woods, kayaks out to somewhere, and buries a trash bag in the ground. In his interview with Robin, he reveals that he has also completed the barista course. Also of note: Johnno has been tracking the use of the kayak with a string.
In another powerhouse moment between Elisabeth Moss and Robyn Nevin, Robin tells her mother, “I don’t give a shit if Sarge is walking around with a grubby bandage on. I hope he is awake and in fucking pain. Always!” “Me, too. Always.”

“Episode Five” | Top Of The Lake | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club Brandon Nowalk

After last week’s muscular focus, “Episode Five” scatters in the wind, and directors Garth Davis and Jane Campion just sort of watch, the authorial GJ hiding behind blank stares and not-so-cryptic expressions. A lot happens, actually. Johnno comes clean to Robin. Robin gets reinstated. Al proposes to her. Jude visits GJ. Jude dies, even, and Tui lives. It’s all very matter-of-fact, nothing given undue prominence outside of the exploitation cinema flashbacks and the cliffhanger. What stands out most is the accidental surprise that it’s been two months since Tui disappeared. By the end, you’d be forgiven for forgetting the episode even aired.

With so little passion, the episode’s jolts of violence easily become this chunk’s main theme. But first Robin says to Johnno, “I want to know the bad thing you were going to tell me.” A seven-hour marathon might not feel so haphazard, but threads like this and Robin’s work status feel arbitrarily manipulated in episodic form. Why bench Robin if she’s just going to come back to work next week? Johnno takes us back to that night, to the practically black-and-white scene of a brutal rape, scored by a barking dog and a screaming woman and shot with maximum jitter. Johnno’s confession is that he was let out of the dog cage but didn’t do anything to help her.

One of the rapists uses his tie as a leash to walk him like a dog, throws him to the ground, and taunts him into submission. It plays like a humorless rendition of Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac, which is all about gender and power. Immediately after confessing to an eminently reasonable Robin, Johnno exiles Sarge in the same way. He grabs him by the throat, knocks him to the ground, and makes Sarge fear him enough to obey him. Last week, I observed that all the men on Top Of The Lake are united by power. No wonder so much of the violence is about domination and submission. It’s not primarily sadism or vengeance or passion that drives all the violence on Top Of The Lake but a need to control.

The Johnno scene also illustrates the repetition of violence, the learned behavior of patriarchal abuse. It recalls Al’s line about rounding up the rapists and teaching them a lesson their fathers failed to. Instead of legally prosecuting them, Al and Matt and some others physically assaulted the guys explicitly as a means of behavioral modificiation. They were trying to teach them. With that in mind, it’s somewhat less surprising than it would have been to see Al take over Robin’s interrogation of Jamie with a prison experiment. He pulls Jamie’s chair out from under him, forces him to go through the motions of making his mother a cup of tea, and slaps him upside the head repeatedly. He must be really impressed with himself that all it took was a position of maximum authority, a much bigger body, and a lot of physical coercion to get Jamie to sort of respond. It’s like he’s spanking a puppy.

When Robin challenges him, Al denies that things got overheated. “Absolutely not. I nudged him. It’s how men relate to each other. It’s how they work with kids who have got no dads, an older male teaches an arrogant little prick some respect. He’s not gonna steal and hand out this yes/no shit.” There are two other striking instances of violence in “Episode Five”: Al flagellates himself again, and Jamie bangs his head into the wall. One wonders, especially given the Jamie-Tui connection, whether the self-punishment is also a learned behavior. Regardless, the episode recalls Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, which seeks to explain “some things that happened in this country” with a story of domineering fathers who beat and manipulate their children when some mysterious accidents happen in late Weimar Germany. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the “things that happened” were those children growing up to be Nazis. Authoritarianism starts at home.

Robin and Jamie’s mother stand up against that violence. Robin’s credentials and authority and relationship with Matt is enough to call him off, but Jamie’s mother has to physically embrace Jamie to keep him from hurting himself. Eventually, he returns the hug. In a show about details instead of events, that’s huge.

Everything else can probably be summed up as strange bedfellows, two disparate characters meeting, mostly to the good. Jude’s visit to GJ actually brings out some compassion. Not in the advice, although it’s comforting: “You’re not going to experience this death of yours. He will.” She prescribes heroin instead of morphine. “In nature, there is no death, just a reshuffling of atoms.” No, what’s most moving is that GJ volunteers comfort instead of waiting for Jude to ask her questions. She reaches out, interacts, gets down on this earthly plane with the rest of the women in Paradise. Later, Jude meets Johnno and could not be more uncomfortable with her daughter’s social arrangements. She warns Robin to cut ties, and Robin acquiesces. Maybe it’s superstition, maybe it’s lingering GJ, or maybe it’s Robin suggesting that Johnno signaled the rapists in the truck that night, but suddenly Johnno doesn’t seem like such a good match. Lucy Lawless’ Caroline Platt, widow of the realtor in the boating accident, meets Robin and offers Bob’s computer if it will help her investigation. The final surprise encounter is the ending. Jamie ransacks his house, kayaks across the lake, dumps his garbage bags on the ground, and makes bird calls. Suddenly, Tui rushes out, rips open a bag, and starts eating. Presumably he’s been helping her the whole time, but it’s not completely clear. He doesn’t say anything when he sees her, and she doesn’t acknowledge him at all. It’s such a manufactured cliffhanger I wonder if it’s even noticeable in marathon form.

Stray observations:

As Johnno evicts Sarge from his trailer park, one female neighbor applauds.
There’s never an official explanation for why Al reinstates Robin, but the editing suggests it’s because a journalist is making him look bad?
It might be nothing, but part of the reason “Episode Five” feels blank is that men keep changing the subject. While Robin doggedly pursues the subjects of Tui and April and demands Johnno finish his story, the journalist gets distracted by the cafe and Al pivots to Robin’s lack of furniture.
Maybe the accusation is ridiculous on its face, but the fact that Johnno refuses to say that he didn’t signal the truck is troubling. On the other hand, no amount of magical jump cuts can redeem such a fake-seeming fight.
An act of violence that isn’t motivated by domination: The peeping tom who slashes Johnno.
A great scene follows, and not just because Johnno is reduced to a mere towel. Johnno sits naked in a shipping container, restrained out of necessity (he needs medical attention), surrounded by women talking frankly about sex and implicitly about his sexuality.
When Jamie is arrested, he has a bottle of roofies on him. Yikes.

“Episode Six”/“Episode Seven” | Top Of The Lake | TV ... - The AV Club Brandon Nowalk

With just an hour to go in Top Of The Lake, answers are finally, tantalizingly close. So why is it still so disquieting? Robin has some hacker friends investigate Bob Platt’s computer, and inside a ZIP folder are pictures of, well, something nefarious. Robin looks at, like, three pictures in a folder of many before the editing takes us away in typical Top Of The Lake fashion. If Robin gets any clues from Bob’s computer, the audience certainly doesn’t. There’s definitely a deer head in there, though, like the one in Al’s office, like the one in Matt’s dining area, like the one at the dance, the list goes on. That dead animal trophy almost has the connotations of a Lars Von Trier movie.

Speaking of Al, the more he protests his innocence the night Robin passed out at his place, the more suspicious he becomes. It doesn’t help that he brings it up out of the blue in a vulnerable place like the tight space between two cars in a parking garage, and it’s almost irredeemable that he does so as a prelude to another romantic proposition. “I didn’t rape you when I could have, so do you wanna go out this weekend?” Johnno may not say once and for all that he had nothing to do with Robin’s rape, but his actions are repeatedly heroic. He rescues Robin by boat, he races the hunters to Tui, he tries to find the man who shot at Robin. But Al is giving out warning signs, not to mention outright offenses, all over the place. He takes Robin boating and then surprises her in the middle of the lake by bringing out Matt, whom he had been hiding. He refuses to take her to shore—this is where Johnno’s boat rescue comes in—and then he sets her up with a one-on-one interview at Matt’s house. Robin is baffling lately, secretly looking into Al’s finances but totally buying this confession idea even after the boat trip. Even Bob Platt can see that Al and Matt are in some kind of cahoots, and that guy went out on a boat with Matt and his sons after cheating him. But back to that night Robin passed out at Al’s, now that you mention it, what was up with that? That Rohypnol is floating around the edges of the story is very unsettling.

At the very least, Jamie wasn’t using Rohypnol to rape women. Johnno chalks up the roofies to adolescent experimentation in the latest skewed outburst of gender politics. But apparently Jamie is not the father of Tui’s child, which is only discovered after he is hounded to his death by Matt’s hunters. At last there’s a solid answer and it’s too late. There’s no comfort in resolution.

That scene is the standout, and not just because the search for Tui has been driving the heft of the miniseries. The sequence begins when Matt’s hunters find the string that leads to Tui’s alarm bell. Tui and Jamie are in her shelter. Tui makes no bones about warning them off, shooting dangerously close to them. But the kids abandon the shelter, the familiar blue hoodie firing at the hunters as the other scrambles up the hill. Robin and Johnno hear the shots. Johnno races directly up and sends Robin to follow the river around. With the minimalism of just people and landscape and the magical geography that bends to the story, it feels mythic. At its best, the whole series does. A dozen shots of figures and agendas racing each other to the top of a mountain later, and Tui slips and falls, sliding down the side of the mountain and then off a ledge. When Robin sees her in free fall, it knocks the wind out of you. When it turns out that Jamie and Tui switched jackets, that Jamie drew the hunters away from Tui and died to protect her, it’s all the more moving.

There’s another interesting fact about Jamie: Turns out he’s gay. His mother implies that that’s a dangerous word ’round these parts, but Jane Campion and Gerard Lee sure took their sweet time complicating the gender structure of Laketop. (Then again, as we’re reminded again with a cut to credits that even Mad Men would blush at, Top Of The Lake is a one-sitting deal, not episodic television. Viewers aren’t necessarily meant to drink in the dregs of heteronormativity for a whole month.) Jamie and Tui are or rather were just friends. Like Robin and Johnno turning the usual gender associations on their ears, when the kids are under attack, look what happens: Tui picks fight, Jamie picks flight. There’s also a fun, albeit foreboding, scene where some friends come visit Tui for her birthday. No weird power structures or practice violence. These kids aren’t adhering to any cycle of violence yet. Maybe there’s a way forward after all.

Stray observations:

Matt’s “cleaners” and “accountant” are “reading” Blue Velvet for “their book club.” Top Of The Lake functions partly as a catalog of references to gender-war pop culture.
Someone shoots at Robin. Life goes on. Sometimes I really don’t understand this fictional universe.
Matt interrupts one of his sons mid-coitus. The other one also sees. The Mitchams are a tight-knit bunch.
Jamie says the man who knocked up Tui is the dark creator who sucks the heart out of people. Then he tells his friends they know who did it. “Wake up.” Hey, it’s more forthcoming than yes/no hands.
Jamie also mimes childbirth from the kid’s point of view to show Tui how easy it will be. Just when he becomes my favorite character, he’s gone forever.
Jamie’s mother wants to testify against Matt and claims some others will join her. We’ll see.
The word “scene” overstates it, but the final scene sets the stage for the ultimate showdown with admirable concision. Robin says her distress code: “‘That’s unacceptable.’ If I say it twice, it means get reinforcements.”

“Episode Seven”

For a while, the last hour of Top Of The Lake actually feels hopeful, which is saying something for an episode that begins with the protagonist learning she’s sleeping with her half-brother. “There is no match for the tremendous intelligence of the body,” GJ says, but look where that got everyone. Robin and Johnno process this information, but before long, they’re racing Matt to Tui. Matt gets there first and runs off with the baby. At the time I wondered if he says, “Kids don’t have kids,” because he believes Tui is biologically incapable of conception or if he’s just in denial. Anyway, he points his rifle at the baby. Johnno points his gun at Matt. And Tui shoots both of them in succession, fatally in the case of her father. Robin holds her in her arms and tells her everything is going to be okay. And it seems like it actually is. Paradise actually seems tranquil for once.

But as they say, all good things must come to a final-act twist. Apparently Al is involved in some child-molestation ring. The barista-program pizza parties, the roofies, it’s so obvious in the end that Robin figures it out staring at the barista pictures like she’s in Veronica Mars season two right down to the rack zoom. She shows up, Matt’s shirt is inside out, he harasses her, she shoots him. Lotta that going around. Mercifully these particular kids just seem drugged so far, not molested. Robin points her gun and her phone at the crime scene and only has to use one.

Top Of The Lake is obnoxiously deterministic. We should probably be grateful Johnno never revealed himself to be into hostel torture, or maybe that’s the subtext. But that’s because the series is more symbolic, and all the roiling themes actually tie into this coup de grace. Al and his buddies pass on the violence to the next generation. Remember what Jamie said about the dark creator who rips out hearts? There is a gender component, even if one of the kids was male. There’s the institutionalization of patriarchy in Al’s badge and the corrupt juvenile-corrections program. And there’s the upsetting solution: violence. Technically Tui acts in defense of her newborn (and she just clips Johnno, who survives), and Robin can likely claim self-defense, as well. But women on Top Of The Lake have two options—fight or flight—and the big heroes pick the former.

Getting past the blindside, the seventh episode foregrounds familial themes of incest and surrogate family. Robin turns out to be Matt’s biological daughter, but Johnno conveniently turns out not to be. Al claims Matt is the father of Tui’s child, too, but guess who has reason to lie about that! There’s evidence Matt is the father, but there’s also his erectile dysfunction, and now there’s another suspect in Al or one of his pals. (In other slightly open questions, it’s pretty obvious now that Al raped Robin that night. The misery of patriarchy is inescapable.) Before Al shows his second face, though, there’s a pretty funny “Go ask your mom” scene that casts him, Robin, and Tui as a happy, little family. Most of the time, though, Robin and Johnno play mom and dad for Tui. Like Robin picking the man who raised her over Matt, you really can choose family.

In the end Robin tries to scrub Al’s blood off her shirt in the lake. At first I rolled my eyes at the cherry on top of the essentialist sundae. The last we see the hero of the gender war, she’s doing laundry. But it’s a complicated image. For one, it represents yet another traumatic period in Robin’s life that will drive her in the future. But there’s a wider implication. Laketop still doesn’t feel safe. Even GJ is fleeing to the opposite side of the planet, fading into the west like Galadriel. Laketop may have lost some authority figures, but those corrupt institutions have training programs with seconds-in-command waiting to take the reins. This will all be passed on. That blood ain’t coming out.

Stray observation:

After all that, I’m with GJ. I just want to get away from these crazy bitches.

A Scandal In Paradise: On “Top Of The Lake” - Los Angeles Review ... Jen Vafidis from The Los Angeles Review, April 6, 2013

“Top of the Lake”: Like the best crime series, it’s about much more than crime-solving Willa Paskin from Salon, March 18, 2013

“Top of the Lake's” superb finale - Salon.com Willa Paskin from Salon, April 16, 2013

Deep Dive - The New Yorker Emily Nussbaum, March 25, 2013

Sundance: Campion's Seven-Hour Top of the Lake -- Vulture Jada Yuan, January 21, 2013

Giving Credit to Paratexts and Parafeminism in Top of ... - Film Quarterly Kathleen A. McHugh, Spring 2015

Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

Slant Magazine [Chris Cabin]

Top of the Lake Is Myth-Mad, But It Gets Under Your Skin Troy Patterson from Slate, March 18, 2013, also seenhere: Top of the Lake

Your Favorite Show Is Too Long - Slate Magazine David Haglund from Slate, March 18, 2013

Top of the Lake What was up with Mitcham and Anita's awful trip? by Dan Kois and David Haglund from Slate, March 25, 2013, also seen here: Top of the Lake review: Elisabeth Moss in Jane Campion's ...

Top of the Lake Wait, did Detective Sergeant Faramir just roofie Robin? by Dan Kois and June Thomas from Slate, April 1, 2013

Top of the Lake GJ is like Hunter S. Thompson mixed with Sappho, by Dan Kois and Michelle Dean from Slate, April 9, 2013

'Top Of the Lake' TV Review: Mini-Series Depicts Dark Reality Of Ra Morgan Davies from Policy Mic, March 19, 2013

Are Miniseries the Future Of Television? Morgan Davies from Policy Mic, March 26, 2013

'Top of the Lake' is an Engaging Misstep David Thomson from The New Republic, April 1, 2013

'Top of the Lake' Finale on Sundance: Review by David Thomson ... David Thomson from The New Republic, April 18, 2013, also seen here: Paradise Lost

Review: Jane Campion's ' Top of the Lake ' a riveting long-form mystery Alan Sepinwall from Hit Fix, March 18, 2013

Series finale review: Top of the Lake - HitFix Alan Sepinwall from Hit Fix, April 15, 2013

[Review] Top of the Lake: Parts 1-3 - The Film Stage Jared Mobarek

Sundance Curiosities: What is Jane Campion's 'Top of the Lake ... Alison Willmore from indieWIRE

Inside Jane Campion's New Sundance Thriller “Top of the Lake ... Jace Lacob from The Daily Beast

'Top of the Lake,' 'Rectify,' and the evolution of the Sundance ... Andy Greenwald from Grantland, April 24, 2013

Top of the Lake - | Berlinale | Programme | Programme

'Top of the Lake' will make a splash Robert Bianco from USA Today

User Reviews from imdb Author: toddg33

Elizabeth Moss and Holly Hunter on Top of the Lake - Vanity Fair video interview with Elizabeth Moss and Holly Hunter, January 2013

Top of the Lake: Sundance Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy, also seen here: Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]

Variety [Justin Chang]

Top of the Lake - first look review | Film | guardian.co.uk Andrew Pulver, February 9, 2013, also seen here: Guardian [Andrew Pulver]

Jane Campion's 'Top of the Lake' is a multilayered mystery Ellen Gray from The Philly

‘Top of the Lake’: A slow-building mystery, skillfully told Hank Steuver from The Washington Post, also seen here: Sundance Channel's 'Top of the Lake': Out of the gloom, a chilling ...

'Bates' backstory and 'Top of the Lake' South Coast Today

In Top of the Lake, Peggy Olson Goes to Hell - - Movies ... - City Pages Alan Scherstuhl

Get to the Bottom of 'Top of the Lake': New miniseries premieres on ... Aleksander Chan from The Austin Chronicle

'Top of the Lake' review: depths satisfy - SFGate Dave Wiegand

'Top of the Lake' star Elisabeth Moss savors miniseries' nuances ... Jessica Gelt from The LA Times, March 17, 2013

Winter TCA: Elisabeth Moss takes break from ad world to find a missing girl in 'Top of the Lake' Yvonne Villarreal from The LA Times, January 5, 2013

TV picks for March 18-24: 'Top of the Lake,' 'Phil Spector' The Chicago Tribune

Pregnant Girl Vanishes, and Story Lines Fork The New York Times

Top of the Lake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Campos, Antonio

/ HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » People We Love: Antonio Campos ... by Antonio Campos from Hammer to Nail, March 17, 2009

'Make-out with Violence' Takes Top Nashville Film Festival Honors ... Jim Ridley from The Nashville Scene, April 20, 2009

ANTONIO CAMPOS ON AFTERSCHOOL - Filmmaker Magazine | The Magazine ... Scott Macaulay interview from Filmmaker magazine, November 22, 2008

Afterschool Director Antonio Campos on Absorbing Internet ... Bilge Ebiri interview from New York magazine, October 2, 2009

'Afterschool''s Antonio Campos: 'Continue to Experiment and Play ... indieWIRE interview, October 2, 2009

BUY IT NOW

USA (58 mi) 2005 US premiere version (34 mi)

User reviews from imdb Author: Roberto Bentivegna from Los Angeles, CA

I saw this film at the Cannes Film Festival. Firstly, I am surprised that the running time here is listed as 60+ minutes. The cut that I saw, and the cut that won the Cinefondation award, was 34 minutes. Perhaps there's an extended version? Anyway. I didn't think the film was great, and I certainly didn't hate it. It was "okay". I usually have a strong opinion about what I watch, but with "Buy It Now" I looked at it more as a technical piece than anything else. Maybe it's because I knew the story that it was based on quite well (UK girl who sells her virginity on Ebay). To me, this adaptation of the real-life incident is joyless and heavy-going. The vertical framing techniques employed are quite good, as is the soft focus used on the mother and the deliberately slow pacing when Chelsea is waiting for "the man". But it all feels a little self-indulgent and pointless. What is the film trying to say? It looks heavy, and it feels heavy, but surprisingly the after-taste is faint and quick to vanish.

Having said that, the performances are excellent, some of the techniques used are interesting and the "direct cinema" photography is inspired. For what it is- a student film- it's strong.

Time Out London (Ben Walters) review [4/5]

Adolescence has always been a period of self-dramatisation, each fledgling adult the hero of his or her own (usually tragic) tale. Thanks to the digital revolution, with its explosion of accessible DV, blogging, YouTube and the rest, these stories can now be articulated, aestheticised and archived as never before. Antonio Campos’ short, bifurcated experimental piece takes a ‘Blair Witch’ approach to this phenomenon, offering a purportedly genuine record of 16-year-old Chelsea Mangan’s sale of her virginity on eBay. The plan, hatched from the bedroom of the comfortable New York apartment Chelsea shares with her divorced mom, leads to a hotel-room encounter that proves less satisfying than the ‘killing two birds with one stone’ situation she hoped for.

The first half-hour, dubbed ‘Documentary’, is supposedly compiled from video material shot by Mangan (played by Chelsea Logan) for her own reasons as the enterprise unfolds; the second half, ‘Narrative’, presents the same chain of events as drama. I took the latter half to be another faux ‘found’ text, a piece of filmic autobiography made by the 16-year-old character, though there’s no particular evidence for this beyond more wooden performances and the wish-fulfilment quality of the john’s paternal qualities. In any case, the situation is presented in the context of parental neglect, self-abusive insecurity, exploitative consumerism and drug use of both the prescribed and proscribed sort. If film’s social commentary can tend towards the preachy and its dialogue towards glib dramatic irony, Campos establishes a complex nexus of contemporary social and aesthetic concerns with impressive economy and Logan’s double performance is strong.

The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review

Antonio Campos's satirical fantasy about a teenage girl putting her virginity for sale on eBay was originally a half-hour short which won the Cinéfondation prize at Cannes in 2005. Now it has been expanded to feature length. This is a ropey 62 minutes, however, making anything other than a DVD rental very poor value for money. And in fact it hasn't really been developed. What we appear to have is the same half-hour piece, preceded by a new 30-minute segment, billed as "documentary" to the "narrative" of the second half, but telling the same story all over again, in a more oblique way, with differences that imply nothing much other than that Campos was unsure how to expand the material. It's almost an object lesson on how enlarging a short film can be messed up.

What a shame it is. Buy It Now has clever and subversive ideas and some shrewd things to say about commercialism, consumerism, alienation and above all the unacknowledged eroticism of peer-to-peer web contact: such as gambling on Betfair, sharing video and music files, and above all buying and selling unwanted stuff on eBay. The fascination of watching the price rise during an auction has an illicit thrill. Downloading pictures of naked people having sex - that's Web Porn 1.0. But buying and selling stuff with anonymous strangers: that's Web Porn 2.0.

Chelsea Logan is a bored teenage girl in New York City, whose parents are separated; her mother is too busy working to make much time for her, and her dad lets her down by not visiting when he says he will. She hangs out with her friends, and does drugs with them in her room, and when she's all alone, indulges in a nasty little vice: Chelsea is a cutter, a self-harmer. But she has a plan to revolutionise her life; sick and tired of having no money to spend on the things she lusts after in magazines, and bored with being a virgin - and furthermore believing her friends' advice that "losing it" is no big deal - Chelsea advertises her virginity on eBay.

Director Antonio Campos appears, mischievously, to have entered this offer on the web for real and filmed the computer screen with its mounting bids from credulous pervs, while his actors improvised around the situation. The actual "delivery" of the goods in a hotel room is filmed very differently in each of the two segments, and the attitude of Chelsea's mother comes out a little differently too.

The grim business of selling sex to a wealthy middle-aged man is in sharp contrast to the prophylaxis of the net, in which transactions can take place quickly and cleanly. It is in this transaction that the true eroticism occurs, an eroticism that relies, paradoxically, on the anonymity and alienation of web contact. A condom is what provides the safety in the case of real sex; in the virtual cyber-world, what is important is a PayPal account, the vital new method of buying and selling with strangers that does not compromise your bank or credit details.

Buy It Now plays elegantly with these contemporary ideas. But what a pity that Antonio Campos could not have found a way to start from scratch and grow and develop his story more satisfyingly.

Shadows on the Wall (Rich Cline) capsule review

stylusmagazine.com (Sandro Matosevic) review

eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter) review [5/5]

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

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]

Gaydar Nation [Rachael Scott]

Variety (Robert Koehler) review

BBCi - Films Paul Arendt

Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]

THE LAST 15

USA (16 mi) 2007

User reviews from imdb Author: rasecz from United States

The Kirkland's are a well-to-do middle class family. We are introduced to each member by means of dollar values and costs: salaries, education, food, etc. The numbers are overlaid on the frame for each family member.

Preoccupations with money are voiced as the family prepares for dinner. Meanwhile, the ceiling is coming apart. Bits and pieces, a tail of dirt, dropping from above. More dollar costs are presented, this time to fix the ceiling.

The youngest boy, a teenager, seems fed up with what is going on around him. He sets to do something about it, fifteen minutes from now. Why they are the last fifteen will be clear if you see this so-so short.

"THE LAST 15" by Filmmaker Antonio Campos (borderline film) - BFOC ... seen in its entirety here on YouTube

AFTERSCHOOL B+ 92

USA (122 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

Why did I think this was a variant, though stylewise at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, of IGBY GOES DOWN (2002), where teens are lost in the wasteland of parental dysfunction, subject, away from home, to a meaningless existence of utter superficiality at a well respected boarding school in Connecticut? What could possibly happen here? This is the kind of prep school that parents start thinking about before pre-school, where they have their children’s lives all planned out for them well in advance, so by the time they get to high school it’s only a matter of course before they’re off to college and dad finds them a job afterwards. Success is measured by a student’s ability to follow a course others have set for them. While this may be a common practice on the East coast, this is a stunning abdication of parental responsibilities that at least opens the door, at minimum, for minor catastrophes to occur along the way outside of parental view when kids all alone at such young, tender ages are forced into a sink or swim situation. At what point did these parents think their kids could fend for themselves, as age-wise they are still immature and not yet ready to make decisions on their own, for if left to their own devices they’ll inevitably make all the wrong kinds of decisions. This is an extremely truthful portrayal of a situation where no one tells the truth. And worse, no one takes responsibility, as the absent parents are too rich and/or busy to be bothered with actually being parents and the school institution itself covers up its own dirty laundry so both hide under the pretense of some non-existent adult moral authority, as if they give a damn, while actually ignoring the kids and completely washing their hands in the event things go wrong, blaming the students themselves for any and all wrongdoing, whether it be grades or behavior issues. This is a glum portrait of moody, parentless kids.

Our journey through the classrooms, hallways, lunchrooms, dormitory rooms and the rest is guided by Rob (Ezra Miller), an overly detached, loner kid glued to his Internet screen, whose geek popularity, what little there is, is based on his ability to find cool stuff on the Internet. To this end he’s discovered porn, particularly one website (nastycumholes.com) that veers into blatantly sadistic treatment of women that he finds sexually arousing. But he also scans war images, school fights, or various other stupid stuff he can find on YouTube. His roommate Dave (Jeremy Allen White) sells dope on the side and bullies and ridicules Rob with ease, also doing the same at lunch to some poor sap who sits there and takes it day after day without so much as uttering a word in defense. To our amazement, Dave is considered his best friend at school. Rob calls his mother and wants to come home, telling her he’s miserable, but she tells him to stick it out, rationalizing that this friend Dave could really be helpful to her son, but if things get worse she’ll have some medicine prescribed. At school, we see a line of kids waiting for their meds from the school nurse. To his credit, Rob isn’t one of them. But we see what he sees, which is looking under the girl’s skirts from the bottom of the stairs, or the multitude of bare legs on display, the tight fitting clothes around the butt, and the occasional glimpse down a woman’s cleavage. Rob is a sophomore who dreams about sex night and day.

At this school, students are required to take an afterschool elective, whether it be sports or something else. Rob chooses the Video Club, where he’s given a video camera and urged to film anything around the school grounds, including the hallways. This transition from passive viewer to active filmmaker is a revelatory moment, as the rest of the film has the eerie and amateurish feel as if it’s all part of Rob’s movie, which gives this an otherworldly, almost science fiction feel. As he sets up an empty corridor shot from a stairway, two girls burst through the door, apparently severely injured, as blood is squirting onto the floor. One girl lays inert, apparently already stopped breathing, while Rob curiously investigates and actually cradles the other girl until she dies shortly afterwards in his arms, all caught on tape, including the aftermath of students and teachers as they create a mob scene around the incident. Afterwards, he’s fairly mum about the incident, even less forthcoming than his usual barely audible mumble, where it turns out the girls died from ingesting cocaine mixed with excessive amounts of strychnine, but he does take advantage of the emotional vulnerability of one of the girls, Amy (Addison Timlin), as their open discussion to each other about sex actually leads to their first incident, which you’d think would be a breakthrough. But instead he tells his roommate, who immediately steals his girl, making him even more miserable, especially since he suspects his roommate sold the tainted drugs that killed the girls. While they send him to the school shrink (Gary Wilmes), the school is sympathetic so long as they think he’s distraught from the school deaths, but aren’t at all interested in what’s really eating at him. And therein lies the theme of the film, as the teachers (stand-ins for the parents) couldn’t be more clueless, as they never have a frank or honest discussion with any of the kids, never know what’s really going on, as their discussions are more centered on the school’s liability, and are fooled into believing the most popular kids are the most successful kids, while the unhappy kids who may be the smartest remain borderline in their eyes. It’s the school itself that devises this social hierarchy of turning out kids the way they think breeds success. Yet behind the scenes, kids routinely buy and sell their homework, ingest alcohol and drugs, and engage in unhindered sexual activity, all without ever discussing any of these issues with anyone except other kids.

The school decides to honor the two seniors, which includes making a school video in their memory, a set of twins who were probably the two most popular girls in school, but both were party girls heavily into drug use, which was overlooked for years as their parents were heavy money donors. Rob and Amy were gathering home movie pictures, but Rob, perhaps the person least qualified to make this film, as he has fantasized about them without ever knowing them, ends up completing it on his own, something of an art film about the loneliness and alienation of youth, which the principal (Michael Stuhlbarg) suggests is the worst thing he’s ever seen, immediately ordering it fixed. When we see the sappy version that plays over the school assembly, we realize what an unadulterated pack of lies this re-edited Hallmark card version is, and these videos could stand for the completely opposite threads of reality that exist between the kids and the adults. I love the play on the two memorial tributes, very reminiscent of Bobcat Goldthwait’s mockingly derisive view of the same in his savagely black satire WORLD’S GREATEST DAD (2009). Campos uses a near documentary style for his film which includes frequent long takes where events unfold in real time without ever offering comment on what we’re seeing, which could just as easily be footage Rob watches on YouTube, but his stark choice of material reveals an excellent job writing, directing, and especially editing his film. It’s an extremely provocative work using humorous dark satire which levels to near zero any positive impact from adults, teachers or parents, and also suggests the nefarious influence of cell phone cameras to capture supposedly private, unguarded moments in our lives, immediately placing them on YouTube without proper context, all of which can do irreparable harm, especially to any individual being targeted. It’s a world out of control with no moral center that no one as yet understands, where the YouTube reality is all that matters, and the actual people being depicted onscreen mean absolutely nothing.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Michael King

With its prep school setting and dead-eyed violence, Antonio Campos' AFTERSCHOOL suggests a heavily narcotized take on Lindsay Anderson's IF... Embodying all of Mick Travers's unfocused rage with none of his charisma, Rob's (Ezra Miller) social skills have been blunted by prescription meds and streaming pornography. Already a three-time Cannes veteran at 25, Campos has a better handle on how young people communicate than indie paterfamilias Gus Van Sant (his closest correlate), and his slow-burn takes ensure more awkward silences than actual lines. The camerawork is often as disconnected from the action as the protagonists: characters wander off into the anamorphic margins, and rigidly fixed pans casually lop off actors' heads rather than tilt up. Rob witnesses the overdose of a set of popular twins, allowing Campos to divide his time between the far reaches of adolescent alienation and the frenzied overreaction that isolated traumas often spark in stunned bureaucracies. (2008, 107 min, 35mm)

The Onion A.V. Club review [A-] Scott Tobias

In Afterschool, a disquieting, remarkably controlled first feature by 25-year-old writer-director Antonio Campos, young people live their lives at a shallow focal distance—roughly the foot between their nose and the computer monitor in front of them. From here, Campos’ hero, a baby-faced boarding-school freshman played by Ezra Miller, consumes a steady diet of YouTube clips (from giggling babies and piano-playing cats to bloody brawls and Iraq footage) and live feeds from nastycumholes.com. Campos frequently trains his telephoto lens on Miller in extreme close-up, with the rest of the world out of focus, which puts this confused young man in a profoundly lonely, alienating place. And the dynamics of high school don’t help: Social hierarchies are heavily enforced at his elite East Coast school, and being a shy, insecure first-year student only serves to drive Miller deeper into his murky headspace.

Owing debts to early Atom Egoyan, Frederick Wiseman’s High School (Campos names a character “Mr. Wiseman”), Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and Michael Haneke (especially Benny’s Video), Afterschool wears its many influences on its sleeve, but it’s very much a movie of the moment. The passing of time and the evolution of technology may give it an expiration date, but more likely, Campos’ film stands to be an essential document of what it was like to be a young person in the late ’00s. A frighteningly opaque vessel of teenage amorality, Miller would stay in his dorm-room forever, were he not obligated to participate in an after-school program. Since he isn’t sporting type, he involves himself in a video-production club, and gets assigned to take B-roll footage around campus. While filming a stairwell, Miller catches footage of twin girls’ shocking deaths from tainted drugs.

The aftermath of the tragedy leads Miller to some disturbing places, not least the questionable assignment to make a memorial video for two girls he never really knew—and who almost certainly wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Between the video clips, the overlapping dialogue effects, the odd framing, and the alternating gambits of suffocating close-ups and surveillance-cam pans, Afterschool has been aestheticized within an inch of its life. But it’s also a rigorously thought-through, precocious first effort that finds Campos using every cinematic means at his disposal to suggest the vacant conscience of a kid who experiences the world in bite-sized fragments.

This is quite a week for American enfants terribles, old and new. Falling firmly into the latter category is Antonio Campos, a New Yorker of Brazilian/Italian parentage who single-handedly wrote, directed and edited his debut feature Afterschool at 23 (he's now 25). Auteurs are getting younger these days, of course: Quebecois prodigy Xavier Dolan was 19 when he directed, wrote, produced and starred in I Killed My Mother, a prize-winner at Cannes in May, while Iranian 21-year-old from Hana Makhmalbaf debuted at 15 with Joy of Madness (2003). As Francis Ford Coppola - a sometime precocious wunderkind himself - famously put it, "One day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart."

Indeed, one of America's leading film-critics, Mike D'Angelo, ranks Afterschool his number three film of the decade, ahead of works by Lars Von Trier, Carlos Reygadas, David Mamet and Wong Kar-Wai: "Sorrowfully observing the quest for something real in a terrain of orchestrated lies, Afterschool never once flinches. This is how we live."

While respecting D'Angelo's verdicts, I can't endorse his encomium this time. From my perspective Afterschool - in which Robert (Ezra Miller), a troubled teenager at a fancy prep school, happens to catch on camera the drug-related death of two pupils while working on a video-project - is a classic example of debutant-overreach.

Campos deserves credit for tackling major issues of contemporary American society - most notably the way (also explored by Michael Haneke's Hidden) that technology is producing a de-sensitised generation which experiences life at one or two removes. But the unsettling, bracingly glacial poise of his direction is repeatedly let down by some basic, distracting lapses in storytelling logic and plausibility. In addition, there's something score-settling and lazy - reactionary, even - about the way his script presents the school's teachers ("you're inherently good kids") and pastoral-care counsellors ("we can always do medication") as sanctimonious, well-meaning, hopelessly ineffectual liberal boobs.

It's hard enough to direct a debut film at any age - but Afterschool gives the impression that Campos could have profited from greater outside help during script-development, and it would probably have been a good idea if he'd handed over editing-duties to more experienced set of hands. Interesting that the major area of responsibility which he did delegate to a collaborator is the cinematography - and first-timer Jody Lee Lipes (now 27) emerges as the name to watch from Afterschool.

His limpid widescreen images here balance on the tricky edge between hyper-realism and hallucinatory intensity - and his visually superb follow-up, artworld documentary Brock Enright - Good Times Will Never Be the Same (which Lipes also directed), strengthens the suspicion that he's a truly outstanding "DoP"in the making.

NYFF '08 Mike D’Angelo

[Remember in Mulholland Dr. when that creepy dude points at the headshot and says, flatly, "This is the girl"? Try to imagine me heavier and much more intimidating as I tell you with equally unshakable certitude: This is the film. All of 23 years old at the time of shooting, Campos tackles head-on the key subject of the early 21st century, viz. mediation, and delivers the first movie I've seen that seems to recognize how drastically the (developed) world has changed in just the last several years, and the extent to which we're now both starved for authenticity and dedicated to pretense. What's more, he does so with a formal control and ingenuity that's nothing short of breathtaking, especially for a neophyte. Switching deftly back and forth between panoramic widescreen celluloid and cramped, windowboxed consumer video, Afterschool deliberately blurs the line between the two: Not only are the "objective" shots brilliantly artless, forever trained on the wrong spot or cutting someone in half at the edge of the frame, but much of the video imagery -- most especially Rob's A/V project, which abruptly turns from mundane B-roll into something so horrifying it can barely be processed, much less resolved -- evinces the chilly neutrality of Haneke or the Asian master-shot school. (And then there are shots that are just plain stunning, with D.P. Jody Lee Lipes working expressionist miracles via the tonal contrast between foreground clarity and backgrounds so magnificently blurred they resemble lost Monets.) Within this unique, semi-alienating worldview, Campos constructs a portrait of Generation YouTube (set here in high school, appropriately, but encompassing all ages) that's somehow at once compassionate and merciless -- which is to say, utterly true. The scene of Rob tentatively applying lessons learned from gonzo porn on new girlfriend Amy does in just a handful of seconds what Larry Clark spent half an hour belaboring in his Destricted short, and is beautifully counterweighted by his (Rob's) later act of sweet generosity in giving Amy his shirt to mop up the post-coital blood. Key moments in the characters' lives wind up scrutinized on the net hours later -- or they find "alternate takes" of events they themselves recorded, captured by persons unknown with ethical imperatives unrecognized. Even minor details cut clean: When Rob calls his mother to tell her he's not fitting in, her response is so credibly concerned-yet-destructive that it made me annoyed at the equivalent moment in Wendy and Lucy all over again. And while at first I thought Campos had erred in continuing beyond the re-edited memorial video, his actual ending will haunt me as long as it haunts Rob. Sorrowfully observing the quest for something real in a terrain of orchestrated lies, Afterschool never once flinches. This is how we live.]

[ADDENDUM, THE NEXT DAY: Like most great films, this one appears to be widely misunderstood. That others don't care for it is fine by me, and not wholly unexpected given its outsized formal and thematic ambition. But it does grate a bit when folks don't seem to recognize what Campos is doing, even as they berate him in the same breath for being overly explicit. And I want to address some of this stuff while my memory is still fresh, even though doing so requires a degree of specificity that I'd rather not inflict on those who haven't seen it (i.e., almost everyone). Please, come back to the next paragraph post-viewing.

You too Waz.

Okay. Now, take this gibe from Slant's Ed Gonzalez, which was echoed in a brief conversation I had today with Aaron Hillis: "Robert (Ezra Miller) joins the new-to-the-curriculum AV club, fucks around with his hottie partner, Amy (Addison Timlin), choking her just like that nastycumholes.com chick he likes so much (it's amazing what kids pick up on these days -- and so quickly too!)." That sarcastic parenthetical completely ignores this disturbing moment's actual import, which is nowhere near as facile as Gonzalez suggests...and while Aaron merely felt (if I understood him correctly) that showing Rob choking Amy was overkill, he's equally mistaken. The point here is not (just) that Rob is aping behavior he's seen in a porn video -- though, as I said above, it does beat hell out of the (inexplicably much-admired) Larry Clark short in that tiny respect. For this deeply confused kid, the throttling is not just some random perversion he's eager to assay on anything suitably nubile. It's an attempt to cut through the bullshit. When we initially see her, "Cherry Dee" is clearly hiding behind a persona, like most porn actors; it's almost painfully evident that she's performing for the camera, doing her best to fulfill male-derived stereotypes of female sexuality. It's only when her unseen interrogator grabs her by the throat that she drops the facade and we get a brief glimpse of the actual scared-shitless girl beneath the manufactured pout and salacious come-ons. That is what Rob is responding to and attempting to replicate. He doesn't choke Amy during their (amazingly credible and virtually unseen) first kiss, when both seem to have forgotten the camera -- he does it at a moment when Amy is clearly performing, after he's seen her demeanor abruptly change. It's his painfully awkward attempt to make her more real. That's what the entire film is about, and if I have a serious quibble it's that there's a scene in which Campos explicitly tells us that's what the film is about, having Rob explain to the guidance counselor what he finds so compelling about found video. You'd think that would clear up any possible confusion. Apparently not.]

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

The 24-year-old Campos has been winning prizes for his short films for the past eight years; started film-making at thirteen and completed his first short film at seventeen; has been a Presidential Scholar; and wrote the script for this film at the Cannes Residence in Paris in fall 2006. It premiered at the 2008 Cannes Un Certain Regard series. Campos, who was a scholarship student at an exclusive international school himself and then went to study film at NYU, has been rejected from many festivals, but Cannes has led him to the NYFF. He has a group of friends and associates from NYU, and has founded Borderline Films. (See the interview "Filmstock: Antonio Campos 'After School'" on PlumTV.)

'Afterschool,' which speaks of a boy and girl in a fancy East Coas prep school video club, of the boy's roommate, and the death of twin Alpha Girl classmates, is a film of and about the YouTube generation. It begins with Rob (Ezra Miller) watching an online porn site called "Nasty Cum Holes" (or something like that) in which a man, unseen, is talking dirty to a young prostitute. Rob is in his dorm room, which he shares with Dave (Jeremy Allen White), who deals drugs. The video club links him with Amy (Addison Timlin), with whom he loses his virginity. While ostensibly making a sort of promotional video for the school he is shooting a hallway and stairway and all of a sudden two twin girls, the most admired in the school as it happens, appear overdosing. Robert rushes down the hall to them and the camera continues to watch as he sits on the floor with them as they die. Links between all this and Michael Haneke's 'Caché' and Van Sant's 'Elephant' are almost too obvious to mention.

In what follows there is a lot that shows the hypocrisy and confusion of the teachers, the headmaster, and the kids. Rob is so full of emotion throughout the entire film that he finds himself almost completely shut down. Mr. Wiseman the therapist or counselor (Lee Wilkof) succeeds in getting him to open up a tiny bit by trading obscene insults with him. (Campos' admiration for Frederick Wiseman's 'High School' led him to pay homage with the character's name.) A lot of 'Afterschool' is seen either as a video camera (or even a cell phone camera) see it, or as Rob sees it. When his lit teacher is talking about 'Hamlet,' he is watching her crotch, legs, and cleavage and that's what the camera sees. At other times the camera is fixed and one speaker is cut out of the picture, or you see only the edge of his head. Campos is not of the shaky, hand-held school of realism. His evocation of the sensibility of his young characters goes deeper than that. When kids today see something like a girlfight (or a boyfight) at school, somebody films it, and when it's filmed it's going to wind up on the Internet. There's a girlfight Rob and his roommate watch on the Web and then they're in a boyfight with each other in which Rob lets out his sudden pent up anger. Maybe his roommate is guilty in the twin girls' death. But as the school headmaster somewhat facilely says, maybe they all are. A wave of repression follows the incident--perhaps evoking the aftermath of 9/11, which Campos interchanged with the girls' death to get kids' reaction shots.

Campos likes moments that make us and himself uncomfortable, starting with the opening porn video, but continuing with Rob's experience and the world seen through his eyes. (Campos made a short film in which a young girl sells her virginity on eBay and loses it for real on camera to an older man.) Rob's safety is continually compromised and his emotions are uncertain. He doesn't know who he is, and neither does the filmmaker. Rob is a cleancut, even beautiful, boy, but he is almost clinically shut down--not an unusual state for a male teenager, maybe even more likely in a privileged setting like a New England prep school.

Rob and Amy are assigned the task of making a 'memorial film' about the dead twins. However the film he makes is too abstract, existential, ironic and just plain crude to be acceptable. When his supervisor sees it he thinks it's meant to be a mean joke. Later a more sweetened up and conventional version of the film is shown to the whole school, which we also see. Altering and re-editing reality is a continual theme of 'Afterschool.' As Deborah Young of 'Hollywood Reporter' writes, 'Afterschool' "is a sophisticated stylistic exercise too rarefied for wide audiences, but earmarked for critical kudos." It may seem in the watching more crude than it is. The cobbled-together vernacular images are clumsy, but the filmmaker is supple, deft, and sophisticated technically and bold intellectually--still-beyond his years. He has also captured a world he himself knows personally with rather stunning accuracy.

(Note: I am not sure of all the characters' names and may have got some identifications wrong here.)

Eye for Film (Jeff Robson) review [4/5]

Afterschool (2009) Directed by Antonio Campos A.A. Dowd from In Review Online

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

filmcritic.com (Alexander Zalben) review [3.5/5]

Afterschool Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Filmbrain [Andrew Grant] Like Ana Karina’s Sweater

The House Next Door [Vadim Rizov]

IFC.com [Sam Adams]

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Electric Sheep Magazine Mark Stafford

Hammer to Nail [Brandon Harris]

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Screenjabber review Toby Weidmann

Gone Cinema Poaching: Antonio Campos's Afterschool Glenn Heath Jr.

Fringe Report John Park

not coming to a theater near you review Stephen Snart

Pajiba (Brian Prisco) review

The Village Voice [Anthony Kaufman]

TrustMovies: Antonio Campos' AFTERSCHOOL opens via IFC, after a ... James van Mannen from Trust Movies

Afterschool Howard Feinstein at Cannes from Screendaily

Boxoffice Magazine review Cole Hornaday

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

Cinema de Merde [Scott Telek]

CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | Auteur Fatigue, "Gomorra" Pops and Wayward Youths Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE

Floatation Suite (Nick Seacroft)

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

CHUD.com (Alex Riviello) review

Offoffoff.com review Stephen Tanzer

Antonio Campos's Afterschool: Gossip Girl For Those Who Don't Know ... Benjamin Strong from The Village Voice, October 3, 2008

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young at Cannes

Channel 4 Film

Variety (Justin Chang) review

Time Out London (David Jenkins) review [4/5]

Time Out New York (Nicolas Rapold) review [1/5]

Afterschool | Film review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, August 20, 2009

The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Tim Robey

Independent.co.uk [Nicholas Barber]

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]

Chicago Tribune (Alexis L. Loinaz) review

Dennis Lim Young and Out to Redefine What’s Real, by Dennis Lim from The New York Times, October 3, 2008

Movie Review - Afterschool - Camera Lingers Near Another Lost Boy ... Neil Genzlinger from The New York Times, October 2, 2009

SIMON KILLER No Rating

USA (105 mi) 2012

An American film set in Paris, the follow up to AFTERSCHOOL (2008), where the print received did *NOT* have French subtitles, due to an error on the part of the filmmaker who sent the wrong copy of his film. As more than half the film is in French, this is a major liability, so much so that the film cannot even be graded or reviewed. While the film has a strong stylistic sense, once more favoring long shots, this time following the lead character walking down the crowded streets of Paris instead of following students in his last film through the interior school hallways, where the victims of his stalking can be seen just out of focus. Lead actor Brady Corbet is excellent as Simon, a professional liar, con man, stalker, and psycho killer, just an all around stand up guy who like Cagney in White Heat (1949), is a psychopath with mother issues. While he continually blends into the surface, finding ways to con his way into people’s lives, his violent meltdowns have a humorous edge.

The look of the film, shot by Joe Anderson who was assistant camera in the last film, is terrific, while the aggressive music is even better, showing an edgy side of this character where females seem drawn to him. As this is a tense and suspenseful psychological thriller, much of what’s left out are the interior thoughts and psychological motivations of the characters, absolutely essential in a film like this. Much of the violent action happens just offscreen, where instead plenty of sex is shown, as this character seems to have a rabid sexual appetite, where most of the film is, in fact, hopping from bed to bed. But there are other threatening gestures, blackmail for instance, that make no sense without clarifying subtitles, also the backstories of several of the characters are missing. One of the film’s highlights, however, is hearing Simon explain on several occasions what he studied in school. Without understanding most of the dialogue, this instead plays out much like Godard’s intentionally left untranslated American version of his latest movie Film Socialisme (2010), as too much of what’s needed is left incomprehensible.

Noel Murray

Antonio Campos’ debut feature Afterschool was one seriously upsetting film, telling the story of an alienated boarding school student with such intimate subjectivity that the audience didn’t realize until it was too late just how messed up this kid was. Campos’ Simon Killer takes a similar approach, subjectivity-wise. The hero, played by Brady Corbet, is a recent college grad who takes a trip to Paris to try and recover from a recent break-up, and as he mopes around the city, failing to meet people and even having trouble masturbating without some difficulty, it’s easy for the audience to identify with this fumbling sad sack. Then Simon befriends a local prostitute, and Campos gradually edges the rug out from under us.

I’ll be frank: there’s nothing all that novel about a movie that asks us to feel compassion for a protagonist who turns out to be batty. In fact, Campos did just that with Afterschool, and in a way that was more visually inventive than Simon Killer. (This movie leans heavy on the back-of-the-head follow-shot, which has become an indie cliché.) But that doesn’t mean the film is devoid of formal interest. Campos makes a big deal about how Simon majored in neuroscience, with an emphasis on the connection between the eye and brain, and Campos throws in the occasional strobe effect or piece of peripheral information to underscore the way Simon sees the world. But he does just as much with the sound design—as Simon seems to make use of loud noises to drive out the distractions in his head—and the characters also take frequent notice of how things smell or taste or feel. What’s most effective about Simon Killer is that like Martha Marcy May Marlene (whose director Sean Durkin co-produced this film), this movie is a sensual experience that asks us to question our senses. It takes the all-too-common feelings of loneliness and disorientation and show in disturbing detail how that can shade into madness.

They Live by Night [Bilge Ebiri]

Antonio Campos’s debut feature Afterschool was one of my favorite films of 2008, so I had very high hopes for his follow-up Simon Killer. And while the style is still distinctly his, the new film plays in part like the opposite of the earlier. Whereas Afterschool was heavily structured, with a downright intricate script, Simon seems deliberately disjointed, almost improvised. Whereas Afterschool’s central character was almost catatonically passive, Simon’s protagonist is intensely there, alive and fierce in his tightly-wound little way. And while actors seemed almost like an afterthought in Afterschool (the camera so often wanted to turn away from them), Simon practically hinges on the grand gestures of performance. It may not be as successful as Afterschool, but it feels rawer, more personal – a quality enhanced by its curiously unformed nature.

In that sense, the central attraction in Simon Killer isn’t so much Campos the budding auteur but rather Brady Corbet’s deceptively complex performance as a young American visiting France after a recent break-up with a long-term girlfriend. Simon meets up with a young, beautiful prostitute (Mati Diop) and enters into a physical, surprisingly emotionally open relationship with her. But he’s a bit of a rattlesnake. He tells little lies, then big lies, and soon enough we realize he’s become something of a monster. Corbet thus has to give a performance that hinges on two almost opposite modes of being: He’s both inward – repressed, closed-off, even scheming – and yet also intensely physical. Simon is both broken boy and desperate, driven animal; by the end, you want to think that the former mode is just an act but the character still believes himself, even if we no longer do.

Corbet is something to behold, even if the movie, packed though it is with lovely moments, isn’t entirely successful. Campos has a very precise style that needs the governing framework of a tight structure (as in Afterschool), and this is where Simon sometimes loses out. The film drifts, perhaps by design but not always to its benefit. Campos’s images have a brittle coolness that makes them feel like pieces of a puzzle; unlike Fassbinder or Denis, they don’t drift well. He’s more in the Kubrick vein, where everything feels deliberate, like it’s pushing towards something greater, like it’s all part of a plan. In Simon Killer, the plan doesn't always feel like it's entirely there.

The House Next Door [Michal Oleszczyk]

Antonio Campos's much-awaited second feature, while less clear-cut than his supremely affectless debut Afterschool, is just about as unsettling. An American-in-Paris story of sorts, it follows a slow but acute mental unraveling of the eponymous character (played by the film's co-screenwriter, Brady Corbet) as he seeks a post-breakup consolation in the "city of love." The Paris of the movie, intermittently respectable and seedy, becomes a scene for Simon's desperate pursuit of affection, which gradually turns more and more insidious and scary.

The opening sections (redolent somehow of Sofia Coppola's much gentler universe) offer some beautifully rendered stretches of epic ennui, with Simon's self-avowed pursuit of "doing absolutely nothing" slowly curdling into a disturbing maze of near-psychotic self-delusion. As Campos coolly multiplies discomfiting narrative ripples that make us question Simon's credibility, then his sanity, Corbet goes from cutely absent-minded to disheveled to plain cuckoo with fearful precision. Given that the whole film plays with the notion of false appearances, it makes perfect, if a tad too symmetrical, sense that Simon's alleged profession has something to do with studying "the relationship between the eye and the brain."

The main character's bipolar personality is literalized by two sexual relationships he develops during his stay—one with a prostitute he first meets as a client and then turns into an accomplice, and another with a perky French literature student (as sweet as she's cultured). The noose of lies Simon weaves in order to keep various strands of his self-made "reality" going slowly tightens to the point of visceral suffocation.

Save for its awfully ominous title, which keeps hovering over the proceedings from the start, Campos doesn't point his story in any generic way that would force us to see every single scene as an indicator of underlying threat. In fact, one of Simon Killer's most admirable achievements lies in the ease with which Campos turns some early scenes of desperate loneliness into nuggets of behavioral comedy, of which a prolonged multitask-masturbation involving a laptop is the most impressive one.

Simon Killer feels both carefully studied and willfully unfocused. Campos opts for showy shock cuts, elaborate wandering-eye pans, and jarring juxtapositions of different kinds of music—much of it courtesy of the main character's iPod, which at times switches from track to track literally mid-scene). Judging by the relatively high number of walkouts I witnessed during the press screening, the film manages to touch a raw nerve and will undoubtedly be deemed "pretentious" by some. I found it stunningly daring, refreshingly adventurous, and impossible to shake off, firmly establishing Campos as the new master of consciously hyper-crafted, dead-serious cine-angst.

Karina Longworth

The most divisive dramatic competition entry yet to screen at Sundance, Simon Killer is the second feature directed by Antonio Campos, director of Afterschool and producer of last year's Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene. Like Martha Marcy, Simon is built around an attractive, enigmatic young person whose ostensible recent trauma -- in this case, the titular recent college grad, played by Brady Corbet, comes to Paris in an effort to recover from a rough break-up -- both muddles their vision, and complicates the film's view of their behavior. They are character studies which willfully obfuscate the truth about their main characters, psychological thrillers only offering misleading glimpses into psyches.

This approach to storytelling, while productively disorienting in Martha Marcy, is given richer formal and thematic complement in Simon Killer. In the first dialogue scene, Simon explains to a family friend that he completed a neuroscience thesis on peripheral vision, and the relationship between the brain and the eye.

"I'm not sure I understand," responds the friend, who is French, and is letting Simon stay in his Paris flat for a week. "That's okay, nobody does," Simon sighs.

What initially seems like pretentious post-grad arrogance twinned with self-pity is slowly revealed to be something closer to an admission of guilt: as long as Simon's modus operandi isn't understood, he can do anything, say anything, be anyone. And over the course of his winter in Paris, he'll create several lives for himself, his pathological lies and manipulations swallowed whole by a couple of very beautiful, very young women unlucky enough to end up in his path, and naive enough to let him into bed.

Simon's early speech about his supposed academic specialty is in some sense a decoder for the whole movie. Joe Anderson's gorgeous cinematography is constantly drawing attention to the way eyes -- and cameras -- work, with widescreen compositions built with Corbet in the absolute center, extreme focal changes amplifying the tension between foreground and background, and pulsing color field abstractions acting as minds-eye transitions.

And whether or not Simon is really an expert in the scientific mechanics of the brain's relationship to the eye, he demonstrates some kind of expertise in the way perception works in his dealings with women, from his coddling mom to the prostitute who takes Simon in when she thinks he's been mugged. These women take what Simon shows them at face value, and lose their ability to focus.

As sensually rich as it is, full of eye-candy color and smartly chosen pop music (one of Simon's seductions is set in a club, to LCD Soundsystem's "Dance Yourself Clean") and flashily ambitious filmmaking, Simon Killer is an embodiment of, and comment on, cinema as a manipulation of the eye and the brain. Plus, it effectively deflates the mechanics of male sexual compulsion without any of the martyr bullshit of Shame.

Simon Killer - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

The Playlist [William Goss]

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

SIMON KILLER Review | Collider Matt Goldberg

SUNDANCE 2012: Simon Killer - Daily Film Dose Alan Bacchus

SUNDANCE: Simon Killer Polarizes, But Maybe That's a Good Thing ... Jen Yamato

Virtual Neon [Damon Wise]

Film.com [Amanda Mae Meyncke]

Sundance 2012. Antonio Campos's "Simon Killer" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson at Mubi

Simon Killer: Sundance Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

Variety [Peter DeBruge]

Sundance 2012: Simon Killer – review | Film | guardian.co.uk Jeremy Kay

CHRISTINE B- 81

Great Britain USA (115 mi) 2016 Official Facebook

Well, if ever you needed a reason “not” to live in Sarasota, Florida, this would be it, set in the vacuousness of a distant time, with occasional references to the Watergate era, where the insipidness of the period musical selections may make you want to pull out your hair instead of reminisce. From the director of the eye-raising AFTERSCHOOL (2008), one of the few films that actually understands the YouTube generation and the prominent influence of the Internet in the lives of high school kids, this is an entirely different exploration of dysfunction at work, largely a character study of a single real-life individual, Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall), a Sarasota news reporter who pulled out a gun and shot herself during a live news broadcast in 1974, perhaps the only known example of a suicide captured live on the air. Rather than react in horror, the film attempts to put the pieces together before it happened, set against the other tragedies that were occurring in the post-Vietnam, Watergate era, where the nation was inundated by a series of catastrophic events, including the continual journalistic exposure of lies and a governmental cover-up from the office of the Presidency, where day by day, new revelations seemed to unravel existing beliefs about the role of government in our lives, eventually leading to a Presidential resignation and an eventual pardon for all crimes committed while in office. While this only plays out as an annoying backdrop, Chubbuck’s suicide may seem like a small indicator of larger societal ills, yet most likely she was suffering from undiagnosed and untreated mental health issues, which is a reflection of our current government posture to close mental health hospitals state by state in cost cutting measures and then deny the significance of mental health issues until “after” the explosions, as there’s been no remedies from the Columbine-like mass shootings that continue to plague our nation, University of Texas, 1966 (18 killings), Luby’s Cafeteria, 1991 (23 killed), Columbine High School, 1999 (13 killed), Virginia Tech University, 2007 (32 killed), Sandy Hook elementary school, 2012 (27 killed), Pulse Nightclub, 2016 (49 killed), for example, as there are more mass shootings in America than any other country, where each event stands out as a stark American tragedy. Yet what, if anything, is being done about it? While this film itself doesn’t ask any of these questions, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum either, where to this day, most urban news reports lead their nightly broadcasts with police blotter information, including the number of deaths that reportedly occurred. Knowing the outcome before the film begins has a chilling overall effect, much like Gus van Sant’s ELEPHANT (2003), where a sense of dread kicks in as the moment approaches.

While the centerpiece of the film is one of the most shocking moments in television history, the film is comprised of small, absurdly amusing moments mixed with pathos in the harrowing life of Christine Lubbock leading up to that moment, where she has a history of depression, is socially awkward, remains a virgin at age 29, and never really fits in anywhere, yet has this ambitious streak where she has delusions of grandeur, seen in front of cameras doing an imaginary interview with a non-existent President Richard Nixon, who is instead just an empty chair, yet the human interest stories that she’s assigned to are lighthearted puff pieces about ordinary people who raise chickens or grow strawberries. Her smothering relationship living with her mother (J. Smith-Cameron) is reminiscent of Ruppert Pupkin in Scorsese’s scathing satire KING OF COMEDY (1982), as both are achingly lonely, creating fantasy worlds that help them cope with the psychological schisms in their fractured view of the world around them, where Christine develops a comedy act between two hand sock puppets that she performs to help educate disabled children, which is easily the most outrageously original aspect of the film, as she recreates moral lessons that she performs alone or in front of preschoolers, offering us insight into her psychological mindset, like a secret passageway into her subconscious that is sensitive and highly aware of how people should treat one another. “How do you know it’s a stranger?” one puppet asks another. “What if you know them, but you don’t really know them?” All right, it can get a bit creepy. Her lesson on how it’s OK to just be quiet with one another is poignant and especially shrewd. While she jots down notes of her personal objectives, like a must do list in the form of a diary, where she’s repeatedly telling herself the things she needs to do to be more effective, yet she’s continually discouraged on the job, butting heads and remaining at odds with her boss Michael (Tracy Letts), who implements the “If it bleeds, it leads” philosophy, as he wants to spice up the broadcasts due to such horrible ratings that he fears the station will be shut down, as the owner of the affiliate, Bob Anderson (John Cullum), announces he intends to visit the station. Despite her insistence on barging into Michael’s office whenever she feels like it, irrespective if he’s in the middle of a meeting, this practice doesn’t win her any favors, as Michael has little patience for her antics, and instead just finds her rude and overbearing. “You know what your problem is, Chubbuck? You’re a feminist. You think that the way to get ahead is by talking louder than the other guy. That’s the whole movement in a nutshell.”

Adapted from an extensive Washington Post article by Sally Quinn in 1974, Sally Quinn's article about Chubbuck for the Washington Post, we learn that George (Michael C. Hall), the news anchor that Christine secretly fantasizes about in the film was actually a stockbroker who came into the studio to read stock reports on the air. While the director Antonio Campos has a history of realistically portraying the psychologically disturbed, his previous works both male portraits, this film has an awkward feel all around, especially from a male director, who puts the female protagonist in a fish bowl and allows her to sink or swim, feeling exploitive from start to finish, as if it’s showcasing her worst instincts, where in some cases we are laughing at her, as her behavior deviates to the weird and bizarre, never really getting inside her head, showing little sympathy, where viewers are never comfortable in her presence, as the film never reveals much insight into why she is this way, or what happened in the past, only that she feels uncomfortable in her own skin. Prone to occasional rants, which scream of self-centered middle class entitlement, where she’s not getting what she thinks she deserves, from her job, her mother, existing relationships, never really feeling loved or appreciated, though objectively speaking, her mother is her biggest supporter and always seems to have her best interests at heart, while her job offers her plenty of opportunities, but she fails to take advantage of them, never establishing her own niche that singles her work out as significant. Her camera operator Jean (Maria Dizzia), probably her best friend, is extremely sympathetic and tries to help her at work, but Christine negates and minimizes the influence of others, thinking exclusively of herself. Part of the reason she’s not very good doing human interest stories is that she expresses so little human interest, continually thinking she’s better than everybody else. What really sets her off is the discovery that news anchor George is being promoted, where he’ll be working in a bigger market, something she felt was rightfully hers, where she’s extremely conflicted by the idea that someone other than herself might be more qualified. In her world that’s simply not possible, feeling there must be some kind of mistake, demanding a recount, of sorts, thinking they must have overlooked what she means to the station. Veering into a downward trajectory, as if to show them just how important she is, she asks for an opportunity to work at the anchor desk, where she devises this plan to shoot herself on the air, complete with typewritten script notes which she utters verbatim, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first: attempted suicide.” While it’s thought that only a few hundred people saw what occurred, the footage quickly disappeared, never to be seen again, but the story made the rounds of all the nightly news reports, and some think this was the origin of Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant satire Network (1976), conceived in a post-Watergate decade that cynically invented happy news broadcasts to boost ratings, while similarly producing a cheerful newsroom comedy sitcom like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970 – 77), which eerily closes the film with a kind of illusory reality.

Cinema Scope: Adam Nayman September 04, 2016

A perfect exemplar of a bad good movie, Antonio Campos’ Christine traps (an excellent) Rebecca Hall in a series of impeccably composed frames as the famously ill-fated Sarasota local news anchor Christine Chubbuck. One good way to gauge your patience for this exercise in high-handed dread is how you react to seeing a protagonist who you know for a fact is going to kill herself at some point before the movie’s end introduced in front of a massive container with “FRAGILE” emblazoned across the front. Imagine Elephant (2003) if the point of Gus Van Sant’s formal gamesmanship was to definitively “explain” Columbine rather than to gesture helplessly at the impossibility of understanding, and you’d have something pretty close to Campos’ dubious achievement here. The movie builds an airtight case: Christine is stifled at work and sexually frustrated; she refuses to go on medication for her depression and suffers terrible personal and professional embarrassments; she becomes fixated on guns and rejects all efforts to penetrate her orbit of paranoid loneliness. Christine presents its namesake’s suicide as the logical end to a mathematical equation, and inflates it into an epitaph for an era (and in case you missed the historical commentary, the script name-checks Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate and mentions the 1974 dateline a half-dozen times). As if that wasn’t enough, Campos even drags in the theme music to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to point up the gulf between sitcom idealism and real-life despair—perhaps the hollowest piece rhetorical point-scoring in recent memory.

Fandor: David Ehrenstein October 13, 2016

Christine, a new film about the sad life and spectacularly awful death of television newscaster Christine Chubbuck, arrives in theaters at a peculiar moment for docu-dramas. Once a staple of made-for-TV movies, and surefire Oscar bait for large-scale Hollywood productions, today’s based-on-a-true-story fare is having a hard time keeping pace with cable television news—for reasons the Chubbuck story illuminates.

Chubbuck hosted a local news digest show at a TV station in Sarasota, Florida, where, on July 15, 1974, a few minute into her regular broadcast, she announced: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first: attempted suicide.” Then she pulled a revolver out from under her desk, and shot herself behind the ear. Today it’s thought that only a few hundred people saw the act when it occurred. Does a video recording of it exist? If so, its voyeuristic value is considerable. A Vulture article from earlier this year calls Chubbuck’s on-air suicide “the Holy Grail” of an internet subculture focused on gruesome, “hard-to-find” videos of people dying—the most popular of these being the 1978 pseudo-documentary Faces of Death. But the film that most keenly evokes Chubbuck’s death in the popular imagination is David Cronenberg’s sci-fi thriller Scanners (1981), best remembered now for one scene of an exploding head.

Christine contains nothing so gaudy. Solidly directed by Antonio Campos, from a screenplay by Craig Shilowich, it tells the sad tale of a depressed woman whose work environment only serves to stoke her despair. Rebecca Hall is excellent in the title role, and Michael C. Hall and Tracy Letts are equally good as her casually insenstitive co-workers. Morbidly curious voyeurs may be disappointed that Christine doesn’t deliver the “money shot,” à la Scanners. Nor, however, does it replicate the casual indifference of cable news, with its seemingly non-stop footage of police pursuits ending in the deaths of “suspects”—invariably unarmed black men.

Philando Castile in Minnesota.

Dylan Noble in California.

Paul O’Neal in Illinois.

Keith Lamond Scott in North Carolina.

Alton Sterling in Louisiana.

Just to take some recent examples. These are people we’ve met by way of “bodycam” and “dashcam” footage from the officers who took their lives—and also, in some cases, by way of cellphone video from horrified loved ones. The news, in short, has become one big snuff film.

Cinema Scope: Blake Williams March 21, 2016

Two heavily pulled quotes from Sundance 2016’s opening press conference, both spilled from the mouth of the festival’s founder and director Robert Redford—“I’m not into the Oscars,” and later, when asked what he was most looking forward to at this year’s edition, “The wrap party”—were endearingly and unexpectedly clear-eyed enough (considering the source) that, as I trekked over to Park City for the second consecutive January, I felt my guard lowering, strangely moved by these perhaps inadvertently cynical gestures. Considering some of the other arch responses Redford gave to the roomful of journalists, it appeared as though the Sundance Kid himself was running out of fucks to give. And who can blame him? The man turns 80 this year—he couldn’t have more than five of these left in him—and the weather was colder than hell, each morning and night’s venture from ski lodge to theatre, theatre to ski lodge a life-threatening operation, what with many of the city’s hazardously slanted sidewalks lying directly beneath some of the longest, pointiest icicles I have ever seen.

Was the risk worth it? Probably not, but for the second year in a row, and despite my visit being limited to a mere four days, Sundance surprised me. The festival’s programmers may be reluctant to put the most promising and inevitably best films at their disposal into the festival’s main slate, the US Dramatic Competition—a section that, from what I can tell, is exclusively reserved for under-40s and those with fewer than ten years of filmmaking experience, which is fair so long as we agree that a Competition without competition is useless, or at the very least boring—but good, even great films were indeed at Sundance, and they were mostly, once again, in the Premieres and NEXT sections.

Call it a product of the zeitgeist, an expression of my current tastes, or simply a coincidence, but the movies I caught in Park City were predominantly engaged with the experience and representational politics of grieving. In their surplus, these movies, which bask in the plangent aftermath of some great or forgotten loss, inevitably recalled and reinforced for me cinema’s original ties to mourning, arriving as the medium did amidst late-19th-century clashes between science and faith, allaying crippling fears of death and oblivion with its so-called Frankensteinian ability to resurrect the lost and embalm the to-be-lost. Perhaps these are, indeed, sorrowful times we live in. If these films compelled me to spend some time imagining this early spiritualist status of cinema—its uncanny ability to re-present its subjects and allow spectators to, once again, see them moving, visibly alive in spite of whether or not they’ve passed on—I was provoked to spend just as much time, if not more, contemplating the present status and function of a cinema of grief, of mourning, of poetic cine-dirges and dramatized mortality, and the moral stakes of manufacturing an image of a death when no authentic documentation is known to exist.

Such are the primary concerns of Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine and, to a lesser extent, Antonio Campos’ Christine, which together made for the kind of serendipitous dual premiere that one would think could only be either purposely coordinated or mathematically impossible were it not for the evidence suggesting their corresponding productions were, in fact, a matter of chance. For both projects, the filmmakers tasked themselves with representing the life and death of Christine Chubbuck, a Florida news reporter who killed herself on live television in 1974. With this incident taking place well before the advent of DVR, the only known tape to have been printed of Chubbuck’s suicide either no longer exists or is in the hands of someone who will apparently only part with it over his or her dead body, making the document something of a holy grail for snuff aficionados. It was only a matter of time, then, until someone decided to re-enact her death for the silver screen, which would, regardless of artistic intent or approach, result in some abstract appeasement of our collective desire for an image we’ve so far been left to conjure with our imaginations. So the decision to finally go through with it clearly carried an immense degree of moral responsibility and risk, and the miracle here is not so much that we got two Chubbuck films at once, but rather that both films wound up implicitly arguing against the other.

Per happenstance, I ended up seeing Campos’ first. His is the more straightforward dramatic work—not unlike, in some sense, Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), a film alleged to have been inspired by Chubbuck’s death—and was thus crafted with artful camerawork and lighting, and is reliant on the world-class thespian talents of, among others, Rebecca Hall (as Christine) and J. Smith-Cameron (her mother) to deliver credible performances while they inhabit, with utmost verisimilitude, the fractured psychologies of their characters. Having seen and liked Greene’s Actress (2014), I watched Christine with his potential counterarguments in mind, and to my surprise found very little there to be objectionable or egregious. The Borderline team—Campos in particular—have in their 13 years of operation established their brand as America’s realist purveyors of the psychologically disturbed, yet Christine manages to do something very tricky: it utilizes Chubbuck’s milieu and our awareness of her fate to develop a thesis about the artifice and the performance of happiness in late-Vietnam America, and it does so in a way that never undermines the singularity of Chubbuck’s psychological experience. This is in many ways the same cluster of themes Campos built into Afterschool (2008), albeit for a different moment in history; but however irksome it is that he would use Chubbuck’s story as a backdrop for forwarding his own auteurist project, I was ultimately impressed, if a bit conflicted, by the subdued force provided in his film’s restraint and its final grace notes.

Conversely, Greene’s take in Kate Plays Christine is all about the denial of grace notes; or rather, about the “problematics” of following through on the promise of its premise. Just as he did in Actress, Greene here aims to demolish the arbitrary delineations separating fiction and documentary, and does so by once again following an actress—this time, the great New York-based Kate Lyn Sheil—who begins to question the degree to which she and her moral standards can be removed from the obligations of her craft. We see footage of Sheil researching the role of Chubbuck—interviewing those she knew, who worked with her at the station, or who now work at places she used to visit—and taking on her likeness via tanning sessions (ultraviolet and spray-on), wig and costume fittings, and viewing broadcast tapings to study her behaviour. The extent to which Sheil’s visits and encounters were staged is always at least somewhat ambiguous, no doubt per Greene’s wont; this imbues the project’s making-of facade with an effective degree of mystery, introducing a palpable tension that is as unnerving as it may be ultimately pointless. But that potential pointlessness, that moral uncertainty, is part of what keeps the viewing experience active, so it was with great disappointment that Greene and/or Sheil opted to blanket the project’s complexities with a contrived, off-puttingly sententious climax that may or may not be a direct attack on the existence of Campos’ project.

Kate Plays Christine’s final moments, while not really working within its own context, do open up when placed next to Christine, and the two together end up mapping out something towards a politics of commemoration. As an interviewee in Greene’s film suggests, the re-utterance of history, and therefore loss, is a means for precluding death—“You die two times; you die when you pass away and you die again the last time somebody mentions your name”—and when it comes to representation, and this is especially true with cinema, there are right and wrong ways of re-uttering, of resurrecting what we’ve lost: good mourning and bad mourning; good grief, bad grief. Over in NEXT, Tim Sutton’s well-intentioned but ill-conceived Dark Night, a tone elegy about the 2012 Aurora shooting at a The Dark Knight Rises screening, is an example of bad grief. Dramatizing—or is it documenting? “evoking? —the Colorado tragedy in languid vignettes set to Maica Armata’s treacly indie rock, Dark Night often feels tasteless. For much of the film’s running time, Sutton snatches at our sympathies with plaintive images of the America that lax gun laws hath wrought, and a soundscape that always threatens to unleash a boo scare, including occasions such as when a group of offscreen teens start screaming bloody murder, drawing our adrenaline until we realize that, false alarm, they were just kidding around.

Film Comment: Michael Sragow October 14, 2016

The anti-heroine of Antonio Campos’s Christine, Christine Chubbuck, is a driven, idealistic reporter at a tiny Sarasota, Florida UHF station in the mid-1970s, who’s striving to perfect her craft and advance her career while serving her adopted community for her signature public-affairs show, Suncoast Digest. Christine (Rebecca Hall) lives with her divorced mother Peg (J. Smith-Cameron), volunteers as a puppeteer to entertain and educate disabled children, and hopes that a handsome coworker, George Peter Ryan (Michael C. Hall), a savvy fellow with a twinkle in his eye, might have a gleam just for her.

She’s been at the station for a year when, as screenwriter Craig Shilowich tells it, the fabric of her life comes apart, just before she turns 30. Her boss (Tracy Letts) takes up the brand-new guideline “If it bleeds, it leads” and devalues the careful, constructive work she’s been doing on zoning regulations and the environment. While Peg readily strikes up a relationship with a new man, Christine has yet to have a single date. She feels piercing abdominal pain, experiences spotting, and worries about her ability to have children. Even her work friend Jean Reed (Maria Dizzia), a segment producer and camerawoman, commits what Chris regards as a professional betrayal. On top of that, the station’s owner (John Cullum) comes looking for talent to move up to his station in Baltimore (a top 30 market). While all this is happening, George finally asks her out for dinner and promises to take her someplace where they “can talk.” By the time she buys a gun, you know she’s going to use it, and not on anybody else.

With its lightning-round rendering of the precipitous dips in a pathos-riddled life, Christine operates like a socially conscious docudrama on steroids. It limns the pressures a Seventies woman would put on herself “to have it all” while it assembles a critique of the sensationalism that local TV stations fell into with the rise of “eyewitness news teams.” But the movie neither gels nor clarifies its points as it goes along. Compelling moment by moment, it ends up a blood-streaked blur.

Christine Chubbuck is, of course, the broadcaster who sat at the WXLT anchor desk in Sarasota on July 15, 1974, and announced, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts’, and in living color, you are going to see another first—attempted suicide.” Then she shot herself behind her right ear. The movie banks that our mixture of fascination and dread will keep us pinned to our seats. Even viewers ignorant of the outcome will recognize that Christine is in a death spiral. The film isn’t exploitative. Hall’s all-in performance projects Chubbuck’s weaknesses as well as her strengths without any editorial underlining. With steely ambition and rampaging insecurity, Hall’s Christine combines professionalism, intelligence, and even some artistic intuition. She pushes Jean to add a final bit of film to a segment seconds before airtime. But she isn’t a broadcast natural. She reads copy expertly but rigidly. Her enunciation is impeccable; her emphases and little jokes perfectly calibrated. Her posture is rigid and her demeanor inexpressive.

Campos and Shilowich whip up narrative momentum without relying on our rooting interest for Christine, who is alternately sympathetic and excruciating. The movie compresses events to achieve pressure-cooker intensity. It alters details for the same reason—for example, according to Sally Quinn’s exhaustive report in the August 4, 1974 Washington Post, George was not a star news anchor but a stockbroker who came in to read stock reports on the station’s news shows. But the film is hardly manipulative, meretricious, or clinical. It lets us discover Christine’s psychological history along the way. She confesses to her doctor that she took—and disliked—antidepressants. During a rant against her mother—heartbreaking for both women—she refers to a psychological meltdown she had at her a previous home base, Boston, suggesting bipolar disorder and/or suicidal depression.

In a vanity-free performance, the tall, lissome Hall creates a woman who seems to be fighting to breathe free as she lurches forward with her life—when she isn’t fighting for airtime. Hall pulls us into the vortex of a very divided character. Christine desperately tries to adapt herself to a hyped-up TV-news environment. She plants a police scanner in her girly pink bedroom and glues her ear to it at night for reports of crimes and calamities. But when she races with Jean to a fire, she ignores the roaring blaze and focuses solely on the victim, a man who has repeatedly fallen asleep holding cigarettes and now fears the loss of his insurance. In that instance she turns out unappreciated art when her employer would prefer trash. At other times she merely seems desperate or delusional. Hypersensitive about herself, insensitive to everyone else, she’s a magnet for micro-aggressions. Every real or perceived slight from her mother, her coworkers, and her bosses wounds her disproportionately.

Campos tunes his direction to micro-nuance. He enables us to enjoy newsroom banter yet pick up on how it goes sour, or to judge how strange it must be for a couple of young lovers when Christine intrudes on them at a restaurant, then introduces herself as a reporter on the lookout for positive stories (she’s actually being embarrassingly wistful about her own lack of a love life). With his cameraman, Joe Anderson, Campos doesn’t shoot the action from predictable angles, or, with his editor, Sofia Subercaseaux, cut it according to familiar rhythms. The technical team and the ensemble work together seamlessly to convey how Christine feels when she’s moving in and out of synch with her colleagues, at the station and, even more stunningly, when the group gathers for a party at the owner’s house. She glides through like a workaholic wraith.

When it had its premiere at Sundance, Christine was immediately compared to Nightcrawler and, especially, Broadcast News: Hall’s Christine Chubbuck, like Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig, is the smartest person in the room and a bundle of insecurities. But Nightcrawler is a great nightmare satire about tabloid media breeding hollow men and women, while Broadcast News is an intelligent, charming light comedy about love and ambition among newsroom elites. When I was considering why Christine left me unsatisfied, and why Hall’s performance never quite reached greatness, the most useful comparison was to a very different movie—Jack Clayton’s masterpiece The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), based on Brian Moore’s 1955 novel about “spinsterhood,” featuring Maggie Smith’s triumphant performance, as Judith Hearne, a single Dublin piano teacher who misperceives the attentions of her landlady’s brother (Bob Hoskins) much as Christine does George’s. Her circumstances are entirely different, but her personal frustration is identical. Being a virgin at 29 or 30 in sun-kissed Sarasota is as mortifying for Christine as being one at roughly 50 is for Judith in lace-curtain Dublin. (“She was a spinster at 29 and it bothered her,” her mother summarized for a TV reporter.) Yet Hall and Campos don’t make us feel the sensual frustration beneath Christine’s surface, the way Smith and Clayton do with Judith’s. Christine does give us one lovely moment when Chubbuck, anticipating a date, relaxes while conducting an interview and for an instant seems warm and sexy—perhaps star material. But the movie and the performance fail to illuminate what’s holding her back. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is an outcry against the rigidity of Ireland’s Roman Catholic Church and the manipulations of Judith’s tyrannical aunt (Wendy Hiller). In Christine, the protagonist wails about her mother’s “hippie baloney,” which supposedly leaves her baffled by life. To the audience, though, her mother is a well-meaning woman stumbling forward on her own path to happiness.

Disappointingly, Christine coheres mostly as a put-down of the bad clothes, banal pop songs, and self-help therapies of the 1970s, the decade that gave rise to the workplace comedy of sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and WKRP in Cincinnati. Campos has assembled a crackerjack cast for Christine’s work-mates. Early on, as George, Michael C. Hall is wonderfully funny and appealing. He suggests that he’s more than just a news hunk; he connects to Christine’s conflicts. So it’s crushing for her, and for us, when George’s secret wisdom turns out to be the Me Decade’s favorite pop psychology, Transactional Analysis; at moments of crisis, he’s reduced to repeating, “I’m OK, You’re OK.” Maria Dizzia gives an even more engaging performance as Christine’s friend Jean. Empathy streaks across her face as she registers her pal’s fluctuations. She’s touching when she urges Christine to “play hooky”—join her on an ice cream run and sing along with tunes on the AM hit parade, as Jean does when she gets the blues. Sure enough, she reacts to Christine’s suicide by scarfing down three scoops of ice cream and humming the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song (aka “Love is All Around”).

Is the movie blaming the culture at large for Christine’s floundering and for her colleagues’ inability to offer any meaningful help? For the audience, the problem seems to lie more with Christine herself—who she is, under that pressure, in that culture. According to the Post story following her death, R. Thomas Beason, a Presbyterian minister, said at her funeral: “We suffer at our sense of loss, we are frightened by her rage, we are guilty in the face of her rejection, we are hurt by her choice of isolation and we are confused by her message.” The movie conveys her rage, rejection, and isolation, but unfortunately doubles down on the confusion.

Christine Stays in the Picture | New Republic Miriam Bale, October 12, 2016

The New Yorker: Richard Brody October 19, 2016

Why a Reporter's 1974 Televised Suicide Resonates Now More Than ... Elle Shechet from Jezebel, October 13, 2016

How Chubbuck's Suicide Video Is a 'Holy Grail' -- Vulture Abraham Riesman, January 29, 2016

Director Antonio Campos on Christine's Ending -- Vulture Kevin Lincoln

Vulture: Bilge Ebiri January 31, 2016

Rolling Stone: Sam Adams October 13, 2016

Filmmaker: Vadim Rizov January 25, 2016

Sundance Review: Antonio Campos' 'Christine' Starring A ... - IndieWire Noel Murray

Christine :: Movies :: Reviews :: CHRISTINE - Paste Magazine Kenji Fujishima

Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw]

Tragedy on screen: Two films grapple with the short life of Christine ... F.S from The Economist

NPR: Scott Tobias October 13, 2016

Review: CHRISTINE, An Essential Report on the Art ... - ScreenAnarchy Ben Umstead

Brooklyn Magazine: Benjamin Mercer October 13, 2016

The A.V. Club: Mike D'Angelo October 13, 2016

Slant: Matt Brennan

Writing: Movies [Chris Knipp]

The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson October 12, 2016

Time: Stephanie Zacharek October 14, 2016

Indiewire: Eric Kohn January 24, 2016

Spectrum Culture [Jesse Cataldo]

Grolsch Canvas [Nick Chen]

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

theartsdesk.com [Tom Birchenough]

The Kim Newman Website (Kim Newman)

Film Racket [Norm Schrager]

PopOptiq [Dylan Griffin]

Film School Rejects [Eric D. Snider]

Ozus' World [Dennis Schwartz]

Westender Vancouver [Thor Diakow]

Senses of Cinema: Bérénice Reynaud March 19, 2016

Brooklyn Magazine: John Oursler February 01, 2016

Letterboxd: Preston Wilder October 10, 2016

Daily | Sundance 2016 | Antonio Campos's CHRISTINE - Fandor Daily David Hudson

Rebecca Hall on starring in Christine: 'It's about her life ... - The Guardian Nigel M. Smith interviews actress Rebecca Hall, October 14, 2016

Rebecca Hall in 'Christine': Sundance Review | Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

'Christine' Review: Rebecca Hall Wows In Strong Christine Chubbuck ... Guy Lodge from Variety

Christine review: Rebecca Hall astonishes in real-life horror story ... Nigel M. Smith from The Guardian

Christine Chubbuck: True story of televised suicide behind two of this ... Christopher Hooton from The Independent, January 26, 2016

Christine Chubbuck suicide video 'has been located' | The Independent Christopher Hooton, June 9, 2016

Death by television: why did Christine Chubbuck commit suicide live ... Horatia Harrod from The Telegraph, October 2, 2016

Metro US [Matt Prigge]

Sally Quinn's article about Chubbuck for the Washington Post August 4, 1974

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]

Dallas Film Now [Joe Baker]

The Los Angeles Times: Justin Chang

San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr. November 01, 2016

Christine Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Sheila O’Malley

Review: In 'Christine,' Why Did She Pull the Trigger? We Don't Know ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, October 13, 2016, also seen here: The New York Times: Manohla Dargis and at The Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Movie Review: 'Christine'

Christine (2016 film) - Wikipedia

Christine Chubbuck - Wikipedia

Christine Chubbuck Suicide Video (Recorded in 1974) | Lost Media ...

Camus, Marcel

Marcel Camus Sight and Sound (link lost), also seen here: The Encyclopedia of Film - Page 93 - Google Books Result (pdf)

Camus was a professor of painting and sculpture before breaking into film as an assistant to Alexandre Astruc, 'Georges Rouquier' and Jacques Becker, among others. During this period he made his first film, a short documentary called Renaissance Du Havre (1950). Like many French film-makers whose first chance to direct a feature came in the postwar era, Camus chose to deal explicitly with the issue of personal sacrifice in the context of war. But unlike most of his colleagues who quite naturally dealt with WWII, Camus took as his subject the war in Indochina. Camus then embarked on three films in collaboration with writer Jacques Viot.

Marcel Camus' work is often characterised by its lyricism, which was central to his films of the 1950s and 60s - Mort en fraude (1957) (aka Fugitive in Saigon), Orfeu Negro (1959) (aka Black Orpheus) and Vivre la nuit (1967). Black Orpheus brought him international acclaim. Winner of the 1959 Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Academy Award as best foreign language film, this exotic modern adaptation of the Greek legend portrays its Orpheus (Breno Mello) as a streetcar conductor who meets his Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) and lives out his legendary destiny during the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.

The next two Camus-Viot collaborations, Bandeirantes, Os (1960) and L'Oiseau de paradis (1962), were generally well received, but neither lived up to the expectations created by Black Orpheus. Vivre la nuit (1967), an affecting portrait of nocturnal Paris, proved successful, but Un été sauvage (1970) was generally recognised as an inauthentic and superficial evocation of young people on vacation in Saint-Tropez.

Camus then returned to the subject of war, this time with a gentle comedy about a Normandy restaurant owner who becomes a hero of the Resistance in spite of himself. Le Mur de l'Atlantique (1970) offered a rich role for comic actor Bourvil, but was essentially a routine commercial product. This unfortunate trend continued with Os Pastores da Noite (1975), and some less notable work for French TV.

BLACK ORPHEUS (Orfeu Negro)

France Italy Brazil (107 mi) 1959

Time Out London review

Winner of the 1959 Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, this retelling of the Orpheus story in carnival-thronged Rio hasn’t altogether escaped the ravages of time. Although Marcel Camus’ film sprang from contemporary currents in Brazil (based on a theatre piece by Vinicius de Moraes, and gaining immeasurably from its classic samba score by fresh talents Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim), it’s still hard to escape the suspicion that the French director is exploiting the abundant local colour for his own purposes. That said, his largely non-professional cast acquit themselves with an appealing sincerity as handsome trolleybus conductor Orfeu (Breno Mello) falls for visiting innocent Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn), despite the fact he’s engaged to the brazen Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira). Romantic intrigue soon gives way to an altogether darker mood though, as Orfeu finds himself unable to protect his new love from the unwelcome attentions of a dark stranger, who makes his fatal strike while the carnival’s at its height and his skeleton outfit blends right in.It’s a film that improves as it goes along, the clunky comedy of the happy favelas eclipsed by an imaginative transposition of the Orphic legend, cleverly using locations such as the city’s missing-persons bureau and a Macumba ceremony seemingly halfway between revivalist meeting and voodoo frenzy. Presumably, this ethnographic aspect impressed at the time, but nowadays it’s the incredibly rich whirl of colour and movement captured by Jean Bourgoin’s gorgeous cinematography and the timelessly appealing soundtrack (inspiration for a subsequent generation of jazzmen) that continue to cast a spell. A mixed bag then, but the highlights are memorable.

Black Orpheus BFI Screen Online (link lost)

In 1959 Black Orpheus introduced the world to the music, sensuality and colour of Rio de Janeiro's Carnival and gave jazz hipsters a new, infectious style - the bossa nova. The film is based on a Brazilian play inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Described as "one of the year's best 10 best films", Marcel Camus' dazzling feature won both the Palme d'Or and the Oscar for best foreign language film.

The hillside slums of Rio de Janeiro, populated by an all-black cast, are alive with anticipation. Everyone is preparing for Carnival, not least Orpheus, a seductive guitar player with an exquisite voice, who's far more interested in getting his guitar out of hock than in buying an engagement ring for his fiancée Mira. He falls in love with Eurydice who's just arrived in town, escaping her village where she's being pursued by a sinister stranger. The drums are beating and the frenzy of Carnival is irresistible...

The impressive cast is led by Breno Mello, the handsome Brazilian football player who plays Orpheus, and Marpessa Dawn as Eurydice, whilst the cast of four thousand extras came free when word got out that a mock carnival had hit the streets of Rio! But the real star of Black Orpheus is samba. Long outlawed as a subversive expression of black slave culture, samba was banned from the Rio Carnival by the Brazilian authorities until the 1930s. By the late 1950s it had been revitalised as bossa nova, and it was Black Orpheus - with its legendary soundtrack by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa - that introduced the world to a sound and spirit which still sets pulses racing today.

Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review

The Orpheus legend is transposed to Rio at the time of Carnival, in this international success which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. Orpheus (Breno Mello) is a tram driver who is also an inspired musician. Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) is a naive country girl who comes to the city to stay with her sister. The acting tends to be crude - some of the supporting cast shout their lines in an annoying manner. And Camus and his writers don't know how to go very deeply into the mythical elements. (Death as a guy in a black leotard may inspire more laughter than dread.) Despite all this, the picture has a vibrantly colorful look, and the carnival atmosphere, with marvelous music and dancing, is seductive indeed. Perhaps because of the film's very naivete, it also succeeds in creating a feeling of youthful passion and romance. And Dawn, the director's wife, is as lovely a Eurydice as one could ask for. Not a great film by any means, Black Orpheus is still a luscious entertainment.

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]

James Bowman review

Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris

Music samples from Black Orpheus soundtrack

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Canby, Vincent – film critic

Movie Reviews - Movies - New York Times There are over 1000 film reviews listed written by Vincent Canby for The New York Times

Review Listings - Theater - New York Times There are 42 theater reviews listed written by Vincent Canby for The New York Times

Canby, Vincent essay by Gerald Peary

Bob Hope, Comedic Master and Entertainer of Troops, Dies at 100 Bob Hope obituary written by Vincent Canby for the New York Times

village voice > film > Vincent Canby, 1924-2000 by Amy Taubin Canby’s obituary written by Amy Taubin from the Village Voice, October 25 – 31, 2000

Four Hairdressers in Heat; Remembering Vincent Canby | The New ... reflections on Canby by Andrew Sarris from the New York Observer, October 29, 2000

Romancing the Screen memorial reflections by Stuart Klawans from the Nation, November 9, 2000

Andy Warhol 23: Andrea Feldman R.I.P. Warholian reflections on Canby by Candy Darling

Filmmakers Call Vincent Canby's Life Overlong, Poorly Paced | The ... The Onion takes a stab at criticizing Canby’s demise

Columbia College Today Film Criticism Comes of Age, an excerpt from Philip Lopate’s Introduction to his book, American Movie Critics

The Evening Class: FILM CRITICISM BLOGATHON—Phillip Lopate: PFA ... Michael Guillen covers the same Lopate speech on his blog

Vincent Canby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Canet, Guillaume

TELL NO ONE (Ne le dis à personne) B+ 92

France (125 mi) 2006 ‘Scope

A thoroughly enjoyable yet somewhat improbable suspense thriller that keeps the audience on their toes throughout with a constantly shifting storyline and well developed characters all of whom are somehow squeezed into the action of this lurid murder mystery. Opening with Otis Redding singing the Impressions song “For Your Precious Love,” a happily married couple appears consumed with that smiley face kind of happiness whenever they look in each another’s eyes, a sure sign that something soon will wipe that smile right off their faces. But first, we are treated to the idyllic lives of François Cluzet as Alex Beck (a case study of a young Dustin Hoffman, think “Is it safe?” from MARATHON MAN in 1976) and Marie-José Crozée as his attractive wife Margot as they retreat to a secluded summer home on a lake where flashbacks remind us that they were secret admirers here on this same spot even as kids. Now, it’s skinny dipping under the moonlight, but the romance is still kindling. When Margot swims ashore, a short scream reminds as that all is not right. When Alex runs to the rescue, he’s coldcocked before he has a chance to intercede. Without any more information, the innercard then reads, “Eight years later.” Adapted by the director and a co-writer from a Harlan Coben novel, this is film with an attitude that offers plots and subplots, first class performances from zany characters to relish, unexpected situations that add multiple layers of suspense, not to mention plenty of police procedural details. We soon learn that two dead bodies were recently unearthed at the same site, that Alex was originally a prime suspect in his wife’s murder and that bad blood remains with the police. We see flashback images of the coffin being cremated, so a body was found, identified by her father in a bruised, slashed, and deteriorated state, one of many suspected victims of a local serial killer who was tried and convicted. Case closed, only to be reopened again now due to new details coming to light where Alex is once more the prime suspect.

Alex is a successful family pediatrician with a skill for relating to children, who shows exemplary tolerance for his sister, Marina Hands, whose marriage to another woman is none other than Kristin Scott Thomas who’s never looked better, the shrill, overwrought Jill Clayburgh of her generation who is surprisingly toned down here and is one of the best things in the film, perhaps Alex’s best friend since his wife’s death, always offering a lucid thought to go along with a sympathetic ear while apparently keeping her eyes on the ladies. Alex continues to mourn Margot’s loss and keeps in close touch with her parents. A subplot soon develops making sure the viewer is constantly fed new clues, this one involving a certain rich lord, Senator Nueville (Jean Rochefort) who has a fascination for all things equestrian, as does Alex’s sister, who is a champion rider, but Nueville’s son, played by the director himself, has a fascination for young boys, so of course he also turns up dead. With the addition of a few more sordid details, provided by a hangdog police investigator François Berléand, we learn Margot was severely beaten shortly before she died, that photos were kept in a safety deposit box lying in the pocket of one of the unearthed deceased bodies, and that she may have lied to protect someone before she died. In another subplot unbeknown to anyone, we see a man and woman team of thugs, including the ultimate villain, the sadistically slender Mikaela Fisher, known only as Zak, who is the heavy with a propensity to hurt people. These two have apparently tapped into Alex’s computer, where he is receiving strange YouTube images indicating Margot may be alive with specific instructions to tell no one, that it isn’t safe, which increases his paranoia that the police may be covering up something, such as the missing autopsy photos of his dead wife and the continued collection of planted clues that point to him as the prime suspect. When Margot’s best friend turns up dead, one of Zak’s victims, Alex is framed for the murder, which leads his sister to call the country’s most notorious defense attorney, Nathalie Baye who is scintillating in the role, multi-tasking by doing 5 things at once all while talking on her cell phone, alerting Alex of his impending arrest. While all of these stories and possibilities are swirling around onscreen, Alex does the only thing left for him to do, jump out the window and run when the police are about to arrest him.

Alex’s escape is classic, beautifully captured by cinematographer Christophe Offenstein, giving the audience a visceral feel for his situation by initially shooting in close range as he’s chased down by apprehending officers, but after a dozen or so quick turns, he’s gained little ground, so he jettisons himself over a fence and risks his life crossing a busy freeway circling Paris with cars traveling 80 miles per hour. Reaching the other side, it’s as if he’s entered a new world of a North African street bazaar. Suddenly we’re in the housing projects where police are heckled and despised. He jumps into a rat-filled dumpster where Alex fends them off while calling his secret weapon on his cell phone, Bruno, played by Gilles Lillouche, the father of one of his patients known for working in black market contraband. Bruno is without a doubt the best thing going for this movie (I checked: he’s made 11 movies since this one, with two others currently under production), stealing every scene he’s in as if he’s a character from another film, like Vincent Cassel from LA HAINE or HATE (1995), a super edgy, ultra realistic drama portraying life in the hood. Bruno knows how to work the housing projects, followed wherever he goes by his gigantic bodyguard called Mouss (François Bredon), a three hundred pound monster of a man who would intimidate anybody. The two driving around in their black SUV are a force to be reckoned with and their presence gives this film a shot of adrenaline and well needed humor. Bruno figures in some of the more significant scenes of the film and he gets the biggest laugh. But the film is not about Bruno, it’s about bringing all these intangible subplots together through the ingenious use of multiple flashbacks, actually embedding multiple stories within other stories and somehow making them work. In the end, it feels all too easy, perhaps spelled out in too much detail as the thrill ride is exhilarating but also exhausting, but well worth it making exquisite use of music, including a fabulous extended sequence with U2’s “With or Without You,” where the film is brilliantly enhanced by the composer, guitarist Mathieu Chedid as M, who wrote the moody, original score.

Tell No One J.R. Jones from the Reader

"Wait, there's more," cautions a character in this French mystery (2006) after peeling away numerous layers of intrigue--and he's not kidding. After a family gathering, a pediatrician (Francois Cluzet) and his wife (Marie-Josee Croze) stop by their favorite lake for some nocturnal skinny-dipping, but their idyll ends with the wife murdered and the husband beaten and baffled about what transpired in the darkness. Eight years later the cops have pinned the crime on a serial killer but still suspect the husband, who's pulled back into the past by a cryptic e-mail indicating his wife is still alive. Cluzet's brooding performance propels the movie, and writer-director Guillaume Canet, best known here for his own acting work in Joyeux Noel and Love Me if You Dare, skillfully orchestrates the cascading revelations. With Andre Dussollier, Nathalie Baye, and Kristin Scott Thomas. In French with subtitles. 125 min.

The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]

François Cluzet, who looks like Daniel Auteuil and runs like Dustin Hoffman, simmers beautifully as a Paris pediatrician who, eight years after the brutal murder of his beloved wife (Marie-Josée Croze), receives an e-mailed video purporting to show her alive. His search for her or her captors is, to understate the situation, complicated by their search for him and the growing suspicions of the police—who reopen the case after two more corpses pop up—that the doc is his wife's killer. That I can't parse the plot of Tell No One without recourse to multiple subordinate clauses gives you some idea of the labyrinthine twists in Guillaume Canet's soignée adaptation of Harlan Coben's rather less elegant crime thriller. Among the movie's many delights are the fluctuating rhythms of its pacing, an atmospheric volatility that sets off the doctor's blooming paranoia against his sunlit, leafy surroundings, and a terrific cast that includes Kristin Scott Thomas as a bitchy lesbian with heart and a quietly funny François Berléand as an obsessive-compulsive detective. Canet's grasp of the way institutional and personal corruption feed on each other is sure, though his excursion into France's racial wars gilds the lily of a plot that already creaks with complication. Crucially, though, the love story at the movie's heart is flat, cliché, and much less engaging than the satisfying mixed motives of its lively supporting characters.

cinemattraction (Sarah Manvel)

Hitchcock's "Wrong Man" scenario gets an invigorating French update in Tell No One, a long-winded but gripping thriller based on American author Harlan Coben's bestseller. Writer-director Guillaume Canet has a preference for awkwardly shoehorned-in pop songs and self-conscious slow-mo pans around characters. Fortunately, such attributes do little to hinder the mounting tension of his tale (co-written by Philippe Lefebvre), which involves a pediatrician named Alex Beck (François Cluzet) who, eight years after his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) was apparently slain by a serial killer, receives an email with a link to a recent video clip of an alive-and-well Margot and a message to "Tell no one. We're being watched." Such a shock is compounded by the cops' discovery of two bodies at the lake where Margot was murdered, one of them in possession of the key to a safety deposit box containing Alex's rifle and photos of a badly beaten Margot. Suffice to say, revelations soon begin piling on top of one another, with Canet giddily orchestrating the harassed plight of Alex, who's suspected of foul play (twice-over) by the cops, and followed by a group of thugs that includes a scary woman who likes to abuse bodily pressure points. Factoring into the overcrowded narrative is a raft of French notables, from Marina Hands as Alex's equestrian sister, to François Berléand as the detective who comes to believe in Alex's innocence (a fact that, in one of many debts to the Hitch template, is a given from the outset), to Jean Rochefort as a senator still grieving over the death of his beloved son. Because too many stars is never enough for a crackling suspense yarn, Kristin Scott Thomas also shows up as Hands's loyal lesbian wife, speaking (as in The Valet) impeccable French that's far more convincing than the story's escalating zigzags. Questions of believability, however, are in the end irrelevant to Tell No One, a film whose entertainingly fleet (and sometimes downright harried) pace—highlighted by Alex's on-foot flight from cops through city streets and across a teeming highway—and enticing central mysteries deliver the tangy kicks one craves from juicy pulp.

Alexandre Beck (François Cluzet) is a quiet pediatrician in Paris, known for his good judgment and excellent rapport with his patients. But his life is not so simple; eight years ago, his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) was murdered at their country house by a notorious serial killer. When a policeman arrives at Beck’s clinic with news that two more bodies have been found on the property, all the old nightmares come back with a vengeance – even more so when he opens an e-mail from his dead wife.

This cracking premise leads us into a mostly satisfying thriller through the parts of Paris (street markets, squalid housing projects, and busy parks) mostly unknown to movie fans. Guillaume Canet’s film, shot almost entirely in dazzling sunshine, shows this most cinematic of cities with new eyes. And yet Tell No One, which won four Césars, relies on many genre clichés which are as stale as old Camembert.

Fortunately, the pace moves along so fast and so assuredly there’s no time to dwell on everything we’ve seen before. Adapted from the best-selling American novel by Harlan Coben, the film’s translation to a French setting works extremely well, although Canet and co-writer Philippe Lefebvre chose to change the names of the characters (and calling the heroine Margot is a clue to people who know their French history). However, in getting through so many plot twists into 125 minutes, Canet forgets to linger on the remarkable performances, most notably that of Kristin Scott Thomas. As Hélène, Alex’s sister-in-law, Scott Thomas holds your focus every time she is on screen. Famous for her “English roses”, she has lived in Paris for 20 years, but this is the first time most Anglophone audiences will have seen this side of her.

Indeed most of the cast are vaguely recognizable as solid supporting players to fans of French movies. Consummate professionals all of them, there’s not a duff performance in the film. Unfortunately they are let down by a plot which offers some very familiar thrills, without the creepiness in Crimson Rivers or the odd-couple protagonists of Read My Lips.

The trouble with most thrillers is their disposability; once you know the ending you don’t need to see it again. What is new in Tell No One is Canet’s attitude towards violence involving women, a necessarily essential component to a thriller. The fights where women are injured are filmed without the titillation or puerile enjoyment which makes so many action films quasi-pornographic. In Jean Goudier’s sound design, where slaps echo like gunshots, and Christophe Offenstein’s dispassionate cinematography, the violence is treated clinically, similarly to the CSI franchise’s autopsies. The occasional nudity is handled in the same unfussy fashion, an attitude hard to imagine in an American film.

The women in Tell No One can be so strong and fearless that their occasional moments of vulnerability are the most shocking in the film. At one point, a woman is shot in the back of a van (to reveal more would spoil it). She actually gets out, shuts the door, and starts walking normally down a busy street. The man who shot her has to follow her, gun drawn, until she collapses; then he’s the one who turns away and runs. This is only Canet’s second film as director, although he’s a huge star in France (and even had a supporting role in The Beach). If he continues to direct women with similar panache, he will really be on to something.

Tony Medley

Here’s another gem of a film that lots of people will avoid because it’s in French with subtitles. Too bad for them.

Alexandre Beck (François Cluzet) is a baby doctor whose wife, Margot (Marie-Josee Croze), was murdered eight years previously. He starts getting mysterious email messages with a picture of a woman who looks like his wife. Then the police want to reopen the investigation, accusing him of killing her. Compounding things is his relationship with his father in law, Jacques Larentin (Andre Dusollier), who was the policeman who identified his own daughter.

Directed and written (with Phillippe Lefebvre) by Guillaume Canet (who also appears in the film as Phillippe Neuville), the film is based on Harlan Coben’s bestselling novel of the same name, which has been translated into 27 languages, and has sold over 6 million copies worldwide.

It’s always difficult to write a review of a good thriller because anything a critic writes can spoil the enjoyment of a fresh viewing without knowing what’s going on and what’s going to happen. I’ve already told too much, but the way Canet sets the ambience of the film at the start, you’d have to be dull, indeed, not to know that something pretty bad is about to happen.

Cluzet, who is a dead ringer for a young Dustin Hoffman, gives a remarkably compelling performance of a man who has lost the love of his life. The film flashes back to Alex and Margot as prepubescent children, already so much in love with each other that they exchange a sweet kiss.

Music plays a big part in most thrillers, and this is no exception. What’s unusual is that the music came from one single screening for guitarist Matthieu Chedid. Canet wanted him to play live over the movie and improvise while he was watching the film. So they had one single screening and Matthieu played along. Says Canet, “The amazing thing is that the music is an integral part of the movie. You hardly notice it but it’s the most vital element. It builds raw emotion without being omnipresent. That was one of the best artistic encounters of my life.”

Although the announced running time is 125 minutes, Canet says that the editing was extremely difficult, “One evening, I was talking with Matthieu Cheded, who said that the reason why Beatles songs are so short and so good is that they are so condensed. All that’s left is the best. That really meant something for me. The next day, in editing, I took out quarter of an hour of the film. (Film editor) Hervé de Luze found a rhythm that I really liked.”

The film was shot with two cameras with Canet operating the hand held camera himself. “That offers huge freedom to express yourself,” he says. “By going right where you want to go, it allows you to be very fluid in your handling of the actors.”

Even though there was a lot of improvisation on this film, the opening scene is the only one that wasn’t scripted. Says Canet, “The night we shot it, we had a drink and I told them it was up to them to improvise. I had a Steadycam moving round the table and told them to talk among themselves. They were free to say what they wanted. I wanted it to be alive, and for people to cut into each other’s conversations. At the beginning they panicked, but they wound up having a lot of fun.”

Only one scene was storyboarded, when Alex runs across the Paris Beltway. Says Canet, “We had one day with eight cameras to get it in the can. We were incredibly lucky. No one was hurt and we got exactly what we wanted.”

This is, by far, the best film I’ve seen this year. In French.

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)

Enough talk; enough flashbacks. Sometimes the best thing a mystery can do is give its protagonist a reason to run like hell.

The example of the year arrives midway through the French thriller “Tell No One.” A pediatrician wrongly accused of murder is being chased by the police. The doctor zigzags across the Paris beltway, narrowly avoiding traffic. The way the sequence is shot and edited, you believe every second; it unfolds, nervously, the way something like this would actually happen. It’s on the money, this brief, memorable scene: tense and sharp but not overblown.

These qualities apply to the acting as well. Under the direction of Guillaume Canet, who adapted Harlan Coben’s English-language best seller with Philippe Lefebvre, this is a splendid ensemble doing its level best to keep the audience guessing all the way through an increasingly knotty narrative. Francois Cluzet, who resembles an elongated Dustin Hoffman, plays the doctor, and the performance is a marvel of containment. He reveals a great deal non-verbally. The man’s grief and cunning come through subtly in each new chapter.

Coben’s story owes debts to Alfred Hitchcock’s wrong-man scenarios, “The Fugitive” and the morally grimy landscape of novelist Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone”). The milieu is as American as apple pie and serial killers. Yet its Gallic transformation works. The story hook remains the same, and it’s pretty irresistible. Eight years after the vicious murder of his wife, whom he had known since they were childhood sweethearts, Dr. Beck receives an e-mail containing a surveillance video of a woman who may be the woman in question, mysteriously alive. She’s played by the superb French-Canadian actress Marie-Josee Croze, last seen as the speech therapist in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

The cryptic e-mail instructs the doctor to keep mum and wait for another message. The police, meantime, have circumstantial evidence implicating the doctor in another murder. The events of the fateful night eight years ago haunt the doctor because they do not add up, and a daisy chain of secrets links that murky past to the increasingly bloody present.

“Tell No One” came out in France in 2006 to enormous success. Subsequently Chicago’s own Music Box Films took a chance on the picture, its third release, following the excellent “Tuya’s Marriage” and the more recent “OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies.” The gamble is paying off, with impressive box office tallies for “Tell No One” in New York and Los Angeles. The film is opening up into a wider American release this week. It’s worth seeing.

The recommendation comes with a caveat. When the resolution arrives, it arrives like a particularly crowded game of Twister. As the truth of the wife’s disappearance emerges, flashback wrestles with flashback, and those of us who tend to get lost in these sorts of explanatory pile-ups, even if the character explaining it all to us is brandishing a loaded gun, may feel that they’ll never get out of “Tell No One” alive.

The actors come to the rescue. Cluzet’s watchful intensity holds you throughout. Andre Dussollier portrays the policeman father of the doctor’s wife, and it’s fascinating to see such a naturally ebullient actor (he sparkled in Alain Resnais’ “Private Fears in Public Places”) trade it all in for a gruff, stern glower. Everyone’s ideally cast: Kristin Scott-Thomas as a lesbian restaurateur; Nathalie Baye as an icy whirlwind of an attorney; and director Canet as the son of a wealthy power broker played by the elegantly sinister Jean Rochefort .

As in the world of Lehane, the circles of corruption widen outward, until those swimming in it can barely see the shore. What I like about this picture—a French policier dropped inside Hollywood pulp fiction—has less to do with its grandiose, dirty-town vision of the evil that men do. I like the opportunities it affords its actors, who elevate every little insinuation and double-cross to a higher level.

Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner)

The New Yorker (David Denby)

indieWIRE Leo Goldsmith from Reverse Shot

The New York Sun (Darrell Hartman)

Reel.com [Chris Barsanti] also seen here: Filmcritic.com

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)

stylusmagazine.com (Paolo Cabrelli)

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson

Time Out London (Wally Hammond)

Hollywood Jesus Darrel Manson

Variety.com [Lisa Nesselson]

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

BLOOD TIES

France (144 mi) 2013

Cannes 2013 Review: BLOOD TIES Knots Up 1970s New York Ryland Aldrich at Cannes from Twitch

To call Guillaume Canet's Blood Ties a love letter to the 1970s is a bit of an understatement. The Clive Owen, Billy Crudup brothers-on-opposite-sides-of-the-law drama absolutely oozes with 1970s nostalgia from its impeccable costume and production design to its almost fetishistic use of 1970s music. Even the story is a throwback to the some of the great crime films of the era (not to mention the choice to cast James Caan). While it doesn't quite get every beat right, strong performances and a satisfying plot make it a memory trip worth taking.

Frank (Crudup) has always had a contentious relationship with his older brother Chris (Owen), though as much as he hates to admit it, his decision to become a cop wasn't enough to stop him from looking up to his criminal brother. We catch up with Chris on his release from a lengthy prison sentence as a reluctant Frank succumbs to his sister's (Lili Taylor) pressure to help Chris get back on his feet. Canet (and co-writers James Gray and Jacques Maillot) don't spend a lot of time on exposition, but things move slowly through the rather lengthy first act as we get to know the family, as well as Frank's prostitute ex Monica (Marion Cotillard) and new love interest Natalie (Mila Kunis). We also meet local thug Scarfo (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his girl Vanessa (Zoe Saldana), who just happens to be the former love of Frank's life.

A plotline involving Chris's return to his former profession slowly develops, though far more time is spent throughout the film on family and relationship melodrama. This tends to wear on a bit but the strong performances all around keep it from ever becoming outright painful. When the action does pop off, it comes furiously and is shot with skill. Thankfully, as the runtime increases, the story develops towards an exceptionally satisfying final act.

A European production, some of the cast of Canet's first English language film tends towards atypical. Both Owen's and Cotillard's accents have awkward moments. Though his screen time is on the short side, Schoenaerts's English is flawless and it's great to see the Bullhead star begin to make inroads with American audiences. Zoe Saldana gives a particularly strong performance, and the oft-overlooked leading man Crudup also does well.

What will surely be remembered most about Blood Ties is its strong period production value. From the wonderfully decorated exteriors loaded with the cars of the era to the record players spinning classic hits, 1970s New York absolutely comes alive. While he takes his time getting there, Canet tells an enjoyable story -- and if nothing else, it's clear the director can execute a complex vision.

Blood Ties Fionnuala Halligan at Cannes from Screendaily

There’s ‘70s design porn and there’s Blood Ties, director Guillame Canet’s ambitious foray into hard-boiled Brooklyn crime drama which boasts impeccable costume and production design credits.

At 144 minutes, however, Blood Ties is too sprawling, its fractured narrative cut far too many ways for the film to succeed. A [longer] remake of Les Liens Du Sang written by Canet with Brooklyn’s finest James Gray, it’s an extravagant, bumpy ride - Heat meets Mesrine via Cain and Abel - which hits more than its fair share of potholes on the way.

Overweight cops sweat through polyester and cheap wool, oozing authenticity over the beaten-up locations of Canet’s English-language debut, while the film is anchored by a typically understated performance from Billy Crudup and a more extravagant turn from Clive Owen as good cop brother/bad criminal brother.

For all its flaws, however, there’s something oddly compelling about the scale of Canet’s (Tell No One) vision. The impeccable technical credits, the leached lensing of Christophe Offenstein, a supporting cast that includes James Caan as the patriarch, Marion Cotillard as a druggie hooker, and the brooding Mathias Schoenaerts as a hulking thug: that’s a film with appeal for the Denis Lehane crowd. (Mila Kunis and Zoe Saldana provide further support in girlfriend roles).

James Gray himself is another benchmark – his own Little Odessa worked over very similar ground back in 1994 (not that good/bad brother films are thin on the ground]. Chris (Owen), just released from a 12-year-stint in prison for murder, is a troublesome character, his snarling second-half completely at odds with his earlier attempts to go straight. His younger brother Frank (Crudup) is a respected cop who no longer wants any dealings with his sibling but is persuaded against his better judgment into taking him in and fixing him up with a job.

According to the film’s synopsis, Chris is 50 (although Owen has the boot-black hair of a 20-year-old), and clearly too old to change, embarking on contract jobs to set himself up in a new life and compromising his brother’s integrity. He has two children he couldn’t be less interested in from a relationship with hooker Monica (Cotillard) and embarks on an affair with the much younger Natalie (Mila Kunis).

Frank, meanwhile, can’t keep away from ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Saldana), putting her scary boyfriend Scarfo (Schoenaerts) behind bars on a spurious charge so he can rekindle his relationship with her. And at home, there’s a dying father Leon (Caan), cared for by sister Marie (Taylor).

If that all sounds plot-heavy, it is. Canet the director hasn’t been able to shave Canet the writer’s work, and Canet the husband of Cotillard couldn’t pare back her role either, even though Monica adds little past colour to the piece. She, like most of the secondary characters in Blood Ties, weaves around Brooklyn, arbitrarily zipping in and out of the plot as the film tries out several tones for size. Performances are strong across the board, though, with Owen taking a while to hit the right pitch, and Crudup lending it quiet authority.

When Blood Ties lifts, such as during a bank heist sequence on the streets, it positively soars. Most of the time it paces around, however, threatening to come together but leaving the viewer to attempt to connect the multiple narrative dots (if they even do connect). The ‘70s redolent soundtrack ranges from the unexpected to the cliché. And in a film where the costumes are universally delightful, a pink suit worn by Chris for his wedding positively steals the show.

Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from The Playlist

Daily | Cannes 2013 | Guillaume Canet’s BLOOD TIES David Hudson at Fandor

Owen Gleiberman at Cannes from Entertainment Weekly

Blood Ties: Cannes Review Todd McCarthy at The Hollywood Reporter

Scott Foundas at Cannes from Variety

Cannes 2013: Blood Ties - first look review Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian

Cantet, Laurent

Review of Cantet's work on DinaView Dina Iordanova

8 July 2006[Arts]: Film-makers on film: Laurent Cantet Sheila Johnston discusses Abdel Kechiche's L'Esquive (2003) with Cantet from The Telegraph

BFI | Sight & Sound | The London Film Festival: The Class - Interview Ginette Vincendeau interviews the director from Sight and Sound, November 2008

Laurent Cantet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LES SANGUINAIRES

France (67 mi) 1997

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

A group of slacker French people decide the upcoming millennium is going to be too plastic and annoying, so they head to a small island off the coast of the country. Soon they're annoying each other, and a donkey ends up dead. In 68 minutes, we're treated to a crude digest of L'Avventura as seen through the eyes of a bunch of hopeless Francs. Part of the "2000 Seen By" series of films about the eve of the millennium, none of which anyone seems to have seen.

User comments from imdb Author: edwartell (edwartell@hotmail.com) from Austin, Texas

This movie finally clawed its way to U.S. distribution as part of the "2000 Seen By" series, six movies from different countries containing the (almost instantly outdated) visions of different filmmakers of what the end of the 20th century (not the real one, but you know what I mean). No doubt someone was sleeping with someone. Les Sanguinaires is a very boring movie about a group of people (French, obviously) who decide to avoid all the hype of the new millennium and spend that time on an isolated, rustic island. Like any good Lord Of The Flies type movie, the predictable sexual tensions and jealousies emerge, along with some semi-mystic events. The problem is that not only is this kind of thing a tired concept, but that it's played at the slowest pace possible, that the characters are none-too-interesting, and that the dialogue is all too realistic. Watch Hal Hartley's Book Of Life instead.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Ressources humaines)

France Great Britain (100 mi) 1999

Business student Franck (Lespert) returns home as a management trainee in the same factory as his father, a tool operator. Like Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité, this rousing and moving drama grandly (and ironically) invokes our peculiar species in its title, even as it's marked by an understated directorial style that minimises visual flourish and favours non-professional actors. But where Dumont applies a mysterious and distanced gaze, Cantet, for all his formal restraint, fashions a film of communicative intimacy, offering a fresh, relevant and challenging view of work, class and family. If the choice of milieu, a concrete industrial satellite of Paris which we first see through Franck's eyes as he journeys home by train, recalls '60s political Godard, so does the film's evolving class-consciousness. But whatever Cantet's political stance, his methods are dramatic, not didactic. His realism is based on acute, telling observation. The film has its faults. Franck's discovery of secret management plans lacks credibility; the skullduggery of the bosses is overdone; and the father is a little too bovine. But these are quibbles.

The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]

On one level, Human Resources is a simple "problem picture" about Franck (Jalil Lespert), a management trainee who gets a job in the same factory where his father (Jean-Claude Vallod) has worked on the assembly line for 30 years, then finds his loyalties tested when his father is among a group of proposed layoffs. But the level on which it’s resonant is as a story about a young man getting his first taste of power and class mobility, and how powerful a deranging force that whiff of self-improvement can be. When he slips into a suit or goes out with friends he feels ever-so-slightly better than, we can see how Franck’s been transformed by the simple promise of a bourgeois life, and it’s frightening to us, if not to him. Directed by Laurent Cantet (Les Sanguinaires), the film’s politics aren’t particularly complicated — you know the ball-busting communist who calls Franck a management pawn will eventually turn out to be right — but it’s not a polemic; like the Dardenne brothers’ La Promesse (and unlike their Rosetta) you feel that the politics emerge from the situation, and not the other way around.

Restrained, tough, and subtle enough to be as engrossing on the second viewing as it was on the first, Laurent Cantet's Human Resources is a film that both Godard and Ken Loach might envy. It combines an eternally alluring subject—the father-son relationship—with one that's a more difficult sell: blue-collar work and the conflict between labor and management.

Human Resources is set in a French factory town where the changeover to the 35-hour week (the real-life current event to which the film is hitched) has the kind of life-or-death urgency that Hollywood screenwriters are paid millions to invent. Frank (Jalil Lespert), an eager-beaver business school student majoring in "human resources," returns home for a management internship at the factory where his father has worked on the assembly line all his adult life. Frank sees himself as the embodiment of enlightened capitalism. He believes that workers and bosses can cooperate toward their mutual benefit, and that, as a worker's son, he's an ideal mediator. But when his pet project—a questionnaire about the 35-hour week—is used as a justification for laying off the oldest workers, his father among them, he burns his bridges with his boss by providing the feisty, unflappable union rep (Danielle Mélador) with enough evidence of management's duplicity to fuel a strike.

Caught between his ambition and his desire to save his father, Frank discovers a working-class consciousness he didn't know he possessed. His father, however, is far from pleased at his son's transformation. Totally identified with his job (he boasts with Stakhanovist pride that he can turn out 700 parts in an hour) and with the working-man ethos, the father nevertheless wants his son to have a better life. Seeing him lunching with the managers is both revenge and a vindication for a lifetime of swallowing shit—although he'd never admit as much to himself. And his own loss of livelihood troubles him less than the possibility that Frank has thrown away his career.

The father is played with remarkable nuance and vulnerability by Jean-Claude Vallod, a bulky but worn middle-aged man with stubborn eyes and a slightly pouting lower lip just discernible beneath his bushy mustache. Like all the actors in the film, with the exception of Lespert, he's a nonprofessional. Cantet filled his cast with workers whom he found in the unemployment office. Using a method similar to Mike Leigh's, he rehearsed with them for about a year before writing a final script based on the characters they developed through improvisation. Across the board, the actors perform with an intelligence and conviction that grows out of their real-life experience. It's an adage that acting is reacting; the most difficult thing for an actor is to react with mixed emotions and contrary desires. Cantet bases his editing scheme on reaction shots, and they draw us into the film by conveying much of what is left unsaid about the power structure that defines life in the factory and in the family.

Just as compelling and tangled as the connection between father and son is the friendship Frank forms with a black worker, Alain (Didier Emile-Woldemard), who's equally alienated but has more insight into the situation. Alain's able to make the case for Frank's father and the pride he takes in his job, so we're able to see him as more than a toady. And it's through him also that Frank comes to an understanding of his own outsider position.

Human Resources was shot on location in a Renault factory, and the actors operate the heavy machinery as only those who've done it for a living can. Like the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta and La Promesse (which also couples oedipal with class struggle) and Olivier Assayas's recent Cannes entry Les Destinées Sentimentales, Human Resources is part of a growing trend in French-language films to make work and the workplace a central concern.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Human Resources (1999) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, December 2000

Louis Proyect

Nitrate Online (Dan Lybarger)

Political Film Review Michael Haas

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

Chris Dashiell at CineScene

Ressources humaines (1999) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

indieWIRE Stan Schwartz

filmcritic.com Matt Langdon, also seen here: DVD Talk (Matt Langdon)

Review by K. C. Howell

MovieFreak [Howard Schumann]

DVD Talk (Chris Neilson)

Flak Magazine (Eric Wittmershaus)

Harvey S. Karten

click here for Human Resources review MaryAnn Johanson from the FlickFilosopher

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Virtual militancy: a conversation with Human Resources filmmaker ... Prarie Miller from the World Socialist Web Site, May 5, 2000

BBC [Michael Thomson]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The New York Times (Stephen Holden)

TIME OUT (L'emploi du temps) B+ 92

France (134 mi) 2001

Like Cantet's first film, Human Resources, this sober, measured and terribly sad movie explores that most subtle of distinctions: what it is that separates who we are from what we do. Middle-aged executive Vincent (Recoing) has been 'let go', although his redundancy seems self-inflicted, an existential torpor he does everything to conceal from his family. He's transferred his expertise to the UN, he claims, working as a business consultant and persuading old friends to invest in a hush-hush get rich quick scheme. It's insane, yet Vincent's pretence is virtually sufficient to his needs, his assumption of propriety and well-being as good as the real thing. Or put another way, a proper job is scarcely more meaningful than this hollow charade. In Cantet's own words, 'Vincent is the sincerest of liars, an actor of his own life.' It's a profound, measured portrait of a man driven - and driving - with no end in sight.

The Boston Phoenix Chris Fujiwara

In this brooding and chilling film, director Laurent Cantet (Human Resources) has come up with an excellent parable for the new Western economy, with its mobile workers, bland interpersonal style, ideology of personal growth, and addiction to jargon. Rather than break it to his family that he's been laid off, businessman Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) pretends to have started a new job that requires him to spend most of the week away from home. He passes the time driving, haunting the lobbies of hotels and office parks, communicating with his wife by cell phone, and spinning a web of detailed lies about his activities.

The film’s black mood owes much to Cantet’s psychological insight. The more obsessively Vincent strives to keep up the appearance of being okay, the more his existence becomes vacuous and unreal. With his family and friends, he masters the art of avoiding situations where he would have to talk too clearly about himself; alone on the fringes of the corporate universe, he seems in danger of disappearing altogether. With sleek precision, Time Out describes a scary emptiness at the heart of the familiar.

Time Out Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Laurent Cantet's Time Out is an intense look at one man's professional angst and its rollover effects, a terrifying study of bourgeois desperation worthy of Claude Chabrol. Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) loses his job and, rather than tell his relatives, invents a new one. He studies a company's media kits and manages to convince friends and family to invest in his fantasy corporation. Vincent's journey is an affront to the dehumanization of economic slavery. By lying to himself and the world around him and freeing himself from responsibility, he achieves the kind of freedom where the only person he has to answer to is himself. Though clearly in turmoil, Vincent seems to take a kind of silent pleasure in his deceit. Like Dirk Bogarde's delusional protagonist in Fassbinder's Despair, the oppressed Vincent may be deranged if only because it appears as if he's really convinced of the authenticity of his fabricated existenz. Most fascinating, though, is the way Vincent's wife Muriel (Karin Viard) becomes an unwitting participant in the lie she believes is destroying their lives. Cantet implies that Vincent is noble at heart by chooseing a job where he gets to live the illusion of helping all of humanity: The man comes to imagine that he works for the United Nations. Cantet's snowy landscapes compliment Vincent's human disconnection. An abandoned cottage by the Swiss Alps is the man's makeshift office and the snowy trek to the cottage comes to symbolize a nervous wire-walk between stringent societal demands and personal freedom. Joceyln Pook's operatic score matches Cantet's unflagging gaze (the film's compositions are as rigorous as the judgment Vincent receives from his peers). As a bona fide thriller, though, Time Out is all tease; the film's many ruses and ominous tonality is patently misleading. (Interestingly, the film is based on a true story with a not-so-happy ending.) Though partially compromised by its horror façade, Time Out is a riveting account of a curious, self-made man, a lone warrior carving out a personal niche for himself in an otherwise onerous landscape.

The real-life basis for Time Out, Laurent Cantet's masterful study of a white-collar businessman in decline, is the infamous case of Jean-Claude Romand, a wealthy Frenchman who claimed he was a doctor for the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. But Romand was actually leading a double life: He had never graduated from medical school, hadn't held a job in two decades, and was living off the savings he'd bilked from his parents, his in-laws, and his mistress. On the verge of being found out, he killed his wife, his two children, and his parents, then burned his house to the ground, rather than simply confessing the truth. Many filmmakers would have heightened the tabloid horrors of this story, but Cantet removes them entirely, focusing on an ordinary guy so overcome with feelings of shame and inadequacy after losing his job that he chooses to bury himself in an avalanche of lies. Beautifully played by Aurélien Recoing, who looks uncannily like middle-management material, Cantet's protagonist isn't a scoundrel or a killer, but a man whose entire sense of identity and worth is bound tragically to the workplace. In many ways, Recoing mirrors William H. Macy's character in Fargo, another low-level suit who hatches an impossible scheme and scrambles desperately to keep it afloat. Both films derive extraordinary tension and dread from the inevitable moment when their protagonists' plans fall to pieces, but Time Out burns more slowly and methodically, achieving its effects through a greater fidelity to the everyday. Cantet follows the rough outlines of Romand's story—the nature of his deception, his commute from northern France to Geneva, his survival on other people's savings—but changes the details to bring it down to earth. Three months after getting fired from a post he'd held for 11 years, Recoing is still traveling on "business trips," driving aimlessly to get away from his family and sleeping in parking lots on the passenger side of his car. To buy himself time, he claims to have a job with the U.N. in Geneva, and he scams his former business associates into phony investments in emerging markets around the world. For extra cash, he gets mixed up with a crooked bootlegger (Serge Livrozet) who smuggles knock-off merchandise from Eastern Europe. Recoing can only go so long before his wife (Karen Viard) and investors begin asking questions, yet it's remarkable how patiently Cantet raises the stakes until he reaches the breaking point. Aside from Recoing's outrageous deception and denial, Time Out could be the sad story of any businessman who loses his job and stares down the resulting humiliation, insecurity, and despair. By pruning the sensational aspects of Romand's story, Cantet makes his hero's psychosis all too recognizable.

Time Out Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

In his last film, Human Resources, director Laurent Cantet addressed a deeply unfashionable subject: unionised labour in the modern workplace. Now he takes a devastating look at the officer class: the affluent types in the hi-tech business of consultancy and financial services, with their families, pleasant suburban homes and sports utility vehicles. In the simple world of work Cantet has hit a rich seam, and in the story he now has to tell - co-written by Cantet himself and his editor Robin Campillo - he delivers a mesmerising, horrifying parable about the way work provides a nourishing delusion of existence to fill up the hours, days and years of our lives.

Aurélien Recoing plays Vincent, a comfortably-off professional man in a French suburb, married to Muriel (Karin Viard), with three bright children and his own mother and father - devoted, supportive grandparents - living nearby. He is away on business for long periods, and drops tantalising hints about getting a new job in Switzerland, working for the UN, helping to assist the developing economies of Africa. But this is all a lie. Vincent was fired months ago, and is too ashamed to tell his family. So he drives around in his car, calls his wife on the cellphone from service stations and hotel forecourts, and pretends to have just come out of meetings.

Stories about redundant executives waving goodbye to their wives and pretending to go off to work have become media folk-myths and get treated as quirky, tragicomic tales. Cantet finds in this one something more disturbing and more pertinent. Vincent has become a ghost in the machine of work. With his smart suit and plausible manner, he strolls into office buildings where he knows no one, breezily hails secretaries he has never seen before, idles his time away in plush lobbies, pretending to be an important salaryman, until he is gently moved on by a polite but baffled security guard. Finally, simply from eavesdropping on a meeting about African development, he gets the idea for a phoney development scheme in Switzerland and uses this to swindle old school chums. Inexorably, Vincent gets further and further out of his depth.

What we are watching is a slow-motion car-crash. As his big lie gets bigger and bigger, Vincent undergoes a kind of monumental breakdown, all the more terrifying because of the fluency with which he is able to deceive his wife, his parents and indeed himself. What scares him is not the prospect of being caught, but how appallingly easy it is not to be caught, and how the pretence and delusion of his current lifestyle is not so very different from when he was genuinely in work, with its empty ritual theatre of executive suits, meetings, conferences, etc. Vincent broods on the people he would see around the conference tables: they were "unknown faces - moments of absence..."

Cantet has based his movie on the more dramatic real-life story of Jean-Claude Romand, a phoney doctor who lived a similar life of deception and in 1993 murdered his wife, children and parents when the lies and the money ran out. Cantet cuts out the murder from his story, but leaves the existential horror intact. His hero, Vincent, has seen for himself how work is a rope bridge which gets us through the day. He has looked down through the slats, and seen the abyss beneath.

Time Out is a film which asks powerful questions about how and why men think of themselves as inseparable from their careers, that without a job they lose not merely money and status but also their identities. In not merely being unemployed, but in flouting convention in this determined and criminal way, Vincent terrifyingly exposes the world of work as a busy diversion from a bottomless void of our own making.

Even with the real-life murder removed, Cantet's film reminded me of Cédric Kahn's movie Roberto Succo (shown in Cannes last year and due to be released in the UK in June) about the real-life desperado who for years outwitted French police. Succo, like Vincent, is a wrongdoer whose crimes are almost gratuitous acts; carried out with sufficient effrontery and persistent disregard for personal consequence, they can be awe-inspiringly successful. Like Succo, Vincent is a fugitive figure as he drives through the French and Swiss countryside, hunted, alone in this heedless landscape, with a dizzying sense of both freedom and fear. Vincent confesses that the only thing he enjoyed about the job he was fired from was the experience of driving hundreds of kilometres to pointless meetings, and was finally dismissed because he was literally reluctant to leave his car.

Recently, David Puttnam complained that modern cinema was failing to reflect real life. Well, that might be true of Hollywood, but outstanding film-makers like Cantet show that elsewhere in the world, real life is proving to be compelling source material. Recoing gives an outstanding performance as Vincent, the white-collar everyman, and Viard gives sterling support as the wife who slowly senses the poison of his lies, without knowing what they are or why he is telling them. It is a brilliant essay on the tragic, secret drama of desperate lives.

PopMatters Elbert Ventura

Movie Vault [Avril Carruthers]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Gary Mairs

Images (David Gurevich)

The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]

Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet)

filmcritic.com calls Time Out Pete Croatto

hybridmagazine.com Ellen Whittier

Reel.com [Rod Armstrong]

L’Emploi du temps (2001) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani)

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg)

Xiibaro Reviews: Lilo & Stitch, Time Out, Nine Queens, and The ... David Perry

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann)

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman)

Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit)

eFilmCritic Reviews Thom

DVD Verdict Michael Rankins

DVD Verdict Barrie Maxwell

Harvey S. Karten

indieWIRE Anthony Kaufman, voted # 1 Film of the Year

Austin Chronicle ((L'emploi Du Temps)) Marritt Ingman

Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden)

Good work - the director of time out, Laurent Cantet Manohla Dargis feature and interview from the LA Times, April 19, 2002

DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

HEADING SOUTH A- 94

aka: Vers Le Sud

France Canada (108 mi) 2005

It's hard to tell the good masks from the bad, but everyone wears one.

Based on "La Chair du Maitre," a book of connected stories by Haitian writer Dany Laferrière, this is an exquisitely beautiful film with an extremely difficult and intricately complex subject matter, sex tourism and the lingering influence of colonialism. Continuing Cantet’s themes on worker displacement and the dehumanization of the work force, witnessing the horrid effects of child labor, this film clearly shows that capitalism has winners, but at the expense of large segments of the rest of the world who, as a consequence of the lavish lifestyle of a few, live in abject poverty with absolutely no hope of any change in their lifetime. As a result, the poor are manipulated into unspeakable actions, enhanced by their need to survive, where from their position of powerlessness they overcompensate by becoming tradable commodities in human flesh.

Aided by powerful performances which bring to life the vacation habits of 3 older rich, middle-aged white women who travel to a seaside resort in Port-au-Prince, Haiti during the 1970’s, the era of the Duvalier regime, where cops were little more than street thugs terrorizing anyone who so much as looked at them funny, yet these American women live a completely luxurious lifestyle where they are waited on hand and foot by young, scantily clad, subservient black men, sometimes even boys, completely oblivious to the world just a few blocks away. The film examines a world within a world, which has an established hierarchy that is brilliantly realized by a series of offhand looks, grimaces, glances, women noticing other women, particularly what men they are with, somewhat jealous when the man is someone who has also paid them attention. Ménothy César as Legba is one such 18-year old man who passes himself off between several women, giving each a good time, but is something of a handsome, well-paid gigolo who is usually clad only in a swimsuit. They lavish him with praise, special gifts, and even desperately promise him a passport out of the country to return home with them to America. What do they really know about this striking young man?

There’s a stunning opening scene where a woman attempts to give her own 15-year old daughter away to a well-to-do man at the airport, as she knows what the future holds for a poor black girl in Haiti, desperate to offer her a chance that she otherwise could not provide. Into this scenario walks Brenda (Karen Young), a shy, sensitive middle fortyish woman from Savannah, Georgia, very much reminiscent of the fragility of Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie, or Joanne Woodward’s wonderful portrayal of a middle aged woman’s first love in her husband’s 1968 film, RACHEL RACHEL. Three years earlier, she met this same young man, Legba, on the same beaches in Haiti, and it was the most remarkable sexual moment of her life, which she recalls in graphic detail. She has never gotten it out of her mind and returns, hoping to rediscover the same romantic magic. But he is already part of an existing social structure led by a domineering queen bee, Ellen, the perfectly cast Charlotte Rampling, a mid fiftyish French literature professor at Wellesley, who for the past 5 or 6 years has been spending her summers at this same resort. Legba is in her company, and is at her beck and call. Brenda, to say the least, is stunned, yet all eyes are glued to one another’s every move. Add to this mix Sue, Louise Portal, a warehouse manager who works in Montreal, who has her own Haitian boyfriend, but is quite aware that this relationship works here and here alone in an idyllic paradise, as back home, they would probably never even speak to one another.

The few moments when the camera moves to the streets of Haiti are riveting, resembling the visceral, hand-held camera style of Michael Winterbottom, revealing hordes of people everywhere, kids begging for coins, street vendors plying their trade asking for next to nothing, but it’s alive with a kinetic energy that jolts us to attention. Almost immediately, the police make their presence, bullying a young kid, needlessly threatening him. The entire population cowers in response, backing off, saying nothing, daring not to interfere. Meanwhile, back on the beach, Ellen remains in control with her acid tongue, laying down the law of the land, entitlement, suggesting the young boys are there for the picking, all they have to do is ask and their carnal desires will be satisfied. Eventually Brenda gets a few moments alone with Legba, but she is constantly humiliated and ridiculed by Ellen, who then calls him over, as if he is her prized possession. Much of this plays out in typical colonialist imagery, the difference being Brenda has a special affection that goes beyond racist depictions.

Each of the major players has a personal soliloquy in front of the camera, the most striking is Albert (Lys Ambroise), a native Haitian who works the bar and restaurant at the resort, the same man from the opening scene where a woman attempted to give him her child, a cautious and restrained man, extremely well mannered, impeccably dressed, explaining how whites were depicted as savages in his grandfather’s day, literally lower than animals after their invasion of Haiti in 1915, describing his position today: "If he knew I was a waiter for Americans, he would die of shame. Today, whites wield an even more dangerous weapon than cannons — their dollars: Everything they touch turns to garbage." Prophetic words.

Pierre Milon's ravishingly beautiful cinematography, along with the perfectly chosen locations and sensuous native music, all add a layer of detailed precision, best expressed in a startling dance sequence where the hotel bar is throwing a party filled with dancers, among which include Brenda and Legba, after both have been thoroughly denounced by Ellen, so there is a feeling of literally letting go, where the music takes on an especially improvisational percussive tone. Brenda becomes oblivious to everyone else, ignoring her partner, dancing completely alone, whirling around as if under the influence of a voodoo chant, literally cast under a spell where all the other dancers stop and stare until Legba urges the musicians to change to a slower musical number. What transpires after that can only be described as strange and off-setting, as events deteriorate rapidly where Brenda’s whole demeanor is somehow transformed from a sensitive romantic into a capitalist blood-sucker, into that of Ellen, another rich, cynical, self-centered American who thinks the world is theirs for the taking, blind and completely oblivious of the consequences.

Dany Laferrière:

Physical desire and sex, as a political metaphor, seemed to me to be the fundamental element, something extraordinary, because, in a society where the relationships between the social classes are so terrifying, where the gap between the rich and the poor is so huge, where humiliation, disdain, contempt for others is so intense, the only thing that can bring one particular person closer to another is physical desire. I’m not describing an innocent form of sexuality, but sexuality as an instrument of political, social or economic power.

Film Freak Central Does the 30th Annual Toronto International Film ... Bill Chambers

Heading South (Vers le sud) represents such a departure from the milieu of Laurent Cantet's previous film (2001's brilliant psychological thriller Time Out (L'Emploi du temps)) that you can't really say it rounds out a trilogy he started with Human Resources. Nevertheless, it resumes his fascination with people in transience, people who've erected complex façades to avoid the repercussions of personal or professional failure; Cantet's pictures are screwball comedies played straight, and we see ourselves reflected in them like Athene saw herself in the water. Thanks to a chilling, if red herring-laden, prologue wherein a Haitian mother tries to "give" her endangered teenage daughter to a respectable-looking islander, a black cloud looms over the piece--and it's just one of the many ways in which Cantet shrewdly exploits Haiti's mystique without falling back on Serpent and the Rainbow-isms, paving a road to doom down which three middle-aged spinsters defiantly walk. Wellesley professor Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), willowy Midwesterner Brenda (Karen Young, who gets to deliver the screen's finest erotic monologue since Persona), and earthy Montréaler Sue (Louise Portal) are returning guests at a kind of sex resort where they take turns patronizing Legba (Ménothy Cesar), a young gigolo who makes them feel not only beautiful but, critically, maternal, too. (When we first meet Legba, he's curled up in a foetal position on the beach, only to be 'awakened' by Brenda's touch.) Unfolding towards the end of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's reign of terror, the 1978-set film relies a little too much on a working knowledge of Haiti's political history to sort out its narrative ambiguities, but by the same token, this seems to stave off noble-savage syndrome--of which the characters are guilty but the filmmaker, for a change, is not.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce from Cinepassion

When Charlotte Rampling in Heading South complains about how difficult it is for older women to get laid in Boston, the comment could just as well apply to middle-aged actresses cruising for roles in Hollywood -- American cinema likes its silver foxes in unthreatening, motherly positions, so the grand Lioness of Kink, in full bloom at 60, heads over to European screens to be properly challenged and appreciated. Rampling's character in Laurent Cantet's sharp, subtle analysis of sexual tourism travels to overseas shores for not dissimilar motives, though this tropical sojourn is fraught with unsettling politics, trenchantly desiccated. The setting is Haiti, 1979: Papa Doc Duvalier's brutal dictatorship and the nation's many miseries are just a distant whiff at the swanky Port-au-Prince hotel where Rampling's Wellesley professor presides luxuriantly in sexual holiday. Good times are what she's after, and she finds them with Ménothy Cesar, the beach gigolo who lavishes her with virile attention; their romping seems like a mutually pleasurable encounter, but because this is the filmmaker of Time Out, it's also an example of degrading capitalist-imperialist commodification, a transaction surreptitiously yet insidiously carried out. Augustly aware of how money puts her in a privileged position in this "dung heap," Rampling just wishes to be left with her illusions; Karen Young, a fellow menopausal traveler, arrives at the hotel desperate to revive her passion for Cesar, and the Caribbean jaunt soon darkens with jealous manipulation.

Louise Portal plays the third vacationer, but the crux of Heading South remains with the tug-of-war between Rampling and Young for nubile, young Cesar, and the racialized, politicized implications the relationships set off. Sunbathing with promptly available locals, the women are part of a meretricious global paradise willfully ignorant of the very conditions driving these men to their beds; when Young asks why poor Haitians put up with the corrupt government's lavish squandering, the well-meaning blindness of the remark momentarily pricks the idyllic bubble. Michel Houellebecq's original stories align tourism with predatory economics, yet because Cantet displays an almost Fassbinder-like sensitivity to emotional shifts in power, every character swells beyond the puppetry of condescending dreck like The Constant Gardener. Aesthetically and emotionally, the work is far closer to Claire Denis' Chocolat, down to a complex femininity of gaze (Cesar posing his ass in bed for Rampling's camera, Young savoring the memory of the way he would look at her) that is gradually and disturbingly revealed to be entrapping, boiling Cesar down to only a luscious physique up for rental, a body denied even the voice of the foreigners' personal monologues. Emotion throws off the neo-colonist equation -- Cesar's ride with an old girlfriend seals his fate, corpses invade the complacent utopia, Rampling chastises Young's "goddamn syrupy love." The hotel manager (Lys Ambroise) understands a tourist's dollar as more damaging than weapons; it attests to the film's multi-layered inquiries that Young's Caribbean journey ultimately emerges as both spiritually liberating and culturally polluting, romance and horror under the sun.

Laurent Cantet's 'Heading South' Shows the Ache of Blinding Lust in a Sexual Paradise Lost Stephen Holden from The New York Times, July 7, 2006

"I'm crazy about love — sex and love, I'm not really sure anymore," declares Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), the haughty, brutally forthright queen bee in the gaggle of sex tourists frolicking through Laurent Cantet's devastating film "Heading South."

Skip to next paragraph "I always told myself that when I'm old I'd pay young men to love me," she continues in her best blasé manner. "I just didn't think it would happen so fast." A beautiful, unmarried 55-year-old teacher of French literature at Wellesley, Ellen has spent the last six summers vacationing at the Petite Anse, a seaside Haitian hotel frequented by poor black boys eager to provide sex to middle-age female guests who lavish them with money and gifts. Ellen, the resident philosopher among a group who picnic with their boyfriends on the beach, is a bossy know-it-all who is not quite as hard-boiled as she would like to imagine.

As "Heading South" narrows its focus to concentrate on Ellen; her favorite young lover, the handsome, sly 18-year-old Legba (Ménothy Cesar); and two of the women in her circle, it becomes one of the most truthful examinations ever filmed of desire, age and youth, and how easy it is to confuse erotic rapture with love.

"If you're over 40 and not as dumb as a fashion model, the only guys who are interested are natural born losers or husbands whose wives are cheating on them," Ellen tartly observes of the mating game as it applies to single women of a certain age.

But "Heading South" is much more than a dispassionate examination of middle-age desire. Adapted from three short stories by Dany Laferrière and set in the late 1970's, when Haiti was ruled by Jean-Claude Duvalier (nicknamed Baby Doc) and a cadre of thugs, this politically pointed film contemplates the darker social undercurrents beneath a seemingly benign example of sexual tourism.

In a dirt-poor country where life is cheap, there is a local saying that those who grow too tall in Haiti are cut down; the exceptions, of course, are tourists.

Observing the tourism with profound distaste is the hotel's courtly, discreet headwaiter, Albert (Lys Ambroise). In a film constructed around four shattering monologues addressed to the camera, Albert's is the only Haitian voice to speak from the heart and what he says is chilling. Descended from a family of patriots who fought the Americans in the 1915 occupation, he harbors an implacable loathing of the white visitors. His grandfather, he says, believed "the white man was an animal." Albert adds, "If he knew I was a waiter for Americans, he would die of shame." Today, he declares, whites wield an even more dangerous weapon than cannons — their dollars: "Everything they touch turns to garbage."

How perilous life is for ordinary Haitians under Mr. Duvalier is suggested in the movie's opening scene, in which Albert, waiting to pick up a tourist at the airport, is approached by a Haitian woman who points to her beautiful 15-year-old daughter and pleads with him to take her because "being beautiful and poor in this country, she doesn't stand a chance; they won't think twice of killing me to grab her."

The other three characters who bare their souls are Ellen and two fellow sex tourists, Brenda (Karen Young) and Sue (Louise Portal). Brenda, 48, is a high-strung, Valium-popping woman from Savannah, Ga.; she is returning to the resort three years after she visited with her now-ex-husband and had sex with the 15-year-old Legba, who gave her her first orgasm. She has been obsessed with him ever since. Sue, a levelheaded, good-hearted French Canadian who runs a warehouse in Montreal, has a Haitian boyfriend she adores, but she knows full well that in any other place the relationship would be laughable.

With a screenplay in French, English and a smattering of Creole by Mr. Cantet and Robin Campillo, "Heading South" is a beautifully written, seamlessly directed film with award-worthy performances by Ms. Rampling and Ms. Young. As Ellen and Brenda compete for Legba's love, both imagine that they play a larger role in his life than they actually do. The little we see of Legba away from the resort suggests a complicated past. When a gunman goes after him, the women imagine they are the immediate cause of his troubles. They are, but only to the extent that Legba conspicuously stands out in the flashy clothes Brenda buys him. As much as Ellen and Brenda think they understand him and the state of fear that grips Haiti, they are ultimately clueless.

At first glance, "Heading South" seems to be a departure for the director of "Human Resources" and "Time Out," two of the more critically acclaimed French films in recent years. But it continues Mr. Cantet's incisive examination of money and class in modern society. In "Human Resources," a French blue-collar family is torn apart when the son of an assembly-line worker joins the same company's white-collar management team, and father and son find themselves on opposite sides of a picket line.

The desperate protagonist of "Time Out" loses the high-paying job on which his self-esteem depends and convinces his family he has landed even better work, while drifting around in his car and living on money borrowed from friends that he pretends to invest. In "Heading South," money also rules. The romantic spell that Legba exerts over Ellen and Brenda is bought and paid for.

Mr. Cantet's film is too sophisticated to demonize these women, whose relationships with their young lovers are more tender and nourishing than overtly crass. For all its political acuity, this great film recognizes and respects the complexity of its memorable, fully realized characters.

Heading South: An Interview with Laurent Cantet — Cineaste Magazine Emilie Bickerton interview, 2006

Laurent Cantet’s feature films to date have been modest, thoughtful, and somewhat varied. There have been three. His two earlier works, analytical in character, are focused on contemporary life in the French workplace. His latest film is a melodrama about women’s experience, and more literary and emotive in its genesis than intellectual.

Ressources Humaines (1999) explored the consequences of the newly introduced thirty-five-hour week for a factory manager and his (employee) father. In Cantet’s next film, the quietly tragic L’Emploi du temps (Time Out, 2001), we were given some insight into the protagonist’s secretive existence as he pretended to his family in France that he had a job at the UN offices in Geneva. A study of modern alienation, L’Emploi de temps depicts the desperation of a man who cannot be sustained by a work to live ethic, yet who is obsessed by an awareness of what society thinks he ought to do. As a result, he forces himself into a cycle of pointless car journeys to fill up his days and give his lies to his loved ones a semblance of veracity.

Cantet’s most recent film, Vers le sud (Heading South), is quite different, exploring a set of concerns not unrelated to his previous work, but articulated in a new style and in a radically altered context. The film is set in 1970’s Haiti, where we follow a group of fifty-something Western women on holiday, searching for romance and physical relations with local boys. Charlotte Rampling leads the pack in yet another appearance in Francophone cinema, continuing her renaissance as a mature actress.

Cantet’s first two films were anything but showy esthetically. Spare in their visual style, they depended on actor-driven, linear narratives. The first features were born of an intellectual desire to engage with the labour–alienation relationship as manifested in contemporary French society. By contrast, Vers le sud grew out of Cantet’s emotional response to his trip to Haiti in 2002 and his reading of Dany Laferrière’s short stories. Struck by the simplistic polarity of colonizer and colonized in Laferrière, Cantet seeks in Vers le sud to reconceptualize the crude ‘sex tourism’ of the stories as ‘love tourism.’ The desire exists, he argues, on both sides. His film portrays women in pursuit of more than forgettable, faceless sex.

Whilst Ressources Humaines and L’Emploi du temps were underwhelming visual affairs, Vers le sud is esthetically innovative, full of striking images, particularly those of racially contrasting bodies. Cantet provocatively provocatively presents young boys in the ways they are seen by the women, thus making his camera a substitute for their eyes and implicating the audience in their desire. As viewers we rationally reject and condemn their actions, but Cantet forces us to have a discomforting intimacy with those we criticize.

Haiti, also, is well captured. The monotony of the French and Swiss landscapes in L’Emploi du temps flying by the car window of protagonist Vincent (Aurelien Lecoing) without a second thought or cinematic relevance, is replaced in Vers le sud by a historically potent setting. Haiti in the Seventies and the brutal division between its white visitors and the burgeoning but disaffected native population is clear. The violent encounter between these two worlds is palpable, whether the women venture into markets, or dance with locals. Cantet’s camera is attuned to picking up on the underlying animosity and resentment as well as the brief, genuine emotions and attachments.

Disappointingly however, Cantet conveys Haitian social politics through a film noir structure. There is a background story in Vers le sud providing a glimpse into events occurring independently of the women’s pursuits. This is initially salutary; it encourages insight into Haiti beyond its Western tourists. Yet Cantet leaves the larger social story-thread hanging and eventually, disappointingly makes it into an inconsequential red herring.

Laurent Cantet’s comparative conservativism makes him a maverick in today’s French film scene. Unlike his peers, for example, Noé, Breillat, Dumont, and Denis, the route of extreme cinema has not tempted him. He inclines toward films that make sense of human relations and psychology. Vers le sud is a little more dreamy, more personally motivated than his typical projects, and eventually it is also less successful as a critical engagement with the issues it touches on. His next project is based on a ‘classe unique’ in a French village school, and although it is likely to be hyped as a ‘fictional Etre et avoir,’ it should primarily signal Cantet’s return to the more localized focus of previous works, setting him apart as a lucid critic of contemporary France.—Emilie Bickerton

****

Cineaste: If I were to pin down a particular subject or concern in your films it would be malaise—for example, the older American women in Ver Le Sud, who travel to Haiti looking for young lovers are full of an inner malaise derived from a sense of not quite belonging to society, or not fulfilling the roles society requires. Is this a fair assessment?

Laurent Cantet: To an extent—the women in Vers le Sud are searching for a place in the world, and a way of accepting themselves, a little like Vincent in L’Emploi du Temps. I feel I’m looking at people who do not have an appropriate place to themselves. As a result they accept to wear a mask, a social mask that allows them to play the game, to be acceptable to themselves and to others.

Cineaste: So partly you’re making a critique of contemporary society?

Cantet: Yes, but at the same time I think there are also existential problems involved. Of course I believe these problems arise from the material conditions of life, society, the current political situation, and so on. But also, the situations I present are universal: what is it to get old, to no longer feel physical desire? What is it to be the only white face in a black environment? I am asking where the problems lie and where they are played out and how people experiment with their difficulties. Really, I’m looking at that very intimate relationship one has with the world, and other people.

Cineaste: It’s striking in Vers le Sud how this intimacy comes through, and the reaction it has on the spectator. I would say that one feels even more disgust for Brenda (Karen Young) after her monologue. Was condemnation what you were after, or did you want to invite greater sympathy with this particular narrative device?

Cantet: Well, first of all, I try hard not to judge my characters. I think I always need to like them a little to then want to develop them, to make them exist or animate them. I try to show the complexity of a person’s psychology, as well as the world in which we struggle to exist, with all the questions that are posed in each one of us. However, I don’t want to carry any moral judgement.

For me Brenda’s monlogue in Vers le Sud is the great moment of sincerity in the film. Through it she also expresses things I can share: feelings of desire, the sensuality she is forbidden in her ordinary life and that now exists because she has been able to create this little, rather utopian, world for herself.

Cineaste: Yes, but it’s difficult to see the film only in this way because there is a darker side, namely the colonial basis on which these relationships exist, the political foundations of the story.

Cantet: Yes, but I don’t want to bring the film down to only that. It’s there, it’s clearly one of the questions in the film but it’s not as simple as: there we are, the evil exploiters and the poor exploited. I think on the contrary there is a far more complex relationship being played out and, as a result, something more enduring might exist. I don’t believe this question of desire works just one way, I think of what Dany Laferrière [who wrote the novella, La Chair du Maître, 1997 that inspired the film] told me at the very beginning of our collaboration: be careful not to make of the boys poor victims. He told me about his youth, living in Port-au-Prince when he would fantasize about the white women passing in the streets. He was quite capable of following a woman for a whole half-day just because her hair was blowing in the wind and the perfume she wore promised all the voluptuousness of the earth to him.

And here I think the relationship is reciprocal, there isn’t on the one side the woman dictating to the young boys, or (to make an even greater generalization) the colonizers and the oppressed. There is something far more complex being played out, and that’s really what the film is trying to show, by accessing the issue from multiple entry points.

Cineaste: There is a very striking scene in the film, in regards to this two-way power relationship: Brenda dances on her own, loses herself completely in the music and Legba (Menothy Cesar) can’t stand this…

Cantet: No he can’t, I think because precisely he feels she is mimicking—or aping—the native dance and in this investment, this integration, sees something indecent.

Cineaste: You could take it another way: Legba resented it when Brenda lost herself in the music, because she was moving away from him, taking no notice, asserting momentarily her independence.

Cantet: I saw it more as a gaze on this white woman who tries to dance like a Haitian, as though she were in a trance, like the kind you experience in voodoo ceremonies for example. And for Legba he felt there was something false in all of this.

Cineaste: One can quickly give Vers le Sud the label of “sex tourism.” In this regard why did you decide to base your film in the Seventies in Haiti, and not in Thailand say, today?

Cantet: Well, for many reasons. The desire to make the film came from my own trip to Haiti and the encounter I had with the country. Partly I felt revulsion, it really is so poor in parts that we can’t see it without feeling revolted, and we also feel the violence around—it exists and it’s very shocking. Yet at the same time, it’s an incredibly engaging country, for the people and how they are; you want to talk with them. I really wanted to work there and the idea for the film was born in the country and from that desire. Then there was the novella by Laferrière, which was for me like a second encounter, a literary one, of the kind that I have rarely experienced in my life. But having decided on making the movie in Haiti, it was impossible to set it in the present day because there is no more tourism in the country.

Cineaste: Is this very recent?

Cantet: For about fifteen years, the country has been in ruins, one has to realize this. The only foreigners there are those who work in the embassies, or NGO’s. So, I preferred to just mention at the start of the film that it was based in the seventies, without then going on to make a painstakingly historically accurate film.

Cineaste: And yet you do manage to make it very historically specific; we do recognise it’s the Seventies.

Cantet: Setting the film in the past did mean I could explore far more. After all, tourism has become industrialized today, and the relationships tourists have with locals are totally different. Mass tourism means the rules of the game are very clear: people go out in search of something very specific.

Cineaste: Yes, things have become much cruder, brutalized, without any emotional investment.

Cantet: Yes, that’s right, whereas in the Seventies we’re closer to the origin of this kind of tourism, that first-sought love, not just sex. What also allows Vers le Sud to be rather different is that we’re dealing with women going abroad, and not men. And they are, we could say, also oppressed. In Haiti they arrive with all their accumulated frustrations from the United States where they are in shackles: a woman over forty is no longer desirable, or she can’t talk of desire at that age. If we had done the opposite, filmed men going abroad, I think they would inevitably have arrived with the arrogance of male dominance. And thus, by virtue of having women as my subjects, the film is more nuanced.

Cineaste: In this sense it is better to understand the film as a particular case, rather than trying to attach broader themes to it.

Cantet: Yes, but at the same time it is a mass phenomenon! All you have to do is go to the Dominican Republic to realize that there are many single women who go over, no longer wanting to accept their solitude and proving instead to themselves that they can still be desirable; they can still live a love story. That seems to me something far more essential, integral, than just travelling so that you can have sex. That’s where I think there is a far more existential search that drives the journey, precisely because it’s not driven only by the aspiration to satisfy a purely sexual and immediate desire.

Cineaste: Yes, as you say, it’s not about a one-sided power relationship.

LC: Power circulates between the two involved.

Cineaste: You spoke about the Dany Laferrière novella that inspired the film. Why exactly—and this is a more philosophical question about your own idea of what film is—did you want to put his words into images? What is it that you feel film can bring to the story?

Cantet: To begin with, I think it’s a film that plays a lot on incarnations; we’re not faced with ideas or words, but really bodies; and in Vers le Sud the presence of bodies is essential. All you need do is put in the same frame Charlotte Rampling and Mênothy Cesar so that all the otherness of their bodies strikes us, embarrasses us even, or interrogates us at least. The other reason, at least what I like in cinema is that it’s not always conceptual, that we can approach such general questions as North-South relations, colonialism, exploitation of women, misery, etc., without having to add to this some categorical questions or chop things up completely into black-and-white distinctions. The more the subject lays itself open to grand themes, the stronger cinema is in bringing nuance to this, by allowing us to avoid crude distinctions.

Cineaste: And so, in this regard, how do you place yourself within French cinema’s tradition? I don’t see you as having very much in common with many young filmmakers in the country today, you differ from the sort of cinema du look they’re producing.

Cantet: If there were a name I should cite in my personal heritage, then it would be Rossellini. His cinema is one of revelation, the ‘real’ imposes itself on the characters, and things never arrive in a discursive fashion, but, little by little, they emerge at the surface. This is what touches me the most in Rossellini, in cinema in general—when I don’t have the impression that the film knows what it has to tell me, but rather, this arrives, emerges… And so, there is Rossellini, but afterwards there have been others. Pialat of course… But I think there are lots of directors who place themselves within this affiliation.

Cineaste: I was struck by the difference between L’Emploi du Temps and Vers le Sud. In the former the development of the story and the way you tell it visually was more traditional, let’s say, than in your latest film. I suppose for reasons that you’ve outlined, it was crucial to impose the images in Vers le Sud…

Cantet: Yes, or especially, replace discussion with things that are communicated through impressions instead.

Cineaste: To come back to the location, has the film been screened in Haiti?

Cantet: Not yet. I may have the chance this summer to present it at a festival in a small town in the country as some Haitians who have seen it reacted very well. Haitians based in Paris and elsewhere in France have also responded well, saying it was the first time they had seen a film based in Haiti, shot by a foreigner, that nevertheless captured accurately the country. They liked that I spoke of it without compassion or a sense of culpability, embarrassed by my obviously shameful colonial heritage. Nor did I allow myself to be too burdened by the fact that Haiti is a country that the international community is effectively allowing to suffocate. To hear all this from the mouths of Haitians really made me very happy.

Cineaste: Apart from the forced delay with the coup in 2003, did you have problems when you eventually filmed in the country?

Cantet: Yes, for sure, in somewhat anecdotal ways perhaps. We would decide on a good location, and fifteen days before it would be impossible to go, deemed too dangerous. We had to constantly adapt to the local environment. I actually really liked this uncertainty, having to be reactive. There were also shoot-outs twice during filming, near where we worked. We all asked ourselves, should we stay or go? But then we saw those around us who lived in the country, who had experienced this their whole lives, and after ten minutes just got on with things. We felt a kind of decency in them and respect for them. We felt that if they could just pick themselves up like that, then we should follow suit, honor that kind of resilience.

The Bitter Critic: April 2006 Martin Tsai from Cinema Scope, April 2, 2006

Tativille: New Film: Vers le sud (Heading South) Michael J. Anderson

indieWIRE: Sand Trap: Laurent Cantet's "Heading South" By Sarah Silver with responses by Nick Pinkerton and James Crawford from Reverse Shot

CineScene [Chris Knipp]

Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Culture Wars [Philip Cunliffe]

Vers le sud - Heading South - Laurent Cantet - 2005 ... - Films de France James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

stylusmagazine.com (Nancy Keefe Rhodes)

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Phil Hall

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]

filmcritic.com Don Willmott

european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Plume Noire [Fred Thom]

Political Film Review Michael Haas

PopMatters (Jon Frosch) guilty of both sloppy filmmaking and muddled politics

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Ljubljana Film Festival calls it a very annoying viewing experience

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) falls short as character study or serious drama

Laurent Cantet • Director interview by Fabien Lamercier from Cineuropa, August 9, 2005

Heading South - Interview: Laurent Cantet • Director - Cineuropa Fabien Lamercier interview from January 22, 2006

BBC - collective - heading south interview and laurent cantet ... Leigh Singer from the BBC June 29, 2006, including audio interviews

Worldview - Laurent Cantet’s Heading South Milos Stehlik from NPR Worldview, August 18, 2006

The first French film in decades to have won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, this involving drama by Laurent Cantet (Heading South, Time Out) turns an inner-city classroom into a cultural battleground. Francois Begaudeau, who drew on his own teaching experiences for the source novel, Entre les Murs ("Between the Walls"), stars as the teacher, and Cantet has assembled a crew of real kids to insult and challenge him; among the most aggressive are the sneering Esmerelda and Khoumba, who succeed in turning the class against him. The teacher's lounge is another gallery of fine performances, as Begaudeau's colleagues vent their despair and desperation. Most impressive, Cantet tracks the racial and ethnic resentments that simmer beneath the classroom discussions but become harder to quell when the parents get involved. In French with subtitles. R, 128 min.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]

Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

A Dose of French Film, Civil and Sane Stephen Holden from The New York Times, March 10, 2006

A Summer Idyll (Never Mind the Tonton Macoutes) Leslie Camhi from The New York Times, May 7, 2006

THE CLASS (Entre Les Murs) A- 94

aka: Between the Walls

France (128 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

Hardly sugar coated, but definitely troubling, as many viewers will be aghast that the “system” doesn’t work any better, this is a self-portrait of a flawed inner city school system inside Paris, France, given a healthy dose of authenticity when one of the co-writers, François Bégaudeau, wrote the book on which the film is based and is also the featured junior high school teacher in the film, giving it a near documentary portrait of the goings on inside his classroom as well as a look behind the scenes at his school. Outside of an opening shot where the teacher (François) grabs a cup of coffee, the entire film takes place “between the walls” (translated French title) on the school grounds. In general, most of the students are dark-skinned with African or Arabic roots with ethnic backgrounds from former French colonies, specifically North and West Africa as well as French-speaking Caribbean countries, while nearly the entire teaching and administrative staff, who introduce themselves in an opening orientation meeting, are white. So just looking at this scenario, one sees we’re on a collision course just waiting for accidents to happen. While François is a committed white educator with four years of experience teaching French, his class remains a cry of rebellion, as students are free to interrupt or interject their thoughts whenever they please, as if it is a democracy. Initially he sets a standard of raising one’s hand but then never follows this criteria for the rest of the film. What’s curiously unique about this classroom is that it’s as much about the students as it is the teacher, where in a somewhat provocative gesture, he calls upon students to voice their views, even if they express a disinterest, which results in open rebellion and arguments, occasionally insults, where the time spent is hurling personal insults and challenges to one another, sometimes with name-calling and disruptive classroom laughter. What begins as an attempt to utilize teaching methods turns into something different altogether, as few students do the homework assignments or express any interest in what he’s teaching, as evidenced here: Multiculturalism in France: short video clip from "The Class" YouTube (2:36)

Unfortunately, part of the problem is the teaching method itself, as a classroom of 13 or 14-year old kids is not a democracy where every student openly engages one another using the Socratic method of open dialogue, instead each seeks their own way to attain attention, breaking down any system of authority through disruption. François pleads his case, but usually makes challenging, personal remarks to each student that only lead to defensive personal responses, where they go back and forth attacking one another, basically throwing any lesson plan, and these kid’s futures, out the window. François is very good at exposing problems, but his interrogation techniques rarely solve any of them. For instance, when there are classroom breakdowns, it’s simply a free for all instead of an accompanying follow up on what went wrong, where the teacher establishes guidelines for what is appropriate and what is not, where he actually takes the time to implement a classroom structure. Instead he gives up on this almost immediately, as he’s overwhelmed by the student’s negativity, believing nothing he’s teaching them is relevant in their lives. Well his challenge is to make it relevant. There are African writers, or Caribbean Pulitzer prize winners they could study, also each of these students has extended families that could be encouraged to bring in personalized information like food, clothing, stories, cultural dances or customs, sports figures, photographs, where they could place colorful pictures on the wall, making everyone all part of a true learning experience. But rather than incorporate what’s actually meaningful to this group of students, their needs are all but ignored, exacerbated by the blatantly racist French policy to ignore all cultural ethnicities in the name of one supposedly united France, a policy that in a classroom like this makes little sense, as their birthplaces themselves could serve as a geography lesson.

François fails to get through to two of his strongest classroom personalities, Khoumba (Rachel Regulier) and Souleymane (Franck Keita), both black, each of whom commands the respect of their fellow classmates. Khoumba, a bright, opinionated girl refuses to read out loud when called upon, believing she’s being picked on, which obviously irks the teacher who tries to find out what’s wrong after class, seen here: The Class - Clip YouTube (3:21), but she’s unable to say what the matter is and sarcastically makes things difficult for him, creating a dramatic scene in front of others. But then she writes a terrific essay on “Respect,” saying she doesn’t feel respected by him, claiming she will no longer even look him in the eye, as she doesn’t wish to give him the wrong impression. More importantly, she doesn’t place it on his desk, but in his locker, which couldn’t be more personal. This is a student crying out for a humane response, for guidance, but he never gives her what she is obviously looking for and what she deserves. Even worse, Souleymane is a well-liked, good looking but undereducated kid from Mali, where French is obviously his second language, as he has problems reading, writing, and acting out, as he has difficulties communicating with many of the teachers, so he remains sullen much of the time, or he overreacts, getting into some of the worst and most offensive arguments with his fellow students. But this is the Alpha male, the kid who’s obviously smart, but his brazen outspokenness is wasted on street cred hailing insults and shouting others down. Again, this is a student crying out for a personal tutor and a different set of priorities. At the parent/teacher conferences, we never see the father and we learn that the mother can’t speak French, so all they know is what Souleymane tells them—that everything is just fine. Rather than attempt to resolve this conflict of communication, as the family deserves to know early on that there are problems in the classroom, the teacher, and the institution itself, is remarkably silent. So it comes as a surprise to his mother when a short time later Souleymane is facing charges of expulsion, where her impassioned pleas in Arabic (with no translator present except Souleymane) fall on deaf ears.

The teachers themselves have group discussions about how to respond to individual behavior problems, like Souleymane, even as they are about to discuss his possible expulsion, but the views are usually washing their hands of any responsibility, all but disregarding his side of the story, implementing punishment whenever possible. The group also discusses the merits of each student in the presence of student reps, where they all share their views before deciding upon grades and what they mutually decide are the appropriate educational remarks, a system that is ultimately undermined by the student reps who tell all the students what grades they’re going to get ahead of time and what the teachers had to say about them. Apparently the subject of confidentiality was never raised before, as this systematic approach is guaranteed to align the students against the teachers, mostly through old fashioned concepts like rumor and heresay, all taken out of context, but highly effective. In fact, this seems to be the metaphor for failure, that spreading rumors behind people’s backs is a much more effective means of communicating than anything the educational system offers. Speaking personally, that would make my lesson plan the very next school day, how rumors spread like a disease, not based on facts or any answerable truth, but based on the quickest and deadliest means of bringing harm to someone. What’s clear here is that the school isn’t budging an inch to learn how to help anyone other than those that already have the tools to help themselves, as the system instead is designed to blame and punish those students who express difficulties. Not one of these kids was lost to the system prior to the school year, as they’re still young and impressionable, but by the end, that’s another story. Unlike American films that would spend a great deal of effort searching for answers, the provocative nature of this film is instead asking all the right questions.

The Class JR Jones from The Reader

Time Out (Geoff Andrew) review

Cantet’s Palme d’Or winner is a marvel, its authenticity deriving both from the superb performances of its non-professional cast and from a screenplay co-written by Bégaudeau, the teacher and novelist who plays François, a teacher of French to 13-year-olds in one of Paris’s multicultural suburbs. Relaxed, young and firm, he generally wins respect. Still, kids can fall by the wayside, and even after he encourages Souleymane’s photographic talents, the young Malian seems somehow unreachable. Such a synopsis may be misleading, however. The teacher’s dealings with Souleymane constitute just one strand of a hugely rich tapestry and for the first hour this partly improvised film feels more like fly-on-the-wall documentary than fiction. Race, religion, age, sex, family and personality are all crucial to the dynamics of the classroom where most of the movie takes place, but Cantet wisely never preaches. Indeed, an allusion to Plato’s Republic is spot on: in a spirit of urgent enquiry, the film raises many pressing questions about education, communication and contemporary culture, knowing there are no easy answers, except that compassion and tolerance are paramount.

Day 11 George Christensen, our resident cyclist on the scene at Cannes, May 25, 2008:

There were shouts of "Bravo" and sustained applause after the morning screening in the Palais of “The Class,” a most moving and impeccably realistic depiction of a classroom of 14 and 15 year old students in a Paris school. If there weren't an unwritten tradition of limiting films in Competition to just one award this could sweep best pitcture, actor, director and script honors.

First-time actor, Francois Begaudeau, who is the author of the book the movie is based on, can't be denied the best acting award for his extraordinary performance playing himself, a teacher who is part master-of-ceremonies, part stand-up comic, part lion-timer and above all a committed educator. He fully engages his classroom of semi-rebellious students, mostly children of immigrants. He challenges them and treats them with respect, while maintaining his authority and his distance. There wasn't a speck of phoniness or cheap dramatic devices that most such films are prone too in this film by Laurent Cantet, whose prevous film, "Heading South," starring Charlotte Rampling, made the Top Ten list of Robert Kennedy of cranesareflying.com.

One of the highlights of this year's festival had to be the promenade up the red carpet later in the evening of the 25 students, amateur actors all, for its formal gala presentation. This was a 130 minute movie that wasn't too long by any shot. The French system of education is astonishly farsightedly. One of the teacher's points is that the students must behave in a manner to "make society run smoothly." A few days ago a young French woman tried to butt in line ahead of me, pretending she was friends of a couple of young women. An older French woman behind me immediately reprimanded her. They exchanged a few words, the young woman holding her ground, but when the older woman used the word "morality," she shamed her into going to the back of the line. "The Class" gives a glimpse of the training that the French receive in schools in such matters. I have seen countless examples of the French concern for the greater good in my travels here the past four years. It is one reason that I have returned year after year. It takes extreme talent and commitment for a teacher to be as good as the one in this movie, but the glimpses of the other teachers in the school show that they have a similar regard, though not necessarily possessing the talent of the featured teacher.

Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris

The center doesn't hold at Francoise Dolto Junior High. It can't. Not anymore. Trouble roils this Paris public school. Not in the way Hollywood has conditioned us to recognize chaos: gangbangers ruling the hallways, dance-offs that erupt in the cafeteria, proms that become blood-drenched nightmares. Laurent Cantet's drama "The Class" brings us back to earth, unalloyed.

The problems at Dolto are more internal and less sensational. Its student-teacher debates are philosophical and political, off-topic but very much on-topic. The school's chaos resides in the shifting nature of how students perceive their roles, and the idea that teachers misunderstand the needs and sensitivities of their students.

It takes a patient filmmaker to draw out the conflict. Cantet sticks his camera for long stretches in the teachers lounge, in the library, in a single classroom (the subject is French) to allow for the impression of fly-on-the-wall transparency. Over the course of a fictitious school year (whittled down to two hours), we can study the faces of the mostly white adults and the mostly nonwhite 14-year-old students from working-class families, and perceive wonder, exasperation, confusion, anger, cool. Some kids' faces don't give anything away, lest that cool be spotted for the pose it is.

The scenes are like photographs left in developer fluid until some kind of truth is overexposed. Here the truth is that there is no good answer for what plagues a troubled school. The institution of education is in disarray: In an inexorably multinational world, the old systems of harvesting knowledge in young minds need to change. The very question of why we learn what we learn and from whom we learn it is under siege.

When young Francois Marin (Francois Begaudeau) tries to teach a language exercise, the kids stop him after he scribbles an example sentence on the blackboard: Bill had a succulent cheeseburger. Why pick a cheeseburger, they ask? And what kind of name is "Bill"? How about Aissata or Rachid? Enough with these white, French names. Marin's elegance hits a snag: You're French, he says. But Khoumba (Rachel Regulier) and Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani), his most vocal opponents, don't see it that way. Esmeralda is French but, as ethnic minority, she doesn't feel French in any traditional, white way, and I imagine she thinks it'd be nice to learn from a teacher sensitive to such matters. She and her classmates are hung up on details, but in this case, those details, the details of identity, actually matter.

Every detail matters to them. Marin says they waste an hour's class time with distractions. But class, they correct, is only 55 minutes. And what is this imperfect subjunctive? Who speaks that way? Nobody, they say. So why learn it? Ah, the empired strike back at the empire.

After one class, Marin makes Khoumba, who's retreated from the progress she made with him a year ago, apologize for being disruptive, and her half-hearted contrition frustrates him even more. After several tries, she delivers one he likes and he dismisses her. The minute she's out the door, she rudely rescinds it.

The amazingly direct letter Khoumba writes him a few scenes later (she titles it "Respect") chastises him for insensitivity and explains that she won't be actively participating during class. Her letter underscores the central tension between the teachers and these politically savvy students. They've been conditioned (probably by each other and by what they know of French history) to expect a kind of parity with adults. They've grown suspicious of the institutional power dynamic in the student-teacher relationship, seeing it, in part, as an unmitigated extension of government. (When the principal shows up to deliver a new student, he has to remind them, rather comically, that standing up when a grown-up enters the room doesn't signify subjugation. It's just polite.) The kids' defense mechanisms encourage them to miss the broader goals of education, but their racial grievances also have merit that seems lost, I think, on Marin, who responds to these challenges with a kind of condescension that the kids always sense.

"The Class" is based on a book Begaudeau wrote about his years teaching in the Paris school system. He drafted the script with Robin Campillo and Cantet, who's encouraged the fine young actors to improvise their way through some scenarios. The version Begaudeau plays of himself makes the author's mistakes, but his sincerity and devotion to education are hardly in doubt. Still, he's not the saintly savior the movies like to parade like propaganda: We don't need another hero.

This man is a much more useful guide to the realities of Western education than the sterling examples of pedagogy we normally get in film. Goodbye, Mr. Chips, indeed. Toward the film's back half, Marin crosses the line with a slur that the appalled kids run with. I've been in that classroom and seen the wildfires that fan out across a school when a teacher's tongue slips. I'm not sure I believe Marin would really have said what he says. But his blunder allows the movie to present the idea that he's more powerless in a way than his students.

Marin is another of Cantet's characters who are basically frustrated laborers; the movie, another intelligent example of his films that show how work doesn't always work out. In 1998's "Human Resources," a son is forced to lay his father off. In 2002's superb "Time Out," a family man pretends to go to his job after losing it. In 2005's half-fascinating, half-regrettable "Heading South," it was poor, underemployed Haitians exploiting horny lady tourists.

"The Class," which is a foreign-language Oscar nominee and was the big winner at the Cannes Film Festival last year, pulls back enough on this school so that it functions as an emblem of a system that both disserves education and greatly enables it. I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.

CBC.ca Arts review Katrina Onstad

In the opening of the French film The Class, kids enter and fill a classroom. They are loud and abrasive, zipping between offensive and defensive, smart and stupid and highly sensitive. In other words, they could be 13-year-olds in any urban school anywhere. And yet, they are entirely of their time and place: 21st-century Paris — the new Old World — in the heavily immigrant 20th Arrondissement, the kind of neighbourhood that comes to the attention of most North Americans only when a riot breaks out.

The Class won the top prize, the Palme d’Or, at Cannes last year for its unromantic probing of the modern teacher-student relationship. The film is a formal experiment of sorts, a collaboration between director Laurent Cantet and a sloe-eyed literature teacher named François Bégaudeau.

In 2006, Bégaudeau published a novel called Between the Walls, which tells the story of a year in a Parisian classroom. After 10 years as a teacher — and gigs as a punk musician and a film critic for French Playboy — Bégaudeau added actor to his resume. In the film, he plays a junior high teacher named Francois, a variation on himself. Over several months, Bégaudeau interacted with a group of Parisian students — none of them actors — for three hours every Wednesday afternoon while Cantet recorded the proceedings on a cheap video camera. From those sessions a loose script emerged; The Class was shot over seven weeks during the summer of 2007.

Months in a small room filled with teens may be a nightmare to some, but Cantet describes the process of making the film as “funny.”

“We were all laughing all the time,” he tells me recently in a Toronto hotel room. Cantet is a composed, slightly distant man who speaks in an unwittingly poetic French accent. “Usually when I’m shooting, I’m really anxious. I always think I’m making the worst film in the history of cinema. But with this film, everything seemed obvious, easy. I wasn’t sure if it was a good film, but I knew the process was working.”

Cantet is the son of two schoolteachers, but he says that his motivation for making the film had less to do with his parents than with his kids. He has two teenagers in a public school in suburban Paris very similar to the one in the film, and he’s witnessed first hand the effect a group of boisterous teenagers has on those around them.

“You are stigmatized when you’re young, especially when you are not white. People are afraid of you, afraid of this energy. But if you manage to harness that energy, you can make great things. We were able to work for six hours a day with these kids; they could really concentrate. We had great trust. The teachers [who appeared] in the film were very jealous that I could handle these kids,” says Cantet, smiling.

Just before shooting the Charlotte Rampling film Heading South (2005), Cantet conceived a script about a troubled African boy who may be expelled from school and sent back to Mali. When he later read Between the Walls, the director decided to meld the two projects, working with professionals and non-professionals in the same improvised, workshop style that he used on critically acclaimed films like Human Resources (1999) and Time Out(2002).

As in Bégaudeau’s book, The Class never ventures outside the school’s property lines. Rather than following a conventional story arc, Cantet captures a string of incidents, both miniscule (like teachers debating a new coffee machine) and metaphoric. French kids from central and north Africa butt heads over what soccer team to back in the Africa Cup of Nations. A new student reads aloud his personal essay, listing his likes (video games, music) and dislikes (“I hate visiting my brother in prison”). A Chinese-French boy risks deportation when his mother is arrested for being in the country illegally.

These small moments speak loudly to larger issues of integration and belonging, which are already the central struggles of adolescence. I ask Cantet if he was inspired to write the film after the civil unrest of 2005, when young Parisians, many of whom came from immigrant families, set fire to cars and rioted in some suburbs. Cantet bristles.

“The press is always speaking of what’s going wrong, but these are often exceptional cases,” he says. “I wanted to look at children more precisely, to show that if you really listen to what they say, you can understand all the problems society is facing. When [one of the students] says she is not proud to be French, she’s saying something we need to understand. These kids desire to be part of our community and they feel that the community doesn’t desire them.”

With its intensely focused, documentary feel, The Class is no noble teacher fantasy in the mode of Dead Poets Society or To Sir, with Love. When Francois rescues his students, the rescues are small and unnoted. He often has the respect of the kids, but he is not always adored, and the film’s climax hinges on the moment when he loses his cool in class and uses the word “skanks” to describe two girls.

“Francois and I did not want to create a perfect teacher. I often asked him to appear more out at sea as he teaches. Lots of teachers told me that being a teacher is like acting: You are always improvising. You can’t hesitate when someone is asking you a question. We all make mistakes. It was important to me to show this weakness, to feel the solitude and loneliness of a teacher in front of a class.”

Cantet finished the film two weeks before Cannes in May, and then watched with relief as the audience embraced it with cheers at the red carpet premiere. It is now on the shortlist for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, a testament to Cantet’s conviction that the film is not only relevant to France. (That said, I can’t imagine a teacher’s lounge in Canada where staff meet for a midday drink to celebrate the new school year.) It is, he hopes, a glimpse of a world as relevant in Vancouver as Paris.

“School is not a sanctuary. It is always crossed by all the issues of the psyche. The kids who arrive have their own problems. The teachers have their own problems. You can’t take school out of society. If you look at a school, you look at society in its whole.”

At the Movies Michael Wood from The London Review of Books

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

Reverse Shot (Michael Joshua Rowin) review

Ruthless Reviews (potentially offensive) Matt Cale

The Class [Entre les murs] Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Chicago Reader (J.R. Jones ) review

Cinescene [Chris Knipp]

Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review

The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]

DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Stephen Snart]

Christian Science Monitor review [A] Peter Rainer

review: Entre les murs (The Class) (Cannes 2008: Palme d'Or) Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes from European-films

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

Reel.com [Chris Cabin] also seen here: filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]

Movie Shark Deblore [debbie lynn elias]

Moving Pictures Magazine [Ali Naderzad]

Eye for Film (Val Kermode) review [4/5]

Critic's Notebook [Martin Tsai]

The Class (Entre Les Murs) Mike Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily

Continue reading Cannes Review: The Class (Entre les Murs) James Rocchi at Cannes from Cinematical

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

Plume Noire [Fred Thom]

The House Next Door [Vadim Rizov]

Slant Magazine [David Phelps] a surprisingly insipid Slant review – rare

Review of Cantet's work on DinaView Dina Iordanova

Between the Walls: Taking “The Class” with director Laurent Cantet Ray Pride from New City

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3/4]

Engineering Simplicity: “The Class” Director Laurent Cantet Erica Abeel interviews the director for indieWIRE, January 30, 2009

Cineuropa - Interviews - Laurent Cantet • Director by Fabien Lemercier from Cineuropa, May 24, 2008

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Justin Chang) review

Interview: Laurent Cantet • Director - Cineuropa Fabien Lemercier interview, September 16, 2008

BFI | Sight & Sound | The London Film Festival: The Class - Interview Ginette Vincendeau interviews the director from Sight and Sound, November 2008

Interview: François Bégaudeau Interview by Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, February 20, 2009

Peter Bradshaw on The Class The Guardian, February 27, 2009

Blog: The Class teaches us a lesson in despair David Cox from The Guardian Blog, March 2, 2009

Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [4/6]

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/6]

Boston Herald (James Verniere) review [A-]

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

The Republic (Plato) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ethics and Politics in The Republic

History of Western Philosophy a guide to Western philosophy from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the early 20th century, by Bertrand Russell

The Internet Classics Archive | The Republic by Plato the entire work on-line, written 360 BC

YouTube - Entre les murs by Laurent Cantet - Cannes 2008 - Golden Palm (1:59)

Caouette, Jonathan

TARNATION A 95

USA (105 mi) 2003

What─documentaries never looked like this before? Perhaps, for some, this style is not sufficiently underground, and for others, too stylistically exaggerated, as the film just doesn’t fit into the accepted genre of today’s films. As a result, it’s not getting the kind of public response it deserves, as it’s being relegated to small, unattended theaters. At least that’s the response here in Chicago, playing only in the small theater at the Music Box, it may as well have been given the kiss of death, which is a shame, as this is a radically different work that breaks the mold on what a documentary film should look like, which deserves be seen on large screens. Instead it’s getting labeled as a gay film by some, ridiculed by others for being too self-indulgent, too much about one guy and his family, using home movies for Christ’s sake, so why is it relevant to me? But the boldness of style here takes one’s breath away. Despite its avant-garde reputation, this is one of the most tender, unapologetically unique films about love and self-affirmation that you’ll ever see.

What seems to be overlooked in evaluating this film is that it is, ultimately, a transforming love story through art. And it is an opening for the viewers to question our own abilities to accept, as one of us, the mentally challenged. The mentally ill are all too often relegated to the back rooms somewhere, out of sight, out of mind. Here, Caouette has the courage to place his mother Renee LeBlanc front and center, showing us the woman he loves, Tarnation - Naked As We Came by Iron And Wine YouTube (2:37). And brain damaged as she is, if he’s not ashamed of her, then why should we be of anyone who is similarly afflicted? If we’re ever to bridge the gaps of intolerance, doesn’t it begin within our own dysfunctional families? That is the ultimate challenge of the film.

What immediately stands out is what a beautifully structured, heartfelt, and eye-opening film this is, using a highly confessional, experimental, style that is punctuated by neverending streams of light, making incredible use of color, narration, editing, and very soft, intimate music that offers the viewer a glimpse of how Caouette feels about the various stages of his life, becoming an excruciatingly personal, autobiographical coming-of-age film, where he is credited as actor/writer/editor/producer/and director. Initially put together for $218 using iMovie, Apple’s DV editing program, Caouette combines hyper-expressive film elements from his own family history, particularly his mother, who lost the use of her legs after a fall from the roof of her house, later diagnosed with a dead nerve, regaining her ability to walk, but at the time she received electric shock treatment, twice a week for two years, emerging with bipolar and schizo-affective disorders, where for the next 35 years Renee would be institutionalized more than 100 times, Diviner Sequence from Tarnation - Music by HEX, Steve Kilbey and Donnette Thayer YouTube (3:47). During a distressing bus ride across the country, she suffered a psychotic episode in Chicago where Jonathan witnessed his mother’s rape at the age of 5. One of the more traumatic moments at the center of the film is awaiting her recovery from a lithium overdose. Nonetheless, the brutal harshness of these memories is contrasted by early photographs when she worked as a model, using a recurring theme of beauty and joy, which is how he continues to think of her even now.

Caouette blends parallel images of his own adolescent development, including his experience with abusive foster parents mixed with attention grabbing drug use and suicide attempts, acting out imaginary characters of his own creation, seen here at age 11 tarnation YouTube in English with French subtitles (2:53), his discovery that he is gay growing up in Houston, masquerading as an older goth girl to get into gay clubs, set to the music of the Cocteau Twins "Ice Pulse" TARNATION -clip de la vida de jonathan caouette YouTube in English with Spanish subtitles (3:20), much of which has the feel of low-grade horror films, his first boyfriend, also unusually creative spurts, such as starring in his own horror films or directing his own high school musical production of David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET (1986), lip-synching to the music of Marianne Faithfull. There is an especially moving sequence of meeting and discovering his true love in New York, which is accentuated by the Magnetic Fields song “Strange Powers,” Strange Powers - YouTube (2:37), which feels so hopeful and optimistic, not in a dreamy sense, but realistically. With much of the film shot in his own apartment, we see film posters of Fassbinder’s QUERELLE (1982), or Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), along with other artworks hanging on the wall. Of noticeable interest is how effortlessly the filmmaker expresses the fact that he’s gay, so matter of factly. It is the one aspect of his life that has not been tarnished, where he feels comfortable and relaxed about himself. This is easily the healthiest aspect of his life. What’s more unsettling is the front and center staging of some of the more incoherent and unglamorous sides of his mother, turning so much of the spotlight on her that many viewers come unhinged and start calling it exploitive. However, as this film is largely a valentine “to” his mother, then showing us who she is, in totality, is showing us who he loves.

Again, every color has been overly saturated, images stretched and reformulated to create new art forms, all blended together with an intensely personal 3^rd person narration that is unspoken, but is instead read like subtitles on the screen, using such eloquently simplistic methods to allow a distance, a detachment in describing tortuous realities that have an inner life of their own, eating and gnawing at him, even entering his dreams, but which drives him to create a stunningly unique work, a transforming artistic experience. While Caouette’s experimental style is not completely new, certainly underground filmmakers from Andy Warhol to Stan Brakhage have devised similar looking films, but his use of such a gorgeously compelling experimental style as a cathartic means of excoriating such intensely personal and very real demons from his life in order to create a sense of being normal does seem revelatory.

The Music of Tarnation

There was also original music composed and recorded by Max Avery Lichtenstein and an original score composed and recorded by John Califra

Laserbeam - Low
Naked As We Came - Iron and Wine
Wichita Lineman - Glen Campbell
Reptile - Lisa Germano
Ice Pulse - Cocteau Twins
Frank Mills - From HAIR
Walking In Space - From HAIR
The Ballad of Lucy Jordan - Marianne Faithful
Diviner - HEX
Embrace - Low
Mysteries of Love - Blue Velvet
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - Chocolate Watch Band
Strange Powers - Magnetic Fields
After Loving You - Jean Wells
A Little Bitty Pissant Country Place - Dolly Parton
Around and Round - The Red House Painters
Back Home Again - Low
How Many Times - Mavis Staples
Around and Round (end credits) - The Red House Painters

to which one IMDb listener responded:

I LOVE feeling sorry for myself! Low rules, so does Red House Painters and all the other totally emasculated Slow-core/Sad-core bands out there. Repeating the same dissonant chord structure at 30 beats-per-minute over and over and over again while droning on lyrically in a whiny voice is the future of rock n' roll! ...One Star...

Tarnation an ardent disbeliever, Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

"The film we deserve," opined cstults after the screening. I don't mean to get all Armond White here, but it's hard for me to understand why people are falling for this hapless piece of charlatanry. Caouette has no feel for the medium, basically putting iMovie through its paces and performing every faux-cool trick in the book. What's more, these "experimental" elements are tied to an autobiographical narrative, the sad tale of a fragmented subjectivity, so apparently that makes it all okay for viewers who would never be caught dead seeing a real avant-garde film. (It's like those idiotic claims that Van Gogh had an optical disorder, that if you can normalize formal experimentation or at least categorize it as a comprehensible pathology, you can then, and only then, admire it for its "diversity.") And in case you have trouble following this story, Caouette emblazons baldly descriptive, third-person captions across the screen, helpfully changing the font point for emphasis. While watching Tarnation, which has been feted far and wide across the festival circuit, I thought of all those folks lambasting Vincent Gallo for his narcissism, then nodding with eggheaded approval as Caouette turns the legacies of Kenneth Anger, Tom Chomont, Jack Smith, and even the Maysles brothers into the ultimate visual expression of Oprahfied navel-gazing. "Jonathan," our tragic hero, occupies nearly every frame. Yet there's no critical distance, no working through the images from an adult, aesthetic perspective. This doesn't make Tarnation "raw;" it leaves it pitifully half-baked. (Not to mention creepily auto-pornographic. Caouette cannot get enough of his own shirtless, eye-linered underage image.) In the end, Caouette's "healing process" takes us from luxurious wallowing to petulant rage, wherein he exacts revenge on his brain-addled mother (a cruel freak show) and his grandfather. (Charges of abuse and neglect are notoriously difficult to prove, and as a result it's almost always the most responsible thing to give the victim the benefit of the doubt. And yet, Caouette does nothing in Tarnation to demonstrate that his grandparents willfully abused his mother Renee. In fact, quite the opposite -- they seem only to have made the mistake of trusting the mental health establishment, which is demonstrably more culpable for destroying Renee's life.) What we see, finally, on both the emotional and the creative level, is an un-reflexive portrait of arrested development. In a society that uses its vast social, political, and interpersonal resources to infantilize its citizens, and more importantly to coach us on how to infantilize ourselves, Tarnation is a stark symptom, but little else.

Tarnation Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

One of the hottest tickets at Sundance '04, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation made headlines when it was announced that it was produced for $218.32 and edited entirely on Apple's free iMovie editing software. Soon, filmmakers Gus Van Sant and James Cameron Mitchell came calling. Using photographs, old home movies, short films, and pop cultural artifacts from the '80s and '90s, Caouette splices together the images of his life using split-screen and recoloring effects, creating a kaleidoscopic found-art project that looks to redefine the nature of documentary filmmaking. Caouette plumbs the depths of his mother Renee's life, revealing a young girl who was forever scarred at an early age when doctors unnecessarily subjected her to electroshock treatment. Years later, when it's revealed that a drug dealer friend of Renee's once gave a young Jonathan two joints laced with PCP, you get a sense that the boy never recovered from the intense trip. Like many gay boys, Jonathan is hell-bent on survival, and he uses his relationship to his camera to exorcize his demons. He naturally responds to camp—from Wonder Woman and The Stepford Wives to Liquid Sky and the films of David Lynch and Paul Morrissey (not surprisingly, his crazed mother suggests a grown-up Andrea Feldman)—as a means of displacing, understanding, and finally subverting human pain. The highlight of the film may be an 11-year-old Caouette's remarkable performance in front of the camera as a pregnant and abused junkie (this is a kid who's watched too much television, but one who's also seen real-life suffering). A drama queen to the core, Caouette evokes the horrible tragedy of his mother's life with printed text on the screen that suggests lines from a children's storybook. As for the soundtrack of hushed, sometimes distorted whispers, movie one-liners, and answering machine messages, it too points to the man's self-diagnosed "depersonalization disorder." The copious digital effects used throughout this brilliant video installation are self-conscious, for sure, but Caouette's psychedelic montage doesn't exist to pander to short attention spans. Instead, his images evoke the texture of the human mind—how it processes thoughts and sorts through memories, some more painful than others, constantly threatening to erode or, conversely, duplicate themselves until the body can't take the pressure. Like a person who divulges too much information on the first date, Caouette is not only self-pitying but also uncomfortably frank. But when you realize that Tarnation exists first and foremost for the director's benefit, you then realize that we should all be so lucky to so bravely confront and sort through the pieces of our lives.

Tarnation: confessional cinema. - Slate David Edelstein

Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (Wellspring) is a memoir composed on film—composed, you might say, over a 20-year span and then rubbed and buffed on a Macintosh computer with the program iMovie. My press kit heralds it as a revolution in the "audio-visual confessional"—which gives me, as a film critic, the heebie-jeebies. I mean, that's all we need: more exhibitionists with ready access to cameras and editing software. Probably after the 5,000^th arty home-movie montage purporting to tell the story of someone's lousy childhood, I'll rue the day I called Tarnation a masterpiece.

But a masterpiece it is, of a mind-bending modern sort: This story of a 31-year-old man and his mentally-ill mother is right on the border between what shrinks call immature "acting out" and mature artistic sublimation. Caouette, the filmmaker and protagonist, weaves psychodrama shot in the middle of the madness together with revelatory stills, surreal montages of the Texas landscape, found footage, clips from such disparate but fetishistic entertainments as Rosemary's Baby and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, fantasy monologues, and stark interviews that inexorably lapse back into psychodrama.

This isn't a journalistic work—a Peeping Tom brief—like last year's squirmy Capturing the Friedmans. The home movies are heavily filtered, transformed into art objects, their subjects encouraged to turn themselves into characters in the great drama of the hero's life. But that doesn't distance them. Tarnation is a collage of pain that breaks over you like a wave. Every second you can feel the cost to Caouette of what he's showing: The sounds and the images are like a pipeline from his unconscious to the screen.

After an opening in which he shows himself and his lover, David, reacting to the news that his mother, Renee, has been rushed to the hospital after an overdose of lithium, he tells the story of his immediate family. He begins with his grandparents, Adolph and Rosemary LeBlanc, and their daughter—a lovely girl, a child model, relatively normal until she fell off a roof and was partially paralyzed for no clear physiological reason. She had shock treatments every three weeks for two years, and she was still beautiful but beginning to unravel even before her brief marriage to Jonathan's dad. Then the penniless Renee impulsively took Jonathan from Houston to Chicago, where right off the bus she was raped in front of her young son by someone who stopped to give them a ride. On the bus back to Houston, she and the boy were thrown off for disturbing the passengers. Renee was institutionalized, while Jonathan ended up in a foster home, physically and emotionally abused (he alleges) until his grandparents managed to adopt him.

Oddly, Caouette narrates Tarnation in the third-person, referring to himself throughout as "Jonathan." He also speaks of becoming more and more detached from his feelings, so that third-person storytelling feels apt. Then he shows us something uncanny: A film of himself as an 11-year-old, in makeup and a female wig, reciting a monologue by a Southern rape victim with a young son. On one level he's appalling: He's mannered, he's overacting, he keeps touching his face compulsively. But he's not overacting as 11-year-old boy, he's overacting as a 30-year-old woman and weeping and losing control as a 30-year-old woman. It's clear—to me, and obviously to him, now—that he overidentified with his mother from an early age and has always longed to live out some fantasy version of her hell. Renee didn't actually raise Jonathan—his grandparents did—and so she's never the oppressive gorgon of other monster-mother sagas. She was lost to him and is therefore an object of longing. He adores her—she's Dolly Parton, she's Mia Farrow, she's Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet—even as he hungrily documents her dissolution.

Exploitation? Debatable. Caouette sees Renee as a casualty of the mental health system—as someone who didn't start out schizoid but ended up that way after all those shock treatments and years of hospitalization. As a non-psychiatrist without a time machine, I can't verify his diagnosis (she seems pretty conventionally schizzy to me), but his empathy for her struggle is a counterweight to his vampiric urge to get her delusions on camera. We always see her through Caouette's eyes, watching helplessly as she metamorphoses from slender, doe-eyed angel to puffy, aging child-woman in pigtails and oversized glasses. It's hard to know what to feel when she moves in with Jonathan and his lover in Brooklyn. She can be such a likable mouthy broad. And then she can suddenly, without warning, begin to rail against those who've conspired to destroy her life.

On a more positive note, we see the roots of Caouette's artistic impulses: how it began with self-dramatization (he's a real drama queen); how self-dramatization runs in the family (his mother and grandmother are both a howl, the latter, especially, in her cups); and how the boy discovers underground filmmaking and gropes to find a way to act out in a strange new medium. His debt to gutbucket horror movies and musicals and David Lynch (he turned BlueVelvet into a musical in high school) and Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho is obvious: Van Sant even became an executive producer, as did John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. But Tarnation is all by itself in its volcanic—and cathartic—blend of biography and hallucination.

I don't know where that title comes from—it's never explained—but as I watched I did think, in breathless admiration, "What in tarnation???"

BFI | Sight & Sound | Tell It To The Camera B. Ruby Rich from Sight and Sound, April 2005

Interview: Jonathan Caouette | Film | The Guardian Gareth McLean from The Guardian, April 15, 2005

Jim's Reviews - Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette / 2004) Jim Clark

In-depth Analysis of TARNATION (Caouette, 2003 ... L. from Previews, Reviews, and Everything in Between

I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR - Filmmaker Magazine - Spring 2004 Andy Bailey

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [5/5]

Tarnation - Reviews - Reverse Shot Matthew Plouffe

A Tale of Sound and Fury: Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation ... Virginia Bonner (pdf format)

Tarnation Reviews & Links - Jonathan Caouette The director’s own website

See for yourself #1 on John Waters list from Artforum magazine’s Top Ten Films of 2004

TARNATION| An Open Letter To Jonathan Caouette | THE ... Tom Hall from indieWIRE

Tarnation - Cinescene Chris Knipp

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [5/5]

Kinocite Beth Gilligan

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B] also seen here: Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film

stylusmagazine.com (Kevin Worrall) review

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

sneersnipe (David Perilli) review

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review

Reverse Shot review Elbert Ventura

Eye for Film (Nick Jones) review [5/5]

Reel.com review [3.5/4] Pam Grady

DVD Times Noel Megahey

outrate.net (Mark Adnum) review

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3/4]

hybridmagazine.com review Roxanne Bogucka

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review Special Edition

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival report

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

Bright Lights Film Journal (Robert Keser) review

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

Reviews Tarnation Jonathan Caouette - Exclaim! James Luscombe

Talking Pictures (UK) review Patrick Bliss

The Village Voice [Ed Halter]

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

indieWIRE review a series of Top Ten Lists

BOMB Magazine — Jonathan Caouette by Christopher Wilcha Cristopher Wilcha interview from Bomb magazine, Fall 2004

Man with a Movie Camera: Visiting Jonathan Caouette ... Felix von Boehm interview from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2008

Time Out London review

Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

Picking Up the Pieces Of a Troubled Family - Washington Post Stephen Hunter

San Francisco Chronicle [Walter Addiego]

Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow DVDBeaver dvd review

Tarnation (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

WALK AWAY RENEE

USA France (90 mi) 2011

Walk Away Renee Howard Feinstein at Cannes from Screendaily

Artful fragmentation of old footage from his own and his unusual family’s lives in the 2004 Tarnation, assembled for next to nothing with free Imovie software on a Mac, put Caouette on connoisseurs’ talent radar, but pigeonholed him as a festival darling. Walk Away Renee is a gigantic leap forward: a real crew and more refined footage, but with enough of an accessible, more linear structure - a quasi-road movie with many more naturalistic scenes than Tarnation in which he takes his mentally ill mother by U-Haul truck from an assisted living facility in his hometown of Houston, Texas to his current residence in New York City - that it will still play festivals but will cross over into the alternative and arthouse circuit.

Once again, it took the French designer agnes b., who has supported the wildly unusual forays of Harmony Korine, to finance the work of an edgy young American filmmaker. This is patronage, and the financial payoff will be small by commercial movie standards. The film is guaranteed to be critic-driven at first, then word-of-mouth among those attracted to edgy works will guarantee it relatively fruitful release in larger, more cosmopolitan cities in many territories territories.

Caouette’s mother, 58-year-old Renee Leblanc, suffers from acute bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. Diagnosed with depression at the age of 12, she received the first of hundreds of electroshock treatments. The life of this once beautiful, animated woman has been a downhill slide ever since: institutionalization at hundreds of facilities, a huge daily regimen of psychopharmalogic medications, especially lithium, to quiet her demons, and a manic, passive-aggressive demeanour when she is off them.

In a role reversal, son has taken on the role of parent to his now brain-damaged mother. Through time shifts in which he shows Leblanc at various ages and in assorted states, as well as footage of their interaction at different phases of their lives, we come to understand the strong bond that attaches him to her so closely that he puts his own needs aside to make sure she is not mistreated by the medical establishment.

On top of the sequences documenting the trying ride through the South from Texas to New York (she loses her pills), gorgeous shots of moving clouds help structure the film. According to a cult called Cloudbusters, which aims to legitimise a fourth dimension, and for which Caouette is commissioned to direct an outreach video, clouds are a reservoir of energy. He has made no secret of his interest in parallel universes, but he treats the cult and his own video with a welcome sense of humour.

Few filmmakers working today can meld the formal wizardry on display here with a relatively straightforward account of a serious personal subject. With a soundtrack of quiet standards (Under the Boardwalk and the nostalgic title song made popular by the Left Bank in the 1960s, among many others) accompanying some extremely imaginative apocalyptic abstractions, Caouette has achieved a balancing act bordering on genius.

Walk Away Renee: Cannes Review David Rooney at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 15, 2011

"Tarnation" filmmaker Jonathan Caouette takes a cross-country trip with his mother, who suffers from acute bipolar and schizoaffective disorder, in this inconsistent film.

In his innovative 2004 debut feature, Tarnation, made on an iMac mostly out of years' worth of home movies and photographic material, Jonathan Caouette forged a new kind of pop-poetic memoir. The film was a cathartic exploration of his emergence as a gay man, and of his determined struggle to remain the one constant in the life of his mentally and emotionally unstable mother. That struggle clearly is ongoing, but revisiting the subject in Walk Away Renee yields far less consistent rewards.

Given the unconventional personalities around which the films are woven, it's tempting to compare Caouette's companion piece to what AlbertMaysles did in 2006 with The Beales of Grey Gardens. That belated afterthought to Grey Gardens, the landmark cinema verite documentary he made 31 years earlier with his late brother David Maysles, unearthed a wealth of unseen footage.

There was no shortage of fascinating material, and there are doubtless enough Edith/Edie cultists to ensure a DVD life for the second installment. But returning to a private world that has already been so beguilingly accessed can be deflating, even banal. As different as they are in style, superior personal documentary portraits like Grey Gardens or Tarnation provide a sense of intimate discovery that inevitably is missing on second acquaintance.

The primary reason for Caouette's new chapter is a cross-country trip he took with his 58-year-old mother, Renee Leblanc, who suffers from acute bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. In and out of psychiatric facilities for most of her life, she endured a prolonged period of shock treatments as a teenager. When her condition deteriorated in 2010, Caouette packed her up in a U-Haul truck to move her from Houston to an assisted living facility in Rhinebeck, N.Y., closer to his home. But the loss en route of Renee's 30-day medication supply causes major problems, sparking a frustrating odyssey of calls to medical professionals.

Where Tarnation careened off on crazy pop-cultural tangents to show the influences that helped shape Caouette as a gay adolescent, Walk Away Renee delves into rudimentary sci-fi territory.

There's a silly bit early on in which Caouette has supposedly been contacted by a crackpot group called Cloudbusters to shoot an outreach video (tacked onto the end credits) spreading the word about their theories concerning the fourth dimension. There's also talk of the universal healing energy carried in cloud movement. Later, a TV report on alternate universes unleashes a blast of psychedelic digital effects to convey mind-warping escape.

Caouette certainly knows how to manipulate images and sound, painting on a vibrantly textured, semi-experimental canvas. But aside from visual stimulation set to some cool music, none of the fictional stuff adds much.

There are many disarming, unguarded moments between mother and son, and the film is most affecting when Renee's increasingly off-the-rails behavior causes Caouette to turn back the clock to earlier episodes in their lives. These experiences will no doubt always remain raw for him, and continuing to process them through his films may be his means of growing as an artist. It also may be necessary for him in order to stay sane, anchored and committed to loving someone so difficult to handle.

It's problematic, however, that we learn very little here that wasn't more stirringly conveyed in the earlier film. In its mesmerizing, propulsive drive, Tarnation was a heartfelt scramble to make sense of messy lives. Walk Away Renee is an occasionally illuminating patchwork.

CANNES REVIEW | Jonathan Caouette Returns With Flawed But Fascinating “Walk Away Renée” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 15, 2011

Cannes 2011: Jonathan Caouette's road trip through mental illness Charlotte Higgins interviews the director at Cannes from The Guardian, May 17, 2011

Capone, Alessandro

HIDDEN LOVE (L'amour caché) D+ 65

Belgium Italy Luxembourg (90 mi) 2007

This is as gloomy a film as you’re ever likely to see, filled with hatred and self-loathing, as Isabelle Huppert as Danielle narrates her experiences as a mother who from the outset never connects to her child, Sophie, as she watches others hover around her baby expressing delight, but she is genuinely disinterested. While one can imagine what it must have been like to be raised by an indifferent mother, that’s not where this film is going. Instead it connects with Huppert after her third suicide attempt, where she’s wracked with guilt to the point where she hates herself, but also expresses nothing but contempt for her now grown 23-year old child (Mélanie Laurent), who she insists is plotting against her, convinced that her daughter cleverly changes and manipulates memories as it suits her in order to place her in a better position. Much of the time is spent in therapy sessions with her psychiatrist, Greta Scacchi, who initially does all the talking, urging Danielle to write down her thoughts, as she refuses to utter a word. However, by the time the smallest bit of progress has been made, Sophie arrives on the scene, storming into the doctor’s office claiming her mother is up to her theatrics again, that she may fool the doctor into believing she’s sick, but really she’s just a cold-hearted mother who has no love to give. As it turns out, both are right, as they genuinely hate one another, and both exude contemptible behavior towards one another that is not how they act or behave with any other living soul. The two are simply joined at the hip in a life cycle of hatred.

Sophie’s only concern is that the hospital is too expensive, insisting she be moved to another that is more affordable. Danielle, of course, sees this as spite, and their fixated view of continually holding each other in contempt is leaving the psychiatrist baffled, as despite every attempt at finding a middle ground, there is no end to the demonstrative accusations. Adding to this one-dimensional picture of dispassion is an original piano soundtrack that morbidly repeats itself endlessly throughout the entire picture, where there is rarely any use of natural sound, instead it is that same monotonous music that drones on and undercuts any emotional connection to what’s happening onscreen. But since we’re given such a clinical perspective from the outset, occasionally showing a few brief flashbacks, the overall tone of the film is one of utter detachment, where the audience could really care less about either one of them. Despite the first rate cast, this is a seriously unengaging effort, where the director has no sense of how to use the performances, allowing them to perform for nothing, as their talents are wasted in a movie that never goes anywhere. By the time the storyline plays out, we’ve had enough of this dysfunctional family, whose fixation on death and morbid gloom is not exactly satisfying. Where are the vampires, one might ask? These are such bloodsuckers, you’d think somewhere in this picture the mood would change, or someone might try a different direction, and occasionally there’s evidence of some surreal visual flair, but then it insists on returning to the exact same grim tone, becoming so relentlessly downbeat that what we’re left with registers as a false note, drown out by the cold gloom in the air.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

(L’amour cache) Another variation on Isabelle Huppert’s burgeoning bestiary of female variations, Alessandro Capone’s 2009 “Hidden Love” finds her playing Danielle, a pointedly perverse mother in her late forties, not hiding her age, who doesn’t care about her daughter Sophie, and a wan Greta Scacchi as the doctor who tries to help her with her anger and suicidal urges. In the shifts from present to past, from black-and-white to color, the ever-luminous Mélanie Laurent (“Inglourious Basterds”) plays the grown Sophie, and brings admirable fire to one memorable confrontation with her mother, yet a grandiloquent mutual hatred is more indicated than demonstrated. Visually, a motif of fearful stairways, corridors and escalators is suggestive but elusive in meaning. Even at its most banal, it’s lovingly lit by veteran cinematographer Luciano Tovoli (“The Passenger,” “Single White Female,” “Suspiria,” “Reversal of Fortune”). With Olivier Gourmet (“Mesrine,” “L’enfant,” “Read My Lips”), underused as the doctor’s husband. A co-production from Belgium, Italy and Luxembourg. 90m. 35mm.

HIDDEN LOVE (L'amour caché) Facets Multi Media

Based on the novel by Danielle Girard, Hidden Love is a moving drama between mother and daughter featuring French star Isabelle Huppert (La Cérémonie, The Piano Teacher) who provides one of her best performances. After a third suicide attempt, Danielle (Huppert) is placed under psychiatric observation in a private clinic in Paris. Her fractured relationship with her daughter Sophie (Mélanie Laurent) troubles her deeply, and she cannot recuperate from her self inflicted wounds, until she is able to speak about her past. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Nielsen (Greta Scacchi, The Coca Cola Kid), is not ready to give up on her and convinces Danielle to put down her thoughts on paper. Under Dr. Nielsen's vigilant supervision, Danielle slowly manages to find the words to articulate and understand the roots of her distress and despair. However, when Sophie unexpectedly reappears, Danielle suffers a devastating relapse, and finds herself wandering through the streets of Paris. She eventually returns to the clinic where she receives unexpected news, which will forever change her life and create for the first time, a future of promise and self fulfillment.

User reviews from imdb Author: simona gianotti (yris2002) from Italy

It is impossible not to be shocked by this movie, focused on a very delicate theme, and on three female characters. An over the top (and very courageous) Isabelle Huppert plays the main role of Danielle, a mother who hates her daughter in a visceral way, and has spent her whole life between indifference and sense of guilt, but incapable of elaborating her suffering condition. Her interpretation is devastating, her face is completely blank and the camera focused on it underlines the void of her inner world, still more underlined by the aseptic, white, impersonal environment surrounding her. Her troubled relationship with motherhood is probably part of a mental disorder, since also the relation with her good husband has always been difficult, as she has often felt disgusted by him, and she feels in general incapable of experiencing any human feelings. Mélanie Laurent plays Sophie, the hated daughter, she shifts from total inexpressiveness when she is with Danielle (although she feels some kind of love for her), to tender maternal love when she is with her own daughter. Greta Scacchi plays the analyst and is the only soothing and positive human female figure, trying to elaborate some sense and to assert the value of human sympathy.

The atmosphere throughout the movie never ceases to be tense, sometimes too tense, the moments of "dialogue" between Danielle and Sophie convey such anger, rage, hate that they are almost unbearable. The final outcome tries to offer some relief, although not too convincing, as if a backwards step seemed to be necessary in order to bring all the hate we have perceived to a more humanly-acceptable dimension, as if some kind of rescue were to be found, but it seems too a hasty ending, which leaves many unsolved, but probably unsolvable questions (above all, the only hinted reference by Danielle to the possibility that every mother could have negative feelings for a child, that you cannot enforce yourself to love someone, not even your own child). Undoubtedly, a very well interpreted movie, but, obviously, very sad and depressing, you need to be prepared and be in the right mood to see it.

Variety.com [Robert Koehler]

Even an actor with the Olympian powers of Isabelle Huppert can’t make “Hidden Love” the scalding psychodrama it was intended to be. Though Huppert is ideally cast as an emotionally entombed mother haunted by memories of her only daughter, director Alessandro Capone’s conception (working in his non-native French) is studied, with a gummy pace and an inability to reach emotional catharsis that leaves just a hint of what the movie could have been. Huppert’s presence alone will assure fest invites, but buyers will mostly lock in deals for small screen sessions.

Weight of entire pic is on Huppert’s shoulders -- or, more specifically, on her face, which is shown as more nglamorous and riddled with age, stress and despair than any other international star has allowed herself to be shown of late.

The image of suicidal Danielle (Huppert), seated in the office of caring shrink Dr. Nielsen (Greta Scacchi), is that of a woman who has stared down the dark, deep hole of her own demise and psychic defeat. It is yet another reminder that there is arguably no other thesp in world cinema who dares push her characters to such radical limits while remaining resolutely human.

After her third suicide attempt, Danielle is in a mental hospital and won’t utter a word. Some brief written notes begin to prompt doctor-patient dialogue, which predictably opens a rush of flashbacks involving a younger Danielle, her bitter upbringing, dubious marriage and a baby she had absolutely no desire to have.

“Hidden Love” never gets creepier than when Danielle, having just birthed daughter Sophie, watches the infant as if it were some odd potted plant she finds repellant.

Capone and co-writer Luca D’Alisera’s adaptation of Danielle Girard’s novel isn’t as interesting as most of the cast, and the film visually struggles against standard TV reference points to get inside Danielle’s head, recalling many of Ingmar Bergman’s more routine projects. Particularly near the end, after a stunning and visceral head-on confrontation between the grown Sophie (a fiery Melanie Laurent) and the mother she profoundly despises, pic plays perceptual games, leaving viewers with a rather pointless set of varying dramatic conclusions.

Frank Capra at Reel Classics

Capra, Frank

Film Reference Charles Affron

The critical stock of Frank Capra has fluctuated perhaps more wildly than that of any other major director. During his peak years, the 1930s, he was adored by the press, by the industry and, of course, by audiences. In 1934 It Happened One Night won nearly all the Oscars, and through the rest of the decade a film of Frank Capra was either the winner or the strong contender for that honor. Long before the formulation of the auteur theory, the Capra signature on a film was recognized. But after World War II his career went into serious decline. His first post-war film, It's a Wonderful Life, was not received with the enthusiasm he thought it deserved (although it has gone on to become one of his most-revered films). Of his last five films, two are remakes of material he treated in the thirties. Many contemporary critics are repelled by what they deem indigestible "Capracorn" and have even less tolerance for an ideology characterized as dangerously simplistic in its populism, its patriotism, its celebration of all-American values.

Indeed, many of Capra's most famous films can be read as excessively sentimental and politically naive. These readings, however, tend to neglect the bases for Capra's success—his skill as a director of actors, the complexity of his staging configurations, his narrative economy and energy, and most of all, his understanding of the importance of the spoken word in sound film. Capra captured the American voice in cinematic space. The words often serve the cause of apple pie, mom, the little man and other greeting card clichés (indeed, the hero of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town writes verse for greeting cards). But often in the sound of the voice we hear uncertainties about those very clichés.

Capra's career began in the pre-talkie era, when he directed silent comic Harry Langdon in two successful films. His action films of the early thirties are not characteristic of his later work, yet already, in the films he made with Barbara Stanwyck, his individual gift can be discerned. The narrative pretext of The Miracle Woman is the urgency of Stanwyck's voice, its ability to move an audience, to persuade listeners of its sincerity. Capra exploited the raw energy of Stanwyck in this and other roles, where her qualities of fervor and near-hysterical conviction are just as essential to her persona as her hard-as-nails implacability would be in the forties. Stanwyck's voice is theatricalized, spatialized in her revivalist circus-tent in The Miracle Woman and on the hero's suicide tower in Meet John Doe, where her feverish pleadings are the only possible tenor for the film's unresolved ambiguities about society and the individual.

John Doe is portrayed by Gary Cooper, another American voice with particular resonance in the films of Capra. A star who seems to have invented the "strong, silent" type, Cooper first plays Mr. Deeds, whose platitudinous doggerel comes from a simple, do-gooder heart, but who enacts a crisis of communication in his long silence at the film's climax, a sanity hearing. When Mr. Deeds finally speaks it is a sign that the community (if not sanity) is restored—the usual resolution of a Capra film. As John Doe, Cooper is given words to voice by reporter Stanwyck, and he delivers them with such conviction that the whole nation listens. The vocal/dramatic center of the film is located in a rain-drenched ball park filled with John Doe's "people." The hero's effort to speak the truth, to reveal his own imposture and expose the fascistic intentions of his sponsor, is stymied when the lines of communication are literally cut between microphone and loudspeaker. The Capra narrative so often hinges on the protagonist's ability to speak and be heard, on the drama of sound and audition.

The bank run in American Madness is initiated by a montage of telephone voices and images, of mouths spreading a rumor. The panic is quelled by the speech of the bank president (Walter Huston), a situation repeated in more modest physical surroundings in It's a Wonderful Life. The most extended speech in the films of Capra occurs in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The whole film is a test of the hero's voice, and it culminates in a filibuster, a speech that, by definition, cannot be interrupted. The climax of State of the Union involves a different kind of audience and audition. There, the hero confesses his political dishonesty and his love for his wife on television.

The visual contexts, both simple and complex, never detract from the sound of Capra's films. They enhance it. The director's most elaborately designed film, The Bitter Tea of General Yen (recalling the style of Josef von Sternberg in its chiaroscuro lighting and its exoticism) expresses the opposition of cultural values in its visual elements, to be sure, but also in the voices of Stanwyck and Nils Asther, a Swedish actor who impersonates a Chinese war lord. Less unusual but not less significant harmonies are sounded in It Happened One Night, where a society girl (Claudette Colbert) learns "real" American speech from a fast-talking reporter (Clark Gable). The love scenes in Mr. Deeds are for Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, another quintessential Capra heroine, whose vocal personality is at least as memorable as her physical one. In James Stewart Capra finds his most disquieting voice, ranging in Mr. Smith from ingenuousness to hysterical desperation and in It's a Wonderful Life to an even higher pitch of hysteria when the hero loses his identity.

The sounds and sights of Capra's films bear the authority of a director whose autobiography is called The Name above the Title. With that authority comes an unsettling belief in authorial power, the power dramatized in his major films, the persuasiveness exercised in political and social contexts. That persuasion reflects back on the director's own power to engage the viewer in his fiction, to call upon a degree of belief in the fiction—even when we reject the meaning of the fable.

A Capra Site official website

All-Movie Guide bio from Bruce Eder

TCMDB profile from Turner Classic Movies

Classic Film and Television Home Page Michael E. Grost

Frank Capra's America

Bright Lights Film Journal Article Capra’s Corn, by D.J.M. Saunders, November 2004

BFI | Sight & Sound | Capra before he became 'Capraesque' Joseph McBride from Sight and Sound, December 2010

Capra, Frank They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN B+ 91

USA (88 mi) 1933

Light years away from the homespun, small-town Capracorn for which the director is best known, this exotic, erotic melodrama is by far his finest achievement. Stanwyck, subtly radiant, is the American missionary in Shanghai who is abducted by a highly sophisticated Chinese warlord (Asther); like the film itself, she is both fascinated and repelled by the prospect of miscegenation. Where Capra's other films are largely stolid, prosaic and talky, this is sensuous and profoundly cinematic, perhaps most notably in a sequence in which Stanwyck dreams of her seduction by a forceful Asther. Odd, but oddly moving.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Frank Capra's very atypical drama about an American missionary (Barbara Stanwyck) taken prisoner by a Chinese warlord (Nils Asther) is not only his masterpiece but also one of the great love stories to come out of Hollywood in the 30s--subtle, delicate, moody, mystical, and passionate. Joseph Walker shot it through filters and with textured shadows that suggest Sternberg; Edward Paramore wrote the script, adapted from a story by Grace Zaring Stone. Oddly enough, this perverse and beautiful film was chosen to open Radio City Music Hall in 1933; it was not one of Capra's commercial successes, but it beats the rest of his oeuvre by miles, and both Stanwyck and Asther are extraordinary. With Walter Connolly and Lucien Littlefield. 89 min.

Senses of Cinema (Kevin Lee)

A missionary's fiancee (Barbara Stanwyck) is abducted by a Chinese warlord (Nils Asther) during the revolution. This intriguing drama is one of Capra's more underrated efforts. While its characterization of the Chinese may occasionally seem backward by present standards, by the standards of 1933 the film is positively daring. The audience is set us up for the usual tale of virtuous womanhood threatened by the brutality of an Oriental villain. Then, in a series of surprising turn-arounds, the picture undercuts all plot expectations while providing some interesting commentary on Western assumptions. Beautifully shot by Joe Walker, the movie has a fine rhythm and a kind of sensuality one doesn't usually associate with Capra. A highlight is a seductive dream sequence which is among the most beautiful examples of the type ever done. The choice of a non-Asian actor to play the title role is not surprising considering the time, but the Swedish Asther turns in a subtle and moving performance. Stanwyck is marvelous too - but then she was great in almost everything she did in those days. Banned in some areas because it crossed the taboo of interracial romance, The Bitter Tea of General Yen was always one of Frank Capra's favorites among his own films.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

In my write-up of Frank Capra's THE MIRACLE WOMAN from a few weeks ago, I noted that, of the fifteen films he directed in the 1930s, it was one of only two that lost money, a fact later attributed to it having been banned in the UK. The other was THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, which was never banned, but performed poorly in large part because of its seemingly offensive nature. (It also has the distinction of being the first film to screen at Radio City Music Hall, though it was pulled after only eight days.) Despite the criticism it's received over the years--back then for its lurid depiction of miscegenation, nowadays for its flagrant Orientalism--it is arguably Capra's masterpiece. Based on the eponymous novel by Grace Zaring Stone and set in China during the Chinese Civil War, it's about a beautiful American missionary (Megan Davis, played by Barbara Stanwyck in her fourth collaboration with Capra) who's detained by the infamous General Yen (played not by a Chinese actor, but by Swedish actor Nils Asther) after she and her fiancé are incapacitated. The rest of the film is a curious push-pull between Megan's devotion to her faith and her growing desire for the charismatic general. What's noteworthy about the plot is that despite its rather stereotypical portrayal of the "godless" Chinese, it also confronts Megan's own dogmatic convictions. Capra doesn't condemn one or the other; instead, they're portrayed as being comparably stubborn, further highlighting their disparate attraction. Stylistically, this film is more impressive than anything he did before or after. With help from cinematographer and longtime collaborator Joseph Walker, its chiaroscuro lighting and informed framing are reminiscent of Sternberg. The set and costume design are particularly luscious, a far cry from Capra's typically understated aesthetic. A surreal dream sequence can only really be explained as a sort-of Nosferatu rape fantasy, in which Yen, first appearing as a Fu Manchu-style criminal with long, pointy fingernails, turns into Megan's dashing savior. (Ironically, despite the film's racist elements, Capra uses these hyperbolic stereotypes to visually denounce Megan's bigoted projections.) Having emigrated from Sicily in the early 1900s, it's possible Capra saw himself in the "exotic" General Yen, especially in regards to how he was viewed by members of the opposite sex who belonged to different social classes. (Joseph McBride touches upon this in his excellent book Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, a must-read for anyone interested in the director.) Some speculate that he took on such a serious subject matter simply to win an Oscar; however, as McBride recounts in his book, "In the late thirties [Capra] described it...as his favorite of all his films." Even though it was a failure at the box office, it endures as a masterwork born from one of cinema's most misunderstood careers.

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Bright Lights Film Journal Robert B. Ito

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT

USA (105 mi) 1934

It Happened One Night Dave Kehr from the Reader

Reporter Clark Gable chases spoiled heiress Claudette Colbert across most of the eastern seaboard, pausing long enough between wisecracks to set the definitive tone of 30s screwball comedy. Even though Frank Capra's 1934 film won all five of the top Oscars, it's still pretty good. This is Capra at his best, very funny and very light, with a minimum of populist posturing. 105 min.

Senses of Cinema (Martha P. Nochimson)

The film which lifted Columbia Studios into the big league by winning five Academy Awards and putting Capra's future output among the biggest box-office successes of the '30s. Gable plays a ruthless reporter who adopts a fugitive heiress making her way across America by bus. She (Colbert) is spoiled and snobbish, he is poor but honest, and his attempts to convert her to homespun pleasures hit the right emotional chord in Depression-weary audiences. Opinions divide about whether the film's comedy and sententious notions about the miserable rich and happy poor have dated, but some of the set pieces definitely haven't aged. Capra's sense of humour is a little like that of Preston Sturges, though less caustic; and the film shows its stars at their best, Colbert as one of Hollywood's fresher comediennes, Gable as dumb-but-loveable hunk.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Julian Antos

During the production of IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, Claudette Colbert purportedly referred to Capra's slapstick opus as the worst picture in the world, a criticism she'd repeat until the film was lauded with all five major Academy Awards. It's a messy work, and it's easy to see how Colbert could have objected, but the intricacies of Capra's earnest patchwork (Thanks, Columbia) give the film its merit. Colbert and Clark Gable seem humbled but lovably obstinate, as their mild trepidations about the script bleed into the film itself (as do various inconsistencies in editing and continuity). But IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT never feels like a film that doesn't want to be made and seen. Capra moves in quick, broad strokes, so that small details get picked up by happenstance and only make themselves apparent on repeated viewings. Stepping back, the film's personality is almost perfectly crafted, and there isn't anything about it that doesn't come across as genuine. The same could be said of nearly all of Capra's work, but his surefooted pacing renders this his most immediately likable.

Turner Classic Movies Margarita Landazuri

A runaway heiress meets a poor but charming newspaper reporter while she's on the lam, antipathy turns to love, and they encounter an assortment of oddball characters. It's the ideal premise for a screwball comedy, and has been the basis for many of them. But none did it better than the original, It Happened One Night (1934), the film that's credited with inventing the genre. Director Frank Capra often said that the making of It Happened One Night would have made a pretty good screwball comedy in itself. Consider the elements: two irascible studio bosses, an impossibly fast schedule, a couple of spoiled stars who didn't want to make the picture and are hostile to the harried director -- yet somehow they manage to produce an enduring classic.

In the early 1930s, Columbia Pictures was considered a "Poverty Row" studio, making cheap B-movies. Luckily, Columbia had a major asset in Capra, who had been nominated for an Academy Award for Lady for a Day (1933). Capra and writer Robert Riskin had adapted and renamed a magazine story called "Night Bus," and producer Harry Cohn had arranged to borrow Robert Montgomery from MGM for the lead in the newly named It Happened One Night. But Montgomery balked, saying there were already "too many bus pictures." Instead, MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer made Cohn an offer he couldn't refuse. "I got an actor here who's being a bad boy," Mayer reportedly told Cohn. "I'd like to spank him." The bad boy was Clark Gable, who was becoming an important star, and flexing his muscles. He told Mayer he wouldn't play any more gigolo roles, and he wanted a raise. Mayer would punish him by exiling him to Siberia on Poverty Row. Gable arrived for his first meeting with Capra drunk, rude, and angry. In spite of this inauspicious beginning, Capra and Gable eventually became friends. Once Gable read the script, he realized the character was a man very like himself, and he enjoyed making It Happened One Night.

Among the stars who had turned down the female lead in It Happened One Night were Myrna Loy, Miriam Hopkins, Constance Bennett and Margaret Sullavan. Claudette Colbert, under contract to Paramount, had four weeks free, but she was also a hard sell. She'd made her first film, For the Love of Mike (1927), with Capra directing, and it had been a disaster, so she was not excited about repeating the experience. What did excite her, however, was the prospect of making $50,000 for four weeks of work, since her Paramount salary was $25,000 per film. So she willingly agreed to do it, but, at the same time, she gave Capra a hard time. Although Colbert had gladly disrobed for De Mille in The Sign of the Cross (1932), she refused to be shown taking off her clothes in the motel room sequence in It Happened One Night. No matter. Draping her unmentionables over the "walls of Jericho" made for a sexier scene anyway. More problematic was the hitchhiking scene. Colbert didn't want to pull up her skirt and flash her legs. So Capra hired a chorus girl, intending to have her legs stand in for Colbert's in close-up. Colbert saw the girl posing, and said, "get her out of here, I'll do it -- that's not my leg!" After shooting wrapped, Colbert told friends, "I've just finished the worst picture in the world!"

Colbert's legs and Gable's chest were the sensations of the film. In the motel room scene, Gable demonstrates how a man undresses. When he took off his shirt, he wore no undershirt. Capra explained that the reason for this was that there was no way Gable could take off his undershirt gracefully, but once audiences saw Gable's naked torso, sales of men's undershirts plummeted. The rest of Gable's simple wardrobe -- Norfolk jacket, V-neck sweater, and trench coat -- also became a men's fashion fad. Thereafter, Gable wore a trench coat in most of his films, considering it his lucky garment.

The reviews for It Happened One Night were excellent, but no one really expected much from the film. After a slow opening, it received great word-of-mouth, and the film picked up steam at the box office. James Harvey, in his book Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, believes that the film succeeded because the couple transcended their stock characters. "There was some kind of new energy in their style: slangy, combative, humorous, unsentimental -- and powerfully romantic. Audiences were bowled over by it."

At Oscar time,It Happened One Night surprised the industry when it was nominated in all five major categories, and stunned everyone when it won them all: Best Actor, Actress, Picture, Director, and Screenplay. It was the first-ever sweep of the awards, a feat that would not be repeated for another 40 years, until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Claudette Colbert was about to depart on a train from New York when she was informed that she'd won. She dashed to the ceremony, dressed in a traveling suit, accepted the award, and dashed back to the train, which had been held for her.

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

MovieJustice (Dan DeVore)

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)

MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN

USA (115 mi) 1936

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)

The public domain issues surrounding It's A Wonderful Life may have made that movie Frank Capra's best-known picture, and the director said on more than one occasion that it was his favorite. And though the Christmas season isn't complete without a visit from Clarence and company, I'm partial to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, myself. It's a marvelous balance of sheer entertainment and hopeful social commentary; it was an enormous success at the time of its release, and has only improved with age.

This was Capra's first picture after the astoundingly successful It Happened One Night, and in context it's easy to imagine the director's unease about selecting his next project—how do you follow up the first movie to win five major Oscars®, for best picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay? By letting just a dollop of social conscience creep in—that's how. Made at the nadir of the Depression, Mr. Deeds has the finely-crafted screwball elements of the director's previous movie, while providing a heartfelt commentary on the hardships endured by much of his audience.

For the uninitiated: Gary Cooper plays Longfellow Deeds, who has never left the small town of Mandrake Falls, Vermont; he's content playing his tuba in the town band and writing doggerel for postcards. He improbably inherits $20 million when a rich New York relative dies in a car accident, and the country mouse is whisked to the big city.

He's the talk of the town, but he isn't talking. To get to him, the New York Mail dispatches their ace reporter, Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur). She masquerades as a small-town girl, and Longfellow falls for her; they're out on the town at night, and she's ratting him out in the paper during the day. Of course, he's heartbroken when he finds out, and reaches a bigger conclusion: all that money is too much trouble. He sets about giving away his fortune to the indigent, to the many that need a boost more than he does.

That scant summary hardly does justice to the picture, with its splendid screenplay by Robert Riskin. Riskin has an acid tongue when he needs it ("You've been making love to a double dose of cyanide!"), and most of his best barbs go to Lionel Stander, later of Hart to Hart. But the writer is charitable toward the Vermonters, too, and especially toward the unemployed, peppering the streets of New York. It's a script that also demands attention from lexicographers, as the words "doodler" and "pixelated" were coined here.

It's always a little startling to see what a terrifically understated comedic actor Cooper can be—I always think of him first as Lou Gehrig, or as Sheriff Joe Kane in High Noon. But the sheer pleasure he takes in, say, sliding down a banister in his ritzy new house, is just delightful. This was also the movie that put Jean Arthur on the map—it sounds as if she was downright neurotic on the set, and had to be coaxed and cajoled in front of the camera; once she was finally there, she only wanted one side of her face shot. But she's a great foil for Cooper, and of course it's in the world of screwball that actresses of this age found their best roles.

There are some things that you don't want to think about too hard—for instance, what are all these farmers doing in Manhattan? But that's poking holes, that's nitpicking at a classic motion picture. Mr. Deeds does have a significant legacy—for instance, it was a remake in which the Nick Nolte character was to star in the ill-fated I'll Do Anything. And if you haven't, you might want to see the original now, because a genuine remake is coming, starring Adam Sandler and Winona Ryder

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN Dan Schneider from Alt Film Guide

Reel.com DVD review [Jeffrey Wachs]

ToxicUniverse.com (Dainon Moody)

CineScene.com (Kristen Ashley)

DVD Verdict Norman Short

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

DVD Talk (Chris Hughes)

LOST HORIZON

USA (118 mi) 1937 restored original version (132 mi)

Film Court (Lawrence Russell)

Classic fantasy epic based on James Hilton's novel, with a number of air-passengers hijacked after leaving war-torn China, and ending up in Tibet's Shangri-La, where peace, good health and longevity are the rule. Colman is torn between staying and returning to normal 'civilisation', and the result is a full-blown weepie, complete with kitschy sets, admirable if incredibly naïve sentiments, and fine acting from Colman. Not at all the sort of film one could make in these considerably more jaundiced times, as was evident with the appearance of the atrocious remake in 1973.

filmcritic.com visits Lost Horizon David Bezanson

The weirdest film by Frank Capra, this epic was adapted from James Hilton’s bestselling novel about a plane full of passengers stranded in Tibet who are brought to the imaginary utopia Shangri-la. (Hilton’s sensational fantasy was inspired by mountaineering trips to the Himalayas -- pretty much unknown then -- and it probably still influences how people in the West think about Tibet.)

Lost Horizon is a strange but haunting mixture of drama, long expository passages, and romance, with lavish, Xanadu-like sets set against stock footage of icy mountains -- but the performance of Ronald Colman carries the movie. Colman’s character is a Brit who decides he doesn’t mind hanging with the Buddhists and enjoying the quiet life, but some of his companions are unhappy in the worker’s paradise and debate whether to try to escape. Sensuality is provided by the young Jane Wyatt, later the matron on TV's Father Knows Best (Wyatt’s character is even shown in a distant frontal nude scene, a wink at the Hays Code).

Years after its release, Lost Horizon became slightly controversial because the depiction of Shangri-la had communist overtones (it was also accused of being pro-Chinese, which seems ironic… if anything, it would be pro-Tibetan). Some important scenes were cut out in response to criticism and some have never been found and restored, so available versions now show several minutes of still photographs where there is no surviving print while the audio plays. Bizarre methodology, but strangely, it works (several minutes is not a big chunk of this long film, which originally ran over three hours).

Actually, the subtext of Lost Horizon is not utopian: the stated purpose of Shangri-la is to create an island of civilization amid the social decline and wars to come, and to someday provide the nucleus for a "new renaissance" (a sci-fi trope later borrowed by Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories). This is a pretty serious theme -- chilling when you consider that the film was released only two years before Hitler began marching across Europe, and still relevant today.

Though it’s often slow-paced and the only surviving versions are fragmented, Lost Horizon is a strangely dreamlike, intelligent cinematic vision; more than most classic films, it has stayed with me over time.

Turner Classic Movies Bill Goodman

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Reel.com DVD review [Bill Schwartz]

DVD Verdict Sean McGinnis

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

Edinburgh U Film Society [Katia Saint-Peron]

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

USA (129 mi) 1939

In order that they can continue with their dodgy deals, Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains) and press magnate Jim Taylor, arrange for naive, idealistic scoutmaster Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), to be appointed to the senate. However, Smith refuses to let himself be corrupted, exposing the shady skullduggery he sees going on around him. As Smith's moralising threatens to expose the deceitful duo, they decide to get rid of him by tarnishing his reputation.

Branded un-American upon its release, because it implied the White House was corrupt, this remains one of Capra's best works. Far from criticising politics, he expresses his unshakeable faith in democracy and its institutions, as well as in the triumph of right against might. Smith is innocent and pure, and in the end, only the voices of the children that support him are able to rescue him from the politicians' snare.

A replica of the Senate chamber was built for the film's most memorable scene - as Smith launches into an exhausting three day filibuster, refusing to yield the floor until he has spoken his mind. Like all Capra, this film could be dismissed as cornball idealism (or `Capra-corn' to give it its official title), but at its heart is a serious message. In an age when the majority of people dismiss anything that comes out of the mouths of politicians, we need reminded of the potential good that can come from politics when it is used as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Smith's fight could be going on in the States today, or anywhere for that matter.

"Both Frank Capra and James Stewart were rarely better than this" - Vox

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

Though it’s now universally revered as an ode to democratic ideals, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) was originally denounced by many Washington power-brokers. That may come as a bit of a shock if you haven’t seen this classic picture for several years. Jimmy Stewart’s lead performance made him a star, and is justly remembered as the key component of a beautifully constructed narrative. But Capra, for all his flag-waving and sometimes naive moralizing saved a great deal of bite for the hallowed halls of American government.

If not subversive, the movie is at least driven by a strong distaste for the misuse of power by our elected officials. This was an exceptionally gutsy message at a time when Americans were concerned with the rise of Nazism overseas, and Capra surely knew he would ruffle a few feathers. But he put his foot down and said exactly what he wanted to say, much like the film’s patriotic lead character. This is the kind of movie that makes you want to light up a sparkler.

Stewart plays Jefferson Smith, a young man who takes over after the unexpected death of a junior Senator. Smith is despised by his cynical secretary (Jean Arthur), and is quickly portrayed as an appointed yokel by the D.C. press. Undaunted, he tries to introduce a bill that would build a much needed boys’ camp in his state. When a powerful businessman named James Taylor (Edward Arnold) and the state’s senior Senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Raines), discover that the camp will be built on land that Taylor plans to sell for an enormous profit under the provisions of an impending bill, they try to bribe Smith.

Smith, of course, stands his ground, so the two men set about ruining him. This eventually leads to an unforgettable filibuster scene that solidified Stewart’s persona – the first persona of his multi-dimensional career, anyway - as a common man with bottomless reserves of backbone and dignity. (Stewart, in a move worthy of Robert De Niro, had a doctor administer dichloride of mercury near his vocal chords to give his voice the exhausted rasp he was looking for at the close of Smith’s filibuster.)

Capra nearly cast Gary Cooper, but finally settled on Stewart. “I knew he would make a hell of a Mr. Smith,” he said. “He looked like the country kid, the idealist. It was very close to him.” Stewart knew this was the role of a lifetime, one that could place him near the top of the Hollywood heap. Jean Arthur later remembered his mood at the time: “He was so serious when he was working on that picture, he used to get up at five o’clock in the morning and drive himself to the studio. He was so terrified something was going to happen to him, he wouldn’t go faster.”

Even in the classics-heavy year of 1939, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was a major achievement, arguably the finest picture of Capra’s storied career. It may wrap itself up a bit too easily, but you’d have to have a heart of stone to not be moved by the journey. Or, in lieu of that, you could be a U.S. Senator or Washington newspaper reporter circa 1939.

On October 17, 1939, the picture was previewed at Washington’s Constitution Hall. The preview was a major production featuring searchlights and a National Guard band playing patriotic tunes; The Washington Times-Herald even put out a special edition covering the event. Four thousand guests attended, 45 Senators among them. About two-thirds of the way through the film, the grumbling began, with people walking out. Some politicians were so enraged by how “they” were being portrayed in the movie, they actually shouted at the screen. At a party afterward, a drunken newspaper editor took a wild swing at Capra for including a drunken reporter as one of the characters!

Several politicians angrily spoke out against the film in newspaper editorials, which, in the long run, may have helped its box office. Sen. Alben W. Barkley viewed the picture as “a grotesque distortion” of the Senate, “as grotesque as anything ever seen! Imagine the Vice President of the United States winking at a pretty girl in the gallery in order to encourage a filibuster!” Barkley, who was lucky he didn’t get quoted on the film’s posters, also said, “...it showed the Senate as the biggest aggregation of nincompoops on record!”

Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina suggested that official action be taken against the film’s release...lest we play into the hands of Fascist regimes. And Pete Harrison, the respected editor of Harrison Reports, urged Congress to pass a bill allowing theater owners to refuse to show films – like Mr. Smith - that “were not in the best interest of our country.” And you thought the Dixie Chicks got a raw deal.

Not everyone, especially American moviegoers, saw Capra’s vision as an affront to democracy. Frank S. Nugent, a critic for The New York Times wrote, “(Capra) is operating, of course, under the protection of that unwritten clause in the Bill of Rights entitling every voting citizen to at least one free swing at the Senate. Mr. Capra’s swing is from the floor and in the best of humor; if it fails to rock the august body to its heels – from laughter as much as from injured dignity – it won’t be his fault but the Senate’s, and we should really begin to worry about the upper house.”

Reel.com DVD review [Jeffrey Wachs]

Film as Art Danél Griffin

DVD Verdict Norman Short

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

DVD Talk (Chris Hughes)

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] from the premiere Frank Capra Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] from the premiere Frank Capra Collection

MEET JOHN DOE

USA (122 mi) 1941

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

Stanwyck causes a sensation with an invented newspaper story about a tramp promising to kill himself to protest at the state of the world - and then she auditions plain-speaking hick Gary Cooper for the part. His goodwill campaign takes the nation by storm, but proves ripe for political manipulation. After a bright start, this hunkers down to serious hand-wringing... Coop's hick (none too convincingly hinted at as the new Messiah) turns out to be a bore, and Capra strains to accommodate political chicanery and his own half-baked idealism.

As an immigrant himself, Frank Capra may seem an unlikely character for building stories of American heroes, the common man who rises against the power of the establishment, and brings the simple folk together to right the injustices of the world. Few movie fans would be unfamiliar with his 1946 holiday classic, It's A Wonderful Life, in which the hero feels his only worth to his family will be in his own death; that is, until he is shown how valuable his life is to other people. Meet John Doe follows the story of a fabricated everyman, who has pledged to end his life as a statement against the increasing hold corporate America has on the people, and the unemployment and hardship it is causing. The script was based on Richard Connell's 1922 short story, A Reputation, which was later the basis for a play entitled The World is an Eightball. Following a similar theme about a character manipulated by a cynical press that Capra used in his earlier, The Miracle Woman, Meet John Doe takes the average guy, and elevates him into the national spotlight, where those behind the scenes use him to their advantage.

The Tribune has a new owner, replacing its motto of "A Free Press for a Free People" with the New Tribune's "A Streamlined Press for a Streamlined Age." Part of this streamlining comes in the form of new editor Henry Connell (James Gleason), who has been sent in to clean out the dead wood. Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), a woman supporting her mother and two children, is a columnist whose job is on the chopping block. In order to save her career, she writes a fictitious letter as her final column, from one John Doe, a man down on his luck and upset at the system, who vows to leap to his death on Christmas Eve from the roof of the town hall. The column causes an uproar, with letters and phone calls coming in by the thousands. Connell deliberates on the story and decides he must kill it immediately, but when the rival paper accuses the New Tribune of fraud, Ann steps in and devises a scheme to drive up circulation by perpetuating the tale, and for hiring a ringer to pose as John Doe. A group of unemployed men creates the perfect opportunity to find such a man, and when Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), an ex-baseball player turned drifter, is offered the job, he reluctantly accepts as he is in a desperate state. Against the advice of his best friend (Walter Brennan as The Colonel), who warns him of the evils of becoming involved, John continues to play along with the ruse, not minding the perks of his position, and the chance to pay for the surgery required to fix his pitching arm. As support for John Doe and increased pleading that he reconsider his suicide come from the public, the newspaper's new owner, D. B. Norton (Edward Arnold) sees the political potential for the cause of the average man, and encourages Ann to write a speech for John Doe's radio debut. Drawing on inspiration from her father, she constructs an impassioned message extolling the virtues of community, and that every John Doe should be counted in society. Norton encourages the formation of a new apolitical John Doe Society to bolster this new found neighborliness, but as the idealism of John Doe reaches the masses, and support snowballs into a national phenomenon, Willoughby's real identity as a sham is something he has to come to terms with.

Unlike earlier Capra films such as Mr. Deeds Goes To Town or Mr. Smith Goes To Washington where the hero was based on old-fashioned American principles, the main characters in Meet John Doe all have decidedly self-serving interests. John Willoughby just wants to have his arm fixed so he can return to baseball, has no family roots and an ambiguous morality. Even as he espouses the many causes he apparently stands for, he has a marked disinterest in all but his own benefits. Ann Mitchell is a conspiring manipulator, bent on moving herself up the social ladder, despite having somewhat honorable reasons behind her motivation. And D. B. Norton has his fascist leanings emphasized with his own private police force.

Most critics agree that the major failing of Meet John Doe is its ending. Capra struggled through 6 different variations (the final of which was not cut until the film was already in theaters), feeling a 1940s audience would in no way accept Gary Cooper committing suicide, which was the original idea. Considering that era from a historical perspective, one might suggest that his swipes at Fascism and the bonding together of the "common man" could be seen as fitting propaganda, as the U.S. was about to be thrust into World War II. The concept of martyrdom also plays an important role in this film, as it did in It's A Wonderful Life, though Meet John Doe's connection with another famous martyr plays a bit heavy-handed. Hailed since its release as a top ten film by the critics, it is interesting to note that some of Capra's earlier work, which he considered his finer films, and which were responsible for putting Columbia Pictures into the major leagues, were often overshadowed by Meet John Doe.

Turner Classic Movies Scott McGee

DVD Verdict Maurice Cobbs

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE

USA (118 mi) 1944

Insanity runs in my family... It practically gallops

Wade Major from Boxoffice magazine (link lost):

One of Frank Capra's most endlessly enjoyable films, "Arsenic and Old Lace" places Cary Grant into Joseph Kesselring's smash play and strikes gold. The hilarious, twisted story of a drama critic and his bride as they endure an endless night-long ordeal with his psychotic, sociopathic family, starting with a pair of joyously homicidal aunts. Adapted brilliantly by Casablanca author Julius Epstein and his brother, "Arsenic and Old Lace" is both Capra and Grant at their level best, a fluid comedy where the laughs never stop, but never seem forced.

DVD Review e-zine Guido Henkel

Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) is a respected drama critic in New York who just got married. Flying off to his honeymoon, he stops by his aunts’ (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) house to gather a few things when the whole world seems to come down. Mortimer discovers that his innocent, dear little aunts are serial killers. Over the past months they have sent 12 men to Heaven, happily liberating them from their earthly sufferings. With poisoned wine the two charming old ladies are convinced they are doing the right thing and keep piling up bodies in their basement. Teddy (John Alexander), Mortimer’s raving-mad brother who believes he is Teddy Roosevelt, regularly helps in the little "undertaking," leaving Mortimer speechless.

Determined to protect his beloved aunts, Mortimer devises a plan to have his deluded brother sent to a sanitarium and blame him for the murders, when just at that moment, his other brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey), the black sheep of the family, re-appears after a 20 year absence.

Looking like Boris Karloff, Jonathan has turned into a criminal on the run, and with him comes Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre) to supply Jonathan with a new face. When they find out about the skeletons in the family’s closet, they try to turn things to their own advantage, and a seemingly endless night of riotous events and twists takes shape.

It is easy to tell that "Arsenic And Old Lace" is actually based on a stage play, as practically the entire movie is taking place in a single room. You won’t really notice while watching the film however, as the racy story and hilarious antics will keep you enchanted and rolling with laughter. The movie’s cast is phenomenal. It is mostly Cary Grant who is showing off his best rubber faces and exchanges his usual slick mannerisms of the gentleman for flabbergasted double-takes and the elegance of a clown, while the rest of the cast play their parts fairly straight and with a serious face. Most of the humor derives from that clash that no one seems to be actually perturbed in the least by the events, but Mortimer. With the sinister brother appearing, the sadistic looking doctor and an assortment of other eccentric characters, "Arsenic And Old Lace" makes for a great movie experience that will have you smiling, chuckling and smirking even after the movie is over.

Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon

Reel.com DVD review [Carrie Wheadon]

DVD Verdict Norman Short

Arsenic And Old Lace (1944) Tim Dirks

eFilmCritic.com (Natasha Theobald)

The New York Times P.P. K.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE A 100

USA (129 mi) 1946

Time Out

'This story is the lousiest cheese...' Capra admitted to his star after making a rotten pitch. Stewart stuck by his favourite director. 'Frank, if you want to do a movie about me committing suicide, with an angel with no wings named Clarence, I'm your boy.' Although the picture has become synonymous with homespun, small town values - values Stewart personified and Capra obviously cherished - it achieves its profound emotional resonance precisely by stressing their limitations, even to the point of suicide. This is the tragedy of a man who dreams of travelling the world, building cities and making love to Gloria Grahame, who never leaves his hometown, works in his dad's office, and marries Donna Reed. The 'unborn' sequence is chilling not because it's morbid fantasy, but because 'Pottersville' was and is so much closer to contemporary society than the nostalgic gentility of Bedford Falls. For both Capra and Stewart, Wonderful Life was their first movie after serving in WWII, and it's riven with their anxieties on coming home. For Stewart, it paved the way for Vertigo and The Naked Spur; for the director it was in effect his testament. That Capra relents and 'saves' his hero is but bitter-sweet consolation. Regardless of whether or not you believe in angels, it's a wonderful movie.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs

Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himself--a child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. Ironically, it's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film, it should be noted), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Crisis In Happyland David Mamet from Sight and Sound, January 2002

Crisis In Happyland

David Mamet looks at America's unofficial Favourite Film.

In Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1947) the screenwriters warp an old-world vision into a populist myth. The old-world vision is Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843), the story of a miser who is given a chance at redemption. In it Scrooge, watching his own death, is treated to scenes of the Cratchit family, happy-though-poor - to scenes of a better life.

It's a Wonderful Life, essentially the same story, features not Scrooge but the paterfamilias Bob Cratchit. Here Cratchit surrogate George Bailey, played by James Stewart, is unhappy though poor. He, like Cratchit, is beloved of his family and community, but 'things go wrong' and a financial shortfall and looming ruin and disgrace make him wish he had never been born. A vision of his own death (a world in which he was never born) wises him up to his many blessings, he decides to live, and all is made well.

But the populist myth cannot cleanse itself completely: George Bailey is a banker. Like Scrooge he handles money. Unlike Scrooge, he takes none for himself - he is a banker-altruist, dedicated to the community. Now, no doubt and thank God, such people may exist. But why do we discover them in a myth? Bailey and Cratchit are both the working poor, dedicated to a life whose rewards are other than material. But only one is a banker.

Bailey tells Old Man Porter (the film's Bad Banker, in effect Scrooge) that he, Bailey, makes loans based on a man's character. This is, of course, the fantasy of anyone who has ever applied for a loan. But who has ever encountered it other than in the movies?

We find it again in an almost identical scene in a very similar movie: William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). In this - another populist American myth - we have a world returned from war. One of the protagonists, Al Stephenson, played by Fredric March, is a banker come back from combat in the South Pacific. He makes a loan to an ex-serviceman based on his, Stephenson's, assessment of the man's character. Stephenson's boss, played by Ray Collins, chastises him and Stephenson replies that in combat one had to learn to read other men's characters and to base one's whole existence on that reading. The boss suggests that though he will let it go this time, that is not the way to run a bank.

In both films it would seem the collective unconscious is asking, 'Why did we fight the War?' And the larger question, the posing of which Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities Committee attacked conclusively soon after: 'To whom does the land belong?' Both films assert that the land belongs to the People, 'Who do most of the living and dying around here.' To 'the little man'. We see the fantasy of the anti-capitalist banker again in Capra's American Madness (1932), in which the hero, played by Walter Huston, is running, one might say, a counter-cultural bank, making loans based on his own intuition and sense of fair play - happy, beloved by his workers, abominated by the 'bad' forces of capital.

In all these films the collective unconscious, perhaps, is coming to grips with the notion of capital, of accumulation, and positing the possibility of a capitalist power benevolent to the workers - to the little man, the common folk. This, it seems, is as close as Hollywood can get to the notion of an equitable distribution of wealth - the reliance on a person of character in a position usually occupied by the heartless.

A dispossessed farmer asks in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), 'Isn't there anybody who knows what a shotgun is?' Thorstein Veblen asks the same question in Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (1923) and, in both cases, the question is, sadly, rhetorical. For the American ethos of accumulation, agglomeration, merger, all in the name of freedom of the individual (unrestrained capitalism, individual choice, lack of government intervention, and so on), ensures that labour must be oppressed.

Scrooge, rescued from eternity in Hell, does not divide all he has with Cratchit, he brings him a turkey. The films named above praise un-selfinterested capitalism. But such is of necessity an oxymoron. In their praise of individual conscience they indulge in a peculiarly Conservative ethos: Enlightened (or Compassionate) Conservatism. Such may, indeed does, pass muster as wish-fulfilling entertainment, but as political aim it can be adopted only by the self-deluded. For if the worker has no power to demand (other than as an appeal to conscience), he or she has nothing. George Bailey can't afford to take a vacation, Bob Cratchit gets a turkey. The first farmer in the door after the war gets a loan from Stephenson, but the second is informed that Mr Stephenson is no longer with us.

The memories of World War II and of the Depression waned. America voted for Ronald Reagan, whose administration, in the fulfilment of a Conservative erotic dream, broke the back of labour. The voter was induced to vote for a fantasy: every man a millionaire; no more government intervention. But government intervention, of course, persisted and persists and must persist, for that is the essence of government. The Conservatives, during their sway, merely had it intervene for them. And it was in those Reagan years that It's a Wonderful Life replaced Casablanca (1942) as the unofficial Favourite Film of America - the fantasy of the Compassionate Conservative.

An allied film, the precursor to It's a Wonderful Life, is Irving Pichel's Happy Land (1943), in which the town druggist (Don Ameche) loses a son in the war but discovers - through the intervention of a medium, the ghost of his grandfather (Harry Carey) - that life is still worth living. What wonderful persistence and reiteration of forms do we find in our collective unconscious. Vide: much the same scene - 'what would have been' - in these small-town dramas. And let me name one more: Our Town. In Thornton Wilder's 1938 play Emily dies and is permitted to look back at the life she lived, and she weeps that she did not know how precious even the least and most mundane of it was.

The drugstore plays a pivotal role - in Our Town it's where George proposes to Emily; in It's a Wonderful Life it's where the young George Bailey intervenes with his employer, a drunken druggist, to correct a fatally mismade prescription; in Happy Land it's where the hero is himself a druggist. (In both Happy Land and It's a Wonderful Life the druggist is destroyed as he learns of the death of his son.) In these films and, as I remember, in the American films of the 50s from my youth, the drugstore was the locus of popular wisdom. Like the character of George Bailey, it bridged the gap between the hierarchical (in this case the medical establishment) and the populist ('anecdotal' information, folk remedy, or, if I may, compassion).

Is it stretching the conceit to suggest that these myths feature the pharmaceutical rather than the medical - that their heroes do not (mythologically) contend with life and death, but merely with analgesia? For the films' financial myths deal with analgesia rather than revolution - with the personal (anecdotal) 'There exists a kindly banker' rather than with the societal 'Capitalism so conduces to excess that strong opponent forces must exist.'

One sees the post-war myth of It's a Wonderful Life and smiles warily at the notion that all one needs is a kindly banker. One sees the visions of Italian neorealist Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves/Ladri di biciclette, 1948; The Roof/Il tetto, 1956) and perhaps wonders what one can do to strengthen one's Union. In De Sica's films the poor are not the 'other', as they are in It's a Wonderful Life; they are people like ourselves, but without money.

Bob Cratchit is happy without money and it seems that George Bailey is happy without money, but the punchline of the film (disregarding the short epilogue, in which 'an angel gets his wings') is George's brother's toast. Upon the restoration of order, George is saved, by the intervention of a rich friend. He is apprised of the community's love for him and his brother Harry toasts him: 'To my brother George, the Richest Man in town.' We are, of course, to understand the toast as metaphor, but we should perhaps note our unremarked acceptance of the metaphor of happiness as wealth.

Film as Art Danél Griffin

Reel.com DVD review [James Plath]

DVD Verdict- 60th Anniversary Edition [Daniel MacDonald]

Bright Lights Film Journal [D.J.M. Saunders]

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich)

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE Reel Classics

"It's a Wonderful Life": The most terrifying movie ever Rich Cohen from Salon, December 24, 2010

Movie Vault [Vadim Rizov]

100 films Lucas

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell)

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley)

Robin's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE Page Robin Olson

Bedford Falls Christmas

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) in 1999

A Different Perspective on It's A Wonderful Life Wendell Jamieson from The New York Times, December 18, 2008

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

Carax, Léos

Carax, Léos from World Cinema

French director, hailed as a prodigy in the 1980s. With his tortured personality, instant success through his first feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), and regular use of alter ego actor Denis Lavant, Carax has been seen as the carrier of the New Wave inheritance. Boy Meets Girl, shot in black and white on location in Paris, combined New Wave romanticism with post-modernism (especially in the use of music). Mauvais Sang / The Night is Young (1986) added overt references to Jean-Luc Godard with the use of primary colours and a Juliette Binoche made to look like Anna Karina. The extravagant (in all senses) Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), starring Lavant and Binoche, is a sumptuous and romantic tribute to Paris, amour fou and Binoche. Carax figures controversially in debates over the cinéma du look, his cine-literacy and "neo-baroque" mise-en-scène earning criticism for a beautiful but supposedly "empty" cinema, but also passionate admiration.

— Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

LA Weekly - Film/TV - Brief Encounters - Manohla Dargis - The ... an overview by Manohla Dargis from LA Weekly

There hasn’t been an American director as wildly out of control as French director Leos Carax, or as passionately in love with film as with his own gifts, since Francis Ford Coppola was working at the height of his violent inspiration. Now 40, Carax has the same talent for jumping off cliffs — he makes art, not necessarily sense. In some measure that’s because his work creates as much meaning through images as words; his films don’t just shuttle forward on the good graces of well-placed verbs and nouns, they soar on images whose mysteries he refuses to fully divulge. The filmmaker has a thrilling visual style, and an infectious optimism about the possibilities of the medium that works a baroque counterpoint to his romantic pessimism — his mad-hatter mistakes are as joyous and swooningly pleasurable as his triumphs. In keeping with his m.o. — first as an enfant terrible, now as an aging, often raging enfant terrible — the artist also has a peculiarly French taste for beautiful losers.

Carax’s first feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), is a heart-stopping fever dream in black and white inspired by Godard and Vigo, in which a melancholic longing for cinematic things past rustles even the film’s quieter delights — lonely tap dancing, an astronaut sighing at the moon — like the gentlest mistral. Carax was 24 when he made the film, and after it premiered to great success at Cannes he found himself anointed a Next Wave hero, an honor that seemed as much curse as benediction. Three years later, he directed Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood), a lovely romantic ramble with Juliette Binoche, Michel Piccoli, a very young Julie Delpy and Carax’s thugish alter ego, Denis Lavant, that is compromised only, and only slightly, by its unwieldy AIDS metaphor. Since then he’s made two features: Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) and Pola X (1999).

A mad, gorgeous epic about a homeless fire-breather (Lavant) and the near-blind artist (Binoche) with whom he falls in love, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf comes as close to representing the feeling of falling in love, the sheer recklessness, even desperation, of passion, as I’ve ever seen on screen. Given that the love story is finally as much about cinema as two stubbornly imperfect human beings (Carax delights in every scrape and smear of mud defacing his stars), it’s no great surprise that the film was alternately hailed and damned by critics, and took nearly a decade to find an American release. The shabby disregard for the film in this country — where many critics seemed too busy lamenting the death of cinema to notice how furiously Carax was pumping life into it — was complemented by Miramax’s clunky, vengefully un-poetic title, Lovers on the Bridge, a translation as pedestrian as the film is not. Due to open theatrically in several weeks, Pola X will be shown with the rest of the director’s features in a brief retrospective at the American Cinematheque, where the screen is just big enough to hold Carax’s exuberance. The director, who puts on almost as good a show in person, is promised to be in attendance.

Leos Carax Christian Checa Bañuz from Senses of Cinema

BOY MEETS GIRL B 88

France (100 mi) 1984

A sad and overly melancholic film, featuring indulgent and completely self-absorbed characters, yet beautifully shot in Black and White on the streets of Paris by Jean Yves Escoffier, but the film suffers from over-stylization, where the impressive cinematic technique on display completely dwarfs the bleak portrait of humanity, filled with downbeat and excessively brooding characters that drift through the mysterious landscape of their empty lives, characters so alienated from the world around them that suicide is a prevalent theme. Denis Lavant begins his journey in Carax films as the director’s impulsive alter-ego, reappearing in each of his first three films as Alex, excluded for some reason from POLA X (1999), easily the director’s biggest failure, and then resurfacing again in Holy Motors (2012) as Mr. Oscar, assuming the director’s middle name. A nocturnal film taking place almost entirely over the course of one night, the film begins with Alex abandoned by his girlfriend, where his mindset is unstable to say the least, showing a violent tendency that nearly leads to murder, directed towards the friend his girlfriend left him for, but instead he soon becomes infatuated by another girl who has also just broken up with her boyfriend, Mireille (Mireille Perrier, the director’s girlfriend at the time), who is seen more as an illusion than someone real. In fact, it’s hard to tell just how much of this film may actually be the ramblings of an overactive imagination, where it could all be taking place inside Alex’s mind, such as this scene of Mireille, unsubtitled, set to The Dead Kennedys “Holiday in Cambodia,” where the former boyfriend returns for a brief, unintelligible conversation over the intercom, all observed by Alex, where it’s clear this feels more like the mad and incoherent ramblings of two lost souls who are drifting apart in the night, a theme that pervades throughout the film Carax - Boys Meets Girls - 1984 - FRA (Interphone Scene ... - YouTube (4:36).

The film is an expressionist reverie not far removed from Sartre’s first existential novel Nausea, a story concerning a man’s tenuous relationship with the surrounding city, offering glimpses into the anguish of the human soul through stream-of-conscious thoughts, as if reading pages from an intimate diary, where the writer is suffocating from a kind of existential dread where life is meaningless unless a person makes personal connections that give it meaning. While one often feels immersed in a world of personal disgust and despair, these are fleeting and temporary moments in time, soon replaced by others just as ephemeral. In much the same manner, Alex is barely connected to the elusively shifting world around him, estranged from friends and family, living alone in a tiny room, filled with his own enveloping interior sense of alienation and dread, constantly seen taking a drug, like popping liquid amyl nitrate, where he doesn’t so much inhabit the world as float through it in some strange and dream-like voyage through time, remaining disconnected from the world he lives in, as if unable to be a part of it. People don’t converse so much as offer long and rambling monologues, reflective of a dreary and joyless existence where characters remain connected to some longstanding interior pain, unable to separate themselves from this anguish and personal trauma they carry around with them wherever they go. Carax expresses this disconnection through jarring choices of music, or the use of long tracking shots, where the composition throughout is superb, often resorting to expressionist lighting, which has a dramatic effect, such as when one character is seen in sharp focus while another just inches away is slightly out of focus.

Moody and overly detached throughout, there are brief moments that touch a different note entirely, such as Mireille pulling out a board in her apartment in order to practice tap dancing, an homage to the more playful moments of Anna Karina dancing in Godard’s BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964) Bande à part (1964) - Dance scene [HD] YouTube (3:57), yet it’s connected to an extended sequence set to David Bowie’s “When I Live My Dream” where Alex wanders alone through the darkened night, where at one point he stops and stares, remaining infatuated by a couple kissing on the street, eventually tossing them a few coins as if this was a street performance "Boy Meets Girl" Bowie song (When I Live My Dream) - YouTube (3:43). After a lengthy period where she exists only in his mind, Alex finally meets Mireille during an extended party sequence, knowing she’ll be there, so he crashes the party, yet is affectionately greeted with perfect bourgeois manners by the American party hostess (Carroll Brooks), before leaving him to fend for himself sitting between an elderly deaf-mute man (Albert Braun) and his gorgeous sign interpreter (Frédérique Charbonneau), insisting young people have forgotten how to talk Boy Meets Girl - Silent films were better, because... YouTube (3:18), before engaging Alex with tales of the old days of Silent cinema where he worked as a dolly grip, but Alex soon drifts off, following Mireille who’s in the bathroom, as it appears she’s about to commit suicide (we later realize she instead cuts her hair much shorter), leaving her alone as he slips into the kitchen where the hostess finds him alone, strangely confessing a piece of her heart, seen as a small part of an elongated party sequence Boys meets Girls - YouTube (9:52). The party itself is a gloomy gathering honoring a dead soul, the brother of the hostess, the loss reflected in her quietly suppressed despair, which perfectly matches the depressed melancholia of the other characters. Carax frames them beautifully here in an unsubtitled sequence Boy Meets Girl - Imbattable - YouTube (2:10) with Alex suddenly inspired, his soul aflame, interestingly expressed through the use of voiceover, where the film is a thinly disguised reflection of the director’s inner world, continually referencing dreamy thoughts of romantic longings that are ultimately frustrated by the reality of lost love and alienation.

Boy Meets Girl | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

The revelation of the 1984 Cannes festival was this first feature by 23-year-old Leos Carax. In its fervor, film sense, cutting humor, and strong autobiographical slant, it suggests the first films of the French New Wave (there's something in the arrogant iconoclasm that specifically recalls Godard), yet this isn't a derivative film. Carax demonstrates a very personal, subtly disorienting sense of space in his captivating black-and-white images, and the sound track has been constructed with an equally dense expressivity. The hero is a surly young outsider who has just been abandoned by his girlfriend; as he moves through a nocturnal Paris, his adolescent disillusionment is amplified into a cosmic cry of pain. The subject invites charges of narcissism and immaturity, but Carax's formal control and distance keep the confessional element in a state of constant critical tension. With Denis Lavant and Mireille Perrier.

Boy Meets Girl | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Shy young Alex wanders the dark Parisian streets gazing in confusion at the passers-by. Meanwhile Mireille is being given the brush-off by her live-in lover. Eventually, their paths cross as if by destiny; in the meantime, numerous other loners have wandered in and out of Carax's meandering, moody narrative. Easy but unfair to fault Carax's first feature when he has conjured up a persuasively poetic atmosphere for his meditation on the failings of human intercourse. Credit must go to Jean-Yves Escoffier's astonishing black-and-white camerawork, and to the largely wordless, eloquent performances. Finally, however, the film's greatest coup is its creation of a Parisian purgatory of lost souls, bathed eternally in night. Absurd humour counteracts the morbid philosophising, while the alternately surreal and expressionist imagery is reminiscent of silent cinema at its most elegant.

Great Movie Reviews [Pseudonymous author Ankyuk]

It’s so rare to see films from young French directors exported to this country that the biggest shock in Léos Carax’s 1984 debut isn’t any of the film’s sometimes contrived effects, but simply the sound of the Dead Kennedy’s "Holiday in Cambodia" blaring from a cheap stereo. Boy Meets Girl certainly has the energy — and the unbridled pretension — of a 23-year-old’s first feature. But there’s no pop energy to Carax’s invocation of the DK’s anti-imperialist anthem; his heart’s far more in line with David Bowie, who’s used on Boy Meets Girl’s soundtrack and who bears a striking physical resemblance to the Teutonic maestro whose Bohemian lifestyle seduces the hero in Carax’s POLA X. Luckily, it gives the Prince an opportunity to program Godard’s A Bout de Souffle, an obvious Carax influence. After watching Boy Meets Girl, you have to be grateful Godard patterned himself after the crude Monogram gangster movies of his youth.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Scott Tobias also examines MAUVAIS SANG

The terms "narcissist," "self-indulgent," and "enfant terrible" have often been used to describe French director Leos Carax over his turbulent career, during which he's made only four features: 1984's Boy Meets Girl, 1986's Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood), 1991's The Lovers On The Bridge, and 1999's Pola X. His guilt on all counts not only fails to diminish his status as one of the world's most exciting filmmakers, but also helps explain his idiosyncratic genius. Combining the emotional intensity of Hollywood melodramas, the dazzling artifice of studio musicals, and the stylistic liberation of the French New Wave, Carax's extravagantly personal vision could easily be perceived as egotism run amok. But there's intoxicating magic and melancholy to be found in the emptied streets of his after-hours cityscape, where wandering souls are drawn to each other through some strange cosmic connection. Love strikes quickly and leaves an irrevocable mark in Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang, the first two entries in Carax's l'amour fou trilogy, but it never guarantees reciprocation. In both films, Carax's alter ego Denis Lavant (Beau Travail), whose craggy face evokes a prizefighter on a losing streak, finds love in tiny, seemingly insignificant moments out of time. In Boy Meets Girl, he's entranced by Mireille Perrier's disembodied voice as she breaks up with her boyfriend over an apartment intercom. Still reeling from a disastrous relationship of his own, Lavant becomes obsessed with her well before they first crash into each other at a party. Shot in luminous black and white, Boy Meets Girl moves with the youthful, anarchic spirit of Godard's early work, endlessly detouring through surreal comedy, romantic philosophizing, and spontaneous flights of fancy. A scene in which Perrier snaps her head around to Dead Kennedys' "Holiday In Cambodia" anticipates the emotional release in Carax's famed setpieces, which reached a crescendo with the bicentennial fireworks display in The Lovers On The Bridge. The DVD editions of Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang each include a short interview segment with the director, conducted by film critic and programmer Kent Jones. Fortunately for the painfully reticent Carax, his work speaks for itself.

A debut feature film, and Carax achieves heights of poetic prowess: light and shadow, duty and love, soul and body, smile and destitution, David Bowie’s song and a couple fighting a bitter trivial battle in a neighbouring apartment, yes all the clash is wrapped up, packaged in the story of self-search, of pain, of love that could never be between two people, victims of uptight, unimaginative, orderly people.

The story is simple: boy meets girl. It’s the same old pain with momentary relief, a flash of teeth of Mireille (Mireille Perrier) that Alex (Denis Lavant) can induce with difficulty, and then the inevitable pathway towards love and doom continues. Lovingly shot in crisp black and white, the film opens with absurd: skis out of the windshield of a car. Nay, even before, there’s that voice, that old voice, which almost reminds me of another very uncanny opening of a totally different kind of film, Mackenna’s Gold, another masterpiece. The film deliberates, thinks, stands on its feet too often, and lets you get sucked into it by this simple contrivance. Not hastily, but slowly, yet not in any order, the camera tracks the life-map of Alex behind the painting, and then today’s scrawl. Again, the father’s phone comes the next morning with a theatrical gravity and which strangely does not look uncalled for in this mockery of all ambitions, mannerisms and achievements compared to love – yes that’s what this film does convey. We have the Einstenian and Armstrongish men, obsessed with themselves, or objects, when something far more beautiful is going on: Alex and Mireille. We have the hostess who says at an arm’s length “Je vous laisse” when Alex is nothing in answer to “Vous êtes qui?” And yet the same hostess treasures a loved one’s cup: is she sitting too long over one memory? Should she have moved away? Is Alex any better for moving from girl to girl, a newer stab in his heart and life-map? Or has Alex finally met Mireille, who even if loin is of the same mauvais sang as Alex, the same dysfunctionality? Or are Alex and Mireille only extensions of the deaf and dumb man and his interpreter: the man has much to say but he cannot speak, the girl has voice but words of the old man since she has to interpret him, not herself? How much do we become extensions of the other when we love, how much should we become, and more importantly can we even determine this? Wouldn’t it be better in that case then to play pinball silently, with the electronic circuits doing all the noises? Occasionally the pinball machine will go wrong, and then we will correct the circuitry; occasionally the sex will go wrong and then we will ask how dry or wet we like it, or change our lover. Isn’t that simpler than love?

User reviews from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

Leos Carax made a name for himself in the early-to-mid nineteen-eighties; emerging from the short-lived "cinema du look" movement with a pair of quirky and melancholic romantic fantasy films, Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986), before taking his central themes of unrequited love and alienated Parisian youth to the next conceivable level with the film Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (1991). That particular film was supposed to be the one that would finally introduce Carax to a wider cinematic audience; finding the filmmaker refining his usual themes and structural preoccupations with a larger budget and much in the way of creative freedom. Sadly, things didn't go quite to plan; the eventual film - a wildly uneven though often quite captivating blend of romantic folly and violent social realism - went massively over-budget and over-schedule before finally limping out with a limited release almost half a decade later.

As with the other filmmakers at the forefront of the cinema du look movement - Luc Besson and Jean Jacques Beineix - Carax's work is high on style and short on plot; often seeming like a collection of random scenes, linked by one or two reoccurring characters, that accumulate over the course of the film's duration to create a kind of whole. His approach to film-making is very much akin to Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, in the sense that the film is created from a brief outline and then improvised in the same way that a sculptor or a painter will work, often impressionistically, until a form begins to take shape. Carax however doesn't quite have the narrative scope or the sense of control of someone like Wong, or indeed, the grand duke of improvisational cinema Mike Leigh; with many of his scenes feeling formless and disconnected while his characters remain vague and curiously unsympathetic throughout. These are the major flaws we encounter with Carax's work, and those who are unable to look past the loose structures and wandering approach to narrative will no doubt find much of the director's first two films completely unwatchable - which is a real shame, as despite this, they're both striking and unconventional examples of the cinema du look movement at its most disarming; mixing elements of the Nouvelle Vague with film noir, silent comedy, existentialism and references to early 80's pop culture.

Boy Meets Girl (1984), Carax's first film, typifies this approach; taking the very essence of Jean-Paul Satre's La Nausée and filtering it through the lens of an early Jean-Luc Godard, to create a film that is both playful and romantic, but also lonely and entirely downbeat. The film was made when Carax was twenty-four years old and is very much the kind of film that a gloomy twenty-something loner would make; with its striking black and white cinematography, stylised performances, continual allusions to lost love and alienation and numerous scenes in which our hero wanders the streets as French pop and David Bowie filter in from near-by windows and onto the soundtrack. The film would announce Carax as the infant-terrible of the new French film scene, with his lead actor Denis Lavant becoming a sort of alter-ego type figure; re-appearing as different characters (but with the same name) in Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang and Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf. He's also aided greatly by cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier, whose use of long tracking shots, imaginative compositions and expressionistic lighting makes Boy Meets Girl one of the most visually stunning films of the 1980's; probably falling somewhere behind Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime and Coppola's One From the Heart. The problems with the film are mostly in the distance we have from the characters; never really getting the chance to know or care for them in a way that would be more beneficial to that ironically bleak and entirely unexpected climax.

The basic plot of the film is loose and meandering; more a moody tone poem centring on a young man cast adrift, lonely and lost within the dark maze of a shimmering late night Paris. After having just split with his lover, the young man, Alex (Denis Lavant), wanders the streets desperate and depressed, eventually happening upon a party hosted by a rich American socialite that he decides to crash. There he meets a fellow lost soul who has also just left split from her lover, and the two begin a complex relationship that grants them a temporary reprieve from the cruelties of everyday existence. This covers at least 30% of the film's actual running time, with Carax padding things out further with lots of beautifully shot sequences of Alex brooding over his lost love and the emptiness of his young life, as well as additional vignettes seemingly unconnected to the central characters at hand that attempt to visually underpin the ideas of loss and love at the heart of the film itself.

These sequences include an opening prologue in which a young mother parks her car by the side of the river and then, over the phone, tells her boyfriend that she is not only in the process of leaving him, but also plans on throwing his unpublished poems into the water. Another memorable sequence finds Alex wandering the streets, as Bowie's 'When I Live My Dream' plays on the soundtrack, and coldly observing a young couple kissing on the bridge, oblivious to his presence. After watching them for a short while, Alex throws a handful of loose change at their feet as if rewarding a street musician for a competent performance. This sequence is a key moment here, as it underpins both the film and Carax's feelings on love and its importance to everything that fits around it. There's also a charming scene in which Mireille (Mireille Perrier), the girl that Alex will later fall in love with, practices a tap dance routine in her one-room apartment, tapping (no pun!) into Carax's combined love for early silent cinema (specifically Chaplin) and Godard's Bande à part.

Leos Carax | Senses of Cinema Christian Checa Bañuz, November 2006

Energy Unleashed: Leos Carax by Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd ... Tony McKibbon’s book review from Senses of Cinema, April 2004

The Problem with Poetry: Leos Carax - Jonathan Rosenbaum originally written for Film Comment, May-June, 1994

Cine Outsider [Slarek]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Are the hills going to march off?: Boy Meets Girl (1984) A Film by ... Carson Lund

Wellington Film Society - BOY MEETS GIRL

#256: Boy Meets Girl (1984) | THE FRAME LOOP Luke Richardson

'Boy Meets Girl': cinematic young love in Paris | The Same Cinema ... Mark Tompkins

the last lullaby (and) peril: 1984: Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax) Jeffrey Goodman

The Return of Leos Carax - Slate Magazine Elbert Ventura

BOY MEETS GIRL (Leos Carax, 1984) | UCLA Graduate Student ... Tomas Roges

Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen J. Brennan]

Holy Motors + The Films Of Leos Carax! | The Cinefamily

Boy Meets Girl : The New Yorker Richard Brody capsule review

DVD Times Noel Magahey reviewing the Leos Carax Collection, MAUVAIS SANG and POLA X

INTERVIEW: Carax X Three; New Life for "Pola X," "Boy Meets Girl ... Anthony Kaufman interview from indieWIRE, September 13, 2000

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) also seen here: 'BOY MEETS GIRL,' A TALE OF LOVE BY LEOS CARAX - NYTimes ...

Boy Meets Girl (1984 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nausea (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

MAUVAIS SANG (Bad Blood) A 97

aka: The Night Is Young

France (116 mi) 1986

Do you believe in love that comes quickly, that strikes quickly, but which lasts forever? —Alex (Denis Lavant)

A gangster film told using bold primary colors which, like his earlier film Boy Meets Girl (1984), is another modern take on the irrepressibility of romanticism that so often leads to the impossibility of love. Made when Carax was having an affair with Juliette Binoche, this is largely written for her, as it is another dreamlike idealization of forbidden love. While many of the French New Wave films dealt with the anguish of love, where Truffaut’s work in particular is full of pain, loss and unrequited love, more seemed inspired by the existential angst of modern youth, filled with carefree moments of risk taking and rebellion, often leading to heartbreak and senseless tragedy, where Godard’s BREATHLESS (1960), BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964), or PIERROT LE FOU (1965) spring to mind. While Carax was obviously inspired by these early Nouvelle Vague films, his real interest seems to be Silent films, where like Guy Maddin, his central focus is examining the hidden layers under the surface, often revealed through an experimental or surrealist visual style that uncovers darkly contained fantasies or fears. One of the unsung gems of 1980’s cinema, what Carax brings to the screen is an explosion of raw emotion, shot once more by Jean-Yves Escoffier, but rather than the morbid black and white obsession of his earlier effort, he uses color as an extension of emotional discovery, where a seductive thread runs throughout the film, as the story follows the romantic exploits of the director’s alter-ego Alex (Denis Lavant). Initially Alex is smothered by the love of a beautiful young teenage girl Lise, Julie Delpy in one of her earliest film appearances, who remains infatuated with him even as he attempts to abandon her, literally running away at first, hoping to get a new start in life. But in his head, Lise is a constant presence, like the picture of innocence, where she never really goes away, and he continues to address her throughout the film in dreams and voiceovers.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the opening is Alex’s answering machine which plays the bombastic opening theme of Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet Dance of the Knights YouTube (3:17). The film quickly delves into a film noir thriller populated by underworld characters, but only out of reverence to an earlier era of cinema. After receiving word his father has been killed under mysterious circumstances, perhaps by the American, the aging and decrepit looking Carroll Brooks from his previous film, Alex falls in with his father’s old gang, led by Michel Piccoli as Marc, a father figure who remembers him as a child, when he interestingly refused to talk, preferring to remain silent, developing the nickname “Tongue Tied.” The first glimpse of Anna (Binoche) is on a bus, where emotions are elevated through a surge in symphonic music, a complete stranger that catches Alex’s eye, seen through reflected images, while the next time she is all shadows and light expressed through German Expressionist imagery. When they finally meet, she appears like an apparition draped in red, a kind of porcelain doll that suddenly comes to life, where a young Binoche has never looked more innocently fragile or as splendidly beautiful, but she is the girlfriend of Marc, easily twice her age. There is the barest outline of a story with Marc masterminding a criminal heist requiring the services of Alex, a street hustling cardshark whose quick and nimble hands can crack open a safe, actually taking his father’s place, where they amusingly must learn to parachute. At the airport, Marc greets Serge Reggiani, playing a pilot named Charlie in the movie, who is interestingly introduced with Marc by greeting one another in a Silent era vaudeville routine. Marc pushes to the point of browbeating Anna to jump out of the plane, clearly against her wishes, but she does it anyway, where she eventually faints, rescued by Alex in a fascinatingly shot air sequence shown here: Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) - Parachuting YouTube (3:37).

Rather than follow the crime, Carax instead follows the romantic attraction of Alex and Anna, easily the most compelling aspect of the movie, becoming the emotional center of the picture. This is all set in motion in a masterful sequence with Alex now hopelessly in love, opening with Serge Reggiani (the pilot seen earlier) heard on the radio singing “J'ai pas d'regrets (I regret nothing),” followed almost immediately by David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” Mauvais Sang YouTube (4:10), in what is easily the shot of the film, where Denis Levant, as if shot by Cupid’s arrow, streaks down the street in an endlessly long tracking shot, stumbling, cart-wheeling, eventually breaking out in a full sprint, where the buildings and lampposts go by in a blur of sheer exhilaration, one of those giddy outbursts of spontaneous emotion, running as if trying to take flight and be free. When he returns to her, she reminds him she’s in love with Marc, remaining unattainable, but the two are still infatuated with one another, unable to say goodnight or let go, offering lengthy monologues of dreamlike nocturnal yearnings. In Anna’s world, it grows slowly surreal where the phone rings, but there’s no sound, or she speaks and her mouth moves, but there’s still no sound, yet with Alex his voice sounds so rapturously lyrical. In another romantic surge, to the music from Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) - Baby Steps YouTube (5:21), Mireille Perrier, the star of his earlier film, appears in a dreamlike sequence where Alex mimics the wobbly steps of her baby. After a brief kaleidoscope of color, the screen turns silent, reassembling all the various players in the film in a powerfully original Silent era montage, a return to innocence, where Carax has a special fondness for close-ups and gestures, not to mention an underlying melancholy in silence. MAUVAIS SANG is a hauntingly beautiful film, one where we never truly comprehend the depth of the relationships, where Carax equates the love for a woman with the possibilities of cinema itself, where like his first film, mood pervades every shot, often with a lush romanticism pre-dating Wong Kar-wai, who hadn’t really defined himself until his films of the 90’s. But the visual expression and stylized composition in this film often veer toward moments of ecstasy, including the final shot, another lengthy sequence where running continues to suggest the possibilities of flight, freedom, escape, or perhaps even a metamorphosis.

Mauvais Sang : The New Yorker Richard Brody capsule review

A masterpiece of ecstatic cinema, from 1986, by Leos Carax, a shooting star who was only twenty-five when he made it and whose furious arc seems to have been foretold in this self-flagellating, self-revealing melodrama. The neo-noir plot concerns Marc (Michel Piccoli), an older gangster who pulls Alex (Denis Lavant), the son of his slain cohort, into a plot to break into a laboratory and steal an AIDS-like virus, and finds his mistress, Anna (Juliette Binoche), falling for the younger man. Alex’s love life is the motor of the story, which begins with his abandonment of his fair-haired teen-age girlfriend (Julie Delpy) and moves on to the eye-popping, breathtaking rhapsody of his newfound romantic obsession with the mysterious dark-haired gamine. Carax sends Alex and Anna airborne in a parachute-jump sequence that is one of the movie’s many anthology pieces (the feral Lavant’s wild run through the streets, to the strains of David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” is another). With an emotional world akin to that of Godard’s early films, a visual vocabulary that pays tribute to his later ones, and a magical sensibility that owes much to Jean Cocteau, Carax allegorizes the burden of young genius in a world of mighty patriarchs who aren’t budging. In French and English.

The Return of Leos Carax - Slate Magazine Elbert Ventura

As if overcompensating for his debut’s absent plot, Carax abruptly immersed us in a world of intrigue in his next feature. In the terrific Mauvais Sang (1986), a shadowy syndicate seeks to get its hands on a serum, locked away in a lab, that will cure a mysterious AIDS-like disease spreading fast. They hire Alex (Lavant again), a card sharp whose late father was the best operative in the business. He says yes—but only after getting a glimpse of Anna (Juliette Binoche, never lovelier), the gangster’s gal. Carax being Carax, the heist recedes into the background as the movie settles into one long, languorous night of Alex’s wooing of Anna. (Seduction is too strong a word—there’s something beguilingly innocent about Carax’s love stories.) It peaks with one of the most exhilarating pop moments in movies: lovelorn Alex’s mad dash down an empty city street to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.”

One of the underappreciated gems of 1980s cinema, Mauvais Sang elaborates on the hallmarks of Carax’s work introduced in Boy Meets Girl. It is at once a valentine to its leading lady (Carax was then dating Binoche), a master class on the close up, a lilting urban nocturne, and a treatise on the annihilating power of love. With its evocations of Chaplin and Godard’s Alphaville, Mauvais Sang was another tribute to Carax’s forefathers. But seen afresh today, we also glimpse traces of the filmmakers who followed: the pell-mell cinema of Arnaud Desplechin, the stylized compositions of Hal Hartley, the drenched romanticism of Wong Kar-wai.

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Bad Blood

The distinctive and unusual talents of French filmmaker Leos Carax have relatively little to do with story telling, and it would be a mistake to approach this, his second feature, with expectations of a “dazzling film noir thriller,” which is how it was described for the Chicago Film Festival last year. Dazzling it certainly is in spots, but the film noir, thriller, and SF trappings–hung around a vaguely paranoid plot about a couple of thieves (Michel Piccoli, Hans Meyer) hiring the son (Denis Lavant) of a recently deceased partner to help steal a cure to an AIDS-like virus–are so feeble and perfunctory that they function at best only as a literal framing device, an artificial means for Carax to tighten his canvas. The real meat of this movie is his total absorption in his two wonderful lead actors, Lavant and Juliette Binoche (The Incredible Lightness of Being), which comes to fruition during a lengthy attempt at the seduction of the latter by the former, an extended nocturnal encounter that the various genre elements serve only to hold in place. The true sources of Carax’s style are neither Truffaut nor Godard but the silent cinema–its poetics of close-ups, gestures, and the mysteries of personality, its melancholy, its silence, and its innocence. Bad Blood uses color with a sense of discovery similar to that found in the morbidly beautiful black and white of Boy Meets Girl, and the rawness of naked emotion and romantic feeling is comparably intense. The tendency of critics to link Carax with the much older Beineix (Diva) and the much callower Besson (Subway) seems misguided, because as Carax points out, “Mauvais sang is a film which loves the cinema, but which doesn’t love the cinema of today.” From the standpoint of a Beineix or a Besson, Bad Blood is jerry-built and self-indulgent; from the standpoint of cinema, it blows them both out of the park.

User reviews from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

CAHIERS DU CINÉMA: There are no rules to cinema. No set way of getting from point A to point B, or a general expectation on the part of the filmmaker to include certain themes and conventions for the benefit of the audience. A film should make us think and feel; the rest is purely secondary. At twenty-six years old, Leos Carax understood this notion perfectly; taking inspiration from the early Nouvelle Vague films of director Jean Luc Godard and producing a work that underlined the key themes already established in his bleak and beautiful debut feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), albeit, with a more clearly-defined and pronounced approach to the conventions of genre and narrative. Like Godard's early work, such as À bout de soufflé (1960), Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le fou (1965), Mauvais Sang (1986) focuses on a number of weighty, existentialist themes - such as unrequited love and the alienation of Parisian youth - disguised by a series of hard-boiled genre conventions - brazenly lifted from post-war crime cinema and early film noir - and an approach to character that is filled with wit, emotion and searing imagination.

L'ÉNFANT TERRIBLE: As ever with Carax, the results are unconventional and highly unique, as we follow a story that is deliberately trivialised in comparison to the more important hopes and dreams of the central characters, whose collective spirit of defiance, adventure and melancholic yearning spill out into the actual visual presentation of the film itself. Here, the similarities to Boy Meets Girl are clear, with lead actor Denis Lavant once again portraying a misfit character named Alex who here comes to act as a representation for Carax himself. However, unlike Boy Meets Girl, the film is this time presented in bold and vivid colour, with much of the action taking place on purposely built sets that fall somewhere between the traditional Gothic architecture of actual, rural France and the cold, retro-futurist design of Terry Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil (1985). Once again, the design of the film reflects the ideas behind the characters, with the notions of escape and of closing yourself off from the outside world and indulging in romantic folly being central to the underlining spirit of the characters, which are here, more important than the widely recognisable aspects of narrative development.

CINÉMA DU LOOK: By visualising the film in such a manner, Carax is able to create a stark and somewhat surreal nocturnal underworld where his characters hide out - free from the rules of society and the conventions of time - with the production design, cars and costumes all standing as deliberate anachronisms to maintain the idea of a world removed from our own. It also works with the ironic, referential tone, in which elements of Godard give way to Chapin, who gives way to Welles, who gives way to West Side Story (1961), and all wrapped up in a preposterous plot that ties in with other French films of this cinematic period - later dubbed the "cinema du look" - in particular, Diva (1981) by Jean Jacques Beineix and Subway (1985) by Luc Besson. The basic outline of the story behind Mauvais Sang involves Lavant's young street punk running away from responsibility and inadvertently ending up helping two elderly criminals in a plot to steal an AIDS like virus from a futuristic, high-security laboratory, so that they can pay off an out-standing debt to a matriarchal Mafia boss. Along the way he dodges an old adversary and the girlfriend that he left behind and falls head over heels in love with the young fiancé of one of the criminals that he's there to help.

L'AMOUR MODERN: This strand of the narrative is the one that is most clearly defined here, both in the romanticised nature of the film and the world view of its characters, as well as the appropriation of the American crime-film references and pretensions to post-war melodrama. Here, Alex is quite literally a boy playing the part of a gangster, with his self-consciously hard-boiled dialog, swagger and no nonsense attitude as he talks about his time spent in a young offender's institute, and how it has turned his insides into cement. Through his relationship with Anna - herself a cinematic reference to Anna Karina, right down to the Vivre sa Vie (1962) haircut - the weight of Alex's internal angst and macho bravado begins to erode, leading to that near-iconic moment in which our hero, realising his unspoken love for Anna, runs down the street in an exaggerated tracking shot, skipping, jumping and cart-wheeling to the sound Bowie's Modern Love. An astounding and unforgettable sequence that comes out of nowhere and immediately reinforces the film's unique sense of romantic fantasy and pure escapism against a backdrop of would-be gangster theatrics.

STRANGULATION BLUES: The juxtaposition between grit, melodrama, fantasy and genre subversion is characteristic of Carax's work, with the self-consciously artificial world of the film and the playful and yet decidedly romantic nature of Alex and Anna's relationship tying together the themes of Boy Meets Girl with those of the director's third film, the grand cinematic "disaster" Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (1991). Like those films, Mauvais Sang uses concept and narrative merely to present a reason for the characters to meet and interact, as the rest of the film develops from a collection of random scenes - linked by one or two reoccurring characters - that accumulate over the course of the film's duration to create a kind of whole. With this film, Carax created a fascinating cinematic abstraction of young love and alienation, unfolding in a world in which the representation of the audience is a young voyeur played by the director himself; a keen comment on the nature of film, and yet another fascinating component to this striking, unique and highly imaginative ode to love, escapism, and cinema itself.

Energy Unleashed: Leos Carax by Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd ... Tony McKibbin from Senses of Cinema, April 2004

Wellington Film Society - MAUVAIS SANG Jill Forbes from Sight and Sound, Autumn 1987

Mauvais Sang - The Same Cinema Every Night Mark Tompkins, also seen here: 'Mauvais Sang': a groovy French movie you might never have heard of

Cine Outsider [Slarek]

Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) «Forrest In Focus: Critical Film ... Forrest Cardamenas from Forrest in Focus

The Lumière Reader » Film » Mauvais Sang (1986) Brannavan Gnanalingam

#257: Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986) | THE FRAME LOOP Luke Richardson

Mauvais sang (1986) / Leos Carax / film review James Travers

film > Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) at Cinema Village ... Dennis Lim from the Village Voice

Sublime Moments | Senses of Cinema Pat Coughlin, December 2000

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Mauvais Sang Richard Scheib from The Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy Film Review

Mauvais Sang Review (1986) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

User reviews from imdb Author: robert-temple-1 from United Kingdom

User reviews from imdb Author: chaos-rampant from Greece

DVD Times Noel Megahey, The Leos Carax Collection, 3-discs

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Scott Tobias also reviews BOY MEETS GIRL

DVD Times Noel Magahey reviewing the Leos Carax Collection, BOY MEETS GIRL and POLA X

Mauvais Sang | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

New York Times (registration req'd) Walter Goodman, also seen here: New York Times

THE LOVERS OF PONT-NEUF A 98

aka: Les Amants du Pont-Neuf

France (125 mi) 1991

Only recently released, seven years in the making, the film has taken on legendary status for a multitude of reasons, long considered one of the best of the decade, yet never seen. The Pont-Neuf bridge crossing over the Seine River is one of the most beloved historical landmarks in Paris, but based on Carax’s passion for certain kinds of shots, and the length of time needed for the production, Carax decided he couldn’t shoot there, and instead erected in the South of France a two-thirds replica of the famous bridge and the neighborhood surrounding it. The production was halted several times, but resumed because of the interest of the star, Juliette Binoche, who was Carax’s lover at the time. The whole thing took three years and ended up costing $28 million, the most expensive French production in history, but a mere pittance by U.S. standards, for which Carax risked his career to realize his vision. Having now seen the film, one would have to say it was well worth the risk, as it blends the authentic with the fantastic, mixing documentary style naturalism with exaggerated film extravagance to create a great urban expressionist fantasy. Yet despite the extraordinary style of the film, much of it realized by the superb camera of Jean-Yves Escoffier, the subject matter matches the visual intensity, using the city’s physical characteristics to poetically reflect the consciousness of its characters.

Opening with a documentary portrait of the homeless in Paris, then centering on two homeless lovers who mentally and physically are a wreck to look at, they live on a dilapidated bridge that is under construction. The woman, Michèle (Juliette Binoche), is going blind and wears a patch over another eye that is already missing, while the man, Alex (Denis Lavant), a former circus performer walks with a limp, as we are witness to a car running over his leg early in the film. Both appear wretched and filthy, like weary decrepit souls living on the outer fringes of the world, so the story delves into what’s inside and cannot be seen, their love story evolving into an incredibly rich fantasy life, culminating in the most unimaginably spectacular fireworks display, the sky ablaze with explosions bursting over the lovers on the bridge, both delirious with joy, unable to keep their bodies from dancing under this deluge of delight, continuing the fireworks fantasia by water skiing down the River Seine, explosions like birthday candles and sparklers bursting all around them, bathing them both in streams of light, a wonderfully powerful and ecstatic vision from such tragically bleak and battered lives.

The film is reminiscent of another French film yet to be made, Olivier Assayas’s COLD WATER (1994), which is sort of a teen version of delinquents on the run searching through unimaginable depths of their souls for love and salvation, featuring a brilliant bonfire scene. There’s a tugging reminder of Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS (1931), and the ending, when both rekindle the love in their hearts in an underwater scene pays homage to Jean Vigo’s underwater love fantasy sequence in L'Atalante (1934), using a similar barge down the river. Unfortunately, the commercial epic TITANIC (1997) also ripped off what otherwise would be one of the more memorable images of the film, the two lovers in each others arms on the bow of the barge. This mental reference to commercialism is an unwelcome reminder to how much imagery is literally stolen in art, a maddening thought that unfortunately comes during the very climax of this film.

Another disturbing thought that continuously haunts the viewer afterwards is the reprehensible behavior of Alex, the manipulating and conniving male lover in the film, certainly a tortured soul in his own right. It is impossible not to be reminded of that, where one realizes these are homeless people who live on the verge of the irrational, a separate universe from our own, but it turns out the coldest, bleakest, most hideous aspect of the film is his purposeful act to keep her blind, to keep her helpless and homeless, to maintain her need for him at all costs, no matter the price. One can’t help but think of the cliché, love is blind, I would do anything for love, but this is such a typical, self-serving act of male misogyny on such a high order that it is impossible not to shiver with disgust. One must ask themselves, what is that doing in this film? And we’re left to believe that urban homelessness on the deteriorating bridge stands for the state of moral decay, the crumbling of what was once the pillars, the foundation of society, signs of a deteriorating moral order that leaves us with the Neanderthal cave man who has always been there, but has now disguised himself in civilization with clean pants and a close shave. Leave it to the French to describe: woe is me, what a weary state is man. Despite the fact the bridge can be rebuilt, the love rekindled, the homelessness and decay remain, even if it’s not seen. It’s almost as if Carax is saying, only in your imaginations can you be free, as the world and the people in it care nothing about you. And we are left with this troublesome thought at the end of this hauntingly intense and beautiful film rather than caught up in the rapture of romance, quite a bleak contrast from the wondrous optimism of the Vigo film.

Following a spell in a hostel for the homeless after he is injured by a hit-and-run driver, fire-eater Alex (Lavant) returns to his open-air home on Paris's oldest bridge. There, besides his drugs supplier Hans (Gruber), he finds a new tenant: Michèle (Binoche), a middle-class art student who has taken to the streets for as long as her failing sight holds. Tentatively, Alex and Michèle embark on a drunken, anarchic, mutually healing affair - but she is haunted both by the prospect of blindness and by a previous, painful romance, while he is increasingly consumed by jealousy. Set against the extravagant backdrop of France's bicentennial shenanigans, Carax's tale of amour fou is even bolder than Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang. It's filled with ecstatic imagery which manages not to jar after the gritty realism of the early scenes, and constitutes a heady anthem to abstracted, mad passion: at once a modern fairy tale and a cinephile's folie de grandeur, frequently exhilarating but never wholly free of pretentiousness.

It took eight years for French critic-turned-director Léos Carax's deliriously romantic Les Amants du Pont Neuf—Miramaxed to translate Lovers On The Bridge—to finally get distribution in America, and in that time, its reputation has ballooned to mythic proportions. Due to runaway production costs, which included building a full-scale replica of Paris' famed Pont Neuf bridge over a Montpellier lake, the film was the most expensive in the country's history and a colossal flop at that, leading financiers to demand too much money for the American rights. Now that the wait is over, watching Carax's uninhibited, gleefully self-indulgent l'amour fou feels like discovering the missing link, a single spark of inspiration that ignited the current (underrated) decade of French cinema. Hovering in its own unique space between dingy, underclass reality and poetic artifice, Lovers On The Bridge is a love story that nearly empties the enchanted Paris streets to make way for its heroes' whims. Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche star as a fire-spitting street performer and a near-blind painter, respectively, who fall in love on the deeply symbolic Pont Neuf, a decaying landmark closed for restoration. The more Binoche's sight diminishes, the stronger Lavant's obsessive hold on her affections—that is, until insane twists of fate lead the couple in unexpected directions. Though no one could accuse him of being a polished storyteller, Carax the impressionist keeps this tenuous affair alive on sheer cinematic gusto. In what should be considered one of the greatest sequences ever committed to film—on par with the 10-minute take of highway carnage in Weekend, the baptism montage in The Godfather, and so on—Lavant and Binoche drunkenly cavort in front of a spectacular recreation of the bicentennial fireworks display, as booming music from Public Enemy to Strauss spills in for their sole benefit. Then it somehow tops itself with something even more extravagant. Lovers On The Bridge doesn't always work, but Carax has a heightened sense of romance that's far too intoxicating to resist.

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf - Kamera.co.uk Adrian Gargett

"The loneliness which wraps the work of art is infinite, and it is nothing which makes it possible less to reach them than criticism. Only the love can apprehend them, to seize them and show accuracy at their place"
(Rilke - letter with a young poet)

"I don't really like writing scripts...For me, it's more like a musical score, with colours and emotions... (Leos Carax)

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) is one of the most visually exhilarating and intelligent films of recent years. A true "cinema of attractions", with music, colour, dazzling camera work, melodramatic coincidences and tour de force performances from Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant.

Leos Carax has all the attributes of the perfect auteur: his work displays not only consistency of theme (amour fou) and cast, but is also cine-literate (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf has many references, from Chaplin's City Lights to Vigo's L'Atalante). His "slight" boy-meets-girl plots are secondary to a mise en scene which is both tightly controlled - particularly in its use of long takes - and deliriously abandoned. Carax's prolonged struggle to complete Les Amants du Pont-Neuf against all odds and resulting in one of the highest French film budgets ever fuels the romantic myth of the artiste maudit.

Paris, Summer 1989. A young vagrant Alex is hit by a car on the boulevard Sebastopol and taken to the Nanterre night refuge for the homeless where he is given a shower and bed among fellow streetlife. Back at the Pont-Neuf which is closed for repairs, he finds that the location he shares with the older Hans (the bridge's unofficial homeless landlord) is also occupied by Michele, a dishevelled young artist who previously drew portraits of Alex as he was lying unconscious on the road the night before.

Michele, who is suffering from a degenerative eye disease and wears an eye patch, has left her middle-class home to keep drawing before she goes blind. Against Hans' wishes, Alex insists she stays and falls completely in love with her. She too is drawn to Alex but in a more ambiguous way.

She stays on the bridge during the summer, with Alex and Hans, the increasingly paternalistic onlooker. There follows a number of separate sequences - Alex and Michele drinking cheap red wine, riding the Metro and stealing money from tourists and eventually "escaping" to the sea. Alex and Michele are the familiar French lovers-on-the-run, nurtured by the maternal city which locates, feeds and entertains them, most spectacularly during the Bastille night celebrations. This is the climax of the film in a cinematic as well as narrative sense, the erotically charged histrionics of the lovers matching the grandiose state display, a bravura parade of sounds and images - filmic fireworks of breathtaking virtuosity.

Despite Alex's efforts to hide the news from her, Michele finally learns that she can be cured and leaves the bridge; Hans slides into the Seine; Alex serves a jail sentence. Some years later they are reunited, but Michele cured by an eye-specialist who has become her lover, is unable to accept Alex. In frustration Alex attacks her and they plunge into the Seine, but they are rescued by a barge en route for La Havre, the same route once covered by Vigo's L'Atalante.

The story of how a film about three people on a bridge became one of the most expensive ever-made in France is extensively documented, and unsurprisingly when Les Amants du Pont-Neuf was finally released in Paris, it suffered greatly from the attendant press coverage (although Cahiers du cinema devoted an entire issue to the film). Perhaps now, the film can be appreciated less as a cause célèbre and more for what it is, a remarkable, if intemperate, hymn to the importance of love.

"For Les Amants my starting point was two strong feelings I have about life and love. One is the "irredeemable"; the other a difficult word to translate - "l'inespere", what you don't dare hope for, it's something you don't really dare dream about, but you do dream about it nonetheless"
(Leos Carax)

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is a hybrid film containing moments of startling realism, especially the opening sequences among the homeless which was short on location "cine-verite" style. But essentially the film is about the romance of existential choice not socio-economic reality, hence the re-location from Nanterre to the staged beauty of the Pont-Neuf, which is spectacularly displayed as both a real location and a set, becoming a metonym for Paris. The vagrant/outsider theme is a metaphor for marginality in the same way that Michele's near-blindness is exploited for its melodramatic potential and is not a statement concerning disability. Michele's condition is only fairy-tale, a device which, when resolved at the end of the film serves only to reveal more forcibly a stunning conclusion.

If Carax's film trilogy - Boy meets Girl (1983), Mauvais Sang (1989), Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) - can be categorized, the first is about loneliness and the second tenderness, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf represents ecstasy. Ultimately Carax has proved that film-making which reflects his own obsessive passions can result in magnificent cinema.

The Nation (Stuart Klawans)

Salon (Charles Taylor)

THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF) Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]

Boston Phoenix [Peter Keough]

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]

Read the New York Times Review » Vincent Canby’s mixed review

DVDBeaver.com [Henrik Sylow]

POLA X C- 68

France Germany Japan Switzerland (134 mi) 1999

Carax's long-awaited follow-up to Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is a misguided and narcissistic update of Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities. A well-to-do Normandy writer, Depardieu, abandons his carefree life with his adoring mother and girlfriend after meeting a ghostly refugee from the Balkans, who may or may not be his sister. Taking off for Paris and a life of frenzied, impoverished creativity (in a grim commune peopled by artistic types who wouldn't look out of place as the Nihilists in The Big Lebowski), he retreats further and further from society. The first part is merely dull and vacuous; thereafter the film slides into absurdly pretentious bluster (or a 'raging morass, full of plagiarism', as the hero's publishers would put it) which, it seems, has far less to do with modern realities than with Carax's nonsensically romanticised vision of himself. Woeful. (In the end, perhaps, it is most notable for securing an increasingly rare Scott Walker recording for its soundtrack.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Given the muted restraint we usually see out of France these days, Léos Carax stands out like an escaped convict at a debutante ball. Adapted from Herman Melville’s Pierre, Or the Ambiguities, POLA X tells the story of a wealthy scion (Guillaume Depardieu) who throws it all away to live with (and eventually bed down with) his long-lost sister (Yekaterina Golubyova). Stories of wealthy folks plunging themselves into degradation in search of enlightenment are tricky territory, and Carax shows little self-consciousness as to the offensive pitfalls of his chosen interpretation. What’s more, he indulges an awfully obvious choice of symbolism, dressing Pierre’s sister all in black and his increasingly-ignored fiancée in white. Hmmm, what could that mean? But even if it’s just a bravura stunt at times, POLA X is more vividly cinematic than the vast majority of movies in release. It’s the kind of movie you want to have an opinion on, even if most people don’t know what you’re talking about.

(See Sam Adams’ interview with writer-director Léos Carax.)

Pola X Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

I haven't read Herman Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities, but it's reportedly director Leos Carax's favorite novel. What there is of a plot to this 1999 modern-dress adaptation, which Carax wrote with Lauren Sedofsky and Jean-Pol Fargeau, concerns a wealthy author (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) living in Normandy in semi-incestuous contentment with his mother (Catherine Deneuve). Upon encountering a soulful eastern European war refugee (Katerina Golubeva) who claims to be his half sister, he runs out on his wealthy fiancee (Delphine Chuillot) and retreats to a funky part of Paris to write another novel. There's clearly some sort of self-portraiture going on here. A 19th-century romantic inhabiting a universe as mythological as Jean Cocteau's, Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood, The Lovers on the Bridge) has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him. He's as self-indulgent as they come, and we'd all be much the poorer if he weren't. Characteristic of his private sense of poetics is this film's dedication, near the end of the closing credits, "to my three sisters"--it appears on-screen for less than a second. Pola, incidentally, is the acronym of the French title of Melville's novel; X alludes to the fact that Carax used the tenth draft of the script. 134 min.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Pola X (1999) Gavin Smith from Sight and Sound, June 2000

France, the present. Wealthy young Pierre Valombreuse lives in Normandy with his mother Marie on the family's estate. He is the author of the best-selling novel In the Light. Pierre divides his time between visiting his fiancée Lucie and writing his second novel. When Lucie's brother Thibault returns after a long absence, he and Pierre have an uneasy encounter. Pierre becomes aware of a mysterious homeless woman who seems to be following him.

One night, he comes across the woman, Isabelle, wandering down a country road. Isabelle describes the atrocities she has witnessed in an unspecified Eastern European country and explains she is the illegitimate daughter of his late father, a celebrated diplomat, long kept a secret by Marie. Stunned, Pierre renounces his former life and leaves for Paris with Isabelle and her companions, refugee Razerka and her young daughter. But after the death of Razerka's daughter, he and Isabelle move in with a commune in a warehouse where he is left alone to concentrate on his writing. Marie dies in a motorcycle accident. Lucie finds Pierre, but gradually realises he and Isabelle are now lovers. Pierre finishes his manuscript but it is rejected by his publisher. At wit's end, Pierre steals a gun from the cult's leader, tracks down Thibault and kills him. As he is being led away by the police, Isabelle throws herself in front of an emergency vehicle and is killed.

Review

Whether one regards Pola X as a preposterous self-indulgent folly or as an improbable triumph of romantic audacity - in fact it's a bit of both - there's no denying Léos Carax's intense imagination and commitment. His act of hubris and commercial perversity in updating and transposing to contemporary France Herman Melville's critically savaged 1852 novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities may be freighted in more ways than one. As a not-so-distant scion of the Dupont dynasty, Carax himself hails from a background similar to Pierre's. Carax has indicated that the book has been an important one to him for many years and it's not such a great leap to discern some degree of over-identification with Melville's critical and commercial misfortunes. The film's very title, an acronym of the book's French title (Pierre, où les Ambiguitiés), foregrounds the act of adaptation, bringing us back to authorial will. On one level the film is an unmistakable if masochistic act of self-parody comparable to Melville's. Even without the comedy of Pierre's metamorphosis from graceful novelist of leisure into caricatured starving artist, there's little doubt the publisher's evaluation of his manuscript ("A raving morass that reeks of plagiarism,") is a just one. On another level, the film, in all its deranged grandeur, represents a defiant refusal to capitulate to the dictates of commerce after the failure of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and nearly ten years in the wilderness.

At the same time, more than in any of his previous films, Carax invests the narrative with highly charged subtext. Pierre's relationships with his mother and Thibault are visibly fraught with intimations of prior or latent sexual interest. Pierre and Marie address one another as "brother" and "sister" and enjoy an unusual level of intimacy. Pierre's blonde cipher-fiancée Lucie and the dark waif Isabelle seem equally passive manifestations of Pierre's implicit psychosexual crisis. Lucie is little more than a projection of Pierre's own self-absorbed aristocratic entitlement, but as his cousin and a mirror image of his mother, she represents the next best thing to Marie herself.

Isabelle by contrast is a projection of Pierre's guilt and self-loathing, a return of the repressed in both personal and historical terms. As his half-sister, she represents an opportunity to succumb to his desire for an "unnatural" (incestuous) relationship. At the same time she is a reproachful spectre, an incarnation of the unspeakable suffering that has underwritten a century of European genocide in which his father and his class are implicated. This is made manifest in the film's stunning prologue montage: an image of the earth from space accompanied by a voiceover quotation from Hamlet ("The time is out of joint..."), smash-cuts to dropping bombs. From this Carax cuts to the paradise of the Valombreuse estate, making an explicit connection between Pierre's privilege and the horrors of 20th-century war.

Carax doesn't idealise Pierre or the world he falls from any more than the cold industrial urban hell he descends into. In fact, the film's most remarkable formal aspect is its bold use of visuals to balance the two realms. In one of the film's pivotal scenes, Isabelle's audaciously over-extended monologue explains her backstory as she and Pierre make their way through the woods at twilight. Carax tests legibility and exposition to breaking point in this scene, and its visual liminality becomes a metaphor for the contradictions in the director's uniquely self-defeating talent. His narrative and formal risk-taking are indistinguishable from failure.

Images Movie Journal David Ng

Kamera.co.uk Adrian Gargett

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson

filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp)

POLA X Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

DVD Times Noel Megahey reviewing the Leos Carax Collection, BOY MEETS GIRL and MAUVAIS SANG

DANCING TO FIREWORKS Leslie Camhi interviews the director for LA Weekly

The New York Times (Stephen Holden)

DVDBeaver Per-Olof Strandberg

Tokyo!

France Japan S. Korea Germany (110 mi) 2008 co-directors: Bong Joon-ho and Michel Gondry

Shaking Up the Crowd at Cannes Manohla Dargis at Cannes from the New York Times, May 16, 2008

Far superior is the metaphorically inclined short “Shaking Tokyo,” a story about a shut-in from Bong Joon-ho, last in Cannes in 2006 with “The Host.” Mr. Bong’s short is the final chapter in the triptych “Tokyo!,” which, as you might expect, mostly takes place in that city. The first, “Interior Design,” is a bit of predictable whimsy from Michel Gondry and involves a wallflower who metamorphoses into a chair; the second short, named for a French vulgarity, finds its director, Leos Carax, in an absurdist mood and throwing scat all over the screen. Too bad that the tough female prisoners in the Argentine drama “Leonera” weren’t around to reply in kind.

Tokyo! Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

One out of three ain't bad for this Tokyo-themed directorial three-hander. Whimsical Michel Gondry delivers a thirty-minute segment that resonates, while compatriot Leos Carax spoils an otherwise tasty genre exercise by pressing it into service as a message film. Korea's Bong Joon-ho, meanwhile, delivers an artsy rom-com that is too slight even for its half-hour running time.

Unlike Asian horror omnibus Three Extremes, the directors of Tokyo ! have little in common and the Tokyo cityscape isn't enough to make them bond. Another recent urban-themed portmanteau, Paris Je T'aime, managed the act better – perhaps because its 18 segments were more bite-sized. Tokyo ! is unlikely to repeat that film's relatively wide arthouse outreach, with only the four co-production territories looking like dead certs for theatrical distribution. But all three directors have cult fanbases – so long-tail ancillary prospects should be more upbeat.

An animated title sequence and the final credits are the film's only communal spaces. Gondry is the first up with Interior Design, a tale of a couple of amiable urban drifters, Akira (Kase) and Hiroko (Fujitani). Gondry perfectly captures the fantasy-realist spirit of his source material, the graphic short story 'Cecil and Jordan in New York ' by Gabrielle Bell, even though it has been moved to Tokyo. Though apparently inconsequential until it becomes a partly-animated surreal parable in the last five minutes, the segment has a warm indie fire to it that is stoked by the chemistry between the three leads (the other is Ayumi Ito, who plays the pair's former schoolfriend and reluctant Tokyo host).

No shrinking wallflower, Carax puts his cards on the table with the title of Merde, an odd, angry little curio about a Tokyo sewer-dweller that is at its best during rare moments of tenderness. Denis Lavant is suitably extreme as Merde, a green-suited, red-bearded, flower-eating freak who is vilified by Japanese nationalists and idolised by the country's non-conformists after a bombing spree. There's humour in a series of spoof TV news reports and both humour and pathos in Merde's courtroom and prison exchanges, but Carax's attempts to turn what is basically an enjoyable weirdfest into a parable of intolerance falls flat.

Which leaves Shaking Tokyo – a decidely minor outing for Korean genre auteur Bong Joon-ho. Teruyuki Kagawa plays an unnamed hikikomori, an urban recluse who shuts himself up in his obsessively tidy apartment, refusing even to make eye contact with the bike couriers whose deliveries he survives on. Then a pizza girl (Aoi) faints on his floor during an earthquake. Jun Fukumoto's poetic photography – which recalls Chris Doyle's long-lens work in another film about an urban recluse, Last Life In The Universe – is the best thing about this occasionally charming but dramatically flaccid love story.

Cannes Film Festival, 2008: “Tokyo!” (Gondry/Carax/Bong, Japan) Daniel Kasman from the Auteur’s Notebook

Tucked in the middle of the surprisingly inspired omnibus Tokyo! is the first masterpiece of Cannes, Leos Carax’ short feature Merde.

A sneering dark comedy pastiche combo of Godzilla and Oshima’s Death by Hanging, it captures in wicked digital imagery (by the unbeatable Caroline Champetier) the emergence from the sewers of a hideous Denis Levant to wreck havoc on the unprepared Japanese city. Red-bearded like an ur-gaijin, wearing a leprechaun’s garb and crawling up from the catacombs not unlike some silent serial super villain, he roars down the streets in a gregarious, brilliant verité sequence set to Ifukube Akira’s killer score from Godzilla, stealing cigarettes, licking schoolgirls, and generally strutting with an anarchic frenzy.

Logically, the next step is to grenade nighttime city crowds, and Levant’s madman—who speaks a gibberish language that only an absurd Parisian defense attorney, himself having the same curled, monstrous nails, devilish beard and milky dead-eye, can understand—is soon captured and condemned to death. Living in the underground remains of Japan’s Second World War detritus and eating only cash and imperial chrysanthemums, Levant’s creature—”Merde”—is too insanely, enjoyable kooky to express any kind of simple allegory. (Arbitrary split screen—now three ways, now four!—and an endless, untranslated interrogation scene seem to underline a certain stunt-like quality to the film’s exuberance and concept.) Instead we only see madness, Carax relishing an all-too-rare opportunity to make yet another unqualifiable, indescribable work of pure cinema, an ode to the monsters of the world.

***

Michel Gondry, with Interior Design, proves that rather than be all by his lonesome, with the help of a screenwriter he can reign in his meta-craftsman indulgence and just tell a story. Of course, we have yet to arrive at character—our heroine leaves her filmmaking boyfriend during the upheaval of the couple looking for an apartment and work in Tokyo but without any real reason for breaking the relationship—but the arc, from Fujitani Ayako’s girl on the sidelines to girl turned into a piece of useful furniture, has a touch of tenderness and much energy, despite the lack of human logic.

Gondry, with much cleverness, makes us assume from the get-go that the filmmaking boyfriend is the protagonist, opening with the joke of having him narrate a post-apocalyptic future over images outside of the window of the couple’s car, stuck in traffic on a rainy night. Is Gondry giving up the obsession with dreamer-filmmaker stand-ins? Probably not, but when Fujitani’s frustration turns her into a wooden chair to be found on the streets, for the first time in a while we see not Gondry watching someone craft whimsy, but rather we see someone inadvertently craft themselves. Feeding a creative impulse inside an ordinary character and not a savant creator is the path that will lead Gondry back to the emotional and narrative splendor of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and his segment in Tokyo! is a very promising step in the right direction.

***

Two out of three isn’t bad, but one must admit that Bong Joon-ho’s Shaking Tokyo has none of the vigor of The Host or Memories of Murder. His enjoyable jerky tone in shorter form here turns into a torpid kind of whimsy—symmetrical interior decoration, push-button tattoos, slightly odd and dramatically convenient earthquakes—none of which carries much impact. And his Imamura-like preference for social losers turns downright quirky-cute with our hero being an agoraphobic shut-in.

As the shortest film of the trio, it gets more than a pass though: it’s final image of the girl who brought our recluse out in the open is a doozy. Literally trembling during a quake which vibrates the glaring light, as if all the fear of leaving the house, facing the sun, and entering the crowd was manifesting itself in the on-fire form of this pretty girl, Bong embraces the latent whimsy of the short and for a few seconds goes all out. No explanation, just magic.

Thursday 15 Emmanuel Burdeau at Cannes from Cahiers du Cinéma

Merde.

This word, used as the title for a mid-length feature by Guitry, became yesterday, around 10 p.m. the title for another mid-length feature, this time that of Léos Carax in his Tokyo! triptych.

In Merde, Denis Lavant comes out of the gutter dressed in green and terrorizes Tokyo crowds. He ends up being hanged, after having tossed a number of grenades en route. It is funny, ferocious, and often facile. It connects well with the first and last parts of the triptych, respectively by Michel Gondry and Joon-Ho Bong. We were happy to rediscover Léos Carax, intact, still alive, as he stated himself, speaking to Thierry Frémaux.

There is more. Merde is a chance for us to say what type of cinema it is that we want. Cahiers du Cinéma readers no doubt already know it. But let’s reiterate it.

It is a cinema that goes from the silent film irises to the multiple screens of the 24 series. That jumps from film to digital media without transition or concern for looking pretty. An outrageous cinema, that makes terrorism its subject, its object, its love: that’s what we saw yesterday, and we’ll certainly be talking about it in the days to come. A cinema of anger and furor.

Films that are stolen, as if kidnapped: that’s the impression one gets, seeing Lavant strolling the avenues of Ginza. And it’s the same impression we get from great films like Cloverfield.

Films that are lost, rediscovered, or reaped are the real deal of our time.

False reporting. Unearthed archives. Violations of privacy.

Thief!

Someone has stolen the cinema!

What luck.

Matt Noller at Cannes from The House Next Door

HOLY MOTORS A 95

France Germany (115 mi) 2012

My guess is the more experience you have with cinema, the more you’ll like this film, which defies any narrative construction, yet continually exhilarates in its pure love and devotion to film language, much of it feeling like bits and pieces of old films all strewn together like broken parts to make something completely new. Those with a need for rational explanation need not enter here, as to many this will simply not make sense, but certainly anyone who does give this a try can’t help but be blown away by the sheer originality and mad energy of the movie itself. In other words you don’t even have to like it, but you can appreciate the unbridled joy with which this film was made, almost like a love letter to cinema itself. Carax was once the boy wunderkind of cinema, where at 24 his first film BOY MEETS GIRL (1984), shot in black and white on location in Paris, won the Youth Award at Cannes, while his next MAUVAIS SANG (1986) was a post New Wave primary color extravaganza that won the Alfred Bauer Award at Berlin, an award given to a movie which opens new perspectives in film art. Given a free reign over his next project, the boy wonder’s cost overruns created the most expensive French production in history, where production was halted several times before finally releasing the extravagant THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (1991), a sumptuous and romantic tribute to both Paris and lead actress Juliette Binoche, which was a colossal flop in Paris, not released internationally until 1999, thirteen years after his previous film. When his next film POLA X (1999) was a huge flop as well, his career was all but finished, where we heard literally nothing about the man throughout the next decade, returning another thirteen years later to Cannes with this mammoth work that literally defies description, but is so ingeniously wacky that parts of the movie are simply off-the-charts hilarious, once again starring Denis Lavant as the director’s alter ego and stand-in for the creative force required to make an art film in the modern era.

This devoutly uninhibited film has such an edgy, stream-of conscious style that it likely summons different thoughts and ideas inside every head that shares this film experience, which plays out more like performance art, where Lavant is an outrageous chameleon-like character who literally takes on various disguises and different theatrical personas as he injects himself into the streets of Paris causing mayhem wherever he goes. What’s intriguing straightaway is the viewer questions whether this character is even real or whether it’s some form of visiting spirit from a world beyond. While this may not make sense to some, but it was reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera, a scarred or disfigured character hidden from the world due to some deep personal tragedy or loss, living instead in a subterranean or alternate universe, which seems to be a blend of the future mixing with the past, where the connecting thread is the pure unadulterated joy of cinema. Lavant is known by a half a dozen different names, but he’s driven around the streets of Paris in a white stretch limousine, where Edith Scob, the aged star of a French horror film more than 50 years ago, Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), is the driver, also dressed all in white, including the color of her hair. She may as well be the driver of dead souls, as she transports Lavant around town where he sits in the back and receives 8 daily case assignments one at a time, literally transforming himself into character for each assignment, where the limo is largely a dressing room on wheels, where Lavant spends most of his time getting perfectly into disguise, becoming the manifestation of faded roles from cinema history which might die out altogether if he didn’t attempt to resuscitate them back into the modern world. Much like the use of memories in Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienb... (1961), which may die if not remembered, Lavant seems to be the reincarnation of near dead movie roles, literally attempting to breathe new life into them, but taken completely out of context when set on modern streets, where he is literally out of place, out of time, where people on the street are aghast at what they see.

The mix of fabulously designed set pieces and on-site locations are part of the brilliance of the film, as Carax does create an otherworldly impression throughout, where never for a single moment does anyone in the audience have any idea what’s happening next, where the built-up intrigue of these imaginary characters and what they’re doing returning back to earth is befuddling to say the least, where even the actors onscreen seem in complete bewilderment at Lavant. In one assignment, like a creature from the silent era, Lavant turns into a little green Leprechaun with bright orange hair, a hideous creature that never utters a word but instead makes weird animal sounds. When he crawls out of a sewer and leaps into a crowd on the street, people back away in disgust, where a high fashion photographer is taking photos of Eva Mendes as an haute-cuture fashion model, a statuesque figure of beauty, but this beastly creature instantly grabs the photographer’s attention, where he orders one of his underlings to immediately sign the creature up for a photo shoot. When she attempts to communicate with the monster, she ridiculously attempts to relate by asking if he’s ever heard of Diane Arbus, famous for taking pictures of giants, dwarfs, and other freaks of nature. Lavant simply grabs the model and carries her off into his lair in the sewers beneath the city that exists in stillness and in silence. In such a short period of time, the marvel of invention that occurs in front of the camera in this one sequence is wildly imaginative and extremely cinematic, using rousing music in much the same way there are frequent cinema homages, as Carax is simply re-inventing cinema by reconnecting all the unused pieces, much like reassembling all the broken body parts of mannequins that we see strewn around the empty warehouse settings.

Midway through his day, Lavant’s assignment book reads “Entracte,” or intermission, conjuring up quick images on early archival black and white film stock of a shirtless man peforming before a crowd, like a circus act, which quickly cuts to Lavant leading a march of accordion players "Let my Baby Ride" by Doctor L (RL Burnside Cover)- Holy Motors OST YouTube (3:20), an utterly enthralling piece of music that literally comes out of nowhere adding a sense of exhilaration to the film. Who knows where Carax comes up with these ideas, where Lavant enters a Tati-like modern glass designed skyscraper dressed in a glow in the dark outfit where he does outrageous MATRIX-like dances in a darkened room, where he receives instructions from an unseen voice, like Warren Beatty in MICKEY ONE (1965), becoming highly experimental using a dazzling strobe light effect, eventually joined by a shapely woman contortionist who can bend her body like a pretzel, with Lavant somewhere entwined. Using two cinematographers, Yves Cape and Caroline Champetier, the streets of Paris often become hallucinogenic-tinged, or the shapes of buildings literally melt, creating phantasmagoric images of a reality unfolding into itself, where the world is seen in utter transformation. Purely by chance, Lavant runs into an old flame, where he wanted to use Binoche, who apparently would not agree, so director Claire Denis suggested he use Kylie Minogue, where they have an extended sequence together that feels altogether unworldly on the rooftops of Paris, a direct reference to Baz Luhrmann’s MOULIN ROUGE! (2001) that starred Minogue, literally bringing in film segments from every bit of the director’s own imagination. This may be too much for some, who may wonder what in the hell is going on, but this is a quintessential dip into the collective subconscious history of cinema, where the entire movie is a subliminal flash in time, spliced together using bits of broken pieces, where the finale with Lavant finally safe at home, innocently looking out his window at night feels like he’s just a kid waiting for the arrival of Peter Pan.

Time Out London [Guy Lodge]

‘Weird! Weird! It’s so weird!’ That’s not a quote from a punter leaving a screening of French eccentric Leos Carax’s first feature film in 13 years (he’s still best known for 1991’s ‘Les Amants du Pont-Neuf’), though it could be. No, they’re the elated words of an on-screen photographer after encountering perhaps the most alarming of the guises adopted by the film’s shape-shifting anti-hero, Oscar (an astonishing Denis Lavant): this version of Oscar is a Rumpelstiltskin-type grotesque who bites off two of the photographer’s fingers before dragging supermodel Kay-M (good sport Eva Mendes) underground to dine on her hair in the nude.

This is one of many such vignettes in Carax’s hypnotically inscrutable story, a cinematic revolving door constantly entered and exited by Oscar, who may or may not be the subject of an invisibly steered reality show. Or make that a sur-reality show: Oscar inserts himself into a series of role-playing scenarios of escalating outlandishness, his instructions fed to him by a stoic limousine driver (Edith Scob).

A day’s work finds Oscar enacting CGI frottage with an actress in a motion-capture bodysuit; begging on the street dressed as a bent-backed crone; and pursuing an ex-lover (Kylie Minogue, surprisingly affecting) around the ruins of a derelict department store.

Weird, yes. But even at its most absurd (chimps are involved), there’s something tender and truthful about Carax’s hall-of-mirrors irrationality, the sense of an artist so weary of human realities that he has no choice but to twist them into the more beautiful shapes afforded by cinema. By the time Scob references the character she played 62 years ago in the seminal French horror ‘Eyes Without a Face’, you might feel a shiver – it’s hard to say what forces are propelling this ecstatic, idiotic, fizzy, frightening provocation, but we’re moved by them too.

The Lumière Reader [Steve Garden]

If the opening night film (Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild) was difficult to describe, the closing night film is almost impossible. Holy Motors is comprised of a series of set-pieces featuring director Leos Carax’s long-time collaborator, Denis Lavant. Among other things, the film is a wry criticism of, and affectionate ode to, French cinema, social mores, and contemporary culture. Where Carax’s Les Amants des Pont Neuf (1991) was a vivid celebration of Paris and passion, Holy Motors is darker but no less passionate, playful, inventive or energetic. The mood is ultimately melancholic, recognising that all things must not only change, they inevitably pass. Along the way, Carax and Lavant dazzle with one entertaining slight-of-hand after another, offering us plenty to be amused by, wonder at, and ponder over. It’s probably best not to work too hard at trying to figure things out, although cinephiles will find much to keep them entertained as Carax alternately honours and takes swipes at various fads, movements and cine-gods, from Cocteau to Kubrick, the Nouvelle Vague, melodrama, theatre, dance, fashion, celebrity, commercialism, action movies, musicals, sci-fi, Matthew Barney (why not?), French intellectual angst and various socio-political hot potatoes, and finally the uncertain future of cinema. In the penultimate shot, Edith Scob dons the famous mask from Eyes Without a Face (directed by her husband Georges Franju, who, 25 years her senior, died in 1987) then walks out of shot saying, “I’m coming home.”

Holy Motors is dedicated to the late Lithuanian actress Yekaterina Golubeva, once married to the exceptional but little-know director Sharunas Bartas, whose films she appeared in prior to their divorce. Relocating to France, she worked with some of the most important directors of the last decade, notably Claire Denis and Bruno Dumont. For several years she was Carax’s partner, but in August 2011 she committed suicide. It’s likely that the ‘bitterness’ some reviewers sense in the film may stem from Carax’s personal grief. One of the most affecting sequences features Kylie Minogue (in homage to Jean Seberg?) singing a poignant song by Carax called ‘Who Were We?’. The sequence ends with Minogue removing the Seberg costume before jumping from a building to her death. Whatever you make of the film, it’s obvious that Carax made it with his heart. Every frame brims with blood and passion, and a genuine love of cinema.

Cannes 2012: Cinema-chewing: Leos Carax's Holy Motors | BFI Demetrios Matheou at Cannes from the Sight & Sound blog, May 23, 2012, also seen here: Cannes Film Festival 2012: The Sight & Sound blog - BFI

It’s been 13 years since Leos Carax’s last feature-length film, Pola X. When you wait that long for a one-time enfant terrible to show his face, the anticipation is mixed with anxiety. What if the older man is now, simply, terrible?

Imagine the relief, then, when the gleaming Holy Motors was wheeled out of the garage in Cannes, an ambitious, brilliantly bonkers shot-in-the-arm to the Competition. Carax may now be in his fifties, but he’s still making films like a young man desperate to explore and have fun with the medium. Thank God for a Palme d’Or contender who dares to be different.

A prologue features Carax himself navigating a surrealist dreamscape, at the end of which he looks down upon an auditorium, in which an audience sits impassively as Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographed athletes flicker across a screen. The nod to that early pioneer signals the fact that cinema itself is a subject of the film. At the same time these still figures remind one of Last Year in Marienbad; and like the characters in that film, the protagonist of Holy Motors will be on an endless round of role-playing, in search of an identity.

When we first see him, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) is a well-to-do businessman, climbing into his stretch limousine and asking his driver (Edith Scob) about his appointments for the day. We imagine a dreary round of business meetings. But then he takes out a lady’s wig. And when the car parks, an old, decrepit woman climbs out and starts to beg on the streets.

Before we’ve had time to take this in, Oscar has changed costume again, into a motion-capture suit, in which he enters a studio and performs a series of energetic stunts, including a sensual clinch with a woman, their fully-clothed writhing transformed into the naked coupling of reptilian monsters.

Oscar is a role-player, then, a master of disguise, performing for invisible cameras and for audiences who we can only imagine are enjoying an exclusive sort of pay-per-view. His other ‘appointments’ include a green-suited, lurching Leprechaun (Lavant reprising the monster from Carax’s contribution to the three-hander Tokyo!) who kidnaps a model (a seductively aloof Eva Mendes) and takes her into his subterranean lair; a killer whose victim is his splitting image; an angry father berating his daughter; a dying old man; and a man who goes home to his family, which happens to be a pair of monkeys.

That simian domesticity evokes Oshima Nagisa’s Max Mon Amour (1986), one of a number of references that will make this a cinephile’s wet dream. But it’s far from a dry exercise – seconds after Scob has donned her mask from Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), a fleet of limos start speaking to each other, in a totally unexpected homage to Cars.

It’s a hoot, but also mysterious and moving. Oscar is becoming exhausted by his characters, losing sight of his own identity. “Is it you?” asks Eva (Kylie Minogue), a fellow performer when they meet in the street. “I think so,” is all he can answer. Oscar also reminisces about the days when he could see the camera in front of him, at that moment conveying Carax’s own view as to how technology is damaging his art form.

Minogue has an on-screen charisma singularly lacking in fellow singer Pete Doherty, who has appeared here in Confessions of a Child of the Century. As for Lavant, well, he’s so multi-skilled and chameleon-like that he hardly seems human. Carax says, mischievously, that if the actor had refused the film he would have offered the parts to Lon Chaney or Chaplin. It’s a fitting compliment.

The Digital Fix [Gavin Midgley]

Holy moly, what a setup! A plane lands at an airport and, inside what may be a nearby motel, a man with a key for a finger rises groggily from slumber, passing his hands across the room's wallpaper: a forest of trees. Behind the wall is a corridor with a Rosemary's Baby cabinet, behind which lies a Club Silencio, where an audience is held rapt by a movie screen and a dog sprung from a Buñuelian zoo skulks an aisle. The soundtrack is the sound of the ocean. On the screen: a girl, but she isn't adrift at sea; her house simply suggests the hull of a ship, outside which her père walks down a Tatiesque pathway, to a limo that will take him to the first of nine "appointments" that, in toto, constitute a prayer for the death of cinema.

That surreal beginning sets up a funny, anarchic, and self-referential tone that never wavers throughout Léos Carax's whatsit. Played by the irrepressible Denis Lavant, Monsieur Oscar travels by limo from location to location, adopting wildly different personas to create (or is it to cause?) unbelievably elaborate scenes for, it initially seems, the audience's benefit. On a bridge, he plays an old lady who begs for alms and feels death's imminence. In the pitch darkness of a movie stage, he and a female contortionist evoke the mating of grotesque dragon-like creatures through the wizardry of motion-capture. He argues with the daughter he picks up from a party, plays the accordion with a bunch of hipsters, drops trou in front of Eva Mendes inside the sewers beneath the Père Lachaise, and is twice murdered, first inside a warehouse when his attempt at stealing another man's identity goes awry, then as an assassin outside a café. But since this isn't life, only cinema, he lives to act again.

Monsieur Oscar could be a member of the strange band of misfits from Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps, filling with performance all that's lacking in the world, giving the living something to actually live for. Really this odd-job man is a thespian, and a great one, flexing his fearless range throughout short vignettes without conventional starts and ends, though some boast great punchlines and almost all play with the conceits of vastly different genres. There's a sense here that nothing is real, as the people Monsieur Oscar interacts with in all his different guises seem to only exist between the words "action" and "cut"—though neither word is ever uttered. What Carax is articulating throughout is the visceral satisfaction of a handsomely framed image, the heartache of a whispered song of regret, the joy of a cleverly presented red herring, and so on, ad infinitum, amen.

But Holy Motors is also more. So winks the man at the beginning of the film when feeling for trees, and when Monsieur Oscar wonders if he will ever see the forest again. They want us to actually see the forest for the trees, to not get caught up in the details or risk losing sight of the big stuff. In a scene that suggests a much wordier interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey's finale, a young girl says goodbye to her dying uncle, and inside an abandoned luxury hotel, Lavant and Kylie Mingoue, playing ex-lovers, act out Hiroshima Mon Amour as a musical. Holy Motors references our history of cinema, much of it the chapter on French film, sometimes Carax's own work and sometimes even its own self, to convey the sponge-like quality of movies, their malleability, their capacity for reinvention, to celebrate not only the joy the cinema gives us, but the joy actors give each other when performing.

But for all its pleasures, Holy Motors is, to quote Jonathan Rosenbaum on Buñuel's The Milky Way, "dangerously close to being all notations and no text"—a maddening, self-satisfied, though never smug, game of spot-the-reference that seems intended only for a particular type of cinephile. "Can't Get You Out of My Head" is a girl's cell phone ringer, not because the song is as earworm-y as cinema is addictive, but because Minogue will be performing for us in a bit. When Oscar's driver, played by Edith Scob, clocks out for the day and dons a green mask, the moment exists only to flatter those who know of Eyes Without a Face. And somewhere in the subterranean bowels of Paris, when Merde from Carax's Tokyo! segment stages a strange pieta, flaunting his crooked boner after transforming Mendes from a supermodel into a burka-clad saint, the scene is so completely unmoored from tangible meaning, even from the film's own heavily coded celebration of the cine-pleasures that the George Lucases of the world threaten to erase with their digital weaponry, it becomes an actor's 116-minute reel, a totem to the crazed Lavant's freakish, almost superheroic range. In such moments, Holy Motors becomes solipsistic, at which point you wish Carax had had the courage to have titled it Being Denis Lavant.

Cannes 2012: Holy Motors Review: Gloriously ... - Pajiba Caspar Salmon

You have never seen a film remotely like Holy Motors. In its gloriously, unapologetically batshit-crazy story and style, it is like a UFO in the competition here at Cannes, flying among normal aeroplanes. Watching it feels like listening to the ramblings of a lunatic and thinking to yourself, “Is he a prophet in our own times, or is he just completely insane?” I cannot overstate how mental this picture is, and will therefore state it several times throughout this review; I am still reeling from the screening, nearly 24 hours ago. It elicited gasps from the audience last night, as well as giggles at its preposterousness. In his refusal to deny himself any extravagance whatsoever, Carax makes Baz Luhrmann look like John Cassavetes.

OK, so this is the bit where I would usually summarise the story. May God himself give me the fortitude to make it through this section. Denis Lavant plays “Monsieur Oscar,” a man who gets driven around Paris in a white limousine for nine ‘appointments’ over the course of one day; this appears to be his job. Phew. That bit went fine. Moving on. In the limousine, Monsieur Oscar has a mirror, costumes and make-up, and a list giving him details on each appointment. His first appointment finds him dragging up to play the part of an old beggar lady on a bridge. For his second appointment, he puts on a black skin-tight latex outfit and is required to go to a studio and do dance moves in front of a performance-capture screen that translates his motions into those of an animated character; he is soon joined by a woman with whom he dances an elaborate contortion dance, which creates a scene of beasts penetrating each other on the screen. For his third appointment, he dresses up as a freak in a green outfit, who runs through a cemetery whose gravestones bear website addresses instead of names, all the while eating flowers he steals from the graves, and arrives at a photo-shoot where he kidnaps Eva Mendes and drags her back to a lair where (amongst other things) he makes her wear a gold hijab. Following this “mission,” he returns to the limousine and continues his other appointments of the day, all more ludicrous and bizarre than the other.

So that’s roughly the gist of the film: man goes around Paris taking various guises, all of which are ridiculous but played seriously, with great conviction. Amongst the other roles he plays throughout the day are a hitman, a father driving his daughter home from her first party, and a dying old man. None of this begins to explain the craziness of this film, which also features a family of monkeys, talking cars and, as all self-respecting films should have, an accordion interlude halfway through. The accordion interlude, set in a church, is introduced with this memorable countdown instead of the usual one-two-one-two-three-four: “Three, Twelve, Shit!”

That isn’t the most preposterous line in the film.

Though the film’s greatness has already been overstated by critics anxious to see in its lunacy the visionary work of a genius — as I say, it really is profoundly ludicrous throughout, and will make you laugh and laugh and laugh — it is true that it does have a kind of crazed brilliance. In his story of a man acting roles in our midst, with apparently no-one watching, Carax appears to be lamenting the death of performance, and of art. The whole film can be seen as a kind of re-statement of the line from Sunset Boulevard: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Carax makes a case for art for art’s sake, for performance delivered for the sheer heck of it; he finds beauty and surprise everywhere.

The film also manages to deliver several poignant moments including, unexpectedly, a wondrous scene where Monsieur Oscar is re-united with his old lover, played by Kylie Minogue, inside a deserted department store. She herself is on a mission, due to play the part of an air hostess later that night. As they walk through the store, Minogue sings a song about loss, featuring the line “What happened to the people we were?”, or something like that; it’s a pretty dumb song and a completely weird moment in a film that is not a musical - but Minogue sings it well, acts her part with belief, and the scene takes on a grandeur and melancholy that are palpable. Throughout the film, in fact, an obsession with death is revisited: with Lavant possibly acting as his alter ego, Carax shows a fidgety fear of death and a sense of love and death’s interconnection. Relationships are fleeting; death settles everything.

I’m dying to reveal so many other insane moments from this film whose twists and turns are not unpredictable so much as brain-melting. I wish you could see how hard I’m holding back from telling you about the final scene, which is so stupid and hilarious, yet also sort of philosophical; what torture it is not to tell you too much about the monkeys and the way Carax uses them; how jumpy I am at the thought of Monsieur Oscar’s limousine driver and the way the film concludes her storyline.

Holy Motors fully deserves to become a cult classic, and I hope that as many people as possible will run out to watch it, be baffled and infuriated and delighted by it, and scream about it on the telephone to friends, with tears of laughter running down their cheeks, revelling in its berserk brilliance.

Film of the week: Holy Motors | BFI Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, June 3, 2014

The House Next Door [Budd Wilkins]

theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]

Holy Motors Review - Fantastic Fest 2012 | Film School Rejects Adam Charles

The Reel Bits [Richard Gray]

Digital Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2012: The Joke, The Silence ... Veronica Ferdman from The House Next Door

Film School Rejects [Simon Gallagher] at Cannes

PlumeNoire.com [Moland Fengkov]

A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]

SBS Film [Lisa Nesselson]

Screen International [Jonathan Romney]

Cannes 2012, Day Seven: Leos Carax's bugfuck masterpiece strikes Cannes like a lightning bolt Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 23, 2012

Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 23, 2012

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 23, 2012

David Jenkins at Cannes from Little White Lies, May 23, 2012

Holy Motors and Leos Carax Q&A at TIFF, August 10th, 2013 ... Troy Bordun from Photogénie, August 10, 2013

Honor Roll 2012: Leos Carax Explains His Beloved 'Holy Motors ... Eric Kohn interview from indieWIRE, December 27, 2012

DAILY | Cannes 2012 | Leos Carax’s HOLY MOTORS » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 23, 2012

CANNES 2012 DIARY: Carax is Back Eugene Hernandez reports on the post screening Cannes press conference from Film Comment, May 23, 2012, also seen here: Eugene Hernandez

Hollywood Reporter [Megan Lehmann] at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 23, 2012, also seen here: Megan Lehmann

Variety [Rob Nelson] at Cannes, also seen here: Rob Nelson

Holy Motors – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Holy Motors: love it or hate it, Cannes cognoscenti can't stop talking about it Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian, May 23, 2012

Carbone, Daniel Patrick

HIDE YOUR SMILING FACES B 84

USA (81 mi) 2013 Official site

While this is an American indie film drawing a lot of praise from a variety of film circles, many claiming it is reminiscent of other coming-of-age films like Ken Loach’s KES (1969), Rob Reiner’s STAND BY ME (1986), Harmony Korine’s GUMMO (1997), David Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000), or Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ THE KINGS OF SUMMER (2013), all of which is pretty hefty acclaim that the film doesn’t really live up to. Perhaps people are starved for a return to that style of American indie filmmaking, or perhaps it’s a welcome shift from the ordinary and mundane commercial filmmaking that critics wish to support. In any course it’s a distinctive style, even austere by indie standards, dark and foreboding throughout, where the undercurrent threat of dread is everpresent, where one might conjure up thoughts of Michael Haneke having had a hand in producing this morbid little film. However, purely in terms of setting a distinctly creepy tone, it doesn’t stand up to the more uniquely original style of edgy Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté in Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013), which is more horrifyingly tragic in an adult sense. Arkansas born Jeff Nichols remains the current American indie standard bearer with films like SHOTGUN STORIES (2007) and Mud (2012), both showing kids at different ages, where all his films express a rare transcendent poetry. While others may attribute those qualities to this film, that’s actually what’s missing in this film, which feels overly predicable even from the opening shot that shows a Darwinian universe in play. Carbone is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he broke into the film business as a cinematographer in various short films, also Matthew Petock’s initial feature A LITTLE CLOSER (2011), a rural Virginia family drama that also drew similarities to David Gordon Green, Paste Magazine [Curtis Woloschuk], “employing similarly lush lensing courtesy of Daniel Patrick Carbone but dispensing with the overt lyricism.” Petock is the script supervisor of Carbone’s directorial debut, where both films, interestingly enough, examine the dynamics between two brothers hanging around on the outer fringes of society.

Caught up in the atmospheric enthrall of its own established rhythm and mood, the film takes place on the outskirts of a seemingly idyllic American town, an undeveloped stretch of woods and open space that for all practical purposes has been deserted, leaving it prime turf for young boys to explore in their daily adventures, where they’re often seen just aimlessly wandering around in the woods. In this way, they have a reclusive habitat of their own to retreat to where no adult supervises or stands watch over them. At ages 14 and 9, brothers Eric (Nathan Varnson) and Tommy (Ryan Jones) have free reign to roam, often seen both on the same bike, occasionally playing with one of Tommy’s friends, Ian (Ivan Tomic), or part of a boy collective in an open field where all the adolescent boys in the region apparently gather to loosely form a circle while two supposed equals pair off and fight one another, with appropriate rabid encouragement. This rite of passage becomes part of the underlying theme of the film, especially when these kids constantly get themselves into endless trouble. What strikes one about these kids is the typical bullying tactics of older brother Eric, but he takes it to another level, escalated by signs of danger everywhere, including the decaying remains of birds, cats, and dogs, where the kid’s fascination with dead things becomes part of their banal existence. After an argument with his Dad (Colm O’Leary), where Ian is caught showing Eric and Tommy his Dad’s gun, his Dad’s irate response sends Ian deep into the forest where his body is discovered shortly afterwards lying at the bottom of a bridge. With an eerie sound design by Chris Foster and Peter Townsend, cinematography by Nicholas Bentgen, and original music by Robert Donne, the established mood is one of menace and horror, where this isn’t the lyrically gorgeous world of David Gordon Green, but one that lingers in dark murky waters.

Neighborly hostilities with Ian’s Dad escalate to near psychotic proportions, where Eric criminalizes his anger, becoming something of a danger to himself and others with his explosive outbursts, initially leaving a dead cat on the doorstep after believing his dog was stolen, eventually breaking into the neighbor’s house and trashing it, where underlying this seething rage are suicidal thoughts of self-loathing, even pointing a rifle in his own brother’s face, often threatening to dangle him off the same bridge where his friend died, where Eric has this idyllic pastoral world at his disposal but hates his existence. While there may be homoerotic undertones built into the internalized anguish and tension, the absence of girls seems a glaring oversight, as one can only imagine how some of this crude, anti-social hostility might play out with the opposite sex. Distrust, lack of communication, alienation, rage, no moral boundaries, and teenage morbidity seem to drive this film deeper into the restless unease of male adolescence. The question is whether a reliance on moodiness can sustain the overall tension without veering into horror territory, where the emotional void leaves the lives of these kids fairly undeveloped, often appearing coldly uninteresting, as they are so self-absorbed, where they could give a crap about others. Carbone, however, never figures out where to go with this kind of bleak, fatalistic view bordering on nihilism, as jail time, for one, certainly comes to mind, but the director is not interested in existing realities. Instead he harbors a kind of mythical innocence bordering on fantasy, believing that behind the hooliganism, suicidal tendencies, and reckless death threats, there’s the potential for goodness in each of these boys. Incredibly, that is the Father Flanagan message in BOYS TOWN (1938), as each boy has their own moral cross to bear, and whether resorting to dreams, mythical reality, or simply an unorthodox turn in the minimalist narrative, the director, who also writes, produces, and edits this film, insists upon a contrived redemption, even if it never for a second feels believable or well-deserved.

Hide Your Smiling Faces - Chicago International Film Festiva

The death of a 9-year-old boy sends ripples through a bucolic town, jarring his friend Tommy and Tommy’s older brother Eric out of their routines and forcing them to stare their own mortality straight in the face. Battling chronic unhappiness and implacable restlessness, the boys look to escape their drab reality by retreating further into their natural surroundings - a lush, densely-wooded expanse that seems to represent both a sought-after freedom and an inexorable mortal peril in this patient and beautifully melancholic film.

Hide Your Smiling Faces : The New Yorker Richard Brody

Testosterone rises like mist on an early-morning lake in Daniel Patrick Carbone’s grimly determined, prettily picturesque first feature. A bunch of boys ranging in age from near-teen to just adolescent, living with their families in a hilly and watery deep-country summer-house community, get together to wrestle, swim, and goof around, which they do moodily and smolderingly. A plot point is set when one of them snatches his father’s gun and, after surrendering it, remains tempted by its proximity—as is his older brother. When a friend is found dead at the base of a high bridge, the stakes of their roughhousing ways become even more serious. The atmosphere grows dense with intimations of homosexual desire; pent-up rage is ready to explode with the slightest spark, and it does so with a blatantly theatrical flourish. The physical tumbles of lean bodies and the emotional fumblings of maturing souls take place in landscapes framed for postcards; the portentous drama, underlined and calculated details, could serve as a travel brochure.

Film Comment Amy Taubin, Fall 2013

A far more talented movie, Daniel Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces depicts two brothers (ages perhaps 11 and 13) hanging out with their dog and their friends, exploring the deep woods and turgid waters around their house, in some unnamed place in rural America. It’s an ordinary summer that will put knots in the stomachs of overprotective parents. There are dangers everywhere—in guns left lying about, in an angry neighbor who has it in for the boys’ dog, in the predatory creatures that inhabit the wilderness (in an early sequence, the brothers watch a snake slowly swallowing a small animal), in the decaying bodies of cats, dogs, and wildlife that the boys poke and prod and carry about. Every sequence could be the prologue of a horror flick minus the spooky music and other overt signals of the genre. The boys’ fascination with violence and death is all the more horrifying for being perfectly normal. Then one of the group dies in circumstances that are never explained to anyone’s satisfaction, bringing the older brother’s potential suicidal impulses into the open. Potential is the crucial word here. Hide Your Smiling Faces is remarkable for the dread it keeps at a slow simmer from the first shot to the last.

In Review Online [Drew Hunt]

Daniel Patrick Carbone’s stoic drama Hide Your Smiling Faces opens on the truly grotesque image of a garter snake slowly but surely swallowing a slug, its slimy residue splayed among the surrounding rocks and on the snake itself. The camera lingers on this image for at least half a minute, drawing attention to the slow, revolting process by which a snake swallows its prey, encapsulating the film’s disarmingly death-obsessed worldview.

Transpiring in a small country town, Hide Your Smiling Faces focuses on the daily exploits of a group of young boys who wile away the summer days exploring the surrounding woods, taking dips in a (pretty nasty-looking) lake, and generally raising hell around town. The ragtag crew, ranging from pre-teens to early adolescents, exude the exact sort of boundless enthusiasm you’d expect, though an odd attitude toward death is evident from the get-go: While exploring an abandoned barn, a few of them discover a dead bird stiff with rigor mortis and proceed to play with it in what seems like both a sick show of bravery and a desperate defensive ploy to avoid contemplating its demise. The film draws natural comparisons to such recent backwoods coming-of-age dramas as Mud and The Kings of Summer, but where those films have decisively nostalgic view of boyhood, Hide Your Smiling Faces reveals its darker points—specifically, the point at which boyhood vanishes forever.

When death meets the group firsthand—young Ian (Ivan Tomic) is found at the base of a bridge, the victim of an unspecified tragic accident—mortality becomes a looming specter, particularly for brothers Eric and Tommy (Nathan Varson and Ryan Jones), who were the last people to see Ian alive. Their respective reactions speak to the various natural responses people have to death—Eric, the older of the two, reacts aggressively, lashing out at his best friend and family and vandalizing Ian’s father’s home in a misguided act of personal therapy; Tommy facing a more introspective, existential crisis—but Carbone exploits these emotions more for dramatic impact than sympathy or pathos, thus betraying the film’s melancholic aspirations.

As the film’s atmosphere grows suitably denser, the filmmakers begin to lose their grip on nuance. Carbone and cinematographer Nicholas Bentgen use multiple wide shots to better incorporate the scenic environ; early in the film, these shots signify the characters’ bright-eyed view of not only their town but their lives as a whole. But as the story unfolds, the wide shots take on a more ominous air: The trees become more menacing, the skies far grayer, and we’re eventually shown parts of the setting that subvert its beauty, including a makeshift gravesite where dead animals of every sort have been haphazardly piled. Carbone aims to signify the gradual disillusion of his characters, but he takes the “show, don’t tell” rule a little too seriously, forcing hubristic lyricism into his already poetic images, barreling toward an off-puttingly histrionic and cheaply allegorical denouement.

Still, such errant over-stylization inherently stems from a place of ambition, and Hide Your Smiling Faces has plenty of that, for better and for worse. Carbone grew up Newton, N.J., where the film was shot, which explains his deep connection and fascination with the setting; it also explains why he is so intent on revealing its darker sides and illustrating how one’s idyllic surroundings can become tarnished and hostile. Such sentiments are certainly not lost on the audience, but the means by which they’re expressed begs for less vehemence and more subtlety.

Indiewire Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist

Spectrum Culture [Stacia Kissick Jones]

[Review] Hide Your Smiling Faces - The Film Stage Amanda Waltz

Hide Your Smiling Faces / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo

Slant Magazine [Wes Greene]

Rex Reed Reviews 'Hide Your Smiling Faces' | New York ... New York Observer

In Hide Your Smiling Faces, a Dreamlike Drift Over Narrative . Jonathan Kiefer from The Village Voice

Reel Georgia [Cameron McAllister]

Film.com [Jordan Hoffman]

Hide Your Smiling Faces Movie Review : Shockya.com Brent Simon

Film Review: Hide Your Smiling Faces Nick Schager from Film International

Hide Your Smiling Faces - Film School Rejects Caitlin Hughes

Review: HIDE YOUR SMILING FACES, A Daring ... - Twitch Ben Umstead

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

About.com [Eric D. Snider]

EFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

Film-Forward.com [Will McCord]

HIDE YOUR SMILING FACES Facets Multi Media

Filmmaker interview Brandon Harris interview, March 22, 2014

Hollywood Reporter John DeFore

London Film Review: 'Hide Your Smiling Faces' - Variety Guy Lodge

'Hide Your Smiling Faces' review: The lost children of NJ ... Stephen Whitty from The Star-Ledger

Miami Herald [Hans Morgenstern]

Hide Your Smiling Faces Movie Review (2014) | Roger Ebert Brian Tallerico

'Hide Your Smiling Faces' Explores a Grim Childhood - The ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Cardinale, Claudia – actress

Claudia Cardinale bio from TV.com

One of the most attractive and talented film actresses ever, Claudia Cardinale has made a name for herself as both a sexpot from the Swinging '60s and a talented, accomplished character actress. Certainly she is several cuts above the average Hollywood actress.

She was born in Tunis, Tunisia, to Italian parents on April 15, 1938. At that time Tunisia was engulfed in bloody political upheaval; however, the Cardinales remained in Tunisia for twenty years.

Cardinale had a number of bit roles in several French films in the mid to late '50s, but it was not until she won the Most Beautiful Italian Girl In Tunis Award of 1957 that she became a major player. Though initially reluctant (she always wanted to be a school teacher), Cardinale eventually signed a contract and entered the Centro Sperimentale, an extremely renowned film school in Rome.

Her first large role was in "Big Deal on Madonna Street", but she began appearing in a growing number of French films, aided by producer Franco Cristaldi, who later married her. Cardinale managed to avoid a potential scandal in 1959 when she gave birth to a child out of wedlock by saying he was her brother.

Cardinale gained international acclaim for her roles in Luchiano Visconti's classics "Rocco and His Brothers" and "The Leopard", along with Federico Fellini's immortal "8 1/2". Shortly thereafter, she took to the road and tried her luck in Hollywood.

Whether fortunate for her or not, Cardinale, in spite of her legendary beauty, did not become the "next big thing" after Sophia Loren and company - most likely because she never mastered the English language. Though she appeared in the comedy classic (and box-office hit) "The Pink Panther", she appeared in a series of relative flops ("Circus World", "The Professionals") and within a few years was out of Hollywood for good.

By 1968, Cardinale, though still young, was growing too old to remain a viable sex symbol for much longer. Thus she began taking on character roles, starting with her role as the put-upon prostitute Jill McBain in Sergio Leone's masterpiece "Once Upon A Time In The West". As the '70s grew on, she remained quite active, appearing in such films as "The Red Tent", "Popsy Pop", "The Immortal Bachelor", and "Escape to Athena". In 1974 she divorced her husband Cristaldi and married film director Pasquale Squittieri, having her second child with him. She appeared in several of his films, notably "Corleone" and "The Gun". During this time period she also worked on Werner Herzog's infamous "Fitzcarraldo", playing Klaus Kinski's girlfriend.

Up until the mid-'90s Cardinale still appeared in a number of films, and often appeared at the US Academy Awards. In 2002 she won the German Gold Bear Award for lifetime achievement. She is also a goodwill ambassador.

Claudia Cardinale - Films as actress: Susan M. Doll from Film Reference

Claudia Cardinale, the Italian actress famous for her husky, almost raspy voice, began her career by winning a contest for "the most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia." As the winner, she was granted a trip to the Venice Film Festival, and eventually attended acting classes at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome. She was promoted by producer Franco Cristaldi, who carefully guided her every move in regard to the cinema, and later married her.

Cardinale was discovered during the era when Brigitte Bardot created one sensation after another both on screen and off. Cardinale could merely have become "the Italian Bardot," and, indeed comparisons have been drawn between the two actresses. But a number of factors helped lead Cardinale's career in a different direction. The publicity surrounding both Cardinale's films and her personal life was not nearly as sensational as that concerning Bardot. More importantly, Cardinale soon began appearing in the films of the major Italian auteurs. Minor, and later more substantial, roles in the films of Mario Monicelli, Mauro Bolognini, Luchino Visconti, and Federico Fellini made her a star in Italy and abroad.

While many of Bardot's films are now known simply because she is in them, Cardinale's films are often important works in the careers of their respective directors. For example, she appeared in Monicelli's best-known comedy (Big Deal on Madonna Street), co-starred in a fine series of films for Bolognini (Il bell'Antonio, La viaccia, and Senilità), and gained critical and popular recognition for her role as the fiancée of the eldest brother in Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers. She appeared in multiple roles in Fellini's 8½, one of her most memorable films.

In these films, Cardinale's characters were, more often than not, portrayed as glamorous sex objects, not unlike Bardot. The variations each director introduced in the presentation of Cardinale in this type of character, however, prove interesting. In 8½ she plays Claudia, herself, as well as the ideal woman of Guido's dreams. Outside the immediate narrative context of the film, her character becomes a symbol for Fellini of unspoiled, yet unattainable, innocence. Though beautiful and sensuous, she is not crassly sexual.

Later, in Leone's Once upon a Time in the West, Cardinale portrays Jill McBain, the new bride of murdered settler Brett McBain. Again, her character could be described as the object desired by the male figures in the film, but Jill McBain signifies much more within the context of the film's complex narrative, and within the genre of the Western itself. She represents the forces of civilization, as female characters often do in Westerns. The final scene depicts Jill providing water to the thirsty workers building the railroad (that other symbol of the taming of the west), implying that Jill will fulfill her husband's dream of running a railroad station. Her past life as a prostitute in New Orleans, however, recalls the less than desirable elements of civilization, which will inevitably follow the settlers. In this film, as in 8½, Cardinale's character carries symbolic, almost mythic connotations.

Cardinale made her American film debut in Blake Edwards's very popular The Pink Panther, securing her international star status. Other American films, such as The Professionals, followed. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, Cardinale made most of her films in Italy and Europe. Many were not distributed in America or suffered from limited distribution, thereby reducing Cardinale's international exposure. Three 1980's roles, in Liliana Cavani's La pelle (well-received at Cannes), in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, and Diane Kurys's A Man in Love, have again focused attention on her as she enters a more mature phase of her life and career.

A Tribute to Claudia Cardinale website

All-Movie Guide - Claudia Cardinale Jason Ankeny

Classic Movies a feature page

CLAUDIA CARDINALE bio from Love Goddess

Claudia Cardinale biography and photo gallery

Claudia Cardinale (I) - Biography from IMDb

Claudia Cardinale Adrian Wootton from BFI interviews Cardinale from The Guardian, May 10, 2003, also Questions from the Floor here: Claudia Cardinale: part two

AlloCiné Blogs - LES DÉESSES DU 7 ÈME ART (in French)

Altavista Image - Claudia Cardinale photo gallery

Google Images - Claudia Cardinale

Fellini's 8½-Claudia Cardinale and Marcelllo Mastroianni (1:03) on YouTube

Les Petroleuses: Brigitte Bardot vs Claudia Cardinale Part 1 (1:44)

Les Petroleuses: Brigitte Bardot vs Claudia Cardinale Part 2 (2:42)

Les Petroleuses: Brigitte Bardot vs Claudia Cardinale Part 3 (3:06)

CLAUDIA CARDINALE (2:36)

Claudia Cardinale sings - catfight - Brigitte Bardot - 1971 (2:40)

Ricordo (Claudia Cardinale) (2:49)

Claudia Cardinale Bellissima (3:00)

Movie Legends - Claudia Cardinale (Reprise) (5:48)

Movie Legends - Claudia Cardinale (6:06)

Claudia Cardinale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cardoso, Patricia

REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES C+ 77

USA (93 mi) 2002

The film is taken from a stage play written by Josefina Lopez. Sometimes the best intentions are not enough, and this film is filled with good intentions, but at best, this is a made for TV movie, and at that, it succeeds fairly well. Everyone, even the minor characters are all well acted, especially the mother, Lupe Ontiveros. In fact, despite her daughter being on screen nearly the entire film, what this film has to say about the mother was much more interesting. I’m sorry, but there’s not any new material here, just some good performances.

Carnahan, Joe

THE GREY B- 81

USA (117 mi) 2011 ‘Scope Official site

An interesting mix of wilderness fable and grim psychological drama that tests the mettle of several hard core men working an oil rig in the remote, far north regions of Alaska, narrated by Liam Neeson as Ottway, a man running away from his own personal secrets. This ragtag group of loners may interest some, described as “ex-cons, fugitives and men unfit for mankind,” but mostly they’re a bunch of drunkards and carousers who think of little other than pleasing themselves. Hired to shoot wolves or other predators that may attack the men at work, Ottway is a trained marksman and outdoorsman. Add this to the movies that make great use of snow, as nearly every image of this film shot in ‘Scope by Masanobu Takayanagi beautifully captures the immensity of the snow-filled landscape. The set up is a plane back to civilization that mysteriously crashes, leaving but a handful of survivors who are immediately overcome by the harsh and brutal elements of the Alaskan wild, also a pack of giant-sized wolves that seem to have them surrounded. John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976) immediately comes to mind, as the men must hunker down into a strategic bunker mentality to save themselves, where big shot heroes on their own are usually the first ones to make themselves easy targets. One might wish Carpenter had the reins of this film, as he’s a master of suspense films. Carnahan doesn’t disappoint, but the script does, adapted by the director along with short story writer Ian Mackenzie Jeffers from the latter’s work Ghost Walker. The dialog never rises above ordinary, even as their circumstances are extraordinary, which is the film’s biggest drawback, as the extravagant landscape always overpowers the bleak interior drama.

Once out in the frozen tundra, just seven men survive, where Ottway fends off an attack by wolves, helped by the intervention of others and wounded on his knee, but one of the others doesn’t make it through the night. On Ottway’s recommendation, they make a break for the distant treeline, where his judgment as leader is immediately questioned, as these are not men used to paying other people’s notions any mind, but are outcasts and social misfits who follow their own instincts. Nonetheless, in the run across the empty plain, the wolves pick off the weakest link, the one with the biggest mouth who lags behind, which leads to a ridiculous display of bravado, useless out there, as the wolves are closing in. One by one, the men are being picked off, where all they have are primitive weapons of sticks to fend them off. If truth be told, the over talkative early portion of the film is the least effective, as these men have little of interest to say, sounding very clichéd, but as their ranks grow thinner, the film takes on a more wordless existential quality which is a huge improvement, growing grimmer and bleaker by the minute. The futility of their efforts begins to resemble André de Toth’s DAY OF THE OUTLAW (1959), where Robert Ryan leads a group of outlaws through a mountain pass impassable by the brutally harsh conditions of snow in winter, where one by one they start to die in the blistering cold where the wind is too ferocious to even light a fire. These men in the Alaskan wilderness need fire to fend off the wolves and to keep from freezing to death.

One must suspend belief to accept the premise of this film, as this does not at all represent the accurate size or look of Alaskan wolves, nor their pack behavior, as if they wanted to attack them all in one flurry, there are more than enough wolves to finish them off at any time, but generally wolves do not attack humans unless provoked. In this film, rather than attack as a pack, which is their nature, they instead send out small scouting parties as the others look on, watching, which is simply a writer’s invention. However, in this manner, the filmmaker is able to build and sustain tension, especially when only a few men are left, as the fatal consequences loom larger. Using terror as the threat of the unknown, the attacks are a blur of indistinct shapes and sizes, where the evidence left behind is dismally gruesome. Flashback sequences and hallucinations help portray the deteriorating state of mind, where the men grow delirious as well as exhausted from trying to walk through the snow to safety, hoping to find a lone hunter’s cabin around the next bend. Always holding out hope, while continually pressed into greater survival mode, the men are fully tested by the ominous void of impending gloom that hangs in the air. The conditions are never anything but unrelenting and merciless, where God is inevitably challenged to show himself, as otherwise all is lost. In the end, each man must face his own interior demons as he’s about to be engulfed by the unyielding indifference of the wild, as this barren landscape has withstood eons of insufferable winds and cold without any sign of man’s footprint. Interestingly, there’s a final shot that comes after the end credits roll.

The Grey Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Tom Huddleston

Liam Neeson’s unexpected but lucrative shift into marquee action-man territory has at best resulted in fun junk like ‘Taken’, at worst in Eurotrash drivel like ‘Unknown’. With ‘The Grey’, he’s officially broken the slump: the film was developed as a vehicle for Bradley Cooper, but it’s hard to imagine his pretty face at the centre of this terse, rock-solid survival thriller. This is a prime example of the right role for the right man at the right time – as Joe Carnahan’s camera lingers over those steel-blue eyes and that expressionless face, as craggy and rugged as the Alaskan landscape, it’s easy to believe that Neeson is, in fact, harder than a pack of wolves.

Neeson is Ottway, a hard-bitten hunter stranded at an oil outpost. When his plane back to civilisation crashes in the frozen wastes, Ottway must lead a ragtag band of survivors to safety. But surviving blizzards and scaling ravines is one thing, dealing with timber wolves quite another.

After the excesses of ‘The A-Team’, this is Carnahan stripping it back to basics – seven men, one wilderness, countless beasts. His directorial hand is firm: the action sequences thrill, the shocks are effective and if the characters are somewhat slight and the dialogue scenes overlong, the film has a streamlined, Hawksian narrative drive which carries it through the rough spots. Best of all, though, is Big Liam: sharp, surly and mean as hell, he’s as close as we’ll get to a modern John Wayne – and who saw that coming?

exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

Grim and desolate, with a mature honesty seldom seen in survival pictures, The Grey is a moving character drama swaddled in a thrilling adventure. On the surface, the set up references true-cannibalism story Alive and the final third of White Fang: plane crash survivors are hunted by a wolf pack, starving and threatened by the encroachment of outsiders. But The Grey is a contemplative piece on finding the will to fight for life and easing the transition to death by holding fast the loves that make it worth living.

Liam Neeson is at the top of his game as a man haunted by his past, of which we see brief flashes – enough to know it's about his wife, but not the context. Taking an expository shortcut, he lays out the setting – an oil drilling job in Alaska with "ex-cons, fugitives and men unfit for mankind" –and his emotional state (really depressed) in a letter to her in the film's opening.

There may have been a more elegant way to present this scene and information, but after this minor stumble out of the gate, The Grey retains solid footing for the majority of the picture, with an excellent supporting cast of well-developed, flawed personalities.

In what's possibly the most harrowing plane crash sequence I've seen, director Joe Carnahan (Narc, The A-Team) displays excellent editing instincts that put us directly into Neeson's perspective throughout the experience, the abrupt cuts to his unconscious mind making it all the more disorienting.

After gathering survivors and helping a dying man make peace in a very poignant scene that eschews subterfuge or denial for the harsh comfort of truth, Neeson (character names have a small, specific part to play in the drama) emerges as the obvious alpha of the group.

As the small band of battered humans attempt to fend off the wolves aggressively defending the wide "kill radius" around their den, their actions parallel the pack dynamics, with challenges to the alpha nipped as necessary. It's an effective way to depict man's animal nature and call out bullshit posturing tactics rampant in society that amount to nothing in the wild.

The oppressive wind and snow are as much a threat as the wolves, amplified by the smart decision to only have a musical score during emotional conversations or moments of personal reflection. Hearing just the wailing wind, crunching snow underfoot or crackling campfire ratchets up the tension for when a distant howl or snarl in the dark breaks through the subdued din.

Despite minor touches of heavy-handed sentimentality and a forgiving attitude about the realities of hypothermia, The Grey is an uncompromising celebration of relying on one's force of will to find the value of fighting for every moment of life.

Hopeless, violent shades of “Grey” Dominick Meyer from Heave Media

“Live or die on this day.” That’s both the tagline for The Grey and a poem John Ottway (Liam Neeson) used to hear from his father, a poem that becomes his mantra throughout his brutal ordeal. During Joe Carnahan’s film, I was moved to recall Abraham Lincoln as well: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” This is a powerful film, savage and spare and horrifying and profoundly moving in its way. It becomes clear that survival is intangible, with the potential hazards to continued life constantly increasing.

The Grey begins in an unnamed rigger’s town in the Arctic. Here, as Ottway mentions in his opening narration, there is no hope, just a place of last resort for those unfortunate enough to arrive there. Like a hopeless, tragic spin on the Antarctic wanderlust colony in Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, this is a place for convicts, escapees and lonely wanderers to end up when hope is lost. Ottway is just one among them, but he’s been forced there by circumstances well beyond himself. He’s also seemingly the only one uninterested in talking about them; men like Flannery (Joe Anderson) and Diaz (Frank Grillo) are all too happy to espouse their take on the rig’s collective existential situation. By day they work, by night they drink to excess, fighting and fornicating to keep themselves moving. These are men who speak in clipped terms, who only know each other by their last names and don’t have friends so much as fellow worn travelers.

When the plane taking them back to the relatively civilized territory of Anchorage ices over and crashes violently, only a select few survive. Their reward is a tundra where snow perpetually blows in sheets and territorial wolves don’t take too well to the few who made it. Ottway is among them, and he takes the lead, guiding his few in a direction that may vaguely signal safety and only guarantees that they won’t immediately die by the wolves or the cold. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi embraces the oppressive monochrome of this sparse world to stunning effect, turning the open wilderness into a claustrophobic nightmare. Through an open field of snow and into a forest, the men trudge through, attempting to find a way to overcome the threat of the wolves, those constant, fast-moving specters of death. They’re rarely seen in detail, instead viewed as dark shapes in trees or glowing eyes in the darkness.

Those expecting the standard Liam Neeson badass-fest need not apply. There’s none of the entertaining histrionics of Taken here, but instead a violent contemplation of strength and mortality, and how the two react under duress. Neeson gives a phenomenal performance, and it’s hard not to feel the twinge of truth at its core; his dreams mainly show his wife, gone for reasons that are unclear until late in the game. That Neeson’s real-life wife Miranda Richardson died tragically last year gives The Grey another level of unbearable emotion. When Ottway stares the wolves in the face, and encourages his men to join him, there is more than bravado behind his eyes. There is fear and pain and raw power all at once.

Carnahan has no interest in clean narrative flow, though the film moves at a stunning clip. Though many of the survivors begin as stock “types,” they evolve with their ordeal into fully realized, vulnerable men who crack jokes about things they want to return home to, but mostly just want to avoid death. I mentioned Herzog earlier, who’s acknowledged in a funny early one-liner, but the naturalistic apocalypse of some of his earlier work is felt here. What’s more surprising is Carnahan’s direction, normally style above all but here stripped to its cold, bleak bones. The Grey offers no comforts, but beneath the tension and violence there is a tale of the darkest parts of memory and life. A movie with the courage to explore such places is a rare, beautiful thing.

Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]

There's little in Joe Carnahan's previous films, marked by their frenetic, fanboy-friendly overindulgences, to predict the cold blast of The Grey, an old-fashioned, neatly arrayed survival story that almost reads like a reaction to the excesses of his past work. The more likely explanation is that the director is something of a chameleon, adapting his style to suit the demands of whatever genre he's operating within, a malleability that finds him scaling back to tell this story of hard men battling the elements, armed with little more than their wits. Whatever the case, this effort reads as a huge improvement, if not a direct step forward.

With hectic blast-fests like The A-Team and Smokin' Aces, and referential, post-film-school fodder like Narc, Carnahan displayed a taste for elaborate plots, which come to fruition with fascistic, violent precision, a method that prizes process over outcome. It's a hollow, exhausting approach, and these films are failures because they expended all their energy setting up these elaborate scenarios, resulting in movies that ran out of steam by the end of the act two.

These big bad messes are fueled by a mordant dorm-room existentialism, a point of view which insists on a world that is morally bankrupt, emotionally hollow, and inescapably pointless. The Grey is driven by roughly the same ideas, and it's definitely rough in this regard, but there are two important distinctions. The first is the tamping down of the director's style, which progresses from whip pans and self-conscious color filters to a more balanced approach, combining stunning Arctic vistas with a pitiless palette of whites, grays, and blacks.

The second is a shifting of gaze, matching up the view of emptiness with the cold void of nature at its harshest, and the blank stretches of the Alaskan tundra prove to be a much more suitable setting for this type of story. The result is a film where plans still have the utmost importance, but they're finally integrated organically into the fabric of the plot, which charts a continuing back and forth between their formation and collapse.

Liam Neeson takes charge of the action as John Ottway, a professional wolf hunter employed to protect pipeline workers, who starts off the film with an abortive suicide attempt. The rest of it plays out almost as if he succeeded: Ottway's plane home crashes, leaving him injured amid a flaming wreck in the middle of nowhere, menaced by wolves unhappy with intruders so close to their den. It's the kind of airy story which seems ripe for symbolism, something that Carnahan never provides, instead sticking to a basic, no-frills tale of man versus nature.

In keeping with this basic structure, Ottway is less a fully established character than a machine springing into action, his instincts taking charge as he attempts to marshal the survivors and make it back to civilization. Driven by the most basic of motives, he's the same type of action-figure male lead as the ones that fronted Carnahan's previous films, and the director remains over-fascinated with the not terribly interesting mystique of male efficiency. But despite his simplicity, Ottway is riveting, partly due to Neeson's commanding presence. So while the character isn't especially deep, he's relatable, trudging forward with an ever-present grimace, driven not so much by the will to live as to compulsion to strike back hard against the uncaring universe which has forced him into this position.

It feels almost sacrilegious to compare The Grey to Budd Boetticher's minimalist westerns, but Ottway shares a lot with the heroes of those straightforward tales, a character whose nihilism seems more and more valid as the story progresses, remaining grave-faced as the world satisfies his meager expectations. Ottway is the hero here because he's competent, angry, and aware of the odds against him, not because he has any special chance of succeeding against them.

This gritty nihilism braces the movie, providing a tough spine to support the increasingly brutal situations these characters encounter. Things could have benefitted from a little more stripping, and the film's worst qualities are inevitably its most obvious, from the still-gaudy, lens-flare-stricken cinematography to a repetitive series of flashbacks, which lead up to a twist ending that, if not tonally dishonest to what's come before, is still mostly unnecessary.

But The Grey largely works, building toward a great ending, which functions as one of the best, truest action climaxes in recent memory. As a flawed but still highly effective action film it's also valuable as a harder-edged companion piece to Lee Tamahori's The Edge, substituting grizzled oil workers for big-city greenhorns, wolf pack for bear, man's futility against the world's callousness for his futility against his own internal savagery. The two also stand out as action movies which set out on a path and doggedly stick to it, resisting the urge to collapse into action-packed third-act bluster, an especially impressive outcome considering Carnhahan's spotty history.

PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]

Essay on death and faith in "The Grey" - Warning: excessive spoilers Omar P.L. Moore

The Digital Fix [Gavin Midgley]

The Grey: Liam Neeson is thrown to the wolves - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]

The Grey,' 'The Innkeepers,' 'Kill List,' - New York Magazine David Edelstein

The Grey Sees Unlikely Brothers Band Together - The New York ... Rex Reed from The NY Observer

Filmcritic.com Sam Kressner

Fangoria.com [Michael Gingold]

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

The Grey Review: Stalked in the Forest, Too Close to Hide - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

Review: 'The Grey' Pits Stock Characters Against Cartoon Wolves ... Gabe Toro from The indieWIRE Playlist

The Grey Movie Review (2012) review by Eye for Film David Graham

The Grey James Kendrick from QNetwork Entertainment

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

Grey, The - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Film-Forward.com [Brendon Nafziger]

EFilmCritic [Brett Gallman]

Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]

Twitch [Scott Weinberg]

Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]

The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]

NPR [Ian Buckwalter]

'The Grey' Review | Screen Rant Ben Kendricks

Bloody Disgusting Horror - "The Grey" Movie Info, Review ... Evan Dickson

THE GREY - Analyzing the Last 6 Seconds - Bloody Disgusting John Marrone

The Grey | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

The Grey | Review | Screen - Screen International Mark Adams

Boxoffice Magazine [Vadim Rizov]

cinemonkey [D. K. Holm]

Lost in Reviews [Sarah Ksiazek]

DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]

Filmophilia.com [Sverrir Sigfusson]

Battleship Pretension [Kyle Anderson]

About.com [Rebecca Murray]

Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]

Review: 'The Grey' Is Adventure Done Right ... - Film School Rejects Rob Hunter

themoviesnob [Larry Taylor]

FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [Kathryn Schroeder]

The Grey Jeffrey M. Anderson from Combustible Celluloid

The Daily Rotation [Jeremy Lebens]

We Got This Covered [Kristal Cooper]

The Wrap [Alonso Duralde] also seen here: Reuters [Alonso Duralde]

The Grey - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Brian Miller

Greg Klymkiw [Klymkiw Film Corner]

The Hollywood Reporter [John DeFore]

Variety [Joe Leydon]

The Grey – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, January 26, 2012

The Grey – review Philip French from The Observer, January 29, 2012

The Grey: A howlingly ordinary survival tale - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

The Grey - Boston.com Wesley Morris from The Boston Phoenix

Prey date: Man vs. wolves thriller should just pack it in - Boston Herald James Verniere

Review: The Grey - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Betsy Sherman

Critic Review for The Grey on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

Kansas City Star [Jon Niccum]

Los Angeles Times [Michael Phillips]

'The Grey' review: Wolves get their way Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle

The Grey - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

The Grey - Movies - New York Times A.O. Scott

Carné, Marcel

Carné, Marcel from World Cinema

Carné's place in film history is assured as the foremost exponent of Poetic Realism, especially in his collaborations with the poet/scriptwriter Jacques Prévert.

Carné trained as a photographed and started in film as a journalist (for Cinémagazine) and assistant director to René Clair and especially Jacques Feyder. His first film, Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1930), was a documentary on working-class leisure, heralding his interest in "ordinary people"; during the Popular Front period he worked briefly with thte left cooperative Ciné-Liberté. With Jenny (1936, starring Françoise Rosay), Carné established his poetic-realist universe: stylized urban decors, a cast of workers and marginals, a dark and pervasive atmosphere of doom shot through with the genuine poetry of the everyday. It was followed by Hôtel du Nord, Quai des brumes (both 1938) and Le Jour se lève (1939). These films showcased the work of Carné's brilliant team: set designer Alexandre Trauner, composers Maurice Jaubert and Joseph Kosma, émigré cameramen Eugen Schüfftan and Curt Courant, actors like Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet, Michel Simon and Michèle Morgan. Last but not least was Prévert, who contributed sardonic humour (as in the surreal-burlesque Drôle de drame, 1937) and romantic fatalism, especially in Quai des brumes and Le Jour se lève, for which he wrote the dialogue.

In the constrained context of the German occupation, Carné, with Prévert, switched to costume dramas. Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) was a medieval fable, and Les Enfants du paradis (1943-45) an exuberant reconstruction of the Parisian theatre of the 1830s, with a remarkable performance by Arletty. While these two films drew on the "poetic" side of poetic realism, Les Portes de la nuit (1946) seemed the swan-song of its dark populism. Carné, with Prévert, switched to natural decors (La Marie du port, 1950) and contemporary subjects, such as the much criticized but highly popular Les Tricheurs (1958), a portrait of the young generation, but he never regained his prewar status. However, Thérèse Raquin (1953, starring Simone Signoret) and L'Air de Paris (1954, with Arletty and Gabin) show that Carné still excelled at evoking, respectively, doomed passion and a nostalgic popular Paris. — Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies

Marcel Carne is best known for his collaborations with screenwriter Jacques Prevert. By the time the team broke up in 1947 they had forever marked French cinema, leaving behind such undisputed masterpieces as "Le Quai des Brumes" (1938), "Le Jour Se Leve" (1939), "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) and "Les Portes de la nuit" (1946). For ten years their work dominated the industry and their style, termed "poetic realism," had an international influence.

After working as an assistant cameraman for Jacques Feyder on "Les Nouveaux Messieurs" (1928), Carne made a short ("Nogent--Eldorado du dimanche" 1929) which so impressed Rene Clair that he hired Carne as his assistant on "Sous les toits de Paris" (1930). Carne then worked as assistant to Feyder on "Pension Mimosas" (1934) and "La Kermesse Heroique" (1935). During this period he also made publicity shorts and wrote film criticism, sometimes under the pseudonym Albert Cranche. Then, thanks to Feyder's intervention, Carne was allowed to direct his first feature, a routine melodrama called "Jenny" (1936), scripted by Jacques Prevert.

A poet whose broad appeal dervied from a unique combination of humor, sentimentality and social satire, Prevert had been associated with the surrealists as well as the Popular Front. In the best studio tradition, he and Carne gathered together a team of professionals, including set designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Maurice Jaubert (replaced on his death by Joseph Kosma).

The poetic realist style flowered as French society plunged from the euphoria of the Popular Front to the despair of the Occupation. Typically, Carne-Prevert collaborations were marked by a tension between gritty realism and the suggestion of a metaphysical dimension beyond that represented on the screen. They are noted for their lyrical language and pessimistic atmosphere, for their meticulous recreations of concrete social milieux, and for truly remarkable performances by, among others, Jean Gabin, Arletty, Michele Morgan, Michel Simon and Jules Berry.

Though their films were banned during the Occupation, Carne and Prevert were allowed to continue working together, with the clandestine assistance of Trauner and Kosma (both of whom were Jewish). Unable to portray contemporary events, the team turned instead to historical subjects. "Les Visiteurs du soir" (1942), a medieval allegory of love and death, was a considerable success in its time; its wooden performances and heavy-handed treatment, however, have aged badly. Their next film remains one of the most celebrated in cinema history. "Les Enfants du Paradis", shot during the Occupation but not released until after the Liberation, was an ambitious tale of love and theater life set in a dazzlingly recreated 19th-century Paris and featuring outstanding performances by Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault and Maria Casares, among others.

With the war over, Carne and Prevert revived poetic realism in "Les Portes de la nuit", but the film met with a poor reception from the public. When their next feature, "La Fleur de l'age", was cancelled in mid-production, the two ended their working relationship.

Carne's later career, despite his willingness to work with younger actors and new subject matter, was relatively unremarkable. Carne excelled at studio production, where reality could be recreated within the controllable confines of the sound stage, and the trend in France, encouraged by the young turks of the "nouvelle vague", was to take film out of the studio and into the streets. Although he became a symbol of the New Wave filmmakers' scorn for the "tradition of quality" in French cinema, Carne left behind a body of films which have stood the test of time.

All-Movie Guide bio from Sandra Brennan

Biography by Daryl Chin from GLBTQ

Film Reference profile by Roy Armes

Films de France Profile

Out of the Past - Three French Films Geoff Gardner from Senses of Cinema

Carné, Marcel They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Robin Buss' Top 10 Directors

PORT OF SHADOWS (Le Quai des Brunes)

France (90 mi) 1938

Time Out Tony Rayns

One reason the French picked up on American film noir so quickly in the late '40s was that they'd had their own films noirs a decade earlier: romantic crime thrillers in low-life settings, fatalistic in mood and fog-grey in atmosphere. Pépé le Moko launched the cycle in 1937 and made Gabin a star. Quai des Brumes clinched every last detail of the genre the following year. Gabin plays an army deserter who tries to protect Morgan from the criminal intentions of Simon and Brasseur. Shot almost entirely on its main studio set, a waterfront bar, the visuals have the same downbeat poetry as Jacques Prévert's dialogue. Those who know Gabin's glowering silences only from the clips in Mon Oncle d'Amérique have a revelation in store.

filmcritic.com (Jake Euker)

Down a foggy, desolate road to the port city of Le Havre travels Jean (Jean Gabin), an army deserter looking for another chance to make good on life. Fate, however, has a different plan for him, when acts of both revenge and kindness turn him into front-page news. Also starring the blue-eyed phenomenon Michèle Morgan in her first major role, and the menacing Michel Simon, Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes) starkly portrays an underworld of lonely souls wrestling with their own destinies. Based on the novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, the inimitable team of director Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert deliver a quintessential example of poetic realism, one of the classics of the golden age of French cinema.

The opening scene of the 1938 French crime classic Port of Shadows takes place at night on a gorgeously fog-bound stretch of highway 12 miles outside the port city of Le Havre. A truck speeds down this tree-lined road, the only sign of life on a moonless night; in its headlights a hitchhiker in a soldier’s uniform looms up on the wet road suddenly, and our adventure is begun.

The style is poetic realism, but viewers will be forgiven for confusing it with film noir, which followed a few years later in America. The “realism” can be hard to spot amid the clouds of man-made fog, street sets built in forced perspective, and heavily stylized exteriors; the word here refers less to the look of the film than to the fact that its characters were criminals and its “heroes” of dubious moral standing. (Contrast the outsiders of Port of Shadows with screen contemporaries such as, say, Astaire and Rogers, done in up in evening wear, dancing the night away at a glittering Art Deco nightclub, and the difference becomes clear.) The “poetry” figures into both the exquisitely evocative feel of the film and its writer’s and director’s conviction that even ordinary lives – that of their deserter hero, his licentious young love, a suicidal artist – sometimes traffic, however transiently, in the sublime.

The plot unfolds as such: Our army deserter (Jean Gabin), fleeing presumably unfortunate events which are never related, plans to leave France aboard one of the many cargo ships anchored at Le Havre. He is waylaid there by a beautiful 17-year-old (Michèle Morgan) whose godfather (Michel Simon) monitors her romantic life rather too closely, and whose favors are sought by a small-time gangster (Pierre Brasseur, who giggles and sulks with a wonderfully sinister girlishness). Both the gangster and the girl are in pursuit of a certain Maurice as well; a box the girl’s godfather carries may or may not hold a valuable clue.

But the treasure most zealously pursued in Port of Shadows is love, and it’s the one most jealously guarded, too. Gabin, recently having overtaken Charles Boyer as French matinee idol of the day, executes the duties of his office with square-jawed efficiency and a fashionable hint of existential insouciance. Opposite him, Morgan radiates an arresting sensuality; in her then-scandalous morning-after scene with Gabin, she’s frankly, surprisingly sexual. She’s a real beauty with a feline gaze, and in her young Nelly we see a woman in whom an instinct for survival is developing. She’ll pay a lot for love: Morgan shows us that. But you feel that she won’t for long. As her godfather, Simon is a screen original. Even his ostensible virtues – his patience, the way he stands up to the gangsters – grate on you. He, like Brasseur, is a marvelous villain, a character it’s a real joy to hate.

Port of Shadows is a pleasure to watch, and there’s much to recommend it. But, like that other poetic realist stalwart Pépé le Moko, what's best about it is its atmosphere of romance. This fog-enshrouded Le Havre teems with human traffic, the ships in the harbor looming above. It seems built for chance encounters. Only natural that these might change lives.

The new Criterion release of Port of Shadows presents the film in a cleaned-up digital transfer that restores the film’s moody ambience, with accompanying essays that provide enlightening insight and, not least, at last solve the enigma of what’s in the box.

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron)

Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss)

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Dan Mancini

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Classic Film Guide

The Digital Bits Tim Doogan

HÔTEL DU NORD

France (95 mi) 1938

A very likeable film, but for once denied a Jacques Prévert script, Carné's 'poetic realism' seems a trifle thin and hesitant in this populist yarn about a sleazy Parisian hotel and its inhabitants. While the sad young lovers (Annabella, Aumont) defy their jobless future in a suicide pact, Arletty and Jouvet run cynically away with the film as a pair of hardbitten rogues. But the real star is Trauner, whose studio sets - the mournful canal bank, the little iron bridge, the shabby rooms - are as amazingly evocative as Maurice Jaubert's score.

DVD Times [Noel Megahey]

Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord, made in the years immediately preceding the Nazi invasion of France, is a fine example of the “poetic realism” style that the director would become famous for - often in collaboration with poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert - on films such as Quai des Brumes and Les Enfants du Paradis.

A young man and woman, Pierre and Renée, enter the Hôtel du Nord in a poor working class district of Paris near the St. Martin canal, and take out a room where they plan to commit suicide together. The attempt fails – leaving Renée wounded and Pierre fleeing the room after the intervention of a neighbour, Edmond, who has heard the gunshot. After her recovery in hospital, Renée is drawn back to the Hôtel du Nord, where she is offered a job as a maid. The romance of her near miss with death in the very same hotel means that the young woman holds a strange fascination for all the hotel’s other clients. Renée however still has a deep attraction for the imprisoned boy who tried to kill her, and her presence and temperament begin to upset the balance of affairs and marriages that up to then had been getting along, if not blissfully, at least tolerantly.

With his regular screenwriter Prévert unavailable to script the adaptation of Eugène Dabit’s novel, Hôtel du Nord was adapted by Jean Aurenche and scripted by Henri Jeanson, but retains a curious blend of poetic observance and social realism. Thus we have grandiloquent words and gestures, romantic double suicides and florid declarations of love, all taking place in the decidedly unromantic setting of a rundown hotel in a rough neighbourhood of Paris, where crime, murder, prostitution, infidelity and battery of women takes place. Even homosexuality is alluded to here, as another of those activities that take place after dark that everyone turns a blind eye to. Any sense of a gritty treatment of social and working class issues is dispelled not only by the romanticised dialogue, but by the remarkable recreation of a large section of the Canal St Martin outside the French film studio at Bilancourt, which also adds to the heightened other-worldly quality of the film.

All this lends the film a deeply romantic, fatal fascination, with great performances from an exceptional cast. And it is in the casting that the film really takes shape, with great actors like Arletty as the prostitute Raymonde and Louis Jouvert’s pimp and gangster Edmond greatly playing up secondary roles that would overshadow the romantic leads of Annabella’s Renée and Jean-Pierre Aumont’s Pierre. In doing so, they help restore balance between the poetic theatricality and the social realism and keep Hôtel du Nord from being more than just a romantic curiosity of early French cinema.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Hôtel du Nord (1938) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, March 1999

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

DVD Times [Mark Boydell]

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov)

The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

DAYBREAK (Le Jour se Lève)

France (87 mi) 1939

Time Out Tom Milne

Possibly the best of the Carné-Prévert films, certainly their collaboration at its most classically pure, with Gabin a dead man from the outset as his honest foundry worker, hounded into jealousy and murder by a cynical seducer, holes up with a gun in an attic surrounded by police, remembering in flashback how it all started while he waits for the end. Fritz Lang might have given ineluctable fate a sharper edge (less poetry, more doom), but he couldn't have bettered the performances from Gabin, Berry, Arletty, and (as the subject of Gabin's romantic agony) Laurent. Remade in Hollywood as The Long Night in 1947.

The most celebrated example of the doom-laden, darkly shadowed "poetic realism" that flourished in France in the years leading up to World War II. Jean Gabin is the honest, timid workingman who, hiding from the police in an attic room, spends the night remembering the events that led him to murder. The screenplay is by Jacques Prevert, the most accomplished dialogist of the period, and the famous sets, with their overtones of German expressionism, are by Alexander Trauner. Only the direction, by Marcel Carne, seems less than it could be; there's a lack of imagination and suppleness in the images that pulls the film down. With Jules Berry, Arletty, and Jacqueline Laurent (1939). In French with subtitles. 85 min.

Poetic Realism Criterion essay

Poetic realism was a cinematic style that emerged in France during the 1930s, the peak of that nation’s classic period of filmmaking. With its roots in realist literature, this movement combined working-class milieus and downbeat story lines with moody, proto-noir art direction and lighting to stylishly represent contemporary social conditions. Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko, with the iconic Jean Gabin as the titular antihero, is generally regarded as the start of this melancholic, often fatalistic brand of cinema, which in part reflected the ominous atmosphere of prewar France but also lent itself to the individual sensibilities of a wide range of brilliant directors, such as Jean Renoir (Grand Illusion, La bête humaine) and Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève), and set designers like Alexandre Trauner. Poetic realism is thought to have greatly influenced such later film movements as Italian neorealism, which was equally sympathetic to the proletariat, and the French new wave, which looked to these great masters who had retained their artistic freedom while working in the French film industry.

Factory-worker Francois (iconic Jean Gabin) broods in his one-room attic apartment having just shot dead Valentin (seedy, hissable Claude Berry), As the police close in on all sides, Francois reflects on the events leading up to his fateful act. A month before, he’d embarked on a passionate affair with the young, sweet-natured Francoise (Jacqueline Laurent), only to find she was also apparently involved in some kind of relationship with Valentin – a middle-aged vaudeville artist, very recently split up from on-stage partner Clara (seen-it-all ‘Arletty’). Francois then got together with Clara, only to return to Francoise when informed by Valentin that the girl was actually his daughter. But Valentin was not to be trusted…

Though firmly established in the movie pantheon as, in critic Danny Peary’s words, “the classic fatalistic melodrama”, Le Jour se Leve hasn’t aged particularly well. Several aspects retain interest – the intriguing structure of Jacques Prevert’s script (Gabin’s flash-backs tend to be two-hander scenes featuring the principals), the carefully delinated social context (with unemployment rife, Gabin is already being killed by the hazardous ‘sand’ at his factory) and, most of all, the performances: Gabin, Arletty and Berry are flawless, though Laurent is a little too wet as the relatively inexperienced Francoise. The pacing is too often distractingly slow, however, and the various aspects of the plot aren’t developed particularly well - the film isn’t quite romantic enough to be a romance, never quite dramatic enough to be a thriller, and the ‘ironic’ ending is rather ostentatiously downbeat. Like Francois, the audience must toil through rather a lot of work for relatively little reward.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

Widely considered a masterpiece of French poetic realism, Marcel Carné's LE JOUR SE LÈVE is noted as much for its narrative structure as it is for its place within the cryptic prewar style. It opens with a bang—literally. From there on out, languid dissolves take the viewer from the tortured protagonist's present to his recent past, revealing the events that led up to (or down from?) the film's first fateful moment. Based on a story thought up by one of his neighbors and adapted to the screen by poet Jacques Prévert (with whom Carné collaborated for more than a decade), the construction is what first attracted Carné; its flashback structure, now taken for granted, was among the first of its kind and has since become a commonly used device. The bang we hear is a gunshot, that of François (played by Jean Gabin) killing an as yet unidentified character. As the police surround his apartment and attempt to either arrest or kill him, François thinks back to the events that led him there. Of course his dilemma involves a woman—two in fact: the sweet, young Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) and the more experienced, more embittered Clara (Arletty). As romantic tragedy is a defining factor of poetic realism, it suffices to say there's no happy ending in store for François. But romance aside, would there ever have been? François is a foundryman who had been employed in hazardous jobs his entire life. Poetic realism is distinct from straightforward realism (and the movements associated with it) in how the work embodies cinematic verisimilitude. It's suggested that François's unhealthy working conditions would have eventually led to his early demise, but it's not the trappings of his social class that kills him, it's his doomed romance. The ill-fated affair is representative both of his unfortunate lot in life as a member of the petite bourgeoisie and the way in which poetic realist directors conveyed their socio-political leanings. The film was released in 1939, the last year of the poetic realism "movement" before the war handicapped the French film industry altogether. Combined with imagery that evokes German Expressionism and would later inspire film noir, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, the movement and the films born of it combine the atmospheric capabilities inherent to cinema and the lyrical persuasion of poetry. As per the Film Center's website, this new 4K restoration "brings back long-unseen footage censored under the Vichy regime (including a nude glimpse of Arletty, and the expunged credits of Jewish creative personnel)."

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

Classic Film Guide

DeWitt Bodeen, Les Enfants du Paradis, filmreference.com

LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS

aka: Children of Paradise

France (190 mi) 1945 US version (163 mi)

Pauline Kael

This lushly romantic creation, directed by Marcel Carné and written by Jacques Prévert, is a one-of-a-kind film, a sumptuous epic about the relations between theater and life. At first, it may seem a romance set in the Paris of Balzac; it turns into a comparison of dramatic modes – it includes at least five kinds of theatrical performance. And, encompassing these, it is a film poem on the nature and varieties of love – sacred and profane, selfless and possessive. It was made during the Occupation, and it is said that the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed. With Jean-Louis Barrault as the soulful mime Deburau (the Pierrot – Barrault sucks in his cheeks so much that he sometimes suggests Dietrich); the incomparable Arletty as Garance; Pierre Brasseur as the Shakespearean actor Lemaître (the Harlequin); Louis Salou as the count; Marcel Herrand as the philosophical murderer; Pierre Renoir as the rag-picker-informer; and Maria Casarès, who has the unrewarding role of the theater manager’s daughter, who marries Deburau and becomes the mother of an abominable offspring. (The child is pure Hollywood.) In French.

Time Out Tom Milne

A marvellously witty, ineffably graceful rondo of passions and perversities animating the Boulevard du Crime, home of Parisian popular theatre in the early 19th century, and an astonishing anthill of activity in which mimes and mountebanks rub shoulders with aristocrats and assassins. Animating Jacques Prévert's script is a multi-layered meditation on the nature of performance, ranging from a vivid illustration of contrasting dramatic modes (Barrault's mime needing only gestures, Brasseur's Shakespearean actor relishing the music of words) and a consideration of the interchangeability of theatre and life (as Herrand's frustrated playwright Lacenaire elects to channel his genius into crime), to a wry acknowledgment of the social relevance of performance (all three men are captivated by Arletty's insouciant whore, who acts herselfout of their depth to achieve the protection of a Count, establishing a social barrier which Lacenaire promptly breaches in his elaborate stage management of the Count's murder). Flawlessly executed and with a peerless cast, this is one of the great French movies, so perfectly at home in its period that it never seems like acostume picture, and at over three hours not a moment too long. Amazing to recall that it was produced in difficult circumstances towards the end of the German Occupation during World War II.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Gio MacDonald)

This ravishing tribute to the theatre would today be called 'Children of the Gods'. The 'gods' were the worst seats, furthest from the stage, where the audience responded honestly and boisterously to the actors below - player and public alike being Les Enfants du Paradis.

Set in 1840s Paris and centred around the Funambules Theatre on the Boulevard du Crime, the story follows the fortunes of four men whose lives are interwoven by their love for the same woman, the beautiful actress Garance (Arletty).

Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault), boyish and love-lorn, might become the greatest mime of his day (and Barrault was); ebullient Frederick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur) aspires to be the greatest actor; and fiery Lacenaire (Marcel Hemand) could transcend his criminal past to be a great playwright.

These three really existed, but the story is fictional, as is the fourth character - the icy Count Edward de Monteray (Louis Salou) who requires exclusive patronage of Garance. For her part; she fully loves only one of them.

Filming began in 1943 while France was still occupied. Their own cinema shunned, the Germans thought French filmmaking essential to the Occupation. Of some 350 films made, Les Enfants was the most ambitious, eluding the invaders in its subtle premise that drama could flourish only where men are free.

In Jacques Prévert's script so full of wit and aphorism, farce and tragedy, Garance best embodies this idea; she is the forerunner of emancipated woman, a worldly sophisticate, rejecting those who try to possess her. Prévert's confidence is such that there is even a scene where, through Baptiste gushing his loss (Garance) to the landlady Madame Hermine, he openly refers to the trick of theatrical exposition.

And the artifice of cinema has costs: the theatre and a quarter of a mile of street fronts were built. Trauner, a designer and Kosma, a composer, worked secretly, and many of the 1,800 extras were in the Resistance, using filming as daytime cover. Special permission was needed for a wartime film of such magnitude (its two parts total over three hours) and production was stalled several times, sometimes by director Marcel Carné who was determined it should be premiered after the Liberation.

With its many marvellous characters, its broad sweep and its Free French spirit, Les Enfants represents the collaboration of Carné and Prévert at its best. (Less happy, that of Robert Le Vigan, the original old clothes man, who disappeared when the Nazis did, to be replaced by Pierre Renoir.) Carné's handling of principals and crowds is masterly, and, like Mayo's costumes, the music, acting and photography are exquisite. Voted the best French film even Les Enfants du Paradis was described by Bernard Levin as 'a masterpiece, a work of art of exceptional and universal quality, a voice which speaks directly to the human heart.'

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Marcel Carné's 1945 vox populi masterpiece Children of Paradise has often been called "the French Gone With the Wind." Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert seem to span the full gamut of love's emotional spectrum, most notably in the film's superior first half, "The Boulevard of Crime." Stage queen Garance (Arletty) is the embodiment of elusive desire; she is loved and seduced by no less than four men at once yet she's incapable of being kept. Indeed, she openly discloses her adoration for freedom when she's mistaken for a petty thief and subsequently rescued by the pantomime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault). Struck, as if by Cupid, the androgynous Baptiste is a kind of fairy tale mime that emotes and renders the truth through his observant gaze. From the beginning, Children of Paradise blurs the line between real life and stage drama, so much so that they become indistinguishable from one another. In the film's opening glide through the Boulevard, Carné seduces the spectator with the allure of the "Naked Truth" circus act, opening its outer curtain only to reveal a bathing woman listlessly staring at her own mirrored reflection.

Just as Carné posits a complex denial of truth and carnal desire, he luxuriantly worships Baptiste's ability to transcend these very mortal restraints. Baptiste may be as timid as the scribe Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand) is violent yet both men could easily double as poets. In the film's stunning bar brawl sequence, Baptiste breaks bread with a blind man who regains his sight whenever he goes indoors. Garance, sporting cartoon heart earrings, is seduced by the heartless Lacenaire ("I'd spill torrents of blood to give you a river of diamonds") only to fall instantaneously in love with Baptiste. In this, the film's most emotionally transcendent sequence, love seems to come so simple. (The emotions divulged here are the complete antithesis of those withheld in a similarly staged sequence from Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love.) Baptiste bemoans his childhood retreat into dreams, where his sadness seemingly had a voice. Still, it was an elusive sanctuary; his abusers would nonetheless beat him while he slept, attempting to wake him and interrupt his dreams. An adult Baptiste occupies a similar pantomime purgatory between dream and reality.

Prévert pays just the right amount of attention to the film's theatre-as-life paradigm, wringing complex emotions from the demands placed on the stage actor. Baptiste's director lives in constant fear of having to incur fines should one of his players speak on stage. Nathalie, the director's daughter, waits and yearns for Baptiste's unrequited love. After seeing Garance speaking to another man, Baptiste is frozen in mid performance. While Nathalie cannot match Baptiste's sightline, she panics and screams. In a film where love becomes the poetry of smiles and motion (witness the spectacular scene where Baptiste's stage clown must glide around stage in patient pursuit of Garance's stone statue), Baptiste's tortured expression is all Nathalie needs to understand what transpires backstage.

Lacenaire prefers the farce to the tragedy and while his opening dialogue should not be taken as an absolute measure of truth and, thus, criticism against Children of Paradise, it's easy to fault the film's second half, "The Man in White," for reverting to tragedy rather than sustaining the film's poetic blitheness. While Lacenaire may call tragedy the inferior genre, Children of Paradise isn't so much burdened by tragedy as it is by a time lapse that's very easy to resent. The film's narrative focus shifts away from Garance and onto her irascible troupe of suitors and their silly obsessions with revenge. Still, Baptiste's relationship to Garance remains achingly and breathlessly felt. She disappears like a ghostly freedom fighter only to return ("embellished by memory") to recapture Baptiste's heart and disappear into the symbolic masses (Prévert calls them the Gods) that populate the Boulevard of Crime. Carné's France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming's cotton pickin' South, is a poetic realist's wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment.

Tribute to Les Enfants du Paradis a website on the film by Jim Richardson

Essay By Stuart Fernie

Derek Malcolm's Films of the Century from the Guardian

Les Enfants du Paradis Girish Shambu from Senses of Cinema

DVD Journal DK Holm

CultureCartel.com (David Abrams)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Debi Lee Mandel)

Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Mike Pinsky

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

Camera Journal: Les Enfants du Paradis Paul Sutton

Movie Habit (Breck Patty)

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

100 films Lucas McNelly

Monsters At Play Lawrence P. Raffel

filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]

The worst best films ever made Tim Lott from The Guardian, July 24, 2009

Boston Globe Mark Feeney

DVDBeaver - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

Children of Paradise - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Carney, John

ONCE A- 94

Ireland (86 mi) 2006 http://www.myspace.com/oncethemovie

a longtime master of sublimely melodramatic sad-bastard music

—a commentator’s description on National Public Radio of Glen Hansard

One of the best double features seen in years, seeing ONCE immediately following Hal Hartley’s deliriously upbeat FAY GRIM (2006), shot in two weeks for under $150,000, this is one of those small films that works, a grassroots hit at Sundance generating such superlative reviews that by the time you get into the theater, you half expect it to fall apart at some point, while the other half, of course, hopes it’s everything it’s cracked up to be. Fortunately, this film doesn’t need to grab you by the throat to pull you in, it does so instantly with the emotional sincerity of the music, which always sounds so heartening, even as it’s describing hearts that are breaking, beautifully shot by Tim Fleming who consistently captures the immediacy of the moment and the freewheeling swagger of the two wonderfully refreshing lead characters, making this one of the more unique twists on an age old love story. Known only as the Guy and the Girl, he’s a thirtyish street singer that repairs Hoover vacuum cleaners at home with his dad, Glen Hansard from the Irish rock group The Frames and Alan Parker’s THE COMMITMENTS (1991), a guy whose songs bear a strange similarity to the optimism and melodic simplicity of Cat Stevens when he was Cat Stevens, while she, Markéta Irglová, is a younger Czech émigré who sells magazines and flowers on the street, living with her mother and small daughter, a girl with classical piano training who bears a strange resemblance to the recently deceased British actress Katrin Cartlidge, as she combines intelligence and a very forward curiosity with an eloquent stage presence, and at only age 17 during the filming, she reminds us of just how glorious it is to be young. Written and directed by John Carney, who was a bass player from The Frames in the early 90’s, this film makes no attempt to overreach, but does an excellent job of living within its small means by creating two well-defined characters living on the fringe of working class Dublin, both with the love of music in common, and with the same loss of an affectionate “other.” The Guy realizes early in the film his mistake at coming on to the Girl, and his face tells all, as he knows he screwed up the instant he violated this fragile trust these two developed on the street when after hearing him sing she was amazed at the profound seriousness of one of his songs, knowing he loved someone, as she could sense an intimate outpouring of personal confession, which he found exasperatingly obtrusive, finding it incredible and somewhat off-putting that this young stranger could see right through to his soul.

Much like the poetic realism of Jacques Demy, who compiled a string of musicals in the decade of the 1960’s that remain at the pinnacle of the art form, this film has more than a passing similarity to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964), immersing itself in the energetic spontaneity of the streets from which these characters spring, where their first sparks of love make the audience sense they are made for each other, soul mates, inseparable, perhaps projecting this chemistry onto the troubled relationships of the unseen “others” in their lives, even as they go their separate ways, much like the audience senses the misdirected love in CHERBOURG. But establishing realism within the world they live in is essential, as from within this carefully defined lack of pretentiousness comes the sincerity of the music, which leads us ever further into the lives of these two young lovers, who mesh together so well in one of the opening scenes in the back of a music store where they basically put a song together for the very first time which is nothing less than revelatory, it’s simply movie magic. Her soft piano and vocal harmony are so understated, yet so pure, it’s simply heartbreaking hearing the song “Falling Slowly” Falling Slowly - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from the movie "Once" (2006) YouTube (6:12) developing onscreen for the very first time: “I don’t know you/but I want you/all the more for that,” as is her response to his request for lyrics to one of his melodies, where she scampers out into the night in her slippers and pajamas to the local music store where she can play his CD of the recorded music, returning later humming this song under her breath, completely oblivious to the outside world, allowing the audience to share in her joy at hearing her lyrics for the very first time accompanied by her pitch perfect harmonies. It would be so easy for scenes like this to disintegrate into artificial grandstanding, but they are charmingly contained entirely within the musical structure. By this time, it’s hard not to sense that we’re experiencing a different kind of film, a tone poem of young love that relishes intricate harmonies and the adrenal rush of waiting for the next chorus.

Much of this film was born as well in Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA (1999), reflective of the exquisite montage use in that film of the Aimee Mann song “Wise Up” Magnolia SoundTrack-Wise Up YouTube (3:38) spread throughout several characters which adds a hyper-realistic quality to the emotional content of the song. In ONCE, this mesmerizing quality extends throughout the entire film, making this one of the most suble musicals of the modern era. Here the Guy’s reborn love is expressed in flashback images from a projected video of his distant love in London, who is actually in real life the girl friend of the director, but it’s a beautiful collage of mixed emotions, where he longs for the love that he’s actually experiencing again, rekindled by the crazy directness of the Girl, who kindly defers all matters of love, as she has a husband of her own living abroad who hasn’t been particularly helpful. Instead, she’s visited each day by three burly guys next door who promptly sit on the sofa and watch her TV, the only one in the building, known in the credits as the men watching TV. Before the Guy leaves for London, he decides to cut a record with the Girl and a few other street musicians, which is basically the end third of the film, watching them pique the interest of the sound engineer who comes to realize he is witnessing a unique recording session filled with undiscovered talent. The strength of the session is the blending of textures and tones, the unabashed joy and genuine passion that comes from Hansard’s vocals, and the gorgeous melodic refrains, always underscored by the Girl’s talent for harmony. The personalized intimacy of the characters is perfectly realized in their joining forces and coming together musically. After immersing themselves in the cramped quarters of a recording session all weekend, there’s a wonderfully sweet release that is simplicity itself, where the music continues over the end credits, but where we know the real story is only getting started, this was just the beginning, a brief moment, once.

Postscript

Like John Waters’ HAIRSPRAY (1988), this film was turned into a hit Tony award-winning musical on Broadway in 2012, winning eight Tony awards including Best Musical.

The Songlist from the movie from the 2007 IMDb Message Board, Bowie718 (link lost):

Did anyone else notice the song he played at the VERY beginning of the film? I was totally blown away that he was crooning one of my all-time favorite Van Morrison songs... "And The Healing Has Begun". That song holds special, sentimental value to me... and for the film to open with that... let's just say, there couldn't have been a better way to usher me into instantly liking it. Too bad that didn't wind up on the soundtrack as well (although, it was interrupted by a thief)

1. Say It To Me Now - The song he sings in the beginning when they meet, from the album Fitzcarraldo by The Frames. - The very emotionally-potent song which the guy is singing, late at night, when the girl first spots him, applauds his music, and then tries to sell him a copy of Issues.

2. All The Way Down - A solo track by Glen Hansard/the guy, a very soft/subdued track from the beginning of the film. It was the scene in his bedroom where he was calling his ex...sitting on his bed playing this song.

3. Falling Slowly - THE song. The song in C that they develop together at the music store, and the one that plays again over the closing credits.

4. If You Want Me - The song (credited, in real life, entirely to Markéta Irglová, which I was surprised by! [she also co-wrote Falling Slowly and Lies with Glen Hansard, and, of course, is the composer of The Hill as well) which the girl is given to write lyrics for, and which she sings while listening to the CD demo while walking home in her sheepy slippers.

5. Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy - 'Nuff said. (The version on disc is precisely the one in the film, replete with 'Well...' introduction, and laughter at the end.)

6. When Your Mind's Made Up - The song in 5/4 which they record in the studio as their 'track 1, take 1', and which later plays, almost entirely again, over the montage in the car and at the beach after the recordings are complete.

7. Lies - The song the guy writes and then sings over the video recordings of his ex-girlfriend.

8. Gold - The song performed by the group (the soundtrack gives their name as Interference) at the evening roundtable sing, with violin and cello accompaniment. (This is the only song on the soundtrack not credited to either Hansard or Irglová, having been composed by Fergus O'Farrell, who sings the track as well.)

9. The Hill - The girl's solo song, which she demoes in the film for the guy on the piano hidden away in the studio. (This is a different version from that in the film, more 'professional' [i.e., containing a complete ending, rather than that of the girl's crying breakoff in the film], with a few extra lyrics and a short instrumental postlude.)

10. Fallen From The Sky - The other main song performed for the recording sessions, with the girl playing a small electronic keyboard while seated cross-legged on the studio floor. (The CD, incidentally, credits this as an old track performed by The Frames, and Markéta, contrary to the film, does not actually appear on it at all [Glen is the one credited for playing the keyboards, with additional keyboard work by a certain Craig Ward].)

11. Leave - You know, I can't remember precisely where this comes from, although I know it's somewhere in the film, because I remember thinking that the guy's voice sounds almost exactly like early-1970's Cat Stevens/Yusef Islam on this solo vocal and guitar track (with a small touch of bass at the end?, although the instrument is not listed in the liner notes). But more than that, I cannot pin down. Suggestions? (The main vocal hook is the repeated line 'You've said what you have to, now leave'. Wrought and dramatic, particularly towards the end.)

12. Trying To Pull Myself Away - Can't recall this from the film, for the life of me. A full band and then some (a synthy string section, for instance) performance. The best I could think of would be the session from the guy's (suddenly rather spacious) bedroom during their preparation for the recording sessions, but it somehow doesn't seem quite right. Perhaps a song recorded specifically for the soundtrack?

13. Once - A softer duet with Markéta, some percussion and a little extra occasional instrumentation. I imagine this must have been especially for the soundtrack, as I seem to imagine I must have noticed a 'title song' being such somewhere in the film. Plus, all the guy/girl songs seem very memorable. But, then again, I can be very, very unobservant at times. Very unobservant.

For George:

from the Frames messageboard: http://www.theframes.ie/v4/faq.shtml

Where does the name "The Frames" come from?

The Frames are called The Frames because when Glen was small he used to fix all the bicycles in his neighbourhood for his friends. His house had bicycle frames lying all around and Glen could be seen up to his eyeballs in oil and grease with that big smile of his fixing bicycles. His house became known as the house with the frames. Hence the name The Frames.

A genuine grassroots hit at this year's Sundance, John Carney's shoestring semi-musical is a modest but utterly winning success. Starring real-life musicians Glen Hansard (The Frames) and Markéta Irglová, the story of not-quite-requited love between a Dublin busker and an unemployed Czech pianist advances the plot through song without falling back on song-and-dance numbers. A haunting duet performed in the back of a piano showroom is a perfect metonym for the process of falling in love; as the two performers fall into sync, wordlessly cueing chord changes and spontaneously harmonizing, you can feel their bond click into place. Carney's sparse theatrics hit a high point as Irglová shuffles back from a convenience store in her slippers, listening to one of Hansard's demos on a portable CD player. As her onscreen voice joins with his offscreen one, the moment is at once tangible and transcendent, magical and utterly real.

Once · Movie Review · The A.V. Club Nathin Rabin

John Carney's sadly beautiful Once is a musical for people who only think they hate musicals, and not just because it boasts virtues seldom associated with the genre, such as realism, intimacy, and low-key verisimilitude. Musical-bashers often complain about the suspension of disbelief required for spectacles in which characters spontaneously break out into song-and-dance routines, but Once's songs are integrated into the story so organically that it'd be unrealistic if the characters weren't largely immersed in them. They are musicians, after all, and the songs they sing say more about their characters than any monologue possibly could.

In a stunning lead performance, Glen Hansard of the Irish pop group The Frames stars as a lovelorn street musician who bares his heart and soul in every wildly emotive song, but keeps people at a wary distance in his personal life. While busking one day, Hansard encounters Markéta Irglová, a lonely immigrant, mother, and gifted singer-pianist. Irglová and Hansard have an instant musical chemistry, but they're too shy and conflicted to let their creative connection lead to bigger things. When Hansard recruits Irglová to work on a demo he's recording, long, productive nights spent realizing Hansard's musical vision and a joyous shared creative alchemy push them together, while equally powerful unseen forces work just as doggedly to keep them apart.

Once's songs are delicate yet shatteringly powerful, and they gain a whole new resonance from the way they express emotions that the film's tragically repressed characters keep bottled up. In a genre full of dreamy escapism and madcap flights of fancy, this ingratiatingly scruffy, slice-of-working-class-life treasure is brave enough to be quiet and restrained, yet littered with moments of transcendence, musical and otherwise. In its own subdued, mellow way, Once is just about perfect. Imagine Belle And Sebastian remaking In The Mood For Love as a heartbreaking low-fi musical, and you have a fair approximation of the film's melancholy, unexpected genius.

The Irish Times (Michael Dwyer) also seen here: The Irish Times film review, 23 March 2007: "Street sweethearts"

SMALL is beautiful, according to the much-borrowed title of a 1973 collection of essays written by an economist. That claim is just as valid when applied to the micro-budget movie that is Once, a deceptively simple love story that proves disarmingly charming. It's not surprising that it collected the audience awards at the recent Sundance and Dublin film festivals.

Written and directed by John Carney, Once is a rarity in that it is a new Irish screen musical. More words are sung than spoken as it charts the tender relationship that forms between two musicians - a Grafton Street busker (Glen Hansard) and a Czech pianist (Markéta Irglová) who sells roses and The Big Issue on the street.

Set over the course of a week, the film observes these two lonely characters - we never learn their names - as they are drawn to each other. He is getting over an affair with a woman who has left him and gone to London; the pianist has parted from her husband and lives with her young daughter and her mother in a Dublin flat where their immigrant friends gather to watch Fair City - to keep up with the storyline and to improve their English.

Carney makes the point - without ever labouring it - that his protagonists are living in a changing city where the economic boom has passed them by. His keen eye for authentic locations is as evident here as it was in Bachelors Walk, on which he was one of the driving creative forces.

The instinctive chemistry between the central couple in Once is beautifully expressed when they make sweet music on an improvised duet, so much so that we are willing them to get closer together. Their plaintive, truthful songs emerge organically from within a narrative of matching honesty, as when she asks him about his ex-girlfriend and he responds with an improvised song.

In her screen debut, Irglová graces the film with a serene, endearing presence, and Hansard, in his first movie since he played Outspan Foster in The Commitments 16 years ago, performs with the passion and intensity he exudes on stage with The Frames.

Carney, a former bass player with that band, captures the sheer joy of performance as they sing, and the evident pleasure and dedication of their backing musicians on a recording. And he treats his characters with affection and respect in this irresistibly appealing movie that is full of heart and packs an emotional punch.

'Once,' a rock musical with an irresistible charm - Boston.com Ty Burr from The Boston Globe

"Once" is a wee slip of a movie, 85 minutes long and notably light on plot. Guy meets girl, guy writes a few songs with girl, guy and girl try to figure out what to do about their mutual attraction. We never learn their names, the movie's that basic.

Yet there are more emotions repressed and then sung out in this transcendent new Irish film than in a year of blockbusters, and in its brief running time, writer-director John Carney does something both profound and unexpected: He reinvents the movie musical as a genre of swooning rock 'n' roll realism.

Say again? OK: "Once" is the first rock musical that actually makes sense. People don't burst into song in this movie because the orchestra's swelling out of nowhere. The guy and the girl are working musicians -- or they'd like to be, if they could make a living at it -- and they're played by working musicians: Glen Hansard of the Dublin-based group The Frames and the Czech singer-songwriter Marketa Irglova .

The performances unfold in well-lit music shops at lunch hour, in recording studios, on double-decker buses, in apartments late at night. Most movies cut away after a few strums, but Carney settles in for the long take and you suddenly realize this is the musical number. This is how these inarticulate people speak.

If you know your movie history, maybe you recall that musicals started this way: as Depression-era backstagers, with Ruby Keeler kicking into a Busby Berkeley dance routine because it was part of the show she and Dick Powell were rehearsing. "Once" actually resurrects that hoariest of old genre cliches, the scene where the couple take a break from performing, sit at a battered piano, and share a tune. It's the only form of courtship the two know, and it underscores that life's already a musical if you're a musician.

The Depression analogy is apt, too, because Carney sets the film in a rough but openhearted Dublin, the sort of city where every junkie knows your name and where even the loan officer's a frustrated musician. The hero works at his father's vacuum cleaner repair shop and busks in the subway in the evenings; we first see him singing Van Morrison's "And the Healing Has Begun " to disinterested commuters.

It has begun, because the girl is listening and wants to compare notes in a literal sense. She brings a broken vacuum cleaner to their next meeting -- it trails after her like a sick puppy -- and he mistakes this for romantic interest, which it's not. Bits of their past leak out: the ex-girlfriend he's working out of his system, the husband she left in the Czech Republic and good riddance.

Eventually, though, he plays her a song he has written and kept to himself -- it has a Damien Rice feel, building from a folky whisper to a glorious scream -- and when she tentatively joins in on harmony, it's like a first kiss. The film's absurd R-rating is for language only; the vocal duets are the closest "Once" comes to sex. Although when the man sings "Take this sinking boat/and point it home/we've still got time," we're already past the carnal and into intimacy.

So the climax of the movie's not a love scene but a recording-studio sequence: the guy and the girl and their hastily assembled band try to cobble the pieces of what they're feeling into something that might convince a stranger hearing it on the radio. "Once" observes the mystery of the creative act -- the false starts, the gathering groove -- and finds within it a larger community.

After working through the night, the band and the producer (Geoff Minogue ) pile exhausted and happy into someone's automobile for the "car test" -- driving around while listening to the finished demo through tinny speakers. Suddenly the movie has become a different sort of love story, a group grope toward the sublime.

Carney shoots "Once" raw, aiming for the aimlessness of captured life. The Irish accents are thick, the lighting 40-watt, the leads dour and unpretty. If you need glamour, this is not your movie. The guy and the girl don't have much use for glamour, anyway. They're doing the best they can with what they have, aware that grace either lands when you least expect it -- in the bridge of a song, say -- or slips through your fingers. They're listening to the musical we each carry inside us and that no one ever hears. "Once" hears it, though, and it rocks the soul.

At First Sight Ray Pride from New City

Just because every movie reviewer in America is calling "Once" something like the greatest music movie of this generation and the best thing since two pints of Guinness on a sleepy Dublin Sunday is no reason not to listen to me as I grab you by the collar and tell you listen, listen to these songs, embrace this movie, because this muss of twigs and straw and strings and pixels and chords can break your heart like a four-minute-fifty-second pop song you will never get out of your head.

"Once" is just a bit more than nothing at all, yet it is one of the rare movies where recollection of the simplest gesture, smile, catch or voice have made me stupid-teary since I first saw it (twice) at Sundance. The grave, tender secret of this tiny picture is, simply, its simplicity, its sketchy but efficient form filled with the grandest of longings.

In John Carney's limber long-player, several songs suggest a life, a small, wonderful world consisting of a few Dublin haunts where an unnamed street-corner performer (Glen Hansard), or "busker," and an unnamed younger woman (Markéta Irglová) with a winsome command of English meet, tease and learn, but mostly, with eyes wide open, develop a mature relationship deepened by the dance of several songs, including the gorgeous "Slowly Falling," which the extremely affable and charming pair convincingly "compose" in front of us in an early scene.

In standard narrative terms, "Once" is the slightest of artifacts, and yet it is filled with a quiet integrity and charm and it offers lessons in how simply a tale can be told. Shot in two weeks in unprepossessingly grungy Mini-DV, "Once" is a grand, effortless Irish musical povera (filmed for 100,000 euro), written and directed by Carney, who was for several years in the fine band The Frames with star-composer Glen Hansard. (An NPR commentator memorably dubbed Hansard "a longtime master of sublimely melodramatic sad-bastard music.") Carney works at some very sophisticated insights about the representation of music on film and also how one walks, talks, lives, breathes, stumbles, fumbles or triumphs while trying to fashion any form of art. Layers peel away, their preconceptions of each other (and ours of them) fall away and Hansard's music, as urgent and lovely as ever, grows in collaboration with someone who turns out not only to be a classical pianist, but a good lyricist and a fine singer. The film's clarity about the happenstance of fruitful collaboration is rare. (In the real world, Hansard and Irglová had already written and performed together.)

There's a whiff of the succinct romance of David Lean's "Brief Encounter," a sing-a-long (in Hansard's own gaff) hints at James Joyce's short story, "The Dead," and the place of the young Czech woman in contemporary Ireland suggests the change in the Irish mindset after the "Celtic Tiger," or vast economic boom that began in the 1990s. But that is not text, those are smart, lovely undercurrents: text in the tale is moments, moments such as the look on The Guy's face when he catches the disappointment on The Girl's face after a clumsy, presumptuous pass.

Like with a song, each listener invests a different measure of heart and hope in this boy-meets-girl perplex. The pair birth a song, they bond beyond romance that's the clothesline for their ample charm. There's nothing oblique, only merely suggestive--like lyrics. Songs are omnipresent in movies and filmmakers are constantly plying the power of music.

But the portrayal of music hardly ever works on screen. Why? Do you have a CD player, an iPod? You swim and surface in a sea of song by day and night. You walk the walk, hope in your head, song in your ears, going slowly deaf perhaps, but the narrative of your waking consciousness is scored, and you would not give that up for the world. You walk through this movie, not once, but every sunny hopeful moment you listen to music, shuffling faster toward the horizon line.

Even essential French film theorist Andre Bazin would likely have embraced this small wonder: he believed the long take and documentary-style elements suggested a greater truth than editing. You, dear reader, could have made this movie. (Carney told me that "Once" should look like anyone's home videos posted on YouTube.)

The music under the final scenes is a reprise of a song called "When Your Mind's Made Up." We've heard it before. We've been there. We're here. It packs an immense wallop: this is how pop works; this is how songs happen in our lives. It is a man's voice, then a woman's voice, in harmony, where the singers (and listeners) can but smile. This is the look (and sound) of love--heartfelt, unabashed and ultimately at farthest remove from the saccharine that is sentimentality.

Kurt Vonnegut famously remarked that music was proof of the existence of God. "Once," to me, is proof of the potential of movies and of love and friendship and creative bonds, of more life in the time that we have in a life that can grow beyond boundaries.

You can hear the songs at http://www.myspace.com/oncethemovie

The Accidental Musical: Once | The House Next Door | Slant ... Todd VanDerWerf

The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]

Once (2006) | PopMatters Daynah Burnett

Rude Reviews [Simon Cameron]

PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]

New York Sun [Jayanthi Daniel]

National Public Radio [Bob Mondello]

Once Mike D’Angelo

FilmStew.com [Brett Buckalew]

ONCE - Film Journal International Frank Lovece

OhmyNews [Howard Schumann]

Once | PopMatters Rachel Kipp

EyeForFilm.co.uk The Exile

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

DVD Verdict [Daniel MacDonald]

DVD Talk [Preston Jones]

DVD Talk [Olie Coen]

Blu-rayDefinition.com [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Movie Metropolis - Blu-ray [James Plath]

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas]

DoBlu.com Blu-ray [Christopher Zabel]

Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]

Film Intuition: Blu-ray [Jen Johans]

Exclaim! (Radheyan Simonpillai)

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Theo Alexander]

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

Zero for Conduct [Michael Atkinson]

TV Guide [Ken Fox]

Once | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks

The Japan Times [Kaori Shoji]

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

TheClevelandFan [Mitch Cyrus]

Austin Chronicle [Toddy Burton]

San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]

Chicago Tribune [Brett Buckalew]

'Once' more, with feeling Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune

Once (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New York Times A.O. Scott

ONCE | Listen and Stream Free Music, Albums, New ... - MySpace

BEGIN AGAIN B+ 90

USA (104 mi) 2013 Official site

Oddly enough, the beginning of this film plays out much like the Coen brother’s Inside Llewyn Davis (2012), where a singer performs alone to a relatively disinterested audience in the dark smoky confines of a small club in the East Village of New York, including a clever somewhat literary use of flashback sequences to show what led up to that moment, where the heart of the film draws a line in the sand between studio processed music and a voice of authenticity, where a common theme in both is refusing to sell out to a faceless corporate music industry that for all practical purposes wants to reshape your songs in their image. Despite the fact you’re the artist and creator, they’re the ones that end up lining their pockets, earning nine dollars out of every ten. That tradition is called capitalism, and many an artist has lost their soul trying to make it in the crass and exploitive atmosphere that is the music business. Made by the director of ONCE (2006), which was turned into a hit Tony award-winning musical on Broadway in 2012, winning eight Tony awards including Best Musical, John Carney was a former bass player in the Irish rock group The Frames in the early 90’s, whose lead singer Glen Hansard starred in his earlier film as the writer and singer of most of the songs, where the beauty of the film was paralleling a budding personal relationship with the collaborative artistic process of making music, turning it into a joyful and uplifting experience, much as Craig Brewer did in HUSTLE & FLOW (2005), two films that thrive on authentic atmosphere and inspiring performances, turning into exhilarating musical love fests. Carney again features a similar storyline, where he seems to have his finger on the pulse of the music business, which has undergone drastic changes in the last decade, where the prevalence of artists putting their own music out on YouTube or iTunes has altered the playing field, allowing the artists themselves instead of some record company to determine their own destiny. This individualized shift in marketing has led to more intimate musical releases that are not burdened with a mass-produced sound that makes every song sound the same. While the songs here are not on the same level as those used in ONCE, they are instead far more toned down to reflect a quiet softness of the female character, nonetheless there’s an authentic degree of sweetness and sincerity from Keira Knightley’s performance (that includes singing her own songs) to generate appeal.

Carney, who started out making music videos for The Frames, seems to specialize in creating “moments of intimacy” both in the musical numbers and in the developing personal relationships, where the entire film seems to be a collection of small and often forgotten moments that people have a tendency to overlook, but here they’re magnified into magical realms through a healing power of music that comes to personify Carney’s area of expertise. The film actually starts out rather amateurishly, as the songs are poorly lip-synched, which causes a needless distraction, while Knightley as Greta is forced unwillingly to sing one of her songs onstage, where there’s little to no appeal in her performance. Simultaneously, Mark Ruffalo as Dan the A & R man, a guy responsible for finding and signing new music talent, is a hard corps alcoholic whose life is tailspinning away from him, already separated from his wife Miriam (Catherine Keener), a musical journalist, and their teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld), where in the early scenes he’s little more than a disgrace and an embarrassment, where in no time at all he’s kicked to the curb from the indie record label that he founded, spending the rest of the day drinking his troubles away. If all of this sounds a bit pat and formulaic, it is, even uncomfortably so. But not to worry, as that’s about to change when Carney rewinds the tape back to Greta’s first nightclub performance where Dan is seen sitting at the bar, and in his state of inebriation he hears something altogether different, which suddenly takes shape onscreen even though it’s only playing in his head, where like Disney’s FANTASIA (1940) other instruments suddenly appear onstage and start playing themselves, adding drums, cello, and piano, even a violin, where this sheepishly awkward performance that everyone else hears suddenly develops a sound. Dan blurts out his ideas that he wants to record her, handing out his business card (where he was fired), where he has to admit he’s dead drunk and that his life is in such turmoil that it would be hard for anyone to take him seriously, but he’s emphatically optimistic about her song. The urgency of his intentions are met with appropriate suspicion and disbelief, as who would believe that guy? Fortunately in the modern era we can Google people’s names and Greta discovers he was an influential force in the music industry, actually reading out loud what it says about him when they meet the next day. Dan, however could care less about the past, and is a rush of enthusiasm about the possibilities of their future working together.

The backstory with Greta is far more intriguing, as she was professionally and romantically involved with fledgling rock star Dave Kohl (Adam Levine from Maroon 5) for the past five years, co-writing his songs, where his career took off after one of his songs was featured in a hit movie. As he cashes in on his success, Greta gets left behind and cheated on, and despite coming to New York to be with him, she was on her way out of town until Dan’s proposition stopped her in her tracks, as he wants to record an entire album of her songs, but they’ll have to do it on the fly, as they don’t have access to a recording studio. Out of nothing, things start to materialize, as they decide to record songs in various outdoor New York street locations, hiring a bunch of student nobodies that are thrilled to be working anywhere outside the classroom, borrowing a few seasoned musicians from artists that Dan helped along the way, including rapper CeeLo Green as Troublegum, whose hilarity is only surpassed by a surprising humanity in his character. The street locations elevate the film into rare territory, becoming an impressionistic tribute to New York itself which is impressively rhapsodized in music, much like Woody Allen’s MANHATTAN (1979), saturating the screen in a sumptuous glow of romanticism, wondrously shared through a playlist of their favorite songs from their iPods, heightening the film with a rapturous feeling of love in the air. Most of the music is written by Gregg Alexander of the New Radicals, though Glen Hansard also contributed the first song recorded in an alleyway called “Coming Up Roses,” Keira Knightley - Coming Up Roses (Begin Again ... - YouTub YouTube (3:14), where the sequence of song recordings come together like the mad crescendo of Busby Berkeley numbers in FOOTLIGHT PARADE (1933). This rush of energy is the appeal of the film, as the initially dour and awkwardly uninteresting characters suddenly surge with a newfound belief in themselves, where their electrical connection is felt throughout the entire cast, becoming wonderfully infectious. Carney has a marvelous eye for small, unembellished moments, as Dan tries to reconnect with his family, especially his aloof daughter Violet, where there are poignant, beautifully written scenes of Greta and Violet with Dan tagging along where he doesn’t even have to say a word, which is only magnified later when they all come together in a Beatles rooftop LET IT BE (1970) moment that feels spontaneously alive. The film captures the joyous spirit of personal discovery, and while it’s bathed in musical romanticism, the overriding power is this unique emotional candor that thrives on the revelatory experiences of life itself.

Begin Again | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Cath Clarke

Avoid this film like E coli if your instinctive reaction to all things infectiously sweet and sincere is spontaneous toe curling. The director is John Carney, who made the scruffy-gorgeous musical ‘Once’ for pennies on the streets of Dublin. Here he repeats the formula with proper money and stars. Keira Knightley is Greta, an English songwriter in New York who’s just been dumped by her rock-star boyfriend (we know something’s up when he starts growing twattish facial hair). Greta is singing a wrist-slitty break-up song at an open-mic night when she’s spotted by Dan, a washed-up record producer out on a bender (Mark Ruffalo: arrest that man, he’s too charming). Together they make an album using the sounds of New York as a backdrop.

‘Begin Again’ in no way has the rough-around-the-edges ring of truth of ‘Once’ – or the brilliant songs. And Carney can’t meet a cliché without tippy-toeing very close to it. But what makes it special is that it’s not another romance about finding a man. It’s about finding your people, about being a bit lost in your twenties and not knowing who you are or what you want to be. And it’s got bucketfuls of charm.

Slant Magazine [David Lee Dallas]

Inebriation and cinema often exist in paradoxical relation to each other: Excepting the broad comedy of The Hangover and its ilk, the tendency among films about drunkenness is to err on the side of sobriety in style and execution. For every Bad Santa there are a dozen films like Leaving Las Vegas and Affliction that view alcoholism from the outside in, observing their subjects with sympathetic but icy reserve, the camera functioning as silent, note-scribbling therapist. Begin Again is the rare film that, in charting the antics of its frequently inebriated protagonist, Dan (Mark Ruffalo), feels drunk itself. Constantly lurching forward at a woozy but rapid rhythm, obsessively revisiting certain scenes while bulldozing through others, the film has a reckless, expressionist energy that offsets the simplicity of its story and characterizations. It lives in the high and not in the comedown, even though its characters are often stalled and wallowing.

Begin Again's true focal point isn't Dan or his demons, but the creative impulse as alchemic entity. This abstract theme finds narrative manifestation in the platonic union between Dan, a struggling music producer when he isn't on the bottle, and Greta (Keira Knightley), a reclusive singer-songwriter healing from a bad breakup. They're united only by their shared passion for music; dissimilar not only in age and experience, but also ideology (she renounces fame while he courts it), they tread around each other with equal parts curiosity and caution. Their sense of interpersonal unease never settles, but rather ebbs and flows as they collaborate on an ambitious project, an album of Greta's songs all live-recorded in various locations around New York City.

The outdoor recording is a romantic but naïve gambit, and indicative of director John Carney's inclination toward fairy-tale storytelling. After a series of initial setbacks, things go a bit too swimmingly for Dan, Greta, and their album, with money suddenly easy to procure and personal reconciliations fueling boons of creativity. The film works better when the exultant power that the duo finds in music is somewhat at odds with their messy, thoroughly unromantic personal lives. The disharmony between their personal dissatisfactions and their artistic passions helps to articulate how the creative impulse can be a drug itself, an escape from the mundane trappings of daily life. Begin Again's ecstatic energy builds out of a place of sorrow and disillusionment, even if Dan and Greta's individual storylines can feel two-dimensional: The former's estranged relationship with his wife, Miriam (Catherine Keener), and teenage daughter, Violet (Hailee Steinfeld), is only presented in brief, broad strokes, while the latter's tumultuous past with sudden superstar Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) takes predictable, flattening turns. Yet these strands adequately function as the banal triggers for Begin Again's quixotic skyward rush.

Dan and Greta's album, seen through from drunken conception to completion and distribution, is the nucleus around which every scene and character orbits, and as such Begin Again lives or dies by the quality of its original music. Written and produced by Gregg Alexander of the New Radicals, Greta's songs are immanently appealing and listenable, but hardly spectacular, which works in the film's favor: Its characters are talented though far from geniuses, finding joy in the making of music rather than in the final product itself, but the album is still absolutely believable as a career-making hit. Original music is also carefully integrated into the fabric of Begin Again's plot: A tender love song penned by Greta for Dave becomes the contested terrain of their fallout, as Dave reinterprets the song and Greta disparages him for it. The song's distortion over time, its multiple incarnations widely varying in quality, affirms the film's greater understanding of music as mutable, transformative organism, different to every person who hears it, but nonetheless a powerful, even sublime facilitator of human connection.

Independent Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]

Sometime past the halfway point of Begin Again, ex-record executive and occasional drunk Dan (Mark Ruffalo) tells his new discovery, the British singer-songwriter Gretta (Keira Knightley), something that could very well be the driving force behind director John Carney’s aesthetic. “Music turns everyday banalities into these transcendent pearls of wisdom.” In both this new film and his highly regarded 2006 movie, Once, Carney, a musician himself, leans so heavy on music for narrative, song lyrics mark moments of transformation in his characters’ lives that transcend exposition.

With Once, Carney brought together a self-conscious yet sincere Irish guitarist (Glen Hansard) and an animated yet awkward Czech pianist (Markéta Irglová). Though they get to know each other in conversation, they actually seem to fall in love through song. The film collected one of the better-earned Oscars for original song in many years because the ballad “Falling Slowly” was, unlike most original song nominees, so much more than accompaniment to an end credits sequence or a musical interlude in the film’s action. It resonated through the film on a narrative level while transcending the traditional narrative of a film. Carney granted the songs in Once, which were written by the movie’s leads, space to move the narrative by allowing them to unfold from the musicians for long sequences, like the equivalent of musical numbers. Once stands as one of the most subtle musicals of the post-musical era.

Eight years later, Carney returns with a film built on a similar formula, this time in New York City and presenting two different stories of love, one of loss and another of redemption, which unfold against a slight critique of the music business. It’s not Once, which was set in Dublin and focused solely on the couple, but it still has elements that will charm many fans of Carney’s previous film. Despite a polish far removed from the low-budget intimacy of Once, at its core, Begin Again maintains the essential formula that made the former film beguiling. Many of the film’s turning points happen via song lyrics. Upon first-listen, Gretta’s music gives Dan renewed hope for his role in the music industry. Gretta also learns of the infidelity of her boyfriend and songwriting partner Dave (Adam Levine) a few seconds into hearing a new song he has just recorded.

As much as the film is about this young creative couple in turmoil, Begin Again spends equal time following Dan, a divorcé who has lost faith in contemporary music (an early scene of him talking back to demo CDs and throwing them out his car window is hilarious in its take-down of pop music tropes). More emotionally crippling, however, is how little faith he has in becoming the father his teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld) needs. The gap between his ex-wife Miriam (Catherine Keener) has entered a place of ambivalent malaise, as the parents have resigned themselves to making a go of a sense of family for the sake of Violet, even though the father moved out of the house long ago. Gretta becomes less a love interest for Dan than a comrade in disheartened arms. She also has her own sense of cynicism about the world of music, as she has no interest in sharing her autobiographical songs outside of her former collaboration with Dave, who seems on his merry way to pop stardom without her. However, Dan and Gretta share a similar passion for music that will prove hard to keep them from working together.

It’s an easy relationship to buy, as within the film’s first few minutes, both the director’s and actors’ affection for these characters shines through, making the movie an easy film to ride along with and fall for, scene after scene. At the start of Begin Again, the morose, freshly-heartbroken Gretta hesitantly takes the stage at an open-mic night at the coaxing of a less shameful musician friend Steve (James Corden who frequently lightens the film’s mood as perky comic relief). She sings a song that not so subtly alludes to suicide by subway while most the bar’s patrons talk over it. Dan, however, seems captivated, and when the song, entitled “A Step You Can’t Take Back,” arrives at its quiet end, he’s the only one applauding. Just why is revealed in drawn-out flashback sequences, as we learn of both Gretta and Dan’s personal baggage leading up to their meeting in separate sequences. Though these Groundhog Day-like narrative turns might sound gimmicky, it works to keep the film’s sprightly pace and speaks to how important experiences are to the enchantments of a song that comes along at the right time. Though the song is a dreary affair, Dan is ripe to receive it after a rough day where he forgets Violet’s age, gets beat up in front of her for running out on a bar tab and is fired from his record label by his former business partner Saul (a slick and elegant Mos Def). By the time he arrives at the open-mic performance, Dan is primed to get lost in Gretta’s downer of a ditty. Despite the fact that she is only up there lightly strumming an acoustic guitar, he can hear and— in what may be too precious a fantastical representation— actually see an invisible arrangement, as instruments start playing themselves behind her spare picking and silky voice. Dan eventually convinces her to make a record with him, outdoors with the ambient din of New York City as just another element of her songs. Several songs unfold over the course of the film that show Gretta growing as a confident bachelorette while finding her voice. Meanwhile, Dan regains his personal confidence in both the industry and as a father and provider.

If there’s one thing lacking in Begin Again it lies in the strength of the songs, this time written by pop music songwriter Gregg Alexander, former frontman of the New Radicals and writer of hits for the likes of musicians from Santana to Boyzone. Outside of the film’s narrative context, Alexander’s songs come across as a tad saccharine and lyrically heavy-handed. That they work within the film, however, stands as testament to Carney’s filmmaking talent. There’s heart and humor between the film’s two leads, and the dialogue never feels forced. That their relationship never becomes romantic reveals a strength of their devotion to their music project, and the importance of their own private pasts, once again consistent to the dimension of the presence of baggage and experience that informs the music.

Though Carney is working with recognizable actors and high-profile musicians (including a scene-stealing CeeLo Green) celebrity never overshadows the film’s essential allure. Levine’s character never has to do much to be the unlikable louse who breaks his partner’s heart. After their breakup, he grows facial hair, from awkward mustache to full-on bushy beard. As he grows both more obnoxious and distant, the facial hair becomes a grander barrier. Knightley, who also does her own singing, infuses Gretta with a natural, fragile charisma that never betrays the character’s strength as a confident musician.

The director juggles the characters well for the duration of the film, and the complexity of multiple storylines merging never throws the drama off balance. As befitting the abstraction of music as narrative element, Carney prefers working in montage to move the film’s action along. There must be about 10 montage sequences in the entire movie. Even without musical accompaniment, the film’s editing features cuts pregnant with action left off-screen but still resonant in the characters’ growth and behavior, as if every second of character development matters, even the moments off-screen. As in Once, Carney employs handheld camera that never feels jarring. It brings an earthy quality to the film that brings the audience closer to the characters. In the end, it’s all about intimacy and nothing captures it better than shared musical experiences, even if the songs can sometimes sound silly.

Tasha Robinson "Begin Again" - The Dissolve

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Spectrum Culture [Forrest Cardamenis]

The Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]

Sound On Sight JR Kinnard

Little White Lies [Sophie Monks Kaufman]

Cinemixtape [J. Olson]

The Modest Pleasures of Begin Again Christopher Orr from The Atlantic

The Playlist [Kevin Jagernauth]

PopMatters [Jesse Hassenger] also reviewing THEY CAME TOGETHER

Begin Again - Directed by John Carney • Film ... - Exclaim! Matthew Ritchie

Digital Spy [Emma Dibdin]

Twitch [Peter Martin]

Film.com [Laremy Legel]

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

Pop Matters [Alex Ramon]

EFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

Qwipster.net [Vince Leo]

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

The Evening Standard [David Sexton]

Begin Again (2013) Movie Review from Eye for Film Angus Wolfe Murray

Interview: Once Director John Carney Begins Again ... Edward Douglas interview from Not Coming, July 1, 2014

'Begin Again': Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

Guardian [Paul MacInnes]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

'Begin Again' review: Adam Levine and Keira Knightley duet ... Stephen Whitty from The NJ Star-Ledger

'Begin Again': A Keira Knightley musical that misses too ... Ann Hornaday from the Washington Post

Begin Again won't let Mark Ruffalo play a person | City Pages Alan Scherstuhl

Austin Chronicle [William Goss]

'Begin Again's' music more appealing than its story - Los ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

Begin Again - Roger Ebert Susan Wloszczyna

'Begin Again,' From the 'Once' Director, John Carney ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

SING STREET B 88

Ireland Great Britain USA (106 mi) 2016 ‘Scope

I remember the 1980’s with somewhat of a blush. No man’s hair should be bigger than his girlfriend’s. But that was the time. Dublin in Technicolor. In reality it was monochrome and in the grip of a recession, but on video tape, you could be transported. You could wear what you liked, and the more outrageous the better. Anything to wind up the jackbooted skinheads on Dublin’s north side. Make-up on a boy drove rockers wild, and the teachers wilder. Thank God for Bowie, who made all the black eyes okay. And allowed people to find out who they were. My brother gave me the gift of music through my first guitar. We formed a band. In truth, at the same stage, U2 were not as good as the kids in Sing Street. In truth most films you’ll see this year won’t touch Sing Street…

—Bono, U2 Frontman Bono Gives 'Sing Street' A Ringing Endorsement ...

Another musical fantasia from John Carney, former bass player of the Irish rock band The Frames, while also shooting their music videos, and creator of such optimistically appealing films as Once (2006) and Begin Again (2013), films that express how music inspires and changes people’s lives, resorting to a more formulaic boy meets girl narrative this time, yet it still retains the youthful exuberance of impressionable, coming-of-age kids that dream of a better life. While it has a kind of fairy tale feel throughout, often mixing in wish fulfillment dream imagery, the dire social realist setting at its core grounds the film in Dublin in the 1980’s during an economic recession, where the kids and their parents actually feel stuck in time with no way out. With the feeling that life has passed them by and left them by the wayside, 14-year old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and his rebellious older brother Brendan, Jack Reynor, easily the best thing in the film, a Jack Black style character from SCHOOL OF ROCK (2003) where an entire film could be made around his character, have to endure the snide comments and constant bickering of their hapless and loveless parents who only stay together for financial reasons. While Brendan is something of an outcast who stays stoned, holed up in his room with his record collection, his brotherly advice, and exquisite taste in rock music, provides the humor and synergistic push to keep Conor wanting more out of life than anything he ever got. Like an alter-ego, or a Jiminy Cricket voice of conscious, it’s really Brendan’s dream that Conor follows, beautifully expressed here in a moment of brotherly pride and tough love as he carves out a path for someone else to follow, Sing Street Movie CLIP - Older Brother (2016) - Jack Reynor, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo Movie HD (1:05). While Conor is pulled from private school and sent to a nearby public school run by sadistic priests, he is quickly acclimated to the predatory nature of things, where intelligence is ridiculed and bullies prey on the weaknesses of others while priests turn a blind eye. The innocence of the times, however, is reflected in the earliest stages of the music video, where Brendan is euphoric how music is literally transformed through the power of images, SING STREET - Duran Duran Clip - The Weinstein Company YouTube (1:09).

While Conor quickly gets picked on as well, an easy target as he’s a good student, but he can’t help noticing the daily presence of a gorgeous girl standing all alone, where nobody has the nerve to talk to her, though apparently others have tried but gotten shut down. So Conor gives it a go, finding her mysteriously alluring, Raphina (Lucy Boynton), asking if she wants to appear in his video, claiming he’s a singer in a local rock band. Incredulously, she takes an interest, as she turns out to be an aspiring model who could use the exposure. Like an answer to his prayers, Conor is dizzy with delight afterwards, hardly able to contain himself, setting out immediately in search of a group of musicians to form a band. Identifying his best friend, the diminutive Darren (Ben Carolan) as the manager, his first recruit is a sensational multi-talented instrumentalist Eamonn (Mark McKenna), who can apparently play any instrument with ease, but serves primarily as the lead guitarist, choosing a black dude Ngig (Percy Chamuruka) simply for his aloofness and look of cool, but the guy can play keyboards. Before you know it, they rehearse a bunch of 80’s cover songs in Eamonn’s living room and record a demo tape. But when Brendan hears it, he smashes it to pieces, calling cover music nothing more than junk, claiming if they want to have sex with a girl they’ll have to take chances, claiming rock music is all about attitude and risk, Sing Street Exclusive Clip: The Last Thing the World Needs Is Another Cover Band (1:03). With that, Conor and Eamonn turn into a Lennon and McCartney writing team, reeling off several original songs, where they finally have a reason to call Raphina and make that music video. It turns out she knows more than modeling, adding hairstyles and make-up while reshaping the look of the band, even changing Conor’s name to Cosmo, resulting in the raucously hilarious silliness of a song recorded in a back alley somewhere, SING STREET - THE RIDDLE OF THE MODEL Music Video Clip (1:45). With Ferdia Walsh-Peelo singing on all the songs, the playfulness of the fun they’re having overshadows Conor’s original motivation, finding time to be with the enthralling and strangely beguiling girl.

Conor develops a new persona as Cosmo, suddenly familiar with the likes and looks of Robert Smith in The Cure - Inbetween Days on Vimeo (3:00), M - Pop Muzik (Official Video) - YouTube (3:13), and Daryl Hall & John Oates - Maneater - YouTube (4:24), growing his hair longer, bleaching his bangs and wearing make-up to school, which the priests find an abomination and a direct confrontation to their authoritarian rule, using brutally cruel, strong-armed tactics to force him to capitulate. While Conor is a somewhat opaque, sympathetic figure, where it’s hard to find offense with anything he does, the more intriguing figures are Brendan, whose musical mind is tapped into throughout, and the elusive beauty of Raphina, whose inner complexity is surprising, as she is always more than she seems, becoming a darker, more tragic figure over time, the damsel in distress that is always worth fighting for. When Conor reports to his brother that she already has a boyfriend, recalling that they were listening to Genesis in his car, Brendan reminds him, “No girl is ever going to take a guy seriously that listens to Genesis.” The on-again and off-again relationship that develops between Raphina and Conor exists throughout, always dropping off tapes of his new songs at her door, where she becomes the central force driving his every move even as she disappears for long stretches of time. Meanwhile the band keeps popping up in their own music videos, creating a lighthearted world of pop fantasy that is continually challenged by the more searing realism of the times, where the songs represent the only affirmative hope to be found anywhere in the vicinity, SING STREET - BEAUTIFUL SEA Music Video Clip YouTube (1:12). These kids want nothing of the drab world surrounding them, where the romantic inclinations between Conor and Raphina grow more magically surreal, where the delirium of teenage love exists largely in the delusions of the imagination, where some of the more brilliantly conceived scenes are just the two of them alone, where the line between fantasy and reality continually co-mingles. One of the better set pieces in the film shows the band playing at the senior prom, creating a song that is beat-for-beat the same rhythm section as “Maneater” in Drive It Like You Stole It - YouTube (3:37), where what exists in Conor’s head grows to ecstatic dimensions, always infused with a hyper-realistic romanticism that becomes the guiding light of the film, idealizing a kind of world one hopes and dreams for, as opposed to the one they inevitably find themselves stuck in, SING STREET - Adam Levine "Go Now" Music Video - YouTube (3:50). With a belief that brighter days are ahead, the magical realism of the finale is as tragically naïve as it is exhilarating, where one is left in a euphoric haze of youth and unbridled enthusiasm.

Slant Magazine [Kenji Fujishima]

There's no doubting that John Carney is an audience favourite at Sundance. His directorial debut Once took home the festival's Audience Award in 2007 - before going on to more critical acclaim and an Oscar for Best Original Song - and his latest retro school musical Sing Street had an early morning 1200-strong Eccles Theatre crowd literally dancing in the aisles along to the credits.

Certainly those who grew up in the 70s and 80s will find much to enjoy in his nostalgic 1985-set drama, with Carney's first-love will they/won't they romance playing out like a feature episode of school soap Grange Hill against a backdrop of terrific music pastiche, which emphasises some of the sillier, moody elements of 80s pop while celebrating what was best about them. A sort of classroom Commitments that finds charm in naivety. The big question is whether younger audiences less familiar with the original music by Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and the like will find the same enticements - particularly as there are no big names in the younger cast.

Perhaps, I ought to say, no big names yet, because Ferdia Walsh-Peelo and up-and-coming actress Lucy Boynton could well establish themselves courtesy of their roles here. Walsh-Peelo is perfect as 14-year-old Conor, not only because he has a terrific voice, but also because he is only 16 now, so is able to bring a childlike vulnerability to a character on the verge of adulthood. The film is set against the economic woes of mid-80s Ireland, when many people quit the country in search of a better life in London. Conor's family aren't immune to the downturn and he becomes a fish out of water in a new school after his mum (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and dad (Aiden Gillen) decide to save some cash at the same time as realising their marriage may be beyond redemption in a country which still forbids divorce.

Synge Street School - a real Dublin establishment which old boy Carney insists is much changed from its depiction here - is a rough-around-the-edges Catholic, run by the despotic Brother Baxter (Don Wycherley). It is outside the school gates that Conor first claps eyes on Raphina (Boynton), an old-beyond-her-years teen, an aspiring model, whose double-denim, hoop earrings and perm look carefully copied from the pages of Just Seventeen. In a bid to get closer to her, he declares he wants her to be in his band's next video. The only problem being, he doesn't have a band, a situation he soon rectifies with the help of up-and-coming likely lad Darren (Ben Carolan), rabbit-loving musical genius Eammon (Mark McKenna) and the school's token black kid Ngig (Percy Chamburuka) among others. The biggest shame of the plot is that despite initially looking as though it might subvert expectations regarding Ngig, it ultimately uses him as little more than set-dressing - although he is not the only band character who is under-written.

Carney is in his element in these early stages of the band, deftly portraying them as just bad enough but improving, so as to keep the musical numbers coming, while the costume and hair department have great fun showing the fickle nature of 80s fashions, as Conor swaps his Simon Le Bon affectations for Robert Smith and then Tony Hadley under the tutelage of his brother Brendan (Jack Reynor). The music is a perfect match for the era, with Riddle of The Model - and the gang's rough-shot video - marrying the flamboyance of a time when pop promos were considered The Best Thing Ever to some Dublin grit as Raphina stands moodily in an alley while the boys gurn away behind the instruments.

Unlike many band films, the group play second fiddle to the romance plot and while it never breaks the mould, Boynton and Walsh-Peelo have a watchable charm. It is the musical moments when the film is at its best, however, particularly towards the inevitable school disco climax, which sees a grimy rehearsal room transformed into a 1950s style Back To The Future prom night to the accompaniment of the Hall & Oates inspired Drive It Like You Stole It. Carney simply loves the music of the era and adores these kids, and his affection is infectious, helping you to forget the more standard issue elements of the plot in favour of embracing its fairy-tale flourishes.

With Sing Street, writer-director John Carney's cinematic themes—budding musicians and the music they strive to create and perform, with the possibility of romance always hovering in the air—remain the same, but the melodies keep changing, though not for the better. His 2007 debut, Once, may have been a sentimental fantasy at its core, but by applying a handheld vérité style to the material and encouraging a sense of improvisatory looseness from his actors, the film exuded a feeling of lived-in honesty that refreshed the story's clichés. Some of that attention to realism could still be found in his bigger-budget follow-up, Begin Again, but the film ultimately felt more sugary, especially in its simplistic take on the eternal conflict between maintaining artistic integrity and selling out for the sake of a wider audience—and it's no surprise that Carney was for the former.

Now, with Sing Street, all traces of grit have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness. It hardly matters that Carney's latest is a period piece, set in Dublin in 1985 during a period of economic turmoil that saw many Irish leave the country for better opportunities in London—or that Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and the rest of his teenage band deal more in Second British Invasion-style synth-pop and new wave than the acoustic balladry at the center of Carney's previous films. There's barely anything new here that Carney didn't dramatize more incisively before.

Conor's own personal circumstances aren't even terribly original. As a result of his ever-bickering parents (Aidan Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy) not having enough money to keep him in a Jesuit school, he's forced to attend Synge Street, a lesser Christian Brothers school where he endures the usual indignities, especially from the bullying Barry (Ian Kenny) and a headmaster, Baxter (Don Wycherley), so bent on uniformity that he punishes Conor for not wearing black shoes like the rest of the students. Naturally, music becomes his outlet for letting off steam—but only when he blurts out to Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a strikingly dressed and styled young woman he notices across the street from school one day, that he's in a band about to shoot a music video that he begins to seriously entertain the notion of becoming a musician. Conor subsequently, and with the help of a wannabe business entrepreneur, Darren (Ben Carolan), recruits fellow school peers like multi-talented instrumentalist Eamon (Mark McKenna) to try to turn that fib into reality.

It's a tribute to how utterly uninterested Carney is in dramatizing genuine struggle that he can's even be bothered to depict the step-by-step development of these young musicians; in his fantasy vision of the world, all it takes is a few records loaned by Conor's brother, Brendan (Jack Reynor), for him to grasp the basics of songwriting, and one long day for Conor's band to learn the finer points of making a music video. Perhaps actual effort would only distract from Conor's real goal out of all this: to get the girl. And whereas said girl in both Once and Begin Again exhibited a sense of agency, Raphina is only as a glorified catalyst for Conor's maturation.

Raphina, who lives in an all-girls home and says she's planning to go to London to kickstart a modeling career, seems to act entirely in relation to the dictates of patriarchal ideology, but it isn't as if any of the other characters are less stereotypically drawn—most egregiously the one black band member, Ngig (Percy Chamburuka), who, after an introduction in which he punctures Conor, Darren, and Eamon's racist assumptions about him, fades into the background, framed only in the context of Conor's coming of age and given less of a personality than Raphina, Eamon, and much of the rest of the cast.

Sing Street sadly reveals the limits of a filmmaker coasting on sincerity and high spirits alone. John Carney may wholeheartedly believe in the power of music to bring people of different walks of life together and even pave the way for a brighter future, but instead of allowing us to reach such a conclusion organically, he's now hectoring us instead.

Sundance Review: 'Once' Director John Carney's Joyously E | The ... Noel Murray from The Playlist

You know the problem with most fictional rock bands? They don’t write good bridges. Whenever a motley group of kids in a movie or TV show come together to make music (and to woo the opposite sex), whoever’s in charge of the original soundtrack usually cooks up decent hooks, yet has a harder time coming up with strong verses or memorable mid-song changes. Pretend pop stars mostly play jingles —they don’t knock out realistic chart hits.

The band in John Carney’s “Sing Street” is an exception. Even the first song they write, a fairly goofy novelty number called “Riddle of the Model,” has an unusually complex structure for something that a bunch of working-class Irish teens would have worked up in an afternoon in 1985. As the story plays out, every couple of days the group’s frontman Conor (played by newcomer Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) pops by the flat of his guitarist Eamon (Mark McKenna), and the two of them write another fully realized pop-rock composition inspired by the Cure, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran or one of the other post-punk groups that appeared routinely in the U.K. in the 1980s. The music in “Sing Street” is so terrific that it strains credulity —it's only a problem if moviegoers would rather watch 105 minutes of sophomoric garage-rock, rather than the marvelously catchy tunes by Carney and veteran folk-pop musician Gary Clark.

Carney’s best-known for writing and directing “Once,” a low-budget film about a talented Dublin street musician (played by The Frames’ Glen Hansard) that came out of nowhere back in 2007 and bowled over Sundance audiences, made a lot money at the box office, won an Academy Award, and inspired a hit Broadway musical. The director followed that up with “Begin Again” (originally known as “Can a Song Save Your Life?” when it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013), starring Keira Knightley as a singer-songwriter who gets dumped by her rock star boyfriend and responds by recording her own brilliant album in the streets of New York City. What Carney’s first two musicals have in common is that their songs emerge naturally from the situation and were performed with the spontaneity and immediacy of a impromptu concert.

“Sing Street” is a little different, in that both the songs and the movie are more polished. The premise fictionalizes some of Carney’s own experiences as a teenager in Dublin, where he attended a tough Catholic school during an era when a depressed labor market was driving a lot of Irish folk to move to England. At the start of the film, Conor’s constantly bickering, underemployed parents (played by Aiden Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy) pull him out of his posh secondary school to save the family some money. At the new school, in between getting beaten up by skinheads and yelled at by priests, Conor forms a band called Sing Street, mainly to impress an older girl named Raphina (Lucy Boynton), who says she’s days away from shipping off to London to become a fashion model. He asks her to be in one of Sing Street’s videos before she goes, and then keeps coming up with more music so that he can spend more time with her. After several months, the band has enough of a repertoire to headline a school dance, and, truth be told, a set strong enough to get them booked into almost any rock club in Dublin.

This movie though isn’t really about the rise of a hot new band. Aside from Raphina, no one pays much attention to Sing Street: not club owners, not booking agents, and not label executives. Instead, the story is about Conor pulling himself up out bleak circumstances with the help of his hash-smoking guru of an older brother Brendan (wonderfully played by Jack Reynor). Brendan hands Conor stacks of albums as “homework” —everything from Hall & Oates to The Jam— and teaches him that the key to greatness in any endeavor is to risk being ridiculed. Carney has a lot of fun playing with mid-1980s pop fashion, with the band changing its look from week to week and song to song. But he’s ultimately making a movie that uses the real social problems of his home country as the backdrop for uplift.

Frankly, the film's plot is a little pat. It’s “boy meets girl” crossed with “underdog makes good,” and both its love interest and its oppressive Catholic school milieu are fairly pro forma. Still, as with “Once” and “Begin Again,” Carney makes great use of real locations, showing these boys singing their songs in cramped rooms, school auditoriums, back alleys and by the sea. And those songs are pretty great… maybe a little too great.

But then, the mark of a top-shelf rock ’n’ roll movie is how well it can capture the element of wish fulfillment. It’s entirely possible to hear the meticulously arranged and performed versions of Sing Street’s tunes as just figments of Conor’s imagination. In one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, Conor plans out a video shoot that goes horribly awry, and Carney quickly cuts away from the dire reality to what Conor had in his head, because the latter is also “real” in its way. What makes “Sing Street” such a joyously entertaining film (besides the songs) is that it thinks the best of its characters, and it presents them the way they’d like to think of themselves. When a kid in Dublin in 1985 picked up a guitar, he wanted to be The Edge. Carney, god bless him, lets it be so. [B+]

Flavorwire [Jason Bailey] The Last Musical Filmmaker: How John Carney Revived a Dying Movie Genre

John Carney rewrites his past as the bouncy pop musical Sing Street ... Tasha Robinson from The Verge

Movie Review: 'Once' Director John Carney's 'Sing Street' Is a Giddy ... Christopher Orr from The Atlantic

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

Cinemixtape [J. Olson]

Sing Street (2016) Movie Review - MovieQuotesandMore Ryan Grace

TwitchFilm [Jim Tudor]

Sing Street :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Andy Crump

Sing Street is a return to form for the director of Once | The Verge Chris Plante

Film Review: Sing Street Is My Favorite Film of the Year (So Far) | We ... Kelly Konda from We Minored in Film

Sing Street Review: A Fantastic, Rockin' Coming of Age 80s ... - Film Ethan Anderton from Slash Film

Vague Visages [Josh Slater-Williams]

'Sing Street': Sundance Review | Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Fionnuala Halligan

'Sing Street' Review: A Boy-Meets-Girl Band - WSJ Joe Morgenstern

The Film Stage [Jordan Raup]

'Sing Street' Review: The Next Great Musical From the ... - ScreenCrush Mike Sampson

Qwipster.net [Vince Leo]

Collider [Matt Goldberg]

Sing Street from Ireland, A Bigger Splash from Italy: Neglected realities Joanne Laurier from World Socialist Web Site

FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]

theartsdesk.com [Matthew Wright]

Review: Sing Street Honors the DIY Spirit | TIME Stephanie Zacharek

Sundance Swoons for 'Once' Director's 'Sing Street' | Criticwire Vikram Murthi

John Carney On His Autobiographical Musical 'Sing Street' Erin Whitney interview from Screencrush, January 29, 2016

Irish filmmaker John Carney gives the modern ... - Los Angeles Times Mark Olsen interview, April 20, 2016

Why Sing Street director John Carney regrets the film's ... - The Verge Tasha Robinson interview from The Verge, April 21, 2016

From 'Once' To 'Sing Street': Director John Carney Infuses Movies With ... Ann Marie Baldonado interview from NPR, May 4, 2016

John Carney: 'I'll never make a film with supermodels again' | Features ... Elisa Bray interview from The Independent, May 28, 2016

'Sing Street': Sundance Review - Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

'Sing Street' Review: John Carney Scores Once More With New ... Guy Lodge from Variety

Sing Street, film review: 'A tremendous sing along ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab

Sing Street review - teen zero to hero in three chord wonder from Once ... Jordan Hoffman from The Guardian

Sing Street review – pop goes the playground Mark Kermode from The Observer

Sing Street review: A New Romantic vision of Dublin in the 1980s Tara Brady from The Irish Times

South China Morning Post [James Marsh]

Toronto Film Scene [Andrew Parker]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Examiner.com [Michael Adams]

'Sing Street' sets an Irish coming-of-age story to an '80s pop beat - The ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

Young Irish star of 'Sing Street' looks forward, while its director looks ... Michael O’Sullivan from The Washington Post

Oregon Arts Watch [Eric D. Snider]

'Sing Street' cranks up great pop music and one ... - Los Angeles Times Katie Walsh

Sing Street | L.A. Weekly Alan Scherstuhl

Rogerebert.com [Sheila O'Malley]

Review: 'Sing Street' Is an '80s Love Affair, Hair Gel Required - The ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

Sing Street - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Caro, Niki

WHALE RIDER B 85

New Zealand Germany (101 mi) 2002

Witi Ihimaera is the first published Māori writer and is believed to have been sitting in his New York home one day overlooking the Hudson River when he saw a whale washed ashore. Inspired by stories of ancient tradition that streamed into his mind, over the next three weeks Mr. Ihimaera wrote The Whale Rider, a children’s novel steeped in Māori tradition. On the east coast of New Zealand, the Whangara people believe their presence on that site dates back a thousand years or more to a single ancestor, Paikea, who escaped death when his canoe capsized by riding to shore on the back of a whale. From then on, Whangara chiefs, always the first-born, always male, have been considered Paikea's direct descendants.

In the book, there are dual stream-of-conscience narratives between ancient whales traveling the ocean since time immemorial and the humorous, overweight uncle of a small girl living in the tiny coastal Māori village of Whangara, a girl deemed “not needed” by her devout grandfather, the aging chief of his people who believes only male descendents of Paikea can be chosen as the new leaders. The film version nearly eliminates the book’s mythic literary connection to the whales of the ancient past, which utilized the omnipresent voice of the whales as a transcendent living spirit, and replaces it with the narration of an 11-year old girl, named Paikea, the incandescently irresistible Keisha Castle-Hughes, who was nominated (but did not win) for a youngest ever Best Actress Academy Award. Tatum O’Neal was age 10 when she won in the Supporting Actress category.

Unfortunately the young girl Paikea becomes negatively objectified, diminished in the eyes of her grandfather simply by her sex which he steadfastly insists disqualifies her from being a chief. Part of the success of the film is along those lines, as it heightens this cultural discrepancy, where the hard reality of Māori people is barely touched upon and is instead fictionalized, and except for the harsh opening sequence, even Disneyized into PG proportions, turned into this perfectly innocent yet stubbornly persistent young girl who is inevitably portrayed as a victim. That scene at the school where she chokes up and cries for a few moments all but solidified my general unease with taking this film more seriously, yet for others, this was the high point in the film. My problem is that it resembles the typical Hollywood format of tugging on the heartstrings by manipulating the audience into thinking what the director wants you to think.

It’s very much an uplifting, though somewhat simplistic vision with a natural feel for Māori symbols and artifacts, where gorgeous ancient sounding music written by Lisa Gerrard provides the transcendental voices of the whales. The film, however, turns into a Māori ROCKY movie, as this young girl rises above the mediocrity that surrounds her, despite the undermining prejudice and meanness shown to her by her grandfather, who obviously loves her, but is too obsessed with finding a new male leader of his people and literally can’t be bothered with a girl. Through some kind of mystical, supernatural means, very much resembling the actions of a horse whisperer (only with whales), she reminds us that we are all connected to our pasts, and that all of us working together, not just those singled out by our leaders, can determine our future.

filmcritic.com (Jules Brenner) review [3/5]

In the beginning... actually, we have here two beginnings. Back in the mists, out of the blue, according to Maori tradition, the tribal founder Paikea rode to shore on the back of a whale. For a thousand years, his male heirs have succeeded him as chief. Yet in the here and now, myths are on the retreat. Chief Koro's grandson arrived stillborn, taking his mother with him, and sending his father abroad for good, leaving his twin sister Pai in the care of her grandparents. Pai grows up 'a bossy one'; yet Koro brusquely refuses to countenance the idea of a female heir. It's a film about belief that doesn't ask you to embrace the tribe's indigenous hocus-pocus so much as credit the strength such people might find in respecting their cultural identity. Koro has the strength of a stone; Pai's fluid free spirits are far more propitious. Their begrudged, teetering relationship is the heart of the film, and acted with suitably impassioned magnetism by Rawiri Paratene and Keisha Castle-Hughes. Around them, writer/director Niki Caro roots her characters in a landscape equal parts mundane and boundless, incorporates tantalising sea photography and Lisa's Gerrard's ambient soundtrack, and lifts off into a sublime, Elysian ending. (Based on a book by Witi Ihimaera).

VideoVista review Debbie Moon

The Whangara people of New Zealand cherish the memory of their ancestor Paikea's arrival in the land, riding on the back of a whale - a talent that his descendants, the tribal chiefs, are said to share. But when her twin brother dies at birth, proud, sparky Pai is left as the only heir - and girls are forbidden to serve as chiefs. Her gruff but loving grandfather brings her up, while grappling with the question of the succession. Her father is a successful artist who's turned his back on the old ways to live in Europe, and none of the boys of the tribe seem to have the necessary skills. Pai sets her heart on winning over her grandfather and attaining her birthright, but it's only when a natural catastrophe strikes that she can finally prove her worth...

Summarised, Whale Rider sounds like a Disney film, full of ethnic colour and faintly patronising moral lessons. But Niki Caro's triumphant first feature is far superior to any House of Mouse morality play. Capturing both the vitality and the fragility of the Maori culture, the film never shies from the problems facing an impoverished people caught between the old and the new. A sprinkling of humour, particularly from the down-to-earth women, certainly doesn't hurt, and the performances are excellent. Keisha Castle-Hughes, making her film debut as Pai, gives a superb performance as a vulnerable and determined child, bruised by the emotional chaos of broken families and the slow decay of traditions that she still understands and adores.

But what's most impressive about Whale Rider is the way that Caro mixes gritty realism with a genuine, unashamed spirituality, a feeling for the land and the people and the links between them. The turmoil in the tribe is reflected in the natural world, and it seems entirely right that it should be. A beautiful, haunting film about change and continuity, Whale Rider is one of the best debut films in years, and proof that New Zealand has more to offer world audiences than just hobbits. Not to be missed.

A good selection of DVD extras includes a substantial making-of featurette (27 minutes) with interesting contributions from the cast, an 11-minute documentary on the art of making traditional Maori canoes, and an understated director's commentary. There's also Castle-Hughes' impressive screen test, and a full range of trailers - including radio spots! Now that's thorough...

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak

In Maori legend the whale rider was "a prophet who came on the back of a whale, a man who led the people out of the darkness of the sea to the land."

Young Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes) has long heard the story. It was her twin brother, "who died at birth and took our mother with him," who was destined to wear the mantle of Paikeia the chief and carry forward the legacy of the whale rider.

Without a male heir and with Pai's grieving father (Cliff Curtis) fleeing from the small tribal village of Whangara, New Zealand, to an art career in Europe, and Pai's gruff, patriarchal grandfather, Chief Koro (Rawiri Paratene), aging, the community faces a succession quandary.

Despite tradition, Pai is sure she is destined for the honor. But Koro who, as his son says, "is looking for something that doesn't exist anymore," refuses to see beyond his own narrow vision.

It will take a supreme test for the extraordinary, equally stubborn and loving girl to force him to open his eyes and realize his limitations may hurt more than help a community already suffering from hardship and economic duress.

Director Niki Caro joins a trio of other visuallyinclined female filmmakers from New Zealand -- Alison MacLean, Christine Jeffs and Jane Campion -- who have taken the country's awe-inspiring terrain and seamlessly used it as a dynamic and visceral character in films. Incredibly vibrant, moody slashes of gray, a ceiling over the Whangaral coast, are haunting and forceful backdrops to the dramatic climax of "Whale Rider."

Caro, who adapted a popular book by Witi Ihimaera, overcomes some plot awkwardness and ultimately succeeds because of her cast, including Maori acting veterans Paratene and Vicky Haughton as Pai's tough and tender grandparents and Curtis ("Once Were Warriors") as her sensitive dad.

But the real find in this lovely family film is Castle-Hughes, who makes Pai's confusion, emotional fragility and devotion palpable.

"Whale Rider," which won the audience farvortex award at this year's Seattle International Film Festival -- following similar awards at the Toronto, Sundance, Rotterdam and San Francisco festivals -- is a gorgeous and empowering movie for preteens that not only enchants but tells a moving fable about tragedy, courage and transcendence.

Just because a female director sets out to make a female empowerment film doesn't mean it can't be charming while rousing the troops. Writer-director Niki Caro presents this story of a Maori girl in New Zealand whose ancestor, according to tribal legend, came from a faraway place, riding on the back of a whale. It's a film of reality and fantasy, treating farfetched dreams and mysticism with acceptance, respecting the tribe's dignity and beliefs.

Koro (Rawiri Paratene) is the Chief of the Ngati Kanohi tribe of Whangara which resides in a coastal fishing village. His thought is that his firstborn son, Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), will succeed him as chief. When it's clear that Porourangi has no interest in filling Koro's leadership shoes, Koro looks to his son's children. But tragedy takes over when Porourangi's wife dies in childbirth along with a twin boy, sending Porourangi to seek solace for his loss elsewhere. He leaves daughter Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes, in her film debut), the surviving girl twin, in the care of Koro. "The girl is no use to me", Koro blusters, disappointed that as a girl, she's not a candidate for tribal leadership.

Despite that initial reaction, by the time Pai is eleven, we see grandfather Koro picking her up at school and riding her home on his bicycle, displaying a grandfather's affection. At the same time, he is schooling the firstborn sons of the village in the arts of leadership and "the old ways," demonstrating ritual behavior and martial arts in an effort to find his successor. Pai tries to join in but must settle for a distant observation of the training she wants so much. On such matters, her grandfather is uncompromising, paying no heed to her abilities. Countering his rejections is her indomitable, no-nonsense grandmother Flowers (Vicky Haughton), Pai's harbor of understanding.

Porourangi briefly returns from his home in England where he has become an exhibiting artist. He asks Pai to come back with him and she decides to go but, as they travel along the seacoast, she seems to hear voices from the deep drawing her back. She returns to village and grandparents to pursue her destiny. It's achieved when a pod of whales beach themselves as though in a sacrificial ceremony. The tribal connection to these beasts is vividly emphasized by a community effort to tug them back to sea. Despite their backbreaking labor and ultimate heartbreak, they are not equal to the task... but Pai is.

Eleven year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes was cast for this part from thousands and the selection proves on the mark. This girl's quality of intelligent self-containment leads us through the emotional travails of her character and bodes well for her in an acting career should she pursue one. I rooted for her as I did for Anna Paquin when she emerged in The Piano and for Natalie Portman, introduced to us in The Professional in 1994.

Writer-director Niki Caro's feminist dream-wish also turns on the theme of personal adaptation in the framework of a new world culture. Her screenplay is based on the novel by Witi Ihimaera and was vetted closely by no less than the actual elders of the Maori's Ngati Kanohi. She entered their tribal world with the necessary patience and humility to effectively direct her gender message with documentary acccuracy. "Anybody who says there are things a girl can't do will have to answer to me!", she declares. Messages aside, time with this little girl and her brethren is well spent.

DVD extras include a commentary track, deleted scenes, and a pair of behind the scenes featurettes.

World Socialist Web Site review John Braddock

stylusmagazine.com (Dan Emerson) review

Film as Art [Danél Griffin]

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [4/4]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) review

Movie Views [Ryan Cracknell]

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]

CultureCartel.com (Dainon Moody) review [4.5/5]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

Movie-Vault.com (Ertug Tufekcioglu) review

here Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge

The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]

3 Black Chicks Review Flicks Cassandra Henry

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

hybridmagazine.com review Mike O’Connor

Newsweek (David Ansen) review

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review also seen here: Talking Pictures (UK) review

MovieFreak.com (Dennis Landmann) dvd review [8/10] [Special Edition]

eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [5/5]

DVD Verdict (Mark Van Hook) dvd review

FilmStew.com [Todd Gilchrist]

Bright Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris

Kamera.co.uk review Bob Carroll

Harvey S. Karten review [B]

Frank's Reel Reviews review Frank Wilkins

Reel.com review [3.5/4] Timothy Knight

New York Movies - False Grooves - Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The Tech (MIT) (Tao Yue) review

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) Andrew L. Urban and Louise Keller, including: NIKI CARO INTERVIEW

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [1.5/4]

Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Private Joker

Reel.com dvd review [4/4] James Plath

Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash) review [4/4]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [3.5/5] Brad Cook

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4]

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Dennis Harvey) review

Guardian/Observer review

The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Rick Groen

Review at The New Zealand Herald

Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr

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

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review

The Whale Rider | The Film: The Legend of Paikea

Catch of the day | guardian.co.uk Film Diana Dobson takes a look at Whangara today, a town of 50 people, also Part II: Read the second part of this article, and part III: Read the third part of this article from The Guardian

Witi Ihimaera - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New Zealand Book Council biography

Kahutia/Paikea - The Whale Rider book review

The Whale Rider -- book review Amanda Cuda from Curled Up With a Good Book, 2003

Whale Rider - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Māori - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

maori.info Māori informational website

maori.org.nz Māori website

The Maori - New Zealand in History

Maori Culture Virtual New Zealand

Whangara — The home of Paikea, Porourangi and other progenitors of ...

Whangara Whale Rider Location

Whangara Village Whale Rider East Cape Coastline NZ

Whale Rider - Jasons New Zealand

NORTH COUNTRY D+ 66

USA (123 mi) 2005

This was a real embarrassment, pure torture to sit through, not from the subject matter, which is real enough, but for the wretched way it was presented, pretentiously dancing around real social issues using glamour girls like Charlize Theron and Michelle Monaghan, who have no business in this story, as they are such commercialized Hollywood, idealized conceptions of what sells, women standing up for their rights along the lines of Jennifer Beals in FLASHDANCE, and not representative of poor salt of the earth Minnesota women who actually work in the mines. These roles belonged to someone else, who might have brought some hard-nosed authenticity to the screen. As it is, this is one of the most poorly written, suffocatingly predictable films I’ve seen in quite awhile, where everything is hand-fed to the audience, so overarching, so overwrought, capturing every cliché, where characters are either all bad or all good, where there is no in between, where the men in the mines are such Neanderthals, so repulsive and evil, one wonders why this film is only about sexual harassment? Why isn’t it about criminal assault charges? Since these events are in the recent past, coinciding onscreen with the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill televised hearings, where Anita Hill described in intimate detail events that occurred, which were understood by the United States all male Senate to be female fabrications, delusions of grandeur, obvious mischaracterizations, one would think an ounce of authenticity might be a part of this film. But that is wish fulfillment. We’re stuck with Hollywood delusions.

Based on a book Class Action by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler which documents the landmark 1988 Jenson vs. Eveleth sexual harassment lawsuit, which opened up sexual harassment laws in the nearly all-male Minnesota mining operations, which followed on the footsteps of previous Supreme Court decisions that ordered a stop to the practice of excluding women from working in the mines, we pretty much know the story and the standard treatment the story gets from Theron’s black eye that she receives in the opening five minutes of the film, so why stick around? Well, there are a few performances of note. Frances McDormand provides a lift to this otherwise totally mundane, overly predictable movie-of-the-week story. As always, she is stunning, a combination of wit, humor and realism all wrapped up into one. Her husband, Sean Bean, gives an effortless performance, especially in a gentle scene with Theron’s all too confused son, while Richard Jenkins, as the downtrodden father, makes a nice transformation, particularly in his union hall speech, which was one compelling moment. The rest is beating the same emotional note for over two hours, never once varying from that established norm. This is what American films do worst, throw lots of money on projects that suits in a boardroom think is appealing, an uplifting film with a message, told in what they believe is a realist form, throwing some dirt and grease on Charlize Theron’s pretty face, add a series of Bob Dylan songs, as he was born in the region, as if that gives it an ounce of authenticity, make sure the Soundtrack is hip and liberal-minded, using known marketable stars to create a celluloid atrocity that has nothing to do with capturing any real flavor of life.

Carolina, Ana

SEA OF ROSES (Mar de Rosas)

Brazil (99 mi) 1977

User reviews from imdb Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Sérgio (Hugo Carvana), Felicidade (Norma Bengell) and Betinha (Cristina Pereira) compose a dysfunctional family, and while traveling to Rio de Janeiro, Sérgio and Felicidade have another serious altercation, culminating with the aggression of Felicidade with a razor blade on Sergio's neck in a motel. Felicidade believes she has killed Sérgio and she decides to escape to São Paulo with Betinha in the family's car. In the highway, she notes that a black Volkswagen Beetle is following their car. After an incident in a gas station caused by Betinha, they are introduced to Orlando Barde (Otávio Augusto), the driver of the Beetle, and they decide to travel together in the small car to São Paulo. In a small town, Felicidade tries to get away from Orlando, but a bus hits her and Dona Niobi (Miriam Muniz) and Dr. Dirceu (Ary Fontoura), a pretentious poet and frustrated dentist, help Felicidade. In their house, the deranged Betinha provokes the most weird and surrealistic situations, when each character discloses innermost revelations. Yesterday I saw 'Mar de Rosas' for the first time and honestly I did not like it. Norma Bengell gives an outstanding performance in the role of the frustrated and wounded Felicidade and is the best this movie offers to the viewer, since the screenplay is too much bizarre for my taste. Some surrealistic situations slightly recalled Buñuel style, but I am not daring to compare Ana Carolina with the master of the surrealism. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): 'Mar de Rosas' ('Sea of Roses' (literally); however, 'Mar de Rosas' in Portuguese is an idiomatic expression meaning 'everything is calm')

User reviews from imdb Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ana Carolina surprised everybody when, after many documentary shorts and a hit documentary feature about Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas, she jumped into anarchist, surrealist crazy drama/black comedy with her first fiction film "Mar de Rosas". A non-sequitur, iconoclast portrait of middle-class family life, her protagonist Betinha (Cristina Pereira, perfectly cast) is a sort of teenage Mafalda (Quino's comic book anti-heroine): rambunctious, naughty, irrepressible, eager to be evil. She's on the run with her mother Felicidade (Norma Bengell, returning to Brazilian films after a long sojourn in European cinema and theater), who has killed husband Sergio (Hugo Carvana) in a hotel bathroom. Betinha and Felicidade are followed by suspicious character Bardi (Otávio Augusto) and, after terrible "accidents" -- Betinha sets fire on her mother at a gas station, Felicidade is hit by a bus while trying to escape from Bardi -- the 3 of them end up being "helped" by wacky couple Dirceu (Ary Fontoura) and Niobi (hilarious, wreck-voiced Myriam Muniz).

"Mar de Rosas" has some major lulls (especially toward the end) and is technically precarious, but the acting is inspired and, despite being ultimately a tragic film, you'll find yourself cracking with the loony dialog which is rather difficult to translate, as Ana Carolina uses a lot of Brazilian jeux de mots, adages and figures of speech in her trademark style of "free association". "Mar de Rosas" is refreshingly anti-cliché, and its critical and commercial success paved the way to Ana Carolina's very individual oeuvre that combines anti- conformism, feminism and social criticism with a delightful touch of surrealistic (black) humor.

Brazil Film Update Robert Stam from Jump Cut

Well-received in both the Paris and Berlin Film Festivals, Ana Carolina's first fiction film (after ten documentaries) is described by its author as a "portrayal of power as it operates within the family — an x-ray of the situation we Brazilians are living today, shown dramatically in the language of the absurd."

MAR DE ROSAS follows a not-very-loving couple (Sergio and Felicity) and their devilishly anarchic daughter (Betinha) through a picaresque series of progressively more surreal misadventures and narrative non-sequiturs. Although Ana Carolina claims to be interested more in making good films than in making feminist films, it is doubtless no accident that the film's opening dialogue consists of a woman's angry demand to be heard, or that one of the first images violates a common taboo by showing a woman urinating.

Using humor as the "best way to talk about serious things," Ana Carolina explores absurd familial situations as a springboard for exposing sexism, repression, and alienation. Implicit throughout is a Reichean analogy between the Family and the State as structures of power: "A photograph of a family," says the director, "is a photograph of the State." The narrative of MAR DE ROSAS is decidedly non-linear; and the dialogue — composed of lonesco-like absurdities, wordplay, proverbs, clichés — dynamites the mystified language of conventional wisdom. All the characters communicate an immense urge to express themselves, as if relearning to speak after a long period of imposed silence. Their will to speak is in itself a critique of the dictatorial regime from which Brazil is just now freeing itself after fourteen long years. But it is the character of the daughter, given to acts of revolt, slipping razor blades into soap, cheerfully puncturing her mother's neck with a pen, setting pools of gasoline on fire, who encapsulates the ambient violence and who, by her refusal to play the game by adult rules, best embodies the spirit of revolt that drives the film.

Carpenter, John

Film Reference profile by Kim Newman, updated by John McCarty

While his career has been neither as erratic as Wes Craven's nor as disaster-littered as that of Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter currently stands as an out-of-time B specialist. His later directorial output has not exactly failed to live up to the promise of his earliest films, but nor has it been able to match their perfect achievements.

Carpenter's first three movies are marvelously economical, deftly exciting, genuinely distinctive, and slyly amusing, and cover a wide range of generic bases. Dark Star, which he made as a student in collaboration with Dan O'Bannon, is one of the miracles of the 1970s, an intelligent and approachable science-fiction film made in the wake of 2001 but fresh and lively, with a satiric bite carried over from the written sf of the 1950s—its surfing punchline is an apt borrowing from Ray Bradbury—and a near-absurdist sense of humour. Its storyline concerns the crew of the spaceship Dark Star and its plunge into isolation-fueled insanity as their twenty-year mission to demolish useless planets with sentient bombs drags on and on. It is a film that repays many repeat viewings. Assault on Precinct 13, an urban Western rooted in Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead, is at once a lean, generic, action machine (its plot centers around a nightmarish street gang as it besieges and lays waste to an isolated police station) and a witty transposition of the certainties of a Hawksian ensemble piece into the racially and sexually tense 1970s. In these films, Carpenter demonstrated that suspense and humour could be combined. He also showed that he was a skilled handler of unfamiliar actors, concentrating unusually on nuances of character in forms where spectacle and effects often take precedence. Finally, he established himself as a talented composer of driving, minimalist, synthesizer-oriented musical themes.

Halloween is every bit as good as the first few films, but seems less fresh because it has been so influential. Itself a psycho suspense horror movie in the vein of The Spiral Staircase or Black Christmas (and Carpenter's lady-stalking 1978 TV movie Someone's Watching Me), Halloween single-handedly revived the drive-in horror movie in the late 1970s, inspiring such nasty pieces of work as Friday the 13th and literally hundreds of blatant imitations. It also inspired a series of sequels, including the intriguing Nigel Kneale-scripted box office failure Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the Carpenter-produced Halloween II, and a couple of Halloween films with which he was not involved in any capacity, except for their re-use of parts of his scores for the original film and its sequel, particularly the title theme.

The original Halloween, which featured Jamie Lee Curtis pursued by an unkillable, masked madman and Donald Pleasence as a hammy shrink on the killer's trail, establishes its own world of horror, as enclosed and unreal as the Transylvanian backlots of the Universal or Hammer series. Carpenter utilizes a mythic American small town teenage milieu, where Halloween is a magical evocation of terror and delight, and where babysitting, trick-or-treating, and blind-dating hold possibilities of joy and/or terror. With its absolute mastery of the hand-through-the-window shock moment, cunning use of the Panavision shape, and a shivery theme tune, Halloween is a slender but masterly confection, and it should not be blamed for the floodgates it opened when it became an unexpected box office bonanza (in fact, one of the most successful independent films in history). Before Halloween took off at the box office, however, Carpenter returned to TV to helm a biopic of Elvis Presley for Dick Clark productions. The telefilm marked the beginning of Carpenter's long association with Kurt Russell, a former Disney child star then trying to break away from his image and land more serious (read adult) roles. Russell was one of many actors who tested for the high profile part, but he got it, and turned in a bravura (at times even uncanny) performance as the legendary King of Rock 'n Roll in what many critics still consider to be Carpenter's best film away from the horror/SF genre.

Although there are pleasures to be found in most of his subsequent works, Carpenter has never quite recaptured the confidence and streamlined form of the early pictures. The Fog, a maritime ghost story, and Escape from New York, a science–fiction action picture, are enjoyable, entertaining movies that straggle through illogical plots, but nevertheless find performers—particularly Carpenter's then-wife Adrienne Barbeau, but also regulars Kurt Russell, Donald Pleasence, Tom Atkins, Nancy Loomis, and Chuck Cyphers—doing nice little things with characters, and individual suspense sequences in these films at times override the general messiness of the stories. The same feel can be found in films made by others from scripts he wrote in this period, such as Stewart Raffill's The Philadelphia Experiment and Harley Cokliss's Black Moon Rising, not to mention the 1990 TV Western El Diabolo. Stepping up into the studio big leagues, Carpenter was then given a chance to remake Hawks's and Nyby's The Thing from Another World (1950). He came through with The Thing, a controversially downbeat but genuinely effective movie in which an Arctic base is undermined by the presence of a shape-changing alien. The film is buoyed by the edgy, paranoid performances of a well-chosen cast of flabby, unreliable types and frequently punctuated by incredible bursts of special effects activity. The Thing handles its setpieces—severed heads sprouting spiderlegs, a stomach opening up into a toothy mouth, a dog exploding into tentacular gloopiness—remarkably well, but Carpenter is also in control of the funny, tense, questioning passages in between. Like so many of his later films, though, he seems unable to bring it to a satisfying conclusion.

It was the commercial failure of The Thing, which having arrived on Earth just as the box office was embracing E.T., a film that rendered evil aliens temporarily unfashionable, appears to have sufficiently disconcerted Carpenter to force him into a succession of blighted big studio movies. Christine is the regulation Stephen King adaptation, loud and watchable but essentially empty and ordinary. Starman is an uncomfortable and impersonal hybrid of It Happened One Night and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Finally, Big Trouble in Little China is a wacky kung fu-monster-comedy-musical-action-adventure-horror-fantasy that features Kurt Russell's funniest Carpenter hero role and some weird and wayward sequences, but it never quite catches the magic of the Hong Kong films upon which it is obviously based.

Subsequently, Carpenter deserted the big studios and handled a pair of smaller projects in an attempt to get back to the basics of his best work. The first of these, Prince of Darkness, is a labyrinthine and diffuse horror movie with a nuclear physics subplot, while They Live is a funny and pointed update of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which the aliens have invaded earth to exploit it economically. These two films display traces of Carpenter's old flair, even if they both open a great deal better than they close; They Live, in particular, is as interesting and offbeat a movie as The Fog or Escape from New York. But neither film arrested the general drift of Carpenter's career. By this time, while he had not yet settled into the rut that Tobe Hooper has dug for himself, he had also not achieved the generic apotheosis of a George Romero or a David Cronenberg, either.

In the early 1990s, Carpenter harkened back to another of his favorite films of yesteryear, James Whale's The Invisible Man. Carpenter's variation on the theme, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, was based on a novel by H. F. Saint. The film presented huge challenges for Carpenter and his FX team in terms of making star Chevy Chase's escapades in invisibility absolutely convincing. Fanciful, funny, and a technical knockout, Memoirs of an Invisible Man was nonetheless not the kind of film that his fans wanted to see from cinema's "titan of trick or treat."

Carpenter's fans wanted Carpenter to return to his traditional landscape of chills and thrills. He did so with a vengeance, creating what many of his fans consider to be the most terrifying film he'd made since the halcyon days of Halloween and The Thing: the Lovecraftian In the Mouth of Madness. Determined to stay the course in the cinema of fear and fright, Carpenter turned again to remaking another classic of his youth, Village of the Damned, originally a 1960 shocker about menacing, otherworldly children, but the results were disjointed and anemic. Escape from L.A. teamed him again with Kurt Russell in a splashier, bigger-budgeted sequel to and rehash of their successful Escape from New York, which did little for the reputations or coffers of either man. With Vampires, Carpenter's name appeared resoundingly above the title. Boasting a superb premise—the Vatican has created a Special Forces team (led by James Woods) to track down and destroy the King of the Vampires and his unholy minions — the film surrendered itself completely to the gore and sleaze that had become endemic to the horror genre by this point. And the opportunity to produce a genre classic was unfortunately missed.

John Carpenter once called his movie Halloween the film equivalent of a haunted house exhibit at an old country fair. The scares are carefully calculated, coming at you at just the right moments between lulls to ensure a thrilling ride. Without apology, he notes that the film sums up the escapist entertainment that his movies are all about. After all, he says, it is the kind of entertainment he enjoys most himself.

The John Carpenter Website

The Official John Carpenter Pages

John Carpenter Forum - Topix

The Unofficial John Carpenter Forum

All-Movie Guide bio info

TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies

John Carpenter Marco Lanzagorta from Senses of Cinema

John Carpenter Biography from the John Carpenter website

john carpenter = filmmaker profile at videovista.net a colorful and extensive profile by Octavio Ramos Jr. at Video Vista

John Carpenter @ Filmbug brief bio

John Carpenter - SCIFIPEDIA another brief bio

John Carpenter more bio info from NNDB

John Carpenter | Classic-Horror another profile from Nate Yapp

Director's Profile: John Carpenter Eric Beetner from Emerson College, March 1990

The Carpenticized Side of the Web

Journey Through The Mind of The Great John Carpenter

The Official John Carpenter, Chic Magazine: August 1979, Dr. Terror stalks Hollywood which includes bio info, by JR Young

Killing His Contemporaries: Dissecting The Musical Worlds Of John Carpenter Daniel and Seth Nelson, May 2002

John Carpenter: A Dialogue Kent Conrad and Joe Cormack from Exploding Goat, September 2, 2004

Building a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, January 7, 2005

LAZY EYE THEATRE: Let The John Carpenter Blog-A-Thon Commence from Piper, April 9, 2007

John Carpenter - The Amplifier Online .::. South Central Kentucky's ... Mark Griffin from The Amplifier, March 5, 2008

Richard B. Riddick: Escaped convict, Murderer and John Carpenter Anti-Hero John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, March 1, 2010

Carpenter, John They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Boston Globe December 9, 1984. Director John Carpenter talks about the movie biz big budgets and cold burgers Interview by Michael Blowen

The Two Sides of John Carpenter (Interview from the L.A. Weekly) From Paranoia to Providence, by Michael Dare, Januray 4 – 10, 1985

John Carpenter interview by Joshua Klein from the Onion A.V. Club, October 28, 1998

Horror.com Staci Layne Wilson 2-part interview on the set in Vancouver, B.C. with John Carpenter and producer David Foster, May 11, 2005

Interview with The Onion A.V. Club by Noel Murray, October 26, 2005

John Carpenter - film composer

John Carpenter – Music at Last.fm you may listen to several Carpenter musical themes

John Carpenter a compilation of Carpenter’s music

Wallflower Press- the Cinema of John Carpenter brief comments on a book edited by Ian Conrich and David Woods

John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness by Gilles Boulenger book review by James O’Ehley from the Sci-Fi Page, Pt 1 of a 5-part series

Next: "Quite gruesome and gory even by today’s standards; the film was actually banned here in South Africa for a while." Pt 2 of a 5-part series

Next: "You didn’t have to be an adolescent teenage anarchist to notice the appealing antiauthoritarian tendencies in Carpenter’s films." Pt 3 of 5

Next: Exclusive excerpts from John Carpenter - Prince of Darkness Excerpts from the book, Pt 4 of a 5-part series

Next: John Carpenter on They Live, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Village of the Damned, Escape from L.A. and Ghosts of Mars Pt 5 of a 5-part series

YouTube - John Landis, John Carpenter & David Cronenberg (Part 1 of 3) a 26-minute roundtable discussion from 1982 between filmmakers John Landis, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and Mick Garris

John Carpenter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

REVENGE OF THE COLOSSAL BEASTS

USA 1962

from imdb Author: Hell-Burner from Belgium (link lost)

What a lucky chance to fall on one of the first John 'God' Carpenter try! This movie was made when he was 14. We already can see the power of his directing way, and the fact that John Carpenter is an artisan explode at face. When you are 14 and that you create such a thing like that, all that you can do is to put 10 for the effort. The influence of Howard Hawkes is already visible, too.

DARK STAR

USA (83 mi) 1974

Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Cox]

Carpenter's fondly remembered first feature, which the director himself described as 'One big optical - Waiting for Godot in space'. Four bombed-out astronauts journey endlessly through the galaxy, whiling away the time with jokes, sunlamp treatment, personal diaries on videotape, and games with their own pet alien. Arguably the last great hippy movie with its jokey references to drugs, the Absurd and California surfing (one crew member makes it back to earth on an improvised board), it also anticipates the sci-fi vogue of the '70s (Alien and Carpenter's own gem The Fog) as well as taking a healthy sideswipe at the pretensions of 2001. Sheer delight.

Space is boring. Kubrick's 2001 makes a point of exploring the tedium of space travel, as do many other films; but Dark Star remains the only one to exploit this key fact for laughs.

It concerns the attempts by four astronauts, who are hysterical with boredom and hate each other to pieces to relieve the dullness of travelling between their "missions". One's a hippy, one's a slob, one gazes at the stars and the fourth guy came in to check the oxygen tanks and didn't leave quick enough. But things go horribly wrong when the ship is hit by an asteroid shower causing the central (female) computer to fail and bomb no. 19 develops a serious attitude. Described by Carpenter as "one big optical Waiting For Godot in space", Dark Star is not just a satire on pretentious sci-fi films like 2001, but also on American culture in general - one character's penchant for surfing, for example. It's an unusual debut from a director who went on to make thrillers such as They Live and The Thing, but then suspense only comes as a result of long periods when nothing happens (just look at Hitchcock). Writer/actor Dan O'Bannon went on to direct Return Of The Living Dead.

Dark Star was a student film made on a tiny budget (the alien gives it away a bit), so join ESVP and see if you can do better.

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

Set to the country ditty “Benson, Arizona,” the intro spaceship sequence of Dark Star is an apt career-opening moment for John Carpenter, whose directorial debut – like so much of his underrated genre output – is steeped in classic Western tropes. Nods to Howard Hawks, however, are here married to a tongue-in-cheek spoof of Kubrick’s 2001, whose sentient, emotional HAL is reconfigured by Carpenter and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (future scribe of Alien) into a chatty female motherboard and a stubborn bomb who wants to explode in the loading bay despite being informed that the launch order was an error. Somewhat episodic in nature, the film – made while Carpenter and O’Bannon were completing their postgraduate degrees at USC’s film school – concerns the various misadventures of the titular ship’s three astronauts. Their mission is to destroy unstable stars to facilitate intergalactic colonization, though the filmmakers primarily use the trio’s story as a vehicle for updating the sci-fi genre for the ‘70s hippie-slacker-drug counterculture via goofy gags and a fittingly grungy, ramshackle aesthetic. Dark Star isn’t nearly as funny as it once was (as a kid, its humor seemed considerably more inspired), but it nonetheless has its amusing moments, such as Pinback’s (O’Bannon) cartoony elevator-shaft pursuit of a beach ball-shaped pet alien, or a final, cosmically loony image of a surfboarding spaceman. And more interestingly, it contains glimmers of its director’s future trademarks, from its minimalist synth score and efficient widescreen panoramas to its inventive use of low-fi special effects.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

A satire of 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course, but also a response against Kubrick's inhuman technology -- the machines here, particularly the titular spaceship, are scrapped together, literally handmade guerilla contraptions. A triangular model sails across the bottom of the screen, the camera lies on its side to summon the vertical perspective of an elevator shaft, and the rattle of bottles and cans provides chimes for an ad-libbed piano-xylophone. The fond cheesiness, closer to It! The Terror from Beyond Space than Arthur C. Clarke, has a low-tech grace, to say nothing of dorm-room, stoner vibes anticipating the Mystery Science Theater 3000 wise-asses. Appropriately, it's a USC Master Thesis expanded to semi-feature length by two budding genre artisans, John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon. Much of it comes from O'Bannon, whose treatment is a deadpan sketch for his Alien darlings (the genesis of the chest-busting slime-drippers of that slicker space opera lies, disarmingly, in a red beach ball equipped with flippers); he also plays the least atrophied of the crew members, long vanished underneath manes, beards and ennui in their mission of vaporizing unstable intergalactic orbs. Yet the invaded Hawksian aesthetic, a camera slithering elegantly across cramped spaces, and gloved intimidations of parallel worlds (the body of the ship's commander, cryogenically frozen in the basement, wheezes info from the beyond) are all Carpenter's, no less ingenious a genre comment than his later, more polished evocations. The tone is meditative slapstick, "How do you know you exist" asked to the bomb ready to detonate the ship, then "Let there be light" and a moment of sublimity -- a piece of debris becomes a surfing board and the comic turns cosmic, the vastness of the universe contemplated to country mooning ("Benson Arizona, the same stars in the sky/But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I"). With Brian Narelle, Carl Kuniholm, and Dre Pahich.

eFilmCritic Reviews Dr. Isaksson

John Carpenter's first feature film Dark Star, a production created during his time in film school, is definitely a small taste of what this amazing director had in store. Years before 'The Great Horror Director' gave us "Assault on Precinct 13" "Halloween," "The Fog," "Christine" etc. Carpenter and his fellow film student and pal Dan O' Bannon wrote, produced and starred in this very very low budget sci fi film which took years to complete and actually saw a theatrical release.

Filmed from 1970 to 1973 and then released in 1974, Dark Star, written by Dan O' Bannon and John Carpenter and directed by John, follows a small group of space travelers who wander throughout the infinant universe blowing up what they consider 'unstable planets'. Their mission being to make space more stable for habitation. At least I THINK that's what the plot was aiming for, (I could be wrong.) The crew on board the ship aptly named the Dark Star consist of four astronauts who are known as the 'space truckers'. There is the thoughtful man in charge Lt.Doolittle (Brian Narelle), the incredibly bored and weary Boiler, (Cal Kuniholm), the thoughtful and still a bit willing Kalby (Andrew Dre Pahich) and of course the goofy scene stealer of the film, Sgt.Pinback (played by writer Dan O'Bannon). The overall focus of the film basically just centers around these four guys who have been floating around for what seems like years. None are all that interested in the mission they have set out to do and they certainly are no longer bothering to interact with one another anymore. The attempts at humor with this kind of bored comedic tone is weaker than it thinks it is but at least the effort is there. This lazy concept can only leave the viewer wondering how does the film expect to be humorous if no one gives a shit about anything? So what would be the logical step? To bring in another character or creature to stir up the bland atmosphere. That they do and that character turns out to be an Alien. A PET Alien that is. Seems that this non hostile creature was a discovery of Pinback who found it during one of the many missions out in space and he decided to bring the little thing on board for a pet. I won't give away what this Alien looks like but it has to be seen to be believed. Trust me it isn't a Giger-esque creation by any means.

The rest of the production on the film is actually quite good and the attempt of trying to tackle the tricky art of a science fiction film way back in the infancy of space travel was really a risky endeavor but Dark Star glows with an amateurish glee that actually enhances it's charm and makes it easier to sit through. It's understandable to wince at the weak acting and crappy sets but take into account that this was made by very young guys who had aspirations to become film directors. The work here by Carpenter and O'Bannon is admirable but when you get down to the actual story, it's quite interesting and well conceived. It all makes sense that these astronauts would be sick of each other and basically have nothing important to say. But this set up isn't going to have the theaters packed with loving audiences. It's just too slow and this problem of long, drawn out scenes was party due to the fact that a film distributor was willing to release the film only if the film was lengthened for theatrical release. So what would probably make a much more fun and easy to watch shorter film ended up becoming an overly long feature film considering the storyline. This being noted, the lack of money and talent doesn't diminish the impact of Dark Star because much of what John Carpenter has become famous for shows up in this film. As always he is in great control of the camera and knows exactly what he wants from his shots. His ability to catch the intriguing but subtle moments of interaction between characters is evident. The terrific mood lighting and gloomy synth music which was always created and performed by Carpenter in all of his films is here in all it's cheesy brilliance.

And it is easy to gather that this film was clearly a prelude to what was to become the best SCI FI horror film of all time, 1979's Alien which was written by Dan O'Bannon. All of the elements that made Alien so wonderful are here in Dark Star.The cold and grimy spaceship, the talking mother computer, the cryogenic sleep, hell, even travelling through the air ducts is part of the plot here. As far as my overall impression of the cast, well it's all you can expect from film school students and O'Bannon's performance sways from horrifically amateurish to slightly endearing. The rest do pretty good work as well considering their lack of expirence and the film really does manage to go along without getting completely flat out dull. But the slow pacing can be death to some viewers and this slow pace probably lead to the film's downfall at the theaters. However, since it's initial release it has become a small cult classic and of course it cannot go without saying that Dark Star, without question, set the stage for what was to become Dan O'Bannon's masterpiece Alien. So how could I diss on this film without a little love because of what came next?

Dark Star is actually a lot like an earlier version of ALIEN, minus the scares, the talent and the budget.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

VideoVista Paul Higson

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Close-Up Film [Dave Smith]

DVD Verdict Erick Harper

SCI-FI Movie Page - DVD Review James O’Ehley

CineScene.com (Ed Owens) also reviewing BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA

The 7th Level also reviewing ASSAULT IN PRECINCT 13, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, and GHOSTS OF MARS

The Official John Carpenter, London Times: March 8, 1978. The slow evolution of Dark Star David Robinson

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13

USA (91 mi) 1976 ‘Scope

Just as Dark Star undercut the solemnity of space movies like 2001 with hilarious astronaut situation comedy, Carpenter's second feature borrows the conventions of protagonists in jeopardy from Night of the Living Dead to produce one of the most effective exploitation movies of the decade. The gimmick is cops and cons besieged in an abandoned LA police station by a group of kamikaze urban guerillas. Carpenter scrupulously avoids any overt socio-political pretensions, playing it instead for laughs and suspense in perfectly balanced proportions. The result is a thriller inspired by a buff's admiration for Ford and Hawks (particularly Rio Bravo), with action sequences comparable to anything in Siegel or Fuller. It's sheer delight from beginning to end.

A Film Odyssey [Robert Humanick]

John Carpenter’s neo-Western Assault on Precinct 13 (loosely based on Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo) is as formally compact and rigorously efficient as anything the genre filmmaker ever made. The story of a police station that, the night before its closing, is besieged by a mysterious gang known as Street Thunder, Carpenter’s early career triumph – his second film, following 1974’s Dark Star – is at once a grittily exhilarating action film and an intelligent, thinly coded allegory for 1970s racial tensions. From a discussion about coffee between just-transferred black cop Bishop (Austin Stoker) and ballsy white officer Julie (Nancy Keyes), to Bishop’s uneasy partnership with sardonic Caucasian criminal Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), Carpenter posits a station under attack from both heavily armed assailants and shifting racial and gender attitudes. Not that such heady stuff interferes with the director’s combat-heavy set pieces, which feature their share of illogicalities – such as the gang members’ mindless attempts to infiltrate the station via broken windows, making them easy targets for Bishop and company’s bullets – but nonetheless exhibit an economical toughness epitomized by the infamous, delirious early scene involving gun-toting Street Thunder members, a little girl, and an ice cream truck.

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

John Carpenter may imagine himself a genre artisan born a generation too late, yet his films can't help being colored by the racial, sexual and political tensions of his turbulent times. Nothing illustrates his seemingly schizoid richness better than his lean update of personal fave Rio Bravo -- a Western in modern urban drag, unapologetically old-school in its straightforward drive, though with the serenity of Howard Hawks' classic cracked under the weight of Vietnam-era anxieties. Thus, the narrative kicks off with the beautiful horizontal lines of L.A. disrupted by the police slaughtering members of a gang of street toughs, whose multiracial leaders, Che beret in place, are then seen ceremoniously dipping blood into a bowl before taking off for vengeance. Against the volatile ghetto topography is Austin Stoker's rock-solid cop, whose babysitting job at the ready-to-close Precinct 13 becomes a test in heroism when in stumbles the gang's target, a schmo gone catatonic after offing a member to avenge his daughter. Off go the lights and the phones, and Stoker and the station's crew (including deadpan policewoman Laurie Zimmer and prisoner Darwin Joston) have to fend off the outside invaders who, by now, have morphed into a rolling, dehumanized force leaking through the venetian blinds. For all the project's B-movie mantle, Carpenter's Panavision formalism, with emphasis on interacting space caught in airtight middle-distances, displays a crystalline rigor to shame pricier, more "respectable" films -- a torrential of abstracting, oddly lyrical effects wrung out of people throwing guns to one other, a bullet sailing through a pigtailed moppet's vanilla ice cream cone and into her chest, a police station cut to ribbons during a noiseless bulletfest. Less remake than reconsideration of Rio Bravo's themes (and a masterpiece on its own right), the film taps into old Hollywood imagery while raising questions of its place and validity in the midst of politically shifting times: When Zimmer's smashing low-budget Bacall places a cigarette in Joston's laconic lips and lights a match in the same gesture, it is a moment of idealized iconography right out of Only Angels Have Wings, yet complicated (and enriched) by the paradoxical subversion of Carpenter's art. With Tony Burton, Nancy Loomis, Martin West, and Charles Chypher.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Kent Jones of Film Comment has referred to horror maven John Carpenter as the last genre filmmaker working in America (indeed, while everyone else seems to move with the digital tide, Carpenter remains a resilient "analog man"). Joseph Kaufman, executive producer of Carpenter's thoroughly-modern western Assault on Precinct 13, wrote in a 1994 essay: "People have noticed that both Rio Bravo and Assault on Precinct 13 take place in besieged and isolated police stations, and that moral codes of behavior are important in the two films." Kaufman is careful to point out that the Assault on Precinct 13 isn't a literal imitation of Howard Hawks's film, but there's no mistaking the modern racial and sexual politics encoded in the distinctly western elements of Carpenter's lean, mean, genre-defying masterpiece.

Less subtle though arguably more successful than Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the film evokes an ever-shifting political pecking order when a cultural cross-section of society trapped inside a Los Angeles police station wages war against a violent street gang named Street Thunder. Blaxploitation star Austin Stoker stars as Bishop, a cop sent to baby-sit Precinct 13 as it closes shop. Tensions mount when cops shoot and kill six members of the gang. (A news reporter notes the interracial mixture of the victims, in essence setting up the film's critical race crisis.) Members of Street Thunder go on a killing spree, senselessly (and fabulously) offing an ice-cream man and the daughter of a man who's obviously distrustful of authority. When the man avenges his daughter's death and seeks refuge inside Precinct 13, Street Thunder descends on the police station with menacing aplomb.

Bishop is none-too-happy that he has to tend shop at a police station his first day on the job. "There are no heroes anymore, Bishop," says his commissioner over the radio to the unsuspecting officer oblivious that he'll have to rid a besieged, god-forsaken town of a violent pestilence. Bishop is welcomed hospitably at Precinct 13 by the sexy Leigh (the great Laurie Zimmer), who shows him the ropes and offers him a friendly cup of coffee as if she were the proprietress at a lone saloon. She asks him if he likes it black. "For over 30 years," he says. She gets the joke, but she's clearly not amused. Compare her to Julie, the whiney chicken-shit played by a hysterical Nancy Kyes, and it's obvious that Leigh is a woman in full control of her sex—certainly she's one to be reckoned with (at least one who'd rather rescue herself than have a man do all the work for her).

Carpenter acknowledges that his protagonists are equally responsible for the choices they make. As a troubled black youth, Bishop walked out of the ghetto on his own, but thanks in part to the guidance of his father. Conversely, white prisoner Napoleon Wilson (the late Darwin Joston) turned to violence on his own, but no thanks to negative encouragement (a priest once told him: "You have something to do with death"). But what is the audience to make of Bishop fearfully observing a white officer as he loads his rifle, or the black prisoner, Wells (Tony Burton), who shoots his silencer at Street Thunder only to realize after one of the film's many mini-battles that his gun wasn't loaded? Carpenter's doesn't allow his characters to play any sort of blame games, and despite any lingering hang-ups they may have with each other's color, the director acknowledges that our problems with race are obscuring larger issues dealing with misguided authority and rampant political deception.

It's easy to dismiss the film's racial morality play as simple, but there's plenty going on beneath the surface of Carpenter's formalist exercise. At Precinct 13, Carpenter envisions a society in moral transition. A crazed and naïve Kathy can't understand why anyone would shoot at a police station (observe the startling defiance of authority when gang members walk stealthily toward the police station with "DO NOT ENTER" street signs to either side of them), and when she realizes that Street Thunder is only after the traumatized man who ran into the Precinct, she suggests that they throw him back into the street. "Don't give me that civilized look!" she screams, feeling the burn of Bishop and Leigh's scorn. With a name like Bishop, it's not surprising that Stoker's hero is a man of God who is not about to forsake his fellow man much-needed sanctuary.

Because Assault on Precinct 13 is among one of the most remarkably composed films of all time, it's easy to look at Carpenter's rigorous framing techniques as their own acts of political resistance. The film's tight medium-shots position the characters in constant defiance of each other: blacks against whites, women against men, prisoners against officers. When Wells announces that he will attempt to escape Precinct 13 (he humorously calls his plan "Save Ass"), Bishop suggests a fairer approach. After a speedy lesson in trust and human decency, Wells and Wilson engage in a quickie game of Potatoes that positions Wells as the group's potential gateway out of the police station. Despite the tragic but inevitable human losses, no one group comes out on top because only their capacity for kindness reigns supreme in Carpenter's democratic kingdom.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

PopMatters David Sanjek

Images Movie Journal James Newman

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young)

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

VideoVista Tom Matic

eFilmCritic Dr. Isaksson

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson]

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Assault on Precinct 13 Head Cheeze from HorrorView

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez)

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

DVD Movie Central Gordon Justesen

Cinephile Magazine [Richard X]

The 7th Level also reviewing DARK STAR, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, and GHOSTS OF MARS

HALLOWEEN A 96

USA (91 mi) 1978 ‘Scope

An exercise in precision, as there isn’t an ounce of excess in this film, honed down to its purest essence as a creepy slasher film that uses the maniacal repeating piano note soundtrack to alert the audience to the presence of Michael Myers, a child murderer when he himself was a child, now a young adult escaped psychopath on the loose who comes home again on Halloween night to wreak havoc in the life of a few teenage high school babysitters who seem to have other things on their minds. It’s an interesting balance of the phenomenal persistence of evil against the prevailing complacency in a quiet, small town community which would never suspect anything like this could happen in their town. But that’s precisely what works in this film, as no one suspects anything, and by the time they’re on to him, it’s too late. Beautifully shot in ‘Scope, showing surprisingly little graphic blood and gore, despite being the mother lode of slasher films spawning so many imitators in the 70’s and 80’s that did, Carpenter builds the mood through a series of skillfully made tracking shots where the camera becomes the eyesight of the psychotic stalker, who is usually seen freely roaming the neighborhood wearing a white mask, accompanied by the sounds of his breathing, always contrasted against the banal details of ordinary suburban life.

The AMERICAN GRAFFITI-like dialogue, a superb mixture of playfulness and humor, is an extremely accurate portrayal of teenagers, where adults are altogether missing, leaving the kids to fend for themselves to negotiate their own obstacles or pitfalls. Donald Pleasence plays the psychiatrist who’s been treating Michael since he was a child, who knows him better than anyone else, calling him the most dangerous patient he’s ever treated, but his warnings also fall on deaf ears. Young attractive babysitters prancing around in scanty attire are meant to attract the eye of more than Michael Myers, but what he does with these girls is classically demented, yet strangely evident of a lunatic’s thinking. Jamie Lee Curtis made her debut in this film, and does a wonderful job balancing her suspicions that something is not right against her own intelligence that tells her otherwise, including informing the kids she’s babysitting, for instance, that there’s no such thing as a “bogeyman,” even after Carpenter has provided her, and the viewer, with contrary evidence. It’s interesting also that later in her career she successfully made the transition playing the role of the mom in the hilarious 2003 Disney remake of FREAKY FRIDAY. There’s a wonderful use of television, which is playing horror movies like THE THING (1951), which Carpenter himself remade, also FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956), which establishes a mainstream theme of sci-fi and horror as safe and acceptable material for children to see within a horror film.

Kathryn Bergeron for 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

No director since Alfred Hitchcock has managed to capture the delicious voyeurism of horror as well as John Carpenter in Halloween, a film so entrenched with our primordial anxieties that it continues to define the genre more than 20 years later. Indeed, the comparison between Hitchcock and Carpenter is no stretch; Halloween is saturated with Carpenter’s tribute to Hitchcock, from character names – Sam Loomis and Tom Doyle, from Psycho (1960) and Rear Window (1954), respectively – to the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh, the ill-fated shower victim in Psycho.

Halloween’s plot is simple enough: a masked psychopath, Michael Myers, stabs and strangles his way through a group of teenage friends as they drink beer and pursue sexual encounters, until he finally comes up against the one pure force in the movie, the virginal babysitter Laurie Strode (Curtis). Despite its minimalism, the pronounced social anxieties of Halloween’s good-versus-evil plot are left unresolved, a strategy repeated consistently in slasher films from Friday the 13^th (1980) to Scream (1996). The intensity of Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s screenplay lies in situating the terror in the calm visage of suburbia, where one would (or at least used to) assume children were safe and sound.

Deconstructing notions of the protective homestead, Halloween’s camera work violates the fictitious town of Haddonfield with the roving point of view shot. The film’s opening shot is itself a radiantly executed point-of-view take, peering through the eyes of the then-six-year-old-killer. Carpenter constructs a purely aesthetic fear, separating Halloween from its own drudgingly expository progeny. Throughout the film, someone is always watching, be it predator or prey. The jolts of subjectivity in Halloween are entrancing, and as the film unravels we are left to peek around corners, over shoulders, through windows, and out of closets at what we are sure is impending doom.

The brilliant pacing and excruciatingly long takes manage to keep the adrenaline pumping, as Michael slinks in the shadows, rising from death again and again to chase the clever Laurie. In the end, we are left to wonder uncomfortably about the thread of separation between fact and fiction.

A superb essay in Hitchcockian suspense, which puts all its sleazy Friday the 13th imitators to shame with its dazzling skills and mocking wit. Rarely have the remoter corners of the screen been used to such good effect as shifting volumes of darkness and light reveal the presence of a sinister something. We know, and Carpenter knows we know, that it's all a game as his psycho starts decimating teenagers observed in the sexual act; and he delights in being one step ahead of expectation, revealing nothing when there should be something, and something - as in the subtle reframing of the girl sobbing in the doorway after she finally manages to kill the killer, showing the corpse suddenly sitting up again behind her - long after there should be nothing. Perhaps not quite so resonant as Psycho to which it pays due homage, but it breathes the same air.

Halloween Dave Kehr from the Reader

John Carpenter's 1978 tour de force, perhaps the most widely imitated film of the 70s. As a homicidal maniac stalks the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, Carpenter displays an almost perfect understanding of the mechanics of classical suspense; his style draws equally (and intelligently) from both Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. Though the film seems conscious of no significance beyond its own stylistic dexterity, its buried themes of sexual transgression and punishment appear to have touched something deep in the soul of the American teenager. The film, in its duplicitous way, makes a powerful plea for the comfort and security of puritanism. With Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, and P.J. Soles. 93 min.

John Carpenter scored major points by nailing the essence of middle American terror. Halloween's Michael Myers struck fear in the hearts of moviegoers with an embodied Evil that made short work of suburban serenity. Responsible for jump-starting Jamie Lee Curtis’s career, this one so thoroughly and thoughtfully exploited American angst that it’s no wonder we had to sit through a slew of derivative slasher flicks for the better part of the next decade. Try to see it on Criterion’s laserdisc, where the essential Panavision frame is intact, and you can look at this again with a fresh eye. Director of Photography Dean Cundey helped define the widescreen Carpenter style through the 1980s, but is better known for the miraculous cinematography of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Jurassic Park (1993), and Apollo 13 (1995).

Halloween Pauline Kael from the New Yorker in 1978

John Carpenter, who made the low-budget scare picture Halloween, has a visual sense of menace. He quickly sets up an atmosphere of fear, and his blue night tones have a fine, chilling ambience---the style is reminiscent of the Halloween episode in Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis. But Carpenter isn't very gifted with actors, and he doesn't seem to have any feeling at all for motivation or for plot logic. Halloween has a pitful, amateurish script (by Carpenter and his producer, Debra Hill). An escaped lunatic wielding a kitchen knife stalks people in a small Midwestern town (Haddonfield, Illinois), and that's about it. There's no indication of why he selects any particular target; he's the bogeyman---pure evil---and he wants to kill. The film is largely just a matter of the camera tracking subjectively from the mad killer's point of view, leading you to expect something awful to happen. But the camera also tracks subjectively when he isn't around at all; in fact, there's so much subjective tracking you begin to think everybody in the movie has his own camera.

As a doctor from the lunatic asylum that the killer has escaped from, Donald Pleasence is solid and forceful; enunciating in the impeccable tradition of Lionel Atwill, he delivers idiotic exposition about e-vil. Sometimes you think he's going to have to cross his eyes to keep a straight face. Carpenter doesn't seem to have had any life outside the movies: one can trace almost every idea on the screen to directors such as Hitchcock and Brian De Palma and to the Val Lewton productions. It may even be that Carpenter selected Jamie Lee Curtis to be his pure heroine---the teen-age babysitter, Laurie---because she recalls the serious-faced little blond girl in The Curse of the Cat People. The daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee Curtis has a hoarse, low, rather inexpressive voice and a plaintive Lauren Bacall-ish look and an attractive gaucheness. For no discernible reason, the bogeyman (who is masked) zeroes in on her near the start of the picture, but he keeps being sidetracked. He has no trouble picking off the teen-agers who "fool around;" only Laurie has the virginal strength to put up a fight.

There's one really neat effect: near the beginning, when the madman is driving past, the more brash teen-age girls jeer at him, and the car pauses for an instant, as if the masked figure inside were deciding whether to dispatch the girls right then or bide his time. But Carpenter also wrote the score himself---all four bars--and he's devoted to it. With the seductive tracking shots and the repetitive music, the film stops and starts so many times before anything happens that the bogeyman's turning up just gets to be a nuisance---it means more of the same. Carpenter keeps you tense in an undifferentiated way---nervous and irritated rather than pleasurably excited---and you reach the point of wanting somebody to be killed so the film's rhythms will change. Yet a lot of people seem to be convinced that Halloween is something special---a classic. Maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but dumb scariness---when it isn't ashamed to revive the stalest device of the genre (the escaped lunatic)---it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do.

DVD Times- Halloween 25th Anniversary SE Mike Sutton

Building a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, January 7, 2005

eFilmCritic.com ("Dr. Isaksson")

Raging Bull [Matt White]

Movie Vault [John Ulmer]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) an extended essay

Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp

DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DVD Verdict: Halloween: 25th Anniversary Edition Patrick Naugle

filmcritic.com gets spooked on Halloween Norm Schrager

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) a groupthink review

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks with his thoroughly expert analysis

ToxicUniverse.com (Lee Chase IV)

The Horror Review [Horror Bob]

Celluloid Dreams Simon Hill

Best-Horror-Movies.com Don Sumner

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr

DVD Sleuth [Mike Long]

Monsters At Play Lawrence P. Raffel

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez) Extended Edition

DVD Verdict Limited Edition, by Sean Fitzgibbons

Filmtracks soundtrack review

John Carpenter po-mo page! It’s Michael Myers at the top of the stairs

House of Horrors Review: Halloween In Loving Memory of Donald Pleasence (1919-1995)

The Trick Was to Stay Alive: My Road Trip to Michael Myers Mecca The Myers House – North Carolina, website devoted to a replica of the original

02/28 - 03/07 a road trip to the Myer’s House, by John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, March 4, 2010

Scifi.com, Interview: John Carpenter looks back at Halloween on its 25th anniversary interview by Michael McCarty and Mark McLaughlin

31 Flicks That Give You the Willies Ed Hardy Jr from Shoot the Projectionist

Austin Chronicle [Mike Emery] taking a look at the original and 5 sequels

All Movie Guide [Donald Guarisco]

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME! – made for TV

aka: High Rise

USA (98 mi) 1978

This early John Carpenter effort, made before Halloween but telecast afterwards, is a modest but solid example of his developing skills as a filmmaker. Carpenter's script isn't terribly original (the premise and several scenes borrow heavily from Rear Window) but he makes the story his own with his own quirky brand of characterizations: Leigh escapes the usual 'pretty heroine' stereotype thanks to her independent mindset and quirky sense of humor and Paul makes a thoughtful, refreshingly non-macho romantic foil for her character. These intriguing characterizations further benefit from skillful performances by a well-chosen cast: Lauren Hutton brings the right combination of charm and skill to make her characterization believable, David Birney turns in a nicely understated performance as and Adrienne Barbeau brings a likeably feisty cynicism to the role of Leigh's wise-cracking coworker. Behind the camera, John Carpenter shows off his already solid grasp of thriller film mechanics with a combination of slick, gliding camerawork and sharply-timed editing. The limitations of the made-for-t.v. format hold back the film from delivering the full-throttle delights of his later work but he manages to pack a high level of jittery suspense into Someone's Watching Me and keeps things moving at a fast clip. As a result, it isn't top-flight Carpenter but is smart and skillful enough to make a viewing worthwhile for his fans.

John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film and Television

Television director Lauren Hutton is being stalked, spied on, and crank-called by an anonymous creep. The cops can't do much to help, but Lauren takes matters into her own hands with the help of boyfriend David Birney and lesbian coworker Adrienne Barbeau.

John Carpenter wrote and directed this TV-movie (never released domestically on video, which makes it a hot bootleg item among Carpenter fans) before his hit Halloween, though it was televised a month after Halloween came out. It can therefore be seen as a good dry run for Halloween — Carpenter does a lot with even less onscreen violence — though viewers who happen to stumble upon it on cable and who don't appreciate Carpenter's participation may just consider it a better-than-average "jep" (woman-in-jeopardy) thriller.

There are Carpenter touches throughout — the mystery man popping up in backgrounds, Hutton losing her knife down a grate — but the movie sorely lacks Carpenter's customary ominous score and musical "stings"; Harry Sukman's wannabe-Herrmann score is cheesy at best. Fans of Carpenter and Halloween will certainly want to track this down, though.

Carpenter's teleplay was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award — very likely the only time he'll be in competition with Nora Ephron for an award.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Oliver Lenhardt from Toronto

John Carpenter's SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME! is an undisguised homage to REAR WINDOW, with nods to BLACK CHRISTMAS (an avowed favourite of Carpenter's) and the Italian Giallo genre, specifically Argento's DEEP RED. One elaborate scene, wherein the anxious heroine drops a knife through a grate, and then squeezes laboriously into the crawlspace beneath to hide, is a clear riff on giallo scenography.

The material is stale, but the execution is not. Carpenter's virtuoso use of gliding camera shots, shadow detail, composition, and mise en scene, ratchets up the suspense even during what would otherwise be incidental scenes in another director's hands. On occasion, TV-movie limpness creeps in momentarily, but, in the main, the picture's production is very professionally handled.

One major irritant is Lauren Hutton's protagonist, Leigh. She is endlessly spunky, constantly talking to herself, always rushing headlong into situations. It's grating right from the start, but as events unfold, her happy-go-lucky ebullience morphs (in the viewers' eyes) into a kind of blithe stupidity. Most thinking people would have closed their curtains, locked their doors, taken the prank calls more seriously, or perhaps moved away (pride be damned), much sooner than did she. Certainly most people wouldn't have walked knowingly into the stalker's trap, as Leigh does at the very end. "Someone's Watching Me" is nerve-wracking enough for one to suspend one's incredulity, and good enough to belong in, or just below, the rarefied sphere of Carpenter's two best, HALLOWEEN and THE THING.

Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

Aisle Seat [Andre Dursin]

Final Girl Stacie Ponder

Cinema de Merde

Mr. Satanism's Video Picks for Perverts

Examiner.com [Ben Kenber]

DVDBeaver.com [Eric Cotenas]

ELVIS – made for TV

USA (150 mi) 1979 UK release in 1988 (163 mi)

User Reviews from imdb Author: blanche-2 from United States

This magnificently produced biop of Elvis Presley contains an eerie, almost frightening portrayal of Presley by Kurt Russell, who literally seems to be inhabited by Elvis' spirit.

Physically, the movie is perfect in casting and location - you could see a freeze of any frame of this film and know it's about Elvis.

All that being said, die-hard Elvis fans will be left frustrated by the movies' gaping holes and unnecessary inaccuracies, the biggest of which is that the film stops in 1970 when Elvis lived until 1977. One can understand having to leave out parts and truncating others but this film went too far. There is nothing indicating Elvis' drug use, which began in the army; nothing that touches on the other women in his life while he was with Priscilla; he and Priscilla seem to be talking divorce in 1969; Elvis' Vegas opening is combined with his later touring - and the concert opens with "2001: A Space Odyssey" - no way; Elvis rants and raves about the movies he has to make, but it's 1968, he's supposed to be doing his comeback special and he's just about free of the films; and on and on. For dramatic effect, the circumstances of his mother's death were changed so that Elvis is present in the hospital room - yet the true description of Elvis learning of his mother's death in the Peter Guralnick book is much more harrowing.

Interestingly, however, the film does touch on Elvis' lethal enmeshment with his mother and the "twinless twin" syndrome, showing him often talking with Jesse. If they could draw on those elements, the producers certainly could have come up with a more accurate script.

Brian Koller, filmsgraded.com

On its broadcast debut on Feb. 11, 1979, Elvis was one of the highest rated made-for-television movies ever shown. It had stiff competition as well, as CBS was showing Gone With the Wind. It was made not long after the August 1977 death of its subject, rock and roll entertainer Elvis Presley.

For a film that was made for television, Elvis had an impressive cast and crew. The director was John Carpenter, whose Halloween was a big box office hit the year before. Kurt Russell had the lead role, and was a brilliant casting. Not only did he look much like Elvis, but he could mimic Elvis' angst without it appearing as parody. Useless trivia: Russell made his screen debut in the 1963 Elvis vehicle It Happened at the World's Fair, as the boy who kicks Elvis.

Multiple Oscar winner Shelley Winters played Elvis' mother Gladys, capturing her humble, selfless, maternal Southern personality. Bing Russell, the real-life father of Kurt, played Elvis' dad Vernon. While screenwriter Anthony Lawrence was not a great talent, he certainly knew his subject matter. His first three screenplays were for Elvis musicals during the 1960s. Dick Clark of "American Bandstand" served as executive producer.

Elvis is not a great movie. The biggest problem is the pacing, which can be very slow. Sometimes the story can be melodramatic, with Elvis quick to wallow in self-pity whenever a setback occurs. The darker side of Elvis isn't covered: he was already abusing prescription pills by the 1960s, he was not faithful to Priscilla. The story also cuts off in 1969, conveniently bypassing his career and physical decline. As a result, the film is very sympathetic to Elvis, and concentrates on his personality strengths. He was very devoted to his family, he was religious, he was loyal and generous to friends. Their sycophantic relationship to him is well covered.

Another problem is the soundtrack. Although obtaining the rights to original Elvis songs would have been expensive, it would also have been much preferable to hearing vastly inferior soundalikes from Ronnie McDowell.

But on the whole, Elvis is a successful and well-intentioned film that fairly accurately tracks his career through 1969. All the legendary stories are covered; that his first record was made as a gift to his mother, that someone at the Grand Ole Opry told Elvis to go back to driving a truck, that Elvis snubbed his best friend Red West (Robert Gray) by not inviting him to his wedding with Priscilla (Season Hubley), that Elvis had a blow up with a Hollywood director, telling him that he was going to stop making 'these stupid movies'.

An even better film about Elvis is the pseudo-documentary This is Elvis, which benefits from archive footage and actual Elvis recordings. (65/100)

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker]

Slant Magazine (DVD) Eric Henderson

The A.V. Club: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

366 Weird Movies [Alfred Eaker]

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]

KQEK.com [Mark R. Hasan]

THE FOG B+ 92

USA (89 mi) 1980 ‘Scope

“To the ships at sea who can hear my voice, look across the water into the darkness. Look for the fog.” —Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau)

THE FOG comes at a distinct time in Carpenter’s life, riding on the heels of HALLOWEEN’S success, a film made for $320,000 that eventually grossed over $100 million worldwide, but it also marked a personal crossroads, as he had been cohabitating with longtime producer Debra Hill, who produced only one more film for the next 15 years, as they split up when Carpenter fell in love with his young protégé, Adrienne Barbeau, first appearing in his earlier made-for-TV thriller SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME (1978), one of the stars of this film that he eventually married, who is utilized in a kind of jazzy radio deejay homage to Eastwood’s role in PLAY MISTY FOR ME (1971). So there’s an interesting blend of the past coming to terms with the present, also expressed through the use of Jamie Lee Curtis (from HALLOWEEN) and her mother Janet Leigh (from PSYCHO), all blending together to create a unique thematic unison, as THE FOG is a ghost story about looking back into your own history and discovering things are not what they seem, that incidents from the past can come back to haunt you. Once more, like in HALLOWEEN, the camera feels like it has eyes, that it moves back and forth and peers around corners, fulfilling the curiosity of the viewer.

Using striking California oceanfront locations just north of San Francisco at Inverness and Pt. Reyes, former hang outs of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, another sleepy coastline community comes together to celebrate their 100^th year anniversary, paying tribute to the strength and formidable spirit of those founding fathers whose dark secret that we ultimately discover is that they were cutthroat murderers, led by a priest who had a near biblical hatred towards the thought of allowing a colony of lepers to locate nearby, so after inviting them into the commuity, he orchestrated their shipwreck at sea so that his town could steal their gold and prosper. In the opening sequence, John Houseman plays the Robert Shaw role in JAWS (1975), or Wallace Beery before that in TREASURE ISLAND (1934), personified nowadays by Davey Jones in the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN series, a crusty old warhorse of a sailor layered in the barnacles and brine from the bottom of the sea, telling captivated young children a ghost story a few minutes before midnight about how sailors tell a story about how a dense fog had caused this legendary shipwreck carrying a treasure of gold, a fog never before seen or since, that legend has it will reappear one day and the dead souls will rise from the bottom of the sea and reclaim what is rightfully theirs. This is quickly told in two or three minutes before the opening credit sequence, but it lays the groundwork for the next 85 minutes to come, another well integrated, well edited, bare bones story that leads to a legendary climax in a church where the ominous dead rise out of a fog that has descended over the entire town, where the fog itself takes on a “glowing” characteristic, which becomes so sinister and threatening in nature that one is tempted to yell out “It’s alive!”

Adrienne Barbeau is terrific as Stevie Wayne, the lone owner of a radio station that operates in the tower inside a lighthouse on the edge of town, choosing relaxed, mellow old jazz standards that play through the night while giving the station identification announcements in that coy, reassuredly sexy voice that speaks directly to each listener, like she’s speaking only to you in the comfort of your living room. But one night, just after midnight, weird things start happening, things that make no sense but are reminiscent somewhat of the yet to come movie CHRISTINE (1983), so this is a foreboding precursor for things to come as the town just for the briefest moment goes haywire. Blink and you’ll miss it. Even if you see it, you’ll likely overlook what you saw, believing you were tired, daydreaming and perhaps seeing things. But something strikes in the middle of the night and what appears to be a crewless ship returns to shore the next morning with odd, inexplicable deaths attributed. Only Stevie who saw the “glowing” fog moving in the opposite direction of the wind made a connection that something was not right. When she sees it reappear again the next night, she takes to the radio airwaves to warn everyone, growing more hysterical by the minute when she realizes her son may be in harm’s way. This is beautifully cross cut with the town’s commemoration speeches, led by Janet Leigh, a descendent to one of the founding fathers, but also Jamie Lee Curtis, working side by side with her mom at certain points, who plays a wayward hitchhiker who once again is taunted by the imminent harm of dark menacing creatures of the night, especially a fabulous moment when a dead corpse rises unsuspectingly behind her.

Carpenter’s signature music is brilliant, one of his best scores, always on cue at any sign of danger, but it really ratchets up to near hysteric pitch to match Stevie’s delirious rising fear on the air, using outstanding rhythmic percussive sounds which include crashing gong noises as the action picks up, as a desperate car attempts to outrace the approaching fog which eventually engulfs the entire town. But its target is the church, the origin of the hate crime against them in the first place, where Hal Holbrook is the mumbling, somewhat incoherent and nearly deranged parrish priest once he discovers the town’s dark secret, which flies like a poltergeist out of its hiding place behind a large stone at the church one night in the form of a secret diary which tells the whole story. He’s sure his days are numbered, which takes place in a picture perfect sequence as the dead rise from out of the fog behind the pews inside his church, a wonderful mixture of darkness and light, sin and redemption, even fire and brimstone, as he carries a giant cross molded out of the missing gold, the burden the town has carried for a hundred years, as the Father attempts to atone for the town and the church’s past sins. Mixed in with this sequence is Stevie Wayne crawling up to the roof of the lighthouse where out of the eerie blue light of the fog are ghoulishly dark faceless creatures of the undead bearing giant hooks, where the incessant pounding of Kabuki-like sticks drives the pulsating fury of the moment to a fevered pitch, using close ups, alternating light from the lighthouse and incredibly oblique angles to excellent effect. It has a kind of Michael Haneke FUNNY GAMES (1997) moment, as right when you think all is right with the world, you realize this is a horror film, where horror never allows for a moment’s rest. This is a beautiful rendering of the church’s own implications to our own sordid past which is lined with untold stories of dead bodies, and there are no diaries revealing the secrets of where they are all buried.

The Fog will disappoint those expecting a re-run of the creepy scares from Halloween. Instead, expanding enormously on the fantasy elements of his earlier films, Carpenter has turned in a full-scale thriller of the supernatural, as a sinister fog bank comes rolling in off the sea to take revenge on the smug little town of Antonio Bay, N. Calif. No shotguns pumping; no prowling of dark corners; no tricksy dry-ice chills. Instead you'll find a masterful simplicity of style, a lonely and determined group of characters under siege, and a childlike sense of brooding fear that almost disappeared in the '70s. Carpenter's confidence is outrageous; the range of his models even more so (from Poe to RKO); and the achievement is all his own, despite ragged moments and occasional hesitations.

This is not a review of John Carpenter's The Fog. It's just a "quick note" written in advance of Rupert Wainwright's remake which, despite truly lousy reviews, Wainwright's version has managed to top the US box-office this weekend.

Those hostile US critics haven't contented themselves with rubbishing the remake: several have had a pop at the Carpenter version as well, dismissing it as "not one of his best" or even worse. In the latter camp: Kyle Smith of the New York Post: I was held in suspense throughout The Fog, aching to learn the answer to its central riddle: Why would any one remake such a crummy movie?

I'm afraid I can't let such comments go unchallenged. The Fog is my favourite John Carpenter film, and has often bobbed up into my all-time top ten. The brisk 89-minute running-time is only one reason why it's probably the film I've watched most often over the years - I may well be in imminent danger of wearing out my VHS copy. So please don't be put off digging out the DVD or catching a TV screening if you get the chance: this is one of the great horror movies.

Following up his breakthrough hit Halloween, John Carpenter eschewed slasher flick terror in favor of ghost story eeriness with The Fog, an atmospheric tale of the angry undead in which a small California coastal town becomes literally haunted by its past. An ominous fog rolling into Antonio Bay carries with it the sinister spirits of a ship’s leper colony-bound crew who, 100 years ago to the day, drowned in a shipwreck orchestrated by a committee led by the town’s priest. As the malevolent mist makes its way first through a shipping boat’s drunken swabs and then into the town proper, a motley crew of characters – including a promiscuous hitchhiker (Jamie Lee Curtis), the woman (Janet Leigh) planning the community’s centennial celebration, a drunken priest (Hal Holbrook) who knows why the fog has appeared, and a sultry radio DJ (Adrienne Barbeau) trapped in her lighthouse broadcasting studio – vainly attempt to stop whatever mysterious force is hiding in the neon-glowing vapor. By attempting to insert some hack-and-slash moments into what’s essentially a moody E.C. Comics-style campfire tale – highlighted by a fantastic opening scene featuring John Houseman’s recounting of the shipwreck legend – Carpenter’s spine-tingler occasionally feels awkwardly constructed. Nevertheless, his gorgeous 2.35:1 compositions and menacingly languorous pacing create a sense of near-apocalyptic gloom. And as with his thematically rich Assault on Precinct 13, there’s more than just deadly pirate hooks lurking beneath The Fog’s pulpy surface; from his story’s overriding preoccupation with history’s inescapable influence on the present, to the subtle critique of the way in which the church sustains itself through decidedly un-Christian dastardliness, Carpenter’s slow but satisfyingly sinister spookfest reveals a surprising depth.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

The Fog was John Carpenter's follow-up to his breakthrough hit Halloween and while this underrated gem is often overshadowed by its predecessor, it bears mentioning that it shares much in common with the director's urban western Assault on Precinct 13, still his greatest achievement. Kent Jones of Film Comment called Carpenter "the last genre filmmaker working in America" (indeed, a resilient Carpenter still makes analog films while everyone else is moving with the digital tide). Perhaps that's the key to understanding Carpenter's success in the '70s. When the director remade Howard Hawks' classic western Rio Bravo as Precinct 13, he showcased a style every bit as genre defying as that of his idol's. Though there's no mistaking the noir and western elements at work in Precinct 13, it is first and foremost an urban horror film. It's only natural that Carpenter's popularity waned as soon as audiences demanded more gore. Still, when Romero (Night of the Living Dead) and Cronenberg (Scanners) were giving audiences what they wanted, Carpenter was more successful at scaring the populace with what it couldn't see. In The Fog, a neon-colored mist descends upon the 100-year-old hamlet of Antonio Bay. Carpenter's use of 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen is beyond legendary and his compositions evoke a town that may as well be the last remaining one on the face of the earth. Adrienne Barbeau's radio host makes for a fascinating heroine. Not only does her on-air shtick make for great narration but her allegiance to her community and job is fascinatingly called into question as she watches her home being consumed by the fog. She's "on top of the world," using the airwaves to guide citizens to what should be the only safe place in town: the old church. Carpenter's use of silence is every bit as impressive as his direction of character movement. The slowness with which his characters walk through his frames (across a beach, down stairwells) evokes an existential relationship between nature and man but, more importantly, one between a spiteful past and a misbegotten present.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Reel.com DVD review [Tor Thorsen]

Classic-Horror Chris Justice

The Fog A review of Rupert Wainright's remake of John Carpenter's The Fog (1980), from John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, October 18, 2005

Final Girl Stacie Ponder

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

eFilmCritic Mel Valentin

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

not coming to a theater near you Thomas Scalzo

The Fog Cavett Binion from All Movie Guide

ToxicUniverse.com (Mike Bracken)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton)

DVD Verdict Harold Gervais

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg]

Eat My Brains Zombie Club also reviewing THEY LIVE

Julian Cope Presents Head Heritage | Unsung | Reviews | John ... soundtrack review

The Official John Carpenter, Rolling Stone: June 28, 1979 The Fog, a Spook Ride on Film, by Paul Scanlon

YouTube - The Fog - John Carpenter - Blakes Revenge the last 8 minutes of the film

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK A 95

USA Great Britain (99 mi) 1981 ‘Scope

“I don’t give a fuck about your war… or your president.” —Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell)

All you have to do is hear that familiar synthesizer intro, a slow moving dirge that feels like a funeral procession, Escape From New York Theme (BEST QUALITY) YouTube (3:55), and you’re taken back to the decade of the 80’s, where this is one of the better musical scores, written by Carpenter and Alan Horvath, a perfect fit for the nightmarish dread that is this movie, where a futuristic apocalypse is upon us in the form of a rising crime rate increased by 400%. Crime is so out of contral that security forces have turned the island of Manhattan (think of Woody Allen’s romanticized movie released in 1979, just two years prior to this one) in New York City into a maximum security prison with guards placed only on the outside, building walls completely around it and mining all bridges, making it completely impossible to escape, like Alcatraz, a prison for over 3 million criminals who are expected to savagely survive on their own, receiving only monthly food drops in Central Park, turning this into an exiled land of undesirables. Looking for the worst city in America to shoot the film, they discovered a recent fire destroyed nearly 20% of the downtown area of St. Louis, leaving it a ravaged no man’s land of burned out rubble, where the remaining piles of garbage strewn along the street give this a beautifully desolate landscape of ruin and emptiness, exactly the mood needed for this film, which is intoxicatingly rich in atmosphere. This film has a swagger all it’s own, inventing a unique conception of über cool in the form of the lead character, Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, easily his greatest role, an inmate himself wearing an eye patch over one eye and a sleeveless shirt under a worn leather jacket, a shaggy-haired former war hero who has the uncanny ability to make things happen. The beauty of his character (besides the name) is the explosively charged, badass attitude mixed with his sneering nonchalance, where his defiant bravado makes the film, as he doesn’t trust a single thing about the government, adding a kind of macho anarchistic rebellion the moment he is dropped into the middle of the war zone.

On his way to a world summit conference, Air Force One carrying the President (Donald Pleasance) is hijacked and crashes into the heart of Manhattan (a decade before 9/11), where he quickly disappears into the ruins and is held hostage. Plissken is injected with a deadly chemical designed to kill him instantly after 24 hours if he doesn’t return with the President and the important documents he’s carrying, a little incentive provided by the police commissioner Lee Van Cleef, along with a watch that counts down his remaining time. Plissken is a perfect choice, as he’s a lone warrior trained to fend for himself under the worst circumstances, which is exactly where he soon finds himself. Shot entirely at night, the cover of darkness provides a creepy environment where things have a way of jumping out of unseen cracks and corners, where a one-eyed guy hauling around a giant-sized gun is bound to attract attention. Ernest Borgnine, of all people, whose presence recalls the fatalism of The Wild Bunch (1969), picks him up in his yellow cab, heaving a molotov cocktail to cover his tracks from marauding hooligans chasing after Snake, where the pleasant sounds of the theme song from American Bandstand Les Elgart - Bandstand Boogie YouTube (2:04) can be heard blaring over his stereo. The cabbie takes him to Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) and his girl Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau, aka cleavage), as both work for The Duke (Isaac Hayes), the ganglord who controls the streets and is holding the President. Amusingly, each of the characters, once learning of Plissken’s presence inside the prison, has the exact same reaction: “I heard you were dead.” Part of the fun of this film is the slow introduction of so many familiar faces that the audience quickly identifies with along with the incessant stream of weird characters, especially the kind that work for the Duke, who is seen driving a pimp-mobile with four chandeliers for head and tail lights and a disco ball hanging from the rearview mirror. Hayes relaxed and ultra cool demeanor matches that of Snake, though he cracks him over the head with a tire iron first chance he gets as a kind of welcoming into the hood.

As soon as Snake comes to, just an hour or so before his deadline, he’s forced to fight in front of disapproving fans in a Roman Colosseum style gladiator match, pitted against a much larger human specimen, Ox Baker, a professional wrestler in real life, set in the dilapidated remains of Madison Square Garden. In front of the Duke and a teeming throng of bloodthirsty psychopaths, both are given baseball bats to smash each other to bits in a small enclosed ring, followed by the next round where the bats have nail spikes sticking out the end, a hint of escalating brutality. Somehow, Snake is able to empty the arena in utter chaos and pandemonium, making a quick escape where he improvises a spectacular last minute rescue of the President, against all odds and some unexpected circumstances, eventually high tailing it in the cab across the George Washington Bridge with the Duke on his heels. Defying death at every turn, with landmines and demolished cars and all kinds of debris left as barricades blocking their path, the route appears doomed, but this is their only path left to escape. The filth and grime of the streets are like a silent character, beautifully captured by cinematographer Dean Cundey who is in perfect synch with the director, revealing a sprawling wasteland in every direction, where fires always seem to be burning off in the distance. Certainly this is an abominable and nightmarish pit of miserable existence, where Carpenter has outdone himself in creating such an extraordinarily bleak vision of Hell on earth. The hypnotic synth theme becomes an anthem by the end that is played like a requiem over the living and the dead, as this jailbreak leaves plenty of bodies left behind, all sacrificed for the noble cause of the President, but otherwise quickly forgotten by the government that simply left them there to die. Written by Carpenter and Nick Castle, who played Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN (1978), this kind of post-Watergate cynicism and post-Vietnam anger and disgust with government for all the lies, cover ups, and dead bodies in its wake has never been so poetically rendered as the contemptuous and distrustful nihilism expressed in this film.

Escape from New York Tom Milne from Time Out London

Sporting a black eye-patch and a mutinous sneer, anti-hero Snake Plissken (Russell) prepares to invade the Manhattan of 1997, sealed off as a self-regulating maximum security prison following a 400% rise in the crime rate, and ruled over by a black drug-dealing Prospero (Hayes) attended by his punk Ariel. Victim of a Catch-22 situation and primed to self-destruct if he fails, Snake's task is to rescue the hijacked US president (Pleasence) from this ominous underworld; and for about half the film, Carpenter's narrative economy and explosive visual style (incorporating some marvellous model work of the new Manhattan skyline) promise wonders. The trouble is that his characters neither develop nor interact dynamically, so the plot gradually winds down into predictable though highly enoyable histrionics.

Escape From New York Rob Gonsalves from eFilmCritic

Another John Carpenter cult classic, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK was one of the best entries in the once popular post-apocalyptic genre which included ROAD WARRIOR and THE TERMINATOR. In 1997, the island of Manhattan has been turned into the world's largest maximum security prison, a place where the worst of humanity is sent to rot. The U.S. Government finds itself in a major crisis when the president's plane crash lands in New York only days before a vital peace summit between major warring nations is to take place. The president survives the crash, but is taken hostage by the denizens of Manhattan and held for ransom. Only war hero turned felon Snake Plissken can save the day, and he is offered a simple deal for his work: save the president and live, fail to save him and die. The one-eyed bandit sets to work, cutting a path of destruction to the president that has to be seen to be believed. Kurt Russell creates the indelible character of Snake Plissken as no other actor could have. Wisecracking and cool under the very worst of pressures, Snake is the ultimate bad good guy. Often copied, but never duplicated, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is full of the wit, energy and action that marks a John Carpenter picture.

EFilmCritic [Brett Gallman]

The product of a time when New York seemed more likely to rot from within than suffer attacks from without, John Carpenter's Escape From New York took Taxi Driver's urban hellscape and projected it onto a cartoonishly savage future. The premise was brilliantly simple: By the far-off year of 1997, crime is so out of hand that Manhattan has been abandoned, cordoned off into a maximum-security prison and left to destroy itself. Needing to rescue kidnapped president Donald Pleasence from within Manhattan's confines, special agent Lee Van Cleef hits upon a desperate plan: Send in a criminal tough enough to take on an island. He finds one in the eyepatched Snake Plissken, memorably played by Kurt Russell as a cross between Clint Eastwood and a damaged Vietnam vet. (Sandwiched between the TV biopic Elvis and the John Wayne-inspired Big Trouble In Little China, Escape From New York is the center of a loose Carpenter/Russell trilogy featuring larger-than-life American heroes.) Created on a relatively tiny budget from constructive editing, St. Louis ghettoes, and pounds of detritus, Carpenter's grittily convincing New York-in-decay remains the film's best element. Never particularly suspenseful and hampered by a finale that almost literally steers the plot toward a dead end, Escape only intermittently finds Carpenter flexing his directorial muscles. But it may be his most visionary film: Escape allowed him to build a future out of scraps from the past. Playing a cabbie (named, appropriately enough, "Cabbie"), Ernest Borgnine cheerily drives one of New York's few working cars while blaring the same big-band song over and over again. He works for "The Duke" (Isaac Hayes), a pitiless warlord who rules the city wearing a cowboy's hat and boots and a Napoleonic military commander's jacket while holding gladiatorial contests to feed the bloodlust of the masses. It's history repeating itself as a violent farce, and it allows Carpenter to revel in his most cynical impulses. Reappearing as a double-disc DVD, Escape From New York contains a nice array of expected features and one nifty find: A long-deleted opening reel in which Russell robs a bank, only to be caught while trying to save his partner. On the audio commentary accompanying the scene, both Carpenter and Russell seem to agree that removing it was a good idea. "This actually humanizes him. Now, some people might say that's a good thing," Carpenter says. Russell interrupts: "This movie's not for them."

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez Pt 1, making a rare film critic double bill

Kent Jones described John Carpenter as "an analog man in a digital world" and blamed the auteur's waning popularity (after the one-two punch of Halloween and his masterpiece Assault on Precinct 13) on the way we make allowances for fashion. Jones said in his seminal piece on the director in 1999's Film Comment: "Whether we like it or not, we attune ourselves to norms and paradigms in filmmaking as they shift like tectonic plates, making unconscious adjustments in our heads about how to watch films and see them in relation to one another." In short: John Carpenter is too old-school for most people's tastes. But what does it say about 1981's Escape from New York that it plays so well after 9/11? The oppressive power of Carpenter's Scope framing is matched only by his ability to speak to contemporary affairs. Written in 1974, made in 1980, and set in the future of 1997, Escape from New York is timeless activist cinema. Manhattan is now an island prison surrounded by an impenetrable containment wall. Hijacked by the National Liberation Front terrorist group, Air Force One crashes into a building near the World Trade Center. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, channeling the mythos of John Wayne) is sent in to rescue the President of the United States and stumbles upon a lawless, hermetic community governed by a pimp named The Duke (Isaac Hayes). If the setup is familiar (an immobile society is penetrated from a paralyzing beyond), so is the windfall (the attack illuminates our reclusive culture's unaddressed evils). Escape from New York is not as enthralling as the metaphor-rich, Reagan-era They Live and the parallel action isn't as pronounced or intoxicating as it was in The Fog, but its politics are no less immediate (the constantly shifting alliances, individualism versus collectivism, the distrust of authority and the overriding public relations fiasco that closes the film). It's difficult to imagine a government in 1997 (let alone 1981) putting this much emphasis on an audio cassette, but that's more or less the point. With Snake's final act of subversion, Carpenter heralds the power of analog (Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" anthem) to bring together sparring nations.

Apollo Movie Guide [Ed Gonzalez] Pt 2

More so than any other director, John Carpenter has learned to predict the cult status of his movies. Watching Escape form New York nearly 20 years after its initial release is like watching a film begging for sci-fi idolization. Everything from the fascinating premise to a cast of actors that includes Ernest Borgnine and Harry Dean Stanton are sure fire ingredients for a post-apocalyptic masterpiece along the lines of other sci-fi oddities from the ‘80s like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

For the opening credit sequence, Carpenter plays with a funky electronic score that bears a striking resemblance to something from a Dario Argento film. This is no surprise, of course, when you consider the influence the Italian giallo director had on his American counterpart and Carpenter does manage to make the movie’s music his own by adding a post-‘70s synth groove that is oddly appropriate to the world he has created. It’s like watching a futuristic blaxploitation film except the only brother in the film is the all-powerful Isaac Hayes.

The opening sequence signals one of the greatest set-ups in the annals of sci-fi: the entire island of Manhattan has been turned into a prison to accommodate the 400 per cent rise in violence between the years 1988 and 1997. The concept is worthy of Orwell, but the execution isn’t as meaty as one would expect from material so ripe with social and political urgency. We get a rather gimmicky plot revolving around a prisoner named Snake Plissken ( Kurt Russell) being offered a pardon if he can enter and leave Manhattan within 24 hours of rescuing the president of the United States. The president, the only survivor of an Air Force One hijack mission, has been left to ward off trouble in the prison city that is unofficially governed by the Duke (Hayes).

This isn’t a brazenly colourful futuristic landscape but a grimy portrait of a city not far from the down-and-dirty real New York of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Comparing Carpenter’s universe to an Orwellian landscape isn’t an overstatement because there is plenty of substance here for a heated exploration of recycled governmental reform.

The inhabitants of the prison are the sort of people who oppose the so-called fascist ideals of the Man, but know they must form some sort of organized governmental system to survive. The creation of gasoline is entirely controlled by underground groups and when food is scarce, criminals resort to cannibalism. These societal explorations are the more interesting aspects of the film, but Carpenter doesn’t give them much play, opting instead to focus on the by-the-numbers rescue mission that is spear-headed by Snake. Still, Carpenter should get some credit for creating a world where criminals spew anti-government rhetoric while hypocritically branding a debonair Black man as their Duke (a less controlling version of a mayor, I suppose) and using a politician as their means to re-enter the world of the Man.

If you know your John Carpenter, then you know he never shied away from his love for Howard Hawks; this admiration obviously revealed itself when he updated “Rio Bravo” and “The Thing From Another World” into “Assault on Precinct 13” and “The Thing.” And while the former technically transplanted Hawks’s story from the dusty frontier to the gravelly streets of Los Angeles, it’s arguable that Carpenter didn’t truly do his Western update until "Escape From New York," a film that actually seems to owe more to John Ford’s “The Searchers” more so than to anything related to Hawks.

The new frontier is the then-future 1997 wasteland, where Manhattan Island has been converted to a maximum security prison (“once you go in, you don’t come out,” Jamie Lee Curtis intones via voiceover narration). When an extremist group (The National Liberation Front of America, representing the insane sector of the 99%) kidnaps the President (Donald Pleasence, still British despite playing the American commanding chief), the military can only turn to one man. Enter Carpenter’s enigmatic gunslinger : Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a former decorated soldier turned outlaw who is given a chance at amnesty if he can rescue the President within 24 hours.

Despite playing the John Wayne role of “the searcher,” Russell snarls and sneers with the detached contempt and gravelly inflection of Eastwood’s Man With No Name, which seems somehow fitting since he’s taking orders here from one of the all time great black hats from the spaghetti western scene in Lee Van Cleef (whose subordinates here are Tom Atkins and Charles Cyphers, rounding out a badass triumvirate).

Plissken even comes with his own aura--somehow, everyone that he runs into recognizes him immediately, though everyone greets him with the same refrain--“I thought you were dead.” Like any drifter who wanders into a frontier, he feels like a conqueror the moment he steps foot into the ashen, bombed out streets of Manhattan, and he even comes complete with an eye-patch to accentuate his grizzled demeanor. One of cinema’s great mercenaries (“I don’t give a fuck about your war,“ he insists), he’s the lone gunman transported to the cyberpunk 80s, brimming with anti-heroic ambivalence that betrays the nihilism and fuelling “Escape From New York.”

This is a searing, bleak vision of the future and one that’s immediately and strikingly realized when we see America’s most iconic city reduced to a smoky, grim husk, its typically illuminated skyline rendered into a ghastly shade. The film’s politics are broad, yet still relevant even in its exaggerated dystopian view of a “future” that’s now 15 years old. Snake is our entry point--he not only doesn’t give a fuck about America’s war--he doesn’t even care for the President himself, seeing this whole shindig as a chance for freedom.

All of this doesn’t come off as ultra-conservative paranoia of big government, but rather, as general distrust for authority, with Snake being the ultimate thumb-nosing anarchist. In a world gone to hell, he’s one of the few people with an actual conviction, even if it is just to himself; that we’re asked to (and on many levels easily) identify with him speaks to post-Watergate cynicism. If westerns often took the form of odes to the lawlessness and violence of the old frontier, then “Escape From New York” is an elegy for a future defined by social morass and violent upheaval, dominated by absurd individuals with either the best weapons or the best intel (one of the film’s subplots involves a chase for a map of a minefield that’s preventing the criminals’ escape).

In keeping with the Western theme, Snake is still somehow the unwavering white hat here, as he’s pitted against Isaac Hayes’s “A-Number-One” Duke of New York, the baron of the penitentiary that’s carved out a social order that probably thrives like any other prison system. Both stage dramas and gladiatorial displays serve as entertainment in this backwater landscape that Snake finds himself navigating; it’s all a bit absurd, populated by oddballs and degenerates, which makes this such a treacherous predicament for the President.

It’s not so much that he’s in mortal peril--that much is clear--however, when he’s gussied up in a wig and made to look every bit as absurd as his captors, it represents a flipped script that blurs the line between civilized and primitive. That line is further blurred when the usually stately and austere Pleasence is ultimately turned into a raving, gun-toting maniac himself, completely consumed by this deranged world that he’s been plopped into.

“Escape From New York” is not only one of Carpenter’s finest films, it’s one an unquestionable masterpiece in lo-fi filmmaking. It’s a grungy, ramshackle production marked by an impressive design from veteran Joe Alves, who dresses up both soundstage interiors and actual locations to realize a seedy post-apocalyptic “future” that feels even more effective now since it’s been rendered a bit archaic. Even the sleek government sets are oppressively dim neon fortresses where men tinker behind computer screens.

A number of spectacularly shoestring special effects highlight the film, some of which were rendered by James Cameron, who was still a Roger Corman disciple at the time. Snake’s descent into the city via glider is particularly memorable triumph of miniature and model work; there’s gritty craftiness to how this sequence (and the rest of the film) came together despite limited resources. Even the film’s score (co-scored by Carpenter and Alan Howarth) is characteristically electronic and minimalist, feeding into the film’s low-key moodiness; it’s an action film with dynamic sequences, but they’re delivered with such a steady, measured calm that they rarely feel like empty spectacle.

Still, this is also a small-scale film made large due to Carpenter’s Panavision grandeur, especially when it comes to capturing his desolate cityscape; this again feels reminiscent of Ford’s affinity for protagonists defined by their surroundings. Just as Wayne was as rugged as the dusty landscape he walked out into and embraced (even as his companions returned for the warmth of the homestead) at the end of “The Searchers,” so too is Snake Plissken as rough and tumble as the pallid, motley streets of New York. At the end here, he too strolls off from whatever comfort can be afforded him, presumably in search of another untamed, ragged land. Such is life in a world ruled by either inane bureaucrats or crude despots.

The dividing line between civilization and savagery was also an overarching theme in “The Searchers,” with Wayne’s quest being to save the innocence of his niece at all costs. “Escape From New York” assumes that the line is gone, though the desire to maintain it absurdly remains. As usual, Carpenter delivers a dynamite landmine of a film parading around in B-movie clothes--again, not unlike his idols, whose Westerns transcended that genre’s tendency towards the bottom half of a double bill.

Carpenter seems to rarely get credit for his ability to transpose and mash-up genres, and, like most visionaries, he wasn’t always appreciated much in his heyday. In fact, “Escape From New York” represented one of the few major genre hits in his career, perhaps because the Western archetype it riffs on is so universal. Or maybe it’s because “Escape From New York” simply kicks ass and is every bit as cool as any spaghetti western, as gloriously pulpy as any action flick, and as heady as any dystopian sci-fi fable.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Escape from New York (1981) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, October 8, 2010

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

Movie Review - Escape from New York - eFilmCritic Mel Valentin

Edward Copeland on Film (J.D.)

Electric Sheep Magazine [John Berra]

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg)

filmcritic.com Jeremiah Kipp

American Cinematographer: DVD Playback April 2003 Jim Hemphill, American Cinematographer, April 2004

HorrorTalk SuperNova

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

0-5 Star Reviews Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

ReelViews [James Berardinelli] also seen here: James Berardinelli

This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]

Cinema Suicide Bryan White

The Film Fiend T. Rigney

"A Helluva Town" Newsweek magazine

"Bad Apples" Richard Corliss from Time magazine

Post-Apocalypse Michael Petch

DVD Verdict Harold Gervais

Escape From New York 1981 - digitallyOBSESSED! Dan Lopez

DVD Drive-In Chris Gullo

DVD Town - Special edition [John J. Puccio] 2-discs

DVD Verdict - Special Edition Bill Treadway, 2-discs

DVD Review - Escape from New York: Special ... - The Digital Bits Adam Jahnke, Special Edition, 2-discs

Escape From New York: Collector's Edition : DVD Talk Review of the ... Jason Bovberg from DVD Talk, Collector’s Edition, 2-discs

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howart, Special Edition, 2-discs

Digital Retribution - Region 4 SE Mr. Intolerance, Special Edition, 2-discs

DVDAnswers.com [Casimir Harlow] Special Edition, 2-discs

Cinema Laser Derek M. Germano, Special Edition, 2-discs

DVD Monsters and Critics [Andy McKeague] Special Edition, 2-discs

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Blu-Ray, 2-discs

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Dan Mancini] 2-discs

AVForums (Blu-ray) [Chris McEneany] 2-discs

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray & DVD with Pictures Kevin Cedeno, 2-discs

High-Def Digest [El Bicho] 2-discs

Upcomingdiscs.Com [Michael Durr] (Blu-ray) 2-discs

HK and Cult Film News [Blu-Ray] (porfle) Ian Friedman

Movie Vault [joecooler2u]

Mutant Reviewers From Hell Justin

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Jonny Lieberman

Explore-science-fiction-movies.com Sandman

Film Intuition [Jen Johans]

The Flick Filosopher's take Maryann Johanson

Daily Film Dose Alan Bacchus

Bad Movie Knights [Big Daddy Yum Yum] (October 2, 2006)

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

Three Movie Buffs [Patrick Nash]

The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]

Movie Vault [William McGuire]

FeoAmante.com [Kelly Parks]

Mainly Movies: Escape from New York

LameMovies.net [James Fagan]

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

Roger Crow

I Like Horror Movies [Carl Manes]

The Movie Scene [Andy Webb]

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

Geek Juice Media [Alex Jowski]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Max Blinkhorn

Read Keith Dudhnath's DVD Review Eye for Film

"Escape from New York" Dave Kehr from The Reader

Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth] Back to the Apocalypse: the best of the 80′s post-apocalyptic films, December 28, 2009

Escape From New York Read the script from the film from the Sci-Fi Movie Page

Escape from New York (soundtrack) by John Carpenter - Tracksounds Christopher Coleman

Escape From New York (1980/2000) Soundtrack - Soundtrack.Net soundtrack review

film_stills: Escape From New York (John Carpenter 1981)

Escape from New York at Official John Carpenter's Website

"On Location" Robert Osborne from The Hollywood Reporter

NY Times Original Review also seen here: "Escape from New York"

Escape from New York - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE THING C+ 78

USA (109 mi) 1982 ‘Scope

You gotta be fucking kidding. —Palmer (David Clennon)

Not for the faint of heart, as this is an old-fashioned, white knuckles, violently grotesque horror flick that modern day directors like Rob Zombie, who remade Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN in 2007, went to school on, where the pervading sense of dread shifts the focus from the horror “outside” to the horror “inside.” One of the few Carpenter films that is adapted from another source, while also being a remake of a classic sci-fi B-movie from the early 50’s (“Watch the skies!!”), Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’s THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), which is also the movie Jamie Curtis is watching on TV while babysitting in HALLOWEEN (1978). Carpenter turns that monster-on-the-loose at the North Pole into a gore fest, changing locations to a science expedition at a remote outpost in Antarctica, which could just as easily be outer space, as this team of about 12 men have lost all radio contact with the outside world, leaving them for all practical purposes stranded and alone should a catastrophe hit. Unlike Hawks’ film which is chatty and dialogue driven, this is a visual exercise about being hunted down from the opening shot, where a malamute dog is being chased and fired upon by a Norwegian helicopter, which inexplicably lands next to the base, yelling and screaming and shooting randomly at anyone that moves, injuring one of the men before being shot and killed, their helicopter destroyed. While Ennio Morricone gets credit for the music, it’s the creepy sounds of a Carpenter synthesizer that holds our attention.

In the icy cold of an endless landscape of snow, Kirk Russell as R.J. MacReady drinking a bottle of J & B Scotch appears in shades, a helicopter pilot sent along with Richard Dysart as Dr. Copper the science officer to investigate the Norwegian camp about an hour away. There they discover a frozen graveyard, a wasteland with bodies frozen with fear still etched on their faces, and something inhuman and half burned appears to be a mutated conglomeration that includes several humans, a scientific phenomenon that they bring back to the base to explore further. While Wilfred Brimley as Dr. Blair conducts a nauseating autopsy, the trademark Carpenter camera moves through empty hallways and peers around corners as if it has eyes. This time it’s the malamute that’s suspicious, as something in the dark attacks the dogs, suddenly mutating into another creature with wretched and grotesque results on full display. A review of the Norwegian tapes reveals they used Thermite charges to unearth a space ship, including a creature frozen under the ice for 100,000 years. Blair’s experiments reveal a total molecular takeover, where the shape shifting alien life form can perfectly imitate the dog or human that it inhabits, making it impossible to detect. The grotesque mutations discovered earlier had not yet finalized their complete imitation. Blair concludes that if unleashed into the world, the entire planet would be infected within 27,000 hours. From this point on, Blair is never again the same.

With the alien unleashed into the camp, suddenly everyone is suspect, as no one is sure who is really human anymore, and the mood changes from the fear of the monster on the loose to the fear of your fellow humans, becoming paranoid and highly suspicious of one another, continually turning on each other with accusations. Soon people are willing to do things they would never dream of doing otherwise, as the laws have changed. Morality is thrown out the window in the interest of self preservation. It is in exactly this kind of lawless environment that Russell excels, fresh from one of his greatest roles, Snake Plissken in Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), he is a throwback to another era, a lone baddass who roams the countryside with ease, a drifter with commendable instincts, though even he, too, is suspect. All grow leery of one another. Blair goes on a violent rampage, using an axe to destroy all the radio and scientific equipment, shooting at anyone who comes close, eventually subdued and locked in a tool shed where he is effectively banished, but not before they realize he has vandalized all the wires to the helicopter, effectively stranding all of them there until reinforcements with new supplies come sometime in the spring. Meanwhile, they are all alone with The Thing, where a slow sense of doom pervades. On several occasions the monster does reveal itself, where its frightening transition couldn’t be more horrifying, as it literally devours its subjects. Humans are defenseless and some freeze in a state of paralyzed shock at what they see, as the gruesome sight does resemble the creature in Ridley Scott’s ALIEN (1979), and Stan Winston had a hand in the special effects of both movies.

All they can think to do is firebomb The Thing using a flamethrower, which they are continually forced to do, until eventually the weapon itself malfunctions, leaving the alien free to wreak the kind of devastating havoc that only exists in horror movies. This is graphically raw and overly violent, with in-your-face horrors onscreen where we see faces stretched beyond proportion, eyeballs bulging out, and human flesh ripped apart with the tentacles of the creature reaching out from inside before suddenly The Thing rises to giant-sized proportions filling the room, a reptile-like alien oozing with goo that eats humans with ease. This is a frightening monster capable of wiping them all out instantly, as unlike a fully developed monster, this one always appears to be evolving from one state to another, constantly changing and always on the move, as it never stays in just one place except when it’s hidden in an imitation form. But when attacked or exposed, it reacts with lightning-like speed and grows to gargantuan size, attacking humans at will. After doing a few rounds with this shape-changing, flesh eater, where men are slowly picked off one by one, the chances for human survival grows dim, where the audience is teased and tantalized and then overwhelmed by the monstrous nature of man and beast, until by the end, the audience is never sure if people are human or if they are The Thing, as it remains cleverly ambiguous with prospects for the future that are bleak and downbeat.

Adisakdl Tantimedh from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

A group of scientists (including Kurt Russell’s protagonist) at an isolated outpost in Antarctica find themselves under siege by an alien lifeform that can take over their bodies. Cut off from the outside world, the men grow increasingly paranoid as they suspect each other of being taken over by the alien, and realize that they can’t afford to let it venture beyond the outpost, lest it infect the entire world.

Based on the classic science-fiction story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, and having originally been adapted by Howard Hawks in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, this 1982 version by John Carpenter eschews the Boy’s Own Adventure of the Hawks film and goes straight for claustrophobia and existential dread. Carpenter’s The Thing proved to be one of the most influential horror films of the 80’s, much imitated but rarely bettered.

Along with the films of David Cronenberg, The Thing is one of the prime texts to explore the themes of bodily invasion that pervade horror and sci-fi movies of that decade. It is one of the first films to unflinchingly show the rupture and warp of flesh and bone into grotesque tableaus of surreal beauty, forever raising the bar on cinematic horror.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

In re-adapting the John W Campbell story (Who Goes There?) already filmed so superbly in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, Carpenter provides a punchy enough action thriller as the men of a lonely Antarctic research team are menaced by a shape-changing alien from outer space. But there comes a time when spectacular special effects - even by the estimable Rob Bottin - are just not enough. Carpenter avoids the subtle suspense of the earlier version - all the guessing and paranoia and wonder - in favour of a mindlessly macho monster mash which looks and feels just like an ineptly plotted remake of Alien, right down to the chest-bursting scene. Russell's sub-Eastwood heroics hardly compensate for the absence of all characterisation, while Bill Lancaster's script boasts the most illogical climax any monster movie ever had. It's only fair to add that, had this been made by anybody else, one might be recommending it for its special effects; but that's the price Carpenter pays for having made so much better movies.

CineScene.com (Sasha Stone) review also reviewing THEY LIVE

The Thing takes you to yet another world. Carpenter seems fascinated by masked worlds, that is, what's behind the one you think you see? What's underneath the snow? What would happen if a team of men was trapped with a killing organism that was about to take them over, one by one? They panic. They accuse each other. It's like Hitchcock's Lifeboat only with great special effects, as good as any I've ever seen even now. Kurt Russell takes over where Cary Grant (for Hitch) left off - a flawed hero with a golden boy past. When The Thing was released in 1982, many people wrote it off because they thought it A) a rip-off of Alien and B) a rip-off of the original horror movie The Thing (1951) and therefore not valid to stand on its own. It remains one of the most perfect horror films ever made, however, having not even one defect, not one wasted scene, a perfect cast of characters capable of holding the story up and then some.

The Thing is not only one of my favorite films of all time, it's gotten me through many an anxious night. Like other Carpenter films, there's something familiar about it - the score, the themes, Kurt Russell. It stands out among the best ever made. It deserves its place in the art of cinema.

A remake of the Christian Nyby (but really Howard Hawks, most would argue) sci-fi thriller, The Thing is about an isolated Antarctic scientific group whose research base is infiltrated by an alien shape shifter that knocks them down and takes over their identities one by one. (Well, actually their behavior and group dynamic really merit the title "posse" instead of "group," and, in that, the film is truly underrated as a Hawksian homage by those who are too focused in on the carnage.) Clearly intended by John Carpenter to be a far grander film than any he had attempted before (hence his decision to turn over the musical scoring duties to Ennio Morricone rather than write another DIY wonder), The Thing was instead castigated and signaled the beginning of the end of the mainstream critical establishment's love affair with the man who, just a few years prior, had a reputation as being the great white hope for the horror genre (though it's gone through a retroactive renaissance in the last decade or so). The film, which is far more deliberately paced than his other, more slender thrillers, is absolutely stacked with Rob Bottin's popping, ripping, oozing make-up effects, but Carpenter wisely turns his focus on the fissures of his own microcosmic civilization under duress than that of their skin and veins. Instead, what makes the bloody visuals so effective in their context is that, given that this is a hyper-masculine Carpenter universe, they suggest the all-male society's ignorance of (and eventual outrage over) the introduction of reproductive "mess" into their staid, fraternal environment, which is perhaps the one singularly transgressive element of the film. Otherwise, The Thing may be a tad too careful and schematic to stand shoulder with Carpenter's very best films—it lacks Halloween's disorienting velvety-black spatial neutrality, Assault on Precinct 13's gliding sense of encroachment, or The Fog's peerless utilization of environment and atmosphere—but its obsessive insistence on emphasizing the dearth of humans' capacity for simple trust does culminate with one of his most satisfying finales (second probably only to Escape from L.A.'s cool, detatched endorsement of an e-apocalypse), a fulfillment of Jean Paul Sartre's No Exit maxim: "Hell is other people."

Camera Eye Evan Pulgino (link lost)

John Carpenter may be better known for Halloween or Escape from New York, but The Thing is easily the famed horror director’s best film. Recalling Alien and the early horror films of David Cronenberg, Carpenter’s version of the oft-adapted short story “Who Goes There?” is a masterpiece of special effects gore and unhealthy paranoia.

When a team of researchers in the unforgiving Antarctic is attacked by a couple of insane Norwegian scientists the group discovers a strange alien parasite that can shape shift into various lifeforms. The creature slowly invades the compound sowing discord and paranoia amongst the scientists.

The Thing is a measured and masterful horror film that relies on mood and atmosphere more than jumps and quick scare. It is a perfect and riveting horror film. Carpenter exploits his claustrophobic setting and a great script by Bill Lancaster with such grace and skill that I find myself wondering how this same director could have made so many bad films in the time since The Thing was released.

Leading the ensemble cast is Kurt Russell as R.J. MacReady. In a departure from his character in Escape from New York, Russell is introspective and moody as the survivors reluctant leader. Russell plays MacReady with ambiguity and mystery so that the viewer must question his motivations (or species, I suppose).

Like many great monster films, The Thing is equally, if not more, interested in the darkness of human nature than in the scariness of the monster. Luckily this is a film that can equally fulfill both needs. The alien is indeed frightening and created with as much care and craft as in Alien. Like the monsters in Ridley Scott’s genre-defining film, the creature is given biological weight and has a defined life cycle. The special effects used to depict the alien’s various stages are marvels of practical effects. The effects don’t look dated at all and are way more effective than they would have been if they were computer generated.

As scary as the alien can be, what is scarier in The Thing is how the humans treat each other. As soon as paranoia infests the compound the men begin to turn on each other and become accusational, fearful and violent. The Thing is profound in the way that it shows how fear causes people to behave outside of their own morality. Thus, the monster becomes a metaphor for anything that sows discord amongst humanity. By wisely avoiding any discernible political commentary of the time in which the film was made John Carpenter has ensured that The Thing will remain relevant to all generations. What makes people paranoid and afraid will change through the times, but mankind’s reaction to fear and paranoia will never change.

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [9/10]

Some brief notes on The Thing…

The DVD of The Thing features a director’s commentary features a boozy get-together between Carpenter (who sounds very close to the microphone) and star Kurt Russell (who sounds very far away) that’s almost as entertaining as the film itself. But The Thing demands to be seen on as large a screen as possible: the icy cinemascope vistas of Antarctica demand nothing less, and Carpenter has always been without parallel in terms of using every single inch of the frame. This is a claustrophobic epic.
It is also a western like all Carpenter movies. He signals as much very early on, when a character hiding inside the base must shoot someone in the open air. He uses his gun to break the glass, Randolph Scott style.
The first hour is a masterful exercise in the build-up and release of suspense: an inexorable progression of taut, economic episodes as a remote US scientific base is infiltrated by a savage, shape-shifting alien creature that picks off the men one by one.
And they are all men (all very well cast), their cloistered celibacy mocked by the grinning females looking down from the forties ad-posters on their walls, by the female voice of the chess-playing computer, by the female faces on the TV programmes they watch on video. Anne Billson, in her BFI Modern Classic book on the film, argues that The Thing itself is female.
The second half is less effective than the first. Scriptwriter Bill Lancaster can’t quite stitch things together and whenever there’s an action sequence he seems to have difficulty regaining his train of thought. Characterisation and story development suffer. Economy goes out of the window. There are more loose ends than in the tattered garments which keep being found around the base – supposedly because being ‘taken over’ by The Thing results in clothes being ripped, though this is never made especially clear.
Despite the flaws, many scenes remain cast-iron classics: anything featuring the monster, especially the ‘defibrillation’ sequence and the ‘blood test’- horrific and hilarious in equal measure.
Ennio Morricone’s music. The Thing is a rare instance of John Carpenter handing over the score to another composer. Morricone delivers a pitch-perfect simulacrum of Carpenter’s established, doomy-synth stylings – entirely appropriate for a film about pitch-perfect simulacra.

John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film and Television also seen here: The Thing (1982)

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

Take Two #1: The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Thing (1982) John Lingan from The House Next Door, seen here: The House Next Door [John Lingan]

Austin Chronicle [Bud Simons] a look at the film placed in a horror context

CultureCartel.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [5/5]

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

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

Classic Horror review Eric Miller

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]

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

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [5/5]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Encyclopedia Of Fantastic Film & TV Kevin Lyons

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

Eye for Film (Jeff Robson) review [4/5]

The Thing Friday and Saturday Night Critic from Movie Vault

The Seven Best Horror Film Remakes So Far? John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, September 25, 2009

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel, Collector’s Edition

Digital Retribution dvd review Mr. Intolerance

DVD Authority.com (Daniel Pulliam) dvd review [Special Edition]

DVDActive (Jeremy Allin) dvd review [8/10] [Collector's Edition]

DVDActive (Chris Gould) dvd review [8/10] [Collector's Edition]

DVDork.com (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Collector's Edition] [3.5/4, 8.5/10]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Collector's Edition] Colin Jacobson

The Sci-Fi Movie Page (DVD Review - Collector's Edition) James O’Ehley

DVD Authority.com (Eric Alan) dvd review [Collector's Edition]

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo, HD Version

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Blu-Ray version

DVD Talk (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

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

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

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

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

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

Best-Horror-Movies.com Don Sumner

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

Bill's Movie Emporium[Bill Thompson]

CultureCartel.com (Mike Bracken) review [5/5] also seen here: Epinions [Mike Bracken]

Mutant Reviewers from Hell review

Horror View a less than impressive view from Red Velvet Kitchen

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

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth and Brian Lindsey

Edinburgh U Film Society (Gavin Inglis) review

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]

Horror Express review Finn Clark

John Carpenter Lives in a BAM Retrospective - Page 1 - Movies ... Scott Foundas from The Village Voice, also seen here: The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive")

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

Michael Turton retrospective

Jason Overbeck retrospective

Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth]

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

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

DVDTalk DVD Review (John Carpenter: Master of Fear Collection) [Tyler Foster]

George Chabot's Review

DVD Verdict- John Carpenter: Master Of Fear Collection [Michael Rubino]

Big Dead Place :: All-John-Carpenter's-"The Thing" Review Section

The Worlds Largest The Thing collection.

eBook All About THE THING, looks at Carpenter's 1982 film in depth

Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

DVDBeaver.com [Henrik Sylow]

CHRISTINE B+ 91

USA (110 mi) 1983 ‘Scope

I hate rock n roll

The only time horror author Stephen King and filmmaker John Carpenter came together on a project, this is a light hearted romp into the world of a possessed car, starring Keith Gordon as Arnie, the nerdy kid who’s picked on in school but develops a love affair with an old beat up car, a ’58 Plymouth Fury that he sees laying around in a junk yard unattended. He’s fascinated by the idea of fixing it up, declaring he’s finally found something uglier than he is, but in the process, it takes possession of him, mind, body, and soul. It’s an amusing look back into an era when adolescent boys became fixated on cars, who spent all their waking hours fixing up cars, getting called greasers, but lived for that moment of freedom that came when riding behind the wheel of a car. Christine represents that freedom, unbridled, with no rules or boundaries, that exists in a state of its own completely outside human comprehension, sort of a wish fulfillment version of high school adolescence.

There’s a terrific supporting cast, a sound track that rivals AMERICAN GRAFFITTI, though it’s utilized in a much more devious manner, always tongue in cheek, a little absurd but hilarious at the same time. It’s a marvel to witness Gordon’s transition into the coolest guy in town, who’s got the cutest girl as well in Alexandra Paul, but mostly, there’s the car, especially memorable when it’s ablaze with fire in the black of night, hellbent on revenge, beautifully captured on ‘Scope film. It’s a novel approach to invent a car that has a mind of its own, expressed through its radio mentality, and the scenes where it stalks the bad guys and later fixes its own damage are simply priceless. By the end, however, poor Arnie is looking more like a character out of Stephen King’s The Shining. After a cage match with a bulldozer, Christine appears down and out. But leave it to a perfect punch line to bring her back to life again. Interestingly, Christine reappears in the Michael Dorris children’s novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, where the lead character is something of a wandering spirit, a teenage Native-American girl named Rayona, whose mother is named Christine, who proudly identifies with the bad-ass nature of the car.

MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant)

Carpenter and novelist Stephen King share not merely a taste for genre horror but a love of '50s teenage culture; and although set in the present, Christine reflects the second taste far more effectively than the first. It concerns a demonic 1958 Plymouth Fury which not only suffocates its victims to blasts of Larry Williams' 'Boney Moronie', but also reconstitutes itself before the naked eye like some fetishistic amoeba, incidentally transforming its puny owner from a pimply nonentity into one of the baddest boys on the block. All of this works rather well as black comedy. But from the horror perspective, Carpenter is only the latest in a long line of film-makers who've been seduced by King's sheer plausibility as a writer. Off the page, a 1958 Plymouth is no more scary than the St Bernard which romped through Cujo.

Wade Major reviews the Special Edition DVD from Boxoffice magazine (link lost):

"Christine" is one of Stephen King's sillier novels, but it's one of John Carpenter's very best films. Just campy enough to make the premise fly and just scary and creepy enough to still be effective, "Christine" stars Keith Gordon as the unsuspecting teenage auto geek who falls prey to the seductive allure of a 1958 Plymouth Fury that is literally possessed by a mind -- and perhaps evil spirit -- of its own. Indeed, this thing would eat KITT alive and run "The Car" right off the road. As far as sentient, demon-possessed automobiles go, Christine takes the cake.

Wrapping all of this around a routine teenage revenge tale is really what handicaps the film from rising to anything truly remarkable, but Gordon and Carpenter are both in such fine form that it's impossible to resist the high-pitched theatrics, even when one knows precisely what's about to happen.

The film was previously available on DVD, though in a rudimentary edition from the early days of DVD that really needed replacing. Columbia's new disc isn't perfect -- the darker spots still seem a tad chalky in places -- but it's light years ahead of where the film was before. The Dolby Surround audio is a really welcome improvement boasting better range and clarity across the board.

The only real supplement here that anyone need note is the commentary with Carpenter and Gordon who clearly relish revisiting the film after all these years. It could have been more energetic and enthusiastic, but fans won't be disappointed -- there's plenty of juice here just the same. Some will enjoy the featurettes -- all three of them are above average for what's essentially EPK material, though they seem to retread much of the same fare. Finally and most unremarkably, are the deleted and alternate scenes -- twenty in all. Those who know the film inside and out will be able to fill in the blanks and appreciate the importance of why these scenes weren't included... but it's a slog to anyone else.

Even still, for all its offbeat faults and cultish appeal, "Christine" is a great deal of fun and an ideal Halloween treat.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The opening is scored to "Bad to the Bone," the diagonal track locating Malle's auto assembly line from Humain, Trop Humain and making it John Carpenter's as soon as the titular vehicle, a 1958 Plymouth Fury, chomps on a worker's arm, the first of its victims; another flickers a bit of ash on the leather, and expires on the front seat, stogie in mouth. The flash-forward to 1978 is appropriate, for Carpenter's movie is not just a response to shallow '80s teen flicks, but also, more obliquely, to the toxic regurgitation of Grease -- head bully William Ostrander pulls a full Travolta, grabbing Keith Gordon's lunch and running a switchblade through the brown bag until yogurt bleeds out. Fifties fetishism here is not nostalgia but critique, the cultural residue that deforms consciousness. The auto is found, battered, in the backyard of Robert Blossom, who sells her to Gordon after proclaiming new-car smell second only to pussy. "You can't polish a turd," says garage owner Robert Prosky in one of his many uproarious orations, yet Gordon soon has Christine back to her resplendent, scarlet self, in the process undergoing an upgrade of his own -- the high school geek ditches the specs and bags Alexandra Paul, who, with jock bud John Stockwell, becomes increasingly freaked out by his metamorphosis into a zombified Mr. Cool. The car dominating a relationship is a satirical notion out of Tashlin, and Carpenter, fine-tuning Stephen King's source, mates it to the sexual horror of pubescent anxieties -- the love scene is between Gordon and Christine as the car voluptuously unwrecks itself (Kustom Kar Kommandos compressed into ten seconds), with the grille, a metal smirk across the widescreen, becoming a flaming skull chasing Ostrander down the empty highway. Revenge of the nerd? Horror may be the genre, yet the shot of Gordon hugging the steering wheel while "Pledging My Love" emanates out of the radio remains a deeply sad and unsettling image. Paul's "I hate rock 'n' roll" punchline pointedly rejects pop regression, Carpenter caps it with a dolly making an abstract canvas out of twisted metal. With Harry Dean Stanton, Christine Belford, David Spielberg, Malcolm Danare, and Kelly Preston.

She was born in Detroit… on an automobile assembly line. But she is no ordinary automobile. Deep within her chassis lives an unholy presence. She is CHRISTINE – a red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury whose unique standard equipment includes an evil, indestructible vengeance that will destroy anyone in her way.

Before he lost his way with movies like Escape From L.A. and Ghosts of Mars, John Carpenter was making classic contributions to the horror/sci-fi genre. Films like Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape From New York, and The Thing, among others, set the bar pretty high for just what could be achieved within genre conventions. He followed up The Thing with Christine, a twisted love story in the guise of a horror film. Christine is not the violent, gory kind of film for which Carpenter had come to be known at that point, but rather a quiet, more character driven piece, with the main character being the menacing Plymouth.

When we first meet Christine, she is beaten up, abandoned, out of step – just like Arnie Cunningham. Arnie is the biggest dork in school, the kind of social zero that can be found in any high school. He gets picked on, does not have a clue how to dress, and his parents rule his life with an iron fist. When he finds Christine – quite by accident – he finally finds something he can bond with. The classically American love of the automobile is alive and well in Arnie – he literally loves Christine to death. Keith Gordon, who had previously been relegated to minor acting roles (albeit with some notable directors), fully embodies his character here. Through the course of the film Arnie covers quite an emotional range, from hopeless nerd, to regular guy, to deranged psychopath, and Gordon pulls it off wonderfully. Great performances are turned in by the whole cast: worried friend Dennis (John Stockwell), fearful girlfriend Leigh (Alexandra Paul), and even Harry Dean Stanton as the policeman investigating the strange series of murders all come back to Christine.

The car, of course, is the real star of the film. The filmmakers used 17 Plymouth Furys in the making of the film, destroying all but two. Carpenter really gives the car a human feel, particularly in the opening scene, where Christine first roles off the assembly line. A mechanic gives her a final inspection when her enormous hood, like the jaws of death, comes down on him. A trifle obvious perhaps, but the film is full of these interesting touches. Even the golden oldies that pop up from time to time when Christine is in one dire situation or another reflect what is happening in the scene and give the car real personality. The relationship between Arnie and the car is compellingly creepy. The more immersed in Christine he becomes, the more Arnie begins to reflect the 1950’s in style and swagger. When Christine gets jealous, bad things happen.

Christine is a fun horror film, dark and playful at the same time. The film has its intense moments, but they are always undercut with a sense that we are all here to have a good time. Christine never gets too serious, and that is its real strength. The filmmakers obviously took the material seriously, without ever forgetting that it was supposed to be fun at the same time. The acting and direction are both superb, and the film holds up surprisingly well, even 20 years after it first hit theaters.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Best-Horror-Movies.com Lee Roberts

ToxicUniverse.com (Mike Bracken)

DVD Movie Central Gordon Justesen

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DVD Verdict - Special Edition Mitchell Hattaway

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) Special Edition

eFilmCritic Scott Weinberg

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth

DVD Verdict Nicholas Sylvain

Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp

Mondo Digital also reviewing THEY LIVE

Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair)

STARMAN

USA (115 mi) 1984 ‘Scope

Turner Classic Movies Nathaniel Thompson

After presenting the screen’s most gruesome depiction of interstellar visitors in 1982’s The Thing, director John Carpenter took a decidedly more gentle and optimistic look at the skies with his third foray into science fiction, Starman (1984). Developed by producer Michael Douglas at Columbia Pictures, the 1979 script was crafted by future Stand by Me (1986) scribes Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon around the same time as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982, also originally a Columbia project) but took longer to reach the screen due to extensive talent assignments behind and in front of the camera, with filmmakers ranging from John Badham to Mark Rydell considering it before Douglas eventually picked Carpenter because, as he said in the Boston Globe, “John has a great sense of style and deals with action masterfully. I knew he’d get to the emotional core of the story.”

The majority of the film is told through the eyes of fragile young widow Jenny Hayden (Raiders of the Lost Ark’s [1981] Karen Allen), who mourns the loss of her housepainter husband in a remote mountain home. One night a crashed starship brings an alien visitor who, using the DNA from a scrapbook hair trimming, assumes the form (played by Jeff Bridges) of her departed spouse. While the government and scientists (represented by Richard Jaeckel and Charles Martin Smith) hunt the alien down, he persuades the terrified Jenny to take him to a meeting point where he can rejoin others of his race and return home.

One of the most powerful fusions of love story and science fiction, Starman succeeds largely thanks to the clever scripting and portrayals of its two lead characters. Jenny’s fully-developed character is one of the genre’s finest, a wounded but strong human being whose numerous obstacles (grief, infertility, loneliness) are relieved when she finds the unlikeliest of fates, a similarly vulnerable being whose own education is in her hands. Carpenter himself likened the approach to a classic romance in an LA Weekly interview, stating “it’s all the classic stories of star-crossed lovers, the lovers who can’t really make it together but have a bond of love, like in Brief Encounter [1945]. It really works on that level, because it touches a little thing inside of us. It was easy for me to tap into that, real easy. It’s a departure, because people haven’t seen something like this from me before.” Grounding the relationship in reality necessitated scaling down some science fiction aspects of the original script, which was more science-oriented and granted the alien more demonstrative powers like flying and mass telekinetic destruction.

However, enough traditional alien mayhem remains to satisfy genre viewers, including a striking opening sequence with Bridges evolving from a baby to adulthood (pre-CGI, of course). The impressive visuals were the combined work of Dick Smith (the teen-to-adult effect), Rick Baker (the baby), and Stan Winston (the face-stretching), with Industrial Light & Magic handling the hair-cloning.

Ultimately the success of the film’s alien must go to Bridges, who was still considered an upcoming name at the time. Actors ranging from Tom Cruise to Kevin Bacon had been considered, but Bridges proved to have the correct balance of warmth, curiosity, and the willingness to look ridiculous in front of the camera. The gamble paid off in an Academy Award nomination and a considerable career boost, followed by the equally successful Jagged Edge [1985]. Meanwhile the Strasberg Institute-trained Allen, who only had a few non-Raiders credits to her name (including the widely-reviled Cruising, 1980), offered another strong lead performance and seemed destined for stardom, but instead she turned to focus on motherhood, stage work and her own yoga studio, with occasional rare returns to the big screen in films such as The Perfect Storm (2000). Playing Jenny proved a pleasant challenge to her acting abilities, and she had much kinder words for her working experience on Starman than Raiders when talking to Starlog magazine: “The role is a complete study in imagination. I spend the film building and sustaining an emotional state. What happens to Jenny never has – and won’t -- happen to me… [John Carpenter] is a really nice guy. The people working with him have a really nice thing going. They’ve developed this strong support system. He has chosen a good group of people. They stay with him film after film. They can bounce things off of each other in order to get the film made. I had a good time making Starman.”

Unusually for Carpenter, he did not score the film himself (The Thing is another rare exception); instead he turned to the composer Jack Nitzsche, one of the music industry’s more fascinating and volatile behind-the-scenes personalities. Best known in popular music circles as the close arranger and conductor on many of Phil Spector’s most influential recordings, Nitzsche went on to collaborate with many of the industry’s biggest names including Neil Young and the Rolling Stones. He also began dabbling in film scoring in the early 1970s with projects like The Exorcist (1973) and soon turned all of his attentions to that field, winning acclaim with One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest [1975] and his Academy Award-winning theme to An Officer and a Gentleman [1982], “Up Where We Belong.” Much of his Starman score works within the solid electronic idiom established by Carpenter but with a pair of powerfully emotional themes for the main characters, as well as a nod to his Spector days with Bridges and Allen dueting on an upbeat rendition of “All I Have to Do Is Dream” (heard on the soundtrack but played onscreen in a more stripped-down acoustic rendition). Unfortunately, Nitzsche died in August of 2000 from a heart attack.

Buoyed by successful sneak previews and excellent Christmas holiday business, Starman became a surprise hit and opened the door for Carpenter to expand his directorial abilities with the big-budget homage to Hong Kong fantasy films, Big Trouble in Little China [1986], as well as a return to romantic science fiction with the far less successful Memoirs of an Invisible Man [1992]. Meanwhile the story of the Starman was continued in 1986 for a single-season TV series of the same name, with Robert Hays taking over as the lead role in a return to Earth fourteen years later to… well, let’s not ruin the end of the original film, but you can probably figure it out.

Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Silver Screen Reviews

Walter Frith

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Alex in Wonderland Review

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA B 86

USA (99 mi) 1986 ‘Scope

John Carpenter enters the realm of kung fu fighting with this heavily comedic, fantasy, martial arts action flick, something to rival the as yet uninvented CHINESE GHOST STORY (1987, 1990, 1991) featuring plenty of John Wayne swagger from Kurt Russell as Jack Burton, a fearless, tough-talking truck driver that arrives into San Francisco’s Chinatown just as underworld spirits decide to show themselves in a battle of earthly domination. Something of a box office flop that left Carpenter disillusioned with Hollywood, forcing a return to smaller independent films, the movie developed a 1980’s cult following with the video release. Initially envisioned as an 1880’s western by writers Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein, using Russell as a loner cowboy forced to mix it up with Chinese fantasy elements in the Wild West, featuring plenty of Eastern mysticism and weird special effects, but the story was rewritten and modernized by W.D Richter, a script doctor who also directed THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BONZAI ACROSS THE 8^TH DIMENSION (1984). The result is a mixed bag, where Russell resembles a typical American badass who continually finds himself as an uninvited guest, an outsider in the middle of a mysterious underworld gang fight in Little China, where evil godfather Lo Pan, James Hong summoning the dead spirit of Ming the Merciless, along with 3 supernatural protectors, Thunder, Rain, and Lightning, have kidnapped the rarest of Chinese women, the emerald green-eyed girlfriend (Suzee Pai) of Jack’s friend Wang Chi, Dennis Dun in something of a Bruce Lee imitation role, where the two partner up, along with the aid of an old tour bus driver Egg Shin (Victor Wong), who is experienced fighting the dark arts, and Kim Cattrall as Gracie Law, a neighborhood lawyer who witnessed the abduction.

The secret to the movie’s success has to be the continual irreverent wisecracking remarks by Russell, where every quotable line he delivers is so over the top, yet uttered with perfect comic timing in this 1930’s screwball comedy rapid-fire style of relentlessly face-paced dialogue matched by a continuing series of frenetic action sequences. Lo Pan is a wonderful invention and the evil centerpiece of the film, something of an undead magician, a 2000-year old ancient sorcerer who, like Harry Potter’s Voldemort (who also hasn’t been invented yet), wishes to reclaim his human status through evil spells and black magic. Egg Shin is the expert in cracking the power of ancient Chinese spells, while Wang Chi fends off hordes of martial arts fighters single handedly. Jack’s largely along for the ride, inept and often clueless, playing second fiddle to the more stunningly acrobatic Wang Chi, instead offering snide comments and a tone of cynicism, helping add more chaos to an already chaotic supernatural undertaking. There are monsters and demons, not to mention green rays coming out of the eyes and mouth of Lo Pan, who has the power to hypnotize and levitate his kidnapped subject, keeping her locked away in a cavernous dungeon underneath Chinatown, protected by an army of skilled martial arts fighters and various other evil spirits that suddenly appear from time to time. While there are waves of action sequences, the two sides go at each other with a relentless fury, where Russell’s comic wit and his love interest in smart aleck Gracie (a touch added by Carpenter) all add to the continual build up of troublemaking, mayhem, and suspense. Carpenter, of course, composed the musical score along with Alan Howarth.

Certainly one of John Carpenter’s most entertaining films, the film creates an entirely new universe, mostly unexplainable, like a house of pleasures at the circus, and is replete with pop references which are all over the map, while it also plays upon Chinese stereotype, such as Fu Manchu, Flash Gordon, and Chinese-American dialect, much of which had to be excised from the film as too offensive. The Writers Guild of America also excised the name of W.D. Richter as a screenwriter, crediting only the original writers, something Carpenter was unhappy with, but the humorous, nonsensical style more than makes up for the continual sense of over exaggeration, as everything is way over the top, especially the weirdness of the set pieces and special effects, some of which look pretty cheesy, like something left over from a discarded Star Trek TV episode. Kurt Russell’s action figure profile, along with the high flying martial arts style of Dennis Dun, both immersed in the richly adorned and delirious subterranean atmosphere of sorcery and mystical spells, could easily be parodied in comic books, or even video games, much like the as yet unenvisioned Jeff Bridges character The Dude in the Coen Brothers’ THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998), but the popularity of the film flew under the radar. The film precedes the prevalent use of computer graphics in martial arts movies, instead relying upon reverse movements and upside down sets, using actual stunts where martial arts fighters fly through the air on invisible wires or trampolines, conducting swordfights in mid-air, adding a rarely seen touch of elegance in an American martial arts film. Still, the thing is the stuff of legends, one of the better Carpenter films that does not veer into the horror genre, perhaps eclipsed two years later by the equally preposterous, also underappreciated, darkly disturbing comic sci-fi satire of THEY LIVE (1988).

John Carpenter's masterpiece tale of Chinese black magic, demons and warriors, ancient Chinese feuds, and the loud mouthed American trucker, Jack Burton (Kurt Russell), who gets caught up in the middle of a mess he can't understand. All hell breaks loose when some Chinatown punks kidnap Wang Chi's (Dennis Dun) fiancée from the airport. The evil godfather of Little China, David Lo Pan (James Hong) wants the girl for himself because she is the woman who can break the horrible curse he has endured over the last 2000 years. Together, Jack, Wang, tour bus driver Egg Shin (Victor Wong), and lawyer Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall) lead an attack againt Lo Pan to get Wang's fiancée back and get a lot more than they bargained for. Kurt Russell's portrayal of Jack Burton is pure genius and Kim Cattrall has never looked lovlier. Great performances by everyone, awesome fighting, superb special effects, a fascinating story, and fun characters with clever dialog make this film an unforgetable treat.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

A film to embody the Eighties, and justify them. John Carpenter in Spielberg-Lucas turf, he surveys the perils and wholeheartedly forges ahead, the analysis is given in a droll exchange between Kurt Russell and Dennis Dun: "Hollow?" "Hollow." "Fuck it." (Or, more poetically: "The darkest magic, my soul swims in it.") Set in San Francisco, the tale is spun by Victor Wong, who lends it the proper gleam by summoning a miniature lighting bolt to a Doubting Thomas, the rest is pure play. Russell is a truck driver who's taken swagger lessons from John Wayne, Dun is a Chinatown restaurateur searching for his kidnapped fiancée, an emerald-eyed supermodel; an early chase gives a pellucid view of the city and a detour into misty alleys locates the overflowing caldron of genres within it, a street melee rages on until a trio of wire-fu divinities descends from the heavens to dice through the warring factions. The villain (James Hong) appears first as a smirky hobo, then resplendent in Ming the Merciless robes, then a pissy Methusela in a wheelchair, yearning to be made flesh following millenniums as an apparition; the heroes enter a warehouse and end up in the "Hell of Upside Down Souls" ("the Chinese have a lot of hells"), while Kim Cattrall breezes through to buttress Only Angels Have Wings in Carpenter's pop magpie foundations, which also include Year of the Dragon, Blood Alley, The Magic Blade, Hair-Raising Hare, etc. W.D. Richter worked on the screenplay, and Russell lovingly evokes the spirit of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension by firing his gun into the air before a showdown and getting knocked unconscious by falling debris; for the rest, Richter's loopy jokes receive Carpenter's unerring formalist elegance, the villain's lair has a cocktail lounge where the intrepid warriors mix magic potion and neon skulls adorn sinister subterranean ceremonies. Naturally, it took the rise of post-modernism in the next decade for people to notice the greatness in it, but Carpenter at once understood the complex layering of pop imagery, and was off to make We Live. Cinematography by Dean Cundey. With Kate Burton, Donald Li, Carter Wong, and Suzee Pai.

filmcritic.com gets in Big Trouble Christopher Null

Ever wonder what happened to Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, the Buckaroo Banzai sequel that was promised at the end of that film? In some sense, this is it. When writer/director W.D. Richter's sequel project fell through, his script was radically retooled, handed to John Carpenter, and voila, a classic was born.

A crazy parody of martial arts flicks, supernatural/spirit movies, and old-fashioned westerns, Big Trouble in Little China gives us Kurt Russell as the inimitable Jack Burton, a good-natured truck driver unconsciously obsessed with John Wayne. On one of his trips to San Francisco, poor Jack gets swept up in a universe-bounding plot to kidnap a Chinese girl with green eyes, landing knee-deep amidst warring gangs that dwell in the Chinatown underground and an ancient spirit that emits blinding light from its mouth.

This is not your ordinary kung fu flick, to say the least. Even though Russell's Jack is not the real driver of the plot (he's just along for the ride, helping out his buddy Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) in his quest), he's truly the star of the show. But while Jack tries his hardest, he seems to knock himself out or lose his weapon every time a fight comes around... and ultimately he's almost more harm than good. Jack's one-liners, delivered with a naïve, hillbilly folksiness that Russell does a little too well, come at a blinding pace. After all... "You know what Jack Burton always says: What the hell?" The story's a bit of a throwaway, but hey, what the hell, it's a lot of fun.

Now released on a double-disc DVD edition, this new release of Big Trouble in Little China is a must-own disc for fans of Carpenter or this cult classic. On a full-length commentary track, Russell and Carpenter provide one of the best bantering sessions I've ever heard -- rarely talking about the movie, really, and with Russell in stitches virtually the entire time. One of the choicest bits in the commentary is Russell waxing about how the press kept hounding him about how it felt to star in what would undoubtedly be the biggest grossing movie of 1986. (The picture would eventually earn a paltry $11.1 million, probably because audiences didn't really get that it was a comedy at heart. With Carpenter and Russell involved, who could blame them?)

Needless to say, Big Trouble is a comedy and it's a fine one, as well. The additional extras (including about half an hour of priceless deleted and extended footage) are well worth your time, and as for the movie itself, well, every time you ride in an elevator you'll likely find yourself quoting Jack.

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) also seen here: Movie Review - Big Trouble in Little China - eFilmCritic

John Carpenter’s genre-bending (and genre-blending) action/adventure/fantasy/martial arts/comedy, "Big Trouble in Little China," was released in 1986 to mixed, if overall positive, reviews, but failed to bring in audiences in sufficient numbers to cover the mid-range budget (Carpenter's largest at that point in his career), despite a wry, ironic, subversive lead performance by Kurt Russell as an ineffectual action hero who’s (mostly) all talk and no action. The passage of time, however, has been more than kind to "Big Trouble in Little China." Like 1982's "The Thing," a box-office disappointment turned cult classic, "Big Trouble in Little China" has developed a small, devoted fan base. "Big Trouble in Little China" may just be John Carpenter’s most entertaining film, repaying multiple viewings with an over-abundance of narrative and visual pleasures.

As Big Trouble in Little China opens, Jack Burton (Kurt Russell), an everyman truck-driver (and the ostensible hero/protagonist) arrives in San Francisco to drop off cargo in Chinatown. At the conclusion of a celebratory evening (and morning) of drinking and gambling where Jack wins big, the other men leave, broke and none too happy with their losses, Jack’s stays behind with his longtime friend, Wang Chi (Dennis Dun), a local restaurant owner (as we soon learn, Wang Chi’s a man of many talents). Wang Chi makes Jack an odd wager, a double or nothing bet Wang loses. Jack, eager to collect his winnings and uncomfortable with letting Wang out of his sight, is convinced to accompany Wang to the airport, where Wang's fiancée, Miao Yin (Suzee Pai), is about to arrive from China. Miao Yin is the rarest of Chinese women. She has emerald green eyes.

At the airport, Jack encounters Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall), an immigration attorney (and part-time troublemaker). Gracie rebuffs Jack's one-liner. In the next beat, a Chinese gang, the Lords of Death, brush roughly past the slightly perturbed Jack. Jack confronts them, only to find himself overmatched and in need of Wang's superior martial arts skills. In the mayhem, the Lords of Death grab Miao Yin, sending Jack and Wang back to Chinatown, where the first of many supernatural events upend Jack's worldview. Stuck in a tight alleyway, Jack and Wang watch rival gangs, the Chang Sing and the Wing Kong, engage in a battle. Enter Thunder (Carter Wong), Rain (Peter Kwong), Lightning (James Pax), three mystical warriors with extraordinary powers. Thunder, Rain, and Lightning serve David Lo Pan (James Hong), a godfather-like figure with a double nature. In their hasty retreat, Jack loses his most important possession, his truck, to the Lords of Death.

Jack, of course, wants his truck back and help Wang Chi recover Miao Yin, but his pride also needs mending. To repair his ego, Jack goes into action-hero mode, despite a distinct shortage of martial arts skills, let alone any understanding of the supernatural forces arrayed against him and his friend. Jack's ignorance is to our benefit, as his constant head scratching and incredulous outbursts lead to cleverly delivered exposition by Wang Chi and a rumpled, slightly disheveled sorcerer/tour bus driver, Egg Shen (Victor Wong). Egg Shen delivers more than his share of witticisms, making him, like Jack, Wang Chi, and the peevish, frustrated David Lo Pan, the most memorable characters in Big Trouble in Little China and in Carpenter's oeuvre. Big Trouble in Little China turns on not one, not two, but three search-and-rescue missions, with the expected martial arts battle between warring groups rounding out the action. The performers fly on wires, jump on trampolines, and swordfight in mid-air, adding more than a touch of the absurd and the parodic to the fight scenes, but that's in keeping with Big Trouble in Little China's feather-light tone.

Big Trouble in Little China has much to recommend first and repeat viewings, beginning with the witty, irreverent dialogue, with a great deal of the humor coming at Jack Burton's expense. Jack's pretensions to action-hero machismo are often met with disbelief, laughter, or both. Jack is essentially the "sidekick" to Wang's hero, but he doesn't know it. He stumbles his way through the film, but Russell's blustery, pitch-perfect performance never crosses over into caricature (which would make him a buffoon). In less sure hands, the almost delirious mix of usually disparate genres, action/adventure, martial arts, fantasy, and comedy would almost surely fail, but thanks to a well-crafted script by Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein (with an adaptation by W.D. "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai" Richter) and typically assured, unobtrusive direction by John Carpenter, the end result is a nearly flawless mini-masterpiece that draws the audience into Jack's adventures and misadventures.

Ultimately, even fans of Carpenter’s work in the horror genre are forced to admit that "Big Trouble in Little China" may be Carpenter’s best film (with the possible exceptions of "The Thing" or "Halloween," but both of those films are firmly within the horror genre). After all, how many films in any director's work can sustain effervescent good cheer from the first frame to the last (book-ended by Jack's pontificating over a CB radio as he drives his pride and joy, the Pork Chop Express, out of San Francisco to parts unknown, moments after leaving his potential relationship with Gracie open-ended)? Alas, "Big Trouble in Little China’s" disappointing box-office returns means that Jack's adventures ended in 1986, without the likelihood of a sequel (other media, e.g., comic books or videogame adaptations, are presumably still possibilities).

Summer of '86: Big Trouble in Little China, Take 1 Robert C. Cumbow from The House Next Door, July 11, 2011

Summer of '86: Forget it, Jack, it's Chinatown: Big Trouble in Little China, Take 2 Odienator from The House Next Door, July 13, 2011. also seen here: The House Next Door [Odienator]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

Big Trouble In Little China - DVD review for VideoVista monthly web ... Tony Lee from Video Vista

Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second (The Cineastes essay) Adam Batty

PopMatters David Sanjek

DVD Journal Alexandra DuPont, Special Edition

DVD Times Raphael Pour-Hashemi, Special Edition

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson, Special Edition

Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]

Film Gumbo [Graham Gough]

Edward Copeland on Film (VenetianBlond)

Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]

Culture Dogs [Sam Hatch]

0-5 Stars Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Combustible Celluloid film review - Big Trouble in Little China (1986 ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

UpcomingDiscs.com » Blog Archive » Big Trouble in Little China David Williams

DVD Verdict Harold Gervais

Cinefantastique Blu-ray Review [Drew Fitzpatrick]

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Dan Heaton, Special Edition

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (DVD) David Grove from Film Threat, Special Edition

Guide To Current DVD: Big Trouble In Little China Special Edition

Attack of the 50 Foot DVD Dr. Freex, Special Edition

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Dan Mancini]

High Def Digest (Blu-ray) [Tom Landy]

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA - Blu-ray review | Movie Metropolis Dean Winkelspecht

DVD Sleuth [Mike Long] Blu-Ray

HighDefDiscNews [Justin Sluss] Blu Ray

FeoAmante.com [E.C.McMullen Jr.]

The Illuminated Lantern [Peter Nepstad]

Chuck Dowling

What a Feeling! [Robert Horton]

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas] August 27, 2008

Filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Film Threat's "Footage Fetishes" [Pete Vonder Haar]

Eccentric Cinema

Guilty Viewing Pleasures

DVD Maniacs Review Michael Elliot

Dr. Gore's movie reviews

She Likes DVDs Review

The Film Asylum Ryan McDonald

Sci Film Review Bear

This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]

The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Mutant Reviewers From Hell Kyle and Justin

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review

Brilliant Observations on 2122 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Cinema de Merde CdM Scott

Past Picks Online [Jimmy Gillman]

Eat My Brains Zombie Club also reviewing PRINCE OF DARKNESS

John Carpenter - Cinescene Ed Owens, also reviewing DARK STAR

Filmtracks: Big Trouble in Little China (John Carpenter/Alan Howarth) Christian Clemmensen soundtrack review

Big Trouble In Little China (1999) Soundtrack - Soundtrack.Net April 25, 2003

Soundtrack: Big Trouble In Little China (1986) - Soundtrack.Net January 20, 2008

Interview - John Carpenter - Soundtrack.Net Dan Goldwasser interview, October 1998

FilmFour.com

Big Trouble in Little China Time Out London

BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Haflidason

DVDBeaver Blu-ray review [Gary Tooze]

The New York Times (Walter Goodman) also seen here: Big Trouble in Little China - Movies - New York Times

THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS

USA (101 mi) 1987 ‘Scope

Carpenter's first low-budget horror pic for some time. Summoned to an abandoned church by a frightened priest (Pleasence), Prof Birack (Wong) finds a basement shrine dominated by a canister of green fluid. A manuscript reveals the existence of the Secret Brotherhood of Sleep, worshippers of Satan, who was entombed in the canister by his father, the evil anti-God, millions of years ago. Birack is sceptical until jets of liquid from the canister transform some of his team into malevolent zombies. Meanwhile, the embryonic Satan is struggling to release himself, and his father's power has begun to manifest itself. Refracting the traditional conflict of Good and Evil through quantum mechanics and sub-atomic physics, the sometimes talky script remains engrossing thanks to Carpenter's chilling atmospherics. The claustrophobic terror generated by fluid camerawork and striking angles is reinforced by a narrative which builds slowly but surely towards a heart-racing climax.

Austin Chronicle [Mike Emery]

Long regarded as John Carpenter’s first outright failure, Prince of Darkness is perhaps the greatest satanic horror story-by-way-of-quantum physics ever put to film. Which doesn’t, admittedly, make it all that great. But what’s lacking in Carpenter’s wacked-out thriller – decent make-up for his demonically possessed ghouls, passable performances from his bland cast, a credit sequence that runs under 15 minutes – is made up for by an insidious atmosphere of apocalyptic doom and a unique script (by Carpenter, using the pseudonym Martin Quatermass) that attempts to provide a real-world scientific explanation for supernatural phenomena. The director’s trademark electronic score is eerily effective, and Donald Pleasance, as a priest named (believe it or not) Loomis, is his usual over-the-top campy self. There’s no getting around the fact that this ludicrous saga about the return of Satan – who has been trapped for centuries (by a secret Church organization) in a vat of gooey liquid which he telekinetically shoots into PhD candidates’ mouths as a means of possessing them – is overburdened with near-incomprehensible exposition about tachyon particles and other such mumbo jumbo. Plus, there’s a strange implication that homeless people (including a pasty-faced Alice Cooper) are easily possessed by the Devil because they’re inferior beings on par with red ants. Nonetheless, with his reasonably chilling film’s finale, Carpenter shrewdly complements his gory scares with tantalizing, time travel-tinged paradoxes.

Outside of Halloween and Escape From New York, most film buffs tend to overlook much of John Carpenter's work. While the recent hit Vampires proves that the longtime director's creative vision is well intact, there are an assortment of other Carpenter nuggets that deserve a second look. One of these is Prince of Darkness. Shot on a shoestring budget with no stars (except for Carpenter regular Donald Pleasence and rocker Alice Cooper), the film explores an innovative take on the old Satan theme. The premise here is that the devil was actually an extraterrestrial who has been locked away in an alternate world that mirrors our own. His son, however, has been preserved as a mass of liquid in an ancient container. When a priest (Pleasence) discovers that the deadly broth intends to free his father, he recruits an old physicist professor (Victor Wong) and an assortment of his students to combat this chemical phenomenon. Soon, our heroes find themselves trapped as the sinister fluid has infected a gaggle of homeless people who kill anything that leaves the church. Zombies, Satan, Alice Cooper. This film has some essential elements for a fright fest, but in the end, Carpenter's moody synth-score and taut direction steal the show. The storyline is certainly unlike that of any other devil flick and the Night of the Living Dead-like setting enhances the suspense level. Creepy to say the least (but not without some cheesy schlock value), Prince of Darkness remains one of Carpenter's forgotten works that is worth a closer look.

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

To describe John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness as merely a fine piece of horror cinema is to give this film a huge disservice. Prince of Darkness is more than horror, it's actually a very interesting piece of science fiction, that dabbles in occultism and the age-old mysticism that have always surrounded organized religion. Although the film contains zombies, demons, roaches, worms, beheadings, blood, and a lot of screaming, the main thrust, the oomph that makes Prince of Darkness special is the way Carpenter attacked the tired and almost cliche theme of the devil boss himself taking over the Earth.

Instead of doing the film in the conventional horror way: witches, Satanists or other demoniacs who urge for their master to make his apocalyptic entrance in our world, Carpenter cooks up this whole theory wherein Satan is actually a creature from another dimension, or planet, and the Catholic Church has kept hidden inside a glass structure (which looks like a cheaply made bright green lava lamp) the Prince of Darkness, which awakens just in that moment where a supernova just exploded and some light particles, or quarks, or whatever, lands in Earth to urge the ooze to turn into an actual living creature, which infects everything it touches like a mind-controlling parasite. Carpenter's theory is complex, he uses scientific banter to raise the film's standing much higher. There's talk of telepathy, visual signals from the future, quantum physics, Catholic history that Carpenter struggles to jive and mix into a coherent whole. Surprisingly, it works and despite the cookiness of it all, is actually very entertaining.

Carpenter starts it off wonderfully. A priest mysteriously dies leaving a key to a darkened chamber in a closed-down church. A man, Brian (Jameson Parker) stalks a beautiful girl Catherine (Lisa Blount) who turns out to be his classmate in a philosophy-physics class under Professor Birack (Victor Wong). The key left behind by the dead priest is used by another priest (Donald Pleasance), who troubled by what he discovered, contacts Professor Birack, who in return, instructs his students who are experts in physics and other scientists to spend a weekend in the abandoned church to measure the happenings in scientific terms, and find out what can be done.

The premise is fantastic and Carpenter's filmmaking is quite admirable. His script (using pseudonym Martin Quatermass) maybe heavyhanded but Carpenter's filmmaking makes up for such, using deadpan humor, or expert scare and shock tactics to allow the viewer to swallow the implausibility of everything. It's fine horror, with tinges of Romero zombie-fest (with the homeless schizophrenics surrounding the church in hordes), Italian schlock (there's an abundance of worms, and other creepy crawlers), and American exorcism scares (the near-latter part reminded me a bit of William Friedkin's The Exorcist). The sci-fi angle is more for thrills and chills rather than serious thinking, but Carpenter's insistence on the far-fetched theory may give the film some sudden pauses to its near-perfect pacing, but everything is forgiven when Carpenter turns the last twenty minutes into a hair-raising, mindboggling, exhilerating ride to a conclusion that will leave you scratching your head by how Carpenter came up with an unexpected stroke of genius.

A typically over-ambitious philosophical horror movie with elements of science-fiction and comedy, Prince of Darkness marks the end of John Carpenter’s spell as a truly essential director. While They Live (1988), In the Mouth of Madness (1995), Ghosts of Mars (2001) and even Vampires (1999) have their admirers, Prince of Darkness is the last time a Carpenter movie managed to be both viscerally exciting, thematically intriguing and (relatively speaking) dramatically coherent.

The script is credited to ‘Martin Quatermass’: Carpenter’s choice of pseudonym indicating his debt to Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale - at one point he even has a character wearing a sweater emblazoned with ‘Kneale University’, just in case we’ve missed the gag. The story combines elements of Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and the legendary TV play The Stone Tape (1972), as a group of researchers visit a semi-derelict Los Angeles church (“St. Godard’s”!) to investigate a mysterious canister found in the basement.

Immediately picking up bad vibes (somebody does actually say, “this place gives me the creeps”) they discover that the canister’s churning green goo is in fact the essence of what we’ve come to call the Antichrist: actually, a powerful alien being who last walked the Earth in the Cambrian era. This evil entity starts taking over the bodies of the researchers, and also controlling the LA street-people who congregate menacingly outside. The aim is to liberate its father, a being we know as Satan, who is currently trapped in another dimension. Or something.

Close attention must be paid to Carpenter’s script, which begins with a dizzying array of complex theories discussed by highbrow figures including priest Donald Pleasence, theoretical physicist Victor Wong and the latter’s students – a fairly geeky collection of boffins apart from implausibly photogenic (and sappy) lovebirds Jameson Parker and Lisa Blount. “Say goodbye to classical reality! Because our logic collapses on the sub-atomic level – into ghosts, and shadows!” exclaims Wong, which is Carpenter’s way of ensuring that we’re ready to swallow all manner of bizarre plot happenings once the action adjourns to the creepy downtown LA church.

Even then, it takes a little while for the action to kick in, and pace is uneven until things suddenly pick up for a trademark Carpenter last reel in which he frantically intercuts between various groups of people in deadly peril. By now all the intellectual chat about Schrodinger’s Cat seems a very long way off, as the ‘possessed’ rise from the dead and we’re suddenly plunged into gory zombie/vampire territory.

As usual, it doesn’t all quite come off. Carpenter can’t resist diltuing the tone with some rather heavy-handed comic relief, and it’s slightly jarring to hear the Anti-Christ (speaking through a human conduit) coming out with the absurd line “I’ve got a message for you, and you’re not gonna like it.” Even worse is Carpenter’s unforgivable treatment of the ‘street-people’, led by a cadaverous Alice Cooper. “He controls simple organisms easily,” someone remarks of the Antichrist – and Carpenter blithely seems to place the scruffy, shuffling homeless on the same ‘pawns of Satan’ level as biddable creatures like worms, ants and cockroaches.

The street-people fulfil the same function as the wordless gang-member hordes in Assault on Precinct 13, as once again our ‘heroes’ come under siege from an undifferentiated, faceless mass. In Carpenter’s next movie They Live the homeless are heroic class warriors against ‘corporate’ (actually alien) oppression – perhaps indicating the director felt guilty about his earlier sins. But even in Prince of Darkness, he pointedly includes a shot of the grim, foursquare business block across from the church that feels positively Cronenbergesque in its foreboding modernity, symbol of a rigorously partitioned, anti-human City of Angels.

The street-people issue aside, Carpenter is on something approaching top form here – his distinctive, thuddingly doomy electronic score plays its part, while the cast cope well with the script’s sudden shifts from airy theorising to kick-ass action. If anything, Carpenter’s (blisteringly anti-clerical) screenplay has too many ideas, with the result that none of them are fully worked through – his best conceit features the researchers receiving messages from the future in their dreams in the form of electronic signals sent backwards in time from 1999 on a beam of ‘tachyons’.

This “remote-camera view of the future” sounds surprisingly plausible, and the grainy images we see (a not-quite-human figure emerging from the church) are easily the most spookily disturbing in the whole of Carpenter’s work. The breathless climax, meanwhile - in which Satan’s monstrous paw is briefly glimpsed on the other side of a mirror - ties everything together in a way that just about makes sense, while simultaneously managing to reference not only Cocteau’s Orphee but also Carroll’s Alice.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, July 6, 2009

Classic-Horror.com Kairo

Final Girl Stacie Ponder

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg)

DVD Verdict Kevin Lee

Scifilm Review Dr. Mality

VideoVista Christopher Geary

DVD Talk (Ian Jane)

Eccentric Cinema

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Moda Magazine (Kage Alan)

CineScene.com (Fausted)

Eat My Brains Zombie Club also reviewing BIG TROUBLE FROM LITLE CHINA

The 7th Level also reviewing DARK STAR, ASSAULT IN PRECINCT 13, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, and GHOSTS OF MARS

Nashville Scene [Jim Ridley]

THEY LIVE B+ 91

USA (93 mi) 1988 ‘Scope

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum.

—John Nada (Rowdy Roddy Piper)

Considered “the finest Marxist science-fiction film ever to feature a professional wrestler,” we finally have a movie that explains why it’s so difficult getting ahead in this world, that is, unless you *conform* and *obey the rules.* This movie, set in Los Angeles sometime in the future, lays it all out for you, as a drifter, none other than professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper, arrives looking for work and hooks up with a construction company, but notices strange goings-on at a church across the street, which really piques his interest when a full-fledged police invasion attacks the church and an entire homeless camp which has been providing free shelter and meals is razed by bulldozers. When Piper checks out what was secretly left behind at the church, he discovers a box of sunglasses that alter the viewer’s perspective, enabling the viewer to see in black and white what’s underneath billboard advertising, which turns into blunt subliminal messages which urge citizens to stay asleep, submit, obey, buy, conform, marry and reproduce, do not question authority, watch TV and have no thoughts. Even more preposterous, it turns out aliens have infiltrated the human race in order to harvest our resources, which they are doing by controlling the TV airwaves and through extravagant business ventures, handsomely rewarding those helpful partners that grease the wheels for them. With the sunglasses, however, one can see the skeletal faces of the aliens, as otherwise they are completely indistinguishable from other humans. Piper goes a little crazed once he sees how humans are being manipulated, but the aliens are everywhere and seem to control the police. When he starts to fight back, he realizes the aliens are all connected by strange wrist watches which immediately connect them to the police and can also help them instantly disappear without a trace.

Defying arrest, television broadcasts are interrupted by hackers who attempt to warn the world about their passivity, where independent thought is discouraged and people are ordered to “watch TV and stay asleep.” Referred to as “free enterprisers” who routinely label their resisters as Communists, this is a brilliant exploration of contemporary 1980’s American culture through an outlandish parody of Republicans in the Reagan era, Big Money subverting Blue Collar interests, suggesting the yuppie revolution of the 80’s was actually an alien invasion, satirically portrayed here as aliens who wish to control the masses through psychological manipulation, hoarding all the money and power for themselves. These broader themes unfortunately continue to plague us today, where not much has changed, as we still struggle with uncontrollable corporate greed and middle class apathy pitting the haves against the have nots, as never before in American history has so much wealth been concentrated in the hands of so few. Piper turns into a somewhat berserk, lone American seeking vigilante justice, as while the world has turned into a totalitarian police state, the dialogue also gets a little campy with some choice one-liners. In fact, the acting is barely acceptable, even for B-movie standards, and Carpenter’s bluesy score is extremely repetitive, creating a near hypnotic mood as the movie takes its time setting up the characters until all hell breaks loose and this turns into an action thriller that never takes itself too seriously, making this delicious fun throughout.

Los Angeles’s darkly corrupt soul is finally revealed for what it is, a vast wasteland of subliminal billboard signs controlled by aliens, where Carpenter, from behind a pair of dark glasses, essential fashion in Southern California, by the way, abruptly alters how the viewer sees the world, often switching from color to black and white. Perhaps the turning point of the film is a vicious fight scene between two friends, Piper and his working class buddy Keith David as Frank, an extended five-minute alley fight, a brutal affair complete with flying suplex wrestling maneuvers, all designed to get Frank to wear the glasses, a legendary scene that may have been the source inspiration for David Fincher’s FIGHT CLUB (1999). Two working class stiffs fighting over what’s left of their stripped down pride and honor gives this film a timeless Us versus Them relevance, also a unique portrait of how the lower class is continually forced to fight over the last scraps at the bottom of the economic food chain. Carpenter’s wit, expressed through a blistering critique of capitalism and the protections provided to an elite upper class, has never been so fully on display as in this paranoid mix of sci-fi and thriller, one of the great unsung satires to truly get the 80’s right. It all plays out like a sci-fi, socio-political horror western, where the individualistic, frontier spirit has to fend off the foreign, outside invaders, which is the key to understanding most John Carpenter movies. What’s unique here is that a professional wrestler is the one chosen to save the world, all given a tongue-in-cheek sensibility that plays out with the cheap fun of an original Twilight Zone or Star Trek TV program.

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] (a fitting excerpt from a review of another Carpenter film)

Mind you, "Ghosts of Mars" is not a good movie by any reasonable standard; it's not one of Carpenter's half-accidental triumphs, like the original "Halloween" or "Escape From New York" or his memorable 1982 remake of "The Thing." It's not even "They Live" -- the finest Marxist science-fiction film ever to feature a professional wrestler -- in which Rowdy Roddy Piper discovers that the yuppie revolution of the '80s is actually an alien invasion (still an unrefuted hypothesis as far as I'm concerned).

John Carpenter completists generally hate this slab of satiric sci-fi, but it's one of my favorite junk movies and a sure-fire Halloween rental. Hideous aliens in human disguise have infiltrated our government and our media; our only hope is drifter Rowdy Roddy Piper, whose sunglasses can see through the aliens' mind-controlling techniques. Sure it's silly, but the laugh's on us when Piper looks at a kiosk full of newsmagazines and sees only covers marked "OBEY" and "CONFORM." (The Scene uses lead-based ink to prevent such exposure.) Classic line: "I'm here to kick ass and to chew bubble gum--and I'm all out of bubble gum."

They Live Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

John Carpenter's 1988 SF action-thriller about aliens taking over the earth through the hypnotic use of TV. The explicit anti-Reagan satire--the aliens are developers who regard human beings as cattle, aided by yuppies who are all too willing to cooperate for business reasons--is strangely undercut and confused by a xenophobic treatment of the aliens that also makes them virtual stand-ins for the Vietcong. Carpenter's wit and storytelling craft make this fun and watchable, although the script takes a number of unfortunate shortcuts, and the possibilities inherent in the movie's central conceit are explored only cursorily. All in all, an entertaining (if ideologically incoherent) response to the valorization of greed in our midst, with lots of Rambo-esque violence thrown in, as well as an unusually protracted slugfest between ex-wrestler Roddy Piper and costar Keith David. R, 97 min.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

They Live, John Carpenter’s paranoia-drenched 1988 thriller about corrupt capitalist extraterrestrials hoodwinking humans via mind-control, may be the loopiest, and coolest, entry in the director’s canon. A vagabond construction worker (pro wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper) uncovers the real reason behind American economic disparity when he finds a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see that skeletal aliens rule the Earth disguised as WASPs. Piper joins forces with a rebel group to fight the insidious invaders – who use subliminal messages in advertising such as “Obey,” “Consume” and “Sleep” to lull people into zombified submission – but this critique of 1980s materialism is best loved for containing the longest fight scene in movie history between Piper and Keith David (clocking in at over eight minutes!) and the greatest so-bad-it’s-brilliant tough-guy line of the decade, spoken as Piper robs a bank: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass…and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

John Carpenter is a director of absolute economy, his filmography replete with, if not distinguished by, simplistic synthesizer and bass guitar scores, and foolproof, masculinized formulas. His career in genre filmmaking is so archetypal that it is with neither irony nor derision that his most celebrated film is named after a holiday, and with some generosity that two of his early films were remade with sparing variation from their original iterations.

These traits are pronounced in Carpenter’s name, as it regularly prefixes the titles of his films, appending each with a trademark for familiar thrills and fantasies. And each, for the most part, delivers: when women are the subject, they are empowered and durable; the men are quietly hostile but strangely asexual; the conflicts usually escalate in parallel threads between which Carpenter cuts in pedestrian fashion; and there is usually some cinematographic reference to Psycho. These are citations of Carpenter’s reliable assets, which are exalted in They Live, my favorite of his melds of 50s SciFi and horror.

Roddy Piper is cast as the lead, an anonymous drifter (credited as Nada) who comes upon an anonymous city in which little work is to be found. Piper is known predominantly as a professional wrestler (specifically, loser to Hulk Hogan in the original Wrestlemania); here, however, this experience fosters little appropriation other than what is arguably the most indulgent fight sequence in film, in which Piper and Keith David spend some eight minutes throwing (and receiving) wrecking ball punches. Otherwise, Piper is underutilized, for the most part relaying paranoia, sudden anger, or anxiety in a pair of eyes that concentrate on something out of the frame. In other words, he is unnaturally appropriate — Carpenter’s Bruno S. — precisely for his inexperience, his obvious inability to suit the role, or, in this environment, to provide an inability to conform within an extraordinarily homogeneous breed of human beings manipulated by a capitalist alien race.

They Live was released in November of 1988, coinciding with the end of Reagan’s extended tenure as United States President. This coincidence improves the analogy of the film’s critique of capitalism and the shelter afforded by an elite upper-class. Such analogy is not unapparent in Carpenter’s films (The Thing, for one, is a more pessimistic dystopia), but in none is it as lucid as it is here. But if this analogy to Reagan-era elitism is accepted, then the effort to diminish said elitism inherits the interpretation of Communism: Nada discovers a militant collective that loans its members guns and an agenda for mutiny. The members range in age, race, and sex, but these traits are incidental—given this army’s modest number, each participant is an identical asset. They Live is Cold War paranoia at its most lucid, leveraging American capitalism with its most logically abhorrent enemy.

The concept is manifested with equal derision in aliens whose faces resemble skulls that house two bulbous eyes. Their appearance is as repugnant as their practice, but neither is easily discerned. Herein, the realization is afforded via a pair of sunglasses that refract the countenance of conspiracy, revealing the aliens’ horrid faces, and the subliminal commands in billboards, magazines, signage, and even currency. In turn, the film hinges on epiphany: the aforesaid fight sequence is motivated by Nada’s intention for his compatriot to look through a pair of the magic sunglasses (which he does, upon his reception of a back suplex); and it closes in a gesture both hilarious and epic, which finds the rest of the world recognizing — for the first time — the subliminal commands that order its existence.

Movie Cynics The Vocabulariast

They Live is another film from horror master John Carpenter. The film was released in 1988, and didn’t really receive much notice until it came to video where it has become something of a cult classic. Carpenter’s They Live is a deliciously misleading film. On its surface it appears to be a simple sci-fi flick with a professional wrestler as its star, not the height of cinema to be sure. However, upon closer examination, the film is actually pretty intelligent and supplies an answer for many of the problems that we still face today, 20 years after the film’s creation. Look at consumer greed, apathy, pollution, the gap between the economically elite and the economically downtrodden and ask yourself where all these problems come from and why no one is doing anything about them? The answer? Aliens, motherfucker! It would be nice if this was really the source of all our troubles.

They Live is the story of a muscular drifter who appears to have alcohol blooms on his face throughout the movie. It’s no wonder he is homeless, jobless, and pussyless. The man, whose name is never used, finds a job as a worker at a construction site and he wanders along, thinking that his day will come and obviously under the illusion that America is still a meritocracy and that the American dream is a reality. Then he finds some sunglasses that let him see that the world is actually run by some ugly ass aliens and filled with subliminal messages such as “Obey,” “Honor Apathy,” and “Consume.” He loses his fucking mind and starts wasting people. Together, the dude and his construction buddy must find a way to stop the alien signal that has all of the humans blinded to the truth.

Carpenter’s film is an amazing exploration of contemporary 80’s American culture, which sadly hasn’t changed very much. Many of the themes that Carpenter bashes such as consumer greed, apathy, and class-based oppression still exist today. The film is anything but subtle as it crumbles up the illusions of the jaded and thrusts them in the viewer’s face. Carpenter manages to turn the familiar world into a wasteland of subliminal signs where even the traffic signals aren’t what they appear to be. His switches from color to black and white jar the viewer from their comfort zone, allowing them to see the world in a different way just as the characters do. Visually, the film isn’t as exciting as some of Carpenter’s other flicks. The visuals have a cheap quality to them, mainly do to poor set design and a small feel to the film, but these all appear to be side effects of a small budget and not a lack of skill on Carpenter’s part.

The acting in the film is ok. Roddy Piper plays the nameless protagonist, and delivers some of the most memorable one-liners in cinema history. Piper’s bubble-gum line has been appropriated by more people than I can count, and the rest of the lines in the movie are just as quirky and strange. Piper isn’t the best actor, but he is perfect in this movie as it doesn’t really ask him to do much but walk around and deliver some one-liners of dubious quality. Keith David plays Piper’s construction buddy with his typical flare. David’s deep voice and charismatic performance ups the quality of the film significantly and his chemistry with Piper seems genuine and makes the idea of a 5 minute and 20 second fight between the characters something to look forward to rather than something to dread.

They Live is a quality satire of the problems present in contemporary society and the beauty of it is that people from all walks of life can watch the movie. It’s possible to watch the film and enjoy it without buying into any of its philosophy, but the converse is also true. If you want a film to inspire thought in your mind, They Live certainly has enough to get you started. As a document that records the death of the American dream, They Live is beautifully rendered.

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

Cinematic Reflections (Derek Smith)

Cold Fusion Video Reviews (Nathan Shumate) review

CultureCartel.com (Travis Lowell) review [3.5/5]

VideoVista Peter Schilling

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

Electric Sheep Magazine Lisa Williams

Scifilm Review D. Mality

Shane R. Burridge

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Erich Shulte

The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

The Sci-Fi Movie Page

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs from Cine-File

"They Live": Jonathan Lethem explains a cult classic Jonathan Lethem from Salon, November 6, 2010

DVD Maniacs Troy Howarth

Eccentric Cinema

Absolute Horror

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

Mutant Reviewers from Hell review

DVDActive (Chris Gould) dvd review [4/10]

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross)

HorrorTalk Harvey Click

Eye for Film (Gator MacReady) review [3/5]

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

Eye for Film (Daniel Hooper) review [4/5]

Movie-Vault.com (Cyrus Banerjee) review [6/10]

The Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan

Noon-Thirty

Movies.InfiniteCoolness.com - John Carpenter's They Live!

Eat My Brains Zombie Club also reviewing THE FOG

Mondo Digital also reviewing CHRISTINE

CineScene.com (Sasha Stone) also reviewing THE THING

DVDTalk DVD Review (John Carpenter: Master of Fear Collection) [Tyler Foster]

DVD Verdict- John Carpenter: Master Of Fear Collection [Michael Rubino]

They Live - John Carpenter Official Movie Site

"The Cult 25: The Essential Left-Field Movie Hits Since '83 Entertainment Weekly, September 3, 2008

MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN

France USA (99 mi) 1992 ‘Scope

The Tech (MIT) (Bill Jackson)

Carpenter's sci-fi comedy is essentially a $40 million B movie, with remarkable special effects compensating for a thin storyline. A noir-ish opening, complete with voice-over and flashback, hints at a darker tone more in keeping with HF Saint's source novel. But once Chase has been rendered invisible, the plot consists of one endless chase scene, punctuated by inventive sight gags and the odd romantic interlude. After a freak accident at a research laboratory, Nick Halloway discovers that being invisible isn't the voyeur's dream he fantasised about as a child. Now 'the most exotic intelligence asset' available, he becomes the subject of a huge manhunt led by cynical CIA man Jenkins (Neill). Aided by anthropologist Alice (Hannah), he tries to evade his pursuers and find time to adjust to his invisibility. When played for laughs, this works well, while the action scenes generate an atmosphere of paranoia and menace; but failing to explore the pathos of Nick's predicament, the film becomes an inflated lightweight comedy whose shortcomings are all too visible.

I want to say that Chevy Chase's new comedy, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, would do well to become invisible itself. But no, that's too easy. Actually, this is Chase's best film in a long time. Memoirs has just as many Chevy-bumping-into-people scenes as any other Chevy Chase movie, but it also has a lot of solid one-liners and -- I don't believe I'm saying this -- it gives its title character a genuine sense of pathos.

Easy-going Nick (Chase) has slipped away from a boring lecture at a laboratory he's visiting. He no sooner falls asleep in an executive's sauna when something goes wrong in a cyclotron and he wakes up to find himself, and parts of the building, invisible. The Bad Guy (Sam Neill, late of Until the End of the World) wants to capture Nick and use him as part of a secret government plot. The rest of the film's plot is taken up by the chase.

Where this movie works amazingly well is in watching the invisible Nick adapt to the world around him. Escaping from the enemy, he returns to his apartment and tries to eat his Chinese food. However, he quickly learns that it's nearly impossible to use chopsticks when you can't see your hands. Finally scooping the food into his mouth with a pair of giant tongs, he passes a mirror and realizes that although he is invisible, the food isn't, and he sees it slowly being digested in his stomach.

In another scene, Nick punches out a drunk, then holds up the man's arm to hail a cab. In a hilarious exchange, Nick moves the man's mouth and provides the words to tell the driver where to go. Nick also gets to have fun being in rooms and hearing people talk about him; "accidents" tend to happen to those who speak badly of him.

In an amusing and interesting bit, Nick is following Alice (Daryl Hannah), the girl he loves but has not yet revealed his invisible self to, when a boorish oaf (Gregory Paul Martin) slimes his way into her room and sheds crocodile tears before throwing himself on top of her. Nick throws him off the bed. The stunned man, thinking Alice must be amazingly strong, gets up and starts to leave. Alice closes the door behind him, but the outraged Nick reaches up and turns her gentle closing into a slam. She has no idea he is in the room, and the subtleties of his actions in protecting her are amazing and lend depth to the character.

While the film does indeed develop Nick, Hannah and Neill are given one-note roles. While Hannah has to spend her time playing cuddly-sexy, Neill at least can (and does) have fun with his ruthlessly evil agent. Both actors show a gift for physical comedy when they have to interact with the invisible character, and they create a very real sense of someone else being on screen.

The special effects deserve mention, being some of the best put on screen since last summer's Terminator 2. Created by (are there any other special effects companies?) George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, they include an amazing scene where Nick smokes, and you see the smoke enter and exit his lungs. Then he leans forward, and you can see the outline of his face shining against the smoke. They manage to take the "liquid" effects of T2 and The Abyss and place them in a comedy-action setting.

Directed by John Carpenter, whose varied resume is a living retribution of the auteur theory of filmmaking, Memoirs of an Invisible Man rises above the level of comedy you might expect from its high-concept plot and delves a bit deeper. Perhaps this is due to the literary source for the story, a book by H. F. Saint. It is a very funny and interesting film which rarely drags; a definite recommendation for an evening's entertainment.

Film Freak Central review [Bill Chambers] which includes a review of the book, John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness, by Gilles Boulenger

DVD Times Gary Couzens

DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

DVD Verdict: Memoirs Of An Invisible Man Patrick Naugle

DVD Talk (Mike Long)

That Cow (Andrew Bradford)

The New York Times (Julie Lew)

BODY BAGS – made for TV

USA (91 mi) 1993

BlackHorrorMovies.com a few photos included at the site

The first segment of this made-for-cable horror anthology from John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, "The Gas Station", stands out not only as the best of the three tales but also the one relevant to this website (fancy that). This 20-minute chiller is one of the very few slashers -- regardless of length -- to feature a black woman as the lead, the so-called "final girl" (the only other one that comes to mind being Devon's Ghost). Maybe this is because black women are perceived as talking too much shit to survive? ("And another thing, Jason, your momma swallows more seamen than the Bermuda Triangle!") Whatever the reason, "The Gas Station" stars Alex Datcher as Anne, a college gal looking to make a little extra money in the pre-Girls Gone Wild days. She ends up taking a job on the graveyard shift at a -- yup, gas station -- and has a first night that has "workman's comp" written all over it. See, there's a crazed killer running around town (In an homage to himself, director Carpenter set this story in Haddonfield; since it's not Halloween, it's safe to assume that the killer is not Michael Myers -- although to Anne's dismay, he apparently needs gas.). What follows is genuinely creepy, giving a realistic sense of the paranoia you'd feel if you were stuck in a gas station attendant's booth late at night in the middle of nowhere...in Haddonfield. Refreshingly, race is never an issue in the story -- at least, until Anne calls her cousins Peanut and Ray-Ray to come mess up the mofo with a machete.

Showtime presented this uneven anthology initiated by John Carpenter (who hosts, in Rick Baker make-up) and directed by him and Tobe Hooper. It may be Carpenter's project, but Hooper steals the show.

The first segment, "The Gas Station," finds Carpenter solidly back in Halloween territory. Alex Detcher stars as a college student spending her first uneasy night working the late shift at the titular joint. Robert Carradine is her boss, who ... Never mind. If you can't figure out what he is within five minutes, you don't know this genre. Carpenter has a ball with the minimalist set-up, though too much of it depends on the woman acting stupid (also a genre standard). Still suspenseful fun.

"Hair," also helmed by JC, is kind of dumb, like an outtake from Creepshow 3. Stacy Keach, though, gives a funny performance as the vain hero, who can't stand the thought of going bald. In desperation, he visits a mysterious hair-restoration clinic run by David Warner. As a rule of thumb, don't go to any clinic run by David Warner, especially if the nurse is Deborah Harry. Some nifty animation involving vicious hairs (!) doesn't compensate for the flat ending. Sheena Easton does okay as Keach's lady love.

The stand-out is Hooper’s piece, “The Eye,” as unsettling as anything he’s directed, though it’s essentially yet another riff on The Hands of Orlac. Mark Hamill is great as an up-and-coming baseball star who loses his right eye in a car accident and submits to an experimental eye transplant — which, as it turns out, comes from a particularly unsavory donor. Hamill is completely convincing as he hallucinates, flips out, quotes obsessively from the Bible, and terrorizes his wife (Twiggy). The climax would’ve been perfect if Hamill had delivered the line allegedly cut from X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes: “I can still see!” Those who dis Hamill as a bland actor with only Luke Skywalker in his range need to see this (and to hear some of his voice work as the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series).

'The Gas Station': Worth a look. 'Hair': Just average. 'The Eye': Awesome. That averages out to four stars.

Popcorn Pictures Review

A trilogy of horror tales is presented to us from inside a morgue. The first is about a serial killer, the second about a hair transplant that goes horribly wrong and the third is about a baseball player who is involved in a car accident and has an eye transplant with serious consequences.

This is a mouth-watering prospect for a true horror fan - a collaboration of two of horror's most infamous directors (Carpenter and Hooper). Here we have a trilogy of horror tales, each approached differently. Considering how Carpenter has gradually got worse as the years progress and Hooper may have directed one of the greatest horror films of all time (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) but his other films haven't been that great, then this is as good as I could have hoped for. Carpenter himself presents the tales and is possibly the best thing about the whole film. He stars as the wacky morgue corpse who cracks jokes and wisecracks about the other dead bodies before introducing us the next tale. So as for the different stories.....

The first story is a standard slasher film about a woman who gets a night job at a gas station in an area that has been suffering from a spate of murders. Since Carpenter directed this one, he brings back some of his old magic with some scenes directly copied from Halloween - the town is even called Haddonfield! It's full of the usual standard slasher elements and includes some wacky cameos from the likes of Wes Craven and Sam Raimi. Overall, this one isn't bad and Carpenter manages to make it more exciting than it should be (complete with another great soundtrack). Some trademark Carpenter in here including the lush distant shots.

The second story is the weakest of the three and is played more for laughs. A bald man gets revolutionary hair therapy in a new clinic only to find out that he is being used for something more devious. Stacy Keach comes off as a pompous git and actually deserves what happens to him for being so worried about his hair. David Warner looks quite wooden during the TV commercials but then improves dramatically in person and gets back to usual reliable self. The ending is quite a surprise and a nice touch though and certainly not how I had envisioned it to end.

The last story is directed by Tobe Hooper and stars Mark Hamill as a baseball player who is involved in car accident and loses his eye. But all is not lost as he gets an eye transplant. Unfortunately for him it is the eye of a killer and he begins to have strange visions. This isn't that bad either but the story has been done before (The Simpsons did one like this, only it was the hair of a killer that was transplanted). Mark Hamill shows how capable an actor he is here and it's a real shame that his career didn't take off like Harrison Ford's did after Star Wars.

Body Bags doesn't give a social commentary or critique anything - it is just a film made by some horror greats who just wanted to give the audience a good time and enjoy making it in the process. And that it does.

Evil Dread

The Video Graveyard (Chris Hartley)

Bloody-Disgusting

Final Girl Stacie Ponder

FearScene

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS

USA (95 mi) 1995 ‘Scope

Tucson Weekly [Zachary Woodruff]

John Carpenter's latest creepfest is a wonderfully playful mind-bender chock full of paranoid fears about mass hysteria and the death of reality. Working from a screenplay by Michael De Luca, the movie gives horror a good name, holding back on blood-'n'-guts in favor of weird, imaginative imagery where white haired beings on bicyles flash through the night, shadows creep up in the cells of insane asylums and figures in paintings turn their heads. Every scene gooses you with a surprise, every dream contains a twist, and Sam Neill, as the skeptical protagonist, makes the journey fun.

In this lightweight but entertaining horror movie, seasoned genre director Carpenter realises the Lovecraftian weirdness hinted at in the eerie atmospherics of The Fog and the monstrous excesses of The Thing: in short, the idea of an order of beings that exists in a parallel dimension, expelled from this world but waiting patiently to cross back and take control again. There are shades of both HP Lovecraft and Stephen King in the central character, Sutter Cane (Prochnow), a popular horror writer whose works allegedly influence his more susceptible readers, transforming them into homicidal harbingers of global chaos. When Cane vanishes just before his new book is due for delivery, his publishers panic and hire sceptical insurance investigator John Trent (Neill) to track him down. Trent suspects an elaborate publicity stunt; but having entered the writer's hometown of Hobb's End, he too experiences a blurring of the line between reality and fiction. The script by New Line's head of production, Michael (Freddy's Dead) de Luca, does not allow Carpenter free range, nevertheless he manages some neat flourishes of his own, handling the narrative twists and unsettling sfx sequences with customary skill.

The American republic is in peril, as usual, and it's going to take a really bad movie to save it. In this uninvolving, abysmally scripted horror picture, insurance investigator Sam Neill (someone please tell me what he is doing in this movie) is sent by publisher Charlton Heston to investigate the disappearance of Jurgen Proch now, a successful Stephen-King-like novelist.

It seems the novelist -- the most successful writer of the century -- turns his readers into psychotic zombies. (Let us emphasize right now, this movie is not about Robert James Waller.) Accompanied almost irrelevantly by publishing editor Julie Carmen, Neill drives to the usual misty, New England location in search of Prochnow. He finds him, of course, as well as a world peopled with rejects from "Children of the Corn" (catatonics with pickup trucks).

The rest is a bewildering, boring assembly of rock-video-surreal nightmare sequences with more repetitive episodes than "Groundhog Day." I said, with more repetitive episodes than -- oh never mind. Just consider yourself warned.

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (R) -- Contains brief nudity, violence and extended passages of incoherence.

Austin Chronicle [Joey O'Bryan]

"Reality isn't what it used to be," warns a creepy-looking old man just seconds before he blows his head off with a double-barreled shotgun, an image which perfectly sums up the bizarre theme and tone of director John Carpenter's latest film, In the Mouth of Madness. The underrated Sam Neill (Jurassic Park) stars as the hard-boiled and cynical John Trent, a claims collector with a special talent for sniffing out a con. Called in by a book publishing firm to track down their deliriously popular, flagship author Sutter Cane, who vanished while completing his most eagerly awaited novel In the Mouth of Madness, Trent teams up with his curiously other-worldly editor (Julie Carmen in a strange, occasionally annoying, trance-like performance) to track him down. Their search eventually sends them into an alternate reality comprised totally of characters and events from Cane's books, where they find the author himself, hastily completing what he refers to as ?the new Bible? -- a book that will turn the world into an army of vicious killers, wiping themselves out to make room for a new order of slimy, toothy monsters (?Every species can smell its own extinction,? Cane remarks thoughtfully.) As much a sly satire on the "movie violence causes real violence" argument as it is a solid piece of horror filmmaking, In the Mouth of Madness is something of a return to form for Carpenter, following his uncharacteristic failure with his last feature Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Clearly having a ball, Carpenter fills the screen with equal amounts of unsettling atmosphere and shameless jolts, while at the same time successfully walking the tightrope that separates the horrific from the hilarious. In this department, Carpenter is aided greatly by Neill, whose witty performance adds resonance to questionable lines of dialogue and believability to every outlandish plot twist. Prochnow, as devilish author Sutter Cane, is wonderfully creepy, saying lines like, "This one will drive you absolutely mad!" with hellish glee. Of course, it's not perfect, with most of the problems lying with Michael DeLuca's script, which has a tendency to dissolve into a series of gory, scattershot "skits" during the second act (Credit goes to Carpenter for working wonders with this section, treating it with a light touch not unlike a fun-filled trip through a haunted-house carnival ride.) However, the film's faults are easily overlooked in view of its strengths: i.e., Neill's performance, Carpenter's sense of mood, his smart use of the widescreen format -- not to mention all the mutations, special effects, and the hilariously self-reflexive finale that diverts your attention. All in all, In the Mouth of Madness is a fun, clever horror picture, full of creepy crawlies, things that go bump in the night, and references to everyone from H.P. Lovecraft to Dario Argento. Welcome back, John Carpenter, and keep up the good work.

Movie Vault [Goatdog]

H. P. Lovecraft was one of those master artists who died penniless and scorned, but passing time built him into a legend. Whether you like horror fiction or not, you have to appreciate his mastery of both the detective story and the horror story. He influenced everyone from Robert Bloch to Stephen King. Unfortunately, his stories don't film very well. Since they dwell on fantastic creatures and indescribable evil, and earn their merit through Lovecraft's evocative prose, they don't translate to film. He describes things as too terrible to describe, so any attempt to picture them is doomed to fail. Actually, the best Lovecraftian films have been ones that borrows elements of the world he created. Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" and Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" and "Evil Dead 2" are the best examples, because they borrow elements that work and abandon those that don't.

That established, this movie is a pretty good attempt to make a "Lovecraftian" movie, in that it wasn't an abject failure. Instead of trying to film a single story, Carpenter and De Luca crafted a synthetic work that deals with most of Lovecraft's major themes in a manner that misses the mark but makes a good effort. Sam Neill plays John Trent, an expert insurance investigator hired by publisher Jackson Harglow (played by Charlton Heston) to track down a missing author. That author, named Sutter Cane (played by Jurgen Prochnow) in a poke at Stephen King, writes nasty little books about lurking demons that are searching for a way into our world (much like Lovecraft's fiction). His rabid fans are prone to fits of violence, prompting some to believe that his words have more truth to them than it would seem. Harglow sends editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) along on the trip to find the author. Their search leads them to the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire, the site of a fictional town where Crane bases his stories. After a freaky nighttime drive, they seemingly end up in Hobbs End, that very fictional town. The place is empty, but they quickly learn that every detail in the novels is there in reality, including a demonic church where the demons are supposed to escape from. Trent is convinced the whole thing is a publicity stunt, but ensuing events shake his belief in his opinion and in reality.

So, why doesn't it work? Well, it relies a little too much on shock techniques, including rapid shots of prosthetic monsters to establish a nightmare quality that doesn't really take hold. Carpenter can't establish the kind of welling dread that Lovecraft conjured, so he shifts to makeup and pyrotechnics. That was his problem with "The Thing", too, now that I think of it. The story idea is wonderful, but it, like most of Lovecraft's work, just works better on paper. I know critics claim that the written word is necessarily different than film, and that one shouldn't try to compare them. The problem is, I agree with them. However, I think my knowledge of the source made me enjoy the film more than someone coming to it cold. I could see what they were trying to do, and appreciated the things that worked.

Basically, go read some Lovecraft. Start with "Pickman's Model," one of his best short stories. It's the best short introduction to his world.

Classic-Horror Chris Justice

Best-Horror-Movies.com Lee Roberts

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth

Evil Dread

Scifilm Review Dr. Mality

Bloody-Disgusting

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

eFilmCritic.com (Justin Helmer)

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

Fatally Yours

Tucson Weekly [Zachary Woodruff]

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

USA (99 mi) 1995 ‘Scope

Based on the British 1960 chiller of the same name, this John Carpenter picture follows what happens when several women in a quaint northern town mysteriously and simultaneously become pregnant. Their offspring: eight white-haired geniuses with telepathic powers and a collective mean streak. Though the material needed to be better updated to justify a remake (as it stands, it looks like a cheesy episode of X-Files), Carpenter directs with his usual immense skill, and the campy selection of players--Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Mark Hamill--give surprisingly engaging performances.

Movie Vault [Nate Anderson]

This movie has always been a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. It's far from great cinema, and in fact, in many circles it's downright awful, but every now and again a person gets hungry for some cheese, and this is the Kraft Mac and Cheese of Horror flicks.

The story begins in the town of Midwich, which is a somewhat isolated coastal town. A weird phenomena occurs in the town causing everyone to black out for six hours. After that, everyone wakes up and has no idea what happened. This incident has caught the attention of government scientists, led by a chain-smoking Kirstie Alley.

It is revealed that on that day ten women were mysteriously impregnated, and we have no idea how or why. The town doctor, played by Christopher Reeve, assures everyone that there is no reason to automatically panic, and Kirstie Alley, cigarette firmly attached to her mouth, waves money in front of the simpleton residents as an incentive to keep their children. They all decide to keep the children and eventually all the mothers go into labor simultaneously.

Over the course of the years, the nine children (One of them didn't make it though the delivery process alive) have grown up together in their own creepy little collective group, with platinum blond hair and glow in the dark eyes. Oh yeah, and they can read peoples thoughts, and control them too (which is only used to cause them serious physical harm). All the children are completely emotionless, except for the odd child out, David, who manages to actually develop some emotion, which seperates him from the evil children.

I wouldn't recommend this movie to everyone, but if you enjoy either the science fiction genre, or the horror genre, you could do ALOT worse.

Besides, how can you go wrong with a movie that casts Luke Skywalker, I mean Mark Hamill, as a priest?

Imagine a scenario where our next evolutionary successors are emotionless, telepathic, and highly intelligent. Village of the Damned presents such a scenario and details the struggle of this "superior" race against the humans.

John Carpenter has taken the original 1960s screenplay and gorified it in this version, but the ideas in the movie are still captivating. A higher lifeform impregnates the females of the Damned Village one night, resulting in the births of nine platinum-blond(e) children and one stillborn, all of which are siblings. What's more, they are telepathically linked and have the power to control people's minds. According to the movie, they are emotionless, but they do seem to get angry for trivial reasons, they seem to have a great drive for survival, and they are intelligent.

The basic flaw in this story seems to be that you can have intelligence without emotions. I believe this to be a contradiction because any reasonable definition of human-like intelligence (say, the one that requires the passing of the Turing test (i.e., any perfect simulation of a human is intelligent)) requires a drive, a curiousity, and a passion, that goes beyond mere survival. But besides this, the picture the movie paints is rather reasonable. One of the main ideas is the notion of a "collective soul", which I think is indeed a feature of higher intelligence (low level examples include our own brain which is simply a collection of smaller "intelligent" units, neurons). However, rigourous conformity, which is one of the aspects of the children in the movie, is not a necessity and is certainly not a sign of higher intelligence. Without allowing for change within such a collective, there is no room for evolution. A sucessor species to us would have emotions, intelligence, telepathic powers (allowing for complete freedom of information), and individual free will, thus enabling Thomas More's vision of Utopia coming true.

The actual story is about how two doctors, one M.D. (Christopher Reeve), and one Ph.D. (Kirstie Alley), battle with the children. The film's ending suggests that emotions help survival, but in my view, all the alien children possessed emotion.

If you do see Village of the Damned, see it not just for the way Carpenter kills off the cast, but for the lesson it teaches us about what our next evolutionary successors might be like.

Popcorn Pictures Review

A strange mist appears in a small town, causing the population of the town to fall asleep. When everyone awakes, it is discovered that ten women in the town are pregnant. No one knows what happened and soon the women all give birth to the children on the same night. But these aren't ordinary children. They have matching white hair and strange, glowing eyes, and grow at an accelerated rate. These children possess amazing mind control and cause havoc with their thoughts. Trouble begins when the children don't like something and they use their powers to evil use.

It is always hard when you try to remake a classic film and this was no exception. It's not as good as the original as Carpenter has opted to go for more violence and explosions rather than outright atmosphere and scares. I mean this is John Carpenter after all and what would a Carpenter film be without the violence and explosions? Having said that, when he was just starting out he would have gone for the atmosphere and the scares. The children are the creepiest things about the film, mostly because of some weird dyed silver hair and some special eye effects when they start using their powers. But the film doesn't have the same mood as the original and this is where things don't work out as they should. Carpenter knows how to deliver on the atmosphere front (The Thing anyone?) so why he didn't deliver the goods here is beyond me. It's something he has failed to do for a while. On the other fronts, the film fares better. The acting isn't too bad especially from Christopher Reeve who puts in a good performance to save the film. Reeve was a good, solid actor and it's a real shame he was paralysed because I enjoy watching the former Superman act. Kirstie Alley's character is completely pointless and the script could have gone along fine without her. Mark Hamill (yes the one and only) pops up in this somewhere, probably wishing that his post-Star Wars career had taken him along Harrison Ford's path to success instead of carving out a living with small roles. However Hamill is extremely underrated as an actor and although his role is limited, he still plays a decent part.

Sadly this was Christopher Reeve's last film before he was paralysed in a horse riding accident. It isn't a bad send off for him and at least he can hold his head up high. The same can't be said for Carpenter who must rank this up there with his weaker efforts. Even the best directors churn out poorer films.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: John Carpenter's Village of the Damned (1995) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, June 23, 2009

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

The 7th Level also reviewing DARK STAR, ASSAULT IN PRECINCT 13, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, and GHOSTS OF MARS

ESCAPE FROM L.A. B 87

USA (101 mi) 1996 ‘Scope

Not nearly as much fun as the cast of characters in Escape from New York (1981), but of special interest was the performance of Kurt Russell, who was just recently showcased in Tarantino’s GRINDHOUSE (2007), as let’s face it, this film is right out of the grindhouse mold and the guy is such a joy to watch in this kind of over the top role (“You’re Snake Plissken? I thought you’d be taller.”) with oftentimes hilarious and completely subversive political satire. Steve Buscemi was a laugh riot as well, especially the look on his face as he’s driving in that borrowed, souped-up white convertible along the ocean road and sees Russell, who was presumed dead, surfing along the waves with none other than stoner surfer dude Peter Fonda in a raggedy old worn out character called Pipeline. LA and its carnivalesque all day and all night party scene has never been treated with such out and out disdain. The film has its moments.

When Escape from New York was released in 1981, its innovative computer graphics, satirical dystopian vision and tongue-in-cheek humour had a freshness that disguised its ramshackle narrative. Equally enjoyable was Russell's cynical anti-hero Snake Plissken, with his eye-patch and tight-lipped, Eastwood-style one-liners. After 15 years of computer-generated effects, apocalyptic sci-fi and Arnie movies with flippant kiss-off lines, the sequel feels hackneyed and pointless. In the original, Snake was sprung from prison in order to rescue the US President from Manhattan, a lawless maximum-security island populated exclusively by hardened criminals. An explosive device injected into his neck enforced safe and timely delivery. This time, the Snake's injected with a fatal virus, despatched to the earthquake-created prison island of LA, and charged with terminating the President's daughter, Utopia (Langer), a Patti Hearst-style runaway who's stolen the government's 'doomsday device' and shacked up on the island with South American drug dealer turned revolutionary Cuervo Jones (Corraface). Once ashore, he crosses the urban wasteland to Jones' fortified lair, encountering tough transsexual Hershe (Grier), weaselly tour-guide 'Map to the Stars' Eddie (Buscemi), and spaced-out surfer Pipeline (Fonda).

It's been 15 years since Carpenter's futuristic cowboy-noir archetype Snake Plissken (Russell) unpenned the President from the New York City Maximum Security Prison, but then as Snake himself liked to note, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Of course, there have been a few minor revisions to the United States since then: The “Big One” finally hit California, decimating Los Angeles and leaving the city and its environs less than landlocked, Donald Pleasance's position as President has been filled by the bible-thumping histrionics of an apparently de-lobed Cliff Robertson, and the resultant political climate has left the country a theocratic police state. Citizens convicted of moral crimes (pre-marital sex, smoking, eating red meat, voting Democratic, etc.) are packed off to the island of Los Angeles where they are left to fend for themselves against the roving gangs and genuine psychotics that litter the island like so much post-quake detritus. On top of all this, the President's daughter, Utopia, has turned seditious, absconding with a “black box” weapons system and hijacking Air Force One to L.A. where she's joined forces with rebel leader Cuervo Jones (Corraface). Tough break. Enter Snake Plissken, newly captured by the United States Police Force. Given a choice between death in 10 hours via a particularly virulent form of neurotoxin, or going along with the President's plan to recapture the stolen weapon and kill Utopia, the ever-perspicacious Plissken opts for the latter and Escape from L.A. is off like a shot. For those who have seen Carpenter's original film, nothing much has really changed -- different coast, different MacGuffin, but still an almost identical story line. Once in Los Angeles, Snake makes his way through the various ruined tourist attractions toward his rendezvous with Utopia and Cuervo. Along the way, he meets up with a number of the local flora and fauna, among them Steve Buscemi as the conniving “Map to the Stars” Eddie, rival ganglord Hershe (Grier), and the (literally) twisted Surgeon General of Beverly Hills (Sam Raimi regular Campbell). Still, familiarity doesn't necessarily breed contempt, and fans of the New York leg of the Snake saga will slip back into the desperado's world with a comfortable grin. Carpenter keeps the pace moving at roughly the speed of sound, and his dark wry wit is evident throughout. Above it all, though, is Russell's inimitably sexy Snake, so unchanged between films it seems as though it's only been a long Labor-Day weekend since the A-Number-One Duke of New York got his. To be brutally honest, the City of Angels doesn't completely pack the gritty punch that the Big Apple did, but then Green Day aren't the Ramones, either. Suffice to say, Plissken's jaunt westward is true to Carpenter's (and producer/co-writer Debra Hill's) original spirit. Loud, rollicking, alternately ultra-violent and hilarious, Escape from L.A. is Snake redux, and what more do you need, really?

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter]

ESCAPE FROM L.A., the latest from John Carpenter (The Thing, Halloween, etc.), is utterly without any redeeming moral values in the conventional sense. True to the title, it's pure escapist schlock in the grand tradition of the B-movie. It's got all the drive-in movie goodies: bizarre characters, over-the-top acting, cheesy special effects, slutty costumes and gallons of blood. The only thing this movie wants is for us to have a good time without guilt, and since the heat has immobilized the intellect of most Tucsonans anyway, why resist? Yes, it's a vapid, cheesy movie with plot holes you could drive a truck through. Yes, it's exciting and funny and sort of great.

Escape From L.A. is a reprise of Carpenter's 1981 Escape from New York: To call it a sequel wouldn't make much sense, since the two are so alike. In Escape from New York, Snake Plisskin (Kurt Russell, all young and buff) is sent into New York in the futuristic hell of 1997. The rotten Big Apple has been converted to a penal colony without keepers or guards; prisoners are dumped there and left to their own wicked devices. Snake, a criminal himself, is sent on a suicide mission to rescue the President, whose plane has crashed there.

Escape From L.A. works with the same elements but shuffles them around: It's the 21st century and the Big One has plunged some of California into the ocean, leaving L.A. an island. Moral degeneracy, rather than crime, qualifies even children for incarceration on the island. (These crimes, never directly specified, seem to include smoking cigarettes, eating beef and being Muslim.) Kurt Russell, grizzled and buff, goes on a suicide mission to retrieve a doomsday device hijacked by the President's flake of a daughter, Utopia (A.J. Langer). Similarities abound. In the first Escape, Snake is injected with timed intravenous explosives. In the second, he's injected with a timed virus. In both, the baddest bad guy drives a funny car with a disco ball, sinful prisoners sport eighties punk rock attire, and portions of dialogue are repeated word for word.

All this leaves Escape From L.A. with a major dilemma: If it's so close to prequel, what's the point? The answer seems to be, there is no point. Escape From L.A. is gloriously pointless. It's completely redundant. There's very little difference between renting Escape From New York and going to the theater to see Escape From L.A. My guess is that John Carpenter figured he could capture a whole new generation of viewers who weren't out of diapers the first time around.

That's not to say there aren't differences between the two versions. The first Escape capitalizes on the Cold War fear of nuclear apocalypse. The second is lighter and more ironic--it capitalizes on the fear of ecological degradation and the dangers of militant non-smokers. The first has gritty sets of a decaying New York. The second has a party atmosphere, with glittery sets of the decaying Santa Monica freeway, half-dead vampiric Californians craving plastic surgery and aging surfers riding tsunamis.

As dumb and enjoyable as Escape From L.A. is, the truth is, Escape From New York is a better movie. It's darker, bleaker, and has the force of originality to propel it. Escape From L.A. lacks tension--it lifts Snake to the level of superhero so we know he'll never get hurt, and the fear of moralistic non-smokers can never, ever equal the shared societal dread of the Cold War era. Carpenter's true talent is his ability to frighten, and he abandons it in Escape From L.A. in favor of shlocky style and humor.

But it almost doesn't matter. Escape From L.A. is so energetic and goofy that only the most die-hard fan of the eighties post-apocalyptic genre is going to get nostalgic for Carpenter's sinister side. All the rest of us have to do is work on enjoying the gratuitous leather bikinis, exploding cars and fountains of fake blood.

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

The best sci-fi film of 1996? While last year saw more sci-fi movies than usual - no doubt because of the financial success of StarGate - it wasn’t such a great year for science fiction on celluloid - even though the biggest earner at the box office was a sci-fi effort (of sorts). Hyped to death, Independence Day wasn’t cinematic sci-fi’s Last Great Hope, but instead the final nail in its coffin. While it showed that there’s money to be made from the genre, it showed that the way to do it is by underestimating audiences’ intelligence, by transposing another genre (in this case, the so-called disaster flick) unto the sci-fi genre. So far, 1997 hasn’t been a good year for celluloid sci-fi either. Two of the biggest sci-fi box office hits weren’t really sci-fi at all: The Fifth Element is an action movie and The Lost World is a horror movie. Maybe Contact can save the day, who knows?

While 1996 wasn’t such a great year for sci-fi at the movies, it did give us a decent Star Trek movie (Star Trek - First Contact), a mildly subversive spoof on 1950s alien invasion movies (Mars Attacks!) and Escape from LA.

Escape from LA? I can hear you ask. Odds are you probably never saw it. It was one of those films that simply slipped right past everybody’s attention - despite its big pre-release publicity campaign. Nobody went to see it - which is sad. Perhaps the film will enjoy a bigger success on home video. Who knows? However, even without hindsight it was clear that Escape from LA wasn’t exactly destined for box office success. A big budget sequel to a film (Escape from New York) made almost sixteen years ago that was only a moderate financial success in any case? Nope, even though it starred Kurt Russell fresh from his StarGate success, pumping a lot of money into Escape from LA probably wasn’t a very wise investment decision. Besides that, the film was just too weird for most audiences: most of the few people who did see it, hated it . . .

Escape from LA is consciously a bad movie. Like Roger Ebert once said: even today’s bad sci-fi movies are good. With today’s technology even the cheaply made exploitation pics can afford passable special effects and sets - so no more Mystery Science Theatre 3000-like spotting the wire keeping the model of the UFO aloft. Yet despite being a big-budgeted film made by one of Hollywood’s major studios, Escape from LA’s special effects are bad. In fact they remind one of some of those 1970s sci-fi flicks when Planet of the Apes represented the state-of-the-art special effects.

All this shows how much film-making has changed throughout the years. Whilst Escape from New York took itself seriously, Escape from LA is infused with a Pulp Fiction-like post modern attitude. It doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect audiences to take it seriously too - which probably accounts for why so many people hated the film. Audiences just aren’t ready for Gremlins II or Last Action Hero-type postmodernism. In a sense this is sad. When film-makers can’t take their own films seriously, they expect us to do so.

Re-watching Escape from New York a while ago I realised that when I first saw the film when it came out, I thought that it was a fast-paced action movie. However, compared to today's frenetic action blockbusters (like The Rock and Speed) the pace seems almost lethargic. (A fact to which Carpenter admitted in an interview.) Which is why Escape from LA goes for the over-the-top. Audiences today expect more spectacle than before from their movies than before - and Hollywood is only happy to supply with more unbelievable stunts, impressive explosions, deafening soundtracks and implausible events. Escape from LA isn't only symptomatic of that trend, but also a commentary on it.

Escape from LA wasn't only stylistically subversive, its very heart is subversive. It was definitely one of the most subversive movies of 1996 - as anyone who has seen its last fifteen or so minutes will attest. But this will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen any of director John Carpenter's movies like Dark Star, They Live, The Thing, Escape from New York and so forth. Carpenter is fond of infusing the science fiction and horror genre movies he makes with his own political and philosophical concerns. At Escape from LA's centre, an anti-authoritarian and libertarian heart is wildly beating away.

Unfortunately, from the beginning of his career, Carpenter has never delivered on the "promising young director" label critics tagged unto him. His films are like Wagner's music - brilliant moments surrounded by stretches of mediocrity. While Carpenter's films veered from good (Escape from New York) to promising (They Live) to poor (Memoirs of an Invisible Man) to mediocre (Village of the Damned) he never delivered the brilliant masterpiece that was hinted to by early films such as Dark Star, Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13. Ultimately the good bits (like Escape from LA's ending, They Live's premise) redeem the films and one's time doesn't seem spent too badly, his films remain in the "could have been brilliant" category. Like this film.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Nitrate Online Carrie Gorringe

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth

Movie Reviews UK Patrick McCray

Popcorn Pictures Review

Movie Cynics The Vocabulariast

MovieJustice ("10k") offering up a grade of F

DGA Interview Ted Elrick from DGA magazine in 1996

Escape From LA Read the script from the film, from Sci-Fi Movie Page

The New York Times (Anita Gates)

VAMPIRES

USA (107 mi) 1998 ‘Scope

This throwback vampire Western wastes the talent of James Woods, and revels in mean-spirited gore, gratuitous female nudity and repellent violence against women. Derived from John Steakley's novel Vampire$, it pitches Vatican-backed vampire slayer Jack Crow (Woods), his portly sidekick Tony Montoya (Baldwin) and naive young priest Adam Guiteau (Guinee) against Valek (Griffith). The 600-year-old bloodsucker is seeking the legendary Berziers Cross, a religious relic that will allow his nocturnal cohorts to stalk the Earth in broad daylight. Eschewing what Crow characterises as the 'Eurotrash fag' approach to vampire mythology, Carpenter opts for a tough, macho beat-'em-up style. The bloodthirsty creatures get staked, decapitated and torched, the last accomplished by dragging them into the New Mexico sunlight to spontaneously and spectacularly combust. Only one scene, in which Valek and his followers emerge from beneath the desert sand at dawn, hints at the stylish genre film-making with which Carpenter established his reputation.

Village Voice (Amy Taubin) easily the definitive Carpenter review

John Carpenter crosses the vampire genre with the western-according-to-Peckinpah, adds some digital camera moves and hi-tech mutilation effects, and voilà!, a gorefest of epic proportions. More bodies are decapitated, crunched, pierced, gutted, and incinerated than in any movie in memory. Is it scary? Not at all. Is it funny? Occasionally, as when James Woods (playing a vampire slayer trained by the Church and assigned to clean up New Mexico) interrupts his labors to offer such cogent observations as "A master vampire able to walk in the sun! Unstoppable unless we stop him."

Vampires is so over-the-top that Woods's performance seems restrained--except when he's throwing Sheryl Lee across the room or bashing her head against the furniture. Lee plays a prostitute who's bitten by a master vampire. Since Carpenter is nothing if not literal-minded, the vampire attends to Lee's neck for only a second or two before sinking his fangs into her cunt. Poor Sheryl. Having begun her career as a corpse for David Lynch, she's now undead for John Carpenter. She's so mistreated in this film (when she's not being bitten or punched, she's naked and tied to the bedposts) that it's positively uplifting when she becomes a full-fledged vampire. Her first victim is Woods's partner, who's played by Daniel Baldwin. (No, she does not bite his dick.) Baldwin's character feels pretty conflicted about becoming a vampire. But not Lee's. When she struts down the highway, blood dripping from her fangs onto her cleavage, you know she's having the time of her life even though she's undead. And she's earned it. You go, girl!

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

"We kill vampires," says Montoya (Billy Baldwin) to questioning hooker Katrina (Sheryl Lee), and that pretty much sums up this new movie from genre mainstay John Carpenter (Halloween, the remake of The Thing). In the sun-baked New Mexico desert, lifelong vampire hunter Jack Crow (James Woods) and his dwindling band of bad asses pursue Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), a sort of supersucker ("master," in the well-thought-out vernacular adapted from John Steakley's novel) who is on the verge of figuring out how to do his business in the daytime. True to form, Vampires -- we'll shorten Carpenter's traditional, unwieldy possessory title -- highlights the best and worst of the director's uneven career: absorbing, gore-filled action set pieces (not for the squeamish) on annoyingly cheesy sets are sprinkled throughout a wildly implausible and often howlingly stupid story in which the three human leads often seem completely lost. Although Vampires is Carpenter's most accomplished movie in quite some time (at least since 1988's They Live), it once again exhibits a nearly fatal distraction, as if the natural flow of human interaction that is the connective tissue of any halfway decent movie is either too trivial to be bothered with or is maybe beyond his abilities altogether at this point. Worth seeing for the zesty action (even now, nobody does cross-cutting, tracking shots and intuitive coverage quite like John Carpenter), Vampires is yet another frustrating chapter in a career that has promised a great deal more than it has delivered. Also available day-and-date with the VHS tape is a DVD edition, featuring audio commentary from Carpenter and the obligatory theatrical trailers. And of further interest to the director's long-suffering fans, his first feature, the spoofy, low-budget Dark Star (which was made in collaboration with Dan O'Bannon, who went on to write the original Alien), will be coming to DVD on February 23.

Albuquerque Alibi [Devin D. O'Leary]

It's refreshing to see a film about vampires that's actually about vampires. Not vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS, not vampirism as a metaphor for drug addiction, not vampirism as a metaphor for persecuted minority groups, or as a metaphor for anything else -- just blood-suckin', sun-hatin', butt-kickin' vampires. JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES is the kind of slick horror package that's increasingly hard to find: raucous, sanguine and almost utterly devoid of sociological sub-text.

Based on John Steakley's novel _Vampire$_, it incorporates that oh-so-90s-vogue vocation of vampire hunting into the context of an old spaghetti Western. Jack Crow (James Woods) is one of many vampire hunters on a Vatican-funded mission to eradicate the plague of the undead. One night his team is obliterated by Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), the oldest vampire ever to walk the earth. Crow and his one surviving associate Montoya (Daniel Baldwin), accompanied by newly-recruited young priest Father Guiteau (Tim Guinee), have to find Valek and kill him before he can locate a mysterious relic which might give him the power to walk in the daylight. Add plenty of flying body parts, stark Western vistas and Carpenter's own twangy Tex-Mex score, and you have a simple, economical horror yarn.

It all makes for fine gruesome entertainment, but it should have been better. John Carpenter has always been able to incorporate wry, weird humor into his films -- remember the crawling head in THE THING, or practically all of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, for that matter? -- and he manages again to pull of a few nice bits of black comedy. Woods, playing Crow with snarling relish and a serious bad attitude, gets most of the choice lines, all of which are either unprintable or incredibly offensive or both. Carpenter's sense of the horrific usually involves a kind of self-aware outrageousness, turning his displays of blood-spraying special effects into absurdist cinematic goofs too purely escapist to get worked up over.

Unfortunately, VAMPIRES keeps upsetting its delicate balance of humor and horror by taking frequent detours into mean-spiritedness. It's one thing to play with notions of political incorrectness; it's quite another to get off on it. The only human female characters in VAMPIRES are hookers who hang around just long enough to get naked and get turned into lunchmeat; when Woods really wants to insult someone, a bit of gay-baiting always fits the bill. Even if you grant Carpenter and screenwriter Don Jakoby the slack they seem to be searching for -- it's okay that a woman is stripped and smacked around because she's a vampire-in-waiting, and it's okay that a Catholic priest participates in a human sacrifice because another priest is a stand-up guy -- the tone simply gets nastier than it needs to be. Everyone is too unpleasant too often.

The thing about VAMPIRES is that when Carpenter rolls up his sleeves and dives into genre action, it's a lot of fun. In fact, if he had rolled with the tone of the first 25 minutes, he might have had a minor classic on his hands. The opening assault on a New Mexico vampire "nest" is wild, silly and superbly paced; Valek's first attack is a creepy and crafty splatter-fest. From there, VAMPIRES gets progressively more angry and ominous, before it finally rights itself for the climactic confrontation between Crow and Valek. There's not enough interest in characterization here to make the casual brutality of Crow and Montoya somehow psychologically appropriate. Psychology's got virtually nothing to do with JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES, a slice of Halloween mayhem that works wonderfully when it lets the good times roll. For a vampire movie without a "message," it offers some mixed messages it could do without.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Vampires (1997) Kim Newman from Sight and Sound, December 1999

Nitrate Online Sean Axmaker

** The Shrubbery Review -- John Carpenter's Vampires ** Justin Felix

Classic-Horror Dana Gravesen

Cold Fusion Video Reviews (Nathan Shumate)

Images (Crissa-Jean Chappell)

Salon (Laura Miller)

CNN Showbiz (Paul Tatara)

DVD Talk (David Blair) obviously understanding Carpenter better than CNN’s unintentionally amusing piece

Horror Express (Finn Clark)

Sci-Fi Weekly Tamara I. Hladik

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell)

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Movie Reviews UK Michael S. Goldberger

HorrorWatch Jareprime

The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]

DVD Verdict Rob Lineberger

DVD Verdict - John Carpenter's Vampires: Superbit Edition Patrick Naugle

Stomp Tokyo review

Film Journal International (Maitland McDonagh)

Popcorn Pictures Review

Soundtrack.net soundtrack review

SoundtrackNet article, "Having a Bite with John Carpenter": October 14, 1998 Interview by Dan Goldwasser

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

The New York Times (Peter M. Nichols)

DVDBeaver.com [Vincent Bouche]

GHOSTS OF MARS C+ 77

USA (98 mi) 2001 ‘Scope

A cheesy, outer space riff on a variation of Carpenter flicks, which plays out like a zombie movie using the cheap production design of the early Star Trek TV series (1966–69), but most closely uses pieces of THE FOG (1980) intermingling with ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976). Set nearly 200 years in the future on the planet Mars, we see little evidence of scientific advancement or modernism. Instead, it’s a world set in primitivism, where Carpenter gets by with a minimum of set design, which consists of a single room used for a governmental investigation hearing, a train, and a series of enclosed prison compounds, each indistinguishable from the next, set in a red bleached, prairie-like emptiness where all signs of life appear absent. Red dust is prevalent, as is a heavy metal sound design from Carpenter that suggests danger looms in every direction. Natasha Henstridge plays Lieutenant Ballard, an action hero, a serious-minded cop sent into a mining region to pick up a prisoner known as Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) and transport him back into the city. Pam Grier plays her Commander, along with the heavily fortified Sergeant Butler, Jason Stratham, and rookie Clea DuVall. Once they arrive at the compound, all armed to the teeth with machine guns, surely the weapon of choice in the future, they are met by an eerie silence with no sign of life. As they explore further, what they discover is harrowing, as bodies are discovered hung upside down, limbs decapitated, with primitive weapons melded together by barbed wire, like some sort of torture device that may suddenly spring into action. An ominous cloud of dread hangs over every step.

Carpenter’s method of advancing the narrative is using two stories-within-the-story. First, Ballard is questioned by the committee hearing and recounts for them what she saw, which is seen in flashback, while they also meet a science officer Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy) whose recollection of what happened are also viewed in yet another flashback. Perhaps most pertinent is the slightly out of focus viewpoint of some alien creature, seen through the lens of the camera, a vapor like substance that invades human bodies through the ear, taking them over, making them go insanely violent, as if possessed by a zombie. Once the body dies, the creature inhabits another physical body nearby, the same method used in another heavy metal alien-inhabiting classic, THE HIDDEN (1987), starring Kyle MacLachlan, the movie he made immediately following BLUE VELVET (1986). Only in that movie, the alien was a slithering creature that entered through the ears, immediately taking possession of the human, who instantly reveals an undying passion for hard-driving, heavy metal music, as opposed to a smoke-like vapor that turns the human into an aggressive, flesh-decapitating monster that continually screams at the top of its lungs.

While the alien force is an exact replica of THE FOG, especially when it is initially unleashed, like the opening of Pandora’s Box, but in order to fight its effects, the small police contingency must align themselves with the prisoner and his pals, arming them in an uneasy alliance, which is the premise of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. Eventually this turns into a full-fledged, hand-to-hand combat movie with zombie-like creatures who love to carry and fling sharp metal objects capable of chopping your limbs off against a police force with a combination of machine guns and side arms, while also carrying hand made grenades. It’s easy to describe the mayhem that follows as all Hell breaks loose. While it is a space western, an unusual genre, it seems like a potpourri of familiar themes that were better explored in the original source version, feeling more like retreaded material here. Nonetheless, there’s some humorous dialogue and an interesting bit of character development, not to mention tense and suspenseful moments, but the overall tone is that of a low grade B-movie that was designed for midnight feature audiences.

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "hilariously hardboiled" (6/10)

Mars, 2176. Shapely cop Ballard (Henstridge) is quizzed by superiors after returning to base, apparently the sole survivor of a mission to retrieve dangerous criminal 'Desolation' Williams (Ice Cube) from a distant mining outpost. Flashbacks reveal Ballard's team arriving at the camp to discover a scene of slaughter, the colonists having been taken over by a mysterious ancient force and turned into cannibal zombie psychopaths. The movie is itself possessed by powerful older spirits: the spectres of Carpenter's back catalogue. Buffs will have a field day ticking off the self-homages, starting with the period setting - exactly 200 years after his breakthrough Assault on Precinct 13. It's easy to knock the hole-ridden plot, the Blake's 7 effects, and the dated racket that is Carpenter's own synth-metal score. But to take it seriously would be to miss the point: the crazily complicated flashback structure and hilarious hardboiled dialogue are all the more amusing for being played dead-on straight.

Carpenter fans should make the most of Ghosts of Mars which stiffed so badly at the US box office it might actually end his once-glorious feature-film career. But while he may not have released anything really exceptional since 1989's terrific Prince of Darkness, neither has Carpenter made a dull movie - even if Vampires admittedly came pretty close. Ghosts may be a ramshackle throwback of a sci-fi western, but if you're in the mood for an entertaining, undemanding slice of undemanding B-movie nonsense, look no further.

Mars, 2176. Shapely cop Ballard (Henstridge) is quizzed by her superiors after she returns to base, apparently the sole survivor of a mission to retrieve dangerous criminal 'Desolation' Williams (Cube) from a distant mining outpost. A series of flashbacks shows Ballard's team arriving at the camp to discover a scene of slaughter, the colonists having been taken over by a mysterious ancient force and turned into cannibal-zombie psychopaths…

The movie is itself possessed by some powerful older spirits - the spectres of Carpenter's own back catalogue. Buffs will have a field day ticking off the self-homages, starting with the film's setting, exactly 200 years after Carpenter's 1976 breakthrough Assault on Precinct 13 which also featured besieged cops, faceless villains, and a bad-ass who finally turns hero. It's easy to knock the hole-ridden plot, the Blakes' 7 FX, and the dated racket that is Carpenter's own synth-metal score. But to take things at all seriously would be to miss the point: the crazily complicated flashback structure and hilarious hardboiled dialogue are all the more amusing for being played so dead-on straight. Movie of the year for teenage Marilyn Manson devotees, a guilty pleasure for the rest of us.

User reviews from imdb Author: TheFerryman

John Carpenter, together with Brian De Palma, are the only active directors who had created a body of work consisting of the representation of a particular, personal world, forged by the mixture of a number of themes and subjects, reinserted on tracks left by classic directors (Hawks and Hitchcock respectively). They make one single movie over and over again, reaching outstanding levels of accomplishment in style and coherence.

Thus `Ghost of Mars' is full of Carpenter's imaginary. The plot, the characters, the tone, everything can be linked to his previous work, most notably `Assault on Precint 13', that was yet a reworking of Hawks' `Rio Bravo'. And that's a significant point regarding this film: despite the zombies, the gore, the futuristic set-up, the red Martian atmosphere, the heavy metal score, `Ghost of Mars' is essentially a western in the most classic way. There is a train, a lawman (played by an actress), a group of deputies, a gang of bandits, a frontier town surrounded by the desert.

As in Hawks, the individuals work as a group, defined by codes of professional skill in a strictly masculine environment. Interestingly, Capenter portrays the Martian society as a matriarchy, but the elements operate the same way: the good guy and the bad guy differentiate from each other just for the fact that they are in opposite sides of the law, but are nevertheless exchangeable. Also, following Hawks' epic, the vulnerability of the hero is determined by a fault or weakness (Melanie's addiction to drugs is a progression of Dean Martin's alcoholism in Rio Bravo).

Told in a peculiar series of flashbacks from different points of view, and as in `Vampires', with the use of long, continual dissolves, the story introduces some original points, like the ghosts taking possession of human through the ears and Desolation's smart device to save Melanie with the aid of drugs. There are some plot holes, yes, some bad acting and gratuitous -though stylized- violence. But it's Carpenter unpretentious as ever, telling us how dark our future appears, not from a pulpit but from his director's chair. And I'm very grateful for his effort.

Wade Major from Boxoffice magazine (link lost):

Unlike many who make effect-laden science fiction films purely for the money or the glory, John Carpenter really, honestly, genuinely loves these kinds of movies. And if there were any doubt about that previously, his commentary -- with Natasha Henstridge -- on "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars" puts an end to it.

Just judge from the commentary alone, Carpenter and Henstridge had a blast of a time making the film, a throwback to old '50s B movies with its tale of awakened Martian spirits seizing the bodies of colonizing humans and wreaking havoc. It's also something of a variation on "Aliens" that works surprisingly well considering how well-worn the scenario is, but Carpenter's obvious enthusiasm carries the day. He's a wonderful commentator, bearing the demeanor of a talk show host that makes any lack of commentaries on such previous DVD releases as "Starman."

The disc, which is loaded with solid extras, is bears first-rate production values marred only by some excess chalkiness in some of the darker scenes (which constitute most of the movie). The featurette material, however, is refreshingly unedited -- two in particular presenting rough, raw footage of the film's making and scoring without the interference of commentary or post-production tinkering. Carpenter's video diary of the movie is the best of these -- some 16 minutes of raw video footage from the shoot at a gypsum mine in the desert. Without the usual featurette interference, one gets a chance to see precisely how the movie was made, complete with the disruption of a sand storm. The scoring session is similarly engaging, as Carpenter's own music is performed by bands Buckethead and Anthrax. This piece is shorter -- only about six minutes -- but gives an equally insightful glimpse into the tedious process of recording a rock film score like this one. Finally, with that same music as a background, a deconstruction montage of the movie's effects shows the elaborate process by which live action model work, CGI and other effects were integrated to create the illusion of a futuristic Martian colony.

Like most Carpenter films, "Ghosts of Mars" is not for everyone -- but fans of this type of material already predisposed to like the movie will not be disappointed by the DVD.

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Almost exactly a year ago I reviewed Godzilla 2000, a vintage man-in-a-rubber-suit Japanese monster movie that opened in multiplexes across the country. After a summer of bland, inflated, half-witted "blockbusters," it was just the ticket. A real, honest-to-goodness B-movie.

Now John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars comes along, again at just the right time of year. It has the courage to be a potent little B-movie in an era when most movies take B plots and inflate and dilute them to such an extent that the flavor disappears. Ghosts of Mars provides a full-fledged blast of undiluted B-movie zest.

Ghosts of Mars concerns a group of human colonists on Mars, which has been 85% transformed into an earth-like atmosphere and is run mostly by women. A team of cops consisting of Pam Grier, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham, and Clea Duvall travels to an outpost to pick up and transport a dangerous prisoner named "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube). When they arrive, they find most of the population dead and headless, hanging upside down.

It turns out an alien species of spore has taken over the bodies of many of the colonists and turned them into (get this) pierced, goth, Road Warrior-like soldiers with painted faces and long hair. Unfortunately, when the good guys kill these goons, they set the alien spores loose, free to take over a new human host. So cops and bad guys must set their differences aside and team up to battle the greater evil.

Carpenter douses his story in grimness; many of the characters openly use drugs, including the main character played by Henstridge. The picture of life on Mars is anything but utopian; we're informed that characters gamble, hire prostitutes, and get high. On the plus side though, the film's heroes are all women and African Americans. (The white males are treated as ignorant scum.) It's a fascinating mix.

The plot borrows heavily from Carpenter's second film, the outstanding Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which itself was a remake of Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. Carpenter often falls back on Hawksian themes like camaraderie between men and women, and different layers of good and evil. Just the fact that he's aware of Howard Hawks and is able to pay tribute to him makes him a highly unusual filmmaker in today's world.

More than that, Carpenter is acutely aware of his position as a B-movie maker and has always proudly stuck to it, come what may. Other "genre" filmmakers have awkwardly tried to squirm out from under their pigeonholes with more mainstream fare, like Wes Craven and Music of the Heart, David Cronenberg and M. Butterfly and Sam Raimi and For Love of the Game, with less-than-favorable results.

But Carpenter proudly stands his ground, even in the face of a new-fangled industry that doesn't really know what to do with him. Indeed, Carpenter belongs to a lost era of filmmakers like Edgar G. Ulmer, Val Lewton, Budd Boetticher, Sam Fuller, and Andre de Toth; filmmakers whose job it was to fill that 65-minute space before the main feature and did so extraordinarily well.

I wish I could say Ghosts of Mars stacks up with Carpetner's best work, but it lacks in a few key areas. Firstly, neither Henstridge nor Cube (who has been extraordinary elsewhere) seems able to suggest the humanity or humor that Kurt Russell, Jeff Bridges, or James Woods brought to earlier Carpenter efforts like Escape from New York, Starman, or Vampires. Secondly, it features an improbable plot twist near the end. After several of the principals finally escape the deadly compound, they decide to go back and risk their lives to blow the place up. Perhaps it's a suggestion of an appropriately Bush-era style ending?

Nevertheless, images of Pam Grier striding around the surface of Mars with a ground-length leather coat, Cube blasting aliens with a semi-automatic in each hand, and Henstridge kung fu-ing baddies will stick with me. And someday -- hopefully sooner than later -- when Carpenter gets his career retrospective at the Castro, I'll be in line to see this one again.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, June 1, 2009

John Carpenter Week is Here! John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, October 4, 2010

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Senses of Cinema (Gabe Klinger)

DVD Times Mark Davis

AboutFilm [Carlo Cavagna]

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

Nitrate Online (Joe Barlow)

Reel.com [Mary Kalin-Casey]

Movie Magazine International [Moira Sullivan]

Classic-Horror.com Kairo

Flipside Movie Emporium Rob Vaux

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.)

Fangoria Michael Gingold

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

The Mag review (*) of "Ghosts of Mars" [Dan Lybarger]

ToxicUniverse.com (David Abrams)

filmcritic.com (Joshua Tyler)

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Scott Von Doviak

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

CineScene.com (Ed Owens)

MovieWeb (B. Alan Orange)

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

The 7th Level also reviewing DARK STAR, ASSAULT IN PRECINCT 13, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, and VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

Soundtrack.net soundtrack review

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell)

Carruth, Shane

PRIMER B 86

USA (80 mi) 2004

Not so much a sci-fi time traveling movie, but much more of a really geek experience, having to listen to a couple of egg-heads go on and on endlessly about molecular engineering details, dovetailing themselves into a world inside their garage, where they amazingly construct a time machine, but where they are also carefully tucked away from the world of their own families, who are probably barely 10 to 15 feet away most of the time, separated only by a wall, but they may as well be on another planet. Initially, these two engineering friends spend “all” their time together. No one seems to ask any questions. They just accept a couple of guys spending 24 hours a day together for long stretches of time, usually offering feeble excuses as to their whereabouts.

At any rate, the story is a lot of talk between these two friends in carefully constricted quarters. You get the feeling life has been literally squeezed out of these guys, like they’ve spent all their life living in cubicles. Then we see one of them ask the other to take off work and come meet him, as he wants to show him something. Through long-range binoculars, they stare out at a storage facility where, a sight for sore eyes, one of them already exists and can be seen walking down the street. Bam! The story moves into different time dimensions, where they are able to travel back an immeasurable number of times, and they do make repeated attempts, feeble attempts at first, but by trial and error, they attempt to change, and ultimately exploit the outcome of their lives. We are never able to see multiple dimensions occurring simultaneously, but we understand there are multiple versions of the same person appearing over and over again, and we never know which one is real, and which is the double or the triple, etc.

Eventually, these friends who couldn’t be separated begin to grow suspicious and have little use for one another, and we wonder which mutated version of them we are really looking at. The film asks what they might do if they could have anything they want, as they seem to be able to change the course of events, but they also leave the refuse of their mistakes lying around in multiple dimensions and it’s hard to comprehend that they can really clean up their act. Rather, it seems like they have created one giant toxic hazard zone, filled with the consequences of human error, including all the deadly sins. I understand that for financial reasons, the director, who is a Dallas mathematician-engineer by trade, shot only 82 minutes of film, and used 80 minutes of it, and like Caouette in TARNATION, wrote the screenplay, shot and edited the film, wrote some of the music and also plays one of the leads. That’s pretty close to wasting nothing. Interestingly, this film has nearly no credits at all. Shot for about $7,000, this always felt like a small-time project, as none of the characters actually mean anything to us, and it’s lacking the visual language to really make this “look” interesting. Without any special effects, the film instead relies on succinct writing and audaciously ambiguous, near subliminal editing, especially by the end, relying on the audience’s own imaginations to provide the heavy lifting, and while it gets off to such a slow start, many will overlook the near nauseating initial dialogue for the brilliance in how it all comes together by the end with a near wordless display of picture perfect film editing.

1. PRIMER Amy Taubin from Film Comment (excerpt)

Primer was the most exciting first feature by a U.S. director at the festival since Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko in 2001. Like Kelly's film, Primer is a muted sci-fi time-warp narrative with allegorical underpinnings, but the similarity pretty much ends there. Where Kelly's high-school hero sacrificed himself to save his loved ones from being destroyed by a demonic rabbit, who was also his evil twin (other interpretations welcomed), the protagonists of Primer are bored 30-year-old engineers trying to invent some get-rich gizmo in a garage. In the process, they stumble onto a device that's too valuable to market and that will allow them to have pretty much anything they want. Since the device is a crude form of a time machine, and since film itself is a kind of time machine, one can read Primer as a film that mirrors its own DIY production. Carruth spent three years teaching himself screenwriting and filmmaking from scratch. He wrote, directed, edited, and scored Primer and also played one of the lead roles. The film was shot in Super 16mm for $7,000 (excluding postproduction and the 35mm blow-up). The look is mysterious and elegant, with frames inside frames and overexposed, blown-out areas. Carruth makes Southwest suburbia look mundane but a touch radioactive. Heady is the word for the film, which doesn't yield its narrative in a single viewing. But even more compelling than the time-warped storyline is the way, visually, every shot has the surprise and intensity of a new idea. The film feels like a succession of brainstorms, held together by a nearly subliminal overlay of sound effects and music. Carruth, his co-star David Sullivan, and rest of the inexperienced cast handle the professional jargon as deftly as the veterans on ER. But despite echoes of La Jetée, The Killing, and various prime-time medical/crime shows, the aptly titled Primer is not a pastiche. Rather, it is evidence of a unique and unified vision.

Carruth is 31 years old and lives in Dallas, where he shot Primer. He has a degree in mathematics and worked briefly at three engineering companies before he decided to be a filmmaker. He is soft-spoken and has an understated, even ingenuous, manner. On-screen, he looks a bit like Noah Wylie on ER. Off-screen, you'd have trouble picking him out in a crowd.

This Q & A is excerpted from a February 2004 phone interview: http://filmlinc.com/fcm/artandindustry/primer.htm

(Note: The website for Primer is www.primermovie.com. It has a trailer, some beautiful still frames from the film and production stills taken by Carruth's brother, musician Caleb Carruth.)

Nov 2004 Mike D’Angelo from Esquire

Science-fiction movies set in the present day have a kind of stubborn purity about them. At its core, sci-fi traffics in ideas, implications, ramifications; place these in the context of an imaginary future, with its myriad technological advances, and the average filmmaker—or sometimes even a giant like Spielberg (see Minority Report)—can easily develop gizmo fever, spending more time huddled with the production designer than with the screenwriter. For all its dystopian visual splendor and bullet-time pyrotechnics, The Matrix remains memorable, five years and two crappy sequels later, because of the simple yet complexly unnerving concept of an ordinary dude discovering that everything he's ever known is a pacifying illusion. In fact, that's precisely why Reloaded and Revolutions disappointed and totally blew, respectively: With the action set primarily in the "real world" approaching 2199 and Neo transformed from baffled hacker to omnipotent superhero, the all-important Whoa factor was sadly diminished.

If it's a quick, potent, mind-bending shot of Whoa you seek—and I'm talking about pure Whoa here, the good stuff, undiluted by extraneous gadgets or CGI cityscapes—I give you Primer.

Written and directed by self-taught tyro Shane Carruth, who also served as editor and composer and plays one of the two lead roles, Primer came out of nowhere to win the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival. If you're at all familiar with the movies that generally win prizes at Sundance, you may well have resolved to give Primer a wide berth. Reconsider. This is no angst-ridden marital melodrama or self-congratulatory paean to harmless eccentricity. Despite having been produced on a microbudget of $7,000—about a quarter of what it costs to attend NYU's film school for a year—Primer is the headiest, most original science-fiction movie since Kubrick made 2001, as visually dazzling as it is narratively confounding. I've now seen it three times, yet I'm still struggling to wrap my brain around its labyrinthine permutations, many of which seem all the more unnerving for remaining just the other side of complete comprehensibility. Less a downward spiral than a steadily increasing feedback loop, the film suggests with merciless irrationality that the only thing you have to fear is you yourself.

Appropriately, the opening scenes take place in a suburban garage, calling to mind the legendary low-tech creation of Apple by the Steves, Jobs and Wozniak. Four similarly obsessive wonks, frustrated by the soul-deadening grunt work they perform by day, gather in this makeshift workshop on nights and weekends in the hope of creating something, anything, that might attract venture capital and lead to instant wealth. Two of them, Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), conspire to ignore the proposal set forth by one of their colleagues, secretly devoting their time and energy to another project. Before long, they're putting in grueling 36-hour days, 12 hours of which theoretically must be spent hiding in a hotel room outside of town, lest they experience the social faux pas of bumping into themselves.

(A little disoriented by the abrupt, matter-of-fact infusion of weirdness in that last sentence? Just trying to acclimate you. The technique is Carruth's stock-in-trade.)

One of the things that makes Primer at once exciting and baffling is that Carruth, who until recently worked as a software engineer, resolutely refuses to dumb things down for an audience of laymen; his dialogue is as rich and poetic in its overlapping nerdspeak jargon as, say, Whit Stillman's is in its carefully articulated snobspeak argot. Unless you have extensive technical knowledge, the characters might as well be speaking Swahili half the time. Don't let it bother you. The details are unimportant, except insofar as they provide a grounding sense of verisimilitude. What matters is the palpable feeling of bewilderment, delirium, and anxiety our heroes evince as they gradually realize that the machine in Aaron's garage permits a rudimentary form of reverse time travel, and then quickly grasp that knowledge of what happens today allows them to make a killing in the stock market yesterday, and then very slowly come to suspect that getting rich quick isn't necessarily what's most important to them—depending upon which version of "them" you're talking about, there frequently being more than one in existence at any given time. When Aaron starts sneaking into Aaron's house in the middle of the night to inject some kind of knockout drug into the container of milk that he knows he, Aaron, will pour on his cereal in the morning, Aaron's worst suspicions are confirmed. Or are they affirmed? Depends on who you mean by Aaron. Either way, it's creepy as hell.

Thematically, Primer's basic scenario fits snugly within the familiar sci-fi rubric of There Are Some Things Mankind Ought Not to Monkey With, Yo. More specifically, and more resonantly, the film warns that utility divorced from understanding inevitably leads to chaos. When Aaron and Abe, having returned to the previous day, work out which trade will be the most profitable, Aaron asks if they know what goods or services the company in question produces—to which Abe replies, sensibly yet worrisomely, that it makes no earthly difference, so long as the price goes up. Any similarity to the mind-set of actual Wall Street brokers or the chairman of the Federal Reserve or our commander in chief is surely coincidental.

Carruth reinforces this ruthless pragmatism with an oblique, fragmentary editing style, frequently cutting from one brief snippet to another without providing any context or indicating how much time has passed. Frankly, anybody who claims he fully understands what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar. Trying to get a fix on the film is like following the path of one blade on a high-speed ceiling fan; give it a shot if you like, but don't be surprised if you wind up very dizzy.

That's hardly a problem, though, since the experience of watching Primer is so intensely pleasurable that you'll want to see it several times, not so much to figure it out (that's a fringe benefit) as to revel in its striking compositions and wry sense of humor. The dialogue is replete with tossed-off one-liners, the best of them predicated on contradictory tenses: "Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." And though Carruth had never made so much as a short before, and relied entirely upon book learnin', he exhibits an astonishingly intuitive grasp of cinematic syntax; there's not an unstriking shot in the entire movie. Time and again, he finds just the right angle or vantage point, unexpected without being showy or distracting. Seven grand didn't allow for special effects—the time machines are strictly functional, suggesting what you might get if Ikea were to develop a line of designer refrigerator boxes for the homeless—but the film's offbeat amalgam of the mundane and the surreal is strangely, vividly beautiful. (Carruth shot on film, not video, God bless him.) When Primer is released on DVD, I intend to buy two copies—one for my library, and another to shove, rebukelike, into the face of any indie filmmaker who hereafter dares to cite his or her minuscule budget as justification for a movie that looks as if it were photographed through Jack Black's lint filter.

Ultimately, though, what continues to haunt me is the absurdist existential crisis of two young men attempting to reconcile an inexplicable event—I'll leave that particular plot twist unspoiled, I think—with the knowledge that one of them must be responsible for it, even though neither one can think of any reason why "he" would have done what logic dictates "he" did. The implication is that we have no real awareness, much less an understanding of our own desires and impulses. As far as I'm aware, there is no greater Whoa.

article on Shane Carruth Dan Sallitt

Primer Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled

At Last, A Definitive Timeline for Primer | - Unreality Paul Tassi from Unreality

UPSTREAM COLOR C+ 78

USA (96 mi) 2013 ‘Scope

Despite all the hoopla about this film, and more particularly the filmmaker, this is not a marked improvement over his earlier film PRIMER (2004), one of the low budget marvels of the last decade. Waiting 9-years to make his eagerly awaited second film, there is a cult audience clamoring for something implicitly deep and complex from this film, perhaps another sci-fi puzzle film, but they won’t find it. Instead it’s simply an obscure, largely experimental piece that attempts to be more than it is, as whatever narrative there is remains obfuscated by a sketchy design that remains elusive at best. The problem is whatever themes or subject matter he is attempting to explore just never rise to the level of interest, as characters nearly sleepwalk through their roles, never generating any relevant dramatic connection. Before he was a film director, Carruth was a math major, becoming a computer programmer developing flight simulating software. As his two films suggest, guys heavily into science don’t always make the best communicators. In fact, one might think there is a pervading style of filmmaking where at least part of what it’s about is the difficulty in communicating, for instance teen angst films, or Heath Ledger in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005), where he takes the hesitant and inarcticulate nature of a young cowboy to an artform, or the many variations of supposedly naturalistic dialogue from low-budget Duplass brothers or Andrew Bujalski mumblecore movies, a fringe movement about post-college or early adult white people with problems that never really connected with mainstream audiences, as they’re not really about much of anything. Damned if that doesn’t plague this picture as well, where its intentional ambiguity remains a puzzle not worth exploring. Even if there is a coherent story here, the question is what difference does it make? How does a film like this have any relevance in our lives? Wanting this to be about something, like say the enveloping fear and paranoia of THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974), is not the same as making a profoundly affecting film, where the underlying focus sticks with you for days and weeks afterwards, perhaps even a lifetime. Interest in this film fades quickly.

As best as one can determine, there are two opposing wavelengths occurring here, where one is a high degree of sensitivity and thought, where you’re able to sense things others don’t see or hear, almost like an autistic sensory level, where one’s capacity to reflect upon altered states of existence, or a unique “otherness,” may be completely mystifying to some, but certainly early on we see many gathered together, including at various times both Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (Shane Carruth) drinking what is believed to be a special (parasite infected) purified water, something to help achieve a state of wellness, where one hopes to feel better than at any other point in one’s life. The downside is the sacrifice or price paid to achieve this sense of heightened elevation, real or imagined, where you have no memory of what happened and leave yourself open to unscrupulous operators, achieving a near hypnotic state like a cult brainwashing effect where people can take advantage of your vulnerability and steal all your money, leaving you paranoid and in fear, but also angry and demoralized by the entire process afterwards. But at least initially you want to believe, like the strange Russian sci-fi film Target (Mishen) (2011) that promises everlasting youth, only to ask yourself later, but at what price? Unknown to each other at the outset, Kris and Jeff are mysteriously drawn to one another, perhaps unknowing why, though Kris is so incommunicative and unapproachable that one has to wonder what’s the attraction? She wears an enormous large-sized headset at all times in public, listening to who knows what, but obviously to keep other people away. Nonetheless Jeff persists, as if by supernatural calling, where he believes they are drawn to one another, perhaps to help one another understand what they’ve mutually forgotten, helping each other piece together missing memories, even though they barely talk. This leads to an intimate relationship, as if by osmosis, where it’s certainly not their unbelievably poor communication skills, where they talk over each other’s words and ignore one another with regularity. What changes is Kris gets pregnant, or at least thinks she does, as her conscious existence is seemingly tracked by the parasite she swallowed, which ends up at a pig farm. It’s actually Kris’s pig that gets pregnant, unbeknownst to her, where Kris grows irate when they take the little piglets away.

There is no explanation for this transference of human consciousness, which goes through yet a third life cycle when the pig farmer wraps several chosen pigs in a sack and drowns them in the river, where the parasite passes through their bodies in a bluish fluid that is released upstream causing exotic orchids to grow. From these orchids is extracted the original parasite that begins this strange life cycle all over again. What is certainly bizarre is the state of inexplicable anger mixed with utter indifference by the humans used as guinea pigs, where they do not seem to be in control of their own human faculties, still affected long after the parasites have left their own bodies. Now if aliens had passed through these bodies, like the high powered, heavy metal infused THE HIDDEN (1987), an over the top, sci-fi story that packs a punch, then you’ve got something to generate interest for decades to come. But in this dreamy saga of lost souls, roaming the earth in a state of listless apathy, where the true meaning of their lives is apparently stolen by a series of unscrupulous business transactions which happens to block the ethereal wavelengths. When Kris takes to swimming, spouting gibberish poolside as she dives for stones on the bottom of the pool, Jeff is able to decipher her apparent mad ramblings as quotations from Thoreau’s Walden, of all things, a springboard to freedom if ever there was such a thing. If it wasn’t so goofy, it might actually be entertaining, but it’s not, as the entire film is cast in such a darkly somber mood, as if the whole thing was the invention of rabid conspiracy theorists who see the end of the world near through genetic mutation. Damn the scientists and mega corporations for spreading toxic poisons throughout the world altering the face of humanity. The best thing in the film is easily the atmospheric score written by Carruth, who writes, directs, edits, acts, composes the music, and self produces his own film, an ambitious compilation of responsibilities for what is ultimately a dreadfully impersonal, drearily sad reflection of the human condition in the modern age, where swindlers and snake oil salesmen, aka the capitalist conglomerate enterprises maintain a greedy, monopolistic control over an easily hoodwinked populace looking for a quick and easy fix. The idea of violating the natural order of things is nothing new, hardly revelatory, and never digs deep enough to matter. Not sure what the characters are listening to on their giant headsets, apparently tuning out the rest of the world, and the audience with them.

Upstream Color | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

When Shane Carruth came out of nowhere—nowhere being the suburbs of Dallas, Texas—to win the 2004 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance with his exceptionally frugal brainteaser Primer, the story of its making got ahead of its significant accomplishment. And it was a great story: In the face of a still-nascent digital revolution, well before the technology caught up with the impulse to shoot on video, Carruth rejected the cheaper format and shot Primer on 16mm for $7,000, a near-impossible feat of planning and resourcefulness. Never mind that the time-traveling thriller, taken on its own merits, represented one of the few recent examples of serious, idea-driven science fiction to surface in a sea of pricey space adventures. This was El Mariachi redux, another Texan doing a lot with a little—and Carruth’s subsequent struggles to get another film off the ground seemed to resign him to outsider-artist anomaly.

Now that Carruth has returned nine years later with Upstream Color, an intensely beautiful and enigmatic puzzle picture, it’s clear that Primer wasn’t some bolt from the blue, but the embryonic beginnings of a major filmmaker. Working with a larger budget—though very little all the same—Carruth has the means to expand another dense, sophisticated conceit into quasi-experimental marvel, as visually arresting as Primer was limited by necessity. The two films share in common an absolute faith in audiences to follow their curlicues of logic—Carruth even ends scenes a few seconds before another director would, trusting viewers to get the idea—and an eerie, destabilizing mood, as reality itself gets radically reconfigured.

To describe the plot of Upstream Color is an exercise in comical futility, but here goes: Amy Seimetz stars as an effects artist who’s abducted and implanted with a bioengineered grub that holds her in a hypnotic trance. By the time she recovers—via some sort of pig-related resuscitation process engineered by Andrew Sensenig (see: comical futility)—Seimetz has no memory of what happened, but she’s mysteriously drawn to a young, disgraced trader (Carruth) who seems to have gone through a similar experience. The two share an intimate relationship, spiked by mutual fear and paranoia, and their memories and identities start to muddy and converge inexplicably. (Also: Something something orchids; something something Walden; something something triggering sound effects.)

As with Primer, it’s not important—or even possible—to grasp everything that happens in Upstream Color on first viewing, though in both cases, Carruth clearly has them both fully worked out. It’s a movie that calls on a more intuitive response from the audience—in that sense, it owes a debt to fellow Texan Terrence Malick—and it’s best just to feel the story as it unfolds, to recognize the depth of Seimetz and Carruth’s connection without needing to have it explained. Imagine an entire romantic subplot cut together with the elliptical cool of the hotel scene in Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight, and that’s reasonably close to how it plays out, minus the sci-fi contortions.

Given the lengths that Carruth went to shoot his debut feature on celluloid—the entire budget was burned through the camera, one take at a time—it’s a pleasing irony that Upstream Color is one of the greatest realizations of the digital dream, which was supposed to allow filmmakers to express a full, idiosyncratic vision from outside the system. To the extent that the film could be talked about as a collaboration, it’s Carruth the autodidact collaborating with himself as producer, writer, director, editor, cinematographer, composer, and distributor. It might be fair to argue that the resonances of Upstream Color are too obscure and internal—many viewers have and will be baffled by it—but it’s the type of art that inspires curiosity and obsession, like some beautiful object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.

Exclaim! [Robert Bell]

Nine years ago, Shane Carruth's ambitious, wilfully oblique Primer (an oblique, tersely constructed assertion of mathematics and time travel as a projection of individual identity) puzzled and intrigued audiences, opening itself to intense scrutiny and analytical interpretation. Various metaphorical and scientific assertions were projected onto the speculative text — something exacerbated by the ascetic, emotionally detached formalism of Carruth's direction — making it an abstract work of cult status, a film used by convergent thinkers to encapsulate their sense of self.

This is why his similarly elliptical, but stylistically antipodal follow-up, Upstream Color, has been met with such a polarized response: dismissed by those that perceive the abstract and confounding as a criticism of self, yet embraced by those intrigued by an expressionistic, lyrical approach to communicating the human experience.

It's a marked, even pointed departure from auteur conceits, concerning itself with the same metaphysical void of Primer while deliberately eschewing the muscular, cold assemblage in favour of a wildly colourful, experiential work of emotional purpose.

Its plot, fragmented into chapters of events that individually mean very little without the context of the bigger picture, follows a woman (Amy Seimetz) who is attacked and infected with a grub, or plant parasite, harvested for its ability to imprison a human within their body. Placing her in a trance-like state, it allows her assailant to exploit her as a puppet, depleting her bank account and giving up her valuable worldly possessions.

But this genre riff is of little importance; Upstream Color infuses these events with a melodic, (mostly) dialogue-free sense of musicality. A soft, pastel palette and abrupt editing style focus on the emotional projection of the sounds and aesthetics, mirroring her plight with the choreographed, instinctual connection of children using the same grub as an experimental drug, fusing their unconscious together in respective anticipation, catching each other's punches and moving together with a natural, anticipatory ease.

This leads the film into its second chapter, which sees this woman unemployed and struggling, finding an unlikely romantic partner in a man (Carruth) with a similar, albeit veiled background. The grubs, which have since been surgically removed by a God-like figure — a farmer with an ear to the ground for the unifying hums and noises of the natural and industrial world — and transplanted into pigs, represent the eerie unspoken connection that people feel when they experience the unexplainable nature of love.

This worldly connectivity and the organic, yet inexplicable nature of entanglements push everything towards its conclusion. Maternal wails emerge from the humans when their host piglet babies suffer, living their brief moments of life in a stream, which flows into, and feeds, other organisms infected by grubs.

In a way, Carruth is constructing a theology, suggesting a simultaneously fatalistic and chaotic nature to the experience of living. But what makes this more than a mere attempt to fashion a pedagogical work of ideological propaganda is that he isn't suggesting specificities in beliefs. Rather than forcing a belief in a God or remaining implicitly, rigidly within the vacuum of science, he taps into the spirit of emotional connection, using his filmmaking style as a tool to reiterate the suggestion of unspoken shared cognizance.

As such, Upstream Color is a work that is better felt and sensed than it is deconstructed and forced into an existing category of human beliefs. Every moment is riddled with intense meaning and purpose, but the intentions are grander than mere superficial analysis will allow.

David Edelstein on 'Upstream Color' - New York Magazine

The title of Shane Carruth’s entrancingly beautiful second feature, Upstream Color, comes from a bluish substance that swirls around drowned baby pigs that came from a sow into which a mind-controlling worm that had been implanted in and removed from an abducted woman by a pig farmer–sound designer was transplanted and carried downriver to wild orchids … I’ve lost control of this sentence. But. But. If you could diagram a thing in words, why make a movie about it? I’ve seen Upstream Color twice and liked it enormously while never being certain of anything. This is not precisely an “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation. The clothes are real—or at least surreal. It’s the emperor I’m not sure about. But some movies warrant a leap of faith.

Carruth’s debut, Primer (2004), divided viewers: Was it mystifyingly bad or mystifyingly good? I drifted back and forth before settling in the rushes on the Pro bank, less because I can chart the permutations of its time-travel narrative (an online community after nine years almost can) than because the movie seems a potent distillation of the perils (emotional, intellectual, existential) of second-guessing. According to a profile in Wired, by Brian Raftery, that is both lucid and respectful of its subject’s mystery, Carruth conceived of Primer after waking up in a hospital with a head injury following an auto accident. Perhaps the best critic of his long-gestating sophomore film would be Oliver Sacks.

Barely visible beneath the surface of Upstream Color are the vague outlines of a sci-fi feminist revenge picture. After a prologue in which two boys engage in a ritualistic worm-tea ceremony watched by a man identified in the credits as the Thief (Thiago Martins), the protagonist, Kris (Amy Seimetz), is glimpsed running a race. (There is one shot of her future mate—played by Carruth—running, too, but then he disappears for half an hour. I only caught that shot the second time through.) She works in some sort of special-effects company—significant? Our first sustained look at her is when the Thief drags her out of a restaurant and forces a worm down her throat that makes her instantly pliable. At her home, he gives instructions in a mechanical voice and she executes them earnestly, her mouth scrunched up with a childlike sense of purpose. While he sleeps, she piles up stones and copies by hand the first pages of Walden. Then she starts signing checks.

The syntax is clipped, allusive, sometimes reallyfuckingannoying. Carruth imparts information on a need-to-know basis and clearly thinks we need to know less than we think we do. His self-composed Eno-ambient score suggests that little in Upstream Color is meant to be time-and-space-specific. What happens to Kris might be a coded sexual violation, though I can’t figure out the Thoreau connection. When the Thief leaves, she tries to remove the worms under her skin with a butcher knife—and then wakes up en route to the pig farmer–sound designer, identified in the credits as the Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), who operates on her and a pig side by side. Later, he seems to be a spirit, looking on after a fight between a man and a pleading wife that isn’t referenced before or after. The Sampler does not interact with the Thief, though both engage in worm-related activity.

Upstream Color could also be taken as Carruth’s version of Moonrise Kingdom: a symbolic fairy tale of damaged souls who help each other work through primal injuries. Carruth’s Jeff is drawn to Kris—broke, fired from her job, desolate—on his morning train commute. She shows him all her meds. He opens his own dark closet. All of this is intercut with footage of pigs.

The official synopsis reads, “A man and woman are drawn together, unknowingly entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism.” I don’t know what that means either, but I loved looking at the actors’ faces. Seimetz is more fascinating the more you look, and Carruth is all soft eyes and hard cheekbones—his face is like his syntax.

Perhaps if too much info were added, you wouldn’t be as spellbound. It would be as if Stanley Kubrick had showed a bunch of aliens watching Keir Dullea eat his peas and saying, “I think these Earthlings might be ready for us now.” You probably wouldn’t watch 2001 for the eighth time with the same sense of wonder—and I wouldn’t be readying myself for a third go-round with Upstream Color.

Everything you were afraid to ask about “Upstream Color” - Salon.com Pigs! Mental breakdowns! Nematodes! "Walden"! We answer all your questions about 2013's strangest film, by Daniel D’Addario from Salon, April 12, 2013

Shane Carruth Designed Upstream Color, Now You ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek

Atlantic [Ian Buckwalter]

Slant Magazine [Calum Marsh]

Shane Carruth's Beguilingly Enigmatic 'Upstream Color' - Indiewire Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist

White City Cinema [Michael Smith]

The House Next Door [Zeba Blay]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Upstream Color Review: There Are Indeed Companions More - Pajiba Seth Freilich

Moviefreak.com [Sara Michelle Fetters]

ScreenDaily [Anthony Kaufman]

Upstream Color FAQ: Analysis and the meaning of Shane Carruth's ... Forrest Wickman from Slate, April 9, 2013

Review: Shane Carruth's 'Upstream Color' is a beautiful ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

IONCINEMA.com [Jordan M. Smith]

Film.com [William Goss]

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

Letterboxed [Mike D'Angelo]

Day Five at Sundance is all about the perplexing ... - The AV Club Sam Adams

Paste Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]

Twitch [Eric D. Snider]

Lost in Reviews [Sarah Ksiazek]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]

The London Film Review [Flossie Topping]

DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]

[Sundance Review] Upstream Color - The Film Stage Jordan Raup

Shock Cinema [Steven Puchalski]

Sound On Sight David Tran

EFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

Interview: Shane Carruth Joseph Jon Lampier interview from Slant, April 4, 2013

Shane Carruth on self-distributing Upstream Color and - The AV Club Sam Adams interview, April 5, 2013

Interview: Shane Carruth Reveals The Mysteries Of 'Upstream Color ... Jessica Kiang interview from indieWIRE, April 8, 2013

Steven Soderbergh & Shane Carruth Talk 'Upstream Color,' - Indiewire Rodrigo Perez interviews from indieWIRE, April 9, 2013

Shane Carruth, indie purist, on new movies and old regrets - latimes ... Steven Zeitchik interview from The LA Times, April 10, 2013

Review: Shane Carruth's 'Upstream Color' baffles and amazes Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

'Primer's' Shane Carruth in total control with 'Upstream Color' - Los ... Mark Olsen from The LA Times

Upstream Color - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times Simon Abrams

Upstream Color Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Jim Emerson

Upstream Color - Movies - The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Mumblecore: All Talk? | Film Comment | Film Society of Lincoln Center Amy Taubin

Mumblecore: 20 memorably inarticulate movie performances | Film ... Mumblecore: 20 memorably inarticulate movie performances, from The Onion A.V. Club

Carson, L.M. Kit and Lawrence Schiller

THE AMERICAN DREAMER D 58

USA (90 mi) 1971

Art as narcissism—as films go, it doesn’t get much worse than this, shown using the cheapest film stock possible, which has already started to fade, an endlessly monotonous portrait of an uninteresting subject, Dennis Hopper himself in a portrait of his own self-indulgence, shot during the editing process of his film THE LAST MOVIE (1971), where throughout the camera is basically pointed at the subject and the audience is subjected to all the drivel that comes out of his mouth, feeling very much like we walked into personal therapy sessions. The confessional quality of the film lacks any sense of coherent themes other than to subject Hopper to utter adulation. It’s like having to listen to the same song over and over again, where Hopper is on auto repeat, taking all the feeling out of the experience until all that’s left is monotony. That’s not to say it’s worthless, which is something else altogether, just a horrible film. While this only works as an art film, there is no actual artistic technique involved except a point and shoot camera approach, reminiscent of Warhol’s SLEEP (1963), 321 minutes, footage of John Giorno sleeping for five hours, and EMPIRE (1964), 485 minutes, a single shot of the Empire State Building from early evening until nearly 3 am the next day. With the camera constantly pointed in his face, with wall to wall music except when Hopper is speaking, Hopper is then supposed to act natural, where at times he’s a ham, more often, however, he takes himself seriously as he attempts to ponder his existence. Why would anyone be interested in what Dennis Hopper has to say, especially when the truth is he has nothing to say? What’s actually revealed, if anything, is just how insecure he is to believe placing himself in front of a camera would help him deal with his own insecurities. While that may work for him, offering a kind of self-analysis, what interest should that hold to anyone else?

Speaking personally, there were two, and only two things of interest during the entire 90 minutes. One was the opening song, “Easy Rider” heard here:

v/a the american dreamer.. chris sikelianos - easy rider ... - YouTube (4:42), where the filmed version cuts in and out of the song, seen here: [RIP 1936-2010]* Dennis Hopper - The American Dreamer (6:45), with Hopper subjecting us to his various thoughts. At least in this opening section, the loping camera looks out onto the Southwestern desert landscape as he’s approaching Taos, New Mexico. The laid back style of the song is a perfect introduction to the emptiness of the landscape, and ultimately, as it turns out, the existential void of the artist himself. This is also the only section of the film where Hopper narrates offscreen without a camera pointed at him, so it offers a more pre-conceived poetic vision, a rambling inner dialogue written out ahead of time as a script matched against the unchangeable arid desert. What is probably most striking about the film is the way Hopper identifies with Charles Manson, something nearly inconceivable to think about today, which, as it happens, was part of the allure of the recent film MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (2011), as it resurfaced the horrifying psychological damage resulting from blindly following cult leaders, whose sole motivation seems to be to redefine the entire world around their own image, where everyone and everything belongs to them, breaking any concept of free will in his cult followers. Hopper namedrops Manson as a flirtatious device with a woman he obviously finds sexually attractive, as if she’d be turned on by that. Much of Hopper’s behavior emulates that of Manson, including his desert sexual fantasies of having orgies and running naked in the desert, high on whatever he could find.

Hopper spends plenty of time high on drugs, running his mouth endlessly, surrounded by groupies who worship his every move, and even surrounded by a group of naked women who have expressed an interest in having sex, he instead bores them to tears with his endless monologues. One of the other pre-conceived segments includes Hopper undressing as he walks down the street of a Los Alamos suburban subdivision, noted for developing the nuclear bomb, which is not nearly as interesting as his narrative thoughts, where he is defining and labeling the people that would live here as conservative and closed minded, the kind of people who would never be drawn to anything new. This is, of course, Hopper’s biggest fear, that he might turn into one of these people who have no identification with freedom and open expression. Ironically, what’s peculiarly evident to the viewer is that Hopper is just as conservative and closed minded, following the deluded belief that he’s any different, or that he somehow knows what the people inside those houses think, some of whom may be teachers or artists, perhaps more into free expression than he is. As it turns out, the methods of open expression that Hopper copies are mostly the kind of thing prescribed in acting classes or therapy sessions of the era, where people are taught to loosen up and trust themselves. So it’s actually Hopper who is showing a surprising lack of originality, haunted by the inability to break through his own self-imposed personal barriers.

CinematicThreads.com Matthew Lotti

Companion piece to The Last Movie about Dennis Hopper's bizarre "cult" in Taos, New Mexico where he did a lot of drugs, drank excessively, tangoed with flighty female fans and tried to edit his 1971 cult Western. The footage - of Hopper having 'group therapy' with liberated women, taking baths with them, admiring his art collection and shooting rifles - does not, in my view, hurt or aid the ultimate effectiveness The Last Movie in any way - it merely shows what kind of physical and mental condition Hopper was in at the time. However, the shadiness of the filmmakers is evident (Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls claims that Schiller and Carson convinced him to run naked around Los Alamos - home of the Manhattan Project - in exchange for girls) and an hour and a half of an ego-tripping Hopper making verbal love to himself and his inflated "ideas" is like spending time with a stumbling party guest who makes everyone sick and that you want desperately to kick out of the house. It's good to know he recovered, of course, and continues to have a unique and unparalleled career in film.

User reviews from imdb Author: reverendtom from Santa Cruz, CA

“Turgid self-obsession”

This movie is worth seeing only if you have a hankering to watch Dennis Hopper wander around smoking joints and or hand rolled cigarettes and spewing retarded hippie philosophy for two hours. This film is horrible. The only interesting and or funny parts are definitely unintentional. Hopper's rambling, near incoherent and clichéd dissertations on life, God, the mind, sexuality and more are extremely nonsensical and make him sound half mad or whole stupid most of the time. Hopper is trying way too hard to create an outlaw mythos for himself and it shows. On top of the false machismo, his attitude reeks of ego mania, or just plain mania. Definitely worth seeing for Hopper fans so they can see what a dirt-bag he was back then. Hopper has stated numerous times that he is very embarrassed about his shenanigans in the 70s, and I'm embarrassed for him. 1/10.

User reviews from imdb Author: lor_ from New York, New York

This documentary film about Dennis Hopper really impressed me back in 1971, when I saw it at U. of Penn. It was released on college campuses per Hopper's wishes as part of a plan to change film distribution patterns which, alas, failed, and I haven't heard of it being revived since. The premise was to show Hopper at his Taos, New Mexico headquarters editing his epic "The Last Movie". Along the way his pal and documentarist L.M. (Kit) Carson revealed a lot about Dennis, including his fondness for dallying with young groupies, occasionally right-wing views mixed in with a generally liberal philosophy (particularly regarding gun ownership), etc. The most fascinating segments show clips from "The Last Movie" and Hopper in the editing room musing over the filmmaking process. Later, when the finished "The Last Movie" was released and flopped miserably, thereby curtailing Hopper's budding career as a director (see "Easy Rider"), this documentary took on added meaning in revealing those excesses that contributed to his Wellesian implosion.

User reviews from imdb Author: django-1 from south Texas USA

This warts-and-all documentary of Dennis Hopper at home in Taos, New Mexico, in the period after the filming but before the release of his amazing THE LAST MOVIE, provides a fascinating window into a world that is forever gone and probably only lasted for a short time: the period when the sixties were over but we were still running on fumes from the sixties and things had not yet crashed and burned. This was a year when you could go see a film like VANISHING POINT at a mainstream movie theater and when THE LAST MOVIE was released by a major studio. I was an adolescent at that time and can testify that Hopper represented a heroic image to many of us back then. I never got to see this film at the time because it did not get much distribution. How interesting to see it thirty-three years later. Hopper raises so many interesting questions and issues in THE American DREAMER, but rambler and dreamer that he is, he moves on without stopping to analyze or apply any of it. Perhaps Mr. Hopper expected US to make the next move fueled by the ideas he threw us. The film itself shows Hopper at home editing what would become THE LAST MOVIE, pontificating on all kinds of subjects regarding the arts, society, sex, drugs,his own legacy, and life in general. Intercut with this is footage of Hopper taking his clothes off on the street in a residential neighborhood, shooting various guns, talking with representatives from Universal about THE LAST MOVIE, walking around. Voice-overs of Hopper thinking aloud are played during these scenes. The music is an assemblage of vaguely philosophical stoner folk that perfectly reflects the atmosphere. Hopper talks about honesty in film, and he certainly lives by his own ideology as this is one of the least flattering artist-approved film biographies I've ever seen. Bob Dylan's DON'T LOOK BACK and Woody Allen's WILD MAN BLUES are the only other films about well-known celebrities I'd include on the same shelf. If Mr. Hopper owns the rights to this, he should definitely release it on DVD. By the way, I mentioned earlier about the sixties crashing and burning (as symbolized in the final scene of VANISHING POINT). The film that for me documents the final nail in the coffin of the sixties spirit is WONDERLAND.

Watching this twisted Dennis Hopper documentary on a double bill with THE LAST MOVIE at Manhattan's Film Forum was pure bliss. The perfect acidhead double bill. And after cringing through his work in sewage like WATERWORLD, this helped to remind me why I used to think he was one of the coolest filmmakers on the planet. Sure, his recent career choices (and sobriety) might be lucrative, but it's certainly left the cinema world short one half-baked artist. Not many public figures would allow themselves to be presented this way for posterity. So I've got to give Hopper credit for having the guts to greenlight this freeform documentary, which follows him to his Taos, New Mexico pad, soon after returning from his lengthy, nasal-membrane-rotting LAST MOVIE shoot in Peru. Filmmakers L.M. Kit Carson (who went onto script PARIS, TEXAS and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2) and Lawrence Schiller (who co-wrote O.J.'s book, "I Want to Tell You") knock on Hopper's front door, Dennis answers it in only a bath towel, and they simply let the guy ramble, as the camera rolls. Bearded and bleary-eyed, he babbles about his lonely, unhappy childhood; fires off semi-automatic weapons; shares a bathtub with three naked young ladies; and lets loose with some terrifically pretentious insights. The Wit and Wisdom of Dennis Hopper includes such quotables as "I don't believe in reading. By using your eyes and ears you'll find everything there is." Or how about "I'd rather give head to a woman than fuck them...Basically, I think like a lesbian." We also get to watch him strip down in the middle of a suburban street and stroll about, butt naked. Ahh, the man's a fuckin' genius... No surprise, Hopper looks very perplexed while piecing together his footage for THE LAST MOVIE, explaining that editing a movie is like "having a child and cutting its arms off -- putting its eyes out." Meanwhile, he's hitting on any pretty young woman within camera range, and suckering a bevy of groupies into a self-declared "sensitivity encounter", with all of them crammed onto his bed and groping Hopper's bare ass. All the while, he puts out these Manson-esque vibes; except instead of killing people, all Dennis did was kill off his own braincells. In a creepy admission, he even boasts of visiting Manson in jail. There's also a terrible, folksy-ballad soundtrack which captures the era at its most irritating -- including lame, Greek Chorus-type tunes about Dennis (complete with rhymes like "Here's to Mr. Hopper / Who traded in his chopper."). Far from your orthodox celebrity profile, Hopper opens wide for the camera and proudly lets loose with a juicy one. I just wonder what he thinks of this pic nowadays.

eFilmCritic Reviews The Ultimate Dancing Machine

There was a brief time circa 1970 where Dennis Hopper was The Man. With overall box office receipts at a historic low, Hopper was one of the few guys around who seemed to have figured out the game; his EASY RIDER (1969; director, co-writer, star) was a massive hit, and he was effectively given the keys to Hollywood. Hopper utilized his new-found star-power to get his dream project made, THE LAST MOVIE (1971), a truly flipped-out experimental western that, alas, turned out to be a bomb of nuclear proportions. But just before his career went to hell, he appeared in this unintentionally revealing behind-the-scenes documentary, filmed during post-production for THE LAST MOVIE, which shows that the emperor had no clothes and quite possibly never did.

For eighty minutes, a camera crew follows Mr. Hopper around his home as he rolls joints, frolics with groupies, plays with his guns, shows off his photography portfolio, wanders around the neighborhood buck naked for no discernable reason, and--above all else--pontificates tediously on anything that comes to mind. Hopper comes off as a harmlessly self-absorbed ass, the sort of fellow who can without a trace of irony utter words like, "It's very difficult at times to, if you believe in evolution, not to believe in revolution." But it's hard to say if it's altogether Hopper's fault that he sounds like a drugged-out gasbag, or the fault of a film crew that hangs on the Great Man's every word like he's Carlos Castaneda. We're treated to too many shots of lovely rural scenery as Hopper rambles on and on in voice-over.

There's little here to indicate that Hopper possesses a terribly interesting mind. We hear a lot about what he likes (group sex, cunnilingus) and dislikes (reading books), but he rarely sounds any more intelligent or enlightened than your Uncle Marty, the one who's been living in his mother's basement since that LSD incident back in the '60s. (The film sometimes gets so vapid--e.g., Hopper making stupid jokes about his daschunds humping each other--that it's chilling to comtemplate all the material that must have been left out of the final cut.) The biggest problem is the paucity of insight into the creative process, which one would think was the whole point of following this guy around with a camera as he tinkered with his pet project. Not that the filmmakers don't try to pump some pertinent quotes out of Hopper; at one point in the editing suite they ask him what he finds most difficult about the post-production process, and he curtly answers, "Sitting here." So much for film theory.

What you're left with is an embarrassingly star-struck vanity project--Dennis Hopper flexing his ego for the whole world to see, cheerfully unaware that his career is about to crash into an iceberg.

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark)

The American Dreamer - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Rumsey Taylor

Dennis Hopper’s American Dreamer: Soundtrack Aquarium Drunkard

I'm Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes — The Man and His Work ... Flavorpill

I'm Almost Not Crazy: Outsider Cinema by Hollywood Insiders: Mary ... Block Cinema

Carter, Helena Bonham – actress

www.helena-world.com - the Helena Bonham Carter website

Helena Bonham Carter Central

helena bonham carter fan website

Helena Bonham Carter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Images for Helena Bonham Carter

Helena Bonham Carter: Snubbed From Vanity Fair Best Dressed ... Isabel Wilkinson from The Daily Beast, August 4, 2011

Caruso, D. J.

TAKING LIVES B 87

Canada USA (103 mi) 2004

A jolting experience from the opening bell with the sounds of Bono singing U2’s “Bad,” we watch a clever serial killer at work, initially thinking he’s just a sweet and innocent kid before we watch him push some guy changing a tire into an oncoming car, switching identities with the dead, much like a “hermit crab” where he outgrows one life, taking another (thus the title), which we discover is his standard modus operandi. Suspenseful, always interesting, filled with gritty images, this is a lurid serial killer thriller set in Montreal, though the locations on screen are decidedly Quebec. Angelina Jolie plays a sexy American FBI profiler who is asked to provide her expertise, irritating the local police, particularly chaffing the lead officer Olivier Martinez. While there is a terrific cast, including the likes of Gena Rowlands, the killer’s mother, Tcheky Karyo, the police chief, and Kiefer Sutherland and Ethan Hawke, two Americans who become the leading suspects, with Jolie in a brief romantic interlude, which does include a nude scene, the film goes on a little beyond its finale, losing some of the suspense, as by that time, the romance is over and we know who the killer is, so the end is something of an unnecessary letdown. Compared to the tight, frenetic feel of the rest of the film, the end seems like it was a last minute throw in.

Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

DISTURBIA B 85

USA (104 mi) 2007

A surprisingly good looking movie, which opens with another signature car crash, one of the best features of his earlier film TAKING LIVES as well, so the guy knows how to use his stuntmen. David Morse, as usual, is simply brilliant as a menacing neighbor in “Suburbia,” a man who becomes the subject of fascination by Shia LaBeouf, whose stir crazy life is reduced to staring out his windows after he’s placed on house arrest for three months, forced to wear an ankle bracelet that is designed to immediately notify the police if he strays too far from his home, causing him Jimmy Stewart-like spacial limitations. Of course, there’s also a beautiful babe, Sarah Roemer, the Grace Kelly girl who moves in next door with an effervescent personality who likes to parade around in scanty attire, and as it turns out she actually likes the guy, joining him in his obsessive interest in spying on his fascinating neighbor, who may or may not be a creepy killer, the Aaron Burr role in Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW.

The film does a good job in capturing common themes in suburbia, perennial boredom, showing kids sitting around with too much time on their hands with nothing better to do, with expensive electronic gadgetry, like computer games, high end cameras that can produce live Internet video feeds, and the instant access through cell phones, as well as teen frustration with their increasingly powerless lives exacerbated by perceived parental and/or societal overreactions. While there are lulls in interest, as the life of these kids is just not that fascinating, it heats up once Morse gets more involved in their lives. There’s really excellent use of high energy music, a wonderful build up of tension once the film starts veering off into the slasher mode, and some chilling, atmospheric freak out moments that are well conceived. The film has been a box office success, particularly appealing to the teen audience, but it’s an intelligent, well written film that creates a disturbing, paranoid landscape lurking just outside the supposed safety of our own doorsteps.

The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]

So, does Disturbia, a teen-beat remake of Rear Window, imply that Hollywood is finally moving on from its obsession with underage remakes of Shakespeare plays? If so, it's just as well: At least it'll mean some less-played-out stories. Granted, it's harder to avoid comparing a remake with the original when both originated in the same medium. Still, while Disturbia doesn't live up to Rear Window—or credit it, though the parallels are unmissable—and it's often annoyingly fluffy where Rear Window is grim, it eventually evolves into a credible thriller, one pointedly rather than coincidentally embedded in the trivia of its time.

Shia LaBeouf stars as a good kid turned bitter and sullen after his father's death. After slugging a snotty Spanish teacher, LaBeouf is sentenced to three months' house arrest, with an ankle monitor alerting the teacher's vengeful cop cousin whenever LaBeouf steps out of line. When his mom (The Matrix's Carrie-Anne Moss) cuts off his iTunes account and his XBox Live connection, LaBeouf gets so stir-crazy that he has to spy on his neighbors—including hot newcomer Sarah Roemer—to stay entertained. But eventually, he starts to suspect that creepy neighbor David Morse is a serial killer, and he, buddy Aaron Yoo, and Roemer launch their own Spy Kids investigation.

The setup takes far too long, at least for viewers who aren't the exact right age to harmonize with LaBeouf's well-acted yet not terribly compelling "Life's sooo unfair" teen angst. But once the plot finally kicks into gear, director D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives) effectively cranks up the tension, via tricks yanked from the Hitchcock and Blair Witch Project playbooks. The script's cultural specificity is likely to date it—amid all the technology being name-checked or brought into play, all that's missing is LaBeouf whining to his LiveJournal friends about how nobody understands him, OMG—but for now, it seems smartly aware of a time in which kids relate to the world as much through their webcams, laptops, and cell phones as through their own eyes. Perhaps most telling is Roemer's romantic interest in LaBeouf, which comes after she learns he's been spying on her; in the era of MySpace and YouTube video blogs, the film implies, everyone is so open that only an obsessive stalker has enough interest and access to uncover actual intimate truths, whether they're about his crush object or a psycho killer.

Fangoria Michael Gingold

The most shocking and harrowing moment in the teen thriller DISTURBIA actually occurs close to the very beginning of the film. Given that it has been showcased extensively in the movie’s advertising, it’s not really a spoiler to reveal that following a pastoral fishing/bonding episode between teenager Kale (Shia LaBeouf) and his father (Matt Craven)—the kind of sequence that, in a movie like this, you know can’t come to a good end anyway—a violent accident steals Kale’s dad from him. The setpiece truly jolts not only due to director D.J. Caruso’s startling and visceral staging, but because it shatters an honest and realistic camaraderie that LaBeouf and Craven elicit in their brief minutes together. Thus it’s easy to understand how Kale becomes a sullen student who decks his Spanish teacher when the latter brings up the tragedy in class, which gets Kale sentenced to a summer of house arrest that propels DISTURBIA into the meat of its story.

Clearly a modern gloss on REAR WINDOW, DISTURBIA (scripted by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth) distinguishes itself somewhat by having fun with aspects of current living and technology that never existed in Alfred Hitchcock’s time. For a youth of today, home confinement (effected by an ankle bracelets that alerts the cops if he strays beyond his yard) would hardly mean being cut off from either entertainment or communication—and thus Kale’s mother Julie (Carrie-Ann Moss) also relieves him of his computer and video-game privileges as part of his punishment. Turning to a lower-tech form of amusement, Kale begins checking out his neighbors through binoculars and, amongst assorted miniscandals taking place in the surrounding homes, discovers the promises of both sex (in the person of lovely new girl-next-door Ashley, played by THE GRUDGE 2’s Sarah Roemer) and violence (Mr. Turner, portrayed by David Morse, may be a serial slayer of young women).

Those, of course, are the twin lures of the genre within which DISTURBIA itself squarely resides—though the film, which never pushes either past the boundaries of a target-audience-friendly PG-13 rating, eschews any self-reflexive commentary along those lines. Mostly, it’s content to be a straightforward, slickly made youth suspenser that’s anchored by LaBeouf’s very fine and sympathetic performance, whether he’s enacting Kale’s contentious relationship with his mother, his burgeoning relationship with Ashley or his suspicions about Mr. Turner. For quite some time, DISTURBIA eschews gratuitous shock tactics and actually allows us to get to know its principals—a refreshing change from the usual teen-oriented genre fare. Genuine concern is built up for Kale as he vainly tries to convince the authority figures around him of what’s going on at Mr. Turner’s place, and enlists the help of Ashley and his goofball friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo, as one of the few recent wacky screen sidekicks who’s actually likable) in gathering evidence.

What keeps DISTURBIA from working to its full potential is that there’s never any doubt placed in Kale’s or the audience’s mind that Mr. Turner is in fact a callous murderer. A blood-splattering shot about halfway through confirms for the viewer what Kale is already sure he knows, and without any mystery left to the story, the rest is left to click through the inevitable developments: Mr. Turner realizes that Kale is on to him, Kale realizes that Mr. Turner realizes he’s on to him, Mr. Turner threatens Kale’s friends and then Kale himself, etc. Under the circumstances, Morse doesn’t have to overstate or overplay his role’s villainy, and he uses his physical size and a matter-of-factly menacing tone to suggest a man practiced enough at both murder and covering it up to be certain he’ll be able to do it again. Repeatedly, perhaps.

Caruso whips up a nicely tense setpiece in which a camcorder-toting Ronnie invades Mr. Turner’s house while Kale watches on a home monitor, but things tip a little too far over the top in the final reels. It’s not surprising to find RED EYE scripter Ellsworth’s name in DISTURBIA’s writing credits; as in the Wes Craven film, the climactic action here lurches into overstated mayhem that fudges the veneer of realism created by what has come before. Suddenly, we’re in movie-land as the characters’ actions veer well outside the bounds of plausibility, and (SPOILER ALERT) Mr. Turner’s modest home is revealed to contain at least a pair of complete serial-killer habitats, including a watery pit of corpses in the basement (a setpiece suggested, Fango was told, by DreamWorks topper Steven Spielberg himself, apparently recalling how well it worked a generation ago in POLTERGEIST). The cast and the craftsmanship—most notably Rogier Stoffers’ sharp cinematography—insure that the movie never completely loses dramatic interest, but had it gone deeper, darker and/or smarter in the home stretch, DISTURBIA might have truly lived up to its title.

PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Cinematical [Scott Weinberg]

BeyondHollywood.com Richard Lewis

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

Cassavetes, John

It's always a good sign when critics write about Cassavetes, because he deserves it, and because his influence should be discussed in the same breath as Altman or Kubrick, who lived to be admired in their lifetimes, or Welles, who like Brando, became a derogatory caricature, something of a comical antithesis to who and what they really stood for in the eyes of the public by the time they died. Cassavetes died relatively young, where he showed no signs of slowing down or becoming more mainstream, continually inventing relevant characters whose personal crises became our own. With his unique style, as no one else was making films like Cassavetes, or taking the critical abuse for making films no one at the time understood, who did he have to draw inspiration from or compare films with? Critics always said he was so off the beaten track that there was no audience for his films, condemning what we now know is his sheer originality in his examination of the human condition. Cassavetes' influence was through the intense creation of his characters, the kind never shown on movie screens, the kind whose troubles and flaws matched their wit and humor, the kind who gave everyone an excuse not to love them, but then finds a way as the director to embrace them all the same. His commitment to his own ideas and to his craft is unlike any other filmmaker, as he was largely self-funded, self-promoting, and only worked when the money was there, which wasn't very often, so he left us only 9 films that are indisputably original works, something along the ranks of Dreyer or Tarkovsky. Most critics don’t go that far in praise of Cassavetes, but at least they’re still paying attention.

Cassavetes is all about finding something human and believable in the characters, where what he's filming onscreen may as well be a theatrical representation of our own screwed up lives. In my view, that's something Cassavetes does better than all the so-called greats, as his films are not filled with grandiose moments or perfect sequences, but in the everyday ordinary moments in our lives, not at all like Ozu, who captures a rhythm and a fixed viewpoint, but in the way he assembles small, uncomfortable moments that have a way of escalating into something more intense, because people have a way of not letting things go, so it germinates into something altogether different and is no longer even recognizable even to that individual. Cassavetes is extremely good at shining a light on what's wrong with us, and then we the viewers have to decide whether or not it's real and if it matters, and if it does, whether we can transcend the material onscreen.

As Shadows (1959) was made at the same time as the French New Wave, his groundbreaking filmmaking style is oftentimes unfairly compared, as Cassavetes’ strengths are not something the French New Wave did very well. No one else except post New Wave director Jean Eustache comes to mind when trying to recollect filmmakers who dwell on human interaction (or lack of it) in such a fiercely documentary manner as Cassavetes. Human interaction is a common theme in cinema, where the screen is constantly lit with subtitled conversations, but they don't *dwell* on it where it becomes larger than life, the focus of the film, an entity unto itself. Cassavetes simply has a different way of exploring humanity, and what some people find crude and ugly is exactly what is most fascinating, as it's probably the most revealing aspect of his filmmaking, and something very few others even attempt to do. Those that do tend to be crude masquerades. In Cassavetes movies, his characters are always caught up in the miracle that is the present, where they may not know what to do with it, but they're sure as fuck in the moment.

"WHAT'S WRONG WITH HOLLYWOOD" by John Cassavetes

Hollywood is not failing. It has failed. The desperation, the criticisms, the foolish solutions, the wholesale cutting of studio staffs and salaries, the various new technical improvements, the "bigger picture", and the "ultra-low-budget picture" have failed to put a stop to the decline.

The fact is that film making, although unquestionably predicated on profit and loss like any other industry, cannot survive without individual expression. Motion pictures can not be made to please solely the producer's image of the public. For, as has been proved, this pleasure results neither in economic or artistic success.

On the other hand, the audience itself, other-directed and mass-minded as it is, may condemn pictures such as Twelve Angry Men or The Goddess. These pictures may lose money, but they have inspired applause from those who still think freely and for themselves. These pictures have gone beyond Hollywood "formula" and "ingredients", and will affect strongly the future of American motion pictures.

More often than not, the mass audience will not accept a new idea, an unfamiliar notion, or a different point of view if it is presented in one or two films only, just as it will not immediately accept new ideas in life. However, the new thoughts must eventually lead to change.

This is not to say that individual expression need only be so called point-of-view films or films that stimulate thought. Certainly the standard of the musical can and must be improved too; the treatment of comedy should reach in other directions; the "epic" and "Western" pictures and the "love story"must also search for more imaginative approaches and fresher ideas.

However the probability of a resurrection of the industry through individual expression is slim, for the men of new ideas will not compromise themselves to Hollywood's departmental heads. These artists have come to realize that to compromise an idea is to soften it; to make an excuse for it, to betray it.

In Hollywood the producer intimidates the artist's new thought with great sums of money and with his own ego that clings to the past of references of box office triumphs and valueless experience. The average artist, therefore, is forced to compromise. And the cost of the compromise is the betrayal of his basic beliefs. And so the artist is thrown out of motion pictures, and the businessman makes his entrance.

However, in no other activity can a man express himself as fully as in art. And, in all times, the artist has been honored and paid for revealing his opinion of life. The artist is an irreplaceable figure in our society too: A man who can speak his own mind, who can reveal and educate, who can stimulate or appease and in every sense communicate with fellow human beings. To have this privilege of world-wide communication in a world so incapable of understanding, and ignore its possibilities, and accept a compromise--most certainly will and should lead the artist and his films to oblivion.

Without individual creative expression, we are left with a medium of irrelevant fantasies that can add nothing but slim diversion to an already diversified world. The answer cannot be left in the hands of the money men, for their desire to accumulate material success is probably the reason they entered into film-making in the first place. The answer must come from the artist himself. He must become aware that the fault is his own: that art and the respect due to his vocation as an artist is his own responsibility. He must, therefore, make the producer realize, by whatever means at his disposal, that only by allowing the artist full and free creative expression will the art and the business of motion pictures survive.

—John Cassavetes, Film Culture Magazine (1959)

MoMA.org | Film Exhibitions | 2003 | John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes was America’s midcentury pioneer of independent filmmaking. More than any other artist, he demonstrated that an American cinema made outside of Hollywood was not only possible, but, given his ferocious and generous spirit, could be exceptional. His cinema, at once spontaneous, intimate, and direct, established both the rough aesthetic and the psychological themes for a generation of filmmakers to follow, from Martin Scorsese to the proponents of the film movement Dogma 95.

from DVDBeaver’s Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/reviews.htm

Regarded as the pioneer of American cinema verité, John Cassavetes experienced success as both an accomplished actor and an innovative filmmaker. He demonstrated courage as a director in his trail-blazing path of experimental, inexpensive features that were regarded as the American counterparts to the Nouvelle Vague. It has been stated that his cinema expressed themes of a previously unrecognized vein of strident American modernism that went against the bleak and hollow forms of many artistic contemporaries. Cassavetes' films have kinship to the philosophical literature penned by Emerson, most emphatically as examples of the consequences of embracing a lifestyle of extreme pragmatism. Cassavetes' work is celebrated with its ability to imbue both the metaphysical and existential revelations of communication through life experience. Much of his early work is considered a watershed in the birth of American independent cinema.

Introduction Geoff Andrew from the British Film Institute

Emotional authenticity was everything for Cassavetes, and performance was not only the main tool he used in exploring the human condition; it was also his favourite metaphor for life. He was endlessly fascinated by the fraught relationship between the private self and the public facade presented to the world. He wanted to see the reality that exists behind the various masks we wear in our quest for love, happiness and a sense of belonging.

The five films in this brief tribute to one of American cinema's greatest mavericks see him at the peak of his powers. It's also possible to see him refining and maturing his style over the years. Though the later films may feel a little less raw than the earlier work, their insights into the human psyche are even more penetrating and powerful. The sheer brilliance of all five movies remains undimmed to this day.

Portrait of an Artist: John Cassavetes Harvard Film Archive

In the ten years since his death, recognition of John Cassavetes’s significance has grown steadily—a recognition that often eluded him in life. Time has made apparent the unique figure he cut across the American cinematic landscape, both through his methods and his brilliantly iconoclastic works. Cassavetes’s dedication to the pursuit of his highly individualistic brand of filmmaking opened new roads of possibility for filmmakers disenchanted with the Hollywood Dream Factory. His debut feature, Shadows, is credited with nearly single-handedly sparking the American independent film movement, and his pioneering example of self-financing and self-distribution have become standard practice for many. The roster of filmmakers who have overtly acknowledged a debt to Cassavetes includes Martin Scorsese, Sean Penn, Tom Noonan, Rob Nilsson, and many others. Most significantly, Cassavetes left behind a staggeringly rich body of work. Devoted to the "small feelings" society at large so frequently attempts to suppress, the films continue to startle, surprise, and move us, challenging not only our assumptions about what a movie is but our deepest understanding of ourselves.

Cassavetes, John Art and Culture

"My characters are not violent or vile. They’re everyday people. They have some money, but find themselves discontented with their own loneliness, their own mortality, the sameness of life." Championing a gritty, unencumbered approach to filmmaking, John Cassavetes directed his art toward a new frontier, one removed from Hollywood’s rules. Introduced to cinema as an actor, Cassavetes spent much of the 1950s portraying tough, gangster-type characters. His detour to directing occurred in 1957 when he formed an actors' troupe in New York and began to play with the improvisational techniques that would become such a unique and essential part of his subsequent films. "Shadows" (1960), Cassavetes’ first film, emerged from his work with the actors' studio and gave him the authority in Hollywood to create larger, more expensive productions. However, Cassavetes soon learned that his approach to filmmaking was directly at odds with the studios’.

After the release of a couple of unenchanting studio pictures, Cassavetes "went independent" and developed a personal style that was decidedly anti-studio. Returning to his improv roots, Cassavetes released "Faces" (1968) and "A Woman Under the Influence" (1974), two films that relied on the actors’ personalities and abilities to ad-lib. Avoiding the controlling influence of Hollywood, Cassavetes worked with close friends and family members on both projects. "A Woman Under the Influence," a dark look at a disturbed woman played by Cassavetes’s wife Gena Rowlands, was entirely financed and promoted by Cassavetes and his friend, actor Peter Falk.

Although Cassavetes enjoyed commercial success in 1980 with the release of "Gloria," the film itself is the least characteristic of his work. Cassavetes gravitated toward unpolished film techniques, including jarring hand-held camera shots that highlighted his representation of suffering, flawed characters.

Facets Multi Media - FACETS FEATURES -> DIRECTORS -> John Cassavetes

Born December 9, 1929 in New York City, John Cassavetes was the younger of two sons of Greek immigrants, Nicholas and Katherine Cassavetes. Cassavetes grew up and attended public schools in the Long Island towns of Sands Point and Port Washington. He attended Mohawk College and Colgate University (both in New York State) before enrolling at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. He graduated in 1950.

After playing for a time in a Rhode Island stock company while trying to get parts on Broadway, his career got underway when he played a small part in a film, Taxi (Gregory Ratoff, 1953). A year later he began acting in short teleplays, beginning with Paso Double (for the Omnibus series). Cassavetes became typecast as a "troubled youth" in these programs and the motion pictures that were based on these plays. Among these films were Edge of the City (Martin Ritt, 1956) and Crime in the Streets (Don Siegel, 1957).

In 1956 Cassavetes began teaching method acting at a drama workshop in Manhattan. One of the group's improvisations had the makings of a film, Cassavetes thought, and he mentioned the project on Jean Shepherd's Night People radio show. While on the air, Cassavetes suggested that listeners interested in seeing an alternative to Hollywood cinema should send in money to fund his project. Shepherd's audience sent in donations totaling around $20,000; Cassavetes raised a similar amount from his show-business friends and from his own savings. With these funds he embarked (with his acting workshop and a volunteer crew) on his first film, Shadows.

Made intermittently over two years, Shadows changed the landscape of American cinema. Actors improvised within loosely defined situations and the story evolved as the shooting progressed. Everything was filmed with a hand-held 16mm camera. The score composed by jazz great Charles Mingus further added to the improvisational, cinema veritè feeling.

Unable to interest American distributors, Cassavetes screened Shadows to enthusiastic audiences in Europe (including the 1960 Venice Film Festival, where it received the Critics Award). In 1961 Shadows was released in America under the auspices of a British distributor.

Impressed by the success of Shadows, Paramount hired Cassavetes to make a series of films but released him after the financial and critical failure of Too Late Blues, his first film for them. He then directed A Child Is Waiting for Stanley Kramer (and United Artists). After a falling out with Kramer, Cassavetes was given just two weeks to edit the film. Kramer re-cut the film (making it overly sentimental, according to Cassavetes). Cassavetes, infuriated, spoke out against Kramer and the film, washing his hands of the project.

Unwilling to have his vision compromised by studio heads and producers, Cassavetes acted in several films - most notably Rosemary's Baby (Polanski, 1967) and The Dirty Dozen (Aldrich, 1967), for which he was nominated for an Oscar - so that he could finance his own films and thereby retain artistic control.

Faces, shot and edited in 16mm over three years, was the first product of this strategy. Though not improvised on-camera as was Shadows, the film marked a return to that film's improvisational, cinema veritè style. It premiered in 1968 and was a financial and critical success, being nominated of two Academy Awards and winning five awards at the Venice Film Festival.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Cassavetes worked independently or with modest studio backing when it was offered with complete artistic control. In the latter category are Husbands (Columbia, 1970), Minnie and Moskowitz (Universal, 1971), Gloria (Columbia, 1980), and Love Streams (Cannon, 1984). Of the self-financed are The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976/78), Opening Night (1978), and what many consider Cassavetes' finest film, A Woman Under the Influence (1974). All feature remarkable performances by one or more actors from his regular stable of players including Peter Falk, Ben Gazzarra, and most notably, his wife (since 1954) Gena Rowlands.

Sadly, Cassavetes' final film was, as Cassavetes put it, the "aptly titled" Big Trouble (1985). Cassavetes reluctantly stepped in to direct in mid-production after Andrew Bergman, the film's writer and director, quit the project. Cassavetes considered it a disaster and was embarrassed to have his name attached to the film. Raymond Carney has persuasively argued (Film Comment: May-June 1989, p. 49) that because of the nature of the project and the final product (it hardly shows the stamp of a Cassavetes film) Love Streams rightly deserves to be considered Cassavetes' final cinematic statement.

After a three-and-a-half year illness, John Cassavetes died February 3, 1989. Cassavetes is survived by his wife Gena Rowlands, and their children Nicholas, Alexandra, and Xan. His spirit continues to inspire countless independent and maverick filmmakers around the world.

-Ray Carney (The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies)

Film Reference Bill Wine

As perhaps the most influential of the independently produced feature films of its era (1958–1967), Shadows came to be seen as a virtual breakthrough for American alternative cinema. The film and its fledgling writer-director had put a group of young, independent filmmakers on the movie map, together with their more intellectual, less technically polished, decidedly less commercial, low-budget alternatives to Hollywood features.

Begun as an improvisational exercise in the method-acting workshop that actor John Cassavetes was teaching, and partly financed by his earnings from the Johnny Staccato television series, Shadows was a loosely plotted, heavily improvised work of cinema verité immediacy that explored human relationships and racial identity against the background of the beat atmosphere of the late 1950s, given coherence by the jazz score of Charles Mingus.

The origins and style of Shadows were to characterize John Cassavetes's work throughout his directorial career, once he got the studio-financed production bug out of his system—and his system out of theirs.

The five prizes garnered by Shadows, including the prestigious Critics Award at the 1960 Venice Film Festival, led to Cassavetes's unhappy and resentful experience directing two studio-molded productions (Too Late Blues, A Child Is Waiting), both of which failed critically and commercially. Thereafter, he returned to independent filmmaking, although he continued to act in mainstream movies such as The Dirty Dozen, Rosemary's Baby, and Two Minute Warning. He continued directing feature films, however, in his characteristic, controversial style.

That style centers around a freedom afforded his actors to share in the creative process. Cassavetes's scripts serve as sketchy blueprints for the performers' introspective explorations and emotional embellishments. Consequently, camera movements, at the command of the actors' intuitive behavior, are of necessity spontaneous.

The amalgam of improvisational acting, hand-held camera work, grainy stock, loose editing, and threadbare plot give his films a texture of recreated rather than heightened reality, often imbuing them with a feeling of astonishing psychodramatic intensity as characters confront each other and lay bare their souls. Detractors, however, see Cassavetes as too dedicated to the performers' art and too trusting of the actor's self-discipline. They charge that the result is too often a mild form of aesthetic anarchy.

At worst Cassavetes's films are admittedly formless and self-indulgent. Scenes are stretched excruciatingly far beyond their climactic moments, lines are delivered falteringly, dialogue is repetitious. But, paradoxically, these same blemishes seem to make possible the several lucid, provocative, and moving moments of transcendent human revelation that a Cassavetes film almost inevitably delivers.

As his career progressed, Cassavetes changed his thematic concerns, upgraded his technical production values, and, not surprisingly, attracted a wider audience—but without overhauling his actor-asauteur approach.

Faces represented Cassavetes's return to his favored semi-documentary style, complete with the seemingly obligatory excesses and gaffes. But the film also contained moments of truth and exemplary acting. Not only did this highly charged drama about the disintegration of a middle-class marriage in affluent Southern California find favor with the critical and filmmaking communities, it broke through as one of the first independent films to find a sizable audience among the general moviegoing public.

In Husbands, Cassavetes continued his exploration of marital manners, morals, and sexual identity by focusing on a trio of middle-class husbands—played by Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk—who confront their own mortality when a friend dies. Director Cassavetes's doubled-edged trademark—brilliant moments of intense acting amid the banal debris of over-indulgence—had never been in bolder relief.

Minnie and Moskowitz was Cassavetes's demonstration of a lighter touch, an amusing and touching interlude prior to his most ambitious and commercially successful film. The film starred Gena Rowlands (Cassavetes's wife) and Seymour Cassel as a pair of dissimilar but similarly lonely people ensnared in a manic romance. Cassavetes again examined miscommunication in Minnie and Moskowitz, but in a much more playful vein.

A Woman under the Influence was by far Cassavetes's most polished, accessible, gripping, and technically proficient film. For this effort, Cassavetes departed from his accustomed style of working by writing a fully detailed script during pre-production. Starring Gena Rowlands in a magnificent performance as a lower-middle class housewife coming apart at the seams, and the reliable Peter Falk as the hardhat husband who is ill-equipped to deal with his wife's mental breakdown, Woman offered a more palatable balance of Cassavetes's strengths and weaknesses. The over-long scenes and overindulgent acting jags are there, but in lesser doses, while the privileged moments and bursts of virtuoso screen acting seem more abundant than usual.

Financed by Falk and Cassavetes, the film's crew and cast (including many family members) worked on deferred salaries. Promoted via a tour undertaken by the nucleus of the virtual repertory company (Cassavetes, Rowland, Falk) and booked without a major distributor, Woman collected generally ecstatic reviews, Academy Award nominations for Cassavetes and Rowlands, and impressive box office returns.

Cassavetes's next two films (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night) feature a return to his earlier structure (or lack thereof)—inaccessible, interminable, and insufferable for all but diehard buffs. However, Gloria, which showcased Rowlands as a former gangster's moll, while uneven in tone and erratic in pace, represented a concession by Cassavetes to filmgoers seeking heightened cinematic energy and narrative momentum.

"People who are making films today are too concerned with mechanics—technical things instead of feeling," Cassavetes told an interviewer in 1980. "Execution is about eight percent to me. The technical quality of a film doesn't have much to do with whether it's a good film."

| The John Cassavetes Pages | The Independent Film Pages | Film ... Ray Carney’s Cassavetes pages

The John Cassavetes Pages (Ray Carney) one section of the Ray Carney site

The Films of John Cassavetes - Table of Contents another entry point to Ray Carney’s site

Welcome to Tirana International Film Festival 2004 an interesting opening (via films) to sections of Ray Carney’s site

All-Movie Guide bio information by Jason Ankeny

John Cassavetes from Baseline’s Encyclopedia of Films

American Masters . John Cassavetes | PBS bio information

John Cassavetes Profile Bret Wood essay from Turner Classic Movies, also seen here: John Cassavetes Profile - Turner Classic Movies

In Loving Memory of John Cassavetes a tribute to Cassavetes website

Classic Movies on John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes - Search.com Reference encyclopedia entry

John Cassavetes - Explore - The Criterion Collection Criterion brief biography

John Cassavetes News regular updates

John Cassavetes press archive

John Cassavetes @ Filmbug more bio information

John Cassavetes - Yahoo! Movies more bio material

John Cassavetes - Starpulse still more bio material

Cassavetes An Inspired Collection Honors a Founder of the Indie Movement, by David Sterritt (Undated)

kamera.co.uk - feature item - John Cassavetes by Jason Wood (Undated)

Love Films: A Cassavetes Retrospective - JonathanRosenbaum.com September 20, 1991

Film & TV: On the Edge of the Edge (Austin Chronicle . 01-26-98) On the Edge of the Edge, by Michael Ventura from the Austin Chronicle

The Cinematic Life of Emotions: John Cassavetes George Kouvaros interviewed by Needeya Islam (1999), from Senses of Cinema

Some older or lesser known films David Walsh from the World Socialist Web Site, May 17, 1999

Impromptu Entertainment: Performance Modes in Cassavetes' Films Pamela Robertson Wojcik (2000) from Senses of Cinema

"Open Letter to John Cassavetes" Jim Jarmusch letter from John Cassavetes: Lifeworks, Tom Charity (ed), September 2000

Identity in the Films of Cassavetes Maximiliam Le Cain from Senses of Cinema (2001)

Senses of Cinema – Meet John Cassavetes Christos Tsiolkas reviews three books on Cassavetes from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

John Cassavetes Retrospective - freedomrightsfilms.com - Tripod What’s Wrong with Hollywood essay by John Cassavetes (1959), The Laemmle Theatres in Santa Monica and West Hollywood from Sept. 1 – Nov. 18, 2001

Reviews of Five Books about John Cassavetes Jonathan Rosenbaum from Cineaste, December 2001

The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an ... Retrospective: John Cassavetes, by Tim Applegate from the Film Journal (2002)

MAGAZINE | INDIES | Cassvetes | VOL 27-5: JAN 2003 John Cassavetes: an Icon of Independence, by Charles Champlin from DGA Monthly

kamera.co.uk - feature item - John Cassavetes by Jason Wood feature article in 2004

Places in the Heart: Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point by George Kouvaros Brad Stevens from Senses of Cinema, October 2004

John Cassavetes UXL Newsmakers (2005)

Fallen Creatures in a Fallen World, Sojourners Magazine/March 2005 Darren Hughes on Cassavetes from Sojourner’s magazine

Beat Street: Johnny Staccato - Film Comment J. Hoberman looks back at Johnny Staccato, March 2005

Like Anna Karina's Sweater: October 2006 John Cassavetes and the Shoes of Pauline Kael, from FilmBrain

Film International Article (2006) Cavell, Altman, Cassavetes, by Charles Warren

Message in a bottle | Features | Guardian Unlimited Film John Sutherland from the Guardian, June 8, 2007

The Cassavetes Letters, #1 Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity, February 19, 2007

The Cassavetes Letters #2 Matthew Clayfied from the Esoteric Rabbit, February 20, 2007

The Cassavetes Letters, #3 Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity, August 9, 2007

Bright Lights Film Journal | John Cassavetes: The First Dogme ... Angelos Koutsourakis, February 2009

How John Cassavetes' Shadows changed American movies forever. Elbert Ventura from Slate, November 11, 2009

John Cassavetes Series at Cinefamily - Page 1 - Film+TV - Los ... Karina Longworth from LA Weekly, March 3, 2011

john cassavetes | silver velvet sky October 11, 2011

Hidden In Plain Sight: Cassavetes The Reluctant ... - The Quietus Anthony Nield, April 18, 2012

Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes: Equal Stars of A Woman Under the Influence Jennifer Sin from Offscreen, February 2013

John + Gena: dynamite on screen and off | British Film Institute Matthew Thrift from BFI, May 30, 2013

Essential John Cassavetes at BAM : The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker, October 3, 2013

Cinematic Jazz: The Myth of John Cassavetes - Roger Ebert Steve Erickson, November 3, 2014

Introduction John Cassavetes: Anti-Melodrama, a lengthy academic paper by Yamashina Yumi (language conversion not needed)

Online Features | FilmPrint The Original Independent: Cassavetes, by Dannis Koromilas from FilmPrint

The Roles of Gena Rowlands from the Gena Rowlands website

Cassavetes, John They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Interview with Gena Rowlands September 1999 interview with Rowlands from Premiere magazine on Al Weisel’s website

John Cassavetes: Genius, Patriot, Freemason Playboy interview with Cassavetes in 1971 from the Filbert website

markromanek.faq excerpts of a Cassavetes interview

Independent Film Quarterly Film Magazine Stuart Alson interviews Phedon Papamichael, who worked on costumes, art design, and helped produce Cassavetes films

Ben Gazzara: 1930-2012 and Remembering Cassavetes Alex Simon interviews Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, and Gena Rowlands in 2004 from The Hollywood Interview, February 3, 2012

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

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

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

GreenCine | product main - John Cassavetes - Five Films (1959-2000) capsule reflections on the Criterion 5 from GreenCine

The Austin Chronicle: Screens: Review - John Cassavetes: Five Films Taylor Holland reviews the Criterion 5

John Cassavetes - Five Films : Filmcritic.com Doug Hennessy

John Cassavetes brief comments on the French documentary (Cinema, de Notre Temps) Cinema, of Our Time: John Cassavetes (1968), a film by André Labarthe, made for French TV that is included as supplemental material on the Criterion 5 DVD

American Dreaming John Cassavetes Marc Couroux interviews Ray Carney on his new book, American Dreaming: John Cassavetes in August 1999

Cassavetes on Cassavetes Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes from Cineaste (2001)

John Cassavettes a brief excerpt from Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes on the Jean Shepard website

Cassavetes on Cassavetes essay from Gerald Peary

Interview with Ray Carney Film Critic who Sheds Light on Filmmaker ... by Cynthia Rockwell from New England Film, November 2001

John Cassavetes: Lifeworks - Tom Charity a book review by David Fear of Tom Charity’s John Cassavetes: Lifeworks (2001)

Combustible Celluloid: Great Film Books - John Cassavetes ... a review of Charity’s book, by Jeffrey M. Anderson (2001)

Places in the Heart: Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and ... Brad Steven reviews the book Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point, by George Kouvaros, from Senses of Cinema (2004)

ACCIDENTAL GENIUS How John Cassavetes Invented the American ... ACCIDENTAL GENIUS How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film, by Marshall Fine, a book review by David Thompson from The New York Times, January 18, 2006

'Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented American ... Phillip Lopate’s book review from The New York Times, January 29, 2006

Cassavetes, Volatile Contrarian, Mulish Master of Improvisation Scott Eyman reviews Marshall Fine’s book for the New York Observer, February 5, 2006

Foreword by Michael Ferris a former Cassavetes cameraman (A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Mikey and Nicky, and Opening Night), Mike Ferris writes a foreword to Dan Selakovich’s book, To Killer Camera Rigs That You Can Build

YouTube - Ronald Reagan John Cassavetes Duel
A quick scene from the 1964 movie THE KILLERS where Ronald Reagan, playing the sole bad guy role of his career, gets punched out by John Cassavetes

KAMERA.CO.UK | BLOG: Watch: John Cassavetes more YouTube film moments

Edge of Outside - John Cassavetes - Television - Spike Powered by ... trailer for a Cassavetes documentary

MySpace.com - John Cassavetes - 60 - Male - New York, NEW YORK ...

Various Quotes by Cassavetes

The religion of director John Cassavetes a glimpse of Cassavetes’s religious affiliation

The 14th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)

Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)

Kent Jones' Top 10 Directors

David Sterritt's Top 10 Directors

John Cassavetes (1929 - 1989) - Find A Grave Memorial

John Cassavetes from Wikipedia

SHADOWS A 97

USA (87 mi) 1959

Shadows was an experiment. It predominantly came out of a workshop. We were improvising on a story, one that was in my mind. It was my secret. Every scene in Shadows was very simple; they were predicated on people having problems that were overcome with other problems…There was a struggle because firstly I had never done a film before, and secondly the actors had to find the confidence to have quiet at times, and not just constantly talk. This took about the first three weeks of the schedule. Eventually all this material was thrown away, and then everyone became cool and easy and relaxed and they had their own things to say, which was the point.

As you go along in life sometimes your innermost thoughts become less and less a part of you, and once you lose them you don’t have anything else. I don’t think anyone does it purposefully. It’s just that a lot of people are not aware of losing those things. I found myself losing them too, and then suddenly I woke up by accident, by sheer accident of not getting along with something, with something inside.

—John Cassavetes, 1968

While Cassavetes often receives credit with this film for being the father of American independent filmmaking, he was heavily influenced by Italian Realism films, especially screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who Cassavetes claims “is surely the greatest screenwriter that ever lived,” along with American studio directors Frank Capra and Robert Rossen, also independent directors Shirley Clarke, Lionel Rogosin, and Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive (1953), where cinéma vérité was an American artform long before the French adopted it. This is a landmark Black and White film, originally shot by Erich Kollmar on 16 mm, later transferred to 35 mm, a contemporary of French New Wave works like Godard’s BREATHLESS (1960) and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), or perhaps more significantly, Rivette’s PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), as this has a New York Belongs To Us feel about it, as the streets of Manhattan and the music of Charles Mingus mix with a free-form jazz improvisational style expressed in quick, jerky, handheld camera movements attuned to Beat movement music and rhythms, producing a grittier realism along with the feel of unscripted dialogue and humor, a wonderful glimpse at a spirit and energy of American youth yearning for freedom. From Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, subtlety, and raw feeling emerged so naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film.” Written, directed, and co-edited by Cassavetes, this is an exuberant film about love, race, changing identity, and searching for meaning in relationships, where each character has a hard time just being themselves, as they’re continually caught off guard, where you catch a glimpse of “I love you truly, truly dear...,” a song that reappears later in all its glory in MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ (1971). The opening sequence of three young guys with three girls, without a clue in the world what to do, yet covering it up with forced laughter and comic showboating, is exactly what the grown men do a decade later in Husbands (1970).

Made for $40,000 using a nonprofessional cast and crew, using borrowed and rented equipment, the texture of the film comes from the grainy film stock, the constantly roving camera, and restless characters that refuse to sit still, as even when standing or sitting their minds are constantly on high alert, sending out streams of energy that are the signpost of this breakout film, where perhaps the underlying theme is coming out of the late 50’s, an era of suffocating conformity, where learning to eschew the conventional pathways and follow your own path was essential, as it was especially important to believe in yourself and trust your own instincts. With astonishing raw intensity, the film rushes ahead at breakneck speed while also probing into the psychological interiors of the characters who each lay bare their souls. All using their own first names, two brothers and a sister live together, but only the oldest is dark skinned black, while the two youngest are light skinned enough to pass for white, a matter of consequence as the film progresses. Lelia Goldoni is stunning as the sensual, yet often opinionated young 20-year old sister who is delightfully confused with the attention of two white guys and one black guy, where we follow her friendships, arguments, sexual encounters, parties and dances, as she tries to blend in and pretend that race doesn’t matter and that “casual” sex has no consequences. Abandoned by Tony (Anthony Ray), one of the white lovers when he discovers her race, her world turns upside down, Shadows by John Cassavetes YouTube (4:46). The other younger brother (Ben Carruthers) is an unemployed trumpet player caught up in the bohemian Greenwich Village scene where he’s always trying to find the elusive mood of hipster cool and spends most of his time unsuccessfully chasing girls while out with his friends. The older brother (Hugh Heard) is the only one working, responsible enough to continue chasing after third-rate singing jobs to pay the bills, but he’s tired of being passed over for lesser talents and for the way he’s continually mistreated in the business, yet he tries to be the strong, protecting older brother. Each seems to be fooling themselves in a film that captures the immediacy of the moment, the importance of now, leaving one to wonder what to do in the next moment.

SHADOWS, like Cassavetes’ later work GLORIA (1980), are two of the best films ever made showcasing the streets of New York, where even a freewheeling discussion about art (“You don’t have to understand it! If you feel it, you feel it, that’s it man.”), which may as well provide an underlying context of the film, makes beautiful use of the Museum of Modern Art, Shadows (Dir: John Cassavetes) - YouTube (2:07). Two years after the original shoot, however, in February 1959, Cassavetes spent two weeks reshooting several scenes, such as Lelia’s unflinchingly honest love scene where the director shows an inordinate amount of concern for the confusion in her character about what happens next, Shadows (John Cassavetes) YouTube (3:42), or her prolonged walk down 42^nd Street alone where she gets accosted by a guy and none other than Cassavetes himself as a complete stranger comes to her aid, Shadows [Dir: John Cassavetes] - Leia y el jazz YouTube (1:21), or her quarrelsome dance scene at a club with her black partner, all of which round out her character, adding greater depth without altering her initial identity — interesting that with this version, Goldoni provides one of the more memorable and underrated performances in film. Seen today, one might marvel at the particularly effective use of close ups, but one of the most startling aspects is the use of sound, how there are so many street scenes with no natural sound, something very prevalent in filmmaking today, instead there are eloquent jazz passages to fill the silence or sufficient quiet to “hear” what they are saying to each other, while at other times conversations struggle to be heard over the noise of the room, which is one of the key elements of the film, as these characters are continually striving for a level of understanding they haven’t reached yet. Amusingly, by the time Cassavetes made Husbands, his characters would fly to the other end of the earth in search of finding something to say. The film won the Critics Award at the 1960 Venice Film Festival and drew the attention of major studios, offering Cassavetes opportunities to make Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child Is Waiting (1963), both of which failed both critically and financially, where in the latter, Cassavetes was fired before completing the film, eventually placed in the hands of Stanley Kramer to reshoot and recut the film. But like Hugh, those films brought in paychecks, as did his continuing acting work in mainstream films, all so he could make the kind of films he wanted to make in his own characteristic style.

What can you say about Cassavetes? He’s a director that evolved out of a love of actors and what they could bring to the screen. To Cassavetes the actor’s performances were more important even than the director himself, as a film is a composite of multiple forces and ideas, all moving in different directions, each with different responsibilities. But onscreen, the director has an opportunity to create something meaningful by having actors come to life in front of the camera, where their lives can connect with the audience if they are believable and feel like real life. This means no phony performances, no method acting in front of the camera, simply characters naturally being themselves onscreen, where the job of the actors is to find and honestly identify with the character they’re playing. What this likely means is that actors have to live with their roles for awhile in real life, where they don’t break character, where they explore what possibilities unfold in differing situations, usually rehearsing for months with other actors in workshops until certain characters and scenes develop. In this manner Cassavetes scripted his films, as they evolved out of rehearsals. The jazz soundtrack by Charles Mingus and his saxophonist Shafi Hadi is immensely significant, as this film grew out of the postwar 40’s and 50’s, a golden age in hard driving Bebop jazz, characterized by uptempo virtuoso performances of recognizable melodies followed by improvisations on the original theme. It was an energetic style of music that brought together people of all races, including Beats, where many of the most celebrated jazz artists of the era were black, though certainly not exclusively, and the audiences that adored them were an eclectic group that came from all walks of life, all drawn to that special feeling discovered in a more liberating and spacious style of music. Much has been made of the film’s closing title sequence, “The film you have just seen is an improvisation,” where many get the idea that the film was unscripted and simply improvised on the spot. Cassavetes, however, was a stickler for writing meticulously composed scripts, where like the jazz performances the film emulates, there are stated ideas and themes, followed by spontaneous emotional eruptions which may as well be the improvisations.

The idea for SHADOWS grew out of Cassavetes’ acting workshops in New York, where in the mid 50’s he and theater director Burt Lane (actress Diane Lane’s father) founded the Cassavetes-Lane Drama Workshop. From the Short Stack: Ray Carney on John ... - Slant Magazine Matt Zoller Seitz on Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, from Slant magazine, March 5, 2006:

To an interviewer who visited the workshop, Cassavetes somewhat vaguely tried to describe the classes as being designed to teach students to 'act naturally,' so that their work didn't look 'staged' or 'artificial.' He said his goal was to bring 'realism' back to acting, and that the highest compliment that could possibly be paid to one of his actors was to say that he or she didn't appear to be 'acting,' but simply 'living' his character. The journalist regarded the explanation as fairly trite until Cassavetes added that the 'artificiality' of the expression of emotion was more than a dramatic problem. It was a problem in life. The young actor argued that most lived experiences were as 'staged' and 'artificial' as most dramatic experiences, and that the real problem 'for modern man' (as Cassavetes inflatedly put it) was 'breaking free from conventions and learning how to really feel again.' It was a daring leap: lived experience could be as much a product of convention as dramatic experience, and in fact one sort of convention could be the subject of the other. it was the first and most succinct statement of the subject of Shadows and of all Cassavetes' later work.

In particular, Cassavetes was displeased with Method actors, especially Actor’s Studio founder Lee Strasberg, whose students included Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Jack Nicholson, where actors were encouraged to draw upon their own personal experiences. Cassavetes believed Strasberg’s protégée’s accumulated too much power with the studio casting directors, and while they were initially seen as something of a revolutionary breakthrough, they also became factory generated products. From the Short Stack: Ray Carney on John ... - Slant Magazine Matt Zoller Seitz on Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, from Slant magazine, March 5, 2006:

By the mid-'50’s the Method had hardened into a received style that was as rigid, unimaginative and boring as the styles it had replaced ten years earlier. The slouch, shuffle, furrow and stammer had been turned into recipes for profundity. The actor filled the character up with his own self-indulgent emotions and narcissistic fantasies…Normal, healthy, extroverted social and sexual expression between men and women dropped out of drama. Inward-turning neuroticism became equated with truth. The result was lazy, sentimental acting.

Using money he had earned from the Johnny Staccato (1959-60) television series, Cassavetes enlisted the actors from his workshop along with more lightweight and mobile 16 mm cameras and took to the streets of New York, where the initial shoot, “entirely spontaneous and improvised,” took ten weeks, from February to May in 1957. Cassavetes also decided to plug his movie idea on the radio, which produced surprising results, from Cassavetes on Cassavetes: The Making of Shadows by Ray Carney:

I was going on Jean Shepherd's Night People radio show, because he had plugged Edge of the City, and I wanted to thank him for it. I told Jean about the piece we had done, and how it could be a good film. I said, "Wouldn't it be terrific if [ordinary] people could make movies, instead of all these Hollywood big-wigs who are only interested in business and how much the picture was going to gross and everything?" And he asked if I thought I'd be able to raise the money for it." If people really want to see a movie about people," I answered, "they should just contribute money." For a week afterwards, money came in. At the end it totaled $2,500. And we were committed to start a film. One soldier showed up with five dollars after hitchhiking 300 miles to give it to us. And some really weird girl came in off the street; she had a mustache and hair on her legs and the hair on her head was matted with dirt and she wore a filthy polka-dot dress; she was really bad. After walking into the workshop, this girl got down on her knees, grabbed my pants and said, "I listened to your program last night. You are the Messiah." Anyway, she became our sound editor and straightened out her life. In fact, a lot of people who worked on the film were people who were screwed up – and got straightened out working with the rest of us. We wouldn't take anything bigger than a five dollar bill – though once, when things looked real rough, we did cash a $100 check from Josh Logan.

But we recorded most of Shadows in a dance studio with Bob Fosse and his group dancing above our heads, and we were shooting this movie. So I never considered the sound. We didn't even have enough money to print it, to hear how bad it was. So when we came out, we had Sinatra singing upstairs, and all kinds of boom, dancing feet above us. And that was the sound of the picture. So we spent hours, days, weeks, months, years trying to straighten out this sound. Finally, it was impossible and we just went with it. Well, when the picture opened in London they said, "This is an innovation!" You know? Innovation! We killed ourselves to try to ruin that innovation!

Shooting without permits, running cables and wires down the street, all designed to make quick getaways from the police if needed, Cassavetes invented a kind of guerrilla shooting inside restaurants, looking out their windows onto the street, or capturing the street activity in various parts of New York City. SHADOWS was initially screened in November 1958, when the film had three free midnight screenings, catching the eye of Village Voice film critic Jonas Mekas, one of the leading advocates of American avant-garde cinema, who immediately championed the film, calling it a “spontaneous cinema” masterpiece, “the most frontier-breaking American feature film in at least a decade…More than any other recent American film, (it) presents contemporary reality in a fresh and unconventional manner. The improvisation, spontaneity, and free inspiration that are almost entirely lost in most films from an excess of professionalism are fully used in this film.” From Cassavetes on Cassavetes: The Making of Shadows by Ray Carney:

I went to a theater-owner friend of mine and I said, "Look, we want to show our film and we can fill this theater." It was the Paris Theater in New York and 600 people filled that theater and we turned away another 400 people at the door. About 15 minutes into the film the people started to leave. And they left. And they left! And I began perspiring and the cast was getting angry. We all sat closer and closer together and pretty soon there wasn't anyone in the theater! I think there was one critic in the theater, one critic who was a friend of ours, who walked over to us and said, "This is the most marvelous film I've ever seen in my life!" And I said, "I don't want to hit you right now. I'm a little uptight, not feeling too hot and none of us are, so" And he said, "No. This is really a very good film." So, like all failures, you get a sense of humor about it and you go out and spend the night – when it's bad enough, and this was so bad that it couldn't be repaired.

I could see the flaws in Shadows myself: It was a totally intellectual film – and therefore less than human. I had fallen in love with the camera, with technique, with beautiful shots, with experimentation for its own sake. All I did was exploiting film technique, shooting rhythms, using large lenses – shooting through trees, and windows. It had a nice rhythm to it, but it had absolutely nothing to do with people. Whereas you have to create interest in your characters because this is what audiences go to see. The film was filled with what you might call "cinematic virtuosity" – for its own sake; with angles and fancy cutting and a lot of jazz going on in the background. But the one thing that came at all alive to me after I had laid it aside a few weeks was that just now and again the actors had survived all my tricks. But this did not often happen! They barely came to life.

Cassavetes, however, was not interested in making an overly intellectual, avant-garde film, but wanted to connect with the audience, so he made an adjustment and recalled the actors, reshooting much of the movie again in 1959, this time adhering to a script while still capturing the feel of spontaneity. However, while he kept about half of the original footage in the revised film, the earlier version has remained a source of controversy. When SHADOWS opened commercially in New York in March 1961, a month after BREATHLESS, Mekas was appalled, calling this new effort “a bad commercial film with everything that I was praising completely destroyed.” Cassavetes countered, however, claiming his final cut was in “no way a concession and…a film far superior to the first.” While all prints of the original version were believed lost, in 2004 Boston University professor Ray Carney, author of Cassavetes On Cassavetes and leading Cassavetes scholar, announced the discovery of the original print, which consisted of two reels of 16mm black and white film with optical sound, apparently spending years with the daughter of a downtown Manhattan junk dealer who discovered it abandoned in the New York subway. The 78-minute film played at the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival, some 45 years after the original midnight screenings, having developed the reputation of the ‘holy grail’ of independent cinema, but hasn’t been seen since. Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes’ leading lady and surviving spouse, the executor of his estate, claims the film is stolen property and threatened legal action to prevent the first version from being screened, contending that the SHADOWS film her husband released to the public is the only one that should ever be seen. SHADOWS remains today a seminal work, the most influential independently produced film of its era, a “virtual breakthrough” for American alternative cinema, giving rise to a group of independent filmmakers that still thrive today making often less technically polished, less commercial, low-budget alternatives to bigger budgeted Hollywood studio releases.

Jonathan Rosenbaum from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

John Cassavetes’ exquisite and poignant first feature, shot in 16mm and subsequently blown up to 35mm, centers on two brothers and a sister living together in Manhattan. The oldest, a third-rate nightclub singer (Hugh Hurd), is visibly black, whereas the other two (Ben Carruthers and Leila Goldoni) are sufficiently light-skinned to pass for white. This is the only Cassavetes film made without a script in the usual sense of the term, although Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney has demonstrated at length how the closing title, announcing that the film you have just seen was an “improvisation,” is closer to being a sales pitch than an objective description. In fact Cassavetes and Robert Alan Aurthur wrote most of SHADOWS, basing their work on a workshop improvisation that was carried out under Cassavetes’s supervision. An earlier and shorter version of the film, reportedly less bound by narrative, is apparently lost. [edit – subsequently found in the New York City subway lost and found by Ray Carney, see two articles comparing the two film versions below]

SHADOWS is also the only one of Cassavetes’ films that focuses mainly on young people, with actors using their own first names to increase the feeling of intimacy. Rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, subtlety, and raw feeling emerged so naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film. The movie is contemporaneous with early masterpieces of the French New Wave such as BREATHLESS and 400 BLOWS, and it deserves to be ranked alongside them for the freshness and freedom of its vision. In its portrait of a now-vanished Manhattan during the beat period, it also serves as a poignant time capsule. Tony Ray (the son of director Nicholas Ray), Rupert Crosse, Dennis Sallas, Tom Allen, Davey Jones, and cameos by subsequent Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel and Cassavetes himself round out the cast.

A wonderful jazz score by Charles Mingus featuring alto saxophonist Shafi Hadi plays as essential a role in the film’s emotional pitch. It’s conceivable that Cassavetes made greater films, but along with his final masterpiece, the 1984 film LOVE STREAMS – another picture focusing on the warmth and empathy between siblings – this is the one to cherish.

The long lost original version of Cassavetes' seminal independent film resurfaced late in 2003, when it was discovered in an antique dealer's attic, and was shown at the Rotterdam film festival 2004 - the first time it had been screened in 45 years. This version's reputation derives largely from the accolades bestowed on it by critic and film-maker Jonas Mekas. Although the running time is similar, only about a third of the material here survived in the second cut, which expanded Lelia's character, clarified relationships and is generally more focused. What you get in the first version is more Mingus music, a couple of Sinatra songs, and a very modern, impressionistic snapshot of New York bohemia with scenes linked not by dramatic line but by place, time and mood. Alas, copyright issues may preclude it being seen more widely.

Shadows (1959), directed by John Cassavetes (VIDEO) - Time Out Stephen Garrett from Time Out New York

Watch the trailer for Shadows, directed by John Cassavetes; No. 8 on our list of the 100 best New York movies.

Raw, intimate and spontaneous in a way that’s authentic to the city’s unpredictable rhythms, John Cassavetes’s jazz-steeped portrait of human relationships is a time capsule of Beat Generation urbanites, as well as the epitome of New York’s scrappy ethos—the template for modern independent filmmaking. This interracial drama was conceived, performed and directed in a studied but freestyle manner that grew out of the Method workshop the rogue Cassavetes had founded in his midtwenties. Bankrolled by family, friends and donations, and lensed largely in the auteur’s own apartment (as well as Times Square, Central Park and downtown), the project was a run-and-gun affair shot on weekends and without permits. It exudes a vitality and candor that still inspire. You don’t have Mean Streets without it, let alone the careers of Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and Lena Dunham.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Gabe Klinger

Independent filmmaking, warts and all: the first available film by Cassavetes (an earlier version of SHADOWS has only screened once since it was made, and has been withheld from view by Gena Rowlands) contains every error and every virtue of a non-studio creation. It's still an unprecedented experience, filled with a bursting energy that makes every cut, every line of dialogue a world unto itself. The episodic, loosely developed story details three black siblings in jazzy, beat-era Manhattan going through racial and romantic tensions, professional disappointments, and trying to overcome an overall ennui about being set apart from one another in the big city. Benny (Ben Carruthers) might have easily been a Kerouac character ("What the hell's a literary party?" he smirks to his friends in a coffee shop conversation), while Lelia (Lelia Goldoni) plants the seeds for what would evolve as the free-thinking Cassavetes female (which Lynn Carlin would embody so well in his next feature, FACES). Here is the creation of the modern American cinema virtually overnight.

Shadows (1959) - The Criterion Collection

Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes's 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, and all their progeny. Cassavetes's first feature, which is receiving a 10-day run at Anthology Film Archives in a newly restored print, was a one-film American new wave; with his aggressive sincerity and swaggering integrity, Cassavetes became the prototype for the American independent director—the Method actor turned filmmaker.

Shadows can be bracketed with Breathless, completed the same year, as a low-budget, post-neorealist, pre-cinema-verité Something New. Both are predicated on handheld camera, stolen locations, elliptical editing, and extended bedroom scenes featuring self-conscious performances by 20-year-old actresses acting like they are characters in a movie. But Shadows is more episodic and performer-driven. Using the members of a drama workshop he directed, Cassavetes shot 30 hours of footage based on their improvisations. The Charles Mingus score later added makes the jazz analogue explicit. Indeed, as the movie's principals are black, white, and mulatto, race is crucial to the movie. So is authenticity. Anticipating life in a Warhol movie, Cassavetes's performers struggle to remain in character (in the now) despite miscues, blown lines, and unforeseen improvisations; much of Shadows' naturalism derives from applying a workshop sense of invented personalities to everyday life and a corresponding failure of the characters—or is it the actors?—to successfully live up to their images.

Opening commercially in New York in March 1961 (a month after Breathless), Shadows impressed The New York Times as a near documentary "shot without benefit of a screenplay, without a word of dialogue written down, without a commanding director to tell the actors precisely what to do." In fact, the movie had been substantially reshot and re-edited since its first public screening in late 1958. It's appropriate that the restored print is having its premiere at Anthology's Jonas Mekas Theater. Then writing for the Voice, Mekas was Shadows' greatest critical champion, at least until Cassavetes revised the movie for narrative coherence a year later. Ray Carney has published a framework for the original version in his BFI Shadows monograph. It would be an amazing event if the ur-Shadows were ever to re-emerge.

Alexa Brighton from Cinema Scope (link lost):

“Shadows was an experiment. It predominantly came out of a workshop. We were improvising on a story, one that was in my mind. It was my secret. Every scene in Shadows was very simple; they were predicated on people having problems that were overcome with other problems…There was a struggle because firstly I had never done a film before, and secondly the actors had to find the confidence to have quiet at times, and not just constantly talk. This took about the first three weeks of the schedule. Eventually all this material was thrown away, and then everyone became cool and easy and relaxed and they had their own things to say, which was the point.” -- John Cassavetes, 1968

All innovation comes from experimentation: some “works” and some doesn’t. What does it mean to have an innovation “work”? The question of whether the arts evolve or go through a multitude of revolutions which change the face of that art is tricky. Did Picasso’s venture into cubism irreversibly alter the nature of painting, or was it a diversion from representational art? Should we even try to tie work of artists together in -- perhaps falsely -- cohesive ways, or should we should acknowledge that artists don’t create to be compared? With film, the questions are even more compounded, because it took a staggeringly brief period for the craftsmen to realize that the camera did not have to remain motionless, simulating the experience of the theatre, but they could, through editing and camerawork, create worlds on celluloid.

Where does John Cassavetes fit into all of this, and why is his first film, Shadows, is such a landmark in the history of cinema? Because he created a film that defied immediate characterization: it was a fiction film in that the events portrayed were not “real,” yet Cassavetes didn’t borrow from any of the techniques that make Hollywood narrative film so identifiable. Films before his had deviated from glossy, “standard” film editing and lighting techniques, but Cassavetes’ approach to acting method and camera technique was unprecedented. That is, within the realm of “fiction.”

Two men argue in a studio filled with talentless chorus girls rehearsing a musical number. The obscenely catchy “A real mad chick” tune drones on and on, drifting back with its refrain just as you’ve managed to let it go and pay attention to the argument at the front of the room. The men’s faces are right up at the camera, and you can hardly even see the girls, but the sound is so powerful that you’re both dreading and anticipating the part of the song you already feel you’ve known -- and wish you hadn’t -- forever. And then you remember -- “There’s a conversation going on. I probably have to know what they’re talking about.”

Around 1960, when Shadows was made, cinema verité was emerging as a new approach to documentary filmmaking. Canadian documentary filmmakers were among the early pioneers of the movement, with Michel Brault’s Les Racquetteurs (1958) widely recognized as spearheading the popularization of the new, modern approach to filming real events made possible by equipment invented for easy transportation during the Second World War.

The characteristics of cinema verite -- synchronized sound, hand-held cameras and an immediate, spontaneous and unobtrusive approach to filming -- were radical changes from the tightly-packaged, voiceover narrated documentaries of the thirties that presented its profilmic events in a didactic manner, leaving little room for multiple interpretations. The idea was that the new documentary could best ‘represent reality’ by allowing the camera ‘passively’ to record and observe, and that this would attain the highest possible level of objectivity.

Whether this is true is a debate that has been ardently fought over the years, but the cinema verite movement practiced in Canada (the Faces of Canada series of the early sixties, 1963’s Pour la suite du monde), the United States (Robert Drew’s Primary, the films of Frederick Wiseman) and France (Jean Rouch’s Une chronique d’un ete) had a very short life span. It was soon thought that it was not possible to delve seriously into an issue if the camera was observing without the accompaniment of verbal explanation by a third party. The documentary with narration and “expert” interviews was born -- and survived.

What of fiction film? We have the neatly tied together narrative film with motivation-driven characters, conflict-mounting plots and cathartic resolutions. We had the Italian neorealists and the French New Wave, giving birth to a grittier realism and the European art film respectively. But what was it about Shadows that makes it so unique, and why weren’t its techniques adopted by later filmmakers?

There is no pretension to Cassavetes’ film, nor a self-consciousness of cinema as an art form. It has the stunning raw power of a film that uses a crude approach to turn a group of unknown actors into people we could conceivably meet on the street. The ‘reality-feel’ of what is presented is achieved in several ways, using cinema verite techniques.

Firstly, there is the use of sound. Unlike standard Hollywood films, sound has not been manipulated to drown out background noise and emphasize dialogue. With scenes such as the chorus girl rehearsal, Cassavetes’ aim is not to tell us what to listen to, but to simulate our actual encounters with sound in the world. The camera is recording this event -- two men conversing in a music-filled room - and we’re free to mix in with the chaos and choose what catches our attention; or, at the very least, to struggle to listen to the conversation as we would in life, say, at a bar.

The second technique used to powerful effect is the close-up. Cassavetes did away with the standard shot-reverse-shot that typically has the actors framed from the shoulders up (usually done to catch the make-up-aided, radiation of the star). Instead, the camera relentlessly lingers on often-cropped faces, so we catch intimate glimpses of faces without eyes or mouths. These almost disturbing shots allow us into a personal space rarely experienced in cinema. Cassavetes’ roving, shaky camera takes us into their lives without mercy – it’s no wonder they rehearsed for months to virtually become the characters on screen.

Our group of hoodlums decide to cultivate their more serious side, and head off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They stand, small, in leather and sunglasses, wandering amid statues from centuries past. A couple of them just don’t get it, and don’t want to. For the sake of argument, one spews out the thrills of art appreciation. The camera cuts to the last man, standing awed in front of an African mask. He is the only one that is speechless. As they’re about to leave, the camera pulls back, and the conversation continues as before - quick, heated, overlapping chatter. The key phrase is almost missed, said by someone who’s given no evidence of understanding the import of his own words: “You don’t have to understand it! If you feel it, you feel it, that’s it man.”

This is exactly what Cassavetes was saying. We live everyday without an inkling of the bigger picture, and all we can ask for is to feel, to receive energy from the people and things around. The understanding comes later. Nothing much happens in Shadows. Nothing much happens when you get together with a few friends for an evening, either, except for the million little things -- a changed expression, a glimmer of empathy, a meaning-laden rebuke -- that somehow reflect everything there is to know about everything you care about. Cassavetes gives us a work of fiction, but with exhilirating immediacy and clarity, and very real emotion. He makes us forget we’re watching a movie: instead, we’re living with these people. He defied his viewers to forget film and re-engage with life, and what image-maker could endorse such a self-defeating approach?

Shadows: Eternal Times Square Criterion essay by Gary Giddins, also seen here: Criterion Collection film essay [Gary Giddins]

Shadows Ray Carney’s discussion of SHADOWS from his website

Ray Carney talks about researching his Shadows and Cassavetes on Cassavetes books Ray Carney website

Cassavetes on Cassavetes: The Making of Shadows Ray Carney website

John Cassavetes' Shadows: Two Versions by Ray Carney

John Cassavetes' Shadows: Press Release Ray Carney website

Shadows and Pull My Daisy Ray Carney website

BFI | Sight & Sound | Open Ear Open Eye Tom Charity compares the long missing version with the 1959 theatrical release from Sight and Sound, March 2004

click here Ray Carney’s discovery of the original version of SHADOWS, also appearing here: The searcher February 21, 2004 from the Guardian

click here press reaction to the discovery, Ray Carney website

click here Gena Rowlands reaction to the discovery, Ray Carney website

Interviews with Carney about Rowlands Ray Carney website

The searcher Ryan Gilbey’s follow-up article March 17, 2004 from the Guardian

The two versions Ray Carney’s look at the two versions of SHADOWS

Page 60 Ray Carney offers short scenes from the original version and offers links to tell the SHADOWS story

Filmmaker Magazine | Spring 2004: SHADOWING SHADOWS Jason Guerrasio on Carney’s discovery of the original film from Filmmaker magazine, Spring 2004

Senses of Cinema – Imperfection Gilberto Perez from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

Identity in the Films of Cassavetes Maximilian Le Cain from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

From the Short Stack: Ray Carney on John ... - Slant Magazine Matt Zoller Seitz on Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, from Slant magazine, March 5, 2006

John Cassavetes’s Shadows: Deconstruction or Evolution John Shaw

Shadows - The Dark Stuff // Jazzwise Magazine

Criterion Reflections [David Blakeslee] also seen here: Shadows (1959) - #251

Storybook Characters: John Cassavetes's ... - Slant Magazine Jason Fitzgerald, May 20, 2013

How John Cassavetes' Shadows changed American movies forever. Elbert Ventura from Slate, November 11, 2009

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

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

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

'The John Cassavetes Collection: Shadows & Faces' Angelos Koutsourakis also reviews FACES from the BFI Blu-Ray release from Pop Matters

Chris Dashiell at CineScene

Shadows (1959) - Amateur Movie Reviews Nuggie Nuggerton

One Movie a Day David Wester

Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages [Matthew Wilder]

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Chasing Cassavetes' Shadows | Film | The Guardian Ray Carney from The Guardian, February 21, 2004

Shadows: No 19 best arthouse film of all time Steve Rose from The Guardian, October 19, 2010

New York Times [Bosley Crowther] March 22, 1961, also seen here: Movie Review - Shadows - Film Improvised Under Cassavetes ...

PopMatters [Michael Barrett]

JOHNNY STACCATO – TV series

USA 27 thirty-minute episodes from September 1959 to March 1960

Film Comment J. Hoberman looks back at Johnny Staccato, March 2005 issue (excerpt)

"A smooth man on the ivories, hot on the trigger, and cool in a jam," so the paperback tie-in for the 1959-60 television series Johnny Staccato describes its protagonist. "He's the toughest private eye to hit America in a decade." That might be one way to describe John Cassavetes.

DVD Verdict [Paul Corupe] one episode included in a Crime Dramas DVD

Undoubtedly the highlight of this release is an episode of Johnny Staccato, a cool noirish series about a jazz musician P.I. played by John Cassavetes in the same year that he directed Shadows. Though only half-an-hour long and obviously shot on the cheap, the show packs quite a punch, with tough-guy dialogue, wild twists and turns, and evocative black and white cinematography. "Tempted" sees Johnny protecting a diamond necklace owned by the amorous ex-wife of a former friend, and getting robbed for his trouble. Was it all a set-up by the femme fatale after the insurance money? Johnny thinks it is, and gets an insurance investigator to help lay a trap. The episode may not be the best the series had to offer, but it should tip audiences to this no-frills, bare-knuckle mystery drama that nicely showcased Cassavetes' acting skill. Johnny Staccato is long overdue on DVD—it's too bad that we don't get everything released as a season set rather than this teaser. The show looks great, too, easily comparable to the digital transfers of other recent Universal shows from the same era.

The Rewind Forums DVD Review

This series lasted only one season, 27 episodes aired between September 1959 to March 1960 and featured actor/director John Cassavetes as the title character, a Jazz pianist who moonlights as a private detective. Set in New York, this noir-influenced series paid tribute to the likes of Robert Bresson and Samuel Fuller. Every episode had Johnny faced with a new crime to solve and nothing is ever quite as it seems. In this episode featured on this disc “Tempted” (which was the 10th episode aired) guest starred Elizabeth Montgomery of "Bewitched" (1964-1972) fame. An old friend crashes back into Johnny’s life with a valuable necklace, convinced she’s being followed for the loot, Johnny agrees to help her until the necklace can be returned to the Jewelry shop in which she works. Shadowy figures and a double-cross all make their faces shown by the end.

This is a good example of formulaic television, taking the noir genre and toning it down for TV, the story is also condensed and fells that way as an ending is quickly gotten to. The show works only for its casting and cool music, Cassavetes is perfectly cast in the lead and commands the screen. Overall it’s an enjoyable show that salutes the best of noir in a limited capacity. Perhaps one day this entire series can be released on DVD.

User reviews from imdb Author: raysond from Chapel Hill, North Carolina

JOHNNY STACCATO: Produced by Revue Productions/Universal Television and ran for just one season on NBC-TV from 1959-1960. In all 27 episodes were produced all in black and white. Starring John Cassavetes with Bert Freed and Eduardo Ciannelli. Filmed on location in New York City.

This was in fact one of the coolest, hippest detective shows that I ever had the pleasure of watching and believe me this was just one "cool" incredible show that centered around the mixture of intrigue,suspense and mystery and all with a truly remarkable jazz score! However the censors canned this show for being too violent or too explicit, but who cares! This short-lived series showcased John Cassavetes' terrific acting ability which would propel him to the next level as one of the most influential American artists in American cimema. In other words, this would be the only TV-series that Cassavetes would star in. He plays Johnny Staccato, a jazz musician who moonlights as a private investigator who is surrounded by mobsters, beatniks, hop-heads crooked musicians, and femme fatales. It's was such a treat that certain guest stars would make their appearances on this show: stars like Martin Landau, Micheal Landon, Yvonne Craig, Tina Louise, Norman Fell, Jack Klugman, and the musical stylings of Shelly Mann and his band. If you should ever catch this show, you'll be glad you did since cable channel TRIO shows this short-lived series every so often. Worth viewing.

User reviews from imdb Author: Dewey1960 from United States

This short-lived (one season, 1959/60) television detective series is without a doubt, the definitive example of what can now be termed TV Noir, riding high atop a list including such programs as Peter Gunn and 77 Sunset Strip. But JOHNNY STACCATO had much more going for it than those other shows, mainly the presence of the mighty John Cassavetes who starred as the jazz pianist turned Greenwich Village private detective. He also directed a handful of the 27 total episodes. The only other regular character was Waldo (veteran character actor Eduardo Ciannelli), the crusty old proprietor of Waldo's, the jazz club where Staccato hung out. On any given show the "house band" might include Johnny Williams (before he became Academy Award-winning composer JOHN Williams), Red Mitchell, Ray Brown, Barney Kessel and Shelly Manne. In addition to Cassavetes, other directors who stepped in were Joe Pevney, John Brahm, Boris Sagal and Paul Henreid. Among the crack cinematographers on the show were Ben Kline ("Detour") and Lionel Lindon ("The Manchurian Candidate"). Each of the 27 episodes are fantastic in their way, but among the stand-outs are: MURDER FOR CREDIT with Charles McGraw as an egocentric jazz musician; THE NATURE OF THE NIGHT with Dean Stockwell as a psychotic slasher; EVIL with Alexander Scourby as a corrupt religious leader; FLY BABY FLY with Gena Rowlands as the target of a bomb planted on an airplane that Staccato's also on; TEMPTED with Elizabeth Montgomery as an old flame of Johnny's; DOUBLE FEATURE with Cassavetes in a dual role; THE LIST OF DEATH with the great Paul Stewart, SOLOMON with Elisha Cook Jr as a megalomaniac attorney and Cloris Leachman as a mysterious vixen; THE MASK OF JASON with a pre- Dick Van Dyke Mary Tyler Moore; A NICE LITTLE TOWN, a Twilight-Zonish episode and THE WILD REED with Harry Guardino as a heroin addicted jazz musician. Lots of VHS tapes and now DVDs are floating around offering up most of the episodes with varying quality, depending on the original source material. Many are taken directly from 16mm television prints. It's truly criminal that MCA doesn't release a full DVD collection of this show, given its incredible credentials and consistently excellent quality. I CANNOT RECOMMEND THESE EPISODES MORE HIGHLY, they are simply superb in every respect. 10 out of 10.

User reviews from imdb Author: Bill Milosz from Chicago

One of the best TV detective shows. Cool, if improbable. The gritty NYC location shots compare favorably with other great programs of the era like NAKED CITY, but are somewhat more moody. The beatnik characters are less goofy than the patronizing look at the Beats that Peter Gunn features. It's just an altogether hip show.

EPISODE LIST http://epguides.com/JohnnyStaccato/ Season 1

1. 1- 1 12901 10 Sep 59 The Naked Truth

2. 1- 2 12906 17 Sep 59 Murder for Credit [Murder for Credit – directed by Cassavetes]

3. 1- 3 12912 24 Sep 59 Parents

4. 1- 4 12904 8 Oct 59 Shop of the Four Winds

5. 1- 5 12914 15 Oct 59 The Nature of the Night

6. 1- 6 12916 22 Oct 59 Viva, Paco!

7. 1- 7 12918 29 Oct 59 Evil     [Evil – directed by Cassavetes]

8. 1- 8 12902 5 Nov 59 Murder in Hi-fi

9. 1- 9 12915 12 Nov 59 Fly, Baby, Fly

10. 1-10 12913 19 Nov 59 Tempted

11. 1-11 12911 26 Nov 59 The Poet's Touch

12. 1-12 12926 10 Dec 59 A Piece of Paradise     [A Piece of Paradise – directed by Cassavetes]

13. 1-13 12923 17 Dec 59 The Return

14. 1-14 12922 24 Dec 59 The Unwise Men

15. 1-15 12921 31 Dec 59 Collector's Item

16. 1-16 12907 7 Jan 60 Man in the Pit

17. 1-17 12930 14 Jan 60 The Only Witness

18. 1-18 12927 21 Jan 60 Night of Jeopardy                [Night of Jeopardy – directed by Cassavetes]

19. 1-19 12931 28 Jan 60 Double Feature

20. 1-20 12929 4 Feb 60 List of Death

21. 1-21 12925 11 Feb 60 Solomon     [Solomon – directed by Cassavetes]

22. 1-22 12920 18 Feb 60 An Act of Terror

23. 1-23 12903 25 Feb 60 An Angry Young Man

24. 1-24 12939 3 Mar 60 The Mask of Jason

25. 1-25 12935 10 Mar 60 A Nice Little Town

26. 1-26 12919 17 Mar 60 Swinging Long Hair

27. 1-27 12905 24 Mar 60 The Wild Reed

Beat Street: Johnny Staccato - Film Comment J. Hoberman looks back at Johnny Staccato, March 2005

“A smooth man on the ivories, hot on the trigger, and cool in a jam,” so the paperback tie-in for the 1959-60 television series Johnny Staccato describes its protagonist. “He’s the toughest private eye to hit America in a decade.” That might be one way to describe John Cassavetes.

Cassavetes was just 30 when he took the gig as a Greenwich Village shamus with a penchant for jazz piano. Staccato (the softening “Johnny” was later added, over Cassavetes’ objections) may have been a one-season wonder, but it enabled its leading man to underwrite Shadows, throw work to his pals, and hone his directing chops, while providing the closest thing he would ever have to a glamorous star vehicle. Cassavetes heralded himself in each episode with a jangling five-second montage. Scampering down a back-alley fire escape, he dodged and vogued, ran like a duck, broke a window and squeezed off a shot, peering through the shattered glass with a look of pure angst.

The half-hour show was one of 30 telefilm series to debut during the 1959-60 season (others included The Untouchables and The Twilight Zone). NBC scheduled Staccato opposite ABC’s hit hillbilly sitcom The Real McCoys: “From West Vir-gi-nee they came to stay in sunny Cal-i-for-ni-ay!!!” Pure counter-programming, Staccato was set almost entirely in a nocturnal Manhattan populated mainly by creeps, junkies, and show-biz bottom feeders. Most episodes open with Johnny jamming at Waldo’s, a MacDougal Street jazz cellar presided over by venerable character actor Eduardo Ciannelli. The (always white) sidemen sitting in with Pete Candolini’s combo include guitarist Barney Kessel, vibraphonist Red Norvo, and drummer Shelley Manne, but, nearly always in a suit, Staccato has the stingiest lapels and narrowest tie in the room.

One of four private-eye shows to premiere that season (an event Time deemed cover-worthy), Staccato was inspired by Blake Edwards’s Peter Gunn, a hit for NBC the previous year. Both shows signified sophistication with their intrusive fake jazz—the disciplined wah-wah of Henry Mancini’s cocktail tinkle versus the strident horns of Elmer Bernstein’s agitated big-city blooze. But rather than a cool L.A. bon vivant, Staccato was an edgy Little Italy street kid with a tense smirk and a barking laugh. Cassavetes had played many a juvenile delinquent during the golden age of live TV, and he brought that recent past to his detective persona. Johnny clearly loved grabbing a big slob by the lapels, and he managed to kill someone in virtually every episode, albeit with remorse: “That’s why I need Waldo’s.”

Staccato’s show tolerated a higher degree of moral ambiguity than Gunn’s. And his world was sleazier. Although produced in Los Angeles, Staccato regularly complicated its back-lot geography with an assortment of Manhattan locations—sometimes annotated by Johnny. (Jumping on the IRT, he notes that “the quickest way to get uptown in the middle of the day is underground.”) Always available for second-unit work in Manhattan, Cassavetes can be seen darting beneath the West Side Highway or pacing the Bowery, cruising the Deuce before ducking into Sardi’s, attending the fights at the St. Nicholas arena and confronting a killer in the empty Polo Grounds. One episode introduces Spanish Harlem as New York’s newest immigrant barrio; in another, Chinatown stands in for the city’s nonexistent “Little Tokyo.” But the show’s spiritual home is its imaginary Greenwich Village.

Staccato materialized during the season of the TV private eye and the year of the beatnik and managed to combine them both. The sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, another new show, featured a comic beatnik named Maynard G. Krebs. A beat musical, The Nervous Set, had opened (and closed) on Broadway just before Staccato began shooting during the summer of 1959. Time ran four pieces on the beats that year, and the week after Life‘s multi-page spread “Squaresville USA vs. Beatsville,” Staccato aired a mad, bongo-driven episode about a pair of crazy kids, shacked up in a cold-water pad, who try to sell their unborn baby. “Parents” reeks of a keyed-up intensity that, thanks in part to its leading man’s jittery affect, was the show’s stock in trade.

As Staccato (a name he stretches out with unmistakable irony in the show’s introductory episode), Cassavetes sprinkles his discourse with offhanded jive—”Man, I thought you’d flip. You bend me, baby!”—delivered between drags on his dangling cigarette. Hardly shy about dismissing fellow musicians (or indeed anyone) as “square,” Johnny is himself something of a moldy fig. He disdains bebop and is driven crazy when, in the gloriously demented “Wild Reed” episode, an obnoxious hophead sax player (Harry Guardino) attempts to make like Ornette Coleman. Nor is this hipster above petit bourgeois moralizing. More than once, he cautions some lissome guest star against “the pitfalls of beatnik living.” But, like, who exactly is the sellout?

Cassavetes was editing his second “commercial” version of Shadows while moonlighting as a private eye, and the movie cast its own shadow on Staccato. Times Square’s neon wilderness was a frequent backdrop, and Shadows cast members put in fleeting appearances: star Lelia Goldoni turns up as a sedately petulant Village chick and producer-editor-extra Maurice McEndree as a crazed ventriloquist. A smooth manager in Shadows, Rupert Crosse played a more literal killer in Staccato. Ben Carruthers never made the scene, but both of his buddies did: Big Tom Allen turned up as a scarily violent Korean War vet, and little Dennis Sallas had a regular job tending Waldo’s bar. (He’s relieved in one episode by Dean Stockwell’s psycho slasher.) A number of later Cassavetes associates can also be found, notably John Marley, Paul Stewart, and Nick Dennis—and there’s one episode that allows the star to riff and flirt with his missus, Gena Rowlands.

It was November 11, 1959, the night before that particular show was telecast, that the second Shadows had its epochal premiere on a bill with Pull My Daisy at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16. A New American Cinema was born! According to biographer Ray Carney, Cassavetes immediately tried to break his Staccato contract. Among other strategies, he publicly attacked the show’s sponsors when “The Wild Reed” was bumped—as inappropriate—from Thanksgiving night. (The show ultimately aired as Staccato‘s season swan song on March 24, 1960.) Another ploy involved getting his picture taken with recently busted Jake LaMotta. Still, sponsor Salem cigarettes could scarcely have been displeased with their chain-smoking shamus.

“I want to not solve some crimes too,” Cassavetes protested. While that existential prospect would never come to pass, Cassavetes did manage to direct five Staccato episodes and co-wrote another. Their visual style varies—”Solomon” comes on like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “A Piece of Paradise” is filled with moody close-ups, “Night of Jeopardy” is blatantly Wellesian in its expressionism—but, in every case, hysteria is a given. In “Murder for Credit” and “A Piece of Paradise,” the obligatory Waldo’s jam has the fingerpoppin’ frenzy that opens Shadows. “Night of Jeopardy” transposes a similarly frantic scene to the local informer’s pad. (Whatever happened to Frank London, who was a Staccato semi-regular as Shad the quacking stool pigeon?)

As a freelance wise guy and two-fisted yenta, the Staccato character functions as a de facto director. He knows more than anybody else, and, for their own good, he’s forever telling people what to do. It’s even possible that the grim glare Cassavetes fixed on his fellow actors, particularly those who had been his students, provoked some sort of behavioral response. But it is in the episodes he signed that the performers get to wail. Carney notes, with some understatement, that these are all “character studies.” Indeed, invariably, Cassavetes stops the action—sometimes more than once—to let a chosen actor take a solo.

“Maybe the critics won’t like it, but I kinda think maybe you cats will,” an overbearing musician hectors the Waldo’s regulars in the first of the Cassavetes episodes, “Murder for Credit.” He could be speaking for the director. Dependable ham Elisha Cook Jr. gets to rant in two shows, first as a skid-row drunk and then as the world’s greatest criminal lawyer. Cassavetes delivers his own righteous diatribe in the former and treats himself to a bravura scene in the latter, browbeating Cook’s beautiful, witchy client (Cloris Leachman), a professional peacenik, during the course of a highly irregular prison visit. The director’s cross-examination takes on a distinct acting-exercise quality, perhaps accentuated by Leachman’s being a member of that Cassavetes bte noire, the Actors Studio. “It was pitiful—a woman revealed right to her core,” he gloats after goading the pacifist to murderous violence.

Watch two-score Johnny Staccato episodes and you have to wonder if American television had ever seen a more impatient, impulsive, hyperactive, twitchy protagonist? As a presence, Cassavetes is less a flashback to James Dean than a preview of jumpy ethnic live-wires like De Niro and Pacino. What’s more, he’s a scold. In “A Nice Little Town,” which Cassavetes co-wrote, Staccato leaves the Big Apple’s mean streets to deliver a snarling denunciation of small-town hypocrisy. The locals have not only allowed a meek little Communist to be lynched in his own living room but enabled the subsequent murder of his patriotic pretty sister. Staccato has reason to be mad, although, even when things end well, he’s liable to be supremely pissed.

Given the forced enthusiasm that frequently shades into exasperation and even disgust, Cassavetes’ Staccato is one swaggering step away from being a crank or perhaps stalking off the set. It’s a pleasure to see him knock back shots at Waldo’s bar—not that they help much. Cassavetes projects so much nervous energy that virtually every show has his character divided against himself. In “Double Feature,” he plays his own evil doppelgänger. A hit man mean enough to squash a kid’s ping-pong ball, his killer stare, obsessive work attitude, and monumental sense of irritation are only a few degrees from Johnny’s. The episode ends with a Cassavetes-on-Cassavetes shootout-the bad self enjoying a wildly baroque death collapse on a handy pinball machine.

Johnny Staccato has many curiosities and a few near-classic episodes—the quasi Pop Front boxing saga “Viva Paco!,” the sub-Subterraneans “Poet’s Touch,” the Twilight Zone creepy “Act of Terror”—but the most authentic thing is Cassavetes’s anxiety. Again and again, he signals that Staccato has just too friggin’ much on his mind—and do ya mind? Communicating a rage barely contained by his cashmere threads and the show’s claustrophobic 24-minute format, the volatile star often seems to be wondering why he should be doing this at all.

Between Action and Cut - March brief reference to Cassavetes in Johnny Staccato by John Gallagher from the National Board of Review

Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean)

TOO LATE BLUES C+ 79

USA (103 mi) 1961

When TOO LATE BLUES was over I thought I would be over too. And then Paramount asked me if I’d like to sign a long-term contract. At that point I realized that success and failure weren’t necessarily success and failure. I had heard so much about people who fail and then get enormous contracts. I never could quite believe it, until it happened to me. Paramount upped my salary to $125,000 a picture. I subsequently learned that [Paramount’s Marty Racklin] had to go to his stockholders and tell them I was a bright guy. He’d built me up, taken a gamble on a guy who wasn’t turning out very well, and he had no real option but to go with me and hope I was smart enough to learn. And I did learn. I learned all the tricks: to get a big office and to ask for anything and everything and insist on it. I told them I wouldn’t do another film unless I wanted to do it and unless I could do it my own way.

—John Cassavetes, from the book ‘Cassavetes on Cassavetes’ by Ray Carney

After the success in Europe of Shadows (1959) and a short-lived TV show Johnny Staccato where Cassavetes plays a private eye who sides as a jazz pianist in Greenwich Village (though shot entirely in Los Angeles), Cassavetes was offered a chance to direct his first studio film at Paramount, which the producers (specifically Marty Racklin) felt could target the youth market. While he signed a contract to develop his own script, it was originally conceived by Richard Carr who he met on the TV show, asking if he wouldn’t come up with something, choosing to rework the third of three stories submitted, where Cassavetes wrote the first half with Richard Carr writing the second half. He was unable to make any changes within a month of the shoot, and certainly no revisions on the set, as everything had to be worked out ahead of time for a 6-week shooting schedule. Additionally, Cassavetes wanted Montgomery Clift and Gena Rowlands for the two leads, while the studio insisted upon pop singer Bobby Darin (somewhat stiff in his first dramatic role) and Stella Stevens, a Playmate of the Year just the year before in January 1960, also considered at the time one of the ten most photographed women in the world. Cassavetes also lost the battle to shoot the scenes entirely in New York City’s Greenwich Village jazz scene, with the Studio opting for a nearly entirely interior studio shot film. These little differences of opinion led to a more reserved and suffocating film, as the Hollywood system itself took all the living and breathing life out of the original conception. What remains is a downbeat story of a jazz pianist selling out his friends for his own chance at success, one that mimics Cassavetes own career move from New York to Los Angeles to star in a TV show, with hopes of breaking into the movie industry. While Cassavetes felt the movie got away from him, unable to do any significant rewrites to correct what he felt were script flaws, he was stuck with meeting the 6-week shoot, which meant handing in a movie he wasn’t at all happy with.

Nonetheless, from a Studio’s point of view, even though the film was a critical and box office flop, the fact that the movie was competently completed on time led to their offering him a contract and a raise, which led to his second feature, A Child Is Waiting (1963), where Cassavetes had a meltdown with producer Stanley Kramer, again over the direction of the film, disowning the film when Kramer basically fired him to finish and recut the movie himself. Despite these run-ins, they gave Cassavetes invaluable experience in shooting a motion picture which eventually led to Faces (1968), written and shot in his own way, using his own timetable, starring his wife Gena Rowlands, and is still considered one of the more groundbreaking works in American independent film. TOO LATE BLUES, on the other hand, is purely a product of the Studio system. Ironically released the same year as Martin Ritt’s Paris Blues (1961), starring two American jazz musicians in Paris, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, also the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington who both make appearances in the film, Cassavetes was originally up for the Paul Newman role, so he was familiar with the script, which bears a few casting and nightclub similarities. Like that film which was all about music, where the lurid romance was secondary, Cassavetes wanted to throw in 17 new jazz pieces into his film, all featured during the nightclub sequences using the musicians that he met on the Johnny Staccato TV show, some of whom are musicians used here, but this was not to be. The opening two and a half minutes of the film may be the most inventive in the entire film, seen here: Bobby Darin in Too Late Blues Part 1 of 12 - YouTube (7:57), similar to his realistic use of children in his next movie, and is one of the few natural scenes in the movie that literally feels unstaged and uninhibited.

Bobby Darin plays a character named Ghost, who leads an undiscovered jazz quintet seen playing in the opening, which includes Seymour Cassel (in only his second picture) on bass, guys who have been working together for years but are still forced into taking whatever gigs come their way. Hanging out in a neighborhood bar afterwards, much of the film is set after hours when the guys are drinking, dancing, playing cards, or goofing off, unfortunately featuring the loud overacting of the Greek bar owner Nick Dennis, who, like many of the cast, were brought over from the TV show, including the sleazy agent (Everett Chambers, a producer on the show), the owner of the recording studio (Val Avery), and the Countess (Marilyn Clark). Ghost’s agent is quickly seen undermining the fragile esteem of the group’s female singer Jess (Stella Stevens), Ghost’s girlfriend, where he’s something of an oily double crosser throughout, always using underhanded tactics to either backstab or showcase his represented talent, who never seem to get a fair shake, but he’s the shady representative of the exclusively financial interests of the music industry, the kind of snake that seems to thrive in the sewer. After a volatile trial number in a recording studio leads to a follow up recording the next day, the guys (and girl) are out celebrating, where a drunk customer (Vince Edwards) gets into a drunken brawl with the boys, challenging and humiliating Ghost in front of his girl, which sends him plunging into self pity, wanting nothing more to do with any of them. In Cassavetes original script, there is a ten-minute dreamlike sequence where Ghost goes out and picks up a girl, spending the night together, but this sequence was cut by the Studio in favor of Jess going home with one of the other members of the band and sleeping with him, effectively ending their relationship.

Devastated by the change of events, Ghost shows up at the studio but walks out on the band, calling them a bunch of amateurs he picked up off the street, making a deal with his agent to find gigs showcasing his talent, where he is sponsored by an older women of means, the Countess, who receives sexual favors in return. This sleazy road to stardom never materializes, sending Ghost back to his roots years later searching for his original band, playing in a dive somewhere in Los Angeles. Also searching for Jess, where Stella Stevens downward spiral is one of the few superbly realized scenes, but one can easily imagine Rowlands and similar drinking scenes with men at the beginning of Faces, he finds her sadly working the customers at the bar of a flophouse, an intensely sad portrait of dreams gone awry, where she doesn’t wish to be reminded of her former life, creating a sense of hopeless melodrama and despair before Ghost hauls her off to confront the band. One by one they reject him, rebuffing his attempts to reconcile their differences, until Jess, off to the side of the stage, starts singing the melody of a song they shared together, bringing them back together again with a reunified sense of optimism and hope as the curtain falls. Once again, this is the Studio imposed upbeat ending, as originally Ghost rejoins the band and starts playing the piano, where the music immediately comes alive as Jess walks out of the club, as he had walked out on her years earlier, where the drive for success has a deep-seeded personal price. One problem with the use of music in this film is the audience can’t tell the difference between the more creative, supposedly original, avant-garde jazz music and the more sell-out, commercial music that audiences tend to prefer listening to. Much of it written by David Raskin, it tends to fall in the middle somewhere of “pseudo-jazz” where there is little distinction drawn between the various styles, which diminishes the theme of an artist selling out for commercial success, as we never really hear what real art sounds like. This is a stark contrast with Paris Blues, for instance, which features Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, where the feverish intensity of live music in jammed nightclubs couldn’t be more exhilarating.

Cassavetes' Works: Too Late Blues Ray Carney

Too Late Blues, Cassavetes’ first studio film, portrays the life of John "Ghost" Wakefield, a talented jazz musician who must pit his artistic ideals against the manipulations of his agent and studio executives, and against his own self doubt. Ghost’s struggle to choose between the hot jazz that he loves and the easy listening music that will bring him an audience and financial reward parallels Cassavetes’ indecision between Hollywood and independent filmmaking. 1962 (133m. B+W) Stars Bobby Darin

MoMA | Too Late Blues

Directed by John Cassavetes. Screenplay by Cassavetes, Richard Carr. Music by David Raksin. With Bobby Darin, Stella Stevens. Hoping to capitalize on the success and style of Shadows, Paramount hired Cassavetes to make this brilliantly scored, low-budget drama about a hotheaded, idealistic jazz pianist-composer who alienates his band and his lover. Many of Cassavetes's themes and devices are in evidence: male bonding, self-destructiveness, the fear of selling out, and the "authenticity" of jazz and improvisational acting. The score by Hollywood composer David Raksin (Laura) features such first-rate musicians as Shelley Manne, Red Mitchell, and Benny Carter. 103 min.

Too Late Blues | tiff.net

Invited to make his major studio directorial debut after Shadows became a critical cause célèbre, Cassavetes returned to the world of jazz music with this story about John “Ghost” Wakefield (heartthrob Bobby Darin), the idealistic leader of a jazz combo that prefers to play “hot” jazz in the park rather than sell out to the establishment. When his agent introduces him to Jess (Stella Stevens), a gorgeous yet mediocre singer, he falls hopelessly in love and abandons his integrity for a shot at fame. Despite its glossy Hollywood facade, Too Late Blues is as intensely personal as any of Cassavetes’ films, an “exploration of Cassavetes’ own mixed feelings about commercial compromise: of the emotional and social problems of working within the system and the perhaps greater problems of trying to stand entirely outside it” (Ray Carney).

Drifters and Dreamers: Cassavetes’s Too Late Blues Julian Anton from Northwest Chicago Film Society

Bobby Darin is straight-laced blues musician John “Ghost” Wakefield; Stella Stevens is the singer who convinces Ghost to leave his band in search of fame (and breaks his heart). This was the first film John Cassavetes directed for a major studio (and his first in 35mm), and his relationship with Paramount was tumultuous (an article in the New York Times suggests that Cassavetes was slated to direct a string of low-budget pictures for the studio that were shelved after the film’s release). The result is a picture about the dangers of selling out that ends up as naïve and sincere as Cassavetes’s appeal in the trailer: “This is a film about people I know,” he says, “the night people, the jazz musicians, the drifters and dreamers, the floaters, the chicks, the smilers, the hangers-on, the phonies, too much sex, not enough love—and they live in a world of too late blues.” (JA) 103 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from the Radio Cinema Film Archive

Too Late Blues | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The success of John Cassavetes's independent Shadows led to a contract with Paramount that yielded only this feature, Cassavetes's second--a gauche but sincere drama with a highly relevant subject: the self-laceration and other forms of emotional havoc brought about when a footloose jazz musician (Bobby Darin) decides to sell out and go commercial. A lot could be (and was) said about what's wrong with this picture: it's pretentious, lugu-brious, mawkish, and full of both naivete and macho bluster. It also has moments that are indelible and heartbreaking, at least one unforgettable performance (Everett Chambers as the hero's manager), and many very touching ones (by Darin, Stella Stevens, Rupert Crosse, Vince Edwards, Cliff Carnell, and Seymour Cassel, among others), not to mention a highly affecting jazz score featuring Benny Carter and a haunting theme by David Raksin. If you care a lot about Cassavetes, you should definitely see this--otherwise keep your distance (1960).

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Pure hepcat pulp, John Cassavetes' second feature uses the story of a jazz pianist (hairpiece-wearing crooner Bobby Darin) to jam on a pretty familiar theme: the principled dude growing progressively less and less principled under the influence of comfort, money, and two-timing dames. Produced as part of a disastrous directing contract with Paramount, it's slicker, more studio-bound, and—in terms of narrative—clunkier, nastier, and more formulaic than the work Cassavetes is best known for—but also sincere, emotionally raw, and impeccably acted, with the dialogue's rich macho chatter more than making up for the bare TV-style sets in terms of atmosphere and flavor. Pretty much the definition of a compromised picture—a movie about New York and the dangers of selling out shot on a major studio's Hollywood backlot—this isn't without its flaws, but it still warrants rediscovery, at the very least for a supporting performance from veteran TV producer Everett Chambers (who produced Johnny Staccato and would later work on Cassavetes regular Peter Falk's Columbo; also, uh, Airwolf) that stands as one of the all-time great one-off acting turns.

Too Late Blues 1961 Film Streams (pdf)

In TOO LATES BLUES, John Cassavetes’ second feature film, Bobby Darin plays a jazz musician who finds his artistic integrity compromised by the slick lure of mainstream success. Without coincidence, it’s a situation the director himself wrestled with at that very moment in time. Following the acclaim of SHADOWS (1959) and a relatively brief run on the TV show Johnny Staccato, Cassavetes signed a contract with Paramount to develop his own script for TOO LATE BLUES. While a more disastrous situation still lay ahead—that being A CHILD IS WAITING (1963), a film Cassavetes disowned after a nasty fight with famed Hollywood filmmaker Stanley Kramer—the experience of making TOO LATE BLUES within the studio system proved deflating enough. When it opened to bad reviews and low box office numbers, Cassavetes thought his career might be sunk (see the reverse side for his thoughts). In hindsight, it was a pivotal experience, one that indirectly led Cassavetes back to the fiercely independent filmmaking that now defines his career. And, looking back, the initial reaction toward TOO LATE BLUES, including Cassavetes’ own opinion, appears more than a little harsh. In the decades since its release, the film has been given a fresh

look by many observers and provides an interesting snapshot of Cassavetes’ filmmaking voice as delivered in a more plot-oriented, studio-approved package. In addition to Darin (incidentally, a replacement for Montgomery Clift), TOO LATE BLUES also features a number of contemporary jazz musicians, as well as an early on-screen performance (just his second film credit) by Seymour Cassel.

User reviews from imdb Author: jzappa from Cincinnati, OH, United States

John Cassavetes creates an eternally unique drama with his chronicle of an idealistic jazz musician played by crooner Bobby Darin, and his relationship among his fellow band members and his object of affection, a beautiful would-be singer who comes between him and his band members, played by Stella Stevens in an honest, humanly extreme performance clearly directed by Cassavetes and cementing an argument that she could have held her own as a star.

Darin, as Cassavetes surely intended, brings a realistic contribution to his character from his life in the world of the era's music scene, as a dogmatically philosophical band leader who takes tremendous pride in seeing a profound, transcendental beauty in a mellow, instrumental school of jazz that he, with the exasperated tolerance of his fellow players, finds ideal to play to empty parks to communicate with nature and birds when he isn't playing gigs at old people's homes and orphanages. What is irrelevant in this film is how we feel about the music he feels most personally in tune with (no pun intended) in comparison to the commercially accessible music that would welcome him into a successful career. Like all Cassavetes films, Too Late Blues is about a character whose proclivities are beyond us, and what keeps it from being subjective or affected is that the rest of the characters share our feelings.

The key to our understanding and relating ardently to Darin's character is his unrelenting obstinacy, which becomes Bobby Darin uncannily, borne by the pride that absorbs all of his perceptions into what is of use only to him. As this dooming characteristic rears its head, an internal conflict between his true passions and what will gain him the recognition that deep down he wants more than anything else, we come to dislike him and find ourselves on the side of his band members and his girl Stevens.

Full of far-seeing insight and relentless individuality, it is not well-recognized film, which in itself is a testament to the artistic truth it presents. This is in some sense a shame though, because it is really a moving film in spite of all the expectations accompanied by an audience's perception of a music film. There are many great scenes where we simply hang out with the band in their regular hang-out spot with an entertaining bar owner, or we indulge in their impulsive diversions, or we react in unusual ways and we must step out of our regiments and make an endeavor out of looking further.

"TOO LATE BLUES": DEAN BRIERLY REVISITS A LOST GEM ... Dean Brierly from Cinema Retro, also including a July 24, 2007 interview wuth actress Stella Stevens: CLICK HERE TO READ DEAN BRIERLY'S EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH STELLA STEVENS ABOUT TOO LATE BLUES

Too Late Blues - The Eclectic Screening Room

TOO LATE BLUES (John Cassavetes, 1961) « Dennis Grunes

Too Early, Too Late Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Sounds, Images, September 15, 2009

Cassavetes' Works: A chronology and list of early events in ... Ray Carney

TOO LATE BLUES 1961 - Movie on DVD! - Bobby Darin Jazz - TOO ... Video Beat

Cool World: Jazz and the Movies Steve Seid from Pacific Film Archive

Too Late Blues Mark Deming at All Movie Guide from Rovi

John Cassavetes Indie Pix bio

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

Time Out Geoff Andrew

New York Times (registration req'd)

THE LLOYD BRIDGES SHOW – TV series 1962 – 63

USA (22 mi) 1962 Cassavetes directed two episodes, “A Pair of Boots” and “My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy”

User reviews from imdb Author: Cheyenne-Bodie

Lloyd Bridges became a big star as skin diver Mike Nelson on "Sea Hunt" (1958-61). Bridges returned to television a year later in this ambitious 30-minute series, designed to showcase his range and depth as an actor. Bridges was 49 years old.

Aaron Spelling was the creator and executive producer. The production company was Four Star ("The Dick Powell Show", "Burke's Law"). Bridges played journalist Adam Shepherd. When Shepherd was researching a story, he would imagine himself as the protagonist. Thus each week Bridges was playing a new character in a new situation.

The line producer was Everett Chambers who had produced "Johnny Staccato" with John Cassavetes (and would later produce "Peyton Place" and "Columbo"). Chambers also had an acting role in the Cassavetes film "Too Late Blues". Bosley Crowther of the New York Times said Everett Chambers gave that film's best performance. Chambers got his pal Cassavetes to direct two episodes of the Bridges series and to guest star in another. Gena Rowlands also appeared in an episode, and later worked for Chambers on "Peyton Place".

The first "Lloyd Bridges Show" episode directed by Cassavetes was "A Pair of Boots". While doing a story on the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, Adam Shepherd imagines he is a Union soldier in a stand-off skirmish with Confederates. Beau Bridges, John Marley, Seymour Cassell, Lawrence Tierney and Royal Dano were featured in the futility of war drama. Marley and Cassel would appear in Cassavetes' "Faces" (1968).

The second episode directed by Cassavetes was "My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy". Bridges played an aging middle-weight boxing champion in the 1920's. He is put in a fight with his son (Gary Lockwood), who he has pretty much ignored his whole life. The self-hating son plans to kill his father in the ring. Robert Towne ("Chinatown") wrote the episode.

In "Mr. Pennington's Machine", Bridges played a somewhat crude, noisy business man, apparently an "Ugly American". But he is touched by the starvation he sees while on vacation in the orient. He tries to help a destitute Chinese village with the aid of his timid wife (Betty Garrett) and a cynical American adventurer (Lee Philips).

Jeff Bridges appeared in three episodes, and Beau was in two. Lloyd's daughter Cindy was also in an episode.

When the series got unimpressive ratings, the Adam Shepherd character was dropped and the series became a straight anthology series hosted by and starring Bridges.

I remember seeing Bridges on the daytime game show "Your First Impression" at the time of this series. When host Bill Leyden asked Bridges the title of his new show, Bridges was embarrassed to tell him. He said the show really should have been called "The Aaron Spelling Show". Bridges said Spelling was a genius.

“My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy” – TV episode from the Lloyd Bridges Show (22 mi) 1962

User reviews from imdb Author: BentCrewStreak from The Bent Crew

"Well, considering your daddy is Rip Taylor, I'm not surprised, but my daddy doesn't swing that way"

Well, at least that was my initial reaction to the title of this movie, but I soon found out that it was not an expose about washed up comedic "actors" and their propensity for attempting male tongue sports. Which, as it turns out, is a very good thing, as I tend to stay away from such exotic movies.

But, this film is an exotic film of sorts, as it is a remake of a French film called "La langue de mon père a plaisir à lécher d'autres pères" or literally, "My Father's Tongue Enjoys Licking Other Fathers".

Directed by John Cassavetes, who is one of those kinda famous directors that I've heard of, but have no idea what they've directed, "My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy" is actually the story of a young boy named "Hucklebee" and his tumultuous childhood.

Powerful performances by such heavy hitters as Lloyd Bridges, who most audiences will know of in his role of Vincenzo Cortino in the epic 1998 comedy "Jane Austen's Mafia!". Bridges' role as the vain boxing champ is simply a marvel to behold.

Of course, one would be remiss to neglect supporting players. Namely, newcomer Frederick Draper who also teamed with Bridges in the war drama "A Pair of Boots". After this movie, however he starred in only a handful of other roles. And then, much like Kaiser Soze, he was gone.

This movie is a good way to spend a lazy afternoon, and is recommended for everyone. Even the little ones, that is if you can drag them away from their violently bloody video games.

A CHILD IS WAITING B 87

USA 1963 (102 mi)

I've always had a sweet spot for this 1963 film, made 5 years before the release of Faces (1968), a more conventional film using footage of handicapped children from the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California, one of the first State facilities for mentally impaired children. This is a remarkable attempt at realism, using moments of documentary style in a fictional film about mental retardation that refuses to look at the children in a group home as victims, but rather as human beings, each needing the help of others. The film attempts to give the children as much screen time as the so-called stars, which caused something of a scandal on the set. Apparently, Cassavetes’ message was too radical at the time, as he was fired from the film by producer Stanley Kramer, who then recut the film, ordering more close-ups, making it more sentimental. Apparently both Lancaster and Garland appealed to him for help from Cassavetes' direction, both openly defying him on the set. In Ray Carney's book, it is described as follows: "Cassavetes' treatment of his stars was a textbook lesson in how to alienate everyone possible." However, in Cassavetes' view, the children were more important in this film than the stars. Despite some overglossed musical strings on occasion, it’s still a surprisingly unflinching look at a largely ignored problem—one might say a follow up to Frank Perry’s 1962 film, DAVID AND LISA.

Burt Lancaster is appointed by the State to run the home, and at first he appears hard and ignoble with the children, especially one problem child, Reuben (played by actor Bruce Ritchey), who he believes the system has failed, but his somewhat radical intention is to treat the children as responsible individuals. Enter Judy Garland, of all people, as a troubled, down and out spirit who is looking to find a place where she might be needed. Having no real qualifications, other than being a Julliard Music School drop out, and having no real professional objectivity, she immediately pities the children and assumes the role of Reuben’s missing mother, so he follows her wherever she goes. Then on false pretenses, she summons Reuben’s real mother, Gena Rowlands, as every Wednesday, Reuben gets dressed up and waits for his parents that never show up on visiting day. This calls into question everyone’s views in an extraordinarily dramatic confrontation. Lancaster’s unbending system is challenged by Garland, whose histrionics are challenged by Rowlands, all are challenged by Reuben, enter the State bureaucrats who really want to wash their hands of the whole problem, threatening to cut finding as it’s not a feel good issue with the public. Who wants to raise children no one wants to see?

Largely disowned by Cassavetes for changing the entire tone of the film, the theater of the uncomfortable is really evident here with broken families, love gone awry, disturbingly flawed characters, big emotional moments, Gena Rowlands nervously smoking a cigarette while wearing gloves, as it’s hard to witness mentally impaired children being themselves, but Cassavetes raises important issues, mostly through the peppering questions of Lancaster, who refuses to let the bureaucrats decide their worth through potential employability. The film does a good job examining society’s response to “damaged” children, where parents immediately alter their expectations, becoming disappointed, embarrassed, eventually hiding their children from public view, supposedly for their own good. And if they allow them to interact with normal children, they’re bound to be teased and humiliated, as children can be relentlessly judgmental. Rowlands, of course, is excellent as the disappointed parent who’s too consumed with personal anguish and shame to be able to relate with her son anymore. Cassavetes wraps up the entire issue in a manner unique to his own particular vision, in a grand, sweeping finale that features the children in a Settlers and Indians Thanksgiving theatrical revue where they are all, at least for a moment, shining stars, continually perplexed with remembering their lines, but singing happily anyway. In Cassavetes' view, it's the adults that label them retarded, when really, they're just children.

Chicago Reader Capsule Review Dave Kehr

John Cassavetes takes a shot at straight commercial filmmaking (1963), and the results are a little wide of the mark. Burt Lancaster is the director of a school for the mentally retarded, Judy Garland is a teacher who disputes his methods. Earnest but uneven. Subjects like this seem to bring out the sanctimony in most directors, and Cassavetes, fine anarchic talent that he is, is no exception. With Gena Rowlands and Steven Hill. 102 min.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Disowned by Cassavetes after producer Stanley Kramer edited it against his wishes and made it more sentimental than intended, this is none the less a very affecting study of the plight of mentally retarded children. Shot in semi-documentary style and using (with the exception of Ritchey, the film's central 'case history') actual retarded children, the movie concerns a new teacher (Garland) whose excessive concern with Ritchey's predicament brings her into conflict with her boss (Lancaster). As ever, Cassavetes elicits magnificent performances from his cast, making especially fine use of Garland's tremulous emotionalism, although the occasional drifts into didacticism (the script was by Abby Mann, who wrote Judgment at Nuremberg and Ship of Fools) entail the sort of special pleading Cassavetes was keen to avoid. Flawed but fascinating.

A Child is Waiting - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Steve Seid

The location for John Cassavetes’s second dalliance with studio production is the Pacific State Hospital, here dubbed the Crowthorn Training School, an institute for challenged children. The wards of the real institute are everywhere to be seen, not just as set decoration, but as poignant bit players in a hard-hitting drama about the social reforms needed to care for adolescents with special needs. Burt Lancaster plays Dr. Clark, a headstrong psychologist who has initiated a progressive program to redeem his charges. With an unnerved presence, Judy Garland takes the role of Jean, a music instructor who has come to Crowthorn hoping to redeem her own aimless life. Once there, she develops an intense affection for Reuben (remarkably played by Bruce Ritchey, the film’s only child actor), a twelve-year-old abandoned by his parents (Gena Rowland and Steven Hill). A Child is Waiting is pure Cassavetes: he has embedded two polished performers in a context that strips them of their grandiosity. The kids steal the show, because the pro actors have relinquished their own special needs.

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

John Cassavetes ("Too Late Blues") second feature as director is a straightforward solid social service drama, without his usual avant-garde twists, that is told in a cinema verite semi-documentary style. It's based on the intelligent but not that impactful script by Abby Mann ("Judgment of Nuremberg"). Burt Lancaster is excellent playing the psychologist Dr. Matthew Clark who is the director of Crawthorne State Mental Hospital (modeled the film's school on the highly regarded Vineland Training School in New Jersey). One of Lancaster's own children is such a troubled child and he had a strong personal interest in the subject matter. Judy Garland gives a sincere performance as the do-gooder inexperienced teacher who believes love is all that matters, and even though she was going through a difficult period of her life and was drinking heavily her performance was powerful. Except for Bruce Ritchey (Reuben Widdicombe), the children in the film were all patients at the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California.

The film ran into trouble with Cassavetes's attempt to bring his unconventional improvisational style to the shoot, which were at odds with Kramer's beliefs and didn't go over with either Garland or Lancaster who weren't comfortable with his unconventional approach to the film. Things came to a head during the final editing when an argument over what to include in the film resulted in Kramer firing Cassavetes. The film was finished by Kramer and the film's editor Gene Fowler, Jr., which prompted Cassavetes to disown it. Watching the film when released, Cassavetes commented "I didn't think his film - and that's what I consider it to be, his film - was so bad, just a lot more sentimental than mine."

The film picks up with the arrival to the institute of the reluctant retarded child Reuben. Two years later the newly hired thirtysomething unattached teacher, Jean Hansen (Judy Garland), who is an ex-pianist searching for meaning in her life, becomes touched by the 12-year-old Reuben's craving for affection and becomes obsessively attached to the child when learning his mom Sophie Widdicombe (Gena Rowlands), recently remarried to a lawyer (Lawrence Tierney), never visits him. Clark is disturbed that Hansen's excessive attention to Reuben will upset the other children and challenges her behavior. Hansen frets that Clark's methods are too stern. So it goes, as the drama is only flawed by the occasional uninviting didactic tone it takes.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Jean Hansen (Judy Garland), a recently hired employee at the Crawthorne State Mental Hospital, finds a new purpose in her life when she begins working with problem children at the facility. Lacking a medical degree, her approach to therapy is constantly challenged by the resident psychiatrist, Dr. Matthew Clark (Burt Lancaster), who feels her interaction with one child in particular, Reuben Widdicombe (Bruce Ritchey), could result in more problems instead of a cure.

Combining a cinema verite approach popular with emerging independent filmmakers of the early sixties and the production values of a major studio film complete with name stars, A Child is Waiting (1963) was a unique attempt by producer Stanley Kramer to create an impacting social drama about the plight of mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed children. His good intentions, however, were complicated by his choice of director, John Cassavetes, and his lead actors, Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland, all of whom had their own creative approach to the material.

Kramer modeled the film's school on the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, an internationally renown institution for their treatment of mentally retarded children, though the movie was actually shot on location at the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California. In Against Type: The Biography of Burt Lancaster by Gary Fishgall, Kramer stated that one of the reasons he wanted to make A Child is Waiting was "to throw a spotlight on a dark-ages type of social thinking which has tried to relegate the subject of retardation to a place under the rocks." As for soliciting Lancaster's involvement in the film, the producer had an ulterior motive. He knew Lancaster had a troubled child of his own and a personal interest in the subject matter. Lancaster had also worked well with Judy Garland in Kramer's previous film, Judgment at Nuremberg [1961] and the actress, who was going through a difficult period in her life, needed a supportive work environment. Unfortunately, "Judy was drinking a great deal," Lancaster recalled, "and it was a big effort to get herself together and get in shape to work...I had to kind of nurse her along with it. And because of her mental condition at the time, she wasn't terribly involved with the part."

Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor had all been considered for the part of Jean Hansen before Garland was cast. Likewise, the original choice for director had been Jack Clayton who had to drop out of the project due to scheduling conflicts; his replacement, John Cassavetes, was suggested to Kramer by screenwriter Abby Mann, a friend to both men. But Cassavetes's improvisational style turned out to be completely at odds with Kramer's working methods and didn't endear him to Garland and Lancaster who weren't comfortable with his often unconventional approach either.

One of the big gambles in the film was the casting of real mentally retarded children throughout the picture which some critics took issue with when the film was released. Kramer, however, felt their involvement was crucial to the film, adding, "it was exciting. They surprised us every day in reaction and what they did." Lancaster voiced a similar opinion in an off-the-set interview at the time, saying, "We have to ad-lib around the periphery of a scene and I have to attune and adjust myself to the unexpected things they do. But they are much better than child actors for the parts. They have certain gestures that are characteristic, very difficult for even an experienced actor."

In the end, the tense relationship between Kramer and Cassavetes came to a head during the final editing of A Child is Waiting. According to the picture's editor, Gene Fowler, Jr., in the aforementioned Gary Fishgall biography, "It was a fight of technique. Stanley is a more traditional picture-maker, and Cassavetes was, I guess, called Nouvelle Vague. He was trying some things, which frankly I disagreed with, and I thought he was hurting the picture by blunting the so-called message with technique." Fowler cited one instance where a scene was jumpy because the camera ran over a cable during filming so he replaced it with a smoother take, only to have Cassavetes complain, "My God, you damn Hollywood people. All you can think of is smoothness of camera. What we want is to get some rough edges in here." Subsequently, Kramer fired Cassavetes and finished the editing himself with Fowler's assistance, prompting the director to disown it. After the film's release, however, Cassavetes remarked, "I didn't think his film - and that's what I consider it to be, his film - was so bad, just a lot more sentimental than mine." For his own part, Kramer admitted, "My dream was to jump the barrier of ordinary objection to the subject matter into an area in which the treatment of it and the performance of it would be so exquisite that it would transcend all that. Somewhere we failed." Yet, many critics found things to praise in A Child is Waiting, such as Time magazine's assessment that "Lancaster has never been better" and Time Out's opinion that "Cassavetes elicits magnificent performances from his cast, making especially fine use of Garland's tremulous emotionalism."

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Brian Koller, filmsgraded.com

Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - A Child is Waiting Gary Couzens

John cassavettes A Child is waiting and Too Late Blues Shaun Katz from JDM Film Reviews

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: theowinthrop from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: lugonian from Kissimmee, Florida

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Ed Uyeshima from San Francisco, CA, USA

A Child Is Waiting | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center

Cassavetes' Works: A Child is Waiting Ray Carney (capsule review)

Abby Mann Interview | Archive of American Television 3-hour Video interview with Writer/Producer Abby Mann by Gary Rutkowski, August 18, 2004

"A Child Is Waiting review" Variety, December 31, 1962

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) also seen here: NY Times Original Review

A Child Is Waiting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER – TV series 1963 – 67

USA (60 mi) 114 episodes, Cassavetes wrote and directed one episode, “In Pursuit of Excellence” that aired June 22, 1966

In Pursuit of Excellence

FACES A 97

USA (130 mi) 1968

He wanted to get as close as it was possible, because he felt these characters, in this middle America scenario, that you had to actually get inside, and you had to feel as though you were that person. You had to experience what they were going through as an audience, so we shot a lot of close ups.

—Al Ruban, cinematographer, producer, and editor

And really I think, at least at that time, John was one of the very few directors who paid any attention to women of a certain age. There’s just so much that they revealed in their lives and their loneliness and their desire to be young again, and if not young at least to be able to have some of the same good times and it just shouldn’t stop at a certain point.

—Gena Rowlands

Art films are not necessarily photography. It’s feeling, and if we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we’ve made a good picture. That’s all we want to do. We want to capture a feeling. Our films, per se, the way they (Hollywood) make films are terrible. They say it’s European photography, which is a dirty word, and art is a very bad word in this country. Art is a very bad word.

People get all upset over things that don’t really matter, like politics, and religion, and things like that. They take offense to such a great degree that they miss the good times. But the good times are probably more important than any bad times that ever happened, and yet we spend so much time on bad times, and so little time on the human behavior.

—John Cassavetes

I get a lump in my throat every time I see her. She tries everything and she doesn’t care how ridiculous and pathetic it is. The point is that she tried. She fought for it, tied herself in knots. She wouldn’t give up. And isn’t it better to fight and realize your fantasies, to fight and to lose, than to gripe and pine away in silence? —John Cassavetes on Florence (Dorothy Gulliver)

In the early 60’s, after Shadows (1959), it was his wife Gena Rowlands whose acting career took off, working regularly in television while Cassavetes made two studio pictures, Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child Is Waiting (1963), experiences that revealed the shortcomings of working within the Hollywood system, as most of his working requests were refused, and more importantly, he lost control of both pictures. He also made a few television appearances and wrote a ton of incomplete scripts, but his phone did not exactly ring off the hook, so he took a job working at Screen Gems when it was offered. Allegedly hired to develop new concepts for television shows, all twenty concepts submitted by Cassavetes were rejected, so he quickly lost whatever initial interest he had. Instead he decided to develop one of his incomplete manuscripts about marriage upon reaching middle age, writing over 200 new pages in October 1964, thinking at the time the story was only half finished. Producer Maurice McEndree, who produced both FACES and Shadows, has an altogether different version, suggesting he and Cassavetes were on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, and during a marathon gin-rummy game, Cassavetes asks him “Did you ever think about what a guy would say to a hooker when he wakes up in her bed the next morning?” At that moment, Cassavetes jotted down a few notes, and this was the birth of the morning-after scene. Thus FACES was born. Once he figured out that initially he only had about $10,000 to play around with, knowing full well that money received from Hollywood studios meant losing control of the project, Cassavetes embarked on a longterm journey which may as well be the definition of an independent film, as Cassavetes wrote his own script, spent his own money, used a cast of friends, family, and non-professionals, starring his own wife Gena Rowlands, where lifelong friend Al Ruban produced the film while also shooting and editing the film, which included actor Seymour Cassel, one of the Cassavetes regulars who has been there with Cassavetes since the beginning, and it was shot in his own home (with set decoration by Lady Rowlands) over a four-year period on week-ends and whenever funds became available, where none other than king of the blockbusters Steven Spielberg is listed as an uncredited production assistant. There’s enough singing and dancing in this film that it could almost be called a musical, where it feels like more is improvised in FACES than any other Cassavetes film.

Actress Lynn Carlin was discovered as Robert Altman’s secretary at Screen Gems where Altman had an office across the hall from Cassavetes. Altman eventually fired her for spending so much time across the hall, but she signed her contract with Cassavetes on a cocktail napkin, which was more a concept of an expanded shoot that might take place anytime instead of a salary listing any monetary figures, and both Gena Rowlands (3 months) and Lynn Carlin (5 months) were pregnant at the time of the shoot. After weeks of rehearsals, Cassavetes always shoots his films in sequence, which allows the actors to develop their characters as the film progresses, where his method of directing was to offer no instructions, as once the film was written and the parts cast, he felt the roles belonged to the actors, believing no one knew more about the characters than they did, but they were restricted from talking to other actors between shoots, where they could not compare notes, so that in the actor’s minds, at least, the other actors remained in character at all times. But when Rowlands was getting dizzy from shooting the same scene about twenty times, claiming that was enough, reminding him she was pregnant, rather than console her and offer her a break, Cassavetes told her they had to get this scene finished, where she reveals “He turned into a director on me.” According to Cassel, he felt Cassavetes always got great performances because he knew the actors as personal friends, so he knew what to say to them if he felt they weren’t being honest on camera, where he’d approach everyone differently. Both Peter Falk in Husbands (1970) and Gena Rowlands in perhaps her greatest role in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), were both bewildered in trying to figure out the complexity of their characters, where they each desperately appealed to Cassavetes for help, asking what he had in mind, but he adamantly refused to tell them anything. According to Cassel, “For John, nothing was more boring than watching an actor act, because you could see them acting.” All he wanted was natural behavior from the actors.

Often credited for being the first independent film to attract a mainstream American audience, the film is groundbreaking, but utterly bleak, perhaps Cassavetes most difficult film, where critical reception was largely mixed in this searing drama about middle-aged dissatisfaction and broken American Dreams, expressed through a disintegrating middle-class marriage in the affluence of Southern California. Now considered a landmark film shot on 16 mm Black and White blown up to 35 mm, the film was shot for $275,000, where the cast and crew worked largely without pay, much of it shot in Cassavetes’ own home (where we learn Frank Zappa lived next door), where people pulled multiple duties, as between takes, actor Seymour Cassel ran cable wires, or painted walls of the set, while the cinematographer, Al Ruban and handheld operator George Sims, both helped edit the film with Cassavetes. Many of the crew appear as extras in the film which has a semi-documentary feel, but the most extraordinary revelations are the blistering performances led by a couple married for fourteen years, Richard (John Marley) and Maria (Lynn Carlin), something of a younger version of George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). An emotional powerhouse of a film begins with a scathing portrait of male corporate America, feeling more like a mockery of the Hollywood studio system, seen as a soulless entity that wields power through a kind of awkward male dominance expressed by drinking, featuring an endless stream of vile and contemptible laughter, using aggressive and assaultive dialogue like sharp knives, all designed to demean the dignity of others, as if these are executive boardroom power tactics playing out in social settings, often filled with misogynistic references, with this IN THE COMPANY OF MEN (1997) smile of insincerity covering up their cruelty, Faces (1968) - Film Clip - "I Dream Of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair" Tango YouTube (5:54). From the outset, it is clear Cassavetes has made a different kind of film, shot in a grainy and unpolished Black and White, a startling contrast to the pristine look of Hollywood films, where outside of Rowlands, who plays prostitute Jeannie Rapp, and first time actress Carlin, who provides the performance of her career, none of the other actors are familiar to American audiences, nor do they provide the glamour of Hollywood stars, as instead they have the appearance of ordinary people we may see everyday on the street. But Cassavetes uses close ups to expose Jeannie Rapp’s vulnerability, a near experimental style of sensuous beauty contrasted against this brutally competitive world of corporate ego and male power. The closeups continue to expose the artificial veneer that hides any signs of the humanity within, when, out of nowhere, a seemingly comfortable middle class marriage begins to unravel.

Like many Cassavetes films, this one started out just over three hours when it premiered at Toronto before being pared down to its current 130-minute length for the American release, where the Criterion DVD lists an earlier cut that interestingly offers an alternative 17-minute opening, most of which precedes where the final cut begins. The film was also nominated for Best Supporting Roles for both Lynn Carlin and Seymour Cassel, also a Best Original Screenplay nomination, while winning five awards at the Venice Film festival, including the Pasinetti Award and Best Actor by John Marley, who plays the corporate CEO who leaves his wife to spend the night with Jeannie Rapp, returning the next morning kicking his heels, smiling triumphantly. Maria tried to have some fun of her own the night before and ended up spending the night with Hollywood playboy Chet, Seymour Cassel, but only after four inebriated wives pick him up in a dance club, which turns out to be the Whiskey a Go Go, featuring camera shots by Haskell Wexler, who was afraid the union would find out he was working on a non-union film. With four women for Chet to entertain, “Honey, it’s absolutely ludicrous how mechanical a person can be,” three remain cautiously restrained behind middle class manners of reserve, but the one who lets it all hang out is Florence (Dorothy Gulliver), the only one of the four wives that actually dances with Chet and touches and kisses him, and is not afraid to tell him she is attracted to him, but she is also the oldest, the least attractive, and the most overweight, becoming one of Cassavetes’ most doomed characters, Faces - To Hell With Louis YouTube (5:43). When Chet wakes up in the morning next to Maria, he has to nurse her back to health after an attempted overdose of sleeping pills, and the film rather uncomfortably begins to explore, with a detached, documentary style, the interior moods of the husband and the wife. Most pronounced are the contrast of opposite moods when the husband and wife meet the next morning, revealing the deep, piercing wounds of emotional devastation, the consequence of covering up their lack of honesty with each other, where a fake comfortable marriage was built upon burying their feelings together for so many married years. FACES is an unsparing and exhausting work, a film with ramifications, but one that perfectly exemplifies Cassavetes cinéma vérité style along with his searching explorations of modern relationships, a film that reveals some rather cruel human behavior on display, consisting almost exclusively of tight, uncomfortable close-ups for which there is no comfortable release, just an emptiness, an overwhelming emptiness. In 2011 the film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

Adrian Martin from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Laughter, because it is so hard to act, often comes across as phony when depicted onscreen. But in FACES, every kind of laughter – lunatic, lusty, nervous, hysterical, defensive – is rendered with absolute authenticity, even when prescripted or postsynchronized.

What was John Cassavetes’s secret? His rapport with actors was so total, his work with them so intensely detailed, that he was able to capture lived reality like no other American director. After the experiment of SHADOWS (1959) and bad experiences within the Hollywood system, FACES confidently marked the beginning of the Cassavetes “signature.” Filmed in his home, it records vivid scenes in the lives of people who are at once hopelessly yearning and furiously alienated – stranded, like all Cassavetes characters, between the difficult responsibilities of daily routine and the reckless intoxications of nightlife.

Cassavetes shows his brilliant ensemble cast – John Marley and Lynn Carlin are especially memorable – always in media res, their bodies off center in the frame, their words and gestures truncated by the editing. Each scene is based on an unpredictable and often terrifying “turn,” a sudden change in a character’s mood or manner toward another. FACES invents a new way of experiencing time in cinema, where sudden pauses register as (in Cassavetes’s words) “like stepping off a fast train.”

Sometimes taken as the condemnation of a soulless, materialist middle class, the film is, rather, a painfully intimate and compassionate account of everyday suffering. Cassavetes stakes out the terrain he would often revisit – marital crisis, casual sex, hedonistic abandon, family ties – within a narrative that constantly shuffles and compares character’s journeys through a long night and its aftermath.

Is FACES the first film in cinema history where characters talk (indeed, laugh themselves stupid) about cunnilingus? Some 35 years later, directors including Neil LaBute and Lars von Trier are still trying to catch up to Cassavetes’s astonishing ability to show the messy complexity of adult relationships.

City Pages [Matthew Wilder]

If, like the music-store geeks in High Fidelity, you play these sorts of taxonomic games (and every film lover I know does), you have your Mount Rushmore of American directors. In my mind, Martin Scorsese is at the summit of the summit, a Shakespeare of film language who draws, Bard-like, on classicism past and originality present to make the strongest style there ever was. But when it comes to the deep moral value of a work of art; when it comes to knowing the human heart in all its recesses, in all its strange veins and valves; when it comes to loving and inhabiting people more deeply than loving and inhabiting movies...well, the heavyweight championship belt has to go to John Cassavetes. An American Chekhov, Cassavetes was mocked in his day as an "Actors Studio director," a self-indulgent maker of improv blabfests, a drunk who indulged the fellow drunkenness of his buddies. Today his work--especially his late masterpieces (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Love Streams)--seems to hold the lyrical yet mordant, fateful quality of something like The Winter's Tale. Faces (1968), which Cassavetes whittled into shape throughout the Sixties, is simply a towering achievement. Without saying a peep about its story or its characters (those are for you to wrestle with), I'll mention just one quality of the filmmaker's work that you may find treacherous or delightful: A Cassavetes scene can start comic, segue into tragic, trip over pathetic, and find five other stops before the word cut is called. If this bugs you, American Beauty is playing right over there.

Faces - Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

There are many who consider John Cassavetes the father of the American independent film movement despite the fact there were many others before him - Morris Engel (Little Fugitive [1953]), Sidney Meyers (The Savage Eye [1960]), and even Stanley Kubrick (Killer's Kiss [1955] to name a few. But Cassavetes's debut feature, Shadows (1959), was the film that made the biggest impact upon its release and proved to be prophetic when it came to defining a new approach to filmmaking outside the Hollywood system.

Cassavetes broke all the rules, inventing his own and then discarding them as he went along, improvising and experimenting with everything from the cinematography to the performances to the actual financing of the film; he mortgaged his own home numerous times to subsidize his movies over the years and took on acting jobs purely for monetary reasons. Yet Shadows, with its jerky, hand-held camerawork, vivid location shooting on New York City streets and edgy subject matter involving an interracial romance and conflicted characters living on the margins of society, was just a warm-up for Cassavetes's next film, Faces (1968). It not only confirmed Cassavetes's early promise as a director but set the tone and style for the rest of his film career, one in which he relentlessly probed the often dissatisfied lives of unglamorous, middle-class Americans. Faces was not the average filmgoer's idea of a good time at the movies but it earned widespread critical acclaim (and three Oscar® nominations) and was an inspiration to future filmmakers such as Martin Scorcese (Who's That Knocking at My Door? [1967]), Henry Jaglom (A Safe Place [1971]) and Sean Penn (The Indian Runner [1991]).

Dispensing with a conventional plot structure, Faces is a cinema verite-like portrait of a marriage in turmoil, rendered in chunks of real time. The film begins at the point where Richard Forst (John Marley) and his wife Maria (Lynn Carlin) are already frustrated and resentful toward each other. Their constant quarreling and angry silences finally lead Richard to ask for a divorce. Then, in the presence of his wife, he calls Jeannie (Gena Rowlands), a prostitute he met recently, and makes a date. He walks out, leaving Maria in shock, but soon her female friends rally to her support and take her out for a night on the town. At a dance club on the Hollywood strip, she meets Chet (Seymour Cassel), a fun-loving, free spirit who ends up spending the night with her. The two different storylines - Richard and Jeannie's tentative romance and Maria and Chet's one-night affair - play out in equally unresolved circumstances but that's less important than Richard and Maria's emotional rollercoaster ride to the film's bleak conclusion.

Faces initially began as ten pages of dialogue Cassavetes had written as a two character sketch about two friends recalling happier times in their lives. Shadows producer Mo McEndree suggested that Cassavetes expand it so he produced a 175 page script that seemed ideal for a stage play. John Marley, who had appeared in Cassavetes's A Child Is Waiting (1963), and Val Avery (who had co-starred with John on the Johnny Staccato TV series) both read it and wanted to appear in it. The play quickly evolved into a film project with Cassavetes juggling finances behind the scenes. "...I went over to Universal [Studios] - my bank - and acted in two lousy TV pilots, which bought me a movie camera and film. I then had enough to start the picture and we shot for six and a half months. We wound up with an awful lot of footage." (From Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film by Marshall Fine).

For the film, Cassavetes recruited his wife, Gena Rowlands, Hollywood friends and associates from his New York days to fill the cast and crew positions and used his own home and his mother-in-law's house as the main sets. With various working titles of "The Dynosaurs," "One Fa and Eight Las," and "The Marriage," Cassavetes's screenplay evolved from its simple beginnings to a more focused concept with John Marley in the central role of Richard Forst. Seymour Cassel, who had followed Cassavetes to Hollywood from New York along with McEndree and associate producer Al Ruban, had a minor part in his friend's previous film, Too Late Blues (1961), but played a much more prominent role this time. In fact, Cassavetes created the part of Chet specifically for Cassel, incorporating aspects of the actor's own personality - his carefree nature, penchant for practical jokes, and habitual womanizing.

Cassavetes also liked the effect he got when he mixed professional actors with non-actors and several minor roles were cast with family members, relatives, and acquaintances. More importantly, the central role of Maria was played by newcomer Lynn Carlin, who had previously been Robert Altman's secretary at Screen Gems. Cassavetes had an office down the hall and had Carlin fill in for an actor during a rehearsal one day; it led to a new career path for Carlin.

The actual filming of Faces was a chaotic affair in the beginning. "John was letting everybody shoot," Ruban recalled. "I would shoot the first shot and then John would say, 'Ok, George [Sims], you shoot the next one, and Seymour, do you want to shoot the next one?' he was giving everyone in the crew a chance to use the camera. John's thought was that everyone should be involved and share the experience. What was happening at that moment was what was important. He gave no thought to the finished product..." Occasionally Haskell Wexler, who was already a renowned industry cinematographer, would occasionally drop by the shoot and even film a few scenes. "It was like working on a film with a living sketch pad," Wexler said, "when the artist has a sense of what the film should be, but he doesn't know whether to use a pen or make this part longer." This communal approach to filmmaking, however, varied wildly in quality and after a month of shooting, most of the footage was unusable, convincing Cassavetes to become more autocratic in his creative process. Still, it was completely unlike any Hollywood film production and was an ongoing learning process for everyone, particularly Gena Rowlands, who at first had terrible arguments with her husband on the film. "My mistake was in thinking that since the director was also my lover, he would think everything I did was perfect. Once I began to regard John as a director, the problems straightened out quickly."

Cassavetes's love for the filmmaking process became an obsession. "Faces became more than a film," he said. "It became a way of life, a film against the authorities and the powers that prevent people from expressing themselves the way they want to, something that can't be done in America, that can't be done without money." Eventually, in between other jobs and working off and on during a four year period, reshooting some scenes to his satisfaction, Cassavetes ended up with approximately 250,000 feet of film - a massive amount totaling almost 115 hours. The most difficult part was editing it down into a final version. The first rough cut ran six hours, the second pass was four hours and a version prepared for preview audiences in Canada clocked in at three hours and forty minutes. After numerous test engagements in Los Angeles, Cassavetes was finally satisfied with his 130 minute cut even though the film wasn't well received by preview audiences in Hollywood. Undeterred, Cassavetes took Faces to the Venice Film Festival where it was nominated for the Golden Lion - the equivalent of a Best Picture Oscar® - and John Marley won the best actor award.

The event that really made the difference for Cassavetes's labor of love, however, was the New York Film Festival, whose importance at the time was crucial for the success of a film as difficult to market and distribute as Faces. It was rejected at first by the festival judges but critic Andrew Sarris, who was on the selection committee, met with the festival founder (Amos Vogel) and programmer (Richard Roud) and stated his case in no uncertain terms: "I feel very strongly about this," he told them. "I'm not a fan of Cassavetes. I don't believe in improvisation and I'm certainly not into naturalism. But if we don't put this film in, I don't see a point in continuing on the committee. There wouldn't be hard feelings but that's how I feel." Faces was voted back into the festival and created a sensation at the festival premiere.

It went on to garner Oscar® nominations for Best Supporting Actor and Actress for Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin and a Best Screenplay nomination for Cassavetes. In addition, the Writers Guild of America nominated Faces as the Best Written American original Screenplay and the National Society of Film Critics awarded the film two honors - Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Cassel). Despite the accolades, not everyone liked the film and some critics absolutely hated it. Among them was Pauline Kael who wrote "There are scenes in Faces so dumb, so crudely conceived and so badly performed that the audience practically burns incense...I think embarrassment is not a quality of art but our reaction to failed art." And even today when Cassavetes's work is more revered than during his own lifetime, the debate continues. David Thomson, in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, offered that "The Cassavetes films are far more thoroughly written than was once believed; and they are badly written...as a director, he [Cassavetes] is like a guy who begs us to hang around because these people are fascinating - and not just drunks. What may be most interesting in his work is the sociology of his middle America. He chooses basic, unenlightened, and unhappily successful people. They are a rarity in American film, rigorously shunned by most directors: they are bores."

Regardless of Faces's imperfections as a film or whether one loves it or hates it, its place as a pivotal moment in the American cinema is uncontested. For underneath the film's messy and sometimes meandering turn of events is an undeniable sense of truth, a mirror is held up and the masks are removed. This was clearly the intention of Cassavetes who wrote the following in his introduction to the published screenplay of Faces: "Playboy magazine, tit films, and cocktail party diatribes have not only affected our society, but have shaped it with such discontent regarding men and women that sex is no longer in itself sufficient without violence, death, or neurosis as stimulants. The idea of love as a mysterious, undiscovered world has come to have no place in our innermost imagination. It is this confusing dilemma in which men find themselves trying to relate to a difficult life and their responsibilities in it that Faces attempts to explore."

Criterion Collection film essay [Stuart Klawans] September 20, 2004, also seen here: Masks and Faces

Faces (1968) - The Criterion Collection

Faces Ray Carney’s discussion of FACES

click here Ray Carney’s discovery of a longer version of FACES

click here press reaction to the discovery

click here Gena Rowlands reaction to the discovery

Senses of Cinema – Performing the Everyday: Time and Affect in ... Effie Rassos from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

Senses of Cinema – Impromptu Entertainment: Performance Modes ... Pamela Robertson Wojcik, September 2000

notcoming.com | Faces - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Chet Mellema

Why you should watch John Cassavetes' Faces right now. - Slate Essential Cassavetes, Dana Stevens from Salon

Faces | Film Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley] also seen here: FilmFanatic.org

FACES Review: John Cassavetes - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares, Pt. 1, and also Pt. 2: FACES Review: John Marley, Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Lynn Carlin

Epinions.com review by Christopher J. Jarmick co-author of The Glass Cocoon

Jackass Critics [Thomas Blain]

Chuck Aliaga - digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Review, Criterion Collection

Faces - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Jeremy Mathews, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Clark Douglas] Criterion Collection

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

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

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

FACES - Ruthless Reviews Plexico Gingrich

Roy C Peterson Movie Reviews

Mondo Digital [Facebook] also reviewing SHADOWS

264 notes - A John Cassavetes Fan site

Faces British Film Institute brief capsule

Variety

Time Out Capsule Review Geoff Andrews

HUSBANDS (John Cassavetes, 1970) | Dennis Grunes

New York Times [Renata Adler] also seen here: NY Times Original Review

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze] also seen here: DVD Beaver Review

40-Minute Documentary on JOHN CASSAVETES: "Cinéastes de Notre Temps: John Cassavetes" (1969) essential viewing on YouTube (38:48)

HUSBANDS A 98

aka: A Comedy about Life, Death, and Freedom

USA (140 mi) 1970

I can understand that certain people would like a more conventional form, so that they can borrow it, much like a gangster picture...You can ‘read’ it, because it’s something that you know already. But if you deal with a scene in an unconventional way, it’s very hard for people to get with the film because of their expectations...Other films depend on a shorthand, a shorthand for living. You recognize certain incidents and you go with them. People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films...They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings and keep ahead of the movie. But that’s boring. I won’t make shorthand films. In my films, there’s a competition with the audience to keep ahead of them. I want to break their patterns. I want to shake them up and get them out of those quick, manufactured truths.

—John Cassavetes

Brilliant independent filmmaking at its masterful best, a radical and deeply personal work that exposes the scars of humanity, where a deepening exploration of interpersonal relationships between three men onscreen ultimately led to lifelong friendships afterwards. Using no blocks, allowing the camera to always follow the actors, where the emotional continuity overrides everything else, the beginning feels like a continuation of Shadows (1959), with the boys jumping around on the streets, playing basketball, having a walking contest on the streets of New York. Also, the confusion from Shadows about how to get along with girls continues here into their adult lives. Another wonderful film about friendships, only the boys are grown up now and have lost their innocence and hope. In fact, they have turned into the corporate men in FACES (1968), only instead of hanging out at the Loser’s Bar, they are living unfulfilled and empty lives on Long Island, called the suburban middle class, but carry their same bad habits, smoking and boozing too much, covering up their own brutality with forced laughter, that without the booze just isn’t so funny at all, as it’s often mean and cruel. John Cassavetes as Gus, Peter Falk as Archie, and Ben Gazzara as Harry have trouble going home after the funeral of their best friend, each virile and overly masculine actors all terrorized at the idea of turning 40, suddenly confronted with the idea of mortality. Harry confesses, “Aside from sex, and my wife is very good at it, I’d rather spend time with you guys.” So they end up at an all-night bar boozing and singing until morning, trying to determine the best performance, where the singer is often praised and kissed heavily, but also subjected to group criticism. Cassavetes allows this scene to play on at great length, where the amount of alcohol consumed is beyond excessive and at times brutal to watch. The only other bar scene that paints as intimate a portrait is Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which takes place entirely inside the Last Chance Saloon, another seedy all-night bar filled with a few scruffy regulars, a raw and emotionally bracing play of pain and disillusionment, exactly as one should feel after the funeral of their best friend. In each, the heightened state of realism and despair is painfully evident. Ironically one of Falk’s first roles was the bartender Harry Hope on Broadway with Jason Robards in The Iceman Cometh. In the UCLA mounted restoration of the film, Gena Rowlands, the executor of the Cassavetes estate, removed ten minutes from the film that she found offensive, including the morning aftermath, the infamous vomiting scene, where Gus and Archie end up puking horribly in the bathroom, joined later by Harry, who feels momentarily left out. Many viewers will find this scene excessive and overly indulgent, but Cassavetes was a man that insisted art could be found anywhere, even in a bathroom stall. Of note, female director Anja Breien’s film WIVES (Hustruer, 1975) was the Norwegian comedic feminist response to Husbands.

Unlike normal people that just go home and sleep it off, these guys stick together throughout, taking Harry home in a cab, apparently to resume his normal life, but he explodes in a violent confrontation with his wife after she tells him “I’m just uncomfortable in front of you —that’s it—it’s nothing personal,” ultimately deciding to run away to London, joined by his two pals who agree “to tuck him in, then come back home.” Every outdoor scene in London is a typhoon of rain where somebody gets drenched, but they gamble, play craps, find girls, and eventually end up in adjoining suites, each with their own girl. Again, these are extended scenes, notable for their obvious discomfort, some of which are painfully cringeworthy (especially Archie) when it becomes so evident they’re on the lookout for women, becoming even more difficult once they’ve actually found them. Gus has an aggressive, tall blond, Mary (Jenny Runacre), wrestling uncomfortably with her in bed while they continually bruise each other physically and emotionally, although Gus constantly tries to hide behind his humor. Archie, who confesses he is slow in bed, wants to talk endlessly to a young Vietnamese hooker Julie (Noelle Kao) who doesn’t speak a word of English, singing “Good Morning Mr. Zip Zip Zip” ever so softly, then erupts in verbal abuse when the girl tries to aggressively use her tongue when kissing, ultimately declaring his love for her in the morning where she can be seen walking aimlessly in the rain ranting to herself in some indecipherable language. Harry wants to talk about his wife, and everything Pearl Billingham (Jenny Lee Wright) can do reminds him of his wife (“I feel so goddamned disloyal!), so he ends up with 3 or 4 different women in his room by morning, declaring, “If you go, you’ll be replaced by someone else,” singing “Dancing in the Dark” with them all, joined by Gus, who has found another 6 foot blond, and Archie. Gus confesses to Archie: “We've got two lovely wives - - the only problem is to go home and make love to them,” leaving Harry in London to fend for himself while Gus and Archie head back home (interestingly seen smoking on airplanes, while earlier they’re also seen smoking on the trains, both prohibited actions today), but also buying stuffed animals for their children at the airport, nervously arriving back to their perfect suburban homes. The two friends are next door neighbors, wondering about Harry, “What’s he gonna do without us?” In a quietly affecting moment, Gus’s 4-year old daughter Xan bursts into tears (as Nick allegedly took her toy away) when she sees him while his 11-year old son Nick yells out to him, “Dad! Oh boy, you’re in trouble,” as the children carry the bags of stuffed animals and walk out of sight together and supposedly continue the rest of their lives.

Film critic Pauline Kael, a longtime Cassavetes antagonist, described the film as “infantile and offensive,” Dave Kehr described the Cassavetes’men in HUSBANDS as “pure creatures of emotion,” while Roger Ebert took issue with Time magazine’s rave review, “seldom has Time given a better review to a worse movie.” The very things people find ugly and overcalculated about Cassavetes are exactly what is unique and refreshing in the movies. Cassavetes was never about technical filmmaking, so if that's your criteria, you will need to look elsewhere, but he is one of the great humanists in cinema, not in a broad sense, like Renoir, whose films nearly sing with poetic light, but in redefining what's considered believable onscreen, by including what's wrong alongside what's right, both part and parcel of the human condition. HUSBANDS may be the best at revealing what's so gut-wrenchingly wrong with these three guys, but it's also one of the best character studies and examples of friendship that you’ll ever see onscreen. The word forgiveness isn't spoken, yet it's continually offered. This is what Cassavetes does better than anybody. You may not like it because it's not pretty, and it might make you feel somewhat queasy at times, but being uncomfortable with others as well as ourselves is something we're always striving to overcome. We never actually succeed, as life is filled with uncomfortable moments, but Cassavetes is simply one the best at meticulously detailing how human we are. One of the marvels of the film, especially at the end of a grueling two and a half hour film called HUSBANDS, is that they left out the part about actually being husbands, where one would absolutely love to hear what these guys have to say to their wives at the end, but Cassavetes doesn't include that in the film, instead it shows them as philandering morons who are no more grown up than typical teenage kids with their parents away for the weekend, where there’s nothing dishonest about that. On the contrary, with something close to a 40-50% divorce level, HUSBANDS shows the degree of suffocation and dissatisfaction associated with marriage. Self-contempt and self-loathing are part and parcel of something we all experience at some point or another. At least Cassavetes is a guy who tries to get at the root of how self deluded we are as human beings, who buy into this marriage till death do us part concept, and then don't know what we've gotten ourselves into. These guys are deluded, and at least for the moment, contemptible, especially in the eyes of their wives, where Cassavetes is relentless in showing what little reward they actually get out of this experience, yet in their minds it is magnified to this great trans-Atlantic adventure. You may not like it, but it's raw and intensely honest. This is a real male bravado movie, and their hurt feelings and insecurities and enormous inadequacies are plastered all over the screen some 20 feet high for the whole world to see, bravely hiding nothing, revealing everything, in a brilliant choreography of emotional confusion.

The film was initially a 4-hour print that was edited down to just under 3 hours, which when previewed before a live audience produced howls of laughter, where the audience obviously loved it. But this was not the feeling Cassavetes was looking for, which is more a devastating glimpse of the enveloping sadness, so despite three friends on the cover of Life magazine in May 1969, seen here: RIP: Ben Gazzara (1930-2012) | AwesomeBMovies.com, which was great publicity, he spent another year re-editing the film before it was finally released December 1970. The controversial scene in question was the bar scene, shot over the course of three days where they were drinking real beer on the set, where many of the extras didn’t have a clue what they were in for. Leola Harlow, for instance, a showgirl stripper in real life, was reduced to tears from the male bullying and abuse, evidence of a politically incorrect, misogynist theme that exists throughout the picture, but for Cassavetes, it was all about being challenged to discover new insight into the characters. Of interest, the song she sings is one the actress actually wrote. While another, John “Red” Kullers sings “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” which quiets the house with a surprisingly effective rendition of a Depression era song, literally wiping away the tears by the end from the harsh reality of its dour essence. Before the term became fashionable, what story there is reflects a midlife crisis taking place during the same time as the completely unseen 60’s counterculture, where these guys are too old to be part of the movement, but too young to be part of the generation that they are rebelling against. They are part of the white middle class and embracing it instead of railing against it, still questioning how to find happiness in life, as the harmony and stability of the world has suddenly shifted on its axis, especially after the death of a friend, and will never be the same. Perhaps what’s most surprising is how they remain defined by their marriages, as it’s how they view themselves, so when you pull them away from their middle class homes, they’re like ships adrift without an anchor, where they each fail to live up to their own expectations of themselves, where they thought they’d be so liberated and free, yet they’re each sexually constrained, still remaining so attached to their missing wives, where at least according to Peter Falk this film is as much a story about the wives, the three women that you don’t see. Watching these men, it’s hard to visualize yourself outside the ingrained social dynamic, which has a way of paralyzing all impulses to break away, as longterm monogamous relationships are held together by old-fashioned concepts of faithfulness and fidelity, felt even subconsciously, and in places you least expect to find it.

Time Out (link lost)

One of the Cassavetes improvisations made before he began profitably subjecting the technique to genre limitations in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night and Gloria, this is a maddening mixture. Cliché is never too far away as three New York commuters, middle-aged, married and disturbed by the death of a friend, embark on a despairing odyssey (partly on a flying visit to London) of drink, sex and self-discovery. Yet for all the rambling repetitions and noisy generalisations, the film does add up to a devastatingly bleak view of the emptiness of suburban life.

City Pages [Noel Murray]

Proving that the personal style he stumbled onto with Faces was no accident, writer-director-actor John Cassavetes goes even deeper into psychodrama with this, his 1970 follow-up feature, in which Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara appear as bitter suburbanites who grieve for a mutual friend by going on a world-class bender and spilling their guts. The situation is raw, and plays out in rambling, tightly shot, improv-quality set pieces that become increasingly submersive. Cassavetes's naturalist aesthetic is sabotaged in a major way by his characters' nonstop heart-on-sleeve discourse, which sounds forced and phony, even coming from a trio of soulsick drunks. But the actors are champs: Even when these husbands are shouting every thought and impulse at one another, body language and inflection tell a different story, one of intense insecurity and self-delusion. (Expensive coats and gloves can't cloak their essential savagery.) Thirty-plus years removed from its original context, Husbands seems as much about a general collapse of civilization as about middle-class America at the dawn of the '70s--and it's precisely the film's social anthropology that saves it from being a presumptuous, overbearing bore. From the photo-album opening to the climactic scene of two men sorting out the souvenirs of their trip to London, Husbands is about freezing moments that may only be understood in retrospect.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Teddy Blanks] also seen here: notcoming.com | Husbands

A wholehearted advocation of John Cassavetes’s films is almost necessarily a defense of them. They don’t look, sound, or feel like movies, but they are as long as them (sometimes longer), and as a result are easy to dismiss as unscripted, amateurish, even boring. Such a dismissal is unfounded: the man worked hard to make his pictures as frustrating to their audiences as they are. And they were frustrating, to audiences and critics alike. Even so, he was angry with his biggest critics. He had a number of choice encounters with Pauline Kael, once famously yanking off her shoes and throwing them out the window of a moving taxicab the two were sharing. Appropriately, he tackled filmmaking with the same socially unacceptable gusto with which he tackled Kael. He would mock, confuse, and torment his actors until their faces settled into an expression he was interested in filming.

In Husbands, Cassavettes takes his own impulsive and lustful behavior and fuses it into three middle-aged Long Island commuters, three buddies—Harry, Archie, and Gus, played by Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, and Cassavetes himself, respectively—who have recently been to the funeral of a fourth. Not ready to go home to their wives and children quite yet, the three friends go on a four day bender, which starts as a relatively innocent night of grieve-drinking and ends with the men in London, picking up chicks at a casino and wrestling with their mortality, unsure of what to do next and on the brink of madness. What comes to light during their escapade is that the square life, the standard path of their day—marriage, kids, picket-fence—is stunting their passion and vigor. This revelation is precisely why it is impossible to think of Husbands being made now: our generation simply has more choices.

The movie resembles real life, but its characters don’t remind you of anybody you’ve ever met: they behave and react in ways that no person, and certainly no other movie character, would ever behave. Cassavetes was interested in emotional truth, and for him, truth and realism were mutually exclusive. It is often difficult to tell whether he scripted his movies or allowed them to be totally improvised, but Cassavetes himself insisted he always had a screenplay, and probably his method was a combination of the two. Whatever this method was, it allowed him to capture some of the most bizarre and confusing moments we have on film. There is a scene in which Gus, the character played by Cassavetes, is in bed with a tall blonde in their London hotel room: they wrestle around exhaustively, and her responses to his come-ons range from wildly kicking him to tenderly kissing him. He tells her how beautiful she is, and then pretends (or does he?) to strangle her.

This scene, like most in Husbands, goes on for way too long, is confusing, cloying, and at times infuriating. Supposedly, Cassavetes really “found” his picture in the editing room, and re-cut it after his audiences’ initial response was positive. He wanted to annoy us, to test our patience. Cassavetes despised entertainment, so when critics call Husbands directionless and overlong, to paraphrase Julian Schnabel (out of context) in the recent Sketches of Frank Gehry, it’s like watching Apocalypse Now and complaining that Robert Duvall’s acting is “over-the-top.”

After two days of drinking, shooting hoops, and swimming laps, the men decide that it might be time to go home, maybe go back to work. When Harry returns to his wife—his is the only wife we see, making him the only one of the three to actively play the role of husband—she announces that she is leaving him, but that “it’s nothing personal.” This sends him into a rage, and — in a moment that is hardly mentioned in most reviews of Husbands and the turning point for the way we view its characters — she pulls a knife on him, and he hits both her and her mother, who happens to also be in the house. This piercing scene of domestic violence ends with Gus and Archie literally dragging Harry out of the house. Gus tells him to take it easy, adding that he’s “not the first guy to beat up on his wife.”

Before this moment, we were able to concentrate on Harry, Gus and Archie as a trio: laughing with them, singing with them, drinking with them, and trying to understand the power dynamic in their relationship. But after this glimpse of home life, the movie’s title looms heavy on its shoulders. These men are husbands— bad husbands. From here, Cassavetes follows them to work and later to London, where their depravity reaches its height.

The three husbands take their anger and regret out on the women around them, but Cassavetes doesn’t once give us a wink or nudge to let us know he doesn’t approve of their behavior. To him, the husbands’ misogyny is institutional, a natural effect of society’s suppression of their individualism. The most disturbing aspect of Husbands is that it is unclear whether the director has any strong feelings about his characters’ abhorrent behavior. Any other director dabbling in moral ambiguity would rationalize his characters’ drinking and wife-beating to the point where we could cautiously sympathize, or at least understand them; Cassavetes just lays it all out in front of us, asking us to merely accept it or stop watching.

Curiously, what redeems Husbands is Cassavetes’ immensely more celebrated film A Woman Under The Influence, made four years later. Whereas the husbands, for the most part, get away with their philandering and slouch home after their long trip, Gena Rowlands’ housewife Mabel is committed to a mental institution when she undergoes a similar mid-life madness. A Woman Under the Influence is the feminist counterpoint to Husbands: it shows us a society that condemns women but lets men off the hook for the same type of irrational behavior. Sympathizing with Mabel is easy: she is the oppressed party in the traditional husband-wife relationship. A Woman Under the Influence is a movie that makes us feel a little more comfortable about watching Husbands. Which, of course, Cassavetes would have hated.

Movie Review - Husbands - Film: Very Middle-Class Friendship ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also seen here: New York Times and here: The New York Times

"Husbands," John Cassavetes's first film as a director since "Faces," is a personal, almost private movie that is devoted to the exploration of the mysteries of a very middle-class American friendship. Like "Faces," which was rambling and funny and accurate, and which I admired, the new film demonstrates a concern for panicky, inarticulate squares that is so unpatronizing that it comes close to being reverential in a solemnly religious sense.

"Husbands," however, also puts one's tolerance of simulated cinéma vérité to the test. It is almost unbearably long. It is a narrative film without any real narrative, and although it is a movie about three characters, those characters are seen almost exclusively in terms of their limiting relationship. It's as if someone decided to photograph a tug-of-war and photographed only the rope between the contestants.

Gus (Cassavetes), Harry (Ben Gazzara) and Archie (Peter Falk), commuting cronies from Port Washington, L. I., meet at the funeral of the fourth member of their group, a man taken off before his time by a coronary. They are shaken up, not only by the loss of their friend and the awareness that it could have happened to any one of them, but also by their own survival into imminent middle age, that dreadful time when it is suddenly apparent that what is, probably is the way it's always going to be. Archie would have liked to be a professional athlete "You get sweaty and feel good and you're with guys you like."

In a four-day bender that follows the funeral. Gus and Harry and Archie start drinking and talking in New York and wind up in London, where they drink and talk some more and make out with three unusually attractive pick-ups. They continue to drink and talk and, finally, come to the end of a very expensive weekend. Archie would like to stay on, but Gus points out that among them they have "three garages, five kids and two lovely wives." The only problem, he adds bleakly, "is going home and making love to them."

"Husbands" seems not only to be about friendship, but also a product of friendship—that of the three stars who react to one another with an extraordinary intensity that seldom is as meaningful to us as it is to them. As the movie rolls on, through scenes of epic non-communication, including one extended interlude in a men's room where Gus and Archie take turns vomiting up a night's worth of beer, a kind of frustration settles over the movie, like that experienced by the three friends.

Harry beats up a telephone booth and then turns to his friends and admits that although his wife is good in bed, he loves Gus and Archie more. Archie almost ruins his night out in London when he recoils in horror to the open-mouth kiss offered by his girl. In Port Washington, that sort of thing is frowned upon, at least between strangers. They are frustrated not only by the dim present, but also by attitudes established in the past.

The movie, in turn, becomes frustrated by the form chosen by Mr. Cassavetes. He lets every scene continue long past closing time, as if in hopes of grabbing, perhaps accidently, some found truth. The effect of "Husbands" eventually is like that of being at a party, after the liquor and wit have run out, and when nobody can quite bring himself to leave.

With the exception of Harry, who is seen briefly in very funny, uproarious battle with his Wife ("I'm just not comfortable in front of you," she tells him, adding "it's nothing personal"), Mr. Cassavetes doesn't let us see the men except as a team, as effectively isolated from wives and family as Arctic explorers. This explains, I think, the sudden relief and effectiveness of a closing scene in which Gus returns home, where he is met by his 11-year-old son and his 2-year-old daughter who, for no visible reason, bursts into tears. It may not be the only spontaneous moment in "Husbands," but it is tender and sad, and it affected me more than anything else in the film.

It affected me, I suspect, because like Gus, I was exhausted by the manic horse-play with which the husbands react to one another, and which is the ritual that represents the exchange of their love. Gus and Harry and Archie cuff one another a lot, and, when drunk, they are given to sloppy kisses. When they swim, they dunk one another under the water, and when it's all over, they are tired, but not much wiser—which is pretty much the sum and substance of "Husbands."

The Making of Husbands (1969-1970) Ray Carney’s discussion of HUSBANDS

3:12 PM a Ray Carney post at Allan MacInnis’s Alienated in Vancouver website on the cut footage from HUSBANDS

Click here to hear the audio of twelve minutes that were cut at the end of the singing scene and the beginning of the men's room scene from HUSBANDS

Cassavetes’s Husbands: Death, Funerals, and New York at bavatuesdays Jim Groom from bavatuesdays (YouTube clips were unfortunately removed)

Wellington Film Society - HUSBANDS Nigel Andrew from Sight & Sound, Spring 1971

Sparks In Electric Jelly: John Cassavetes' Husbands Jez Winship

HUSBANDS Review: John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk Dan Schneider from Alt Film Guide, also seen here: Husbands/DVD Review/Dan Schneider - Cosmoetica and here: Dan Schneider - The Spinning Image

The Confusion of Husbands | The House Next Door - Slant Magazine Chris Gisonny

John Cassavetes and the Shoes of Pauline Kael - Like Anna ... Filmbrain from Like Anna Karina’s Sweater

Husbands review | Little White Lies Matt Thrift, also seen here: Cinephile: Review : Husbands

Husbands - Turner Classic Movies Sean Axmaker

Personal Criticism : The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker, August 3, 2009

EatSleepLiveFilm.com Review: Husbands Luke Richardson

Husbands | PopMatters Stephen Snart

Welcome to Emanuel Levy » Peter Falk Tribute: Husbands

A comment on Peter Falk's finest moments: Husbands and A Woman ... Robert Fowler on Peter Falk from The World Socialist Web Site

Life and nothing but... Cassavetes' Husbands | British Film Institute Geoff Andrew from BFI, September 25, 2012

Eventually, This Will Be a Review of the Movie 'Husbands' - Smug Film Greg DeLiso

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] DVD Review

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson

Husbands | DVD | HomeVideo Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin

Film-Forward Review: Husbands (1970) DVD Review by Scott David Briggs

John Cassavetes' Long-Lost And Freewheelin' 'Husbands' To Hit ... DVD Review by The Playlist

cinemadaily | Cassavetes' "Husbands" On DVD Today | Filmmakers ... Andy Lauer from indieWIRE

IFC.com [Michael Atkinson] DVD Review

John Cassavetes's Husbands on DVD : The New Yorker Richard Brody, August 10, 2009

Honda's Sci-Fi, Cassavetes' Husbands, Tati at Play – DVDs for the ... Sean Axmaker, also seen here: seanax.com » DVDs for 8/18/09 – Runaway Husbands, Undercover ...

DVD Verdict [Roy Hrab]

Jason Bailey Fourth Row Center

Seminal Cinema Outfit: Watch Cassavetes' 'Husbands' – Cassavetes ..

Husbands by John Cassavetes | Ephemeral Digest

Husbands Review - TV Guide

Cassavetes' Works: Husbands critical reactions to the film from Ray Carney’s website

• View topic - Husbands (Cassavetes, 1970) - CriterionForum.org film discussion site

Time Out Dave Calhoun

Husbands – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Husbands – review | Film | The Observer - The Guardian Philip French from The Observer

Husbands, John Cassavetes, 131mins (12A) - Reviews - Films - The ... Anthony Quinn from The Independent

Cleveland Press [Tony Mastroianni] obviously not feeling the love

Baltimore City Paper Bret McCabe

DVD Reviews / Husbands (Extended Cut) - SFGate John Stanley

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1970

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1998

DVDs - Men Carouse; Women Clean - Films by Cassavetes and ... Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 20, 2009

Husbands - Cassavetes Falk Gazzara - DVDBeaver.com Gary W. Tooze

34-Minute Clip of JOHN CASSAVETES, PETER FALK AND BEN GAZZARA TAKE OVER 'THE DICK CAVETT SHOW,' 1970

MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ A 98

USA (115 mi) 1971

It's never as clear as it is in the movies. People don't know what they are doing most of the time, myself included. They don't know what they want or feel. It's only in the movies that they know what their problems are and have game plans for dealing with them. All my life I've fought against clarity – all those stupid definitive answers. Phooey on a formula life, on slick solutions. It's never easy. And I don't think people really want their lives to be easy. It's a United States sickness. In the end it only makes things more difficult. —John Cassavetes

You know, the world is full of silly asses who crave your body. I mean, not just your body, but your heart, your soul, your mind, everything! They can't live until they get it. And you know, once they get it, they don't really want it. —Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands)

I think about you so much, I forget to go to the bathroom! —Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel)

MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ was, oddly enough, Universal Studios response to the youth market, where the success of MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) and EASY RIDER (1969) opened the door for low budget, independent films that were less conventional. Ned Tannen in the youth division of the studio approved the script in record time and appropriated $678,000 to start shooting within two months. According to Cassavetes, most of the “youth” films of the period were not any better than the movies they replaced, where young directors were equally enthralled by the status and power of established Hollywood stars, so even though he pitched his idea as a low-budget youth film, he seethed at the idea that his films had a targeted youth market, countering “I think of youth being life.” Cassavetes hand picked his own production team, including lifelong friend Al Ruban and Paul Donnelly, former head of production at Universal. More significantly, rather than operate in the standard, impersonalized, businesslike way of shooting a studio picture, Cassavetes personalized every aspect of the filmmaking process, making it a family affair, casting his wife Gena Rowlands as Minnie and lifelong friend Seymour Cassel as Moskowitz for the two leads, also his wife’s mother (Lady Rowlands as Georgia Moore) as well as his own (Katherine Cassavetes as Sheba Moskowitz) for their respective parents, using his wife’s real brother David Rowlands as the Minister that, of course, forgets his sister’s name at the altar. Elizabeth Deering, the girl who has a one-night fling with Moskowitz is, in fact, Cassel’s real wife, while Elsie Ames who plays Florence, Minnie’s coworker at the art museum, is his mother-in-law. Five members of producer Paul Donnelly’s family appear, also two of Cassel’s own children and three of Cassavetes’s children appear in the final scene. Cassavetes himself plays Jim, the married man having an affair with Minnie, while Jim’s kitchen is Cassavetes own home kitchen, Minnie’s bedroom is their home bedroom (also seen in Faces), while Florence’s apartment is Cassel’s own apartment.

A wonderful entry point to Cassavetes films, though it’s not available on DVD (likely due to the unauthorized—meaning not paid for—Hollywood film clips used of Bogart), as this is largely a film about films, easily one of Cassavetes funniest, most optimistic, uplifting and happiest, and while no filmmaker had a greater distaste for formula, this is one of the few Cassavetes films with a genuinely happy ending. Yet underneath the frolicking set-ups and madcap humor is an ambitiously honest picture about lonely people trying to discover love, breaking down the stereotypes that set us up to fail in matters of love and relationships, where leading men are required to be handsome, charming, suave and debonair. When we first meet Minnie, she is at a screening of CASABLANCA (1942) with her older friend Florence, where afterwards Minnie confesses she likes Humphrey Bogart while Florence likes Claude Rains, “but not so much the girl (Ingrid Bergman).” Returning to Florence’s apartment afterwards, the two have a few glasses of wine where Minnie opens up about how compared to the movies, her personal life is a disappointment, having no luck with men, as there’s no one out there to sweep you off your feet. “Movies are a conspiracy, they set you up to believe in things. There’s no Charles Boyer in my life. I never even met a Charles Boyer. I never met Clark Gable. I never met Humphrey Bogart. I’ve never met any of them. You know who I meet. I mean, they don’t exist. That’s the truth.” This may as well be the theme of the film, the deconstruction of the Hollywood myth, using a classical screwball comedy genre as a love story that goes haywire, where in addition to the quirky love story, featuring zany characters and the usual slapstick gags and jokes, the story is infused with a painfully evident realism, described as a “screwball comedy where people actually get hurt.” In this film, everywhere they turn, characters are running into trouble, where even Seymour, a man who loves to park cars for a living, has his own truck scraped by an inattentive car lot attendant (played by one of producer Paul Donnelly’s sons), “Sorry about that brick wall, sir.”

An oddball Los Angeles romance about an impulsive, loud-mouthed, long-haired, truck-driving parking lot attendant, Seymour Moskowitz, wearing a giant walrus mustache, and Minnie Moore, a radiantly beautiful but introverted middle-class blond who works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, always seen hiding behind her sunglasses, who reaches the end of a dead-end relationship with an overly jealous married man, played, appropriately enough, by the director. She finds love and romance in a sequence of connected scenes, jumping from one event, immediately cutting into another, with hilarity, brilliant dialogue, some superlative acting along with gut-wrenching drama holding it all together. The origin of the film may have come from an earlier 1964 television series called Who Killed Annie Foran?, where Seymour Cassel appeared as a parking lot attendant, co-starring John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Several months after the film's release, Universal Studios apparently decided to shorten the running time by cutting out a scene near the beginning of the film, even though it violated their contract with Cassavetes. All subsequent releases since that time are still missing this scene, while Ray Carney claims the studio cut a “morning after” scene with Irish (Holly Near), a girl Seymour meets in a bar and gets beat up just for talking to her. This follows an earlier scene where Seymour is watching another Bogart movie, THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), where he and Minnie view Bogart pictures differently based upon their own characters, where Seymour sees Bogart as a fiercely independent tough guy that makes his own rules, irrespective of the feelings of others, while Minnie sees him as a self-sacrificing romantic that uses an outer veneer of toughness to hide his real feelings of tenderness and love. The film offers insight into Cassavetes’ own relationship with Rowlands, where they come from completely opposite worlds, one the son of a Greek immigrant, the other the daughter of a Midwest banker and state legislator, where Rowlands actually aspired to become an actress after watching Marlene Dietrich onscreen in THE BLUE ANGEL (1930), where movies are the connecting tissue of their marriage.

The film is built upon the disillusionment of love, where Minnie has grown tired of men, “I don’t like men. They smile too much. You see a lot of teeth,” as she’s continually let down by their lying and deceiving ways, where in the end they’re never romantic enough, and Seymour is continually getting beaten up whenever he exposes his feelings, though the scene with his wife (Deering) is touching for the tenderness it expresses. Nothing exposes this disillusionment quite like two classic scenes that literally bleed into one another. One is the worst date scene ever, a blind date from hell, where Minnie goes out to lunch on a blind date (chosen by Florence) with Zelmo Swift (Val Avery, also seen behaving crudely and reprehensibly in Faces). Zelmo is so loud and overwrought, taking candor to new levels, where he pours out his heart with a continuing stream of over-revealing confessions about his own life’s personal failings that would drive anyone away, making such a scene, “Blondes! What is it with you blondes? You all have some Swedish suicide impulse?” getting louder and more coarse with his language until Minnie gets up to leave, embarrassed to be seen with the man. In the parking lot afterwards, he heaps on still more abuse, where Seymour attempts to intervene and gets clobbered before bloodying Zelmo’s nose, rescuing the fair damsel in distress by whisking her away in his broken down truck, where Seymour has a penchant for making U-turns in the middle of traffic, but in an impromptu moment takes her to Pink’s Hot Dogs afterwards where she’s so distraught she can’t eat a hot dog or even speak, but then he tells her she has a way of looking down on people, which sends her away in a huff, while Seymour winds up chasing her down the sidewalk in his truck, angrily telling her “I gotta’ be a dummy to get myself wrapped up for a Minnie Moore!” before driving her back to work. If that’s not bad enough, Jim is at the museum waiting for her, bringing his oldest son with him to witness that he’s breaking up with her, as his own wife attempted to cut her wrists in front of the kids earlier that morning after he was out all night with her. The tastelessness and cruelty of this moment is written all over her face when she contemptuously utters “Are you kidding me?” in the dignified manner only Gena Rowlands can achieve. In little more than an hour, she’s hit rock bottom.

This is a film that builds romance through emotional destabilization, wildly swerving from toughness to tenderness, where Minnie and Seymour have a volatile relationship that continually seems unlikely, yet before you know it, there’s Minnie, feeling braver, creeping ever closer to Seymour in a wonderful scene where she sadly tells him “Everything used to make me smile. I’ve noticed I don’t smile as much as I used to.” Nothing about these two together makes any sense, as they’ve already been through a train wreck, and when they kiss you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, as every romantic scene is interrupted by immediate concerns that they’re doing the wrong thing. “Seymour, that’s just not the face I’m in love with,” yet fearlessly, she takes her chances anyway, setting up an insta-date in C.C. Brown’s ice-cream parlor, where the two couldn’t be on more opposite wavelengths, yet they obviously feel something for each other. Whenever they go out on conventional dates, there are no perfect moments like we see in other movies, where instead there’s an ironic use of Johann Strauss’s infamous The Blue Danube Waltz from Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), Herbert von Karajan conducts The Blue Danube Waltz YouTube (10:34) as they’re driving through the streets of Los Angeles, where the film is an entertaining roller coaster ride of their ups and downs, where Minnie has her doubts, but Seymour knows this is the real thing, where he gets her halfway up the stairs and is so overcome with emotion that he insists right then and there, “Sing a song, take off your clothes, do something!” where they end up singing softly to one another, occasionally off-key, or one of them can’t remember the lyrics “I love you truly, truly dear. Life with its sorrows, life with its tears...” It’s a beautifully fragile moment where they eventually meet in the bedroom, not to have sex, but to call their respective mothers, with Seymour singing tenderly throughout with that puppy dog look in his eyes. The meeting of the mothers is a hilarious moment of off-kilter humor, with Sheba Moskowitz suspecting Minnie must be pregnant, then railing against her son’s lack of ambitions, “Albert Einstein he’s not. Pretty he’s not. Look at that face. A future he doesn’t have. He parks cars for a living. Look at my son. He’s a bum.” It’s simply more of the emotional terrain they must learn to navigate, where this is a film about perseverance and believing in yourself, trusting your own instincts, and following your heart. The final sequence, though brief, is a purely classic Cassavetes ode to joy.

Time Out Capsule Review Geoff Andrew, also seen here: Time Out

An idiosyncratic romance, and a far lighter movie than is usual from Cassavetes. Detailing the problems that background and character bring to a relationship, he creates a captivatingly witty and sympathetic picture of a pair of misfits deciding to make a go of it together despite numerous incompatibilities and adversities. As always, it is the performances that dominate, with their sensitively-felt, naturalistic speech patterns and gestures; and for all its optimism, the film is still centred around a core of loneliness, while Cassavetes also contrasts the difficulties of real life with the idealised glamour purveyed by Hollywood (an attack on the system that could barely accommodate him?). The result is an understated and intimate view of two unexceptional people that is only sentimental when the characters themselves are sentimental.

not coming to a theater near you Cullen Gallagher

When we first meet Minnie Moore, she is at a repertory screening of Casablanca with one of her museum co-workers, Florence. As the movie ends and the lights come up, the two women are seemingly elated: Minnie likes Humphrey Bogart, and Florence has a yen for Claude Rains. Back at Florence’s apartment, the two indulge in wine (the only thing to eat or drink in the entire place) and open up about their disappointment with both their personal lives and the movie, and the way the two are interconnected. “Movies are a conspiracy,” Minnie says. “I never even met a Charles Boyer. I never met Clark Gable. I never met Humphrey Bogart. I’ve never met any of them. You know who I meet. I mean, they don’t exist. That’s the truth.”

Minnie’s speech becomes the foundational principle for Minnie and Moskowitz, a revising of the classical Hollywood “screwball comedy” that goes decidedly against the grain of the genre’s archetypes. Writer and director John Cassavetes has constructed a narrative that contains many of the elements that characterized the genre—a quirky love story, zany characters, a whimsical plot, slapstick gags, and a romantic bond that trumps any rational explanation—but he has infused them with a sobering, painful realism. I’ve heard the film explained as a “screwball comedy where people actually get hurt.” It’s a spot-on assessment, one that is perfectly in line with the world of Cassavetes where laughter, more often than not, signals pain. Between all the slapping, punching, pushing, and hollering, it is sometimes hard to remember how this movie even qualifies as a comedy. Humor, however, is never fully absent from Minnie and Moskowitz: it is present in Cassavetes’ tender concern for his characters, his affection for their many foibles, and his humanistic embracing of their actions (even when they are less than ideal).

Two of Cassavetes’ regular actors make up the titular duo. Seymour Cassel is the bushy-moustached Seymour Moskowitz, a New York transplant new to Los Angeles who makes his living as a parking lot attendant for restaurants. Gena Rowlands (Cassavetes’ wife) is Minnie Moore, an introverted employee for the county museum who hides behind her oversized dark sunglasses. The two of them meet after one of Minnie’s blind dates goes violently wrong. Seymour comes to her rescue and not only gets beaten up but also loses his job. Seymour and Minnie’s first impromptu date (at LA’s famous Pink’s Hot Dog Stand) doesn’t go over much better: Minnie refuses to eat the hot dog, and Seymour winds up chasing her down the sidewalk in his truck.

“I gotta’ be a dummy to get myself wrapped up for a Minnie Moore!” exclaims Seymour, while Minnie protests, “That’s not the face I dreamed of!” Though they fight it (and each other), the pair can’t deny their attraction for one another—or explain it, for that matter. One of the underlying themes in the movie is the difficulty of expressing love either verbally or physically. When Minnie is around, Seymour can talk about anything, except what he really wants to. Minnie, on the other hand, closes right up and can hardly speak. The two of them try to do the “conventional” things people do on dates – go dancing, look at the stars, eat ice cream – but none of them provide the opportunity for that magical harmony between two lovers, the sort of perfect moment one finds in so many movies.

Minnie and Seymour’s inability to find a way to mutually express their love without causing a black eye or a busted nose leads to one of the film’s philosophical quandaries: how can love exist if it doesn’t show itself somehow? After an accident-less swimming interlude, Seymour is so desperate to prolong their newly found joy that he compels Minnie to “sing a song, take off your clothes, do something!” But when they sing it is out of tune, and neither of them can remember the proper lyrics. In this moment, the two of them realize that the truest sign of their love isn’t in the right notes or the right words, but in the actual process of trying and failing but never giving up. Society may find it more proper to say, “I love you,” but who is to say that Seymour is any less romantic when he tells Minnie, “I think about you so much I forget to go to the bathroom”? Loving relationships outside of the bounds of social propriety have been integral to the screwball doctrine from It Happened One Night to The Lady Eve, and in it John Cassavetes (ever the independent spirit) has found at least one thing he can agree with Hollywood on.

Cinetarium [Jack Gattanella]

Cambridge Book: Minnie and Moskowitz Ray Carney

Cassavetes on Cassavetes - Page 277 - Google Books Result (pdf format)

Minnie and Moskowitz Ray Carnie’s discussion of MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ Minnie and Moskowitz

Alternative Film Guide (Dan Schneider)

Jason Bailey

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley] also seen here: FilmFanatic.org

Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews Harry Knowles, with Seymour Cassel introducing the film

AudioVideoRevolution.com DVD review Bill Warren

DVD Verdict [Nicholas Sylvain]

Film Freak Central Bill Chambers

The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

CinemaFunk Aaron Weiss

• View topic - Husbands (Cassavetes, 1970) - CriterionForum.org film discussion group, December 7, 2005

Variety

New York Times [Vincent Canby] also seen here: The New York Times

DVD Verdict [Maurice Cobbs]

COLUMBO – TV episode

USA all 8 Second Season episodes, one episode released September 17, 1972, “Étude in Black” (120 mi) 1972 d: Nicholas Colasanto (the coach in Cheers), starring John Cassavetes

User Reviews from imdb Author: blanche-2 from United States

This is another of my favorite Columbos. It sports a top-notch cast, including John Cassavetes, who was never handsomer or sexier, Anjanette Comer, Myrna Loy, and Blythe Danner. Now here's something I've always wondered - had Gwenyth Paltrow been born when this episode was shot, or was Danner pregnant at the time? Thanks to IMDb, I have my answer - she was five months' pregnant. Now I can really feel ancient.

Cassavetes plays a brilliant conductor whose marriage to Danner was apparently to use the social connections of her mother (Loy). He has a mistress on the side, Anjanette Comer, a prominent pianist, but she announces she wants more. She's sick of being back street. On the night of their concert, he gets rid of her and makes it look like suicide. Columbo picks up a few problems immediately. One thing he notices: "You have a beautiful woman here - bedroom eyes - she has money, a body, and a career. Where's the man?" It's wonderful to see Falk and good friend Cassavetes together. There's a very funny episode at the vet with Columbo's Bassett. Everyone in the cast is great.

This is one of the episodes that made Columbo the classic series it became.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Vaughan Birbeck from Scarborough, England

The Columbo formula - as everyone knows - requires the great one to wear down his opponent almost to the verge of a nervous breakdown until they make the fatal error that reveals their guilt.

For me the great moment in any Columbo story is the point when he knows who the murderer is, then has to set about proving it. In this film 'the moment' comes when he sees Alex Benedict replacing a flower in his tail coat, revealing he had been at the victim's home earlier that night. From there the pursuit is on.

In 'Etude in Black' Columbo seems almost sadistic in his pursuit of Benedict. He 'turns up' at his home (twice, the first time supposedly just for an autograph), at his garage (actually sitting in Benedict's E-Type and revving the engine to pieces, having told the mechanic he was 'a friend') and at the Hollywood Bowl. He is constantly 'sidetracked' in his questioning and 'forgets' to mention the investigation has been changed from suicide to murder and that he is now in charge of the case.

One blot in the film is Cassavetes 'conducting' of the orchestra. There's more to it than waving your arms about. He could at least have tried to keep time with the music. We're being asked to believe this man is a world-famous musician and on this evidence Alex Benedict couldn't direct traffic. Perhaps the pieces for the soundtrack were only chosen after filming.

This is a classic Columbo episode that pairs Peter Falk with his long-time friend and collaborator John Cassavetes. I actually think the scene where Columbo asks Benedict about the cost of his house, furniture and how much he earns was improvised between them. I can see the set-up: "Columbo has turned up unexpectedly at your house, you know he wants to ask you something but you don't know what it is. You have to avoid giving him any real information."

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Edward Copeland on Film

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

DVD Verdict [Patrick Bromley]

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review, Season 2 Cosette

An Evening Illuminated [Iain Stott]

Boston Phoenix [Matt Ashare]

A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE A 99

USA (147 mi) 1974

I’m very concerned about the depiction of women on the screen. It’s related to their being either high or low class concubines, and the only question is when or where will they go to bed, and with whom or how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of woman as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her...I’m sure we could have made a more successful film if we had depicted Mabel’s life as rougher, more brutal; if it made statements so that people could definitely take sides. But along the way, I’d have to look at myself and say, ‘Yes, we were successful at creating another horror in the world.’ I don’t know anyone who has had such a terrible time that she doesn’t smile ever, that she doesn’t have time to love, open her eyes, think about the details of life. Something wonderful happens all the time, even at the height of tragedy...I wanted to show that too...It’s never as clear as it is in the movies. People don’t know what they’re doing most of the time, myself included. They don’t know what they want or feel. It’s only in the movies that they know what their problems are and have game plans for dealing with them. All my life I’ve fought against clarity – all those stupid definitive answers. Phooey on the formula life, on slick solutions. It’s never easy. And I don’t think people really want their lives to be easy. It’s a United States sickness. In the end it makes things more difficult.

—John Cassavetes

Along with Faces (1968), these are the two most emotionally exhaustive works in the Cassavetes repertoire, and the most difficult to experience, where afterwards you feel fatigued and emotionally spent, though the uncomfortable structure of the film, continually built around ensemble pieces spiraling out of control, resembles Husbands (1970). While it’s something of a choreography of mood changes, it’s arguably Cassavetes’ most acclaimed film, though the New York critics loathed it when it was released, forcing Cassavetes to distribute the film himself, eventually doubling the box office receipts of Faces (with profits paying for most of the production costs of his next two films), where American Film Institute students working for free comprised most of the crew, including cinematographer Caleb Deschanel who was later fired on the set, taking nearly the entire crew with him, as they all regarded Cassavetes as impossible to work with, as he completely dismissed their working methods. Originally written by the director as a theater piece, designed as three plays, each to be performed over three separate nights for Ben Gazarra and the unparalleled Gena Rowlands, who offers a towering performance, but the Academy Award was given to Ellen Burstyn in the more sweetly conventional Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), where the plays were eventually turned into a film, as Rowlands felt the daily performances of this role would be too demanding, that no one could survive such a harrowing test of endurance. She plays Mabel Longhetti, someone without inhibitions, a funny, seductive and enchanting woman, who, unlike other films like Rolf de Heer’s THE QUIET ROOM (1996) or Alain Berliner’s MA VIE EN ROSE (1997), which feature parents without the imagination to understand their children, Mabel has plenty of imagination to spare, but is caught in a world gone wrong. “She’s not crazy, she’s unusual.” But no one is really listening, no one understands her, in one of Rowland’s greatest and most vulnerable roles, easily her most human, a misfit among misfits, a working class housewife’s descent into a mental breakdown, surrounded by all the so-called “loving” people who drove her there. She wants so much, wants to care so much, driven to despair by her own unrealized expectations. Frustrations, embarrassments, and disappointments just fill the screen in this film, an endless rhythm of giant mood swings, an emotional symphony played out before our eyes, where Maria Callas opens the film with the music of opera, foreshadowing the demonstrative passions to come. Rowlands pleaded with her husband for help in understanding her character, growing more and more irritated when he refused, literally glaring at him, angry at the way he was treating her, but somehow all that anger dissipated offscreen as her onscreen persona was pure innocence and vulnerability.

John Cassavetes is connected to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary's Baby (1968), a film he despised, by the way, playing the lying and deceiving husband that drugs his wife Rosemary to conceive the devil’s child, using a flashback-style of recurring dreams that slowly become Rosemary’s reality, where she is left alone to contend with and ultimately embrace a hellish nightmare that becomes her life, with no possible way out. It’s considered one of the great psychological horror films. Less than a decade later, Cassavetes writes this film, with critic Molly Haskell calling it “The biggest piece of garbage I’ve ever seen,” yet it’s easily one of the most frighteningly cruel films ever made, scarier perhaps even than the Polanski horror epic, yet it’s a love story, but one with brutal interior ramifications. Peter Falk, who partially funded the movie from earnings from the television series Colombo (1968 – 2003) and who plays against type, is Mabel’s overbearing husband Nick, a more introverted, closed-in man, a city sewer worker who brings the entire hard-hat work crew home with him after a midnight shift, where they sit around the kitchen table for a spaghetti breakfast. Mabel wants to like everyone, draw them out of their shells, and appears to be succeeding, as one of the black workers, none other than older brother Hugh Heard from Shadows (1959), is singing Italian opera from Aida, where she literally stares down the guy’s throat to find out where all that dramatic power is coming from, but when she gets too friendly the mood shifts instantly when Nick, embarrassed by her somewhat kooky display of affection, yells at her to “Sit your ass down!” clearing the house instantly in a moment of complete embarrassment. Yet afterwards Nick tells her she did nothing wrong, but she’s overcome by the fear of getting screamed at and humiliated in front of company, where Nick’s abusive habit of trying to control every situation by yelling and inflicting demeaning behavior has a way of sending mixed messages, where often the emotional circuitry gets confused, leaving Mabel a nervous wreck.

Having worked through the night, Nick is trying to get some sleep afterwards, but is interrupted by a visit from Grandma and the kids, with the kids jumping all over his bed wanting to play, but this time, Mabel yells at them to get away, ordering Grandma to take them to school. In an immediate mood shift, after the kids leave, the house is stunningly quiet, with Mabel quickly realizing, “Boy, I can hardly wait for the kids to come home from school. All of a sudden I miss everyone.” In a truly wonderful scene, Mabel can be seen in mismatched clothes jumping up and down in the middle of the street, excitedly waiting after school for her kid’s school bus, where the anticipation is warmhearted and joyful, throwing them a party when they get home with the neighbor’s kids. She plays them the music to Swan Lake, asking the straight-laced neighbor Mr. Jensen (Mario Gallo) if he dances, “Kids, that’s Swan Lake, you know, the dying swan. C’mon and die for Mr. Jensen.” One by one, the kids drop like flies, Dying Swan - YouTube (1:23). But Mr. Jensen can only handle so much of this pure anarchy, so perfectly realized with Mabel’s chubby daughter Maria (Christina Grisanti, real life daughter of one of the hard-hats) running around the house butt naked as the theme quickly changes to a costume party. In utter disbelief at how out of control everything is, Mr. Jensen orders his kids to leave (with Xan Cassavetes, the older daughter playing one of the Jensen kids, while Mabel’s oldest son Tony is actually the son of Seymour Cassel), where the mood swings from innocent happiness to a stunning nightmare, as the party ends in a fight with Nick slugging the neighbor, yelling he’s going to kill him, then slugging Mabel, threatening to kill her. It’s an amazing turnaround.

From utter turmoil, it only get worse, as Nick calls the psychiatrist to have her committed, believing his wife is deliriously out of control, as he simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to understand her, as for him, everything has to be spelled out in black and white terms, where as the man he gets to decide what’s what. The beauty of the entire children sequence is that it was delightfully innocent fun, where the kids were happily playing along with each other, and only the parents got upset. The degree of horror displayed in this scene is utterly chilling, one of the ugliest scenes on film, especially once Nick’s mother shows up (Katherine Cassavetes, the director’s mother), adding fuel to the fire in an emotional roller coaster of shifting emotions, urging the doctor to take her away. While Nick pretends to have a change of heart, as Mabel becomes suddenly afraid they’re all conspiring against her, but the real instigator is his mother pleading with the doctor to give her a sedating shot to shut her up, ranting at the top of her lungs “This woman is crazy!” Of course, the compliant doctor, little more than a weasel of the establishment, willingly obeys, signing the order for a 6-month institutionalization, becoming a socially imposed order that is nothing more than insanity itself imposed upon Mabel. As emotionally traumatized as she is, she is the voice of clarity in this family, but no one listens, ruling with an iron fist, like a totalitarian government imposing their control. Of note, Cassavetes was not aware what direction this scene would take, as he left it up to the actors and was susprised that Nick allowed Mabel to be institutionalized, Peter Falk’s explanation was that Rowlands was so superb that he didn’t want to interrupt her performance, and by the time he realized what was happening it was too late. Cassavetes, of course, never bought that explanation, believing Nick was just being over-controlling, but was happy the scene erupted into a life force of its own.

Perhaps worst of all, the kids watch their mother get sent away for reasons they can’t understand. Without Mabel in the picture, we’re forced to witness Nick’s sorry excuse for fatherhood, where he is more like a drill sergeant, ordering his kids around, dragging them this way and that, feeding them beer as he feebly tries to apologize and justify his actions to them, and is just a pathetic disgrace for a parent. In yet another mood swing, Nick throws a grandiose party for Mabel’s return 6 month’s later, but realizing her potential social awkwardness, convinced by his mother that it would be a bad idea, he throws everyone out at the last minute except for the immediate family, which gathers around Mabel like a witches coven from Rosemary's Baby, all staring at her where she’s literally petrified to move, analyzing her every wince and murmur, repeating like a mantra for her to relax, take it easy, not to over exert herself, basically driving her so crazy she orders them all to go. But no one listens to her until she starts singing to herself, utterly ignoring them all, off into her own little world. When they finally do leave, she makes a terrible attempt to cut herself, saved by Nick with the kids jumping all over her, where she’s subjected to yet another slap from Nick. Then, in a final inexplicable mood shift, with blood still dripping from her cut hand, Mabel tucks her children gently and lovingly into bed, putting the dishes away, and turning out the lights, as life goes on while an original piano improvisation that played at the opening is heard again, this time adding kazoos. The piano music by Bo Harwood is raw and simple, perfectly matching the naturalistic mood, and accordingly adds a timeless simplicity to the original score.

This is a transforming film about what makes us so different from one another, with Nick barking out orders, wanting to control Mabel’s lunacy while at the same time encouraging it, and Mabel, the vulnerable, dying swan who pays the cost for not holding back, who means well and thinks she can charm the world by continuously being motivated by a love for everyone she meets, where neither have malice in their hearts, but both cause each other severe emotional harm. Especially chilling is how the film reveals the emptiness of those in charge, who have the full force of authority to get their way, no matter what price, even if it destroys a loved one. It's a nightmarish story and some feminists may see this as ultimately an abusive one, but the unvarnished truth is the couple does love each other, each continuously trying to do better, and it does show the lengths that people will have to go to find love. While there are only subtle references to Mabel’s medicine cabinet, such as an evening when Mabel goes out drinking alone and gets completely blitzed, this movie was made at a time when diet pills as uppers (amphetamines, speed) and downers (valium, barbiturates) were commonly available and even normal in middle class American homes, usually making matters much worse in combination with alcohol. Mabel’s fragile insecurity is driven by an insatiable need to be needed and appreciated, where she simply loves too much, while her immediate family’s reactionary instincts drive her even further off the edge. This is truly an expression of undying love, as in the end, little has changed for the better, as the conflicts they cause each other remain thoroughly entrenched in their lives, yet you feel somehow this couple is inseparable, that they will find the will to survive and persevere through whatever emotional cost they have to pay if it means staying together. This is an unforgettable film that creates such unimaginable emotional depth, described by many as one of the films of the decade. Of note, in post-release comments, the director interestingly pointed out that in real life, Rowlands plays Nick to Cassavetes’ Mabel.

A Woman Under the Influence | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

John Cassavetes's 1974 masterpiece, and one of the best films of its decade. Cassavetes stretches the limits of his narrative—it's the story of a married couple, with the wife hedging into madness—to the point where it obliterates the narrator: it's one of those extremely rare movies that seem found rather than made, in which the internal dynamics of the drama are completely allowed to dictate the shape and structure of the film. The lurching, probing camera finds the same fascination in moments of high drama and utter triviality alike—and all of those moments are suspended painfully, endlessly. Still, Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen. With Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) - The Criterion Collection

One of Cassavetes' best films, with a suitably ambiguous title for a plot that manages to be political in its social implications without succumbing to any crass statements. Rowlands and Falk play a lower middle class couple with three kids, whose combined temperaments produce a potentially explosive emotional energy. He can let off steam in his work; she tries to do it at home, but ends up by turning her household into a cross between an encounter group and an adventure playground, to the fury of neighbours and mother-in-law. The brilliance of the film lies in its sympathetic and humorous exposure of social structure. Rowlands unfortunately overdoes the manic psychosis at times, and lapses into a melodramatic style which is unconvincing and unsympathetic; but Falk is persuasively insane as the husband; and the result is an astonishing, compulsive film, directed with a crackling energy.

City Pages [Jim Ridley]

To see John Cassavetes's 1974 film for the first time is to become one of those sci-fi heroes who gets rudely disconnected from a spoonfed alternate reality. The disruption isn't pretty or pleasant: At times it hurts like hell. The trade-off is that the world seems stripped of its sugarcoating, its delusions of knowability and comfort. Gena Rowlands, her husband's muse and onscreen alter ego, fuses with the role of Mabel Longhetti, a hard-drinking wife and mother who's slipping into flighty madness to the consternation of her hard-hat husband Nick (Peter Falk). Is she a lovable madcap? A threat to her family? An embarrassment to a spouse whose throttled emotions may be even more harmful? On the set, according to Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney, the writer-director withheld the answers (and approval) his actors wanted, infuriating Falk and driving Rowlands in particular to the brink of a breakdown. Instead, he left them to feel their way through agonizing scenes of near-improvisatory awkwardness and indirection--foot-dragging, navel-gazing, emotionally brutal vignettes that trail off into frustrating uncertainty. This unresolved tone led critics to mislabel Cassavetes throughout his career as a naturalist. What's closer to the truth--which, after all, is what he sought--is a brand of theatricality so intense and unrelenting that actor, character, performance, and film become indivisible.

EmanuelLevy.com

Cassavetes created vehicles for himself (Husbands), his wife Gena Rowlands (Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence), and a select group of actors that he liked.

In A Woman Under Influence, an insightful essay on sexual politics, Mabel is a housewife who crosses the line into sanity. With a light feminist touch, she is perceived as a victim of a repressive patriarchal order and imposed social roles. Cassavetes sees Mabel as desperate, yet courageous enough woman not to pull back from madness, but descend into it, confronting every facet of life with her husband Nick (Peter Falk). Cassavetes never considered Mabel insane, just a woman who has her subjective way of perceiving the world, insisting on the validity of her feelings.

Cassavetes allows no distance: Like Mabel's family, the viewers are forced into the troubling experience of her life. As Michael Ventura pointed out, for Cassavetes that was the meaning of family, refusing to compromise the portrayal with comfortable cuts and smooth scene changes. Even in her worst pain, Mabel possesses a transcendent beauty that affects those around her. This was Cassavetes' strong point: Love can exist in the most horrible circumstances, an idea that would be later embraced by David Lynch.

Contrary to popular notion, the film's underlying structure is so rigorous that every aspect of Mabel's conduct receives equal attention. As always, though, Cassavetes' approach depends more on the actors' personalities than on pre-determined scripts and camera technique. He provided the essential key to his philosophy when he said, "I'm more interested in the people who work with me than in film itself." That's why his films go deeper than most in their explorations of the emotional truth of their participants.

Gena Rowlands received a well-deserved Oscar nomination as Best Actress for this movie, which represents the height of her and Cassavetes' careers.

A Woman Under the Influence was innovative in another major way. Dismayed by the poor distribution of his previous films, Cassavetes, Falk and Rowlands traveled from coast to coast to promote and book their movie directly with theaters. This pattern would encourage other indie filmmakers to take control of the distribution of their movies and often release them by themselves.

A Woman Under the Influence - Turner Classic Movies Lorraine LoBianco

The genesis of A Woman Under the Influence (1974) began when director John Cassavetes' wife, actress Gena Rowlands, told him she wanted to do a play about the difficulties women were facing at that time. As Marshall Fine wrote in his biography of John Cassavetes, Accidental Genius, "One day he handed Rowlands a play he had written and said, 'See what you think.' Rowlands recalled, 'I couldn't believe John wrote it. I don't mean to be sexist because I don't really believe that women can't write for men and vice versa. But I really couldn't believe that a man would understand this particular problem.'" What Cassavetes had written was so intense and emotional that Rowlands knew she couldn‘t bear performing in such a play eight times a week and told him that if she did, "I‘d have to be hospitalized." So Cassavetes decided he would make it into a film. "I only knew one thing about Woman when we started: that it was a difficult time for today's woman to be left alone while somebody goes out and lives. I know when I was not working and Gena was working for me - because I was really in trouble in this business - I stayed home and took care of the baby and I was a pretty good housewife and all that. But I didn't have really the same reactions as a woman would have, mainly because I didn't have to think into the future of when I'd get older or when my attractiveness would fade or when the kids would grow up or when the baby would cease to cling to you. All those things are more interesting than what they're making movies out of." No one seemed to agree with him when he approached Hollywood money men with the idea. He was told, "No one wants to see a crazy, middle-aged dame."

Without studio financing, Cassavetes decided to break the fundamental rule in filmmaking, "never use your own money". Instead, he mortgaged his house and approached friends and family to help him. Gena Rowlands remembered, "We didn't have the money to do it, but we had a lot of friends, all actors and interested in the project. So they all helped us. And we just did it." One of these friends was actor Peter Falk, who was starring in his hit television series Columbo. Falk read the script and believed in it so much he turned down a role in Day of the Dolphin (1973) and put up half a million dollars of his own money. The cast included Rowlands' and Cassavetes' mothers, their son Nick, their daughter, Xan, and Matthew Cassel, son of actor Seymour Cassel and Cassavetes' godson. The crew was a hodge-podge of professionals and students from the American Film Institute, where Cassavetes was serving as the AFI‘s first "filmmaker in residence" for their Center for Advanced Film Studies. The AFI was where Cassavetes ended up doing most of his editing as composer Bo Harwood remembered, "John wouldn't leave. He said, 'My movie's not done'. We were there for two years. It was like a bunch of bank robbers had taken over this eighteen-acre estate." Unable to find studio space to shoot, the scenes in Longhetti's home were filmed in a slightly run-down house on Taft Avenue, just off Hollywood Boulevard. As there was no budget for hair and makeup, Rowlands simply did her own, and with only one copy of her costumes (unthinkable in a Hollywood production), the clothes were sent to an overnight dry cleaners after each shoot.

After production and editing wrapped up, Cassavetes couldn't find a distributor for the film so he ended up calling theater owners across the country trying to get them to run the film. "Everyone who makes a movie is at the major distributor's mercy. We're distributing Woman ourselves because the studios have had no interest in it. And if they did come to us, we wouldn't sell it cheaply because we've taken our risks and expect to be paid well for it. After all, who the hell are they? Unless they finance the productions, they're a bunch of agents who go out and book theaters. That's what it really boils down to." As Jeff Lipsky, a college student hired by Cassavetes to help distribute the film, said "It was the first time in the history of motion pictures that an independent film was distributed without the use of a nationwide system of sub-distributors." A Woman Under the Influence was booked into small theaters, even at college campuses where Cassavetes and Falk would appear to talk about the film. It eventually made it to the New York Film Festival where it caught the attention of film critics like Joseph Gelmis of Newsday, who wrote that it was "an emotional blockbuster that should touch a nerve in every family that shelters an adult who's never grown up." Rex Reed called it "shatteringly profound and disturbing in ways movies seldom affect their audiences". As Marshall Fine wrote in his biography of John Cassavetes, "Actor Richard Dreyfuss was appearing on The Mike Douglas Show in Philadelphia, during a week when Peter Falk was Douglas' co-host to promote Woman. As they chatted on camera, Douglas asked Dreyfuss if he had seen A Woman Under the Influence. Rather than simply say, 'Yes and I thought it was great', the voluble actor launched into a description of the film: 'It was the most incredible, disturbing, scary, brilliant, dark, sad, depressing movie. I went crazy. I went home and vomited.' At which point Falk piped up, 'It's also funny. It's a funny movie.' ...When the show went to commercial, Falk picked up a nearby phone and called Cassavetes: 'This kid, he's telling everyone how terribly dark and scary the movie is,' Falk said. And on the other end of the phone, Dreyfuss heard Cassavetes laughing, telling Falk 'He can say what he wants.' In fact, it worked to the film's advantage. Suddenly everyone wanted to see the film that made Richard Dreyfuss sick, to see if it would happen to them, too."

To everyone's astonishment, A Woman Under the Influence, the film Hollywood studio chiefs thought no one would want to see, not only made back its $1 million cost and turned a very respectable profit, it earned Academy Award nominations for Rowlands as Best Actress and Cassavetes as Best Director. They lost out to Ellen Burstyn for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather, Part II, respectively.

A Woman Under the Influence: The War at Home Criterion essay by Kent Jones, September 20, 2004

Press Notes: Portraits of Cassavetes Criterion comments, November 18, 2008

Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes: Equal Stars of A Woman Under the Influence Jennifer Sin from Offscreen, February 2013

A Woman Under the Influence Ray Carney’s discussion of A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE

A Woman Under the Influence by Barbara and Leonard Quart - Jump Cut Cassavetes’ Lunatic-Comic Pathos, by Barbara and Leonard Quart from Jump Cut, 1975, also seen here: Jump Cut [Barbara and Leonard Quart]

Catching the Classics [Clayton L. White]

Alternative Film Guide Review Andre Soares

Reverse Shot [Eric Hynes] Spring, 2006

DVD Times [Anthony Nield]

Artforum What’s Your Take on Cassavetes? by Darrell Hartman from Artforum, November 5, 2008

World Socialist Web Site [Richard Phillips and Ismet Redzovic] July 23, 2010

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

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

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]

CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule review)

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

eFilmCritic Reviews Greg Muskewitz, so bad a review it’s hard to believe this made it into print

Film makers on film: Lynne Ramsay - Telegraph

Film makers on film: Lynne Ramsay - Telegraph Sarah Donaldson discusses Cassavetes 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence with Lynne Ramsay from The Telegraph, November 2, 2002

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1974

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1998

New York Times (registration req'd) Nora Sayre

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE A 98

USA (135 mi) 1976 revised in 1978 (108 mi)

I won't call [my work] entertainment. It's exploring. It's asking questions of people, constantly: How much do you feel? How much do you know? Are you aware of this? Can you cope with this? A good movie will ask you questions you haven't been asked before, ones that you haven't thought about every day of your life. Or, if you have thought about them, you haven't had the questions posed this way. [Film is an investigation of life.] What we are. What our responsibilities in life are – if any. What we are looking for; what problems do you have that I may have? What part of life are we both interested in knowing more about?

—John Cassavetes

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Sophistication and his Delovlies will be along in a moment. My name is Cosmo Vitelli; I’m the owner of this joint, I choose the numbers, I direct them, I arrange them. You have any complaints you just come to me and I’ll throw you right out on your ass.
—Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara)

Following A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and the sense of friction it caused between the controversial Cassavetes working methods and his wife Gena Rowlands, they took a step back from working with each other. Cassavetes had an affinity for gangster pictures, largely because he had to work in them as an actor in order to support his career as a film director, and he felt the gangster genre could be commercially viable, where he could get out of the film distribution business, a time consuming and all too draining effort. While the idea for the film came in a discussion with Martin Scorsese, Cassavetes often thought of studio heads as men who associated with gangsters, and that they were dealing with mob money, which he felt filtered into many of the most powerful businesses in America. Also, one should not overlook the huge success of THE GODFATHER Pt’s 1 and 2 (1972, 74) in the early 70’s, a genre Cassavetes didn’t find terribly interesting, but he found a way to wield a storyline he was excited about into a gangster picture, imagining a nightclub owner owing a huge amount of debt, where he’s talked into killing someone who turns out to be completely different than what he thought, not a low rung bookie but a West coast mob boss. He got the idea of a strip club from Alain Bernardin’s Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, recently depicted by documentarian Fred Wiseman in Crazy Horse (2011), largely because it was such a personal vision, where Bernardin founded, owned, and operated it, hired the girls, scripted the shows, and choreographed the acts, bringing all the girls into his extended family operation, much like Cassavetes own concept of making films, which are largely family affairs. In addition, Cassavetes drew upon the knowledge of actor Seymour Cassel and his mother, who was a burlesque dancer, where Cassel spent much of his youth hanging around strippers and old-time Vaudeville acts. One of Cassavetes’ favorite films was Arthur Penn’s surreal and criminally underrated Mickey One (1965), which features Warren Beatty as a night club comic who goes on a drunken gambling binge and ends up owing some astronomical amount to the mob, apparently so large an amount they won’t even tell him how much, where Beatty spends the rest of the film drifting in and out of his own imagination, a dreamlike, Kafkaesque nightmare where the interior landscape is portrayed as an existential wasteland. Both films today feel like modernist works, like a Waiting for Godot theatrical production where there's only one guy left talking to himself, stuck in his own Hellish purgatory.

A film infused with existential angst, first released in 1976 (but recut two years later to a shorter version, which was, for awhile, the only version available), this is an intimate character study of Cosmo Vitelli, a suave and debonair Ben Gazzara, who owns a lurid Los Angeles strip club, the Crazy Horse West, with club singer Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts, an American television and movie screenwriter who collaborated with Tennessee Williams on several plays brought to the screen) and a staple of beautiful girls he calls his Delovlies, and has finally paid off all his debts to a lowlife loan shark, with Cassavetes own lifelong producer Al Ruban playing the role as Marty, then recklessly gambles his way back into debt one night to the tune of $23,000. When faced with the loss of his club, which, in effect, represents his “life,” he settles with the mob, who orders him to kill a Chinese gangster to call it even, where they order a double cross to take him out afterwards. In a departure from the norm, Cassavetes actually shows action shots, chase scenes, and a hellish life and death meeting of the minds in a seedy looking garage. The last hour of the film follows Cosmo with a bullet in his side, slowly bleeding to death, like Johnny Depp in Jim Jarmusch’s revisionist acid western DEAD MAN (1995), as he revisits his girl friend Rachel (Azizi Johari), whose mother Betty (Virginia Carrington) kicks him out, not wanting any of that trouble making its way into her home, then his lovely showgirls, who he adores and who are his real family, as his life and its previous secrets pass before his eyes. This intimate portrait of a man whose world is crumbling, yet never once flinches or misses a day at work, keeping his best face forward so that no one suspects a thing, revolves around his staple of lonely hearts who faithfully get up on stage everyday, talent or not, just to keep the business afloat for Cosmo. This is a wildly idiosyncratic view of the human psyche, with similarities to Cassavetes’s own circumstances, gambling his own money on what were considered his crazy artistic ventures, offering some unusual views about what it takes to stay in business, expressed with a breath of fresh air, with theatricality and song, with a unique warmth and charm, a human face in the crowd, as Mr. Sophistication brings the film to a close singing the movie’s anthem: “I can’t give you anything but love, baby.” There's a lifetime of lost opportunities wrapped into this film, where things could turn out a different way, but people struggle and persevere, and oftentimes redeem themselves, gloriously expressed in a song. Cassavetes finds the poignant moments. It’s hard to imagine, but he finds them.

There is some confusion about the two versions of the film, as the movie bombed at the box office, with critics finding it disorganized and unfathomable, causing Cassavetes to rework the film and release it two years later in a shortened version, but also introducing new footage, which was the only version seen thereafter. Today the film emotes a clarity of vision, with a semi-ragged, offbeat style that generates plenty of suspense, especially as he approaches the killing itself. Due to the rarity of the original longer version, it became the cut to see. After the Criterion label released both versions, there is rising support for the 2^nd version, as this was not at a studio’s urging, but a newly revised vision from the director himself, not exactly a director’s cut, but perhaps an extension of his original vision, with both versions using as little artificial light as possible, creating a noirish mood, where people are often seen creeping through the dark, then in stunning contrast they’d shoot through color filters on the inside of the club. Because the camera stays on Cosmo throughout the entire film, and so much is filtered through his eyes, one would think the more time you get to experience Cosmo onscreen, which is the original version, the better idea you have of the complexity of his character, where he continually has to divide his interests, always trying to please others, where the moments spent alone are particularly devastating, where he expresses a profound loneliness. As Cassavetes sees himself in Cosmo, leading his own rag tag group of fringe characters, the story comes to typify his own experience with Hollywood. A case can be made that this experience is better expressed without the meandering scenes that tend to get easily sidetracked, where Cosmo is in a world of woe, having to be all things to all people. In the 2^nd version, the editing eliminates any hint of excess, and actually changes many of the sequences, adding a different sense of focus to the film. In both versions, what’s central to the film remains intact, particularly the meeting scene with the gangsters, who may as well be the producers, which must resemble the hundreds of meetings Cassavetes attended where his ideas were undermined and he was betrayed, where you have to sit around and wait, as they go through this myriad of meetings with others first, and when it’s finally your turn, you’re outnumbered, as it’s eight against one, where you’re so worn out from waiting that whatever your original intent was has been worn down by the weariness and exhaustion of having to sit around, and the executives end up getting their way. Perhaps where Cosmo differs from the director is in Cosmo’s need to please, where he only felt comfortable as a snappy dresser, always looking sharp, surrounding himself with beautiful girls, and thinking he’s got it made.

In something of a blistering critique of American capitalism, Cassavetes invites the audience to share in Cosmo’s journey to survive in a cesspool of lies and broken promises, not to mention money and plenty of muscle that prevent you from ever succeeding. When Seymour Cassel invites Cosmo to their gambling club, they’re looking for a patsy to do the job. After a bit of gangster rough stuff, believing he has no other choice, Cosmo buckles, as would just about anybody if enough pressure is put on them, and reluctantly agrees to perform the hit, and surprisingly he gets out of it alive, surprising even the mob who figured that would never happen. He’s rewarded by the mob snuffing him out in a double cross, which is Cassavetes version of how artists are treated in Hollywood. Cassavetes sees gangsters as all the hired movie executives that prevent artists from doing what they want to do, as petty people that nag at you with details and restrictions, ordering rewrites and other various changes, all detracting from the artist’s original vision. Even onstage, Mr. Sophistication, a man of elegance and taste sharing a stage with strippers, is forced to deal with booing from the audience, who just want to see the girls, and repeated ridicule and humiliation from his fellow performers, as they can’t believe a guy would take himself so seriously, so they pull various pranks on him, which he doesn’t find so funny. In this environment, it’s impossible to create anything daring or new, as no one would ever come to see it, much less appreciate it, which was the story of Cassavetes’ career, largely misunderstood during his lifetime, disliked by audiences and critics alike, while anointed both critically and publicly after death to one of the founders of the American independent movement, though he remains something of an outsider, stuck as he is in the art world. This was certainly not Cassavetes’ choice, but became the only way to survive in an ocean of sharks to get his films in front of the public. He likely never anticipated the invention of the DVD in the mid 90’s, long after his death in 1989, or the effect of the Criterion label, where more people would view his films after death, and laud his artistry, than they ever would in his lifetime.

Looking at a few scenes from the film, one sees how the opening sequence has been altered in the two versions, as the original opening starts with an extended scene with the loan shark, Marty, Ben Gazzara in Killing of a Chinese Bookie - Opening 15 min: OneMinFilmSchool YouTube (13:48), followed by a bar scene with the cabdriver, who is cut out of the 2^nd version, while this recut 1978 opening starts with Cosmo walking out of his club, “Things’ll pick up,” shortening the scene with Marty, the killing of a chinese bookie: opening YouTube (1:18), before moving directly to scenes at the club where Cosmo introduces himself. One of the more interesting scenes is a waitress who asks to audition for Cosmo, Morning audition YouTube (7:12), set to the song “Rainy Fields of Frost and Magic” by Bo Harwood, where his original music leaves a timeless impression, but ends up in a fight between Rachel and the potential new girl, culminating with the classic line, “I’m a club owner. I deal in girls.” Here’s a hilarious phone call expressing an incredulous state of mind as Cosmo is about to pull off the hit, but calls the club on a payphone while waiting for his cab, Ben Gazzara Phone Booth scene, Killing of a Chinese Bookie YouTube (1:39), which leads here The Killing of a Chinese Bookie - bookie gets whacked YouTube (1:27). Like Henry V, Cosmo gives an encouraging speech to revive his floundering troops, sad about losing Rachel, one of their stars who quits, where this entire rah-rah speech comes with a bullet in his side, Scene from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Ben Gazzara YouTube (4:13). The final moments are given to Mr. Sophistication, The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie - end scene YouTube (1:55), a picture of futility, where an artist can expect to be humiliated and made a complete fool of, dying a slow death onstage, reminiscent of the Charles Mingus song “The Clown,” Charles Mingus - 04 The Clown - YouTube (12:13), narrated by Jean Shepherd, about a clown who in his efforts to please the audience is forced to endure more and more pain, where the greater the pain, the greater the applause, until eventually the clown dies onstage, to thunderous applause, as they all felt it was part of his act, where the public has always had a hard time distinguishing between illusion and reality, while Cosmo himself is too caught up exuding his own personal warmth and charm, ignoring the obvious reality.

Jonathan Rosenbaum from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

John Cassavetes’s first crime thriller, a postnoir masterpiece, failed miserably at the box office when first released, and a recut, shorter version released two years later didn’t fare much better. The first, longer, and in some ways better of the two versions is easier to follow, despite reports that – or maybe because – Cassavetes had less to do with the editing (though he certainly approved it). A personal, deeply felt character study rather than a routine action picture, THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE follows Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara at his best), the charismatic owner of a Los Angeles strip club – simultaneously a jerk and a saint – who recklessly gambles his way into debt and has to bump off a bookie to settle his accounts.

In many respects the film serves as a personal testament. What makes the tragicomic character of Cosmo so moving is its alter-ego relation to the filmmaker – the proud impresario and father figure of a tattered showbiz collective (read Cassavetes’s actors and filmmaking crew) who must compromise his ethics to keep his little family afloat (read Cassavetes’s career as a Hollywood actor). Peter Bogdanovich used Gazzara in a similar part in SAINT JACK (1979), but as good as that film is, it doesn’t catch the exquisite warmth and delicacy of feeling of Cassavetes’s doom-ridden comedy-drama.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] - review of 1976 (longer) version

Cassavetes doesn't believe in gangsters, as soon becomes clear in this waywardly plotted account of how a bunch of them try to distract Gazzara from his loyalty to his barely solvent but chichi LA strip joint, the Crazy Horse West. Or rather Cassavetes doesn't believe in the kind of demands they make on a film, enforcing clichés of action and behaviour in return for a few cheap thrills. On the other hand, there's something about the ethnicity of the Mob - family closeness and family tyranny - which appeals to him, which is largely what his films are about, and which says something about the way he works with actors. The result is that his two gangster films - this one and the later Gloria - easily rate as his best work crisscrossed as they are by all sorts of contradictory impulses, with the hero/heroine being reluctantly propelled through the plot, trying to stay far enough ahead of the game to prevent his/her own act/movie being closed down. It's rather like a shaggy dog story operating inside a chase movie. Chinese Bookie is the more insouciant, involuted and unfathomable of the two; the curdled charm of Gazzara's lopsided grin has never been more to the point. (After its initial release, Cassavetes re-edited the film, adding sequences previously deleted but reducing the overall running time from 133 minutes.)

Jason Bailey

Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie had an odd journey to the screen (and beyond). It was originally released in 1976 at a length (135 minutes) that even star Ben Gazarra thought was bloated; it tanked, as did his follow-up the following year, Opening Night. But Cassavetes got reflective in 1978 and went back to the well, re-cutting Chinese Bookie to a leaner 108 minutes. It was reportedly the kind of full-on re-working (he re-edited entire sequences, changed the order of scenes, and even added in some material that wasn’t in the first cut) that became commonplace in the years to follow (starting with Spielberg’s Close Encounters). But, as usual, Cassavetes did it first.

As the 1978 version was reportedly his preferred one, I chose to watch it instead of the earlier cut (both are included in Criterion’s Five Films set). It is, in many ways, a tighter and more audience-friendly film than usual for Cassavetes (making its failure all the more confusing). It is, in its broad strokes, a gangster movie, but it’s got the same rough-edged, down-and-dirty aesthetic as Mean Streets (Scorsese was involved in Bookie’s development). Both films are disconnected from the halls of power that dominated The Godfather; these pictures deal with the grinders, the small-timers, the guys who are humping it out on a daily basis.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is one of his most richly atmospheric films; the scenes in the burlesque club that Gazarra manages are depressing but alive, particularly at the picture’s conclusion. The scene in which the title hit is brought up has an incredible naturalism, as does the sequence where it is carried out; there’s something intrinsically odd about a Cassavetes “action sequence,” but the staging is certainly appropriate to his approach.

Gazarra’s performance is fiery and alive; he’s always an efficient actor, but this may be his best work. Cassavetes doesn’t change his style much for the material, but our inherent interest in crime stories sustains those lulls that he likes to indulge in. It’s certainly his most even film; it holds together in a way that some of his other films don’t, for better or worse.

Los Angeles, the mid-seventies. Originally from New York, Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) is the proud owner of the Crazy Horse West, a nightclub featuring dancing semi-naked girls "A-Live in the Flesh" as the garish sign outside the premises puts it. Cosmo, seeing himself as a high-roller, spends an evening gambling at a club in Santa Monica - and ends up $23,000 down. A bad move: the club is owned by gangsters who coerce Cosmo into carrying out a 'hit' for them in lieu of payment. Cosmo is told that his target is merely a "Chinese bookie". This is only partly true...

Cassavetes trimmed The Killing of a Chinese Bookie by 26 minutes after its initial release - and box-office failure - in 1976; this review is based on the longer version, and there's clearly plenty of fat that could and should have been excised: several of the nightclub burlesque performances outstay their welcome pretty fast, and during one in particular (a 'Gay Paree' number) the picture's momentum grinds to a complete halt. If nothing else, these Crazy Horse West sequences do showcase the astonishing feature-film acting debut for 45-year-old veteran screenwriter Meade Roberts as the chubby, top-hatted, thoroughly jaded MC known as 'Mr Sophistication' (he's amusingly mis-introduced as 'Mr Fascination' at one point) - as compelling in his own way as the very different Joel Grey in Cabaret.

It's around Gazzara, however, that the film really revolves: as a portrait of a once-cocksure man in crisis and (terminal?) decline, it's a Stateside precursor of The Long Good Friday - from certain angles the balding, flat-faced, round-headed Gazzara even looks like Bob Hoskins' strutting bantam Harold Shand. Performances are, in fact, strong across the board - including a truly wild turn from Timothy Carey as the most menacing of the hoods. Otherwise Cassavetes aims for and achieves his usual documentary-style rough-edged realism - the level of verisimilitude is consistently impressive, and we believe that these people really do inhabit this neon-orange smudge of an anything-goes night-town city.

But despite Cassavetes the director having expended so much attention on the details, performances and atmosphere, Cassavetes the writer doesn't seem sure of how to make them work to his story's advantage. Suffering a serious injury following his blood-spattered visit to the 'Chinaman's' house, Vitelli starts to lose his grip on reality - and the movie goes downhill with him, its swaggering air of self-indulgence fizzling out into a lather of pseudo-philosophical dialogue.

Gazzara apparently reckons that Vitelli at least partially represented Cassavetes' view of himself as show-must-go-on impresario, battling against the odds to bring entertainment and diversion to the public - if so, it's not the most flattering of self-portraits, as the routines Vitelli devises are pretty lousy affairs and his on-stage patter alienates rather than amuses his customers, who are vocally impatient to see his girls in action. Audiences watching the two-hour-plus version of Bookie are likely to feel a similar sense of get-on-with-it exasperation: the outlines of a truly great movie are clearly discernible here, one which presumably came a step or two closer to fruition following Cassavetes' wise rethink.

John Cassavetes: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie | Features ... Derek Malcom from The Guardian

John Cassavetes, the actor, writer and director, was one of the most influential American film-makers of the post-war era - a big claim, since he only had one hit movie and made many which were only shown in art houses. But, at one time, there was scarcely a film-maker who was not inspired by his improvisatory work and his capacity to achieve exceptional performances from actors. He has been called the first American independent.

His hit film was A Woman Under the Influence, in which Gena Rowlands, his wife, was celebrated for her portrait of a family woman pitched into manic psychosis by the pressures upon her. Otherwise, the films of Cassavetes were always more praised than seen and some of the fulsome tributes to him when he died in 1989 were nauseously hypocritical.

Cassavetes acted so that he could make his own films in the way he wanted. Shadows, his first, made well away from Hollywood in 1959, was a huge critical success that prompted Hollywood to sign him up for Too Late Blues and A Child Is Waiting. But both films were compromised and flopped, and he decided to go his own way with funds gathered from taking parts in films such as The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary's Baby.

The result was a collection of films, usually inhabited by Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and Seymour Cassel. The films were called indulgent and disorganised by those who hated them, but they were adored by his supporters for their passionately truthful depiction of American life.

One of them was The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a film that displays most of the faults of his kind of on-the-hoof film-making - and all the virtues. Cassavetes always used to say that the emotion in his films was improvised but the lines written. There is no doubt, though, that when he let his actors loose on the set, there were considerable surprises in store.

Ben Gazzara is the star of Killing, the story of the owner of The Crazy Horse West, a failing LA strip joint he is determined to keep open because it's the only thing he's built up from scratch in his somewhat tawdry life. In order to remain solvent, he has to kill a Chinese bookie for the mob. The sequence in which he breaks into the old man's luxurious apartment and does the job is as terrifying as anything in The Godfather.

The film is a thriller, but equally it is a treatise on the sleazier side of showbiz, and on the persistence of hope in almost ludicrously unhopeful circumstances. It's about a man hanging on for dear life to dear life. As such, you could call it pretentious, bombastic, indulgent and full of actorly tropes, concocted by Cassavetes and Gazzara as they progress through a waywardly philosophical tale. Why, then, can one simply not forget it?

It's principally because of its accurate summation of one man's American dream in all its absurdity - the girls in the strip-joint are nurtured almost as part of him, and the club itself, which looks like a particularly seedy purgatory to us, is clearly heaven to him. You can see why he will do anything to save it and feel the sincerity of even the most portentous of his monologues.

Above all, Cassavetes orchestrates the whole thing almost as if it is a dream from which we are about to wake up. But even his most eccentric worlds have a point in them which seems to parallel our own lives. Most Cassavetes films were like that. They didn't make you fantasise, like the best of Hollywood. They faced the messiness of life and then turned to you and said: "But it's the truth, isn't it?"

Criterion Collection film essay [Phillip Lopate] October 24, 2013

Cassavetes’s Company Tom Charity offers various photos

Cassavetes at Work photo gallery

John Cassavetes: Five Films - The Criterion Collection

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie Jason Mark Scott compares the two versions from Bright Lights Film Journal, August 2008

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie Ray Carney’s discussion of THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE

PopMatters [Drew C. Miller]

Cassavetes, The Mob and Realism: 'The Killing of a Chinese Bookie' Adrian Warren from Pop Matters, Criterion Blue-Ray

Rescuing the Dream: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie | Goodbye ... Rescuing the Dream, Looking back on John Cassavetes’ masterpiece, by Anthony Moretta

DVD Times [1976 version] Anthony Nield

DVD Times [1978 re-edit] Anthony Nield

Artforum Darrell Hartman from Artforum, November 5, 2008

New Yorker The End of Allegory, Richard Brody from The New Yorker, November 17, 2008 New Yorker

Brains On Film

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Episode 47: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, John Cassavetes) / Less Than Zero (1987, Marek Kanievska) Andrew Wickliffe on the Alan Smithee Podcast, June 15, 2010

Killing of a Chinese Bookie, The (19 76) Dennis Schwarz from Ozu’s Movie Reviews

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

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

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

Peter Bogdanovich Talks About Ben Gazzara: "I don't ... - Indiewire Dana Harris on the death of Ben Gazzara from indieWIRE, February 3, 2012

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie Paul Brenner from All Movie Guide

DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [ Gary W. Tooze]

New York Times Vincent Canby

OPENING NIGHT A 97

USA (144 mi) 1977

[Opening Night] is the other side of A Woman Under the Influence, about a woman on her own, with no responsibility to anyone but herself, with a need to come together with other women. [Myrtle] is alone and in desperate fear of losing the vulnerability she feels she needs as an actress. [She is] a woman unable any longer to be regarded as young: Sex is no longer a viable weapon. You never see her as a stupendous actress. As a matter of fact, her greatest thrill was comfort, as it is for most actresses. Give me a play I can go into every night and can feel I have some awareness of who I am, what I am. [She didn't] want to expose myself in [certain] areas. So when she faints and screams on the stage, it's because it's so impossible to be told you are this boring character, you are aging and you are just like her. I would be unable to go on to the stage feeling that I'm nothing. I think that most actors would, and that's really what the picture is about. Although she resists [facing them,] Myrtle must finally accept and resolve the dilemmas which lie not only at the core of the play she is doing, but which [reflect] the basic realities of her own existence, from which she has heretofore fled, aided by alcohol, men, professional indulgence – and fantasy! The character is left in conflict, but she fights the terrifying battle to recapture hope. And wins! In and out of life the theme of the play haunts the actress until she kills the young girl in herself.

—John Cassavetes

Perhaps the gutsiest film about theater ever made, right alongside Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952) or Desplechin’s ESTHER KHAN (2000), and though filmed in 1977, it was not released commercially until 1991, two years after Cassavetes’ death, as until then, incredulously enough, no theatrical distributor expressed an interest. A film about the making of a theatrical play, both onscreen and off, with Gena Rowlands starring as Myrtle Gordon in the play A Second Woman written by the 65-year old Joan Blondell as Sarah Goode, which concerns a woman at the moment in her life when she realizes she has lost her youth, and the second woman takes over. The part of the writer was originally conceived with Bettie Davis in mind, both screen legends from the 30’s, where the film was originally about the writer, where the integrity of the story came by showing an actress standing up to her. Davis would have brought a much tougher dimension to the role, adding her own sense of theatricality as well. Rowlands plays a still vibrant middle-aged star in her forties who has difficulty coming to terms with Blondell’s age, so avoids it at all costs, continually haunted by the ghost of a teenage girl (Laura Johnson), one of her fans whose accidental death she tragically witnessed one night, fantasizing a younger version of herself. Perhaps inspired by ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), purportedly one of Cassavetes’ favorite films, a movie that might be called a woman’s picture, as it delves into different phases of a woman’s life and career, examining the various motivations, where Cassavetes turns the adoring fan of the Hollywood picture into a disturbing hallucination that haunts the actress, while also similarly staging out of town, tryout rehearsals of the play in New Haven, Connecticut as it nears its premiere in New York on Broadway. One of her onstage actors is Cassavetes himself as Maurice Aarons, who interestingly plays a version of himself had he not married Gena Rowlands, a charming actor onstage who is something if a cynical womanizer offstage, largely making his way on his own, much as he did before he met Ms. Rowlands. A word about the giant photographs of aging women on the set, a similar device was used by Woody Allen in Stardust Memories (1980), who used a giant, wall-sized photograph in his apartment that continually kept changing pictures, depending on his changing moods. Also, the introductory still photos shown in the opening credits are used to brilliant effect, opening credits montage Opening Night YouTube (1:11), where Cassavetes, as he did in Faces (1968), uses close ups of blown-up photographs to exude sensuality to the character, while also using a cavernous penthouse apartment to reflect the immensity of Myrtle’s isolation and loneliness.

Using the theatrical device of a play within a play, what’s curiously interesting about the film is there’s more time spent together onscreen between Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands than anything previously seen in a Cassavetes film, where they appear to relish each moment shared with the audience, becoming a sheer, unadulterated joy to watch, where through various rehearsals there’s a continuous stream of looks at scenes within the play, and each time it’s played just a bit differently, where their performances are not so much acted as captured in a time capsule retaining all its original vibrancy, where their characters are so effortlessly and absolutely real. Rowlands gives an enthralling performance, perhaps especially significant because she absolutely defies the part she’s been given, even though it’s been written especially for her. Part of it appears like a melodramatic soap opera as she wanders into an earlier part of her life, almost like a ghost, but the scenes onstage playing ex-lovers with Myrtle and Maurice are unmistakably more significant, as it appears they’re talking about their own lives, where the film continuously blurs the line between performance and real life. Part of the genius of the film is this rare glimpse of intimacy into their real lives, yet it’s always shown with a flair for theatricality, where the underlying emotions grow more abstract by negotiating this strange and somewhat illusory boundary world that exists between reality and the imagination. Art impacts life, where Cassavetes and his real life wife have achieved a work of astonishing emotional depth that may be unique in all of cinema. Cassavetes has indicated “I won’t make shorthand films, because I don’t want to manipulate audiences into assuming quick, manufactured truths,” where the beauty of this film is creating a work of art that explores the mystery of the personality and the often unfathomably complex motivations of artists.

Myrtle, however, has found herself in the midst of a full-blown identity crisis, where an early tragic encounter with a young fan continues to haunt her for the rest of the film, as she’s literally visited by the young woman’s ghost who’s not at all happy with the outcome, yet Myrtle attempts to channel some of her own character through her youth, but her warmth and affection for the young woman is received with anger and disgust, turning brutally ugly on occasion, where the two are literally fighting spirits, creating a whirlwind of emotions that continually swirl around the theatrical production. Countering this maelstrom of dramatic force is the play’s director, none other than Ben Gazarra as Manny, as suave and debonair as ever, who continually coddles his actress, believing she is one of the great actresses of our time, and perhaps an ex-lover as well, but he constantly pushes her to accept Sarah’s play, which he feels offers brilliant insights into a woman aging. Manny, Sarah, and a kindly producer David, Paul Stewart, the butler in CITIZEN KANE (1941), form a kind of troika of theatrical convention, like the drama police, as they continually urge Myrtle to accept the provisions of the play, while she continually experiments with the role, often changing the lines altogether, telling Sarah “age is depressing, age is dull,” claiming “I’m looking for a way to play this part where age doesn’t make any difference,” which deeply offends the author by changing the intent of her play, who believes all the emotions are clearly evident on the written pages, where “all you need to do is say the lines clearly and with a degree of feeling.” But therein lies the problem for Myrtle, because if she’s accepted as an “older woman,” she’ll never receive any other lead casting roles for the rest of her career, relegated to the world of older secondary character performers. For men, like Maurice or Manny, they typically deal with the questions of aging in full denial by having an affair, but Myrtle has to reach inside herself to find something else.

More than anything, the film is about personal transformation, where theater simply offers an artistic vehicle for personal expression. Myrtle’s defiance to accept a role as written because she feels it’s constrictive and suffocating leads to major disagreements and confrontations with the consistently inflexible theater management, continually altering the format of the play, inventing new lines, literally fighting for her life by turning to the audience in live dress rehearsals and exclaiming, “We must never forget this is only a play.” Exacerbating the fears is heavy alcohol use, where in the middle of the night before the play opens, Myrtle desperately turns to Maurice, her co-star and ex-lover for comfort, exactly as Judy Garland used to call Cassavetes in the middle of the night looking for reassurance during the filming of A Child Is Waiting (1963), where Myrtle encourages him to try a radically new approach to the play, “Let’s dump it upside down and see if we can’t find something human in it,” an approach the real life Cassavetes would find inspired, but Maurice rejects her, telling her “You’re not a woman to me anymore. You’re a professional,” telling her “I have a small part. It’s unsympathetic. The audience doesn’t like me. I can’t afford to be in love with you.” By morning, however, she becomes traumatized, where her inner demons take over, and she mutilates herself viciously in front of the playwright, who by this point she despises, believing this may put her own demons to rest, telling her, “I will do anything, anything, to give my character authenticity on stage.” Myrtle is late for the opening, then arrives dead drunk, yet she is cruelly pushed by Manny to perform anyway, refusing to allow anyone to help her, forcing her to literally crawl her way to her dressing room. Unbelievably, still careening off walls, she stumbles to her backstage position, receiving the encouraging words from Cassavetes stalwart John Finnegan, “I’ve seen a lot of drunks in my day, but I’ve never seen anybody as drunk as you and still be able to walk. You’re fantastic!”

Leaning against walls, and with the help from everyone involved who often carry her from one location to the next, she goes onstage, where she then proceeds to change all the lines of the play, totally improvising with co-star Maurice, leaving characters alone onstage as she disappears unexpectedly, then completely reinvents the dialogue when she returns. Despite her state of extreme inebriation, she remains a sympathetic figure, actually reversing the roles, with Maurice playing her aging character while she flirts with everyone in sight, showing signs of Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball, even the Marx Brothers, some of which is brilliant, other times failing miserably. Breathing life into an otherwise failed literary misadventure (despite those giant feathers in Joan Blondell’s lavishly ostentatious hats!), this is a film that is not afraid to fail, and is about the fear and pain of performing, heightening the anxiety and the insecurity of the star to the limit, somewhat similar to the exaggerated theatricality of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), but stretched and expanded here, juggling on stage and off stage actions, becoming a free-wheeling comedic improvisational farce, Opening Night (1977) - Stage play with the leg trick YouTube (4:28), like something out of a hilariously inventive vaudeville routine with actors addressing the audience directly with personal asides, “I am not me!...There’s someone posing here as us!” While it’s always important to recall that Rowlands is really channeling her husband, becoming his alter-ego for both his methods and his madness, OPENING NIGHT shows what happens both on the stage and behind the scenes, capturing the persona of all persons involved in the theater, large and small, where this is a brilliant, in-depth look at the world of performance, art, and the extraordinarily fragile connections between the performers and the audience. Of interest, the ending was allegedly recut as the preview audience stood up and cheered at what they saw on stage, not the bewildered effect Cassavetes was looking for.

In this outtake from a 1978 television interview (which was never broadcast), Cassavetes discusses his film Opening Night for a while, and builds into a terrific rant on movies and movie audiences. This is a great example of Cassavetes' way with words, his dislike of people who live only for the approval of others, and his anger at the low popularity of his later films (especially Opening Night and Killing of a Chinese Bookie): John Cassavetes - "Television Sucks!" YouTube (8:08).

Opening Night British Film Institute (link lost)

"one of the unsung masterpieces of the 70s"

Opening Night is less famous than the other movies in our mini-retro, but it may be Cassavetes' finest film. Certainly it feels incredibly modern. Directed, shot and acted with exhilarating energy and sensitivity to detail, this is one of the unsung masterpieces of the 70s.

Cassavetes' abiding interest in how performance - in art or in relationships - relates to inner reality is dealt with more deeply and directly here. Actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) is troubled by her role in a new play and by thoughts of a young fan killed while pursuing the star's car. She begins to behave so erratically that her co-star (Cassavetes), director (Ben Gazzara), playwright (Joan Blondell) and producer (Paul Stewart) wonder how she'll fare on opening night. An acutely insightful study of an actress anxious about ageing, Cassavetes' 1977 film may be seen as his own response to All About Eve and, in turn, an influence on Almodóvar's All About My Mother.

Opening Night Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London David Jenkins

If Bergman had ever been asked to make an MGM musical, one imagines that ‘Opening Night’ wouldn’t have been far off the result. It stands as Cassavetes’ least self-consciously organic piece of work, with an improvisational tone that doesn’t just quietly fold itself around the narrative but ricochets off the film’s main themes. As in 1974’s ‘A Woman Under the Influence’, Gena Rowlands offers a devastatingly tactile performance in the lead role, this time as Myrtle Gordon, a grande dame of American theatre whose total immersion methodology backfires when she unwittingly accepts the part of an aging inamorata in the suggestively titled ‘The Second Woman’. Dogged by an instinctive fear of playing ‘the older woman’, she is loathe to acknowledge publicly an emotional overlap between herself and her character, but when the ghost of a young autograph collector begins to haunt her private life, her body becomes the battleground for a conflict between youth and maturity. Self-reflexive to an almost infinite degree, Myrtle is regularly forced to re-position her emotions from the context of her life, her sub-conscious and her role within the play.

And if that isn’t enough, Cassavetes builds upon the illusion by rarely indicating whether the actors are acting, improvising, on the stage, behind the stage, rehearsing, relaxing or, in one extremely painful and protracted late scene, totally drunk. At once a lament to the ravages of age and an examination of those tiny foibles which separate reality from dramatic artifice, it’s a baffling and intricate film which, although light on conventional pleasures, still manages to provoke and beguile.

Opening Night | BFI Distribution (link lost)

An overlooked masterpiece of the 1970s, Opening Night was the ninth film of writer-director John Cassavetes, the pioneer and patron saint of American independent film-making who from the late 1950s until his death in 1989 steered a courageous course beyond the confines of the Hollywood studio system.

Gena Rowlands (Cassavetes' wife and muse) plays Myrtle Gordon, a Broadway star cast in a new play as a middle-aged woman of declining sexual power. Reluctant to accept her age and fearful that she will be typecast as an older woman, Myrtle is also haunted by visions of a dead girl - an adoring young fan killed in a car accident - whom she sees as a figment of her younger self. Rebelling against the pessimism of the script, Myrtle questions the part she is playing both onstage and off. In the words of Cassavetes: 'she fights a terrifying battle to recapture hope.'

Rowlands' characteristically vital, risk-taking performance is brilliantly supported by a charismatic Ben Gazzara (one of Cassavetes' regular ensemble) as Manny Victor, the play's long-suffering director, and by Cassavetes himself as Maurice, Myrtle's co-star and former lover. The part of ageing playwright Sarah Goode was originally envisaged for Bette Davis - Opening Night has been seen as a variation on All About Eve - but went in the end to Joan Blondell, another still-active star of 1930s Hollywood, who despite her bewilderment at Cassavetes' methods ('I can't tell when the actors are acting and when they're talking about their home life.') turned in a superb performance.

Today, thirty years after it was made, it's a film that feels incredibly modern, insightful and intriguing - ripe for discovery by a whole new generation of film-goers.

Culture Wars [Sarah Snider]

From the start of Opening Night, director John Cassavetes situates us firmly both as the audience of a film and in the real-life audience of a play. Myrtle Gordon, played compellingly by Gena Rowlands, is the star of the film and the play. When she witnesses a young fan of hers run over in the street, Myrtle breaks down. The girl’s death invokes feelings of guilt, but also a dizzying journey into time, highlighting what it means to live in only one direction in time.

Myrtle is no longer young, and being cast as an older woman in the play traps her in a dilemma in which she sees no way back: if she plays the role well, her career will be catapulted into the geriatric ward; if she accepts the implications of the role for women in general, women will be forever delegated to life without hope. Instead of accepting and assuming her role as an older woman, both in the play and in her own life, Myrtle decides not to compromise. She chooses to inhabit differential identities, at once reframing characters and her audiences’ opinions of them. This brings her into conflict with others, each of whom has decided upon and assumed a fixed identity, for better or for worse. She wants to keep all of her possibilities open, even though time and circumstance have already shut many doors. This openness leads to much emotional turmoil, augmented by heavy bouts of drinking.

Cassavetes shows that in order to be someone fully, we need to recognise, through pain, loss and grief, what we are not or can be no longer. Paradoxically, struggling with these questions and limitations provides a way to personal growth: recognising the boundary of the self is the first step to pushing it back. Myrtle refuses to exorcise her demons except through the work of her own hands, making the transformative process a dialectic within herself rather than an imposition by external forces.

This exploration of the self in a state of becoming is a continuation of themes present in Cassavetes’ earlier works. Cassavetes tends to shoot his arrows via his actresses. Rather than this being based on Romantic notions of women as fleeting and inconstant, perhaps Cassavetes is subverting these assumptions in order to urge everyone to embrace a more mercurial approach to the possibilities life has to offer. Contrary to A Woman Under the Influence (1974), this film is about a woman on her own, with no responsibility to anyone but herself and her work. However, both films portray characters moving out of positions of power and control into spaces that are exploratory and dangerously underdetermined. The characters are quite literally taken out of their roles, stripped of their scripts, left to wade through the possibilities of what the stage, qua stage, and actors, as other human beings, will offer.

The script and the role are basic abstractions of actual human experience. Cassavetes’ work, itself heavily scripted, drags us into what Ron Carney calls ‘non-contemplative art’. This is thought that occurs in ‘time, space and the body’. Cassavetes throws off the fetters of the platonic valuation placed on reflection, and sees thought as something dynamic, not restful, something that happens in the body in real time. The non-scription of Cassavetes’ work is perhaps the reason it is so hard to watch his films. Not only are we unaware of the character’s next move, we actually have to watch it being formulated through thought and action over time. For Cassavetes, this is film: just as a real life scene presents traces – dialogue, action, etc. – of the process of a character in becoming, so too the film presents traces – image, sound, etc. – of the experience of the director creating. Both document and bear witness to a dynamic set of decisions and choices. Cassavetes’ films are a temple to this negotiation.

Opening Night | Peter Bogdanovich - Blogs - Indiewire

Early in 1977, John Cassavetes called me, both of us living in Los Angeles. He was shooting a picture in some legitimate theater down on Wilshire; it was supposed to be a Broadway opening night, and he needed a few celebrity faces, so Peter Falk was going to come down as an extra—-could I? “Anything for you, John,” I said and meant it, because in a town of artists of all sorts, Cassavetes was the rare real thing. The picture, he said, was about theater people bringing a new play to New York, and was called Opening Night (available on DVD). John financed it entirely from his own pocket, starring his brilliant wife and partner, Gena Rowlands, as the play’s star on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and Ben Gazzara as the director, Joan Blondell as the playwright, Paul Stewart as the producer, Zohra Lampert as the director’s wife, and Cassavetes himself as a totally self-absorbed actor.

A Broadway opening meant probably winter in New York, so I brought an overcoat. When Peter Falk spotted it, he said, “Where’d you get the coat?” I told him my thinking. Peter immediately called John over to say that I had a coat, and so he needed one. John whirled away, calling to an assistant to get Peter a coat. For my big shot backstage behind the curtain, John told me to go over to Gena, give her a kiss and tell her how great she was in the play. Then he did a little yelling to get everyone on their toes, pointing out that all screw ups were costing him personally. There was no rehearsal. Once he called out, “Action!” everything went quickly, in a kind of blur, a lot of people moving and talking at once. While I was having my intimate moment of praise for Gena, suddenly—-without anyone having prepared me—-Gazzara’s character was introducing Ms. Lampert’s character to me. “You know Peter Bogdanovich...?” The joke is that Ms. Lampert is so stoked by Ms. Rowlands' opening-night performance that she is totally uninterested in meeting me; essentially she ignores the introduction and turns to gush at Gena. And that’s how the picture ends.

Cassavetes has said, “I won’t make shorthand films, because I don’t want to manipulate audiences into assuming quick, manufactured truths.” Opening Night, one of the filmmaker’s least known pictures—-made between the financial failure of The Killing of A Chinese Bookie and before the box-office success of Gloria—-is a perfect example of this credo. There are certainly neither quick nor manipulated truths, and what dominates is the mystery of personality, and the often unfathomably complex motivations of artists. The struggle to open the play depends on these intangibles.

This could be called Cassavetes’ anti-All About Eve. The adoring fan who becomes a threat in that picture, shrewdly calculating her way to stardom, here turns into a weirdly disturbing, clearly disturbed fanatic accidentally killed in an auto accident on a rainy night while trying to maintain contact with Ms. Rowlands. This tragic encounter haunts the actress throughout the rest of the movie, the young woman’s troubled ghost appearing to her, fighting with her. Yet this is only one of numerous obstacles Gena’s star has to overcome to make it through opening night. Others include her fear of aging, discomfort with the role, even active dislike of the playwright’s creation, conflicts with the director and her co-star. The terrible whirlpool of emotions that swirl around a theatrical production are superbly evoked. The main obstacle, of course, is fear, and Opening Night eloquently dramatizes Cassavetes’ comment: “You can defeat fear through humor, through pain, through honesty, bravery, intuition, and through love in the truest sense.”

All of the performances are not so much acted as caught. Everyone feels absolutely real, but Gena Rowlands is magnificent in an extremely challenging role, her characterization as naked and memorable as her amazing work in such other Cassavetes’ masterworks as Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, and Love Streams. If any other picture maker and actress have together repeatedly achieved such emotional depths, I don’t know about them. That John cast himself as the least understanding or sensitive character in the picture—-and that he plays it so convincingly—-is probably the biggest inside joke in this singular, distinctive look at show business people by a transcendent artist who single- handedly began the modern independent film movement, and was the most uncompromising and poetic American filmmaker of our time.

Criterion Collection film essay [Dennis Lim] Criterion essay, October 25, 2013, also seen here: Opening Night: The Play’s the Thing

Cassavetes’s Company Photo Gallery by Tom Charity at Criterion Collection, October 30, 2013

Opening Night (1977) - The Criterion Collection

Opening Night - John Cassavetes Scene by scene analysis by John Deforest from John Cassavetes.net

Excerpts from a Discussion on Opening Night Ray Carney’s discussion of OPENING NIGHT

All the World's a Stage: John Cassavetes' Opening Night - Senses of . Matthew Clayfield from Senses of Cinema, May 2007

Senses of Cinema – Performing Aging/Performance Crisis (for ... Jodi Brooks from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

Dan Schneider on Opening Night, by John Cassavetes Dan Schneider from Cosmoetica

John Cassavetes' 'Opening Night' reviewed on the official website ... Dan Schneider’s edited review on the Laura Hird website

Ecstatic [Jason Hedrick & Nathaniel Drake Carlson]

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands | anna helme. portfolio. blog. Anna Helme, September 4, 2009

notcoming.com | Opening Night Victoria Large

Retrospective: John Cassavetes - The Film Journal...Passionate and ... Tim Applegate from The Film Journal

Electric Sheep Magazine Caroline Blinder

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Notes on the Work of John Cassavetes | Jonathan Rosenbaum July 18, 1980

Both Sides of John Cassavetes - JonathanRosenbaum.com June 28, 1981

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

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

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977) | So Noted Grant Phipps

Jason Bailey

The King Bulletin [Danny King]

epinions Criterion DVD [Stephen O.Murray]

Epinions [David MacDonald]

CineVue [Craig Williams]

Bo Harwood Music

Bina007 Movie Reviews sadly lacking in insight or appreciation

Opening Night on Wikipedia

BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] October 18, 1991

GLORIA B 88

USA (121 mi) 1980

Look, I’m not very bright. I wrote a very fast-moving, thoughtless piece about gangsters. And I don't even know any gangsters.

—Cassavetes on Gloria

Hard to believe this is a Cassavetes picture, as there is an exaggerated musical soundtrack with swelling music to heighten the action, just like a regular Hollywood picture, and plenty of action and guns, and a beautiful, perfectly dressed blond with a pistol who blows anybody away who stands in her way. In her second Oscar nominated role, after A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, Gena Rowlands plays an ex-gun moll, dressed in purples and pinks and wearing heels, running through the seedy tenement districts of New York and New Jersey, trying to protect the life of an orphaned Puerto Rican 6-year old whose family was blown away by the mob on day one of the picture. This is a rather conventional melodrama that plays out in a strange and unusual visual style, with undercurrents of naturalism, including some guitar and sax solos, which add a humanist element, particularly to the child, as their difficulties in relating to one another mirrors the physical world around them. The finale, however, is pure gold, as the film resolves in a poetic, dark ambiguity.

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson]

Notwithstanding Cassavetes' own dismissal of this crime thriller fantasy as a commercial chore he made for Disney so that his wife could act opposite a kid, it's clear from the opening montage that we're in the hands of a master. The film moves gracefully from painted credits through an exhilarating aerial survey of Manhattan by night to a vexed woman struggling to leave a crowded bus, all to the soulful strains of Bill Conti's lovely jazz/orchestral score. Rowlands is typically superb as the tough talking New York moll - half-whore, half-mother - reluctantly lumbered with a prematurely macho Latino boy (Adames) whose family have been killed by the Mob. As they go on the run, antagonism inevitably turns into affection, but Cassavetes and the two leads keep maudlin sentimentality at bay until the very bitter end, when the film basically 'fesses up that movie-style happy endings are the stuff of pipe dreams. Terrific.

Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

Indie godfather John Cassavetes transforms Gena Rowlands into his own little Pam Grier in this oddly sweet-and-sour, PG-rated mob melodrama with, naturally, a cute orphan kid. The ingredients ensure that the overall mixture is far from colloidal, but Gloria's most salient feature is Rowlands' extraordinarily well-rounded embodiment of the titular role: an extremely classy ex-mob dame with a hair-trigger temper and a tongue of fire. When Mafia accountant Jack Dawn (Buck Henry) accidentally lets it slip to his bosses that he's been jotting all their dirty little secrets in a little black book, they come by and waste him and his surrogate family, but not before he drops off the little moppet Phil with Gloria Swenson. Whether she's lackadaisically serving Phil milk or fending off his incessant (and creepy) suggestions that she's both his mother as well as his girlfriend, Rowlands fills her somewhat sketchy role with blowsy good humor and an honest sense of hollowed-out emotional vacancy that the film around her doesn't quite merit. It's no surprise that her supporting cast pales in comparison to her, with the possible exception of a string of NYC taxi cab driver archetypes (one looks and sounds eerily like Pat Ast of Paul Morrissey's Heat). John Adames, who plays little Phil, had the dubious distinction of splitting the first Razzie award for Worst Supporting Actor with Laurence Olivier (in The Jazz Singer), and one has to assume most of the blame rested on his unique vocal delivery. He manages to perfectly capture what Paddy Chayefsky would sound like impersonating Alvin Chipmunk.

Gloria's obvious reason for being is to give the marvelous Gena Rowlands (a national resource if there ever was one) an excuse to play James Cagney. Snarling and glaring her way through the ranks of Mafia crooks, Rowlands carries the entire picture. The majority of her scenes are played with a child actor who unfortunately isn't up to the job; and the awkwardness bogs the picture down somewhat.

Ex mob moll Gloria Swenson (Gena Rowlands) takes charge of young Phil Dawn (John Adames) when his family is wiped out in a mob hit. The problem is that the mob knows who both of them are, and they want the kid dead. At first wishing only to steer clear of the responsibility, Gloria builds a relationship with the kid, and together they defy and evade the gangsters.

Gena Rowlands, an actress with definite strengths, is beyond excellent as a self-pronounced overweight woman, up to her neck in organized crime trouble. Husband John Cassavetes took a break from his personal improvisation films to do this much more centrist gangster chase film; and he has a fine eye for the streets of New York City as they might be travelled by people on the run. Remember, a Cabbie can be your best friend, and keep your money in your sock.

There's a socko opening, involving the panic that shakes the Dawn family as the father (Buck Henry) tries unsuccessfully to get his wife (Julie Carmen) and kids evacuated before the hit men arrive. But as the picture unspools, there are a couple of factors (beyond its slight overlength) that bog it down.

He's cute and well-meaning and for some people may be just the ticket, but young John Adames is by any reasonable measure, simply terrible as the orphan who falls under Gloria's protective wing. Every line he says rings false, and his coached smiles and attempts to 'act' all look as if Cassavetes is off camera trying to manipulate his face from afar. Improvisatory genius don't mean diddly without accomplished talent, and most kid actors simply aren't up to it (an exception, the little fellow stealing Ice Cream in Kramer vs. Kramer). With this ] particular kid actor having to be led through everything, it falls upon Gena to make scenes work, and to the extent she succeeds, the show is impressive. But even she ends up talking to the kid one syllable at a time, as if near the end of her wits.

Secondly, a lot of Cassavetes' dialog for the kid doesn't cut it either. Too many of his lines just don't sound as if a child would say them, not even a precocious one. The adult dialog is just fine, so this must simply be a weakness that Cassavetes didn't count on.

The big thrill is watching Gloria cut loose in standard gangster confrontations. She's always more than credible when drawing pistols and blasting away at the baddies; we actually believe she could intimidate a table-ful of hoods. When the picture opts for standard sentimentality, it's a bit less successful; we get the idea that Cassavetes and Rowlands were doing their best for a mainstream boxoffice hit, and second-guessing themselves.

Columbia TriStar's DVD of Gloria is very handsome, and far, far better-looking than the smeary green prints I've been seeing on cable television for 20 years. The enhanced widescreen image focuses the action better. There are a few shots early on that look unusually grainy, but most of the show's visuals have a snap to them, and the color is far richer than anything I've seen. Neal Hefti's music is a big plus, especially the strange song heard under the titles.

PopMatters (Chris Robé)

John Cassavetes was at his artistic height by the late 1970s. He directed Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and Opening Night (1977), and gave his best performance as lower-class narcissist Nicky in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976). Although largely ignored or even denigrated by some contemporary film critics, Cassavetes’ work grew increasingly sophisticated over the decade.

And then came Gloria, in 1980. The film exemplifies the conflict between Cassavetes’ character-based, “guerrilla” filmmaking and Hollywood’s predilection for action-packed plots. Financed by Columbia Studios, Gloria often submerges Cassavetes’ focus on offbeat, difficult characters within a mainstream production style.

Cassavetes himself was not happy with his script. He claims he wanted to earn some fast cash, but have nothing to do with its filming. Columbia, however, insisted that he direct the film and that his wife, Gena Rowlands, star in it. Cassavetes later claimed, “I was bored because I knew the answer to that picture the minute we began… Whereas Husbands is not simple, whereas A Woman Under the Influence is not simple, Opening Night is not simple. You have to think about those pictures” (Ray Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes, 454).

The film tracks the adventures of Gloria Swenson (Rowlands) with six-year-old Phil Dawn (John Adames), after the boy’s family is murdered by the mafia. Phil retains his father’s ledger of the mob’s illegal activities, which might earn him FBI protection. But, because Gloria has a criminal past, she cannot go to the authorities, and instead attempts to make a deal with the mob to hand over the ledger in exchange for Phil’s life.

As familiar as this set up may sound, Gloria doesn’t represent the relationship between Gloria and Phil in clichéd terms. Her ambivalent feelings toward this boy, so suddenly imposed on her life, emerge when they’re in a tight spot, and she instructs him, “Run as fast as you can.” She accompanies him for a few steps, then turns, telling him to go on by himself. “I’m not taking care of you any more,” she says. “I’ve been in jail.” We get a sense here of her frustration with this impossible situation.

Phil’s feelings for Gloria are similarly messy; he sees her as a substitute mother, a tough broad, and a potential sexual interest. His efforts to perform as “the man” in their relationship expose the absurdities of standard hetero-masculine assumptions and behaviors. When, early on, Gloria tries to convince him to leave the murder scene, he resists, repeating while pounding his chest, “I am the man. I am the man. Do you hear me? Not you. I am the man. I do anything I can.” Gloria wipes the blood trickling from his nose and says, “You are not the man. You don’t listen. You don’t know anything.”

Moments such as these between Gloria and Phil expose both Cassavetes and Rowlands’ mutual interests in the nuances of character. He inserts pauses in the narrative, occasional details that draw attention to the struggle within the film—between Hollywood conventions and the filmmaker’s resistance to same.

Sometimes, the struggle is lost: even as Gloria and Phil develop a mutual and complex fondness for one another, the narrative eventually pushes Gloria to play the standard role of mother. One of her old mob-connected boyfriends tells her, “I understand. You are a woman. He’s a little boy. Every woman is a mother. You love him.” Gloria is confused: “I love Phil?”

We are not so confused, however, as the formula seems unavoidable. Worse, emotional interactions between Gloria and Phil are usually underscored by swelling soundtrack music. Or they are just forgotten in the wake of multiple chase scenes through a stunningly filmed Manhattan; these dominate the film, creating excitement and suspense that have little to do with tender moments between fully developed characters.

Still, Gloria intermittently reveals some of the director’s subversive inclinations, not to mention Rowlands’ subtleties. These are visible often enough to make Gloria more intriguing than a standard Hollywood gangster movie.

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Rosado)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

LOVE STREAMS A 99

USA (141 mi) 1984

I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter. I’ve never seen anyone go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way, I’ve seen people withdraw, I’ve seen people hide behind political ideas, behind dope, behind the sexual revolution, behind fascism, behind hypocrisy, and I’ve myself done all these things. So I can understand them...What we are saying is so gentle. It’s gentleness. We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems.

—John Cassavetes

Very few great artists, other than those named Mozart or Beethoven, save what is arguably their greatest creation for their last and final work, where a gaunt Cassavetes makes his last great film, written immediately after playing in Paul Mazursky’s film, TEMPEST (1982), filmed after he had already begun to be ill with liver damage. LOVE STREAMS is Cassavetes’ Prospero, a farewell to his art, using dozens of references from his earlier films. Like Faces (1968), all the interiors are filmed in the actual Cassavetes household, adding a documentary element of family photos and portraits lining the walls, interestingly containing no hand-held camera work, a staple in nearly all his earlier films, yet this may be his most intimate film. Unlike most married couples that strive for a sense of balance and security, Cassavetes and Rowlands continued to struggle and evolve creatively directly in front of the camera during the course of their lives, an outrageously courageous and highly original form of personal expression, with Cassavetes waving goodbye to Gena Rowlands, and goodbye to the audience in the final shot. With it, a career of risk taking comes to a climax in this rich, original, emotionally immense film about a brother who cannot love and a sister who loves too much. The film is adapted from a play written by Ted Allan, while both he and Cassavetes collaborated on the screenplay. Cassavetes characters insist upon their relevance, they demand to be heard, even when they don't have a clue what they're about to say, like the befuddled Rowlands who loses her daughter in the opening divorce proceedings, something inconceivable to her, as no one could love her more. But she can't find the words and her loss is immeasurable, so she spends the rest of the film trying to fill the empty void from that missing love.

Initially the film follows the separate lives of Robert and Sarah, Cassavetes and Rowlands, parallel lives of loneliness and loss, where Sarah loses her 13-year old daughter in a divorce, losing her companionship and love, trying to introduce love into the legal proceedings, but there’s simply no place for it. Looking largely disheveled for the first half of the picture, Sarah is a natural extension of Mabel from A Woman Under the Influence (1974), a hyper-emotive woman who tends to get carried away with herself, growing deliriously happy or utterly despondent. Referred to a psychiatrist, she attempts to explain to him, “Love is a stream. It’s continuous. It does not stop,” to which he replies, “It does stop,” but she insists otherwise, which is the heart of her personality, driven to be liked and appreciated, refusing to accept the middle ground of mediocrity. Recommending that she take a trip to Europe and meet people, the film turns comically hilarious when we see the mountainous pile of luggage she drags behind. Robert lives in a dream house on top of a Hollywood hill reachable only by a steep, winding incline making a successful living writing sex books about women. We see him visit a gay nightclub picking up Diahnne Abbott after hearing the club’s singer doing a sultry rendition of “Kinky Reggae” Love streams - kinky reggae - YouTube (2:10). Robert never sleeps alone, filling his house with beautiful young bimbos, where sex is all that is real. Life is one long champagne party of women and sex, where there are literally several carfuls of call girls who spend the weekend, most of the time amusing themselves however they wish, as only one or two are with Robert, who occasionally takes the time to get to know them, actually asking probing questions which are beyond their years.

In something of a surprise, mixing up the drunken revelry is an 8-year old kid Albie (Jakob Shaw) arriving on his doorstep, who turns out to be a son he never knew existed, whose mother says she’ll come back for him the next day. Needless to say, Albie is terrified at the drinking and lewd behavior going on, so Robert clears the house of everyone else while the two get acquainted, ridiculously plying him with beer, offering him the fatherly advice that by the time he’s 14 he should hitchhike across the country and discover “real” people, “not these guys out here with their suits and ties, but real men.” What distinguishes this film is the heavy mix of humor along with the depth of realism and warmth of the characters. What do you do when you’re finally alone with a newly discovered son? Take him to Vegas, obviously, where you go out partying all night leaving him alone in a hotel room, basically quivering in fright. But before they leave, Sarah is greeted affectionately on Robert’s doorstep with her boatload of luggage that arrives in two cabs. There’s a wonderfully extended ambiguity about their relationship, as we don’t discover the truth until about 90 minutes into the film. Needless to say, the Vegas trip is a disaster, culminating in what could almost be described as spectacle, which is so bizarre in its own uncompromising way that Robert’s most embarrassing moment turns into something poignant and perversely comedic at the same time.

One of the more beautiful sequences involves Robert’s date with Diahnne Abbott’s mother, repaying earlier kindness, where they dance and drink champagne in her living room, where she’s treated like a queen to the music of Jack Sheldon - Almost In Love With You - YouTube (2:51), a scene reminiscent of the suave and debonair Ben Gazarra as Cosmo Vittelli in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) who similarly flirts with his girl friend Rachel’s (Azizi Johari) mother, where in each instance the mother used is the real life mother. Returning home to a quieter, darker house, Cassavetes gently tells Rowlands, “Life is a series of suicides, divorces, broken promises, children smashed, whatever,” which is not in any way meant to be downbeat or maudlin, but simply an acceptance of reality. From that, Sarah gets the idea to go bowling dressed in a classy black sequined dress and heels, where her response to the desk clerk’s “How are you?” is simply classic, as she’s bound and determined to give the man an honest answer, most of which is simply contorted facial expressions searching for the truth. Of course, she’s a sensation wearing no shoes on lane 13, meeting Ken (John Roselius), returning home with renewed exuberance, where the two of them sit down and discuss the idea of love as art. Sarah, however, refuses to abandon her romantic dreams about love, and in a brilliant conversational climax, defends her ex-husband, who no longer loves her and is giving her nothing but grief, telling Robert, “We’re talking about a man who put food on the table, who held my hand in the hospital, who cried when his baby was born. Where were you?”

Sarah’s way of providing balance to their lives is returning in a cab one afternoon with two miniature horses, a goat, a parrot, chickens, a duck, and a dog named Jim, but swoons in a spell when Robert doesn’t seem to appreciate the gesture. Feeling miserable and disconsolate, barely able to move, Sarah has two extraordinary dream sequences while a storm rages outside and Robert, the Ancient Mariner, lovingly gathers up all the animals, providing them a shelter from the storm. The first dream is one of Rowlands’ greatest scenes, tragically obsessed with the idea of making her daughter and ex-husband happy, she performs a burlesque comedy routine, trying every cheap vaudeville gag, fake mustard and ketchup, water spurting out of flowers and pens, fake eyeballs on springs, funny glasses, but gets nothing, despite the fact she is simply sensational, she gets no reaction from either one of them. Her second dream is more surreal, like something out of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), a small autobiographical operetta where her daughter’s feelings are being tugged back and forth between the mother and father, with Sarah on one side of the stage and her husband on the other, the spotlight shines on Sarah in a haunting, classical image of beauty and motherly love, where her daughter is seen as one of the dancing Degas ballet girls.

Meanwhile, Cassavetes comically gathering all the animals is a bit like Rowlands’ earlier luggage scenes, where they are carrying their emotional baggage like an added weight on their shoulders. Cassavetes, however, has the presence of mind to use the back door for comedy, so reminiscent of WC Fields’ “Not a fit night out for man or beast” in 1933 The Fatal Glass Of Beer (W. C. Fields) - YouTube (18:32), as each time they open it to the raging storm outside, Robert stumbles in out of the deluge with another animal. Despite the howling storm, Sarah resolves to make something of her life right then and there, claiming sudden family clarity, not waiting another moment, while Robert urges her to never go back to any man that doesn’t love her and to stay and live with him. But to the music of Harold Adamson and Jimmy McHugh’s “Where Are You” MILDRED BAILEY - Where Are You (1937) - YouTube (3:15), “Must I go on pretending, where is that happy ending, where are you?” Rowlands is whisked away in a cab as Robert waves goodbye to his sister, framed in a windowsill, his image distorted by the rain. Of interest, there is no trace of a play in this film, arguably Cassavetes’ best and most accessible film, no dialog driven moments, instead the occasional improvisational bursts offer needed energy to Cassavetes’ free-wheeling style, briskly moving between sequences where both Cassavetes and Rowlands offer such rare emotional authenticity, creating a cinematic farewell that will forever be beautiful and heartbreaking.

girish: 2006: Ten Favorite Older Films December 19, 2006

In a just world, it’s performances like these—by Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands in Love Streams—that would win Oscars; no Academy Award-winning performances I’ve ever seen can match their emotional truth and power. The physical presence of these characters and the complexity of their desires make you think—this is what human beings are really like! In the wake of Cassavetes films, other movies can feel a bit fake and cartoony in their human depictions….

Time Out Geoff Andrew

As so often in Cassavetes' work, there's little plot: desperate attempts at a sexual life from a boozy, middle-aged writer staving off loneliness; a divorced woman's struggles to hang on to her husband, daughter and sanity. Halfway through, when the woman takes refuge in the writer's chaotic household, the nature of their relationship (they're brother and sister) gradually unfolds. Very little else happens; but sparks fly throughout as the characters, guided firmly by the director's customary emphasis on spontaneous, naturalistic performance, search for closeness, warmth and self-definition. It's a long and wayward path, but humour, aching sadness, and sensitivity to the inner lives of people deemed eccentric, mingle to produce a rich, impressionistic tapestry. The oblique treatment occasionally leads to infuriating obscurity, but the movie's sense of 'real life', dynamic performances, and admirable lack of moralising make it compulsive. (From a play by Ted Allan.)

Minneapolis : Love Streams - City Pages Matthew Wilder

"Doin' okay in there?" "Yeah, fine--just washing up!" "Good. Because love is dead." The first of these speakers is Robert Harmon (John Cassavetes), a macho fiction writer who fills his ratty Mulholland Drive house with hookers he seems more interested in interviewing than screwing; the second is Robert's sister (Gena Rowlands), who shows up at his door with a menagerie of goats, dogs, cats, chicken, and geese. His problem is a pseudo-wised-up demeanor that seals off any possibility of human connection. (He locks up his seven-year-old kid in a suite in Vegas while he spends a night on the town; the consequences are horrific in a manner only found in real life--or in a John Cassavetes movie.) Her problem is a surfeit of love: She loves her husband, daughter, and any needy thing around her in a way that exceeds social limits. Her displays of emotion--her "love streams"--embarrass and terrify the movie's "normal" characters. In this, his last film, writer-director Cassavetes goes deep. Where his earlier works explore previously unfilmed emotions and modes of behavior, Love Streams aims for higher mysteries. Like the late-period Shakespeare (think The Winter's Tale), Cassavetes interests himself in bonds of affinity between unlike characters--bonds that go beyond words, beyond explanation. What on earth is happening in the climactic musical number? Who's the satyrlike bearded man who shows up half-naked in Robert's living room? Cassavetes makes us sit in the not-knowing. For me, there's just about no more beautiful place in the movies to be.

LOVE STREAMS Cinematheque Ontario (link lost)

Underrated and impossible to see (except on a French import DVD), John Cassavetes’ LOVE STREAMS, based on a play by Canadian Ted Allan, reappears in this deluxe new print from Sony Entertainment. Cassavetes, who ushered in the American independent movement with his staggering debut SHADOWS, confirms in this, his penultimate film, the unflagging auteurism that made his body of work one of the most unique and unified of post-Fifties cinema. A thematic summation of his twenty-five-year career, LOVE STREAMS is a rough and raw examination of love: its limits and falsities, its teetering into delusion, its power to destroy and to set free. Robert Harman, played with remarkable strength by Cassavetes (when Jon Voigt pulled out of the project mere weeks before shooting he was forced into the role, though suffering from the cancer that was to take his life) is a high-rolling, perpetually inebriated romance novelist with wildly unorthodox research methods living up in the Hollywood Hills in a house filled with a bevy of babes and a cross-section of Noah’s Ark. Gena Rowlands, preternaturally enthralling, is Sarah Lawson, Robert’s loopy sister whose recent divorce (from Seymour Cassel, in a re-casting of MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ) results in her estrangement from her daughter, and a lunacy that is equally tragic and absurd (note the GREED-like epic expansion of her hair). The depths of desperation are mined and contrasted through Robert’s ambivalence towards love and Sarah’s embarrassingly juvenile surfeit of affection. The performances are so naked that their fragility cuts through the film’s fiction, making LOVE STREAMS “a movie that gets better with every viewing” (Dennis Lim, The Village Voice). Not to be missed. – Andréa Picard

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror) Gary Morris, August 2006

"Independent" cinema, like "alternative" music, is increasingly difficult to recognize these days. The indie movement has its own set of conventions that make it as much a copy of as a challenge to its alleged nemesis, the mainstream. It's only a few mental steps from the Hollywood star to his or her slacker variant. Raging egos, star fits, ruthless self-promotion, and unabashed greed are as omnipresent in the alleged underground as in the mainstream.

Nowadays, cinematic innovation is easier to find by looking backward. A fine case in point is John Cassavetes' last film, Love Streams, made five years before he died. Cassavetes wore his reputation for intransigence like a crown; he simply refused to bow to the endless reshaping and recutting of his films that would have made him a beloved and successful hack. Instead, starting in 1960 with Shadows, he turned out a wrenching series of closely observed melodramas — critiques of romantic and sexual relations in modern American life — that still seem fresh today. The rarely screened Love Streams is among his longest, least compromised, and most demanding works. It's also one of the most rewarding.

The film is a series of extended vignettes, some of them improvised to varying degrees, centering on the disintegrating lives of two people — the driven, abusive novelist Robert Harmon (played by Cassavetes himself), and his sister Sarah (a brilliant Gena Rowlands), who's in the midst of a bitter divorce and a nervous breakdown. Harmon spends his days gathering "material" for his fiction — in reality, desperately indulging himself with hookers and booze, while misusing a string of ex-wives and a pitiful abandoned son he meets briefly for the first time. Sarah's life has become a series of hysterical interludes — collapsing at the divorce lawyer's or at a bowling alley, and in a memorably comic-pathetic scene, bringing several taxis full of miniature horses, goats, chickens, and other fauna to her brother to give him "something to love." Not every director could make such melodramatics ring true — and there are even more over-the-top dream sequences — but the film offers such a richness of emotional detail in its pictures of Robert and Sarah and those around them that we eventually uncover the humor and humanity behind these damaged lives.

The Parallax Review [D. B. Bates]

John Cassavetes went into Love Streams knowing he was dying, and while it's as difficult and as disturbing as the rest of his body of work, it also comes to light as an oddly tender film, and open-hearted work.

Cassavetes stars as Robert Harmon, a writer of trashy novels about sex and women. As "research," he hangs out -- and often sleeps with -- all manner of women, but mainly prostitutes. To him, love exists only in a fleeting moment and not much more.

His sister, Sarah, has a much stronger view. Her smothering, all-encompassing brand of love has led to a divorce from her husband (Seymour Cassel); her daughter (Margaret Abbott) has chosen to live with him. She tries a trip to Europe but mostly winds up lugging a mountain of suitcases around, so she visits her brother.

Meanwhile, he has been assigned to baby-sit a son (probably a "mistake" from a long-forgotten sexual experience) for the weekend; he drives to Vegas, leaves the kid in a hotel room and goes out boozing and whoring for the night. Later, Sarah brings home a menagerie of new pets to teach Robert how to love something.

As if that weren't enough, Love Streams wraps up with a truly memorable, frightening, dazzling series of dreams and hallucinations, taking place during a vicious rainstorm.

Though Cassavetes has a reputation for looseness and improvisation, he is at his most and deliciously visual here, using the huge home, the circular driveway, windows and dark corners for extreme emotional impact. Characters slip in and out of shadows, or around doorways, just as often as their characters slip from emotional accessibility to emotional obscurity.

This is a great film, and worthy of the effort it takes to sit through it. Cassavetes and playwright Ted Allan adapted a play by Allan. Peter Bogdanovich reportedly directed one scene, without credit.

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin

There's no other American director who can do what John Cassavetes does on the screen. There may not be many who would want to. Mr. Cassavetes's work, in ''Love Streams,'' as in his earlier films, is as overflowing with emotional constructs as it is barren of other forms of thought. It's excessive and idiosyncratic all the way. Yet Mr. Cassavetes, as both actor and director, is never without his own peculiar magnetism and authority. Once again, he is able to galvanize a long, rambling, quirky psychodrama through sheer force of personality.

''Love Streams,'' which opens today at the Coronet, has the style, cast and concerns with which Mr. Cassavetes' devotees are familiar. The director stars as Robert, a famous author who is ''writing a book on night life,'' which means that he's a kind of den father to a household full of clean-cut young prostitutes and that his nights on the town often leave him drunk, bruised and bloody. Gena Rowlands plays Sarah, a self-proclaimed ''very happy person'' who likes to visit sick relatives - anyone's relatives - and is fragile enough to have lately been institutionalized. Their stories remain parallel for the film's first hour, but they run together when Sarah comes to stay at Robert's house. It is gradually revealed that she is his sister.

The second half of the film, in which this new closeness between Robert and Sarah accentuates their neuroses, has a different tone from the first half, which is all exposition. It takes a while for Mr. Cassavetes (who wrote the screenplay with Ted Allan, based on Mr. Allan's play) to introduce a number of subsidiary characters. Among them are the sultry nightclub singer (Diahnne Abbott) whom Robert pursues desperately and just as desperately abandons; the 8-year-old son (Jakob Shaw) who pays Robert an unexpected visit (''I haven't seen him since he was born; we were just going over old times,'' the father casually explains), and Sarah's husband (Seymour Cassel), whom she calls to tell brightly: ''Jack? I'm almost not crazy now.'' The real drama barely involves these people at all. It centers on Robert and Sarah, who are meant to be seen as two sides of the same coin.

Because Mr. Cassavetes is so much better equipped to consider his characters individually than in tandem, because his speciality is the long close-up monologue rather than the dialogue or the reaction, ''Love Streams'' is more successful in sketching Robert and Sarah separately than in bringing them together. Once they meet, the film gives itself over to outlandish devices, like an operetta fantasy in which Sarah sings to her husband and daughter about the breakup of their family, and to outlandish humor. There is the moment, for instance, when Sarah decides Robert needs something to love and brings him home two miniature horses, a goat, a parrot, a duck, some chickens and a very large dog. The spectacle of Sarah arriving at Robert's place with most of these creatures in a single taxi is funny enough. But the joke goes on too long.

It is repeated several times in ''Love Streams'' that ''love is a stream - it's continuous, it doesn't stop,'' and that ''a beautiful woman has to offer a man her secrets.'' So ''Love Streams'' is of less interest for its verbal insights than for the offbeat energy of its best scenes. In one of these, Sarah goes alone to a bowling alley in an evening dress, bowling alone to show how cheerful she can be. Miss Rowlands is vibrant enough to make this scene appealing, rather than bizarre.

Mr. Cassavetes has a fine long sequence in which he introduces his newly discovered son to a life of casual flamboyance, whisking him off to Las Vegas and teaching him how to drink beer. The outstanding moment in Miss Rowland's performance - and in the film itself - comes when she takes a spur-of-the-moment trip to France, arriving there with fur coats, several steamer trunks, lots of shopping bags and at least a dozen other pieces of luggage. She needs a porter, but the only one available speaks no English. She tries to tell him about the bags in fractured French, but he blinks uncomprehendingly. ''You can understand me if you want to,'' Sarah tells him then, with a definiteness that very nearly makes it true - and with the authority that much of Mr. Cassavetes's film possesses.

Love Streams Ray Carney’s discussion of LOVE STREAMS

John Cassavetes's Love Streams Charles Leary, from Screening the Past, June 17, 2007, also seen here: The Return Home: John Cassavetes's Love Streams

GreenCine N.P. Thompson, May 24, 2006

Procrast-Nation

ReFramed No. 6: John Cassavetes Love Streams - PopMatters Jordan Cronk and Calum Marsh converse on the film

John Cassavetes - The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film ... Tim Applegate from Film Journal

Cinematic Jazz: The Myth of John Cassavetes - Roger Ebert Steve Erickson, November 3, 2014

Jason Bailey Fourth Row Center

Strictly Film School Acquarello

The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]

Siffblog [Kathy Fennessy]

Cassavetes in the Provinces Allan MacInnin from Alienated in Vancouver, February 24, 2006

John Cassavetes' Love Streams at the Vancity Theat... Allan MacInnin from Alienated in Vancouver, March 9, 2006

Love Streams (1984) - Overview - TCM.com

Love Streams - Torrents d'amour Image 1 sur 14 - Toutlecine film photos

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] January 1, 1984, original review is better

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] January 7, 1998

Love Streams - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BIG TROUBLE

USA (93 mi) 1986 ‘Scope

digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss)

Presumably directed as a favour to old buddy Falk, Cassavetes' last film is a far cry from the glories of Gloria, Husbands, Shadows and the rest. Indeed, it's absolutely unrecognisable as his work, being a conventionally glossy spoof thriller in which insurance salesman Arkin, desperate for finance to send his musical triplets through Yale, agrees to forge a double indemnity policy on Falk's life for his third wife D'Angelo. Sounds familiar? For the first third, this is a comic reshuffle of moments from Wilder and Chandler's classic Double Indemnity, but then out come the wacky surprises in a chaotically inventive mish-mash of black neurotic humour. Never hysterically funny but scattered with pleasingly OTT moments and throwaway lines, it looks as if Cassavetes merely wanted a) to prove he could make a blandly stylish commercial piece, and b) the cash.

PopMatters Chris Robé

Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
— Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

John Cassavetes struggled long and hard against mainstream movies' predilection for action-packed, slickly produced plots. And so, it's distressing that his last film, Big Trouble, appears to capitulate to just that sort of formula.

At first glance, Big Trouble seems to be an uneven ode to Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944). As in Wilder's film, a femme fatale, Blanche Rickey (Beverly D'Angelo), convinces an insurance salesman, Leonard Hoffman (Alan Arkin), to murder her husband, Steve (Peter Falk), in order to collect a $5 million insurance policy. But a sharp insurance fraud investigator, O'Mara (Charles Durning), thwarts their plans, while Hoffman learns that Steve was never actually killed. And in this plot turn, Big Trouble initiates a theme that runs through all of Cassavetes' work, that is, his interest in ruinous deceptions and failed relationships.

Typically, Cassavetes provides complex characters, whom we never entirely like, and refuses to explain fully their motivations. Big Trouble, however, is only concerned with investigating the basic deception. The intimate reality that lies beneath this scheming remains unseen.

Much of the film's humor comes from its parodies of stereotypes. Devious Blanche is surely out of place in the 1980s 'burbs, and as such, she embodies male anxieties about female fidelity and love. Both Leonard and Steve fall prey to her, unable to tell whether her seductions are genuine, or if there is anything genuine about her at all. Steve, in turn, is a parody of conventional masculinity. Dressed in jungle fatigues and hat, posed in pictures with rifles and slain animals, he is a Hemingway character come to life 50 years too late. In one of the film's most hilarious scenes, Steve offers hen-pecked Leonard a potent Norwegian liqueur, calling it "really a man's drink." Leonard takes a large sip, then, unwilling to admit that he can't handle it, nods approval as his gag reflex forces him to rid his mouth. Steve offers him another drink that might suit him more. But Leonard insists, in a gruff voice, "This was fine. This was plenty."

But, despite such moments of humor and insight, the film is flat, even when referencing Cassavetes' previous films. In a scene borrowing from A Woman Under The Influence (1974), Steve unloads a group of illegal Chinese workers at his house, then asks Blanche to cook them a quick meal. This recalls Nick Longhetti (Peter Falk) similarly forcing his wife Mabel (Gena Rowlands) to cook for his lower-class sewer buddies. But unlike the earlier film that used the scene to examine the intricate dynamics between husband, wife, and co-workers, Big Trouble only makes a weak stab at humor, when Blanche says she will do anything for Steve and then delegates such work to her maid.

At its worst, the film seems less the work of a seasoned director than a pretentious film student overdosed on post-structural theory. Debord once wrote, "In a society of the spectacle, everything is image, even reality. All we seem to have left are references to other references."

But for all his criticisms of the culture, Debord considered reality worth fighting for, a means to maintain a sense of human complexity and thoughtfulness. Cassavetes also explored the danger of the spectacle, exposing how individuals compromise their emotions and beliefs by adhering to mediated notions of "humanity." Flimsy and frustrating, Big Trouble suggests that he finally gave up on reality; it's a vague representation of a Cassavetes film. Unlike his other work, it only questions stereotypical, socially constructed roles to find out that, ultimately, there is nothing beneath them

Film Freak Central review [Travis Hoover]

From the depths of the files marked "for completists only" comes John Cassavetes' Big Trouble, a film that defies all but the most determined attempts to fit it into the master's canon. Not only is the director's raw emotionality nowhere in evidence here, but the unforced aesthetics that are his hallmark are totally unsuited to the broad and dialogue-dependant farce screenplay by Andrew Bergman (writing under the pseudonym Warren Bogle). It's hard to think of a bigger mismatch of director and material--unless it's Robert Altman doing a teen comedy called O.C. and Stiggs (which, regrettably, happened the following year). I'd suggest a double bill for the diehard auteurists among us, but the disillusionment would be so shattering that I doubt that any of them would survive the experience.

In all fairness, Big Trouble is much better than that ill-fated Altman venture, and can be seen as an interesting example of a helmsman subverting assigned material: parachuted in to replace another director, Cassavetes appears to have pretended that it's another movie, and hoped that it would all work out in the end. On paper, the picture involves uptight Leonard Hoffman (Alan Arkin), an insurance salesman whose triplet sons have been accepted to Yale; Leonard is, alas, scrambling to secure financing for their tuition. Enter Blanche Rickey (Beverly D'Angelo), the wealthy Tennessee Williams wife whose husband Steve (Peter Falk) has been given six weeks to live. The two hatch a plot to make $5M off a policy that only pays when the victim dies on a train, à la Double Indemnity. It's not until the phoney accident takes place that the truth is revealed: Steve is a con artist planning the ultimate score. His scheme has dragged Leonard's future--and his sons'--into serious jeopardy.

Is this really a Cassavetes picture? I suppose that Big Trouble could seem vaguely related to his concerns--the transformation of a repressed family man at the hands of free-spirit criminal veers dangerously close to the director's insistence on the primacy of emotion. (Essentially, it's like the wake scene in Husbands with Falk trying to bully some catharsis out of Arkin's fusty old lady.) But this only goes so far, and most of the time you're aware of the disparity of styles between director and screenwriter. The script is quite deliberately mild--one never believes for a moment that any lasting damage can be incurred, even as the plot trades up from fraud to kidnapping to terrorism. In classic Cassavetes, the slightest tic is of earth-shattering importance, meaning that he's got one strike against him going into this wisp of a screenplay.

The director tries to fight the deliberate nature of the script by short-circuiting the dialogue and letting the action ebb and flow. But while this blows off the fake snappiness of the genre, it results in something amorphous and weird. A typical scene involves the co-conspirators, having kidnapped the insurance investigator (Charles Durning) who is hip to their plot, meandering roadside considering their options: a regular director would have made a sharp distinction between the horrified Arkin and no-worries Falk, but Cassavetes renders the scene with little crosscutting, and as a result the laughs dissolve into a feeling of what-the-hell-is-going-on-here. Cassavetes doesn't have the insane focus of classical pop, and while that's why we love him, there's no denying that his attempts to colour interestingly inside the lines end in failure.

The problem isn't so much that Big Trouble is neither a classic farce nor typical Cassavetes, it's that it isn't really much of anything else. The film is a freak of nature without home or purpose, and while it isn't especially painful, it leaves you with nothing but chaos. Moreover, it's completely convictionless--and if there's one thing we expect from Cassavetes, it's strong convictions. All said, this bizarre anomaly makes a depressing capper to a brilliant career, and will have you longing for the excesses of the great one's least compromised work.

The platter is of surprising quality when you consider the low priority it must have been for distributor Columbia Tri-Star. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen image is reasonably good: while blacks are somewhat bleached-out and darkened scenes have a hint of grain, the colours are otherwise as vibrant as they can be given the hideous mid-'80s pastels being rendered. The 1.0 mono soundtrack is similarly satisfactory, with no bars to intelligibility, though the clarity of Bill Conti's (awful) score is often much better than the diegetic sound itself, and consequently rather jarring. Poorly-transferred trailers for the Falk vehicles The Cheap Detective and Murder by Death, as well as a rather fresher one for I Spy, round out the disc.

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Dindrane

The Onion A.V. Club [Stephen Thompson]

Cassavetes, Nick

UNHOOK THE STARS

USA France (103 mi) 1996

In this gentle drama, screen legend Gena Rowlands plays a widowed mom who learns to live again, thanks to the influence of a lovable small boy, and befriends locals like hellcat neighbor Marisa Tomei and affable trucker Gerard Depardieu. As you'd expect, Rowlands' performance is expertly understated, while the movie has a sweetness that's magnified by the fact that Rowlands is first-time director Nick Cassavetes' mom. But there's really not an awful lot going on in Unhook The Stars: The sympathetically drawn characters evolve through the course of the movie, but the ambiguous, choose-your-own-ending conclusion feels more like a copout than the profound moment it's supposed to be. It's a nice little dramatic diversion—not at all the uproarious comedy promised on the video box—but it's too slack and marginal to warrant recommendation.

Unhook the Stars | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Though her husband died leaving her financially secure, life isn't exactly great for Mildred (Rowlands). Her teenage daughter Ann Mary Margaret (Kelly) is an argumentative ungrateful sort who only visits when she wants something; her beloved son Ethan (Thornton) is supportive and solicitous, but he's keen to take her with his family to San Francisco and install her in a granny flat, and Mildred's not sure she wants to move. Mildred's a little bored and lonely - not that she'd complain - so when a new neighbour, foul-mouthed, frequently drunk Monica (Tomei), asks her to babysit for six-year-old JJ (Lloyd), Mildred's happy to oblige. Little does she know the encounter will change her life. Nick Cassavetes' debut as writer/director is a sensitive, honest, touching study of the seemingly limited options faced by a woman whose age belies her energy, enthusiasm and ability to enjoy herself whenever the opportunity presents itself. If it lacks the raw intensity and brilliant insights of his father John's work, Cassavetes Jr still provides enough subtly observed moments to suggest he's a talent to watch. The film features a clutch of terrific performances, headed by the director's mother - sweet, strong, vulnerable and iron-willed, Rowlands is entirely credible and affecting throughout. The film's only misjudgment is the inclusion of Depardieu in a minor but important role: while there's nothing wrong with his performance, we're just too aware of who he really is to be properly convinced that he's a French-Canadian trucker.

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

Nick Cassavetes, the son of acclaimed international director John Cassavetes, makes his directorial debut with Unhook the Stars, a pleasantly unsentimental character study of one woman who has difficulty letting go. Although Cassavetes may want independence from his father's name and memory, this film won't earn it, for, although the style bears only a passing resemblance to the late film maker's, Nick not only uses several members of John's crew (notably Phedon Papamichael), but has cast his mother, Gena Rowlands, in the lead role. In addition, the script has a heavy autobiographical tinge -- Cassavetes is using cinema to work out his ambiguous feelings towards his famous father.

For Mildred (Rowlands), a single mother (she was widowed many years ago), her last chick is about to fly the coup. Her oldest, a son (David Sherrill), has already left home. Now, her daughter, Annie (Moira Kelly), is on her way out. Their parting is less-than-amicable. Annie finds her mother to be a controlling and interfering influence, and wants to get away as soon as possible. Mildred watches her go sadly, wondering what happened to all the aspirations she harbored for her only female offspring. But Mildred isn't destined to be alone for long. Her new neighbor across the street, Monica Warren (Marisa Tomei), has thrown her husband (David Thornton) out following a particularly nasty quarrel. Now, she's alone with her young son, J.J. (Jake Lloyd), and doesn't have the money to pay a sitter when she goes to work. Mildred offers to help, gratis, and soon becomes J.J.'s surrogate mother.

Looking back on Unhook the Stars, the first thing that strikes me is the script's openness and honesty. It doesn't try to trick and manipulate us with melodrama. Every action has a natural consequence -- nothing ever feels forced or scripted. When Monica's husband returns to town, wanting to see his son, there's no shouting match or violence. When Annie eventually comes home, there's no big, tearful reunion. And, when Mildred begins to realize that her time with J.J. is coming to a close, we're spared an emotional scene. Unhook the Stars is consistently low- key, and, in the context of an intelligent script and strong acting, this represents a welcome change- of-pace from most American films.

Gena Rowlands is excellent, but that shouldn't come as a surprise. She becomes Mildred, subtly and effectively bringing the woman's every emotion to the surface. This is the kind of role that could easily be overacted, but Rowlands strikes the perfect balance between restraint and abandon. From the first scene, where she's delivering newspapers, to the last, where she turns her back on the past and strides purposely towards the future, Rowlands makes us care about Mildred.

Marisa Tomei, who has always had screen presence, gives the best performance of a relatively short career. Tomei makes Monica a swirling, contradictory font of pure emotion -- she's always nervous, agitated, elated, furious, or a combination of the above. Monica may not be the best- developed character, but Tomei invests her with such passion and energy that it's impossible not to see her as a lot more than the person on the pages of Cassavetes' screenplay.

It doesn't demand much of a stretch for Gerard Depardieu to play the likable French Canadian truck driver who becomes infatuated with Mildred. Depardieu is a pleasant addition to the cast (and got involved for the chance to work with Rowlands), but isn't a revelation. However, Moira Kelly is. The young actress, the best thing about the recent Entertaining Angels, gives a powerhouse performance in limited screen exposure. Annie's pain and rage are palpable, going far beyond the norms of youthful rebellion, and Kelly realistically and effectively portrays them.

Unhook the Stars is an engaging motion picture, mixing various flavors of comedy and drama into a satisfying whole. Admittedly, there are times when Cassavetes skims lightly over subject matter that is deserving of a fuller exploration, but the quality of the finished product allows us to overlook most of these incidents. Unhook the Stars is a movie of many special, small moments, that, combined together, make for a shining cinematic experience.

Review for Unhook the Stars (1996) - IMDb Scott Renshaw

Women's Studies, University of Maryland (by McAlister) Linda Lopez McAlister

That Cow - Review of Unhook the Stars (1996) Andrew Bradford

DVDFile Jim M. Howard

Rolling Stone [Peter Travers]

Movie Magazine International [Mary Weems]

Unhook the Stars - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Unhook the Stars - Philadelphia City Paper Cindy Fuchs

San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

A Widow Alone, Loving And Full of Longing - New York Times Stephen Holden

SHE’S SO LOVELY

USA France (100 mi) 1997 ‘Scope

She's So Lovely | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule review)

A streamlined, sometimes affecting Hollywood studio version of a maverick independent script by the late John Cassavetes, this 1997 film offers a fascinating glimpse at what Cassavetes was from the vantage point of what he wasn't. Sean Penn (his choice for the lead ten years ago) stars as a crazy low-life city brawler deeply in love with his pregnant wife (Robin Wright Penn). One of his jealous rages gets him committed to a mental asylum for ten years, and by the time he gets out his wife has married John Travolta (who's the best reason for seeing this movie), had a couple more kids, and moved to the suburbs. Nick Cassavetes (John's son) is the director, though without the luxury of final cut enjoyed by his father on all his own features, and the brassy in-your-face music and 'Scope framing both seem antithetical to the father's style. Most of the characters (also including Harry Dean Stanton, Debi Mazar, and James Gandolfini), irrational and ineffable, are recognizable denizens of John Cassavetes's world, though the way they're sometimes pressed into sitcom routines robs them of some of their potential density. Not really a Cassavetes movie, but worth seeing anyway.

Working from a screenplay by his late father, legendary filmmaker John Cassavetes, Nick Cassavetes' second film as a director stars Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn as a down-and-out white-trash couple as hopelessly in love with each other as they are irresponsible and self-destructive. After Wright Penn is raped and beaten by a neighbor, Penn has a psychotic episode, shoots an EMR worker, and ends up spending 10 years in a mental hospital. In the interim, Wright Penn cleans up and marries responsible, wealthy, somewhat shady businessman John Travolta and settles into a comfortable life as an upper-middle-class wife and mother. But when Penn is released and comes looking for her, Wright Penn is faced with a choice: to leave the soothing, predictable life she leads or voyage once again to the edge of sanity with the man she never stopped loving. At once grittily realistic and hopelessly romantic, She's So Lovely walks a fine line between artiness and pretension, and to its credit, it seldom falters. Anchored by a brilliant performance by Penn—and a powerful one by Wright Penn, as well as stalwart supporting turns by the ever-reliable Harry Dean Stanton and Travolta—She's So Lovely is consistently strong, subversive, and unpredictable. Cassavetes' grip on the material is surprisingly sure-handed for such an inexperienced director, but he's been blessed by a screenplay that proves a wonderfully fitting swan song to his father's career as one of Hollywood's most uncompromising, enduring visionaries.

The Man Who Viewed Too Much [Mike D'Angelo]

She's So Lovely, at least, has the virtue of novelty. Its meaning, however, must have died with its scenarist, John Cassavetes, whose script has finally been made by his son, Nick (and, if the rumors are correct, by star and co-executive producer Sean Penn, who is said to have given Junior the heave-ho in post-production). The film is a romantic ode to craziness that's at the same time disconcertingly cleareyed, so that the barfly couple at its center, Eddie (Penn) and Maureen (Robin Wright Penn), are clinically loco. Gone, it seems, is the R.D. Laing-ish gloss that holds madness to be the ultimate sanity. But nothing has replaced it save a dopey misogyny, in which women remain the unknowable Other. "What an interesting thing a woman is," muses Penn, in an appallingly moist turn that carries echoes of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man. "Tits, ass, hair. Where the fuck did hair come from? What is hair?" Regressing further, he asserts that he's in trouble: "The world is controlled by a computer and seven different women." Wrapped in a straitjacket after shooting a mental health worker, he spouts infantile Beckettisms: "You just suck on your mother's tit and then you die."

Ten years later, Maureen is ensconced in the suburban manse of Joey--John Travolta--who, in a Danny Aiello role, just can't suppress his hipness. He's a construction honcho with whom she's raising three little daughters, one of them Eddie's. When her ex is set free, she begins to feel his gravitational tug, and flatly explains to her current spouse that she loves Eddie more and owes him big time: "He went right off the bridge for me. I think he went nuts for me." Joey, understandably stricken, wants to take on his rival mano a mano and man to man. But the asylum has left Eddie sweet and passive and beatific. He knows Maureen will come back to him, because she's his and she has to and that's that. In a conventional thriller, Eddie would be the dark monster out of the past who threatens the sanctity of Maureen's new family and sanity. In a Cassavetes script, he's more likely to be saving her from suburban lobotomization.

Robin Wright Penn does amusing tipsy schtick, tottering around, black and blue, on those long, skinny legs. But it's hard to say if she's supposed to be a drunk, a junkie, a moron, a schizophrenic, or all of the above. The actress, pre-Penn, played the title character in The Princess Bride (1987), and has been cast against type with a vengeance. The vengeance rebounds on her. Casting against type doesn't work in a John Cassavetes script, in which the principal interest lies in watching actors plumb their already well-entrenched personas. Wright plumb doesn't have a persona to pen. I mean, Wright Penn doesn't have a persona to plumb. She can't begin to make sense of this character, not even poetic sense. "She doesn't love you, she doesn't love me. She's de-lovely," says Eddie to Joey in what's meant to be the wisdom, by way of Cole Porter, of a simpleton poet.

I'm tempted to applaud the film for its perversity, for the fact that the wife doesn't do the responsible thing, that family values are unsanctimoniously flouted, that the ending is less programmatic and more open-ended than anything I've seen on-screen in years. Having said that, it behooves me to add that Cassavetes' script must have been written in the final throes of delirium tremens. It's impossible to know how to take this woman who up and abandons her three little girls for a man newly sprung from the booby hatch and still demonstrably nuts. Yet the ambiguities aren't rich, because so much has been left out--the meat of both relationships, along with a coherent point of view. Betraying my traditional masculine possessiveness, I found myself dreaming of an alternative ending, in which Travolta puts a bullet in Penn's brain. Then, in the final shot, he lowers his pistol and submits to an interview with Susan Faludi.

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Packaged Parables ... August 29, 1997

Nitrate Online Eddie Cockrell

“She's So Lovely” - Salon.com Gary Kamiya from Salon

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

Crazy for Cinema

JamesBowman.net | She's So Lovely

Review for She's So Lovely (1997) - IMDb Scott Renshaw

Review for She's So Lovely (1997) - IMDb Dragan Antulov

Blu-ray.com [Michael Reuben]

Movie Magazine International [Andrea Chase]

She's So Lovely | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Austin Chronicle [Russell Smith]

Washingtonpost.com: Cassavetes' Last Bleak Fling: Love on the Rocks Rita Kempley

WashingtonPost.com: 'She's So Lovely': Wild Thing Desson Howe

San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]

New York Times Janet Maslin

JOHN Q

USA (116 mi) 2002

"I Am Sam Syndrome" might be an appropriate name for the process whereby the best intentions sometimes lead actors and directors to indulge in their worst artistic impulses. John Q's cast is the actorly equivalent of an all-star benefit concert, and director Nick Cassavetes has done interesting work in the past. But even with 10 months left in the year, 2002 will be hard-pressed to outdo John Q in terms of unbearability. Playing a character who practically glows with virtue, Denzel Washington stars as a salt-of-the-earth Chicago-area factory worker already struggling through the hard economic times indicated by George W. Bush speech footage. Then Washington's son (Daniel E. Smith) is rushed to the hospital with a previously undiagnosed heart condition. After learning that Smith needs a heart transplant to live, a smug doctor (James Woods) and a hospital executive (Anne Heche, who might as well have worn a T-shirt with the word "heartless" stenciled on it) inform Washington and wife Kimberly Elise of their options: Either find a way to insure a $250,000 payment, or take Smith home to die. ("You might want to make it a happy time," Heche suggests.) Refusing to take "no" for an answer, Washington takes Woods and his hospital hostage, forcing them at gunpoint to guarantee a place on the transplant list. Much speechifying follows, with Washington's rhetoric growing more impassioned after he's given a foil in the form of hostage negotiator Robert Duvall, who virtually reprises his role from Falling Down. Cassavetes' connection to the subject is apparently personal, but his film exemplifies all the pitfalls of Western Union-style filmmaking, right up to the scene where an ER-full of one-dimensional characters engage in a debate on the dangers of HMOs and contemporary health care. (Sample line from Highway To Heaven vet James Kearns' screenplay: "More like the hypocritical oath.") For all the facts spouted, John Q plays less like an exposé than a piece of exploitation, its clear divide between good and evil allowing no breathing room for real drama. By the time it arrives at a climax involving a race against time, rapidly dropping vital signs, and a noble sacrifice, the word "manipulative" hardly suffices.

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

In last week's New York Times"Arts and Leisure" section, I scratched the surface of the vigilante genre, focusing mostly on Collateral Damage, which combines two right-wing strains: the "you killed my wife and child and now you must die" motif and the "government won't let us fight so it's back to 'Nam our way" motif. But the vigilante is a malleable figure. He (or she) might use violent, coercive means, but this can easily be for liberal ends. Thus, John Q. (New Line Cinema)—a commercial for universal health care in which a kind, gentle Everyman (Denzel Washington) is forced to take a hospital hostage to secure a heart transplant for his cute, Gary Coleman-esque son. Needless to say, he becomes a populist hero to everyone but the police chief and his SWAT team.

What can a critic say? You'll hate the cold, skinny white bitch (Anne Heche) who tells John and his wife (Kimberly Elise) that the cost of the transplant is "prohibitively expensive" and that they should start thinking about "quality of life." You'll hate the surgeon (James Woods) who won't lift a finger to help even though he clearly knows the difference between right and wrong. You'll want to cheer when John produces a gun and announces that there will be "Free health care for everyone!" You might—although this is the film's most garish twist—choke back tears when John decides that, in the absence of a donor, he'll blow his own brains out on the operating table so that his son can have a heart. Denzel Washington is so powerfully earnest an actor that you never want to laugh at him—even when you ought to be in stitches.

I don't have a problem with John Q.'s depiction of despair in the face of insurance companies' inflexibility. But I do think the fairy-tale benefits of hostage-taking are a tad exaggerated. In the course of our hero's taking over a hospital, no innocent people are killed or injured—no patient even wants for medical treatment. A truly socially responsible movie would not suggest that vigilantism isn't hazardous to your health.

Exclaim! [Erin Oke]

If I have to sit through a mediocre Hollywood hero story, I take some consolation in being manipulated through "John Q.," whose ideas deserve to see the light of day, even if the execution is predictable sometimes to the point of being embarrassing. At least it's not another one of the war movies dominating the multiplexes in a cynical effort to keep the American public in a patriotic stupor. In fact, in a time where all media is pointed at America's "heroic" efforts abroad, "John Q." is somewhat daring in taking a critical look at the country's domestic policies.

The story centres around John Archibald (Denzel Washington), a downsized steel worker struggling to keep his family financially afloat when his son collapses suddenly of an undiagnosed heart condition. John then begins to wade through a bureaucratic nightmare when he's informed that his health insurance (recently changed to an HMO without his knowledge) will not cover the expenses of the lifesaving heart transplant operation the his son requires. He grows increasingly despairing as each appeal for help or leniency is rejected, and finally, in a moment of panic and desperation, takes the hospital's emergency room hostage.

For all it's noble intentions, it's really too bad that this couldn't be a better movie. The performances are all strong enough, given the cliched material and caricatured roles (the impersonal hospital administrator played icily by Anne Heche, the overpaid heart surgeon played sleazily by James Woods, the sympathetic police negotiator played crustily by Robert Duvall, the trigger-happy police chief played idiotically by Ray Liotta, and of course the heroic everyman played nobly by Denzel Washington). The main problem is the script, which clunkily shifts between hokey portraits of family togetherness and didactic diatribes on the sorry state of the United States' health care system. There is nothing in "John Q." that you don't see coming from a mile away. Every single moment is foreshadowed extensively and then played out beyond its natural conclusion, leaving nothing subject to interpretation. The good guys are untarnishably perfect (even during criminal actions, because of course John immediately wins the sympathies of his hostages over to his plight), and the bad guys are unfeeling and petty (until they too are won over by the noble cause). The film, with all the decent issues it raises, would have been so much more effective as a tragedy, but instead cops out with an implausible Hollywood ending that goes a long way to negate any import that the subject matter carried. Still, with all its flaws as a film, it made me darn happy to live in a place with universal health care and if people are going to insist on flocking to heart-warmingly mediocre movies, they may as well go to one that takes place in the real world and has a few important things to say.

“John Q.” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs] also seen here: PopMatters

John Q. | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Film Freak Central - John Q. (2002) Walter Chaw

Review: John Q || ErikLundegaard.com

Why John Q. doesn't make sense. - Slate Magazine Erik Lundegaard from Slate, February 21, 2002

World Socialist Web Site J. Cooper

Decent Films Guide - Faith on film Steven D. Greydanus

Movie Ram-blings Ram Sumudrala

Movie Vault [Movieman]

The Village Voice [Ed Park]

Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]

Kevin Clemons - digitallyOBSESSED!

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

eFilmCritic Reviews Eric D. Snider

JOHN Q - DVD review | Movie Metropolis Eddie Feng

DVD Verdict Michael Rankin

Forgettable and hokey 'John Q' - The Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Movie Magazine International [Casey McCabe]

BBCi - Films Neil Smith

John Q | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes, movie ... - Time Out

Washington Post [Michael O'Sullivan]

Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]

Cincinnati Enquirer [ Margaret A. McGurk]

Austin Chronicle [Steve Davis]

Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]

New York Times Elvis Mitchell

THE NOTEBOOK B+ 90

USA (121 mi) 2004

Yes, this is nothing like his father’s work. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. But he’s got the good sense to use his mother. Using a tearful, melodramatic movie of the week format, where things are, of course, overly idyllic, Cassavetes displays a surprisingly conventional movie format filled with Hallmark card images. Reminding me of the overexaggerated Southern antiquity on display in BIG FISH (2003), which certainly tugged on one’s heartstrings, others have given more obvious comparisons to the film IRIS (2001), which, because of the caliber of the performances, Jim Broadbent and Judi Dench, with Kate Winslet as the Dench character during her youthful war years, where as adults, the sharp-as-a-tack Dench suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease, but that film was a more realistic drama and not so much just an out-and-out, melodramatic tearjerker.

Here the film uses fewer tricks of the trade and relies instead on good, old-fashioned acting performances. While it has the look of the placid ON GOLDEN POND (1981), James Garner and Gena Rowlands play the aging couple, with Rowlands suffering from dementia. Garner reads to her in an attempt to get her to reconnect with some of her own lost memories, from what turns out to be the story of their youth, played by Ryan Gosling and the young, luminous, Judy Garland-esque Rachel McAdams, who just lights up the screen. In my view, despite all the film’s faults, she and Rowlands are worth the price of admission, and every second they are on screen is movie magic. There is even a moment quite reminiscent of Rowland’s performance in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974). This is a film I will always catch whenever it comes out on TV, as it’s easy to get carried away by the beauty of that quirky thing called love. The music featured is Billie Holiday, and later Jimmy Durante, both singing renditions of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” James Garner spoke affectionately on talk shows afterwards about how he had to laugh whenever he heard director Nick Cassavetes calling out “OK Mom” before shooting all of Ms. Rowlands’ scenes.

I defer to Ken Rudolph’s comments: NOTEBOOK, THE

“This is not a film for realism sticklers, cynics, or real men. Me, I had a good cry and left the theater feeling great.”

The Village Voice [Jessica Winter]

Big-lunged lovers Allie (Rachel McAdams) and Noah (Ryan Gosling)—pampered Southern debutante and rough-earth mill worker, respectively—are on a freedom spree: lying down in the middle of the main drag late at night; getting aviary without the aid of hallucinogens ("Say I'm a bird!" Allie shrieks at her stud muffin. "Now say you're a bird too!"); daring their teen romance to conquer time, distance, class, family meddlings, World War II (which the film renders as a brief skirmish played out in somebody's backyard), and some inconvenient significant others picked up like lint along the way. The minutes of Allie and Noah's magical hysteria tour are duly recorded in the titular ledger-cum–framing device, these days in the possession of a kindly codger named Duke (James Garner). He reads from the notebook to the now elderly Allie (the director's mom, Gena Rowlands), who's sadly befogged by an Alzheimer's-like illness. Amid the sticky-sweet swamp of Jeremy Leven's script (adapted from Nicholas Sparks's novel), Rowlands and Garner emerge spotless and beatific, lending a magnanimous credibility to their scenes together. These two old pros slice cleanly through the thicket of sap-weeping dialogue and contrivance, locating the terror and desolation wrought by the cruel betrayals of a failing mind.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Opening shots tend to say a lot about a movie, but they say everything about The Notebook, a glossy adaptation of Nicholas Sparks' four-hanky sudser. Over a twinkling piano, director Nick Cassavetes sets the scene of a thousand paperback romances: A lone boatman paddling against a blazing sunset, a woman staring wistfully from the garret of a lakeside plantation, a flock of seagulls flapping toward her window in slow motion. Subtract the references to Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway, slap on a cover with flowing locks and heaving bosoms, and the film could be a smash at supermarket checkout counters nationwide.

Retooling Love Story for a new generation, with Alzheimer's replacing cancer as the terminal disease du jour, Cassavetes runs headlong into a bitter irony: His father, indie legend John Cassavetes, spent a career depicting relationships as messy, contentious battlegrounds of the heart, light-years removed from Love Story's gloppy notions of crystalline preciousness. There's plenty of tension inherent in The Notebook, which pairs a strapping lumberjack with a wealthy debutante, but none of the elder Cassavetes' passion and grit; instead, the film leaves an oft-told tale to marinate slowly in its own syrup.

The framing device presents the gag reflex with its first and most critical test. As his beloved Gena Rowlands withers away in a nursing home from Alzheimer's, James Garner tries to jog her memory by reading the story of their lives together, prompting a flashback to their youths in 1940. Garner stand-in Ryan Gosling stars as a humble yet free-spirited country boy who falls for rich girl Rachel McAdams, over the objections of her snooty parents, played by Joan Allen and Josef Stalin look-alike David Thornton. When McAdams' family moves to upstate New York and WWII begins, the young lovers are forced apart, as Gosling fights bravely for the Allies in Europe and McAdams volunteers as a nurse, swooning over wounded stud James Marsden. But Gosling's steadfast love, manifested in a beautifully restored Southern plantation house, draws them together in a chance rendezvous.

Periodically, Cassavetes cuts back to Garner and Rowlands, who muses about the "wonderful story" being told. But those not suffering from Alzheimer's may find it a bit too familiar. At one point, Gosling and McAdams even marvel at the improbability of a city girl and a country boy falling in love, as if they'd necked through all the movies in which that happens. Lingering memories of Gosling's turn as a neo-Nazi in The Believer give his character an edge that the film desperately needs, but his hard features melt at all the appropriate beats. In a romance where paradise is a duck-filled pond, it helps to be mild-mannered.

The prose in Nicholas Sparks' romantic potboiler "The Notebook" isn't simply purple — it's a violent purple, as blue-black and slobbery as a chow's tongue. A triumph of kitsch emotion and easy-does-it style, the book vaulted up bestseller lists on its publication in 1996, all but assuring a movie adaptation. The rights were sold to Hollywood and for years directors such as Steven Spielberg and Jim Sheridan toyed with the property, before Nick Cassavetes summoned the courage to go where few filmmakers of taste dare to go — the three-hankie weepie. Ladies and gentlemen, start your sobbing.

Divided between the gauzy past and a somewhat flintier present, the story spans six decades of love between an Emersonian type named Noah Calhoun and a wealthy Southern belle, Allie Nelson. Played in the film by Ryan Gosling and Rachel Mc-Adams in flashback, and more movingly by James Garner and Gena Rowlands in the present, the pair first meet while she's on summer break. A flurry of quick-sketch scenes and puppy-love nuzzling ensue, along with a load of hooey, some awkward filmmaking and two unpersuasive lead performances. McAdams, last seen in "Mean Girls," and Gosling, a talented young actor who ripped the screen to shreds in "The Believer," look good in period skivvies, but their passion is too bridled, their actions too well-behaved. They never blow hot life into their characters.

Trouble with a capital "T" arrives in the form of Allie's parents (played by Joan Allen and, in a waxed mustache, David Thornton), who deem Noah unsuited to the task of cultivating their hothouse flower. The lovers part, tears fall and time marches inexorably on, though Cassavetes does pause, rather inexplicably, for a World War II interlude with exploding bombs and bodies. Years later, Noah has sprouted a beard and Allie has snared a prospect (James Marsden). Haunted by what might have been, Allie visits Noah for what she believes will be one final time. Too many beers and one thunderstorm suggest otherwise, leading to the story's big mystery. If you don't know what happens next you've either never seen a Hollywood movie or dipped into a paperback filled with throbbing passion and endless love.

Adapted by Jan Sardi and written by Jeremy Leven, the film turns out to be a modest improvement on the novel. In place of Sparks' barely there sense of place and psychology, and wall-to-wall platitudes ("He'd learned to enjoy simple things," he writes of Noah), the filmmakers attempt to fashion a backdrop with a little actual bite. The results are generally toothless — the film's honeyed vision of race borders on the obscene — but there's a real attempt to place the characters in context, a material world rather than a greeting-card tableau. Cassavetes isn't much of a director and he never settles on a mood, which he seems intent on ruining with hiccups of goofiness. But there's an underlying humanity to his scenes, a sense that movies are made by people for other people.

That's never truer than in the final scenes with Garner and Rowlands. By then the messiness of the past has been neatly resolved and the story's minimal mystery finally revealed. Alone in a sick room with Allie, Noah — now rheumy-eyed and stooped, his hands trembling and face opened wide with wonder — pours out his heart. It's a breathtaking image of a man clutching at what gave his life meaning and completely heartbreaking, although perhaps not for the reasons the filmmakers intended. An unsettling consequence of growing up with the movies is watching beloved stars decline, seeing these heavenly bodies fade. One of the promises old movies make us is that its stars will remain untouched by age, impervious to the passing of time — it's a promise that new movies like this must inevitably break.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Kamera.co.uk Beth Gilligan

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

Martin Tsai's Blog

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Peterson)

Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner)

Salon.com [Charles Taylor]

Film Freak Central Bill Chambers

Peter Sobczynski gives it Zero stars

That Cow (Andrew Bradford)

Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]

San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]

The Village Voice [Rob Nelson]

ALPHA DOG B 84

USA (122 mi) 2006

A high voltage film that is a force to be reckoned with, teens in the wasteland gone wild, MTV on steroids, whose high energy buzz both offends and impresses with its ability to visualize America’s youth, a film that bears a strange stylized resemblance to BRICK (2005), a noirish high school murder mystery also set in LA where kids have the run of the place, pretty much eliminating all adults from their lives, living in their own contaminated underworld of petty violence and crime. Opening to a home movie montage of young children at play, who couldn’t be more harmless and innocent, we hear Eva Cassidy’s haunting rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” What follows is an in-your-face close up look at the goings on of a dysfunctional LA gang that couldn’t shoot straight, guys who are home bred on the mythology of MTV, a glamorized, sexed up, completely artificial depiction of manhood and success, defined by the overtly denigrating sexist and homophobic imagery of gangsta rap, where girls are bitches, and guys who aren’t cool are faggots. Unfortunately, all these features are sublimated into anyone indoctrinated by this vocabulary of pathology, where no one ever tells the truth, and where their commercialized lifestyle becomes the emblem of insincerity, fueled by money and the image of success, expressed through drugs, booze, and sex, which means guys surrounding themselves with a stable of beautiful girls, slavish sirens who are so oversexualized that nothing else in their lives matters except draping themselves all over the alpha dog, the leader of the pack. No one has a voice except the guy picking up the tab, and his bills are so high that his identity dissolves into the criminal underworld, usually involving the distribution of drugs and guns in order to support their neverending, hedonistic pleasuredome of sex, drugs, and fun. The problem with this lifestyle is there are consequences, but the persons living in this playground are always immune to them.

Teenage angst used to be best represented by the social pressures put on James Dean in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), whose clueless parents remained hoplessly out of touch. In time, the criminal element of BADLANDS (1973) was introduced, where killing attracted the eye of the otherwise bored and innocent girls. By now, BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991) is taken for granted as the touchstone for gritty realism, where more money and guns have only accentuated the necessity for senseless violence. White kids from the posh suburbs have discovered the allure of quick easy money, and the intoxication of no one telling them what to do, extending the moral boundaries where anything is possible. That, in a nutshell,is what this film is about. The attraction of elicit sexuality and a drug induced 24/7 gangsta party lifestyle is so strong, it trumps and devours any thoughts about moral limits, so that kids are willing to do the unthinkable, drug and gun running, petty thievery, to actual murders, then covering up their crimes, blaiming anyone else they can, refusing to believe they had anything to do with it.

Scored to a thumping, gangsta rap soundtrack that never stops, the film does a good job exposing the viewer to the adolescent mindset of this lily white criminal underworld of status and special privilege filled with the sons and daughters of the rich and famous, kids who just want to have fun, who are lured into this mythology of glamor and the good life, but underneath it all, it’s a network of thugs and broken promises, tough kids raiding the wallets of easy prey, sustaining their lifestyle through shakedowns. Inspired by a real life story, Emile Hirsch as Johnny Truelove leads this gang of thugs by operating a drug ring, which includes Justin Timberlake as Frankie, his reliable yes man, and Shawn Hatosy as Elvis, the runt of the litter, shown the least amount of respect, always left to do the dirty work. We are introduced to this hierarchy by Bruce Willis, Truelove’s father, drug supplier, and alleged mafia ringleader, whose own father is portrayed by none other than Harry Dean Stanton. So this lineage has proven name recognition and balls, and ocasionally we see Willis making snide remarks in front of tabloid TV journalists, obviously basking in the limelight of his own sordid undertakings.

Into this picture walks another dysfunctional family, led by the hysterics of Sharon Stone as the rich bitch mother, David Thornton as the spineless father, young Anton Yelchin as Zack, the dreamy younger brother who idolizes his much more troublesome older brother, Ben Foster as Jake, reminiscent of Edward Norton from AMERICAN HISTORY X (1998), the short fused skinhead pumped up on adrenaline and drugs, whose startling viciousness is nothing less than astonishing, as he’s a one man train wreck with a hairtrigger temper just waiting for anything to set him off. But he can’t afford to pay, leading to his ultimate confrontation with Johnny Truelove. In a brief period of time, Jake’s life veers totally out of control, led by rage and violence, including threats to Truelove: “I will take you down to hell with me!” In an attempt to get back at Jake, who besides owing him money has publicly ridiculed him by challenging his masculinity, so in what seems like a completely random moment, Truelove sees Jake’s brother and kidnaps him. Immediately a string of witnesses to the crime is identified when we see them as they appear in the film, heightening the sense that what we are witnessing is an ongoing crime scene. Yet once Johnny has him, he doesn’t know what to do with him, because Jake still hasn’t got the money, and even if he did, as described perfectly in an infamous phone call with Truelove, he’d rather see Truelove dead for what he’s done. But amazingly, Zack has never been happier, away from the hovering demands of his mother, he’s constantly fed all the dope, booze, and girls that he could ever want, so it’a like his dream vacation. The girls are attracted to him as he’s that “Stolen Boy,” and he actually befriends everyone who’s kidnapped him.

But Johnny is backed into a corner with no escape, as Jake is a man possessed, a man on a mission who has vowed to make him pay, so he orders a hit on the kid, Zack, who represents a threat to no one, and who everyone has grown to like. No one knows what to do, least of all Johnny, but they don’t know what else to do. The entire tone of the film changes at this point, as everything up until now has been an adrenaline-laced party, and the idea of whacking a kid is pretty demented, yet no one can stand up to Johnny either except Jake, easily the best thing in the picture, but he inexplicably fades out of the picture altogether. So we’re left with a couple of knuckleheads who feel forced to get ugly. By the end, Johnny has left the country while his gang of wannabe’s is left holding the bag. As it turns out, all participants have been convicted of something, while Truelove, whose real life name is Jesse James Hollywood, made the FBI’s most wanted list at the age of 20. Eventually he was caught in Brazil, brought back to LA where he is currently awaiting his trial. All this suggests truth is stranger than fiction.

The defense attorney who threatened to seek an injunction against the Sundance screening of the fact- and conjecture-based Alpha Dog may not have been acting on behalf of the festival (or New Line Cinema, still "indie" despite orcs and Oscars). Yet the appearance of controversy around New Line's latest youth-bait gangsta flick hardly hindered the programmers' bid to justify a closing-night slot. Essentially a bigger-budget Bully (whose director, Larry Clark, got enough props in Park City this year to look like a kid again), Dog sniffs around the stinky legend of a twerp Scarface (Emile Hirsch) who compels his weed-dealing crew to kidnap and then whack a delinquent client's 15-year-old brother (Anton Yelchin). Director Nick Cassavetes has a blast with scenes of testosterone-fueled aggression (until it's time to repent), working the subwoofer in a way that'll surely boost DVD sales among boys with bedroom posters of Tony Montana. Sundance needs to recruit the next generation of "indie" enthusiasts, and Alpha Dog, if nothing else, did succeed in bringing Justin Timberlake to Park City High.

FILM REVIEWS Scott Foundas from LA Weekly

Hewing closely to the case of the San Fernando Valley drug dealer and petty thug Jesse James Hollywood (who made the FBI’s most-wanted list at the tender age of 20), Alpha Dog follows Hollywood surrogate Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) as he plots the kidnapping and eventual murder of a baby-faced teen (Anton Yelchin) whose Jewish skinhead half-brother (Ben Foster) owes Truelove an unpaid debt. But the abduction is a botch from the start, with the victim willingly submitting to his captors — happy to be freed from under the thumb of his overprotective mother (Sharon Stone) — and proceeding to spend the next several days getting high and getting laid in the company of his captors, before landing in a shallow grave. Part cruel story of anomic suburban youth, part alarmist parental cautionary tale, Alpha Dog exudes the lurid, stranger-than-fiction appeal of Bully and River’s Edge and all those other ripped-from-the-headlines portraits of seemingly good, privileged kids gone very, very bad. Yet if the trappings sound familiar, the execution is anything but. In his best film to date, Nick Cassavetes (John Q, The Notebook) directs with ferocious energy, taking scenes past their logical stopping points and pushing his actors (particularly Foster, who can be as terrifying as Edward Norton in American History X) to, but never over, the precipice of absurdity.

The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]

Nick Cassavetes's Alpha Dog is based on a real-life story that's still waiting for its ending: In 2000, a gang of SoCal kids kidnapped and murdered 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, a soft-spoken boy from the San Fernando Valley who dreamed of becoming a rabbi and was sacrificed as payment for his older half-brother's drug debt—a measly $1,200. Four teens were convicted of the murder; the ringleader, a teeny Tony Montana with the real-life moniker of Jesse James Hollywood, escaped to Brazil, where he was arrested in 2005.

Hollywood now awaits trial, and his attorney has tried to block the release of Alpha Dog, claiming it convicts his client before he's had the chance to prove his innocence. The movie is getting a negligible release as it is—a shove into the January dumping ground, where nothing survives for long. It deserves better.

Writer-director Cassavetes, who prepped for the movie by poring over off-limits files leaked by the case's prosecutor, smartly stages much of his tragedy as though it were a comedy of errors—the plans of dumbass punks gone awry. Hollywood, here named Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch), is, after all, not a great criminal mastermind, but merely a baby-faced punk who deals weed to spoiled Valley girls and their hip-hopped-up boyfriends. Truelove's posse, as threatening as any hallway gang at your average prep school, includes Elvis Schmidt (Shawn Hatosy), a subservient clown who suffers Johnny's abuse and Frankie Ballenbacher (Justin Timberlake), a swaggering sidekick clad in tank tops to display his tats. No way they could kill a kid (here named Zack and played by Anton Yelchin), not these wake-and-bakers.

( Alpha Dog isn't simply about boys and girls gone wild—that's Larry Clark's milieu, and even he's worn it sheer—but also about the parents who allow it to happen because they're either doped-up imbeciles wearing plasticine grins, absentee assholes waving the occasional iron fist, or both.)

Cassavetes, cut loose after tethering himself to the old-fashioned, ham-handed romance of The Notebook, digs his new role as New Journalist, laying out a horrific tale of suburban indulgence gone wrong. He's so into the movie he put himself in the movie: That's his voice you hear on the soundtrack, interviewing folks about their roles in Johnny's life and Zack's death. Cassavetes gets overly enthusiastic with the docudrama form at times—lots of split-screen, in an attempt to make Alpha Dog play like some seedy '70s crime drama—but I'm tempted to forgive his excesses because the guy knows tension. How better to ram home the horrific consequences than by building up the boys' actions as little more than rough-and-tumble fun?

And, if nothing else, Alpha Dog's worth a look for the performance of Justin Timberlake, the moral center of a movie sorely in need of some conscience. Already a gifted comic actor—his Saturday Night Live appearances are now anticipated events—he proves himself able to go to a pitch-black place. Frankie, covered in tats, is less a gangsta with a heart of gold than a nice guy capable of doing some very bad shit—like every last one of the rabid pups in Alpha Dog.

A true story about drug-addled youths committing crimes of breathtaking stupidity, Nick Cassavetes' Alpha Dog instantly recalls Bully, an underrated black comedy about more or less the same subject, directed by Kids helmer Larry Clark. The crucial difference between the two is perspective: Bully mines uneasy laughs from the immense gulf between its morally vacuous conspirators and those in the audience who understand right from wrong. But Alpha Dog doesn't seem to have any feelings about its characters' misdeeds one way or another—it's intermittently bemused or tragic, but utterly lacking a conscience or a point of view. The characters offer plenty of avenues into this story, from a young drug dealer who tries to summon the moxie to cover up his essential weakness, to a willful victim who treats his abduction like a summer-camp bacchanal. But writer-director Cassavetes never picks a direction, so his look at a pointless tragedy wallows in pointlessness.

Loosely based on the alleged crimes of Jesse James Hollywood, currently awaiting trial for his alleged abduction and murder of a 15-year-old kid, Alpha Dog centers on Emile Hirsch, a wealthy dealer carrying on the business of his father, Bruce Willis. Cassavetes presents Hirsch as a snarling tough-talker perceived as more bark than bite by others, including Ben Foster, a vicious neo-Nazi junkie (and telemarketer!) who refuses to settle his overdue debts. One lazy afternoon in San Fernando Valley, Hirsch and cohort Justin Timberlake spot Foster's kid brother (Anton Yelchin) and rashly decide to kidnap the boy as collateral. This isn't the smartest idea, and things almost immediately turn desperate when the authorities get involved. Meanwhile, Yelchin couldn't be more grateful to his keepers for letting him dine at their generous buffet of pot, booze, and loose women, but the party eventually comes to a dreadful end.

Borrowing the worst tendencies from his father John (A Woman Under The Influence), whose raw melodramas made him the godfather of independent film, Cassavetes tries to amplify the tension by having his actors scream at each other for two hours. Some of them are up for the challenge, especially Foster, whose combustible energy and humor feed off the absurdly ripe conception of his character, but there are embarrassing turns, too, including Sharon Stone sobbing in pancake makeup as Yelchin's mother, and a special appearance by Alan Thicke. For an untrained actor, Timberlake acquits himself reasonably well in quieter moments, but Cassavetes provides precious few of them, and even they can seem as overwrought as the noisy, profane clutter surrounding them. All the bright colors Cassavetes splashes on the canvas don't make Alpha Dog art.

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs)

A fictionalized E! True Hollywood Story starring a bevy of hot young actors—and a few aging vets sporting awkward hairpieces (Bruce Willis) or grotesque fat prosthetics (Sharon Stone)—Nick Cassavetes's Alpha Dog arrives in theaters after numerous delays caused by legal wrangling over the procurement of documents relating to its true-life source material. No "inspired by actual events" notation accompanies the film, but Cassavetes's onscreen timestamps and use of text to note the names of witnesses to the central crime makes clear its real-world basis, which involved a group of teens' marijuana and hip-hop-fueled decisions to engage in felony kidnapping and murder.

Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) is a big-time Cali pot pusher in 1999 when a falling out with psychotic neo-Nazi associate Jake (Ben Foster) over an unpaid debt compels him and his boys—including right-hand man Frankie (Justin Timberlake) and demeaned whipping boy Elvis (Shawn Hatosy)—to nab Jake's younger brother Zack (Anton Yelchin) and hold him for ransom. It's a crime that Zack, ironically, treats as a welcome escape from his stultifying middle-class home life with wimpy dad (David Thornton) and smothering mother (Stone), a not altogether surprising reaction given that his captivity is spent getting high and having only-in-the-movies threeways in motel swimming pools.

A crew of racist, sexist, homophobic wannabe Tony Montanas, Johnny and company's proactive irresponsibility complicates a claim made by Johnny's complicit father Sonny (Willis), delivered in one of many lame faux-verité 2003 interviews, that the unfortunate situation was caused by "bad parenting." Yet Cassavetes is less interested in investigating such conduct's origins than in exploiting the crime's particulars for cheap thrills. Essentially one of those hypocritical cautionary tales in which moral lessons—here, that you shouldn't treat life like a "Guns And Bitches" music video, and that constantly calling a guy "faggot" will drive him to homicide—are contradicted by glorification of said appalling behavior, Alpha Dog boasts a menacing drum n' bass score and lots of meaningless split screen effects.

Which doesn't, however, prevent it from being sporadically entertaining, a fact owing to a finger-in-the-socket turn by Foster (in the type of bonkers role usually reserved for Giovanni Ribisi) and Timberlake—attempting to bring tattooback via copious body art—delivering an empathetic, nuanced performance that captures how selfishness and naïveté can inadvertently lead to tragedy. Not to mention that buried deep within the film's compilation of gangsta poses and blustery profanity lies a sage warning for prospective drug users: pot may impair your decision-making, but only speed will drive a man to drop trou and crap on another's living room floor.

Reel.com [Jim Hemphill]

CineScene [Chris Knipp]

filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

New York Sun [S. James Snyder]

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

stylusmagazine.com (Jeffrey Bloomer)

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

DVD Verdict [Brendan Babish]

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

Edward Copeland on Film

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) rated one star, “Come Back, Larry Clark - - All Is Forgiven”

Deep Focus Cinema [Clayton L. White] grade D-, direction is flat and lifeless, and it seems like the only true gift he has is in exploiting his subjects

Nick's Flick Picks (Capsule Review) rates the film an F, a screeching, poorly shot, and flagrantly indulged troupe of young Hollywood aspirants

Austin Chronicle [Marrit Ingman]

Los Angeles Times [Kevin Crust]

Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

Cassavetes, Zoe

BROKEN ENGLISH B 89

USA France Japan (97 mi) 2007

“Humphrey Bogart reminds me of my father.”

Yet another inexplicably well-made Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban production, men with questionable artistic sense who instead exhibit marketing skills with HDNet enterprises, as the film is simultaneously released to cable, DVD, as well as a theatrical release. Like Hal Hartley’s earlier film FAY GRIM (2007), this one also stars Parker Posey in a lead role, traveling once again to Paris no less, receiving better accolades here than she did for the Hartley film, but don’t believe it. Hartley and Posey are a supremely gifted combo working together with impeccable comic timing, and in FAY GRIM, Posey has put an exclamation point on what in my mind is the performance of the year. Here Parker is charming, vulnerable, impressively off-kilter, and such a pleasure to see in a more mature role, but the script ultimately lets her down. Nonetheless, Parker never disappoints, especially when her character (Nora Wilder) speaks for the director Zoe Cassavetes herself after walking out of a Nicholas Ray film IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) uttering the words “Humphrey Bogart reminds me of my father.” Those are big shoes to fill. Actually, there are quite a few poignant missing father references in the film, as Nora has lost her father at a young age, and they add autobiographical credibility to the film. But her overbearing mother (Gena Rowlands) is there to remind her at every turn that life without a man is unthinkable, so of course, Nora’s glaring deficiency is in the relationship department, always falling for the wrong guys. After all, who can live up to Humphrey Bogart?

Nora sits in a cramped private office dwarfed by her computer and knits at an upscale Manhattan hotel waiting for the inevitable catastrophe to occur, where it’s her job to provide instant resolution for every problem to the customer’s satisfaction, sort of a personal attendant for the VIP’s. She’s quick on her feet, provides service with a smile, and has an air of confidence and poise in her job, while in the privacy of her own home she constantly second guesses herself, doesn’t know who that person is staring back at her in the mirror, and tends to overcompensate by smothering her loneliness and shy insecurities with alcohol. Drea de Matteo is her more up tempo, full-throttle best friend Audrey, married to the guy Nora’s mother wished Nora had married, as she’s heard he has “a terrific trust fund,” but the time the two actresses spend together is a delight, as they both light up the screen. In one of those hotel catastrophe sequences, Justin Theroux plays a manipulative, self-centered actor who throws a tantrum, only to become another personal relationship disaster waiting to happen, which after an evening bar hopping together, she succumbs to only too brilliantly. Theroux is terrific in his bad date from Hell role which he maximizes with a Mohawk haircut and his smooth insincerity that is such a frequent commodity on the Entertainment Tonight airwaves, but Nora is so desperate to please her mother that she actually announces he’s a “boyfriend” the next day just before he declares on national TV that he’s in love with another girl.

All humiliation aside, the first part of the film does a good job demythifying the perfect Hollywood couple stereotype, offering plenty of fresh insight, as Audrey’s so-called perfect relationship is also showing signs of cracks, and Nora is an excellent stand-in for intelligent single girls who have to dumb down their act to be with guys. Nora can be perfectly frank in the company of women, with no airs of pretense, but all that is thrown out the window in the presence of a guy, as if some awkward, hit-me button continually gets pressed into action. Unfortunately, despite a charming performance from French actor Melville Poupard, from Ozon’s TIME TO LEAVE (2005), who seems to really care about her, and despite a wonderful romp through Paris with her friend Audrey, which features an exquisite sequence through an art museum, or delightfully holding her own with perfect strangers in both a corner bar and the upscale jazzy grandeur of a 5 star hotel, or even reintroducing Bernadette Lafont, not seen since Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1973) as an eccentric Parisian grandmother who mistakenly welcomes Nora back home as her own grandchild, something is strangely amiss in the direction of the story, as it takes a U-turn back into the world of whimsical Hollywood fairytale that the film initially did such a good job deconstructing. Zoe Cassavetes’s first film is layered in a Poseyish natural intimacy that holds a great deal of appeal, as the actors never miss a beat, but there is some uneven pacing, with occasional mistimed or hesitating dialogue, an amateurish fondness for close ups, which at times detracts from the emotional tone, and the film has a surprisingly unoriginal, copy cat ending that mirrors Linklater’s BEFORE SUNSET (2004) and suffers badly in comparison. Still, any evening with an actress as gifted as Parker Posey is an unending delight.

Parker Posey's neurotic, romantically challenged Nora Wilder is a spiritual return to her break-out "Party Girl" persona, a dozen years of single life later. Though prone to late-night clubbing, Nora is more settled and less impulsive -- almost cripplingly so -- and as her dips in the dating pool become more disastrous, she relies on cocktails to break down her inhibitions. It results in more one-night-stands than long-term relationships.

Nora has transformed her comfort zone of work, yoga and dinners in front of the TV into a kind of prison, afraid to step past boundaries of intimacy and commitment. A whirlwind weekend affair with dreamy French drop-in Julien (Melvil Poupaud) is so nerve-wracking that she suffers an anxiety attack. Is such spontaneity too much to handle, or does she simply realize how miserable her plodding, predictable life has become?

"Broken English" is the debut feature of Zoe Cassavetes, daughter of Gena Rowlands (who blesses the film in a small role as Posey's mother) and the late John Cassavetes, and her direction borrows something from her father's focus on character interactions.

There's not a lot of story here and the dialogue lacks the snap one usually gets in New York stories of affluent young adults, but the characters have an authenticity. Posey's scenes with Drea de Matteo (as her married best friend) have a lived-in quality that tells more than their words, and Cassavetes turns a spontaneous trip to Paris into a joyfully uninhibited series of little connections made on the street, in chance meetings, and over brief dinners and drinks with strangers.

Both admirably and frustratingly low-key, "Broken English" doesn't have a lot of answers. Cassavetes and Posey find Nora's journey in asking the right questions and, if only in emotional terms, the sense of possibility is affirming.

The Village Voice [Michelle Orange]

For a time in the '90s, Parker Posey was so ubiquitous that even people who liked her work got a little tired of seeing her impish grin and cocksure pose in seemingly every other indie film. So Posey slowed her pace—two movies a year instead of four—and by the time she started showing up onscreen more again last year, it felt like the return of an old friend. She comes back fully in Broken English, a rare star turn that opens with Posey in a different key, staring at herself in a mirror, melancholy and exposed. She shows a new side, older and more serious, while giving a performance that outpaces its movie.

Posey plays a concierge for VIPs at an upscale Manhattan hotel, where she meets most of the men she dates—mainly actors who are just passing through. She also lives her life under the constant scrutiny of her mother (Gena Rowlands), whose nagging about marriage and children forces Posey to overstate how her life is going, making the reality even more disappointing. Avoiding easy jokes and breezy romance, writer-director Zoe Cassavetes tries to get underneath what it's like to be just past 30, alone and rudderless. Even when Posey meets man-of-her-dreams Melvil Poupaud, a French sound designer in town for a few weeks to work on a movie, Cassavetes focuses more on the fragile emotional state surrounding new love than she does on idyllic walks through New York's hipper neighborhoods.

But Cassavetes' unconventionality only extends so far. Given the gift of Posey at the peak of her powers, Cassavetes squanders her star in low-key, go-nowhere conversations, shot without flair and drained of any improvisatory energy. Broken English's distinct tone, at once naturalistic and flatly scripted, gives it an original feel for a while, but the movie starts petering out when Poupaud arrives. He's a male version of one of those European ingénues who ground so many '60s comedies to a halt with stiff line readings and a syrupy pace. Through no fault of his own, aside from an accident of birth, Poupaud sandbags Posey, and by the time she goes chasing around Paris trying to win him back, the audience may wonder why she even needs a man, when she's so much more interesting on her own, acting beautifully sad.

Nothing has turned out as expected for Nora, the drifting, doleful heroine played by Parker Posey in Broken English, writer/ director Zoe Cassavetes's feature debut. Confront-ed in her mid-30s by a sinkhole of unaddressed expectations—only a few of them her own— we meet Nora as she attempts to slog through a backlog of doubt and uncertainty without going under completely.

The opening sequence—a wry riff on the primping montage so common to this film's spiritual godmother, Sex and the City—features Posey dressing for the fifth-anniversary party of her friend Audrey (Drea de Matteo), whose husband is the man that Nora's mother (Gena Rowlands) insists she should have married. The party girl no more, Posey imbues this silent ritual with a world of resignation and burgeoning resentment, the novelty of pulling on one more party dress long extinguished.

There are key similarities between Nora's foggy neurosis and the characters Posey recently played in Fay Grim and The Oh in Ohio; if urban female confusion is the new suburban male confusion, surely Posey's lost and wary eyes are the face of that angst. Nora lives alone and hates her job coddling the VIP guests of a Manhattan boutique hotel. Before sleeping with a fussy movie star on the premises (a mohawked, smooth-talkin' Justin Theroux), Nora admits that she always thought she'd work in the art world. A beautiful woman with the curious big-city habit of accepting loneliness as her lot, Posey is beguiling for the first third of Broken English; lovely, fragile, and tense, she's the lonely girl who screens her phone calls and winces at compliments with tweaked ambivalence. Combining Posey's performance with lingering pacing and an eye for alienation in a city of millions, Cassavetes's standard material takes on the promise of something fresh.

Alas, we must wait on for a fully realized investigation of what Nora's mother suggests is eating—and paralyzing—young women in the city today: too many choices. When the Man- hattan man shortage threatens to doom the inexhaustibly stylish Nora (this girl has cute tops for days) to a life of closet rearrangement, a charming Frenchman swoops in with some grade-A Euro-lovin'. Julian (Melvil Poupaud) is instantly smitten by Nora's letter-perfect, twitchy New Yorker routine, complete with a public panic attack. Their affair is brief but tender, and Nora's timid practicality prevents her from pursuing it past his stay in New York. . . .

Until, that is, she has an epiphany and takes off to Paris in search of Julian, and the film devolves into stilted-foreigner scenarios and self-help platitudes. Nora's initially existential problems become nothing that a romantic pick- me-up can't fix, and efforts to indicate otherwise feel tacked-on and disingenuous. Posey remains touching as the woman with happiness in sight but bewilderingly out of reach, yet in paraphrasing the final lines of Before Sunrise for Broken English's closing scene, the director only highlights how her film suffers in comparison.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

First shot, a closeup: Parker Posey. Next shots, mostly closeups. She smokes, she regards her face in the mirror, she does her hair and gets ready to go to work. She captures perfectly that way women have of arming themselves against the merciless scrutiny of the world. Does any woman, looking in the mirror, think of herself as beautiful?

What Posey brings to this sequence is something I've often felt while watching her movies, even the incomprehensible ones like "Fay Grim." She stands poised between serene beauty and throwing a shampoo bottle at the mirror. She always looks great, and she always seems dubious and insecure. She can make half her mouth curl into a reluctant smile. But when she fully smiles, she's radiant. She is well cast for "Broken English," because her character, Nora Wilder, needs precisely that in-between quality.

In some seasons, she falls instantly in love. In others, she sinks into depression. The perfect man comes along and hurts her cruelly. The movie, written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes (daughter of director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands), is about a woman with a knack for trusting untrustworthy men. She dates an actor (Justin Theroux) and a nice normal guy (Josh Hamilton), and both times confides to her closest friend Audrey (Drea de Matteo) that this guy might be the one, and both times she is crushingly wrong.

Then at a party she meets Julien (Melvil Poupaud), a French guy who seems too good to be true. Maybe that's where the story breaks down, if only because he is too good to be true. It's like he went to a feminist training academy, to learn how to treat a woman with gentleness, warmth and perfect sexual tact. He has to return to Paris. Quel dommage. She says she will join him there.

At a party, Nora Wilder (Parkey Posey) meets a cute French guy (Melvil Poupaud) and follows him to Paris in "Broken English."

Meanwhile, there are subplots. Audrey is unhappy after five years of marriage. Nora's mother (Rowlands) has wise but worried advice (most women "at your age," she tells Nora, have been snapped up). Nora, who works as the VIP concierge in a Manhattan boutique hotel, works all day to make others happy, and then drinks and smokes and mourns about her life to Audrey. Is Julien the answer? After all, she doesn't even speak French (unlikely, as the VIP concierge in a boutique hotel, but there you have it).

The question clearly becomes, will she go to Paris and find Julien? If the answer is no, that's a rotten way to treat your audience. If it's yes, your movie is over. So I'm not giving away anything if I point out that, from the point of view of plot dynamics, she must first fail to find Julien and then succeed. As I've pointed out before, some movies give themselves away.

OK. She's in Paris. All she has to do is call Julien. How could there be a problem? Read no further if you can't guess (pause) that she loses his number. And that after moping about Paris and meeting an extraordinary number of nice guys, she has a Meet Cute with Julien, but he is sullen and angry because she is on her way to the airport and has been in Paris and did not even call him. Obviously, it's a perfect Idiot Plot setup, because one word would solve everything. But he glowers between Metro stops, and when he finally discloses what bothers him, she says, "It's really complicated." Which it is not. All together now, as we telepathically chant the four words she needs to say.

So what happens is, "Broken English" establishes a sympathetic character, gets Parker Posey to make her real, and then grinds her in the gears of a plot we cannot believe. Surely these people are complex enough to have their futures settled by more than a Meet Cute and an Idiot Plot that can only hold out for two minutes? When the credits roll, we ask, with Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?" There is a very good movie named "Before Sunset" that begins more or less where this one ends. Which tells you something right there.

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)

Parker Posey is one of those rare performers who can elevate a mediocre film into a good one and a good one into a great one simply by the sheer force of her personality. Her latest film, the romantic dramedy “Broken English,” is an example of the former–a not especially unique or distinguished low-budget indie film that she personally infuses with so much quirky energy and spirit that it winds up being worth watching almost in spite of itself.

In the film, Posey plays Nora Wilder, a neurotic thirtysomething New Yorker who is getting to that point in life where all of her friends are married and having families while she is stuck with a nowhere job as a hotel concierge, no social life to speak of and an overbearing mother (Gena Rowlands) who never ceases to remind her about her lack of a fulfilling professional and personal life. After a fling with a vapid actor (Justin Theroux) ends badly, she essentially decides to give up on romance completely. It is at this point, of course, that she meets Julien (Melvil Poupard), a happy-go-lucky Frenchman who is immediately attracted to her. Of course, she tries to brush him off but he is both smitten and persistent and when he doesn’t freak out when Nora has a panic attack in the middle of a sort-of date, she finally gives in to his advances.

After a few days of bliss, however, the hammer falls down and Julien reveals that he has to return to Paris to a crestfallen Nora. However, this doesn’t appear to be a dodge on his part–not only does he seem genuinely regretful over this turn of events, he asks her to come back to France with him. Nora declines–she can’t possibly leave her job and jet off to another country just like that–and he leaves without her. After a few days of moping around that culminate in her quitting her job and a fateful encounter with a psychic, she realizes that she should have taken a chance by going to Paris with him. With nothing more than Julien’s phone number in her hand (for a while, at least) and best friend Audrey (Drea De Matteo), whose own seemingly perfect marriage appears to be crumbling, in tow, Nora leaves her comfort zone and heads for Paris.

“Broken English” was written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes but that doesn’t mean that it is as insufferable as the works of father John (whose films, as heretical as it may be to say, I have always found to mostly be pretentious bores enlivened only by the performances) or brother Nick (whose “Alpha Dog” is still one of the worst films to emerge in 2007 to date). It is low-key, likable without being cloying and filled with a bunch of nice performances (Theroux is quite amusing as the sleazo actor and De Matteo’s work may surprise those who know her only from “The Sopranos”) but while I liked the cheerfully meandering tone of the first half, it starts to drag in the second once the mechanics of the plot (will Nora find Julien or not?) begin to take hold of the proceedings. Cassavetes also begins to clutter her story with needless distractions (such as the circumstances surrounding Nora and Audrey traveling to Paris, a strange encounter Nora has with a woman she may or may not be related to and Audrey’s infidelity with a man she meets in France) that bog down the proceedings at precisely the point when things should be perking up. And while I wouldn’t dare to reveal the ending, I will say that it will seem awfully familiar to anyone who saw another film about the burgeoning romance between a Parisian and an American from a couple of years ago, right down to the virtually identical final lines of dialogue.

And yet, I found myself more or less willing to overlook these flaws and enjoy “Broken English” for the most part and that is almost entirely due to the wonderful and often surprising Parker Posey performance. Granted, the idea of her playing a neurotic and high-strung dame from New York may not sound like the casting people were exactly thinking outside the box but this isn’t the hilariously brittle Posey that we might be expecting to see. She nails the neurotic behavior of Nora for prime comedic effect but she also gives Nora a vulnerability that makes her far more likable and sympathetic than she might seem to be at first glance–even as the story itself grows less and less interesting, she keeps us invested in it enough so that we find ourselves genuinely rooting for her character to finally find happiness. In the end, “Broken English” as a whole may not be worth a full-price admission (but since this is one of those HDNet enterprises that is debuting more-or-less simultaneously in theaters, on cable and on DVD, the multiplex isn’t your only option) but if you are either a confirmed Parker Posey fanatic or are in a more forgiving mood than usual, you may well find yourself succumbing to its modest charms.

Slant Magazine [Jason Clark]

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

Broken English Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Reel.com [Pam Grady]

Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)

New York Times (registration req'd) Matt Zoller Seitz

Cassidy, Brian M. and Melanie Shatzky

FRANCINE C 70

USA Canada (74 mi) 2012 Official site

This is a horribly downbeat film evoking stark alienation along with many unpleasantries of rural poverty that some will find shocking in its portrait of tragedy and loss, also in its graphic depiction of animal cruelty, but retains a central focus through the idiosyncratic performance of Melissa Leo, from FROZEN RIVER (2008) and her Best Supporting Actress role in THE FIGHTER (2010), who is seen in the film’s opening being released from incarceration, which could be prison or a locked mental health facility, as the film never makes it clear, nor does it provide any backstory as to how she arrived there in the first place. Instead the near wordless character study simply follows her routine after she returns home alone into an isolated, rural community, as if pointing a camera at someone helps make some sense out of their life. This is the third film seen recently, by the way, featuring scenes with women naked in the shower, including Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011) and Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet (2011), where one common element is a similar vision by female directors. Not sure what to make of this trend other than to suggest these scenes reflect women at their most vulnerable where they have nothing to hide. The collaborative husband and wife team of filmmakers Brian Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky have a history making documentary films, where both are co-writers and directors of this film, while Cassidy also works behind the camera as the cinematographer. Shot in video, the camera offers a highly mobile presence, literally tracking the random daily occurrences, which includes her arrival home to a small house in upstate New York situated on a tranquil lake. The remote calm feels like a surprise, as one could think of worse places to begin anew, but a glimpse of life at her job inside the local Petco store feels a bit hectic, even if some of the products are mysteriously weird, as if the quicker pace of having to interact with co-workers and customers is difficult, as Francine rarely utters a word or changes that sullen look on her face, feeling socially inept, eventually losing her job from sheer social awkwardness. But she makes the rounds and hits the bars or goes to parties, usually drinking too much or having inappropriate sex, picking up stray animals en route, feeding them and taking comfort in their accessibility, as they become her only solace. Over time her house is overrun with animals, as she becomes obsessed with animals at the expense of human interaction.

Along the way we see a glum Francine wander around town, where a death metal band is playing in an open field to about a dozen listeners where she joins a group of others thrashing around, her head shaking to the frenzy of the music, a sort of kick out the jams moment. We also see her at an AA meeting and at a local church service, but from the decrepit look at the inside of her home, completely overrun by her accumulated collection of strays, literally playing with each as if they were helpless babies, we realize life’s gotten the better of her, as she’s lost any sense of order or balance, sliding off the edge, mostly retreating into her squalid trailer trash existence. This may catch some by surprise, as initially one may have missed the clues, but eventually the camera captures the numbness in her disaffected life, where only the animals provide meaning, as in her eyes they are so defenseless, constantly seen hugging and kissing them, but her rising animal count only increases the clutter and disarray inside her home, reflective of her mental state, where she’s incapable of realizing what’s happened even after she starts working as a veterinarian’s assistant, where some of the graphic images seen are deplorable, where the camera never shies away from staring death in the face, where the concept of harm, both to herself and to animals, rises to the surface. The observational style remains too detached and the overall mood ambiguous, often meandering at times or even aimless, where the audience is kept at a distance without ever sensing the intimacy or immediacy of the moment. Not sure this young director team has made the transition between documentary and fiction, as what’s missing is any element of human drama, creating a fictional character with literally no story construction, existing instead in a netherworld of mental torpor. Even as she empathizes with the plight of animals, it’s clear she’s incapable of really managing her own dreary life, where the bleak austerity is all we’re given. Given a spare and unsentimental gaze, it’s little more than a minimalist outline, a sad and empty portrait of mental alienation, not nearly the powerhouse work of Lodge Kerrigan’s more emotionally resonant KEANE (2004).

Francine | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center

Academy Award winner Melissa Leo (Frozen River, The Fighter) is unforgettable in the title role of this starkly powerful first fiction feature by documentary filmmakers Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky (The Patron Saints). Newly released from prison, Francine (Leo) tries to start a new life for herself in a small rural town where she takes on a series of jobs--at a pet store, a farm, and a vet’s office--that bring her into close contact with animals. Francine finds herself able to relate to these small creatures with an intimacy that everyday human interactions seem to stifle in her, gradually coming to share her small home with a sizable menagerie of furry creatures. Employing a terse narrative style that recalls the films of the Dardenne brothers, Francine brings us intensely close to the emotional truth of this fragile woman while leaving the specific details of her past intentionally mysterious. On screen in nearly every frame, Leo proves more than up to the challenge, recalling the great stars of the silent screen in her fiercely expressive, largely wordless performance. An official selection of this year’s Berlin and South By Southwest film festivals.

Francine Movie Review : Shockya.com Brent Simon

There’s a familiar saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day, which Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s assertively minimalist ”Francine” recalls. An emotionally impressionistic story of a recently paroled woman coping with life on the outside of prison, this character study feels like a less successful riff on Kelly Reichardt’s much more evocative “Wendy and Lucy” — caught up in its own metaphor, its blank canvas and broadly sketched melancholic tones an empty vessel for those who would like to automatically turn the personal into the political.

There isn’t much in the way of plot to “Francine.” Oscar nominee Melissa Leo stars in the title role, as a woman who leaves prison and tries to re-acclimate to life in a downtrodden lakeside town. Though awkward around pretty much all humans (she frequently doesn’t respond at all in conversation), Francine comes to life through animals. She gets a couple odd jobs at a pet store and then a veterinarian, taking in felines and other animals until her house begins to resemble an episode of TLC’s hit new show “Crazy Old Cat Lady.” Boozy interactions with other societal fringe-dwellers then ensue.

It’s not that “Francine” feels phony, necessarily — it just feels tripped up and smitten with the notion that in saying so little it’s actually saying a lot. Francine is fairly realistic emotionally stunted character, and Leo inhabits her with a deadpan commitment and complete lack of vanity – and not just because of a full-frontal nude scene in which she exits the prison shower. There’s just not enough latent intrigue or outside force upon Francine, and the movie’s elliptical psychological explorations feel half-sketched rather than arty.

“Francine”‘s no-frills, somewhat grubby production value and handheld cinematography are in lockstep with its austere narrative inclinations, and give the movie an undeniable intimacy. Laurie Collyer’s “Sherrybaby,” starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, or the aforementioned Reichardt film, starring Michelle Williams, though, are better examples of depressive American marginalia. “Francine” feels like a photocopy.

Review: Francine | Film Comment | Film Society of Lincoln Center Sophie Blum

It’s high time we had a new definition of torture porn: torture not for an imaginary subject, but for the audience. Merely “hard-to-watch” will no longer suffice. If “torture porn” is too divisive, we could call it a “cinema of discomfort.” Somehow Francine, quite intentionally, I imagine, manages to render its brief 74-minute run time interminable, with minimal dialogue and an abundance of excruciatingly awkward social interactions as ex-con Francine (Melissa Leo) struggles to reintegrate into society after prison. Animals, it seems, allow Francine to feel, receive, and bestow a kind of love she cannot muster from people, so she takes up a series of odd jobs involving animals, meanwhile amassing a menagerie to rival the Bouvier-Beales of Grey Gardens.

Writer-director pair Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky present everything you never wanted to know about working at Petco (zip-lock baggies full of frozen fetal rats like cocktail sausages), a back-lot death metal concert that lures spectators into a evangelical trance, and, as a coup de grâce, actual on-screen canine veterinary euthanasia. Of course, this takes place under the supervision of a real veterinarian, but Melissa Leo’s presence eerily blurs the line between documentary and fiction.

What PETA will make of Francine remains to be seen, but if you wait for the expected notice, “no animals were harmed in the making of this movie” in the end credits, no such luck. Instead, you will find a mystifying dedication in the same delicate font as the title, “In memory of Sparky.” It’s unclear if this epitaph is meant to be ironic, heartfelt, or a mix of both.

Francine does the pet lovers of the world no favors by perpetuating the stigma of the crazy cat lady. Francine is infantilized and animalized, craning her head out the car window like an overjoyed Labrador on the way home from prison or gaping, mesmerized, at a tank of goldfish in the pet shop. With her own animals, she recalls Steinbeck’s Lennie Small, literally smothering her objects of desire with naïve and clumsy affection. It is alarming to see Melissa Leo eschew her usual vibrancy—the emotional dynamics that characterize so many of her other performances, swiftly spanning the spectrum from livid to ebullient (as Kay Howard on Homicide: Life on the Street or Toni Bernette in Treme)—in favor of emotional vacancy. According to Francine there is something wrong with the woman who loves animals more than people, she is sexually confused and emotionally stunted. And ultimately the predictable happens—back to prison she goes in a pat little ending. There might be more merit to this film if it concerned itself only with making us uncomfortable, but no, it seems to be telling some sort of story with a questionable moral that does not the justify the torture suffered by spectators just trying to make it from beginning to the end.

Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]

There is great comfort in cats. Francine, played by a remarkable Melissa Leo, loves her feline friends. She’s a crazy cat lady of sorts, a Nell-ish ex-convict who struggles with society but finds solace in furry critters. A quiet, episodic character study, Francine proves a difficult film experience that might work quickly through all nine lives of some viewers, but those who stay with it will enjoys its rewards long after.

The film begins with Francine making the transition from one life to another. As she prepares to leave prison, the camera locks on her blank, sullen face as the warden describes to her that the transition to a normal life will be difficult. Francine says little as she leaves, and she keeps mute as she moves into the outside world.

Francine doesn’t adjust to life too easily. She gets a job at a pet shop, which seems like a good fit for her since the only hint at joy she comes across after leaving the slammer is a stray cat she finds at the lake. Francine takes the lakeside feline and embraces it with kisses. She rubs the kitty all over her face and signals a trope that will echo alongside the crickets on the film’s soundtrack. In spite of Francine’s affection for animals, she struggles to fit in at the pet shop. She walks with the animals/talks with the animals with skill, but she seems incompetent at connecting with customers and co-workers. Likewise, Francine is socially inept outside the workplace: her years of living within the small quarters of her cell left her as helpless and directionless as a mouse that has escaped its cage.

Francine slides into trailer-trash odyssey of anti-social behaviour. Francine, a feral child of sorts, spends much of the film exploring her habitat with little sense of purpose. She joins a rave, dabbles in religion, and does it doggy-style with random men. None of these actions sates her creature comforts, though, so Francine mostly retreats into her squalid little house.

Francine’s home is filthy ramshackle sty full of animals. The number of cats and dogs in Francine’s house multiplies at random: whether she steals them from the shop or brings them in off the street, Francine adds to her litter ad nauseam. The cats and dogs give Francine some stability (or instability, depending on how one looks at the situation). Enjoying the sensual pleasure of the kitties’ fur, Francine finds a placebo to human connection with her pets. Her love for the pets goes to the point of putting their paws in her mouth, which is gross, but makes one wonder what kind of help Francine needs to adjust to life outside of prison. She makes some baby steps by getting a new job as a veterinarian’s assistant, but this transition moves Francine into its most emotionally charged segment because Francine becomes far too attached to the sick little animals to which she gives care. Francine takes a notable turn with an ambiguous long take that observes Francine’s point-of-view as watches the vet tranquilize a small cat and prepare it for surgery. As Francine holds the cat’s little paw and watches it go under the knife, she makes a sharp turn into a strange emotional attachment that escalates until it erupts.

Told in a strange, observational style by writers/directors Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky, Francine might be too detached for its own good. The bare bones/cinema verité aesthetic lets the filmmakers make a semi-comfortable transition from documentary to narrative feature, but it puts Francine in an awkward position. Like a dog on a choke chain, Francine rarely travels outside of medium shot—the camera is trained on her face much of the time; moreover, with scant dialogue and an elliptical, episodic structure, Francine always keeps the viewer at a distance. We never learn why Francine went to prison—perhaps it doesn’t matter—but more than a backstory feels absent. Francine therefore scraps to move beyond a mere character study, and it mostly stays as an intriguing, if mildly effective character study.

On the other hand, one hardly needs the film to offer much else when the focus of the handheld camera is trained on a strong actress like Melissa Leo. If anything, Francine shows that Leo can carry a feature length film with the silent expressions of her face. She needs nary a word to create a character, let alone one who is so tangibly downtrodden and destitute. Leo gives a brave performance in Francine: thanks to her, this tale of a crazy cat lady is quietly compelling.

indiewire.com [Jessica Kiang]

NPR Ian Buckwalter

pastemagazine.com [Will McCord]

Francine | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson

Slant Magazine [Bill Weber]

Sound On Sight (Edgar Chaput)

JEsther Entertainment [Don Simpson] also seen here: Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

The Fan Carpet [Stefan Pape]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]

Way Too Indie [Dustin Jansick]

thelmagazine.com [Benjamin Mercer]

Screen International [David D'Arcy]

CineVue [Patrick Gamble]

Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]

FRANCINE Facets Multi Media

Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

Variety [Justin Chang]

TimeOut NY Keith Uhlich

newyorktimes.com [Denis Lin]

newyorktimes.com [Stephen Holden] also seen here: New York Times

Castel, Catherine

48 HOURS A DAY (48 Heures par Jour) C 76

France (108 mi) 2008 Official site Trailer

A typically breezy, light-hearted romp through the stereotypical roles of a modern marriage that becomes tested through nefarious means as the wife decides the children need more than an absent, self-absorbed, career-minded father and turns the tables on her husband, going out of town on a business trip herself for 6 months, turning into a down and dirty battle of the sexes, the better to ensure love will eventually prevail in the end. The film is overly formulaic about raising a family in the cutthroat era of executive advancement, how it plays havoc with a marriage, but it features terrific performances from the lead couple, Aura Atike and Antoine de Caunes, who are nauseatingly rich, well dressed and charming, like a couple out of the latest fashion magazines, while also featuring an interesting mixture of supporting characters who are much better known in Europe, not the least of which includes Almodóvar stalwart Victoria Abril, a Chabrol and Eustache favorite a quarter of a century ago, Bernadette Lafont, while Aurore Clément started her career in the 70’s working with Louis Malle and Chantal Ackerman. Only Abril as a career hungry power broker, accepted as one of the boys, and Catherine Jacob, who does most of her work on the phone demurely purring to her lackluster boyfriend during working hours, really shine in their roles.

Outside of broad gestures, the film makes no pretense of relevance and is thoroughly in the entertainment camp. It’s just another saga of the rich and the famous doing scant work of any kind bearing little reality to the lives most of us lead, as executive business status is really a façade for a longing for power, as no one wants to give up their privileged status, as being at work is just an excuse to avoid responsibilities at home. While there are comical twists and turns, using fast paced 1930’s screwball dialogue mixed with elements of farce and romantic comedy, much of this is just plain preposterous. Both are amenable to each other’s sexual charms, so it comes as a surprise when they resort to underhanded methods to avoid speaking plainly to one another. But that’s the nature of show business for you, going through the most complicated theatrics to avoid the obvious. It’s pleasant enough and easy to digest, occasionally witty, but most is forgotten by week’s end.

Festival of New French Cinema JR Jones from The Reader

Aure Atika and Antoine de Caunes star as a harried professional couple in Paris who bicker over their household and parenting responsibilities. After Atika loses a prestigious account at her ad agency, she decides to get even with her spouse and announces she’s taken a six-month assignment in Tokyo, secretly moving in with a girlfriend and leaving him to mind their two young kids. Catherine Castel makes her writing and directing debut with this French comedy, whose notable achievement is that it’s stupid enough to be an American comedy. The contrived premise is to blame, though there are some solid laughs along the periphery, particularly in Atika’s paranoid reveries about what her husband is doing while she’s gone. With Victoria Abril. 85 min.

User comments from imdb Author: Iliyana from United Kingdom

This is an imaginative and lively comedy by the French director Catherine Castel who manages to tell us a very familiar story in an unusual way.

The cast is very good with strong performances by both the leading actors (Aura Atike and Antoine de Caunes) and the supporting ones (among them the charming Victoria Abril) and my family and I thoroughly enjoyed the film.

It's very refreshing to see that modern filmmakers can still produce funny and intelligent comedies which can be as gripping as the fast paced actions and thrillers which overflow the cinemas these days.

12th Annual Festival of New French Cinema Facets Multi-Media

The battle between the sexes rages on in this energetic romantic comedy starring Aure Atika (Ill Wind, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies) and Antoine de Caunes as a successful professional couple with diverging opinions about household and parenting responsibilities. As the primary care giver to their two young children, Marianne struggles to remain competitive in her advertising career while managing the many demands of motherhood. While her husband Bruno allows himself to return home late night after night for professional reasons, an important client that should have been assigned to her gets passed on to a male colleague. Frustrated, exhausted and unable to elicit much empathy from her husband, Marianne devises a truly audacious plan: she announces to Bruno that her agency is sending her to Tokyo for six months and that he will need to fend for himself. With the roles now reversed, Bruno finds himself frantically trying to juggle school drop-offs and microwave dinners, nanny auditions and household chores, along with the wrath of a demanding boss with antiquated beliefs about women and work who does not look kindly on Bruno's new schedule. All of this is witnessed with conflicting emotions by Marianne, who is staying in a friend's apartment not far away... Eventually Marianne's plan must collapse on itself, and the narrative leads up to the final confrontation between these two human beings who love each other, their children and their work but got a little lost amidst the demands, expectations, gender roles and responsibilities of modern day life. Supporting roles by Victoria Abril (High Heels, French Twist, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down) as a tough as nails financial executive who works, lives and earns like a man, and Catherine Jacob as a put-upon assistant with a lazy live-in banana-eating writer boyfriend, are a delight. Directed by Catherine Castel, France, 2008, 35mm, 108 mins. In French with English subtitles.

Reeling Reviews [Robin Clifford, Laura Clifford]

It is still a man’s world in France. Women work just as hard, or harder, at their jobs but the good-old-boy network keeps them from getting the top positions. A woman should take care of the home and children and leave the work to the men folk. Thus is the case for Bruno (Antoine de Caunes) and Marianne (Aura Atike) until she decides to take the bull by the horns and announces that she is leaving for Tokyo for her job. Bruno now has to take care of their two kids and his job, too, and realizes that he, like mothers everywhere, needs “48 Hours a Day.”

Robin:
Nobody does farce like the French and freshman filmmaker Catherine Castel does her country justice with her oh-so-sophisticated comedy above love, work, marriage and family. Bruno, like the rest of his brethren, is used to working late, unpredictable hours and coming home to a hot meal, a loving wife and happy kids. For Marianne, though, it is a balancing act as she, every day, single-handedly care for their two kids and works hard at her mid-level job. She has grown tired of her second-class status, though, and invents the trip to Japan to teach Bruno a lesson in parenting.

As is typical in a comedic farce, things do not go as planned for Marianne. She soon misses Bruno and the kids and begins to wonder if her plan will work, especially when she finds out that her husband has been remiss in his fatherly responsibilities. And, hired a pretty young au pair to take care of the kids while he is at work. But, Bruno is a quick learner and begins to get with the flow of parenthood and the joy of spending quality time with his children. Things heat up, though, when he accidentally sees Marianne going into an apartment building with another man! The farce notches up as their roles reverse and Bruno is the one to question Marianne’s fitness as a spouse and mother.

Director Castel does a solid job in marshalling her large cast friends and family abound around the little family while delving into the real issues of the responsibility of both parents in raising their children. Aure Atika and Antoine de Caunes anchor the festivities as their lives change, for better or worse. The veteran supporting cast Victoria Avril, Catherine Jacob, Aurore Clement and Yves Jacques among them help give the story depth and Mathias Mlekuz is charming as the neighbor and client who falls for Marianne.

I have not found a writing credit for “48 Hours…” but, except for the trite and predictable happily-ever-after ending, the story is imaginative and lively. I give it a B.

Laura:
Catherine Castel's film is often too broad (the caveman credit sequence opening) and too obvious (the 'cute' denouement) and its two lead characters behavior is both reprehensible, yet it is just as often funny - often laugh out loud so. Aure Atika
("OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies") is a harried, working wife who lies to her husband (Antoine de Caunes) about a business trip. Forced to deal with their two children, Bruno's career begins to slip, but in the end, the two learn what is important in life. It's a raucous French 'battle of the sexes' farce that feels dated in its one-sidedness, but a chuckle earned is a chuckle earned. C+

Castle, William

TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies

Eccentric director of routine low-budget horror films, with a flair for self-promotion. Castle's standout efforts include the B thriller, "When Strangers Marry" (1944), with Robert Mitchum in his first important role and the camp gem, "House on Haunted Hill" (1958). Like latter day P.T Barnum, upon whom he modeled himself, Castle lured audiences to his chillers by appearing in their trailers and psyching the audience up to be scared. Most of his films included outrageous gimmicks such as an insurance policy against death by fright for "Macabre" (1957), skeletons that whistled over the audience in a process called "Emergo" during critical scenes in "House on Haunted Hill" and his most audacious stunt, "Percepto" which literally shocked the audience by wiring selected seats in the theater with electricity and administering mild jolts during moments in "The Tingler" (1959). Castle is also noted as the producer of the psychological thriller, "Rosemary's Baby" (1968).

All-Movie Guide Bruce Eder

Classic Film and Television Home Page Michael E. Grost

The Tingler The Horror Films of William Castle

Metroactive Article William Castle, the Prince of Paltry Promotions, Returns, by Richard von Busack from October 12 – 18, 1995

The William Castle Blogathon: Mysterious Intruder (1946) Shadows and Satin, July 30, 2013

Castle, William They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

WHEN STRANGERS MARRY

aka: Betrayed

USA (67 mi) 1944

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

The Monogram B-picture that gave Mitchum his first starring role. Hunter's the innocent one, turning to former boyfriend Mitchum, when husband Jagger disappears after a couple of months of marriage. A trip to the cops reveals that the latter may not be quite the man she thought and thus the plot thickens. Future horror showman Castle keeps it simple, leaving the cast and the cracking dialogue to make the running. Mitchum shows promise.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

It sounds like a Sally Jesse Raphael episode, but this Monogram quickie is actually a pretty okay thriller, if not quite the shoestring classic James Agee once hailed. Ohio gal Kim Hunter comes to New York City to meet the man she’s just married (Dean Jagger), who’s got a penchant for fake IDs, hem haws about his work, and gets jumpy whenever somebody mentions the recent "silk stocking murder." William Castle, later the cheery huckster of such gimmickoid classics as The Tingler and 13 Ghosts, is here young and hungry and, if nowhere near the level of a Joseph H. Lewis, his modest ingenuity blooms within the anecdotes offered by the script (co-written by Philip Yordan). Some of the effects (a maid’s shriek melting into a train’s whistle, guffawing faces clouding up the heroine’s mind) are direct lifts from other movies, but for every thud (a neon sign "visualizing" Hunter’s anxiety) there’s a nifty bit (suspense drummed up around a glass-plated mail chute). Castle’s unjaded eagerness blurs the line between disarming naiveté and outright hackdom. Best of all, the picture offers glimpses of careers at their flowering: Hunter is very touching, and Robert Mitchum, playing her ex-boyfriend in his first major role, is already the man. With Neil Hamilton, Dick Elliott, and Milton Kibbee. In black and white.

User comments from imdb Author FilmFlaneur from London

Castle's third feature is an interesting case of talents in the bud. Previously he had been responsible for a bright Boston Blackie series entry with Chester Morris, and the less successful Klondike Kate (1943) with Tom Neal. When Strangers Marry (also known by the less accurate title of Betrayed) shows the director's increasing confidence as he ventures into the territory of the new film noir genre. He was also lucky in securing the services of a good cast: Kim Hunter, Dean Jagger and, in his first co-starring role, a young Robert Mitchum. One of the greatest noir stars, Mitchum is slimmer and perhaps more tentative here than he would be in later films, but still has enough presence and skill to make an impact, especially in the sweaty closing scenes. Already an experienced hand, Dimitri Tiomkin provided the music, and the result was an above average production from Monogram.

Having said that, there's a certain peremptoriness to the film, making it not entirely satisfactory. The noir style, which thrived on inexpensive sets and the economic use of shadow, cheap location shooting and the like, is evoked by Castle rather than expressed in any thorough fashion. Castle's next film The Whistler (1944), on yet another miniscule budget, was much more effective in evoking a continuous mood of paranoia and doom from the haunted Richard Dix. Some successful scenes apart, (Millie's first night in the hotel, her Lewtonish night walk, her innocent suspicions in Paul's apartment), the present film rather clumsily bolts noir elements on to a standard suspense plot - one vaguely reminiscent of Hitchcock's Suspicion of three years before - rather than to let them arise naturally from situation and character. An example is Millie's night of disturbed rest in the hotel. Husbandless in her neon sign-lit room, drowned in shadows and fear, she is distracted by the repeated blaring of nearby dancehall before taking a fraught phone call from Fred (Mitchum). This scene has no real plot purpose except to show her loneliness and distress, and the expressionist images seem over emphatic. On its own it is startling and dramatic, but nothing more, a pool of hard noir in a more naturalistic film. Even less convincingly, as if it had never happened Millie then makes no move to change her room later the next day, and the music never occurs again (it would have made an excellent punctuation for any later confrontation with Fred, for instance). As an actress, Kim Hunter makes an effective noir victim, even if her trusting fragility needs a willing suspension of disbelief. Powell and Pressburger obviously recognised such sensitivity even in a poverty row product like this, for they shortly cast her in such films as A Canterbury Tale, of the same year, and then in A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

A more serious plot flaw resides in the character of her husband Paul (Jagger). His personality and motives are shrouded in mystery throughout the film and, sadly, are not much clearer by the end. For a while this enigmatic man provides the narrative with a lot of useful suspense. The lack of resolution to his drama, while supplying the necessary twist as the truth is revealed, leaves the viewer with just too many questions to be comfortable. One misses even the rudimentary psycho-analysis which appeared in some noirs from this time, supposedly explaining the aberrant personality. Either elements of helpful exposition were jettisoned in the course of filming on a tight budget, or the writers (who included the excellent Philip Jordan, of Dillinger, Detective Story, Big Combo fame) thought they could get away with such a lacuna. The result is to reduce a happy ending to one where a married couple must still live on unresolved tensions, their determined contentment notwithstanding.

For those interested in trivia there are some private jokes in the film. A 'Mr King' is paged at the hotel (the film was produced by the King brothers). More amusingly, Millie hands over a deliberately misleading picture to the investigating detectives, saying 'This is the man you want'. It is director Castle. Such gallows humour, and self-publicity, would manifest itself in a series of gimmick films for which he is better known, starting in the 50's...

THE MARK OF THE WHISTLER

aka: The Marked Man

USA (60 mi) 1944

User comments from imdb Author goblinhairedguy from Montreal

This entry is the best in this above-average series from Columbia. All the stories had intriguing premises and clever twists, but this one even more so, since it was based on an original by Cornell Woolrich, that master of gloom, fate and paranoia. You definitely won't see the last curveball coming. There's a nice element of "Crime and Punishment"-like guilt infiltrating the protagonist's shady exploits, although it's not directly responsible for his downfall. The material is the essence of noir, but Castle filmed it straightforwardly for the most part. In his early days before churning out his gimmicky horror pics, he knew how to add telling little touches and include fascinatingly offbeat characters on the margins. All the same, one can't help thinking that this might have been a low-budget noir masterpiece along the lines of "Blind Spot" or "Fear in the Night" if the style had been more doom-laden and shadowy.

When a bum discovers that he almost shares the same name with someone with a dormant bank account, he is tempted into engaging in fraud to get the money for himself. Unfortunately, complications arise when he discovers that the man he is impersonating has some enemies...

The genre resource which supplied this title for my hunt list admits that it will include all movies of a series if only some of the movies in the series have fantastic elements. This apparently doesn't apply all across the board; they don't list every Bowery Boys movie, despite the fact that several of them qualify. But it does include the entire Whistler series, and sometimes it's hard to tell if a certain movie is included because of elements of its own or due to its connection to the series. This is one of those ambiguous ones.

Granted, the whole Whistler series could be considered fantastic, since they're all narrated by the unseen, shadowy Whistler, who might be considered a mystical character of sorts. Still, since he serves only as a narrator, this is a fairly weak element. The only other element of this movie that could cause it to even remotely qualify is that the revenge-driven villain of the piece may be mad, but I don't think he goes over the edge to insane-psycho-killer mad, so that's another weak element. At any rate, this movie remains extremely marginal to the genre.

Nonetheless, it's a great little movie about guilt and fate, and it has a good sense of tension and some wonderful plot twists, as well as strong direction from a pre-horror William Castle. Richard Dix is excellent as the bum whose plot to get a fortune backfires on him, and you may want to keep your eyes open for an uncredited cameo by Willie Best. I certainly don't mind covering marginalia when it's as good as this one.

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

THE VOICE OF THE WHISTLER

USA (60 mi) 1945

User comments from imdb Author goblinhairedguy from Montreal

Like the other entries in the Whistler series, this one has an intriguing premise (not far removed from "Indecent Proposal") with a couple of nice twists. Unfortunately, it doesn't make for good cinema due to its static nature -- it's much more suited to the series' original medium, radio. The grungy setting of the first entry in the series (also directed by the fledgling William Castle) is sorely missed, though he does introduce a few oddball characters in passing. Nonetheless, it is worth sitting through the dull parts for the clever climax and the haunting aftermath. And there's one of those nice little walk-across-the-room bits by a sexy waitress to keep the guys alert (reminiscent of Lana Turner's rookie appearance in "They Won't Forget" or Yvette Vickers' eye-catching serveuse in "Hud"). A similar tale of a lighthouse-bound ménage-a-trois occurs in PRC's semi-noir appropriately entitled "Lighthouse".

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

When a lonely, dying millionaire passes out in a cab, the cabbie takes care of him and urges him to change his suspicious nature and distrustful ways.

One of the books that I use as a reference to choose movies for this series claims that in this movie, hypnotism is used to cause someone to commit murder. If they thought so, it's no surprise they included it; however, there's no hypnotism at work in this movie, though we do have a man who is tempted into a murder by another man's suggestion. In truth, the only fantastic elements in this movie are the existence of the Whistler, that strange, shadowy character who sees all, knows all and tells all (though in a purely passive sense – in other words, he plays no role other than that of narrator) and a certain horror atmosphere towards the end of the movie. In short, this movie is another false lead.

On its own terms, I found it quite engrossing, though not necessarily in terms of its murder story; If considered merely in that aspect, the movie takes far too long to get going (which is why my plot description doesn't touch on it at all). No, it's the human drama and the themes that made it interesting for me; it deals with loneliness and how it is bred by distrust, and how distrust arises from having to cope with fame or riches and consequently not being able to tell a true friend from a false one. It's handled somewhat simplistically, but I found it engaging nonetheless. In fact, I was even a little disappointed when the movie does turn into a murder story in the latter part of the movie, since it is somewhat at odds with the rest of it. Of course, I can't say that I'm surprised; if murder weren't involved, this wouldn't be a Whistler movie. Still, the murder setup is rather clever, and the ending is quite sad. Ultimately, I must admit I really enjoyed the movie, even if I don't think it quite works as a whole.

The Video Vacuum [Mitch Lovell]

UNDERTOW C+ 77

USA (71 mi) 1949

A rarely seen film from schlockmeister William Castle, a B-movie director who spent his career making forgettable features, whose real claim to fame was his Barnum & Bailey flair for self-promotion, often appearing in the trailers revving up the fear factor in his films, psyching up the audience to expect to be scared, where his most audacious stunt was wiring selected seats in the theater with electrical buzzers and administering a mild shock during heightened moments of THE TINGLER (1959). In addition to being an uncredited screenwriter, a second unit director, and an associate producer for Orson Welles’ THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947), perhaps his biggest claim to fame, however, and certainly his most lucrative, was buying the book rights to Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary's Baby (1968), which became a monster hit. But in 1949, little did the director, or anyone else connected with the film, know that 60 years in the future audiences would be sitting quietly and actually paying attention to this film, which was always intended as a second reeler. Opening in Reno, Scott Brady (Lawrence Tierney’s younger brother) as Tony Reagan has just completed his second stint in the Army and is in a celebratory mood, having recently invested his entire Army savings on a Lake Tahoe resort sitting on a pristine location, owned by the father of a fellow soldier who died in the war, but always spoke highly about this property being the most beautiful place on earth. Having seen it and meeting with the father, Tony has to agree, thinking this would be the perfect place to make a new start in his life. Having come from a troubled past where he had extensive trouble with the law, Tony was looking to go straight. But he’s hit with two major coincidences before he can set foot out of town, one is meeting Danny Morgan (John Russell), an old con artist working for the casino’s, and the other is accidentally running into a beautiful woman, Peggy Dow as Ann McKnight, where they coincidentally meet again on an overnight flight to Chicago. By her look, she has more than a passing interest in him, but he rather clumsily announces his plans to meet his future bride in Chicago and bring her back out to live in Lake Tahoe, which takes the sizzle out of their obvious chemistry.

In Chicago, he’s met by the cops and warned to get out of town, as they’ve received news he’s planning to get revenge on Big Jim, a local mob boss, as they had plenty of run-ins together 7 years ago. Using plenty of Chicago location shots, they arrive at Midway Airport before he takes a taxi to the Palmer House, where there’s plenty of street shots down Wabash Avenue as Tony has to shake the cop that’s following him, which he does at the Wabash/Adams el stop which looks exactly the same today as it did 60 years ago. Tony’s in Chicago looking for his girl, Sally (Dorothy Hart), whose uncle is Big Jim, who disapproves of their impending marriage, but Tony thinks he can change his mind, especially if they’re going to be family. But before he gets a chance, Tony is blindsided and coldcocked, where he awakes later with a gunshot wound on his hand placed in a car containing a gun that can be traced to Big Jim’s murder. The radio announces his description as a killer on the loose, where he’s immediately on the run, trying to outrun chasing cops, leading to a shootout scene at a factory warehouse where he climbs up a gigantic storage tank, similar to James Cagney in White Heat (1949), a film released 3 months earlier that same year. You’d think it might be the same set, but this is a Universal picture, while Cagney’s is Warner Brothers. With police canvassing all his known friends, he has no options left and nowhere else to go except to call upon Ann, the friend he met in Reno who was coming to Chicago to be a schoolteacher. Having heard the radio description, where he’s considered armed and dangerous, Ann is a bit suspicious, but once he announces he didn’t do it, that he’s been framed, she immediately breaks into a trusting smile and fixes him breakfast - - only in the movies.

Knowing there is no way out except to clear his name, Tony calls upon an old friend from the neighborhood now working for the police, Bruce Bennett as Detective Reckling, something of a straight shooter, in real life a silver medalist in the shot put for the 1928 Olympics under his actual name Herman Brix, holding both the indoor and outdoor world records at the time. Due to his athleticism, he was being considered for the Tarzan role by MGM pictures, but he broke his shoulder making another film, opening the door for Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller. Nonetheless, Bennett lived to be a hundred and did complete one Tarzan picture, completing all his own stunts, including a fall to rocky cliffs below in THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN, Pt’s I and II (1935), also TARZAN AND THE GREEN GODDESS (1938), which was largely put together from previously shot footage. Though Reckling is unable to prove Tony’s innocence, where there is a brief first time film appearance by a young Roc Hudson as a fellow detective, he does begin to believe the alleged murderer has been framed. The film packs a punch, cramming a huge amount of story detail into the highly condensed 71 minutes, where Buckingham Fountain is used as a favorite meeting place, showing the Chicago skyline, including what was the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Certainly a crowd pleaser moment for anyone from Chicago has to be when Ann pulls up to the fountain in her slick convertible car and parks directly in front of the fountain on Columbus Drive in what is a notorious tow zone. Another is a secret meet with Sally outside the Adler Planetarium down a few stairs while Ann stands guard at street level, where the two women may as well be at opposite ends of his life, morally speaking, one above and one below. There’s a stellar hallway sequence down a long corridor near the end, an unforgettable scene that is exquisitely filmed, also the interesting presence of unsung black actor Daniel Ferniel, perhaps the most unusual role in the film, a small part with major consequences, where he represents the surviving moral voice of the murdered victim, Big Jim, who interestingly is never seen onscreen.

Noir City Chicago 4 ( 3rd Night) Dan in the MW from The Blackboard, August 19, 2012

Thus far, the audiences have been enthusiastic and the ticket sales have been quite good overall. This is my fourth such festival and I was able to recognize many repeat customers in the audience from prior years. One of the nicest things about Noir City Chicago is that, when time permits, the Film Noir Foundation hosts have been approachable and patient in terms of answering questions and holding conversations with theater patrons. The Music Box, which opened its doors in the late Twenties, has always been a neighborhood theater, but it does have a fairly large lobby area that allows people an opportunity to do a bit of casual socializing. I am not certain that such intimacy would be possible in Los Angeles or San Francisco where the audiences are oftentimes much larger.

User reviews from imdb Author: lorenellroy from United Kingdom

William Castle was always a B movie director .His talent -amounting almost to genius -elevated some of his 50's work to the status of "event movies" but works like "The Tingler" "Homicidal"and "Macabre"were nothing but glorified B pictures wrapped in the razzle -dazzle of showmanship.

"Undertow"makes no pretense at being other than what it is-a brisk programmer for the bottom half of double features-and satisfies on this level Scott Brady is Tony Reagon,an ex-con going straight who is framed for the death of a mob boss,Big Jim,and the movie deals with Reagon's fight to clear his name with the help of a sympathetic cop and a schoolteacher with whom he struck up a friendship while en route to Chicago where the bulk of the movie is set.

Good use of the Chicago locations and a brisk pace compensate for moderate acting.Its predictable but narrative pace stops it getting tiresome

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Today ,William Castle's is known as the man who bought Ira Levin's "Rosemary's baby " rights and produced one of the best horror movies of all time.

"Undertow" has a quite derivative screenplay but the director made the best of it and any film noir buff can give it a chance :it thoroughly deserves it.It features at least one unforgettable scene: the chase in the long corridor which gives you goose flesh.Of the two female leads,I prefer Dorothy Hart to the rather bland Peggy Dow.

In the 1968 movie Castle produced ,there was a corridor which played a prominent part too.

User reviews from imdb Author: GManfred from Ramsey, NJ

"Undertow" is a simplistic example of a good 'B' picture, your basic Film Noir 101 movie. There are no surprises, lots of coincidences and plot contrivances, and the endgame is telegraphed about midway through. Screenwriters could have written this one in their sleep, which may account for the flawed, unsatisfying nature of Undertow.

The cast is attractive; several familiar 'B' actors put this picture over with performances that infuse it with much-needed energy. I thought Scott Brady, John Russell, Bruce Bennett and Peggy Dow were just fine, production values were good, but the movie lacks suspense and tension. Every time a crucial scene would come up you just knew the outcome.

Nevertheless, 'Undertow" succeeds in its own unsophisticated way, and for 40's theater audiences it would have been a good time killer while waiting for the main feature to come on.

User reviews from imdb Author: bmacv from Western New York

There's more to Undertow than the first screen credit of young `Roc' Hudson (in fact his tiny role as a police detective barely registers). It's one of a handful of noirs that William Castle directed before turning his attention to, and making his name in, gimmicky schlock. While none of them is so good as his first – When Strangers Marry, with Robert Mitchum and Kim Hunter – they're more than passable. As is Undertow.

Scott Brady looks like Lawrence Tierney's kid brother (which in fact he was). In Reno after a stint at a mountain lodge he wants to buy and run, he bumps into an old pal from mobbed-up Chicago (John Russell). They compare the diamond rings they've bought for their respective fiancees, though that doesn't stop Brady from flirting with a girl (Peggy Dow) he met in a casino and shares a flight home with. Since the police meet him at the plane, any extracurricular romance comes to naught, so Brady dutifully hooks up with his intended (Dorothy Hart). Next thing, he's taken for a ride and framed for the murder of unseen crime boss Big Jim, who happens to be Hart's uncle. Trying to clear himself while on the lam, he enlists Dow's help; he also happens to stumble onto the fact that his fiancee and Russell's are the same woman....

Undertow is pure story, competently enough executed if devoid of anything particular to lodge in the memory. It preserves evidence of why Brady stayed in his brother's imposing shadow, and leads one to wonder why Hart made so few movies (though, of her handful of credits, roughly half are noirs). While not an essential title in the noir cycle by any means, Undertow was one of the hundreds of titles that went into making it a cycle, and far from the weakest of them.

Noir City Chicago 4 ( 4th Night) Dan in the MW from The Blackboard, August 20, 2012

Tonight's menu featured the Brothers Tierney. Big bad Lawrence Tierney acted in Joseph Pevney's "Shakedown" while his estranged kid brother "Scott Brady" (Kenneth Gerard Tierney) starred in William Castle's "Undertow." The latter film was partly shot on location in Chicago.

Alan K. Rode completed his hosting duties on Sunday and tonight another Director of the Film Noir Foundation, Professor Foster Hirsch of Brooklyn College, introduced the films on the double feature bill. Both men are the authors of valuable film studies books that belong in the library of every film noir student: Hirsch produced the seminal "The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir" and most recently authored a full length biography of Otto Preminger; Rode wrote the biography of the iconic noir tough guy Charles McGraw and is currently engaged in writing the biography of Michael Curtiz, a director who worked in an almost every movie genre imaginable, including several highly regarded film noir pictures ("The Unsuspected" and "The Breaking Point").

Hirsch noted that both of tonight's features were intended to exhibited as "B" films or second features. As such, the two movies were shot economically and were densely plotted -- audience were supposed to being paying attention to plot points. There are no wasted scenes. Every frame of film tells a story. "Shakedown," which was Pevney's movie debut as a director, checked in at eighty minutes. "Undertow" was even briefer. Its running time was a mere seventy-one minutes in length. Nevertheless, both movies did not lack for action. The key difference as compared to modern films was a matter of rapid pacing.

Howard Duff's character was described as "a ruthless opportunist" by one of his newspaper colleagues in "Shakedown." As he hustles to establish his credentials as a big city news photographer, he is appeared to sacrifice his integrity in pursuit of a fast buck and to stage photographs to get ahead. He even goes so far as to try to play both sides against the middle in a war between two rival gangsters played by Brian Donlevy and Lawrence Tierney.

Before William Castle achieved notoriety as an exploitation film maker specializing in low budget horror films that relied upon assorted gimmicks, he was a competent "B" director of crime dramas and mysteries. He worked on some well regarded lesser film titles such as the King Brothers' production of "When Strangers Marry" at Monogram Pictures and he collaborated on "The Whistler" series at Columbia. He even worked with Orson Welles on "The Lady from Shanghai."

One audience member opined that "Undertow" featured some of the best location shooting that he had seen in a film set in Chicago. While several city landmarks were clearly identifiable, I wondered if it was simply a case of other films screened at the previous Noir City Chicago festivals emphasizing the city's slums as opposed to its tourist attractions? Midway Airport, Buckingham Fountain, the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium and the Palmer House are all on display in "Undertow." It was amusing to see that it was permissible to park automobiles on Lake Shore Drive six years ago.

Both films were produced at Universal-International and some of the same cast and crew members were employed on both productions. One of the habits that I have had to cultivate as a film noir fan is studying the credits. Learning the names of the cinematographers, the directors and writers has proven to be an invaluable tool in terms of seeking out other worthwhile films from the classic period. For example, Martin Goldsmith, who is best known for "Detour," was one of the writers credited with creating "Shakedown."

I don't know if the ill will between Lawrence Tierney and Scott Brady had its origins in a family feud or not. Maybe Larry was jealous that his younger brother occasionally got cast as a heroic figure rather than being typed as a villainous heavy or a bad ass.

Both films were well attended. This was something of an accomplishment for a Monday night.

CONQUEST OF COCHISE

USA (70 mi) 1953

User comments from imdb Author cowboy7642 from Alexandria, VA

The Gadsden Purchase of Southern Arizona is the setting for this underrated western that has fine action sequences, beautiful cinematography and a nice music score. The plot involves the U.S. Government's attempt to forge a peace treaty between ancient enemies, the Apaches and Mexicans, the latter of whom the American troops are duty-bound to protect from Cochise's red raiders. Indian-hating Mexicans and trouble-making Americans from Tucson stand in the way of peace and inflame hostilities on both sides of the border, for profit and revenge. The Comanches, at war with both the Americans and the Mexicans, hope to enlist Cochise and his Apaches as allies in their war of extinction against their enemies. Robert Stack is the best-known name among a good cast of players who were veterans of many western films. John Hodiak is Cochise, and his mannered, somewhat formal bearing as the Apache leader is better than might be expected.

MASTERSON OF KANSAS

USA (73 mi) 1954

User comments from imdb Author louis-king from Watertown, Massachusetts

Even though the title is Masterson of Kansas, It's James Griffiths' Doc Holiday who's the most interesting character. His quiet, cultured manner radiates more deadliness than the generic Western manner of Montgomery's Masterson. Griffith was a good character actor who was worthy of better movies.

The problem with the Masterson of this movie is that the real Masterson was a bit of a dandy (more like Gene Barry's TV version) whereas here he's no different than Wyatt Earp.

Of the three 'good guys' Holiday, Masterson and Earp, Holdiay seems the most intelligent. Masterson knowingly takes on about 8 bad guys who are waiting for him and almost gets killed but for Holiday's intervention. Earp's attempt to face down a lynch mob lasts about 5 seconds when he gets knocked unconscious by a well thrown rock. That would never have happened to Burt Lancaster! Unfortunately for the viewer, the bad guys are not menacing enough and waste time with elaborate plotting. Makes you long for Lee Marvin or Leo Gordon.

Turner Classic Movies review Rob Nixon

Audiences who attended the Columbia Pictures release of Masterson of Kansas (1954) got not one but three legends of the Wild West for their money: Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. The story involves Dodge City Sheriff Masterson's efforts to prove that a group of cattlemen are framing an acquaintance of his, Merrick, for murder because Merrick negotiated a treaty that gave land rights to a Kiowa tribe. He enlists the aid of Earp and Holliday in bringing the true murderer to justice, thereby preventing an Indian war.

In real life, Masterson (born in Illinois in 1855), was initially a deputy marshal under Earp in Dodge City. In 1877 he campaigned for and won the post of county sheriff, where he enforced a curfew and gun restrictions on the often lawless town. In 1879, he was appointed U.S. deputy marshal but lost his bid for re-election primarily because of accusations by a newspaper editor that he was crooked. After that, he made a living as a gambler in such Western boom towns as Leadville, Deadwood, and Tombstone (where he came to know Holliday, a friend of Earp's). Eventually he went East to New York, where he was for a time U.S. deputy marshal (appointed by his friend President Teddy Roosevelt) and editor for the New York Morning Telegraph. His three-times-a-week column was one of the paper's most popular. He lost his law enforcement job when Roosevelt left office but stayed on in New York, continuing his newspaper work. On October 25, 1921, in the middle of writing his column, he died at his desk of a sudden heart attack.

The Western legend has been portrayed on screen a number of times by, among others, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. Gene Barry played Masterson in a long-running TV series. Here the role is taken on by George Montgomery, a former boxer who, while never a top-rank star, made a string of popular action-packed Westerns in the 1950s. During this time, he was married to singer Dinah Shore, a successful recording and television star. In later life, he turned his self-taught talents to sculpture and created busts of such Western film legends as John Wayne, Gene Autry, Randolph Scott and Clint Eastwood.

Masterson of Kansas was directed by William Castle, better known for his horror movies and the over-the-top gimmicks and marketing devices he used to draw audiences. Among the pictures he directed were such early 60s schlock-horror classics as The Tingler (1959), which used a vibrating device attached to theater seats for shock effect; Thirteen Ghosts (1960), released in "Illusion-O," requiring viewers to use special glasses to see the ghosts; and the late Joan Crawford vehicles Strait-Jacket (1964) and I Saw What You Did (1965). As a producer, he gained a measure of respectability when he produced Rosemary's Baby (1968) for director Roman Polanski and even appeared in a cameo. He also served as associate producer and uncredited second unit director on Orson Welles' film noir The Lady from Shanghai (1947). John Goodman played a character based on Castle in the affectionate spoof of the B-movie industry Matinee (1993).

The chief of the Kiowa in this picture is played by Jay Silverheels, famous as the faithful Indian companion Tonto in the long-running Lone Ranger TV series and subsequent spin-off films. The Canadian-born son of a Mohawk chief, Silverheels entered the movie business in 1937 and worked steadily through 1974, although always typecast as the stereotypical Indian character. In later years, he became a spokesperson for improving the portrayals of Indians. He died in 1980.

Masterson of Kansas Dan DeVore of Movie Justice

THE TINGLER

USA (82 mi) 1959

Turner Classic Movies [Sean Axmaker]

A cultish chiller that acquired some fame on its original US release when Castle wired up the cinema seats with electrical buzzers to give his audiences a little extra shock value. The plot is ingeniously ludicrous: a doctor (Price) discovers that fear breeds a centipede-like organism in the base of the spine. The organism can kill if its grip is not released, and only a scream can do that. So the good doctor experiments on a deaf-mute, the wife of a cinema-owner who only shows silent movies. Castle was a real Hollywood showman, a downmarket Hitchcock whose work shows considerable flair. The scenes in the movie theatre are very striking, and the way the doctor torments his victim - by providing her with visual shocks (a kind of acid trip) and by causing running water from a tap to turn into blood (black-and-white gave way to colour here) - is clearly the work of a sick mind. Castle recalled, 'I was asked by somebody at Yale whether The Tingler was my statement against the establishment and whether it was my plea against war and poverty. I said, Who knows?'

"Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic. But scream – scream for your lives!"

Director William Castle was an ambitious journeyman looking for his breakout film when he hit upon his winning formula with Macabre, a low-budget 1958 thriller that sold its onscreen shock effects with promotional ballyhoo. In a brainstorm of publicity ingenuity, Castle issued an insurance policy (backed by Lloyds of London) to cover all ticket buyers against "death by fright." The campaign was a success, the film was a hit, and Castle found his new persona: a B-movie P.T. Barnum by way of Alfred Hitchcock. He launched a new gimmick with each succeeding horror film and took to personally promoting and introducing his films, just like Hitchcock was doing on television. In fact, for The Tingler (1959), Castle's third feature in this vein, composer Von Dexter's score borrows from the Hitchcock sound with the distinctive harp glissandos of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo (1958) theme.

The Tingler was Castle's second and final film with Vincent Price, whose silky voice and acting grace had brought a little class to Castle's previous film, the gleefully disreputable House on Haunted Hill (1959). Price plays Dr. Warren Chapin, a part-time coroner and full time scientist pursuing a private inquiry into the power of fear in the human body. "There's a force in all of us which science knows nothing about," he explains. "That it's strong enough to shatter the spinal column we know, but what it is – what causes it to appear and disappear – that we don't know." With a few simple scares and some timely X-rays, Chapin proves that the human body hosts a parasite that feeds on fear (quick, rewrite the medical texts!). He theorizes that screaming is the only thing that can stop it (becoming an early champion of primal scream therapy in the process) and names it the "tingler," after the tingles one feels in a state of terror.

It's not long before he extracts one of these things from a victim literally scared to death (too bad she didn't have her Lloyds of London insurance policy), revealing one of the cheapest of any of Castle's special effects. His tingler is a cheap rubber model that looks like a lobster crossbred with a centipede. When it moves through a faux animal skin rug, the fur ruffling past the otherwise stiff extremities creates an illusion of the legs actually moving, but for the rest of the film Castle is content to show the thing wobble across floors and over potential victims, yanked by unconcealed strings at times.

"In a controlled experiment with my own fear, perhaps I can find out all the things we have to know," Chapin muses to his assistant. "Only nothing scares me." That sounds like a challenge, and Chapin faces it with a movie first: he shoots himself up with an experimental chemical called LSD and has the first acid-trip freak-out on American screens. Price hams it up with gusto, but apparently no one on the production had any actual experience to draw from, and his histrionics make the scene endearingly square in retrospect.

"I gotta tell you something, neither Bill nor Vincent nor I took any of this too seriously," recalls co-star Darryl Hickman (brother of Dwayne "Dobie Gillis" Hickman). You can't blame them. Screenwriter Robb White, Castle's loyal partner in high-concept schlock, is more concerned with the gimmicks than with the story or the suspense. There were plenty of complications, to be sure; Chapin hates his socialite wife (Patricia Cutts), a millionaire tramp who doesn't bother to hide her affairs or apologize for blocking her younger sister's marriage to Chapin's handsome young assistant (Hickman). There are even a couple of murder attempts, but the main storyline is not very compelling.

A subplot concerning a deaf-mute woman (Judith Evelyn) who owns a silent movie theater is used to greater effect. At one point she finds herself in a waking nightmare of macabre threats (including a sink and bathtub running with blood-red fluid, the sole shocks of color in the black and white film), unable to scream and thus stop the tingler before it kills her. Castle takes credit for casting Evelyn, though it was actually Price who suggested her for the role, and she adds the right touch of eeriness to her part, a character right out of the silent films she shows in her theater.

Ultimately, however, it's all about the gimmick. In House on Haunted Hill, Castle had theaters rig skeletons to glide over the heads of the audience at a certain point in the film. For the climax of The Tingler, where the creature gets loose in a movie theater, Castle had theater owners hire a plant in the audience to faint on cue and get carried out by doctors (not real ones, of course). But that was just the appetizer. For the main course he unleashed "Percepto," a fancy name for a small, motorized vibrator placed under selected theater seats and wired to the projection booth. It was carefully timed to a key scene where the tingler crawls across the projector lens just before the screen goes black and the booming voice of Vincent Price entreats audiences not to panic, but to "Scream - scream for your lives!" Cue Percepto, which goosed the audience into playing along. "In the final count, I think we must have buzzed 20,000,000 behinds," writes Castle in his biography, a possibly inflated number, but then would you expect any different from a born self-promoter?

There is no doubt that William Castle could mount an effective B-movie thriller with an offbeat sensibility. The Tingler is more gimmick than movie and it lacks the level of tension and terror of other productions, but the showmanship is still a lot of fun.

"Ladies and gentlemen, just a word of warning. If any of you are not convinced that you have a tingler of your own, the next time you're frightened in the dark...don't scream."

B-Movie Central Duane L. Martin

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! Liz Kingsley

The Bad Movie Report Dr. Freex

Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp

Badmovies.org review Andrew Borntreger

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Mondo Digital

The New York Times (Howard Thompson)

Cates, Joseph

WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR B 84

USA (94 mi) 1965

Why with everybody else? Why with every slob…and not with me?

—Lawrence Sherman (Sal Mineo)

A sleazy B-movie cult favorite and fetishistic voyeur’s delight from director Joseph Cates, father of actress Phoebe Cates, where you might expect to see flashers in raincoats in attendance, written by Arnold Drake who also wrote and produced THE FLESH EATERS (1964), yet it’s also an absurd cautionary tale dedicated to exposing a rising threat of pornography and all things sexually prurient, literally showcasing the Times Square porn shops, peep shows, and smut magazines in their heyday, where despite some excellent performances from cult stars Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, and Elaine Stritch, the exploitive tone veers so off the rails that the film was banned in the UK for being too luridly explicit, sending mixed messages about recognizing the warning signs, suggesting rock ‘n’ roll music is the devil’s work that may send you into a tailspin where you’ll burn in Hell. What’s mystifyingly different about this film is just how hysterically exaggerated it becomes in misjudging reality, playing it completely straight, without the outrageous wit and sarcastic humor of Luis Buñuel in films like VIRIDIANA (1961) and Simon of the Desert (Simón del Desierto) (1965), both of which poked fun at religious hypocrisy and conventional society’s overreaction to Elvis, rock ‘n’ roll, and the wildly theatrical dance contortions on display in garish discotheques, suggesting one whiff of that and you’ll be drowning in sin. Throughout this film it’s hard to tell just where most characters are coming from, as they all seem to suffer from some sort of character disorder. At the center is Nora Dain (Juliet Prowse, never better, where it’s a shame she didn’t make more films), a confident, independent woman living on her own in Manhattan, who’s got the smarts to match her dazzling beauty, yet here she’s down-on-her-luck, working as a DJ playing dance records at a seedy midtown discotheque while in pursuit of a career as an actress. The nightclub is owned by Marian, tough as nails Broadway legend Elaine Stritch, a lesbian with a special overprotective fondness for her girls, where one of the busboys waiting tables and serving drinks is Sal Mineo as Lawrence, a decade older than his Oscar nominated role as Plato in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), where at 27 his career was on what would be a decade-long, downward spiral, despite winning two Oscar nominations by the time he was 21, now typecast as a sex pervert, where it would be four years before he’d work again in the movies, instead working exclusively in theater and television. Hollywood never knew what to do with Sal Mineo, as he didn’t look the part they envisioned for handsome, leading men in the 50’s and 60’s, and instead was always typecast as a psychologically troubled or disturbed youth, playing demented criminal lowlifes, like “the Switchblade Kid,” or some off-color, outcast character, a Mexican boy, a Sioux Indian, a radical Zionist, and even a chimpanzee, where it’s fair to say his typecasting all but ruined his career.

An acknowledged bisexual during his lifetime, posthumously Sal Mineo has become something of a gay icon, a poster boy for gay beauty, with his exotic Sicilian looks, but in his lifetime, an era when Rock Hudson had to hide his homosexuality until his death bed, his openness about being gay curtailed his career, resulting in roles like this one, a deranged criminal, where he plays a disturbed psychopathic sexual predator, a stalker who anonymously calls Nora on the phone, with a lurid book entitled When She Was Bad sitting on the mantle, crawling into bed, wearing only his tighty-whities (a first in American cinema, as actors were previously required to wear boxer shorts), and masturbates suggestively while whispering sleazy trash to her, like “I just want to touch you…I’ll make you feel like a real woman…You and I will be on fire!” At first she thinks he’s just a drunk who’s got the wrong number, but as calls persist, and she finds a decapitated teddy bear in her apartment, she enlists the aid of police Lieutenant Dave Madden, Jan Murray, an otherwise likable TV game show host who got his start as a Borscht Belt comedian, but here he’s a cynical, hard-nosed vice cop who’s seen it all, becoming an expert on “the sadomasochists, the voyeur masochists, the exhibitionists, the necrophiliacs,” where his mind is so immersed in gutter crime that at one point Nora believes he’s the perpetrator. In fact, part of the strangeness of the film is that Nora feels personally insulted and threatened by the overly personalized acts of both Lt. Madden and Marian, who comforts her a bit too closely, apparently not wanting to let go, which just gives her the creeps, but she’s not the least bit threatened by Lawrence, and never reads the signs until it’s too late. In her haste to make a quick exit, Marian inadvertently leaves Nora’s apartment wearing her fur coat, quickly noticing she’s being tailed. While earlier in the day we watched Nora walk through the crowded city streets outside her apartment, where the city was a bustle of activity, yet Marian, in a bizarre parallel, bolts for the nearest alleyway, where she finds herself cornered, only to be strangled by Lawrence in a case of mistaken identity, suffering a similar demise as Sal Mineo in real life, who at age 37 was fatally stabbed in an alley behind his Sunset Strip, West Hollywood apartment. According to Elaine Stritch, Son of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Google Books Result, “I was a lesbian owner of a disco who fell in love with Juliet Prowse and got strangled on Ninety-third Street and East End Avenue with a silk stocking by Sal Mineo. Now who’s not going to play that part?”

All kinds of shenanigans are going on in this film, where Lawrence has an incestually suggestive, overly chummy relationship with his brain-damaged, younger sister Edie, (Margot Bennett), seen falling down the stairs in an opening flashback sequence that rather cryptically leads to the title, startled and then terror-stricken at seeing him naked in bed having sex with an older woman, where in her fright to run away she trips down the stairs, causing permanent brain damage, also decapitating the head of her teddy bear. Lawrence has felt guilty ever since, unable to have healthy relationships with women, instead spending his time on 42^nd Street paging through titillating porn magazines with lurid titles such as Shame Mates and Dance-Hall Dykes, raunchy books featuring salacious material, including Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs, and visiting XXX movie theaters in Times Square, becoming obsessed with Nora, seemingly the perfect woman that Edie will never become, where he can see into Nora’s apartment with binoculars and constantly spies on her. Lt. Madden is overprotective towards his own young daughter named Pam (Diane Moore), hiring a housekeeper to look after her while he’s at work, as his wife was murdered by a sexual psycho who chopped up the body afterwards, yet when he comes home, he plays back tape-recordings of other women who were stalked by predators, studying them for clues, completely oblivious to the fact that his daughter’s in the next room and can hear every word, not to mention he leaves smutty magazines around the house. Shot by cinematographer Joseph C. Brun, who also shot the brilliant Robert Wise film noir Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), with assistant cinematographer Michael Chapman, by the way, who ten years later would help direct Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), resembling the stylistic virtuosity of the John Cassavetes classic Shadows (1959), especially the black and white, cinéma vérité look of the street scenes, offering a time capsule look of New York City. After showing scenes of Lawrence shirtlessly working out in the gym, juxtaposed with Nora in skimpy swimming attire at the pool, WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (1965) Sal Mineo works out & swims in ... YouTube (4:24), the film does have a serious erotic obsession with the human anatomy, especially Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse, though no explicit nudity. While part of the camp style is watching the disco dancers do their thing, blacks and whites mixed together on the dance floor, gyrating to very cheesy music (they couldn’t afford real music, so they used fake rock ‘n’ roll songs composed by former Four Seasons backup singer Charlie Calello), the scene of the film takes place after hours, with Lawrence alone with Nora, who couldn’t be friendlier, showing him how to dance after he expresses a certain reservation, where the go-go dancing style at the time was representative of Shindig! (1964-66) or Hullabaloo (1965-66), where Nora is an absolute delight doing the Watusi, Who Killed Teddy Bear Dance Scene HQ - YouTube (2:21), so caught up in feeling good for a change that she doesn’t notice the sudden change in mood that comes over Lawrence, creating a lurid climax scene, where the psychological disorientation is vividly expressed in a room full of mirrors that recalls Orson Welles in THE LADY OF SHANGHAI (1947). While it’s not just trashy fun, there are some poignant as well as bewildering moments, with plenty of documentary style realism in the street locations, along with a theme song sung over the opening and closing credits by Rita Dyson that captures the smoky eroticism of the film, WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (1965) Title song / opening ... - YouTube (2:34).

Who Killed Teddy Bear? - Film Society of Lincoln Center

In a far cry from his signature role as the doe-eyed, crushed-out Plato in Rebel Without a Cause, Sal Mineo is seen to his advantage in Who Killed Teddy Bear? as a brawny busboy working at a New York discotheque. He spends his downtime as a peeping tom with a penchant for making obscene phone calls to his co-worker Norah (Juliet Prowse), who also finds admirers in the club’s tough-talking lesbian manager (Elaine Stritch) and a cop dedicated to the assiduous study of sexual deviancy (Jan Murray). Set amid the smut shops, peep shows, and porno theaters of old Times Square, Joseph Cates’s cult classic anticipates Scorsese’s Taxi Driver with its wonderfully seedy tale of obsessive desire and urban alienation.

Chicago Film Society Julian Antos

When a nightclub DJ (Juliet Prowse) receives threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, she enlists the help of detective Dave Madden (stand-up comedian and game show host Jan Murray, whose small time television personality is perfect for the role), specialist in “the sadomasochists, the voyeur masochists, the exhibitionists, the necrophiliacs,” to find the culprit. Sal Mineo, unable to avoid typecasting, is the brooding, sex-obsessed busboy who makes the calls and lives alone with his sister. A snaggly, nightmarish answer to Rebel Without a Cause, Who Killed Teddy Bear? was ahead of its time in dealing with sexual frankness, more empathetic than exploitative. Beautifully shot on location in New York by the underrated Joseph Brun (Cinerama Holiday, Wind Across the Everglades), Teddy Bear keeps its characters at arm’s length, obscured in flickery shadows and crying out for help. With Elaine Stritch in a heartbreaking turn as the nightclub manager.

CINEFILE.info Kyle Cubr

Norah (Juliet Prowse), a young twenty-something new to the city, is recently hired as a DJ at a New York nightclub. Shortly after beginning her job, she discovers that she has a stalker, who telephones her nightly to say increasingly sexual things. Her stalker is often filmed shirtless and from the neck down and solely in closeups, suggesting a kind of intimacy with Norah that could only be known by someone from her everyday life. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Madden (Jan Murray) is assigned to her case and shows a special interest in her situation due to his wife having been tragically murdered while walking home from the movies years prior. Released at a time when film censorship was loosening and the Hays Code nearly at its end, Joseph Cates’ film is able to tackle heavy subject material including both perversion and misogyny. Voyeurs, sadists, and fetishists are all examined from a lifestyle point of view as part of Madden’s investigation as well as serving as points of social commentary on the male-dominated world of the 1950s and early 60s. Women are not the only ones sexualized here; men receive their fair share of the treatment, especially Norah’s athletic co-worker, Lawrence (Sal Mineo, in a particularly striking role). Sensitive issues like sexual harassment and rape are commonplace talking points in TEDDY BEAR. It is a film unafraid to unearth the darker side of the human condition. A film full of mystery and red-herrings, WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR? is a sobering take on some of the seedier aspects of New York City and a Freudian-like exploration into the human sexual psyche.

sexploitation – Cinema Enthusiast

#12. Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965, Cates) (USA)
Hits all my check boxes for cult curios with a rare kind of verve. When it was recommended (only by one individual who I’m grateful for) while doing my 1965 research, it piqued my interest more than any other film on my to-watch list. It revels in its simple ‘Peeping Tom’ plot and is largely made up of the threat of transgression and threatening-to-boil-over sexual energy. The body is constantly eroticized; male and female alike in the forms of Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse.

The location footage captures Times Square and Manhattan as peep show haven. A place you can stroll to your crotch’s desire. All proto-Taxi Driver comparisons are apt. Mineo seethes with self-hate, both at his unquenchable thirst and an inability to separate himself from what he sees as the gutter. It’s too preoccupied with deviancy to function as an on-the-level release at the time. It’s also too much of a rehash story to be truly outre. So it lies between with its underground renegade spirit and endless streaks of art-sleaze stopping by way of kitsch.

You’ve got Sal Mineo with his chiseled bod, and a perfectly repressed performance, complete with gym workout montage! There’s Juliet Prowse whose is so engaging and gorgeous; I wish her career had steered more towards film. There’s Elaine Stritch as a lesbian discotheque manager! Three guesses what happens to her. There’s a detective obsessed with fetishists whose daughter is stuck overhearing victim’s detailed case interviews and being surrounded by smutty mags lying around the apartment. Outdated in its hilarious blanket definition of ‘perverse’ and yet progressive in its voyeuristic fixation on and acknowledgment of different types of sexuality and urges (both healthy and harmful) that society largely ignored(s).

Comes complete with an almost too-catchy title song and contains quite possibly the greatest scene in the history of film. Oh yes. I’m talking about the Sal Mineo/Juliet Prowse dancing scene. I already have such a lasting fondness for Who Killed Teddy Bear.

StinkyLulu: 5 Stinky Thoughts on Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965) - For ... February 17, 2010

Thought #1: What is Who Killed Teddy Bear?!?

Who Killed Teddy Bear? is an enthralling, often incoherent mix of cinematic high-style (a glop of Sirk, a little bit of Hitchcock, a whole lotta noir) telling a smut-tastic tale and riven with tough-on-crime, pop-Freudian riffs on all the latest perversions circa 1965. To contemporary eyes it looks a lot like an erotic thriller avant la lettre (with just enough Law and Order: SVU to make it really weird). And it's a film I've been intending to sit down with for a good while, ever since a dubiously pedigreed dvd copy came into my possession several years ago. Of course, I've long been intrigued by the film's startling cast/ing: Sal Mineo in one of his first (and most) "mature" roles playing a sweet waiter who happens to also be a sexually-confused stalker; Juliet Prowse in a rare dramatic role as a hot-to-trot deejay; and Elaine Stritch playing a glamorous, predatory lesbian. That's plenty, right? But I was also interested in the independent film's date -- 1965 -- and its being tagged an "exploitation" picture. I suspected (rightly) that Joseph Cates's Who Killed Teddy Bear? might be one of those films that happens to land right at some key boundaries -- of taste, of genre, of style, of its own historical moment -- the kind of little-ish movie that gets lost in the cracks as all those cultural boundaries shift right across it. As I watched the film, I kept thinking how this film is like a "nudist magazine" or a "sleaze novel" (print genres of adult entertainment briefly popular in the mid60s just before things got really explicit). Who Killed Teddy Bear? delivers a sexual frankness that's also curiously coy; like a nudist magazine, Teddy Bear lets it all hang out without really ever showing anything. And just as "sleaze fiction" is the filthier, raunchier but not much more explicit older cousin to "pulp," Teddy Bear is also palpably lurid while somehow avoiding anything that might cross the line into obscenity. It's the kind of film that would have been nearly unthinkable in 1960, but hopelessly old-fashioned by 1970. Yet its also a clear (and clearly American) bridge between -- oh -- Psycho and Taxi Driver. No wonder it nearly got "lost" in the cultural tumult of the cinematic sixties.

Thought #2: Pretty pretty, Sally boy, pretty pretty.

Joseph Cates's camera just loves Sal Mineo. And its clear that Sal doesn't mind being loved by Joe's camera. From the opening credits, and throughout the film, one of the more startling aspects of Who Killed Teddy Bear? emerges from the voyeuristic paradox that the film establishes. The narrative impetus of the film -- that Norah Dain (Prowse) is being stalked by a peeping tom/obscene caller-- is immediately complicated by the camera's chiaroscuro fixation on the refined musculature of the stalker's own body. In these intimately private scenes, the stalker's muscular manhood is softened by the camera's almost dewy gaze, through repeated and abstracted glimpses of this body in glorious, rich black and white. Yes, it's the body of the movie's creepy peeper, but we're the creepy peepers sitting in the movies staring at him as he touches himself in all kinds of pretty pretty ways.

As the actor in these scenes, Mineo actually does a really nice job of investing his many self-touching scenes with -- if you can believe it -- deft characterization. Mineo inhabits the scene's eroticism, but in ways that are not entirely simple, and -- as the twisted narrative unfurls -- it becomes clear that Mineo's Lawrence touches himself as he was once touched, with each self-touch reminding him of his defining trauma. It's subtle, smart, sophisticated work on Mineo's part -- if you feel inclined to look past the utter prettiness of the spectacle itself. And, boy howdy, is it pretty.

Thought #3: How 'bout that sister?

Even without the glorious spectacle of Sal weaving throughout the picture, Margo Bennett's performance as little Edie (didja catch that?) might be reason enough to rediscover this picture. The role's your standard issue "disabled relative" role. You know the one. That secondary character who's there as a device to (a) develop dimensions of the main character's humanity while (b) also anchoring the backstory of his monstrosity. In this one, Bennett's Edie is the brain-injured younger sister of Mineo's Lawrence. He's her only connection to the world, and she's his constant reminder of how damaging illicit sexuality can be. It's not much of a spoiler (see video link above) to note that the opening credits show the child Edie witnessing an adult sexual encounter and then falling down the stairs as a plaintive vocal sings "Who Killed Teddy Bear?" As best as I can figure it, the film's "moral alibi" can be discerned in this hand-wringing about the ways that increasingly overt and perverted sexuality distorts and destroys "today's" youth. Thus, little Edie's chance encounter with adult sexuality while still a child leaves her, literally, brain-damaged -- the Freudian psyche made manifest. Bennett's Edie is also frozen as a child even as her body changes to that of a young woman, a fact which agitates her devoted but ashamed older brother all the more. For her part, Bennett delivers a deliciously feral performance as this brain-injured little girl. Every moment is vivid with urgent, plausible emotion.

And the scene in which she "dresses up as a lady"? Hilarious, grotesque, heartbreaking. There's a tiny moment in which Bennett's Edie stumbles in her high heels that's shocking. Bennett's body seizes for a moment, like the character's been smacked by some unseen hand, before she recovers with a jittery pride. As little Edie, Bennett delivers a thrilling, strange performance -- one steeped in the midcentury American Method, yet rooted in an urgent emotional honesty -- and, in so doing, evinces the movie's bizarre and twisted little heart.

Thought #4: As You've Never Seen Them.

Were it not for its queer cult stars -- Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Elaine Stritch -- I suspect this movie would have really been lost down the rabbit hole of cultural memory. But, thankfully, the best fans are quite skilled at following the footnotes to unearth the lost gems in their beloved icon's crown. And it is fun to see each of these legends strut their stuff and stretch their range. In those moments when Cates pauses his camera to frame Prowse carefully, her oddly insect-like features develop a stunning beauty. (Unfortunately, Cates's camera is much less interested in Prowse than it is in Mineo and most of her scenes become flat with tv-drama blandness.) Mineo, on the other hand, doesn't wait for the camera to find him before he fills it with his particular bizarre intensity, always pensive and impassioned simultaneously.

Like Prowse, Mineo's distinctive features are capable of shifting almost imperceptibly from the beautiful to the bizarre yet Mineo somehow marshals this in service of the character, shifting from tenderness to terror with a simple shift of his jaw. He's an amazing actor to watch -- not always "good" but always interesting. And then there's Stritch.

In the role of the Lady Lesbian Marian, Stritch delivers perfect Stritch. A hard-working, hard-drinking dame who takes good care of her hunky deaf/dumb bodyguard. All acid tongue and tart timing barely concealing a devastating vulnerability. It's a compassionate, humane performance in a role that could have become easily noxious. (Of course, the fact that Stritch's Marian receives the film's most brutal treatment does legitimately lodge it appropriately on those lists of "smear the queer" films from this era.) Stritch's performance is really quite interesting for its intelligent and even empathetic handling of the character, one which she's talked about recently. Her choices are clean, clear and elevating -- once again demonstrating the woman's chops as an actor (even in the unforgiving close-up of low-budget film).

Thought #5: Who Cares Who Killed Teddy Bear?

I remain entranced by Teddy Bear as a "queer" film. Not only in the sense that it is a film that deals frankly with sexually outré situations and characters, but also as a film that doesn't fit simply within easy categories of genre, period or style. As a document, the film holds historical interest. The captures of 1960s NYC are thrilling (both Prowse and Mineo hold the center of separately exhilarating extended sequences in which the camera follows them verité style as they each do "their thing" -- auditioning and horndogging, respectively -- in Times Square). The film also provides an incredible document of Sal Mineo's curious but haunting screen charisma. But even more than its status as a cultural document, I find the film remarkable on formal and thematic levels as well. Cates's neo-documentary depiction of Mineo's forays into the city's underbelly seems to anticipate (if not inform) similar sequences in subsequent works by Mike Nichols (1968's The Graduate & 1971's Carnal Knowledge), Francis Ford Coppola (1966's You're a Big Boy Now) and Martin Scorsese (1975's Taxi Driver). Likewise, the nearly incoherent blend of noir, Freudianism and Sirkian mise-en-scene in a semi-explicit erotic thriller seems to also anticipate the entire ouevre of Brian DePalma. I'm not saying it's as "good" as any of those other films but seeing this film helped me to understand those other, more established films in a richer, deeper way. Finally, I have to say that -- though I don't have any proof for this -- amidst the film's mix of the highbrow and lowbrow, the swirl of camp pleasures alongside tentatively erotic ones, I'm left wondering if this film was made "for" -- or at least with an alertness to -- a gay urban audience at a moment when "coded" depictions of cinematic queerness were beginning to give way to more overt depictions. That might be part of the reason this flick is routinely classified as "exploitation" but I can't shake the feeling that there's something important in the fact this film seems to have been built to be seen by queer eyes.

who killed teddy bear? 1965 - dreams are what le cinema is for... Ken Anderson

Cinema de Merde [Scott Telek]

Who Killed Teddy Bear? - DVD Compare Paul Lewis

Who Killed Teddy Bear | DVD Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Cinedelica: DVD Review: Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965)

Who Killed Teddy Bear? 1965 Monster Girl from The Last Drive-In

The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz

'Who Killed Teddy Bear' review by Catherine Stebbins • Letterboxd

Movie Magazine International Monica Sullivan

VideoVista Ian Sales

SAL MINEO ~ LIVE FAST, DIE YOUNG | HOUSE OF RETRO

'Who Killed Teddy Bear' Movie Review: Sal Mineo - Alt Film Guide Danny Fortune

Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965) - Joseph Cates - RoweReviews

Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965) James Marshall from The Hound Blog, October 24, 2009

The Tragically Short Life of Sal Mineo, Hollywood's Mediterranean ... The Tragically Short Life of Sal Mineo, Hollywood’s Mediterranean Teen Demigod, by Rob Blauwhuis from Gay News, December 25, 2016

Brooklyn Magazine: Michael Koresky April 27, 2016, also seen here: BK Mag [Tanner Tafelski]

Who Killed Teddy Bear, A Fascinating Chronicle of Wagner-era Times ... Melisa Anderson interviews actress Elaine Stritch, Village Voice, January 19, 2010

Who Killed Teddy Bear - Film4

Who Killed Teddy Bear - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide ...

DVD review: Who Killed Teddy Bear? | Film | The Guardian Phelim O’Neill

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Stack

DVDBeaver [Gregory Meshman]

Who Killed Teddy Bear - Wikipedia

Caton-Jones, Michael

ROB ROY

USA (139 mi) 1995 ‘Scope

Time Out review Geoff Andrews

The Scottish Highlands, 1713. Clan-leader Rob Roy MacGregor (Neeson) asks the Marquis of Montrose (Hurt) for a loan. The aloof Machiavellian hesitantly agrees; but Rob hasn't bargained for the laird's house-guest, the foppish wastrel Cunningham (Roth), who together with Montrose's scheming factor (Cox) steals the money, killing Rob's friend Alan (Stoltz) in the process. The scene is set for deadly enmity between Rob and Montrose. As scripted by Alan Sharp and directed by Caton-Jones, this stirring historical drama is less swashbuckler than transposed Western, with a feel for landscape, intrigue, romance and questions of honour reminiscent of Mann's Last of the Mohicans. Neeson makes a less dashing action hero than did Day-Lewis, but he brings enough gravitas to his role to endow his love for his wife Mary (Lange) and his conflict with Cunningham with real emotional punch. Still better are Lange, Hurt, Cox and, notably, Roth, whose final duel with Neeson is a tour de force. While the film's chief virtue is the mythic clarity, Sharp's script, which shifts easily between the fruity innuendo of the aristos and the more demotic colloquialisms of the clansmen, never soft-pedals the historical and political context.

eFilmCritic.com (Natasha Theobald) review [2/5]

"Sudsy enough for Lifetime: Television for Women"

If this film is a book, Fabio is on the cover.

Tim Roth is the only reason to see this movie. He is deliciously malicious as a bad guy you love to loathe. In fact, he brings so much energy to the procedings, you start to wish bad things upon perfectly wonderful, if not a little boring, people just so he'll show up.

The story centers upon honorable man, Rob Roy Macgregor. It is to him that people look for protection and guidance, succor and sustenance. In fact, he feels so responsible for the welfare of others, he puts his land against a note from a nobleman in an effort to start his own business, as it were, buying and selling livestock of some sort. But, the nobleman's money man plots to steal said amount with Tim Roth's wealthy-seeming yet woefully penniless rogue. The nobleman is willing to forgive the debt if Rob will help him to sully the name of another nobleman, but Rob will not oblige. Can a man remain moral in an immoral world? This movie is not to be bothered with such questions.

Because of his choice to stand his ground, Rob and those closest to him suffer great losses, particularly his wife. She, strong and long-suffering, has tried to get him to see the gray of things, but he will not be moved. And, even with all that happens to her, she repeats to him the same words of wisdom he, just by chance, sought to share with his sons before all of this happened, that honor is a gift a man gives himself. As you may suspect, revenge also is something Rob would like to see wrapped with a bow. Murder, I guess, is honorable in his world if it can be justified.

The ins and outs are pretty much as you might expect. There are few surprises, save the aforementioned performance of Tim Roth. He doesn't have an imperfect moment in the whole affair, and I'm glad to have seen him glory in it.

So, this is for Tim Roth fans or those looking for a bodice-ripping, revenge fantasy. The eye-rolling implausibility starts about halfway through the film, but, if you stick with it, you'll get to see Rob gut an animal so that he can hide in the carcass. Good stuff.

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]

Rob MacGregor strides through the laird's ornamental garden, like Gulliver amongst the Lilliputians, with the Marquis of Montrose (John Hurt), his factor Killearn (Brian Cox) and the effete swordslinger Cunningham (Tim Roth). It would be farcical if these little men did not hold sway over MacGregor's fate.

Liam Neeson carries his height with grace. What he gains in stature, he loses in speech. The ruling classes have all the best lines. Montrose is portrayed as an acerbic wit, ruthless with money and tempered by the English court's fashion for foppery.

Cunningham, his hired sword, beds a serving wench - "You think I'm a gentleman because I have linen and can manage a lisp." He's an impoverished aristo, who considers rape an afternoon's sport and murder a pleasurable pastime.

Roth is hardly the ideal choice for such a fearsome enemy, uncomfortably camp besides Cox's superb Killearn, Andrew Kerr's noble Argyll and Jessica Lange's indomitable Mrs MacGregor. If Neeson wasn't such a strong, vulnerable actor, with an inner sense of his own limitations, the dandy would have danced away with the movie.

As it is, Roth's affectation becomes a victim of Neeson's honesty. Rob borrows a thousand pounds from Montrose to buy cows. The money is stolen. Montrose demands retribution, sending Cunningham and the redcoats in pursuit, as Rob heads for the hills.

This could easily have been a romp - Rob Roy: Prince Of Reivers - but is saved by Alan Sharp's bawdy, bramble-scratched script and fine acting from a multinational cast. Michael Caton-Jones, the Scots-born director, is not afraid of tackling a national hero in the Stevenson tradition. Energy, enjoyment and a refusal to be bothered by purist sensibilities make this a rollocking good adventure.

He avoids beauty spots in favour of untrodden glens. No one seems to be wearing enough clothes - the weather is filthy in Scotland - and there isn't a midge in sight. At times, the editing appears crude, not that it affects the fierceness of these wild places. The final scene is breathtakingly banal, which, in anyone else's hands, would have been pastiche.

Lange gives the film class, Neeson gives it passion, Roth gives it flair, Cox gives it body. After a shaky start, in which David Hayman does an impersonation of a caveman and folk band Capercaillie washes the soundtrack in mulled Gaelic balladry, Sharp unsheathes his language and Caton-Jones grasps the nettle. Despite soapbox Rob ("All men with honour are kings, but not all kings have honour") and cutthroat cynicism from Cunningham ("Love is a dunghill and I am but a cock that climbs upon it to crow"), this is exhilarating entertainment.

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Liam Neeson cuts quite a swath—aye, and makes a fashion statement, too—in "Rob Roy," a humorless history of the 18th-century swashbuckler's feud with the Marquise of Montrose (John Hurt). As the dour chief of a declining clan, Robert Roy MacGregor has little left but his honor and his noble lineage, which he stubbornly guards, nae matter the cost to his kith and kin.

Writer Alan Sharp gets so caught up in the legend and the lush language that he doesn't seem to know he's written "Death Wish" in kilts. There's also something of "Rambo" in Rob Roy's cheap butch conventions—grabbing the wrong end of a rapier, wearing fetishistic leather garb and sporting a photogenic array of wounds. Even back then, guys in skirts had more to prove than their panted counterparts.

Never mind that they were a bunch of dandified prisspots. RR's nemesis, Cunningham (Tim Roth), is the uber dandy, a limp-wristed fop whose absurd gestures disguise his sociopathic tendencies. Cunningham and the marquise's repellent henchman, Killearn (Brian Cox), are behind all the hero's troubles with Montrose, formerly MacGregor's employer.

The hero's problems begin after Cunningham and Killearn bushwhack his lieutenant, who has been entrusted with fetching a 1,000-pound loan from Montrose and bringing it back to the clan's village. When RR can't repay the loan, Montrose puts Cunningham in charge of hunting him down. To lure the hero out of hiding, Cunningham kills his cows, burns his land and rapes his wife, Mary (Jessica Lange). The last is considered an assault on RR's honor.

Somebody call Monty MacPython!

Skirmishes and swordplay ensue as RR abandons his people to Montrose's troops and sets out to settle the score. Not that he was ever much of a leader or a provider for the poor souls. Maybe the MacGregors were dying out with good reason. Frankly, Rob Roy is about as bright as one of his cows. He doesn't even recognize that his obsession with honor will lead to the destruction of his clan.

Director Michael Caton-Jones and Sharp, both Scotsmen, are so caught up in the legend that they don't seem to notice that RR is about as heroic as a hatful of haggis. Like Charles Bronson, RR has no greater cause than vengeance. Not king, not God, not country. He just doesn't want to be dissed.

Neeson, otherwise relentlessly solemn here, does make convincing love to Lange, who could make a bagpipe play "Love in Bloom." The villains, played with glee, manage to perk up the glacial pace, but they too grow tiresome. It's hard to feel bad when they all get kilt.

ROB ROY Man in the Middle, by Brian Woolland from Jump Cut, July 2000

Scott Renshaw review [8/10]

Tucson Weekly (Zachary Woodruff) review

Edwin Jahiel review

Pedro Sena retrospective [4/5]

Macresarf1's Epinion Review of ROB ROY.

George Chabot's Review of Rob Roy

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A-]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [1.5/5]

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Austin Chronicle (Hollis Chacona) review [2/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

Cattet, Hélène and Bruno Forzani

AMER C 70

Belgium France (90 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

This is a style-over-substance horror film, where the focus of attention is on a single character beginning as a young girl, where her hyperactive imagination continues to get the better of her, where much like REPULSION (1965), we see the world as she perceives it, complete with all the built-in anxieties and fears, where for most of the film, which continues through teenage and adulthood, it actually exists in the world of the imagination which blends seamlessly into real life, using camp retro music to add occasional tongue-in-cheek humor. This does give the director team a chance to exhibit their considerable skills behind the camera, as they obviously relish what they’re doing. But most assuredly, despite the artful high-grade, glossy coating, this film is not for everyone, as evidenced by plenty of walkouts throughout the journey. While this is entirely a genre film, exploring the various ways to terrorize and scare the living bejesus out of a living victim, where she seems to be doing a pretty good job of it all on her own, there’s barely any dialogue and not a hint of character development, which makes this more of an exercise than a film with any complexity or depth.

Nonetheless, the film has a visually startling Tarantino-esque quality to it, even if it seems like a cross between the exaggerated, overly serious style of Sergio Leone films and an uninhibited, sexually exploitive perfume commercial. What distinguishes this film is its air of artfulness, as the production design is among the best, but the film falls short in having any emotional connection or meaningful relevance in anyone’s life, deteriorating into a visualized hell that exists for its own sake, as the tension in the early sequences are all but forgotten by the finale, where any evidence of suspense has completely evaporated. However, because it has such a stylishly appealing look, it’s bound to at least initially catch anyone’s eye, that is until they see what the directors are up to, which is instantly obvious. The child torment sequences with actress Cassandra Forêt as Ana have an unsettling PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006) feel to them, as she is constantly besieged by demons both living and dead, among which include her constantly berating mother who would just as soon get rid of her and throw her out of the house, calling her a witch, but most all of this seems to exist in her mind.

Yet with a sound design that accentuates every creaking door, water drip, and eerie unexplained sound that seems to come from the dead, Ana is besieged by what lies under the bed and behind closed doors, constantly suggestive of lurking shadows behind the enormity of empty space to fill in a huge mansion that appears to be haunted. As a sexually provocative teenager (Charlotte Eugène-Guibeaud), Ana is shown in slow mo as she prances in front of a group of bikers, where close ups of the biker’s eyes and Ana’s short hemline are intermixed with near frantic regularity, where the film itself, again very much tongue-in-cheek, exploits the exploitive genre. Perhaps the weakest yet most grotesque element is reserved for Ana in adulthood (Marie Bos), most likely because of how macabre and demented her fears have become, turning into a full-fledged splatter film with the help of the always available switchblade, followed by scenes for the budding necrophiliac. This film panders to the voyeuristic element by providing ever more uncomfortable imagery, but to its credit, it doesn’t hold back and aggressively persists in going full throttle. While this may be a dismal exercise to endure for some, there is ample evidence to suggest others will be more than just a little bit titillated by the highly exaggerated sense of self-indulgence.

Visit our Blog for reviews of individual films Doug McLaren from Cine-File

The psychosexual development of a young female, Ana, is explored with minimal dialogue in three episodes, tracking childhood, adolescence, and womanhood. The first (and best) episode takes its stylistic cues from Dario Argento, complete with a Goblin-esque soundtrack during the movie’s opening credits. Primary-color lighting and extreme close-ups hint at what a children’s horror movie made by Argento would look like, and this episode pins it down quite nicely. A terrified child’s interpretation of the mystical phenomenon of a grandparent’s death and his subsequent viewing are perfect for a kid’s version of giallo. Unfortunately, the rest of the film does not hold up to the first half hour, once it abandons its SUSPIRA aping (It returns at the end to lesser effect.), and is often dragged down by repeated shots of erect nipples under sundresses and panties flashed by a breeze. It’s an unfortunately masculine interpretation of female sexuality, rivaling only BLACK SWAN in its absurdly faux-feminist approach. Still, this first section stands so strongly it is worth sitting through (or, gasp!, walking out on!) the later portions of the movie. (2009, 90 min, DigiBeta)

Amer – review | Film | The Observer Philip French

The lurid Italian horror movies of the 1970s were called giallo (yellow) after the colour of the covers in which the original books appeared in the 1930s, and this Franco-Belgian homage to them invites, indeed compels, the viewer's participation. It unfolds in three chapters over some 30 years at a grand mansion on a cliff overlooking the Côte d'Azur. In the first part, the young Ana is terrified by the family's witch-like housekeeper, is fascinated by the corpse of her grandfather (from whose deathly clutches she wrenches a watch) and sees her parents having sex.

In the second chapter, the adolescent Ana leaves the house to accompany her sexually competitive mother to the hairdresser and is drawn, to her mother's horror, towards a motorcycle gang. In the final, most compelling episode, the grown-up Ana returns to the empty, decaying house where her sexual fantasies merge with reality in a violent, bloody, ambiguous conclusion.

This is basic movie Freud, elegantly mounted. The soundtrack (footsteps, dripping taps, creaking doors, banging shutters) is ominously exaggerated. The close-ups are extreme. Colours change melodramatically to fit the shifting moods. The music is borrowed from old horror films. The dialogue is at first sparse, then non-existent. Luis Buñuel (sliced eyeballs, insects crawling out of bodies), Mario Bava and Dario Argento are affectionately alluded to. Viewers are left to create their own narratives or absorb the events into their own dreams and nightmares. This is art-house horror, a pure cinema for connoisseurs, a return to late-19th-century decadence.

Amer Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London David Jenkins

It’s been argued that this frightening and erotic piece of experimental montage from Belgian directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani is all form and no feeling. It’s easy to see why, since its most easy pleasures derive from a cool juxtaposition and stylisation of sound and imagery. But there’s more to it: the film also functions as a knowing, lightly feminist homage to Hitchcock and the chief exponents of the Giallo genre, Dario Argento and Mario Bava. As such, its ‘meanings’ may not be instantly traceable through a cosy linear storyline or densely wrought characterisations.

In immaculate detail and with barely any dialogue, the film depicts three symbolic events in the life of Ana: the first involves a family death and some mid-coitus voyeurism; another shows her first experience of male attraction; and the final, most impressive chapter (a wholesale updating of a key segment from Argento’s ‘Deep Red’) sees our heroine (played by Marie Bos, pictured above) sneaking around an eerie, European mansion, maybe stalked by a razor-wielding maniac.

Cattet and Forzani sculpt with pure mood. They deliver a vivid sense of Ana’s heightened sensitivity towards her surroundings via an array of bravura camera tricks and fine edits. The best way to describe it would be to imagine the shower scene in ‘Psycho’ played over feature length. A large part is shot in extreme close-up, mostly of Ana’s eyes or the silhouette of her crotch underneath a billowy cotton summer dress.

This technique imbues the film with a rich sense of texture, such as in an early scene where Ana runs her fingers over the cracking, mottled skin of (what appears to be) the corpse of an old man, or later when she’s riding in a taxi and the heat makes the leather trim too hot to touch. Some may find the film a mite academic in its glassy deconstruction of genre convention, and it’s perhaps asking a bit much to read it as anything more than a claustrophobic portrait of sexual danger, but it still fulfils that highly specific brief with blood-splashed gusto.

Cinema Crazed [Felix Vasquez Jr.]

Visually and viscerally, "Amer" is a film that is a throwback to the classic Giallo thrillers, but deep down it is much more of an academic breakdown of the Giallo sub-genre and not so much a straight forward giallo film. True it has shades of the visual flourishes with uses of color and specific dashes of sharp editing that suck us in to the narrative, all the while invoking memories of "Suspiria" and "Tenebre" upon which both directors call on to create something of an evocative sexual thriller, in the end. "Amer" is admittedly an exhausting film and that counts as a criticism and a recommendation. While I'm never one to pigeon hole a film, "Amer" is strictly for the film buffs who are more prone to de-constructing genres than sitting through a film that is adhering to genre trappings. With only ten percent dialogue, "Amer" is strictly a movie based around sound, and color, and one that keeps audiences motivated through its thick pastels and unforgiving solid representations of moods through bold hues of red and blues expressing emotions and sexuality as a threat and a seduction.

"Amer" is a French born giallo that portrays in three acts the evolution of a young girl through sexual exploration and a looming evil, both of which are connected through periods of her life and constantly threaten to end her existence. Always on the brink of giving in to her unbridled lust, Ana is a girl who has seen evil and sexual thrills in her youth coming face to face with death and a wicked evil embodied in a laced figured and a dead body, both of which inspire her to seek out the darkness and also maintain it within her.

This is shown through her escapades venturing in to the wilderness of the world that is filled with numerous threats including dangerous bikers, stalkers in the woods and enigmatic taxi drivers, all of whom pose a threat and a form of enticement for the young woman who continues narrowly avoiding this evil at every turn. Directors Cattet and Forzani's film is visually amazing and one that will either annoy audiences or enthrall them as it more often revels in being a practice in giallo methodology and sexual symbology than it does in posing as a horror film with a routine killer. Marked with an excellent score hearkening back to Argento and Fulci, the story is kept on a constant tense pacing and framing that will grab audiences and force their emotions to the surface through stunning sweeps of French landscape and riveting close-ups that define this as a notch above a typical horror film. in the end, "Amer" works more as a moving piece of art than a typical horror thriller, and it's a look at a woman fighting sexuality and being faced with giving in to it and its dark trappings.

Anyone looking for a bonafide giallo movie with grue and thrills will find "Amer" to be quite polarizing as it is mostly an experiment in the devices and moods of the classic giallo than an actual one in the surface. Nevertheless, this French erotic thriller is a marvelous work of moving art, and one I suggest for film students and cineastes alike.

BrutalAsHell.com [Kayley Viteo]

First, I’d like to preface this review by noting that I don’t really consider Amer to be a horror film, but more of an erotic thriller/art film. However, what you go into this movie expecting is decidedly not what you get, which only adds to the intriguing and overall captivating nature of the film. The problem is, the film comes off as too experimental and while lovingly crafted, you can’t really love a film where the different parts of it don’t connect seamlessly.

The premise of Amer is simple. It is a detailed look at sensuality and desire at three points in the life of a woman, Ana. It is broken up into three parts, one with Ana as a young girl, another in her teens, and later as a young adult. Amer, the French word for “bitter” (which may tell you a little more about how this film is constructed) is essentially a dark portrait of when moments in your life – especially as a child – can mark you in both positive and negative ways. For Ana, the result is decidedly macabre and not at all clear.

To introduce the film, the two filmmakers had a video play before the screening that asserted how the film was meant to be viewed – with audience members as the eyes and the ears of the lead character. I believe this is probably the most important thing to understand about the film, as Amer is extremely image heavy, with little to no dialogue, and does not present a clear narrative. Much like Ana, we are lost in the seemingly random images and sounds, forcing us to walk her same confusing path.

Amer is every inch an homage to Dario Argento, particularly in the first chapter where the use of color is amazing. What works is the general creepiness that seems to invade every movement of the character. There are some wonderfully simple shots here that are so realistic and definitely play off that theme we can all identify with: what you want when you’re a child is not necessarily the best thing for you. Looking through that keyhole or opening the door you were previously told not to just might force you to realize a world that is harmful in ways you can’t even understand yet.

Still, as much I enjoyed the individual pieces of Amer, it is a challenging film to watch. It feels more like someone stuck inspiration from Bava, Argento, and Italian Giallo films and mixed in a blender than like a feature – you get the sense that it would have worked far better as a long short film or perhaps a series of shorts. The supernatural and horror elements of the first section don’t match what I see in the rest of the film, which makes the ending feel almost tacked on or at the very least, clunky. It is a film that essentially starts out horror, but ends up somewhere else and it is like the bookends do not match when they are supposed to.

Amer is enjoyable on an experimental level and should certainly be viewed in a theater if you get the chance, but it does not work on any sort of visceral level for me. While I enjoyed each separate section of the film for different reasons, overall everything feels too mismatched for me to make a real connection to the lead character. For this type of film, where you are literally supposed to be a part of the character, that connection is a vital piece missing and for that reason, I can’t say I’m a fan of it.

Cult Reviews Vomitron

BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge

REVIEW: Giallo Homage Amer Is a Slice of Cruel Beauty | Movieline Stephanie Zacharek from Movieline

Horrorview.com [Black Gloves] UK Blu-ray

CiNEZiLLA [Jason Meredith]

The Blood Sprayer [Jeff Konopka]

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

Chuck Norris Ate My Baby [Matt House]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

Bloody Disgusting Horror - "Amer (limited)" Movie Info, Review ... Michael Panduro from Bloody Disgusting

Cinetalk [Katherine McLaughlin]

Rich On Film [Richard Haridy]

eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

filmsoundoff [alex roberts]

EatSleepLiveFilm [Jordan McGrath]

Eatsleeplivefilm.com [Ian Loring]

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

Movie Talk [Peter Fuller]

Arrow in the Head John Fallon

Little White Lies Magazine [Martyn Conterio]

The Reelists [Cailtin Murphy]

Popdose [Robert Cashill]

Blueprint: Review [David Brook]

Sky.com [Rob Daniel]

Devon & Cornwall Film [Tom Leins]

The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]

Film 365 (Blu-ray) David Beckett

Interview: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, Writer/Directors of Amer Gerard Elson interview from the Celluloid Tongue, June 17, 2010, also seen here: Desktop Magazine

Amer - review | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks

Amer Movie - Movie review: 'Amer' - Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden, also see: Two Sides of 'Amer'

Caumon, Yves

BOYHOOD LOVES (Amour d’enfance) A- 94

France (102 mi) 2001

Another real surprise, a hauntingly beautiful film that features surprisingly little dialogue, but features instead excruciatingly beautiful landscape images matched by some very fragile and intricately developed scenes. A college student returns to his rural home due to the terminal illness of his father, and while at first, he is obviously out of place, almost in a different time dimension, he slowly changes his pace to blend into a world where those living in it seem to have very little use for that style of living any more. There is a clash of cultures.

The film explores the uncomfortable nature of the various relationships with family and friends, past and present, to the rural life they are living, and how the hopes and dreams so easily change from moment to moment, like the changes in light on a hillside, so what appears to be certain at one moment is not at all certain in the next. Lauryl Brossier plays the younger sister of his former girl friend, and she is a delight throughout, her charm and her wonderful ability to adapt to her surroundings invites all of us to take another look here at a world that is all but vanishing before our very eyes. This film is a somber meditation on the immense beauty of nature, and how small and puny man must seem through nature’s eyes, how our inner world is so weak and confused, twisted by our own tension and unease, and how perfect the world around us is, if we could only see. I was reminded by the complex observations of Jean Eustache’s MES PETITES AMOUREUSES or the haunting imagery in HUMANITY, or the inner family complexity of 5 EASY PIECES, also the multiple views through windows that represent the wonderful world outside that was featured so elegantly in RATCATCHER.

Caunes, Antoine de

MONSIEUR N. C 76

France (127 mi) 2003

Just what we need, another long, drawn out historical costume drama speculating on what happened to Napoleon once he was exiled to the Atlantic Ocean island of St Helena while jailed under the British rule. Shot in South Africa, impressively shot in a very sharp, precise focus, the film depicts the color and graphic beauty of the landscapes, especially set against the bright red uniforms of the British soldiers. This film just gives the French another opportunity to tweak the noses of the British, who are, of course, ridiculed for their stiff manner and myopic sensibility, believing Napoleon was always devising ways to escape, so they attempted to make that impossible, but were always outflanked by the eccentric imagination of this military mind. Apparently, Napoleon continued to have supporters worldwide and was previously exiled to the island of Elba off the coast of Italy, but escaped only to lead another uprising and was eventually defeated by the British at Waterloo, losing some 60,000 soldiers, which led to his second, more secluded and geographically isolated confinement, sort of a 19th century version of Guantanamo prison guarded by warships and 3000 British troops. However, his officers and inner circle voluntarily follow him into exile while continuing to maintain military conduct as well as a surprisingly lavish lifestyle. Other than the first rate photography, I found this film unmistakably tedious, as it actually turns into a whodunit, as various theories are offered as to what might have happened, from the British trying to poison him to Napoleon using a body double to feign his own death while he secretly left the island in disguise. The film backtracks between his last few years of confinement and the time shortly after his death, when his body was returned to France with great fanfare, using an English-language, British officer voice over narration to explain it all.

Cavalier, Alain

IRÈNE

France (85 mi) 2009

Irène Jonathan Romney at Cannes

French New Wave cinema was founded on the idea of the camera as a pen, through which film-makers could channel their perceptions directly onto the screen. This concept has rarely been born out so thoroughly as in the recent work of veteran director Alain Cavalier. Using minimal resources, Irène is an example of pure first-person film-making. All we get is one man, his camera, a few places and objects – and Cavalier’s memories and thoughts, brought to the screen with intense but restrained intimacy.

The film – a memorial to the director’s wife, who died after a car accident in 1972 – is a spare but moving work, and while commercial prospects will be limited, Irène will be appreciated by the type of buyers who in recent years might have taken a chance on similar DV minimalist enterprises by Abbas Kiarostami and Agnès Varda.

The film takes the form of a first-person discourse in which Cavalier contemplates his marriage, Irène’s death and its repercussions, both short- and long-term. After the death of Cavalier’s mother, the film-maker unearths his diaries from the early 70s. Reading them, he muses on his former callow self, then starts to unravel the complexities of his marriage – touching on such thorny topics as his late wife’s gynaecological problems, their disputes and their sex life. He visits various places that were important in the couple’s life, and wonders how best to evoke Irene’s presence on screen, briefly contemplating using actress Sophie Marceau, for whom he admits to having a secret passion.

All this is conveyed in near-continuous voice-over that sounds sometimes pre-scripted, more often improvised, and always – so far as one can tell – recorded directly by Cavalier while he films, giving the film a remarkable immediacy, sometimes startlingly so. At one point, the image is interrupted as Cavalier has a sudden fall while filming in the Metro: he then cuts to his own bruised hands and his face, seen in a mirror. Cavalier never seeks to make himself likeable: he is quite simply a thinking, feeling presence, almost at one with his camera. When the 78-year-old director appears, it is to reveal himself in all his vulnerability, even down to shots of his gout-swollen feet.

Ultimately, the film is interested more in conveying thought than in producing pictures: hence the deliberately rough, anti-poetic quality of Cavalier’s images. This director requires remarkably few resources, sometimes just the odd object on a table – a lamp, his diaries, or a watermelon and an egg, which he uses to evoke the circumstances of his own birth.

Such film-making can easily come across as narcissistic. That’s not the case with Cavalier, whose work echoes a French literary tradition of soul-searching that goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As a film-maker, Cavalier’s closest affinities are with the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and latter-day Agnès Varda, as well as some of the spare recent works (eg. Five) of Abbas Kiarostami. Irène doesn’t aim for easy catharsis, and doesn’t have the feelgood payoff of Varda’s recent memoir The Beaches of Agnes, but it makes the viewer feel rather privileged to be so confided in.

Cannes. "Irène" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 24, 2009

Rob Nelson at Cannes from Variety, May 18, 2009

Cannes #8: Oh, the days dwindle down, to a precious few... Roger Ebert at Cannes, May 22, 2009

PATER

France (105 mi) 2011

Bemusement Nick James from Sight and Sound, May 18, 2011

It happens every year: at least one film from France is in competition that the domestic audience seems to adore but which leaves us foreign journalists, almost without exception, utterly nonplussed as to why it was selected.

This year’s puzzle is Pater (France), the latest relaxed, personal, made-at-home film from the usually estimable Alain Cavalier. The director is best known for movingly personal lo-fi work of immense intelligence – for instance Irene, his tribute to his late wife, a moving poetic search for fragments of memory typical of his inventiveness which screened here in Un Certain Regard two years ago.

But what are we to make of Pater? It’s made up from a series of conversations between Cavalier and actor Vincent Lindon in which the director proposes that he is the President of France standing for re-election and that Lindon is the Prime Minister who wants his job. Lindon grabs the attention at first by insisting that the first thing he will do is slash the pay of top bosses.

Laudable stuff, you might think, but in its ‘let’s pretend’ self-reflexive mode the film soon degenerates into mid-scene giggling, and a lot of preening about appearance that’s probably aimed at Sarkozy but isn’t funny (and the cosmetic-surgical removal of Cavalier’s dewlap seems real). Pater is no doubt littered with French political in-jokes, but there could hardly be a more parochial exercise in insider filmmaking. So why put it in the Competition?

Cannes 2011: Pater/Hanezu – review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2011

For me, in the oddest way, Cannes 2011 has made history. In the 13 years I have been coming here, the festival has always been a closed world. No one is interested in anything but the movies. I have never seen any delegate reading the newspapers, just the trade press published here in special festival editions.

This year, that changed. There is one fascinating, appalling non-cinema subject that people have been talking about endlessly. This came home to me when I saw a knot of people gathered saucer-eyed around one of the TVs positioned around the Festival Palais. Generally, these show Cannes press conferences or the rolling chatshow on the festival's dedicated channel. Not this time. The TVs were showing live coverage of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the 62-year-old IMF chief and French socialist presidential candidate who has been charged in New York with the attempted rape of a hotel maid.

The line taken generally is that Strauss-Kahn is innocent until proven guilty, but also an uneasy sense that this sort of legal sensation could never have happened in France, where attitudes to sexual politics and powerful men are quite different.

The case gave an interesting flavour to Alain Cavalier's Pater, which satirises the patriarchal system of political power, and power generally, in France. The film, which is showing in competition, is a stripped-down, low-budget two-hander, shot on high-definition video – the sort of piece that might work as well, or better, as a stage play. Cavalier plays a version of himself, starting work on a movie in which he will play the president of the republic. Rugged French star Vincent Lindon also plays a version of himself, getting ready to play a politician who will be prime minister.

The two men have a close, almost father-son bond: their bantering conversations sketch out both their fictional and actual relationships. The older character is keenly, almost resentfully aware that this man may supplant him, and run for president himself. This conflict runs in parallel with Cavalier's feeling that the younger generation, represented by Lindon, is going to ease him out of the spotlight.

It is a very verbose film – yet with interesting things to say. These men, with their distinguished white or receding hair and their expensive dark suits, are the law in France. Perhaps they and their self-satisfied sort are the law all over the world. They are endlessly tolerant of each other's peccadillos; they are addicted to their own importance; and they adore promoting the spectacle of this importance. Movies and movie celebrity are akin to this.

Pater Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily, May 18, 2011

Pater is arguably the ultimate two-people-in-a room film - and so is only partly as departure for veteran experimentalist Alain Cavalier, who over the last few years has proved himself France’s master of the one-main-in-a-room film. In recent work - including 2009’s superb memoir Irène, about a former partner - Cavalier has used video and strictly restricted resources to create intimate, highly crafted, seemingly off-the-cuff personal essays that are the very definition of the 100% authored cinema dreamed of by the precursors of the Nouvelle Vague.

Cavalier varies his approach in Pater, in which he joins with popular actor Vincent Lindon in a sometimes comic double act that could be described variously as improvised acting exercise, political satire, quasi-documentary experiment and folie à deux. Occasionally droll and engaging, this often opaque venture ultimately disappears up its own meta-cinematic derrière, and is unlikely to appeal outside a hardcore coterie of Francophile lovers of experiment. Commercial prospects are negligible.

The film is shot on DV cameras, sometimes actually wielded on camera by either Lindon or Cavalier, or both simultaneously, at a number of locations, including the homes of both men (Lindon has a large walk-in closet that provides the only concession to spectacle). Pater begins with a lunch of canapés prepared in close-up, and Cavalier and Lindon discussing the video project they’re embarking on.

It will involve the wearing of suits and ties, which - Cavalier points out - will come out of the production budget rather than the men’s own pockets. The first in a series of role-playing exercises reveals the basic scenario: Cavalier will play the President of the Republic and Lindon his newly appointed as Prime Minister. They discuss their plans for several radical new laws, proposing for example that any elected official who steals as much as one euro from any citizen will incur maximum penalties. They then decide to pass a bill stipulating that, if there’s such a thing as a minimum wage, then there should be a maximum one too.

The film follows the two politicians’ relationship, through the rise of Lindon (or ‘Lindon’, if we’re to see him as a fictional character), through the suggestion that he might one day be President himself, through to his eventual sacking. In between, the two politicians, and/or the men who play them, swap improvised banter with a group of other actors and act out scenes from an imaginary political life: Lindon visits a bakery and listens to a barfly dispensing misogynistic repartee, and Cavalier gazes at himself in the mirror after having (genuinely, it appears) undergone cosmetic surgery to reduce his sagging dewlaps.

A seemingly free-associative structure, with Lindon’s political ‘career’ as the coherent thread, yields some lively moments: in particular, Lindon, playing up his rough-diamond charm, fulminates tetchily off the top of his head. The odd moment of outright surrealism - such as the discovery of a car spiked with pickaxes - pushes the project into the realm of video art rather than auteur cinema in the familiar sense.

Beyond the political themes, other preoccupations are (as the title suggests) the quasi-oedipal tension between the elder-statesman ‘father’ and the chosen ‘son’ or successor; and the question of how clothes maketh the man, with the cast’s demeanour and comportment partly determined by the sober formal garb they wear throughout.

Both principal participants are lively, often witty presences: Cavalier is self-mockingly, impishly punctilious, while Lindon shows that his energy can command our attention even when he’s visibly flailing for something to say (at more than one moment, he and other actors simply start corpsing). But ultimately, the film is too hit and miss - and often too slow and vague - to yield many trenchant insights. And, partly because it’s never clear at the outset exactly what kind of project Lindon and Cavalier think they’re pursuing, we can never quite gauge whether it’s successful within its own terms of reference.

Finally, little is revealed either about power politics or about the mirror game of acting and filming. This self-referential terrain has been pretty thoroughly covered in recent years by the likes of Godard, Kiarostami, Catherine Breillat (Sex is Comedy) and von Trier (in his The Five Obstructions), to name a few. Cavalier and Lindon add little of note in this dressing-up game for adults.

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 17, 2011

Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day Seven – Le Havre, Hors Satan, and Pater Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from The House Next Door, May 17, 2011

Cannes 2011. Alain Cavalier's "Pater" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 19, 2011

Rob Nelson at Cannes from Variety

Cavalcanti, Alberto

Alberto Cavalcanti Linda Wood, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors, from BFI Screen Online

DEAD OF NIGHT

Great Britain (104 mi) 1945 co-directors: Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden

Dead of Night Sight and Sound

"Tales of horror and mounting fear ... prepare to be genuinely frightened" —Alex Cox, Moviedrome

Dead of Night, Ealing's first post-war film, was also the studio's first omnibus film - five separate stories set in a framing story, handled by four different directors. Also Ealing's first ghost movie, it still strikes a potent chill sixty years on.

Starting light-heartedly, in a vein of drawing-room comedy, the tone steadily darkens into nightmare. A man arrives at an old country house that he's never seen before - yet the house itself and all the people there are instantly familiar to him, and he realises to his horror that he's dreamt this occasion and everything that's about to happen. Repeatedly he tries to escape, but each time events conspire to thwart him. Meanwhile the other people present tell stories of their own...

Robert Hamer's segment (his first official directing credit), 'The Haunted Mirror', is the standout, with a young couple being taken over by murderous events from the past. But Cavalcanti's segment - a ventriloquist possessed by his own malevolent dummy - runs Hamer close, with Michael Redgrave getting scarily inside his role as the ventriloquist. Dead of Night climaxes with the different stories blending into a fantastic nightmare - a stylish feast of chills.

"One of the best films made about the supernatural" —George Perry, Forever Ealing

Cavani, Liliana

Liliana Cavani interview with Gerald Peary from the Boston Phoenix, December 2003

THE NIGHT PORTER (Il portiere di notte)

Italy (118 mi) 1974

Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Townsend) review

Like Last Tango in Paris, an operatic celebration of sexual disgust, set in 1957 in a Viennese hotel where Bogarde (maintaining a low profile as a porter) and Rampling (a guest while her conductor husband embarks on a concert tour) meet and recreate their former relationship as sadistic SS officer and child concentration camp inmate; a sexuality that can only end in degradation and self-destruction. Somewhere along the way, the film's handling of serious themes, and its attempts to examine the Nazi legacy in terms of repression and guilt, both sexual and political, get lost amid all the self-conscious decadence. The English language version is terrible.

Liliana Cavani, Italy's most famous female filmmaker, wrote and directed The Night Porter, one of the most controversial films of the 1970s. The time is 1957, the setting is Vienna. Max (Dirk Bogarde) is a respectable night porter at a luxury hotel. A former Nazi officer, he relieves his guilt by devoting himself obsessively to his work. One day, however, his dark past catches up with him when he glimpses Lucia Atherton (Charlotte Rampling) in the hotel lobby. She was a former concentration camp inmate and also his lover. Uncontrollably drawn to each other, it's not long before they revert back to the sado-masochistic relationship they enjoyed during the war. Lucia abandons her husband and Max gives up his job. Their future is uncertain, surrounded as they are by Max's bloodthirsty Nazi friends.

This is an imprortant film that cannot be easily dismissed. Psychologically complex, it focuses on a side of human nature and an aspect of history that many would prefer to ignore. One thing is for certain - once you've seen this film you'll not forget it in a hurry.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Though less a hot-button item than Last Tango in Paris, Lila Cavani's clammy danse macabre gave way to nearly as much porn-versus-art yakking, even if the offending baggage here is mostly ideological. Much of the disgust centered on the movie's use of the Holocaust as background for the sleazy theatrics of a former SS officer and the young prisoner he used to violate, reunited years later for a reprise of their affair. Cavani virtually gives the game away by casting with the kinky iconography from another Nazi carnival, Visconti's The Damned -- thus, Dirk Bogarde attempts to hide his past behind the managing desk of a Vienna hotel until he bumps into Charlotte Rampling, his anorexic concentration-camp Lolita, now the respectable wife of an opera maestro. It's 1957, and Bogard arranges meetings for his monocled German pals, all Nuremberg escapees bumping off potential witnesses. Rampling is next on the list, but Bogarde has fallen for his former jailbait plaything -- the two hole up in his apartment, bring out the chains and the broken glass, and let the good times roll. Made one year before Susan Sontag's essay, the film is awash in Fascinating Fascism, and all its troubling intimations: pushing the audience's buttons, Cavani cuts from a Mozart aria to green-tinged barracks rape (both "spectacles" rendered, problematically, by her camera and the viewer's gaze), and imagines Salomé as a Dietrichian Swastika dirge, decapitation-capper included. Questions about the irresponsibility of the project remain utterly valid, yet it is by no means Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS -- Cavani's far subtler cruelty locks the characters within a grid of guilt, memory and disgusted passion played out in the fallout of unspeakable horrors, where ignoring the past compulsively leads to repeating it. With Philippe Leroy, Gabrielle Ferzetti, and Isa Miranda.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

Sensuous elegantly mounted melodrama (in the true sense of the word) exploring the long-term psychological trauma suffered by both victim and captor. Alfio Contini's cinematography and Daniele Paris' score, incorporating Mozart, couldn't be much better. Franco Arcali's editing approaches the level of Sam Peckinpah's best films, regularly crosscutting to grainy flashbacks in a manner that makes them seem more like a parallel universe. Liliana Cavani has been criticized for exploiting the holocaust, but her film is anything but the conventional black and white look at unredeemable nazis and their saintly victims. Nazi abuser Dirk Bogarde is both tormentor and tormented, as all the survivors must repeatedly justify their actions to themselves. Bogarde had his way with Charlotte Rampling during WWII when he pretended to be a doctor so he could do various photographic experiments on his "patients" - gender and style of performance were meaningless to him. From the outset their obsessive-compulsive, sadomasochistic relationship had both as victims, and it only grew more self-destructive as a way of dealing with the pain of the holocaust. They restart it twelve years later because they are prisoners of their past; it never really stopped in their minds. Each relinquish the one thing that provided a slight distraction in the interim, Bogarde's job as night porter and Rampling's marriage to a conductor. What's so uncomfortable is not so much their sexual practices, which sometimes involve broken glass, but the fact everything is spectacle to the people in this film. The spectacles simply change with the times, so people look at Rampling (forced to) sing topless the same way they look at opera. If you are a guy and in the mood to be honest, you most likely prefer the former, which is part of the way Cavani shows that opportunity supercedes morality. The story is a bit silly and sketchy as Cavani was never much of a writer. In this case, the film isn't overwhelmed by her lurid and incoherent tendencies like the disaster Beyond Obsession, largely because she chooses to tell it through looks and gestures. Night Porter isn't a film for those who need to have every tidbit explained to them, and it's often rejected because Cavani goes places the audience may not be willing to. I may not believe in the premise that Rampling is the special specimen and Bogarde is the only nazi with a conscience, giving his life to protect her from elimination by them. However, the performances and filmmaking style are excellent, saying it all with nary a word. Bogarde has never been better, his compulsions second nature to the point we wonder if he even notices them.

The Night Porter Criterion essay by Annette Insdorf

The Night Porter (1974) - The Criterion Collection

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]

Images Movie Journal Shane M. Dallmann

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

Mondo Digital also reviewing other Caviani films FRANCESCO and RIPLEY’S GAME

DVD Verdict Sean McGinnis, Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central Michael Jacobson, Criterion Collection

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

Beardy Freak Reviews

Dr. Gore's movie reviews

The Night Porter The Auteurs

Francois Ozon + Charlotte Rampling + Marc Jacobs El Bosquejo, August 15, 2008

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]

The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

Cedar, Joseph

BEAUFORT

Israel (125 mi) 2007

Beaufort Wally Hammond from Time Out London

The title of Joseph Cedar’s foreign-language Oscar-nominee refers to the ancient, symbolic Crusader fort in Lebanon, stormed, at great cost, by Israeli elite troops at the beginning of the ‘first’ Lebanon War in 1982. By 1999 – when Cedar’s autobiographical movie re-visits its now God-forsaken, missile-holed, prefab concrete corridors – that symbolism has been all-but fogged-over by seven years of conflict.

The desultory members of the Israeli Defence Force company charged with manning the post, too, wonder where their idealism has gone – ‘I wanted to be here, that’s my mistake’, says one – and even the morale of their fiercely professional, if militarily unorthodox, young commander, Liraz (the charismatic Oshri Cohen) is fatefully tested as the series of pointless deaths of his troops continue even as he and they await the orders for the hilltop to be finally abandoned.

Making effective, subjective, use of hand-held camera, well-mounted action sequences and perfectly-pitched heightened-naturalist-style acting, tempered with clever surrealist touches – not least the creepy deployment of ‘dummy’ decoy soldiers – and a judicious use of framing and sound design more familiar from the horror-movie lexicon, ‘Beaufort’ mounts an impressively credible ‘expressionist’ reconstruction of the futility and contradictions of war as experienced by these men. Its limitation comes from a fundamental failure of vision, not inherent, as Wolfgang Petersen’s ‘Das Boot’ proved, in its microcosmic view or any failure to spread its ‘humanist’ vision to its unseen, putative ‘enemy’, but everything to do with Cedar and his co-writer Ron Leshem’s inability to properly universalise its poor subjects’ true predicament.

War film strikes chord in Israel Joel Greenberg from the Chicago Tribune

TEL AVIV -- In the opening scene of the new Israeli movie "Beaufort," mortar rounds crash into a mountaintop outpost in southern Lebanon as Israeli soldiers dash to a helicopter to hustle an arriving comrade to the safety of their bunker.

"Incoming, incoming," a soldier intones monotonously over a loudspeaker as explosions rip through the post.

The troops hunker down in their isolated fortress, a bleak, dimly lit netherworld of steel and concrete. The mood, punctuated by an eerie soundtrack of electronic music, is one of profound dread.

"It's awful," said Sharon Shahabaz, 37, as she and her mother watched transfixed by the film, which opened Thursday in theaters across Israel.

The movie follows a group of soldiers in their last weeks at the outpost on Beaufort, an ancient Crusader stronghold, up through the Israeli army's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 after an 18-year occupation.

The scenes of soldiers struggling with fear, suffering casualties and finally retreating from a mission that had lost its purpose are resonating powerfully with Israeli audiences after last summer's inconclusive war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

"It looks like it was taken right out of the second Lebanon war," said Helen Shahabaz, 60, Sharon's mother. "The truth is out. There's nothing more to hide."

An official panel investigating last summer's war is expected to issue interim findings by the end of this month, a report likely to fuel further public debate about the way the campaign was conducted, its aims and cost in human lives.

"Beaufort" examines similar questions through the prism of Israel's withdrawal from its long entanglement in Lebanon in the 1980s and '90s, a time in which political and military goals that defined a generation were abandoned under public pressure to bring the troops home.

Joseph Cedar, 38, the movie's director, served in Lebanon as an infantry soldier and said he was intrigued by the "moment in every war when the mission, or purpose, for which soldiers gave their lives . . . ceases to exist."

He wrote the screenplay with Ron Leshem, an Israeli writer whose novel about soldiers in Lebanon served as the basis for the film, which was completed before the second Lebanon war erupted.

Cedar was chosen best director at the Berlin International Film Festival last month, giving his movie important international exposure, and the film is expected to be shown this year in the U.S.

At home, the film has raised troubling questions sharpened by last summer's conflict, and early screenings have drawn large audiences.

In the movie, soldiers confront the futility of their mission as withdrawal nears and comrades are felled, one after the other, by rockets and mortars fired by an invisible enemy.

In the end the strategic fortress, captured by the Israelis in 1982 in what was celebrated as a heroic battle, is blown up, and the soldiers head home.

After watching the film, Sharon Shahabaz said it was about a different hierarchy of values than the culture of sacrifice fostered in Israel through decades of war and conflict.

"We don't have to be ashamed to be human," she said. "The more we are afraid to die, the stronger we will be. We've forgotten that human life has value. Life is more sacred than an outpost, than land."

Cedar, the filmmaker, said that contrary to many war movies in which the protagonists conquer the high ground and raise a flag, his film is about coming down from the mountain and folding the flag, about how wars end.

"The message is the opposite of the army's ethos, which is based on Masada, where Jews were ready to die, even to commit suicide, rather than surrender," Cedar said in an interview, referring to the ancient fortress where Jewish zealots took their lives rather than submit to a Roman assault. "In the withdrawal we were ready to swallow our pride and surrender in order to come back alive."

In general, Cedar added, Israel after the wars in Lebanon and the withdrawal two years ago from the Gaza Strip is in a time of retrenchment. "There's a feeling that we are no longer in an era of raising flags, but in an era of lowering them," he said.

There is also a deep crisis of confidence in the government, widely perceived to have mishandled last summer's campaign against Hezbollah, which also tarnished faith in the army.

"We feel that there's no one we can depend on," said Helen Shahabaz.

The Lebanon withdrawal in 2000 was "an attempt to take our fate into our own hands, contrary to all military tactics," Cedar said. "The thought that this is possible, that we live in a moral, humane society that sanctifies human life and that this can be translated into pressure on the leaders, is an optimistic thought."

Last summer's return to Lebanon with broad popular support was a depressing regression, Cedar said.

"The film can't change reality," Cedar said, "but maybe it will contribute something that will filter down into people's memories, contribute to the next wave of protest and chip away at the consensus leaders need before they go to war."

FOOTNOTE (Hearat Shulayim) B 84

Israel (105 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

This is a lightheartedly complex and wryly satiric look at the textual analysis of the Hebrew Talmud, a belly slapper of a subject if ever there was one, turned into an exposé of a dysfunctional patriarchal Jewish family. Using a somewhat mocking tone, especially the exaggerated, oompah pah circus music of Amit Poznansky, and title cards as subject headers, like “The Worst Day of Professor Schkolnik’s Life,” the film quickly delves into a scholarly subject, where Professor Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba) is seen as a painstakingly fastidious scholar of Hebrew text, examining history word by word, looking for patterns of variance at odds with current understandings. Making this his life’s work, he spends 30 years trying to piece together missing pieces of an ancient Talmudic text, sacrificing time with his family and spending every waking minute in the dank basements of historical libraries, painting a portrait of a joyless and compulsive man with obsessive routines, something of a perfectionist with a superiority complex whose glory is stolen right out from under him by a fellow academic colleague, Professor Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), who finds a copy of the actual missing text and publishes it a month before Eliezer, all but making his efforts outdated and unnecessary. But this is not his worst day, instead it is the day his son Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), also a professor of Talmudic studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is honored by being invited to join the Academy, an honor the father has never received, creating an intense rivalry between the two. The father belittles his son’s accomplishments, despite publishing several books, believing he’s not a real scholar, as Uriel is much more popularly accepted in the world of academia than his father, who is seen as something of an outdated dinosaur.

Nonetheless, Uriel is an ardent defender of his father, something that is put to the test in the titled sequence “The Happiest Day of Professor Schkolnik’s Life.” After being bypassed for twenty years, Eliezer receives notification that he’s won a prestigious award, the Israel Prize, for his lifelong dedication to scholarly integrity. However it is Uriel that is called into an emergency meeting at the Ministry of Education, a faceless yet formidable building that could just as easily be Stasi headquarters, protected by ridiculously excessive security measures, where Uriel meets with distinguished officials in a tiny committee room that resembles the Marx Brothers cramming an absurd number of guests into a tiny ship stateroom from A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935), Ordering Dinner and Crowded Cabin Scenes - YouTube (4:03). This comical farce reveals the heart of the matter, as Professor Grossman heads the selection committee, but he informs the son of an egregious committee error, as they wrongly notified the father instead of the son, who the award is meant for, mixing up their names as both are professors at the same institution. The committee intends to set matters straight, with the help of the son, but Uriel believes this could ruin the already stressed relationship with his father. More misadventures ensue, as this is a scathing indictment of what passes for historical accuracy, placing the entire Jewish history in question if interpretation hangs on the literal meaning of certain words or phrases from ancient texts that have remained unquestioned truths for centuries.

The whole picture of authority here is a fragile house of cards that come tumbling down with the slightest bit of ill wind. Cedar mocks the arrogance of self-righteous authority on every level, including police, academic, political, governmental, religious, and even family, where the handed down patriarchal authority has a troubling history, one that does not openly accept criticism or changing opinion. This hypocritical narrow-mindedness is the centerpiece of the film, and a challenge to the Israeli culture, but the director refuses to take real aim at seriously influential targets, leaving this instead vague and allegorical. While the film is intelligent, occasionally veering towards farce, and is competently made, there’s nothing of cinematic note and is a story largely advanced through a dialog-driven narrative, giving this the feel of a meticulously detailed short story. While this may remind viewers of the Coen Brothers’ irreverent take on American Judaism in A SERIOUS MAN (2009), this film doesn’t just poke fun, but points out possible historical inconsistencies with the development surrounding a possibly misogynist Jewish state, as humans are fallible in their interpretation of Jewish law, which may have grown more militarily aggressive as a matter of convenience due to recent political realities. While the film points out inconsistencies in analyzing and ultimately rendering judgment in morally complicated issues, it also suggests a flawed and inherent sadness within the patriarchal system itself, where resentments, grudges, and human fallibility may be passed down from generation to generation, where it’s unlikely what passes for elderly wisdom will be challenged any day soon. Of note, Cedar's own father is a biochemist who also studied the Talmud and received the Israel Prize in biology.

Kept expecting to become annoyed by the style, which is bouncy and a little bit precious, with intertitles and cute little graphical illustrations and the like. But these visual flourishes turned out to be in keeping with the theme of this unexpectedly sharp, purposeful drama, which is essentially truth vs. truthiness, and the notion that in a world that’s human and imperfect, truthiness wins out. Also helps that the film, directed by Joseph Cedar (Time of Favor), has a wicked, wonderfully dry sense of humor — what might be the key scene in the film takes place in a crammed conference room, causing a laborious cascade of rising and chair-shuffling every time someone comes in and leaves. (Not sure why I found this so funny –maybe it’s a Jewish thing — but I basically lost it.) Some may find the ending a little too nifty, but I liked the grandiosity of its presentation, and found it monumentally sad in its implications. Certainly this is the most thrilling movie you are ever likely to see about dueling father-son Talmudic scholars.

The House Next Door [Oscar Moralde]

The conflict in Israeli director Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a bit more lighthearted, where the world of Talmudic scholarship at Hebrew University becomes a battleground in which longstanding simmering father-son resentment comes to the fore. The story itself hews to classic types: Eliezer (Shlomo Bar Aba) is a Talmudic philologist whose scientific rigor and obsessive dedication to his work has received little approbation, while his son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) is a superstar in the field. Uriel is showered with acclaim and awards for scholarship, which Eliezer, with barely hidden disdain, dismisses as the pandering of a mere "folklorist." So when Eliezer is mistakenly informed that's he'll be receiving the prestigious Israel Prize, one actually intended for his son, Uriel knows that if his father discovered the truth, it would utterly devastate him.

This tension of uncovering hidden knowledge comes through in the way Cedar enlivens the material with a manic energy by transmuting the qualities of footnotes into the film. Here, we witness the "text" of the father-and-son history and then dash through a web of illuminating and explanatory background information that deepens our understanding of the situation at the same time that it complicates it. Such a strategy draws out not only the chasm between ignorance and understanding, but between past and present; an early anecdote Uriel recounts about his father in a glowing and almost hagiographic way is later revealed to be the shell around a darker truth. But most importantly, Cedar's direction is able to balance the gentle humor of genial pokes at the academic establishment with the recognition that for those who have spent their whole lives in that establishment, who've constructed their whole identities around it, even the smallest things, like a tiny footnote, become imbued with grave importance.

John Carter | Footnote | Friends With Kids | A ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The subtext of "Footnote" is savagery—not that of Martian Tharks but of rival Talmudic scholars in Israel's Hebrew University. The text, not so simply, is text—the Talmud in its manifold historical versions. Joseph Cedar's wise and playful comedy of intellectual manners, in subtitled Hebrew, could be called "Almost All in the Family," since it focuses on a rivalry between father and son. Eliezer Shkolnik, played with wonderfully grave demeanor by Shlomo Bar Aba, is a senior lecturer with a reputation for meticulous research, but the fruits of his lifelong labors are bitter; instead of receiving the Israel Prize, his nation's top honor for scholarship, he has become a mere footnote in other scholars' books. Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), Eliezer's middle-aging son, may be a glib popularizer by comparison to his pop, but he doesn't lack for the adulation that Eliezer craves. Instead of a chip off the old block, he's the most proximate reason for a permanent chip on the old man's shoulder.

All of this might have been no more than the basis of a rich character study, but the writer-director, Mr. Cedar, has devised an intricate, ironic plot that's set in motion by a thunderclap call to Eliezer's cellphone: The Israel Prize has finally come his way. I won't reveal any of the delicious complications that ensue, or discuss the slightly surreal climax, but one of the best scenes, intensely serious yet delicately flavored with Marx Brothers lunacy, involves a hurriedly arranged convocation of six men and one nervous woman in a Ministry of Education office big enough for three. And "Footnote" does function as a character study, an exceptionally rich one. The more we learn about Eliezer, who walks with a forbidding forward tilt and dispenses approval to no one, the more we understand Uriel's anxious need for acclaim. A mere footnote the father may be, but he's written a life script for the son.

Cinescene [Chris Knipp]

The US-born Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar's last effort, which won the Silver Bear at Berlin, was Beatufort, a tense, excellent war film about a few members of the Israeli army making a dangerous last stand in south Lebanon in 2000. Footnote deals with a rather different topic -- textual analysis of the Hebrew Talmud. Now there's a change of pace, you will say. But not so much as might seem, because there is excitement here. Footnote is not an action movie but a tragicomedy -- about scholarly integrity; or is it futility? -- with enormous conflict, both repressed and open. It too, like Beaufort, centers compellingly on figures who wander a kind of half-abandoned but still dangerous battleground. It's also a deeply fascinating character study, and would warrant unhesitating recommendation were it not for a weak ending.

Footnote is full of the ironies that arise out of family and occupational rivalry. There is rich intentional ambivalence about the ways in which the film views each of its two main characters, father and son, both, -- this itself ironic -- Talmudic scholars. First is the father, Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba), who has waited vainly for twenty years to receive the Israel Prize in his field. Cedar's own father, by the way, a biochemist, has received the Israel Prize in biology; he himself has studied the Talmud, so he knows whereof he speaks in more ways than one. Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), Eliezer's son, is more popular among students and his peers, and receives an award as the film begins. At the awards ceremony he gives an ambiguous speech, mostly about his father, who sits stony-faced in the front row listening, not, it would seem, with any approval. The speech is entertaining, light, modest, a tribute to the father. But it also seems to mock him a little. Elieser already emerges from the speech and the way he listens to it as stubborn, dogmatic, and difficult. And if he is admirable, he is equally off-putting.

Elieser is a pure philologist, who approaches the text as a text. His son's work, which speaks more of manners and customs at the time of the texts, he disdainfully refers to as "folkloric." The father turns out to have examined one version of the linguistically problematic Talmud for decades, seeking to suss out inconsistencies. And then another scholar found the other text that caused them, and published his finding before Elieser could, rendering Elieser's decades of work irrelevant. Elieser is a monumentally dedicated scholar. But what has he accomplished? It seems his highest honor is being mentioned as a footnote in the work of another distinguished Talmudic scholar.

The whole film uses a sliding-back-and-forth visual format (with appropriate accompanying sound effect) in presenting its sections and images, to suggest what it's like to examine a manuscript on microfilm in a library. At first Footnote seems to be examining the career of Elieser Shkulnik as if it were itself a footnote or a small detail in a manuscript. But then come the bombshells. First, Elieser is walking, as he does every day, to the national library, to pursue his research, when his cellphone rings and he gets a call telling him he has won the Israel Prize. Then, a little later, Uriel is summoned to an urgent, secret meeting of the Israel Prize committee in a tiny cramped room, to be told that this has been a terrible mistake: he, Uriel, won the prize, not his father. (This is clearly the best scene, tense and confined like much of Beaufort. Some brief sequences showing Uriel to be a cutthroat squash player help to expand our sense of the undercurrent of violence in the events.)

We cannot reveal what happens after that, but it's suspenseful and thought-provoking, and leaves us perhaps forever in doubt as to who is the better man. Is one indeed less fatuous than the other? There probably hasn't been a much better or deeper or more telling on screen look at the jealousies and passions that surround certain kinds of academic work and the ways certain scholars (or brilliant, egocentric men) construct a fortress (a key word in the film) around themselves, the ivory tower protection from the real world. And the immense uncertainty of achievement in narrow fields that few understand or really know about. And then of course there is the question, held suspensefully in the balance almost to the very end: which will win out, professional ambition or family loyalty?

Cedar turns the finale into a meaningless extravaganza in which both the bitter and the comic sides of the story fade into mere spectacle. The film winds up feeling like a memorable little short story that, unfortunately, its author didn't know how to end. But even without an ending this is a strong and original film.

Other characters are also important, such as the chief back-stabber, Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewesohn, whose brow looks like an exposed brain). Alma Zak and Alisa Rosen are good too as the wives of Urial and Elieser, respectively. And then there is also Uriel's young son (whose name I can't find), a beautiful young man, who is also ambiguous. Is he a useless time-waster, as Uriel suspects, or a free spirit about to choose a different, perhaps more interesting, path?

Footnote was in Competition in May 2011 at Cannes, where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won the Best Screenplay award, and also shown at Toronto and New York; at the latter it was screened for this review. Sony Classics has bought the film for US distribution. French release is slated for November 30, 2011.

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anton Bitel]

Joseph Cedar's previous feature Beaufort used the true story of an Israel Defence Forces-occupied fortress in Lebanon to allegorise the bunker mentality of the beleaguered Israeli state and this follow-up both expands and domesticates that film's themes. As in Beaufort, a fortress will play a pivotal role in the plot – and even if this time round the fortress is merely metaphorical, it proves as capable as any concrete structure of entrapping and destroying its blinkered occupants. As, however, might be expected in a film entitled Footnote and set within an academic milieu, Cedar's weapons of choice are not shells nor roadside bombs but words – including one particular word which will come to be subjected to close philological scrutiny, exploding all the protagonist's illusions about himself, his family and his legacy.

Described by his daughter-in-law as 'autistic', elderly Professor Eliezer Schkolnik (Schlomo Bar Abe) has devoted his life to words, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. A joyless man of near obsessive-compulsive routine, this grumpy Talmudic scholar spends his days buried in the basement of his university's library and his evenings locked away in his study at home, wearing earmuffs to block out any noise that might intrude upon his research and sleeping on the study's sofa bed rather than beside his long-suffering wife Yehudit (Aliza Rosen).

Eliezer had invested 30 whole years of his youth into meticulously piecing together a lost medieval version of the Talmud, only for his academic colleague and rival Professor Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn) to discover a copy of the actual lost text just one month before Eliezer was due to publish his monumental reconstruction. His work both validated and rendered utterly irrelevant in one fell swoop, Eliezer has for decades since been sidelined and ostracised within the academic community.

His only measurable achievement is that he was long ago acknowledged by name in a footnote of his late mentor's great scholarly tome on Talmudic studies – and he remains a footnote on today's campus too, with few writings to his name, an outmoded approach to scholarship, research too abstruse for his 'idiot' colleagues to understand, and with a lecture course attended by just one student. The only thing still sustaining him is an unyielding, though perhaps not well founded, sense of superiority.

Yet even as Eliezer has been passed over for 20 successive years by the board (headed by Grossman) that awards the coveted Israel Prize, Eliezer's middle-aged son Professor Uriel Schkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), who has followed his father into Talmudic studies and works in the same department, has received one plaudit after another for his more populist work, and so become the convenient focus of all Eliezer's deep-seated resentments.

Then one morning (dubbed "The Happiest Day In The Life Of Professor Schkolnik" in one of several arch intertitles), Eliezer gets an unexpected phone call from the Ministry of Education informing him that this year's Prize is his - and so he hubristically sets out on a path of cold-hearted revenge that will turn out to be both tragically misguided and irreparably damaging.

Cedar's film may boast a playfully melodramatic string score (by Amit Poznansky), occasional scenes of low-key farce, and some keen satire of Academia's institutionalised pettiness (not to mention Israel's officious application of security measures), but the initially breezy tone of the comedy gives way to a depiction of calculated cruelty monstrously vicious enough almost to qualify as horror, human enough to count as tragedy and nuanced enough to face viewers with a most unusual kind of dilemma, part intellectual and part moral.

Trapped in the very 'fortress of culture' that he has constructed around himself and his family, Eliezer must eventually resort to his much-vaunted philological skills to analyse and uncover the errors, deceits and self-immolations that he has, in his egotistical blindness, helped promote, and so is confronted with the vanity for which he is at last being (wrongly) celebrated. His empty triumph is also his son's ruin, creating a tradition of indignation, recrimination and bitterness that will no doubt be passed on down to Uriel's own feckless son Josh.

Footnote ends as it begins, with Yaron Scharf's camera remaining rooted on Elezier's facial expression which, though fixed, is all too readable for those with the right interpretative tools. The film, too, offers an unflinching portrait of a deeply unlikable man, while suggesting that, as much as he – and no doubt we – might like to deny it, Eliezer is, in all his vindictiveness, his narcissism, his inflated sense of entitlement, and his capacity for delusion, quite a bit like the rest of us (and certainly like his son).

That his final charade will unfold not just in the presence of his family and colleagues, but also in the presence of members of the Knesset (including the Prime Minister), makes Cedar's drama of infidelity and falsehood extend beyond the confines of the domestic sphere to the realm of national politics. As for what such accusatory allegory might suggest about the state of Israel, Cedar trusts his viewers to observe the fine print and read between the lines.

Subtly drawn and perfectly performed, Footnote was a deserved winner of the 2011 screenplay award at Cannes, as well as taking awards across the board from the Israeli Film Academy. And while the very substance of the film's plot might lead you to question the validity of such awards and ceremonial recognition, Footnote really is a refreshing original, expanding its apparently small-scale, pedantic concerns into an examination of truth itself, and of the aggression and violence which we will commit to defend our place within truth's walled façade.

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]

REVIEW: Israeli Comedy-Drama Footnote Makes Talmudic - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek

Father and Son Scholars Grapple with Each Other ... - Village Voice Karina Longworth, also seen here: Footnote is Israel's Best Foreign Language Oscar ... - City Pages

Boxoffice Magazine [David Ehrlich]

CANNES REVIEW | “Footnote” Finds the Comedy in a Talmudic Feud Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 14, 2011

Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]

Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

Popdose [Robert Cashill]

exclaim! [Manori Ravindran]

FILM REVIEW: Footnote - Things That Go Pop! - CBC.ca Eli Glasner

Footnote | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Alison Willmore

Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

The Wrap [Alonso Duralde]

celluloid Heroes Radio [Charlotte Skeoch]

Footnote Dan Fainaru at Cannes from Screendaily

Reeling Reviews [Laura Clifford]

The Film Pilgrim [Frances Taylor]

Battleship Pretension [David Bax]

Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]

MovieBuzzers [Melissa Hanson]

Quickflix [Simon Miraudo]

HeyUGuys [Craig Skinner]

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Angeliki Coconi]

Cannes '11, day three: Dizzying highs and staggering lows from the Festival's sidebars Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 14, 2011

Of popes and poissons and Kim Ki-duk Barbara Scharres at Cannes from the Ebert blog, May 13, 2011

CineVue [Patrick Gamble]

Bonjour Tristesse (English)

Cannes 2011. Joseph Cedar's "Footnote" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 14, 2011

Joseph Cedar Discusses 'Footnote' - ArtsBeat Blog - New York Times Mekado Murphy interview, October 11, 2011

An Interview with Joseph Cedar Dr. Eric Goldman interview from Yeshiva University News, February 10, 2012

The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]

Variety [Jay Weissberg]

Footnote Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London, May 14, 2011

Footnote: A delicate tale of father-son rivalry - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen

Boston Phoenix [Ann Lewinson]

Footnote movie review -- Footnote showtimes - The Boston Globe Wesley Morris

'Footnote' marked as fair tale - BostonHerald.com James Verniere

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

'Footnote' review: Being passionate about Talmud Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle

Joseph Cedar's 'Footnote' is brainy and effective: Movie review ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times, March 15, 2012

'Footnote' director Joseph Cedar and the new Israeli cinema ... Patrick Goldstein from The LA Times, March 18, 2012

Footnote movie review by Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips ... Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

‘Footnote,’ a Satire and Family Drama by Joseph Cedar A.O. Scott from The New York Times, March 9, 2012

Ceylon, Nuri Bilge

THE SMALL TOWN (Kasaba) B+ 90

aka: The Town

Turkey (85 mi) 1998

A small, intimate black and white film about a remote village in Turkey, adapted from a story, “The Corn Field,” written by the director’s sister, Emine Ceylan, where family members play most of the roles in the film. The director did his own cinematography, shot on a shoestring budget in a remote part of Turkey. Two children, a boy and a girl, discover the mysteries of nature over the four seasons, revealed in beautifully told personal impressionistic vignettes that tell us much about the villagers’ concerns and their dreams for the future.

The film opens in winter under constant snowfall, where children playfully ridicule another young boy who slips and falls in the snow, who initially smiles back, but then expresses a horrible look of despair. In school, the kids pledge their love to the homeland, “I surrender my happy being to Turkey.” The children read aloud lessons about the rules of community and family in society, but are obviously bored with the proceedings, where even the teacher stares out the window at the falling snow. There is a hissing sound of socks dripping wet on a burning pot-bellied stove. The students blow a feather around, like a beach ball, until it lands on the teacher. A cat arrives at a window and meows, as a voice drones on in a monotone, “What we call national unity is loyalty to one another.” A sequence of small town images, the snow changes to rain, old men finger holy beads around their necks, children throw rocks at them, a truck drives by with bleating goats which are slaughtered out back, their throats slashed, then cooked on sticks by people living in tents, their laundry hanging on a line.

In spring, kids are swinging in the air on a Ferris wheel, a man underneath smokes, while a boy and a girl explore the woods. The girl stares at her reflection in a pond, the wind blows wildflowers in a field, an egret nests on top of a telephone pole. The two kids pick fruit from a tree, eating plums in a cemetery where a mule grazes. A boy stares at the flies, birds are singing, distorted music fades in and out, suggesting something less than harmonious. They play with turtles, turning them upside down, then right side up, slapping it with sticks trying to make it move. We hear a rifle shot. The boy and girl leave the woods. There is a close up of the turtle sticking it’s head out of the shell, but the boy runs back and turns it upside down, it’s legs flailing in the air trying to turn over, but it can’t. The boy watches but does nothing, the turtle will die. The shot was from a man shooting birds in the woods, the wind picks up, the grasses wave in the wind, the kids run away.

A grandfather recounts how a barber used to come from town and cut hair for a few tomatoes, as we hear a constant sound of birds and crickets chattering as the sun goes down on a summer night. The family gathers around a blazing fire and eat roast corn while the grandmother cuts apples. The children listen as the adults talk about change, “Pesticides drove the cranes away,” or about their families, who left, who remained, who came back, or about a noble victory, “Our soldiers got into a skirmish with the British, even defeated them. The British officer was so ashamed he committed suicide. Then their reinforcements arrived and defeated us.” Howling hyenas can be heard in the distant forest, while the grandmother remarks to several kids, “Homesickness is a suffering like any other,” but the kids don’t seem to care. She reminds them, “You are young and far from death, that’s why you think that way. We remain part of the world even after we die,” a dead tree sways in the wind, “Alexander conquered the world from end to end. No ordinary man could do that.” The leaves rustle in the wind, an image is shown of that turtle still struggling on its back, a boy sleeps with a pigeon in his room and dreams it was his mother, not about the turtle, that eventually dies. The grandmother continues, “Forget about other people’s troubles, what about our own?” She grieves over the death of one son that went away and never returned. “He wasn’t here when we needed him, he only visited once or twice a year,” telling another son, “You are a rebellious boy, always out of work, you quit every job, you just walk away or you’ll join the army. You still don’t know what you want.”

In a beautifully constructed image, reminding me of Sokurov’s wide-angled imagery in his 1997 film MOTHER AND SON, the rebellious son stands by the side of the road carrying a bag, a close up of his face reveals a tear. Ascending clouds rise over a field in the background, bare trees rustle in the autumn wind, he reveals his thoughts, “I’ve got no home, no friends, no life. In the morning, only stray dogs wander, I feel like them. This is an unhappy place, there is nothing for me here,” and he walks down an empty road.

The grandfather speaks, “Nature has an answer to our questions.” “So what?” the son responds, “You have to live in this God forsaken place which is like a prison.” The uncle blames it on his education, that he never went to college, lecturing him, “I went to college and I made something of myself,” to which the son replies, “What good is knowledge if you have no one to share it with?” The wind rustles, close ups reveal tears, a family torn by different visions, different natures. The grandfather scolds his wife, “Stop crying woman.” She continues to cut apples next to a burning fire. The uncle tells his nephew, “You have the same trouble as your father, no job, out of the army, what do you do? You came back here. Didn’t you study to get away from the fields?” The nephew murmurs, “That’s where we’re all destined, nature’s fields,” grieving over the loss of his own son. “Why a child? He was only two years old. What sin could a two year old commit? Why God? We lost our son, but it was the will of God.” Ants crawl up and down a tree trunk. There is another Sokurov wide-angled morning mist on the fields, one hears dogs barking, the sounds of birds, and goats with bells, as the young girl inquires “Where is India?” “Over the mountains,” a voice is heard answering. After a long silence in the rain, the grandmother asks “Are the children in bed?” The young girl dreams of a dead boy in the cornfields, she stares at him, then reaches her hand into a stream, a freeze frame that ends the film.

DISTANT (Uzak) B+ 92

Turkey (110 mi) 2003

An emotionally challenging film about the difficulty men have connecting emotionally, one more likely enjoyed by the critics than the viewing public, as the film is more successful in a wordless format, for when the two lead characters speak, their attempts to communicate are so futile that they resemble a “cinema of annoyance.” More to the point, perhaps, is their communicative inability to ever get through to anyone, which is the root cause of their individual isolation and dissatisfaction, which, at least for me, speaks volumes for the entire region. It is as if the two guys are taking stabs in the dark in a hit or miss format and they continually miss. Shared winners of the Best Acting prize at Cannes, these are two lonely guys on different wavelengths that never seem to say what they need to say, so it’s frustrating throughout the film to witness their futility. I found the wordless scenes much more satisfying, strictly from an enjoyment standpoint, as artistically the canvas is saying it all. And that seems to be the point of the film, how “distant” we are emotionally, how disconnected we have become from one another, especially those that we love. Winner of the Best Director award at Cannes and filmed by the director himself, this is a serious, slow moving, very detached film, not particularly pleasant to watch, as there isn't a moment of hope in the entire film (Bela Tarr, are you in the house?) but it becomes more memorable when seen in context with other Festival films, as it's a style and subject matter just not seen anywhere else. Winner of the Chicago Film Festival 2nd place Silver Hugo Award.

As for me, I can’t say it worked totally, as it’s hard to enjoy a film with such unlikable characters, not that they are bad guys, but they’re a couple of nincompoops that seem to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Still, this is the kind of film that continues to evolve in your head for days afterwards. It reminded me of a film I truly did enjoy, Antonioni’s RED DESERT, where in that film, the characters are overwhelmed by the noise and aggravations of industrialization, where they are overcome by an anxiety they cannot see or understand, where their attempts to find love in their personal relations are constantly interrupted by work and routine, so much so that these disruptions become their reality. It’s as if their hearts stop working from disuse. But while the very Italian Antonioni in 1964 uses the extraordinarily appealing and vulnerable Monica Vitti, who fights non-stop to keep from giving in to this interior wasteland, and her efforts succeed in touching the hearts of the audience, this film, by contrast, features a couple of Turkish guys in 2003 who really don’t try very hard at all, who couldn’t care less it seems, who refuse, seemingly culturally, to show any emotion, as if in Eastern Europe this is seen as a weakness and is a characteristic never shown by men. Yet they are just as affected by the personal failures and inadequacies in their lives as is Monica Vitti, but are not nearly as appealing when they suffer emotional meltdowns before our eyes, showing little remorse, showing little to no feelings at all. In my view, that’s how far their spirits have fallen. I found the depths of their disconnection in this film to be a little creepy, however, the interior wasteland that they find themselves living in, to be surprisingly real.

Distant Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It's often tough to see films late in their release, since by that time I already have a sense of what to expect from them from other people's reviews. Plus, a lot of the fresh insights are already taken. For instance, most of what I could say about Distant by way of praise is nicely encapsulated by Mike D'Angelo here, right down to the disclaimer about its formal elegance in no way blunting its comedic value. It's frequently very funny, more so than you might expect. But I do part company from Mike's viewpoint when I say that the final shot is not overwhelming. In fact, I found it precious and arch in a way that nearly recoded the entire film for me. But not exactly. You see, I mostly felt, well, distant from Distant, all the while marveling at its obvious mastery. In fact, its mastery is painfully obvious. The film offers frequent pleasures and perceptual disruptions and is never less that achingly beautiful. (The film oscillates between cramped interiors and stunning, wide-angle panoramic shots of the cityscape and waterfront of Istanbul which in themselves are worth the price of admission. This film must be seen in 35mm on the big screen.) And yet, its plant-and-payoff spatial humor, its emotional growth in the form of subtly switched identities, its numerous riffs on the concept of distance -- it all felt too neat, like an airless essay on modern loneliness, City Mouse vs. Country Mouse in the Existential Wasteland. I've gotten a reputation among my friends for being a sucker for formal rigor in cinema. It's a fair rap to an extent -- I tend to prefer clean minimalism to sprawling, anal-expulsive punk emotionalism. But it has to be said: there's rigor, and there's rigor mortis. Distant, don't get me wrong, is far too alive to be dead. It is frequently fleet of foot (the car-alarm and Tarkovsky jokes are amusing and deftly deployed), and its characters do emerge as complex, well-rounded human beings. (The two leads are responsible for this to no small degree. Muzaffer Özdemir's Mahmut, the urbanite photographer with failed high-art ambitions, is hangdog-to-slowburn, and looks like a meld of Ron Silver with Amitabh Bachchan. The late Emin Toprak, as drifting Yusuf, beautifully conveys the struggle to embody ambition when hapless shambling -- cigarette dangling from the lips and held in place by random spittle alone -- constitutes the true core of your being. The actor resembles a Mediterranean John Cusack with an errant lump of flesh colonizing his left temple.) As much as I enjoyed Ceylan's film, I also felt that I was watching a work of art whose fussed-over meticulousness had driven it just a smidgen over the edge into dry demonstration, the illustration of a watertight thesis. In this regard, the final shot was an all-too-logical conclusion to a film that in some ways is hobbled by its logic. Distant works very carefully with the balance between near and far, between stillness and motion, but too often, motion comes to feel like a necessary evil and a niggling irritation. For better and worse, a film written, directed, shot and conceived by a photographer.

Climates (Iklimler) B 85

Turkey France (101 mi) 2006

I believe I’ve heard that same dog barking now in every one of Ceylan’s films, usually echoing off in the distance of an otherwise quiet, wordless shot. The opening has the feel of Egoyan’s CALENDAR, only without the interpreter, as a couple is visiting the site of an ancient ruin, barely able to speak to one another, as their relationship crumbles before our eyes, though we have little idea what precipitated their disinterest, but initially he asks her “Are you bored?” And immediately we understand we’re in a relationship that’s not really going anywhere. Due to our experience with Ceylon’s numbingly slow pace, some among us actually time when the first viewers will get up and leave the theater in disgust. I believe it was around the 50 minute mark, just after the controversial sex scene, so people were willing to stick around and give this a chance, but as usual, it’s not really about much of anything. And that’s the problem with Ceylan films, as they’re quiet, well acted, slowly paced, yet beautifully made, featuring some extraordinary poetic shots, but there’s no connection to the people onscreen.

Ceylan himself plays Isu, an Istanbul university professor who is taking photos of historic ruins for his thesis, while his real life wife, Ebru Ceylan, plays Bahar, a television art director. The camera silently sits and stares at her for awhile before he raises the idea of splitting up. She needs no convincing and expresses her hard feelings in a painfully wrathful manner, while he just silently sulks. He takes the break up as an opportunity to hit on another friend’s girl friend, Isu’s former mistress, Serap (Nazan Kesal), waiting for her outside her home one night. Their sex resembles a violently grotesque rape sequence, where he demonstrates his need for a peculiar amount of control, which makes him something of a domineering creep in the eyes of the audience. Later, he devises a plan to do the same thing with Bahar, somehow showing up out of the blue at a remote shooting location in the middle of nowhere, tracking her down like a stalker, pretending he was just in the neighborhood. She tells him she has no time for him and appears to have moved on with her life, but he insists on seeing her one more time, which is one of the best scenes in the film where he speaks to her in a van where he finds her in tears, for a reason left unexplained, but he assumes it’s over him and starts pleading with her that he’s a changed man, asking if she’ll quit her job and come back to Istanbul with him. This serious talk is amusingly interrupted a dozen times by guys opening and closing the doors as they’re loading the van. She has nothing to do with him.

The next day he visits another historical site, a gorgeous church set in the middle of a near perfect landscape, an immense valley situated between mountains on each side. As far as I was concerned, that could and should have been the final shot, as that elusive, inescapable something that we’re all looking for, a balance between the spiritual and the natural world was wordlessly depicted in perfect harmony. Instead, in a reunion that feels unnecessary, she knocks on his door in the middle of the night the day before he leaves and collapses in exhaustion on the bed while he sits in a chair and smokes and pretty much leaves her be. In the morning, he asks when she has to be at work, which startles her. Her look says it all, as it never occurred to him that she was taking him up on his offer. Instead he’s got it all figured out, as is his customary style, and he’ll drop her off at work before he flies back home, everything exactly as he understands it and directs it, without any thought whatsoever for what was in her head. This mixture of domineering control and emotional neglect is suffocating the very life out of them. In the end, as the plane flies out of sight overhead, there is only falling snow, the soft sleep of forgetting.

Climates (Iklimler) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

In 2002, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan made his mark on the Cannes competition with Distant (Uzak). That, his third feature, struck many audiences as a resounding blow in favour of the great art-cinema tradition of films as contemplative, thematically rich personal essays. Ceylan’s growing reputation as a contemporary classic is confirmed by the immensely satisfying Climates, which is certainly as personal as anything we’re likely to see in Cannes, or anywhere else, this year.

The director stars opposite his wife, Ebru Ceylan, as a couple undergoing a painful break-up. But far from raising suspicions of therapeutic self-indulgence, Ceylan’s complex, subtle film will repay multiple viewings – especially given his rich, precise use of high-definition digital video. Climates should achieve healthy exports, and reinforce Ceylan as a festival presence to reckon with.

The Ceylans play an Istanbul couple, Bahar (Ebru Ceylan) and Isa (Nuri Bilge Ceylan), first seen on a summer holiday, during which something is evidently going wrong between them. A pricelessly taut dinner with friends shows their relationship start to unravel; things come startlingly to a head during a motorbike ride.

After the couple go their separate ways, university teacher Isa bumps into Serap (Kesal), an old flame with whom, it’s implied, he cheated on Bahar. Although she’s seeing a friend of his, Isa follows the glamorous Bahar home, and in a troubling extended shot, forces his attentions on her. Later, Isa follows Bahar to a remote, snowbound province where she is working on a film shoot. A rapprochement appears to be in the air, but it’s clear that Isa is not nearly as capable of change as he insists.

Like its predecessor, Climates tells a complex, understated story about the emotional distance between people, and about the psychic repressions and unshakable habits that hamper men (undeniably, this is rather more Isa’s story than Bahar’s, as she is out of the picture much of the time). The maturity of Ceylan’s storytelling is evident from his refusal to tell us too much: he prefers silences and finely-tuned facial expressions provide the nuances we need to fill in the blanks for ourselves. In terms of what faces can express, without ever doing too much, Climates puts Ceylan on a par with Ingmar Bergman.

In this respect, Ceylan benefits greatly from the use of high-definition, for its extreme precision in capturing shifts and uncertainties on faces, but also for its clarity in registering other aspects of people’s physical presence: moments of the film almost come across as a tenderly painted portrait of Ebru Ceylan’s hair.

At once the film’s most moving and most disturbing aspect is Ceylan’s casting of himself and his wife as the troubled couple. This should not necessarily suggest that Climates is in any way an autobiographical portrait of marriage difficulties, yet Ceylan clearly wants us to be aware of, and to speculate on, the unusually close-to-home nature of his drama. It has often been apparent, however, that Ceylan is playing with aspects of his own life – the hero of Distant inhabited the director’s Istanbul flat, and here Ceylan’s own parents have affecting cameos as Isa’s mother and father.

If Isa really does resemble Ceylan, then Climates surely offers one of the most merciless self-portraits ever seen in cinema: Isa is insecure, faithless and selfish, excessively needy and with a violent streak which emerges in his assault on Serap. He’s far from unlikeable, though, which bears witness to Ceylan’s warm if sometimes doleful screen presence. By virtue of her role, Ebru Ceylan is by necessity a more distant figure, but especially in those scenes where Bahar’s feeling suddenly become wordlessly apparent, she’s immensely affecting.

Overall, Climates is more of a chamber drama than Ceylan’s earlier films, although the imagery gradually opens out to take in more of the poetically-shot landscapes that are a Ceylan trademark. It’s futile to argue about whether or not Climates tops Distant, but either way, Ceylan’s latest hints at a richness, complexity and subtlety of feeling that are rare even among today’s most revered blue-chip directors. In his pensive, undemonstrative way, Ceylan is making films as rewarding, and as adult, as any director alive.

Facets Multi Media - FACETS FRONT PAGE -> Film Festival Diaries Milos Stehlik on Day 6 at Cannes 2006 from Facets

The screening was predictably packed, but strangely there was no buzz afterward. You heard no one talking about the film.

A major disappointment: CLIMATES, the new film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director of the wonderful film, DISTANT. The lead characters are played by Ceylan as Isa, a teacher of archeology at a university. Isa's wife Bahar, an art director for TV, is played by Ceylan's own second wife, Ebru Ceylan. At the beginning of the film they are on vacation, as their relationship falls apart. They go back to Istanbul separately and begin to live separate lives. Isa takes up with an ex-girlfriend Serap, then has a change of heart and goes to eastern Turkey where Bahar is now working on a new TV series. He asks her to take him back, quit her job and come back to Istanbul with him. He is a guy who can't get anything right in relationships. But all of this is not only transparent but kind of cloyingly self-indulgent because none of the characters are particularly interesting. We leave the film not caring whether they get together or not. Ceylan says in the press book that "Isa and Bahar are two lonely figures dragged through the ever-changing climate of their inner selves in pursuit of a happiness that no longer belongs to them." But even this statement is generic - they are empty people, but the film is empty, too. Antonioni knew a lot can be said about empty lives and empty people. In CLIMATES, it's obvious that Ceylan is no Antonioni.

Time Out Chicago: The TOC Blog The French Connection: TOC</em ... Helen Gramates on Day 4 at Cannes from Time Out Chicago

Another competition film that had its world premiere tonight was the Turkish film Climates by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a director whose previous three films we’ve screened at the Chicago Film Festival. Being a fan of his previous films (including his most recent, Distant, which screened in 2003) I was eager to see the film and even made sure to quickly down a cup of coffee prior to the screening in order to be extra alert.

Anyone who’s familiar with Ceylan’s work knows that his framing is gorgeous and images are meditative, so while you don’t have to fear a dense plotline, you might be tempted to nod off during a scene if you’re not properly prepared to focus in on his quiet style. The director himself acts as the main character of the film, which deals with his unsuccessful romantic relationship. While the director’s talent is still ever-present with clever framing and sly humor, the film was more disappointing than impressive. Perhaps one of the reasons is that expectations were so high. Coming out of the screening, the critics I encountered echoed that sentiment.

I spoke with two Turkish critics whose first reaction to the film was to comment on a lengthy sex scene which starts off violently and then turns slightly absurd. They felt it was going to be difficult to get Turkish audiences to respond well to it. I got the feeling that they, too, were a bit disappointed that their country’s most celebrated film export didn’t deliver more. Anyone who doesn’t want to be reminded of ambivalent times with a paramour will probably want to skip this one—but on the other hand, if you want to see unsuccessful romantic relationships of not-too-likeable characters portrayed very truthfully, then this one’s for you.

Climates Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Recent world cinema (not to mention your average American sitcom) is chock-full of inept, ineffectual men. (Hong Sang-soo is the reigning champion of this domain.) So it comes as something of a shock to find Ceylan delving into the problem of male over-effectuality in the form of unbridled patriarchal prerogative. Utterly blistering in its (self-?) excoriation of a cruel, even violent asshole, Climates harks back to an earlier moment in art cinema, especially the Italians -- the Rossellini of Voyage to Italy, the Antonioni of L'Avventura. In the midst of an architectural ruin, we begin to observe the dissolution not only of a relationship, but of a man's capability to relate to the human race as anything more than standing-reserve, as Heidegger put it. But what's even more frightening, to the very last, is the manner in which the women in his life seem to have internalized his abuse, as if being emotionally and even physically battered is somehow what one deserves for letting him in in the first place. I confess to being deeply moved by Climates in part because I saw reflected a familiar portrait, sides of myself in my worst, weakest moments that I would prefer to disavow. Ceylan's film -- a considerable step forward from the overly-mannered Distant -- refused to let me look away. Also, the film's use of deep space represents a giant leap for digital video. The shallow space of the final tryst, on the other hand, is ravishing, and could easily be excerpted as an avant-garde film in itself.

Long Pauses: TIFF 1: Three for Three Darren Hughes from Long Pauses

After spending two weeks meticulously filling in my TIFF spreadsheet, I was surprised to find Climates, the latest film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, at the top of the heap -- surprised, mostly, because I'd never seen any of his previous work. I rented Distant (2002) last week and was completely captivated by it. Even before reaching the scenes that make explicit reference to Tarkovsky, I was smiling at the more subtle allusions -- the clanging wind chimes, the mothers and sons, the struggling, alienated artists. How could I not love a film that was so obviously an homage to my all-time favorite, Mirror?

Climates didn't move me quite so powerfully, but it's a very good film nonetheless. Ceylan and his wife (Ebru Ceylan) play the starring roles, a couple in the final throes of a failing relationship. He is older, a university professor struggling to finish his thesis; she is an art designer working to establish a career in television and film production. The film opens as they're breaking up and then follows him over the next few months, as he attempts to begin the next -- and hopefully more satisfying -- phase of his life.

Climates includes three or four key scenes -- a daydream at the beach, a night in a hotel, and a brilliant sex scene -- that will certainly be among my favorite moments of any film I see this year. Often employing incredibly shallow focus, Ceylan taps into that transcendent Tarkovsky "magic" by shattering his images into abstraction and, in doing so, offering shards of subjective emotion. At times, I was reminded of Denis's sex scenes in Friday Night, but I haven't decided yet if she and Ceylan are working toward similar ends. After I get home, I hope to give more thought and time to Climates, which, like Atom Egoyan's Calendar, also uses photography and ancient religious architecture to raise questions about memory and national identity. (That last phrase is such an art film cliche [or maybe an art film criticism cliche], but I'm confident it's true in this case, and it will make this film fun to write about and discuss.)

Slant Magazine Keith Uhlich

If Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant is Andrei Tarkovsky directing a sham-spiritual Odd Couple, then his high-definition follow-up Climates is Neil LaBute directing an apolitical rendering of Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Reverse Shot critic Nick Pinkerton is onto something when he observes in his review of Distant that "[the film is] just the sterile flipside of those old, haywire Turk cheapies…where it's nothing unusual for a Machiavellian Spiderman to tangle with Mexican über-wrestler Santo." He goes on to give cautious praise to Distant and it's easy to understand why. Ceylan makes some of the best-looking bad movies around, all off-kilter compositions and vivid landscape photography, populated by characters who aimlessly wander the magical land of ennui in search of the next interminably pregnant conversational pause. You're half-convinced by the end of Distant that something meaningful has occurred, but it's all film-fest friendly smoke and mirrors. Ceylan is too much a secular prisoner of his influences, a fact he cops to in Distant's best scene where the sell-out photographer Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) toggles his television between Tarkovsky's Stalker and lesbian porn.

But let's give credit where it's due: By casting himself in the lead role of Climates, it's clear that Ceylan is more than willing to lay down his head on the proverbial chopping block. There's a huff n' puff sex scene herein that must be seen to be believed, all revolving around Ceylan's self-centered professor character Isa, his stiletto-heel clad mistress Serap (Nazan Kesal), and a stray nut (of the completely edible type) evasively rolling along the floor. Would that such conceptual bravery balanced out Ceylan's When in Doubt…Exhale! style of acting or the film-school pretentiousness of his visual/aural interplay (Roaring wind! Falling snow! Glistening tears! And, do my ears deceive me, is that the rusted windmill creak from Once Upon a Time in the West?). Yet in spite of all its critic-bait window dressing, Climates remains consistently watchable, if for no other reason than its dogged self-seriousness, which helps it attain an—I'm guessing—unintentionally high level of camp hilarity. "Are you bored?" Isa asks his girlfriend Bahar (Ebru Ceylan) at the film's start. I can only speak for myself, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from this Euro-art train wreck.

A terrific movie in the Antonioni tradition, Climates confirms 47-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as one of the world's most accomplished filmmakers—handling the end of a relationship and the cloud of human confusion rising from its wreckage as if the subject had never before been attempted.

Urban professionals on vacation: Bahar is a sullen twentysomething TV art director; Isa, 20 years older, is an overbearing university instructor. The opening sequence alternates between mega close-ups of bored Bahar in the summer sun and long shots of Isa, glimpsed between the pillars of the Roman ruins that he's photographing for his still unfinished dissertation. What is she looking at and what is he looking for?

The imperfect not-quite-disengagement of these two isolated figures makes for a more emotionally complex tale than Ceylan's 2003 Distant, in which a country bumpkin moves in with his massively indifferent city cousin. The tone is pensive and the narrative fluid. (Sitting on the beach, Isa wants to end the affair; he rehearses a line that segues into his actual conversation with Bahar.) A symbolic motorbike mishap notwithstanding, the couple's breakup is more mediocre than bad. The situation is rendered extraordinary through Ceylan's use of landscape as objective correlative—the action, such as it is, moving from Black Sea resort to Istanbul to wintry province in eastern Turkey.

Superbly crafted on high-definition video, Climates is a movie of intimate, unbalanced compositions. Ceylan specializes in human microbehavior. Were it not for the studied sound mix (so crisp you can hear the cigarettes sizzle), he might be directing a silent movie. Climates' best moments chart the reactions of one character to another when the second unexpectedly appears. The default mode is a watchful look at once sheepish and challenging. Alienation is palpable and ambivalence universal. (The sense of the human condition is that expressed by Marilyn Monroe in There's No Business Like Show Business: "After you get what you want you don't want it.") When the newly single Isa drops in on his ex, she can't decide whether to be hostile or hysterical. After a few preliminaries, he pins her on the floor.

Climates is filled with unforced metaphors— the tacky music box Isa gives Bahar, the televised earthquake he watches—many of them meteorological. Isa tells a colleague that he's going south for his vacation: "I need some decent weather." He next appears in a snowy dump where he's heard Bahar has gone on location. (In one of the movie's several extraordinary one-on-ones, Isa corners her as she waits in a van, the film crew loading equipment behind them, and proposes.)

Knowledge that Isa is played by the director and Bahar by his wife, Ebru Ceylan, inflects Climates less toward confessional psychodrama than ultra-professional acting exercise. Ceylan wants to make certain that his character is understood as a mildly odious, self-pitying passive-aggressive type; his wife's character has the monopoly on inner life, expressed not only by her mood-flickering close-ups but two dreams. The wonderful ending ponders her face once more. The falling snow substitutes for unshed tears.

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)

The beauty of the Turkish film "Climates," a small but indelible masterpiece, is more than skin-deep. I saw Nuri Bilge Ceylan's fourth feature on the festival circuit last year, which qualified it for inclusion on the year-end lists. No 2006 film meant more to me. It's as sharp and lovely as the best Chekhov short stories.

It is also a paradox: a cool, exacting but soulful work about a man of limited soul, set at the end of a longstanding relationship between an art history professor (played by the director, who also wrote the script) and a television art director (Ebru Ceylan, the director's wife). Ceylan focuses on the end and what happens after the end, in the emotional twilight before either half of a couple has made a new beginning.

The writer-director works also as a photographer. You can tell; his eye for both landscapes and faces is exquisite. The film begins in the heat of summer, on an extended vacation to the Mediterranean coastal region. Camera in hand, professor Isa, whose rumpled charm masks a steely core of passive-aggression, takes pictures of ancient ruins for his endlessly delayed dissertation. His lover Bahar climbs a nearby hill and observes him. In a daringly lengthy close-up of her face, which says everything that needs saying, "Climates" reveals what lesser filmmakers use reams of dialogue to convey when someone stands on the brink of a precipice.

Months later, the relationship has dissolved. Isa, back in Istanbul, has a chance bookstore meeting with a colleague and the colleague's Cheshire Cat-grinning girlfriend Serap (Naz Kesal). The name rings a bell: Earlier in the film Isa mentions something to Bahar about his "meaningless Serap incident." Months later, in the bookstore, we detect a distinct sensual meaning in that meaninglessness, and the Serap incident of old becomes new again, in an audacious sex scene verging perilously on rape.

Serap is a memorable Other Woman, and the superb Kesal's knowing laugh is like something from one of Dante's rings of hell. She wields her cigarette like a devil's pitchfork. Yet she is not a caricature--no one is in "Climates"--and even as she sees right through the hopelessly weaselly Isa, you are never sure what she's thinking. It is she who updates Isa on his ex-lover's whereabouts. After telling a teaching colleague that he needs a vacation in a warm climate, Isa does the opposite: He contrives a plan to drop in on Bahar unannounced in the snowy eastern Turkish region, where she is filming. What happens there brings "Climates" to its rueful but brilliantly inevitable ending.

Many admiring critics have likened Ceylan's camera eye and thematic interests to those of early Michaelangelo Antonioni. The shared aesthetic is there, especially comparing "Climates" to works such as Antonioni's "Il Grido." The directors' respective uses of space--vast, beautifully desolate, carefully framed--define the characters' emotional lives. But Ceylan, whose previous picture, "Distant," was very fine but not nearly this full and fully realized, doesn't go in for Antonioni's chic, occasionally platitudinous despair. In "Climates" we're seeing ordinary people examined with merciless novelistic perception, yet without a single wasted word. As Gabriele Ferzetti says to Lea Massari in Antonioni's "L'Avventura": You know it's a bad sign when "words are becoming less and less necessary."

In Isa, Ceylan creates a forbidding character, an academic better with artifacts than with people. He is not so much a hopeless romantic as a man hooked on romantic nostalgia, living in a languid state of unfinished business. I love the way Ceylan refuses to ennoble Isa, just as I love the way Ceylan uses the familiar notion of a character regarding herself or himself in a mirror, to such different ends. Just before she lets him into her apartment, Serap looks in a mirror and what we see in her face is a little of everything: regret, lust, doubt, resignation. When Isa looks in the mirror, it's to see how he looks when he sucks in his gut a little.

Everything about "Climates" is extraordinary, from the sound mix (buzzing flies in summer, the crunch and hush of snow in winter) to Gokhan Tiryaki's crystalline cinematography. Tiryaki and Ceylan shot it on high-definition digital video, and I've never seen high-def look so rich. The colors sing, and the faces become landscapes unto themselves, none more plaintive than Ebru Ceylan's. Late in the film, Bahar sits at a hotel room table in the early morning light. Looking across the table at Isa, newly dropped back into her unsteady life, she is hoping for one resolution. A single, casually callous remark makes Bahar realize she's in for the opposite. The way Ceylan's camera holds steady on his actress-wife's face, as it undergoes a series of fleeting climate shifts, you're getting what you get in a great Chekhov tale: an entire life story in a glance.

Antonioni once told an interviewer that his task wasn't to worry about the audience. His task was to delve into "our psychology, our morals, our feelings." Few contemporary films try; fewer succeed. "Climates" is one of the few.

indieWire [Nick Pinkerton]

The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias

stylusmagazine.com (Nancy Keefe Rhodes)

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith)

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson)

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin)

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman)

The Nation (Stuart Klawans)

DVD Verdict (Jesse Ataide)

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Tallinn Film Festival report

Climates Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Crust)

RogerEbert.com (Jim Emerson)

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis)

THREE MONKEYS (Uc Maymun)

Turkey France Italy (109 mi) 2008

Jonathan Romney at Cannes from The Independent

But for now, my personal favourite in competition – and a definite Palme d'Or contender – is Three Monkeys, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director who made his auteur reputation at Cannes with his features Uzak and Climates. Ceylan vaults into new territory here: Three Monkeys is a noir-flavoured psychological thriller, which starts off close to Georges Simenon, slides more into James M Cain territory, and ends up vaulting into the Dostoyevsky league. A driver is persuaded by his politician boss to take the rap for a hit-and-run accident, in exchange for payment that will ease his family's financial troubles. The driver goes to prison; his son drifts into bad company; his wife gets involved with the politician – and when the driver gets out of jail, things slide toward even darker consequences. It is very much a Ceylan film – there are all the elegant, brooding cityscapes we expect of him – and the elliptical intrigue is typical of his sombre, slow-burning style. But here we find Ceylan having the sort of fun with narrative twists you might expect from the Coen brothers, and the moral resonances leave you feeling you've grappled with not just a teasing enigma but a substantial tragedy too.

Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE

The haunting center of "A Christmas Tale" - the death of a first sibling at the age of six - also lingers over another strong competition entry, Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest "Three Monkeys." While not as satisfying as his previous Cannes stunners "Distant" and "Climates," the film confirms Ceylan's photographic mastery, of landscape-as-psychological vista, and his incisive excavation of a certain type of male, unwilling to face the consequences of his actions. The story concerns a wealthy businessman who persuades his driver to take the fall for a hit-and-run committed in the dead of night: nine months in jail with a healthy pay-day when he gets out. In the meantime, we meet the other monkeys, presumably a reference to these Ceylan-drawn human species who act on basic instincts rather than reason: the driver's wife and his mature son. The film's hi-definition video images are blanched and grainy, lending a vaguely surreal air to the film's hot summer coastal setting along with the secrets, lies and barely repressed recent tragedies that hover over the characters' psyches. That phantom past reemerges in two spectacular moments in the film; jarring and disturbing, the scenes create an unnerving effect that lasts longer than just about anything else yet seen on screen here.

Cannes Dispatch: Day Two: Patrick McGavin from Stop Smiling magazine (excerpt)

The best film of the second day was Three Monkeys, the fifth feature of the exceptionally talented Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. His previous work, Climates, was my favorite film of year in 2006. Climates brilliantly navigated the emotional and personal contours of a couple’s relationship that Ceylan imbued with a lyrical, sharp register of pain and regret. The new film is grungier and shadowy, detailing a different kind of guilt concerning the fallout of an unusual business transaction between an ambitious politician and the personal driver who agrees to take the blame for his boss’ crime.

The drama pivots on the emotional wreckage of the unorthodox arrangement that expands to the driver’s wife and son. Thematically the film is a sharply drawn noir about behavior and consequence — it binds a malicious dark humor to a trenchant exploration of circumstance and fate. Visually, Three Monkeys is frequently astonishing. Like Climates, the movie is shot in high-definition digital video. Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips has written perceptively about the influence of Chekov in Ceylan's work — that influence is especially evident here. Ceylan is also especially adept at creating an environment and a mood: The bleached-out colors and crystalline images attain a level of photorealism that gathers a tremendous immediacy and vitality.

Cannes: "Un Conte de Noel," "Three Monkeys" Glenn Kenny at Cannes from Then Came Running

...that said, you might not be surprised at my expressing disappointment over the latest from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose alienated omantic drama Climates blew me away here in 2006. Three Monkeys (the title refers to the ones who don't speak, see, or hear any evil; thankfully, the film itself never explicitly evokes that image) is also a family drama, also haunted by a dead son, and while it's compellingly performed and often beautifully shot (in the same digital video format Ceylan used for Climates), it's largely commonplace, drear, and claustrophobic. One finds oneself frustrated by the stories Ceylan chooses not to tell—the would-be politician who sets the film's plot into motion seems a more interesting character than anybody in the family whose lives he effects—and by his too-insistent emphases, e.g., a bit involving an idiosyncratic ring tone that's funny and wrenching the first time, still effective the second, and stale the third. The movie's not bad, but it's not terribly special, either.

And in any case, Ceylan's reluctance to explore Turkish politics after bringing them up in the first place may cost him big with this year's Cannes jury. At the jury press conference the other day, its president Sean Penn, no doubt relishing his new-found power, said something along the lines of (I don't have the exact words in front of me, damnit) "We have to teach directors they need to be conscious of the world that we live in." Whatever you say, Kommisar. Although that'll be tough in this case, as all the movies you're judging have, you know, already been made and all.

Is this guy a dick, or what?

Cannes 2008 diary: ‘Lion’s Den’ and 'Three Monkeys' Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London

On the surface, the best film here so far for me – Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ‘Three Monkeys’ – is only very superficially about incarceration, in that the story is quickly kick-started when a local politician facing elections persuades his driver to take the rap for him after the former knocks over a man with his car; in return he’ll pay his employee’s salary to his teenage son, and hand over a large lump sum when he emerges from prison after six months or so.

But if we actually see only a couple of prison-set scenes, when the son visits his father, that doesn’t mean that imprisonment isn’t a central, almost Dostoievskian metaphor for what happens to the driver, his wife and son, and the the politician. For that lie told to the cops is merely the first – and indeed the fount – of many more deceits that shape the increasingly twisted and dangerous interactions between the four protagonists, all of whom soon find themselves trapped like rats by their own fears, desires, doubts and suspicions.

This fifth feature is arguably the most ambitious film yet from the maker of ‘Uzak’ and ‘Climates’. It has the dry humour, assured pacing, astute psychological insights and sharp sense of moral and dramatic irony that has been conspicuous in all his work, but in many respects the film feels like an expansion upon ‘Climates’, not only in extending that film’s clear-eyed, unsentimental assessment of male-female relationships from a couple to a whole family and its acquaintances, but in exploring the rich potential afforded by digital technology; if you thought Ceylan’s photographer’s eye produced stunning images in ‘Climates’, ‘Three Monkeys’ pushes the envelope still further. It’s been bought for the UK, so when it turns up, see it – and marvel!

Three Monkeys (Uc Maymun) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

An ostensibly routine noir-style psychological thriller vaults into the realms of high art in competition contender Three Monkeys. Cannes has been kind to Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan in the past, with Uzak and Climates establishing his auteur credentials here in 2003 and 2006. His new film represents a bold departure from his past style: it's best described as introspective melodrama, yet both visually and tonally, it's still quintessential Ceylan.

For the first time, Ceylan really involves himself in narrative complexity, spinning a subtly-twisty yarn with echoes of such crime writers as Simenon and James M. Cain. Three Monkeys will consolidate Ceylan's reputation among art-house cognoscenti, but should win him new fans too. Its genre bent should give it a niche crossover appeal for export, in ways that Uzak and Climates never quite reached.

The film's theme, as with so much prime noir, is guilt, and the people who either accept it or try to slough it off: the title allusion is to the proverbial apes of 'see/hear/speak no evil' fame. The story starts in moody, night-soaked fashion, with a middle-aged man dozing at the wheel of his car before causing a hit-and-run accident (it's typical of the film's elliptical approach that the victim remains unknown).

The perpetrator is Servet (Kesal), a politician who fears that the accident will affect his election chances. He therefore persuades his driver Eyüp (Bingöl, best known in Turkey as a folk singer) to take the rap, in exchange for a payoff that will keep his family financially secure. Eyüp goes to prison, while his teenage son Ismael (Sungar) strays into undefined bad company - presumably the reason for him coming home bloodied one night.

Hoping to help out her son, Eyüp's wife Hacer (Aslan) approaches Servet for a handout, and ends up getting more involved with him than she, or we, expected.

Some standard pulp-thriller tropes are tantalisingly spun out for the first hour, but the slyness of the narrative approach only becomes fully apparent after that. It's only then, for example, that Eyüp, newly released, fully enters the action as a player, the emphasis of the drama shifting disorientingly to him. And it's only after an hour that we discover that the couple have had another son, long dead, who haunts the story in a couple of enigmatic images, one a dream with vaguely Tarkovskian overtones.

Throughout, Ceylan and his co-writers - his wife Ebru Ceylan and actor Kesal - systematically withhold key information, keeping us as much out of the loop as his characters often are. Much of the film, crucially, revolves round the suspicions and anxieties of both father and son. Like previous Ceylan films, this one looks long and hard into the mysteries and self-destructive contradictions of the human heart, but the film's sombre, arguably pessimistic bent also finds room for Ceylan's blackly sardonic humour, embodied here by a running gag about an unintentionally eloquent cellphone ringtone.

Using HD video in steely, washed-out hues, Ceylan and DoP Tiryaki provide the beautifully composed cityscapes that have become the director's trademark, as well as facial studies that speak more eloquently about characters' conflicting emotions than the common run of close-ups. A gorgeous, digitally-manipulated final shot gives the film a troubling open ending that can only stir debate and send intrigued viewers back for a second viewing.

The only cavil is that the pacing gets a little slack in the final stretches, and - while it's the nature of a Ceylan film to be slow-burning - the smallest amount of trimming could well turn an exceptional film into a near-perfect one.

'Three Monkeys' at present is toast of Cannes Michael Phillips at Cannes from The Chicago Tribune

CANNES, France—The Cannes Film Festival is an international bazaar, and no single aspect of this cinematic kaleidoscope by the Mediterranean exemplifies its globalism better than the pavilions lining the beach behind the Palais. The Irish pavilion sits at one end, Portugal’s a few steps down. The Icelandic commission has its own releases and locations to promote, as does Brazil.

On Friday, under the sort of threatening skies the director himself favors on screen, I’m sitting in the Turkish Pavilion, drinking Turkish coffee with the Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. His fifth feature, the stunning “Three Monkeys,” is one of the widely acknowledged favorites in the opening days of the 61st Cannes.

The title chosen by Ceylan (pronounced JEY-lahn) refers to evils about which his characters choose not to hear, see or speak. Late one night, a politician falls asleep behind the wheel of his car on a country road. He strikes and kills a pedestrian and then coolly coerces one of his employers to take the rap for him and serve a nine-month prison sentence.

This arrangement initiates a string of deceptions, including a tryst between the politico (Ercan Kesal) and the wife, Hacer, (Hatice Aslan) of the fall guy (Yavuz Bingol). Their son (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) learns of the affair. When the son’s father comes home from prison, the turmoil so long buried in his family—another son has drowned years earlier—rises to the surface.

Growing up, Ceylan says, “my family life was really complicated. Fights, things like that. I lived for a long time, for instance, several families together. Very complicated, and many tragic and very painful memories.” Making films, he says, has its “consoling” side. It is a way of “trying to understand the dark side of my soul. I use all my memories; that’s my primary material. They make life more…standable? Tolerable, I think you say.”

Ceylan’s previous film, “Climates,” traced the dissolution of a relationship. Ceylan and his wife, Ebru, played the central couple, and Ceylan shot it on high-definition digital video. When “Climates” premiered two years ago at Cannes, the film’s astounding vibrancy struck many in attendance as the medium’s first masterwork shot in that format.

“Three Monkeys” clearly comes from the same director’s eye, but its palette—virtually denuded of color, except for splashes and blotches of dark red—is very different, placing the characters in what Ceylan calls “a specific, separate world of their own.”

“‘Climates’ was my first film in digital, so I was a bit afraid of trying certain things,” he says. “I was interested in protecting the values of the digital resolution and things like that. Which is nonsense. I don’t care about resolution anymore…I know now that after you shoot you can change your lighting completely, and in a very cheap studio, with the cinematographer, I modified colors and the lighting in the post-production. [When filming] I only want to concentrate on the actors and the story.”
There are moments in his latest picture where you sense Ceylan’s inability to let go of a particularly rich image, in which the characters, placed just so in an exquisitely realized frame, are dwarfed or suffocated by storm clouds, or an interior darkness. The director acknowledges he shot several different endings toying with different fates of the major characters.

Narrative lurches notwithstanding, “Three Monkeys” offers the kind of artistry rare in contemporary cinema. Little details linger in the mind, such as a knife on a cutting board, tipping slightly in the breeze. Ceylan gets wonderful suspense out of everyday things, such as a telltale cell phone ring-tone that wails to the tune of a vengeful Turkish pop ballad.

Most indelibly, the film’s brief but brilliant depictions of the dead son grip the audience like nothing else so far in this year’s Cannes festival.

Ceylan’s web site showcases his photography along with his filmmaking. Despite courting far-flung comparisons to director Michelangelo Antonioni, “Three Monkeys” suggests that a more apt comparison regarding Ceylan’s compositional leanings involves another photographer turned director, Stanley Kubrick. Ceylan, says actress Hatice Aslan, a fierce marvel as Hacer, “is like his photos; he’s very calm.” But there is a great deal roiling underneath the surface.

This quality distinguishes the texture of Anton Chekhov, Ceylan’s favorite writer. For his next project he may adapt Chekhov’s “My Wife” to a Turkish setting and, if so, the film will star his wife, Ebru.

That’s a maybe, mind. “I’m not the kind of director who has lots of projects waiting,” Ceylan says, with a laugh. “Making a film changes you, and after struggling with a film, I just…wait. I go through hating cinema for some time. And then, under the load of the images and ideas, I slowly begin to work.”

BFI | Sight & Sound | Three Monkeys (2008) Jonathan Romney from Sight and Sound, March 2009

Matt Noller at Cannes from The House Next Door

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (Bir zamanlar Anadolu'da) B- 82

Turkey Bosnia Herzegovina (157 mi) 2011

Anatolia is the rest of Turkey other than Istanbul, so this is basically a police procedural taking place in the backwoods rural regions of Turkey, reminiscent of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) or Bong Joon-ho’s MEMORIES OF A MURDER (2003), where the local cops and their country bumpkin methods are at odds with the latest scientific police procedures, as represented by a doctor from the city, who digs a little deeper in determining the causes of death. The result is a cultural clash, often comical, but once again an examination of a male dominated society which has a notoriously low regard for women. Shot in ‘Scope and on HD film, it opens with what is immediately recognizable as a Kiarostami shot, a long static take of a distant horizon of rolling hills in the dark, where after awhile car headlights can be seen from 3 cars moving in the camera’s direction, a police team eventually stopping nearby where two alleged killers are attempting to locate where they buried the body, where many of the distinguishing landmarks of the hilly region are similar. Much of this feels like a wild goose chase, made even more difficult by a search in the dead of night, led by an outraged Police Chief Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan) dragging the handcuffed lead suspect Kenan (Firsat Tanis), with Prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel) and Doctor Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner) tagging along as part of the team, all awkwardly bumping into one another throughout the night, where slowly the audience develops a feel for the characters. Most of the time the group just stands around smoking or chatting in small groups as the perpetrators are led through various locations, trying to ascertain clues that are more recognizable, trying to pinpoint an exact spot, as the suspects are vague in their recollections, which makes one wonder why they assembled such a large team when they didn’t even know where they were going. The endless search builds to a slow monotony, broken only by moments of absurd humor.

There is a running dialogue between the Prosecutor and the Doctor, a battle of modernist moral wills that plays out like existentialist banter, as each approaches their work quite differently, though both believe they utilize rational methods. Being from the region, the Prosecutor seems more willing to accept without question many of the local habits and customs, where his understanding of the lay of the land helps him identify motives for criminal acts, as he believes he understands how people react when things go wrong, believing he is an excellent student of human behavior. The Doctor on the other hand discounts much of the local lore while balancing the personal side of a physician’s treatment of a patient with the professional side of determining the forensics evidence in criminal cases, believing science explains itself rather than simply accepting the word of alleged criminals. This gets into a Dostoevskian Crime and Punishment exposé where the Prosecutor sees no reason to doubt the word, once motive has been established, and finds the Doctor extremely cynical not to accept what amounts to rational explanations for human behavior. All of this sounds like back and forth theoretical legalese, and to a large degree it is, not particularly involving with any of the characters, where instead the information revealed is used to update and advance the state of the case, where some of the particulars have an eerily incestuous feel to them, where family spats have spilled over into generational blood feuds, where few in the region are educated enough to change the continuing cycles of violence that are inflicted on each other.

The most interesting aspect is the entire group takes shelter in a local village due to a coming storm, where the local mayor greets them and has his family serve food, where he updates everyone on the latest developments within his own family, proud of his two sons and their budding professional careers, also a daughter who has married into a good family, calling his remaining daughter still living at home an “afterthought.” When she serves the tea, however, in the middle of a power outage, her angelic face is illuminated by candlelight, where each man is taken aback by her breathtaking beauty, including the suspects, where it seems such a waste for someone that beautiful to end up in such a distant, God forsaken place, where there is little hope her life will ever amount to anything. But these thoughts and ruminations reflect the continuing frustrations this group faces throughout the night. By daylight, however, they discover the body and the particulars of the crime are revealed. Much of the local flavor is lost in the professional vernacular of documenting the case, a slow and meticulous process that is mostly read out loud which simply elongates the film well beyond the director’s ability to sustain the audience’s interest. There are ambiguous tidbits added to the case, throwing doubt into whether or not they’ve actually captured the real murderer, or whether any of this will have any impact in the lives of the local citizens whose hopes disappear at such an early age.

Cannes 2011 Diary #8: 'Once Upon a Time in Anatolia', 'Poliss', 'The ... Eduardo Lucatero at Cannes from Sound on Sight

Murder. Suicide. Pedophilia. Prostitution. Just another day at Cannes. The murder came from the very last competition film, Once Upon a time in Anatolia, the longest, most demanding film of the official selection. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous movie was the very accessible, entertaining drama Three Monkeys, but this time around, he returned to his previous style: quiet, bleak, without giving much information. A group of men are driving through the country, looking for a corpse after the murderer has confessed the crime. They can’t find the body and while searching, they engage in what appears to be random chatter. They find the body after 90 minutes, and by this point the audience realizes that most of that apparently pointless talk has major significance, not in the crime itself, but in the different lives of all the men involved in the procedure. This is not an easy film, but if watched in the right frame of mind, it is an extraordinary meditation of being a man and a fascinating (if ultra slow) police procedural.

Once upon a time in Cannes... - News, Films - The Independent Jonathan Romney

The Cannes Film Festival closes tonight, and it has been an especially strong year. Even so, it's taken till this final weekend for critics to start muttering the M-word – "masterpiece". The longest, and arguably the slowest, film in the competition, the Turkish entry Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, is also the most substantial offering here, and a definite front-runner for the Palme d'Or.

The latest from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the film recounts a shambling police investigation, with the first hour cloaked in darkness and the crime scene reached only 90mins in – raising some sarcastic cheers. But this complex, beautifully crafted film has it all – laced with black humour, it's a character piece, a landscape study, a police procedural thriller and a philosophical contemplation.

This lengthy crime drama is the definite slow-burner of the competition, with its share of head-scratching moments. But Ceylan's austerely no-frills work is also the most serious and intellectually stimulating entry in contention, and shows why the Turkish director is increasingly talked about in the same breath as Bergman and Tarkovsky.

User reviews from imdb Author: nowtheworldisgone from Turkey

Anatolia, simply the rest of Turkey other than Istanbul. It is a place where the hospitality is served as the only gift with respect and honor. The fascinating thing is to see such sort of story which takes place in this land of world where hundreds of nations have existed and vanished throughout the history, by a magnificent director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. I can understand people who have harsh criticism about these kind of arts so called as ''film-noir''. It may seem too slow or simply lack of action or someone can even question how other people can enjoy by watching so called cliché ' a man looking beyond the horizons all along the movie'. The point is no body has to like this sort of art. For instance it is like reading a book. Consider some pages of a book when there is no action but the author speaks instead of the hero of the book. So by watching ' a man looking beyond the horizons' makes me question what he could think or makes me put myself in the middle of the situation. And I really feel like I am that guy in the movie. But I really really and really feel like I am that guy, when the movie is so perfectly directed and so perfectly portrayed.

We can call this movie as a bridge or as a milestone in Ceylan's career. It is as simple as that, there is a very obvious change in Ceylan's directing and writing after seeing that movie. Having seen that, we can make this comparison like Before or After Once upon a Time in Anatolia. It is not 'three monkeys' or 'the climates' or 'the distant', it is obviously another one that carries Nuri Bilge Ceylan's way of directing to the next level.

Another must see...

The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become a name synonymous with the more traditional type of auteur that the Cannes film festival reveres. In his sixth film and also his longest to date (also the longest film playing in competition) Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a morality tale that reflects the state of mind of the Turkish people. Known for long, steady shots that reveal mystery and beauty similar to the styles of Abbas Kiarostami, even Andrei Tarkovsky, Ceylan has mastered his unique style of Turkish cinema that evokes philosophical questions about life. And while he seemed to have perfected his method with his previous films Uzak and Climates, Ceylan takes a different turn with his latest film. Combining the mystery of a dead body buried in the hills of Anatolia with the spark of an existential journey for its protagonist, the drama mirrors issues the country faces today.

Opening with an extremely slow investigation into the night of Anatolia by a group of policemen bringing a supposed killer Kenan (Firat Tanis) to find the dead body of his victim, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia begins unlike any of Ceylan’s previous films. The darkness of the first hour of the film is punctuated with bursts of light from the head-beams of cars, painting the dark night canvas like a painter. The group of men include a prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel), police officer Naci (Yilmax Erdogan) and Dr. Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner) who eventually will become the films protagonist, though its not immediately apparent. After searching for what seems like hours, the group stops at a local farmers home to rest, which brings into focus the differences in their lifestyles and highlights the kind of themes Ceylan wants his audience to ponder.

As dawn breaks for the party, so does the evidence, and the group finally discovers the body they’ve been looking for buried deep in the ground. Nurset the prosecutor dictates the facts of the crime scene, peppered with an odd sense of humor, while the absent-minded policemen have forgotten to bring a body bag. The only one who remains serious with solidarity is Dr. Cemal, who notices that the accomplice of the murderer seems to have confessed before being shut up by Kenan, an odd ambiguity that the police do not notice. In fact ambiguity is a central theme that Celyan plays with that reoccurs throughout the film. He shows a brief apparition of the man who might’ve been murdered and in the final autopsy, when the Dr. bizarrely ignores an incriminating piece of disturbing evidence.

Ceylan has a clear and direct message he hopes to send with the film, despite the mysterious and ambivalent nature of his characters. Throughout the journey of the search for the dead body, the prosecutor shares a story with the doctor about a woman who had predicted her own death after the birth of her child, and then abruptly died as foreseen. This story continues to come back into the fray as the doctor doubts anyone can drop dead randomly, and we soon learn that the woman was the wife of the prosecutor. It’s this kind of emotional detachment hidden in subtle glances and minimalist dialogue that highlights the strength of Ceylan’s filmmaking.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Dave Calhoun from Time Out London

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceyan is unlikely to attract heaving crowds to his sixth film, ‘Once Upon A Time in Anatolia’, but since when was the 51-year-old director of ‘Uzak’, ‘Climates’ and ‘Three Monkeys’ in it for the multiplex? Ceylan is a sly and daring screen artist of the highest order and should draw wild praise with this new film for challenging both himself and us, the audience, with this lengthy, rigorous and masterly portrait of a night and day in the life of a murder investigation on his country’s Anatolian steppes.

‘Once Upon A Time In Anatolia’ is a crime movie, but not as you know it, and as well as asking us to puzzle together fragments of a murder case, it also offers rich, and sometimes comic, ruminations on city, small-town and village attitudes, on cynical versus more feeling attitudes to life, on our ability to separate the personal and the professional and on the banalities that arises even in extreme, unusual situations. It might be about a murder, but it’s also about the passing of time (and, in a subtly different way, passing the time), and to stress both, Ceylan asks that we share nearly three hours with him and his film.

We follow a group of 12 men in three vehicles – policemen, soldiers, two suspects, a doctor, a prosecutor and two men with shovels – as they trawl the countryside at night looking for a buried body, trying and failing several times before they make some progress. One minute they’re looking for freshly dug earth, the next they’re discussing the merits of cheese or the tell-tale signs of prostate cancer. With two prisoners in tow, they make a pit-stop at a village where we get a naturalistic portrait of everyday relations and where small, endearing differences emerge between the town folk of the investigation and their rural hosts. Back on the road, Ceylan moves around characters, and sometimes leaves them behind altogether for some staggering landscape shots. Night becomes dawn, and only when it’s morning do they return to town and the final chapter of the film unfolds in a police station and doctor’s surgery.

There are many eccentric, intriguing touches. Lightning flashes on a rock and illuminates an ancient carving. An apple falls of a tree, rolls down a hill and passes through a stream. Ceylan sometimes locks his camera on individual faces, although he also steps back and lets things unfold in attractive, compellingly lit wide shots. In many ways, it’s an ensemble piece in which the main event has happened and the lead character is dead. But, gradually, our interest focuses on the doctor (originally from Istanbul, and a proxy for the director, perhaps) and there are several conversations between him and the prosecutor as they discuss various emotional and pragmatic approaches to life in relation to someone close to the prosecutor who has recently died.

Displaying a new interest in words and story (albeit of the most elusive kind), ‘Once Upon A Time in Anatolia’ feels like a change of direction for Ceylan and may disappoint those who were especially attracted to the urbane melancholia of ‘Uzak’ and ‘Climates’. Ceylan set his last three films in Istanbul and they were all quiet, psychological portraits of individuals or families, even if his last, ‘Three Monkeys’, the tale of a corrupt politician and a wronged man, also flirted with the crime genre. The new film is also about crime, but its final word on genre is to reject it. Beyond being chronological, the film follows no obvious storytelling pattern. Things happen when they do and at a natural rhythm. There are stretches of silence, followed by bursts of chat; there are plot details revealed slyly, almost imperceptibly; there are shifts of tone and repetition. The film is also a test in patience: only by paying close attention and thinking hard on the spot will you gain all there is to gain from the film. Ceylan invites us along for the ride – but only if we’re up for it.

There are many silent stretches and Ceylan typically creates endless striking images, especially during the night-time scenes, when rain, thunder and lightning add to a foreboding, even apocalyptic air. But ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’ is also unusually wordy and Ceylan plays with borders in language between the useless and useful, the banal and significant. It’s a mysterious and demanding work, and it marks a distinct progression in Ceylan’s career as he continues to gnaw at the boundaries of film storytelling with humour, grace, empathy and a dry, wry view of everyday life.

Review: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia - New Statesman Ryan Gilbey

Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day 11 – Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Oslo, 31. August, & Predictions Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from The House Next Door, May 21, 2011

October 2011 Ben Sachs from Cine-File Blog, October 12, 2011

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia Dan Fainaru from Screendaily, May 21, 2011

CANNES REVIEW | “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” is a Mesmerizing Police Procedural Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 22, 2011

NYFF Spotlight: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia | Film Society of Lincoln ... Nicholas Kemp from Film Comment, September 22, 2011

Film review – Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) | Cinema Autopsy Thomas Caldwell

User reviews from imdb Author: DoksanlarSinemasi from Türkiye (The Turkish Republic)

User reviews from imdb Author: sarajevo-2 from Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina

User reviews from imdb Author: MEHMET EMRAH ERKANI from Turkey

Toronto Film Scene [Sarah Gopaul]

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Nick James at Cannes from the Sight & Sound blog, May 21, 2011

Cannes Film Festival: 'Bir zamanlar Anadolu'da' and 'Le Gamin au vélo' Elena Razlogova at Cannes from Pop Matters

Toronto International Film Festival 2011: 'Once Upon a Time in ... Pop Matters

Once upon a time in Anatolia | Screen Comment Ali Naderzad at Cannes

Cannes 2011. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 22, 2011

'Once Upon a Time in Anatolia': Cannes 2011 Review Deborah Young at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 22,

2011

Justin Chang at Cannes from Variety

Inquiry Into a Haunting Land Could Grab Palme d’Or Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 21, 2011

WINTER SLEEP (Kis uykusu) B 84

Turkey (196 mi) 2014 ‘Scope

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.

—Richard III, Act 5, by William Shakespeare, 1592-3

The film that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the most prestigious award in all of cinema, and it doesn’t come without controversy. In fact, because of the vehement discussions generated afterwards and the various problems people have with the film, it plays into its role as generating interest and enthusiastic film discussion, certainly one of the goals any filmmaker could have before releasing a film. Most likely the worldwide audience will think the pros outweigh the cons, but this is an exhausting experience, and not altogether for good reasons. Filmmakers can always rationalize excessive length in films, finding some artistic basis, but the truth is this doesn’t need to be well over three hours and the length is only part of the problem. This is largely a writer’s film, as every word is about the author writing the words, which he transfers into a story taking place onscreen, where the majority of the film is spent in arguments and personal criticism, but there is little doubt that the subject is the author himself. Because of the overall length of the film, this plays out as a summation of his entire film career, like an opus work, one that is meant to immortalize the author/creator. In CLIMATES (2006), the director places himself in front of the camera and stars with is real life wife Ebu Ceylon, where the male character couldn’t be more self-absorbed and selfish, resorting to psychological harassment and sexual abuse, where he comes across as a domineering creep. While it takes guts to expose oneself like that in front of the camera, this seems to have been the preliminary lead-in to this larger, more extended work, focusing on one man’s overcontrolling demeanor that chokes and suffocates the life out of his marriage, where initially he comes across as cultured, well-mannered and sympathetic, but over time we lose patience with him, as do all the other characters in the film, because the only person he really cares about is himself, where the world must revolve around him, and he always has to get his way, continually bullying those around him until he gets it, where he nags and picks at every little thing to undermine and discredit others while remaining totally immune to his own faults. He is the perfect example of a seemingly innocent male misogynist whose chief overriding flaw is emotional and psychological abuse, who hides behind his occasional moments of kindness and genuine concern with philosophical posturing while remaining clueless and blind to the other times where he simply doesn’t give a damn about others, as he tramples over their fragile emotions with the subtlety of a steamroller.

Because this film dwells so completely on the director himself, where the film is a choreography of disagreements and arguments, filled with lacerating criticisms targeted at the overly bossy husband that have likely been leveled at Ceylon, co-written by his wife who certainly offers authentic critiques of her own, it comes across as self-indulgent and egotistic, where the length only aggravates this obsessional need to dwell on himself. Viewed in this manner, this is not a very good film, as the narrow focus is equally suffocating for the viewers in the audience, most of it expressed with the lecturing tone of superiority. Thankfully, Ceylon’s greatest strength is shooting outdoor landscape shots in Turkey that are breathtakingly beautiful, taking us to historical sites of natural splendor in CLIMATES, virtually unknown rural geographical beauty in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), where this film, shot by Gökhan Tiryaki in Cappadocia and Nevşehir in Central Anatolia, may be the most astonishingly beautiful natural locations of all. Unfortunately, only about 20% of the film is shot outdoors, while the rest takes place in the claustrophobic confinement of their home, where Mr. Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), an extremely wealthy former actor now runs a small hotel in one of the more unusually impressive locations on earth, where the building itself feels like a cave dwelling built into the natural rock formations of the region. Aydin lives with his much younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen) and recently divorced sister Necla (Demet Akbag). Initially the story concerns the turbulent relationship with various men in the region where Mr. Aydin inherited wealth from his deceased father, including the role of landlord, inheriting tenants who are not in a position at the moment to make their rent payments, as the drunken older brother in the home, Ismail (Nejat Isler), was recently imprisoned for six months and no one afterwards will hire him. Aydin’s hotel clerk and driver, Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan), nearly comes to blows with Ismail after his young son throws a rock breaking the truck window of Aydin’s vehicle, apparently mad that he’s possessed many of the household items like furniture and the television in exchange for rent. Ismail’s brother Hamdi (Serhat Mustafa Kiliç) is an imam that tries to teach his brother’s son to apologize, but this obviously causes great humiliation, especially when the dirt poor family has to walk miles across a muddy landscape to seek the pleasure of the master of the house (Aydin), who on some occasions arrogantly refuses to see them at all.

“A king in his own little kingdom,” as he calls it, Mr. Aydin is an imperious man full of mockery and scorn for others with different moral values than his own. Behind the scenes, he writes an Internet column that serves as a platform that allows him to become a moral voice for the region, often expressing religious views, though he never sets foot in a mosque, but that doesn’t stop him from preaching about the behavior of others, often criticizing their lack of ethical conduct. While Aydin sits at his desk, his sister Necla often stretches out on the couch behind him, like a back seat driver, where she also has a way of expressing her own contempt for the hypocrisy of these columns, wondering who her brother thinks he is that he can become a moral spokesperson when he doesn’t know the first thing about religion or the affairs of impoverished people. This, of course, leads to long, drawn out discussions that begin politely enough but slowly turn into more pointed attacks on each other’s character, eventually feeling like all-out personal assaults. Initially the audience may sympathize with Aydin, as there’s been little evidence onscreen to support such sharp attacks, but by the end of the film we feel Necla never went far enough, as his shifty character, especially the way he manhandles and mistreats his wife, is far worse than imagined. Nihal is seen as one of the few with a moral conscience, mostly unseen initially, where we hear from others that she spends her time working with various charities. Her husband seems to support these activities, proud of her honorable intentions, but grows suspicious when they start to have clandestine meetings at his house without his knowledge. When he awkwardly sits down to see for himself what’s going on, Nihal takes him aside and politely asks him to leave. Aydin, however, is outraged that she’s intentionally concealing her work from him, suspecting something is going on under his roof. Aydin won’t leave this issue alone, but begins a series of patronizing discussions about his wife’s naiveté, claiming she doesn’t know the first thing about running a business, that he wants to protect her from being discredited and taken advantage of by others, but what he’s really doing is stepping on the one thing that truly belongs to her, that provides her sole source of independence and freedom, yet he begins a series of arguments where he literally squashes what’s left of her pride. Despite her tears and protestations and her obvious discomfort, Aydin continues his domineering practices where he literally must have his way at all costs, no matter the consequences, which the viewer can see is having devastating consequences, but Aydin refuses to relent, insisting he is right, where he is literally full of himself and his holier-than-thou self-righteousness. Nihal grows tired of being bullied in this monstrous fashion, where her husband couldn’t be more condescending, displaying a kind of male arrogance that isn’t just hurtful, but is mean and suffocating, draining every last ounce of energy just to put up with it. While the film is an extended character study of overbearing male behavior wrapped in the erudite politeness of social class, supposedly adapting ideas from Chekhov, it’s really an ugly exposé of human contempt and maliciousness, a punishing existential journey where “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” By the end, however, growing ever more tedious and monotonous, the audience may feel more imprisoned than enlightened.

Which movies to see—and which to skip—at the 50th Chicago International Film Festival Ben Sachs from The Reader

This compelling psychodrama by Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan contains relatively few of the landscape shots that have become his artistic signature, but this may be his most epic film in terms of narrative design. It charts the slow emotional breakdown of an arrogant actor who has retired to a small mountain town with his divorced sister and his much younger wife. He regards himself as a bastion of high culture, but his noble self-image is hardly borne out by his callous behavior toward the poor family who live on his property. Ceylan presents psychology much as he presented exteriors in his earlier films—as intricate, monumental, and mysterious—and the lengthy, confessional dialogue scenes generate an uncanny vibe. That dissipates in the last hour when Ceylan starts dictating exactly how one should feel about the characters; but until then this is masterfully staged and performed. In Turkish with subtitles.

In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]

Winter Sleep, the latest from Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, stylistically, at least, picks up from where his last film, the police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, left off: The landscapes are vast, the pace portentously deliberate, the human dramas slow-burningly subtle. This time, though, he applies his meditative style to a relationship drama: the splintering marriage between Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), a controlling former actor/current hotel owner and writer; and his long-suffering wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen), who desires to break from her husband's clutches and establish an existence of her own.

With its panoramic landscapes that engulf the human figures contained in them, the opening shots of Winter Sleep are bound to put some viewers in an Andrei Tarkovsky-like frame of mind…but whereas Tarkovsky tended to deemphasize character and dialogue in favor of a broader spiritualism, Ceylan aims for the novelistic in his contemplation of these people and the underlying belief systems that drive them. Aydin, for instance, has apparently, over the years, become so defensively cynical about humanity that he has essentially argued himself into his current state of deadening professional and personal stasis; Nihal, meanwhile, has latched onto a particular fundraising project in a last-ditch attempt to hold onto her own idealistic belief in the essential goodness of people. Instead of coming off as mere thesis-paper tentpoles, however, Ceylan, by virtue of his leisurely pace and close attention to nuances of behavior, brings these people to vivid-enough life that Winter Sleep gradually acquires the weight of a classic Greek tragedy. By the end of the film, both characters will find their tightly held world-views challenged in ways both constructive and destructive.

Cannes Film Festival 2014: Part One - Reverse Shot Jordon Cronk

The clear main competition highlight of the first wave of titles, however, is Winter Sleep, from Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan. An even denser, more philosophically and emotionally draining experience than his masterpiece Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan’s latest, a 196-minute dissection of familial and matrimonial bonds, moves from the dirt-shrouded expanses of the former to a simultaneously vast and suffocating vertical fortress carved into the mountainous Turkish topography. It’s here where we meet Aydin (Haluk Bilgner) and Nihal (Melisa Sözen), a May-December married couple who run the Hotel Othello, which is wedged into the cliffs above the crest of the Anatolian steppes. Aydin’s sister Necla (Demet Akbag) lives with the couple, and in early scenes we watch the three attending to work-related duties when not otherwise mulling about the grounds. Tension mounts and cracks begin to show in the family facade as the winter snow slowly starts to blanket the hovel. Soon buried resentments surface as the two women take turns confronting Aydin about his professional and personal indiscretions.

Ceylan shoots these sequences and, in particular, a pair of extended argument scenes, in his typically patient style. His mastery of editing and crosscutting are on full display here as well, a stark contrast to the generally removed and drifting compositions of Anatolia. Dialogue, which has become an increasingly essential component of Ceylan’s cinema, is likewise utilized to a plentiful degree, eclipsing even his prior film in expository detail. Thus, to the list of influences, including Antonioni and Kiarostami, we can add the always verbal Bergman, who took a similar interest in aging and the disintegration of passion. In the wake of these verbal duels, Aydin considers and eventually takes steps toward leaving for Istanbul, while Nihal begins a journey of her own, away from the strictures of marriage and to a moral reconsideration of her autonomy, which she just as quickly finds is insufficient in the face of male insolence and egoism. One final, seemingly heartfelt gesture on the part of Aydin (and by extension, Ceylan) stings the most: an apparently heartfelt attempt at reconciliation reflected in the expression of a traumatized Nihal as simply further evidence that the psychological storms in this household are far from over.

The Lumière Reader [Brannavan Gnanalingam]

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep went into Cannes as the frontrunner for the Palme d’Or, and the positive, yet slightly muted reaction that followed its win was perhaps due to such gargantuan expectations. It had all of the hallmarks of an ‘important’ film: big length, big themes, and big landscapes. Despite the obvious grandness on show, Ceylan’s film is minute in its interactions. Chekhov has been a common comparison (made by Ceylan himself and by critics in the aftermath of its screening), and there is certainly a short story feel to the piece, all symbolism and small events. It’s a chamber piece made to be seen on the big screen, with the stunning Cappadocia landscapes lending the film a peculiar otherworldly feel.

Mr. Aydin (a superb Haluk Bilginer) owns a hotel in the Turkish tourist hotspot. It’s winter, the tourists are few, and the snow is about to blow on in. Aydin lives with his divorced sister (Demet Akba?), with whom he verbally spars on regular occasions, and his much younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen),who makes up for her boredom by involving herself in charity projects in the nearby towns. Aydin rules over the household like a benevolent dictator, seemingly giving the others enough space to do as they choose, but more than happy to cut them down with a few well-placed words. On the way home, his car window is broken by the son of Aydin’s tenant Ismail. Ismail is struggling to keep with rental payments as he lost his job after being arrested, and his brother, the local imam, tries to plead on Ismail’s behalf.

The central crux of the film is the concept of charity. The concept of giving alms (zakat) is one of the five pillars of Islam, with the idea that it is an obligation that the well-off owe to the needy. Voluntary charity (sadaqah) is also an important obligation for Muslims. Ceylan presents charity in all of its complicated manifestations: Aydin is happy to throw money in certain situations (and arguably gives up a bunch of money without knowing what he giving money too), yet he is uncharitable when required to directly in front of his face. He is also uncharitable in the way he talks to his sister and wife. He captures, then releases a wild horse. Meanwhile, Nihal does charity to help not only the community, but also in part to help herself. Her attempts to do charity come from competing and it seems, mostly altruistic reasons, yet she is completely thrown when things don’t quite go as planned.

Ceylan is interested at looking at how charity operates in contemporary Turkey. Aydin was a presumably successful actor (he is currently attempting to write a potentially ludicrous book on the history of Turkish theatre), but he is also a large-scale landowner. He is able to give charity if he chooses. The poorer characters however, through cruel circumstances, have to rely on charity in order to survive. Ceylan suggests that there’s no guarantee of dignity if one is forced to accept charity nor should there necessarily be an obligation to be grateful. Charity without empathy is perhaps as deadening as deprivation.

This difference has also led to two versions of Turkey, the two kinds that clashed so forcefully with the Turkish protests in 2013-4. One the one hand, there is an urbanised, European direction-looking, nominally Muslim, liberal class—the ones who protested Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. On the other hand, there is a poorer, more conservative class, the ones who vote for Erdogan and who have given him power to carry out autocratic actions. The charity that governs the various classes’ relationship is presented in contrasting ways. For Aydin, charity results in smugness, gives him an ability to rationalise the way things are by appeasing his conscience by giving up some of his money (yet he appears to have inherited his wealth). He is also clueless about actual ways to improve people’s lot, and his focus on other areas is perhaps Ceylan’s criticism of the artistic classes failure to help effect social change. For Ismail’s family, the reliance on charity breeds resentment and contempt, and the natural reaction is to divert one’s energy towards other aspects, such as religion or at its worst, begging. This appears most forcefully in the film in two bravura scenes: when the imam pleads on his brother’s behalf and Aydin gleefully and mock-ashamedly puts out his hand for a kiss, and in the final scene involving Nihal and Ismail.

Ceylan’s focus on conversations and dialogue (his characters for the most part speak past each other releasing suppressed—or hibernating—feelings) results in an almost too literal film. He could have left a few things unsaid, relied a bit on Chekhov’s mastery of understatement, which Ceylan had done so perfectly in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Accordingly, it could have been a bit more enigmatic, but this is a relatively small criticism in a film that looks gorgeous and is superbly acted. While Winter Sleep quite clearly speaks to a conflicted modern-day Turkey, it casts its net wider than its Turkish setting in terms of examining how money and power intertwine, and how intellectuals and artists have the potential to ignore others. It also magnifies its gaze: the relationship breakdown and the power relations touches on some of the great 1970s relationship films—Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and the later French Nouvelle Vague films of Maurice Pialat and Jean Eustache come to mind. Charity isn’t simply something involving money, and Ceylan’s magisterial film expertly weaves this through in examining both personal and societal relationships.

Winter Sleep: Can a Three-Hour-Plus Prize-Winner Be Just ... Richard Corliss from Time magazine, May 24, 2014

Cannes 2014 Review: WINTER SLEEP Asks The ... - Twitch Ben Croll

Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan drifts off in talky, trying Winter Sleep Guy Lodge from HitFix

Screen Comment [Ali Naderzad]

The Film Stage [Peter Labuza]

The Lumière Reader [Jacob Powell]

SBS Movies [Fiona Williams]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]

The House Next Door [Budd Wilkins]

'Winter Sleep' ('Kis Uykusu') - The Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young

'Winter Sleep' Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Latest ... - Variety Justin Chang

Chabrol, Claude

There is no new wave, only the sea.

I am a Communist, certainly, but that doesn’t mean I have to make films about the wheat harvest. (1971 interview with Roger Ebert)

—Claude Chabrol

from DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/reviews.htm

One of the most prolific directors to come out of the Cahiers du cinéma stable, Claude Chabrol is considered the founding father of the Nouvelle vague. His first features are recognized by there independent production values, locational shooting, and unrecognizable young stars while the films primarily focused on a youthful, indifferent sub-culture. The first to depart from the New Wave theories and existential themes, Chabrol would eventually define his preferred niche with dark crime/murder thrillers. His work as a cinematic craftsman found comfort bridging to this, more mainstream, genre that dealt with morals, compromise, murder and guilt. Often pigeon-holed as "the French Hitchcock" Chabrol still remains widely overlooked by North American audiences. His films are often characterized as having uncomfortable, startling or improbable twists that define the narrative climax. The best of his work is reminiscent of the classics of both Lang and Hitchcock.

Chabrol, Claude from World Cinema

One of the stable of Cahiers du cinéma critics, Chabrol inaugurated the New Wave with Le Beau Serge (1957), Les Cousins (1958) and Les Bonnes Femmes (1960). Like other early New Wave films, these were characterized by independent production, location shooting, new stars (Jean-Claude Brialy, Stéphane Audran) and a focus on a young, disaffected generation. Chabrol soon departed from this idiom to enter on a prolific and varied career embracing comedies (Marie-Chantal contre le docteur Khâ, 1965), thrillers (A double tour / Web of Passion, 1959), war films (La Ligne de démarcation, 1966), political thrillers (Les Noces rouge / Blood wedding, 1973, Nada, 1974), a "lesbian" drama (Les Biches / The Does, 1968), and more; his filmography runs to over forty features. If there is unity in Chabrol's work, it can be found along two axes. The first is his work with his main star (and for a long time, wife) Stéphane Audran, especially Le Boucher (1970) and their superb "drama of adultery": La femme infidèle / The Unfaithful Wife (1969), La Rupture / The Breakup (1970) and Juste avant la nuit / Just Before Nightfall (1971). The second is Chabrol's dissection of the French bourgeoisie, which ranges from the incisive to the affectionate, usually in the thriller format. At the incisive end are Que la bête meure / Killer! (1969) and Violette Nozière (1978); more affectionate are Poulet au vinaigre / Cop au vin (1984), Masques (1987) and Le Cri du hibou / The Cry of the Owl (1987). With his lush adaptation of Madame Bovary (1991, with Isabelle Huppert), Chabrol made an excursion into the Heritage cinema genre, though Betty (1992) and L'Enfer (1994) signal a return to the bourgeois thrillers. Ironically, given Chabrol's critical beginnings, there is a comfortable "quality" to his films, which is, however, far from unpleasurable.

— Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

BFI | Sight & Sound | Claude Chabrol obituary Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound BFI Online, September 15, 2010

The film-maker Claude Chabrol, who died on Sunday 12 September, can truly lay claim to being a pioneer of the French New Wave. Last year, several anniversary celebrations of the nouvelle vague took the release of his first feature film Le Beau Serge on 11 February 1959 (closely followed by Les Cousins on 11 March 1959) as the ‘official’ launch of the movement that would transform post-war cinema.

A renowned gourmet and bon vivant, jovial and self-mocking, Chabrol was the sunny face of the Young Turks who emerged from the stables of Cahiers du cinéma – as opposed to bookish Rohmer and Rivette, tortured Truffaut and rebarbative Godard. Yet he pursued, through a hugely prolific career (71 films in 50 years), an incisive and at times vitriolic portrait of the French bourgeoisie. As the French daily Libération put it, with his demise, “France has lost its mirror”. President Sarkozy praised him as a modern Balzac – even if the image that the mirror sent back was not entirely flattering.

The son of a chemist, Chabrol emerged from the very bourgeois milieu he so derided (he notoriously used his first wife’s inheritance to finance Le Beau Serge). He studied law and worked as a press attache for Fox in Paris, but like his Cahiers friends, his cinephilia led him to film-making. As a critic, he was part of that band who railed against the French “cinéma de papa” and loved American films, and was truly one of the first to take Hitchcock seriously in his 1957 book Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, co-written with Eric Rohmer.

The Hitchcockian heritage would prove seminal, as he went on to make a trail of successful thrillers. But he would first make his mark by defining what we understand by the term New Wave with Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins and Les Bonnes Femmes (1960). These were independent, small-budget productions shot in black and white on location with relatively unknown actors – although his preferred players would in turn become central to New Wave stardom: Jean-Claude Brialy, Gérard Blain, Bernadette Lafont and Stéphane Audran, the latter doubling as his leading actress and wife from 1964 to 1980.

While his New Wave peers made films that were intrinsically romantic (Truffaut), classically analytical (Rohmer) or self-consciously modernist (Godard, Rivette, Resnais, Varda), Chabrol’s specificity emerged from these early films as a combination of social derision and black humour; his was an almost ‘scientific’ examination of characters who he was not afraid to make unsympathetic. The critical jury is still out about whether the cynicism of the Parisian cousin (Brialy) in Les Cousins is just the nature of the character or the position of the film-maker, or whether the vacuousness of the women in Les Bonnes Femmes should be seen as sociological observation or misogynist portrayal. What is undeniable in each of these films, though, is the novelty and freshness of Chabrol’s study of his chosen milieux of disaffected youth.

For Chabrol, as for his fellow cineastes, the transition to the post-New Wave period was not untroubled. From the start, accusations of ‘amateurism’ had been leveled at the film-makers by hostile parties (Chabrol’s 1959 parody thriller A double tour was a particular target). Chabrol’s response was to go mainstream and make a rapid variety of films (he managed more than one film a year) in different genres, including comedies, thrillers, war films, political thrillers, dramas, biopics, heritage films and documentaries.

Though the results were uneven, some patterns emerge. First was a series of superb psychological thrillers (as famous as his early New Wave films) set among the Parisian or provincial bourgeoisie, including La Femme infidèle (1969) and Le Boucher (1970), both offering defining roles to Stéphane Audran, and Que la bête meure (1969), a disturbing thriller adapted from a novel by Cecil Day Lewis (under the pseudonym ‘Nicholas Blake’). Chabrol would pursue this vein with some other excellent thrillers in different modes: political (Nada, 1974), light comedy (Poulet au vinaigre, 1985; L'Inspecteur Lavardin, 1989), provincial melodrama (Merci pour le chocolat, 2000; La Fleur du mal, 2002; La Fille coupée en deux, 2006).

Another career thread was Chabrol’s ongoing collaborations with actresses – first Audran, then, starting with Violette Nozière (1978), Isabelle Huppert, stunning as the eponymous heroine (based on a real-life case) who kills her father and tries to kill her mother. The combination of Chabrol’s sardonic gaze and Huppert’s glacial insolence worked wonders, and their subsequent films together include some of each’s best: Une affaire de femmes (1988), Madame Bovary (1991), La Cérémonie (1995, adapted from Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone) and L’Ivresse du pouvoir (2005).

Chabrol was notoriously difficult to pin down politically – as a young law student he was close to Jean-Marie Le Pen, but in interviews he was also prone to calling himself a ‘communist’. His films show delight in mocking both the establishment and those who would undermine it (as in Nada), and several explore the ambiguity and compromise of the German occupation: La Ligne de demarcation (1966), Une affaire de femmes, L’Oeil de Vichy (1993).

Equally, the variety of his films makes it difficult to pinpoint a single Chabrolian style. Yet he showed that it was possible to rejuvenate French cinema while remaining accessible. The Young Turk became one of the papas of French cinema, but always a mischievous one. It was suitable, then, that his last job of film was as an actor (one of his many regular side activities), providing a funny cameo in Gainsbourg as a leering record producer about to release ‘Je t’aime, moi non plus’. Chabrol’s work was as caustic as it was enjoyable. As his contemporary Claude Lelouch observed, “He represented both a revolution and tradition.”

The Claude Chabrol Project

Claude Chabrol: A Career Overview Charles Derry from The Chabrol Project

Welcome to a Tribute to ClaudeChabrol.com

All-Movie Guide biography from Rebecca Flint Marx

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Film Reference Film Reference profile from Charles Derry

Claude Chabrol Richard Armstrong from Senses of Cinema, September 2002

Claude Chabrol: Information from Answers.com biography page

Claude Chabrol: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article bio and filmography from Absolute Astronomy

Claude Chabrol - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Claude Chabrol - Director Bigraphy brief bio from Madman

The Films of Claude Chabrol - by Michael E. Grost Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

The life of Claude Chabrol biography and multiple film reviews by James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Strictly Film School multiple film reviews by Acquarello

Claude Chabrol Film Biography - Film - Time Out London

Film4 Filmography Claude Chabrol

Kino Press Release - Chabrol Collection The Claude Chabrol Collection

Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - Claude Chabrol Collection: Volume 2 John White reviews The Claude Chabrol Collection: Volume 2, from DVD Times

Claude Chabrol Mubi

"New Wave Film Guide: Nouvelle Vague & International New Wave Cinema - Where to Start"

Paul Gégauff Peter Lev essay on Chabrol screenwriter from Film Reference

GreenCine | French New Wave Craig Phillips Pt. I from GreenCine

Continue to Part Deux and our recommendations... Craig Phillips Pt. II from GreenCine

Marie-Claire Ropars, 'A Cinematic Language', Rouge 11, 2007 originally published in Esprit, June 1960

Celebrating France's Directors Who Rode the New Wave G.S. Bourdain from The New York Times, August 11, 1989

FILM; For Papa Chabrol, It's All in the Family Alan Riding from The New York Times, August 22, 1993

FILM; Grim, Shocking, Didactic, a New New Wave Rolls In Phillip Lopate from The New York Times, November 22, 1998

just before nightfall--claude chabrol Chabrol restrospective with brief reviews at the Lincoln Film Center, July 23 – August 19, 1999

Movie Review - Juste avant la nuit - With Chabrol, the High Tide ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times, July 30, 1999

Fin; The Story Of Why Ginia Bellafante from The New York Times, February 20, 2000

FILM; The View From Inside the Dream Karen Durbin from The New York Times, June 18, 2000

Tony McKibbin, 'Slow Burn Suspense: The Films of Claude Chabrol', Images, Issue 9, December 2000 also seen at EuroScreenwriters: [04]

Gary Morris, 'Chabrol, Losey, Antonioni: Three Classic Eurofilms: Les Bonnes Femmes, Eva, Il Grido', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 31, 2010 originally published January, 2001, also seen here: Images (Gary Morris) and here: Bright Lights Film Journal

Film; In Its Fiery Pages, A French Revolution Dave Kehr from The New York Times, October 7, 2001

Ray Young, 'Stéphane Audran', Cinema and the Female Star - A Symposium Part 1, Senses of Cinema, 2002 profile of Chabrol actress and wife, Stéphane Audran

Tony Williams, 'Relations Between the Sexes in the Cinema of the Nouvelle Vague', WELL Project, February 28, 2002

The French New Wave Revisited / Nouvelle Vogue moviemakers were ... Phillip Williams from Moviemaker magazine, July 2, 2002

FILM; A Face the French Repeatedly Forget Alan Riding on Isabelle Huppert from The New York Times, July 28, 2002

FILM; Straining to Be The Nouveau Hitchcock Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, September 1, 2002

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

Christine Evans, 'I Fought the Law and the Law Won: Transgression, the Act, and Narratives of Aphanisis in Claude Chabrol’s Story of Women', Refractory, July 4, 2006

Katja Nicodemus, 'Arming Isabelle', SignandSight, August 7, 2006 originally published in German for Die Zeit, July 7, 2006

Claude Chabrol Is a Master of the Thriller (Hold the Thrills) Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, July 30, 2006

Claude Chabrol’s 10 Best Films Lists, Cahiers du Cinema 1954-1966 JD Copp from My Gleanings, December 27, 2006

Claude Chabrol article Chabrol retrospective article by Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion, August 17, 2007

• View topic - Claude Chabrol Criterion forum, a film discussion group, October 28, 2007

David Sterritt, 'Hitchcock, Hume, and the Matrix of Modern Cinema', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2007 December, 2007

Kevin B Lee, 'Claude Chabrol: an online dossier', Shooting Down Pictures, March 27, 2008

Serious Pleasures: Season’s Sweet Spots Stephen Holden from The New York Times, August 22, 2008

Plus ça change: French New Wave directors are still tearing up the ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent, August 24, 2008

Claude CHABROL - French Culture Miami Beach Cinematheque, October 16 – 26, 2008

Film Studies For Free: Going the distance with Claude Chabrol Catherine Grant, June 16, 2009

F L I C K H E A D: The Claude Chabrol Blogathon June 21 – 30, 2009

Reading Chabrol Online Ray Young at Flickhead, June 21, 2009

Richard Jameson, 'Claude Chabrol – The Classicist', Parallax View, June 24, 2009

Chabrol Day Eight: Gallery photo gallery by Ray Young from Flickhead, June 28, 2009

Chabrol Day Nine: Fun facts! Ray Young from Flickhead, June 29, 2009

Claude Chabrol Clippings Chris Poggiali and Paul DeCirce from Temple of Schlock, June 30, 2009

Parallax View » Claude Chabrol on DVD Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, July 3, 2009

Isabelle Huppert and Her Daughter Meet on Screen at Cannes Joan Dupont from The New York Times, May 18, 2010

David Hudson, 'Chabrol @ 80', The Daily Notebook, June 24, 2010

Claude Chabrol - Telegraph Obituary, September 12, 2010

French film-maker Claude Chabrol dies Lizzy Davies from The Guardian, September 12, 2010, including a life in photos: Claude Chabrol's life in pictures

Claude Chabrol obituary Ronaled Bergan from The Guardian, September 12, 2010

Claude Chabrol, Pioneer French Filmmaker, Dies at 80 - Obituary ... Dave Kehr from The New York Times, September 12, 2010, also seen here and here: directorsloungeblog

Claude Chabrol, critic and filmmaker, dies at 80 Emma Brown from The Washington Post, September 12, 2010

Claude Chabrol anatomised the French middle class with a twist of the scalpel Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, September 12, 2010

RIP Claude Chabrol Lee Ferguson from CBC News, September 12, 2010, including the 10 minute party sequence from Les Cousins (1959) on YouTube (9:54)

BBC News - French New Wave film-maker Claude Chabrol dies BBC News, September 12, 2010

French New Wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol dies at age 80 - latimes.com Jenny Barchfield from The LA Times, September 12, 2010

French filmmaker Claude Chabrol dies at 80 | The Daily Caller ... Jenny Barchfield from The Daily Cellar, September 12, 2010, also seen here at Austin 360: French filmmaker Claude Chabrol dies at 80, at Yahoo News: French filmmaker Claude Chabrol dies at 80 - Yahoo! News and the Associated Press here

French Maestro Claude Chabrol Dead at 80 - indieWIRE Brian Brooks at indieWIRE, September 12, 2010

Some Came Running: Claude Chabrol, 1920-2010 Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, September 12, 2010

Filmmaker Claude Chabrol Dies at 80 « Film School Rejects Landon Palmer from Film School Rejects, September 12, 2010

Claude Chabrol 1930-2010 « davekehr.com September 12, 2010

Acclaimed New Wave director Claude Chabrol dies aged 80 France 24 News, September 12, 2010

R.I.P. Claude Chabrol | Film | Newswire | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps, September 12, 2010

Film Studies For Free: Le Génie de la liberté: In Memory of Claude ... Catherine Grant, September 12, 2010

The Playlist: R.I.P. Claude Chabrol 1930-2010 The Playlist, September 12, 2010

Vitro Nasu » Blog Archive » R.I.P Claude Chabrol Vitro Nasu, September 12, 2010

Claude Chabrol, 1930-2010 Alison Willmore from IFC, September 12, 2010

France mourns Claude Chabrol, giant of cinema's New Wave John Lichfield from The Independent, September 13, 2010

Geoffrey MacNab: Avuncular auteur whose depictions of bourgeois society had a morbid undertow The Independent, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol Tom Vallance from The Independent, September 13, 2010

Through the French looking glass with Claude Chabrol | Agnès Poirier Agnès Poirer from The Guardian, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol: a career in clips Ben Walters from The Guardian, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol 1930-2010 - New York News - Runnin' Scared J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, September 13, 2010

The Front Row: In Memoriam Claude Chabrol : The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker, September 13, 2010

In memory of Claude Chabrol (1930-2010) - scanners Jim Emerson from Scanners, September 13, 2010

Claude Who? Meremu C. from Pop Matters, September 13, 2010

James Mourns The Passing of Claude Chabrol With A Top Ten List James McCormick from The Criterion Cast, September 13, 2010, including YouTube clips from each film

Entertainment News: The Passing of Claude Chabrol and Kevin McCarthy Beth Acomando from KPBS, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol1930 - 2010 -- Ain't It Cool News: The best in movie ... Harry Knowles from Ain’t It Cool News, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol 1930 – 2010 - www.moviemail-online.co.uk MovieMail, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol, French New Wave Director, Dies at 80 - TIME Richard Corliss from Time magazine, September 14, 2010

Au revoir to French director Lizzy Davies from The Sydney Morning Herald, September 14, 2010

Flavorwire » A Claude Chabrol Primer Judy Berman at Flavorwire picks 5 Chabrol scenes on YouTube, including the (9:06) 9-minute swimming pool sequence from Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), September 14, 2010

David Thomson on Claude Chabrol The Guardian, September 16, 2010

Claude Chabrol Knew How to Eat > Todd McCarthy's Deep Focus September 16, 2010

The Unseen Chabrol, Pt 1 Chris Fujiwara from Moving Image Source, October 12, 2010, also here: Part One

The Unseen Chabrol, Pt 2 Chris Fujiwara from Moving Image Source, October 26, 2010, also here: Part Two

The Unseen Chabrol, Pt 3 Chris Fujiwara from Moving Image Source, November 11, 2010, also here: Part Three

Chabrol, Claude They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Claude Chabrol, RIP. The master at midpoint - Roger Ebert's Journal Roger Ebert (September 12, 2010) reprint of his interview from The Chicago Sun-Times, January 24, 1971, also at EuroScreenwriters: [03]

At the Movies Lawrence Van Gelder feature and interview with Chabrol from The New York Times, December 27, 1991

Interview with Chabrol by Pierre Berthomieu, Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, Claire Vassé from Positif magazine in 1995, from EuroScreenwriters

Interview with Chabrol Chris Darke interview from The Independent, June 11, 2001

Interview: Surfer on the New Wave Peter Lennon interview from The Guardian, June 16, 2001, at EuroScreenwriters, also here: CHABROL, Claude [01]

Claude Chabrol - Director by Film Rank Film rankings by Films 101

Claude Chabrol (1930 - 2010) - Find A Grave Memorial

Gerald Peary's Magnificent Seven (2006)

Claude Chabrol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

YouTube - claude chabrol (1930 - 2010) hommage (3:42)

YouTube - Two films by Claude Chabrol - analysis by Dan Sallitt (6:02)

LE BEAU SERGE A- 93

aka: Handsome Serge

France (97 mi) 1958

Sometimes considered the first of the French New Wave films, Chabrol, along with Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Bertrand Tavernier, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Rivette, who appears briefly as an actor in this film as himself, jump cutted their way to a more spontaneous filmmaking that was more realistic and more rambunctiously stylized than what had come before. Centering on a theme that might be called the aimless lost generation, the films focus on how to find a way out of youthful delusion, sometimes not offering any solution. Produced, written, and directed by Chabrol, the film was produced on a miniscule budget in the natural setting of the French provinces, the village of Sardent, cinematography by Henri Decaë, camera by Jean Rabier.

A naturalistic rural drama, Jean-Claude Brialy plays Francois, a former theology student who returns to convalesce in his hometown after spending years recovering from tuberculosis in Switzerland. What he discovers is “not so much the village, but the people have changed.” Serge, Gerard Blain with a James Dean look, used to be Francois’s friend, but is now a chronic drunk, wallowing in self-pity ever since he and his wife Yvonne lost their first baby, a baby deformed at birth. She’s now pregnant again and suffers from his constant abuse, slapping her around and taunting her about the deformity. Marie, played by Bernadette Lafont from Jean Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, plays the town slut who immediately seduces Francois and gains his trust, getting him to believe she is the victim of the man who claims to be her father, though everyone in town knows he’s not her father, he’s another notorious town drunk. Francois visits the village priest who describes the villagers as having lost faith in themselves, and the film follows Francois’s search for redemption. Many aspects of this very Catholic search for morality in a world with no morality reminds one of Robert Bresson’s spiritual realism, the film features a brilliant flashlight sequence through the otherwise pitch black night, where just little bits of light lead Francois in his journey to find purpose in a town with no purpose, like Xiao S’ir in Edward Yang’s A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY. In the end, it’s questionable whether he actually succeeds.

Dan Harper, 'Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge', Senses of Cinema, March 2001

Technically this 1958 Claude Chabrol film was the first feature of the French New Wave to be released--though it was Chabrol's second film, Les cousins, with the same stars, Gerard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy, that had an international impact. Brialy plays a tubercular theology student who returns to his hometown to convalesce and becomes reacquainted with a childhood friend (Blain), an alcoholic stuck in a bad marriage. Roland Barthes attacked this film for its "right-wing" and "static" image of man, and even Chabrol fan Tom Milne has found its Hitchcockian theme of "transference" expressed too overtly in terms of Christian allegory. I barely remember it, but it has a certain fascination as Chabrol's first practical (as opposed to critical) encounter with mise en scene.

Time Out Tom Milne

Chabrol's first film - one of the first manifestations of the Nouvelle Vague - is about a young student (Brialy) who returns to his native village to convalesce from an illness, finds that his childhood friend and hero (Blain) has become a hopeless drunk, and attempts to reclaim him at the cost of his own health. As mirror images of each other, the two men reflect the interest in Hitchcockian themes of transference later elaborated in Chabrol's work, but here expressed rather too overtly in terms of Christian allegory (a transference not so much of guilt as of redemption). Shot entirely on location in the village of Sardent (where Chabrol spent much of his childhood), it presents a bleak, beautifully observed picture of provincial life, later revisited to even more stunning effect in Le Boucher.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-disc Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

Like Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol was born in Paris in 1930 and had a typical middle class upbringing. He had originally studied to be a pharmacist and planned to enter the family business after returning from military service. Instead he took a job as a publicist at the Paris branch of 20th-Century-Fox and began writing film articles for Arts and Cahiers du Cinema. After co-authoring a book with Eric Rohmer on Hitchcock in 1957, Chabrol began work on his first film, Le Beau Serge (1958), which focused on the social milieu of a provincial French village and was financed by inheritance money from his first wife. Generally acknowledged as the first film in the Nouvelle Vague movement, Le Beau Serge represented a new direction in commercial filmmaking and eventually led Chabrol to set up AJYM, a production company which helped nurture the work of fellow filmmakers such as Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Philippe de Broca.

FilmFanatic.org (excerpt)

Le Beau Serge (”Handsome Serge”) was arguably the first film to emerge from the French “Nouvelle Vague” movement. Directed by former Cahiers du Cinéma critic Claude Chabrol, it’s a deeply personal, character-driven portrait of the tensions inherent in “returning home” after spending years away. The story centers on Francois’s concern for his childhood friend, Serge, who has descended into drink after the stillborn death of his retarded son; despite the imminent arrival of another child by his loyal wife (Michele Meritz), Serge refuses to sober up and live responsibly. Francois is determined to help his friend “see the light”, and eventually sacrifices his own health for the sake of Serge’s happiness; meanwhile, a local sexpot (Bernadette Lafont) is raped by her stepfather, yet Francois’s noble attempt to intervene once again falls flat.

In characteristic New Wave style, the narrative in Le Beau Serge is rather loose, with more of an emphasis on characters, setting, and philosophical contemplation than straightforward action. While it’s never made clear exactly why Francois is so determined to “save” his friend, it’s hinted that he may be driven by a sentiment of “there but for the grace of God…” — indeed, rural life in the film is depicted as narrow and limited, with sexy Marie (Lafont) channeling all her energy into the pursuit of men, and Serge giving up his dream of an architecture career for life as a husband and truck driver. Does Chabrol intend for us to pity the lives of these “simple” characters? It’s hard to tell, but the film’s baroquely allegorical ending — which posits Francois as a sort of Christian martyr — seems to label the townsfolk as somehow needing salvation. Despite its narrative flaws and ambiguities, however, Le Beau Serge remains an oddly compelling character study, one which clearly demonstrates Chabrol’s passion, talent, and dedication to the craft of filmmaking.

P.S. Chabrol returned to the theme of country-versus-city in his next film, Les Cousins (1959), in which country-boy Blain comes to stay with his more urbane — and infinitely less sympathetic — cousin (Brialy) in Paris.

Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford

Le Beau Serge (1958) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review

LES COUSINS (The Cousins)

France (105 mi) 1959

Chicago Reader (Don Druker)

Charles (Gerard Blain) comes to live with his cousin Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy), falls in love with a fellow student (Juliette Mayniel), but sees her become Paul's mistress in Claude Chabrol's 1958 study of the ill effects of urban sophistication on an uncorrupted country youth. This is Chabrol's second film, and its subtle development of character points toward the dense structures of his later films with their reluctance either to condemn or extol without reservation.

Time Out Tom Milne

The town mouse and his country cousin. Or, the story of two students, one who was very, very good, and one who was very, very bad; but the bad one passed his exams, got the girl (when he wanted her), and survived to live profitably ever after. A fine, richly detailed tableau of student life in Paris, and Chabrol's first statement (in his second film) of his sardonic view of life as a matter of the survival of the fittest. The centrepiece, as so often in the early days of the nouvelle vague, is an orgiastic party climaxed, as the guest sleeps it off next morning, by a sublimely cruel and characteristic 'joke' by the bad cousin (Brialy) when he performs an eerie Wagnerian charade with candelabra and Gestapo cap to wake a Jewish student into nightmare.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Although it's Chabrol's second effort (the first one being "le beau serge" featuring the same actors), this one is closer to Chabrol-as-we -know-him. The detective ending and the first steps in the bourgeois world of Brialy character herald Chabrol 's heyday (which begins with "les biches," encompasses such works as "la femme infidèle,""que la bête meure" "le boucher" "la rupture" "juste avant la nuit " and ends with" les noces rouges"; that's not to say all the movies were great during that period: "doctor Popaul" and "la decade prodigieuse" can be forgotten"; that does not mean there were no great works after "wedding in blood" (les noces) either as testify such memorable works as "Violette NOzières," "Une affaire de femmes" or "l'enfer." But in France the 1967-1973 era is generally regarded as Chabrol's peak, with "le boucher," his towering achievement. So we enter the bourgeois world with Brialy's character, a bon vivant as we say in France, with parents (whom we never see) who provide him money and a comfortable flat. He is a student, but we never see him studying, girls and pleasures taking the best of him. In direct contrast with him, enters Blain, his provincial cousin. He comes from a much more modest background, his parents (whom we never see either) had certainly to struggle hard to send him to the Latin Quarter. So from the beginning ,the incommunicability is total. Blain is a grind,and if sometimes he accepts to follow his life-lover cousin in not-so-intellectual places in Paris, he knows he shall not disappoint his old parents. Brialy's kind of life is bewildering for a young lad like Blain: a scene is particularly strange, baroque, and even threatening: some fascination for Nazism from Brialy and his clique during a strange party (it's 1959,and German occupation is not that much far behind after all). Chabrol has ready begun his bourgeoisie wholesale massacre: Brialy is the prototype of the bourgeois student,selfish and smug, self-confident and apolitical (And however,1959, it's Algerian war! Young French are sent to do the dirty job). Apolitical, such is also Blain's case, but with more excuses: after all, when you're poor. In his autobiography "le ruisseau des singes," Brialy told that Chabrol(and the producer) had planned an happy end with the two cousins running across the fields, reconciled. Both endings were filmed,and finally the two actors urged Chabrol to renounce this silly conclusion. Hence an almost Hitchcockian ending, Hitchcock whose influence will grow over the years in Chabrol's work.

The Film Sufi MKP, November 28, 2009

John Conomos, 'Les Cousins', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005

Les Cousins (1959) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The Films of Claude Chabrol [Michael E. Grost]

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

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

PopMatters (David Sanjek) dvd review

LEDA (À DOUBLE TOUR)

aka: Web of Passion

France Italy (110 mi) 1959

Chicago Reader (capsule) Jonathan Rosenbaum

Claude Chabrol's first color feature (1959), also known as À double tour and Web of Passion, adapts a Stanley Ellin thriller in which a bourgeois family's oedipal conflicts lead to murder. The beautiful color cinematography of Aix-en-Provence is by Henri Decae, and the film is plotted with a mise en scene that suggests Alfred Hitchcock. The lively if uneven cast includes Jean-Paul Belmondo, the creepy Andre Jocelyn, Madeleine Robinson, Bernadette Lafont, and nouvelle vague axiom Laszlo Szabo. It's not a total success, but it was one of the first pictures to translate the French New Wave's genre interests into mainstream terms, and it's full of sexy and irreverent details.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

An interesting transitional work, Chabrol's third film, in color, with Madeleine Robinson (Best Actress at Venice for this), about an adulterous husband who's a rich vineyard owner with problems. He's fighting with his wife (Robinson), he's out of touch with his son Richard (André Jocelyn) and daughter Elizabeth (Jeanne Valérie), and he has a young artistic girlfriend Leda (the voluptuous Antonella Lualdi) who gets murdered. Bernadette Lafont is Julie, the maid. Full of Sirkian and Hitchcockian elements, this is Chabrol's bridge from the New Wave to his own brand of bourgeois crime story. This was also a film featuring the young Jean-Paul Belmondo (as "Lazlo Kovacs," an alias he uses in Breathless; he's Elizabeth's disreputable, freeloading boyfriend) just before he became famous, and he's got all the rude grace he put into Godard's debut. Some sequences play too long, but the murder scene is amazing. Not altogether successful, but unquestionably worth seeing--indeed essential viewing for any Chabrol fan. Somewhat under the radar in its 1961 first US release, this was not available on DVD till recently.

Time Out Tom Milne

Chabrol's third film, greeted at the time as a Hitchcock pastiche, now looks like pure Chabrol: his first demolition job on the bourgeois family as internal tensions - father (Dacqmine) is indulging a clandestine affair, mother (Robinson) worries what the neighbours will think, daughter (Valérie) struggles with her inhibitions, and son (Jocelyn) quietly strangles on his mother's apron-strings - finally succumb to spontaneous combustion. Belmondo is fun as the uncouth, outrageously déclassé interloper who serves as a catalyst, goading both father and daughter into an open acknowledgment of their sexual needs, but he seems to have come from another, more overt movie, at odds with the subtly detailed (and beautifully acted) portrait of social repressions and malaises. Seen in the light of Chabrol's later work, the film has gained considerably in stature. Best of several stunning scenes is the climactic murder of the mistress (Lualdi), a fragile china doll who comes gift-wrapped in a Japanese-style house. Glacial, almost serene in its inevitability, this chilling sequence reveals the first glimpses of the Fritz Lang influence later to flower in Chabrol's work.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Claude Chabrol's dissection of the living-dead bourgeoisie, though to ruling-class tastemakers his major affront was dynamiting Le Beau Serge's promise of French neorealism in favor of expressive artifice -- the colors pop, the lenses glide and circle, there are scrims, aquariums, and mirrors, mirrors, mirrors. A slow lateral pan surveys the remains of a Frank Tashlin set to end on a mesmerist's wheel, on which the opening credits roll; a window slams open and the camera glances out (the Renoir connection), Bernadette Lafont leans out in her bra and panties to tease the gardener with the huge shears, the camera then dollies back through a keyhole for a jolt of subjective peeping (the Clouzot connection). The setting is a vineyard cottage, the timeline is kept rigorously from morning to night: the pallid paterfamilias (Jacques Dacqmine) is wed lovelessly to matriarch Madeleine Robinson, the son (André Jocelyn) conducts Berlioz in his room and feels up lil sis Jeanne Valérie, who loves wild 'n' crazy Jean-Paul Belmondo. Belmondo arrives in a raucous Nouvelle Vague flurry, prole handheld shots unsettling the languid aristocratic tracking around the mansion; his gusto at the breakfast table disgusts Robinson, to whom manners matter (she can stomach her husband's affair with Antonella Lualdi, the puffy-mouthed ingénue next door, as long as the scandal is avoided). Belmondo may own up to "a bit of nasty character," yet at least he never keeps it leashed, unlike the moneyed ghouls who feign order while tending to unsavory tensions like fields of poppies -- "Behold, my wife," Dacqmire snaps while grabbing Robinson by the hair (Chabrol shock-cuts to the peacock cackling outside) while Jocelyn tracks down Lualdi to showcase reservoirs of Oedipal hysteria, which accumulates until a fist smashes a mirror. A pair of severe flashbacks folds the plot onto itself, although Chabrol recognizes a lush architecture already crumbling from within: his "sordid insects" feel the pull of exposure that can illuminate and destroy them, the film closes as a lamp is turned on. With László Szabó, and Mario David.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

Ah, this is more like it, the truly Chabrolian world taking shape, liberated into the constraints of genre. As if to signal the shift from the new wave naturalism of his earlier works to the glorious artifice of what would become his mature mid-period, he offers us two films, two worlds, one giving on to the other, appropriately divided by a murder, figuring the death of one style and the birth of another.

The film opens with almost parody New Wave-ness, a loud, gaudy riot of blaring American jazz, broad character comedy, and larger-than-life performances. The film begins with a nearly naked housemaid lounging from her window in a huge country house, like a heroine locked in a fairy-tale tower, driving to erotic madness an aging gardener and a camp milkman, the gardener with his shears signalling his lascivious intent matched by the rose she rubs over mouth, squalls of jazz adding to comic overheatedness - it's like some sort of Gallic 'Carry On' movie, especially as the strait-laced mistress looks on with prudish distaste.

Then we're introduced to Jean-Paul Belmondo, still milling around Paris in fast cars and jump cuts, an escapee from his fate in 'A Bout De Souffle' (his character's name, Laszlo Kovacs, is one of Michel's pseudonyms in that film), although Chabrol's true intent is revealed when he follows the Godardian frenzy with a cool long shot which imprisons Laszlo down a snake-like alley, hemmed in by a street, houses, roofs, Chabrol's ironic camera. Laszlo IS a snake, the city boy who infects the rural Eden, by bringing transgressive lust into the bourgeois family, as well as the baser attitudes (food and sex outrageously linked) airbrushed by the middle-classes; an early flipside to Terrence Stamp in 'Theorem'.

The film continues in this hyperactive vein, with Laszlo and his drunken buddy clowning about at a parade to the astonishment of the real-life bystanders who stare uncomprehendingly at Chabrol's camera. But even here, there is another Chabrol waiting to get out, as he sets in motion the country-house murder plot, the family tension, the psycho-sexual power games, the incestuous/Oedipal frisson. It's remarkable how he takes a genuine, 'real' location e.g. the cafe where Laszlo and his buddy drink, and turns it into a set for an MGM musical.

It is no accident that the first truly Chabrolian film should also be his first in colour - his skill in artifice is given free reign, the restricted camerawork already developed in COUSINS bolstered here by the bursts of pure primary colours and the rigid tableaux, as he traps his characters in more than a country estate.

The two halves are joined by simultaneous flashbacks, that seem to free the film from its oppressive present tense, but only cancel each other out, the promise of spiritual rebirth through love in one destroyed by madness and death in the other. The first flashback begins a common motif in Chabrol, the transgressive relationship conceived in a setting of nature, in woods - this subjective memory of the father's is coloured with Chabrol's irony - the Oz-like poppy fields hinting ominously at danger; the move from 'natural' secrecy to a social openness finally sealing the relationship's fate.

The second half is truly magnificent - the murder taking place completely in mirrors, mirroring (sorry) the cruel humiliation of Therese earlier. The eerily peaceful track over the dead woman's artefacts, stopping at the bed that caused all the trouble, wiping her out in more ways than one, but also reminding us of the real source of all the trouble, prefiguring Chabrol's hero's 'Psycho' by a year (although Laszlo's tacit Oedipal tension with his surrogate father adds a Chabrolian twist). The silent mastery of the interrogation sequence and the closing shots hint at Chabrol pleasures to come, pleasures we have to wait eight years and 'Les Biches' to fulfil.

A Double Tour John White from 10kbullets

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]

À double tour (1959) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) capsule review

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review

Catherine Grant, 'Unsentimental Education: On Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes - a video essay', Film Studies For Free, June 30, 2009

LES BONNES FEMMES (The Good Time Girls) A 96

France Italy (100 mi) 1960

Before Chabrol started mocking the complacency of the bourgeoisie with artificially stylized whodunits, he made at least two stabs at a social realist film, BEAU SERGE (1958), a naturalistic rural drama, and this deceptively complex work that on the surface appears to be a free wheeling, light-hearted drama about the social patterns of young Parisian girls, shot in a near documentary style following events as they occur over the course of several days. Balancing their time at work in an appliance store with no customers to speak of, where the highlight of the day is a hopeful visit from a delivery man, the film examines the lives of four young girls who work there, each more bored than the next where their low-end wages offer little hope for a better future. While they tease one another at work all day and continue socializing at night, it is clear they exhibit an artificial cheerfulness to hide their otherwise empty lives, very much in the manner of John Cassavetes, particularly in FACES (1968). In fact outside of Cassavetes, this is one of the best films to capture the emotional authenticity of young women and the difficulty they face enduring men who are exaggerated caricatures of themselves, all promising to be more than they are. While the men are uncomfortably obnoxious, this is all part of the mating ritual where the social art of persuasion is a double-edged sword, where if you allow yourself to get lured in, you may suffer the consequences. On the other hand, if you take no chances at all, you’re back where you started from, which is a neverending routine of endless monotony. Chabrol, with help from cinematographer Henri Decaë, does an excellent job finding the rhythms of the streets of Paris which exude a wonderful sense of energy and hopeful possibilities while the oddly dissonant score by Pierre Jansen and Paul Misraki may give some the creeps.

Bernadette Lafont plays Jane, perhaps the most liberated and sexually audacious of the group, who through acts of exuberant spontaneity hopes to find happiness, while Stéphane Audran, soon to be the director’s wife, working in dozens of films together for some twenty years, plays her roommate Ginette, living a secret life as a singer in a variety revue. Lucile Saint-Simon plays Rita, an attractive blond who is incessantly schooled by her fiancé how to please his snooty, overbearing parents, demanding that she change to become the girl of his dreams, while newcomer Clothilde Joano plays Jacqueline, a recent hire late on her first day on the job, a shy, quiet girl lost in her thoughts about a young motorcyclist (Mario David) who shows up regularly without so much as a word, staring at her through the storefront window, following her on his bike, always keeping his eye on her. From an early sequence where a couple of the girls are followed by two guys in a white Cadillac, the audience has an idea what’s in store for them and can see these men are little more than goons, but the girls have a zest for living that typifies the sudden influx of boldly energized New Wave films. What follows is a wild strip club sequence with a bon vivant Bridgitte Bardot look-alike that gets the guys pinching and grabbing, followed by an extended party sequence that plays out like New Years, where it’s all Jane can do to fend them off, which she does brilliantly until a night of champagne finally wears down her defenses. Jane can be seen in the same clothes spraying perfume under her arms the next morning as she joins her roommate for another day at work, interrupted by a frantic run to the zoo at lunchtime where they interact with the caged monkeys, rare birds, and a stalking leopard before returning back to work where Jane ends up asleep. One by one each of the girls is called into the boss’s office to be fondled and pinched, a day where time literally stops, counting the minutes until the work day is done.

Interesting that the guys surrounding these girls are typically crude, boorish and ill-mannered, more interested in dominating any female desire to express themselves, like hunters caging wild animals or rare birds (“They don’t look rare to me.”), while the girls themselves couldn’t be more vividly gorgeous and appealing in their feminine charm, spending their days in dead end jobs filled with hopes and dreams that someday it might all be different. There’s a strange swimming pool sequence where the original louts that picked up Jane decide to bully the girls, thinking it’s fun to throw them in the water and continually dunk them, like rude water polo, until they are rescued by the motorcycle guy who runs off the imbeciles. In perhaps the strangest scene in the film, the motorcyclist takes Jacqueline for a ride into the country, where they walk deeper and deeper into the woods. It is clear Jacqueline has never been happier, that she is finally, at this moment, herself, in a scene highly reminiscent of similar scenes with the happy and dreamy-eyed Giulietta Masina on her wedding day in Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), a walk in the woods sequence borrowed again by Fassbinder in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980) featuring Barbara Sukowa as Mieze in the beautifully choreographed Part XII “The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent.” These are scenes of utter heartbreak and despair, shown without a hint of excess, probably the turning point in each film. The ramifications are beyond description, the audience is in a state of disbelief, as this was thought to be a dizzyingly absurd New Wave comedy of sorts, was it not? The final sequence is just as exasperating, as the tone has completely shifted to a stunned audience that can’t quite comprehend what just happened. This brilliant change of gears offers a completely new appraisal of the film, adding a profound layer of depth to these girl’s lives, where Chabrol expresses a surprising level of sympathy for their stark vulnerability in such a harsh world that barely notices they exist.

User comments from imdb Author: Nin Chan from Canada (excerpt from review on L’ENFER)

Throughout his career, Chabrol has been especially critical of the life-denying entropy and suffocating claustrophobia of bourgeois marriage, a plight where the insatiably voracious woman feels her haplessness and subordination most acutely. This, in some respects, might be his finest evaluation of marriage and erotic love in general. The tensions explored throughout the film are far from novel, again we bear witness to the irresolvable Romantic preoccupation, the desire to possess and identify with a subjective other. Again, as with "Les Bonnes Femmes," we see the carnivorous, destructive male principle, eager to subdue, asphyxiate, smother and ultimately devour irrepressible femininity.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Guilt, complicity, bourgeois aspirations and murder: Chabrol's fourth feature clearly illuminates his abiding interests, even as it achieves a dazzling formal complexity in its arrangement of a series of events charting the dreams of a better life entertained by four Parisian shopgirls desperate to escape the daily monotony of their existence. One longs for success in the music halls, one the staid security of marriage, another a good time and little else; and the last, seeking romance, is the most vulnerable... At once a detailed portrait of Parisian life and an ironic, witty study of human foibles, the film remains emotionally affecting thanks to Chabrol's unsentimental compassion for his subjects.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-disc Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) marked a turning point in Chabrol's career. This masterful synthesis of neorealism, psychological detail and the mystery thriller genre revealed his debt to artists like Roberto Rossellini and Alfred Hitchcock but was poorly received by the French film community. For the next eight years, Chabrol took on a variety of independent and commercial film projects; everything from Ophelia (1962), a contemporary variation on Hamlet, to La Route de Corinthe (1968), a spy-thriller parody. It wasn't until Les Biches in 1968 that he enjoyed a critical resurgence and began to specialize in stylish suspense thrillers which served as critiques of the bourgeoise (La Femme Infidele, aka The Unfaithful Wife) or explored personal obsessions (This Man Must Die (1969) and complex relationships (Le Boucher).

User comments from imdb Author: ieaun from dudley, england

The film shows a weekend in the lives of four Parisian shop girls, from their Friday night out in the nightclubs of Paris through to a Sunday outing into the countryside. All four dream of escaping their humdrum existence: Ginette (Stephane Audran) is trying to start an alternative career as a music hall singer, Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) is engaged to a shop owner, Jane (Bernadette Lafont) is wined and dined by two married businessmen, and Jacqueline (Clothilde Joano) falls in love with a biker who is stalking her. The monotony of the girls' lives is shown as they spend Saturday in the shop just waiting for the moment when they can go home. At the same time Chabrol shows a fascinating portrait of the city at work and at play. The storyline holds the viewer's interest, the acting is excellent (especially Lafont, and despite some terrible overacting from the girl's boss), and the director hints at some of the gruesome shocks of his later films.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

Chabrol's career is often seen as moving from the naturalism of his early films to the extreme stylisation of his great mid-period. It's not as simple as that, but in 'Les Bonnes Femmes', Chabrol achieves a balance between the two that he has rarely equalled. The story of four shopgirls, their work and social lives, has all the plotless and poignant banality of realism, while the closing third, with its move from Paris to the country, its seducer-cum-motorbike-riding-devil (reg. no.: 666) talking about the Creator, as little schoolboys called Balthasar pass by; and its closing vision of Hell/Purgatory bespeak a more Cocteau-like world of mythology and religion. But there is Cocteau too in the framing of Jacqueline in the shop window, while Chabrol's filming of treacherous nature later on is uncommonly vivid. Although 'Bonnes' is his least typical film, it is also his most lovable, and seems to get richer with the years.

User comments from imdb Author: snucker

i liked this film. it has an ambigious quality about it, almost paradoxical. it has a feel of a documentary and is observational in nature, yet there is a obvious message or view taken by chabrol and the women in this film. they're doomed objects of desire for men. the women have this elusive quality about them, they're beautiful and somewhat misguided about the men in thier lives. they seem unattainable, yet vulnerable to a ominous unspoken danger that awaits them that is denoted by the music. there's this creepy yet mysterious sounding music that runs through the film when the female characters roam through the streets. and for some reason, all the men in this movie are misogynist jerks! they disrespect these women and believe they're entitled to them. yet, these women flirt with them and passively resist them for most of the film. chabrol lovingly shoots these women and has affection for them, but also sadness at their romantic naivety about the men in their lives that will bring them doom.

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

Shifting mood in the New Wave manner, Les Bonnes Femmes is a crime film that devotes most of its time to the quasi-documentary examination of four young Parisiennes—clownish Bernadette Lafont, elegant Stéphane Audran, dreamy Clotilde Joano, and stoical Lucile Saint-Simon—all of whom work at the same neighborhood appliance store. Les Bonnes Femmes is a New Wave fantasy in that it provided Chabrol the pretext for directing four pretty young actresses but it's also a portrait of thwarted generational aspirations. The women are harassed by their boringly lecherous old boss and most of the film's males are fools.

Les Bonnes Femmes is reminiscent of its better-known peers, Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player, in its location shooting, playful use of music, and intermittent high spirits. But, Audran's unexpected (and literal) star turn notwithstanding, there's little here that's self-reflexive and no cinephilic homages, apart from the incongruous Zero de Conduite quotation that contributes to the shock ending. As a Cahiers du Cinema critic, Chabrol had analyzed Rear Window and polemicized in favor of "little themes." Although Les Bonnes Femmes demonstrates a Hitchcockian knack for implicating the spectator—most obviously in the scene in which the heroines are harassed, at some length, by a pair of obnoxious boors in a public swimming pool—the movie has a surplus of incident and an absence of plot.

In the end, however, every haphazard digression, from the creepy "fetish" kept by the appliance store's middle-aged cashier to the lunch hour the shopgirls spend in the zoo, comes together in a trap as implacable as anything in the thrillers Chabrol admired. Deeply unsettling, Les Bonnes Femmes manages a dialectic between the freewheeling and fatalistic unlike anything else in Chabrol's oeuvre.

culturevulture.net Tom Block

Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes is a valentine written in poisoned ink, and the cinematic equivalent of Tough Love. It sinks its teeth down to the acrid core of its characters, yet chews them with real affection. A critical and popular misfire in France at the time of its release in 1960, Femmes wasn’t even shown in the United States until 1966, by which time it was already overshadowed by the French New Wave’s more famous efforts. It is now being re-released by Kino International, the company responsible for ushering so many long-buried masterpieces back into the light of day.

Les Bonnes Femmes covers three days in the lives of four Parisian shopgirls, following them through a night’s debauch, a long, drab day on the job, another night of celebration, and part of the following day. The women are in no way remarkable, but they’re types we’ve lived beside all our lives: a party girl; a mouse who’s ready to sacrifice what little identity she has in order to secure a husband; an aspiring singer whose insecurity causes her to hide her ambitions from her friends; and a daydreamer yearning for the white knight who will rescue her from her dead-end existence. The women live in a world that mocks them, uses them, heartlessly exposes their hopes as desperate fantasies. Worse yet, they’ve been so pulverized by longing that they don’t even have each other to cling to; they’re all too busy drowning to think of saving one another.

The keynote is struck in the opening title sequence, in which scores of vehicles race through a traffic concourse in a million different directions, all of them somehow managing to avoid a collision. The film’s sequences haven’t been formed to let us know when they’ve reached their climaxes; they start, and then they just go on until they stop. As John Cassavetes’ Faces would do eight years later, Femmes lets its characters act out their lives with a maximum of movement and noise, until we realize that their behavior is a grotesque outgrowth of their brittle emotional lives. Amongst themselves the women are always fretting, laughing, banging on tables; they grow quiet only when fully engaged in their dreams or when their anxieties have deflated them.

Femmes turns the world into a nightmarish expression of what the women suspect is the truth of their own existence. The male characters who pursue them are funhouse-mirror caricatures whose enfeebled notions of masculinity are reflected in their clown disguises and beanie-style bathing caps, in the way they grovel before their mothers or gracelessly press their hands into a woman’s skirt, in their poses as wimps and louts and outsized pranksters. But the men’s very absurdity calls into question the women’s appearance as well. Would four such absurdly beautiful women really work in the same rinky-dink appliance store? (Not enough customers come into it to warrant even two employees.) When we look at the women, we are only seeing their ideal versions of themselves, their collective dream; everything else in the movie is their collective nightmare. Even the climactic act of violence swims into the movie like a daydream that goes inexorably bad.

All four stars – Bernadette Lafont, Clothilde Joano, Stephane Audran, and Lucile Saint-Simon – fill out their roles, but it is Lafont and Joano who linger in the mind afterwards. As Jane, the adolescent caught in a body that’s bursting with sexuality, Lafont (The Mother and the Whore) nails the sensibility that can’t be calmed down. Not even at dawn, when her nocturnal carryings-on have left her just enough time to slap some perfume into her armpits before going to work, does Jane have any inkling of the toll her lifestyle is taking on her. Joano, as the diehard romantic who’s being pursued by a mysterious stranger, shows how Jacqueline’s yearning has put her into a walking coma. Near the end, when her dream lover has miraculously materialized, she lights to earth in bodily form; for the only time in the movie, we see one of the characters as she truly is, undistorted by fear or desire.

Throughout his long career, Chabrol has often squandered his best material by thinking about it too much; too often his ideas, no matter how inspired they sound in the telling, come out overcooked and flattened. (The drop of blood falling out of the sky in Le Boucher is a good example.) But in Femmes Chabrol blazed a shortcut between his brain and what he got onto the screen. Its images are raw and undigested – they haven’t had the chaos polished out of them. The great cinematographer Henri Decae (Bob le Flambeur, Plein Soleil), working in a dingy black and white, turns Paris into a maze of shadowy streets that extend in every direction; it’s a smokier, danker version of the nighttime Manhattan that James Wong Howe captured in Sweet Smell of Success. And more than most movies, Femmes is a vivid reflection of the time in which it was made, giving us time-capsule views of the fashions, decor, and mannerisms of mid-century Paris.

Les Bonnes Femmes has its moments of irritation and excess, but it has bursts of filmmaking as vibrant as anything produced by the New Wave. The strip-club sequence, a freewheeling montage of faces and bodies inflamed by lust and alcohol, appears to have influenced the best scenes in films as different as Lenny and Schindler’s List. A quiet, searching conversation in a restaurant uses as its background music the carefully modulated tinkling of the customers’ silverware. And the film’s final five minutes are a masterful blend of choreographed camera movements and impeccably controlled sound effects, culminating in an image that puts a universal face on these lives of noisy desperation. Les Bonnes Femmes is a vivid, indelible work.

On Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes Catherine Grant from Film Analytical, June 22, 2010, which includes a video essay (13:32)

Les Bonnes femmes (1960) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Les Bonnes Femmes John White from 10kbullets

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review

Baltimore City Paper (Heather Joslyn) review

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

Movie Review - Les Bonnes Femmes - Screen: 'Les Bonnes Femmes ... Robert Alden, May 13, 1966

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

Bernadette Lafont Obituary by Ronald Bergan from The Guardian, July 26, 2013

Bernadette Lafont, 1938-2013 | British Film Institute Ginette Vincendeau from BFI, July 30, 2013

WISE GUYS (Les Godelureaux)

France (99 mi) 1961

Les Godelureaux (1960) James Travers

Roland, an idler living on the Left Bank in Paris, is determined to inflict a terrible revenge on his friend Arthur, after the latter subjected him to a harmless joke. He engages the services of the seductive Ambroisine, who pretends to fall in love with Arthur. Oblivious to his friend’s scheming, Arthur is certain that Ambroisine’s feelings for him are genuine and looks forward to their wedding day…

After the hugely controversial Les Bonnes femmes, Claude Chabrol’s next film was this distinctively New Wave satire, an uninhibited portrayal of human spite and self-destructive delusion. Although an entertaining film, it appears inconsequential alongside the more notable films which Chabrol made during this period. It is perhaps most memorable for the hugely caricatured performances by Jean-Claude Brialy and Bernadette Laffont. Film critics and film historians are still arguing over what the film really means.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

....or almost nothing of this old Nouvelle Vague. For these who are still believing that this cinema was uncompromising, revolutionary and saved us from the old drivelers (However, Truffaut once said that he would give his whole filmography in exchange for "Les Enfants Du Paradis";I would too), they will be probably disappointed when they learn that Chabrol didn't have even read the book when he accepted to transfer it to the screen (Cinema D'Auteur, my foot!); he did it just because "Les Bonnes Femmes" had been a flop and his producer urged him to repair the breach by releasing a more accessible effort; it was much better but even so displayed no sign that Chabrol had genuine creativity to offer. Among his already big output -compared to the other directors of his school- ,there's only one good movie ("Les Cousins" ) and a handful of watchable ones ("A Double Tour " "Le Beau Serge " " L'Oeil Du Malin" ). It would take him ten years to produce really great movies in the late sixties /early seventies: but then he had forgotten the precepts of the N.W. and worked on terrific screenplays.

Chabrol himself told "Les Godelureaux " was a futile movie about futility. It bears all the scars of the time: a succession of desultory scenes, some funny, some much less so, cult of youth, young people busy contemplating their navel, exchanging fortune- cookie philosophies, blaming bourgeois charity (the scene when Stephane Audran, later Chabrol's wife and his best actress ever, performs an erotic dance before the ladies' deeply shocked eyes and the gentlemen salivating like Pavlov's dogs is perhaps the highlight of a terrible hodgepodge ) and singing "La Carmagnole," the revolutionary anthem, in their sports car in most of the N.W. works, the characters can always make both ends meet .

Jean -Claude Brialy portrays (even if the story is not very clear on that point for good reasons) a bisexual playing a two- bit Vicomte De Valmont ("Dangerous Liaisons") whose motto is probably "revenge is a dish best eaten cold." Charles Belmont ,an actor who quickly fell into oblivion, is his victim.Bernadette Laffont, an actress either outstanding or exasperating, depending on whom you ask, serves as the instrument of this revenge .

Only the Nouvelle Vague students -and God only knows how many they are here there and everywhere- should pick up this flick among Chabrol's monumental filmography; to people who would like to discover him, I 'd simply say : try "Le Boucher" or "Que La Bête Meure" instead.

Like this? try these.......

"Les Bonnes Femmes," Claude Chabrol

"Les Copains," Yves Robert

"Vacances Portugaises," Pierre Kast

"Et Satan Conduit Le Bal," Dabat

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

The movies Claude Chabrol made in the first ten years of his career are vastly underrated nowadays with the film under review being, arguably, the most obscure of the lot; admittedly, LES GODELUREAUX – an unwieldy single-word title if ever there was one (literally meaning "the popinjays") – could not have endeared it much to audiences. Consequently, it seems rather hard now to believe that Chabrol's more renowned colleague at the "Cahiers Du Cinema", Jean-Luc Godard, once named it among "The Top Six French Films made since the Liberation"(!) alongside Robert Bresson's PICKPOCKET, Jean Cocteau's LE TESTAMENT D'ORPHEE' and Jean Renoir's LE TESTAMENT DU DOCTEUR CORDELIER (all 1959)!!

Thematically, the film is basically Bresson/Cocteau's masterful LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE (1945) reworked for the "New Wave" set – though the revenge this time around is triggered by a petty incident between strangers, making the whole scheme an even more cynical one. Apart from the director himself, the film also finds some choice performers at somewhere near their best, notably the two leads: Jean-Claude Brialy (genuinely Mephistophelean, he displays a remarkable flair for melodrama throughout) and an entrancing Bernadette Lafont (peerlessly epitomizing earthy sensuality)– though some, like the reviewer of the "Films De France" website, actually felt their characters to be caricatures! Equally imperative to the success of the film is Jean Rabier's glossy black-and-white camera-work, a typically fine score by Pierre Jansen and also a clever use of overlapping sound (actually one of the revolutionary cinematic techniques characteristic of the French "Nouvelle Vague" movement).

The plot – oozing with the hedonistic/nihilistic outlook of Chabrol's regular scribe Paul Gegauff – sees the seemingly bisexual bourgeois fop Brialy sending out coquettish seductress Lafont to attract the attention of a young man (well-played by virtual unknown and future director Charles Belmont) who had spited him at the very start of the film. Subsequently, the newly-minted trio becomes virtually inseparable ensuring an invasion of the latter's domestic life (which embarrasses him no end, since he is still in the custody of a strict and wealthy uncle) – as much as they force him into their own private chaos (which involves not only an omnipresent homosexual valet by Brialy's side but a nerdy soon-to-be-wed cousin whom Lafont has no qualms about seducing in front of her current boyfriend, Belmont)!

Although at one point a ménage-a'-trois between the three leads is implied, some of their shenanigans are fairly harmless – such as disrupting an art exhibition with the dissemination of sneezing powder, or an upper-class soiree' by incorporating into the program both a sultry dance (performed by none other than a dark-haired Stephane Audran!) and an eccentric ditty sung by a pathetic ex-vaudevillian lady. However, the bacchanal in the style of Ancient Rome, togas and all – held at Belmont's house, having charged Lafont with its upkeep while he is away on business (in the same vein, Luis Bunuel's contemporaneous VIRIDIANA [1961], would feature a famously blasphemous parody of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper") – has more severe repercussions; this sequence is cleverly, and amusingly, cross-cut by Chabrol with the most formal of restaurant dinners being consumed by the oblivious Belmont and his uncle!

Eventually, the schemer feels vindicated and confesses to having taken the young man 'for a ride' and that Lafont (whom the boy had genuinely fallen for and was even planning to marry) had been his tormentor's mistress all along. However, in keeping with the film's darkly humorous tone (boasting a couple of bona-fide howlers along the way), the coda shows that, though obviously broken-hearted at first, Belmont has picked himself up by the time we next see him a year later and is consoling himself with a plain-looking girl; in fact, running by chance into Lafont on a pier, it is rather the latter who is unable to mature – being seemingly involved in yet another romantic scam (with a high-ranking Naval officer, no less)…

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS (Les Sept péchés capitaux)

Chabrol segment: L’Avarice

France Italy (113 mi) 1962 omnibus film with 9 directors

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

This is a pretty mediocre film made up of sketches. Julien Duvivier did a lot better with "le diable et les dix commandements," and he did all the segments single-handedly .

Only Godard snubs can enjoy the sloth sketch which is a saddening bore, with Eddie Constantine,an actor who made duds by the dozen. The anger sketch recalls the silent movies era, that is to say it's modern! Philippe De Broca's part is vulgarity itself, which is amazing, coming from a director known for his elegance. There's nothing to expect from Roger Vadim, whose movies have not worn well, it's the least we can say.

Edouard Molinaro will be dismissed by the "connoisseurs," just because he's not part of the new wave; however his sketch is not that much bad. But the two best segments are Chabrol's and Demy's .

Demy's "lust," abetted by two peerless thespians, Laurent Terzieff and Jean-Louis Trintignant, blends present and past when the latter, still a young kid, didn't know what "lust" meant. This is the most daring sketch, even featuring furtive nudities.

Chabrol's segment ends up the movie on an unpretentious welcome note .The "polytechniciens" putting their problem -how can we sleep with the de luxe prostitute?- in equation is one of the funniest moment of the whole movie.

Two sketches and a half:you make it on the percentages but lose out on the bonuses.So why don't you try Duvivier's "le diable et les dix commandements" instead? No, Duvivier is not part of the new wave. It's not a crime, is it?

Vern's review

Last time we spoke I found that the best way to forget about the nightmarish USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act - which is designed to protect freedom and democracy by, among other things, allowing police to enter and search your house without probable cause, warning or even notification after the fact - was through the delights of French Cinema.

As you know the french are very romantic, very beautiful, full of whimsy and what not. The French always know how to make you smile, like they did with AMELIE, or MR. HULOT'S HOLIDAY, or those musicals with the umbrellas and etc.

For example they got this movie called SEVEN DEADLY SINS that I just discovered. Anyone who has read my works thoroughly knows of my admiration for the director Roger Vadim, who married Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve. Also, his movies were pretty good.

Vadim is most famous for BARBARELLA, and then for SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, the edgar a. poe anthology picture he did a segment of along with whatsisname, the frenchy, as well as godard, malle, fellini, and etc. etc. SEVEN DEADLY SINS is another one along the lines of SPIRITS but this one is in black and white and has the, you know, the seven deadly sins theme. Seven segments, seven sins, all french.

This one's got Vadim, it's got Godard, it's got Chabrol, it's even got Demy who is the individual who did the young ladies of the umbrellas at the corner of cherbourg and rochefort. No fellini this time but otherwise, you got every individual who ever mattered in europe, except maybe robin hood, I don't know.

So you got Godard in this one, he does the famous sin "sloth". His story is about a movie producer so lazy he doesn't want to take off his clothes when he gets down to the casting couch type business. There is a scene at the gas station where the producer asks a guy hey, wanna make a quick buck? And the guy says no, I'm not interested. So the producer lets out a disappointed sigh and goes ahead and just ties his shoe his damn self.

Vadim's sin is "pride" (maybe that's why his version of Dangerous Liasons says "Un film de VADIM" instead of using his full name) but he goes ahead and makes it about fuckin anyway. His is about a husband who's cheating on his wife with a gal who is cheating on her husband, but he doesn't realize that his wife is actually cheating on him and also there are two mannequins who are in love.

My favorite one though is the first one, "anger", written by - whatsisdick - you know, the theater of the absurd fucker. Ionesco I believe is his name. This one kinda reminds me of ol' Louie Boonuel, with this ridiculous story about how everybody gets a fly in their soup one Sunday and this leads to the destruction of the earth.

I really enjoyed this picture, thanks to the hard work of the French Cinematists of yesteryear. For 113 glorious minutes I was able to forget that Unelected President Bush just one month ago signed an executive order giving presidents, former presidents and former Vice Presidents the power to veto the release of any information from their time in office. So some time in the future, a hypothetical former vice president, let's give him a random name - maybe "George H.W. Billingsley" - he could hide whatever it was he did during his tenure, whether it was picking his nose or, let's say... for years allowing cocaine into the country to finance an army of terrorists in Nicaragua. Or you know, whatever it is.

Anyway, movies though. French movies.

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Bob Taylor (taylor9885@sympatico.ca)

At-A-Glance Film Reviews

The New York Times review A.H. Weiler

THE THIRD LOVER (L’Oeil du Malin)

Italy France (80 mi) 1962

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

To begin with, this is one of the rarest Chabrols as well as a key early effort. For anyone who hastily pinned him down as the French Hitchcock, this shows yet another facet to his 'personality': if THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS (1967) saw the director take a leaf out of Fellini's book, here he seems to be influenced by the work of Antonioni – complete with a faux-thriller plot (evoking in some aspects Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley", actually first brought to the screen in 1960 by the French as PURPLE NOON) which, owing to the protagonist's enigmatic behavior, progresses gradually into semi-abstraction!

Having mentioned that later Chabrol, the movie under review likewise allows Stephane Audran an unprecedented central role which she carries off with aplomb. Incidentally, even at this preliminary stage, her future husband's thrillers were peppered with sudden shocking murders (as both WEB OF PASSION [1959] and LES BONNES FEMMES [1960] will attest) – and the climax of this one is, undeniably, superbly handled.

The hero – played by virtual unknown Jacques Charrier – supplies the right mix of blandness and arrogance the part requires. Similarly, Jean Rabier's gleaming monochrome photography notwithstanding, the picture counters its essentially rough-and-ready quality (in pure "New Wave" style) with a quite remarkable incisiveness (particularly in the noir-ish dialogue).

At a mere 77 minutes, THE THIRD LOVER (better served by the original title L'OEIL DU MALIN, which translates to THE EVIL EYE – a moniker later also attached to two, obviously unrelated, Italian giallos!) does not overstay its welcome. In hindsight, if back then the film's inherent pretentiousness may have alienated critics and audiences alike, it can now be seen as a shining example of Chabrol's burgeoning talent.

L'Oeil du malin (1962) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Albin Mercier, a French journalist, is sent to Bavaria to write an article about life in Germany. He is befriended by a bourgeois couple, the writer Andreas Hartman and his wife Hélène, who live near to him. The Hartmans appear to be perfectly happy together, and they seem to enjoy Mercier’s company. Mercier, however, resents their happiness and determines to take the place of Andreas…

L’Oeil du malin is one of the earliest and best examples of the ironic suspense thriller for which Claude Chabrol is best known. It contains all the ingredients of a Chabrolesque thriller, including a relentless, lurking sense of menace, a fragile bourgeois setting, a mounting drama which builds to an inescapable tragic resolution and, naturally, a creepy musical score. Although the film is definitively Chabrol from start to finish, it pays more than a passing homage to the work of that other master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.

What marks this film out as a particularly noteworthy entry in the enormous Chabrol canon are the quality of the acting performances, particularly the three lead actors. Excellently supported by Stéphane Audran and Walter Reyer, Jacques Charrier is perfect as the malicious young journalist Mercier.

Mercier is a typical Chabrol creation, the menacing predator who intentionally triggers a devastating denouement, yet who is incapable of rationalising his own actions. Through a cleverly constructed series of voice-overs, we are able to eavesdrop on Mercier’s thoughts, allowing us to look into a deeply troubled and dangerous mind. Mercier emerges as the victim of his own wicked machinations, a naive, incomprehending instrument of fate.

The film benefits greatly from Chabrol’s characteristically voyeuristic photography (supplemented with jump cuts, an innovation used extensively by the New Wave directors). This intrusive style of photography reflects Mercier’s obsessive attempts to break into the life of the Hartman couple and then into Hélène’s secret double life. Some of the scenes are troubling, creating a sense of impending disaster which, inevitably, is how the film ends.

Although the film was very badly received on its initial release in France, L’Oeil du malin is regarded today as one of Chabrol’s best thrillers, and also a good example of Nouvelle Vague cinema of the 1960s.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User comments from imdb Author: mario-rad from wien, austria

LANDRU

aka: Bluebeard

France Italy (115 mi) 1963

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

Enigmatic, slyly amused, fastidious, swinging from bleak introspection to boisterous knockabout, such is the style of Landru, the character and the film both. Its first half is a series of repetitions: WW1 newsreels to confirm the period, Landru selecting a victim, winning her confidence; then a freeze-frame on a trusting face, followed by a smoking chimney and the English neighbours complaining about nasty smells. The remainder - arrest, trial, execution - is slightly anti-climactic, but carried along by Denner, his mincing movements, booming bass voice and his mesmerising strangeness making for a plausible mass murderer. It's violence-free, though not without visual shocks: bilious purple upholstery intruding into a world of pale pastel, a victim-to-be ominously aligned with a row of brimming coal scuttles.

Landru (1962) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

During World War I, a seemingly respectable middle-aged man Henri Landru has devised an ingenious means of obtaining money to feed his large family. Adopting various assumed names, he lures middle-class women to his villa at Gambais just outside Paris, where he kills them and burns their bodies. He then helps himself to his victim’s bank accounts. Having murdered 10 women and one boy, Landru is finally captured and placed before a court of law. With an eloquent defence, he is optimistic that he will not be found guilty…

One of Claude Chabrol’s most bizarre films, Landru is an extraordinary off-the-wall black comedy which allows the director to combine his flair for comedy and thriller to create something which is both original and surprisingly entertaining.

Compared with Chabrol’s conventional thrillers, the mood of this film is light, with some moments of delicious slapstick comedy (most notably Landru's arrest). In fact, you would hardly think that Landru had committed any crime at all, so banal is the way in which his lifestyle is portrayed. What should be moments of horror are brilliantly transformed into comedy, something which has an unsettling effect on the audience.

The film is most memorable for a remarkable performance from Charles Denner who, barely recognisable under his make-up, plays the creepy Monsieur Landru, in fact almost too convincingly. Denner’s Landru is as seductive and tender as he is frightening, making the casual way in which he disposes of his victims doubly disturbing.

Ultimately, it is the self-righteous and complacent bourgeois milieu in which the murderer lives, not the murderer himself, that is the real villain of the film – a theme which reveals itself in many of Chabrol’s films.

User reviews from imdb Author: guy-bellinger (guy.bellinger@wanadoo.fr) from Montigny-lès-Metz, France

OPHÉLIA

France (105 mi) 1963

The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review

After initial success Chabrol had a string of failures, of which this revamping of Hamlet was one. It led to a string of commercial movies until a return to form with Les Biches. Inspired by Olivier's film of the Shakespeare play, Yvan (Jocelyn) plots revenge on his uncle (Cerval), who has married the young man's mother, Claudia (Valli) with - as he sees it - indecent haste after the death of his father. In Chabrol's hands the original plot is simply a jumping-off point for an indulgent work that shows, perhaps, that he was still as much a critic as a film-maker.

When it takes 12 years for a renowned director's movie to reach our screens, the product is apt to be a jewel or a dog. Claude Chabrol's "Ophelia," made in 1962, has just emerged from the kennel, and although the picture has a bit of historical interest, much of it strays far from the film maker's own talents. "Ophelia" opened yesterday at the Playboy Theater.

A wealthy young provincial suspects his mother (Alida Valli, a study in bitter restraint) and his uncle of having killed his father in order to marry each other. Clutching some clues from "Hamlet," he tries to expose them by shouting accusations at meals, pretending to be crazy, and by making a short movie about an incestuous crime. Obsessed with seeming and being, denouncing humanity at large, he trots about in the woods in a business suit and tie, hugging his divine discontent

Meanwhile, he attempts to force a young woman (Juliette Mayniel) into the role of his Ophelia. Their relationship mainly consists of his murmuring claptrap about the beauties of nature into her ear, while she laughs skittishly and favors him with somber or demure smiles. Eventually, her father — who is of course labeled Polonius — dies in a tree after one of the funniest heart attacks I've seen in years. The quasi-Hamlet remarks that trees bear strange fruit these days.

The movie is equally boring and pretentious, because of the characterization of the tormented hero. Played by André Jocelyn, he comes across as a huffy bundle of affectations, and between the bouts of hollering, his style is stiff and vapid.

However, there are moments that will reward some students of Chabrol, such as the theme of individuals feeling guilty when they're innocent. The elegant camera-work lifts the woodland episodes above the general banality, and the formal meal scenes contain some of Mr. Chabrol's choicer observations of people chewing and swallowing while their pleasure in food is spoiled by the anger in the air. And there are a couple of nice thugs. But "Ophelia" hardly evokes Mr. Chabrol's best films, such as "La Femme Infidèle"; instead, it recalls his creakiest earlier work, like "Les Cousins" and "Landru."

THE BEAUTIFUL SWINDLERS (Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du monde)

Chabrol segment: L'Homme qui vendit la Tour Eiffel

France Italy Japan Netherlands (90 mi) 1964 ‘Scope Omnibus film with 5 directors

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

Four tepid episodes profile various kinds of cons. In "Amsterdam," the best of the lot, directed by Polanski, a young woman convinces a doddering old man to buy her an expensive necklace, promising sexual favors. Once she has the necklace, she runs away and trades it for a parrot, giving the necklace to an old salt who has no idea how expensive it is. In "Paris," a sucker buys the Eiffel Tower but is arrested when he attempts to charge visitors a toll. In "Naples," prostitutes, to avoid being sent out of the city, marry old men in retirement villages at the urging of their pimp, who believes this will give his girls immunity. The scheme backfires when the men refuse to let their wives work at night. In the most gruesome of this dubious quartet, "Tokyo," a Japanese barmaid serves her elderly escort noodles and then gleefully watches him choke to death on them, later trying to pawn his false teeth which she believes to be platinum. They are worthless, and she is arrested for murder. (In native languages; English subtitles.)

THE TIGER LIKES FRESH MEAT (Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche)

aka: Code Name: Tiger

France Italy (90 mi) 1964

User comments from imdb Author: John Seal from Oakland CA

How's this for confusing? The indispensable Eurospy Guide indicates that this early Claude Chabrol feature originally ran 100 minutes, but was cut to an unbelievable 65 when it was released to the American market. IMDb lists it at 90 minutes. This review, however, is based on the 82 minute version available through Something Weird Video! Whichever running time is definitive, however, Code Name Tiger is a very entertaining entry in the genre, which generated scores of identikit features throughout the 1960s thanks to the success of the James Bond films. Chabrol acknowledges his debt to Bond by prominently featuring a French-language copy of From Russia to Love in one scene, and other fixtures of the meme--ranging from beautiful women (From Russia With Love's absolutely stunning Daniela Bianchi) to oddball villains (a midget in a bird cage)--pop up throughout the film. Chabrol also displays his talent with a camera, especially in the early going, when a chase scene is shot from overhead and an assassin comes to a sticky end in a bizarre flooded mansion. Starring the still active Roger Hanin as the titular secret agent, this is a prime candidate for DVD--assuming someone can find the full length version!

Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche (1964) James Travers

Baskine, the Turkish ambassador, arrives in Paris to sign an important trade agreement, allowing Turkey to buy a sophisticated new war plane from France. Immediately, he is the target of an unknown assassin and special agent Louis Rapière (a.k.a. ‘The Tiger’) is assigned to protect him. During a failed assassination attempt at the opera, the ambassador’s daughter Mehlica is kidnapped. Discovering that the enemy is in truth the ambassador’s own secretary, Koubassi, the Tiger attempts to rescue Mehlica…

Although it is now largely (and justifiably) overlooked by most film enthusiasts, Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche occupies an important place in Claude Chabrol’s film-making career. After a promising debut in the late 1950s, in which he effectively spearheaded the French New Wave, Chabrol soon ran into difficulties when his films failed to attract audiences. With the spectacular failure of L’Oeil du malin and Landru in 1962, he lost the confidence of his producers and his career as a director could well have ended there and then if it were not for an offer from Gaumont to make a spy film.

Chabrol took up the offer willingly and was tasked with making a film in the series of “Gorilla” spy films, following La Valse du gorille (1959) and Le Gorille a mordu l'archevêque (1962), with Roger Hanin reprising his role as the agent known as “The Gorilla”. When the rights to the Gorilla series were suddenly withdrawn, Chabrol was still keen to make a film in the same style – as was Hanin, who decided to write a script under an assumed name (Antoine Flachot). The resulting film, Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche allowed Hanin to continue playing the kind of role he enjoyed most – a sophisticated, slightly masochistic action hero, effectively a Gallic version of James Bond.

Although now appearing very dated and unsophisticated, this film and its sequel Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite were very much in tune with the mood of the time. They proved to be a box office success – allowing Chabrol to win back the confidence of his producers and thereby secure his future as a mainstream filmmaker.

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: gridoon2010

SIX IN PARIS (Paris vu Par…)

Chabrol segment: La Muette

France (95 mi) 1965 Omnibus film with 6 directors

Time Out review Tom Milne

A disappointingly lightweight collection of sketches, filmed in 16mm (blown up to 35mm) in an attempt to encourage experiment by reducing costs. Godard's contribution elaborates a story told in Une Femme est une Femme (about a girl who posts letters to her two lovers, then agonises that she got the envelopes mixed), interestingly but not very successfully shot cinéma-vérité style with Albert Maysles as cameraman. Rohmer and Rouch are desperately cramped for space; Douchet's episode is routine Nouvelle Vague sexual sparring; Pollet's is neatly observed but conventional. By far the best sketch is Chabrol's ruthlessly funny caricature of a bourgeois couple (played by himself and Audran) whose constant nagging, quarrelling and platitudinising drive their young son to resort to ear-plugs, with the result that he is blithely unaware of his mother's desperate cries for help when...

Also known by the French title Paris vu par . . . , this is probably the best of the French New Wave sketch films (1964). Six directors are assigned separate sections of Paris, and each sketch is shot in 16-millimeter. The most powerful episodes are those by Jean Rouch (one of his few purely fictional works, shot documentary style in only one or two takes and costarring the future director of Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder) and Claude Chabrol (a convulsive bourgeois family melodrama featuring Chabrol himself and his then-wife Stephane Audran). Eric Rohmer contributes a mordant and well-crafted story set around l'Etoile, and the interesting if uneven Jean-Daniel Pollet, whose other films are woefully unavailable in the U.S., is represented by a bittersweet comic short starring the Harry Langdon-like Claude Melki. Jean Douchet (best known as a Cahiers du Cinema critic) offers a fairly undistinguished depiction of a Left Bank seduction, and Jean-Luc Godard presents a more detailed version of a story told in his feature A Woman Is a Woman, shot by Albert Maysles and starring Joanna Shimkus. Like most sketch films, this is patchy, but the Rouch, Chabrol, and Rohmer segments shouldn't be missed.

User comments from imdb Author: Aw-komon from Los Angeles, CA

Except for the idiotic Godard segment which just plain sucks, all the other directors did a hell of a job shooting these 16mm short films. In the best tradition of the French New-Wave, most of the films come as close to documentary as possible. The American girl (Barbara Wilkins) in Jean Douchet's little film about American girls who get taken for a ride by French playboys, is just wonderful in her role and perfectly portrays many nuances that have never been captured on film. Douchet was a critic at Cahiers du Cinema who wrote one of the greatest analyses of Hitchcock ever. Documentary master Jean Rouch, one of the godfathers of the New Wave is represented next in a spectacularly authentic and resonant segment that's one long continuous take for about 15 minutes straight, following its protagonist (another wonderfully authentic young girl, this time French) from the breakfast table argument with her boyfriend (producer/director Barbet Schroeder in an early role) into the street where she meets a mysterious man who wants her to go away with him. A wonderfully hilarious 10 minute segment by Jean Daniel Pollet features Michelline Dax playing the experienced Parisian prostitute to perfection as she affectionately makes fun of her inexperienced john who looks like a French version of Buster Keaton. Rohmer's piece is about a salesman/former runner who gets into an altercation with a drunk man on the street and thinks he might have accidentally killed him; it is very different from anything else Rohmer has ever done and, needless to say, quietly masterful. In Chabrol's interesting and typically Hitchcockish 'horror-under-the-prim-bourgeois-surface' expose piece Chabrol himself acts as the 'bourgeois' father and his then-wife Stephane Audran as the mother of a mischievous boy who starts putting ear-plugs in his ears to keep from hearing their constant arguments. Overall, there's a lot of decent stuff here for attentive viewers and French New Wave fans.

User comments Author: jotix100 from New York

"Paris vu par..." was a surprise that was shown on cable recently. Not having seen the film before, and not having an idea what to expect, proved to be the right choice when everything being shown didn't compare to this excellent account about Paris in the early 1960s, as seen by six distinguished directors, mostly followers of the New Wave movement.

The six segments concentrate in a Paris neighborhood. The first one, "Saint Germain-des-Pres, deals with a young playboy and a young American woman who have a one-night-stand. The girl evidently had romantic hopes that doesn't pan out. Barbet Shroeder, a film director himself, appears as the young playboy.

Another vignette "Rue Saint-Denis" present us a young man who has brought home a prostitute. The woman senses the shyness in Leon, her client, and assumes is his first sexual encounter. She ridicules him, and even shames him into feeding her; she even offers to pay him for her meal. Micheline Dax and Claude Melki are the excellent players.

"Gare du Nord" is a disturbing account of an encounter between a young woman and a stranger as they walk on a stretch of the street that looks down on the train tracks leading to the station. The man, who appears in a car out of nowhere, follows the young woman who has had a quarrel with her boyfriend. He appears to be quite sincere in what he asks her, but we are not prepared for what he will do, in a surprise ending that leaves the viewer quite shocked.

Eric Rohmer, a director still active, shows his hand in "Place de l'Etoile", which follows a man as he rides the metro to his place of work in a men's store near the Arc of Triumph. He is man of habit who follows the same path every day. When he encounters a mad man, intent in harming him, he responds with his umbrella. Later on, Jean Marc will meet again his attacker, but then it's a different encounter altogether.

"Montparnasse-Levallois" by Jean-Luc Godard, presents a young woman who is seen posting two letters in one of the pneumatic devices popular in Paris. The only problem is she has sent letters to two different men with whom she has been having intimate relations. As she tries to get out of her dilemma, expecting forgiveness, she gets instead reactions she didn't expect. A young Joanna Shimkus is seen as the Canadian at the center of the conflict.

The last section of the film is by Claude Chabrol, a master of suspense. "La Muette" shows a young man whose parents seem to be not interested in him. The father has a roving eye for the sexy maid, something the mother doesn't seem to care about. Chabrol plays the father himself and Stephane Audrn, at the height of her beauty, is seen as the careless mother. Giles Chusseau is the young man.

"Paris vu par..." is not seen often these days, yet it offers the viewer an interesting look at the early work of these directors. Paris being the background for the story is captured as it appeared in those days.

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] (excerpt)

Paris vu par... is a portmanteau film from 1965, part of a brief vogue for such multi-director compilations in the 60s. Anyone who's made an attempt to go through the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard, in particular, will certainly have encountered their fair share of these films, since Godard seemingly contributed to almost all of them. And anyone who's seen a few will know that in general they're a terribly uneven lot, marred by many lackluster efforts, with maybe a gem or two (usually from Godard!) sparkling amidst all the muck. This film, in which six different French directors contribute six shorts about Paris, is no exception to the general rule. Each director focuses his short on a different neighborhood of the city, a conceptually slight idea that allows them pretty much free rein to choose their own stories. The results, though, are largely disappointing.

Claude Chabrol's La Muette is the most visually striking of the films here, dominated by odd camera angles and disorienting setups that turn a simple domestic space into something cold, alien, and even frightening. A young boy (Gilles Chusseau) is traumatized and aggravated by the constant bickering of his parents (Stéphane Audran and Chabrol himself), as well as his father's unsubtle dalliances with the family's sexy maid (Dany Saril). The family is obviously upper class, and their life is presented as a rhythmic and unvarying series of similar events, especially centered around the dinner table, where they all stuff their faces and fight. Chabrol rhythmically returns to the same or similar images again and again, panning around the dinner table to show each member of the family shoving food into their mouths and chewing exaggeratedly. Then a cut, and the pan sequence repeats, maybe with subtle differences, but with the same basic emphasis on eating and mastication. This cycling quality of domestic life is both numbing and painful, and Chabrol expertly draws out the obvious anguish, boredom, and antagonism lurking beneath the surface.

When the boy has had enough, he unleashes a rampage around the house — curiously unpunished and unmentioned afterwards, which makes me wonder if he just fantasized it — and discovers that he can dampen his hearing with some ear plugs he steals from his mother. From then on, the boy walks around his house in a curtain of total silence, not hearing the petty arguments of his parents. Chabrol obliges by shutting off the soundtrack as well, cloaking the viewer in that same eerie stillness and silence. It's an effective (and affecting) portrait of alienation and isolation, whether self-imposed or not. The segment's ending leaves a lot to be desired, resorting to cheap shocks in order to bring the situation to a quick close, but Chabrol redeems the film by inserting a final shot of the boy out on the streets, in the center of a crowd, totally silent, looking confused and lost. It's a haunting final image of desperation and loneliness, as the boy is very much alone even in the center of the crowd of people from whom he's sealed off by a wall of silence.

As a whole, Paris vu par... is a flawed and mediocre collection of shorts, with even some of the more well-known directors here turning in subpar efforts. With the exception of the completely worthless Douchet and Pollet shorts, all of these films have at least moments or aspects of interest, and fans of Godard, Chabrol, or Rohmer would certainly want to fill in their knowledge of those directors' key 60s period with the shorts included here. Otherwise, this is a disappointing collection of utterly average films, and the periodic moments of interest and engagement don't do too much to elevate it above this low level.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Sean Axmaker

IFC.com [Michael Atkinson]

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review

DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review

Twitch (Michael Guillen) review

DinaView [Dina Iordanova]

The Stranger (Charles Mudede) review

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [C+] Adam Markovitz

Time Out New York (Melissa Anderson) review [3/5]

Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune review Kathie Smith

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review

BLUE PANTHER (Marie-Chantal contre le docteur Kha)

France Spain Italy Morocco (110 mi) 1965

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

If you're looking for something like "le boucher" or "les cousins," please pass by. It's Chabrol's second period, between his promising debut ("le beau Serge" "les cousins" "à double tour" ) and his golden age ("que la bête meure"; le boucher").To set the record straight "Marie -Chantal contre docteur Kha " is commercial stuff. It was obviously intended as a spoof on the James Bond movies which were at their absolute peak at the time, when Sean Connery ruled.Marie Laforêt -who is also a singer but here she does not sing- portrays a false bubble head girl, much smarter than her enemies -and allies - think she is and she's both gorgeous and efficient. A bevy of good actors support her: Bunuelian (!) Francisco Rabal, Serge Reggiani, Roger Hanin -François Mitterrand's brother-in-law-, and as the villain, Akim Tamiroff who hams it up as hell, halfway between Fu -Manchu and a SPECTRE member. But one should also note Stephane Audran's presence: she was Mrs Chabrol at the time, and she would be the star of his best movies ("le boucher" "la femme infidèle" "la rupture" "les noces rouges" "Violette Nozières"...) as well as Bunuel's "le charme discret de la bourgeoisie" and Axel's "Gaestebud".Audran portrays Olga, a false widow. Claude Chabrol, in the grand Hitchcock tradition, appears as a barman.

All these people are searching for a jewel, a panther with ruby eyes; its secret is not very original.

This is a movie for Chabrol completists. If you're not, there's much more interesting in this director's uneven but interesting career.

OUR AGENT TIGER (Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite)

France Italy Spain (122 mi) 1965 ‘Scope

User comments from imdb Author: vjetorix from Seattle

Roger Hanin is Louis Rapiere AKA the Tiger, his reoccurring character in several spy flicks. He beds the babes and gets beat up regularly but manages to overcome in the end and this adventure is no exception. This time he's up against a lunatic ex-Nazi type called Hans Wunchendorf, also known as The Orchid, who wants to rule the world with his master race (of course) via his evil organization.

The score by Jean Wiener is somewhat cheesy in the French music hall style and therefore pretty much forgettable. This is a middle-of-the-road spy adventure, not entirely without interest especially if good fights are one of your enjoyments.

Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite (1966) James Travers

Secret agent Louis Rapière – code name “The Tiger” – is sent to French Guyana to supervise the recovery of a treasure from a sunken ship. The operation is hi-jacked by a group of armed mercenaries who flee with the treasure after a bloody fight. Rapière discovers that the treasure is now in the hands of a group of revolutionaries who intend to sell it to an international terrorist organisation, Orchid, using the money to buy arms they need to overturn the country’s government. The authorities are prevented from intervening, through fear that this would provoke a national strike, and so it is left to Rapière to recover the treasure and thwart Orchid’s ambitions for global domination...

After the success of his first venture into the spy-thriller genre (Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche, 1964), Claude Chabrol was invited to make a follow-on film in the same vein. That film was Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite, a more obvious copy of the British James Bond films which were, at the time, proving to be enormously successful throughout the world. Without the budget available to the Bond films, Chabrol was wise enough not to attempt a direct imitation of those films and instead veered more towards spy parody, similar to Georges Lautner’s Les Barbouzes (1964), which were equally popular at the time.

Admirers of Chabrol’s work – particularly his later films – will be surprised, if not appalled, by this film. Typical of the mid-1960s spy thrillers, it has an unconvincing hero, a rambling plot which stumbles from one improbable situation to another, and is drawn out with a rather pointless series of overly choreographed fight scenes. Although the film is now largely overlooked, and is seldom considered alongside Chabrol’s serious films, its success at the box office did allow Chabrol to win back the confidence of his producers, who were then more inclined to finance his subsequent films.

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

The "Tiger"'s second adventure incorporates a few novelties – namely, color and an exotic setting – but it also downplayed the original's humor (mainly relegated here to the hero's omnipresent gadget-inventing partner – who also appears, albeit less prominently, in the first instalment). In any case, the film upped the ante on the villains' stake, as star Roger Hanin now has to contend with both a South American revolutionary regime and a band of neo-Nazis (named after the titular flower)!

As usual, willing girls come into play too and, in fact, The Tiger is made to be more of a ladies' man here: what seems to be an uncredited bit by Christa Lang (Fuller) once again at the very start, the would-be dictator's guerilla daughter (played by an Italian, Micaela Cendali) and, beguiling as ever, heroine Margaret Lee; the latter, who did several such films during this time – including one I just acquired i.e. O.S.S. 117: DOUBLE AGENT (1967) next to John Gavin – has her entrance actually delayed until the film is almost half over and, besides, she is made out to be a femme fatale, going by the surname of Mitchum no less, until exposed as a double agent {sic}!

The plot this time around concerns a sunken treasure (shades of the contemporaneous Bondian outing THUNDERBALL, peut-etre?), with which the baddies intend to finance the afore-mentioned insurrection and, by extension, help obtain world domination for the 'master race'. Chief among them is Chabrol regular Michel Bouquet (who, though allowing himself to be slapped around by Lee, is the one to finally blow her cover and, in one of the film's most effective sequences, even electrocutes Hanin!) and Assad Bahador (appropriately supercilious as The Orchid).

As with the first film, we get a number of wacky moments in the mix – not least the sight of sharks appended, as a warning sign, to several front doors of a fishing village (later on, one of these is X-rayed by director Chabrol himself, looking disheveled in an amusing and unbilled cameo) and, to keep the tiger connection alive, the two protagonists are caged and whipped as if they were circus animals (with Lee even decked-out in a skimpily fetching leopard-skin loincloth). The climax, in fact, takes place in Bouquet's zoo – where the ensuing shoot-out feels almost like a dry-run for the memorably subtle closing scene of one of Luis Bunuel's latter-day masterpieces i.e. THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY (1974)!

LINE OF DEMARCATION (La Ligne de demarcation)

France (120 mi) 1966

If you believe his autobiography, Chabrol shot this picture in an alcoholic stupor, partly due to physical discomfort (on location in the mid-winter Jura countryside), but mainly because he felt no affinity with the material, a wartime resistance drama with daring escapes, heroic self-sacrifice and little moral complexity. And yet it seems a well-controlled, perfectly respectable piece, directed for its surface values and not undermined by any knowing winks at the audience (except perhaps in the scenes with leather-coated Gestapo agents Maury and Gégauff). It's a rural counterpart of L'Armée des Ombres, and although that comparison is by no means annihilating, it does point up the low intensity of Chabrol's involvement.

User comments Author: dbdumonteil

"La ligne de demarcation" is arguably the most successful Chabrol movie of his transitional period -roughly from "l'oeil du malin" (1963) to "la route de Corinthe (1967).

Although there are many characters, this is a well-constructed script, adapted from the Colonel Remy's book. The film is dedicated to French men and women who became smugglers and helped soldiers and Jews to cross the demarcation line which divided France into two parts: occupied and unoccupied zone during WW2.

Among many characters the couple Maurice Ronet/Jean Seberg stands out: he is a defeated officer, his war is over, and he cannot get over the 1940 debacle. On the contrary her war has only begun. She's involved in resistance and he thinks at the beginning of the movie that finally what happened was fair cause the Germans are the strongest. Seberg's beauty illuminates the movie: her face when she hears the coded message "It's a long way to Gibraltar" is one of the rare moments of happiness in a somber movie. French are not all depicted as heroes. Some are hateful cowards, who pretend they help the Jews and gives them away to the gestapo.

In its way,"la ligne de démarcation" foreshadows several aspects of Chabrol future heyday. Two of his favorite actors, Stephane Audran and Jean Yanne are already here ("le boucher"). The entomological depiction of the villages like in the aforementioned movie is here too. And in some scenes (the attic, the burial, the forest where the patrol is on the prowl) Chabrol displays his skills of master of suspense. Good cast.

User reviews from imdb Author: argus-10 from Germany

Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review

THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS (Le Scandale)

France (105 mi) 1967 ‘Scope

Time Out Tony Rayns

The most striking feature of Chabrol's glossy murder mystery is the totally incomprehensible plot, revolving around rivalry for the rights to a family champagne firm: Perkins has said that he took his part solely in order to figure out whodunit. Rather like a pop Huis Clos, it turns out that all four parties in the bourgeois household are as intolerable as each other, but who strangled whom and why remains opaque. Made by Chabrol's regular team, it's relentlessly stylish. (A separate English-language version runs 98 minutes.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

CONTAINS A BIG SPOILER Chabrol's transitional period was coming to an end. Its golden era was about to begin, and would culminate two years later with "le boucher." But the transitional period is still here in 1967.

"Le scandale" is nothing short of rubbish. The first hour is meandering and dragging on and on and on: you're going to tell me it's Claude Chabrol 's usual disgust for the bourgeoisie. It would work the following year in "la femme infidele" when Chabrol began with a fly on the wall account of the daily life of those wealthy people. It does not here. Anthony Perkins and Maurice Ronet are wasted and Yvonne Furneaux is undistinguished. Stephane Audran is here too and with her, comes my big spoiler: so stop reading now if you have not seen the flick (but haven't you got a better way of spending your time anyway?). Anyone who knows Chabrol's works has thus seen Audran in a lot of films; and you realize that Jacqueline is a Stephane Audran made look ugly, and the German hostess is the real sexy Audran. When the movie was made, Audran was hardly known in France and the audience could be fooled. No longer.

Chabrol, in the second part, tried to create suspense and fear, by suggesting Ronet was going nuts. But it's too late and the ending recalls some of those Joan Crawford extravaganzas, the likes of "straight jacket" except that you had a good laugh in Castle's movie. Not in Chabrol's dud.

Gastronomist Chabrol fills his quota of good food. Here they treat themselves to some delicious kidneys (not hot enough, one of the guests complains.)

Le Scandale (1967) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Paul Wagner has inherited a successful champagne business, but seems to have little interest in either commerce or social etiquette. Some time ago, Paul suffered a severe head injury and, despite extensive treatment, still shows signs of mental disorder. His cousin Christine is determined to sell out to some American buyers, but Paul refuses to hand over his stake in the company. Hearing that Paul will be staying in Hamburg shortly, Christine appeals to her husband, Christopher, to try to win Paul round to her way of thinking. In Hamburg, Paul spends an evening with a prostitute, Paula, who is found dead the following morning. Unable to recall whether he killed Paula or not, Paul returns to France. The same thing happens again, only this time it is Paul’s English lover, Evelyn, who is murdered. Realising that he is going mad, Paul finally agrees to Christine’s terms, provided she keeps her suspicions about the two killings to herself. However, the nightmare is far from over…

After the commercial failure of his early films – notably L’oeil du malin (1963) and Landru (1963) – director Claude Chabrol found himself straitjacketed into making commercial films that would attract a sizeable cinema audience. The period 1964 to 1966 is not Chabrol’s greatest – it included such lowbrow fare as Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche (1964) – but it allowed him to continue making films and refine his technique, thereby cementing his reputation as a serious director. This intellectually fallow period came to an abrupt end when Le Scandale was released in 1967, marking the beginning of Chabrol’s “true” career as a filmmaker. Thereafter, most of the director’s output was in the same vein: creepy, intelligent psychological thrillers with a vicious anti-bourgeois underbelly.

Le Scandale is unlike anything which Chabrol made before (with the possible exception of L’oeil du malin) and serves as a template for a large proportion of his subsequent films. The characteristics that most define a Chabrol thriller are evident in this film, even if the end result is less polished and effective than in later works. First and foremost, we have the familiar upper middleclass setting. It is a seemingly well-ordered, rational world governed by simple status-quo-preserving rules and populated by seemingly civilised, rational people (the much-maligned bourgeoisie, those who acquire status through wealth alone). Yet just beneath this semblance of order we know that chaos, subterfuge and death lurk; when the balloon is pricked, these will break free, and the ordered reality of bourgeois respectability suddenly disintegrates. The world of the bourgeois elite is a fragile one indeed, but worse: it is apparently programmed for self-destruction.

Another typically Chabrolian feature assumes prime importance in Le Scandale – the almost total lack of a reliable objective point of reference. This is what makes the film so baffling – some might say incomprehensible: seeing is most definitely not necessarily believing. As in L’oeil du malin, the viewpoint is primarily that of a single character, but what we are seeing isn’t necessarily reality, but rather his interpretation of that reality. In Le Scandale, this is the obvious thing to do, since we know that the central character suffered a head injury; what we don’t know is whether he is mentally deranged or not, hence the ambiguity, and hence the dramatic tension.

Stylistically, Chabrol is being very daring, since the plot to Le Scandale assumes a far lesser importance than the filter by which it is related to us – that is, through a mind that could be in the process of gradual disintegration. There is a strong resonance with the films of Roman Polanski, although Chabrol somehow manages to sustain the sense of ambiguity for longer, and in a subtly different way. Even at the end of the film, the spectator is left wondering how much of what was seen was real or imaginary, and who, if anyone, was the villain of the piece. The most important thing though about Le Scandale is that Claude Chabrol finally found his voice as a film director. He had become the Alfred Hitchcock of French cinema.

The Champagne Murders Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

THE ROAD TO CORINTH (La route de Corinthe)

aka: The Criminal Story

aka: Who’s Got the Black Box?

France Italy Greece (90 mi) 1967

DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review

One of the most outrageous films from Chabrol's first 'commercial' period, before Les Biches renewed critical interest in the wayward New Wave instigator. Released here cut, dubbed and lacking an essential prologue featuring a mad illusionist, lumbered with the title Who's Got the Black Box? in the States, it's a wonderfully maddening mix of clattering allusions (to Greek tragedy and Hitchcock), characteristic black humour, and stunning visual irrelevancies, all poured into the deliberately banal mould of the spy thriller. 'I do not ask you to believe it, but I suggest that you dream about it' runs the film's opening epigraph. 'The silliness was more important than the spying' runs Chabrol's own retrospective line.

User comments from imdb Author: jim riecken (youroldpaljim)

Enemy agents have been jamming NATO radar signals with mysterious "black boxes" that they have planted around various locations in Greece. American agent Bob Ford (who speaks with a perfect French accent) is killed while hot on the trail of the nefarious enemy agents. His widow Shanny, despite warnings from fellow American agent Dex, vows to avenge his killing and locate the "black boxes."

Claude Chabrol claimed his LA ROUTE DE CORINTHE was homage to Alfred Hitchcock. The film does vaguely resemble Hitchcocks NOTORIOUS with the "black boxes" serving as "the McGuffin." The film is also typical of 60's spy movies in that it features cartoonish bad guys. Jean Seberg is lovely as the brave avenging widow who gets in and out of many scrapes through out the course of the film. The films Greek locations give the film much visual interest. LA ROUTE DE CORINTHE is a competent and fairly enjoyable 60's spy thiller but it is also undistinguished.

VideoVista review Jim Steel

This is a curious film. Claude Chabrol is acknowledged as the founder of the new wave and is generally recognised as a master of the thriller. The Road To Corinth (aka: La Route de Corinthe) however, is not a classic. Indeed, its lightweight approach to the spy thriller genre seems almost contemptuous of the audience. It still entertains, though.

A stage magician, Socrates, arrives at the docks in Greece and drives off the boat in his open-top white car. A customs official searches his car. Birds appear from the engine and Socates produces his papers from behind the ear of the customs official. Then the customs official finds a curious, wire-filled black box, and the magician is hauled in for questioning (which involves a severe beating). He produces a cigar from the air in which he has hidden cyanide (!), which he then uses to kill himself.

It turns out that the black boxes are being used to disrupt NATO missiles. Secret agent Bob Ford (Christian Marquand, with terminal male pattern baldness) is investigating the case and discovers that the Kahlides Marble Works is somehow involved (this is a warning to British viewers that much of the upcoming action will take place in a quarry). Later on, back in his hotel room, Ford decides to celebrate but is murdered while Shanny, his wife, is getting the champagne out of the fridge. With commendable self-composure, Shanny (Jean Seberg, blonde and beautiful) then picks up the baton and sets to work with her late husband's fellow agents. This is, of course, after she's been framed for his murder and sprung from prison. She proceeds to charm her way through the rest of the plot without dishonouring herself.

All the Greek clichés are present: orthodox priests, marble busts, island hopping, and copious amounts of zither music. Add the spy clichés such as Anthony Pass as a dapper, almost camp, hitman, and you can pretty much imagine what you are going to get. Much is made of the visually arresting Corinth Canal, and there is the odd piece of editing and the occasional shot that might signify that a genius is sleepwalking through a film, but don't expect too much and that way you will be able to enjoy it. It might go well with a couple of beers.

Other than the option of turning off the subtitles (although set in Greece, the dialogue is in French), there are no disc extras.

Route de Corinthe, La Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, October 13, 2008

The Claude Chabrol blogathon: The Road to Corinth » Peter Nellhaus from Coffee Coffee and More Coffee, June 22,

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [1.5/5]

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

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

LES BICHES

France Italy (100 mi) 1968

Time Out review Tom Milne

The film with which Chabrol returned to 'serious' film-making after his series of delightful thriller/espionage spoofs, this was also the film in which he began transferring his allegiance from baroque Hitchcockery to the bleak geometry of Lang. A calm, exquisite study, set in an autumnal Riviera, of the permutational affairs of one man and two women which lead to obsession, madness and despair. Each sequence is like a question-mark adding new doubts and hypotheses to the circular (as opposed to triangular) relationship as a rich lady of lesbian leanings (Audran) picks up an impoverished girl (Sassard), and whisks her off to her St Tropez villa. There, much to the distress of her benefactress, the girl embarks on an affair with a handsome young architect (Trintignant), only to find in her turn that architect and lesbian lady are in the throes of a mutual passion. Impeccably performed, often bizarrely funny, the film winds, with brilliant clarity, through a maze of shadowy emotions to a splendidly Grand-Guignolesque ending.

Les Biches (1968) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Frédérique, a wealthy heiress, befriends a young woman, a street artist named Why, and invites her to stay at her villa in the South of France. There, at a dinner party, Why meets a young architect, Paul, whom she is easily seduced by. Jealous, Frédérique in turn seduces Paul, but the two fall in love. Realising that she too is in love with Paul, Why clings to them both, hurt but unable to leave them….

Les Biches is one of Claude Chabrol’s most intense and aesthetically pleasing films, a riveting melange of traditional love triangle and subtly dark thriller. Fans of Chabrol’s work will notice strong similarities with his earlier film, Les Cousins, which mirrors this film in a number of imporant ways.

As in all of Chabrol’s films, nothing is quite what it initially seems. Beneath what appears to be a conventional bourgeois drama, dark undercurrents can be discerned. Three solitary characters are drawn together by forces they cannot control, the tension gradually building to a crescendo as the sexual tensions between them direct them towards the film’s shocking conclusion.

This is first and foremost a film about seduction. The opening sequence, with the mesmerising panoramic views of Paris, drenched in golden sunlight, seduces the audience, and in the first scene, a beautiful woman seduces an impoverished street artist. From then on, these two characters indulge in a game of seduction which starts innocently enough but which quickly acquires a dangerous momentum of its own.

All the time, we, the audience, are seduced by the beautiful cinematography, the captivating, sensual performances, most notably from the Sphinx-like Stéphane Audran, and Chabrol’s masterful direction. This is a deliciously seductive work, but one which is also profoundly disturbing.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-disc Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

Against the wintry backdrop of Paris and moving on to Saint Tropez, two women - Frederique (Stephane Audran), a predatory socialite and an enigmatic sidewalk artist named WHY? (Jacqueline Sassard) - begin a tense, erotically charged relationship that evolves into a deadly power struggle once a handsome architect (Jean-Louis Trintignant) enters the scene. A chic and often droll black comedy that explores the dynamics of a menage a trois, Les Biches is also a psychological thriller (in the second half) and firmly reestablished Chabrol's reputation internationally after a series of critically panned though commercially successful films (The Line of Demarcation (1966), The Champagne Murders, 1966). Stephane Audran, Chabrol's wife at the time, is fascinating to watch as she shifts gears emotionally from scene to scene; like Anna Karina's presence in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Ms. Audran proves to be the perfect collaborator for her husband's cinematic dissections of the French bourgeoisie. The print quality of Les Biches is quite nice, from the muted, watercolor look of the opening pickup to the crisp, cool tones of Frederique's San Tropez villa. And Pierre Jansen's jangly, discordant score adds a considerable layer of psychological and sexual tension. It's presented in the letterbox format.

DVD extras: a still gallery, a battered-looking trailer, three language options with subtitles and audio commentaries by film critics Wade Major and F.X. Feeney.

The latter are generally informative on Chabrol's work and often quite entertaining. However, both commentators have a tendency to overstate Chabrol's influence from time to time; for instance, despite Major and Feeney's claims, Les Biches wasn't the first mainstream film to feature a lesbian relationship in fairly explicit terms for its time (Sassard's and Audran's shower sequence). American audiences had already experienced The Fox (with a passionate kissing sequence between Sandy Dennis and Anne Heywood and a much discussed doorknob masturbation scene) and The Killing of Sister George (Coral Browne's bedside seduction of Susannah York) the year before.

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

Les Biches (The Does) contains many of the expected elements of the quintessential French film: the smouldering thirtysomething, the enigmatic male, the younger - less assured - female, the suggestion of sexual ambiguity, and examinations of the bourgeoisie set against a noir-ish background, the epitome of cool where nothing happens and everything is intimated. And where Les Biches succeeds is that it handles all these elements impeccably, creating a filmic slipstream that only falters slightly due to an unnecessarily dramatic ending considering the handling of what has gone before.

The movie begins with bored socialite, Frédérique (Stéphane Audran), dropping a ridiculously high payment to pavement artist Jacqueline Sassard, which creates enough conversation for Sassard to follow Frédérique home. Throughout the movie Sassard's character is known as 'Why', in response to an off-the-cuff remark she makes to Frédérique when she is asked for her name. Obviously there are metaphorical echoes to be considered here (and interestingly she is called 'Why' - in English, not 'pourquoi', the French equivalent), which basically stem around the reason for her being selected. Frédérique is probably a bi-sexual bourgeoisie with too much money, who seems to have picked up Why for amusement only. Yet how much of the movie is a pre-arranged game is difficult to tell, because once the action moves to St Tropez and architect Paul (Jean-Louis Trintignant) steps into the picture there is much ambiguity over which events might be planned and which are not. The three main players become enmeshed in a kind of méénage-a-trois (mostly intimated, nothing graphic), which eventually culminates in a death.

Surprisingly for a movie about passion, there is little evidence of it on screen, or even much under the surface. One interpretation could be that Chabrol believes that his characters' wealth assigns them the status of boredom - if they can have anything, nothing is desired. This analysis explains how Why slips so easily into her role, once plucked from the gutter she seems to lose ambition. Just as Frédérique drifts from one party to the next, seemingly not enjoying them, but having little else to do with her time, Why follows her, doe-like (hence the title), content to play out of her social class because once ensconced there her personality becomes superseded by her role. Paul himself is not much more than a stereotypical male, it is as though the characters are unable to think beyond their social constraints. Interestingly, Paul's masculinity is the only clearly defined sexual role, with Frédérique's St Tropez houseguests being a couple of obviously gay males. Exactly what conclusions Chabrol wants us to think are unclear - and some of the movie's edge may well be lost due to the passing of time - but the film doesn't lose power because of that.

The performances are well pitched. Audran, Chabrol's wife at the time (who starred in 24 of his movies), radiates directionless sexuality, and whilst she isn't a fantastic actress, it's often difficult to look away from her. Additionally, Sassard's Why is also incredibly watchable - indeed Paul can barely move never mind keep his eyes off her when they first meet. The similarities between the two women are further accentuated when Why dresses as Frédérique, mimics her voice. For Paul this might seem the perfect multi-relationship, but he is disquieted. Is his masculinity under threat here? Trintignant plays the role in a matter-of-fact manner. It's impossible to know what he is thinking.

Ultimately, Les Biches raises numerous questions about what is actually happening, both in the movie and in society when sexuality blurs. Yet despite its aloofness and a feeling that sometimes it feels staged and a little too cold, there is an inherent fascination created by the three main characters that pulls the viewer through. For that alone it's definitely worth watching, and for me ranks high amongst Chabrol's work of that period.

Biches, Les Vladislav Mijic at Senses of Cinema, March 2001

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Biches, Les Justine Smith from House of Mirth and Movies, August 23, 2008

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

not coming to a theater near you review Sammy Wasson

Eye for Film ("Hotcow") review [3/5]

Les Biches (Claude Chabrol, 1968) Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, October 23, 2008

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

Chabrol Day Seven: Coffee break Ray Young from Flickhead, June 27, 2009

image series: Les Biches (Chabrol, France, 1968) Daniel Kasman from D+ Kaz, January 29, 2007

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

The New York Times (Renata Adler) review

Fin; The Story Of Why Ginia Bellafante from The New York Times, February 20, 2000

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gregory Meshman]

LA FEMME INFIDÈLE (THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE)

France Italy (98 mi) 1969

The Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Claude Chabrol's richly ironic 1968 melodrama, in which it is shown that nothing revitalizes a dried-up marriage quite like murder. Not the least of the ironies is that the point is made sincerely and responsibly: when the film's smug, tubby hero kills his wife's lover, he genuinely becomes a richer, worthier individual. The observation of bourgeois life (as practiced in France, where it was perfected) is so sharp and funny that the film often feels like satire, yet its fundamental seriousness emerges in a magnificent last act, and an unforgettable last shot. With Michel Bouquet, Stephane Audran, and Maurice Ronet.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

When a happily married family man learns his wife is having an affair, he is devastated. Outwardly calm, he pretends to accept the awful truth, even going so far as to arrange a secret meeting with his wife's lover so they can discuss the situation calmly and intelligently as two adults. But during a seemingly cordial meeting between the two men, the cuckolded husband is consumed by a sudden moment of pure rage that has drastic repercussions. If the plot seems familiar, that's because it was recently remade as Unfaithful (2002) starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane (she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar®), but the Chabrol version (original title, La Femme Infidèle) is a much more disturbing portrayal of man's bestial nature, despite his civilized facade. Like Les Biches, The Unfaithful Wife was universally praised by most critics upon its release; Paul Taylor, critic for Time Out called it "a brilliantly ambivalent scrutiny of bourgeois marriage and murder that juggles compassion and cynicism in a way that makes Hitchcock look obvious." And Dave Kehr in The Chicago Reader wrote that The Unfaithful Wife "so sharp and funny that the film often feels like satire, yet its fundamental seriousness emerges in a magnificent last act, and an unforgettable last shot."
DVD extras: filmographies, a trailer, and one language option, French with English subtitles

* The print quality of this disc is merely fair (the image is soft with faded colors and occasional scratches). But Chabrol's command of the narrative and the central performances by Stephane Audran, Michel Bouquet and Maurice Ronet are so riveting that you'll hardly notice these minor flaws once the movie begins.

La Femme infidèle (1969) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

When Charles Desvallées suspects that his wife Hélène is having an affair with another man, he hires a private detective to follow her and find the name of her lover. Having obtained the information he was after, the jealous husband confronts Hélène’s secret lover and, having gained his confidence, kills him…

Few films exemplify Chabrol’s cinema better and more fully than La Femme infidèle . The bourgeois setting, the dangerously repressed characters, the mildly disturbing voyeuristic photography, the discordant music… all the familiar motifs which conspire to conjure up an unsettling world of seemingly middle-class respectability in which deadly passions are struggling to break free. This is the world of Claude Chabrol.

On the surface, La Femme infidèle is a simple tale of marital infidelity and revenge. However, look close and you will see much more than that. Hélène, like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, is driven into having an affair because she can no longer endure the passionless sham that her marriage has become. Her husband is content to watch pictures of wine classes on an eight inch screen television. She needs much more than he can offer. It is only when he kills his wife’s lover that Charles shows any passion for his wife – a stupid, ill-conceived spur of the moment act of madness, so he can keep his wife for himself. Of course, when Hélène realises what her husband has done, she rediscovers her love for him and she has no further need of her surrogate lover. Of course, by that stage, the edifice of respectability has been completely destroyed and their lives will never be the same again.

The beauty of this film lies in both its subtlety and its charming playfulness. The film has an almost existentialist minimalism in its plot; all of the detail – the drama, the suspense, the comedy – stems from the reactions of the characters to their predicaments. To this end, Chabrol is well served by his leading actors, Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran.

The film is far lighter than some of Chabrol’s more complex thrillers, such as Le Boucher and Que la bête meure, with some pleasing comic touches (such as the tweedle dum, tweedle dee police double act), which both help to relieve the tension and emphasise the artificial nature of Charles and Hélène's cosy middle-class life.

Despite its apparent simplicity, La Femme infidèle is a film of great merit, visually enticing and subtly disturbing. Beneath the polished veneer of staid middle-class respectability their lurk dark and dangerous passions…

Adrian Lyne directed an American remake of the film, Unfaithful (2002) starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane.

Claude Chabrol: La Femme Infidele Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

Nowadays you never know what you are going to get from Claude Chabrol. But there was a short spell in the late 60s and early 70s when you knew exactly. From 1968's Les Biches to 1971's Juste Avant La Nuit, he made half a dozen psychological thrillers that have never been equalled, at least by a European director in Europe.

Even Hitchcock, who has often been named as Chabrol's inspiration, would be hard pressed to beat the cool certainty of Chabrol's technique and the emotional heat he generated while examining the underbelly of the always well-fed French bourgeoisie.

Most of these films starred the fine-boned and striking Stephane Audran, who was then his wife, and all were shot by the great Jean Rabier. The trio perfectly complemented each other; together they produced some of the most civilised depictions of highly uncivilised behaviour ever to reach the screen.

My favourite is one of the simplest - La Femme Infidele, in which Chabrol displays an irrestistible logic and an ironic humour that never gets in the way of the horrific implications of the story. Michel Bouquet is the husband who suspects his wife of having a lover, gradually discovers that he is right, and - not entirely on purpose - kills the man (Maurice Ronet). He then has to get rid of the body without telling his wife (Audran). But she discovers, and so eventually do the police.

Instead of giving him away, the femme infidele, realising how much he loves her, keeps mum. They are, after all, both culpable. Finally, however, the evidence against him is too great and he has to give himself up. He leaves her with the words "I love you madly" and we believe she loves him too. This is a very emotional film, but the way Chabrol depicts that emotion is cumulative rather than baldly stated. The control is absolute throughout, and makes the finale all the more moving.

One of the best sequences, which manages to be very funny as well as heart-stopping, is when the husband decides to introduce himself to the lover. At first he is polite and matter-of-fact. But as the unsuspecting boyfriend expounds on the extraordinary nature of the woman with whom he is infatuated, nerves snap and the murder results. We see that the husband never really knew his wife, and that's where his anger comes from.

Another amazing section of the film concerns this urbane man's efforts to cover up all traces of his crime - cleaning the flat, dragging the body to his car in a weighted sack and finally heaving it into a nearby lake. This has been done so often before and since in film, but seldom with a greater sense of what such an awful process must be like.

But, all the way through, what could have been just another thriller becomes much more than that. It is also a passionate love story, with its share of intense irony and a pervading sense of the quirkiness of fate.

Perhaps the most famous of Chabrol's six golden thrillers is Le Boucher (the Butcher), in which a psychotic village butcher is driven to murder by his unrequited passion for the local schoolteacher (Audran again). This may be an even better film than La Femme Infidele. But then, this was a period when Chabrol seemed to be at the height of his powers.

Hitchcock, whom Chabrol greatly admired, was a considerable influence on his best work, particularly as Chabrol examines the nature of guilt and more often than not decides that the victim is as culpable as the so-called criminal.

But Chabrol was a different kind of stylist, equally cynical but basically more of a humourist - and thus more humane. I once had lunch with him in Paris, which was an amusing affair at which murder was nearly committed when the time came to pay the bill. "Oh, and by the way,' he said, as the talk turned to a studious British critic who always praised his work in very intellectual terms, "Give my regards to -. He invents my films so beautifully."

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Paul Tatara, a comparison of Chabrol’s version (1969) and the Adrian Lyne remake (2002)

Femme infidèle, La Charles Derry essay from Film Reference

Femme infidèle, La Jim Emerson from Scanners, July 30, 2006

909. La femme infidele / The Unfaithful Wife (1969, Claude Chabrol) Kevin Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, March 27, 2008, also including: Video Essays (three of them!) for 909. La femme infidele and 910. Le boucher

La Femme infidèle Richard T. Jameson from Parallax View, June 25, 2009, originally written for the University of Washington Office of Lectures & Concerts Film Series, May 22, 1973

La Femme Infidele (1969) Claude Chabrol « Twenty Four Frames John Greco from Twenty Four Frames, May 29, 2010

La Femme infidèle (Claude Chabrol, 1969) Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, October 24, 2008

Tony McKibbin, 'Slow Burn Suspense: The Films of Claude Chabrol', Images, Issue 9, December 2000

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [3/5]

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

Eye for Film ("Skyline") review [3.5/5]

A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe

Chabrol Day Ten: Le charme discret de la bourgeois... Ray Young from Flickhead, June 20, 2009, scene from YouTube (2:08)

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

The New York Times (Roger Greenspun)

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gregory Meshman]

THIS MAN MUST DIE (Que la bête meure)

aka: The Beast Must Die

France Italy (110 mi) 1969

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Possibly Claude Chabrol's finest work, a dark, moody, and endlessly compelling look at a hit and run that takes the life of a young boy. His father (Michel Duchaussoy), a writer of children's books, embarks on a crusade to find and murder the driver. Midway through the film, he finally does find his man, only to discover his family hates him just as much as our hero does! Capturing his violent thoughts in a diary, it becomes the only evidence against him when the deed is finally done -- but who really did the crime? It happens off camera, and the answer is vague. Two people end up confessing. We never quite found out who's telling the truth. Wrestling over it in your mind will give you a headache, but it's a pain that hurts good.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-disc Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

A fascinating study of revenge and its consequences, This Man Must Die has often been compared to Hitchcock's best work but, unlike the latter director, Chabrol chooses to concentrate on the main protagonist's constantly evolving psychological state instead of constructing a breathlessly paced suspense thriller. It opens with a beautifully edited credit sequence that culminates in tragedy - a young boy returning from the beach is killed by a speeding driver while crossing the quiet square of a coastal village. The driver (Jean Yanne) and his distraught female companion (Caroline Cellier) flee the scene of the crime and the father of the boy (Michel Duchaussoy) vows to hunt them down like animals. Although it takes time and patience, the revenge-obsessed father eventually learns the identity of the girl in the car. Creating a false identify for himself, he meets her, initiating a romance which is merely a cover for his true motives - to lay a trap for the hit-and-run driver, the girl's much-feared brother-in-law. This Man Must Die is full of astonishing moments which toy with the viewer's perception of Duchaussoy's character which goes from sympathy to disgust. The scene in the upscale restaurant where Cellier realizes the true nature of Duchaussoy's interest in her is devastating; she breaks down in tears while he calmly lays out his motives; all of this unfolding while their waiter meticulously debones and carves up a succulent oven-baked chicken for their plates. Another unforgettable sequence occurs when Yanne's hateful character almost falls to his death from a seaside cliff. As he clings to a rock ledge, the father rushes to smash Yanne's fingers with a large stone, an act which is interrupted - and unseen - by others hurrying to pull the man to safety. The DVD is presented in the letterboxed format. DVD extras include biographies, a trailer, three language options with English subtitles, and a still gallery.

Que la bête meure (1969) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

When his young son is killed in a hit and run accident, Charles Thenier resolves to hunt down and murder the killer. By chance, Thenier makes the acquaintance of an actress, Helène Lanson, who was in the car at the time of the accident. Initially suspecting that she is the target of his revenge, Therier pretends to be in love with her, savouring his moment of triumph. Then his view changes when Helène confesses to having had a nervous breakdown at about the time of the car accident. Therier discovers that the real culprit of his son’s death was Helène’s brother-in-law, Paul Decourt, a truly horrible individual. Therier persuades Helène to introduce her to her family and they go to spend a few days at the family home in Brittany. Paul Decourt proves to be every bit as wicked as Therier suspects, and Therier has no qualms about carrying out his plan of revenge. However, he is not the only one to wish Decourt’s death...

This compelling study of revenge and hate is easily one of Chabrol’s better films. Throughout, Chabrol is in perfect control of the drama and suspense, and the result is one of his darkest and most absorbing works.

A film that is so firmly built around the viewpoint of its central character relies for its success on the performance of its lead actor. Michel Duchaussoy fits the bill admirably, with a performance that is more moving than menacing. He is perfectly convincing as the young father who loses his son and then dedicates himself to one aim: revenge.

By contrast, the character of the film’s villain, Paul Decourt, is a much more ambiguous figure. Even before he appears on screen, he is painted as a brutal monstrosity, and our first view of him only confirms that impression. But then, as he gains Therier's confidence, a softer, more complex, character begins to emerge, and he takes on the character of a victim. This change of perspective is not original in cinema, but it seems to work very well in this film, and is achieved through a fine performance from Jean Yanne. There is also a memorable performance from Caroline Cellier as the vulnerable and beautiful Helène.

Pierre Jansen’s very atmospheric music adds a great deal to the mood of the film. His score heightens the drama that is already there rather than trying to create the impression of drama which is absent (a fault which is noticeable in many of Chabrol’s less successful films).

However, it is probably Jean Rabier’s masterful photography that is the film’s main strength. His work gives the film great energy and depth, perfectly fashioned for a dark psychological drama such as this. The scenes on the Breton coast are truly haunting and add a sense of suppressed horror and conflict, strangely capturing the essence of Thenier’s uncontrollable lust for revenge.

Like Thenier's gruesome obsession, this is a film to be savoured and enjoyed.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

This is one of the best Chabrol films I have seen. It's interesting to note that it's based upon a novel by Nicolas Blake, pen name of C. Day Lewis, at one time Poet Laureate of England and father of Daniel Day Lewis. From the movie, it seems Blake/Lewis was writing very much in the spirit of the great, and very cinematic, mistress of psychological crime writing, Patricia Highsmith. Though she never wrote anything exactly like this, the similarity is in the first-person narrative of a potential murderer, and in the way the story approaches an utterly evil person in an everyday upper-bourgeois setting; even the account of a man having an 'affair' with a woman he isn't necessarily attracted to is typically Highsmith; and there's attempted murder on a sailboat, and a man is almost bludgeoned on the head with a rock – Highsmith devices. The journal of the man contemplating murder, which is then found out, is something Highsmith might have liked.

Though as some have noted the narrator finds his way to the hit and run killer of his son a little too easily, the movie by allowing that is able to take us headlong into an astonishing, almost shocking situation. To get so close to evil -- this man who everybody hates, who would kill and cover it up and make his sister collaborate, who is abusive to everybody and everything, yet lives in bourgeois splendor, is so unusual it takes a while to realize how hair-raising it is.

Events move quickly after that. This is more understated than most of Chabrol and the greatest violence consists of a few slaps on the face of a lover or a boy, and words of abuse hurled by a boorish man and his nasty mother, but those moments are all the more disturbing for coming in such a buttoned-up world, and the action is very fast and economical compared to some of Chabrol's films. The scenes between the narrator and the boy Philippe where the boy says he wants his father dead and wishes Mark/Charles were his father, are very touching. The references to the rich variety of death descriptions in the Iliad are particularly resonant, as is the one at the end to Brahms quoting Hebrew scriptures, with the Brahms song sung by the great Kathleen Ferrier. The style may be neutral but the film is elegant and its look has not dated. The repugnant family scenes and the nightmarish dinners are typically Chabrol. The simplicity of the style is the more impressive seen in terms of possible followers like Ozon. They don't make them like this any more; they can't.

Michel Duchaussoy makes a good contrast to Yanne because he is so bland. He's an intentionally neutral figure whose moral status is meant to be ambiguous. Is he a hero out of Greek tragedy or is he just an escaping villain? Has he brought about justice -- has he even done it, since the son claims responsibility -- or has he merely been sucked into a whirlpool of evil? In the detective's office he finally begins to look for the first time like a sensitive writer. Before that he looked like a bland actor, but his opacity is just what Chabrol wants. Maybe he's one of Chabrol's most appealing heroes, but in the end what are we admiring?

Quentin Turnour, 'Que la bête meure', Senses of Cinema, March 2001

Que la bête meure Ed Howard from Only the Cinema

Eye for Film (Richard Mellor) review [4/5]

Que la bête meure Jeff Duncanson from Filmscreed, June 22, 2009

Que la bête meure (Claude Chabrol, 1969) Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, November 12, 2008

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User reviews from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, Ireland

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: ametaphysicalshark from prejudicemadeplausible.wordpress.com

User reviews from imdb Author: doctorlightning from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni) review

The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review

The Vagrant Café - Christian Cinema [Seth Studer]

LE BOUCHER

France Italy (93 mi) 1970

Time Out review Tom Milne

Classically simple but relentlessly probing thriller, set in a French village shadowed by the presence of a compulsive killer. Some lovely Hitchcockian games, like the strange ketchup that drips onto a picnic hamburger from a clifftop where the latest victim has been claimed. But also more secretive pointers to social circumstance and the 'exchange of guilt' as Audran's starchy schoolmistress finds herself irresistibly drawn to the ex-army butcher she suspects of being the killer: the fact, for instance, that alongside the killer as he keeps vigil outside the schoolhouse, a war memorial stands sentinel with its reminder of society's dead and maimed. With this film Chabrol came full circle back to his first, echoing not only the minutely detailed provincial landscape of Le Beau Serge but its theme of redemption. The impasse here, a strangely moving tragedy, is that there is no way for the terrified teacher, bred to civilised restraints, to understand that her primeval butcher may have been reclaimed by his love for her.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Chabrol's triumph and also Stephane Audran's finest performance; only "le festin de Babette" will give her a part as strong as this one. She plays a luminous radiant beaming schoolteacher, teaching her pupils spelling with a little help from Honore de Balzac and dance with "le menuet du Bourgeois Gentilhomme,"a Molière-Lully collaboration. She epitomizes honesty, loyalty, innocence and devotion to her work. In direct contrast to her, we have Popaul, the butcher, masterfully played by Jean Yanne (He's never been as good as with Chabrol: please, please,do see "que la bête meure" (The beast must die)): He's obviously in love with Hélène /Audran but he realizes the gap between them. He's a crude uneducated brute, but his clumsiness is so touching you side with him. But we know from the start that won't be a happy story:the first scene, dealing with Cro-Magnon in dark caves heralds a story of blood and bestiality. Popaul is Cro-Magnon ,but he's also a victim of the war they waged with his blood. Chabrol 's camera insists on the war memorial, this inhuman piece of stone surrounded by four shells. LOOKS are more important than words between Popaul and Hélène, and as she begins to comprehend the horror of the situation, we know, that in spite of what Popaul has done, she feels for him. Chabrol excels in depicting a small village, French critics often compare him to an entomologist."Le boucher" remains his finest work to date.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-disc Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

For many Le Boucher is considered Chabrol's mid-career masterpiece and it's unlike any other suspense thriller you're likely to see. In a provincial French village, a celibate schoolteacher (Stephane Audran) finds herself attracted to the local butcher (Jean Yanne), an affable but somewhat melancholy man who's a veteran of the Indochina conflict. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the loose in the province, killing and mutilating young women. Subtle and non-exploitative in its treatment of this subplot, Le Boucher is more disturbing for what it doesn't show and for the occasional macabre image such as the scene where blood from a fresh corpse drips down onto a little girl's sandwich from a rock ledge above. At the core of the film, though, is a tender romance set against a beautiful pastoral setting; it gives this thriller a poetic, lyrical quality that is in direct contrast to the horrific murders taking place just off-screen. The image quality on Pathfinder's DVD is excellent and the credit sequences, incorporating prehistoric cave paintings from the region, are particularly striking.

DVD extras: three language options with subtitles, biographies, a trailer, a still gallery and audio commentaries by screenwriters Howard Rodman (chair of the screenwriting division at USC and chairman of the screenwriting lab at Sundance) and Terry Curtis Fox (screenwriter & USC film department faculty member).

The commentaries, though loose and informal, are full of fascinating insights about Chabrol's working methods, thematic concerns and specific obsessions such as how food plays a crucial part in his selection of each film location as well as the narrative; in fact, Le Boucher opens with a wedding cake being carried down the street by several chefs on their way to a large reception with regional specialties and local wine being served.

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

During some local wedding celebrations in a small rural French village, much-loved schoolteacher Helene (Stéphane Audran), strikes up a conversation with butcher Popaul (Jean Yanne). Whilst they do not appear to have much in common, the foundations are laid for a tentative relationship which blossoms into love. In this regard, both Audran and Yanne are superb in their roles, which is essential as the believability of this relationship lies at the crux of the movie.

Where Helene's background in terms of love has not previously been happy - due to a bad relationship ten years in the past she has remained single - Popaul's background has largely been one of violence, fighting in the French army in Algeria and Indochina. Her character is wholesome, yet not twee; his is brutish, yet not apparently barbaric. However, as they allow their feelings for each other to develop something startling begins to happen around them. Young girls are found murdered and the finger of suspicion points heavily to Popaul. But will Helene betray him when she finds out what she knows?

Le Boucher (The Butcher) is a superb piece of quiet filmmaking that is both subtle and compelling. Despite the simplicity of the rural setting - which Chabrol pinpoints with his usual accuracy - the main characters have deep, complex emotions that are not easily directed by the moral code under which they know they must live. Helene's feelings towards Popaul become at odds with what she discovers about him - to admit the truth would undo her fantasy - to deny it simply perpetuates a lie. Desire for normality also runs through Popaul, who seems tortured by his compulsions but whose relief, through Helene, cannot control him. Chabrol marvellously balances their emotions: they both fear each other and yet fear losing each other. Whilst the ending is hardly revelatory, it feels honest. Chabrol cuts to the bone of their humanity without us losing an inch of our respect for them. Deservedly, the movie is a classic.

Like the other films in Arrow's Chabrol collection there are no extras on the DVD.

Le Boucher (1969) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

At the marriage of a colleague in a rural French village, the school teacher Helène meets the local butcher, Popaul. The two become friends, but Helène is reluctant to have a love affair because she was badly hurt by her last boyfriend. Popaul is also scarred by his past – he used to serve in the army and is haunted by memories of the atrocities he witnessed. The tranquillity of village life is abruptly shattered when a girl’s mutilated body is found in the woods. A few days later, the wife of Helène’s recently married colleague is discovered, with similar wounds. At the scene of this latest murder, Helène discovers a lighter which is identical to the one she gave Popaul as a birthday present...

Le boucher is an early and splendid example of the kind of gentle but engrossing thriller which would become the mainstay of Claude Chabrol’s film work. The director’s skills are very much in evidence in this film. The film begins with a charming and perceptive portrayal of provincial life, reminiscent of scenes from Chabrol’s earlier film, Le beau Serge. But then, as in many of Chabrol’s thrillers, the darker side of human nature begins to intrude, first very gradually, before making a spectacular and gripping entrance in the last twenty or so minutes of the film. The shift in mood from the normality of everyday life to the horror of an unfolding nightmare is brilliantly achieved in this film. The tension gradually increases, following Helène’s growing suspicions about Popaul, towards an unbearably suspense-filled climax.

This film boasts some excellent photography – the idyllic beauty of the French countryside contrasting with the claustrophobic horror of the night scenes. The opening title sequence involving pictures of primitive cave paintings, accompanied by some eerie music, sets the mood of the film very well. This adds to the feeling of suspense, because it causes us to question the apparent normality of the first part of the film and prepares us for what is to follow.

Chabrol is well-served by his two lead actors, Stéphane Audran and Jean Yanne. Yanne is particularly memorable as the butcher Popaul who behaves with apparent normality whilst always giving the impression of a darker, more sinister character – perfect material for Chabrol.

User comments from imdb Author: jono-73 from United Kingdom

Claude Chabrol's international reputation was cemented by a sequence of enduring films dating from the late sixties and early seventies, of which "Le Boucher" is one of the most famous. The influence of Henri-Georges Clouzot is apparent here, the provincial school setting recalling "Les Diaboliques". "Le Boucher" though, is first and foremost quintessential Chabrol, and as such it's less concerned with plotting than either Clouzot or Hitchcock, another cinematic forebear, the focus more specifically being the interior psychological states of his protagonists.

Helene (Stéphane Audran) and Popaul (Jean Yanne) meet at a wedding and strike up an instant friendship. She's the local schoolmistress and he's the village butcher, recently returned from 15 years in the army having served in Algeria and Indochina. He's evidently scarred by the violence he's seen and also by his relationship with a cold, unloving father who seemed to be the reason he left France in the first place. Helene too bears scars from the past, apparently dating back to a relationship ten years previously which ended badly, the trauma forestalling any further emotional entanglements. Thus, Helene and Popaul become tentatively attached without any subsequent physical consummation of their relationship. Against the backdrop of this, a series of killings of young women is taking place in the vicinity, and Helene has reason to believe that Popaul may be responsible. Yet curiously, she doesn't inform the police of her suspicions, nor does she confront Popaul. While she may be in some danger, therefore, a deeper suspicion lurks that she has undisclosed, perhaps unconscious, reasons of her own for continuing the friendship.

Typically, Chabrol isn't terribly interested in providing explicit explanations for the choices that his characters make, or the actions they carry out. Nor does he seem too concerned with the mechanics of suspense, preferring to conjure an omnipresent atmosphere of unease through subtle use of camera placement and a pared down script in which what remains unsaid hangs pregnantly over proceedings. The extensive use of locations in the Dordogne region provides a naturalistic feel, into which Audran and Yanne blend effortlessly. Each convincingly inhabits the bodies of these introverted characters whose amiable, worldly personae mask troubled interior lives that one can really only guess at. This obscurity is less frustrating than it is fascinating, however, because Chabrol is a master of pacing and mood, and he knows not only how to keep an audience gripped right to the end, but also how to haunt them afterwards.

Le Boucher - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications R.F. Cousins from Film Reference

910. Le Boucher (1970, Claude Chabrol) Kevin Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, March 27, 2008, also including: Video Essays (three of them!) for 909. La femme infidele and 910. Le boucher

Le Boucher Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, June 25, 2009

Boucher, Le Seth Studer from The Vagrant Café, January 5, 2004

Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, 1970) Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, January 24, 2009

Epinions [metalluk]

Le Boucher John White from 10kbullets

Strictly Film School Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

Doug Pratt's Laserdisc Review

Boucher, Le Glenn Heath from Match Cuts, February 19, 2009

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Norwegianheretic from Los Angeles, California

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Turfseer from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: doctorlightning from United States

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

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gregory Meshman]

LA RUPTURE

aka: The Breakup

France Italy Belgium (124 mi) 1970

One of the key films of the 70s, La rupture is Claude Chabrol's most audacious experiment with narrative form--a modernist reworking of the melodrama (1970). Stephane Audran is innocence unprotected, a wife and mother whose husband has gone mad under LSD, and who now has to suffer a bizarre plot spun by her father-in-law to recover custody of her child. The "rupture" of the title belongs to the narrative, which begins with clear black/white, good/evil distinctions and then gradually self-destructs, breaking down into increasingly elliptical and imponderable fragments. Highly recommended.

Another characteristic Chabrol onslaught on the bourgeois family, which falls chronologically between the warmth of Le Boucher and the aridity of Ten Days' Wonder, and comprises the usual scrupulous mix of elements chosen to shock with the kind of cinematic references critics feel happy about only in quality movies. The plot comes from a Charlotte Armstrong thriller (The Balloon Man), and is loaded with the true stuff of pulp. Sex and dope, for instance, meet in a scene where a subnormal girl is drugged and forced to watch porn movies; earlier, Audran's husband, escalating to schizophrenia with help from interfering in-laws, tries to murder wife and child; while countering these, along with references to Balzac, is a wonderful echo of Murnau's Sunrise. What does it all add up to? Essentially, the Chabrol puppet threesome again, but in a different combination this time: a crazy construction that is magical and magnificent, although you may have to look twice to make sure it isn't just crazy.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

"La rupture" might be the best Chabrol. I've recently seen it and I think it has improved a lot with time,more than any other movie of the Chabrol 1967-1973 heyday, even more, in several respects, than "le boucher" or "que la bête meure." Completely unrecognized, there are a lot of Chabrol fans that don't even know the existence of "la rupture,"and the critic-when they know it - has always been condescending.

Why is it the best Chabrol? Because it has almost everything that we find in the director's other works: love, suspense, bourgeoisie contempt, mystery, humor-mostly black-, and even surrealism. Two influences are glaring as far as"la rupture" is concerned: Alfred Hitchcock 's (the actor, telling the heroine that the world is a dirty place recalls Uncle Charlie in "shadow of a doubt") and Henri-George Clouzot's (the boarding house recalls "l'assassin habite au 21")

The main topic is the power of money; never Chabrol has been as convincing as here. Michel Bouquet, the accurate prototype of a French bourgeois circa 1970 is terrifying. He's got a wallet by way of heart and he stalks her daughter-in-law as a spider on its web, to get the custody of his grandson.When Audran , desperate, comes back from the airport, two scenes pack a real wallop :the first one shows the reunited couple, desperately trying to pick up the pieces, whereas they know they are bound to fail. Audran and Drouot are harrowing and the spectator wish they could get out of this money pigpen. A second scene, just following this one, shows Audran telling her contempt to the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. Chabrol is actually speaking out here, and his voice has never been so devastating.

There 's a lot of subplots and never a Chabrol supporting cast has been so important. He achieves a real tour de force: every character is interesting, be it the owner of the boarding-house, her alcoholic husband, her retarded daughter, the three old ladies, the villain (Machiavellian Jean Pierre Cassel), his nymphomaniac accomplice, the good doctor....

Money allows very bad things, the right to pervert an innocent child is not the least. The scenes between the villains and Elise, the poor idiot have a contemporary feel. Money allows the over-possessive mother (an Hitchcockian influence again) to pick up her beloved child (in his thirties!), to read him "the knights of the round table,"and to poison him with protection. Money allows to tarnish a brave mother's reputation when she makes her best to cope with her plight.

The movie eventually drags down the whole cast for an astounding finale, complete with drugs, deaths, hallucinations (a bit dated, admittedly) and the balloon release comes as a relief.

Stephane Audran, more than 15 years before "babette's feast" is wonderfully cast as a mother who 's got to fight for her child and her honor. Her beauty radiates in this filthy world. Once again,"la rupture " contains whole everything that Chabrol had done before and heralds the best that he has done since. It deserves to be restored to favor.

NB:It's superior to Charlotte Armstrong's "balloon man" which provided the story.

User comments Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The plot: Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot) is a tentative writer with a drug problem who goes berserk and attacks his own wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) and their baby boy in a rage fit (oh those amazing Chabrol's opening sequences!!). Hélène files for divorce and custody of their child, but Charles' wealthy father Régnier (Michel Bouquet) is ready to fight dirty for the boy's custody: Régnier promises money and a job to shady Paul Thomas (Jean-Pierre Cassel) if he can find out nasty things about Hélène. As Paul tries hard but fails to find skeletons in Hélène's closet, he begins to scheme foul plans to do her in. But things go terribly wrong.

"La Rupture" (1970) is a study about misleading appearances and the destructive power of money and of social conventions. In the film, conventions play a very important part: Hélène used to be a stripper so people assume she's something of a whore, which she wasn't and isn't. Régnier is a rich and respectable bourgeois, but ready to play dirty to have things his own way. Paul is seductive, funny and good-looking, so everybody likes him -- even Hélène -- though he is rotten to the core.

The film belongs to a very rich period in Claude Chabrol's career, including "Les Biches" (1968), "Une Femme Infidèle" (1969) and "Le Boucher" (1970), all of them Hitchcockian in style but much darker, more violent, critical and tragic. These four films portray Chabrol's perennial (self)-criticism on the French bourgeoisie, while dealing with apparently "normal" characters going berserk (Jean-Claude Drouot here, Jacqueline Sassard in "Les Biches", Jean Yanne in "Le Boucher", Michel Bouquet in "Une Femme Infidèle"). They all star his then-wife, beautiful, fascinating Stéphane Audran, here in a terrific performance, whose acting style, world-weary eyes, fabulous legs, high cheekbones and cool sexiness is only comparable to Marlene Dietrich's.

In "La Rupture", not everything in the plot strives to be "believable" - this is not the standard Hollywood thriller! It's rather a tragedy with surrealistic overtones and a very black sense of humor. To fully enjoy it, one must forget about "plot logic" and marvel at the rich character study, particularly of the main trio (Hélène, Régnier, Paul) but also the supporting ones (Régnier's wife, the three MacBethian "witches" who live at the pension, the understanding lawyer, the pension owner and her alcoholic husband played by the great Jean Carmet, Paul's nymphomaniac girlfriend etc) depicting the "evil ways" of human nature. What is refreshing with "La Rupture", as in Chabrol's best movies, is that things never happen the way we expect them to - there's always an offbeat element coming along.

Don't watch this film if you only like thrillers with Cartesian logic, lots of action and gunshots; but do watch this if you like to see an experienced, talented filmmaker in full power of his craft who, though dealing with a below par material (the novel on which the film is based), manages to make a virulent attack on social conventions while thoroughly entertaining you. PS: The final scene may be too symbolic and "loose" for some tastes.

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

La Rupture (1970) – The Tragic Demise of a Picaroon Jonathan McCalmont from Ruthless Culture

Rupture, La Will Laughlin

Claude Chabrol's LA RUPTURE (1970) Robert Monell from I’m in a Jess Franco State of Mind, February 28, 2008

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

VideoVista review Ian R. Faulkner

User reviews from imdb Author: jcappy from ny-vt

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: au_bonheur_des_dames from United Kingdom

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL (Juste Avant la Nuit)

France Italy (106 mi) 1971

A fascinating Claude Chabrol film, much more subtle in its effects than most of his work of this period (1971). Michel Bouquet is a model middle-class family man who kills his mistress--the wife of his best friend--in a fit of perverse sexual excitement. But neither Bouquet's wife (Stephane Audran, of course) nor his friend (Francois Perier) will allow him the self-indulgence of punishment. Chabrol adds another layer of irony through his careful use of consciously artificial tracking shots, which break the narrative at precisely determined points. Recommended.

ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]

Chabrol's tortuous, entertaining study of murder and the expiation of guilt in a small suburban town, a low-key thriller about a husband who murders his mistress (his best friend's wife), tries to confess and accept punishment, but finds a bland bourgeois unwillingness to recognise guilt from his own wife and friends. Organised in Chabrol's lurid, witty and elegant manner, this was his last productive mining of the themes of La Femme Infidèle before they were transmuted through repetition into the farcical intrigues of Les Noces Rouges. Direction, acting and script are all meticulous, and the use of subplot (the meek accountant who robs the hero's safe) is especially fine.

Juste avant la nuit (1971) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Charles Masson, an advertising executive, is having an affair with Laura, the wife of his best friend, François. During a violent love making session, Charles kills Laura. He flees the scene of the crime and returns to his loving wife Hélène as if nothing had happened. Although he appears to have got away with the murder, his guilt soon becomes too much to bear…

Juste avant la nuit is another meticulously crafted psychological drama from Claude Chabrol. It is one of his darkest, most introspective works, one which explores a recurring theme in his cinema: the all-consuming need for a criminal to expunge his guilt once he has committed a crime. The irony of this film is that a perfect crime has been committed and the perpetrator would have got way with it if his only his conscience would let him. As in Chabrol's later film, Les Noces rouges, a murderer will remain a prisoner of his guilt until the day he is unmasked and judged for his crime. Only then, can he taste freedom again.

In many ways, this is the mirror image of Chabrol’s earlier suspense thriller La Femme infidèle : the two films appear to tell the same story from a totally different perspective. The similarities are reinforced by Chabrol casting the same lead actors Michel Bouquet and Stéphane in effectively the same roles (again named Charles and Hélène). As in La Femme infidèle, the plot revolves around a murder which results from marital infidelity. But from thereon, the two films differ markedly.

In La Femme infidèle, the murder was deliberate and the murderer goes to extreme lengths to avoid capture. In Juste avant la nuit, the murder is entirely accidental yet it provokes an intense guilt response in the murderer. The irony is that in both cases the murderer, Charles, is tortured by his crime – in the first by fear of being found out, in the second by a guilt which no one can understand.

Whilst Juste avant la nuit allows Chabrol ample scope for exploring some of his favourite themes (such as bourgeois complacency and the darker side of human nature), it is less accesible than La Femme infidèle. It is, all the same, a compelling and stylishly filmed work, featuring some great acting performances (Michel Bouquet is extraordinary here) and the usual blend of Chabrolesque intrigue, drama and suspense.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

...Et regardait Cain (Victor Hugo, La Légende des Siècles) (trad: The eye was in the grave watching Cain...)

The follow-up to "la Rupture," with the same actors (Bouquet and Audran), "Juste Avant la Nuit" is its exact contrary. In the light of the chilly -and with hindsight , totally unfair-reviews "la Rupture" had received, Chabrol came back to the simple bald style of "la Femme Infidèle." "La Rupture" had a lot of subplots, characters and action whereas "Juste Avant la Nuit" is not even a thriller: it's pure psychological drama; and there are only three characters: the husband (who sleeps with his best friend's wife), the wife and the friend.

Charles (Bouquet) accidentally killed his lover as they were playing S/M games. No one suspects him, not even the victim's friend who saw him once there in the room where they used to meet. Life could go on. Like Michel Duchaussoy in "Que la Bete Meure" (1969), he could get away with it. He isn't even a suspect. The Police investigate, but they do not ask him any questions.

The main originality of "Juste Avant la Nuit" is that Charles is his own worst enemy. He is literally eaten with remorse, he wants to be punished! After all, in his advertising agency, his accountant who has embezzled is arrested and will be tried. So why not him? Little by little, he confesses the whole thing to his wife who thinks that" it's only an accident." Audran's character possesses ambiguity: in several respects, she's still some kind of child; we see her make chocolate cake and play with her children; we never see her have sex with her husband and they do not share the same bed (an element which was already present in "la Femme Infidèle" ) The scene where Bouquet describes his crime and his -obscure- motives is frighteningly intense, Chabrol makes us attend the scene in lavish details without using any flashbacks (the prologue was also very restrained ). The looks and smiles which were a true sign language in "la Femme Infidele" have been replaced by low voices ,almost whispering. (Half of the lines are whispered) When he tells the victim's husband the whole truth, the man seems impassible, a Buddah's face. "I could have done the same,should Helene have been Laura" "I do not like revenge."

"You want to be punished cause you want to suffer " his wife screams out of despair."You used to see that girl for the same reasons."

Bouquet gives a tormented complex portrayal of a bourgeois - Bouquet says he is afraid of becoming a bourgeois, that's perhaps why Chabrol takes pity on him in the last sequences - who thinks that any crime must be punished : he is in direct contrast to his character in "la Rupture."

"Juste Avant la Nuit" belongs to that short period (4 or 5 years ) during which Chabrol was arguably the best director in France and was making the most brilliant films of his career.

All those works end in quietness and peace: on the sea ("Que la bête meure,"where Michel Duchaussoy sails away), in a luminous green landscape in "la Femme Infidèle," near a lake ("le Boucher" ), with a balloon release ("la Rupture") or here in front of the sea where children are playing. "They're beginning to forget" Grannie says ....

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Juste avant le nuit Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, June 26, 2009

Eye for Film (Caro Ness) review [4/5]

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review July 30, 1999. also here: Movie Review - Juste avant la nuit - With Chabrol, the High Tide ...

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

TEN DAYS WONDER (La Décade prodigieuse)

France Italy (110 mi) 1971

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Here Chabrol inaugurates a new genre, the theological thriller. Charles (Perkins at his most charismatically unstable) wakes from a dream of Creation to find himself with blood on his hands. He turns for help to his erstwhile professor of philosophy (Piccoli), and persuades him back to the Van Horn country estate to use his 'Logic of Science' in sorting out the family mess. The estate is a 1925 dream engineered by Charles' adoptive father Theo Van Horn (Welles), who is worshipped by his child-bride (Jobert), and sculpted as Jupiter by the awed Charles. Chabrol's movies, echoing Fritz Lang's, have long been edging towards a confrontation with the theme of Fate. This is it. Theo Van Horn chooses to play God, creating his own world, dictating the behaviour of those he places in it, taking care to add flaws to his creation to keep it breathing. But God hasn't reckoned with his own capacity for imperfection, for such shining qualities as jealousy, hatred, revenge; so he comes to his own grief, faced with the lonely fact that his creation is a nine-day wonder... Chabrol's movies grow less and less like anyone else's; this is one worth seeing again and again.

La Décade prodigieuse (1971) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

A young man, Charles, wakes up one morning in a hotel room, his hands stained with blood. He has no recollection of the events of the past few days. Half convinced he is going mad, he appeals to his former university professor, Paul Régis, to stay with him at his father’s country house and analyse his behaviour. Charles’ father, Théo, is a domineering eccentric who insists that all his family dress in 1920s garb. He is married to a young woman, Hélène, whom he adopted when she was a small girl. Since childhood, Charles and Hélène have been close, but recently they have started to have an affair. Disaster threatens when Charles’ love letters to Hélène are stolen and someone begins to blackmail the adulterous wife. With no income of his own, Charles is compelled to steal money from his father to pay off the mysterious blackmailer. When Paul finds himself implicated in the staged theft of Hélène’s jewels, he has no recourse but to betray Charles. It is only after he has left this strange menagerie that Paul realises the truth. Someone is about to be killed...

La Decade prodigieuse is not the most well-oiled of Claude Chabrol’s thrillers, and coming after such excellent examples of the genre as Le Boucher (1969) et Que la bête meure (1969), it is something of a let down. Whilst the director succeeds in sustaining an aura of grim menace - for which the often weird cinematography is largely responsible - inept plotting, poor editing and weak dialogue make this a painfully stilted work. Even the combined talents of four great actors cannot breach the stifling envelope of complacency that shrouds this film, although casting Anthony Perkins (a.k.a. Norman Bates) in the role of yet another (presumed) psychopath and Awesome Welles as an all-knowing patriarch is hardly likely to have won Chabrol many awards for original thinking.

The denouement to the story is rather ingenious, but the pay off is greatly diminished by the faltering narrative that precedes it and a shameless lack of depth in the characterisation (Marlène Joberts’ character is so two dimensional that the actress could have been replaced by a full-size cardboard cut-out without anyone noticing). Chabrol was himself dissatisfied with this film, citing as one of the reasons for its failure the fact that, for commercial reasons, the film had to be made in English. This would account for the ropey dialogue - which is even worse in the badly dubbed French version. Mr Welles’ insistence on wearing a fake green nose doesn’t help matters either...

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

All comments bar one are very negative, no one mentions writer Ellery Queen, those two cousins who gave some of the best murder mysteries of the twentieth century. Theirs is the metaphysical detective story (Borges admired Ellery Queen), theirs is the unexpected final clue, theirs is the "nursery chryme" dear to Agatha Christie. Some of their novels are on a level with "And then there were none."

All Ellery Queen novels feature Ellery Queen himself as the detective. Here he is replaced by Michel Piccoli's character, Paul Régis, which is not a big problem.

But the problem lies in the fact that most of the viewers did not recognize "their "Claude Chabrol. If they knew his numerous works, they'd realize that only a dozen (roughly, the 1959-1961, the 1967-73 golden era and some scattered later films (l'enfer, la ceremonie) are really Chabrolesque, that is to say detective plot-with- bourgeois background-and ominous atmosphere. There are plenty of bizarre oeuvres in such a huge filmography (a lot of movies should never have been made; Clouzot, who easily artistically surpasses him only made 11 movies, only one of which is mediocre).

Actually " decade " took the eerie elements of "la rupture" (1970) and tightened them up. But whereas "La rupture" had a chabrolesque atmosphere and the usual suspects (Stephane Audran, Michel Bouquet), "Decade" features actors Chabrol had not used before (and to my knowledge never would). Coming after "juste avant la Nuit," "decade" could only be slagged off when it was released. Today, I must confess that it's not that much bad and compared with recent fiascos such as "la Fleur du Mal" or "au Coeur du Mensonge " or "rien ne va plus" or.... (the list is endless) it retains some originality. I can easily comprehend that people who do not know E.Queen 's world could be infuriated by this Punch and Judy style, but Chabrol faithfully transferred the writer's atmosphere to the screen :the gigantic metaphysical metaphor, a nervous Anthony Perkins -a good choice- , a enough is enough Orson Welles-who else?- , God himself. Do not get me wrong: "decade " is no masterpiece but it is a curious offbeat work, sometimes clumsy (Chabrol felt compelled to "explain" the last scenes for fear his audience may not have understood), sometimes brilliant (the little girl in the train reciting the ten commandments).

"Decade" verges on fantastic and predates another non-Chabrolesque intriguing flick "Alice ou la dernière fugue." I have a warm spot in my heart for these two despised films .

"Decade": a failed success or a successful failure? And if you hate it (such is the case with many users) it's better than to be unconcerned about it.

User comments from imdb Author: berthe bovy (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from paris, france

One of the great anti-detective films of the 60s and 70s (such as THE SPIDER'S STRATEGEM, BLOW-UP, THE PARALLAX VIEW) in which the traditional, detached, problem-solving power of the detective is removed and he finds himself lost in a labyrinth. The detective here, Paul Regis, is so much the embodiment of reason that he is a professor of philosophy. He observes, analyses, seeks patterns in a bewildering maze - his genius results in the suicidal death of the wrongfully suspected hero.

The film opens as a young sculptor, Charles Van Horn (Anthony Perkins), wakes up, hands bloodied, mind disoriented, thinking of ocean-deep life, in a hotel. He has no idea how he got there, and Chabrol visualises his disturbed mind with extreme tilted angles and harrowing electronic music. He calls the only person he knows in the area, an old lecturer of his, Paul Regis (Michel Piccoli), and asks him to visit his home, a vast provincial mansion presided over by his bulky, Americanised father Theo, played with a lovely mixture of melancholy and play by Orson Welles, and his pretty young wife, Helene (Marlene Jobert).

Beneath the bourgeois facade, Paul finds an almost Gothic seething of adultery, power games, mad old ladies, blackmail, theft, Oedipal trauma. Charles and Helene have begun an illicit relationship, and are being blackmailed. Charles steals the money from Theo, and both parties enlist Paul to spy on the other. Paul finds his detachment, however, increasingly compromised, and in the climactic 'revelation' scene, all fingers point at him.

This film is based on an Ellery Queen novel, exemplar of all that is lucid and simplistic about the detective genre, in which complex plotting is always framed in such a way as to be accessible to the reader, so he can have a go at playing detective himself. They follow the usual formulae: crime-investigation-solution; disruption-reassertion of order.

Chabrol's film is Ellery Queen written by Borges. It subverts every tenet of the genre in a myriad of ways. Although the traditional crime film is deliberately artificial, it depends on a surface realism (plausible settings and outwardly recognisable characters) to succeed. Chabrol foregrounds his material's gleeful playfulness at every turn. The viewer is never allowed to lose himself in the plot; the elaborate, disruptive camera movements; the intrusion of decor into the plot; the wild playing with time and point of view; the 'amateurish', unrealistic acting and stilted dialogue; the wayward plotting all point up the artifice and unbelievability of the film, the sense of a godlike puppetmaster pulling strings. This sense is crucial to the story, when the narrative puppetmaster (Theo) is linked directly to the camera, i.e. the director (Theo's wife bears a remarkable resemblance to Chabrol's wife, Stephane Audran).

This foregrounding of artifice reverberates throughout the film, which creates an opposition between creators (Theo, Charles) and interpreters (Paul). This is linked to the traditional crime story - someone 'creates' a crime that must be interpreted by the detective. This kind of pattern, however, suggests a social order in which reality can be known, ordered and controlled. Chabrol suggests that this is not the case.

He shows the unknowability in many ways. The film is set in a rarefied space away from the 'real' world, which is also a fantasy set where Theo plays out his dreams of 20s grandeur. Much of the plot is related by characters whose reliability is seriously in doubt from the start. WONDER starts with Charles emerging from a dream, and the film never loses this sense of the oneiric. Scenes repeat themselves as characters are lost in a maze, literally so, with all the repeated corridors and stairs in the film, the profusion of mirrors and windows that reflect back or multiply meanings, the decor that constantly dwarfs the characters.

WONDER is about play, but also quotes from a famous play, Oedipus Rex, which is among other things the first detective story. Charles sleeps with his mother, Helene, and tries to destroy his father. This founding human myth is countered by the father with Christian patterning (in a way that foreshadows SEVEN); both cancel each other out, one is left with neither catharsis nor redemption. But Oedipus was both detective and criminal, and

so is Paul (Theo says he is guiltier than him). Images of sight and blindness pervade the film (linked in a very real way to the cinema), and the final 'revelation' is lit by a lamp half Atlas, half eye. But the detective is truly blind, trying like Holmes to fix patterns in the abyss, revealing that abyss as he fails to do so, carelessly costing lives. There is, ironically, no death, UNTIL the detective makes his judgement, rather than the other way round.

The film is also a brilliant family saga, the country house a site for all manner of generational psychodramas (the paedophiliac implications of Theo's and Helene's marriage are chilling). But there are Oedipal struggles too, and the apparent artifice masks a very personal Chabrol film. His casting is very deliberate, with Welles playing a self-destructive KANE figure, playing God through kindness; Perkins invoking both PSYCHO (and the Hitch suggestions are both brilliantly misleading (we're all looking at the mother!) and enriching (the 'innocent' wrongfully accused; the Catholic depths; the famed concept of transferring guilt), and the (Welles-directed) THE TRIAL; Piccoli (veteran of bourgeois bashers Bunuel and Godard, as well as a link, through LE MEPRIS, to Chabrol hero Lang).

The film is remarkably perspicacious about class and money (the 'God' figure is a poor Frenchman who made his fortune in America) - and the country house is used in its double metaphor for both the state at large and the mind. Amid all the sterile, despairing , destructive, man-made constructs, Chabrol has never lost his beautiful sympathy with the French countryside. This is one of a series of stunning thrillers made by Chabrol in the late 60s/early 70s that blow apart the conservatism of the genre.

La Décade Prodigieuse – Ten Days' Wonder (Claude Chabrol 1971) C. Jerry Kutner from Bright Lights After Dark, June 26, 2009

Cinepassion.org Francisco F. Croce

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Ten Days Wonder Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gregory Meshman]

HIGH HEELS (Docteur Popaul)

France Italy (95 mi) 1972

The project on which Chabrol first gave his cynicism full rein and took his mordant playfulness to outrageous lengths. This coarse farce, hardly worth the vitriol poured on its apparent misogyny, always looked more like the director's revenge on the French mass audience, who had consistently ignored his good movies, but would accept anything with Belmondo, and in this case did. Ironic inversions of the star's image, charming ugly women for their 'moral beauty', or 'unmanned' as his schemes rebound, ring pretty hollow.

DVDBeaver.com [Per-olaf Strandberg]

Belmondo is an obsessive medic who has an ugliness fetish and falls in love with the homely Farrow. They wed, but before long her vivacious sister Antonelli pays a visit. Belmondo forgets his desire for the blemished and discovers the meaning of beauty. He drugs Farrow each night and ritualistically kills off his sister-in-law's three husbands. Farrow, however, is not blind to his ways and devises a plan that convinces Belmondo he has become paralyzed. He is driven to kill again, with himself as the victim. A fine black-humor comedy from Chabrol, one of the leading directors of the New Wave. In a statement that applies to this film, Chabrol has said that he likes "to lead the audience along, to set them chasing off in one direction, and then to turn things inside out."

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

At the time, Chabrol was producing movies at an alarming speed. And that period is still looked upon his very best: "la femme infidèle" "le boucher" "que la bête meure" "la rupture" and "les noces rouges" are unqualified musts for any Chabrol fan. Two works took a divergent road in this golden era: "la decade prodigieuse " was a failed (but not completely wretched) attempt at transferring one of Ellery Queen's absorbing books to the screen . And then "Docteur Popaul" which is from Hubert Monteilhet's "meurtres à loisirs." Monteilhet writes thrillers which sometimes recall Boileau-Narcejac ("Diabolique" "Vertigo" ) but he introduces a sense of humor and a certain bad taste not present in the works of the writers I mention above. Chabrol has given a totally true rendering of Monteilhet atmosphere: the set up, the grotesque characters (particularly a made look ugly Mia Farrow: why her anyway? The director had to dub her in French ). The conclusion, like in any Monteilhet's book, is immoral to a fault. But deliciously immoral.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

User reviews from imdb Author: Benjamin Gauss from Salzburg, Austria

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

WEDDING IN BLOOD (Les Noces Rouges)

France Italy (95 mi) 1973

ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]

Coinciding with the French elections, Les Noces Rouges was banned ostensibly because it was about a real murder case, but obviously also for the broad portrayal of its Gaullist villain - a man with a sly plan for purchasing property and developing it as factory-workers' high-rise dwellings plus plastics factory which, while benefiting the town, will end up pouring a small fortune into his own pocket. Sadly, although there is more positive vulgarity around than ever, Chabrol doesn't seem to know how to take his errant couple. As more or less critically approached figures of fun, they're great; it's when he falls in love with them that the film goes awry. Should have been sly and funny, or dark and tragic; ends up neither one nor the other.

Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review

Yet another facet of Claude Chabrol's view of the bourgeois life as a facade behind which lurk extravagant, destructive, and often totally ridiculous passions (1973). Like his idol Alfred Hitchcock, Chabrol loves to work variations on the disintegration of an ordered world; but unlike Hitchcock, who keeps his order and his chaos neatly separated, Chabrol concentrates more on character, so that when the bottom drops out, it does so precisely and inevitably. Stephane Audran and Michel Piccoli star as adulterous lovers who never manage to realize that there's an easier way out of their predicament than murder. A smashing work from a master craftsman.

Les Noces rouges (1973) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Pierre Maury and Lucienne Delamare are conducting a frenzied extra-marital affair. The intensity of their clandestine meetings is a reflection of their otherwise empty lives. Both are trapped in loveless marriages with partners they despise. Pierre’s wife Clotilde is perpetually ill and has no desire for physical contact. Lucienne’s husband, Paul, is a self-important businessman who is also deputy mayor of the local community. By killing his wife, Pierre believes he will be free to spend more time with Lucienne. However, to avoid arousing suspicion, Pierre and Lucienne are compelled to meet only during the night. Then Paul discovers his wife’s infidelity. He intends to blackmail Pierre, whom he has roped in as his mayoral assistant, to participate in a dubious land development scheme. Disgusted, Pierre and Lucienne decide to dispose of Paul…

Once again, director Claude Chabrol sets about exploring the not so discrete charm of the bourgeoisie in another well-honed psychological thriller. Here the central theme is how the endless pursuit of freedom can rebound and result in ever-growing imprisonment. The characters Pierre and Lucienne find release from the shackles of their barren marriages by defying the standards of middle class respectability and acting out love making trysts in the manner of a cheap porno movie. When the obstacles to their perceived lack of freedom are removed one by one, they each find it more difficult to get together – either because they genuinely believe there is a risk of their seedy affair being discovered or, equally probably, because the excitement has begun to wane. There is a resonance with classic film noir, where the pursuit of freedom almost invariably ends with failure or disillusionment.

Whilst less intense and artistically striking than Chabrol’s earlier great thrillers of this period – Le Boucher (1969), La Femme infidèle (1969), Que la bête meure (1969), to name just three – Les Noces rouges is nonetheless just as effective as a satire of bourgeois double standards and an exploration of the darker side of human behaviour. It is possible to regard the film as a black comedy rather than a conventional thriller, and indeed the trio Pierre-Lucienne-Paul makes a far more amusing triangle than in most of Chabrol’s other films (where the triangle is a recurring motif). Part of the reason for this is Claude Piéplu’s delightfully parodied portrayal of a pompous businessman with grand political ambitions. But there are other comical elements which Chabrol uses to cleverly darken the mood (note that most other directors use comedy to lighten the mood). For one, there’s a slight comic veneer to Michel Piccoli and Stephane Audran’s performances. Their love scenes look as if they were written for a debauched sex comedy, and the scenes where they meet in public “as near strangers” to keep up appearances are irresistibly funny.

One intriguing aspect of the film is Hélène, Lucienne's daughter. In three of Chabrol’s previous films, the character of Hélène was played by Stephane Audran and was central to the story, to a greater or lesser extent a victim of the bourgeois milieu she inhabits. In Les noces rouges, Hélène is a minor character who provides a crucial part in closing the narrative – a kind of self-appointed judge who acts with supreme innocence to restore order and harmony to a broken universe. Here, Hélène is the epitome of the bourgeois system, smug and content in her comfy middle class bubble. But she is also an angel of virtue, motivated solely by the desire to bring happiness to those around her – just like the self-righteous little politician she will inevitably become…

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Claude Chabrol started as part of the nouvelle vague, as contemporary of Truffaut and -yuk!- Godard, but his roots are in the old cinema, that of Clouzot and Duvivier. That's why his best movies hold up very well today.

A first golden era included such works as "à double tour" "le beau Serge" and "les cousins." Then came a period of barren inspiration which ended with "les biches" (1967) with which Chabrol entered his most fruitful period the 1967-1973 era: at least five of the works of this time are first-rate works: "la femme infidel" (1968; dubious American remake); "the beast must die" (1969); "the butcher" (1969) his towering achievement; "la rupture"(1970) his most underrated; "juste avant la nuit" (1971) and finally "les noces rouges" which seems today as the last hurrah, a farewell to a golden era.

Unlike the four other films I mention "les noces rouges" is based on a true story which was widely talked about in France of the early seventies. But, true or not, Chabrol's touch is strong and he makes the story a chabrolesque plot to the core. The bourgeois whom Chabrol depicted in "la femme infidel" or "la rupture," and who was played by Michel Bouquet has turned into a caricature. Enter Claude Piéplu, and with his high-pitched voice, he almost overshadows the excellent Stephane Audran and Michel Piccoli. An impotent self-satisfied mean bourgeois with political ambitions, he accepts his wife's(Audran) affair with his deputy mayor (Piccoli), more, it's fine with him because it will be useful for his shady business. The scene when he tells the lovers so is incredible; lines such as "I want everybody to be happy around me!" he delivers to a stunned Piccoli and a bewildered Audran give goose pimples.

You will notice the omnipresence of water: in "que la Bete meure" and "le boucher," it symbolized a return from hell, not necessarily a happy end but a world with some peace of mind. In "les noces rouges" it appears during the love scenes (played by the two actors with more gusto than usual: never in a Chabrol movie the carnal act had been -and will be-so much to the fore) as a symbol of innocence (after all, the two people have no sex with their legal partners) in the sin. But it's the heroine's daughter, called Helene, who epitomizes innocence and some kind of deus ex machina.

What's more puzzling is that Stephane Audran's characters were all called Hélène in the four other movies I mention: in "la femme infidel' Helene had a lover but with some excuse: her husband appeared like a washout sexually; in "le boucher" she was a brave schoolteacher, purity flesh on the bone; in "la rupture" her character had to fight against a hostile bourgeois world. In "les noces rouges" Audran, called Lucienne, is on the other side of the mirror: she really becomes a criminal, almost in a dream. When her daughter, Hélène, who took the place she occupied in former movies asks her "I want you to be happy, mom, please tell me the truth" Audran does not seem to realize all that means. And when she does, it will be too late.

Les noces rouges" is also a movie which depicts political life circa 1970 in a small town where gossips run rampant. And as usual, Chabrol is marvelous when it comes to paint vignettes of ordinary life -see the scene in the library-

It would take Chabrol five years to muster this sort of command ("Violette Nozieres" (1978)),and although he has occasionally made great works ("l'enfer" " la cérémonie" ), he will be remembered in fifty years or so for those gems of the late sixties/early seventies era. "Les noces rouges" is a must.

User comments from imdb Author: timothy tangs (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from little hintock, england

The films of Claude Chabrol are probably most famous for their artifice, their heightened use of colour, stylised plots and action, elaborate, distancing camerawork, intrusive decor and music, especially their turning domestic melodrama into murder mysteries. But Chabrol first made his name with LE BEAU SERGE, a scrupulously naturalistic rural drama, and mined this vein throughout his career, co-existing in compelling tension with the artifice.

LES NOCES ROUGES is on one level Chabrol's most accessible film, with a straightforward plot and realistic filming. The thriller elements are for the most part sublimated, and instead we have a moving tale of adultery and political skullduggery in provincial France. Michel Piccoli is Pierre Maury, deputy vice-mayor, whose wife is permenantly incapacitated by asthma. In the extraordinary opening sequence, his unreciprocated loving gesture to his wife seems like a strangling; as she mopes off to bed, he, in real time, walks through the street, to his car, drives into the forest and there meets a beautiful red-head, Lucienne Delamare, wife of the mayor. They make love on the river bank.

It is here the film becomes formally interesting, and questions its very picturesque realism. Like a relay-race, we follow Lucienne now, driving in her car home. There is an edit in her journey though, and because the symmetry doesn't add up, we ask what's missing. When she arrives home it's night, making us wonder how far she lives from the forest, or what she's been doing in the meantime.

After dinner with her husband and daughter by another man, she goes to bed, and thinks/dreams about how she and Paul met, how he became a political partner of her husband, how they made love anywhere and everywhere like teenagers on heat - this is the slyly funny film's most comic section, as they sneak into the local chateau, or are nearly caught fornicating behind a bush.

The thing is, Lucienne's going into dream/thought mode is signalled by a conventional fading, and by the outside noises of a local celebration. Not only does she visualise things she cannot know - Paul's glum dinner with his wife, for example - but the sequence breaks off not with her, but Pierre, when the image fades 'back', and the outside noise intrudes. What's going on here? How do we reconcile these formal breaches within the film's surface realism?

Is it enough to suggest that the film's 'narrative' is actually the projection of Lucienne's desires? Why does Paul come out of Lucienne's dream? Chabrol was one of the first to take Hitchcock's artistry seriously - do the REAR WINDOW-like similarity of initials link Paul and Pierre closer than they seem?

This seeming fantasy serves at least two purposes. Firstly it shows that a bond that transcends social rules and probable social ostracism is not all that real - the scene in the chateau, beginning in excitable joy, role play and daring, ending in alienation and disillusion, hinted as much. Alternatively, this realm of fantasy, escape, transcendence, can be seen as a riposte to the very real world of corrupt politics and paralysing marriages. What seemed a rather old-hat investigation into bourgeois transgression becomes something far richer, a psychological dramatisation of a woman's desires.

But Chabrol is an ironist, and he would never go too far with any one character. We might regard, for example, the husband and daughter as marginal figures in the main love story if they weren't called Paul and Helene, and therefore linked to Chabrol's other 70s films of love triangles featuring these characters. We expect some kind of intrusion from these, and we do, powerfully so. Indeed, Helen's effacing observing becomes almost supernatural as it comes to wreak passive havoc, as do her constant paralleling with paintings. The Hitchcockian use of a church (and the VERTIGOesque music) also suggest a spiritual dimension seemingly minimal, but possibly devastating.

Whatever. This is a Chabrol masterpiece. His recreation of provincial France is beautiful, but always corresponds to emotional states. The acting is extraordinary. Piccoli is one of the great actors, and his burly-eyed charm, decency and humour suggest a man ready to murder, whose embraces are like frenzied maulings, whose civility is undermined by his slurping of soup.

Claude Pieplu as the husband is a wonderful comic character who initially suggests a repellent but laughable Charles Bovary (who was once called a monster because he snored on his wedding night), and becomes something much more dangerous. The representation of politics in the film got it banned, and it does reveal corruption in very high places, but Chabrol seems more interested in its dehumanising processes contrasted with the redemption of imaginative power. What is most disturbing about Paul is that we think it perfectly reasonable he be killed.

Stephane Audran, Chabrol's wife, is a revelation, though. Normally icily elegant, she is enrapturing here as a woman in love, unafraid to be vulgarly happy, the sense of freedom allowing her to - horrors - smile, laugh, even lounge on chairs.

Les Noces rouges Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, June 27, 2009

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Wedding in Blood John White from 10kbullets

Eye for Film ("Themroc") review [2.5/5]

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

The New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder) review

ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]

NADA

France Italy (110 mi) 1974

Time Out review Tom Milne

A chillingly cool political thriller, all the better for its non-partisan stance. No attempt is made to whitewash the activist group in Paris, calling themselves Nada in memory of the Spanish anarchists, who kidnap the American ambassador (at an exclusive brothel) in a welter of functional violence. A motley collection of malcontents and seasoned professionals, driven by absurd ideological confusions, they are for that reason a doubly dangerous time bomb likely to explode at any random moment. But against them Chabrol sets the cold calculation of the forces of order, wheeling, dealing, finally engineering a politic holocaust, and emerging as even less concerned with human life than the terrorists they are hunting down as a threat to society. Right is on their side, but it is the members of Nada, groping desperately to build little burrows of viable living in a world of expediency and corruption, who become the heroes in spite of everything. Powerful, pure film noir in mood, it's one of Chabrol's best films.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

For nearly a decade, in the late 60s and early 70s, Claude Chabrol was arguably the greatest director in the world, in Europe at any rate. 'Nada' comes from this period, and yet is an exception in the oeuvre. Instead of a claustrophobic thriller in a domestic setting, 'Nada' is about international terrorists running amok through France (in a way, the film is a parody of the previous year's 'Day of the Jackal'). Instead of intricate psychological depth, Chabrol offers pure cartoon. The police are a hangover from the Vichy era, murderously cyncial, while the terrorists are organised by someone who no longer believes in revolution.

As a sophisticated analysis of pressing contemporary events, the whole thing seems rather silly, until you start spotting Chabrol's wicked, misanthropic irony, and you wonder if the old boy hasn't done it after all. Never take Chabrol's glittering surfaces at face value. The massacre scene is deeply cynical, shocking, brilliant cinema.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

"Nada" was the most inadequate follow-up to "Les Noces Rouges" which,with hindsight, appears now as the last good movie of Chabrol's golden era (1967-1973) "Nada" is Chabrol's first real attempt at a wholly political movie; its previous work "les Noces Rouges" had also political elements but it was more a psychological thriller with the usual look at society in French provinces. "Nada" includes terrorists, ambassador, hostage-taking, a lot of blood, not really Chabrol's field. A heterogeneous cast gives the movie the coup de grâce: only Duchaussoy, who had already played with the director, and Maurice Garrel are up to scratch. Viviane Romance, one of Duvivier's actresses ("la Belle Equipe" "Panique"), is wasted as a madam (Gabrielle). Italian actors (Fabio Testi, Lou Castel) are awful.

With "Nada" this a second period of barren inspiration for Chabrol. It would be "Violette Nozières" before he was again at the top of his game.

User comments from imdb Author: Camera Obscura from Leiden, The Dutch Mountains

THE NADA GANG (Claude Chabrol - France/Italy 1974).

With this excellent political thriller Claude Chabrol charted into more familiar genre territory. This time he made this cynical account about a small Franch group of post '68 terrorists kidnapping the American ambassador from a luxury Parisian brothel, secreting him away in an isolated farmhouse while they wait for an answer to their demands. But the police chief they're dealing with is even more violent than they are and doesn't care about getting back the hostage alive.

In hindsight this film has become a typical exponent of the - mostly left wing - underground activities in the '70s and 80's. In these modern times, when terrorism is almost exclusively associated with Islamic religiously motivated terrorists, this kind of political activism comes across as refreshingly modern.

Above all, exciting and tense film-making. Cool, stylish and superbly filmed. And what about Fabio Testi in his black leather overcoat? Is he the coolest looking criminal you've ever seen, or what?

Camera Obscura --- 8/10

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Politics in Claude Chabrol's work are, like his fallen Catholicism, filtered through an ambivalent eye that's less agit-prop than moral-sardonic. Though it played a cameo in the skewered Gaullist aspirations of Wedding in Blood, his sense of political irony is central to this hot-button thriller, huddling would-be revolutionaries and their establishment nemesis under an umbrella of devastating cynicism. Revving up for their Paris upheaval, the eponymous medley of activists (which include Fabio Testi's bearded firebrand, Maurice Garrel's impotent intellectual, Michel Duchaussoy's malcontent teacher and Michelangela Melato's Uzi-toting frau) shanghais the American ambassador from his weekly brothel stop. Waiting for the ransom up in their pastoral hideout, they too late realize that the authorities, acting through sadistic police stooge Michel Aumont, are using the kidnapping as excuse to conduct an anti-terrorist massacre. Virtually a lampoon of Costa-Gravas' halo-wearing rebels, the film's ragtag freedom-fighters are a bumbling lot, their plans constantly poked through by alcoholism, disillusionment, myopic zeal and other assorted troubles. Is the director guilty, as one character accuses Garrel, of "no longer believing in revolution but acting out of despair"? Actually, Chabrol is as much of a radical as his more militant May '68 chums, only his anti-bourgeois fervor is leveled by an inquiring skepticism that refuses to write blank checks to either side. If the Nada folks emerge with more humanity once the dust has settled it is because their attempts, no matter how flawed, reveal a genuine impetus for change, while the ruthless machinations of the government, manipulating both their enemies and each other, are retro-Vichy. Far from nihilistic, Chabrol's cynicism bellies an impassioned, even anguished engagement, chillingly illustrated by the final, carnage-surveying high-angle panning shot. From Jean-Patrick Manchette's novel. With Lou Castel, André Falcon, and Viviane Romance.

Nada (1974) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Nada is a small leftwing terrorist group made up of six people from very different backgrounds. Diaz, the most militant of the group, plans to kidnap the American ambassador Richard Poindexter, in a bid to draw attention to their cause. One of the group, Treuffais, a timid philosophy teacher, will have no part in this and walks away. His five comrades succeed in spiriting Poindexter away to a remote farmhouse. Unfortunately for them, the police chief who is assigned to the case sees the elimination of the terrorists as having much greater priority than rescuing the ambassador...

Coming towards the end of Claude Chabrol’s second gold run of films, which ran from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s, Nada stands out as something of an oddity - a mix of political thriller and black comedy which has a far darker, far more ironic edge than anything Chabrol directed in this, arguably his best, era. Based on a popular série noire novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, the film reflects both the public’s growing appetite for grimly realistic action thrillers and the perceived threat from increasingly militant leftwing activists.

Whereas Chabrol's previous populist thrillers - Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche (1964) and its equally bland sequel - stuck to a tried and tested formula to maximise audience size and consequently had virtually no intellectual merit, Nada looks like a conventional thriller but is one with an underlying political subtext, and a potent one at that. In fact, this is possibly Chabrol's most overtly political film, and certainly one of his most scathing satires on contemporary society. One of the concerns shared by many people at the time was the extent to which the State would go to maintain an ordered society. As was reflected in the neo-polar novels and films of the period, there was a belief that the police would transcend moral boundaries, with the complicity of wealthy businessmen and legislators, to safeguard the interests of those who most benefited from maintaining the status quo (coincidentally, wealthy businessmen and legislators).

In Nada, the ragtag band of fair weather terrorists find themselves pitted against an insuperable enemy, professional State-sponsored terrorists in the guise of the police. The outcome is certain - the Nada group is obliterated with ruthless efficiency, their message and threat totally neutralised (well, almost). Those that perform this necessary clean-up operation are themselves revealed to be pawns in a wider political game and end up no better off. The true villains are not the police, but the mandarins sitting at the apex of our supposedly benign democratic system, the unseen guardians whose job it is to protect us - from ourselves. Watching the film today, when the threat of terrorism is omnipresent, the film is as relevant as when it was first released (perhaps more so). Who should we fear most - homicidal extremists made of clay or those god-like protectors in palaces of state who sit in judgement over us all? The answer is self-evident. We should fear both.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Chabrol Day Three: Nada Ray Young from Flickhead, June 23, 2009

Eye for Film (David Stanners) review [2.5/5]

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: HEFILM from French Polynesia

User reviews from imdb Author: jcappy from ny-vt

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

PLEASURE PARTY (Une Partie de Plaisir)

France Italy (100 mi) 1975

Time Out review Tom Milne

One of Chabrol's most maligned films. A cool and elegiac study of the canker destroying a family from within, it is given bizarre overtones - part confession, part game - as well as a peculiar poignancy by the fact that the script is modelled by Chabrol's regular scriptwriter Paul Gégauff, who plays the lead opposite his former wife Danièle, on his own marital troubles. Accusations galore of chauvinism were levelled at the film, of course, as the man, having fashioned the woman in his image of perfection, then simultaneously encourages and resents her independence to the point of brutality and even murder. But what emerges from the heart of the film, undercutting the Pavlovian response, is the sense of bitter despair underlying the man's full awareness that he had found paradise, but because of his own intransigently idealistic nature, was unable to find peace and harmony there.

This is one of Claude Chabrol's most unpleasant films, but it can't be denied that it's also one of his most fascinating and provocative. It was written by his longtime collaborator, the late Paul Gegauff, who stars with his own ex-wife Daniele Gegauff, and the subject is the brutal breakup of their apparently idyllic marriage. Things start to crumble when the chauvinistic and unbalanced Gegauff perversely suggests that his wife consider taking on a lover, and then becomes increasingly abusive when she follows his suggestion. As often happens in Chabrol films, it is their child (played by their actual daughter, Clemence Gegauff) who winds up bearing, mainly silently, the brunt of the ensuing carnage. You may be enraged by this film, and you won't find it easy to shake off; the self-exposure of the leads and Chabrol's unswerving control of the direction combine to make it corrosive (1976).

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Claude Chabrol exposed his own complicity in the bourgeois world he skewers via withering self-caricature (alongside wife Stéphane Audran) in the La Muette episode of Paris Vu Par..., then filmed Paul Gégauff, screenwriter and fellow misanthrope, pushing even further. A family affair -- Gégauff based the storyline on his own marital breakup and plays abusive male ego to wife Danièle through an implacable erosion of upper-class bliss. The plot opens on the couple's happiness on a fishing trip with a young daughter (Clemence Gégauff) in tow, making love by the shore then returning to their luxurious country home, though not before a crab is cracked open in close-up (later, a spider devours a trapped bug -- "C'est la vie"). Paul, fit and graying and frequently shirtless, nevertheless feels menopausal pangs, casually tells his wife of his several affairs and encourages her to feel free to sleep around, as well. Libertine intent quickly hits its head on the ceiling of selfish possessiveness, and he publicly turns contemptuous of Danièle's increasing autonomy, paranoid less about her body than about her mind. "Freedom is a pain," Gégauff intones at a party, though this is Chabrol's Scenes from a Marriage, with both sides allowed emotional complexities while a visit to the wax museum (complete with a Landru dummy) assures us that the violence fecund within this relationship will erupt, sooner than later. People drift apart, yet the husband insists on the idealized stability of his family (or at least his dream of one), blind to how egotistical brutality laces his longing, Gégauff the writer dramatizing his own male-entitlement anxiety while exposing it up on the screen. "I believe in transcendence" over a pan across a graveyard, yet the bars waiting by the end are Lang's, not Bresson's, thus a final clank in Chabrol's grinding machine of chauvinist excoriation. With Paula Moore, Michel Valette, and Giancarlo Sisti.

User comments from imdb Author: jcappy from ny-vt

This may or may not be Chabrol's best, but it must be his bravest. For what else can "The Pleasure Party" (1976) be but an open protest of patriarchy and battery. Think Ibsen's "A Doll House," and you cannot be far off. I think it's the final scenes that erase any minute doubt about the film's intent. First there is the belated rescue attempt of four men and a woman: the adult men's physical prowess seems suspended as if, as men, their hands are tied, while the woman casts a blinding black veil over Philip's head, halting the action, and condemning the actor. And then the prison scene in which Elsie (his new llama or lamb) tells her father that she is unable to learn under the harassment of a male student, to which his non-response includes the same transcendent jargon he used in the cemetery prior to his vicious assault. Chabrol and the Leguaffs have indeed taken their stand with this shattering portrait of male terror--one that explodes out of a convincingly two-faced man, and is thus all the more effective.

Yes this is a movie about male power. It is not about sexual impotence, philosophies, or a mid-life crisis , but about Philip's hard-wired connection to masculine identity. If he feels inadequate and helpless in the face of what he can only understand as female weakness, it is because he has bought into women's difference--from men. In other words, Esther is so other to him that anything other than ownership is threatening. The turning point of the film is when he advises Esther --"you should do it."--to sleep with other men. This moment must be as pointedly misogynist as his later acts of violence; for here he equates his lover with sex, temptation, and whoredom --ostensibly to test his purity and his ideas of freedom, but, in effect, he is using her to provoke her own demise. It's very instructive that although he manages the first test--even offering his satiated wife breakfast in bed the next morning, it is sex in bed--with him (to reclaim ownership) must come first. And during a party scene, he argues for the comparison of Gandhi and Hitler--unaware that Gandhi similarly used women to test his own purity, and that the latter's sadistic, eruptive violence would soon adhere to him.

What Philip becomes is a full fledged Magus: "the man who tells you everything and what to do" as he explains to Elsie, in his characterizing Habib. Toward Esther, he grows increasingly resentful, suspicious, tense, judgmental, menacing--and possessive. He shows the brawn to break down doors, and a mentality which can accept and enact cruelty. He becomes more withdrawn and, as Esther points out, racist. In the bathroom mirror scene his face, viewed through her tears, is as perverse as the Landru he introduced to his daughter in his House of Wax. The "freedom" he has granted his wife has boomeranged on him. He hates it and everyone and everything connected to it. "Liberty makes me sh_t," he says. When Sylvia simply asks "Why do you yell at Esther?" he answers that she talks too much of freedom and hangs out with guitar players. And his "profound" need for his ex-wife doesn't occur till Sylvia displays her independence in the fishing scene--here he longs for Esther's dependency symbolized for him in her fear of crabs.

Esther grasps the picture, but does not have the social power to act sufficiently on it, so finds herself ultimately trapped. However, her defiance is quiet, lucid, and courageous. Her "you, you, it's all about you" refrain, and lines like: "You make the decisions, I only say amen" and "I was great as your reflection" are equal to Ibsen's Nora. But she is more psychologically isolated than Nora, and must suffer from far more abuse, verbal, and, of course, physical. Esther is a battered woman and must endure that syndrome--she cannot fully grasp what Philip says to his buddies: "her weak point move me," and how many times is she willing to forego the depth of her own words: "since when do you care what I say." She can never finally disbelieve her husband--even the forced foot-licking is not proof-- and so, in the end turns to him in a moment of personal crisis because "she is too scared" to visit alone the tomb of the dear deceased aunt, the woman who raised her. The irony here is as devastating as her words are convincing. And her final "NO, NO" has come too late and is heard too late.

I understand that the Phillip role was turned down by several leading French actors. If one can relive some of his lines just previous to the assault, one can understand why? But his words serve to finally and totally expose the man behind the mask. His self-assurance, disarming directness, and engaging and almost defenseless smile belong now to a slave-holder, rather than a man who in his words, was "born to be joyful." When he say to Esther that all his sufferings (since their breakup--ha, ha, ha) "must be compensation for what I've been through," the viewer can only say bring on the executioner. It's so extremely tragic that he is the executioner.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Nathaniel Thompson

Following a streak of astonishing thrillers in the 1960s mostly starring his wife, Stephane Audran, director Claude Chabrol took a strange turn in the next decade with a number of bizarre international co-productions often far removed from his usual studies of domestic nightmares. Closest in spirit to his previous work but far more disturbing is Une partie de plaisir, issued on DVD under the misleadingly prurient title of The Pleasure Party. (The title more closely translates as "A Piece of Pleasure.")

The film begins on a rocky beach as a seemingly happy couple, gray-haired and muscular Philippe (Paul Gégauff) and lithe brunette Esther (Danièle Gegauff), casually mutilate crabs as bait while their child cavorts near the waves. Back home at the dinner table Philippe casually indicates to Esther that he'd like to test a pet theory that married people who sleep with others aren't cheating; they're simply enhancing their marriage. Esther doesn't seem too wild about the idea but decides to pick a partner from an upcoming dinner party; fortunately Philippe has been less than faithful himself, which makes the adjustment easier. Esther opts for Habib (giallo staple Giancarlo Sisti), whom neither spouse seems to particularly like. However, she soon finds herself responding to her new lover, igniting a nasty jealous streak that results in Philippe trying to control every aspect of her life. Not surprisingly, things do not turn out well.

While this film might seem on the surface like another Chabrol excursion into the hell of modern marriage, the proceedings are given sickly, fascinating extra layers of meaning when one considers the project's history. The script was written by Gégauff, who penned such landmark Chabrol titles as This Man Must Die and Les Biches; however, this particular work was based entirely on the disintegration of his own marriage, painting himself in a most unflattering light. Yves Montand was cast in the lead role but walked shortly before production; next up was Jean-Louis Trintignant, who similarly balked at the character's extreme behavior. Finally Gégauff offered to play the role himself, but Chabrol insisted in that case that the role of Esther could only be played by its real-life inspiration, Gégauff's ex-wife Danièle. As a result, the viewer is left with the surreal experience of watching a real divorced couple reenacting the brutal circumstances of their separation with a fictitious, murderous turn near the end. As if that weren't enough, Gégauff went on to remarry and write a number of other films, only to be stabbed to death by his second spouse in 1983. If this confessional on film is any indication, she might have had just cause.

Aesthetically the film also feels like something of a hybrid, mixing Chabrol's patented visual fixation with architecture and landscape with cinematic techniques he usually avoided like frequent and rapid zoom shots and even an atypical slow motion passage at the end. The result is a darker and more claustrophobic film than one might expect, foreshadowing his later, more oppressive films like La ceremonie and the similarly plotted L'enfer. Gone is the traditional minimalist underscore common in his other thrillers; here we have the soothing strains of Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert, sparingly used to add an elegant counterpoint to the increasingly barbaric behavior in the film.

As an entry in Pathfinder's ongoing series of important Chabrol releases, The Pleasure Party falls in line with the quality standard one might expect, i.e., fine but not great. The letterboxed image (not 16x9 enhanced) is a significant improvement over the dupey-looking VHS releases but still looks on the dull side; the deliberately desaturated cinematography may also be to blame. Print flaws are obvious in a few scenes, but overall it's a watchable presentation and at least free of the distracting PAL-conversion glitches found in a handful of other titles like This Man Must Die. The optional English subtitles are well-rendered and easy to read, also an improvement over the bleached-out, illegible ones from past releases.

The extras are more substantial than one might expect for a lesser-known Chabrol film, beginning with a thorough and often interesting audio commentary by screenwriter/critics Dan Yakir and Ric Menello. The former's thick accent notwithstanding, it's an easy track to digest and is largely textual in nature, pointing out symbolic and technical aspects of the film while offering an occasional tidbit of historical info. Unlike most directors there isn't anything terribly salacious or invigorating about Chabrol's behind-the-scenes behavior, so analyses of his films tend to be oriented to readings like this. For some reason the discussion kicks off well into the film after the opening titles and doesn't seem in synch with the film, but fortunately the discussion is mostly not scene specific.

Also included is a theatrical trailer (in French, no subtitles), a stills gallery, talent bios, and a very long (47 minutes!) audio interview with Chabrol, recorded in 1977 during the production of Blood Relatives. The chat only briefly touches on the film at hand when discussing the director's working relationship with Gégauff; otherwise it's a handy career overview, focusing on Chabrol's fascinations and preferences as a filmmaker and how he sees society. Luckily his view is usually a bit more optimistic than this, one of his darkest and most challenging films to date.

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] June 29, 2009

DVD Verdict Bill Gibron

Une Partie de plaisir Dennis Grunes

UpcomingDiscs.com (David Annandale) dvd review [2.5/5]

Une Partie de plaisir Chris Poggiali and Paul DeCirce from Temple of Schlock, June 25, 2009

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

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]

User reviews from imdb Author: gridoon2010

User reviews from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Darragh O' Donoghue (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from dublin, ireland

Channel 4 Film capsule review Fran Hortop

DIRTY HANDS

aka: Innocents with Dirty Hands (Les Innocents aux Mains Sales)

France Italy Germany (121 mi) 1975

One of Claude Chabrol's periodic attempts to break into the English-language market, this time with Romy Schneider and Rod Steiger as a vacuous upper-class couple involved in a murderous love triangle. Although the American version lacks a half hour of Chabrol's original footage, the film seems unforgivably weak and overwrought for the usually meticulous Chabrol, who perhaps suspected that the English-speaking world wasn't quite ready for his subtle brand of irony.

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

A superbly stylish and baroque crime thriller which marks a return for Chabrol to the bravura incorporation of pulp conventions that distinguished some of his earlier work. But here the convoluted plot draws us inexorably through a minefield of kaleidoscopically changing relationships at the kind of measured pace that allows the film to accumulate all sorts of tragic resonances. There are innumerable bold strokes as Chabrol treads from irony to irony, ambiguity to ambiguity. Romy Schneider is fascinating as the icy wife plotting to rid herself of her boorish husband (doubts about Steiger fade as the film progresses), and the minor characters - including a characteristically histrionic lawyer and two policemen given to discussing the case over meals of various dimensions - are drawn with absolute precision.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The title of this Claude Chabrol thriller is terrifically emblematic -- when in his movies (or in Hitchcock's, or Lang's) are there hands unsullied by sanguine evidence? Culpability permeates the plot's Double Indemnity Revisited trio, with luscious trophy wife Romy Schneider's bare-assed sunbathing session interrupted by hunky Paolo Giusti's descending kite; no sooner has she introduced him to her impotent, boozy, self-pitying hubby (Rod Steiger) than she's fucking him on the lush living room rug, and the two are hatching a plot to dispatch weak-hearted Steiger out of the equation. Schneider dutifully bludgeons the figure under the bedcovers, though Giusti gets the shakes and splits for Italy, leaving her to deal alone with the prodding of a duo of police snoops and, less explicably, with news of the supposedly-killed husband draining the bank account and putting their St. Tropez home for sale. The pricey setting is La Femme Infidèle territory and, again, murder serves as both decadent outgrowth and transforming catalyst for a spiritually bankrupt relationship. "Believe it or not, I'm trying to forgive you," says a newly rejuvenated Steiger after humiliating his duplicitous vixen of a wife. Normally filed under Misogynist, Chabrol has actually always displayed unusual sensitivity for the travails of the female psyche, and underneath the character's cultivated chill lies La Passion de Romy Schneider -- her gorgeousness both a cross to bear and a weapon to wield, she sails from languid femme fatale to penalized victim to redemptive soul. Since there is little hope of help from justice ("the truth is whatever people want to hear," according to quicksilver attorney Jean Rochefort, who should know), her deliverance is inevitably spiritual, following a light that could stand for salvation or death or, knowing Chabrol, a combination of both. From Richard Neely's novel.

User comments from imdb Author: miss douce (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from dublin, ireland

The films of Claude Chabrol are, more than those of any other director, highly unnerving. I don't just mean in subject matter, which are generally taken from pulp fiction. This plot is Double Indemnity as if written by Nabokov. The beautiful Julie, is married to overweight, rich, impotent, drunk, self-loathing Louis Wormser, and plots with her young hack writer lover, Jeff Marle, to kill her husband. Things generally go to plan, but Jeff panics and lies low in Italy, sending Julie letters, while she has to face the insinuating investigations of two detectives.

For a director of his intellectual reach, Chabrol shows a strange affinity for Golden-Age style mystery stories. Unlike the fiction of Pynchon and Borges, or the films of Bertolucci and Antonioni, he has no interest in formally deconstructing the mystery story, subverting its narratives, ironising its principle characters, obviously undermining its tenets (although his double act of Epicurean detectives, teasing out the crime like cross word puzzles over dinner, making lecherous jokes and misogynistic comments, unbelievably hitting on solutions, yet completely missing the point, are a comic, disturbing joy, as are the upturned faces of the Law searing Julie at the climax). It is perfectly possible to watch INNOCENTS as a straight thriller with a recognisable crime, investigation and solution, and plenty of excellent twists and turns.

Even on this conventional level, the film is unnerving. The abruptness of the decision to murder. The shocking, callous act of murder itself. The brutal, climactic rape. But Chabrol's real nagging is in his whole-hearted artifice. Many directors, from Chabrol heroes Lang, Welles and Hitchcock to Von Sternberg, Sirk and Ophuls are artificial, but they create convincingly hermetic worlds, which are totally artificial and plausible on their own terms. Chabrol's is different.

Although not as breathtakingly formal as LA DECADE PRODIGEUSE, INNOCENTS is highly artificial, from the stylised acting, the unrealistic dialogue, dissonant score and stunningly contrived plot, to the breathtakingly intrusive camera movements and alienating shifts in point of view, and, especially, the setting, the futuristic/modernist architecture which swallows up its characters; the decor that moves and closes in on them.

With Chabrol, however, this artifice is not self-sufficient. It co-exists, jarringly, with a sublime feeling for nature, for the French countryside, the shadows cast by wind-blown trees, the wide green fields, the parched roads. The two realms refuse to merge, and this disjunction of registers moves the film away from mystery to something much more metaphysical.

An interesting question that arises from this film is whether it is a film about misogyny, or a misogynistic film. We are shown quite clearly how a female protagonist who is in almost every frame of the film, who seems to be in control and driving the plot, is completely betrayed by men - husbands, lovers the law - an object of contempt, whose desires are made seem guilty, whose grasping for love in a chilling, loveless evnironment and marriage are reduced to petty motives.

Maybe they are - she does collude in murder and theft. She is often featured in scenes, present but silent, as men decide her fate. The director, further, is obviously a man, colluding in this too, filming her pain and humiliation, witholding from her all the information. Yet, despite this, the film is very sympathetic to Julie, its visuals often seeming to arise from her emotions.

However, I don't think the film is really a post-feminist 70s comment on the still marginal and oppressed role of women in French society. Before Chabrol became a filmmaking genius, he was one of the brilliant critics of Cahiers du Cinema, co-writing a book on the religious underpinnings of Hitchcock's thrillers. In one sense INNOCENTS (a religiously loaded title) can be seen as an allegory in the Bresson tradition of the spiritual progress of a woman, a three part processo of Sin, Suffering and Redemption.

The final image, when Julie rises in the darkness, stripped of material wealth, defining environment and human companionship, and walks towards a flickering light is compellingly enigmatic, possibly indicating suicide, but, such is the theorematic godlike structure of the film, the sly, allusive imagery, I prefer to think of it as Julie existentially completing her spiritual journey. In any case, an endlessly rich masterpiece.

Innocents with Dirty Hands Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, June 12, 2008

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

VideoVista review Paul Higson

Les Innocents aux mains sales (1975) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

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

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: eva25at from Vienna, Austria

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: taylor9885 (taylor9885@sympatico.ca) from Ottawa, Canada

User reviews from imdb Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: gridoon2010

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Alexander Otth from Feldmeilen, Switzerland

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: writers_reign

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C-]

DEATH RITE (Les Magiciens)

France Germany Italy (94 mi) 1976

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

After "les noces rouges" (1973), began Chabrol's second period of barren inspiration. Although adapted from a Frederic Dard novel (Robert Hossein's best film was a Dard novel: "Toi le Venin" ), "Les Magiciens " is a mediocre movie, which was probably made to combine business with pleasure (holidays in Tunisia in a luxury hotel).

The plot: a conjurer explains to an idle dandy, Edouard, that he can predict a murder. Edouard will help make his prediction come true. The cast includes Jean Rochefort -a non chabrolesque actor- ,Gert "Goldfinger " Froebe, one of the few foreign actors which Chabrol did not have to dub in French, and one of Bertolucci's favorites, Stefania Sandrelli. That does not make a film for all that.

User reviews from imdb uthor: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

This is yet another fine unsung (because obscure) gem from Chabrol, which shows him once again in rather experimental vein (particularly the elliptical editing) though sticking close in this case to his fortuitous genre i.e. the thriller. That said, I was alerted of its quality beforehand by the analogous rating given it by the "Cult Filmz" website, whereas the same reviewer had awarded the equally superb ALICE OR THE LAST ESCAPADE (1977) a measly **!

DEATH RITE really shows off the director's affinity with the cinema of Fritz Lang: not only are balloons a key motif here a' la M (1931), but he even utilizes for one of the various protagonists in the film an actor (Gert Frobe) from Lang's swan-song – THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE (1960; actually one of a long-running series to which Chabrol himself would contribute an entry in 1990), with which this also shares a narrative concern in parapsychology!

As ever, the French master does very well by his actors – particularly the afore-mentioned Frobe as a magician/clairvoyant (the original French title of this one was in fact LES MAGICIENS) and Jean Rochefort as a self-confessed member of the idle rich who becomes involved with his stage act (which includes a sawing-in-half routine the director would re-use 30 years later in the aptly-named A GIRL CUT IN TWO [2007]) and even 'helps', albeit behind Frobe's back, in the realization of a vision that is obsessing the latter! With this in mind, as indeed it is stated in the brief didactic prologue, the film attempts (via a fiendishly clever script) to rationalize the gift of second sight: could the alleged perception of future events somehow make one predisposed towards their ultimate accomplishment? The role-reversal twist at the end, then, recalls the shocking climax of DON'T LOOK NOW (1973); similarly, the Tunisian setting draws parallels with the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet (though largely eschewing its trademark obliqueness).

Anyway, the rest of the principal cast features a typically intense Franco Nero, married to luscious Stefania Sandrelli (whose character began as atypically ditsy but gradually acquired maturity and scope), as well as Gila von Weitershausen (a former companion of French director Louis Malle here playing an ex-lover of Nero, a relationship that is eventually rekindled – following his estrangement from the belligerent Sandrelli who, in turn, is herself seduced by the Macchiavellian Rochefort!). Incidentally, in what appears to be a deliberate decision on the film-makers' part (though no allusion is ever made to this end), the latter quartet of actors bear strikingly similar physical features – with Nero and Rochefort both sporting a moustache, while Sandrelli and von Weitershausen are each given a frizzy hair-do!

Finally, in view of the lackluster quality of the copy I acquired (marked by unsatisfactory English dubbing, fuzzy picture and hard-coded Greek subtitles), I regret not checking that of the film's recent broadcast on late-night Italian TV.

THE TWIST (Folies Bourgeoises)

France Italy Germany (107 mi) 1976

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

That was Chabrol's seventies nadir by such a wide margin it's difficult to find which would be the second :"nada" perhaps,and nevertheless ,that film seems to tell a story,and the director seemed still to know where he was going.

It did not seem that way after "les folies bourgeoises" a disastrous collaboration between Chabrol's usual suspects (Audran,Cassel),German earnest thespian Schell (who was never as bad as here,as an user aptly points out ,as the swiss maid ) and American stars (Bruce Dern who walks across a theater completely naked :it's only a fantasy ,we are told,but Luis Bunuel,Claude Chabrol is definitely not.

After this disaster,which got unanimous thumbs down in his native country,Chabrol occasionally came up with good films ("Alice Ou la dernière fugue" "L enfer" )but he was never to recapture the magic of the 1968-1973 productions.

ALICE (Alice ou la dernière fugue)

aka: Alice or the Last Escapade

France (93 mi) 1977

Stefan Gullatz, 'Exquisite Ex-timacy: Jacques Lacan vis-à-vis Contemporary Horror', Offscreen Journal, March 31, 2001

Haunting nightmarelike tale of a pretty young wife who leaves her overbearing husband, drives off, and stops at an old house when her windshield cracks. She spends the night in the house after being tended to by an old man who seems to expect her, and she prepares to drive off in a newly fixed car. Finding no way out, she is told to "accept" her situation by a young man and realizes that she is in limbo. After she walks down a dark cellar, the woman's body is seen hanging out of her demolished car. She has finally met Death. College philosophy-course idea is given a lush photographic treatment by the Hitchcock-influenced Frenchman Chabrol.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Few people know this Chabrol movie and I agree with the precedent users: it's a work that deserves to be restored to favor. Almost unique in the director's canon, it deals with the fantastic genre: only the final sequences of "la rupture" (1970) verge on it. Its less-than-critically-acclaimed reception led Chabrol to ditch that new direction, which was perhaps too bad, considering the big amount of mediocre films he made afterward.

Probably influenced by American B movie "carnival of souls"(1962) and Louis Malle's "black moon" (1975),"Alice" walks a fine line that directly leads to works such as "Jacob's ladder" (1990) "a pure formality" (1994) and "the sixth sense " (1999). Sylvia "Emmanuelle -Krystel is not much of an actress, but it does not matter here because it's the atmosphere which counts: a green green landscape, where Chabrol achieves the incredible feat of exuding anguish in the daylight, a gloomy mansion where, when you talk on the phone, your own voice echoes you; a strange library where the heroine finds a Borges book-and it's no coincidence- Jorge Luis Borges's "ficciones"(one of his short stories is called "El jardin de Sanderos que se bifurcan": the garden with paths which fork), Borges whose spirit literally haunts the movie. The party where the guests celebrate "my sister's death" displays Luis Bunuel's influence, notably " the phantom of liberty" (1974)

A very strange supporting cast "plays" with the heroine, and their behavior predates David Fincher's "the game" by more than twenty years: Charles Vanel and Fernand Ledoux, whose careers began during the silent era, Jean Carmet, Andre Dussolier, playing two parts, dressed in white then in black and showing one more time Hitchcock's stranglehold on Chabrol's cinema when he says "the world is a pigpen,isn't it?" as Uncle Charlie in "shadow of a doubt"(1942).

What will you find on the other side of the mirror? Sorry... of the wall?And when there's no wall anymore?"Alice ou la dernière fugue" should appeal to Chabrol's fans even if it's not really chabrolesque.

Overlooked Classics: Claude Chabrol's Alice (1977) Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter, March 13, 2008

Go Ask Alice « shadowplay David Cairns from Shadowplay, August 8, 2008

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

BLOOD RELATIVES (Les liens du sang)

Canada France (100 mi) 1978

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Uneasy and only partly successful thriller, taken from one of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, with Sutherland overshadowing the rest of the cast as the detective investigating the assault and murder of a young girl in Montreal. The result is pretty much par for the Chabrol course, with the girl's family - a hive of incest that provides the chief suspects - pictured as a typically degenerate example of the bourgeoisie. But it's mainly rather wooden, and shot in a flat television style; only towards the end do suspense and the director's full talent really take hold.

User comments from imdb Author: christopher-underwood from Greenwich - London

Considered by many to be a strangely overlooked Chabrol it seems to me the reason it has been cold shouldered is its sleaze factor. Not as overtly sexy, violent or gory as many films of this period it nevertheless starts rather startlingly and although becoming more measured continues to ooze a rather unpleasant odour. Ms Audran, not here the ice maiden but a drunken mother, Donald Pleasence does a cameo as a child molester, David Hemmings has his eyes on underage sex and the central theme involves the relationship between a brother, sister and niece. No not very nice at all and Chabrol treats it all as if it is very normal (like it might be in some small French village!) instead of Ed McBain's New York City. Had this been treated in a more sensational manner then it would have been a more acceptable but lesser film. Here we really have to choose between the likelihood of various unpleasant options before the final denouement. Very watchable

Canuxploitation: Sharing the Blame

Incest, murder and child-molesting. What do these words have in common besides assuring this page more hits? Why, they're the plot of Les Liens du Sang (Blood Relatives), a Canada-France co-production made by seasoned French genre film director Claude Chabrol. Detective Steve Carella (Donald Sutherland, minus the giant mustache he sported in Bob Clark's Murder by Decree) is investigating the murder of 16-year old Muriel Stark (Lisa Langolis). Muriel's cousin Patricia explains that they were both attacked on the way home from a party, only she got away. Carella rounds up all of Montreal's pedophiles for no other reason than to feature a cameo by Donald Pleasence in perhaps his greatest role, Sweaty Sex Offender #4. After a few more red herrings, Patricia reveals that it was her brother Andrew. The last half of the film is told in flashback as Carella recovers and reads Muriel's diary. Turns out that she and Andrew were kissin' cousins until just a few days before her murder when a pregnancy scare ended their fun. Having Muriel fall in love with her much-older boss at work sets up at least one additional suspect, but there's not enough characters with motives to provide a real surprise ending. Despite a few problems, including horrendous English language dubbing, Les Liens du Sang is not a bad little crime film which clips along nicely despite a lack of anything really substantial or interesting going on in the plot. As a special bonus, the film's flashback of Muriel's murder is perhaps the most uninspired killing in the history of cinema.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

"Les Liens De Sang" got chilly reviews in Chabrol's native France and the movie has sunk into oblivion. Made at a time when Chabrol was really good again (it was made between "Alice Ou La Dernière Fugue" and "Violette Nozière" ), after a period of barren inspiration (1974 /1975), you can enjoy this movie provided that you forget all that you know about Claude Chabrol. It's a pleasantly-anonymous thriller which could have been made by any director at all. Which does not mean it's bad. But if you know the fifty + Chabrol movies, you cannot hail it as his masterpiece. What you can say, though, is that it's neatly superior to his recent movies (the last ten years were full of mediocrities). Donald Sutherland and Pierre Mallet are very convincing. Aude Landry's playing, on the other hand, displays nothing disturbing, nothing irrational in her behavior, which makes the ending, although praised for its "unexpected twist," a bit artificial. Remember the characters in such works as "Le Boucher" "La Rupture" "Que la bete Meure" or even "Les Biches" Of Chabrol's world, only Stephane Audran remains: but her part is underwritten, and she is probably dubbed for I cannot recognize her voice, so it's not worth talking about it.

The social background ( the director's trademark) has completely disappeared here. As Chabrol works in a foreign country, he is incapable to depict the Canadian society whereas his métier was the ruthless portrait of French bourgeoisie.

That said, you can enjoy the film: It is a good thriller if you do not think it over too much. Donald Sutherland portrays an endearing human cop.

Les Liens du sang (1978) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

One night, a teenage girl, Patricia, rushes into a police station, bloodstained and panic-stricken, claiming that her cousin, Muriel, has just been raped and killed. Inspector Carella takes charge of the investigation and begins by rounding up the known sex offenders in the area that match Patricia’s description of the killer – a man with dark hair and blue eyes. Just when Carella discovers that Muriel’s middle-aged employer fits this description, Patricia reveals that the murderer was in fact her brother Patrick. Carella isn’t convinced but then he comes across the dead girl’s diary, which contains the key to the mystery. From what he reads in the secret journal, Carella discovers that Patrick and Muriel were far more than just cousins…

For anyone who is familiar with the work of French director Claude Chabrol, Blood Relatives will come as something of a surprise, as it is quite unlike the films for which he is best known. Although the film’s subject is recognisably Chabrol-esque – a crime drama which cynically subverts the norms of comfortable middleclass life – stylistically, it’s altogether the work of a different director. For one thing, there’s a cold realism which gives parts of the film a striking documentary feel, something which the Canada setting (a one-off for Chabrol) reinforces. Also, the film’s treatment of sex and eroticism is unrecognisably the work of this director. In contrast to the subtle, sophisticated sexual references of Chabrol’s other thrillers, what we see here is a graphic portrayal of sex that is twisted, sleazy and brutal – a sickening concoction of incest, paedophilia and rape. With its gruesome knife slash sequence and dark Freudian undertones, the film is as close as Chabrol got to making a psychosexual thriller. Whilst the film may nor be the best example of its kind, it is strangely compelling (in spite of the pretty wooden acting from most of the supporting cast) and it stands as one of Claude Chabrol’s most disturbing films.

10kbullets John White

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

Canuxploitation: Sharing the Blame 4th from the end

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

VIOLETTE (Violette Nozière)

France Canada (124 mi) 1978

Huppert landed a clutch of awards for her performance in this inspired-by-fact Gallic murder thriller, based on the story of a mixed-up teen who was convicted in the 1930s of conspiring to murder her parents. It's a slow-moving but fascinating account of what drives a person, especially one so young, to such lengths (especially given that Violette came from a comparatively privileged background and simply fell for the wrong man), while Huppert is mesmerizing in the lead.

Time Out review Tom Milne

The Chabrol film for people who don't really like Chabrol films. Based, like the infinitely superior but much maligned Les Noces Rouges, on a real-life murder case - the 18-year-old Violette poisoned her parents in 1933 - it begins brilliantly with a characteristic demolition job on the dreary, furtive squalors of petit bourgeois life that drive Violette to murder. But the political and social implications thus raised are never really confronted. Instead, leaving all sorts of questions unanswered and avenues unexplored, Chabrol ('I fell in love with Violette Nozière he roundly declared) settles down latterly to canonise her for no very apparent reason as a patient and saintly Grizelda. The period evocation is gorgeous, but ultimately it's an empty slice of sleight-of-hand.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

Claude Chabrol in his restrained and responsible mood, which is not my favorite. The very fine Isabelle Huppert has the title role as the French schoolgirl who, in the 1930s, murdered her parents and became the center of a national scandal. Chabrol suggests many motives--sexual repression, social ambition, sheer boredom--all of which finally seem inadequate in the face of Violette's personal impenetrability. The film shows great craft and integrity, but that's part, I think, of what's wrong with it: Chabrol is at his best when he loses control, running away with his characters' passions. Here, he's distanced, aloof, and finally a little dull. With Stephane Audran, Jean Carmet, and Bernadette Lafont (1978).

Violette Nozière (1978) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The daughter of a respectable middle-class couple, Violette Nozière leads a disreputable double life. Far from being the innocent young girl her parents mistake her for, she spends her nights with dissolute young men in the less salubrious areas of Paris. To acquire money for her latest lover, Violette resolves to murder her parents so that she can inherit their wealth...

Based on a true story, Violette Nozière provides its director Claude Chabrol with substantial material to explore his pet themes of bourgeois repression and the psychology of a murderer. At just over two hours, the film feels somewhat overly long and unevenly paced, lacking the sustained intensity of Chabrol’s other dramas. However, the film boasts some exceptional camera work, which gives the film an epic feel, and it features some remarkable acting performances, notably from Isabelle Huppert and Bernadette Lafont. Huppert won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her role in this film, which marked the first of her many collaborations with Claude Chabrol.

Violette Nozière gave Cinema: A Critical Dictionary editor Richard Roud the rare occasion to editorialize that a once-great French filmmaker had returned to form—which, at the time, put director Claude Chabrol in the thin company of Alain Resnais (with Providence), Chris Marker (with A Grin Without a Cat), and pretty much no one else. Violette is, if not much else, some kind of throwback. Two scenes in, and the titular femme noir (played by Isabelle Huppert with what turned out to be an inexhaustible willingness to tackle fiercely slappable characters) is clutching her jet-black fur collar to her jawbone while her freshly-bobbed girlfriend scoffs at the bespectacled bookworms fighting over socialism at the local bar. "Such bores with their politics," giggles said friend, while Violette smirks and breaks off half of some temperamental student's panini and asks him, "Do you want to sleep with me?" In the next scene, she's shown wiping the slut lipstick off her mouth, hiding her stockings and walking up to meet her frumpy mother (a bravely against-type Stéphane Audran). We've all been here before, and so has syphilis. But Violette doesn't so much rejuvenate the "sex = death" equation that had been in place since Louise Brooks opened Pandora's Box as it does struggle to remember why women want sex in the first place. If the true-life case of Miss Nozière is accurately reflected in Chabrol's plodding, obvious melodrama, it's not sex that women are even after but the desire to out-whore their mothers. As it turns out, Mrs. Nozière berates, shames, and eventually presses charges against her daughter not over Violette's attempt to kill both parents with poison (and successfully bumping off her father) but because, years ago, Mr. Nozière bounced the budding girl in his lap a little too vigorously. Hence, sex has very little to do with anything resembling attraction to the entire race of political bores and STD-carrying gigolos and a whole lot more to do with the sudden disgust a mother can feel toward a daughter reaching sexual maturity…or maybe the resentment a daughter can feel toward her mother once she realizes her parental stability was likely founded on the classic bartering system of faking orgasms…or maybe there is no lesson to be learned from Violette's example. Maybe one hardly needs a film to see that mankind is incapable of having good sex without it revealing their other various ineptitudes.

Violette Skilled, delicate, pernicious, by Claudette Charbonneau and Lucy Winer from Jump Cut, November 1979

PopMatters (Meremu C.) review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Nathaniel Thompson

User reviews from imdb Author: Jiri Severa from Canada

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

New York Times (registration req'd) Hilton Kramer, October 7, 1978

THE HORSE OF PRIDE (Le Cheval d'orgueil)

France (120 mi) 1980

Time Out review Tom Milne

This impressionistic account of peasant life in Brittany around the time of World War I is a reminder that Chabrol began his career with a bleak portrayal of the provinces in Le Beau Serge. This is a much rosier picture, attractively - perhaps too attractively - shot by Jean Rabier. Stressing the poverty, it caresses the eye with picturesque interiors worthy of any model village, while the peasants decked out in their national costumes look like delegates to a folk-lore congress. Hardly another Tree of Wooden Clogs, but it does have charm, sparks of Chabrol clownery, and plenty of intriguing information about superstitions and customs. One problem is that the autobiographical book by Pierre Jakez Hélias on which it is based has obviously been too severely truncated. In the latter half, particularly, attempts to get to grips with the social and cultural implications of being Breton emerge with curious muddlement.

User comments from imdb Author: netwallah from The New Intangible College

Based on a novel by Pierre-Jakez Hélias. A small Breton community before and during the First World War – mostly very idyllic, despite periods of hard luck, poverty and despair (la chienne de monde). The young couple (both blessed with lovely smiles) and their child, the narrator. Many sweet and funny scenes, as well as a few sad ones. The soft-hearted postman cannot bear to read letters bringing bad news. The title comes from a family saying; they're too poor to own a horse, but they have the horse of pride – the child rides on his father's shoulders. Better than any horse, the boy says at the end. There is tension in the schools about speaking French, not Breton. The family are reds, proud and liberty-loving. Beautiful pace, photography, costumes...

La Cheval d'orgueil Jeremy Nyhuis from Cinematorics, June 28, 2009

Based on Pierre-Jakez Hélias’s 1975 autobiographical novel of peasant life in early 20th-century Brittany, Claude Chabrol’s very uncharacteristic feature forgoes his usual preoccupation with the contemporary French bourgeoisie for a calm, serene portraiture of a culture now faded in the nation’s memory. Possessing no plot in the traditional sense, the film primarily centers on the childhood of a son (played at different ages by Ronan and Armel Hubert) born to a poor couple (Bernadette Le Saché and a young François Cluzet), occasionally diverging from its casual depiction of Breton communal life into folkloric interludes and tall tales. Chabrol’s controlled and distant aesthetic, previously and subsequently utilized to provide sharp commentary on characters’ relationships in films like La femme infidèle (1969) and La cérémonie (1995), here functions more as a respectful reverence for Breton customs, as if Chabrol is cautious to not contaminate the culture’s singular traditions with his own commentary. In this sense Chabrol’s remoteness differs from that of a period film like Barry Lyndon (1975), where Kubrick’s detached sensibility turns all of his characters into bizarre curiosities rather than the human, if still slightly eccentric, populace observed in Chabrol’s film (Jacques Dufilho, playing the protagonist’s grandfather, is especially memorable).

Of course, the irony is that by shooting the entire film in French language rather than Hélias’s original Breton, Chabrol automatically contaminates the production with his own culture anyway. Perhaps due to this linguistic anachronism, Chabrol understandably skips over the majority of Hélias’s extensive and fascinating discussion of learning French in his novel—an omission that perhaps is for the best anyway, given the topic’s relation to the literary form over the cinematic. Indeed, Chabrol’s use of French language in his adaptation adds a significant thematic layer to the film, anticipating the manner in which French laws and the economy would eventually force Brittany to discontinue its national language. Chabrol explicitly illustrates the country’s cultural assimilation, both into France and into the world as a whole, near the end of his film, when cinema is introduced to the Breton community in the form a silent gangster serial (causing one woman to pull down the projection blanket out of fright). On a more formal level, Chabrol at one instance evokes Brittany’s gradual global awareness by cutting to black-and-white stock footage of World War I—a startling, interruptive explication of modern technology that contrasts to the antiquary age referenced by Chabrol’s cutaway to Georges de La Tour’s Le Nouveau-né at a much earlier point in the film. Anticipating Jia Zhangke’s similar documentation of cultural shift in Platform (2000), Chabrol’s film humbly admits France’s gradual absorption of Brittany, an act essentially compounded in Chabrol’s literal attempt to capture the reality of a bypassed period through the artificially modern process of filmmaking.

In spite of the national tensions that Le Cheval d’orgueil inevitably alludes to and even intentionally references (catalyzing in an encounter between the protagonist’s grandfather and his employer, which is one of the few scenes that is recognizably Chabrolian in its absurd actorly mannerisms, sparse interior location, and biting critique of class), one shouldn’t dismiss the tranquil, pastoral beauty that Chabrol achieves for the majority of the film. Heightened by Jean Rabier’s lush photography, the film’s painterly mise en scène often resembles the landscape works of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. More than a series of pretty pictures, however, Chabrol also does wonderful things with movement, both within the frame (such as the complementary rhythms of washing and hoeing, not to mention the effects of the wind on fields and strung wooden shoes) as well as through the frame (some of the tracking shots, particularly in the film’s opening wedding ceremony, are marvelously composed). Perhaps most significant of all is Chabrol’s ability to depict the Breton people in a way that does not sentimentalize (and thus condescends) them, thereby steering clear from the bourgeois tendency, as commented on by Hélias in his novel, to view the lives of the lower class as “bad melodrama.” This may not only be Chabrol’s greatest film in terms of visual and aural composition, but it’s also one that reveals, in its deference for an older culture and its Truffaut-like playfulness, a compassionate and tender sensibility beneath the director’s normally cold exterior.

User reviews from imdb Author: (richard@berrong.fr) from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

THE HATTER’S GHOST (Les Fantômes du chapelier)

France (120 m) 1982

The hatter (Serrault) is a mass strangler who allows his secret to be discovered by hangdog Cachoudas (Aznavour), the tubercular Armenian tailor opposite. The ensuing relationship seems unbelievably reckless, even with a mad hatter involved, and manifestly it's the Hitchcocko-Jesuitical theology about shared guilt which animates the picture. If it's all a bit exclusive, it's redeemed by Serrault's baroque performance - shaking with secret mirth, letting slip snippets of the mysterious conversations running on in his head. Though based on a 1956 Simenon novel (The Judge and the Hatter) Chabrol locates his adaptation in an off-kilter time zone - little bit '30s, little bit '50s - that some may find the most intriguing aspect of the movie.

User comments from imdb Author: ieaun from dudley, england

A hatter in a provincial town (Michel Serrault) leads the life of a respectable citizen but is in fact a serial murderer. The only person to suspect this is his neighbour the tailor (Charles Asnavour). It is difficult to believe that this film was made in the eighties as not only is the film set in the fifties but it has a totally fifties style production. It seems to be exactly the kind of film that Chabrol and the other members of the nouvelle vague were rebelling against. The story is very straightforward, the characters are stereotypes, the female characters are two dimensional and treated as objects. "Le Boucher" made years earlier is far more modern and superior in every way. The story is well told if you suspend your disbelief and the acting on the whole is good. The town in which it is set is very photogenic, with narrow cobbled streets and no traffic. Not only does it compare badly to other Chabrol films but also to other Simenon adaptations. "Monsieur Hire" has a similarly paced and straightforward story line but is more adventurous in visual style and tells a more modern story with two more believable characters. "Le Horloger de Saint-Paul" has almost a documentary style and requires a lot of thought as the development is to do with the main character rather than the storyline, and is far superior.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

"Les fantômes du chapelier," very well received at the time of release, still stands as Chabrol's best movie in the eighties, though certain aspects of its premise have undergone some reassessment.

Seen today, the movie displays flaws that were hardly noticeable 20 years ago. First of all, Michel Serrault overplays: his over-the -top performance, once lauded, seems now exasperating and throws the movie off balance. (I wonder what Chabrol's other favorite,Michel Bouquet, would have done in this part). This imbalance is increased by the fact that Charles Aznavour's character is not present enough on the screen. Aznavour gives a wonderful portrayal of an Armenian émigré, whom bourgeois Serrault enjoys humiliating and demeaning. With hindsight Aznavour beats Serrault hands down.

The problem with "les fantômes du chapelier" is that it recalls other superior movies: bourgeois impunity had always been treated by Chabrol himself during his 1967-1973 heyday (notably:"la femme infidèle,""la rupture" "juste avant la nuit""docteur Popaul"), but also long before him: Henri Decoin's "non coupable" (1946) and "la verite sur Bebe Donge" (1952): in the 1946 film, the intention is much clearier and scarier than in Chabrol's 1982 effort ,and,anyway, Serrault is no match for Michel Simon. We can also mention George Lautner's "le septième juré." "Les fantômes du chapelier" has an eerie side, verging on fantastic, but again,there's the rub: let's face it, .it looks like some kind of "psycho" of which the secret would have been be revealed sooner.

Something intriguing the camera often shows a "Ben Hur" poster in the neighborhood. A tribute to William Wyler is dubious from a "nouvelle vague " family director, but who knows?

See it anyways. Its several incredible moments will make it worth your while.For Charles Aznavour and for Chabrol's always absorbing depiction of a small town.

Les Fantômes du chapelier (1982) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Léon Labbé owns a hatter’s shop in a small provincial town in northern France. To the outside world, he is a respectable tradesman, dutifully caring for his disabled wife. In fact, he has killed his wife and goes through an elaborate charade to give the impression that she is still alive. The town is shaken by the discovery that a serial killer is at work, murdering women apparently without any motive. Only Labbé’s neighbour, the quiet tailor Kachoudas, knows the identity of the killer...

In this exemplary adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, director Claude Chabrol creates possibly his darkest and most introspective work, in which he explores some of his favourite themes - most notably the idea of a deadly threat hiding beneath a mask of bourgeois respectability. The film is set in a small Breton village where it appears to rain continually and where the hours of night appear to outnumber those of daylight quite substantially. This claustrophobic location lends the film an oppressive, suffocating atmosphere, which is strikingly evocative of the mood of Simenon’s novels. A streak of the driest black comedy permeates the film, making it both oddly amusing and intensely disturbing, a quite different tone to most of Chabrol’s other thrillers.

The drama revolves around two men - a hat-maker and a tailor - who live opposite each other but who appear to inhabit totally different worlds. Each man is, in his own way, a prisoner of his own making - the hat-maker is forced to live alone in order to conceal the fact that he killed his wife; the tailor is stifled by the large family who lives with him in his confined house. Each man secretly envies the other, and so a sinister attraction begins to draw them together - with ultimately tragic consequences for both of them. Chabrol’s mastery of the psychological thriller genre enables him to tell this story effectively, using deceptively simple cinematography and surprisingly very little dialogue. Towards that end, he is admirably served by his lead actors, Michel Serrault and Charles Aznavour.

In a career spanning fifty years, Michel Serrault has acquired a reputation as one of France’s most versatile and talented character actors. In Les Fantômes du chapelier, he gives one of his most distinctive and memorable performances - indeed it could be said that it his portrayal of the hat-maker Labbé which carries the film and contributes most to it its poignancy and quirky comic slant. Serrault shows an extraordinary ability when it comes to playing characters who are either mad or bad: whilst he manages to frighten, he is also able to arouse sympathy. This is readily apparent in his performance of the hat-maker in this film - even when he is murdering his victims, you cannot help having more sympathy for him than for the women he is disposing of (with an ease which is more comical than shocking). As the film develops, we are drawn further and further into the hat-maker’s troubled world - rather like the tailor who observes him from across the street - and what we are most struck by his not so much his dangerous insanity but rather his tortured humanity. Without an actor of Serrault’s calibre, it is unlikely that Chabrol could have achieved this level of sophistication and depth.

Whilst the film is mostly focused on the hat-maker, the tailor also plays an important part in the film, and Charles Aznavour (in another fine performance) allows the character to function brilliantly alongside Serrault’s hat-maker. Perhaps the most important role of the tailor is to provide a kind of psychological bridge which enables the spectator to cross over into the hat-maker’s world. The idea of a voyeur spying on another world is a device Chabrol has used a number of times previously (most effectively in his 1962 film L'Oeil du malin ), but here it is crucial to the film’s development. The tailor also serves as a contrast with the hat-maker - one is well-mannered yet a perpetual outsider; the other is irritable yet an accepted member of the community. Although one man lives alone and the other in a large family, both experience a terrible solitude which leads them inexorably towards self-destruction. There are perhaps as many similarities as differences, which leads us to make some interesting speculations. Could the tailor and the hat-maker be two facets of the same individual? Or could the tailor merely be a projection of the hat-maker’s own conscience? One of the most beautiful aspects of Chabrol’s cinema is its subtle sense of ambiguity, which implies - possibly - that nothing is quite what it seems. What you see depends on who you are and where you happen to be standing - much as it does in real life. Can there ever be such a thing as an objective reality in Claude Chabrol’s universe?

Compared with some of Chabrol’s other thrillers, Les Fantômes du chapelier must appear strangely minimalist. It is certainly sparse on dialogue and the film’s dramatic moments are heavily downplayed. Chabrol’s intention is not to create a suspense thriller - that much is evident. Instead, what he offers is a palpably chilling study of a man who is driven - perhaps by the noblest of motives - to murder his crippled wife and who - alone, afraid and guilt-stricken - is drawn further and further into insanity. By keeping the traditional thriller elements to the minimum and by leaving it to the camera and setting to say far more than his actors, Chabrol manages to construct one of his most tragically poignant portraits of human fallibility.

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

THE BLOOD OF OTHERS (Le sang des autres)

Canada France USA (135 mi) 1984

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C-]

Chabrol was an unlikely choice to film Simone de Beauvoir's 1945 novel about moral growth and sacrifice during the Occupation - he being more your man for moral decay, egotism and such. His response to the heroine's progress from frivolity to engagement wavers between disinterested and uninterested. And considering the Mills & Boon trimmings one sort of sympathises, what with a lovelorn Nazi (Neill), a lovelorn resistance fighter (Ontkean) and Foster - patently modern American - at the centre. An occasional scene catches fire, but mostly it's an uninspired plod through very routine material. This is the theatrical version of a three-hour TV mini-series.

User comments from imdb Author: José Alexandre Lima Gazineo from Brasilia, Brazil

This movie has some points that invites a viewer: first of all, the story is based upon a novel written by the great Simone de Beauvoir; second, the movie has a fine director, Monsieur Claude Chabrol and last but not least, a good cast where we can find some great names, like Jodie Foster and Sam Neill (in a great performance, as a sick and deeply in love nazist). The important is that all these points are not a deception. The movie has a witty and elegant screenplay, the direction of Monsieur Chabrol, if it's not a overwhelming work of art, is good and convincing and the cast is really a standout. A good love and war story that goes on in a pleasant way. Watch out: the very last scene is a really knockout! Cotation (7 of 10).

User comments Author: nbott from Washington DC

Jodie Foster and Michael Ontkean playing French war resistors is a stretch of the imagination I could not entertain. This story should have been in French with French actors and actresses. I really do not like films that have English lines but songs that are in French etc. At least they did not attempt to have phony French accents. I hope Mr. Chabrol was paid well for this lapse in his usual brilliant film career. This is truly the worst film I have seen directed by this classic filmmaker. Towards the end of the film there is a bit of script writing involving a love-obsessed Nazi and Jodie Foster that is one of the silliest things I have ever seen. This film, as so many others do, seems to enjoy depicting Germans during World War II as somehow not intelligent. Storytellers seem to forget that they almost conquered all of Europe. This VHS will definitely be donated to the next charity yard sale in my neighborhood. Skip this film.

User reviews from imdb Author: jonathan-577 from Canada

User reviews from imdb Author: Kupotek from United States

COP AU VIN (Poulet au vinaigre)

France (110 mi) 1985

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

Grotesque murders in a small provincial town; huge meals; a scourging of the bourgeoisie. Where could this be but Chabrol country? The young postboy is investigating the local cartel's murderous business schemes, with the help of his crippled mother (an increasingly uglified Audran) and his girl-friend. But he is no match for the out-of-town cop (poulet) wonderfully played by Poiret as an omniscient, genial fellow who transforms into a roughhouse two-fister when occasion demands. And it is all done with the skittishness which Chabrol brings to this kind of policier, but given edge by his very mocking eye.

One of the more flagrant injustices of foreign-film distribution has been the near total eclipse of Claude Chabrol in this country. This delightful, acidic 1984 mystery--set in a corrupt small town rife with land speculation, murder, and diverse other intrigues--was a big enough hit in France to prompt a sequel the following year (Inspecteur Lavardin), but American audiences weren't allowed so much as a peek at it. Adapted by Dominique Roulet and Chabrol from Roulet's novel Une mort en trop, this sexy and adroit intrigue starring Jean Poiret, Stephane Audran, and Michel Bouquet is one of Chabrol's best efforts in his lighter vein, and proves that the classic French cinema has never been quite as dead as U.S. release policies have suggested.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

The first of Chabrol's many collaborations with producer Marin Karmitz marks a return to form after the impersonal, terribly uninspired and unconvincing Jodie Foster dreck The Blood of Others. Chabrol is working more toward Henri-Georges Clouzot territory, creating a morally corrupt province full of spies controlled by an inspector with dubious methods. That said, like most solid Chabrol this is a much lighter and calmer work, working more on the level of irony. As usual the film starts slowly, introducing us to several silly unlikable bourgeois characters who have their little secrets to hide. The lower class Cuno family consists of a shy mamma's boy postman (Lucas Belvaux) typically suffocated by his possessive (wheel chair bound) mother's (Stephane Audran) overbearing influence. The more powerful elements are trying to force them out of their house, and they are up to much more as well due to their ability to sneak peaks at everyone's mail. There are no heroes here, but Chabrol somewhat sides with the Cuno's because they are out to shatter the bourgeois veneer of respectability. It's a typically minimalist work from Chabrol relying heavily on the setting, but the story continually folds in after the connections are established. However, with a surprising second murder Chabrol slowly switches the focus of this mystery to a newly introduced character Inspecteur Jean Lavardin. Jean Poiret delivers a sinisterly brilliant steely-eyed performance as this motiveless, seemingly roaming dick. Lavardin is something of a new breed of cop, crossing ruthlessly efficient brutal fascism with ironic detachment and utter cynicism. In a way, he's a Dirty Harry who doesn't enjoy it or believe in anything (he has no allusions that his goon tactics are for the good of the public). Poiret's portrayal went over so well that Chabrol immediately followed up with the sequel titled after his character. Then they made it into a TV series, which spawned a TV movie (directed by Christain de Chalonge, who did the series episodes Chabrol didn't direct) and probably would have led to more had Poiret not succumbed to a heart attack.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

It is true that Chabrol loosened his grip after 'Les Innocents Aux Mains Sales', possibly horrified by his own insights. This is probably a shame; but the light, comic mysteries and thrillers he has largely produced since are by no means negligible, always entertaining and full of Chabrolian irony and motifs. In this film, believe it or not, he seems to believe in the God of marriage. Normally that venerable institution is the site in Chabrol of repression, a (usually literal) stifling of humanity, a closed, rigid world not too far from hell. With the relaxing of his style comes a relaxing of his world view.

As ever with Chabrol, a young man is being emotionally strangled by his mother's dependence, her emotional paralysis somewhat unsubtly figured in her being crippled. Although the title punningly refers to the detective, and the film is nominally a mystery story, Chabrol seems more interested in his rites-of-passage narrative - the detective doesn't make his first appearance for forty minutes, and doesn't dominate the movie until the last third.

It would be wrong to claim that this is Chabrol in 'realistic' mode, but he certainly gets a sense of a rural town community, its unexpected connections, the malicious schemes of its most respectable citizens; pure soap opera, maybe, but the idea of a society turning in on itself, almost incestuously, is convincing. Louis Cuno is the unexpected centre of the town's secrets, a sullen, gangly, lovestruck teenager, but as postman he connects as no-one else can, betraying his civic trust as he takes home to his mother incriminating letters to peruse, as a defence against plans to demolish their property, destroy their home.

Chabrol usually deals with the threat to the home from within; the extending of focus here, leads to a more relaxed film. Because the film focuses of Louis, whose not always legal actions are treated indulgently by director and detective alike, the other characters are more shadowy, more like caricatures, minimising the mystery, making its potentially horrifying conclusions somewhat perfunctory. Chabrol doesn't let his hero off too easily, as we suspect Louis is exchanging one mother for another; his initiation into the delights of sex is in the grounds of a country house, a typically Chabrolian green space blighted by the surveilling eyes of the detective.

Spying is one of the main themes of the film, from the camera taking pictures at the beginning, to Louis' nocturnal amateur detective work. In such a community, private and public space are not so clearly marked, and one's identity is as much defined by one's public role (doctor, butcher etc.) as by any personal merit, so there is something creepy as well as comic about this police (the Law) spying on the sexual act.

There is something creepy about this policeman, anyway. Unlike the rooted, defined villagers, he is a rootless stranger, without motive, personality, role, except to solve the crime (he keeps insisting that he is the 'flic'), in order to do which he resorts to alarming thuggery, even more objectionable than Harry Callahan, whose heart at least was in the right place. Don't be fooled by Chabrol's autumnal cheerfulness - this is a vinaigre with a very bitter aftertaste.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

I have sometimes written in some reviews about some Claude Chabrol's flicks that I didn't find "Poulet Au Vinaigre" a memorable work. However I watched it recently and it's not that bad after all. Of course, it is several notches below such incomparable works as "La Femme Infidèle" (1969) or "Le Boucher" (1970) but it remains thoroughly watchable. Congratulations to the English film distributors who found an equivalent for the translation of the French title into English. It is perfectly well translated.

When in 1984, Chabrol starts the preparation of this "Poulet Au Vinaigre", he endured three fiasco in a row. The eighties didn't look a fruitful decade for him. "Le Cheval D'Orgeuil" (1980) got bogged down in a spate of clichés about Brittany and betrayed Pierre-Jakey Hélias' book. "Les Fantômes Du Chapelier" (1982), his first venture in Georges Simenon's universe was well received by French critics but hardly anybody went to see it. "Le Sang Des Autres" (1984) was a turgid and impersonal film in his spotty but riveting career.

So, what could Chabrol do to get things back on an even keel and to be reconciled with both critics and his public? Very simply, to cook them a typical Chabrolesque dish to the core with a minimum of money (the filmmaker wanted to show that it was possible to shoot good films with a modest budget in times of inflation) and time (a few weeks of shooting were sufficient for him to shoot his film). Thus, he kept turning over the staple ingredients which made his hallmark recognizable. He needed the apparently peaceful scenery of a small provincial town. Here, he chose Forges-Les Eaux in Normandy which isn't very far from I live in Rouen! The perfect backdrop for his story. Then, precisely a solidly structured story with several functions. First, to grab and entertain the audience and his fans with a certainly derivative but catchy storytelling. Louis Cuno is a timid postman who lives under her mother's thumb (Stéphane Audran). They refuse to sell their house to a trio of perfidious, perverse bourgeois, the doctor Morasseau, the butcher Filiol and the notary Lavoisier (Michel Bouquet) who want to set up a momentous and shady estate business. As he is a postman, Louis gets information about this trio of upper-class people At night, Louis spies them and one night, he kills the butcher by pouring sugar in the essence of his car and the maverick inspector Lavardin (Jean Poiret) keeps on harassing him... Then, Delphine Morasseau, the doctor's wife seems to have absconded while Anna Foscarie (Caroline Cellier) a prostitute is found dead in a car crash. With his unconventional methods, Lavardin will find the truth...

It is at this reading that we fully understand Chabrol's mainspring for the last function of his scenario and perhaps the most essential ingredient: to unearth skeletons in the closet of his trio of bourgeois and to shatter the respectability of the provincial bourgeoisie which has usually been Chabrol's trademark. He tapped it again with gusto here. But his scenario also encompasses a dash of psychology to better construe the persona of his characters and it gives more substance to his work.

Chabrol served his film (and his recipe) with ingenious camera work too. It encompasses neat camera angles and fluid camera movements which can only rejoice the gourmets. To enable them to fully savor the film, Chabrol shot his story on an unhurried pace. There was also effort on the lighting and framing which are up to scratch to the aura the film conveys according to the circumstances. And the director didn't put aside his pronounced taste for gastronomy. The inspector Lavardin is nutty about paprika eggs. He has eaten 30,000 of them in his life! At last, the chef Chabrol spiced up his work with a soupçon of deadpan humor essentially provided by the apparently nice Lavardin. By the way, is it innocuous humor? One has to admit that Lavardin's methods to make the suspects speak aren't really reassuring.

Maybe the cast contains a few little drawbacks. Lucas Belvaux is not bad but often bland. Pauline Laffont's acting is sometimes annoying. Jean Claude Bouillaud acts a caricatured character. But Stéphane Audran (once Mrs Chabrol) is excellent as usual. Like in "la Rupture" (1970), she was Michel Bouquet's enemy. This is precisely Bouquet who dominates the cast at the level of the quality of the acting with of course Jean Poiret.

In the end, the chef Chabrol concocted the audience and his fans an eatable even tasty "Poulet Au Vinaigre" which pleased a lot to the chef's connoisseurs. It was succulent enough to prompt Chabrol to do it again with a sequel which opened the next year: "Inspecteur Lavardin" (1986). That said, Chabrol's "pièce De resistance" in the eighties came with the contemporary "Masques" (1987) which stood the test of time quite well.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review [3/4] also seen here: Poulet au vinaigre May 26, 1989

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [3/5]

VideoVista review Paul Higson

Poulet au vinaigre (1985) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

DVD Outsider [Timothy E. RAW]

INSPECTEUR LAVARDIN

France Switzerland (100 mi) 1986

Time Out review Tom Milne

Shortly after investigating the banning as blasphemous of a play entitled 'Our Father Which Farts in Heaven', a high-minded paterfamilias is found dead on the beach, PIG scrawled insultingly on his naked backside. With the widow offering a regal display of indifference, a teenage stepdaughter skulking furtively in drug-pushing circles, and a gay uncle gloating madly over his collection of glass eyes, this is Chabrol at odds with the bourgeoisie again. But there is a difference as Poiret's police inspector arrives for his second murder investigation following Cop au Vin, this time trailing memories of his former love for the widow, a fallen angel who has innocently sinned in her emotional affairs. Discovering what amounts to a paradise lost, Lavardin elects to play God in order to rout the otherwise unassailable forces of evil. Strangely tender, bizarrely funny, with gorgeous performances from Lafont (the widow) and Brialy (the uncle), this is Chabrol back to the mood of eccentric metaphysical mystery he mined in the marvellous Ten Days' Wonder.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

In the middle of the eighties, it would be interesting to see what the survivors of the New Wavelet have become. Well, François Truffaut passed away in 1984 and Eric Rohmer persists in signing empty, sloppy films to show his "skills" at film-making. Her majesty Jean-Luc "God Ard" only keeps his small handful of faithful intellectual ones happy with his hermetic products like "Détective" (1985) or "je Vous Salue Marie" (1985). Same judgment for Jacques Rivette who drive many movie-goers indifferent with his version of "les Hauts De Hurlevents" (1985) (Wuthering Heights).

Fortunately, there's still Claude Chabrol to deliver us a worthy, understandable film even if his production as a whole is patchy. In 1985, "Poulet Au Vinaigre" boosted his career again and so the temptation to give it a sequel was inevitable. "Inspecteur Lavardin" is the heir of the 1985 film and features again the same main character plunged in the same bourgeois universe, in a different provincial town this time in Dinand in Brittany. He's still acted by Jean Poiret who seemed irreplaceable in this role.

The writer Raoul Mons was found murdered on the beach and Lavardin has to find the culprit. His investigation is the opportunity for Chabrol to break the respectable appearance of the upper-class milieu but also to include unexpected twists about the plot, notably when Lavardin found who the murderer is. Like in "Poulet Au Vinaigre," humor is the main motor of the film, notably with the way Lavardin employs to make his suspects talk. More than in the 1985 film, the witty personality of this maverick cop is more precise and deepened for the audience.

"Inspectur Lavardin" isn't as intense as "la Femme Infidèle" (1969) or "le Boucher" (1970) but with a palatable story and good acting in the bargain, it would be a shame to skip it. In 1988, a TV series entitled "les dossiers secrets De l'inspector Lavardin" will be launched and four installments will be shot.

NB: video and TV play an important role in the film. It must have given an idea to Chabrol about the direction his next film would take: "Masques" (1987).

User comments Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

The great thing about Inspecteur Lavardin is that he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He is, as an old friend remarks, 'an ex-thug, now a cop'. He has none of the wit, eccentricity or flair we expect from our fictional detectives, none of the artistic mathematics of Holmes, the dandy comedy of Poirot, the dogged integrity of Marlowe, or even the warped moral fervour of Harry Callahan. He is a grim authoritarian, illiberal, homophobic, who counters wit with a threat, menaces the vulnerable and weak; utterly humorless, any wit merely self-satisfaction at someone else's discomfort.

He is the perfect vehicle for Chabrol's art, a moral force whose godlike powers of detection and final rewarding of spoils subvert his social, rational role. In Chabrol's world, the innocent are always guilty, but sometimes he sounds a grace note, and the guilty can be truly innocent. Lavardin doesn't solve a crime, he exposes hypocrisy, corruption, evil. Chabrol's later (post-1975) films are less vice-like than his mid-period masterpieces, and in some there is hope for trapped characters to escape, as does the shadowy Peter Manguin, who in a previous Chabrol film would have been driven to inexorable, elaborate murder.

It's not all that rosy though - the final image of the 'restored' bourgeois household, mother and daughter staring out zombie-like at the departing detective, has some of the ironic force of 'La Femme Infidele''s ending, a bitter image of withdrawn, probably mad maternity, and an innocence that has seen too much.

As with the first Lavardin film, 'Poulet et Vinaigre', surveillance is the main theme. In Chabrol's earlier films, spying was a form of control by one person on another; here his net casts longer. Chabrol is famous for his switches in point of view, in spending much of the film with one character, before abruptly turning to another, complicating, even casting doubt, on the preceding narrative.

Although most of of this film is seen from Lavardin's commanding point of view, there are moments when the film seems to escape it (e.g. Francis' first appearance, or Veronique's final blackmailing pay-off), but Lavardin is soon revealed to be gathering knowledge unobserved, a virtual panopticon from which no-one is free (not even the paparazzi who seem to catch him with Helene unobserved on the beach).

Much is made of new media of surveillance - the case is solved by a hidden camera, a point of view significantly taken up by Chabrol's camera before it is revealed - but these are simply extensions of Lavardin's gaze: in one brilliant scene, the 'real' world of the film and that at a remove through CCTV cameras meet, when the inspector talks to a man in the same room we see on screen. To reinforce the point, a key figure in the plot has as a hobby the exquisite sculpting of marble eyeballs, in a scene which virtually gives away the plot early on.

The big difference between this film and its predecessor is the figure of Lavardin. In 'Poulet', he is a shadowy figure who only dominates in the last quarter. Here, he is on screen from nearly the beginning, and has profound personal links with the case, the murdered man's wife having been a lover who abandoned him. He claims his amateur searching for her led him to the force. The closing, bitter joke, however, involving the photo of his family, casts doubt even on this intriguing psychologising.

As ever with Chabrol, there is a strong comic element in the film, strangely disrupting the film's earnestness - the murder scene, with its threat of rape, is made ridiculous by the victim's porcine squealing. The bourgeois-baiting comedy is so entrenched in Chabrol as to have lost most of its sting, although the rigid framing of the family dinners, despite all the criminal goings on, is priceless.

The characteristic Chabrolian 'metaphysical' implications are at first rendered absurd with the blasphemous play, but when Lavardin replaces the crucifix after he's solved the case, and his general sense of a haunted house (this is one film where the present is fractured by the past in a startling way, not least in its references to Chabrol's previous oeuvre) that you're not quite sure. It's a shock to see Bernadette Lafont, that sexually voracious force of early Chabrol so prim, distant and bourgeois, although there's the odd glint in that huge come-hither mouth that suggests otherwise.

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [2/5]

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

Inspecteur Lavardin (1986) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Claude Chabrol and Inspector Lavardin Gareth’s Movie Diary, June 24, 2009

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: whist from United States

The New York Times (Caryn James) review December 26, 1991, also seen here: Review/Film; On Buffing and Polishing Even the Stereotypes

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

MASQUES

France (100 mi) 1987

DVD Outsider [Timothy E. RAW]

'I'd kill my sister for a good pun,' says the hero of Chabrol's murder mystery; but it looks as if smarmy TV show host Christian Legagneur (Noiret) may already have knocked his chances, and his sister, on the head. Dressed in the sheep's clothing of biographer Roland Wolf, the hero insinuates himself into Legagneur's country house, where the latter's goddaughter (Brochet) languishes in a state of narcolepsy. Everyone in the house has a double identity, from the allegedly mute chauffeur/chef to the amorous masseuse/fortune-teller (Lafont). But it is what lies behind his host's polite mask that interests the snooping Roland. Noiret's slobbish screen persona is ill-suited to his role as a bourgeois manipulator with a gift for cerebral word games, and it is only when the facade cracks at the end that his more corporeal style of nastiness seems appropriate. Chabrol frames the verbal sparring with characteristic precision, but the subtle plot suffers from a surfeit of politesse and a dearth of red-blooded passion.

Masques (1987) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Christian Legagneur is the host of a popular television talent show and engages a young reporter, Roland Wolf, to write his biography. Unbeknown to Legagneur, Wolf’s motivation to take on the job was to allow him to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his younger sister, who was once a close friend of Legagneur’s daughter. Whilst staying at his employer’s country house, Wolf discovers that Legagneur has a sinister secret and that he may not be the genial, chivalrous individual that he appears to be on the television...

This film asks a pertinent question: what lies beneath the mask of an apparently pleasant and sugar-sweet public figure? Can such a person be utterly wicked, capable of fraud, deceit - even murder - and get away with all that unnoticed? How far can the public image and the private reality differ?

For the subject of his analysis, Chabrol could not have chosen a better actor than Philippe Noiret. In his role, Noiret is so successful that it is virtually impossible to believe that his character could harm a fly - until the truly disturbing scene when his daughter shows him a bird in a cage, triggering a phobic reaction that causes the mask to slip - albeit for just a moment. After that, the mask stays firmly in place, until the last possible moment. Of course, by this stage we already know the worst and far from being a nice, amiable individual, Noiret's character has an air of genuine menace, even though the mask is back in place. This shows great subtlety in Noiret's performance which Chabrol uses to great effect.

When the mask finally does fall, as it has to, and Legagneur turns on his television viewers, we see the truth in an instant and ask ourselves: how could we have been so blind? More disturbingly, we begin to question - as Chabrol intended we should - whether any real-life TV presenters have similar dark secrets.

Whilst not quite in the league of some of Chabrol’s other thrillers (most notably the superb La Cérémonie), Masques is a film which does have some gripping moments and some sparkling dialogue. The ending is as funny as it is tragic, and, as a thought-provoker, it achieves its objective a little too successfully.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The eighties were not that much a great time for Claude Chabrol. Most of the works of this era, either have not worn very well (les fantômes du chapelier, poulet au vinaigre) or were not themes for him anyway (le cheval d'orgueil, Patricia Highsmith's "le cri du hibou")

"Masques " is probably his best since "Violette Nozières" (1978) and nearly matches the brilliance of the late sixties/early seventies heyday.

Completely unpretentious, it's full of humor, suspense and of course gastronomy (is there a Chabrol movie where they do not eat?). A marvelous spoof on these numerous TV shows which take dumbness to new limits, a detective story, this movie is much fun to watch.

Philippe Noiret, overplaying as hell -and he's thoroughly enjoyable-, plays the emcee of a broadcast for old people who sing songs of long ago, ("les roses blanches," the most maudlin song of the whole French repertoire, crooned by an old man, can be heard on the cast and credits). By no means a caricature, because, we've seen worse on French TV.

And to crown it all, he host uses "Hitchcock presents " music to enhance his horrible show. And that's not all! Philippe Noiret's character is Mister LEGAGNEUR (GO-GETTER)

The emcee is so full of himself he asks a young novelist (Renucci) to write his biography. They are to work in the country in Legagneur's desirable property, complete with court and chef. A delightful gallery of weirdoes hangs around: A couple, Roger Dumas, a wine connaisseur, and Bernadette Laffont, who enjoys reading someone's cards and less commendable things -to think that Lafont was featured in Chabrol's very first,"le beau Serge" in 1958!-; a deaf and dumb chauffeur; two strange servants, one of them relishes with Charlotte Armstrong's detective stories-like Chabrol ,who adapted this writer twice: "la rupture" (1970) and "merci pour le chocolat" (2000)-; and, last but not least, a strange girl (Brochet), Legagneur's goddaughter(sic). She seems very sick, or maybe someone helps her to be sick?

Actually nothing is what it seems. Everybody hides himself behind his mask, including the director ,who puts on his Chabrol mask this time.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Nathaniel Thompson

DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

Masques Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [3/5]

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

User reviews from imdb Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: robert-temple-1 from United Kingdom

Images Journal James Newman, reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

THE CRY OF THE OWL (Le Cri du hibou)

France Italy (102 mi) 1987

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

A young woman moves around her isolated house. Outside in the dark, among the trees, a man watches her - is he smiling? From this equivocal opening there unfolds a tale, unpredictable but of rather precarious credibility, that takes in rage, persecution and several violent deaths. Actually the plot is unpredictable only if you haven't read the Patricia Highsmith novel of which this is a doggedly faithful adaptation. Since Highsmith and Chabrol have so much in common, both as regards tone and preoccupations, it's surprising it took so long for their paths to cross. But maybe it's precisely this lack of reciprocity which explains why the movie is somewhat disappointing. Author and director in this case are not complementary so much as tautological.

User comments from imdb Author: Thorsten_B (thb8@hotmail.com) from Frankfurt, Germany

This Chabrol movie seems to be almost forgotten - given the few comments printed here and given the fact that it's unlikely to be mentioned among the maestros masterpieces. Even though it is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, and has some degree of tension in it, "Le Cri du Hibou" doesn't really draw the viewer inside the small world of it's handful of characters. Everyone in this film seems to have his private neurosis, and when fate bonds them all together, an explosive mixture is the result. Unfortunately (and unusually for Chabrol) the narration is not clever enough to tantalize the viewer. Instead, quite a bunch of implausible elements make it hard to enjoy the unfolding of the story. Then again, since it is the story of a man regarded as threat by his surrounding without ever wanting to threat anyone, a man seen as guilty without guilt (or is there guilt at his hands?), Chabrol had to avoid all too much realism. An ultra-realistic view at the same story would stop at 40 minutes; it would not be able to display the ideas driving the characters to their deeds like Chabrol does. Seen through this perspective, the film is quite an interesting statement.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Patricia Highsmith's "cry of the owl" was not her best or even among her best; we are far from triumphs such as "the talented Mister Ripley" "Ripley's game " or "strangers on a train." But it was an interesting psychological study, focusing on a man who thought that, whatever he might do, he was bound to fall and he would even bring bad luck to his human pals. Like a lot of Highsmith 's characters, he was a neurotic, who could not fit in the "normal world," with a heavy guilt feeling and a touch of masochism. Chabrol's screenplay is very faithful to the novel, keeping even the last line, but it's a good example of how accuracy leads to failure.

The choice of Christophe Malavoy was excellent because the actor is subtle enough to convey such a despair. But Chabrol put him against a gallery of weirdos who would drive any man insane: a brunette whose behavior is completely implausible, played an unconvincing actress, Mathilda May; a vulgar unattractive wife -Ah Stephane Audran where are you ?- ; a brute of a fiancé who seems even more irrational than the hero, it's the last straw! On the paper the hero's thoughts and frames of mind made up for the implausibilities of the plot and built an atmosphere of ambiguity, an ambiguity which is almost totally absent in the film, in spite of Malavoy's commendable efforts. To top it all, there's an irritating part of a cop (Kalfon), a la Colombo, gobbling up madeleines, and hinting at Marcel Proust as he tries to remind his unusual suspect of what he may have done.

Because, like in a lot of Chabrol movies, people eat in in "le cri du hibou." The hero and his lady friend treat themselves to some delicious crêpes suzette (flambées) and cassolettes of langoustines: the neurotic is also a gourmet! And he does love the girl's home-made cookies!

Doing two movies a year, Chabrol makes frequently spotty works: such was the case of "le cri du hibou," deservedly forgotten work, whereas the contemporary "masques " - released at the beginning of the same year- was a brilliant film noir turned almost farce.

Veteran French filmmaker Claude Chabrol observes exurban existentialism in "The Cry of the Owl," an icily ironic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's mystery. Relocated from the American Midwest to Vichy, this cerebrally directed, deadpan thriller meditates, a la "Blue Velvet," on the malaise underlying a seemingly wholesome bourgeois neighborhood.

Christophe Malavoy plays Robert, a debonair depressive who has moved to peaceful Vichy to wait out a messy divorce and a vitriolic wife. An admitted emotional cripple, Robert starts to feel better when he becomes by avocation a dedicated voyeur. For three months he peeps in on the happily unaware Juliette (Mathilda May), tantalized by what he imagines is the perfect order of her pretty young life. Then one night he becomes careless and Juliette discovers him in the dark edge of her yard. We expect the worst when she invites him in for tea, but Robert is no ax murderer. He's the man who knows too little.

Of course, Juliette turns out to be about as normal as Son of Sam. Right off, she confides a lifelong preoccupation with morbidity and soon becomes obsessed with Robert, who she believes is the harbinger of death. And who can blame her? Indeed he must have born with an albatross around his neck, affirms his estranged wife (Virginie Thevenet), a poisonous vamp who relishes her husband's increasingly miserable life. "It always rains on his birthday," she explains to a police officer who suspects Robert of murdering Juliette's fiance (Jacques Penot) as well as assorted other victims that have begun piling up in the foyer.

The only characters who survive knowing the hero, in fact, are a co-worker and his wife, who insist on keeping Robert at a distance. Chabrol seems to be following their example with his clinically detached direction. He approaches "The Cry of the Owl" as if it were not a film but an autopsy.

Le Cri du hibou (1987) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

An artist, Robert, moves to Vichy after having separated from his wife, Véronique. He relieves his depression by spying on a young woman, Juliette, who lives in a house in the countryside with her fiancé Patrick. One day, Juliette discovers Robert in her garden and invites him into her house. Although Robert is not looking for an affair, Juliette is drawn to him and contrives to meet him whenever she can. When he finds out, Patrick goes into a rage and threatens to kill Robert. One night, the two men get into a fight and Robert knocks his opponent unconscious. The next day, Patrick has disappeared and the police suspect Robert of killing him. This news drives Juliette to suicide, but for Robert the nightmare has just begun, as he becomes the target of a mysterious sniper...

After the comparatively bland Lavardin crime thrillers of the mid-1980s and the wryly comical Masques, director Claude Chabrol returned in 1987 to the dark psychological thriller genre with which he is probably most closely associated. That film, Le Cri du hibou, reminds us of the director’s earlier successes of the late 1960s, like Le Boucher and Que la bête meure, whilst giving us a foretaste of the gems which were to come (La Cérémonie , Merci pour le chocolat , etc.)

Adapted from a novel by thriller writer Patricia Highsmith, Le Cri du hibou is undoubtedly one of Chabrol’s darkest films, and also one of his most compelling and chillingly ambiguous. Although it received some lousy reviews when it was first released, and has subsequently dipped into comparative obscurity, it really deserves to be ranked as one of the director’s better films.

Like his New Wave contemporaries François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol was a great admirer of the English film director Alfred Hitckcock, and this is clearly reflected in many of his films. The Hitchcock influence is noticeable in virtually every shot of Le Cri du hibou, but Chabrol, to his credit, uses Hitchcockian techniques to embellish rather than drive the film’s content.

The voyeuristic camerawork is distinctive Chabrol, in evidence in most of his films, but here it is an essential component of the film, emphasising the distance between the protagonist, Robert, a kind of latter day Great Reaper, and his hapless victims (who have an awkward habit of dropping dead thanks to his unwitting influence).

Impressive acting performances, particularly from Christophe Malavoy and Mathilda May, supplemented by the atmospheric, stylish cinematography, sustain an almost unbearable tension throughout the film, culminating in one of the most horrific and bizarre endings in a Chabrol thriller. As is the case with many of Chabrol’s better works, the film combines the mundane experiences of everyday life with a shockingly surreal streak of the macabre, yet it does this with great subtlety and ambiguity so that we never question what we see. It is only in the last fifteen seconds of the film that the film departs from the real world and propels us into fantasy, causing us to question our assumptions about everything we have just seen.

The best psychological thrillers tend to leave you with the impression that you have just woken from a bad nightmare. Le Cri du hibou certainly has that affect – and will probably induce in its spectator many subsequent nightmares, all with a recognisably Chabrolesque thrill...

The Tech (MIT) (Manavendra K. Thakur) review

10kbullets John White

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review

Cry of the Owl Peter Nellhaus from Coffee Coffee and More Coffee, June 6, 2006

Karate Party Finger of Doom

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

User reviews from imdb Author: heliotropetwo from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

Mondo Digital also reviewing LA CÉRÉMONIE and MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]

THE STORY OF WOMEN (Une Affaire de Femmes)

France (108 mi) 1988

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

True crime: Marie-Louise Giraud, here renamed Latour (Huppert), was guillotined in Paris in 1943 for carrying out abortions. Perhaps fearing that his characters might emerge as facile symbols (of oppressed womanhood, defeated France) Chabrol plays it very cool indeed. The background of the Occupation is only lightly touched on, feminist themes remain merely implicit, and the director amuses himself with ghoulish intimations of the catastrophe to come: the decapitation of a goose, the ambition of Marie's son to become an executioner. The body of the film is an engrossing account of Marie's almost inadvertent assumption of the role of neighbourhood abortionist, her amused involvement with the demi-monde (Trintignant as a no-nonsense hooker) and her husband's slow burning resentment of the situation. Chabrol dedicates the film to his actors - with reason, since they serve him so well.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

This is a true story and the heroine is not unlike Louis Malle's hero "Lacombe Lucien." They are too coarse, too immature to realize what they are doing. Lucien could have opted for the Resistance, but he's deemed too stupid by the schoolteacher and he winds up in Collaboration. Chabrol's heroine only wants to "help" her neighbors before she realizes she can earn a lot of dough with abortion. Chabrol watches his character as an entomologist, as she makes her way through those troubled times: the world has gone mad, and anyway is abortion worse than what the authorities are doing with the Jews? Maréchal Petain's France was so humiliated that it tried to make up with it by focusing on "morality."

The heroine could make also think of Violette Nozières, another Chabrol movie which also featured Huppert. And she's also akin to Sandrine Bonnaire's character in "la cérémonie." All are women overtaken by events, all are victims of a well-meaning society, Chabrol's trademark. "Une affaire de femmes" is certainly a good work although it lacks the sweep and the directing innovations of his late sixties/early seventies classics.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Copeland Brown (alicecbrown@yahoo.com) from Boston

If you're a citizen of the U.S.A. you will feel some 'deja vu of the moment' when you see this movie. Like the Nazis killed the Jews, we are killing brown-skinned people in Iraq and Afghanistan- about 13,000 of them todate --while our puppet-in-chief moralizes about gay marriage, abortion and 'family values'. The saddest part of it is, like Petain's flunkies, the American people are going along with it. It helped assuage the feelings of guilt the French people had at sending their fellow Frenchmen to the concentration camps; just as it assuages the wilful blindness of my fellow Americans to focus instead on 'those wicked gays and pro-abortionists'. Read WHAT HAPPENED TO KANSAS? to understand this political ploy even better.

Since I am all for the right of a woman to control her own body and find no scientific proof for the statements these rabid anti-life misogynists make, I reacted strongly to this movie. On the other hand, her adultery-- her cuckolding of her husband in his own bed-- made me a little sick.

Yet this was 'fair and balanced' treatment: she was not a saint, but you still have to answer the question, "Was it right that she should be guillotined?" No, it was not, and perhaps her death hastened the will of the French to put aside capital punishment as a fitting way to punish law-breakers. To kill her because she provided a room for a prostitute to do her business, because she helped many a family preserve it's 'family values' by having the adulterous women unpregnant when their husbands returned from war....no, not right.

Cabrol's use of the lover killing the trussed-up goose with the sword--decapitating it-- not 2 feet from her face with the approval of the Nazi officer at the 'festival' echoed later with her representing the silly goose who has her own head whacked off by the guillotine. Excellent movie and fantastic acting by a brilliant woman who acts dumb. "Can I send a postcard of the Eiffel Tower to my children?" she asks the guard on her way to her death.

Might be good for teen-agers to see, as it emphasizes the price you may pay for unprotected sex.

CLAUDE CHABROL's "Story of Women" is not only about the extraordinary, it is extraordinary; an unflinching treatment of a volatile issue, it refuses to simplify or close its eyes. Undoubtedly -- assuming this movie is seen, and it ought to be seen -- such an unblinking approach, given the abortion hysteria currently enveloping the Supreme Court, will shock, divide and maybe -- and let us pray for such civic enthusiasm -- bring out the magic markers and placards.

But the only banner "Women" unfurls is an artistic one. Chabrol, in fact, dedicates his film, with impishly outstretched arms, to "all its interpreters" and, at the close of this rigorous, stirring work, asks us (in a rare flash of grandiosity) to "have pity for the children of those who are condemned."

Pity for children is better underlined when a woman, whose sister-in-law has died from a shoddy backroom abortion, visits the illegal "clinic" with two of the children of the dead woman in tow. She hasn't come to scream or accuse. She has come to show the woman who performed the abortion some living children -- the ones lucky enough to escape her booming "service."

"Women" isn't merely watching from the aggrieved woman's point of view. Chabrol, one of France's finest film directors who, like his idol Alfred Hitchcock, finds sympathies on the shadowy side of conventional morality, makes us feel equally for Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert), the one who did the dirty deed, who receives the news of this grim death with genuine surprise and whose story, based on the real-life doings of Marie-Louise Giraud, this is.

Chabrol doesn't allow "evil" and "immorality" to remain abstract, which has already outraged the appropriate Europeans. Rather than morally justify Marie's change from poor wife and mother to abortion-meister, Chabrol follows her evolution human-detail by detail, with a compassion broad and un-hysterical enough to understand someone who can love her two children, have an extramarital affair, perform more than 20 abortions (upping the price too), rent out a room to a whore-friend (Marie Trintignant) and, after the Vichy authorities throw the book at her, utter a blasphemous (and unprintable) anti-prayer to the Virgin Mary.

Huppert (star of Claude Goretta's "The Lacemaker" and title murderess in Chabrol's "Violette"), gives that evolution robust dimension. By the time she reaches the depths of abject despair (hence the malignant prayer), she has felt the elation of new-found love, a childlike ambition to be a stage singer and the initial satisfaction that this profitable thing is right because, after all, the war against women knows no armistice.

User comments from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

Claude Charbrol's stark and unsentimental masterpiece about the last woman to be executed in France--she was guillotined for performing abortions in Nazi-occupied France during World War II--forces us to see a side of war not often depicted. What does a woman with two little children do when her country is occupied by the brute forces of the enemy? How is she to find enough to eat, to buy the increasingly scarce and costly necessities of life? How is she to find joy in life? Women often turn to prostitution during such times, but Maire Latour does not. Instead she aborts the foetuses of the prostitutes and of other women impregnated, often by the Nazis. In a sense this is her "resistence." However she prospers and takes up with a Nazi collaborator. In the process she reduces her husband to frustration and humiliation.

Isabelle Huppert as Marie Latour is mesmerizing in a role that allows her talent full latitude. She is clear-headed and sly as a business woman, warm and ordinary as a mother, cold and brutal as a wife, childish and careless as an adulteress, resourceful and fearless as an abortionist, and unrepentant as she awaits the executioner (foreshadowed, by the way, by her son, who wants to be an executioner when he grows up). Francois Cluzet plays her husband Paul, and he is also very good, especially at rousing our pity. Charbrol makes it clear that both Marie and Paul are victims, not only of war, but of their divergent natures. Paul wants the love of Marie, but she wants only a man that represents success and power, a man who is clean-shaven, not the menial worker that he is. Marie Trintignant is interesting and convincing as a prostitute who becomes Marie Latour's friend and business associate.

While abortion is indeed "Une affaire de femmes" this film is about much more than that. No doubt the title is there to emphasize Charbrol's point that men really do not (did not then, and do not now) really understand abortion and why it is sometimes a horrible and abject necessity. When Marie is taken to Paris for a show trial she exclaims to a woman in jail with her, referring to the court that will pass judgment on her, "It's all men...how could men understand?" We can see that men really can't, and that precisely is what this movie is all about: showing us just how horrible pregnancy can be under the circumstances of enemy occupation.

A secondary story here, not quite a subplot, is Paul's story. What does a man do when he and his children are dependent on a woman who doesn't love him, a woman who rejects him and even goes so far as to arrange for the cleaning woman to sleep with him? It is not only Marie who humiliates him, but it is the defeat of his country, the easy surrender to the Nazis that has so reduced him. This is made clear in a scene late in the film between two lawyers who voice their shame as Frenchmen in a time of defeat.

What Paul does is not pretty (and I won't reveal it here), but so great is the provocation that one understands his behavior and can forgive him.

User comments from imdb Author: desperateliving from Canada compares the film to Mike Leigh’s VERA DRAKE

Having seen "Vera Drake," I don't think it's possible to address the film without comparison. The stories are remarkably similar (this one is based on fact), to the point that the plot goes along the same road -- there are a few successful abortions, then one goes bad, we see her reaction to hearing that her abortion has resulted in tragedy, and the abortionist gets found out (and both have husbands who exist in the sidelines). The differences between the material are two: the approach taken in terms of inflating the work (and how), and the manner of the abortionist.

Here, the actual story is deceptively simple, but the targets are obvious -- it's a very obvious indictment of anyone who dared question the right of this abortionist; that's why Chabrol makes her so easily unlikeable -- she ignores her son, doesn't satisfy her husband, pals around with a prostitute, cheats on her husband, takes money for her abortions (this is a primary difference) and lets her "assistant" (read: the housekeeper she hires from the extra money she's bringing in) take over an abortion when she wants to go fool around sexually. So you can look at it two ways: this is Chabrol pushing OUR boundaries to ask just how much we're willing to take if we consider ourselves pro-abortion, or this is him setting up the party line, making sure everyone's on one side or the other. (He's obviously on her side -- with her hair being chopped, he invokes Joan of Arc -- but he makes her so emotionally distant and so superficially ugly that it's easy for anyone opposing abortion to see her as a villain.)

Even though both films are period pieces, I don't think, despite the stress on this, that Chabrol has the talent for rendering a lower-class life with much emotion. Everything here seems geared toward the political injustice of this (though it doesn't feel angry), whereas Mike Leigh's film swarms around the tragedy of the personal, first, fills it with a crushing sense of moral weight, and *then* the socio-politic injustice comes into play. (It's clear that Huppert's family does need the money, but the daily life and struggle that shows that isn't really felt; Chabrol is more interested in just telling the story. We don't feel their pain, and I think Leigh's personal interest is better for this material than Chabrol's political and historical outrage. Leigh's cinema understands that the personal is larger than any social structure.)

When Huppert asks a friend if she thinks babies in their mother's bellies have souls, and she gets a smart response and smiles fatly -- and while this is a very obvious choice on the director's part, not ineptitude -- you don't feel as if the serious subject matter is being treated with much reverence. That's fine, it's a choice (and some would argue that Chabrol is being more subtle and Leigh more portentous -- I would argue that Chabrol is being frivolous and that Leigh's endless caring gives his film weight, not heaviness), but I object to that choice, just as I object to the way the film plays at times like a mystery (perhaps solely out of rote), as if something of this richness needs to be fitted into a genre.

That said, Chabrol has one scene that is brilliant: after an abortion goes bad, the girl's sister comes by to see Huppert, tells her what's happened, and places two bills on her table as payment. It's a moment worthy of Bob Dylan at his most insulting -- think of the last lines in "John Brown": "As he turned to go, he called his mother close / And he dropped his medals down into her hand." 7/10

Christine Evans, 'I Fought the Law and the Law Won: Transgression, the Act, and Narratives of Aphanisis in Claude Chabrol’s Story of Women', Refractory, July 4, 2006

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

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

DVD Outsider [Timothy E. RAW]

DVD Verdict (Neal Solon) dvd review

10kbullets John White

Une affaire de femmes (1988) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: allisonalmodovar from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Rents (RentyMissesStKildan) from London, England

Images (James Newman) review James Newman, reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

Siskel & Ebert (audio)

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

FILM; Chabrol Offers A Cool-Eyed Look At a Stormy Issue Celestine Bohlen from The New York Times, October 15, 1989

QUIET DAYS IN CLICHY (Jours tranquilles à Clichy)

France Italy Germany (116 mi) 1990

Any Chabrol character who washes his oysters down with a pint of beer is probably in directorial disfavour, and indeed the director does seem to find Joey - Henry Miller's alter ego - a bit of a creep. The film opens with Joey shrivelled and impotent, living in desolation. The flashbacks to '30s Paris are a fantasia of florid decor, nudity and uncomplicated pleasure. Left and right clash in the streets but at the fabulous Club Melody the fun goes on. 'I want to stay here forever,' cries Joey, fastening onto a symbolic nipple, even as the image fades to dry, embittered old age. It's hardly profound and the Jules et Jim references are misplaced. But as a subversion of its source material the film is on a par with Kiss Me Deadly.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Henry Miller, the famous nefarious American writer in the twilight years remembers his youth spent in Paris at the dawn of the thirties. A life of debauchery guided by the search for rapture and intense pleasure of the senses through sex, food and literature (he was a profound admirer of Marcel Proust).

Amid a bushy and patchy filmography, Claude Chabrol admits liking this movie very much. That this movie makes him feel good is a mystery to me for it showcases none interest. His lack of input in his film, even his absence in the directing are blatant. He shot in a glib way an amorphous biopic to which one doesn't succeed in getting interested beyond the first ten minutes. The characters (Henry "Joey" Miller, Alfred "Carl" Perlès, Colette Ducarouge) have little depth and thickness and their acting mainly consist in wandering from brothel to brothel, from restaurant to restaurant (as Chabrol's inclination for gastronomy has it) and from flat to apartment. Probably to obey to the famous Latin expression "Carpe Diem". The action is sluggish and it's nearly a feat that the filmmaker could stretch his film for two hours with such a thin, stale, repetitive screenplay. It's all the more infuriating as the scenario doesn't live up to some heaven-sent opportunities. The ones through which one could have remembered Chabrol's trademark like unearth the hateful flaws of a posh bourgeoisie. But alas, Chabrol contented himself to skim over this point. Bereft of this asset which might have justify the vision of this film and of rigor, Chabrol installs the audience in a deep torpor and one stays out of this derivative picture of the Paris during the Roaring Twenties.

The cast is totally undistinguished, a far cry from Chabrol's great family like Jean-Claude Brialy, Michel Bouquet, Jean Poiret or Isabelle Huppert. Yes, the luminary Stéphane Audran is part of the cast but she's completely wasted in a role unworthy of her skills. Anna Galiena is also included in the cast but she will be given the chance to shine the same year with Patrice Leconte's dreamy "Mari De La Coiffeuse".

Chabrol beat his dead horse with this mediocre commissioned film which is now in limbo. Anyway, 1990 was a dreadful vintage for him with these "quiet days in Clichy" and also with another fiasco the same year: "Dr. M".

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

This one is, by far, the most surprising project to be tackled by Claude Chabrol and one that seems to be greatly despised by devotees of Henry Miller (author of the autobiographical source). Being an aficionado of the French director myself (especially after going through the current comprehensive tribute and even if I omitted several of his best-regarded work, with which I was already familiar), I give no weight to such criticisms and, frankly, having preceded this with the vulgar 1970 Danish version, Chabrol's stylish treatment of the same material grew that much more in my estimation (despite this being a rather choppy edition, since it loses some 20 minutes from the original running-time)! If anything, the film under review is far closer in look and approach to Philip Kaufman's biopic HENRY & JUNE (1990), a portrait of the life and times of the taboo-breaking novelist himself, than the earlier cinematic rendition!

Whenever he chose to make period pieces, Chabrol always managed a detailed evocation of time and place: here, he seems to be particularly inspired by the ornate production design (not least a flashback/fantasy structure set in a desert limbo that recalls the "Angel Of Death" sequences in Bob Fosse's autobiographical ALL THAT JAZZ [1979]), which provide a striking visual backdrop to the necessarily candid narrative. That said, the ample nudity (in this case, all the women are gorgeous) and potential tastelessness (the two protagonists simultaneously marry an underage girl, who is also not the retard depicted in the earlier version) are handled with sensitivity, eschewing sensationalism to the point of them appearing quite natural!

Incidentally, the loosely-related events of the original (and, presumably, the book) are presented here in a fairly organized manner and, while the whole may still feel insufficiently interesting (as per the "Cult Filmz" website), they certainly hold one's attention much more than before. One of the thorns in the side of Miller fans here is the central casting, which I admit Chabrol could have improved upon, and also the way that their constant penury is basically ignored in this version (while adding a political subtext in its latter stages). That said, Andrew McCarthy (looking quite a bit like Johnny Depp!) is better than one could have anticipated in the role of Miller's alter-ego Joey, while Nigel Havers is appropriately urbane as his more experienced pal Carl. By the way, one of the venues where McCarthy goes for a pick-up is a cinema which is screening Fritz Lang's THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933) – this is not only in keeping with Chabrol's renowned admiration for the Austrian master film-maker but also foreshadows his very next effort, DR. M (1990), in which McCarthy himself appears in a bit part!

As I said earlier, the gallery of attractive females is given its due here: Barbara De Rossi (as McCarthy/Miller's true love Nys, though she finally opts for security with mild-mannered Dominique Zardi, a Chabrol fixture), Stephanie Cotta (as the teenage temptress Colette – even lustfully ogled by middle-aged aristocrat Mario Adorf), Eva Grimaldi, Anna Galiena (perhaps coming off best as the client who demands payment for her services at gunpoint – a scene which turns up towards the end here whereas it opened the 1970 version!) and, of course, the ubiquitous Stephane Audran – the former Mrs. Chabrol and whom he apparently still could not do without, at least in his films – as a sprightly Madame. Ultimately, therefore, while I was all prepared to hate this going in - after having bumpily made it through the 1970 original - and denounce it as a huge mistake for Chabrol, I have to say that I was sufficiently entertained and titillated by the (pardon the pun) heady cocktail of sex and death.

Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog: Quiet Days In ... RC, May 17, 2009

User reviews from imdb Author: Oreste (oreste.sl@sympatico.ca) from Montréal, Québec

User reviews from imdb Author: offenes_meer from Germany

Henry Miller - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chabrol Films a Henry Miller Tale Clyde Haberman from The New York Times, August 9, 1989

Miller's interview with The Paris Review September 1961

Kenneth Rexroth on Miller

DR. M

aka: Club Extinction

Germany France Italy (112 mi) 1990

Doug Pratt's Laserdisc Review

Chabrol's futuristic thriller, set in a still divided Berlin, turns out to be something of a folie de grandeur, flawed but fascinating. Dr Marsfeldt (Bates, playing like a Bond villain) is head of the omnipotent Mater Media corporation, and has his headquarters in a technology-filled back room of the 'Death' nightclub, where youngsters dance while mushroom clouds blossom on screens. Screens also fill the streets, the thousand faces of Sonja Vogler (Beals) inviting an increasingly suicidal populace to get away from it all at Theratos holiday camp. Detective Hartmann (Niklas) pads the mean polluted streets to fathom the rash of self-destruction. Chabrol's film, intended as a loose homage/reworking of Fritz Lang's proto-fascist master criminal Dr Mabuse, is at heart a sombre, timely meditation on our millenial, self-destructive instincts. Retained from Lang is the use of overawing architectural compositions, and his mix of silent serial, comic strip melodrama and expressionism. Less rewarding are a hopelessly difficult exposition, and the dial-a-country casting exigencies of the new Euro-productions.

User comments from imdb Author: Rosabel from Ottawa, Canada

I quite liked this movie, and intend to watch it a few more times in order to peel off a few more of the layers of meaning Chabrol has woven together. I think most people would find the movie incomprehensible if they didn't know that this is a quasi-remake of Fritz Lang's 1922 masterpiece, "Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler". The "Dr. M" of the title is Chabrol's way of indicating that we are once again in the presence of the bad doctor - not just *a* villain, but THE villain, the ultimate bad guy, genius and madman. Marsfeldt/Mabuse is a pure nihilist in this outing; he's not trying to conquer the world, but to destroy it. His total contempt for humanity drives him to eradicate life wherever he can; he doesn't even bother with Hitler's excuse that he's clearing away the deadwood to make way for a master race. Marsfeldt wants nothing but death and destruction for their own sake. As usual, the plans of the criminal mastermind are disrupted by emotion - in this case, Marsfeldt's weakness for his adopted daughter, Sonja, which prevents him from eliminating her when she becomes a danger to his plans. Alan Bates plays the avuncular father-figure with a compelling creepiness; on the surface he's kind and concerned, but you can't help noticing that every time he touches her, his fingers seem to sink into her flesh like claws, and he kisses her with far too much intensity, leading Sonja to slightly shrink away every time he approaches her. His performance is the best, but Benoît Régent is also good as the high-strung Stieglitz, trapped in a job that's killing his soul, yet unable to disappoint his friend and partner Hartman by leaving. In the end, everyone is guilty to some extent, and only by acting and refusing to yield to despair are Sonja and Claus able to thwart Marsfeldt's plan.

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

To begin with, I vividly recall reading the mixed newspaper review of this one when it was surprisingly released locally; needless to say, I missed it at the time and, until earlier this year, never again did I have the opportunity to check it out. In fact, it turned up – alas, dubbed – on late-night Italian TV and, though I did record it, I recently opted to acquire the English-language version…which is just as well, since two deleted scenes were included in the package! Anyway, knowing the flak the film has received (which was practically universal), I really did not know what to expect from it. However, I must say that I liked it quite a bit, while acknowledging it cannot hold a candle to any of Fritz Lang's movies revolving around the influential figure of criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse (here, the name has even been changed to Marsfeldt!). Incidentally, the actor most identified with the role (in a revival series of 1960s low-budget efforts) i.e. Wolfgang Preiss appears here as the Chief Of Police!

Perhaps the film does at times feel like one of the many German TV cop shows which have flooded the market from the 1970s and still continue to this day, but there is no denying the grip of the narrative (which tried, but unfortunately failed, to be prophetic when the Berlin Wall got torn down only months before the picture debuted!). Equally striking is the imagery pertaining to mass suicide (the most disturbing being a child waiter in full view of the patrons at a swank and busy restaurant), media manipulation and wasted disco-crazy youth (appropriately bleak though, I concede, not all that original).

The intense performances are also a plus: particularly Alan Bates as the outwardly charming but obviously sinister Dr. M and Jan Niklas as the disenchanted yet dogged cop on his trail of terror, though heroine Jennifer Beals proves no mere purveyor of eye candy either. Indeed, Bates' occasional resort to hamminess (especially when he passes himself off as a psychedelic guru at a desert holiday resort and spouting his nihilistic credo to an incredulous, disgusted Beals and Niklas during the climax – set in the Doctor's obligatory 'control room' – all the while connected to a life-support system!) are perfectly in keeping with the fanciful goings-on. The eclectic cast also includes the likes of Euro-Cult regular William Berger, future Italian TV presenter Daniela Poggi and former "Brat Pack"-er Andrew McCarthy in small roles.

In the end, while it may fall short of Chabrol's best work, the film nonetheless makes for a thought-provoking, stylized and yet entertaining parable on our less-than-reassuring times (incidentally, its suggestion/fear of the millennium as the 'end of days' is pretty amusing at this juncture).

A Wasted Life Bryin in Berlin, September 21, 2007

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [1/5] Richard Scheib

User reviews from imdb Author: ofumalow from United States

DVDBeaver.com [Per-olaf Strandberg]

MADAME BOVARY

France (143 mi) 1991

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

Chabrol's long-delayed adaptation of Flaubert's novel is as suffocating as its heroine's predicament. Emma, the ambitious farmer's daughter taken for a wife by arch-mediocrity Dr Bovary (Jean-François Balmer in a perfectly controlled performance), has been the subject of see-sawing literary interpretations since the 1860s. Chabrol sticking to the letter of the text avoided the temptation to cast her in a modernised feminist role and stressed instead her stifling limitation of choices in provincial 19th century France. Isabelle Huppert, often a blood-drained, internalised actress, outdoes herself here, playing Emma in a distracted, half-comatose state, resuscitated briefly by the odd gowned ball or the lifeline to passion proffered by heart-breaker Rodolphe (Malavoy). The birth of a child fails to bring light into her eyes. A classical art movie saturated with Chabrol's dark romantic pessimism.

VideoVista review Gary Couzens

France, the 19th Century. Emma Rouault (Isabelle Huppert), the romantically inclined daughter of a country squire, marries the local doctor, Charles Bovary (Jean François Balmer). Unfortunately, marriage soon loses its charm for Emma, and she finds living with Bovary is stupefyingly dull. She enters into love affairs with a landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger (Christophe Malavoy), and a law student, Leon Dupuis (Lucas Belvaux), and soon her debts mount up...

Scandalous to the point of being tried for obscenity when first published, Gustave Flaubert's tragic novel is now recognized as one of the great works of French literature. The story has had an obvious attraction for filmmakers, with so far at least eight adaptations for the big screen, not to mention other versions for TV. Claude Chabrol's film is something of a departure from his usual genre of suspense thrillers among the bourgeoisie, and it's only a partial success. Although she was too old to play the younger Emma, you can't fault Isabelle Huppert's command of acting technique, with the smallest of expressions conveying great emotions. However, she may ultimately be a victim of miscasting, as the film simply doesn't have the impact that it should. For two-and-a-quarter hours, we admire the craft of a scrupulously well-made film, and for the fact that it's very faithful to the novel. To the letter, that is: something went awry in this film's chemistry, as the spirit of one of the world's great tragic passionate love stories is missing.

Arrow's DVD has an anamorphic transfer (which is a little too dark in places), and a French soundtrack in Dolby digital 2.0 mono, with optional English subtitles. The extras are extensive, but potential buyers should note that they are all in French without any subtitles. They comprise: cast and crew biographies, the theatrical trailer, an interview with Huppert, 10 trailers for other Chabrol films, an extract from Jean Renoir's 1936 version, an introduction to the present film from Joël Magny, a commentary on five selected scenes by Chabrol, an extract from Bonnes addresses du passé (a French TV programme from 1962 which took a look round Flaubert's house), an extract from The Faces Of Madame Bovary (a TV news report on the location shoot).

During his labor on "Madame Bovary," Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend, "Everything should be done coldly, with poise." And in directing his film adaption of the novel, Claude Chabrol has followed the master's instructions to the letter. The veteran French filmmaker's treatment is precise, deliberate and a peerless example of faithful allegiance to its source.

But Chabrol has taken his countryman's advice far too literally. The movie is coldly done, all right, yet as an exercise in literary transposition it's as joyless as ditch digging. He's managed to reproduce Flaubert's clinical fastidiousness, the diligent spadework done in the service of realism, but none of the tensile passion that gave his prose its shapely muscle.

All this may sound like ragging on the movie for not measuring up to the novel, a long-winded way of saying "I liked the book better." A successful rendition of Emma Bovary's story -- of her petit-bourgeois ambitions, her loveless marriage and her extramarital fiascoes -- could be presented without following literally in its creator's footsteps, one, for example, that used its source only as a springboard for the adapting artist's leap in the same fictional themes. But Chabrol, who has Isabelle Huppert as his adulterous Emma, seems to have worked here without the inspiration of a strong personal vision, or the empathetic ability to enter into its creator's skin.

Nor can he get inside the soul of his heroine. Flaubert's genius was that he could see Emma both from within and from without; we felt her emotions, her claustrophobia and her frustrations with her dullard husband (played here by Jean-Francois Balmer), yet at the same time saw through the cruel amorality of her rationalizations. Chabrol, on the other hand, is careful about his facts -- he's studiously objective -- but he can't invest them with any psychological weight.

A great actress might have rescued him; unfortunately, he has Huppert, who plays Emma as a shallow, pouty brat. And while Flaubert's heroine might have been both, there was a tragic magnitude in her banality that evoked sympathy and identification. Huppert makes us want to shove this creep down a flight of stairs. Her Emma Bovary merely expresses, in microcosm, what is wrong with the movie as a whole. What she and her director have given us is a colorless facsimile that is the opposite of ideal -- that instead of leading us to a great work, turns us away.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

the film Flaubert would have made from his novel

This was Claude Chabrol's intention and it's easier to say than to do. Gustave Flaubert's novel was so rich, undulating that any adaptation in images can only be reducing and simplistic. More than the tragic story of its heroine, Flaubert's novel encompassed a word picture of Normandy (the bulk of the film was shot in the village of Lyons-La-Forêt near Rouen) and a cruel, cynical vision of the world. If the first feature is satisfying on the screen, the second one is hardly perceptible. Hence, this crucial question: is it possible to fully recreate Flaubert's novel? Chabrol's film is faithful to the main plot with the rise and fall of her heroine sometimes told by François Périer's voice-over in spite of accelerated views on certain vital episodes, notably the peasant marriage that disgusted Emma Bovary. On the other hand, the crest of the novel (the ball to the marquis) found a perfect equivalent in Chabrol's film with this shot which goes through the turning dresses creating thus a whirlpool. The glittering life Emma dreams of instead of a dull one with her mediocre husband Charles.

Chabrol is buoyed by topnotch interpretations. Even if Isabelle Huppert is a convincing Emma Bovary, a woman whose messy dreams and follies badly conceal boredom and disgust of her condition, the other main actors steal the show with Jean-François Balmer as the perfect, narrow-minded Charles Bovary, Christophe Malavoy as unfaithful Rodolphe Boulanger and Jean Yanne as the unscrupulous chemist Homais.

"Madame Bovary" is aesthetically a refined work with lush scenery and lavish costumes that recreate rural life in Normandy in the middle of the nineteenth Century. But Chabrol doesn't break new ground with this adaptation that required something else than an elegant directing, a brilliant cast and splendid scenery. That's why his rendering of Flaubert's work is just an honorable reading of the novel in the end. One could also add that Flaubert's book was a solid opportunity for an onslaught at provincial lower middle class. But it's only skimmed over and it's a wasted bonanza.

Chabrol's reading of "Madame Bovary" amounts to the same result as Claude Berri's adaptation of Emile Zola's epic novel "Germinal" in 1993: honorable instead of being unforgettable, a commendable action instead of a ground-breaking creation. The author of "le Boucher" (1970) was rather on the wrong track but fortunately, he'll find his way again the following year with another woman depiction: "Betty" (1992). Georges Simenon's universe suits him much better than Flaubert's one.

Mary Donaldson-Evans, 'A Medium of Exchange: The Madame Bovary film', Dix-Neuf, No. 4, April 2005

DVD Times Noel Megahey

DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [2/5]

DVD Talk (Jeffrey Kauffman) dvd review [4/5]

Brilliant Observations on 2122 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Georgia Straight (Mark Harris) review

DVD Verdict (Kerry Birmingham) dvd review

EyeForFilm.co.uk Domers

Madame Bovary (1991) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

CHUD.com (Eileen Bolender) dvd review

User reviews from imdb Author: rosscinema (rosscinema@cox.net) from Oceanside, Ca.

User reviews from imdb Author: jeremy-giroux from France

User reviews from imdb Author: gridoon2010

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [3/5]

Siskel & Ebert (video)

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review December 25, 1991, also here: Review/Film; From Claude Chabrol, A 'Madame Bovary' With Isabelle Huppert

FILM; Flaubert Does Hollywood -- Again Alan Riding from The New York Times, January 13, 1991

BETTY

France (103 mi) 1992

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

Betty (Trintignant), a once well to-do housewife, now a pasty barfly, is taken under the wing of Laure (Audran), conveniently wealthy and herself a borderline alcoholic. Gradually fragments of Betty's story emerge in non-chronological, sometimes misleading, flashbacks, revealing a character simultaneously vulnerable and poisonous, moving haphazardly between her key modes of lassitude and betrayal. Chabrol is the least ingratiating of storytellers and certainly the portrait of Betty we end up with is admirably unsentimental. On the other hand, she's such an aggravating presence that after 103 minutes there will be few viewers who won't rejoice to see the back of her.

Betty was my first Chabrol experience. Having seen more than a dozen of his films since, it's a much richer work than I originally realized. Flashbacks are regularly utilized in Betty, which seems to elevate the past, especially since they make up so much of the film. However, they are always triggered by the present, showing life as a kind of loop. Chabrol likes to show human nature by repeating the same situations, and like his characters most of his films are variations of one another. He builds on his previous work even more than usual, particularly his 1968 masterpiece Les Biches, which involves two women living together and struggling for the same man. Stephane Audran plays off her character in that film, the lonely older woman who uses her fortunate financial state to take in a young stray girl. She seems very helpful, but is also very selfish, needing other people to amuse herself. Marie Trintignant began acting when she was four in a compilation film that involved Chabrol though her mother Nadine directed her segment. Her first work under Chabrol was 1988's Story of Woman where she plays a prostitute. She too somewhat continues her past role, so there are many possibilities, all of which Chabrol refuses to reveal. Chabrol starts the film with Betty in her lowest state having recently given away her children, and will only give us her intrigue over Audran and the bar owner having sex as a clue. But Chabrol's indifference to plot makes this far tenser and much more fascinating than it would otherwise be because we can't figure out where the story is going. Chabrol will not hint as to whether Trintignant's title character is an unfortunate victim of marrying into a bourgeois family who accepted her only as a childbearing object or a diabolical whore. Nor will he tell us if Audran is a good nurse or once again up to no good.

Washington Post (Megan Rosenfeld) review

“Betty,” the Claude Chabrol movie at the Key, is a French film like they used to make: dark, full of chic women and utterly opaque.

Betty (Marie Trintignant), in a white raw silk, two-piece number, is on a binge. Yet because of her expensive clothes, we can tell she is not just any old slut, but a mysterious slut, hiding some terrible pain behind her enormous eyes. She knocks back le whiskey and les cigarettes as though she is seeking oblivion. Aha! Perhaps this is a clue.

This movie, based on a novel by Georges Simenon, is, unfortunately, nothing but clues. It is the mystery of the Bad Woman: Why is she so immoral? Why does she have no feelings? How can she abandon her children and find her pleasure only in drink and seducing men? Perhaps it was her hard-hearted mother, who sent her away to live with an aunt and her lubricious husband in the country. Perhaps it was her father dying when she was 8.

Perhaps it is just that she is a stupid, unfeeling person. Suffocated by her bourgeois in-laws, deprived of caring for her two daughters by the overbearing nanny, she can think of nothing better to do with her life than drink and take lovers. It is not surprising that her husband eventually tosses her out, at which point all she can think of to do is wander from bar to bar, going home with any greasy old guy who asks her. And all this in one evening!

She ends up in Le Trou (The Hole), where she meets Laure, a fashionable widow played by Stephane Audran. Laure takes care of her, in a luxury hotel; they drink more of ze whiskey and Betty tells her story, which we see in flashbacks.

Betty is one of those women whom people, especially men, find intriguing because she is very beautiful and silent. They think there must be something exquisitely existential behind those bangs. It never occurs to them that perhaps this person has nothing to say.

Trintignant brings little to the role beyond her beauty, including a curvaceous figure (fully visible). Even her tears seem painted on. Audran is always a woman of substance, and seems wasted here in the secondary role of a woman intrigued by someone who is essentially vacuous.

"Betty" is unrated but contains some nudity.

Betty (1992) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Alone and drunk, Betty, is led to a Paris restaurant by a stranger. Here, she meets an older woman, Laure, with whom she strikes up an instant rapport. The two women seem to have suffered the same lot in their lives. Laure takes Betty back to her hotel and helps to cure the young woman of her depression and alcoholism. Little by little, Betty pieces together her recent history and realises that perhaps her life is not worth living. The she meets Mario, Laure’s lover...

This is a fascinating portrait of a woman - in fact, two women - who cannot live without love. Director Claude Chabrol was clearly as much motivated by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (which he adapted for the silver screen immediately before this film) as by Georges Simenon’s 1960 novel Betty. What Chabrol’s film Madame Bovary lacked in emotional depth and conviction, his subsequent film Betty has in abundance.

There are two very remarkable things about this film. The first is unmistakably Marie Trintignant’s performance as the central character, Betty. She manages to get completely under the skin of a very complex character, portraying the love-torn alcoholic with considerable conviction. Betty is an enigma, a tragic victim of circumstances - and the power with which Chabrol is able to tell her story is due largely to Marie Trintignant - very capably supported by her co-star Stéphane Audran.

The second remarkable thing is the way in which the film is constructed. Chabrol treats the subject of Betty rather like a puzzle, using all the devices and skill he has perfected over two decades of making thrillers. Betty’s past is unveiled through a series of flashbacks, going progressively back in time as the character Betty manages to recover from her alcoholic binges. It as an approach which creates suspense and adds poignancy to a sad story with great effect. As a result, Chabrol manages to get away with an understated, yet rather moving ending to his film.

This is another in a long series of films which shows Chabrol’s mastery of cinematographic suspense and a surprising depth of understanding of female psychology, whilst taking yet another swipe at the hypocritical brutality of French bourgeois society.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The nineties didn't start under auspicious skies for Claude Chabrol. "Jours Tranquilles à Clichy" (1990) was a big bore, "Dr.M" (1990) constituted one more fiasco and one could have easily done without a new version of "Madame Bovary" (1991) which strictly brought nothing to Gustave Flaubert's novel.

So, after three failures on the trot, Chabrol turned to one of his favorite novelists, Georges Simenon hoping to find some help to boost his career again and he found it with the novel "Betty." He was so much taken with this novel that he decided to transfer it to the screen. It wasn't one of Simenon's most well-known novels but a commendable one all the same and it's easy to understand why Chabrol liked this novel so much. It assesses the portrait of an immoral woman who got a raw deal. She's like a driftwood in the throes of a river full of undertows and unbalanced by unfortunate events. A heartless mother who sent her to live with her aunt when she was young. The day she discovered her uncle having sex with a teenage girl, a loveless marriage in a bourgeois milieu whose members especially considered her as an object pregnancy so that the Etamble descendants could be assured, a scandal which obliged her to break with her upper-class family and her children. In Chabrol's work all these events are related as flashbacks and at the outset of the film, Betty is a complete drifter, wanders from café to café, is often on booze and fags (she spends a good half of the film with cigarettes and alcohol near her). In a rather sleazy bar, she's rescued by a rich widow, Laure (Stéphane Audran) who befriends with her. She also seems to be a woman with a heavy past behind her and searching for human warmth...

As Marie Trintignant once put it: "Chabrol likes these monstrous women who do terrible things with a total innocence." With this noteworthy opinion and the contents of the film, "Betty" is easy to locate in Chabrol's bushy filmography. One could regard it as the female cousin of "Violette Nozières" (1978), "une Affaire De Femmes" (1988) and "la Cérémonie" (1995). Without losing the thread of the plot, Chabrol unveils to the audience, key-elements in Betty's life which might have been watershed ones in the construction and the solidification of her numb and a little unfathomable persona. Chabrol was right not to give us available, direct solutions or weak possibilities to explain her actions and so his enigmatic heroine keeps all her mystery. To better emphasize her elusive character, the filmmaker bestowed his directing with deft, shrewd ideas. For instance, when Laure begins to speak about Mario her lover or herself, Betty doesn't appear to listen to her, she's completely immersed in her bitter memories and so, during Laure's words, the camera takes us in another time, another place like a dinner in her former bourgeois family. This kind of brainy idea tells a lot about the type of character that is Betty and also gives an inkling to the audience about her mind in disarray. And I particularly relish the very last shot which showcases her behind an aquarium whose water is unclear. It's self-explanatory...

"Betty" also provided to Chabrol another god-sent opportunity to deliver one more scathing attack on the upper-class milieu given that Betty's bourgeois family has a part of responsibility in her fall.

The two central performances command admiration and respect. Marie Trintignant and Stéphane Audran completely mesh together with easiness. For the latter, it would be the very last time she acted in a film made by her ex husband.

A compelling writing of the characters, a painstaking construction and the big efforts Chabrol put in this story of an ambiguous woman make "Betty" a real winner amid his uneven filmography. Unfortunately, his adaptations from Simenon didn't put the critics and the public on the same wavelength since the film had a fleeting life in the French theaters in spite of glowing reviews. The same mishap happened ten years ago with "les Fantômes Du Chapelier" (1982), another Simenon adaptation, inferior to "Betty." But never mind, in 1992 Chabrol found again his high artistic potential and the level will maintain itself with his two following works: the divine "l'Enfer" (1994) and "la Cérémonie" (1995).

Georgia Straight (Mark Harris) review

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

User reviews from imdb Author: (jkowski@hotmail.com) from State College, PA

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

At the Movies Lawrence Van Gelder feature and interview with Chabrol from The New York Times, December 27, 1991

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review August 20, 1993, also here: Review/Film; Two Women With Secrets Talk and Talk

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)

THE EYE OF VICHY (L’Oeil de Vichy)

France (110 mi) 1993

A fascinating 1993 compilation by Claude Chabrol of material from French newsreels and related ephemera between 1940 and 1944, during the German occupation--mainly propaganda in the form of news items and "public service" features, but also a few movie trailers and one startling animated short. It's all edited by Chabrol with a keen, ironic eye, with a few English voice-overs to help point out the lies and omissions, and adds up to an irreplaceable view of what living in Vichy France was like.

From France, Depardieu as God And Other Joys Caryn James from The New York Times, February 18, 1994 (excerpt – page 2)

Mr. Chabrol's "Eye of Vichy" is an engrossing look at French propaganda films and newsreels made for the collaborationist government of Marshall Petain during World War II. As the narrator notes at the start, the film depicts France "not as it was, but as Petain and the collaborators wanted it to be seen." The film could have used more context. How many French people saw these films? What Allied or Resistance works might have counterbalanced them? But this firsthand evidence of what was put forth as happy news -- unemployed French find jobs in Germany and Petain is beloved by children all over France -- is still chilling.

User comments from imdb Author: Dave Godin from (Sheffield, England)

Film is the closest to a time-machine that we yet know, and this remarkable compilation of authentic newsreels from the Vichy period, (and let's not forget, the Vichy regime was officially recognised as the legitimate government of France by the USA, the USSR and the Vatican), are particularly chilling since so much of what the politicians and official spokesmen of those times said is unsettlingly close to much of today's political rhetoric. We hear of a United States of Europe, "a New World Order" that is "all" Hitler is seeking to achieve, and how `patriotism' is always free of dissent or criticism. That people constantly fall for this jingoistic rubbish is a cause for mourning rather than celebration, and these films clearly illustrate the overlooked historic fact that France was not `occupied' but had reached an armistice with Germany under the terms of which Germans were allowed to operate in the Northern sector of France. It also shows that Vichy needed no prompting from the Nazis to implement anti-Jewish legislation and eventual persecution and relied on good old French anti-Semitism to get away with it. This film also makes one wonder just how France was deemed `qualified' to administer a zone in post-war Germany, and how truly dangerous it was to be heroic enough to be a member of the Resistance. History is always written by the victors, but the uncomfortable gaps in their given version are exposed when you can see these shadows from the frontline experience. A vital and exceptionally important document.

DVD Verdict [David Ryan] - 3 disc set Chabrol film is Disc One in the 3-DVD review of HITLER AND THE NAZI’S (excerpt)

This 1993 documentary comes from an unexpected source: New Wave French director Claude Chabrol (Les Bonnes Femmes, Violette, The Story of Women), often nicknamed "The French Hitchcock." Befitting this impressive pedigree, The Eye of Vichy is a thoroughly unique documentary.

In 1940, after the fall of Paris, many key French governmental officials fled the country before the advancing Wehrmacht could capture them, including future Free French leader Charles de Gaulle. However, there still was a French government, and France had not been completely occupied. The remnants of La Republique turned to Marshal Phillipe Petain, the unquestioned number one hero of the First World War, to lead them. Calling Petain "beloved by the people" would be an understatement—he was worshipped. Unfortunately, he led his country into collaboration with the Nazis, ruling with an increasingly iron fist out of the small central French village of Vichy.

The Eye of Vichy explores this period of collaboration, which lasted from 1940 until the Allied invasion of Normandy and subsequent liberation of France in 1944. It does so exclusively through official newsreels and propaganda of the Vichy administration. This is a fascinating tactic—as time progresses, we see how the Nazi overlords steadily indoctrinated the French people with textbook Nazi ideology. But it's subtle, and devious…most of the time. Sometimes, it's brutally direct. It's chilling to see a newsreel that talks, in very matter-of-fact, almost friendly terms, of how 100 villagers will be shot unless the town turns in a Resistance fighter who murdered three Nazi officers. Equally powerful are scenes from "The Eternal Jew," a "movie" demonstrating how Jews are actually "vermin." As the war progresses—and begins to go poorly for Germany—French workers are de facto forced into moving to Germany to work in war factories. But of course that isn't what the newsreels tell you…

Chabrol assembles this material with a dramatist's eye for narrative. This is the raw reality of the Vichy period; and that reality tells its own story without the need for extensive explanation. Occasionally, Chabrol will have the narrator (Brian Cox, Manhunter, for the dubbed English version here) put things into historical context, or explain the real story behind some manufactured "news," but for the most part he lets history speak for itself. The result is a film that fairly zips through its 110 minutes, playing like a tragic drama instead of a documentary.

On the other hand, if you aren't familiar with the specific history of Vichy France, or of the general progress of the war, you aren't going to learn it here. Obviously, the falsehoods perpetuated by the Vichy propagandists will have no impact on a viewer if that person doesn't know what really happened. Hence, although it's a very high quality piece, The Eye of Vichy isn't for neophytes.

DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [2/5]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

User reviews from imdb Author: r-c-s from Italy

User reviews from imdb Author: dbborroughs from Glen Cove, New York

L’ENFER

aka: Hell

France (100 mi) 1994

Austin Chronicle [Christopher Null]

Paul (Cluzet) is charming, attractive, hard-working; Nelly (Béart) is beautiful and carefree, devoted to her husband and more than happy to help him make a success of his Edenic lakeside hotel. They're madly in love. Nelly has a baby. Paul has trouble sleeping; he can't shake off a nagging inner voice which needs to know what Nelly's up to every minute of the day. Little by little his suspicions take shape, and jealousy plunges him into an unfathomable purgatory of doubt and dementia. Chabrol's film is a relentlessly bleak, gripping study of pathological jealousy which finds the director more thoroughly engaged than he's been for some while. Based on a rediscovered screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot (whose 1964 production was abandoned after six days' shooting), this is a black comedy which evolves into a long dark night of the soul. The nihilistic vision may be Clouzot's, but the economy, concentration and oppressive atmosphere are pure Chabrol, as is the eruption of the suppressed into the public arena. A work of enthralling virtuosity.

This little-seen French number's title translates as "Torment." Or more to the point, "Hell." In other words, not your typical get-cozy-and-snuggle-up-by-the-fire-with-a-loved-one art flick. But as the film opens, everything is as happy as could be. Nelly (Beart) and Paul (Cluzet) are young hoteliers with a gorgeous country estate. Paul is the consummate host and concierge, while Nelly's stunning beauty and playful friendliness are worth the trip alone. But there lies the problem; it starts with a smile that lingers too long, a lost keepsake, or a few unaccounted-for hours... and pretty soon Paul is convinced that his wife is up to no good. By the time the picture ends, Paul has become hysterically possessive, and L'Enfer's cryptically French ending will make you glad you can rewind a few times to catch the nuance. The lead roles could not have been cast better, and Beart does better work here than in anything else I've seen. As a thriller, L'Enfer is a solid film. As a character study of the horrific way jealousy can ravage a man's soul, L'Enfer is not to be missed.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Among all the directors labelled "nouvelle vague," Claude Chabrol was arguably the one who had more affinities with the precedent generation so despised by a lot of his sixties colleagues. And the generation before Chabrol included the genius Henri-George Clouzot. So, to film "les diaboliques"'s director lost screenplay, Chabrol was ideal. Both he and Clouzot mix detective stories, social satire and psychological studies. "L'enfer" might be one of Chabrol's finest achievements. François Cluzet, in a lifetime performance, portrays a jealous man-recalling Bunuel's hero in "El'(1952)-, but his jealousy verges on madness. Little by little, with small touches, we see this maleficent obsession grow like a cancer, destroying everything, his wife's sincere love (well played by Emmanuelle Béart), his personality, his job. And see how Chabrol masters space. At the beginning, the action takes place in a wonderful lake setting. Then we do not get out of the hotel owned by Cluzet, with its dangerous corridors. And in the final sequences, the director confines his two characters to a doctor office or their bedroom. Cluzet's madness and its inexorable progression are masterfully shown too. First, only some gestures, some voice inflexions. Then he begins to follow her everywhere. Then come the hallucinations:the amateur movie projected onto a small screen in the restaurant is the film's apex and should be part of a Chabrol anthology. Interior voices obsess the unfortunate hero, and every time he looks himself in a mirror, he sees an irrational world, this world he lives in, this world he believes in. No longer able to communicate with the normal one, he forces the other ones (his wife being first in line) to enter his. And we are not sure, at the end of the movie, that Béart is not on the other side of the mirror too.

Two private jokes: In the first sequence, Béart puts her hair in braids, and she resembles Vera Clouzot in "les diaboliques." When the young couple comes back to the restaurant after the wedding, the little accordion tune "les couleurs du temps" that you hear was written by Guy Béart, Emmanuelle's father a long time ago.

NB.Clouzot's version, which he began to film circa 1963, featured Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani.(although the film was never completed, it has a page on IMDb)

User comments from imdb Author: jono-73 from United Kingdom

With "L'Enfer", Claude Chabrol has successfully revamped a first draft of Henri-Georges Clouzot's unfilmed 1964 screenplay, to produce a typically elegant and particularly dark psychological drama. On the face of it, the film's central character Paul (François Cluzet) would appear to have it all: he's the owner of a successful hotel in an idyllic rural lakeside setting, he has a beautiful, spirited young wife, Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) and a healthy young son. It's almost as if Paul needs to invent something to upset this picture perfect scenario - although people in the hospitality industry may wryly note that to the extent that they manage to create a surface impression of calm and order for their guests, the stress levels behind closed doors increase exponentially. Thus Paul begins to suspect Nelly of carrying on an affair with hunky car mechanic Martineau (Marc Lavoine). Jealousy takes root in an already neurotic personality, and gradually consumes every fibre of Paul's being. His suspicion becomes an absolute conviction despite the lack of any hard evidence, and eventually becomes non-specific, so that every man in the vicinity is seen as a threat. The hotel becomes, in effect, an asylum, with the resident lunatic in charge. I guffawed when I read Roger Ebert's review which alluded to the guests getting the Basil Fawlty treatment, but Chabrol plays it deadly serious, to good effect. This story of destructive obsession is taken to its logical conclusion. Hell may or may not have any metaphysical reality, but for Chabrol and Clouzot it's most certainly a place on earth, a place of our own making, though not alas somewhere that one can easily escape once one has unwittingly made it one's destination. As a portrayal of the onset and development of mental illness, "L'Enfer" is very effective indeed, made with an economic precision that sustains its ever-narrowing single-pointed focus. Although to begin with Nelly's capricious behaviour indeed suggests that Paul's questions as to her fidelity are justified, the manner in which he attempts to find the answers is increasingly alienating. Our sympathy shifts to Nelly, and with it the film's most pressing mystery, which turns out not to be whether or not she is actually adulterous, but why she stays with Paul and is prepared to be held captive by him. Is it guilt? Unconditional love? A misguided attempt at rescue? Something more mysterious still? Cluzet and Beart both judge their performances well. His is the showier of the two roles, and he does well to express the fragmenting personality and seething rage of Paul without allowing it to spill into farce. Beart, though, interested me more. While Paul becomes just one thing, an embodiment of unadulterated jealousy, Nelly seems to be constantly re-inventing herself in response to events, revealing ever more facets of an enigmatic, sensual, resourceful nature. Paul's ruthless attempt to contain this creative life-force is a genuine tragedy for both of them.

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

Of the filmmakers who emerged from the late '50s French New Wave, Claude Chabrol is one of the most prolific -- and the most curiously uneven. In "L'Enfer," which in French means "Hell," the 64-year-old auteur sets up another of his subtle examinations of human motives -- in this case, a husband's insane jealousy over the alleged infidelities of his wife. Inadvertently, though, Chabrol reveals less about his chosen themes than he does about his own reluctance to bring them fully to life.

The story itself -- which was originally written then abandoned three decades ago by Henri-Georges Clouzot with Belgian novelist Jose-Andre Lacour -- has all the elements of a gripping potboiler. Paul (Francois Cluzet) lives with his ravishing, newlywed wife, Nelly (Emmanuelle Beart), in the small country hotel they run on the bucolic shores of a lake. On the surface, at least, Paul's life seems perfect: His surroundings are idyllic; his work is fulfilling; and his wife is so vivaciously, sensuously alive that all men -- young and old alike -- seem to melt at her feet.

Unfortunately, this last matter is the source of his distress. After catching Nelly in the act of viewing some slides with a local car mechanic, this fidgety squirrel of a man becomes convinced that she is cheating on him with everybody in town. It's true, of course, that with a woman as buoyantly irresistible as Nelly as a partner, jealousy is a simple, unavoidable fact of life. And, initially, Chabrol casts a suspicious light on Nelly's girlish flirtations with other men. She could be making a fool of Paul, using those visits to her sick mother and long days sunning on the beach as a cover for her illicit liaisons.

What's more likely, though, is that Paul is simply bonkers. As the movie progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Nelly is as devoted to him as she is beautiful. But despite his wife's desperate efforts to convince him that she is faithful, Paul will hear nothing of it. Sure that a woman as desirable as his wife couldn't possibly be satisfied with someone so nondescript, Paul plays Iago to his own Othello, torturing himself to the point that his mind begins to unravel.

As the film moves toward its gory climax, Paul slips more and more deeply into delusion. But instead of escalating the tension as the dramatic stakes heighten, Chabrol seems to let up, allowing the story to idle and stall. In both Clouzot's original script and Chabrol's updating, the premise of "L'Enfer" is brazenly melodramatic. But in bringing his version to the screen, Chabrol seems intent on blunting the sensationalistic edge of his material. It's as if he hoped to discover something deeper in the material, something beneath the melodrama that touches on the universal.

If so, he blew it; and not only that, he turns an otherwise juicy story into an enervating exercise in cutting against the grain of the text. Though this is the film's major failing, there are other, smaller ones as well. The most alarming of these is his use of Beart, who without doubt is one of the movies' most dazzling natural wonders, but who, in playing this open, unaffected woman, looks as if she were instructed to prance around like some sort of circus pony in Gypsy drag. In the presence of such beauty, what Chabrol does comes close to defacement.

User comments from imdb Author: Nin Chan from Canada

If this film represents a faithful adherence to Clouzot's original script, one would have to say that the story may be regarded as the absolute apex/exemplar of Clouzot's understanding of psychology. At the same time, L'Enfer is absolutely a Claude Chabrol film, and the fact that it rests comfortably in either canon attests to the lasting parallels between the two masters.

As with all of Chabrol's foremost creations, this is incisive social commentary masquerading under the banal tag of "psychological thriller". Though the film can be enjoyed without any deeper engagement with or meditation on its themes of Othello-esquire obsession/jealousy, I think some thought will reveal it to be a far more rewarding film than a superficial viewing might suggest.

Situating/contextualizing the film in Chabrol's vast corpus of work, one finds in "L'Enfer" another nightmarish journey into the hazards of bourgeois sterility. Though one might say that the work is naturalistic in some respects (the intense violence that simmers beneath the genteel exterior is revealed in his disdainful disparagement of the neighboring competition), that the overreaching, emotionally volatile and profoundly sensitive husband is particularly prone to this type of neurosis, the telling proclamation of "sans fin" that closes the film suggests that the narrative is not one of isolated particulars, but a general affliction, a self-perpetuating tragedy engendered by flawed social mechanisms.

Throughout his career, Chabrol has been especially critical of the life-denying entropy and suffocating claustrophobia of bourgeois marriage, a plight where the insatiably voracious woman feels her haplessness and subordination most acutely. This, in some respects, might be his finest evaluation of marriage and erotic love in general. The tensions explored throughout the film are far from novel, again we bear witness to the irresolvable Romantic preoccupation, the desire to possess and identify with a subjective other. Again, as with "Les Bonnes Femmes," we see the carnivorous, destructive male principle, eager to subdue, asphyxiate, smother and ultimately devour irrepressible femininity.

Yet lest we distance ourselves from Paul's evident psychosis, Chabrol implicates marriage as an institution endorsed by society at large. Note Paul's perverse, masochistic pleasure in fabricating these outlandish fantasies, particularly the wild reverie of Emanuelle Beart entertaining the entire hotel in the attic. Is this the only way to preserve erotic love in the nauseating ennui of marriage, to continually reinvent the Other and, through wild imaginings, make him/her a stranger so as to escape the concreteness of conjugal reality? On another level, the film might be read as an Adlerian representation of modern neurosis, of a nervous man who is inadequately equipped for the rigours of social expectation, whose overreaching demand for absolute order and unity invariably drive him to dementia and a flight from reality. Chimeras of success and masculine authority elude him, undermined by personal insecurities and a willful, independent wife. How then, does he compensate for his lack of control? Refuge in the sadistic alternate reality that he manufactures throughout the movie.

Technically, this movie is almost immaculate, featuring outstanding performances (Emmanuelle Beart is a force of nature) and repeated viewings affirm that it is a movie of great understanding. I'm not sure if this review made any sort of sense at all, but at the end of the day all I can do is urge you to immerse yourself in "L'Enfer".

Westminster Wisdom Gracchi

DVD Times Noel Megahey

L'Enfer Mark Boydell from DVD Times

Raymond Johnston review

L'Enfer (1994) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [2/5]

WearetheMovies.com AK

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

L’enfer Jeremy Nyhuis from Cinematorics, June 22, 2009

A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5] (different review from above)

User reviews from imdb Author: Doctor_Bombay from Lucas Buck, NC

User reviews from imdb Author: zio ugo

User reviews from imdb Author: howie73

User reviews from imdb Author: christopher-underwood from Greenwich – London

User reviews from imdb Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Angus T. Cat from England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Alice Copeland Brown (alicecbrown@yahoo.com) from Boston

The New York Times (Caryn James) review October 19, 1994, also here: FILM REVIEW; Chabrol's Study of Conjugal Jealousy

FILM; For Papa Chabrol, It's All in the Family Alan Riding from The New York Times, August 22, 1993

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

Nashville Scene [Rob Nelson]

LA CÉRÉMONIE A 97

France Germany (112 mi) 1995

LA CÉRÉMONIE (1995) is among Chabrol’s most critically acclaimed films and greeted with such unbridled enthusiasm that Les Cahiers du Cinéma suggested Chabrol may be France’s greatest filmmaker, an extremely ironic observation coming on the heels of Chabrol, at least in America, being the most neglected filmmaker of the French New Wave, where Rivette, Rohmer, Godard, and Truffaut have all been anointed to the head of the class at some point in their careers, but never Chabrol. This assessment is largely based on a lack of innovation in the world or cinema, where Chabrol, often seen in the Hitchcock thriller mold, may be viewed as the most commercial of the bunch. Perhaps as significant, while they all wrote regularly for the film magazine, Chabrol less memorably, as his critical comments were less strident and opinionated, never going as far out on a limb as the others. Chabrol, along with Godard, who has seemingly retreated into the video milieu, have been the most prolific directors, where this is the 46th film of 54 features. Adapted from British suspense writer Ruth Rendel’s 1977 novel A Judgement in Stone, one of the fascinating elements is the title change, which suggests the celebration of a wedding or an awards banquet, but instead it refers to a French nickname for the guillotine, their historical version of the electric chair, as it is the ritual device used to execute prisoners. And true to its title, this is a sharply written comic satire on class divisions and the principles of social order, a domestic thriller standing somewhere between comedy and horror, where it’s impossible not to recall Jean Genet’s One Act play The Maids, loosely based upon the infamous Papin sisters, though both Genet and Chabrol depart from historical realism, where Chabrol resorts to a meticulous recreation of the banal habits and routines of everyday bourgeois life, shown in minimalist detail.

The unique power of this film is the fascinating relationship that develops between two of the finest and most eccentric actresses in French history, the pairing of Isabelle Huppert, nothing short of sensational as Jeanne, a volatile and acid-tongued postal clerk, and the equally enthralling Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie, the reserved and tight-lipped maid of the upscale Lelièvre family living in an immense chateau in Brittany where Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset), a former model turned trophy wife, gives the orders. She dotes on her authoritative, Mozart loving husband (Jean-Pierre Cassel), owner of the family business, while running her own art gallery. The spoiled children are twenty-year old Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) and teenage Gilles (Valentin Merlet), all basically wrapped up in their own lives, a typically aloof and condescending bourgeois household. When the kids try to get closer to Sophie, claiming their mom treats her like a robot ordering her around, she quickly rebuffs them, showing no social interest, retreating to her room where she prefers watching mindless television shows. Nonetheless, Sophie keeps the house spotless, which puts Catherine at ease, but the rest of the family remain skeptical at her utter indifference, showing no outside interests or social skills. She does hear about Jeanne from the outraged father who believes she is opening their mail and resealing it before delivery, an act that just galls him, as he refuses to allow anyone else to undermine his authority. Sophie fulfills her chores perfectly, but grows ghastly pale when she receives written shopping instructions, deathly afraid the family will find out her closest held secret, the fact that she is illiterate. When she runs across Jeanne for the first time in the supermarket, her verbal reticence is matched by Jeanne’s nonstop chatter, where she is quickly baled out of the jam while Jeanne gives her all kinds of shopping tips. The two lower class women become instant friends, growing even closer when both share dark secrets, as Jeanne may have accidentally killed her own baby, while Sophie implies she might have murdered her own father in an arson incident. In both cases there as insufficient evidence to prosecute.

Once they become friends, they’re inseparable, like long lost sisters, where Jeanne spews cruel gossip with regularity, showing nothing but contempt and disdain for the upper classes, literally mocking Catherine for asking Sophie to work on an off day for a birthday party for Melinda, expecting the hired help to be available at a moment’s notice, even though Sophie informed her ahead of time that she was doing volunteer work at the church with Jeanne. Sophie helps set up the appetizers before leaving for church, to Catherine’s dismay, finding her attitude troubling. At the church, women pick through the donated clothes, separating the usable from the worn out, where Jeanne can’t believe what junk rich people donate, using the church as a garbage disposal, as most of what they find is unusable. Their rude mockery grows so excessive and out of control that eventually the priest has to ask them to leave, as they’re humiliating the donors. To Sophie and Jeanne, they’re just being honest, saying what must be said, where Sophie’s friendship seems to empower Jeanne to be even more wild and outspoken, which in turn opens up Sophie as well, where isolated, they feel powerless and alone, but together they’re an unstoppable force, perfectly expressed when they’re watching television together like sorority sisters, arms around each other, where ironically they’re watching Michel Piccoli and Stéphane Audran in Chabrol’s earlier film WEDDING IN BLOOD (1973). The Lelièvre family finds Sophie’s behavior so alarming they give her a week’s notice, which only further infuriorates Jeanne who bristles with anger, sick of the rich always having their way, always telling others what to do. When they return to the estate to pick up Sophie’s things, the Lelièvre’s are sitting calmly on the sofa recording a televised production of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, where a notorious liar and seducer of women is sent to Hell and damnation. Actually the Mozart opera of choice where the lower class servants sarcastically make fun of the idyll rich is The Marriage of Figaro, literally leading them around like puppets on a string. Nonetheless, Chabrol uses this setting to bring it all to a head, leaving nothing to the imagination, where this strange pair of women exacts justice, a strange word that has a different connotation in the larger cosmos, as the universe exacts its own, seen at work over the end credits, where the ultimate finale doesn’t occur until the final credit has run.

There is a creepy and seductive nature to this strange pair of women, with erotic lesbian undertones to their developing intimacy, where Jeanne gleefully offers plentiful kisses all over Sophie’s cheeks, where implied sex is intertwined with their growing anarchistic liberation, where they defy all moral boundaries. While it begins innocently enough giggling and tickling one another on the bed, it’s telling that it takes both of them together to rise to the level of class revolt, becoming a lethal pair, while individually they are harmless, as neither would have the strength to carry out their fateful rebellion. After the deed is done, Jeanne proudly comments to Sophie, “On a bien fait (We have done well),” as if they’ve finally risen to the occasion and stood up to the higher classes, like some kind of Mother Courage Marxist spectacle. Their friendship, however, is toxic, like a time bomb waiting to go off, where the results can only be disastrous. Together they represent an ultimate horror, driven by Jeanne’s calamitous sense of danger, unease and restlessness, becoming a collective madness.

It was chilling to see this film about this classic murderous pair on the day following the Boston terrorist fiasco, where the Tsarnaev brothers, 26-year old Tamerlan and his 19-year old brother Dzhokhar, seem more like Jeanne and Sophie and the Columbine killers than al Qaida. A pair of brothers is a classic dyad scenario, like Bonnie and Clyde, Leopold and Loeb, and the Washington D.C. snipers, a twisted relationship that plays out very differently than a lone gunman. Mass killers are mostly *not* loners or outcasts, and the Columbine killers were neither. Killer dyads are more consistent with a dominant, charismatic leader and a submissive follower, where the leader is often a sadistic psychopath. Dyads usually contain contrasting personalities, as often there is a significant age difference, where a psychopathic killer generally does not hook up with another psychopath, nor do depressive pairs work well together. Columbine was a perfect illustration of a classic dyad, where a psychopath like Eric Harris craved excitement and had difficulty sustaining it, but needed Dylan Klebold following his every move with adulation. Who knew this film would recall the Columbine massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings?

This brilliant, near-diabolical drama by French director Claude Chabrol stays with you for days. The film follows Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a sullen, nervous live-in housemaid who takes a job caring for the rich Lelievres family--led by matronly Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) and her inhumane patriarch of a husband, Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel). Sophie can't read, nor does she appear to notice the family's condescending habit of psychoanalyzing her behavior. Evading their inquiries with defensive bursts of "I don't know," she holes up for hours in her attic bedroom. Then she meets Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a pig-tailed, gum-smacking postal worker who casually advises her new friend to "Stand up to them!"--which, in her own way, she does. The class tension continues to escalate in this perfectly detailed film, calibrated by Chabrol to deliver maximum impact.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

When Catherine (Bisset) takes on Sophie (Bonnaire) as housekeeper, her family's impressed by Sophie's aura of quiet responsibility, even though they're not convinced she knows how to serve dinner correctly. Snobbish but liberal, they nevertheless treat her generously. Only when she starts to consort with postmistress Jeanne (Huppert), a gossip whom husband Georges (Cassel) suspects of opening the family mail, do they find real cause for complaint. But by then the women have a secret bond which excludes them from the safe cosseted world of Sophie's employers. Chabrol's adaptation of Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone benefits from the director's immaculate sense of social and psychological detail. The film's strong points are not mystery, suspense or even surprise, but Chabrol's flair for characterisation, careful pacing and solid evocation of bourgeois complacency and anti-bourgeois hatred creates a palpable sense of unease that fully justifies the shockingly violent finale. Ledoyen, the daughter of the household, is a discovery; Bisset returns to form; and Huppert, unusually vivacious, is terrific.

User comments from imdb (page 4) Author: dbdumonteil

Chabrol's plan was similar in "la ceremonie" to that of "la rupture" (1971). Take a detective story (Charlotte Armstrong for "la rupture" (the balloon man), Ruth Rendell for "la ceremonie" (A judgement in stone), then give it a "social satire" flavor. He did it all right in Armstrong's case which was a pure thriller. Rendell's case is much more different, since she is a much superior writer than her late American colleague. "A judgement in stone" is a captiving novel, very subtile, with interesting characters. The social critic is implicit, but sitting on the fence; the bourgeois are sympathetic people, their daughter's proposal to teach the maid to read is sincere. But Rendell makes us feel the gap between this cosy intellectual life in which you enjoy operas and the illiterate world of the maid where books are enemies. A lot of the psychological side eludes C.Chabrol. First of all, Sandrine Bonnaire was not the character. She's much too beautiful. (A young Shelley Winters would have fit the bill quite well!) In the novel, the heroine was some kind of village idiot with empty eyes who was not realizing her social condition. The same goes for I.Huppert, much too attractive to play her crude friend. Jean-Pierre Cassel and Jacqueline Bisset, on the other hand, are credible bourgeois and make up a bit for the weakness of the casting. Chabrol's work is not bad, by a long shot. But, while explaining what should be implied his wholesale massacre loses some of its strength.

Albuquerque Alibi [Karla Esquivel]

The new film, La Cérémonie, may play with your expectations of what a suspense thriller should be. Forget shock value for the sake of itself. Instead, this Gallic import is filled with a somber tension that carries itself hypnotically throughout the entire film--like the white noise of television after you've fallen half asleep. French new wave director Claude Chabrol, whose career is laden with thrillers that also function as social commentary, is considered France's Alfred Hitchcock. It's obvious he has learned much from Hitchcock as he slowly unravels the suspense of his story ever so carefully.

The film takes place in Brittany, where Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) hires the withdrawn Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) to care for her comfortably numb bourgeois family. The class span is wide between the two women. Catherine basks in her money, perhaps rubbing it in a bit as she gives Sophie an overzealous tour of her immense château. Sophie, on the other hand, is oblivious, almost mechanical, in her behavior. Clearly, it is her main purpose in life to serve like a listless proletariat ... or is it? The family is relieved that Sophie appears content. She doesn't read books; instead she reads the talking heads of television. The children accuse their parents of wanting Sophie to become paralyzed by television. Of course this makes sense. The best workers are always those who are complacent in their world.

Sophie is the best housekeeper the family has ever had. But soon her anti-socialism and gross lack of social skills begin to get her into some trouble. It's not as if she doesn't want to be social. She's just too busy hiding her illiteracy from the family. She wanders about town trying to decipher shopping lists and hangs up the telephone when she can't retrieve information that would require her to read. If she appears mute to the family, it is because they are blind to her obvious problem.

Sophie eventually sparks up a friendship with Jeanne, (Isabelle Huppert of Amateur) a wild child who loathes the upper class and harbors a distinct sense of rebellion. They share the common bond of both having committed crimes in the past that they scarcely got away with. Isabelle Huppert strays away from her usual delicate roles and comes out roaring like a lion; she is hardly recognizable. The friendship between these two women has an inherent quality of danger to it. Jeanne represents the ultimate horror because she is unreasonable and helplessly chaotic. She's a time bomb waiting to explode at the upper middle class, which she loathes. She ignites her sense of rebellion in Sophie, pushing the meek servant to stand up for herself. The family resents Jeanne, and they forbid Sophie to have her in their house. In return, Sophie despises the family, noting all of their trivial problems and says, "If I only had a tenth of what they have, I'd be happy."

La Cérémonie is filled with a vicious psychological tension that admittedly isn't always easy to sit through. You just know that something atrocious is lurking in the corner, waiting to happen. Chabrol utilizes class differences to emphasize the brewing tension. In reality, Chabrol is making social commentary. He brings to light, in a horrific manner, the blatant problems that exist between the classes in modern-day France. Though Communism has recently taken a dive, Marxist ideology is still alive and well.

"You can't get the staff these days" by Quentin Curtis from The London Independent, March 10, 1996

Two of the finest—and strangest—French actresses of our time play a pair of menial workers in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie, based on Ruth Rendell's novel A Judgement in Stone. As the rapport builds between Isabelle Huppert's volatile postal clerk and Sandrine Bonnaire's tight-lipped maid, Huppert confesses: "I'd really like to be an actress, wouldn't you?" With just about any American or British star, the line would seem bathetic or incredible. But these two astonishing actresses so completely shrug off their glamour—though not their luminous, compulsive watchability—that it rings true. They are humble people dreaming of histrionics. Like everything in Chabrol's perfectly poised film, the line hints at hidden depths while staying rooted in the everyday.

Such as, for instance, the first scene of the film, played out in the bleached white light of a winter's morning in Saint Malo, northern France, in which Mme Lelièvre (Jacqueline Bisset), the elegant wife of a wealthy businessman, picks up Sophie (Bonnaire) from the station, and interviews her in a local restaurant about the job of looking after her house. The meeting is curt and joyless—as fraught as the strings resounding on the soundtrack. Sophie gets the job and makes a satisfactory, self-effacing start. If she is diffident, even defensive, it may be only that she is desperate for her employers not to know that she is illiterate. Or, then again, there may be a darker secret—one that bonds her with Huppert.

Huppert is already known to the family Bonnaire works for—and hated and distrusted by them. But Bonnaire forms an outlaw friendship with her. They collect discarded clothes for the local church, though even their charity hints at something sinister, disturbed. These weird soul sisters are linked by an odd closure of character; the world proceeds unnoticed by their tight, focused minds. They are not unhappy, just detached.

Isabelle Huppert, last Saturday night, won the French César award for best actress. Fine though Huppert is, it should have gone to Bonnaire (also nominated). It is her pale, tense presence that carries the film, whose first section Huppert doesn't appear in. "I would have noticed if she were hideous," Bisset tells her family when she first employs Bonnaire. And it is true there is nothing outwardly alarming about Bonnaire: just a hint of pique in her quietness, maybe, a flutter of neurosis in her efficiency. Her short, trim figure and her trousers make her seem girlish. The only real worry is in the flustered way she clears a tray of glasses, betraying more madness than method.

Huppert's clerk is a much more obviously troubling character: sullen, abusive, atrabilious. Both Bonnaire and Huppert have always had a coldness in their acting, equally well suited to playing the transcendent and the transgressive. Here their peculiar brands of off-centre beauty—Bonnaire all gaunt intensity; Huppert wispy distraction—meet and meld. In one of the most memorable scenes, they watch television, arms around each other's shoulders, joined into one brooding beast.

Some may view the movie as an attack on the bourgeoisie, as represented by the family Bonnaire works for. But Chabrol, though he has described the film as the "last Marxist movie," retains some balance. True, the Lelièvres are rich and live in luxury. At the climax, the family watch Don Giovanni on television, wearing evening dress. However, even here, it is hard to gauge from their high-flown dialogue ("It's very homogenous: nobody stands out," Mme L says of the performance), whether we are supposed to see them as pretentious or cultured. Certainly, they are considerate employers, even if Jacqueline Bisset's superb mistress of the house is too chic-ly busy to notice much that goes on around her. If the movie has a message, it's that the fault lies not in masters or serfs, but in the society that fosters such divisions. The rich's succour only exacerbates the wounds of the poor. Then again, you may think the movie illustrates the problem of getting good staff these days.

For Chabrol, this is a return to the form of his heyday, of films such as Le Boucher (1970). His imagery is subtly unsettling, as when he shoots Bonnaire getting out of a car from around the other side of it. As so often in his work, the feel is Hitchcockian. There is an indefinable but distinct sense of foreboding, and one unbearable suspense sequence. But there is not so much sadism as with Hitch. Chabrol withdraws the knife rather than turning it, allowing us to stop screaming and start thinking. It is probably best that you know as little about the plot as possible. But one word of advice: stay for the credits—this is a movie that stores surprises to the end.

La Cérémonie by Royal S. Brown from Cineaste

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review [4/4] February 14, 1997

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

Slate [Dave Kehr]

Senses of Cinema – La cérémonie Julien Lapointe from Senses of Cinema, April 2001

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also seen here: Ceremonie, La (1996) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com

DVD Times Anthony Nield

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4] also seen here: ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

Mike D'Angelo

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review

<vergerus@interlog.com>

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

La Cérémonie (1995) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

James Bowman review

WearetheMovies.com AK

DVD Verdict Dan Mancini

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]

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

Froilan Vispo review

Chabrol Day Two: Class status and delusional think... Ray Young from Flickhead, June 22, 2009

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Mark R. Leeper review

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [4/5]

Cérémonie, La Glenn Heath from Match Cuts, February 16, 2009

The Ceremony Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Reader (capsule review)

User reviews from imdb Author: Edgar Soberón Torchia (estorchia@gmail.com) from Panama

User reviews from imdb Author: KuRt-33 (kurtaerden@yahoo.com) from Antwerp, Belgium

User reviews from imdb Author: G. Gulati (v@gulati.demon.co.uk) from Preston, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: LCShackley from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: doctorlightning from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: writers_reign from London, England

Mondo Digital also reviewing MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT and CRY OF THE OWL

Images Journal James Newman, reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman

Austin Chronicle (Russell Smith) review [3.5/5]

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review

San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]

Cérémonie, La Kevin Thomas from The South Florida Sun-Sentinal

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] February 7, 1997

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] April 17, 2012

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review December 20, 1996, also here: Maid Is Hired: Danger Is Served

From Chabrol, a French 'Thelma and Louise' Alan Riding from The New York Times, December 15, 1996

NEW VIDEO RELEASES The New York Times, August 15, 1997

DVDBeaver.com Blu-ray [Gary W. Tooze]

La Cérémonie: Information from Answers.com

Were the Tsarnaev Brothers Like Columbine Killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? Dave Cullen from Slate, April 19, 2013

THE SWINDLE (Rien ne va plus)

France Switzerland (101 mi) 1997

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dbdumonteil

This Chabrol's movie begins well with funny characters, Michel Serrault cast as a bogus colonel, Huppert, as a bogus femme fatale, and François Cluzet as a security guard working for shady guys. The scenes in the ski resort and on the plane, with a witty dialog including money, of course, gastronomy,army (Ah! our beautiful French Army! an old and distinguished lady tells the "colonel"), and even Dead Poet Society (watch out for the lines). Then, half-way through, the movie loses steam, the pace becomes too slow, the dialog ponderous. Jean-François Balmer (a great actor though) and his gang of baddies are not convincing, being too stereotyped compared to the three initial characters. At times, it would seem that Chabrol and his actors preferred to enjoy the sea sun and beach of the wonderful setting. Hence this disappointing second part where "rien ne va plus"(nothing works anymore), and with a very trite ending at that! Average.

Village Voice (Amy Taubin) (Page 2)

Claude Chabrol specializes in bleak social comedies and brutal historic melodramas that take a pickax to the economic and power relationships of the bourgeoisie. The Swindle, his 50th film, is a failed attempt at frivolity. Isabelle Huppert and Michel Serrault play a pair of con artists, long-term partners who, despite a 25-year age difference, may have been lovers at some time in the past. In any event, this is a symbiotic relationship. Their most ambitious caper takes them from Paris to the Swiss mountain resort of Sils-Maria (where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra) to the Caribbean. The scenery is fetchingly photographed, as is Huppert, who changes wigs as often as others change their underpants. Even in the most tired situations, Chabrol has a few sophisticated filmmaking tricks up his sleeve. Thus the double-crossing protagonists have a visual correlative in traveling shots where it's impossible to tell if it's the cars or the camera that's changed direction.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

When you're a con artist, how can you really trust your lifepartner if they're also your professional partner - a trickster, like you? And at what point does a small-time scam become dangerously big-time? When is the game no longer a game? How, in fact, after years of living a lie, can you tell what's real any more? These are the questions raised by Chabrol's eccentrically clever concoction, situated in that treacherous territory between sly comedy and something rather nastier. Betty (Huppert) and Victor (Serrault) have been happily conning convention guests for years, until she sets her cap at Maurice (Cluzet) - is she simply out to swindle him, really attracted, or out to make Victor jealous? And is Maurice as innocent as he seems? Chabrol's movie is mostly a slight, elegant jape, enjoyable but undemanding save in the way it asks us to keep pace with the Mamet-style twists. It's all very playful, with an ironic, irreverent take on national stereotypes, and motives kept admirably ambiguous. Then, along comes a killer twist and a climax of authentically operatic cruelty, as baroque, brilliantly unsettling and casually brutal as almost anything he's done; proof that after 50 movies the old magic's still there.

Austin Chronicle (Russell Smith) review [3.5/5]

Even if -- especially if -- your movie tastes run to the aggressively stylish textures and Benzedrine-cranking narratives of young filmmakers such as Doug Liman, Guy Ritchie, and Danny Boyle, I call to your attention this 1997 film by 68-year-old French New Wave pioneer Claude Chabrol. Mind you, I'm not here to argue the intrinsic superiority of understatement over flamboyance. Art's a big tent, after all, and the pipe-bomb flingers deserve their place right alongside the rapier artistes. But Chabrol's uncannily subtle and suggestive movies do serve as powerful reminders of how little main force is actually required to pack a story with mystery, ambient tension, and psychological complexity. As with many of Chabrol's films, The Swindle achieves more of its emotional effect through what is hinted at than what is actually said or shown. The script, by Chabrol, revolves around the relationship between two modestly successful French con-gamers: an attractive fortyish woman named Betty (Huppert) and partner Victor (Serrault), a debonair older gent who, in a typical bit of Chabrolian ambiguity, might be her lover, father, mentor, or some kinky combination thereof. Most of the pair's scams involve Betty putting the femme-fatale moves on some patsy in a hotel bar, drugging his drink, then accompanying him to his room. After the Mickey kicks in, she and Victor rob him. (Invariably, they take only part of the dupe's money, leaving enough behind so that he's unsure whether he's been robbed.) For such a devious pair, Betty and Victor are surprisingly trusting of each other, scrupulously dividing their spoils and sharing all the details of their respective lives. So when Betty unexpectedly starts working a solo scam on a handsome Swiss guy named Maurice (Cluzet), Victor starts losing a bit of his arrogant assurance about where he stands with his sexy, increasingly independent-minded protégé. A fairly standard grifters' cross/doublecross setup drives the plot, but far more interesting is the extreme uncertainty that Chabrol introduces into the characters' intentions and motivations. Like the novelist Patricia Highsmith, whose material he adapted very successfully in The Cry of the Owl, Chabrol concocts intelligent, infinitely complex criminal characters who act out of such unorthodox motivations as slighted pride, insecurity, raging hubris, and simple misunderstanding. The Swindle's story develops slowly and matter-of-factly, but as with Chabrol's previous film, La Ceremonie, it builds up a powerful head of psychological tension toward the end, adding a late twist or two that shed further oblique light on the whole affair. Compared to Chabrol's La Ceremonie, which also featured Huppert, The Swindle has a much lighter, sometimes overtly comic feel, though the delightfully multilayered performances of Huppert and Serrault lend it a perverse, Hitchcockian kind of charm that's anything but sweet and innocuous. It'd be nice if more movies possessed these virtues, but the fact is that Chabrol (once slagged as a Hitchcock knockoff artist) is essentially inimitable -- a sole-source supplier of a refreshing, sui-generis filmmaking style. Appreciate him now, both for what he is and what he stubbornly refuses to be.

not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review

DVD Times Anthony Nield

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

CNN Showbiz (Paul Tatara) review

Chabrol Day Six: Rien ne va plus Ray Young from Flickhead, June 26, 2009

Harvey S. Karten review

The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

Rien ne va plus (1997) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review

Nitrate Online (Capsule) Eddie Cockrell

DVD Talk (David Cornelius) dvd review [2/5]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C-]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

User reviews from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

User reviews from imdb Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

User reviews from imdb Author: rosscinema (rosscinema@cox.net) from Oceanside, Ca.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: writers_reign from London, England

Variety (David Rooney) review

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

San Francisco Examiner (G. Allen Johnson) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review

Swindle, The Kevin Thomas from The LA Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin, December 23, 1998, also here: FILM REVIEW; Chabrol's 50th Feature: What Are His Enigmatic Scam Artists Doing?

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

THE COLOR OF LIES (Au coeur du mensonge) A 96

France (113 mi) 1999

This is the kind of deeply complex character study that is nearly absent from films today, though superficially it might recall those Sunday night television episodes of Columbo or Murder She Wrote, as this is ostensively a small town murder mystery. But Chabrol’s artistry turns this into a chilling atmospheric descent into dark interiors, idyllically set by the sea in a small Breton fishing village of St. Malo on the north coast of France where there’s little sunlight, as every scene is bathed in the cool dampness of a frigid Atlantic air, where waves can be heard crashing overnight, literally explosions confronting a collective mindset of the town’s guilty consciences. A superb sociological mystery that is as much an exposé of the sleepy local community, a place where everyone knows everybody else, where the film examines the quiet reverberations of a young 10-year old schoolgirl’s raped and murdered body discovered in the nearby woods. The prime suspect, due to the fact he was likely the last person to see her alive, is her emotionally fragile art teacher, René Sterne (Jacques Gamblin), himself a failed and frustrated artist following an accident that has left him with a limp. His devoted wife Vivianne (Sandrine Bonnaire) refuses to believe he had anything to do with a grotesque murder, but many of the locals withdraw their kids from René’s art classes. The film recalls Chabrol’s earlier films COP AU VIN (1985) and INSPECTEUR LAVARDIN (1986), as both feature an irrepressible detective sniffing around small town homicides, though here Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, with her high pitched voice and constant cigarette in her hand, plays the recently hired chief inspector Frédérique Lesage, much to the regret of veteran inspector Loudun (Bernard Verley), who was next in line for the position until they turned to an outsider, claiming the town leaders didn't want to pay him a higher pension since he plans to retire in a year.

The film is replete with this kind of local charm, adding humor and color to the otherwise somber interior reflections of the anxiously insecure René, who remains interesting largely because of his artistic temperament, as he’s always intensely passionate about his painting, but his continual frustration with his work and his own troubled life leaves him in a perpetual gloomy state, seemingly a broken man who remains overly dour and morose. Vivianne, on the other hand, remains vivaciously alive and couldn’t be more cheerful and upbeat, but she has a restless spirit as well, becoming increasingly introspective as the film progresses. Enter Desmot (Antoine de Caunes), something of a local media celebrity, a charming but overly pretentious cad, a man with an inflated view of himself, but a successful writer and TV commentator. Vivianne is challenged by thoughts of an affair with Desmot, as he continually flatters her with an easy going charm, exactly the opposite of her self-loathing husband, where getting information out of him is like pulling teeth. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film is Chabrol’s choice to turn this into a psychological study camouflaged as a murder mystery, where the police investigation takes a back seat to René’s self absorbed trauma, focusing instead on his reactions to the murder, his public ostracism, and his artistic failures. His deteriorating state of mind is matched by the police frustrations with their own inability to identify a suspect. Perhaps most interesting is the changing relationship between René and his wife, which on the surface remains supportive, but her subconscious yearnings lead her to Desmot, who makes an impulsive suggestion that Vivianne wear the color blue, a color that quickly pervades the entire film, as the town is suddenly immersed in a dark bluish tinge, especially the natural seaside landscape whose special vibrancy continually eludes René.

Neither Vivianne nor the audience know if René is actually guilty, but Chabrol delights in laying a minefield of clues, every one of which alerts the audience to the mysterious realm between suggestion and reality, often indistinguishable, begging the question of what we ever really know about anyone, including those we love and think we know the best, as our perceptions are riddled with superficial implications, such as someone appears to be acting a certain way, or they seem to be telling the truth. What do we ever really know? And in René’s case, what happens when our self confidence and faith in reality is literally shattered? This shifting psychological pattern where everyone is suspect, where guilt inhabits all the principal characters through rumors, accusations, and malicious gossip spread throughout the town (mostly by Bulle Ogier), only adds to the mounting tension, where uncertainty pervades the landscape, like the impenetrable fog that eventually engulfs the community and figures into so much of what eventually happens. While René is choking and literally suffocating on his own uncleansed soul, continually wracking his brain with a kind of self-induced guilt, yet he’s also the only one who seems to care about telling the truth, a fact that should not be overlooked. Nonetheless, in a carefully constructed dinner scene where Desmot is invited to the seaside cottage of René and Vivianne, René plies him with wine, a man he detests, getting him good and drunk, but rather than making a fool of himself, as he hoped, Desmot continues to spout his obnoxiously vain and unflappable sense of superiority, ego and self-importance, usually centered around making callous and belittling judgments of others, including René, who is always perceived as weak, something that infuriorates him. What happens that night in the fog, as René takes him home in a midnight boat trip, adds to the enveloping mystery, as the presence of inspector Lesage the next morning informs us that another murder has been committed, finally becoming the police procedural that we always thought it would be. As a host of characters are paraded before the inspector, each one defending themselves by casting guilt on others, we soon realize that everyone’s lives have been defined by a constant state of dishonesty, creating an inner tension that can only be relieved by a truth that may never come. Ultimately, the fog breaks and people have to live with themselves, but it’s Bonnaire’s strength and undying love for her husband that stands out, becoming novelesque in scope and unique in unraveling the multiple layers of protective lies, perhaps in the long run, a necessary social evil. The film goes out on a poetic grace note, a recognition of how much ambiguity plays a part in our lives, where perhaps the overriding power of love is faith in its existence.

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Chabrol-by-numbers: a female cop (Bruni-Tedeschi) investigates the strangling of a schoolgirl in a Breton village, centring her enquirieson three 'outsiders': an insecure art teacher (Gamblin), his wife/protector (Bonnaire), and a fashionable novelist/TV presenter (de Caunes). All the usual motifs are wheeled out, from guilt-by-thought versus guilt-by-deed to sexual inadequacies and jealousies, but this time the manure lacks nutrients. The denouement comes second to the closing 'meditation' on the deep meaning of lies, as flagged in the title, but most viewers will be too deeply asleep to care.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

One of Claude Chabrol's poorest offerings, this movie is near plagiarism: it sometimes recalls Edouard Molinaro's "La mort de Belle" from George Simenon. The teacher unfairly suspected of a crime who commits another crime: it's all there in Molinaro's 1963 movie featuring the great Jean Desailly. So why bother? Chabrol even copies himself: the ending looks like that of "juste avant la nuit" (1971).

"Juste avant la nuit," though inferior to "la femme infidèle" "que la bête meure" "le boucher" or "la rupture," boasted a wonderful cast: Bouquet and Audran. Here, what have we? Sandrine Bonnaire, totally incredible as a doctor, Bulle Ogier, a grotesque matron, and Antoine de Caunes, an "actor" generally cast in some ponderous French comedies. Fortunately, he dies half an hour before the end, what a relief! The actress playing the cop should enter the Guiness book of Records as the worst performer of a police officer in history: how lucky they are, the ones who see the movie dubbed in English. Her voice and her swagger are comic at best, unbearable in the long run. I really wonder how she passed the audition.

Along with this one, some of Chabrol's films to avoid at any cost: "folies bourgeoises" ,"les magiciens","les innocents aux mains sales,"; and the ones that should be restored to favor: "l'enfer" and "masques".

From where we sit, Claude Chabrol may seem to be the most ubiquitous of the aging French New Wavers, but only about half of his last quarter-century's output has made it to American theaters. A superb sociological mystery, The Color of Lies (1999) examines what happens to a small Breton village when a schoolgirl's raped body is discovered in the woods. The quiet implosions hit primarily between a moody painter on a career downturn (Jacques Gamblin), his supportive but restless wife (Sandrine Bonnaire), and an intolerably pretentious celebrity-writer (Antoine de Caunes) on the make, but the emotional repercussions spiral out to touch the entire community. In his surest Simenonian mode, Chabrol balances the hidden, the exposed, and the philosophical with little fuss, and the characters are all drawn with a scalpel— including Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's masterfully idiosyncratic portrait of a meek-voiced yet fearlessly confrontational police inspector. (De Caunes's self-pumped litterateur is a triumphant piece of social satire.) Co-written with longtime Chabrol collaborator Odile Barski, the movie is a deft genre étude and provincial interrogation of a kind Chabrol has made his own. Clearing the Chabrol shelf, Kino is also releasing Betty (1992), the deux femmes psychodrama adapted from Simenon and starring Marie Trintignant and Stéphane Audran; L'Enfer (1994), the well-loved Emmanuelle Béart nastiness based on a script by Henri-Georges Clouzot; as well as two policiers that never emerged here, Cop du Vin (1985) and Inspecteur Lavardin (1986), both with mega-suave Jean Poiret as a detective snuffling around small-town homicides. All five films come with trailers and audiovisual appreciations by author and critic Joel Magny.

BBC Films review Michael Thomson, also seen here: BBCi - Films

Director Claude Chabrol, one of the most successful members of the French New Wave, is still (after a hugely busy career) able to breathe life into suspense with subtlety, irony, and humour. Considering he returns time and again to the French bourgeoisie, the freshness of his films is all the more striking. Yet it is the middle classes, the gulf between what they say and what they actually think, and the importance of things left unsaid which stoke the drama of so many of his films.

And so it is with "The Colour of Lies", a gentle but powerful psychological thriller, which targets a failing French painter and his increasingly introspective wife, both of whom live in a Brittany fishing village. One of his art students - a young girl - is found raped and murdered, and he - immersed in nervousness and gloom - is placed under the microscope by the police and the gossipy, judgmental community, with even his own expressions suggesting he might well be guilty. His wife's demeanour, meanwhile, hints at a woman who, though clearly very loving, would quite like to withdraw from her marriage and enjoy an affair with the media celebrity next door, a glib, charming egotist played by Antoine de Caunes. It is this ambiguity in both husband and wife which keeps the other - and us - guessing.

In a film whose theme lies in all their assorted forms and shades, the three actors prove highly skilled in nuance, with Antoine de Caunes banishing all memories of his clownish alter ego in "Eurotrash". Chabrol, forever asking us to spot detail, ensures that every one counts. A work of superior acting and quiet strength.

User comments from imdb Author: darragh o'donoghue (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from dublin, ireland

Although Claude Chabrol has worked predominantly in the crime genre, and adapted much mystery fiction, very few of his films are straight whodunits. Crimes may be the central feature of these films, or the catalyst at least, and investigations may shape these narratives and bring them to their conclusion, if not resolution. But Chabrol is usually more interested in focusing on point-of-view, of the killer, the victims, the suspects, the community, than in any who's-the-killer games. So 'Au coeur du mensonge' belongs to a relatively marginalised (and recent) position in Chabrol's filmography; its most famous predecessors are 'Cop au vin' and 'Inspecteur Lavardin' (although there are important echoes of earlier Chabrol classics like 'Que le bete meure' and 'Le Boucher').

However, just because we don't know who committed the two murders until the end, this doesn't mean Chabrol is only interested in artifical games. The limits of the whodunit paradoxically give Chabrol the freedom from delineating the psychology of the criminal, to something much more interesting to him; in other words, the unknowability of other people, especially those we love, live with and think we know best.

Chabrol's films are so self-contained and remote, that it's rare to find him concentrating on 'topical' issues. Here the subject is the all-too-familiar paedophile rape and murder of a young girl in the woods. She was last seen at a lesson with her art teacher, Rene, and suspicion immediately falls on him, in one of those oppressive small towns where the Internet will never outpace malicious gossip. If we didn't know whodunits, we might think so too - he is lame, shifty looking, whiny, and a failed artist experiencing mental breakdown who thinks his masseuse wife, Vivianne, is having an affair with a slick media personality, G.R.

There are other suspects: G.R. himself, his criminal go-between, and Rene's friend, Regis, even, as the coroner cheerfully suggests, a woman with strong hands and gloves - an exact description of Vivianne earlier. But it is Rene everyone suspects, especially the new Chief Inspector, Lesage, whose personal stake in the case (she has a daughter of the same age as the dead girl) makes her determined to bring him to justice.

'Mensonge' is a psychological study in the guise of a mystery thriller. We are asked to follow Rene's reactions to the murder, social ostracism, artistic failure etc., and yet we're not told whether he's the murderer or not, or any of the other characters, which would surely be a crucial element in anyone's psychology! so these two impulses - towards psychological truth and towards a mystery story which necessarily precludes the audience having any access to the character's psychology, puts it with the same level of knowledge of characters as the other characters, making for an effectively tense film, which, beyond its mystery trappings, asks whether we can ever know anyone, when trust, or self-confidence, or faith in 'reality' is gone.

The film links the idea of lies (characters concealing truths, making realities out of lies), with art (painting - Jacques revels in panoramas and trompes d'oeil; the second murder is 'composed' like a painting). Throughout, various media for the diffusion of truth - painting, TV, books, recitals - as well as the police investigation, with its need for artistic resolution, are highlighted, interrogated and undermined (even a last minute confession is suspect, and the denouement, appropriately, takes place in a deep mist). Chabrol's blithely elliptical narrative style further compounds our uncertainty. As with every Chabrol, the surface every character sees, or creates, is as treacherous as a trompe d'oeil. As the child-murder in the forest, echoing 'Diary of a Chambermaid', suggests, Chabrol is letting out the closet Surrealist in him.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4] also seen here: Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [2/5]

Cine Outsider [Timothy E. RAW]

10kbullets John White

Au coeur du mensonge (1999) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

Great Movie Reviews [Pseudonymous author Ankyuk]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5] also seen here: EyeForFilm.co.uk

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

User comments from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User comments from imdb Author: robert-temple-1 from United Kingdom

User comments from imdb Author: FilmCriticLalitRao (cpowerccc@yahoo.com) from Paris, France

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) dvd review [2/4]

Guardian/Observer review

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT B+ 90

France Switzerland (99 mi) 2000

A dark, velvety film which masks the rough with the smooth and coats a bitter pill in a veneer of decadent French polish. This has been Chabrol's way as often as not over the course of more than 50 films, and he's long since got it down to a fine art. Too fine, one suspects, for an audience accustomed to Hollywood overkill. Dutronc stars as the famous pianist André Polonski. Recently remarried to his first wife, Mika (Huppert), Polonski lives in Lausanne, along with Guillaume, a son by his second wife. Enter Jeanne Pollet (Mouglalis), born on the very same day and in the very same hospital as Guillaume, and a prodigy on the piano. Could it be there was some terrible mix-up 18 years ago? Plenty of material there, you'd have thought, for crazy farce or anguished melodrama. But Chabrol prefers a drily understated comedy of manners. These members of the haute bourgeoisie remain serenely implacable - intent on maintaining their own charades even as their dearest relationships unravel. You could call them sophisticated, or emotionally comatose. Either way, it takes a more macabre twist to shock them to their senses. Visually restrained and aurally elaborate, it's an old-fashioned, subtly deceptive film, the sort of thing Chabrol can turn out in his sleep. (From the novel The Chocolate Cobweb by Charlotte Armstrong.)

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Claude Chabrol's camera has a way of gently swaying back and forth as it cradles its characters, veiling tension beneath otherwise tender movements. There are many such motions in the director's 48th feature film, Merci Pour Le Chocolat (also known as Nightcap), the story of an icy chocolate heiress who uses Rohypnol to manage her domestic bliss. Mika (Isabelle Huppert) rules the Muller chocolate company with an iron fist and while Chabrol spends little time with her at the workspace, we come to know her as a fiercely competitive creature less concerned with profits than with keeping up with the times. Her pianist husband Andre (Jacques Dutronc) married her not long after his first wife died in a mysterious car accident. Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis) is the young piano player that could be Andre's biological daughter. Together they make beautiful music (oddly yet appropriately, there are two grand pianos in Andre's living room) and while Jeanne's birthright is ultimately of little consequence, Chabrol loves to tease Mika with the possibilities (see the fabulous graphic match that links Jeanne to Andre's dead wife). As if guided by Andre's favorite Liszt tune, Mika makes her way upstairs and into her stepson's room, staring at the portrait of the woman who has seemingly returned to the present via the precocious Jeanne. Chabrol's attention to detail is every bit as terrifying (watch as Mika recreates the past with a pot of boiling water) as his atmospheric use of sound and close-up. Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly) plays a handheld video game while his father plays a piece by Liszt; the jarring juxtaposition of sounds is not only indicative of the son's dubious heritage but the scene wondrously prefigures Jeanne's domestic infiltration. Once again, Huppert makes it look easy, slithering in and out of rooms like a snake molting its skin. She's no more terrifying in the end than she is at the beginning and while a lesser actress may have made a spectacle of her character's transformation, Huppert welcomes sympathy for Mika just as the character breaks apart. Mika is as deadly as she is genuinely nurturing and Huppert's final pose reinforces the film's obsession with uncertain parentage. Sound and image gloriously converge during the film's final crescendo when Mika metaphorically returns to the fetus.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dbdumonteil

This is the second adaptation of Charlotte Armstrong by Claude Chabrol for the screen: the first was " la rupture" (1970) (from novel "the balloon man" ) and it's really a pity no one cares about it. It's Chabrol's sleeper, and I urge any of his fans to see it.

"The chocolate" cobweb was not that strong a detective story to begin with. I read it 20 years ago and forgot all about it. The movie promises some good things at first, though, then finally disappoints to a fault. This is a confusing Chabrol movie, mixing elements of the heyday (circa 1969), and a lotta tongue-in-chick stuff coming from the eighties, the likes of 'poulet au vinaigre," not one particularly memorable work.

Part of the disappointment comes from the cast:this is a distressingly poor gathering: Jacques Dutronc plays like a zombie, Isabelle Huppert reveals herself a somewhat limited actress, finally rather vulgar. It worked in "une affaire de femme,"it does not here. They are not supported by the young couple: both are bland and unremarkable. Actors from the past,say, Stephane Audran or Michel Bouquet (both in "la rupture") were brilliant and contributed to Chabrol's then unique atmosphere.

The story itself is undistinguished: beginning as some kind of "serious" "la vie est un long fleuve tranquille " (besides, a character hints at Etienne Chatilliez's very funny movie), the movie drags on and on as a laughable psychological drama afterwards. We will not congratulate the young female pianist , who, after all she learned about her wicked hostess, agrees to drive a car along a dangerous road.

Because he makes too many movies, Chabrol frequently releases turkeys. One wonder why people who wants to watch one of his movies should choose this one among all his stuff up for grabs.

It seems that Chabrol's bourgeoise satire has finally given way to leniency. In "la rupture" the first Armstrong adaptation-an average detective story which Chabrol completely transcended-, you should hear Audran say "they have so much money!" Here, Chabrol has lost his bite, his strength.

Claude Chabrol's Merci Pour le Chocolat is a light confection with a tasty Isabelle Huppert performance at its center. Working from a 1948 recipe by a sometime scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Chabrol knocks off a witty psychological thriller—more gothic than noir.

Set by the placid shores of Lake Lausanne, the movie opens with Swiss chocolate factory heiress Mika Muller (Huppert) marrying celebrated concert pianist André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) for the second time, in a ceremony where family business blends with gossipy intrigue. Without pausing to clarify, Chabrol introduces a second domestic unit whose daughter, Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), herself an aspiring pianist, learns that she was almost switched at birth with Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly), André's highly unmusical son by his first (or rather, his second) wife, dead some years ago in car accident. The tangled genealogy has intimations of Elizabethan comedy—as does the spirited Jeanne, who, intrigued with the possibility that she might be the biological daughter of the great Polonski, presents herself at his wife's hilltop chateau.

Jeanne is soon examining photos of the late Madame Polonski and striking similar long-necked poses. Although not too distracted to observe the strange household to which she's been welcomed, she returns the following weekend—in an atmosphere made heady by a few more uncorked family secrets—to practice Liszt's most unfunereal "Funeral March" with her new mentor. Merci is filled with peculiar characters and sharply drawn physical types. Dutronc's Polonski would be suspicious for his mop of dyed black hair alone. The ever smiling, bizarrely solicitous Mika is also a philanthropist who subsidizes "anti-pain" centers. "I just want everyone to be happy," she explains, inadvertently spilling a pot of boiling water on hapless Guillaume's foot. Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film.

Chabrol has always enjoyed puncturing the balloon of bourgeois complacency, and as his creatures jump to ever quicker conclusions, the movie's edge of campy self-reflection grows increasingly pronounced. The more one suspects, the funnier Merci becomes. Mika brings her injured stepson a pair of videos—Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door and Jean Renoir's Nuit de Carrefour—which would alert any habitué of the Paris Cinématheque to where Chabrol is going.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

'Merci pour la chocolat' combines the two most characteristic tones of late Chabrol - the grim, relentless Langian formalism carried over from his great mid-period to films like 'La Ceremonie'; and the more relaxed, comic works like 'Cop Au Vin' or 'Rien ne va plus'. the seriousness can be found within a plot about individual and family tragedy; the treatment is never flippant, and the ending is numbing. The 'fun', if you want to call it that, arises from Chabrol's winking contract with his audience, offering a magnificently contrived story about parents and children, possible switches of babies, boyfriends who conveniently happen to be trainee forensic scientists, and so can check chocalate stains for poison: adding up to a mystery story whose solution is actually revealed in the first half hour.

The fun lies not in who done it - there are no other suspects, there may not even be a crime - but what is going on in the heroine's head, with Chabrol littering clues and red herrings. He is gloriously helped by Isabelle Huppert's obfuscating performance, her character's fundamental blankness - she is an observer judging others' reactions - is varied by vacuousness; hysteria; somnolence; good humour; tenderness; calculation. Which of these, if any, are the 'real' Mika? In a film characteristically loaded with allusions to Greek mythology, Mika is Arachne, a spider caught in her own web (appropriately the design on her sofa as her defeat sinks in, suggesting it was never her web in the first place, but that of the bourgeoisie to which she, as an orphaned outsider, never truly belonged), every cunning plan never bringng her closer to the object of her desire, the wearyingly narcissistic Polonski.

Of course, Chabrol achieves his effects more subtly than mere plot leg-pulling - as the allusion to Fritz Lang suggests, it is the smoothly unstable playing with point of view that unsettles our attempts at definitive explanations. It might be going too far to suggest that Chabrol's method in the film is Cubist, but he has an unsettling habit of breaking up sequences, cutting between camera positions as if he is starting a new scene, although it's just another angle on the same one. This can happen when he shifts the focus from one group of characters in a scene to another; more distractingly, it can happen within one group itself, breaking up a conversation with camera angles, or colour tones that don't match.

Despite the title and the central McGuffin about poisoned chocolate, the film's governing metaphor is the music that frequently punctuates the narrative (Liszt's 'Funerailles'!). The central structural unit, the preserve of that other Chabrol idol, Hitchcock, is the double or reproduction - the film begins with a once-married couple remarrying, the officiary and 'bride' sharing the same red hair. The main action towards which the narrative leads doubles an action that shadows the entire film (the death of the first wife), right down to the son suffering the same ankle injury.

The plot is full of parents and their children, many of dubious certainty about their relationships. In the piano sequences, the original pieces are doubled by the pianists' interpretations (further reproduced in a recording Polonski and Jeanne listen to), on two pianos reflecting their bourgeois surroundings; they become a weird kind of incestuous sublimation.

All this doubling and reproduction serves to further isolate Mika, a ganging up on her in terms of form and content, increasing a sympathy enlisted enlisted by Huppert's acting, and achieving a kind of empty tragedy.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Merci pour le chocolat (2000) Keith Reader from Sight and Sound, June 2001

DVD Times Gary Couzens

Film Monthly (Parama Chaudhury) review

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10] longer review seen here

Merci pour le chocolat (2000) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Political Film Society review Michael Haas

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3.5/5]

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

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Kamera.co.uk review Ben McCann

DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [2/5]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]

Harvey S. Karten review [3/4]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3/4]

Jonathan F. Richards review

Reel Movie Critic (Shelley Cameron) review [3.5/4]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

VideoVista review Gary Couzens

Film Intuition Jen Johans

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Mondo Digital also reviewing THE CRY OF THE OWL and LA CÉRÉMONIE

User reviews from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

User reviews from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, Ireland

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: writers_reign from London, England

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]

BBC Films (George Perry) review George Perry

The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review July 31, 2002, also here: FILM REVIEW; Such Delicious Hot Chocolate, Dear. Whatever Do You Put in It?

FILM; A Face the French Repeatedly Forget Alan Riding on Isabelle Huppert from The New York Times, July 28, 2002

THE FLOWER OF EVIL B- 82

aka: La Fleur du Mal

France (104 mi) 2003

“People have lived like hypocrites since the dawn of time. That's what we call civilization.”

From one of the living legends of film craftsmanship, known for his humorous social criticism, his Hitchcockian control over each shot and every angle, this is a taut, well-acted look at some dark secrets in an upper crust bourgeois family where the family crest motto seems to be "hypocrisy—thy name is civilization." Too many phony smiles, enough for an entire year's worth, and the story really wasn't black enough, not enough sharp edges or surprises, that was the missing ingredient to this otherwise elegant looking but fairly mainstream film. However, Monsieur Chabrol really does love a party and ever since LES COUSINS in 1959 he's always outdone himself in filming party sequences.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: writers_reign

Classical Greek students after a modern take on The House of Atreus need look no further than Chabrol's latest. As ever there is elegance and style to spare and it's really great to know that actresses as old as Suzanne Flon (who scored again this year in Effroyables Jardins) can still not only get meaty roles but also deliver. Unlike other commenters the charm, sex appeal and, most of all, acting ability of Benoit Magimal is lost on me but I would walk a mile for a Nathalie Baye performance and she does not disappoint here. I note that other comments touch on the Frenchness on display but if you choose to see a French film why expect Sauerkraut and halva. Not Chabrol's finest but still out of the right bottle.

Village Voice (Jessica Winter) review

The extraordinary thing about this 2002 Chabrol is how easily it could pass for a 1968 Chabrol. Back then, the politically ambitious wife would have been played by Stéphane Audran rather than Baye, and the creepy husband by Michel Bouquet instead of Le Coq. The juveniles, children of their previous marriages, would have been represented, as here, by the decorative youngsters of the day. Otherwise the spectacle of the bourgeoisie demonstrating their hypocrisy in between lashings of haute cuisine, the sense of violence just under the surface, the deliberate, unshowy staging, the relish for unexpected detail (a fit of giggles during corpse disposal) are evidence of how stationary, for better, or worse, Chabrol's preoccupations and methods have remained. The plot device of having history repeat itself down the generations involves a ferocious amount of exposition, which Chabrol treats with impatience. You may need to take notes.

User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: dbdumonteil

I've seen tons of Chabrol movies, about 95% of his films and all I can see is that the proportion of duds increases with the years. Even directors deserve retirement! The bourgeoisie dolce vita has been told told and TOLD by CC! Enough! I'm fed up! It's all more infuriating as earlier works had bite and guts going for them ("que la bete meure" "la rupture" "la femme infidèle" ) when it wasn't pure genius ("le boucher"). We feel now, and it's the last straw, a discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, he treats his bourgeois indulgently. The actors go from excellent (veteran Suzanne Flon, in a part not worthy of herself) to passable (Baye is good enough in her "paying a visit to the Poor" scenes, a pale reflection of his predecessor Claude Autant-Lara' s "Douce" (1942) to dismal (Bernard LeCoq, generally relegated to mediocre comedies, Benoit Magimel and his girlfriend -who might not or might be his cousin-) Sign of the times: the gastronomy sequence which you can find in everything CC did, for the first time is a fiasco: the oysters, says bourgeois Magimel, are not what they used to be. If it were only the oysters....

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Claude Chabrol is once again in minimalist mode, exposing the dark side beneath the bourgeoisie's gentile, civilized veneer. Reunited with child psychologist Caroline Eliachef, author of his greatest late work La Ceremonie, I had high hopes but as with their follow up Nightcap, Flower of Evil is another minor work. La Cememonie was class warfare where the uneducated instinctively lashed out, but in ignoring the maid to focus solely on the rich family Chabrol & Eliachef have crafted a toothless satire where the audience looks on perversely as the family's own bourgeois indulgence does them in, leaving the viewer to wish comeuppance was more often right on time. Flower of Evil has some good dry humor about the folly of small time politics due to the ambitious but insincere wife Anne Charpin-Vasseur (Nathalie Baye) running for a office, but lacks the sinister nature the Le Corbeau poison pen letter plot seems to beg for. The author's identity is unimportant, the fact that Gerard Vasseur (Bernard Le Coq) doesn't support his wife's bid and is selfish and dubious enough to possibly have written it to undermine her is. Neither Francois (Benoit Magimel) nor Michele (Melanie Doutey) like his father Gerard, who wishes people wanted to be with him, but despite his jealousy and philandering has no clue why they don't. Politics are largely Anne's escape from Gerard, something to amuse herself with while he scouts for young women to have one afternoon stands with. Chabrol lets the story unfold, not really trying to create a great deal of tension or intrigue, but rather providing a detached observation that sticks to the limitations of the characters. He refuses to milk the gaping gap between audience and character reaction, as the characters think nothing of their history of nazi collaboration and family murder that's dredged up, not to mention the dubious nature of the young lovers Francois and Michele being brother and sister by marriage and probably actually related. They experiencing no guilt and feeling no remorse, so they're bound to fall into the same traps as their predecessors. Chabrol captures the shallowness of the younger characters, but fails to really do or say anything more about them. At best they are as uninteresting as in real life, but much of that is his plan; over time Chabrol has moved away from wit and toward reality, simply showing the ridiculousness of these spoiled brats. Most of Chabrol's films have a big jolt at the end, but this had held back so much that it didn't really pack much of a punch, unlike Ceremonie which led you enough that the surprise(s) were far more credible and impactful. Even without the ending, the characters in Ceremonie were hundreds of times more interesting. That said, Suzanne Flon deserves special mention though for her memorable performance as the spry old enabling Aunt who has been through all kinds of intrigues and may have killed her father.

Where Baudelaire slurred together sex and death, Claude Chabrol blurs genealogy and morbidity in The Flower of Evil and throughout his profuse career, which by now has turned out 50 features. Another tastefully baroque roasting of petty bourgeois rites within suffocating domestic environs, his latest impassive melodrama begins with a prowl up a winding staircase that, as in La Cérémonie and his previous effort, Merci Pour le Chocolat, can only portend corkscrewing revelations of murder and deceit.

Scaling a family tree snarled and ingrown even by Chabrolian standards, The Flower of Evil opts for Bordeaux's upper middle classes over urban flaneurs, centering on a comely twosome who evoke the possibly switched-at-birth sleuthing duo of Merci. Michèle (Mélanie Doutey) and François (Benoît Magimel) are cousins, step-siblings, and covert lovebirds, reunited after François's four-year jaunt practicing law in Chicago. Their father and mother, respectively, died years ago in the same peculiar car crash, leaving the widowed spouses, Anne (Nathalie Baye) and Gérard (Bernard Le Coq), to marry each other. Indeed, the Charpin-Vasseur clan may rival the Kennedys for high mortality rates—not to mention political ambition, since Anne's running in the local mayoral election. After her parents perished in a plane crash, Anne grew up under the care of her now elderly Aunt Line (Suzanne Flon), who probably killed her collaborationist father, who himself probably killed her adored elder brother . . .

According to Chabrol, Aunt Line's father stands for Maurice Papon, the Vichy government official who oversaw the deportation of at least 1,600 French Jews from Bordeaux to Auschwitz in 1942-44. (Papon became prefect of the Paris police under de Gaulle; decades later, he finally served just three years of a war-crimes sentence, and was granted a compassionate release in 2002 after dubious assertions of ill health.) The Nazi-abetting dead patriarch casts the first and longest shadow over the film, which starts with a corpse and works backward. Making much of an inflammatory pamphlet—circulated by an anonymous foe of Anne's campaign—that details her checkered lineage, The Flower of Evil lightly toys with notions of original sin and the heredity of wickedness, though the procedural trips on characterization; Aunt Line, for one, is self-interrogatory, open-minded, and preposterously sweet. Chabrol's interest typically lies less in psychology than in the fastidious architecture of his redoubling family secrets: Every poison blossom begets its own fraternal twin. So, it seems, does every Chabrol film. Not to imply that our Claude's gone native, but here his unabiding fascination with bourgie-style repetition compulsion bears some resemblance to sympathy.

Reverse Shot review Broken Blossom, by Michael Garofalo, November/December, 2003

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

La Fleur du mal (2003) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Plume Noire review Laurence Nicoli

PopMatters (David Sanjek) dvd review

filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [2/5]

La Fleur du mal Bill R. from The Kind of Face You Hate, June 29, 2009

indieWIRE Erica Abeel

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review

10kbullets John White

VideoVista review Gary Couzens

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]

DVD Verdict (Patrick Bromley) dvd review

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3/5]

CineScene.com (Josh Timmermann) review

Offoffoff.com review Leslie (Hoban) Blake

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [3/5]

Movie Habit (Breck Patty) review [3.5/4]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]

Harvey S. Karten review [C]

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [3/5]

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

User reviews from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

User reviews from imdb Author: lavatch from Twin Cities, Minnesota

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Harry T. Yung (harry_tk_yung@yahoo.com) from Hong Kong

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris

San Francisco Examiner (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

San Francisco Chronicle (G. Allen Johnson) review

Flower of Evil Kevin Thomas from The LA Times

Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review Elvis Mitchell, October 8, 2003, also here: FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Family Whose Flower Might Be a Venus' Flytrap

FILM; In the Country With Chabrol Marcelle Clements from The New York Times, October 5, 2003

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

THE BRIDESMAID (La Demoiselle d'honneur)

France Germany Italy (111 mi) 2004

Given his doggedly consistent fascination with psychopathic crime intersecting with bourgeois lives, it's a surprise to find that The Bridesmaid is only Claude Chabrol's second adaptation of a Ruth Rendell novel (after La Cérémonie). It is, in any case, a psychodrama of typically brisk efficiency and relaxed gallows humor. The semi-functioning family at the center is sketched in—responsible son (with incestuous lurkings) Benoît Magimel, high-spirited single mom Aurore Clément, bickering sisters—before we meet the titular catalyst at a family wedding: Senta (Laura Smet), a sensuous but off-putting seductress with a mysterious past. Magimel is all pro, deciphering life with his eyes, as the chump who gets vacuumed in by this odd girl's impulsive devotions and Nietzschean delusions, but Smet, all eyelashes and butterscotch skin, is the film's prize; she doesn't act out the character's slowly revealed pathologies so much as keep them barely contained behind her mesmerizing stare, like mad dogs in a cage. Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as genre expertise.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Some of Claude Chabrol's most problematic films limit themselves to a circumscribed view of female identity and expression, like the ground-breaking but dated Les Biches, whose "open" ending implies that its main character's lesbianism was only a figment of her imagination. This is why it's tempting to look at the director's remarkable Story of Women, given its strong feminist stance, as a corrective. To that film's company we can add The Bridesmaid, a gripping lark that finds Chabrol lithely sorting through the serpentine snarl of bourgie behavior and gazing at the attic clock's pendulum-sway between fantasy and reality. Senta (Laura Smet), an impulsive creature who claims to be an actress and lives in the cellar of a musty old manse, meets Philippe (Benoît Magimel) at his sister's wedding, quickly seducing him and lavishing him with obsessive declarations of love before proposing a queer-murderous pact to validate their feelings for one another. Her enigmatic she-devilness might be offensive if that were all to the film, which casts a large, mischievously cool shadow of suspense across all its characters. The question here isn't whether Senta is simply passionate or out of her fucking gourd, but whether the gorgeous Philippe is the greater mythomaniac. Don't let the statue of a woman's head Philippe hordes and sensually kisses at night fool you: This is not a symbol of oedipal struggle (Chabrol is too clever for such simple psychoanalysis), but an albatross of his controlling and insecure male nature—a seemingly instinctual urge that he permits to get the better of him. Chabrol's scrutiny of human behavior is remarkable for its laidback intensity and absence of finger-wagging. The less said about the story's plot machinations the better, but this much can be revealed without spoiling the film's pleasure: that Philippe's repeated attempts to appease women (Senta, his mother, two sisters, and an elderly client who complains about a misaligned object in her new bathroom) is a profound consideration of how chaos is born and passed between the sexes.

filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

At first glance, she doesn't seem like much -- maybe it's the dress. When Philippe (Benoit Magimel) -- the slim, self-satisfied, smart-but-stupid chump in Claude Chabrol's psycho-drama The Bridesmaid -- sees Senta (Laura Smet), a bridesmaid at his sister's wedding, he's intrigued by something in her direct stare and later, flirty brush-off. However, when Senta appears unannounced at the door of his mother's home (where Philippe, a mama's boy practically smothered by her constant compliments) a few hours later and then proceeds to strip off the wet dress and have her reckless way with him, he becomes positively interested. When later she starts in with all that talk about how they're fated for each other and, hey, what if they each committed a murder to prove their love, he remains interested because, well, he doesn't have much else going on in his life.

In Smet and Magimel, Chabrol has found willing partners for his bleak little tale -- like the director, they keep things under wraps, playing things close to the vest, which is harder than it may sound, given the high drama plot, taken from a Ruth Rendell novel. Philippe is a cipher straight from a detective story of years past, working as a numbers guy for a contractor in a small French town, he's completely bottled up inside his trim suits and slightly superior demeanor, just aching for something to come along and bust things up. After easing us into Philippe's life with some minor melodrama involving the three women in Philippe's house (mother, two sisters), Chabrol drops Senta in to knock Philippe out of his rut, and she's perfect for the job.

A sloe-eyed vixen who practically radiates crazy, Senta's nevertheless a fantastic storyteller, even if many of her autobiographical tales (moving to Morocco on a lark when she was a teenager, getting that small role in a Woody Allen movie, this guy she may have killed) are most likely made-up. Once her eyes lock onto Philippe's, they never again seem whole without the other; it's obsessive and inexplicable attraction presented to us as fait accompli, without any tiresome backstory or psychological justification -- when they launch themselves at each other after spending a few days apart, it's more mathematical necessity than anything else. And when the question of murder and Senta comes up (Philippe initially laughs it off, but then isn't so sure), tied in with the series of local disappearances, the love affair takes on a darker hue.

This is all noir in a very minor key, featuring a femme fatale without a score to settle, only the clanging needs of her inner voices to satisfy by whichever suitable male happens across her zig-zagging path. Chabrol has a created a placid and creepy work here, with hints of Hitchcock proliferating, from Philippe's controlling mother to the vast and falling-down house Senta inhabits like a subterranean ghost, all of it helping give this occasionally draggy and too-literal story a pleasantly perverse sting.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dbdumonteil

no wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle, no flowers, no wedding dress...,

About ten years before he decided to venture again in Ruth Rendell universe, Claude Chabrol had transferred to the screen "a Judgment in Stone" entitled "la Cérémonie" (1995). It was his last great masterwork although he somewhat betrayed the novel. The choice of Sandrine Bonnaire for the main role was ill-advised. Afterwards, his career followed a creative downswing with rather mediocre works such as "au Coeur Du Mensonge" (1999) or "Merci pour Le Chocolat" (2000). So, could a new excursion in Ruth Rendell territory boost his career again?

Alas no and the title of my summary should give you an inkling about my thoughts on the Chabrol 2004 vintage. However, there were some good elements to make the film compelling and to grab the attention. The first sequence showcases Benoît Magimel and his family in front of the TV news that reveals a murder. Perfect to weave an eerie climate. The big, imposing, eerie house in which Laura Smet lives seems to shelter dark secrets and the "bridesmaid" lives in the basement. Chabrol was also interested in the games of truth and lie that link his two main actors and real suspense lies in Magimel's personality dangerously attracted to the bridesmaid. The filmmaker's touch is also discernible at the wedding ceremony where he ridicules its crucial steps. See the church sequence and the feast which echoes to the one in "Le Boucher" (1970). While I'm evoking this meal, the gastronomy dear to Chabrol has three sequences devoted to it in the whole film. But let's come back to the bulk of the plot. Like "a Judgement in Stone," "La Demoiselle d'Honneur" was an exciting novel to read and again Chabrol skipped over some important points, notably the reasons which prompt the hero to steal the bust from Gérard Courtois (Bernard Le Coq). In the novel, he stole it because he thought that Courtois was a vulgar man, but here Magimel's motivations to steal the bust remain blurred.

The thrust of the novel and so of the film is a man who gradually loses the control of his everyday life facing a sensual, attractive disturbing young woman. However, things aren't looking good because there's an absence of unnerving climate and the scenario seems to have been sedately written, especially near the end. In another extent, I know what I'm going to write is questionable but I do think that Chabrol contemporary films suffer from the choice of the actors (see bland Jacques Dutronc in "Merci pour Le Chocolat" or Jacques Gamblin in "au Coeur Du Mensonge") and sadly "la Demoisele d'Honneur" isn't an exception to the rule. Magimel's character isn't credible at all. He should get bogged down in madness as he's deeply in love with Smet but it isn't discernible on the screen. Laura Smet (Johnny Hallyday's daughter) has a monotonous acting while Bernard Le Coq's part is underwritten. Michel Duchaussoy who was brilliant in "Que la Bête Meure" (1969) is relegated to a minor tramp role unworthy of his wide acting skills.

So, an absence of interest for this story of manipulation is surely due to its actors and also because like for "la Cérémonie," Chabrol made dull Rendell's novel. Mr Chabrol, let's put it this way: the best of your work is far behind you in time (roughly the dusk of the sixties and the dawn of the seventies) and you will probably never reach this scale again. How about contemplating retirement?

User comments from imdb Author: gradyharp from United States

The films of French Cinema master Claude Chabrol have been some of the quirkier, intelligent, strange, and creative works to come out of France (La Fleur du mal, Merci pour le chocolat, Au coeur du mensonge, Rien ne va plus, La Cérémonie, L'Enfer, Madame Bovary, Dr. M, etc). His works are marked with sinister underpinnings and his technique has been to place his characters in situations that challenge them to behaviors they consider bizarre until they understand the core of their somewhat deranged personalities. LA DEMOISELLE D'HONNEUR (THE BRIDESMAID) succeeds as a art work on so many levels that the viewer is inclined to forgive some of the dangling missing pieces in character and plot development that prevent this film from being Chabrol's finest. The setting, pacing, cast and concept are intriguingly seductive: that is enough to make the film work well.

The Tardieu family is in the midst of preparing for the wedding of one daughter Sophie (Solène Bouton), learning to accept the new love affair of the mother Christine (Aurore Clément) to a wealthy newly divorced man Gérard (Bernard Le Coq), becoming used to the edgy antisocial behavior of daughter Patricia (Anna Mihalcea), and all the while being cared for by the successful contractor son Philippe (Benoît Magimel). On the television is the report of a murdered young woman and the disruption of a television show frustrates the obsessive Philippe in his work to keep the family focused. We jump to Sophie's wedding to nerdy Jacky (Eric Seigne) whose cousin Stéphanie "Senta" Bellange (Laura Smet) is the bridesmaid of the title. The strange but sensuous Senta captures Philippe's eye and a rather torrid love affair begins. Senta is passionate and makes Philippe agree to four demands to prove he loves her: the last two (killing someone/anyone) and having sex with a same sex partner) jolt Philippe but he throws his usual caution to the wind and proceeds with the pairing. A homeless man who lives at Senta's grimy cellar lodging door repulses her, and when a police report that the man has been found dead, Philippe falsely 'confides' to Senta that he is responsible. Senta then promises to kill Gérard as her half of the bargain: Gérard has avoided Philippe's mother and Philippe feels animosity toward anyone who would disturb his beloved mother. The plot thickens, then boils: the 'murders' change from reality to mistaken identity to heinous ends. Philippe has become immersed in Senta's madness, leaving an ending that remains 'in media res'.

Chabrol leaves strange clues scattered about for the astute eye to discover, at times in retrospect, and it is this trait that makes the story so fascinating. The cast is superb, with Benoît Magimel proving that his success in 'The Pianist' was not a fluke. He is a gifted actor and maintains an electrifying screen presence. This may not be Chabrol's best film, but it is twisted enough to keep the viewer tensely focused on the very strange story and on the complexly interesting set of characters in this very French film noir!

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover

La Demoiselle d'honneur (2004) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5]

James Bowman review

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij)

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]

Film Intuition [Jen Johans]

10kbullets John White

Watch the Great Illusion Drown Greg at Cinema Styles, June 25, 2009

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart] also seen here: Film School Rejects (H. Stewart)

Close-Up Film [Martyn Bamber]

DVD Verdict (Neal Solon) dvd review

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]

Siffblog Review [Kathy Fennessy]

Martin Tsai's Blog

User reviews from imdb Author: guy-bellinger (guy.bellinger@wanadoo.fr) from Montigny-lès-Metz, France

User reviews from imdb Author: doctorlightning from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: writers_reign

Variety (Deborah Young)

Time Out London

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]

Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review August 4, 2006, also here: In Claude Chabrol’s Film ‘The Bridesmaid,’ a Mama’s Boy Meets a Femme Fatale

cinemattraction (Sheila Cornelius) review

COMEDY OF POWER (L’Ivresse du pouvoir) B 86

France Germany (110 mi) 2006

Any resemblance to actual events is, as they say, entirely coincidental

Chabrol is known for his precision and occasional malicious humor and wit, for deliciously exploring the boundaries of moral implication, making a career of films that highlight themes of guilt, complicity, bourgeois aspirations and murder. Any of his films starring Isabelle Huppert (this is the 7^th), is a must-see treat, why should this film be any different? Using the scandal du jour as his centerpiece, corporate corruption and theft, this is inspired by true events, as a dozen years ago a French oil company was the subject of a government investigation, where the CEO and several of his henchmen were brought to justice by a determined female prosecutor who investigated the trail of their secret bank accounts that supported their upper crust lifestyles, drinking the best champagne, smoking the most expensive cigars, always dining in luxury, including the price tag for the purchase of property and other lavish expenses bestowed on mistresses that were charged to the company, which eventually led to some highly publicized jail terms.

In a hilarious introduction to the viewers, two businessmen are discussing the arrest of one of their own, explaining it’s all over for him as he’s scheduled to appear before a judge known as “The Piranha,” cut to Huppert eating a power business lunch of sushi in front of a giant aquarium, scarfing down the fish in giant gulps, which introduces the subsequent theme of eat or be eaten. This is followed by a series of interviews in her cramped office of the alleged offenders, belittling them with her sinister contempt, making them squirm as she sends them off to the slammer. The men investigated are part of a political elite that have historically lined their pockets as if it was their aristocratic birthright, using high level politicians to provide cover, which certainly catches the eye of the Chief Justice who hobnobs with this same clientele. So after the initial exposure, attempts are made to undermine Huppert’s efforts, which creates a nasty set of circumstances for everyone involved, as spies are everywhere and everyone appears corrupt. With scenes behind the scenes which veer towards the French farce of Molière, everyone is made to look ridiculous, while Huppert, in a surprisingly sympathetic role for a change, is hung out to dry by her superiors.

Unfortunately, in a legal entanglement, there are too many generalities and too few specifics, so all of this is reduced to a cynical exercise of bravado and bluster over evidence. Huppert is seen as a lone female taking on the entire all-male French aristocracy single-handed, while her own marriage disintegrates, and she is subject to intimidation tactics from some highly paid thugs, which leads her to wonder if everyone is against her. The film is something of a Chabrol family affair, as the director is also a co-writer, one son Matthieu Chabrol wrote the original music, another son Thomas Chabrol plays an odd, somewhat subversive nephew who may have romantic designs in his aunt, who turns out to be the only person in the end that she trusts, while Aurore Chabrol was a script supervisor.

User reviews from imdb Author: jfseignol from Paris, France

This new movie by Claude Chabrol is directly inspired by a true story. The "Affaire Elf", named by the french oil-company, was a large financial and political scandal where several top-level french politicians where involved, such as Roland Dumas (ex foreign-affairs minister) or Charles Pasqua (ex minister of interior). As in the true story, a judge is investigating about some corruption in business between a french major company and some African states. Most of the characters in the movie are very similar to real persons involved in the "Affaire Elf".

The movie focuses on two subjects: the first one is how the judge (Isabelle Huppert) becomes more and more addicted to the power she uses by sending powerful businessmen to jail; the second one is the wide-scale cynicalness of people involved in the scandal, used to play with public money and take advantage of this without seeing anything immoral.

A good movie, very funny because, as stated at the beginning "any similarity with real person or event would be, as it is said, fortuitousness".

Claude Chabrol’s seventh outing with Isabelle Huppert plays to the strengths of his leading lady, a collaboration that began in 1978 with the hit film Violette Nozière. Huppert is perhaps better known outside France for her role as a sexually deviant lead in The Piano Teacher (2001).

Credited with starting the French New Wave movement of the 1950s, Chabrol is often compared to Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he shares a penchant for chilly heroines. Chabrol directed a string of classy suspense stories with more than a hint of social satire in the ’60s and ’70s. His wife Stephane Audran’s icy presence graced films which delved into the minds of nondescript killers, as in Le Boucher (1970) and the unsavory habits of the “respectable” bourgeoisie, in Les Biches (1968). A Comedy of Power combines some favorite motifs in a story based on a real-life case, the ELF Aquitaine fraud scandal that rocked France in the ’90s, according to The Guardian “the biggest fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War.” The role of the woman who cracked the case seems tailor-made for Huppert’s beautiful yet remote screen persona.

Jeanne Charmant Killman (Huppert), top investigator for the French government, has a killer instinct when it comes to corporate corruption and bringing executives to justice. Her Medusa-like approach to interrogation and instinct for spotting financial irregularities means she’s known as “The Piranha”. Humeau (François Berléand), the multi-allergic CEO of a major oil company, squirms and scratches in her office until Jeanne decides to jail him pending inquiries, knowing prison conditions will “encourage” a confession. Meantime she looks into a lifestyle which includes a couturier-clad mistress (ironic touch, as Killman’s sharp suits, blouses and bags are designed by Balenciaga) as well as a château-style house for his wife. Humeau’s shifty fellow board members fear they too will be implicated. Jeanne’s husband (Robin Renucci), already unhappy with her obsessive thoroughness, is further irritated when her feckless nephew arrives as a guest in their Paris flat. When Jeanne’s life is threatened and bodyguards are posted at the apartment door the strains on the marriage become unbearable. The career-minded sleuth must choose between bringing highly-placed criminals to justice and saving her marriage, possibly her life. More importantly, she must ask herself questions about power and its illusions and whether the challenge of being a woman in a patriarchal system is too great for her.

“Any resemblance to persons living or dead is, as they say, coincidental.” - the on-screen disclaimer is typical of Chabrol’s tongue-in-cheek irony. A quirky piano soundtrack, clever editing cuts, witty one-liners and subtle situation humor is this director’s forte. “Ah yes, the Piranha,” sneers a corrupt bureaucrat on hearing who is assigned to the case, and the camera cuts to a close-up of fish kept in the crusading investigator’s office. The signature lightness of touch is seen when Jeanne drops a red glove at a suspect’s feet, like a symbolic gauntlet, or researches designer clothes on her laptop to estimate how much Humeau’s mistress spends on clothes. Locations like the plush restaurants where the company men conspire and the office where Jeanne conducts her leisurely cat-and-mouse sessions with her subjects breathe an authenticity which makes the sudden raise in stakes more shocking.

Competence is apparent in the supporting roles, especially from Berleand as the shiftily uncomfortable Humeau, and the ensemble playing of his co-conspirators. Jean-Francois Balmer is the oily but doomed charmer Boldi, who hopes to deflect Jeanne with a combination of flattery and – this being France – a case of fine wine, but only increases her determination to bring him down when she realizes his intentions. Thomas Chabrol, the director’s son, as the cynical nephew provides contrast and support to Jeanne’s driven character as well as bringing out her warmer side through their casually humorous exchanges.

The film’s French title L’Ivresse du pouvoir translates more accurately, perhaps, as “Drunk with Power”. Whether it refers to the corporate fat-cats who believe themselves beyond the law or to Jeanne’s misguided belief in her own invulnerability is a question that, typically, Chabrol leaves to his audience to decide.

Swimming with Sharks: Comedy of Power - Film Comment Elisabeth Lequeret from Film Comment, March/April 2006

In 1994, French oil company elf was the subject of an investigation initiated by the country’s Stock Exchange Commission. Conducted by judge Eva Joly, this inquiry wasted no time in bringing to light a network of corruption implicating businessmen and politicians at the highest level. Sometime later Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, Elf’s former CEO, was jailed for using company funds to finance the purchase of a lavish apartment intended for his wife. At that moment, the French delighted in discovering a new expression: banditisme en col blanc—white-collar crime.

The Elf affair made for one of the Nineties’ most popular politico-legal soap operas. Secret commissions, abuse of public property, sinecures, cronyism and corruption at every level—above and beyond the sheer gravity of the facts there was, from start to finish, through all the multiplying revelations, an air of Grand Guignol to which the auteur of Masques (87) could hardly have remained indifferent. Television or international scandal, it doesn’t matter: either way, it’s good to lift the lid on a milieu when things smell a little fishy.

If Joly’s investigation provides Comedy of Power’s basic construction, the film distances itself from the real-life case not only by its title but by its opening caveat (“Any resemblance to actual events is, as they say, entirely coincidental”), a warning that hardly suffices to explain the need for the standard legal disclaimer, tinctured as it is with typical Chabrolian irony. Why immediately distance yourself from a reality from which the film borrows its framework and main characters? The initial explanation lies in the fiction’s structure, which takes as much interest in the personal as in the public life of Jeanne Charmant Killman (Isabelle Huppert), the magistrate in charge of the investigation.

Such a point of view, hardly uncommon in the crowded field of legal thrillers, usually serves to relieve the pace of a plot that otherwise races toward one objective: to uncover the Lie and show the triumph of Truth. You’ll find nothing of the sort in Comedy of Power. If the film seamlessly blends the private with the professional, these private interludes yield neither a contrasting soft side to the protagonist nor a play of opposites: Jeanne is just as much a judge at home as she is in the city. “I hear you. What you’re saying and what you’re not saying. That’s my job,” she tells her husband dryly during an argument one night.

Chabrol’s latest opus is a theoretical fable on power and its abuses. The intoxication of power in question is less a matter of a bunch of corrupt businessmen operating with complete impunity than the hubris of one little judge. Hence the dialogue preceding Jeanne’s on-screen introduction, between two businessmen commenting on a colleague’s arrest: “He’ll suffer. Do you know her nickname? The Piranha.” These words lead into the first appearance of Madame Judge, gobbling down sushi in front of a Japanese aquarium. It’s big fish versus small fry, and we’re invited to observe the latter’s dismantling of the food chain.

Comedy of Power hardly burdens itself with subtleties. We can see here the shadow of an affair whose protagonists aren’t exactly brought down by an excess of nuance—a universe governed by the principle of eat-or-be-eaten, which relentlessly confronts this gang of well-heeled crooks with a Robespierre in skirts whose big mouth conjures troubling echoes of Nazi persecution: “Ah, if I could only flush out those bloodsuckers…” Chabrol’s mise-en-scène never misses an opportunity to make the most of this contrast: the fat cats’ ruddy complexions versus the bags under Killman’s eyes, their fine dinners versus her vodka-chocolate diet, Monte Cristo cigars versus Marlboro, Armagnac versus caramel candy bars.

And so the film constantly plays out within the borders of a perfectly traceable reality, overwhelming it with an absolutely rigorous mise-en-scène. This dialectic opens out onto an infinity of perspectives, and it also facilitates a renewal of the discreet Nietzscheanism that permeated Chabrol’s cinema in the Sixties. Killman isn’t so far from the journalist protagonist of The Third Lover (L’Oeil du malin, 62): both are enclosed in their mental worlds, pulling the strings yet imprisoned in traps of their own making, and in their meager gratification they aren’t far from the heroes of Rohmer’s Moral Tales. They are confronted, all too late, by the hard reality of the actions to which they have been led by their abstract ideals (a certain idea of Justice, of France, of Evil) and which leave them suddenly sobered, on the roadside, contemplating a landscape that’s nothing but ruins and ashes.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review

The literal translation of Claude Chabrol's 55th motion picture in nearly 50 years, L'Ivresse de Pouvoir, is "the intoxication of power" ... but for its brief American theatrical run earlier this year the film was called Comedy of Power. The script by Chabrol and longtime collaborator Odile Barski takes as its jumping off point France's Elf-Aquitaine scandal of a decade ago. The biggest criminal trial in the history of postwar France, "l'affaire Elf" arose from the indictment of three dozen individuals associated with the state-owned oil company Elf Aquitaine (and connected to the government's ruling elite) in the misappropriation of almost two hundred million dollars in company funds. Isabelle Huppert (in her seventh collaboration with Chabrol) stars as Jeanne Charmant-Killman, a government-appointed magistrate assigned to crack the case and nicknamed "the Piranha" for her singular tenaciousness. Although Jeanne is based on the real life judge Eva Joly, Chabrol is far less interested in reliving headlines as he is in revealing the preoccupations and peccadilloes of the bourgeoisie.

Claude Chabrol is a rare storyteller able to reconcile an acidic cynicism with an impish joie de vivre. His films can rail at institutional hypocrisy (1988's Un affaire de femmes, starring Isabelle Huppert) or seem lighthearted to the point of inconsequentiality (1987's Masques) but they are consistently charming, expertly filmed and elegantly acted – and Comedy of Power is no exception. At the outset, the film seems to hew close to a familiar paradigm: the lone female investigator, the guilty male parties protecting one another and conspiring to undermine her, and the glass ceiling against which she ultimately bumps on her doomed quest for justice. Where Comedy of Power distances itself from the Hollywood formula is in the subtlety of its playing, in the maturity and sophistication it expects from its viewing audience, in its eschewing of caricature and its refusal to patly bring down the curtain on either an inspiring positive conclusion or a soul-crushing negative outcome. While American viewers may feel frustrated by its unabashed and oh-so-French anti-climax, Comedy of Power isn't about its ending but about the particulars of the case (and the lives of those involved) as it approaches its inevitable endgame.

Eva Joly, putative model for "le grand menace" Jeanne Charmant-Killman, was a French citizen of Norwegian blood – an immigrant who made good and married well - and surely Joly's/Charmant Killman's devotion to the innately French principles of "liberty, equality, fraternity" fired her desire to bring the conspirators of l'affaire Elf towards an ultimate accounting. (It's worth noting that the national motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité is a legacy of the French Revolution.) In scenes filmed for b>Comedy of Power but dropped from the final cut, Chabrol has Jeanne visit her washwoman mother, a commoner whose slave labor provided the down payment for Jeanne's ascendancy toward middle class status (a standing solidified by Jeanne's eventual marriage into a bourgeois family that had hired her as an au pair). As a founder of the French Nouvelle Vague, Chabrol was both a Communist and a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma ; rejecting the auteur theory embraced by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Chabrol was branded déclassé during the 1960s but his craftsman approach bespeaks an essential egalitarianism that is reflected in the majority of his protagonists. Although Jeanne Charmant-Killman (the hyphenate name hints at a dual nature) has risen to a position of prominence, fame and affluence, her fetishistic documentation of the cash amounts paid by the conspirators from company funds for their mistresses' comforts, for personal landscaping and for Caribbean vacations betrays the hard-wired frugality of her peasant stock.

Now in her fifties, Isabelle Huppert has lost none of the sex appeal or the love of risk of her seminal (and career-making) film appearances in such French classics as Les valseuses (Going Places, 1974), La dentellière (The Lacemaker, 1977) and Coup de torchon (Clean Slate, 1981). By turns impenetrable, formidable, coquettish, seductive, indomitable and vulnerable, Huppert's performance is a master class in film acting. Backing her play is an exceptional supporting cast, including Thomas Chabrol (son of the director and actress Stéphane Audran) as Jeanne's slacker nephew (with whom she shares a dangerous rapport), Robin Renucci as her dissatisfied husband and Patrick Bruel, François Berléand (the dogged cop of The Transporter films), Jean-François Balmer, Jean-Philippe Duclos (Queen Margot) and Jacques Boudet as the cabal of conspirators whose code Jeanne must crack before she can bring the guilty to justice. Crisply shot by Portuguese cinematographer Eduardo Serra (Blood Diamond) and sensuously scored by Matthieu Chabrol (son of the director and his first wife, Agnes Goute), Comedy of Power is sly and sexy entertainment from a master storyteller at the top of his game.

For a filmmaker more than a little interested in the physical textures of human life, Claude Chabrol has endured some exceptionally shoddy DVD transfers. Happily (and perhaps due to the film's freshness), this all-region DVD from Koch Lorber Films is an exception to this rule. Letterboxed at an anamorphic 1.85:1, the image is clear and richly colorful. Although a recent French DVD offered the film's soundtrack in a 5.1 remix, only Dolby 2.0 mono is present here; the monaural soundscape is acceptable and yellow English subtitles are optional. A making-of featurette is most welcome (it's always fun seeing Chabrol behind the scenes) but comes off at first as a bit of a Babel-like muddle, with many talking heads popping up in quick succession, their French subtitled and spoken (by a Scottish translator!) – sometimes even at the same time. Unidentified except by name, Christine Deviers-Joncourt, former mistress to implicated French foreign minister Roland Dumas, appears briefly to thank Chabrol for not using her name in the film. The only other extra is a 1m 45s theatrical trailer.

PopMatters (Meremu C.) review

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Reel.com DVD review [Jim Hemphill]

Village Voice (Jim Ridley) review

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij)

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C+]

The Beachwood [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Eye for Film (Paul Griffiths) review [4/5]

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [3/5]

stylusmagazine.com (Dave Micevic) review

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]

Reel Movie Critic [Vittorio J. Carli]

Georgia Straight (Mark Harris) review

MSN Entertainment [Sean Axmaker]

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Roland E. Zwick (magneteach@aol.com) from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

Entertainment Weekly review [C] Owen Gleiberman

Comedy of Power Lisa Nesselson froom Variety

The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review

Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [3/5]

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review

Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris

San Francisco Chronicle review Ruthe Stein

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review January 5, 2007, also here: When a Woman Rattles a Man's World of Fraud

Eva Joly - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Elf king who fell from power BBC News, March 13, 2003

Oil scandal billionaire tells French court of bribes | World news ... Paul Webster and Martin Bright from The Guardian, May 7, 2003

BBC News | EUROPE | French elite hit by sleaze claims BBC News, June 18, 2003

Former Elf oil chiefs jailed | Business | The Guardian Jon Henley from The Guardian, November 13, 2003

Elf Executives Jailed Over Fueling Corruption in Africa - Nations ... Hector Igbikiowubo from The Global Policy Forum, November 18, 2003

France: Elf verdicts reveal state corruption at highest levels Antoine Lerougetel from the World Socialist Web Site, November 25, 2003

euro|topics - Eva Joly The bad screenplay of the Elf affair, a quote from Eva Joly, the lead judge on the Elf scandal in Le Monde, March 17, 2006

Eva Joly: Britain is destroying the anti-corruption struggle ... article written by Eva Joly from the Independent, December 20, 2006

BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Eva Joly and her fight against top ... BBC radio interview with Eva Joly publicizing her book Justice Under Siege, February 7, 2007

Interview of EVA JOLY The France 24 Interview (in English) on YouTube (14:00)

A GIRL CUT IN TWO (La Fille coupée en deux)

Germany France (115 mi) 2007

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

All you need to know about Claude Chabrol's new film is in its title, though a more apropos one might have been Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things. Chabrol opens the curtains on a one-dimensional world where little boys and girls are reared using handbooks and wine is considered the nectar of the gods, though the director's mounting indifference means that it's hard to tell if he still cares to give the finger to the monstrous upper-crust environs in his films or if he wants to be part of them. Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), a TV weather girl with men raining all around her, is similarly conflicted, though her romantic crisis is not resolved as a prickly foil to bourgeois complacency. To Chabrol, she is something close to an inanimate object, tossed back and forth between Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand), an accomplished novelist twice her age, and Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel), a child of fortune whose nail-biting points to personal demons. It's easy to latch on to the rationale Gabrielle's mother gives for her daughter's devotion to Charles—she's looking for a father!—because there appears to be no other. Confusing Charles's sex for love, she becomes enraged when he doesn't come back for more, at which point she marries Paul, whose violence against Charles late in the film isn't so much waged on behalf of Gabrielle as it is in deference to a skeleton that falls out of his closet. One of those Chabrol productions perched awkwardly between thriller and comedy, A Girl Cut in Two is almost documentary-like in its examination of bourgeois rituals of wining and dining and modes of self-preservation, but its intriguing bits of psychological observation are not engineered into a particularly sensible or pulsating whole. Paling next to Raul Ruiz's nutty Chabrolian parody That Day, the film is only as artful, amusing, and thoughtful as the last Woody Allen picture.

One in the middle for Claude Chabrol, La Fille Coupee En Deux is nowhere near the heights of his greatest films but is a damn sight better than some of his less notable hack work.

Ludivine Sagnier stars as a TV weatherwoman who falls for famous but married older man Francois Berleand. Unfortunately, after a whirlwind romance and an introduction to kinky sex, he decides that he can’t leave his wife, giving our heroine no choice but to end the relationship. Alas, she foolishly takes up with obnoxious trust fund baby Benoit Magimel, only to find that he’s obsessed with her past love to the point of madness. This naturally sets the scene for a tragedy, one that will leave the protagonist all but destroyed.

At first, the film seems on autopilot, with the Bazinian realism cranked up all the way to banal and the familiar jabs at the bourgeoisie little more than limp bashing. Further, Magimel is a little too obviously creepy (and too comically decked out in bad suits), making him an unlikely choice for the apparently level-headed Sagnier. But once the big event of the script happens, the film is surprisingly affecting as the creep’s family closes ranks and pressures our heroine into making a wrong decision.

Though La Fille Coupee En Deux almost exactly copies Richard Fleischer’s film of the Evelyn Nesbit case, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, it packs a punch that movie doesn’t have, and while I can’t say that I’ll ever think about it ever again it’s still somehow a cut above a mere time killer in terms of how it works on an audience.

You could do a lot worse than this; if only it didn’t seem a dry run for a much better movie.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Chabrol's latest film (La Fille coupée en deux) is a barbed comedy set in the city of Lyons. A charming young TV weather person, Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier), suddenly finds two men competing for her affections. The successful writer Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand) is appearing on TV when he first runs into Gabrielle; her mother (Marie Bunel) works at the bookstore where he's later signing his new book. Though he's a good thirty years her senior, they feel an instant connection. To her, he's sexy, fascinating, and rich. But not nearly so rich as Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), the capricious young heir to a vast local pharmaceutical fortune. With his tinted Napoleonic hairdo and flamboyant wardrobe, Magimel spins onto each scene like some spoiled princeling. He's amusing, absurd, and a bit menacing. There are obvious hints that he may be completely wacko. He spots Gabrielle too at the book signing, falls for her, and woos her aggressively henceforth. Saint-Denis lives with professed contentment and serenity in a splendid superbly brittle ultramodern house in the country and has a vivacious and understanding and longstanding wife (Dona, Valeria Cavalli. Gaudens lives in a mansion with his widowed mother (Caroline Sihot) and two grown sisters. Both men have some dark scandals and improprieties hidden in their past, though we don't learn much about them. In this relatively provincial world they are well acquainted with, and have always cordially detested, each other.

It appears that Gabrielle is led into some indecencies by Charles, whose special club and in-town pied-a-terre she visits more than once. Preposterous as it may seem, Paul, who's head-over-heels for Gabrielle, appoints himself Gabrielle's moral savior. Though she's sought after by Canal+ and her current boss wants to make her the emcee of a new show, Gabrielle eschews these opportunities for advancement and instead devotes nearly all her time to pursuing or being pursued by these two men, enjoying the attentions of the curiously endearing Paul, but running off the instant the sophisticated Charles summons her—because he's the one she truly adores. (In the French cinema, older men are quite commonly seen as the more attractive.) Both Berleand, a convincing ladies man, and the visually transformed Magimel, by now a Chabrol regular if not a male muse, are splendid in their roles. Sagnier, whom Americans will probably best remember as Tinker Belle or the naughty young woman in Ozon's Swimming Pool, projects a world of beauty, charm, vivacity, and (relative) innocence.

The Girl Cut in Two is highly amusing. The script by Chabrol's longtime assistant Cecile Maistre sparkles with witty zingers in every scene and has particular fun with the literary world, "intellectual" TV shows, and as always with the director, the gilded squalor of the upper bourgeoisie. This being Lyons, one of France's chief gastronomic capitals, there are lots of good restaurants and there's lots of good wine; many coupes of good champagne are tossed back. Nifty sports cars are driven—and when Paul arrives anywhere in his, he leaves it at the door, and tosses away the ticket afterwards with a disdain any driver would envy. For a good part of the time, each scene is more fun than the last.

The dialogue is smooth and glib, but it's also smart. This isn't a murder mystery, though a pistol does appear and later it is used. It's more a portrait of emotional conflict. And it treats issues of high and low; of love trumping ambition and then turning out to be naïve; about wealth and madness; about men and women; youth and age. At the center of it is Gabrielle's "search for love." But in focusing on Paul and Charles, Gabrielle is, of course, carrying out that search in two quite wrong places. Both men are as deeply tempting as they are flawed, so it's no wonder she wavers hopelessly between them.

Gabrielle marries Paul, but only on the rebound from Charles. This leads to unhappiness, discontent, and finally violence. The film has transposed to contemporary times (without loss of credibility) the story of the 1906 murder, in New York, of the famous American architect and womanizer Stanford White (represented here by the writer) by the husband of his latest mistress. It's a theme dealt with before, notably in Richard Fleischer's 1955 Girl in the Red Velvet Swing and Milos Forman's 1981 screen adaption of E.L. Doctorow's novel, Ragtime. But the Maistre-Chabrol treatment is unique.

The Girl Cut in Two is one of Chabrol's lightest and brightest and most buoyant films. It may not, as few can, rest on the top shelf with his absolute classics, but it is the best thing he's done in years.

The film was shown at the New York Film Festival 2007 in September; it opened in France in early August.

World Socialist Web Site (Hiram Lee) review

Ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [3/5]

Reverse Shot (Michael Koresky) review

Between Productions [Robert Cashill]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Beverly Berning

National Public Radio (Mark Jenkins) review

A Tale of Two Halves James Hansen from Out 1 Film Journal, August 30, 2008

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review (Page 2)

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] which includes an interview with actress Ludivine Sagnier, August 14, 2008

Killer Movie Reviews (Andrea Chase) review [2/5]

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3.5/5]

The New York Sun (Darrell Hartman) review

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) also here: european-films.net

The Auteurs' Notebook

Screen International Jonathan Romney

Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]

VideoVista review JC Hartley

Cinema de Merde

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

Little White Lies magazine Matt Bochensky

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review also seen here: New York Cool [Harvey Karten]

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

Screenjabber review Robert Hull

Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair) capsule review

Tiscali UK Paul Hurley

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Channel4.com/film

Variety.com [Lisa Nesselson]

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [4/5]

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [3/5]

The New Wave rolls on in Claude Chabrol John Patterson from The Guardian, May 16, 2009

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5]

The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review August 15, 2008, also here: Two Men Wage a War Only to Harm the Spoils

Serious Pleasures: Season’s Sweet Spots Stephen Holden from The New York Times, August 22, 2008

INSPECTOR BELLAMY (Bellamy) B 88

France (110 mi) 2009

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
— W. H. Auden, excerpt from Song VIII of Twelve Songs (1933-1938)

In this his final film, as the director recently passed away at the age of 80, Chabrol finally teams up with French legend Gérard Depardieu who plays a charmingly personable Police Inspector, the kind of guy who would just as soon hear your life story than the specific facts at hand, which more likely bore him, as he’s spent a career investigating police work and it’s other things now that interest him in this latter stage of his life. Depardieu as Inspector Bellamy is something of a settled, but never quite comfortable middle-aged man in a bourgeois marriage with his still sexy wife Françoise (Marie Bunel), who always appears calmer and a step ahead of her husband. But he’s the one on duty, though you’d never know it, as each of his calls are a “personal visit” instead of an official police questioning, where it feels more like Bellamy is simply trying to get a grasp on the lay of the land, offering bits of kindness where he can. Interesting from the opening shot, a real puzzler as the camera curiously pans out of a cemetery out onto a stretch of beach where a demolished burnt-out car lies at the bottom of a cliff, with a charred body and a severed head sitting upright laying right next to it. Need one say more? What’s more interesting is that the Inspector and his wife are on holiday in the south of France at their country home in Nîmes, but like indigestion, the man won’t let it rest, and his curiosity gets the better of him. This husband and wife team is so conventionally close that they’re a toss between the straight-laced yet comical McMillan & Wife (1971–1977) and the suave sophistication of THE THIN MAN (1934).

And did I mention that Depardieu is ginormous, a man who looks like a beached whale when he sits upon the edge of the bed with his wife in little skimpy outfits? It had to have been an in joke on the set, as the man gives Brando a run for his money as the world’s most bloated up human being, but his acting is impeccable. In no way does his size interfere except as an occasional aside joke. Instead, Bellamy visits all the known suspects, never once raising his hand or fist as a threat, or a gun, or a warrant. Instead, he relies on the pleasantries of old-fashioned conversation. This non-threatening manner in investigating a hideous crime also describes the pacing of the film, where age really does enter into it, as this film has no target audience in mind, but ambles along in its own manner, veering here and there, occasionally seeming off course, but all in good time seems to be the director’s aim. This healthy dose of maturity adds to the charm of the picture, as it uses old-fashioned methods to lure the audience into a somewhat unconventional crime, insurance fraud that resurrects the use of a dead body double to steer interested parties away from the real mastermind who’s behind this swindle, where we can imagine this exact same scenario in the 1940’s and Bellamy would be a hard drinking, skirt chasing, and decidedly younger version of himself.

Here, despite his size, he’s still a skirt chaser, and, blasphemous in France, he’s given up drinking altogether, that is, until his wayward and long lost brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac) arrives on the scene, a gambler, a thief, but mostly a drunkard flirting with his wife every chance he gets while drinking every last bottle on the premises, a hard-drinking ex-con who is belittled and constantly criticized by his bullying elder brother throughout the rest of the picture. The only time they have a moment’s peace is when they have a little drink together and share a few laughs, as otherwise they’re at each other’s throats. Bellamy never cuts him a break, which makes Jacques all the more devious, a complete fuck up and damaged soul who seems incapable of doing anything right. In his own way, he’s the perfect side attraction to Bellamy’s continuing conversation with the girl friend of the dead body double (Adrienne Pauly), the friend of a homeless man who ends up dead, while the real mystery man, cleverly maneuvering his way through three roles, one following the alterations of plastic surgery, is Jacques Gamblin, a man who rarely sees his dutiful wife anymore (Marie Matheron), as he wants to abscond with his mistress (Vahina Giocante) and the money. Bellamy, however, unscrambles the clues, which, you’d never know as he’s too busy fuming about his own brother’s various indiscretions, railing against the incompetence of the local police detective (who’s never seen onscreen), while amiably following the drifting thoughts of the town. There’s an uncommon ease about this picture which makes it easy to like, and a final shot that exquisitely offers a poetic transcendence to the director himself, a renowned gourmet and self mocking bon vivant who loved life, and unlike many of the other more tortured New Wavers, wasn’t afraid to show us a good time.

You could almost call this movie Inspector Nick Charles: though it's peppered with minor profundities, it's an airy trifle—a warmly written and acted jumble of character studies. Claude Chabrol reportedly wrote this engaging, popular-appeal potboiler for star Gerard Depardieu who, now thick with age (and a nose like Karl Malden, mon dieu!!), plays a famous-but-retired police detective pulled into a Chandler-esque mystery, filled in with fleshed-out characters—as per usual with Chabrol, the story is far less important than the people in it. (The story includes a lot of fraternal bickering, sibling rivalry with a no-good brother who, in the film's best joke, arrives in the middle of the night with ominous Tchaikovsky music blaring...from the taxi! "Could you turn that down please?")

The mystery unfolds slowly, with Depardieu putting the pieces together as if for sport—as if, what else would he do while on vacation? And they come easily; there are no twists here, and certainly no surprises. Instead, you get a missing-persons case and a cop's life whose small details start to parallel one another slightly, as if the two are bleeding into each other. It suggests something about how art and life share a porous border, strengthened by the fact that the movie opens in a cemetery, with a shot of a decorated grave stone, through which the camera winds before landing upon a corpse. How's that for the opening of the last film you'll make before you die?

Critic's Notebook [Martin Tsai]

Gérard Depardieu looks terrible these days. He’s always packed a few extra pounds, but right now he’s just obese. No doubt, the death of his son Guillaume last October has taken a toll on him, but who knows if that’s a factor in his letting himself go? He has made some lousy choices through the years, as have De Niro, Pacino and other fine, only-last-name-necessary actors of his generation. Even though time really hasn’t been kind to him, Mr. Depardieu can still generate some movie-star wattage and pull off the larger-than-life presence of a leading man. He has done it so expertly in “Bellamy” – a star vehicle made-to-measure by none other than Claude Chabrol – that one sometimes forgets he is lugging around some 200 extra pounds.

Mr. Depardieu plays the eponymous character, a renowned police commissioner vacationing in Nîmes with his wife, Françoise (Marie Bunel). Paul Bellamy lives for his work, and he readily welcomes the distraction when Noël Gentil (Jacques Gamblin) contacts him out of the blue to confess an insurance fraud and the possible foul play involved. Meanwhile, Paul’s black-sheep half brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac) shows up to disrupt the peace and quiet in a bid to settle an old score.

Fans of Mr. Chabrol who expect “Bellamy” to be a policier or whodunit will be disappointed. It isn’t a psychological thriller either, despite the Freudian sibling rivalry and all. In his first collaboration with Mr. Depardieu, Mr. Chabrol sets out to tailor a role that is fit for the preeminent leading man of French cinema. The joy is to watch Mr. Depardieu slipping into it with such effortless charm and charisma even when we fear that seams might burst and buttons might fly at any time. If nothing else, the film proves that, unlike many of his contemporaries who appear to be coasting, Mr. Depardieu is no mere fat-suited caricature of his former self.

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

The death of Claude Chabrol inevitably saddles Inspector Bellamy, the prolific French New Waver's final feature, with a coda-status heft that the wispy opus cannot possibly shoulder. Paul Bellamy (Gerard Depardieu) is the last of the filmmaker's ambiguous protagonists, a renowned police inspector whose analytical mind can't resist drifting toward riddles even during a holiday in Nimes. As if answering his desire for a bit of sleuthing, a mysterious client shows up at the cottage Bellamy's staying at with his wife, Françoise (Marie Bunel), trampling their garden and dropping hints of psychological anguish. Intrigued, the inspector hears the man's tale, which involves a decapitated charred corpse, the disappearance of a philandering local businessman, and a death-obsessed vagabond. That all three characters are played by the same actor (Jacques Gamblin, slipping in and out of bogus whiskers) is a reminder of Chabrol's decades-long affinity for Hitchcockian doubles and façades (murder is at one point described as a Strangers on a Train-style "exchange of favors"), yet such sporadic thematic spice mostly serves to heighten the well-bred dustiness of the narrative, which meanders between Bellamy's investigation and his own buried family secrets with all the urgency of a crosswords puzzle.

A sardonic humanist in the Balzac mold, Chabrol was always less interested in the mysteries of his plots than in the nets of insinuating relationships that they would invariably open up. Accordingly, the hazy crime at the center of Inspector Bellamy functions primarily as a fractured mirror through which the protagonist ponders his interactions with his wife and his younger, broken-down half-brother, Jacques (Clovis Cornillac). The vehement upstart of Les Cousins and Les Bonnes Femmes would have mined this territory for confrontational studies of human foolishness and desire, while the urbane surgeon of Les Biches and Le Boucher would have taken a scalpel to the crossroads of bourgeois and provincial corruption. Unfortunately, the Chabrol at work here is the cozy craftsman of the previous 10 years, where the occasional gratifying perversity is swamped by somnolent polish and the sense of a missed dinner being the biggest thing at stake.

Merci Pour le Chocolat and The Bridesmaid would have made for more robust swan songs, though Inspector Bellamy does provide the auteur with an affecting final self-portrait in Depardieu's wry, slightly melancholy sleuth, a man grown plump with age and comfort yet to the end continuing to search and inquire.

Chabrol's Magufffin Armond White from The NY Press

After Claude Chabrol’s death Sept. 12, 2010, the French New Wave continues to pass into history even though the best films by Nouvelle Vague directors— Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and others—stay amazingly vital. Chabrol’s final film, Inspector Bellamy, is a good example: Chabrol re-imagines the detective genre in the course of practicing it. Gerard Depardieu plays Inspector Bellamy, whose domestic life with his affectionate wife Francoise (Marie Bunel) is interrupted by a client (Jacques Gamblin) seeking help in a murder case and by Bellamy’s half-brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac), whose unexpected arrival brings unsettling family demands.

It took a year for Bellamy to open in the U.S. following its premiere in Europe, probably because New Wave movies are no longer hot commercial properties.

The nonchalant, almost spontaneous way Bellamy’s life complicates his profession (and vice-versa) challenges the simplistic narratives of current Euro imports. In Bellamy, Chabrol and Depardieu both audaciously reveal their personal approach to the world as opposed to the way films like Carlos, Mesrine and A Prophet—as well as American grindhouse product like Let Me In and The Town—simply concentrate on generic sensationalism.

As the New Wave masters age and their innovations become unfashionable, modern audiences lose connection with the New Wave thrill of rethinking life through the codes of movie narrative. Bellamy’s client’s calls for help have an existential sense that the conscientious inspector cannot avoid. Bellamy sees himself in the client—and in his attraction to the women he meets during his investigation. The film isn’t simply about a case, but about the moral questions of social life, law, marriage, family, sex and privilege.

“Do you think mankind is improving?” Bellamy asks his despairing alcoholic brother. “Did her sexual hunger frighten you?” Bellamy probes his client about a femme fatale. Both questions and answers—posed in Chabrol’s signature style of casual observation—raise the film’s moral inquiry. Bellamy is suffused with humane concern that startlingly enlarges the solid, coherent crime-and-justice plot (co-written by Odile Barski who also co-wrote Techine’s The Girl on the Train). That’s vital art. That’s also Chabrol’s real purpose. Scenes of domestic harmony or friction, flashbacks of criminal activity and human duplicity, have a depth and precision that suggests Chabrol’s masterly summing-up of what he knows about cinema and about human nature. Bellamy’s rivalry with Jacques goes back to the remarkable sibling tension of Chabrol’s 1958 debut Le Beau Serge—Cornillac’s haunted performance even evokes Gerard Blain in that film. Genre is Chabrol’s Maguffin. The New Wave’s favorite icon, Alfred Hitchcock, explained “Maguffin” as: “The thing the hero cares about but the audience doesn’t,” which could also define the difference between profound cinema and trivial, escapist cinema—the stuff Hollywood traditionally emphasizes versus what matters in viewers’ lives. In Bellamy’s various dealings, Chabrol conveys a lyrical sense of the world. (The film is dedicated to “The Two Georges,” saluting the crime novelist Georges Simenon and musician Georges Brassens, whose classic songs articulate several characters’ points of view and even inspire a trial lawyer’s whimsical summation.) All the film’s dramatic tensions get distilled in exchanges that could be either literary apercus or song cues: “You have to forgive the weak. Why? Because they’re weak, that’s how it is,” and “He thought the world was a mess. He was right. Right doesn’t make you happy. No, it’s the opposite.”

It turns out Bellamy was a summing-up for Chabrol after all. Moviemaking this rich is passing from our culture.

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Chabrol is 78, and this is his 57th film. He's in fine form here, though this hasn't quite got the delirious malice or the cloying bourgeois atmosphere of his most potent works. The closing dedication is to "the two Georges." They are Georges Brassens, the French singer-songwriter, and Georges Simenon, the prolific Belgian-born maker of novels hard and soft and the creator of the inimitable Commissioner Maigret. This is the first time Chabrol and Gérard Depardieu have worked together. For the occasion, Chabrol has conceived a lead character who's half Maigret, half Depardieu. And he has based his crime plot on a news item. The ingredients blend well and the result is guaranteed to entertain.

There is an actual Maigret novel in which the Paris detective goes on vacation with his wife, but then becomes involved in a case. ('Les Vacances de Maigret'--and it was made into a film!) It's a foregone conclusion that Maigret, and Chabrol's Commissioner Paul Bellamyworki (Depardieu) is no different, is happiest when he's solving a murder mystery. Bellamy spends every summer with his wife Françoise (Marie Bunel) in the region of Nimes, in the south of France, where she maintains a cozy bourgeois family house. She would prefer they join a cruise on the Nile, where Bellamy would be less able to get his nose into French crime, but here they are. And as the film begins and Maigret, I mean Bellamy, is doing a crossword and Françoise is planning dinner and shopping, a suspicious-looking lean sort of fellow called Noël Gentil (Jacques Gamblin) is hovering around in the garden just outside the picture window, and finally gets up his courage and raps on the front door. Bellamy has written a well known memoir and like Maigret is so famous people seek him out.

Mme. Bellamy turns the man away, but there's a phone call, and Bellamy goes to a motel room, and he finds this chap interesting because people interest him. Gentil turns out to have several aliases, and even faces, because he's sought the help of a plastic surgeon. He shows the photo of a man who looks rather like himself and says he "sort of killed him." He declares himself to be in a terrible mess. There are several women, a wife (Marie Matheron) and a beautiful young woman who has a beauty shop (Vahina Giocante) in the town. And, as in the Simenon novel, there is a local police inspector, a certain Leblanc, whom Bellamy doesn't respect, and assiduously avoids, and Chabrol never shows us on screen.

M. Gentil turns out to be a suspect involved in a double life and a devious crime. But he is seeking the Commissioner's help--on a private basis. It has to do with an insurance scam that went awry.

Chabrol is also involved in a double process, because the film takes a complicated family turn with the arrival of Bellamy's ne'er-do-well half-brother Jacques Lebas (Clovis Cornillac), who gambles, drinks too much, and has a habit of going off with things that don't belong to him. Cornillac wears this character's skin so comfortably he never seems to be acting, and with a part like this, that's a neat trick, and he makes Jacques somehow elegant as well.

Part of the charm of this easy-to-watch if unchallenging film is the warm relationship between Françoise and Bellamy, which is romantic and affectionate and physical and cozy all at once. Bunel and Depardieu (who is very large now, a benignly beached whale in a good suit) play very well together. There is a dinner with a gay dentist (Yves Verhoeven) and his partner, which Jacques horns in on; this isn't terribly interesting. Nor is the case extremely resonant. The most memorable moments are those between Bellamy and his wife and his love-hate squabbling with the unpredictable half-brother, which are enhanced by the bright colors and warmth of the southern French setting. There is a young lawyer who shines in court, and lines from a Georges Brassens song are used in a surprising way. Fans of Chabrol and of Depardieu (and the two Georges!) won't want to miss this.

Bellamy opened in Paris February 25, 2009 to decent reviews. Given its north American premiere at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center in March 2009, this seems sure to get a US distributor, but none has been announced yet.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Ian Johnston] August, 2010

filmsoundoff [Alex Roberts]

Claude Chabrol's INSPECTOR BELLAMY - Two DVD Reviews of the ... Michael Atkinson and Sean Axmaker from Turner Classic Movies

Claude Chabrol Andrew Sarris from Film Comment, November/December, 2010

The Front Row: Happy Endings : The New Yorker Richard Brody

Critic Picks [Alex Udvary] October 20, 2009

Slant Magazine DVD [Chuck Bowen]

eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver

DVDTalk.com [Jamie S. Rich]

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

Vancouver Voice [D. K. Holm]

Inspector Bellamyl review (2009) Gerard Depardieu - Qwipster's ... Vince Leo from Qwipster Movie Review

DVD Verdict [James A. Stewart]

Bellamy | Review | Screen Mike Goodridge in Berlin from Screendaily, also here: micropsia: Berlinale: "Bellamy", de Claude Chabrol (Screen Daily y ...

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Adam Micklethwaite]

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Jigsaw Lounge [Matthew Tempest] Berlin Film Festival 2009

Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel and Kent Turner

Bina007 Movie Reviews [Caterina Benincasa]

The House Next Door [Veronika Ferdman] January 2, 2010

micropsia: Berlinale: "Bellamy", de Claude Chabrol (Screen Daily y ... Boyd van Hoeij from Variety

Movie review: 'Inspector Bellamy' - Los Angeles Times Gary Goldstein, December 9, 2010

From the Hitchcock of France, a final farewell: 'Inspector Bellamy ... Susan King, December 7, 2010

Georgia Straight [Adrian Mack]

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott, October 28, 2010

Chadha, Gurinder

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

Germany (112 mi) 2002

Bend It Like Beckham Michael Agger from the New Yorker

A crowd-pleasing British movie devoted to the radical idea that girls can play soccer and sprain their ankles. Jess (Parminder Nagra) is a Sikh who hides her love of the game from her conservative parents, while Jules (Keira Knightley) is a tomboy who defies her English mother. Both of them have a thing for their Irish coach, Joe (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers)—he of the wounded knee and the watery eyes. The movie is a hodgepodge: nicely barbed scenes with Jess's family bump against weird practice montages that play like sports-bra ads. What it all adds up to is multicultural empowerment for the pre-teen shin-guard crowd.

Chadwick, Justin

MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM B 84

Great Britain South Africa (139 mi) 2013 Official Site

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

—Nelson Mandela, in a speech before the sentencing court, 1964

This is another Harvey Weinstein project, obtaining the rights to Nelson Mandela’s 700-page memoirs written in 1995, Long Walk to Freedom, then hiring a white British screenwriter, William Nicholson, known for writing GLADIATOR (2000) and LES MISÉRABLES (2012), to adapt it for film, and another white British television director, Justin Chadwick, to direct the movie. Unfortunately, the film only scratches the surface, and despite the overall length, skims over his life without much scrutiny, playing out more like a movie made for the History Channel. What cannot be denied, however, is the enormously appealing story of Mandela himself, played with a great deal of authority by black British actor Idris Elba, where the film benefits from a release coming just weeks after the monumental 95-year old figure died in Johannesburg, South Africa on December 5, 2013. Had the film gone into greater detail and actually explored his life with more depth and complexity, it would have been an invaluable historical portrait. Instead it’s an overly pious film that reveres its subject to such an extent that he becomes a saintly figure. South African producer Anant Singh, who was himself an ardent apartheid activist, has been trying to make this film for over 16 years, but makes the mistake of attempting to cover half a century of his nation’s history through the life of one single man. By the time the film opens, he’s already an established lawyer with a thriving practice in Johannesburg, but next to nothing is known about how he came to assume this esteemed position, quite rare for a black man in a racially segregated society that routinely denies career advancement for blacks. While he lives with his wife Evelyn (Terry Pheto) and small children in a crowded black township, he practices in white courts before white judges where whites providing testimony aren’t used to being questioned or cross-examined by blacks about the accuracy of their testimony, sending some into a shock of racial indignation, where for racial reasons the judge allows these individuals to answer directly to the judge instead of having to speak to the questioning attorney.

Initially Mandela is seen as a large physical presence, one who boxes in his spare time, adores his wife and children, and maintains a close relationship to his community, though he also has a reputation as something of a womanizer. When the leaders of the African National Congress come calling, a non-violent, anti-apartheid movement that aligns themselves with the communist party to address the rights of black South Africans through mass demonstrations, boycotts, and protests, they impress him with their effectiveness in channeling social injustice into a mobilized defiance against the government, as Mandela is a believer that lone actions are largely ineffective, but when groups work together around common principles, this gets the attention of the government. Eventually he joins the party and becomes one of their leading speakers, where he’s especially effective in stirring crowds into action. The government’s response is to send military tanks and police forces into the black townships, effectively turning their neighborhoods into a segregated police state, where in response the international community initiates an arms and trade embargo against the apartheid government, which is seen as increasingly repressive and brutally violent. These sanctions isolate South Africa from the rest of the world, placing them on notice. Perhaps the one single event with the most significance is the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, when thousands of demonstrators burn their identity cards that they are legally required to carry in a sign of protest, demanding they be arrested to fill the jail cells, as police routinely check these “passes” as a means of harassing black citizens, often hauling anyone without their passes off to prison. On this date, however, they open fire on unarmed citizens, killing 69 people, including many children, almost all of them in the back as they attempted to flee the scene.

Mandela loses his wife Evelyn to the cause, as she needs a man who will be at home with his children, not one continually absent who swears his allegiance to the ANC, which alters their political tactics after the incident, turning to violence to achieve their goals, leading a campaign of targeted bombings of police stations, refusing to passively stand by and allow black citizens to be murdered by police without a response. Mandela meets and marries Winnie Mandela (Naomie Harris), who in real life is barely out of her teens, where there is an 18-year age difference, yet it is the romance of his life, as both share the same political dream. Their lives are split when Mandela and the ANC leaders are forced to go underground, where they are eventually arrested and sentenced in 1964 to spend the rest of their lives at hard labor on the Robben Island prison, a lime quarry where inmates spend their days breaking rocks down into gravel, both under a blazing hot sun, but also a constant assault of racial invectives by the white prison guards. Mandela is only allowed one letter every 6 months, with language censored by the guards, and no children visits until they reach age 16. At the time, Mandela’s oldest daughter was only 5. Winnie Mandela attempts to resume the political figurehead of her husband and is the object of repeated arrests, and most likely sexual assaults, including 18 months in solitary confinement, where she only grows more fiercely defiant. Winnie’s story is a bit more complicated, as to fill the void of the ANC leadership’s incarceration, there is tremendous pressure for her to exert leadership, becoming the face of the anti-apartheid movement around the world, and she thrives on the power, becoming intoxicated with the belief she is invincible, that she is the people’s champion, growing more hateful towards the white government, resorting to increasingly violent methods, even ordering the deaths of perceived collaborators, reprehensible actions that eventually separate her from her husband.

Mandela’s vision of leadership evolves during his 27 years in prison, amazingly showing no malice towards his oppressors, becoming one of the great figures of our time, directing his attention not only to his release but to obtaining the democratic goal of one man, one vote, where he eventually becomes the first freely elected black President of South Africa (1994–1999). While the overly conventional film arouses heroic sentiment through a soaring score, one might have appreciated greater examination of historical events, as extraordinary lives do not necessarily equate to extraordinary films, where the unique opportunity to film the memoirs of such a great historical figure deserves better, requiring greater depth and creativity. The international sanctions, for instance, are all but ignored, which helped weaken the nation’s economy, as is the increasing radicalization of young South Africans, failing to mention a split in the anti-apartheid movement that only widens after Mandela is released from prison, when suddenly, without providing context, blacks are killing blacks in the townships. There is little mention of the political challenges he faced to heal this divide, and barely touches upon the complexities of implementing a policy of national reconciliation. Despite all the critical acclaim surrounding the punishing pre-Civil War film 12 Years a Slave (2013), the literary source material for this film is far more appealing, as Mandela is such a uniquely compelling figure in history, where Idris Elba adds a commanding presence to the role, though his ANC associates are almost entirely non-existent, while Naomie Harris becomes little more than a brooding caricature by the end. Much like Harvey Weinstein’s Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013), this film tries to cram too much into a single film, glossing over the historical profundities of the moment, while the definitive works tend to remain more extended versions of Carlos – made for French TV (2010), a film divided into 3-parts, the extended made-for-television cut of THE LAST EMPEROR (1987), or the 2-part MESRINE (2008) or CHE (2008). Better South African films are Gavin Hood’s use of searing realism in his superb TSOTSI (2005), an eloquent voice of protest during the apartheid era, filmed in the shantytowns of Soweto and Johannesburg, or even Australian Phillip Noyce’s CATCH A FIRE (2006), a more mainstream film shot on actual locations and based on real events, following the early years of a budding anti-apartheid activist, where he and his family suffer a relentless series of assaults by the police, which only radicalizes his life in an attempt to finally provide meaning and purpose fighting against the prevailing system of apartheid.

Producer Anant Singh has been trying to make this movie for over 16 years, so no inferring anything about timing.

All the same, if you believe in the cosmic giggle, then there’s more than just convenience to the death of Nelson Mandela as this adaptation of his autobiography begins its long walk to Oscar season. Even with the best intentions, a posthumous surge of interest in the man will translate into bigger box office, making Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom look a lot more like the exploitation flick that it really is. If it were Roger Corman’s name above the credits, would this stodgy biopic come off any worse? (At least the car chases would be better.)

Putting aside Idris Elba’s charismatic performance as the giant known by his clan name, Madiba, this is nakedly manipulative filmmaking. Mandela’s all-too-human complexities are reduced to a simple violence versus nonviolence binary by screenwriter William Nicholson, while the deep politics of apartheid are way beyond the film’s grasp. Instead we see Afrikaner fat cats puffing on cigars in the early scenes of Mandela’s pre-revolutionary work as a lawyer, and a parade of cartoon villains after.

Winnie’s radicalization (portrayed by Naomie Harris, also rising above the material) and Nelson’s 27 years in prison are summarized to equally unsatisfying ends. Once the gnomic future statesman emerges from captivity—with no mention made of the compromised presidency that followed—good liberals will be high-fiving themselves over the film’s rousing finale, leaving the theatre with a brand-new song by those noted black South Africans U2 ringing in their ears, and ongoing global apartheid in all its increasingly pitiless manifestations conveniently forgotten.

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

An attempt to cover fifty years in the life of South African President Nelson Mandela in the time span of two and a half hours seems as exhausting to sit through as it was daunting to piece together, even if it is based on Mandela’s own autobiography. To their credit, Justin Chadwick and screenwriter William Nicholson have made a well-paced film, albeit one that gives us a rudimentary glance at Mandela’s development, doggedly comprehensive without taking any opportunities for depth or subtlety. Its rather conservative depiction of apartheid further places the film into a textbook category and seems an appropriate and elementary learning tool for those ignorant of the subject matter. Despite adhering to the trappings of generalization as seen in many genuinely produced biopics that would have been better served by sticking to one particular moment or period, Chadwick’s Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom does sport two notable performances, with leads Idris Elba and Naomie Harris sure to walk away with prestigious awards consideration for laying claim to the most definitive cinematic portrayals of the Mandela family, to date.

Cinematographer Lol Crawley has a rather varied resume, with work on notable indie titles like the excellent Ballast (2008) and On the Ice (2011), to more high profile items like the rather middling Hyde Park on Hudson (2012). Here, he paints a golden hued South Africa that fluctuates between looking repetitive and unremarkable (though he’s DP on Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s long gestating Dau, which will certainly be a sight to behold). We fly over the locales as quickly as we warp through time, beginning with certain touchstones of Mandela’s childhood growing up as part of the Xhosa, to his beginnings as a lawyer, through his first marriage which partially ended due to his adulterous and womanizing ways. Chadwick and Nicholson try valiantly to remain subjective as they portray unlikeable truths, but the more they play it safe, the more Mandela feels like a glossy package.

Nelson Mandela, like Martin Luther King, Jr., is a man whose life’s work has changed history, a daunting task to reenact with any sort of humble grace. He’s a figure that’s been portrayed by Poitier, Terrance Howard, and Morgan Freeman in an Oscar nominated turn in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, which chose to focus on one major event. And despite being fettered by some distracting old age make-up, Elba’s performance will usurp them all, if not for quality, then for scope. As engrossing as Elba is, the real (and perhaps, only) surprise here is Naomie Harris as Winnie, who steals the latter half of the film. Harris is given more expressive leeway since she’s not the main focus, and thus maneuvers through the film more subtlety.

Granted, Chadwick’s tasked with a tall order, so it seems unfair to censure him, and he’s dealing with volatile subject matter. Certainly, he avoids a semblance of ‘torture porn,’ and keeps the graphic violence to a minimum, but to such an extent that discomfort rather than running time seems to have dictated the content. The warped militant that Winnie Mandela becomes after her relentless experiences surely deserves a better due (and no, the 2011 Jennifer Hudson biopic is not it), as does her husband’s prison transformation which would turn them into ideological opponents, which is explained but not depicted. While Elba is in top form when reenacting Mandela’s exciting oratory power more than anywhere else, his long walk is here relayed with a taken-for-grantededness, confusing sincerity with brevity.

Review: 'Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom' - HitFix Guy Lodge

It is a cruel rule of thumb that extraordinary lives rarely make for extraordinary films. The more densely storied the personal narrative of its subject, the harder it is for dutiful screenwriters to resist tackling it whole, checking off every compelling accomplishment in thorough, linear fashion, even if such orderly diligence comes at the expense of more time-consuming character nuance. Critics have taken to calling this approach – not inaccurately – the “Wikipedia biopic,” though of course it dates back to the dustiest days of 1930s studio prestige drama, while Richard Attenborough effectively rebranded the genre in his own name decades later with the nobly dreary likes of “Young Winston” and “Gandhi.”

Attenborough comes frequently to mind while watching Justin Chadwick’s competent but predictably (perhaps inevitably) featureless “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” the latest and largest of several attempts to cinematically totemise the most consecrated of all living politicians: South Africa’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.

That’s not just because the film’s elevated but textbook-solemn tone so closely recalls “Cry Freedom,” Attenborough’s own stab at apartheid-era myth-making – nor because “Mandela”’s screenwriter, the reliably fusty William Nicholson, has twice worked with the British lord. “Cry Freedom” was released in 1987, three years before Mandela emerged a free man from the gates of Victor Verster Prison; Steve Biko may have been its worthy subject, but it was effectively a stand-in for a Mandela biopic that, at that heated point in history, had no satisfactory ending.

Chadwick, then, is making the film that many an august filmmaker has wanted to make for the better part of a quarter-century, and directs it with enough respectful anonymity to honor them all: the first official adaptation of Mandela’s 1994 doorstop memoir, produced by South Africa’s foremost industry mogul Anant Singh, it has the hefty but guarded presence of any authorized biography. It’s also the first film to follow Mandela from cradle to dotage. Recently, Bille August’s “Goodbye Bafana” and Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus” both attempted to capture the man entire by covering a more contained section of his life. That’s generally the approach of the more discerning and insightful biopic – see “Lincoln” or “Capote” for proof – but neither of those drab spirit-lifters felt equal to Mandela’s personal magnetism, and Chadwick’s more substantial film doesn’t come much closer.

To be fair, I’m not sure Mandela’s own sincere but shrewdly self-positioning book – written at the outset of his presidency, a delicate time of national healing when he very much needed to be all things to all men – does either. Mandela is and always has been a conflicted hero, one whose positively miraculous professional accomplishments sit in fascinating balance with the ruthless personal streak by which he achieved them: not just the romantic guerrilla action for which the political right continues to judge him, but his manifold failings as a husband and father. “Mandela” isn’t so hagiographic as to sweep those under the sprawling carpet – indeed, some of its most engaging stretches are those which cover the man’s early incarnation as a shark-suited lawyer and heedless township cocksman. But it does ultimately present those facets as immaterial in the face of his self-sacrificing Goodness, which overrides the filmmaking as much as it more justifiably does his historical standing.

Nicholson’s plainly overworked script scores points for showing us both sides of the man, but is rarely so deft or daring as to show them at once. Mandela is callous in one scene – invariably a domestic one, and most joltingly in those involving his first wife Evelyn (a too-swiftly discarded Terry Pheto) – and pious in the next, with the scales favoring the latter as the stakes of his political crusade escalate.

'Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom' Is An Unsentimental But Flawed Portrait Of Nelson Mandela Alyssa Rosenberg from Think Progress

World Socialist Web Site [Isaac Finn]

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom Amplifies Mandela's ... - Village Voice Michelle Orange

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom movie a worthy tribute. - Slate Jessica Winter

Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

Film.com [Jordan Hoffman]

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

In Review Online [Dan Girmus]

Movie Mezzanine [Kristen Sales]

SpiritualPopCulture.com [John A. Zukowski]

'Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom' Review: The ... - Pajiba TK

1NFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]

Twitch [Peter Martin]

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom | Reviews | Screen Tim Grierson

AVForums - Blu-ray [Cas Harlow]

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray & DVD with Pictures [Luke Bonanno]

DVD Talk [William Harrison] Blu-Ray

Mandela - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, Blu-Ray

Blu-ray.com [Martin Liebman]

Film Intuition: Blu-ray [Jen Johans]

SBS Film [Peter Galvin]

theartsdesk.com [Nick Hasted]

Dork Shelf [Andrew Parker]

Digital Spy [Emma Dibdin]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]

Little White Lies [Sophie Monks Kaufman]

Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom - Eye For Film Angus Wolfe Murray

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

'Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom' Review: Idris ... - Variety Scott Foundas

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom – review - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom – review - The Guardian Xan Brooks

The Telegraph David Gritten

Review: Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom is too ... - The Independent Kaleem Aftab

examiner.com [Christopher Granger]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson]

SPL!NG [Stephen 'Spling' Aspeling] (South African)

The South African Movie Database [Andrew Germishuys]

The Sowetan [SAPA]

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Simon Abrams

'Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom' With Idris Elba - The New Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Chahine, Youssef

Chahine, Youssef from World Cinema

The best known and most highly regarded Egyptian filmmaker. The son of a well-to-do lawyer, he was raised as a Christian and educated at Victoria College, an exclusive high school where studies were conducted in English. After a year at Alexandria University, he went to the US, where for two years he trained as an actor at the Pasadena Playhouse. Returning to Egypt in 1948, he entered the film industry and began directing in 1950. From the start he asserted himself as a skilled technician. Although his early films only occasionally veered far from the thematic concerns of commercial cinema, they were frequently distinguished by the director's eclectic personality and bold visual style. He is credited with having discovered Omar Sharif (then Michael Shalboub), who made his debut in Chahine's Struggle in the Valley (1953). Chahine's career was by necessity affected by political events at home. During the heyday of Gamal Abdel Nasser's push for Pan-Arabism, for example, he was assigned to direct the nationalistic epic El Naser Sallah-e-din / Salladin (1963). But he continued handling strictly commercial ventures like Sand of Gold (1966), an Arabic version of the bullring drama Blood and Sand. After Egypt's stunning defeat by Israel in 1967, his films became increasingly political and social. Clues to his personality and state of mind can be found in his autobiographical film Alexandria...Why? (1978), winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1979 Berlin Festival, and its sequel, An Egyptian Story (1982). — Ephraim Katz, The Film Encylopedia

Youssef Chahine Youssef Chahine: forget the stereotypes, by Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix, December 2 – 9, 1999

CAIRO STATION (Bab el Hadid)

Egypt (95 mi) 1958

Chahine, himself, stars in one of his earliest and best neo-realist films, a dramatic powerhouse which also features his simply amazing comprehension for staging nothing less than incredible musical sequences right in the middle of the most powerful, dramatic scenes.

Jean-Michel Frodon from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

First, there was nothing. This view was wrong and stupid, of course, as there were plenty of films being made in Egypt. In Arab countries, in Africa; plenty of stories being told, images being composed. But none of these stories, images, or films were being seen outside their places of origin – they were hardly known. Then there was an anticolonialist surge, an awakening of the nations of the South, Nasser, Suez, and – at the same moment – the arrival of singing comedies and sugary dramas, with (more or less) veiled and rather carnal beauties, young men with burning eyes and voices. These films were nice, exotic, sometimes quite remarkably made – if you ever got a chance to see on, you could appreciate it with some condescension.

Then came CAIRO STATION. And it was as if cinema having reached adolescence is suddenly thrust back into infancy in a hitherto unknown part of its world. This new cinema had learned from Hollywood and Italian neorealism to build a form of its own. It is filled with humor, wisdom, and anguish; pays attention to the minute details of everyday life in the city; portrays the primal powers of lust and desire; and delves into classical and oriental iconography – all presented in a mix of fantasy and reality. CAIRO STATION is vivid and moving, precise in its portrayals, original both as the creation of a single individual and as the embodiment of a secular culture, one that is so close and yet so different to that of the West.

And who is responsible for it? Youssef Chahine, a “crazy” little guy filled with longing and despair. Bringing disturbing revelations about himself and life to the screen, he plays a crippled newspaper vendor named Kenaoui who bears an unrequited desire for a voluptuous lemonade seller (Hind Rostom). Although the plot components are simple enough, the world depicted here is both dangerous and complex. The way events turn out opens up dark abysses in the city’s life, made the more unexpected by the initial friendly codes the film uses. Panned by Egyptian viewers upon its initial release, CAIRO STATION has justly been hailed as a masterpiece on its rediscovery some two decades later.

The film which put Egyptian writer/director Chahine on the international map plays like a great overlooked masterpiece of Italian neo-realism. In Cairo's busy rail terminus, passions are simmering: hard-working porter Abou Serib (Chawqi) aims to form a union to combat the corruption which divides and rules his fellow workers; his fiancée Hanouma (Rostom) uses her flirtatious charm to sell lemonade to train passengers, much to the chagrin of the official drinks concession; news vendor Kenaoui (Chahine) has designs on her too, but he's a simple-minded soul with little choice but to suffer her teasing and his colleagues' taunts. Fascinated by girlie images in magazines, he's soon yearning for revenge on a world that has excluded him. At first glance, the upfront sexuality startles in a film from an Arab country in 1958, but the bigger picture captures a society experiencing rapid change. Chahine fans out from a sweaty, realist base towards social observation, florid melodrama and dark suspense. It's a strikingly controlled, confident, bitingly effective display, which leaves you wondering where this film has been all our lives.

Chicago Reader (Lisa Alspector)

Reportedly (and understandably) Youssef Chahine's most popular film among Egyptians, this gritty and relatively early (1958) black-and-white masterpiece also features his most impressive acting turn, as a crippled news vendor working at the title railroad station. The adroit interweaving of various miniplots around the station is matched by a heady mix of moods and genres: at various junctures this movie becomes a musical, a slasher film, a neorealist drama, a comedy, and a horror film--come to think of it, it's pretty noir as well.

Guardian/Observer Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

All human life is here: the phrase really does apply to Chahine's tragicomic masterpiece from 1958, the highlight of the Chahine season at the National Film Theatre in London. Cairo Station is the venue for a blazingly passionate drama about Kenaoui, a lame newspaper vendor, played by Chahine, and his unrequited desire for Hanouma (Hind Rostom), the Bardotesque lemonade seller. Chahine conducts his big cast with uproarious energy, immediacy and freshness; he has tremendous stylised set pieces, including a railway-carriage rock'n'roll number performed by a group gloriously credited as Mike and his Skyrockets. As Kenaoui's love becomes more obsessive, the mood darkens, and elements of Hitchcock and Powell creep in. Finally, Cairo Station virtually attains the air of a tragedy, observing classical unities of time and place.

My favourite moment is the shot that Chahine contrives after Kenaoui is convinced of the need for violent action: we immediately cut to an extraordinary selection of fearsome knives, big and small, hanging up in what appears to be an elaborate and preposterous outdoor knife shop. "Can I help you?" asks an assistant, directly to camera, clearly addressing the seething would-be assassin. It is a beautiful, deadpan, black comic touch - and an unmissable film.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The aftermath of the Suez Crisis, elucidated by Youssef Chahine in a furious sketch gleaned from Lang noir. Steam, machinery, knickknacks, and assorted scramblers fill the Cairo station vortex; when repression lives next to free-geysering sensuality, a body is bound to turn up in the luggage. Each of the three sides of the triangle is laid out with strenuous frankness: Chahine as the limping newspaper seller in his shack papered with saucy cheesecake, Hind Rostom as the flashing femme hawking soft drinks, Farid Shawqi as the muscular porter pushing for a workers' union. The crippled outsider gazes at a couple of young ingénues with envy, then with simmering desire at Rostom's scampering spitfire -- he offers his mother's necklace and dreams of bucolic domesticity but she turns him down, they all "got quite used to trains and noise." When the humid heroine jumps into a rock 'n' roll frenzy and a feminist rally with the same abandon, Chahine establishes his plotline as Sadie Thompson whirling through transitory Egypt. ("Cursed be such modern idiocies," a staid cleric scoffs, just as uncomprehendingly.) Tension accelerates: Chugging trains shift from objects of fate to anxiety signifiers, along with a decapitated magazine cutout, a Coke bottle smashed against a wall, a shiv dangling before Chahine's fervid eyes. It builds to a climax ferociously amalgamated from La Bête Humaine and Buñuel's Susana, where a culture's internal turmoil is exposed only to be carted away in a straitjacket. Egyptian censors saw only the tawdriness and despair of the work, and Chahine's film was banned for years rather than heralded as the excoriating classic it is. With Hassan el Baroudi, and Abdel Aziz Kahlil. In black and white.

A Nutshell Review Stefan S

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

THE LAND (al-Ard)

Egypt (130 mi) 1969

Once acclaimed in a nationwide critic’s poll as Egypt’s greatest film, this epic historical film examines the lives of small peasant villagers against the powerful interests of the landowners. Much like using brush strokes, the director paints a broad canvas in the small, intimate details in the lives of ordinary citizens, powerfully affecting, especially when we come to understand the historical exploitation of workers just such as these.

User comments from imdb Author: Amr Kamal from Egypt

This film can be considered one of the world's best movies, actually it was chosen on top of the best 100 movies in Egypt.

The movie is adopted from a novel written by Abdel Rahman El Sharkawi and was directed by Youssef Shahin.

Abdel Rahman El Sharkawi is a well known novelist and play-writer, in fact he's much more recognized for the plays he wrote. The movie "El-Ard" was produced in 1969, which falls inn a very important period of time in the Egyptian history, at this time the Egyptian ideology was being restructured.

As for the film itself, I would start by the choice of actors, when you think of the actors that were in Egypt at that time, you can't find a replacement for any of the actors in the movie, and you feel that no one else can play in any of the roles.

I would start by the Great actor Mahmoud El-Meliguy. His performance in this movie is like an intense lecture in the art of acting, Mohamed Abu Swelam, that character he played is so nicely written by Abdel Rahman El Sharkawi, it's a character facing so many struggles and at the same time with a history to be proud of, but it reached a point where he feels helpless in the struggle between him and the rich man in his village, who is connected to the Egyptian Royal palace (the time of the story was before Egypt changed from a kingdom to a republic). At the same time he's facing struggles with the English authority, which he has a long history with, and finally a struggle with the people of his village who are facing the same in justice he's facing!! This dilemma reflects to a great extent how the human behavior changed over the years. Back to Mahmoud El-Meliguy's acting, if this movie was translated to other languages I bet he would have been rewarded for his performance. I believe he's one of the best world's actors. He was known for playing the roles of gangsters and bad guy's, although all his friends and colleagues refer to him as the kindest person, in this movie his character was the main character in the film, another actors in this film were, Ezzat El Alaili and Yehia Shahin, they were both performing amazingly in there roles. The movie can be considered as a success story, even the music and the song performed were so distinguished and were so related to the movie. As for the directing, I believe Youssef Shahin did the right choice of actors which got his mission even easier. But this does not mean he wasn't good. In fact this is his masterpiece.

Finally, I would like to recommend this movie for any one who wants to enjoy acting

THE SPARROW (al-Asfour)

Egypt Algeria (105 mi) 1972

The characters in this 1972 allegorical comedy-drama, set in Egypt just before the Six Day War, deliberately invoke movie cliches with their courtship behavior and adroit manipulation of cigarettes. Obsessively composed shots subvert realism by being marvels of technique even as they advance the story of a young policeman, the adopted son of a military official, who learns his biological father is a legendary activist. Written by Lotfi el-Khouly and director Youssef Chahine (Destiny). In Arabic with subtitles. 105 min.

ALEXANDRIA... WHY? (Iskandnerija…lih?)

Egypt Algeria (133 mi) 1978

This 1978 film, the first feature in Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's fascinating and complex autobiographical trilogy about Alexandria, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival. It's set during World War II, when Rommel's army is approaching the city and a youth who serves as a stand-in for Chahine (Mohsen Mohiedine) is undergoing crises of national identity, sexuality, and vocation. A terrific movie in many respects, though perhaps less of a revelation than the trilogy's 1990 conclusion, Alexandria, Again and Always.

Loosely based on film-maker Chahine's childhood, Alexandria - Why? explores two different and difficult love affairs - one across religious and the other cross national boundaries - in his usual perceptive and visually convincing style. Showing a heart-felt interest in his characters and their predicaments while refusing to take sides in these complex affairs, this adds up to poignant and intelligent film-making. Using war-torn Alexandria as an effective backdrop, this personal history is an always effective way to cast light on the bigger picture. Like Chahine's later Alexandria Encore, this is a little-seen gem, well worth discovering for yourself.

User comments from imdb Author: Tilly Gokbudak from Roanoke, Va.

I was quite impressed with "Alexandria, Why?" It is just the second film I've seen from Egyptian master Youssef Chahine, but I can already see why many scholars have praised his work tremendously. This film captures both its' time and setting quite eloquently. It is clearly inspired by Italian neo-realism and uses dubbing as many Italian films of the yesteryear have so often done. The film is perhaps an autobiographical one as it depicts a young man in World War II Egypt who wants to immigrate to California and become a filmmaker. I sense the reason this film is so rated so poorly here is because it has a production value which is very minimal in scale. You realize that many shots are shot in a studio and backdrops, particularly ones with the Meditterranean shore, are ones from stock footage. This is something which is more often in B-movies from the '60s here. But, I am sure this was due to inherent financial limitations which Chahine had too work around. If one compares this film with ones from Turkish and Indian films made in this era, it seems as though Chahine effectively utilized what he had. And, if you compare it with films from other African countries, like Senegal, well it seems like an MGM production! I imagine if George Lucas had the film's producer, these things would have been remedied but as it is, very little artistic integrity is compromised here. We are drawn into the characters' lives and we are captivated by their struggles too find love and freedom. In the end, some things are sacrificed too achieve one desire over another and thus we are left with the brutal reality of the immigrant experience. And, the result is one sterling film which suggests that if an artist truly believes in their work, they can achieve the same artistic merits as filmmakers from more developed nations.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Black-and-white stock footage of Rommel's desert advance mixes with Esther Williams' Technicolor pirouettes for a razzmatazz opening montage -- German forces swear "Alexandria, you're mine," but the city is Youssef Chahine's from the start, as fervidly distinctive as Fellini's Rome. Mohsen Mohieddin is the director's teenaged stand-in, avidly daydreaming MGM extravaganzas to block out family drama and wartime trauma; his extended clan hangs on to a façade of elegance while living on top of a rowdy cabaret lounge, curfews and blackouts punctuate the raucous burlesque, no argument is too tiny for garrulous tidal waves. The young hero performs Shakespeare and yearns for Hollywood, stages mock-glamorous musical revues and arranges impudent skit shows. He celebrates and suffers with the same ardor, but Alexandria is a veritable mural of saturated passions: the approaching Nazis are viewed as a welcome change in oppressor ("Hitler will turn you into belly-dancers," a local says to the occupying British), Egyptian nationalists hatch a wacky plot to sink Churchill's submarine, British soldiers become the main article of contraband, trafficked among rebels for assassination potential. Mohieddin's rich uncle buys a young Brit (Gerry Sundquist) and falls in love with him, though "patriotic" bloodlust keeps their forbidden affair from being consummated; a Muslim Communist (Ahmed Zaki) and his Jewish squeeze (Naglaa Fathi) are more successful in bridging the various frantic tensions, even as her aged father prophesizes both Israel and American military interference to "protect the oil." An air raid kills the lights, the handheld shot as the old grandfather shuffles through the darkened living room (illuminated by the bomb blasts outside) follows into a disarming, kitschy panorama of animated search lights -- Chahine's pop diorama of memory. Examining identity both personal and cultural, the filmmaker lends his own early home movies to the writhing fabric, and directs the final laugh at himself, an eager alter-ego crossing the Atlantic to be greeted by a chortling Lady Liberty. With Ezzat El Alaili, Mahmoud El Meligui, Mohsena Tewfik, Abdalla Mahmoud, Seif El Dine, and Youssef Wahby.

User comments from imdb Author: AdnanZ from Canada

For a director who has been making movies for nearly 60 years, Youssef Chahine is still criminally unknown outside of Arabia and Europe, even in critical circles. The widest release outside of Europe for any of his films was a very limited run in the US for 1997's "Destiny", and only five or six of his films are available on Region 1 DVD. Still, dedicated cinephiles who have studied world cinema will inform you that Chahine is considered one of world cinema's great masters. He has been nominated for no less than seven awards at Cannes, five of them either for the Palme D'Or or its predecessor, the Grand Prize. Chahine won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 at Cannes, as well. He has been awarded numerous other awards over the course of his illustrious career and has made some of the best regarded works in Arabic (specifically Egyptian) cinema. So why hasn't he achieved recognition across the Atlantic? His films are dense, rich, colorful, articulate, controversial, and endlessly fascinating, but they are also difficult. Few Chahine films can be watched and fully understood in one sitting, and even fewer are fully enjoyed on first viewing. Occasionally Chahine's films fall prey to his complex plots and multiple layering, and though it is still a good film, "Alexandria… Why?" is one of his most difficult and muddled films.

The film, set during World War II tells multiple stories, one being Chahine's own story through the character of Yehia (played excellently by Mohsin Mohieddene), a young man in Egypt with directorial ambitions but the passion to be an actor, who frequently watches the same film repeatedly at his local cinema out of fear that he missed something the first time, performs Shakespeare, struggles with social and familial pressures, falls in love, and pursues his dream of studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. This is the film's main story, but subplots include a Jewish-Muslim romance where the female character is pregnant, a homosexual romance between a gay English soldier and a wealthy Arab, and a wacky, often funny plot featuring a group of communists who plan to kidnap Winston Churchill in hopes of ending the war.

Though certainly not Chahine's first controversial film (his masterpiece "Cairo Station" was banned for twelve years in Egypt after its first run of screenings in 1958, and understandably so, being a film about a sexually frustrated, handicapped fetishist), "Alexandria… Why?" created quite the furor in conservative Islamic Egypt upon first release, it made bold statements on global politics, suggested (truthfully) corruption in Egypt's political structure, supported communism, and featured a homosexual relationship between a British soldier and a wealthy Arab, among other taboos. Chahine designed his script not only to tell the story of himself as a young man, but to tell his story as part of a bigger one, the story of the social and political climate in Alexandria, and the story of what he clearly believes to be incorrectly considered social taboos come to life. This is a brave and challenging film which affected me more than most films I've seen recently, all the more surprising since I thought it was a lacking effort from a director whose films are generally quite brilliant.

The words 'stock footage' have negative connotations in any film fan's mind because it is so often used ineptly, but here the stock footage of WWII used brings the war to life at an appropriate distance and is edited cleverly and realistically into the film, so we never feel that we are watching a cheap production. That said, the overall production design on this fairly low-budget film is minimal, but when the film does look expensive in about three or four scenes, the money is used well. Unfortunately Chahine slips into some unfortunate mistakes like using footage from "An American in Paris" when that film was released several years after the Second World War ended. The photography is on occasion sloppy, but more than often it is precise and adds a lot to the mood of the film. There is not much of an original score used in the film as Chahine prefers to use a variety of music clips from various sources to suit whatever point the film is at. The music works perfectly with the film, but it so varied I cannot imagine it would make good listening as an album.

Ultimately it is the film's occasional sloppiness that lets it down, as well as Chahine's tendency for complex plotting. This would have been perfect as a two hour film about Chahine as portrayed through the character Yehia, but his desire to comment on more than himself brings the film's quality down. Its script is excessive and often incoherent, and although there are some exceptionally shot scenes like that in which Yehia directs his first theatrical performance, the film on a whole is more remarkable for its ambition, scale, viewpoint, and characters than the end product. It is muddled and messy at times, worth watching but certainly not Chahine's best as sometimes named by critics. Chahine's later films in his autobiographical trilogy, "Egyptian Story" and "Alexandria Again and Forever" are better ways to appreciate Chahine's cinema and the character Yehia, as is his very best, most original, and bravest film "Cairo Station", which I honestly consider one of the great masterpieces of cinema.

7/10

AN EGYPTIAN STORY (Hadduta misrija)

Egypt (115 mi) 1982

Boldly blending personal and political histories, intercutting its fast-moving fictional scenes with documentary footage, this sort of sequel to Alexandria - Why? follows the fortunes of Chahine's charismatic film-maker hero and alter ego, forced to review his past and learn to love himself by a critical open-heart operation. The occasionally clumsy central conceit - Yehia/Chahine standing trial for his life during surgery - is amply offset by the energy and style of this indulgent, exuberant, and immensely likeable self-portrait.

On the slab undergoing a vital heart operation, a film-maker confronts his alter ego as it leads him through his own past and the parallel history of his country. As his vanity and weaknesses come to light, so he learns to come to terms with himself. Bravely attempting to blend an intimate personal journey with a broad political one, Chahine only partly succeeds. There is real energy and commitment here and, while the use of documentary footage interwoven with fictional and dream sequences is hardly original, it is surprisingly effective. However, the project is unforgiveably self-indulgent, and this outweighs its good points.

User comments from imdb Author: AdnanZ from Canada

Who designed the set for the trial? Come on, that's one of the most ludicrous things I've seen in a good film and it really doesn't work as a supposedly 'surrealist' set. Come to think of it, all my problems with this film are contained within that set, because the trial scenes are also the only scenes where the writing and/or acting comes across as heavy-handed in a film which is otherwise quite frankly one of the best and most exhilarating films about film-making ever made.

This film is very special and unique. Chahine has been compared to Fellini in the past and here he is making one of his three autobiographical, slightly surrealist dramas, though I think that comparing this to Fellini's "8 1/2" is taking things a bit far and can only be described as having a narrow vision of world cinema.

The concept is certainly interesting, we meet Yehia many years after we saw him in "Alexandria... Why?", and he is undergoing heart surgery and starts to remember his entire life and see it from a detached perspective. If "Alexandria... Why?" barely tried to conceal that fact that it was an autobiographical film, then "Egyptian Story" doesn't even bother, referencing by name and content several of director Chahine's celebrated early films including "Bab El Hadid (Cairo Station)" and "Djamila". These are in my opinion the best scenes in the film. The film starts well enough, but the first hour is less fascinating than the second hour, which from start to finish is quality cinema (outside of the cheapness of the set for the trial, but I've done too much complaining about that already).

This film assumes a level of familiarity with Chahine's earlier work, and of particular interest are the scenes surrounding the making of his masterpiece "Bab El Hadid" (English title: "Cairo Station"), where we see the influences that lead to the writing of the film as well as the filming of one of its most memorable and crucial scenes and a hilarious sales pitch for the film, where Yehia sold the film essentially as pornography, a scene that apparently mirrors actual events, and not surprisingly, as films about sexually frustrated cripples weren't exactly common in Egypt in 1958 (the film was banned for no less than 20 years following its release, as well). The scenes that follow, with Yehia's (really Chahine's) frustration over his near-win for Best Actor at Cannes (which is really saying something, considering the fact that he has only acted in four films to this date), and nervousness over his film's performance at Berlin and at Cannes providing a candid and rare look at an artist's feelings toward his work.

The film is technically excellent, the camera is used beautifully and the film looks splendid outside of its obvious lack of a real budget. The acting is mostly solid, with Nour El-Cherif in the lead role giving one of the best performances of the entire decade as far as I'm concerned.

This is a difficult film, for sure, but despite its often considerable flaws, it's a cinematic tour de force and one of the most fascinating documents of a great director's work there has ever been. It's a perspective we don't see often and hence it always feels fresh and interesting. Well-directed for sure, and mostly quite brilliantly-written, Chahine's second installment in his autobiographical trilogy is well worth your time.

8.5/10

ALEXANDRIA AGAIN AND FOREVER (Iskanderija, Kaman oue Kaman)

Egypt France (100 mi) 1990

User comments from imdb Author: Spuzzlightyear from Vancouver

As much as I don't understand Youssef Chahine's cinema, I will give him credit for creating some of the most beautiful images in the world of cinema. In this, Alexandria Again and Forever, the filmmaker seems to be having a ball with his salute to other genres of film. While the main story, about striking actors and their attempt to force the government into a resolution is terribly boring, the other parts such as the director preparing a movie of 'Hamlet' and his set up of Gene Kelly Musicals, toga pieces and what may appear to be Bollywood musicals are a RIOT to watch. I honestly feel Chahine has it in himself to do a full blown musical, as all of the musical bits are brilliant, while the rest is just blah.

The dazzling 1990 conclusion of Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's autobiographical Alexandria trilogy can be seen independently of the other two features; its writer-director stars as a famous filmmaker very much like himself, happily married but also smitten first with one of his young actors and then with a young actress he meets (Yousra). Yousra played Chahine's wife in the second part of the trilogy, An Egyptian Story (1982), and the young actor in this film is based on Mohsen Mohiedine, who played Chahine as a young man in Alexandria, Why? Filmed in sumptuous color, this is not only one of the most passionate celebrations of bisexuality ever filmed, it's also one of the funniest; Chahine's tap-dance duet with his lead actor on a movie set is priceless.

Alexandria Again and Forever (Iskanderija, kaman oue kaman) is Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's third and final film (to date) about Yehia, a film director whose life bears a striking resemblance to Chahine's own. The plot concerns a hunger strike carried out by the Egyptian film industry, expressing its support for democracy (and greater artistic freedom, presumably) which Yehia joins while he is writing and planning a film about Alexander the Great. Yehia wrestles with his troubled relationship with Amr (Amr Abdel Guelil), a young actor who was Yehia's protégé and onscreen alter-ego in the first Alexandria film, finding himself unable to visualize his next project without Amr in the lead role, a part in which he has no interest. During the strike, he meets Nadia (Yousra), an intelligent, beautiful young actress who inspires Yehia to move in a different artistic direction.

It's a good idea to see Alexandria... Why? and An Egyptian Story first, as the three films are heavily interrelated and many of the returning characters are not explicitly re-introduced. Writer/director Youssef Chahine extends the semi-autobiographical saga of Yehia here, and for the first time assays the role of Yehia himself, lending a second level of self-referential complexity to this entry. Flashbacks cover the real-world events surrounding Alexandria... Why?, including the film's Silver Bear prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and the film is in many ways the most honest of the three, closing the cinematic distance between the director and his subject in an intensely personal way. Few directors who appear in their own films dare to portray their own lives, and Chahine's risk-taking in this regard pays off.

As always, Chahine realizes his ideas with creative sound and visuals, finding a unique style for this film, linked to but not derived directly from the earlier Alexandria films. Most notable are several musical numbers, presented with a refreshing lack of irony as Yehia remembers past events and fantasizes about the future. One evokes vintage Hollywood as Yehia and Amr dance joyfully in the streets of Berlin; another sequence resembles an Egyptian Jesus Christ Superstar as Yehia sings the glories of Amr in the age of Alexander to an amazingly catchy Eastern rock beat. These well-staged elements lend a hyperreal quality to the film, but they consistently enhance the story of Yehia's emotional and creative struggles, never diluting or distracting from them. Chahine's talented cast delivers performances that are naturalistic and credible, allowing for some intentional hyperreality during the fantasy scenes. Alexandria Again and Forever is an emotionally powerful and intellectually satisfying conclusion to the series; Chahine realizes his complex and ambitious themes successfully, and his love for film is evident throughout.

The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]

DESTINY (al-Massir) B+ 92

Egypt France (135 mi) 1997

Interwoven narrative with brilliantly colorful musical song and dance sequences rivalling even Bollywood numbers, that have a lot more raw, Gypsy-like sensuality, an excellent expression of religious fanaticism and terrorism, using a 12^th century story which explains the current wave of religious inspired murders, especially impressive are some of the shooting locations from Syria and Lebanon.

Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's 1997 film Destiny (a.k.a. al-Massir) is dead out of context. The film is a more or less traditional historical epic, punctuated by the occasional song-and-dance number, about the Arab philosopher Averroes, whose works were burned by the Caliph to accommodate the growing factions of religious fundamentalists in 12th-century Andalucia Spain. Because Chahine's last film, The Emigrant (al-Mohager), was banned in Egypt, Destiny's censorship theme seems like a didactic and heavy-handed response to his critics. Yep, fundamentalism sure is dangerous, and book-burning can't halt the progress of thoughts and knowledge. What a revelation! Anyone going into Destiny blind is bound to be lost among the political machinations, while anyone oblivious to Averroes (or Chahine) and his works will likewise find little to latch on to. The film does have odd appeal as a surreal approximation of '50s musicals, and the Syrian and Lebanese locations are often stunning. But taken as it is, minus the generous benefit of the doubt earned by its overtly political intent, Destiny is a muddled and only minimally diverting costume drama, never as exciting as it tries to be and meaningful only in the most obvious of ways.

User comments from imdb Author: Moheb from Egypt

"The Ideas have Wings, you can never stop them from reaching the people".

That was Al Massir, or the Destiny of Youssef Chahine. After his previous movie "El Mohager", Chahine was taken to court by a fundamentalist lawyer who claimed that Chahine presented the prophet Joseph in this movie and this is something forbidden "To show prophets on the screen" by Al Azhar. The lawyer wanted the court to stop showing the movie on the Egyptian screens as well as its distribution outside Egypt.

Regardless of the final conclusion of the court, this case was the major motive behind the script of "Al Massir". Jo (Chahine) wanted to send a clear message to this people "You can never stop ideas from reaching the people, neither by burning the books (last scene of the movie), nor by forbidding movies, etc....' As usual, Averoes in this movie was Chahine himself. Trying to keep a good balance between what the history says about Averoes and what Chahine wanted to reflect on this character, he chose his characters to include all the contradictions he wanted to show. Politics, philosophy, love, integrism, etc.... they are everywhere. This idea of combining Islam with Terrorism bothers Chahine, that is why he started the movie with the french religious authorities burning a man who "Translated the books of this Averoes", so don't you be surprised when Muslims burn "Only" the books of Averoes. This analysis of Chahine is what really makes the movie special. It was expected after what happened to him in his last movie (as I said in the beginning), he could have just make it a good reason for a movie showing Muslims as Terrorists, an easy way to attract a Western spectator. But Jo chose the hard way to do it, showing that among all this terrorism, people are still "Life lovers" as mentioned by the first song. These people who just love their life were those fighting against terrorist - not with weapons - but with love. "We have to know first why they are doing this', said Averoes. Actors were really good specially Nour Elsherif, Mahmoud Hemeida, Khaled Elnabawi and Ahmed Fouad Selim. Mohamed Mounir is as usual the voice of Chahine singing "Sing out loud, we still can sing".

village voice > film > The Haunting by J. Hoberman J. Hoberman from the Village Voice

Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine's Destiny—shown in the 1997 NYFF—is a big, lush, boldly kitsch piece of political pop. The script is scarcely more elevated than a comic book, but its intellectual pedigree rivals Beloved's, concerning as it does the 12th-century Arab Andalusian philosopher Averröes.

Shot largely in Syria and Lebanon, Destiny suggests a form of Oriental orientalism. The scenes are lit like the portico of a Miami Beach hotel and it will sprain no brain to imagine Maria Montez as a player in this swashbuckling tale of rival princelings, gypsy dancers, religious assassins, and court conspiracies. There is, however, another agenda. Beginning with an auto-da-fé in which French clerics burn a fellow Christian for the heresy of translating Averröes, Destiny evokes a multicultural Europe and defends a particular mode of secular humanism—an exuberant alliance of intellectuals, entertainers, and free spirits devoted to tolerance and sexual equality. (The political is certainly personal: the 72-year-old Chahine grew up a Maronite in cosmopolitan Alexandria and studied film at UCLA.)

Although Destiny is filled with spirited production numbers and even the zealots perform a mass prayer dance on the battlements, the movie's most ecstatic scene has Averröes's Christian disciple return north to his chilly homeland, piloting a skiff filled with books. As a philosopher, Averröes did ultimately have a greater impact on Christian than Islamic thought. (Dante generously includes him along with Abraham and Socrates among the virtuous heathens in hell's first circle.) But that is not Chahine's point either.

Destiny ends as it begins, with a huge bonfire. The difference is that the barbaric Europeans burn people while the more civilized Arabs only incinerate ideas. Even more than Beloved, Destiny is a movie that directly addresses its audience. Would the fatwa the fundamentalists declare against Averröes and his friends apply to this film as well? As the distraught philosopher watches his life's work thrown on the pyre, a friend whispers consolation: "I know your books are safe in Egypt." Let's hope so.

User comments from imdb Author: guanche from New York City

This film is an entertaining and thrilling mix of melodrama, music, history, grief and joy, showing the best and worst sides of human nature in an ultimately hopeful manner.

The story is set in medieval Moorish Spain, and concerns the conflict between Averroes; a historical humanistic Muslim philosopher; and a group of reactionary fundamentalists. It is extremely well acted and the characters are sympathetic as well as credible. It is often forgotten that many of the Islamic societies of the Middle Ages (particularly in Spain) were way ahead of Europe in science, mathematics, medicine, religious tolerance and most intellectual pursuits. However, there were those who reacted negatively to all this and severe conflict was sometimes the result.

This is not just an historical epic. The Egyptian director, a very courageous man named Youssef Chanine, deliberately molded the script to show how fanaticism not only undermines a society's intellect, but destroys the very souls of its members. Particularly disturbing, but highly relevant to our times is his portrayal of the subtle manner in which young men are recruited into these movements and about how empty and dishonest they turn out to be.

Although the population of medieval Andalusia was 10-15% Jewish and Averroes had extensive contact with both Jewish and Christian intellectuals, there isn't a Jew in sight and the only Christians depicted are evil, fanatical, external enemies who enter into a secret pact with the fundamentalist cult. While this is not entirely accurate and a gross simplification of the actual situation at the time, I don't fault Mr. Chanine. He has endured extreme legal harassment in the Egyptian courts over this and another film as well as extensive death threats against himself and his family. Merely exploring the themes portrayed in this movie has put his head on the chopping block, and any sympathetic depiction of Jews or Christians would have resulted in the banning of the movie and possibly his head rolling into the basket. He deliberately crafted this film to educate his own society about the moral corruption and debasement of violent fanatical behavior and no doubt wanted to make sure the message got out.

A bold, yet gently provocative film by a very brave man.

Boston Phoenix [Peter Keough]

There’s nothing like a burning heretic to grab your attention at the beginning of a movie. Shekhar Kapur staked us to three in his Elizabeth, and in Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's Destiny, another epic historical drama with contemporary resonance, a 12th-century Frenchman is ceremoniously torched for copying the writings of the Islamic philosopher Averroës.

You may feel less attuned to this saga of the political and philosophical intrigues of medieval Islamic Andalusia, or even be put off by the film's meandering narrative punctuated by melodrama, broad comedy, and musical production numbers. Then again, you may find this film's issues more cogent than the realpolitik of the redoubtable, proto-feminist Virgin Queen. An impassioned plea for tolerance and reason and against fundamentalist fanaticism, Destiny also fares well as a rollicking and intelligent, if sometimes clumsy and heavy-handed, entertainment.

Chahine himself is no stranger to persecution and censorship. His previous film, L'émigré, the story of the Biblical patriarch Joseph, was pulled from release in Egypt after religious groups protested that it was illegal to depict prophets on the screen. Such fanatical small-mindedness is the chief target of Destiny, which is unusual even for a Western film in its espousal of liberal values. A philosopher noted for reviving the teachings of Aristotle and insisting that true religion relies as much on reason as on revelation, Averroës is a voice needed more urgently now than ever.

Unlike his fundamentalist adversaries, however, Chahine doesn't think teaching a lesson needs to be an obstacle to having a good time. So exuberant is he in spinning yarns, indulging colorful characters, breaking into song, and cutting a carpet that at times it seems the film might better be titled Density. He begins with the adventures of the archly named Joseph, son of the unfortunate heretic of the beginning sequence, who flees France for the more open-minded environs of Islamic Spain -- where he bumps into the sons and brother of Al Mansour, the Caliph (Mahmoud Hemeida), hanging out at an inn run by the bibulous bard Marwan (Mohamed Mounir) and his wife. The group embraces the hunky, blue-eyed Joseph as part of the family, and all join in with Marwan in a celebratory, badly lip-synched and jarringly contemporary song-and-dance.

Joseph's destiny, though, gets lost in the shuffle of the family and political wranglings to follow. The worthy if somewhat vain Caliph complains to his adviser Averroës (an earthy and avuncular Nour el-Cherif) about his worthless sons. Crown Prince Nasser (a charismatic Khaled el-Nabaoui) is interested only in horses and women -- particularly Marwan's winsome daughter. And young Abdallah (Hani Salana) just wants to dance. For his part, Averroës is concerned about the growing influence of a growing fundamentalist cult out to stifle free speech, and about the machinations of the Caliph's Machiavellian adviser, Cheikh Riad (a sleekly sinister Ahmed Fouad Selim).

The two sets of problems converge when the green-clad fundamentalists seduce -- almost literally, in an extraordinary bath-house scene that glimpses the sexual pathology of certain religious extremism -- callow Abdallah into their cause. Meanwhile Nasser, Prince Hal-like, puts aside his carousing to join up with Averroës in resisting the burgeoning wave of intolerance. Despite the complexity of alliances, treacheries, romances, and intermittent production numbers that ensue, Chahine keeps his Destiny clear. Sometimes with hoky over-emphasis, as when Joseph resurfaces to smuggle books back to France, a sequence made ludicrous by the crescendo of operatic music on the soundtrack.

Despite such lapses, Destiny pulses with warm-blooded fervor and surges with moments of genuine eloquence. The opening conflagration is mirrored in the end -- this time Averroës's books themselves are set ablaze. Tossing in the last volume is Averroës himself -- triumphantly, perhaps a little too optimistically, because he believes that ideas have wings to surmount all worldly impositions. Perhaps so, but bad ideas -- fanaticism, intolerance -- have wings too, despite the efforts of such films as Destiny to soar above them.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Harvey S. Karten

San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack)

THE OTHER (L’Autre)

France Egypt (105 mi) 1999

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Minor Chanine, perhaps, but still an intelligent, idiosyncratic and enjoyable movie. It's a Romeo and Juliet-style fable about the ill-starred love between the son of a a rich couple happy to deal both with dubious Western business interests and fanatical extremists, and a journalist from a poor family keen to uncover corruption in high places. As it proceeds towards its unexpectedly bleak outcome, Chahine pulls out the stops with his unique blend of melodrama, dance musical, political comment (it begins with two characters going off to an appointment with Edward Said, who cameos with a few brief words on political, national and cultural identity) and forthright sensuality. A pot-pourri held together by the director's bravura style and abiding commitment to the ideal of tolerance, and by Ebeid's extraordinary performance as the hero's scheming, insanely jealous mother, at times eerily reminiscent of Callas in Pasolini's Medea.

User comments from imdb Author: mmolabi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates

This movie is one of the best romantic dramas and examples of political realism in the Middle East region. It discusses what is the meaning of terrorism and who is a terrorist, and who is the real terrorist. The movie shows how power can destroy the most beautiful things in the world. The movie is extremely intelligent and it has many interesting ideas. Every time one watches the movie, it is as if you are seeing it for the first time because you see additional layers of meaning in the movie.

The movie is a love story between Adam, the son of an American woman and an Egyptian man (who are married only for business reasons without love) and Hanan, a female journalist from a poor family. Adam studied human rights and terrorism. Hanan's brother is a member of a terrorist group. The movie explores how their life develops and grows after their marriage. The American woman becomes jealous on her son and doesn't want someone to take her son and wants to destroy their love story. It's a very touching love story and expresses much about the situation faced by poor Egyptians and gives the viewer lots of questions as to how people become terrorist and what leads a young guy to pursue this path.

SILENCE…WE’RE ROLLING (Skoot hansawwar) C 74

Egypt France (102 mi) 2001

We know there’s trouble in Egypt when Chahine turns to Elvis movies as the vehicle to display just how ridiculous and extravagant Hollywood-style musicals can be in this his 40^th film. This is a comedic spoof of a genre, but also revels in plenty of close ups, over the top musical dance routines, Elvis-style water-skiing that in a momentary daydream turns into a flying umbrellas sketch, and while it’s really just another silly love story, it offers an opportunity for Tunisian singer Latifah to charm the audience with what appears to be a concert performance. I found this unbelievably lame, as the film is really just an entertainment spectacle. Chahine has always taken on controversial political issues in his films with musical numbers accentuating the human emotions associated with the very real and tragic consequences. But here, the story is replete with lavish images of over-indulged, pampered, rich people whose self-centered lives are of little consequence to anyone else. It’s just another Elvis movie.

To judge by his reputation, 76-year-old Chahine is Egypt's one-man melting pot, melding influences from the world's four corners in myriad permutations through the course of his 37 films (and counting). Judging by the movies themselves is a harder task, given the rarity of British screenings. Still, even a cursory overview of the director's oeuvre suggests that if there's one thing a Chahine film doesn't resemble it's another Chahine film - compare, for instance,1958's greasy-realist Cairo Station and this knockabout high-society musical melodrama. What they would seem to share, however, is a commitment to secular humanism as a substantial, if volatile and vulnerable way of life, bound up in questions of art, sensuality, love, family, money, freedom, honesty, trust and tolerance. Admittedly that's a lot to read into this particular frolic, a lightly self-reflexive story of Egypt's rich and creative types that recalls Sirk, Demy, Fellini, Bollywood and, lately, A l'Attaque! The story also suggests All About Eve, with a popular actress and singer (played by Tunisian diva Latifa) falling under the sway of a charming snake, while her daughter sets a proper example with the chauffeur's son. It's so sunny a film that it's hard to feel ill-disposed even to the charlatan - and maybe the sheer warmth and exuberance invested in every scene is the point - if there is one.

Guardian/Observer Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

The beating heart of show business pulses gloriously through this latest film from Youssef Chahine. It's a musical romantic comedy about the movie world, with a dash of Bollywood, Stanley Donen and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film is set in a westernised, cosmopolitan Alexandria, which with its hotels, musical theatres and beach scenes (some tongue-in-cheek back projections here) looks like bygone Hollywood's imagination of the Cote d'Azur. A super-successful screen actress Malak (Latifa) is being wooed by creepy Lothario and would-be star Lamei (Ahmed Wafik), an unreliable, gold-digging fellow with highlights in his hair. Meanwhile Malak's formidable mother is attempting to match-make her beautiful granddaughter Paula with her chauffeur's son, a radical, bookish intellectual.

It's impossible not to be carried along by the hellzapoppin' high spirits of Chahine's movie, which like all the best comedies is leavened with a touch of sadness as Malak's regular screenwriter, heartbroken by her infatuation with the unsuitable Lamei, reveals his own adoration - and then engineers Lamei's downfall with the aid of a hidden microphone, a device that certainly adds piquancy to the title. The happy ending has all the buoyancy of a Shakespearian comedy. A treat.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Youssef Chahine's Silence...We're Rolling is a rollicking paean to the Hollywood and Bollywood musicals of yesteryear. Recently separated from her husband, singer/actress Malak (Tunisian singer Latifah) falls prey to slimy lothario Lamei (Ahmed Wafik), a psychoanalyst with aspirations of superstardom. Lamei is a threat to family and the purity of song, moving his attentions from mother to daughter once he's tricked into thinking Malak's mother (Magda El Khatib, resembling a Dynasty-era Barbara Stanwyck) left her fortune to the young Paula (Rubi). A screenwriter angered by Malak's naïveté seeks to expose Lamei for the snake he is, but he's blinded by his own genius, confusing the makeshift stairs from a film set for an actual exit. Silence...We're Rolling is an eye-popping celebration of art imitating life (and vice versa)—a movie valentine inundated with famous movie references (the uniformly excellent cast channels Sturges with every comic breath). At this year's New York Film Festival, Silence...We're Rolling was preceded by the animated short Tuesday, directed by Geoff Dunbar and voiced by Dustin Hoffman. On Tuesday nights, frogs float through the air aboard their lily pads, breaking into an old woman's house in order to catch David Letterman and reruns of I Love Lucy. When four o'clock comes around, the frogs return to their lakeside abode, leaving their pads to litter the city streets. Tuesday is a delightful show of quirky happenings which might have made a great pre-show to Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. The film is produced by Paul McCartney and dedicated to his deceased wife Linda.

CineScene.com (Don Larsson)

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz)

The New York Times (A.O. Scott)

Chaikin, Eric and Julian Petrillo

WORD WARS B 84

USA (78 mi) 2004

Sort of a documentary follow up to SPELLBOUND, only instead of a children’s spelling bee, it instead follows the lives of 4 obsessed adults whose lives revolve around playing scrabble, eventually entering competetive tournaments for prize money. Though they have to pay their own way, their travel fees, their hotel fees, also their food, which for some includes brain nutritional supplements, and for others marijuana or hashish, the prize winnings grow larger each successive year - $25,000 first prize one year, $50,000 the next. This film was similar to CINEMANIA, as each crossed the line on what would be considered normal behavior, yet each had a voracious appetite for words and anagrams, in some cases actually memorizing the dictionary. These were individuals with extremely specialized skills, who could do on the scrabble board what mere mortals could only dream of. Despite the quirks and the humor, with offbeat guitar licks to sustain the tension, these were alienated souls, most of whom had few, if any, friends or family. Without the scrabble board, which they would spend 4 or 5 hours a day playing, what life did they have? There was a brief comparative glimpse into the New York City Washington Park speed-scrabble players, similar to chess players, none of whom played for glory or for tournaments, as they were too rooted to those particular seats in the park, and it would be unheard of to change their routines. I never knew the scrabble national anthem was John Lennon’s “Across the Universe,” but we got to hear several different personal renditions of this song, each heartfelt and illuminating.

Chamie, LIna

THE MILKY WAY (A Via Lacteal)

Brazil (88 mi) 2007

The Milky Way (A Via Lacteal) Lee Marshall from Screendaily

A cross-city drive turns into an existential odyssey in Lina Chamie's The Milky Way, which opened Cannes ' Critics Week sidebar. Part urban road movie, part stream-of-consciousness cinematic monologue, Milky Way layers flashbacks, bon mots about life and death, and variant versions of the same scene into what could have made an intriguing 30-minute short.

This being permanently gridlocked Sao Paulo, however, it drags on for almost 90, and an elegantly-managed twist at the end fails to make up for the frustrating feeling that we too have been stuck in a creative traffic jam, its emotional flow blocked by an excess of literary references and a tricksy structure that needs more genuine drama to counterbalance its cleverness. Unapologetically pitched at the arthouse, this slender title is unlikely to set the already crowded Brazilian market on fire; audiences there and abroad are more likely to see it in festivals and niche cinemateque outings.

After a row over the phone with his much younger girlfriend Julia (Alice Braga), in which he says things that he immediately regrets, introverted, solitary writer and literature professor Heitor (an intense Marco Ricca) decides to drive across town to make up with her in person. But this is Sao Paulo, and even once he's remembered where he parked the car, the drive takes forever. On the way, Heitor runs through salient episodes of life with Julia on his mental Avid: their meeting at a fringe-theatre performance of Euripides' Bacchae; the promises he made to her (or she to him? - a later variant flashback makes us unsure which of them was afraid to commit); his jealousy of Thiago, an actor whose interest in Julia seems to go beyond mere friendship.

The first part of the film is laced with nods to poems, plays and literary works, from Dante's Divine Comedy (the first lines of which appear on a roadside video billboard) to Roland Barthes' Fragments Of An Amorous Discourse, which Heitor keeps on the passenger seat of his car (we can't help feeling that a Sao Paulo A-Z would have got him there more quickly). The city's oppressive presence is underlined by subjective handheld camera as an increasingly frantic, fazed Marco is dazzled by lights and becomes prey to visions that may or may not be real (a beggar girl who seems to be able to hear Heitor's voiceover thoughts; Thiago in a car speeding ahead to his own romantic tryst with Julia). The sound texture of the film acts as a running counterpoint to the main action, mixing the Tom And Jerry theme with Schubert, Satie and Mozart, and foregrounding repeated siren and heartbeat noises that will be explained by the final twist.

Meanwhile, day turns to night and Marco is unmasked as an unreliable narrator, as flashbacks mix with flash-forwards to his arrival chez Julia, and both start to offer multiple, contradictory versions of what actually happened. Once you survive the drag of the first half and begin to guess at the surprise ending, the film picks up; but an involving finale is not enough to justify its feature-length running time.

Chan, Fruit

Film Festivals . com - Festival pages Fanfan KO (excerpt)

Born in Hainan Province, Mainland China, 40 year-old Fruit Chan fell in love with movies after watching a Soviet film in his childhood. While in Middle School he worked part-time in a theater projection room. The first film he screened was a traditional Chinese opera directed by the famous Hollywood cracker John Woo. Fruit Chan joined the entertainment business in 1982 and directed his first film in 1991. Unfortunately the film was stocked for three years, which made him almost totally give up. In 1997, Fruit Chan raised 500,000 HKD to make his award-grabbing Made in Hong Kong, which became a myth in Hong Kong film history. Fruit Chan was honored with Best Director that year at the Hong Kong Film Golden Awards, mostly for his courage and sincerity. Fruit Chan challenged the stable model of filmmaking in Hong Kong and was dubbed the "Hope" of Hong Kong Cinema (by other Hong Kong filmmakers).

"The making of Made in Hong Kong made me realize why composers always write their masterpieces at a time when they are lovelorn," Fruit Chan said. On being asked if he would become less"independent" after making his trilogy, Fruit Chan said he wished to mix commercial films with his more personal "auteur" films. His next film in the works is There's a Hollywood in Hong Kong starring Zhou Xun, the actress who won the Best Actress Prize at the Paris Film Festival for her performance in Suzhou River. "I enjoyed her acting in that film," said Fruit Chan, "she's wild and energetic, but with a face rather traditional."

culturebase.net | The international artist database | Fruit Chan Ulrich Jossner

Fruit Chan was born in 1959 in Canton in China. In the 90s, he was the first Hongkong filmmaker to go beyond the genre of Hongkong films and to make realistic films about Hongkong´s social and political situation independently of the big studios. With ´Made in Hongkong´ (1997), ´Little Cheung´ (1999) and ´Durian Durian´ (2000) he has won many film-prizes.

Fruit Chan was born in Canton in China but emigrated to Hongkong with his parents in 1969. He has shown that Hongkong films need not be what the name suggests and that a filmmaker may successfully start where the big studios leave off. After studying at the Hongkong Film Centre and working for a time as a director´s assistant, Chan directed the first of his own films ´Finale in Blood´ in 1991. This is a psycho-drama, in which the young director gives us a dark picture of Hongkong in the 1920s.

Chan´s ´Made in Hongkong´ was the first independent film which showed realistically the social situation in Hongkong at the time of its transfer to China. The nearly documentary view of parts of the city, as also the use of non-actors, make this melancholy and dark romance especially convincing. Chan tells the tale of three youths who wander together for awhile: the attractive Ah Ping with kidney-disease, the rather dim Sylvester and the eighteen year old protagonist Autumn Moon.

Moon has dropped out of college, is working for a drug-dealer and is not as hard as nails, since he is loath to kill. He roves through the streets together with Sylvester and Ping, encountering stray gangs of ´foes´ or individual fighters, against whom they have to be on their guard. The figure of the suicide Susan is a leitmotif. On falling from a block of flats she was holding two letters, which have passed into Moon´s hands. While Moon is lying in hospital after being shot, Sylvester and Ping are killed. Moon finds a surrogate family for the first time with his father´s new wife and the couple´s small daughter.

Fruit Chan shows eccentric mothers, who are helpless and overworked. Fathers move off as the going gets tough or earlier, or they even abuse their children. Moon witnesses how a smart lad at secondary-school hacks one of his father´s hands off in a public toilet to avenge the abuse of his sister. The director shows cramped flats and the back sides of glittering facades; and with quick cutting, slow-motion and freezes, he conjures up sadness, wit and irony. The tiny rooms with lattice-doors in heavy cement blocks are like cages. The only place which youths can go to for some peace and quiet is the graveyard. In this film the teenagers are outcasts searching for havens in a place with an uncertain future.

´Made in Hongkong´ is the first part of a trilogy about the transfer of the island-republic from England to China. The second part, ´The longest Summer´ (1998), shows five soldiers´ consequent crisis of identity. They are released from service just before the ceremonial transfer, in the midst of which they get involved in a bank-robbery. In this film, too, Chan works mostly with non-actors. Two of his main figures were soldiers in real life. Above all, he examines how someone loses his orientation, questions himself and then decides in favour of the underworld. He uses a lot of documentary material and shows the feelings of Hongkong citizens - from schoolgirls to pensioners - during the transfer.

Chan rounds the trilogy off with a light tale. ´Little Cheung´ (1999) deals with the transfer of the crown colony from the point of view of a lad who is living in the immigrant quarter Mengkok. Little Cheung wanders through the streets as a delivery-boy with snacks from his father.

In ´Durian Durian´ too, Chan turns to the consequences of social change in China. Yan, a young woman from northern China, hopes to get wealthy in Hongkong but ends up in the red-light district. ´Durian Durian´ shows no victims. Its heroines are pragmatic sex-workers with a chance to use their visas simply and effectively. Chan´s telling of tales is jumpy and often untidy. His hectic Dogma-camera captures not so much his protagonists´ inner conflicts as their outer effects. Yan, for instance, showers so often that her skin starts to peel from her feet. Chan draws attention to the contrast between the hectic neon-lit life of Hongkong and the calm winter countryside of northern China. But Yan´s period in Hongkong does not pass without leaving its mark on her. When at last she sings a communist song with her old schoolmates, the refrain turns into a collective orgasm.

Chan´s realism does not lack a sense of humour and the scurrilous, as shown by ´Public Toilet, WC´, which is a digital film about toilets in Korea. In it the change in the bathroom-culture in Korea is compared with the same in Japan, Hongkong, the USA and China. A Korean page in Internet eulogises: ´In one of these inimitable conveniences, one can listen to classical music, recline on plush sofas, gaze out at Namdaemun and Kanghwamun and even puff a Turkish cigar.´

Fruit Chan Hong Kong Movie DataBase

loveHKfilm entry Selected filmography

Hong Kong Cinemagic - Fruit Chan Gor

YESASIA: YumCha! - Fruit Chan - King of Hong Kong Independent ... Fruit Chan - King of Hong Kong Independent Filmmaking, Vicci Ho overviews Chan’s film career, November 1, 2004

The class imaginary in Fruit Chan's films Wimal Dissanayake from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Interview Fruit Chan Robin Gatto interviews Chan from Cinemasie, May 2002

Fruit Chan : the Career Interview Interview by Robin Gatto and Nassim Maoui at the Venice Film Festival, August 29 – September 8, 2002

Bright Lights Film Journal | Interview with Fruit Chan The Immortality Blues, interview by Boris Trbic, November 2005

Fruit Chan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

FINALE IN BLOOD (Da nao guang chang long)

Hong Kong (94 mi) 1993

The Illuminated Lantern review [1/4] Peter Nepstad

A radio announcer (Lawrence Cheng) finds an umbrella that contains the spirit of a dead girl (Ruth Winona Tao). Not quite what I expected from the title. He gets the spirit on the air where she tells her love story, how she fell in love with a cop (David Wu) and got married, but he kept shagging a hot prostitute (Chikako Aoyama) on the side anyway. Eventually, they cause her death. When they hear the story on the radio they are none too pleased, and soon they are after the poor radio host to make sure he stops talking. While the movie is passably interesting, the long awaited finale is less in blood and more in slapstick, a ridiculous ending that sucks the last remaining goodwill from the audience. Like ROUGE, only much, much worse. A brief cameo by Tony Leung Ka-fei just serves to underscore how boring and uncharismatic the male leads are. The women prop up the film as best they can, Ruth Winona Tao is likable and a strong performer in individual scenes, though her character as a whole never quite adds up. Still, I'd like to see more of her so it's sad that she only made a couple more films before disappearing from the industry. Chikako Aoyama fulfills the obligatory Japanese import role and handles the nude scenes, and her portrayal of the "other woman," rather than being entirely cruel, is fairly nuanced and sympathetic. After this, his first film as a director, no one would let Fruit Chan touch the camera again, until his breakthough independent production MADE IN HONG KONG (1997), which transformed his reputation, and combined with the films that followed made him one of the most celebrated directors in Hong Kong. Well, everyone has a skeleton or two in their closet, right?

MADE IN HONG KONG (Xiang Gang zhi zao)

Hong Kong (108 mi) 1997

User comments from imdb Author: Matador from NYC, New York

Despite a weak last half-hour, Fruit Chan's debut is absolutely stunning. It continues the 'new Hong Kong' visual style (strobe, overexposure, freeze-frames, and jump-cutting) that fellow director Wong-Kar Wai has pioneered in his last three films. In addition to superb cinematography and editing, the storyline also is exceptional, taking the viewer into the harsh realities of Hong Kong youth gangs. Autumn Moon, the main character, is a rare creation - both attractive and repulsive. The moment we begin to empathize with him, he pushes us away with his enormous capacity for violence. This perfect mix of tenderness and harshness push it head and shoulders above most Hong Kong cinema, not only of 1997, but of any other year as well.

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Bad things start happening to Moon, a kid from a housing estate, when he comes into possession of two bloodstained letters left behind by a schoolgirl suicide: his mother walks out, he starts having pesky wet dreams, his mentally handicapped best friend gets into trouble - and he falls for a girl who turns out to be seriously ill. The irresistibly named Fruit Chan, a long-serving assistant director in the film industry, got this indie feature made on a wing and a prayer: various industry figures (notably Andy Lau) helped out, hardly anyone got paid and the non-pro cast was recruited on the street. Much of it is fresh, truthfully observed and touching in its honesty, but the climactic escalation into triad melodrama and the several false endings suggest that old industry habits die hard. None the less, a striking achievement.

BBC Films review Tom Dawson

The first independent film to emerge from the former British colony since the changeover to China in 1997, "Made in Hong Kong" is an intoxicating drama about teenage alienation.

The narrator and central character Autumn Moon (Lee) is a high school drop-out, whose father has abandoned his family for his mainland mistress. Moon now works as a debt collector for a Triad member Wing, and it's on his daily rounds with the simple-minded Sylvester (Li) that he falls for Ping (Yim), the daughter of one of his debtors. She is suffering from a fatal kidney disease, so the teenager decides to accept an assassination contract to pay for her medical fees. He continues, however, to be haunted in his dreams by visions of a female classmate (Tam) who committed suicide. And when Ping herself dies, Moon decides to take revenge on the adult world.

The plotting to "Made in Hong Kong" may be over elaborate and the scenes of bloodshed predictably familiar, yet writer-director Fruit Chan's vision of youthful nihilism still carries a heartfelt charge. This is Hong Kong seen from a new perspective - a world not of glittering office blocks but of anonymous housing estates, fractured families, and ubiquitous crime, in which according to Moon, "There is no true or false, no right or wrong."

Impressively shot on hand-held cameras, it boasts convincing performances from the non-professional cast, whilst amidst all the pessimism, hopelessness and self-destructive behaviour, there are sequences such as a daytrip to the cemetery of genuine lyricism. The concluding Mao monologue that can be heard on the soundtrack - "You young people of flourishing exuberance in these thriving times" - makes for a powerfully ironic resolution. Made for just $100,000, it shows that a low budget need not be a hindrance to cinematic creativity.

Senses of Cinema (Acquarello) review Mass-Produced Alienation: Disposable Lives in Made in Hong Kong, January 2003

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]

Fruit Chan's "Made in Hong Kong" The Auteurs

LoveHKFilm.com (Ross Chen) review

THE LONGEST SUMMER (Hui nin yin fa dak bit doh)

Hong Kong (128 mi) 1998

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Chan’s recklessly original film centres on Chinese soldiers from the HK Military Service Corps (two played by real ex-members) who are left penniless and jobless when the Brits disband the force three months before Hong Kong is handed back to China. Ga-Yin (dancer Tony Ho making a terrific acting debut) gets work as a driver for a triad gang because his brother Ga-Suen (Lee, from Made in Hong Kong) is a member; then he and several unemployed mates decide to rob a bank. Everything goes wrong, but they end up with the money anyway - and with both cops and robbers on their trail. Shot to look like docu-drama and integrating vivid documentary footage of the handover, the whole film has a street authenticity rare in Hong Kong movies. The only bum notes are some misogynistic asides about delinquent schoolgirls. Otherwise, impressive and gripping.

User comments from imdb Author: ETCmodel02 from vancouver bc canada

This is a film that argues the vitality and worth of living beneath the rule of government, society, peers or even gangs of skirted schoolgirls. A sometimes heavy handed film about a group of disenfranchised guys who suddenly feel alienated in their own country as their employers, the British Military, pulls up anchor and leaves them behind during the hugely weird hand over of Hong Kong in 1997. Set against the backdrop of the largely uncertain and extremely anxiety ridden hand over, from a few months prior to just past the hand over the story arcs through a string of events that force each man in the group to confront himself on some level, and if surviving, to come out changed and scarred. Sam Lee, younger than I've seen him before, is amazing in this. The cadence of the film is often uneven, but forgivable. The filming often feels very impromptu and gorilla. The relationships among characters in the film seem as congruous as being lucky enough to twice drive beneath children chucking rocks off an overpass. There are some fresh visuals to haunt you afterwards, like the kid on the subway with the hole straight through his head, and the hole is an improbably healed hole, and we even get another child's POV view through the hole to gaze down the length of the subway aisle, or the story of how he got that way, the story that turns out to be oddly incidental, nearly unrelated. Maybe a bit too much like how real life works, I dunno. Still, the scene where Sam Lee, after being called a mainlander redneck by the loudest of an obnoxious group of school girls, chucks the offending girl out of the open 2nd story window of the moving bus down into traffic below makes this film worth the rental, not because I have anything against obnoxious gangs of HK schoolgirls (although the director appears to, they are a recurrent theme in the film, and often end up getting done over, a metaphor about karmic rewards apparently), but I have to applaud the unprecedented sudden burst of horrifying action this scene accomplishes. Now that is good shock cinema!

Perhaps the future of Hong Kong film lies with director Fruit Chan, who follows up his excellent first feature with one that may be even better.

No sophomore slump for director Fruit Chan, whose Made in Hong Kong was last year’s biggest surprise. He follows that up with another well-crafted drama about Hong Kong told through its most dubious citizens. Newcomer Tony Ho Wah-Chiu is Ga Yin, a former member of the British Army who is discharged pending the upcoming handover. Finding little steady employment, he falls in with his younger brother Ga Suen (Sam Lee Chan-Sam) as a triad in HK’s infamous gang underworld. With the uncertainty of the future bearing upon Yin and his comrades, the group decide to rob a bank to provide for themselves. However things don’t turn out as they expect, as the consequences for their actions prove disastrous. With July 1997 bearing down, the sky is full of fireworks as are the lives of these downtrodden Hong Kong citizens, each striving for their own identity in the rapidly changing world.

The Longest Summer is an affecting, sometimes strangely funny masterpiece. Fruit Chan is probably the most exciting director to surface in Hong Kong since Wong Kar-Wai. His talent for using unknowns (among his actors, only Sam Lee is recognizable) and eliciting strong performances from them is undeniably strong. Also intriguing is his subject matter, which is at once political and personal, allegorical and intimate. Chan manages to explore and elucidate his average characters through incident and inaction, and though the meaning of his work might seem opaque, it nonetheless elicits a stirring emotional response. With Made in Hong Kong, Fruit Chan showed that he could craft stunning narrative work which spoke of both personal and social concerns, and he did so with charged cinematic eloquence. With The Longest Summer, Chan does it again.

18th Annual Hong Kong Film Awards
• Nomination - Best Picture
• Nomination - Best Director (Fruit Chan Gor)
• Nomination - Best Supporting Actor (Sam Lee Chan-Sam)
• Nomination - Best Screenplay (Fruit Chan Gor)
• Nomination - Best New Artist (Tony Ho Wah-Chiu)
• Nomination - Best New Artist (Jo Koo)
• Nomination - Best Original Score (Lam Wah-Cheun, Bat Kwok-Chi)
• Nomination - Best Original Song ("Hui Nin Yin Fa Dut Bit Dor", performed by Andy Lau Tak-Wah)
5th Annual Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
• Recommended Film

H.K. DVD Heaven (Chris Gilbert) dvd review

Chinese Cinema Page (Shelly Kraicer) review

LITTLE CHEUNG (Xilu xiang)

Hong Kong (118 mi) 1999

Nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards 2000:
Best Picture
Best Screenplay (Fruit Chan)
Best New Artist (Yiu Yuet-Ming)
Best Supporting Actor (Robin Lau)
Best Editing (Tin Sup-Bat)
Best Original Film Score (Lam Wah-Chuen & Chu Hing-Cheung)
Best Original Song: Po Moot Tung Jun (Farewell Innocence)
Music & Lyrics: Lam Wah-Chuen
Performed by: Jo Kuk

Award at the Hong Film Critics Society Awards 2000:
Film Of Merit

Awards at the Taiwan Golden Horse Awards 1999:
Best Screenplay Originally Written For The Screen (Fruit Chan)
Best New Performer (Yiu Yuet-Ming)

Time Out review Tony Rayns

There are three Cheungs in Chan's complex and inventive film: the dying Cantonese opera star Tang Wing-Cheung (to whom the film is dedicated), the original Kid Cheung (child star Bruce Lee in a '50s movie) and the film's nine-year-old protagonist, who helps out in his family's restaurant in the working class district of Mongkok, surrounded by hookers, gangsters, coffin makers and illegal immigrants from China. Framed as an investigation into the community's economic structures and dynamics, the film (set in 1996, on the eve of the handover) uses a non-pro cast and a free form plot to assert what's specific and distinctive about HK's culture - albeit defined across Chan's now-familiar scatological obsessions. With a Kieslowskian flourish the protagonists of Made in Hong Kong and The Longest Summer turn up in the closing moments, making this the third part of an informal 'handover trilogy'.

With a brilliant style and subject, and a nuanced, subtly balanced political subtext, director Fruit Chan's Little Cheung was the most impressive Hong Kong film on display at the 2000 Hong Kong International Film Festival. This film is the final part of Chan's 1997 handover trilogy, following Made in Hong Kong (1997) and The Longest Summer (1998), though the fact that it has its own sequel, Durian Durian [Liu lian piao piao, 2000] complicates matters (I left Hong Kong before Durian Durian screened as one of the two closing films, so I am not able to review it here). .

Set within a few blocks of Portland Street, an extremely dense, Triad-haunted working class Hong Kong neighbourhood of Mongkok, Fruit Chan's little masterpiece tells the story of Little Cheung, a 9-year-old occasional delivery boy at his father's short-order restaurant. In its focus on the family and the surrounding neighbourhood, the film recalls the classic family neo-realist dramas of an earlier Cantonese cinema. It is richly populated with vaguely clownish, slightly menacing triad toughies, wise old coffin makers, former Cantonese opera actors and extras, newspaper vendors, dishwashers, genial and not-so-genial cops: an entire self-contained little world that Chan portrays with dense realism and obvious affection. The wonderful cast, almost entirely made up of non-professional actors, brings all of these characters to vivid, three-dimensional life. But the film's centre has to be nine-year-old prodigy Yiu Yuet-ming, who gives an astonishingly powerful and charismatic performance as the slightly goofy, passionate, and impossibly world-wise narrator and title character.

Chan has described Little Cheung as a generation-spanning film, its characters balanced between children and the elderly. Little Cheung teams up with Fan, a girl his age who, along with her mother, is an illegal immigrant from China. Fan and her mother surreptitiously wash dishes down the street, behind a restaurant where Fan's father works legally. Little Cheung befriends Fan and offers her extra income as his delivery partner (they split the tips). His strongest relationship is with his grandmother, who seems to divide her time between telling him stories of her past and watching TV with him. In fact, Fruit Chan dedicates his film (in an opening title) to the subject of her viewing: Tang Wing-cheung. Tang, or "Brother Cheung" to his fans, was a real-life former Cantonese opera and movie musical star whose old films seem to play continuously on television. If her stories are to be trusted, Grandma seems to have known personally, co-starred with him in her youth, and perhaps even had an affair with him.

Like all of Chan's work, Little Cheung is also a political film. Brother Cheung's death coincides with the 1997 return of Hong Kong to Chinese control: both episodes play significant roles in the film. In a striking sequence, Little Cheung, in school, celebrates the "return to the motherland" with a flag waving mass salute bristling with regimented lines of schoolchildren and rigidly symmetrical camerawork (Chan needs nothing more explicit than this to comment on the HK Special Administrative Region's new political climate). But this scene is tempered with Little Cheung and Fan's rhapsodic bicycle ride along the HK harbour promenade, set against that inescapable Hong Kong skyline, as they fling louder and louder shouts of "Hong Kong is now ours" into the harbour. This scene is itself set beside the film's most heart-rending moments, of Fan and fellow mainlanders (who also have no HK residence permits) rounded up and marched into police vehicles prior to deportation back to the mainland.

Chan builds his film out of just such a counter-weighted structure. Scenes recoil from or counter-balance preceding scenes in a way that invites us constantly to re-evaluate what we have already seen, to rethink it in the context of what is presently unfolding in front of us. Think, for example, of the devastating image of Fan and her fellow child deportees starring out through the bars they are clutching of the police van that carries them away. And contrast this with the film's iconic image of Little Cheung naked from the waist down on the base of a pillar in the middle of the street, standing as punishment for having tried to run away from home. Soaked by rain and urinating, Little Cheung declaims his passionate, rebellious lament, quoting a famous song of Brother Cheung's while molding it into a lyrical defiance of patriarchal authority.

Little Cheung's neo-realism only goes so far. It is a background, a genre touchstone and inspiration off which Chan bounces his freely-spun flights of magical fantasy: passionately conceived scenes that skirt but just avoid sentimentality through their honest, precise detailing. Stylistic references are plural, heterogeneous. Chan will use long takes from fixed cameras through doorways (from a Hou Hsiao-hsien-influenced Taiwanese art cinema); wildly associative montages and variable speed shooting (out of John Woo's urban action cinema); skewed angle photography and dynamically tracking cameras (taking a page from Tsui Hark's film kineticism); Rabelaisian gross-out scenes of the broadest comedy (HK schlock-master Wong Jing's specialty); and adds to them elements all his own. There are moments when the film's extended frame of reference seems to embrace and ratify the whole recent history of Hong Kong cinema, while at the same time re-synthesizing it into a poetic montage that feels utterly fresh, daringly new.

Little Cheung - DVD Review Kenneth Brorsson from So Good Reviews

"Fruit Chan and class" p. 2 Wimal Dissanayake from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Little Cheung (2000) Paul Fonoroff from Hong Kong Movie DataBase

Film Festivals . com - Festival pages Fanfan KO

Little Cheung The World Film Festival, also seen here: The Reel Life Review [Paul Benmussa]

Hong Kong Cinemagic - Little Cheung good series of photos

Fruit Chan Gor Selected filmography from Love HK Films

Hong Kong Film Critics Society

LoveHKFilm.com - 19th Annual HK Film Awards

Chinese Cinema Page (Shelly Kraicer) review

YouTube - Little Cheung (Fruit Chan, 1999) - opening (1:30)

DURIAN DURIAN (Liulian piao piao)

Hong Kong France China (116 mi) 2000

You Can't Go Home Again Mark Peranson from The Village Voice

Reacting to the "one country, two systems" approach of post-handover Chinese life with alarming alacrity, Fruit Chan's semi-improvised film finds the new Hong Kong as sour as the titular fruit. A mainland transient in HK on a three-month visa, Yan lives the new capitalist's reality: She whores herself ragged and watches TV. Her friend, Fan, is an illegal dishwasher pulled from Chan's even better prequel of sorts, Little Cheung. Chan is most successful with the perversely sensitive, verité-styled HK half; when the troubled Yan returns home, the mood chills and the story meanders. But with two first-class films in one year, this guy's on a bigger roll than Steven Soderbergh.

Durian Durian is a two-part film split between Mongkok's Portland Street in Hong Kong and the north-eastern border region of mainland China. Ah Fan [Mak Wai-fan], the young girl from Little Cheung, lives in the former with her poor family, originally from Shenzhen, who illegally overstayed their three month visas to scrape together an income washing dishes and selling cigarettes. Fan meets Yan (Qin Hailu), a prostitute from the mainland, in a laneway behind Portland Street. They become friends after Yan's pimp is assaulted in front of Fan by an assailant wielding that most dangerous of weapons, a heavy, sharply spiney-skinned durian fruit. Yan returns to the north-east to invest what she has earned after her three month Hong Kong visa expires.

The film has the most well-defined formal structure of all of Fruit Chan's works, and seems to be about contrasts -- between Hong Kong and the mainland, hot, crowded Tsimshatsui and cold, barren, white north-eastern Heilongjiang. Film techniques seem to reinforce these oppositions; the former is filmed in bright, vivid colours, with an almost constantly moving, close-up, hand held camera, scenes are spliced together with quick cuts; the latter is filmed with a still, placid camera that stands off and films longer shots, and its palette seems desaturated, muted, much more controlled. But Durian Durian really asks you to look closer, and find similarities within differences: Yan's bathing in both places, Hong Kongers' and mainlanders' parallel obsessions with the anxiety of earning money, and most notably, the iconic presence of the durian fruit itself, offered first as a gift to Fan by her family, then as a gift to Yan by Fan. Both protagonists, too, trace parallel odysseys: first towards limited but enticing opportunity in Hong Kong dictated by a capitalism at its most brutal, an experience which wounds but doesn't seem to scar either of them. Then back to a mainland that, slipping away from a past marked by nostalgia towards a future that remains resolutely undefinable, seems charged with possibility.

Hong Kong and China: defined and constructed by history, politics, and sentiment as seperate places, yet inextricably bound together. "One country two systems", or two places sharing the same system? These are some of the themes that Fruit Chan explored throughout his '1997 trilogy' (Made in Hong Kong, The Longest Summer,and Little Cheung). Though never as richly or as subtly as here. Durian represents a stunning advance in technique and in conception for Chan. He manages to infiltrate his themes into the film's fabric, rather than stringing them up across the screen. DURIAN has a beauty, a tempo, and an integrity all its own, thanks to Lam Wah-chuen's richly varied, controlled cinematography, Tim Sam-fat's lively and expressive editing, and Lam Wah-chuen's (again) brilliant score (listen to the song and watch the trailer).

Reel Life Review [Paul Benmussa]

Variety (David Stratton) review

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review

Durian Durian - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HOLLYWOOD HONG KONG (Heung gong yau gok hor lei wood)

Hong Kong France Great Britain Japan (108 mi) 2001

KFC Cinema Branndon Fincher

Story: Hung Hung, a beautiful girl from Northern China, brings a magical sense of bewilderment to the lives of the inhabitants of the tiny village of Tai Hom. An obese father with his two portly sons and a local aspiring pimp, fall helplessly under the spell of this whimsical beauty as she acts as the catalyst for all sorts of calamities.

Review: Fruit Chan continues in his quest to work outside the Hong Kong machine. In an age and region saturated by romantic comedies and action flops, it is refreshing to see that a director exist with enough vision to bring an art house picture to a market that is caving in on itself with an overabundance of disposable entertainment.

In Hollywood Hong Kong we are introduced to Chu, the local roasted pork vendor, and his two sons, Tiny and Ming. Living a common life of the lower working class, these three go about there days butchering and selling off their edible swine to the passing consumers and hungry denizens of the district. Just down the block from Chu and the boys lives Keung, a young upstart with a website and a dream of amassing a stable of ladies with which to prostitute. Fancying himself the “Little Tiger” of the neighborhood, Keung’s dreams are to make it big using his harem of Chinese delights. Throw into this mix an alluring stranger named Hung Hung, with her sweet demeanor that unfortunately plays second fiddle to her desire to live the good life, and you have the foundation for this quirky little glimpse into the existence of the have-nots of Tai Hom.

The amazing part of this film is most certainly not the predictable storyline, but the manner in which it is delivered. Even though hands are chopped off, hearts get broken, and an all around sense of betrayal is in felt, the vibe of the film always manages to return to a state of harmless tomfoolery. This aspect is the true bait with which this spider sets its trap. With the aid of a delightful soundtrack, a scene consisting of something as gruesome as two men marching off to murder a woman with kitchen knives gradually turns into something capable of putting a smile on one’s face. That is not something that is easily achieved.

The film also does a great job of developing the lives of the characters. Hung Hung is the obvious center of this microcosm, but there is enough meat in the plot (no pun intended) to allow each character to grow with his own motives and desires. Even butcher Chu’s pet pig “mamma” gets some lime light when a crazed doctor forces her to make a jail break in order to save her own hide. If the subject matter of this film were dealt with in any other way it would not have been nearly as enthralling as it is.

Peculiar characters and bizarre twist aside, this film also has going for it a noteworthy aspect in the form of its aesthetic appeal. Carrying a look about itself that is far from typical, we find a lush pallet of colors to be discovered in the oddest of places. From the shades of pinks and browns in the fleshy hides of the butcher’s wares, to the hues of the seasons found in the rusted out sheet metal that endlessly lines the shacks and homes of the area, Fruit Chan truly reminds us that one man’s trash can be another man’s treasure.

Possessing a certain magic that is tough to nail down, Hollywood Hong Kong’s success is perhaps an attribute to the fact that its characters remind us of ourselves in our attempts to better our own situations while still adding unusual and unpredictable circumstances.

PUBLIC TOILET (Hwajangshil eodieyo?)

Hong Kong South Korea Japan (102 mi) 2002

40th Annual Golden Horse Awards
• Nomination - Best Art Direction (Ben Luk Man-Wah)
• Nomination - Best Make-up and Costumer Design (Ben Luk Man-Wah)
• Nomination - Best Original Song ("I'm Still Young", performed by Kim Hyo-Soo)
• Nomination - Best Sound Effects (Phyllis Cheng Wing-Yuen)
10th Annual Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
• Recommended Film

LoveHKFilm.com (Ross Chen) review

The Beijing crapper where Dong Dong was born is a venerable 40 years old and has no stalls, just a couple of long benches with holes cut in them - which at least makes for free-flowing conversation. Fruit Chan's film is whimsical effluent: loosely connected ideas and sketches range across the globe (New York, India, Korea), but come back repeatedly to loos and lavatories. For better or (I think) worse, the movie feels as if it was made up as they went along: a series of hand-held DV postcards which ultimately fails to conceal an insubstantial shaplessness. Once or twice, however, Chan reminds you what a gifted film-maker he can be.

Chinese films at the 27th Toronto International Film Festival - A ... Shelly Kraicer from Senses of Cinema, November 2002, also seen here from The Chinese Cinema Page: Public Toilet (excerpt)

Also from Hong Kong, but miles from Shaolin Soccer's blockbuster aspirations, is the ultra-low budget Public Toilet (Renmin gongce, 2002). This film, shot by director Fruit Chan on digital video, didn't exactly take TIFF by storm. Its exceedingly rough look and rambling narrative seem to rule out its acceptance as standard entertainment or “art house” fare. Part of the problem might be its subject matter – let's call it toilet culture – something of a return of the (only partially) repressed, with a vengeance. Familiar items of Chan's unique world recur: a largely non-professional cast made up of student actors and “civilians” that he plucked from the street; astonishing images seemingly grabbed on location by Chan's inspired (and lucky) camera. But Public Toilet makes a radical break for the filmmaker in several ways. His focus explodes outside of the Hong Kong-China nexus that preoccupy his other features, to locations in Korea (Pusan), India (Varanasi), and New York. And he experiments boldly with digital video, capturing and manipulating images in ways that were only hinted at by the surrealistic underpinnings that poked out from the surface of his 35mm features.

Most striking, though, is Public Toilet's narrative complexity. Four stories intertwine in the film, all involving toilets, plenty of pissing and defecating, and quests for miracle cures: a Beijing adolescent born in a toilet is on a quest to cure his comatose granny; a young Hong Kong hitman performs his last mission in New York; a family of HK-born South Asians accompany their ill father on a spiritual voyage to the Ganges; a Korean fisherman discovers a mermaid, sick from a polluted sea, in his outdoor toilet. The film, like the Hong Kong SAR, looks outward, discovering Hong Kong's home no longer in its intensely and exhaustively argued-over relationship with the mainland, but in a world defined globally. Hong Kong faces a new identity crisis: it needs to remake itself as a global city now that it has been subsumed into the PRC. It can only thrive if it reconceptualizes its distinctiveness, if it constructs a new identity of its multicultural society, its richly interconnected communities and their links to the rest of the world. Hong Kong's hope lies in its recognition that, already globalized, it is already radically advanced. Public Toilet embodies vanguard HK globalism, a brand of globalism that is as yet undeveloped, inchoate, waiting to be shaped and formed. While Public Toilet's radical style and sensibility mirrors this formal instability, the film bubbles with the untapped energy of new possibilities waiting to explode.

User comments from imdb Author: edmame from beanie pods

Fruit Chan's uncanny knack to splice together the most personal, poetic and idiosyncratic, then make it stuff of collective empathy and profound lament in MADE IN HONG KONG '97, has forever made him one to watch. PUBLIC TOILET is no different, and it was intensely healing as the second half of a double-bill viewing with Michael Haneke's CODE UNKNOWN '00. While Haneke looked at the invisible, complex layers and years of history making us mutually exclusive, rejecting time bombs just biding for collision from marital squabble to ethnic-cleansing wars, Chan does the opposite.

Surely the common humanity that we all eat and discharge appropriately is an accepted cliché best left to no imagination. But Chan asks, why not -- and don't just imagine, but LIVE around such fecal acts - as motions of civilized life like to pretend we don't? Who knew relieving yourself can be so moving, especially in the context of an ailing body, or the precious portal to friendship when strangers are cramped in a small space when traveling? How about the different ways we set up facilities to handle "the deed", that say as much about our aesthetic pretensions (or lack of) in dealing with other people's discharge next to ours?

Some point out the clash between globalization and fading local culture, or how each culture is supposedly tagged a different verdict of where it's going in the film. But try not to think so hard, that the film's beauty goes into a rigid, cold box of "this means that." Instead, see how Chan almost gloats (via voice-over narration) that displaced Italian, Somalian, Chinese, Indian, Korean, and even non-Human in places they're decidedly foreigners, yet come to embrace their ambivalent existence. Or the whimsical trepidation and inevitable clutches of films and images about another culture, just might be discredited before your eyes by the reality you actually experience. The lament of youths at the forces pulling us away from each other, despite the toilets we all share, is strangely uplifting simply because Chan believes in the youthful consciousness as he gloomily began in MADE IN HONG KONG.

The courageous vision and multi-cultural, -generational casting, interaction in PUBLIC TOILET is true epic stuff for digital video, especially compared to the "DV for our own backyard"-approach to Japan's Love Cinema series (which nevertheless boasts gems like Miike's VISITOR Q '01.)

P.S. Sam Lee the MADE IN HONG KONG-star is appropriately, but in bittersweet fashion, doing a clichéd genre hit-man in PUBLIC TOILET, with more symbolic presence than camera-bracing face-time. It affirms Chan's lament, though an inevitable product of their mutual success as director and actor, that Lee has developed the professional's facade no longer suited to Chan's vision (aside from DUMPLINGS '04 of course.)

Asian Cinema Drifter Tuna

iofilm.co.uk Rebort

THREE…EXTREMES (Sam gang yi)

aka: Three Extremes

aka: Three

Hong Kong segment “Dumplings” d: Fruit Chan

Japan segment “Box” d: Takashi Miike

S. Korea segment “Cut” d: Park Chan-wook (118 mi) 2004

The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias

Anthology films are mixed bags by nature, partly because multiple novella-length features rarely complement one another when stitched together, but mainly because directors tend not to bring their A-games to a side project. If nothing else, the horror anthology Three... Extremes, a trio of macabre shorts from first-rate Asian filmmakers, provokes a strong effort from everyone involved, though they're not all wholly successful. There isn't much to connect the three in terms of style, which ranges from Park Chan-wook's thick baroque sensibility to Takashi Miike's uncharacteristically elegant formalism, but each concern the capacity people have for vindictiveness and cruelty when their feet are in the fire. Whether due to vanity, jealousy, or sheer desperation, the leads in all three stories commit atrocities that would seem beyond their capabilities.

In Chan's queasily effective "Dumplings," Miriam Yeung plays a stressed-out trophy wife in need of some polish, lest her wealthy husband leave her for a newer model. For this, she turns to the giddily sadistic Bai Ling, a former gynecologist who has parlayed her old career into a new one making "special" dumplings for older women seeking a miracle rejuvenation cure. Taken literally, the premise of aborted fetuses being ground up and cased in fried dough is distasteful in the extreme, especially when Chan plays up the sound of teeth grinding through the gristle. It's more acceptable (though blunt) as social commentary—the rich gaining luster by making a meal of the underclass, basically—but that doesn't make it any easier to digest.

Made between Oldboy and Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, the second and last entries in his revenge trilogy, the disappointing "Cut" is concerned with Park's usual pet theme, but it feels like he's going through the motions, albeit with his usual surplus of technical brio. Lee Byung-hun stars as Park's alter ego, a popular film director who returns home to an invader who ties him up and forces him to choose between atrocities: the murder of an abducted child, or watching his pianist wife get her fingers chopped off one by one. Gradually, Lee's response to this torment makes him seem as villainous as his captor, but Park's idea of revenge spreading like a poisonous contagion gets lost in the baroque unpleasantness.

The last and strongest of the three is Miike's "The Box," which is more abstract and less immediately accessible than the other two, but looks and feels unlike anything Miike has done. Unfolding like a waking dream, with memories of a past trauma flooding into the present, "The Box" follows Kyoko Hasegawa, a successful but lonely author whose latest book attracts an editor that reminds her of her childhood. As a little girl, Hasegawa and her twin sister were contortionists at their father's traveling magic show, but one night, her jealousy over her sister's close relationship to him leads to tragic consequences. Few directors are as "extreme" as Miike, but ironically, his entry in Three... Extremes is the least explicit; its suggestive tale of envy and guilt resembles Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" more than Miike's usual six-per-year gorefests. Could this mark the start of a new phase in his career, or will it be back to business as usual?

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Les Wright

Following the style and format of the old television series Night Gallery, Three...Extremes showcases a trilogy of short films by master directors of Asian cinema. In the order they appear in the U.S. release, these include Hong Kong director Fruit Chan’s macabre meditation on the fountain-of-youth-themed "Dumplings," South Korean Chan-Wook Park’s self-consciously cinematic psychodrama "Cut," and Japan cult director Miike Takashi’s much-praised trauma drama "Box."

The film’s billing as hybrid horror genre is somewhat misleading. All three narratives do have much in common with the long string of American trashy slasher films, going back to Hershell Gordon Lewis’s 1963 cult classic Blood Feast. But more notably, they partake of a specifically Asian cinematic taste for sadomasochistic family romances. The acknowledged masterpiece of this tradition is Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 world-wide hit In the Realm of the Senses, which re-enacts a famous "weird news" case from 1930s Japan, in which the sexual obsession between a man and a woman causes them to forsake everything, including life itself. The genius of Oshima’s film’s narrative lay in how it pursued the theme of sexual obsession until Oshima had emptied it of any sexual dimension whatsoever.

The shorts of Three … Extremes, however, celebrate their sexual perversion, blending the sexual metaphors of carnality, gustation and desire as vehicles of power. In each tale, an underlying, unresolved sexual obsession opens the door to baser cravings for control over other people. In "Dumplings" (referring to what is more popularly known as "potstickers" in the U.S.), for example, Mrs. Qing Li (Miriam Yeung), a not quite so young wife, sets out to regain the sexual attention of Sije Li (Tony Ka-Fai Leung), her husband, by visiting a former gynecologist (presented as a modern-day witch) known as Aunt Mei (Bai Ling) in her prison-like working-class high-rise cage of an apartment. Mrs. Li quickly embraces the diet of potstickers, steamed, boiled, or pan-fried, slurping the crunchy critters with ever increasing pleasure. As she and the audience come to know, viscerally, the source of the little meat hearts of the dumplings, Chan intensifies his montage of human body fluids and body parts, gleefully offering cannibalism, acts of abortion, and blood-disgorging sexual congress for the audience’s delectation.

In "Cut" (the title plays on both the notion of cutting with knives and a director’s command to "cut" a scene and ergo an actor’s ego), fictitious film director Ryu Ji-Ho (Lee Byung-Hun) comes home to find his wife bound to the family grand piano, her fingers simultaneously glued to the keys and attached to wires which spiral into the walls and ceiling. A disgruntled extra (played by Lim Won-Hee) has set a series of traps for Ryu, forcing the director to atone for being both rich and a morally good person at the same time (something which enrages the poor, no longer humble extra, frustrating his world view that the rich are morally bankrupt).

The absurdist challenges given Ryu (to strangle a child, to witness his wife’s fingers being chopped off one at a time, to morally debase himself in front of the actor) are mirrored in the self-conscious way in which director Park plays with the artificiality of film. Ryu leaves a sound stage after a day’s filming and returns to his home, which is the sound stage he had just left. The actor portraying a man bitten by a female vampire and left frozen on-stage turns up still frozen in Ryu’s home. The little girl Ryu is commanded to strangle turns out to be someone else, and even Ryu’s wife is cast in several different lights, depending on how a particular scene is being acted out at any given moment.

Three … Extremes is definitely an acquired taste of an art-house subgenre type. The dim sum-like array of choices, glimpses into contemporary Asian cinematic styles and prominent directors and actors, is noteworthy. The tension, of balancing visceral horror with psychological sadomasochism, requires a disciplined viewer. Whether this film achieves its pay-off depends upon the palate of the moviegoer, for this is a rare delicacy indeed.

Eye for Film ("Marnie") review [3/5]

Three of Asia's premier horror directors each delivering a 40-minute tale of terror sounds like a dream - or should that be nightmare?

Sadly, the end result is not quite the spine-tingling scare-fest you expect. While the three Twilight Zone-style movies - Dumplings, Cut and Box - are not without merit, they are far from satisfying or truly terrifying.

Most Asian horror offers up a large slice of the supernatural, often in the form of creepy, long-dead killers (Ring being the prime example) but Dumplings goes for gruesome over ghostly... and it is one of the most stomach-churning films I've ever had the displeasure to see.

There isn't slasher movie-style decapitations or buckets of blood - the story alone is enough to have you chucking up. There is no point to the short other than to disturb - a surprise and huge disappointment considering it was written by Farewell My Concubine scribe Lillian Lee. But there is a feature-length version of the movie, which perhaps develops the themes only briefly touched on here.

Ageing TV star Mrs Lee (Miriam Yeung) wants to recapture her lost youth and goes to visit Mei (Ling Bai), who makes dumplings that turn back the clock. But forget a Death Becomes Her-style magic potion and a few laughs - Mei's anti-ageing treatment is made from the cooked foetuses of aborted babies. All together now, "EEEWWWW". It gets worse... you get to see one of said foetuses after its grizzly home abortion and just before it gets sauteed. Now there's a version of Hell's Kitchen Gordon Ramsay has yet to try.

There are stylistic touches which save the film, as it is altogether too gruesome a concept to enjoy otherwise. Its themes of the desperate pursuit of youth are thought-provoking, though, and the movie also hints at an interesting social comment on China's one baby per family policy - particularly since the most potent anti-age foetuses are boys and they are rarely aborted - but it fails to fully develop this concept.

Next on the bill is Cut, from Korea's Park Chan-Wook. The acclaimed Sympathy For Mr Vengeance and Oldboy director serves up a sadistic revenge tale reminiscient of Saw - but this tale of torture could be a lot more bloody and shies away from any real gore.

It tells the tale of a likeable film director (Byung-hun Lee) who is kidnapped by one of the extras from his movies. The psychotic failed actor takes him to his movie set - incidentally a replica of his living room - where he is forced to witness his wife (Hye-jeong Kong) being mutilated.

His bride - looking truly terrified and yet almost comical with wild hair and a waterfall of running mascara - is sitting at the piano and tied up using an intricate, spiderweb-style system of piano wire - which could be used to inflict more inventive harm than is actually delivered.

Cut's saving grace is its twisted humour and bursts of unexpected ridiculousness - the extra demonstrating the roles he has played dressed as a soldier, doctor and even a swimmer, complete with flippers, are hilarious. His song and dance routine - complete with wacky faces Jack Black would be proud of - will also have you on the floor.

There are also wonderful fast tracking shots across the sets and quick, almost montage-like cuts to each character, brilliantly showing their fear, confusion and anger.

The final instalment is Box and it is the highlight of the disc, offering supernatural chills.

Young woman Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa) is haunted by nightmares of her child. Aged 10, she and her twin Shoko (Yuu Suzuki) performed as contortionists in a circus, with their star turn being their ability to fold themselves into a tiny box. But Shoko is killed in tragic circumstances and her twin is haunted by the past - literally.

A wonderful atmosphere of dread is introduced early on by Japanese director Miike Takashi, who brought us Audition.

The dark sets and solemn score lower the mood and create tension, while the Ring-style scene involving a little girl will put you firmly over the edge.

But the plot is confusing and the unexpected ending will have you scratching your head. But hey, at least this doesn't rely on gore to get a scare.

Reverse Shot [Michael Joshua Rowin]

Reel.com review [3.5/4] James Emanuel Shapiro

LoveHKFilm.com (Ross Chen) review

Classic Horror review Kairo

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

DVD Outsider Slarek

FilmsAsia [Soh Yun-Huei]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Jeremy Knox

stylusmagazine.com (Jake Meaney) review

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival report

filmcritic.com (Nicholas Schager) review [3.5/5]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4.5/5] Eric Campos

Twitch (Philippe Gohier) review

Twitch Nick

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

CHUD.com (Jeremy G. Butler) dvd review

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]

Film Monthly (Andrew Dowd) review

DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review

PopMatters (Ryan Vu) review

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [4/5]

Scott Mendelson review [B]

Thoughts on Stuff Patrick

Bright Lights Film Journal [Ian Johnston] May 2005

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3/5] Heidi Martinuzzi

Lee's Movie Info (Lee Tistaert) review [C+]

Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]

ReelTalk (Adam J. Hakari) review also seen here: Passport Cinema [A.J. Hakari]

Bloody-Disgusting review [3.5/5] T.W. Anderson

FilmJerk.com ("The Real Dick Hollywood") review [B]

House of Horror (Caretaker) review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]

Korean Grindhouse Drew P.

Mike D'Angelo review

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

Variety (David Rooney) review

Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Ty Burr

The Boston Phoenix review Brett Michel

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

San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Crust) review

Movie review: 'Three...Extremes' Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune