A stylish indie film with plenty of attitude and some
particularly fine moments, featuring strong performances from an excellent
cast, especially from the best friend leads Rusty (Shawn Hatosy) and
Dallas 362 Mike D’Angelo
Near the end of
Scott Caan's improbably electrifying directorial debut, the main character,
Rusty (Shawn Hatosy), sits talking to his mother, Mary (Kelly Lynch), about
some impending upheavals in their lives — her sudden engagement to her
psychiatrist boyfriend, his desire to return to Texas and pursue a career as a
rodeo cowboy. It's a fairly straightforward heart-to-heart, sharply written and
beautifully acted but still potentially something of a Hallmark moment. As
mother and son converse in the foreground, however, quiet magic unfolds in the
background, out of focus: About halfway through the scene, Mary's fiancé, Bob
(Jeff Goldblum), who's been doing double duty as Rusty's shrink, wanders out to
greet them, but stops dead upon sensing that he's about to intrude upon The Big
Talk. He watches briefly from afar, then turns and beats a hasty, positively
giddy retreat — all of this conveyed solely via Goldblum's gangly body
language. Tender and goofy, it's the kind of detail that most novice filmmakers
would underline with a close-up or a focus pull; Caan simply lets it happen,
and has the confidence never to refer to it again.
Limping into a handful of theaters some two years after its festival
premiere,
Dallas
362 Michael Sicinski from the
Academic Hack
Here's a film that no one really gives two shits about in the
larger world -- it won at CineVegas 03, played Toronto, and slumped into
theatres two years later -- but a lot of people in my immediate circle are
pretty high on it. I first tried to watch it late last year but turned the disc
off at the 30-minute mark. It struck me as way too smug, and its seeming
celebration of thick-necked dumbass thuggery turned me off like, well, like a
family reunion, if you catch my drift. In fact, the opening minutes were a bit
misleading, since
Variety (Scott Foundas) review
The 26-year-old actor Scott Caan likely grew up watching films his father James made during the late-1960s/early-1970s, and the influence shows in his debut as writer-director, "Dallas 362." Set and shot, like last year's "Spun" and "The Salton Sea," in grimy flophouses and back alleys of Los Angeles, Caan's picture refreshingly refrains from borrowing from those films' stylistic handbook. Rather, it has a relaxed poeticism to it; it's a sweetly naive, adolescent Hemingway fantasy with a star-making performance by Shawn Hatosy and good ones from everyone else (including Caan). The recipient of the critics' jury prize at Cinevegas, this low-key but accomplished pic definitely has a future as a festival item and a specialized theatrical release.
The story of two longtime friends, Rusty (Hatosy) and Dallas (Caan), who ramble aimlessly from bar fight to bar fight, always getting bailed out by Rusty's understanding mom (Kelly Lynch), "Dallas 362" has a first-time-filmmaker's tendency to overplay its hand. At times, Caan (like Hemingway or Sam Shepard at their worst) gets a bit too seduced by the notion of angry young men working out their frustrations physically when that's exactly the thing pic purports to be rallying against. (There's one scene, in which Dallas stares at his split-open and bleeding head in the mirror and seems turned-on by it.) Rusty, who's supposed to be the one with the bright future in this doomed, "Scarecrow"-esque friendship, occasionally smacks of bad Will Hunting-isms. He's a loner-rebel caricature: the toughest, most sensitive and most misunderstood kid on the block.
But this shaggy dog of a movie (decked out in work boots and blasted blue jeans), is also involving and surprisingly mature. There's something sweetly appealing about Caan's near-fetishization of adolescent angst. Despite his indulgence in cliches, Caan connects to his characters on a deep, meaningful level; auds will care about Rusty and Dallas, even if they don't quite believe they exist. Caan lets their situations -- Rusty is looking for a way back to the Texas of his youth; Dallas is plotting a robbery to set him up for life -- play out in unpredictable ways, even if too much time is spent on the Dallas subplot.
Caan stages some lovely scenes, like one early on where a beautiful girl (Marley Shelton) walks into the diner where Rusty is eating and he tells her, without batting an eye, that he loves her, that instinctively he ought to sweep her off her feet and "rescue" her, but that he can't at the moment, because "it's a thing."
Caan also gives ample chunks of the movie over to the very honest relationship between Rusty and his mom. Lynch is very good as the mother -- it's the biggest mother role in recent memory in a movie ostensibly aimed at Generation Y -- and she even gets her own tender, unhurried romance with a shrink played by an enjoyably goofy Jeff Goldblum.
But the movie belongs to Hatosy, in his best role to date, whose Rusty is by turns child-like and wise-beyond-his-years, imploding with sadness and rage.
"Dallas 362" overstays its welcome by a bit, but keeps introducing new characters along the way to keep things fresh. (Freddy Rodriguez's turn as a Cuban shyster with a "Scarface" accent is particularly memorable.) And in pic's final moments, there's an unexpected emotional pull.
Widescreen cinematography by Phil Parmet has a day-dreamy haze that captures L.A. very well. The superb opening titles (by Howie Nourmand) are further proof that such sequences are the true renaissance art at the movies nowadays.
The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]
Slant Magazine review Akiva Gottlieb
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
Film-Forward.com Deborah Lynn Blumberg
User reviews from imdb Author: Bruce Coughran from Santa Monica, CA
The Village Voice [Joshua Land]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
BBC Talking Movies [Scott Andrews]
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
The
New York Times (Dana Stevens) review
A Scattered
Homage to Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Victor Fowler Calzada from Rouge
Cacoyannis, Michael from World Cinema
Greek
Cypriot film director, also theatre director, editor and producer. After law
studies in
— Thomas Nedelkos, Encylopedia
of European Cinema
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
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.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
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.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
WINDFALL IN
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
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.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
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
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.
Chicago Reader (capsule) Dave Kehr
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)
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
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
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson)
Director Michael
Cacoyannis' documentary Attila '74: The Rape of Cyprus chronicles the 1974
Turkish invasion of
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
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.
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.
PEOPLE
SAY I’M CRAZY B 85
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
aka: Buenos Aires, 1977
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.
Mini Reviews (July 2011) - Reviews by David Nusair - Reel Film Reviews
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.
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]
Another Earth | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson, including an interview with the director July 22, 2011 here: Mike Cahill | Film | Interview | The A.V. Club
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]
Another Earth : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Tyler Foster from DVD Talk
Film-Forward.com [Adam Schartoff]
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
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
Cinema Verdict [Marco Duran] also seen here: The Critical Movie Critics [M. Duran]
Movie Review - Another Earth - eFilmCritic Jay Seaver
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Another Earth | Review | Screen John Hazelton from Screendaily
Another Earth — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Ray Greene
'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
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
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
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
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
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,
Sigourney In
3-D | The New York Observer Sigourney in 3-D, by Sara Vilkomerson
from The
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,
Newsweek
Interview (2007) by Sean Smith from
Newsweek,
THE
TERMINATOR
Chicago Reader on Film Dave Kehr (earlier version, now re-edited online)
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
"A blazing, cinematic comic book, full of virtuoso moviemaking,
terrific momentum, solid performances, and a compelling story" - Variety
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)
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
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
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DVDBeaver - Blu-ray DVD review [Leonard Norwitz]
ALIENS
Chicago Reader On Line Dave Kehr
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
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).
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.
DVD Times Review [Daniel Stephens]
Turner Classic Movies Pablo Kjolseth
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
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
eFilmCritic.com Slyder
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
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
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Walter Goodman)
DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze
THE
ABYSS
The
Abyss Jonathan Rosenbaum
from the Reader
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
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.
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
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
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
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]
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
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
Terminator
2: Judgment Day Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader
BeyondHollywood.com - Ultimate Edition Nix
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 1
James Cameron on Terminator 2 - Part 2
The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks attention to detail
The City Review [Carter B. Horsley]
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
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
filmcritic.com reaches Judgment Day Christopher Null
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Terminator 2: Judgment Day Sean Fitzgibbons from DVD Verdict
The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley
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
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
DVDBeaver - Blu-ray DVD review [Leonard Norwitz]
TITANIC C 75
Waiting for the
$1.50 show at the
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 3rd 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)
Bright Lights Film Journal T.L. Putterman
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]
eFilmCritic.com Slyder
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala)
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Chicago NewCityNet (Ray Pride)
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis)
CultureCartel.com (Laurie Edwards)
Bright Lights Film Journal Robert Keser
The Onion A.V. Club [Maria Schneider]
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani)
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) also here: second look at Titanic and here: third look at Titanic, after its Oscar win for Best Picture
Gods of Filmmaking review of Titanic
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray)
Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald)
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
The Digital Bits Bill Hunt
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Chris Knox)
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
Blogcritics - Collector's Edition DVD Review [Matt Paprocki]
Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]
James Cameron on Titanic interview with the director by Rick Schultz
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov)
The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
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
Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) review [4.5/5]
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.
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
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.
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
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.
filmcritic.com (Bill Gibron) review [5/5]
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
Avatar
and American Imperialism
zunguzungu
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?
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-]
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
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
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
CNN Showbiz (Tom Charity) review
Feo Amante [E.C. McMullen Jr.]
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]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
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
Campanella,
Juan José
The
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
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
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
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
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 Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) 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.
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
In
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
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
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.
ScreenCrave [Tom von Logue Newth]
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3.5/4]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner) review [4/4]
The
Oscar-Winning Ridiculousness of The Secret in Their Eyes Nicolas Rapold from The Village Voice
HollywoodChicago.com (Patrick McDonald) review [4.0/5]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
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]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
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
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
EDGE
OF DARKNESS B 88
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
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
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
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
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.
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
While Campbell and screenwriters William Monahan and Andrew
Bovell have transplanted the action from
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
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
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
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
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
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
filmcritic.com (Bill Gibron) review [3/5]
Screen International (Mike Goodridge) review
Screenjabber review David Franklin
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
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]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
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
Mel
Gibson: back with a vengeance John
Hiscock interviews Mel Gibson from The
Daily Telegraph,
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
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review also seen here: Los Angeles Times [Michael Phillips]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
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
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
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
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
In 1984, fresh out of film school, Campion began working on a
screenplay about the colonial past of
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
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: <em>Jane
Campion: Interviews</em>
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
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
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
AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE –
PEEL B+ 92
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
"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
Film's Female Powerhouses — Part 3: The International Cineastes ... Saidah Russell
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Peel | Short Film | NZ On Screen
Peel (Jane Campion) on Vimeo (8:34)
PASSIONLESS MOMENTS B- 80
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.
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) -
MUBI
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
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 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).
A
Girl's Own Story (1984) | danielleshortfilm
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 (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
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
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 -
Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
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
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 (1st 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 (
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.
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
Sweetie (1989) - The Criterion Collection
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
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
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
MOVIE
REVIEW : Family Unsettlingly Under Siege in 'Sweetie' From Australia Sheila Benson from The LA Times
'Sweetie':
A Second Look - latimes Dennis Lim
Sweetie Movie Review
& Film Summary (1990) | Roger Ebert
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
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
An
Angel at My Table, directed by Jane Campion | Film ... - Time Out
Geoff Andrew
Though adapted for television from three volumes of autobiography
by
An
Angel at My Table Terrence Rafferty
from the New Yorker (link lost)
Based on the autobiography of the
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
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 (
"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
"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
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
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
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
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 19th
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
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
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 19th 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
<em>Jane Campion's The Piano</em> 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
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
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
Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]
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,
Piano, The Movie a
film website
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 Marjorie Baugartner from The Austin Chonicle
The Piano Movie Review
& Film Summary (1993) | Roger Ebert
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)
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
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.
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)
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 19th 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?
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
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
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
New York Magazine (David Denby)
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
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)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
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
Far from her suburban
Philadelphia City Paper review by Sam Adams
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.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
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
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.
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
There's reason for joy among feminists this morning, at least in the top
film market citties such as
When her family finds out, they're worried sick and her mother goes to
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
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
Kamera.co.uk Richard James Havis
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Rob Nelson
Chris Dashiell at CineScene (down the page)
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
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
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
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
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
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
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
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,
Making
the Cut: Joy Press from the
Village Voice
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
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
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
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)
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt)
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi)
"In the Cut" - Salon Stephanie Zacharek
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
About.com Rebecca Murray
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Kamera.co.uk John Atkinson
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
DVD Verdict - Uncut Director's Edition Elizabeth Skipper
Film Journal International (Maria Garcia)
FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]
channel4.com/film [Jamie Russell]
Sunday Online, Australia (Peter Thompson) including brief comments from Campion and the two leads
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday)
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (A.O. Scott)
Bookslut | In the Cut by Susanna Moore Gena Anderson book review from Bookslut
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.
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 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.
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) 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.
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.
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
RealTime Arts - Magazine - issue 96 - campion's realm of the senses Kirsten Krauth
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
PopMatters (Renee Scolaro Mora) 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]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
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]
The Daily Telegraph review [5/5] David Gritten at Cannes from The Telegraph, 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
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
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
John Keats - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Life and Work of John Keats (1795-1821)
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
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
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:
“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:
“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.
“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:
“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:
“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:
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]
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
'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]
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
'Make-out
with Violence' Takes Top Nashville Film Festival Honors ... Jim Ridley from The Nashville Scene,
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
'Afterschool''s
Antonio Campos: 'Continue to Experiment and Play ... indieWIRE interview,
BUY IT NOW
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 (
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,
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
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
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
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]
Variety (Robert Koehler) review
BBCi - Films Paul Arendt
THE LAST 15
User reviews from imdb Author: rasecz from United
States
The
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
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,
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).
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
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,
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,
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
Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]
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
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.
It's hard enough to direct a debut film at any age - but Afterschool
gives the impression that
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,
[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
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
User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from
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.
'Afterschool,' which speaks of a boy and girl in a fancy
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. (
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.)
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
Sundance
2012. Antonio Campos's "Simon Killer" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson at Mubi
Simon
Killer: Sundance Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Sundance
2012: Simon Killer – review | Film | guardian.co.uk Jeremy Kay
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
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson October 12, 2016
Time: Stephanie Zacharek October 14, 2016
Indiewire: Eric Kohn January 24, 2016
Spectrum
Culture [Jesse Cataldo]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Amber Wilkinson]
theartsdesk.com
[Tom Birchenough]
The
Kim Newman Website (Kim Newman)
Film
School Rejects [Eric D. Snider]
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
Westender
Vancouver [Thor Diakow]
Sally Quinn's article about Chubbuck for the Washington Post August 4, 1974
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
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 ...
Marcel Camus
Sight and Sound (link lost),
also seen here: The
Encyclopedia of Film - Page 93 - Google Books Result (pdf)
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)
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
The Orpheus legend is transposed to
Film
Court (Lawrence Russell) review
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review
[4/5]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Music
samples from Black Orpheus soundtrack
Canby, Vincent essay by Gerald Peary
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.
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.
cinemattraction (Sarah Manvel)
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.
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)
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)
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson
Hollywood Jesus Darrel Manson
Time Out London (Wally Hammond)
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
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.
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
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
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.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
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.
The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]
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
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
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott
Tobias]
Political Film Review Michael Haas
Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara
Ressources humaines (1999) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
indieWIRE Stan Schwartz
filmcritic.com Matt Langdon, also seen here: DVD Talk (Matt Langdon)
Flak Magazine (Eric Wittmershaus)
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
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Stephen Holden)
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.
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 Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
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.
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
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
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
Recently, David Puttnam complained that modern cinema was
failing to reflect real life. Well, that might be true of
PopMatters Elbert Ventura
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Gary Mairs
Movie Vault [Avril Carruthers]
The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]
Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet)
filmcritic.com calls Time Out Pete Croatto
hybridmagazine.com Ellen Whittier
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
L’Emploi du temps (2001) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani)
Xiibaro Reviews: Lilo & Stitch, Time Out, Nine Queens, and The ... David Perry
CineScene.com (Howard Schumann)
Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit)
eFilmCritic Reviews Thom
DVD Verdict Michael Rankins
DVD Verdict Barrie Maxwell
indieWIRE Anthony Kaufman, voted # 1 Film of the Year
Austin Chronicle ((L'emploi Du Temps)) Marritt Ingman
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
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]
aka: Vers Le Sud
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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."
"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
In a dirt-poor country where life is cheap, there is a local
saying that those who grow too tall in
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
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
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
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
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
filmcritic.com Don Willmott
Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Political Film Review Michael Haas
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)
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
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Boston Globe Ty Burr
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
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
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Chicago Reader (J.R. Jones ) review
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
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
Reel.com [Chris Cabin] also seen here: filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
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
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
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
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
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
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
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 3rd 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.
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 5,000th 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]
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B] also seen here: Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review
stylusmagazine.com (Kevin Worrall) review
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
sneersnipe (David Perilli) review
Plume Noire review Fred Thom
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
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival report
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
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
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
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
Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Picking Up the Pieces Of a Troubled Family - Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle [Walter Addiego]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
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
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.
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.
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Film
Reference Charles Affron
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
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)
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
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
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Senses of Cinema (Martha P. Nochimson)
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson)
The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)
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
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
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
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)
DVD Verdict Norman Short
The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
CineScene.com (Kristen Ashley)
The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent)
Classic fantasy epic based on James Hilton's
novel, with a number of air-passengers hijacked after leaving war-torn
The weirdest film by Frank Capra, this epic was adapted from James
Hilton’s bestselling novel about a plane full of passengers stranded in
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
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
The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent)
Edinburgh U Film Society [Katia Saint-Peron]
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 [Jamie S. Rich] from the premiere Frank Capra Collection
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] from the premiere Frank Capra Collection
The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent)
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.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)
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
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
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
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson)
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze
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
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
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
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.
'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
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
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
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Reel.com DVD review [James Plath]
DVD Verdict- 60th Anniversary Edition [Daniel MacDonald]
Bright Lights Film Journal [D.J.M. Saunders]
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE Reel Classics
"It's a Wonderful Life": The most terrifying movie ever Rich Cohen from Salon, December 24, 2010
100 films Lucas
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell)
The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley)
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson)
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
Robin's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE Page Robin Olson
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) in 1999
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
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 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
— Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia
of European Cinema
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
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
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.
Boy Meets Girl | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
The revelation of the 1984
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.
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
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.
Great Movie Reviews [Pseudonymous author Ankyuk]
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
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
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
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
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
Are
the hills going to march off?: Boy Meets Girl (1984) A Film by ...
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
BOY MEETS GIRL (Leos Carax, 1984) | UCLA Graduate Student ... Tomas Roges
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen J. Brennan]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Boy Meets Girl : The New Yorker Richard Brody capsule review
Holy Motors + The Films Of Leos Carax! | The Cinefamily
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,
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) also seen here: 'BOY MEETS GIRL,' A TALE OF LOVE BY LEOS CARAX - NYTimes ...
DVDBeaver [Per-Olaf Strandberg]
Boy Meets Girl (1984 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nausea (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
aka: The Night Is Young
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.
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
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
The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
#257: Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986) | THE FRAME LOOP Luke Richardson
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Mauvais sang (1986) / Leos Carax / film review James Travers
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
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
User
reviews from imdb Author: chaos-rampant from
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
DVDBeaver [Per-Olaf Strandberg]
aka: Les Amants du Pont-Neuf
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
The Onion A.V.
Club [Scott Tobias]
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 LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF) Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Read the New York Times Review » Vincent Canby’s mixed review
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
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
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.)
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.
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
At the same time, more than in any of his previous films, Carax invests the
narrative with highly charged subtext.
Isabelle by contrast is a projection of
Carax doesn't idealise
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Images Movie Journal David Ng
Kamera.co.uk Adrian Gargett
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
POLA X Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
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
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
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
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
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.
‘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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
Digital Fix [Gavin Midgley]
The
House Next Door [Budd Wilkins]
theartsdesk.com
[Emma Simmonds]
Holy
Motors Review - Fantastic Fest 2012 | Film School Rejects Adam Charles
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]
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
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.
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
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.
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
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]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
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]
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
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.
A Tribute to Claudia Cardinale website
All-Movie Guide - Claudia
Cardinale Jason Ankeny
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
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
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?
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]
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
Grey, The - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Film-Forward.com [Brendon Nafziger]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]
The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]
'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]
Lost in Reviews [Sarah Ksiazek]
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
Filmophilia.com [Sverrir Sigfusson]
Battleship Pretension [Kyle Anderson]
Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]
Review: 'The Grey' Is Adventure Done Right ... - Film School Rejects Rob Hunter
FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [Kathryn Schroeder]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
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]
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
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
'The Grey' review: Wolves get their way Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle
Los Angeles Times [Michael Phillips]
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
Carné, Marcel They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
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.
Down a foggy, desolate road to the port city of
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.
Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster
Turner Classic Movies James Steffen
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)
Deep
focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016
DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Dan Mancini
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss)
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
The Digital Bits Tim Doogan
The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent)
HÔTEL DU NORD
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.
Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord, made in the years immediately
preceding the Nazi invasion of
A young man and woman, Pierre and Renée, enter the Hôtel du
Nord in a poor working class district of Paris near the
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
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
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
DAYBREAK (Le Jour se
Lève)
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
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.
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
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
LES ENFANTS
DU PARADIS
aka: Children of
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
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.
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
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.'
DeWitt Bodeen, Les Enfants du Paradis, filmreference.com
Tribute to Les Enfants du Paradis a website on the film by Jim Richardson
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)
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
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
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
100 films Lucas McNelly
Monsters At Play Lawrence P. Raffel
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]
The worst best films ever made Tim Lott from The Guardian, July 24, 2009
Boston Globe Mark Feeney
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
DVDBeaver - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
Children of Paradise - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Carney,
John
ONCE A- 94
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.
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.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
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
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
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
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
The Accidental Musical: Once | The House Next Door | Slant ... Todd VanDerWerf
Once (2006) | PopMatters Daynah Burnett
The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]
PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
New York Sun [Jayanthi Daniel]
National
Public Radio [Bob Mondello]
Once Mike D’Angelo
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
ONCE - Film Journal International Frank Lovece
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Once | PopMatters Rachel Kipp
EyeForFilm.co.uk The Exile
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]
DVD Verdict [Daniel MacDonald]
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]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Exclaim! (Radheyan Simonpillai)
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Theo Alexander]
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Zero for Conduct [Michael Atkinson]
Once | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks
Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]
Austin Chronicle [Toddy Burton]
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
'Once' more, with feeling Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune [Brett Buckalew]
New York Times A.O. Scott
Once (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ONCE | Listen and Stream Free Music,
Albums, New ... - MySpace
BEGIN AGAIN B+ 90
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
‘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
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
Spectrum Culture [Forrest Cardamenis]
The Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]
Sound On Sight JR Kinnard
Little White Lies [Sophie Monks Kaufman]
The
Modest Pleasures of Begin Again
Christopher Orr from The
The Playlist [Kevin Jagernauth]
PopMatters [Jesse Hassenger] also reviewing THEY CAME TOGETHER
Begin Again - Directed by John Carney • Film ... - Exclaim! Matthew Ritchie
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
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,
'Begin Again': Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
The Evening Standard [David Sexton]
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.
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Amber Wilkinson]
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.
Slant
Magazine [Kenji Fujishima]
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]
Sing Street (2016) Movie Review - MovieQuotesandMore Ryan Grace
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
'Sing Street' Review: The
Next Great Musical From the ... - ScreenCrush Mike Sampson
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]
'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
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
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]
Caro, Niki
WHALE RIDER B 85
Witi Ihimaera is the first published Māori writer and is believed
to have been sitting in his
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.
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.
filmcritic.com (Jules Brenner) review [3/5]
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
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [4/4]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) review
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
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
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
3 Black Chicks Review Flicks Cassandra Henry
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
hybridmagazine.com review Mike O’Connor
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
Bright Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris
Kamera.co.uk review Bob Carroll
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
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Private Joker
Reel.com dvd review [4/4] James Plath
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [1.5/4]
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
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
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
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 Village Whale Rider East Cape Coastline NZ
Whale Rider - Jasons New Zealand
NORTH COUNTRY D+ 66
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
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
The Official John Carpenter
Pages
The Unofficial John Carpenter Forum
All-Movie Guide bio info
TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies
John
Carpenter Marco
Lanzagorta from Senses of Cinema
Director's
Profile: John Carpenter Eric Beetner
from
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
Genius Again... for
a While from Crescent Blues, Volume
1, Issue 1 © 1998, 1999, 2000
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
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 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
REVENGE OF
THE COLOSSAL BEASTS
from
imdb Author: Hell-Burner from
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
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.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Cox]
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.
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
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
Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]
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
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT
13
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
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
John Carpenter’s neo-Western Assault on Precinct 13
(loosely based on Howard Hawks’
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
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Kent Jones of
Film Comment has referred to horror maven John Carpenter as the last genre
filmmaker working in
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
A Film Odyssey [Robert Humanick]
Images Movie Journal James Newman
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)
The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
VideoVista Tom Matic
eFilmCritic Dr. Isaksson
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
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
HALLOWEEN A 96
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 13th
(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.
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).
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 (
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.
Building a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, January 7, 2005
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) an extended essay
Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp
DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson
eFilmCritic.com ("Dr. Isaksson")
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 (Rumsey Taylor)
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
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]
ToxicUniverse.com (Lee Chase IV)
The Horror Review [Horror Bob]
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Celluloid Dreams Simon Hill
Best-Horror-Movies.com Don Sumner
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr
Monsters At Play Lawrence P. Raffel
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
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
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze
SOMEONE’S
WATCHING ME! – made for TV
aka: High Rise
All Movie Guide [Donald Guarisco]
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.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
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
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.
John
Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film and Television
Moria
- The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
Final
Girl Stacie Ponder
Mr. Satanism's Video Picks for Perverts
ELVIS – made
for TV
User
Reviews from imdb Author: blanche-2
from
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.
On its broadcast debut on
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
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)
Slant Magazine (DVD) Eric Henderson
The A.V. Club: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
366 Weird Movies [Alfred Eaker]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
THE FOG B+ 92
“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
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
Those hostile
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.
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
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
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
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
Reel.com DVD review [Tor Thorsen]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
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
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)
ToxicUniverse.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
DVD Verdict Harold Gervais
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton)
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg]
Eat My Brains Zombie Club also reviewing THEY LIVE
The
Official John Carpenter, Rolling Stone: June 28, 1979 The
Fog, a Spook Ride on Film, by
Paul Scanlon
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
“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.
The
Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
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
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
This isn’t a brazenly colourful futuristic landscape but a grimy portrait of a
city not far from the down-and-dirty real
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
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
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Mutant Reviewers From Hell Justin
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Jonny Lieberman
Explore-science-fiction-movies.com Sandman
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]
Mainly Movies: Escape from New York
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
I Like Horror Movies [Carl Manes]
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Max Blinkhorn
Read Keith Dudhnath's DVD Review Eye for Film
Geek Juice Media [Alex Jowski]
"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
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
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
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.
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.
Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]
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…
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
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
Edinburgh U Film Society (Gavin Inglis) review
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]
Horror
Express review Finn
John Carpenter Lives in a BAM Retrospective - Page 1 - Movies ... Scott Foundas from The Village Voice, also seen here: The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive")
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth]
Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley) review
Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
DVDTalk DVD Review (John Carpenter: Master of Fear Collection) [Tyler Foster]
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]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
CHRISTINE B+ 91
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.
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.
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
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
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 (Jeremiah Kipp)
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
ToxicUniverse.com (Mike Bracken)
eFilmCritic Scott Weinberg
Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
DVD Verdict Nicholas Sylvain
Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp
Mondo Digital also reviewing THEY LIVE
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
STARMAN
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
Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair)
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
BIG TROUBLE
IN LITTLE CHINA B 86
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
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).
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
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
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
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]
Edward Copeland on Film (VenetianBlond)
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]
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
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
Cinefantastique Blu-ray Review [Drew Fitzpatrick]
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]
What a Feeling! [Robert Horton]
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas] August 27, 2008
Filmcritic.com Christopher Null
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
DVD Maniacs Review Michael Elliot
The Film Asylum Ryan McDonald
Sci Film Review Bear
Film Threat's "Footage Fetishes" [Pete Vonder Haar]
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
Mutant Reviewers From Hell Kyle and Justin
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
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
Big Trouble in Little China Time Out London
BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Haflidason
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
The New York Times (Walter Goodman) also seen here: Big Trouble in Little China - Movies - New York Times
DVDBeaver Blu-ray review [Gary Tooze]
THE PRINCE OF
DARKNESS
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.
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
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.
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
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
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
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)
Final Girl Stacie Ponder
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]
DVD Verdict Kevin Lee
Scifilm Review Dr. Mality
VideoVista Christopher Geary
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg)
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
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
Washington Post [Richard Harrington]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
THEY LIVE B+ 91
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
Defying arrest, television broadcasts are
interrupted by hackers who attempt to warn the world about their passivity,
where
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."
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
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.”
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]
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
Electric Sheep Magazine Lisa Williams
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
Scifilm Review D. Mality
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Erich Shulte
The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
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
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Mark R. Leeper review [+2 out of -4..+4]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Mutant Reviewers from Hell review
DVDActive (Chris Gould) dvd review [4/10]
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
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
Washington Post [Richard Harrington]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
MEMOIRS OF AN
INVISIBLE MAN
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.
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 Verdict: Memoirs Of An Invisible Man Patrick Naugle
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Julie Lew)
BODY BAGS –
made for TV
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.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
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.
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.
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Final Girl Stacie Ponder
The Video Graveyard (Chris Hartley)
IN THE MOUTH
OF MADNESS
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.
"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.
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.
ToxicUniverse.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
Classic-Horror Chris Justice
Best-Horror-Movies.com Lee Roberts
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth
Scifilm Review Dr. Mality
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
eFilmCritic.com (Justin Helmer)
DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle
Washington Post [Richard Harrington]
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
VILLAGE OF
THE DAMNED
USA (99 mi)
1995 ‘Scope
Tucson Weekly [Zachary Woodruff]
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.
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?
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala)
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
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson)
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
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
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov)
Washington Post [Richard Harrington]
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
ESCAPE FROM
L.A. B 87
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).
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
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
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.
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
Nitrate Online Carrie Gorringe
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala)
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth
Movie Reviews UK Patrick McCray
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
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Anita Gates)
VAMPIRES
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
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.)
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.
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
BFI | Sight & Sound | Vampires (1997) Kim Newman from Sight and Sound, December 1999
Albuquerque Alibi [Devin D. O'Leary]
Nitrate Online Sean Axmaker
** The Shrubbery Review -- John Carpenter's Vampires ** Justin Felix
Classic-Horror Dana Gravesen
Cold Fusion Video Reviews (Nathan Shumate)
ToxicUniverse.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
DVD Talk (David Blair) obviously understanding Carpenter better than CNN’s unintentionally amusing piece
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
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
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
HorrorWatch Jareprime
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]
DVD Verdict Rob Lineberger
DVD Verdict - John Carpenter's Vampires: Superbit Edition Patrick Naugle
Film Journal International (Maitland McDonagh)
Soundtrack.net soundtrack review
SoundtrackNet article, "Having a Bite with John Carpenter": October 14, 1998 Interview by Dan Goldwasser
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Peter M. Nichols)
DVDBeaver.com [Vincent Bouche]
GHOSTS OF
MARS C+ 77
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
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.
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) :
"hilariously hardboiled" (6/10)
Carpenter fans should make the most
of Ghosts of Mars which stiffed so badly at the
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.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
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
The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]
Movie Magazine International [Moira Sullivan]
Classic-Horror.com Kairo
Flipside Movie Emporium Rob Vaux
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.)
Fangoria Michael Gingold
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
The Mag review (*) of "Ghosts of Mars" [Dan Lybarger]
ToxicUniverse.com (David Abrams)
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Scott Von Doviak
The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson
Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala)
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
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell)
Carruth,
Shane
PRIMER B 86
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
Carruth is 31 years old and lives in
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.
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
Shane Carruth's Beguilingly Enigmatic 'Upstream Color' - Indiewire Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist
White City Cinema [Michael Smith]
The House Next Door [Zeba Blay]
Upstream Color Review: There Are Indeed Companions More - Pajiba Seth Freilich
Moviefreak.com [Sara Michelle Fetters]
Upstream Color FAQ: Analysis and the meaning of Shane Carruth's ... Forrest Wickman from Slate, April 9, 2013
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
Review: Shane Carruth's 'Upstream Color' is a beautiful ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
IONCINEMA.com [Jordan M. Smith]
Day Five at Sundance is all about the perplexing ... - The AV Club Sam Adams
Paste Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]
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
Sound On Sight David Tran
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
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 (
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.
Shock Cinema [Steven Puchalski]
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 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
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
Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in
contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling
from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
DISTURBIA B 85
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]
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
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
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
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
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
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
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
After playing for a time in a
In 1956 Cassavetes began teaching
method acting at a drama workshop in
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
Impressed by the success of Shadows,
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 (
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
-Ray Carney (The Films of John
Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies)
Film
Reference Bill Wine
| 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
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
John Cassavetes - Explore - The Criterion Collection Criterion brief biography
John Cassavetes News regular updates
John Cassavetes press archive
kamera.co.uk - feature item - John Cassavetes by Jason Wood (Undated)
Love Films: A Cassavetes Retrospective - JonathanRosenbaum.com September 20, 1991
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
MAGAZINE | INDIES |
Cassvetes | VOL 27-5: JAN 2003 John Cassavetes: an Icon of
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
Film International
Article (2006) Cavell, Altman, Cassavetes, by Charles Warren
Message
in a bottle | Features | Guardian Unlimited Film John Sutherland from the Guardian,
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 Times [Anthony Nield] Region 2
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
Blu-Ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] BFI release
John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Ian Jane] BFI Blu-Ray
Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] BFI Blu-Ray
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection
Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
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
John Cassavetes: Lifeworks - Tom
Charity a book review by David Fear
of Tom Charity’s John Cassavetes:
Lifeworks (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 American ... Phillip Lopate’s book review from The New York Times,
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 ...
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)
David Sterritt's Top 10 Directors
John Cassavetes (1929 - 1989) - Find A Grave Memorial
John Cassavetes from Wikipedia
SHADOWS A 97
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).
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
42nd 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
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…
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
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
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
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
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
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.
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
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):
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
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
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 (1959) - The Criterion Collection
Shadows Ray Carney’s discussion of SHADOWS from his 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
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
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 <i>SHADOWS</i> 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
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,
How
John Cassavetes' Shadows changed American movies forever. Elbert Ventura from Slate,
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 Times [Anthony Nield] Region 2
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
Blu-Ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] BFI release
John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Ian Jane] BFI Blu-Ray
Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] BFI Blu-Ray
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection
Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
'The John Cassavetes Collection: Shadows & Faces' Angelos Koutsourakis also reviews FACES from the BFI Blu-Ray release from Pop Matters
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Shadows (1959) - Amateur Movie Reviews Nuggie Nuggerton
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
One Movie a Day David Wester
Time Out Geoff Andrew
Chasing Cassavetes'
Shadows | Film | The Guardian Ray
Carney from The Guardian,
Shadows:
No 19 best arthouse film of all time
Steve Rose from The Guardian,
Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages [Matthew Wilder]
New
York Times [Bosley Crowther]
JOHNNY
STACCATO – TV series
"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
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.
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
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
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
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
2. 1- 2 12906
3. 1- 3 12912
4. 1- 4 12904
5. 1- 5 12914
6. 1- 6 12916
7. 1- 7 12918
8. 1- 8 12902
9. 1- 9 12915
10. 1-10 12913
11. 1-11 12911
12. 1-12 12926
13. 1-13 12923
14. 1-14 12922
15. 1-15 12921
16. 1-16 12907
17. 1-17 12930
18. 1-18 12927
19. 1-19 12931
20. 1-20 12929
21. 1-21 12925
22. 1-22 12920
23. 1-23 12903
24. 1-24 12939
25. 1-25 12935
26. 1-26 12919
27. 1-27 12905
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
When
TOO LATE BLUES was over I thought I would be over too. And then
—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
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
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
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.
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
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,
Cassavetes' Works: A chronology and list of early events in ... Ray Carney
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
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
Time Out Geoff Andrew
New York Times (registration req'd)
THE LLOYD
BRIDGES SHOW – TV series 1962 – 63
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 "
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.
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 ("
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor had all been considered
for the part of Jean Hansen before
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."
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
(
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 Times [Anthony Nield] Region 2
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
Blu-Ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] BFI release
John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Ian Jane] BFI Blu-Ray
Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] BFI Blu-Ray
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection
Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
FACES - Ruthless Reviews Plexico Gingrich
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Mondo Digital [Facebook] also reviewing SHADOWS
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Faces British Film Institute brief capsule
Time Out
Capsule Review Geoff Andrews
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)
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
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.
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
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 (John Cassavetes, 1970) | Dennis Grunes
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 ...
Jason
Bailey
Seminal Cinema Outfit: Watch Cassavetes' 'Husbands' – Cassavetes ..
Husbands by John Cassavetes | Ephemeral Digest
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
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
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
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,
Husbands -
Cassavetes Falk Gazzara - DVDBeaver.com
Gary
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
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
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
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. “
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
not coming to a theater near you Cullen Gallagher
When we first meet Minnie Moore, she is at a repertory screening
of
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.
Cambridge Book: Minnie and Moskowitz Ray Carney
Cassavetes on Cassavetes - Page 277 - Google Books Result (pdf format)
Alternative
Film Guide (Dan Schneider)
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley] also seen here: FilmFanatic.org
Ain't
It Cool Movie Reviews Harry Knowles,
with
AudioVideoRevolution.com DVD review Bill Warren
DVD Verdict [Nicholas Sylvain]
Film Freak Central Bill Chambers
The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
CinemaFunk Aaron Weiss
• View
topic - Husbands (Cassavetes, 1970) - CriterionForum.org film discussion group,
The Japan Times
[Giovanni Fazio]
New
York Times [Vincent Canby] also seen
here: The New York Times
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
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
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."
Needcoffee.com - DVD Review, Season 2 Cosette
An
Evening Illuminated [Iain Stott]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
A Woman Under the Influence (1974) - The Criterion Collection
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
Artforum What’s
Your Take on Cassavetes? by Darrell Hartman from Artforum,
World Socialist Web Site [Richard Phillips and Ismet Redzovic] July 23, 2010
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
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 Times [Anthony Nield] Region 2
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
Blu-Ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] BFI release
John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Ian Jane] BFI Blu-Ray
Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] BFI Blu-Ray
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection
Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]
CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule
review)
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
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,
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1974
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1998
New York Times (registration req'd) Nora Sayre
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
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 2nd
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
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
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.
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.)
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.
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] - review of 1976
(longer) version
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
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,
New Yorker The End of Allegory, Richard Brody from The New Yorker, November 17, 2008 New Yorker
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
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,
Killing of a Chinese Bookie, The (1976) 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 Times [Anthony Nield] Region 2
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
Blu-Ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] BFI release
John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Ian Jane] BFI Blu-Ray
Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] BFI Blu-Ray
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection
Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Peter
Bogdanovich Talks About Ben Gazzara: "I don't ... - Indiewire Dana Harris on the death of Ben Gazzara from
indieWIRE,
The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie Paul
Brenner from All Movie Guide
New
York Times Vincent Canby
DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [ Gary W.
Tooze]
[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
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!”
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 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)
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
Both
Sides of John Cassavetes - JonathanRosenbaum.com
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 Times [Anthony Nield] Region 2
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
Blu-Ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] BFI release
John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Ian Jane] BFI Blu-Ray
Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] BFI Blu-Ray
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection
Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977) | So Noted Grant Phipps
The King Bulletin [Danny King]
epinions Criterion DVD [Stephen O.Murray]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Bina007 Movie Reviews sadly lacking in insight or appreciation
Opening
Night on Wikipedia
BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael
rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert]
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis)
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Rosado)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
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
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 (
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
LOVE
STREAMS Cinematheque
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
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.
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
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
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
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
The Parallax Review [D. B. Bates]
Jason Bailey Fourth Row Center
Strictly Film School Acquarello
The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
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
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
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
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
USA France (103 mi) 1996
The Onion A.V. Club [Stephen Thompson]
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
Movie Magazine International [Mary Weems]
Unhook the Stars - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Unhook the Stars - Philadelphia City Paper Cindy Fuchs
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
A Widow Alone, Loving And Full of Longing - New York Times Stephen Holden
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.
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
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.
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
The Man Who Viewed Too Much [Mike D'Angelo]
“She's So Lovely” - Salon.com Gary Kamiya from Salon
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
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
Movie Magazine International [Andrea Chase]
She's So Lovely | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washingtonpost.com: Cassavetes' Last Bleak Fling: Love on the Rocks Rita Kempley
WashingtonPost.com: 'She's So Lovely': Wild Thing Desson Howe
Austin Chronicle [Russell Smith]
San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
New York Times Janet Maslin
USA (116 mi) 2002
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
"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.
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.
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
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
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
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
eFilmCritic Reviews Eric D. Snider
JOHN Q - DVD review | Movie Metropolis Eddie Feng
DVD Verdict Michael Rankin
Kevin Clemons - digitallyOBSESSED!
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]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
New York Times Elvis Mitchell
Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]
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
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Peterson)
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner)
Film Freak Central Bill Chambers
Peter Sobczynski gives it Zero stars
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
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
The Village Voice [Rob Nelson]
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.
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
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.
( 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.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
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.
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.
filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
New York Sun [S. James Snyder]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
stylusmagazine.com (Jeffrey Bloomer)
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]
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]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Los Angeles Times [Kevin Crust]
Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]
“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.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
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
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 Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
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.
The Village Voice [Michelle Orange]
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
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
Until, that is, she has an epiphany and takes off to
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
At a party, Nora Wilder
(Parkey Posey) meets a cute French guy (Melvil Poupaud) and follows him to
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
OK. She's in
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
“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
Broken English Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)
New York Times (registration req'd) Matt Zoller Seitz
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
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.
NPR Ian Buckwalter
Francine | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
pastemagazine.com [Will McCord]
JEsther Entertainment [Don Simpson] also seen here: Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]
Way Too Indie [Dustin Jansick]
thelmagazine.com [Benjamin Mercer]
Screen International [David D'Arcy]
Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]
FRANCINE Facets Multi Media
Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]
TimeOut NY Keith Uhlich
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
newyorktimes.com [Stephen Holden] also seen here: New York Times
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
User comments from imdb Author: Iliyana from
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,
Reeling Reviews [Robin Clifford, Laura Clifford]
It is still a man’s world in
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
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
("
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
aka: Betrayed
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...
aka: The Marked Man
User comments from imdb Author goblinhairedguy from Montreal
This entry is the best in this above-average series from
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review
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
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]
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
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
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'
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
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?'
Turner Classic Movies [Sean Axmaker]
"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]
The New York Times (Howard Thompson)
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 42nd
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
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 - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide ...
DVD review: Who Killed Teddy Bear? | Film | The Guardian Phelim O’Neill
San Francisco Chronicle Peter Stack
Who Killed Teddy
Bear - Wikipedia
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
Tucson
Weekly (Zachary Woodruff) 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-]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
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
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
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
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
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]
eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
EatSleepLiveFilm
[Jordan McGrath]
Eatsleeplivefilm.com
[Ian Loring]
Arrow in the Head John Fallon
Little
White Lies Magazine [Martyn Conterio]
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Blueprint:
Review [David Brook]
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'
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.
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.
France (85 mi) 2009
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.
France (105 mi) 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?
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
Dead of Night
Sight and Sound
THE NIGHT PORTER (Il portiere
di notte)
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.
Edinburgh
U Film Society (Stephen Townsend) review
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
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]
The Night Porter The Auteurs
Francois
Ozon + Charlotte Rampling + Marc Jacobs
El Bosquejo,
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]
The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review
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.
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
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.
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
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]
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]
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
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]
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
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
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
‘Footnote,’ a Satire and Family Drama by Joseph Cedar A.O. Scott from The New York Times, March 9, 2012
aka: The Town
A small, intimate black and white film about a remote
village in
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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)
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman)
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Tallinn Film Festival report
Climates Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Crust)
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
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
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
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
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
Opening with an extremely slow investigation into the night of
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
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
October 2011 Ben Sachs from Cine-File Blog, October 12, 2011
CANNES
REVIEW | “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” is a Mesmerizing Police Procedural Eric Kohn at
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
User
reviews from imdb Author: sarajevo-2 from
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
Film Festival: 'Bir zamanlar Anadolu'da' and 'Le Gamin au vélo' Elena Razlogova at
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
'Once
Upon a Time in Anatolia': Cannes 2011 Review Deborah Young at
2011
Justin Chang at
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
The
Lumière Reader [Brannavan Gnanalingam]
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep went
into
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
This difference has also led to two versions of
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
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
The
Lumière Reader [Jacob Powell]
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.”
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
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
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
The
French New Wave Revisited / Nouvelle Vogue moviemakers were ... Phillip Williams from Moviemaker magazine,
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
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
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
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)
aka: Handsome Serge
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
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
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
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.
Dan Harper, 'Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge', Senses of Cinema, March 2001
Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford
Le Beau Serge (1958) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review
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
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
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
aka: Web of Passion
France Italy (110 mi) 1959
Chicago Reader (capsule) Jonathan Rosenbaum
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.
PopMatters (David Sanjek) dvd review
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
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection
Baltimore City Paper (Heather Joslyn) review
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
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?
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)
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review
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
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
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
LANDRU
aka:
Bluebeard
France Italy (115 mi) 1963
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.
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review
User reviews from imdb Author: guy-bellinger (guy.bellinger@wanadoo.fr) from Montigny-lès-Metz, France
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
OPHÉLIA
France (105 mi) 1963
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.
The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review
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
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...
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
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
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
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
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The Stranger (Charles Mudede) review
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule 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 New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
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
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,
DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review
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
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
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
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
The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review
Les Biches (Claude Chabrol, 1968) Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, October 23, 2008
Eye for Film ("Hotcow") review [3/5]
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
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
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]
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]
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
VideoVista review Andrew Hook
Eye for Film ("Skyline") review [3.5/5]
The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
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]
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
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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
The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection
Cleveland
Press (Tony Mastroianni) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review
DVDBeaver.com - Full Review [Gregory Meshman]
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...
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
The Vagrant Café - Christian Cinema [Seth Studer]
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
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
The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review
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]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gregory Meshman]
aka: The Breakup
France Italy Belgium (124 mi) 1970
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
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.
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
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]
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
The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver.com - Full Review [Gregory Meshman]
France Italy (106 mi) 1971
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
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.
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
ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]
VideoVista review Andrew Hook
Eye for Film (Caro Ness) review [4/5]
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
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review July 30, 1999. also here: Movie Review - Juste avant la nuit - With Chabrol, the High Tide ...
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
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
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C+]
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 (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gregory Meshman]
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.
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
DVDBeaver.com [Per-olaf Strandberg]
WEDDING
IN BLOOD (Les Noces Rouges)
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.
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
ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Wedding in Blood John White from 10kbullets
Eye for Film ("Themroc") review [2.5/5]
VideoVista review Andrew Hook
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder) review
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
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
ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]
Chabrol Day Three: Nada Ray Young from Flickhead, June 23, 2009
Eye for Film (David Stanners) review [2.5/5]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
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
Turner
Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol
Collection
The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review
DVDBeaver.com - Full Review [Gregory Meshman]
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.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
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
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
aka: Innocents with Dirty Hands (Les Innocents aux Mains Sales)
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
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.
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
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
The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review
VideoVista review Paul Higson
Les Innocents aux mains sales (1975) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B+]
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
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver.com - Full Review [Gregory Meshman]
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.
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C-]
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.
aka: Alice or the Last Escapade
France (93 mi) 1977
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
Stefan Gullatz, 'Exquisite Ex-timacy: Jacques Lacan vis-à-vis Contemporary Horror', Offscreen Journal, March 31, 2001
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
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
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.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
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.
Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]
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
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Nathaniel Thompson
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
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
DVDBeaver [Per-Olaf Strandberg]
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 New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
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
Canada France USA (135 mi) 1984
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.
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C-]
User reviews from imdb Author: jonathan-577 from Canada
User reviews from imdb Author: Kupotek from United States
France (110 mi) 1985
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.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
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
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review
The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review
Poulet au vinaigre (1985) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
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
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
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]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review
Inspecteur Lavardin (1986) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Claude Chabrol and Inspector Lavardin Gareth’s Movie Diary, June 24, 2009
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B+]
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
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
'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
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) 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
France Italy (102 mi) 1987
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.
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
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...
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
10kbullets John White
The Tech (MIT) (Manavendra K. Thakur) review
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
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
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
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov)
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]
THE
STORY OF WOMEN (Une Affaire de Femmes)
True crime: Marie-Louise Giraud, here renamed
Latour (Huppert), was guillotined in
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.
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
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
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
10kbullets John White
DVD Verdict (Neal Solon) dvd review
Une affaire de femmes (1988) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) 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
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
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
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
Chabrol Films a Henry Miller Tale Clyde Haberman from The New York Times, August 9, 1989
Henry Miller - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Miller's interview with The Paris Review September 1961
aka: Club Extinction
Germany France Italy (112 mi) 1990
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]
France (143 mi) 1991
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).
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
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 Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
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]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
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
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
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.
Raging
Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review
[3.5/4]
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
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
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
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
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
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
France (110 mi) 1993
Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule
review)
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.
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.
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
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
aka: Hell
France (100 mi) 1994
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.
Austin Chronicle [Christopher Null]
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
L'Enfer (1994) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [2/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review
L’enfer Jeremy Nyhuis from Cinematorics, June 22, 2009
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5] (different review from above)
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
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
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
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
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 (
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.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review [4/4] February 14, 1997
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
not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4] also seen here: ReelViews [James
Berardinelli]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
La Cérémonie (1995) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
DVD Verdict Dan Mancini
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Chabrol
Day Two: Class status and delusional think... Ray Young from Flickhead, June 22, 2009
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
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
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
Austin Chronicle (Russell Smith) review [3.5/5]
Philadelphia
City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
Cérémonie, La Kevin Thomas from The South Florida Sun-Sentinal
San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]
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
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
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Chabrol Day Six: Rien ne va plus Ray Young from Flickhead, June 26, 2009
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) 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
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
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-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?
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
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".
The Village
Voice [Michael Atkinson]
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]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review
10kbullets John White
Cine Outsider [Timothy E. RAW]
Au coeur du mensonge (1999) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5] also seen here: EyeForFilm.co.uk
Great Movie Reviews [Pseudonymous author Ankyuk]
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
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) dvd review [2/4]
New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005
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
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.
Village
Voice (J. Hoberman) review
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
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10] longer review seen here
Merci pour le chocolat (2000) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Film Monthly (Parama Chaudhury) review
Political Film Society review Michael Haas
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3.5/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
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]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3/4]
Reel Movie Critic (Shelley Cameron) review [3.5/4]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
VideoVista review Gary Couzens
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Film Intuition Jen Johans
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
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
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
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
aka: La Fleur du Mal
“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.
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....
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.
Village Voice (Jessica Winter) review
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
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
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]
The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [3/5]
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) 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
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
BBCi - Films Jamie Russell
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]
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
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
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
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
France Germany Italy (111 mi) 2004
The Village
Voice [Michael Atkinson]
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
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5]
www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij)
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]
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)
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
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]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Siffblog Review [Kathy Fennessy]
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
BBCi - Films Tom Dawson
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
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
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
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 7th), 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".
cinemattraction (Sheila Cornelius) review
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.
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.
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
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
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
MSN Entertainment [Sean Axmaker]
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
Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review January 5, 2007, also here: When a Woman Rattles a Man's World of Fraud
DVDBeaver [Per-Olaf Strandberg]
Eva Joly - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elf
king who fell from power BBC News, March 13, 2003
Germany France (115 mi) 2007
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.
Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
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]
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Beverly Berning
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
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
National Public Radio (Mark Jenkins) review
Killer Movie Reviews (Andrea Chase) review [2/5]
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3.5/5]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) also here: european-films.net
Screen International Jonathan Romney
The New York Sun (Darrell Hartman) review
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
VideoVista review JC Hartley
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]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Screenjabber review Robert Hull
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
Tiscali UK Paul Hurley
Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair) capsule review
Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum
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]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
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.
The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
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
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
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
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
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott, October 28, 2010
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.
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
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.
Georgia Straight [Adrian Mack]
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.
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
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Movie Mezzanine [Kristen Sales]
SpiritualPopCulture.com [John A. Zukowski]
'Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom' Review: The ... - Pajiba TK
1NFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]
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
Film Intuition: Blu-ray [Jen Johans]
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]
SPL!NG [Stephen 'Spling' Aspeling] (South African)
The South African Movie Database [Andrew Germishuys]
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
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 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
Youssef Chahine Youssef Chahine: forget the stereotypes,
by Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix,
December 2 – 9, 1999
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
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
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 (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
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
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
Once acclaimed in a nationwide critic’s poll as
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
Chicago Reader (Lisa Alspector)
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
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
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson)
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
Boldly blending
personal and political histories, intercutting its fast-moving fictional scenes
with documentary footage, this sort of sequel to
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
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson)
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
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.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson)
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.
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]
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".
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
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
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.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
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
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.
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
We know there’s
trouble in
To judge by his
reputation, 76-year-old Chahine is
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
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
BBCi - Films Jamie Russell
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz)
The New York Times (A.O. Scott)
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
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
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.
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."
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
The class imaginary in Fruit Chan's films Wimal Dissanayake from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
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
Senses of Cinema (Acquarello) review Mass-Produced Alienation:
Disposable Lives in Made in Hong Kong, January 2003
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[2/5]
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!
LoveHKFilm.com
(Ross Chen) review
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
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
H.K. DVD
Heaven (Chris Gilbert) dvd 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'.
Chinese Cinema
Page (Shelly Kraicer) review
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
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
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
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.
Chinese Cinema Page (Shelly Kraicer) review
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).
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Reel Life Review [Paul Benmussa]
Variety (David Stratton) review
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
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
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)
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.)
LoveHKFilm.com
(Ross Chen) review
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
Classic
Horror review
Kairo
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
LoveHKFilm.com (Ross Chen) review
DVD Outsider Slarek
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
DVD
Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [4/5]
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
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Korean Grindhouse Drew P.
Motion
Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review
[image] cartoon
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[3/4]
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
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The
New York Times (Dana Stevens) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DUMPLINGS (Gaau ji)
Hong Kong (91 mi) 2004
Time
Out London (Ben Walters) review
After moving to Hong Kong from
mainland China, former abortion doctor Mei (Bai Ling)
has established a highly profitable black-market career selling dumplings from
her small apartment in an ordinary housing block. Not just any dumplings, mind
you: made with special stuff that Mei picks up on regular trips back over the
border, these can halt or even reverse the ageing process – an irresistible
proposition to former TV soap star Mrs Li (Miriam Yeung),
already afraid of losing her looks and her husband (Tony Leung Ka Fai [the
‘other’ Tony Leung]). There’s just the small problem of what's actually in
them…
‘Dumplings’ originated in the shocker compendium ‘Three… Extremes’, alongside
work by Takashi Miike and Park Chan-Wook. Expanded to feature length, it
remains a claustrophobic, queasy piece of work, relying less on supernatural
horror, gross-out effects or even narrative suspense than on slowly curdling
human relationships and heightened social realism. The womb-churning central
premise is heavily signposted from the start but – a few deadpan cookery scenes
notwithstanding – it’s used for satire rather than visceral exploitation: Mei’s
cool-headed, border-hopping enterprise is a case study in market pragmatism,
servicing the requirements of the HK vanity industry with the waste products of
Chinese birth-control policy. Regular Wong Kar-Wai collaborator Chris Doyle’s
photography offers a fine balance between shabby naturalism and improbable
radiance while Bai
Ling’s Mei is sexy, canny, flour-dusted and wise, but not quite real; Miriam Yeung’s
Mrs Li is more plausible, vanity and compulsion gradually overtaking her
initial revulsion. Like most elixir-of-youth fables, ‘Dumplings’ never seems
actually credible and the plot baggily dissipates towards the end, but it
leaves a lingering and distinctive aftertaste.
Talking
Pictures (UK) review Shaun McDonald
VideoVista
review Jonathan
McCalmont
Dumplings first appeared in 2004
as one third of a short film collection called Three... Extremes.
Despite also boasting short films by Takashi Miike (Audition)
and Park Chan Wook (Oldboy), this collection was only recently made
available on DVD in the UK and, intriguingly, it's the lesser known of the
three directors (Fruit Chan) whose film now gets released as an extended
feature-length director's cut. Dumplings
(aka: Gaau ji) is less a traditional horror movie than it is a
slow-burning drama about the hideous lengths to which people will go to feel
young, and it's arguably one of the most exciting Asian films to be released
this year.
Mrs Li was once a famous TV actress. However, over the years age has taken its
toll and the acting jobs dried up as she was supplanted by a younger generation
of actresses. When this younger generation also threatened to take her husband
from her, Mrs Li is forced to seek out the services of Aunt Mei. Mei was once a
renowned surgeon but she now makes her living as a midwife and a cook. Indeed,
despite being in her sixties Mei looks to be barely out of her thirties thanks
to the miraculous properties of her dumplings. Mrs Li's new diet wins back her
husband's affections but also sets in motion a chain of events that will lead
to Mei cutting her off, forcing her to look elsewhere for supplies in her
constant quest to appear young.
The film itself is built around the tension between beautiful appearances and
internal squalor and this tension is beautifully expressed through the constant
juxtaposition of beauty with ugliness as magnificent food is produced in filthy
kitchens and people eat with impeccable etiquette to an almost deafening
symphony of grunts, slurps and crunches. Even the serene sensuality of the
estranged couple's reunion is undercut by the body horror of a back-street
abortion as Chan relentlessly hammers home the message that beauty and squalor
go together and that for all the beauty you posses, you can never escape the
corruption. The visual beauty of this film is perhaps hardly surprising given
that its director of photography was Christopher Doyle, the man behind the
visual style of controversial Jet-Li fascist apologia Hero.
However, for all the beauty and symbolic power of this film, what ultimately
drives it forward are the performances. Ling Bai is stunning as the cook who
manages to be sensuous and warm but at the same time utterly chilling. She is
ably supported by Tony Leung Ka Fai and Miriam Yeung Chin Wah, who are
initially made up to look a lot older than they actually are. These three play
off each other wonderfully as they create an enigmatic love triangle that draws
the film forwards despite never coming to dominate proceedings. Indeed, Chan
perfectly balances the film by grounding it in human relationships but without
ever allowing those relationships to overshadow the central theme of the film.
Chilling and darkly satirical, Dumplings steers clear of the usual J-
and K-horror genre conventions to produce one of the more unusual but
fascinating films to have emerged in recent years. Warmly recommended.
Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)
Twitch Nick
stylusmagazine.com (Sandro Matosevic) review
KFC Cinema Daniel Lee Fullmer
Illuminated Lantern Peter Nepstad
eFilmCritic Reviews Elaine Perrone
SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
Eye for
Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review
[4.5/5]
The Lumière Reader A.Y.
Razor Reel Pat
BBCi - Films Matthew Leyland
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Observer (Mark Kermode) review
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]
Jackie
Chan Olympic Commercial (1:28) on YouTube
Top 10 Jackie Chan Stunts (5:55)
Top 10
Jackie Chan Fight Scenes (6:18)
Jackie
Chan The Best Stuntman Tribute (8:10)
"Jackie Chan: My Stunts"
Documentary Part 1 of 10 (10:00)
"Jackie Chan: My Stunts"
Documentary Part 2 of 10 (10:00)
"Jackie Chan: My Stunts"
Documentary Part 3 of 10 (10:00)
"Jackie Chan: My Stunts"
Documentary Part 4 of 10 (10:00)