Directors:

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Jules Dassin, Terence Davies, Rolf de Heer, Manoel de Oliveira, Brian De Palma, Vittorio de Sica, André de Toth, Guillermo del Toro, Jonathan Demme, Jacques Demy, Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin,

William Dieterle, Walt Disney, Xavier Dolan, Stanley Donen, Alexander Dovzhenko, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Bruno Dumont

Dabernig, Josef – filmmaker

By Andréa Picard from Cinema Scope

“Someone ought to do a Dabernig Derby soon,” a North American friend and colleague recently exclaimed. And right he is. Aside from a sprinkling of screenings at obscure American underground film festivals and his inclusion in a group show at the corridor-shaped, formidable Storefront for Art and Architecture (www.storefrontnews.org) co-designed by Vito Acconci and Steven Holl in NYC, Josef Dabernig’s renown has not crossed the Atlantic. His name, unfamiliar even among cinephiles and art cognoscenti in North America, is a mainstay of the European avant-garde. Since the early ‘90s, Dabernig has been granted numerous film retrospectives and festival screenings, solo and group shows, including appearances at the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2003). He has guest curated both film and art, and is known for his work in installation, architecture, photography, and for his cultural theory, which reads as modernist-inflected gnosticsm. I’ve also heard from an Austrian curator who once commissioned an architectural installation from Dabernig that the Viennese artist is quite eccentric and almost pathologically meticulous. Reading some of his statements and seeing the precision with which his films are constructed, this comes as no surprise. His severe, stiff tenor, on the other hand, seems strangely out of line with the comedic charge running through his films—a register of absurdity which often aligns him with a certain Eastern European tradition. His work is more camp than kitsch, however, and the self-conscious performances that characterize his films are careful gesticulations of monotony, a physical disenchantment responding to the unfulfilled promise of modernism’s supposed utopia.

Dabernig’s short films have concurrent themes and motifs, each recognizably, unmistakably his. A cross between Béla Tarr, Jacques Tati, Samuel Beckett, and Aki Kaurismäki, these works ranging in length between seven and 24 minutes rely on minimalism to fashion portraits of modernist decay and the banal scenarios that occur amidst their structures. As much about architecture and history in place as they are about the ridiculous inherent in ritualistic exchange (between people, landscape, technology), Dabernig’s films exhort contradictions with every twist of road. A deadpan treatment of these existing and fabricated scenarios further distorts a definitive worldview, which, while puzzling, is alluringly bizarre and foreboding. The farcical elements, often physical, are laced with a dark, existential confusion—not only one which questions existence but every social interaction and prescribed decorum. A Monsieur Hulot-type character, played by Dabernig himself, often figures in the work, embarking on a set task which seemingly exists in a fully formed universe, but the audience is welcomed in perhaps mid-way through the endeavour (it is not clear). Much remains blurred in the work, but the repetition of imagery—of cars, trains, desolate and decaying landscapes, abandoned buildings and semi-futuristic, socialist architecture—suggests an ongoing narrative whose structural expectations are all but abbreviated in any given film. Difficult to situate, Dabernig’s films reside near the boundaries of both narrative and avant-garde filmmaking, resting unsure of either’s hypothetical position in today’s art world.

Wisla (1996) begins with a large, blocky, concrete structure jutting into the composition, a modern ruin standing proud despite its neglect. The camera then pans insistently to the left, surveying tops of structures barely penetrating the frame composed of a big, grey sky. Shot in soft black and white, the film looks and feels old, itself an implied remnant from another time. Two men in suits and ties walk through the concrete catacombs of a dilapidated, brutalist football stadium, to the coach’s bench, “Wisla” clearly labeled on the side of the glass structure where they settle and sit. This is the home of the famous Polish football team; off-screen sounds (Italian!) erupt as the game gets underway. Boisterous cheering and loudspeaker refereeing conjure the visuals of the match as the camera remains focused on the two men who are somewhat awkwardly playing out the clichés of a soccer coach and training assistant. Registering nervousness and frustration, their gestures are exaggerated and unrealistic. And yet, they are amusing, never maddening, nor nearly as unbelievable as the real thing. Dabernig’s character gets up, calmly walks to the edge of the playing field and signals to his make-believe players, and the camera responds to his order by quickly panning up to reveal row upon row of empty seats. This game (the imaginary football match and the film’s precise sound-image play) continues for a few more minutes until the two men rise, walk up through the bleachers and greet dignitaries watching the game. A series of handshakes takes place, and the two Wisla members walk off-screen, the camera pulling out to expose the barren stadium. Wisla ends as the Italian football commentary continues through the credits, which appear at the end of all of Dabernig’s films in a typewriter-like, anachronistic font. An introduction into Dabernig’s self professed “no-man’s land,” Wisla depicts the un-depicted, where familiarity is elided in exchange for the geometry of human-made interventions into the natural order.

Two years later, Dabernig co-directed Timau with German photographer Markus Scherer, a 20-minute, black-and-white, tripartite vignette which has been called a “workers’ melodrama.” The first shot reveals two men driving in a car through a beautiful, but treacherous, mountainous landscape, with lyrical lightplay being performed upon their car’s windshield. The sleepy passenger shifts to reveal a third person in the backseat—the entire film, like all of Dabernig’s, relies on a revelation-concealment structure. As they drive, we hear the distinctive but undetermined sounds of the car radio and see wondrous ruins like aquaducts and bridges from a distant era. Driving through tunnels, the passengers are alternatively obscured by darkness and obliterated from sunshine, this chiaroscuro peek-a-boo exchange acting as dramatic highpoint to the film’s uncertain storyline. Finally, they park next to a rock face that displays a mysterious rectangular delineation seemingly drawn with chalk, and fetch their gear from the trunk. As the tension for narrative builds, the second section of the film draws out the desire for story and refuses quick fulfillment. The three men, dressed in some kind of uniform, continue their journey on foot, lugging briefcases. The leader of the trio uses ski poles to help him climb the hilly, landscape. Timau adopts a silent film aura as they mount the brush ever upward, their steps unheard on the soundtrack, the quiet contradicting the arduousness of their hike. This oddly tranquil ascent seems to go on forever until eventually they reach a dark tunnel and the sound is restored. The light from the opening casts their plodding outlines in sharp contrast, and there is very little to see on screen except for shafts of light alternatively illuminating the top of their heads and then their feet. Laborious and claustrophobic, their trudging is enhanced through the sounds of heavy breathing. When they at last emerge into daylight again, the camera explores the jagged rock faces and catches a slithery snake as it cowers beneath a rock, this observational gaze belonging to none of the men.

The third section reveals what the three men have come to do, an uncanny denouement which is sealed through a formal pact (whose echoes will reappear later on at the end of Rosa Coeli, one of his best and most fascinating films). Deed done, wistful romantic music concludes this odd, elegant tale, the end of which I will not spoil. But it’s a typical Dabernig motif: the paradoxical coming together of old and new worlds. Unsurprisingly, his oeuvre has occasionally been read as a fabled Western excursion into the East; his camera and Hulot-esque character representing the European sophisticate (though awkward and misplaced) casting a peculiar look upon former Soviet states stuck in a time warp. While the aesthetic collision of rural and urban, and of traditional structures and modernist buildings recurs, the dividing line between old and new is not the dominant theme. Anything askew is.

Jogging (2000), for example, is wickedly strange. Again we begin in the car, this time in striking, saturated colour. Twentieth century orchestral music plays from the stereo as the car travels through a decrepit landscape marked only by unidentified communist architecture; the mood grows steadily eerie. The music, now haunting and gothic, grows louder as the camera voyeuristically glances through the sideview mirror, catching the reflection of buildings hovering in the background, compulsively observing the driver’s hands, pausing on the dashboard, and looking out the windshield from the backseat. The editing grows quicker as the collage of bizarre imagery (drooling and barking wild dogs, a herd of goats) increases with the music, culminating in an all-consuming state of disquiet. The ultimate destination is Renzo Piano’s UFO-inspired Stadio San Nicola, built for the 1990 World Cup. The car suddenly stops, and the Adidas-sporting driver (we never see his face) steps onto the pavement with his puffy black sneakers; the camera goes mad. Swirling out of control, the ethereal music still soaring, the camera finally rests upon the big blue sky as the film ends in a L’Eclisse extended finale shot, the doom of modernity hanging indeterminately in mid-air.

Two less successful works followed, Wars (2001) and automatic (2002), before Dabernig’s most ambitious film, 2003’s Rosa Coeli. (In between, Dabernig made a six-minute short, Parking, but I was unable to locate any information on it, let alone a screening copy.) Though sumptuously shot in pristine black and white, Wars is a bit goofy, with the service staff of a passenger train going through the motions with too much self-inflection, the props too perfectly positioned, and the end result stilted. The trademarks are all there: the unsigned landscape framed by a series of windows, the title of the film physically located in the space—this time over a baggage compartment and on the back of the seats in the empty restaurant compartment—the boredom and monotony, the rehearsal of motion and movement through time and space. It’s not tossed off by any means (how could it be with gleaming, precise cinematography that reveals the train compartment as a work of lacquered art?), but it is minor. The same can be said of automatic. Made with the music group G.R.A.M., the film is a drum-and-bass, pulsing, automotive musical taking place in a ramshackle parking garage. A road movie that never sees the road, this pared down curio is oddly reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), but the revved up homoeroticsm is here replaced by solitary and silly art-making. But the crafty interplay between diegetic and non-diegetic sound is remarkable, and reminds us of Dabernig’s clever and intricate use of sound overall. It’s not incidental that the car audio tape player (now virtually obsolete) figures so prominently in his works—that, and the chugging of trains, like the rhythmic mechanized sound at the beginning of Rosa Coeli.

A man (Dabernig) sits on a train ostensibly reading a newspaper. German voiceover recites his private thoughts, a dense and poetic text written by Bruno Pellandrini which lasts the duration of the film. En route to a small Moravian town, his birthplace, to bury his recently deceased father, the protagonist conjures his past inside his head as he physically goes through the motions of settling the formalities over his father’s death. A rumination on childhood, tinged with regret, sorrow, and existential longing, the beauty of the text is rendered elegiac through the masterful compositions highlighting the wonders of the land. As the village’s past and the ruining of its eponymous monastery, named the Celestial Rose (after which the wine of the region was christened), emerges through this internal monologue, the camera dissects this snowy, sleepy town, its feeble-bodied villagers, and the anachronisms of its interior design. Like Timau, the signing of a pact is the concluding gesture, but Rosa Coeli is imbued with the weight of psychological solitude, a Baudelairian recoil for which there can be little sense of accomplishment. A cloaked sense of irony surely lays hidden amidst this picaresque tale, but as it’s so different from Dabernig’s other works, it’s difficult to detect.

The same cannot be said of his latest film, the magisterial-farcical Lancia Thema (2005), showing in the Wavelengths program at this year’s Toronto film festival. Once again at the helm of a car, Dabernig plays a tourist driving through a lush, damp and kaleidoscopic landscape (looking very much like the Garfagnana region of Italy), listening to arias on his stereo as we get to take in the astonishing splendour of the scenery. Suddenly, he pulls over by a rock face (the same one as in Timau) and gets out of his Lancia, fumbles with his still camera and begins photographing his car. As he does so, the film’s gaze strays from the protagonist and contemplates the painterly surroundings. This gesture is repeated several times over between long stretches of driving; it’s like the Euro version of The Brown Bunny (2003), with opera instead of Gordon Lightfoot. An omnipotent eye oversees the world, is conscious of its geometries, of what is present, absent and celestial. The arias emerge from the audio tape, but it is the landscape that really sings, metaphorically but also in an otherworldly display—the enigmatic pull that figures in all of Dabernig’s works cannot be contained or explained. Despite the recurring image of Dabernig in his films, an unseen presence looms larger, effectively reminding us that there is something greater than both time and matter. However daunting, this we must accept as modernity’s grand narratives betray their promises.

Dabis, Cherien

BOMB Magazine: Cherien Dabis by June Stein June Stein interview from Bomb magazine, Fall 2009 (excerpt)

January, 2002: Columbia University’s graduate film school. The winter sun flashed through the mini-blinds in my classroom, spilling slatted bars of light onto the beautiful face of a stranger in the corner. Who was she? It was a new semester, but “Directing Actors,” the class I teach, is a full-year course and I don’t allow new students to join midstream. Rules are rules, but I didn’t bargain on the likes of the force about to be born. Cherien Dabis stayed, busted her ass, and ate every pertinent molecule in that room. As my colleague, professor and filmmaker Katherine Dieckmann said: she was incredibly diligent, dogged, and determined to learn the screenwriting form. She’d rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. She was tireless. She just didn’t give up on her ideas until she got them right. Her great determination and focus were a huge factor in how she got her first feature made. Because she’s tenacious. Power to her.

Amreeka, a comedy/drama, premiered at Sundance in 2009 and played as opening night of New Directors/New Films at MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. At Cannes in 2009, it was awarded the prestigious FIPRESCI Critics’ Prize. The film is a universal journey into the lives of immigrants searching for a better future in America’s promised land. Muna, a single mother, leaves the West Bank with her son Fadi only to find undreamed-of challenges in a new world full of seismic changes.

I thought of my own young artistic ambition as I trudged up 85th Street, past a FedEx depot that used to be Merkin’s, a jazz-and-drugs bar. Bizarrely, Cherien’s apartment was in the exact same building that I had moved into exactly 40 years ago when I first came to New York, before Cherien was even born. Here’s the old wrought-iron fence! And the crooked little entrance facing the elevator that I got attacked in! God, the lobby hasn’t changed at all. I feel old, but proud. Cherien answers the door and we horse around, do some girl talk, and apply lip gloss for a photo shoot. Then she cracks a joke that she is clearly fond of, so please, LOL.

One on One: Najwa Najjar and Cherien Dabis | Sundance Festival 2010 January 19, 2009

Huffington Post Sundance Interview Melissa Silverstein interview at Sundance from The Huffington Post, January 21, 2009

New York Magazine, "Arab in America: Cherien Dabis" Kera Bolonik interview from The New York Times magazine, August 16, 2009

INTERVIEW: Amreeka's Cherien Dabis | Film Independent Carolyn Cohagan interview from Film Independent, August 24, 2009

Out director Cherien Dabis brings Arab Americans to the screen ... Jen Sabella from After Ellen, August 25, 2009

Director Cherien Dabis straddles two worlds -- latimes.com Reed Johnson feature and interview from The LA Times, September 4, 2009

Authenticity, Intimacy and Realism: Cherien Dabis Talks 'Amreeka ... Interview by indieWIRE, September 4, 2009

'Coming to Amreeka' Michael Archer interview from Guernica magazine, September 2009

BOMB Magazine: Cherien Dabis by June Stein June Stein interview from Bomb magazine, Fall 2009

Cherien Dabis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AMREEKA B 87

USA Canada Kuwait (97 mi) 2009 ‘Scope Amreeka

The title is the Arabic word for America, so this film plants its feet firmly on an idealization, using a series of small real life incidents to help re-visualize a new image of what it is to be an Arab-American. At least for me, I much preferred the opening sequences that took place in Ramallah, which show geographically how the Palestinian territories aren’t one continual land mass, but separate little entities, like islands, each of which is separated by an Israeli checkpoint. Imagine traveling from Connecticut to Rhode island, but being unable to pass through any major cities, as 99% of Palestinians can’t travel through Jerusalem without an Israeli permit, so have to be diverted but also pass through several different checkpoints along the way where the guards have the authority to hold you indefinitely for as long as they want, intentionally leaving some travelers stranded for hours at a time, all under the security imposition that each Palestinian is a would be terrorist. So a trip that might normally take 45 minutes ends up taking several hours instead. (See a detailed map from “Around Jerusalem to Ramallah” on August 18, 2006 by Ben here: B o s t o n t o P a l e s t i n e ..., where a 30 minute trip requires an hour and a half detour, and this is before you hit the checkpoints) It’s very difficult to live and work under those conditions, but Palestine has been occupied for over half a century or more, forty years by the Israelis and twenty years before that by Egypt and Jordan, and still can’t rightfully call itself home. Nonetheless, there are nearly 3 and a half million Palestinians living in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, while another 3 million live in Jordan. The opening sequences show how aggravating it must be to endure these conditions on a regular basis, as Palestinians young and old are routinely subjected to abuse and humiliation by what amounts to Israeli kids holding machine guns.

Newcomer Nisreen Faour in her first film is the slightly pudgy Muna Farah, an extremely warm and overly affectionate mother of a high school son Fadi (Melkar Muallem) living in Bethlehem with her own elderly mother. Implications are that her husband has left the family for a younger, skinnier girlfriend under unpleasant circumstances that remain unspoken. When she wins the U.S. immigration lottery allowing full admittance to America, all she can think about is how America will offer a better life for her son than the hatred and humiliation that greets him here at home. It’s interesting to see the transition to America where the Israeli kids have turned into racist and profoundly ignorant American teenagers heaping scorn and ridicule upon Arab-American families, starting with the insults hurled at Arab named kids, so many of whom are compared to extremist Islamic terrorists simply by the sound of their names. It’s easy, of course, for unaffected groups to simply not take an interest, as this doesn’t affect them, but intolerance and prejudice have been around for eons and spread like a cancer fomented by extremist nationalist ideology, such as the Nazi’s or the Japanese in WWII, or the slave-holding American South leading up to and even lasting a century beyond the Civil War, probably throughout history the singlemost cause of war and discord. These perceptions, especially after 9/11 and accentuated by American troops being sent to the Middle East region in record numbers, are inflamed by a prejudice of hostile ignorance, as hundreds of thousands of Americans are sent to a region where they demonstrate little sympathy with the citizens, any number of whom is seen as a potential suicide bomber. So out of self protection, the perception is to automatically racially profile and castigate everyone who looks or sounds Arabic, negative feelings that transfer to their own families who would prefer to believe soldiers are fighting for a freer and better country, which is not exactly the perceptions of those living under an armed American occupation. But enough of the Civics lesson. However it is to these inflamed and out of proportion perceptions, carried over towards Arab-Americans walking around the streets of the United States, not in a war zone, that this film was intended to redress.

With only benign trace notes of political discourse mentioned anywhere throughout the entire film, this becomes instead an intimate family portrait where the idea of America becomes the focus of Muna’s journey, where she enters the country with such naïve, open-minded anticipation, eagerly believing she has finally found a place of acceptance, except she runs into a wall of resistance. She begins to see herself in pathetic terms, as does her son during his own confrontations with bullying kids, as both are made to feel less than human. The film appears rooted in realism, where the discord outside finds its way inside, where families are challenged by the fundamental indifference and ostracism shown to them by their neighbors, where your problem is not my problem, so why should I care? It is here that the film falters somewhat, as it doesn’t really dig deep enough into the bitterness that develops when nothing but scorn is heaped upon you at every turn and in every layer of American bureaucracy, where people find themselves in a no-way-out pit, especially when they have no one and nowhere else to turn. But this is not a political film, instead it uses warmth and humor to win our affection, where Muna’s smile alone is enough to brighten anyone’s day, and how could anyone not love Muna, who is simply a force of good will? America is still too deeply mired in the Middle East war efforts and is not exactly ready to embrace a film that takes a pro-Arab stance, which is exactly the point of the film, where facing everyday prejudices becomes part of the human dilemma. There is a sweet contextualization and something of a contrived Disneyland ending, using a liberal American school principal Joseph Ziegler, similar to Richard Jenkins in THE VISITOR (2007), to become a bridge between different cultures, where all things work out in the end, but also a terrific performance by an Americanized Palestinian cousin Salma (Alia Shawkat) who dates a black guy, so there is a United Nations goodwill feel to all of the characters, where the single-minded xenophobic white notion of what it is to be an American is seriously challenged.

User comments from imdb Author: hprockstar from United States

This story follows a Middle-Eastern woman as she struggles living in an military-occupied West Bank. When she receives notice that she has been chosen in a lottery for a U.S. Green Card, she has to make the decision whether or not to uproot herself and her son for greener pastures. After making the decision to go, leaving her mother and brother behind, she realizes that life in Amreeka (America) is not all that she had dreamed it would be. Facing prejudice everywhere she turns, she makes other hard choices in trying to support her family...the son she brought to America with her and the relatives that she is staying with in the Midwest who are facing prejudice and struggling to make ends meet. In the end, this film reminds the viewer of the importance of family and the sacrifices we make for those we love.

Village Voice (Ella Taylor) review

The thriving subgenre of immigrant displacement dramedy gets a confident new spin from Cherien Dabis, a Palestinian-Jordanian raised in the United States. Divorced, demoralized, and struggling with her weight, Palestinian bank employee Muna (a very good Nisreen Faour) leaves the occupied West Bank with her teenaged son, Fadi (Melkar Muallem), to find a new home with her sister (The Visitor's Hiam Abbass) in Chicago. The discovery that she has exchanged one set of checkpoints for another doesn't prevent Muna—an archetypical maternal survivor straight out of Italian neorealism—from buckling down to the business of survival in a culture whose traditional mistrust of dark-skinned foreigners is exacerbated by 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Dabis concedes only subtitles to Western sensitivities—the perspective is firmly with the newcomers, whose dialogue switches on a dime from Arabic to English, signaling the constant juggling every acclimating migrant must undertake. But there's nothing bitter or cynical about Amreeka, which is directed with impish wit, an observant visual competence, and an open, conciliatory spirit (Muna befriends her son's Jewish teacher) that embraces the marginality that Arabs and Jews share in common.

Paper Magazine, "Amreeka, the Beautiful" Rachel Syme from Paste magazine, September 3, 2009

Growing up in small-town Ohio, 32-year-old director Cherien Dabis, the product of a Palestinian-Jordanian coupling, learned early on how it feels to be different in America. After the Gulf War began in 1990, the then 13-year-old Dabis's life exploded when local citizens began abandoning her physician father's practice because he was Arab. "We got death threats and someone even came to my high school to investigate my seventeen-year-old sister for an assassination plan against the president," says Dabis, speaking from her family's home in Jordan, where she is visiting and researching a new film. "I mean, things changed overnight, and I became very interested in the media's depiction of Arabs, and how to shatter the stereotypes."

Two decades later, Dabis has made a film her teenage self would be proud of: Amreeka, a runaway hit at Cannes, tells the story of Muna, a single mother who departs the Left Bank for Illinois with her teen son Fadi. Fadi navigates harsh bullies at school, and Muna makes her way serving up falafel burgers at the local White Castle -- but the film never feels heavy or sad. Rather, it tackles Dabis's memories with lightness and comedy, a treatment rarely seen in Arab-American film. "When I started writing it at Columbia in 2003, everyone was looking for heavy Iraq drama," says Dabis. "But now, things have really changed. The Obama of it all is really working -- his messages of acceptance. Now if only I can get him to see the film!"

Moving Pictures: Cherien Dabis - Amreeka Article by Cherien Dabis from Moving Pictures magazine, December 2008

This past November, the country that Arabs call "Amreeka" proved that it's not what it had appeared to be. And, in doing so, it surprised the world by ushering in a whole new era - the era of hope. It is in this era that my first feature film, Amreeka, will make its debut. Though it was conceived during troubled times, much like Obama's presidency, it was born out of a desire for change and the hope for something better.

A first-generation Palestinian/Jordanian American, I grew in Celina, Ohio, a small town of little more than 10,000 people on roughly four square miles. Though I spent nine months of the year isolated amidst its cornfields, my homesick mother insisted that we travel back to Amman, Jordan, every summer for three months at a time. In Amman, I was known as "the American." But in Celina, I was known as "the Arab." In reality, I was neither, entirely, but both in part. My classmates - many of whom had never traveled beyond the state line - often asked, "Are there cars in Jordan?" Because I wanted nothing more than to be understood, to truly belong, I was plagued with the question, "How could I bring my life in the Middle East closer to my life in the Midwest?" How could I bridge the huge gap between these two distinctly different worlds?

Then the 1991 Gulf War hit, and the question that plagued me became the fire that fueled me. Virtually overnight, my family became "the enemy." My father lost many of his patients because people suddenly decided they didn't want to support an Arab doctor. We got death threats on a daily basis: "Love it or leave it." And: "We know what to do with you Saddam-lovers." But the icing on the cake was when the secret service came to my high school to investigate a rumor that my older sister threatened to kill the president. My eyes were opened to the racism that can result from the stereotypes that the media propagates. Not only did I start paying close attention to the ways in which Arabs were portrayed in the news and in Hollywood movies, I realized that I wanted to have a hand in changing the images that were (and still are) associated with being Arab.

It was in this spirit of activism that I discovered the power of filmmaking, the power to bridge cultures and bring stories to the masses, the power to use the universal language of emotion to effect change. A decade later, I moved to New York City to start the graduate film program at Columbia University. Coincidentally, it was September of 2001. And the events of that month very much set the tone for my film school experience. In the spring of 2003, Bush invaded Iraq, and history was repeating itself. I felt an enormous responsibility, both as a filmmaker and as an Arab American. Hearing stories of how Middle Easterners were once again being scapegoated was all I needed to realize that it was time to sit down and script my story. Rather than spin it into a heavy drama, I wanted to imbue it with humor so as to make it real and relatable. And I wanted to create an Arab character that was - to me - familiar, yet that no one would ever expect: a Palestinian single mom who has every reason to be cynical but instead is full of naïve hope.

Thus "Muna" was born. Inspired by the strength and optimism of my aunt who immigrated to the U.S. in 1997, Muna is a woman who doesn't see her own differences but rather assumes a sense of belonging everywhere she goes. She'll do anything for her family, except let them down. And though she starts off eager to run away from her problems back home, she learns that she must face them and stand up for herself. It's through her that I set out to uncover the truth of our shared humanity in a film that ultimately is a gesture of love for my own family and community.

Five years, countless drafts of the script and more than half a dozen development labs later (from the Film Independent Director's Lab to the Sundance Middle East Screenwriter's Lab to Tribeca All Access), I was in production. I'll never forget the feeling of pride that overwhelmed me when I stood on set watching my incredible international cast as we recreated - at least in part - my 1991 reality in Celina, Ohio. I couldn't help thinking that my true hope is that this movie be seen in small towns across the U.S. Naïve? Perhaps. A few years ago, I would have never thought it possible. But as Obama declared at Grant Park on election night, "Change has come to America." That gives me great hope for Amreeka.

review Caryn James from The Daily Beast, September 1, 2009

In the Sundance favorite Amreeka, a single mom goes from the West Bank to White Castle. The Daily Beast’s Caryn James on this fall’s most charming indie film.

Muna, the down-to-earth heroine of Amreeka, arrives in the United States from the West Bank with her 16-year-old son and offers only smiling agreement to an obtuse officer at passport control. “Citizenship?” he asks. Eager, endearing, speaking fluent but imperfect English, she says, “I don’t have.”

“Then you don’t have a country?” he says sarcastically. She cheerfully nods, and explains she’s from the Palestinian territory. And when he moves on to ask, “Occupation?” she innocently answers, “Yes, it is occupied, for 40 years." That’s as overtly political as this witty little film about Palestinians coming to America becomes.

Even though the movie pointedly takes place just as the U.S. is invading Iraq in 2003, politics creeps in quietly. First-time writer/director Cherien Dabis leaves it to us to notice the sign outside the White Castle burger joint where Muna works. With a couple of strategic letters missing, it reads “SUPPORT OUR OOPS.” (If only Bush’s famous banner had read “Oops!” instead “Mission Accomplished.”) But Dabis’ own girlhood as the daughter of Middle Eastern immigrants in small-town Ohio, which inspired the film, adds a valuable dimension we never see on screen.

The earliest scenes, set in the West Bank, make the film seem more blatantly political than it is. Muna has to pass through checkpoints to get home from her bank job, and when her son, Fadi, makes a wisecrack to the guard, the boy is hauled out of the car at gunpoint. Muna worries that in America, “We’d be like visitors,” but Fadi says, “It’s better than being prisoners in your own country.”

Even in this fraught political atmosphere, though, the film’s focus is on Muna herself. She is the kind of willful person whose determination has to overcome her lack of self-confidence; a pudgy middle-aged woman who calls attention to her recent weight gain before anyone else can, who is still wounded that her husband has traded her in for a younger, skinny wife. A new life is just what she needs. (Nisreen Faour, unknown here, makes Muna entirely sympathetic and real.)

She finds a different ordeal in Illinois, where she and Fadi move in with her sister and brother-in-law, and their two thoroughly American daughters. Muna is so embarrassed at having to mop floors and flip burgers for a living that she tells her family she is working at the bank next door. The family is mistaken for Iraqi and finds an anonymous threat in the mailbox. Muna’s brother-in-law, a doctor, begins losing so many patients that he can’t pay the mortgage.

Even the kindest characters display unexamined bias. Fadi’s high-school principal, who develops an instant crush on Muna, tries to reassure her when Fadi is bullied, telling her that kids ignorantly assume all Muslims are terrorists. Muna quietly says, “We’re not even Muslim.” Dabis makes all this part of the fabric of her characters’ lives, along with other strands as ordinary as Fadi getting stoned with his American cousin and learning how to dress so he’ll look cool.

As Amreeka was making the festival rounds, including Sundance and the opening night slot at New Directors/ New Films, Dabis often talked about how her girlhood shaped the film. (She has written for the Showtime series The L Word, but Amreeka is her first movie.) The daughter of Jordanian and Palestinian immigrants, she was 14 during the Gulf War. Her father, a doctor, lost patients; the family received death threats. And in an incident more dramatic than any on screen, the Secret Service investigated a rumor that her 17-year-old sister had threatened the president. It’s startling to realize how easily she was able to transport those memories intact from the first Iraq war to the post-9/11 world. But like the sign outside White Castle, Dabis’ memories enhance a film that is fundamentally quite cheerful, taking its cue from the ever-optimistic Muna as she successfully finds her way in a new country.

On the scale of current Iraq-themed movies, Amreeka is far less skewering than the gleefully anti-Bush In the Loop, but more opinionated than the determinedly apolitical soldiers’ story The Hurt Locker. Giving a fresh twist to the evergreen story of immigrants, Amreeka shows how politics infuses daily life, and how the muddled image of Middle Easterners in this country has persisted from that first Iraq conflict straight through to the Big Oops war of today.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Christian Science Monitor (Andy Klein) review

CultureCatch.com [Brandon Judell]

filmcritic.com (Norm Schrager) review [3/5]

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3.5/5]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B] also seen here: Dark Horizons review and here: DVD Talk

Screen International review David D’Arcy

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

Huffington Post Sundance Interview Melissa Silverstein interview at Sundance from The Huffington Post, January 21, 2009

Out director Cherien Dabis brings Arab Americans to the screen ... Jen Sabella from After Ellen, August 25, 2009

'Coming to Amreeka' Michael Archer interview from Guernica magazine, September 2009

Authenticity, Intimacy and Realism: Cherien Dabis Talks 'Amreeka ... Interview by indieWIRE, September 4, 2009

BOMB Magazine: Cherien Dabis by June Stein June Stein interview from Bomb magazine, Fall 2009

Variety (Rob Nelson) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review September 4, 2009

Director Cherien Dabis straddles two worlds -- latimes.com Reed Johnson feature and interview from The LA Times, September 4, 2009

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times, "Settlers from Afar, In Land of Lincoln" Stephen Holden from The New York Times, September 4, 2009

New York Magazine, "Arab in America: Cherien Dabis" Kera Bolonik interview from The New York Times magazine, August 16, 2009

Palestinian territories - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Demographics of the Palestinian territories - Wikipedia, the free ...

Demographics of Palestine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

B o s t o n t o P a l e s t i n e ... “Around Jerusalem to Ramallah" by Ben, August 18, 2006

Dag, Umut

KUMA B- 81

aka: 2^nd Wife

Austria (93 mi) 2012 ‘Scope Official site

An exposé on Turkish culture in an Austrian film is quite a novel undertaking, an extremely detailed slice of life, unraveling like a Turkish Madame Bovary, another realist work that was the subject of obscenity attacks in its era, written in mid 19^th century France. Similarly, the religious backwardness ingrained in these small Turkish sects existing today almost in secrecy brings ancient customs and beliefs into stark contrast with the modern world. The story revolves around the idea of Turkish husbands taking a 2^nd wife, something outlawed in Austria, yet continues to be practiced, albeit infrequently, outside the gaze of unsuspecting government officials. What starts out as a festive, wide-open, country wedding in Turkey (where perhaps money changes hands) soon takes a quick turn for the worse, as the alleged bride and groom, the beautiful young Ayse (Begüm Akkaya) and handsome Haslan (Murathan Muslu), are quickly ushered back to Vienna with Haslan’s mother Fatma (Nihal G. Koldas) where we learn the wedding is a sham, as Ayse is really the 2^nd wife of Fatma’s husband, the aging patriarch Mustafa (Vedat Erincin), already with 5 children, where the two older grown daughters, perhaps more Austrian than Turkish, disapprove of the younger Ayse from the moment she enters the house, turning this into a claustrophobic chamber drama. Written from a woman’s perspective by Petra Ladinigg embellishing the director’s story, this is a small scale, realist work that eventually becomes suffocatingly melodramatic.

The widescreen pan of the mountains of Turkey quickly give way to a secret, closed-off world that likely conflicts with Muslim practices as well, but are holdover family customs. Fatma is extremely ill with cancer early on, as her condition is deteriorating with chemotherapy, requiring surgery, where she welcomes and embraces Ayse even over her own daughters, suggesting if anything happens to her, she wants Ayse in charge of her family. Making matters more uncomfortable, the family must prepare a bed in the living room for the wedding to be consummated, where every sound reverberates through the thin walls, but Ayse is soon pregnant. Like Cinderella, she is still treated within the family as a scrub lady, doing all the cooking and cleaning while everyone else has the freedom to live their lives. Even when she visits the grocery store, she is labeled arrogant and snobbish by the Turkish women in the community for not engaging in the local women’s gossip, and she’s afraid to speak as she’s still learning the Austrian language. Despite her best efforts to please her own family, she is constantly ridiculed and humiliated, as if she is the cancerous growth within the family. The director, in his first feature film, plays on the audience’s expectations, offering a few plot twists that come unexpectedly.

Pitting the old against the new, raising relevant but often embarrassing questions, each generation has to face its own challenges, where you’d think Ayse might be steered towards other 2^nd wives, many of whom might be undergoing similar resentment, each having no one they can turn to, as their very presence is an abomination in strict Austrian society. The featured characters are Ayse and Fatma, as it’s really their story, where the performances of both are standout. Director Umut Dag, of Kurdish descent, aided by cinematographer Carsten Thiele, displays a special interest in the plight of his female characters, effectively making a ‘women’s film.’ Not welcomed and faced with overly harsh options are typical immigrant stories, where the severe treatment often backfires, forcing characters into making more reckless choices they’d never otherwise have considered. The small, baby steps that Ayse has been taking throughout the picture suddenly turn into leaps and bounds, as the film takes a strange turn towards the end, but one which is telegraphed throughout, sending tensions literally skyrocketing through the roof, becoming an intimate portrait of women’s hysteria, where Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. The film is a wrenching glimpse of the underside of humanity, often tightening the noose around their own necks when they become the arbitrary enforcers of morality.

User reviews from imdb Author: tandrei2001 from Romania

I recently saw this movie at TIFF in my hometown. Although it gets a little time to get into the slower pace it deserves every inch of it. It is also a good insight of Turkish traditional family, although emigrated with strict rules that are carried on even in western countries. The film develops the drama slowly until the climax towards the end. The acting is very solid, although they are all Turkish actors. I don't know how famous are they in their own country, but I would give credit to Nihal G. Koldas as Fatma, the authoritarian mother of the family, and Murathan Muslu who plays Hassan, the hard working son hiding a secret that wouldn't be tolerated in such conservative environment. The biggest surprise is the 21 year debut Begüm Akkaya in the role of Ayse , a young Turkish woman sent out for marriage abroad by her family. Her performance is stunning, incredibly fresh and brilliant. I hope to hear more of her in the future. If you have the chance, go for it, you won't regret for sure. andrei Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Screen International [Fionnuala Halligan]

Kuma means ‘second wife’ in Turkish, and Umut Dag’s debut feature is indeed a claustrophobic domestic drama about a second wife, although, in the way of the Turks living in Austria who are depicted on screen, this film is quite deceptive and secretive in its approach. Posed entirely from a female perspective, Dag’s work is small-scale but cumulatively affective, even a little bit racy.

Exposure may well be limited, but this turns out to have enough heft to guarantee festival profile at the least. The events onscreen are greatly enhanced by a distinctive shooting style which presses in on the viewer in the subtlest of ways, until the limitations and tensions of the lives led onscreen become palpably real.

Kuma starts out wide, with a wedding in a Turkish village; amidst the clamour and the colour, several facts reveal themselves. Fatma (Koldas) is very ill; her son Hasan (Muslu) has just married a local girl called Ayse (Akkaya), which his sister Nurcan (Karabayir) resents; and they are all travelling back to Vienna where they will live together.

On their return, however, it becomes clear that all this is an elaborate ruse, and the young Ayse has been brought to Austria to become second wife to the ageing family patriarch, Mustafa (Erincin), with the full blessing - if not connivance - of his ailing first wife Fatma, who also has a son working in Germany, a married daughter in an abusive relationship, a teenage girl and a 10-year-old boy.

Once in Europe, the film quickly cuts from a wide shot of the mountains of Turkey to a closed-off world - the apartment, the local halal shop, the playground. This isn’t so much a film about integration - effectively, there is none, although Ayse does slowly learn to speak German - but the old ways and the new, the past and the future.

In this sealed-off Turkish community, appearances are everything and everybody guards their secrets, but the timid and well-meaning Ayse, brought in as a glorified housemaid, may yet effect a change.

Kuma isn’t evenly paced, and some of the early establishing sequences can tend towards the plodding. With a lot to shoulder, performances from the two leads are crucial and strong, although Koldas, as the somewhat saintly Fatma, only really makes her full mark in the final denouement - but it’s quite a mark.

Young Akkaya is certainly a face to remember, as is Muslu, as Hasan, her ‘husband’. Director Umut Dag, himself a Kurd, displays a marked sensitivity for the plight of his characters, turning in fundamentally what used to be called a ‘woman’s film’.  In his efforts, he is much assisted by intriguing camerawork from Carsten Thiele and a screenplay of some unexpected depth by Petra Ladinigg.

Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]

Director Umut Dag's quiet drama, which opened the Berlin Panorama, tells the story of a village girl who is recruited as a second wife.

An innocent village girl is secretly recruited as the second wife, or kuma, of a Turkish pater familias in Vienna, with a practical eye to having her take over the household when his sick wife dies of cancer. The perverse simplicity of the domestic drama in Kuma, a cleverly done, not overly ambitious first feature by talented young Austrian-Kurdish director Umut Dag, is heightened by young Begum Akkaya’s lovely and mysterious performance in her first major role. Making its weird premise seem plausible, this quiet drama, which opened the Berlin Panorama, is well-positioned for both fest and some art house dates.

If it’s hard for Westerners to swallow the idea of co-existing wives, one suspects modern Muslims have a few problems, too. Perhaps this is why Ayse’s (Akkaya) wedding to a nice, anonymous white-haired gent is passed off as a much more appropriate marriage to his handsome son Hasan. Only the family knows the truth: The pretty teenager is being shipped off to Austria as the old geyser’s second wife. No motivation is offered to explain why she agrees to such a thing, and no money is seen changing hands. The opening wedding scene is all about village life and obedience to tradition.

In Vienna, the family must adjust to the new situation. The most gung-ho to have Ayse move in is Fatma (Nihal Koldas), the mother, who is undergoing chemotherapy and will soon be operated on. She sees the frail girl as her care-taking replacement for her husband and five children when she’s no longer around. Still, preparing a sofa bed in the living room for the bride’s deflowering is a delicate matter, and there’s no getting around the awkwardness of those creaking springs as the family lays awake in the small apartment, listening. Before long, Ayse is pregnant.

The children’s reactions (two are already grown up) provide a reality check on the surreal situation. Though they still wear tightly wound headscarves out of doors, the two younger girls appear to have been born in Austria and to have absorbed many Western European values, which don’t include second wives for Daddy. With his perpetually downcast eyes and guilty look, Hasan has his own reasons for agreeing to the fake marriage, revealed in an affecting tete-a-tete with Ayse.

Just when things are settling down, a major plot twist sends the story rocketing off in a new direction. The second part of the film splits wide open in the kinky way Austrian films tend to do, raising all sorts of embarrassing social questions no character is prepared to answer. Finally, after all Ayse’s Cinderella-like masochism and self-sacrifice and the family’s outrageous bad faith, tensions explode in a highly satisfying, knock-down fight that sends genuine old Turkish values flying out the window.

The fine cast is exceptional in creating a closed-circuit world in which hidden passions can explode. Koldas’ mature performance is full of unspoken, repressed feelings, making an ideal foil for Akkaya’s blank-faced country goodness and apparently will-less compliance. The camera and tech work are modest no-frills.

Variety [Boyd van Hoeij]

Dahan, Olivier

THE PROMISED LIFE (La vie promise) B+ 90

aka: Ghost River

France (100 mi) 2002 ‘Scope

This had the makings of a great film, as it has the magnificent Isabelle Huppert in an unforgettable performance, with exquisite photography by Alex Lemarque, making this a truly gorgeous film to watch. But along the way, we are subject to repeating expressions of flower images which grow burdensome after awhile, also some musical miscues, especially some overly explanatory American folk music, which was out of synch with the emotional complexities of Huppert’s performance, which was dark, mysterious, emotionally spare, distant, agonizingly protective and silent. Huppert plays a street prostitute whose daughter, who has been living in a foster home, returns unexpectedly with disastrous results, causing an immediate getaway. The rest is a road movie taking them into the rural regions of France, then into the French Alps, near the Swiss border. Huppert doesn’t remember much about her past, but her memories slowly reassemble before our eyes through a series of flashback montages sparked by visiting people she hasn’t seen in years. While this journey is problematic, as her past is filled with heartbreak, Huppert lights up the screen, providing an electrifying character that is deeply troubled, yet holds our interest through every frame. Her 14 year old daughter (Maud Forget) is rebellious yet resilient, and may be more than her mother can handle. In fact, everything seems to be more than she can handle. “I feel like I’m living through someone else’s life.” But little by little, small bonds of affection and trust bring them closer together. So while there are moments of quiet subtlety, the power of the performances was compelling enough to make up for the film’s deficiencies. The near wordless closing sequences are strung together by a single piano piece by Modern Jazz Quartet pianist John Lewis, sounding very much like Glenn Gould playing Bach, very controlled, yet effortless, then breaking into small jazz riffs as the film emotionally comes together at the end, returning to the precision and beauty of Bach.

User comments from imdb: fha-2 (fha@bigfoot.com) Pt Richmond, California:

"La Vie Promise" ("The Promised Life") is among the French actress' Isabelle Huppert's finest accomplishments. This amazing masterpiece presents Huppert in a character, which is a combination abrasiveness and vulnerability, she is both exasperating and at the same time pathetic, monstrous, and saintly. It is difficult to envision another actress who could embrace the complexity of her character and yet still present her persona in such an intriguing paradigm of humanity who magically captures our full attention while taking our breath away.

It seems palpably unfair when such other female film stars as Halle Berry, Julia Roberts, or Renee Zellweger win Academy Awards, whereas Isabelle Huppert has never been nominated for an Oscar. Over the last thirty years, this effervescent French actress has put forth a series of remarkable performances, capturing every aspects of the human experience with style and panache. Check out her brilliant performances in "Madame Bovary," `Merci pour le Chocolat' and "The Piano Player" or the delightful weirdness of "8 Women'.

Huppert's role is that of Sylvia, a sullen prostitute walking the streets of Nice in France, seemingly frozen in time with an obsolete sense of her rebellious prerogative. When the cameras dolly in for a close-up, her heavy cosmetic attempt to preserve the illusion of youth reveal their exercise in futility. Her brittle, oftentimes hostile attitude is typical of what one would expect of a seasoned hooker.

Sylvia seems in charge of her life until the appearance of her 14-year-old epileptic daughter Laurence (Maud Forget). Laurence is in foster care and Sylvia would prefer to have her out of her life, which becomes obvious by her callous rejection and disrespect even though it was Laurence's birthday. Laurence, desperate for attention, turns up again unexpectedly in Sylvia's apartment and observes her mother's pimp pummeling her. When the pimp's associate turns his attention to Laurence by sexually attacking her, she fatally stabs him, thus compelling mother and daughter to hastily leave town.

Eight years earlier, Sylvia had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized after giving birth to a son. The boy's father (whether he was married to her or not is not clear) lived in the north of France. Out of some sort of mysterious compulsion, she and Laurence journey North, traveling by train, on foot and hitching rides with strangers; in order to seek out her long abandoned son and his father, who represent perhaps a new beginning or sanctuary. It is on this journey that mother and daughter begin to experience each other as the seeds of love kindle what had been lost over the harsh years. While hitchhiking they encounter Joshua, (Pascal Greggory), a car thief and escaped convict who has taken an interest in the well being of Sylvia and Laurence and ultimately takes the time to bring them to their final destination.

The film has the inspiring appeal of a half-told chronicle where significant and intriguing passages are casually left unexplained. The full meaning and resolution of Sylvia's relationship with Laurence and Joshua's criminal career remain delightfully obscured; leaving us just enough information to maintain our interest, yet preserving the mystery that tweaks our attention. The audience must search their own repertoires of imaginations to conclude the story.

Director Olivier Dahan is daring enough to bring his camera into tight close-ups leaving Huppert's character displayed in unflattering poses while wearing harsh make-up and in poor lighting. Huppert does not attempt hide behind the cheap make-up in order to present a good performance. Her talent is sufficiently powerful to reveal Sylvia's inner strength and bring her true character bubbling to the surface. Her painted exterior suggests one stereotype while her eyes tell yet another story. This is an extraordinary film not to be missed.

LA VIE EN ROSE

aka: La Môme

France Great Britian Czech Republic (140 mi) 2007 ‘Scope

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

Olivier Dahan's sprawling portrait of the life of Edith Piaf is the kind of grand, passionate historical drama that no one seems to be able to pull off any more. Dahan does so magnificently, thanks largely to a brilliant performance by Marion Cotillard.

Discovered singing on a Belleville street corner by a nightclub owner (a quick star turn by Gerard Depardieu) who nicknamed her "La Môme Piaf" (the Little Sparrow), Piaf rose from the gutter and gangster culture to nightclubs and finally concert halls to become a French songstress legend and cultural icon.

Cotillard plays the legend from 20-year-old street singer and hard-living urchin to superstar concert-hall vocalist to frail icon, bent and palsied from a life of drink, drugs and high living without ever losing the spark of the sassy street kid who muscled her way into polite company. Even when planted in front of a microphone, she stands aggressive and defiant, as if holding her ground and staring down the audience while belting out her stories.

The sprawling historical epic slips back and forth through her life, leaping from traumatic moments to quiet reveries with little apparent pattern. It tends to confuse her timeline, which already skips over her legendary work with the French Resistance during the German occupation. It's really less a biography than the sketch of a melodramatic life of triumphs and tragedies and a passionate woman who favored emotion and impulse over reason and restraint.

But no, she has no regrets, or so goes her signature song and lyric epitaph. While Dahan's take on her final moments may contradict the defiant lyrics of that song, Cotillard convinces that Piaf lived by that romantic and heedless philosophy.

The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]

Uplifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie En Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than the woman. It's not hard to do, given the fuzzy borders between Piaf's undeniably scarred life and her relentless gift for revisionist autobiography. By any measure, France's favorite songbird had a lousy childhood. Shuttled from pillar to post of Paris's slum district by her mother, an alcoholic café singer and part-time hooker, Piaf was eventually dumped as a toddler by her father (a circus contortionist) on his mother, who ran a brothel. This serial abandonment led to a self-destructive streak that dogged Piaf through her years singing for scraps on the streets. A meteoric rise to fame did nothing to ease the existential panic, and Piaf spent years as a soused party animal with scads of unreliable lovers who made her miserable and vice versa. Two tumultuous marriages didn't help, nor did Piaf's addiction to morphine after a serious car crash. Dragging herself from one performance to another long after she should have quit, at age 47 she finally succumbed, defiantly but famously with no regrets, to cancer in 1963. If that's not a movie, I don't know what is.

Piaf was a brawling mess who parlayed the pain she wore on her sleeve into a glittering career as France's heartbreak balladeer. To this day her gravel voice thrills me, but she was also a rabid self-mythologizer who liked to play up her childhood travails. An unblushing fan, writer-director Olivier Dahan has bought the package and added a myth or two of his own, cooking up a fictional warm-hearted tart (Emmanuelle Seigner) who nurses little orphan Edith through a period of temporary blindness (unconfirmed) and drums up sufficient funds to dispatch the child on a pilgrimage, where Saint Theresa provides a miracle cure that Dahan hands us without so much as a cocked eyebrow.

La Vie En Rose trudges dutifully from one costumed "defining" event to the next, building to a kind of Piaf theme park that plays out like a bad parody of Dickens or Balzac. Slack-jawed proles wearing artistically grimy faces drop everything to gawk as the tiny waif belts out "The Marseillaise" on a street corner, followed by copious shots of rapt and bejeweled audiences in Paris's cavernous Olympia Hall as Piaf finds the voice and the style that seal her phenomenal success.

Quite aside from her towering vocal range and forcefulness as a populist interpreter of the French chanson, Piaf was an instinctive social leveler (she hobnobbed with Cocteau, but the love of her life was a married middleweight boxer and pig farmer) who became a unifying romantic voice for war-torn France. But there remains the murkier and still unresolved question of whether Piaf, along with her pal Maurice Chevalier, was a collaborator who happily performed for Nazi military bigwigs during the Occupation, or a clandestine protector of the French Resistance. Reluctant to muddy his diva with complication, Dahan sticks with neurosis, focusing in on the often yawning chasm between the terrified child and the grandstanding diva.

Cotillard doesn't do her own singing—who, after all, could replicate the soaring rasp that burst fully formed out of that tiny body? In a sense, every scene in La Vie En Rose is a holding pattern for the next ballad, which would reduce the movie to a musical were it not for Cotillard's command of character. Though she's far prettier than Piaf at any age and has to be heavily made up to come close to the bug-eyed jolie-laide that was la Môme, Cotillard not only has her fluttery mannerisms down, but the fragile sense of self that kept her always on the edge. With shoulders hunched, head tipped, and hands flung forward, Cotillard gives us a Piaf stranded between the mutinous child she never fully outgrew and the crowd-pleasing supplicant who could never get enough audience love. If Piaf was an empty shell, she knew how to put on a show, on and off stage. Channeling the shell, the performer, and the shambles in between Cotillard raises France's poor, beloved chanteuse clean out of mundane pathos, into the ruined grandeur she deserves.

Critique. La vie en rose by Olivier Dahan. Emmanuel Burdeau from Cahiers du Cinéma

Reverse Shot [Chris Wisniewski]

Slant Magazine [Dan Callahan]

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

The Lumière Reader Diane Spodarek

Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]

Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]

Time Magazine (Richard Schickel)

La Vie en Rose [La Môme] Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Creative Loafing Atlanta [Felicia Feaster]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Reel.com DVD review [Chris Cabin]

Austin Chronicle [Toddy Burton]

Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

Dahl, Gustavo

UIRÁ, AN INDIAN IN GOD’S FOREST (Uirá, Um Indio em Busca de Deus)

Brazil (90 mi) 1973

Brazil Film Update Robert Stan from Jump Cut

Dahl's second feature, UIRA is a work of what the director calls "anthropological fiction." Based on research by the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, UIRA tells the story, set in 1939, of an Urubu Indian who, in despair over his son's death at the hands of whites, departs with his family in search of Maira, the Indian Creator-God living in Paradise. During the course of his trip, Uira is harassed by whites, forced to wear European clothes, and imprisoned. Freed through the good offices of the Indian Protection Service, that agency begins to exploit him as a token example of governmental generosity. Scornful of such suspect benevolence, Uira flees from the whites and enters the river in hopes of finding Maira — through death.

In Gustavo Dahl's able hands, Uira's journey becomes a pretext for a ringing critique not only of the Indian policies of the Brazilian government (although the story is set in 1939, little has changed), but also of white capitalist civilization in general. Through Uira's astonished eyes, Dahl reveals to us the strangeness of our own customs — the strangeness of finding human nudity obscene or titillating, the strangeness of wage slavery and capitalist commerce. UIRA, in short, is an exercise in cultural relativism, a critical look at our civilization from the standpoint of La pensee sauvage. Avoiding the twin extremes of racist vilification and noble savage idealization, UIRA treats its native subject with rare respect and dignity, even while it offers a provocative critique of our own civilization and values. 

Dai, Sijie

BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS (Xiao cai feng) B+ 90

China France (116 mi) 2002

A French-Chinese co-production, this film features some lush cinematography by Jean Marie Dreujou, filmed in the remote Phoenix mountains area during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where two friends, one the son of a “reactionary intellectual,” are sent to a Maoist re-education camp, a forced labor camp, where they are the only ones who can read, who know what a violin is, so they find out immediately that if they want to play Mozart on the violin, then they have to name the song, “Mozart is thinking of Chairman Mao.” They meet a local village seamstress, read her some stolen, reactionary literature of Balzac, and it plays almost like a fairy tale of what could have been in the labor camp, a love story intertwined in the dreams and recollections of the two young men. There were some beautifully constructed scenes, especially when the two boys were sent to view North Korean films, returning to re-tell the local villagers, who were none the wiser when they used these elaborately re-constructed stories of the forbidden reactionary literature to amaze them all. This must be considered an overwrought, idealized, high drama, the style of film that should never work, but it worked for me, largely due to the gorgeous remote locations, some interesting storytelling, and a few magical moments that can only be described as the wonder of cinema.

Daldry, Stephen

THE HOURS A- 93

USA (114 mi) 2002

BFI | Sight & Sound | Day In The Life Sheila Johnston from Sight and Sound, February 2003

THE READER B+ 91

USA Germany (123 mi) 2008

If people like you can’t learn from people like me, then what the hell is the point? —Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz)

A decidedly somber work, which is appropriate, as the subject touches on the Holocaust, where in an unusual choice, Kate Winslet plays Hanna Schmitz, a Nazi prison guard who is brought to trial twenty years after the war ended. What makes this even more unusual is a flashback sequence that opens the film in the late 50’s when she is working as a train conductor and has a summer affair with a 15 year old boy, Michael (David Kross), a young student at the time who has just recovered from scarlet fever. Though they meet for sex, it’s clear her favorite activity is listening to him read classic literature to her, where she is frequently moved to tears from the stories she hears. Unexpectedly, she disappears without a trace before that summer is over. Michael goes on to study law where his class visits a Nazi war tribunal in the late 60’s where Hanna Schmitz is on trial for war crimes. His emotional upheaval is the subject of the film, which brings into question the role of working class Nazi’s during the war, as some 8000 worked in the prison camps, but only a few dozen were actually tried or convicted of war crimes. Winslet’s status as one of the leading actresses of her generation lends credibility and a bit of extra added emphasis to the role, and she does not disappoint, never excusing what she did, but also questioning what choice working class women had during the war, where prison guard work was probably one of the few reliable sources of income.

Adapted by David Hare, THE HOURS (2002), from a novel by Bernhard Schlink, the film has a low key sense of detachment, which matches Michael’s moody introspection. In this light, Hanna’s orderly existence with a boy twenty years her junior does not seem all that unusual, and certainly the effect she had on him was profound, but he got on with his life afterwards. When she re-enters his life so unexpectedly, he is ashamed yet at the same time immeasurably moved by the experience, leaving him deeply haunted by the trial. At one point he revisits Auschwitz today, which has been left as is, with the shower rooms, broken down beds, and the tens and thousands of shoes all neatly piled up. One wonders if showing these scenes exploits the uniquely powerful impact in a fictional film, if it in fact diminishes the power of the event itself? Yet it is done wordlessly and with utter detachment, without any added effect, simply shown without comment as if seen by any observer. It can’t help but add an extra dimension to the film, as the camera takes you right there to the scene of the crime. When it becomes clear that Michael has information that might effect the trial outcome, in particular the sentencing, he can’t summon the courage needed to act, which only makes him more ashamed of himself, as that’s precisely the crime of ordinary German citizens during the war.

In fact, Michael’s behavior is suspect throughout his adult life, as he has a failed marriage (his wife is never seen), and an estranged daughter that he doesn’t see enough of, remaining largely closed off to her as well, so he is a man that lives behind layers of walls that he has built for himself, which perhaps defines how anyone copes with traumatic events in their lives. Ralph Fiennes as the adult Michael has made his career out of wordless subtlety, and his growing sense of unease is exasperating, as one wonders why he doesn’t visit Hanna in prison, why he doesn’t confront his own past, and perhaps why he can’t forgive her. The trial itself is exposed as a sham, because Hanna did nothing any differently than thousands of others, but unlike the other guards, she actually came forward and acknowledged her crimes. Much is made of how different people perceived her actions, as she was the victim of a lynch mob mentality, as people so needed someone to blame, and others would just as soon put a bullet through her head. Michael’s quandry is more personal, but he’s just as indecisive about how the law applies to her actions. Her sentence carries with it a degree of certainty that the court got it right, that justice delayed is still justice served, but Michael remains in a moral fog, as does, I suspect, a majority of the audience, as it’s simply not appropriate to sympathize with a Nazi prison guard. They personify how routine the Holocaust became to ordinary German people where one carried out one’s responsibilities and never thought to ask questions. Only in hindsight were questions asked. To its credit, what the film really shows is that we still can’t begin to fathom any answers.

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B]

Bernhard Schlink's bestselling novel "The Reader" is about how the German generation born after the Holocaust coped with its legacy of guilt. The movie adaptation by screenwriter David Hare and director Stephen Daldry starts out choppy and overdrawn but develops a cumulative power. It's about a 15-year-old boy, Michael (David Kross), who in 1958 has a passionate affair with Hanna (an uneven Kate Winslet), a working-class woman 20 years his senior. Eight years later, while a law student observing the Nazi war crimes trials, Michael – played as an adult by Ralph Fiennes – is shocked to discover that Hanna, whom he had lost track of, is in the dock admitting her role as a guard at Auschwitz. The emotional core of "The Reader" is how Michael copes with this fact. His emotional transformation is not easily rendered on film but Fiennes knows how to do nuance. He brings to the role a shimmering subtlety.

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

People can give themselves away with a single word. Early in "The Reader," which is about words and literacy, and much more, Hanna Schmitz, a German tram conductor played by Kate Winslet, comes upon a teenage schoolboy who's obviously ill and takes him into her flat. "Have you always been weak?" she asks. The word sounds a faint alarm -- weak as opposed to Germanic-strong? -- that grows louder as the film swings between past and present, though also between impassioned and abstract.

The story starts in 1958. Hanna seduces the boy, Michael (David Kross), making him an eager slave who must read classic literature to her in exchange for their illicit sex. (He's under-age by several years.) Later, as a law student, Michael discovers that Hanna, as a young woman, was a concentration-camp guard. From that moment on, the young man (who's played in middle age by Ralph Fiennes) must struggle with the meaning of what he has learned -- he loved her, after all -- in something of the same way that modern Germany still struggles with the meaning of the Nazi era.

Stephen Daldry directed, skillfully, from David Hare's adaptation of a widely read novel by Bernhard Schlink. The elegant cinematography is the work of two of today's finest shooters, Chris Menges and Roger Deakins. (Mr. Deakins also shot "Doubt.") And the cast is superb: especially Kate Winslet, who transcends, by far, the limits of her character's narrow soul. Yet "The Reader" remains schematic, and ultimately reductive. It really is about literacy, which proves to be a dismayingly small answer to the enormous questions posed by Hanna's dark past.

Newsweek (David Ansen) review

Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader" was a terse, morally complex, erotically charged novel that examined the impact of German guilt on the generation born after the Holocaust. Director Stephen Daldry ("The Hours") and playwright David Hare have taken up the challenge of turning this double-edged, cerebral book into a film, and it's not surprising—movies being better at the visible than the internal—that the eroticism trumps the moral complexity.

Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) is a well-educated schoolboy who, in 1958, falls into a passionate relationship with a secretive, tough, working-class wo-man 20 years older. Hanna (Kate Winslet) is a woman of few words, sudden rages and a hungry sexual appetite that's matched by her equal ardor for literature; she demands, as foreplay, that Michael read Homer, Twain and Chekhov to her.

Then one day, after seeing each other in secret all summer, Hanna vanishes. The next time Michael spots her, eight years later, he's a law student witnessing a war-crimes trial—and Hanna is in the dock. She's willing to confess her role as a guard at Auschwitz, but she has one secret—a far less damning one—that she clings to with even deeper shame.

"The Reader" is not about the horrors of the "final solution." It's about how Michael deals with the fact that the great first love of his life was implicated in these atrocities. Ralph Fiennes plays Michael in middle age— a parched, solitary man of the law whose unusual relationship with the older Hanna raises questions about his own moral compass. "The Reader" can feel stilted and abstract: the film's only flesh-and-blood characters spend half the movie separated. But its emotional impact sneaks up on you. "The Reader" asks tough questions, and, to its credit, provides no easy answers.

Slant Magazine review Nick Schager

Once again drawn to a tale that alternates between (and often parallels) intrinsically connected pasts and presents, The Hours director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare exhibit, with The Reader, a continued inability to thrillingly translate literary forms to the screen. Even greater than it was in their previous Virginia Wolf-centric collaboration, the problem is that the two mediums aren't necessarily natural bedmates, as piercingly evidenced by the filmmakers' method of adaptation, in which faithful straightforwardness gets the particulars correct but makes their source material's plot tropes, symbols and mirroring structure both simplistic and obvious. Transposing German author Bernhard Schlink's novel about a young boy's maiden sexual relationship with an older woman and, years later, the devastating revelations that come to light about his lover's true identity, Daldry and Hare's film has the stately polish and thoughtfulness that's come to define award-courting season, a sort of faux-highbrow atmosphere whose measured deliberateness, when matched by intense star turns, implies prestige. Yet even a minor peek underneath this elegant surface reveals clunky conventions and superficial shorthand dramatizations, both of which are delivered with self-important sophistication intended to mask the fact that the affair is no more graceful or profound than your average Hollywood mediocrity.

Which is a shame, as The Reader occasionally bumps up against the pressing, universal tension that derives from furiously wanting to alter the past, and yet recognizing that not only is said desire impossible, but that one's anguish over this powerlessness can never be fully assuaged. This discord blooms in the heart of 15-year-old Michael (David Kross), who, stricken with scarlet fever in 1958, is aided on his way home one day by thirtysomething stranger Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). When he returns months later to thank Hanna for her kindness, she catches him peeking at her putting on stockings and responds by bathing him, pleasuring him, and then having him read to her. Their affair, depicted through the prism of adult, divorced Michael's (Ralph Fiennes) remembrances, is given flickering vitality by a few early offhand images (such as Michael's feet racing to another rendezvous). However, a dinner sequence in which flatware clink-clanging ignites Michael's memories of devouring Hanna is a thing of eye-rolling silliness, and moreover, their initial courtship—he tentative and excited by his first lessons in carnality, she concealing concern over their May-December amour with sternness—feels basic, familiar. And as Michael begins regularly visiting Hanna, Daldry's grip on the material quickly goes slack, beginning with the director's insertion of a needless, upfront articulation-of-theme from a teacher who opines that secrets define character.

This blunt thesis statement is followed by Michael telling Hanna that "I didn't think I was good at anything" and, intriguingly, a cutaway to the sight of him confidently, joyously dominating a game of gym-class handball. It's a tantalizing suggestion of dueling deceptions to come, but alas, The Reader never makes good on that promise, as once Hanna suddenly disappears, and her young beau grows into a joyless, emotionally detached law student studying, in 1966, under the tutelage of Bruno Ganz's professor, Michael is reduced to a man conflicted but not particularly complicated. Attending the war crimes trial of female SS guards who stood by as 300 Jews burned to death in a church during the Death March from Auschwitz, Michael is stunned to find that Hanna is one of the accused. It's a discovery that, regrettably, obliterates any potential focus on his own hinted-at (self-)deception and, instead, pivots the action around his agony over both adoring, and now despising, his former erotic muse—who, to make matters worse, used to make doomed inmates read to her, thus saddling Michael with the added realization that he unwittingly served as Hanna's concentration camp prisoner-by-proxy.

Michael's love/hate turmoil propels The Reader into a flip-flopping second half concerned with his attendance at the trial—in which he realizes that Hanna is secretly illiterate, hence her requests to be read to—and his adult efforts to grapple with the past, which mainly involve making audio recordings of books for the incarcerated Hanna. All the while, narrative echoes begin piling up, each of them so tidily schematic that the story's literary roots become distractingly glaring, a situation compounded by two protagonists who are embodied with earnest gravity by Winslet and Kross/Fiennes, yet, like the many plot device-only peripheral figures, remain fuzzy, shallow creations. Even more than the book-on-film atmosphere and the pitiful, disengaging old-age makeup Winslet eventually dons, it's the filmmakers' inability to immerse themselves in, and wrestle with, their characters' distress that ultimately proves most troublesome. Though nominally about individuals' inner—and, by extension, post-Holocaust Germany's national—struggles with history, The Reader remains a stiff, external affair, too refined to muck about in its protagonists' consuming confusion, and too leaden and contrived to allow anything to organically materialize, epitomized by a final conversation between Michael and the sole church-fire survivor (Lena Olin) that takes great pains to spell out those very thematic points which, in the name of subtle storytelling, should best be left unspoken.

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Reader (2008) David Jays from Sight and Sound, February 2009

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth]

PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

CBC.ca Arts review Katrina Onstad

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [3/5]

Village Voice (Ella Taylor) review

The Onion A.V. Club (Tasha Robinson) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

Screen International review Mike Goodridge

Reel.com review [2.5/4] Sean O’Connell, also seen here: filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [3/5]

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Peter Bradshaw's original review from The Guardian, January 2, 2009

The lame, the weak and the godawful Writer David Hare responds to a scathingly negative review from The Guardian, January 19, 2009

Sir David's attack on my Reader review is as glib as the film itself Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, January 19, 2009

Time Out New York (Ben Kenigsberg) review [1/6]

Tulsa TV Memories [Gary Chew]

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [2/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

The New York Times review Manohla Dargis

EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE C 74

USA (129 mi) 2011 ‘Scope Official site

The post 9/11 movies worth considering are Spike Lee’s 25th HOUR (2002), Paul Greengrass’s UNITED 93 (2006), Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (2011), also the video of Paul Simon singing Sounds of Silence at the 10-year Memorial Event Paul Simon's Heartbreaking 'Sound of Silence' at Ground Zero ..., - - and that’s it. You can forget the rest, which don’t so much examine the consequences as manipulate the viewer with plenty of tearful guilt that is really insignificant filmmaking, basically telling the viewer what they already know about losing someone, reminding us in many different ways just how bad it feels. According to an interview with actress Sandra Bullock (The Cast Of 'Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close' Talk Navigating ...), “I think a lot of people haven’t been able to grieve.” Just who are these people, and are they the same undecided voters who can’t make up their minds until they walk into a polling booth? There have been endless discussions, news reports, magazine articles, radio chat sessions, online essays and personal recollections, fragmented memories, tributes, memorials, photos and video reminders, not to mention endless merchandising of the event, so certainly there has been time to process the event. What we haven’t had before, which this film provides, is a child’s perspective, where despite the gravity of the event, this is almost exclusively viewed through the eyes of a child—not just any child, mind you, but a borderline autistic child whose brilliance is only overridden by his meticulously obsessive nature, where he views the world through a catalog file system that is nearly perfectly mathematically arranged. In this way, the writers are allowed to paint with a broader brush, as this isn’t really a child so much as an overly mature young adult, but also one for which there is always a logical expression, where his brain continues to compute until everything makes sense, where the events of 9/11, of course, send the faculties of his brain into utter turmoil, where the computer does not compute and literally goes haywire.

Despite an utterly maudlin story that tearfully shows a brilliant and highly sensitive 11-year old boy Oskar (Thomas Horn), with few social skills, on a journey through the streets of New York to find the connection between the father he lost on 9/11 and a mysterious key he found in his father’s belongings in an envelope identified only by the name “Black.” In his mad rush to make sense of it all, he organizes everything with meticulous detail, like inventing a Dewey Decimal system for tracking down all the families named Black in the entire city, cataloging their addresses, where if he contacts each of them on foot only on weekends, taking no weekends off, he figures it will take him three years to complete his project. Initially allotting 6 minutes per visit, he soon discovers that people offer him sympathy and hugs, have their own stories to tell, which takes considerably more time. And while he enjoys the collective efforts to connect with him and offer some degree of comfort and friendship, snapping photos of those he meets along the way which he places in a scrapbook, all he really wants is to find out what the hell the key opens. While the diverse population he encounters does resemble a portrait of those that lost their lives on that day, only two really stand out. The first is Viola Davis as Abby Black, perhaps the first one visited, where Oskar bursts into her apartment with the subtlety of a blitzkrieg, forced to endure his non-stop, incessant chatter while already moved to tears by the impending separation with her husband who’s about to walk out the door, where she simply hasn’t the strength to send him on his way, so she endures both events happening simultaneously. The other is an old and feeble man who can’t speak (Max von Sydow representing the unspoken voice of the dead), who may be his grandfather, though he claims to be a renter in his grandmother’s apartment, where he’s forced to write hand written notes for Oskar to understand. Oskar asks him to tag along on his visits, which turn into carefully choreographed mime routines.

Oskar runs everywhere he goes, never tiring, blurting out words like tiny explosions, where occasionally he tries to use his words to outrun his thoughts, where in his excitement the adrenaline takes over, creating a frenzied rush of near panic as he continually relives the events of that fateful day, telling perfect strangers what happened to him on 9/11. Well how do you expect people to react? As the film is a recording of his journey, we hear Oskar recall what happened to him over a dozen times, each one adding a significant detail left out of the last version, where the sum accumulation loses any hint of subtlety and starts pounding into your skull like a sledgehammer, where this literally becomes overkill. Forcing the audience to re-live 9/11 over and over again in a movie theater through the repeated exploits of an overeager but delicate child is not exactly great theater, as we re-live the photos and the news reports and Oskar’s own personal recollections, all of which has some cathartic quality, one assumes, except that for many it doesn’t. One’s reaction to a nationwide catastrophe is much too intimately personal, where none of us match the weird and eccentric personality traits of this overly precocious kid, nice as he may otherwise be, but he’s not us and he can’t be made to stand for us. He’s who he is and he makes it understandable by making a child’s pop-up scrapbook of photos and memories, which he calls by the movie title, taking something that’s messy and condensing it all into something nice and neat and clean. Unfortunately, there are many who survive the horrors of war, incest, rape, torture, the Holocaust, or Japanese-American internment camps, and can never utter a word about their experiences to their respective families. For those many individuals who don’t believe America’s collective sentiment can be neatly compartmentalized or rolled into one and the same experience, this movie is something of a disgrace. As a children’s story, this may have more value due to the originality of the child’s-eye view, but there are few kids who can identify with his bizarre personality, where as he ages, he’s only going to become more and more of a social outcast, and that has nothing to do with 9/11, but the reality of his psychological condition. So while the film plays to a populist theme, it’s another example of oversimplification, ultimately little more than merchandising trauma.

Time Out New York [Joshua Rothkopf]]

It is, simply, the “worst day”—that’s how 9/11 is referred to in Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 child’s-eye novel, ambitious if a touch forced. In being true to the intentionally naive material, filmmaker Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours) has now created an earnest puddle of slop: Fragile nine-year-old Oskar (Horn), bereaved after his dad’s death at the World Trade Center, is too quiveringly stunned to be any kind of long-form surrogate for a viewer. You watch him roam through a shaken city nonetheless getting on with itself, and wish this brainy kid—or at least his director—could enjoy a nonglazed moment or two.

That’s not to say the best scenes don’t work, particularly those that transcend the specifics of that terrible Tuesday. Some geeky, relaxed work by Tom Hanks as the doting father helps you feel the toll taken on a sensitive relationship filled with microscopic inquiries, Barney Greengrass brunches and Central Park expeditions. Who will help this Aspergian child emerge? Alas, you also have to endure a guilt-ridden Max von Sydow (why cast one of the best voices in the biz to play a mute?) and the sad sight of Oskar’s handmade scrapbook, in which a jaunty red string restores a falling man to the 106th floor. We might have all felt like lost children for a while, but ten years later, the innocence is shameless.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo | The ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

I've heard people say they weren't sure, even a decade after Sept. 11, if they could handle this film about a boy whose beloved father has recently died in one of the twin towers. I know what they mean. Almost half a century after Dallas, I still have trouble watching film of President Kennedy's assassination. Yet Stephen Daldry's screen version of the Jonathan Safran Foer novel, adapted by Eric Roth, proves hard to handle for other reasons. The production's penchant for contrivance is insufferable—not a single spontaneous moment from start to finish—and the boy is so precocious you want to strangle him.

It's surely not the fault of Thomas Horn, the remarkable young man who plays him. In widely seen clips from his winning appearance on "Teen Jeopardy," Thomas was thoughtful, articulate and poised beyond his years. That must have made him seem like a natural for the role of Oskar Schell, who may or may not have Asperger's syndrome, and who outdoes any of J.D. Salinger's gifted kids in richness of vocabulary and complexity of ideas.

But Oskar in print is one thing. As you read the book (which I also disliked), you are tracking, at your own pace, the workings of the boy's mind—and the pain in his heart—as he searches New York City for a lock that matches a key his father has left behind. It's quite another thing to watch Oskar on the screen, with no respite from his shrill voice or his mannered behavior. A less remarkable actor—or Thomas himself, directed for simplicity—might have taken the curse off the movie's case of the terminal cutes. Mr. Daldry, however, chose to push his young star in the opposite direction, toward a totality of artifice that dilutes the impact of Sept. 11 and underscores the blissed-out illogic of Oskar's quest.

Sandra Bullock is Oskar's griefstruck mother, Linda, and Tom Hanks is his father, Thomas. In flashbacks, father and son express their special relationship with such relentlessly abstruse conversations that you long for one or the other to say something like "Let's have scrambled eggs." Max von Sydow gives a lively performance as The Renter, a mysterious mute. In another film his silence might be golden. In this one it goes platinum.

Scott Tobias The Onion A.V. Club

In the aftermath of 9/11, the question arose of when it would be appropriate for popular art to address the events head-on. For a national tragedy of that magnitude, when would it not be “too soon”? Yet Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, an appalling adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, suggests that maybe that’s the wrong question. The 2006 docudrama United 93, once the trial balloon for “too soon,” dodged exploitation by focusing rigorously on the minutiae of a single flight. But it will always be “too soon” for Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, which processes the immense grief of a city and a family through a conceit so nauseatingly precious that it’s somehow both too literary and too sentimental, cloying yet aestheticized within an inch of its life. It’s 9/11 through the eyes of a caffeinated 9-year-old Harper’s contributor. 

Thomas Horn plays that 9-year-old as a boy who’s somewhere between precocious and autistic, given to channeling his energies through whimsical projects that give his intellect the exercise it needs. After his father (Tom Hanks) dies in the World Trade Center attacks, Horn discovers a key hidden in a vase in an envelope labeled “Black,” and embarks on a quest across the five boroughs to find out what the key opens and perhaps receive one last message from his dad. This involves looking up “Black” in the phone book, visiting every address—on foot, for he is too neurotic for public transit—and sharing his story. (Does a montage of all the diverse people he meets evoke the memorialized faces of the missing and the dead on 9/11? Sure does.) Sandra Bullock gets a few scenes as his exasperated mother, and Max von Sydow plays a mute old lodger who tags along. 

Through the boy’s journey, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close tries to link the personal with the universal, connecting one story of grief within the larger context of a wounded-but-resilient city. (Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour accomplished this in one breathtaking montage, but still.) Yet the film is like a monument that calls attention to its own magnificent architecture—at one point, a “Black” actually cradles one of Horn’s letters to her breast like a newborn babe. Rather than dilute the sap, director Stephen Daldry slathers on Alexandre Desplat’s prodding score—he did the same with Philip Glass in The Hours—and makes a motif out of a body falling from one of the Twin Towers. It’s all very tasteful, he presumes.

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

"If I ask you a question, will you tell me the truth?

Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is relentless in the worst way. Every moment, every line of dialogue presses its themes and metaphors with a mulish determination. Each shot is an emotional appeal. Not for a second does the movie breathe; never does a character say or do something not perfectly on all fours with the film’s designs. When he feels too much slack on the rope, Daldry cranks up the musical score, or launches an overwhelmingly emotional montage, or just has his precocious protagonist start yelling. The movie is furiously obsessive, hell-bent. It will wear you down or die trying.

I can construct a theory of why it should be this way. Extremely Loud is, after all, a story of a young boy toward the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum (Thomas Horn), trying desperately to make sense of his father’s death in the September 11th attacks in the only way he knows how: by throwing his entire being into an elaborate, compulsively-formulated plan to search for something he believes his dad (Tom Hanks) meant for him to find. It makes a certain kind of sense that the film would be as meticulous and purposeful as its main character.

But even if this works as a conceit, what we have in execution is unspeakably pushy and obnoxious. It is not enough that young Oskar Schell must canvas a traumatized city with a business card reading “Amateur Entomologist and Pacifist” looking for the lock that fits a mysterious key found in his late father’s closet. He must also tow along with him an old geezer who is (a) mute; (b) wise; and (c) clearly a long-lost relative of some sort. And he must tell his long-suffering mother (Sandra Bullock) that he wishes it was her in that tower. And if all of that is not enough, there are at least three maudlin plot twists, each calibrated for maximum sob extraction. It’s frankly shameless.

The film deserves credit for featuring an autistic character as a bona fide protagonist, rather than a subject of curiosity and pity as in, e.g., The Black Balloon. But I note that Daldry and his screenwriter, Eric Roth, rather cynically turn this to their advantage. Oskar speaks (and narrates the film) in elaborate, verbose declamations, a fact that the screenplay implicitly ascribes to his Asperger’s, but that in practice allows Roth to repeatedly verbalize the film’s themes: how sometimes bad things happen and they don’t make sense no matter how hard you try to figure them out, or how Thomas’s quest is his attempt to cling to his father’s memory. A weird sort of exploitation.

To be clear, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is earnest, and mostly good-hearted, and I found it hard to hate. It moves pretty well, and is too slick to be boring. I certainly did not have the same virulent reaction as Scott Tobias, despite harboring many of the same complaints. But if you want a movie that genuinely grapples with the effect of 9/11 on New Yorkers who lived through it, look elsewhere (perhaps to Spike Lee’s 25th Hour). This is, if you can believe it, maybe the first mainstream example of 9/11 kitsch.

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” “We ... - The New Yorker David Denby

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Review | Cover Up Your - Pajiba Brian Prisco

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

'Extremely Loud' Review - Entertainment - Time Magazine Mary Pols

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David Edelstein on 'War Horse,' - New York Magazine David Edelstein

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Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close mines 9/11 and - HitFix Drew McWeeny

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Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Screen Daily Brent Simon

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Filmcritic.com Bill Gibron

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Review: 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ... - Film School Rejects Jack Giroux

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Motion Picture Academy Ho-Hum Over 'War Horse,' 'Extremely Loud' Screenings Steve Pond from The Wrap

Stephen Daldry Talks Asperger's, Depicting 9/11 In 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,' And The Oscars Todd Gilchrist interviews the director from The indieWIRE Playlist, December 20, 2011

Stephen Daldry Discusses New Movie Robert Sigel interviews the director from NPR, December 20, 2011

The Cast Of 'Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close' Talk Navigating ... Gabe Toro speaks with several of the principals from The indieWIRE Playlist, December 23, 2011

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Extremely loud & incredibly sentimental - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen

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'Hugo,' Plummer, Von Sydow and Close make this a ... - Boston Herald James Verniere

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Kansas City Star [Jon Niccum]

Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]

'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' review Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Movies - New York Times December 22, 2011

Just Close Enough for an Oscar Nod? - NYTimes ... - New York Times December 19, 2011

Daly, Rebecca

THE OTHER SIDE OF SLEEP

Ireland Netherlands Hungary (88 mi) 2011

The Other Side of Sleep: Cannes Review David Rooney at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 13, 2011

Murder-mystery from first-time director Rebecca Daly deliberately avoids suspense.

CANNES -- In her first feature, The Other Side of Sleep, Irish director Rebecca Daly channels much creative energy into atmosphere and mood, but shows less skill at developing characters or escalating tension. Like its chronic sleepwalker protagonist, who still bears the psychic scars of the disappearance and death of her mother 20 years earlier, this somber drama inhabits a gloomy dream state that’s intriguing but far too opaque.

The film opens mid-dream, as Arlene (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) wakes up in the woods of her small rural hometown in the Irish midlands next to the murdered body of a young woman. Reality and subconscious immediately begin to blur as news circulates that local girl Gina has been killed while returning home after a night out partying. Like a ghost observing her own life from the outside, Arlene registers the gossipy speculation of her fellow factory workers and the shell-shocked grief of Gina’s family at a community prayer service.

Obsessively collecting newspaper coverage of the murder while returning repeatedly to a photograph of the mother she was too young to remember, Arlene insinuates herself into the lives of the dead girl’s family. She befriends Gina’s sister (Vicky Joyce), and cautiously gets closer to the victim’s boyfriend (Sam Keeley), a suspect in the murder.

While the police investigation happens outside the confines of the narrative, Daly and co-screenwriter Glenn Montgomery cast suspicion over a number of shadowy figures, including Arlene’s factory boss and Gina’s troubled father. It’s suggested that Arlene might have committed the murder herself while sleepwalking, but more strongly, that she is courting her own death by wandering the town at night, willfully exposing herself to danger.

All this is moderately absorbing, but the filmmaker’s deliberate avoidance of suspense keeps the drama remote and unaffecting. Even in high-meltdown mode when Arlene is trashing her kitchen and smashing plates, we’re never encouraged to feel much for her, despite Campbell-Hughes’ intense vulnerability.

Characterized by extended silences, minimal dialogue, static shots and penetrating close-ups, the film’s melancholy stillness feels a little studied and its slow pacing makes it a slog. The contrasting notes of balefulness and raw sorrow are disquieting at times, but overall, its spell tends to dissipate without getting under the skin.

In texture, it’s not unlike AMC’s The Killing and the Danish TV series from which that highly addictive procedural drama was adapted. That show conjures death and grief into palpable, insidious forces that condition wave upon wave of unpredictable, often irrational behavior. Daly’s film, however, remains soft and impressionistic, too caught up in its own ambiguities.

The Other Side Of Sleep Fionnuala Halligan at Cannes from Screendaily

With Irish accents so strong they require subtitles, Rebecca Daly’s Offaly villagers are palpably real; her dreamy story ebbs and flows around them as a psychologically frail young girl draws herself into the aftermath of a disturbing murder.

A Cannes Residence project, The Other Side Of Sleep is undeniably Irish but speaks the film language of the European art-house, where it should make an immediate impression, notching strong sales for Paris-based Memento Films (its closest relation is Urzula Antoniak’s Nothing Personal).

Daly’s haunting debut flirts with dreams and reality; it is under-stated yet powerfully etched. Although it can’t quite maintain the force of its opening sequences and an elliptical narrative sometimes takes a turn into muddy waters, The Other Side of Sleep is a notable debut with a lead performance that marks out young Antonia Campbell-Hughes as a talent to watch. Daly’s work with photographer Suzie Lavelle and her sound team of Michel Schopping and Marc Lister is notable throughout.

Arlene (Campbell-Hughes) is a sleepwalker since childhood, a lonely and vulnerable orphan living by herself in a downbeat Offaly village (this is not an Irish Tourist Board destination) with occasional visits from her grandmother.

None of this is apparent in the memorable opening sequence, however, when she rises from her bed and wakes up beside a dead body wrapped in a duvet in the woods. A factory worker, she leaves the scene, comes home and showers, and goes straight to work.

Arlene lives in a silent, internalised world; a friend jokes that people think she’s a little mad. The murder of her mother in England when she was an infant has left her cautious and alienated, yet somehow she has a need to reach out to the dead girl, whose smiling face reaches out of the newspapers to ensnare her. Villagers gossip about what might have happened, denigrating the victim and pointing the finger at her wild boyfriend (Keeley), who Arlene is also drawn to.

In the meantime, her sleepwalking - and terror of it - is intensifying, provoked by the trauma of waking up beside a corpse (although it does seem odd that in such a small town her neighbours would not be more aware of Arlene’s nocturnal ramblings). Arlene, at times, looks dangerously like she’s about to join a long line of cinema’s silent, blank-faced young girls, but Daly and her co-writer Montgomery have worked hard with young Campbell-Hughes to give her more than meets the eye.

Cannes critics praise director Rebecca Daly for The Other Side of Sleep Vanessa Thorpe at Cannes from The Guardian, May 14, 2011

Damian, Anca

CROSSING DATES (Intalniri incrucisate) F 9

Romania Finland (100 mi) 2008

This incoherent catastrophe is among the most stupefyingly awful films I have ever seen, which could possibly be due to the worst subtitling on record, but this first time feature film director was present during the screening claiming she wrote what we just saw, so I’m inclined to believe either her English is atrocious or she simply wrote the most insipid, god-awful dialogue I may have ever seen, as so much of it made absolutely no sense of any kind. It was as if people were speaking pure gibberish for two of the three segments. The film is in three parts, supposedly linked together by a common element, but don’t hold your breath for any real connection to speak of. The director indicated this began as a film short that she expanded to feature length, so perhaps the final segment (at least in understandable language) was closer to the origin of her idea, while the other segments are pretty close to worthless. They are laughably bad, but listening to the seriousness of the director afterwards, one realizes right away that she hasn’t even an ounce of a sense of humor, that she’s instead pretentiously full of self-justifying explanations. I can only think she must know somebody important at a high level in Romania as this film is not suitable for screening. I’m open to the possibility that in Romanian language this may be an altogether different film experience.

As seen in a theater, an obnoxious radio personality is summoned for a prison interview to meet an inmate who is supposedly his exact double. But when they meet, the interview goes nowhere. It’s as uncomfortable an opening segment as one could possibly be subjected to, because if it’s 30 minutes in length, the first 25 have no interest whatsoever. There is a scene of mild interest (a guy making a jerk of himself) in the parking lot afterwards. In the second segment, the prison warden who is female meets up with a Finnish colleague at the airport for a business conference in Bucharest, where they apparently have a romantic history together, but you’d never know it by the inane dialogue that is entirely in English. My only clue was the exposed cleavage in a red dress. But they are interrupted in mid form by an unexpected visitor. We’re not talking aliens here, which might have helped. The two ignore the visitor still in their room and do the nasty on the floor. A crisis sends the warden scurrying back to the prison. In the final sequence, the visitor in the previous sequence actually has a life, happily meeting up with her brother after he’s released from prison, but he soon realizes she’s being handled by a goon who is offering her services for nude magazines, which sends the brother voluntarily scurrying back to the prison, like he’s somehow happier there.

After watching this incomprehensible movie, the director takes the microphone and claims it’s all about the absence of love which is responsible for why people end up heading in the wrong directions. Wow. This is one stinker of a film to be avoided at all costs.

Damiano, Gerard

DEEP THROAT

USA (61 mi) 1972

Time Out

This notorious porn movie was originally released in 1972. Its sole intention is to arouse with close-ups of fellatio. One of three principal women, Lovelace, discovers that her clitoris is in the wrong place - in her throat. Cue close-ups of one dick-swallowing trick after another. Stilted performances, dud production values and a thrashy, hilariously cheesy '70s soundtrack.

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

A dirty-funky joke, the one about the small woman on Swallow Street, the salacious party trick that spread out of sticky Times Square screens and into 1970s American culture like a tremor. The tone is offhand carnal vaudeville, Linda Lovelace -- frizzy, freckled, slender, affectingly half-lost -- wanders into her bungalow and nonchalantly greets her cigarette-dangling roommate (Dolly Sharp), who’s spread on the kitchen counter with a lout’s head between her thighs. Orgasms have long eluded the heroine, sex makes her "sort of tingly all over, and then... nothing." An orgy leaves a roomful of exhausted studs strewn about the living room but none of those bursting dams and exploding bombs she yearns for. Finally, in a medical examination adorably patterned after A Day at the Races, the Ovidian revelation: Her clitoris is hidden deep in her larynx, the bell at the bottom of the well. The doctor (Harry Reems) volunteers to help her overcome her gag complex ("a matter of discipline"), the oral spectacle that follows startles, tickles, and earns its shuddering orgasmic montage of fireworks and rockets. Parodying a certain Mickey & Sylvia hit, the soundtrack tries to make sense of it all ("Looooove is strange, a lot of people like it in the mouth..."). As befits a tale of displaced anatomy and pleasure, Gerard Damiano’s crossover triple-X smash is a male fantasy of female desire, a Doris Day-Rock Hudson romp with the polished veneer scraped off and the coy innuendo replaced with slapdash, raunchy surrealism (Lovelace in nursing lingerie readying herself for an old kinkster’s soda pop and straw, a spent Reems clutching his bandaged schlong under the sheets, "wounded in the line of duty"). Nixon led the prudes after it only to have its title haunt his dethroning scandal, Cronenberg took the yonic drollery and ran with it. As for Lovelace, there she is gasping in her final close-up, flushed and smeary and smiling, ready to be launched as pop emblem and pop casualty. With Carol Connors, Bill Harrison, Bob Phillips, Jack Birch, and William Love.

The Deuce [Ed Demko]

There's no doubt that the Gerard Damiano's 1972 porn masterpiece "Deep Throat" is not only one of the most successful films of all time, but it's also one that holds a great deal of historical significance as well. It was the first and only porn film that managed to get a great deal of mainstream attention and recognition at the time and even helped coin the phrase "Porno chic". Because of "Deep Throat" it was thought that pornographic films would start to move outside of the underground and into the mainstream theaters all over the United States. Although that never happened it certainly is one of the reasons why people have more lax attitudes on the subject up until this day. Without the release of "Deep Throat" who knows if that would have ever been possible.

Another thing that "Deep Throat" should be credited for is introducing the world to the most famous porno actress of all time, Linda Lovelace. At the time the actress became a phenomenon outside of the pornographic film industry and somewhat of an icon of porn. After all she didn't play a character in the film as she played herself. Understandably she was deserving of the attention however because not only was she actually funny in the movie but she also had a charisma about her that better looking porn actresses of today could never achieve. Not only that but she was the first woman to perform a "deep throat" in a porn flick before and it pretty much had jaw's dropping in every theater that it was shown.

Linda Lovelace however wouldn't be the only porn actor in the film though to become a phenomenon. The most memorable role to me in the film however goes to veteran porn actor Harry Reems who played the hilariously over the top Doctor Young. Not only did Reems show his acting chops in the film as well as his talents in comedy, but managed to really work well with Lovelace in the film. It was later said that Lovelace was sweet on Reems and would work very well with him when they managed to get rid of her pimp/boyfriend Chuck Traynor (who is actually credited as a production manager on the film) for the shoot. Reems himself was brought up on charges in Memphis at one time for "conspiracy to transport interstate obscene material" for a movie that he simply acted in. He's even mentioned that he felt that he was a recognizable part of the film and was getting the punishment for it. Director Gerard Damiano and star Linda Lovelace were actually brought in to be witnesses against him. He also mentioned that the only reason the case was overturned is because the Republicans had lost control of the White House when Jimmy Carter was elected, as Nixon was dead set on going after the porn industry as the Watergate controversy spiraled out of control.

The thing about "Deep Throat" though that made it special was the fact that the movie had better production values than most other pornographic films from that time period. Although by today's standards it's not much to look at, it's still one of the first pornographic films to achieve such high technical standards at the time as were many of the Mafioso funded films of Gerard Damiano. At the end of the day it looks like your typical B-movie, but if you are at all familiar with pornography made before it as well as porno loops you'll see just how much better the production is here as a whole.

Another notable about the movie is that some Hollywood stardom has actually come out of it in the strangest of ways. See actress Carol Conners and actor Jack Birch worked on the film together and collectively they are the parents of actress Thora Birch who starred in the Academy Award winning film "American Beauty".

The main thing about "Deep Throat" was the fact that it's still to this day the biggest money maker as far as film at the box office goes. Sure Titanic made more at the box office but it certainly cost more to make. "Deep Throat" was shot on a modest $24,000 budget while bringing in an estimated 600 million dollars making it the most profitable film ever made. Considering that most of the money coming in was doing so in cash, it's believed that the movie actually made more over the billion dollar mark but there is no evidence to prove it. Most of the money was going into illegal activities and it's been noted that the mob couldn't figure out how to cover up all of the money that was coming in.

Overall, "Deep Throat" is a historically significant film that deserves the attention that it has received. It's one of the most important films ever made and I would dare to say that it's easily the most important adult film that has ever been produced.

VideoVista [Andrew Darlington]

eFilmCritic Reviews The Ultimate Dancing Machine

Movie Vault [Avril Carruthers]

Adult DVD Talk - VCA [Flash]

Adult DVD Talk [Selena Silver]

Adult DVD Talk [classic connoisseur]

All Movie Guide [Matthew Doberman]

Channel 4 Film

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

Deep Throat (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deep-throating - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat 1972 YouTube (59 seconds)

Daney, Serge – film critic

Chronicle Of A Passion Steve Erickson has many Daney offerings, some translated by Erickson himself

Although widely considered the best living French film critic at the time of his death in 1992, Serge Daney remains pretty much unknown in the English-speaking world. An editor of CAHIERS DU CINEMA from 1974 to 1981, critic for the daily LIBERATION from 1981 until his death, and founder of TRAFIC, Daney published four books during his lifetime. An additional three (a collection of journal entries, L'EXERCISE A ETE PROFITABLE, MONSIEUR; a book-length interview, PERSEVERANCE; an anthology of sportswriting, L'AMATEUR DE TENNIS) have come out posthumously. Yet no publisher has found it worth their while to put out an English-language Daney collection .

Thanks to the graciousness of editor Paul Willemen, I've finally managed to get a copy of the manuscript for Daney's CINEMA IN TRANSIT, an unpublished English-language anthology acquired by the British Film Institute in 1994. I've written to them to inquire about the possibility of posting it on this site but have yet to receive a response and doubt I ever will. If anyone out there would like a copy, please contact me.

In other Daney news, the French publisher POL has just released a collection of his work from 1964 through 1981, the period when he wrote for CAHIERS DU CINEMA. The best source for ordering Daney's French books in North America appears to be  Gallimard, Montreal's French-language bookstore. They carry TRAFIC, as well.

For your one-stop Daney needs, you can take a look at the Serge Daney in English blog.

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Serge Daney introduced by Adrian Martin from Senses of Cinema

Montage Obligatory The War, the Gulf and the Small Screen, by Serge Daney from Rouge

Serge Daney: L’Homme cinéma - Harvard Film Archive a retrospective of films advocated by Daney

The Tracking Shot in Kapo Serge Daney from Senses of Cinema, originally published in Trafic, Fall 1992

The Missing Image The Missing Image – From Cinephilia to the World – The Trajectory of Serge Daney, Jonathan Rosenbaum from New Left Review, 2005

Dzenis on Postcards from the cinema Serge Daney, Postcards from the cinema, review by Anna Dzenis from Screening the Past, July 19, 2007

Obituary written by Adrian Martin

Dang Di, Phan

BI, DON’T BE AFRAID! (Bi, Dung So!)

Vietnam France Germany (96 mi) 2010

Bi, Don't Be Afraid! (Bi, Dung So!) Lisa Nesselson at Cannes from Screendaily

Grounded in the authentic bustle of Hanoi and the uncomfortable interplay of familial relationships Bi, don’t be afraid! is a thoughtful cinematic exploration of inchoate longing, the messy consequences of physical decline and encroaching death, and confirmation that sex and youthful exuberance spring eternal. Frankly and overtly sensual with scant dialogue, this contemporary portrait of relatives living in close quarters while harbouring secrets is conveyed with impressive visual assurance.

Writer-director Phan Dang Di’s leisurely debut feature, which was part of the Cinefondation’s Atelier line-up in 2008, is a heat-soaked panorama of human desires that is probably more festival fare than art house material in most territories, but bodes very well for the directing future of Phan Dang Di who wrote the screenplay for Bui Thac Chuyen’s 2009 Venice Horizons and Toronto competition title Adrift (Choi Voi).

Ice is a recurring motif. It’s so hot that six-year-old lad Bi’s favourite place to play is among the various work stations at a neighbourhood ice factory. Bi’s attractive but strait-laced Aunt is later seen masturbating with a hunk of ice.

Bi’s seriously ill paternal grandfather has recently returned from years abroad and uses ice to dull the painful cramps in his belly. 

Bi’s father’s coping mechanism consists of getting sloppy drunk with cronies every night in a large outdoor café.  Bi, his father and grandfather, while each distinct characters, seem to suggest three major phases in every man’s life. Bi forms a bond with his ailing granddad.

Bi’s mother is frustrated by her husband’s filial cowardice and unwillingness to have sex… at least with her. The family’s cook is a not-always-silent witness to the proceedings.

Bi’s spinster aunt looks after him more attentively than the rest of the household. When do-gooders fix her up with a man they think might be a suitable mate, she struggles to take his advances in stride. But it’s a much younger man she encounters by chance who will rock her to the core.

Various couplings boast convincing raw energy. While there’s not a lot of humour, a scene in which two characters inhale helium from balloons and carry on a high-pitched conversation is as funny as it is incongruous.

Daniel, Bill

WHO IS BOZO TEXINO?

USA (56 mi) 2005

10/05 IN THE RAILROAD EARTH : Bill Daniel's 'Who Is Bozo Texino ... Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge

Who Is Bozo Texino? is a great American movie, and its greatness is tied up very closely with its American-ness. With this brilliant experimental documentary, self-styled hobo film-maker Daniel places himself firmly in the bootprints of Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie - a fine, long tradition of American artists who look for their inspiration to the marginal, the underclass, the vagabond and the outcast. Nominally a chronicle/survey/history of boxcar graffiti (a tradition as old as the railroad itself) and the men who create it, Who Is Bozo Texino? soon transcends its narrow subject-matter to become a gloriously rough-edged elegy for an America which is being swept away before our eyes.

Unlike the overwhelming majority of documentaries - even entertaining recent examples like Murderball, Dogtown and Z-Boys and Stoked - Daniel's film manages a near-perfect union of radical form and radical content, And it does so in consistently accessible style: at first you're intrigued by the stunning monochrome images captured by his self-effacing, sensitively-handled camera(s); by the startling kineticism of his fluent editing style; by the sheer range of voices, music and sound-effects we hear as he tracks down a series of grizzled hobos and wisdom-dispensing graffiti-'markers.'

Then you realise that, just as these men have always instinctively rejected authority and convention, Daniel (who has made a fantastic old-school poster for the movie) has likewise embraced the unorthodox in his style of film-making - even down to his choice of title and running-time. Indeed, in less than an hour Daniel manages to say more about life, art, America and the simple joy of film-making than most directors manage in decades.

There's a secret stigma, reaping wheel
Diminish, a carnival of sorts
Chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel
Stranger, stranger to these parts
Gentlemen don't get caught, cages under cage.
Gentlemen don't get caught,
Box cars (are pulling) out of town,

There's a secret stigma, reaping wheel
Stranger, stranger to these parts
Chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel
Diminish, stranger

Box cars are pulling
a carnival of sorts
Out of town

Daniels, Lee

PRECIOUS B 83

USA (109 mi) 2009

While there is a compelling story here and moments of brilliance in certain scenes, the amateurish direction and lack of subtlety, despite the attention to detail, seriously overdramatizes at the wrong times, creating an uneven tone throughout, especially an over-reliance on Precious’s high gloss fantasy world, where the editing is at times atrocious, adding artificial sequences so jarringly obnoxious that their garish style undermines the otherwise established realist tone, which has the effect of muddling the story, as these fantasy sequences, many shown early on in short succession, detract more than they add, each time juxtaposed immediately following a humiliating violent confrontation, where the dramatic power of the moment gets lost in a glitter collage of teen wish fulfillment where Precious sees herself as a slender white girl. This story is so compelling it needs no glorification, as the life of Claireece “Precious” Jones, played by newcomer Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe, is about as abusive and horrifying as it gets, a morbidly obese teenage black girl in Harlem whose mother (Mo’Nique) berates her constantly, ordering her around like her personal slave while also physically abusing her, subjecting her to mental defeatism by continually telling her she is worthless. Despite going to high school and enjoying the world away from her mother, she sits in the back and does not participate, never learning to read or write. When she becomes pregnant at 16 with her second child, her first born with Downs syndrome at 12, repeatedly raped by her own father, her mother’s boyfriend, the school principal suggests an alternative school that would help her learn to read. The mother has a conniption because she thinks it will affect her welfare check, and Mo’Nique has a welfare queen scam going on to collect as much welfare as possible by doing absolutely nothing, where her life consists of drinking and smoking cigarettes in front of the TV while making her daughter’s life as miserable as possible, actually blaming her for stealing her boyfriend. Precious, however, is a gentle giant who silently endures it all, but it’s clear she’s never had a moment of happiness in her life.

The opening sequences are so harrowingly miserable that they are only made worse by what feel like one-note, stereotypical depictions of meanness and abuse that thrive on crude language and over-melodramatizations. But once Precious finds her new school, a new world opens up to her, coming under the tutelage of the near saintly Ms. Rain, an excellent Paula Patton, who is a stand-in for Sapphire, a former Harlem literacy instructer and the lesbian author of the book Push upon which the film is based, named one of the top ten books in 1996. Ms. Rain feels right at home with the most difficult, hardest to reach students, all girls as it turns out, but she treats each with the kind of respect they never get at home, so her classroom becomes a safe haven and offers some of the best moments in the film. The girls themselves are a treat, all stylish attitude with hair trigger tempers and foul mouths that fume in sexual innuendo. The teaching method, unfortunately, feels very similar to Hillary Swank’s portrayal with at-risk high school kids in FREEDOM WRITERS (2007), where she similarly has her students spend time every day writing about their personal experiences in their diaries, which opens up their eyes by forcing them to verbalize their thoughts. This teaching method requires Precious to learn how to read and write in miraculous fashion, all supposedly during her pregnancy, though her actual speech is literred with foul, sexually graphic terminology. (See an excerpt from the book at the Random House publishing website) One of the problems with black lesbian writers is not only their hostility towards black men in general, where Precious’s father is depicted as a savage ghost, mostly an offscreen presence, yet responsible for the ruination of a young girl’s life, a common thread seen throughout the works of Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Tina Mabry, or now Sapphire, but they also can’t resist depicting an idealized, rainbow-colored camaraderie between the women where sisterhood suddenly materializes at the hospital, all rallying their united support around Precious when she delivers her baby, an odd twist because these women were at each other’s throats with a healthy dose of scorn and skepticism in the previous scenes.

Sidibe narrates her story throughout the film, much of it taken from her diary entries, spoken in a calm monotone of semi-literate, stream-of-conscious language as she describes the gritty, unforgiving world around her, oftentimes feeling so alienated and alone that she may as well be from another planet. Like Celie, a similarly abused child in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, both survive by developing a trust in language, Precious in her diary entries, Celie in her series of letters, which connects them both to the outside world. There’s a manipulative pan shot as figures in black history encircle Precious as she is suddenly capable of connecting a sense of self and identity to her own history. Precious eventually reveals the truth about her father to the welfare office, where the sympathetic worker is played by a near unrecognizable Mariah Carey without makeup, where their bond along with her school and teacher allows Precious to confront her mother with a renewed belief in herself. What happens gets ugly, and is a bit hard to believe, but baby in hand, Precious hits the streets in the snow with nowhere to go, which in her case is grounds for optimism. There are several outstanding moments, Sidibe has hers after discovering her father passed the HIV virus to her, where she is literally laid bare in class, exposed perhaps for the first time in her life, while Mo’Nique has a similar confession, probably the scene of the film, when the social worker at the welfare office demands to know what she was doing while her boyfriend was having sex with her daughter. It’s a gut-wrenching moment that is beyond words, but it releases a world of indescribable pain off the shoulders of a 16-year old girl whose life has finally been handed back to her. It’s these haunting moments of raw emotion that save the film, as the performances are simply outstanding. Overall the tone of the film is uneven and manipulative throughout, and doesn’t really match that dramatic firepower offered in a few brilliant scenes, but it’s nonetheless searingly intense, uniquely relevant, and hard to look away from this seamy underside of life.

Time Out Online (Geoff Andrew) review [3/6]

Harlem, the late ’80s: Clareece ‘Precious’ Jones is 16, terribly overweight, illiterate, frequently bullied and already pregnant for a second time – by her own father. Only when she’s sent (against her mother’s wishes) to an alternative school and begins to express her anger and pain does life begin to seem a little less hellish. It’s hard to be unaffected by this familiar story of horrendous abuse, though a certain slickness and literalism in scripting, camerawork and cutting threaten to turn the film into a kind of Sundance variation on the ‘sickness movie of the week’ genre. But the performances somehow make it work: not just Sidibe as Precious, but Mo’Nique as her mother, who in one scene towards the end single handedly takes the movie into far more rewardingly complex territory.

Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [2/6]

Given the months-long hype, what’s most bewildering about Sundance sensation Precious is its overall shrug-worthiness. You’d think the litany of horrors that befall Harlem teenager Clareece “Precious” Jones (Sidibe)—illiteracy, rape, domestic abuse, Mariah Carey—would register with some piercing and perceptive effect. Instead, they pass by with the glazed-over, lookie-lookie luridness of a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode.

And yet, at the film’s center is a fully lived-in performance by newcomer Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe, who will hopefully go on to better things and not be cast aside, Slumdog-style, in the post-awards season. The actor holds her own with such scene-stealers as Mo’Nique—dangling her cigarettes with Oscar-baiting malevolence as Precious’s mom, Mary—and navigates the neorealism-lite trappings with brazen, always arresting confidence.

The film’s best scenes take place in a literacy class headed by a tough-love educator (Patton). It’s here that Precious finds the means to express herself in ways reminiscent of Celie, the uneducated heroine of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple. Indeed, director Lee Daniels seems to be aping Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Purple (specifically the sequence where Celie discovers a long-hidden pile of letters from her sister) in the moment when the camera circles Precious while video images of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, et al. are projected around her. The meaning is the same—history floods the consciousness of both Celie and Precious and powerfully widens their worldview—but Daniels’s methods are decidedly cruder. It’s hardly surprising that, in another instance, he emphasizes the revulsion of incest by cutting to a pan of sizzling eggs. Even the worst behaviors, he appears to be saying, have to go over easy.

Moving Pictures magazine [Eric Kohn] at Cannes

Lee Daniels' Precious could go wrong in many ways, and yet nimbly avoids the obvious trappings of the material. Based on the novel Push (and screened at Sundance under that name) by noted poet Sapphire, the story focuses on an overweight, pregnant, Harlem teenager (Gabourey Sidibe, in her first movie role) at odds with her crazed single mother (Mo'Nique) and the larger possibilities of the world around her. With a lively soundtrack and heavily stylized manifestations of the girl's emotional distress, Precious frequently approaches the dangers of getting too ambitious - and somehow emerges unscathed.

This results from more than just Daniels' directorial guidance. Primarily recognized for producing Monster's Ball rather than for his sole previous directing credit, Shadowboxer, Daniels tends to pile on many ideas at once, which runs the risk of alienating his viewers. But the constant experimental formalism in Precious jibes with the nature of the characters, and thus succeeds because the performances never falter. Sidibe turns in a frighteningly low-key onscreen personality to reflect Precious' abused, withdrawn nature (her father raped her, adding two children to her life). This creates a powerful contrast with the vibrant world inside her head, where she dreams of a happier life. In her fantasies, Precious wears lavish clothing, dances with the man of her dreams, smiles for the cameras and pleases the crowds. The movie tracks her progress from wishing for this impossibly palatial world to understanding how to correct the problems of the one in which she resides.

By staying close to his main character's downtrodden perspective for most of the film, Daniels keeps things refreshingly simplistic despite the dark themes. Because of her poor schooling and virtually nonexistent parental guidance, Precious views the world with childlike simplicity - and yet she develops a sense of confidence that fosters her own personalized intellectual capabilities. A witty moment where Precious imagines herself in an old, histrionic Italian movie as it airs on television, echoing Oliver Stone's ironic use of canned laugh tracks in Natural Born Killers, shows us the remarkable complexity of the girl's escapist tendencies. But just as she grows more distant from her unhappy existence, it starts to improve.

Guided by the passionate welfare case worker Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey, surprisingly less showy than one might imagine) and the supportive efforts of a teacher (Paula Patton) in the alternative school where she goes after proving herself academically superior to low-rent public school education, Precious gradually steps out of her mental box. This transition would simply not seem credible without Sidibe's extraordinarily subtle performance. Watching her try to comprehend her constantly expanding universe is at once scary and sociologically fascinating. In early scenes, since she lacks the verbal skills and optimism to find success, her daydreams contain a cold, disconnected feeling that constantly reminds us of their unreality - strengthening the discomfort permeating the real world.

Mo'Nique's awards-ready performance completes the puzzle. A grotesque manifestation of American poverty, it gives us one of the more memorable and important movie monsters in years. She's composed of fragments, much like the structure of the film; an abusive husband, lack of work ethic and no evident talent give rise to her own rage, which she takes out on her despondent child. But as Precious grows out of the psychological cage where her mother desperately tries to trap her, Mo'Nique gets the opportunity to allow her character to blossom into a fully believable human being. Her final monologue, a self-defense of her bad mothering delivered to Mrs. Weiss, explains not only her own flaws but how they prevented Precious from reaching her potential. The scene is unabashedly manipulative but not vindictive, making it an apt summation of the movie itself.

New York Times review Michiko Kakutani, June 14, 1996

What do you get if you borrow the notion of an idiosyncratic teen-age narrator from J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" and mix it up with the feminist sentimentality and anger of Alice Walker's "Color Purple"? The answer is "Push," a much-talked-about first novel by a poet named Sapphire, a novel that manages to be disturbing, affecting and manipulative all at the same time.

Like Celie in "The Color Purple," the heroine of "Push" is the survivor of a brutal childhood and youth; at the age of 16, Claireece or "Precious" as she calls herself, has already had two children by the man she knows as her father. Her mother has not only allowed these rapes to occur, but also beats Precious for stealing her man. She, too, sexually abuses Precious, and treats her as a maidservant around the house.

It's hard to imagine how things could get much worse, but in the course of "Push," Sapphire throws a lot more misfortune Precious's way. Little Mongo, Precious's first child, to whom she gave birth at the age of 12, turns out to have Down's syndrome and is quickly taken away from her. A week after her second child, Abdul, is born, Precious finds herself out on the streets of Harlem, without a place to live. Not much later, she learns that her father has infected her with H.I.V.

Given these circumstances, it's no surprise that Precious often feels as if her mind has become a television set, playing and replaying videos that offer her a brief respite from the bleak realities of her daily life. In these daydreams, she is thin, not fat; white, not black; loved, not mocked.

"Push," however, is not the story of a helpless or self-loathing victim. It's meant to be a story of female empowerment and triumph. Through the help of a gifted teacher named Rain, Precious learns to read and write. She learns how to write down her own experiences and turn them into poetry. She also gets hooked up with an incest survivors' support group, and a H.I.V.-positive support group. She gains friends, self-respect and the hope of one day going to college. "Push," the paramedic says to her when she's giving birth. "Push," says her teacher, when she despairs of making anything of her life.

What prevents all this from sounding as cloying as the characters' names is Precious's street-smart, angry voice, a voice that may shock readers with its liberal use of four-letter words and graphic descriptions of sex, but a voice that also conjures up Precious's gritty, unforgiving world. Sapphire somehow finds lyricism in Precious's life, and in endowing Precious with her own generous gifts for language, she allows us entree into her heroine's state of mind.

Precious talks of the neighborhood addicts with "kraters like what u see wen you look at spots on the moon" on their arms, and girls in her incest support group who sit in a circle with "faces like clocks, no bombs." She speaks of time seeming "like clothes in the washing machine at laundry mat -- round 'n round, up 'n down," and the television in her own head, "always static on, flipping picture."

"I'm walking across the lobby room real real slow," Precious recalls. "Full of chicken, bread; usually that make me not want to cry remember, but I feel like crying now. My head is like the swimming pool at the Y on one-three-five. Summer full of bodies splashing, most in shallow end; one, two in deep end. Thas how all the time years is swimming in my head. First grade boy say, Pick up your lips Claireece 'fore you trip over them."

Although the reader comes to feel enormous sympathy for Precious, one is constantly aware of the author standing behind the scenes, orchestrating her heroine's terrifying plummet into the abyss and her equally dramatic rescue. The first time we see Precious with a book at school, she is having difficulty sounding out the words in a picture book and learning the alphabet. Only pages later, her teacher is trying to get her to read "The Color Purple" in class.

For that matter, Alice Walker's ghost hovers more and more insistently over "Push" as the novel progresses, lending Precious's story a blunt ideological subtext. We learn that white social workers are foolish, patronizing liberals, and that men are pigs who only think about sex. Though it's easy to understand how Precious might hold all of these views, it soon becomes clear that Precious's creator, Sapphire, is also stacking the deck. In a lengthy postscript in which Precious's classmates tell the story of their lives, we are treated to a recitation of crimes committed against women by men. Rita's father kills her mother in front of her eyes, and Rita begins working as a hooker at the age of 12. Rhonda is raped by her brother, then thrown out of the house by her mother; when she gets a job taking care of an old white man, he asks her for sexual favors. Jermaine is molested by a boy at the age of 7, then raped by a friend's father a few years later; at 19, she is assaulted by six men.

No doubt this rapid-fire sequence of horrifying stories is supposed to mean that Precious has finally found a community of friends with shared experiences. Instead, they leave the reader with the feeling that one has abruptly exited the world of the novel and entered the world of a support group. In trying to open out her heroine's story and turn it into a more general comment on society, Sapphire has made the tale of Precious decidedly less moving than it might have been.

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

There are worst-case scenarios, and then there is Precious, who’s in a hellish league of her own. The heroine and narrator of the novel Push by Sapphire (born Ramona Lofton), now a much-hyped film called Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, is the embodiment of everything—I mean, everything—American society values least and victimizes most. She’s a poor, illiterate, morbidly obese, dark-skinned African-American girl. She was raped by her father from the age of 3, pregnant with his child at 12 (the baby, which she names Mongo, has severe Down syndrome), and then pregnant by him again at 16, when the novel begins. She’s also sexually molested by her jealous, welfare-cheating, gross, and sedentary mother, although the genital fingering might seem preferable to the verbal and physical abuse. The book gives you quite a bludgeoning. I started to pull back from it in a flashback when the 12-year-old girl is in labor on the kitchen floor and her mother is kicking her in the face.

Sapphire goes on to chart Precious’s journey from darkness to light: her transfer to an alternative school and acceptance into a warm, matriarchal community, where she’s encouraged to give voice to her experiences in poetry and prose. A former teacher, Sapphire wants to show young women that if the damaged, emotionally locked-up Precious can develop a sense of self-worth and autonomy, anyone can. But Push, written in Precious’s distinctive patois (“I still don’t say nuffin’. This hoe is keeping me from maff class. I like maff class”), is so schematic, so single-minded in its depiction of predatory evil and empowering good that you may think its title is not an exhortation to drive through pain but a description of the author’s technique.

I dwell on the novel because the movie leads with it (that subtitle!) and because it faithfully, even reverently, sticks to Sapphire’s outline. But the director, Lee Daniels, working from a screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher, has a good sense of when to push and when to lie back. His rhythms are punchy—abrasive without being assaultive. And he has such a striking actress in Gabourey Sidibe, who plays Precious, that he doesn’t need to force her alienation—or ours. I’m not judging girls who look like Sidibe in life, but her image onscreen is jarring to the point of being transgressive, its only equivalent to be seen in John Waters’s pointedly outrageous carnivals. Her head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin, her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits. Her expression is either surly or unreadable. Even with her voice-over narration, you’re meant to stare at her ebony face and see nothing. The movie is saying that she’s not an object, but the way that Sidibe is directed she becomes one. It’s only in a couple of heavy-handed fantasy sequences (she emerges from a theater in a bright-red gown to popping flashbulbs) that her eyes are windows to the soul.

Daniels does everything to hold the melodrama at bay, but there’s only so much he can do. The comedian Mo’Nique gives a vivid and surprisingly varied performance as Precious’s mother, Mary (ironic-name alert): I have no doubt she found psychological justifications for Mary’s sadism, for the displacement onto Precious of her fury at a man who she thinks preferred her daughter to her. But the woman who drops a TV onto Precious as she hurries down the stairs with her infant is a sociopath, too singularly garish to be universal. As Precious’s teacher, Ms. Rain, Paula Patton is at the other extreme. A light-skinned beauty with fine features, she has a network-TV wholesomeness: Even her lesbianism has the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval—a poster on her wall of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. The most offbeat touch is a social worker played by Mariah Carey. She’s a tad too goody-goody, but her toasty, caressing voice is a gift beside Sidibe’s mush-mouthed monosyllables.

Daniels does well with the girls in Precious’s class, who have a mordant, barbed rapport. They’re almost as defended as she is, so when they bond with her it’s not sticky: You can feel their relief in being able to get out of their own heads and be kind. That’s when the film is genuinely moving without being manipulative. But it somehow skips over the part where Precious actually learns. When she tells us, in voice-over, that she won a literacy prize, you may think you missed something. Precious jumps from signpost to signpost. Set in 1987, it features obligatory images on TV of Reagan and Ollie North—but also, for hope’s sake, photos of Oprah Winfrey (thinner than she was at the time), who signed onto the film as co-executive-producer after it was made. The elements of Precious are powerful and shocking, but the movie is programmed. It is its own study guide.

Edelstein's Response to Commenters a response to his angered critics, specifically Latoya Peterson at Jezebel:

Some readers (and a posse led by Latoya Peterson at Jezebel) are angered by my review of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. They believe my language reflects deep and both conscious and unconscious prejudices toward African-Americans, obesity, and the so-called “underclass.” Defending myself against those charges (as well as outright abuse) is bound to be a losing battle, but I respect the feelings of Peterson and many of her commenters (the least abusive, anyway) and am sick at the thought that my attempts to evoke this movie have been viewed so harshly — and, I believe, unfairly.

When a filmmaker in or out of Hollywood makes a movie about a victimized African-American girl, you can expect him or her to cast an actress who is thin and light-skinned with big round eyes to make everyone — black and white — want to identify with her. Lee Daniels, in filming Precious, has gone to the opposite extreme. He presents a heroine, Precious (Gabourey Sidibe), who is, in the context of mainstream American culture, on the bottom rung status-wise. That is not my prejudice; it is reflected in every aspect of our society, from job opportunities to magazine covers. (Outside of Oprah, who has spent millions to lose and keep her weight off, it’s hard to think of another overweight African-American cover girl — until now, anyway.) It is unjust, it is mean, it is destructive, it is inhuman, but it is true. It’s also the whole point of the movie (even more so than the novel). Here is an obese, black-skinned (as opposed to latte-colored), pregnant, illiterate, poor girl: She has everything against her. And Daniels, like Sapphire, continues to pile on the abuses. She is sexually assaulted by both parents. She is beaten into unconsciousness with a cast-iron pan. She is kicked in the face giving birth. She is expelled from school for being pregnant — not even her fault but the result of her father’s rape. She has AIDS.

Contrary to commenters' assertions (“What does it transgress, exactly? Because she is, you know, human, and she looks like a human … The usage is just racist. And sizeist”), “transgressive” isn’t a misuse of my thesaurus and it doesn’t reflect my racism or prejudice against fat people. In the context of movies, her image is a shock; it throws you violently outside your normal frame of reference, forcing you to rethink your assumptions. My assumptions are not, as many have inferred, judgmental. I’ve had weight issues all my life. My mother, an M.D., once treated obesity (or tried like hell) and in filling in for her receptionist in my late teens I saw what women in the African-American community with a certain body type and metabolism were up against — especially since they were surrounded by crap food (which, as the great documentary Food, Inc. makes clear, is both addictive and cheaper — thanks to corn subsidies — than, say, a head of broccoli). As for her affect, Sidibe is reportedly a bubbly, outgoing girl in life, but she is directed to be inexpressive. Again, that’s the point. Horribly abused and slighted or ignored by those around her, Precious has learned to reveal nothing. The first time you can see into her eyes is in her glamorous fantasy sequences, when Precious can let go.

I could have used euphemisms in describing the way she is presented to us, but I don’t think that would have evoked the movie. Daniels is very calculating in how he uses Sidibie’s image. He also has a scene in which she stares into a mirror and sees a beautiful thin white woman staring back, as if to say, “This is how she sees herself on the inside.” If he can so starkly portray how she wants to be versus how she is, if he can say, “Look how many strikes are against this girl,” then at the end when she emerges with real self-esteem, he can claim to have made a truly affirmative film — and I don't mean Hollywood-style affirmation.

So I was taken aback by comments like this:

Can I nominate Edelstein for worstie? That's how a real human being actually looks like in real life. I realize that her appearance may be shocking to you but you seriously need to filter your mouth. I agree with your sentiment and I hope this does spur some type of discussion, but his "reaction" was incredibly rude and shouldn't have been published (at least that bluntly). It didn't even take into consideration that some people do look like that and probably have very fragile self-esteem. As for her "shortcomings," obviously Ms. Sidibe is overweight but, from what I gather, that doesn't really have much to do with the true message of this movie.

It doesn’t have to do with the “true message” of the movie, but her weight is front-and-center.

OK, Edelstein, granted, maybe if Hollywood had allowed for a broader (ahem!) portrayal of black womanhood through the decades, showed the points between and beyond Dorothy Dandridge/Thandie Newton/Halle Berry and Mammy/maids/Medea/Eddie Murphy in a dress instead of spending a century studying how to properly light toothpicks onscreen, you'd find Sidibe less "jarring."

Actually, many of my colleagues and I have complained about fewer opportunities for beautiful women who are darker and more, ahem, broad (read: rounder, less model-skinny), like Angela Bassett. It is in the context of the Halle Berrys that Sidibe is, like it or not, jarring.

Also, her eyes are naturally narrow, not "squashed." I have a longstanding hatred of Edelstein, but this takes the cake.

As Jason Alexander said in Shallow Hal (the ultimate absurdist riff on prejudice against weight), “It takes the whole bakery.” My use of the word “squashed” was meant to suggest that Precious’s most expressive features are, thanks to how she's directed and photographed and lighted, hidden by her flesh; it was not a comment on Sidibe’s eyes, which are lovely in out-of-character photos.

The New York Magazine article confirmed my opinion of magazine and well, uh, all print media. Namely, the shockingly broad de-humanization of black people that exist outside of what it is to be a "good black," namely light skin, "good hair," thin, well off, and devoid of any linguistic trace of "black accents." (See: uh, the vast majority of black female actresses and singers). It's fucked up. It's sad. But seriously. It's about time he just played it as it lays and said "these are monsters." Which is to say, he missed the entire point of the book, the movie, and fucking life, that is, humanity exists in us all. In fact, this review is fucking evidence of some of the fucked up pathology that drives the self-hatred of the main character in Precious.

No one at New York would describe the characters (or people they're based on) in Precious as monsters. That's an unfair prejudice against this magazine. But I think the film does cater to a Reaganite preconception about “welfare mothers” by making Mary — in between the beatings of Precious — obsessed with her “check” and baldly lying about looking for work.

One line of mine I admit was insensitive: “She’s also sexually molested by her jealous, welfare-cheating, gross, and sedentary mother, although the genital fingering might seem preferable to the verbal and physical abuse.” The last thing I would ever do is make light of sexual abuse. In a clumsy way I was trying to suggest that I have read accounts of incest in which victims have said that at least when being touched they weren’t being beaten bloody, that it was perceived by the victim at the time as the lesser of two evils. But that is too complicated and too debatable a point to pack into a single offhand phrase. I apologize.

I think he means it offends his delicate sensibilities to be shown a fat woman on the screen. There should have been a black rectangle over her body so people wouldn't be offended.

No, my “delicate sensibilities” weren’t offended. I was offended based on other criteria. I still believe — and we can debate this I hope without throwing around charges of racism — that the piling-on of abuse and the relentless demonization of the family is a kind of demagoguery. I’m not naïve enough to think that monsters like Precious’s mother don’t exist. But I think the job of an artist is to get inside and understand people like that and not exploit their inhumanity in melodramatic ways to make us furious. It’s the crudeness of Precious I resent, not its message of hope.

UPDATE: Latoya Peterson also points to my description of Precious's mother, Mary, as "too singular to be universal," asserting that I refuse to accept (perhaps because of my different background) "ferocious violence" in this community. I accept its existence, but reject the portrayal onscreen — not out of squeamishness but in the belief that an artist owes us something more than a relentless display of cruelty edited for shock value.

UPDATE 2: I hope this is my last word on the subject, but as we get closer to the opening of Precious, it's important to note how casually the movie's adherents (many of whom haven't seen it) throw around the charge of racism. I've read that by pointing out that Precious is dark-skinned in a world that prizes lighter skin, I've revealed my own bigoted preferences. What garbage. In Sapphire's Push, Precious says she wishes she were light skinned and looks with envy on women who are. Early in the movie, the woman she sees in the mirror who represents — she thinks — who she is on the inside is thin and white. Those weren't my racist projections!

Meanwhile, a woman who calls herself piranha in an entry called "how not to defend yourself," quotes me selectively:

so now he defends himself, because he, david edelstein, isn't racist or sizeist, noooo:

"I’ve had weight issues all my life. My mother, an M.D., once treated obesity (or tried like hell) and in filling in for her receptionist in my late teens I saw what women in the African-American community with a certain body type and metabolism were up against — especially since they were surrounded by crap food"

*sigh*. that really needs no further commentary, does it.

*Sigh*. Maybe it does. Notice how she omits the final, parenthetical clause: "... which, as the great documentary Food, Inc. makes clear, is both addictive and cheaper — thanks to corn subsidies — than, say, a head of broccoli." I guess she doesn't feel that some people are genetically predisposed to obesity — and therefore have a much tougher time losing weight. And if she'd seen Food, Inc., she'd know that among the consequences of America's corn subsidies is a hugely disproportionate rise of obesity in poor communities. The filmmaker shows why a family goes to a fast-food drive-in window instead of eating at home: a) the parents both work several jobs and don't have time to cook; and b) double cheeseburgers are cheaper than a head of broccoli. The book and movie Precious drive this home by showing Precious's breakfast: a tub of fried chicken.

The dishonesty is breathtaking.

Precious Reactions Interesting, Infuriating Latoya Peterson at Jezebel

Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire | Reverse Shot Andrew Chan

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

Slant Magazine review [1.5/4] Ed Gonzalez

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B+]

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

Film Freak Central Review [Alex Jackson]

The Onion A.V. Club review [B] Noel Murray

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

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [5/5] Scott Knopf

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Cinematical (Eric D. Snider) review also seen here: The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A-]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B+]

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

Precious Mike Goodridge from Screendaily

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3/5]

Moving Pictures magazine [Andre Chautard] at Toronto

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Bina007 Movie Reviews [Caterina Benincasa]

Cannes '09 Day 3: Up with people Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe blog, May 15, 2009

A “Precious” moment; no really, no sarcasm Charles Ealy at Cannes from 360 Austin Movie Blog, May 15, 2009

Kim Voynar at Sundance under the film title Push, from Movie City News

Noel Murray at Sundance under the film title Push, from The Onion A.V. Club, January 18, 2009

Nathan Rabin at Sundance under the film title Push, from The Onion A.V. Club, January 18, 2009

Scott Foundas Pushed to the Brink, at Sundance under the film title Push, from The LA Weekly, January 20, 2009

Paul Moore at Sundance under the film title Push, from indieWIRE, January 26, 2009, also seen here: PUSH: BASED ON THE NOVEL BY SAPPHIRE Review, Sundance 2009 | SpoutBlog

Patrick Z McGavin at Sundance under the film title Push, from Stop Smiling magazine, January 24, 2009

Precious David Hudson at Sundance under the film title Push, from The IFC Blog, January 18, 2009

Eric Kohn at Sundance from indieWIRE, January 17, 2009

Lee Daniels Reveals His Gritty Vision Stephen Farber interview from The Daily Beast, November 2, 2009, also there is more: More Daily Beast coverage of Precious

IndieWIRE Interview with director Lee Daniels, January 8, 2009

Gabby Sidibe’s Astonishing Debut Living the Life, Tim Murphy from New York magazine, September 25, 2009

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Glieberman

Variety (John Anderson) review at Sundance

Ty Burr at Sundance from The Boston Globe, January 18, 2009

'Precious' divides among black viewers Erin Aubry Kaplan from The Chicago Tribune, November 29, 2009

A precious American girl, a Japanese love doll, Iranian rockers, and a Korean vampire Barbara Scharres at Cannes from The Chicago Sun Times, May 15, 2009

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

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review November 6, 2009

The Audacity of ‘Precious’ Lynn Hirschberg from The New York Times, October 21, 2009

Black author Sapphire, her novel Push becomes Precious on big ... Nordette Adams from The Indianapolis Examiner, May 20, 2009

Sapphire's Push: Merciless Honesty | BlogHer Nordette Adams from Blogher, November 9, 2009

Precious (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Risky Material in the Classroom: Using Sapphire's Novel “Push”

What to Watch: Precious, Based on the Novel Push « Knopf Doubleday ... Study guide from the Random House publishing website

excerpt excerpt from the book at the Random House publishing website

here Random House profile of author Sapphire

Owen Keehnen: Interviews Owen Keehnen interviews Sapphire from Queer Cultural Center, August 1996

For Colored Girls: The Sapphire Interview Ernest Hardy interviews Sapphire from LA Weekly, November 11, 2009

Zabeth's Corner: Book Review: "Push" by Sapphire

Alice Walker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alice Walker - The Official Website for Alice Walker

Anniina's Alice Walker Page

Ntozake Shange - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Women of Color Women of Word -- African American Female ... biographical information

Ntozake Shange biographical profile

glbtq >> literature >> African-American Literature: Lesbian

THE PAPERBOY B 88

USA (107 mi) 2012 ‘Scope

The recipient of some of the worst reviews in print, a train wreck alleged to be one of the worst and most forgettable films of the year, this is instead a highly entertaining and juicy film noir, a candidate for a spot on John Waters Top Ten films of the year, with enough repressed sexual dysfunction and lurid southern atmosphere to rival any Tennessee Williams play. Reportedly offered to Pedro Almodóvar as his first English-speaking feature film, after toying with the screenplay he eventually declined, but certainly the raunchy tone of the material is there, based on a novel by Pete Dexter who along with the director helped adapt the screenplay, which is unashamedly trashy, B-movie material. Some may find the boundaries of bad taste pushed to the fullest here, yet that is the point of the film, that people require their “news” to be sanitized and cleaned up beyond description so that it is no longer recognizable from its origins, where truth is a virtue that exists only in concept, as there are so many powers in play desperate to spin and alter the news to suit their readers. While there is no attempt to add sanctimonious morality or a message to this film, but this is ascertained strictly from the title of the film, and as it concerns a family where the patriarchal father (Scott Glenn) runs a newspaper. Set in a small town in Florida (though filmed in Louisiana) during the late 60’s when New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm can be seen delivering a speech on television, where by the early 70’s she was one of the founding members of the Black Congressional Caucus and even initiated a bid for the Presidency in 1972, surviving several assassination attempts, running as the ideological opposite of race segregationalist candidate from Alabama, Governor George Wallace, whose picture may be seen on the walls of law enforcement officials. This sets the scene for the existing racism that routinely exists in the region, where Macy Gray steals the thunder from some of the bigger names, playing Anita, the family maid, who takes the place of the missing mother to Jack (Zac Efron), an impressionable teenage kid just out of high school who also happens to be a paperboy.

Like a modern day MILDRED PIERCE (1945), Anita opens the film awkwardly recounting her personal recollections of a local murder to a journalist, where the film is a flashback of colorful events that she continues to narrate throughout, often with a bewildered amusement. Jack’s older brother is Ward, Matthew McConaughey, working for a Miami newspaper, returning to his home town accompanied by a fellow black reporter, Yardley (David Oyelowo), supposedly from London, where both are following the information offered to them by Charlotte, Nicole Kidman, who believes the convicted murderer is innocent. Kidman, channeling Karen Black from FIVE EASY PIECES (1970), who interestingly did all her own hair and make up due to budget restraints, is wonderful throughout as an oversexed Barbie doll who writes letters to convicted criminals, becoming especially infatuated with the letter of the cop murderer, Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack), believing she has finally found true love. When this motley crew visits the prisoner, the over the top sexual explicitness of the visit is unprecedented, where Charlotte literally gives herself to him, though there is no touching. Her sexual bravado instantly endures her to Jack, who’s never seen anything like her, who thinks of her constantly as the woman of his dreams, where she literally becomes his wish fulfillment fantasy. But instead she instantly befriends Jack, like a little brother, whose coming-of-age experience may actually be the film’s central narrative. Early in the film big brother Ward drives the action, where his regional knowledge allows him to understand the backwards gutter mentality of many of the local good ‘ol boys, where sleaziness is something they all seem to have in common, though Yardley finds this particular local attribute somewhat pathetic, where his education has allowed him broader views, but so many residents in small towns only know their own regionalism, as for them, no outside world exists. Jack interestingly makes the news in amusing fashion, where after a candidly sexual conversation with Charlotte at the beach, he takes a swim and gets repeatedly stung by jelly fish, where the instant cure is urination on the affected areas (similarly expressed in a Friends episode where Joey steps up to the plate and rescues Monica), which Charlotte publicly and heroically performs, making all the editions published by his own father.

While some of the best scenes exude personal familiarity between Anita and Jack, it’s also clear the murky atmosphere under the surface is seething with a suffocating claustrophobia, often retreating into the swamps for more local color, as every character in the film has been seriously damaged in some deeply affecting way, where Jack follows his brother’s footsteps until Ward gets into a heap of trouble where he barely makes it out alive, the victim of some starkly graphic, criminally inspired, brutally sadistic gay bondage, literally forcing little brother to assert himself more due to his medical circumstances. Jack is the victim of the prevailing racial attitudes where he stupidly embarrasses himself in front of Anita, but also carries the baggage of abandonment issues due to the loss of his mother, while Ward is on a self-destructive bent driven by his inability to accept the fact he’s gay. Charlotte has such a low degree of self-esteem that she hangs on literally every word of some of the lowest and most depraved men on earth, driven to the point of delusion by her need to be desired by men. When Jack offers his love, she sees it as little more than child’s play. Yardley, like a modern day Mr. Tibbs, is forced to take advantage of job opportunities that have routinely been denied blacks, even if it means stepping on the backs of others to get there, losing his moral compass in the process. Hillary Van Wetter, on the other hand, is a swamp creature that lives with the alligators, snakes, and incessant swarm of bugs, a primeval force of nature that we’ve come to accept in Robert Mitchum’s roles in The Night of the Hunter (1955) or CAPE FEAR (1962). Brought together by uncommon circumstances, they all seem to bring out the worst in one another, where the insidious nature of man is portrayed as little more than that of lowly animals, where it’s questionable who we are and what we’ve evolved into. The film is more interested in capturing the right tone and atmosphere, like CHINATOWN (1974) set in the swamps, filled with Mario Grigorov’s original score and a collection of standard R & B hits from the 60’s, where the interplay between characters is interesting and often hilarious, leading to an unvarnished and uncompromisingly thrilling finale, where the unexpected raises its ugly head and proclaims victory, where many of us may be wondering what happened, and how did all this rarely seen material suddenly appear before our eyes? Daring and devious throughout, where Kidman especially is another force of nature onscreen, credit is due for having the fortitude to approach this material head on without studio imposed concessions.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Patrick Friel

The plot of Lee Daniels' THE PAPERBOY—the director's brave follow-up to his critically and popularly acclaimed PRECIOUS—reads like Tennessee Williams melodrama hopped up on Erskine Caldwell pulp. It's a Southern Gothic, sure enough, but don't let the critics who dismiss (or praise) it as a simple, trashy romp fool you. This is a heady and intoxicating brew that, honestly, shouldn't work—but does. The narrative threads are many (excessive even)—but they're worthy vehicles for an ensemble of exaggerated characters, a messy set of themes, and a carefully pastiched visual style. Jack Jansen (Zac Efron—yes, really) is the hub of the film (a stand-in for the source novel's author, Pete Dexter), a young man whose 1960s small-town life starts to spin out of control. Jack's older brother (Matthew McConaughey) is a newspaper journalist who returns from the city, with his black colleague Yardly (David Oyelowo), to investigate the case of a convicted killer on death row. The convict (John Cusack) is a swamp-dwelling, alligator-hunting maybe-psycho mixed up in a torrid jailhouse romance with a trampy death-row groupie (Nicole Kidman). Rounding out the primary cast, singer Macy Gray plays the Jansen family's domestic Anita (and the movie's narrator). As in the great genre films of Hollywood's heyday, Daniels uses a sensationalistic story, a debased genre, to explore a host of potent themes. Through shifting interactions and allegiances among his characters, Daniels riffs on race and class, guilt and innocence, sexual repression, friendship, trust, and more. There are shades of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, IN COLD BLOOD, DELIVERANCE, WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, and GOD'S LITTLE ACRE. Kidman evokes a sexed-up Elizabeth Taylor; McConaughey has the charming aloofness of Paul Newman's Cool Hand Luke; Cusack combines the frightening iciness of Robert Blake's Perry Smith and psychotic intensity of Richard Widmark in KISS OF DEATH. The list of cinematic reference points could go on, but it's not the specificity of these (or others) that matters. Daniel's achievement is recapturing the hot, sultry mood of these movies in his own haunting and beautiful way. It's trashy, exasperating, convoluted, over-the-top, violent, and deliberately provocative. But these charged-up qualities give the film its unique power, and Daniels piles them on as if daring his audience to come to grips with, and move beyond, the excess.

The Paperboy | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin

It’s hard to describe Lee Daniels’ sweaty new melodrama The Paperboy without making it seem far more vivid and entertaining than it actually is. Everything about The Paperboy promises a deranged instant camp classic, from Nicole Kidman’s strangely stylized turn as a prisoner-obsessed nymphomaniac who looks and behaves like a malfunctioning Marilyn Monroe sex robot to the surreal miscasting of genial Midwesterner John Cusack as a borderline-feral Southern death-row inmate to a much-buzzed about scene involving Nicole Kidman peeing on Zac Efron. So why is The Paperboy so bizarrely dull? It’s as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.

Efron stars as a directionless young man in a perspiration-soaked 1960s Florida, where he frequently spends time clad only in a pair of tighty-whities. His dashing reporter brother (Matthew McConaughey, whose impressive recent winning streak reaches an end here) comes to town with his enigmatic African-American partner (David Oyelowo) to investigate the case of a prisoner (Cusack) on death row for killing a corpulent, corrupt sheriff. Efron falls in love—or at least a profound state of lust—with Cusack’s fiancé, a hot-to-trot sexpot played by Kidman, whose sun-baked sensuality spills out in all directions and is the film’s main attraction and source of morbid fascination. 

An intense, almost disconcerting level of investment and commitment characterized Lee Daniels’ previous two directorial efforts, Precious and Shadowboxer, yet The Paperboy feels strangely remote throughout, in part because it centers on a murder case nobody in the film seems to care much about, not even the folks directly involved. The framing device finds maid Macy Gray recounting the sordid events in flashback, which further distances the film from the lust, rage, violence, and longing at its blurry core. In his previous films, Daniels established himself as a sensualist with a gift for feverishly over-the-top melodrama, but his primary directorial stamp here, beyond finding infinite reasons to separate Efron from his clothing, involves giving the film a retro-fever-dream look that suggests an Instagram filter called “Bayou Swamp.” The Paperboy offers a perversely bloodless take on rough sex, murder, intrigue, and race. If Daniels actually set out to transform the wildest possible source material into the most inert possible film, he’s succeeded spectacularly.

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

The Paperboy is an enjoyably lurid southern noir set in the mid-Sixties from Pete Dexter (who collaborated on the screenplay) with additional touches added by the director of Precious, who has a taste for the highly colored ant the shocking. If you want to see Nicole Kidman pee on a half-naked Zac Efron this is your movie. But Kidman is excellent as the tacky bleach-blonde Barbie Doll death row groupie and Efron (Jack Jansen) is vulnerable and sweet as the younger brother of Miami newsman Matthew McConaughey (Ward Jansen), who comes with Yardley, a black colleague apparently from London (David Oyelowo) to investigate a murder case. The sleazy, odious inmate is played by John Cusack (Hillary Van Wetter). Of course in this Florida town in this year a black colleague is provocative enough; and it's Daniels' touch, not in the Dexter novel, that he should be black. The peeing scene has a therapeutic purpose: it's to counteract toxins from a jellyfish Jack (Zac) has met up with while swimming. Daniels' finest touch is his use of the excellent Macy Gray as Anita Chester, the Jansen family maid, who also does the voice-over narration, and the best scenes are ones of familial intimacy between Anita and Jack. Everybody is good, McConaughey doing his Good Old Boy drawl, Oyelowo infuriatingly cocky as the British-accented colored man, Cusack a scary piece of swamp muck Hilary's family comes from the swamp and lives by gutting alligators to sell for shoes and handbags). Daniels at times tries to evoke Seventies B-pictures. I don't think you can take all this seriously, despite the strong hints at many turns of Sixties South racism, but there's something unique about it, and it entertains.

Charlotte gets the "paperboys" to come following a romantic correspondence with Hillary, and when they come into town comes wearing a tight dress and bearing big boxes of research into the case. But the newsmen seem distracted, and not very interested in finding out the truth. Jack, a former swimming star kicked out of college who's not doing much but delivering papers, is enlisted to be the reporters' driver, and he falls madly in love with Charlotte and moons for her or sexes for her till finally he gets her "Okay, but just once." Meanwhile there is Anita's humorous voiceover narration, and the present-time Anita's many cozy little scenes with Jack, while unexpected or not so unexpected truths emerge concerning Ward, Hillary, and Yardley.

The movie is great in individual scenes, but doesn't move so well from on to the net. For a noir, The Paperboy lacks urgency or narrative drive. This won't convince anybody it has contemporary relevance as did Lee Daniels' previous film, the 2009 Precious, but again there may be some Oscar mentions. Along with condemnations: the critics are not joining up to praise The Paperboy. Rex Reed has launced one of his diatribes against it: '"This raunchy dreck, cut from the same disposable toilet tissue as the recent trailer-trash creepfest "Killer Joe," is a leap downhill from "Precious,"' he intones. Indeed McConaughey is also featured with Zac Efron in Killer Joe, but that's Tracy Lett, and that's a different kettle of rancid catfish.

User reviews from imdb Author: karenaziz229 from San Francisco

It's hard for me to understand the scorn that has been heaped upon this film. You'd think Lee Daniels had created a film praising Hitler, the Antichrist, and communism. Also, it's hard to understand why some critics have focused on certain aspects of the film. Zac Efron in his "tidy whities" or Nicole Kidman urinating on Mr. Efron. The level of titillation that is being shown would be credible in a 7-year old, but not for adult critics. To focus on these rather minor points shows a deep misunderstanding of what this film is about.

So, what is this film about? While I think it's hard to reduce a work of art to the level of a short essay, I am so fed up with what has been written about this film that I shall attempt to do so.

For starters, I believe this film reflects the world as it is, and not as we want it to be. I think this film is saying that our deepest need is for love, connection, and moral truth but these needs become warped when filtered through the lies,despair, and degradation that American society has offered up as the truth. Mainstream films never go here, and while some indie films touch on this theme, they don't usually go for as deep a dive. The only other director that I can think of even approaching this level of an unblinking stare into the abyss is Todd Soldendz.

The characters in the film consist of Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey), a journalist who has come back to his home town to investigate whether or not Hilary Van Wetter (John Cusack), a man on death row, received a fair trial. Ward's attention has been drawn to this case by Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), a woman who has maintained a jail house correspondence with Mr. Van Wetter, and who believes she is in love with him. Ward brings with him a colleague, Yardley Acheman (David Oyewolo), a black journalist from London. They are assisted by Ward's younger brother, Jack Jansen (Zac Efron), who still lives at home. The Jansen family maid, Anita Chester (Macy Gray) is Jack's confidant and a stand in for the mother that left the family several years ago.

Each character's story is that of connection or love that has been twisted or thwarted for various reasons. Jack's playful relationship with the family maid can never be a relation between equals because of his racism. Jack can see that she is his natural ally and friend, but his racism denies them both a deeper connection. As brothers, Ward and Jack share a powerful bond of affection, but no amount of affection between the brothers can halt Ward's impulse to self-destruction brought on by his inability to accept being homosexual. Charlotte Bless is looking for love and thinks she can find it by writing to men in prison. She receives a response from Van Wetter, and because of its seeming indifference to what other men want from her, she decides this man loves her. The delusion is so powerful that even when real love is offered by Jack, she doesn't understand it. The film doesn't make it clear why she is so self-destructive. We can only assume it is the logical end to the toxic sexism that forces women to see themselves as worthy only if they are desired by a man; any man. Jack's impulse toward love and connection with this woman is driven by the damage done by the abandonment Jack experienced at the hands of his mother.Yardley is a black man trying to have a decent career as a journalist at a time (1969) when racism almost guaranteed that black men remain in lowly positions and did not allow them to rise to their full potential. It is this very racism that makes him betray his colleague and his principals and forces him to assume an identity other than his own. Van Wetter is, I think, a kind of stand in for a force of nature. It is when you face up to these kind of forces that your innermost strengths and weaknesses are revealed.

Through these characters, Lee Daniels is showing the damage done to human relations, forcing people to act in ways that are not pretty to watch, and so the world he shows us is not pretty. It's hard and brutal. But so are the forces that drive these characters. To the critics who hated this film, if you want pretty, watch Lucy and Desi. Mr. Daniels world is the real world; flawed, messy, and hard to look at, but with humanity and the impulse to transcendence at its core.

Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]

Review: 'The Paperboy' Gets the Hard Things Right – | Film.com Stephanie Zacharek

The Atlantic [Jason Bailey]

Paperboy, The - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

The Paperboy - Entertainment - Time Mary Corliss, also seen here: Time [Mary Corliss]

The Atlantic Wire [Richard Lawson]

Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]

outlawvern.com [Vern]

Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Angeliki Coconi]

FILM REVIEW: The Paperboy - The Buzz - CBC Eli Glasner

NPR [Scott Tobias]

The Paperboy Review: A Haggard Old Dog of a Movie, A - Pajiba Caspar Salmon

Swampwater: The Paperboy Is a Long Way Off ... - New York Observer Rex Reed

James Rocchi at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 24, 2012

Film Comment [Violet Lucca]

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

The A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

REVIEW: Lurid Sleaze Saga 'The Paperboy' Starring ... - Movieline Alison Willmore

Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 24, 2012

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

Culture Blues [Jeff Hart]

DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Jesse Skeen]

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray [Luke Bonanno]

Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Neil Lumbard]

The Paperboy Mike Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily

FilmSchoolRejects [Daniel Walber]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]

Cinema Blend [Katey Rich]

Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]

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Kyle Buchanan When Nicole Kidman Gave Zac Efron a Golden Shower at Cannes, at The Vulture from New York magazine, May 24, 2012

DAILY | Cannes 2012 | Lee Daniels’s THE PAPERBOY » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 24, 2012

Cannes 2012: Nicole Kidman reveals why she loved playing a 'hot, over-sexed Barbie' in The Paperboy Anita Singh interviews Kidman from The London Telegraph, May 24, 2012

'The Paperboy': Nicole Kidman is used to audience discomfort - Los ... Mark Olsen interviews actress Nicole Kidman from The LA Times, December 20, 2012

The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy] at Cannes, May 24, 2012, also seen here: Todd McCarthy

TV Guide [Perry Seibert]

Variety [Justin Chang]

The Paperboy Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun

Cannes 2012: The Paperboy – review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 24, 2012

Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian, May 24, 2012

Cannes 2012: The Paperboy, review Robbie Collin at Cannes from The London Telegraph, May 24, 2012, also seen here: Robbie Collin

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'The Paperboy' delivers a dark, angrily steaming tale: Review - Los ... Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times

Nicole Kidman refused to say N-word for Lee Daniels in... Steven Zeitchik from The LA Times

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The Paperboy - Movies - The New York Times A.O. Scott

LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER B- 80

USA (132 mi) 2013 Official site

Darkness cannot drive out darkness — only light can. —Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is a truly strange movie, at times deliciously entertaining, while at other times one is simply aghast at the ineptitude, where mixed signals are sent throughout, partly tragic, partly comic, where for several moments one had to wonder if this could possibly be a subversive attempt to actually send a message to America, but instead it comes across as a toned-down Disney movie of the week, where the narrative style unfortunately resembles Uncle Remus storytelling at the White House, told in the supposedly inoffensive manner of Disney’s SONG OF THE SOUTH (1946), which is really one long American narrative as Uncle Remus takes us through the Civil Rights era of history, as seen through the eyes of a long-serving White House butler, Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker). Rather than deal with anything remotely resembling the present, it appears that today’s movies prefer to remain stuck in the past, continually conjuring up stories that deal with an era of loyal black servitude and obedience, like The Help (2011), Django Unchained (2012), 12 Years a Slave (2013), and now yet another, as if the drumbeat of showing past transgressions will somehow alter the course of today’s history. If that is the desired effect, it’s not working. One has to wonder who decides which black stories are told, or how they’re told? And why do we continue to project the same negative stereotypes that only reinforce images of black subservience? Black talents like Viola Davis and Forest Whitaker have received critical acclaim for playing maids and butlers, while British black actor Chiwetel Ejiofor is the odds on favorite for an Academy Award for playing a kidnapped free slave sold into the brutality of slavery. Why is Hollywood retelling the same story of black oppression and subjugation? Because the formula makes money, so it appears the only work blacks can obtain in Hollywood these days is enduring the unending racial abuse inflicted upon them and then somehow it’s considered a victory if they survive. No one likes to be reminded of the times when they were terrorized and subjugated and forced to live in fear, but black Americans have to relive this experience seemingly forever and then watch people applaud this as art.

Adapted from an article written by Wil Haygood that appeared in The Washington Post just a few weeks after President-elect Obama won the election on November 27, 2008, A Butler Well Served by This Election - Washington Post, providing a profile of White House butler Eugene Allen and his wife Helene. While the article placed its focus upon the painfully slow addition of black officials working in various White House administrations, this story is ignored by the movie. It should also be stated that Allen didn’t have a militant son, or a cotton plantation childhood, as these were Hollywood constructions needed to fabricate an epic storyline like this one, which is a doozy, as it weaves one man’s family through a greatest hits of Civil Rights history, including Brown vs. Board of Education, the freedom riders, the Birmingham boycotts, the Little Rock school crisis, federal intervention sent to integrate southern schools, the Civil Rights legislation, the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X, the cities burning, the Black Panther party, before then reaching across the ocean to Apartheid in South Africa. That’s quite a mouthful, enough to make one wince at the utter superficiality that each historical event receives. Making matters worse, the name actors portraying the United States Presidents are caricatures that one presumes are unintentionally comic, where guffaws in the audience are simply based upon casting choices and the physical mannerisms used to play each President, as they resemble Saturday Night Live comic portrayals. And the casting of Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan, how is that not subversive? She’s exquisite, by the way, in her own hilarious way.

The casting of Whitaker as the butler is a good one, as after all, he already won an Oscar for portraying Idi Amin in THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (2006), and he was Jim Jarmusch’s Zen-like high priest in GHOST DOG (1999), so we know this guy’s capable of just about anything. Oprah, on the other hand, as his wife Gloria, will always be seen as Oprah, no matter what anybody else says, as she’s too big a celebrity and personality, where all attempts to act are just that, pretending to be something she isn’t, where in the early part of the picture where she plays a drunk, she simply channels Mo’Nique from PRECIOUS (2009), and yes, it’s really that obvious. They have two sons, where the oldest, Louis, is played by David Oyelowo, who becomes a fierce young militant who literally takes us through every stage of history from the freedom riders to the Black Panthers, all of which he experiences himself, including being in the same motel room as Martin Luther King just before he got shot. Say what? How is that possible if he was not part of the inner team, all names that are familiar to us by now? Well, the truth is, it’s not, but this is a Hollywood recreation of history, and they can do whatever they want so long as they think it will sell tickets. Which brings us to why is Lee Daniels name in the title? Screenwriter Danny Strong was hired a year before Daniels signed on as the film’s director, a picture purchased by Harvey Weinstein, so one would suspect that Daniels, the last one hired, had the least amount of control over the picture, even when it comes to naming rights. The official story is that The Weinstein Company could not get the MPAA’s Title Registration Bureau (TRB) to authorize the use of the title, even under appeal, because of an existing 1916 Warner Brother’s short film by that name, charging Weinstein with willful violation and ordering a $400,000 fine. As a result, they put the director’s name in front of the title, causing a certain amount of consternation to Daniels, who felt people might think he was drawing too much attention to himself.

What is particularly powerful about the picture is the portrayal of black father and son relationships, established in the opening shots of the film in 1926 Georgia at an existing cotton plantation where Cecil (as a child) and his own father worked, which was run exactly as it did during the slavery era, no difference whatsoever except they didn’t shackle slaves. Blacks were still routinely killed by whites, calling them “niggers,” even by judges in court, and whites just as routinely got away with it, using the violent threat of lynchings and the KKK if anyone had any other ideas. In another casting misadventure, Mariah Carey plays Cecil’s mother in the fields, where after her own sexual assault, they both witness the shooting of her husband, after which Cecil is led from the fields into the house under the tutelage of none other than Vanessa Redgrave to become the subservient “house nigger.” He learns so well he eventually becomes the White House butler serving 8 different Presidents from Truman to Reagan, where the rules are identical, as he is never to display any emotion, react to anything seen, or engage anyone other than his boss. The irony here is that his oldest son runs off to college and becomes a campus militant, the polar opposite of his father, where viewing American black history from the 20’s through the 80’s through the shared father and son experiences is simply too much, as it’s too great a cultural divide. For instance, we learn about what happened to Emmett Till over the dinner table as a drunken Gloria is serving food to her family, where that’s the extent of the experience, mentioned in much the same way as idle gossip. Both parents are convinced that having left the South, they have obtained security for their family. But Louis will not rest until blacks have the same rights as other American citizens, joining the freedom riders where he is routinely assaulted, beaten, spit upon, and arrested. Because of these offenses, Cecil disowns his son and refuses to speak to him, which is his way of deluding himself about his son and history.

In much the same way, it’s interesting how the Presidents engage in private conversations with their black butlers about the ‘black” problems, where Eisenhower doesn’t get how his experience growing up on a farm isn’t the same as Cecil’s, or LBJ’s profusive use of the word “nigger” to his own cabinet and staff somehow evolves to the word “Negro” on national television, JFK coolly describes to Cecil (who had no idea) that his son has been arrested 15 times, before television photos of the firehoses turned on peacefully demonstrating blacks in Birmingham cause he and his brother to have a change of heart on the race issue, while Reagan (played by the Harry Potter wizard specializing in the Dark Arts) second guesses his own shortsightedness on the post Civil Rights race relations, something one sincerely doubts, since the Reagan Republicans have consistently attempted to all but legalize racial discrimination, playing the race card in political ads ever since that cynically appeal to white votes. But in this film, the theme of the film comes from the prophetic words of Martin Luther King, Jr. spoken to Louis just moments before he would be shot, “Domestics play a very big role in our history. In many ways they are subversive without ever knowing it,” suggesting they break down negative racial stereotypes by demonstrating steady employment, also by performing their jobs with grace and dignity, showing that they can be trusted, all of which defies the inherently distrustful views of racial bigotry.

But the arc of the story leads to a reunification of father and son, to President Obama, and the mistaken belief that things are finally so much better for blacks in America, where the film’s tagline, “One quiet voice can ignite a revolution,” is simply ridiculous. Who are they kidding? Then why are so many black men (over a million) languishing in prisons at the moment? And why is it legal to arrest a black and a white man for the exact same drug offense, yet the sentence for the black is so much more severe than the white, who with a lawyer may never serve any prison time at all? Whites use drugs 5 times more than blacks, yet blacks are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites. Blacks constitute more than 80% of those incarcerated under federal crack cocaine laws and serve substantially more time in prison than do their white counterparts, despite that fact that more than 2/3 of crack cocaine users in the U.S. are white or Hispanic, so it’s now perfectly legal for the police to exclusively target black neighborhoods for drug raids and for the court system to exhibit racial discrimination in court sentencing, and no one says a word. But while blacks no longer have to sit at the back of the bus, progress has been slow going, with all too many reminders of the vicious cycle of racial hatred that continues without end from generation to generation.

While the picture has some well known blacks promoting and participating in the making of the movie, the question must be asked, is this a black movie? Borrowing from the website Racism Is White Supremacy: Is “Lee Daniels' The Butler” (Really) A “Black Movie?” | Racism Is ...

1. Who wrote the screenplay for the movie, The Butler?

Danny Strong, Screenwriter for ‘The Butler,’ who was hired to write “The Butler” in 2009, a year before Daniels even signed on as director.

2. Who Owns the (Distribution) Rights to  the movie, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”?

Harvey Weinstein (Co-Chairman – the Weinstein Company)

David Glasser, Weinstein Co. COO

3. Who are the Producers, Executive Producers and Co-Producers of “The Butler?”

Laura Ziskin – Executive Producer (deceased)

Hilary Shor – Executive Producer

Adam Merims – Executive Producer

Buddy Patrick – Producer

Shelia Johnson – Producer

Lee Daniels – Producer

Cassian Elwes – Producer

How, then, is this considered a “black” movie? This is Hollywood’s portrayal of a black movie, which is an altogether different thing, as the creative minds and financial power behind the film are almost entirely white. So one must keep in mind that this is still how white people view blacks even in contemporary society, where it’s a continuation of a white Hollywood racist fantasia that’s been the corporate business model for well over 100 years, where leading black roles of continued submission and obedient servitude to whites are the ones more likely to be accepted by white audiences and nominated for Academy Awards.

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

Lee Daniels' The Butler follows the title character, Forest Whitaker's Cecil Gaines, as he serves under eight American Presidents over a period of several decades, with the setup employed primarily as a springboard for an exploration of the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s and '70s. Filmmaker Lee Daniels has infused Lee Daniels' The Butler with an unabashedly old-fashioned sensibility that's reflected in most of its attributes, which does ensure that, for a little while, the inherently compelling subject matter is exploited to maximum effect - with Whitaker's solid turn matched by an eclectic group of periphery performers (including Oprah Winfrey, Cuba Gooding Jr, and Terrence Howard). (And this is to say nothing of the various folks playing the Commander in Chief, with Robin Williams' Dwight D. Eisenhower and Alan Rickman's Ronald Reagan standing out as highlights.) The film's compulsively watchable vibe proves to be short lived, however, as scripter Danny Strong begins to emphasize the comparatively less-than-engrossing exploits of Cecil's rebellious son, Louis (David Oyelowo). Whitaker's character is increasingly relegated to the sidelines, as Daniels and Strong devote much of the film's midsection to the battle for equality among African Americans - with the narrative's one-track-mindedness growing more and more tedious as time progresses. (It doesn't help, either, that Strong pads out the proceedings with a number of palpably useless subplots, including the possible infidelity of Cecil's wife and other similarly pointless asides.) The ensuing lack of momentum paves the way for a second half that wavers between mildly engaging to flat-out interminable, with the heartfelt final stretch, as a result, unable to pack the emotional punch that Daniels is obviously striving for - which ultimately cements Lee Daniels' The Butler's place as a terminally underwhelming curiosity.

Exclaim! [Robert Bell]

As presented, Lee Daniels' star-studded, multi-generational epic of truncated American Civil Rights history, The Butler, is an easily interpreted political argument. It's an emotionally driven documentation of the fight against subjugation, utilizing a framing device and broad character conflicts to make it a twee narrative rather than a ramshackle, overly sweeping documentary.

As written by Danny Strong (the scribe behind the similarly observed Recount), this effective, but woefully contrived drama takes the Forrest Gump approach to storytelling, utilizing the titular cipher — here, a slave turned butler named Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) — to observe a complex tapestry of historical events unfolding around him.

Although based loosely on the life of Eugene Allen, many liberties stretch this story from the cotton fields of Macon, Georgia in the '20s up to the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama. Cecil (a slave that witnesses the murder of his father and the raping of his mother by white men) eventually learns the ways of domestic service. Sent out on his own as a coming-of-age journey, the theft of pastries pushes him into the good graces of a prestigious local butler that teaches him the craft and who eventually recommends him for roles that subsequently land him in the White House during the Eisenhower (Robin Williams) years.

Amidst the endless array of montages quickly guiding us through his trainings and acclamation to fellow staffers (Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz, primarily), we also get a sense of Cecil's physical, and non-physical, absence at home, with wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and oldest son Louis (David Oyelowo).

Significant Civil Rights events fuel the exposition spewing out of the mouths of various presidents — Kennedy (James Marsden), Johnson (Liev Schreiber), Nixon (John Cusack) and Reagan (Alan Rickman) — reiterated on the news highlights that Gloria watches, reacting as emotionally and dramatically as possible in close-up (demonstrating Daniels' sycophantic tendencies).

As a work of pacing, utilizing formulas and the interspersing of informational, structurally necessary montages with quiet moments of intensity, focusing on acting and the pointed pronunciation of profound dialogue, The Butler is exceptional. As manipulative and ridiculous — every president shares a telling, character-defining moment with Cecil and Cecil alone — as it is, there is a whirlwind of inspiration and feeling projected from this story, doing as intended by reminding us just how profoundly disturbing our collective history of ignorance and discrimination really is.

As a work of art, The Butler is quite embarrassing, featuring characters that can be summarized in brief anecdotal form and conflicts that exist only to reiterate the thesis statement and some rather redundant political assertions. While the eventual deterioration of the relationship between Cecil and his son does hold some intensity on its own — the dinner scene where he brings home a classless, belching girlfriend (Yaya Alafia) is priceless — the overtly argued ideological difference is presented with ultimate condescension.

Louis (a young freedom fighter and eventual Black Panther, who engages in rallies to remove segregation in public locales and spends more time in jail than out) doesn't respect his father's decision to serve the white man. Contrarily, some African-American academics suggest that, while not exactly ideal, the role of the butler helped debunk most of the negative stereotypes whites asserted about blacks, being a reliable, hard-working, professional role, with a constant air of dignity.

It's an interesting argument that helps give this century-long bout of name-dropping ("Oh, look, it's Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan!") some sense of purpose beyond heavy-handed histrionics. But it's also painfully obvious and reiterated too overtly and pointedly to leave this desperate awards hopeful with a great deal of integrity by the time the make-up artists are struggling to make everyone look decades older than they are.

Of course, since we're looking at a story seeking to reach as wide an audience as possible, preaching the word of tolerance to the masses, this lack of subtlety and the absurdist convenience of it all are understandable. While most films of this nature are completely devoid of humour, Cuba Gooding Jr.'s character makes regular jokes about fornicating with a woman that defecates during orgasm. This was almost as surprising as having to admit that Oprah actually does a good job with her character.

Lee Daniels' The Butler reviewed by Armond White for CityArts ... Armond White

How Daniels asserts/inserts himself into his films is crucial to the failings of…oh, let’s just call it The Butler. While Daniels purports to make a biography of Cecil Gaines, a Black Southerner who went from picking cotton in Georgia to serving as butler in the White House for seven Presidential administrations, the film primarily displays Daniels’ opportunism. Taking advantage of our strange, polarized political moment, The Butler only makes noise about race–simplifying the history that Gaines lived through from Jim Crow to 2008–implying that Gaines’s story prepared the way for the election of Barack Obama. So soon after Kushner-Spielberg’s Lincoln, another foreshortening of American history.

The Butler’s major malfunction is its inexact parallel to Obama’s own biography; Gaines’s suffering through the post-slavery experience is completely different from Obama’s story. Daniels feeds the marketable concept that Gaines’s very particular sojourn represents the entirety of Black America’s struggle for equality. He distorts Gaines’s private life into a national epic, making him an emblem rather than a character.

Everyone here, from limousine liberal parade of Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave to the various Presidential caricatures (Robin Williams, James Marsden, John Cusack, Liev Schreiber, Alan Rickman), look like waxworks. From the beginning, Forest Whittaker plays the title role as a gaunt, wizened symbol of oppression and endurance–a Morgan Freeman figure of quiet dignity and rectitude. His wife (Oprah Winfrey) and two sons (David Oyewelo and Isaac White) seem like appendages rather than family. Gaines’s estrangement from his world suggests a reverse Benjamin Button aging through decades, keeping quiet during eras of social turmoil. He—and this film–most resembles Forrest Gump, that symbolic idiot savant witness to social progress he played no part in.

The Butler is unconvincingly noble–without even that streak of psychotic behavior in the ridiculous shit pie scenes of The Help. Gaines is always crotchety and proper, leaving dirty-minded resilience to Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding, Jr in scene-stealing supporting roles–they’re surrogates for Daniels the salacious auteur who’s uninterested in what propriety and self-control mean.

Instead of a freaky-deaky view of the Civil Rights Movements’ behind-the-scenes hook-ups (even Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waves quotes Martin Luther King defending masturbation as a great release), we get an Obama-ized tale of Gaines as a dogged, enigmatic paragon. Rectitude as political caution was better dramatized in Brian Helgeland’s far superior Jackie Robinson story, 42. But this film is so solemn and disingenuous it neglects its opening thesis: Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong never confess what it feels like to make a room “feel empty” (although Whitaker’s zombie performance inadvertently gives an inkling). They trade the existential torment of self-abnegation (refuted by decades of Hollywood’s servile-yet-impudent stereotypes) for the cliche of long-suffering martyrdom. (Daniels lacks the honesty and talent to show what being close to power feels like.)

A more credible film would consistently portray the advice of Gaines’s father “Don’t lose your temper with the Man. Dis his worl’; we jus’ livin’ in it.” The Butler will feel inauthentic to most Americans who painfully, cagily work menial jobs; it is designed to appease condescending elites—what politicians call “the Middle Class”–who like to sentimentalize about workers who are beneath their regard (symbolized by the ever-changing line of Presidents, lightly satirizing the indifference of patronizing whites). The Butler may feature a largely Black cast under a Black director’s baton, but it’s really a movie for whites who seek self-congratulatory lessons rather than entertainment.

Daniels’ key trope is the presumptuous montage: Lunch counter sit-ins at Woolworth’s contrasting formal White House dinner parties–pseudo-political juxtapositions that would make Eisenstein wince. Daniels uses montage for sensationalism–not feeling or politics. The entire film exploits subtle and overt American racial violence. The first striking image poses a lynching next to the American flag. Such cheap, Spike Lee rhetoric trivializes history. The 1929 flashback to Gaines’s mother being raped and father being killed isn’t just horrible, it’s an infuriating simplification: The son’s modern attitude shows ignorance of Southern custom; pressuring his father (“Pop, what you gonna do?”) is what gets his Dad killed. When titles say “Inspired by a true story” it merely means an anachronistic fantasy of Black American history adapted from Wil Haygood’s propagandistic Washington Post article (“A Butler Well Served By This Election”) celebrating Obama’s inauguration.

This fantasy includes casting Mariah Carey as the mother defiled and made crazy by the puzzlingly pretty white plantation-owner (Alex Pettyfer) and Oprah Winfrey as Gaines’s horny, boozing then devoted wife. Only Oprah–in a role better suited to Mo’Nique–could act self-righteous about committing adultery (dismissing her “yellow ass” lover). Oprah’s not a character but a Black Womanist Figurehead which places this film far outside the artful realm of Jonathan Demme’s magnificent Beloved. The subplot of Gaines’s conflict with his politically-wayward son merely extenuates the story without delving into the father’s painful, necessary political reticence. Worse, it misrepresents what Lorraine Hansberry explicated about the Black generation gap in A Raisin in the Sun.

Daniels panders to the hip-hop attitude that Black youth know more about survival than their hard-working ancestors. The scene of Gaines driving through urban chaos in response to MLK’s assassination is as phony as the riot scenes in Dreamgirls. Pandering to history and violence lacks the political detail of Melvin and Mario Van Peebles’ Panther; this more resembles Tarantino’s unrealistic s&m circus Django Unchained. These discomforting prevarications are angled toward Obama’s “Tonight is your answer” election speech—turning historical pain into shallow, maudlin victory. Daniels’ tendency to falsify Black American experience and then exploit it is as offensive as Spielberg-Kushner’s factitious Lincoln. A more personally honest, openly licentious fantasy would be more interesting. Now that he’s played his Obama card, I’m sure Lee Daniels’ Satyricon will come next.

Richard A. Epstein Defining Ideas, a Hoover Institution Journal, August 20, 2013

World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]

“Lee Daniels' The Butler”: An Oscar-worthy historical fable - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

David Denby: “The Butler,” “Lovelace” Reviews : The New Yorker David Denby

PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]

Subversive Subservience: Exploring the History of Black Servitude ... Sophia Dorval from Highbrow magazine, October 31, 2013

A Butler Well Served by This Election - Washington Post Wil Haygood, source article, November 27, 2008

Is “Lee Daniels' The Butler” (Really) A “Black Movie?” | Racism Is ... Racism Is White Supremacy, August 17, 2013

Racism Still Exists, Representations of Black People in Film Racism Still Exists

Today's Hollywood And The Reinforcement of Black Subservience Anthony Samad from Between the Lines, October 3. 2013

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Lee Daniels' The Butler / The Dissolve Nathan Rabin

Movie Review: The Butler -- Vulture David Edelstein

Cinemixtape [J. Olson]

Critic After Dark [Noel Vera]

Sound On Sight [Josh Spiegel]

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

SBS Film [Michelle Orange]

The Butler, reviewed: Lee Daniels and Forest Whitaker lead a ... - Slate Dana Stevens

The Butler Review: Lee Daniels' Big Ol' Feel-Good Mess - Pajiba Amanda Mae Meyncke

1NFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]

OSR [John A. Nesbit]

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

Film.com [Laremy Legel]

James Kendrick - QNetwork Entertainment Portal

'The Butler' Doesn't Do It - The Wire Richard Lawson

Slant Magazine [Chris Cabin]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]

Review: 'Lee Daniels' The Butler' Starring Forest Whitaker, Oprah ... Kimber Myers from The Playlist

Erik Lundegaard

The Film Stage [Nick Newman]

Movie Mezzanine [Odie Henderson]

Film-Forward.com [Christopher Bourne]

CultureCatch.com [Brandon Judell]

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

'The Butler' Review: Lee Daniels Goes Historical, the 'Forrest Gump ... Kate Erbland from Film School Rejects

Butler, The (2013) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Twitch [Eric D. Snider]

Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]

ArtsScene [Yvonne]

Georgia Straight [Patty Jones]

Trespass Magazine [Sarah Ward]

Ruthless Reviews [Matt Cale]

Lee Daniels' The Butler Review - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

Why 'Lee Daniels' The Butler' Has 41 Producers Pamela McClintock, August 14, 2013

Lee Daniels on 'The Butler': 'I Don't Feel So Good About the Title ... Hilary Lewis from The Hollywood Reporter, August 9, 2013

John Singleton: Can a White Director Make a Great Black Movie ... John Singleton from The Hollywood Reporter, September 19, 2013

The Guardian [Orville Lloyd Douglas]

The Star Online [Sharmilla Ganesan]

examiner.com [Christopher Granger]

Examiner.com [Jana J. Monji] also seen here: Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]

Charleston City Paper [T. Meek]

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pam Zoslov]

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Dallas Film Now [Peter Martin]

Lee Daniels' The Butler Movie review by Kenneth Turan -- latimes.com

Lee Daniels' The Butler Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Steven Boone

New York Times [A.O.Scott]

Dannelly, Brian

SAVED! B 87

USA (92 mi) 2004

“God only knows what I’d be without you...” rings out over the opening shot. I found this satire on fundamentalist Christian adolescents attending an all-Christian high school hilariously subversive for the first half, but when the story starts to coincide with the previously released MEAN GIRLS, well it looses some steam and never really recovers, becoming all too predictable by the end while remaining thoroughly enjoyable. Mandy Moore plays Hillary Faye, the all-too-perfect mean girl queen bee who thinks loving Jesus is like scoring points at a sporting event, is obsessed with all things Christian, and remains at the spiritual center of the picture as the most mean-spirited, yet most popular cheerleader for the Lord. Jena Malone plays (the Virgin) Mary, the actual lead who otherwise has doubts about her faith, becoming pregnant with a gay hunk on her first experience, believing getting pregnant was the Lord’s will to try to save him from his sin of homosexuality. For that sin, he is sent away to a Christian recovery home where we learn: no one actually recovers, but it makes the parents feel better.

Macaulay Culkin sets just the right tone in the film as the non-believing, wheel-chair-bound brother to Mandy Moore, with his calm, acerbic wit. When he witnesses Jena coming out of a Planned Parenthood building, he knows this could mean only one of two things, then immediately concludes: “O my God, she’s planted a pipe bomb!” Mary-Louise Parker is Mary’s flirtatious mother who has a fling with the Christian pastor, while Eva Amurri plays Cassandra, the school’s only Jew, who attends this school only because she’s been kicked out of all the other ones and this was better than being home schooled. Initially, the music was part of the fun, such as the use of the “Tubular Bells” from THE EXORCIST, which precedes Hillary Faye’s actual attempt to kidnap Mary and perform her own self-imposed exorcism, as well as some African-sounding a cappella male choir that just hums, which, of course, was the only sign of any racial diversity in this crowd. The first half of the film is playful, silly, and smart, but then the fun stops, and the melodrama of Mary’s pregnancy, her alienation, and her religious doubts of faith dominate, and instead of being fun, it becomes a typical television script where all the loose ends must come together in an easily understood happy ending.

Dante, Joe

All-Movie Guide

Born and raised in New Jersey, Joe Dante was a garrulous, semi-obsessed "movie nut." As a teenager, Dante wrote articles and criticism for "#Castle of Frankenstein," a popular "fanzine" for horror-film aficionados. While attending the Philadelphia College of Art, Dante and his friend Jon Davidson put together The Movie Orgy (1968), a 7-hour compilation of kitschy film clips that was screened on the college-campus circuit under the sponsorship of Schlitz beer. Dante went on to write for The Film Bulletin, then joined Roger Corman's New World Pictures, starting out editing trailers. When Dante made noises about becoming a director, Corman challenged him to whip up a picture for $50,000; the result was Hollywood Boulevard, an elongated (and frequently sidesplitting) inside joke about low-budget moviemaking. With Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1980), Dante began attracting critical attention as a director to keep an eye on. For producer Steven Spielberg, Dante directed his most profitable film, Gremlins (1984), a funny and frightening compendium of filmic "quotes" from past movie classics, full of cameo appearances by such pop-culture icons as Chuck Jones, Dick Miller, and Robby the Robot. For television, Dante has directed episodes of Police Squad, Amazing Stories, Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt. While Dante is best known for his stylish "scare" pictures, one of the director's finest and most personal projects was Matinee (1993), a nostalgic (and very movie-savvy) glance back at what it was like to grow up as a film buff in the early 1960s.

The Unofficial Joe Dante Web Site

Filmbug Biography

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Film Reference profile by Ross Care

Film Fanzine Profile

Joe Dante - Issue 51, 2009 - Senses of Cinema Martyn Bamber from Senses of Cinema, March, 2003

BFI | Sight & Sound | Joe Dante: serious mischief Tom Charity from Sight and Sound, October 2010

Dante, Joe They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Joe Dante: 'Gremlins' Director Reflects on His Biggest Hits Glenn Kenny interview from The New York Times, August 5, 2016

SMALL SOLDIERS

USA (110 mi) 1998

1998 from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Best Films of 1998 article from the Reader

4. Small Soldiers.
Satire, according to George S. Kaufman, is what closes on Saturday night. But judging from the critical response to Joe Dante's high-spirited satire of watching wars and war movies, it's also what gets pilloried in the Friday papers. I've seen this pleasurable and highly visceral extravaganza twice in Chicago and once with thousands of other viewers at the outdoor piazza of the Locarno film festival, where it was showing on a double bill with There's Something About Mary. All three times I had the delightful experience of being surrounded by viewers of all ages who were laughing as much as I was, all of them clearly in tune with Dante's pointed but far from mean-spirited agenda. Friends who've shown Small Soldiers to ten-year-olds on video have described how much these kids love it and how none of them is so foolish as to confuse toys with human beings. Yet most adult reviewers wrote the picture off as a violent, cynical, and potentially trau-matic piece of exploitation with no higher agenda than matching the high-tech shenanigans of Toy Story. The satirical intent--not to mention Dante's love for the noble Gorgonite monster toys, programmed (like so many of their real-life counterparts) to lose--clearly sailed right past them.

This isn't the first time Dante has been misunderstood, nor, I suspect, will it be the last. (His previous picture, the 1993 Matinee, was about war fever, and critics who connected its treatment of the Cuban missile crisis with our periodic eviscerations of Baghdad were few and far between.) Though all his movies are about the ethics and ramifications of spectatorship, Dante prefers to keep a low profile within the studio system and works without a personal publicist, so you won't catch many critics treating him like an auteur. For me the satire of Small Soldiers was so powerful and persuasive that when I saw Saving Private Ryan a week later, the Spielberg film seemed like derivative, warmongering claptrap. Now that Private Ryan has been hailed as the movie to end all wars, I can only wonder whether we've chosen Spielberg as our filmmaker laureate because we implicitly understand that he's every bit as innocent about his motives as we are--meaning that we can all remain children as long as he's the grown-up in charge. "I think World War II was my favorite war," the late Phil Hartman says wistfully in Small Soldiers while showing his wife his fancy new home-viewing setup--or media arsenal. Judging from the success of Private Ryan, Spielberg has lots of company, but now that the critical obfuscation has abated, I hope that home viewers able to laugh at their own worst impulses will discover the year's best studio picture.

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jonathan Rosenbaum, also seen here: Small Soldiers and Saving Private Ryan

HOMECOMING

Masters of Horror TV show

USA (58 mi) 2005

Masters of Horror: "Homecoming" Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

For a more in-depth consideration of Dante's shrewd, on-time political satire than I can really offer, I refer you to Mark Peranson's insightful analysis and Dante interview in the latest Cinema Scope. While I was impressed with "Homecoming," I suppose some of its broader strokes left me a little ambivalent. Dante and screenwriter Sam Hamm have produced a classic Juvenalian satire, with impossible-to-miss stand-ins for Ann Coulter, Jerry Falwell, Larry King, and other contemporary unsavories. Despite a few poetic touches (none quite so moving as when an earnest polling-place worker affixes an "I Voted" sticker to the body of a fallen soldier), there is a sense of inevitability to much of "Homecoming." As a viewer I found myself nodding in assent but also acutely aware of the fact that its trajectory and its political takedowns were intellectually preordained. It's as though this film was in the zeitgeist for the taking, and it is absolutely to Dante's credit that he brought it into being. (After Ralph Nader's comment that the presidency of George W. Bush was "beyond satire," it's nice to see someone prove that thesis wrong.) But Dante abandons even the thin metaphorical register recently employed by Romero, scoring direct hits but sacrificing the subtlety that usually characterizes great art. So although I began and ended my viewing of "Homecoming" secure in the knowledge that Dante's point of view is the correct one, the director has perhaps accomplished something else here, implicitly posing a secondary set of questions, reverberating in the shadow of the primary ones. What is art's function in a desperate political present? When are the stakes too high to risk speaking in the ambiguous languages of aesthetic response? What's gained, and lost, when the gloves come off? ["Homecoming" can currently be seen in the U.S. on Showtime On Demand.]

By Mark Peranson Dante’s Inferno: The Necessary Satire of Homecoming, from Cinema Scope

Darabont, Frank

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

USA (142 mi) 1994

Time Out review

In 1946 a young New England banker, Andy Dufresne (Robbins), is convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and sentenced to life at the Shawshank State Prison - twice over. Quiet and introspective, he gradually strikes up a friendship with the prison 'fixer', Red (Freeman), and over the next two decades wins the trust of the governor and guards, but in his heart, he still yearns for freedom. Darabont's adaptation of a Stephen King novella is a throwback to the kind of serious, literate drama Hollywood used to make (Birdman of Alcatraz, say) though the big spiritual resolution takes some swallowing - ditto the colour-blind relationships within the prison and the violent disavowal of any homosexual implications. Against this weighs the pleasure of discovering a first-time director with evident respect for the intelligence of his audience, brave enough to let character details accumulate without recourse to the fast-forward button. Darabont plays the long game and wins: this is an engrossing, superbly acted yarn, while the Shawshank itself is a truly formidable mausoleum.

Eye for Film (David Haviland) review [5/5]

The story of The Shawshank Redemption is well known. Based on a Stephen King novella, the film was released in 1994 to a warm critical reception, but failed to turn a profit at the box office. Finding an audience through TV and video, it gradually grew to become a phenomenon, a canonised classic, and something close to a religious experience for many. The story may be well known, but the mystery remains: What is it about The Shawshank Redemption that has such a profound effect on people?

The film tells the story of Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), an educated banker sentenced to life for the murder of his wife and her lover. In prison, Andy inspires his fellow inmates with his courage and humanity and has a profound effect on Red (Morgan Freeman), an older prisoner, who has given up hope.

Unlike many films of the Nineties, Shawshank has no "high concept" plot premise and is somewhat episodic compared with the tight, linear narratives of closer structured pictures. This sense of freedom in the storytelling allows the film to consistently throw up genuine surprises, as the viewer isn't constantly on guard for clues and plot points. In hindsight, we tend to forget how successfully writer/director Frank Darabont leads us to expect a very different resolution.

Now it is regarded as a feelgood classic, which only achieves such popularity by first visiting the darkest places imaginable. It's easy to forget how violent and depressing the story is and it's only by evoking a powerful sense of horror that Darabont's masterful screenplay earns its climactic feeling of release.

The film's inspirational power is heightened by the use of religious references and symbolism throughout. Some argue, compellingly, that it can be read as a religious parable, with Andy as a Christ figure, who sacrifices himself in order to inspire those around him, and is figuratively killed and reborn.

Part of the film's popularity is the way it warrants rewatching, as the quality of the writing means each new viewing throws up fresh details and delights. The tension, when the warden checks Andy's cell, for example, is only fully appreciated second time round. Similarly, the wonderful dialogue is best enjoyed with the leisure of already knowing the story; Andy's reply in court, for example, to the accusation that the disappearance of his gun is convenient: "Since I am innocent of this crime, sir, I find it decidedly inconvenient that the gun was never found."

The story obviously inspired the makers as much as it does the audience, as it marks a career high for most of the considerable talents involved. The cinematography by long-time Coen Brothers collaborator Roger Deakins is awe-inspiring. Freeman and Robbins were never more touching and restrained and Darabont's direction displays the mastery of a man making his twentieth film, rather than, as this was, his debut.

The Shawshank Redemption is perhaps the only undisputed classic of the Nineties, although it's more popular with the public than with critics, who tend to be slightly sniffy about it's feelgood magic. In this respect, it has much in common with the other classics, with which it is often compared, such as Casablanca and It's A Wonderful Life, which suggests that it will remain a favourite of the people for decades to come.

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Though adapted from a Stephen King novella, "The Shawshank Redemption" has more to do with a man's internal demons than the kind that routinely rise up from overgrown graveyards. Like "Stand by Me," it's not a typical story from the horror King. Instead, it's a devoutly old-fashioned, spiritually uplifting prison drama about two lifers who must break their emotional shackles before they can finally become free men.

Set in a spooky old penitentiary with turrets and towers, the movie manages to be true to its Big House origins while incorporating such horrific mainstays as the clanking of chains and the creaking of the walls. There's even a raven that roosts in the prison library, where he is cared for by a darling old trusty (James Whitmore). For the most part, however, the movie expands upon cliches that date back to James Cagney's prison portraits—the twisted warden (Bob Gunton) and the sadistic guard (Clancy Brown).

Director Frank Darabont, who apprenticed on B-scripts ("The Fly II") and TV movies ("Buried Alive"), manages to fashion an improbable new pattern from the same old material in his remarkable debut. While he deals with the grimmest aspects of prison life (sadistic guards, gang rapes and befouled food), Darabont is chiefly interested in the 20-year friendship that sustains Andy (Tim Robbins) and Red (Morgan Freeman) .

The movie opens in 1947 as Andy, a prominent New England banker, is on trial for murdering his wife and her lover. Not only did he have a motive, but he had the opportunity—his footprints were found at the scene of the crime—and he had a weapon of the caliber used in the shootings. He insists that he is innocent, but the jury finds him guilty. Sentenced to life twice over, Andy is shipped to the maximum-security state prison at Shawshank, Maine. An introverted loner with an interest in reading, chess and rock carving, Andy doesn't make himself many friends until Red, a 30-year-veteran of the system, decides to take him under his wing.

Things begin to change for the better when Andy finds a way to use his skills and education to benefit his fellow felons. When he overhears the guard captain complaining about losing most of an inheritance to taxes, he offers to trade his advice for three beers for each of the men who are working with him that day tarring the roof.

His reputation as a financial adviser spreads, and soon he is doing the taxes for all the guards and running the warden's outside scams. This leads to a position in the tiny prison library, which Andy gradually expands into the best educational facility of its kind in the area. It takes him six years to do it, but Andy never gives up hope.

It is hope that allows the self-proclaimed innocent man to survive what may or may not be an unjust imprisonment. And hope is his gift to his friend Red, who no longer even tries to impress the parole board at his hearings. He's become "institutionalized," he explains to Andy, and would be a "nobody" on the outside.

Red's gift to Andy is absolution when he finally confesses his true sins. Whether or not he pulled the trigger, Andy blames himself for causing his wife's death; his redemption comes as he learns to give of himself over the course of this marvelously acted and directed film.

Robbins gives a performance that evolves with beautiful clarity from starchy banker to warm and loving friend. Freeman is sure to gain his third Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Red. He also reads the film's lovely narration, much of it drawn verbatim from King's 1982 novella.

A detailed portrait of the routine of cellblock life, "The Shawshank Redemption" might change a few minds about the usefulness of incarceration in terms of rehabilitation. Mostly, though, it reminds us of that we all hold the keys to our own prisons.

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

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Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

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filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [4/5]

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THE MIST B 87

USA (127 mi) 2007

A good old-fashioned and highly entertaining horror movie, where one can read volumes into our society’s preparedness for such a large scale accident or disaster, namely, that despite the formation of a new Homeland Security cabinet position after 9/11, and billions of money spent in each state to update various security systems, the plain truth is that people aren’t even close to ready in the event of a real disaster. Katrina remains the best metaphor for our state of preparedness, which is a pretty pathetic picture. What this film does is break it down to a typical small town anywhere in the USA, in this case it’s Maine, writer Stephen King’s home state, where out of nowhere an event that no one can explain turns into a disaster of epic proportions. But it evolves out of an ordinary day, the night after a storm where the wind blew all the phone reception and power lines down so people flocked to the local supermarket to stock up on supplies, including a father and son, Thomas Jane (a LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE Greg Kinnear type) and Nathan Gamble, along with their next door neighbor, Andre Braugher, whose car was smashed by a falling tree. After a few courtesy hello’s, a man comes running into the store bleeding on his face screaming “There’s something out there in the mist.” Sure enough, the entire town has been engulfed by a strange and unexplained mist. People have a hard time believing the severity of their situation, even after one of the stock clerks has been ripped away from them by a giant creature, largely because most didn’t see it with their own eyes, so they’re inclined to be skeptical. When a group, led by Braugher, decides to brave the mist alone, they are set upon by giant creatures instantly, where one man’s half-eaten body is left lying in front of the store. So much for skepticism.

After a few instant fortifications of the front windows, in no time people are divided into factions, one by the level-headed dad, the only one brave enough to try to save the store clerk, and another led by the fire and brimstone spouting Marcia Gay Harden who is terrific in her role as the semi-crazed town fool who rises to the occasion fortified by her belief that the Apocalypse of Revelations is upon them, whose dire predictions of evil rooted in sin begins to resonate with a few, largely due to the rising degree of their fear. When prehistoric winged flying creatures break through the window and start flying through the store, well, to put it mildly, all hell breaks loose, and rather than stick together as a unit, one group risks their lives fending them off, while the other group cowers in fear, but claim Harden as a prophet afterwards, bolstering her position as the voice of hysteria. Although much of the action takes place stuck inside a supermarket, their dire circumstances are well demonstrated, because it’s as if someone opened Pandora’s Box and the world has been set upon by giant demons. How would anyone react under those circumstances? When it becomes clear that the fear factor is spreading as fast as the Mist itself, dad’s small group tries to come up with an escape plan, but their initial venture outside only exposes them to still greater danger than they ever imagined, and only a few get back alive, whereupon they are turned upon by the fear mongers, who have no answer except to resort to Old Testament ideas of offering human sacrifices to an angry God, as Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, as if that would quell the storm. But all it seems to do is turn this angry mob into what resembles a hateful feeding frenzy. Despite the ugliness of the winged creatures, and a few giant spiders thrown in as well, they are no less repulsive than humans turning against one another with such a bloodthirsty lynch mob mentality.

It’s interesting that one of the charms of small town life is how everyone knows everyone else, how there are few secrets, how you can keep your door unlocked at night, or even leave the keys in your car while it’s running, how there’s a palpable sense of unbroken community trust. This view that in hard times, the community will pull together and help each other out is simply shattered to bits in this film which shows instead a clawing and scratch-your-eyes- out mentality where self-preservation comes first. The idea that when faced with such hard times, extremist views prevail should open up a few eyes as to the desperate straits that exist in the rest of the world where religious extremism has already grown out of control, yet few who see this film will sympathize with others, instead they’ll take the individualist approach, like the days of the wild west when no moral order prevailed, where it was every man and woman for themselves. It appears we have come full circle by returning to that western mentality of 150 years ago – some progress we’ve made. Oh yes, but we have Ipods and cellphones to be thankful for.

Paste Magazine [Tim Basham]

With about a hundred film credits to his name, the works of Stephen King continue to fill movie theaters. But only a handful of the projects can really be considered “great,” and two of those were co-written and directed by the same person: Frank Darabont. His work on The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile garnered each film an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The Mist may not rise to such lofty heights, but Darabont proves once again that he’s got King’s number.

The film features a group of shoppers trapped inside a small town grocery store, with something from a strange mist killing anyone who ventures outside. Thomas Jane plays the typical King hero as movie poster artist David Drayton. Marcia Gay Harden plays the villain in the guise of the town’s local religious-extremist-wacko Mrs. Carmody, who uses the fear of the unknown to build what David calls her “congregation.”

Darabont employs a bevy of terrific effects to bring flying pterodactyl-like creatures, giant, lethal insects and very creepy acid-web shooting spiders to life. But he also relies on man’s humanity, or lack thereof, which always makes King’s stories shine above the typical horror fare. When it comes time for David and some others to make a run for it, they do so more out of fear of their fellow man rather than the creatures outside.

Harden does a fine job of keeping her potentially hysterical character reined in. The journey of her “becoming” as the store’s savior is a wonder to watch. And Toby Jones (Truman in the “other” Capote movie Infamous) is excellent as the surprisingly courageous grocery clerk. But it’s the story of the store’s inhabitants as a whole versus the mist’s unearthly realm that creates a tense and visually exciting standoff, eventually leading to an ending that King never wrote. Darabont’s skills go beyond interpretation, as he creates a work not just fit for a King, but fit for the screen.

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson)

Frank Darabont’s adaptations of Stephen King’s writings are not just some of the best mountings of the writer’s work but some of the best films, period, of recent years: The Shawshank Redemption, anyone? The Green Mile? So I don’t think it’s too outrageous -- or too surprising -- to say that The Mist, which Darabont wrote and directed from a King novella, is not only one of the best movies of 2007, it’s one of the best horror movies ever made. Period.

Look: B movies went A a long time ago, even before the real world turned into its own kind of science fiction nightmare of drowned cities and kamikaze terrorists, and so isn’t civil disaster the perfect springboard for exploring the most sinister aspects of humanity? Because, oh yes, there are creatures here with teeth of both the metaphoric and literal kind, but they’re just animals doing what animals do. The monsters of The Mist are the people, and how we give in to fear and give up on hope at the very moments when we don’t need the one and desperately need the other. This is horror of a philosophical, humanistic bent, examining the nightmares of politics and religion on the small scale upon which they act upon individuals, as well as our propensity to dispense with reason at the drop of a hat... or a tentacle. For all its fantastical elements, this is as grounded and as immediate and as real as movies get. This is “horror” the way that Rod Serling told it -- think the creepy societal breakdown of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” and you’ve got it.

The civil disaster is an ordinary one: a gusty storm knocks down trees and brings down power lines in one of those outwardly charming, secretly insidious Stephen King small towns. But did it also knock out the power at the local army base, wherein, it is rumored, is housed the remains of a crashed flying saucer and dead alien bodies? This is the stuff of the polite, time-passing chatter strained neighbors David Drayton (Thomas Jane: The Punisher, Stander) and Brent Norton (Andre Braugher: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Poseidon) engage in as they drive, with David’s young son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), into town to pick up supplies to board up windows, and groceries before the shelves are picked clean. They’re all in the supermarket when a thick mist descends, obscuring the view out the plate-glass windows beyond a few feet. And then a bloodied man runs into the store, screaming about monsters in the strange fog...

It’s quiet inside the store for a while, the couple of dozen people trapped by their uncertainty over what’s happening but not yet giving in to panic. That begins to happen soon enough, however, when no rescue comes and, well, other, more deadly things begin to occur. It’s all smartly, brilliantly, paced, not just the more traditional aspects of what you’d expect from a horror movie -- those things with the tentacles in the mist are vicious buggers -- but the collapse of the civilization as represented by the little supermarket society. Tribes start to form along sharply drawn lines, drifting toward either David and his calm logic or Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden: Into the Wild, The Dead Girl), a vocal proponent of hellfire-and-brimstone Biblical literalism, and her preaching about how this is the promised Armageddon, and boy, is God pissed with us or what? (She’s the most terrifying thing about the movie, no question.)

There’s an almost orgasmic rise and fall to The Mist in how it scares the hell out of you via the monsters of both the human and the creature varieties, lets you relax with a tension-relieving laugh or two -- though the film never indulges in a snarky joke that would break the satisfyingly grim mood -- and then starts on you all over again. And if the movie worked purely as that kind of intellectual roller coaster ride and nothing else, that would have been more than enough. But it also offers finely drawn portraits of the kind of positive strength movies of this ilk -- or any ilk -- rarely see, of a real-masculinity not about bombast or machismo but built up of courage in the face of one’s own fear and a refusal to descend into easy animality... and not just in the obvious hero character of David but also in, say, the apparently meek supermarket manager played by the ever-essential Toby Jones (The Painted Veil, Infamous). Hell, even the woman customer played by Laurie Holden (Fantastic Four, The Majestic), who teams up with David, is strong and capable and genuine -- so let’s call it not just real-masculinity but real-humanity.

It’s impossible to guess quite what’s going on or quite how Darabont -- who took some liberties with King’s material -- can possibly resolve his story in a way that will completely gratify. But he does. How it ends... well, I couldn’t move from my seat, I was that blown away by the power of it. It’s absolutely right, exactly the kind of uncompromising kicker it needs to be to ensure that The Mist haunts you for a good long while with its shocking reminder of how we can be our own worst enemies in all ways imaginable.

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)

"There's...something...in...the...fog....er, mist!"

Book or story to screen adaptations of Stephen King’s work cluster around the mediocre ("1408", "Pet Cemetery," "Firestarter") or the truly wretched ("Night Flyer," "Night Shift", "Maximum Overdrive"). Of the few adaptations that stand on their own, most were made from King’s early novels ("Carrie," "Salem’s Lot," "The Shining") or novellas ("The Shawshank Redemption," "Stand by Me") with the occasional exception ("Dolores Clairborne," "Misery") drawn from his realistic novels. Writer/director Frank Darabont has adapted two of King’s work, "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile," and after a long hiatus, is back with a third, an adaptation of King’s 1980 apocalyptic survival/horror novella, "The Mist."

Darabont sticks closely to King’s novella, centering The Mist on David Drayton (Thomas Jane), an artist who lives and works from a lakeside home in Maine. After a freak electrical storm knocks out all the power in the area, Drayton decides to go into town to stock up on supplies with his son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), and his neighbor, Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), in tow. Drayton leaves his wife, Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lintz), behind to face a seemingly innocuous mist rolling in over the lake. Drayton discovers the supermarket jam-packed. Everyone, it seems, decided to come to the supermarket to stock up.

But then the mist rolls in. One man, Dan Miller (Jeffrey DeMunn), appears out of the mist, bloodied, and bruised and with a story to tell: something non-human came out of the mist and took his friend. The other townspeople disbelieve him at first, but decide to stay put. The screams of a man dying in the mist suggest that Wayne’s story might be, in fact, true, but it’s not until several men decide to open the loading dock door to clear a vent for the generator that they realize something large and hungry is out there waiting for them. But some of the townspeople cling tenaciously to their rationality like a life raft, including Norton, who suspects Drayton and the other locals are pulling an elaborate gag on him. Rationality means nothing, however, to Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), a deeply disturbed religious zealot who suggests that the monsters in the mist are harbingers of the end times and of God's wrath. Only Wayne Jessup (Sam Witwer), a soldier from a local army base, seems to know what's going on.

The struggle between rationality and fear and between religious zealotry and fire forms the backbone both of King’s novella and Darabont’s adaptation. Human conflict, the breakdown of the social order, personalities crushed under extreme duress are also elements found in most stories involving apocalyptic horror, of which there’s no better example than George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Despite a larger cast of characters in The Mist, the conflicts are practically the same, the dilemmas almost identical: what to do when information is severely limited and the risks are high, usually filtered down to a simple, if extremely hazardous choice between staying or going.

In all that, The Mist is a fine example of the sub-genre. The increasing desperation of the characters, the turn to religious comfort, and eventually, the turn to violence as the answer are emphasized in a way few directors working in the horror genre would, since they’d risk heavy criticism for such a choice. Backed by Dimension Films (a.k.a. the Weinstein Brothers), Darabont was given wide latitude in adapting King’s novella. To his credit, Darabont includes all the major characters and, just as importantly, all of the major plot points, including the attacks by the monsters, each one more intense than the last. Up until the last ten or fifteen minutes, The Mist is truer to King’s work than any other adaptation of his work.

Darabont, however, strays from The Mist original ending or, to be accurate, continues the story past where King left his readers. King opted for an ambiguous ending, one that gave the survivors, at best, a temporary victory. Frustrating or refusing narrative closure, The Mist allowed readers to make up their own ending, hopeful or bleak. Darabont’s ending provides far more closure and offers, at least on one level, a more optimistic ending, but another, more personal (meaning the characters we’ve followed for two hours), it’s anything but. It’s bleakly ironic and probably the most daring ending to a mainstream film this year.

If "The Mist" doesn’t falter by tacking on a “false” or illogical ending (it doesn’t), it’s far from perfect. At almost two hours, "The Mist" is too long and repetitive, especially where the bible thumping, Revelation-quoting Mrs. Carmody is concerned. The visual effects are also a bit dodgy, due no doubt to budget constraints. To be fair, most of the visual effects, especially those obscured by the mist are more than serviceable. It’s in the cold light of day or in a well-lit interior that the visual effects look unfinished or unpolished. Luckily, that only happens twice, once during the loading dock scene and later on during an attack on the supermarket. Still, those are minor, easily forgivable problems in comparison to Darabont’s achievement: an adaptation of a Stephen King work that’s faithful to the source material while managing to stand on its own.

Fangoria.com Don Kaye

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Dardenne, Jean-Pierre and Luc

from DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/reviews.htm

For over 20 years in Seraing, Belgium, brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne produced/wrote and directed politically leftist documentary films. Their recent career of feature films hit international prominence in 1996 with La Promesse. Their next feature, Rosetta, another fictional story written and produced by them, won the top honors at Cannes in 1999. Constant reexamination in editing transmogrify their films to contain powerful realism expressions with social inequities often a central theme. This is a daring, gritty style often with the use of handi-cam modulations. Their key attributes appear in two distinct forms - extensive time spent on casting, and flexibility in production - often fearlessly migrating from details of their own initial story. In 2005 their latest full-length feature, L'Enfant, was chosen as best film again (Palme D'or) at the 58th Cannes International Film Festival. Juror Emir Kusturica stated: "The jury was working on the basis of discovery, helping and trying to find the movie that synthesizes most of the aspects of cinema, combining the public side of it, but looking for something that doesn't lose the artistic aspects...

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia Kathleen Kuiper

In 2005, with their film L’Enfant, the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for the second time in six years won the Cannes Festival’s Palme d’Or for best film. Only filmmakers Emir Kusturica and Imamura Shohei had previously won twice. Two other pairs of brothers—Vittorio and Paolo Taviani, in 1977, and Ethan and Joel Coen, in 1991—had earned a Palme d’Or.

Like Rosetta (1999), the Dardennes’ first Palme d’Or winner, L’Enfant explored life in an impoverished, gritty, industrial region in French-speaking southern Belgium, particularly around the city of Seraing, where the brothers grew up; the region was known for its steel mills, coal mines, and endemic unemployment. Both award-winning films also examined the circumstances of people on the margins of Belgian society. Whereas Rosetta limned the life of a young woman determined to find work in order to escape the grinding poverty of her life, L’Enfant was essentially a young man’s story. Its protagonist, Bruno, is a 20-year-old petty criminal whose life is changed when his 18-year-old girlfriend, Sonia, bears their child. The story was inspired, according to the brothers, by an image that haunted them during the shooting of another of their films—that of a young woman alone seen daily aimlessly pushing a baby carriage.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne was born on April 21, 1951, in Engis and Luc on March 10, 1954, in Awirs. The elder brother studied acting in Brussels, while the younger took a degree in philosophy. The video work of one of Jean-Pierre’s teachers, French director Armand Gatti, provided their inspiration to use videotape to document the lives and struggles of working-class Belgians. It also determined their signature camera style: use of the handheld camera and a preference for improvised dialogue. Beginning in the 1970s they made a number of documentaries, establishing their own production company, Dérives, in 1975. To date the company had produced more than 60 documentaries, including Le Chant du rossignol (1978), about the Belgian Resistance movement in World War II, and Leçons d’une université volante (1982), concerning Polish immigration. The brothers expanded the production company in 1981, creating Film Dérives Fiction. With the latter company they made their first fiction feature, Falsch (1986), adapted from the play by Belgian playwright René Kalisky, and Je pense à vous (1992). In 1994 they further expanded their company to create Les Films du Fleuve. Among their other noteworthy nondocumentaries were the art-house favourites La Promesse (1996) and Le Fils (2002).

from Emilie Bickerton in Cineaste, Spring 2006 (link lost):

Three years separate the brothers. Jean-Pierre born in 1951 and Luc in 1954, they grew up in the industrial town of Seraing, part of the French-speaking province of Liège, Belgium. The Meuse River runs through it, and this area – where they first “kissed girls and became adult” – has provided the backdrop for all their films since 1996. Jean-Pierre studied drama at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion in Brussels, and Luc, philosophy. In the early Seventies Jean-Pierre met Armand Gatti, the poet and director of L’ENCLOS (1961) and it was Gatti who first encouraged the brothers to work together. – “He brought us out of our daydreaming, threw us into the poem...taught us to start from our truth” – involving them in two of his theatrical shows, La Colonne Durutti and L’Arche d”Adelin.

In 1975 the Dardennes set up Dérives, a production company that became the outlet for the sixty or so documentaries they have made together. These works cover diverse historical events including anti-Nazi resistance groups, Polish immigration, underground newspapers, and the 1960 general labor strike in Belgium. All grounded in community-based [politics, they were often screened at union meetings. In 1994 the brothers founded a second company, Les Films du Flueve, which has since produced their fiction features, as well as those by other directors. They explain their move from documentary to fiction as coming from a desire “to push the limits of possibility and raise questions” that the former doesn’t allow. Increasingly they saw their challenge differently to the one posed by documentary, they wanted to do something that could bring more out of reality, because ‘the problem is not painting life but creating a living painting.” Feature films allows them greater freedom to invent characters and work with actors – they can reconstruct reality rather than just recount it.

In each of their pictures they start from the same, simple question: what does it really mean to be human today? They succeed in answering this through precision, discipline, and the very way they use the camera and carefully construct their scenes. They take single characters or a family relationship and concentrate entirely on these. Their films have little dialog, no music (“It blinds you to the image”), and the most spare of narratives (they refuse to draw any “dramatic line that would stifle [the] life” of their protagonists). Simplicity is an essential component. The Dardennes concentrate our emotions, which in turn allows us time to reflect on a single predicament or event. Also, we are given the space to sense the very rhythm of the film, we feel and follow the movements of the bodies, are conscious of surrounding traffic noises, and notice the little habits and accessories that define the characters.

The Dardennes tend to reuse their actors (Gourmet, Renier) and nearly always cast nonprofessionals. In these four films they gave Gourmet and Renier their first major parts, and Dequenne, Marinne, and Déborah François (Sonia in L’ENFANT) their first acting roles. Their technical team, as well as their settings, has remained mostly the same for each picture, too – Marie-Hélène Dozo (editor), Denis Freyd (producer and screenwriter), and Alan Marcoen (director of photography). The small group and budget, along with the single location and selection of actors, is a very conscious choice, a filmmaking ethic, almost, as it is the product of the brothers’ relationship with cinema and what they aspire to achieve.

In light of their subject matter and this approach, it isn’t surprising that the brothers are often described as political and socially conscious filmmakers. They focus on the marginalized or déclassé in society – black market employers, immigrants, the unemployed, young offenders, and teenage parents, all shot in the postindustrial landscape of eastern Belgium. There are recurring concerns, in particular, the transmission of skills and lessons, especially focusing on the journey to adulthood, the role of parents for future generations, and the continued importance of employment for status and a sense of self in contemporary society. ROSETTA had such an impact that it even spurred a new law, passed in Belgium in 1999 by Minister of Labor and Socialist Party member Laurette Onkelinx. “Plan Rosetta” targeted youth unemployment by intending to offer all young people a job no less than six months after leaving school.

However, it is not so much their subject matter that makes the Dardenne brothers’ work political, but more the way their films explore certain emotions or situations and the humanist vision that subsequently emerges. What the Dardennes represent is the way cinema can be political today, their real originality coming from their refusal to be cynical and struggle against what they call the loss of confidence in man. This can’t be achieved by making characters mouthpieces for particular ideas or representative of predicaments and struggles. This appeal to class consciousness is an old strategy and it is the lack of such an appeal in the Dardenne’s work that makes them so interesting today.

If the brothers have concentrated on a similar selection of characters so far it’s because theirs are the experiences they know about. The same setting of Seraing in Belgium is also chosen because of its familiarity and, as Gatti taught them, it is best to start with this when dealing with fiction, if you’re to go on and say anything true. Of course, some aspects of the film industry and the media, as we have seen, do rile the brothers. That the déclassé are such a blind spot, cinematically and socially, is particularly disturbing for them. Either they are ignored or given charity, yet both, they argue, annihilates them as active subjects capable of shaping their own futures. Echoing the criticisms of the late French critic Serge Daney, the Dardennes are scathing about what they see as the estheticization of poverty of famine on screen – the manipulative pictures of starving children put to pop songs for example, does little more than nourish a vision of a powerless victim. “Filming the body of someone starving is, for the media, the same as filming a mute body,” so “filming a human being...who refuses to be reduced to the symbol of suffering, who refuses that pity be felt towards him, filming this human being has become an act of cinematographic resistance against the contempt of a man who holds onto the morbid pity contained in these images, derived from a victim-centred aesthetic.” What is so remarkable and quite unprecedented about the brothers’ work so far is they have achieved this cinematographic resistance, depicting characters without transforming them from subjects into victims. Dignified is perhaps the most fitting word to describe their cinema, as we are able to grasp the reasons for the character’s actions.

dardenne-brothers.com - An unofficial website about Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

All-Movie Guide: Jean-Pierre bio from Lucio Bozzola

All-Movie Guide: Luc bio from Lucio Bozzola

Belgium Federal Portal Biography

TCMDB: Jean-Pierre biography from Turner Classic Movies

TCMDB: Luc biography from Turner Classic Movies

Soldiers' Stories - Movies - Village Voice - Village Voice Leslie Camhi from The Village Voice, November 2, 1999

Filmjourney.org: Dardenne documentaries Doug Cummings reviews a Dardenne Brothers documentary retrospective, April 2, 2006

Girish also reviews Dardenne documentaries, April 3, 2006

Filmjourney.org: Dardenne documentaries and early features April 7, 2006

Dans l’Obscurite Doug Cummings from Filmjourney, July 22, 2007

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas] Films of the Dardennes Brothers, August 5, 2008

Real and Reel Life: The Aesthetics of the Dardennes Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, May 21, 2009

Dardenne, Jean-Pierre & Luc They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

kamera Interview by Tom Dawson

indieWIRE Interview by Anthony Kaufman

Filmjourney.org: Interview with the Dardennes by Doug Cummings March 23, 2006

Dardenne brothers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE PROMISE (La Promesse) B+ 90

Belgium France Luxembourg (93 mi) 1996

Interesting racial mix, culturally diverse, gritty, authentic drama told mostly in real time, exposing an illegal immigrant cheap labor and apartment scam, where the artifice is stripped completely bare in this heavy dose of realism.

from Emilie Bickerton in Cineaste, Spring 2006 (link lost):

LA PROMESSE tells the story of the relationship between a teenage boy (Igor, played by 14-year old Jérémie Renier) with his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), who houses illegal immigrants and employs them in building work. Roger covers up an accident on site that leaves one worker dead. In the process Igor makes a secret promise to the dying man to take care of his widow, Assita, and their newborn child. Fulfilling this promise forces Igor into adulthood, as he must choose to act against his father.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

An impressively tough, raw realist drama, set in and around the drabber areas of Liège, in which a 15-year-old comes into conflict with his single parent father after a tragedy forces the boy to confront the moral implications of the pair's exploitative business in smuggling and housing illegal immigrants. Having made a promise to a dying African that he'll look after his wife and kid, young Igor is torn between filial duty and growing affection for his impoverished 'charges', between fear of his dad's bouts of drunken violence and his desire to keep his word. The performances are superb, the interplay between father and son extraordinarily well observed, and the whole thing at once wholly unsentimental and deeply moving.

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

The subject is the birth of a conscience, the film was written and directed by two brothers from Belgium, Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne. 15-year-old Igor (Jeremie Renier) is in some ways a normal kid - he loves riding his moped and working on a go-cart with his friends. But he also works for his father, helping to smuggle illegal aliens into Belgium. Roger, the dad (Olivier Gourmet) puts the aliens in substandard housing, forges their passports, makes them work for him on his construction unit, and generally squeezes all the money he can out of them. Igor helps in most of the dirty work - and he's exposed to an atmosphere of lying and corruption that is beginning to harden him. But one day an African, one of the immigrants, falls off a scaffold. Dying in Igor's arms, he asks him to take care of his wife and infant son. Igor promises, and it is the need for this young man to be faithful to his promise that sets the stage for conflict with his father.

Instead of reporting the death, Roger enlists his son's help in burying him on the site - covering him with cement. He then lies to the wife, Assita (Assita Ouedraogo), saying that her husband fled because of gambling debts, and then uses an elaborate ruse to get her to go with him to Germany, where he plans to sell her as a prostitute. Igor, faithful to his promise, decides to help her, at great personal cost to himself.

La Promesse is quite vigorous and immediate in its editing and direction. The Dardennes have achieved a small miracle with their mostly non-professional cast. The young Renier has a special honesty and naturalness. We can see the painful growth of a moral sense in the boy. The drama of the immigrants, the social observation, the sense of corruption as an everyday reality, is seen from the inside, not preached at from the outside. The modesty and directness of the technique make the story all the more compelling. Although the film is sad, there is hopefulness - there is even a kind of faith in this film, the faith that promises do mean something and that the simple actions of this young man can make a difference.

La Promesse Mike D’Angelo (excerpt)

In short, I can't think of a recent English-language film as immediately and powerfully concerned with filial confusion and anguish as is La Promesse, by Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. There's no mystery in their heartbreaking tale, no "did he or didn't he?" -- young Igor (Jérémie Renier) watches, dumbfounded, from inches away, as his father (Olivier Gourmet) removes the impromptu tourniquet that Igor had fashioned from his belt. Later that night, at dad's insistence, he helps to bury the poor fellow. Has it ever before occurred to him to question his father's decisions, behavior, or authority? The film's early scenes, which deftly and succinctly establish the pair's ruthless, amoral trade, suggest that it hasn't; but judging by the expression on his towheaded face as he watches pop shovel cement upon the corpse of the man he'd hoped to save, those aren't exactly visions of sugar plums dancing in his head. What prevents him from acting immediately is not uncertainty or self-delusion, but love and inertia. (Irrelevant aside: if I ever form a speed-metal band, which is about as likely as Thomas Pynchon writing CD liner notes [what's that you say?], it will be called Inertia.)

But act he does. Like last year's otherwise utterly dissimilar Jerry Maguire, La Promesse depicts the aftermath of a noble, selfless gesture made by someone unaccustomed to bestowing such largesse; in this case, however, the stakes are a great deal higher, and there's nothing remotely funny or charming or romantic about the subsequent ordeal. In a development so downbeat and feel-bad that the mere suggestion of it would have development flacks cowering in abject terror beneath their mahogany desks, the beneficiary of Igor's compassion, Burkina Faso expat Assita (Assita Ouédraogo), is so bewildered and terrified by her circumstances that she turns on her protector, accusing him of trying to kill her baby. The stark narrative culminates in one of the most harrowing familial confrontations imaginable -- all the more remarkable because for once there isn't a handgun in sight. The Dardennes create tension the old-fashioned way: not with rote equations like train + helicopter + plastic explosives = BOOM!, but with volatile human emotions and contrary wills.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first film made by the brothers Dardenne to be shown in the U.S. -- not just commercially, but on the festival circuit as well. (I saw it at last year's New York Film Festival, where it outshone new work by such eminent auteurs as Chen Kaige, Hou Hsiao-hsien, André Téchiné, and Mike Leigh.) I'd assumed that it was, in fact, their debut feature, but I could hardly have been more mistaken: before they turned to narrative fiction films (La Promesse is their third), they spent almost 20 years making documentaries, mostly for television. Or so the critics who received press kits inform me, anyway, and I have no reason whatsoever to doubt them...not because press kits are invariably accurate (ha!), but because La Promesse seems so effortlessly, unselfconsciously natural that it's difficult to believe -- and easy to forget, while it's unspooling in front of you -- that it was deliberately crafted. Every scene, every performance, every emotion feels spontaneous and true, and the film as a whole is so vividly imagined that I think I'd be momentarily nonplussed if I came across any on-set photos or video footage. Of course, I'd probably fall over dead if I ran across a story about the film in the national news media, but that's a different matter entirely.

Since I began writing this review, I've seen La Promesse a second time. As a general rule, I try to see my favorite movies at least twice, but I usually wait until they hit the bargain houses (or until I can sidle in from an adjacent auditorium) before returning. In this case, however, I shelled out the full $8 -- in part because I was eager to relive the experience, but also because it had been more than seven months since I'd seen it the first time, and I thought that I might well have forgotten significant details that I could incorporate into, say, this very paragraph. (My memory for plot minutiae is notoriously bad, and I've even been known to blank on entire films. For example, I had completely forgotten, until I stumbled onto the title about an hour and a half ago in my master film list, that I'd seen Nicholas Ray's Flying Leathernecks, and had to look it up in Maltin before I could even vaguely recall what the hell it was about (flying leathernecks, as it happens). Understandable, though, since I saw it a small lifetime ago: 8 August 1996. Hell, Bob Dole was still a presidential candidate back then [arguably].)

As it turned out, however, the refresher course was unnecessary: on the second go-round, I experienced La Promesse less as "that movie I saw last autumn" than as "that thing that happened to some folks I knew last year." This sensation was so disorienting, on the few occasions that I became conscious of it, that I fought against it, by attempting to envision the world beyond the frame as a set -- imagining, for instance, the boom operator standing a few feet to Igor or Roger's left, holding the microphone just above their heads, wondering how much longer it would be before somebody called lunch, trying hard not to cough. It didn't work. The illusion was too strong, the verisimilitude too great. I'm not entirely sure what that betokens, as I don't necessarily believe that filmmakers should strive for realism -- many, if not most, of my favorite films feature ostentatious artifice -- but there's no question that it grabbed me as I've seldom been grabbed by a movie this plain. If nothing else, it's the cheapest special effect I've ever encountered, and somebody ought to run and tell James Cameron, pronto.

Simple Life Darrell Hartman from Artforum, August 4, 2008

“ONE THING IS CERTAIN: small budget and simplicity everywhere.” When Luc Dardenne articulated these twin principles—curiously, as though they were one—in his diary in 1992, did he have any idea they would guide him and his brother, Jean-Pierre, so surely into the upper realms of cinematic achievement? Several Cannes victories later, the Belgian duo—the subject of a mini-retrospective that begins at New York’s Anthology Film Archives on Thursday—are responsible for some of the screen’s most disarmingly resonant portraits of modern Europe. And they haven’t availed themselves of much more than a handheld camera, a pocketful of virtually unknown actors, and a single Belgian town.

The skies over Seraing, the postindustrial heap the filmmakers hail from and film in, are gray. That gray seems to seep down through the city’s dull buildings and into the frigid, inert river Meuse. Against this drab backdrop and a concomitant atmosphere of moral indifference, the Dardennes etch minimalist narratives of the urban underclass that are infused with tension and urgency. The characters, acted naturalistically, sink in. The scenarios, free of the overblown drama so often found in the similarly stripped-down Scandinavian Dogme 95 films, never feel exploitative or unreal. And yet they become captivating.

In La Promesse (1996), a teenager struggles to help an African immigrant whose husband has died in an accident; in Rosetta (1999), a girl tries to hold a steady job and keep her mother from sinking into complete dissolution. A carpenter mentors the boy who killed his son in The Son (2002), and The Child (2005) tracks the wanderings of a young hoodlum who sells his baby.

The critic J. Hoberman has described the cinema of the Dardennes as “spiritually infused social realism.” The brothers, who started out making documentaries, have a detective’s eye for authenticity. Look closely, and you’ll notice that Olivier Gourmet’s woodshop instructor in The Son has a blood blister on his left thumb. Their movies look raw and modern, but there’s a classical rigor at work in them: The Dardennes film scenes at different paces before deciding which feels right, and if they don’t detect the “life force” in a scene, Jean-Pierre has said, they reshoot it—often in another location.

The ghost of Rossellini lives in their frames—also, Bresson. The actors in these films don’t seem like they’re acting, and the dialogue is minimal. The Dardennes are known for honing body language more than delivery. And while they like to foreground the human face—especially in tight, over-the-shoulder close-ups—they have pretty much staked their career on the assumption that the camera can’t get into someone’s head. In Luc’s words: “We film what we can see. This starts you thinking.”

Thinking about economic injustice, among other things. The Dardennes deliver memorable images of life on the brink—as when Rosetta, wrestling with her alcoholic mother near their trailer, falls into a muddy sinkhole. She flounders, cries out, then drags herself out of the slime alone, gasping desperately. You can almost hear the filmmakers crying out: How can a civilized country tolerate anything so abject? Seraing is not so much postindustrial as postapocalyptic: Bruno, the protagonist of L’Enfant, spends money as if it will be useless the next day; Igor, in La Promesse, and Rosetta bury their meager possessions in the ground. Most of the characters occupy not livable neighborhoods but dead zones of cement, mud, and barbed wire.

Tragic conditions like these, the films posit, breed almost unfathomable apathy. When his girlfriend confronts him about selling their child, Bruno says: “We’ll make another one.” But even if he isn’t aware of it, his panting and scheming are leading him toward a redemption of sorts. On the one hand, the abrupt, ambiguous conclusions of the Dardennes’ films are a snub to the Frank Capra ending. Marginal types in particular, these endings say, move their lives ahead on their own—certainly the watchful eye of a couple of high-minded filmmakers doesn’t budge them. Maybe some divine force does? Beautifully, the lingering threat of violence that pervades The Son is most vividly expressed on a plank of plywood, by a red stain that almost seems to have appeared there by accident.

Ultimately, the Dardenne brothers’ films are not about their austerity—a default aesthetic, after all, for many a penniless filmmaker—but their richness. Simplicity can be a complicated proposition. Even, potentially, a heroic one.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review

Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) review

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

Long Pauses Darren Hughes

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

Louis Proyect retrospective

Edwin Jahiel review

Lucid Screening Andrew

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [3/5]

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5] Ken Fox

The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Liam Lacey

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

San Francisco Examiner (Walter Addiego) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

ROSETTA A 97

Belgium France (94 mi) 1999

from Emilie Bickerton in Cineaste, Spring 2006 (link lost):

ROSETTA (played by Émilie Dequenne), even more simply, is a young woman’s fight to “stay standing.” She is determined to find employment and not “fall in the hole,” not disappear from society and be engulfed by her own humiliated situation: living in a caravan park with her alcoholic mother. “Rosetta moves, moves, moves,” she is “in a state of war,” and the camera follows her every step...The moment she starts to move we follow and try to make sense of her actions but at the end we’re thrown back in our seats, forced to deal with the journey we have just witnessed.

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

From the opening seconds, this feature from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, was surely the most visceral filmgoing experience of that year, including all of Hollywood’s explosions and special-effects extravaganzas. It concerns the desperate efforts of the 18-year-old heroine of the title to find a steady job. Played by Émilie Dequenne, (a remarkable non-professional), Rosetta lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother and suffers from stomach cramps. She particularly hopes to work at a waffle stand whose current employee has romantic designs on her. This may sound like the grimmest sort of neo-realism, but the Dardennes keep the story so ruthlessly unsentimental and physical that it would be a disservice to describe it as neo anything.

You feel ROSETTA in your nervous system before you get a chance to reflect on its meaning, almost as if the Dardenne brothers were intent on converting an immediate experience of the contemporary world into a breathless theme-park ride. It makes just about every other form of movie “realism” look like trivial escapism. The film is certainly not devoid of psychological nuance either, and it had such an impact in Belgium that a wage law for teenagers, passed in November 1999, is known as “the Rosetta plan.”

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

A deserving Palme d'Or winner at Cannes '99, Rosetta is in the same, grim realist mould as the Dardennes' earlier La Promesse; it, too, offers a glimmer of hope through the prospect of friendship. Teenage Rosetta (Dequenne) has it tough: living in a trailer park with her promiscuous, alcoholic mother, she tries to hang on to whatever mundane jobs she can get, but for all her determination and hard work, bad luck and her surly, volatile disposition repeatedly tell against her. Is life really worth living? Using very little dialogue and long, hand-held tracking shots (the relentlessly restless visuals perfectly reflect Rosetta's unsettled life, the secret to which is provided only halfway through the movie - and even then, subtly), the Dardennes never sentimentalise their heroine but respect the mysteries of her soul; the result is a film almost Bressonian in its rigour and power to touch the heart.

Tucson Weekly (Mari Wadsworth) review

Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne co-write and co-direct this bleak and unredeeming tale of an embittered trailer-park teen and her cutthroat climb to the top of the Belgian waffle-cart ladder. It's every bit as fascinating as it sounds -- and in French, oui! -- which means some people will insist it's a cosmopolitan and artistic exploration of wage-earning, homelessness, alcoholism and desperation. A dearth of dialogue means non-French speaking audiences won't be encumbered by lengthy subtitles, affording plenty of time to focus on the off-road antics of the Dardennes' hand-held camera, and increasingly pointless point-of-view horseplay as Rosetta attacks absolutely every human being who crosses her path. If it wasn't so literally hard to watch, it might be funnyÉfrom a sort of insensitive, bourgeois perspective. Rosetta will not deepen your compassion for humanity, but it reveals the violent and melancholy underworld of the sidewalk-waffle industry in a way that only a French film can.

Slate [David Edelstein]

The camera is at eye level for Rosetta. In the tumultuous opening, it hurtles down a staircase behind the teen-age title character (Emilie Dequenne) as she tries to elude the factory boss who has just fired her. It swerves left then right as she pulls on locked doors in a vain attempt to evade the plant's security. It's sickeningly in the thick of things as she claws at her pursuers and shrieks that it's unfair, she's a good worker, she doesn't deserve to be let go. Throughout this terse, entertaining parable (it won the grand prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival), the Belgian-born writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (La Promesse, 1996) immerse you in the sensations of Rosetta's life: her daily, roundabout slog through the woods to reach the trailer park where she lives with her alcoholic mother (she's too ashamed to go through the front entrance); her frustrating treks to find employment, however menial; and, most of all, her countless rages at a society that refuses to grant her a "normal" (her word) existence.

By confining the movie's perspective to Rosetta and her rituals, the Dardennes suggest the ways in which people lose the big picture and so have no insight into their own corruption. All they know is what they need--and what will happen if someone else beats them out. In Dequenne, the filmmakers have found a somewhat lumpen girl with just a trace of prettiness, especially when she opens her eyes and lets the world see in. She mostly doesn't, though, which is the point. She tromps around dull-eyed in a gray skirt and thick, mustard-colored stockings--a sullen bottom-feeder. When a generous friend, Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione)--the only one she has ever had, the film implies--falls into quicksand and screams for help, you can see Rosetta's thought processes: If he dies, his job will open up, she'll get it, and she'll be "normal."

As in the La Promesse, the point is to show how capitalism is fundamentally at odds with human decency. People are good, but they're driven to victimize others by the fear that what they have will be taken away. At best, they turn into machines; at worst (most of the bosses), they become casual exploiters. You can't land a job without being raked by the angry gaze of the person you've unfairly replaced, and once you have it there are no guarantees that tomorrow you won't be raking someone else with your own angry gaze. Change the way things work and you will change mankind, is the implicit message--although it's crucial to add that there are no explicit messages, no Brechtian/Marxist exhortations. Both Rosetta and La Promesse end at the point when their protagonist's consciousness begins. The next step is anyone's guess.

I fear I've made Rosetta sound programmatic. Well, it is, but the thing you come away with isn't the program but the rhythm and texture of a young, working-class woman's life. The Dardennes are peerless at staging and shooting rituals, such as Rosetta's day selling waffles and beer from a truck: taking an order, plucking a waffle from the iron, grabbing a beer from the shelf, counting money, making change, saying thank you, taking another order … It's easy to dismiss films that make grandiose statements about how people ought to live but never convincingly portray how they do. The utterly believable capitalist ecosystems of the Dardennes are harder to shake off.

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » True Grit [ROSETTA] January 14, 2000, also seen here: Rosetta | Theater Critic's Choice | Chicago Reader (capsule)

Senses of Cinema (Rhys Graham) review Why Bodies Collide, March 2001

BFI | Sight & Sound | Rosetta (1999) Lizzie Francke, March 2000

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Gary Mairs

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

Bright Lights Film Journal review Five Rampaging Women, October 2001

Reverse Shot review Knock On Any d'Or: Looking Back at Ten Years of Cannes Winners, by Adam Nayman at indieWIRE

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Reel.com [Ray Greene]

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

Epinions [metalluk]

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

Film Journal International (Peter Henn) review

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

The Globe and Mail review [3.5/4] Liam Lacey

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

THE SON (Le Fils) A- 93

Belgium France (103 mi) 2002

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Olivier (Gourmet) is a good teacher of carpentry, but a touch gruff; even so, when he refuses to accept young Francis into his workshop, that doesn't explain why he takes to following the boy, as if he were spying on him. Might it have something to do with his own dead son, as his estranged wife insists? One strength of the Dardennes' follow-up to Rosetta, winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or, is that, once again, they ask us to discover certain crucial facts for ourselves: by the time we're faced with questions of ethical and spiritual import, we've done enough groundwork to assess the evidence properly. Wisely, the camera stays close to Gourmet, with the result that, notwithstanding his subtle understatement and a relatively taciturn script, we're privy to his every fleeting thought and nagging emotion. Never manipulative or sensationalist, the film is none the less deeply moving.

The Son Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It is interesting how many critics have praised this film by saying, in essence, that there is nothing to say, that it is almost too perfect for words. The dumbstruck wonder so many seem to be experiencing before The Son could be likened to the non-linguistic reactions that viewers often have to experimental films. Like a structural film, The Son deploys a closed-off style which determines what can and cannot happen within the film’s universe. At a certain point, its narrative trajectory becomes clear, and the tension becomes not how the narrative will be resolved, but how its necessary resolution will be depicted. Although The Son is significantly different than Time Out and Spider, these films share a sense of absolute completion and self-sufficiency, which for me provoked more intellectual admiration than emotional engagement. Still, the film is a major work of art. Olivier Gourmet and Morgan Mariane deliver exquisite, naturalistic performances. And, as was the case with Pasolini, the Dardenne brothers’ Marxism allows them to create a clear-eyed Christian film, one with both feet planted in the everyday world. [A second viewing cleared up many of my reservations. The moral confusion, the near instinctual propulsive drive of Olivier was more palpable, as were the jarring flare-ups of anger. Olivier does not forgive and then act upon this forgiveness. Rather, his impulse to teach and reshape the boy is a physical one, like righting a badly mitered joint. Depth comes later, and surprises Olivier, Francis, and us.]

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

The latest film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is not without allegorical implications. Cannes Best Actor winner and Dardenne mascot Olivier Gourmet stars as a bereft carpenter who develops a sudden fascination for his young apprentice. As mirror reflection of Gourmet's inner turmoil, the Dardennes' camerawork isn't as assaultive as it was in Rosetta, but it's equally demanding. Their camera contributes to the film's near cosmic state of grace. The nature of the film's relationships are revealed without fanfare, and as such part of the film's mystique is learning that Magali (Isabella Soupart) is not some pregnant stranger but Olivier's estranged wife. Forty minutes in, the Dardennes offer a context for Olivier's strange attraction to the young Francis (Morgan Marinne): Some five years earlier, the teenager strangled Olivier's son while attempting to steal a radio from the carpenter's car. The Son or, more accurately, How Joseph Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Judas Iscariot, has been seemingly pieced together from similar confessions. As allegory, The Son is a testament to Christian forgiveness. While far from heavy-handed, the film's metaphors are still unavoidable: Magdali-as-Magdalene, her Wednesday declaration (Lent anyone?), and the many panels of wood Oliver is forced to carry (like Jesus, on his way to Calvary). Most astounding, Olivier's remarkable ability to judge the metric distance between any two points fascinatingly alludes to the character's moral precision. Our willingness to submit to the film's grueling element of fear is then perhaps a measure of our spiritual skepticism. Despite the film's overwhelming bleakness, its Bressonian human spirit is unmistakable.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

More than any other contemporary filmmakers, Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne understand the ways in which work gives tenor and meaning to people's lives, and how the mundane routines of everyday life set the limits of their world. In their last film, 2000's Palme D'Or-winning Rosetta, these routines form the distinct shape of a cage, with the title heroine clawing ferociously to survive in a city with dire unemployment rates. Former documentarians, the Dardennes followed her around with a handheld camera pinned to her back, getting about as close to her visceral experiences as possible without burrowing into her skull. If anything, this intense first-person technique is employed even more rigorously for The Son, a searing Christian allegory about sin, redemption, forgiveness, and, not least of all, carpentry. After the silent, white-on-black credits, the Dardennes rudely plop the audience into the organized chaos of Olivier Gourmet's workshop, as his juvenile apprentices work up a racket with hammers, buzzsaws, and welding torches. A lesson in how to bury exposition, the film proceeds for a full 30 minutes before the dramatic core of the story spills out in casual conversation; until then, it simply lays out Gourmet's daily life and offers something close to a crash course in his trade. Gourmet's insistence on precision and order gives him a quiet command over his young charges, who come to him as part of a reform program designed to usher them from delinquency to responsible adulthood. But his stable life is upended when a sullen new applicant (Morgan Marinne) turns out to be the boy who murdered his only son five years earlier, a tragedy that ended Gourmet's marriage. Though the Dardennes' style sometimes limits his expression to his ears, neck, and shoulder blades, Gourmet's tormented, internalized performance sets the film on edge: Not only does the audience not know what he's going to do, but he doesn't seem to know, either. From the moment he recognizes Marinne, Gourmet's interaction with the boy takes on an agonizing intensity, yet he's bound up by conflicting impulses, with anger and bloodlust mingling alongside curiosity, compassion, and an unexpectedly tender fatherly connection. The Dardennes sustain that tension through a masterful closing drive that resembles the final third of In The Bedroom, only without the same dreadful inevitability. In the process, they also offer a few helpful lessons on back support, proper beam storage, and distinguishing one type of wood grain from another.

Los Angeles Times review Manohla Dargis

There are few filmmakers today for whom moviemaking is as deeply moral an enterprise as it is for Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. In the brothers' powerful new film, "The Son," a man trembles at the threshold of vengeance, confronted by a boy who has done him immeasurable wrong. Forgiveness is the sort of thing that can sound the death knell for a movie, but in "The Son" absolution isn't grist for a sermon or anything so blandly reassuring -- it is instead the stuff of ordinary life.

The story opens in the barren Belgian city of Liège, not far from the German and Dutch borders, where a carpenter named Olivier (Olivier Gourmet) rushes through a few anxious days. Dressed in blue overalls, his stocky frame girded by a work belt and his eyes obscured by thick lenses, Olivier enters in a whirlwind of frantic motion, the hand-held camera dogging his every move. He has just this minute -- almost in the very instant the story begins -- realized that one of the students at the school where he teaches is the same boy who once murdered someone he loved. In stunned agitation, the carpenter races through the school, peering around corners to catch sight of the teenager, Francis (Morgan Marinne). From the way he looks at the kid, there's murder in his eyes.

Francis doesn't know what Olivier knows, and the great, almost unbearable tension in the film comes from the gap in their respective awareness of each other. Recently released from a juvenile prison, Francis lives alone in an apartment outfitted with not much more than a radio, a bed and his prescription medicine. (He has chronic insomnia.) Sullen and watchful, with blunt features arranged like a wall against the world, the teenager has learned little from jail save for defensiveness. As far as Francis is concerned, as he explains to Olivier in one of the film's more wrenching exchanges, he's paid his debt to society and has a right to a normal life. He wants to learn carpentry from his standoffish teacher, but, as it becomes painfully clear, Francis is also searching for love.

It doesn't take Olivier long to realize what Francis wants from him; it takes almost the entirety of the story for us to understand what the man will give. At the center where he teaches, the carpenter pushes the boy away even as Francis tries to sneak under his wing. Olivier forces the boy to carry beams that are too heavy for him, yet he also patiently shows Francis how to build a toolbox. He's at once gruffly paternal with the teenager and scarily hostile, caught between curiosity and contempt. (Gourmet won best actor at Cannes last year, beating out Adrien Brody's performance in "The Pianist.") Often silent, Olivier keeps his feelings hidden, but he can't keep his unhappiness quiet. He radiates such extreme unease that even the camera that hovers next to him darts about as restlessly as a hummingbird.

Best known for their modest art-house successes "La Promesse" and "Rosetta," the Dardennes began making nonfiction films in the 1970s as a form of political action. From documentaries about strikes and factories, they moved into fiction and, after making two features that slipped into the ether, found international acclaim with stories about people desperately clinging to a place in the world. (The fiction films retain a gritty documentary texture.) Like the immigrant African workers of "La Promesse" trying to find a foothold in Europe, and like the eponymous Rosetta, whose attempts to find and keep a menial job nearly destroy her, Francis is single-minded in his pursuit of normalcy. Just as poverty did for Rosetta, prison has turned him into one of society's resident exiles, an outcast among the comfortably living.

The Dardennes have said that "The Son" could have been called "The Father," an observation that reinforces the film's religious undertones. It's possible to see the film as a Christian allegory, but there's something too limiting about that take and not only because the filmmakers are Jewish. The themes of vengeance and forgiveness aren't the provenance of any one faith, after all, and there's as much leftist politics in their worldview as there is the documentarian's pursuit of realism and a first-rate Hollywood director's sense of narrative urgency. There are all sorts of ways to look at "The Son" -- as a philosophical thriller, as a statement of faith, as a call to political arms or just as a terrific entertainment. Perhaps the best way to look at it, though, is as a gentle warning that in a world guided by an eye for an eye, everyone ends up blind.

Slate (David Edelstein) review

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Son (2002) Richard Kelly, 2003

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

PopMatters (Elbert Ventura) review

indieWIRE review David Sterritt and Mikita Brottman

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10]

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

filmcritic.com (Nicholas Schager) review [3/5]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4/5]

Reverse Shot review #4 Film of the Year, by Erik Syngle and Jeff Reichert

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Kamera.co.uk review Antonio Pasolini

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [4/5]

PopMatters (Mark Labowskie) review

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [4/4]

Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films

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

Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet) review [A+] from a religious perspective

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [1/4] from an infuriorated cinephile

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review increasingly esoteric, if not pretentious

The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3/4]

DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review

Harvey S. Karten review [3/4]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

Plume Noire review Moland Fengkovm

Twitch Jason Morehead

Film Journal International (Erica Abeel) review

CineScene.com (Josh Timmermann) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

Guardian/Observer review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4] Ken Fox

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

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

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

THE CHILD (L’enfant) B 87

Belgium France (100 mi) 2005

Only fuckers work

Using the Bressonian model, the film is a series of precisely measured, almost mathematically determined small pieces of a puzzle, fragmentary moments in the lives of two young people (Jérémie Renier and Déborah François) that in the end add up to a whole, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The problem here is that we’ve seen it all before from the Dardennes, the exact same formula, and in much more interesting human life dramas. In this story, a despicable guy sells his girl friend’s newborn baby for quick cash, then when he sees her devastated reaction, realizes he better get the baby back, which leads to even more profoundly distasteful results. The use of cell phones in this film are so prevalent and repulsive, symptomatic of the exacting world of criminal activity, that the pronounced effect of continual mechanical ringing actually has a greater impact on the viewer than anything the people say or do. Interesting that he is forced to give up his cell phone midway through the film, focusing the center of the repugnant activity squarely on the shoulders of young Renier, a model of unrepentant behavior up until his baptism in the putrid river water, where his attempts to conceal himself from a crime nearly gets his young accomplice friend killed.

The lead character of street punk Renier is so disaffected, and his connection to the world and the people around him so nonchalantly predictable and routine that by the end, there is little sympathy. Part of the problem is the Dardennes style of making films. By now we know what to expect. In the past they have been fueled by brilliant performances, unlike the non-actor Bressonian model, but with a similar perfectly etched drawing of a world-within-a-world that meticulously defines the parameters of one human life. By showing what they do, describing their everyday routine with such amazing detail, we come to understand who they are, usually by that single moment when they break free of their self-imposed blinders and have a transcendent moment. Again, because we’ve seen it all before, and in situations where our emotional connection is much more involving, this film disappoints because it never really connects with the audience, almost intentionally so. Despite the fact it is broken down to the barest minimum, it defies you to care, going through a step by step process of defining a world with people where it is impossible to care about anything at all. All that’s left is making it through each and every day, which is exactly the same as the last one, and in time, growing more endlessly dreary than the next. To suggest that there is a breakthrough moment here is to see a different film. There is no transcendent moment, all that’s left is the dreary ennui. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

Luc Dardenne:

We understand why critics have seen similarities (with Bresson’s PICKPOCKET), especially because of the endings, since in both films the boy is in jail and the girlfriend comes to visit him. The famous sentence that the boy says at the end of PICKPOCKET is, “Jeanne, what a strange path I had to take to meet you.” It’s true that Bruno has also gone on a long and strange path to be able to encounter, to be able to meet and accept, the woman and accept his son, accept fatherhood. So there is a similarity, but I think that the terms are very different. The narrative construction is very different. We’re talking about very different things, and our manner of editing isn’t at all Bressonian.

At the same time, there’s a similarity with Bresson in the link to Dostoevsky, to Crime and Punishment. I think that perhaps out choice of the name Sonia for the girl is unconscious, because it’s Sonia who at the end of Crime and Punishment goes to Raskolnikov in jail, who allows him to cry and to remember and understand what he’s done.

from Emilie Bickerton in Cineaste, Spring 2006 (link lost):

Finally, last year’s release, L’ENFANT, focuses on Bruno’s (Jérémie Renier) process of renouncing his life of petty crime and fulfilling instead, consciously, his role as a father. This is done through the exploration of decision, and subsequent repentance, to sell his newborn son.

In L’ENFANT, for example, rather than dwell on his mistake, the Dardennes are interested in how Bruno comes to understand his act as such. They explore the sources of his final repentance. Where does this sense of morality come from? Given his environment it would have been comprehensible that he never felt any remorse but continued his amoral life of petty crime. Yet Bruno turns himself in to the police, seeks forgiveness from Sonia, and finally takes an interest in his son. He does this because of those moments of friendship and love he has experienced, and so feels their absence acutely. His sense of morality, then, derives from his interaction with the young Steve (especially after hiding in the freezing water together, saving him from drowning, and trying to warm his legs afterwards) where he realizes his ability to look after another person, and the disgust Sonia shows towards him. The conclusion to L’ENFANT, as with their other films, roots morality in society through engagement with others, rather than any innate human (and thus Christian-based) goodness. It is this understanding of human beings that must be derived from the Dardenne’s body of work.

For some the simplicity that characterizes the Dardenne’s films might seem too easy. Rather than agonize over what Sonia should say to Bruno, she faints. There is a similar act in a difficult scene from LE FILS. And even when Sonia’s confrontation with Bruno does come, her words are few – “Get out!...outside!” But there is nothing easy about this. The ability to keep silent, to hold your tongue, is a restraint that differentiates the Dardennes from other directors who appear to fear silence, anxiously filling their frames with unnecessary sound and color. When Sonia and Bruno meet again, the scene is nearly without dialog and there is no music, only their movements. But everything is so heavily charged that you watch with increasing concern (you have time to feel this), wondering what will she do. She makes soup in the tiny kitchen, there is barely space for Bruno and even less for the camera. We feel the claustrophobia and every detail and action has a magnified impact – the pans slammed down on the cooker, the gas flame hissing – we really are in that room. And finally Sonia snaps, screams those two words, and her expression is savage, total disgust and anger. It lasts a second but imprints itself on our memory. The humanism is here, in the refusal to bow to our own expectation for melodrama. Will Sonia take him back, you ask yourself, willing her not to. And then you watch this scene and realize of course not, of course she won’t because we are dealing with human beings and the gravity of Bruno’s action is fully realized.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

With their breakout hit La Promesse, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne cultivated a singularly exquisite ethical and emphatic view of the world adopted and extended by each and every one of their successive masterpieces: Rossetta, The Son, and now L'Enfant. The verite aesthetic of these films is instantly recognizable and rooted in the brothers' shared background in documentary filmmaking; the wobbly camera, back-of-the-head shots, oblique framing, and lack of mood music is its own artifice, but the cumulative emotional and spiritual affect of these films never feels premeditated. So innate is this style that the films appear to materialize out of thin air, and with each new project, the filmmakers appear to be daring us to find a single false note in their startling simulations of real life.

In typical Dardenne fashion, L'Enfant wastes scant time chokeholding its audience. In a grim eastern Belgian steel town, Bruno (Jérémie Renier) panhandles and cons locals with the help of 14-year-old Steve (Jérémie Segard). Bruno's girlfriend, Sonia (Déborah François), waits to collect an unemployment check, oblivious that Bruno is about to sell their newborn child, who's tossed around like an article of trade throughout the film's running time. This moment is horrifying, not least of which because Bruno betrays the moral and emotional responsibility implicit in that mythic image the Dardennes allow us to glimpse early in the film of father, mother, and son huddled in ostensible rapture near the cold, dirty embankment they sometimes call home.

L'Enfant's swirling sense of moral chaos, sustained horror, and courage has not been seen since The Son, which was also open to the possibility of good coming out of a world that can be relentless in its callousness. Like the Dardennes' camera, Bruno seems propelled by an innate mechanism beyond his control; he is keen only on self-preservation, oblivious to his role as a father. The Dardennes help us to understand Bruno's helplessness, but they never abuse or toy with our sympathies. They may see Bruno's actions as the residual damage of a heartless social existence (a dog-eat-dog global market), but this bitter truth isn't revealed to the audience with a guttersnipe's sense of class, but with uncanny ease, and with the compassionate belief that the world, in spite of its merciless cruelty, is still possible of affecting good.

The Dardennes are religious men, but their detached style is so munificent their films defy easy categorization; these works can just as easily be read as Christian allegories or visions of socialist-humanist daring. Indeed, every remarkable composition and movement in L'Enfant exudes compassion and remorse, evoking a profound sense of transcendental, existential, spiritual, or emotional unease (take your pick, or take them all, because the brothers' vision is nothing if not absolute), and its incredible, gut-punching finale—which follows what may be the most exciting and revelatory chase sequence the movies have ever seen—can be looked at as a male pieta or, more simply (but just as powerfully), an eruptive demonstration of a child finally becoming an adult. Either way, the film is nothing short of a miracle.

The Child (L'Enfant) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

A few square miles of unprepossessing urban landscape continue to yield a rich fictional universe in the Dardenne brothers’ latest chronicle of life among modern European have-nots.

Filmed as usual in the Belgian industrial town of Seraing, The Child continues the run of steely, confident realist dramas that began in 1996 with The Promise (the brothers’ third feature) and that won them a Palme d’Or with 1999’s Rosetta (The Child also played in competition).

Closer in tone to that film than to the challengingly austere The Son (2002), The Child is a complex, at times emotionally painful story of an artless young couple struggling to survive at the bottom of the ladder. The film features an undemonstrative but utterly compelling performance by Jeremie Renier, who made his name with The Promise, and although very much of a piece with the Dardennes’ other films, it consolidates their reputation as sparing, insightful storytellers.

Strong narrative and a powerful emotional charge, added to the brothers’ growing auteur reputation, should make The Child a considerable hit with art-house audiences.

The child of the title is Jimmy, just born to 18-year-old Sonia (Francois), seen at the start of the film searching for the kid’s father Bruno (Renier). Bruno, a young petty thief sleeping rough – having sublet Sonia’s flat – is pleased to see her, but markedly less interested in the baby. Initially the young couple are in buoyant, if blinkered, good spirits.

But before long, Bruno decides that he and Sonia need cash more than another mouth to feed, and unilaterally decides to sell the child for adoption. At one nerve-racking moment, he visits an abandoned flat to hand Jimmy over; in an even more tense follow-up scene, he waits in a garage in the hope of getting the child back.

Grim as this scenario may seem, The Child is anything but sensationalistic; the Dardennes are not interested in manipulating our emotions. Rather, they want to show us, without rhetorical commentary, how life is for people like Bruno and Sonia, and to depict the daily pressures that could lead a young man – cocksure but inarticulate and unable to think beyond the moment – to such a reckless act.

By all reasonable criteria, Bruno should seem a monstrous figure, foolish, selfish and callous. Yet the Dardennes bring us close enough to let us understand his behaviour, and to watch him as he begins – however dimly – to question it himself.

The film’s subtlety partly stems from Renier’s performance. Although he often doesn’t give much away, he conveys a nuanced sense of gradual change in Bruno: in the scene of the empty flat, little registers on his face, but small hesitant tremors tell us that he’s beginning to feel unpleasant emotions that he’s unused to. Deborah Francois has her own key moments at the start of the film, as a waifish and not too smart girl still in thrall to her boyfriend’s shallow confidence.

As for the ill-used Jimmy, it is a mark of the film’s intelligence that we never get a sense of him as more than a faceless bundle in a romper suit (he is played, in fact, by some 20 different babies): this at once precludes any spurious sentimentality or personalised horror at the child’s treatment, and also allows us to understand that the child of the title is perhaps less Jimmy than his young father.

Much more narratively driven than The Father – whose lead Olivier Gourmet makes a brief appearance here as a policeman – The Child comes to a head as Bruno descends into an abyss of his own making. The film climaxes with Bruno and a teenage accomplice (Segard) fleeing after a theft, in a chain of events that finally allows Bruno to accept responsibility for his actions.

The coda, cathartic without offering any easy payoff, bears out the frequent comparisons made between the Dardennes and Robert Bresson: like the hero of his Pickpocket, Bruno might have some redemption in store, or at the very least, begin to grow up.

The film’s energy is driven by the now familiar camera style of the Dardennes and cinematographer Alain Marcoen – held-held and often very close to the actors, sometimes in confined spaces, and always in harshly drab settings.

The result is a quasi-documentary viewpoint that, while detached, never seems impersonal but rather allows us an unimpeded view of the characters’ actions, while their emotions and thoughts remain harder to gauge. In a remarkable film, the Dardennes once again prove that there’s still life to be found in hard unvarnished realism, especially when executed with such adult seriousness and compassion.

World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh

Bright Lights Film Journal [Ian Johnston]

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]

At the Movies Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, April 6, 2006

The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

DVD Times Noel Megahey

BFI | Sight & Sound | Weight Of Water Jonathan Romney from Sight and Sound, April 2006

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C+]

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Reverse Shot [James Crawford] with responses by Nick Pinkerton and Jeannette Catsoulis from indieWIRE

Luc and Jeane-Piere Dardennes interview and essay by Gerald Peary

here Walter Chaw, while a shorter condensed version may be seen here: Film Freak Central dvd review

DVD Outsider Slarek

Kamera.co.uk review Antonio Pasolini

Film Monthly (Andrew Dowd) review

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [3/5]

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [5/5]

Cinephile Magazine [Richard X]

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4.5/5]

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

stylusmagazine.com (Sandro Matosevic) review

DVD Verdict (Joe Armenio) dvd review

The New York Sun (Ben Kenigsberg) review

eFilmCritic.com (Doug Bentin) review [4/5]

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [2.5/5]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Lucid Screening Ben

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/5]

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B+]

not coming to a theater near you (Beth Gilligan) review

Talking Pictures (UK) review Alan Pavelin and Howard Schumann

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

eFilmCritic.com (Paul Bryant) review [3/5]

Film Journal International (Wendy R .Weinstein) review

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

The Lumière Reader Tim Wong

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review

CineScene.com (Chris Knipp) review

The Cinematheque (Kevyn Knox) review

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Premiere Magazine [Glenn Kenny]

BFI | Sight & Sound | Interview Jonathan Romney interviews the Dardennes from Sight and Sound, April 2006

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4] Ken Fox

Variety.com [Scott Foundas]

Time Out London (Geoff Andrew) review

Guardian/Observer

Austin Chronicle (Marrit Ingman) review [3.5/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Wesley Morris

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

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

LORNA’S SILENCE (Le Silence de Lorna) B 88

Belgium Italy France Germany (105 mi) 2008

The Dardenne’s take a dip into familiar territory in another minimalist, unadorned and unsentimentalized examination of life in a loveless and paid-for marriage, where immediately we’re aware of being caged-in, where the wife Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) has few options, as she was given a raw deal when her worthless husband Claudy (Jérémie Renier) turns out to be more of a slimeball than she realized, a pitiful junkie who’s always whining and pleading with her while promising to straighten himself out. Claudy is easily one of the least appealing and more pathetic characters seen onscreen in awhile, as it’s hard to know why she doesn’t simply kick him out, as he’s otherwise a useless bastard that is an all-consuming force in her life. We soon realize what kind of black market hoodlums she’s dealing with, as they’re arranging to have “the junkie” killed in order to arrange another marriage for her, this time with “the Russians,” who apparently pay top dollar. In typical Dardenne fashion, all of this evolves through an endless series of walks, drives in cars, conversations on cell phones, more walks, which feels like a pathetic way to waste one’s time, always arranging times and places for an unending series of meetings where Lorna is treated like a piece of merchandise that can be inspected and evaluated prior to purchase. Since the method has been utilized so often before, none of this draws the audience into this circular web of money and deceit, as cinematically it resembles ROSETTA (1999), one of the first to employ such restless visuals through what seems like an endless stream of hand-held tracking shots, more or less projecting the image of a caged-in animal, which becomes especially relevant here as the film veers more towards a slave market ring, as she’s a bought and paid for illegal Albanian immigrant, so if she disobeys their rules, they’ll take her passport and send her back to Albania. Her idea of getting a quick divorce instead of following the murder plan threatens the Russian’s timetable, so it’s out of the question, yet she pursues it anyway. This idea of free will soon has its consequences, as she’s just as much a slave as the women living behind locked doors depicted in international sex rings, such as Lucas Moodysson’s LILYA 4-EVER (2003), yet she still persists, perhaps out of innocence, naiveté, perhaps a misreading of the situation and the kind of thugs she’s dealing with, or more likely because she aspires to freedom of choice.

The most powerful moments in this film are wordless, requiring believable performances, especially by Dobroshi, who grows more inwardly intense as the film progresses and had to learn an Albanian French accent, while Renier is so skin and bones he’s a ghost of his former self. The inflexible underworld figures are not men anyone would want to meet and would feel right at home in Cronenberg’s EASTERN PROMISES (2007). Unfortunately, the darker edges of the world today are infiltrated by men just such as this, men who exploit the weaknesses of others (usually young women) for profit, where killing is seen as a business decision. It’s from these dark, restless waters that Lorna must learn to survive. She goes through a charade of fake battery attempts in order to quicken the divorce proceedings, all of which leaves Claudy in disgust, as he’s checked himself into a rehab hospital in an attempt to get clean and refuses to have anything to do with hitting her. So instead she has to settle for a series of self-inflicted wounds and a convincing police report, all in a last ditched effort (which he knows nothing about) to spare his life. The best piece of filmmaking is saved for last, as there’s a bit of a plot twist where things really spin out of control, but rather than find herself above the fray, as she hoped, she finds herself more immersed in the muck than ever before, leaving a bitter taste in her mouth, as the men in her life become ever more despicable, which of course, is how the rest of the world views her. As a foreigner living in Belgium, she is seen as a shadowy outsider who’s so completely under the radar she’s barely even acknowledged as human. She’s used to being shunned by nearly everyone, so what’s interesting in this movie is a storyline that’s never told, that’s only hinted at, where in this rancid depiction of black market corruption there’s only a brief glimpse of hope, but nonetheless, this screenplay won the Cannes festival award for best screenwriting. From my perspective, the first half is overly mechanical, but by the end it discovers its own inspiration. Perhaps trying too hard to be overtly Bressonian, it reminded me of AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966), where everything that could go wrong with the girl (taking the ownership and property place of the donkey) goes wrong, as she’s led around on a leash by despicable characters, yet in the end lands on a perfect grace note, where a Schubert piano sonata is replaced by Alfred Brendel playing Beethoven’s sublime 32nd piano sonata.

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

In “Lorna’s Silence,” a somber beauty of a French-language drama by the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the heroine is looking for purity of purpose too, though she doesn’t know it, or can’t articulate it to herself. Lorna, an Albanian émigré in the process of gaining Belgian citizenship (she’s played exquisitely by Arta Dobroshi), dreams of opening a snack bar with her boyfriend. But doing so depends on her keeping silent about a criminal scheme that may cost the life of another man, Claudy, whom she has come, inconveniently, to love. (He’s played by a Dardenne veteran, the always impressive Jérémie Renier.)

Every time predictability threatens, the plot takes an unexpected turn that traps Lorna more tightly between her love and the thugs who run her life. Like earlier Dardenne films, “Lorna’s Silence” is naturalistic, yet this one, beautifully shot in 35 mm film by Alain Marcoen, achieves a poetry of bereftness. “They want to kill us,” Lorna says near the end. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.” Simpler words were never spoken in more startling circumstances.

Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [5/6]

A soul-crushing weight rests upon Lorna (Dobroshi), the Albanian-immigrant heroine of the Dardenne brothers’ stunning proletarian character study. You can see it in her tightly wound expression—lips subtly pursed, eyelids heavy—and in how she walks from place to place with a sleepwalker’s gait. To describe the plot she’s entangled in would ruin much of the film’s surprise, and also be a capitulation to those who have accused the Dardennes of moving away from the less storied structures of masterpieces like La promesse and The Son.

Suffice to say that Lorna’s under the thumb of a mobster (Rongione) and is falsely married to her drug-addict lodger (Renier). From there, the tale twists and turns until it spirals out of control, though the Dardennes maintain their usual rigorous aesthetic and thematic grip. They make it look easy, to the point that the effortlessness and elegance of certain revelations barely register until after the credits roll.

In the moment, it’s easy to wonder if Lorna’s Silence will be much of anything beyond a subdued, seemingly realism-bound pulp fiction. The Dardennes’ most praised films tend to hinge on a climactic epiphany that is noticeably absent here. Additionally, Lorna is left behind at her most vulnerable moment, a point that a good number of stories would either begin at or at least continue on from. Yet what becomes clear in these final moments is that the whole film has been an epiphany; each story beat has brought us closer to Lorna while slowly severing the narrative umbilical cord. It’s an entirely new world that we’re left in—a place where the rules of the movie we’ve just experienced no longer apply.

The Lumière Reader  Barry Levinson (spoiler)

FOR ALL their nominal prestige, there’s a welcome lack of pomp surrounding the event of a new Dardennes’ film. Maybe it’s because, unlike the Coens – whose in-house pecking order sees to the divvying up of writing, but not directing duties – the Belgian duo enact their craft under the same industrious anonymity that informs their characters. Whatever the case, Lorna’s Silence, their latest collaboration, opens on familiar terms – with a nod to Bresson: Mimicking L’Argent, we witness a cluster of Euros changing hands, unspooling a bleak scenario that finds the title character hitched to a junkie named Claudy (Jeremie Renier) in order to gain citizenship. Strictly a formal arrangement, the pair cohabit a flat in Liège, where – hair cropped boyishly close – Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) flaunts an obvious lack of empathy over her spouse’s struggle to give up heroin. (More salient, as it turns out, than her steppingstone existence as an alien-bride, is the one she pictures alongside her thuggish boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), with whom she dreams of opening a snack bar.) But Lorna, like Claudy, is just another pawn in a plot overseen by Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) – a shadowy cab driver who, after removing Claudy via a forced overdose, seeks to marry her off to a mafioso known as “the Russian.”

Like their 2005 film The Child, Lorna’s Silence uses the sale of bodies as shorthand for a desperate sub-order – one whose collapsed territories fall under the lonely grip of the Euro. As viewers, our sole entry point into that world remains Lorna: Shunning omniscience, the brothers purposely muddy character relations, in a bid to lock us into the mindset of their flailing heroine. But where as, in the past, that tactic has been used to devastating ends, the web of crime surrounding Lorna – and her standing within it – prove to be intuitively simple: that is, she treats Claudy with contempt for no other reason than his co-dependence – suddenly awoken to his humanity by his impending death.

As such, a chism is aroused, draining the impact from a crucial turning point in in which Lorna strips down and fucks Claudy during the throes of withdrawal. Before any tendrils of affection can emerge, however, Claudy is killed, and what ensues is the typical spur towards redemption, only with an added twist: When the resultant guilt proves to be too much, Lorna is sent reeling into a kind of punch-drunk martyrdom in which she becomes convinced – against all medical reasoning – that she’s carrying his unborn child. As played by newcomer Dobroshi, Lorna is a pleasure to behold – magnetically shuffling between open vulnerability and devout resilience. But the Dardennes’ ascent into a delusional spiritualism feels off: Their films are at their best when they reframe Christian tropes of sin and forgiveness as a fraught exchange between two individuals; here, absolved of the source of her anxiety, Lorna simply feels like a tool in some God’s-eye prank.

gradnick wrote in Lumiere Reader comments:

The Dardene’s have referenced Bresson in one way or another in virtually all of their work, and while a nod to his final masterwork L’ARGENT (1983) in LORNA’S SILENCE is quite likely, the film might also reflect an understated awareness of Bresson’s UNE FEMME DOUCE (1969) and MOUCHETTE (1964). The latter was referenced more stridently in the Dardenne’s second feature, ROSETTA (1999), whereas here in their new film the similarities are more implicit. Another striking touchstone for this excellent film might be Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 masterpiece, VIVRE SA VIE, through which LORNA’S SILENCE resonates all the way back to Dreyer’s LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARC (1928).

Dardenne heroines have all experienced their own unique Passion. La Passion de Lorna follows a similar trajectory to that of Godard’s Nina: the circumstances are different, but the options for Lorna are disturbingly similar to Nina’s some 45 years earlier. However, the Dardenne’s take a different route. Just when you think Lorna and Nina are about to merge in a repetition of VIVRE SA VIE, Mouchette returns to pull us towards Bresson again. Where David Levinson saw Lorna as the victim of a cruel prankster-God in what he took to be an unsatisfying foray into delusional spirituality, I saw a very grounded late Bressonian moral struggle. There is nothing in LORNA’S SILENCE to signal a theological, spiritual, or specifically Christian reading of the film. Lorna’s crisis and birth pangs that manifest inside her are moral and philosophic rather than theological or spiritual. In this respect the Dardenne’s have an affinity with Bruno Dumont, another Bresson-influenced French filmmaker who locates his philosophical studies solidly in the earth (as signaled at the end of LA VIE DE JESUS, the beginning of HUMANITE, and repeatedly throughout TWENTYNINE PALMS and FLANDRES).

Starting with MOUCHETTE, Bresson’s films dealt with moral and philosophical despair – the impact of the absence of God in the affairs of humankind. For Lorna (like all of Bresson’s sensitive protagonists) pain and guilt are nevertheless very real, and she cannot ignore them. Godard’s Nina was an innocent, used by the world and spat out. Like Jeanne d’Arc before her, she was martyred at the hands of men. Mouchette was another innocent, used by the world then left to rot. She took action and martyred herself. Elle in UNE FEMME DOUCE was another innocent broken by the indifference and self-interest of the world. She took action and martyred herself. Lorna is not an innocent, but she longs for the innocence of being at peace with her conscience and to be free of the corruption of the world. She also takes action. If God is anywhere in the equation, it might be (as Dumont suggests) in the silence of conscience – maybe.

Posted: 05.08.08 @ 22:53:44

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth]

Whether or not you “like” their work, if you’ve spent any significant time this decade at film festivals (or reading the blogs that cover them), you’d be hard pressed to deny the impact that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have had on recent art cinema. With traces spottable in films as diverse as Berlinale winner About Elly, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and Jacques Audiard’s over-praised A Prophet, the Dardenne style (handheld camera kept close, hyper-naturalistic performances, real locations, a general hard-on for brutality wrapped in the mundane) has become the dominant style of serious movies about ordinary people. This is what happens when you win two Palme D’ors in less than ten years, I guess — other filmmakers presume that you’ve cracked the code. The dirty secret, of course, is that the audience for an actual Dardenne brothers film consists almost entirely of other filmmakers and critics, and neither group has done a sufficient job of persuading that this shouldn’t be the case. This decade’s key art film phenomenon is — ironically, considering the Dardennes’ preferred subject matter — virtually completely inaccessible to any sort of audience outside of the elite circle that made it a phenomenon in the first place. If you are reading this, you are probably part of that elite. If you are not reading this, you probably hear the phrase “Belgian film about poor people” and run as fast as you can in the other direction, and frankly, I don’t blame you.

That said, the Dardennes’ follow up to the Cannes-winning L’enfant is of interest for two reasons: with a pulp kick giving way to psychological intrigue before the globo-political thesis kicks in, it’s more entertaining on a base level than “a Belgian film about poor people” has any right to be, and it reveals why the Brothers are not only worthy of emulation, but also why they do what they do so much better than their pretenders.

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), an Albanian immigrant who dreams of opening a cafe with her largely absent boyfriend, has married Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier, nearly unrecognizable at about 30 pounds lighter than in his last stateside release, Summer Hours) to secure citizenship, which will allow her to get a bank loan. As part of a deal set up with taxi driver/low-level crook Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), Lorna has agreed to make her newly-acquired Belgian citizenship useful by passing it on to a Russian stranger via another marriage. Claudy thinks he’s going to be paid 5,000 Euros to divorce Lorna so the second half of the deal can go through, but Lorna knows that Fabio really plans to kill Claudy and make it look like an overdose. When Claudy asks for her help in getting off heroin, Lorna tries to convince Fabio to spare Claudy’s life, faking domestic violence so that they can get a quickie divorce. At the point where Lorna is self-inflicting head injuries, it looks like Lorna’s Silence is on the road to a happy ending. It’s not.

Formally, Lorna’s Silence is above repproach. There’s a pure beauty to the imagery here that seems antithetical to the concerns of most films made by Dardenne pretenders, an ease with color and a subtlety of light that seems distinctly related to classic Belgian painting. The Brothers also understand that sometimes a fixed camera doesn’t impede immediacy, but actually enhances it. Their visual minimalism is all about quiet control.

Lorna’s emotional complexity is such that when I saw it first 14 months ago at Cannes, I interpreted Lorna and Claudy’s relationship — the heart of the film, the area where her silence most crucially comes into play — as a different beast than it seemed to be when I screened the film again last week. It’s clear that lonely, self-loathing Claudy would love for Lorna to be a real romantic and domestic partner, but Lorna’s motivations are much more ambiguous. Why does she suddenly become emotionally invested enough in Claudy to try to save his life, to the point where she literally throws herself mind and body to the cause, when everyone she trusts insists that a junkie’s life is expendable? Fabio suggests at one point that her show of basic human empathy is out of character with “the Lorna I know.” Something has happened over the course of the marriage to change her; on first viewing, I assumed that she had fallen in love, but the second time around I was sure it wasn’t as one-note as that. Indeed, the Dardennes’ project here seems to be emotional whiplash: when you suspect you have a character pegged you’re proven wrong, the moments of lowest spirit bump up against the highest, and there’s a dark humor to its deepest horrors.

Also seemingly more complex on second viewing, and ultimately more difficult for me to reconcile, is Lorna’s ending. It’s because of the Dardennes’ commitment to speaks-for-itself naturalism that they’re able to make the point, without ever stating it in anything like literal terms, that the 21st century globalist dream of a middle class life in a Western country inevitably resolves in either death or madness. And then in the final scene, any pretense towards realism is thrown out the window, as a desperate Lorna finds and, thanks to a conveniently placed crow bar, gains access to a safe haven, all in about 30 seconds. At this point, Lorna has without question been driven by guilt and grief to some kind of madness, so it’s possible a psychotic break has occurred — in a film that often makes use of narrative ellipese to throw the viewer off the track of the narrative, it’s possible that we’ve switched from an objective view of her circumstances, to her fantasy. I’d like to believe that’s the case; I’d like to believe the Dardennes are too good to suddenly change the rules of their game at the last minute.

Lorna's Silence - Film Comment Against the Grain, Thom Andersen from Film Comment, July/August 2009

After only four films distributed internationally, it seems that the influence of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne can be seen everywhere, even in American films, such as Ballast. Those continuously moving sequence shots, following the protagonist in tight close-up, now belong to everyone. So the appearance of a new film by the Dardennes themselves might seem almost irrelevant, and the critical response to Lorna’s Silence at the 2008 Cannes film festival was lukewarm at best. But it’s too soon to write them off.

What counts with Dardenne films are the continuities and the slight variations. In Lorna’s Silence, they have created yet another protagonist for whom the most mundane action is a matter of life and death. Returning to the theme of immigration, the topic of their prophetic breakthrough film La Promesse (96) and the great subject of 21st-century cinema, they show once again how to tell an outsider’s story without sentimentality or excessive melodrama.

For the new film they have moved from their hometown Seraing (pop. 60,000) to neighboring Liège (pop. 190,000), although the difference is undetectable to someone like me who has never been to either municipality. One critic complained that the filmmakers have lost their bearings, but the change in location is like moving from Long Beach to Los Angeles or from Long Island City to Brooklyn. They now keep their camera farther away from their protagonist, so the details of her environment register more strongly. During Lorna’s final escape from her masters, a hint of magical realism is even introduced when she comes upon an abandoned cabin in the deepest forest, as well as a bit of music at the end.

Lorna’s Silence is no less bressonian than The Son (02) or L’Enfant (05), but it looks back to the Bresson of The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne or Les Anges du péché, that is, film noir Bresson. In its plot and milieu, however, it is even closer to some classic Hollywood noir films. I was reminded of Nobody Lives Forever, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, and The Prowler.

Lorna’s Silence and Jean Negulesco’s 1946 Nobody Lives Forever both feature minor-league hoodlums who will do anything to advance their schemes. In Nobody Lives Forever, a trio of over-the-hill con men pursue their pathetic plot with single-minded ruthlessness, finally threatening to kill their intended victim. In Lorna’s Silence, small-time gangsters have paid the heroin addict Claudy (Jérémie Renier) to marry Albanian immigrant Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) so that she can become a Belgian citizen. They have promised him a second payment to divorce her so that a Russian mobster can then marry her and become Belgian too. But they plan to speed things up and save 5,000 euros by killing Claudy with an overdose.

The con in Nobody Lives Forever goes awry when front man Nick (John Garfield) starts to fall for the mark, wealthy widow Gladys (Geraldine Fitzgerald). Something like that happens to Lorna. At first, she regards Claudy with polite contempt. Although she lives in his apartment, she treats him as an annoying tenant, setting down clear rules of separation and enforcing them rigidly. But she begins to feel more sympathy for Claudy as he tries to kick his addiction, even though he becomes more of a burden to her. To save him, she does everything she can to accelerate the divorce proceedings, banging her arms and later her head against a wall in order to make a case for domestic violence.

Both Lorna and Nick are careful to avoid an open break with their more cold-blooded confederates, offering reassurances that they are still on the same team and trying to find a solution that will satisfy their interests, but they are both betrayed by their gangs and forced to fight back. Nick and two loyal pals save Gladys from an improvised, amateurish kidnapping. Lorna cannot save Claudy, but she can save herself when her associates decide she has become more of a liability than an asset.

Jules Dassin’s 1950 Night and the City presents a remarkably vivid ensemble portrait of the hustlers, touts, and promoters who people the London underworld and of the complex webs of trust and betrayal they create. Information is capital, capitalism is crime, and crime is capitalism. The petty hoodlums in Lorna’s Silence are portrayed just as vividly, but they are not as colorful and idiosyncratic. It may be said they represent a more advanced stage of capitalist development. They’re all business: no small talk, no charm, no colorful lines, no philosophical speculations. There’s work to be done, and they’re doing it as efficiently as possible, with a grim attention to detail. Even Lorna’s Albanian boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), a long-distance truck driver, is always preoccupied with some obscure criminal endeavor during their rushed encounters. Hard men, indeed.

Night and the City is a fast film (its protagonist Harry Fabian, played by Richard Widmark, literally runs from one encounter to another), and so is Lorna’s Silence. The Dardennes’ method of shooting creates a pace that takes on the rhythms of the characters. Since Lorna is always in a hurry and never off screen for more than a minute, the film moves as briskly as Dassin’s film. There’s an amazing sense of exhilaration whenever she stops to rest. One such moment comes at the very end of the film, and the other when it seems Claudy has kicked his drug habit and she pauses for just a moment to celebrate. They think they are finding their freedom, and their joy leaps off the screen. These sudden breaks from routine are among the great moments of cinema.

Like Lorna’s Silence, Nicholas Ray’s 1952 On Dangerous Ground and Joseph Losey’s 1951 The Prowler follow their protagonists from their familiar urban world to the countryside. On Dangerous Ground’s Wilson (Robert Ryan), an angry, brutal cop, finds a kind of redemption in the snow-covered mountains of Colorado. The resentful, embittered cop Garwood (Van Heflin) of The Prowler cannot overcome his narcissistic self-pity and finds only death in the California desert. Garwood shares with Lorna a very modest dream. She enters a criminal underworld so that she can accumulate enough capital to open a snack shop with her boyfriend. He kills a total stranger so he can buy a motel in Las Vegas. For both of them, freedom just means being your own boss. They lose their dreams, but Lorna discovers another kind of freedom in the woods outside Liège.

Of course, Lorna’s Silence is more obviously a piece of neo-neorealism than of neo-noir, but I am proposing another historical context to suggest what I regard as the real originality of the Dardennes’ work and what sets it apart from that of their followers, which is precisely its break from neorealism.

Film noir and neorealism were, of course, contemporaneous responses to the profound psychic shock of World War II. Although we may look back on film noir with greater fondness, neorealism was more adequate to the artistic needs of the Forties. Contemporary critiques of Forties film noir—notably Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites’s 1950 Movies: A Psychological Study and Running Away From Myself by Barbara Deming, completed in 1950 but not published until 1969—may remind us how much these films retain of classic Hollywood fantasy and wish fulfillment, an aspect of the films that is generally overlooked today. Classic film noir provides us with an invaluable record of its time, but that is because we have learned to read the films against the grain. Neorealism is still necessary today, and the films of the Dardennes evidently recognize this need and respond to it. But neorealism has its limitations. Even more than film noir, it is a cinema of despair.

The neorealist protagonist—at least in Gilles Deleuze’s account of neorealism, which I regard as the most useful as well as the most provocative—becomes a spectator, a witness. According to Deleuze, before neorealism, in the cinema of the “action-image” (to which film noir belongs), “perception is organized in obstacles and distances to be crossed, while action invents the means to cross and surmount them.” But in the modern cinema that neorealism inaugurates, “perceptions and actions cease to be linked together.” A sensory-motor link has been broken, and the character can no longer act effectively. This impasse brings into being a new kind of cinematic image. There is a transformation of cinematic forms that is both a formal advance (the cinema has finally discovered its essence) and a reaction to how we see ourselves and the world: we have lost our belief that our actions (both individual and collective) can respond to the demands of our situation and change it.

In the broadest terms, this loss of faith was brought about by the political impasse of the Cold War. Then, with the collapse of authoritarian socialism, a new world order was installed beyond the reach of democratic institutions and movements. “Neoliberalism” is a nice euphemism for primitive rapacious capitalism.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne respond-ed to the triumph of neoliberalism not with neorealist despair but with a scrupulous examination of its workings on a human level, and they discovered that film noir was a useful idiom for their explorations. Like their other protagonists, Lorna is not a neorealist character. Her perceptions lead immediately to actions; there is no dissociation between them. Against the tide of neorealism, the Dardennes continue to insist that action is character. They demonstrate the possibility of human agency in a time when we have lost faith in that possibility. The victories they record are always tentative, provisional. It may be no more than a suspension of futile actions or wrong movements; it may be something very simple, like Lorna gathering wood and lighting a fire in a stove. As Brecht wrote just before his death: “The simplest things must be enough . . . / You’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself / Surely you see that.”

The House Next Door [Andrew Schenker]

Village Voice (Scott Foundas) review

Village Voice (Nick Pinkerton) review

Little White Lies magazine  Matt Bochenski

IFC.com  Matt Zoller Seitz

DVD Outsider  L.K. Weston

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]

Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce

Moving Pictures Magazine [Ron Holloway]

Cannes 2008: Days 4, 5, and 6 Matt Noller from The House Next Door

Cannes, Competition: "Le Silence de Lorna," "Serbis" Glenn Kenny at Cannes from Some Came Running, May 19, 2008

Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Le Silence de Lorna" (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2008) Glenn Kenny from The Auteur’s Notebook, May 19, 2009

Lorna's Silence (Le Silence De Lorna) Mike Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily

Andrew O'Hehir at Cannes from Salon

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3/4]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Cannes Dispatch: Part Three: Patrick McGavin at Cannes from Stop Smiling magazine

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | Auteur Fatigue, "Gomorra" Pops and Wayward Youths Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [3/5]

Avuncular American [Gerald Loftus]

Daily Plastic - Festival Report [J. Robert Parks]

The Hollywood Reporter review Peter Brunette at Cannes

Film4 [Steve Watson]

Variety (Justin Chang) review

Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney]

The Independent (Robert Hanks) review [3/5]

Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [5/6]

Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [3/6]

The Japan Times  Kaori Shoji, also including and interview January 23, 2009 with actress:  Arta Dobroshi: A role model

The Boston Phoenix (Brett Michel) review

Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

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

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

THE KID WITH A BIKE (Le gamin au vélo) B- 81

France Belgium Italy (87 mi) 2011

Easily the most contrived and manipulative of the Dardennes Brothers’ films, one which borders on melodrama and is likely to divide audiences, as they will either despise or feel sorry for the protagonist, in this case an 11-year-old boy Cyril (Thomas Doret), who from the outset is seen as a determined but problematic kid, one who is not likely to listen to or believe anyone else, but instead do whatever he wants with no apparent punitive repercussions. Known for writing their own screenplays, a documentary style, the use of hand-held cameras, and complete lack of artifice in a social realist setting, this film is an extension of their previous works, where this young boy is in nearly every frame of the film, initially seen as a detestable brat who insists the world is lying to him about the whereabouts of his absent father, involuntarily placed in a boys home where his only desire is escape. Obsessively driven by inevitable circumstances, the reunification with his father, the bare-bones plot seems paper thin, as more and more it becomes clear his father has abandoned him. Nonetheless, Cyril continues to seek him out with relentless desperation, including multiple escape attempts. Simply by accident, in the building where his father previously lived, he grabs and clings to a woman, Samantha (Cécile de France), to avoid being captured by the authorities, where she offers further assistance by finding the bike he reported missing, which is his only link to his father. His bike is also his means of flight and freedom, as it can seemingly take him wherever he needs to go.

When Samantha agrees to house Cyril over the weekends, offering no reason whatsoever for this extension of kindness, her character is immediately seen in glowing and rather angelic terms, as a guardian angel watching over an angry and dissolute child. It’s never made clear why Samantha takes such an interest in this utter stranger whose life is a perpetual series of misfortunes, but the first thing he does is disobey her with the same consistency as he does other adults. While she actually reaches out to him and helps find the father (Jérémie Renier), the object of his continuous obsession, who is working in a neighborhood nearby, the father simply shows no interest in seeing him again. While it’s clear there are damaging psychological issues, no one seems to offer any assistance on that front, as it is never mentioned. Cyril instead is left to resolve his personal issues on his own, where he gets involved with a gang of street kids who easily steal his bike (the kid never learns to use a lock), headed by an older kid Wes (Egon DiMateo), something of a dark angel who takes a particular interest in him, taking him under his wing, using Cyril’s blind persistence to hold onto his bike as a useful tool in accomplishing a secret task that he has in store for him, using Cyril to take care of some unfinished business, which, of course, he readily agrees to, as he thinks this guy is his new friend. To a kid who has no one, a new friend has a strange and intoxicating allure, so much so that he continually lies and deceives Samantha, who mystifyingly continues looking out for his best interests, even at the expense of her own relationships, where boyfriends find Cyril nothing but endless trouble, an ungrateful and impudent malcontent who refuses to listen or learn.

Clearly, Cyril tests the audience’s patience as well, as the typically non-sentimental Dardenne approach leaves one thinking this is an unusually obnoxious and abrasive kid, one who is continually asking for trouble. This escalating wrongward path can only have a few possible outcomes, where the narrow focus of a child’s fate becomes overly predictable, especially considering all the contrivances thrust upon the audience along the way, where this becomes a black and white existential struggle for good and evil, meaning and salvation, where Cyril is caught between the vested interests of a dark force and a guardian angel, where both are trying to tap into and redirect this kid’s inner rage and seething discontent. The overlying reliance on maternal affection and sense of societal justice appear quite French, where both somehow miss the point, but are overly accentuated with an exaggerated power of influence. Cyril is a psychologically damaged and extremely self destructive kid, one who would not likely succeed without intensive personal therapy, but this film bypasses the necessary hard work involved and instead would have you believe that a healthy dose of motherly affection is all he needs to steer him on the right path, which for a realist film is a bit preposterous. Adding to the solemnity and sense of interior transcendence is a brief recurring passage from Beethoven’s 5^th Piano Concerto, Glenn Gould - Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto 3/4 YouTube (9:53), the symphonic section just preceding the introduction of the solo piano. These brief passages hold clues and are musical road markers interspersed throughout the film, where the piano is heard only over the end credits, where the narrative finally offers a glimpse of renewal and a sparing sense of release.

The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]

Modern cinema's poets laureate of working-class marginalization and spiritual crises, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are also bona fide motion-picture makers whose works brim with the kind of propulsive thrust that would have left pure action pioneers like Raoul Walsh or Allan Dwan green with envy. Think of the Belgian brothers' new film, and the first thing that springs to mind is a red shirt zipping kinetically up and down and across the screen, rushing in and out of corridors when not climbing fences and trees. Of course, ardent humanists that they are, the Dardennes are interested first and foremost in the character wearing the shirt, a runty, half-feral 11-year-old boy (Thomas Dorset) whose single-minded pursuit of a feckless father who doesn't want to see him (Jérémie Renier) adds to the filmmakers' indelible intergenerational galleries of children plunging into adult worlds and adults learning to move beyond childish confines. As talismanic as De Sica's, the bike of the title becomes the main element through which the film scrutinizes the boy's anger and confusion, his relationship with a sympathetic hairdresser (Cécile de France) and a neighborhood hood (Egon Di Mateo), and the abrupt and furtive acts of revenge and compassion that lift rough-hewn realism into the realm of cinematic grace. Astoundingly unsentimental yet consistently heart-squeezing.

New York Magazine [David Edelstein]

The Dardenne brothers of Belgium, Jean-Pierre and Luc, have moved away from the somewhat formless quality of their early work into the realm of melodrama, which would be worrisome if their new films weren’t as good or better—heightened and purified by stronger narratives. The Kid With a Bike centers on 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret), whose father has deposited him in a state-run school and decamped, leaving no address. In the face of all evidence, Cyril won’t accept this rejection. He runs away to their now-empty flat and pounds on the door. When school counselors come, he clings to the legs of a random young woman and screams for his papa and his bike.

The woman is a hairdresser named Samantha (Cécile de France) who tracks down the bike (it was sold), locates the father (“Seeing him stresses me out. I’m starting over”), and arranges to take the boy in. Why? Hollywood would demand a backstory, but to the Dardennes, what does it matter? She defines herself by her moral choices. The boy, though, is wild, un-broken-in, apt to lash out, like a damaged pup from a shelter that you fear might have to go back. His frightening openness is evident when he falls in with a local delinquent, who teaches him to clobber people and take their cash. There are hints of Pinocchio and the tragic A.I. Can Cyril become a real boy?

The Dardennes have an exquisite sense of when to let their shots run on: A scene in which Cyril pedals furiously away from a crime evokes his state of mind and gives you time to brood on where he has been and might be going. Despite the simplicity of the brothers’ technique, The Kid With a Bike has deep religious underpinnings, a relentless drive toward the mythos of death and resurrection. The film is not just in the tradition of Pinocchio and A.I.: It is a worthy successor.

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

The Dardenne Brothers’ The Kid with a Bike is a character study of boundless empathy. It is impossibly wise about childhood, human frailty, and moral responsibility. I will return to it again and again for comfort and perspective. It is chicken soup for my black, cynical husk of a soul.

Kids are inclined to think in absolutes. And so Cyril (Thomas Doret), the Dardennes’ 11-year old protagonist, absolutely refuses to believe that his father has moved away, sold his precious bike, and left him in a state orphanage indefinitely. After all, he said it would only be for a month. Ergo all of the other adults insisting that he is gone are wrong or lying. Biting and darting like a feral cat, Cyril runs to his dad’s old apartment, and inspects every empty room. Even then he doesn’t believe it. He must have been forced to go away, and take the bike with him.

A kind hairdresser (Cecile de France) recognizes Cyril’s bike and buys it back from its new owner. It’s a kind gesture, and the usually mistrustful boy asks if she would foster him on weekends. She agrees. But Cyril hasn’t given up on his father. Samantha, the hairdresser, tracks him down and they go to see him. There’s no dramatic confrontation.  “When are you coming for me?” Cyril asks. The dad, played by the great Jeremie Renier, takes down Cyril’s mobile number and promises to call, but it’s clear he wants nothing to do with the kid. “I’m starting over,” he tells Samantha out of earshot. “I can’t if he’s around.”

As Cyril, Thomas Doret is an amazing discovery — he has a compact intensity of a born star, commanding attention without ever asking for sympathy — but the real triumph is the way his character is written. The Dardennes’ screenplay is extraordinary in its ability  to pack drama and heartbreak into simple, naturalistic, entirely unsentimental scenes. Cyril’s dialogue is artfully terse and often beautiful (or at least the translation is), but at the same time perfectly plausible for a bright 11-year old boy: “I’ve come to see you. Do I jump or will you open the door?” he yells to his dad over a fence. He can be nasty and an awful brat (he certainly isn’t cute) but the movie makes sense of it: his family has left him with wounds that won’t heal just because a nice lady lets him stay with her on weekends.

Cyril’s pride and desperate need for a father figure he can respect gets him into some third-act trouble I’m loath to describe. The last 30 minutes of The Kid with a Bike are the year’s most riveting stretch of film, and the ending is just perfect. After what must have been years spent flailing in anger, Cyril faces his toughest test, and does the right thing.

Film Reviews, Hong Kong Cinema Listings & Interviews – Time Out ... Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London, May 15, 2011

There are some very consistently distinctive things about the Dardenne brothers’ films. They are about recognisably ‘ordinary’ working-class people; they are usually about inter-generational relationships; they deal with ethical (and psychological) issues in such a way that people often describe them, rightly or wrongly, as somehow concerned with ‘redemption’; they fall, for all their apparent documentary-like naturalism, into three fairly clear ‘acts’; and – perhaps most distinctive of all – they often feel, for one reason or another, a little… well,  unremarkable for the first 20 minutes or so. Then something happens which makes you realise you’re watching something very special indeed.

All of which is true of their fifth film in the main Cannes competition (which follows two Palme d’or-winners and two other recipients of major awards). It’s not as if the situation here is exactly original: a troubled 12-year-old, reluctantly living in a home since his father abandoned him without leaving any forwarding details (let alone the titular promised bicycle), meets and is shown sympathy and understanding by a hairdresser, who finds herself having to deal not only with the kid’s own capacity for violence but with the temptations put in his way by a local gangleader. To anyone familiar with the Dardennes’ relatively small but very substantial body of work, this might sound as if it’s going over old ground – and maybe it is, but it’s still producing fresh and extremely fruitful results.

Partly, that’s down to performance. Besides such Dardenne regulars as Jérémie Renier and (admittedly in a small role) Olivier Gourmet, the film boasts wonderful work by Cécile de France (recently seen in Eastwood’s ‘Hereafter’) as the protagonist’s unexpected but altogether plausible protectress, and by Thomas Doret as young Cyril. Still, it would be wrong to attribute the excellence of the Belgian brothers’ film simply to a form of well-acted Loachian ‘realism’.

The marvellously nimble, fleet pace perfectly suits the adolescent, often desperate energy of Cyril’s search for stability, while once more the narrative embraces both naturalism and something more mythic, even Biblical; this, after all, is a tale of crime and punishment, longing and disappointment, love, hatred and forgiveness. But in the end it’s probably best to forget such contextual stuff, as the film is primarily about people. See the sheer fear on Renier’s face as his character confesses that he just can’t cope any longer with looking after his own son. At this point, about half an hour into the story, the power, subtlety, enduring relevance and absolute truthfulness of the Dardennes’ latest immediately become brilliantly clear.

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]

The Kid With A Bike has the classic Dardenne Brothers plot. Like those other famous brothers, the Grimms, the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne put their hearts and souls into the telling of tales about children in bad situations. The horrors of childhood are taken very seriously and there is nothing cliché or sentimental in their special neorealist approach to illuminate the human condition.

Their latest, and fifth film at the New York Film Festival and winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, is about 11-year-old Cyril (played with fantastic agility, vulnerability and strength by 13-year-old Thomas Doret), whose father abandons him. The mother is never mentioned, she only exists as absence, like in many a fairy tale, where one bad parent is more than enough to deal with.

Cyril wants to get in touch with his father, desperately dialing his old phone number over and over again, as if pure willpower and stamina could change the NOT IN SERVICE message to his father's voice. Cyril also wants his bike back - he cannot believe that his father could have sold it. The various people at the orphanage where he is staying, have a hard time keeping up with this whirlwind of a boy, who runs, breathes, bangs on doors, checks his old apartment building, runs some more, always dressed in red, because he will not give up the fantasy that his father still loves him, has not abandoned him, and that everything is a big misunderstanding, just like Hansel uses pebbles to get back to his father's house, only to be forced out again.

In this tale, Cyril does not encounter a witch, but a hairdresser he holds on to, played with wonderful grace and toughness by Cécile de France. Samantha is like "the good fairy," Jean-Pierre Dardenne told me in response to my comment that their stories set in a tough Belgian working class milieu capture the core of what makes fairy tales relevant. "This film is the closest to a fairy tale," he agrees, "because it is the simplest. It is about a child who is losing a very big, terrible illusion."

Characters in a Dardenne film don't analyse situations or talk about why things occur. They act and in their movements, hits, smiles, they reveal the whole world. The little boy defends his father who never wants to see him again and he tries to latch on to a dangerous drug-dealing wolf in the woods who calls Cyril "pit bull". The boy doesn't know how to accept the affection from Samantha, a woman who is not family and still deeply cares for him.

Watch for a Dardenne brothers' favorite, Olivier Gourmet, who makes an appearance playing the cafe owner who serves the beers. Another Dardenne regular, Jérémie Renier, plays Cyril's father, in many respects an aged shadow of his role in The Child (a film that blew me away at the NYFF in 2005) which starts with him selling his baby, just like Rapunzel.

At the press conference Luc, the younger Dardenne, mentioned the locations in the film are in the form of a triangle: town, forest, gas station, everything happens between these three points.

Cécile de France's Samantha "brings a light to the story," when she reclaims the child's soul as they drive and bicycle to and fro.

In a world where everyone seems so lost, The Kid With A Bike will help you find your humanity again.

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

The Kid With A Bike | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias, also seen here: The Kid With A Bike

Cinephile [Matthew Thrift]

Cannes: A heart-rending take on a movie classic Andrew O’Hehir at Cannes from Salon, May 15, 2011

A Lost Boy and a Sliver of Hope in the Dardenne ... - Village Voice Karina Longworth

Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day Four – The Kid with a Bike, Pina, and Good Bye Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from the House Next Door, May 14, 2011, also seen here: The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]

Capital New York [Sheila O'Malley]

The House Next Door [Jonathan Pacheco]

JamesBowman.net | The Kid With a Bike

Chicago Reader [Ben Sachs]

The Kid With A Bike Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

cinemonkey [D. K. Holm]

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Little White Lies Magazine [Jason Wood]

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Movies [Tom von Logue Newth]

Keyframe: the Fandor Blog [Jaime N. Christley]

Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]

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Cannes Review: “The Kid With a Bike” at Once New and Too Familiar Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 14, 2011

Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 14, 2011

CANNES REVIEW: The Dardenne Brothers Break From Formula with Le Gamin au Vélo Stephanie Zacharek at Cannes from Movieline, May 15, 2011

theartsdesk.com [Demetrios Matheou]

The Film Pilgrim [Frances Taylor]

Battleship Pretension [David Bax]

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Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]

Cannes '11, day four: The Dardennes shoot for the Palme D'Or trifecta, and Freaks & Geeks' Linda Cardellini gets a rare showcase Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 15, 2011

Pirates of the Riviera Barbara Scharres at Cannes from the Ebert blog, May 14, 2011

Cannes 2011. Rushes: "Ninja Kids", "Goodbye", "Le gamin au vélo" Daniel Kasman at Cannes from Mubi, May 17, 2011

Drew McWeeney at Cannes from Hit Fix, May 15, 2011

Kid With a Bike, The Emanuel Levy at Cannes, May 14, 2011

Plume-Noire.com [Moland Fengkov]

Film Review: The Kid With A Bike (2011) Steven S. from Film Scope

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remembering-leon-cakoff-the-kid-with-a-bike-a-trip ... - Slant Magazine Aaron Cutler

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Anthony Lane - The New Yorker (capsule review), also seen here: Not Child’s Play

The Kid with a Bike Richard Brody from The New Yorker (capsule review)

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Bonjour Tristesse (English)

Cannes 2011. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's "The Kid with the Bike" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 15, 2011

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne | Film | Interview | The A.V. Club Chris Kompanek interview, March 15, 2012

Dardenne brothers: 'We don't argue in front of the actors' Anne Billson interview from The Guardian, March 15, 2012

Movie Review: The Kid With A Bike - Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Kid With a Bike: Cannes Review David Rooney at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 14, 2011

Peter Debruge at Cannes from Variety

The Kid With a Bike (2012), directed by Jean-Pierre ... - Time Out Dave Calhoun from Time Out London

The Kid with a Bike – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, March 22, 2012

Cannes 2011 review: Le Gamin au Vélo/Polisse | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 15, 2011

The Kid With a Bike – review Philip French from The Observer, March 25, 2012

Cannes '11 Day 4: Unfair Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 14, 2011

Philadelphia Inquirer [Steven Rea]

'The Kid With a Bike' review: Dardennes' quiet truth Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle

'Kid With a Bike': Tale of troubled child told with deft directorial touch ✭✭✭ 1/2 Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune, also seen here: 'Kid With a Bike': Tale of troubled child told with deft directorial touch ...

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

At Cannes, Synergy but Not Consensus - New York Times Manohla Dargis at Cannes, May 16, 2011

The Kid With a Bike - Movies - New York Times Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, March 16, 2012

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (Deux jours, une nuit) B 88

Belgium France Italy (95 mi) 2014

An excoriating critique of capitalism, brilliantly revealing how it isolates and divides workers, pitting one against the other, where over the course of the film the Dardennes turn this into a modern era horror story. What’s most striking, however, is how it’s framed in such ordinary circumstances, where the fear of losing one’s job is the overriding concern, capable of driving one to do the unthinkable. While the opportunity to work with an actress of the stature of Marion Cotillard may have proven too alluring to resist, the film would probably have played much better with a lesser known, unknown actress, much like their earlier efforts, especially ROSETTA (1999), where the actress’s daily struggle might mirror the role of the character in the film. Part of Cotillard’s role as Sandra, a young Belgian mother working at a small solar panel factory, is her invisibility, where she is forced to come out of the anonymity of her character to make herself seen as she confronts each and every one of her fellow workers. When trying to return from a medical leave, she discovers the company has instead decided to lay her off in order to pay the annual 1000 euro bonus to the rest of the workers. When cornered in a parking lot, the owner agrees to hold a vote by secret ballot to alleviate allegations of pressure and intimidation by the foreman, and if a majority of workers agree to vote for her return instead of their bonuses, then he will honor their decision. He is of the opinion, however, based on an initial vote tallied by the foreman, that most everyone prefers the bonus. This leaves her little time, as indicated by the title, to change people’s minds. While a worker on leave could be confronted by any number of illnesses, such as losing a child, recovery from an injury or an accident, to having a more serious medical diagnosis such a cancer, but in Sandra’s case she suffers from depression (another invisible disease), seen taking large doses of Xanax, well beyond the recommended limit, in an attempt to maintain her sanity throughout this ordeal. The idea for the film is based upon real incidents occurring in French factories, but also Belgium, Italy, and the United States, where a worker was laid off so the rest of the workers could get their bonuses, all of which raise questions of solidarity in the workforce.

Shot in Seraing, an industrial town in Liège, in Wallonia, the French-speaking section of Belgium where the Dardennes were born and raised, and where all their previous films were shot as well, Cotillard had to change her French accent to Belgian for the film—no minor undertaking, as she’s the first non-Belgian actor to ever work with the directors. By all accounts, many believe she was robbed at Cannes by not winning Best Actress, but this is an understated, minimalist, low-key film without any major dramatic moments. Experts in social realist films, this is most reminiscent of a Bresson film (Introduction to Bresson), a meticulous film constructionist who downplayed the performances of his actors, where this film is based upon a repeating, cyclical theme where Sandra literally goes door to door tracking down her coworkers, asking them to vote to save her position by sacrificing their bonuses. While this is incredibly humiliating, to say the least, it leaves her emotionally exhausted and demoralized afterwards when she realizes what an uphill struggle this is turning out to be. Shot in chronological order, most of the scenes are long takes culminating with stressful discussions at someone’s front door, usually interrupting them from their weekend activities with their children, where the situation couldn’t be more awkward, as in an economic downturn, everyone needs the money, with some in desperate straits. While it’s hard to believe someone is placed in this position, literally begging for their job back, the Dardennes don’t over-dramatize or turn this into a melodrama, but confine their focus to exposing what each of these people must be going through, literally providing a window into their souls, as for each, this is a gut-wrenching decision. People are surprisingly honest with one another, as is Sandra, who is never pushy or argumentative, but simply presents the reality of the situation, then must gracefully accept the fact that not everyone is going to support her, even some who sympathize with her. In some cases, the husbands aggressively bark out their opinions while their wives (who work with her) meekly stand in silence, unable to alter the balance of power in their homes.

Beautifully portraying the accumulative stress and mental anguish, Cotillard anchors the film with her warmth and sense of decency, where the urgency of her situation mirrors how other people live and the pressures they face, where in troubled times it’s extremely hard to support her efforts. Nonetheless it’s a heroic act to summon the courage to embark on such a personally revealing journey, where you literally strip yourself naked standing completely vulnerable before your coworkers, always struggling to overcome feelings of hopelessness and despair. Perhaps the weakest character in the film is Sandra’s own husband Manu, Fabrizio Rangione in his fifth film with this directing team, whose pathetic struggle to continually push his wife feels overly abusive, though perhaps necessary when she’s incessantly on the verge of giving up. We don’t see an emotional connection between the two, or any hint of happiness, but their interaction together represents a tired couple that is used to struggling to get through every day. Perhaps the most beautiful scenes involve music, including Petula Clark singing the French version of the 1963 Jackie DeShannon song “Needles and Pins” Petula Clark - La Nuit N'en Finit Plus - YouTube, while the scene of the film is the euphoric emotional release expressed to the song of Van Morrison and Them singing a teen anthem from the 60’s, “Gloria” THEM (Featuring VAN MORRISON) - LIVE 1965 - "Gloria" YouTube (2:47). While Sandra is literally terrified at what will happen behind the knock at each door, it’s a petrifying journey set by her boss against her colleagues, where no one protests against the inherent cruelty of the employer’s actions, instead it’s a barbaric act commonly accepted in the modern workplace. Sandra has a husband and child, perceived as a woman’s dutiful role in the 50’s, but in today’s world she needs a place in society where she can be of use. Work has come to represent a sense of purpose in people’s lives, even in the routine work of factory jobs, without which many people feel lost and useless, expressed in the film as confronting one’s worst fear, “living on the dole.” Despite the anger and outright hostility that arises, where the foreman (Dardennes regular Olivier Gourmet) blames her for “stirring up this shit,” this is an unconventional exposé of the meaning of work in people’s lives, where to some their fellow coworkers are an indispensable part of their lives, like one of the family, where they spend eight to ten hours a day alongside each other, while others routinely ignore the social dimension of working with others for a period of years. In this film, the Dardennes allow the characters to determine the outcome by challenging their humanity, which has greater significance than some predetermined moral lesson that would quickly be forgotten.

Which movies to see—and which to skip—at the 50th Chicago International Film Festival JR Jones from The Reader

An assembly-line worker at a solar panel factory (Marion Cotillard), recently returned to work after an emotional breakdown, discovers that her coworkers, coerced by management, have voted to terminate her employment rather than forfeit their annual bonus; over a long and desperate weekend, she visits them at their homes and begs them to change their votes. The premise for this Belgian drama couldn't be simpler or more compelling, yet writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (The Kid With a Bike) tease out any number of moral complexities as the heroine learns of her coworkers' various circumstances (many of them have children, and almost all of them are living hand to mouth). In film after film the Dardennes have proven themselves the cinema's most acute humanist critics of predatory capitalism; this masterful drama finds them at the top of their game, laying bare the endless uphill battle of getting workers to look out for each other. In French with subtitles.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Elspeth J. Carroll

The most masterful film of 2014 was also the quietest. The Dardenne Brother's latest is a characteristically nuanced portrait of a young mother recovering from a bout of severe depression. Steadily regaining her strength and ready to return to work, Sandra (Marion Cotillard) is told that to keep her job she must convince her coworkers to vote to save her and lose their bonus. It seems an act of supreme cruelty that a woman who can barely bring herself to get out of bed should be forced to persuade others to sacrifice so that she can return to life, and her greatest battle is not to convince her coworkers but to summon the strength to try. Her campaign provides a window into the lives of the men and women she works with. We see their homes, their families, their weekend lives. They're a diverse group, but they occupy the same economic position—not dire, but precarious. Their reactions are telling—guilt, anger, reluctant yeses and apologetic nos. There may be a right choice—solidarity over self interest, but the Dardennes resist easy moralizing, and their main indictment seems to be of the system which forces such a choice. It's hard to imagine any other director with a soft enough touch to keep the material from edging into melodrama, but its that restraint and precision which makes the film so effective. Their control is matched by that of Cotillard whose performance as Sandra is powerful without overpowering. "But they're right. I don't exist. I'm nothing. Nothing at all" Sandra says to her husband before collapsing on the floor. It's hard to read without cringing, but in Cotillard's hands it feels honest, real (unnervingly so.) So much rests upon Cotillard's performance. She is so fragile, so often on the verge of tears, that her moments of triumph, however small or short lived, are truly moving. TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT is a film that does so many things so well and so quietly. It's at once a study of depression, of family dynamics, of community and of an inhumane and exploitative economic system. But perhaps most excitingly, it's a convincing work of realism that's much more hopeful than it is grim.

Cannes Film Festival 2014: Part Two - Reverse Shot Jordan Cronk

A similar sentiment is expressed in far more visceral terms in Two Days, One Night, a typically efficient work from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. In fact, efficiency itself is a central subject of their new film. In two stealth, single-shot opening scenes, the Dardennes lay out their basic narrative conceit: Sandra (Marion Cotillard), informed by her boss of her impending termination, must convince her coworkers to side with her in a vote to retain her job at the expense of their yearly bonuses. She’ll have the weekend to complete the task and she’ll have to rely on nothing more than goodwill and persuasiveness to accomplish it. The Dardennes’ brand of socially minded, realist filmmaking has for well over a decade been one of the most recognizable in contemporary cinema. Each film’s distinguishing nuances lie in its uniquely implemented narrative devices—not as variations but as a subtle protraction of a specific working-class plight.

Two Days, One Night utilizes its temporal strictures to build tension via elemental means: handheld camerawork, infrequent but purposeful editing, and situational drama, all delivered through dialogue or dramaturgy. Sandra spends the majority of the film essentially restaging the same scene for an audience of one: a colleague with the ability to leave this woman and her husband (who can’t support the couple on his own) without immediate financial recourse. What’s fascinating about the film is how perspectives continuously shift; as a viewer we’re ostensibly asked to sympathize with Sandra—who we learn has recently suffered some sort of breakdown and is now taking prescription Xanax, which she pops incessantly throughout—and yet each successive encounter presents to the viewer an entirely new dilemma, with implications that could affect more than just this one couple. Many of these men and women are worse off and in greater need of a bonus than Sandra—who, if nothing else, is young and experienced—no matter the immediate repercussions on her life. The way the Dardennes foster this empathy, without allowing Sandra to wallow in self-pity—if anything, she refuses to beg, never resorting to negotiation—granting her the strength to exhibit grace during a final moral crisis of her own, further confirms their unyielding faith in human resilience and righteousness.

The Playlist [Jessica Kiang]

An unfeasibly gripping social realist parable that provides a gravitational showcase for one of Marion Cotillard's finest performances (and yes, we know that's saying something), the Dardenne brothers' "Two Days, One Night" sees the two-time Palme d'Or winners put in a serious bid for a third (though probably, Cannes rules being what they are, a Best Actress trophy for Cotillard is more likely). It’s a deeply lovable film, satisfying, nourishing and accessible, and bar the odd stumble toward melodrama (more on that later) we were completely immersed in its plain-spoken yet impossibly resonant rhythms practically from the first frame. 

A great deal of that is Cotillard—her character is in nearly every single shot, and hers is inarguably the point of view of the film throughout, making it a riveting performance in a film that is riveted to her. But perhaps the greatest achievement is in how brilliantly the film balances the trademark Dardennes social conscience with a conceit that plays out almost like a ticking-clock thriller, as well as being a deeply felt character study, at the same time as it operates on at least two metaphorical levels in parallel at any one point. Casting the biggest name star they’ve ever worked with, who herself happens to be one of the finest actresses of her generation enjoying an extraordinarily impressive run of performances, and writing perhaps the most focused and sculpted screenplay of their illustrious careers, Jean-Pierre and Luc turn in a film that may well be their richest. At 63 and 60, respectively, it feels like they crested the peak of their powers a while ago, only to discover a higher summit to conquer, on top of which “Two Days, One Night” has now planted their flag. 

As the film begins, Sandra (Cotillard), a wife and mother of two living in straitened circumstances in an economically depressed town, has slipped back into the depression from which she had ostensibly recovered, following the news that she has lost her job. Unemployment and potentially a return to social housing beckons for her family. In fact, the day before, she had been voted out of the company by her co-workers who were offered the choice of retaining her, or retaining their €1000 bonuses. An ally convinces her that the foreman had pressured some of her colleagues into voting her out, and when they confront the boss he agrees that they can hold a new secret ballot on Monday morning. Sandra therefore has the weekend to convince a majority to sacrifice their bonuses in order to save her job. 

What then unfolds is an almost epic journey from house to house to meet each of them face to face, providing snapshots of the lives and attitudes of her co-workers, many of whom are in just as perilous a situation as she. It’s a portrait of a moral dilemma considered from every conceivable angle and not just on the part of those she’s visiting—Sandra, still fragile herself, can only negotiate with difficulty the oceanic swallowing of pride necessary to, essentially, beg for her livelihood. With difficulty, and Xanax.

The responses to her entreaties vary wildly from positive and sympathetic to outright violent, but a few insightful similarities remain. Almost everyone’s first question is “how is everyone else voting?” just as almost everyone’s response to Sandra's pointing out how it's not her fault that the boss put her job up against their bonuses is “Mine neither.” And there’s a hopelessness to the way they all simply accept the fact the injustice, really the barbarity of pitting workers’ self interest against their fellow-feeling in an effort to rationalize the company's bottom line. No one once suggests protesting the unfairness of it; it seems like they might as well shout at the moon to change its phase. And so, seamlessly and always within the context of this tense, ever evolving story, the film examines truly meaty moral themes of herd mentality, manipulation, pity, guilt, remorse, empathy, peer pressure and so on, at the same time as becoming an allegory for socialism, worker’s rights and corporate corruption and a heartfelt plea to recognize the humanity of others. 

It’s true that the whole having-to-go-and-present-a-moral-dilemma-to-a-disparate-group-of-people premise does feel less organic than a typical Dardennes set up and more manufactured for those allegorical purposes, but that's not so much a criticism as an observation. In fact it’s a film with which we could find exactly two, and only two, things wrong. Without wishing to spoil, there is a section later on in the story when the story’s resolute believability falters and the actions and reactions of Sandra and one other character feel overtly manipulated for [over] dramatic effect. It is a shame, because the film is easily compelling enough without these extra turns of the screw. 

Those hiccups in the flow of this deceptively taut, honed narrative would have ruined our enjoyment more, however, if they hadn’t been superseded by an ending that is simply perfection. Accomplishing a similar feat to last years Cotillard-starring Cannes contender “The Immigrant” the Dardennes here pull off an astonishingly satisfying somersault as their dismount, a simple moment in which we suddenly realize that the film we’ve been enjoying as a multi-layered ethical parable to that point was in fact also something much simpler and more human all along: the story of a broken woman’s journey back to herself. It’s nothing as simplistic as a happy ending, but it couldn’t be more uplifting and affecting, and we left the theater with our hearts nearly bursting. [A]

Two Days, One Night review | Sight & Sound | BFI August 22, 2014

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THE UNKNOWN GIRL (La Fille Inconnue) B+ 91

Belgium France (113 mi) 2016

In film after film, the Dardenne brothers provide the gold standard on social realism, using a near documentary format to make spare and cinematically austere films with a social message and moral implications, set exclusively in Liège working class environments, exposing social dilemmas that viewers universally can identify with, revealing the difficult kinds of choices people are forced to make, often risking their economic security to preserve their own humanity, where their insight is usually right on the nose. While the quality of their films is always high, two time winners of the prestigious Palme d’Or (1^st place) award at Cannes, for ROSETTA (1999) and L’ENFANT (THE CHILD) (2005), while also winning The Grand Prix (2^nd place) award for The Kid With a Bike (Le gamin au vélo) (2011) and best screenplay for LORNA’S SILENCE (2008), their most recent work included heralded actress Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit) (2014), yet one detects a kind of indistinguishable similarity in their films, as they are all made exactly the same way. Speaking personally, what’s been missing are the transcendent moments that elevated both ROSETTA (1999) and LE FILS (THE SON) (2002) to near religious experiences, films that are comparable to the Bressonian template, where the mechanics of rigorous technical precision lead to a spiritual release, like finding a way out of the labyrinth, suddenly freed from all human limitations, discovering salvation in the most improbable places. This film attempts to do the same, revealing how hard it is to make moral choices in today’s world, as no one else is interested in lending a helping hand. Like an accident victim stranded on the side of the road, most would prefer to conveniently drive by and not get involved, something that might have been unthinkable 50 years ago, but times and perceptions have changed, literally altering human behavior.

Born and raised in the industrial Belgian town of Seraing, the French-speaking Walloon municipality in the province of Liège, the setting of literally every single one of their feature films, the Dardenne brothers originally planned to make this film with actress Marion Cotillard, but due to scheduling difficulties made the earlier Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit) (2014) with her instead, choosing another extraordinary French actress for the role, Adèle Haenel, who was involved in an open relationship with French director Céline Sciamma, meeting on the set of her first feature film WATER LILIES (2006), continuing until the Belgian release of this film in October 2016. Surprisingly the Dardenne brothers re-edited the film after the initial Cannes release, trimming 7-minutes off the film with 32 new edits, in effect streamlining the film, adding greater fluidity, where the visceral pace is one of the distinguishing features of the film, becoming something of a daunting police procedural carried out by a private citizen, ratcheting up the suspense, evoking an edge-of-your-seat style of thriller. Haenel plays a young, successful physician, Jenny Davin, taking the place of a retiring doctor in a small, neighborhood family clinic as she prepares for a more prestigious position in a larger medical facility with state of the art equipment and the recipient of huge research grants. As she examines an elderly patient struggling for breath, she is also providing hands-on instructional training to a young intern, Julien (Olivier Bonnaud), where her uncompromising attention to detail leaves him a bit overwhelmed, feeling she is being overly critical, which makes her even more resolute to be precise. In response, Julien grows more introverted and aloof, which alarms the doctor. When he freezes at the sight of a young patient having a seizure in the waiting room, she reprimands him, “A good doctor has to control his emotions.” Working well past closing time, unable to see any more patients, she instructs him to ignore the ring of the outer door buzzer, reminding him, “Don’t let patients tire you or you won’t make a proper diagnosis.” The following morning, however, the police arrive at her door requesting to see her security video, as a crime took place across the street, where a young woman’s body was found lying dead on the rocks by the river. Jenny’s conscience kicks into high gear, remembering the late night buzzer, bringing this to the attention of the authorities, as she’s haunted by the thought that the woman might still be alive had she opened her doors, where the remainder of the film feels driven by the depths of her guilt.

While the video did not capture the incident, police contend she was a young African prostitute, suggesting the woman’s body showed signs of a struggle, where her head was crushed by a blunt object and then left for dead after the perpetrator fled the scene. Curious about what happened, Jenny examines the crime scene, having to pass through a construction zone to get there, as it was one of the workers who initially discovered the body. Rattled to the core, she is apologetic to Julien, overly critical of herself for not checking the door, but unable to ascertain the identity of the woman, she has a photograph made from the security video, placing it in her phone, then showing it to Julien and various patients asking if they know her. Without explanation, Julien bolts from the office, claiming he’s not coming back, apparently rethinking his career path, where Jenny tries to be as supportive as possible, encouraging him not to make a rash decision, yet he’s obviously been affected by the incident. Similarly, after consulting with the retiring physician she is replacing, she decides to take up his smaller neighborhood practice instead of the more lucrative offer, even though it caters to a decidedly poorer clientele. While the rhythm of the film is built on a succession of patient examinations, she routinely makes house calls as well, establishing an alternative storyline that requires travel, so she’s constantly on the move, an action that only accelerates when she adds a series of investigative inquiries to her list of things to do, questioning if people have seen the girl, what do they know and what can they tell her? Based on the impoverished circles she’s exploring, she heads straight into warning signs, where there are dangerous asides, as she’s investigating people who do not like anyone asking questions. Getting herself deeper and deeper involved, she assumes more responsibility, where even the police warn her to stay out of their business and eventually give her the cold shoulder. While some will argue the script is overly contrived, as detective work is never this easy, as everyone she meets seems to have some involvement in the matter, but the quickening pace of the film is extremely affecting, as viewers get caught up in her moral quest, finding a name that belongs to a violated body that was simply tossed aside, like it meant nothing, something the police and society at large are routinely indifferent about, particularly when it comes to immigrants and people of color, yet it is precisely this issue that elevates the tension and creates a compelling drama. Always psychologically complex, delving into the plight of forgotten or impoverished individuals, the Dardennes succinctly humanize this moral issue in ways others can’t or won’t, making this essential viewing.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Scott Pfeiffer, also seen at from The Moving World here: 20th Chicago European Union Film Festival (March 3-31, 2017), Report No. 2 (SLACK BAY and THE UNKNOWN GIRL)

The Dardenne Brothers return with this expressive, visceral realist mystery. Adèle Haenel gives a naturalistic central performance as a promising young doctor at a working-class clinic on the outskirts of the Belgian riverside city of Liège. She's admired, even beloved. One fateful evening after a long day, she refuses to let her intern buzz someone in after hours. When the night caller turns up dead, she feels responsible. If she'd given the desperate African woman shelter, she'd be alive—a powerful, relevant metaphor. Mounting an investigation to discover the unknown woman's name, she discovers secrets involving the young son of her own patients, as well as various more or less threatening characters. (The boy's father is played by Dardennes regular Jérémie Renier). The Dardennes' mise en scène, carefully composed yet open, is rendered in the fluid handheld style of their longtime cinematographer, the great Alain Marcoen. Actors, directors, cameraman: all seem to be in a process of mutual discovery, catching real life as it unfolds. There's something in the doctor's steadfast, non-judgmental acceptance of people as they are, the way she even shares in their guilt, that makes one unforgettable scene in particular play out very differently than it might have. This movie has no score to telegraph how we're meant to feel. There's just one person caring, helping... because that's what she does.

Cinema Scope: Richard Porton September 05, 2016

Each new film by the Dardenne brothers is soothingly familiar, in the sense that the directors masterfully recycle tried-and true-motifs. For their detractors, the Dardennes are in danger of making formulaic art films, while their equally fervent supporters maintain that, by continuing to plough familiar terrain, they are enriching an already distinguished body of work.

The Unknown Girl, while certainly competent and intermittently moving, is unlikely to convince skeptics who wonder if the brothers’ flair for socially conscious melodrama might have peaked with acknowledged landmarks such as La promesse (1996), Rosetta (1999), and Le fils (2002). Like much of their previous work, The Unknown Girl deals with questions of moral responsibility and the plight of forgotten, impoverished individuals. Dr. Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel), an ultra-conscientious Liège-based doctor, is as hard on herself as she is on her harried intern. When she learns that her obliviousness to a late-arriving visitor might have inadvertently caused the death of a young African immigrant, her guilt compels her to become one of the most assiduous investigators since Hercule Poirot. Although Haenel’s portrayal is never less than brilliantly self-assured, the fact that the unknown victim referenced in the title remains a tabula rasa ensures that the film is rarely more than a somewhat rote exercise in liberal self-flagellation. Dr. Davin’s dedication to both her medical practice and the lives of her forlorn patients make her something of a secular saint, but the film’s cathartic twists are less well-earned than the culminating moments in the brothers’ best work.

The Unknown Girl | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Like “The Promise” and “Two Days, One Night”, “The Unknown Girl” examines the moral dilemmas facing people living in Belgian society where the possibilities of acting honorably are constrained by the capitalist system. In “The Promise”, a teenaged boy is forced by his racist father to keep secret the death of an undocumented worker from Africa. When he comes in contact with the man’s widow, he violates his father’s trust but discovers his own innate humanity. In “Two Days, One Night”, a woman pleads with co-workers from her factory to forsake a desperately needed year-end bonus so that she won’t be laid off.

The unknown girl referred to in the title is a seventeen-year old prostitute from Africa who buzzes to be let into the medical offices of Dr. Jenny Davin an hour after office hours have closed. Since her office is in a poor neighborhood in the outskirts of Lieges with more than enough patients to make regular hours exhausting in themselves, the refusal to open the door does not seem particularly portentous.

The next morning cops show up at her door to inform her that the girl was found dead on the banks of the Meuse River, the result of a fractured skull probably due to a violent assault. Davin, a single woman in her thirties who seems to have no life outside of her patients, is stricken with guilt over finding this out. She might not have landed the blow but her keeping the doors closed was almost being an accessory after the fact since the girl was not a patient but someone fleeing an assailant. Will this tangled human relationship evoke Europe’s refusal to accept the refugees fleeing war and economic misery? One cannot be sure that this was the Dardenne brothers’ intention but on a subconscious level, it is entirely possible.

The girl’s body lacked any kind of identification papers so Dr. Davin begins to grow even more remorseful. Not only was she inadvertently responsible for her death; she has denied her family the knowledge of her passing since she is unknown. Buried in a potter’s field, she can only be identified by the newly dug up dirt above her coffin.

Like the factory worker who goes knocking on doors in “Two Days, One Night”, “The Unknown Girl” is also a film whose plot is driven by a similar voyage as the doctor contacts people one by one who might have run into the prostitute on the night she was killed. Can they tell her who she was? While there is an element of a detective story at work here, including facing the violence of men who do not want her snooping around, the film is much more an existential mystery as the doctor tries to persuade various men to unburden themselves of a secret. And like “Two Days, One Night”, the conversations become increasingly intense to the point of leaving you emotionally drained.

The film is made in the Dardenne brothers characteristically austere naturalistic style with no interest in melodrama, only in showing the daily grind of a doctor who in her spare moments plays amateur detective. Unlike no other film I have ever seen, this is one that really conveys the life of a doctor. Since the Belgian medical system pays for house visits, many of her calls bring her into touch with poor people who are socially isolated. Her presence seems to lighten up their day, including a young cancer patient. In some ways, she is as much a priest as a doctor, especially when she is trying to get someone to confess.

As is the case with their previous films, there is no film score. But that does not mean that the sound of the film was of no interest to the co-directors. You constantly hear passing cars on the highway below the office, just as I hear now on Third Avenue beneath my high-rise. The low growl of the motors and the hiss of the tires against the pavement are as effective as the strings in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”.

I regard the Dardenne brothers as among a handful of directors who are continuing in the grand tradition of the masters of the 1950s and early 60s such as Kurosawa, Ray, Fellini and Truffaut. When you get an opportunity to grab one of their films, do not miss it. A word to the wise should be sufficient.

The Dardenne's The Unknown Girl (2016) – first-look review | Sight ... Jonathan Romney from BFI Sight and Sound, November 4, 2016

Here’s Adèle Haenel, keeping it simple and open as a medic turned gumshoe in the Dardenne brothers’ latest investigation of social ties and moral binds.

This has arguably been the great year of the minimalist performance in Cannes. Throughout the competition, we’ve been watching actors creating characters that are complex and suggestive because the performances are pitched so low, allowing free play to the viewer’s imagination. There was Kristen Stewart as an anxious haunted medium in Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper; Adam Driver as a contemplative bus-driving poet (or a poetry-writing bus driver? We’re invited to see it both ways) in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson; and Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as real-life characters declining to stand on the centre stage of modern American history in Jeff Nichols’s daringly underplayed Loving.

Now we have the star of the new Dardennes film The Unknown Girl (La Fille Inconnue) – Adèle Haenel, the extraordinary, ever-rising French performer who made her mark in Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies before going on to work with Bertrand Bonello, André Téchiné and Guy Maddin, and who proved abrasively funny as a soldiering-obsessed young woman in 2014 comedy Les Combattants (aka Love at First Fight).

Haenel is mesmerising in The Unknown Girl, but where Driver, say, is a captivating presence in Paterson because he’s essentially absent, Haenel is absolutely present in every shot of the film, her intense but utterly calm concentration holding our attention, although she’s almost never called on to emote on screen in the conventional sense.

The locale, as ever, is the Belgian industrial town of Seraing, and Haenel plays Dr Jenny Davin, a committed medic who works in a small surgery. In the opening scene, she attends a young boy who’s having a fit, then quietly but firmly upbraids her intern Julien (Olivier Bonnaud) for letting his emotions get the better of his efficiency as a doctor. She also tells him to ignore a late ring at the surgery door – let patients rule you, she says, and you can’t make good diagnoses.

Making good diagnoses – of your own judgement and of the world’s demands – will become one of the key themes of the film. The call that she refuses to answer turns out to have been from a young African woman, later found dead nearby. Jenny realises that if she had answered the woman’s call, she might not have died – and so comes to feel directly responsible for her death. The young woman remains unidentified, and seems fated to have a pauper’s burial without a name to be remembered by. Jenny determines to unearth her name, but in the process discovers more about the facts of her death, as well as secrets in the lives of certain of her patients.

The film thus becomes a detective story of sorts – the Dardennes’ first, although like their last title, 2014’s Two Days, One Night, it’s also a female-led quest narrative with a sense of ticking-time urgency (albeit without that movie’s strict deadline).

There are also echoes of Hitchcock’s I Confess in terms of the question of secrecy and the transference of guilt. Jenny is bound by professional protocol, so anything that a patient might tell her must remain secret; but we also become aware that she’s breaching the codes of professional conduct by pushing her patients for information quite as insistently as she does. The film is very much an inquiry into the conflict between personal responsibility for others (a recurring Dardennes theme) and the matter of social codes and protocol. But, Jenny says at one point, she’s not interested in anyone else’s guilt: the guilt is entirely hers for letting the girl die.

As usual with Dardennes films, what makes the film work so beautifully is what’s taken out rather than kept in: there’s a startling moment when Jenny confronts a person who knows a great deal about the case, but we aren’t told exactly what led her to him in the first place. It’s also a film about restriction: like the filmmakers’ other characters, Jenny inhabits a very small world. She seems to have little social contact, and the detachment that goes toward making her a good doctor leaves her somewhat isolated: the point is never stressed, but viewers might detect a quiet poignancy to the sight of her preparing tomatoes in her flat above the surgery, where she sleeps among filing boxes and other work materials.

Only at one point does Jenny raise her voice – when coming into conflict with a patient who’s furious that she won’t provide a sick note. And there are only a few moments at which she breaks into an out-and-out smile: notably, when an appreciative patient throws her a panettone.

But one of the great things that Haenel achieves in this film is to convey a sense of Jenny’s seriousness, moral and professional, reminding us that the way to reveal a character’s complexity is not to concoct an overtly complex performance. This is some of the best acting we’ve seen in Cannes this year, and Haenel fits into the overall tone of the Dardennes’ distinctive enclosed world every bit as well as Cécile de France did in The Kid With the Bike and immeasurably better than Marion Cotillard did in Two Days… Her performance very much determines the register of the film, which is pitch-perfect until, alas, another actor – and hitherto, a very dependable Dardennes repertory regular – somewhat throws the pitch out of whack by over-emoting in a conclusion that itself is borderline melodramatic.

Reverse Shot: Julien Allen Without Prejudice, October 15, 2016, also seen here: NYFF: The Unknown Girl - Reviews - Reverse Shot

Sight & Sound [Hannah McGill] (full) December 1, 2016

Film Inquiry [Alistair Ryder]

Filmmaker: Howard Feinstein October 12, 2016

Little White Lies: David Jenkins

Slant Magazine [Jake Cole]

The Unknown Girl :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Tim Grierson

The Unknown Girl (2016) Review - Filmoria Chris Haydon

The Unknown Girl – Review – Jaime Rebanal's Film Thoughts

The Quietus | Film | Film Reviews | Guilt And Responsibility: The ... James Ubaghs

MUBI's Notebook: Daniel Kasman May 20, 2016

The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]

ScreenAnarchy.com (Teresa Nieman)

Indiewire.com [Eric Kohn]

Screendaily [Lee Marshall]

The House Next Door [Sam C. Mac]

theartsdesk.com [Saskia Baron]

Brooklyn Magazine: Elise Nakhnikian October 10, 2016

France in London | Review - The Unknown Girl by the Dardenne ... Matthew Anderson from France in London

The Unknown Girl | Socialist Review Esme Choonara

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

The Dardenne Brothers' The Unknown Girl | Movie reviews, interviews ... Jason Solomons

La Fille inconnue / The Unknown Girl / Jean-Pierre Dardenne / 2016 ... James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

NYFF Film Review: 'The Unknown Girl' Is Another Compelling ... Joey Magidson from Awards Circuit

NYFF Review: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's 'The Unknown Girl ... Aaron Boalick from Vague Visages

The A.V. Club: Mike D'Angelo May 18, 2016

The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri May 20, 2016

n+1: A. S. Hamrah December 12, 2016

JLT/JLT: Josh Timmermann October 07, 2016

What's Worth Seeing [Jason Korsner]

Cineuropa.org [Fabien Lemercier]

The Upcoming [Imogen Robinson]

HeyUGuys [Jo-Ann Titmarsh]

Flickreel [Craig Skinner]

TheUpcoming.com [Joseph Owen]

CineVue [John Bleasdale]

Senses of Cinema: Daniel Fairfax July 10, 2016

Film review: The Unknown Girl — 'Torpid' - Financial Times Nigel Andrews

Letterboxd: Preston Wilder

Sight & Sound: Geoff Andrew Top 15 Films at Cannes, May 24, 2016

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's THE UNKNOWN GIRL - Fandor David Hudson

The Dardenne Brothers' 'The Unknown Girl': Cannes Review ... David Rooney from The Hollywood Reporter, also seen here: Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

'The Unknown Girl': Haenel Enriches the Dardenne Brothers' Latest ... Guy Lodge from Variety, also seen here: Variety [Guy Lodge]

The Unknown Girl (2016), directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc ... Dave Calhoun from Time Out

The Unknown Girl review – crime drama with jarring problems | Film ... Wendy Ide from The Guardian

The Unknown Girl review – a rare misfire from the Dardenne brothers ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

The Unknown Girl review: Casualty-style melodrama comes to Belgium Tim Robey from The Telegraph, also seen here: The Telegraph [Tim Robey]

Evening Standard [David Sexton]

The Unknown Girl: review: a worthwhile addition to the Dardennes ... Donald Clarke from The Irish Times

Movie review: Truth and despair in La fille inconnue (The Unknown ... T’Cha Dunlevy from The Montreal Gazette

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

The Unknown Girl - Wikipedia

Dargis, Manohla – film critic

Filmmaker Magazine: Blog (excerpt)

I don't know about you, but I'm enjoying tremendously Manohla Dargis's film writing in the New York Times, particularly the more freewheeling attitude that runs through her pieces. Her Godard interview of a few weeks back was brilliantly edited. Leaving in his intellectual japes and her bemused ripostes -- bits that might have been edited out in the hands of another Times critic -- both made the piece entertaining and indicative of Godard's entire enterprise. In today's Times, Dargis steps in front of her byline to frankly answer questions from readers. (Registration required.) In response the various queries she raves about Li Yang's underseen Blind Shaft, canonizes Bad Santa as a new holiday classic, and responds to a reader who asks, "Hasn't the bar been set too high for a medium that is meant to entertain? Must a film always improve upon the art?"

Her response winds through a great story about a bored Paul Schrader falling asleep during Warren Beatty's Reds, to a discussion of James Agee, before winding up with the following:

I thoroughly understand the desire for entertainment (really!), but movies were never "meant" to be any one thing. The medium was seized on by opportunistic business types early on, but it was always also a medium for artists, intellectuals and those for whom a life in the movies means something more than just a succession of pneumatic blonds and a swank Beverly Hills address.

Manohla Dargis interview Steve Erickson from Senses of Cinema

Critic Biography: Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

The Awful Truth From Vertigo to Austin Powers, Scenes We Love, by Manohla Dargis from The Nation, March 16, 2000

The New York Times > Movies > The Way We Live Now: The 21st ... The 21st-Century Cinephile, by Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, November 14, 2004

Being the owner of DVDBeaver forces me to respond to Manohla ... (pdf)

The New York Times > Movies > Godard's Metaphysics of the Movies Manohla Dargis interviews Godard from The New York Times, November 21, 2004

The New York Times > Readers' Opinions > Questions for ... Questions for…Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, December 7, 2004

The New York Times > Readers' Opinions > Questions for ... Questions for… Manohla Dargis, February 1, 2005

Manohla Dargis - New York Times Questions for… Manohla Dargis, February 6, 2006

scanners The critic: Manohla Dargis on film criticism, by Jim Emerson June 13, 2006

Manohla Dargis: Film Critic Starting to Think Every Slightly ... the only photo I’ve found of the elusive Dargis, from Gawker, June 16, 2006

"Movie Review: Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties (2006) As Told to MANOHLA DARGIS by LORD DARGIS, from The New York Times, June 16, 2006

Best of 2006 - Movies - Manohla Dargis - New York Times December 24, 2006

a long Manohla Dargis essay Unblinking Eye, Visual Diary: Warhol’s Films, New York Times, October 21, 2007

Women in Hollywood 2009 - At the Box Office but Not Directing ... Women In the Seats, But Not Behind the Camera, Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, December 10, 2009

Amazon.com: L.A. Confidential (BFI Modern Classics): Manohla ... Amazon’s listing of BFI Modern Classics: L.A. Confidential, by Manohla Dargis

kamera.co.uk - book review - BFI Modern Classics: L.A. ... BFI Modern Classics: L.A. Confidential, by Manohla Dargis, book review from Ben Walters (2003)

"Fuck Them": Times Critic On Hollywood, Women, & Why Romantic Comedies Suck Irin interviews Dargis from Jezebel, December 14, 2009

Articles by Manohla Dargis - Los Angeles Times

Reviews by Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Manohla Dargis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

YouTube - What is Manohla Dargis of the New York Times ... (3:36) on YouTube

Darling, Todd

A SNOWMOBILE FOR GEORGE C+ 77

USA (94 mi) 2008 Official site

What begins as a lighthearted query about snowmobiles and the two-stroke engine that was banned initially by the Clinton administration but quickly reinstated by the Bush administration, which led our documentarian to wonder why? He quickly learns that his snowmobile tends to smoke heavily, where the exhaust fumes are twenty seven times more toxic than an automobile. So how’d they get reinstated? People who make snowmobiles had no answers, as they had already redesigned the engine when they were informed there was no need. So he visited the Klamath Falls area in Oregon where there had been a hundred year dispute regarding water restrictions caused by water withheld by a dam to irrigate local farms, which impacted upon the salmon runs up the Klamath river, one of the strongest in the nation, causing ever smaller numbers of fish. George W. Bush’s chief political strategist Karl Rove decided this was an opportunity to rally their Republican base and intervened in the dispute, immediately taking sides with the farmers, giving them all the water they needed despite dire warnings about what this would do to the fish. During the next salmon run, all the fish died, the worst in the nation’s history, and could be seen washed up to shore belly up, as there was insufficient water to make it to their breeding grounds. Despite this disaster, the Bush administration refused to acknowledge their decision had anything to do with it, instead blaming recent drought conditions.

He visited Yellowstone National Park where snowmobiles were frightening away the natural wildlife, causing another battle between preservationists and snowmobilers, with the Bush administration siding with the snowmobilers, again, pandering to their political base, where these noisy, heavy pollutants continue to be allowed into the park in the winter, but where toll guards at the gates can wear protective gas masks. He visited a man in Wyoming who discovered that Wyoming grandfathered into their state constitution that land purchased a hundred years ago by a family was still obligated by state law which indicated they bought only what was above land, as the federal government owned what mineral rights were below the land. So oil and natural gas companies can enter people’s properties at will, with no notice or approval, and dig for oil and gas by any means necessary, even install permanent machinery to continue the operations indefinitely. The farmer visited indicated the noise of the machines was driving all the wildlife away, and the huge quantities of water brought out from beneath the earth to release the methane gas was killing the natural prairie grass that his cows had been eating for decades. Even worse, despite drilling at distances of nearly 5 miles away, private water wells were drying up, leaving many residents with no water supply at all. However, the government again took no responsibility, and blamed the families for improper maintenance of their land. The overriding theme here is that companies were given a blank check to do whatever they wanted, while families were simply marginalized in the process, and were of no concern whatsoever to the companies or the government.

When he visited survivors of 9/11 in New York City, the film obviously shifted from Red States to a Blue state, where the idea of individual liberty has an altogether different context than the rugged individualism of the Wild West, a shift which isn’t even noted in the film. Instead they document how the EPA was forced to change the language of their fact finding mission to drop precautionary language about the hazardous air quality and instead alleviate all fears by claiming the air quality is safe. They did this by using low quality microscopes which could not detect small asbestos particles instead of more heavy duty microscopes that could. This blatant lie meant that all the service personnel that were sent back into the work areas are now becoming high risk for various forms of cancer, as the initial area where the buildings collapsed was contaminated by asbestos particles for a several block area which was initially engulfed under a powder cloud. So now police, fire fighters, and construction workers are coming down with cancer, yet their claims are being denied by the government that indicates there is no link. Finally, the film identifies the specific people within the Bush administration who had jobs with oil and natural gas companies before they were chosen to work within the Bush administration where they could drop all regulations as a government policy, simply refusing to consider science, and approving whatever the companies wanted. Ironically, the list of snowmobilers and local farmers who were rewarded by the Bush administration became big donors in his political campaign. The entire operation was based on political and corporate expediency, blurring the line until they were one and the same.

BURNING FUSE FILM FESTIVAL Facets Multi Media

A Snowmobile for George is a rambunctious road trip that collects the stories of fishermen, cowboys and firemen who have had to face the consequences of environmental deregulation by the Bush Administration. Started by a question about the filmmaker's own used two-stroke snowmobile engine, this trip steadily reveals the political strategy and rationale behind a massive sell-off of public resources. A Snowmobile for George begins modestly as a one-man, one-machine road film that simply asks why rules to clean up a smoky off-road machine got shelved. With no presumption of guilt or blame, filmmaker Todd Darling tows his family snowmobile across the United States and persists in asking that question. The film's humble point of departure gives little hint as to its ultimate destination. What starts off as a personal quest gradually morphs as this journey takes the viewer to the sites of more serious environmental change. The common thread among these stories is deregulation - the notion that common citizens benefit when "the government gets off their back." But the film uncovers how the Bush Administration worked efficiently to match up the goals of select industries with the political demands of the White House at the expense of the average American citizen.

The Burning Fuse Film Festival

Darnell, Eric and Tom McGrath

MADAGASCAR B 86

USA (80 mi) 2005

Just smile and wave. That’s what we do boys, just smile and wave.

Chris Rock and Ben Stiller lend their voices to this colorful animated story of New York City Zoo animals, a zebra and an audience-pleasing lion respectively, also a hypochondriac giraffe and a no nonsense hippo, played by David Schwimmer and Jada Pinkett Smith. Aided by a few irrepressible penguins who are nothing less than ingenious, among the most hilarious animated creatures ever, a group that seem to be missing from a Nick Park film, featuring co-director Tom McGrath’s voice as the Skipper, the lead penguin who is always barking out orders, who accidentally dig their escape tunnel into the zebra’s grounds, giving him for the first time an idea of being free, living in the wild. Be careful what you wish for as it may soon come true, as they quickly find out when they are sent away from the zoo as disgruntled, irate animals, tranquilized, crated and sent to the island of Madagascar. They keep wondering where “the people” went, but soon discover an entirely new universe at their fingertips, one that is gloriously beautiful and pristine, but also one that is vicious and deadly, featuring cabaret-like musical production numbers by the island’s lemur population, led by the King of the Lemurs (Sascha Baron Cohen) and his sidekick Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer) who leads his followers into strutting their stuff to the music of “I Like to Move It, Move It,” always on the lookout for hyenas, known in this film as the foosa, eaters of lemurs, so the lion, who scares the foosa away, takes on an instant interest. However, in the wild, the lion returns to his natural elements that even he doesn’t fully comprehend, as he starts seeing images of meat with every animal he sees, including his best friend, the zebra, and surprisingly has a few moments where he can be seen taking a bite out of his ass. But friendship prevails, even in the wild. While the story is simple, the look of the film is always gorgeous, the musical choices interesting, the relationship and the non-stop banter between the lion and the zebra is well developed and oftentimes hilarious, the wit continues throughout the entire course of the film, but the penguins especially were superb.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

Eric Darnell ("Antz") and Tom McGrath plug old-fashioned Looney Tunes style into the computer-animated film and come up with the zippiest CGI comedy DreamWorks has produced to date.

Showbiz lion Alex (voice of Ben Stiller), the merchandised-to-the-mane king of the Central Park Zoo, loves living in the Big Apple: the feel of cement, the sounds of cars and sirens, the black night sky where helicopter spotlights are the closest you get to starlight. His best friend, Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), longs for the legendary open plains.

When Marty escapes to sample the wild (of Connecticut, via Grand Central Station, of course), the ensuing city adventure of Alex and his buddies, Melman the hypochondriac giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith), is misinterpreted as a cry for escape, the furthest thing from their minds. Shipped off to an animal preserve in Kenya, they wind up (due to the "Great Escape" shenanigans of a hilarious platoon of penguins) washing ashore in Madagascar.

Alex is no predator, he's a ham who lives for the spotlight, but he succumbs to his primal instincts in the wild (the marvelously animated sequences suggest a giant housecat in the feral fever of play) and his best friends start to look an awful lot like dinner on the hoof. It's the film's basic conflict -- instinct versus individual choice -- and it comes through with what I like to call the "Iron Giant" moral: "You are who you choose to be."

Slim on plot but fat with furiously paced gags, "Madagascar" is a routine story enlivened by location, color, exotic landscapes and a cascade of comic flourishes. The directors give a modern twist on the Bugs and Daffy cartoons of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, from the sleekly stylized faces and extreme caricatured bodies to the whiplash movements and zippy comic pacing.

For the adults, there is a non-stop bar rage of cultural references, from "American Beauty" and "Silence of the Lambs" to "The Twilight Zone" and "National Geographic" TV specials.

For the kids, there are a smattering of poo jokes (some inspired -- it's the lingua franca of the monkey kingdom, after all) and slapstick gags, all directed with zany energy. It could be more involving, but it's funny enough that you won't care.

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones)

If anybody bothered to ask movie critics, we’d tell you that the fastest way to solve the population problem is to expose those of childbearing years to a cartoon sneak preview, with its packed house of squirming, screaming little, er, angels. I mention this only to set my mood (cantankerous): That is to say, I was in no way prepared to like this film. The perfunctory opening scenes didn’t help: There’s Marty the Zebra (voiced by Rock), who is weary of pampering at the Central Park Zoo and lusting for a life in the wild. There’s his grab-bag of wisecracking best friends: the self-centered showman, Alex the Lion (Stiller); sassy hippo Gloria (Pinkett Smith); and glum hypochondriac Melman the Giraffe (Schwimmer). Gently amusing stuff, sure, but nothing terribly inspiring – that is, until a bookish primate makes a crack about throwing monkey poo at Tom Wolfe, and Madagascar dangles the possibility of being something slightly nutter. Consider that possibility mostly realized: After its leaden beginning, Madagascar launches into a lunatic pace of left-field pop-culture references and physics-defying physical comedy worthy of the Looney Tunes of yore. When Marty the Zebra hooks up with a quartet of penguins (the birdmen of this particular Alcatraz, they are plotting an escape to Antarctica), he too breaks out of the zoo and hoofs it to Grand Central Station, in order to catch a train for the wilds of … Connecticut. Like its jailbreak protagonists, the film grows more ambitious outside the confines of the zoo and truly takes off when the four best friends accidentally wash up on the shores of Madagascar and are stranded in a lemur country ruled by an idiot king (voiced by no less than Ali G, aka Sacha Baron Cohen). It’s a kick watching Lion, Zebra, Giraffe, and Hippo – city folk who fish bagels out of the trash and thrash in their sleep unless they are lulled by New York’s peculiar symphony of sirens and shoot-’em-ups – try to adapt to life in the wild. Smaller children, however, might be lightly terrorized when Alex the Lion’s carnivore instincts kick in with a junkie’s jittery fervor. In truth, Madagascar boasts a black comic bent that might not be entirely kid-friendly, as in a scene that works as a food-chain primer: See pretty chickadee; see pretty chickadee get crocodile-chomped; smirk to one’s self as Louis Armstrong warbles "What a Wonderful World" in the background. But it’s all so terrifically silly – in just the right ways – that the darker stuff probably won’t make a dent, anyway (nor will the cheeky asides to Chariots of Fire, Cast Away, and American Beauty). The somewhat-rote life lessons that cartoons – sorry, animated features – require are all in attendance (the importance of friendship, check; risk-taking, check) and somewhat gum up the fun, as does an overriding philosophy that doesn’t quite shake down, but maybe that’s just the crank in me coming out again. Forget life lessons: I much prefer a lemur king doing the robot.

The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

Crazy for Cinema

DVD Times Eamonn McCusker

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver)

Film Journal International (Kevin Lally)

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Movie Vault [Avril Carruthers]

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

The New Yorker (David Denby)

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

YouTube - The Madagascar Penguins scenes (10 minutes)

The Madagascar Penguins in a Chrismas Caper - Free Video ... samo ... (10 minutes)

Dash, Julie

DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST

USA Great Britain (112 mi) 1991

Time Out

Set in 1902, on a barrier island off Georgia, this first feature is an impressionistic portrait of the ritual last supper of the Peazant family before migrating to the mainland. The younger generations are leaving the matriarch Nana (Day) and the insulated traditional life she symbolises. Tensions are raised by the return of family members Viola, a Baptist missionary, and Yellow Mary (Barbara-O), a proud whore, and by Eli's apprehension that his wife Eula (Rogers) is carrying the child of a rapist. Nana fears these rifts will destroy her family when they leave the home of their African ancestors and calls on the spirit of Eula's unborn child to heal them. Steeped in symbolism, superstition and myth, this disconcertingly original film is structured in tableaux which jump through time. The characters speak in the islanders' Gullah dialect and little is explained; however, Dash's universal message about holding on to tradition in face of change rings clear.

Daughters of the Dust: The Film File: The New Yorker Michael Sragow

There’s teaching potential in Julie Dash’s acclaimed celebration of the Georgia and Carolina Sea Islands culture, especially for classes in African-American studies. But it’s hard to imagine how Dash expects general-interest audiences, black or white, to find their way into her dreamy evocation of Gullah traditions in transition. In theory Dash aims to present a folkloric story from inside a folk culture, but her script, set on the eve of a family’s departure to the mainland, makes the material seem distant and aesthetic. Fortunately, Dash and her cinematographer, Arthur Jafa, endow their outdoor imagery with a supernal prettiness, hitting otherworldly shades of purplish blue and yellow-orange, as if they’d managed to drape an Oriental scarf over the sun. If this movie has gained a following beyond those fascinated by the Sea Islands, it’s possibly because it peddles the same exotic mixture as “The Piano” does—men and women with contemporary emotional drives and nineteenth-century costumes, parading on a primitive shore.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Kathleen Sachs

The narrator of Julie Dash's DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST is more than just a character in the film, but a symbolic representation of the film's message. The unborn child who tells the story of the Peazant family in their last days before migrating north is as much a reflection of the past as she is of the future; all that has come before her is as inherent to the family as the very blood within their veins, and it's that history which will propel them along the trying and changing times. The Peazant family are inhabitants of the southern Sea Islands and members of its Gullah culture, having preserved the identity of their African heritage in the face of slavery and post-war oppression. Before the move, the matriarch of the Peazant family contemplates her native beliefs while the family's younger members overcome their personal struggles. Rape and prostitution have afflicted several female members of the family, and the scorn from both society and their own clan present the unique obstacle of African American women within an already disparaged race. Dash uses magical realism not only in the story, but also as a filmmaking device that is reflective of the characters' culture. It was the first feature-length film by an African-American woman to receive theatrical release, and its historical context and female-oriented storyline set it apart from both other films of the time and other films put out by fellow members of the L.A. Rebellion.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Set at the turn of the 20th century on the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, writer-director Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters Of The Dust explores a culture at a crossroads. The Gullah people, the islands' inhabitants, have carved out a uniquely African-American culture that's in touch with both sides of the hyphenate. Former slaves and their descendants, the Gullah have preserved many African traditions while incorporating those of the New World and its European heritage. Religion, more a syncretic collection of traditions than a single faith, could involve charms against evil spirits as easily as Baptist hymns, and the Gullah culture as a whole reflects this. It's a way of looking at the world that both hearkens back to an ancient malleability and anticipates post-modernism. The greatest strength of the film—which covers one significant day in island history, and in the history of one large family as it makes plans to join life on the mainland—is its ability to portray this culture in almost documentary-like fashion. A rich, fully realized vision, beautifully shot by Arthur Jafa (Crooklyn), Dash's film is one-of-a-kind, and at times that works against it as much as for it. Her exhaustive research has allowed her to re-create Gullah life in remarkable detail, but many of the details, however intriguing, are left unexplained, a fact that makes this new DVD version, and Dash's audio commentary, all the more useful. What may be more difficult for many viewers is the film's non-linear narrative and obtuse characterizations: Dash argues that she tried to structure her film in a way more in touch with African narratives than Western storytelling, but she still could have allowed her characters greater depth and permitted them to serve as something more than icons. Still, it's hard to argue that Daughters Of The Dust's faults outweigh its virtues, and the supplemental features of this packed DVD (deleted scenes, a documentary, interviews) only enhance the experience of a project that works better as an experience than a film.

Washington Post [Rita Kempley]

“Daughters of the Dust” is an African American family heirloom, a gorgeously impressionistic history of the Gullah people set on the South Carolina Sea Islands at the turn of the century. In the hands of director Julie Dash and photographer Arthur Jafa, this nonlinear film becomes visual poetry, a wedding of imagery and rhythm that connects oral tradition with the music video. It is an astonishing, vivid portrait not only of a time and place, but of an era's spirit.

The story focuses primarily on the women of the extended Peazant family of luxuriant Ibo Landing, a black community descended from the slaves who worked the indigo, rice and cotton plantations before emancipation. Isolated from the mainland, the Peazants have preserved many of the traditions, beliefs and language of their West African ancestors. All that stands to be lost, however, as the Gullah clan prepares to migrate from this paradise to the industrialized North. Only the matriarch Nana (Cora Lee Day), an 88-year-old mystic, insists on remaining behind with the old souls and her "scraps of memories."

On a summer day in 1902, a farewell picnic is underway on the beach, where the Peazants in their Sunday best are gathered for a feast of shrimp gumbo, fresh clams, yellow corn and johnnycake. The young women, romantic in long white dresses, move as languidly as clouds while a photographer (Tommy Hicks) records them for posterity. Nana's daughter, Yellow Mary (Barbara-O), looks like a bride in her lacy veil, but she is in her family's eyes a "ruint" woman. A wet nurse and a prostitute, she has just returned from Cuba with her beautiful lover. She naturally finds herself in conflict with her cousin Viola (Cherly Lynn Bruce), a fundamentalist Christian who rejects Yellow Mary's morals along with Nana's spiritualism.

There is also conflict between Nana and her dour sister-in-law (Kaycee Moore), an outsider who considers the "Geechee" ways backward and dreams of assimilation. Meanwhile, Nana seeks solace from the ancestral spirits who have gathered for the birth of her great-granddaughter (Kai-Lynn Warren), whose mother, Eula (Alva Rogers), was raped by a landowner. It is the precocious unborn girl's job to convince her father (Adisa Anderson) that he, not the rapist, is truly her father. The spirit girl, who sometimes mysteriously shows up in the photographer's compositions, is also the movie's narrator, a guide who unites the Gullah past with the future that might be.

A multidimensional family drama spoken in the patois known as Gullah, "Daughters of the Dust" is not always easy to follow, nor does it reward viewers with neat resolutions. As Dash intended, her film enfolds us in its dark arms and ancient sensibilities.

"Daughters of the Dust," in the Gullah dialect with some subtitles, is not rated but is suitable for general audiences.

User comments from imdb Author: Michael P. Lewis (mplewis) from Edina, MN

Daughters of The Dust was produced by Geechee Girls and American Playhouse Company. The movie main focus is on the Peazant women. Nana Peazant is played by Cora Lee Day, and Eula, her granddaughter, is played by Alva Rogers who is pregnant and has been raped by a landowner. Nana's granddaughter, Yellow Mary, is played by Barbara-O who is returning, with her friend Trula, from the mainland and her life as a prostitute and wet nurse. Haggar, who has married into the family, is played by Kaycee Moore and wants nothing to do with the old traditions. Similarly, the Christian Viola, played by Cheryl Lynn Bruce, is returning from her life on the mainland.

Daughters of the Dust is a film written and directed by Julie Dash. It tells the story of a family of African-Americans who have lived for many years on a Southern offshore island, and of how they come together one day in 1902 to celebrate their ancestors before some of them leave for the North. The film is narrated by an unborn child, and ancestors already dead also seem to be as present as the living.

Julie Dash underwent many hardships in bringing the story to the silver screen. She had severe budget constraints, filmed in mosquito and insect infested areas, was delayed by Hurricane Hugo, sidetracked by sudden and violent sandstorms, and was forced to decide to either have a child or make the movie. In the end, she choose to give birth and nurture the story Daugthers of the Dust and the result is an unconventional masterpiece.

Initially, the response by white male critics was not favorable and they accused Dash of not adequately explaining the Gullah people, their culture, and their religious traditions. While attacking Dash, these critics failed to acknowledge many positive aspects of the film. The reasons behind this, according to Bell Hooks, is that "we've never been taught, most of us, in any history class that black people had different languages, had different religious practices, etc. So, to some extent, the film represents that challenge to a critic of any race" to review something they are not familiar with.

Because of these reviews and the fact that movie tells the story of African American women in an unconventional manner, it would seem to have slim commercial prospects. However, through word of mouth and some positive reviews it was able to generate a cult following. To date, the film has grossed 1.6 million from a budget of only 800,000.

The Newark Black Film Festival has chosen Daughters as the Film of The Century while the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound Magazine chose the soundtrack as one of the best in the past 25 years. It also received the Best Cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991.

I believe the film hits the viewer on various levels. By placing the story in the early 1900's, Dash is able to show us a turbulent time for African-Americans and address many issues such as migration, lynching, and the changing African-American culture. Dash also shows and teaches us about Ibo culture and its importance in the lives of those inhabiting the Sea Coast Islands, not just the African-Americans sharing the Gullah culture, but also the Native Americans, Muslims, and Christians.

DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1991, 113 min notes, essay and Julie Dash bio info by Michael Dembrow

Untitled Document A History of Exile, an essay on the film by Deanna McGowen Prufert

CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon)

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

Daughters of the Dust (2016 restoration in 2K from Cohen Film Collection) Antti Alanen

Read the complete review for Daughters Of The Dust TV Guide magazine

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Daughters of the Dust Eat-Online

Sarah M. Elkins

Writing > Essays > Women Studies > "Daughters of the Dust," my ... my impression of the movie by Yanet Manzano

Diary of an Anxious Black Woman: Revolutionary Cinema: Julie ...

Manish Malhotra says it’s poorly made

Daniel Barrett calls it a dud

Daughters of the Dust (1991 comprehensive film website with analysis, essays and links

Religious Traditions of the African Diaspora The Gullah People and Their Link to West Africa

ISSUE ESSAY Maintaining Cultural Identity in the Face of Adversity

The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection Joseph A. Opala

Bench of Memory at Slavery’s Gateway Bench of Memory at Slavery’s Gateway, by Felicia R. Lee from The New York Times, July 28, 2008, at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, S.C, Toni Morrison led the procession dedicating her “bench by the road,” honoring the memory of slaves who arrived there

Daughters of the Dust capsule book review by Casey King from The New York Times, December 14, 1997

Daughters of the Dust book review of Daughters of the Dust, a novel by Julie Dash which expands the story, from Akilah Monifa

Read the transcript of an on-line featuring Julie Dash discussing "Daughters of the Dust" Interview with Julie Dash, December 19, 1997

MoMA.org | The Collection | Julie Dash. Daughters of the Dust. 1991 a photograph from the film

WELCOME TO DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST: Secrets and Whispers film website

Julie Dash Homepage on the AALBC.com's web site Julie Dash website

MAGAZINE | FEATURES | JULIE DASH-ROSA PARKS | VOLUME 26-6: MARCH 2002 Julie Dash and the Rosa Parks Story, by Robert A. Jones from DGA, March 2002

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Stephen Holden)

'Daughters of the Dust,' a Seeming Inspiration for 'Lemonade,' Is Restored Mekado Murphy from The New York Times, April 29, 2016

Julie Dash Made a Movie. Then Hollywood Shut Her Out. Cara Buckley from The New York Times, November 18, 2016

Daughters of The Dust DVD - Kino on Video

Gullah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Daughters of the Dust - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

YouTube - Daughters of the Dust Scene an opening scene (1:41)

Invisible Woman.....Black Cinema At LARGE: Daughters Of The Dust a YouTube condensation of the film (9:05)

YouTube - Robert Farris Thompson Speaks: Daughters of the Dust an Interview with a Yale Art professor about the film, also seen here: Robert Farris Thompson on Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust ... (14:55)

Dassin, Jules

Film Reference Rob Edelman

Between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s, Jules Dassin directed some of the better realistic, hard-bitten, fast-paced crime dramas produced in America, before his blacklisting and subsequent move to Europe. However, while he has made some very impressive films, his career as a whole is lacking in artistic cohesion.

Dassin's films are occasionally innovative: The Naked City is one of the first police dramas shot on location, on the streets of New York; Rififi is a forerunner of detailed jewelry heist dramas, highlighted by a thirty-five-minute sequence chronicling the break-in, shot without a word of dialogue or note of music; Never on Sunday, starring his wife Melina Mercouri as a happy hooker, made the actress an international star, won her an Academy Award nomination, and popularized in America the Greek bouzouki music. The Naked City and Rififi are particularly exciting, as well as trend-setting, while Brute Force remains a striking, naturalistic prison drama, with Burt Lancaster in one of his most memorable early performances and Hume Cronyn wonderfully despicable as a Hitlerish guard captain. Thieves' Highway, also shot on location, is a vivid drama of truck driver Richard Conte taking on racketeer Lee J. Cobb.

Topkapi is a Rififi remake, with a delightful touch of comedy. Many of Dassin's later films, such as Brute Force and Thieves' Highway, attempt to observe human nature: they focus on the individual fighting his own demons while trying to survive within a chaotic society. For example, in A Dream of Passion, an updating of Sophocles' Medea, an American woman is jailed in Greece for the murder of her three children; Up Tight, the filmmaker's first American-made release after the McCarthy hysteria, is a remake of The Informer set in a black ghetto. Unfortunately, they are all generally flawed: with the exception of Never on Sunday and Topkapi, his collaborations with Melina Mercouri (from He Who Must Die to A Dream of Passion) are disappointing, while Up Tight pales beside the original. Circle of Two, with teenager Tatum O'Neal baring her breasts for aging Richard Burton, had a limited release. Dassin's early triumphs have been obscured by his more recent fiascos, and as a result his critical reputation is now irrevocably tarnished.

The villain in his career is the blacklist, which tragically clipped his wings just as he was starting to fly. Indeed, he could not find work in Europe for five years, as producers felt American distributors would automatically ban any film with his signature. When Rififi opened, critics wrote about Dassin as if he were European. The New York Herald Tribune reported in 1961, "At one ceremony, when the award to Rififi was announced, (Dassin) was called to the dais, and a French flag was raised above him. 'It should have been a moment of triumph but I feel awful. They were honoring my work and I'm an American. It should have been the American flag raised in honor."' The blacklist thus denied Jules Dassin his roots. In 1958, it was announced that he was planning to adapt James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan, a project that was eventually shelved. It is one more tragedy of the blacklist that Dassin was not allowed to follow up Brute Force, The Naked City, and Thieves' Highway with Studs Lonigan.

Encore: A Touch of Noir - Film Comment Robert Horton, May/June 2013

After the frenzied flamenco clapping of ghostly hands against a black void under the opening credits (this is going to be arty) the movie really begins with a series of nighttime shots in a Spanish town. And they’re good, evocative, tingly even: cobblestone plaza seen at a low angle, stark splash of light, a jealous man with a gun, two adulterous lovers shot dead.

We recall here that Jules Dassin, blacklisted American turned Euro-art-house director, once flourished in film noir. The opening to 10:30 P.M. Summer doesn’t quote Dassin’s Night and the City (50) or Thieves’ Highway (49) or anything, but these shots have a crackle that remind us that the man best known at the time (1966) for Never on Sunday (60) and Topkapi (64) knew his way around the haunted shadows of America’s darkest genre.

10:30 P.M. Summer doesn’t roll off the tongue as a title, and it probably doesn’t ring a bell, either. This flop has been overlooked by film history, and the reasons are not difficult to discern: it’s definitely a guest at Pauline Kael’s Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Party—pretentious, self-serious, and fatally susceptible to trendy stylistic gestures churned up in the wake of Antonioni, Fellini, and Resnais.

And yet, and yet. That opening is punchy and strong. And much of what follows is intriguing in ways that sit side by side with what’s exasperating about the movie. We are in this Spanish town because Paul (Peter Finch) and his alcoholic wife, Maria (Melina Mercouri, Dassin’s wife and muse), are driving to Madrid with their young daughter and their friend Claire (Romy Schneider on the youthful side of her prime), who has been invited on the ride for somewhat mysterious reasons. Trapped in a crowded hotel as police search for the killer, the travelers spend a fraught night waiting out the manhunt, a rainstorm, and their own wayward passions. The following day brings a long, complicated hangover.

In a sequence carried off with Hitchcockian aplomb, Maria looks out from a hotel window during the stormy night. On a balcony her husband engages in a mid-deluge liplock with Claire; on the roof of the building across the way the escaping killer (Julián Mateos) flaps around in a sodden black cape, like a wounded monster. We know at this moment, thanks in part to Mercouri’s Greek-goddess-facing-the-Furies grandeur, that Maria will aid the fugitive’s escape. Which she does, in a series of mostly dialogue-free scenes of passable suspense (whether intentionally experimental or not, the drawn-out business of Maria’s car finding its way through the streets points more toward Kiarostami than Hitchcock).

The movie was adapted by Marguerite Duras from her own novella (Dassin’s also credited on the script). Dassin was originally to produce the movie for his fellow blacklistee Joseph Losey to direct, but the two fell out. (It would’ve been a characteristic picture for this period in Losey’s career, that’s for sure.) The frequency of stilted posing, the enigmatic glances portending that which cannot be said, the business of wondering whether certain moments are reality or dream—all these fix the movie in its era.

But there are moments when Dassin’s sense of craft (he did excel at heist scenes—see Rififi and Topkapi) and the locations and the actors’ specific presences combine to create something genuinely eerie. In her husband’s previous films, Melina Mercouri is all too iconic, a starkly outlined Force of Nature chiseled out of Greek marble; but she’s very human here, warm and wounded, and convincingly ready to slip the bounds of propriety and commit a crime of passion. (Color helps: she’s softer without the black-and-white outlines of Never on Sunday and 1962’s Phaedra.) As Maria pantomimes an attempt at connection with the killer in the car, or as she and Paul run along the plateau outside the town that opens onto a dry vastness for miles beyond them, the movie does fleetingly attain a kind of yawning existential largeness. It isn’t quite the edge-of-oblivion journey in The Sheltering Sky, but it is close.

And the ending? Not cool. Peter Finch running around shouting faintly anticipates William Shatner’s final cries in his memorable cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But the movie’s just evocative enough to make you wonder where Mercouri’s great injured bird has gone, after all, and to regret—well, at least register—her absence. 

cineCollage :: Jules Dassin biography

Jules Dassin - biography and films - Le Film Guide James Travers biography

All-Movie Guide bio from Hal Erickson

Internet Broadway Database

Jules Dassin Films | Jules Dassin Filmography | Jules Dassin ... Rod Edelman biography and filmography from The Film Director site

Jules Dassin | American film director | Britannica.com Michael Baron biography

Overview for Jules Dassin - TCM.com profile page and brief biography

Jules Dassin | Biography and Filmography | 1911 - Hollywood.com

Film Noir Directors: Jules Dassin filmography

Jules Dassin - NNDB.com filmography

Jules Dassin - Explore - The Criterion Collection

Harvard Film Archive film retrospective summary

JewishPost.com - The Homecoming of Jules Dassin essay by Gad Nahshon (Undated)

Jules Dassin: The early years - Salon.com Michael Sragow from Salon, August 24, 2000

How Jules Dassin Set The Standard For Film Noir - tribunedigital ... Loren King from The Chicago Tribune, November 27, 2000

Jules Dassin for the Honorary Oscar? - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares, 2007

Jules Dassin, Filmmaker on Blacklist, Dies at 96 - The New York Times Richard Severo, April 1, 2008

Obituary: Jules Dassin | Film | The Guardian Tim Pulleine from The Guardian, April 1, 2008

Jules Dassin, 96; Blacklisted Filmmaker - Washington Post Adam Bernstein, April 1, 2008

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film director Jules Dassin dies April 1, 2008

Jules Dassin Obituary | Jules Dassin Funeral | Legacy.com Associated Press, April 1, 2008

Self-Styled Siren: Jules Dassin, 1911-2008 April 1, 2008

Jules Dassin - Telegraph Obituary, April 2, 2008

Jules Dassin: In Exile, American Became an Auteur : NPR A Remembrance by NPR, April 2, 2008

Jules Dassin, victim of the anti-communist witch-hunt, dies at 96 ... David Walsh from The World Socialist Web Site, April 3, 2008

Tribute to Jules Dassin – Forward.com Masha Leon from Forward, April 11, 2008

Jules Dassin BRUTE FORCE 1947 - Center for Studies in American ... September 23, 20 (pdf)

Film - Film Forum Salutes Jules Dassin, an Expatriate at Home Among ... New York Times, March 20, 2009

Edward Copeland's Tangents: Centennial Tributes: Jules Dassin Part III December 21, 2011

Jules Dassin's 1955 'Rififi' Remains the Best of All Heist Movies ... Alan Scherstuhl from The Village Voice, September 1, 2015

The Essentials: The 8 Greatest Jules Dassin Films | IndieWire September 1, 2015

Dassin, Jules They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Jules Dassin - Directors Guild of America including lengthy video interviews by Bruce Goldstein, Undated (56 mi and 39 mi)

Jules Dassin: You'll never work in this town again | Profiles | News ... Roger Clarke interview from The Independent, August 8, 2002

An interview: Filmmaker Jules Dassin, witch-hunting and Hollywood's ... David Walsh interviews Reynold Humphries, author of Fritz Lang : Genre and Representation in His American Films, 1988, The American Horror Film: An Introduction, 2002, and a recent release Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History, from The World Socialist Web Site, April 7, 2008

Wise Guys roundtable discussion with André de Toth, Budd Boetticher and Jules Dassin by Patrick Francis from LA Weekly

Jules Dassin (1911 - 2008) - Find A Grave Memorial

Jules Dassin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BRUTE FORCE B+ 92

USA (98 mi) 1947

Those gates only open three times. When you come in, when you’ve served your time, or when you’re dead!
—Gallagher (Charles Bickford)

The Macbeth of prison break films, as there’s no happy ending to soothe the audience’s built-up anxieties, instead there is only a film noir world of death and destruction. Ostensibly a leftist, postwar reaction to fascism, Dassin’s film elevated the American prison picture to the role of a WW II POW film, where the sadistic chief prison guard is equated to the Nazi SS officers running the concentration camps. The timing of the film is interesting, as it was released in the summer just prior to the first Hollywood blacklist instituted on November 25, 1947, the day after ten writers and directors were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Dassin rose to Hollywood prominence in the late 1940’s with a series of taut and moody pulp films, including BRUTE FORCE (1947), THE NAKED CITY (1948), and THIEVES HIGHWAY (1949), each distinguished by an inventive camera style and shadowy imagery capturing a bleak, sometimes sadistic vision of human nature. Shortly after completing NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950), his career in America was finished when fellow movie director Edward Dmytryk testified before a congressional committee in 1951 that Mr. Dassin was a communist sympathizer, forcing him into self-imposed exile in Europe. One of eight children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, his family moved to New York City when Dassin was a small child, eventually settling in Harlem. According to Dassin, “We were so poor it was ridiculous. At that time Harlem wasn’t entirely black. There were about three or four minority groups living in the ghetto, at each other’s throats all the time: Jewish, Negro, Irish, and some Italian, divided among themselves and taking out their wrath and their poverty upon each other. I was conscious of this, and of the daily problem of eating. And it was cold...it was always so cold.” Left-wing artistic circles abounded in New York during the Depression, where he worked in New York’s legendary Yiddish Theatre, which was founded on Brecht along with the principles of agitprop theater based on the Soviet model, working with Elia Kazan, among others, on a 1937 WPA Federal Theater Production of Revolt of the Beavers, playing the lead in a Marxist musical for children that was terminated after only three weeks by the New York police commissioner. For five summers during this period Dassin worked as an entertainment director of a Jewish camp in the Catskills, where, among other things, he engaged the young campers in productions of Shakespeare. At this time he was briefly a member of the Communist party, heavily influenced by the revolutionary realism of Lee Strasberg’s Group Theatre (1931- 1940), the first acting company to introduce Stanislavski acting principles, but left the party in 1939 when Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet pact with Hitler. From Alastair Phillips, Rififi, 2009, pages 5-11:

The cultural milieu in which Dassin thrived during this period provided a formative influence on his later political and cultural sensibilities. It was during this time that he was exposed to New York’s vital left-wing theatre then flourishing in the progressive climate of the New Deal. Dassin would later claim, for example, that he joined the Communist Party after seeing the Group Theatre production of Clifford Odets’s episodic drama, Waiting for Lefty, set among a community of taxi drivers on the verge of a strike during the Great Depression of the 1920’s. Like Orson Welles, Dassin also worked in radio and it was his audio adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat that led to him being noticed by the Broadway producer, Martin Gabel, who subsequently invited him to direct The Medicine Show by Oscar Saul and H. R. Hays at the New Yorker Theater. This, in turn, led to an invitation to work in Hollywood.

Two of the actors from the Group Theater joined Dassin in this film, Roman Bohnen, the befuddled warden, and Art Smith, the alcoholic prison doctor who is really closer to the narrative center of the film, and both would later be blacklisted (two other actors as well, Jeff Corey and Sam Levene), with Bohnen suffering a fatal heart attack afterwards, while Smith was named by Elia Kazan from his work in the Group Theater. Later in his life Dassin forgave plenty of people associated with McCarthyism, but one he never forgave was Elia Kazan. Dassin was included among a group of younger, socially aware, left-wing directors that resorted to the use of film noir to help them explore psychological motives under the surface, including Robert Rossen, who directed Body and Soul (1947), Abraham Polonsky, who directed Force of Evil (1948), and Joseph Losey, who remade M (1951), directors whose work carried some weight and substance, as they had known hardship and struggle in their lives, having lived through extraordinary historical events whose experiences helped define their artistic vision, something Red Hollywood (1996) director Thom Andersen suggests is “characterized by ‘greater psychological and social realism,’ by a skepticism about the American dream, and by pointed reference to the ‘psychological injuries of class.’” After becoming dissatisfied by the conservatism shown by MGM, Dassin signed with Universal Studios after his contract expired, specifically to work for a newly formed production unit under the helm of liberal crime journalist Mark Hellinger, who advocated a greater degree of social realism within the Hollywood crime film, having just produced Robert Siodmak’s Oscar nominated film noir THE KILLERS (1947), a film that introduced Burt Lancaster, an actor with outspoken liberal sympathies. Prison movies were most popular in the 1930’s when dozens of films were made about men serving hard time, coinciding with the hard times experienced by the general public during the Great Depression, including George W. Hill’s THE BIG HOUSE (1930), Mervyn LeRoy’s I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932), Roland Brown’s HELL’S HIGHWAY (1932), Michael Curtiz’s 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING (1932), and a host of others, all about men trying to survive under oppressive circumstances. Other subjects explored by this liberal group of filmmakers were outspoken films that attacked racism, anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, vigilantism, and the misuse of the criminal justice system.

Enter Jules Dassin, with a script written by Richard Brooks, from a story by Robert Patterson, opening with grim, black and white shots of a solitary, cathedral-like Westgate prison compound surrounded by water, like Riker’s Island, where the austerity of the cold stone walls with an armed security tower rising overhead are subject to a constant deluge of rain, the film aches with an unrelenting sense of despair. Instead of dangerous prisoners in their midst, where it’s every man for themselves in a Darwinian world, the real enemy is the tyrannical rule of a notoriously brutal prison system run by a particularly disreputable, yet power hungry chief guard, Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn). What’s immediately apparent is the camaraderie of the inmates, seen welcoming a fellow prisoner back from an extended stint in solitary confinement, where Joe Collins, in a dynamic performance by Lancaster, played with a battle hardened, inner-rage, always seething with intensity in a role that made him a star, immediately sets his sights on escape, driven by a single-minded purpose to get “out,” “Nothing’s OK. It never was and it never will be. Not ‘til we’re out, get it? Out!,” as there’s nothing left for them on the inside, no hope, no future, and no life. Seen as a tight-knit group, where the main characters are introduced, Collins gathers them around as soon as he’s returned back to the cell, including Howard Duff as “Soldier” Becker, John Hoyt as Spencer, a gambler, Jack Overman as Kid Coy, a professional boxer, Whit Bissell as Tom Lister, an embezzler, and Jeff Corey as “Freshman,” where they’re all-in with Joe’s plans. But first there’s another matter to take care of, what to do about the squealer that got Collins sent away in the first place. While Collins visits the prison doctor for an alibi, his cellmates menacingly surround the snitch (James O’Rear) in the metal shop, taunting him with blowtorches, forcing him backwards until he falls into a huge metal-stamping machine that instantly crushes him. So much for prison justice. But that’s just for openers. We see that the beleaguered and ineffectual Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen) is getting threatened to improve discipline by some political hack (Richard Gaines) whose only interest is protecting the governor from scandal, preferring to avoid problems through the use of strong-armed tactics by Captain Munsey to supposedly keep the inmates in line, whose motto is “Kindness is a weakness.” But the doctor, the only voice of conscious throughout the film, who witnesses first-hand the demoralizing effect this has on inmates, speaks up, “I know in medicine that you don’t cure a sick man by making him sicker. In here, you’re returning a man into the world a worse criminal than he came in.”

Realizing that he’s one bad press release away from assuming control of the prison, Munsey deceptively drives Lister to suicide, hounding him that his wife was erroneously filing for divorce, causing him to hang himself in his cell. It’s sadistically cruel moves like this that drive the men to band together and revolt, suddenly scrounging for things they can use as weapons as they plan an all-out escape. However, there’s a brief flashback sequence that connects several of the men to the women they knew on the outside, creating a series of romantic threads, which may or may not be real, as the men have plenty of time mulling over their fates, but they’re intriguing by the brevity, humor, and great camerawork of these sequences, where Spencer is fleeced at gunpoint by his stylish date, Flossie (Anita Colby), taking him for his money and his swanky new car, while Lister embezzles money from his company to give his wife (Ella Raines) a fur coat. Collins needs money for a lifesaving cancer operation, as otherwise his girl (Ann Blyth), who refuses treatment unless Joe is with her, may spend the rest of her dwindling life in a wheelchair, while “Soldier” fondly recalls the Italian woman he met during the war (Yvonne DeCarlo), smuggling food to her resistance faction, willingly taking the rap after she shoots her own father, as he was about to expose the American to nearby Italian soldiers. While essentially the inner thoughts of the men, they offer a completely different vantage point, as we see each of them prior to their arrests. Another unique twist is the use of one inmate named Calypso (Sir Lancelot), who sings all his lines, like a Greek chorus sung to Caribbean Calypso verse — bizarre. Easily the most surreal moment of the film takes place in Munsey’s office to the music of Wagner, Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture - Thielemann / Münchner ... - YouTube (14:42), a clear connection to Nazi concentration camps, as he brutally tortures a Jewish prisoner (Sam Levene) for information by beating him nearly to death using a rubber hose. Featuring outstanding camerawork by William Daniels, once associated exclusively with Greta Garbo, but his work dates back to Erich von Stroheim, the musical score is by Miklós Rósza, one of the great film noir composers. Adding to the visual landscape is the hellish place of work assigned to this group of prisoners, as underneath the prison compound is a giant sewer system, where like Sisyphus, they endlessly excavate for a mud-drenched drainpipe that supposedly goes from one end of the island to the other, but no one is really sure. As this is their only opening to the outside world, this is their avenue of escape. With Munsey agitating prisoners behind the scenes, using stool pigeons as informers, Collins was supposed to align his forces with those of fellow prisoner Gallagher (Charles Bickford), a man of discretion who only signed on after his upcoming parole was revoked “indefinitely.” It becomes a fatalistic exercise in futility once they learn Munsey has taken over as Warden and is aware of their planned escape route, waiting for them with machine guns pointed straight at them, literally daring them to go. Not to be deterred, Collins refuses to be stopped, as this is their only chance. With blistering results, using another stoolie as a human shield, the ensuing battle scene chaos is remarkable, meant to resemble the 1946 Battle of Alcatraz where a prison riot ran out of control for two days following an unsuccessful escape attempt. Fueled by a hatred for fascism, the Spartacus-like revolt was meant to educate and liberate the masses, where the spectacular gory violence of the finale predates Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) by twenty years, with Peck using slo-mo for even greater emphasis, where William Holden’s Pike Bishop declares, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Brute Force, directed by Jules Dassin | Film review - Time Out Tom Milne

Despite a loss of temperature through the flashbacks which let in some female interest, this is one of Dassin's best films. Less coherent than Siegel's Riot in Cell Block 11 in its challenge to prison conditions, it draws on WWII experience to draw a powerful analogy between the prison (where Cronyn's sadistic chief guard beats up prisoners to the strains of Wagner) and a fascist state. With brutality breeding brutality in this world which the dialogue (script by Richard Brooks) defines as an existentialist hell from which there is no escape, Brute Force was a notably violent film in its day. The scene in which an informer is herded by blow-torches to execution in a steam press still chills.

Shirtless but Not Burt-less: Hunky Lancaster in Jules Dassin’s Crackling Prison Drama Brute Force – 35mm Kyle A. Westphal from Chicago Northwest Film Society

Is America a nation of laws or a fragile society held together by little more than brute force? The elemental prison backdrop of Brute Force serves as a springboard for an incendiary examination of the postwar American psyche in this grisly thriller. The work of newspaperman-turned-producer Mark Hellinger and a raft of Communists and leftist fellow travelers (director Jules Dassin, screenwriter Richard Brooks, one-man Calypsonian chorus Sir Lancelot, supporting players Art Smith and Roman Bohnen), Brute Force drills down to sociological basics: exploited prisoners, a quasi-fascist jailer, ineffectual civilian control, a none-too-subtle drainpipe to nowhere.  Sweaty, frequently shirtless prole Burt Lancaster and the other inmates of Cell R17 plot an improbable escape, their efforts legitimized by the participation of model prisoner Charles Bickford and punched up by patriotic memories of wartime exploits. Standing in their way is Hume Cronyn, a politically ambitious enforcer who cleans his gun with a t-shirt and stages Wagner-scored torture sessions like a Nazi wannabe. Scarcely softened by the domestic flashbacks transparently inserted to make the movie more palatable to women, Brute Force still packs a wallop.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Prison-break movies are off-limits in real houses of correction, but the decommissioned Eastern State is fair game for Secret Cinema's screening of Jules Dassin's high-drama yarn. Drawn from Richard Brooks' script, Brute Force stars Burt Lancaster as a rock-jawed inmate with a yen for the outside air and an effetely effective Hume Cronyn as a sadistic head guard. Dassin liked to marry pulp forms to socially conscious themes, which sometimes produces a kind of leftist camp. (I suspect the reference in Barton Fink to a wrestling movie in which the main character "wrestles with his soul" is a dig at Dassin's Night and the City.)

Fond of Wellesian high angles and showy deep focus, Dassin is a relentlessly self-conscious stylist, amping up the climactic prison riot to gladiatorial proportions, an instinct that jars with Brooks' desire to make each of his inmates an average Joe, complete with heart-tugging flashbacks in which their crimes are laid down to economic need. Dassin would do better with the just-the-facts approach of Rififi, but William Daniels' cinematography is often stunning, and Cronyn's slyly menacing performance will come as a shock to those who only remember his kindly roles.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

Time is of the essence in Jules Dassin’s BRUTE FORCE. Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster in an early role) and his maudlin band of misfits frequently refer to it; as prisoners, they have both too much and too little, yet their focus isn’t on this trite contradiction but rather exact measures of said essence. “What time is it?” Collins asks twice during the film, just minutes before violent conflict. Dassin’s prison noir doesn’t dwell on long sentences or seemingly longer days; instead, it relies on the vitality of the moment to anchor its “metaphoric frisson,” as critic Michael Atkinson calls it in his essay for the film’s Criterion release. The atmosphere is certainly reflective of its time, when freshly cemented postwar ideology was fomenting a new kind of political unease. There are many references to fascism, both historical and fictional; a brutally ambitious guard is clearly meant to represent, or at least imitate, Nazism, and the drainpipe where prisoners are sent to work is Kafkaesque in its contextual ambiguity. Dassin would experience similar absolutism—he was blacklisted several years later—though whatever radicalism he was participating in while making BRUTE FORCE apparently didn’t endear him to it. He later referred to the film as a “really dumb picture” and remembers saying, “but all these prisoners are such nice sweet guys—they’re all so lovely—what are they doing in jail!” (Sarcasm aside, he has a point. This black-and-white, baddies-and-goodies approach somewhat undermines its convictions.) Still, the emotional depth eclipses both these amateurish failings and the noirish futility, and it certainly delivers a message, however unintentional it may be.

Brute Force (1947) - Articles - TCM.com Mark Frankel

"Those gates only open three times. When you come in, when you've served your time, or when you're dead!"
- from Brute Force

Producer Mark Hellinger had wanted to make a prison movie for almost a decade, and when he read an article by a former convict, the basic story of Brute Force (1947) began to take shape. Hellinger hired San Francisco Examiner reporter Robert Patterson to come up with the scenario and then brought in Richard Brooks to write the screenplay. A young screenwriter, Brooks had already worked on two of Hellinger's productions: The Killers (1946, uncredited) and Swell Guy (1946). Hellinger also reunited Burt Lancaster with two of his costars from The Killers: Sam Levene and Charles McGraw. Brooks and Lancaster clearly got along. At one point, Brooks told Lancaster to get himself a copy of the Sinclair Lewis novel Elmer Gantry, as Brooks was determined to turn it into a film. Though it took thirteen years, he and Lancaster did make that picture, and both received Academy Awards for their work.

Part film noir and part Hollywood "message movie," Brute Force is filled with images of extreme, almost psychopathic violence. In the prison workshop, Lancaster's buddies take revenge on a stool pigeon, cornering him with lit blowtorches and pushing him into the giant press. An informer is strapped to the front of a railroad car as it hurtles towards manned machine guns. The prison captain tortures an inmate with a rubber hose while blaring Wagner from the record player.

Hume Cronyn's portrayal of the sadistic Captain Munsey is one of the highlights of his film career. Of course, the idea of a final physical confrontation between the athletic Lancaster and the wispy Cronyn was a bit hard to imagine as a real contest. As Cronyn recounts in his autobiography: "Burt, who had at one time been a circus acrobat, was in magnificent physical condition and weighed about two hundred pounds. He could in reality have picked me up with one hand and wrung me out like a washrag. As a concession to the casting and the totally unbelievable match, it was agreed that before the struggle began, Burt's character should be shot and wounded. Even so, Julie [Dassin] staged one of the most murderously filthy fights ever photographed, so filled with kicks to the groin, eye gouging and karate chops that when the scene was cut together, it was considered altogether too violent for the public and portions of it were eliminated."

Though ostensibly an indictment of a corrupt prison system, what emerges most clearly from the film is the sense of utter hopelessness. According to one of Lancaster's biographers, "as a postwar parable, the movie is deeply sad. The Nazi-type Captain Munsey is vanquished only to have the heroes who killed him either dead or still in prison." As the prison doctor (and the film's moral compass) repeatedly intones, "Nobody escapes, nobody ever escapes."

The only respite from the film's unrelenting brutality comes in the four romanticized flashbacks. At night, after the inmates use their blowtorches to push James O'Rear into the machine press, the four cellmates reminisce about the women who, unwittingly or not, put them in prison. Whit Bissell recalls his wife, Ella Raines (Hail the Conquering Hero, 1944), for whom he juggled the company's books in an effort to get her a mink coat. John Hoyt bitterly remembers con woman Anita Colby and the way she played him for a fool. (Colby, a former fashion model and advertising executive, was the inspiration for Grace Kelly's character in Rear Window, 1954.) Howard Duff thinks back to his Italian beauty, Yvonne De Carlo. She had killed her own father in an attempt to protect Duff, but when the authorities arrived, it was Duff who nobly took the fall. Finally, Lancaster thinks of his kind, wheelchair-bound girlfriend, Ann Blyth (Veda in Mildred Pierce, 1945). To get his hands on the money Blyth needs for an operation, Lancaster and his gang pull one more job, and Lancaster ends up in jail.

Though today she is chiefly remembered for her roles in The Ten Commandments (1956) and the TV series The Munsters, at the time De Carlo was one of Universal's most captivating starlets. And according to her autobiography, her charms were not lost on the film's star. "I had no doubts that Burt knew exactly what he wanted, and at the moment it was me." Though Lancaster had recently been married, he and De Carlo went together to a cocktail party and then out to dinner. Lancaster took the twenty-four-year-old back to her home, and there, outside, beneath an oleander bush and on top of De Carlo's mink coat, they made love. According to De Carlo, "It was so spontaneous and explosive, I thought I was playing a scene from a blazing romantic novel. Talk about being swept away!" Their "mutual fling" was short-lived, though as one can see in De Carlo's recollection, quite memorable.

According to Dassin, the flashback sequences were not his idea and though he vigorously objected to their inclusion in the film, he lost that battle (presumably to Hellinger). Lancaster too felt that the romantic subplot detracted from the intended effect. But as he said in a 1973 interview, "this was all part of Hollywood then. The emphasis was always on the love story. . . . They believed that what was known to have worked well at the box office should not be tampered with."

Dassin and Lancaster's concerns aside, the film does work, and part of the film's power comes from the exceptional music and photography. Miklos Rozsa's dramatic score gives the whole film an almost operatic quality, while the photography of William Daniels, which once made Garbo look otherworldly, here paints a crisp and all-too-real prison world, from which not even a soft light can escape.

Though the Production Code Office demanded several cuts to soften what it called the film's "excessive" brutality, the film's depiction of violence remained potent, and many critics felt that Hellinger had stepped over the line. Responding to these critics, Lancaster commented: "If Daumier knocks off a sketch of a rat eating out a woman's eye, by God, you say it's art, but if Joe Blow writes it for Hellinger, you say it's obscene. I don't get it."

Brute Force: Screws and Proles Criterion essay by Michael Atkinson, April 16, 2007

13 of Criterion’s Most Villainous Villains photo gallery, October 31, 2011

Brute Force (1947) - The Criterion Collection

Jules Dassin BRUTE FORCE 1947 - Center for Studies in American ... September 23, 20 (pdf)

Deep Focus Review - The Definitives - Brute Force (1947) Brian Eggert

Brute Force (1947) Jules Dassin « Twenty Four Frames John Greco

Criterion Reflections [David Blakeslee] includes trailer

Only the Cinema [Ed Howard]

Movie Outlaw [Mike Watt]

Film Noir of the Week Steve-O

Brute Force (1947) | PopMatters Tim O’Neil

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Canadian Cinephile [Jordan Richardson]

Classic Flix Review: Brute Force (1947) - FlixChatter Jack Deth

Shameless Self Expression [Ryan McDonald]

Brute Force (1947) - Jules Dassin - film review - Le Film Guide James Travers

FilmFanatic.org

DVD Savant - Blu-ray [Glenn Erickson] also seen here: Brute Force (1947) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com

DVD Talk - Criterion edition [Jamie S. Rich] condensed version here: Criterion Confessions

Film @ The Digital Fix - Brute Force: Criterion Collection Gary Couzens

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] Criterion collection

MyReviewer - DVD Review [David Beckett]

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]

Rock n Reel Rupert, Blu-Ray

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

Curiosity of a Social Misfit [Patrick Scattergood]

Movie Review: BRUTE FORCE (1947). - Mystery*File On-Line Steve Lewis

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

BRUTE FORCE (Jules Dassin, 1947) | Dennis Grunes

Prisonmovies.net [Eric Penumbra]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell, also reviewing BLUE GARDENIA and THE NAKED CITY

movieshrink.com [Derek Dorris]

Through the Shattered Lens [Gary Loggins]

Backseat Mafia [Rob Aldam]

10 great prison break films | BFI Matthew Thrift from BFI Sight & Sound, September 11, 2014

AllMovie [Michael Costello]

Classic Film Guide

TV Guide

Brute Force review – Philip French on a classic jailbreak drama | Film ... Philip French from The Guardian

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review also seen here: Movie Review - - THE SCREEN; ' Brute Force,' Prison Thriller, With ...

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

Brute Force (1947 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

10 great prison break films | BFI Matthew Thrift from BFI Sight and Sound, September 11, 2014

10 great London crime films | BFI Michael Pattison from BFI Sight and Sound, July 22, 2015

THE NAKED CITY

USA (96 mi) 1948

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Despite its reputation, a rather overrated police-procedure thriller which has gained its seminal status simply by its accent on ordinariness and by its adherence to the ideal of shooting on location. In organising the hunt for a brutal murderer, Fitzgerald's detective is too winsome and hammy, Taylor's assistant merely wooden; thanks be then to Ted de Corsia as the killer, adding a touch of real nastiness and urgency to the admittedly well-constructed final chase.

Movie-Vault.com review Ramsey

In retrospect, The Naked City is an odd piece of film noir. It contains few recognizable stars, was shot completely on location, and includes real people in supporting roles. As the film attempts to capture a certain street-level grittiness, there isn't much swank -- no burning Los Angeles elegance as in The Big Sleep or shadowy, old world decay as in The Third Man.

The film begins with some unvarnished and rather startling violence, when a women is coldheartedly murdered in the middle of the night on the Upper East Side. The case falls into the lap of Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald), a diminutive Irish homicide lieutenant with a sort of muddled amiability and clever wit that predates Columbo by nearly thirty years. Muldoon and his team of flatfoots doggedly pursue their investigation, following lead upon lead, reaching dead-ends, and getting lucky a time or two. It's all solid police procedural, and the nature of the plot will feel familiar if you've ever seen an episode of Law and Order. And like that program, the movie's not afraid to get up close and offer quiet, desperate moments as when a mother is faced with the prospect of identifying her daughter's corpse at the city morgue.

The standout is, of course, the cinematography, for which the film won an Academy Award. There's plane shots over the city that are simply breathtaking, especially a view of the Empire State Building clearly towering over mid-town. And there's sequences involving crowded Lower East Side streets, packed subways and 5th Avenue shops, not to mention a climax on the Brooklyn Bridge, all of it real, each moment filled with true New Yorkers fifty years gone. It's all the more impressive when you consider the lack of backscreen projection, dolly and steadicam work. This was an on-location movie made in an era in which production wizards routinely turned California backlots into the teeming streets of Morocco one week and the surface of Mars the next.

To its credit, The Naked City gave rise to a television show of the same name, and it's had an obvious influence on a score of police dramas, from Starsky and Hutch to Hill Street Blues and the aforementioned Law and Order (which owes some, if not all, of its existence to this film).

Granted, there's an intrusive, annoying voice-over narration done by none other than the film's producer, in an attempt to glue together some sloppy storytelling and editing during the opening. But The Naked City's daring approach to its photography, characters, casting, and ugly, thrilling climax, more than make up for it.

The real star of the picture is New York itself. The closing line, "There's eight million stories in the naked city, and this has been one of them," simultaneously demonstrates the conflicting, dual nature of the city. New Yorkers enjoy unique lives while living in a city so caught up with itself that it can, at times, give them a certain brutal anonymity. In the end, The Naked City captures the grandeur of the place while depicting its harsher realities in the same moments.

Turner Classic Movies review Paul Tatara

"There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."

With that memorably stark declaration, producer Mark Hellinger closes one of the greatest film noirs of all time, Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948). The picture itself is just as hard-edged as its narration, a groundbreaking detective story shot in raw documentary style amid the bridges and concrete canyons of New York City. Nowadays, this sort of location filming is commonplace, even on network TV. But Hellinger and Dassin were the first filmmakers to venture into the streets of the Big Apple to shoot a movie.

The Naked City opens in tawdry noir style, with the murder of a young model in her Manhattan apartment. We then follow the six-day investigation of her death, which is lead by straight-shooting Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and Detective James Halloran (Don Taylor.) Their often mundane police work is interspersed with quick sequences about the private lives of the detectives and the day-to-day rumblings of New York City itself. The investigation will lead to a trio of men who may have wanted the woman dead, including Frank Niles (Howard Duff), a shady type who seems to be hiding something even when he spills his guts to the cops. The final foot chase across the upper reaches of the Williamsburg Bridge is a classic sequence that is helped immeasurably by cinematographer William Daniels' Oscar®-winning camera work.

No doubt about it - this is one great-looking movie. Dassin and Daniels delivered perhaps the most starkly realized movie of the 1940s. Hellinger intended the images to resemble tabloid newspaper photographs. But it was Dassin and Daniels who had the brilliant idea to shoot scenes with a camera that was hidden inside a van, behind a tinted window. That way, the cast could cover the sidewalks without passersby even knowing they were taking part in a movie! The results are a virtual time capsule of life in post-war New York City.

Dassin directed other memorable films in the same mold as The Naked City, including Brute Force (1947), Night and the City (1950), and Thieves' Highway (1949). But his career in Hollywood, like so many others, would be tragically cut short when he was blacklisted during the ruthless McCarthy-era witch hunts. Dassin took the fall rather than name names before the committee...unlike several of his closest friends, including actor Lee J. Cobb, director Elia Kazan, and playwright Clifford Odets. After moving to Europe to find film work, Dassin settled in Greece, a weary but idealistic man who later admitted to having been a member of the Communist Party, although he never aimed to espouse his beliefs in any of his pictures.

Nevertheless, even with Dassin at the helm, Hellinger is the most fascinating person connected to The Naked City. A quick scan of his biography reads like an elaborate, Damon Runyon-inspired put-on: His first job was as a reporter for a theatrical publication called, mysteriously enough, Zit's Weekly. During prohibition, he drank copious amount of brandy and wrote the first-ever Broadway column, a wildly popular slice-of-life called "About Town." He soon began dressing in his lifelong uniform of dark blue shirts and white ties. He was so generous with his money, people would line up on pay day and wait for him to slide bills into their hands. In 1926, he married a beautiful showgirl whose actual name was Gladys Glad. In 1931, he wrote sketches for the Ziegfeld show, Hot Cha. He successfully toured the vaudeville circuit as an actor for a year. He broadcast football games for Columbia University without knowing a single thing about football...It goes on like that for pages.

Eventually, Hellinger wrote a couple of books that got sold to the studios out in Hollywood. He then declared that he, too, would go to Hollywood, but not as a mere screenwriter- he wanted to produce movies, too. After a string of forgettable B-pictures, he insisted, in 1941, that Humphrey Bogart play the lead in his production of High Sierra. The film was an indisputable classic that made Bogart a major star. Later, Hellinger would produce The Killers (1946), which introduced the world to Burt Lancaster. It was around this time that Hellinger became good friends with Ernest Hemingway, the author of the short story on which The Killers was based.

Hellinger dropped dead from a heart attack in 1947, having lived just long enough to enjoy a successful preview of The Naked City. At long last, he finally got some sleep.

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not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston) review

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] condensed version here: Criterion Confessions

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review [4/5]

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3.5/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay Carr

DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

DVD In My Pants - Criterion Collection DVD Review Jerry Donaghe

Reel.com DVD review [Jim Hemphill]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THIEVES HIGHWAY

Great Britain (94 mi) 1949

Time Out review

Jules Dassin's trendy reputation (and an awful lot of money) was made with Rififi, Never on Sunday and Topkapi - triumphant European success for a blacklisted Hollywood talent. But cultists groaned, for the 'real' Dassin was surely to be found in the baroque and electrifying Brute Force, the grotesquely Dickensian Night and the City, and - a personal favourite - Thieves' Highway. AI Bezzerides' script (from his own novel Thieves' Market) and the performances of Conte, Cobb, and Cortese (in her American debut) help restrain Dassin's feverish artistic ambitions in this tale of racketeering in the California fruit markets. The result slots sleazy eroticism and rigorous action seamlessly together into a high-grade trucking melo. Nothing more, but nothing less, which in the '40s was the most triumphant kind of American success.

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

While Thieves' Highway's superficially upbeat ending (reshot, against the filmmakers' wishes, by Fox chief Darryl Zanuck) might prevent it from being categorized as a genuine noir, Jules Dassin's 1949 melodrama about long-haul truckers—the director's final (and finest) film made in America before the House Un-American Committee exiled him to Europe—is nonetheless a bleak portrait of post-WWII despair, corrupt capitalism, and idealistic disillusionment. Nick (a sturdy Richard Conte) returns home from a stint overseas as a military mechanic with exotic Asian gifts for his mother, father, and fiancé, yet from the get-go, Dassin (working from They Drive By Night and Kiss Me Deadly scribe A.I. Bezzerides' script, based on his novel Thieves Market) layers this happy reunion with portentous signs of the nasty reality lurking beneath this cheery suburban facade.

In his family's sunny kitchen, Nick finds his bride-to-be Polly (Barbara Lawrence) disappointed with his china doll gift (until she spies the even-more expensive ring hanging from its arm) and his father legless due to an accident caused by underhanded San Francisco produce market kingpin Mike Figlia (a devious Lee J. Cobb, exuding small-time shadiness). Bent on exacting revenge, Nick teams up with Ed (Millard Mitchell), a trucker currently tending to his dad's rig, and the duo hatch a two-killings-for-the-price-of-one plan to travel to Frisco, where they can simultaneously deliver a truckload of sweet, highly coveted apples and dish out some bitter payback to the rotten Figlia.

With the exception of the opening scene and Ed's fatal hairpin turn on a winding highway, Dassin swathes Thieves' Highway's long-haul boys in claustrophobic compositions and menacing darkness, amplifying the sense of danger that hangs over Nick's head (whether it be the truck that collapses on his neck during an impromptu roadside pit stop or the axe hanging from the belt of Figlia's goon) and the air of doom that follows these desperate nomads as they hurtle through the night in their rickety rigs. Breakneck close-ups of speedometers and spinning tires create a propulsive sense of inevitability, while Italian prostitute (and Figlia crony) Rica's (Valentina Cortese) comment that Nick's bloody neck wound looks "beautiful" speaks to hers (and, later, Nick's) reconciliation with life's pain and disappointment. When Nick tells Rica—whose conniving smile initially says she wants to screw Nick in more than one way, but ultimately radiates authentic affection—that she looks like "chipped glass," she responds without a hint of surprise, "Do I? It took me a long time to get that way."

For Nick, however, it only takes the film's brutal 94 minutes to devolve from an enthusiastically optimistic ex-soldier—the misery of war already a fading memory—to a battle-scarred itinerant hardened by life's callous depravity. Although Dassin's film is less an anti-capitalist screed than a cynical portrait of revenge, betrayal, and dubious dealings, money is nonetheless an insidious force throughout Nick's ordeal, from Figlia's backhanded market manipulations to Polly's money-grubbing. Like pride and honor, love is also a commodity with a steep price in Thieves' Highway, and when Nick drives off into the sunset with Rica, his supposed triumph is colored by the fact that he's been forever corrupted by his vengeance, his newfound lust for wheeling and dealing, and the realization that the world—rather than full of pretty gifts and prettier girls—is a cheerless, degrading labyrinth of treacherous highways.

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jerry Stafford

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [4/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/5]

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

Being There Magazine [Nathan Williams]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

NIGHT AND THE CITY A 97

Great Britain (101 mi) 1950

Time Out review Tom Milne

Bizarre film noir with Widmark as a small time nightclub tout trying to hustle his way into the wrestling rackets, but finding himself the object of a murderous manhunt when his cons catch up with him. Set in a London through which Widmark spends much of his time dodging in dark alleyways, it attempts to present the city in neo-expressionist terms as a grotesque, terrifyingly anonymous trap. Fascinating, even though the stylised characterisations (like Francis L Sullivan's obesely outsized nightclub king) remain theoretically interesting rather than convincing. Inclined to go over the top, it all too clearly contains the seeds of Dassin's later - and disastrous - pretensions

Night And The City Movie Review (1950) from Channel 4 Film

Quality London noir starring Richard Widmark and directed by Jules Dassin. Highly atmospheric throughout, it follows an American scamster as he tries to get to the top of the wrestling underworld, with disastrous consequences for himself.

In 1950 American director Jules Dassin fled to Britain, afraid of being named on McCarthy's blacklist. There he made this undervalued thriller, which mixed moody noir with the more urgent style of documentary. There's much to appreciate in the ominous tone and strangely over-the-top performances of Night And The City.

Opening with a shot of American crook Harry Fabian (Widmark) sprinting down the street, the story follows his doomed attempt to gain control of London's lucrative wrestling scene. His key into this world is Greek fighter-promoter Kristo (Lom) but Harry's inability to play it straight means he ends up marked and alone.

Widmark actually spends a great deal of the film running away from things, both literally and metaphorically, and his nervous energy infects every scene. Dassin uses low camera angles to sweep through the gloomy streets and the wrestling sequence (featuring Lom and Mazurki) has a brutal power and beauty. A taut plot moves towards a conclusion that's both tense and tragic and though Dassin would go on to produce rather more ponderous fare, here he's bang on the mark throughout.

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

From its definitive title, which succinctly encapsulates the genre's fundamental gloominess and urbanity, to the inevitably cataclysmic end for its enterprising protagonist, Night and the City is no less than the archetypal film noir. Jules Dassin's 1950 masterpiece was his first movie after being exiled from America for alleged communist politics, and the unpleasant ordeal seems to have infused his work with a newfound resentment and pessimism, as the film—about foolhardy scam-artist Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) and his ill-advised attempts to become a big shot—brims with anger, anxiousness, and a shocking dose of unadulterated hatred. Few films are as wholeheartedly bleak as Night and the City (sharply adapted from Gerald Kersh's novel by Jo Eisinger), which ignores typical noir elements (an intricate heist, a femme fatale of some dangerously sexy note) in favor of watching the wicked, weasel-like Fabian scamper about like a decapitated chicken that doesn't realize it's already dead. That such nihilistic nastiness is remotely entertaining is a tribute to Dassin's frantic, expressionistic portrait of London's sickly underworld and Richard Widmark's hysteria-laced performance. And even then, the fact that it's this breathlessly exhilarating is something of a small cinematic miracle.

Richard Widmark's sweaty, chaotic face—his eyes on the brink of popping out of their sockets, and his mouth a tight, humorless line that emits a cackle like the Riddler on speed—is a reservoir of self-loathing and agitated ambition, and the director shoots his star's maniacal mug in slashing shadows that suggest Fabian's delusional lack of self-awareness. A two-bit crook who dreams of a life of "ease and plenty," Fabian finds what he believes to be his ticket to the top when he persuades legendary Greco-Roman grappler Gregorius the Great (Stanislaus Zbyszko) to form a wrestling business aimed at toppling the phony pro-wrestling operation of crime boss (and Gregorius's son) Kristo (Herbert Lom). However, as the film's opening and closing scenes (set to Franz Waxman's throbbing, hot-blooded score) convey, Fabian is on the run not just from those he's screwed (a considerable segment of London's population), but also from the cold, hard truth that he's a minor-leaguer unfit for the lawbreaking big time. Fabian's loyal, upstanding girlfriend Mary (Gene Tierney) is told by her friend Adam (Hugh Marlowe), a wealthy artist and cook whose domesticity is a counterpoint to Fabian's juvenile, amateurish career of vice, that her boyfriend is "an artist without an art." Desperate to prove Adam wrong and validate his calling as a wheeler and dealer, yet completely incapable of honest self-analysis, Fabian commits noir's cardinal sin by striving to better his lot in life. The results, predictably, aren't pretty.

Only a year removed from the more traditional Thieves' Highway, Dassin's first production abroad is dripping with symbolism, from the constrictive staircases Widmark rapidly descends (indicative of the direction Fabian's schemes are headed) to the lethal wrestling match between Gregorius and The Strangler (a metaphor for the uselessness of Fabian's attempts at social climbing). Just like his anti-hero, the director is obsessed with "angles," as his frame doggedly circumscribes Fabian with astringent architecture and harrowing darkness while amplifying the mood of impending existential tragedy by refusing to present the character's face in full light. Meanwhile, Dassin's London is a malevolent urban nightmare, a tangled web of disorienting murkiness and dastardly double-crosses, and the metropolis's menacing enormity—just like ruthless Silver Fox club proprietor Phil's (Francis L. Sullivan) massive girth—forms a discordant visual and thematic contrast with Fabian's wiry, hyper-kinetic frame. "Harry, you coulda been anything," a despondent Mary sighs after her lover's foolproof plans have been torn asunder, but in truth, Fabian—a man who robs and abuses Mary and callously screws over Phil's untrustworthy entrepreneurial wife Helen (Googie Withers)—is fulfilling the only destiny he's got. A more apt summation of this vitriolic hustler comes courtesy of the acidic Kristo, who perceptively recognizes that Fabian was "born a hustler, and you'll die a hustler." Fabian is confined by—and doomed to perish in—the endless night and the wicked city, and thus when Mary, working in a swanky nightclub, sings, "Here's to tomorrow morning," the unromantic irony is enough to make one choke.

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Film Noir of the Week Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell, from Encyclopedia of Film Noir

Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [5/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Nathaniel Thompson

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

Electric Sheep Magazine Pat Long

DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

Epinions - Macresarf1 Review

Rob Crawford retrospective

The Spinning Image (Mark Dellar) review

Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

DVD Talk (David Walker) dvd review [4/5]

Turner Classic Movies review

New York Sun [Gary Giddins] also reviewing 3 other Criterion crime films

The Village Voice [Jim Ridley] A Tribute for Richard Widmark, August 19, 2008

Austin Chronicle [Jerry Renshaw]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

RIFIFI (Du rififi chez les homes) A 98

France (116 mi) 1955

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Archetypal heist thriller, with a group of thieves banding together for a daring jewel robbery and falling out afterwards. Highly acclaimed for the 35-minute robbery sequence, conducted without a word being spoken, and for the generally downbeat atmosphere, it's actually rather overrated, lacking the tension, profundity, and vivid characterisation of similar films by, say, Becker and Melville. Like even the best of Dassin's work, in fact, it never penetrates beneath its fashionable, self-conscious surface.

Guardian/Observer review Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

Jules Dassin's classic jewel-thief caper of 1955 looks as smart as paint, with its unendurably tense, entirely wordless robbery section, and its beautifully constructed payoff in the final act, built on failures to communicate superseded by the cellphone age. In fact, the whole robbery is from a low-tech, even pre-tech era, larceny on a human scale, hinging simply on spraying fire-extinguisher fluid into an alarm-grille, which somehow makes it more real and more exciting.

As ex-con Tony, Jean Servais has a tremendously cold and haggard look (Ray Milland is the nearest Hollywood equivalent I can think of). And he has a very gamey sadism scene when Tony orders his duplicitous mistress to strip naked, starting with her mink and jewellery, and then lashes her with his belt, a punishment to which she loyally, even lovingly submits. (Can you see George Clooney trying it with Julia Roberts in Ocean's Eleven 2?) The desperadoes with their guns and girls careering from dusk to dawn about the monochrome Parisian streetscapes prefigure A Bout de Souffle and Les Quatre Cents Coups, movies in whose company Rififi doesn't disgrace itself. A diamond.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Jules Dassin's brilliant depiction of betrayal, revenge, redemption without joy, and irony. Jules, having been run out of the land of the free on political grounds, knew something of each. Auguste Le Breton pitched in on the script based upon his novel, but it's probably fair to say that the latter work was coloured as a Dassin statement. And it is. It's difficult to imagine a more comprehensive two-hour indictment of capitalism; it even corrupts the criminals! As a secondary concern it then turns out that the film is an utter technical masterpiece. The realism that already characterized Dassin's better work is brought to critical mass in the famous 28 minute robbery, a scene delivered without any dialogue or music. The next thing is that when the music returns, when cinematic devices return, Dassin/Breton sustain the horriffic level of suspense through to the darkest comedy of a conclusion; so dark that it's not even funny. It is not, of course, supposed to be. There may be something humorous about a talented artist giving American fascists the finger, and then being welcomed with an enormous budget and all of the cinematic talent in France (and England, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Greece)...but, it's really not funny. Jules got the performances that he both deserved and demanded from Jean Servais, Carl Mohner, Robert Manuel, Janine Darcey, Pierre Grasset, and Marie Sabouret. Dassin himself (billed as Perlo Vita) portrays a safecracker who folds under pressure and names names, and is then sadly, but summarily, executed by Servais. The reality behind the film is the legacy of Dassin executing that of Edward Dmytryk. Dassin lays the foundation for Dylan's law of gangsterism ("to live outside the law/you must be honest"), by demonstrating that to live outside the law you must live outside the law, and all that entails. It's a world that Dassin knows something about. It's a dark world inhabited by innumerable spirits of attractively evil undercurrents. And he says that money is the only one.

Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review

As a French production made by an American movie veteran, Rififi forges a world where the Hays Code of censorship never existed and Hollywood’s robust showmanship wasn’t forced to reconcile itself to America’s Puritanism.

Classic Hollywood filmmaking language, especially its tabloid-pulp side street of film noir, is both unmistakable yet impossible to imitate. That is, unless you don’t need to imitate, being a veteran of the system. Jules Dassin had been making tough, politically-conscious dramas of men under pressure since 1942, before HUAC red-baiting forced him into blacklist exile during the fifties. After years in European limbo, his Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes created a fusion of Hollywood filmmaking language with enlightened European sensibility that, for such a potent combination, has never been surpassed.

What director Jean-Pierre Melville synthesised from the French side (witness his bar in Le Doulos based on American models never seen in a French setting), Dassin conjures up from the perspective of the left-hand side of the Atlantic with his Hollywood nightclub architecture, echoing to the strains of doleful Parisian blues in Rififi. Here a chanteuse sings the film’s eponymous song, and gives us some clues as to its elusive meaning: "slugging it out" is one which, in context, may mean rough love play, but ultimately its point is its very unknowability to all but the initiates – the ‘gang’.

We know we’re moving into a different cinematic world in the key confrontation scene that comes early between wronged gangster ‘the Stephanois’ (Belgian actor Jean Servais) and his ex-squeeze, Mado (Marie Sabouret), who betrayed him to police. He demands compensation through taking her jewellery and, as she sheds the baubles, his next demand - for her coat - turns power to eroticism, brought home as she continues to shed… Nothing is seen, all is suggested, but it’s a vengeful, domineering (and hence political) assault that wouldn’t even have reached American censors, let alone been passed by them. Coming after the familiarity and comfort of the Hollywood cinematic style Rififi uses, in which Hays Code morality has always been embedded, it’s a shock. That the flesh isn’t always seen sadistically is immediately realised in the following playful bath scene featuring a buxom soapfight – something equally as foreign to Classical Hollywood style. "Go warm up the bed", is this scene’s closing dialogue.

Sex rears its head again as the gang members bid farewell to their loved ones before the heist through erogenous touching in scenes that have a truth in them that can’t be denied, yet would never have been contemplated in 1950s Hollywood. Then immediately after this, strident heraldic music - very Hollywood – presages the ‘job’. In this way Rififi essays a constant dialectic between two worlds of representation: European sensibility and American showbiz. By conducting this conversation single-handedly, in this one film can be experienced the ‘cross-examination’ between Europe and America that was French noir.

Music plays a big part, especially for a film famed for its ‘silence’, in Americanising Rififi. We are unknowingly prepared for the unvoiced drama to come when seeing the heist’s foundations being carefully laid - in a montage of mime! This extraordinary sequence of preparation is driven by breathless music – even the safecracker (played by Dassin himself) is seen as a cash-paying jewellery customer – completely sans dialogue. How very French this must have seemed from an American point of view. It’s a short but lovely sequence – no wonder we are barracking for the crooks!

The ‘silence’ of the fabled heist sequence glides in imperceptibly; it’s almost an elision. This setpiece is choreographed to perfection – it’s a ballet of teamwork, camaraderie and cunning, building inexorably without a wasted moment. And because it’s character-driven, it grows organically out of the narrative of gangland connectivity, rather than being dropped in with bookends as in later copies of this sequence like The Hot Rock (1972) and Dassin’s own, regrettable reprise, Topkapi (1964). Rififi ‘s famed sequence remains legendary not because it was first but because of its humanity, all eye contact, frailties and egos in full flight.

As the gang members’ nerves stretch tauter, the shadows steadily deepen, the camera angles skewing more rakishly off level. But it’s the ever-present sound that drives our tension – grinding saws, stepping feet, breathing bodies – we’re there! (Talk about mime!)

Stunning cinematography by Philipe Agostini (who also shot 1939’s Le Jour Se Lève) has echoes of The Third Man in its rococo noir: European wedding-cake architecture dramatised in destabilising fields of light and acute, ink-black voids. Attention to detail comes in their leader smoking at the crime scene but holding on to the match – forensics won’t get any breaks from these guys!

The ultimate putdown of police is their near-total absence (as it’s gangsters who initiate and make the running on ‘investigations’) which, like Fritz Lang’s M (1931), implies a lawlessness closer to jungle rule than constitutional – an unsurprising view for someone like Dassin hounded from their country by the kangaroo court of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Who can blame Dassin for running a dialectic between Hollywood and Europe? It’s the arc of his life and career after HUAC forced him into exile. In the film the escalating capacity of the state-of-the-art alarm systems they must outwit comes to stand for ‘progress’ as the real world sees it, the ‘overground’ that is the flipside of the underworld we’ve come to love through these sympathetic characters. Rififi makes its subversive point with subtlety.

The final death ride, in a ‘49 Oldsmobile ragtop (almost certainly the director’s personal ride), with the rescued boy in his cowboy suit enjoying his toy pistol waving shenanigans, oblivious to the dying gangster at the wheel, mocks the American tough guy aesthetic. Its stunning visual design has a subtlety and economy that leaves the Hays Code ‘crime must not be seen to pay’ admonitions standing exposed for their artlessness. But at the climax there is also a moment of paternal tenderness, recalling the fadeout of the American noir classic Double Indemnity (1944) in which Edward G.Robinson cradles the dying Fred MacMurray. It ties together two works of a mutually reinforcing canon, of which Rififi may be one of its ultimate distillations.

CINEASTE Paul Arthur

Alternative Film Guide [Doug Johnson]

Bands of Outsiders - Movies - Village Voicepage 1 - Village Voice J. Hoberman

Images (David Ng) review

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Tom Block

The Digital Bits dvd review [Criterion Collection] Todd Doogan

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Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]

VideoVista review Debbie Moon

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]

Vern's review

Epinions [metalluk]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]

James Bowman review

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4.5/5]

Reel.com DVD review [Juliet Clark]

DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review

hybridmagazine.com review Jonpaul Guinn

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

NEVER ON SUNDAY (Pote tin Kyriaki)

Greece (91 mi) 1960

Never on Sunday Movie Review (1960) from Channel 4 Film

Utterly delightful comedy that is like a winning blend of Pygmalion and Pretty Woman. Dassin is the American scholar who comes to Greece, meets Mercouri's uncouth prostitute and offers to spend the next fortnight educating her in the finer aspects of her country's culture - but will she rise to the challenge? Just as memorable for its Oscar-winning soundtrack as it is for Mercouri's hooker with a heart - a truly unique creation.

Time Out review

Ilya is the happy hooker of Piraeus. Her clients are all shy and handsome, her circle of friends and lovers innocent of jealousy or ill will. Along comes earnest American Homer who tries to reform Ilya's morals and introduce her to Culture. By the end, of course, he's swigging ouzo and smashing crockery with the rest of them. You can see how this might have felt joyful and liberating to audiences coming out of the uptight '50s. Decades on, the relentless Grecian gusto is wearing, and rangy, gravel-voiced Mercouri is a very specialised sort of sex goddess. But in its favour is Hadjidakis' foot-tapping music and Dassin's ploy of shooting this rosiest of fantasies like a gritty documentary.

Turner Classic Movies review Frank Miller

The Greek film industry took center stage in 1960 with the release of the off-beat romantic comedy, Never on Sunday. The film led to increases in tourism and location shooting there. But not only was it the product of an American writer-director's imagination, but it was even resented by many in its country of origin.

Never on Sunday was the brainchild of American expatriate Jules Dassin. After a promising start in Hollywood as director of such acclaimed film noirs as Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948), Dassin had been subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities because of his liberal politics. Because he was busy directing a play, he received a postponement, only to discover that he had been blacklisted without ever having testified. Unable to work in the U.S., he fled to Europe, where he scored an international hit in 1955 with the caper film Rififi.

Eventually, he settled in Greece, where he fell in love with actress Melina Mercouri after casting her in his religious allegory He Who Must Die (1957). Wanting to boost both his own career and hers, he set out to create a vehicle for her that would capture the international market. The result was Never on Sunday, the comic romance of an American tourist (Dassin) who sets out to reform a small-town prostitute (Mercouri) only to make her miserable. In an effort to assure the film's U.S. success, he even wrote most of the scenes in English, using the tourist's ignorance of the Greek language as an excuse.

With no major producers interested in the project initially, Dassin kept his budget low, a mere $125,000, which adjusted for inflation still comes out to less than a million in current dollars. One clever move on his part was assigning the music score to Manos Hadjidakis, a Greek composer noted for his work in developing new forms for the traditional instrument, the bazouki.

The result was a huge hit. With Hadjidakis' score and hit title song selling records, the film went on to gross almost $4 million in the U.S. alone, despite -- or maybe because of -- the fact that it was condemned by the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency. When Atlanta's local censor tried to ban the film, the distributor, United Artists, had the decision reversed in the courts, marking one of the first successful challenges of the city's censorship law.

Moreover, the film scored well with critics. Mercouri won Best Actress honors at the Cannes Film Festival, and the picture picked up five Oscar® nominations: Best Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Costumes and Best Song. That was when the real controversy started. Many Hollywood old-timers were appalled that any foreign film, much less one showing a positive view of prostitution, should knock more wholesome American fare out of the running. In a year marked by some embarrassingly blatant campaigns for the Oscar®, Mercouri made headlines when she refused to heed United Artists executives who urged her to fight for the award. She complained to newspaper columnist Art Buchwald, "I'm not a Kennedy. I'm an actress, not a politician. What do they want me to do -- ring doorbells in Beverly Hills??" With Elizabeth Taylor a shoo-in for Butterfield 8 (1960) after her near death from pneumonia, Mercouri and Dassin decided to wait out the awards in Paris.

There also were complaints about Hadjidakis's nomination for the title song. Some pointed out that the song had achieved its greatest popularity with an English lyric by Billy Towne, who was not eligible for the award since his version was not the one heard in the film. Others complained that Hadjidakis had stolen his melody from a Greek folk song. Nonetheless, on Oscar® night, he came out the film's only winner. Even then there were problems. Through a communications snafu, Hadjidakis was not there, nor had French producer Raoul J. Levy been notified that he had been asked to accept any of the film's Academy Awards®. When Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows announced the Best Song winner, nobody came to the podium. After a few quips from Allen ("I guess he won't be here until Sunday."), host Bob Hope came on and tried to claim the award, joking "This is the moment I've been waiting for." But Meadows simply took it herself and made sure it got to the composer.

Ironically, in all the furor about the film's foreign production and permissive subject matter, nobody had noticed Dassin's sly criticism of the U.S. that underlay the plot. He had intended the film as a political allegory about America's penchant for forcing its values on other countries with no regard for their native cultures, but people were too busy laughing to notice. Audiences continue to enjoy Never on Sunday, through television showings (when the film aired on network television, they had to cut one scene in which Mercouri's character helps a young sailor lose his virginity) and a Broadway musical adaptation called Ilya, Darling. Mercouri re-created her film role, with music once again by Hadjidakis and script and direction by Dassin. Shortly after her Broadway triumph, however, the film began drawing fire from a new generation of Greek artists who complained that as a result of its success, the only movies people wanted to see about Greece were those perpetuating the stereotype of the happy, earthy Greek peasant.

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

Film Freak Central review [Walter Chaw]

Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Movie House Commentary Tuna

Movie Magazine International review Moira Sullivan

Classic Film Guide review

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

Davaa, Byambasuren and Luigi Falorni

THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL (Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel)

Germany Mongolia (93 mi) 2003

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

Pitched somewhere between a Disney "true life adventure" and a Jean-Jacques Annaud natural world drama, "The Story of the Weeping Camel" is (in the words of filmmakers Byambasuren Dava and Luigi Falorni) a "narrative documentary." That is to say, their portrait of a family of nomadic shepherds in the Gobi Desert of southern Mongolia honestly presents a real way of life in all its cultural color. It's merely restaged for the camera. The four generations living in a self-created community of circus-tentlike yurts portray themselves in dramatic re-creations of work and play on the scrubby plain.

The real life drama that gives the film its title, however, is (as they say in the reality TV business) unscripted. In the early spring birthing season, as the camels, goats and sheep of the family herd go into labor, a pregnant camel endures a particularly difficult delivery. (At one point in midbirth, she walks away with the calf's legs dangling out of her.)

The offspring, a rare white camel with an empty flop of skin where the humps will eventually take shape, teeters and shakes on its spindly legs and moves in to nurse. The mother rejects her calf, refusing to let it suckle, so shepherds Ikchee (Ikhbayar Amgaabazar) and Odgoo (Odgerel Ayusch) send their sons to bring a musician to perform an ancient ritual that, tradition maintains, will bond the two.

It plays out like a naturalistic fable in an austere, timeless land in which ancient traditions co-exist with modern technology. The route to the local community center is marked by power lines running through the desert, and the boys take a break on their journey to watch a neighbor's satellite TV.

The gentle glimpses of simple family life serve largely as a backdrop to the natural drama and at times feel idealized through the Western eye of the camera lens. Yet there is a warmth and simplicity in the presentation that feels honest and respectful and a captivating beauty to their desert world.

The live camel birth (shown in all of its excruciating beauty) is enthralling, and the cultural details, however staged, provide a vivid window into a world that is fast disappearing.

The Village Voice [Leslie Camhi]

"So now, my children, I'll tell you the legend of the camel," a Mongolian grandfather intones as The Story of the Weeping Camel opens. This magical film, a "narrative documentary" (or so its makers call it) with the aura of a fairy tale, unfolds amid the scrubby brushland of the Gobi Desert, where nomads live in yurts, ride camels, and tend to herds of sheep and goats as they have for centuries. The granddaughter of nomads, Byambasuren Davaa (who co-wrote and -directed the film with Luigi Falorni) was inspired by a movie she remembered from her Mongolian childhood about a mother camel who rejects her newborn calf, before the two are reconciled by means of an ancient musical ceremony.

Influenced by classic documentaries such as Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, Davaa and Falorni cast a nomadic family of four generations living in three yurts, who play themselves in sometimes carefully planned scenarios. Shooting this family in the southern Gobi during the brief camel-birthing season, the filmmakers stumbled across the story they were seeking. As Camel begins, the lovely Odgoo (Odgerel Ayusch) and her husband, Ikchee (Ikhbayar Amgaabazar), along with their parents, grandparents, and two young sons, are assisting the animals in their labors. All goes well until the difficult birth of a beautiful white calf (called Botok) stretches over two days, straining the mother camel (played by a dromedary named Ingen Temme) to her limits.

Beyond its rare visions of remote vistas, Camel's great charm lies in its seeming simplicity. The camera records the events of the day—from a little girl's tears to an afternoon sandstorm—with a childlike clarity and curiosity. When Odgoo's sons set out on camelback to the nearest settlement (some 50 kilometers away), to find the violinist needed to heal the rift between mother and baby, the camera notes the outside world's encroachments on a traditional lifestyle—satellite dishes, video games, the ubiquitous motorcycles that serve as alternatives to animal transportation. But these are offered without heavy-handed judgments; the filmmakers merely note the coexistence of modernity and ritual.

Sometimes the nearly too perfect images border on kitsch. But with its stately pacing (and consistent with its broader theme about the need for belonging), Camel conveys a sense of an indigenous culture whose relationship to the earth and to nature is shaped not by conquest but by collaboration. Perhaps that's why the film's camel stars are also credited as performers. Living alongside these otherworldly creatures, whose stubborn independence shines through their wild, bovine eyes, must inspire a profound respect. Infinitely serviceable tanks of the desert, built to withstand the harshest climatic conditions, they may be coaxed, but never forced. And when they weep, their tears seem real.

Filmjourney Doug Cummings

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

The Story Of The Weeping Camel Gerald Peary

Martin Tsai's Blog

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Erasing Clouds Anna Battista

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Harvey S. Karten

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Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell

Daves, Delmar

Delmer Daves - Film Comment Bertrand Tavernier from Film Comment, January/February 2003

Delmer Daves is the most forgotten of the American directors championed by French film critics in the Fifties—why? The reasons have little to do with his true stature as a filmmaker. He was unlucky enough to end his career with a string of Warners sudsers that seemed sorely lacking in ambition (although a good deal of them are visually quite remarkable). Some of his masterpieces are westerns, a genre that has now fallen back into disrepute. He rarely ventured into noir territory, and when he did, he stood the genre on its head. To make matters worse, he had given few interviews by the time he died in 1977. As a result, his best films are seldom shown, and hardly any of them are available on video or DVD.

To be sure, one shouldn't gloss over his more tentative efforts (Broken Arrow, for instance, is less inspired than his subsequent westerns, and probably would have benefited from the camera eye of Winton C. Hoch, who shot Bird of Paradise), the reluctantly accepted assignments (Demetrius and the Gladiators, A Kiss in the Dark), and hopeless failures (Never Let Me Go or The Battle of the Villa Fiorita). Not to mention the weaknesses resulting from period constraints and studio-imposed actors (Dennis Morgan in To the Victor; Alan Ladd in Drum Beat; and Troy Donahue, whose ubiquity in the late films goes a long way towards accounting for Daves's unfairly low critical status).

Such flaws, however, pale in comparison with the stunning originality of Daves's style, handling of dramatic structure, and approach to genre, which set him apart from his contemporaries.

What first impresses the viewer is Daves's attention to landscape, to nature, expressed in shots that intimately and sometimes inextricably mingle lyricism and realism. He actually insisted on personally supervising the kind of material many Hollywood filmmakers would leave to second-unit directors—extreme long shots, transitional moments filmed at dawn or twilight. For one setup in To the Victor (48), he spent a whole night on the Trocadero Esplanade in Paris, and, as he wrote to me, “it was worth the trouble.”

One recalls from his work an immense and spectacular variety of landscapes, sometimes within the same film—and not only in the westerns but in a lyrical melodrama like The Red House (47), an urban film noir like Dark Passage (47), or Parrish (61), a soap opera whose one redeeming feature is its use of exteriors. Jubal (56), for instance, derives part of its power and originality from its diversity of locations, ranging from the dramatic bareness of the opening shots to the elegiac forest of the Felicia Farr sequences, with each new locale appearing to modify the approach and construction of the narrative and shape feelings and emotions. Landscape is not just a setting for the action—it becomes part of it, its secret driving force. I have never forgotten the underbrush, the craggy slopes, the torrent of The Last Wagon (56), the parched, cracked soil in 3:10 to Yuma (57), the Modoc camp in Drum Beat (54), the beach graveyard in To the Victor, the gold-mining camp overlooked by Gary Cooper's small cabin in The Hanging Tree (59). All these locales are pregnant with meaning (more poetic than symbolic), filmed with a lyrical, emotional power but totally devoid of the picturesque. Daves's is not a tourist's eye—his ambition is to weave an organic link between a scene's inner feeling and its location. In Bird of Paradise (51), the black, gleaming sand of the beach where Louis Jourdan lands seems to foreshadow the dark, painful mood of his encounter with Everett Sloane, a magnificent Stevensonian character. Later in the same film, the basalt-colored rocky spur on which Jeff Chandler confronts the high priest imparts genuine solemnity to the scene. In Drum Beat, the windswept plateaus provide a visual counterpart to the thorny discussions surrounding the peace treaty. Doc Frail's cabin overhanging the small mining town in The Hanging Tree, connoting exclusion, reclusion, and domination, speaks volumes about the contradictions that tear him apart.

Nature in Daves's films is is not imparted with the grandeur, the epic theatricality so admired in Ford, who manages to convince us that one could farm and raise cattle in Monument Valley, a thoroughly unrealistic proposition. Daves does not mythologize Nature but befriends it, the way his characters do, at least those who must live or survive in it. His signature camera moves—crane shots, lateral tracking shots, which show his extraordinary mastery of space—are movements of integration: of character within community, landscape, and setting—and of emotional entrenchment (unlike Anthony Mann's, whose direction, one might say, is founded on movements of opposition, dramatizing the difficulty of an ascent or the imminence of danger). As Jacques Lourcelles has noted, Daves's crane shots “which often have no immediate, logical connection with the plot, magnify the emotions which in turn help the spectator commune with the landscape.”

To befriend Nature, however, is not to idealize it. While Daves's Nature may provide a field for apprenticeship (if one knows how to look at it), it isn't necessarily a realm of purification and redemption counterposed to a corrupt and corrupting civilization.

Such Bible-tinged ideological discourse, with frequent populist and conservative undertones, has inspired much of American cinema past and present and underlies key works, whether they manage to transcend it (like The Birth of a Nation, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now) or not. It is interesting to note that a number of Hollywood emigrés—Sjöstrom, Lang, Tourneur, de Toth, Preminger, Renoir, Boorman—have challenged, diluted, or subverted this creed.

Daves is closer to them (and to progressives or liberals like Ray, Brooks, and Polonsky) than he is to Griffith and Vidor. Nature as he sees it is at once beautiful and cruel, blind and magnificent, deadly and consoling. It may, with the help of Comanche Todd (Richard Widmark), contribute to opening the eyes and erasing the prejudices of the adolescents in The Last Wagon, but it can also drive a farmer (Van Heflin in 3:10 to Yuma) to the brink of ruin and force him to accept a lethal assignment. In Bird of Paradise, an elegiac scene is interrupted by blood suddenly streaming into the water, announcing Debra Paget's death. Living close to Nature does not confer any superiority. The ranchers and country folk in Broken Arrow suddenly turn into a racist lynch mob, undermining the peace effort; the small religious community in Jubal has its Judas; and bigots and hypocrites poison the atmosphere of the gold mining camp in The Hanging Tree, a film that eschews moral oversimplification throughout, opposing complex, conflicted characters played by Cooper and Karl Malden, or George C. Scott's terrifying Fundamentalist preacher. In this film, Nature plays an extremely complex role, either as savior or destroyer. Although a thunderstorm and the fall of a tree unearth gold, the consequences are extreme: only by giving up the gold can Maria Schell save Cooper from hanging. Nature should not dictate behavior, Daves suggests; rather, human beings, as they conquer it, should learn how to discover the values that underlie their lives. This, ultimately, is the subject of Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma, The Hanging Tree . . . 

As a logical consequence, the City and Civilization are not systematically depicted as noxious, corrupting entities, as in, say, Capra. Daves challenges this simplistic vision, upsetting many a cliché, and subverting fundamental aspects of certain genres in the process. Thus Dark Passage, a truly unique film, completely ignores the rules of the urban noir. As I and Jean-Pierre Coursodon noted in 50 years of American Cinema, “Curiously, despite the overabundance of bad breaks the protagonist is dealt by fate, the city (here San Francisco) doesn't have the threatening presence it usually does in film noir. It is on the street, at night, that Bogart's Vincent Parry meets the providential taxi driver, a kind of good fairy from the urban shadows, who will grant his wish of invisibility. And the endless staircase he climbs after his operation leads to Irene’s apartment, a refuge that protects him from danger.” The city may also represent shelter, and even redemption, as in Pride of the Marines (45).

Progress, represented by civilization, science, and knowledge, is a positive force for Daves, unlike Hawks. He shows immense respect for the psychologists in Pride of the Marines, a masterpiece of the kind of progressive, liberal cinema that was wrecked by the blacklist. He sides with them against the John Garfield character, an unusual stance in cinema of that period. Of course, writer Albert Maltz's contribution shouldn't be underestimated; Communist or liberal screenwriters and authors reacted against Hollywood's widespread anti-intellectualism (still prevalent today), the tendency to ridicule scholars, scientists, and practically anyone who might pass for high-brow. While the odd-looking, disquieting surgeon in Dark Passage seems to belong to that tradition at first, in the end he turns out to be quite efficient.

Respect for knowledge, education, and culture is felt in practically all of Daves's films. In his remake of Bird of Paradise he introduced the essential character, played by Jeff Chandler, of a Kanaka who explains to Frenchman Louis Jourdan all that makes the richness of his people. Many of his characters have attended a university (usually Stanford, Daves's own alma mater). Henry Fonda struggles to send his son to college in Spencer's Mountain (63), and the others, those who, in Al Schmitt's words in Pride of the Marines, are “less than ordinary men,” won't have a chance of making it until they accept that they must learn and open themselves to the world. Ignorance is belittling. The true Davesian hero is one who seeks, who educates himself through the study of various races and cultures, and who fights prejudice and the racist or puritanical blindness perfectly embodied by Jack Elam in Bird of Paradise or Constance Ford in A Summer Place (59). “To understand is to love,” Daves said to me, a creed that stands apart in a cinema that has often advocated isolationism, withdrawal, and nationalist self-sufficiency.

Daves loves America and knows how to make us share his feelings, but he also views the rest of the world with the same respect. In his cinema, foreigners are on equal moral and emotional footing with everyone else. He freely grants them an identity, a right to exist. He strongly reacted to DeMille's mockery of Wilder's and Wyler's foreign accents during a notorious Screen Directors Guild meeting in 1950, and berated him for his shameful xenophobic statements. Although a Republican, Daves worked with Communist screenwriter Maltz three times: Destination Tokyo (43), Pride of the Marines, and Broken Arrow.

Daves also stands apart from his contemporaries, and even more so from today's filmmakers, in his refusal to promote and extol individualism, placing rum closer to the European émigrés filmmakers, but also to Ford and his cult of public service. Both directors reject solitary heroes, favoring characters who are integrated into a community (as distinct from Hawks's small groups that are cut off from the rest of the world even as they crisscross it). They work with and for this community, and those who ignore it are challenged and questioned. “Nobody stands alone,” the nurse in Pride of the Marines tells John Garfield, who rejects all outside help. Maria Schell manages to convince Gary Cooper of the same thing in The Hanging Tree. No Daves character makes it on his own, whether negotiating a peace treaty, getting an outlaw onto the train in Yuma, or surviving a gunfight. It's only thanks to Charles Bronson, who throws him a weapon (a lightning-fast panning shot links the two men) that Glenn Ford wins the shootout in Jubal. He also needs help from several others—Felicia Farr, Valerie French, the small religious community—in order to escape his pursuers.

Howard Hawks, that most individualistic of directors, criticized 3:10 to Yuma, challenging everything that makes the film strong and original, and misreading the plot in the process: “The sheriff caught a prisoner, and the prisoner taunted him… saying, 'Wait till my friends catch up with you.' And I said, That's a lot of nonsense, the sheriff would say, 'You better hope your friends don't catch up with you, cause you'll be the first man to die.'” Van Heflin, however; is not a sheriff, a “professional” accustomed to killing (neither has he “caught” the prisoner), but a farmer forced by economic circumstances to accept the job of guarding the outlaw and putting him on the train to the penitentiary. Hence, everything that makes the character so moving, so original for its time, so close to us, his hesitations, his fears, his reluctance to use violence, as well as his determination to defend his community, all justify his final decision, imparting so much power to his confrontation with Glenn Ford.

This acknowledgment of other cultures and respect for collective consciousness account for other peculiarities of Daves's work, such as his devoting two entire films to something that westerns usually dispatch with a couple of scenes: the discussions and negotiations that go into a peace treaty. For Daves, causes, and particularly consequences, are as important as the events themselves—if not more so. Action scenes and moments of violence are usually swift, even lightning-fast: the ambush in which Debra Paget is killed is shown in just a few splendid shots to which Daves grants less emphasis than to those describing Glenn Ford's reaction to his discovery of Borgnine's dead body in Jubal. He certainly knows how to film violence—the dark, chilling scene in which Cooper kills Karl Malden, admirably shot in movement (The Hanging Tree) and Ford's cold-blooded murder of the stagecoach driver (3:10 to Yuma) would suffice to prove it. But he pays more attention to what brought the violence about, or to its results. For Daves, a battle is an opportunity to show lines of wounded soldiers and a retreating army (particularly in Drum Beat, whose magnificent shots are worthy of Ford). Pride of the Marines's extraordinary battle sequence, perhaps the most powerful in the genre alongside the one in Andre de Toth's Monkey on My Back, would be the climax of most other war films. Daves and Maltz follow it with what turns out to be the real subject of the film, the individual's discovery of everyday courage. This is civilian courage, very different from military heroics—a blind man's realization that he belongs to a whole social universe he had always taken for granted. It's one man's discovery of responsibility.

Several of Daves's films show characters struggling for survival, paying the price for a moment of violence or madness—Everett Sloane in Bird of Paradise, Widmark in The Last Wagon—or endeavoring to relearn how to live, like Glenn Ford in Jubal. At least three of his films deal with themes of blindness and healing: Pride of the Marines, Dark Passage, and The Hanging Tree.

It's easy to see how such a cinema might seem alien to fans of contemporary Hollywood, which seems to have forsaken the notion of consequences or responsibility (the lack of reaction shots in recent movies is a phenomenon worthy of study) in favor of pyrotechnics and virtual games in which digital effects, unlike the tracking shots of yore, are divorced from ethics.

If a single scene could summarize Daves's cinema, images of peace and quiet come to mind: Debra Paget emerging from the water, filmed in a devastating tracking shot, and lying down beside James Stewart (Broken Arrow); the wedding in the same film: “You will no longer fear the rain, for he will protect you, you will no longer fear the cold, for she will warm you,” a fine, faithful adaptation of the scene as described in Elliott Arnold's novel; the moving delicacy of the love scene between an outlaw and a former singer sick with TB (3:10 to Yuma), an admirable moment that broke one of the era's major censorship taboos. Glenn Ford and Felicia Farr are immediately attracted to each other, and a little while later we sense that they have just made love. The young woman shows no trace of guilt or regret, quite the opposite. She also accepts the fact that they won't see each other again (“I'll keep a beautiful memory”), and when Glenn Ford is arrested, she opens the stagecoach door for him—a heartrending shot—in defiance of the whole town. Beautifully staged and photographed, such scenes are unique in a genre that usually gave short shrift to female characters. Equally lyrical are the discreet, touching parting on a railroad station platform in Pride of the Marines and, a few minutes earlier, Garfield's declaration to Eleanor Parker: “I like the way you stand up to me. I like the way you curl up in a car sitting. I like the way you don't jabber all the time and you sit quiet. I like the way you laugh at my corny jokes. I like the way you listen. I like it when you say you're gonna do something, you do it, and you don't make up a 101 of silly excuses …. “

ndeed, women's faces are what I feel like singling out the most in Daves's films: Leora Dana in the pouring rain (3:10 to Yuma); Felicia Farr, sublime in three films; Genevieve Page, absolutely magnificent in Youngblood Hawke (64), whose character is handled with such respect and dignity that it thankfully upsets the conventions of an excessively traditional narrative; Maria Schell taking her first steps on the hill above the village (The Hanging Tree) . . . It is a rare Daves film indeed that does not boast some luminous portrait of a woman, or a great love scene; many of his actresses have found their best roles under his direction.

No American director is more alien to the cult of machismo, to cynical manipulation. More often than not, women are the driving force, or the filmmaker’s mouthpiece; they challenge the film's heroes, educate them in matters of the heart, without any hypocrisy or puritanism. The emotional power and lyricism with which Daves endows his female characters make him a worthy successor to Borzage. Indeed, if one must compare Daves with another director, it should be Borzage, or McCarey (for whom he wrote the splendid Love Affair), especially the McCarey of Make Way for Tomorrow, rather than with Mann. Daves share with Borzage “a certain naïveté, or rather a desire not to be influenced or censured by fear of ridicule” (Lourcelles). They both favor feeling over action, to the extent that the characteristics of certain genres become diluted, as film noir is in Dark Passage. Seldom has a film felt so dreamlike. Eschewing banal gestures toward verisimilitude, Daves's own adaptation of David Goodis's novel immerses us in an eerie atmosphere that makes the most unlikely encounters and coincidences seem quite ordinary—right up to a fairy-tale happy ending, invented by Daves (this wonderful conclusion was highly praised by the Surrealists, who saw it as a perfect illustration of the triumph of Breton's cherished concept of amour fou). Far from emphasizing gloom and despair in the pessimistic noir tradition, Daves makes up for his hero's every bad break with a fantastic stroke of luck (none of his encounters is indifferent; they're all either catastrophic or providential). The motherliness of the Bacall character and Bogart's enforced passivity make for an uncharacteristic type of relationship, quite different from their first two outings together. Instead of the erotic tension and seduction games of the Hawks films, gentle tenderness prevails—which probably accounts for Dark Passage's comparative obscurity. Again in contrast to Hawks, the depth of feeling between Daves's characters is such that their love seems impervious to hardships, to the rust of time—thus Van Heflin and Leora Dana in 3:10 to Yuma are a truly adult couple, bruised by the rigors of life but enduring (one is reminded of the relationships between men and women in Grémillon's films, especially The Sky Is Yours). Only death can destroy such love, as it does in Broken Arrow and Bird of Paradise. Daves, moreover, rejected the latter film's Hays Code—and studio-imposed ending. He found it revolting that interracial lovers always had to die. Daves's kinship to Borzage (and sometimes to Sirk and Mitchell Leisen too) is felt in all the late melodramas, especially, I think, in Youngblood Hawke. But traces of it can be found in all his films—it is the core of Broken Arrow, elegiac lyricism was quite foreign to the genre at the time, and worthy of Lucky Star or Man's Castle. One might argue that Dave's reinvention of film noir and the western was as revolutionary, although not as conspicuous, as those of Mann and Ray.

The Hanging Tree, a fine adaptation by Wendell Mayes and Halsted Welles of the equally fine Dorothy Johnson novel, is as groundbreaking in terms of genre as Dark Passage, from which it borrowed certain of the earlier film's relationships and situations and then reversed them: the womb-like house, a refuge located on top of a hill, a disabled character protected by another place (also found in The Red House). The narrative becomes a kind of dark fantasy, full of shadows, ghost, and houses set on fire, in the British Gothic fiction tradition.

One could not conclude an article on Daves without praising the constant and often sublime beauty of his photography, whose paradoxical style, at once realistic (even to the point of rejecting makeup) and theatrical, harmoniously combines a documentary approach with near-baroque experiments: The Hanging Tree, Bird of Paradise, The Last Wagon and the night scenes in Cowboy are exemplary instances of this felicitous mingling. Let’s not forget, of course, 3:10 to Yuma: the importance of shadows, the refusal to soften contrast with filters, the attention to the parched, cracked soil. Cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr. told me that of all the directors he worked with, Daves was, along with Welles, and de Toth during certain sequences, the one with whom he most closely collaborated with on the visual style of his films, on their photographic texture. Drum Beat has a breathtaking visual splendor that paradoxically underscores the meditative, melancholy quality of the best scenes and compensates for the weakness of the initial premise and the performances. The Red House, as seen in the recent restoration by the Cinématheque Française, reveals an equally remarkable visual quality.

On a personal note, I could add that I knew Daves and that we corresponded quite often. I received his first letter in August 1960 (he was the first director who responded to me) and we met several times Paris and California. I remember his lust for life, his insatiable curiosity, his warmth, how highly cultured he was. One of his most surprising traits, one which astounded my children, was his talent as a forger: he could imitate any signature, any calligraphic style. He amused himself by painting the signs for the inns in his historical films, and I can still see him drawing and engraving a “Certificate of Existence” covered with unicorns and vine leaves for my son Nils. I had blocked out all these images, these recollections, banished them from my memory after his death. Now they resurface as if out of the mist, like the red cab at the end of Pride of the Marines. Of course, they are much less vivid than the images from his films that feed my reveries, such as those miraculous ones that close—or should one say open up?—Dark Passage: an unseen Peru, the ocean, a man and a woman dancing to “Too Marvelous for Words”—such an appropriate title indeed.

All-Movie Guide bio from Hal Erickson

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Film Reference profile by Patricia King Hanson

Daves, Delmer They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

DARK PASSAGE

USA (106 mi) 1947

Time Out review Tom Milne

Classic thriller based on the David Goodis novel about a man wrongly convicted of murder who escapes, has his face changed by plastic surgery, and clears his name with the aid of a girl whose father was similarly framed. Brilliantly atmospheric San Francisco settings, memorably bizarre supporting performances, a superb use of subjective camera (much more effective than in Lady in the Lake) throughout the entire first third of the film. The only flaw is the momentary absurdity when the bandages are finally unwrapped to reveal the 'new' face as dear old Bogart's (although prepared for by the use of his distinctive voice from the start).

Movie Round-Up Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary

Dark Passage, based on a novel by David Goodis and directed by the underrated Delmer Daves, teamed Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall for the third of their four movies together. Because the noir plot hinges on a plastic surgery operation, the audience doesn't actually see Bogart's face until the last third of the movie; most of the first third is shot from a subjective camera perspective (well done). There is terrific location footage of San Francisco throughout the film, which looks to me to have been a definite influence on Hitchcock's Vertigo (one shot in particular, a fall from a window, is startlingly reminiscent of the later film). Dark Passage is especially strong in juicy supporting performances; even the actors only on for one scene give it their all. Tom D'Andrea is a standout as a sympathetic cabbie; less than thirty seconds into his first scene, you know you're seeing something special. Anyone who responds to film noir or Forties melodramas ought to catch this movie.

Dark Passage Movie Review (1947) from Channel 4 Film

Dark Passage was Bogart and Bacall's third feature as a couple following on from the successes of To Have And Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). Billed as a compelling romance, Dark Passage is, in fact, a very different movie. Firmly in the tradition of late 40s film noir, it is primarily the tale of escaped prisoner Vincent Parry (Bogart) and his bid to clear his name and find out who framed him for the murder of his wife. Bacall plays his independent and wilful rescuer Irene, who hides him from his pursuers, nurses him when he undergoes plastic surgery to change his identity, and falls for him along the way.

It's a dark, surreal and slightly implausible tale. An unusual vehicle for such a star as Bogart - he doesn't show his face until at least halfway through the film. The first third makes inventive use of first-person camera technique, never showing the actor's infamous face. For much of the second third, he appears mute and in bandages after having undergone the quickest and most effective facelift in history. Much more successful, technically, than the much cited earlier attempt to introduce subjective camera into film, 1947's Chandler adaptation Lady In The Lake, it's an intriguing device which adds to the already tense atmosphere and sense of growing paranoia as Parry is tracked down by police and other foes.

The film also benefits from its suitably gothic location of San Francisco and some wonderfully oddball supporting characters such as Agnes Moorehead's psychotically jealous Madge and Tom D'Andrea's lonely cabby. However, it never quite hits the high notes and is rather slowly paced in parts and lacks the fiery, smart dialogue from other Bogart/Bacall vehicles.

Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford

While it might not rank as a favorite film among those who love the screen team of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, you have to admit Dark Passage (1947) has one of the great screen gimmicks of all time. For the first forty minutes of the film, you see everything through the eyes of the main character - an escaped prisoner from San Quentin who eludes the authorities while making his way to a plastic surgeon who will give him a new face. When the bandages finally come off, the audience gets their first look at this wanted fugitive as he studies himself in a mirror. And guess what? He looks just like Humphrey Bogart!

To be perfectly honest, the subjective camera technique wasn't a new idea and had been utilized the previous year in Robert Montgomery's innovative detective thriller, Lady in the Lake (1946). But the gimmick is still fun, and the San Francisco locations are a definite asset.

This was Bacall and Bogart's third movie together, and they were still in the honeymoon stage of their marriage, enjoying their accommodations at the Mark Hopkins Hotel with meals at the Top of the Mark during the filming of Dark Passage. Bogie was also the highest paid actor in Hollywood (he averaged $450,000 a year) at the time, which didn't depress him in the least.

There was one problem though. In her autobiography, By Myself, Lauren Bacall wrote, "Toward the end of shooting I became aware of Bogie's nerves; if the phone rang, he'd tense up, didn't want to answer it, didn't want to speak to any except the closest. He'd noticed a bare spot on his cheek where his beard was not growing. The one spot increased to several, then he'd wake up in the morning and find clumps of hair on the pillow. That alarmed him. It's one thing to be bald with a rim of hair, an actor could always wear a hairpiece, but without the rim it would have to be a full wig. The more hair fell out, the more nervous he got, and the more nervous he got, the more hair fell out. In the last scene of Dark Passage he wore a complete wig. He panicked - his livelihood hung in the balance. A visit to the doctor was in order. He never went to doctors. The verdict was that he had a disease known as alopecia areata - in layman's terms, hair falls out as a result of vitamin deficiencies. He was plain worn out - the years of mistreating himself in bars and an unsteady diet had added up to this. It would grow back, but he'd need B-12 shots twice a week...scalp treatments...more food...in general, more care. That was a relief to us both. His next film was going to be The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948) with John Huston, and he'd have had to wear a wig for that anyway."

Film Noir of the Week Don Malcolm

digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson

Film Freak Central Review [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

Crazy for Cinema

DVD Verdict Mark Van Hook

Reel.com DVD review [Sarah Chauncey]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

George Chabot's Review

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] reviews a 4 DVD Bogart release, They Drive by Night, High Sierra, To Have and Have Not, and Dark Passage

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] 4 DVD Bogart release

TV Guide review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

BROKEN ARROW

USA (93 mi) 1950

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

James Stewart turns in his usual fine performance in this otherwise uninteresting 1950 western, which is mainly remembered for launching a wave of revisionism in the genre: the Indians (as played, of course, by whites) are the good guys. Debra Paget is the squaw sacrificed for racial harmony; Jeff Chandler is a Boy's Life Cochise.

Channel 4 Film capsule review

An excellent western from little known director Daves, which pits Stewart as ex-army man Tom Jeffords and Chandler as Apach leader Cochise, who strive to reach the common goal of peace between the setlers and the indians despite the 10-year war which continues to rage. A quieter, more thoughtful western than many of its peers, this is so well directed and shot it's a wonder that Daves didn't have a more high-profile career. Although Chandler creates a formidable presence as the indian chief, acting honours unsurprisingly belong to Stewart, who brings his everyman persona to the battlefield in fine style.

Time Out review Tom Milne

The Western that launched the be-nice-to-the-Indian cycle of the '50s now looks a little on the self-consciously liberal side, making something of a meal of its plea for racial tolerance and peaceful coexistence, as Stewart's army scout and Chandler's Cochise strive to bring peace to the Apache. A little awkward, too, in its bows to convention while trying to present an authentic picture of the Indian way of life (lots of Apache extras, but the leads are played by white actors; the Apache language rendered into 'poetic' English). A fine film all the same, despite the compromised ending, quite beautifully shot by Ernest Palmer.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The movie is in the past conditional, because we know the real end of the story and Delmer Daves who had been studying the Indians ways for a long time did not try to fool the audience: "broken arrow" is not a nice "peace and love" movie: there are plenty of death, violence and hatred here, more than in the average western. As Cochise says, living in peace is more difficult than waging war. But Jeffords and him become legendary figures whom we can still meet today everywhere in the world, peace on earth and good will to men. Thus his story becomes universal.

There's a wistful, not to say very sad side: Delmer Daves is like John Lennon singing "imagine" or Neil Young singing "Pocahontas" (I wish I was a trapper/I would give a thousand pelts/To sleep with Pocahontas/And find out how she felt/In the morning in the fields of green/in the home land we've never seen): he does know that all these promises are illusive, the two protagonists trust each other, but who else can they trust? The dice are loaded from the start.

That's why the love scenes are so important and among the most visually astounding we can see in a western. Thanks partly to Debra Paget's breathtaking beauty, the scenes between Jeffords and Sonseearhay climax the movie. They give the audience a taste of a lost paradise "the homeland we've never seen": Jefford's dream only really comes true in these sequences where the lovers are under the "big sky" in communion with nature.

Some will complain because everybody speaks English, but Tom's voice-over warns us from the very start. Kevin Costner, who makes his Oscar-winning "dance with wolves" in the early nineties, owes a good deal to Delmer Daves.

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Broken Arrow has earned its place in cinema history as the first mainstream Hollywood Western to treat Native Americans as something beyond mere rifle fodder. More importantly, it’s a film fully aware of its own significance and uses this knowledge with which to form its plot. James Stewart, in affable mode, plays an open-minded prospector (read audience surrogate) who’s “sick and tired of all this killing” and so decides to immerse himself in the Apache with the aim of becoming a go-between for the whites and their sworn enemy.

Understandably, being a Hollywood “first”, Broken Arrow’s progressive qualities only go so far. (Indeed, we should hardly expect an Apache equivalent of Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner.) As such it is still the whites who are at the film’s centre, not only in terms of Stewart being the leading man (as well as the supplier of the voice-over), but also inasmuch as all the principle Native Americans are played by white actors, with Jeff Chandler taking the primary role. Of course this device was regularly used throughout the fifties - witness Chuck Connors in Geronimo, Burt Lancaster in Apache or Rod Steiger in Run of the Arrow - and as with those pictures Broken Arrow has the same problem insofar as it severely stunts the performances of those actors who are, effectively, “tanning up”. In this case Chandler is forced to keep things stoical meaning that none of the nuance he later displayed in, say, Samuel Fuller’s Merrill’s Marauders is available to him. Indeed, it’s as if the level of respect the filmmakers are adopting has reduced the character to near paralysis.

But then such was the regularity of this problem throughout the decade that it’s also an easy one to overlook - and besides Chandler’s role is essentially peripheral to Stewart’s. Moreover, it is Stewart who makes Broken Arrow so inviting. It’s intriguing to compare his role here to that of his other Western of 1950, Winchester 73, the film which began his terrific run of collaborations with director Anthony Mann. Whereas that series of Westerns, alongside his films for Alfred Hitchcock, take a deep look at Stewart’s psyche, here he’s the simple all-American he’d portrayed in his earliest pictures, particularly the lightweight musicals such as Born to Dance. Of course, there’s a little more integrity at work and with that in mind it is perhaps unsurprising that Broken Arrow best recalls such Stewart pictures as The FBI Story than it does any of his Westerns.

There’s also some of the overall tone of The FBI Story about Broken Arrow. As its treatment of the Apaches is neither incidental nor unintentional it does at times come across as more than a little haughty. There’s a faintly patronising air to the way in which the “mysticism” is dealt with and the manner in which the dialogue is translated is of the cod-poetic variety. But there’s also more than just Stewart to counteract such misgiving, the strongest coming from Delmer Daves’ typically muscular direction. Perhaps not in the same league as his later 3.10 to Yuma or the earlier Dark Passage, Broken Arrow still sees Daves approaching the material with a briskness which prevents it from ever becoming too self-serving or overwrought. The action quotient - an element he also succeeds in - may be low, but there’s the requisite amount to demonstrate his obvious skills.

Furthermore, any preachiness is also off-set by a pleasing lack of simplicity. Broken Arrow was made at a time when Hollywood was engaging in a number of problematic themes, such as anti-Semitism in Crossfire and Gentlemen’s Agreement. Yet a number of these pictures also had ulterior motives so to speak, with these two efforts, for example, also tackling, in a roundabout manner, homosexuality. From this perspective then, Broken Arrow is as much a plea against racism as a whole as it is an atonement for the Western’s previous treatment of Native Americans. Indeed, if looked at in such a manner then the romantic subplot between Stewart and Debra Paget’s character, and the miscegenation that involves, becomes all the more daring and complex. Likewise, the treatment of both the Apaches and the whites is equally complicated, with neither being presented in a wholly good or wholly bad light, but altogether more human. That Geronimo sneaks a cameo in the final quarter more than suggests, despite the filmmakers’ best efforts, the ending can never be entirely happy.

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

JUBAL

USA (100 mi) 1956 ‘Scope

Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review

Nowadays, most film buffs who don't tend to drift off to one genre tend to ignore Westerns not made by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Sam Peckinpah or Sergio Leone. That's a shame, because such a fertile genre has spawned a great number of terrific films not belonging to well-known auteurs. Case in point are the Westerns of Delmer Daves, who, besides making the next-to-last Bogart & Bacall vehicle, Dark Passage, also helmed a number of creditable Westerns in the 50s, including one of the first to sympathetically view Indians, 1950's Broken Arrow (no relation to Woo or Travolta).

Jubal is a deftly put together tale ever-so-slightly modeled on Othello in which Glenn Ford and Rod Steiger compete for acting honors, with the edge going to Steiger. Ford, who had just come to major fame with his starring role in the previous year's Blackboard Jungle, is Jubal Troop, a cowhand found lying unconscious in the road. Picked up by rancher Ernest Borgnine, Ford gets a job on Borgnine's ranch, rousing the dislike of malcontent Pinky, played by the inimitable Rod Steiger with an odd voice that doesn't quite lisp but gets awful close; it's a mesmerizing, perfectly attuned performance. Borgnine's wife, Valerie French (overacting, who later appropriately ended up on soap operas) makes many passes at Ford, who refuses to cooperate; Pinky, however, is jealous, as French's ex-lover. When Ford becomes foreman of the ranch because of Borgnine's need to attend to his new administrative duties as the head of a cattleman's association, the stage is set for a tense showdown.

Concentrating more on the relationships between the men on the ranch than on the various showdowns that ensue, Jubal is a well-paced character study. Well-photographed in Cinemascope (letterboxing is a must), Jubal's screenplay can be clumsy and has too much hollow-sounding dialogue for comfort; the success of the film rises and falls on the delivery. Ford delivers his lines with conviction, and Steiger is terrific; Borgnine, I fear, is far too over-the-top in his caricature of a crude but good-hearted rancher. Charles Bronson has a small part, in one of his first appearances where he wasn't billed as "Charles Buchinsky." David Raksin's score is sometimes, but sometimes very obtrusive, straining to create heated conflict where there is none.

Jubal is a bit unusual for the genre in concentrating first on the sex angle (the storyline is motivated solely by it), and also for its sympathetic portrayal of wandering religious fundamentalists searching for a promised land; apparently, a stock evangelical preacher wouldn't do for this film. Although the acting and writing is variable, the compelling themes at work here and the superior directorial execution make Jubal a worthy psychological Western of the 50s (though it's still a long way from here to Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher).

Turner Classic Movies review Sean Axmaker

Delmer Daves's Jubal (1956) was one of the new wave of adult westerns that flourished in the fifties. Starring Glenn Ford as a cowhand drifter befriended by a big-hearted rancher (Ernest Borgnine) while his beautiful, young, and deeply disenchanted wife (European starlet Valerie French, in her American debut) does her best to seduce the simple, stoic cowboy, it has been described as an Othello on the Range.

That characterization gets at the web of jealousy and desire manipulated by envious ranch hand Pinky (Rod Steiger, playing Iago to Borgnine's Othello) whose seniority is suddenly usurped by this outsider, but it confuses the details and motivations. In this take, the young wife is no innocent but a dark, exotic beauty (she's Canadian which is supposed to account for her French accent) in a stifling marriage to the sincere but crude and boisterous cattleman Borgnine; Steiger's cowhand is the spurned lover of the unfaithful wife. It's not even about the Othello or the Iago figures, but the drifter caught in the middle of the frustrated desires and desperate deceptions. This is less Shakespeare than Hollywood melodrama in chaps and Daves was a seasoned hand at both genres.

Delmer Daves had established himself as a screenwriter with a series of light comedies and romantic melodramas (including the original 1939 Love Affair) before stepping behind the camera with the World War II adventure Destination Tokyo (1943). Like most directors of his era, he moved easily between all genres, but he proved his affinity for the western from his very first effort, Broken Arrow (1950), one of the first sympathetic depictions of Native Americans. Along with his fine eye for imagery, Daves brought a psychological dimension and an adult sensibility to his westerns. With Jubal he favors suspense over action and violence, tightening the tension until Pinky finally pushes his boss over the edge and the cycle of violence begins. Even then, the violence is brief and abrupt and Daves leaves the most brutal assault off screen, a suggestion far more powerful than anything he could show the audience.

Glenn Ford had become a quietly intense leading man in the 1940s and seasoned into a natural western star by the time he was cast as the title character, Jubal Troop. It was his first of three westerns for Delmer Daves (they teamed up again the next year with 3:10 to Yuma, an austere, noir-ish western that remains a highlight of both of their careers) and a good match between director and actor. Ford plays the part of the wary loner close to his chest, opening up to his new boss, Shep (Borgnine), who becomes both father figure and best friend to the emotionally bottled up cowhand. Jubal opens up even more with a sweet young member of a religious wagon train passing through the ranch on the way to the promised land. Felicia Farr plays the blonde American innocent to French's exotic brunette, and Jubal practically opens the floodgates of his damaged childhood (revealing all the psychological baggage that sends him endlessly drifting) to this adoring girl.

Borgnine plays his part with a garrulous, boisterous amiability, the better to contrast with Ford's closed-in performance, while Noah Beery, Jr. and John Dierkes offer easy-going support as Ford's friendly bunkmates and fellow cowhands. Steiger stands out in this company with his mesmerizing but mannered method performance. His character, Pinky, is an even more devious version of the brooding, jealous cowhand he played in the screen version of the musical Oklahoma! (1955), and his drawling delivery drips venom as he plants the seeds of suspicion in his boss. Daves preferred the laconic style of the rest of the cast and clashed with Steiger, only giving way because the producer liked what Steiger was doing. It's a jarring performance next to Ford and Borgnine, but his coiled and calculated turn also enhances his menace.

Daves gave the key supporting part of Reb Haislipp, a plain-speaking cowhand whose loyalty to Jubal is unshakable even when Pinky turns the town against him, to the up-and-coming supporting player Charles Bronson. It was one of the first substantial supporting roles for the actor previously billed as Charles Buchinsky in such films as House of Wax (1953). He had changed his name just a year before in another Daves' western, Drum Beat (1954). For their second go-round, Daves brings out Bronson's easy-going humor and understated style, that was so rarely tapped by directors (the notable exceptions being The Magnificent Seven [1960] and The Dirty Dozen [1967]), and the film became a modest showcase for the actor's heretofore untapped potential.

Jubal was generally well received ("The strong point… along with ace performances and an overall plot line that grips tightly, is a constantly mounting suspense," reads the Variety review) and New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was inspired to write his mixed review in verse: "It does have its wide-screen points / Lovely scenery; good performing; /Smooth knee-action in the joints." Shot in the Grand Teton country of Wyoming in CinemaScope and Technicolor, Jubal remains an exceedingly handsome film and Daves fills the widescreen frame with the magnificent mountain backdrops and dramatic forests and rolling hills, without allowing the majesty to overwhelm the human drama.

Reverse Shot review Nick Pinkerton

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [3/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeremy Arnold

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

3:10 TO YUMA

USA (92 mi) 1957

Time Out [Tom Milne]

A classic Western scenario, adapted from a short story by Elmore Leonard. For $200, the sum he desperately needs to save his land from drought, a small-time farmer (Heflin) agrees to escort a notorious outlaw (Ford) to the state penitentiary in Yuma; holed up in a hotel to await the train, with the outlaw's gang gathering in force outside, the escort finds himself in effect the prisoner; nevertheless, although the financial inducement evaporates (he's offered more to let matters slide by both the outlaw and the town's alarmed mayor), he insists on fulfilling his contract. It's of necessity a talkative film, with Ford working on Heflin's nerves in a stream of Machiavellian banter, but one held in perfect balance by Daves, who keeps the tension strung taut (especially in the gauntlet-running final walk to the station) while at the same time elaborating a subtle psychological conflict. The nerve centre is exposed in an early scene where Heflin, the dour family man careworn by responsibilities, watches as his wife and sons come under the spell of Ford's carefree charm: the conflict, ultimately, stems from each man's envy of what the other has.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]

If you weren't too hot on the Western genre you might well mistake 3:10 to Yuma for that classic of cinema, High Noon. The film follows the High Noon formula closely, with the story (by Elmore Leonard) following a gang of outlaws as they try to hold up a stagecoach on a valuable run. The leader however is captured when he dallies too long with a lovely lady and as a result is held until the train of the title can take him off to Yuma for trial. Luckily, as in Ice Cold In Alex, there are no ambushes by killer washing machines to contend with (Alicia, we still miss you)!

This should not detract from the film itself, for 3:10 to Yuma is an excellent example of how to build a tightly plotted, well-acted drama. Glenn Ford excels in an unfamiliar role, as the quietly sinister gang leader. Van Heflin, as the impoverished local landowner who agrees to hold Ford until the train comes, also gives us a characterisation which elicits our sympathy and respect. Felicia Farr's brief role as the barmaid who causes Ford's guard to be dropped lights up the screen with an ole-time sensuality, yet also appears delicate and touchingly poignant.

3:10 To Yuma remains a much overlooked film in the genre, produced in a period when the time of the Great Westerns was coming to an end. As a precursor to the superior Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone or the post-modern antics of Clint Eastwood, it remains an important turning point in the history of the Western.

3:10 to Yuma Glenn Erickson from DVD Savant

3:10 to Yuma is one of the best of the late '50s Westerns, and is about as handsome as the B&W Western ever got. Low-key performances from an interesting cast back up great work by Van Heflin and Glenn Ford, whose tense angst adds a Noir-ish dimension. It's not as flashy as the color super westerns being made at the time, and it has no particular gimmick to exploit, yet 3:10 to Yuma is more enjoyable than 'meaningful' efforts like The Left-Handed Gun. Taken from a story by the now-revered Elmore Leonard, the show develops a nice little knot of suspense.

The leader of a gang of thieves, Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) robs a stage and shoots a guard outside the town of Bisbee, a crime witnessed by Dan Evans (Van Heflin) and his young sons. Passing through town to put the marshal on the wrong scent, Ben is captured when he stays behind to court young bartender Emmy (Felicia Farr). Dan is given the unenviable job of escorting the prisoner to Contention, there to catch the train to the penitentiary at Yuma. But Wade's gang has other ideas. If the outlaws should catch up, Dan hasn't got a chance.

The kings of the '50s Western were Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. Mann's productions got bigger until he graduated to the epic (El Cid); Boetticher stayed with small stories. Sneaking in among them was Delmer Daves, who had started as a Warners' contractee in the '40s, writing and directing wartime tearjerkers (The Very Thought of You) and action films (Destination Tokyo). In the early 50's Daves turned to color Westerns like the interesting Drum Beat and The Last Wagon. He eventually struck gold (or fizzled out) doing glossy Peyton Place imitations like A Summer Place, Parrish and the popular but horrendous Spencer's Mountain. Before the big fizzle he gave us this efficient piece followed by his best Western, The Hanging Tree. The critics never showed much interest in Daves; Andrew Sarris had little to say about him except that his frequent crane shots were 'debasing.'

We know we're in a '50s Western when we hear Frankie Laine, and 3:10 to Yuma has a title song that may make one smile with thoughts of Blazing Saddles. From then on it becomes a tense thriller that just happens to take place in a Western setting. It's a battle of wills between prisoner Glenn Ford, who's determined to escape, and Van Heflin, who's equally committed to making sure he delivers his man to prison.

There's nothing grand in 3:10 to Yuma, no celebration of genre values. Halstead Welles' script, from a story by crime favorite Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty) is down to earth; everyone in the picture has a job and a particularized point of view, even the outlaws. Dan Evans is just a farmer with problems. He does the prisoner escort job mostly out of stubbornness, as opposed to a conscious adherence to a greater truth. His wife (nicely played by Leora Dana of Some Came Running and Tora! Tora! Tora!), purposely made up to be plain-looking, is no whiner like Grace Kelly in High Noon. They're just trying to hold on to their hardscrabble farm in a drought, which makes Dan highly susceptible to Ben's offer of a bribe to let him go. One nice twist of genre conventions is Stage Line owner Mr. Butterfield, a businessman both principled and honorable. He's played against type by stock baddie Robert Emhardt, as is the town drunk played by the familiar Henry Jones, who also specialized in craven characters. 3:10 to Yuma doesn't isolate its hero by surrounding him with worthless help, or saddle him with a sanctimonious code to uphold.

Of special mention is Felicia Farr (Kiss Me Stupid, Charley Varrick), who has a quiet, excellently conveyed one-reel romance with Ford. Delmer Dave's films are known for a lot of windy dialogue but much of this winner is carried by looks and attitudes and moments of silence. The understated sparks between the two inform Ford's character, and help motivate his later actions in a satisfying way.

With its finely judged B&W photography, 3:10 to Yuma has excellent atmosphere. It never seems like a small picture and the Arizona Western town setting familiar from Howard Hawks and Budd Boetticher pictures never looked better. There's a constant feeling of confrontation and far less gunplay than the countless boring oaters that were being made at the time; this one stands out.

Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon

At the Movies Michael Wood compares both film versions from The London Review of Books, October 18, 2007

eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver

PopMatters (Shaun Huston)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

Turner Classic Movies review The idea behind the film

Turner Classic Movies review Why the film is essential

Turner Classic Movies review A look behind the camera

Turner Classic Movies review Trivia and Quotes from the film

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

Davidson, Kief and Richard Ladkani

THE DEVIL’S MINER B+ 91

USA Germany (82 mi) 2005

A humanistic glimpse at a scandalous tragedy that probably repeats itself around the world every day, particularly in the poorest regions, namely the necessity for children to work in the bleakest, most dangerous working conditions in remote regions of the globe, as there is no one else that can provide for their families. This film explores the life of Basilio, a 14-year old who works in one of the most dangerous mines in Cerro Rico above Potosi, Bolivia, said to have claimed eight million lives since the Spanish began extracting silver, renowned by the locals as “the mountains that eat men.” Since his father died at the age of two, his mother moved to a tiny stone hut outside one of the mine entrances over 14,000 feet high, guarding the mine equipment that is left there each night. Basilio and his 12-year old brother Bernardino work together as a team earning $2.50 a day in what looks like the most dilapidated and unsafe conditions imaginable. Inside the mine, they worship a hand-made satanical deity Tio who they believe will protect miners from accidents and harm, leaving offerings of cocoa leaves or herbs, while faithfully worshipping God and attending Catholic services on the outside.

Basilio also attends school, where his walk down the mountainside into town is enough to challenge anyone’s stamina, again it’s an uphill climb all the way for the entire return. Interesting that his biggest obstacle in school was not learning, or even the distance from his home, but girls, who he claimed were few in numbers, but were the meanest students in school, that he never played with them as they always got into fights scratching other people’s eyes, so were considered too dangerous. On days of carnival, the one day when everyone stays out of the mines, the boys can be seen lobbing water balloons at the girls, perhaps the most delightful moment in the film, which is otherwise overly serious, as this 14-year old must act and behave like an adult for the duration of his life. The life expectancy for a miner is 35 or 40 years of age before they succumb to silicosis, where the dust from the mines actually clogs the lungs, so Basilio dreams of finding a way out of the mines. Unfortunately, his condition is shared by another 800 or so other boys, few of whom ever leave the mines.

Told largely from Basilio’s point of view, which draws us into his world, constantly chomping on cocoa leaves to avoid hunger, yet maintain his level of energy, he describes in his own words his observations, fears, and his plans for the future while the camera crew follows the daily ritual of the boys entering and working in the mines. Eventually they have to split up, as Basilio has to move to a larger, more dangerous mine where he can earn $4.00 a day. The foremen who take these young boys under their wing obviously care for them, and feel a heavy sorrow in their heart, but they work them nonetheless, as they know their families need the money. When we see Basilio go deeper into the mine, where the temperatures rise to over 100 degrees where we witness the master drillers enveloped in smoke, the conditions are nearly unbearable to the viewer, as the kid has no mask, so he has to breathe it all in, enduring images that are simply terrifying. Imagine how much more terrifying they must be to a young boy in real life, forced to return there again day after day? This film feels like a relentless pursuit of realism.

Davies, Taran

AFGHAN STORIES C- 67

USA (60 mi) 2002

This filmmaker never ventures very far "inside" Afghanistan, visiting only two northern border towns under the control of the Northern Alliance at the time of the initial US bombing campaign, so the film barely scratches the surface, instead, this is largely a view of  Afghanistan from people who are no longer living there, and as "outsiders," they are bitter or upset by their displacement - no surprise there

Davies, Terence

I began making films [out of] a deep need . . . to come to terms with my family’s history and suffering, to make sense of the past and to explore my own personal terrors, both mental and spiritual, and to examine the destructive nature of Catholicism. Film as an expression of guilt, film as confession (psychotherapy would be much cheaper but a lot less fun). —Terence Davies

Sing, Memory: The Postwar England of Terence Davies - Harvard ... Harvard Film Archive

Arguably the greatest living British filmmaker, Terence Davies (b. 1945) is renown for the meticulous care that transforms each new release into a highly anticipated cultural event. A member of the distinctive generation of British Film Institute nurtured directors whose ranks notably included Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and Peter Greenaway, Davies first established himself with three celebrated shorts, known collectively as The Terence Davies Trilogy (1984). Like his trilogy, the subsequent features Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) are also set in postwar England, a dreary land of scarcity and sexual repression which inspires the elemental dichotomy at the heart of Davies’ work, a contrast between the somber outside world of gray, brick and rain and the intimate interior world, whose promise of warmth and camaraderie is tempered by poverty and the threat of violence or isolation. In Davies films escape – from both worlds – is provided by the radio, by the cinema and above all by music.

This is terrain that the Liverpool-born and Catholic-raised Davies knows well, and shapes with a strong autobiographical intimacy of his films. Davies’ work is distinguished by the wonderfully cinematographic qualities of his stories which are told most powerfully not through dialogue but rather through framing, camera movement, lighting and editing. Davies’ style has been called “memory realism”: everyday life is rendered in naturalistic detail colored by or overlaid with fantasy or reminiscence.

Davies’ postwar England is, indeed, defined by a kind of heightened reality that swings, with pendulum inevitability, from the best of times to the worst of times. That sense of life-and-death drama also animates Davies’ adaptations of American novels: The Neon Bible (1995) and The House of Mirth (2000), two films that foreground women struggling against patriarchal society to live on their own terms. Davies’ latest film, The Deep Blue Sea, continues in this latter vein, although relocating to the time and place of his semi-autobiographical work.

Seen as a group, Davies’ films set in postwar England reveal him as an artist deeply grounded in a milieu as specific as Faulkner’s Mississippi or John Waters’ Baltimore. Davies has spoken of “the British genius at creating the dismal,” but his films show something else: the ability to make glowing poetry from the dismal.

BFI Screenonline: Davies, Terence (1945-) Biography Ewa Mazierska, Directors in British and Irish Cinema

Terence Davies was born in Liverpool on 10 November 1945, the youngest child in a large working-class family. After working for ten years as a clerk in a shipping office and a book-keeper in an accountancy firm, he entered Coventry School of Drama in 1971. There he wrote the script for Children, which he directed after he left with backing from the BFI Production Board. He then went to the National Film School, where he completed Madonna and Child as his graduation film in 1980. Three years later, thanks to funding from the Greater London Arts Association and the BFI, he made Death and Transfiguration. These three short to medium-length films comprise The Terence Davies Trilogy, which put him on the cinematic map as one of the most original British film-makers of the late 20th century.

In the Trilogy and the two films that followed, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), Davies reconstructs his childhood and youth in a working-class district of Liverpool in the 1940s and 50s. His alter ego, called Robert Tucker in the later films, is shy and introverted; his teachers and peers treat this as testimony to his mental slowness and an excuse to bully him. His family life is traumatised by his violent and unpredictable father, who regularly harasses his sisters and his mother, the most important person in his life. Another cause of unhappiness is his homosexuality. The pain of being different is exacerbated by his Catholic upbringing, which makes him believe that homosexuality is the gravest sin possible. Yet Davies regards the past with nostalgia as well as resentment. All the films are imbued with tender memories of the communality of working-class life and the old forms of entertainment, such as listening to the wireless, visiting the cinema, and singing together.

The uniqueness of Davies' representation of the past lies in the way he uses cinematic means to convey the fragmented nature of memory and the partial knowledge of his young protagonist. Instead of using a smooth narrative, we receive a succession of loosely connected episodes, with no dominant story line. A moving image is sometimes replaced by a discoloured photograph to convey the impression of time frozen by memory and to emphasise the gap between the real and a recollected past. Thanks to the subjective camera, objects lose their hard, material existence, becoming only shadows on the wall or floor. Such a technique also suggests that children - his viewpoint characters in all his films except The House of Mirth - tend to over-interpret facts and mix truth with fiction. He also makes extensive use of songs, which play as important a role as dialogue in revealing his characters' feelings.

In 1984 Davies published a novel, Hallelujah Now, based on his memories of life in Liverpool; he turned to someone else's autobiographical novel for his next film (1994). The Neon Bible, written in secret by John Kennedy Toole when he was sixteen, is set in Georgia in the American South, but it shares thematic, stylistic and ideological similarities with Davies' earlier work, such as the constricting influence of religion, the special bond between a boy and older women, male violence (at one point the father takes his sensitive son to a Ku Klux Klan lynching), and the distorted nature of memory. The novel is set during and shortly after the Second World War, a period Davies had already explored in Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. As in those films, his adaptation of The Neon Bible leaves the viewer with a bitter-sweet mixture of pain and nostalgia.

The House of Mirth (2000) marks Davies' furthest departure from his childhood obsessions. Based, like Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (US, 1993), on a novel by Edith Wharton set in America at the beginning of 20th century, the main theme explores the struggle of an individual with a culture. In The Neon Bible Davies seemed to have difficulty connecting with the feelings of his characters, but here he offers penetrating insights into an emerging American industrial society defined by greed, narcissism and hypocrisy. The fight ends in the defeat of the heroine (Gillian Anderson), confirming Davies' view that against the backdrop of history an individual human being is only a particle of dust.

Davies' carefully composed tableaux and highly stylised narratives have led to him being grouped with Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman. But Davies is no post-modernist: his use of popular songs and constant allusions to Hollywood musicals reflect a sincere affection for popular culture. Davies' intensely emotional cinema makes him unique among contemporary British film-makers.

Terence Davies.com also seen here: Official website

TCMDB biography

All-Movie Guide bio from Sandra Brennan

"Davies, Terence" bio from the encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer culture

Earth mother Terence Davies on why he wants to film Sunset Song, from The Guardian, August 17, 2003

Terence Davies, neglected genius Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, October 26, 2006

The tragedy of Terence Davies Shane Danielsen from The Guardian, February 7, 2008

Closely Watched Films: Terence Davies - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Davies Film Retrospective, February 20 – 27, 2008

Moving Image Source Article (2008) The Persistence of Memory by Michael Koresky, June 4, 2008

Life on the land Tessa Hadley on Sunset Song, from The Guardian, August 8, 2008

Terence Davies (review) David Lancaster’s review of Wendy Everett’s essay Remarkable Balance, from Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, (2005), from Project MUSE

Terence Davies, neglected genius Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, October 26, 2006

The tragedy of Terence Davies Shane Danielsen from The Guardian, February 7, 2008

Closely Watched Films: Terence Davies - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Davies Film Retrospective, February 20 – 27, 2008

Moving Image Source Article (2008) The Persistence of Memory by Michael Koresky, June 4, 2008

Life on the land Tessa Hadley on Sunset Song, from The Guardian, August 8, 2008

Terence Davies's Sunset Song gets green light at last Catherine Shoard from The Guardian, February 17, 2012

The Power of Restraint in the Films of Terence Davies - Village Voice Karina Longworth, March 14, 2012

Terence Davies’s Inner Light J. Hoberman from The New York Review of Books, March 23, 2012

TSPDT - Terence Davies

An old-fashioned Gill Brian Pendreigh feature and interview from The Guardian, June 11, 1999

First steps in show business Simon Hattenstone interview from The Guardian, October 5, 2000, also seen here: Guardian Unlimited Interview

Terence Davies Pinewood Dialogues audio interview from Moving Image Source, December 15, 2000

Bigmouth strikes again Simon Hattenstone feature and interview the director from The Guardian, October 19, 2006

"Miserable to be gay: A Q&A with Terence Davies" Johnny Ray Huston intervew from The San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, February 20, 2008

Bright Lights Film Journal Article (2008) Paradise Betrayed, Karin Luisa Badt interview, August 2008

Interviews | My Liverpool: Terence Davies' Of Time and the City Jason Anderson intgerview from Cinema Scope, 2008

In the director's chair: Terence Davies Videoessay by Shehani Fernando, Rebecca Lovell, and Christian Bennett from The Guardian, November 12, 2008 (8:28)

Terence Davies: follow your hormones Stuart Jeffries interview from The Guardian, November 23, 2011

Top 250 Directors

Ranked 10th on Film Comment's list of the 25 Best Directors of the Decade (2000-2009)

Telegraph's Top 21 British Directors of All Time

Terence Davies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE TERENCE DAVIES TRILOGY B 88

Great Britain (94 mi) 1983

People either love what I do or they absolutely detest it. One woman said of the Trilogy ‘I loathe every frame of it.’ One critic said ‘These films make Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis.’ …other people come up to me and say ‘I’ve seen my life on screen.’

—Terence Davies

Having seen the man speak in person at the premiere screening in Chicago for The Deep Blue Sea (2012), Terence Davies is impressive in every respect, passionate and extremely personal, revealing a sharp wit with healthy doses of acid humor, polite, well-schooled and continuously thoughtful, taking his time carefully choosing his words, where every uttered word feels as if it’s been reflected upon at great length. The overriding impression that comes across in person is his blunt honesty, where he doesn’t refrain from speaking his mind, where there’s an unadulterated force behind his raspy voice, often quoting from Shakespeare or other poets to emphasize particular points, which are perfectly superimposed into his own thoughts and reflections. He speaks with compassion about others, especially his beloved mother, and freely admits in his relationship with the church that it’s easier for him to remain celibate these days, like a high priest, something he mentioned several times. Upon reflection, however, this may as well be the theme of this early film, having condemned the Catholic Church for their dangerously hypocritical stand on gay issues, professing their love for anyone that’s gay so long as they don’t act upon their sexual inclinations, as all homosexual acts are considered a sin. While the Davies of today is comfortable speaking openly about gay issues, this wasn’t the case in his youth, where he had to remain closeted and extremely repressed, where he was taught all his sexual yearnings would send him straight to Hell, instilling a fear of God into his understanding of himself, literally hating himself as only Catholics can do, feeling he deserved punishment for his misplaced sexual feelings. Living a life of torment is the subject of this film, where three short films are integrated into a whole, from childhood, middle age, to imagining his own death, a painful and brutally honest account of his own life.

Born in Liverpool right at the end of World War II, the youngest of 10 children in a working class family, he was a painfully shy and studious child that was raised Catholic by a deeply religious mother and an alcoholic and abusive father. After working as an office clerk for about ten years, he entered the Coventry School of Drama at age 26, where by 30, with the financial help of the BFI Production Board, he wrote the script and directed a 43-minute short film CHILDREN (1976). Afterwards, he attended the National Film School where the 30-minute MADONNA AND CHILD (1980) was his graduation film. Three years later, again with the help of the BFI, he completed the 23-minute short DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION (1983). These three films, all with the same Robert Tucker protagonist (played by Phillip Mawdsley, Terry O’Sullivan and Wilfrid Brambell), comprise THE TERENCE DAVIES TRILOGY (1984), a feature-length film that won the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 1984 Locarno International Film Festival. Shot on 16 mm in Black and White by William Diver and blown up to 35 mm, these films have a rougher edge and lack the sophisticated lyricism of his later masterworks Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). All reflect a unique style of near documentary “memory realism,” where the story is not advanced by dialogue, but through flashbacks intruding upon thoughts and reflections. Loosely connected vignettes are interrupted by memories or fantasy, where the dramatic power is often obtained by the juxtaposition of one stark reality with another equally powerful image, where the contrast can be shattering. Davies also intercuts music or songs, which add their own sense of nostalgia and emotional realism, where they become time capsules of a specific era. Thematically, the films examine sexual and emotional repression, Catholic guilt, a lifetime of instilled fear, death and the associative grief, and the accumulated effect of disillusionment with the Catholic Church, leading to a lifelong sense of outrage and indignation, yet all somehow buried and kept locked in the closet.

Driven by the church to fear his homosexual inclinations, he attends a strict all-boys Catholic school where he is regularly bullied and beaten by older boys, called “a fruit” by his classmates, only to then be bullied again by the teachers who demand strict adherence to discipline. The emotionally severe demeanor of the nuns is equally forbidding, always shot in dark shadows where we never see their faces, only an admonishing tone of disapproval in their voices, all driving this poor kid into a world of complete isolation. At home he has to listen to his father’s brutal attacks on his mother, seen burying his head in his pillow, actually wishing his father were dead. When his father unexpectedly dies a short time later, he is profoundly conflicted, afraid of his own thoughts, as if he was somehow to blame in the eyes of God, sending him into a rush of uncontrollable despair. Later seen in middle age, he has the look of defeat painted on his face, seen crying in the opening sequence of MADONNA, where gone is that childlike naiveté. Robert literally takes the Ferry Cross the Mersey (with no accompanying song by Gerry and the Pacemakers) to get to and from work each day, where this section concerns itself with being a dutiful son, still living at home with his mother, while secretly attempting to address his own sexual needs, heard by his mother creeping out the door at night as he makes the midnight rounds of gay clubs and public lavatories, where a wordless pick-up in a public urinal is the closest he can come to companionship. In one of the most scathing scenes of the film, a mix of the sacred and the profane, the camera pans the inside of an empty church while Robert’s voice can be heard pleading with a tattoo artist for sexual services, where it’s hard to tell if this is really happening or if it’s all playing out just in his imagination. We see more cuts to various S&M gay sex acts while he sits bored at his desk at work, or even sitting with his mother sipping tea. At church, when he goes to confession, he reports every manner of banal infraction, remaining silent on his real sins. It is this second section that delves most deeply into the film’s overall themes, where the anguishing guilt associated with homosexual fantasies leaves him even further isolated and repressed, trapped in an all encompassing depression, where he has a nightmare of his own death, seeing himself laid out in a coffin receiving a priest’s eulogy, awakening with a bloodcurdling scream of fear. Davies uses the image of Robert on a boat crossing the River Mersey as one in an infinite line of dead souls that Charon ferries into the mythical underworld.

The final sequence opens in the most extraordinary fashion, showing the kind of poetic imagination we associate with this director, where we hear the comforting sounds of Doris Day while Robert attends his mother’s funeral, It All Depends On You - Doris Day [The Terence Davies Trilogy] YouTube (2:04), which end up being reflections of Robert as an old man who is a stroke victim now lying near death in a hospital bed. This chilling lead-up to his own death recalls Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1931) when the ghost-like protagonist sees himself lying in a coffin as it’s driven to the cemetery where he cognizantly witnesses his own funeral. As in the previous segment, these nightmarish dreams of death intrude into his waking state as well, where his sad and dreary existence seems like he’s stuck in a hellish purgatory forever paying penitence for his sins. As the hospital nurses all but ignore their patients, calling them honey or other terms of affection, while never for a moment sitting down and actually taking the time to talk to them, so all they have left is to look back upon their lives and become lost in a flood of their own memories, shown in an impressionistic stream of flashback vignettes. As the nurses decorate a Christmas tree Robert recalls being an angel with a halo, dressed in white with angel’s wings for a child nativity play. As he remembers fearing the harsh rigidity of the nuns in Catholic school as a boy, he is once more surrounded by nuns caring for him in the final stages of his life, still wracked with guilt over his unmentionable sexual thoughts, haunted by his fractured relationship with the church as his thoughts often turn to God. Davies refuses to spare the audience any comfort when it comes to death, as he literally rubs our noses in it, showing himself breathing heavily in a death rattle, wheezing and gasping for breath, haunting sounds and images that when combined couldn’t be more chilling, as the reality of the inevitable seizes the viewer with a gripping intensity. Davies narrates his final thoughts to rarely depicted images, where death never felt so frighteningly unappealing, exclaiming “When the light goes out, God dies,” seen as the night nurse makes her midnight rounds in the dark with a flashlight, stopping and sitting with him until the screen turns to white.

The Terence Davies Trilogy | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The first three films of Terence Davies—Children (1974), Madonna and Child (1980), and Death and Transfiguration (1983)—make up an 85-minute semiautobiographical trilogy about a Catholic working-class Liverpudlian named Robert Tucker, who's seen as a victimized schoolboy, a closeted middle-aged homosexual, and an 80-year-old dying in a hospital. The emotional power of Davies's subsequent great symphonic works (Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes) is already present, as are the dry wit and visual mastery, though in terms of range and technical means these short films remain sketchy chamber pieces by comparison.

User reviews from imdb Author: scotsexile from United Kingdom

This has to be one of British cinemas unsung masterpieces. In three parts equating to childhood manhood and old age it painstakingly delineates the details of a very ordinary life. Filmed in B/W it has a documentary feel to it and its Liverpool setting is indeed bleak. The main character is based on the life of the writer of the film Terence Davies and as such is autobiography as catharsis and confession. He is gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England and the stifling effects of his strict catholic upbringing only serve to deepen his guilt. It is a bleak story with some stark and terrifying imagery. Wilfrid Bramble aka Steptoe plays Daveies as the old man brilliantly. The deathbed scene and the way it is shot stay in the mind for ages. So with no light relief why see this? I can only say that it has a humanity and insight that are rare in cinema. He is in the same league as Loach and Leigh.

The Terence Davies Trilogy - International Film Festival Rotterdam ...

In the first three autobiographically inspired short films by Terence Davies, we see the development of his unique poetic talent. A rich variegation of scenes from a human life, shaped by Catholicism and homosexuality, which have not lost anything of their power and ability to move.

'Originally there were three medium-length films (Children, Madonna and Child, Death and Transfiguration), all of which had the same protagonist, Robert Tucker, and followed him from childhood to death, illustrating a lifetime struggle between Robert's (homo-) sexuality and his Catholicism and family background. Terence Davies (1945, Liverpool) has now edited all three into a feature-length film in which the original three parts have become three acts of a continuing drama. For those in need of a filmic reference, the Davies Trilogy resembles the trilogy by Bill Douglas (My Childhood, My Ain Folk, and My Way Home). Davies has stripped his fragmented narrative to the barest essentials: the way the light falls through a window to light a room and the character sitting in it, a glance, an obliquely heard half-phrase, the tones in which a name is pronounced, all provide more needed information than dialogue (of which there is a minimum). The sudden understanding shock of sexual self-discovery when the young Robert sees the water running over the body of an older boy in a school shower room has never been captured so accurately (and economically) on screen before. The film is not a happy one (films about repression never are) but it is terrifyingly moving.' (David Overbey, 1984)

Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents [Michal Oleszczyk]

"The Terence Davies Trilogy" is a work of such profound sadness and despair that watching it has to result in either obliteration or catharsis (unless it provokes a walk-out). Six years in the making, the three black-and-white shorts took their time oozing from Davies' personal experience and one can see the growing assurance of their director's hand. "Children" (1976) try out things in a tentative way, "Madonna and Child" (1980) solidify them into a steady mode of expression and "Death and Transfiguration" (1983) present a mature, stunningly poetic cinematic voice. Now that the three movies are only shown spliced together (and became available on a Region 2 DVD released by British Film Institute), one can see the emergence of Davies' techniques and savor what remains his most direct and devastating work to date.

Brutally autobiographical, "The Trilogy..." channels Davies' own experiences of growing up Catholic and gay in post-war working class Liverpool: a child to a protective mother and a volatile sadist of a dad. The sad and abused kid turns into a ghoulish adult overcome with sexual and religious guilt, living a life that is best described as a one long, barely repressed sob. Even though the specifics (as well as the main character's name) differ from movie to movie and will further morph in Davies' subsequent features, the solid core of unprocessed guilt is on clear display at all times. These are movies about a man growing up to hate himself to the back-beat of pious incantations of God's everlasting love. What makes this portrayal of total self-hatred even more poignant, is that "The Trilogy..." covers its character's entire lifespan (including a grueling post-stroke death Davies admittedly abhorred and imagined for himself in the final installment). Davies tells a story of a man who never comes to terms with his homosexuality and, to paraphrase the final sentence of Henry James' "Washington Square," willfully locks himself into a closet - for life, as it were.

The way the films are made, the plot events not so much progress as come to the surface - albeit fleetingly. Past, present and future are jumbled together and presented in a free-associative way that seems natural and inevitable thanks to superb editing. Davies switches from his alter ego's youth to middle and old ages, presenting his life as a hall of mirrors with a running theme of guilt and desperation. The movies may have been produced in 1976 and later, but they take place in a reality that never registered Stonewall. Tucker (as Davies' stand-in is called in two of the films) is stuck as much in his dead-end job as he is in his closet. All of his sexual encounters take place in seedy clubs, S/M joints and public toilets. His face seems pummeled in, his eyes lack all spark and his mouth remains sculpted into a perpetual grimace of anguish. There's not even a hint at a possibility of a different life for him - not because Davies doesn't believe in it as a matter of principle, but because it doesn't dawn on this particular character at this particular time and place. (As Julian Barnes' wrote in his brilliant "The Sense of an Ending," commenting on the main character's forced chastity: "You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country").

Even though he will ultimately direct a superb adaptation of Edith Wharon's "The House of Mirth" many years after finishing "The Trilogy...," there's not a novelistic bone in Davies' body. His movies are never put together in terms of elegant story arcs or even straightforward narrative progression. As a director, Davies is all about juxtapositions - both in terms of editing and overlaying images with seemingly incongruent sound. The power of the "Trilogy..." lays in how boldly Davies employs those means in order to convey his character's state of mind - as well as nature of memory itself. Moments of son's affection towards his mother morph into clandestine sexual encounters with smirking, tattooed hunks; a man on his deathbed seems to be visited by his younger self running late to school; a childhood memory of a glowing Christmas tree clashes with images of a nighttime hospital ward: a place not so much haunted as downright inhabited by death.

In what counts as the "Trilogy"'s most shocking sequence, Davies employs all his strategies at once: slowly gliding camera scrutinizes the splendor of an empty Catholic church, Bruckner's majestic "Mass in E-minor" plays on the soundtrack, while Tucker is making a telephone call to a back-alley tattooist in vain hope of having his genitals adorned with one of his works. The obscene and vulgar language of the conversation alone makes for a startling contrast with the sacred interior - what's even more blasphemous is the fact that this sexually motivated bargaining is in fact a kind of Tucker's heartfelt prayer ("Please say you'll do it... Please...").

According to Catholic church's teachings, all homosexual acts are sinful - it's only the condition of being homosexual that's not. Hate the sin, love the sinner, et cetera. "The Terence Davies Trilogy," among other things that it does, shows just how this very logic pushes an individual to misplace sexual fulfillment and perceive it only in terms of punishment and transgression. The reason Tucker doesn't form a loving relationship with another man isn't that Davies denies him one in order to stay as miserabilist as he can. It's the logic of the religion Tucker adheres to that forbids him any expression of sexual longing. What Davies actually shows is Catholic teachings about homosexuality followed to their logical conclusion: a life of solitude and longing that will never go away and will forever seem a form of torment - not a promise - to the one who experiences it.

In fact, Tucker desires another man even on his deathbed, extending his arms towards a vision of a bare-chested, muscular angel. This may be the boldest of all Davies' suggestions: that for this repressed man, whose life has been destroyed by a cheerfully inculcated message of self-hatred, afterlife alone can provide another man's loving (and guilt-free) embrace.

Only the Cinema [Ed Howard]

Cinelogue [Jonathan Henderson]

The Terence Davies Trilogy | DVD Video Review | Film @ The ... Gary Couzens

Children (1976) Annette Kuhn from BFI Screen Online, also: Show full synopsis

Madonna and Child (1980) Annette Kuhn from BFI Screen Online, also: Show full synopsis

Death and Transfiguration (1983) Annette Kuhn from BFI Screen Online, also: Show full synopsis

The Inner Light of Terence Davies - The New York Review of B J. Hoberman from The New York Review of Books, March 23, 2012

Exploring the melancholy early work of Terence Davies / The Dis Sam Adams from The Dissolve, October 11, 2013

Average shot lengths in the films of Terence Davies | Research into ... Nick Redfern from Research Into Film

The Terence Davies Trilogy | Drew Hunt The Talking Pictures

BFI Filmstore British & Irish Film & TV

• View topic - Terence Davies - CriterionForum.org film discussion forum, May 2, 2008

The Terence Davies Trilogy - Film4

The Terence Davies Trilogy Geoff Andrew from Time Out London, also seen here: The Terence Davies Trilogy | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out

DVD review: The Terence Davies Trilogy/The Long Day Closes ... Phelim O’Neill from The Guardian

The Terence Davies Collection - DVDBeaver.com Gary W. Tooze

Terence Davis Trilogy BFI Children (1976), Madonna and Child ... Gary W. Tooze from DVDBeaver

Terence Davies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES A 98

Great Britain (87 mi) 1988 Distant Voices, Still Lives Trailer - Video Dailymotion (2:54)

The water is wide, I cannot get o'er
And neither have I wings to fly.
O go and get me some little boat,
To carry o'er my true love and I.

A-down in the meadows the other day
A-gath'ring flow'rs both fine and gay
A-gath'ring flowers, both red and blue,
I little thought what love could do.

I put my hand into one soft bush,
Thinking the sweetest flow'r to find.
I prick'd my finger to the bone
And left the sweetest flow'r alone.

I lean'd my back up against some oak,
Thinking it was a trusty tree.
But first he bended then he broke,
So did my love prove false to me.

Where love is planted, O there it grows,
It buds and blossoms like some rose;
It has a sweet and pleasant smell,
No flow'r on earth can it excel.

Must I be bound, O and she go free!
Must I love one thing that does not love me!
Why should I act such a childish part,
And love a girl that will break my heart.

There is a ship sailing on the sea,
She's loaded deep as deep can be,
But not so deep as in love I am;
I care not if I sink or swim.

O love is handsome and love is fine,
And love is charming when it is true;
As it grows older it groweth colder
And fades away like the morning dew.

B.Britten & P.Pears - O Waly, Waly - YouTube in a historic live performance (3:46)

Despite being listed in 2007 as the third greatest film in British history in Time Out’s 100 Best British Films, listed after #2, A THIRD MAN (1949) and #1, DON’T LOOK NOW (1973), or listed as the 9^th greatest film worldwide in the past 25 years in Sight and Sound’s 2002 poll of selected British critics, BFI | Sight & Sound | Modern Times, the British newspaper The Guardian calls the film "Britain's forgotten cinematic masterpiece.” Set in the 1940’s post-war working class community in Liverpool, shot in washed out sepia tones, the film resembles the experience of glancing through an old family photograph album or scrapbook, offering a glimpse of faded memories. Using a Joycean stream-of-conscious style and novelistic detail, this is an experimental, non-narrative film that works as an interactive memory play, because as the audience views what’s onscreen, simultaneously they may be lost in rhapsodic thoughts of their own. While this is a distinct period piece that is actually two films, shot using the same actors two years apart, it begins with family portraits that come to life, moving freely between various time periods, as characters go back and forth between adulthood and childhood. One focal point is a small photograph of the director’s real life father (who died when he was six) which hangs on the wall, often centered between carefully composed tableaux of portrait-like shots of the family facing the camera, a presence that remains even after they walk away. Peter Postlethwaite plays the abusive wife-and-child-beating father, shown to have a dour mood, a fierce temper and quickly changeable moods, yet his impact is enormous even as he dies early in the opening segment. His family is haunted by his absence, somehow tarnished by his wretched and miserable existence, but still a force to be reckoned with that hangs over the rest of the film like a specter of gloom.

Opening with audio cues, Distant Voices, Still Lives on Vimeo (4:39), voices are heard before the characters appear, which typifies the unusual structure of the film, as shot dissolves move from memory to memory, largely consisting of events being recalled by different family members, creating a mysterious living theater where memories come to life, often set to song, like Ella Fitzgerald singing “Taking a Chance on Love” “Distant Voices, Still Lives” « Distant Voices YouTube (2:18). Freda Dowie plays the long suffering mother, Angela Walsh the more reflective older sister Eileen, Lorraine Ashbourne the embittered younger sister Maisie (“He was a bastard and I bleedin' hated him”), while Dean Williams plays brother Tony. While the film is autobiographical, there is no one in the film who represents the filmmaker, who in real life is the youngest child of ten children. Whatever story there is consists of a funeral, three weddings, a baptism, and an extended scene in a pub where one after another different characters break out in song, like the light and breezy “Brown Skin Girl” Visual quote from Terence Davies' Distant Voices Still Lives - YouTube (1:40), but also Eileen singing the heartbreakingly poignant “I Wanna Be Around” “Distant Voices, Still Lives” « Distant Voices YouTube (2:27). Characters simply blurt out songs as they would thoughts or sentences, where this unique and distinguished style reflects a continuing inner dialogue with the audience. Davies also uses other carefully chosen pieces of music, such as Hymn to the virgin - Benjamin Britten - YouTube (3:33), Harold Darke’s rendition of what has become a British Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter” Kings College Choir, Cambridge - In the bleak ... YouTube (4:14), and the soprano section (Rebecca Evans sings soprano here, while it is Susan Bullock on the film recording) of the final movement of Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 3 (Pastoral) Finale - IV Lento YouTube (11:20).

A darker and more difficult work than The Long Day Closes (1992), much of this recalls James Joyce short story The Dead, especially the meticulous, novelistic detail of specific events being recalled by someone much later in life, where a similar effect is the startling naturalness of the memories, which evolve over time, as people may mature and find a way to live with the ghosts of the past. Much of it taking place so close after the war, the entire nation was similarly traumatized by the same events, finding it difficult to rebuild their lives on anything resembling stable footing. Davies signature move is to juxtapose moments of happiness followed immediately by incidents of brutality, where this jarring effect has a way of drawing attention to the interior worlds of the people who magically come alive onscreen. Perhaps the most stunning is a scene of the father tenderly tip-toeing into the children’s room, sleeping three in a bed, on Christmas Eve, quietly hanging their stockings before becoming consumed with rage at the next day’s Christmas dinner. Told as a series of vignettes all strung together, where movies and radio are captivating the nation, beautifully expressed here with the escapist romanticism of umbrellas in the rain while hearing “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” “Distant Voices, Still Lives” « Distant Voices YouTube (1:55), which contrasts vividly with the stark reality of a nation in ruins, where the men in particular are brutish and revoltingly short-sighted, where their shortcomings reflect a dysfunctional spirit even as they sit together and sing communally in the local pub, all displaying basic survivor’s instincts at their best as they try to maintain their resolve while collectively keeping their wits about them. A poetic evocation of courage and transcendence with an utterly celestial finale, this film celebrates the humanity often thought lost when enduring horrible tragedy, something of an homage to a nation that refused to accept the humiliation of defeat, where the scars of the past become a redemptive and transformative agent of recovery.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Richard Dewes]

Terence Davies drew heavily on his own childhood in this highly original, devastatingly emotional study of the lives of a working-class Liverpool family, centring around the death and funeral of the father and the marriage of his daughter. There is little plot, the film being composed instead of innumerable short scenes, fragments of daily life which blend together into a seamless collage of experience.

Illustrating the intense conflict and unhappiness the young Davies felt at the time, the film often contrasts scenes of starkly incompatible emotional content - as when the father tiptoes with incredible tenderness into his childrens' bedroom to hang up their stockings, only to break down in impotent rage at the Christmas dinner table. Throughout the film, the sentimental love-songs of the soundtrack counterpoint the strained, often violent family ties; but far from being depressing, the film is a celebration of the trascendent power of love and is amongst the most moving and involving pictures ever made.

Distant Voices, Still Lives | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver, April 19, 2007

Few British film-makers have dared to attempt such a thoroughly poetic treatment of their native land, and Terence Davies is the only one to have succeeded so spectacularly. This re-issue of his 1988 debut feature is not only a disinterring of what is arguably the high point of postwar British art cinema, but is also testament to what we have lost, cinematically speaking, in the intervening period. There's simply no way a film like this could be made now. Davies casts an unapologetically myth-making eye over his own adolescence in wartime Liverpool, forging primal drama out of father-son conflicts, sisterly solidarity and maternal fortitude. But what really sets his film apart is the stunning power of the images Davies conjures up. Long, stately shots combine with impassioned performances to create a visual tour de force unmatched elsewhere in British cinema. It almost feels like a Sickert painting come to life. Davies, of course, has a few visual tricks up his sleeve not available to the painter, and certain sequences - such as two workmen's slow-motion plunge through a glass roof - achieve a sensuousness that is simply remarkable. Davies' subsequent stop-start output is a cautionary tale, perhaps, of the difficulties of maintaining a career as a working film-maker if you're consumed with a particular creative vision, but I'll say it again: this film is a masterpiece.

Distant Voices, Still Lives | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule review)

It's hard to say what Terence Davies's powerful masterpiece is about—growing up in a working-class family in Liverpool in the 40s and 50s—without making it sound familiar and lugubrious. In fact, this beautiful memoir, conceivably one of the greatest of all English films, is so startling and original that we may not have the vocabulary to do it justice. Organized achronologically, so that events are perceived more in terms of emotional continuity than of narrative progression, the film concentrates on family events like weddings and funerals and on songs sung at parties and the local pub. It's clear that Davies's childhood, which was lorded over by a brutal and tyrannical father, was not an easy one, yet the delight shown and conveyed by the well-known songs makes the experience of this film cathartic and hopeful as well as sorrowful and tragic. (There are some wonderful laughs as well.) Much of the film emphasizes the bonds between the women in the family and their female friends, although there's nothing doctrinal or polemical about its vision, and the purity and intensity of its emotional thrust are such that all the characters are treated with passion and understanding. The sense of the periods depicted—ranging from the blitz to a mid-50s screening of Love Is a Many Splendored Thing at the Futurist Cinema—is both precise and luminous. With Freda Dowie, Pete Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh, Dean Williams, and Lorraine Ashbourne; winner of the International Critics' Prize at the 1988 Cannes film festival.

Time Out Dave Calhoun

Superlatives are in short supply to describe the emotional power of Terence Davies’ fractured chronicle of the life of a working-class family in 1940s and ’50s Liverpool. Drawing on his own childhood, Davies turns his film on the pivot of a brutal patriarch’s death and his daughter’s subsequent marriage, so splitting his film into two episodes (which he filmed a year apart). The first, ‘Distant Voices’, is a set of difficult memories of childhood fear and wartime suffering that drift in and out of the wedding day, while its companion, ‘Still Lives’, portrays the life of a happier widow, her two daughters, a son and their friends who gather in pubs, sing and are beginning to suffer their own marriages. Pete Postlethwaite is Tommy Davies, the violent, damaged and taciturn father; Freda Dowie is Mrs Davies, his stoic wife and the suffering lynchpin of the family; and Angela Walsh is Eileen, the daughter whose marriage blows a gust of fresh air into the stale misery of her family but also threatens to follow the same tragic pattern as her parents.

Davies’ storytelling is a unique joy. Images evoke family photos and the struggle of recollection. Voices drift in and out, suggestive of family ghosts and inner demons. Chronology is poetic, and memories are filtered after the event like the film’s washed-out colour palette. The writer-director offers a terrifying tension between the public solidarity of pub sing-a-longs, marriage celebrations and mourning and the private horror of domestic abuse, depression and personal dreams sought and destroyed. The men are the most flawed, but the women, though the heroines of the piece, are compromised too: ‘Why did you marry him, mam?’ asks a daughter. ‘He was nice. He was a good dancer…’ It’s a heartbreaking work. Its cast are phenomenal; its songs flow through the film like blood; and Davies is unflinching in his hunt for truth and full of nothing but love and understanding for his characters. A masterpiece.

BFI Screen Online Annette Kuhn, also including: Show full synopsis

Terence Davies's debut feature is actually two films, made two years apart. With the same cast and setting, and an effective matching of image and mood, Distant Voices and Still Lives work together to make a highly resonant feature which continues to mine the rich biographical seam explored in Davies's earlier Trilogy.

The experiments in 'memory-realism' honed in the earlier works are extended and brought to fruition in a highly distinctive marriage of style and content. Distant Voices, Still Lives combines the social concerns of much British cinema (in this case, life in a working-class Liverpool Catholic family) with formal and existential preoccupations more readily associated with European art cinema: an emphasis on the personal and on sexual or religious themes, for example, as well as narrative ambiguity and a distinctive visual style.

But far from being a gratuitous stylistic flourish, the film's 'poetry of the ordinary' is grounded in, and dictated by, its subject matter. Composed largely of events and situations recalled by different family members, Distant Voices, Still Lives is about memory itself, and through its organisation of sounds and images enacts the very process of remembering. Especially distinctive features of the film include the mixture of standpoints from which events are recalled, the vignettish character of the memory-stories, and references to popular songs, popular culture, religious iconography and religious music. Film critic Derek Malcolm aptly described it as "a musical version of Coronation Street directed by Robert Bresson, with additional dialogue by Sigmund Freud and Tommy Handley."

The film's authentic feel derives not from naturalism, nor even from realism in any ordinary sense. Rather, it contrives to convey the emotion, the 'structure of feeling', that attaches to memory. The narration, like memory itself, is cyclical, repetitive, ambiguous, suggesting, as Martin Hunt puts it, an "ambivalent, interrogative, contradictory and ultimately unresolved" relation to the past. The film's refusal of nostalgia is underscored by the brownish, bleached-out, hand-tinted look of its colour palette, and by startling juxtapositions of memories of happiness and brutality.

Distant Voices, Still Lives captures, from the inside, what it feels like to live (or rather to remember living) in a particular kind of family and in a certain class setting - a way of life some might say is now lost. Whether or not this is so, the film effectively conveys a very particular set of experiences in a way that is universally recognisable.

Distant Lives, Still Voices Fernando F. Croce from Slant magazine

Not the least among its achievements, Terence Davies's wondrous Distant Voices, Still Lives offers a crystallization of the appeal of the musical. An odd linkage, to be sure, since the genre's trademark studio boisterousness would seem a world away from the kitchen-sink dreariness of the director's mood piece about his years growing up with his working-class family in post-WWII Liverpool, dominated by his abusive ogre of a father. Yet Davies transcends the facile trap of misery-porn by tapping into the basic notion that could make musicals so enlivening—music as direct expression, music as emotion felt. Cinema is the most unashamedly emotional of arts, and the musical feeds in no small part on repressed, frustrated sensations, the better to explode them with bursts of melodious bravura; what are musical numbers, after all, if not lyrically stylized declarations of feelings that could not be expressed any other way?

In genre terms, Davies's opening "number" consists of a languid, almost ghostly tracking shot through an empty, dark-greenish living room as "I Get The Blues When It Rains" fills the air, dissolving then to a medium shot of the main characters in funeral blacks: Mother (Freda Dowie) and her grown children, Eileen (Angela Walsh), Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), and Tony (Dean Williams). Posed frontally in a spare, doleful tableau, they suggest figures in a faded family album, and, indeed, the role of memory is intensely connected to the director's use of music. Songs from Davies's childhood flood the soundtrack, and throughout the film there is the feeling that each snippet heard is braided to an emotion biographically experienced and ripped, still bleeding, out of the past. When "Taking A Chance On Love" is heard while Mother sits on a windowsill polishing the glass from the outside, the lovely specificity of the moment becomes incantatory, the earthbound plainness turned as awesomely lyrical as the flashiest of Stanley Donen's showstoppers.

Incarcerated in an all-too-real world, however, Davies's characters are unable to swim into the Technicolor glories of their fantasies the way Vincente Minnelli's or Tsai Ming-liang's can. Davies cuts from the kids watching Mother by the window to her being brutally beaten by Father (Pete Postlethwaite) yet lets the same piece of music play as he shifts from a fondly recalled moment to a traumatic one. The obvious point of reference would be the sardonic bitterness of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, though Potter's irony is completely alien to Davies. In fact, the two artists' approaches could not be more different from each other; whereas Potter sees the lies of pop culture in the chasm separating idealized fantasy and cruel realities, Davies finds in it the possibility for salvation.

No MGM glitz pierces through the film's barrage of cramped interiors, bombing shelters and abuse, yet it is through music that the characters' souls reach heavenward, even as their feet remain grounded in soot. To them, the very act of enjoying or actively performing a song constitutes defiant ecstasy, a moment of revolt against the crushing oppression all around them. Locked in the brig for briefly going AWOL to confront his father, Tony pulls out a harmonica and plays the theme from Limelight; feeling a continuation of her family's patriarchal tyranny in her own marriage, Eileen rebelliously sings "I Want To Be Around To Pick Up The Pieces" in response to her domineering husband's orders. In both cases, Davies displays a profound understanding of how art can liberate people from sorrow.

Davies's film is an act of exorcism, but also one of redemption. "I make films to come to terms with my family history," the director has said. "If there had been no suffering, there would have been no films." Distant Voices, Still Lives is a far darker work than The Long Day Closes, Davies's luminous 1992 follow-up, where he could freely, lyrically recall the burgeoning awareness of his homosexuality, his joy for cinema, or, simply, the stupefying play of light on a carpet; as Armond White superbly put it, the difference between the two films is the difference between "memories Davies can't get rid of and memories he won't let go."

The filmmaker actually shot the film as two deliberately contrasting halves, each made with a different crew over a two-year phase; Distant Voices peeks through pale-sepia tones while Still Lives abounds in ominous-ethereal fades to white just as painterly stillness alternates with gliding camera movement. The title may imply the stagnation of oppressed lives, yet the picture's lasting impression is one of concentrated, purified motion, of images poetically triggering images, and, above all, of waves of feeling flowing from screen to audience and back. Never ignoring the characters' pain as the family dissolves in the course of the film, Davies brings to their gatherings a heartfelt sense of emotional community struggling with the inescapable passage of time.

Although Davies has stated that in filmmaking he has worked out his reasons for rejecting his early Catholicism, Distant Voices, Still Lives remains one of the most profoundly spiritual films in recent decades. Davies's utter faith is in human emotion, rendered through popular art; late-'40s tunes, enriched over the years with the expressive personal connections they have come to carry, are no less sacred than the baptismal liturgy that welcomes Maisei's infant into this world. "Buttons And Bows" performed at a wedding reception, the crowd at the pub warbling "Bye Bye Blackbird" as the night comes to a close: These are instances of feeling distilled to its essence, as if Davies took the musicals he loved so much growing up and zeroed in onto the tremulous heartbeats. Time, joy, and family are transitory, yet Davies knows that the camera's ability to capture them borders on the divine. I can think of few more moving expressions of this than the sublime ascending crane from the huddled umbrellas outside a theater that dissolves into a gentle pan over the rapt, weeping faces of the audience inside. From rain to tears, and set to the strains of the Love Is A Many Splendored-Thing score, Davies exults cinema's transformative powers past, present, and future.

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES - JonathanRosenbaum.com August 18, 1989

Still Lives Distant Voices - Film (Movie) Plot and ... - Film Reference G.C. Macnab

The Art of Memory Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

Cinelogue [Jonathan Henderson]

Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear: Distant Voices, Still Lives Nathanael Hood

Distant Voices, Still Lives Ric Burke from Film for the Soul

film is love.: Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies, 1988)

Chris Dashiell - Cinescene

Bina007 Movie Reviews

Febriblog

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Amber Wilkinson

What a Feeling! [Robert Horton]

Close-Up Film [Peter Fraser]

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Terrence Davies hosts 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' and 'The Long Day ... PR Web

Time Out’s 100 Best British Films Listed as #3

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Ten Best Lists, 1980s Best Films of the 1980’s, January 6, 2010

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Top Ten Lists 1974-2006 #1 Film in 1989

Bigmouth strikes again Simon Hattenstone feature and interview the director from The Guardian, October 19, 2006

Terence Davies: interview Wally Hammond interview from Time Out, October 6, 2008

BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael

LFF - Terence Davies presents 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' Sarah Cohen from Time Out London, October 23, 2006

Guardian/Observer

Bittersweet symphony Beryl Bainbridge from The Guardian, April 20, 2007

Distant Voices, Still Lives: No 21 Steve Rose from the Guardian, October 19, 2010

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Review/Film; 'Distant Voices, Still Lives,' a ... - New York Times Vincent Canby, August 13, 1989

Distant Voices, Still Lives - Movies - New York Times Vincent Canby, September 29, 1989

DVDBeaver [[Gary Tooze]

Distant Voices, Still Lives: Information from Answers.com

Distant Voices, Still Lives - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Videos for "Distant Voices, Still Lives"

THE LONG DAY CLOSES A 96

Great Britain (85 mi) 1992

No star is o'er the lake,
Its pale watch keeping,
The moon is half awake,
Through gray mists creeping,
The last red leaves fall round
The porch of roses,
The clock hath ceased to sound,
The long day closes.

Sit by the silent hearth
In calm endeavour,
To count the sounds of mirth,
Now dumb for ever.
Heed not how hope believes
And fate disposes:
Shadow is round the eaves,
The long day closes.

The lighted windows dim
Are fading slowly.
The fire that was so trim
Now quivers lowly.
Go to the dreamless bed
Where grief reposes;
Thy book of toil is read,
The long day closes.

—Henry Fothergill Chorley and Arthur Sullivan, 1868, The Long Day Closes by Arthur Sullivan 2008 Prom ... The King Singers at Royal Albert Hall (2008) on YouTube (4:21)

A heartbreakingly beautiful work, a memory play turned musical theater, where this impressionistic, Joycean stream-of-conscious Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man piece is unlike anything else you’ll see, though J. Hoberman from The Village Voice called it a “Proustian musical,” it is a follow up to the director’s earlier autobiographical work, DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (1988), the difference being that this is a few years after the death of his father, whose absence allows a wistful happiness. While it is a family portrait of a distinct period in time in the director’s childhood, namely the mid 1950’s in Liverpool, shown as still life painting over the opening credits, it has an experimental feel, as there’s no real narrative to speak of, while nearly every scene is accompanied by either a TV, movie, or musical reference. The camerawork by Michael Coulter, however, is near unforgettable, where the transitions between shots, visual and audio are spectacular. One could easily mistake this for a Michael Powell film, as the meticulous art design is so perfectly rendered, but the yearning, atmospheric mood is all Terence Davies. While something of a nostalgia piece, the film is more complex, mostly shot in the gloom of the everpresent rain, with 11-year old Bud (Leigh McCormack) staring listlessly out the window, the film reflects his inner thoughts and is a tribute to his recollections. What’s surprising about this film is how much of it is an audio experience, reflective of an era when so many listened to the radio, when this experience was literally a post-war national pastime. It’s no accident that even in pubs today one of Britain’s most unique traditions are its own citizens singing popular songs in unison, where seemingly everyone knows the words.

As the film moves along with elegant dissolves from shot to shot, song to song, sequence to sequence, the audience is following along the interconnected, interior thoughts of Bud, where the screen is aglow with a cinematic visualization of his imagination, literally using 35 different pieces of original music, some in their entirety, where the film received a 10-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes in 1992. Jam packed with movie references, seen here on IMDb: connections, Davies uses various songs like time capsules, or personal markers in his life, where we hear opera singers Isobel Buchanan Ae Fond Kiss from The Long Day Closes - YouTube (3:32) or Kathleen Ferrier Blow The Wind Southerly by Kathleen Ferrier 南の ... YouTube (2:23), but also Judy Garland from MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944) Judy Garland - Over the Bannister (Meet Me in St. Louis ... - Youtube (1:15) and Doris Day from LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME (1955) Doris Day - At Sundown - YouTube (1:44) singing popular songs from movies. In one of the more beautiful sequences, his family poses for a WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954) picture postcard, where people are constantly in motion, and even though they’re all sitting inside, snow continually falls behind them. The imaginings of things past have such a haunting immediacy that the film recalls the inner segment of the recent magisterial Terrence Malick work THE TREE OF LIFE (2011), where both blend visual poetry with personal intimacy.

What also stands out is what a perfectly behaved and obedient child Bud is, a Mama’s boy who idolized his mother (Marjorie Yates, a member of London’s Royal Shakespeare Company), often seen holding hands or sitting in her lap as she sings to him, a guy who follows all the rules and does everything he’s supposed to do, yet begins to have second thoughts early in life about the rigidity of Catholicism, where the church shows an extreme intolerance and inflexibility for homosexuality, at odds with his own budding sexual nature. Rather than receiving a reward for his efforts of devout obedience, the scriptures all but leave him in eternal damnation. Is it any wonder he would turn to the movies and popular songs for personal refuge? The evidence of conformity in British life is stunning, where in school or in church they are all expected to play by the rules, as if there’s something to be gained from that. But there’s no evidence of any reward, nor is there any sign of the insolence and rebellious disobedience seen in American films that suggest a cultural break with the past. Instead in Davies dreamy but orderly world, being smart, respectful, and polite creates a certain inner harmony, the perfection of which is not matched by the bleak world outside where it’s constantly raining, where young men are sent off to war, and where Catholic boys fall in love with Protestants on the road to both becoming atheists.

Davies remarkably demonstrates how each of the various social institutions from school, church, home, pub, and theater shaped and changed his life, actually framing his consciousness, where the ingenious way of introducing each sequence is like showcasing a new Broadway number with music, lighting, and elaborate camera movements, with brief pauses between sequences, shot in a sepia tone, where the colors are washed out. Using snippets of an instantly recognizable Orson Welles narration from THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), itself a modern exercise in nostalgia, “Back then they had time for everything,” Davies shows how the combining forces of art illustrate the power of the past as a living and breathing force in our lives. While the movie is not chronologically ordered, it makes sense if one can imagine how the mind can travel from thought to thought, often on emotional impulse, where perhaps the most remarkable scene of the movie is set to Debbie Reynold’s rendition of Tammy: The Long Day Closes with Debbie Reynolds' Tammy YouTube (3:51), an extended overhead tracking shot where the constantly inquisitive camera passes Bud alone at home before moving to a crowded movie theater, to a packed church, dissolving into a classroom with an amusing snippet from KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949), coming full circle before the camera finds its way back to where it started, as if its gone all the way around the world where poor Bud is once more isolated and alone, much like he spent a good deal of his childhood. Davies has a way of bookending his film, where the elegiac opening song lyric “the music of the years gone by” from Stardust - Nat King Cole - YouTube (3:16) seems to match the lamenting tone of the gloriously lyric final sequence, The Long Day Closes (1992) Closing Sequence (4:18), a part song bringing a high minded sense of seriousness to a setting from an earlier epoch.

The Long Day Closes - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Juliet Clark

“The music of the years gone by”: with Nat “King” Cole singing “Stardust” while the camera slowly moves past tattered movie posters and down a dim studio street, Davies ushers us gently, lovingly into another world. This is a land of music and shadows and light, also known as 1956 Liverpool, where an eleven-year-old boy gazes through windows and dreams of pictures. The Long Day Closes maps some of the same autobiographical terrain as Davies’s earlier films (although here the family is a happy nest of feminine warmth, without a father’s troubling presence). But the subject of the film is not so much the events of a life as the drama of consciousness. Tableaux flow one into another, theater, church, and schoolroom all part of the same interior landscape. Tracking the passage of time with sun crossing a battered carpet, making the moon gleam through clouds like a projector beam through cigarette smoke, Davies unites the textures of cinema with those of memory.

Time Out [Geoff Andrews]

Like Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies' final autobiographical film rings wholly true, due to the richness and the rightness of the allusions he makes through sets, costumes, dialogue, music, radio and cinema itself. Such is Davies' artistry that he shapes his material (an impressionistic series of brief, plotless scenes recalled from 1955-6, when he was about to leave junior school) into a poignant vision of a paradise lost. While economic constraints, school bullies, religious terror and barely-felt sexual longing are present, the accent is on the warmth 11-year-old 'Bud' receives from his family and neighbours. Indeed, it's primarily about the small, innocent but very real joys of being alive, recreated with great skill and never smothered by sentimentality. The stately camera movements; the tableaux-like compositions; the evocative use of music and movie dialogue; the dreamy dissolves and lighting - all make this a movie which takes place in its young protagonist's mind. Beautifully poetic, never contrived or precious, the film dazzles with its stylistic confidence, emotional honesty, terrific wit and all-round audacity.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Rob Christopher

In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson describes Davies' masterpiece as "a poem to ordinary bliss ... [it] is about a state of being, a kind of paradise, despite the rain, the harsh circumstances, and the cramped tenement house ... Nothing happens, yet lives and a time have been opened up and gently restored, as in a tender anatomy lesson." The lives are those of a lonely schoolboy, Bud, who takes solace in the local moviehouse, and his tight-knit family. The time is post-WWII—not a span of specific years, but an atmosphere that goes beyond time. There's no story, exactly, only the progression of a mood as it unfolds. The camera glides through this mood with infinite slowness, as if afraid to disturb anything, exactly the way your memory works when you're replaying a life-changing moment in your head. Yet, moment-to-moment, the film is bursting with a vibrancy that goes beyond mere memory. It's exhilaration so simple and pure that it's almost mysterious. (1992, 85 min, new 35mm print) 

The Long Day Closes | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule)

The 1992 conclusion of Terence Davies's second autobiographical trilogy may not achieve the sublime heights of parts one and two (which comprised 1988's Distant Voices, Still Lives), but it's still a powerful film, possibly even a great one—the sort of work that can renew one's faith in movies. Part three chronicles his life in working-class Liverpool between the ages of 7 and 11, a period he compresses into the years 1955 and 1956, but Davies focuses less on plot or memory as they're usually understood than on the memory of emotions and subjective consciousness. Music, lighting, elaborate camera movements, and the sound tracks of other films are among the tools he uses in relation to the basic settings of home, street, school, church, pub, and movie theater. Davies emphasizes the continuities and discontinuities between these places and the emotions they evoke, creating a consistent sense of religious illumination and transfiguration. What he does with the strains of “Tammy” in one climactic sequence and with the drift of moving clouds in another are alone worth the price of admission.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Richard Dewes]

This film, the sequel to Distant Voices, Still Lives, takes up the story of director Terence Davies' childhood in 1956, a few years after the death of his father. Compared to the earlier film, it is a much lighter, more optimistic work (one need only contrast the Hollywood-fantasy Christmas dinner with the analogous scene in Distant Voices), but still Bud, Davies' alter ego, is a lonely child, isolated in a fantasy world constructed out of popular songs, snatches of movie dialogue and faintly homoerotic Catholic iconography.

The style of the film is a fascinating blend between an unwavering naturalism in the performances, and a suggestively unreal stylisation in much of the mise-en-scene, as when church becomes cinema in a memorable overhead tracking shot. These allegorical leaps allow the film to escape the confines of strictly historical and autobiographical authenticity, and attain a near-mythological universality - this is the childhood not just of Terence Davies, but of anyone who has ever sat in a cinema, anyone who has ever dreamed.

The Long Day Closes Cinema Arts Centre

After creating his acclaimed autobiographical first feature film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Terence Davies returned to his past for the even more brilliant The Long Day Closes. Davies’ lyrical hymn to childhood focuses on his own memories of growing up in a working-class Catholic family in Liverpool. Eleven-year-old Bud (a heartbreaking performance from Leigh McCormack) finds escape from the greyness of ’50s Britain through trips to the cinema and in the warmth of family life. Composed of the details and small moments that make up a life—a mother’s favorite song sung softly to herself; a hot cup of cocoa on a cold rainy night; a family get-together; or a joyful trip to the cinema—the film is infused with a sense of contentment occasionally darkened by the shadow of sadness. The youngest in a large family, Bud often can’t be part of his siblings’ activities and, at a new school, is just starting to face conflicts and realizations that will bring him into his own adulthood. Davies’ muted colors, austere camera movements, painterly still lifes, snatches of dialogue and ripe, eclectic soundtrack—containing everything from Mahler to popular songs to traditional melodies to slivers of soundtracks from The Magnificent Ambersons and Great Expectations—are meticulously crafted into a sublime evocation of the imprint of time and place on one man. According to the director, “the film is a story of paradise, but the story of a paradise that’s already being lost and will only survive as a memory.” 

The Long Day Closes | Green Left Weekly Wayne Ruscoe

"Between my father dying when I was seven and leaving primary school, those years were just so happy I was almost sick with happiness", says writer/director Terence Davies of the period of his life that is documented in his latest film.

As in the earlier, award-winning Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies' own childhood reminiscences form the "plot" of this evocative and visually lush homage to England in the '50s. Freed from a brutish father, the young Davies discovers the magic of the cinema, puzzles over life's many mysteries and miseries, discovers his nascent sexuality and starts to step out into a world that was previously hidden from him.

The problem for this reviewer is that life in mid-'50s Liverpool is not something that I can easily relate to. Frankly, it looks grim and boring, and, sadly, lacking any redeeming charm.

Davies gives us a view that is not unlike the sickly sweetness of the musical Oliver; an unrealistic slice of a world best forgotten. Anglophiles will probably love this buried treasure from the time before TV, and, I suspect, the more precious critics will rave about its honesty and detail. But really, nothing happens of great consequence, nothing is learnt, nothing is received of value. It's rather like smelling camphor and being reminded of the odour of the closet your grannie used to look you in when you'd been a naughty child. A vivid memory for sure, but one that can be lived with out.

Still, it is a beautifully shot film, the work of a crew who have laboured to reproduce exactly the child's view of his environment. The soundtrack too, is rich with resonances of the post-war days of little England, the last days of the music hall and the wireless radio. Songs such as "Me and My Shadow", "Stardust" and the gorgeous Debbie Reynolds' version of "Tammy" float through the ether wistfully; Mahler's Symphony No. 10 mawkishly tugs at the audiences heart strings; and Davies' mother, compellingly played by former Shakespearean actor Marjorie Yates, lullabies us with "She moves through the fair".

The full effect of sound and light together is spellbinding. This is a masterful piece of film making. You will believe you are in Liverpool. You will believe it is 1956. You will believe it is raining. But you will want to be somewhere else.

Davies has said that this will be last of his autobiographical pieces, and after five shots at the genre it is definitely time for him to move on. Clearly, he is a director of considerable talent and his skill in bringing out the best in his actors can well be seen in The Long Day Closes, but he is, in this film, very much marking time. So you had a gloomy chilhood, Terence. Get over it, man. Get another life.

Flicks - January 2005 Chris Dashiell from CineScene

Popular songs are often used in films as mood- establishing interludes. The main action of the film, with characters and plot and dialogue, is punctuated by wordless sequences in which a song highlights the events or feelings occurring in the story. In Terence Davies' elegiac tone poem about a lonely 11-year-old boy in 1950s London, this technique is reversed. The song sequences take center stage, while the story, such as it is, appears only in hints and glimpses on the edge of the canvas. The result is one of the most beautiful, and eccentric, portraits of childhood on film.

Gradually, without being told, we discern that the boy, Bud (Leigh McCormack), lives with his mother and older siblings in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods. He attends Catholic church, is bullied by both teachers and peers at school, and takes refuge in the sounds and images he absorbs at the cinema. As the youngest in the family, he looks on -- much of the time in silence -- as his family socializes with friends and relatives, his brothers go on dates with girls, his sisters put on makeup and talk about boys, and his mother sings to herself while doing chores. He looks out of windows -- the outside world both threatening and beckoning -- as he sits in the comforting safety of home.

This is all conveyed, not by a linear narrative, but by discrete scenes done in long, often static takes, like snapshots or lightning flashes that briefly illuminate Bud's life. Ordinary aspects of his existence -- the rain pouring down in buckets, the shifting patterns of sunlight on a bedroom rug, or Bud swinging on a makeshift metal bar in front of the apartment building where he lives -- are set to the recordings of 1950s film songs by the likes of Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, and Doris Day. In the most impressive use of this device, an overhead panorama of daily life is accompanied by (of all things) Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy." The effect is both moving and disquieting -- lush American ballads suffusing the drab working class environment with the golden light of memory. For this is a memory piece -- not related as if the events were happening now, but shown as filtered through a later awareness, fragmentary, with coherence supplied only by the aid of song.

The characters sing as well: old folk songs and show tunes sung at get-togethers, "Auld Lang Syne" on New Year's Eve, a performance of Berlin's "A Couple of Swells" by Bud and his sister at a party. That most of the film's songs are from romantic movies (what are often called "women's pictures") seems significant in the light of Bud's attachment to his mother, his shy, gentle nature, and (one suspects, knowing something of Davies' biography) his later sexual identity.

It is in the nature of autobiographical films to risk self- indulgence. Davies avoids the trap by eschewing the conventions of drama altogether. Taking this radically non-narrative approach, The Long Day Closes vividly portrays the inner life of memory and desire, while at the same time allowing us to glimpse a particular place and period reflected in the mind of a boy. There is no rapid cutting -- the film moves slowly, like a gentle stream, with the graceful quality of time recaptured. The photography and muted color schemes are impeccable. This is a one-of-a-kind movie -- both formal experiment and nostalgic tribute. The ending, with the title song playing as Bud looks out at a sunset, sums up his passage from the reclusiveness of his childhood into a wider life in the world.

The Long Day Closes | REVERSEBLOG: the reverse shot blog Robbie Freeling

Is Terrence Davies the greatest living director that no one talks about? There, got your attention. This past weekend, demurely tucked away amidst the current pre-Alexanderplatz Fassbinder hoopla and the post-Imamura blow out of New York film culture, was one of the finest films of the past twenty (or whatever arbitrary number you care to add…thirty? forty?) years, Davies’s The Long Day Closes. A continuation of sorts of Davies’s acclaimed, and still non-DVD’d, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1987), which recounted the director’s traumatic remembrances of his abusive father as a period songbook of sorts, The Long Day Closes focuses exclusively on the relationship between mother and son, not quite dramatized as a series of images and whispers.

Just when you thought you’d seen all this stuff before (dramas of working-class postwar Liverpool, concerning little boys who escape from reality to the cathedral-like confines of the cinema…), Davies transforms rote movie-honed pathos into something that nearly bursts with invention and integrity. Nostalgia, undeniably. Family, cinema, music, holidays, snowfalls, school bullies? For sure. Yet it isn’t some simple “trip into the past”—it may be closer in tone to Woody Allen’s Radio Days than something like Cinema Paradiso, yet it’s more liminal and less distanced than either. The Long Day Closes is immersive, a plunge into the lingering terrors of prepubescent sexuality and the mysterious ways in which memory is concerned more with indefinable rushes of feeling than events. Threadbare as the narrative seems, Davies packs more experience in this film’s short 90 minutes than most directors do with epics of belt-widening girth.

There are seemingly no traditional transitions in the film; from scene to scene, using elegant dissolves or gorgeously distilled graphic matches, it flows from one moment to the next with intuitive nonchalance. There are no scenes, just perceptions; traces and moods rather than defining happenstance. Psychological makeup isn’t established, it’s already a given: at the film’s outset the director’s young surrogate (Leigh McCormack) is seen curiously scoping out a bit of shirtless male musculature from his window with a mix of shame and wonder, the same two emotions he will feel when sneaking peeks at those other mysteries of childhood—cinema, the church. Davies brilliantly uses McCormack as his vessel: he’s not “pensive,” not a passive observer of his family and friends so much as a slowly forming moral being; the child’s pursed lips and eagle stare don’t convey “innocence” (as in other, thuddingly banal portraits of children escaping into dreams, such as, I have to say it, Pan’s Labyrinth) but rather an actual absorbent intellect. Imagine that: kids with the capability of judgment! Davies lets his actor’s face convey this, relegating his dialogue to simple asides and repetitions, like his occasionally asking his mum for movie money.

And such lovingly infrequent dialogue—the most memorable in the film being lines from other films draped across the soundtrack, as they echo in the boy’s mind, the most exquisitely rendered being a snatch of exchange between Judy Garland and Tom Drake from Meet Me in St. Louis, played while he spies his older brother romantically commingling with a girlfriend in glass silhouette behind the front door. (There’s also some Magnificent Ambersons thrown in there, with Orson Welles’s honey-acid narration incongruously telling us of George’s comeuppance—another example of a classical family narrative providing counterpoint.) Even more beguiling are the moments in which Davies abstracts the solitude of childhood to minute drifts across patterned rugs or wallpaper, watching and waiting for the light cast by a window to change with the passing of a cloud, or, in the memorably foreboding opening, an extended glide (heavenly but resolutely earthbound) across a rain-swept street and into an alleyway, bereft of people but pregnant with time and memory.

Anyone who’s seen Davies’s The House of Mirth knows that his dreamlike and ethereal approach to memory is simply a mask for the stuff of true flesh and blood. Ultimately, when Mirth’s Lily Bart succumbs to the oppressive realities of the falsely genteel New York social codes that she had previously floated upon without care or consequence, the effect is devastating, as if a hole had opened up in the earth and swallowed her. Similarly, young McCormack is completely enveloped in darkness by film’s end (an escape? Not so fast, Guillermo Del Toro….), though the future here is undefined. Like many a David Lynch character, he wanders into an open doorway and disappears into a vapor, doomed (blessed?) to become a witness to his own memories played up on a silver screen, whose sun is slowly, slowly fading out.

The Long Day Closes: In His Own Good Time Criterion essay by Michael Koresky, January 28, 2014

The Long Day Closes | Reverse Shot earlier essay from Michael Koresky

Looking at The Long Day Closes photo gallery, January 27, 2014

The Long Day Closes (1992) - The Criterion Collection

BFI | Sight & Sound | Sound And The Fury: Terence Davies David Thomson from Sight and Sound, April 2007, also seen here: Sound And The Fury: Terence Davies

Jonathan Rosenbaum July 30, 1993

intellectual writings on film Samiracle

Remembering the Future: Terence Davies and the Paradoxes of Time Wendy Everett from Film Studies, Winter 2006 (pdf)

The Long Day Closes / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

The Long Day Closes | DVD Video Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Songs for my mother « Things left undone Matt

Mark O'Hara

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Long Day Closes, The Review (1992) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Terrence Davies hosts 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' and 'The Long Day ... PR Web

Dennis Schwartz

"The Long Day Closes": A great gay film that didn't make the list ... S Nicks from After Elton

The Little Wooden Boy: The Long Day Closes by Terence Davies

Straight.com Ken Eisner from Georgia Straight

The Long Day Closes : The New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule)

Movies for a desert island | Slide Show - Salon.com Matt Zoller Seitz

ReelViews [James Berardinelli] also seen here: James Berardinelli

BAMcinématek | Terence Davies

terence davies - at the walter reade theater

The Long Day Closes Music Box Theatre

The Long Day Closes - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com Mubi

Last Seat on the Right: The Long Day Closes (1992, Davies) Michal Oleszczyk 3-part audio commentary

An Interview with Britain's greatest living film Director: Terrence ... Martyn Contero interview from Scene 360, September 16, 2008

Film4 also seen here: The Long Day Closes

Variety Reviews - The Long Day Closes - Film Reviews - - Review ...

Time Out’s 100 Best British Films Listed as #72

The Long Day Closes | Film review - Film - Time Out Chicago A.A. Doud

The Long Day Closes Mark Kermode and Philip French from The Observer

DVD review: The Terence Davies Trilogy/The Long Day Closes ... Phelim O’Neill from The Guardian

Terence Davies This Weekend at the Aero - Page 1 - Film+TV - Los ... Doug Cummings from The LA Times, March 8, 2012

Movie Review - The Long Day Closes - Review/Film; Turning a ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W Tooze]

The Long Day Closes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Long Day Closes (song) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE NEON BIBLE

Great Britain (91 mi) 1995 ‘Scope

The Neon Bible Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

This adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's novel returns to the concerns of Terence Davies' acclaimed autobiographical work: the joys and agonies of family life; the onset of adulthood; the oppressive hypocrisy of organised religion. Here, however, instead of Liverpool, the setting is small-town Georgia in the '40s: life is quiet for young Tierney, son of struggling farmer Leary and hyper-sensitive Scarwid, until the sudden and not entirely unwelcome arrival of his aunt (Rowlands), a has-been but eternally optimistic nightclub singer whose devil-may-care ways sit awkwardly with the town's conservatism. Though the writer/director is working abroad and telling a linear story, it's immediately apparent - from the measured pacing, the immaculate compositions and elegant camera movements, the audacious ellipses and the inspired use of music - that this is a hallmarked Davies film. As such, it is extraordinarily moving, notably in a simple, underplayed death scene. Gena Rowlands' performance is a marvel of subtle nuances.

The Neon Bible Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader

After showing himself a master at juggling autobiographical material in Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, both dealing with his childhood in Liverpool during the 50s, Terence Davies adapts a novel by John Kennedy Toole about growing up in the rural deep south in the late 30s and 40s—and it's remarkable how persuasively he handles this milieu while making it wholly his own. Two substantial assists are provided by Gena Rowlands (starring as the narrator-hero's disreputable aunt, a onetime torch singer) and the 'Scope format, both of which boost some of the mythological possibilities in the material. Davies's special gifts as a filmmaker have much more to do with expressing and sculpting passages of pure feeling than with telling a story. Diana Scarwid, as the hero's fragile mother, is almost as good as Rowlands (both actresses sing in this movie, and Davies turns their songs into incandescent experiences). Neither Toole's novel nor Davies's faithful version of it adds up to anything more than a period mood piece, but some of the passages in this movie are so beautiful and potent that you may carry the moods around with you for weeks. With Jacob Tierney, Denis Leary, and Leo Burmester.

The Neon Bible Mike D’Angelo

Terence Davies is something of an acquired taste. I thought his first feature, Distant Voices/Still Lives, one of the most tedious movies I'd ever seen; when I finally got around to seeing The Long Day Closes, his second feature, many years later, I was entranced, despite the fact that it really isn't any kind of significant departure from the one I'd loathed. I think that if I'd seen then in the opposite order, my opinion of them would similarly have reversed, because the key to my appreciation the second time around was the knowledge that nothing much is going to happen in a Davies film...at least, nothing in the way of narrative. The Neon Bible, by comparison, is positively fraught with incident -- there's even a murder, by god -- but it's shot in the usual Davies fashion, concerned less with 'what happens next' than with the juxtaposition of sound and image, and the dynamics of motion. A Davies film can almost be plotted, like a map; the camera, rather than any linear notion of time, propels the viewer forward, or backward, or to the left or right, up, down, and so forth. Davies' films are almost entirely about mood, and if you forget about plot and simply allow yourself to be transported, you're in for a hell of a ride (albeit a slow, leisurely ride -- when the film was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1995, Davies remarked that he'd have loved to have directed Speed, "but if I did Speed it'd just be one car moving very slowly, and then eventually it'd leave frame and you'd just be looking at a field or something"). In fact -- and here's something I complain about very infrequently -- this adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's precocious novel really has too much plot to be truly satisfying; there are moments of such narrative import that they effectively break the spell Davies has created. There are also moments in which Davies tries to push the spell too far, such as one in which Diana Scarwid sings "Tura-lura-lura" (I'm sure I just mangled the spelling -- somebody mail me the real one) for approximately sixteen years. On the other hand, Gena Rowlands is in it, so what're you waiting for?

The Tech (MIT) [Stephen Brophy]

It would be great to report that The Neon Bible is not only worth seeing but also a satisfying movie experience, but unfortunately, only the first statement is true. Terence Davies' latest film looks as ravishing as Distant Voices, Still Lives, or The Long Day Closes, and it uses musical cues to evoke the past as well as any of his previous works. But he is not telling his own story here, and the story he has leaves a lot to be desired.

The novel on which The Neon Bible is based is a juvenile work of John Kennedy Toole, the eccentric Louisiana author noted for posthumously winning the Pulitzer Prize for literature eight years after committing suicide. He won for A Confederacy of Dunces, a work which was rejected by one publisher after another during its author's life but is now considered to be a major comic masterpiece. His mother succeeded in getting the book published after his death, and the rest is history.

Toole wrote The Neon Bible when he was 16 years old; it would probably never have seen print without the bizarre and phenomenal success of his later work. It concerns David, a boy growing up in the rural South in the years surrounding World War II. The narrative is framed by the nighttime musing on a train of this boy about events in his past. It develops that he is running from that past and his participation in it.

Davies works as much of his magic as he can on the material he has been given and is generously assisted by his actors. Denis Leary and Diana Scarwid play David's parents, poverty-stricken and unable to support each other, even with the revival-tent religion they both cling desperately to. Into their lives like an exotic night bird flies Aunt Mae, played by Gena Rowlands, who becomes David's closest friend and the final straw in the battle that has become his parent's lives.

Aunt Mae used to be a nightclub singer, and she still wears flamboyant clothes and strikes one defiant pose after another. Her washed-out sister and denim-clad brother-in-law can't deal with her citified ways and fear mightily what the neighbors might think. Everybody is supposed to be the same in the Bible Belt - those who are different have got to get out.

Gena Rowlands delivers a complete Aunt Mae, one who flirts with her seven-year-old nephew, feeds his imagination, and is willing to abandon him to further her career. She can be cocky one second and humiliated the next and is believable every step of the way. Leary and Scarwid also develop well the inconsistencies of their characters. David is competently played by two actors, Drake Bell for the scenes when he is seven, and Jacob Tierney for his teenage scenes.

Davies creates some intensely beautiful set pieces, as one would expect given his previous work. Watch for the town women singing "Chatanooga Choo-Choo" while their men are off being soldiers and for a schoolhouse recital of the Pledge of Allegiance while Tara's Theme from "Gone With the Wind" swells in the background. The torch-lit tent revival half-way through the story simultaneously allures and frightens. If it weren't for the absurdity of the climax and its lack of relevance to all that has gone before, The Neon Bible could be highly recommended. Too bad.

AssociatedContent.com [Stephen O. Murray]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Dennis Schwartz

Movie Martyr [Jeremy Heilman]

Film Scouts Reviews: Neon Bible, The Henri Béhar

The Seventh Art [Just Another Film Buff]

Movie Magazine International [Mary Weems]

Steve Rhodes

FireBlade DVD Review [Jerry Stratton]

filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]

TV Guide

Austin Chronicle [Steve Davis]

San Francisco Examiner [Barry Walters]

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

Los Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH A- 93

Great Britain France Germany USA (140 mi) 2000 ‘Scope

The House of Mirth Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader

“If she slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on a slightly lower level.” Edith Wharton's encapsulation of the narrative form of her tragic (and sexy) 1905 novel, describing the progressive defeat of socialite Lily Bart by the ugly indifference of Wharton's own leisure class, is given an extra touch of Catholic doom in Terence Davies's passionate, scrupulous, and personal adaptation, which to a surprising degree preserves the moral complexity of most of the major characters. It's regrettable if understandable that the Jewishness of social climber Sim Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia) is no longer an issue, and Lawrence Selden, Lily's confidant, is somewhat softened by a miscast Eric Stoltz, but the cast as a whole is astonishing—especially Gillian Anderson as Lily and Dan Aykroyd in his finest performance to date. Davies feels and understands the story thoroughly, giving it a raw emotional immediacy that would be unthinkable in the shopper-friendly adaptations of Merchant-Ivory and their imitators, and the film's feeling for decor and costumes, derived from both John Singer Sargent paintings and Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, is exquisite. With Terry Kinney, Laura Linney, Elizabeth McGovern, and Eleanor Bron. 140 min.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

"A girl must, a man if he chooses," laments turn-of-the-century New York socialite Gillian Anderson in The House Of Mirth, neatly encapsulating the tragic dilemma of being independent-minded in a world governed by stifling social mores. Writer-director Terence Davies' sumptuously detailed and quietly devastating adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel courts inevitable comparisons to Martin Scorsese's masterful version of Wharton's The Age Of Innocence. But in some ways, the two directors couldn't be more different: Davies, best known for his hermetic and rigidly controlled autobiographical "montage" films The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives, opens up to delicately muted emotions, but he could never hope to match Scorsese's intense, unrequited passions. Still, both are equally skilled at evoking those upper-crust corridors of power, the ornate drawing rooms and dinner parties which are always abuzz with coded language and polite viciousness. Unskilled in the "vocation of marriage" practiced by other single women, Anderson has a reputation for being on the hunt, but she scares off potential suitors with her brash demeanor and unladylike habits, particularly her weakness for gambling. Living off the tenuous allowance of her forbidding aunt, she needs a wealthy husband to secure her elite status, but she's undone by an illicit affair with lawyer Eric Stoltz, conniving vipers like her "friend" Laura Linney, and men (Dan Aykroyd, Anthony LaPaglia) who propose devil's bargains. Further burdened by an uncanny knack for poor timing, she begins a steep, inexorable drop down the social ladder, skipping rungs on her way to the bottom. Thawed just slightly from the cool monotone she perfected on The X-Files, Anderson creates a multi-layered character whose impulses make her at least partially culpable in her own demise, but who also holds herself to a nobler set of moral standards. Without the aid of a voiceover like Joanne Woodward's in The Age Of Innocence, Davies does an astonishing job of translating Anderson's subtle violations of draconian rules so they make sense to a contemporary audience. Following Wharton's lead, Davies presents a point of view that's relentlessly downcast and bleak but far from staid, with sharp digressions into a brutal comedy of manners. Meticulously detailed and beautifully performed, The House Of Mirth may be branded conventional by Davies' standards, but it's an assured and welcome change of pace.

The House of Mirth Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

In Terrence Davies' The House of Mirth, Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson) is repeatedly tested with a series of marriage proposals, but it's clear that her heart lies with the handsome Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz), whose poverty more or less proves difficult for the avaricious woman to ignore. When she loses a considerable amount of money at cards, she turns to Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd) for help. Even though Lily refuses to have an affair with him in order to erase her debt, Gus nonetheless lends her the money but only on the condition that she will pay him back. Now penniless, she returns to Sim Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia), whose marriage proposal she once rejected (or put off, as she begs to differ). In one devastating swoop, Lily's dignity is completely ravaged and she becomes painfully aware of the consequences of her indiscretions.

Besides his remarkable ability to render a profound sense of past in all his films, Davies can uncannily map out the emotions of his characters via his mise-en-scène. Born to a working class family in Liverpool, Davies is clearly worshipful of his heroine, a woman whose ravenous desire to fit into her money-hungry New York milieu is at once pathetic and devastating. Not unlike Chopin's heroine from The Awakening, Lily is uncomfortably lost in time. What with its prophetic and languorous tone, The House of Mirth most resembles Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives. A lesser director may have romanticized the woman's tragic downfall; instead, Davies holds her as equally responsible for her fall as the parasites she considers her friends. Davies' dour direction befits Edith Wharton's cynical subject matter, which feels as fresh and relevant today as it did when it was written in 1905.

One particularly ravishing pan in the film moves from a clock on a mantle and across a room full of furniture recently covered in white sheets. From there the camera glides across lush outdoor greenery and over a small brook. From the bright circles emanating from the sun-drenched water, the gentle swell of the camera gorgeously evokes Lily's psychical and emotional trajectory from her New York home to the European retreat that triggers her downfall. Anderson, picked for the role because she reminded Davies of a Singer Sargent heroine, recalls Rossetti's figure from the painting Beata Beatrix, while her actual attitude brings to mind William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience. Hunt was very much obsessed with social mores and, like Davies, his use of light and composition played an integral role in his aesthetic universe. Both Hunt's painting and Davies' film are hauntingly hung up on heroines possessed and suffocated not only by the people around them but the actual physical space they inhabit.

BFI | Sight & Sound | The House of Mirth (2000) Kevin Jackson from Sight and Sound, November 2000

New York, 1905-7. Lily Bart, a young lady of slender means, arrives in New York and meets her friend Lawrence Selden, a bookish bachelor, who invites her to his flat. Leaving, Lily is spotted by rich businessman Sim Rosedale. Staying at the country retreat of friends Judy and Gus Trenor, Lily woos the wealthy but boring Percy Gryce, but he rejects her advances on learning of her gambling debts. Later, she and Lawrence kiss, although they skirt the issue of marriage. When staying at the country house of her aunt, Mrs Peniston, who pays her a modest allowance, Lily purchases letters which reveal that Lawrence had an affair with married socialite Bertha. On hearing of her money difficulties, Gus Trenor offers to invest Lily's savings, and introduces her to Rosedale, whose offer of marriage she refuses. Later, after he reveals he used his own money to augment her savings, Gus makes a move on Lily, which she angrily rejects. Gus then demands she pay back the money he invested for her.

Facing mounting debts, Lily joins Bertha and her husband George on vacation in Monte Carlo, not realising that Bertha is using her as a shield for an affair. Bertha then accuses her of seducing George. Outcast by her circle, left only a small sum when her aunt dies, and unwilling to use the incriminating letters to tarnish Bertha, Lily falls down the social scale, from secretary to drudgery in a milliner's to unemployment and chloral addiction. Bertha visits Selden and throws his letters into the fire. Using a loan from Rosedale to pay off her debt to Trenor, Lily takes a lethal dose of chloral; Selden - having retrieved the letters from the fire - discovers her body.

Review

"The world is vile," murmurs one of Lily Bart's few loyal allies, Carry Fisher, as she reflects sadly on the cruel stupidity with which their social circle has cast out and is gradually destroying her young friend. In Edith Wharton's novel, it is Lily herself who speaks the line, but writer-director Terence Davies is wise to have changed it: it resonates in his film as a grimly impartial summing-up, not as the personal grievance of a lady who has run out of luck. For the world of The House of Mirth is indeed largely vile, one in which the unprincipled and vigorously hypocritical, like Gus Trenor and Bertha Dorset, tend to triumph while the idealistic (Lily grows braver, less venal and more magnanimous as her worldly fortunes fail) are branded as immoral and ruined, unless cushioned, like Lily's lover Selden, by enough money and the appropriate chromosomes.

This beady-eyed view of the early 20th-century's nouveaux riches (a rather different tribe from the Old New Yorkers of The Age of Innocence, but no less savage at heart) was Wharton's own, and Davies has preserved its astringent spirit in bringing it to the screen. It's rare that a period film, however seriously intended, doesn't fall at least half in love with its fancy frocks and immaculate crockery, but The House of Mirth is quite different. Though handsomely designed (by Don Taylor) and lovingly shot (by Remi Adefarasin) - there's one dissolve, from pellets of rain lashing the surface of a cold pond to the softly glowing waters of the Mediterranean, that's almost excessively gorgeous - it never loses sight of the fact that the pretty graces of this world are also, as it were, the trophies of barbarism.

Wharton was keenly interested in the writings of her contemporary Thorstein Veblen, the first sociologist to make the insolent comparison between the leisure classes and ancient warrior hordes; Veblen, one suspects, would have appreciated the unbeglamoured eye of Davies' film. Indeed, far from diluting the remorseless quality of Wharton's social tragedy with the familiar backward-glancing nostalgia of most costume pieces, Davies has, if anything, accentuated its melancholy.

A modest budget no doubt played the decisive part in having Lily walk on to the screen alone at the beginning of the film, rather than weaving her way through the afternoon crush of Grand Central, but the effect is more than apt: the image of Lily emerging from a cloud of railway steam evokes Anna Karenina, and hints proleptically at her sticky end. And when we arrive at that sticky end, Davies certainly out-does Wharton in bleakness: where the novel's heroine drifts off into a more or less accidental drugged sleep and the soothing fantasy of nursing a child, the film terminates in unambiguous suicide.

As with Davies' trilogy of autobiographical short films, there are sequences in The House of Mirth (the misleading title, taken from the Old Testament, was applied by newspapers to an insurance scandal of 1905) so gloomy they border on the excruciating; as in those shorts, the redemptive qualities here are eloquence, precision and grace. If Gillian Anderson's first scenes bear the inescapable trace of her role in The X Files, she rapidly sheds it. Apart from her un-Lily-like inability to pronounce French words appropriately, she is not merely plausible but exceptionally powerful, and she makes Lily's final self-lacerating encounter with Selden horribly real.

Anderson more than vindicates Davies' idiosyncratic casting decision (as, in a different register, does Dan Aykroyd, whose smug violence as Trenor is miles away from anything he's shown on screen before), and lends both sympathy and dignity to a character who could too easily provoke - as she sometimes appears to provoke even in Edith Wharton - impatience and scorn. Fine as she is, though, the film's finest quality is its typically quiet attentiveness to tone of voice, posture, nuances of facial expression - Anderson proves herself a grand mistress of that most elusive look, the crestfallen. It's a remarkable, if sometimes harrowing adaptation: beautifully intelligent, intelligently beautiful.

The Magnificent Anderson: The House of Mirth | Senses of Cinema Kent Jones, June 2001

Reverse Shot [Jeff Reichert] Summer 2009

Best of the Decade #20: The House of Mirth | Reverse Shot Michael Koresky

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

The House of Mirth - World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

AboutFilm.Com - The House of Mirth (2000) Carlo Cavagna

PopMatters F.L. Carr

Dan Lybarger - Nitrate Online

The House of Mirth (Best of the 21st Century?) « Wonders in the Dark Sam Juliano

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

Nor a thorn nor a threat... - Cinescene Chris Dashiell

A Sinking Lily Bart and Her Unforgiving Circle | The New York ... Andrew Sarris

The House of Mirth - Culture Vulture Arthur Lazere

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH - DVD - Film Freak Central Walter Chaw

The Crop Duster [Robert Horton]

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Slate [David Edelstein]

Movie Vault [Vadim Rizov]

Flak Magazine Stephanie Kuenn

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH - Hybrid Magazine Roxanne Bogucka

Xiibaro Reviews: The Mexican, The House of Mirth, The Last Resort ... David Perry

No chuckles in 'The House of Mirth' - CNN Paul Tatara

The House of Mirth | Film Blather Eugene Novikov

JamesBowman.net | House of Mirth, The

SPLICEDwire | "The House of Mirth" review (2000) Rob Blackwelder

The House of Mirth - Isthmus | The Daily Page Kent Williams

Exclaim! [James Luscombe]

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young)

HOUSE OF MIRTH, THE - Film Journal International Wendy Weinstein

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

Dennis Schwartz

Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz

The House of Mirth (2000) - Cinescene Jeffrey S. Wettig

Jam! Movies

eFilmCritic Reviews iF magazine

Harvey S. Karten

DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky

The House of Mirth : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Gil Jawetz

Guide To Current DVD: House Of Mirth

About.com Home Video/DVD [Ivana Redwine]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

TalkTalk also seen here: The House Of Mirth review

Laura Clifford

Robin Clifford

Steve Rhodes

UTK Daily Beacon [Ryan Freeman]

The Movie Report/Mr. Brown's Movie Site [Michael Dequina]

Epinions Review By Dan Ray, For The House Of Mirth

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Elizabeth McGovern Webpage - Review

Christopher Null also seen here: filmcritic.com cracks smile in House of Mirth

Jon Popick also seen here: Planet Sick-Boy

Film Comment's End of Year Critics' Poll 2001 | Filmlinc.com | Film ...

Andrew Sarris' Top Ten Lists 1958-2006 See year 2000

BBCi - Films Michael Thomson

Daylight snobbery Philip French from The Observer

Gilded rage - Boston Phoenix Scott Heller

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Death and the Maiden - Page 1 - Movies - Minneapolis - City Pages Rob Nelson

San Francisco Chronicle [Wesley Morris]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

the-house-of-mirth-2000-film - Answers.com

The House of Mirth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia book

Edith Wharton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edith Wharton's House of Mirth book review by Jonathan Wallace from The Ethical Spectacle, April 2001

OF TIME AND THE CITY A- 93

Great Britain (74 mi) 2008 site "Of Time and the City" Trailer on Vimeo

The golden moments pass, and leave no trace. —Anton Chekhov

Davies’ passionate documentary about his hometown of Liverpool, England is given a scorchingly personal view, blending superb archival footage with his own acerbic thoughts that he narrates, reading literary passages, poems, and using an exceptional musical soundtrack to punctuate his feelings. Sometimes movies have the effect of speaking to you as if you’re the only person in the room. This film has that effect. Interesting that the writers are acknowledged throughout the film, but not the many poets who are fully integrated into the Davies narrative. Do not miss the opening segment which is a marvel of invention, as the director lures us into his world Of Time and the City: A love song and a eulogy YouTube (6:28), which at least initially resembles other British war documentaries of the 40’s like Humphrey Jennings LISTEN TO BRITAIN (1942) which depict a country uniting under a common cause despite obvious social deprivation. But then we are introduced to his distinctly erudite voice, like a raspy call from beyond the grave where we hear him speak of darkness and God, as if we spend our lives learning to differentiate between the two. Davies was a devout Catholic where the ideology of the church was not so much a religion as an imposed indoctrination, an imprinted way of life from which he could not waver, where he may as well have been born into piety. But as he familiarizes himself with literary works and observes the trappings of the world failing to live up to those high standards, doubting the existence of God appears to be among the first places he started.

At times bitingly sarcastic, yet exquisitely to the point, Davies appears to be having a rollicking good time (at our expense) with his recollections from his own life, like the touch of a boy beside him, the sweaty warmth coming from the enormous bodies of male wrestlers, the sins of the flesh accompanied by a repressed society around him where homosexuality was illegal in Britain during the 50’s, recounting in humor a judge’s definitive description of horror when sentencing two male lovers, his immersion into cinema that perhaps replaced his interest in the church, his developing love of literature, and after hearing no divine call from the darkness, his descent into atheism. Davies paints a portrait of a once thriving working class city whose status is elevated by the religious overtones of John Taverner’s “The Protecting Veil.” John Tavener - The Protecting Veil - YouTube (6:48). But he also shows endless rows of graffiti-laden tenement buildings where children play amidst the brokendown rubble of cracked concrete. Davies mocks the inane immorality of such extravagant wealth spent on the British royal family while England contains some of the worst slums in all of Europe, while Peggy Lee sings to the lush, romantic tones of “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” Of Time and the City -- The Folks who Live on the Hill YouTube (3:36).

Perhaps his biggest ire is reserved for how it was all thrown away, how the beauty and splendor and grandiosity of art and architecture and the idea of a fraternal community of man was turned into images of factory workers going to work in the dirtiest, grimiest parts of town, where filth and factories were joined by housing projects and uniformly tasteless concrete monstrosities all of which rapidly decayed and in no time turned into rot and ruin, leaving behind no trace of the city he once loved. Of course, the Beatles and the Hollies were from Liverpool, where the song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” Of Time and the City -- He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother YouTube (2:37) plays to images of uniformed soldiers lined up in columns marching off to yet another war, a taunt actually to the pervasive feeling after the collective international effort of fighting a war that would end all wars when all men were considered brothers and how the song was mangled into incomprehensible sentiment by the sudden popularity of rock “n” roll which he disliked immensely (eventually leaving Liverpool in 1973), where he was driven away by pop music directly into classical where he discovered Mahler’s “every overwrought note.” Gorgeously interweaving images of everlasting immortality among those of ruin and decay, Davies uses the sublime beauty of Mahler’s 2^nd Symphony (“Resurrection”) Gustav Mahler - Urlicht - YouTube (5:08), an apocalyptic vision of the end of the world, where we hear the last faint earthly echo, the song of a nightingale, a hushed quiet before the final spiritual transcendence is transformed into a chorale of radiant glory that overwhelms and enthralls. Davies does an excellent job dealing with his own wrath, the bitter pill of being human, finding cinematic expression that reaches a lofty plateau through its own intellect and self examination, a classic cinematic essay that exalts in its timeless status.

eye WEEKLY capsule review [5/5] Jason Anderson

Much missed since 2000’s House of Mirth, British director Terence Davies is at the top of his craft with this tribute to his dirty ol’ (home) town of Liverpool, a work largely inspired by Listen to Britain, Humphrey Jennings’ immortal ode to Englishness. Caustic, rueful and profound in equal measure, Davies’ narration is a marvel of erudition, especially when he’s venting his spleen in the direction of the Queen (or Betty, as he calls her). His alternately withering and affectionate observations are accompanied by an effective montage of archival footage and newly shot images, as well as some perfectly chosen musical selections. Is it any surprise Davies hates the Beatles?

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

In his first film since 2000's The House of Mirth, Terence Davies blends found footage and ruminating sonnets in Of Time and the City, an alternately tender and caustic meditation on his native Liverpool. Commissioned to honor the city's designation as the European Capital of Culture 2008, Davies quickly shifts the film from celebratory pamphlet to first-person reverie in one of his first lines of narration: "Come closer now and see your dreams. Come closer and see mine." Modern-day Liverpool, filmed in lustrous digital video, is sleek but distinctly underpopulated; instead, it's the city from the director's childhood, invoked in a layered collage of archive images, which truly commands his attention, affection, and vitriol. Details that would find their way into Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes can be glimpsed in the montage of grim industrial sprawls, beaches, working-class tenements, movie premieres, and wrestling TV shows that inflamed the mind of a certain queer Catholic boy. Davies's deep regard for the city's prole camaraderie is matched by his disdain for the strictures of the Church and the pomp of the monarchy, a disdain oddly extended to the Beatles or, at least, to the notion of the band as Liverpool's most celebrated voice. (One could understandably take issue with the oracular crankiness of Davies's voiceover, which often makes him sound like Monty Woolley in The Man Who Came to Dinner.) Mahler, Liszt, and the Hollies are more to his liking, yet even the film's most melodic passages are tinged with the feeling of a world vanishing as it is remembered: When Peggy Lee sings "The Folks Who Live on the Hill," it is to accompany images of buildings being pulled down into dust. If its mix of rue, anger, and elation only occasionally achieves the rhapsodic, Of Time and the City never less than throbs with emotion, a reminder of what a loss Davies's absence from the screen has been.

Mary Corliss Blood on the Beach, by Richard and Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 19, 2008

In Ashes of Time, Leslie Cheung says, the root of men's problems is memory." Yet memory is the root of identity for many of us, and for some of the best films at Cannes. One of these is Terence Davies' Of Time and the City, a dreamy documentary of Davies' home town of Liverpool. Shots of working-class Liverpudlians from the '30s, '40s and '50s doing the wash, or playing with school-friends, or preparing dinner, offer a fascinating, poignant glimpse of the rhythm of ordinary life — so precious because it is so rarely seen in documentaries.

Davies has been brilliantly memorializing his Liverpool youth for a quarter century: in The Terence Davies Trilogy of short films, in Distant Voices, Still Lives (the most powerful aesthetic autobiography I know) and The Long Day Dying. His new film has elements of a memoir: of a Catholic boy discovering his love for movies and, later, his love for other men. But this is mainly a biography of a place and time: of its stately old civic monuments and, later, its soulless estates (an expression, Davies says in the narration, of "the British genius for creating the dismal"); of its residents' football mania and fondness for radio's corniest comics; of the contrast between postwar rationing and the regal excesses of Queen Elizabeth's coronation ("the Betty Windsor Show").

Davies quotes Chekhov — "The golden moments pass, and leave no trace" — but the director's entire, exemplary career has been a mission to ensure that old moments, golden or grim, will have a prominent place in the museum of our collective memory.

Excavating the Past to Set the Record Straight Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 20, 2008

CANNES, France — Memory twists and turns, peering into this and that dark corner in Wong Kar-wai’s “Ashes of Time Redux” and Terence Davies’s “Of Time and the City,” two beautiful entries at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The selections, both screened out of competition, find each director working through the past, with Mr. Wong revisiting one of his older features, the martial-arts fantasia “Ashes of Time” (originally released in 1994) and Mr. Davies returning to Liverpool, the city of his birth and the backdrop for his earlier autobiographical films, including the haunting and haunted “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988).

“Of Time and the City,” one of three movies commissioned to celebrate Liverpool’s having been chosen as Europe’s Capital of Culture in 2008, marks a welcome return to filmmaking for Mr. Davies after an interminably long eight-year absence. His magnificent adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth” died a cruel box-office death in 2000; his last film at Cannes, in 1995, “The Neon Bible,” fared as poorly. At once a symphony of the city and a memento mori, intensely site specific and yet of general interest, “Of Time and the City” seems bound for a long festival tour, having received an enthusiastic welcome after its first screening.

Mr. Davies narrates the fleet 72-minute film in a gravelly rumble that conveys as much through his delivery (arch, amused, enraged) as through his words (poetic, ruminative, elegiac). In that short, even too-short time, he ranges far and wide through both the city and its history, waxing personal and then political as he lingers at the movies (an early love), pauses in bleak homes and passes through one grim brick-lined Liverpudlian street after another, strewn with litter and busy with children. Mixing his words with quotations (from Friedrich Engels to Willem de Kooning), pop songs and classical music, he brings the past sensitively to life with black-and-white and color footage of a time long gone, both distant and still.

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

No man on earth is as pissed off as Terence Davies. Moments into this dirge-like docu-essay, he’s railing against his Liverpool Catholic upbringing, and the move out of the church into the street is no less spiked with fury.

His hometown is no panacea, simply the springboard for a blissful working-class youth ruptured by his dawning sense of homosexuality, immense poverty and the scuppering of the elegant pop culture he grew up with in the ’40s and ’50s.

The erosion of the economy and the rise of desultory public housing somehow run neck and neck with the menace of the Beatles, but this was never supposed to be methodical piece of social anthropology. Davies, whose autobiography is always front and centre in his work, has instead finally broken that fourth wall and addressed his lonely fury straight to the back of the auditorium.

As a long-time fan of the director, the film is at once dazzling and horrible: dazzling for its maker’s refusal to acknowledge the bullies who ruled his life, horrible for how much the struggle has cost him in self-esteem and isolation. Watching it is like listening to your best friend doubled up with rage on an incoherent rant: you want to comfort him but how?

Sorting out the social problems with the personal grudges is not easy with this movie and there are times you just want to get him drunk, find him a prostitute and hope things look better in the morning.

But in terms of undiluted expression of its creator’s sensibility, it’s pretty much without peer. And as awesomely unpleasant as it is it’s still pretty awesome.

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh at Toronto

Of Time and the City is an intensely personal, but also socially perceptive film by veteran director Terence Davies (The Long Day Closes, House of Mirth). Davies has made a documentary of a sort, a tribute to his native city of Liverpool, where he lived from his birth in 1945 until he left in 1973.

He has organized black-and-white photos, newsreel footage and contemporary video, beneath a soundtrack composed of classical and popular music, radio programs, oral history and his own intense narration, into a highly individual response to the culture, history and evolution of a major city.

There are many images that appear on the screen, but more than anything else, Of Time and the City evokes the Liverpool of Davies’ childhood and early adolescence. Raised a devout Catholic, the Church figures prominently in his memories. The narrator speaks of his dream of finding peace in his struggling soul, struggling with his sexuality in particular, a dream thwarted by the Church. About religion, he concludes, “It’s all a lie,” and notes that he became a “born-again atheist.”

Days at the beach (“The world was young and oh how we laughed”), football crowds and football scores on radio, radio programs with bizarre sexual double entendre (in the 1950s, when homosexuality was illegal in Britain). Narrow streets, long terraced rows of small houses. Footage from the postwar period of women carrying bundles of laundry on their heads down the street to communal laundries. Women at those wash-houses, chatting and singing, while they scrub out the dirt.

And Davies cites Friedrich Engels somewhere here, a portion of this passage from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845): “Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can.”

At an early age, Davies discovers the cinema, which replaces the ritual and splendor of the Church with its own. Gregory Peck arrives at the Ritz Theatre in Birkenhead across the river from Liverpool. “We gorged ourselves on Musicals, Westerns, and Melodramas,” the voiceover tells us.

Rightly so, the soundtrack includes “Dirty Old Town,” with its evocation of factory walls, canals and the gas works. (Although the version by The Pogues is superior to the one used in the film.)

The monarchy appears—the future Queen Elizabeth’s marriage in 1947 and her coronation in 1953. We fear the worst and even prepare ourselves for a somewhat sentimental, national-popular approach on Davies’ part. But he surprises and pleases us when he is quite unsparing on “Betty and Phil and a thousand flunkies.” He notes the vast sums “wasted on the monarchy...privileged to the last,” while the rest of the population, Davies drives home with deep feeling, “survived in some of the worst slums in Europe!”

Those slums are cleared in the 1960s and replaced with high-rise housing estates, which soon become new and perhaps more depressing dwellings. “We had hoped for paradise, we got the anus mundi [the anus of the world].” Two young girls push a stroller through a wasteland of rubble, broken glass. He refers in passing to “Municipal architecture—dispiriting at the best of times, but, when combined with the British genius for creating the dismal, makes for a cityscape that is anything but Elysian.”

Of Time and the City is unabashedly, unashamedly elegiac, so much so that it’s almost impossible to be offended. “The golden moments pass and leave no trace,” he declares, quoting Chekhov. Davies has no use for many aspects of the modern city, where “cocktails are consumed in Babylon” and well-heeled diners eat in restaurants located in “deconsecrated churches.”

The film is valuable not because of its carefully thought-through approach to history and social life. No, not at all. This is a poetic version, but genuinely felt and elegantly expressed. What Davies is largely paying tribute to, although he probably doesn’t recognize it, is the socialist working class culture that existed in cities like Liverpool into the 1970s. That “dirty old town” is gone, but so too much of the parochialism and insularity associated with it.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Of Time and the City (2008) Ryan Gilbey, November 2008

On Terence Davies' Of Time and the City - Bright Lights Film Journal Ian Johnston, February 2009

Of Time and the City | Reverse Shot Michael Koresky

Film Journey Doug Cummings

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

GreenCine Daily [Aaron Hillis]

DVD Outsider Slarek

Critic's Notebook [James Rocarols]

The Auteurs Glenn Kenny

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Of Time and the City Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Of Time and the City Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge, also shorter version here: Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Edinburgh Film Festival 2008

OhmyNews [Howard Schumann]

Film-Forward.com Michael Lee

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

Row Three [Marina Antunes]

Of Time and The City (2008): culturevulture.net - culturevulture film ... Beverly Berning

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2/4]

Filmcritic.com Movie Reviews Paul Brenner

User comments from imdb Author: Anscombe from United Kingdom

User comments from imdb Author: Martin Bradley (MOscarbradley@aol.com) from Derry, Ireland

Nerve [Adam Ford]

eFilmCritic Reviews Martin Schoo

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Val Kermode]

The New York Sun [Martin Tsai]

Of Time and City - sneersnipe film review David Perilli

Graeme Clark - The Spinning Image

Jam! Movies

Steady Diet of Film [Erin Donovan]

Of Time and The City : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Chris Neilson

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Floatation Suite [Sheila Seacroft]

Filmink Magazine Australia

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Of Time and the City - Talking Pictures Emma Farley from Talking Pictures UK

The NYC Movie Guru [Avi Offer]

Bina007 Movie Reviews

Shadows on the Wall (Rich Cline) capsule review

Daily Plastic - Festival Report [J. Robert Parks]

IFC.com [Michael Atkinson] Page 2

TotalFilm.com

Scott's Movie Comments

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Sky.com [Elliott Noble]

Phil on Film: Interview - Terence Davies Phil Concannon interview from Phil on Film, May 24, 2008

Terence Davies: interview Wally Hammond interview from Time Out London, October 6, 2008

'I like my vanity and ego rubbed occasionally' Jason Wood interview from The Guardian, October 27, 2008

Interview: Terence Davies on “Of Time and the City” – IFC Aaron Hillis interview from IFC, January 15, 2009

Cineaste Remembering Liverpool: An Interview with Terence Davies, by Leonard Quart, 2009

The Hollywood Reporter review Duane Byrge

Leslie Felperin Variety

Cannes 2008 diary: 'Of Time and the City' Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London, May 19, 2008

Of Time and the City Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun

Of Time and the City Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out ... Hank Sartin

The Times of London review Wendy Ide

Guardian/Observer

It was hailed as a great work of cinema - it made people cry Ian Jack from The Guardian, October 3, 2008

How a Prom took me on a journey to Terence Davies Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, July 29, 2009

Reel Review: Of Time and the City Xan Brooks video review from The Guardian, October 31, 2008 (2:35)

Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney]

Independent.co.uk [Anthony Quinn]

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

Critic Review for Of Time and the City on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Hartlaub]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

Remembrance of Liverpool Past Dennis Lim from The New York Times, January 9, 2009

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

Terence Davies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of Time and the City - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE DEEP BLUE SEA B+ 91

Great Britain USA (98 mi) 2012

One thing you can count on with a Terence Davies film is intelligence and impeccable taste, also a nostalgia-tinged glimpse of the face of Britain lying in ruins, still recovering from World War II. According to Davies who was present for the screening, it took until the reign of Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997 – 2007) to pay off the reconstruction post-war debt to the United States, so part of the character of the country is defined by the arduous challenge to rebuild their lives. This task of the entire nation is given a parallel story of rebuilding one’s life from the broken dreams and failed promises of love and marriage. Set in the early 50’s, the film is adapted from a 1952 play by Terence Rattigan, who typically writes about the upper class, while the director comes from a working class background, though both show a sympathetic understanding of women, especially the social restrictions that seem to confine them to a cage-like existence, where the idea of fleeing from the restrictive suffocation of a perfectly respectable marriage is the liberating theme of the film, seen as an act of bravery and foolishness in the same measure.

The audience gets a heavy dose of what to expect in the wordless opening sequence of the film, prefaced by a brief narration, a failed suicide attempt by Hester (Rachel Weisz), who closes the windows, seals the door, and turns the gas on in her rented apartment before being discovered by the landlady. Within the sequence itself, various flashbacks occur that alter the sense of time, as Davies slowly blends together the present with the past, adding bits and pieces of her stifling marriage with an older judge, William (Simon Russell Beale), who still lives with his insufferable mother (Barbara Jefford) on the grounds of their large estate. The erudite and polite conversation over tea laced with bitter and acrimonious undercurrents may remind viewers what a beautiful thing well written dialog can be, as the scene is seething with unexpressed emotion that all but consumes every last breath of air. Within minutes, Hester is confessing she’s been secretly concealing an affair, announcing her marriage is all but over, running into the arms of an RAF pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston).

While Freddie is tall and handsome, a bit of a smart aleck, boastful of his days protecting the nation from ruin, he’s also not the sort to remember important relationship details. So while it may be easy to love the guy, he’s too in love with himself, playing golf, drinking with his mates, and his devil may care nonchalance to even remember what really matters, like all that Hester has given up to be with him. Hester’s love is more than infatuation, but it’s a dramatic idealization, a kind of hopeful perfection that doesn’t exist, where despite giving her all in a passionate approach to fulfilling each other’s true desires, where sex, love, and intimacy are all intertwined, it still sends her into the depths of despair, reeling from his personal indifference, the discovery of how little she actually matters in his life. Hester is a brilliant woman, the intellectual equal to any man, including her husband and his overbearing mother, where Freddie continually avoids having to listen to her, knowing he can’t answer her reasoning. Scribbling a suicide note read in the opening, true to her own dizzying passion, her suicide attempt reflects her sense of futility both in herself and her failed ideals. But she is rescued, and then has to face those who drove her to such anguish.

Most of this entire film is shot indoors, in darkened rooms, crowded bars, entrance hallways, down long corridors, or in barely lit rooms of an old house, where the chintz wallpaper and old photographs hanging on the wall define a now forgotten time. Shot on 35 mm by Florian Hoffmeister, the dimly lit lamps in each room have a luminous beauty creating a dramatically rich interior detail. What’s perhaps most captivating about the film is the exquisite use of music, and how reflective it is of her character, including Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, Andante movement, Barber, Samuel violinc. mvt2 Andante on YouTube (9:06), played by Hillary Hahn, with its lyrical yearning and almost pleading sense of urgency. Other songs offer a unique sense of British character, such as Jo Stafford - You Belong To Me (1952) - YouTube from 1952 (3:03), where the patrons in a crowded pub sing along in unison, leading to a dance sequence with Hester and Freddie off on their own, seemingly under the spell of romance. Perhaps the shot of the film is an underground subway station, used as bomb shelters during the war, where citizens gathered to wait out the bombings overhead, which persisted for 72 consecutive nights, where a lone tenor voice leads the hushed and downbeat citizens in a sad rendition of “Molly Malone The Dubliners - Molly Malone YouTube (2:58). These songs are at the core of the film, giving voice to the inexpressible emotions of the times, which was an era of rationing and shared sacrifice, where mothers, and women in particular, had to make do with so little, where the simple idea of wanting more out of life was too radical and far too out of character with the rest of the nation’s burdensome need to carry on, beautifully capturing a key period in British life.

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

Musky with a dry wit that induces laugh-out-loud chuckles, Terence Davies’ spot-on adaptation of Terence Rattigan's brilliant 1952 theatrical stage drama, is a finely crafted gem of British post World War II malaise. The filmmakers perform no easy feat of putting the audience in the uncomfortably melancholy mind of the story's romantic leading lady. Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) is intensely intellectual, and defined by a passion that draws her away from a wealthy-but-emotionally-remote husband (Sir William Collyer—wonderfully played with tonal depth by Simon Russell Beale). Rachel Weisz keenly exposes her character’s emotional, psychological, and sexual conflicts during a time of rebuilding from war’s devastating effects. A master of creating character—in the Stanislavski sense—Weisz creates a very complex portrayal of human desire.

Hester falls passionately in love with Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), a handsome RAF pilot returning from military duty. Tom Hiddleston’s dashing Freddie finds his fiercely physical passion for Hester challenged by something she does that introduces the film’s dark melodramatic context. Rattigan’s refined dialogue bites and tears between characters we, the audience, intuitively comprehend on elemental levels. The story’s love-triangle motivates the characters’ actions of loyalty and betrayal, which necessarily arrive with equal ferocity to the physical acts that cause them. From a production standpoint the film is beautifully charged with organic elements of costume and production design to reflect the subject's post-war era. “The Deep Blue Sea” is about a very “blue” (fatalistic) young woman who makes a terrible mistake from which there is no romantic return. It’s a terrible cost. Such is the culturally loaded narrative landscape that director Davies exquisitely captures in every pulse of Terence Rattigan’s source material.

The House Next Door [Phil Coldiron]

After an 11-year absence from fiction filmmaking in which he produced only the acrid love letter to his hometown of Liverpool, Of Time and the City, Terence Davies has returned to narrative storytelling in the fluid, memorial style of his first features. Faithfully adapting Terence Rattigan's overheated romance, the effect of this mixture of high theatricality in the performances and dialogue and pure cinema in the mise-en-scène turns out to be curiously similar to Davies's blunt, distilled presentation of his own past in Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. The story, set "sometime around 1950," concerns a woman with a proclivity for suicide attempts (Rachel Weisz) who leaves her boring, wealthy husband (Simon Russell Beale) for a hotshot pilot (Tom Hiddleston), who's everything her husband isn't—a list that includes well-off, caring, or in love with her.

Davies collapses the entire first act of Rattigan's play into a wordless 10-minute sequence that sets into motion all of the personal dynamics without any expository slogging, and while the rest of the film isn't so radical, it nonetheless manages to achieve the rare feat of maintaining an unmistakably theatrical tone without ever playing as stagy in the least. Rattigan's dialogue veers between clever and tedious—a fight in a museum is hilariously stymied by Hiddleston's storming off with a shout of "I'm going to the impressionists!"; Rattigan follows this up in a reconciliation scene by having Hiddleston quip, "I only did it for the Monet"—and Weisz, Hiddleston, and Beale, all three accomplished stage actors, all bring off a balance between the small gestures of cinema and the bold ones of theater. The ghost of WWII haunts the film, materializing at two moments that prove to be its finest: a memory of community in the London Underground during an air raid that continues Davies's use of song as a key social unifier, and the final shot, a crane movement that connects Weisz, who in the circular structure has progressed from total resignation to something like hope, to a stark post-war image—an ambiguous, moving moment that could only have been achieved in cinema.

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]

The early Fifties. Chintz wallpaper. Repressed emotions. The wife of a High Court judge walks out on him for love of a younger man. But this is no conventional celebration of romance, as the suicide attempt with which the film opens should indicate. Sometimes things don't go happily ever after. Hester's husband still loves her and she cannot escape the awareness of his pain. But more devastatingly than that, her young man, Freddie, has never really seemed to care. A forgotten birthday is just the latest indication of the ease with which she slips his mind. Now she knows he is slipping away and, in the face of her helplessness, she tries to find a rational reason to stay alive.

Terrence Rattigan's powerful play has been adapted for the big screen before. The role of Hester could have been written for Vivien Leigh, yet Rachel Weisz makes it her own, delivering a powerful, raw performance that is undoubtedly Oscar material. She presents us with a woman who is sharply intelligent and acutely aware of her circumstances yet no more able to save herself because of that.

Much of the gay subtext of the play has been stripped away in this version (it's a shame to see so little of the doctor, though Karl Johnson plays him well) but in many ways this helps to bring out feminist themes that may seem more pertinent to 21st century viewers. Hester's emotional dependency on men is mirrored by her social and economic dependency, and though the subject is rarely touched upon, it's clear that she would be vulnerable on her own. She's caught at a point of social change where she is increasingly expected to take responsibility for herself yet is denied the tools to do it. The passion that she directs at Freddie seems like a surrogate for finding her own passionate connections with the world.

Unfortunately, what works wonderfully on the stage does not always translate well to the screen, and in other ways this film really suffers. The set decoration and the technical work are perfect (particular kudos should go to the sound crew) but the atmosphere is still too artificial, to a degree that feels inappropriate even in a story that sometimes takes artificiality as its subject. Too many scenes open in a contrived, awkward way that diminishes rather than enhances their impact. There are stretches of dialogue that feel leaden and some of the wittiest lines are let down by crude set-ups. Weisz works wonders with what she has and Tom Hiddleston makes a commendable effort as Freddie but struggles with the material; this ought to have been more effective than it is.

With its heroine caught between the Devil and the eponymous sea, this film finds itself caught between the art and romance crowds; it's not clear that it will fully satisfy either. There is no doubt that it has interesting things to say but its curiously old fashioned, awkward approach obfuscates them to little artistic effect. What remains is definitely worth watching if you like intelligent cinema. Still, one can't help but feel that it would have been better kept on the stage.

The Deep Blue Sea – review | Film | The Observer - The Guardian Philip French from The Observer, November 25, 2011

If we count his first three short films made on shoestring budgets between 1976 and 1983 as a trilogy, and his next, Distant Voices, Still Lives, as a diptych (they were actually made separately), Terence Davies has directed a mere seven films in 35 years. This puts him in the same exclusive league for low output and high quality as his contemporary, Terrence Malick. Davies's last film, Of Time and the City (2008), was a withering documentary about the sad decline of his hometown, Liverpool, and it followed two feature pictures adapted from American novels set at different times and in different American milieux, John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.

His outstanding new movie, The Deep Blue Sea, is a version of a play by Terence Rattigan, who died in 1977 aged 66, Davies's present age. Despite the difference in age and background (Rattigan upper middle class, home counties, Church of England; Davies working class, northern, Catholic), they have much in common: being gay, having a deep attachment to England, a sympathetic understanding of women and a stoical sense of living with and making the uncomplaining best of the hand life has dealt you. This is perhaps best expressed in Rattigan's plays The Browning Version, Separate Tables and The Deep Blue Sea, all filmed in the 1950s, but none with such love, attention and understanding as Davies brings to his present task.

Rattigan's characteristically well-made play, first staged in 1952 with Peggy Ashcroft in the lead, is set on a single day in a dingy bedsit in north London. It begins with an act of despair as Hester, 40ish estranged wife of reserved, 50ish high court judge Sir William Collyer, attempts to commit suicide (a crime in those days) by gassing herself. This action is dictated by the callously offhand behaviour of her lover, the 30ish Freddie Page, a handsome, feckless, sexually vigorous ex-Battle of Britain pilot. The play ends symmetrically beside the same fireplace, but this time the gas is lit – an unforgettably simple gesture, an act of almost heroic resignation.

Davies has skilfully reworked the play, cutting it up into a number of short scenes, beginning with a quarter of an hour almost without dialogue. This sequence first creates a lifeless early morning in a 1950 Ladbroke Grove cul-de-sac that looks a lot like the murderer John Christie's killing field at Rillington Place. A montage then establishes the frustrated life of Hester (Rachel Weisz) at home with her unresponsive husband (Simon Russell Beale), her meeting with the dashing Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), their passionate love-making and the writing of the suicide letter, which later falls into Freddie's hands with disastrous consequences.

Davies drops conventional chronology to give us moments from Hester's life such as her meetings with the overbearing mother-in-law to whom her husband is in thrall. If Sir William is the deep blue sea of the chilly but kindly British establishment, Freddie, with his passion for sport, his drinking, his devotion to fading military glory, is its devilish other face, the physically fulfilling, misogynistic philistine. There is a gay subtext in Rattigan's play, but it is subtly buried. Davies leaves it there as he directs us to observe The Deep Blue Sea as a link between Brief Encounter, which appeared just as the second world war ended, and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which supposedly introduced a new, angry, less repressed Britain in 1956. We now see in Davies's film what might have been, had Celia Johnson's character in Brief Encounter taken off with a Jimmy Porter figure, a self-loathing, insensitive narcissist. Freddie is obsessed, as Porter was, with a romantic notion of the past and the belief that there are, as Jimmy puts it, "no good, brave causes left".

Davies elicits outstanding performances from his central triangle, all sympathetic in their various ways, lacking in self-awareness and victims of sorts. Tom Hiddleston, however, has a suggestion of a hidden sensitivity as well as a bitterness that was lacking in the character as created on stage (and later played in the film) by Kenneth More and which made More so much sadder a figure. Davies also brings to the film a particular stylistic trope of his own that he developed in Distant Voices, Still Lives, the drawing together of people into a community through popular music. In the new film a group sheltering in an underground station during the blitz sing "Molly Malone" (a folk song that echoes Hester's own tragedy); later the drinkers in a packed pub raucously perform the 1952 hit "You Belong to Me", which modulates into Jo Stafford's version as Hester and Freddie dance, slowly and romantically, in the empty art deco foyer of a hotel. This is a magical moment in a movie in which Davies, his cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, production designer James Merifield and costume designer Ruth Myers masochistically capture a key period in British life, a repressed and repressive time. They coat it with the brown varnish of postwar austerity.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film review: The Deep Blue Sea (2011) Jonathan Romney, December 2011

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones]

The Power of Restraint in the Films of Terence Davies - Village Voice Karina Longworth, March 14, 2012

The Deep Blue Sea | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

2011 Toronto International Film Festival Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Nigel Andrews The Financial Times

A Deep Blue Sea Nourished With Lovers' Tears - The New York ... Rex Reed from The New York Observer

Lovers Try to Stay Above Water in The Deep Blue Sea - Village Voice Nick Pinkerton

Slant Magazine [Bill Weber]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Review: 'The Deep Blue Sea' A Beautiful ... - Blogs - indieWIRE Kevin Jagernauth

TIFF 2011: 'The Deep Blue Sea' - Toronto ... - Time Magazine Richard Corliss

REVIEW: Rachel Weisz Shines Through the Contemplative Dankness of The Deep Blue Sea Stephanie Zacharek from Movieline

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Phil on Film: Review - The Deep Blue Sea Philip Concannon

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FRR [Michael Pattison]

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Battleship Pretension [David Bax]

Combustible Celluloid Review - The Deep Blue Sea (2012 ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

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Suze Reviews [Susan Bush]

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exclaim! [Robert Bell]

David Denby: The Deep Blue Sea - The New Yorker (capsule review)

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UK. Terence Davies's "The Deep Blue Sea" David Hudson from Mubi

Interview: Terence Davies Stuart Jeffries interview with the director from The Guardian, November 23, 2011, also seen here: Terence Davies: follow your hormones

Tom Hiddleston interview Xan Brooks interview with the actor from The Guardian, November 25, 2011

Ready for your close-up, Mr Hiddleston? with Time Out Film - Time ... Dave Calhoun interviews actor Tom Hiddleston and actress Joanna Hogg from Time Out London, February 2011

Phil on Film: Interview - Terence Davies Philip Concannon interview with the director, November 25, 2011

The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]

Variety [Leslie Felperin]

The Deep Blue Sea Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun

The Deep Blue Sea – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, November 24, 2011

Catherine Shoard's Toronto review The Guardian, September 12, 2011

The Independent Geoffrey Macnab, November 25, 2011

The Deep Blue Sea Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe

Review: The Deep Blue Sea - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Michael Atkinson

'Deep' characters wallow in shallow end James Verniere from The Boston Herald

'The Deep Blue Sea' review: Rachel Weisz great Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle

The Deep Blue Sea': Hushed, deft adaptation resonates 1/2 Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

The Deep Blue Sea - Movies - New York Times A.O. Scott

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

SUNSET SONG A- 94

Great Britain Luxembourg (135 mi) 2015 ‘Scope

And out she went, though it wasn’t near kye-time yet, and wandered away over the fields; it was a cold and louring day, the sound of the sea came plain to her, as though heard in a shell, Kinraddie wilted under the greyness. In the ley field old Bod stood with his tail to the wind, his hair ruffled up by the wind, his head bent away from the smore of it. He heard her pass and gave a bit neigh, but he didn’t try to follow her, poor brute, he’s soon be over old for work. The wet fields squelched below her feet, oozing up their smell of red clay from under the sodden grasses, and up in the hills she saw the trail of the mist, great sailing shapes of it, going south on the wind into Forfar, past Laurencekirk they would sail, down the wide Howe with its sheltered glens and its late, drenched harvests, past Brechin smoking against its hill, with its ancient tower that the Pictish folk had reared, out of the Mearns, sailing and passing, sailing and passing, she minded Greek words of forgotten lessons — Nothing endures.  

And then a queer thought came to her there in the drooked fields, that nothing endured at all, nothing but the land she passed across, tossed and turned and perpetually changed below the hands of the crofter folk since the oldest of them had set the Standing Stones by the loch of Blawearie and climbed there on their holy days and saw their terraced crops ride brave in the wind and sun. Sea and sky and the folk who wrote and fought and were learned, teaching and saying and praying, they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever, you were close to it and it to you, not at a bleak remove it held you and hurt you. And she had thought to leave it all!

She walked weeping then, stricken and frightened because of that knowledge that had come on her, she could never leave it, this life of toiling days and the needs of beasts and the smoke of wood fires and the air that stung your throat so acrid, Autumn and Spring, she was bound and held as though they had prisoned her here. And her fine bit plannings!—they'd been just the dreamings of a child over toys it lacked, toys that would never content it when it heard the smore of a storm or the cry of sheep on the moors or smelt the pringling smell of a new ploughed park under the drive of a coulter. She could no more teach a school than fly, night and day she’s want to be back, for all the fine clothes and gear she might get and hold, the books and the light and learning.  

The kye were in sight then, they stood in the lithe of the freestone dyke that ebbed and flowed over the shoulder of the long ley field, and they hugged to it close from the drive of the wind, not heeding her as she came among them, the smell of their bodies foul in her face-foul and known and enduring as the land itself. Oh, she hated and loved in a breath! Even her love might hardly endure, but beside it the hate was no more than the whimpering and fear of a child that cowered from the wind in the lithe of its mother’s skirts.

—passage from Sunset Song, first of a novel trilogy known as A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 1932, A Scots Quair - Page 119 - Google Books Result

Based on the 1932 Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell, part of a collective trilogy known as A Scots Quair consisting of three novels, Sunset Song published in 1932, Cloud Howe in 1933, and Grey Granite in 1934, completed shortly before his death the following year at the age of 33. For decades afterwards his books were all but impossible to buy, though they have steadily come back into print. The first, Sunset Song (mandatory reading in Scotland), is considered the best Scottish book of all time according to a 2005 poll from The List magazine conducted in association with the Scottish Book Trust (BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Mearns classic lifts book honour), though it caused a moral scandal when it was released. While not explicit by modern standards, the book dealt openly with sexual matters in a frank manner that caused many to reject it at first, but eventually the book was embraced by the same northeast Scotland Aberdeenshire community being depicted in the novel. Mitchell’s father was an impoverished farmer who was bitterly hostile to a child’s education interfering with his livelihood, so he read everything he could get his hands on, loathed farmwork, considered it slave labor, and instead ran away from home at the age of 16 to become a young reporter. A fierce advocate of socialism, he was blacklisted by the newspaper and eventually joined the army, becoming a clerk in the RAF for nearly a decade, traveling to the Middle East, before devoting his life to writing. Drawing heavily upon his childhood, Sunset Song is a revolutionary work, a mixture of stream-of-conscience and social realism, cleverly crafted in an innovative blend of English and Scots language (while his other works are written in plain English), noted for its use of humor, politics, and worldly characterization, showing amazing insight into a woman’s mind, a deep understanding of the complexity of human behavior, and a compassion for the human race, creating one of the strongest female characters in modern literature, following her as a young 14-year old girl in a tight-knit farming community through the passing seasons, weddings, funerals, and the eventual toll of World War I, becoming a testament to Scotland’s agricultural past that was wiped out and destroyed by the war, becoming a powerful statement about waste, loss of tradition, and social deterioration in the modern world. Writing a first draft for the film in 1997, Terence Davies noted the film has languished in a kind of funding purgatory for nearly two decades following repeated rejections from funding sources, claiming “That kind of thing erodes your soul, and I almost gave up. I’m not a mainstream filmmaker and the UK Film Council was set up to try and ape Hollywood. So the climate was terrible for the type of film I wanted to make.” (News News - The Sunday Times)

Without subtitles (which would definitely enhance the experience), much of the language is missed, while initially there is an odd and peculiar style that takes some getting used to, especially the blend of artifice and searing realism, but the wrenching power is unmistakable, creating a haunting and elegiac work of ultimate devastation. Davies is a master at getting to the heart of the matter, and by the end, much like his best works Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), his poetic literacy is just stunning. Opening with a rapturous look of the golden wheatfields, the novels are set in a fictional village in “The Mearns,” a sparsely-populated area characterized by farmlands, forestry and empty hills that rise heading inland from the coast towards the peaks of the Grampian Mountains, while the film is haunted by the foreshadowing of early words spoken by the protagonist’s mother, “You’ll need to face men for yourself.” Chris, played by Agyness Deyn, English fashion model, actress and singer, is a 14-year old farmer’s daughter with a thirst for education, harboring ambitions of becoming a teacher, which is viewed as among the noblest professions. We soon recognize the dichotomy of the family, a bullying and overly pious father (Peter Mullan) and an overburdened mother (Daniela Nardini), where the father continually picks on her older brother Will (Jack Greenlees), finding him weak and fragile, singling him out for harsh punishments that include beatings, while also brutalizing his own wife with uncontrolled lust, where the prevailing view of marriage at the time, supported by religious dogma, was for women to be bound by a man’s wishes and desires, treated as little more than personal property, leaving her utterly demoralized. This was the path of righteousness in her father’s eyes, yet what they witnessed in his ruthless behavior only made them cower with fear, and in Will’s case, generated outright hatred, where he wanted to get as far away from him as he could. The merciless patriarchal behavior on display is not only disconcerting but grotesque, yet in one extraordinary shot the anguished cries coming from the bedroom lead to the protracted wailing of child delivery, reminiscent of the agonizing screams in Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972), among the most extended uncomfortable moments in film. When it’s announced that twins are born, instead of elation, it only adds to a perception of deepening misery, further exacerbated by scenes of the entire family moving to a larger countryside home in a deluge of rain, eventually settling into the Blawearie place on the fictional lands of Kinraddie. In no time, the mother poisons herself and the newborn twins after discovering she is pregnant again. Davies leaves no mistaking the brutal harshness of the conditions, rendering a faithful portrait of Scottish life dominated by men, where women silently suffer in perpetuity. Chris assumes the role of her mother, but is torn between competing versions of herself, an English Chris that loves books and wants to go to University, and a Scottish Chris that loves the land of her birth, but also develops a growing resentment at the arduousness of farming life.

Contrasting the beauty of the landscape with the violence inflicted upon one another, the film is luxuriously shot by cinematographer Michael McDonough, where the outdoors resembles painterly masterpieces hanging on museum walls, using 65mm for the lush exteriors as well as a digital camera, where the literary aspect of Chris’s inner narration offers a kind of unapologetic pastoralism that provides the guiding light of the film, “But the land was forever. It moved and changed below you, but it was forever.” Using a stylistic technique known as “memory realism,” Davies portrays everyday life with a vivid naturalism, which allows him to delve into the inner psychology of Chris, whose maturity, represented by her changing mindset, continues to advance the story. The surrounding land of Kinraddie is seen as mythical, viewed in almost utopian terms, where it is a land and tradition worth defending, even if the inhabitants remain stuck in their own backward ways, where one of the strongest impressions counteracting her father’s viciousness comes from a neighboring farmer, Chae Strachan (Ian Pirie), a strapping physical specimen whose gentle kindness always feels welcomed and appreciated. His presence throughout the film becomes synonymous for the mindset of the other farmers, where he is always viewed as a virtuous man. When her father suffers a debilitating stroke, paralyzed and bedridden afterwards, barely able to speak, totally reliant upon his daughter, yet his abusive mindset never changes, where he attempts to impose his wrath upon his daughter, with suggestions of incestuous rape. With a blasphemous justification of his lust for Chris, and his brutality towards Will, we see the destructive possibilities of his harsh, single-minded religious belief. When she ignores him afterwards, shutting him out of her life as if traumatized, it’s hard not to be sympathetic for her position, even when he dies. As if a dark cloud has been removed from hovering overhead, her demeanor changes instantly, emboldened by her own freedom, as for the first time she takes charge of her life. Inheriting the farm, as her brother ran off to Argentina, she takes an interest in one of her brother’s friends, Ewan Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie), humorously realized in a street scene where both are overwhelmed by a flock of sheep that suddenly appear in the middle of a conversation as the sheep are herded down the middle of the street. In no time at all they are married, where the meticulous nature of the extended wedding sequence is sumptuously realized, an uplifting and joyous occasion with plenty of drink, dancing, and song, where Chris drops hearts with an a Capella rendition of “The Flowers of the Forest,” a sad lament with historical roots that may as well be the Scottish National Anthem. This punctuates their marital bliss with a particularly appropriate spiritual blessing, resulting in the birth of a child, named after Ewan, where their lives, never happier, feel beautifully intertwined and in perfect harmony with the surrounding fields, whose rhapsodic harvest resembles Dovzhenko’s mythic pastoral depiction in EARTH (1930), where this brief rural idyll seamlessly evolves into poetic literary description where only the land endures, becoming “the splendour of life like a song, like the wind.”

It came on Chris how strange was the sadness of Scotland’s singing, made for the sadness of the land and sky in dark autumn evenings, the crying of men and women of the land who had seen their lives and loves sink away in the years, things wept for besides sheep-buchts, remembered at night and at twilight. The gladness and kindness had passed, lived and forgotten, it was Scotland of the mist and rain and the crying sea that made the songs.

While Chris feels relieved when her father dies, it is from him mainly that she inherits her peasant spirit, where she is drawn to the presence of the Standing Stones (Pictish stones) that dominate the landscape, relics of a pre-Christian era that connects them all to their pasts, that embody a sense of timelessness, yet whose meaning remains elusive and lost. At the onset of World War I, which is the first moment we really get a firm sense of time, there is a jingoistic spirit in the air, where Chae Strachan enlists, believing it will bring about a new socialist era, thoroughly misled by the newspapers to volunteer for the army in 1914, where those that didn’t were called cowards. Ewan has no interest in fighting, as his life is running a farm, but he’s goaded into joining the thousands of other young men sent to the European front for prolonged trench warfare, where the idea of honor and nobility becomes confused with masculinity, as his entire perspective undergoes a crude transformation, where the influence of war turns him into a ruthless savage, returning shortly after training where he is little more than a bullying beast, the spitting image of her father, coarse, brutal, and vulgar, drunk nearly the entire time, treating her horribly, where Chris needs to grab a knife to defend herself from his boorish advances, leaving again shortly afterwards for France without so much as a word from Chris. But the reality of the war is a distant event and is barely noticed in Kinraddie, yet the magnitude of its impact leaves an indelible impression, as so many men that left never returned, including Ewan Tavendale, who we learn afterwards was shot as a deserter, where there are fleeting moments that remind one of the absurdity of the military trials in Kubrick’s PATH’S OF GLORY (1957). In the aftermath, the sweeping aerial shot of the abandoned war zone is a stark reminder of those who lost their lives trapped in a vile and meaningless existence of barbed wire and mud, a kind of hell on earth that is both beautiful and appalling, yet also a chilling reminder of how a nation so willingly sacrificed their own sons in an excessive display of warmongering at the expense of human conscience and genuine humanity. A thought provoking film, where the overriding tenderness lies in the aftermath of war, punctuated by Scottish folk songs, languorous images of a timeless landscape, time-altering 365 degree pans, and dissolves between shots that make it appear people are melting into the earth and sky, where it’s hard not to be swept away by the sheer painterly beauty of the film. But the emotional intensity of the last fifteen minutes is utterly transfixing, deeply tragic and profoundly uplifting, that begins with an eloquent tracking shot following the inhabitants of the entire town, one by one, walking through the wheatfields on their way to a church memorial service, where the thunderous sounds of a mournful chorus accompany them throughout, Glasgow Phoenix Choir - 'All in the April Evening ... - YouTube (3:39), where the elegiac music becomes the unspoken sermon. But nothing is as memorable as the final outdoor memorial service, where the names of the Kinraddie men killed at war are inscribed in the Standing Stones, where a new reverend makes an impassioned speech with clear communist leanings, denouncing the British government’s war policy, comparing it to imperial Rome, “They have made a desert and they call it peace” (A Scots Quair - Google Books Result), while a Highlander in kilts and bagpipes is silhouetted against the sky, much like the bugler against the red sky in John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), playing “The Flowers of the Forest,” not really a folk song, but a national song of reverence commemorating the Scottish dead at the Battle of Flodden against England in 1513, now reserved almost exclusively for funerals or memorial services.

In the sunset of an age and an epoch we may write that for epitaph of the men who were of it. They went quiet and brave from the lands they loved, though seldom of that love might they speak, it was not in them to tell in words of the earth that moved and lived and abided, their life and enduring love. And who knows at the last what memories of it were with them, the springs and the winters of this land and all the sounds and scents of it that had once been theirs, deep, and a passion of their blood and spirit, those four who died in France? With them we may say there died a thing older than themselves, these were the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a song, they pass with the things that seemed good to them, with loves and desires that grow dim and alien in the days to be. It was the old Scotland that perished then, and we may believe that never again will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions, rise but with alien effort to our lips. The last of the peasants, those four that you knew, took that with them to the darkness and the quietness of the places where they sleep. And the land changes, their parks and their steadings are a desolation where the sheep are pastured, we are told that great machines come soon to till the land, and the great herds come to feed on it, the crofter is gone, the man with the house and the steading of his own and the land closer to his heart than the flesh of his body. Nothing, it has been said, is true but change, nothing abides, and here in Kinraddie where we watch the building of those little prides and those little fortunes on the ruins of the little farms we must give heed that these also do not abide, that a new spirit shall come to the land with the greater herd and the great machines. For greed of place and possession and great estate those four had little heed, the kindness of friends and the warmth of toil and the peace of rest – they asked no more from God or man, and no less would they endure. So, lest we shame them, let us believe that the new oppressions and foolish greeds are no more than mists that pass. They died for a world that is past, these men, but they did not die for this that we seem to inherit. Beyond it and us there shines a greater hope and a newer world, undreamt when these four died. But need we doubt which side the battle they would range themselves did they live today, need we doubt the answer they cry to us even now, the four of them, from the places of the sunset?

And then, as folk stood dumbfounded, this was just sheer politics, plain what he meant, the Highlandman McIvor tuned up his pipes and began to step slow round the stone circle by Blawearie Loch, slow and quiet, and folk watched him, the dark was near, it lifted your hair and was eerie and uncanny, the ‘Flowers of the Forest’ as he played it . . .

It rose and rose and wept and cried, that crying for the men that fell in battle, and there was Kirsty Strachan weeping quietly and others with her, and the young ploughmen they stood with glum, white faces, they’d no understanding or caring, it was something that vexed and tore at them, it belonged to times they had no knowing of.

He fair could play, the piper, he tore at your heart marching there with the tune leaping up the moor and echoing across the loch. Folk said that Chris Tavendale alone shed never a tear, she stood quiet, holding her boy by the hand, looking down on Blawearie’s fields till the playing was over. And syne folk saw that the dark had come and began to stream down the hill, leaving her there, some were uncertain and looked them back. But they saw the minister was standing behind her, waiting for her, they’d the last of the light with them up there, and maybe they didn’t need it or heed it, you can do without the day if you’ve a lamp quiet-lighted and kind in your heart.

Up Above and Down Below - Film Comment Gavin Smith, November/December 2015

And then there was Terence Davies’s even more anticipated Sunset Song, adapted from a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Set on a farm in northern Scotland on the cusp of World War I, it features an exceptionally strong central performance by Agyness Deyn as Chris, the bright daughter of a brutish farmer (Peter Mullan in top form) who sees her educational prospects and consequent hopes of a teaching career evaporate following the suicide of her mother and the departure of her brother. With great exactitude, Davies traces how Chris’s bleak future as her father’s housekeeper is averted and where life takes her, imbuing the action with an unostentatious tenderness and eliciting uniformly lovely performances from the rest of his cast. As a study in hardship, brutalizing family life, and romantic loss, Sunset Song is a deeply felt return to territory with which the director is intimately familiar. At first I wasn’t sure about the bold and unexpected shift in point of view in the film’s final stages, but the effect is absolutely devastating, and on reflection it’s a perfect move. Nothing short of sublime, Sunset Song ranks with The House of Mirth and The Long Day Closes among Davies’s finest achievements.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal and Kathleen Sachs

2016 is the year of Terence vs. Terrence. Or, perhaps less confusingly, Davies vs. Malick. Both are titans of modern cinema with conspicuously long gaps in their recent filmography, and both are releasing not one, but two films this year alone. The first pairing of these films, however, couldn't be more different—or decisive. Malick's KNIGHT OF CUPS is almost a parody of his mature style, while Davies' SUNSET SONG is the fulfillment of an ever-evolving aesthetic. But to simplify the distinction, one might also say that the former film is conspicuously sexist, while the latter is ardently feminist. Malick seems to view women as mere chapter titles in a book about virile existentialism (a.k.a. pure fantasy), whereas Davies positions his female protagonist as the author of her own story. Adapted from the classic Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibson, SUNSET SONG is about a young woman, Chris Guthrie—who's unexpectedly played to perfection by one-time It Girl Agyness Deyn—as she comes of age before, during, and after World War I. Davies has been nursing this project for years (he almost made it after THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, but met inexplicable resistance from the UK Film Council), and it necessarily invites a dialogue with his other work. The figure of the tyrannical patriarch links SUNSET SONG to Davies’s 1988 breakthrough, DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES, but he’s working in a different mode here: the narrative development is more conventional, the musical digressions are less frequent, and the trademark Davies patina has given way to a bucolic grandeur. (The exteriors were shot on 65mm, while the interiors were recorded digitally; the lack of 70mm prints of SUNSET SONG is one of the scandals of the age.) “There are lovely things in the world,” laments Deyn’s Guthrie, “lovely that do not endure … and the lovelier for that.” It’s a measure of restraint that Davies, hitherto a poet of memory and reverie, leans so heavily on the tangible here; he clings to solid objects as if they were on the verge of fading away.

TIFF 2015 | Sunset Song (Terence Davies, UK/Luxembourg ... Steve Macfarlane from Cinema Scope

There is no such thing as a “minor” Terence Davies. If anything, the divisive response at Toronto to the Liverpool-born master’s new Sunset Song (based on a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon) verifies the preciousness with which critics have been holding Davies’ auteurism, and perhaps their own experiences of his work, in their minds. (Few would disagree this is his least abstract, most narratively conservative picture yet.) Sunset Song is anchored to Chris (Agyness Deyn), an (actual) bonnie lass growing up in rural Scotland just after the turn of the century. Her father (Peter Mullan) is a joyless, Bible-thumping sadist who rules by the lash, the type of character typically reserved for, well, Peter Mullan. The positioning of Mullan’s character as a bottomless dumping ground for the audience’s fear and hostility is probably more Gibbon than Davies, but the filmmaker is perhaps too good at turning these passages into a dreadful experience.

While the first hour of Sunset Song addresses Chris’ attempts to imagine a life for herself beyond this particular one-family cult of patriarchy, it’s consistent with earlier Davies that no small part of her repose is found in the very act of looking. Dour and musty interiors are juxtaposed with breathtaking, impossibly colour-corrected 70mm vistas of wheat and grass, with voiceover quotations from the novel buttressing the film’s unapologetic pastoralism (“And the smell of the Earth in her face almost made her cry, for the beauty of it”). Early into Sunset Song, I had the discomfiting notion that I was watching an over-refined classicalism bleed blindly into artlessness; what came to mind was less The Long Day Closes (1992) and more Michael Bay’s axiom at a Pearl Harbor press conference that “You should be able to hang every frame on the wall.”

Chris’ mother takes her own life, and after Pa is debilitated by a stroke, Chris (silently) takes her father’s. And soon she has met, and fallen in love with, a bloke from town named Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), giving way to Sunset Song’s bittersweet middle passage: a brief romance made all the more elysian for its welcome sense of relief (although the film has more than conditioned us to expect the worst). The couple have a low-stakes wedding in Chris’ family barn, on New Year’s Eve; in a moment of sublime power, Chris regales the crowd with a song, only for the image to haphazardly dissolve (grainlessly, painlessly) from a wide shot of her singing to a medium close-up. It’s jarring, but matters little—this is as tranquil a moment as exists in Sunset Song, and it’s an understatement to call its happiness hard-won.

Chris and Ewan have a child; the Great War begins; Ewan is drafted; he returns from basic training a person utterly alien to the man Chris married—somebody closer in temperament to her father. This expository lapse is masterful: it bespeaks time’s callous indifference, cementing that this story must begin and end on Chris, alone. Eventually, Sunset Song can’t help but reveal what—aside from the imponderable lengths of evil Christendom has allowed men to do—drew Davies to the material in the first place: the handshake memory makes between internal trauma and national myth. I was woefully unprepared for the film’s devastating final passages, wherein the camera returns to the same florid panoramas from before, now granted a (literally) breathtaking sorrow and majesty that risks turning the film’s soft-nationalist bent utterly inside out. There is no such thing as a minor Terence Davies.

Sunset Song | Film reviews, news & interviews | The Arts Desk David Kettle

There’s been a hugely protracted production history behind Sunset Song. Terence Davies first mooted a screen adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel of northern Scottish farming folk way back in 2000, soon after the success of his Edith Wharton pic The House of Mirth. But what’s emerged, at long last, is classic Davies through and through – luminous and lyrical, sorrowful and celebratory, and, most impressive of all, shot through with an intense compassion for its characters, good and bad alike.

In many ways it’s a pretty radical rethink of Gibbon’s novel, which charts the fortunes of hardy heroine Chris Guthrie, an independent-minded young woman in what’s now Aberdeenshire, from school through to love, marriage and beyond, taking in an abusive father, a mother’s suicide and, crucially, her unbreakable connection with the rural landscape she inhabits.

Gibbon is revered for challenging cosy, romanticised depictions of Scotland with his harsh, unforgiving (some might say miserabilist) portrayal of Scottish rural life. Yet Davies remoulds the story into something altogether more symbolic, almost mythic. There’s a sense of inevitability to Davies’s gently unfolding storytelling, as though what he’s showing us is one of the world’s great epic stories. But behind it all lies a taut structure and careful pacing. Sunset Song feels every minute of the 135 it lasts, but Davies plays a remarkable Tardis-like time trick: a deceptively slow-moving plot with a huge amount of narrative packed into it.

Model-turned-actress Agyness Deyn is strong, if occasionally a little unreadable, in the central role, combining determination and vulnerability to eminently watchable effect. But it’s Scottish actor Kevin Guthrie (pictured above), as Chris’s suitor Ewan Tavendale, who sparks the movie into dramatic life. He doesn’t appear until an hour or so in – introduced in a solid close-up that tells us everything we need to know about his imminent importance – but his sensitive, (literally) wide-eyed performance is heartbreakingly tender. The film’s second act, focusing on Chris and Ewan’s idyllic relationship, is its magical, glowing heart, and it comes after the horrifying, mundane violence doled out by Chris’s religious-obsessed father. Although whether we really need yet another mad-dad offering from Peter Mullan (pictured below) – strong though he is here – is probably debatable.

Where the film falls down, however, is in its third act, when the horrors of the First World War intrude on Chris and Ewan’s rural idyll. Ewan’s return from the trenches brutalised almost beyond recognition strikes a horribly jarring note. And despite the poetry of Davies’s slowly moving aerial shot of the war zone – at once beautiful and appalling – his final sequence feels unnecessarily manipulative – in fact, simply unnecessary, since by then we know the facts already.

That said, it’s hard not to be swept along by the sheer painterly beauty and emotional intensity of Davies’s achievement, conveyed in the visual grandeur of Michael McDonough’s remarkable cinematography. It’s all a bit too good to be true – as in endless scenes of sun-drenched rippling wheat fields, or a heart-swelling flirtation scene with Chris and Ewan magically surrounded by a scampering flock of sheep. But it's proud of its artifice, and achingly beautiful at the same time.

Sunset Song is quietly devastating in its emotional impact, but its passions are held firmly in check. And Davies’s masterful exploration of his underlying themes – the strength of the human spirit, the wonders of nature, even the brutality and fickleness of fate – sweeps everything before them.

Hearth and Home: Sunset Song | Terence Davies - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, May/June 2016

Terence Davies’s Sunset Song was nearly one for the list of great apocryphal films. The British director originally attempted to make it after his 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, but it was turned down by the body then overseeing British cinema, the UK Film Council—who, Davies remembers, told him, “It hasn’t got legs.” There followed a long gap in his career, broken in 2008 by Of Time and the City, an archival documentary about his native Liverpool. An intense chamber-drama treatment of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea followed in 2011—and now, at last, Davies has been able to return to Sunset Song.

The film was a challenging project, not least because of the attendant expectations. Set in rural Scotland in the early 20th century, it is based on a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the first part of his trilogy A Scots Quair. The creation of a left-wing writer who emphasizes Scottish cultural and social autonomy, Sunset Song has an iconic status north of Hadrian’s Wall (unsurprisingly, it’s the favorite novel of Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon), but it’s a remarkable work by any measure, eminently modernist in its attention to the materiality of language and to the complex interweaving of personal and public history. Written using an English that incorporates the traditional Doric dialect, it’s crammed with words that will be unfamiliar to many readers—quean for “girl,” meikle for “big” or “much”—while its narrative register veers between the domestic and the cosmic, locating the inhabitants of the fictional Kinraddie, in northeast Scotland, within a broader sweep of history.

More specifically, the book recounts the coming-of-age of farmer’s daughter Chris Guthrie, torn between educational ambitions and her attachment to the land. The film’s Chris is Agyness Deyn, best known as a supermodel of singular, impish features, here in her second lead role. Davies, who claims to know nothing about popular culture, had never heard of Deyn, but knew when she auditioned that she was the perfect Chris. Deyn is remarkably affecting in the role, partly because she progresses so compellingly from innocence to experience, from composure through ecstasy to pain, and partly because her curiously old-fashioned face wouldn’t have looked out of place in the era of Peggy Ashcroft and Wendy Hiller.

Sunset Song was shot partly in Scotland, but substantially in New Zealand for the summer scenes, with interiors shot in Luxembourg. As you’d expect from Davies, the film is at once lyrical and austere. The beauty of the landscapes is offset by an ever-present awareness of violence and danger, embodied partly by Chris’s father (Peter Mullan), whose attitude toward his daughter is terrifyingly like that of a Biblical patriarch, even down to his incestuous urgings. As for Chris’s happy marriage to local boy Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), that too is tainted by brutality, notably when he returns from military service a changed man.

While the film literally concludes with a song at sunset, the title indicates a lament for a certain society and era, brought to an end by World War I. That this is very much a story about war is signaled, late in the film, by an extended track over the desolate mud of northern France, while the reality of military service suddenly comes to the fore in an audacious narrative left-turn that transforms the film entirely.

This is unmistakably a Terence Davies film, partly in its themes (Mullan’s character is a close relation of the volatile father in Distant Voices, Still Lives), partly in its execution. Like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Deep Blue Sea, with their pub sing-alongs, the film uses music—here traditional folk ballads—to evoke the identity of a community, sometimes in scenes (e.g., Chris’s wedding) of a marked formal theatricality. Visually, the enclosed spaces of Chris’s house eerily echo those of Distant Voices, Still Lives, their austerity suggesting a touch of Dreyer, while sweeping exteriors echo the romanticism of 1940s rural melodrama (Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going!, Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). The bleakness and the rapture are interwoven to altogether symphonic effect.

A similar sense of contrast prevails in Davies’s follow-up film, A Quiet Passion, about the cloistered life of poet Emily Dickinson. With Cynthia Nixon in the lead, and a superb supporting cast including Jennifer Ehle and Keith Carradine, it premiered to great acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival in February. As befits its reclusive heroine, it’s largely a claustrophobic chamber drama, and arguably Davies’s most uncompromisingly austere film since The Long Day Closes (92). But it’s also a film of often sensuous beauty, and in stretches, a surprisingly funny one too, as when the Dickinson sisters exchange brittle badinage with their witty friend Miss Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey)—sequences in which the Dickinson residence in Amherst really does become a House of Mirth.

I spoke to Terence Davies in London last December, while he was promoting Sunset Song.

You discovered Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s book through the BBC TV adaptation in the early ’70s.

Yes, I saw it in 1971. There used to be a Sunday serial then on BBC, and I’d never heard of the book. Vivien Heilbron was playing Chris, and I watched every episode. Then I read the book, which is quite hard-going for the first couple of chapters, but once you get past that, it really is a great work.

The story is wonderful—like Jane Eyre. It’s an intimate epic. Although he never gives Chris’s exact age, when the book starts she must be 14 or 15, and when it ends she’s only about 20. In those five or six years, she’s going though an enormous change. That in itself is powerful. But there are other things that run beneath it, particularly toward the end—the aspect of forgiving suffering, not just the suffering that’s been inflicted on her, but all suffering. The last chapter is about forgiveness and not despairing.

Given that the book is considered a Scottish national treasure, did anyone object to an English director filming it, or to Chris not being played by a Scottish actress?

No. It was at the back of my mind that if people don’t do a convincing Scottish accent, then people in Scotland would know. Agyness was the only one we had a voice coach for, but we couldn’t afford a coach for everyone. So I made it a general accent. But my ear isn’t acute enough to tell which part of Scotland that would appear to come from. It went down well in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and Ian Pirie, who plays Chae Strachan, said: “They’re a very hard audience in Aberdeen. They booed Billy Connolly off the stage.” That I was dreading—but I’ve never in all my life entered a room where there was such warmth and generosity.

Chris is an individual but at same time she’s an archetypal figure. She comes across in the book as an embodiment of the land and of the experience of women in rural communities. Given that, what were you looking for in casting the role?

Just someone who could look old and young at the same time. The only person I’ve ever seen pull it off is Joan Fontaine in Letter from an Unknown Woman: you believe that she’s a schoolgirl, and she was 30-odd years old when she did it. When I saw Agyness for the first time, it was a Monday morning, she was the first in, and she gave a wonderful audition, and I said: “We’ve found her.” She’s extraordinary, a real talent. The performance is truly innocent and pure, because she is. What she understands is that Chris actually is a poet—not an obvious poet, but her feeling toward that land and the world is essentially poetic.

How much did you want to keep the political resonances of the book?

None at all. I’m not political. I’m a socialist by instinct, but I’m not in any way political. I’m interested in the way that life and politics affect ordinary people. What Chris feels isn’t political, it’s emotional—do I stay on the land, do I become a teacher?

How did you plan the look of the film with DP Michael McDonough?

I said: “I don’t want any visual sentimentality, I don’t want pretty for the sake of prettiness. It’s got to be harsh, and in that harshness, there will be beauty.” And he got that. His eye is wonderful—he’s always looking.

The film’s tone is characterized by contrasts between vast landscape exteriors and often cramped interiors. We’re often looking out of windows onto the outside world.

I’m always drawn to people at windows, and empty rooms and staircases. I have absolutely no idea why. When we were doing it, [production designer] Andy Harris said: “Do you know a Danish painter called Vilhelm Hammershøi?” His paintings are basically empty rooms or windows, and if there is a subject, it’s usually a woman, usually with her back to the viewer. It’s like Vermeer, but with a smudged Northern light. I just thought they were breathtaking. I said the interiors have to look like that—that stillness you can get when nothing appears to be happening but a lot does, just through its stillness.

You’ve talked about shooting at a particular time of day known as the gloaming. Is that the same as “magic hour”?

No, the magic hour is earlier. Gloaming is the most wonderful word that you can’t translate. It’s not twilight and it’s not late evening, there’s a bit in-between. There’s a wonderful Richard Strauss song called “Im Abendrot,” which means “Red Evening,” and it’s always translated as “At Gloaming.” It’s a special time, and when you see it you think: “Yes, that’s gloaming.”

The film contains a number of very telling camera moves, as in the scene when Ewan comes home and forces Chris into the bedroom, and the camera just sinks down under the bed, hiding them from view.

I was rather proud of that. I said to them: “We’ll do this in one take. I’m not going to put you through this again.” It was really very powerful what they did. It’s much more interesting not to see something—you only hear, and that’s terrifying. It doesn’t have to be marital rape, it can be anything—but then you leave it and say to the audience: “You’ve got to fill in the gaps now.”

When you use music in your films, it’s very much as a part of characters’ lives. Here you use folk songs mentioned by Gibbon, with very specific meanings—like “Flowers of the Forest,” which is about death, and “Ladies of Spain” about sorrow and parting.

“Flowers of the Forest” was written by a Scottish noblewoman after [the battle of] Flodden—Henry VIII fought there and just slaughtered the Scots. It’s about slaughter. [Executive producer] Bob Last sent me three recordings, one by Ronnie Browne, which absolutely knocked me out, it was so moving. In the Doric dialect, you cannot understand a word of it, but you know what’s being said. “Ladies of Spain”—we found out it was a sea shanty, which was lovely. You don’t necessarily place them where they are in the book, but you make sure they’re in the right place, because a film isn’t a book.

There are scenes in the book, which you’ve filmed, that speak very intensely of sexual danger in rural life—for example, the man’s hands grabbing Chris’s ankles in the barn.

Where her emerging sexuality is concerned, it was terrifying for people in that era, when they weren’t told anything. What do you do if someone doesn’t want to tell you that you menstruate? I can’t imagine. She doesn’t know anything and it does disturb her—and she’s clearly disturbed enough to look at herself in the mirror and think: “What am I now?” She’s not sure what she is—she’s on the cusp of womanhood but she’s still a child.

I wanted to make it powerful, in the sense that it’s an unknown thing, that was what was important—not necessarily its violence but that fact that she doesn’t know what it is. When she does find out what it is, it’s actually tender.

There’s a moment in the book when Chris slaps Ewan, early in their marriage—you don’t show that. In the book, anger seems integral to the state of marriage.

It was shot, but it just didn’t work—you didn’t believe it. I thought it was more interesting to keep the tenderness within their relationship, so that when Ewan comes back [from the army], it’s really shocking. It releases this rage: he’s angry because he’s terrified. But his redemption comes at the end when he says: “I deserted because I wanted to go back to her—I did it for her and I did it for Blawearie [farm], because I still love her.”

You probably don’t like budget cuts more than any other director, but there does seem to be something about your cinema that thrives on economy. The period drama of The House of Mirth works so well precisely because it’s pared down.

I look upon it as a moral duty—it’s not my money and it has to be husbanded, not wasted. The way I write the script, I write every track, every dissolve, everything, so when I go on set I know what the shots are, and that saves time. I couldn’t do that on the day, I’d just be too worried. I’d written the execution scene in a specific way and we couldn’t find [a location] anywhere. Andy Harris found this disused railway siding in Luxembourg—I thought [sarcastic tone] “Yeah. Fabulous.” I walked along the platform, and I thought: “We’ve found it. Give me 10 minutes and I’ll redo the shots.” It’s wonderful when you think: “We can’t do that—let’s do this.” That’s very exciting.

You went very quickly from Sunset Song to making A Quiet Passion.

I’ve never had so much work in my life. A Quiet Passion went without a single hitch, a joy from beginning to end. With Sunset Song, every single thing that could go wrong went wrong, I don’t know how we pulled it off. A Quiet Passion was the complete opposite.

What was it about Cynthia Nixon that made you want to cast her as Emily Dickinson?

I’d met her a number of years ago, when she was doing Sex and the City, for a film that never came off and I’ve never forgotten her. When I was writing the script, I could see her face because she’s very much like Emily Dickinson.

What are the aspects of Dickinson that most fascinated you?

She was a great poet—it all becomes terribly solemn. She never went anywhere except when she was 17, she went to a ladies seminary, and she spent her life in this house. But that doesn’t make it restricted—it makes it much more powerful, because these things were very important to her. It’s the stoicism of writing wonderful poetry that does not get published. I find that almost unbearably moving. I think a genius like that—and she was a genius—not getting recognized in their own time is the most unbearable thing. Having a posthumous reputation isn’t going to help them at all. Because she’s a poet, she sees things in a very different way—she has one skin missing.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon Socialist Review, December 2001

Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. Sunset Song. :: Anglistika

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Film Review: Terence Davies' Sunset Song - Press and ... Blair Dingwall from The Press and Journal

The House Next Door [Keith Uhlich]

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Sunset Song :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Brogan Morris

TIFF Review: "Sunset Song" | Movie Mezzanine Kenji Fujishima

TIFF Review: Terence Davies' 'Sunset Song' Starring Agyne ... Nicola Grozdanovic from The Playlist

Joshua Reviews Terence Davies' Sunset Song [Theatrical Review] Joshua Brunsting

Sight & Sound [Robert Hanks] December 4, 2015

Sight & Sound [Ashley Clark] September 15, 2015

Sunset Song (2015) Antti Alanen

Sunset Song - Little White Lies David Jenkins

Hardest harvest: the understated ache of Sunset Song Ryan Gilbey from The New Statesman

The Film Stage [Ethan Vestby]

Sunset Song May Be the Most Visually Stunning Movie of the Year ... Julia Felthensal from Vogue magazine

'High-Rise' And 'Sunset Song' Reviews: The Past As Another Country Keith Phipps from Uproxx

MOVIE REVIEW: Sunset Song — Every Movie Has a Lesson Don Shanahan, also seen at Chicago Independent Critics Circle here: Don Shanahan reviews “BFFs” and “Sunset Song” on his “Every Movie ...

'Sunset Song': Review | Reviews | Screen - Screen Daily David D’Arcy

Sunset Song - Newcity Film Ray Pride

Exclaim! [Robert Bell]

Of Time and the Movies: The Complete Terence Davies — and a New ... Melissa Anderson fom The Village Voice

Fuse Film Review: “Sunset Song” — Misogyny in the Highlands » The ... Peg Aloi from The Arts Fuse

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

Hannah McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie]

World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]

Something, but not very much - World Socialist Web Site

Sunset Song — film review: 'Magical' - FT.com Nigel Andrews from The Financial Times

Film Review: Sunset Song | Film Journal International David Noh

Sunset Song Review (2015) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

The Coops Review [Freda Cooper]

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Sunset Song | Chicago Reader JR Jones (capsule review)

Heart of the Country - The New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule review)

High-Rise makes for an unlikely highlight at Toronto ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club

Sunset Song | Find all the latest movie reviews and documentary ... Jason Solomons

At the Toronto International Film Festival: The Passion of... Adam Cook from Brooklyn magazine, also seen here: Sunset Song - Brooklyn Magazine

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Daily | Toronto 2015 | Terence Davies's SUNSET SONG ... David Hudson at Fandor

Terence Davies Interview (Sunset Song) | The Dailies Blog ... Christopher Heron interview, December 4, 2015

Terence Davies on religion, being gay and his life in film ... Andrew Pulver interview from The Guardian, November 15, 2015

Toronto: Terence Davies on 'Sunset Song ... - Variety Guy Lodge interview, September 13, 2015

'Sunset Song': TIFF Review - Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young

'Sunset Song' Review: Terence Davies Swoons for ... - Variety Peter Debruge

Sunset Song (2015), directed by Terence Davies ... - Time Out Tom Huddleston

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Sunset Song film review - The Herald Alison Rowat from The Herald Scotland

Film review: Sunset Song (15) - The Scotsman Alistair Harkness

Sunset Song, film review: Different voices, still Terence Davies Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent

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MOVIE REVIEW: 'Sunset Song' brings life to England on even of World ... Eric Althoff from The Washington Times

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Review: 'Sunset Song' Shows a Woman's True Grit - The New York ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times

In 'Sunset Song,' a Hard Life Amid Cruel Beauty - The New ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Sunset Song (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sunset Song - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Scottish Poetry Library The Flowers of the Forest lyrics

Scotsman article, Aug 29 2005

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Davis, Andrew

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

USA (108 mi) 2002

Time Out review

Schwarzenegger's recidivist grunt-flick returns him to Amazonian Commando territory, but with fewer firearms and a greater predilection for taking himself seriously. As LA firefighter and contented family man Gordy Brewer, he's an unassumingly heroic Joe, until Colombian terrorist El Lobo (Curtis) parks a bomb beside his wife and child and leaves him a brooding widower. Finding no redress from the US authorities, he plunges deep into the Colombian jungle to administer some damage of his own. The film's less knee-jerk than it could have been. Brewer may think he's stony set on revenge, but an encounter with a wandering mother (Neri) and her son in the danger zone give pause for thought. That said, it's often daft, whether unveiling the fireman's instinctive bomb-improvising skills, or showing a liberation leader's penchant for shoving snakes down flunkies' throats. Yet a populist American movie that acknowledges a troubled world beyond US borders must be worth flagging, even though the roles and responsibilities of Colombia's guerillas, paramilitaries, army and US 'advisers', and the hierarchy of drugs and politics in its civil war, are all firmly fudged.

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review

I can't fathom why the release of Collateral Damage was delayed in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. In its own simplistic way (considering that it is very standard Scharwzenegger fare), it demonstrates the complexities of any given war on terrorism.

Once again, Schwarzenegger dons on the role of an everyday man waging a just war. This time he's Gordon Brewer, a Los Angeles fireman out to get revenge for the killing of his wife and daughter by a terrorist with the moniker "The Wolf" (Cliff Curtis). The Wolf's real targets are Americans and Colombians in cahoots with each other, but Gordon's wife and child end up as "collateral damage". Needless to say, the movie features Gordon performing death-defying feats in the jungles of Colombia, using his fire-fighter training to explosive effect, to bring the Wolf to justice.

The movie illustrates that there are really no good guys, except maybe our protagonist, and he too is portrayed ambiguously at times. Governments (both American and Colombian) have their own motivations, and the terrorists have theirs. The movie also illustrates the problem of shifting ties which occurs when dealing with other humans, particularly those involved in violent conflict. It seems everyone could learn from The X Files adage, "trust no one."

I suppose if you thought hard about it, the movie could be made to make sense, but it doesn't have to. Collateral Damage is a lot of fun, and I highly recommend checking it out on the big screen if you get a chance.

Reel.com review [3/4] Tor Thorsen

The current spate of nationalistic films such as Behind Enemy Lines, Hart's War, We Were Soldiers, and Black Hawk Down has got many conspiracy theorists a-fuming. After all, weren't all these movies already in post-production before 9/11? This glut of flag-waving propaganda must point to some grand Israeli/CIA/ Freemason/Skull-and-Bones/Illuminati conspiracy to keep the citizenry unquestioning, Wag the Dog-style, during wartime.

Collateral Damage is the proof that this theory is bunk. Why? Because recent events have transformed the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle from bang-bang escapism to an unexpectedly complex action/drama in ways that no media manipulator could have foreseen. Even though the film was already more like Clear and Present Danger than Commando, with an emphasis on the perils of fighting terrorism with terrorist methods, last year's attacks have turned what were once supposed to be "ooh-aaah" moments of pyrotechnic splendor into chilling reminders of our own vulnerability.

The first of these comes early, when fireman Gordy Brewer (Schwarzenegger) watches helplessly as his wife and young son are incinerated by a bomb blast at the Colombian consulate in Los Angeles. The culprit is El Lobo (Cliff Curtis), a mysterious rebel leader who's equal parts Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos, narco-baron Pablo Escobar (whom Curtis played in Blow), and famed terrorist Carlos the Jackal.

In an Osama bin Laden-esque videotaped communiqué, El Lobo justifies the attack as retaliation for America's repression of the coca-growing Colombian peasantry. The point man for this meddling is CIA agent Peter Brandt (Elias Koteas), a ruthless operative whose use of murderous death squads forces the Senate Intelligence Subcommittee to order his operation shut down. Undeterred, Brandt heads back down Medellín way to find and kill El Lobo, a plan shared by a certain hulking fireman hell-bent on revenge.

Through some artful editing, director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive, Under Siege) compresses the planning and execution of Brewer's trip through the South American jungle. However, as absurd as the fireman's infiltration into Colombia is — he's about as inconspicuous as a monster truck at a Vespa rally — once Brewer arrives, David and Peter Griffiths' screenplay takes a turn for the socially conscious. Like a less violent version of the similarly themed McBain, the film shows the campesinos' poverty and the death squads' brutality while also treating audiences to some viscerally pleasing action. There are also a few bits of comedy, courtesy of bit parts by John Turturro as a Canadian mechanic with a proclivity for public indecency, and John Leguizamo as an American transplant who dreams of ditching the coca trade for a rap-music career.

It's only when the action returns Stateside that Collateral Damage's energy begins to flag. Other than a few 11th-hour twists, the finale is a sad sputtering-out of threadbare action tropes. That's doubly sad, because what came before it was the most politically complex film of Schwarzenegger's career. Throughout all the battles, Arnold never shoots a gun and seems more intent on searching for answers than stacking up bodies. He even cries, for Conan's sake, much more convincingly than his unintentionally comic sobs in End of Days. And, at a time when the smallest note of dissent against the war on terrorism could get you tarred and feathered, his character questions whether military force alone can solve the terrorism problem. "Did you have to kill all these women and children?" he asks Brandt following a deadly raid on a rebel camp. There's no question that terrorism is never justified, but Collateral Damage at least makes an attempt to show that eliminating the desperate conditions that spawn murderous fanatics is equally important as blowing said fanatics into oblivion. Did Rambo ever do that?

Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review

"Collateral Damage," the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie famously postponed after 9-11, seemslike a telegram from a dead world. It hails from the America that no longer exists, a world that ended in fire.

In this film you see things, continually, that could not happen today. A man deposits a briefcase next to a potted plant in Union Station and saunters away. He'd be nailed before he got 10 feet. A child's toy is not examined but shunted around a checkpoint at the entrance to a highly secure government office. No way. A mysterious police officer parks his motorcycle in front of a foreign embassy and wanders off, just before a party of dignitaries shows up. Never.

You also see things that could not happen any day. Chief among these is that a firefighter – a Los Angeleno with a suspiciously thick Austrian accent and the muscles of a bratwurst Clydesdale – sneaks into Colombia and, languageless, planless and clueless, simply bluffs his way from one end of the country to the other, ultimately penetrating a secret guerrilla compound that not even the CIA has found. There he improvises a clever bomb. I doubt this could even happen in Columbia, much less Colombia; Arnold's accent would give him away there, too.

Then there's the very thorny issue of the title subject, about which one must say at least the movie worries a little bit, one man's collateral damage being another man's family tragedy. How can one make sense of that paradox? The movie, gamely, tries; just as gamely, it fails, because it's from a world where moral equivalence and promiscuous empathy were still the colors of the day and it was possible to equate a terrorist bombing in Los Angeles with a helicopter gunship attack on a terrorist base in Colombia and hold the authors of each equally guilty.

That was glibly easy when there had been no foreign terrorist bombings on American soil that claimed casualties in double figures; it's almost impossible in an America when terrorist bombings have claimed casualties in quadruple figures, when we are in the middle of an enormously popular war and, sad but inevitable, our military pilots create collateral damage on nearly every mission.

You may let these considerations spoil the movie for you or not, depending on your sensitivities to such matters. But all that aside, does the movie work if one makes a willful effort to banish context from the experience? Well, a little better than you might expect, given the simplicity of the story, which simply follows as Schwarzenegger's character gets even. His wife and child slaughtered in that original L.A. terrorist attack, the (then) wishy-washy State Department uninterested in pursuing mere justice in place of geopolitical wisdom, he goes it alone, mano a guerrilla movement.

It's all too easy, and one of the movie's problems is the eerie disconnect between what it is showing you as real and your deep instincts that it couldn't have happened that easily. But you might not notice. That's because the director is Andrew Davis, who might be called a good action mechanic, as his "Above the Law" and "The Fugitive" attest; so the film has a high level of who-what-where-when authenticity to it.

It's set in a natural, believable world, not a fantasy place like so many of Schwarzenegger's other films, and the craftsman Davis has a penchant for setting. He makes the fire in which we first discover Arnold's Gordon Brewer, performing heroically, feel palpably real; likewise the bombing in downtown L.A. and the seedy jungles and decrepit cities of Colombia, and finally the inside of various D.C. institutional buildings, from rail stations to State Department annexes.

And there's some cleverness, too. As Schwarzenegger's character is a fireman, he does in fact know all the practical things a fireman would know: electrical wiring, explosion potential, the incendiary qualities of certain chemicals. Suppose he'd been a life insurance salesman: He could have bored the guerrillas to death by explaining the difference between term and whole life.

I liked, too, some late plot reversals, sorely needed after the numbingly simple straight-ahead plunge of the first hour of the movie. Things aren't quite what they seem and the twists are neatly done.

All that said, the movie still feels stale. Schwarzenegger tries hard to act but in the end the foolishness of the thriller formula becomes ridiculous; our old friend, the villain who seems to be dead but isn't really, puts in several appearances and there's too much motorcycling through too many tunnels that probably aren't there in the first place.

What is to become of Arnold Schwarzenegger? It's a question this movie cannot help but raise.

"Collateral Damage" by Russell Meeuf - Jump Cut Russell Meeuf from Jump Cut, Winter 2006

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review also seen here: Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs]

World Socialist Web Site review Joseph Kay

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]

Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [D]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

Slate [David Edelstein]

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review

Film Monthly (Chris Wood) review

CultureCartel.com (John Beachem) review [2.5/5]

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

Movie-Vault.com (Angelo Aquino) review

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]

DVD Talk (D.K. Holm) dvd review [2/5]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review

Reel.com dvd review [1/4] Neal Block

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review

New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review

VideoVista review John M. Peters

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2/5]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Ruthless Reviews review Erich

hybridmagazine.com review Clinton Davis

filmcritic.com (Joshua Tyler) review [1.5/5]

Variety.com [Todd McCarthy]

Guardian/Observer review

The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [1/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review

HOLES B 85

USA (117 mi) 2003

An off-beat story that takes place largely in a boys detention camp in the middle of a desert, a place where it never rains, and young boys are instructed to dig a hole each day as tall and wide as the shovel they are given, supposedly to build character. Much of it filmed in Red Rock Canyon State Park, where, like Death valley, the temperature was always over 100 degrees during the shoot, where the elements alone make it virtually impossible to escape, as the camp has the only water for a hundred miles in any direction, featuring a variety of young boys wearing bright orange jump suits. Based on the successful children’s book by Louis Sachar, Shia LaBeouf, later known as Caveman, just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, supposedly due to an ancient family curse, that “no good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather,” which seems to guide the symmetry of this story, sending him a one-way ticket for 18-months to the Camp Green Lake, a place where there is nothing green and there is certainly no lake, as it dried up years ago and all that’s left is baked dry earth and dust.

Much of it told in beautifully sequenced short flashbacks starring Eartha Kitt, also inspired performances by Patricia Arquette and Dulé Hill, both of whom are responsible for one family cursed to digging holes for 100 years and never finding anything of value. That family would be the prison warden, Sigourney Weaver, and her side kicks and overweight and overacting Jon Voight, and Tim Blake Nelson as the overly optimistic counselor who sees himself as a friend of the boys, always calling them by their birth names instead of their nicknames, which earns him no respect at all with the kids. Khleo Thomas as Zero is one of the most compelling kids I’ve seen in films for quite some time. He hasn’t spoken a word for months until Caveman shows up, and then he’s the only one he takes the slightest interest in, but his developing curiosity becomes the moral center of the story. The two become fast friends, helping each other in ways that would ultimately save the day, but it’s a long time developing, most of it lost in the daily routine of getting up in the morning, eating slop for breakfast, then digging holes under the hot sun each day. The film is beautifully edited, a nice balance of flashbacks mixed with the present day, allowing us to see how easily the past affects our lives, and it’s well-written, filled with witty dialogue and always great music, where there is always something interesting to find in the characters, who are themselves challenged in ways beyond their years. It’s a heart-warming story that is not saccharine-sweet, but is genuinely moving at times, where character ends up meaning something.

Davis, Bette – actress

Biography

RUTH ELIZABETH DAVIS was born on April 5, 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her parents divorced when she was 7 and her mother encouraged her interest in acting by taking her to New York in 1928 where she made her acting debut in 1929. In 1930 Universal Pictures signed her to a contract and Bette and her mother went to Hollywood. Her first film was BAD SISTER (1931), which also featured Humphrey Bogart, but her first big success came with George Arliss in THE MAN WHO PLAYED GOD (1932).

Bette's career took a dramatic turn in 1934 when she was lent to RKO to play opposite Leslie Howard in OF HUMAN BONDAGE, and on account of her good reviews, she began to get better parts. The following year, she made DANGEROUS (1935), for which she won a Best Actress Oscar, the first of ten times she would be nominated. In 1936 Bette challenged the studio system and went to London to make pictures with a British company. After Warner Bros. successfully sued her, she returned to Hollywood and signed a new contract offering her even better roles. She won the second of her two Best Actress awards for William Wyler's JEZEBEL in 1938 (also starring Henry Fonda), and made four notable films in 1939 including DARK VICTORY with Humphrey Bogart, JUAREZ, THE OLD MAID and THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX.

Davis became famous and often imitated for her clipped diction and distinct mannerisms (especially her extravagant cigarette smoking), and her popularity continued to grow with successes such as ALL THIS, AND HEAVEN TOO (1940), THE LETTER (1940) with Herbert Marshall, THE LITTLE FOXES (1941) with Teresa Wright, and NOW, VOYAGER (1942) with Paul Henried. Her career faltered in the late forties, but she came roaring back in 1950 playing the fading Broadway star Margo Channing in ALL ABOUT EVE, the Best Picture of the year. Later in the '50s, her career began to falter once more, but she came back once again in WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962), also starring Joan Crawford.

Bette continued to adapt to new acting opportunities throughout her career, taking on roles in horror films in later years as well as making various TV appearances. Her personal life was not as successful however, having been married four times and suffering estrangement from her daughter B.D. Her last significant film appearance was THE WHALES OF AUGUST in 1987. Bette herself once said, "I adore playing bitches … there's a little bit of bitch in every woman; and a little bit of bitch in every man." In 1977, she was the first woman to receive the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, and she died on October 6, 1989 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.

CMGWW: The Estate of Bette Davis the official website

Bright Lights Film Journal: Bette Davis Howard Mandelbaum

Article Smokescreen: Bette Davis and the Cigarette, by Angus E. Crane (1997)

100 Years of Bette Davis The Bold and the Bad and the Bumpy Nights, by Terrence Rafferty from the New York Times, March 30, 2008

The Fiery Bette Davis Bette Davis: In Those Eyes, Always a Glint of Fire, by Bob Mondello from NPR, April 7, 2008

Black and White Bette Bette Davis photos from the New York Times

Meeting Miss Davis an interview by Jim Emerson (1988)

Meredy's Bette Davis Page

Bette Davis at Reel Classics

Bombshell's Bette Davis Page

Lynn's Bette Davis Page

All About Bette

Denny's Bette Davis Page

Brad's Tribute to Bette Davis

The Golden Years: Bette Davis

Distinguished Women, Past and Present: Bette Davis Danuta Bois

The Kennedy Center Honors: Bette Davis

Meredy's Bette Davis Trivia Page

Screen Sirens: Bette Davis

All About Bette, a Forum for Bette Davis Fans

TV Now's monthly Bette Davis schedule when her films will be on TV

Davis, Michael

SHOOT ‘EM UP C- 67

USA (87 mi) 2007 ‘Scope

Clive Owen stars as a hyper-aggressive, carrot-chewing gun and shooting specialist that is so good that he wipes out legions of men attempting to track him down, led by the overly obnoxious, sadistically murderous, yet obviously overmatched Paul Giamatti, in another rendition of what looks like and resembles SIN CITY, with Monical Bellucci in the femme fatale role. The film is an homage to Road Runner and Wiley Coyote or Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny with non-stop bullets, but it’s also very funny with ridiculous throwaway one-liners. The most ridiculous aspect of the film, which is its central premise, is that Owen must theatrically blow away dozens of would-be killers while helping an unnamed woman deliver a newborn baby, and then when the woman is shot, continue blowing away the bad guys while carring her baby in his arms, all cast in a bleached out, artificially contrived universe of comic book style storyline and characters. While this worked perfectly in the beginning, as Owen is drawn into this bloodbath without any connection to the woman and her baby, making his gallantry appear overly heroic, if not utterly improbable, yet as the film continues, it plays the same note ad nauseum, leaving nothing left to the imagination, becoming dull and senseless after awhile, largely do to the uninspiring direction which never changes course or attempts to keep the audience off balance, reeling us into the constant assault of guns and carnage where our hero walks away unscathed more than 90% of the time until the end, when he literally walks into a parallel universe of David Cronenberg’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. Interesting for about ten minutes, a film where the actors did nothing wrong, but were given entirely too narrow a range of emotion to work with in this storyline. Using an unorthodox cool and suave James Bond and his girl formula, the body count in this film is ridiculously high, never varying from that one-note theme.

The Village Voice [Chuck Wilson]

In this extremely violent guilty pleasure of a thriller, Clive Owen is Mr. Smith, a tough guy in a long leather coat who comes to the rescue of a screaming pregnant woman being chased by a creep with a gun. A warehouse shoot-out and birth ensue, and before long, Smith is tucking the infant under his arm and running for his life, a snarling Paul Giamatti and an army of hit men on his tail. Writer-director Michael Davis freely admits to lifting the idea for Shoot 'Em Up from the classic baby-in-peril hospital shoot-out in John Woo's 1992 thriller Hard-Boiled, a strategy he expands by gleefully referencing Raising Arizona, The Matrix, and James Bond movies. Riffing on 007 is such old hat as to be a sign of lazy screenwriting, but the jokes take on new resonance with the presence of Owen. There's no way to watch this Oscar-nominated Brit running, leaping, and firing a gun in a single, elegant bound and not wonder anew just how close he came to landing the big part.

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Getting worked up over Shoot 'Em Up's excessive bloodshed is playing right into its hands. So instead of slamming its loud-and-proud Looney Tunes carnage as indicative of a cultural desire to view violence as detached, consequence-free spectacle, perhaps it's better to simply ask: When action is this thoroughly, willfully divorced from any sense of gravity (both the tonal and scientific sort), how is anyone supposed to be excited by it? Aimed at hormonal, Xbox-ing 13-year-old boys who like their mayhem phony and their one-liners plentiful, Michael Davis's film is an extended demo reel for the director's expertise at special effects-laden gunfights, charting with much bombast, tongue-in-cheek humor, and mild sexism the efforts of mysterious man-with-a-fake-name Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) and his lactating Madonna/whore sidekick DQ (Monica Bellucci) as they attempt to protect a computer-generated infant from murderous criminal Mr. Hertz (Paul Giamatti). Davis makes no pretense at believability, casting his story as a superficially titillating R-rated cartoon—replete with Owen comically chomping on a big (and deadly) carrot and Giamatti fuming at his wascally adversary like a sadistic Elmer Fudd—and there's an undeniable verve to his go-for-broke set pieces, which mainly revolve around Smith heroically cutting down hordes of faceless enemies amid wacko situations such as childbirth (he severs the umbilical cord with a bullet), skydiving, and screwing DQ ("Talk about shooting your load," he quips). This anything-goes approach to combat, when coupled with outlandish Western-noir affectations, intermittently amuses, even if Davis's aspirations to John Woo-ish poetry fall decidedly short. Buried beneath its avalanche of firefights lies an ignorable conspiracy involving a U.S. senator, a covert fertility clinic hidden above a heavy metal club, bone marrow transplants, and the second amendment. However, though this gun-crazy film recognizes the irony of presenting weapons manufacturers as bad guys, its pervasive self-consciousness eventually makes it feel like just a big, empty, albeit mildly diverting, joke. And while Shoot 'Em Up successfully replicates the rhythm and energy of a first-person shooter videogame, it forgets—or cares to ignore the fact—that videogames are always more fun to play than to simply watch.

The Onion A.V. Club Tasha Robinson

Half a dozen fight scenes into the action-movie parody/exemplar Shoot 'Em Up, a minion asks Paul Giamatti's smirking thug character whether he wants to risk personally pursuing ludicrously lethal quarry Clive Owen. Giamatti shrugs off the danger with a derisive comment about people leading from the rear, then adds, avidly, "Besides, violence is one of the most fun things to watch." He's clearly talking directly to the viewers, taking them into his sleazy confidence: The line (which has been widely attributed to Quentin Tarantino) amounts to a pat on the head and a forgiving license to enjoy the film's gleeful, enjoyably mindless excesses, which don't reach much further thematically than "Whee! Violence!"

Shoot 'Em Up has a plot, but it's an illogical mess of coincidence and conspiracy, and it takes a distinct back seat to hilariously cartoony sequences like the opener, in which Owen is quietly munching a carrot at a bus stop when a hysterical pregnant woman runs by, pursued by a gun-wielding, abuse-screaming man. Owen comes to her aid with a world-weary, "Here we go again" attitude that's only the first of many ways in which Shoot 'Em Up recalls his role in Children Of Men. Soon, he's delivering her child while handily dispatching waves of attacking thugs, even taking one out with his carrot. Then he's on the lam with the baby, killing so many of Giamatti's pursuing mercenaries in such increasingly ridiculous ways that shock-exhaustion rapidly sets in. And while the film keeps trying to get even more outrageous—for instance, by having Owen pass baby-feeding duties to jaded lactation-fetish hooker Monica Bellucci—it rarely tops the vigor and hilarity of that first scene.

It certainly tries, though. Giamatti plays his villain role with a purring fervency that implies he wishes he had a properly twirlable mustache. Owen plays his usual generic modern desperado; in his case, the characterization mostly comes from the choreography, which has him sexually satisfying Bellucci while killing eight would-be assassins, or deliberately engineering a head-on collision with a van to propel himself through both windshields and into the other vehicle, where he proceeds to shoot everyone. The "Can't stop! Will die!" franticness closely recalls Crank, but the glossy special effects and polished aesthetic bring the action closer to Kung Fu Hustle or Tarantino's Kill Bill. Certainly Shoot 'Em Up has those films' flailing humor and desire to pander simultaneously to action-film fans and to people who mock action-film excess. It's all meant as gory good fun, but once the novelty wears off half an hour in, the rest of the film is only meant for people who absolutely agree with Giamatti's character about that violence thing.

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

Reel.com [Tim Knight]

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Davis, Peter

HEARTS AND MINDS A 95

USA (112 mi) 1974

The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there.

—LBJ

An Academy Award-winning film examining the Vietnam War that doesn’t fit the usual formula, that maintains its integrity and truthfulness after the passage of time and is well served by providing both the American and Vietnamese perspectives with such even-handedness. Much of the time, they could be talking about the American occupation of Iraq, as the root causes appear so similar. It’s an extraordinary document of openly displayed racism by General William Westmoreland, who appears on camera, relaxed, sitting beside a peaceful lake, waxing eloquently about how throughout history Asian culture doesn’t value human life, thoughts juxtaposed against the searing grief and agony of ordinary Vietnamese peasants mourning over their dead, thoughts that reveal how America gets into these unwanted, undeclared wars in the first place, by devaluing and underestimating the opposition.

This film humanizes the face of the enemy with striking images of ordinary people, such as a farmer in a remote region away from any fighting who has to contend with the military strikes into his rice fields that wiped out his family, or a coffin maker who is overrun by the insurmountable grief from the steady stream of war dead, while similar images are seen on the airwaves today of innocent victims of U.S. air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the neverending rise in casualties, or a Buddhist monk describes how anyone who expressed thoughts of freedom or liberation from the American occupation was labeled a Communist and was either jailed or killed, while American strategists who worked for multiple administrations are seen defending their actions, never wavering a bit from achieving their desired goal.

On the American side, Daniel Ellsberg is especially eloquent about how he initially supported America’s involvement in Southeast Asia until he realized America was financing the French colonial effort during the Eisenhower years, and that a succession of government lies were used to justify military expansion, literally ticking off event after event, until eventually, nothing could justify our continued presence in a country that was fighting for its own liberation. Again, similar claims could be made for the current administration’s global misadventures as well. But rather than explore the political ramifications, this film concerns itself with the human cost, the agonizing toll on an entire generation growing up. One couldn’t help thinking that nothing has changed, it’s as if the same people in charge of the Vietnam military excursion are now in charge of the Iraq occupation, where the one thing that has changed is the public viewing of the war, which is taking place completely offscreen, out of sight, out of mind, with the dead and wounded returning home in record numbers and no cameras are allowed to film them.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

It's hard to believe Peter Davis' anti-Vietnam documentary won the Academy Award in 1974 -- not because it's undeserving, but because it's so much more provocative and artful than the PBS-style dreck that usually nabs the statue these days. Chalk it up to the mood of the times rather than declining aesthetic standards; it's pretty clear Hearts & Minds won because it underlined the message Hollywood was too chicken to send with its own movies. Drawing some of its footage (and more of its connections) from Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig (recently shown as part of International House's war film series), Hearts & Minds goes, appropriately enough, for emotion over intellect; released after the war's end, it's an elegy rather than a cri de coeur. (The film's look, too, is elegant color rather than scrappy black and white.) Through the haze of a Vietnam hangover, Davis ponders the war's ramifications at home -- not what it did to them, but what it did to us. One gung-ho vet tells a crowd of schoolchildren that the country would be great "if it wasn't for the people. They make a mess of everything," while an unidentified girl on the sidelines of a support-the-troops parade opines, "Once in a while, I think about [the war,] but I like to think about the things that are happening right now, to me." Davis' audio commentary and a handful of booklet essays provide context, but none so compelling as the day's newspapers, which show the U.S. on the verge of entering another war that enjoys scant international and soft domestic support (although the comparison ends there; Ho Chi Minh was a liberator, not a tyrant). Vietnam hasn't been forgotten, certainly, but some of its lessons have been gathering dust; Hearts & Minds shines them up and puts them on display.

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

Nearly three decades after its resolution, the Vietnam War continues to exert a strong hold over the American psyche. The controversial winner of the 1975 Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary, Hearts & Minds wades headfirst into the war's swampy moral and emotional morass. Shot in the U.S. and Vietnam, the film explores the psychological damage on both sides through newsreels, film clips, and interviews with figures ranging from a Vietnam peasant surveying the wreckage of his home to alpha-hawk Gen. William Westmoreland, who waxes racist on the weaknesses of the "Oriental" character. Heavily influenced by cinéma vérité, Minds eschews traditional narration, instead documenting the myriad complexities of warring societies through the stories and commentary of foot-soldiers, leaders, and victims. Minds reserves its most damning criticism for the politicians and generals who directed the war from a comfortable distance, but it expands its critique to include America's near-pathological obsession with winning at all costs. Criticized at the time for what some perceived as its anti-American slant, television veteran Peter Davis' film veers close to propaganda, most notably by linking military imperialism with the jingoistic aggression of high-school football. During his clumsiest moments, Davis' fondness for provocation rises to the surface, which is unfortunate, since it weakens the impact of his many salient points about how American men are socialized to be warriors. At its best, Hearts & Minds bears wrenching witness to the terrible cost of war, from permanently traumatized soldiers to the communities and families it destroys. One of the definitive anti-war documentaries, Davis' film puts a human face on an American and Vietnamese tragedy. This new DVD version includes a booklet of informative essays and an invaluable audio commentary, featuring Davis ironically railing against the use of narration in documentaries while providing his own. He also defends himself from the inevitable charges of anti-Americanism, although the film makes it clear that his sympathies lie with humanity, not any specific nation or ideology.

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review (Page 3)

These thoughts lead me, naturally, to Peter Davis's masterwork, Hearts and Minds.

It is one of the great feats of filmmaking: a coolly comprehensive assessment of America's war against Vietnam, completed while the shots were still being fired. Since the film's first showing in 1974, and its subsequent receipt in 1975 of the Oscar for best documentary, an entire generation has grown up without being able to watch this picture on the screen. Parker and Stone belong to this generation, which never saw the realities of American power revealed in a movie house but was steeped in counterfantasies, which soon came flooding into theaters as if to wash away Davis's achievement: First Blood, Top Gun, Missing in Action and their innumerable knockoffs.

Some subjects, America does suppress.

Fortunately, the Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has spent two years restoring Hearts and Minds, and Rialto Pictures is putting the new prints into national release, starting with a run at New York's Film Forum (through November 4). If you are of an older generation and lived through the years of the Vietnam War, you need to see this movie; only a picture this uncompromising can shake the dust off your memories and emotions. And if you are of a younger generation, you also need to see Hearts and Minds. It will shock you not only with the truths it brings to light but with the force of its truly balanced filmmaking.

Davis got all sides into the movie: American Presidents, generals and planners; Vietnamese leaders, prostitutes and peasants; French colonial officials; US veterans, from the heartbroken to the vehemently prowar; mourners; flag-wavers; coffin-makers; amputees; even a high school football team, whose coach helps set the tone for the movie by instructing his players to kill. By creating a counterpoint among these many voices, Davis composed a work that is simultaneously an exposé of the history of the war, an exploration of American martial culture and a deeply humane portrait of the victims.

In Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis managed to understand everything. Then, against convention, he forgave nothing.

village voice > film > Silent Majority Report by Michael Atkinson

Not only the definitive American documentary about the war in Vietnam but a landmark political action, Peter Davis's Hearts and Minds (1974) was built to outrage, appall, and indict. Certainly, its re-release in Film Forum's conscientiously agitprop autumn season has the identical intent—today, Vietnam is hardly simply a disputed footnote on our candidates' CVs, but an idiotic historical hellfire we did not remember vividly enough and are therefore already repeating. Look how many of us, who think the present administration has a copyright on public lying for the benefit of the war industry, have forgotten the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. ("He lied," Senator J.W. Fulbright says of LBJ, but Davis doesn't elaborate—in 1974, he didn't have to.) Look how many of us—the polls remain even steven—have at least semiconsciously decided that body bags returning from a faraway killing field are the noble price we'll pay for some dishonestly touted something-or-other. 'Nam pressed on officially for nine years, unofficially for 14 or more—as someone in Davis's stinging gallery of talking-heads interviews reminds us, it's the longest U.S. conflict of all time—and yet virtually all that remains of it are pop-cult clichés and the most beautiful monument in the District of Columbia.

Interested primarily in the conflict between experience and the propaganda lingering in stateside mouths, Hearts and Minds may not have been the first feature film to expressly interrogate American policy (Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig saw light in 1968), but it crystallized its era. Davis is hypnotized by the semiotics of middle-class militarism, whether in and around a high school football game or a 1776 re-enactment, itself counterset against Ho Chi Minh's hope that America would be empathetic to the similarly righteous Vietnamese war against the French. (We were, instead, funding nearly 80 percent of the opposition.) Radicals still maintain that no one acknowledges the American invasion as such, but Davis's witnesses were saying the words in 1974, and in an Oscar-winning film. Not to mention, the peasants in Davis's film, like Palestinians and Iraqis today, know perfectly well whose planes are annihilating their homes and families: "Nixon murderer!" one bereaved mother screams.

Still, Davis's trump moments are strictly Eisensteinian: cutting from a Vietnamese capitalist hopefully outlining his future plunder to a busy factory rapping out prosthetic limbs or a heartbreaking funeral scene, complete with loved ones assailing the coffin, followed by beefeater General Westmoreland asserting that "Orientals" don't put "the same high price on life as does the Westerner." Even if you think Davis went too far in scoring images of village razing and torture with a bouncy rendition of "Over There," the all-important equation of official jingoism and murderous destruction is tough to dicker over.

There might be five documentaries no American should be able to finish public school without seeing, and Hearts and Minds belongs on the docket. It also forms a vital link in a subversive people's cinema, clearly realigning history as a never ending series of crimes perpetrated by the powerful upon the innocent. But for a few particulars, Davis's film seems as much a prosecution of the present as it is of the recent past; only the names and geographies have been changed.

Hearts and Minds by Saul Landau An American Film Trial, by Saul Landau from Jump Cut, 1975

The winning and losing of hearts and minds: Vietnam, Iraq, and the claims of the war documentary Tony Grajeda from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

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Dayan, Josée

CET AMOUR-LÀ B+ 92

France (98 mi) 2001

Where did this little gem of a film come from?  This was a complete surprise, as there was absolutely no advance fanfare. Jeanne Moreau in a sweeping lead role, not a small part, mind you, as she is captured in nearly every frame of the film, why was this not the opening film at Cannes, particularly in the year of the French? As it turns out, the film played at Cannes only as a Jeanne Moreau Tribute Presentation.

A wonderful portrait of love and aging, using the real-life story of French writer Marguerite Duras, who, in the midst of a writer's block at age 66, decided, after a long correspondence from a twenty eight year old literary admirer, to call upon his love and companionship, who, despite being less than half her age, remained at her side for the last 16 years of her life as her lover, secretary, companion and nurse, where he helped revive her "joie de vivre" as well as her considerable writing skills.  Both had initial doubts about their own self-worth, she a chronic alcoholic while he was suicidal, but through their appreciation for "the other," they learned to understand their own worth as well.  What will stick in my mind are the small moments of patience and love, as this very shy man initially suffers demeaning treatment from this overbearing woman, but through his love for her prose, he withstood all personal attacks by always admiring her vision of humanity, so in time, they steadfastly endured.  Their final moments together are nothing less than pure elegance.  Jeanne Moreau, who knew the writer and is in her mid-seventies herself, provides a performance for the ages, supremely brave and individualistic, she never conceals Duras's profound human flaws, yet always remains luminous and intelligent.  This is a graceful and truly elegant film.

The comparison to SUNSET BOULEVARD is actually a good one; age is seen as mere caricatures in Billy Wilder's hands, while Dayan's own screenplay presents age in a much more humanistic light.  Forget that this film was about a real-life writer, that heightens the interest, of course, but the film would still work just based upon such a fresh and insightful view of aging.  Sort of like sickness, people shun age in this country, as if it has overgrown its usefulness.  The idea of a man so young falling in love with such an older woman would seem preposterous to most in this country, which is why this film took me by such surprise.  It was a completely unexpected subject.  Why weren't there busloads of senior citizens?  Not since the Canadian film STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY have I been so enraptured by the wit and charm of the elderly.  To see it realized with such calm assuredness, as well as the enormous presence of Ms. Moreau, was a delight.     

Cet Amour-Là David Denby from the New Yorker

At the age of sixty-six, during a fallow period of her working life, the novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and director Marguerite Duras (Jeanne Moreau) takes as a lover a twenty-eight-year-old philosophy student and admirer, Yann Andréa (Aymeric Demarigny), who has been writing her fan letters for five years. As they live together, she dictates to him and drinks, and exercises the French art of making arbitrary declarations. "Bathtubs scare me," she says. But she might just as well have said, "Rattan furniture scares me." The only point of such remarks is that she exhibits the will to make them. As writer-director Josée Dayan imagines her, Duras is a dazzling intellectual star in the French diva-oracle tradition, and her continuous self-assertion is a miracle. But in this movie Duras comes off as a sibyl without vision. And poor Andréa comes off as a nothing. He is not an intellectual companion, and Duras does not look at his naked body with desire. If you're going to make a movie about sadomasochism, you had better make it funny or dirty. But "Cet Amour-Là" is watery and sentimental and (perhaps unconsciously) cruel. In French.

User Reviews From imdb: Ralph Michael Stein (lawprof@pipeline.com)

Only France I suspect could produce a fascinating, self-absorbed, libertine, brilliant woman intellectual like Marguerite Duras whose long relationship with a very young and callow Yann Andrea is the subject of director Josee Dayan's "Cet Amour-la."

Born in 1914 in a Vietnam firmly under French control, the young Duras absorbed the often silent influences of the lush and exotic land that she often referenced, in writing and conversation, during her very long life in France. Her first important writings came out during World War II, a difficult time for Duras and her family under the German occupation that saw relatives incarcerated in concentration camps including her husband. He survived - others didn't.

Hardly surprisingly, Duras - always committed to examining social issues - flirted with and joined the French communist party after her country was liberated by the U.S. With a few other intellectuals who brought a brilliant honesty to their view of life she abandoned the false prophets after about five years. She always, however, mirrored issues of social justice through the prism of her writings which largely reflected her own experiences and values.

The belle of a postwar literary establishment that offered avant-garde writing to a country that in two world wars had seen demographic decimation and international humiliation, Duras tackled every theme and every subject while pursuing a somewhat hedonistic lifestyle (including a very celebrated menage-a-trois). By the time she met Yann, such exploits were interred in the mists of her memory.

Based on Yann Andrea's novel, the film starts with his meeting Duras after long writing to her, poetically expressing his admiration (and, undoubtedly, ambition to follow in her literary footsteps). Played by Aymeric Demarigny, the young (in his twenties) Yann is invited to Duras's apartment by the seaside.

A mutual attraction develops as Duras, in a role only Jeanne Moreau could bring to life, accepts the young man as her muse, amanuensis and lover. He moves in. As a couple, they argue, make up and often engage in whimsical pursuits (her attempt to teach him to drive, for example) in which the generational gap melts away. This was no short relationship - the couple was together from 1980 to Duras's 1986 death.

In the film and perhaps in real life (this is, after all, the surviving lover's tale of a relationship of near mythical proportions in literary circles) Yann brings certain gifts that spur the aging author's writing. Unfortunately he also brings bottles of red wine which set the alcoholic Duras back into the drinking she apparently had escaped from earlier.

An affair between a woman in her eighth decade and a man in his third - an American film would highlight exploitation, perhaps sex served up as bizarre. With actresses in their thirties now appealing to directors to find roles for "older" women it's doubtful many film makers here could portray a relationship such as Yann and Duras's with unflinching honesty, subordinating the sexual aspects to the more interesting core interdependence that Jeanne Moreau gives life to here.

Demarigny's excellent portrayal notwithstanding, this is Moreau's film, a triumphant demonstration of the depths of her acting AND a statement about her own innate vitality and sexuality. She must care deeply about Duras.

A slow moving film that will reward second viewings, it isn't for everyone. Duras isn't that widely read in the U.S. and I suspect many won't even recognize her name. Still, the intimate and often rambunctious Duras/Andrea relationship can stand independent of any knowledge of the protagonists' real lives.

Nicely filmed in a verdant France.

8/10.

Full Review Andrew Sarris from the New York Observer

Josée Dayan’s Cet Amour-Là is not the kind of film I would recommend to anyone who found The Hours too depressing. Cet Amour-Là, from Ms. Dayan’s own screenplay, with dialogue in collaboration with Yann Andréa, Maren Sell and Gilles Taurand, based on the novel by Mr. Andréa, recounts the passionate and scandalous love affair between the 66-year-old, much-read and much-honored French author Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) and a 28-year-old college philosophy student named Yann Lemmée (but renamed Yann Andréa by Duras). After a long correspondence between literary admirer and literary celebrity, Duras in 1980 summoned Yann to her side, where he remained for the last 16 years of her life in the capacity of lover, secretary, companion and nurse.

Their relationship was a stormy one. On more than one occasion, Duras threw Yann out of her apartment, telling him never to return. She frequently called him a nobody, a zero, right to his face, and he never flinched. Yet despite her recurring writer’s block, her alcoholism and her overall poor health, she managed to resume her writing, in the process teaching her neurotic, suicidally inclined young lover not only how to write, but also how to live and stay alive. Indeed, the unstated moral of this cryptic film of modest dramatic dimensions is that dying is easy, but writing is hard—or perhaps that just as a shark must keep moving or die, a writer must keep writing or die.

In any event, unlike most of my colleagues, I admire the film enormously, though I can understand why other people do not share my enthusiasm. I notice that many critics, while generally praising Jeanne Moreau’s accomplished delineation of Duras, have been very hard on Aymeric Demarigny’s quietly flaky portrayal of the seemingly masochistic and shamelessly submissive Yann. If I differ with my colleagues on the quality of Mr. Demarigny’s performance, it is because his is one of the hardest roles for even a minimally virile male actor to play. Besides, if one is to accept the film on any level, one must understand—as Duras undoubtedly did in real life—that being old and undesirable and near death, the only way she could escape the demeaning status of a supplicant was to lash out periodically at her young lover, who almost certainly would outlive her.

Yet there is nothing delusional in the relation of Duras to her work, as there is with Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Fortunately for Duras, an elderly writer doesn’t need a close-up from Cecil B. DeMille to validate her art. Similarly, Mr. Demarigny’s nerdy Yann is a far cry from William Holden’s male pin-up Joe Gillis, who sells his soul as well as his body for the easy life in Norma Desmond’s mansion. By contrast, there is nothing cynical or sleazy in Yann’s alliance with Duras. He loves and admires Duras as Joe Gillis never loved or admired Desmond. Yann believes with religious fervor in the prose that Duras dictates to him on his typewriter, whereas Gillis has all he can do to avoid laughing at the massive manuscript that Norma Desmond entrusts to him, to be turned into a filmable screenplay.

Don’t get me wrong. Sunset Boulevard is a magnificent movie, despite all its cruel derision. Cet Amour-Là is something else entirely: something smaller and less dramatically exciting, but also something subtler and more spiritually transcendent. I think we need both kinds of movies to balance our cinematic diet—which may just be another way of saying that we need both French and American movies to better appreciate the difference between one cultural constellation and another.

Yann, for example, as a representative of the French male, would make Donald Rumsfeld chortle with glee at this confirmation of the stereotype driving the current anti-French hysteria over here, directed at a whole people reluctant to shed their blood in a foreign land. The point is that I can’t imagine an American actor accepting a role as unrelievedly humiliating as this. Am I then a closet masochist or a hopelessly unredeemable Francophile? Not at all. It’s simply that Duras and Yann happened to be two very real people who danced for a brief time on the edge of eternity.

Ms. Moreau was both a friend and an artistic collaborator of Duras, but she pays her the greatest tribute by not slavishly mimicking her—which would have easily degenerated into parody—but rather by endowing her with Ms. Moreau’s own acting charisma and luminous charm. It can be argued (as many already have) that Duras was considerably overrated as a writer. I am not prepared to say she wasn’t. It seems to me that in most of her work, she was telling and retelling the same story of her own sexual initiation at a very young age by an older man from a different culture, race and ethnicity. Whether or not one respects her literary presence in such stylish cinematic works as Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and her own India Song (1975), she has left an indelible mark on the screen that makes her story of more than passing interest. Ms. Dayan is to be commended for breathing even often-painful life into a relationship that was largely sealed off from the world outside.

Dayton, Jonathan and Valerie Faris

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE B+ 91

USA (101 mi) 2006

She’s a super freak, super freak

A road movie with a demented dysfunctional family sense of humor, among which includes finding humor in a failed suicide attempt, jilted love, drug addiction, death, even how to dispose of a dead body, all wrapped around one family’s experiences where the dad opens up the film declaring: “There are two kinds of people in this world, winners and losers. And winners don’t give up.” Hard to live up to that philosophy without falling flat on your face. Dad (Greg Kinnear) is a rather despicable believer in a “Refuse to lose” positive mental attitude 9-Step Program, disregarding all other options, including the normal states of being in others. Mom (Toni Collette) has to put up with Dad, and is rather pissed off at his holier-than-thou approach where every obstacle is solved by the Sermon of the Dad. Frank (Steve Carell), is Mom’s gay brother, the nation’s leading Proust scholar who was recently jilted in an affair with one of his grad students who left him for Proust scholar #2 (yes, what could be more aggravating?), leading to his attempted suicide, so he has returned to his sister’s home for a supposedly “safe” environment during his recovery. Granddad (Alan Arkin) was kicked out of the senior citizen home for lewd and lascivious behavior as well as heroin addiction, and is a foul-mouthed libertine, but also has the most tender moments in the film. Dwayne (Paul Dano) is a Nietzsche-obsessed dour and sullen early teen son who hasn’t spoken to anyone in 9 months, while 7-year old Olive (Abigail Breslin from KEANE) loves Granddad, who is helping her practice her dance routine for the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest for kids, which she is “most” excited about, considering she only learns she’s a contestant two days before the pageant when the #1 contestant couldn’t fulfill her obligations.

On their way from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach in a broken down yellow VW van, where the sliding door keeps coming off and the clutch gives out, which means it always needs a running start, the family is one continual pain in the ass to one another, knowing how to get under each another’s skin, how to spark a nerve, which Olive tunes out by wearing her earphones. But along the way, each person comes face to face with their own delusions, almost like a mirror image of themselves, the one they never want to see. Each faces a horrible personal tragedy, but it’s also met with this terrific pick-me-up music that sends them on their merry way with a newfound purpose in life that wonderfully straddles the line between the grotesque, the tasteless, and the hilarious. When they arrive at the pageant and see what an artificial Barbi-doll each of the other contestants turns into, which is beyond tasteless and grotesque, they want to spare Olive, a genuine “real girl,” from the pain and disillusion each of them has recently had to face. But once onstage, she asks for a microphone and delivers her personal message, “I’d like to thank my Granddad who taught me all the dance moves,” and when the emcee asks for Granddad to take a bow, she tells them, “He can’t. He’s in the trunk of our car,” before launching into a relatively tame but bawdy version of Rick James’s “Super Freak,” which is enough to create pandemonium and send the audience out the room in droves. As it turns out, Michael Arndt’s script is something of an eye-opener, as most of the humor and personal tragedy is dead on, spurred on by outstanding acting performances, turning one-dimensional comical oddball misfits into compelling people, making this exaggerated farce something of a rollicking ride.

Little Miss Sunshine Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

True, it's hard to imagine a more aggressively prefab "indie" than Little Miss Sunshine, which seems to have been conceived and written to pander to as broad a demographic swath outside the mainstream (well, right next to the mainstream) as possible. It's about a dysfunctional family road trip. Its cast of quirky characters includes a suicidal Proust scholar, a mute teenager taking cues from Nietzsche, a suffering but stoic wife, an ambitious but fundamentally bone-headed husband sending all the wrong messages, a cranky, dirty-minded grandfather who sends the right ones, and an adorable little girl.

Screenwriter Michael Arndt puts them through their paces with a rigor that evolves from the tautly clever storytelling of the opening sequence, which introduces each major player and establishes their foibles, to a more slipshod narrative built on metaphor, coincidence, and forced reconciliations.

Every critic's least-favorite scene in the film seems to be the hospital caper that leads directly into the film's tedious home stretch, and that's where I really lost interest, as well. However, the performances are very appealing (Abigail Breslin? Next time you see Dakota Fanning, tell her she can kiss your ass), and music-video veterans Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris direct with a forthright confidence and simplicity of expression that propels the unlikely yarn through some rough spots.

And then, in the final reel, something miraculous happens — the film climaxes as the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant finally welcomes little Olive, a guileless underachiever in a hotel full of tiny, highly sexualized painted ladies, onto the stage. Suddenly, the film squares up what feels like about a dozen contradictory impulses -- it's simultaneously dopey and wise, riotous and sublime, splendid and vulgar -- and, for a few moments at least, and if only from my seat in the room, all was forgiven. Clunky though much of the film had been, and cranky though I was just a few minutes earlier, I had a happy grin plastered on my face as the credits started to roll. That's worth something.

film > Little Miss Sunshine : A "What's Wrong With ... Jim Ridley from the Village Voice

Like the shambling VW van its hapless characters steer from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, Little Miss Sunshine is a rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill. How this antic extended sitcom from first-time feature makers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris left Sundance with an eight-figure deal and reams of enthralled press clippings is beyond comprehension, even factoring in its big-name ensemble and the predisposition of festival audiences to pat a film about lovable losers on the head.

A grating black comedy about the paralyzing fear of not being strong, successful, or skinny enough, Little Miss Sunshine means to indict our national obsession with winners and the stigma of coming in second. The opening sequence introduces dad Richard (Greg Kinnear) delivering a motivational nine-step pep talk with mounting fervor. Big surprise: The very next shot reveals his audience as a few stragglers in a dingy classroom. At home, cantankerous Grandpa (Alan Arkin) settles in for his favorite leisure activity—snorting heroin— while mop-topped teenage Dwayne (Paul Dano) hits the weights in a sullen vow of silence under a giant Nietzsche poster.

In the next room, seven-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin) stares through glasses at a TV beauty pageant. The camera settles in a hospital ward, on the sodden misery of Uncle Frank (Steve Carell)—a gay Proust scholar who cut his wrists after losing his lover to an academic rival. Over his scowling face, the words appear: "Little Miss Sunshine." This is called irony. With Frank sequestered in Dwayne's room on suicide watch, the bickering household gathers for dinner—the movie pauses to chortle over a gauche Mayor McCheese cup on the table—just as a fluke announcement makes Olive a contender for the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest. Gung ho Richard convinces wife Sheryl (Toni Collette) to make the 700-mile drive in the family's decrepit van, and the others reluctantly sign on—for no better reason than that's what characters in shaky farces do.

Little Miss Sunshine is the latest in a long line of Sundance clunkers, from Happy, Texas to Me and You and Everyone We Know, that seems to have developed its impression of human behavior from incomplete space transmissions. Why does Sheryl, who doesn't want to take the van because she can't drive stick, suddenly decide when they're already on the road that she needs to learn? So the gears can go out, turning the van into a rolling junkyard that requires group pushing. How does Richard manage to sweet-talk a biker into loaning him a ride? That scene, in a Preston Sturges movie, might've been a pip—an illustration of the power of can-do optimism, that pure-grade American snake oil, to hypnotize even the skeptical. But the movie just breezes on by, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a stranger to hand over his bike. By the time the family makes a hospital getaway with a loved one in the trunk, the characters have edged from foolish to humanly unrecognizable.

The pity is that there are strains of tenderness and generosity here: an affectionate scene between Grandpa and Olive comes as sweet relief, mainly because Arkin's character momentarily becomes a person instead of a wheezy comic device. (Can anyone remember the last time the Foulmouthed Grandpa bit was funny?) And occasionally the directors capture an unexpected bit of beauty or freedom—like Carell's cakewalk bolt toward the rolling van's doors, or a lyrical shot from underneath a whorled overpass.

The movie's platitudinous payoff—winning isn't everything, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, etc.—would go down a lot easier if Little Miss Sunshine didn't roam from scene to scene searching for new characters to patronize. A sequence with a brusque hospital "bereavement liaison" (Paula Newsome) comes off thuddingly sour, but the beauty pageant finale is the nadir. To engineer a happy ending—the heroes mustn't look like losers—the movie has to make everyone else look worse. Thus the contestants are made up into grotesque little kewpie whores, while the adults include a helmet-haired harridan organizer, a leering emcee, and an audience of snooty stage moms. Even as a metaphor for What's Wrong With America—"Life is just one fucking beauty contest after another," offers one character helpfully—it goes past comic exaggeration into cruelty.

And yet Little Miss Sunshine saves its one belly laugh for this scene, which not coincidentally is the movie's only left-field surprise: Olive's glaringly inappropriate (or is it inadvertently appropriate?) talent contest specialty, one of exactly two punches the movie doesn't telegraph. (The other involves Carell's reading material, and it's not Remembrance of Things Past.) As for the rest of this desperately contrived farce—wouldja settle for Little Miss Congeniality?

de Andrade, Joaquim Pedro

MACUNAÍMA B- 81

Brazil (95 mi) 1968

A mix of sensuality and the grotesque, a somewhat ridiculous, yet politically potent period piece, an anti-intellectual satire on what it is to be Brazilian, following the birth and life of a young naive Brazilian born in the jungle of the Amazonas, making his way into the civilized world before returning back into the jungle again, along the way attempting to establish his own identity, a bit like Candide, using an emotionally detached viewpoint of a main character who always seems to be in the middle of something going wrong. An epic hero goes into the wilderness and returns a conquering hero. A barbarian goes into civilization and returns still a barbarian. The film is an adaptation of a book by the same title written by Mario de Andrade, somewhat influenced by a seminal literary work in Brazil, “The Lusiads,” written by Luis Vaz de Camoes, known as the Portuguese Shakespeare, in 1928 when Brazil was establishing its independence from Portugal. A fairy tale, a carnival-like mock epic, a satirical rhapsody on a theme, a highly illustrative look at Vasco de Gama’s voyages of discovery to India, based on Indian myths and legends, written in verse in a manner similar to Virgil’s The Aeneid, focusing on Portuguese people in the plural as a collective people, transported in the film to the modernized 1960’s. This was the first work of Magical Realism in Latin America, and was the first Brazilian Cinema Novo film to enjoy public interest, capturing the attention of newspapers as well as much financial success.

During the decade of the 60’s, Brazil’s population increased from 70 million to nearly 95 million, or by 1/3, endured a 1964 coup d’etat, followed shortly afterwards by 3 more before the end of the decade, introducing the TFP, Tradition Family Property, a right-wing organization formed to protect their own assets, with a militarily controlled parliament and president who suspended civil rights, sending many citizens into exile, implementing a brutal totalitarian regime in the 1960’s, somewhat reminiscent of the fascist dictatorship of the 1930’s after the country’s coffee economy was devastated, leading at the time to a nationwide depression. Cinema Novo was completely accessible due to its very strong roots in Brazilian literature. This novel introduced Brazilian modernism, something along the lines of Surrealism, Expressionism, Dadaism, or Cubism, it was attempting to express something about the modern age, an effort to break free from Europe, a cry for artistic independence with a nationalistic spirit. Prior to 1922, Brazil was a colony, a mirror image of Portugal. After its 1922 independence, it looked more to France. But this novel attempts to discover something uniquely Brazilian, bringing Indians and Africans, and their languages, religions, and music, all synthesized together into one cultural being.

Using a main character who changes from an Indian to a Black man to a White man, the film attempts to de-Europeanize the cosmos, making it an Indian cosmos, overturning established racial categories by parodying race and character, as despite the changing races, he continues to behave in exactly the same way. He is a hero with no character, who constantly yawns and murmurs “I’m feeling so lazy,” a Shakespearian Caliban, a noble savage with an unbridled sexuality. A woman is seen pulling a joint from between her legs, offering it to our black hero, who, after taking a puff, is immediately transformed from a country hick into a handsome white prince. He is not strong and brave, the European ideal, instead he faces danger by running away, by using cunning, and the African religious practice of macumba or magic, which is viewed for the first time in a completely non-judgmental manner. A dancer is seen in a near hypnotic trance possessing his enemy, a metaphor for foreign capitalists infiltrating Brazil. In perhaps the most visually unforgettable scene, a Mussolini-like strongman is having a party with distinguished guests around his pool, which is filled with red blood and corpses, with maimed and dismembered body parts. The game of bingo is played, and the winners are pushed into the pool where they immediately drown in the blood. The strongman, cartoonishly depicted as a bloodsucking, neocolonialist, has designed a large trapeze-like swing where he can enjoy himself by swinging over the pool. Using a cultural cannibalistic metaphor known as Tropical Modernism from the Tropicalismo movement, especially effective at the height of a military dictatorship, it begs the question: How did the Indians deal with the first colonizers? They ate them. So too are the foreign, imperialist cultures assimilated into Brazilian society, satirized by bringing together the opposite ends of Brazilian society, blending them together, unifying them as one.

Macunaíma Revenge of the Jungle Freaks, by J. R. Molotnik from Jump Cut

CONJUGAL WARFARE (Guerra Conjugal)

Brazil (93 mi) 1975

Brazil Film Update Randal Johnson from Jump Cut

In his fifth feature film, Joaquin Pedro interweaves three separate narratives based on elements of some 15 short stories by the "vampire of Curitiba," Dalton Trevisan. One narrative line deals with an unscrupulous lawyer who seduces his female clients until one day the situation is reversed, and a homosexual friend attempts to seduce him. Another deals with the conflicts between a poor, old man and his wife, which culminate in her revolt against him. The third tells of a young man who goes from woman to woman but who does not feel satisfied enough to return to his wife until he sleeps with a 70 year-old prostitute.

Using as a model the erotic comedy, or pornochanchada, which inundates the Brazilian market with its sexist and degrading exhibitionism, the director demystifies the corruption and hypocrisy of many moral values of Brazilian society. As in his previous film, OS INCONFIDENTES (1971), Joaquim Pedro apparently accepts the dominant ideology's roles and models only to subvert them on another level, thus maintaining a critical vision of Brazilian society. He also continues to develop the cannibalist metaphor of MACUNAIMA (1969). In one sequence, the young man attempts to make love with an attractive woman. Her bed is in the shape of a mouth, complete with lips and tongue. After the young man leaves, the woman rolls up in the blanket and the mouth closes over her. This reverts to the idea examined at length in MACUNAIMA that all social relationships in capitalist society reduce, in the final analysis, to cannibalism. Whoever has the power to do so devours his fellow wo/man. The use of the pornochanchada formula is in itself a critique and demystification of that genre.

de Antonio, Emile

POINT OF ORDER

USA (97 mi) 1964

Chicago Reader [Pat Graham] (capsule review)

A memento of that wonderful cold-war era over which our revisionist Coppolas (e.g., Peggy Sue Got Married) shed such wistful, luminously nostalgic tears: Point of Order is Emile de Antonio's 1962 excerpting of Army-McCarthy hearings TV kinescopes, presented in the white heat of outraged liberal propriety (though in retrospect defense counsel Joe Welch's sentimental parries to crude McCarthy thrusts look slick and calculated, disingenuously evasive; by comparison, the Tailgunner's bumptious dishonesty seems almost tonic).

Time Out

Rejected by the 1963 New York Film Festival because it wasn't 'a real film', de Antonio's debut feature is perhaps the purest expression of his analytical approach to documentary and the 'media-event'. To the raw material of hours of video footage of the 1954 US Army-McCarthy hearings, he brought a radical collagist's technique: constructing an inquiry into the phenomenon of McCarthyism without moving from his editing bench, taking up a camera, or adding a word of commentary; re-democratising the historical documents once dominated by the authority of McCarthy's 'performance'; and opening up an early oppositional direction to cinéma-vérité.

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

Briefly glimpsed in Good Night, and Good Luck, Senator Joseph McCarthy's self-destructive demagoguery first got the full-spectacle treatment in Point of Order, radical filmmaker Emile de Antonio's engrossing compilation of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Less documentary than distillation, the film compresses nearly 200 hours of footage into 97 minutes, giving a best-of view of the events that marked the beginning of the end for the belligerent commie-hunter. The dreaded, innuendo-lubricated bullying of the early 1950s' witch hunts hit a wall when the U.S. Army charged McCarthy and lackey Roy Cohn of pressing officers to give Private David Schine, Cohn's friend and lover, special treatment when he was drafted. The senator unwisely countercharged that the Army was helping the expansion of the "red world," so matters were brought to the fore (and, more importantly, to the front of TV cameras) for an extended inquiry that, through de Emilio's editing strategies, emerges as both claustrophobic and cleansing.

By pruning away at the raw footage of CBS kinescopes, de Emilio has given the material the compact structure of drama, and it's easy to read the film as the story of an ogre who ate himself to death, taking with him a decade's worth of evil. In fact, de Emilio, later to craft such corrosive works as the Vietnam War tract In the Year of the Pig and the Nixon essay Millhouse, scarcely lets anybody off the hook within this enclosed political arena. The most celebrated moment of the hearings, when Army counsel Joseph Welch chastised McCarthy for his "cruelty" and "recklessness" after he tried to smear a member of his staff with accusations of Communist links, is routinely singled out as a moment of old-school decency battling it out with (and silencing) reactionary fascism, yet Point of Order remains awash in shades of gray. More than a mere showdown between good and bad politics, the hearings come to stand for a system slowly realizing its own potential darkness, with McCarthy, Cohn, and the other participants coming off as more or less extreme outgrowths of a political organism interested mainly in the control of lives and the elimination of any hints of "subversion."

Contrary to the initial impression of "artlessness," de Emilio's use of raw footage actually accentuates theatricality, from the opening "cast" roll-call to the division of the film into "plot point" segments ("The Army's Charts," "President Eisenhower Intervenes," "A Letter from J. Edgar Hoover"). Far from anonymous, the TV cameras are intensely felt throughout as not merely a recording instrument but a draining device, the blasting light prodding each participant for the truth. Clueless to the new medium, McCarthy self-circuits in the long run—he fidgets, sweats, and snickers at his own flaccid puns and slurs, and launches unfounded attack after unfounded attack while an exasperated Cohn lifts his eyes to the heavens. More than anything, he exposes himself. Welch, meanwhile, knows the TV lenses are there, and gives just enough of his ornery heroism to hook the crowds, modulating the outrage and turning the examination of a cropped photo into irresistible vaudeville by sheer timing—a natural performer, as Otto Preminger richly understood when he cast Welch as a judge in Anatomy of a Murder. McCarthy's bullying exploitation of national fears could not be more timely, though Point of Order is also a pioneering work in its portrayal of politics as mastery of the media. It's not for nothing that de Emilio in the end locates McCarthy's fall as the ultimate loss of audience, threats barked at the chamber as the crowd disperses—the sequence itself a self-conscious manipulation of existing texts, with only the unmanned TV equipment ultimately left in the empty frame.

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson]

DVDTown [Christopher Long]

New York Magazine [David Denby]

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

DVD Verdict [Jesse Ataide]

Baltimore City Paper [Luisa F. Ribeiro]

Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule review)

Fulvue Drive-in [Nicholas Sheffo]

All Movie Guide [Tom Wiener]

Turner Classic Movies [Paul Sherman] (capsule review) also reviewing IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG

Critic's Choice: New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, November 29, 2005

IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG

USA (103 mi) 1968

The Cinematic Threads Matthew Lotti

Chilling agit-prop made during the Vietnam War fervor here in the States, questioning our very role in the region (domino theory my ass) and making a point to cover some of the history of the country itself. Having a little knowledge of the details certainly helps, although spot-on interviews with various journalists (David Halberstam, who I've always admired, is particularly lucid) and politicians fill in the gaps. Peter Davis' Hearts and Minds is more intense and memorable - and, despite its faults (and, like de Antonio, he has a clear bias), a haunting experience - but this picture's methodical construction suggests extensive research on behalf of its makers, and one of the more cutting critiques I've seen of America's political "issues."

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

The pig of the title is the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, thoroughly roasted by Emile de Antonio's agitprop montage. The documentarian's method is Eisensteinian righteous, the raw materials copied and pasted to illustrate his sympathies -- the opener interrogates heroic statuary, a snapshot of "make war not love" scrawled on a grunt's helmet, a cacophony of helicopter whirring scoring it all. Later, leveling artillery provides the ominous pulse, and "La Marseillaise" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" get filtered snickeringly through Vietnamese harp and flute to burlesque imperialistic "peacemakers" aboard a deceived, deceiving overseas invasion. Joseph McCarthy pops up briefly as a reminder of Red scare and ignorance, though the main aspect carried over from Point of Order remains de Antonio's vertical selective editing for plot-making and razzing the puppets of history: Lyndon Johnson is bracketed by Kennedy and Nixon as American troops are sent to Southeast Asia, a glimpse of Gerald Ford along the way. General Curtis E. LeMay assures us that "Orientals" regard lives more "cheaply" than him, George S. Patton III says his "feeling for America just soared" for a "bloodygood bunch of killers," with newsreel footage of soldiers torching villages and kicking prisoners (bound while others are led away, bags over their heads, "for interrogation") sandwiched between soundbites. Among those siding with "despicable communist enemy," along with the filmmaker, are Jean Lacouture, Daniel Berrigan, Kenneth Landon, William R. Corson, Harrsion Salisbury, David Halberstam, and Sen. Thurston Morton, who contemplates the war machine and ponders, "How silly can you get?" A batch of American "observers" is flown in to prevent fraud at Saigon polls, so absurdity is scarcely in short supply here, to say nothing of Emperor Bao Dai, Madame Nhu, the self-immolating Buddhist monk, Ho Chi Minh as the Vietcong George Washington, distraught peasants and plenty of napalm detonations. The theme of de Antonio's tract, assembled with calm anger, is the "arrogance of power" of the U.S. colossus, dissected and questioned, the path carved for Hearts and Minds and Michael Moore down the decades, as locations change but the song remains the same. In black and white.

Turner Classic Movies [Paul Sherman] also reviewing POINT OF ORDER

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing POINT OF ORDER

On "The Year of the Pig" by Emil De Antonio and Bill Nichols Critical dialogue between filmmaker Emile de Antonio and Bill Nichols, from Jump Cut, December 1978

The winning and losing of hearts and minds: Vietnam, Iraq, and the claims of the war documentary Tony Grajeda from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

The New York Times (Howard Thompson)

UNDERGROUND

USA (87 mi) 1976 co-directors: Mary Lampson and Haskell Wexler

Time Out

With a somewhat greater reputation as a 'cause' than as a film (FBI subpoenas on de Antonio, Haskell Wexler and Mary Lampson to surrender all footage brought an outcry from left-liberal Hollywood, before being withdrawn), this clandestinely-shot interview with five leading members of the Weather Underground marks both de Antonio's weakness and his strength as a radical film-maker. Soft-pedalling the analysis of the Weather-people's position on revolutionary armed struggle in the States (the questioning suggests reverence for 'the outlaw' rather than rigorous enquiry), and accordingly obtaining a number of rather woolly theoretical self-justifications, he none the less firmly situates the group in a recent US political history constructed largely from his own previous films and those of his followers, constantly relating his almost anonymous (obliquely shot) fugitive subjects to the events and conditions that radicalised them and sent them underground.

Political filmmaking U.S. political filmmaking: 2 stories, by John Hess from Jump Cut

Underground Weatherpeople at Home, by Thomas Waugh from Jump Cut

Emile DeAntonio and the New Documentary of the 70s Beyond verité, by Thomas Waugh from Jump Cut

Weather Underground faction attacks Underground Underground and the WUO split, by Peter Biskind from Jump Cut

de Bartillat, Laurent

THE VANISHING POINT (Ce Que Mes Yeux Ont Vu) B+ 91

aka: Le Mystère de Watteau

France (89 mi) 2007 Trailer

This is the kind of film that is rarely, if ever done well, perhaps the last being THE GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING (2003), a gorgeously conceived, fictionalized version about Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) and his growing obsession with one of his subjects (Scarlett Johansson), the face in many of his most famous paintings (seen here: Full resolution). The elegant attention to detail in that film was apparently an aberration as the director’s next project was another wretched Hannibal Lector film, perhaps the worst of the series. What this film has going for it, first and foremost, is Sylvie Testud, an actress of phenomenal range, who has performed leading roles in multiple languages ranging from German, Italian, French, English, and Japanese. Here she remains wordless through most of the film, which is really one long extended art appreciation lesson on the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau, an 18^th century French painter whose sketchbooks are largely lost, yet his extensive take on similar subjects and his use of color and décor show early signs of Impressionism some 150 years ahead of time. Testud plays Lucie, an art researcher studying the women in Watteau’s works, particularly one woman who is almost always shown from the back, who, she suggests, may have been the painter’s lover, a theory scoffed at and ridiculed by her highbrow professor and advisor, Jean-Pierre Marielle, something of a Michel Piccoli look-alike and a leading expert on Watteau. The rudely imperious professor discourages Lucie at every available opportunity, both publicly and privately, continually suggesting there is nothing to her theory.

While working in a photo print shop, she notices a mime standing still on a box just out of traffic in the middle of a busy intersection, a man who catches her eyes for several days before they finally get a chance to meet, where she is intrigued by his eyes. Vincent (James Thiérrée) is both deaf and mute, but can read lips and pantomimes his speech, which she immediately takes delight in, as he obviously finds a different way of viewing the world, which is especially interesting when they visit a Latin dance bar playing Willie Colon’s “Idilio.” As she spends hours on end staring at paintings, blowing up specific details, searching for signs of recognizable patterns or themes, Vincent appears to have an influence on just what she’s looking for, as he has an extraordinary ability to eliminate all extraneous, unnecessary matter in the world around him and find what’s truly significant. Perhaps without realizing it, his lifestyle alone encourages her to continue her search which borders on obsession, if only because he’s perhaps the only person she knows who realizes what life without it would mean to her. The cinematography by Jean-Marc Selva is stunning, in particular the detail in examining the Watteau paintings, while David Moreau perfectly balances the mood with quietly introspective music. Written by this first feature director along with Alain Ross, its attractiveness is the seductive world that is built from gazing intently in silence. While I haven’t a clue if any of this is based on credible art history or if it’s all made up, and the film never really makes clear how she draws her conclusions, but the time we spend immersed with a single artist of such renown is in itself stunning, as it’s an exquisite and thoroughly intelligent mix of medias. The end credits list an endless number of Watteau paintings, easily over 50, a list that seems to go on and on, something unprecedented in movie credits.

User comments from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

This is the offbeat kind of movie they not only still make in France but make well. Sylvie Testud is a student of Art History with a particular leaning to Watteau, becoming almost obsessed with his personality and one of his subjects painted with his back to the viewer. Yeah, I know, doesn't sound like something you can work up much of a sweat about but Sylvie Testud is one of the finest French actresses of her generation and Jean-Pierre Marielle is also on hand to offer some tasty opposition - in a different kind of film one of these two would say to the other, 'at last, an opponent worthy of my steel' - and in my case at least it was time well spent.

Festival of New French Cinema Andrea Gronvall from The Reader

The title refers to the focal point at which all lines converge to create perspective, which becomes the leitmotif of this highly imaginative 2007 mystery. Sylvie Testud (Fear and Trembling) stars as a headstrong art student in Paris who’s determined to prove the identity of the unknown model central to a masterwork by the 18th-century painter Antoine Watteau. Ignoring her imperious, disapproving adviser (Jean-Pierre Marielle of The Da Vinci Code), she follows a clue provided by her secret admirer, a deaf-mute street performer nicely played by James Thierree. Director Laurent de Bartillat uses jump cuts, rack focus, wipes, and extreme close-ups to suggest thematic connections in this elaborate puzzle, which considers both the rewards and the costs of tunnel vision. In French and Flemish with subtitles. 79 min.

12th Annual Festival of New French Cinema Facets Multi-Media

The always interesting Sylvie Testud (La France) stars as Lucie, a talented and dedicated art history graduate student obsessed by the paintings of 18th century French artist Antoine Watteau. Intent on uncovering the identity of a mysterious woman who appears in many of his canvases but is always only seen from the back, she begins a relentless and exhausting search for answers. Her quest takes her to an art auction in Belgium where she bids for a work she can't afford, opens her up to the scorn and ridicule of her thesis director, inspires her to research the work of a contemporary of Watteau, and leads her to an unexpected friendship with a mysterious mime who performs in the square across from the photocopy shop where she works and may have clues for her to investigate. Lushly photographed and exquisitely composed, this "art thriller" takes the viewer down the path of one woman's obsession and explores emotions both violent and delicate that are shared and unleashed the deeper she travels down her journey. Directed by Laurent de Bartillat, France, 2007, 35mm, 89 mins. In French with English subtitles.

User comments from imdb Author: Felix-28 from Melbourne, Australia

This was shown on World Movies last night. I didn't quite know what to expect, but I thought it might be something like Possession, the excellent novel by A S Byatt which was made into a much less good film; i.e., a story in which a present-day researcher solves a mystery about some aspect of the life of a historical figure. Well, it is that: the historical figure is the painter Watteau, and the present-day researcher is Lucie Audibert, who is played charmingly by Sylvie Testud.

There's a side-story about a deaf-mute mime who does his act outside Lucie's work, and with whom she strikes up a relationship. It adds little to the film, although there seems to be some real chemistry between Lucie and the mime, Vincent, played by James Thiérrée.

I found it quite compelling. The pictures on the screen are beautiful: the cinematography is by Jean-Marc Selva, which is not a name I had ever heard before, but it one I'll look out for in the future. The story moves along steadily, never hurriedly, and an atmosphere of tension is gradually created and built. Although Watteau is long dead, there's a sense of sadness and loss at the part of his life that is revealed, which is complemented and counterpointed by the sadness and almost desperation that surrounds Lucie's. Sylvie Testud is superb. She's as thin as a sparrow and not particularly pretty, but one of the things I like about French films in general and this one in particular is that they are about (not always, of course, but quite often) rather ordinary-looking people who are shown to be men and women of substance.

I've given it a score of 8 out of 10. I'd prefer to have given it 7.5, but that's not possible, and it's better than a 7. It's not a great film, but it's a very thoughtful one.

Hollywood Reporter Bernard Besserglik

James Thierree offers a clue to the mystery that Sylvie Testud is probing.

PARIS -- "The Vanishing Point" ("Ce que mes yeux ont vu") is a cerebral, visually impressive reflection on concealment and revelation in art rather than a "Da Vinci Code"-style action film. Laurent de Bartillat's debut feature may have enough crossover appeal to ensure moderate boxoffice at home and abroad.

Art history student Lucie (Sylvie Testud) is fascinated by the presence of a mysterious woman, invariably seen from behind, in the works of the great French 18th century painter Jean-Antoine Watteau. She embarks on an investigation to determine the figure's identity, a quest that leads to a series of discoveries and a visit to Belgium for an auction.

As she becomes increasingly absorbed in her mission, Lucie is given a vital clue by Vincent (James Thierree), a deaf-mute she sees performing mime in the street outside the photocopy shop where she works. Meanwhile her academic supervisor Dussart (Jean-Pierre Marielle) appears bent on discouraging her from developing her theory that the woman was an actress, Charlotte Desmares, with whom Watteau was in love.

Perpetually broke, Lucie is in debt to her landlord, constantly borrows from her actress mother (Christiane Millet) and has to sell off a family heirloom in order to buy a painting that appears to hold the key to the mystery. "Freely inspired" by the true story of Watteau's life, the movie imagines the discovery of a previously unknown work by the painter and seeks to establish a series of parallels, notably one between Lucie's mounting obsession with Watteau and the loss, when she was a child, of her mountaineer father.

Dussart, we also learn, lost his wife as a result of his own obsession with Watteau, while Vincent has an obsession with the river Bievre, a waterway that continues to flow beneath the pavements of Paris's left bank despite being paved over in the 19th century.

The movie has weaknesses as these connections often appear forced and there are holes and obscurities in the storyline. Yet De Bartillat and co-writer Alain Ross expertly convey their own painterly obsessions. (There are echoes here of Peter Greenaway's early movies.) Every picture tells a story, not simply about the subject but about the painter and even, digging deeper, about the person who is examining it. The frequent dissolves between paintings and Paris exteriors also add to an impression that mystery -- or history -- lies beneath every paving stone and every stroke of paint.

Testud, one of the brightest of France's young acting talents, is faultless as the dogged Lucie, while Marielle -- whom moviegoers will recognize as the slain museum curator in "The Da Vinci Code" -- is enjoying an Indian summer in an acting career going back half a century. Thierree is underused though, his character fading from the picture in the second half, one of the least satisfying aspects of a movie that rewards and frustrates in equal measure.

Variety review Jay Weissberg

Antoine Watteau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

WebMuseum: Watteau, Jean-Antoine

Jean-Antoine Watteau

Watteau paintings at the Web Gallery of Art

Idilio. Willie Colon Video Rockola on YouTube (5:11)

Idilio - Willie Colon (6:39)

de Broca, Philippe

Philippe de Broca Rob Edelman from Film Reference

Philippe de Broca has worked consistently since the 1960s, directing films for theatrical release and television. Yet when one thinks of de Broca, one thinks not of his recent titles but of his earliest and most successful films: sincere, playfully impudent comic spoofs made with dexterity and vigor, which stress illusion over reality.

In these early films, which he also co-scripted, de Broca's characters are nonconformists who celebrate life and the joy of personal liberation. Structurally the films are highly visual, more concerned with communicating by images than by any specifics in the scenario. And these images often are picturesque. De Broca acknowledges his desire to give pleasure to the esthetic sense and, as such, he is a popular artist. While these early films are neither as evocative as those of François Truffaut (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant director on The 400 Blows) nor as cinematic as those of Claude Chabrol (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant director on Le beau serge and Les cousins), they exude style and wit. While they might be fanciful in content, their essence is emotionally genuine.

De Broca's films are non-tragic, and feature humorous treatments of characters and their situations. One of his favorite themes is the relationship between the sexes, explored in his earliest films—Les Jeux de l'amour, Le Farceur, and L'Amant de cinq jours—each with Jean-Pierre Cassel playing a lighthearted lover. This character appears 20 years older in Le Cavaleur, featuring Jean Rochefort as a bored, self-centered womanizer. De Broca's most popular early-career films, however, star Jean-Paul Belmondo: Cartouche, a flavorful comedy-swashbuckler chronicling the exploits of kind-hearted criminals in 18th-century Paris; and L'Homme de Rio, a charming James Bond spoof about a soldier on leave who is led to a stunningly photographed Brazil on a chase for treasure. His most renowned effort is Le Roi de coeur, set during the final days of World War I in a town that has been abandoned by all except the residents of an insane asylum.

Thematically speaking, Le Roi de coeur is a perfect film for its time. Released just as the anti-Vietnam war movement was gaining momentum, it is a pungent satire that lampoons the very nature of war and conflict. Not surprisingly, Le Roi de coeur fast became a cult favorite among college students. It ran for six-and-a-half years alone at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, moviehouse. Le Roi de coeur is de Broca's idea of an anti-war film. Typically, he does not focus on the calamity of a youthful hero who is robbed of his life (as in All Quiet on the Western Front), or soldiers needlessly and maddeningly put to death by a military bureaucracy (as in Paths of Glory and Breaker Morant), or the bloody slaughter of his protagonists. Deaths and tragedies in a de Broca film usually are obscured by humorous, feel-good situations. In Le Roi de coeur he gently, satirically celebrates individual freedom. His inmates appear saner than the warring society that has labeled them mad.

De Broca is more concerned with good than evil. He began his career as a newsreel cameraman in Algeria and made several documentary shorts, but switched to narrative filmmaking because he "decided the real world was just too ugly." At his best, de Broca deals with possibilities—for peace, beauty, hope, love.

Nevertheless, the work in his first half-decade as a feature filmmaker generally is more satisfying than his efforts of the past three decades. Among de Broca's higher-profile post-1960s films are Le Cavaleur and Tendre Poulet (Dear Inspector and Dear Detective), a romantic comedy about a female cop who rekindles a romance with an old lover while sniffing out a killer. The latter was so popular that it spawned an American made-for-TV movie and an inferior de Broca-directed sequel, On a vole la cuisse de Jupiter (Jupiter's Thigh). By the 1990s, de Broca mostly was directing for French television. A typical credit was Le Jardin des plantes (The Greenhouse), a chronicle of the warm and protective relationship between a little girl and her grandfather in the waning days of World War II. Le Jardin des plantes is a thematic throwback to Le Roi de coeur in that it may be interpreted as a statement about the folly of war. It also reflects on the less-thanhonorable behavior of some Frenchmen and women under the German occupation. Yet despite its somber setting, Le Jardin des plantes is consistent with de Broca's cinematic view in that it primarily is a candy-coated entertainment that exudes a sentimentality for a time and place that in reality was brutal and dangerous.

By far de Broca's highest-profile late-career theatrical feature is Le Bossu (On Guard), which may be linked to Cartouche as a swashbuckler/ripped-bodice period piece. Le Bossu is set in the France of Louis XIV and charts the derring-do resulting from a faithful swordsman's rescue of an infant princess from the grasp of her sinister relations. While entertaining and acclaimed—it won nine César Award nominations—Le Bossu is nothing more than a slick, by-thenumbers commercial vehicle. In the end, de Broca's best films were those made in the 1960s.

THE LOVERS (Les Jeux de l'amour)

aka: The Love Game

aka: The Games of Love

France (86 mi) 1960

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

WHAT happens to the heroine of "The Love Game" ("Les Jeux de l'Amour"), which came to the Sixty-eighth Street Playhouse yesterday, shouldn't happen to any normal female, let alone to the heroine of a French film.

Here she is, nimble and nubile, rarin' to get married and have kids with a fellow with whom she lives and runs an antique shop on the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve. But he is a very fragile specimen. Rose paintings are his speed. He prefers to keep it chummy and casual. No marriage, no kids, just fun and games.

So she has to turn to their neighbor, who is tiresome but fairly masculine, for a down-to-earth matrimonial offer. When her partner hears of this, he pouts and goes off in a terrible tizzy. But the next morning he comes around and says, okay, he'll marry her and have kids if he has to—but gawd! And that's how we leave our heroine.

As you can see, this is not the sort of romance that is likely to be favored generally. It is certainly not the sort we ordinarily expect from the well-adjusted French. But then, this film is a production of Claude Chabrol, who is one of the foremost exponents of the so-called "new wave," so it may be a fair example of what the snappy young Frenchmen want these days.

If so, they are welcome to it. Genevieve Cluny is cute as the girl—a little skinny but full of sparkle and fun. However, Jean-Pierre Cassel is in strictly outer space as the lad. He flits and flounces and grimaces, and once he takes off through the woods, waving his arms and screeching. Not exactly our idea of charm, Jean-Louis Maury is rather plain looking, also rather dull, but he holds the franchise for the male sex. They're the only characters of any consequence in the film.

Let us add that the English subtitles, which translate the French dialogue, are very meager for the amount of conversation. And it looks as if some silly bedroom scenes have been cut.

THE JOKER (Le Farceur)

France (88 mi) 1961

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

NO matter how much you may be tempted to snort "balderdash!" and walk out during the early part of "The Joker" ("Le Farceur"), which came to the Fifty-fifth Street and Sixty-eighth Street Playhouses yesterday, take our advice and stay with it. Along about the third or fourth reel, the whimsey of the thing begins to bubble and from then on it's a lot of genial fun.

For this wacky little French picture about a charming Parisian libertine whose career seems to be a one-man business of providing amiable females with love is a casual amalgamation of several lively comedy styles, including a bit of that of Mack Sennett and a bit of the early René Clair. It gallops along at much the same pace as does the stage play of "Irma la Douce" and it concludes on a note of bland defiance of bourgeois conventionality.

But obviously Philippe de Broca, who directed and helped to write the script, had no particular message or even intention in mind, other than to stimulate the audience with a little impudent and bizarre activity. His idea is nutty and improbable, it is supported by the barest thread of plot and its details are pure conceits of fancy. That is its basic fun.

That is also why it is a bit difficult to get with it at the start. The spirit and sport are so extraneous to the slam-bang conceits of usual farce. It opens with the hero's popping out of a lady's apartment onto a roof and skipping lightly across the rooftops of Paris, pursued by the bellowed threats of the lady's spouse.

He proceeds then to his own residence, which we ruefully discover to be a veritable mare's nest of grotesque decorations and eccentric relatives. His uncle, the evident genius loci, comes to breakfast wrapped in a rug and wearing a knitted skullcap that frames a cherubic face. His brother is a wacky sort of gasbag who uses the family group to make historical photographs for cheap magazines, and the brother's wife is a weird little creature who we learn bore the hero's first child. Upstairs, in a gallery chamber protected by chicken wire, are a couple of darling youngsters who are acknowledged as the hero's dividends.

Do you wonder it is a little baffling? But soon it begins to take form as the sweet satyr fixes his intentions upon a financier's beautiful wife. As he pursues this tempting beauty, first blowing hot, then blowing cold—and when he blows cold he soothes his anguish by playing solos on a bassoon—the whole thing acquires a light, elastic, rollicking, carefree charm. The conclusion is much too witty and fragile to be exposed.

Under M. de Broca's pert direction, the performances are superb, with Jean-Pierre Cassel especially blithesome and amiable in the leading role. He has the grace of a dancer and the nonchalance of a faun. He's so much better in this than he was in "The Love Game," which was M. de Broca's one previous film.

The lady pursued is played nicely by elegant Anouk Aimee, and the old uncle is made a droll eccentric by the portly actor, Palau. Georges Wilson as the brother and Geneviève Cluny as his wife are dandy as residents of the ménage that might have been dreamed up by cartoonist George Price.

Georges Delerue has contributed a lively and deliciously amusing musical score. The whole is so much better than "The Love Game" that it isn't funny. Or, rather, it is.

This time the English subtitles are far from adequate.

FIVE DAY LOVER (L’Amant de Cinq Jours)

aka: Infidelity

France Italy (95 mi) 1961

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

LOVE gets a gauzy going over in two fragile little films, one French and one Dutch, that opened at the Normandie yesterday.

The first is "The Five Day Lover," a flick of the directorial hand of youthful Philippe de Broca, who did "The Joker," and the flimsy, "The Love Game." In substance, it bears comparison to them. That is to say, it is quite thin and it toys with the notion of illusion as the essence of romance. But, unlike "The Joker," it misses the beneficence of good, madcap fun, and, unlike "The Love Game," it follows a pattern to the point of becoming a bore.

The idea is simply that a young wife and mother of two adorable tots meets up with a light-hearted fellow at a Paris fashion show and pops up to his apartment. She has no more shame about her husband being left at home to care for the kids than she has about taking this cuckoo away from her very best friend. All she cares is that he gives her the illusion of champagne romance, which she doesn't get from her husband, who is something of a clown and dunce.

But her best friend cares. She arranges a little party at which all four meet—the wife, the lover, the husband and, of course, herself. And out of this kooky confrontation there come understandings whereby the wife and the lover disentangle, the lover goes back to the best friend and the husband allows the wife to go on chasing illusions with other fellows, as long as she comes home week-ends.

As anyone can see, this is a gauzy and strictly whimsical design for a kind of domestic living that could only hold water in a play or film. And then its water-holding virtues would entirely depend upon the charm with which the nonsense is developed and dribbled into the thing.

In this case, M. de Broca does it a bit too airily, too patly and with too little humor or glittering assistance from his stars. Jean Seberg, looking quite different from what she has in previous films, is a bit too prosaic and posey—and immature, certainly—as the wife. Jean-Pierre Cassel, who has been prominent in both of M. de Broca's previous films, is too willowy as the lover and Francois Perier is too bumptious as the spouse. Only Micheline Presle as the good friend is credible in this fluttery romp.

KING OF HEARTS (Le Roi de Coeur)

France Italy (102 mi) 1966 ‘Scope

Time Out

One of the sleepers of all time in that, tried out in a small Boston cinema years after it flopped in the UK and in America, it became a kind of Mousetrap in student cinemas across the States. On a World War I mission, Bates discovers a town of lunatics which is due to be blown up at midnight. The fairy-tale atmosphere and carnival energy are nicely placed, but the whole excessively whimsical thing would have worked so much better if de Broca had toughened up the overall (wartime) context instead of letting everything slide towards farce.

All Movie Guide [Craig Butler]

A gentle, whimsical anti-war fable, King of Hearts was wildly embraced as a cult favorite in the 1970s. Even at the time, however, there were detractors who felt that the charms of the film were a bit too "soft" to compensate for its flaws. There's certainly validity to this argument, for Hearts definitely has its share of flaws. For one thing, nothing very much happens after the main predicament is established; one witnesses the former members of the asylum reconnecting with their past lives (real or imagined), without a great deal of variation. In addition, the "who is sane and who is mad" argument is a trifle precious, especially when the asylum residents are presented as exhibiting a very bowdlerized version of madness. However, most viewers are very willing to overlook these deficits, and it can easily be argued that these are not so much flaws as characteristics that add to the film's unique feel and sense of enchantment. Certainly, viewers who like Hearts like it a lot, which speaks volumes about its ability to impress, engage, and enthrall. Those who like the film will appreciate Philippe de Broca's delicate direction; those who are not taken with the film will find the direction slow. But almost all should agree that the cast is quite good, especially Alan Bates in what is essentially a straight-man role. Bates makes the character much more than an amused, bemused, or confused observer, bringing just the right amount of weight to the part without going overboard. Geneviève Bujold has never been more attractive or appealing, and the supporting cast as a whole plays their roles with just the right tone. If a viewer is able to enter into King of Hearts' particular world view, he will most likely feel as if he has made a new and very dear friend.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

An antidote to (or, perhaps, a necessary appetizer for) LaBute's neo-Cromwellian moralizing may be found this week at Film Forum, which has chosen to revive the most cloying of cult films, Philippe de Broca's 1967 King of Hearts.

As World War I ends, the retreating German army abandons a picture-postcard French town but not before booby-trapping the place to blow sky high when British troops arrive. The locals flee and, left to their own devices, a gaggle of cheerful lunatics escape their bin and take over the doomed town—thoroughly confusing the British soldier (Alan Bates) who has been dispatched to defuse the bomb. "Theater is everywhere," the wisest of the loonies informs him—and so are saccharine bromides. The LaBute Skinner box is here filled with bonbons.

As a movie, King of Hearts is more pageant than story. (To add to the enchantment, de Broca contrives to have circus animals wandering the streets; even the British soldiers are costumed in kilts.) As a cultural artifact, however, the movie is less a relic than a symptom. Set to a lilting score by Georges Delerue that shamelessly pastiches his music for Jules and Jim, King of Hearts managed to conflate a topical anti-militarism with the sentimental glorification of mental illness already percolating through mid-'60s popular culture in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, movies like Morgan! and A Fine Madness, and even the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha. Indeed, given its notion of schizophrenia as a form of defensive role-playing, King of Hearts is nearly a pop exegesis of R.D. Laing's anti-psychiatry. These adorable crazies are like children who never tire of play: Pierre Brasseur, the ripest piece of Camembert, impersonates a lunatic impersonating a general; Bates's love interest is provided by a very pert and pretty Geneviève Bujold, zany enough to imagine herself a virginal hooker. (The importance of her fantasy brothel suggests a diluted version of Jean Genet's The Balcony.)

This cutie-pie be-in opened in the U.S. during the full flowering of hippiedom in the very Summer of Love ("The arena of the spectacle might just as well be Central Park," Andrew Sarris wrote in the Voice) and achieved bona fide cult status in the early '70s, evidently running for five years at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge, among other college towns. (In New York, King of Hearts succeeded the wildly successful Pink Flamingos as the Elgin's midnight attraction in January 1974, lasting a mediocre 14 weeks before being yanked for the redoubtable Freaks.) The movie's middlebrow destiny may be considered fulfilled by its own transformation into a Broadway musical that ran 48 performances in late 1978.

What's most striking about King of Hearts today is the cost-free detachment of its specious whimsy: There's a blithe Hitler joke, several farcical executions, and an exceedingly high body count. "Don't you think these actors are a bit over-the-top?" one wacko remarks upon watching the British and German armies slaughter each other at close quarters. Not really. The new 35mm print, as customary with Film Forum revivals, is impeccable.

Epinions [metalluk]

Ted Prigge

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Cleveland Press [Tony Mastroianni]

de Heer, Rolf

Vertigo Productions: Rolf de Heer's Official Website

All-Movie Guide

TCMDB

Hearing the Story: Sound Design in the Films of Rolf de Heer Cat Hope from Senses of Cinema, 2004

Sydney Morning Herald Article (2007) The Sage of Innocence, by Garry Maddox, March 3, 2007

Telegraph Article (2007) Utterly Strange, Totally Enthralling, by Sheila Johnston, March 23, 2007

de Heer, Rolf They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

The Blurb Interview (2002) by David Edwards

Australian Film Commission Interview by Julia Overton

ENCOUNTER AT RAVEN’S GATE

Australia (94 mi) 1988 ‘Scope

Encounter at Raven's Gate from Time Out London

Arriving to investigate the smouldering wreckage of an outback property, Special Branch agent Hemmings (Camilleri) seems disconcerted to find local police sergeant Taylor (Cullen) already at the scene. Taylor senses that he has stumbled on Something Big, and as the two men piece together the events leading up to the disappearanceof the house's three inhabitants, he begins tosuspect a government cover-up. In flasback, we observe the fraught triangular relationship between paroled car-thief Eddie (Vidler), his responsible older brother Richard (Singer), and Richard's frustrated artist wife Rachel (Griffin). Meanwhile, cars grind to a halt, wells dry up, dead sheep and birds litter the sun-parched earth. De Heer's disconcerting images suggest not only an intangible link between the seething emotions and the unexplained physical events, but also an invisible, all-seeing alien presence. The original screenplay apparently explained the strange occurences; the film itself is more enigmatic and open-ended, using an elliptical narrative and bizarre camera angles to reinforce the prevailing mood of mystery and unease.

User comments from imdb Author: dispet from Melbourne, Australia

an early film from rolf de heer (bad boy bubby, the tracker), it is also one of the most impressive pieces of visual art to be created in australia, and far superior to the majority of horror coming from the rest of the world. a tale of the human condition in the lonely mental wastelands of the australian outback, de heer succeeds in making us feel the insanity and discordance which lurks beneath the surface of country australian life for anybody who can no longer keep themselves sane through nature, sports or trips to the pub. far superior to picnic at hanging rock, this is a film that will truly creep you out and leave you thinking about what lurks outside. america has its backwoods, and australia has its outback.

User comments from imdb Author: charliecbc from Greensboro, North Carolina USA

I'm not sure what to make of this film, or who to recommend it to. All I can say is I liked it, it was amazingly well made, and it definitely held my interest throughout the duration of its run time.

Visually, film has amazing composition. The cinematography and directing is striking. The audio is quite striking as well, like during the dog attack the sound of digiridoos (spelling?) blends with the dog's growling.

The film reminded me there are still many things in nature we do not completely understand yet. Some things seem to defy scientific explanation. Having just finished viewing this film for the first time, I could probably write a dozen pages about this film and how I interpret it. Someone else could do the same and our ideas might be quite different.

For one, this film is about is how every once in a while, whether you live in the city or the country, sometimes everybody's biggest problems can come to the surface all at once. In this film, the s--- hits the fan for several different people in the same place, but in different ways. There are no flat, one-dimensional characters here.

I don't want to muddle peoples' impressions of this film with comparisons to other movies. There is definitely some "X-Files" type stuff going on, and parts of it reminded me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But in general this film is quite unique, and is virtually unknown in the United States.

There is no DVD available in NTSC Region 1, and the copy I watched was a dusty old VHS tape issued by HBO, I recently found it in the Sci-Fi section of the old, cluttered video store I work at. The cover looked interesting. Usually when I find a film made in certain foreign countries, I assume a lot of people there must have liked it if it a US distributor picked it up. Of course that is not always true, and thousands of great foreign films never get released here, while plenty of crap finds its way here thanks to the money hungry corporations monopolizing the distribution networks. But I've always had good luck with films from Australia, such as Chopper, Razorback, and The Last Wave.

I really hope this film gets a DVD release over here. I would love to view it with better picture quality. I am also curious to know if this film was big hit in Australia

Goatdog's Movie Reviews [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DINGO

Australia France (109 mi) 1991 ‘Scope

Austin Chronicle (Pamela Bruce) review [3/5]

Winner of Best Musical Score in the 1991 AFI Awards (and nominated for Best Film), Dingo is a jazz-infused tale set in what seems the most unlikely of places to inspire such music: the Australian outback. But, it is this unusual cultural combination which, for the most part, successfully serves as the driving force behind the life and dreams of the protagonist, John “Dingo” Anderson (Friels). A tracker by trade who hunts the Australian wild dogs of prey known as dingoes, “Dingo” Anderson is also a struggling, part-time musician who dreams of breaking away from the dusty outback dancehalls and the Johnny Cash-meets-Herb Alpert-and-the-Tijuana Brass repertoire of his small band, Dingo and the Dusters, for the sophisticated, urban aesthetics of modern jazz. All because of an unforgettable incident from his childhood in which a plane carrying legendary jazz trumpeter Billy Cross (Davis in his first and only film role) makes an unplanned landing in Dingo's remote hometown of Poona Flat, and Cross gives an impromptu performance for the astonished citizens. Rather than allow his unfulfilled aspirations to forever fade into the void of “what might have been,” Dingo -- much to the dismay of his wife, Jane (Buday), and childhood friend, Peter (Petruzzi) -- makes repeated attempts to re-establish contact with Cross in Paris through letters in order to realize his lifelong dream of performing with his idol. However, once Dingo's dream transforms itself into a face-to-face meeting with his idol after 20 years, the narrative's logic is disrupted due to the fiction-reality interface involving the larger-than-life persona of Miles Davis in such a thinly disguised role. Perhaps if a lesser-known actor or musician had been cast as Billy Cross, the last quarter of the film might have been more plausible and less alienating. Nevertheless, Dingo does have its share of worthwhile, memorable qualities, such as Denis Lenoir's (Monsieur Hire and Daddy Nostalgia) rich cinematography which provides a nice contrast between the slick, neon urbanity of Paris nightlife and the primordial beauty of the Australian outback, as well as the atmospheric jazz score which was co-written by Davis and Michel Legrand (and is one of Davis' last recordings before his death in 1991). The actors also give credible performances and blend easily with the naturalness of the outback population. If you are a jazz aficionado, an Australian film connoisseur, or both, Dingo might be the film for you.

Urban Cinefile (Australia) dvd review Andrew L. Urban

Boxoffice Magazine review Susan Lambert

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

BAD BOY BUBBY

Australia Italy (112 mi) 1993 ‘Scope

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Rolf de Heer's film is pretty much a weirdo. It begins in the sordid flat which 35-year-old Bubby (Hope) shares with his corpulent, incestuously demanding mum; since she insists the outside world is poisoned by gas, the only creatures he knows are the cat he torments and the cockroaches he eats. Then his long-lost dad turns up: jealous that he's been usurped in his mother's affections, Bubby deals with the situation the only way he knows how and, with a mixture of fear and curiosity, leaves the slum. The following adventures are somewhat predictable; but at the same time the world into which the innocent hero is cast has a singular loneliness and desolation. The film's attitude to misfits is admirable, but it's hard not to feel slightly uneasy about the use of real handicapped people in the later scenes. That said, this proficient film is never less than intriguing. It may be muddled, but one can't deny its ambitions, or the integrity of Hope's performance.

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

Rolf de Heer's "Bad Boy Bubby" is a bold, often comic contemporary parable of good and evil, ignorance and enlightenment. It will recall the two film versions of the saga of Kaspar Hauser, as well as Truffaut's "The Wild Child," in which a human being is cut off from the world until adolescence or adulthood.

Beyond the ever-potent premise of turning a naif loose in today's society and seeing what happens, De Heer creates a spiritual odyssey, criticizing the divisiveness of organized religion and the way in which it can become an instrument of destruction rather than redemption. Painstakingly crafted in all aspects, 'Bad Boy Bubby," which is as funny as it is poignant and bizarre, is a tremendously ambitious film that succeeds triumphantly. It is a decided advance on De Heer's "Dingo," notable for its rare screen appearance of Miles Davis.

You might never guess that it would attain such scope or even be the kind of film it becomes from its first half-hour, which is sure to be a turnoff for some viewers. It takes place in a dank, drab, sparsely furnished two-room apartment in Australia's Port Adelaide that looks more like a bunker than a home.

Bubby (Nicholas Hope) has never left it in his entire 35 years. His blowzy mother, Flo (Claire Bonito), is like one of those women who still occasionally turns up in the news: Someone with low intelligence who bears a baby out of wedlock and feels such shame that she keeps her child locked up until some chance discovery years later.

Bubby's entire knowledge of the world comes from Flo, who owns neither TV nor radio, thus making him even more deprived than "Being There's" Chauncey Gardiner. Every morning Flo bathes her son and herself, prepares breakfast for them, then has lusty sex with her son as matter-of-factly as the other routines, puts on a gas mask and leaves for the day, presumably to go to work. She's convinced Bubby over the years that the air outside is poisonous and that he must not venture forth on pain of death. In her dim, perverted way, Flo loves Bubby but, in addition to confining him, she often treats him brutally.

To say the least, the entire section of the film that takes place inside the apartment is bizarre in the utmost, steeped in dark, savage ignorance. After 35 years, Bubby's father, Harold (Ralph Cotterill), a low-life bogus priest, shows up, eager to make "an honest woman" of Flo at long last.

Bubby's world is swiftly turned upside down and dire events propel Bubby out into the streets. At this point Bubby's mental capacity is pretty much limited to an expert gift for mimicry. As you might expect, he is confronted with kindness, indifference and outright hostility in a wide variety of circumstances, but two encounters prove crucial. He falls in with an easy-going rock 'n' roll band, and at about the same time he paws a pretty, plump young woman aptly named Angel (Carmel Johnson, a radiant, selfless actress) who is naturally repelled and enraged. But his second encounters with the rockers and with Angel will transform his life.

On the one hand, he scores a hit as a rock singer, where a litany of all the abusive remarks hurled at him turn him into a popular rapper--ah, what a comment on a certain level of pop music--and on the other, Bubby's instant rapport with the severely disabled people in Angel's charge captures her imagination. She seems not to recognize him from their initial ugly encounter. Bubby is on his great adventure of self-discovery.

De Heer is admirably assured in his ability to take us on Bubby's amazing journey, and he has the gift of inspiring his actors to bare their souls (and often their bodies as well). "Bad Boy Bubby" must be taken figuratively, of course, rather than literally: For starters, it's unlikely that a 35-year-old man confined all his life would be as trim and agile as Hope.

The point is that De Heer and Hope succeed in persuading us to go along with the "reality" of the film, which is concerned with matters of the heart and mind rather than appearances. "Bad Boy Bubby" is that rare film that progresses from dark to light, emerging a celebration of the soul.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Pablo Kjolseth

I first became aware of director Rolf de Heer (who was born in the Netherlands, but moved to Australia at the age of eight) at the 2003 Telluride Film Festival, where they showcased his film, Alexandra's Project. The story involved a housewife going to sadistic extremes to get revenge on her husband; the program notes described it as being "almost unbearably tense from start to finish," and certainly the crowd's reaction would confirm this. Sure, it was controversial, but it was also smart, it was compelling, it had buzz, and it seemed destined to become a memorable theatrical release in the U.S., once a distributor picked it up. What happened was the opposite. It disappeared for a long while and then went straight to dvd. Almost exactly ten years before this, De Heer's film about a developmentally stunted 35-year-old who escapes a harrowing confinement for various changing adventures, Bad Boy Bubby (1993), followed a similar trajectory; it got a rousing reception at several film festivals (winning, among several other awards, the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival), it created a big stir, and then was roundly ignored in the U.S. (but certainly not elsewhere). In the case of Bad Boy Bubby, I blame the cats.

Prospective viewers, especially if they are neurotic cat lovers (and I count myself among them), would do well to recall the "it's only a movie" mantra for several key scenes ? especially since one of the biggest censures to threaten the film was over perceived feline abuse. De Heer assures viewers that the cat in question was, in fact, saved from the pound and well rewarded with a nice long life after filming. It's unclear if the same can be said for lead actor Nicholas Hope, whose various humiliations are now forever immortalized ? but all to his great credit, for he anchors this stunning and unique film with flawless transitions that careen between a naïve and innocent man-child demeanor and outbursts of autistic and manic intensity that can be either violently destructive or magically productive.

The first half-hour of Bad Boy Bubby is so oppressive and grim that De Heer realized his original idea of presenting these scenes in a cramped aspect ratio would make it unbearably claustrophobic for the viewer, so he opened it up to a 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio to let the scenes breathe even as both Bubby and his cat suffocate under the weight of Bubby's oppressive "Mam." In turn, Bubby's mother only leaves the squalid apartment with a gas mask so as to keep Bubby in fear of the outside world and to make sure he won't escape. But escape he does, and so Bubby's journey begins. Aside for being a stranger in what is, for him, a new planet, Bubby also has a talent for mimicry that compulsively informs every scene that follows. Thematically, the cinematic relatives that come to mind are The Wild Child (1970) by Francois Truffat and Being There (1979) by Hal Ashby, but otherwise it's hard to compare both of these traditional films to Bad Boy Bubby if only because De Heer's film is so completely whacked out, crazy, unpredictable, and also quite inspired and totally memorable in its own deranged way.

With most films, should the viewer leave for a quick bathroom break they could easily come back and fill in the gaps as to what they had missed. Not so with Bad Boy Bubby, for even the briefest trip to the lavatory might mean missing an entire segment that you could never have predicted and yet, somehow, plays an instrumental part to the whole. One of the reasons for this comes down to its unique construction as a work that gestated over several years, with De Heer writing down bizarre life moments and then putting them away for later. In some cases he'd revisit scenes that he realized weren't quite as strange anymore, so he'd ratchet them up a bit, thus creating a tapestry of changing encounters that are all amped up in their strangeness and glory, and that range from Bubby joining a rock band to eventually playing a key role in another group that assists people with cerebral palsy. He also kills things with cling wrap, but that's all part of his learning curve.

Adding to the dynamic element of the film is De Heer's decision to shoot each segment with a different cinematographer/director of photography, so that the end credits reveal 32 different names in this capacity. It's a daring venture but the gambit pays off by making each separate scene vibrate with a unique visual signature, and Hope's riveting performance as Bubby helps to anchor the overall flow of the story. Another interesting stylistic feat, which the dvd announces in a foreword, is the use of what De Heer refers to as a binaural sound design that is captured by attaching small transistorized microphones just behind each of Hope's ears. The microphones are hidden behind Bubby's hair, which was relatively easy to do since Bubby always looks like he licked a light socket first thing in the morning. The effect is interesting and just a touch disorienting, which was De Heer's intent as he wanted the viewer to share in Bubby's more immediate and askew way of taking in the world.

The dvd by Blue Underground for Bad Boy Bubby includes an interview with director De Heer that is very informative and will certainly elevate ones respect for the film. Other bonuses include an interview with Actor Nicholas Hope, as well as an earlier short film in which he starred and that helped land him the role in Bad Boy Bubby. A gallery of stills and the original theatrical trailer round out the package.

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [5/5]

DVD Times [Gary Couzens]

Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski) review

Critical Review

DVD Verdict (Paul Corupe) dvd review

Katie Badham retrospective

Urban Cinefile (Australia) dvd review [Collector's Edition] Andrew L. Urban, offering additional thoughts here: NICHOLAS HOPE INTERVIEW

David Dalgleish retrospective

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth

Monsters At Play (Gregory S. Burkart) dvd review

Rev Dr Phil Herring review

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [4/5] Eric Campos

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

Variety.com [David Stratton]

TV Guide

THE QUIET ROOM A 95

Australia Italy France (87 mi) 1996

This film is a disintegration of a family seen though the eyes of a 7-year old child, who provides a stream-of-conscious narration throughout, refusing to speak to her parents, who bicker and fight and eventually separate. The film is so dramatically effective and true to life that it felt like rather extraordinary therapy, the child and the audience are the only ones who know everyone’s true feelings, as the parents don’t have a clue. They simply don’t have the imagination to understand their own child, who provides a unique and unusual intensity, mostly from the startling honesty of her inner thoughts, finding her parents “cold and sad and dark, and really not there,” alone in her room, confused, afraid, unappreciated, unloved.

Note: As the young girl (at age 3 and age 7), the director cast two of his own daughters under the pretext that he could spend more time with them. Aware of their limited acting abilities, he decided to make the older girl mute.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

The fascination with perception and communication that characterised de Heer's Bad Boy Bubby again dominates this look at a couple's deteriorating relationship as witnessed (with confusion and misunderstanding) by their seven-year-old daughter, who simply refuses to speak - though we hear her thoughts in voice-over. Without ramming the point home, de Heer shows the well-meaning parents' insensitivity, their desperation and their occasional readiness to use the child as a pawn in their power games; and while it's basically a one-idea movie, and perhaps too concerned with formal originality, as opposed to emotional content, it still offers acute insights into a child's inner world.

Los Angeles Times (John Anderson) review

A different kind of suspense film, "The Quiet Room" takes place largely in the mind of a 7-year-old girl (Chloe Ferguson) who, for reasons only gradually explained, has stopped talking. And she's good at it. You can't trick me, we hear her think, as her mother (Celine O'Leary) or father (Paul Blackwell) pose questions that literally beg for answers. She resists their pleading, their anger, their wrath. She's driving them a little mad.

But "The Quiet Room," a deft bit of psychological business from Australia's Rolf de Heer, is about a world gone mad. It's the girl's world, granted, but since we're inside her head, it's all we have. And that's apt: As her parents go through the pains of eventual marital breakup, they're oblivious to the fact that what they're dismantling is their child's entire universe.

This isn't a moralizing film, per se, but it certainly puts a new slant on a subject taken for granted. The Girl (she has no name as such) flashes back to herself at age 3 (played by Ferguson's sister, Phoebe), wanting to be loved the way she was when she was little. Her rationale carries the self-absorbed logic of childhood: Her parents may have stopped loving each other, but by doing so they've unavoidably changed their love for their daughter.

"The Quiet Room" is one quiet movie--you adopt the Girl's silence, and it keeps you on the edge of your seat. If there's a fault here, it's that the Girl--given a very affecting reading by Chloe Ferguson--swings a bit broadly from innocence to irony (not that kids aren't capable of it, but this is a movie). And when she thinks a line like, "You're hurting my heart," it may indeed be true, but it doesn't sound like it.

"The Quiet Room" is an odd film, a taut tale of modern woe that will leave you moved. "Are you and Dad making progress?" she asks her mother, having at last broken her code of silence, adopting the euphemistic language of adults and slipping away from us even as we watch.

Anatomy of a Quiet Crash - Panix Mike D’Angelo, also seen here: The Quiet Room

Is The Quiet Room over yet? Or am I still watching it? Rolf de Heer's psychodrama about a seven-year-old girl who stops talking to get her squabbling parents' attention might have made a first-rate 15-minute short; at 57 hours and 14 minutes, however, it becomes just a tad repetitive and tiresome. I'm all for leisurely, measured pacing and minute examination of characters' lives, but this film doesn't exactly suffer from a surfeit of ideas -- there was really no need for it to be longer than Die Zweite Heimat, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Lars von Trier's work-in-progress The Kingdom combined.

Okay, I confess, I didn't actually look at my watch -- maybe it wasn't quite that long. But even an hour and a half was enough to stupefy me; by the end, I no longer had the strength even to move my hand in the circular get-on-with-it gesture that had characterized my response to The Quiet Room for the previous hour. Moment to moment, the film is effective and affecting; unfortunately, every moment is the same moment. If Crash spins its wheels, The Quiet Room is up on blocks.

The film's primary asset is young Chloe Ferguson, who plays The Girl (all of the film's characters are unnamed; The Girl's parents are simply The Mother and The Father) in the present tense, at age seven. (The actress' younger sister, Phoebe Ferguson, appears in a few brief flashback scenes.) A remarkably expressive child actor with an arresting face, she, and she alone, makes The Quiet Room tolerable, and occasionally even moving; her rare smiles are infectious, and while the film's premise requires her character to spend most of its three-day running time in a deep funk, she manages to communicate a fairly wide range of emotions without the benefit of dialogue. Or, rather, she could have done so, had De Heer been willing to trust her. Instead, his script has The Girl jabber incessantly in voiceover, both when alone and in "conversation" with her parents (played unmemorably by Paul Blackwell and Celine O'Leary), who can't hear her precocious replies to their questions and comments. This handy road map to The Girl's feelings and desires effectively undercuts any emotional power the film might otherwise have had; imagine Holly Hunter speaking in voiceover throughout The Piano,and you'll have an idea of how miserably misguided this choice was.

Eliding the voiceover might help The Quiet Room somewhat, but the best and simplest way to improve it would be to leave three-quarters of the footage on the cutting room floor; there simply isn't enough material here to justify a feature-length film. It's quickly established that The Mother and The Father are ignoring The Girl in favor of endless petty bickering, and that The Girl, unhappy about this development, has adopted silence as a weapon. There's only so much you can do with this scenario, and De Heer does all of it about twenty times over, making Crash look like a model of narrative economy by comparison. The occasional flashbacks break up the monotony, and the use of language with regard to them is intriguing -- The Girl refers to herself at age three in the present tense, not the past, as if the happiness her family once shared is still a tangible entity, just out of reach. But even this inspired notion is eventually discarded, and we're left with yet another variation of the line "Still not talking, huh?"

I was surprised, upon investigating the film's credits in preparation for this review, to discover that it is not an adaptation of a stage play. It certainly looks like one: nonstop dialogue (most of it in voiceover, true, but that might have been a cinematic alternative to a gimmick that would only work onstage, in which The Girl would speak aloud and the other actors would simply pretend not to hear her; theater audiences, for obvious reasons, find it easier to suspend disbelief than do movie audiences), four characters (there's also a teen babysitter, but that's it), one set. Rolf de Heer, who is best known in his native Australia for the reportedly outrageous Bad Boy Bubby, which hasn't been released in the U.S., has a strong visual sense, and I was prepared to applaud his skill in making the most of a weak play. Turns out he wrote the thing himself, directly for the screen. Can we get a little voiceover on him, by any chance? I'm dying to know what he was thinking.

Film Scouts (Karen Jaehne) capsule review

The Movie Boy (Dustin Putman) review [3/4]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Andrew L. Urban, which includes: Read Andrew L. Urban's interview on location in Tasmania with writer/director Rolf de Heer

Boxoffice Magazine review Susan Green

Metro Pulse (Jesse Fox Mayshark) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

EPSILON

aka: Alien Visitor

Australia Italy (92 mi) 1997 ‘Scope

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: liberalgems from Baltimore, Maryland

This movie is quite original! It's dream-like quality is simply delightful. I thought to myself while watching this film, "imagine what could have been accomplished with a larger budget and a harder edge!" This is a subversive story, one that political conservatives will detest. With chests puffed-out they will sing the following chorus: "What gives an "extraterrestrial outsider" the right to condemn the human race's destruction of the environment, and ostracize our precious way of life? A filmmaker with guts, that's who!

The love affair between two lonely strangers, is shown to be both confusing and inspiring. While one being is obviously an alien with a unique ability to control time & place, she is in some ways, all too human! How ironic!

While message movies are - for the most part - out of vogue. I dearly hope that when they come back in fashion they tackle issues regarding the health of the world's environment with a vengeance!

Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Andrew L. Urban, which inclides an interview with: ROLF DE HEER

Grandma is telling the story: once upon a time… He, an ordinary Aussie surveyor bloke, is camping alone in the outback. She lands on Earth (by mistake) nearby and after a confused meeting, She begins to show him how crazy his world is - there is so much beauty but it has been so badly spoilt by the locals. Not like home, on Epsilon….

I first saw it at Cannes in 1995, at a 10pm ‘by invitation only’ screening, when it had just been finished, and sold unseen to Miramax. Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax heavy, was at the same screening, but left half way through. He later offered Rolf de Heer "a very generous amount of money" to re-think the film. Rolf did.(After making The Quiet Room.) I saw it again in January 1997: he has added a new top and tail story around the film’s basic premise, and shot some new footage to go with it. This has helped give the film a stronger narrative structure.

Even so, Epsilon is a film impossible to categorise in terms of genre or formula; it abandons traditional film making, using motion control and time lapse photography to put its editorial viewpoint about our waste of the earth’s glories.

In some ways, the eagerness to get the message home pushes the film closer to preaching than drama, but the often breathtaking visual and musical fusion comes to the rescue. Using time lapse photography, de Heer gives us a new perspective on our world, through the eyes of an alien. It’s a valid device, and considering his ambitions, highly successful. The film is still essentially a two-hander, and is peppered with surprises.

Although it’s unlikely to find a mass audience, it is a novel and highly enjoyable experience."

User comments from imdb Author: Draconian (pjsavoie@home.com)

EPSILON, a.k.a. ALIEN VISITOR, is not what I expected. This is a no-budget Australian film with no special effects other than speeded-up film and quick scene cuts. The female alien (who comes over immediately able to speak perfectly accented Australian) can "blip" from place to place or time to time and alter her perception of the flow of time to match the "faster" humans.

An elderly grandmother tells her two granddaughters about a story a wandering man told her 40 years before, when an unnamed "She" came to the planet naked and completely disoriented, unable to recognize which star in the sky she came from...She meets a man alone camping in the Australian Outback, apparently bewildering him. She is here by "mistake", and gets angry when she is told she is on Earth. The Earthlings are known as consummate despoilers of the environment and a metaphor for the most insulting thing imaginable to the rest of the universe: those who "breathe the foul air" but do nothing about it, sticking their heads under the sand like an ostrich. In another amusing metaphor, Earthlings are "frogs".

From there, it is entirely a film about dialogue, as the perplexed man tries to understand She's peculiar psychology and viewpoints, even as She calls him unintelligent and "quaint". The man begins to realize maybe it's humans who are irrational and not thinking straight. Yet, while waiting to be "beamed up" back home, She sees that this human is not entirely faulty in his thinking and even falls in love with him.

The dialogue about perspectives is in spots interesting, but it is all layered with a heavy-handed environmental message and a low-budget feel (there are only two main actors, who blip around various deserted scenes, and the evil despoiling humans on the planet are never seen at all). The environmental message offers no solutions, but paints one or two dire metaphors about what will happen to nature and man if something isn't done. The logic also doesn't hang together: the rest of the universe has "given up" on Earth, yet one space woman caught on Earth by mistake manages to effect some positive change by the conclusion of the movie. What would a battalion of aliens deliberately sent here manage to achieve against pollution and waste?

Variety.com [David Stratton]

DANCE ME TO MY SONG

Australia (101 mi) 1998

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Julia (Rose, persuasive) is bound to a wheelchair and her carer Madeleine (Kennedy) is a man chasing bitch pushed by frustration and jealousy towards violence against her vulnerable charge; Eddie (Brumpton) is the faintly mysterious but ultimately angelic local guy who, much to Mad's jealous annoyance, takes a shine to Julia. The third film in de Heer's loose trilogy dealing with the fraught relationship of the marginalised with the world is his bravest yet (it was scripted by Rose, who is herself confined to a wheelchair); often, however, it resorts to fairytale coincidence and contrivance, while the characterisation is cartoon thin and the message heavy handed.

Film Scouts (David Sterritt) capsule review at Cannes

It certainly isn't hard to imagine a Best Actress award going to Heather Rose, the star and coscreenwriter of "Dance Me to My Song," directed by Rolf de Heer, whose "The Quiet Room" was so memorable in 1996. Rose plays a severely disabled woman who strikes up a friendship with an ordinary man, then finds herself in an unexpected love triangle with this new companion and her emotionally disturbed caretaker, who abused and mistreated her even before the romantic rivalry started to develop. The movie would seem exploitative if Rose hadn't coauthored it herself, but her harrowingly honest performance--physically, she is the character she portrays, multiple handicaps and all--is precisely what lifts the otherwise too-familiar drama into the realm of genuinely unique cinema. It's one of the highlights of the festival so far.

User comments from imdb Author: Theatrefella from Los Angeles, Calif.

I saw this film at the Telluride film festival in 98 or 99. This film has never left me. Making critical comments on this film is simply foolish. The director and Heather filmed this film over a 5 year period due to the physical limitations of the writer/actress. This was a labor of love and inspiration. This was a project that stunningly provides an impeccable vision into a kind of life that is led by some of our fellow human beings that the rest of us would prefer to deny. Some of the comments have indicated that they were uncomfortable or that they did not get it or they didn't not care for the gratuitous moments of the film. Well tough. This is reality, the pain of body, mind and spirit and the conquering of these trials by a monumental demonstration of power, creativity and fortitude that those of us defined as "normal" can not hope to understand or match. This film is a must see for any young person or adult who wants or needs an amazing reality check. This film is a vehicle to tell a story of freedom and unquenched intellect trapped but not surrendered.

User comments from imdb Author: Eugene Kim (gene_kim@earthlink.net) from Arlington, Virginia, USA

"Admirable" and "courageous" are two words that come to mind while watching "Dance Me to My Song." "Frank," "candid" and "uncompromising" can also be used to describe this Australian film about Julia, a woman with a severe form of cerebral palsy that prevents her from doing the most basic things, like getting dressed or going to the bathroom. She's played by Heather Rose, who really is afflicted with cerebral palsy, and who co-wrote the script. (I'll admit feeling acutely uncomfortable at times watching Rose's Julia as she writhes and contorts while making gurgling noises - I'm sure that says a lot more about me than the film or Ms. Rose.)

I saw this movie at the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C. (where it was shown as part of FilmFest DC '99). "Dance Me to My Song" deserves a lot of credit for refusing to blink at Julia's condition. We see her completely undressed; Julia's nakedness conveys her vulnerability without being the least bit prurient or exploitive. Julia is very much at the mercy of Madelaine, her latest assigned caregiver. And it quickly becomes apparent that Madelaine is an extremely selfish person who has no business caring for Julia or anyone else. How she uses - and abuses - Julia is at the core of this drama. Also figuring prominently in the plot is a rather mysterious man named Eddie, whom Julia manages to befriend after comically blocking his path with her motorized wheelchair.

As straightforward and unpretentious as this film is, one thing it's not is... terribly complicated. I'm hard-pressed to think of any scene where it isn't abundantly clear how we're supposed to react; everything is so clear-cut. This scene will make you smile, that one will make you shed a tear, this one will make you laugh, and that one will make you want to shout in anger. The film falls short of true greatness, IMHO, by making Madelaine a near-total witch. There are a few attempts at making Madelaine a more three-dimensional character (including a scene in which she sits by herself and cries), but in the end, it's apparent that we're just supposed to hate her. Further stacking the deck are visits from a woman named Rix, one of Julia's former caregivers who's meant to be every bit as wonderful as Madelaine is horrible. (When Madelaine gets a form of comeuppance from Rix, it's as if the audience is expected to cheer. The AFI audience didn't.) Viewers might rightly wonder: If Madelaine is so awful, why doesn't Julia get rid of her? We get something of an explanation fairly late in the film - it's implied that caregivers are hard to come by, which suggests a lot of borderlines slip through - but it doesn't really explain why Julia tolerates as much ill treatment as she does. (The movie is too preoccupied with making Julia out to be a total victim to consider the possibility of an abuser-enabler relationship.)

Also - and I think this is a legitimate point - for all the time we spend with her, I don't feel as though we get to know Julia all that well (unlike, say, the way I think we become acquainted with Daniel Day-Lewis' Christy Brown in "My Left Foot"). Part of this may have to do with the fact that Julia (and, I assume, Heather Rose) lacks the power of speech (unlike Christy Brown), and must rely on a "voice machine" to synthesize simple spoken sentences. I mourn as a lost opportunity a scene in which Eddie reads a lengthy message that Julia has left on the screen of her personal computer, a message which must have required a Herculean effort on Julia's part to type out. The camera sweeps past the monitor; we can only pick out a few phrases. (The gist of the message is summarized by the film's title.) This was our best chance to experience Julia's inner voice at length, and the movie skips over it.

Still, "Dance Me to My Song" is a strongly acted film, very much worth seeing.

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Toto Cinema Matters, Australia review Peter Long

Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Louise Keller, David Edwards, and Andrew L. Urban, including Urban’s FEATURE and Paul Fischer’s interview with actress RENA OWEN

Arts Alive [Jan Chandler]

THE OLD MAN WHO READ LOVE STORIES

Australia Netherlands France Spain (109 mi) 2001 ‘Scope

Mediasearch, Australia review Giula Sandler

The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is Rolf De Heer’s adaptation of the Luis Sepulveda book, and he succeeds in making you want to read the novel, but the film itself is not such a success.

The Old Man, Antonio Bolivar, is played endearingly by Richard Dreyfuss. He lives in the jungle of South America and is slowly romancing the local prostitute Josefina, played by Cathy Tyson, via their mutual love of romance novels. When a jaguar whose cubs have been killed goes on a rampage attacking the locals, Antonio must go on a hunt with the mayor, Timothy Spall, the dentist, Hugo Weaving, and several others to kill the beast before it kills them. On the way, the themes of progress, leadership and courage are explored, but not much new is said about any of them.

The film doesn’t seem to quite know what it is. It is too slow and sedate to be an adventure, too farcical to be a drama and too serious to be a comedy. This confusion is not helped by the vastly different performance styles, the hammy over the top mugging of Hugo Weaving and Timothy Spall and the restrained respectability of Dreyfuss, Tyson and Victor Bottenbley, who plays a local tribesman who befriends Dreyfuss in a series of awkward flashbacks. The accents employed by the cast are also quite a distraction.

The film was shot in French Guyana and the locations are beautiful. It is lovely to see Richard Dreyfuss in a role a world away from his usual fare and Timothy Spall, who seems to be everywhere at the moment (The Last Samurai, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) is always fun even if it feels like he’s acting in a different film. There are some lovely moments of humour and a lyrical pace that could have been better utilised.

The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is a more accessible film from Rolf De Heer. It is certainly gentler than Bad Boy Bubby or Alexandra’s Project, and has an uplifting, happy ending. However, you never quite believe these characters are real. They have not made the transition from novel to living, breathing people, and it is this that makes it hard to care about what happens to them.

Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Andrew L. Urban, including an interview here: ROLF DE HEER INTERVIEW

Antonio Bolivar (Richard Dreyfuss) lives in the village of El Idilio, a widower of many years, whose wife died shortly after their arrival in the Amazon, where the Government encouraged young families to colonise the jungle. Now 60-ish, the natives have accepted him, and his one friend is a bohemian, rustic dentist, Rubicondo (Hugo Weaving). When Bolivar expresses an interest in books, Rubicondo persuades him read the pulpy romantic novels read by his mistress Josefina (Cathy Tyson), rather than the Bible. Reclusive, but happy and familiar with the jungle, Bolivar is coerced by the venal village Mayor (Timothy Spall) into tracking down a jaguar which has killed a poacher, a task that makes him reflect on his life and its relationships.

Filled out by details and anecdotes from the rich imagination of the writer, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is a character study that takes us into the exotica of the Amazon and the proximity of a man who begins to reflect on the truths and beauties of life almost absent mindedly. Despite, or perhaps because of, the many logistical, physical and financial difficulties of making the film, Rolf de Heer has wrought a remarkably engaging adaptation, aided by beautiful, powerful images and an excellent crew – including sound designer James Currie and composer Graham Tardif, whose combined efforts are a significant element in the film’s success. 

Richard Dreyfuss makes the self reflective, reclusive Bolivar interesting and credible (including a well sustained accent), by the sheer refinement of his technique. Bolivar is a man who recognises the value of the essentials of life, such as the beauty and ideas that words might convey, as equally as the beauty of the female jaguar pining for the cubs stolen from her – and seeking revenge. 

Timothy Spall’s rotund, moustachioed, black-haired Mayor is broadly drawn and his accent is wobbly, but Hugo Weaving makes a nice fist of the dissolute, ruffian dentist. I also like Victor Bottenbley – an unlikely name for a South American Indian – who plays Nushino, the local Indian leader who befriends Antonio. But the film’s greatest strength is its sinewy ability to keep us involved in the character and avoiding the trap of turning the story into a jaguar hunt. Indeed, that becomes an extension of the discovery of Bolivar’s character, with insights of simple but noble humanity. 

The film includes many of the supporting events and asides, snatches of life and snippets of humour that inhabit novels, but never stumbles over them. Memorable, with something to say about the human condition, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is gentle yet powerful – like nature itself – and reflects on de Heer as a filmmaker who is comfortable with his craft and the self that is reflected through it.

User comments from imdb Author: Philby-3 from Krakow, Poland

User comments from imdb Author: chauvesouris from Sydney, Australia

Nofreelist.com Pearly

hoopla.nu review Stuart Wilson

Hugo Weaving

Variety.com [David Stratton]

THE TRACKER A- 94

Australia (95 mi) 2002 ‘Scope

De Heer is a meticulous director who knows exactly what he wants to do, who’s skilled enough as a craftsman to create very precise images that are known for being coherent and unique. Here he’s created something that’s hard to find – a brand new film experience. At the core, what’s so striking about this film is that the presentation is as startlingly unique as it is blunt about racism, not an easy subject to present. Set in the Australian outback around 1922, three armed white mounted police, with the aid of an aboriginal tracker played by David Gulpilil, pursue an alleged black murder suspect who has retreated into the bush. The names of the three are a bit unusual, which include Gary Sweet playing the lead named The Fanatic, a cold, cruel man who is the most ruthlessly racist and violent of the bunch, a man whose best friend is his gun, also The Follower, an innocent, young recruit, and The Veteran, an older man who no longer itches for violence, as he’s seen it all. The story is framed in narrative songs written by the director and Graham Tardif, sung by aboriginal singer Archie Roach, which are hauntingly slow, yet dead serious, which perfectly match the somber mood and languid pace of this film, gorgeously photographed by Ian Jones.

The lyrics are protest songs, passionate outbursts of quiet outrage, expressing feelings that are used to being ignored, such as “Far Away Home,” using feelings that express the viewpoint of the tracker, who is witness to the outrageous murder and white violence against his own native people. There are brief incidents of violence, which are always shown off-screen, cutting to still paintings by Peter Coad, which are in bright colors, and in the style of aborigine art. So aborigine presence is everywhere in this film, surrounding the action of the pursuing whites, who, little by little, get picked off by unseen enemies, creating a psychological condition of dread and horror, and a sense that danger lurks behind every rock, beyond each turn in the road, behind every tree. And the camera does not disappoint, always aimed at the pursuing trackers, sometimes close up, sometimes from afar, but the camera moves in such a way that the trackers themselves are always being tracked by unseen forces. Part of the brilliance of this film is the character of the tracker, who is himself enslaved for part of the journey, but despite the chains, he is the freest spirit among them, filled with guile and cunning wisdom, and a startlingly dark sense of humor, who defers to the need of the whites to be called “Boss” without blinking an eye, but he misses nothing, always keeping the pursuers a half-day’s ride from their intended target, always keeping one step ahead of the pack. With songs and pictures that were created just for the events in this film, it lends the impression that this is a legendary story, a fable that will be talked about for years to come. If only that were true.

Senses of Cinema (Jake Wilson) review January 2003

Early in the 20th century, four men travel in the Australian outback, over high sandy ridges strewn with gums and mounds of spinifex. They are in pursuit of a fugitive, an Aboriginal man accused of the murder of a white woman. Three of the four are white and on horseback: the Fanatic, the Veteran and the Follower. Their Aboriginal offsider, who precedes them on foot, is the Tracker.

As their labels suggest, these figures are immediately recognizable types, rather than individuals. Heading the expedition, the Fanatic is a lean, grizzled martinet who believes in being firm with the natives. The Veteran is an older man, who looks wise but says little. The Follower is a cheerful youth, anxious to do his best. He plays the ukulele, and sings a song, “The Copper’s Lament.”

The Tracker himself is a seemingly docile “civilized” black who blithely echoes his companions in their scorn for his race. Like a Shakespearean clown, he plays the fool, cringing and capering in his baggy borrowed clothes. Yet right from the start, there are moments when his mask of deference slips a notch – when his grin stretches a little too wide, or his laughter vibrates for a moment longer than expected.

In some ways, The Tracker resembles a stripped-down Western, with its rugged outdoor setting and its focus on primal power struggles between men. Equally, the film is a politically charged fable about colonization and resistance, pondering the very contemporary question of how far two systems of law and belief can exist side by side. But above all, this is a drama of vision, where what each character sees (or fails to see) determines his destiny.

We might think of the game “Follow the Leader.” As a subordinate, the Tracker is expected to mimic his masters. Yet it’s not so obvious who’s following. In theory, the Tracker is a despised servant. In practice, the others defer to him at every step, since only he can read the traces in the landscape marking out the fugitive’s trail. By acknowledging their guide’s superior skills, the white men confess their essential weakness: their failure to grasp the reality of the country they purport to rule.

Rolf de Heer is one of the few auteurs who regularly succeeds in financing features in Australia. His earlier, uneven work has been marked by a taste for punitive morality tales, at worst falling into clumsy sadism. The Tracker shows his years of practice have allowed him to develop a mastery of cinematic language few of his colleagues can match. It also suggests that while de Heer has been identified with “art cinema,” his real gift is for flamboyant, highly personal melodrama, in the vein of Sam Fuller or Cornel Wilde.

The film’s formal system depends in large part on alternating between multiple points of view, spatial and psychological. De Heer makes classical use of widescreen composition to dramatize the shifting group dynamics, but also regularly employs overt stylistic flourishes, at dramatic high points and as plot punctuation. One important recurring device is his bold use of zooms, as when the Tracker’s gaze fixes on an object and penetrates the intervening space like a spear – or conversely, when the image begins as an extreme long-shot, then zooms out until the figures in the distance are lost to sight, folded into the detail of the immense landscape.

Much as these zooms pull us towards or away from the subject of the image, the film solicits a mixture of immediate emotional response and more distanced contemplation. De Heer refuses to represent acts of violence directly, replacing them with Aboriginal-influenced, faux-naif paintings. The massacres seem partially detached from their narrative context, like archetypal scenes repeated throughout Australia’s bloody history. A similarly meditative commentary is supplied by Aboriginal singer Archie Roach’s mournful songs. These contemporary laments, backed by guitar and Hammond organ, create a kind of fourth-dimensional perspective that complicates our response to the narrative – an extraordinary effect, like looking down a corridor of time between past and present.

But the film’s greatest asset is David Gulpilil, in perhaps the best role of his long career. If the Tracker is conceived by the script in abstract, allegorical terms, Gulpilil’s concrete, humorous performance clearly draws on a lifetime’s experience of navigating between cultures. It’s largely thanks to him that the film pulls off a remarkable balancing act, neither veiling Aboriginal traditions in romantic mystery nor seeking to define their essential truths. The Tracker remains a protean hybrid, whose thoughts and motivations are knowable only in part. Literally and figuratively, he has the last laugh as he rides into the sunset – leaving us to wonder what else we might have failed to see.

Slant Magazine review Jay Antani

Aboriginal Art and Film The Politics of Representation, by Marcia Langton from Rouge (2005)

Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review also seen here: In Film Australia review

Filmjourney Doug Cummings

filmcritic.com (Jules Brenner) review [3/5]

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

Political Film Society review Michael Haas

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Emma Westwood

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review also seen here: Talking Pictures (UK) review

Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban, also including: ROLF DE HEER INTERVIEW and from Brad Green: SOUNDTRACK REVIEW

Michael D's Region 4 DVD Info Page

The Tracker: triple j film reviews also here: Triple J

ABC Sunday Morning Julie Rigg

European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights Mark Freeman

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

Film Forward Kent Turner

The Tracker MaryAnn Johanson from the FlickFilosopher

ReelTalk (Donald Levit) review

Cinephilia

eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [3/5]

Variety (David Stratton) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Crust) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Antti Viklund

ALEXANDER’S PROJECT A 95

Australia (103 mi) 2003 ‘Scope

Read nothing about this film ahead of time! In my view, the less you know, the greater the impact. A Film Festival is an ideal place to see a film like this, as the word about what to expect hasn’t spread yet. So I’ll simply say this is flawlessly executed, with an amazing screenplay that is hands down the best of the year in my view, written by the director himself, perfectly paced, brilliantly acted, with Helen Buday pulling off one of the best performances of the year in the role of a lifetime. A film that’s not afraid to take risks, from start to finish, this is a cold, austere, raw yet hilariously uncompromising glimpse into the dissolution of a marriage, as staged in what resembles an impregnable “Panic Room.” Watch a woman turn a man into a mouse, something right out of NO EXIT, the kind of film Neil LaBute wishes he had written, but hasn’t…very, very creepy. Not for everyone’s pleasure, but precise and powerful. It’s hard to imagine anyone else could have made it any better. “Is Mistress Alexandra home?” Unforgettable.

I'm not sure what the beef is here.  One guy claimed the film showed only "her" side of the story, while another claimed Alexandra was "insane."  I found her sexual analysis to be right on the money, including her demonstration of the gifts he had given her, gifts for his own pleasure and amusement, not hers. I found the hairy hand of the gardener next door to be simply classic, "Wait, it's not time for that yet."  And the kid’s comments at the end, "Is Mistress Alexandra home?" to be hilarious, particularly when contrasted against this control freak kind of guy. Even the final bit with the neighbor next door worked, as it again demonstrated his wife's intelligence, and his complete inability to deal with her well-thought-out thoroughness. Even leaving in the film blurb with the kids at the end worked perfectly. "Cheers, dad!"   

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

A revenge film somewhat in the style of Neil LaBute's best work (In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things) that isn't what it seems to be and makes the audience complicit in the ugliness. Helen Buday gives a great performance as the middle aged wife who leaves a tape for her highly successful pretty boy husband, his birthday present. The film largely consists of the husband sitting in an armchair watching the tape, but it's very well written and understands how to keep the husband (and audience) glued to the screen. It asks us how much we really know about the people around us, and how our perception of our own actions differs from their perception of our actions. The impact of the film is such that you find yourself looking at your significant other in a whole different light. Though written and directed by a man (big surprise), it's one of the rare films about sex that offers a believable female perspective. Few will be listing this among their all-time favorites, but it's the kind of film that you don't forget, that gets stuck in your gut.

The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias

As Rolf de Heer's unsettling Alexandra's Project opens, suburban dad and company man Gary Sweet wakes up on his birthday to a happy domestic scene, as the sun beams into his cozy two-story townhouse and his adoring children dogpile on him in bed. Things only get better at work, where his chummy coworkers greet him with a cake in the boardroom, and his boss grants him the promotion he so richly deserves. But when the other shoe drops, it falls hard: Anticipating a surprise party after work, Sweet instead returns to an empty home with the furniture upended, all the light bulbs unscrewed, and a videotape waiting ominously on the television. On it, his scorned wife Helen Buday dictates their marital problems and includes a few shocking, sadistic touches for good measure.

A Medea for the chilly age of Atom Egoyan and Michael Haneke, Alexandra's Project brings a powerful dose of "hell hath no fury" revenge to a relatively ordinary domestic breakdown. For all the provocations on the videotape, which throw Sweet's extramarital activities in his face and permanently threaten his status as a parent (among other blows), Buday's complaints are garden-variety, the sort of issues that might put Divorce Court judges to sleep. While conceding Sweet's success as a father and provider, Buday lashes out at him for his sexual appetite, and how she was made to feel that she existed only to satisfy his desires, with little consideration for her needs, or for anything apart from her body. Obviously, Buday's feelings of neglect and objectification—if not outright enslavement—are grounds for a nasty divorce, but the punishment doesn't remotely fit the crime.

To a degree, Buday's extreme response gives Alexandra's Project a powerful kick, much like the nuclear families gone awry in Haneke's superior The Seventh Continent or Funny Games, to which de Heer owes an obvious debt. Had Sweet's abuses been more outrageous, it would be much easier for viewers to get some distance from Buday's actions, or to sympathize with her. But de Heer's high-concept feminist tract loses some of its integrity over time, as it slowly devolves into a seedy, voyeuristic thriller that takes all too much pleasure in turning the screws. After a while, the sadistic hows of Sweet's comeuppance begin to supercede the more important whys.

filmcritic.com Jeremiah Kipp

It’s his birthday, and a husband returns home from work expecting a not-so-surprising surprise party. But the house is deserted, and all that’s left of his wife is a videotape where she and the kids wish him a happy one. The children are sent off to a relative’s house and the wife engages in a vivid striptease seduction. But she cuts her act short, beginning instead a one-way monologue to her husband, sifting through the complex issues of their troubled marriage. Clearly, Alexandra’s Project is entrenched in the realm of dysfunctional relations and comes up with a novel way of handling it: a psychological thriller told in monologue form, where a husband cannot interact with his wife’s “battle of the sexes” speechifying.

Directed by Rolf de Heer, Alexandra’s Project is minimalistic and very formal. The actors, after a brief introductory section, have almost no interaction together, and it’s basically a one man show as husband Steve (Gary Sweet) attempts to figure out exactly what his wife is going on about, and ultimately where she is. The wife, Alexandra (Helen Buday, whom some may recognize from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome), starts out simply, discussing their basic problems, but eventually it gets into issues of sexism, fidelity, and ultimately compassion. She does, ultimately, take off her clothes for him, but the effect is strangely unnerving after she’s brought up her mastectomy, and the possibility that another person (and not her husband) may be behind the camera watching her undress.

Alexandra’s Project is confidently shot and scripted in clipped, emotionally direct dialogue that’s thankfully not resorting to Harold Pinter, David Mamet, or Neil LaBute (collectively, the role models for this sort of film). And though it’s compelling to see a husband-wife debate where the two cannot interact, ultimately de Heer’s project doesn’t have much to say about sexuality and emotional violence that hasn’t already been covered before. It may say something that such things have become banal within the cinema, and that we the audience are unaffected even as Steve goes through a meltdown.

But also, it’s refreshing that for all Alexandra’s transgressions, I don’t know if her actions qualify as female empowerment. Alexandra’s Project says that we’re dead inside, and yet because of its puzzle-like structure of Steve figuring out what, where, why, and how this is happening to him, the movie is never a deadening viewing experience. As the characters brutalize themselves and each other, Alexandra’s Project appeals to the viewer’s mindfulness rather than teasing them for shock value. But it also begs the question: What does the filmmaker value? That’s not immediately clear; but it’s certainly compelling.

The Lady Vanishes: Alexandra's Project and Rolf de Heer Jake Wilson from Senses of Cinema, May 2003

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [2.5/5] also seen here: Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]

Film Monthly (Erin Paulson) review Oren Golan

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

Triple JJJ

eFilmCritic.com (Dr Nick) review [4/5]

Mediasearch, Australia review Sonia Da Silva

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review

Art Right Now 2 Natasha Gray

Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban, also including: ROLF DE HEER INTERVIEW

Montreal Mirror Matthew Hays

Digital Retribution dvd review Julian Bodenmann

DVD Net (Jules Faber) dvd review [Region 4]

hoopla.nu review Stuart Wilson

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4.5/5] Eric Campos

DVD Net (Terry Kemp) dvd review [Region 4]

Movie House Commentary Tuna

eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [4/5]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [1/4] easily the most negative review out there

Eye Weekly [Kim Linekin] until I read this one

DVD Talk (Robert Spuhler) dvd review [3/5]

ABC Tasmania Jonathan Dawson

Variety (David Stratton) review

Sunday Online, Australia (Peter Thompson) review which includes an interview with the director

TEN CANOES B 88

Australia (91 mi) 2006 ‘Scope Ten Canoes Official Website

Ten canoes, three wives, 150 spears…trouble. —movie tagline

Once upon a time, the move starts, in a land far far away...then the narrator breaks out in a hearty laugh, claiming that’s not the way this story goes. David Gulpilil narrates a sumptuously beautiful ‘Scope film that mixes the present with the ancestral past of the indigenous Yolngu peoples of Ramingining, Australia, moving from color to black and white, where the narration is English, while the scenes are acted out in Ganalbingu tribal language. Told in a humorous but very personalized style, referencing life spreading through the branches of a tree, the one thing we learn is that a good story may take days to tell. The title was inspired by a photograph of a group of ten Aboriginal men in their bark canoes on the Arafura swamp. The photo was taken by anthropologist Dr. Donald Thomson, who lived among the Yolngu tribes in Central and North-Eastern Arnhem Land during the mid-1930s and the visual style of the movie, beautifully shot by Ian Jones, owes much to those striking black and white photographs by Thomson. While the film takes great pains to meet the standard of “authentic,” it is ultimately overshadowed by how simplistic the story turns out to be, despite the twists and turns and embellishments that attempt to heighten our historical as well as sensual perspectives.

Opening with a shot flying above the trees, following a river for endless miles, David’s son, Jamie Gulpalil, plays an impatient, overeager youth, Dayindi, who has his eyes on the youngest wife of one of his tribal elders, Minygululu (Peter Minygululu). As he joins men from his tribe on a goose egg hunting expedition, Minygululu tells him a long, meandering ancestral story about a similar young man who had his eyes on the youngest of his brother’s three wives. After they cut bark from trees to make canoes, they head out into the Arafura swamps in search of the magpie geese. Throughout their expedition, we hear the story from the past about learning to follow the right way, which throughout the course of the film, provides insight into the life and cultures of tribes in Arnhem Land. This hypnotic film is certainly more mesmerizing than a similar mythic journey in a fictionalized LORD OF THE RINGS, with its untold killings, as this is the oral history of real people that lived a thousand years ago, expressed through their own mythical tale of ancient times which reveals the ramifications from the killing of one man, with fictionalized visuals provided by the film director, in collaboration with David Gulpilil and the Ramingining community, as this is basically their film.

Ridjimiraril (Crusoe Kurddal) is a tribal warrior with three wives, but he travels back and forth between his small village and a far away residence that exclusively houses the young men of his tribe. Yeeralparil, also played by Jamie Gulpalil, is attracted to his brother’s youngest wife, a dangerous practice that is immediately noticed by the older wives who try to shoo him away like an annoying fly, but he persists. One day they are visited by a stranger, who may be a sorcerer, and might have come to steal their souls. But they give him food and kindly wish him off. After that, Ridjimiraril’s second wife mysteriously disappears. They suspect the stranger, but it could be others who have kidnapped her as well. On the tip from an uncle, a search party travels to a neighboring tribe, returning much later knowing no more than when they left, as they never found any trace of her. Kids capturing honey high up in the trees in order to satisfy the sweet tooth of the one fat member of the tribe, Birrinbirrin (Richard Birrinbirrin), see a stranger off in the distance and the tribe is notified. Ridjimiraril, still enraged over the loss of his second wife, grabs a handful of spears and says he only wants to talk to the stranger, followed behind by Birrinbirrin. Ridjimiraril, however, hurls his spear on first sight, killing the stranger, who turns out to be the brother of the stranger who passed through their village.

According to tribal law, the affected tribe has the right to avenge their loss in a spear-off against the man responsible, who along with a chosen partner (Yeeralparil), must withstand a barrage of spears thrown at them by the stranger’s tribe. They do a good job dodging them at first, but eventually their legs lose their initial energy and Ridjimiraril is hit by a spear. As no vital organs were hit, he survives, but loses strength over time until eventually, after returning home to their village, he rises from his bed to dance a final dance of death, which is carried on by others after he passes on. Yeeralparil believes it’s time for him to make his move and claim the youngest wife for his own, but when he arrives in the village, it’s the oldest that claims him, which leads to a huge catfight among the women, with plenty of screaming and yelling, which gives Yeeralparil a pretty good glimpse of what the future holds for him.

Facets Multi Media - FACETS FRONT PAGE -> Film Festival Diaries Milos Stehlik at Cannes, May 16, 2006

And the new film by Rolf de Heer - certainly Australia's most talented filmmaker, and the one Aussie filmmaker who has continued to work in Australia, not emigrating to Hollywood. De Heer is, I think, a filmmaker who is fascinated by many different genres, and the range of the subjects of his films is, in itself, quite astonishing. QUIET ROOM, THE TRACKER, BAY BOY BUBBY, ALEXANDRA'S PROJECT seem to have nothing to do with each other.

Yet there is always a certain cutting edge of an idea, and an artistic concept. TEN CANOES is essentially an aboriginal tale. The great actor, David Gulpilil (The Tracker) narrates the story if ten men who go out into the swamp to collect eggs of the gumang, the magpie goose. Dayindi, a young warrior who covets the wife of his older brother, is told a cautionary tale from the mythical past. The story is, in itself, fantastic, but what is most fantastic is how expansive it is, how it grows, as Gulpilil narrates in the film, "like a tree." It is an entirely different way of storytelling demanding, allegorical, lyrical, violent, moral. The film is beautiful to watch and deeply humanistic, with the narration in English and the acted sequences in the original tribal language.

Eye for Film (Jeff Robson) review [4/5]

The Aboriginal peoples have always played a prominent part in Australian cinema – but this is the first film I’ve seen that puts them centre stage.

Several directors have focused on their plight since the coming of the white colonists, yet even in sympathetic portrayals such as Rabbit Proof Fence and The Chant Of Jimmy Blacksmith they are seen solely in relation to the European settlers.

Ten Canoes, on the other hand, takes us back a thousand years before the First Fleet. Using an entirely Native Australian cast (many of whom are not professional actors) and shooting completely on location, De Heer is clearly attempting a cinematic portrayal of the Aborigine neither as tragic victim or theme park ‘noble primitive’.

Of course, you can’t entirely ignore the box office, so the presence of David Gulpilil will undoubtedly be a big advantage in getting bums on seats. Probably the only Aboriginal actor most people could name, he’s turned in sterling performance in everything from Walkabout through Crocodile Dundee to The Tracker (his previous collaboration with De Heer). As a musician and performer he’s also been one of the standard bearers of Native Australian culture over the years and spends much of his time in his traditional homeland of the Arafura Swamp, in the far north of Northern Territory, where the film is set.

His love for this stunningly beautiful and remote land shines through from the first words of his voiceover. He never appears on screen but acts as a guide, chorus and, most importantly, storyteller as the film unfolds.

The story concerns a small group of men from the Yolngu tribe, engaged in the annual goose-egg gathering expedition. As they strip tree bark to make the titular canoes it becomes clear from their conversation that Dayindi (Jamie Gulpilil, who’s inherited a fair slice of his dad’s screen presence) is in love with the youngest wife of his much older brother, the white-haired expedition leader Minygululu (many of the cast have their real name and character name in common). To take the heat out of the situation the older man tells his brother an instructive tribal legend.

In true Aboriginal tradition the tale is poetic, discursive and several days long. As the hunters make their way to the swamp to gather the eggs we see flashbacks to an older time, where another younger brother, Yeeralparil (Gulpilil Junior again) feels the sap rising for the young bride of Ridjimiraril, a noted warrior and hunter. The tension is palpable but Yeeralparil does nothing except find more and more ludicrous excuses to swing by from the single men’s camp and catch a glimpse of his beloved, and life goes on as normal.

Until the arrival of a stranger from another tribe (Djigirr, whose role as co-director was to advise on tribal customs and liaise between crew and cast). The men of the village are alarmed, especially when he tells them he has magical objects to trade - the effect is similar to a drug-dealer gatecrashing a parish council meeting - and suggestions range from killing him to employing their own sorcerer to give the camp a clean bill of health. Soon after, another of Ridjimaril’s wives disappears...

The events that follow include accidental murder, self-sacrifice and tragedy. But it would be a mistake to dismiss this as a worthy but gloomy grinder that you ‘ought’ to go to see. De Heer succeeds in proving that, despite their way of life appearing utterly alien to the audience, these characters are not so different to us. They are often greedy, deceitful and morally flawed. But they also radiate compassion and good humour, getting through a hard and often dangerous life with love for their families and their land, and an awareness that even when you make your own law, there’s still a difference between right and wrong.

Dayindi’s life lesson is in the end less important than the film’s almost documentary-level immersion in a way of life that is basic, but neither simple nor impoverished. Admittedly, there are some longeurs and Gulpilil Senior’s narration isn’t always as sparkling and endearing as he seems to think it is. But these are minor quibbles. This is storytelling in its truest sense and the cast rise to the occasion; you wouldn’t guess they aren’t professionals, probably because they live these roles rather than acting them.

And did I mention that it looks absolutely stunning? De Heer and his cinematographer Ian Jones conjure up the vistas of swamp and forest, quiet and yet still teeming with life, superbly. The black and white camerawork used in the ‘framing’ story is equally effective. Inspired by a 1930s anthropologist’s photographs of (you’ve guessed it) ten canoeists, it reminds the audience that whatever our initial conceptions of these people were, they already had a history and culture going back millennia. It’s a privilege to share in it.

The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review

Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes is a richly layered folk-myth drama set among Australian Aborigine tribes in the Northern Territory: a tale of war and love and death among unclothed hunter-gatherers. There is beautiful photography, and some terrifically insouciant performances from first-time actors. But as captivating as Ten Canoes often is, in all its robust humour and candour, I couldn't help feeling ambivalent. The film is very much like the kind of stripped-down, universally applicable legend from which Peter Brook might create a marvellous piece of stage theatre, yet at times it also resembled a very worthy, National-Geographically-correct version of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto - a version in which an explicit, exciting and unidirectional story would be considered too vulgar. What unfolds here on screen is so gently and obliquely laid out that I have to admit my attention very occasionally wandered, and I even suspected that bush spirits were silently attaching tiny weights to each of my eyelashes. Regular moments of enchantment removed them.

The very notion of a storyline is perhaps inapplicable to a worldview in which the distinction between past and present is blurred, in which thousands of years can pass and the nature of people's lives remain precisely the same. Indeed, the storytelling calls into question the notion of time passing, and in reaching back to the lives and identities of one's ancestors it transcendentally reveals these existences to be at one with the lives that are being lived now. De Heer - who writes, and co-directs with Peter Djigirr - begins with a simple, beautiful image: a winding river in lush country, whose course is followed by an overhead shot with a wry, playful voiceover from actor David Gulpilil, who explains that the story he has to tell, so far from being simplistic, is a complex and sophisticated affair with as many ramifications as branches on a tree. A young hunter with his tribesmen is out stripping tree-bark with a view to making 10 canoes. He is discontented with his unmarried status, and nurses a desire for one of his brother's wives. In order to instill wisdom and patience into the young buck, his elder sets out to tell him some overlapping, inter-relating stories of his ancestors which then take place before us in colour, with the present tense material limited to black and white - itself a way of making the distant past more vivid than the here and now.

The same actors playing their ancestor-counterparts also dramatise a tale that brings the past into parallel with the present, a tale of thwarted romance, tribal fear, and sexual politics: a tale with something of the Iliad in the way the belligerent males talk themselves into doing battle with enemies over the assumed abduction of one of the womenfolk.

Part of what is charming and refreshing about Ten Canoes is that it does not make the Aborigine peoples alien or exotic, or a subordinate part of a story about white people's transgression. Movies such as The Proposition or Jindabyne or Rabbit-Proof Fence, all valuable in their different ways, have made them into a kind of drama-accessory about a disturbing or hostile landscape. Incidentally, the first two of these movies were prefaced with warnings that they contained images of dead people that were liable to be offensive to Aborigine viewers. As it happens, Ten Canoes does not have such a warning, despite the themes of violence and death: perhaps the cultural stricture is not universally applicable, or perhaps the camera is not deemed to have captured the precise moment of death. At any rate, the Aborigine people are not brought on as part of a realist thriller or shocker. Ten Canoes makes a more ambitious leap of sympathy, entering their own world, on its own terms. What is also striking about Ten Canoes is that it is one of the very few films of any sort to show the human body, without the incessant western idiom of irony and sexualisation. The men and women actors here are unselfconsciously naked, and yet De Heer does not imply that they are living in some kind of Edenic state. Their real lives are fizzing with romance, with gossip, with yearning, with dirty jokes and backtalk, and with privacy and secrecy too. Their bodies, young and old, fat and thin, are not the neurotic centre of attention.

Having said all of which, I couldn't help wishing that the narrative did not meander and diversify and double back on itself quite as much as it does. There is something a little bit pedagogic and even fastidious in its insistence on a multiplicity of narratives which play themselves out in ways that draw the sting from their own tails. Ten Canoes is not a shaggy-dog story, exactly, but it's a story that declines to be bound by the traditional guidelines of beginning, middle and end.

This refusal is part engaging and part exasperating - but in the end mostly engaging, and the performances by, among others, Crusoe Kurddal, Jamie Gulpilil and Richard Birrinbirrin have an unforced authority and ease. The movie simply presents these vivid personalities in various permutations and lets their natural charm do the rest.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Ten Canoes (2006) Adrian Martin from Sight and Sound, June 2007

Review: Ten Canoes (2006) : In Film Australia - all about ... Luke Buckmaster

Ten Canoes Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

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Richard Phillips World Socialist Web Site, which includes an interview with the director, July 19, 2006

Twitch (Michael Guillen) review at Toronto September 9, 2006, which includes a Q & A with the director

Twitch (Michael Guillen) review Idaho Film Festival October 3, 2007, also seen here: The Evening Class

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Electric Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy

Reel.com review [3.5/4] Jim Hemphill

The Onion A.V. Club review Noel Murray

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culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Emily S. Mendel

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De Jong, Mijke

LAYLA M B 86

Netherlands Belgium (110 mi) 2016 Topkapi Films [Netherlands]

It’s hard to make topical films, especially when the screen reality doesn’t match the authenticity of on-the-ground news reports of terrorist attacks, police crackdowns, angry demonstrations, or following the hordes of refugees swarming into Europe, not to mention those citizens left behind in the war zones and refugee camps. It’s a searing reality that is difficult to digest, no matter how meticulously accurate the newscasts may be. But as links to terror organizations have been discovered within major European cities, it has led to an accompanying rise of Islamophobia, including burkini bans on French and Corsican beaches, leaving people wondering how local citizens are being recruited into jihadist organizations, where this film attempts to answer some of those questions. Dutch director Mijke de Jong, with a script written by her husband Jan Eilander, combine their efforts in a story studying the roots of the problem. Set in Amsterdam, Layla (Nora El Houssour) is an 18-year old student studying to become a doctor who is a Dutch citizen with a Moroccan background, living at home with her middle class Muslim family. While her parents, including her father (Mohammed Azzay) and mother (Esma Abouzahra), encourage her to follow a promising educational path that will lead to a better life, she gets more distracted by the way Muslims are treated differently than ordinary Dutch citizens, as they are profiled simply by their appearance, labelled agitators by referees in local soccer matches, and routinely singled out and arrested by police for practicing free speech, even getting into a heated discussion with a fellow student when asked not to pray, to the point where she feels ostracized by society. As she explores her Muslim background, she devotes more of her time studying the Quran, where she learns to identify radical phrases, scours the Internet for YouTube coverage of attacks on Muslims throughout the country and atrocities to Muslims around the globe, which she immediately shares with her friends and family, and is disappointed by the timid reaction by her parents, who lead a comfortable life and don’t make waves.

What’s clear, at least in this film, is that she comes from a loving family, where she’s had plenty of opportunities to succeed, something her parents don’t want her to jeopardize. She’s a bit of a tomboy, as she loves to play soccer and mix it up with the boys, and can more than hold her own when it comes to a fiery attitude, including plenty of trash talking. But in accordance with custom, she wears a headscarf and dresses modestly, but she’s a modern woman that believes women can stand up for themselves, joining a radical group of women called the Sisters who discuss ways they can help fight repression, passing out flyers, posting YouTube videos depicting the horrors in Syria and Gaza, while also meeting a male radicalized friend that she likes named Abdel (Ilias Addab) in clandestine Skype sessions. Developing a growing indifference towards her studies, she makes a bold move to drop out of school, secretly marry Abdel, and run away to Belgium to join a jihadist training camp, where the intimacy expressed while traveling together are among the best scenes in the film, showing a joyful and loving relationship. But they barely avoid arrest when they leave, heading for Amman, Jordan, where they plan a life of religious activism. While she is embraced by the women, where one takes her out to the refugee camps, where the children are starved for affection and anyone willing to spend time with them, she is totally ignored by the men, including her husband, spending long hours alone with absolutely nothing to do, where as an Islamic wife she is expected to clean the house and serve food, and do little else, as they have no use for a woman’s ideas. The extent of the patriarchal society is not only demeaning, but cruel, as they demand total subservience, something that’s simply not in her DNA. While she loves her husband, he positively stifles her spirit, where she’s not allowed to do anything without the husband’s permission, as the man makes all the decisions, while the subject of men’s discussions is off-limits to women.

What the film does is humanize the character of Layla, as she is searching within herself and in a surrounding society for a world without insults and recriminations, where people can lead their lives in peace without continual disruptions by police and angry citizens. For most college-age kids, this is a fairly common dream, a belief in social justice, a hope that everyone can be treated fairly. Instead what they discover is a daily reality of discrimination and profiling, which exists as much in black communities in America as Islamic neighborhoods in Europe. The heavy-handed treatment, the overreactions by police that result in the shooting deaths of innocent young black men, or the continued harassment of Muslim men with beards, only leads to a seething discontent, a breeding ground for anger and radicalization, where the result is a lack of trust with existing authorities, which can lead to the extremist radicalization the film examines. While this film asks as many questions as it answers, it attempts to fill the holes in a better understanding of what people are up against, where there are no easy decisions when facing the cruel realities of life. One is reminded of Merzak Allouache’s Algerian film The Repentant (El Taaib) (2012) which is largely seen through a jihadist’s eyes, where despite honest efforts, they may never fully integrate back into society, as they’ve crossed too many lines. While this is a well-meaning film, it only addresses the initial phase of radicalization, where she’s too intelligent and there are too many obstacles placed in this one woman’s path for her to become a true believer, becoming a public service corrective for someone who has swayed from the path of the civilized and was tempted by the jihadists, but ends up discovering their own extremism is too harsh. That’s not the case with everyone, especially those coming from impoverished communities decimated by war, where there’s no hope anywhere to be found. This is fertile territory for extremist recruits, as they have no other options. So this is a somewhat watered down picture, but it’s helpful nonetheless, revealing how mistreatment builds discontent, that better police procedures that recognize the rights of minorities would be in society’s larger interests, as discriminatory behavior will come back to bite you. That’s something both Europe and the United States seem to be ignoring, instead plunging ahead with more sophisticated use of surveillance and profiling techniques, where targeting racial groups will only lead to more ruthless police confrontations and create even more animosity.

Layla M. (Mijke de Jong) — Platform - Cinema Scope Angelo Murredda

The youth-in-extremis movie gets a relatively fresh new face in Mijke de Jong’s Layla M., which, together with Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, positions TIFF’s Platform programme as a quality clearing house for coming-of-age melodramas with a critical difference. Here the point of distinction is the budding radicalism of the heretofore university-bound Layla (Nora El Koussour), a Dutch-Moroccan teen whose growing devotion to Islam—and specifically to its radical fringe online—puts her at odds with both Amsterdam’s xenophobic whites and her more or less secular middle class family. Layla starts by tiptoeing into liberationist memes about burqas, whose construction de Jong charts in loving procedural detail, then graduates to marrying an equally devout jihadist she meets online and relocating to Amman, Jordan, where she’s sidelined to serving duties as the men host grim meetings about taking direct action, never stopping to consider that she’ll be implicated in their plots.

Layla M.’s progression from youthful enchantment to adult exhaustion (as well as from liberation to newfound oppression) feels too fast and more than a little tired; the closest analogue in recent years is probably Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air (2012), which similarly finds its plucky protagonist sidelined by the end to dirty-dish duty while twentysomething radical dudes plan their very important protests in the living room. De Jong is also guilty of relying on visual shortcuts to chart Layla’s radicalization, decontextualized moments where, for instance, we see her silently parked in front of her laptop, watching jihadist propaganda instead of doing her homework. But there’s a believable, shopworn naturalism to the performances, and a particular spontaneity and vibrancy to El Koussour, whose Layla just barely suppresses her innate insolence whenever a patriarch— whether her father or her husband—has the gall to put her in her place.

'Layla M': Toronto Review - Screen Daily Allan Hunter

Mijke de Jong’s exploration of the issues surrounding radicalisation and identity is one of a number of current films on the theme (Heaven Can Wait etc) but is distinguished by its intelligent approach to complex matters, the polished visuals of cinematographer Danny Elsen and a knockout central performance from newcomer Nora el Koussour. That combination and the timeliness of the topic should make Layla M a regular fixture of the festival circuit and guarantee some theatrical interest.

Nora el Koussour’s Layla Mourabit is a fantastically stroppy, compelling character. A Dutch/Moroccan teenager, she is a fiery, opinionated figure. Encountering casual racism on a daily basis, she is outraged by a father who never fights back and is ashamed by her defiance. He merely wants her to study hard, keep out of trouble and become a doctor.

There is a very striking sense of Layla as someone whose voice is not heard in her home, her school or her city of Amsterdam. There is also a sense of how eagerly she embraces her status as an outsider, becoming more devout in her prayers, studying the Quran, attending demonstrations and never giving an inch in the defence of her position. She is spirited and would probably start an argument with her own shadow. She also tends towards the insufferable in her righteousness which makes her all the more interesting.

The process of Layla becoming open to radicalisation is convincingly depicted as she abandons friends who mock her decision to wear the full hijab and finds it intolerable that so few people seem to care about what is happening in Syria. Even though you fear where this is heading, the viewer can fully appreciate what she is feeling.

Layla is drawn to the charismatic jihadist Abdel (Ilias Addab). Skype chats and supportive words fuel her starry-eyed romantic notions. When her life in Amsterdam becomes intolerable, she is more than willing to become Abdel’s bride and follow him to the Middle East and a new life in which her role as a docile wife leaves her with similar feelings of being denied a voice.

One of the admirable qualities of Layla M is the way it strives to find the good and bad in each character. There is a genuine affection in the relationship between Layla and Abdel, especially in the moments when they are alone together. There is a charming scene when they slowly dance in a hotel room  and later they look out  on a starry sky and the promise of their new life, both intimate moments beautifully captured by Danny Elsen. The fact that Abdel will come to see Layla as someone who disrespects him and fails to fulfil her duties does not diminish his earlier fondness.

There is a fatalistic arc to Layla M. There is a distinct break between life in Amsterdam and life as a fugitive. We know this is unlikely to end well but there are still unexpected details that emerge and Nora el Koussour’s performance to carry the narrative. Her big, yearning eyes, the hot flashes of her anger and the tears of disappointment all convey the emotional turmoil of an incredible journey.

my film journal: Layla M. John P

The story couldn’t be more timely and urgent as European and other Western countries find themselves in the grip of weekly reports of young people being recruited by ISIS to perform acts of terror on unsuspecting innocent lives.

Layla M. follows a spirited, headstrong Moroccan/Dutch 18 year old, Layla, living with her family in Amsterdam where she was born, as she becomes radicalized by a local Islamic fundamentalist group.

A poignant and powerful wake-up call, Layla M. deals with the current problem of homegrown radicalization of Europe’s young and disenfranchised. This controversial film shows the struggle within a Muslim family living in the Netherlands as they deal with interpretations of their own Religious doctrines and the critical liberal society they live in.

In the wake of increasing backlash against Muslim communities sparked by terror attacks, Layla's faith grows stronger. She is warned by her family and friends from continuing on the extremist path, but she grows increasingly frustrated by what she sees as oppression of her religious beliefs by a racist western society and begins to use her new found faith as a form of protest.

Dutch director Mijke de Jong’s gripping new film immerses us in Layla’s reality as the film is shown from her perspective. Nora El Koussour gives a mesmerizing passionate performance as Layla and draws us into a world where she is coached by online radicals who convince her to persuade her parents and brother to join in protesting the injustices perpetrated on the Muslim community.

Layla’s family and friends grow increasingly worried and encourage her to focus on her studies and career to no avail. With exams looming, she is drawn further into dangerous activities; protesting and making jihadist videos which are drawing the attention of the authorities who are now keeping a close eye on her and her family. 

When she falls in love with Abdel, a quiet young man from the jihadi group, she secretly marries and follows him to the Middle East where they are free to practice a so called ‘truer’ form of Islam, only to discover that she is not prepared for the cruel realities of life in an extremist militant patriarchal society and its oppressive ideas about the role of women which goes against her ideals.

Like most teenagers, Layla is just looking for an authentic life she can believe in. We worry for her as she naively navigates her journey to find truth and battle injustice. We keep hoping that her parents or a teacher will guide her on the right path but the society in which she lives seems so aggressively hostile toward her decisions that her tragic fate seems inevitable.

Part of the 2016 TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, Layla M. is a thought-provoking must see for anyone looking for insight into the underlying causes of the current violence and terrorism spreading across European countries with large Muslim communities.

We Got This Covered [David James]

Front Row Reviews (Greg Wetherall)

TIFF 2016: Layla M. Review | Dork Shelf Michael McNeely

'Layla M': Inside the Experience of a Female Radical ... - No Film School Emily Buder interviews the director, September 21, 2016

'Layla M.' Review | Hollywood Reporter Boyd van Hoeij

Toronto Film Review: 'Layla M.' - Variety Scott Tobias

TIFF 2016: “Old Stone,” “Layla M.”, “Past Life” - Roger Ebert Matt Fagerholm

Nora El Koussour | Favor Talents

de la Iglesia, Álex

COMMON WEALTH (La Comunidad)

Spain (113 mi) 2000

Common Wealth Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

The straight man's Pedro Almodóvar, Álex de la Iglesia has enjoyed tremendous success in his native Spain for over a decade, but it's not until now that U.S. audiences are getting a chance to see the director's crowd-pleasing genre pastiches. Drenched in all sorts of pop cultural references, La Comunidad (Common Wealth) is by far Iglesia's most enjoyable film to date. A deliriously insane study of human greed, the film begins with a giddy title sequence that in many ways anticipates the opening of Almodóvar's Bad Education (Iglesia's film was released in Spain four years ago). Carmen Maura is Julia, a real estate agent trying to sell an apartment in a building infested by a community of oddballs who've waited many years for an old man to die so they can steal a hidden stash of money. When the woman stumbles upon the 300 million pesetas (she's led to the location of the treasure by—get this—a Mr. Clean commercial), Iglesia fashions a frenzied comedy of errors out of Julia's repeated attempts to get out of the building alive. When Julia jumps on a waterbed with her husband inside the apartment she's trying to unload, she's spotted across the way by a mysterious presence. The binocular-vision and heavy breathing suggests a pervert is on the loose, but the peeping tom is hysterically revealed to be a man dressed as Darth Vader (!) and still living at home with his mother (!!). Iglesia updates the persecution complex and Holocaust allegory of Polanski's The Tenant as a nerd empowerment ritual, a pop anthem bursting at the seams with gut-busting non sequiturs (see the boy dressed in the super hero outfit, who doesn't bat an eye when the man in the elevator is cut in half), endlessly inventive set pieces (none greater than the tenants' attempt to lure Julia and her suitcase filled with cash away from two police officers and back into "her" apartment), and over-the-top performances. The actors are all insane, none more so than Maura, whose rapid-paced delivery points to the sad desperation that seethes beneath the film's comic surface.

THE PERFECT CRIME (Crimen Ferpecto)

Spain (105 mi) 2004

Crimen Ferpecto Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Spanish auteur Álex de la Iglesia continues to show absolutely no signs of reconciling his dramatic and comedic impulses. Though inextricably bound to one another, these dueling urges refuse to play nice, and it's the fallout from their non-stop collisions that makes the director's latest genre pastiche (think Buñuel's Ensayo de un Crimen meets Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith) so much fun to watch. Though not as consistent in tone as La Comunidad, Crimen Ferpecto (the title, changed for the film's American release to The Perfect Crime, is a reference to the Asterix and Obelix comic Asterix and the Laurel Wreath) is more self-reflective in the sense that the battle between its two leads mirrors the ongoing war between the serious and the absurd that has become par for course in de la Iglesia's metafictive canon of films.

Two employees at YeYo's department store—Rafael (Guillermo Toledo, a happy slave to capitalism, and Lourdes (Mónica Cervera), a homely saleswoman who wants to desperately buckle the system—enter into an unofficial lifetime contract when one helps the other dispose of a body after a sinister accident in a dressing room, and what unravels is at once a critique of consumer culture and a bawdy comedy of the sexes. Lourdes is the low woman on a totem pole that favors runway model types—intervening in Rafael's disposal of their boss's body and getting him into her bed becomes, in effect, a means for her to express the kind of power society otherwise denies her. Like him, she's a perverse opportunist, but since her battle evokes lower-class revolt, she more easily commands the audience's compassion.

People are crazy in de la Iglesia's films and the constrictive atmosphere the man summons throughout Crimen Ferpecto suggests people wanting to break free from the crippling allure of consumerism. "The secret's in the gift wrapping," says Rafael to a customer he attacks like a hawk with the hope of driving his commission so high he can secure a position as the store's floor manager. It's a slogan de la Iglesia takes more than seriously: The melodrama that takes place inside YeYo's feels suffocatingly boxed-in (the people inside the store are like animals gasping for breath inside a container were a child keeps a pet animal) and the film's splashy aesthetic seems to exist only to gussy up the action with a sinister bow (the camera charts the mise-en-scène as if mounted on a horizontal path that can turn on a 90-degree dime at any moment).

De la Iglesia uses style to sketch emotional context: The giddy cinematic cross-references, feverish hallucinations, and gut-busting non sequiturs fill in the gaps of his characters' backgrounds. There's no scene more profound than Rafael losing all sense of what's real in the world at the precise moment he enters the stage of a reality program, or no scene as funny as Lourdes's macabre little sister screaming at a dinner table that she was raped by her gym teacher, but as soon as the film builds to a startling scene atop a Ferris wheel (with 2D backdrops straight out of Hitchcock!), de la Iglesia seems to lose his grip on the film. Once Rafael's boss starts making appearances as a Grinch-like ghost and a Columbo-like police officer's investigation of Rafael and Lourdes's crime is hastily incorporated into the otherwise resourceful delirium, you get a sense the film wants to be over and done with as soon as possible. The ending is a messy, contradictory kaput, but we should all be so lucky to experience the witty pop that precedes it.

Feature: Every Heaven Has a Hell: An Interview with Álex de la Iglesia

De Lencquesaing, Louis-do

IN A RUSH (Au Galop)

France (93 mi) 2012

In A Rush Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

If ever a film didn’t live up to its title, it’s In A Rush (Au Galop), a family drama as stylishly laidback as its director and male lead Louis-Do de Lencquesaing. The actor turned auteur made a considerable splash as the suicidal producer in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Father Of My Children, and his debut feature is rather in the mould of that film - an elegantly executed drama with distinctive, sometimes eccentric dashes of characterisation.

But de Lencquesaing’s offering, despite its strong cast and unflappable confidence, never quite distinguishes itself from the run of the thoughtful, literary mould of bourgeois drama that is an enduring staple of the Gallic screen. The path has been well trod of late by the likes of Christophe Honoré, Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas (whose Summer Hours this perhaps most closely resembles, with its theme of letting go of the past). Audiences and distributors already committed to this vein of French drama will probably remain faithful; others will shrug it off as more of the same, however classy.

The story is intermittently narrated in voice-over by novelist Paul (de Lencquesaing), who appears to be writing, possibly for his next book, about his encounter with Ada (Cervi); the story is ostensibly about Ada, but Paul increasingly becomes its focus, which perhaps says something about the somewhat narcissistic bent of de Lencquesaing’s venture. Ada’s settled life, we hear at the start - she has a partner and a young daughter - is about to be disturbed by her meeting with Paul, himself divorced and living with teenage daughter Camille (Alice de Lencquesaing). When Paul, whose publisher Ada works for, walks into her life, Ada is immediately intrigued by his rumpled suavity, and the two soon start an affair.

Meanwhile, Paul and restaurateur brother François (Beauvois) have to deal with their loftily capricious mother Mina (Keller), following the death of their father (a briefly glimpsed Verley). And Camille, more or less the sanest in the family, has her own romantic traumas with her footballer boyfriend.

If the film seems oddly familiar, it’s partly because the director and his real-life daughter Alice have already memorably portrayed a version of their own relationship in Hansen-Løve’s film. In fact, Alice’s performance is the freshest element of In a Rush, her pert wit and alertness bringing a tart spontaneity to proceeedings. Also winning is veteran Keller, drolly imposing as the patrician Mina, especially once the character begins to unravel with dignity.

The film’s most significant flaw, however, is that de Lencquesaing comes across as overly impressed with his own presence. While his brooding, often wry charisma appears to stem from his real personality, rather than being an actorly construct, he makes Paul too seductive to allay accusations of vanity - especially given the ease, and thoroughness, with which Ada falls for him.

Elegantly, if modestly crafted, and shot with an eye for crisp atmospherics by Jean-René Duveau, this is a consummately crafted package - but in tone, often a rather complacent one. While you could only dislike it deeply if you had an animus against haut bourgeois dramas per se, In A Rush comes a touch too close to lifestyle cinema for comfort.

In a Rush (Au Galop): Cannes Review Jordan Mintzer at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter

With a seductive novelist, gorgeous mistress, a dying patriarch, a country house and an inheritance - this film is French to a tee.

CANNES - Ticking off a laundry list of French art film prerequisites – Seductive novelist, check! Gorgeous mistress, check! A dying patriarch, a country house and an inheritance, check! – while bringing nothing really new to the table, In a Rush (Au galop) reps a rather generic directorial debut for Gallic actor Louis-Do de Lencquesaing (The Father of My Children, Polisse). Featuring strong performances – especially from the filmmaker’s daughter, Alice (Summer Hours) – yet very little in terms of creativity and cinematic prowess, this Cannes Critics’ Week title should trot around fests and Francophone territories, while major offshore play remains a stretch.

40-something Paul (de Lencquesaing père) is an accomplished author with suicidal tendencies, as evidenced by an opening scene where he dangerously hangs off a bridge in Paris, staring into the abyss. But things quickly pick up when he stops by his publisher (Denis Podalydes, underused) and meets the irresistible Ada (Valentia Cervi), who’s already shacked up with the sweet-faced businessman, Christian (Laurent Capelluto), with whom she has a daughter, Zoe (Enola Romo-Renoir).

Paul being Paul (or just being French), such a fact does little to deter him from pursuing his conquest, although the sudden death of his father (Bernard Verley) and its effect on his spirited mother (Marthe Keller) throws a few curveballs his way. Soon enough, though, Paul and Ada begin their illicit relationship, which seems to consist mainly of the former admiring the latter’s physical attributes, and the latter admiring the former’s wit and intelligence. Such is the plight of the writer.

As the plot points crisscross and Ada is eventually driven to choose between the two men she claims to love, both Paul and the narrative start to turn in circles, and there’s hardly enough traction in the characters – mostly Parisian archetypes – to keep things engrossing through the final reel. Slightly more palatable, though never fully developed, is the story between Paul’s smart-alecky daughter, Camille (de Lencquesaing fille), and a troubled soccer player (Ralph Amoussou) who winds up interned at a local psychiatric hospital.

If the cast in generally convincing and the tech credits passable, In a Rush never takes things far enough either emotionally or thematically to place it above the fray of any number of French dramedies that deal with sex, death and love – usually in that order. Since de Lencquesaing has already proved himself a worthy presence in the works of filmmakers like Maiwenn, Emmanuel Mouret and Mia-Hansen Love, one gets the impression here that his talent is best expressed on the other side of the lens.

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa

Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes from Variety

de Oliveira, Manoel

Still making films now into his 100’s, de Oliveira is almost as old as cinema itself and was a contemporary of Eisenstein and made his first short film in 1929, HARD WORK ON THE RIVER DOURO, a scathing portrayal of poverty, making his first feature in 1942, then directed only documentaries and short films for the next 30 years, rising to a feature film director only in the 1970’s.

Mary Corliss Blood on the Beach, by Richard and Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 19, 2008

Manoel de Oliveira was born in 1908,and made his first film, Douro, Faina Fluvial (Working on the Douro River) in 1931, when he was 22. That documentary, a vital panorama of dockside life in Oporto, Portugal, was shown today, with the director, who will be 100 on December 11, in attendance. Oliveira has been a mainstay in the Cannes competition for a quarter century, providing such sere delights as The Cannibals (with its comic shock of a conclusion), Voyage to the Beginning of the World (Marcello Mastroianni's last great film) and I'm Going Home, with a wonderful role for French film luminary Michel Piccoli. Piccoli was onstage to present an honorary Palme d'Or to the director who had never won one in competition. "Finally," Oliveira impishly exclaimed as he kissed the award, "I got one!"

Oliveira carries a cane, but he uses it less for support than as a jaunty prop —twirling it, pointing it at the cheering audience — till you expect him to break into a song-and-dance routine. The cane might be a tribute to his first cinema idol, the dapper French comic Max Linder, who influenced Charlie Chaplin, Oliveira's second idol. In the audience, clearly buoyed by the old man's energy, were other distinguished directors: Cannes Jury President Sean Penn, Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis and a young pup named Clint Eastwood, who will be 78 at the end of the month and who was a year old when Working on the Douro River opened in Portuguese theaters.

The Internet Movie Database tells us that Oliveira has two films in production. If he keeps going, and his vigor today suggests that's not a problem, he will eclipse Leni Riefenstahl (who released her last movie on her 100th birthday in 2002) as the world's oldest cineaste. And one of the most vital. "Vive le cinema!" he exclaimed before striding offstage. Oliveira is living proof that cinema is a game old men can play with agility and ageless grace.

All-Movie Guide Sandra Brennan

Manoel de Oliveira ranks among Portugal's most renowned and prolific filmmakers. The son of a wealthy industrialist, he was born in Oporto on December 12, 1908. While attending school in Galicia, Spain, Oliveira excelled in sports and auto racing, but his long-term goal was to become an actor. To this end, he enrolled in an acting school founded by Italian filmmaker Rino Lupo in 1928. However, after viewing Walther Ruttmann's lyrical documentary Berlin — Symphony of a City (1927), Oliveira's acting aspirations began to take a backseat to his increasing interest in filmmaking. In 1928, he bought a 35 mm movie camera and shot his first non-fiction film, Douro, Fainafluvial, a chronicle of life in his native Oporto; it was released in 1931. Oliveira's interest in the documentary form remained with him throughout his life, and would greatly influence his later fictional features. In 1933, the burgeoning director made his acting debut in a feature film, in A Canção de Lisboa/The Song of Lisbon (1933), Portugal's first sound film. He also made several short films, many of which were unreleased.

It was not until 1942 that Oliveira made his feature-film debut as a director with Aniki-Bóbó. With its naturalistic approach, Aniki-Bóbó was the forerunner of the Italian neorealist cinema. However, it was a commercial failure in Portugal, and it was only with time that this portrait of Oporto's street children became the nation's most popular and acclaimed film. Despite the film's promise, Oliveira was unable to complete his several subsequent film projects due to a lack of official support, so he focused on running his various family businesses until 1955, when he traveled to Germany to explore new filmmaking technology and purchase a better camera. The following year, Oliveira used that camera to make a short but influential documentary, again set in Oporto, O Pintor e a Cidade/The Painter and the City (1956). In 1963, he reemerged as a major director with his seminal documentary O Acto de Primavera/Rite of Spring, an account of peasants staging an annual passion play. The film marked a turning point for Oliveira; instead of focusing on realism, it reflected his belief that cinema existed as a means of preserving the theater. He followed up the documentary with the medium-length film A Caça/The Hunt, which, aside from a happy ending imposed by the censors, was as grim as the previous film was happy; the two films have been said to symbolize Oliveira's conception of heaven and hell. Though both films garnered the director international acclaim and made him the hero of other young Portuguese filmmakers, Oliveira would not make another feature until the early '70s.

When some of Portugal's new directors formed an innovative cooperative, CPC, they invited Oliveira to make the group's first film. The result, O Passado e o Presente/Past and Present (1971), was the first of what would be called Oliveira's "Quartet of Frustrated Loves." Oliveira would abruptly fall out of favor in 1977 with his poorly received adaptation of Camilo Castello Branco's popular romantic novel Amor de Perdição/Ill-Fated Love. Part of the aforementioned quartet, the film originally aired as a four-part television miniseries. Finding himself the butt of a national joke, Oliveira rallied back with what was arguably one of his finest films, Francisca (1981), in which he used the writer Branco as a main character. The final entry in Oliveira's "Frustrated Loves" series, O Dia Do Desespero/The Day of Despair (1992), returned to Branco's life to recount the day he shot himself. Through the 1990s, Oliveira's output became more frequent; he released about one film each year. Two of his better-known works, Viagem Ao Principio Do Mundo/Journey to the Beginning of the World (1997) and La Carta (1999), featured two members of the same celebrated family, the former being Marcello Mastroianni's last film, and the latter, a 17th century love story set in modern society, starring Mastroianni's daughter, Chiara Mastroianni.

The Classical Modernist: Manoel de Oliveira - Film Comment Jonathan Rosenbaum, July/August 2008

Films, films,
The best resemble
Great books
That are difficult to penetrate
Because of their richness and depth.

The cinema isn’t easy
Because life is complicated
And art indefinable.
Making life indefinable
And art
complicated.

—Manoel de Oliveira, “Cinematographic Poem,” 1986 (translated from the Portuguese)

Since this century has taught us, and continues to teach us, that human beings can learn to live under the most brutalized and theoretically intolerable conditions, it is not easy to grasp the extent of the, unfortunately accelerating, return to what our 19th-century ancestors would have called the standards of barbarism.

—Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991

To insist that all great filmmakers contain multitudes is to risk a counter-response—that the same might equally be said of the not-so-great. Just as much labor can be expended on bad work as on good, and this applies to the labor of viewers and filmmakers alike. Life and art are both complicated, as Manoel de Oliveira points out, but that doesn’t necessarily make them interesting.

And so, from a practical standpoint, I’m afraid it won’t do to argue that lingering skeptics who still dispute Oliveira’s greatness simply need to see more of his films, especially because this advice usually leads to their seeing more of his bad stuff. Familiarity with Oliveira’s work as a whole does have its compensations, such as recognizing and enjoying his repertory company of actors, who seem every bit as loyal as Ford’s or Bergman’s, and include stalwarts Luís Miguel Cintra (17 films), Leonor Silveira (16 films), and Oliveira’s grandson Ricardo Trepa (13 films). But this doesn’t necessarily redeem his less scintillating features. And you don’t have to look far to find a bad Oliveira film—or at the very least boring (such as The Convent), pretentious (The Divine Comedy), or slight (Christopher Columbus, The Enigma), not to mention difficult (almost anything). This problem is compounded by the fact that some of Oliveira’s lesser efforts are the easiest to see, probably because they often feature stars.

These films are also usually the talkiest, as well as the ones in which Oliveira’s ideas—cinematic as well as thematic—seem too sketchy to sustain feature length, perhaps helping to explain why he sometimes alternates the gab with extended musical performances and/or prolonged establishing shots. The Letter (99) and Belle Toujours (06), for example, have their charms and fascinations, to be sure, but I’d hate having to use either one to support claims for Oliveira as a major figure.

The former transplants to the late 20th century Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess of Clèves, written in 1678 and commonly described as the first great short novel in French—a tale about the self-abnegating love of the highly principled, and married, heroine (Chiara Mastroianni) for the Duke of Nemours. (Reportedly, the idea for both reading and adapting this novel came about two decades earlier, from Oliveira’s principal French collaborator, translator, and exegete Jacques Parsi. Knowing the director’s fascination with the theme of frustrated love, he also suggested Paul Claudel’s The Satin Slipper.)

Part of the promising and initially amusing joke here appears to be the notion that aristocrats and their fussy distinctions hardly change at all from one century to the next—a conceit that works only if you don’t think about it too much. The other part is giving the role of the Duke to Portuguese pop star Pedro Abrunhosa, a dour, poker-faced dandy who hails from Porto, Oliveira’s hometown. Known for never removing his sunglasses, he plays himself à la Dean Martin in Kiss Me, Stupid.

Yet the campy humor of this double conceit extended over 105 minutes is so dry that it ultimately becomes arid. Oliveira neither runs nor plays with it; he dully plows ahead like a bulldozer, leading one to wonder eventually whether he has forgotten that the idea is supposed to be funny and ironic. And “Momento,” the surprisingly conventional and humorless music video that Oliveira made with Abrunhosa three years later, makes one wonder if he ever intended any sort of joke to begin with.

There’s a similar mulishness in Belle Toujours—an unlikely sequel/speculative footnote to Belle de jour that, unlike Buñuel’s work, has more to do with class than with sex, and whose only authentically Buñuelian touch involves the absurdist appearance of a chicken at a climactic moment. In the original film, Séverine (Catherine Deneuve), a frigid bourgeois housewife who loves her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel), gets an afternoon job at a high-price brothel in order to satisfy her masochistic desires—a secret discovered by Pierre’s friend Henri (Michel Piccoli), a rakish brothel customer. After Pierre is shot by one of Séverine’s jealous clients, leaving him permanently mute and paralyzed, Henri announces that he’ll tell Pierre everything, but we (and she) can’t be sure whether or not he actually does.

Oliveira, who couldn’t persuade Deneuve to play Séverine again, got Bulle Ogier, the female lead in his My Case (86), to assume the role. Beside the fact that she never comes across as the same character (a difference in conception that goes beyond casting), the story’s focus has shifted to Henri (Piccoli again). He chases after the reluctant Séverine for most of the movie to invite her to a swank dinner, which she finally agrees to attend because she wants to discover whether he did in fact tell Pierre the truth 40 years earlier. As Henri pontificates to a young barman (Ricardo Trepa), he portrays Séverine as a masochist who became a sadist in order to work through her love for her husband. Yet it’s his own unacknowledged sadism and glib narcissism that dominate the story—even though Oliveira, judging by interviews, appears to think that the film is mainly about Séverine. One might even argue that some “civilized” form of misogyny is the main aristocratic attribute on display here, just as “civilized” xenophobia and/or misanthropy may be the key form of disdain in A Talking Picture (03), another star-laden production.

In sum, you might say that there’s some sort of joke at play in The Letter and Belle Toujours, but an extremely private one in both cases, and without a clearly demarcated punchline. Oliveira’s apparent remoteness from these characters (apart from his seeming complicity with Henri) and the audience creates a yawning distance that at times seems to define his method. There are plenty of attractive distractions along the way, such as the musical interludes in both films, e.g., the performance of the second and third movements of Dvorák’s Eighth Symphony at the Paris concert that opens Belle Toujours, where Henri first sights Séverine. But the fact that they often register as distractions rather than as essential narrative or nonnarrative forays is part of the problem.

It also won’t do to try to clinch any briefs on Oliveira’s behalf by pointing out that he’ll be a century old this coming December. This is impressive in its own right, and makes his ongoing productivity all the more remarkable—though he’s pointed out himself that it’s largely been his filmmaking that has been keeping him alive. Even so, this doesn’t automatically validate the work being produced, at least beyond proposing that he may actually have more to tell us about the 19th century than James Ivory. Like Oliveira’s celebrated early stints as a champion pole-vaulter, diver, and race-car driver, you might say that his age adds more to his legend than to any better understanding of his filmography. (Some Oliveira fans seem to value Christopher Columbus, The Enigma chiefly because Oliveira, as lead actor, can be seen driving a car in it. I suppose one could also relate Oliveira’s principal assertion in this 75-minute film—that Christopher Columbus was a Portuguese Jew—to John Malkovich’s theory in The Convent that Shakespeare was a Spanish Jew, but I’m happy to leave the elaboration of this cross-reference to others.)

The son of a prominent industrialist—the first Portuguese manufacturer of electric lamps—Oliveira was an athlete, film actor (who appeared in the first Portuguese talkie), and college dropout who also helped run his father’s factories and took over a farm inherited by his wife when he wasn’t trying to make movies. But even though he finished his first film—the documentary short Labor on the Douro River (31)—when he was 23, over a decade would pass before his first feature, then a whopping 21 years more before his second.

If he deserves to be regarded as a master—and I believe he does—his mastery belongs partially in an eccentric category of his own invention, comparable to that of Thelonious Monk as an idiosyncratic jazz pianist. And it’s a mastery of sound and image that took shape fairly early—even though, as a director of actors, his foregrounding of artificial styles of performance doesn’t always enhance the technical gifts of his players. A few of Oliveira’s films are worth seeing principally for their actors: Voyage to the Beginning of the World (97) offers Marcello Mastroianni’s last screen performance (as an Oliveira surrogate); the all-star cast of A Talking Picture includes Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich (in a hilarious turn as a charming if self-absorbed American cruise ship captain), Irene Papas, Stefania Sandrelli, and Leonor Silveira; Trepa’s best turn probably comes in the decorous but static The Fifth Empire, in which he plays clueless, despotic King Sebastian I (1544–78); and Michel Piccoli is especially fine in representing the joys and sorrows of getting old in I’m Going Home (01), perhaps the most accessible of Oliveira’s fiction films. But none of these are exactly characteristic.

Making my strongest claims for Doomed Love and Benilde isn’t likely to stir up many disputes. But this is partly because outside of scattered retrospective screenings, these features are almost impossible to see. Neither has ever been released on VHS or DVD anywhere in the world, and even if you want to try to track down Inquietude (98), which is nearly as good, you’ll have to settle for French subtitles if, like me, you don’t understand Portuguese.

The language barrier represents only one of many obstacles that stand between Oliveira and his audiences. A major strength of Randal Johnson’s recent book on the filmmaker, the first in English, is that it guides us through the features up through Belle Toujours and most of the 20 or so shorts and documentaries with all the essential contextual information, making it possible in many cases to follow the basic thrust of even those films that aren’t available on DVD with English subtitles. In this respect, besides being up to date, Johnson’s book has proved more useful than the five French books on Oliveira that I’ve acquired, all published between 1988 and 2002; in comprehensiveness, it’s topped only by the mammoth catalog produced for a tribute at the Torino Film Festival in 2000.

But certain other cultural barriers persist. No less formidable are issues involving class (Oliveira’s aristocratic background), political orientation (never directly stated in any of his films), the history of Portugal in the 20th century (especially the aforementioned dictatorship), and history in general (specifically, how one situates Oliveira, a 19th-century modernist, in relation to any particular period, past or present).

Indeed, another off-putting aspect of his career is its highly asymmetrical shape. He started out like Dreyer with an overall average of one feature per decade for half a century, then continued with about one feature per year ever since. It’s true that his initially sparse output can largely be attributed to the constraints of Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship, which lasted from 1926 to 1974, and that the fairly steady flow of work afterward can largely be attributed to the resourcefulness of Paolo Branco, who produced all of Oliveira’s films from Francisca in 1981 through The Fifth Empire in 2004. Yet the facts that Oliveira’s mastery as well as his modernism were firmly established in Benilde (75) and Doomed Love (78), before Branco came along, and that his near-annual output has continued since they parted company, only confirm that any simple cause-and-effect explanations of his unusual oeuvre are likely to be untrustworthy.

Let’s consider briefly the first three of these issues. (The fourth will be addressed a little later.) Despite some shared (and mutually avowed) cinematic influences, such as Bresson and Straub-Huillet, Oliveira and Pedro Costa might be said to occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of Portuguese culture in terms of the respective milieus of most of their films—rich versus lumpen-proletarian. The working-class milieus of Oliveira’s first two features, Aniki-Bóbó (42) and Rite of Spring (63), and his subsequent A Caixa (“The Box,” 94), can’t of course be factored out. But these three features, which have practically nothing else in common with one another (and even less in common with any of Costa’s films), are all atypical of Oliveira’s work, comprising, respectively, a neorealist children’s film, a documentary following a rural Passion play (à la Flaherty, with deliberate restagings and re-creations), and an adaptation of a play loosely resembling Elmer Rice’s Street Scene.

The elusiveness and ambiguity of Oliveira’s politics may partly derive from survival tactics during a half-century of living under the repressive regime of Salazar’s Estado Novo (New State). But one can’t necessarily conclude from this that Oliveira was simply or only a victim of the Estado Novo, even if, like many others, he was briefly jailed at one point (as he mentioned when he visited Chicago in 2005). Johnson reports that the occupation of the Oliveira dry-goods factory in Porto by leftists during the 1974 revolution led to its eventual bankruptcy and Oliveira losing “almost all of his personal assets, including the house where he had resided since 1940.” The fact that both a conservative devout Catholic like Paul Claudel and a leftist atheist scamp like Buñuel belong to his personal pantheon only begins to suggest that whatever his political positions might be, they aren’t likely to be simple.

The same goes for Oliveira’s mixed credentials as an avant-gardist. It’s been a quarter of a century since I’ve seen his hour-long Nice—À Propos de Jean Vigo (83), clearly meant as an homage to Vigo’s half-hour 1930 À Propos de Nice, but I remember thinking later how strangely sedate and polite it all seemed as a tribute to a fire-breathing anarchist. My favorite Oliveira features are his most transgressive, yet I also have to admit that part of what makes each of them qualify as avant-garde is the way these various transgressions rub shoulders with diverse forms of propriety and repression—the sort of traits that used to be called square. But then again, the ultimate avant-garde act may be to undermine what we mean by avant-garde.

I’ve seen 26 of Oliveira’s 29 features to date. One of those that I haven’t seen, Memories and Confessions (82), is, according to Oliveira’s own instructions, to be screened publicly only after his death. (I wonder if it constitutes, among other things, a political confession; it’s also said to be about a house he’s lived in for years.) His longest feature, the 400-minute The Satin Slipper (85), I’ve managed to see most of, but under uniquely frustrating circumstances: at an Oliveira event held at Brown University in 1998, repeated breakdowns in the projection of a 35mm print led to the entire audience being forced to leave well before the end in order to attend an already-scheduled panel discussion about the film—a perfect example of bureaucratic obtuseness at its most dysfunctional. The other missing item for me is Past and Present (71), Oliveira’s third feature—and this isn’t counting his 20-odd shorts and documentaries, only five of which I’ve seen.

As hazardous and provisional as such an undertaking might be, I’d like to rank all his other features in descending order of preference, in order to establish both where I’m coming from and, in terms of my own defense of his work, where I’m going. I’ve seen roughly half these films more than once, but my memories are more vague about many others, so the order assigned to the final 10 is somewhat more arbitrary:

1. Doomed Love (1978)
2. Benilde or the Virgin Mother (1975)
3. Inquietude (1998)
4. Porto of My Childhood (2001)
5. My Case (1986)
6. Francisca (1981)
7. I’m Going Home (2001)
8. Rite of Spring (1963)
9. No, or the Vain Glory of Command (1990)
10. Day of Despair (1992)
11. Aniki-bóbó (1942)
12. Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997)
13. Magic Mirror (2005)
14. The Letter (1999)
15. A Talking Picture (2003)
16. Belle Toujours (2006)
17. The Cannibals (1988)
18. The Uncertainty Principle (2002)
19. Valley of Abraham (1993)
20. A Caixa (The Box) (1994)
21. The Convent (1995)
22. Word and Utopia (2000)
23. The Fifth Empire (2004)
24. Party (1996)
25. Christopher Columbus, the Enigma (2007)
26. The Divine Comedy (1991)

A few general points about these assessments:
(1) As far as I’m concerned, there is no “golden age” in Oliveira’s career—even though what I take to be his supreme adaptations of prose fiction and theater, Doomed Love and Benilde, occur relatively early on, and the superb and pivotal modernist musical scores of João Paes, which play substantial roles in Oliveira’s films of the Seventies and Eighties, no longer figure in his work afterward. Nevertheless, masterpieces and less interesting or accomplished films turn up in all periods.(2) Similarly, I can’t entirely privilege the films in Portuguese over the films in French, or the adaptations (which comprise most of his features) over the original scripts (such as Porto of My Childhood and No, or the Vain Glory of Command), or the adaptations of stories or novels over the adaptations of plays. In fact, two of Oliveira’s boldest and most original films, the Portuguese Inquietude and the French My Case, are derived from combining adaptations of theater with adaptations of fiction, while the no less adventurous Porto of My Childhood—an autobiographical documentary that could serve as an excellent introduction to Oliveira’s work if it were more readily available—freely draws on the resources of both theater and fiction.

My Case chiefly consists of three successive onstage adaptations of a frenetic 1957 one-act Portuguese farce translated into French, José Régio’s O Meu Caso, but it also manages to work in portions of Samuel Beckett’s Pour finir encore et autres foirades (a collection of stories known in the U.S. as Fizzles) and the Book of Job. Inquietude begins as another frenetic one-act Portuguese play (Helder Prista Monteiro’s 1968 The Immortals); it’s revealed to be a performance of the play taking place in Porto in the Thirties and attended by four characters adapted from António Patrício’s story “Suzy” (circa 1910). Then, one of these four characters in turn recounts to another the film’s third story, derived from Agustina Bessa-Luís’s haunting and magical 1971 fairy tale, The Mother of a River.

(3) While some commentators have tended to privilege the eight Oliveira features derived from or co-written by his novelist friend Bessa-Luís, I regard most of these as secondary, with the notable exceptions of Francisca and the third episode of Inquietude. Arguably no less important, and for me more interesting, is another writer friend of Oliveira’s, José Régio (1901–69), principally known as a poet, who wrote the plays Oliveira adapted in both Benilde and My Case as well as in The Divine Comedy (which also draws material from the Bible, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, but perversely ignores Dante) and The Fifth Empire (derived from Régio’s play El-Rei Sebastião, written only two years after Benilde). Although I’ve read nothing by either Bessa-Luís or Régio, I’ve mainly concluded, based on Oliveira’s adaptations, that Régio’s troubled existentialism and skepticism are far more fruitful and intriguing (at least from a dramatic standpoint) than Bessa-Luís’s congealed and conservative Jamesian ironies. But I also must confess that when I saw The Divine Comedy 17 years ago, I found it insufferably pretentious, hectoring, and dull; at their worst, Bessa-Luís’s stories seem boring and snooty, but I wouldn’t fault any of them for pretension or aggression. (Aggression, in fact, is what they sometimes appear to need the most. For me the most gratifying moment in Valley of Abraham occurs in the third hour, during a character’s interminable monologue about the decline of Western civilization, when another character suddenly lifts a purring cat from the heroine’s lap and flings it straight at the camera, as if to wake us all up.)

As suggested by the somewhat bewildering mix of materials in Inquietude that are drawn from 1910, 1968, and 1971, in a film set in the Thirties, the settings of Oliveira’s period films are sometimes difficult to date in relation to specific periods, apart from the specific periods of their major source materials (e.g., the late 16th and/or early 17th century for The Satin Slipper; the 17th century for Word and Utopia; and the 19th century for Doomed Love, Francisca, and the unjustly overlooked and underrated Day of Despair—the trilogy about novelist Camilo Castelo Branco). Along with such contemporary tales as I’m Going Home and Belle Toujours, The Letter provides a much clearer take on the 20th century than the eight films with Bessa-Luís, which for me often appear to exist in a kind of time warp arising from both the insularity and preciosity associated with wealth and the freezing of history typically found in totalitarian regimes.

(4) For a good many commentators, the 166-minute Francisca has eclipsed or supplanted the 262-minute, 16mm made-for-TV Doomed Love as Oliveira’s ultimate masterpiece about obsessive, unrequited love, perhaps to some extent because its distribution has been much wider. My preference for the earlier and longer film (explored in my criticism collection Placing Movies) has a lot to do with the evident superiority of its source material (widely regarded as one of the greatest of all Portuguese novels) and its exceptional theoretical interest as a workshop of ideas regarding cinematic literary adaptation—rivaled to my mind only by Greed. It’s a tribute to the epic staying power of Doomed Love that it survived even a recent showing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that denied it an intermission, omitting an important element in its dramatic structure.

(5) The strident, over-the-top acting featured in My Case and in the production of The Immortals in Inquietude is in striking contrast to the distanciated underplaying more characteristic of Oliveira’s other films, which sometimes come across more as “representations” than as performances (especially in Doomed Love, Francisca, and The Satin Slipper). And for me, the most impressively acted of the films lying between these extremes is Benilde, which also boasts the most astonishing opening shot to be found in any Oliveira film.

Like the original opening of Touch of Evil, this shot appears behind the credits—with Paes’s bombastic, apocalyptic score, punctuated by manic screams and moans, accompanying a rapid, endless tracking shot that snakes and pans around the labyrinthine backstage spaces of Lisbon’s Tobis Studios until it finally arrives at and enters the film’s set, a room in the mansion where the play takes place. Then, as in Michael Snow’s Wavelength, the camera continues its journey all the way up to a framed photograph on a wall, in this case depicting a field, at which point the following title is superimposed: “The action of this film is supposed to take place in the 1930s.”

The wickedly and subtly subversive “supposed to” introduces a note of existential doubt that’s in fact central to Benilde—a film that indelibly captures the dread of living under totalitarian rule by following the same general approach adopted for Vichy France in Clouzot’s 1943 Le Corbeau and for Franco’s Spain in Bardem’s 1956 Calle Major: reformulating political oppression in sexual terms. The 18-year-old title heroine, living sequestered with her widowed father and a maid, has become pregnant, and since she’s an avowed virgin, she claims it’s an Immaculate Conception. But she also sleepwalks, while some of the other characters think that a crazed village outcast is somehow to blame. The remainder of the three-act play steadfastly refuses to confirm or refute either explanation. The remote setting, the spiritual ambiguity, the competing interpretations, the lighting and the mise en scène—all recall Ordet without the closing miracle. Instead, at the end we get a shortened and slowed-down reversal of the opening shot, making Benilde as much a theoretical statement about filmed theater as Doomed Love is about filmed literature.

But this shouldn’t imply that either masterpiece is any sort of formalist exercise; both are also claustrophobic hothouses of fierce meditation about ideological and spiritual as well as physical confinement. Benilde is a suffocating chamber piece, while Doomed Love, which opens with an iron gate swinging shut, emphasizes the bars in convent and prison alike. (The latter, incidentally, was inspired in part by a viewing of Straub-Huillet’s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach—as we learn from Conversations avec Manoel de Oliveira, by Antoine de Baecque and Jacques Parsi, the best of the French books devoted to his work.)

Superficially, Benilde might be said to bear some thematic relationship to Magic Mirror (05), made 30 years later, about a wealthy woman (Leonor Silveira) determined to witness an apparition of the Virgin Mary. But in fact I’m more apt to view it in terms of contrast, offering another illustration of the arguable superiority of Régio’s existential skepticism over Bessa-Luís’s more conservative wit and irony. (More mannerist than Doomed Love, Francisca for me periodically founders on its surfeit of hollow and posturing banter, its silly aphorisms such as “Death is only a moral accident” and “If fatality was a woman, I would marry her.”)

The grandest claims to have been made for Oliveira, and in some respects the most persuasive, are those suggested by Raymond Bellour, in 1997. Bellour associates Oliveira’s name with the word “civilization” (“a word far greater than cinema, its life or death”), and continues, “Oliveira’s preoccupation is, to put it banally, the fate of the world, how to live and die, survive in harmony with the logic of an ancient and prestigious country, which was fortunate to discover the world when it was worth discovering, and the strange destiny of having in part escaped the worst conflicts of this century thanks to a cruel and miserable dictatorship. He is, I believe, the only filmmaker who knew how to tell, in a single film, the history of his country, from its founding through a melancholy myth up to the end of its empire (No, or the Vain Glory of Command).”

This accounts for the difficulty of Oliveira’s cinema as well as its importance and necessity—especially during a period when the fate of the world has been widely perceived to be a less pressing matter than the accumulation of wealth by a few individuals whose lack of interest in art is as conspicuous as their obsession with empire. As we return to what Eric Hobsbawm in my opening quote has described as barbarism from a 19th-century perspective, the civilized serenity of a broader view is bound to seem somewhat remote.

The author thanks Scott Foundas and Richard Peña.

TCMDB bio from Turner Movie Classics

Film Reference Manuel Dos Santos Fonseca, updated by Rob Edelman

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Against the Grain: On the Cinematic Vision of Manoel de Oliveira Randal Johnson from Senses of Cinema

On the Uncertain Nature of Cinema (By Way of the Work of Manoel de Oliveira) by filmmaker Víctor Erice from Rouge, 2004

The Enigma of What Endures in Manoel de Oliveira's Belle toujours ... Nathaniel Drake Carlson from Cineaste, Summer 2008

BFI | Sight & Sound | Game for a century Jonathan Romney from Sight and Sound, December 2008

Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica - Cinema Scope ... Michael Sicinski, Spring 2010, also seen from The Academic Hack here: The Strange Case of Angelica

Daily | Manoel de Oliveira, 1908 - 2015 - Fandor David Hudson, April 2, 2015

de Oliveira, Manoel They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

DOURO, FAINA FLUVIAL

aka: Hard Work on the River Douro

Portugal (18 mi) 1929

User comments from imdb: Author: sibisi73 from United Kingdom

Oliveira's first film, shot around the harbour in Oporto, Portugal, is an avant-garde series of images of the fishermen and assorted workers of the town. Although there are obvious influences from other 'art' films of the time, it isn't simply a montage of unrelated images, but a vision of a working town, even with so much as a narrative thread running through. The version I have seen (at the London Film Festival 2001) was overseen by the director himself with a new score by Emmanuel Nunes. It is a pounding, vibrant 18 minutes, despite it's limitations.

Classic Films Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack (September)

Didn’t really want to include this one, since I honestly wasn’t that impressed with it. But considering it’s an off-year, and the 35mm screening at Toronto was very rare, it’s worth a mention. One gets the sense that MdO’s heart isn’t entirely in this whole city-symphony thing, since the whole travelogue effect stops cold in its tracks for a mini-narrative involving a man run down by a horse-drawn carriage. Nevertheless, there is the appropriate silhouetted photography of bridges and causeways, the stark, heroic face of modernity. And the images are nicely assembled, even if Oliveira’s rhythms never approach the musicality of Walter Ruttmann, much less Vertov.

ANIKI-BÓBÓ

Portugal (102 mi) 1942

Aniki-Bobo Movie Overview (1942) from Channel 4 Film

One of the earliest features by Portugal's most renowned director, it was also one of De Oliveira's best-known works for many years. Using the actual children of the area, the film follows the adventures of street urchins growing up in the slums of Oporto and on the banks of the river. Much simpler in style and more approachable than many of De Oliveira's later films, it has excellent location photography and natural performances from the kids. Coincidentally it was made in the same year as Vittorio De Sica made his first Italian neo-realist film, The Children Are Watching Us.

User comments from imdb Author: ruiresende84 (ruiresende84@mail.pt) from Porto, Portugal

Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest world poets, which happened to be Portuguese, as the director of Aniki Bobó once said something like "No children's book should be written for children". I apply this to cinema. There's no sense in making children's movies completely empty of any idea, as Hollywood loves to do them (maybe because no one there can make them another way). For those who never saw Aniki Bobó I will say this movie is the cinematic equivalent of Éxupery's "The Prince". A poetic tale for children, absolutely breathtaking in terms of the dramatic intensity created around such a simple story; but, at the same time, a deep reflexion on the theme of human behaviours and conscience. Its characters portrait innocence, vain, envy, generosity and the consequences of all that. (This movie also reminds a soviet old short movie, which tells Romeo and Juliet incarnated into two school children, but I'm afraid I forgot the name of the director and of the movie; if you have any idea of what film that might be, it would be nice to tell me, please). But apart from the second senses of all the movie, it should also be apreciated for it portraits Porto's society and way of living of that time as well as the city's physical appearance, which makes this movie, along with "Porto, faina fluvial", from the same director, and a few others from other people, a vital document for the city's history. An all time classic which should be better known, for the sake of the cinema.

The Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]

DOOMED LOVE (Amor de Perdição)

Portugal (261 mi) 1978

Doomed Love Dave Kehr from the Reader

Manoel de Oliveira's 265-minute adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco's 19th-century romance contains virtually every word of the source novel, played out in perfect fidelity to the text. The result is a striking, eccentric film that finds its meaning in the rupture between a 20th-century medium and an antique rhetoric, measuring the passage of time through the modulations of human thought. A wealthy young man falls in love with the daughter of a rival aristocratic family; kept apart by their parents, the two lovers communicate through long, impassioned letters. Oliveira constructs a temple of words against a deliberately stiff, theatrical mise-en-scene, yet for all its abstraction, the film is astonishingly immediate and moving, driven by a prickly obsessiveness and a swooning romanticism.

NO, OR THE VAIN GLORY OF COMMAND (‘Non’, ou A Vã Glória de Mandar)

Portugal Spain France (110 mi) 1990

User comments imdb Author jpmota from Porto, Portugal

I had to see this film, it was about all I like: Portuguese History. It may be one of the richest, in battles, glory, drama, myth... a small country with the most amazing historical background (celts, Romans, sueves, Goths, Arabs, francs...), a nation that could and would rule over the entire world for about 200 years without any opposition (from 1384 to 1583), the so-called Portuguese Centuries! But Oliveira centers his movie around the Portuguese downfall, the way Portugal virtually disappeared from international political scene during the 20th century during the fascist regime, that destroyed the Portuguese place in the world while feeding the people with lies about their glorious past. And what more adequate episode of Portuguese recent History, than the Colonial Wars? From 1963 to 1975, thousands of Portuguese soldiers were killed, wounded, maimed, in the forests of former Portuguese colonies in Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau), leaving a permanent scar in Portuguese society that's not healed even today... Oliveira joins everything, from the myths of the past to Alcacer-Quibir, to the Colonial Wars, attempting closure. It achieves none. The movie becomes too dull, too slow (although the photography is amazing), and the marriage of King John (Henry the Navigator's father, and the one that started the Portuguese Centuries after defeating the Castillans in Aljubarrota in 1384) shows exactly that (a priest reciting in Spanish with actors placed like cardboard cuts imitating a famous painting). The only scene with stamina belongs to the famous actor Ruy de Carvalho, a warrior ranting about the uselessness of war... A nice movie if you're an intellectual; a boring one if you're a passionate lover of History!

Thomas E. Billings review

Synopsis: A group of Portuguese soldiers are on their way to the front at the war in Angola, in 1974. On the way, they discuss patriotism, nationalism, and colonialism in the context of Portuguese history. Flashbacks are used to illustrate Portugal's history. Although parts of this film are interesting, much of it is dry and even tedious. Rather disappointing; not as good as Manoel de Oliveira's last film.

The plot is very simple. A group of Portuguese soldiers are in Angola, in 1974. They are in the back of a truck which is driving them to the front lines, where they will join the battle against the guerillas fighting for an independent Angola. On the way, they have long discussions about Portugal's ancient history, its colonial period, and how nationalism and patriotism relate to colonialism and their history.

Flashbacks are used frequently to illustrate the Portuguese history the soldiers are discussing. Some of the flashbacks include: tribal chieftain Viriato, in Roman times; King Afonso and the dream of a combined Iberian Empire with Spain (12th Century); battles with the Moors in Africa. Most of the discussion centers on wars and colonial conquests, and the utter futility of it all, the "vain glory of command," of the film's title.

The story continues as the soldiers arrive in a staging area, where they await orders for field operations. The discussion and flashbacks continue, as the soldiers prepare for battle....

Although the film does convey a message -- the futility of colonialism and foreign military adventures, it does so in a dry, rambling, and slightly incoherent way. This was surprising and disappointing to me, as my expectations were rather high for this film. The last film by the Director, Manoel de Oliveira, was much better (THE CANNIBALS, a black humor parody of opera, in which a bunch of stuffy, pretentious opera singers accidentally engage in cannibalism).

Although the film was disappointing, it does have some good moments. Although some of the historical flashbacks are quite dry, there is one (far too brief) battle scene that looks like it was done by the Three Stooges. Also, one of the flashbacks deals with a visit of Portuguese explorers to an island populated with beautiful, naked nymphs and little cupids. That flashback is quite silly and illustrates Manoel de Oliveira's delightful (and slightly warped) sense of humor. My complaint is that there isn't enough of his wonderful humor in the film! Also, part of the soldier's discussion is interesting, though I suspect many viewers will find little of interest in their discussion.

Manoel de Olivieira, who is 83 years young, is currently working on his next film. I look forward to his next film with interest (to be released next year?). As for the current film, I think it might appeal to those with an interest in Portuguese history and/or modern perceptions of colonialism. I don't recommend it to a general audience -- instead, see if you can find de Olivieira's film THE CANNIBALS on video instead.

Strictly Film School Acquarello

The Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

ABRAHAM’S VALLEY (Vale Abraão)

France Switzerland Portugal (187 mi) 1993 Director’s cut (203 mi)

Time Out review

This Portuguese adaptation of Madame Bovary - or rather a poetic meditation on the novel by Augustina Bessa-Luis - is encased in a hypnotic atmosphere, both melancholic and tranquil. Ema (Silveira), orphaned at six, house-bound till 14, grows up in a bourgeois family in the unchanging vine-terraced Duoro valley. She's slightly lame, but possesses a beauty which is 'exuberant and therefore dangerous'. Despite a taste for luxury, she marries a doctor who depends on her 'like a worm on soil'. She's twice unfaithful, but her only close bond is with a mute servant. In a world where 'the pleasures of hypocrisy exceed those of love', her spirit must die. Subtle, elegant, enigmatic, this movie by the veteran Oliveira exercises a powerful grip. Oliveira's style is hard to categorise (the director began making films in 1931): the timelessness of the modern-day setting, where the Lotuses and Maseratis seem so incongruous, is reminiscent of Resnais, but the languorous acting echoes the satiric irony of late Buñuel and the secretive minimalism of Bresson.

User comments from imdb Author: valadas from Caldas da Rainha, Portugal

Well the resemblance of the plot with the Flaubert's novel is very superficial after all. This is much more than a story of bourgeois adultery. It's the story of an intelligent and sensitive young woman brought up in the frame of the society of mid-20th century northern Portugal in an atmosphere of bigotry and social stagnation who marries a man she does not love and whose life has no way out. The plot develops itself in old rural mansions under the eyes of a silent witness, the deaf-and-dumb servant Ritinha who sees everything and understands everything without speaking or intervening by any means but forming with Ema the main character, a strong union of love and mutual understanding. The visual images develop themselves in a slow poetic movement which is Oliveira's favourite. The scenery however, is beautifully located in the Portuguese river Douro one of the most beautiful rivers in the world.

User comments from imdb Author: Marc from Buenos Aires, Argentina

"Abraham's Valley" may be the most extraordinary achievement for Portuguese cinema, and puts Manoel de Oliveira on a level with the world's greatest directors who were equally able to create an unmistakably personal style on their exploration of the human condition. I agree with the first commentator that one cannot speak of an adaptation of Flaubert's novel, but it should also be pointed out that de Oliveira – maybe comparable to Robert Bresson's film versions of Dostoyevsky – conveys the theme into his very own perception of the world, and leaves behind the source in his search for the profound depths of it to create something likewise outstanding, like only a true genius can. The rigid and formal aestheticism which de Oliveira had been developing in more than 60 years as a filmmaker transcends into a perfect composition, which owns a lot to the original marvel of static shots in early silent cinema and the eclectic rigours of Dreyer and Straub/Huillet, so that the few times the camera actually moves it creates an amazing effect on the viewer. The antique decoration as well as spellbinding landscapes of the Portuguese valley reshape the baroque feeling of "Abraham's Valley", a film which is guided by an omniscient voice over but nonetheless always centering around the stunning beauty of main actress Leonor Silveira. Alongside Béla Tarr's "Sátántangó" and Edward Yang's "A Brighter Summer Day" this might be the greatest masterpiece of the 90s, but since the critical world still doesn't seem to be willing to give credit to Portuguese films which doesn't star international actors one might just be lucky to catch this film during a retrospective in some hidden cinematheque.

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

Ema (Leonor Silveira), the beautiful daughter of a rich Portuguese businessman, is married off to a doctor whom she doesn't love. Although she stays with him and has two daughters, she takes a succession of lovers to fill the void inside her, but still feels essentially alone.

The veteran Oliveria's three-hour epic, with its overt references to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, is an odd duck of a movie. It takes place in the 20th century, with automobiles and references to the upheavals in Portugal in the 1970s, but its style, tone, and thematic concerns are decidedly 19th century. Most unusual is the use of voice-over - this is perhaps the most extensive use of a narrator in a fiction film to date. The urbane, omniscient voice is something of a character itself - what we are shown enacts what we have been told, or sometimes subtly comments on it - and this technique takes some getting used to. I can't say that it's a complete success - at times it seems pretentious - but the union of image with the old-fashioned literary style of the word began to grow on me during the film's second half.

Oliveira treats the film like a novel. The main story is like a river with many tributaries (the picture in fact takes place around a beautiful river in the titular valley) that explore different characters and themes, and include intellectual discussions on topics political and spiritual, as well as amusing glimpses into the sexual mores and hypocrisies of the Portuguese upper class.

The director's serene style, with its careful attention to the passage of time, does create the full-bodied impression of a big novel. Silveira is stunning in the lead role, while the rest of the cast is of variable quality, with one standout being Luís Lima Barreto as one of Ema's rich admirers.

On the whole, Abraham's Valley cannot fail to impress as a rich expression of the director's personal vision. Its central theme is the tragedy of women having their self-worth defined as being admired by men. Ema internalizes what she is taught, so that she becomes trapped by her own need to be considered desirable, no matter what the cost.

It's a huge, beautiful, flawed motion picture, alternately graceful and awkward, composed with very few moving shots, yet taking great risks with its narrative technique. Vanguard's recent DVD release, however, apparently doesn't get the image ratio quite right, so until someone takes the trouble to do it correctly, you'll just have to put up with the annoyance, or hope the film pops up at a festival near you.

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [1/5]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

The Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

THE CONVENT (O Convento)

Portugal France (90 mi) 1995

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

In which eccentric veteran Oliveira transcends wackiness and achieves utter tosh. US professor Malkovich and wife Deneuve visit a remote Portuguese monastery to research his thesis that Shakespeare was in fact a Spanish Jew, and become embroiled in vaguely sinister sexual shenanigans apparently engineered by the guardian of the place. What might have been an effective horror thriller or psychodrama is turned, by the director's endless erudite allusions to myth, literature and so on, into what looks like a mere blueprint for a more coherent, less tedious meditation on good and evil.

Dragan Antulov review [2/10]

Portugal had one of the more obscure cinema industries on the European continent. This is somewhat easy to explain due to that country's cinema being always in the shadow of their big Iberian neighbour. This state of affairs, however, is not going to change if more of Portuguese films turn out to be like O CONVENTO, 1995 drama directed by Manoel de Oliveira.

The plot deals with Matthew Padovic (played by John Malkovich), American professor who wants to prove his hypothesis about William Shakespeare being Spanish of Jewish descent. Some of the evidence might be hidden in the isolated Portuguese monastery. Padovic decides to go there, accompanied by his wife Helene (played by Catherine Denevue). There he is greeted by sinister-looking guardian Baltar (played by Luis Miguel Cintra) who quickly begins hitting on Helene, while Padovic must deal with the presence of beautiful assistant Piedade (played by Leonor Silveira).

Intriguing premise and two great actors - Malkovich and Denevue - are only two good things about O CONVENTO. The movie had misfortune of being directed by Manoel de Oliveira, man who used to make movies for more than sixty years. Unlike other octogenarians who defied their age while making films, de Oliveira defied any idea of making this film comprehensible to anyone but himself. The result is complete mess - film that meanders between genres of drama and Satanic horror. Many of the scenes are poorly lit, while the soundtrack, consisting of Stravinsky and other examples 20th Century classical music, irritates the audience instead of creating any sort of atmosphere. O CONVENTO runs for merely 90 minutes, but for those who must sit through that experiences, those 90 minutes would look like eternity. Whenever someone wants the example of the "art film" at its worst, O CONVENTO would serve this purpose quite nicely.

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

American professor Michael Padovik and his French wife Helene arrive at a convent in Portugal. Padovik is seeking evidence in the convent’s library for his thesis that Shakespeare was Spanish. He is attracted to the beautiful and pure-hearted librarian Piedade. The curator Baltar, who also claims to be The Devil, tries to seduce the irritated Helene. But she demands that he prove his professed love by disposing of Piedade.

The Convent is a variation on the Faust story. At least it might be. It is really very hard to tell what it is meant to be about. Certainly Goethe’s Faust figures prominently and passages of it are read throughout. The swarthy Luis Miguel Cintra hovers sinisterly in the background and at one point claims to be The Devil, although there is no way of telling if this is meant literally or not. There’s an innocent soul – the piercingly beautiful and virtuous Leonora Silveira – who appears to come to a tragic end. But beyond that not much is clear.

What appears to happen is that John Malkovich’s wife (Catherine Deneuve) makes some sort of diabolic agreement with Cintra to be rid of Silveira whom Malkovich is attracted to. We see a scene where Silveira tells Cintra she desires him rather than Malkovich but then she runs away to a part of the forest Cintra has earlier told Deneuve contains an abyss. He yells after her and the scene then cuts to a later point where Silveira has vanished. Whether the abyss was real or allegorical is left unclear. The film reaches an ambiguously happy ending with Malkovich and Deneuve walking off down the beach arm in arm, apparently reconciled, maybe due to Deneuve’s diabolical contract with Cintra, then again maybe not. The end credits spell the vagueness and ambiguity of it all out with the statement that their bodies were found burned in the forest, although there were also reports that they were found living in Paris, although just as equally the word of the observing fisherman cannot be trusted.

The French cultural critic Jean Beaudrillard made the observation that the ultimate postmodernist building would be one that has no entrances. By like analogy the ultimate postmodernist film would surely be one that tells a story that operates on a set of rules that are never conveyed to the audience. The Convent is very much that. The plot is all loose ends and uncertain metaphors that never cohere into a clear direction or any overall roadmap. This sort of thing can often be utterly pretentious but here it proves somewhat fascinating. Director Manoel de Oliveira invests the landscape and the grounds of the decaying convent with a brooding mysteriousness. His camera focuses on empty landscape far longer than is necessary for mere scenography, as though if we look at bleak stretches of beach long enough we might find some meaning in them. There is an intensive violin score, which adds much.

Movie Magazine International review Michael Fox

Steve Rhodes review [0.5/4] the pacing is atrocious, scenes drag by at a glacial speed

Boxoffice Magazine review

Film Scouts (Henri Béhar) capsule review

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [1/5] No place is safe from this movie

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [1.5/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

VOYAGE TO THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD (Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo)

Portugal France (95 mi) 1997

Time Out review

Manoel de Oliveira was born in 1908 and made his first movie in 1929. It's no surprise then that this 1997 production feels like an old man's film. Manoel, a Portuguese director (Mastroianni), revisits childhood haunts on a pilgrimage with his actors and collaborators, Afonso (Gautier), Judite (Silveira) and Duarte (Dória). Oliveira keeps it simple. Conversations are interspersed with shots from the moving car. They stop by a river and look across to the Jesuit college Manoel attended. He reminisces and flirts with Judite - then they drive on. The first half is rambling and pretentious - unless you share Oliveira's obvious fondness for Manoel. Then a strange thing happens. With scant warning, attention shifts to Afonso - in fact, it transpires that this pilgrimage is for his benefit, a visit to his dead father's sister in a remote peasant village. They've never met before, and Afonso's aunt is hostile and suspicious. The scene in which he breaks through is a sustained tour de force. Oliveira's insistence on stasis and change, saudades - nostalgia, history, atavism - these themes find an emotional hold in the face of actress Isabel de Castro.

Film Scouts (David Sterritt) capsule review

I've gotten into a tiff or two over de Oliveira's picture, which I find much stronger in its second half than in its first. The opening scenes chronicle an automobile trip into Portugal taken by an aging film director--played by the late Marcello Mastroianni and clearly based on de Oliveira himself--with an actor friend of Portuguese ancestry who wants to rediscover his family roots. The on-screen director gives long, leisurely, generally uninteresting monologues about the school he went to, the discipline he suffered as a child, and so on, while his entourage listens raptly and reverently; not since Akira Kurosawa's maddening "Madedayo" inched its way through Cannes have I seen such a clear example of a truly great filmmaker exploiting his (totally deserved) elder status to indulge personal interests and memories that simply don't count for much with people who aren't close friends or longtime associates. Defenders of this material justify it as self-portraiture on de Oliveira's part, but while this is certainly a legitimate argument, it remains true that even great artists may produce both major self-portraits and minor self-portraits; in my view this is a minor one, de Oliveira's huge artistic stature and fascinating professional history notwithstanding. Fortunately, the film becomes very involving and touching once the Mastroianni/de Oliveira character fades largely out of the screenplay and the actor-figure has a long, tragicomic encounter with an elderly aunt who knows the family's history by heart but isn't sure she wants to share it with a member of the clan who's never bothered to learn Portuguese, and who works in the degraded profession of TV acting to boot. Approaching his 90th birthday, de Oliveira still has the skills of a master, and I mean no disrespect for his awesome abilities when I note that he only shows them in the latter portion of his latest film.

Boxoffice Magazine review Ed Scheid

"Voyage to the Beginning of the World" ("Viagem Ao Principio Do Mundo") contains the 171st film appearance by Marcello Mastroianni, notable because it's the last of his many memorable performances before his death in December of last year. Mastroianni's character here is very similar to Manoel de Oliveira, the film's 88-year-old writer/director. Both have the same profession, the same first name and wear a similar floppy-brimmed hat.

Alfonso (Jean Yves Gautier) is a French actor with a role in a Franco-Portuguese co-production. His dead father was originally from Portugal. He decides to visit his father's home village and to meet a surviving aunt for the first time. Because Alfonso does not speak Portuguese, the film's director, Manoel (Mastroianni), and two other actors accompany him to translate. As their car drives through the rural roads, the sights trigger the director's reminiscences of his early life. At journey's end, the travelers find a village full of harsh conditions and unhappy memories.

Providing a depth the rest of the film lacks, Mastroianni's performance shows the remarkable range of his talent. He is full of charm while bantering in the car with a young actress (Leonor Silveira). Close-ups show Mastroianni's face full of deep emotion and warmth as the director remembers events from his past. He even makes a face full of childish delight at a stuffed cat. But the main storyline, of the actor investigating his Portuguese roots, is too slight to maintain much interest when Mastroianni is not onscreen. Part of the reason is that the script doesn't develop the other characters on the journey, and much of de Oliveira's directorial style consists of a repetitious combination of conversations in the car and shots of the road as if viewed from the back window.

Nostalgia for the Real: Manoel de Oliveira and Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo zunguzungu, August 12, 2008

The program for the Manoel de Oliveira series at the PFA speaks of that hundred year old director–still active, amazingly–as the “dean” of Portuguese cinema, yet hurries from that statement to another, more interesting one, asserting that “Portugal could never lay sole claim to him: like Louis Bunuel and Raul Ruiz, he is a major European film stylist. He belongs to cinema.” By the end of the paragraph, too, the writer has returned to this point, reasserting that “Again, he belongs to cinema.”

I’m fascinated whenever it feels like a writer or speaker is putting a somehow excessive emphasis on a seemingly banal point, when the lady protests too much. After all, who is the writer arguing against? Who is denying that he belongs to “cinema”? Why is that being the “dean of Portuguese cinema” has to be so quickly qualified and neutralized and why is it so necessary to establish that he’s still one of us? Why would being Portuguese be incompatible with belonging to cinema, and why does the writer compare him to people like Bunuel and Ruiz? Why don’t I stop with the rhetorical questions and just say what I think?

The answer, I think, is that Portugal’s position within Europe (and within modernity) is different than France’s, as the first film of the series–Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo / Voyage to the Beginning of the World–sets out to illustrate. Half of it is in French, mainly consisting of sparkling philosophical banter amongst a troupe of television people, and the other half is in Portuguese, as these television people try to communicate with a bunch of old farmers in a tiny Portuguese village. As we were walking out, I delighted myself with the thought that it’s a European version of Deliverance: nothing like Deliverance–because Deliverance is an extremely American film–but having in common a journey into a place defined as the “past,” and the problem of communicating with the strange savages who inhabit that past. That the American version features anal rape and manly men in boats while the European version highlights existential self-loathing in bad mustaches only firms up my confidence in the parallel, and my conviction that I have discovered the key to all cinematic mythologies.

So here’s what happens: three actors and their director are on his way to a location shooting in Portugal, and they make a stop at the place where one of the actor’s father was from. After much verbal mutual masturbation regarding the meaning of The Past, Art, Truth, Sex, and Time, the quartet end up in a tiny little Portuguese village trying to communicate with an old lady who is one actor’s aunt (and one of the joys of this movie, by the way, is Mastrioanni’s irritated body language once everything’s not all about him anymore). The old lady refuses to be convinced that he is in fact her nephew, repeating over and over again, “why can’t he speak our language?” Eventually, by visiting the family cemetery with her and via a particularly moving sequence where he makes her feel the blood in his arm, he manages to convince her that even though he doesn’t speak their language, blood is the important thing, and (when they have to move on to a TV shoot) she makes a final request: return with his brother, Yves, so she can see him before she dies.

Deliverance, too, is about the death of an “old” way of life: the river they paddle down is due to be destroyed by a TVA dam, so that hydro-electrification can bring progress. And, like the hicks in Deliverance, this old woman has a particular but barely explained antipathy to the outside: not only does she hate TV, she speaks with a poignant distaste for the ways that, by fleeing to the cities, the “old” ways are being left behind. So, as the film ends, we are left with an unanswered question: will the TV actor return with his brother Yves? Or will he prove all of his aunt’s prejudices against the “new” right?

The film’s final shot is the actors standing in a dressing room, resplendent in their period costumes–apparently they’re putting on the Portuguese version of How Green Was My Valley–and you just know, looking at them, that there’s no way any of them are going back. The silly nostalgia for “authenticity” that they are performing for television is from the same script that made it so hard for them to understand what the old woman was trying to tell them back in the village. As she talked about his father, she kept telling him variations on the same story: how he came to leave the village. Afonso is unsatisfied, wanting to know about his father’s life here, but she only shakes her head, refusing to tell he: there is no “here,” here anymore. TV has destroyed it, and the departure of young people. I don’t think he quite gets this, but–just like when she bitterly complains that the EEC has ruined the local economy by taking away smuggling as a business opportunity–it’s a remarkable piece of social theory: under globalization, being “local” isn’t about adhering to a static and authentic past, but an identity constructed by being left behind.

So it’s funny that, as in the film, Manoel de Oliveira gets defined not as merely Portuguese, but as a purveyor of Portugueseness for a global audience, an origin redefined by the function its interpellated into. Like the old woman in the village, his identity as local gets constructed not in opposition to the global, but through it. Like hers, it’s an identity constructed out of nostalgia for a real that not only never existed then, but only exists now because of the ways that nostalgia creates it. How green was my valley, indeed.

Senses of Cinema (Wheeler Winston Dixon) review August 2005

Pedro Bras Marques review

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

Harvey S. Karten review

Apollo Movie Guide [Rachel Sanders]

The Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

ANXIETY B+ 92

aka: Inquietude

Portugal France Spain Switzerland (110 mi) 1998

Working with cinematographer Renato Berta, shot on location in Portugal and Madrid, the film is a triptych, adapting 3 literary works into 3 episodes, and is a very slowly evolving work revealing the pace and subject of aging, beginning with Prista Monteiro’s one act play “The Immortals.” The father is a respected doctor, the son a respected writer, and using a methodology of theater of the absurd, the elderly, spiteful father urges his son to commit suicide as the only means to obtain immortality. He is obsessed with driving him there, eventually taking matters into his own hands, with some clever use of his walking stick after asking his son to straighten out some curtains next to an open window.

The second story is Antonio Patricio’s “Suzy,” which follows four characters attending a play in the 1930’s, where two rich playboys pick up a couple of beautiful women, one becomes obsessed with the beauty of a long-suffering prostitute “Suzy,” and spends endless moments talking in restaurants about women with his friend, which features the monotonous, recurring refrain, “poor Suzy.” This section was reminiscent of Fassbinder’s THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972), particularly in its use of dramatic backdrops, which provides extraordinary expression in an otherwise minimalist, emotionally spare piece, the highlight of which is a dance sequence in the restaurant between the director and his wife.

The long conversation from the second episode evolves into the third, as one recounts a story to the other, a tale within a tale, Agustina Bessa-Luís’s “The Mother of the River,” which is beautifully filmed outdoors in an elegant, dream-like fantasy. Irene Pappas is an ancient river nymph, the river’s mother. When a young, dreamy country girl comes to ask her advice, discovering she has fingers made of gold, the nymph recites ancient Greek poetry to express the King Midas-like imagery of magic and illusion.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review (original link lost, the lengthier review is no longer available)

Now pushing 90, Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira is our oldest living film master, which makes it all the more astonishing that he's averaged one feature a year for the past decade. He's best known in the U.S. for his recent star vehicles (The Convent, Voyage to the Beginning of the World). But his finest work tends to be bound to literature and theater, and this eccentric triptych--easily his best since No, or the Vainglory of Command (1989)--is no exception. In keeping with what might be termed de Oliveira's 19th-century modernism, this French-Portuguese production contains three episodes; it begins with a curious one-act play (Prista Monteiro's The Immortals), then proceeds to a story (Antonio Patricio's "Suzy") concerning four characters who attend the play, one of whom recounts to another a third story, Agustina Bessa-Luis's "The Mother of the River," which is the strangest of all. The play is about old age, but the theme linking the three episodes is existential identity, played out in each by two characters--a father and son (both respected doctors and writers), a playboy and a prostitute, a young village woman and an ancient witch. (The witch is played by Irene Papas, and de Oliveira can be seen dancing with his wife in a restaurant in the middle episode.) The stately, reflective tempo of this masterpiece of displacement gave it a deceptive, almost artless simplicity the first time I saw it; on a second viewing, the poetic mirror structure took hold, and the three sections began to resonate together in rich and exquisite harmony. This is the best new European film I've seen this year.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's favorite of the year Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Best Films of 1998 from the Reader

1. Inquietude.

I prefer the French and Portuguese title of this three-part feature--which my dictionary defines as "disturbed state"--to its English title, Anxiety. But whatever you call it, Manoel de Oliveira's masterpiece offers so many lingering beauties and profundities that even after three viewings I feel I've barely scratched the surface. (Also, because the New York film festival passed on it, it's one of the few major foreign films of 1998 that received a U.S. screening only in Chicago.) It features no stars (excepting Irene Papas in the third episode), and few mainstream critics are liable to support it, so its odds of getting an American distributor are just about nil. But one way or another, I'm sure, it will find its way back to Chicago.

De Oliveira, who celebrated his 90th birthday last month, is the only director working today who started out in the silent era, and while his modernist and aristocratic sensibility is steeped in the 19th century, there's nothing old-fashioned about his work. For Inquietude he daringly combines a one-act play (Prista Monteiro's The Immortals) and two stories (Antonio Patricio's "Suzy" and Agustina Bessa-Luis's "The Mother of the River") into a single narrative: the characters in "Suzy" attend a performance of the play, and one of them recounts to another "The Mother of the River." The theme of existential identity links the three works, and de Oliveira's stately, reflective style fuses them into a seamless and luminous visual poem. Comparable in its achievement only to de Oliveira's Doomed Love (1978), this can't be written off simply as a "testament" that sums up an illustrious career; de Oliveira is currently working on an adaptation of La princesse de Cleves, and he may well have other major films up his sleeve. Indeed, though The Immortals ponders the issues of old age, de Oliveira refuses the conventional pose of the old master looking back on his life and career with equanimity; Inquietude, a masterpiece with irreverent wit, ironic bite, and anger over the vagaries of self-definition, has the decanted authority of Carl Dreyer's Gertrud and the imaginative splendor of The Arabian Nights.

David Dalgleish review [1/4]

Mike D'Angelo capsule review

THE LETTER (La Lettre) A- 93

Spain Portugal France (107 mi) 1999

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

This distinctly odd version of the classic novel The Princess of Clèves, from Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (b. 1908), falls between a rather studied literalism and a woebegone updating. The chaste wife (Mastroianni) is here wooed by real-life rock singer Pedro Abrunhosa, who to non-Portuguese may well seem an utter prat. Some reckon the film is intentionally funny, but this writer's in the larger camp that considers it misconceived and out of touch. (See also La Fidélité).

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

The great 91 year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira returns to the festival with The Letter, an adaptation of a 300 year-old novel set in modern-day France. Chiara Mastroianni (Marcello's daughter) stars as a lovely French woman who marries a doctor and then falls in love with a Portuguese pop star (played by Portuguese pop star Pedro Abrunhosa) but never cheats. As usual, Oliveira exerts a masterly control over his pacing and compositions, juxtaposing wild emotions with still surfaces, and still keeps the movie breezy by explaining away huge chunks of the novel during intertitles. It's a brilliant work.

The Letter Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

This doesn't approach the achievement of Manoel de Oliveira's previous feature, Inquietude, the highlight of last year's festival and my favorite film of 1998. But the 34th film of Portugal's greatest filmmaker maintains his usual cool audacity, fearlessly courting absurdity at every turn. Now that he's in his early 90s--making him the only living filmmaker who worked before the coming of sound--you might say he's entitled to his dry conceptual wit; but this wasn't the position of the members of the American press at Cannes when The Letter won the jury prize, many of whom seemed scandalized. An adaptation of Madame de La Fayette's classic 1678 novel about court intrigue and unrequited love, La princesse de Cleves, transplanted into contemporary European high society and played out in designer clothes, it simply and brutally juxtaposes two eras 300 years apart to elicit not easy laughs but sustained, amused disbelief. The heroine, suffering stoically in a passionless arranged marriage, is not so much played as embodied by Chiara Mastroianni--whose mother (Catherine Deneuve) was cast in de Oliveira's The Convent and whose father (Marcello Mastroianni) was in his Journey to the Beginning of the World. Even less acted is the object of her concealed love and lust, the famous Portuguese pop singer Pedro Abrunhosa, imperturbably playing himself as an incongruous stand-in for the duke of Nemours. Most of the action is summarized in long intertitles, leaving de Oliveira free to ponder the imponderable with his usual aristocratic distance and patience.

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

Luminous and impassive, radiating a mysterious sadness from her wide brown eyes and chiseled Aubrey Beardsley lips, Chiara Mastroianni is more than an image of virtue in Manoel de Oliviera's film ''The Letter.'' In this Portuguese director's contemporary update of the 17th-century French novel ''La Princesse de Cleves'' by Madame de Lafayette, she is the apotheosis of the sort of fervent morality that is the private domain only of saints and fools.

Her character, Catherine de Cleves, is a beautiful, deeply unhappy woman who torments herself with questions about loyalty, virtue, honor and trust that may have been vital issues in Roman Catholic France three centuries ago but that today hardly anybody anywhere bothers to ask. And in relocating the story from 1678 (when the book, considered to be the first great French novel, was published) to contemporary Paris, the 90-year-old filmmaker risks looking ridiculous. At a press screening of the movie, which the New York Film Festival is showing this evening at 6 at Alice Tully Hall, certain situations drew titters from the audience.

Would a sophisticated Parisian doctor upon learning that his wife has been pining for another man with whom she has never slept (and never will sleep) allow himself literally to waste away from jealousy and a broken heart? Not in this day and age. But in Mr. de Oliviera's raw spiritual allegory of the war between the flesh and spirit and the destructive consequences of one woman's extreme goodness and honesty, that is exactly what happens.

Those familiar with the director's earlier films shouldn't be surprised by such flagrant anachronisms. In a way they are the point.

In contemplating the eternal versus the temporal, he cuts directly to the chase. His characters may wear modern dress, but they're still caught up in the moral and religious issues of an earlier time. ''The Letter,'' like his other recent films, repeatedly and pointedly juxtaposes the flimsy modern world with images (especially heroic sculptures) that betoken an older, more permanent idea of Western civilization and Christian aspiration.

Temptation appears to Catherine in the person of a Portuguese pop singer, Pedro Abrunhosa (playing himself), an enigmatic, Mephistophelean figure with a face full of stubble who affects black sunglasses and designer hip-hop fashions. When they first meet at a party, Catherine is contentedly married to a handsome doctor (Antoine Chappey), whom everyone believes to be her perfect match. But a spark is struck between the beautiful young matron and the free-spirited singer. For the rest of the film she struggles to resist a passion that she confesses first to a childhood friend (Leonor Silveira) in a convent and later (as a sign of her virtue) to her husband.

The doctor is blissfully unaware of his wife's love for another man until they are watching television, and she involuntarily cries out at the news that Pedro has been injured in an accident. Even after her husband dies and she is free to marry Pedro, she avoids him, eventually taking the most extreme, self-mortifying measures to assuage her guilt.

It isn't until the end of the film, when her confidante reads a long letter from Catherine, who has disappeared, that the movie makes its case for an absolute morality along with a fierce asceticism. ''The Letter'' tacitly endorses a view that the ultimate purpose of human life is neither happiness nor perpetuation of the species but engagement in an agonizing struggle toward an impossible moral perfection measured against eternity.

The Letter: Eurovision and the Aesthetic of Silence David Melville from Senses of Cinema

Mike D'Angelo capsule review

Variety (David Stratton) review

I’M GOING HOME (Je rentre à la maison) B+ 92

France Portugal (90 mi) 2001

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Thanks to the dependably marvellous Piccoli, this heartfelt but slim, slightly predictable and sometimes silly study of an actor in his twilight years manages to hold the attention throughout, despite longueurs as we see him on stage and in rehearsal (for, obviously, The King Is Dead and The Tempest and, very implausibly, as Buck Mulligan - to be sûr! - in a Malkovich movie of Ulysses). The film has its moments - the sudden news that he's lost almost his entire family in an accident, some gentle comedy with café tables, Piccoli's expression as make-up is applied - but without the actor's charm, warmth, expertise and sheer presence, the pickings would be slim.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Manoel de Oliveira's I'm Going Home might have made a fitting swan song for the 93-year-old director if he weren't still so spry; unlike his main character, the filmmaker obviously has more work to do. After a performance in Ionesco's Exit the King, Gilbert Valence (the great Michel Piccoli) discovers that his entire family (minus his grandson) has been killed in a car crash. He is an aging actor, friendly to his admirers (he is frequently seen signing autographs) and careful when making important choices. Gilbert's decision-making (to buy or not to buy a pair of shoes, to take or decline a role in an action-packed American film) suggests a willingness to overcome his overwhelming sense of loss, except he doesn't know how. Though he takes risks, he discovers that comfort lies in that which is familiar. Too young for a role in the aforementioned action film and too old for the part of Buck Mulligan in a screen adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses (directed by John Malkovich's John Crawford), Gilbert not only becomes a victim of typecasting but a slave to his mortality. Staring at a Jack Vettriano painting depicting dancing lovers, Piccoli profoundly evokes Gilbert's sense of loss and remorse. On the Exit the King stage, a character says of Gilbert's King Berenger: "His majesty the king is raving." Like his Berenger, Gilbert is seemingly convinced that his power is intact. Gilbert busies himself after the death of his family (he buys the shoes, he takes the part in the film) as if to return to normalcy. Tragically, Gilbert's shoes are stolen and he soon finds himself struggling through his demanding English role in Ulysses. Oliveira's compositions engage silent film idiom to glorious effect, and the story itself unravels like a great silent work with a haunting open ending. However sad, Oliveira suggests that there is no place like home and certainly no better place to die.

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

"I'm Going Home" is a quiet, closely observed study in the small ways people accommodate big things. It's about an elderly man living in Paris, who is encountering the final chapter of his life. But viewers who come to this delicate creation with expectations of just another quaint or sad story are in for a surprise. The 93-year-old Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira does as much to subvert the conventions of cinematic grammar as the most radical Young Turk, but he does so with restraint perfected throughout a 75-year career. Watching this gentle, mesmerizing portrait of a man coming to terms with time, you barely realize your mind is being blown.

Michel Piccoli plays Gilbert Valence, a famous French actor whom we meet onstage, performing a searing death scene in the Ionesco play "Exit the King." It's a tour de force of hammy bathos, a real star turn: He nails it, as do his co-stars (who include an actress played by Catherine Deneuve). De Oliveira films much of the scene from backstage, where we later see the actors waiting for their curtain calls with bored resignation: It's just another day in the theater. But then Gilbert receives a message that his wife, daughter and son-in-law have just died in a car accident.

If this were a Hollywood movie, the synopsis would go something like: "This cataclysmic event sends Gilbert on a journey of adventure and self-discovery, during which he finds out he can live and love again." Gilbert does embark on a journey, but one of less epic proportions: "I'm Going Home" finds him a few months later, when he's once again ensconced in the comforting rituals of dailiness. He greets his grandson each morning, watches as the housekeeper sends the boy off to school, walks to a cafe, has a coffee and reads the paper at his usual table, exchanges pleasantries with his regular waiter and goes to work at the theater. The closest he comes to discovering that he can live and love again is when he takes a job on a movie being directed by an American filmmaker (John Malkovich). But instead of finding new possibilities, Gilbert winds up facing the realities that he had used his carefully constructed habits to conceal.

As he proves in the extraordinarily bold first sequence, during which the scene from the Ionesco play is filmed virtually in its entirety, de Oliveira is not afraid to take risks in "I'm Going Home." He'll often film Gilbert from behind a pane of glass, the front of a boutique or the facade of his neighborhood cafe, through which we see but don't hear the actor speaking with people. An amazing amount of information is communicated during these passages, as the nuances of expression and gesture reveal the man behind the words. The visual style also conveys the rhythm of Gilbert's day, as he strolls placidly down the Paris streets. With its easy pace and shop-window points of view, "I'm Going Home" recalls the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who wrote so eloquently about the flâneur, the unhurried but alert wanderer of city streets.

"I'm Going Home" is a flâneur of a movie, unhurried and alert as it limns the patterns of Gilbert's cheerful, yet unmistakably mournful, routine. You get the sense that he can't keep up appearances much longer, and he doesn't. But even as "I'm Going Home" reaches its crisis point, what's gone before doesn't seem like denial as much as the quiet heroics of the last civilized man.

I'm Going Home Gerald Peary

There's no cinema-producing country in the world with less of a popular tradition than Portugal, where, year after year, the feature films released are personal and private, experimental and esoteric, and paid for, mostly, with government subsidies. Nobody has made out better than Manoel De Oliviera who, literally since the silent period (that's when he began directing!), has forged his kind of Portugese movie, without the slightest glance toward what regular audiences want.

I'm Going Home, shot in 2000 when Oliviera was a robust 92 (he's maybe 94 now) is typical fare in some ways, i.e., beginning, without any set-up or explanation, deep in a stage production of Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King. A 13-minute sequence from an obscure absurdist drama, and Catharine Deneuve appears here and never again! But then the movie becomes normal (mostly), moving, and wise. It's one of the most accessible, and endearing, movies in Oliviera's seventy-plus years of film directing.

Actually, even that cutting from Exit the King, though brazenly indulgent, has resonance for what happens afterward. Ionesco's dottering ruler admits he knows nothing of life, then announces impulsively that he wants everyone in his kingdom to have his image before them. O vanity! Soon, the morally blind stage character and the actor playing him, Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli), separate. As the play-within-a-movie finally ends, Valence walks off stage to be met by three men in street clothes with the worst news: the actor's wife, daughter and son-in-law have been killed in an auto crash. Now, just as the creaky king he inhabited on stage, Valence is faced late in life with how to live his life.

Valence, different from the self-vaunting potentate, chooses solitude. Saying "no" to the possibility of romance with a young actress, he lives in an old house, in a bedroom up the stairs, and his only companion is his little grandson, Serge, whose parents were killed in the accident. I'm Going Home, as it unfolds, teaches the opposite value from that espoused by Ionesco's ruler. Pure humility, and what counts in Valence's lived life are the miniscule things: a new pair of shoes, a cup of espresso at his neighborhood bistro, the music of a calliope, the form of a revolving ferris wheel, the Eiffel Tower lit at night, all these captured beautifully, tenderly, by Sabine Lancelin, Oliviera's cinematographer.

What also counts is making art, the real kind, the right kind. Oliviera, who has never compromised his own vision, wants the same for Valence, who is seen contentedly on stage playing Prospero in an avant-garde production of The Tempest.

But he says "no" again when his eager-beaver agent tries to talk him into a lucrative action TV serial. Valence makes one mistake, allowing himself to be cast in a movie version of Joyce's Ulysses, wooed by an American director, Crawford (John Malkovich). But the film is being shot in English, not easy for the French actor, and it's obvious that he's miscast, under a silly wig, as stately plump Buck Mulligan.

That's where the title kicks in, an epiphanic decision: "I'm going home."

It's a moment close to the heart of Michel Piccoli, the amazing French actor so simple, so sublime, as Valence. "I think as the world becomes more complex, the more you have to learn to say, 'No,'" Piccoli said at a Cannes 200l press conference, where I'm Going Home was perhaps the best-loved film in competition among the gathered critics. "Valence is a character I found extremely interesting. Am I playing myself in the part? I can't say."

"I chose a child I saw for the very first time as his grandson," Oliviera piped in. "I chose Piccoli because he's an actor with a lifetime of experience. I'm more and more excited about a long life of experience. Still, he's a youngster next to me." At that, Oliviera, who honestly looks about 65, laughed uproariously.

Piccoli, born in 1925, agreed. "I can't do the math, but I could perhaps be Mr. Oliviera's son."

What's so special for Piccoli about acting for Oliviera? "There's a great deal of intimacy and closeness. He is a man who has a kind of diabolic authority and a perverse authority. At the same time he's an enormous joker. How is it that Deneuve and Malkovich accept a part on two days notice? Because they have a loyalty to this mysterious man."

A journalist had to ask the obvious: the secret of these spry ancient gentlemen, actor and director, about holding back aging.

Piccoli: "I don't want to get old. One has to become more and more radical."

Oliviera: "You must ask the Lord in heaven."

indieWIRE review Scott Foundas

filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review [4.5/5]

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

VideoVista review Paul Higson

Jonathan F. Richards review

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

CineScene.com (Josh Timmermann) review

World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh

PopMatters Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

Harvey S. Karten review

DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

Political Film Society review Michael Haas

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [2/5]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Boxoffice Magazine review Ed Scheid

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [4/5]

Camera Journal (Cambridge) Paul Sutton

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A-]

Variety.com [Deborah Young]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4]

Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Owen Gleiberman

I'm Going Home Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Guardian/Observer review

BBC Films review Neil Smith

The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Liam Lacey

The Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

San Francisco Chronicle (Carla Meyer) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

PORTO OF MY CHILDHOOD (Porto da Minha Infância) B- 80

aka: Oporto of My Childhood

France Portugal (61 mi) 2001 Argentina’s Mar del Plata Film Festival (92 mi)

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

Manoel de Oliveira's 2001 masterpiece explores the Portuguese city where he's lived for more than 90 years, though it concentrates on the first 30 or so. It's remarkable for its effortless freedom and grace in passing between past and present, fiction and nonfiction, staged performance and archival footage (including clips from two of his earliest films, Hard Work on the River Douro and Aniki-Bobo) while integrating and sometimes even synthesizing these modes. He's mainly interested in key images, music, and locations from the Eden of his privileged youth, and some of the film's songs are performed by him or his wife-though we also get a fully orchestrated version of Emmanuel Nunes's Nachtmusik 1. In Portuguese with subtitles. 61 min.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Sundance Channel’s tribute to mercurial Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira is a VCR alert for anyone who missed the Philadelphia screenings of I’m Going Home and A Talking Picture, which air throughout the month. But even Oliveira regulars probably haven’t seen the 2001 Oporto, undistributed in the U.S. due to its complex structure and brief length (just over an hour). Announcing its concern with memory in an opening title, the 95-year-old director’s 35th film is, after a fashion, an elegy for his hometown, or at least the parts of it that no longer exist. A picture of "the ghost" of the home he grew up in seems trapped midway between a photograph and a painting, which is a fairly good description of Oporto as a whole. Re-creations of places Oliveira remembers from childhood, more impressions than vignettes, contrast abruptly, almost cruelly, with the glass-fronted boutiques that the nightclubs and parlors of his youth have become. Not all the memories are consequential, which might be the point: A memory of being driven "the long way home" after a theater performance that marked him as a child plays out as a lengthy shot out the front of an imposing black town car; flashes of descending streets are visible, but rarely details. (Watch for a rare onscreen appearance by Oliveira in the play his younger self watches.) As in A Talking Picture, Oliveira’s theatrical staging emphasizes the art in artificial, as does his voiceover observation that in remembering his younger self, "I saw myself as naturally as I had seen the actors in the theater." The idea that memory, and by extension identity, is as mediated as any stage play, has profound implications which Oporto hints at more than it exhausts. But suggestion is the hallmark of Oliveira’s recent films, and Oporto certainly leaves a lot hanging in the air.

Manoel de Oliveira Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE (O Princípio da Incerteza) B 88

Portugal France (132 mi) 2002

Parlor games of the morose, super-rich, who, in true de Oliveira style, sleepwalk through this film, bored and listless with life and themselves, who have nothing better to do than turn on one another in true melodramatic fashion. A similar comedy of manners style of story was done to much better effect by Fassbinder in CHINESE ROULETTE (1976), but here, it’s almost as if the characters were lifted out of the dreamscape of the Sokurov film, as there was plenty of art work on display here in this film as well, beautifully filmed by Renato Berta, who spends much of his time in dark interiors, but particularly the repeated scenes out the window of a moving train, always accompanied by this frenzied violin that goes up and down the scales like the devil himself was playing, always finding a triumphant final high note. This served a purpose of making sure you stayed awake. This film continues the ANXIETY (1998) feel of two men sitting at a table discussing things that no one in normal conversation ever discusses, but this is the norm for de Oliveira, so it starts out with an abnormally slow, languid pace, slower than watching paint dry, but if I’m not mistaken, the uncertainty principle was a pointed reference to whether the bride was actually a virgin or not. In this emotional vacuum, a few hilarious moments appear out of nowhere, so while people are stabbing one another in the back, they always act so civilized about it. Ahhh, the sense and sensibilities of the Europeans!

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

A typically eccentric, playful post-post-modern account of dynastic and domestic intrigue involving a seemingly pure heroine, her wealthy husband, his childhood friend the maid's son (who has always loved the girl), and his friend, a seductive and seemingly Machiavellian brothel madame. If that sounds complex, it's as nothing compared to the ludicrously ornate opening exegesis (complete with speculation on bizarre nicknames) offered by two men on the fringes of what little action there is - mostly the film comprises static, stylised tableaux of often impenetrable talk. Then there are the endless, minimally varied shots of the Douro valley, from trains or from high above Oporto. For admirers in the right mood, the parodic absurdity and syntactical experimentation is deliciously funny; otherwise, the discussions over split characters, tragic heroines and so forth may leave you cold. (From the novel Jóia de Família by Augustina Bessa-Luis.)

filmcritic.com (Rachel Gordon) review [2/5]

Social class, prideful martyrdom, and a dollop of beautifully expansive landscape weave a tale of operatic proportions, both by plot and physically exhaustive standards, in veteran Manoel de Oliveira’s latest exploration of motivation. Marrying for money instead of childhood love, Camila (Leonor Baldaque) naïvely assumes the supposed epic and selfless attributes of Joan of Arc to deal with her husband’s infidelity and the consistent treatment of being irrelevant to the very people that encouraged the doomed match.

When The Uncertainty Principle isn’t relishing placing Camila within the bleakly lush settings of her prison, it takes the time to humorously discuss philosophical ideas with an energy that keeps character interaction enjoyable. It can never be fully surmised if Camila’s passivity is an effort at provoking guilt out of those in her environment or if she is internalizing some imagined voice emanating from the cobwebbed statue she visits frequently, so her erratic impulses are continually amusing. Also well executed is the slowly mounting, subtly-played tension between her lifelong crush Jose (Ricardo Trêpa) and apathetic husband Antonio (Ivo Canelas) for the possible fate of the woman they share.

Unexpectedly, the source of Antonio’s adultery is a missed opportunity in the amount of time she is given to communicate with others. Vanessa (Leonor Silveira) seems to be grasping at the last of her possibilities at respectability. She has a truly unique struggle of balancing the grudging feelings she has for an ungrateful married man and wanting to protect the immature princess that shares his home. Combine this with the fact that she has money and connections because she runs a brothel… but will never surpass Camila’s rank despite her extra life experience and Camila’s forced provincialism. The few moments that pit the two women together are pricelessly biting satire.

But while some of the emotional uproars are stunning, or even hilarious, it takes so long to build to those climaxes that it’s easy to let your eyes close for a few minutes and still not miss much of importance. Several conversations repeat themselves, and the additional scenes of the Roper brothers as Camila’s previous tutors serve no other purpose than to over-extend an already lengthy story.

Though excessively tiresome, The Uncertainty Principle, as verbally pretentious as the title may be, has its handful of redeeming features, as long as you discount its ability to bore.

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Variety (Deborah Young) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

A TALKING PICTURE (Um Filme Falado) B- 81

Portugal France Italy (96 mi) 2003

Certainly a filmmaker who makes some of the wordiest films on record, who, along with Godard, tries to use film as an extension of history and memory, here he creates a talking travelogue, something akin to Sokurov’s film, RUSSIAN ARK (2002), only it takes place on the site of ancient ruins instead of inside a museum. A young Portuguese history professor takes her inquisitive 9-year old daughter on a European journey, describing the history of each location as the camera shows images, like post cards, capturing their travels passing through Marseille, France, where the Greeks once spread their civilization in ancient times, with a brief history discussion with a local fisherman, visiting the ancient ruins of Pompeii, Italy, the Acropolis and Parthenon in Greece, with a brief history discussion with a Greek Orthodox priest, then sailing on a cruise ship through the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, visiting Istanbul and the Persian Gulf, heading for Bombay, India, where they plan to meet with her husband. The captain of the cruise ship is an American, John Malkovich, who dines each night with 3 divas who curiously discuss their own country’s history, language, and cultural perspectives. They include Catherine Deneuve, a French business entrepreneur, Stefania Sandrelli, a retired Italian fashion model, and Irene Pappas, a professional singer, who actually sings a song late in the film about the passage of time where the wind blows the orange blossoms away. Along the way, French, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, and English are all spoken, sometimes at the same table, yet they all find a way to understand one another. The dialogue feels forced, feeling very much like a series of lectures, especially the inclusion of John Malkovich, who, representing America, purposefully seems to be the cultural lightweight here, despite his attempt at gracious manner. An attempt at a surprise ending wasn’t much of a surprise at all, but fit right into my expectations, even with a certain amount of pretense. Not nearly as provocative or as complex as Godard’s NOTRE MUSIC, which continuously adds an artistic dimension that is ignored here, still, this film simply and quite interestingly tells the tale of history and questions the effect of religious bigotry in world civilization.

Time Out review

Nonagenarian Portuguese auteur Oliveira's eccentric fable begins like a low key travelogue. A beautiful academic (Silveira) is taking her young daughter on a Grand Tour through Europe and the Near East, visiting the Acropolis, the Sphinx, Istanbul and various other cultural hotspots. Only gradually does it become apparent that the film is Oliveira's response to the events of 9/11. We listen as the academic sits at table with the sleek and cultured cruise ship captain (another purring performance from Malkovich) and discusses art, language, culture and history with three ever present female guests (Deneuve, Papas and Sandrelli). Then, we learn that there are terrorist bombs aboard and Oliveira's rambling, reflective essay lurches uncomfortably into thriller mode. The extraordinary final shot, at once tragic and absurd, shows that even in his 90s, Oliveira still knows how to wrong foot an audience.

City Pages [Mark Peranson] (link lost)

A coy, verbose meditation on history, civilization, and, indeed, the fate of humanity, this postmillennial headscratcher from the great Portuguese nonagenarian Manoel de Oliveira (I'm Going Home) is divided neatly in two, symbolizing past and present, young and old. The first part finds a university professor (Leonor Silveira) and her young daughter on a pleasure cruise from Lisbon to India, exploring the great relics of antiquity--including Vesuvius, the Acropolis, and the Pyramids--en route. The mother imparts a sense of history to her inquisitive tyke, and Oliveira does the same for his audience. Meanwhile, three grand dames (Catherine Deneuve, Irene Pappas, and Stefania Sandrelli--all Oliveira regulars, all loosely playing themselves) board the ship and are greeted by Capt. John Malkovich, who invites them to dine at his table for Part Two: a long, multilingual conversation about aging, celebrity, and, yes, civilization. Some viewers may conclude that Oliveira has lost his marbles, and they may be right. Me, I still can't decide what to make of this odd, personal film, definitely Oliveira's response to 9/11 (and probably his Titanic, too), but I take my indecision to mean that there's still some life left in the old coot.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]

The magnificently civilized A Talking Picture more than keeps the promise of its title, proceeding via a stream of cultivated discussion of history, largely through the person of an elegant history professor from Lisbon University who is taking her seven-year-old daughter on a cruise through the magical ports of call that established civilization on the Mediterranean. Like Vasco da Gama, they are two Portuguese seafarers, and with the same destination of India, to meet her husband, an airline pilot. Both teacher and mother, answering the child’s questions she becomes the vehicle for Portuguese auteur Manoel De Oliveira to reconsider first principles: What does civilization mean? What’s a myth? Why are people so wicked? What do we mean by “nature”? What’s a mosque? From the Acropolis to the pyramids at Giza to a market in Aden, the golden sunlight illuminates the discussion, while the director notes mysterious correspondences: a dog pulled on a leash in Marseilles is mirrored by a similar figure in a mosaic in Pompeii. It wouldn’t be a De Oliveira movie without performance elements, so a majestic shot introduces the Greek theater where Antigone and Medea first played, and later Irene Papas performs a folk song for the passengers aboard ship. At the captain’s table, John Malkovich speaks in English, Catherine Deneuve in French, Stefania Sandrelli in Italian, and Irene Papas in Greek, with the conceit being that they all understand each other (and even remark on the fact). Love, women, politics, and language are the topics, presided over by Malkovich, who is surely the most effete sea-captain known to cinema. Those seeking an eventful narrative must wait for the final ten minutes, where the writer-director deviously changes course and convulses expectations, casting an entirely new context for the hundred minutes that have gone before, but only a 94-year-old director could get away with ending on such a supremely audacious note.

Senses of Cinema (Yaniv Eyny and A. Zubatov) review September 2004

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

Village Voice (Dennis Lim) review

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) review

Reverse Shot review Nicolas Rapold

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]

The Onion A.V. Club review Noel Murray

The New York Sun (Nathan Lee) review

PopMatters (Lester Pimentel) review

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

MovieFreak.com (Howard Schumann) review [A-] also seen here: Talking Pictures (UK) review

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]

Boxoffice Magazine review Tim Cogshell

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [1/5]

Variety (Deborah Young) review

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

San Francisco Chronicle [Walter Addiego]

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

MAGIC MIRROR (Espelho Mágico)

Portugal (137 mi) 2005

Dec Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack (December 2005)

Certainly at this point in Manoel de Oliveira's career, most cinephiles have made up their minds: either you like him or you don't. Granted, his late-career burst of creative energy (a new feature every year) has included some odd lurches into near-accessibility (I'm Going Home) and a controversial travelogue-cum-Euro-comedy (A Talking Picture) whose apparent swipe at Islamo-fascism raised certain hackles in the critical community. But by and large there has been a consistency of quality and style in Oliveira's work since the 1980s, most of his films from this period engaging in variations on a single formal problem: the disparity between the filmic and the literary. Oliveira's exploration of this problem hasn't been quite as severe as that of Straub and Huillet, although there are points of convergence, most notably a rigid, often immobile visual field and a flat, declamatory performance style, both of which emphasize the impossibility of a smooth transition from text to moving image. Like Straub and Huillet, whose last film to seriously make the North American festival rounds was 1999's Sicilia!, over time Oliveira has evolved into a filmmaker so stark in execution, and so peculiarly European in his concerns that it's much easier at this point for programmers (forget distributors) to ignore him altogether. Actually, the same could be said of Raul Ruiz, whose late-90s splash of recognition has all but evaporated. Magic Mirror is not an entirely successful film, and in many respects it is a frustrating and almost anachronistic effort that recalls certain tendencies in both Ruiz and Straub / Huillet. Oliveira's film is an adaptation of a novel, The Soul of the Rich, by Augustina Bessa-Luis. The sprawling yet static narrative centers around Alfreda (Oliveira stalwart Leonor Silveira), a wealthy woman who believes that contrary to conventional church doctrine, the Virgin Mary was born to a rich family. She keeps renegade theologians on call and preoccupies herself by mentally preparing for a spiritual visitation by Mary herself, on the assumption that Our Lady would naturally want to speak to someone of equally noble birth. The film's other protagonist, Luciano (Ricardo Trepa), takes a position with Alfreda upon his release from prison. He tries to engineer a fake Virgin Mary sighting for his increasingly deluded boss, although this subterfuge never really comes to fruition. Around these major poles orbit endless cascades of talk, centering on the Church, the role of the wealthy in society, the archetypal nature of the sexes, and the frequent joylessness of existence. Magic Mirror resembles mid-period Ruiz films such as On Top of the Whale and Life is a Dream, with their determinedly banal mise-en-scène, beige-matte color scheme, and assertive foregrounding of intricate spoken text. Unlike even Oliveira's most uncompromising recent films, such as The Letter or The Uncertainty Principle (which shares with Magic Mirror a character called Blue Bull), Magic Mirror is unleavened by even the driest sense of humor. Be advised, there are no taciturn rock stars, discotheque fires or goofy Malkovich cameos here. In fact, there's nothing about Magic Mirror that is "entertaining," by any conventional meaning of the term. And yet as I hung with it, it eventually won me over with its commitment to pure philosophical abstraction. Even late Godard will offer up seductive cinematography or dazzling montage sequences, but Oliveira reduces the visual field to blank signifiers of decadent aristocratic accumulation, garish fountain statues and gaudy mausoleums. The social critique is clear -- the world no longer needs this ineffectual gentry, or its self-serving claim to have God in its back pocket -- but even more than this, Oliveira's stultifying narrative format serves to embed these people in the screen like frescoes, putting them into an indeterminate historical past until some random clue reveals the fact that no, Magic Mirror is a portrait of the present, a segment of society that can conveniently opt out of time's motility. Magic Mirror really is like watching paint dry, as the saying goes, but its ineluctable weirdness compels and rewards attention to the phenomenon. Over time, the cracks in the wall start materializing, and that seems to be the point.

The Village Voice [Nathan Lee]

One way of looking at Magic Mirror, a baffling opacity from Manoel de Oliveira, is easy enough. Every film is a magic mirror. Watching them, we regard ourselves, and what we find there depends on an infinite array of memories, capacities, tastes, and desires. (That a work of art is completed by its audience is a cliché insufficiently acknowledged when it comes to cinema, a medium highly involved with audience identification and conventional notions of authorship.) Flung through space, reflected into the eyes of the audience, a movie is released from the mind of its creator to be absorbed, and transformed, by that of its co-creator, the viewer. The nature of that absorption can be hazarded by the filmmaker, theorized by the academic, commented on by the critic, but the process is private, subjective, and ultimately beyond analysis.

Magic Mirror is not oblivious to these things. Indeed, the impression given by de Oliveira's cinema is of an intelligence charged to an almost intolerable degree with attention to fundamental principles of art, spectatorship, civilization, you name it—his films are omnivorously ontological. Born in 1908, de Oliveira is one of the last living artists to bestride the entire 20th century. Prolific into the 21st, his recent movies have contemplated this fact. He has made a Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997), reflected on Word and Utopia (2000), discoursed on The Uncertainty Principle (2002), and announced that I'm Going Home (2001). Directed by a man who remembers the silent era, A Talking Picture (2003) contemplated the voyage of Western culture toward a rendezvous with disaster. That de Oliveira conceived his apocalypse onboard a cruise ship piloted by John Malkovich speaks to the puckish swing of his philosophizing.

Unlike Jean-Luc Godard (born in 1930), who has long equated his own mortality with the lifespan of cinema, de Oliveira has a sense of humor about his role in the Long Goodbye of the Seventh Art. Belle Toujours, an impish sequel to Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour opening next month, is the work of a man whose confidence in his own powers is rivaled only by his capacity for self-amusement. It's natural that the Portuguese master should now engage with his Spanish colleague, having achieved a late style equally (and ineffably) graced with supernal poise and high metaphysical humor.

Summarizing the plot of Magic Mirror is about as useful as diagramming the narrative of a Rilke poem, but here goes: Released from prison, handsome Luciano (Ricardo Trêpa) goes to work at the palatial country estate of Alfreda (Leonor Silveira), a chilly aristocrat obsessed by a desire to meet the Virgin Mary. While her husband noodles about in the music parlor, Alfreda discourses on religious topics with an assortment of male callers, including a scholar played by Michel Piccoli. Highlights: Was Mary rich or poor? Did Jesus wear socks with his sandals? Has anyone ever thought about the souls of the wealthy?

Enter the piano tuner and quasi-reformed forger Filipe (Luis Miguel Cintra) who, for reasons not entirely obvious, conspires with Luciano to hire a Mary doppelganger and arrange a visitation with Alfreda. Meanwhile, a mysterious Spanish nun (Marisa Paredes) materializes in the garden in order to add several thousand recondite words to the unabashedly literate, if semi-comprehensible script.

Academic theologians with a taste for obdurate Brechtian aesthetics, say hello to your new favorite film! Civilians, even those versed in Oliveira at his most extreme, may find their patience pushed to the limit. Thick with mirrors and breaches of the fourth wall, Magic Mirror is avidly aware of being watched, even as it rejects every avenue of accessibility. Based on a novel by Augustina Bessa- Luís, a frequent de Oliveira collaborator, the film is perversely textual, an endlessly talking picture seemingly addressed to no one but itself.

Were it not for de Oliveira's visual elegance, contemplating this Mirror could, Medusa-like, turn your brain to stone. He has the inexplicable ability to make an endless, immobile medium-shot bristle with dynamism, and can, when he chooses, marshal spine-tingling montage. For the most part, however, word takes precedent over image—the great exception being an astonishing detour, deep into the film's second hour, to Venice and Jerusalem. Spied from a recumbent point of view, summoned in the reflection of a gilt-edged mirror, these ecstatic shards of memory—frescoes, canals, twists in a labyrinth—suggest the immense reserve of pictorial prowess de Oliveira has kept under wraps. Their surpassing beauty arrives like a shock of recognition.

The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) review

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Variety.com [Deborah Young]

The New York Times (Matt Zoller Seitz) review

BELLE TOUJOURS C 76

Portugal France (68 mi) 2006

Get thee to a nunnery

A short and beautiful film up to a point, but that is the crucial point in the film. The 97-year old director dedicated the film to Luis Buñuel and his scriptwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière, the creators of the 1967 film BELLE DE JOUR starring Catherine Deneuve as Séverine, a woman who explores her bizarre sexual fantasies by secretly becoming a high-class call girl by day in order to save her marriage, where at home she remains faithfully chaste. Michel Piccoli reprises his role as her husband’s friend who awkwardly becomes one of her customers, but Deneuve turned down the role, which was instead given to French actress Bulle Ogier, who starred in the 1972 Buñuel film, THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE. This switch turns out to be crucial, as Ogier is not Séverine.

Opening with an entire final movement from Dvorak’s 8^th Symphony, Piccoli is beside himself sitting in the audience after he spots Séverine after the passage of nearly 40 years. When he just misses her at a local bar in Paris, he enters and strikes up a conversation with the young bartender, revealing the relevant backdrop of the original film, while two ogling prostitutes sit in the corner. His search has several near misses, as it’s clear she wants nothing to do with the man, but they eventually agree to meet for a late night dinner, just the two of them in a private room, served in formalized aristocratic elegance, which reveals some amazing lighting, both in the darkened interior of the earlier bar and in the dimly lit and eventual candle lit interior of this room, all beautifully shot by Sabine Lancelin. The meal is served with champagne and 3 courses in real time, beautifully ritualized to the rhythm of the servers who move in and out of the picture with an elegant restraint.

When the meal is over and the servers leave the room, turning off the lights, allowing them a conversation in candlelight, the entire film loses steam. All energy is just sucked out of the film. Their conversation is void of any hint of interest, completely lacking the brilliance and acerbic wit of the original film. When their conversation is over, and there is a lame attempt at surrealism, it is more pathetic than interesting. People are fascinated that a man of this age can continue cranking out the films, but calling this a sequel to the original, dedicating this project to Buñuel, is sure to draw unflattering comparisons.

2006 New York Film Festival Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion (excerpt)

The New York Film Festival once seemed highly loyal to 98-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, but they’ve passed on most of his recent work. Fortunately, they’re back on board for “Belle Toujours,” one of his best films. It’s a highly unusual sequel to Luis Bunuel’s 1967 “Belle de Jour,” in which Catherine Devenue played Severine, a bored housewife who explores her sexual fantasies by working in a brothel. Michel Piccoli reprises his part from “Belle de Jour,” while Bulle Ogier replaces Deneuve as Severine. On the surface, Bunuel and Oliveira, who has an affinity for distanced, Brechtian literary adaptations, don’t have much in common, but the latter’s homage is touching.

Here, Oliveira is less concerned with sexual or narrative experimentation than Bunuel. Instead, “Belle Toujours” is a calm but powerful reflection on aging, a theme Oliveira has frequently—and understandably—touched on. The director’s avoidance of camera movement creates a stately feel, enhanced by the lighting and cinematography. “Belle Toujours” is a miniature whose minimalism—only three major characters and a few settings—sometimes feels theatrical. The film’s emotional charge peaks in the sublime next-to-last shot, in which Oliveira turns a scene of waiters clearing a table into an image resonant far beyond its literal content. It’s as powerful a metaphor for loss as I’ve ever seen.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Manoel de Oliveira is someone Luis Buñuel actively rebelled against: an aesthete. Belle Toujours, a sequel of sorts to Belle de Jour, plays out as a bad bar joke. Literally. What do you get when a man walks into a bar and deconstructs a Buñuel picture for half an hour? The answer is not a whole lot. The genius of Buñuel's 39-year-old masterpiece—like that of David Lynch's modern renovation, Mulholland Drive—is how the walls separating its conscious and unconscious dimensions are completely dissolved. De Oliveira strips the original film of its power by cementing its spongy mysteries with banal annotation. Michel Piccoli, one of the brightest stars in Buñuel's complex milky way of philosophical wonders, reprises the role of Henri Husson, who spots Séverine Serizy (Bulle Ogier) at a symphony (Lynch's Bondar might say, "Si hay banda!"), loses her in a crowd, and spends much of the film trying to catch her—perhaps to taunt her with broken glass and play with her as he once did under a table. By casting Ogier, one of the middle-class dopes from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in the role originated by Catherine Deneuve, and keeping her character out of Husson's hair for so long, de Olivera rekindles a familiar Buñuelian theme: woman as obscure object of desire. But Husson, after deconstructing Belle de Jour and Buñuel's directorial mantra for a barkeep, will eventually catch her, at which point Séverine reveals, during a suspenseful candlelit dinner, that the past is long gone and her sexuality is no longer "unbalanced." Buñuel, the most acerbic humanist the movies have ever seen, would have been disappointed to see Belle de Jour stripped of its stunning ambiguities and Séverine judging herself so: By assuming that the 1967 film's supposed perversities in fact took place in the real world, de Oliviera doesn't have to pose moral arguments in relation to what Raymond Durgnat described as the "inner world of desires and feelings" of its characters. Not that de Oliviera's film should behave like Buñuel's, but why does growing old have to mean becoming boring?

Belle toujours Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Masters on Autopilot (Sort of) #3: A trifle, but an intellectually reaching one nevertheless, Belle toujours is my least favorite Oliveira film since Party, but it does have the virtue of being short. Oliveira's stylistic stiffness, especially with respect to actors and line delivery, adds some interest value to Belle, Oliveira's tribute to Buñuel and Carriere, partly because their approaches to cinema are so divergent as to barely make sense in relation to one another. The passkey to understanding Belle toujours is perversity, a concept Oliveira has Michel Piccoli's character discuss ad infinitum, to awkward effect but not without a certain conceptual rigor. Piccoli's character Henri regales a chummy young bartender of tales of the limitless masochism of Belle, a woman driven to thwart her relationship with the man she genuinely loved. Henri makes no attempt to disguise his relish at recounting Belle's Buñuelian exploits, displaying himself as a dirty old man with his second-hand memories, indulging a fetish for narrativizing the salacious past. Meanwhile, Oliveira himself is unable to convince Catherine Deneuve to reprise her role and yet persists in completing the project anyway, substituting Bulle Ogier as though the women are interchangeable. This points to a different level of male perversity, the free exchange of women as commodities (and the main reason, psychoanalytically speaking, that prostitution carries such erotic force for its consumers). As with Buñuel's original, Oliveira demonstrates that male sexual deviance so saturates our social world, setting its rules without having to interrogate them as such. So MdO has basically made a perverse work of art about the perversity of narrative desire, in the erotic sphere, certainly, but in the realm of cinema as well. (This makes Belle toujours of a piece with Oliveira's larger project of working with language and performance in an almost sculptural manner. We treat narrativity in the cinema as if it were the most natural thing in the world, whereas for years Oliveira's primary aesthetic charge has been making it deeply strange.) This is, like so many other Oliveira films, "a talking picture," but if talking here is substitute sex, Piccoli and eventually Ogier move in circles to no climactic aim. If the film has any notable flaw, it's that it spells out its themes so precisely and overtly that there's little left for the film (or the viewer) to do. Unless we "like to watch." [ADDENDUM: I cannot for the life of me understand why I initially gave this picture a 6, other than perhaps kneejerk auteur brownie-points (my own brand of perversity, I suppose). My review, as well as my memories of the picture itself, all point to a 5/10 rating. So at the risk of looking kind of flaky, I must correct myself. Oh, and I'd added in all the tilda-N's. Good job, me.]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay Carr

Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira, who will turn 100 in December 2008, is amazing not only for his longevity, but for the undiminished vitality of his art and craft. Far from slowing down, he has accelerated his output. The spare, elegant, minimalist style he has arrived at late in life has resulted in six films (two in pre-production) since Belle toujours (1998). But that film illustrates as well as any the unique mix of felicities he’s dispensing these days with such virtuosic ease. Having lived through, and with, almost all of cinema, it’s not surprising that he should with such offhand naturalness not only reference its past masters, but fall so smoothly into step beside them. In this case, he not only extends the scandal-provoking Belle de jour (1967) of Luis Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carriere, making his add-on film seem an airy postscript whipped up by a pastry chef, but turns it as well into an unforced meditation on age and the impossibility of reconciling past and present before bringing all to a close with a wistful smile and a seraphic shrug.

The punning title of Belle Toujours is a tipoff to de Oliverira’s mindset here. Like the original, his film is mischievous and something of a tease. It begins in a Parisian concert hall, when Michel Piccoli’s Henri Husson, the sybarite of the original, is easing into the enjoyment of the coda of Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony at a concert when he notices in the audience a few rows ahead of him the Belle of all those years ago – Catherine Deneuve then, Bulle Ogier now). His face, puffy with age, is nonetheless responsive and sentient. Hers, stylish, framed by a blond perm, is a mask. At concert’s end, he tries to approach her. She spots him, hurries out, steps into a waiting limo, and flees, leaving him on the curb.

Life has evidently left him well-fixed, to judge by his well-tailored conventional clothing, and the fact that we never see him at any kind of work. He clearly is a man who knows his way around, as we see by the way he enters a bar he saw Belle later leave, and pumps the barman (a knowing, yet obliging Ricardo Trepa) for info. Clearly, he means to stalk her, but always in the most well-mannered haute bourgeois way (yes, we’re thinking Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie here – one of many sly references to Bunuel and his themes). Not that de Oliveira doesn’t establish a tone all his own. His views of Paris, mostly at night, and his reiterations of the autumnal strains of the romantic Dvorak symphony, lay the visual and aural groundwork for a certain melancholy.

Almost comically, his efforts to track the elusive Severine Serizy, known as Belle when she would leave her wheelchair-bound husband all those years ago for sex as a part-time prostitute, become delicately bumptious after he tracks her to the hotel where she lives. He’s eager to reopen their relationship (he was the husband’s best friend, with whom she betrayed the husband she nevertheless loved in her perverted way). Piccoli’s Husson spends a certain amount of time trying to align the past and a possible present. He half-explains, half-confesses to the patient barman, while ignoring the pointed remarks of two streetwalkers who are regulars in the bar, his reawakened obsession. To his surprise, the young barman is an insightful confessor.

Finally, he runs into Severine on a street, stops her, and undergoes what clearly is a verbal and sometimes physical tug of war. Here, de Oliveira draws back to show us their convergence in a medium long shot. We don’t hear what they say. What we learn is that he has played his only card, and that it works. He will tell her what he whispered into her husband’s ear before he died – she has wondered and agonized over it for decades – if she will agree to an intimate dinner with him. She can’t resist.

And so she appears for a candlelight dinner in a private room, attended by three waiters, bearing a few surprises for him. Essentially, they are updates. The Belle he knew then has no connection with the life she has led ever since, she informs him. The fire no longer burns within her, she states. The sexuality she refers to as unbalanced and twisted has died down, she adds. So eager is she to distance herself from her former identity that she’s thinking of entering a convent, she concludes. There is further talk of betrayal, masochism, sadism, and a bit of the latter from Husson, whose silken manner becomes blurred by what he freely admits is alcoholism. He’ll tell Severine what he said to her late husband as promised, he insists. But not before toying with her first.

That they are not of one mind is made clear when he kisses her hand, saying “Belle toujours, ma cherie,” only to have her reply, “I was never your darling.” Far from being any sort of sexual conqueror (an idea mocked by an earlier shot of a gilded statue of Joan of Arc riding off to battle), Husson was at the time of their liaison, he learns, merely an instrument of her perversion -- a perversion, she insists, that was buried with her husband. The power game in which he thought he had the upper hand doesn’t quite go the way he had imagined. Now, as then, he admits, women remain sexual enigmas to him. The new Belle, with her rueful clarity, is rendered more sympathetically by Ogier than the younger Belle was by Deneuve. Ogier’s face communicates a vulnerability and self-awareness not available to the more closed-off visage of Deneuve’s younger Belle.

It’s not surprising that such retrospective weighing of various pieces of the past and such bemused reflections on memory should figure in the then 98-year-old de Oliveira’s film. What’s not at all to be taken for granted are the graceful touch he brings to the juggling of them and the twinkling humor epitomized in his final Bunuel homage as he surrealistically has a rooster (cock, if you will) strut in its jerky barnyard way down the corridor of the slightly shabby edifice to which Husson invites Belle. Belle Toujours isn’t about sexual combat. It’s meditation as meringue.

The Enigma of What Endures in Manoel de Oliveira's Belle toujours ... Nathaniel Drake Carlson from Cineaste, Summer 2008

Manoel de Oliveira’s 2006 film Belle toujours can be said to be many things, from a sequel to Luis Buñuel’s classic Belle de jour, to an homage from one artist to another, to a self contained consideration of Oliveira’s own signature ideas. But perhaps this film’s most salient point of distinction is its emphasis on the ultimate inadequacy of adherence to only one particular point of view or vision of truth no matter how thoroughly determined; this is what establishes Belle toujours as its own separate entity and gives weight to its overriding theme of an encompassing sense of loss. This sustained state of loss is contrasted with the prospect of an equally enduring and potentially eternal principle of ever renewing self-conceptualization represented by the character of Séverine (Bulle Ogier).

Belle toujours picks up the events of Belle de jour almost four decades later. The new work is all about those events as they continue to be obsessively processed by Husson (Michel Piccoli), one of the primary characters of Buñuel’s film, also played there by Piccoli. Husson is, in fact, the principal character of Oliveira’s film, and Séverine, who was the dominant figure in the original, is subordinated to his relentless scrutiny. Husson, who had knowledge of Séverine’s indiscretions in Buñuel’s film, catches sight of her at a concert recital. His interest in her is rekindled, and he stalks her, eventually inducing her to agree to meet with him. He taunts her with his secret knowledge, specifically with the possibility that he will at last disclose what he told her husband. She is intimidated by this form of manipulation; and, as a result, Husson enjoys a brief, ephemeral power over a woman he could never have had in the natural course of events.

What stands out most on a first pass is the film’s brevity, its succinct and purposeful character. As viewers familiar with Oliveira’s oeuvre know, though his films are technically precise, they are by no means uniform in length. The duration of his narratives vary widely and appropriately, determined by their individual internal logics. In Belle toujours, stylistically, Oliveira has made what is arguably his most approachable feature since I’m Going Home. Similarly, this film is haunted by an acute awareness of mortality and an insulated retrospective vision. Knowledge of the Buñuel forerunner clearly helps one grasp Oliveira’s project, but it isn’t essential. The precision of Belle toujours can’t be overstated; Oliveira goes in, gets the job done, and gets out. The work is very complete and cohesive, yet demanding of further engagement and closer scrutiny.

As an “homage” to Buñuel, Belle toujours functions in an interesting fashion. It certainly does not read as any kind of attempt at a sequel per se. Rather, it acts as an opportunity for one artist, with his own unique sensibility, to reflect on another who has been a formative influence. Still, and despite plenty of Buñuelian allusions, there is no effort made to adapt the style of the one to fit the other and no concern that the Oliveira’s film may feel like only an appendage to the earlier, self-contained great work. In this regard, the infamous rooster scene in Belle toujours comes across as almost perfunctory, a nod of recognition to the origins of an attitude. Oliveira’s own attitude (and his films are always about the imposition of attitude) is never absent even if it remains often, and typically, hard to pin down. However, the fact that his relationship to the earlier film is in a certain sense paralleled by the clearly incomplete perspective of the new film’s central character cannot help but act as an acknowledgment of ironic limitation. For Oliveira is conceding that his own reflection on the contents and thematics of the first film are but one possible reflection of many. If his view is seen as a settled statement it would be no less systematically prescribed and delimited than Husson’s; the significant difference is in the ability to recognize it as such. This recognition prevents it from any absolutist pretension.

The occasions for a kind of perversity to surface in Belle toujours are abundant in terms of both form and content. We observe Husson as he finds Séverine in a crowd and loses her. It’s evident that she is trying to avoid Husson’s numerous unsuccessful attempts at confrontation. There is a willful perversity to be sure in Oliveira’s staging of the first actual conversation between the two, composed in long shot, the dialog inaudible. Later, and in another explicit moment of deference to Buñuel, Husson presents Séverine with a replica of the buzzing box from the original film. She turns it away claiming to have no interest anymore in such cryptic provocations and we, of course, are not even afforded a glimpse of its contents.

Nevertheless, Oliveira’s most perverse and characteristic stylistic decision is his presentation of the climactic dinner sequence, which is designed in a very forthright way to accommodate the confrontation we’ve been waiting to see. It is depicted in minute detail; we watch Husson and Séverine go through drinks and several courses before saying more than a few words to one another. This particular staging has precedent in Oliveira’s familiar and rhythmic use of static framed imagery as transitional or bridging material, a device which is often mistakenly singled out for ridicule—as with, for instance, the shots of the ship’s prow cutting through the water in A Talking Picture. Many took these images to be evidence of a desiccated imagination instead of perceiving in their perpetual return a comment on the inexorable forward motion of an aggressively insidious and unreflective progress. In other words, Oliveira’s compositions imply a function or purpose beyond what is depicted and yet the depiction itself can be seen as a perverse act, an inexcusable secession to the supposedly mundane.

But the dinner sequence in all its detail is crucial to an understanding of what Oliveira is up to in Belle toujours. It establishes the confines of the room and the enactment of this very civilized dining ritual as the ultimate context for these characters’ attitudes. It has been referred to as almost equivalent to a religious rite and this is not far off. Certainly, the whole sequence depends for much of its effect on Oliveira’s understanding of the inherent theatrical dimension of lived space, the way it can and almost always does align itself with the specifics of an imposed consciousness or imaginative vision inherent in the human condition. The final, literal dismantling of this space is, of course, apt.

The dismantling of space has its esthetic parallels to the opening scenes of the film. Oliveira begins Belle toujours with a long take of a Dvorak symphony performance, another signifier of high culture. It is here that Husson catches his first glimpse of Séverine. Afterwards, we observe the patrons filing out and the methodical closing procedures in which the music hall, once vibrant with energy, is slowly shuttered and darkened. Husson is thrust into isolation, cut loose from socially specific orientation, and as he drifts down the city streets the electric lights above him also begin to dim and go out. In the later, final sequence, Husson and Séverine’s ritualistic dinner also eventually dissolves into darkness as the candles flicker and die, appropriately complementing the tone of their retrospective conversation. Husson and Séverine are finally reduced to almost indiscernible silhouettes against the light from the expansive background window. In close-up they are isolated in virtual darkness, a haunting separation from the room’s many emblems of high culture and refined taste, which had served to sustain and ground what communication they could have.

Structurally, Belle toujours is almost evenly divided between the “search” and the “resolution.” The first thirty-five minutes of its sixty-five minute running time details Husson’s attempts to track down and confront Séverine. His efforts are rhythmically broken up by a series of extended visits he makes to a bar from which he saw Séverine emerge. Static, though panoramic, vista shots of Paris are also intercut throughout and act almost as chapter breaks; these shots are scored by snippets of Dvorak, the only time other than the opening performance when we hear any music. The music enhances the artifice of the seemingly naturalistic dramatic sequences and emphasizes their presentational qualities. We recognize with clarity how actors are positioned and move within the frame to create highly precise images. Husson, for instance, is seen consistently in a mirror behind the bar, a compositional decision which highlights the enforced division of his conscious self during his confessions to the bartender.

Perversity is a continuous theme within the artificial context of the film. The very word is used by both Husson and Séverine but with radically different emphases. Once again, attitude is at the heart of Oliveira’s film. Husson uses the word to describe Séverine’s proclivities as he knew them; he uses it to describe a kind of licentiousness by which he is secretly enthralled. Its appeal is the forbidden. Ultimately he wants to justify that appeal to himself by using the term freely, rendering his desire normative. This is why the final confrontation with Séverine is surely so unsatisfying for him. She regrets her “ill-spent past” and even speaks of retiring to a convent. But when she speaks of her “perverse” desires she uses the term to denote a deviation from a recognized or established norm, even if she is not necessarily voicing a moral judgment. Séverine’s use of the term “wicked” seems to be more of an acknowledgment of social designation than evidence of any moral condemnation. Her denial of feeling guilty for her past actions (significantly she simply says they “no longer interest” her) is significant as it indicates a distinct misunderstanding between the two characters. Husson misses this point when he declares that they are similar as he is now an alcoholic, an addictive behavior that functions as his “convent.”

Husson’s crucial lack of insight is also highlighted during his several dialogs with the barman (Ricardo Trêpa), whose variations on the same point time and again seem not to register upon Husson at all. The barman mentions that, “[a] lot of customers feel the need to confess. And they only do it with a stranger. With somebody who seems disinterested in what he’s hearing.” Later he adds that “they feel a need to unburden themselves. But never to someone they know, and even less to a friend. They confess... to someone neutral like me who doesn’t know them or won’t see them again. That way, they’re sure their confessions will die there.” This anonymity parallels Severine’s brothel experience of long ago, which shielded her from the threat of authentic or emotive intimacy, which she now acknowledges. But Husson strenuously denies his position as a participant in perversity and insists on defining himself as an impartial third person observer, while all the time he is seeking, under this cover, to manipulate the known limits of his described universe. He fails to recognize that this kind of behavior is partially responsible for much of his present alienation. Beyond that, his aggressive and self-imposed ignorance, perhaps, also is meant to indicate why his “confessional” must take the form it does. It is precisely because Husson’s dismay is not a genuinely moral one that it cannot by rights be construed as religious guilt. His disillusionment is too obscured by denial and truncated vision to ever be subject to such codified moral instruction; it lacks the necessary self-awareness for that.

The symbolic female is a consistent presence throughout this film, appearing in forms as diverse as mannequin heads in a store window, prostitutes at the bar, an image in a tapestry or within a painting, and even the figure of a bronze Joan of Arc (a personality who also turns up to significant effect in Oliveira’s The Uncertainty Principle). These appearances illustrate Husson’s method of seeing and understanding women. Though there is a seemingly broad spectrum represented, what is important is that these representatives are all so rigorously positioned. They exist either behind glass or within the frame of the painting. The prostitutes, for their part, are pressed into unyielding, conceptually recognizable social roles, and even Joan of Arc is presented as though on display, set solidly within a space of admiration and earned respect. Husson states, “(t)o me, women were always Nature’s greatest enigma,” and yet, by responding to these specific variations in female presence, safely rendered and contained as they are, Husson can maintain a position of implicit authority, of unchallengeable interpretive accuracy.

The prostitutes are paired to highlight an age difference, which reads superficially as a comment on the enduring nature of their profession, as well as yet another link to the milieu of the previous film. At one point, the younger prostitute (Leonor Baldaque) says to her companion (Júlia Buisel), “They say you’re something special in bed. The problem is getting them there,” to which the older woman responds, “But you’ve always helped me to get them interested.” These remarks not only acknowledge the reality of an economic relationship between the two women but also suggest a way in which this reflects on the central narrative. The barman speaks of them as “poor souls” but also “angels” who “don’t delude anybody” and “do business with their bodies.” The implication is that feminine sexuality is a potentially wild and chaotic thing that can risk escaping the enforcement of designation. The prostitutes are, in a sense then, congratulated for their candid and forthright lifestyle, but this is partially because the persistence of this lifestyle maintains orientation within a balanced social order. As Agustina Bessa-Luis says during her cameo in Oliveira’s Porto da Minha Infância, “The geisha is a misdemeanor within democracy, but without misdemeanors there can be no culture.” It’s no slight detail that Séverine later refers to her own youthful attitude as “imbalanced.” Her comment does not resonate as a moral judgment, but simply a recognition of what is; and, furthermore, an indicator that she will not fit easily within the rigors of such a social order, especially one motivated by the superficial transgressions provided by a shallow set of moral assumptions.
The prostitutes also represent the flux of definable beauty that has long held a fascination for Oliveira. The pragmatics they ground their friendship in is a valuable part of a system in which the primary quality of beauty is its function as an inducement. The beauty that diminishes then is that which is only an inducement.

The final sequence itself functions as a metacommentary on this established theme. The space Husson has prepared is so ornate and richly luxurious as to be almost oppressive or claustrophobic, so full of paintings, tapestries, carpeting, cabinets, and screens that its ornamentation is virtually inescapable. The only release is the window between Husson and Séverine, heavy red curtains framing it on either side. The window allows the two characters to gaze out over Paris and to regard it as belle toujours, a cultural inheritance which will endure beyond the transience of their particular relationship to it. In this way, the city itself serves as Oliveira’s ultimate model exemplar; the embodiment or definition of an eternal principle.

Husson makes a practice of imposing his own story upon all the narrative elements of Séverine’s. He relentlessly reads her history as an adjunct to his own, as some perfectly realized embodiment of all his prejudices. Even when he finally engages in a prolonged dialog with her, a gulf of separation remains between them, perpetuated by Husson’s inability to imagine an alternative vision that could be just as legitimate as his own. The title itself is Oliveira’s ironic acknowledgement of this nuanced distinction; the idea that the notion of beauty is infinitely malleable and applicable as perspective warrants. The casting of Bulle Ogier in the role made famous by Catherine Deneuve provides another example of how beauty affects us. That Ogier is not the original Severine is emphasized by the glaringly artificial blonde wig she wears. Surface signifiers, then, will fade or alter unavoidably while the internal aspects of character and its refinements can endure and develop or be neglected and remain unrecognized. Yet it is very much in the notion of a fixed, static series of reference points that Husson finds his comfort and reassurance.
Michel Piccoli is superb throughout and so much relies on his performance. He projects a consistent imbalance of his own, a self-effacing quality marbled with a very real desperation. He seeks a justification for his own perceptions, a way to convince himself of the inevitability of where he has ended up in life. He raises himself in his own estimation by intruding himself in Severine’s story, telling the young bartender that he “represented the conscience she didn’t have” and happily agrees with the bartender when he suggests that Husson was “just an instrument to her.” The continuity of civilization as embodied by Husson appears to rely upon well-deployed hypocrisies.

Hypocrisy is also evident as Husson details Séverine’s “wicked” past, referring in passing to the brothel of the first film. The bartender then remarks that “some customers tell me that in their youth there were a lot of these houses. They say things have changed a lot since then. They even complain about the mentality of people these days. That the values of their day have been overthrown.” This irony is casually stated, but the implication is immense; for Husson’s imagined power over Séverine comes from an assumed moral context, the assumed authority of a particular circumscribed moral order which he is only interested in insofar as it can bestow him with that power of authority. That she can transcend it, positioning her own renunciation in a broader context, is the key to her freedom. Husson’s inability to understand this is the definition of his damnation.

Critique. Belle toujours by Manoel de Oliveira Hervé Aubron from Cahiers du Cinéma

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [1/5]

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

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

PopMatters (Barbara Herman) review

cinemattraction (Mia Ferm) review

The Village Voice [Michelle Orange]

House Next Door [Keith Uhlich]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]

DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

DVD Talk (Gerry Putzer) dvd review [3/5]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review

The Cinematheque [Kevyn Knox]

The New York Sun (Steve Dollar) review

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Crossing Europe Film Festival (Linz) report

Variety.com [Deborah Young]

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [3/6]

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [3/6]

Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLONDE-HAIRED GIRL (Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura)

Portugal Spain France (64 mi) 2009

Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

At this point, I honestly have no idea whether it's special pleading to speak of Oliveira's work in the context of his advanced age. The recent Toronto International Film Festival catalog matter-of-factly referred to MdO as "cinema's most senior filmmaker," which of course he is -- 100 years old and counting. But one of the things that impressed itself upon me while enjoying Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl is the fact that Oliveira is making films for no one but himself. He's following his own rules, or so it seems. Sure, there may be external circumstances that have impacted his recent turn to under-70-minute featurettes. Making shorter films might ease Oliveira's ability to secure completion bonds, and the man himself may be considering, consciously or not, a desire not to leave projects in an incomplete state, should his health take a bad turn. But I prefer to think that Oliveira simply has no more use for the arbitrary rules of commercial cinema, choosing instead to follow the avant-gardist's dictum that the internal demands of the work should determine its ideal length. Many of Oliveira's recent films have been overt confrontations between the classical and the contemporary. His work has exhibited a tendency to examine pre-modern ideas by staging them within a vague, awkward present day (as in Belle toujours or Magic Mirror), or by arranging an outright clash of incompatible histories (the crypto-conservative A Talking Picture). Formally, these films have tended toward stasis -- immoble camera, very basic blocking of performers, and a dry, declamatory acting style designed to drain the films' long dialogues of any clear cadence or narrative arc. I've written elsewhere that Oliveira's great subject is the incongruity of cinema and theatre, the moving pictures' ability to pin performative presence to the wall like a slide-mount, denying the very sense of temporal coexistence that is cinema's most casually-achieved aesthetic effect. Oliveira's films are not just "about" history; they are history, and his methods emphasize their anteriority to us, the audience.

Eccentricities is Oliveira's most unique, and most pleasurable, film is many years, partly because it renews the confrontation of "living" and "dead" elements, this time giving presence and spontaneity their due. It's a lively film, frisky and bizarre. From the very first shot, Oliveira has taken us somewhere new. Instead of his typically stately establishment shot, or the frontal two-shot that has characterized most of his dialogue sequences for many years, Oliveira starts us out onboard a moving train. After the conductor moves through the aisle, we settle on our protagonist, Macário (Ricardo Trêpa), seated next to a stranger (MdO axiom Leonor Silveira). We view them from a high 45° angle, and at a 45° diagonal, upper-left / lower-right pitch. Naturally, they both face forward, and although they never really make eye contact, they do turn their heads in one another's direction. Macário will recount his sad tale of ruination to this stranger on a train, of course -- the framing conceit of the film. But the physical stasis of this narratorial duo is backdropped by the train window, the lush southern Portuguese landscape of Algarve racing by as they talk. The visual impact of this decision, especially in the context of Oliveira's usual procedures, cannot be overstated. Instead of the retrospective tale being cordoned off inside a sitting room or a dimly lit upper-crust bar, Eccentricities's story is jutting out into the larger contemporary world. The train appears to protect it, but time's arrow determines its course all the same -- the relativity of modern physics in action.

This framework is vital, because it characterizes Oliveira's treatment of the source material, and his own film, throughout. Eccentricities is based on a short story by Eça de Queiroz, and Oliveira allows the author's work to look in two directions at once. Eccentricities emphasizes both the awkward nineteenth-century morality and filial codes of the original work, and Eça de Queiroz's basic modernity, his recognition of the impetuousness of youth and a self-destructive streak that Romanticism all too often valorized while taking inadequate account of the real world's material exigencies. Through his second-floor office window, young Macário, an accountant at his uncle's cloth shop, spies Luisa (Catarina Wallenstein), the fetching young girl of the title, across the street. We discover that she and her mother are of ambiguous, possibly dubious class provenance, although this is conveyed in subtle hints that the boy fails to observe. The boy's uncle (Diogo Doria) refuses to let his nephew marry the girl (or, it appears, anyone else -- not clear why), so he flees to Cape Verde to make money on an again-ambiguous work trip. (Oliveira hints at nefarious colonial goings-on, but the diegetic world allows them to stand unchallenged.) By the end, the girl is quite suddenly revealed to be much less than she at first appeared, and the young man casts her aside, heartbroken. He has, in short, thrown away his life and position for a low-class charlatan.

Oliveira stages this anachronistic "moral fable" (I guess you'd call it) with an eye to maintaining its fundamental inscrutability. The uncle's behavior, or the strange, stilted gender dynamics that characterize the film's courtly codes of conduct, are never explained, even within the young man's narration to Silveira. However, Eccentricities is set in the present. We see a computer on the accountant's desk, but the anachronism runs deeper than this. When Macário gets an early positive sign from the girl that his attention may be returned, he goes back to his office and performs a giddy, arm-flailing dance, like Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil. He's breaking the placid Victorian-era frame of decorum that otherwise shrouds the story. What's more, Oliveira inserts the contemporary through semi-documentary material enfolded into the diegesis. Macário is taken by a friend into the salon of the Eça de Queiroz Society, the story's very author enshrined as a part of the historical past. And Eccentricities also makes space for the performance of Portuguese music and poetry, in a manner very clearly intended to honor and preserve their past. Therefore, Oliveira is implicitly asking his audience to lend a 21st century ear to works in a classical mode, to admire their beauty and present-day resonance, despite but perhaps in some ways even because of their temporal alterity to our world. And in a sense, the film itself is a component of the exact same project. Factually, the basic material that comprises the film's text is an historical artifact, a point made clear by the intrusion of literary history into the work itself. The determinism of Eça de Queiroz's tale might be best understood at a remove, behind the glass armor of canonical distance. But for Oliveira, this and every text is alive, pushing its way gawkily into the animate present so as to test its mettle, to learn whether or not it has any truths left to disclose. Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl might seem to belong in a box, but Oliveira chooses instead to send it off on its way, to see if its final destination still exists.

THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (O Estranho Caso de Angélica)

Portugal Spain France Brazil (104 mi) 2010

Cannes 2010: Sincere Love: "The Strange Case of Angelica" (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal) Daniel Kasman at Cannes from The Auteurs, May 16, 2010

Often I get the sense that serious movies are the rarest kind of them all.  I don’t mean the easily self-serious and pretentious films, films closed to mockery through riskless gravity.  The most serious leave room—dangerous room—for failure.  They need that room to necessitate a leap of faith—if the film isn’t willing to risk something, how can we truly take it seriously?  As such, love stories can be the most serious of them all, and the hardest to beautifully pull off.  We sing high praises for Hollywood’s sincere sentimentalist—and sentimental sincerest—Frank Borzage, and with The Strange Case of Angelica it is a delight to see Manoel de Oliveira apply a cerebral, shaded touch to a Borzagian, risk-taking, haunted love story.

As in all recent Oliveira, everything is deceptively simple: Isaac (Oliveira’s perennial youth, Ricardo Trêpa), a young photographer, falls in love with a dead girl he photographs. Through his viewfinder, and later his still images, he sees moving, smiling, radiant life.  Suddenly his still, ascetic existence as an old world outcast—he’s a Sephardic Jew who delights in poetry, old radios, and appreciates the outdated, dying beauty of the countryside working class—is transformed by irrational love into a hopeless existence.  Like Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn—which similarly took some inspiration from Cocteau—Oliveira conjures ghostly love through the sheer risky pleasure of hokey special effects so earnest with belief they are impossible to laugh at. Méliès is seen in the naïve splendor of Isaac’s dreams of flying with his love, and the intellectual heroes common to 19^th century literature, angst ridden by wrestling with themselves and their place in the world, is suggested by the muffled humor of the old societies—the dead girl’s religious-aristocratic household and the compassionate inquisitiveness of his landlady and her opinionated friends—that fail to understand Isaac’s passion.

Angelica’s anxious old world / new world dream—where photography and moving images inspire the dreamer—is shot in concrete grays where the world’s small pleasures are in dawn’s light falling on Isaac’s face as he gazes at his mysterious moving picture, or the afternoon slanting in from the door to the rumpled bed linen telling the story of another night of wrestling with visions of a solemn world and an impossible love.  Trucks rumble by under his window, and across the river from his humble home is the splotchy hillside where the vineyard workers are being replaced by machines.  As in Borzage, escape from the world’s ails to the bliss of an otherworldly love is at once the most cowardly and most heroic of actions, and since our haunting ghost is played by the beaming Pilar López de Ayala, Isaac’s ultimate act is a leap of faith that’s not hard to understand at all.

The Strange Case of Angelica (O Estranho Caso de Angélica) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Now aged 101, Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira is one of the surpassing prodigies of cinema. He continues not only to film but to flout commercial logic with features that are intransigently eccentric and calculated to please only himself and a ‘happy few’ of long-term admirers.

His latest film has all the maestro’s subtlety and precision, but lacks the more accessible touch that gave Belle Toujours and Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl some slim, but tangible, chances of crossover appeal. A contemplation of love and metaphysics, The Strange Case of Angelica finds Oliveira, nothing if not game, trying out some new visual tricks, but the rarefied tone and somewhat funereal mood will make Angelica one for only his most faithful art-house distributors.

One rain-swept night, a young Jewish photographer named Isaac (the director’s grandson and regular lead Trêpa) is called out to the moneyed Portas estate, where he is to take a photo of the family’s married daughter Angelica (López de Ayala), who has just died.

He starts snapping the deceased - only to see her open her eyes and smile at him through his viewfinder.
Isaac finds her still smiling when his photos are developed (the story apparently takes place some years before digital photography), and becomes obsessed with her. Angelica haunts his dreams, notably in a digital fantasy sequence - a first for Oliveira, and a rather beautiful one - as she takes Isaac for a spin through the skies, in the manner of Chagall’s wedding paintings.

The film’s first half is executed with a finesse that could only be Oliveira, and almost entirely in visual terms, as Isaac visits the estate and muses in his shabby room. About midway, however, the film moves into more rarefied, discursive mode, as an engineer (Cintra) and friends muse on the economic crisis, theory of matter and antimatter and, more enigmatically, the “seven mosquitoes of the Apocalypse”. It’s one of those Oliveira sequences which pile on the obscurity, only to end on a sublime comic note as - just on the edge of the frame - a cat eyes up the landlady’s caged bird.

Apart from the classic supernatural theme of a man falling for a seductive revenant, it’s hard to say what the film is really about - but there are plenty of tantalising hints in the quotes from metaphysical texts and the allusions to particle colliders and the Hubble telescope. Trêpa is an undemonstrative but winningly bemused lead, while López de Ayala, in a wordless role, lends perplexing allure to the ghostly siren.

As ever, this film is partly a hymn to Portugal, its landscapes and traditions, and the Douro valley is shot with downbeat magnificence by Sabine Lancelin, giving welcome balance to the film’s oppressively sombre interiors.

Review: The Strange Case of Angelica - Film Comment Haden Guest from Film Comment, January/February, 2011

Hovering somewhere between ghost story and fairy tale, the 30th feature by the indefatigable Manoel de Oliveira is a beguiling meditation on the ontological and illusionist powers of cinema. The Strange Case of Angelica tells the story of a young Jewish photographer summoned late one stormy night to take a final, postmortem portrait of the eponymous aristocratic maiden whose sudden death has left her lying in mysteriously blissful repose in her ancestral mansion high on a hill outside of town, a knowing Mona Lisa smile suspended enigmatically across her face. As he looks through his camera’s rangefinder to capture a last memento mori, the Sleeping Beauty suddenly opens her eyes, pulled back from death by the photographic kisses of her Prince Charming. He recoils only to find that Angelica’s waking gesture was revealed to him alone, a private vision seen solely through his camera—although, of course, also seen by us, the viewers. What secret does Angelica long to share and why has she chosen this young man? And, more importantly, is she real or an illusion? 

Gently refusing any clear answers to these questions, Oliveira instead offers Angelica’s exquisite corpse as a beguiling emblem of the simultaneous embrace of realism and magic that has animated and defined the cinema since its earliest years. Like the Surrealists, Oliveira understands the cinema as, to borrow the title from another of his late films, a “magic mirror” in which the real and the fantastic are mutually dependent upon one another, as tightly intertwined within the same image as they are in the printed photograph of Angelica, whose eyes continue to flutter longingly at the photographer. Among the most openly fantastical moments in all of Oliveira’s vast oeuvre are those of the photographer’s recurrent dream that he is flying through the night sky with Angelica in his arms. Rapturous black-and-white sequences without dialogue, the dreams are silent films whose fervent artificiality and ecstatic magic clearly evoke Méliès. Oliveira’s first use of 21st-century digital technology paradoxically marks a return to the origins of cinema with the special effects trembling with a handcrafted sincerity and shimmering sense of wonder—a reminder of Oliveira’s status, at the miraculous age of 102, as the only still-active director to have worked in the silent cinema and to have experienced firsthand the age of Murnau and Borzage. 

Yet these “flights” of pure fantasy are also firmly tethered to a strong Lumière impulse and counterargument that runs insistently throughout Angelica, expressed most powerfully in the photographer’s sudden urge to shoot a series of portraits of workers breaking soil in the hilly vineyards outside his studio window. As his dreams of flight with Angelica become increasingly vivid, the real world grows dim, sad, and slow, and the photographer turns desperately to labor, the quintessential realist subject and, of course, the first inspiration for the Lumière Brothers—and for Oliveira’s 1931 debut Douro, Working River. In a frightening sequence toward the end of the film, the young man desperately follows a tractor smashing the rocks behind it, snapping furious snapshots of the most purely physical material he knows, only to find that the hard, stony soil remains as elusive as his phantom lover. The Strange Case of Angelica recovers and unsettles the photographic roots of cinematic art in the figure of the photographer, the man with the still-but-somehow-moving camera, whose instrument, we learn, is wonderfully imprecise and uncontrollable—since by “capturing” the real it also unleashes the imagination.

Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica - Cinema Scope ... Michael Sicinski, Spring 2010, also seen from The Academic Hack here: The Strange Case of Angelica

There are, needless to say, certain old saws that we as critics rely upon far too often. They can help us get somewhere in a hurry, make a point or join a gap in an argument so that we can move on to where it is we really want to go—and this can be useful when we’re forced to fend off counterarguments or attacks that are equally as reflexive as the ones we’re invoking. For example: “So-and-so just makes the same film over and over again.” To which we might reply: “No, a great master devotes him or herself to a lifelong aesthetic program, continually refining it, exploring it from every possible facet. You could say it is all one big film.” The first statement needs to be knocked down, because it is not a real criticism. It’s a manoeuvre against thinking, what Roland Barthes once called “deaf and dumb criticism.” (“I’m a professional film critic, and ______ bores the crap out of me, so guess what? You punters really don’t even need to bother. Thou art vindicated!”) But the retort, while serviceable as rhetoric, isn’t particularly useful as criticism either. It doesn’t really help us see or hear.

I speak as someone who has relied too much on this One-Big-Film idea a bit in the past, and who, for the twelve or so years that I have been watching the films of Manoel de Oliveira, have too often allowed that idea to structure my deep appreciation of his work. In certain ways, this has prevented me from being fully attuned to how his films have changed in recent years, how bizarre, unruly aspects of them that struck me as “anomalies” (in an almost Thomas Kuhn way: “outlying” facts that I couldn’t square with “Oliveiraness”) were really collapsing my dominant interpretive paradigm. For a long time, I understood Oliveira’s work as representing, first and foremost, a kind of modernist joust with classical literature and theatre. The films that shaped my understanding of his cinema—No, or the Vain Glory of Command (1990), Valley of Abraham (1993), Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997), Inquietude (1998) and Word and Utopia (2000)—tended to employ a text-laden, flatly declamatory style, oftentimes delivered almost directly to the camera. Positioned somewhere between the stripped-down neo-Baroque of Raúl Ruiz, the materialist readers’ theatre of Straub-Huillet, and a colour-saturated variation of late Rossellini, these films seemed intent on pulling apart everything they ostensibly aimed to harmonize. Thick literary language and theatre’s unadulterated physicality were, ultimately, inhospitable to cinema, resulting in an almost Greenbergian separation of the elements, a suspension and, indeed, a thoroughgoing inquietude.

But then Oliveira’s films included elements that were unavoidably “cinematic,” by any meaningful definition, and I wasn’t sure what to make of them. Were they just offhanded jokes, sidetracks that had nothing to do with the “great project”? It was easy enough to discount the lovely I’m Going Home (2001) as a unique semi-middlebrow one-off, Oliveira trying his hand at a more stringent version of the typical European art film. (It even begins with Michel Piccoli onstage in a very Oliveirian Ionesco production alongside Catherine Deneuve and Sylvie Testud, the theatrical “scene” from which personal tragedy extracts him.) But if I’m Going Home “doesn’t count,” what of Portuguese musician Pedro Abrunhosa’s vacant, behind-the-shades “performance” in The Letter (1999)? The discotheque fire in The Uncertainty Principle (2002)? And pretty much the entirety of Belle toujours (2006) or A Talking Picture (2003)?

I began to wonder what I’d been missing by glomming on so quickly to a master key for interpreting Oliveira’s oeuvre. (And what do we miss when we similarly reduce Straub, Iosseliani, or the most prevalent case these days, Hong Sang-soo?) This isn’t to say that I’d been entirely wrong about Oliveira’s methods before, or that he stopped making “talking pictures” in that original sense. (Magic Mirror, from 2005, is underrated, but does feel more like an early-‘90s effort.) But what I did discover, upon revisiting The Strange Case of Angelica, is that my prejudices regarding what Oliveira films are, or should be, threw me off the track. I failed to recognize this film for what it is: both an open text and a cautionary tale, a work that gestures toward many possible levels of social and aesthetic inquiry but also scans on its surface like a lost entry from the Brothers Grimm. First of all, Angelica is a ghost story. The Romantic tale of love beyond the grave is one of the most basic storytelling templates there is, of course, but one of the often unacknowledged effects of ghosts within a narrative space is the introduction of multiple timeframes within a single diegesis. Ghosts are, after all, “the past” slicing through to the present, and one of the key aspects of Angelica, long before any ghosts even appear, is Oliveira’s creation of a highly unstable timeframe.

In the middle of the night, a Catholic family requires the emergency services of a photographer. The local professional is unavailable, but they are referred to Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), an amateur enthusiast with darkroom capability. The neighbours call him a “Sephardic immigrant,” and the emphasis on Isaac’s Jewishness, along with the rather anachronistic specificity with which it is denoted, seem to place us in the late 19^th or early 20^th century. However, when the family sends a car around to pick Isaac up, it’s a contemporary SUV, complete with a glowing electronic dashboard. Oliveira gives us a very deliberate shot of the vehicle rounding a traffic circle in the night, with classical statuary and a fountain in the foreground. This otherwise banal gesture—a car moving through Old Europe’s public face—becomes an ambiguous time travel, out of known history and into the spirit world.

Isaac’s assignment is to shoot funereal images of the young, deceased Angelica in her final repose, prior to her burial. (Pilar López de Alaya, an actress perhaps best known for having been stalked in José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia [2007], portrays this exquisite corpse.) As he looks through the viewfinder, the dead girl appears to come to life again, opening her eyes and smiling at him. Naturally, Isaac is rattled. This happens once again in the makeshift photo studio he has arranged in his boarding house bedroom: while working on developing the photo, the dead Angelica’s image comes to life, with a smile so pure and benign as to allow for any possible projection upon it—angelic beatitude or doe-eyed virginal expectancy.

My initial experience with The Strange Case of Angelica was, in a word, off-putting, although I did find much to admire and even enjoy about this seemingly simplistic tale. Oliveira’s dip into “special effects,” in the form of the lo-tech superimpositions of the ghostly Angelica, was as much of a shock to me as the disco fire or the various odd deployments of John Malkovich in the earlier Oliveira films. (The use of cobalt blue spectres in the Méliès idiom, actually, reminded me very much of Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon [1950], another tale of love-struck madness.) But I found myself mentally slotting Angelica alongside I’m Going Home as another cul-de-sac off the “main track” of Oliveira’s primary artistic trajectory. It moves at a mid-tempo pace, drawn in part from the Chopin piano works that comprise its soundtrack. It also contains a relative dearth of extended dialogue sequences. (Even the boarding house breakfast, with its discussion of anti-matter and “the seven mosquitoes of the apocalypse,” is brisk compared to some of Oliveira’s showstopping colloquia.) Angelica seemed oddly accessible, but also somehow empty.

What I failed to observe, however, is that Angelica is every bit as concerned with the problems of cinema as Oliveira’s more theatrically inclined works, but explores them through more specifically visual means. In fact, this may be Oliveira’s most sustained meditation on the cinematic medium itself, apart from other aesthetic considerations. We began to see intimations of this direction in his previous feature, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (2009), which staged its talkiest, most static passages on a moving train, combining frank verbal delivery with the raw power of cinema’s originary magic. But with Angelica, we find the old questions regarding spirit photography and the camera’s alleged truck with the supernatural brought forward, onto the Mulvey/Lacan spectatorial axis. Isaac’s desiring gaze is an animating one, one that haunts his dreams and turns his waking life into a kind of haunted paralysis, simply awaiting the next visitation. (Isaac keeps his poor landlady awake with his nightly moaning and yelling, implying that this para-Freudian subject is in the throes of nocturnal emissions.)

But Isaac is the “enunciator” of the images that haunt him, is he not? Oliveira shows us the photographer becoming enslaved by his own images, and the repeated sight of Isaac removing them from the stop-bath and hanging them on the drying line, one “frame” after another, alludes to photography “becoming” cinema, the “dead” image coming to life and overtaking its maker, becoming more real than the world from which it was extracted. But these photographs are not a sequence. Some are of the dead Angelica, and others are of the team of vineyard workers who sing and plow and harvest across the road from the boarding house, men working in what Justina the landlady (Adelaide Teixeira ) dismisses as “the old-fashioned way.” “That’s why I like it,” Isaac replies. Before his heartsick lunacy takes over, we see Isaac cross over into the field like a good ethnographer, documenting this vanishing mode of labour. Each of the workers crosses in front of Isaac, stops, and poses for his “official” portrait, and these are the images that hang on the line alongside the shots of Angelica’s earthly remains.

What does this tell us? Isaac can be seen as being locked inside a classically modernist economy of images, using his camera to try to read past the surface of things and acquire a representation of authentic moments, “spirits” of the temporal world, before they fade. He fixates on Angelica’s image, much more so that her own family does. They wait for him to deliver the proofs while he hoards them, investing an inordinate amount of attention on the assignment. For the Catholic family, of course, the photos would be merely a reminder, a devotional object, to gesture toward the departed soul of their beloved wife and daughter. Isaac, whose Jewishness is very much made an issue at the start of the film and as he enters the family’s house, has instead fallen prey to the graven image, which sets him on the dangerous path of artistic modernism and of cinephilia in general.

In the end, The Strange Case of Angelica is a film that strikes me as double-coded. It does exist denotatively as a parable of amour fou in which the outsider allows himself to project his fantasy life upon the passive screen of the inert object. In this regard it falls in line with the classical literature of the Fantastic and the Uncanny, from “Sleeping Beauty” and Pygmalion to E.T.A. Hoffmann and right up to Almodóvar’s Talk to Her (2002). But it is also quite clearly Oliveira’s ironic consideration of the cinematic apparatus and the deeply irrational desire that it instills in us. Before the start of cinema proper, both Méliès and Étienne-Jules Marey were exploring motion study, but only the former felt the need to reconstitute motion, before a live audience, after breaking it apart. Marey, for his part, wondered why we should work to replicate what we can already see with the naked eye. Because Méliès knew well in advance what Isaac discovers to the point of insanity: only the cinema can allow us to live forever inside the temporality of another’s death.

113. Centenarian Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira’s “O Estranho Caso de Angelica” (The Strange Case of Angelica) (2010): Mixing illusion and reality with the mystery of life and death Jugu Abraham from Movies That Make You Think

The Strange Case of Angelica | Film Review | Slant Magazine Andrew Schenker

Cannes Film Festival 2010: Day Two Matt Noller from The House Next Door, May 14, 2010

Cannes 2010. Manoel de Oliveira's "The Strange Case of Angelica" David Hudson at Cannes from The Auteurs, May 14, 2010

Cannes 2010 – Un Certain Regard Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 13, 2010

Vitor Pinto at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 13, 2010

Cannes: What Does a Film by a 101-year-old Director Look Like? I Don't Know, I Fell Asleep Julian Sancton at Cannes from Vanity Fair, May 13, 2010

Guy Lodge In Contention at Cannes, May 13, 2010

Charles Ealy at Cannes from The Austin Movie Blog, May 13, 2010

Matt Bochenski at Cannes from Little White Lies, May 13, 2010

Peter Brunette at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 13, 2010

Cannes 2010: Manoel de Oliveira premieres film at 101 The Strange Case of Manoel de Oliveira, still making films at 101, by Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian, May 13, 2010

Cannes '10 Day 2: Old maids, old masters Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 14, 2010

Cannes 2010: Day 2 » Michael Phillips at Cannes from The Chicago Tribune, May 13, 2010

Stars or Not, Cannes Finds Glamour Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 13, 2010

De Oliveira's Latest, 'Strange Case of Angelica' - Review - The New ... The New York Times, December 28, 2010

The Strange Case of Angelica - Wikipedia

de Orbe, José María

AITA B+ 91

aka: Father

Spain (85 mi) 2010

No one lives in the house anymore – you tell me –; all have gone. The living room, the bedroom, the patio, are deserted. No one remains any longer, since everyone has departed.

And I say to you: When someone leaves, someone remains. The point through which a man passed, is no longer empty. The only place that is empty, with human solitude, is that through which no man has passed. New houses are deader than old ones, for their walls are of stone or steel, but not of men. A house comes into the world, not when people finish building it, but when they begin to inhabit it. A house lives only off men, like a tomb. That is why there is an irresistible resemblance between a house and a tomb. Except that the house is nourished by the life of man, while the tomb is nourished by the death of man. That is why the first is standing, while the second is laid out.

Everyone has departed from the house, in reality, but all have remained in truth. And it is not their memory that remains, but they themselves. Nor is it that they remain in the house, but that they continue about the house. Functions and acts leave the house by train or by plane or on horseback, walking or crawling. What continues in the house is the organ, the agent in gerund and in circle. The steps have left, the kisses, the pardons, the crimes. What continues in the house are the foot, the lips, the eyes, the heart. Negations and affirmations, good and evil, have dispersed. What continues in the house, is the subject of the act.

—No One Lives in the House Anymore, by César Vallejo (1892 – 1938), translated by Clayton Eshleman

A spare and stylistically unique film, one that insists it be viewed in a pensive and quietly reflective manner, something along the lines of minimalist conceptual art, as the camera lingers and hovers around every corner of an old 13th century home in the Basque region of Spain. While it doesn’t rely upon long takes, as one might expect, it instead finds novel angles and viewpoints, where rarely do we feel like we are revisiting the same area twice. Filmed exclusively in natural light, composed of static shots, it’s largely a meditation on death and dying, where the glacial pace and constantly probing camera by Jimmy Gimferrer may suggest every structure has a life and core identity of its own, something beyond superficial character traits, but is a part of a living history of the geographical region, a natural part of the world around it, where every structure may have its own carefully defined personality. Part of the title may suggest the paternal responsibility that comes with each successive generational lineage as the home is passed from person to person and family to family, each with the obligation to care and look after the home, which is something of a national treasure, especially when small schoolchildren visit to hear a lecture about vying families that lived and fought nearby defending what they perceived as their own territory, using the home as a kind of fortress when it was originally built. Mostly we see two characters, Luis Pescador as the elderly caretaker who continually tinkers around the building and Miken Goneaga is the amiable priest of the nearby church who can be seen paying neighborly visits.

Based on the date alone, the home would have survived the Plague and the Spanish Inquisition, but there is some question as to whether it will survive the break-ins from various home invaders, largely small groups of kids that try to ransack the place in the mistaken idea they may find something of value inside. All they really do is break a few windows and alter the existing sense of order inside, where Luis has to painstakingly put everything back together again, a constant with an old house, where leaks, decaying walls, and the constant sense of structure deterioration play a part in the overall character of the home. What’s perhaps most peculiar are flickering lights on the wall seen initially in a lightning storm, eventually turning into projected images of heavily decomposed film, Basque found footage from the region that continues the parallel theme of aging and decay, but also the idea of human visitation, as these flickering images offer a ghostly presence, adding a dreamlike state of reality, a kind of unknown netherworld that perhaps exists only while we sleep. Offering a peculiar sense of beauty, perhaps one that each inhabitant brings through subjective perceptions, this personifies the changing nature of things over time, where what was originally a face becomes a barely recognizable ghostly apparition, as there may be few traces of that original face left, but perhaps only a glimpse of what looks like an eye or perhaps a nose, altering the very face of existence.

This is a somber and reflective work on the nature of time and history, a non-narrative film given an experimental and even interactive adaptation, as the filmmaker plays around not only with images on the wall but with various forms of light, continually opening doors and windows, where in one of the more remarkable transition shots one sees out of darkness what appears to be a full moon in an otherwise black sky, but slowly over time there are small almost imperceptible changes, as the slightest increases in light soon reveals a beautifully designed window, where what one thought was a moon is the opening to the world outside. While there are occasional engaging conversations between Luis and the priest, mostly all we hear are the sounds of Luis tending to various repairs, scraping away the vegetative plant life that has overgrown several of the windowsills, measuring pieces of wood as he attempts to repair a broken window, spraying the walls with a toxic insecticide, all part of a seemingly endless process of keeping up with what’s needed to care for such an old structure. But mostly, it’s a quietly contemplative film, where Luis can be seen leaning against the walls, where near inaudible traces of the sounds of the church can be heard playing indescribably beautiful sacred music, where the sound wafts though the house like a holy presence. While the film is continually accessible on a number of levels, testing the boundaries of documentary and fiction, its patient adherence to an unusually curious and continually shifting perspective makes one focus and take notice, where there is certainly no pressing urgency anywhere, but instead a quietly transcendent state of mind is achieved, feeling almost like a brief cinematic prayer.

AITA | siskelfilmcenter.org Marty Rubin

Like his compañeros José Luis Guerín, Pere Portabella, and Mercedes Álvarez, director de Orbe adventurously bridges the boundaries of documentary, fiction, and avant-garde. The subject of AITA is a decaying but beautiful Basque home that de Orbe inherited. The building is tended by an aged caretaker and visited by a priest, schoolchildren, vandals, and various ghosts, including the flickering images of decomposed nitrate films. Winner of the best cinematography prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, this haunting meditation on time and light is a must in 35mm. In Spanish and Basque with English subtitles. 35mm print courtesy of Eddie Saeta SA.

Father Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Set wholly in or within the grounds of a rambling, semi-derelict old mansion outside San Sebastian, this calm, measured, visually very beautiful blend of documentary, fiction and archive footage bears some resemblance to Tsai Ming-liang’s ‘Goodbye Dragon Inn' and Jose Luis Guerín’s ‘Train of Shadows’, but is amply rewarding in its own right. It takes a while to find out who the various people visiting and working in the house are, and as long to learn about the building itself, but a series of brief, often pawkily amusing conversations between two of the men comes slowly to focus on themes related to death, faith and the possibility of ongoing life: certainly the house, thanks to cinema, is alive with the ghosts of Basque history. Experimental but very accessible and humane, and quietly affecting.

cine-file.info/forum Candace Wirt

Several years ago, the Spanish artist and filmmaker Jose Maria de Orbe inherited his family’s ancestral home in the Basque country, dating back to the thirteenth century, from his father.  Working with nonprofessional actors and without a script, De Orbe focuses on the castle’s elderly caretaker, Luis Pescador, and his upkeep in addition to the caretaker’s conversations on dreaming and death with the local priest, Mikel Goneaga.  However De Orbe’s protagonist is the home itself, and he mixes fact and fiction to capture its history in his family and a larger public sphere.  Aspiring toward the depiction in the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo’s “No One Lives in the House Anymore,” De Orbe and cinematographer Jimmy Gimferrer bring the home alive again through light.  Using high definition video, they explore the nature of light as it moves through this space, questioning its source and potential meaning.  Ultimately, AITA is the filmmaker’s “tribute to light” and “legacy to [his] son.”

The House Next Door [Veronika Ferdman] Karlovy Vary Festival

In my three years attending the festival, I've never seen more walkouts than those inspired by José María de Orbe's Father. And that's too bad. Filmed exclusively in natural light and composed of static shots of varying distance, it boasts a minimalist narrative: an elderly caretaker looking after an old and crumbling 13th-century mansion. The film carries a Moonlight Sonata-like rhythm; a once-black frame slowly fills with strips of light as the caretaker goes down the corridor to open door after door, letting in the light. There's great attention to space, from claustrophobic hallways to empty, spacious room, and the textures and colors of walls (crumbling blue paint and wallpaper and cement). The film is concerned with the effort it takes to take care of something—from pulling vines off the façade of the house to steaming an ornate cornice. It's similar in tone and theme to fellow countryman José Luis Guerín's masterpiece Tren de Sombras. Both films are concerned with the simultaneous decay—of places, people, images, film stock—brought about by the passage of time and the miraculous ability of objects, like the mansions the films are centered around, to remain preserved through history.

Oct Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

A favorite among some of my most trusted filmic advisors (especially the Cinema Scope crew), I found myself surprisingly underwhelmed by Aita. The title, which translates as "Father," largely spells out Orbe's agenda, in much the same manner that Alain Cavalier does by calling his most recent effort Pater. It's about patrimony, cultural inheritance, the weight of tradition as passed down from (male) generation to generation, and the degree to which the "sons" will be adequate to the task of preserving this vital identity.Aita is specifically about an elderly caretaker (Luis Pescador) tasked with protecting a 13th century Basque castle, both from the ravages of time and from wandering groups of kids. Some of the kids just like to break the windows out of any available structure, whereas others break in out of curiosity, wandering through the halls, swiping the random artifact. The irony that the caretaker is swatting away the only folks with any interest in the castle, however misplaced, is not lost on Orbe; his disembodied camera slowly wanders the halls, oscillating between a restrained human point of view and one identified the camera and dolly itself, the detached apparatus. (Or "ghosts," I suppose, if you're inclined toward such a reading.) For contrast, the caretaker is visited on occasion by a priest (Miken Goneaga). They engage in unscripted dialogues on the nature of time and decay, the transitory character of material things. And, as a "ghostly" superimposition of those lost artifacts of the past, Orbe projects early cinema onto the interior castle walls, the image-history of Basque culture as a material emanation and a frame-within-the-frame. I think I was bothered by this semi-avant-garde procedure, since it clarified the problem I had with Aita throughout. Neither flesh nor fish, the film ends up dabbling in experimental gestures as a kind of garnish, for what is primarily a conceptual effort. In the end, I felt as though I could always see what Orbe was getting at, but experienced it at a second-order remove.

The Lumière Reader [Steve Garden]

The central character in Aita (Father) is the dilapidated 13th Century Basque mansion inherited by Spanish director José Maria de Orbe. In a recent interview, he said that he made the film to create art where decadence and destruction once ruled. While neither a documentary nor a work of fiction, Aita is most assuredly a work of art, a mesmerising, poetic contemplation on light, texture, space, the past, the present, decay and rebirth. In the first shot we see overgrowth being cleared away, and in the second, two workmen discuss the outer shell of the house while another fossicks among bones in the basement. These shots prime us for a contemplative film that will require our active participation.

With the measured opening of doors and windows, de Orbe uses natural light to not only paint beautifully composed frames of textured surfaces and shifting perspectives, but to suggest a broader (perhaps political) metaphor for the need to reveal, examine, and restore. In this respect, the mansion could be read as more than just a building. While the film largely explores textures and spaces, it frequently pauses to focus on sound: the resonance of rooms, dripping water, wind, rain, birds, and the distant sounds of other life. We get the sense that everything we hear and see is as the house might perceive it. As a silent witness to centuries of war and injustice, this is indeed a haunted house, and Aita could be an attempt to exorcise some of the ghosts.

In a scene where school children visit the house, two girls whisper to each other in the attic. When one tells the other they should leave because she’s scared, I was reminded of Victor Erice’s masterful Spirit of the Beehive (1973), another subtle Spanish film about a nation haunted by its past. It’s also worth noting that Aita is another name for Hades: lord of death, ruler of the underworld, the invisible or unseen one. I wouldn’t know if this had anything to do with choosing the name of the film, but it is an interesting aside.

Throughout the film, a number of (mostly playful) conversations between the mansion’s elderly caretaker and a younger priest allude to various themes and ideas, such as whether the past should be unearthed and examined or simply left in peace. All the while, the film patiently waits on the house to reveal itself. Shown but never fully revealed, the house remains something of an enigma, but as night falls it does indeed start to speak, as images from the past flicker upon walls. Silhouettes (of former occupants perhaps) and numerous other ghosts silently re-enact their eternal rituals in a captivating display of light and texture, a purely cinematic sequence reminiscent of Bill Morrison’s equally extraordinary Decasia (2002). Of the many films I saw at this year’s festival, Aita was probably the most original. While the pacing may test some, those with an eye and an ear for such rarefied delicacies will be well rewarded.

The Lumière Reader [Tim Wong]

LIFF 2011: AITA review Eight Rooks from Twitch

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

London Film Festival 2010: The S&S blog Sight and Sound, October 2010

AITA (FATHER), LA VIDA ÚTIL, & ATTENBERG Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 4, 2011

The Light Within: An Interview with José María de Orbe on Notebook ... Daniel Kasman feature and interview with the director from Mubi, April 25, 2011

Variety Reviews - Father - Film Reviews - San Sebastian - Review ... Jonathan Holland

The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition - Google Books Result

De Palma, Brian

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2/5] Richard Scheib (excerpt from his review of THE FURY )

De Palma can be an extraordinarily stylish director. He regularly experiments with techniques like split screen, 360^o pans and slow-motion. His films come filled with amazing pieces of stylistic showmanship - like the wordless erotic pursuit through the art gallery in Dressed to Kill, the cinematic bravura of the climactic scenes in Carrie, the taping on the bridge in Blow Out, and the first 20 minutes of Snake Eyes which were all directed in a single shot.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info John Dickson

Has there ever been a modern filmmaker that can divide the aisles like Brian De Palma? He makes blockbusters, sparingly, mixing the high profile with the personally under-the-radar. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE is in every way a blockbuster of the mammoth scale, yet it also manages to fit right alongside the entire body of De Palma's work. In its cinematic construction lay scenes in which what we witness to be normalcy/truth are followed by shots or scenes that expose everything as a lie; there are surveillance cameras of all shapes and sizes monitoring the very surface of what is seen, a hero bound to get to the bottom of a conspiracy while trying to redeem themselves over a past trauma, plus not to mention the dazzling formal mastery on display, giving its technique over to new meaning, as filmic wonderment becomes a tool in which to purge the very nature of what is seen and felt. However theoretical you want to draw Brian De Palma, everything serves a function for entertainment, never too far from the importance of keeping an audience on the edge of their seat. RAISING CANE delights in it’s Buñuelian-surrealism by showing characters revisiting similar settings throughout their reality and dreams, unsure where one ends and one begins, while shifting gears so fast that the need for clever twists become obsolete, and a purer cinema is had as a result. FEMME FATALE (closer to MULHOLLAND DRIVE and HOLY MOTORS than anything else) uses repetition as its very function of creation, returning constantly to places and situations with images and characters bleeding over from previous scenes, as if the very nature of the film can’t keep up with the main character’s lies and imagined realities. FEMME FATALE fuses the idea of dreams and film together as one, seen as a temporary escape from one’s own past mistakes and traumas, as characters create their own thrillers in their heads while desperately clinging to the reality that keeps shifting all around them. Of course with De Palma, not only do the individual films reveal their stories through the nature of repetition, so does the context of De Palma’s entire body of work. Objects, faces, clothes, and rooms always reappear: the body double, the disguise from the murderer in DRESSED TO KILL popping up in SCARFACE, RAISING CANE, BODY DOUBLE, and PASSION, as well as certain situations being nodded to from film to film. Take for example a scene in FEMME FATALE where Antonio Banderas’ character follows Rebecca Romijn around a city, after being instructed by a voice on the phone to do so. While tailing the mystery woman, Banderas sees things that to him, reveal her to be a woman in trouble, beaten by her diabolical husband, all the while unaware of the fiendish plot/truth simmering underneath, as he decides to play hero while simultaneously being fascinated by her as a sexual object. Also, following both Banderas and Romijn is a shadowy character played by Gregg Henry. Everything just mentioned is a virtual re-telling of a scene in BODY DOUBLE, even down to having the same actor, Henry, playing the shadowy character in both films. FEMME FATALE even features a glowing-red poolroom with a fight involving a pool cue, and a jukebox sound-tracking the action, à la CARLITO’S WAY. Spending time with the entirety of De Palma’s work allows the viewer to catch every visual reference and nod, as if all the films function as one, revealing a key to the filmmaker’s imagination and thought-process. Going as far back as his late 60’s work GREETINGS, one finds the seeds for political conspiracy taking root in its characters’ minds, dictating their every action that follows. The American Cinema has always kept De Palma neatly-categorized under the file “subject for further research,” as if the bubbling satire beneath his films’ surfaces were a gate blocking viewers and critics from taking him seriously as a filmmaker. His recent film about the Iraq War, REDACTED, is a modern re-telling of his Vietnam-war film CASUALTIES OF WAR. What possibly evaded viewers when it came to a film like REDACTED, was the level at which De Palma was playing with the flimsiness of the image itself, revealing the documentation of the war, not to mention the war itself, to be a badly disguised farce, revealing its true nature in the very last minutes of the film. DE PALMA is evidence of the importance of popular filmmakers of their era to pay homage to filmmakers of the past, giving collective rise to how vital a filmmaker like Brian De Palma is to our history. Like his films, replaying what has come before can tell us how to move forward. I seem to recall in the history books, a certain filmmaker of suspense films being labeled as a pure genre filmmaker by critics of his time, until a group of younger, contemporary critics/filmmakers proved the case for his genius in the late 50’s-60’s, by writing articles, books, and making films drawing from his influence. Certainly it’s not too late for De Palma as well?

All-Movie Guide Hal Erickson

American director Brian De Palma has always insisted that he gained his fascination with all things gory by watching his father, an orthopedic surgeon, at work. It's more likely that the principal influence on De Palma's career was Alfred Hitchcock, a fascination he has claimed to have outgrown professionally. Whatever the case, De Palma did his first film work in amateur short subjects while a student at Columbia University. Thanks to one of these films, he won a writing fellowship to Sarah Lawrence College, where he made his first feature, The Wedding Party, between 1962 and 1964. In the cast of The Wedding Party, which wouldn't be released until 1969, were Sarah Lawrence student Jill Clayburgh and a Brooklyn kid who called himself "Bobby" De Niro.

De Palma's first film to gain theatrical release was 1968's Murder à la Mod, and the first to accrue critical approval was a trendy anti-war tome called Greetings (1968), again with the Brooklyn boy who by this time was known as Robert De Niro. Hi, Mom! (1970) was a similarly irreverent comedy, but De Palma was prescient enough to realize that the vogue for anti-establishment films would soon pass. Thus he began emulating Alfred Hitchcock with Sisters (1973), utilizing the split-screen technique popularized by such late-'60s pictures as Grand Prix and The Boston Strangler. De Palma not only admitted to borrowing from Hitchcock in Sisters, but also underlined the tribute by having the film scored by Hitchcock's frequent musical director Bernard Herrmann. Obsession (1976), again scored by Herrmann, was one of several De Palma imitations of Hitchcock's Vertigo (see also Body Double), and also established the director's fascination with 360-degree camera pans.

Carrie (1976), De Palma's most successful film to that date (and still one of the most successful Stephen King adaptations), marked a return to the split-screen technique and wrapped the story up with another of De Palma's trademarks, the "false shock" ending which turns out to be a nightmare. There was a similar finale (again staged as a dream) in Dressed to Kill (1980), which audaciously included a shower scene à la Psycho (but the director deceived, staging the murder in an elevator). By the time Body Double came around in 1984, De Palma was all but parodying himself with gratuitous gore, slow motion, lyrical panning shots, Herrmann-esque musical scores, characters who weren't who they seemed to be, and twist-around endings. With the acclaimed Scarface (1983), the director inaugurated his "crime is not nice" period, ladling out grimly violent sequences in such films as Wise Guys (1986) and The Untouchables (1987) to show that the bad guys weren't the lovable lugs Damon Runyon had made them out to be. De Palma next explored a different kind of violence in Casualties of War (1989), a Vietnam War film that centered on the outrageous mistreatment of a Vietnamese woman by a platoon of American soldiers.

Raising Cain (1992) was a full-blooded return to terror, with one of De Palma's favorite actors, John Lithgow, given free reign to express his wildest, darkest passions. Carlito's Way (1993) was another crime flick, this time with Al Pacino (who'd worked with De Palma in Scarface), and proved to be one of De Palma's most widely praised films in years. With the exception of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), which was a full-out failure, De Palma has remained one of a handful of truly bankable Hollywood directors capable of opening a picture on the basis of his own name rather than the names of the stars. He had another hit on his hands in 1996 with a big-budget adaptation of the TV series Mission: Impossible. Snake Eyes (1998), a thriller revolving around a political assassination, was something of a critical and commercial disappointment, but the director resurfaced two years later with Mission to Mars. A sci-fi suspense thriller, it removed the director from earthly horror and violence, only to restage it elsewhere in the solar system.

De Palma was back just two years later with Femme Fatale, a typically stylish exercise featuring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as the title character and Antonio Bandaras as the man unlucky enough to become entranced by her. After a four-year layoff De Palma returned to theaters with an adaptation of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia. Based loosely on the infamous unsolved murder case, the book was the first of a four-book series that would also include L.A. Confidential.

Directed by Brian De Palma

De Palma a la Mod a fan site run by Geoff Beran

Le Paradis de Brian De Palma a French/English site run by Carl Rodrigue and Tony Suppa

Film Reference Robin Wood, updated by Joseph Milicia

Brian De Palma Keith Uhlich from Senses of Cinema

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Brian De Palma profile from Alfred Hitchcock Collaborators & Partners in Crime

Brian De Palma @ Filmbug bio info

Brian De Palma NNDB profile page including a filmography with links to short reviews

Brian De Palma by FilmMakers Magazine profile page including a biography and filmography

Feature: Auteur Fatale: The Films of Brian De Palma Eric Henderson from Slant magazine

Objects of Appalling Beauty: An Appreciation of Brian De Palma Michael K. Crowley from 24LiesASecond, April 28, 2004, which features a mob-like photo of the American “whiz kid” directors

Casualties of Genre, Difference, and Vision: Casualties of War James Moran from 24LiesASecond, April 28, 2004

The Plausibles: The Problems of Make-Believe in the Age of Reason Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, April 29, 2004

Double Reflections: Beyond the Shadow of the Double Giuseppe Puccio from 24LiesASecond, July 18, 2004

Pleasures Worthy of Guilt: A Cinephile's Confession Dennis Cozallio from 24LiesASecond, March 21, 2005

Building a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, July 1, 2005

girish: Brian De Palma July 24, 2006

Brian De Palma: Critical Black Mass." Dennis Cozzalio from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, August 21, 2006

Brian De Palma’s land of paradox Peter Gelderblom from Lost in Negative Space, August 26, 2006

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule: THE BLACK RHAPSODIES OF ... Dennis Cozzalio, August 28, 2006

The Films of Brian De Palma, Part One Jeremy C. Fox from Pajiba, September 15, 2006

Say ‘Brian De Palma.’ Let the Fighting Start. - New York Times A.O. Scott from The New York Times, September 17, 2006

Los Angeles Times Article (2006) The death-deifying De Palma, by Peter Rainer, September 24, 2006

Reverse Shot Feature (2006) Junk Art: Brian De Palma, by Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert, Fall 2006

Fall 2006, Brian De Palma | Reverse Shot A Reverse Shot online index of two dozen De Palma film essays, Fall 2006

TIFF 2007: Brian De Palma on the front lines - scanners Jim Emerson from Scanners, September 14, 2007

Brian De Palma Explains Himself - Movies - Village Voicepage 1 ... Anthony Kaufman, September 25, 2007

Brian De Palma: 'Apparently, I'm a left-wing wacko traitor who ... James Mottram from The Independent, February 24, 2008

Objects of Appalling Beauty: An Appreciation of Brian De Palma Michael K. Crowley from The House Next Door, September 7, 2008

The House Next Door: The Shape of Substance: Brian De Palma and ... Peter Gelderblom, November 10, 2008, initially published here: The Shape of Substance: Brian De Palma and the Function of Form from 24LiesASecond, September 17, 2005

brian de palma - The Screengrab When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Paul Clark, November 18, 2008

De Palma, Brian They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Gerald Peary Interview January 1979 for Take One

interview De Palma a La Mod, interview by Geoff Beran during a retrospective in Paris, France, February 26, 2002

Brian De Palma on "Snake Eyes" interview by Wade Major from Boxoffice magazine

Steve Rose talks to director Brian De Palma | Film | The Guardian Crazy, huh? September 8, 2006

The Black Dahlia The San Francisco Brian DePalma Theory Collective, a taped transcript of the post viewing discussion, September 15, 2006

NYFF: Brian DePalma's Blowup Katey Rich from Cinema Blend, which includes a transcript of the October 11, 2007 interview by J. Hoberman that ended up in a shouting match with a Magnolia Pictures representative (see YouTube footage below)

De Palma Versus Cuban: Edelstein Enters the Ring David Edelstein from the New York magazine, October 11, 2007

Brian De Palma Gives Up in the Battle Over ‘Redacted’ Darrell Hartman from the New York magazine, October 12, 2007

Conversations podcast: Brian De Palma | Salon Arts & Entertainment Stephanie Zacharek interview from Salon, November 13, 2007

Redacted The San Francisco Brian DePalma Theory Collective, a taped transcript of the post viewing discussion, November 17, 2007

Close-Up Film Interview - Brian De Palma Re: REDACTED

The Nerve Film Lounge: Q&A: Brian DePalma Re: REDACTED

De Palma Image of the Day #01 A series of De Palma images from films, by Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled

De Palma Image of the Day #02

De Palma Image of the Day #03

de Palma Image of the Day #04

De Palma Image of the Day #05

De Palma Image of the Day #06

The religion of director Brian DePalma

Photos and discussion around the director Flickr

Brian De Palma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Five themes for Brian de Palma YouTube (4:22)

BRIAN DE PALMA COOL TV INTERVIEW (4:48)

YouTube - Brian De Palma interrupted at NY Film Festival ... October 11, 2007 (6:44)

YouTube - Scene By Scene with Brian De Palma - Part 1 (9:51)

Scene By Scene with Brian De Palma - Part 2 (9:55)

Scene By Scene with Brian De Palma - Part 3 (9:57)

Scene By Scene with Brian De Palma - Part 4 (9:53)

Scene By Scene with Brian De Palma - Part 5 (9:35)

MURDER À LA MOD

USA (80 mi) 1968

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Based on the title and the year of its release (1968), you'd expect Murder a la Mod to be a brisk exploitation romp: bare breasts, flashing lights, perhaps a brief appearance by the Strawberry Alarm Clock. But that wasn't Brian De Palma's style, even in his rarely seen first feature. The movie opens with a low-angle shot of women jumping into the air in front of a photographer's backdrop, breaking up the rhythm of their rise and fall with brisk, stuttering cuts. De Palma then jumps to a shot of one model with her throat slit, making the analogy between one kind of cut and another explicit.

Mixing Peeping Tom and Blow-Up with a soupcon of Luc Moullet-style anarchy, Murder a la Mod kills time with weird digressions, like a woman's prickly conversation with an officious bank clerk, then leaps forward in undercranked spasms. A photographer's model is introduced, forgotten, then fatally stabbed with an ice pick, although not before being covered in ketchup. De Palma rewinds and replays the action from multiple points of view, although further "explanations" only amplify the absurdity, which eventually coalesces around a manic and possibly murderous stagehand played by Phantom of the Paradise's William Finley.

Although it clearly prefigures the false-bottom puzzle boxes of De Palmas to come, Murder a la Mod is exhausting and unrefined, a gas in stretches but a bummer on the whole. Still, there's one sequence you can't tear your eyes away from. Following the model's date with a straight razor and before the plot gets cooking, De Palma interpolates a series of screen tests for the central role, which generally come down to an off-camera De Palma urging buxom cuties to take off their tops. The girls, however, don't go quietly; one looks positively sick at the thought of disrobing, while another gripes about the low pay, her resistance turning to resignation as the director gets his way. It's not clear if the auditions are real or staged, and particularly if De Palma's crass cajoling is a put-on or the real McCoy. (One doubts these girls could act so convincingly if they were in on the gag, but you never know.) But it's worth noting that the sequence provides Murder with its only flash of the nudity that was all but essential for "art" films of the time, and that it's viewed through a viewfinder's crosshairs. Worth noting, too, that De Palma plays essentially the same role in The Black Dahlia, and that he was more convincing as an asshole director when he had less experience.

BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD review: Murder à la Mod (1963) Tim Lucas from Sight and Sound, March 2007

Anyone attempting to chart Brian De Palma's development as a film director has long been thwarted by the unavailability of his earliest work. As luck would have it, the most easily found pieces of this puzzle - Greetings(1968) and The Wedding Party (1969) - look forward to the unsuccessful, comic side of De Palma exemplified by Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972), Wise Guys (1986) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), while only the anarchistic and involuted aspects of Hi, Mom! (1970) offer shades of the sly, malicious prankster he would become. Last year, an important change in these affairs was facilitated by the Carlotta label's French DVD release of Brian De Palma Années 60, which collected the 1970 release Dionysus in '69 (documenting an orgiastic Greenwich Village stage production of Euripides' The Bacchantes) as well as two shorts, Woton's Wake (1962) and The Responsive Eye (1966), and a 30-minute documentary. Now, thanks to the wily specialists in orphaned exploitation cinema at Something Weird Video, an even more significant recovery has been made: Murder à la Mod, De Palma's second feature and first ever theatrical release.

The only feature ever distributed by the oddly named Aries Documentaries, Murder à la Mod seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth after playing at a single New York City theatre. Very likely only a single print was circulated, and it's presented here looking fresh from the lab. Better yet, it's unmistakably a De Palma film through and through - a very close relative of Sisters (1973), Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981) in particular, with subject-matter both suspenseful and recursive, revealing close affinities with the time-and-spatial play of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, and the self-confessional cinephilia of the previous year's David Holzman's Diary.

An extended pre-credits sequence finds various young women (including Sisters' Jennifer Salt) caught in the cross hairs of a movie camera, being auditioned by their boyfriend (the offscreen voice is De Palma's own) for a skin flick he's got to make to pay for his divorce. Each woman seems to think she's the only one in the photographer's life, and the final session segues from a pop explosion of Lesteresque effervescence to on-camera murder. The ensuing story finds the fashionable Tracy (Andra Akers), back from Europe, catching up with her less worldly friend Karen (Margo Norton), who announces her engagement to Chris Jordan (Jared Martin), a handsome photographer for whom she's posed nude but who strangely hasn't touched her or applied pre-marital sexual pressure. When next they meet, Chris tries to break his engagement to Karen, admitting that his divorce is not yet final and that he's had to take a job shooting a smut movie to get the $10,000 necessary to dissolve his marriage. (The film is masterful at inserting details that must be easily recalled to mind later.) The startling murder-by-icepick of a key character (very Sisters), filmed in high contrast, puts into effect a cinematic mechanism - a big, loudly ticking one like the car bomb in the director's 1974 film Phantom of the Paradise - that continually turns the chronology of events backwards and forwards in an effort to elucidate the murder and its motivations from multiple angles and through multiple eyes, including those of an acid-giggly director played by frequent De Palma collaborator William Finley (who also contributed the psychedelic theme song). It would not be much of an exaggeration to call Murder à la Mod the first fully realised De Palma film; a crude model certainly, but with an intricacy of design to rival Snake Eyes (1998) or Femme Fatale (2002). It's also precociously recursive: Phantom fans will be intrigued to spot De Palma's own name on the clapboard in a film-within-the-film.

The extras in this 'special edition' are two bonus features. The first is Larry Moyer's The Moving Finger, another heretofore lost independent curiosity filmed in New York City, in which a Beat coffee house run by resident poet Lionel Stander becomes a hideout for wounded bank robber Mike Dana. A young Barry Newman is prominent among the countercultural coveters of Dana's stolen $90,000, and there's an impressive brief appearance by the legendary New York street musician-poet Moondog.

The tin can tied to the end is An Eye for the Girls, a condensation of a feature consisting of stock footage and original still photographs, credited almost solely to one Harold Klein. At 50 minutes, it's quite long enough, thank you, but its non-story has sufficient thematic ties to Murder à la Mod to show that it wasn't included thoughtlessly.

Reverse Shot [Jeff Reichert) also reviewing GREETINGS and THE WEDDING PARTY

Shock Cinema [Steven Puchalski]

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

PopMatters (Brian Holcomb)

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

GREETINGS

USA (88 mi) 1968

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

A loosely linked series of sketches involving two young men who coach their buddy on how to weird out the army psychiatrist and thereby flunk his draft physical. There's also some strangeness about the Kennedy assassination and a lot of sexual horseplay. It's all served up with good humor, self-indulgence, a touch of wit, and once in a while a fine satirical relish. It was Brian De Palma's first major film, and also the first major role for Robert De Niro. Hindsight works wonders here: the film seems more comprehensible than it did when first released, now that its style has been taken up by television. With Gerrit Graham, Richard Hamilton, and Allen Garfield (1968).

Jeeem's Cinepad [Jim Emerson] also reviewing HI, MOM!

"Yeah, you know, tragedy is -- it's a funny thing."
-- John Rubin (Robert De Niro) in Hi, Mom!

Looking back at Brian DePalma's career, it seems perfectly natural that he should move from quirky, underground black comedies like Greetings and Hi, Mom! to highly sophisticated, operatic horror films like Carrie, The Fury and Dressed to Kill. The difference between the early films and the later ones is only a matter of scale and genre emphasis. DePalma began making comedies which are horrifying, and has progressed to making horror films which are hysterically funny. Like all the best American directors, DePalma recognizes that horror and humor spring from the same source-our inability to confront what frightens us. We have two choices: we can draw back in horror, or we can retreat into laughter. DePalma knows that humor and horror are so inextricably intertwined in the American imagination (recall Ronald Reagan quipping to his wife, "Honey, I forgot to duck") that it is fruitless to try to sort out which is which, to go for "pure" horror or "pure" humor. There's really no such thing. DePalma's films are bursting with moments which are funny because they are so horrible-and all the more horrible because they are funny. Conundrums like this are the stuff of which his films are made. Tonight you'll see what I mean.

“I met a man in filmland, a patron of the arts

He bought my scheme to turn my dream into a peeping art.”

-- Hi, Mom! title song

The first thing you notice about DePalma's movies is that he is absolutely obsessed, and in love, with the medium. Rarely has the cinema seen such a fluid visual imagination. Always acutely aware that films are made to be watched by audiences in theatres, he pulls us into his film-stories using hand-held camera, character point-of-view shots, and other audience identification techniques-then turns the film around on us, tossing us back into our seats and reminding us that we're watching a movie by slipping in Godardian inter-titles, jump cuts, split-screen, slow-motion, fast-motion, fancy wipes and dissolves, and anything else you can think of that can be done with a movie camera, an optical printer and a moviola. The artist is clearly in his element, and that's what makes DePalma's films such a joy to watch.

Greetings, DePalma's 1968 anti-military/anti-war movie melange, was the first of his films to find an audience. In fact, it was so successful that Hi, Mom! was conceived as a sequel (originally to be called Son of Greetings). Greetings is an ebullient, brazenly disturbing mixture of movie-movie acrobatics and American counter-culture politics in the manner of pre-1968 Godard. Critics have emphasized over and over DePalma's debt to filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and (especially over-emphasized) Alfred Hitchcock. In Greetings, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, another hip youth-cult film of the time, also looms large. But the filmmaker whose spectre really presides over this film is that of Abraham Zapruder, the man who made the most famous 8-mm home movie of the Kennedy assassination at Dealy Plaza.

The first thing we see in DePalma's movie is a television set carrying a speech by President Johnson. In front of the set sits a book: Six Seconds in Dallas. Greetings, made five years after the assassination, is a picture of a nation obsessed with six seconds of Kodak movie film. Right away, DePalma begins detailing the dissolution of the barrier between the personal and the political in American society; just as, in this and subsequent films, he will dissolve the barrier between the film and the audience, between horror and humor, between public and private.

“Peeping through my window / Seeing life on little screens.”

-- Hi, Mom! title song

All of these elements are operating splendidly in the first shot of Greetings. President Johnson, giving a televised speech, is speaking both to the audience there in the auditorium with him and the audience watching him on TV. In front of the television set on which we are watching him is a coffee pot, partially obscuring a portion of the screen. We're not just watching Johnson on TV, we're watching him on a particular TV set in a particular room in someone's home somewhere-which puts us at three steps remove from that hall where we see Johnson speaking. When Johnson turns to the camera to address a question directly to his audience, we experience a strange, chinese-box sensation. Johnson, speaking directly to the TV camera, is speaking directly to the audience watching television. We, watching this television set in this movie, suddenly find him addressing us, too. The documentary reality of Johnson's speech becomes a part of the fictional film, Greetings; all these layers are at once telescoped and compressed into a single frame-within-a-frame. Appropriately, DePalma both begins and ends his film with this shot.

Even more tension is added to the above moment when you consider how DePalma is playing with the dimension of time: Johnson delivered the speech at a particular moment in time; the videotape of that speech was broadcast at another time-say on the evening news; DePalma, after making a videotape of his own from the broadcast, filmed the speech off the television set at some other time in 1968; and we are watching that film now on April 14, 1981. Johnson, in the moment he looks through the camera lens at us, slices through all those levels of distanciation and the moment becomes an immediate one again, Time is trapped on film and renewed. If this is beginning to make you feel dizzy, it should. It's this kind of mind-boggling tension that DePalma's films thrive on. Each film is like a pair of mirrors facing each other with the audience trapped in the void between.

In Greetings, Gerrit Graham plays Lloyd Clay, a conspiracy buff who finds evidence everywhere-but especially in blow-ups made from the Zapruder film-which he feels proves conclusively that the Warren Commission was a whitewash, that the FBI lied, and that there was indeed a man with a gun behind the grassy knoll. DePalma, too, is clearly fascinated by the "frozen" moment in time which that piece of film represents.

Godard called cinema "the truth 24 times a second." But DePalma, echoing David Hemmings in Blow-Up, also realizes that the closer you examine a frame (one twenty-fourth second) of film, the less tangible the "truth" of the visual evidence becomes. One person may clearly see an assassin; another may see only a grainy blob. Part of DePalma's fascination with split-screen lies in its ability to bombard the audience with a great deal of visual information, allowing viewers to choose what they want to watch at any particular moment -- like Jon Rubin, picking out the most interesting windows in the apartment building in Hi, Mom!, or Allen Garfield watching three porno movies at once in the same film.

Film is a medium in flux; time will never stand completely still for scrutiny, even when "captured" with a movie camera. So DePalma plays with that flux. In Obsession, we move from 1975 to 1959 in one apparently seamless shot. In The Fury, the past and the present occupy the same frame simultaneously as Amy Irving has a telekinetic vision on a stairway. And in Greetings -- well, there's that opening/closing shot.

In what is probably Greetings' funniest and most unsettling scene, Lloyd Clay draws diagrams of bullet paths on the nude body of his sleeping girlfriend to prove that the doctors provided the Warren Commission with false information. Suddenly, in a rather jarring reminder of the film's first shot, he looks directly into the camera and, on the verge of hysteria, shouts his assassination theories at us. We thought we were witnessing what Clay's friend, Jon Rubin, will later call a "private moment." What could be more private than this intimate scene in these people's bedroom? But all at once DePalma and Gerrit Graham reach out of the film and nail us to our seats. A private moment, blown up on a movie screen, becomes a public one. The private and the public, the personal and the political, are fused. A decade later, this scene will find its echoes in Woody Allen's Annie Hall.

Reverse Shot [Jeff Reichert] also reviewing MURDER À LA MOD and THE WEDDING PARTY

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

10,000 Bullets - DVD review Michael Den Boer

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

eFilmCritic Reviews The Ultimate Dancing Machine

All Movie Guide [Keith Phipps]

TV Guide

Time Out review

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review

THE WEDDING PARTY

USA (92 mi) 1969

Peter Nellhaus Coffee Coffee and More Coffee

In part because of the entries written by Girish on his blog, and because I like to be a completist with some filmmakers, I finally saw Brian De Palma's debut feature. Filmed in 1964, with a copyright dated 1966, the film did not receive theatrical play until the release of Greetings, De Palma's first film to get significant distribution following its December 1968 opening. The evolution of Brian De Palma will probably be better evaluated by the scheduled DVD release of his first solo directorial credit, Murder a la Mod from 1968.

What importance The Wedding Party has is largely based on its being the first film for several participants in the cast. Cast primarily with actors and friends from Sarah Lawrence College, the film includes Jill Clayburgh, as well as three actors who would collaborate several more times with De Palma - Jennifer Salt, and William Finley, seen above to the left of Charles Pfluger and future De Palma star Robert De Niro. Had none of the actors or the co-writer/director gone to greater acclaim, The Wedding Party would probably be another forgotten student movie.

This is not to say that the film is bad or unwatchable. The Wedding Party is the kind of cute farce that students from the Sixties would make primarily for an audience of their peers. Having been an NYU film student at the end of the decade, I speak from experience. De Palma's taste for satire and sight gags would be developed in future films. The rich white people teased gently here would be treated more savagely in films like Greetings and Hi, Mom. Some of the visual humor is inspired, if not by silent films, then second-hand by Godard, Truffaut and quite probably, Richard Lester.

De Palma has become something of the Rodney Dangerfield among the so-called Film Generation directors. Instead of giving his films fair evaluations, De Palma has too frequently been written off for imitating Alfred Hitchcock. I have to wonder why Claude Chabrol is not held to the same standard, especially as his films have become increasingly formulaic. More than any other filmmaker from the Nouvelle Vague, Chabrol has made films that are similar to the French "Cinema of Quality" that Cahiers du Cinema had rebelled against fifty years ago. De Palma, at his best, including the maligned Femme Fatale, still manages to take his narrative into unexpected places, often with startling images. While Chabrol sometimes is too refined for his own good, De Palma is unafraid to shock, jolt and above all, entertain.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

The Wedding Party was Brian De Palma's first feature, though the subsequent Greetings made its way onto a handful of screens earlier when Wedding Party found itself without distribution. De Palma had to fund the film's meager release with his co-producers: Wilford Leach, a renowned stage professor who had become one of a young De Palma's mentors, and Cynthia Monroe, a wealthy film student who basically funded the entire project. (Don't bother looking for her as the bride, as she wasn't funding a star vehicle for herself—in fact, she only appears briefly as a bridesmaid.) Falling in line with De Palma's early, predominately goofy projects leading up to the morose gravity of Obsession, the film begins with the groom being picked up from the ferry to be driven to his bride-to-be's estate, sped up to look like a Keystone Cops outtake. The chauffer isn't allowed to drive the vehicle and ends up hanging from the running board, the prospective groom takes the wheel from the back seat and relatives keep finding their way outside of the car, one wandering to the sea because, so the overlapping voiceovers tell us, he enjoys the melancholy effect the surf has on him.

Talk about exiting the gate with a running start. Wedding Party, once finally released, was subject of a review in Variety that has proven a handy epigram for De Palma's critical standing since ("techniques themselves were deemed more fundamental than ideas of substance"). At the risk of siding with the critical enemy, Wedding Party is admittedly far more confident in form than it is in function. From a screenwriting perspective, De Palma, Leach, and Munroe don't ever really convey the role that the young couple's posh, island estate wedding has on the groom's psyche. (And they seem to often forget that the bride has a psyche to attend to as well.) The film gives the "a film by" credit to all three, but it's abundantly clear Leach turned his attentions on his gifts as a stage director to create a well-stocked ensemble of character actors doing actorly things, which is probably one reason why the film frequently calls to mind Robert Altman's A Wedding.

This left De Palma free to begin exploring his role as a film director with all the enthusiasm one can expect from a director whose works never completely shed their film-student trappings (and that's meant as a compliment). Much as the groom's hectic arrival was played in triple time, the excruciating round of introductions the groom is subjected to thereafter plays out in slow motion with the isolated patter of whispering old bitches dominating the soundtrack. ("Look at that hair, I guess he thinks he's fashionable.") The punchline extends to the opening credits, where all the bride's family fills a single title card that blocks out the entire screen. The groom's relatives are listed next: one single, lonely name. Later on, when the family keeps intruding into the future newlyweds' privacy, De Palma films the two from outside their window (in a seemingly purposefully fake matte shot) to resemble a jail cell. Wedding Party is a spunky freshman effort, but De Palma undoubtedly felt more comfortable—and continues to flourish)—in the realm of the wryly sophomoric.

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

Reverse Shot [Jeff Reichert] also reviewing MURDER À LA MOD and GREETINGS

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [2/5]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Reel.com dvd review [1.5/4] James Emanuel Shapiro

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review

DIONYSUS

USA (85 mi) 1970 co-director: Richard Schechner

User comments from imdb Author: FaustPWilliamsWLeach from Canada

I'd been wanting to see this play/movie for a while, and when a friend was kind enough to send me a copy of Brian DePalma, Le Annees 60 (Brian De Palma- The 60's) I couldn't believe my luck!

Having been introduced to both Bill Finley and Bill Shephard through PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, I was intrigued and deeply impressed to see both men in VERY different roles, and yet, if you've seen Phantom, there's almost a reversal of roles. Whereas, with Phantom, Mr. Shephard's role is an active spectator in the theatrical blood bath, with Dionysus, he plays a character who is duped in much the same way Bill Finley's character would be, a few years down the road.

And speaking of Mr. Finley, you really have to wonder how idiotic the folks in Hollywood's high hills must be, to pass up such a natural talent! After seeing Phantom of the Paradise a number of times, I was amazed and impressed to see him in roles that are as far removed from the ambitious but naive Winslow Leach as it's possible to get!

In Dionysus in '69, Bill plays the title role; the man/god Bacchus/Dionysus, who plots out revenge on the family and city responsible for the killing of his mother. His villainy is so cleverly deceptive, however, that you couldn't help but be reminded of a unscrupulous record producer, as he lures young king Pentheus and his entire kingdom to its own ruin.

I'll admit that there were a couple scenes I couldn't sit through, for the graphic nature, but that's just me. The story, over all, was intriguing and had me reading Euripides' The Bacchae, to find out how the play really ended. I like Bill Finley's version better.

User comments from imdb Author: Brad Mays (redmund) from Los Angeles, CA

Dionysus is not really a film as such, but a "from the hip" documentary "capture" of the Performance Group's legendary 1969 staging of Euripides' THE BACCHAE. Hugely inspired by the ground-breaking theatrical rituals of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, DIONYSUS IN '69 (as the production was named) stirred up huge controversy amongst New York theatre audiences and critics alike.

Although the production was directed by Richard Schechner, Dionysus In '69 was created through a rehearsal process that was part democracy, part anarchy, part primal scream therapy. The final result was more a ritualized confrontation than conventional play, which culminated in a virtual orgy of audience participation. Nudity, profanity and huge amounts of stage blood were used to tremendous effect. Brian DePalma discovered the production and brought two NYU film maker friends of his into a special performance where multiple 16mm cameras were used to archive the iconoclastic proceedings in B&W. The final cut is an exercise in the "split screen" techniques which would eventually become DePalma's cinematic trademark.

The cast shows deep commitment to their material, and Bill Shepherd (later known as Will Shepherd) is particularly brilliant in the role of Pentheus. I will not go into the plot, which should be well-known to most college graduates, but will say that the original Euripides play (written about 500 B.C.) deals with the myth of Dionysus and his revenge upon the city responsible for his mortal mother's death.

I had the good fortune to direct Will Shepherd in my own film adaptation of THE BACCHAE, produced in October of 2000, where he played Cadmus, grandfather to the character he portrayed so brilliantly some thirty years before at the Performance Garage in New York.

I highly recommend the film DIONYSUS, if not for its filmic brilliance, then at least for its documentation of one of the true theatrical marvels of the late 1960's.

There are a number of 16mm prints of Dionysus floating around out there somewhere, but I'm not sure what company distributes the film, which is not available on video through

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

Dionysus is frequently still written off as a footnote in Brian De Palma's filmography, even though its status as a difficult-to-see film has created an enthusiasm amongst De Palma fanatics counter to this. And, in any number of ways, the film probably deserves its status as a conversation starter in the De Palma canon rather than the entire conversation: it's more theater director Richard Schechner's and his Performance Group theater troupe's vision, the cinematic experimentalism is scaled back to one single signature form (again De Palma shares "a film by" credit, this time with his two co-cinematographers Robert Fiore and Bruce Rubin), and any vague parallels to the Kennedy assassination were prescribed nearly 2,500 years in advance.

Dionysus is a feature-length split-screen, a bifurcated recording of what was one of the New York avant-garde theater world's more controversial productions: a loose interpretation of Euripides's Bacchae performed in and around its audience in a garage that frequently detoured into simulated sex acts and modern political soapboxing. (It's original title, Dionysus in '69, is a campaign slogan for William Finley as Dionysus, who shatters the play's—and film's—illusions of Greek dramaturgy with an explicitly American context by repositioning the performance as a bloody, sexy cautionary tale—one that can only be remedied by replacing President Johnson with President Finley. Works for me.)

De Palma frames the entire performance as just that—a performance—to the best of his abilities. He opens with the actors on one side of the screen before curtain, stretching, purring their vocal exercises, centering, and shaking it out. On the other side, he shows the audience lined up around the block. (Unless my eyes deceive me, the sequence features one of De Palma's only moments of self-referentiality when his camera finds The Wedding Party's groom Charles Pfluger waiting in line.) While the performance of Bacchae (specifically, Finley's dependably galvanizing performance at its center) is undoubtedly the primary element of Dionysus, De Palma's contributions are worth considering, if only for context. The split-screen, so often an attempt to make the screen a psycho-physiological extension of the characters within the film, is here used as an attempt to unite one audience with another.

While it's obviously impossible to get down and dirty with the actors from the other side of the movie screen, at least De Palma's multiple choice frames-within-frames suggest the intimacy of the theatrical experience. The merging of political radicalism, melodrama, sophomoric humor, and turbulent sexual transgressions survived as a formula—with varying ratios—in basically every De Palma film to follow. After all, it's worth mentioning that the film features a male-on-male make out session that predates Femme Fatale's lesbian bathroom grope.

Reverse Shot [Dan Callahan]

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review

HI, MOM!

aka: Blue Manhattan

USA (87 mi) 1970

Time Out review

A blast from the past which recalls De Palma's beginnings as a really eclectic independent. Made for $95,000 after the unexpected success of his anarchic Greetings, this is the sequel to end all sequels. De Niro plays variations on a Vietnam vet returning to NY as, variously, a 'peep art' porno movie-maker, an urban guerilla, and an insurance salesman. At least that's the framing excuse for an increasingly lunatic series of set piece gags. 'Be Black Baby' is a skit on off-Broadway 'encounter theatre', in which a middle class white audience is terrorised by black actors in whiteface. Shot by De Palma in visceral vérité, it actually is terrifying. Structurally, the film never recovers - but then its main merit is a refusal to 'hang together'. Anarchic and very appealing.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Before he strode confidently into Hitchcock territory, filmmaker Brian De Palma began his career in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a series of anti-authority satires. Hi, Mom! (1970) wasn't quite as controversial as its X-rated predecessor, Greetings (1968), but it still has a bite, even today. Robert DeNiro stars as Jon Rubin, a Vietnam vet looking to find his place in America. He gets the idea of making porno films with a voyeuristic quality, filming the residents of a neighboring apartment building from his window. To get quicker results, he even seduces one woman and tries to perform for the camera, set on a timer. He also auditions for a role in a play entitled "Be Black Baby," in which the white spectators are humiliated by black performers. The film goes off on many tangents, using black-and-white footage to capture seemingly spontaneous reactions of passersby, but it never loses its obsession with voyeurism and the power of the camera. In many ways, this rambunctious mess gets closer to De Palma's dark heart than many of his later, more artistically successful works. Charles Durning appears in an early role as a slum landlord.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

An online film critic said upon the release of 2000's Mission to Mars—probably the film that demonstrates the single largest gap in perception between mainstream American audiences and hardcore French cinephiles—that there's no better test case for the auteurist model currently working in film criticism than Brian De Palma. No matter how seemingly diverse his films are (or, conversely, how seemingly tied they are to the work of a certain suspense director), they are all immediately identifiable as "a film by Brian De Palma." But too often De Palma's films are looked at as simple, stylistically flossy, self-referential exercises using thriller genre tropes. This is unfortunate, because it leaves no room for De Palma's reckless early films, including the stunning, complex comedy Hi, Mom!

Conceived as a sequel of sorts to the three-pronged satire of 1968's Greetings (in fact, Hi, Mom! was originally set to be titled Son of Greetings), Hi, Mom! is likewise a film with three major threads, only all are devoted to the character of Jon Rubin (played by an appealing, floppy-topped Robert De Niro in a performance many consider to be a direct harbinger of his Travis Bickle role in Taxi Driver). (Readers should be advised of possible spoilers, and those already familiar with the film should be aware that I make no attempt to clearly streamline the film's wild, ungainly plot.) Jon, a Vietnam vet, drifts through the film like a skuzzy butterfly, moving from one underground social environment to the next: first the world of pornographic filmmaking, next becoming an actor in a performance art-cum-social crusaders' college theater troupe, finally landing on domestic terrorism. His enlightenment-barbarism is held against a distorted paradigm of flowering courtship rituals with Judy (Jennifer Salt), the girl with whom he initially wants to make his Candid Camera pornographic film.

De Palma biographer-enthusiast Laurent Bouzereau notes in The De Palma Cut that the film received rave reviews from adventurous critics, but suffered a financial failure that led De Palma to also consider it an artistic failure. But one has to take into consideration that the director's greatest directorial strategy—one that incidentally informs Hi, Mom! more than it does practically any other De Palma film—is his attempt to make us aware of our role as an audience, and also our connection with what he as a director is attempting to accomplish through a heady mix of artifice, contradiction, and a hectic emotional pitch.

De Palma's films are nothing if not structural, representational works of art, filled with winking moments that distance the audience from the diagetic details of his scenarios through their flamboyant technique (the slow-mo zoom on Nancy Allen's open-book face as she discovers Angie Dickenson in the elevator in Dressed to Kill, the downright Brechtian finale to Body Double), even as other equally showboating moments are galvanizing narrative K.O. punches (John Travolta feverishly discovers his erased tapes in Blow Out, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos comes to the water's surface in Femme Fatale).

If indeed De Palma's own auto-critique of Hi, Mom! in relation to his own personal canon was informed by what wags sarcastically refer to as the "Hitchcock connection" (derisively calling to mind images of De Palma fixed on the belly of the Master of Suspense like a lamprey or via an umbilical cord) and that this early counter-cultural comedy somehow falls short on the required tally of Hitch riffs, it would be a shame. Hi, Mom! might have been only the third feature film by the director, but practically every trait that would come to signify the art of De Palma is at play in the film, many of them, natch, in direct conflict with another.

The most Hitchcockian riff that De Palma ever examined is the capacity for the human psyche to harbor intense, complicated divergence. But, whereas Hitchcock often resolved this tension by placing it in the context of a relatively well adjusted, normalized society (i.e. the long-winded psychological rationale that closes Psycho), De Palma complicates the archetype through his insistence on highlighting the equally labyrinthine tangle of contradictions behind social normalcy, knots that seem to cause individual maladaptive dysfunction. An early broadcast from NIT (that's National Intelligent Television, the front used by the anarchist theater clan) sees the crew of black students taking to the streets with the intention of exposing the internal hypocrisies of the average WASP. Obviously baiting people to their breaking points, the students reveal the sham of social grace, as their targets are stripped of their reliable defense (their politeness and tacitly segregated racial congregations). This sequence is obviously the comedic set-up for the "Be Black, Baby" performance art nightmare that practically rapes the definition of social façades and the lengths people will go to preserve them. But it's also a reflection of Jon's demented internal logic (to the extent that a cipherous figure can be said to have logic); in De Palma's world he is portrayed as a man whose utter alienation from normalcy stems, appropriately enough, from the total absence of it.

As Chaka Khan purrs in "Tearin' It Up," "I'm going to make you wish there were two of you." Many schisms in De Palma's movies are tethered to sexual frustrations and confusions—basically anything having to do with sex that doesn't involve supine boudoir humping. The Fury can be taken as a sweeping, apocalyptic satire of educational sex education films, charting the development of one boy and one girl as they go through a sort of psychic puberty. The attempts of adults to contain their increasingly virile state (psychic abstinence) leads to the ultimate sexual-murderous release. Hi, Mom! doesn't so directly address the connection between sex and violence, but it should be noted that the film's last act, in which Jon plants a bomb that demolishes the building he and a pregnant Judy share in domestic tranquility, is a sly joke. Being that Jon and Judy met under the pretense of sexual intent (at least according to Jon), the fact that Judy is pregnant indicates a newfound absence of sexual conquests, and every tryst between the two now carries the promise of further consequences. Jon's destruction of everything that represents familial domesticity, like Amy Irving's "removal" of John Cassavetes, clears the way for further sexual adventures.

Like the shot in To Die For of Nicole Kidman as a kid looking back and forth between a video camera and the monitor feed in an effort to see her own face on television, Jon Rubin's relationship to pornography in the film's first segment is complicated by his desire to straddle the gulf between watching and being watched. (The Rube Goldberg device he invents to film himself making love to Judy in the building across the way—which predictably fails—accentuates the comically Sisyphesian difficulty of bridging the gap between the two.) In its take on the relationship people have with their own image-making games, Hi, Mom! occasionally comes off as the work of a film student who spent his summer session on Marshall McLuhan blitzed out of his mind on acid. The concepts are all there, but they've been kneaded into a bizarrely funny burlesque of the "medium is the message" worst-case scenario.

With the "Be Black, Baby" sequence, De Palma manages to do with racial tension what he no doubt hoped to pull off with sexual ambiguity in filming Cruising (a project he lost to William Friedkin before turning out the thematically similar Dressed to Kill). Aided by a deliberate dissection of a very real social stress point, it is one of the most thrilling left turns ever filmed. The theme of voyeurism, which up to this point had been treated as a blue joke, becomes a hellish shattering of the seemingly secure fourth wall, both for the on-screen audience of upper-crust whites who attend the show, submitting themselves to humiliation, beatings, and broomstick rapes, as well as the actual film's audience, who are basically cast adrift into an 8mm calamity without even the comfort of a recognizable character. For their trouble, the audience is thrown a bone with the post-performance reactions of the upper-class twits who exclaim, amazingly, their gratitude for being shown how they're directly responsible for all of society's racial ills.

There are, of course, basketsful of further stylistic and structural tactics that construct Hi, Mom! If the descriptions of the film's collage of ideas and subplots all sounds rather daunting and busy, it probably is that and more so; this is, after all, De Palma's Godard period (I say that without wishing to be flippant). In fact, if the film indeed has a failing, it would be in its unbridled, undisciplined ambition. Early in Jon's would-be career as a pornographer, he pitches his idea to his decidedly uninterested producer (Allen Garfield, deliriously funny) to blur the lines between fiction and verité by filming four real windows, four real storylines. This not only predicts De Palma's fascination with split-screen effects (he actually had already experimented with this device in Dionysus in '69), but also his fascination with the difference between private emotions and public "performance" (take note of the fact that the "reality" he's filming across the courtyard is filled with sexual fantasy role-playing, or "fiction"). Hi, Mom! is an overachieving film that deserves better than mere footnote status in De Palma's already far too marginalized career.

Reverse Shot [Michael Joshua Rowin]

Cinepad (Jim Emerson) review also reviewing GREETINGS

Hi Mom Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

VideoVista review Gary Couzens

Jdanspsa Wyksui

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

PopMatters Tim O’Neil

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

TV Guide

GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT

USA (91 mi) 1972

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

Warner Brothers turned off the money before Brian De Palma was able to finish shooting this anarchic 1973 comedy. Consequently, the plotline, about a business executive (Tom Smothers) who decides to chuck it all and become a magician, is even more confusing than it would have been otherwise. De Palma, though, gets off some interesting shots (there's a witty parody of a Hitchcock track under the opening credits), and Orson Welles does some magic tricks. A mess, but not intolerable. With John Astin, Allen Garfield, and Katharine Ross. 91 min.

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

Unable to handle work pressure, marketing executive Donald Beeman walks out of his job and becomes a tap dancing magician under the tutelage of Mr Dallesandro. On his travels he encounters various strange people. Later he and his workaholic ex-boss create Tap Dancing Magicians, a course for pressured executives to drop out into, and it becomes one of the most successful corporations in the world. But then this business begins to exert pressure on Donald too.

This was Brian De Palma’s third film. With his next film, Sisters (1973), De Palma ventured into the psycho-thriller genre and had an international hit. He would go on over the next decade to make hits like Carrie (1976), The Fury (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981) and become synonymous with stylish psycho-thrillers and his recurrent Hitchcock homages. But before that De Palma for all the world seemed to be shaping up as a director of quirky independent films with the likes of Greetings (1968), The Wedding Party (1969), Hi, Mom (1970) and this. Sadly most of his earlier indie films languish forgotten nowadays – they are rarely seen today and difficult to find, if not completely unavailable, on video.

All of which is a shame as Get to Know Your Rabbit is a brilliantly funny absurdist comedy. Were it more well known it would undoubtedly become the cult film it should be. Americans never really understood the absurdist sense of humour that emerged out of the British tradition (Monty Python, the Goon Show, The Young Ones et al), which this falls very much into. This may well explain why the film was not a success. Jordan Crittenden’s script is filled with wonderfully nonchalant absurdities – the bomb-caller who tries to announce there is six minutes before a bomb goes off and is put on hold; Katharine Ross’s delightfully nonsensical story about her crush on the paper-boy and how she had to sell herself to pay for the paper subscription in order to continue to see him every day; or John Astin as Smothers’s workaholic former boss begging – “I’ve been so long without an office. Just give me an office, I wouldn’t ask you to trust me with a job” and then collapsing in relief when he finally gets to paperclip two pieces of paper together. The final throwaway gag is sublime. The cast are memorable, of which John Astin and a wonderfully dignified Orson Welles, who gets to indulge his love of magic tricks, are particularly standout. De Palma directs in sublimely droll straight-face and the film is a joyous little gem. The only time that De Palma ever got to indulge this sort of sense of humour again was in The Phantom of the Paradise (1974) – comedy is a genre one wishes he would visit again.

Reverse Shot [Nicolas Rapold]

Slant Magazine review Zach Campbell

TV Guide

Channel 4 Film capsule review

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

SISTERS

USA (92 mi) 1973

The Silencers to Smiles of a Summer Night Pauline Kael

Brian De Palma's low-budget horror movie about a psychotic ex-Siamese twin has its share of flaked-out humor (as in the TV game-show parody at the beginning) and De Palma does some virtuoso stunts though not in the dream-slapstick style of his later thrillers, CARRIE (1976) and THE FURY (1978). This is a much more primitive scare picture. He lurches his way through; he can't seem to get two people talking to make a simple expository point without its sounding like the drabbest Republic picture of 1938. The facetious dialogue is a wet blanket, and De Palma isn't quite up to his apparent intention--to provide cheap thrills that are also a parody of old corn. He manages the thrills, though (there are some demented knife-slashings), and audiences seemed to be happily freaked by Bernard Herrmann's score, with its old radio-play throb and zing. With Margot Kidder, who knows how to turn on sexiness with a witch's precision, and Jennifer Salt, who gives a feeble performance as a nitwit girl reporter. Also with Charles Durning, Lisle Wilson, Mary Davenport, Bill Finley, and Barnard Hughes. Shakily written by De Palma and Louisa Rose. A Pressman-Williams Production, released by A.I.P. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Reeling.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

Though Sisters is an undeniably tight homage to Hitchcock from an obviously indebted De Palma, I am still inclined to place it at least a tier below the likes of Dressed to Kill and Body Double. It might just be that, when held up against the spectacles of Angie Dickenson's showering body double soaping up the velvety lining of her cootch or De Palma restaging the death-by-power-drill-phallus box cover of Slumber Party Massacre, the discreetness of Sisters' first hour (with its fairly obvious variations on doubling and mirroring psyches) can't help but seem a tad academic and recherché in comparison. If it weren't for the post-murder clean-up split-screen (with a cunning frame within said split featuring Margot Kidder's mentally fried Danielle looking at her bifurcated image in the bathroom mirror) and Bernard Herrmann's knowing B-rate knock-off of his own musical clichés, one is almost tempted to entertain De Palma detractors' arguments that his exploitation of Hitchcock tropes is nothing but a dead end. Lucky for the film that Jennifer Salt's one parsable character trait—a habitual need to place "very important" telephone calls (I think she tallies at least 27 in the space of a half-hour)—leads her into the lair of a Lysol-wielding C-rate faux-Faye Dunaway, who stops Salt's Nancy Drew momentum dead in its tracks, leisurely hissing "Better spray yourself, hon…I think you have a cold." Her feline devotion to keeping germs off of the receiver makes quiet mockery of Salt's huffy addiction to moving her reporter's notion of "plot" forward, culminating in a primal scream that sends Salt, Kidder, and even De Palma himself reeling into the film's free-form, experimental, destructive final act. As the symbolic gatekeeper to the very ennoblement of De Palma's reputation as "Master of Suspense, Jr.," you'd think the nut would at least get a screen credit.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Brian De Palma made several films before Sisters, but that 1973 thriller, recently restored for video and DVD release, truly set the stage for the rest of his career. A self-confessed homage to Hitchcock bursting with references to Psycho, Rear Window, and others, Sisters allowed De Palma to find his own voice by imitating another's. But those who have written him off as a stylish imitator were wrong from the start: Sisters could never have been made without his inspiration, but Hitchcock never could have made it. Independently financed and shot on an extremely modest budget, Sisters joins Hollywood-caliber suspense sequences to the feel of a gritty exploitation film and themes in tune with the time of its creation. That it opens with one of DePalma's trademark fake-outs—in this case Peeping Toms, a game show that recalls Candid Camera by way of Michael Powell—reveals both its importance in terms of the director's later work and how much the initial enjoyment of it depends on an ignorance of its many plot twists and ingenious dashing of expectations. Suffice it to say that it features Margot Kidder as a sweet French-Canadian model, Jennifer Salt as an intrepid female reporter, Charles Durning as a by-the-book private eye, a madhouse, a doctor specializing in Siamese twins, and a fatal set of prize cutlery. With Sisters, De Palma created an expertly paced technically audacious thriller that's too knowing to be easily dismissed as a mere exercise. Albeit a near-perfect fusion of craft and material, particularly in some remarkable split-screen sequences, there's more at stake than immediately apparent: Consider the way every male character uses a combination of patronization and aggression to suppress female ambition, or the way an uncredited (and scene-stealing) Olympia Dukakis uses different techniques to the same end in a cameo as Salt's mother. For a director later labeled a misogynist, Sisters has an awful lot in common with early-'70s feminism. But, as a filmmaker most often comfortable working within a genre, De Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best. Featuring such wicked jokes as a sequence juxtaposing a woman going into seizures with a man happily and unknowingly purchasing her a birthday cake, it finds his career quickly taking shape.

Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford

The first film of New York based filmmaker Brian De Palma to receive a wide theatrical release and attract favorable notices from mainstream critics, Sisters (1973) is an audacious mixture of psychosexual thriller and Alfred Hitchcock homage infused with a wicked sense of humor. Certainly, De Palma had already established himself as a director to watch with such promising indie efforts as Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970), two improvisational, anti-establishment satires, both of which starred a young Robert de Niro. But Sisters is the film that set the tone and style of De Palma's "thriller" oeuvre which blossomed with Carrie (1976) and peaked with Dressed to Kill (1980). Bursting with creative energy and visual experimentation, the film is a virtuoso sampler of his strengths (and weaknesses) and a lot more fun than some of his later work which often verged on self-parody.

In the tradition of other mystery thrillers about twins where one is good and one is bad (The Dark Mirror [1946], Dead Ringer [1964]), Sisters tops that plot device with a kinky twist: Danielle (Margot Kidder) is a former Siamese twin, separated from her psychotic sister, Dominique. She becomes the object of a police investigation when a neighbor, aspiring journalist Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), witnesses a murder in Danielle's apartment. When the police fail to find any evidence that would convict Danielle, Grace conducts her own private investigation, hiring a detective (Charles Durning) to monitor the suspect's apartment while she tries to unravel the strange relationship between Danielle and her creepy ex-husband, Emil (William Finley), who continues to stalk her. It all ends in a madhouse, appropriately enough, with Grace strapped to a gurney and completely at the mercy of Emil, who is revealed as the doctor who performed the separation surgery on Danielle/Dominique.

While De Palma's detractors have always accused him of plagiarizing Hitchcock, Sisters is actually an inspired homage to the British master of suspense, with De Palma enriching the narrative with situations and elements from key Hitchcock films. The film's voyeuristic nature and the nosy neighbor who cries murder is inspired by Rear Window (1954); Emil's attempts to control and dominate Danielle mirror James Stewart's behavior toward Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958), the unexpected early murder of a sympathetic character audiences had assumed was the protagonist harkens back to Janet Leigh's shocking demise in Psycho (1960). The other Hitchcock connection, of course, is the film's music score, composed by Bernard Herrmann, one of Hitchcock's most famous collaborators (The Trouble with Harry [1955], The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956], North by Northwest [1959], etc.). De Palma strikes just the right note of freaked-out paranoia with the opening credit sequence featuring Herrmann's frantic orchestration which is like an amphetamine-fueled version of his Psycho overture. Yet, despite the pervasive Hitchcock influence, Sisters has a distinctive style all its own with De Palma employing split-screen techniques, alternate points-of-view, dream sequences, frenetic editing, ominous tracking shots and dashes of graphic gore to give the film a feverish rollercoaster momentum.

Scratch the surface, however, and you might notice a feminist subtext which has been noted by many film scholars, among them Robin Wood who wrote in his chapter on Brian De Palma in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond: "Sisters analyzes the ways in which women are oppressed within patriarchal society on two levels, the professional (Grace) and the psychosexual (Danielle/Dominique)." Even if you don't buy that academic jibber-jabber, Sisters is a true reflection of its troubled era, marked by the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War and the emergence of the women's movement. It's also easy to see how some reviewers believed that De Palma was creating a feminist horror film since both Danielle and Grace are the real victims of Sisters, both of them thwarted in their attempts at independence by men. Danielle is constantly manipulated by Emil and the prescription drugs he administers while Grace is at first humored by the police, then dismissed and eventually silenced as the film's potential heroine. At the film's conclusion, she has returned home to her mother's care in a post-hypnotic state, docile and subservient.

On the other hand, some critics consider Sisters misogynistic, an accusation which has followed De Palma throughout his career. Remember the cruel fates awaiting Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill and Fiona Lewis and Carrie Snodgress in The Fury (1978), their deaths rendered with an almost sadistic glee? One could argue that Sisters has no sympathetic female characters. Danielle could just as easily be viewed as a dangerous psychopath, a castrating avenger who alternately seduces and destroys men. As for Grace, De Palma occasionally exploits her character for humor in scenes where she bungles her own investigation and comes off like a nitwit (such as the scene where she drops the birthday cake on the cop's leg). The fact that Sisters can be viewed as both a feminist film and a movie by a misogynist makes it one of De Palma's most fascinating works and one that compliments the film's schizophrenic nature.

Without a doubt, Sisters marks an important turning point in De Palma's career. It looks back toward his early films with its loose, freewheeling, try-anything style of filmmaking and the presence of William Finley and Jennifer Salt who appeared in some of De Palma's first movies. It also anticipates his rise as a Hollywood auteur with its more traditionally structured plot, visual stylization and prominent roles for Margot Kidder and Charles Durning, both of whom would go on to greater success; Kidder for box-office hits such as Superman [1978], The Amityville Horror [1979], and Superman II [1980] and Durning for Oscar®-nominated supporting roles in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas [1982] and To Be or Not to Be [1983]. For some however, Durning's shining moment may be the final closing shot in Sisters, one of the great comic fadeouts of all time and the perfect setup for a sequel.

SISTERS : Les cicatrices du gros plan (Soeurs de Sang) de Brian de ... Didier Truffot from Cinetudes (translated below)

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Sisters (1973) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, September 25, 2009

Sisters Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

Reverse Shot [Tom J. Carlisle]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

Flipside Movie Emporium (Michael Scrutchin) review [B+]

Images Movie Journal Derek Hill

DVD Journal JJB

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [1.5/5]

Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]

The Digital Bits dvd review [Criterion Collection] Adam Jahnke

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3.5/5]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review

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DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

Movielocity Movie Reviews (Blake Kunisch) dvd review [7/10]

Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]

Grouch at Epinions.com

Horror View Head Cheeze

DVD Talk (Brian R. Boisvert) dvd review [3/5]

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]

Elusive Lucidity: De Palma Image of the Day *

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE

USA (92 mi) 1974

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

This rock 'n' roll musical is still many fans' favorite due to its success as a "midnight movie," a year before The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's a new take on Phantom of the Opera, and quite unlike any other De Palma film. An evil music producer (Paul Williams, who also wrote the score) steals the new composition of Faust by a talented young composer (William Finley), written specifically for a gifted young singer named Phoenix (Jessica Harper). To complicate things, the composer tumbles into a record-pressing machine and becomes the phantom! Filled with bizarre colors, vintage 70s-era rock and truly imaginative ideas, it's still a thrill. Sissy Spaceck reportedly worked as a set dresser, which helped lead to her role as Carrie two years later.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Despite the dread MOR dirges given to Harper's crooning ingenue, arguably De Palma's finest film. A highly inventive updating of the Phantom of the Opera story to the rockbiz world - complete with borrowings from Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray - it tells of rock composer Finley's desire for revenge after he is cheated by a nightclub and record label mogul (Williams). Nothing that remarkable about the plot in itself, but De Palma employs his love of gadgetry to imaginative effect (making terrific use of split screens and video technology), and casts a satirically beady eye upon the money-hungry foibles of the music industry. Best, in fact, is the cameo by Gerrit Graham as the camp, 'Producers'-style glamrock star, although Memmoli's world-weary manager and the piss-take of Alice Cooper are also memorable.

Phantom Lady to Planet of the Apes Pauline Kael

This satire of horror movies is also a rock musical comedy. The writer-director, Brian De Palma, has an original comic temperament; he's drawn to rabid visual exaggeration and to sophisticated slapstick comedy. William Finley is the idealistic young composer who is robbed of his music, busted for drugs, and sent to Sing Sing, all at the instigation of Swan (creepy Paul Williams), the entrepreneur of Death Records, who has made a pact with the Devil for eternal youth. The composer escapes from prison, is maimed by a record-pressing machine, and becomes the Phantom, who haunts Swan's new rock place, the Paradise, where the girl he loves (Jessica Harper) becomes a star. This mixture of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and Faust isn't enough for De Palma. He heaps on layers of acid-rock satire and parodies of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, PSYCHO, and THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY--AND the impacted plots actually function for him. The film is a one-of-a-kind entertainment, with a kinetic, breakneck wit. The cinematographer, Larry Pizer, keeps the images full to overflowing, and the set designer, Jack Fisk, supplies striking takeoffs of the frenzied decor of German silent films. The singer, Beef, is played by Gerrit Graham, who gives the single funniest performance; Harold Oblong, Jeffrey Comanor, and Archie Hahn turn up as three different groups--the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums, and, with black-and-white expressionist faces, the Undeads. 20th Century-Fox. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Reeling.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Mark Radice) review

One of De Palma's earlier films, Phantom of the Paradise is a bizarre blend of rock, horror and comedy, as well as being a pastiche of a number of sources, including Faust, Hitchcock and a wry comment on the rock word's commercialiam and on showbiz as a whole.

Swan (Paul Williams), a megafamous rock producer; steals Winslow Leach's (William Finley) rock cantata on Faust frames him and gets him sent to prison. Leach escapes and breaks into Swan's studios but inadvertently gets crushed in a record press, becoming horribly deformed, and starts to haunt the Paradise, Swan's new club/theatre, where Swan plans to crown the opening night with Leach's opus. Thereafter Leach, a la Phantom of the Opera, proceeds to wreak havoc on anyone who murders his beloved work except for one girl, Phoenix (Jessica Harper).

De Palma as usual puts in a few cinematic references, a cheap joke Psycho shower scene, a programmed assassination faintly reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate, and of course echoes of earlier versions of The Phantom of the Opera. The film is adorned with the unattractive side of 70s style: tight half T-shirts, huge bell-bottoms, the ubiquitous lank hair with centre-parting, men with chunky black polo-necks, overgrown fringes and nasty 'taches, plus the encroaching drugs scene and primitive music technology. He also uses his split screen device, and makes good use of sound and video technology (then). The general feeling is (partly since the film has dated quite remarkably) quite bitter, but this is intentional, as De Palma deliberately sets out to satirise showbiz - the machine you have to conform to (as he had to and still has to) to get anywhere, the sad wannabees, and pathetic easily-pleased crowds.

The grand finale is a grotesque almost cartoon-like amalgam of rapid cutting, bizarre colours, wild music and crazy people, with a touch of Grand Guignol thrown in for good measure - it has to be seen to be believed. It suitably encapsulates De Palma's quirky film, an entertaining period piece from the 1970s, whose satire still holds much relevance in the cut-throat world of showbusiness today.

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

A hit only in Winnipeg (a city then and now of exquisite good taste), PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE seems to have everything going against it. Music by the anti-cool songsmith Paul Williams, who also plays one of the leading roles, an alienating, mannered, downright strange performance by William Finley in the title role, a visual scheme exuberant with kitsch, gaudy colors, and off-putting compositions, and a tone of jokiness and self-mockery resolutely at odds with the deadly seriousness of the subject matter: at first glance, there's nothing about the movie that's not at odds with itself. It's the same with the plot line, which is so absurdly constructed and disconcerting as to fairly defy summary. Winslow Leach, bespectacled composer of a cantata about Faust, has his music stolen by the Svengali-esque Swan, a producer and nightclub owner. Framed as a heroin dealer, Winslow is sent to Sing Sing, where all his teeth are extracted in an experimental medical procedure. He soon escapes, however, when he hears his own songs on the radio being butchered and breaks in to Swan's record-pressing plant, only to have his head trapped in the machinery. Now with the grooves of the hated record inscribed on his face, and his own voice destroyed, he determines to destroy Swan's nightclub, disguising himself as a cybernetic owl, only to be waylaid in his quest for revenge when he falls in love with the ingénue Phoenix, played by the great Jessica Harper. And that's just the first two reels. There are a dozen musical numbers, elaborately staged and hilariously parodic, and a series of terrible murders, committed grotesquely by the otherwise sympathetic hero, Winslow, all of which work to prevent any attempt on our part figure out what in the world we're watching. PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE never lets us get comfortable, and this is not merely on the level of plot. The film's strange, distracting style and other-worldly sights and sounds are just artificial enough to suggest that the work is wholly within a fantasy land, the fairy-tale world of the classic Hollywood musical, and just nasty, explicit, and corporeal enough to indicate that we're seeing a version of reality. After Winslow becomes the Phantom, he plants a time bomb in the trunk of a prop car about to be rolled onto a stage crowded with his enemies. It's is a dead ringer for the bomb we see in the opening seconds of TOUCH OF EVIL, and what follows is nothing less than a stunning one-upping of that film's luxurious and deadly first shot. Not content with one mobile camera, De Palma shoots his car-bombing in split-screen and during a song-and-dance routine. On one level, it's an exercise in audacity and confusion and suspense, a great director showing off. But, as in all aspects of PHANTOM, the segment serves to unnerve the viewer tonally, preventing us from fully enjoying the technical mastery of the style or from enmeshing ourselves within the story and feeling unmitigated suspense and horror, from either condemning or identifying with the characters and their actions. Hilarious, horrifying, mortifying, embarrassing, engrossing, and delirious all at once, PHANTOM's masterful control over every aspect of cinema makes it impossible to truly come to term with, but makes it one of the most profoundly pleasurable experiences in American cinema.

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

At the time of The Phantom of the Paradise, director Brian De Palma had emerged with four quirkily eccentric comedies – Greetings (1968), The Wedding Party (1969), Hi, Mom (1970) and Get to Know Your Rabbit (1971). However De Palma had not really garnered major attention until the striking psycho-thriller Sisters (1973). This psycho-thriller genre would for the next decade become De Palma’s most fertile directorial ground. (See below for Brian De Palma’s other titles).

The Phantom of the Paradise is one of Brian de Palma's most enjoyable hour-and-a-halves. It was written back in 1969 when De Palma was still in experimental form. De Palma has designed the film as a parody of the oft-filmed The Phantom of the Opera (1925) - all conducted as a hilarious parody of seventies glitter rock. Although not just satisfied with The Phantom of the Opera, De Palma also throws in spoofs of Faust, The Picture of Dorian Grey and the Universal Frankenstein films. Not to mention a really funny parody of the Psycho (1960) shower sequence - the first and funniest of numerous Hitchcock quotes that would turn up in De Palma's films - with The Phantom wielding a toilet plunger in lieu of a knife. Just as much as the horror genre, De Palma conducts wild and hilarious swings at 70s glam rock - with De Palma and songwriter/star Paul Williams winding in send-ups of every imaginable musical style from The Beach Boys to Alice Cooper to retro-50s rockers like Sha Na Na.

De Palma is a director with a love of flashy directorial style. Here he characteristically shows off - some of his use of anamorphic lenses and split-screen trickery proves a distraction, but the scenes with his camera conducting 360^o pans, or animated musical bars and notes winding around Finley as he composes are highly stylish.

Gnomic 5’2” Paul Williams gives a campy performance that, among the rest of the film’s lunatic exaggerations, seems only to be perfectly in place. He’s clearly having a lot of fun. Williams had a sporadic career as a musician and actor in film and tv – he appeared as an orangutang in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) and in Smokey and the Bandit (1977), had his own very short-lived tv series The Paul Williams Show (1979), voiced The Penguin in the various animated Batman tv series of the 90s, and wrote the theme music for The Love Boat (1977-86) and songs for several of the Muppet movies. But the film’s real scene stealer is Gerrit Graham as Beef, a macho parody that seems to combine David Bowie’s gender bender persona with Gary Glitter to quite hilarious regard. Gerrit Graham had debuted in Brian De Palma’s Greetings, made his first major performance in The Phantom of the Paradise and went on to appear in a lot of B horror movies throughout the 1980s, particularly those produced by Albert and Charles Band. Graham however has never been better than he was here. His attempts to walk in platform heels are guaranteed to have one in hysterics.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) the following year mined fairly much the same territory as The Phantom of the Paradise in its combination of monster movie clichés and parodistic glitter rock. This joyfully mad film is a perfect companion piece for the Rocky Horror set and is indeed a side of himself that Mr De Palma should visit again some time.

De Palma’s other genre films are:– Get to Know Your Rabbit (1971), Sisters/Blood Sisters (1973), Obsession (1976), Carrie (1976), The Fury (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), Body Double (1984), Raising Cain (1992), Mission to Mars (2000) and Femme Fatale (2002).

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Reverse Shot [Travis Hoover]

Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review

Critic After Dark Noel Vera

Epinions.com - Review on Phantom of the Paradise by Phineaskc

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [4/5]

Horrorview Suicide Blonde

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/5]

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Dennis Prince

Cinema Suicide Bryan White

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]

Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Weinberg]

DVD Verdict (Kevin Lee) dvd review

Mondo Digital also reviewing DRESSED TO KILL and THE FURY

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

OBSESSION

USA (98 mi) 1976 ‘Scope

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Schrader and De Palma's tribute to Hitchcock's Vertigo may lack the misogyny and bloodbath sensationalism of De Palma's later work, but it's still dressed up in a mortifyingly vacuous imitation of the Master's stylistic touches. Virtuoso gliding camera movements do not necessarily a good film make. The main problem with the film, in fact, is the excruciatingly slow pace; although if you've seen Vertigo, the story itself - of a businessman haunted by guilt about his wife's death, and getting involved years later with her lookalike - will fail to yield the narrative surprises and suspense required in a thriller.

BoxOffice.com [Wade Major] (link lost)

If "Obsession" isn't Brian De Palma's best film, it's definitely his best "Hitchcockian" film. A fascinatingly clever, vibrantly mystical reworking of the "Vertigo" concept, "Obsession" is wall-to-wall virtuoso filmmaking sustained by a fabulously well-structured script. The story basically concerns a businessman (Cliff Robertson) who loses his wife and daughter to a botched kidnapping plot, only to years later run into a woman who is the spitting image of his deceased wife.

There are the obligatory creepy twists and turns, nearly all of them dictated by "Vertigo," but just askew enough that audiences still won't know where the film is headed. It's a credit to the script by Paul Schrader, who wrote his text based on an idea that he and De Palma generated after an enthusiastic viewing of "Vertigo." That story and more are related in the brief documentary on the film's making, which is the most significant extra here.

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

Brian De Palma seems to vary from one film to another as to whether he is the plunderer of Hitchcock's tomb or the carrier of his torch. This borderline genre entry is the first of De Palma's reworkings of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). [De Palma even admits on the DVD release that his decision to make Obsession came after he and screenwriter Paul Schrader watched a print of Vertigo, a film that was out of general circulation at the time]. The debt is emphasized even to the extent of De Palma employing Vertigo composer Bernard Herrmann. (Also borrowed, one might note, is the famous scissors killing from Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder [1954]). De Palma's other great debt is to Nicolas Roeg and Don't Look Now (1973), from whom he borrows the obsessive, gloomily haunted vision of Italy (he merely swapping Rome for Roeg's Venice locations ). It is certainly an attractive idea to set the Vertigo obsession amid the sinister Europe, playing on the anxiety of the continent's oppressive past and culture that have preoccupied filmmakers ever since The Third Man (1949). Like Roeg, De Palma certainly creates an attractive image of figures funereally moving through an elegant Old World landscape, caught up in a doomed repetitive destiny. Herrmann's score is powerful and brooding and Vilmos Zsigmond delivers alluringly gauzy, watercolour photography. But while the characters brood, they are as silent as graves and the backdrop offers no resonance to anything other than to mechanical plot twists. It might have worked, but when the final contrived and completely implausible plot twist comes, the whole ridiculous house of cards comes tumbling down into complete absurdity.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

Geneviève Bujold was a little bit like the Björk of late '60s, early '70s cinema. She worked between predominately pop-minded American films and hermetic, aggressively Euro productions, coasted a long way on adorably pliable looks, and kept you perpetually off-balance with her off-kilter line-readings and interpretations. She was a sterile cuckoo with a voice whose grit confirmed the darkness in her eyes. Paul Schrader may have ended up having to capitulate Obsession's original (ridiculous) scripted ending to the will of Brian De Palma, but the casting of Bujold in what is essentially Kim Novak's role in Vertigo results in a literary emphasis not seen in De Palma's work again until the strong-arm showboating of Oliver Stone and David Mamet. Obsession is, as far as De Palma's tributes to Hitchcock go, half-baked and far-fetched without even the benefit of being audacious-unto-tasteless. It's the movie in which the only dearth of a metaphoric "double" is the comedy mask that ought to complement the dour visage of tragedy. (Is that the reason that it is Obsession, and not any other De Palma film up until Femme Fatale, that is included in the top 1,000 film list of that old sourpuss Jonathan Rosenbaum—the critic who sneered at the director for expressing delight at audience reaction to Dressed to Kill?) While Bernard Herrmann's rapturously funereal score (with at least four separate dirge leitmotifs swirling around the opulent, central "Valse Lente") ratchets up the film's metastasized, polluted doom-gloom, Bujold takes her role (a screenwriter's "pitch" if there ever was one—e.g. "What if we took the idea that Kim Novak was practically young enough to be James Stewart's daughter and just ran with that?") in the opposite direction, at least initially. Within minutes of meeting Cliff Robertson's sad sack, she bites heartily into Schrader's symbolic dialogue about the ethical implications of discovering an original draft of art and restoring the revision. It's clearly a bout of self-deprecating guilt from a writer who felt a little dirty turning Vertigo into a teary-eyed sick joke. But Bujold's enthusiasm as a performer redeems the entire picture, especially when she's asked to perform flashback scenes that shouldn't work but, thanks to her, represent another of De Palma's fearlessly experimental whims.

OBSESSION by Brian de Palma / 1975 Jérôme Reber (Hughes) from Cinetudes

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Reverse Shot [Brad Westcott]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Erick Harper) dvd review

Jackass Critics [Tom Blain]

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

Variety review

TV Guide

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

CARRIE

USA (98 mi) 1976

C.C. and Company to Catouche Pauline Kael

The best scary-funny movie since JAWS-a teasing, terrifying, lyrical shocker, directed by Brian De Palma, who has the wickedest baroque sensibility at large in American movies. Pale, gravel-voiced Sissy Spacek gives a classic chameleon performance as a repressed high-school senior whose energy is released only telekinetically, and Piper Laurie plays her deep-voiced, sexy fundamentalist mother. With John Travolta, Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, and William Katt. United Artists. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book When the Lights Go Down.

Time Out review

Unlike other Hollywood virtuosos, De Palma's central inspiration remains unashamedly the horror film and its thundering techniques of emotional manipulation. Carrie is almost an amalgamation of The Exorcist and American Graffiti, with Spacek as a religious maniac's daughter whose experience of puberty is so harrowing that it develops paranormal aspects. De Palma's ability to combine the romantic and the horrific has never been so pulverising. Here he contrives a wild juxtaposition of Carrie's freakish inner turmoil with the dreamy cruisin' mentality of her high-school colleagues. The style and imagery are strictly primary in the Freudian sense: menstrual blood and spotless ball dresses, Cinderella dressed up for the abattoir. But the fierce sympathy it extends to its unfashionable central character puts the film a million miles above the contemporary line in sick exploitation.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Harral) review

Carrie sees De Palma on top form in what is perhaps his preferred territory, namely that of the horror movie. Sissy Spacek could almost have been born just to play Carrie, the daughter of an ultra religious Christian, whose fanatical and dictatorial character dominates her life, causing her to be treated by her "cool" high school peers as a "weirdo", and general social outcast. However, with the onset of puberty Carrie discovers that she possesses fantastic psychic powers and sufficient means to strike back at her teenage antagonists.

In the hands of De Palma this seemingly straightforward horror story becomes a vehicle for a slick display of stylistic virtuosity. His intermingling of dreamy romanticism and schlock horror is a pleasure to behold, climaxing in a fantastic scene at the high school dance where all the stops are pulled out (slow motion shots, split screen sequences, floating soft focus cameras and numerous other devices) to make Carrie's final humiliation a truly stunning set piece. While De Palma's obvious linking of the supernatural and the emergent female sexuality is not an uncommon one for a horror movie to make (see The Exorcist, for example), his evident sympathy with the internal turmoil and pain of the eponymous "heroine" is relatively unusual for the genre. Carrie is all the more impressive and fascinating as a consequence.

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

The strange CARRIE finds De Palma in a mode of perpetual discovery, movement, and defilement. In the film's now-legendary second scene, Carrie White, High School senior, cleans her thighs in the shower after P.E. class. She drops her bar of soap, and we, but not she, see it bounce off the tiles at her feet only to be replaced by a stream of blood filling her hand. After a moment, she gazes into her palm, and we see her fingers in close-up, cupped and dripping with menses. For Carrie, it is a moment of unspeakable horror—she wails like a beast for someone to help her—a horror of sudden knowledge: her body isn't what she thought it was, is in fact terrifyingly unruly where it ought most be domestic. Her blood has revealed her body to be a thing she cannot recognize, a thing we and Carrie are soon to see has a power that, like her first period, is uncontrollable, bloody in effect, and invisible in source. This moment becomes the structuring conceit for both the film's thematics and its style: nearly every shot finds space operating as on the principle of the jack-in-the-box, showing us what we expect to see but in a different place or way than it ought to be. While punishing her daughter for daring to enter sexual maturity, Carrie's religious fruitcake mother works with an antique sewing machine in a forced deep-focus composition made possible by the split-field diopter. It is a deeply uncomfortable shot, with the mother framed far to the right and a vast and preternaturally focused empty kitchen behind her. Suddenly, Carrie emerges through an unseen door into that kitchen. Two shots later, Carrie is weeping in a medium shot, but in a mirror: De Palma has faded from the woman, still at work making clothes, to her daughter's face in reflection such that Carrie's image has exactly replaced that of her mother's head. These slightly off revelations repeatedly reveal hidden filths, corruptions, or hatefulnesses we hadn't access to before: a hurtful graffito, a murderous parent, a bucket of blood. CARRIE begins and ends not in blood but in bleedings, horrifying transfers of what we keep desperately contained within our bodies at all cost, and as such it is a film that itself metaphorically bleeds, spreading though every crevice of its diegesis, mapping out the creepily familiar and labyrinthine space of monstrosity.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

Carrie might be a film about high school, but it was perhaps Brian De Palma's first completely mature film, at least equaling the nearly-concurrent release Obsession in gothic pathos. Based on Stephen King's first novel, famously written in near-poverty as the future bestselling mogul tried to make ends meet by teaching English to high school kids, Carrie turns a fairly contemptuous source text (in the book, Carrie is nearly as unappealing as her tormentors) into, as Pauline Kael said, a "teasing, lyrical thriller." It brought both De Palma and King into mainstream visibility, kick-started the careers of nearly everyone involved (or, in Piper Laurie's case, provided an unexpected return to form playing horror cinema's ultimate mom from hell), won two acting Oscar nominations and earned fantastic reviews and word-of-mouth. Surely this represents De Palma's first great selling out, right?

Absolutely not. Carrie, a profoundly sad horror comedy about a dumped-on, telekinetic outcast whose late-blooming menstrual cycle and sexual maturation react violently with her fundamentalist mother's psychological chastity belt, is the film in which De Palma discovered that his destructive sense of humor could be synthesized with his graceful visual sensibilities in a manner that would accentuate both. The linearity of King's storyline (actually, the linearity of screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen's version of King's novel, which was told via a fussy collage of news articles, testimony, and Reader's Digest memoirs) has the preordained momentum of Greek mythology; some of the shots of a pig blood-soaked Carrie standing above her peers at the fateful prom were lifted from the theatrical performance De Palma shot of Dionysus.

But De Palma's technique reaches a new volatility here. Half Phantom of the Paradise, half Obsession, Carrie is hysterical in every sense of the word. Laurie said while filming that she took the entire film to be a satire, even claiming it was difficult for her to film her perverse death scene—being pinned to a doorway by flying knives until she resembles the Christ-as-pincushion shrine she keeps in Carrie's punishment closet—without busting out in laughter. She later admitted to being disappointed that the film wasn't inherently a comedy, not realizing it was. Maybe the comedy isn't always as broad as Mrs. White heaving and moaning in ecstasy as her daughter gives her the vaguely homo-incestuous gift of martyrdom, but it's always there, and usually bittersweet.

The scene in which Carrie realizes she likes Tommy Ross, for instance. De Palma begins by showing Carrie sitting in class with pencil eagerly poised to transcribe Tommy's poem as their tweedy teacher reads it aloud to the class. The camera swirls around to show the entire class slacking, yawning, exchanging jocular smirks to indicate they know the poem's true author was Tommy's girlfriend Sue. Tommy ends up in severe close up while a split diopter shot puts Carrie in the background behind Tommy's impressive blond mane. "It's beautiful," she murmers, her hair like bundled hay in front of her face. Even the teacher piles on, sensing the emotional vulnerability as an opportunity to attain camaraderie with his indifferent students. "You suck," Tommy says, even more covertly than Carrie, before the teacher's request for a repeat begets the response "I said 'aw shucks.'" Tommy's chiseled features melt into a triumphant cackle. A perfectly realized scene in the midst of a hundred (many of which have little to do with the horror of mind-controlled fire and everything to do with the horror of teenage responsibility), Tommy's social triumph under the wire stands in mockery of Carrie's inability to do the same. And when Tommy silently demands "What's that?!" in slow motion after the bucket tumbles down on Carrie, the fulfillment of that disparity comes to pass and the resulting inferno must be carried out.

Whether intimate or flamboyant, Carrie's style is insistently sensual: Carrie running her finger along the definition of "telekinesis" in super close up, Miss Collins's gym class doing detention calisthenics to the accompaniment of a blaxploitation-esque "Baby Elephant Walk," Carrie and Tommy swirling in rapture courtesy De Palma's Tilt-O-Whirl cam, Pino Donaggio's tempestuous chamber music leading up to the bucket drop, Carrie seeing red in kaleidoscope as her sanity burns. It's as passionate, erotic and clumsy as the descriptor "sensual" implies. Maybe because it's the first De Palma film that it could be said belongs decisively to women. (Those Oscar nominations don't lie, and it's a shame both Spacek and Laurie lost to the virgin and whore in Network's boys club.) The would-be revealingly-titled Sisters may seem a volley between Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, and an insane woman with her can of Lysol, but all three are tamed and controlled by Kidder's effete creep husband. Carrie, on the other hand, is frighteningly feminine, a slap in the face of those charging De Palma with misogyny as fierce as the one Betty Buckley whales across Nancy Allen's face.

Myth and Magic in De Palma's Carrie Dmetri Kakmi from Senses of Cinema (2000)

Carrie Ragtime: the horror of growing up female, by Sarafina Kent Bathrick from Jump Cuts

Carrie and Marathon Man Carrie Meets Marathon Man, by Michelle Citron from Jump Cuts

Building a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, January 7, 2005

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Carrie (1976) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, September 11, 2009

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Reverse Shot [Jeannette Catsoulis]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review [Special Edition]

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

DVD Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review [Special Edition]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review Special Edition

Cinematical [Jeffrey M. Anderson] yet another review

Film Freak Central dvd review [Special Edition] Bill Chambers, also reviewing a host of other De Palma films

Classic Horror review Jenn Dlugos

Jerry Saravia retrospective

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5] Special Edition

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Leslie Dunlap

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review

Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

eFilmCritic Reviews Dr. Isaksson

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

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson

filmcritic.com (Blake French) review [2.5/5]

Cinemaphile.org (David Keyes) review

Collector's Corner [Wes Marshall]

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Mike Long

DVD Verdict (Christopher Kulik) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Digital Retribution dvd review Michael McQueen

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]

Bloody-Disgusting review [5/5] Steven

Political Film Society review Michael Haas

Last Drive-In on the Left: DVD review also reviewing THE FURY and DRESSED TO KILL

LA TACO » Brian de Palma’s “CARRIE” ~ Hollywood Forever Cemetery ... October 23, 2008

TV Guide review

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [B+] [Special Edition] Michael Sauter

BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Richard Eder) review

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze

THE FURY B+ 90

USA (118 mi) 1978

One of Pauline Kael’s favorites, a movie that meets her loving criteria of trashy films as art, where according to Michael K. Crowley from The House Next Door Objects of Appalling Beauty: An Appreciation of Brian De Palma: “She called his films serious, compared them to works by Godard and Antonioni, and devoted pages and pages to cataloguing their virtues and, when necessary, their deficiencies. Certainly one of the most daring sentences she ever authored appeared in her 1978 review of The Fury, in which she asserted that De Palma had at last directed a movie that surpassed in intensity, vision and number of classic sequences anything directed by Hitchcock. In her defense of De Palma, Kael made adversaries and—in the eyes of the critical establishment—jeopardized her credibility. She was pilloried and even parodied by other critics. But she never backed down.” Kael went further in her admiration for this film: “This finale -- a parody of Antonioni's apocalyptic vision at the close of "Zabriskie Point" -- is the greatest finish for any villain ever. One can imagine Welles, Peckinpah, Scorsese, and Spielberg still stunned, bowing to the ground, choking with laughter.”

Where does one begin? This kind of overpraise is more shocking than the film, which chugs along like a typical B-movie, carrying the weight of plausibility on its shoulders despite the presence of improbable stars like Kirk Douglas and John Cassavetes, both extremely intense individuals in their own right, who despite their opening cordiality turn into arch enemies in the film. Following the success of CARRIE (1976), what did the world need during the post Vietnam era of the 70’s but another telekinetic horror movie, this one starring two similarly endowed college age kids, Andrew Stevens as Robin Sandza, Kirk Douglas’s son, and Amy Irving as Gillian, neither of whom ever meet except telepathically. The opening sequence is so cheesy that it could just as easily have been pilfered from the latest Elvis movie, where it’s hard not to laugh at the blatant Palestinian stereotypes and the less than spectacular special effects. Douglas and Cassavetes share a similar history of working for a secret Government organization, which adds to the allure of the film, as following the Vietnam and Watergate debacles, behind-the-scenes, secret CIA organizations were looked upon with outright suspicion, as if they had deceitfully derailed the moral purpose of government in the first place, to provide for the common good, and done so behind everyone’s backs. To put it another way, Childress (Cassavetes) steals Peter Sandza’s (Douglas) son right out from under him, making it look like his father died, where Peter is declared dead by the U.S. government and forced to live underground for the rest of the film in order to keep the government and Childress from finding him.

The movie shifts to the idyllic sunny beaches of Lake Michigan, where Gillian and her friends are typical teenagers, but Gillian has special powers that even she doesn’t understand, as she has visions that are powerfully real, yet so intense that anyone touching her at the time bleeds heavily, causing a kind of panic for all involved. Of course, Gillian’s mother doesn’t seem too alarmed and runs off to Europe, never to be seen again in the movie, much of which takes place in recognizable Chicago locations, including a mesmerizing set piece taking place at the now torn down Old Chicago Amusement Park in Bollingbrook, leaving her daughter to fend for herself at a mysterious medical institute known as Paragon, a clinic uniquely specializing in studying the powers of telepathy, where Gillian scores off the charts, as Robin did before her, which catches the eyes of Childress, who secretly harbors his own devious intentions. It’s Gillian who can see what Childress is doing with Robin Sandza, who’s been moved to a secret location where he’s a captive guinea pig, a test rat living under scientific observations where his every move is monitored closely. Gillian’s identification with Robin is like discovering a lost identical twin, where the power between them is like nothing she’s ever experienced. Peter, meanwhile, is attempting to track down his son through a nurse at the clinic, Hester (Carrie Snodgrass), where he’s romantically seducing her in order to get information on his son. Hester ends up Gillian’s only friend there, as everyone else seems to be plotting against her. Her daring escape plays out like an extended choreographed slow-motion ballet for which there are serious consequences.

Gillian has struggled to keep her telekinetic visions under control, but despite her best efforts, people continue to get hurt, and even worse, killed, which mirrors exactly what happens around Peter, only without the secret powers.  Their very presence attracts danger to anyone who is near, always connected by the hovering presence of Childress, the dark force of evil that wants to corral and ultimately possess her powers, much like the scientists poking and prodding David Bowie as the alien from outer space in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).  Where all this leads is to another whirlwind finale, where the world literally spins out of control and all hell breaks loose, exactly what Gillian has been trying to prevent.  Cassavetes, much as he was in Rosemary's Baby (1968), is simply a detestable character, an abomination to humankind, like a villain out of a James Bond movie who deserves a more heinous nickname, as he’s hell-bent on controlling the world.  Searching for Robin, Douglas and Irving are an unlikely pair, as none of the characters in the movie really gel together, instead it’s all about creating the mood and atmosphere of a strangely dark and paranoid world that’s under a veiled attack unbeknownst to anyone except these few who have the fate of the world resting in their hands.  It veers into the world of the macabre, but in doing so, distinguishes this director with another thrilling finale, one filled with operatic grandeur and obsessive hallucinatory moments. 

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Here De Palma poses the burning question: is there still commercial mileage in demonic possession? But this attempted follow-up to Carrie almost entirely lacks its predecessor's narrative thrust and suspense. At centre it's another common-or-garden story of children screwed up by their own telekinetic powers, but there are several distracting subplots: one about secret US government research into psychic phenomena (masterminded by Evil Incarnate in the person of Cassavetes), more on the hero's paternal angsts as he approaches the male menopause. Stylistic pretensions further defuse whatever punch the original script might have had. In so far as the film lives at all, it's in its shock effects, which are adequately cruel if too thin on the ground - although the heartwarming sight of Cassavetes getting his just deserts compensates for a lot.

Four Friends to The Fury Pauline Kael

Brian De Palma's visionary, science-fiction thriller is the reverse side of the coin of Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. With Spielberg, what happens is so much better than you dared hope that you have to laugh; with De Palma, it's so much worse than you feared that you have to laugh. The script (John Farris's adaptation of his novel) is cheap gothic espionage occultism involving two superior beings-spiritual twins (Andrew Stevens and Amy Irving) who have met only telepathically. But the film is so visually compelling that a viewer seems to have entered a mythic night world; no Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many "classic" sequences. With Kirk Douglas, Carrie Snodgress, John Cassavetes, Daryl Hannah, Dennis Franz, and Charles Durning. 20th Century-Fox. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book When the Lights Go Down.

The Fury | Film Review | Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

And so we come to The Fury. One of the very highest-rated De Palma films by those who claim the man as a personal favorite and clearly the lowest-rated "red period" De Palma film elsewhere (check for yourself). The movie that draws the deepest line in the sand between De Palma apologists and De Palma maniacs, whose attempts to revive the movie are usually characterized as self-aggrandizing test cases to see quite simply how far their role as arbiters of counter-taste can stretch. The movie that Armond White said is impossible not to completely, wholly love if you have any shred of understanding of the film medium and how it works. The movie that gave Pauline Kael occasion to paint a portrait of Orson Welles, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg choking to death with laughter (and, presumably, envy). The movie that David Thomson watched while sitting next to Kael during her (presumably only) viewing, and then oh so gallantly recalled her misguided appreciation thereof to eulogize her upon her death in 2001. To be generous, Thomson's fussy, detached approach to movie appreciation is about as sensual as drying out homemade beef jerky, and we can have every reason to expect a critic of his type to feel a little embarrassed by the vocalizations of a critic who did all but receive head from her favorite movies.

In retrospect, Kael's review of The Fury doesn't quite pack the same sort of punch as some of her other famous raves (like Last Tango in Paris, Nashville, even Blow Out). But nonetheless, her afterglow is palpable. Appropriately, what most endures about The Fury is its vitality, by which I don't so much mean the relevance of the film's ideas (though reportedly its stutter-editing patterns were single-handedly responsible for Vertov-period Godard's desire to return to the notion of popular art filmmaking) or that the film is a radical departure from a general reading on the work of De Palma, but rather that it has a higher sperm count than any of the director's other films. I don't say that lightly, considering his trio of gangster movies. Literally and figuratively, The Fury is a landmark, pile-driving, feature-length money shot of a film. On the figurative count, it's a deliberately paced symphony of narrative tantrism, one whose crescendos and plateaus may arrive with the faint predictability of a writers' workshop draft but certainly not to the detriment of the stultifying finale (the catalyst for Kael's roll-call of choking filmmakers, which only goes to suggest a third rogue element they might have lodged in their laughing, envious throats). As a representation of De Palma's formal potential, The Fury is killer kinema.

But, additionally, there's a literally prurient element to The Fury that fascinates at a subconscious level, one which refutes claims that the incoherence of the script keep the film at a lower level than De Palma's other masterworks. Certainly the film doesn't overwhelm the endocrine system with the attractive distractions as in Dressed to Kill or Body Double, but it's comparative chastity is a red herring. There is no moment in The Fury that spins as wickedly out of control as "Be Black Baby" or Winslow Leach's hallucinatory "Faust" composition montage or Tommy and Carrie's vertiginous prom waltz, but the tradeoff is a film with an insidious stamina. As Kael noted, The Fury is one of those rare films where even the passages of exposition and unnecessary dramatic clutter are filmed in the least boring manner possible. The plot is as square as anything De Palma ever adapted for the screen, but his cinematography has so many abstruse angles that it's frequently disorienting. Which is exactly what adolescence feels like. Ultimately, The Fury is a film about pre-pubescence by a director whose work had finally reached the level of confidence reflecting a post-pubescent talent. The best of both worlds, baby, and barely legal.

The Fury, a film whose sexual dynamic metaphorically explores the point in adolescence where females hold a legitimate, mystic authority over males (even gay ones...especially gay ones), is a teasing riff on the sort of 16mm coming-of-age lyceums that kids were shown when the boys were sent to the gymnasium and the girls were sent to the cafeteria. Amy Irving (who even begins the film in a single-sex educational environment) and Andrew Stevens, the two young paragons of psychokinetic power being exploited at Paragon, are shown in parallel courses of development. Stevens's progress is charted by kitschy displays of musculature such as slow-mo pole-vaulting while Fiona Lewis narrates, "His body is getting stronger." (The clinically-proportioned musculature of Stevens is beautifully cast in this respect; he's a bronzed bulldog without a leash.) Meanwhile, the more mature Irving (who was already the least credible of Carrie's cast as a teenager) is repeatedly embarrassed by the inopportune appearance of blood. It may not be blood from her celestial orifice, but she must claim responsibility for it and thus the sick joke metaphor stands.

The Fury's Sturm und Drang sides with the paired-off salt-and-pepper shakers of pent-up psychic-sexual bloom, but De Palma's anarchic sense of humor and undercurrent of luxuriant, tragic mortality (unforced as in Obsession) belongs to Kirk Douglas as Stevens's father, John Cassavetes as Stevens's governmental kidnapper, and Eleanor Merriam as Mother Nuckells, the dotty old woman whose apartment Douglas crashes while escaping Cassavetes's goons. They're the flip side to the pertness of the two walking psychic genital diagrams. In fact, the one-scene-wonder that is Merriam's performance, as a woman who's delighted by Douglas's intrusion because it inconveniences her adult children who consider her a burden, represents an anomaly in The Fury. When the old biddy, while fussing over Douglas and helping him prepare a disguise to escape surveillance, talks about life ending "when the old ticker gives out," it is the indication of life terminating on a reasonable timetable. Everyone else who dies in the film does so in increasingly incorrect moments. This accounts for why De Palma stages each progressive death set piece more and more like an extended requiem, and bids John Williams to howl "Ases Tod."

So even though Thomson's own requiem for both The Fury and Kael as an apparent phase that cinema just had to go through but has now passed boils down to a remarkably condescending "it exists, trust me," The Fury is the most crucial movie of all De Palma's movies. When Paragon doctors come to Irving's private girls' school to "recruit" her under the guise of a paranormal sort of career day, one of the doctors tells her to achieve alpha state by picturing herself in an empty movie theater in front of an empty screen, to gradually let the screen fill her mind. Even so, the 360-degree rotation of the sequence indicates that Irving's "screen" is a poster board with various paranormal definitions, finishing with "psychometry," or the ability to sense and understand an object's past, present, and future conditions just through physical contact. Defending a film like The Fury might run you the risk of understanding what it feels like to achieve alpha in a totally empty theater, but making contact with the movie will snap everything De Palma has to offer into clarity with the shuddering force of an orgasm.

DVD Times [Mike Sutton]

Reverse Shot [James Crawford] Fall, 2006

not coming to a theater near you (Jason Woloski) review

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Terms of Psychic Warfare Steve Johnson, November 2010

Objects of Appalling Beauty: An Appreciation of Brian De Palma Michael K. Crowley from The House Next Door, September 7, 2008

Jim Emerson's Scanners blog Can a movie ruin a good review? June 8, 2009

Cinema At A Fury-ous Height Kenji Fujishima from My Life, From 24 Frames per Second, June 10, 2010

Exploded Goat [Joe Cormack]

Black Hole Reviews [Mark Hodgson]

Pluck You, Too! Thomas Pluck

Commentary Track [Richard Winters]

@ Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Dennis Schwartz

Brian Koller also seen here: filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]

The Terror Trap Dan Hunter and Jason Knowles

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review also seen here: DVD Verdict

The Fury Mark Davis from DVD Times

...read the complete Fury, The review at A Guide to Current DVD (Mark McLeod)

The Fury G. Noel Gross from DVD Talk

She lost it at the movies David Thomson on sitting next to Pauline Kael from Salon, September 5, 2001

Popdose [Robert Cashill] scroll down near the middle

And You Thought It Was Safe [David DeMoss]

Cinescape [Andrew Hershberger]

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

Combustible Celluloid film review - The Fury (1978), Brian De Palma ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

HorrorDigital.com [Karen]

CinemaDuMeep.com [Michael Ferrari]

GenX Movies Random

Sound On Sight Tyler Baptist

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]

Elusive Lucidity: De Palma Image of the Day

girish: De Palma Image of the Day: The Fury

Mondo Digital also reviewing DRESSED TO KILL and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE

Last Drive-In on the Left also reviewing CARRIE and DRESSED TO KILL

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

Say 'Brian De Palma.' Let the Fighting Start. - New York Times A.O. Scott, September 17, 2006

HOME MOVIES

aka: The Maestro

USA (90 mi) 1980

Movie Vault [Aaron Graham]

I'm a pretty big De Palma fan, have seen all his films except for this one, which I've finally found a few days ago at a video blowout sale. It's pretty hard to find, so the question is: Is it worth looking for? Well, yes and no.

Certainly any De Palma fan would love to have it in their collection. As it is his most autobiographical, but I found the film too slapsticky.

It stars Keith Gordon as Denis Byrd (the nerd in "Christine", a teen in "Jaws 2")as an 'extra in his own life'. His family's eccentricies have overruled any chance of being an individual.

Enter Kirk Douglas as The Maestro. Now, Douglas is barely in it. He teaches 'star therapy' and how to be the star in your life. (Trust me folks, it's not as crazy as it seems).

Denis's father (Vincent Gardenia), a doctor, is having affairs with his patients, and his Mother (Mary Davenport)is a wreck after catching him. His brother (De Palma regular Gerrit Graham) is a health nut and teacher of Spartinectics (nod to Douglas in "Spartacus"?) who constantly spouts ridiculous, idiotic sayings like "Those who know, know".

Denis' brother is set to marry Nancy Allen (Kristena), but she has to prove herself 'worthy' by being tempted by the opposite sex, drugs, etc.

Denis grows a crush for Kristena, and the scenes between them are my favorite in the film. Many De Palma trademarks are seen, like the split diopter shots and themes of voyeurism. It was a filmed experiment with Sarah Lawrence College students (One of the students was future music director Mark Romanek) but with top notch talent involved like composter Pino Donaggio, and I seem to recall Spielberg being somewhat involved.

So I'd recommend "Home Movies" to De Palma enthusiasts and completists only. Althought, if you happen to be browsing through your local video store and see a copy. Jump on the chance and rent it. You could bring home much worse.

Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce

At once Brian De Palma's most slapdash and most autobiographical picture, Home Movies takes playful stock of the director's tenacious motifs while positing a lighter, even more hopeful relationship between the characters at play and the eye of the camera surveying them; call it a benign Peeping Tom, or, considering the foregrounded personal intimations of the title, a rather less corrosive version of Hi, Mom! Indeed, it is as a throwback to De Palma's skittering countercultural comedies of the late '60s and early '70s that this brash oddity is most often situated in the filmmaker's oeuvre, an allegedly failed attempt to recapture Godardian radicalism after "selling out" to the Hollywood jungle. On the contrary, the film builds progressively on the auteur's understanding of the entrapping/liberating possibilities of cinema, consciously shedding the technological spectacle of, say, The Fury, to better parade the raw anxieties lying underneath the blanket of screwball farce. From the opening credits caricaturing the cast to Nancy Allen's emotional crescendo with her hand up a puppet-bunny's ass, Home Movies is an unashamed farce, though the comedy is tinged by De Palma's obsessions; the narrative is continually recorded, and every character is defined by his or her relationship to the lenses. The hilariously dysfunctional Byrd clan is the main subject: Young Denis (Keith Gordon) is saddled with a philandering father (Vincent Gardenia), a self-pitying mother (Mary Davenport), and a brawny older brother (Gerrit Graham), to say nothing of a lingering feeling of being "an extra in his own life." Personal growth (and love, embodied by Allen as Graham's ex-slut fiancée) hinges on being able to master the ongoing mise-en-scène that is life, a task as perilous to the hapless Byrd protagonists as to the Maestro (Kirk Douglas), the "star therapy" professor who oversees their foibles and whose cinematographic paraphernalia constantly intrudes upon their realities. Made as a workshop class project with De Palma's students during his 1979 Independent Filmmaking course at Sarah Lawrence College, the film is a cluttered, often very funny and even more revealing portrait of the artist as cinephile truth-seeker. Gordon's sensitive whiz-kid is often tagged as a stand-in for De Palma, though the artist's ties to Douglas's all-controlling overlord, even as he challenges the Maestro's "The camera never lies!" declaration, remain just as inescapable.

User comments from imdb Author: Bill Treadway (treads22@hotmail.com) from Queens, New York

Brian DePalma's "Home Movies" is a genuinely strange film. It is hard to believe that DePalma made this. It doesn't have the superb technical credits that you come to expect from him. It doesn't have a logical story (for DePalma that is). And it doesn't have the big budgets DePalma's films are accustomed to ("Sisters" has a budget of 500,000 bucks; this film was made on a few thousand)

What it does have is a goofy charm that most Hollywood comedies lack these days. The story is nonsense, but that's a good thing in this case. And the low budget is appropriate because it suits the story. Most of the cast are from other DePalma films, of which I'll let you know.

The film stars Kirk Douglas ("The Fury")as The Maestro (the video title), a teacher who films his life constantly. He attempts to have his prize pupil Keith Gordon ("Dressed to Kill") do the same, but he has problems of his own. The object of his affection is Nancy Allen ("Dressed to Kill", "Carrie", "Blow Out"), a hooker who has too many vices for her own good. The problem? She is attached to Gordon's brother (wonderfully played by Gerrit Graham, who appeared in most of DePalma's early films and just about stole "Soup for One"), who is a nut.

All this is established within the first 25 minutes or so and the film's success depends on all of the surprises DePalma sets up, so I won't reveal any more. Some people might be turned off of "Home Movies" possibly due to the content, but more probably due to the visual style. Today's audiences are accustomed to gloss and if they don't get it, they protest. If you are one of those people, I just want to say three words: SHAME ON YOU!!!!!!!! How dare you criticize a film just because it doesn't look glossy like Hollywood product does? "Pi", a film I admired highly, had the same dilemma. Made on a shoestring budget, the film's grittiness helped it more than hurt it and the same goes for "Home Movies".

DePalma shoots on 16mm and makes the film look like someone's home movies, which is appropriate since the Kirk Douglas character is constantly filming his own life (and others). Also, give DePalma credit for helping his students get a first credit (the film was made as a class project for Sarah Lawrence College). Robby Benson did a similar thing in 1990 with "Modern Love" and was heavily criticized, despite the fact that it was a good, strong film. "Home Movies" isn't as strong as his more accomplished thrillers, but it is a very entertaining movie that had me smiling most of the way. And how can you hate any movie that casts Gerrit Graham as a slimeball? *** out of 4 stars

Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

TV Guide

DRESSED TO KILL

USA (105 mi) 1980 ‘Scope

Time Out

Beginning and ending with a pair of shower frissons, this brazen reworking of Psycho is most striking for its sheer audacity, and actually lifts that film's most shattering device. But having achieved this coup, the film degenerates into near-farce, punctuated by a number of hollow audience-grabbing moments which hang together not at all. Ultimately, the film amounts to little more than a consummate study of suspense technique, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Down to the Sea in Ships to Dune Pauline Kael

One of the most sheerly enjoyable films of recent years, this sophisticated horror comedy, written and directed by Brian De Palma, is permeated with the distilled essence of impure thoughts. Set in Manhattan, it's about sex and fear; De Palma presents extreme fantasies and pulls the audience into them with such apparent ease that the pleasure of the suspense becomes aphrodisiacal. Angie Dickinson shows a much warmer expressive range than might be expected as a beautiful, aging golden blonde, married yet frustrated, and longing to be made love to; Michael Caine brings fine, precise shadings of ambiguity to the role of her analyst; the breezy comedienne Nancy Allen is a pretty, investment-minded hooker, who witnesses a murder; Keith Gordon is Dickinson's teenage prodigy son, who builds computers; and Dennis Franz is a brash police detective. The music is by Pino Donaggio, the cinematography is by Ralf D. Bode, and the editing is by Jerry Greenberg. Filmways. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In.

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib (excerpt)

Whatever one can dismiss De Palma for plundering Hitchcock, one cannot deny that he is one of the most extraordinarily stylish directors. His work has a dazzling playfulness, an elaborateness of artifice constructed for its own sake - in Snake Eyes (1998), for example, he shoots the first 20 minutes all in one single unbroken shot. The stylistic highlight of Dressed to Kill is a quite amazing ten minute sequence with Angie Dickinson set in an art gallery. It's a sequence conducted entirely without dialogue. De Palma strikes a mood of weirdness right from the start with the comically alienating blankness of the modern art works looking back down at Angie Dickinson, silent vignettes of the other patrons with their voices disembodiedly coming from the corners of the screen, and cuts away to little picture balloons of Angie's thoughts. An elaborate sequence is wound around her intimations towards the stranger, the dropped glove, his game leading her around the maze of halls, with rising urgency in the score and frenzied point-of-view camera-work as she becomes lost. The sequence outrageously culminates with him appearing and dragging her into a cab and making love to her. The whole sequence is left on a note of dis-ease in the last shot as a hand reaches down in the foreground to pick up the discarded glove. Directorially this is a sequence of extraordinary visual daring.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info John Dickson

DRESSED TO KILL opens like a diamond reflecting light in many directions, inside the Day-Glo ambience of a bedroom, bathed in the immortal sound-sphere of Pino Dinnaggio’s soft-core string arrangements; the mind is where this film begins and ends. The glare of light pierces through the skin of this film like a sharpened razor, tearing at the fabric of the illusion. No other filmmaker, other than Godard, has played so much with what we as viewers perceive as the surface, or surfaces of films, revealing their layers into a sinking hole, like mirrors reflecting into themselves. This is the start of what we have come to know as Brian De Palma. While his previous films pointed towards the direction this film would take audiences, this is the film from which the rest follows. The layers of reality are just as buried as the more “obvious” BODY DOUBLE years later, and this work cements the filmmaker as the premiere Master of Subversion. While its tempting for critics to dish out weak cases in the trial of “Is De Palma the new Hitchcock?” maybe we as viewers, in our own times, should better ask the question “Is De Palma the new Buñuel?” A great deal could be said on that point, avoiding the narrow view to which we compare De Palma to Hitchcock; but what will this serve other than a base entry-way into De Palma the filmmaker? Maybe this is the ultimate juncture where PSYCHO and BELLE DE JOUR meet? Maybe De Palma better illustrates the similarities between Buñuel and Hitchcock? Or maybe De Palma is just De Palma and we’d serve his work, and ourselves, better if we proceeded as such? Yes, this film is an almost reimagining of PSYCHO, more so, an examination of the Hitchcock film itself, in which all the elements from the 1960 classic are fleshed out in the most literal sense: there is the murder of an innocent woman trying to regain her moral compass, her discussion with the unknowing murderer about her position in life, a killer with multiple personalities, a relative of the victim investigating the murder, the psychologist’s explanation, nefarious showers, and cross-dressing. De Palma seems to be daring critics and viewers to make the obvious comparisons, as he would do so more graphically the rest of his career. There may be no greater filmmaker, sans Griffith, to truly develop/invent the cinema like Hitchcock (certainly directors like Scorsese and Polanski “rip off” or “pay homage” to Hitchcock as much) and De Palma understands Hitchcock’s position as bedrock in the proliferation of the cinematic language. He understands that to try to avoid imitating Hitchcock within the “thriller genre” is almost as foolish as someone simply trying to BE Hitchcock. Its of note to mention the emotional connection that runs throughout the film, that of a boy being separated from his mother. While the emotions are less obvious than they are in an emotionally fuelled work like CARLITO’S WAY, they are not simply absent. Over the course of the film, the boy’s obsession with solving his mother’s murder, transitions into the fascination of using the eye of a camera to better establish a long-sought truth, one that will become more refracted and oblique as the investigation proceeds. As in a film like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA, the original objective of the investigation is but a mere side-entrance into the connection between two lost souls as they solve the mystery together. This film is no more a horror film than the opening of BLOW-OUT is, and yet simply reducing the film to a mere commentary on genre, is completely missing the point. The ending of this film splits, like male and female, into two different planes of view, as we now get the voyeur perspective more explicitly, à la mental institution patients and customers at a posh Manhattan restaurant. To be more revealing about its conclusion is not so much an avoidance of things being spoiled, but more of things being discovered; this is not a film that sits neatly into the category of “well-defined,” but one that reveals itself over time, as it sweeps you up in the fantastical joys of how a film speaks to an audience and how an audience speaks to a film.

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Dan Heaton

Brian DePalma has the ability to create unbelievable tension and excitement with camera movements that rival the best film directors of all time. In Scarface, he heightens the effect of an extremely brutal chainsaw killing by pulling away from the action right in the middle and moving into the silent outdoor air. Mission Impossible features a tight, nail-biting heist from an apparently impenetrable facility that showcases remarkable precision and timing. The opening murder sequence in Snake Eyes covers a single shot through a diverse array of locations and characters. Given this talent, it's surprising to notice how often his stories fall flat; sometimes his top-notch skills overcome the characters and lead to an overload of style. Numerous critics have lambasted DePalma for years, and while I don't share their strict views about his shortcomings, he does go overboard at times and hinder the story.

In Dressed to Kill, DePalma utilizes ingenious filmmaking tactics to heighten the suspense. Events are shot from distorted camera angles, reflected through mirrors, and followed closely with very few quick-cuts. The camera moves at will through the scenes and even lifts upward at one point to reveal nightmarish details. Steadicam point-of-view shots are common, especially from the eyes of the killer. There's seldom a dull moment in terms of style and original visuals. Unfortunately, the story falls short in terms of interesting characterizations. The subject matter is often taboo and filled with danger and seediness, but the action generates more of a yawn than true tension. While certain episodes work nicely, the overall product suffers from a lack of charisma from most of the major players.

The story begins with Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson)óa sexually frustrated housewife who meets a complete stranger at a museum and engages in a risky affair. Several early moments, especially Dickinson's shower scene, resemble soft-core pornography more than engaging cinema. The opening scene correlates to the beginning of Blow Out, with DePalma once again shocking the audience, then revealing that the events are not real. He loves toying with audience's expectations and fooling them with dream sequences and false endings. Unfortunately, this can grow tedious and cause viewers to revolt. Without revealing too much about the plot surprises, I'll say that the story centers around a vicious female killer who attacks women with a razor blade. Along with Miller, another target is Liz Blake (Nancy Allen)óan upper-class prostitute who uses her funds to invest in the stock market and high-priced paintings. It's possible that the killer is a psychiatric patient of stoic Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine), who refuses to aid Detective Marino (Dennis Franz, in NYPD Blue mode). Also involved is young Peter Miller (Keith Gordon)óKate's sonówho's determined to catch the murderer even if the police won't help him. The tension-filled action eventually culminates in a bloody and unexpected conclusion.

Film critics often criticize Brian DePalma for blatantly ripping off plots and devices from Alfred Hitchcock's movies; he calls these allegations ridiculous, and instead says his methods are in homage to the legendary director. While I usually agree with DePalma, there are several moments in this film that cross the line between originality and copying. The prime example is an elevator murder scene, which has a strong resemblance to the infamous shower scene in Psycho. During this brutal attack, I couldn't get past the similarity, and it ruined the effect of a key scene. Instead of generating suspense, it frustrates because it's impossible to forget the original Hitchcock moment. The scene's music, direction, and role in the plot mirror the 1961 chiller far too closely to casually dismiss them as coincidental.

Dressed to Kill features several grisly images of extreme violence that are difficult to forget for days after viewing them. This disc offers the option of viewing the unrated version, which contains several additional close-ups of the razor blade slicing through skin. While these moments are memorable, they raise the question of DePalma's motives for choosing this form of presenting the violence. He appears to relish providing a slow, methodical look at a disheartening murder. While the effect is shocking, it would work much better if the characters were more complex and interesting. Although the blood is troubling, it would become mind-blowing if there was more at stake in the story. The directing is impressive, but the script converts it to a gimmick because it lessens the impact of his style.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

It isn't only because one of the first shots of (the unrated director's cut of) Dressed to Kill is of Angie Dickenson's body double lathering her cooch that the cunty spirit of Pauline Kael is resurrected whenever anyone wants to score a few cheap points at the expense of Brian De Palma's reputation. It's also because she was one of the only contemporary critics who accurately described what wavelengths De Palma's movies were working on. For instance, she was one of the few who actually used the term "comedy" to describe the obviously riotous Dressed to Kill, which anyone who really listens closely to that maid's scream after the film's centerpiece elevator scene could tell you is a truism. Dressed to Kill is the quintessential New York erotic horror-comedy of the grindhouse heyday; the film's luxurious, almost eerily plastique elegance just barely disguises its unapologetic presentation of fetish iconography.

Because fetishizing requires the dislocation and amplification of objects from their surroundings, a quick rundown of the formal dildos and vibrating bullets on De Palma's kink counter: creamy, coordinated couture, complete with sonically active jewelry and heels; razor fixation (reminiscent of Argento, though predating the astonishing moment when blaze meets bulb in Tenebre); manhole steam illuminated by porn shops' traveling marquee lights; the sighs of a masturbating woman merging with the prurient bloom of Pino Donaggio's best score (even if De Palma probably wanted something closer to his former collaborator Bernard Herrmann's score from Taxi Driver); the choreography of the Phil Donohue split-screen, with exactingly timed parallel turns; "What's the going rate on running red lights?"; a jerry-rigged time-lapse camera hidden in a shoebox; the way the trannie psycho's name Bobbi is spelled; the fact that it's the only one of De Palma's "red period" films whose palate is overwhelmingly blue.

Dressed to Kill certainly belongs in the rich company of Noo Yawk, Rotten Apple, post-disco, post-feminist, post-Stonewall, post-Son of Sam, pre-AIDS urban nightmare movies that seemed to emerge from faded balconies of the slightly more upscale grindhouse venues on 42nd. But Dressed to Kill's funk of hedonism is only as pungent as a perfume sample in a department store catalogue ad, unlike the thick grime of its shrieking cinematic sisters Ms. 45, Maniac, and Cruising. The latter film was a project De Palma himself wanted to make initially and had written a screenplay for as early as 1974. He ultimately passed the project over to William Friedkin (who crafted a provocative, misunderstood masterpiece of his own to complement De Palma's much-protested hit), which is just as well, since De Palma's original script reportedly spent far more time creating an erotic fantasy life for a character (almost certainly the gestation of Angie Dickenson's lonely housewife) who had little to do with Cruising's central plot about the psychosexual role-playing kinship between undercover cops and fisting homos.

No, what we have here is the work of a director who saw the charred aftermath of the sexual revolution's late-'70s bust and thought, "I should cast my wife as a hooker again. A real Park Avenue whore." Who, instead of taking a gritty, hard-on look at the twisted bi-curious ground shared by Ms. 45, All That Jazz, and The Warriors, inflates paperback pulp psychology into something like a plot, all the better to demonstrate that filmmaking is an inherently visual storytelling. Who is justifiably confident enough in his craft that he can limit himself to two schools of dialogue: soap opera exposition and silence. Who, to paraphrase Kael, could turn a seamy museum pick-up into an accelerated, 10-minute Dangerous Liaisons. The pleasures of Dressed to Kill flat out do not translate to print, but for what it's worth it is the most perfectly-directed film ever, provided you, like me, bust into orgasmic laughter when De Palma's double-shuffling editing makes it seem like the only threat Nancy Allen and a wooden cop can see boarding the subway is a 250-pound bag lady.

DVD Times [Mike Sutton]

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Dressed to Kill (1980) John Kenneth Muir from Reflections on Film/TV, July 24, 2009

DVD Times [Daniel Stephens]

Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]

Protesting Dressed To Kill leaflet by Women Against Violence and Pornography in Media, from Jump Cut, October 1980

The Seduction The pornographic impulse in slasher films, by Patricia Erens from Jump Cut, April 1987

Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Criticism Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, reviewed by Ellen Seiter from Jump Cut, February 1988

Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

DVD Verdict Gary Militzer

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Jerry Saravia

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

Film Freak Central Bill Chambers

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick

George Chabot's Review of Dressed to Kill

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

All Movie Guide [Keith Phipps]

DVDTalk.com review [Holly E. Ordway] Special Edition

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] Special Edition

The Digital Bits Greg Suarez, Special Edition

Mondo Digital also reviewing PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE and THE FURY

Last Drive-In on the Left: DVD review also reviewing CARRIE and THE FURY

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

BLOW OUT

USA (108 mi) 1981 ‘Scope

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A-]

Underrated by just about everyone except Quentin Tarantino (who wears his influences on his sleeve and probably overrates this one), Brian DePalma’s remake-cum-homage of Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic Blow-Up (and Francis Coppola's The Conversation, actually) isn’t as skillful as the earlier film at questioning the nature of "reality," but culminates nevertheless in a devastating sleight-of-cinema that reverberates in the brain for days afterward. John Lithgow and Dennis Franz (lately of the TV series NYPD Blue) both play supporting roles, but John Travolta, on his way out of vogue, stars as the B-movie sound man scouring Philadelphia in search of the perfect scream. By the end of the movie, he finds it.

Blazing Saddles to Bombay Talkie Pauline Kael

It's hallucinatory, and it has a dreamlike clarity and inevitability, but you'll never make the mistake of thinking it's only a dream. John Travolta is Jack, a sound-effects man who happens to record the noise of a car speeding across a bridge, a shot, a blowout, and the crash of the car to the water below. The driver-the governor who is the most popular candidate for the Presidency-is dead, but Jack is able to rescue the governor's passenger, a cuddly blonde (Nancy Allen). On paper this movie, written and directed by Brian De Palma, might seem to be just a political thriller, but it has a rapt intensity that makes it unlike any other political thriller. Playing an adult (his first), and an intelligent one, Travolta has a vibrating physical sensitivity like that of the very young Brando, and Nancy Allen, who gives her role a flirty iridescence, is equally vivid. It's as if De Palma had finally understood what technique is for; this is the first film he has made about the things that really matter to him. It's a great movie (and probably the best of all American conspiracy movies). With John Lithgow, Dennis Franz, and Deborah Everton as the unlucky hooker. Set in Philadelphia; cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. A George Litto Production, for Filmways. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

I often have a hard time defending my admiration for Brian De Palma. In this country he's considered a rip-off artist who pillages from Hitchcock, Kubrick, Antonioni and Michael Powell, as well as a misogynist and a violent creep. It gets especially difficult when discussing such obvious turkeys as The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and last year's Mission to Mars.

But in France he's considered a genius, a visual stylist of the first degree (the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinema voted his film "Carlito's Way" the best film of the 1990s). If one can get past the shaky plots of some of his films (Snake Eyes, for example), he proves he's a man wrestling with some serious demons on film, even more so than Hitchcock ever did. He's obsessed with voyeurism, sneaking peaks at stuff we're not supposed to see, and the movies themselves are a voyeuristic medium. He's a natural born filmmaker.

Of all De Palma's movies, Blow Out is the one I most like to see over and over. It's a clever updating of Antonioni's Blow Up and Coppola's The Conversation with John Travolta as a movie sound effects man who accidentally records an auto crash that may have been a murder attempt. Nancy Allen (playing a hooker again) survives the crash and now knows too much. A young Dennis Franz plays a sleazy photographer whose snapshots prove Travolta's theory. And John Lithgow plays a "strangler" who complicates things. Though Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction made Travolta a star, this may be his finest performance as an actor. Flushed with the box-office success of Dressed to Kill, De Palma was allowed to use the appropriate but downbeat ending he wanted for Blow Out, which subsequently guaranteed its failure. It remains one of his greatest efforts.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Jim Gabriel

The tides of auteurist reputation seem to be turning away from BLOW OUT and toward CARLITO’S WAY as De Palma’s finest achievement. Not, as they say, that there’s anything wrong with that; CARLITO is an undersung triumph and is held in special esteem by the director himself. But BLOW OUT remains De Palma’s signature moment, the nexus of so many strains of his directorial temperament: the longstanding fascination with technology blooming into fullest mastery of the filmmaker’s toolkit, the use of lens and angle to force the viewer into a way of seeing; the political bent of his young career metastasizing into a vision of macro- versus micropolitics no less despairing for their couching in pop thriller verities. John Travolta’s Jack Terri, a sound man reduced to working on T&A bloodbath B’s who finds himself front and center in an assassination conspiracy, seems like Keith Gordon’s whiz kid from DRESSED TO KILL now grown up, ostensibly wised up, but marinating in cynicism. He’s too young to be this beaten up, but beaten he is, phoning it in at the job, taking weakish jabs at the political operative who wants him to disappear after fishing escort Nancy Allen out of a river-sunk Presidential candidate’s car. Travolta is marvelous, by turns giving and withdrawn, petty and playful—a wounded romantic if ever there was one. (Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is rightly renowned for it’s inky blacks, split diopters, and bravura 360-degree moves, but the cherry on the sundae is his lighting of his star’s eyes, which reaches Golden Age heights of expressiveness.) Travolta here embodies an underreported trait of De Palma’s—his deeply felt political sense, a foursquare sense of right and wrong that runs through his career from HI, MOM! to BLOW OUT, the furious CASUALTIES OF WAR, and REDACTED. Travolta processes every deception as a personal affront, and proceeds as such, bringing his technical prowess and sheer cussedness to bear, to the point of finally using Allen as bait to expose the conspiracy. The movie was originally to be called PERSONAL EFFECTS, and it never strays far from that title’s resonance. Travolta and Allen’s give and take, their flirts and terrors, their romance that dies aborning, is among the sweetest and saddest things you’ll ever see. (Allen is every bit the screen presence as Travolta, or at least as nearly beloved of the camera. Her comic timing is impeccable, and her character’s upshot heartbreaking.) BLOW OUT is, along with THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, the finest of modern American romantic tragedies, released at point in time when the moviegoing public had no inclination to buy tickets for such bitter pills, no matter how expert and tantalizing their coating. But what remains is that De Palma-ness: the whiz-bang and the mourning, the fetish and the hard truth, the sex and the lie. With Dennis Franz, John McMartin, and a scarifying John Lithgow.

Slant Magazine review Paul Schrodt

Blow Out is not known as one of Brian De Palma's horror movies, but of all his films, it's the one that feels most like a nightmare. Carrie and The Fury ended with orgasms—frustrated teenagers revenging their oppressors in phantasmagoric releases of pent-up sexual energy. This espionage thriller goes out quietly, with a slow-motion dwindle into personal and political hell. By the end, the viewer half expects to wake up sweating, as if from some terrible dream. De Palma underlines this disillusionment by setting the story up for a heroic conclusion in the traditional Hollywood mold. Instead, the famous "scream" climax and the haunting epilogue that follows serve as a reminder that with political progress always comes loss. Set against the hopeful red-white-and-blue fireworks of Philadelphia's Liberty Day parade, this tragedy recalls Thomas Jefferson's wisdom: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Good guys and bad guys both spill blood in Blow Out; one wrong is righted, many more persist. De Palma's cinematic sentiment, in the spirit of Jefferson, isn't cynical so much as it is refreshingly frank.

America had fallen into a deep funk by 1981—the year of Blow Out's release and Ronald Reagan's presidential inauguration. Still hung over from the Vietnam War and dealing with inflation on the brink of recession, the public's election of Reagan, on a platform of optimism, suggested a desire to move on and leave the past behind. De Palma, as anti-establishment as ever, suggests this in itself is another lie. When Jack Terry (John Travolta) inadvertently records the assassination of a presidential candidate, everyone politely asks him to leave his conspiracy to himself. But he can't let it go. "It was just a blowout!" one official says of the car accident. Cops don't want to bother investigating, and the deceased candidate's campaign wants to see his legacy sink in peace. Everyone else would like to believe it was just "a freak accident," so the nation can quickly heal again. (Maybe De Palma was prescient: Five years later Reagan would secretly and illegally sell arms to Iran in order to free U.S. troops, only to then deny he ever knew about the deal, retaining his bright image.)

Terry remains steadfastly principled, another one of De Palma's naïve protectors of all things innocent and good in this world (re-crafted for Michael J. Fox in Casualties of War). An interrogator asks him, "Why do you care?" and Terry shoots back, "Well, it's the truth, isn't it?" Terry is a soundman for movies; he is in the business of recreating truth. Early in Blow Out, a split screen juxtaposes Terry marking effects with the deceptive production work of a network news show. Whereas Terry searches for unadulterated reality in his recordings (a gunshot, a door slam), TV journalism is invariably surrounded by white noise and political spin. Eventually, Terry will similarly sift through images and sounds from the accident to uncover a bullet that shot out the tire ("the bang before the blowout"). This virtuoso study in perception comes from Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup—though, unlike Antonioni, De Palma doesn't question reality itself but, instead, its fragmented political representation. Blowup's photographer prints his picture larger and larger, becoming lost in its iffy signs of murder. In Blow Out, the truth is cut-and-dry but spins out of control—hence a Blowup becomes a Blow Out.

Despite his determination, Terry always seems to keep complete dejection at bay (helped, no doubt, by the fact that Travolta suffered from insomnia during filming). In a flashback, we learn that he helped crack down on corrupt cops until one of his wires got an undercover detective killed: "I'm not gonna get fucked again." Nancy Allen as Sally, a prostitute Terry rescues from the car accident, is like a new reason to live. She's the ditzy blonde completely ignorant to the situation at hand, unable to differentiate good guys from bad guys. Everyone uses her, from conspirators to her photographer-cum-pimp Manny (Dennis Franz). Only Terry takes Sally seriously, for a very specific reason that comes to reveal itself as time goes on. Some critics have complained that the character is dumb, which is true, in a sense—if Sally was smart this would be a very different movie—but entirely beside the point. Sally is a victim of the political machine, someone Terry feels compelled to protect. De Palma projects onto her the innocence and purity Terry wishes to impart on his country.

Through the right mixture of batting eyelashes and world-weary sighs, Allen makes this damsel believable, even poignant. Most critics applaud Travolta, though in reality Allen deserved the Oscar. She turns herself into the Lady Liberty for modern times—a Barbie Doll hooker with a childlike giggle and a soul pure enough to make her of another world. Terry's fight to save the truth is as much a fight for Sally (both are very real, and yet both are somewhat vague symbols of Terry's love for his country), which makes the turnout all the more heartbreaking. When Terry finds himself inadequate to keep Sally or the truth out of harm's way, it sends both him and the audience spinning into a moral nosedive…literally. Two times the camera revolves around him, as he feels his grasp on the mission slipping away. De Palma treats Terry sympathetically but sees through to his blind idealism that can't possibly jibe with the way things really work. Terry becomes another casualty of war, one of the hermits who stay stuck in the past because the present is built on a lie. He still believes in principles, but they've been irrevocably tarnished. Maybe that's what everybody else already knew.

Blow Out Mike Sutton from DVD Times

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Blow Out (1981) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, August 21, 2009

Blow Out: Take One | Reverse Shot Andrew Tracy

Blow Out: Take Two | Reverse Shot Michael Koresky

Blow Out Fake Humanism, by Beth Horning from Jump Cut

Dialogue on Blow Out Jacquelin Bautista and Beth Horning from Jump Cut

Epinions [Mike Stone]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DVD Verdict (Gary Militzer) dvd review

Blow Out Raphael Pour-Hashemi from DVD Times

The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [3/4]

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

What I Watched Last Night [Ross Williams]

Cinema de Merde

Time Out review

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

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

SCARFACE

USA (170 mi) 1983 ‘Scope

To get the full effect of this film’s international influence, take a look at young non-professional actor Marco Macor playing himself as a young hoodlum from the housing projects of Naples (photo seen here: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1190958336/tt0929425) in Matteo Garrone’s brutal and excruciatingly intense film GOMORRAH (2008), where he mimics Scarface’s Tony Soprano throughout, including a wonderful impersonation scene in an abandoned warehouse where he and his friend Ciro are just beginning to get the itch to shoot guns, eventually leading to a signature scene shooting guns on a riverbank in their underwear, where they discover (the bigger the better) the joys of shooting a rocket launcher. They exemplify, twenty-five years later, the cultural reach of this film.

Time Out review

The first motel shootout bodes well, a set piece handled with panache and the right note of clammy terror, but the rest of this lengthy modern morality tale (updating Hawks' film to 1980) is downhill all the way. When Castro last threw out all his scum, most of them fetched up in Florida, including Tony Montana (Pacino), a man with only 'balls of steel and my word, and I don't break either for anyone'. He attaches to the right sort of godfather, and rises and rises through a world of conspicuous consumption which would make the Borgias blanch. Filmed in the bright widescreen glare of a thousand white suits, the movie is still empty at its heart; where Coppola gave you a whole dynasty in The Godfather, with a world and all its moral confusions behind it, De Palma spends three hours sketching out another tetchy little fiend with no more than the ability to nose-dive into mountains of cocaine and come up to razor a few more rivals. Pacino gives a monstrous performance as the Cuban heel, clearly aiming for role of the year, but the abiding memory is of just another Method boy chewing the scenery in his quiet way.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Jim Gabriel

The director’s second biggest theatrical hit, and the one with the longest life as gangsta staple and dorm room wallpaper (not to mention decades of legendarily risible censored AMC schedule filling.) De Palma needed a grabber after the financial disaster of BLOW OUT, and he delivered in spades: a headline-ripping, three-ring circus of excess, causing an epic battle with the MPAA over its ultraviolent set-pieces and spare-no-expense disreputability. It was, and still is, despised by all the right people, and a few of the other kind, too. It’s not seen by De Palma partisans as anywhere near the purest representation of his sensibility, and they have a point; whole sequences roll by in a logy, somewhat rote haze. One can spend stretches of the film daydreaming about what it could have been if directed by its writer, Oliver Stone, in full Warners-meets-SALVADOR punch-and-parry tabloid mode. But despite those passages, SCARFACE still has its fascinations, beginning with its star. Nothing quite prepared 1983 audiences for the 180-degree change in Al Pacino’s basic attack, his very mien, his transformation from supreme underplaying to jabbing, bobbing, ostentatious bombast. The accent is broad and ludicrous, but the kinesis is unfettered, utterly free; for better or worse, this is the film where he became a wholly different kind of actor, and it is nothing if not captivating. And many of those set-pieces really are something; De Palma’s native willingness to go there, to deliver the goods, to break out the chainsaws, grenade launchers, and defenestrations with a childlike glee, a delinquent’s love of pissing off the squares, is appreciated if you’re just plain in the mood to get off. Even the three-hour running time works if you feel it as a cokey hangover instead of the rush that you go to a Scorsese for. It is, in the final analysis, a deeply strange affair when looked at in the right light. With Michelle Pfeiffer in the first bloom of career luminescence, F. Murray Abraham as a guy you can’t wait to see die, a bonhomous Robert Loggia, and the great actor Harris Yulin, who delivers the finest expulsive “Fuck you!” in the whole of American cinema.

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Hawkboy

“This is why Pacino never won any Oscars.”

Quite possibly, the most quoted movie ever made. And boy oh boy, is it funny.

This movie's a comedy, right? The dialogue in this movie is so completely laughable and the situations so warped that to take it as a crime movie on the level of "Goodfellas" or "The Godfather" would be insane. It's written by Oliver Stone, so I guess that being WAY over-the-top is par for the course. I enjoy it every time I watch it, but in the same way I enjoy "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". It's crazy, wild fun.

Al Pacino plays Tony Montana, a cuban punk who ends up being a big cocaine kingpin in Miami in the early 80's. He marries Michelle Pfieffer, he has mountains of coke on his desk, life is good. But Tony's a bit of an asshole, really. I take it that Tony's supposed to represent the greed in the society of that day. He has it all, but he wants more.

I recently saw the 1932 version of this film, and was amazed at how effectively Howard Hawks was able to tell the EXACT same story in 90 minutes. This movie is LONG. But it never really drags, because Pacino is being very entertaining. He wears women's hats, watches his friends make obscene gestures to women, buys fancy cars with leopard cushions, walks around with a white nose - Pacino has a BALL. He makes the movie, and his dialogue is among the most memorable in recent memory.

Criticizing this movie is impossible, because Stone and DePalma pretty much dare people to criticize it. It's all so desperately over the top that it goes beyond scorn or derision - "Scarface" KNOWS that it's all silly. It's in on the joke. It's an immensely entertaining movie, but don't watch it with your parents.

Play the "Scarface" drinking game - do a shot every time someone says "fuck". You'll be passed out in the first hour.

Slant Magazine review Martyn Bamber

It's not often that a Brian De Palma film has dialogue that becomes part of pop culture lore. This isn't to say that his films aren't commercially or artistically successful, simply that De Palma primarily expresses himself visually. While The Untouchables has its fair share of quotable lines (courtesy of David Mamet), it's the dialogue from Scarface that's endlessly repeated (preferably with a heavy Cuban accent), as affected by Al Pacino as the ruthless small-timer Tony Montana, who rises rapidly to the top of the underworld. He gets the money, the power, and the woman (Elvira, played by Michelle Pfeiffer) that he desires, but it's not long before he just as quickly falls from on high, in spectacular style. Aside from the now-famous lines, Scarface is also remembered for other reasons: the huge amount of swearing; the graphic violence (particularly the chainsaw murder), the mountain of cocaine that Tony buries his face in (the perfect symbol of destructive excess and oblivion), and the climatic "Made it, Ma! Top of the world"-style gun battle, to name but a few.

It's therefore surprising to think that this hugely popular and highly influential update of Howard Hawks's classic Scarface met with howls of criticism when it was originally released. Remaking a Hawks film may have seemed sacrilegious at the time, but this Scarface remake is vastly superior to the majority of recent updates of classic films and TV shows. Instead of an actor, director, and screenwriter working on autopilot, Scarface has the impressive filmmaking triumvirate of De Palma, Stone, and Pacino. This combination of talent in front of and behind the camera must have had the executives at Universal eagerly anticipating another Godfather-style epic; a tasteful and sober examination of organised crime and the Miami cocaine business, and a film that would bring in big bucks and gain critical kudos. The result, though, wasn't a subtle dissection of gangster life, but the equivalent of a bloodstained and bullet-riddled body, with De Palma and his crew ripping the guts out of the gangster movie and leaving the result on the operating table for all to see.

Scarface presents us with a tacky, gaudy, sleazy world, where billboards and murals depict a paradise of sunsets and palm trees (a "fake paradise" look that's carried over into Body Double and reappears in Snake Eyes), which hides the ugly reality of the drug world, and eventually serves as a backdrop for violence and murder. Although the combination of gangsters, guns, and cocaine promises a rapid-fire pace with flashy camera moves to match, this is one of De Palma's most visually restrained films. The camera often drifts slowly into scenes from above and picks out characters, or starts in close-up on an object and pulls out into a wide shot. But the languid camera moves are deceptive, slowly luring us into a world full of flamboyant characters who express themselves through aggressive talk and violent action. The sunlit streets and disco nightclubs (backed up by Giorgio Moroder's electronic score, reinforcing the artificiality of the film's world) suck these gullible characters into a corrosive capitalist nightmare that will consume and destroy them.

Although the film depicts a nightmarish world, it's also very funny. There's the "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" one-upmanship between Tony and Omar (F. Murray Abraham), Tony telling a little kid on the beach to watch as the mafioso's friend Manny (Steven Bauer) gets slapped by a girl, and Tony wearing Elvira's sun hat (leading to a burst of laughter from Pfeiffer). But alongside the humor there are elements of horror. When Tony's bloodied hand reaches into frame and rests on a sleeping Elvira, it's like a beast rousing his beauty, or the Phantom of the Paradise getting his Phoenix. But the monstrous Tony also has a code of honor, an example being the moment when he refuses to blow up a car with children inside—an agonisingly suspenseful scene that was recently echoed in Spielberg's Munich, and is a nod to Hitchcock's Sabotage). This fateful decision precipitates Tony's downfall: as frequently happens in De Palma's unforgiving film world, if a character suddenly acquires a conscience, they're mercifully punished for it.

Like the tiger chained up outside his mansion, Tony eventually becomes a prisoner in his own palace. He's the '80s gangster equivalent of Charles Foster Kane—a demented capitalist trapped in his own Babylon, who ends up being bored, alienated, and alone. We only see Tony enjoying the high life in a brief montage sequence (the rapid scenes conveying the fleeting pleasures on offer), with the remainder of the film concerned with his slow descent into mistrust and paranoia. Tony ends up destroying himself and those he loves, including his younger sister, Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), an innocent whom he swiftly corrupts. The promise (seen on the side of the Goodyear blimp) that "The World Is Yours" at first seems like a gift to Tony, but it soon becomes a millstone around his neck, and finally an ironic epitaph when he dies, with the neon sign above the fountain where he falls to his death like an engraving on a headstone.

At the beginning of Scarface, we see archive footage of Fidel Castro giving a speech and Cuban refugees arriving on boats in Florida, echoing LBJ's appearance on TV in Greetings. But the '60s mix of idealism and scepticism (with De Niro and his crew in Greetings rushing around New York dodging the draft and trying to get laid) is replaced by the '80s business ethos (with Pacino & Co. pursuing the era's dream of accumulating wealth at the expense of anything else). When Tony berates the social x-rays and businessmen in a fancy restaurant, we're seeing a Bonfire of the Vanities-type saga filtered through the gangster genre. Tom Wolfe's hefty tome may be considered the literary summing up of the "greed is good" decade, but Scarface is the cinematic equivalent: a gun-toting, coke-snorting, chainsaw-wielding, no-holds-barred epic. "Push It To The limit" goes one song in the film and De Palma wilfully obliges.

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

A masterpiece of guilty pleasure.

Without further ado, fifteen reasons to love Brian De Palma's "Scarface."

1. Al Pacino's Tony Montana just might be his gravestone role, the one everyone knows — moreso even than Michael Corleone (whose legacy was hampered by a weak third movie). Pacino, of course, goes way over the top and through the floor on the other side — and that pretty well describes the arc of his character and his performance. He starts out young and hungry, his eyes mischievously alive in the detainment room, and ends up face down in (literally) a pool of his own blood. Along the way Pacino invests the scummy Tony with a surprising amount of humor, compassion, and humanity.

2. Brian De Palma just wants to have fun. Occasionally he can be serious, as in Casualties of War (for me his masterpiece). But for the most part he's a coldly brilliant prankster with a camera. He fools you into thinking you saw the chainsaw carve up Tony's unfortunate partner (you didn't); he pulls off any number of dazzling set-pieces thick with menace, as when Tony and Manolo (Steven Bauer) stalk Rebenga through a chaotic detainee tent. If your blood doesn't freeze when Manolo calls out "Rebengaaaaa!!" and De Palma cuts to Manolo's hand holding a knife and Manolo picks up the chant "Libertad! Libertad!", you don't have any blood.

3. Oliver Stone, in his day, was the rudest screenwriter ever to win an Oscar for screenwriting. Other screenwriters used the F-word — Stone used it 218 times. And he contributed dialogue that will outlive almost anything else he's ever written (with the possible exception of Wall Street's "Greed is good" speech). I won't take your time quoting it all, but I will say my personal favorite is the "Say good night to the bad guy" monologue (it truly begins, I think, when Tony is seated and feeling sorry for himself: "Is this it, Manny?"), which hits amazing notes of pride and contempt.

4. Giorgio Moroder (who also scored the Stone-scripted Midnight Express) gives us an immediately recognizable theme — a spaghetti-western sound weighed down by the Miami heat and piles of cocaine. Ominous yet fundamentally cheesy, the music nonetheless fits the images like a leopard seat. And don't get me started on the songs, many of which turn up in Grand Theft Auto on the radio station. Rush, rush, get the llelo...

5. Michelle Pfeiffer, at that point, could've been just another chilly blonde (though she'd shown some spirit in Grease 2 the year before). In retrospect, after years of complex performances, we can better appreciate what Pfeiffer is doing as the jaded, coked-out Elvira Hancock ("Like a bird flyin' around," Tony comments rather inaccurately — Elvira barely moves if she doesn't have to, even on the dance floor). Pfeiffer has the perfect look for a snooty white girl that a crude Cuban like Tony would fall for, but she backs it up with subtle intonations of disdain and also sadness at the glitzy but hollow life Elvira has chosen.

6. Robert Loggia. He owns you. He owns everything. And he would own this movie if not for the extreme competition all around him. His Frank Lopez is a past-his-prime mobster, soft in the middle and no match for an amoral up-and-comer like Tony. Frank is pathetic and murderously duplicitous, but he retains our guarded affection right up until Tony's cruel "I won't kill you" switcheroo. Frank's indulgence of choice is food and booze, not cocaine, so he has no edge, and Loggia etches a funny and, in the end, poignant portrait of a man who has outlived his own effectiveness in a violent career.

7. What has F. Murray Abraham done besides this movie and Amadeus? (Go ahead, think about it. I'll wait.) Even if those two roles were all he did, what more do you need? Abraham raises the bar the second he hits the screen as the slimy Omar, who has one of the absolute all-time great Oliver Stone dialogue exchanges with Tony:

Tony: Okay, fuck you. How's that?
Omar: ...Fuck you.
Tony: Fuck you.

...I mean, if you can't appreciate that, we really have nothing more to say to each other.

8. Harris Yulin as corrupt cop ("Whoever said you was a cop?") Mel Bernstein, if only because he paves the way for perhaps Al Pacino's funniest line reading ever: "HOKAY MEL." But Yulin is more than that — his Mel is so puffed up with white male privilege he's negotiating with Tony even after a bullet to the gut: "We'll just get this fixed up..." Talk about denial, man. I love that his final choice of words on this earth is a hearty "FUCK you!" — again, Oliver Stone in action.

9. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Tony's mercurial little sister Gina, who wastes no time hoovering cocaine with some dork in a toilet stall once she gets some money. Gina is the most significant holdover from the Hawks/Hecht Scarface of 1932, wherein Tony's sister also dallied with his best friend, thus fucking with Tony's twisted incestuous fixation on her. In this version, Gina gets to wear a skimpy nightgown and offer the coke-befuddled Tony what he really wants. Mastrantonio commits to the moment wholeheartedly without looking foolish, no mean feat for any actress, never mind a 25-year-old in her first movie.

10. John A. Alonzo's cinematography makes the most of Miami's sizzling lurid topography, from the neon nightclubs (with their mirrored walls that made the scenes a bitch to shoot) to the bleak clutter of motel rooms where drug deals go sour. Without this movie's influential look, you have no Miami Vice (TV series, not movie) and none of the many, many urban action flicks to follow.

11. The character actors that thicken the tapestry of evil: Al Israel as the chainsaw-wielding Hector ("Ahora tú!"); Paul Shenar as the big boss Alejandro Sosa, who inspires that Pacino phone-juggling moment that always makes me laugh like an idiot; Mark Margolis as Alberto the assassin, whose insistence on blowing up Sosa's target along with wife and kids provokes Tony's legendary post-mortem tirade ("I tole you, no fuckin' kids! No, but you wouldn't listen! Well, you stupid fuck — look at you now!"); and the wordless Geno Silva as "The Skull" (the baddest-ass name in a movie full of bad-ass names), who finally pulls the trigger on Tony.

12. The novelization by Paul Monette, before he started writing about AIDS. It offers a lot of backstory on what Tony was doing in Cuba before he came over with the rest of the Marielitos. I just thought I'd give the book a shout-out, since novelizations usually suck, especially novelizations from the '80s, but this one is worth seeking out. There's also, as yet unread by me, a new Scarface series of books that launched in December 2005.

13. The network-TV version, worth watching just for the hilariously insufficient substitutions for all that Oliver Stone obscenity. For instance "Miami is one big pussy just waitin' to get fucked" becomes "one big chicken just waitin' to get plucked." Not quite as funny as "melon farmers" in the TV edit of Repo Man, but close.

14. The sheer ballsy length of it. Sure, it takes De Palma ten minutes shy of three hours to tell a story that took the 1932 version 90 minutes to cover. I don't care. I never find it boring, except maybe for the scenes at home with Tony's disapproving mother. It's a movie you sit down with and either nibble on or kick back for the whole ride. It's a big thick colorful comic book you can open up at any point and lose yourself in.

15. The enduring cult. The hip-hop culture has embraced Tony and his upwardly mobile ethos, apparently without irony. I can go to the corner convenience store and buy Scarface keychains and stickers — who anticipated that in 1983? Analysis of this particular phenomenon is better left to analysts of such things, but I'll give it a shot anyway (hey, you got this far, didn't you?) — I think it's just that Tony is the original bad-ass mofo, and Scarface was playing endlessly on cable when so many rappers in their impressionable formative years watched it and studied it. They wanted the mansion, the bodyguards, the piles of cash, maybe the white girl. First you get the money. Then you get the power. Then you get the women.

Well, that about covers it. To paraphrase John D. MacDonald's intro to Stephen King's "Night Shift": If you have read this whole thing, I hope you have plenty of time. You could have been watching "Scarface."

Reverse Shot [Leah Churner]

Dragan Antulov review [7/10]

DVD Talk (Preston Jones) dvd review [3/5] [Platinum Edition]

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [2.5/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

Movie-Vault.com (John Ulmer) review

NYC Film Critic (Ethan Alter) review [3.5/5]

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

Scarface to A Sense of Loss Pauline Kael

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Reel.com DVD review [Kim Morgan] 20^th Anniversary Edition

Vern's review Anniversary Edition

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers] reviewing both the Platinum and Anniversary Edition

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Anniversary Edition

American Cinematographer dvd review Kenneth Sweeney, Anniversary Edition

DVD Talk (James W. Powell) dvd review [4/5] [Anniversary Edition]

DVD Town (Tim David Raynor) dvd review Anniversary Edition

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [4/5] Platinum Edition

DVD Town (William David Lee) dvd review Platinum Edition

DVD Verdict - Platinum Edition [Rob Lineberger]

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr, Collector’s Edition

The Digital Bits dvd review [Collector's Edition] Todd Doogan

DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson, Collector’s Edition

Urban Cinefile (Australia) dvd review [Special Edition] Andrew L. Urban

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

All Movie Guide [Keith Phipps]

Gods of Filmmaking

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]

BBC Films review Nick Hilditch

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] in 1983

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] in 2003

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

A Foul Mouth With a Following; 20 Years Later, Pacino's 'Scarface' Resonates With a Young Audience Bernard Weinraub from The New York Times, September 23, 2003

BODY DOUBLE

USA (114 mi) 1984

Blazing Saddles to Bombay Talkie Pauline Kael

Brian De Palma, working with material that he has grown past: a murder mystery set in LA, in the overlapping worlds of "serious" acting and performing in porno films. The big, showy scenes recall VERTIGO and REAR WINDOW so obviously that the movie is like an assault on the people who have put De Palma down for being derivative. This time, he's just about spiting himself and giving them reasons not to like him. The central role-that of an actor who suffers from claustrophobia-is played by Craig Wasson, whose conscientious acting is a drag on the movie. Things pick up close to the midway point, when Melanie Griffith arrives and gives a tickling performance as Holly Body, a porno star with a punk-vamp haircut and a sprig of holly tattooed on her rump. Holly is like a dirty-minded teenage seductress, and what she says has an element of surprise even for her; her talk is so sexy it gives her ideas and drives her eyebrows up. But most of the movie lacks zest. In De Palma's CARRIE, when the camera moves languorously around teenage girls in a high-school locker room there's a buzz between the camera and what it's filming. Here, De Palma saves the languorous camera for the sleek, expensive settings, such as the Beverly Hills shopping mall called the Rodeo Collection, and there's not only no comic buzz-the camera seems wowed, impressed. The voyeuristic sequences, with Wasson peeping through a telescope, aren't particularly erotic; De Palma shows more sexual feeling for the swank buildings and real estate. With Deborah Shelton, Gregg Henry, Guy Boyd, David Haskell, B.J. Jones, and Dennis Franz. The script by Robert J. Avrech and De Palma is from De Palma's story (a contraption). Cinematography by Stephen H. Burum; the score, by Pino Donaggio, seems to be ladled on. Columbia. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book State of the Art.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info James Stroble

The 80s were a heady time: Apple released the Macintosh, Eli Lilly brought you Prozac, and Brian De Palma was constantly inventing new and exciting ways to fail the Bechdel test. BODY DOUBLE (1984) had the unenviable task of following up the director's DRESSED TO KILL (1980), BLOW OUT (1981), and SCARFACE (1983). Say what you will about those films—I think the horse is still breathing—but in the waning days of New Hollywood they occupied a certain place in its pantheon. Caine, Travolta, Pacino. Add to that mononymous list: Wasson. "Nobody's perfect" is the De Palma mantra though, and BODY DOUBLE manages to transcend its flaws en route to realizing its unique vision of Reagan-era Los Angeles. Craig Wasson plays Jake Scully, underemployed actor and amateur claustrophobic. When we meet Scully he's just suffered a series of unfortunate setbacks: he has a fit on the job, he catches his wife cheating on him, and is thus booted from their home. Temporarily adrift, an acting acquaintance offers him a plush housesitting gig high, high in the Hollywood Hills. From this lofty vantage point Scully makes a habit of spying on exhibitionist neighbor, Gloria, and under the flimsy pretense of chivalry the practice eventually evolves into outright stalking. No points for catching the Hitchcock nods; De Palma's allusions to (or outright theft of) works like REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO are so overt as to signal jumping off points rather than ends in themselves. In a surreal segue toward the end of the film, a lip-synching Holly Johnson of the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood leads Scully, suddenly decked out in thick-rimmed glasses and argyle, onto a porno set to the tune of "Relax." The sequence functions as a movie-within-a-movie; it's De Palma's "Broadway Melody Ballet," if you will, except Gene Kelly didn't find Cyd Charisse behind a door labeled 'SLUTS.' The "Relax" scene marks a tonal crossroads in BODY DOUBLE. Soon after, the proceedings begin to accelerate at an almost nightmarish rate and the tightly plotted thriller De Palma fashioned in the film's first half starts to unravel as the limits of internal plausibility are pushed to the extreme. If you're on De Palma's wavelength though it's a worthy tradeoff, as tension gives way to near mania. When the film was released, Roger Ebert characterized BODY DOUBLE as having De Palma's "most airtight plot" yet—an assertion it's hard to imagine Ebert leveling without cracking a slight smile. The virtue and, dare I say, greatness of BODY DOUBLE come not from bulletproof narrative or even rudimentary character development, but instead from a messier place. De Palma synthesizes a multitude of disparate references into a scathing critique of nice-guy chauvinism, critical Puritanism, and countless other -isms, all under the guise mindless genre fare.

Jerry Saravia review

My initial review of "Body Double" went something like this: "Brian De Palma's stylish yet empty-headed exercise in thriller mechanics from the Hitchcock school of 'Vertigo' has little to offer beyond stylish mechanics. Not that it is a bad film, far from it, it is putrid but so cheaply entertaining and rudely exploitative that it is hard to forget." Well, this was a review I had written two years ago but never posted or published since. Seeing the film again a few times since, I can honestly say it is a truly stylish, erotic film that offers something unique from De Palma (which he usually manages to accomplish without reservation) - he knows how to keep you hooked into the story and it is definitely hard to forget.

Craig Wasson is Jake, the listless, wan and unintelligent hero of the film, playing an actor fired from a low-budget vampire flick thanks to his outbreaks of claustrophobia. His wife is sleeping around with other men and so now he needs a place to crash. Another aspiring actor offers a UFO-shaped house on stilts as accomodation. This house also has another distinguishing feature - a telescope allows one to spy on the sexy neighbor who stripteases every night with the blinds open. Wasson is so intrigued that he watches her every night, until tragedy strikes. Of course, I would not dream of revealing any more of the plot except to say that if you've seen Hitchcock's excellent "Vertigo," then you'll know how this turns out. Even then, De Palma has a few tricks up his sleeve.

"Body Double" was one of my favorite films of 1984. When I saw it again two years ago, I thought it was a slipshod, mediocre thriller that at least keeps one interest in seeing how much De Palma has blatantly borrowed from good old Hitch. And I can't say I agree with that assertion anymore. "Body Double" grows on you and makes you want to watch what happens next (a phrase used by the Wasson character during a porno shoot sums it up: "I like to watch."). De Palma has that hook that grabs you tight and won't let go. Many great directors have it, including Stanley Kubrick, and even if all their films are not masterpieces, they keep you watching.

There is no reason for this film to work but Wasson's uncharacteristically strange, voyeuristic Jake (who becomes a temporary porn actor at one point) is watchable enough, particularly his trip into the porn industry where he discovers a sexy starlet (Melanie Griffith). She describes in a pre-"Boogie Nights" monologue all the acts she will and will not perform for the camera. Griffith is a dynamo to watch on screen, sizzling here with more pizazz than in any of her 90's screen efforts.

What else there is to enjoy is De Palma's fabulous tracking shots inside a mall (echoes here of "Dressed to Kill"), an ugly murder involving a power drill, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" performed as a musical backdrop for a porno flick, Guy Boyd as Detective McLean who calls Jake a "peeper," Wasson's hilariously overdone claustrophobic acts, a ponytailed Indian who follows the sexy neighbor (played with true sex appeal by Deborah Shelton) everywhere, and Dennis Franz's sleazy independent director who is ready to fire Jake at any moment.

Though this is not as monumentally good as De Palma's "Dressed to Kill," it does have plenty of style to spare and has more interesting characters than "Blow Out." I just do not know how to describe the feeling I have every time I see "Body Double." Perhaps its story of Hollywood scandal and murder, and its peek into the world of pornography, is akin to the stories that interest me ever since reading "Hollywood Babylon." In light of the masterful "Mulholland Dr.," "Body Double" certainly holds some interest in contrast. All I know is I like to watch.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

In the introduction to Slant's symposium on the director, I mentioned that Brian De Palma was possibly the only mainstream director capable of lobbing a hate crime in the form of a pop film a la Godard's Weekend. What I didn't mention is that he already has. Body Double, De Palma's relentless declaration of war against his critics, bars no holds. The only other time he stepped this close to the precipice over the pit of nihilism was with the first 90 minutes of Femme Fatale. The later film, of course, flowers into something considerably more life-affirming and benign. The saving grace of Body Double is that De Palma could willfully make a film so successfully debased and still position the entire experience as an apparatus to prove the axiom "it's only a movie." It's more than that. It's a movie movie in the same sense that Little Caesar offered "pizza pizza"—a diminutive svengali selling a cut rate product that gets the immediate job done and leaves a lot for leftovers.

"What are you, some kind of method actor?" asks a grimy porno producer to failed actor Craig Wasson halfway through the movie. I call the failed actor Craig Wasson not because I can't remember the character's name but because Wasson's off performance is one of the crucial keys to understanding De Palma's Herschell-Gordon-Lewis-meets-Radley-Metzger-by-way-of-Bertolt-Brecht routine. No, make that porno Pirandello! Call the whole film Six Set Pieces in Search of a Sleazy Subtext (or maybe Six Movie Reviewers in Search of a Beatdown), but appreciating Body Double means taking stock of the ways the film's pieces don't add up. You could say that Wasson isn't a particularly convincing actor as an actor, but he's not supposed to be. Wasson's transparency makes him the perfect fall guy for the hideously ugly man who wants to murder an extremely sexy woman. Similarly, Wasson's swing-and-miss performance (from a technical, emotional standpoint) in Body Double helps De Palma achieve more radical distancing experimental tropes than he'd ever attempted to pull before while ostensibly in Hitchcock thriller mode.

More than any other De Palma film, Body Double requires the audience to step outside of their role as spectators and, instead, examine the fissure between what the director is conveying and how they're processing it. In other words, they have to observe how they observe. He does this by inserting movies within the movie. Wasson is filming a movie, or was until he gets fired for his inadequacies. Melanie Griffith's porn pixie Holly Body stars in Holly Does Hollywood, a movie dubbed the Gone with the Wind of porn. The two meet on the set of a porno sequel that recreates the making of the earlier film. (A mirror shot that Wasson claims he created reveals the camera crew.) Body Double even begins and ends with deliberate deconstructions, tricking the audience into accepting scenes at face value and then breaking down the reality of a film set's goings on. (Of course, we're watching De Palma's false set-ups of the film-within-a-film's false set-ups, which compounds the complication.) It's heady, but the cavalcade of titties help the medicine go down, which is why Body Double has far more potential to demonstrate avant garde concerns, techniques, and cognitive dissonance than anything by, say, Peter Kubelka. (Unless, of course, you prefer your tits National Geographic-style. Then, by all means, double bill this one with Unsere Afrikareise.)

Though it's evident that De Palma was taking petulant pot shots at the bluenoses who turned Dressed To Kill's classy, good-natured ribaldry into the purported number one cause of all rapes committed between 1980 and 1981, Body Double's manufactured assaults never cross the line. Like Godard, who was also a master of mixing bile with a steady sense of fatalistic humor, De Palma isn't capable of perpetrating hate crimes. Just hate humps. Not every attack on the hypocrisies of what is and what isn't acceptable in mainstream sensuality comes from the business end of an erect power drill. For instance, whenever Wasson catches a glimpse of his own "Madeline"/"Judy" double (i.e. a doppelganger of a doppelganger) dancing in nothing but headphones and panties, De Palma has Pino Donaggio score the discovery as a parody of Tangerine Dream's "Love On A Real Train" from Risky Business. Without drawing too fine a point of it, he seems to be mocking the set of standards that romanticize the corruption of virile, high school boys at the hands of non-Chlamydia-carrying whores. But heaven forbid a middle-aged woman should have a remotely risqué sexual fantasy life without the middle-aged film director taking the flack.

Body Double, while not his finest, is the best candidate as De Palma's signature film. It's a wicked, feature-length double entendre from a Doublemint era. Take it at face value, take it for its prurience or take it for all it's worth. Hell, try taking on all three at once. Ever since Dionysus, De Palma has force-fucked the intellect with the libido. Even though the assistant director on the set of Holly Body's new porno epic quips, "I thought we were doing Body Shop here, not Last Tango," that's no reason for you not to masturbate over the footnotes. What are you, some kind of method cinephile?

Double Reflections: Beyond the Shadow of the Double Giuseppe Puccio from 24LiesASecond, July 18, 2004

DVD Times Mike Sutton

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Body Double (1984) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, August 14, 2009

Reverse Shot (Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega]

not coming to a theater near you (Teddy Blanks) review

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]

Reel.com dvd review [2.5/4] Brie Beazley

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Nerve.com [Bilge Ebiri]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

Movie House Commentary Tuna and Johnny Web

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [1/5] Richard Scheib

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2/4]

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]

411Mania.com [Will Helm]

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

Time Out review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

WISE GUYS

USA (100 mi) 1986

Time Out review

Made in between Scarface and The Untouchables, De Palma's third gangster movie of the '80s is something completely different: a light-hearted and extremely wacky caper in which DeVito and Piscopo play small-time errand-runners for a local mobster. Failing in their efforts to essay a little double-crossing, each finds himself faced with a contract to kill the other. Instead they go on the run, and end up on a spending spree using the mob's credit card. Some great laughs, but it isn't hard to see why the film was never released theatrically in Britain: at times it just gets bogged down with over-the-top performances. The ending is great, though.

Wife vs. Secretary to The Wiz Pauline Kael

Danny De Vito, as the bumptious Italian Harry, and Joe Piscopo, as the Jewish simpleton Moe, are the two clownish underdogs who come out on top in this Mafia burlesque--a broad, slapstick farce, set in Newark and spattered with boyish gross-out humor. The directing, by Brian De Palma, is canny and smooth, but this musty genre calls for fresh jokes and sharp, colorful personalities, and that's not what he's working with. The frankness of the picture's grubby anti-glamour is its only claim to charm. Maybe you'd have to be part of what is delicately referred to as the undemanding audience--say, somebody who watches every rerun of the Abbott and Costello pictures--to succumb and find the antics and the mugging as uproarious as they're meant to be. The script is credited to George Gallo. With Dan Hedaya, Captain Lou Albano, and, in brief appearances, Harvey Keitel, Ray Sharkey, Patti LuPone, Julie Bovasso, Mimi Cecchini, Antonia Rey, and Anthony Holland. Cinematography by Fred Schuler. MGM/United Artists. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Hooked.

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

If you love the rancorous humor of gangster films — the scenes in which the ethnic goons strut, gesticulate, and insult each other — you’ll enjoy this screwball mob comedy.

Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo are two New Jersey mob lackeys (and best friends) who screw up while placing a large bet for their boss, the smooth, remorseless Dan Hedaya. The boss gives each man one last chance to redeem himself: DeVito is ordered to rub out Piscopo, and vice versa. Not knowing they’ve been set up, but knowing they’re dead one way or the other, the two hit the road and go to Atlantic City, where DeVito hopes his uncle — a former heavy-hitter for the mob — will bail him and Piscopo out.

Everyone in the large cast sparkles, but the standout is Captain Lou Albano as the colossal Frank the Fixer, who barks profanities for the whole movie (“This is the strangest pillowcase I’ve ever seen,” says a flunky; “IT’S MY UNDERWEAR, ASSHOLE!” bellows Frank). Captain Lou isn’t an actor, but we start laughing every time he waddles onscreen, because he’s so relentlessly, monotonously irascible he’s hilarious.

On its own terms, this is a terrific piece of throwaway entertainment, a fun return to comedic roots for Brian De Palma.

Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce

Not even Brian De Palma's most ardent champions came to claim Wise Guys: Pauline Kael deemed it fit for Three Stooges fans only, while Armond White assumed its creator was as embarrassed as he was. A mid-career faux pas, or the director's equivalent of the coruscating, laugh-stuck-in-your-throat dissonance of The King of Comedy? One way or the other, De Palma points to Scorsese from the start, with Danny De Vito doing a Travis Bickle oration in front of the mirror while being mimicked by his young son in the next room, the wall between them providing a parody of De Palma's own trademark split-screen. Working from a wonky screenplay by George Gallo and Norman Steinberg, the filmmaker modulates the feeble gags through sheer visual elegance: a slow, 360-degree circular pan in the middle of a New Jersey street is sped up for full Mack Sennett effect; and the local capo di tutti (Dan Hedaya) puts a cigarette into a holder in huge close-up, then the camera pulls back so that half a dozen lighters can spring into the frame to vie for the honor of lighting it. Harry (DeVito) and Moe (Joe Piscopo) are best pals and lowly mob flunkies whose to-do list routinely includes such items as doing laundry and trying on bulletproof jackets. A chronic gambler and dreamer, Harry longs to open "the first Italo-Judeo combination restaurant-deli" and convinces Moe to take a chance at the horse races with their boss's money; a fortune goes down the drain, of course, and, as punishment, Hedaya assigns one friend to kill the other. Following the rich avant-gardism of Body Double, Wise Guys is a frenetic step toward mainstream filmmaking, a course duly completed the next year with The Untouchables. The macho bluster taken seriously in De Palma's gorgeous but uninterestingly pumped-up Elliott Ness saga is here intriguingly skewered, with the two guys off to Atlantic City in a pink Cadillac belonging to vein-popping assassin Captain Lou Albano, who digs into a mountain of lobsters with his bare hands to illustrate the director's bold, nearly Eisensteinian gift for caricature. Such subversive touches show how, though toiling in a manic studio assignment, De Palma understands that "the issue here is loyalty," as one of the characters puts it—the loyalty of Harry and Moe to their friendship and unashamed comic mugging, and also of the auteur to his artistic instincts in the hack-infested grounds of '80s commercial Hollywood.

Reverse Shot [Adam Nayman]

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

Teen Movie Critic (Roger Davidson) capsule review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Walter Goodman) review

THE UNTOUCHABLES

USA (120 mi) 1987 ‘Scope

Time Out review

Time-honoured mayhem in the Windy City, and if there are few set-ups you haven't seen in previous Prohibition movies, it's perhaps because De Palma and scriptwriter David Mamet have settled for the bankability of enduring myth. And boy, it works like the 12-bar blues. The director's pyrotechnical urge is held in check and trusts the tale; the script doesn't dally overmuch on deep psychology; the acting is a treat. Connery's world-weary and pragmatic cop, Malone, steals the show because he's the only point of human identification between the monstrously evil Al Capone (De Niro) and the unloveably upright Eliot Ness (Costner), and when he dies the film has a rocky time recovering. Costner looks like the kid who got a briefcase for Xmas and was pleased, but painfully learns under Malone's tutelage how to fight dirty. De Niro establishes his corner courtesy of a bloody finger in close-up, and unleashes uncontrollable rage to electrifying effect, most notably at the blood-boltered baseball-bat board meeting. The Odessa Steps set piece at the railway station could maybe do with one more angle to shuffle, and the battle at the border bridge diminishes the claustrophobic grip of the corrupt city, but the narrative thunders to its conclusion like a locomotive.

Ugetsu to Utu Pauline Kael

Set in Chicago circa 1930--Al Capone's capital of crime--this Brian De Palma movie, from a script by David Mamet, is like an attempt to visualize the public's collective dream of Chicago gangsters. Our movie-fed imagination of the past is enlarged and given a new vividness. De Palma is a showman here. Everything is neatly done in broad strokes, and the slight unbelievability of it all makes it more enjoyable. Robert De Niro's Capone is a plump peacock with receding hair and a fat cigar in his mouth. The four men who fight to restore the honor of a corrupted society--the four who can't be bribed, the Untouchables--are the fresh-faced young Special Agent Eliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner; a smart, ornery veteran cop, played (magnificently) by Sean Connery; a rookie-cop sharpshooter (Andy Garcia); and a small, middle-aged accountant (Charles Martin Smith). It's not a great movie; it's too banal, too morally comfortable--the script is too obvious. But it's a great audience movie--a wonderful potboiler. It's a rouser. The architectural remnants of the era (including solid traces of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright) have been refurbished to provide a swaggering showcase for the legend. Cinematography by Stephen H. Burum; music by Ennio Morricone. (Every now and then you may wonder what Morricone's throbbing disco-synthesizer beat is doing in this period.) With Jack Kehoe, Billy Drago, and Richard Bradford. Paramount. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Hooked.

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

For the most part, De Palma's career has moved between the very personal, deeply self-reflexive, and politically agitational films which he has largely written himself (the major exceptions here are the astonishing late ‘70s pair OBSESSION and THE FURY) and the impersonal, formalist exercises in genre and narrative construction for which he has mainly been a hired director for the projects of others. These journeyman pieces tend to be opportunities for him to explore tensions and structures in the creation and manipulation of space, of rhythm, of imagery that are more daring and extreme than what is found in his more organically built films. Depending on the very conventional, very unproblematic scripts and Hollywood-standard casting developed through the studio processes has allowed him to be more wildly and dangerously experimental in many ways in his direction, knowing that his competent and star-powered actors and predictable, predigested dialogue and story patterns will be reliably intelligible to a mainstream audience no matter what devious or disruptive visual strategies he might deploy around them. THE UNTOUCHABLES is one of De Palma's most extraordinary deviations from the norms of cinematic narrative, though its propulsive, fascistic screenplay by David Mamet and wooden, aw-shucks central performance by Kevin Costner do wonders in disguising that. De Palma creates a Prohibition-era Chicago that is drunk on violence and corruption, in which the vileness of the city's degradation and humiliation by Al Capone's rule of terror seeps up from the streets like a miasma, distorting the world as though the very atmosphere was drunk, as though the city buildings themselves were insane.  He shoots in disconcerting, narratively-unmotivated wide angles, and makes his camera weave in eldritch patterns through corridors, through shootouts, through windows and off the edges of rooftops, creating a kind of evil-eyed counterpoint to the staid and simplistically heroic tale of white hats battling black hats that the movie's ostensibly telling. As the film progresses, the incoherence between the deeply sane, self-satisfied, and respectably inoffensive Hollywood half and the mad, self-critical, and cartoonish De Palma half reaches a breaking point in the justifiably lauded sequence in which Costner's Eliot Ness attempts to capture Al Capone's bookkeeper amidst a firefight in Union Station. Any pretense of realism is abandoned as De Palma teleports characters from one end of the station to another, has gunshots propel victims multiple yards through plate glass walls, dilates time well past its breaking point, and does this all as part of a grand upstaging of himself by building the shootout around a short moment lifted and perverted from Eisenstein's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. While others of his films are more accomplished and powerful and disturbing—there is nothing here to rival, for instance, the anti-patriotism of BLOW OUT and its vision of America as a machine for turning the deaths of the poor into capital, or the distressingly insoluble problems of free-floating personal identity, determinism, and illusory mental states that are at the heart of FEMME FATALE's double roles and unreliable narration—but the constraints provided by the crutches of so much prima facie normalcy come with their own radical freedoms. This is top-notch B-grade De Palma.

The Untouchables (1987) Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary

I have been happily viewing my way though the box set of the first season of The Untouchables television series, including the original two-part Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse pilot, directed by the great Phil Karlson and theatrically released as The Scarface Mob. (I wrote that up as a "Noir of the Week" at The Blackboard and will post it here as soon as I can unearth it; that board's online archives don't go back very far, and I can't seem to find it on my own computer.)

I thought I should take a look at Brian De Palma's 1987 film version of The Untouchables, which I had never seen. It is reasonably entertaining but nothing great; Leonard Maltin gives it four stars and I'd maybe give it two (largely on the basis of Sean Connery's fine supporting performance). The aesthetic of late Fifties television serves this material so much better than the aesthetic of late Eighties blockbuster film-making! The celebrated noir look of The Untouchables series lends it an atmosphere and intimacy that the movie can't touch. You are drawn into that world.

With his moral rectitude and his sharp way of wearing a three-piece suit, Kevin Costner is spot-on casting for Eliot Ness, a worthy successor to Robert Stack. But Robert De Niro's Al Capone is strictly a cartoon-style villain. By having Ness confront Capone early on, the movie loses the great moment at the end of The Scarface Mob when Neville Stack's Capone doesn't even recognize the man who brought him down. But then, the movie trades subtlety for broad effects with consistency. The television series had its own tommy-gun garishness, to be sure, but nothing like as stupid as the confrontation between Ness and Frank Nitti in the film, which is played strictly for crowd-pleasing and is an insult to the historical Ness, who didn't push foes off buildings. (I'm a big admirer of the real Ness; I use a photograph of him as my avatar at several web bulletin boards.)

This has to be the most anonymous film by Brian De Palma that I have ever seen. The riff on the famous baby carriage scene from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is a fun, stylish bit, but most of the rest of the film could have been helmed by any competent Hollywood traffic manager. The films of DePalma's that he gets knocked around for by critics, the supposed "Hitchcock rip-offs" -- those are actually personal, obsessive film-making, the movies that De Palma will be remembered for. The Untouchables was a paycheck for him.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Untouchables (1987) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, July 31, 2009

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder

Reverse Shot [Eric Kohn]

Dragan Antulov retrospective [6/10]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

filmcritic.com (Mark Athitakis) review [4/5]

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Michael Pflug

The Digital Bits dvd review Greg Suarez

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Harral) review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review series of fanboy reviews

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]

Lars Lindahl retrospective [4/4]

eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] DarkHorse

Eye for Film (Josh Morall) review [5/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/5] Special Collector’s Edition

DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [3/5] [Special Collector's Edition]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio & Hock Guan Teh) dvd review Special Collector’s Edition

PopMatters Leigh H. Edwards, Special Collector’s Edition

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Collector's Edition] Colin Jacobson

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

DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD DVD Version]

DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Verdict - Special Collector's Edition (HD DVD) [Ryan Keefer]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]

BBC Films review Neil Smith

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

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

Siskel & Ebert (video)

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

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

DVDBeaver - Blu-ray DVD review [Leonard Norwitz]

CASUALTIES OF WAR

USA (113 mi) 1989 ‘Scope Extended version (121 mi)

Time Out review

De Palma is not a director one looks to for conscience, and his track record on the issue of rape has been innocent of moral debate. It's odd to find him dealing with both, and the non-sensationalist approach seems to have taken a toll on his energies: Casualties of War is dull. Sgt Meserve (Penn) kidnaps a Vietnamese girl to service his squad during a dangerous reconnaisance mission, and only the rookie Eriksson (Fox) opposes him. The quarrel is as static as their characters - Meserve plain nasty, Eriksson a model of decency. They shout at each other lots; when Eriksson reports the crime, Meserve tries to blow him up in the latrine. The official reaction - what's a crime in wartime? - only comes to life when Lt Reilly (Rhames) explains what injustice means to a black Southerner. David Rabe's screenplay is disappointing in the light of his brilliant Streamers, and the conclusion in which Eriksson achieves catharsis back home with a Vietnamese girl on a campus is preposterously corny.

Casablanca to Charlie Bubbles Pauline Kael

A great, intense movie about war and rape, based on a Vietnam incident of 1966 that was reported in The New Yorker, October 18, 1969, by the late Daniel Lang. He gave an emotionally devastating account of the actions of a squad of five American soldiers who kidnapped a Vietnamese village girl, raped her, and then covered up their crime by killing her. One of the five men refused to take part in the rape, and, despite threats and attempts on his life, forced the Army to bring the other four to trial. He's the one who suffers from guilt: he can't forgive himself for his inability to save the girl's life. Directed by Brian De Palma, the movie is the culmination of his best work. Sean Penn gives a daring performance as the squad's 20-year-old leader; Michael J. Fox is impressive as the soldier who can't keep quiet; Thuy Thu Le is the dazed, battered girl who haunts the movie long before she's dead. Also with Erik King as Brownie, John Leguizamo as Diaz, John C. Reilly as Hatcher, Don Harvey as Clark, Ving Rhames as Lieutenant Reilly, and Sam Robards as the chaplain. The adaptation (too explicit in a few places) is by David Rabe; the cinematography is by Stephen H. Burum; the music is by Ennio Morricone. Columbia. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Movie Love.

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review

It is inconceivable to me that anyone who kills or harms another human being can be considered a hero; any act of violence represents a failure of the person's humanity and imagination. It is inconceivable why people should feel the need to kill, simply to survive, profit, or as a matter of emotion. There is no reason a human being cannot transcend this. Yet not only are most humans incapable of doing this, they put their faith and trust in those who have less control than they themselves do.

The plot for Casualties of War is apparently based on an actual event from 1996: five soldiers are serving in an unit during Vietnam War, led by Meserve (Sean Penn), a forceful but effectively psychopathic personality. Eriksson (Michael J Fox) is a new member of the unit, and still unjaded by the violence around him. Frustrated, Meserve leads his team into a village where they kidnap a young girl, Oahn (Thuy Thu Le) and rape and violate her, physically and emotionally. They take her along with her, and force her to be their slave. Eriksson refuses to take part in this and attempts to set her free. However, in the end, the battered and broken girl is killed by Meserve's team, with Eriksson unable to do anything to stop it.

Eriksson tries to find some semblance of justice, but runs up against a wall of people who refuse to look into the abyss. But he perseveres and finally the people who committed the actions are brought before a military tribunal.

Sean Penn portrays Meserve highly effectively. Michael J. Fox is surprisingly good as the naive recruit. The performance of Thuy Thu Le is heart-wrenching. Brian DePalma's direction of the primary subject matter (the brutality of Meserve and his unit; and Eriksson's conflicted position) is top-notch. The film is based on Daniel Lang's article in a 1969 New Yorker, and a subsequent book. The score by Ennio Morricone is excellent. The ending is a bit of a cop-out.

Casualties of War is one of the best war films I've seen. It s emotionally manipulative but it's effective (unlike films like Saving Private Ryan). It illustrates how war demonises in a stirring manner, while also showing that it doesn't need to be that way.

War is the refuge of the lazy and the foolish. Institutionalised violence represents the failure of humanity as whole. Casualties of War brutally illustrates the affect of institutionalised violence, and how it shapes ones thinking so that any action can be dismissed (not justified or rationalised). By not taking a position on the Vietnam War itself, and by illustrating the resistance Erikson runs into when he wants to do something right, the film goes beyond war and points to the failure of humanity's institutions as whole.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review

Within the impressive array of Vietnam War films released in the 1980s and '90s, few entries are more disturbing than Brian DePalma's Casualties of War. Unlike other more rollicking pictures that display the intensity of the jungle atmosphere, this story takes a more personal look at the effects of the war. A band of five American soldiers embarks on a typical reconnaisance mission through the wilderness. However, this task becomes much different when they commit horrible atrocities on a young, innocent Vietnamese woman (Thuy Thu Lee). These acts reveal the vicious flipside of the Vietnam experience, where soldiers direct their anger and vengeance onto the local inhabitants.

Private Eriksson (Michael J. Fox) has spent only three weeks in Vietnam yet has already faced a life-threatening experience. During a battle with enemy forces, he finds himself trapped halfway into an underground tunnel. His legs dangle above the heads of young men determined to kill this American intruder. Luckily, the sergeant of his platoon arrives just in time and pulls him away from the incoming mortar fire. Eriksson's savior is Sergeant Meserve (Sean Penn)—a confident leader who draws faith from his men through his arrogance and unflinching hatred of the enemy. Meserve's best friend is Brownie (Erik King), an amiable jokester nearing the end of his service period. Unfortunately, the V.C. murders him during a sneak attack at an apparently harmless village. This pivotal action changes Meserve and pushes him further towards the realm of paranoia and cruelty.

The group of soldiers taking this fateful journey are an odd collection of individuals brought together by the war. Eriksson is a bright-eyed young man with a wife at home who has yet to develop any pure hatred of Vietnam. Hatcher (John C. Reilly) embodies the not-too-bright soldier with few emotions in either direction. After they've kidnapped the girl, he compares their actions to Genghis Khan and says it's "fantastic." Clark (Don Harvey) is an off-kilter individual who enjoys nothing more than destroying the enemy. Diaz (John Leguizamo) is the new member of the band, and he struggles with internal conflicts between his conscience and following the group. They're all led by Meserve, who labels the girl a V.C. suspect and plans to "interrogate" her. When Eriksson rebels and refuses to commit rape, he becomes isolated from everyone and puts his own life in danger.

Director Brian DePalma (The Untouchables, Dressed to Kill) is widely known for injecting loads of style into his films, with varying results. Although this story plays in a fairly straightforward manner, it still includes some inventive moments. During Eriksson's plight in the tunnel, the camera pans straight down from his body and reveals the danger hidden beneath the ground. DePalma also uses several extensive takes that allow the actors to jump into their roles. The camera avoids showing the worst moments of the terrible incident, and this omission adds to the disturbing nature of the scene.

Casualties of War places the audience directly into the war environment and grabs us during the chilling trek across the impressive landscape. The pace hardly slackens during the introductions, through the kidnapping and its ultimate resolution. However, the moments following this event fail to match the same intensity of the previous occurrences. This is a minor problem, though, and can be forgiven, considering the effectiveness of the earlier scenes. Nevertheless, I see no reason for the inclusion of the bookends back in America. Intended to provide a more upbeat ending, they feel out-of-place and unnecessary. This inclusion may slightly lessen the film, but it still provides a chilling, spell-binding experience.

Casualties of Genre, Difference, and Vision: Casualties of War James Moran from 24LiesASecond, April 28, 2004

Rape and captivity Elliott Gruner from Jump Cut, June 1994

DVD Times [Extended Cut] Mike Sutton

Reverse Shot [Justin Stewart] Extended Cut

DVD review (DVD Times) Raphael Pour-Hashemi

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

Movie-Vault.com (Arturo García Lasca) review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Chuck Aliaga) dvd review [Extended Cut]

Reel.com dvd review [Extended Cut] [3/4] Jerry Renshaw

DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review Extended Cut

DVD Talk (Phil Bacharach) dvd review [4/5] [Extended Edition]

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

The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Todd Doogan

eFilmCritic.com (Jack Sommersby) review [4/5]

Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers

Edward Copeland on Film

Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman

Movieline Magazine review Richard Natale

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

The Onion A.V. Club also reviewing MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

USA (125 mi) 1990

Time Out review

De Palma's film of Tom Wolfe's dark, hilarious magnum opus bombed in the States - amid charges of racism - and it's easy to see why. It's norra lorra laffs. Wolfe's book about the inhabitants of the Big Bad Apple has a Dickensian scope and a Faustian dynamic: 'What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole, but lose his soul?' His view of an ethnic pressure-cooker society is ironic and caustic but even-handed. In the movie, simplification and scaling down - plus significant changes in ethnicity - lose the balance. In a twin-track movie, we watch dipso journo Peter Fallow (Willis) - who narrates - rise as adulterous Wall Street trader Sherman McCoy (Hanks) falls. Fallow is put onto a story: a poor Bronx black is a near-fatal hit-and-run casualty. The car turns out to be McCoy's Mercedes - scoop! - and the jackals descend. What De Palma delivers is merely a mediocre yuppy nightmare movie, stylistically flashy but with little pace, bite or pathos. As usual with De Palma, the woman gets shafted (here Griffith as McCoy's mistress). If anything, it's a Hanks 'little boy lost' movie, more in the Big tradition than The Big Tradition.

Slant Magazine review Paul Schrodt

Since any positive retrospective of Brian De Palma's career must inevitably be pitched as a defense of the director, it goes without saying that a key film in such a feature would be The Bonfire of the Vanities, his most unpopular work after Mission to Mars and one ravaged by critics with a vitriol that still seems remarkable. It's remarkable because, in retrospect, Bonfire of the Vanities is one of De Palma's tamer movies, no doubt eviscerated for not living up to the same image critics held in their heads when they read Tom Wolfe's enormously popular novel three years earlier; hype always did kill the cat, and the movie's nastiest pans came from journalists comparing it to the book—one called it a "fascinating calamity" and another, more frighteningly, commanded readers to "destroy this film."

That latter comment exposed something else: critics' completely unfounded, shamelessly unmasked hatred for De Palma the auteur. Watered-down as it may be, Bonfire of the Vanities channels much of the same rambunctious, anarchic spirit of his deeply personal Vietnam-era films, Greetings and Hi, Mom!, which makes complacent viewers tremble. Politically and artistically, Bonfire of the Vanities is a challenge—a visceral wake-up call to the mind and the senses. And as in any De Palma film worthy of its director's name, in this one the audience plays the role of participant as much as it does spectator. To watch De Palma lampoon the self-indulgence of the '80s, as Wolfe did much more straightforwardly in his book, is to be forced to confront a long list of off-kilter images and incongruous tones—embodied here by the innately good-natured Tom Hanks's performance as Sherman McCoy, a slimy, adulterous investment banker; Melanie Griffith's gleefully absurd vixen mistress Maria Ruskin; and, most important of all, the sudden and jarring shift from farce to straight-faced moral declaration that is Morgan Freeman's masterful courtroom speech (which draws its inspiration from, cleverly, a similarly positioned political decree within Jean-Luc Godard's own social critique, Weekend).

"I don't do satire," De Palma reportedly said in one interview, and in a sense, he doesn't, because satire suggests a sly ironic twist to otherwise stern material, whereas De Palma prefers to wear his parody with a big, dumb grin—or alternatively, with his fangs fully protracted. Tom Wolfe's novel was satire; the movie is broad comedy, playing up its characters' vices and follies to viciously cartoonish levels, rendering them more laughable than contemptible. This is why it was ultimately necessary that the movie's corporate sleaze bucket be played by, of all people, Hanks, who up to that point had been tied to light comedies. And why, naturally, Melanie Griffith chose to make her character more daffy than sexy; likeable or detestable, De Palma's protagonists fumble at everything they do. And it's worth noting that both actors punctuate their billboard-size representations of greed, racism, and infidelity with some of the more gut-busting moments in movie history, such as when Griffith squeals at the ominous sight of two approaching black men in the Bronx, "Oh my God, natives!"

De Palma's characterizations may not have the subtle tongue-in-cheek wit of Tom Wolfe, but his version of the story is both more comic and angrier for it. Behind Hanks's and Griffith's vaudeville act (and to a much lesser extent, Bruce Willis's dull work as a alcoholic journalist who ties the narrative together), De Palma's sinuous camerawork suggests a fiery examination of New York's racial and economic head-butts—if critics were searching for the film's muscle, this is where it was at. A glorious time-lapse shot opens the film, observing 24 hours in the city's vibrant goings-on from atop the Chrysler's building's high perch. On one hand ecstatically unifying all New Yorkers under one sky, the image is also strangely foreboding, as a peering eagle statue looking down on the landscape insinuates the precarious social imbalances that exist among different neighborhoods. Never since has there been such a brilliantly singular distillation of a city's cultural strife—certainly not in Crash's contrived fender-bender-as-peacemaking visual metaphor.

For all its polish, Bonfire of the Vanities neither sustains the feverish, revolutionary energy nor reaches the visceral peak of Hi, Mom! But as major Hollywood pictures go, it can become stunningly hot-tempered, a quality most journalists are too quick to ignore. As in Godard's Weekend, a cutting sorrowfulness underlies slapstick humor that can quickly turn violent. When guests at a cocktail party condescend to his downfall, McCoy runs them out by blowing shotgun pellets into the ceiling. Here Hanks's point of view is the camera's, and so his character's frustration is the audience's, and that of every one of New York's underdogs, rich and poor, who struggle to find genuine human feeling within the city's partisan theatrics (signified here by a crooked Mayor, a savage media, and a pretentious intelligentsia, one of whom hysterically fawns over a gay poet by saying, "He's on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS."). Late in the film, De Palma juxtaposes the central plot with a production of the opera Don Giovanni—a tragicomedy within a tragicomedy, tying one century's societal baggage to another's. Each generation's ills are really universal, a cycle of inhumanity that continues endlessly…

But not hopelessly, as Morgan Freeman articulates in his genius climactic speech—absent from the novel—playing the only good-natured character, a judge who presides over McCoy's case. With a gavel in his hand to symbolize De Palma's own measured plea for common sense, and approaching the camera directly as if to lecture the audience, Freeman turns various groups' self-righteousness back on them, exposing each one's duplicity and crying out for "decency." "It's what your mother taught you," he explains, in a down-home vernacular that reverses, radically, the movie's giddy parody into earnest speechifying. It's still self-aware, of course (De Palma tests his audience's limits in more than one way), but the sentiment is meant sincerely. De Palma doesn't do straight satire, and as such his coda puts everything prior into a clarifying moral focus while simultaneously challenging the way we watch movies: In an unjust world, law is our "feeble attempt" to make things right. Bonfire of the Vanities is De Palma's. Don't like it? "The court directs you to shut up!"

Reverse Shot [Eric Hynes]

brian de palma - The Screengrab When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Paul Clark, November 18, 2008

Edward Copeland on Film

The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [1/4]

eFilmCritic.com review [2/5] Hawkboy

George Chabot's Review

Entertainment Weekly review [D] Owen Gleiberman

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

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

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

RAISING CAIN

USA (91 mi) 1992

Time Out review

Dealing here with the potentially juicy subject of multiple-personality disorder, De Palma provides an irresistible vehicle for Lithgow in a variety of parts stemming from child psychologist Dr Carter Nix. The first half-hour is deliberately unnerving and confusing before the plot settles down to examine why and how a number of children and a few adults have disappeared. There's a great deal of humour, not least in the persons of Carter's evil alter ego Cain, and their equally nasty father, a psycho-scientist who thinks nothing of driving his own kin completely round the twist in the name of research. And Sternhagen is superb as a cancer-stricken doctor who first sparks off suspicions about the aforementioned Lithgow brood. More to the point, De Palma, as an avowed disciple of Hitchcock, is back at his chilling best with a series of real seat-ejectors. Lithgow is consistently brilliant, while Davidovich makes a good fist as his wife. A really exciting 90 minutes worth, so long as you don't take it too seriously.

Jerry Saravia retrospective [3/4]

There are very few thriller directors you can count on nowadays (I've lost all hope with John Carpenter after the boring "Vampires"), but Brian De Palma is one that manages to deliver, witness his more recent films such as "The Untouchables" and "Mission: Impossible." "Raising Cain" came in between "Carlito's Way" and the outrageously uneven "The Bonfire of the Vanities," and it is a goofy and sporadically scary thriller that at least shows the director still has command of the medium with his deft sleight-of-hand.

The film stars the perfectly cast John Lithgow as child psychiatrist Carter Nix, who may have multiple personalities, including that of his evil German (or Norwegian?) father and his leather-jacketed, sleazy brother, Cain (all played by Lithgow). The tormented Carter is seemingly happily married to his unfaithful wife (Lolita Davidovich), who longs for a handsome widower named Jack (Steven Bauer). Oh, no!!! And all hell breaks loose when Carter finds out.

"Raising Cain" is fun, but it is not intended as a serious thriller since it too often mocks itself. De Palma borrows freely from his favorite director of suspense, Hitchcock, and even rips himself off (look at the infamous shot of tennis shoes from "Dressed to Kill"). This makes for a highly uneven thriller, albeit with one or more red herrings than necessary. An example would be the cliche of the dream-within-the-dream that Davidovich has, which makes me squirm each time I see it (a similar sequence took place in "An American Werewolf in London"). Still, De Palma has moments that make you scream with delight and he knows how to draw suspense with precision and cleverness (the shocking flashback to Davidovich kissing Bauer at a hospital during New Year's Eve is a screamer). There is also a superb long tracking shot at a police station that is as equally breathless a scene as De Palma has ever done.

The performances may be over-the-top and silly, but it is still an intriguing movie to watch - a definite case of style over substance. De Palma knows how to engineer an efficient, suspenseful, chilling thriller, and for better or worse, that's exactly what "Raising Cain" is.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

Rather than attempt to stay way ahead of the audience, Brian De Palma's thrillers just are usually one step aside you—the better to lull you into admiring the scenery before guiding you smack into the seedy part of town. With Raising Cain, a truly nutzoid psychological mindfuck in which the experience of trying to pin down where reality stops and dream states begin makes John Lithgow's crippling schizophrenia look like an attractive alternative, De Palma hands you a map to an entirely different city. Dressed to Kill, in comparison, is his greatest triumph of fastidiousness—a tight, tense, well-oiled calliope of suspense. The film's jolts don't stem from the plot taking unexpected detours, but, rather, they grow from one's slow-dawning realization that De Palma is so talented he can make a film about mistaken and concealed identities without a single shred of doubt over who's tailing who and you're still enthralled, grooving on the pleasure of technique.

In contrast, the gauzily astringent Raising Cain recoils from the surfeit of technique, and pleasure takes a holiday. The rickety frame of the story involves John Lithgow as Carter Nix, a child psychologist whose father, also a psychologist, used him as a test subject to examine the factors by which a young personality can be formed. Unfortunately, Nix the elder apparently thought it best to focus his research on seeing just how many maladaptions a single brain can hold. Despite a long, annotated case history from Frances Sternhagen that plays out just long enough to merit one of De Palma's bravura traveling shots, it's never clear how many fractured fragments of psyche make up the title character (Cain is Carter's amoral, almost beatnik alter ego). Accentuating the confusion, De Palma turns the film's second act into a disorienting labyrinth of dream sequences within flashbacks within fantasies. As Carter's cheating wife Jenny, Lolita Davidovich spends at least 10 minutes of the film either waking up in the wrong man's bed or dying violently, over and over.

Rather than clarifying, De Palma's technique with Raising Cain effectively obliterates the audience's bearings. Which gives the film's final sequence—on the surface a shameless swipe from Dario Argento's killer reveal at the climax of Tenebre—a nasty twist. De Palma has frequently used dream sequences in his films as a way to demonstrate transference: the bequeathing of erotic terror to Nancy Allen sleeping in Angie Dickenson's bed in Dressed to Kill or the fear of isolation from peers that Carrie sanguinely (in every way) teaches Amy Irving. But in Raising Cain, there's no forum for this type of psychological exchange because there isn't a rational control group. ("There was no body because there was no murder," as Jennifer Salt would say.)

The film is, from frame one, a tapestry of dreams; the first shot shows Carter and Jenny's daughter Amy sleeping on the parental surveillance video (in fact, she spends most of the movie either sleeping or waiting to sleep). It's not difficult to accept much of the film as emerging from deep within her abused psyche. Not only does the final (rationally impossible) shot suggest it, but so does the film's creepiest grace note: the curly-haired little boy emerging from a park bathroom to rasp "I know what you're going to do. It's a bad thing, and I'm going to tell" to Cain, his voice sounding eerily like John Lithgow on helium. I know if I were Amy and trying to make sense of why my daddy wanted to put me in a cage, I might start by making one of his personalities in my own age bracket. Ultimately, the reason the final shot is so perversely effective is because of its absence of transference. Instead, it reveals a psyche (or a bunch of them) hopelessly caught in a cycle of insanity.

The Key to De Palma's Raising Cain Dmetri Kakmi from Senses of Cinema (2000)

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Raising Cain (1992) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, August 8, 2009

Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [2.5/4]

Shane R. Burridge review

Vern's review

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

DVD Talk Review [Justin Felix] Thriller Pack Quadruple Feature

Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman

Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [0/5]

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

CARLITO’S WAY

USA (144 mi) 1993 ‘Scope

Time Out review

A fairly straightforward '30s-style gangster tragedy about a man doomed to an early grave by his society and his own code. Carlito (Pacino) wants out of the rackets, but to get there he has to 'play Bogart', running a discotheque, and even then he can't escape his friends - lover Miller and lawyer Penn. Just as Carlito can't reconcile who he is and where he came from, so Brian De Palma can't quite craft an anonymous mainstream movie. The picture comes alive in its set-pieces, most notably in the climax at Grand Central Station. It runs long and is ultimately not much more than a showpiece, but Pacino looks every inch a movie star, and De Palma provides a timely reminder of just how impoverished the Hollywood lexicon has become since the glory days of the '70s.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Brian Welesko

What compelled Cahiers du Cinema to name Brian De Palma's CARLITO'S WAY among the best films of the 90s? At first—and for some maybe even second—appearances, this one is a head-scratcher. Al Pacino plays a just-released heroin dealer with a new appreciation for life, setting out to remake himself as a law-abiding citizen. Dreaming of running off to the tropics with his girlfriend, and despite his optimism, Carlito gets dragged down by the undertow of his former life. Rife with allusions to other gangster films, such as De Palma's own SCARFACE, CARLITO'S WAY hews closer to creative imitation. But where most gangsters opt for the shootout-cum-temper tantrum, Carlito's mid-life reemergence is a realization of his agency and an attempt to move beyond recriminations. Well shot and iconic in its own right, CARLITO'S WAY is worth viewing, but best film of its decade? Though ranking films is rarely edifying, the film's placement at the top might be in recognition of its ability to both capture and comment on the prevailing temperament of the 1990s. After years of material excess and rampant capitalism brought little more than an exacerbation of societal problems, the film's optimism that life is worth living despite such hardships—and that a modicum of inner peace can be found even in a world that is doomed from the beginning—is a message of hope, however thin and however problematic.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Lang) review

Al Pacino plays Carlito Brigante, an ex-con who decides to make his new way an honest one in this stylish action thriller from De Palma. But his determination is hampered by the pressure which his crooked lawyer friend (Sean Penn) puts on him, taking advantage of the fact that Carlito feels indebted to him for obtaining his release from prison. Carlito gets back together with his ex-girifriend, a beautiful dancer with whom he had split up because he thought that they would never see each other again, and they dream of getting away to paradise together However, Carlito's association with his lawyer puts his life and liberty in peril; for him, a different kind of joumey beckons.

The character of Carlito represent someone who is stuck between two ways: the criminal way of the street, which, represented by his drug-addict lawyer; Carlito now finds unattractive; and the honest way, represented by his girlfriend and by the dream which he shares with her of getting away. But it is being trapped in the middle that threatens to destroy Carlito - he now finds the dishonhest way repulsive, but his history has been to stick by it, and by those in it - and while he continues to do so, he cannot realise his aim of life on the straight and narow.

De Palma directs with flair and vigour, and he is helped a lot by good performances from the three main characters. Penn is particularly noteworthy as Kleinfeld, Carlito's dishonest Jewish lawyer. But as well as being an excellent action movie, Carlito's Way is at times an emotional one, especially at the ending (another shoot-out at a station, in fact). De Palma will have to make his next film a really exceptional one if he is to better this.

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

After too long in the wasteland, Brian De Palma has once again found his footing. With Carlito's Way, De Palma has turned out a masterful piece of entertainment anchored by an interesting story and fine performances and hoisted by an intoxicating field of vision that nevertheless, maintains a sharply focused perspective. In some ways the movie is reminiscent of De Palma's last reteaming with Pacino in Scarface, but only in the sense of their narrative settings in drug underworlds. Yet Carlito's Way, though violent, has little of that baroque, drug-paranoid barrage of bulletry that pocked Scarface. Carlito (Pacino), through whose eyes we witness the whole movie, is a man who carries a gun; it's part of his work, a part of who he is. But rather than say that Carlito is willing to use his gun, it's perhaps more to the point to say that he is not unwilling to use it. Set in Spanish Harlem in 1975, the story is derived from a couple of novels by Edwin Torres, a New York State Supreme Court justice. Opening with the inexplicable subway shooting of a character to whom we're yet to be introduced, the sequence is filmed from this character's skewed point of view as seen from his gurney. That character is Carlito who next we see as he's being sprung on a technicality from a 30-year jail sentence after five years by his wily attorney and old friend Kleinfeld (Penn). Formerly a major player in all sorts of underworld economies, Carlito returns to his barrio a respected figure despite the fact that he wants to go straight and open a car rental agency in the Bahamas. All he needs is a stake and even then, he works a straight job managing a nightclub and saves his money. Well, maybe also he needs his old girlfriend Gail (Miller), a woman who might go along with his fool's dream about the Bahamas in the same way that she is the only person to call him Charlie. Early on, the street-wise Carlito remarks to Kleinfeld that “a favor will kill you faster than a bullet” and from there we can see the end coming. And so should Carlito. But then we'd be deprived of the thrill of getting there. As an actor, Pacino imbues Carlito with such spark and quick grace, bringing a depth to the character that I'm not sure was fully there in the original script. Penn turns in another extraordinary performance as Kleinfeld. It takes a while to even recognize Penn in the role and then once you do, you suspect that he's really playing Daniel Stern playing a coked-out mob lawyer who's begun to think of himself as above all law. Miller, by and large, has a thankless role as the enigmatic Gail, a character lacking depth and dimension. The real star here, however, is De Palma's signature camerawork. It reels and swoops and tracks and pans, creating palpable physical excitement and interest. In the Seventies nightclub set with its tiered architecture and flashing lights and choice disco music (choices were supervised by Jellybean Benitez), the movie pulses with energy and fervor. With a concluding chase/shoot-out episode that might even make Hitchcock jealous, Carlito's Way is a dandy piece of entertainment. If the story needs a bit more depth and reason, who really cares? There's hardly time to notice.

Reverse Shot [Matt Zoller Seitz]

DVD Times Mike Sutton

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Carlito's Way (1993) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, August 28, 2009

A Revelation: Carlito's Way Fiona A. Villella from Senses of Cinema

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [4.5/5] Ultimate Edition

Slant Magazine review Zach Campbell

Scott Renshaw review [7/10]

The Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan

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

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]

Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman

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

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

Reel.com dvd review [Ultimate Edition] [3/4] Ken Dubois

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Ultimate Edition] Colin Jacobson

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Ultimate Edition

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Ultimate Edition]

DVD Verdict (Brendan Babish) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) dvd review Keith Lofthouse

Eye for Film (Gary Duncan) review [4.5/5]

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

Edward Copeland on Film

Ted Prigge retrospective [3.5/4]

Exclaim! dvd review [Ultimate Edition] Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Variety.com [Leonard Klady]

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

DVDBeaver - HD DVD review [Gary Tooze]

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

USA (110 mi) 1996 ‘Scope

Time Out review

Twenty minutes into this big-budget update of the '70s spy series, half the cast has been wiped out, and Cruise's Ethan Hunt has been 'disavowed' by his employers, the CIA. To clear his name and avenge the death of his mentor Jim Phelps (Voight), Hunt assembles a crew of rogue agents to break in to CIA headquarters, playing a precarious double game with breathless self-assurance. 'Mission: Impenetrable': a bewildering, ludicrous, but mostly fun, sometimes even smart postscript to a genre that went out of fashion with the Cold War. There's more and less here than meets the eye. More, because De Palma, the cinematographer and the screenwriters have concocted an elaborate series of conceits and deceits, masks and trompe l'oeils, which slyly undermine the paranoid imperatives of the original series - and, indeed, the Cold War itself. Less, because De Palma is the most hermetic of American film-makers; combine that with the pressure to deliver a mainstream blockbuster and you've got a recipe for superficiality. Despite the snags, De Palma remains a virtuoso puppet-master, pulling the strings taut in a nail-biting robbery sequence, switching from micro to macro with Hitchcockian panache, and finally letting rip with a hell-for-leather climax.

Mike D'Angelo review

There are two disclaimers that absolutely must accompany my favorable opinion of this ridiculous movie. The first is that I have never seen even as little as five seconds of the TV series on which it's (apparently rather loosely) based. There's been no small amount of criticism regarding the ways in which the movie negates or ignores the fundamental tenets of the show, and these complaints may well be valid, but I wouldn't know. Never saw it. The second disclaimer: I like caper movies. If you make a film in which a group of people work as a team to infiltrate some impregnable fortress and retrieve some vital document, I'm along for the ride; you'll have to work overtime to make a film of this sort that's so awful that I won't enjoy it. I liked Sneakers, okay? Hell, I liked The Manhattan Project, and there wasn't even a team -- just a single geek! Mission: Impossible, to be honest, is pretty darn stupid. The double-crossing-back-stabbing-second-guessing plot is convoluted and largely uninteresting, and De Palma and/or various writers don't help matters by inexplicably revealing one of its twists far too early. Tom Cruise, who does fine work when he's cast opposite a "heavyweight" like Paul Newman or Dustin Hoffman, is in Superstar Mode here, and provides his usual serviceable but bland performance (he's still better than Keanu Reeves in Speed). Emmanuelle Beart, in her first English-speaking role, is utterly wasted. On the other hand, Cruise and Beart are surrounded by a host of terrific character actors having tremendous fun: Kristin Scott Thomas, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, the always interesting Henry Czerny, and especially Vanessa Redgrave, who alone seems to fully understand what kind of dopey movie she's in. The narrative is ultimately unsatisfying, but it does manage to keep you awake while it's unfolding (unlike that of another summer blockbuster I could name), and the set pieces, when they arrive, are truly spectacular; the Langley break-in may have been borrowed wholesale from a couple of Dassin films, but it's still a bravura piece of filmmaking, and precisely what De Palma does best. The more I think about the movie's flaws, the more I'm tempted to downgrade my rating, but the fact is that I enjoyed it while it was in front of me, which is all that I ask. That I'll have completely forgotten it by next week doesn't matter.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [B+]

The mere title sequence of Mission: Impossible, this summer's second big blockbuster, is more thrilling than all of Twister. The titles were designed by Kyle Cooper of R/Greenberg Associates (he created the knockout opener for David Fincher's Se7en), and they're made up of ridiculously quick cuts, flashing lights, big noise and sharp graphics. In about 30 seconds, they capture the very ephemeral essence of a weekly television program as well as the in-your-face aesthetic of Action '96, and suggest the concept of continuing franchise even more succinctly than the film's final scene.

They announce a picture that knows enough about style that it's absorbing to watch even when nothing much is going on. Framed in director Brian De Palma's stubbornly widescreen viewfinder (it's like nobody ever told him about the "TV-safe" area), each shot is an almost abstract delight. Tom Cruise looks great, whether he's peering over the screen of his laptop, or doing the James Bond thing on the top of a hurtling, cgi-rendered train. The settings, which range from old-world ornate to a cold high-tech style that recalls Kubrick, are exquisitely rendered. And while the movie never really revs up the headlong rush that I was hoping for, it's a pretty good nailbiter, with a handful of clever set pieces culminating in a nicely realized special effects showcase that knows when to quit -- a rarity in this age of double and triple "surprise" endings.

Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt, a member of the elite "IMF" team led by Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) to infiltrate delicate situations and extract important information. At the beginning of the movie, one mission goes terribly awry when the force is ambushed and everyone but Ethan is apparently killed. The target of this ambush is a computer disc containing a list of IMF agents worldwide. When Ethan hooks up with a senior agent in Prague, he learns that since he is the only survivor of the raid, he's suspected of being the "mole" working inside the organization, trying to get at the data. Ethan figures out immediately that the only way to clear his name is to escape his superiors and deliver the real bad guy ... mission? Impossible.

And that's why this movie is so much fun. The storyline is stubbornly implausible, but it's not dumb -- in fact, I can't recall a stops-out action picture so precisely calculated, performed, and timed since Andrew Davis's The Fugitive. (On second thought, Luc Besson's The Professional is pretty damned good.) The three acts are defined by their attendant action sequences. In the first, we see Ethan's friends gunned down and blown up one by one. In the second, we watch spellbound as Ethan and new pals Luther (Ving Rhames, Marcellus from Pulp Fiction) and Krieger (Jean Reno, from The Professional/Leon) infiltrate CIA headquarters in Virginia to hack the main computer system (yes, it's utterly ridiculous -- and totally cool). And at the end of the third, loose ends culminate in the aforementioned train sequence, which is eye-popping and almost convincing. (Is it my imagination, or is Tom Cruise completely computer generated in one of these shots?) The major bummer is that if you've seen the trailers, you've already seen too much of the climax for it to be as much of a kick as it should be.

Cruise himself certainly has screen presence, and his sculpted good looks are complementary to the film's vacuum-packed visuals. As Claire, Phelps' wife and Cruise's ostensible love interest -- and the only other member of Ethan's ill-fated mission who manages to survive -- Emmanuelle Beart (Manon of the Spring, Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud) is sleek and gorgeous, even though her presence is barely felt (DePalma told USA Today that what must have been an important opening scene exploring the relationship between Claire, Ethan, and Phelps was cut after test screenings). Reno and Rhames are more than welcome here, although they're not really full-blown characters -- rather, they're exploited as cinematic shorthand, spirits from other movies. And most delightful is Vanessa Redgrave, playing the cultured villain, a charmer among charmers who nevertheless falls under Ethan's spell. (Unfortunately, Cruise can be most irritating when he's trying hard to be charming, and in his scenes with Redgrave, his exaggerated mannerisms made me want to yell "Cut!")

The director loads the film with his own imagery, which is characteristically derivative but distinctive in a post-Hitchcock way. As DePalma films go, this one is relatively satisfying, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it lacks the bizarre circumstances that distinguish much of his work. There's a great scene about two-thirds of the way through, where we're invited inside Ethan's head as he works out the puzzle facing him, even as the fellow he's talking to spins an elaborate lie. It's not a flashback, and it's not "reality." Disorienting stuff for mass consumption, maybe, but audiences should be smart enough to keep up, or at least to wait until everything becomes clear. Does it all make sense? Well, not quite. For instance, in the showdown between Ethan and the real villain, you have to wonder why the baddie, who's pointing a gun right at Tom's lovely chest, doesn't just shoot him dead to get the chief obstacle out of the way. But don't fret over it, or the ludicrous scenes involving computer hardware, or even Cruise's picture-perfect disguises, which apparently involve some magical substance not of this earth. Like the ad man says, "expect the impossible." Indeed.

It's perhaps disconcerting that the productions Hollywood lavishes the most attention on, that it's most proud of, are the ones that are, like this one, pretty much devoid of realistic human feeling and sensitivity. But for me at least, it's heartening when a movie recognizes itself. Mission: Impossible has a heaping helping of well crafted action, a twisting, involving storyline, strong enough performances, and few pretensions. The most pressing question facing Ethan Hunt is who's going to try to kill him next -- there's no time for him to ruminate on the meaning of it all, or to bed down with his co-star. And that seems to suit him, and this movie, just fine.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Mission: Impossible (1996) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, September 4, 2002

Reverse Shot [Jeff Reichert]

Slant Magazine review Zach Campbell

Scott Renshaw review [5/10]

Salon (Charles Taylor) review The Filmmaker Who Came in from the Cold

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review

Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe) review

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review also reviewing two other films

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

Jerry Saravia review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]

Movie Reviews UK review [3/5] Damian Cannon

Mission Impossible (2-Disc Special Collector's Edition) Eamonn McCusker from DVD Times

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/5] Special Collector’s Edition

Reel.com dvd review [Special Collector's Edition] [2/4] Jerry Renshaw

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Collector's Edition] Colin Jacobson

DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review Special Edition

DVD Talk (Phil Bacharach) dvd review [3/5] [Special Collector's Edition]

DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review [Special Collector's Edition]

Exclaim! dvd review Thomas Quinlan, Special Collector’s Edition

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

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

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

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

DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) dvd review [3/5] [HD-DVD Version]

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

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]

SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]

Dragan Antulov review [3/10]

Serdar Yegulalp review

Steve Rhodes review [2.5/4]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

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

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review also reviewing MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [C+] with links to MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II and III

The Onion A.V. Club also reviewing CASUALTIES OF WAR

Variety (Greg Evans) review

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman

Tucson Weekly (Stacey Richter) review

Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [2.5/5]

Washington Post review links to Hal Hinson and Desson Howe

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

SNAKE EYES

USA (98 mi) 1998 ‘Scope Official 'Snake Eyes' site

Time Out review

De Palma's coldly executed techno-thriller opens with a signature sequence: a continuous Steadicam shot starts outside an Atlantic City sports arena, then snakes its way along corridors, up stairs and down an escalator, to reveal the packed crowd awaiting the start of a heavyweight boxing match. We're following flamboyant Rick Santoro (Cage), a corrupt cop who revels in the fact that he sees every angle. Inside, his old pal, Navy commander Kevin Dunne (Sinise), is keeping an eye on Secretary of Defence Kirkland, who has a ringside seat courtesy of arena owner and munitions tycoon Gilbert Powell (Heard). Minutes later, the odds-on favourite hits the canvas, a shot rings out, and Kirkland is fatally wounded. Santoro immediately seals the crowd inside the arena and, using TV and surveillance camera playback, scans the screens for clues as to the killer's identity. As Santoro interviews key witnesses, the film turns into Rashomon with action replays, as we see flashbacks from multiple points of view. The film echoes the technical wizardry and complex plotting of De Palma's best film, Blow Out. Edgy suspense and powerful kinetic energy are generated by the intriguing revelations and razor-sharp editing, while the truth behind its convoluted conspiracy has a surprisingly serious political and emotional undertow.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

The first 20 minutes of Brian De Palma's new movie Snake Eyes are among the most imaginative and energetic minutes of film I've seen in a while. Nicolas Cage plays Rick Santoro, a dirty cop in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Gary Sinise plays his best friend, Major Kevin Dunne. It's Fight Night (as Cage heartily declares many times). Cage is there to watch the fight, and Sinese is there to keep an eye on the United States Secretary of Defense, who is also attending the fight. The first several minutes of Snake Eyes is all done in one long shot, which is one of Brian De Palma's many trademarks. The camera travels all over the place, up and down staircases, around the arena. I was going to time it for you, but the truth is, I got so wrapped up in the action, I wasn't paying attention when the first cut occurred.

Of course the Secretary is shot during the fight's climax. A sexy woman in a white suit and blonde wig is also shot at but gets away. Cage and Sinise order the entire fight arena sealed off. "We've got 14,000 witnesses," Cage says. From there, Cage and Sinise try to piece together what happened through an elaborate series of flashbacks -- only someone's not telling the truth. Cage finally catches up with the sexy blonde, now a brunette (Carla Gugino), who had been trying to inform the Secretary of a military cover-up. Her story is told in a split-screen flashback, comparing it side-by-side with Cage's story.

I think I'll stop there and not ruin any of the film's surprises or discoveries. I will say that the films' ending (perhaps the last 10 or 15 minutes) seems sloppy and patchwork, especially for two experts. Brian De Palma and his screenwriter David Koepp (who wrote Carlito's Way and Mission: Impossible for De Palma) seem to have run out of either time or interest in their story, and after 80 minutes of brilliant, crackling filmmaking, the ending drops over a cliff. I'm still recommending the movie on a mathematical ratio. It's worth your price of admission to see the 80 good minutes.

It's also worth it to see Nicolas Cage. Cage continues to develop as an actor, and Snake Eyes is among his greatest treats. He dances and bristles with energy. He's like a delirious whirlwind. As the story breaks open, and Cage is forced to reckon with forces he hadn't foreseen, he becomes slowly deflated, and the fireworks are replaced by confusion and hurt. It's a mighty performance. Gary Sinise, another great actor, keeps a steely reserve, and marches around grimly like Robert Patrick's character in Terminator 2, but within the context of Snake Eyes, it works.

Brian De Palma is an extraordinarily primary filmmaker. After more than 20 films, he is still fascinated with and excited by the medium itself, and the ways with which you can move it and cut it. He is the most obvious of voyeurs. He doesn't get very deep into characters very often, but he loves to watch them in their private moments. He continues to invent new styles while paying less attention to his stories.

De Palma has been strongly defended by veteran New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, while other critics have both demolished his work and admitted to having guilty pleasures among his films. He is at his best with dark suspense, horror, and crime where demons are flying about as in Sisters (1973), Carrie (1976), Obsession (1976), The Fury (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), and Scarface (1983). Somewhere along the line Hollywood decided he would be good at action, and he energized the tired and dull scripts for The Untouchables (1987), and Mission: Impossible (1996). But his masterpiece may have been Casualties of War (1989), where he got interested for the first time in human beings who committed secret unspeakable acts. I think he scares most people by the way he strips cinema down to its vicious roots, but he is a great artist.

That said, Snake Eyes falls somewhere in the middle of De Palma's work, but it's an incredible body of work. Spotty, maybe, but full of personal demons and exorcisms. May De Palma's soul never be clean enough to stop him from making movies.

Slant Magazine review Paul Schrodt

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [C+]

Slate [David Edelstein]

Snake Eyes | Reverse Shot Justin Stewart

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review

Scott Renshaw review [5/10]

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Rob Nelson

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review …No Dice

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]

Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) review

Chicago NewCityNet (Ray Pride) review

New York Magazine (David Denby) review

Images (Gary Johnson) review

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review

eFilmCritic.com (Paul Bryant) review [1/5]

CNN Showbiz (Paul Tatara) review

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

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

Harvey S. Karten review

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

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

Ted Prigge review [1.5/4]

Edward Johnson-Ott review [2.5/5]

Kevin Patterson review [3/4]

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

James Bowman review

Entertainment Weekly review [D] Owen Gleiberman

The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [3.5/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

MISSION TO MARS C 73

USA (113 mi) 2000 ‘Scope

Time Out review

2020: a manned mission to Mars has run into unexplained trouble on the red planet and a rescue team has the risky task of going in after them. With three of his colleagues dead and no radio contact, Cheadle draws the short straw. He has to hole up on the Martian surface, grow a beard and wait. The cavalry are coming, however, and they're the best that NASA's got, including ace helmsman Sinise and wise commander Robbins. All they have to do is align themselves to the correct orbit, but a dangerous fuel leak may be about to jeopardise their plans. De Palma's best stuff is in the middle of the movie, where he gets to grips with the nuts and bolts of the precarious rescue attempt and constructs a couple of flawless suspense sequences. The deliberate approach is most refreshing, but nothing else in the movie matches up to it - not the draggy set-up and certainly not the dismally unimaginative final half-hour, when we uncover the age old secrets of Mars. Given the glaring mismatch between the able performers, comic strip dialogue and monumental Morricone score, the whole thing reeks of a perversity unusual among today's machine tooled blockbusters, but that's hardly an unqualified recommendation.

Missions Impossible - Movies - Village Voicepage 1 - Village Voice J. Hoberman from The Village Voice

Mission to Mars is a movie to warm John McCain's heart—a rescue saga full of a touchy-feely esprit that's predicated on equal parts Buck Rogers bravado and backyard barbecue, the whole burnt burger drenched in Ennio Morricone's elegiac western-style score. Despite one unmistakable De Palma gag—a visual joke evoking the Challenger explosion—the project is scarcely more personal than Mission: Impossible. Who would have imagined the director would show so little interest in the Tinkertoy surveillance tractors used to explore the Martian terrain? Nor does he have much fun with sociological extrapolation. To judge from the fashions, music, and slang, the year 2020 is in the grip of a powerful '90s revival.

Suavely shot by De Palma's frequent collaborator Stephen H. Burum, Mission to Mars has its sensuous aspect. The weightless camera moves under, over, sideways, down. Everything is aestheticized. (Even the—here extremely—red planet might be the site of Constantin Brancusi's greatest project.) De Palma almost never cuts when he can use a slow dolly to close-up. The performances are less limber. Don Cheadle, Tim Robbins, and, most anxiously, Gary Sinise rush around pretending to be soldiers—although no one is as awful as Armin Mueller-Stahl as their blustering CO.

Despite an ending that out-Spielbergs the master, Mission to Mars mainly coarsens 2001 in its mix of cosmic consciousness and "naturalistic" product placement (Dr. Pepper bloblets and multicolored M&M's floating around the cockpit). As in the Kubrick trip, the middle voyage is best. Halfway through, De Palma literally explodes his narrative to orchestrate a superb deep-space float-opera replete with runaway modules, high-tech lassos, dramatic self-sacrifice, and, in the most surprising maneuver, a montage-driven modicum of actual suspense.

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [5/10]

Critics on both sides of the Atlantic have been having a right go at Mission To Mars - judging from the reviews you'd think it was some kind of cinematic disaster on the scale of, say, The Avengers or any of those films where Jude Law plays Jude and Ray Winstone plays Ray. But I went along with an open mind. The trailers I'd seen were pretty promising, and while Brian De Palma's last film, Snake Eyes, was a major disappointment, it nevertheless proved that, although he'll never regain the heights of Carrie and Blow Out, he's still one of the most technically audacious film-makers in Hollywood, with a keen (if bitter) sense of humour and a terrific visual skill.

And I must admit I quite enjoyed Mission To Mars. It's nothing special - the only Mars film that's much out of the ordinary is probably Total Recall - but to brand it "one of the all-time bad movies" (Variety) is way off the mark, and suggests that the reviewer in question doesn't visit his local multiplex very often. Yes, the film does borrow many ideas and images from previous science-fiction epics, but it does so in an original and interesting way. For example, De Palma's clearly referring to 2001 during a sequence which shows the characters walking round the walls of their spacecraft, but he puts his own stamp on the scene by having the camera itself also floating, weightless, around the various cabins. He's famous for his use of long, technically demanding tracking shots - he's showing off his mastery of the latest technologies, but here it's also entirely appropriate to the material.

The film is full of such impressive visual flourishes. I especially liked the sequence in which the astronauts walk through a 3-D holograph showing the history of Mars and Earth and the evolution of Earth's creatures. The elaborate effects work stands in nice contrast to the very straightforward, refreshingly uncluttered story: in the year 2020, a NASA expedition - featuring Don Cheadle - lands on Mars but is attacked by a mysterious force - an enormous, malevolent tornado which is controlled by unseen powers. A second expedition - featuring Sinise and Robbins - sets out to find out what happened and bring back any survivors. After various mishaps, the astronauts discover much more than they bargained for - nothing less than the secrets of the origin of life on Earth.

In many ways, this is a typical American space movie, full of dopey philosophical speculations, gung-ho jargon, unbelievable scrapes and last-minute rescues. To put it mildly, it isn't much of a stretch of the actors involved - Cheadle, in particular, is sadly wasted, and you'd never guess that he's one of the half-dozen most talented performers in Hollywood at the moment (as a video double bill of Boogie Nights and Out Of Sight should easily prove). But that isn't really the point. This kind of thing stands or falls on its visuals and its set-pieces, and on not dragging too badly during the down-time. On those scores Mission To Mars is a very solid entrant in the genre, and De Palma is still capable of bringing more talent flair to the project than most directors could even dream of. So don't believe the critics - apart from me, of course.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

Is Mission to Mars an auteurist litmus test for the Y2K generation in the same sense that Baby Face Nelson or The Girl Can't Help It were in the theory's salad days? Or is Mission To Mars the ultimate in hackery? Is De Palma etched into every CGI-loaded frame? Or can't his personality overcome a budgetary tidal wave in the shape and magnitude of $80 million? While it's tempting to shrug such questions off with a "go fiddle with your Hatari and jerk your Steel Helmet somewhere else, there's formalism to be seduced here" (yes, even in this context of a critical appraisal of a singular talent), the impulse would rob an already gravelly underrated movie of its context. It would suck the air out of Mission to Mars like space robs Tim Robbins of his every last droplet of essential moisture. Leave a movie like Mission to Mars to fester among the slaves to the genre, and you'll wind up with a bloated and laughably irrelevant Web page of technical gaffes over on IMDB. So while an auteurist reading of Mission to Mars might invite self-involved chatter over whether the movie or the viewer is supplying the meaning, at least you won't find yourself sharing an oxygen mask with a caste of Trekkie outcasts. And Trekkies can't dance in outer space.

Buena Vista undoubtedly conceived of a very different film than the Mission to Mars it released in theaters. Its once and future pie-eyed protagonist is played by Gary Sinise, revealing executives' intentions; this was meant to be a space movie aimed at those for whom Apollo 13, in which Sinise brooded and kicked clods of dirt while everyone else got to board the Good Ship Patriotism, was just a little bit too dark. Why they hired De Palma is beyond me, but they must've felt intensely pleased with themselves when the movie earned a kid-friendly PG rating. But Mission to Mars isn't only a warm, up-with-people sci-fi actioneer in an Event Horizon era. It's also a fearless twist on the sadly still controversial theory of evolution, a completely anti-James Cameronian epic with a blockbuster budget and a completely becalmed man at the helm, and maybe the first chapter in De Palma's already richly rewarding "old man cinema" period. And did I mention that De Palma gets the chance to redux Fiona Lewis's gothic pirouette of death from The Fury, only this time the limbs actually fly off?

Sure, De Palma may have been able to direct movies with an AARP card in his back pocket since 1992's Raising Cain, but without Mission to Mars and Sinise's haunted memories of Kim Delaney, De Palma could've never found it within himself to make Femme Fatale, his answer to that immortal one-two "old man cinema" punch of 1964: Hitchcock's Marnie and Dreyer's Gertrud. While the obvious connection between these three films won't necessarily win over feminists for whom auteurism is another way of saying "no girls allowed," all three mark a decisive point of psychological capitulation on the part of otherwise resolute personalities.

Mission to Mars' redemptive coda opened the door for the subsequent film's continuing figurative and literal sanguinity. There are few sights more disturbingly beautiful in the De Palma canon than Jerry O'Connell's miniature globes of blood dancing in the air as they drift toward a hole in the Mars-bound shuttle's structure. At once referencing bodily danger and assisting the crew and allowing them to repair a potentially greater danger, the fluidity of the film—from its blood to its serpentine cinematography—testifies to its elegance. Not to say there's not a little hardening in De Palma's heart even at this stage. It's more a reflection of our culture's reactionary values than of De Palma's radicalism that this film airs on the Disney-owned ABC television network without its poetically direct 3D diorama of Earth's evolution, suggesting the redolence of a corporation in hysterical self-censorship mode. But even De Palma turns the majority of the film's saintly NASA heroes away at film's end, leaving them to turn around and return to a planet of genetic inferiority. A planet where gravity makes it awfully difficult to dance through air.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Mission to Mars (2000) Philip Strick, May 2000

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Mission to Mars (2000) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections of TV/Film, September 18, 2009

Mission to Mars Bernardo Rondeau from Reverse Shot

Salon (Charles Taylor) dvd review September 29, 2000

"Mission to Mars" In space, no one can hear you jeer, by Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, March 10, 2000

A nerd's rhapsody In Defense of “Mission to Mars,” by Ray Sawhill from Salon, March 16, 2000

PopMatters (Mike Ward) review

Scott Renshaw review [5/10]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

PopMatters (Tobias Peterson) review

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

Slate [David Edelstein]

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

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Scott Von Doviak

Urban Cinefile MISSION TO MARS (Australia) review, Louise Keller, Andrew L. Urban, and Shannon J. Harvey, including a review of the Urban Cinefile MISSION TO MARS: SOUNDTRACK

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

Reviews by John (John Haywood) review [3.5/5]

Shane R. Burridge review

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [4/5]

Reel.com review [3/4] Mary Kalin-Casey

DVD Verdict (Harold Gervais) dvd review

Reel.com review [3/4] Ray Greene

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

Right Turn Clyde

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Nitrate Online (Joe Barlow) review the hate corner begins around here

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [1.5/5]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [1/4]

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [2/5]

Images (Elizabeth Abele) review

Jerry Saravia review [1.5/4]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [1.5/4]

Grouch at Epinions.com

Memphis Flyer (Mark Jordan) review

James Bowman review

SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2/4]

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review

Alex Ioshpe review [2/10]

Movie Reviews UK review [1/5] Michael S. Goldberger

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [1/5]

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [1.5/5]

Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [D+]

The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [0.5/4]

That Cow (Andrew Bradford) review [0/10]

AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [F]

Entertainment Weekly review [C-] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety.com [Todd McCarthy]

The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rich Groen

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [1/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

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

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review

FEMME FATALE B+ 92

France (114 mi) 2002 Official site

Time Out review

A cinéphile's cinéaste, Brian De Palma is a genre unto himself these days, and this elegantly dreamy Femme Fatale (unreleased theatrically in the UK) is as rich and strange as anything he's made for a while. It includes a twist which, as the writer/director admits, will alienate half the audience. But go with the flow. Beginning with an exquisitely designed diamond theft set against an authentically recreated red carpet premiere at the Cannes film festival, the film introduces Marnie to Rear Window, Obsession to Dressed to Kill. The result is outrageous, provocative, fun. I'm not convinced she's the answer to De Palma's feminist critics, but tall willowy Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (X-Men) makes a poised, confident anti-heroine, and the visuals are often breathtaking.

VideoVista review Ian Shutter

Ever the Hitchcockian stylist, De Palma's skilfully constructed European thriller of deception, revenge and mistaken identity evokes the Master's unique brand of mystery narrative and innovative movie exposition. With chillingly suspenseful moments of alluring sexuality and simmering violence, obsessive attention to intriguing details, and expert handling of visual design and editorial techniques, here's another endlessly fascinating piece of cinematic wizardry that's boiling over with impressive trickery, audacious revelations, and a vivid sense of sheer exhilaration worthy of Dario Argento's best work.

Femme Fatale stars Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as bad girl Laure, and kicks off with a sophisticated heist sequence at the Cannes film festival, where the plan by a gang of diamond thieves to steal body jewellery from a supermodel known only as Veronica (Rie Rasmussen), goes horribly wrong and the shooting starts. Black Tie (Eriq Ebouaney) gets wounded and goes to prison, while sexy blonde Laure assumes the identity of suicidal runaway Lily and flees to the USA.

Seven years on, luckless photojournalist and wannabe collagist Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) is hired for the paparazzi mission to get the first ever pictures of the reclusive wife of Bruce Watts (Peter Coyote) - the American ambassador to France, a job at which he succeeds despite interference from security agent, Shiff (Gregg Henry). Eventually, however, Bardo regrets his actions and tries to make amends, only to become embroiled in a fake kidnapping scheme to extort ransom from the moneyed Watts...

De Palma's cinematic technique, such as it is, remains faultless. From startling camera angles to a variety of pastel and noir colour schemes, it's always arresting. Where Femme Fatale goes off the rails is with the scarcely adequate performance of Romijn-Stamos in dual roles. Far too much of this sensational and exploitative melodrama relies on the leading lady's acting talents (which, it must be said, are as scanty as her night scene's costumes), and no matter how often Laure/Lily tells Bardo (and, by implication, the audience) that's she's thoroughly wicked, there's just no hope of convincing anyone familiar with numerous other examples of the archetypal film noir female of the title that Rebecca fits the bill. Alongside the bold Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct or ultra bitchy Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction, poor Romijn-Stamos is unfortunately lacking in both spirit and polish.

Although she looks absolutely stunning and does make a great supporting player as blue-skinned Mystique in the X-Men films, Romijn-Stamos simply hasn't got the expressive depth or the ballsy attitude to carry a movie such as this.

Happily, the director's thematic and contextual references to his own back catalogue - Mission: Impossible (1996), Body Double (1984), and especially Blow Out (1981), itself inspired by Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) - are not particularly intrusive or too self-indulgent, instead seeming less a straightforward repetition of earlier works and more like a tolerable auteur signature. As with De Palma's most successful productions, Femme Fatale is more concerned with provocation and emotional resonance than with logic or plausible story development - hence the premonitory 'dream' sequence taking up so much of this film's running time.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Brian De Palma's formal obsession with allusions to seeing and sightlessness have forever brought to mind the works of Dario Argento, perhaps the only other living director who can create and sustain the kind of delirious artifice on fierce display in Femme Fatale. While its Cannes Film Festival sequence must count as one of the most impressive set pieces ever mounted by a director, it is the film's opening long shot that deserves special mention. Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) watches Double Indemnity on French television, studying Barbara Stanwyck and rewriting herself as a modern femme fatale. She and a group of thugs break into the Cannes Palais, hoping to swipe a fortune in diamonds from Regis Wargnier's whorish girlfriend Veronica (Rie Rasmussen). Wargnier's hideous East-West plays to the crowd while Laure and Veronica make out in the femmes bathroom.

Though De Palma's latest cinematic thesis may pale in comparison to both his own Body Double and Argento's Tenebre (the giallo director's audacious defense of auteur theory and possibly the best film De Palma never made), the remarkable use of water imagery throughout Femme Fatale welcomes a Jungian analysis and beckons comparisons to Argento's Trauma. Seven years after betraying her cohorts in crime, Laure returns to Paris a new woman (literally and figuratively) and married to an American ambassador (Peter Coyote). De Palma is a master of signs. While the Déjà Vue 2008 poster that decorates a telephone booth outside Nicolas Bardo's (Antonio Banderas) apartment may seem like a simple wink to the audience, the use of John Everett Millais's "Ophelia" as cover art for the poster evokes Laure's trouble with water. (In Trauma and Argento upstart Chang Youn-hyun's Tell Me Something, the Millais painting is used for similar effect.)

Laure packs a gun and a one-liner or two, challenging the way men perceive women and using that perception to consume and spit out her men. De Palma remarkably superimposes Romijn-Stamos's face over that of the film's many women (Stanwyck during the film's opening shot and Mellais's Ophelia when Laure chit chats with Nicolas over cold espresso), at once reinforcing the nature of the character's split self and the overall dreamlike momentum of the narrative. There's an overwhelming sense here that the past is looking forward into the present and any given move can forever change the way of things. De Palma's formal fixation with multiple dualities is so precise and pervasive that it can be read into any given aspect of this elaborate puzzle of a film: Banderas and the silent Frenchman who "watch" Romijn-Stamos as she seduces them with the power of her sex; the dash that separates East from West in the title of Wagnier's water-logged film; and a larger more personal conflict between the U.S. and France.

De Palma has made remarkable use of split-screen before (perhaps most prominently in his masterpiece Sisters) though his use of the technique in Femme Fatale deserves special mention because of its riveting self-reflexivity. Nicolas came to Paris in order to reinvent himself. A washed up paparazzo, he has nothing to photograph but the church plaza across the street from his apartment. The collage he creates on the walls of his apartment represents his ongoing struggle to reinvent reality and his search for a divine moment. While De Palma continues to engage tropes used by Hitchcock and Argento before him, the intellectualism, experimentalism and overall delirium with which he teases and attacks these tropes is remarkable to behold in Femme Fatale. Nicolas's struggle is then that of De Palma's himself. Laure gives Nicolas his divine moment and Femme Fatale gives De Palma his.

DVD Times [Mike Sutton]

Femme Fatale | Reverse Shot Nick Pinkerton

Femme Fatale | Reverse Shot Chris Wisniewski

Femme Fatale Noel Vera from Noel Movie Reviews, February 9, 2003

Scanners opening shots from FEMME FATALE by Jim Emerson

Slate (David Edelstein) review

CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon) review [5/5]

Kamera.co.uk review Neil Jackson

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [A-]

Vern's review

Salon (Charles Taylor) review

DVD Times [Eamonn McCusker]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]

Movie-Vault.com (Scott S.) review

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review also seen here: Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

DVD Talk (Jason Janis) dvd review [4/5]

SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]

Harvey S. Karten review

A Film Odyssey: <i>Femme Fatale</i> (2002) Rob Humanick

DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review

Reel.com review [2.5/4] Rod Armstrong

Jerry Saravia review [3/4]

Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [2/5]

filmcritic.com (Aaron Lazenby) review [1.5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [2/5]

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review with a few comments tucked away at the bottom of Page 2

Exclaim! dvd review James Keast

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2/4]

Entertainment Weekly review [F] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review

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

Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

De Palma's exquisite madness sparkles in 'Fatale' - seattlepi.com Sean Axmaker from The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review

Definitive Gaze - Film+TV - LA Weeklypage 1 - LA Weekly Amy Taubin from LA Weekly, November 7, 2002

Get To Know Your Rabbit John Powers from LA Weekly, November 14, 2002

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

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

Los Angeles Times (Manohla Dargis) review

Filmmaker Magazine: Blog Reverse Shot Calls Out Dargis, May 20, 2005

THE BLACK DAHLIA B 88

USA (121 mi) 2006 ‘Scope

Nothing stays buried forever. Nothing.

Another de Palma film that is hyper-saturated in artificiality and style, depicting Los Angeles in the late 40’s, using his rising and falling crane shots to excellent purpose, where the camera feels like it’s floating through the air all at once discovering multiple points of view. Resembling the seedy, creepy atmosphere of THE BIG SLEEP (1946), a mixture of family dysfunction, sexual provocation, and murder lurking around every corner, where the tough guy narration from the 1987 James Ellroy novel puts a testosterone-laden, film noir spin to the story, the film highlights a team of star detectives, Aaron Eckhart as the more senior ranking Lee Blanchard and Josh Hartnett as Bucky Bleichert. In the opening moments of the film, the two are thrown into the ring in a rip-roaring boxing match where they end up trying to take each other’s heads off, all supposedly to generate excitement and raise money for the police department, while the mysterious blond wearing loads of lipstick sits on the sidelines, Scarlett Johansson as Kay Lake, a Veronica Lake look-alike, similarly updated by Kim Basinger in Ellroy’s LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997).

Known as Fire and Ice, Hartnett is the reserved, strong silent type, perhaps too nice a guy and too soft-spoken in his narration, while Eckhart wildly leads the action, ambitiously diving headfirst into the headline grabbing Black Dahlia police crime, becoming obsessed, behind the scenes, by the lure of this enthralling young woman in black, the apparent victim of a sex crime. Eckhart starts taking benzedrine to sustain his manic drive, but seems to be losing a part of himself in the process. Years ago he made his career by putting away a bad guy, Bobby DeWitt (Richard Brake), stealing his girl (Johansson), now living with her but he may not be sleeping with her, which leaves an opening for his partner, so the three become fast friends. Hartnett is immediately smitten with Johansson, they are real-life lovers off the screen, but here their passion remains on ice. Early in the film, from a distance in that wild crane shot, we see the title character’s dead body lying in a ditch, a woman sceaming for help, but the crane then swoops away to other action, taking us completely away from the Black Dahlia story for the next hour of the film, only to return again in a flurry at the end which makes everything that came before, that seemingly had nothing to do with the story, somehow complicit in her murder. Hartnett on his own begins tracking down potential witnesses, where we get a picture of a developing story within a story, opening with a brilliant set piece in the huge expanse of a lesbian bar where K.D. Lang, dressed as a man, is singing while scantily clad women gyrate in a suggestively provocative dance. With no help from the women, about to give up on his leads, in walks Hilary Swank, dressed in black, staring at him with “that look.”

Following Swank’s strong, overly physical role as a female boxer in MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2004), here she is horribly miscast as Madeleine Linscott, a sex kitten who attempts to exhibit a dark feminine allure, who couldn’t be more out of her element as a tantalizingly demure femme fatale, yet flaws and all, the intrigue is to see how playing against one’s own nature will unfold. And she’s not alone, much of the acting resembles the Gloria Swanson school of dramatic arts, yet it’s set in such a murky atmosphere of over-stylization that it never stops being a joy to watch. It’s hard to fault de Palma for the obvious relish he has in filmmaking. Swank is a spoiled, pampered ultra-rich socialite, very similar to the family dysfunction in THE BIG SLEEP, but her family is so outrageous that it veers towards The Adams Family, perhaps more at home in the oddly macabre ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944). Dinner with the Linscotts is a memorable experience, as her mother Ramona (Fiona Shaw), actually has spells where she exhibits a feeling of light-headed faintness, like she’s about to swoon at any moment, mostly generated by her consumption of alcohol, but she lives her life in this state of neverending delirium, or is it inebriation, prone to a barrage of inexplicable verbal assaults directed towards anyone that suits her, usually her husband. John Kavanagh plays Emmett, her 1930’s screwball comedy BRINGING UP BABY-style father, the kind of guy who would get satisfaction telling the same story he’s told dozens of times, as if it was the first time, as his life has been diminished to a neverending monologue of listening to himself in a series of one-sided conversations. Madeleine has a flirtatious younger sister Martha (Rachel Miner), and thrown into this mix, Hartnett, is like a fish out of water. He hasn’t got a chance.

Into this swamp of murky delights, throw into the spotlight the showcasing of an altogether inhibited and tongue-tied Johansson, whose part calls for a wildly provocative, uninhibited sexual movie siren, like a stay at home Jean Harlow, but instead she sleepwalks through the part, which again, adds a kind of strange, out of place allure; throw in a largely incomprehensible story that delves ever deeper into sexual exploitation and depravity, all while the director is fully aware that he’s saturating the screen with a flood of sexually exploitive imagery, most of which are seemingly irrelevant side plots; throw in a dramatic, scene-stealing moment that appears to be a cross between V FOR VENDETTA (2005) and Zorro; and throw in a grainy, black and white stag film made at the scene of the crime, where what initially looks like harmless, soft core porn by an aspiring actress eventually leads to the brutal offscreen murder of one of its participants, Betty Short, the Black Dahlia played here by Mia Kirshner, which features the oddly disorienting technique of the actress staring straight into the lens of the camera, used again with Swank, reminiscent of the experimental camera style of the 1947 film LADY IN THE LAKE.

This film is a potpourri of oddly mismatched characters and storylines that feel like we keep stumbling into mysterious detours that continue leading us astray, luring us into a netherworld that exists only in the imagination of the author, expressed through incomprehensible, momentary fragments in time, which when simultaneously mixed together, feel like an interesting experiment gone wrong, especially when de Palma, unlike THE BIG SLEEP, inexplicably reveals the secrets to all the mysteries that had been building up throughout the film. Had they remained under the surface, the film might have become one of those intoxicating midnight feature cult favorites. Much of it shot in Bulgaria, of all places, by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, the texture of the film is what holds this together, enhanced by Mark Isham’s moody musical score and superb production values. Simply put, de Palma knows how to make any movie look great.

The Onion A.V. Club review Nathan Rabin

The qualities that make Josh Hartnett such a washout as a romantic lead—his emotional opacity, his inexpressive, coal-black eyes—make him a natural for the world of film noir, where stoic men cut themselves off from their emotions to avoid being swallowed whole by the darkness surrounding them. In Brian De Palma's masterful adaptation of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, Hartnett embodies two hardboiled types: the cop who gets too close to the case, and the boxer who must take a dive. Hartnett and co-star Scarlett Johansson—that most fatale of current filmic femmes—are naturals for this kind of noir-hued material, but the pairing of Ellroy and De Palma proves a marriage made in hardboiled heaven.

In many ways, Dahlia is De Palma's History Of Violence—a virtuoso thriller by a wildly idiosyncratic filmmaker working at his most restrained and commercial. But it nevertheless touches on many of De Palma's pet obsessions, from kinky sex to voyeurism to classic film. In a surprisingly commanding lead performance, Hartnett plays a boxer-turned-cop partnered with fellow boxer-turned-cop Aaron Eckhart. After a struggling actress (Mia Kirshner) is found murdered and gruesomely disemboweled, the two L.A. golden boys set out to solve her murder, in an epic quest that brings Hartnett into the warped circle of Hilary Swank, a kinky rich girl with an insatiable appetite for sex and low life.

Though Dahlia features De Palma in restrained-classicist mode, he can't entirely resist the urge to show off, most notably in a morbidly funny sequence shot entirely from Hartnett's perspective as he's introduced to Swank's nouveau-riche horror-show family. Elsewhere, De Palma's obsession with voyeurism and the power and danger of watching and being watched—so endemic to film as a medium, and De Palma's work in particular—finds its most haunting expression in a series of heartbreaking scenes where an unseen director interviews Kirshner during a vaguely sinister audition. She glories in the subversive power of exhibitionism while betraying the innate vulnerability of every struggling actress angling for a big break that'll never arrive. Where Swank is empowered by her raging sexuality, Kirshner is destroyed by it, just another casualty of a city and an industry that chews up pretty girls and spits them out whole.

Slant Magazine review Keith Uhlich

Brian De Palma eschews the Classics Illustrated mannerisms of L.A. Confidential in his adaptation of James Ellroy's novel The Black Dahlia, a fictionalized take on the still-unsolved murder of aspiring starlet Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner). An ostensible work-for-hire, the film is nevertheless distinguished by De Palma's expert navigation of its frighteningly finite space. This is a fever dream vision of the City of Angels, the shared nightmare of its principal players whose every move, we realize in retrospect, is helplessly preordained. Dante Ferretti's elaborate sets, built almost entirely on Bulgarian soundstages, are quite intentionally hollow (one wrong turn by prop or character and the scenery would no doubt cave in on itself) and it is out of this—as opposed to more standardized, gut-punch narrative twists and turns—that the film's primarily psychological tensions arise.

Though its main actions take place in 1947, the world of Black Dahlia is essentially timeless. De Palma tips his hand via the film's key exchange between warrants cop Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and the brunette Dahlia doppelgänger Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank). Standing before a portrait of Gwynplaine, the deformed protagonist of Victor Hugo's novel The Man Who Laughs, Bleichert says, "I don't get modern art." To which Madeleine responds, "I doubt modern art gets you either." De Palma is as much a historian as a filmmaker, so his intense focus on and present-tense reading of the painting (an incidental plot point in Ellroy's book) is no accident. This is a film that understands its influences, tracing a line from Hugo's Romanticism (and likewise incorporating his cutting critique of aristocracy) to German Expressionism and film noir (in its brilliant use of Paul Leni's silent film adaptation of The Man Who Laughs). It's a short jump from there to Black Dahlia's flamboyant lesbian bar sequence featuring k.d. lang in full Dietrich drag, singing "Love For Sale" among slinky French-kissing chorines, and to De Palma's own Greetings homage that sees the director himself assuming the impatient voice of authority in Elizabeth Short's screen tests.

But it's not all film theory. A throwaway sequence sees Bleichert stumbling upon the bodies of two Chinatown residents whose deaths he inadvertently caused; the bullet-ridden tableau suggests and points the way toward Vietnam, highlighting a retroactive sense of guilt, helplessness, and rage all-too-applicable to our own current events. It's often forgotten (or casually elided) that De Palma is a political filmmaker; even Black Dahlia's finest set piece (a subjective-camera "first date" between Bleichert, Madeleine, and her dysfunctional family) gets at the push-and-pull of the democratic system, with all its hierarchical factions and subdivisions fighting for power and the final say-so. The tragedy of Black Dahlia is that there is no finality for anyone—solving the "mystery," so to speak, counts for next-to-nothing. Ellroy himself said it best in an interview ("Closure is bullshit") and De Palma likewise understands that experience lingers and that there's no telling where, when, or how the ghosts of our life will haunt us.

DVD Times [Mike Sutton]

Alternative Film Guide [Andre Soares]

SHOT: The Black Dahlia | Reverse Shot Keith Uhlich

House Next Door [Matt Zoller Seitz]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Black Dahlia, The Jeremy C. Fox from Pajiba

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review

The Black Dahlia Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

REVERSE SHOT: The Black Dahlia | Reverse Shot Elbert Ventura

DVDTalk Theatrical - [Jamie S. Rich]

The New Yorker (David Denby) review

Beyond Hollywood review Brian Holcomb

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

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Jim Hemphill

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

CultureCartel.com (Lee Chase IV) review [2.5/5]

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

european-films.net Venice Film Fest review Boyd Van Hoeij

VideoVista review Richard Bowden

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/5]

DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [2/5]

Reel.com review [2.5/4] Pam Grady

Cinephile Magazine [Richard X]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [D]

Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale

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

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

The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review also another review here: cinematical.com

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

Chris Jarmick review [5/5]

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

CineScene.com (Shari L. Rosenblum) review

Urban Cinefile (Australia) review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [2/5]

Nerve [Adam Ford]

Edward Copeland on Film

stylusmagazine.com (Jeffrey Bloomer) review

Film School Rejects (Neil Miller) review [D]

CBC.ca Arts (Stephen Cole) review

Variety.com [Todd McCarthy]

Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman

The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review

The Observer (Philip French) review

Time Out London (Ben Walters) review

Boston Globe review [2/4] Wesley Morris

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

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [2/4]

Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

FILM REVIEW; Out of the Past: In a Noir Los Angeles, Murder Most Lurid Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, September 15, 2006

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Steve Rose talks to director Brian De Palma | Film | The Guardian Crazy, huh? September 8, 2006

The Black Dahlia The San Francisco Brian DePalma Theory Collective, a taped transcript of the post viewing discussion, September 15, 2006

REDACTED

USA Canada (90 mi) 2007

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

The interplay between maker and subject is just what's missing from Brian De Palma's Redacted, a strained anti-Iraq War mock-doc based on a real-life incident in which U.S. soldiers raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then murdered her and her family. The idea to stage the movie as a found-footage collage is an ingenious one, allowing De Palma to simulate everything from a Marine's video diary to a swollen French documentary (complete with lingering extreme close-ups and operatic score). But the movie's disparate styles don't yield different points of view. De Palma's soldiers are either guileless, ineffectual or homicidal (sometimes all three), and so poorly acted they come across as little more than stick puppets. The movie's failings are arguably more dramatic than political, but it amounts to the same thing; with no sense of the way a directionless conflict has turned otherwise upstanding young men and women into conscienceless killers, the movie inadvertently endorses the "bad apples" theory of military misbehavior. (In an interview, De Palma countered that the constant demand for fresh troops has forced the military to admit candidates who never would have passed a psych evaluation in the past, which is a fair point, albeit one that appears nowhere in the film.) De Palma apologists bent themselves double trying to find self-awareness in the movie's thudding script, but nothing in it matches, or merits, the power of its closing images, a horrific slide show of collateral damage meant to rectify the mass media's circumspection.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

Form follows function, or at least it is supposed to. It's alarming how little this idea actually applies to most American filmmaking. Maybe that's why "Redacted," Brian De Palma's "fictional documentary" inspired by reports of a real-life war crime with unnerving parallels to De Palma's 1989 Vietnam drama "Casualties of War," has been met with such divergent reactions.

De Palma won the Best Director award at Venice for his audacious approach, yet his alienating style has frustrated critics and bewildered audiences expecting his thrilling cinematic flourish. It has even angered some people. Which is ultimately what De Palma set out to do.

Using the techniques of non-fiction filmmaking, news, video diaries and propaganda, he charts events surrounding an American platoon guarding a checkpoint in Samara, Iraq. An atrocity is captured on video by one of the participants. The participant's unblinking documentation is almost as chilling as the arrogance of the thuggish soldiers who execute the violent "retribution."

These two aggressively racist soldiers are caricatures rather than characters. They represent both a particular brand of ugly Americanism and the desperation of the armed services to recruit new men (they're serving their country to avoid serving time). The performances are neither conventionally theatrical nor convincingly naturalistic, which only serves to further distance us from this dramatic construct.

"Redacted" is as much a cinematic experiment as a movie, a deconstruction of our ideas of objectivity, subjectivity, and the way we relate to screen characters. Under De Palma's cool disconnection is an anger, and it's this anger that drives his act of political theater. It's maddening and frustrating, challenging and alienating, hard to like and harder to shake off.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Brian De Palma’s Redacted uses a variety of multimedia means to fictionally recount the true-life 2006 rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman by U.S. soldiers: surveillance camera footage, YouTube-ish Internet videos, a pretentious French documentary, and, most of all, the camcorder diary of Private Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) shot during his tour of duty. As implied by his film’s title – a term that refers to material removed from a document – De Palma is interested in confronting the way in which truth about the war is presented. And thus, the deliberate phoniness of his various aesthetics (which always seem purposefully stagy) is an intentional attempt to illustrate the unreliability of media-filtered information. Or at least, that’s the best excuse I can come up with for the awful awkwardness of Redacted, a furious diatribe against the U.S. military and – even more so – against the government and media’s willful manipulation of reality that misses no opportunity to have one-dimensional characters (all embodied with embarrassingly wholesale amateurishness) conveniently spout talking points about the various facets of the war. De Palma apparently intends for his film, which follows the soldiers’ transition from palling around to committing heinous atrocities, to play out like a hodgepodge of self-consciously artificial visuals and didactic dialogue. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s a tolerable tack to take, and more often than not, Redacted feels like the work of a director so righteously angry and so pleased with his formal experimentation that he doesn’t realize how painfully, inelegantly obvious he’s being.

Brian De Palma’s Redacted uses a variety of multimedia means to fictionally recount the true-life 2006 rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman by U.S. soldiers: surveillance camera footage, YouTube-ish Internet videos, a pretentious French documentary, and, most of all, the camcorder diary of Private Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) shot during his tour of duty. As implied by his film’s title – a term that refers to material removed from a document – De Palma is interested in confronting the way in which truth about the war is presented. And thus, the deliberate phoniness of his various aesthetics (which always seem purposefully stagy) is an intentional attempt to illustrate the unreliability of media-filtered information. Or at least, that’s the best excuse I can come up with for the awful awkwardness of Redacted, a furious diatribe against the U.S. military and – even more so – against the government and media’s willful manipulation of reality that misses no opportunity to have one-dimensional characters (all embodied with embarrassingly wholesale amateurishness) conveniently spout talking points about the various facets of the war. De Palma apparently intends for his film, which follows the soldiers’ transition from palling around to committing heinous atrocities, to play out like a hodgepodge of self-consciously artificial visuals and didactic dialogue. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s a tolerable tack to take, and more often than not, Redacted feels like the work of a director so righteously angry and so pleased with his formal experimentation that he doesn’t realize how painfully, inelegantly obvious he’s being.

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Harry Chotiner

It has been a strange year in terms of movies about the Middle East. In the Valley of Ellah, The Kingdom, Rendition, Home of the Brave, Lions for Lambs, Grace is Gone, Kite Runner, and Redacted are welcome indications that filmmakers want to engage, from different perspectives, the catastrophies of the Iraq occupation, Islamic fundamentalism, and terrorism. But it's a disappointing engagement. Not a single movie in this group will be remembered for its writing, acting, political or psychological insight, or for having any particular resonance with our national nightmare. Yet it is tempting to want to defend these films because of their jingoistic critics. Most of them have been attacked as anti-American, anti-G.I., and giving comfort to our enemies. What makes Redacted so interesting and unusual is that it is guilty as charged. Brian DePalma has written and directed a deeply anti-American film, and that should be acknowledged, embraced, and defended as one legitimate reading of our country in 2007.

Inspired by a true story, Redacted recounts how a handful of American soldiers raped a fourteen year old Iraqi girl, and then murdered her and her entire family. We first meet these and other soldiers as they do what most soldiers do: tend checkpoints, obsess about sex, try to relax during their down time, complain, bond and bicker with each other, and anxiously count the days until they can come home. DePalma seemingly structures his story in a conventional way. We get to know the guys, decide whom we like and whom we don't, see the toll that the war is taking on them, and then see that toll explode in horrific violence. DePalma himself used this familiar narrative device to criticize our involvement in Vietnam in his Casualties of War (1989), which also involved Americans raping a local girl. 

But if this conventional type of anti-war film seems familiar, DePalma cues us from the get-go that he's doing something different.  Making this a quintessentially post-modern film, we are given no single, true perspective from which to see the story. Instead, the film is a mélange of documentaries. Primarily, our perspective is the view-finder of one soldier's camcorder. Angel (Izzy Diaz) is making a documentary of his experiences for use as a future ticket to enter film school. Other vantage points include those of a French documentary film crew, the video being shot by terrorists for their website, and security cameras. The reliance on these forms of video seems to give the film a particular claim to authenticity. Presumably everything we see, experience, and know is the uncensored truth derived from the ubiquity of the digital. DePalma is clearly intrigued by how much "truth" is being recorded all the time, everywhere, being broadcast for free, and giving us unprecedented access to levels and layers of human experience. And DePalma the director is intrigued by how this technology allows him to make a serious, ambitious feature film for ridiculously little money.

Once we get accustomed to the lack of a master narrative and the proliferation of smaller, more intimate, amateurish visions- the content becomes as radical as the form. An anti-war movie usually depicts fundamentally decent guys who are so badly damaged by combat that they become capable of monstrous behaviors. But DePalma never gives us decent guys. While not necessarily monstrous, the GI's in this film range from banal to brutal, from psychologically damaged to raving psychopaths. But the point is that whether monsters or just morally hollow men, it's not the war that has made them this way. They, like the war, are the product of America.

The treatment of sex is illustrative. As long as there have been war movies, there have been soldiers missing and yearning for love and sex. But in DePalma's world, the sex is more than a basic need. It has been transformed into a misogynistic drive that colors every interaction and reduces American soldiers to Hobbesian aggressors. It's not that these guys are horny. It's that their sexual needs control them and take an ugly, hateful form. Being in Iraq didn't make them this way; these men were fucked up about sex long before they joined the military.   

The most upsetting characters are two friends- Flake (Patrick Carroll) and Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman). Flake has a driving need to inflict sexual harm on women. Rush is more than happy to go along for the ride. But again, we understand that the war didn't make Flake what he is. He reminisces about how happy and proud he was when his brother murdered a dissident labor leader. Flake and Rush were deeply damaged individuals long before they arrived in Iraq. And those who join them on that fateful night, knowing that, minimally, a violent rape is going to happen, are craven and weak. Again, it's never suggested that their lack of character and integrity has anything to do with their Iraq experience. The most decent of the guys has been taught by his military father not to rat on a fellow soldier no matter what he intends or does. His combination of bad values and moral weakness are seen as having everything to do with his family and nothing to do with  serving in Iraq. And while some of the other soldiers seem benign, the ones that we truly get to know seem more damaged by America than the war.

DePalma intends his movie to be anti-war. And he intends to show how the war damages everyone it touches. It certainly harms Iraqi civilians. But he has a made a movie where the war has not harmed decent American boys and scarred a fundamentally decent America. Rather the war is an extension of a fundamentally indecent America which now sends its fundamentally indecent boys to bring misery elsewhere. I don't mean any of this to be a criticism of DePalma. Whether intended or not, it is legitimate to see a bad war as stemming from a bad society, and finding rottenness not only in our powerful decision-makers, but also in the young men who do such a poor job of representing anything decent.  

The problem is that for all the creativity in the form and the interesting provocation in the content- it's still not a very good movie. DePalma wanted to work with un-recognized actors, which is fine, but none of the performances are all that good. We learn about the characters from the lines they speak, not from anything surprising, moving, textured or idiosyncratic in the acting. But the deeper problem is that the film is almost unwatchable. It's not just that we know that we're headed for rape and murder. And to DaPalma's credit, that is shown off-camera; there's no gratuitous violence. The deeper problem is that we simply can't stand the people we're with.  It's not only that there's not a mensch in sight- someone with an ounce of moral courage and real integrity. It's that there's not even someone with some simple softness and decency that we can come to care about. And given that our reactions to these characters leave us feeling somewhere between repulsed and unengaged, the film can shock us but never burrow more deeply inside. The depiction of daily routines is done very well. The concept of seeing the war as like a reality TV show or an assortment of what's available on You Tube is richly suggestive. And there's an interesting audacity in not indicting a terrible war but indicting the terrible society that birthed this war. But dramatic tragedy requires our deep emotional engagement with the material. If DePalma could have complemented his anger at America and assault on our humanity with some moments that allow us to lower our guard- we might have been able to feel that emotion of engagement.

(Note: In the real incident that inspired this story, an Iraqi girl was raped and she and her family murdered by four GI's: Paul Cortez and James Barker pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 90 and 100 years in prison, respectively. They will be eligible for parole in ten years. Jesse Spielman, who did not participate in the rape and murders but was there for the planning and execution, did not cop a plea. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to 110 years in prison. Steven D. Green, the mastermind and driving force behind the crimes, was discharged from the army for psychiatric reasons before the crime was fully investigated. Now a civilian, he is to be tried on rape and murder charges in a federal court in Kentucky. The girl was named Abeer Qasim Hamza Al-Janabi.)

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

The House Next Door [Keith Uhlich] also seen here: Zoom in Online (Mike Raffensperger) review

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]

DVD Times Noel Megahey

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C]

World Socialist Web Site review Sandy English

Slant Magazine [Kevin B. Lee]

Newsweek (David Ansen) review

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth]

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

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

The New Yorker [George Packer] October 18, 2007

The New Yorker (David Denby) review November 19, 2007

Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek] which includes an interview with the director: Salon (13 November 2007)

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

Twitch [Michael Guillen] also seen here: The Evening Class

Film Journal International (Chris Barsanti) review

DVD Talk (Phil Bacharach) dvd review [3/5]

CBC.ca Arts (Katrina Onstad) review

Culture Wars [Hugh Ortega Breton]

Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]

Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann, also seen here: CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review

The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review

Redacted Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Mike D'Angelo review

Film Intuition [Jen Johans]

Film Monthly (Doc Pedrolie) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

Screen International review Dan Fainaru in Venice

cinemattraction (Martin Tsai) review

DVD Verdict (Ben Saylor) dvd review

filmcritic.com (Paul Brenner) review [1.5/5] also seen here: Reel.com [Paul Brenner]

The Nerve Film Lounge: Q&A: Brian DePalma

Variety (Derek Elley) review

The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [3/6]

Boston Globe review [1/4] Ty Burr

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

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

Chicago Tribune (Tasha Robinson) review

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

NYFF: Brian DePalma's Blowup Katey Rich from Cinema Blend, which includes a transcript of the October 11, 2007 interview by J. Hoberman that ended up in a shouting match with a Magnolia Pictures representative (see YouTube footage below)

De Palma Versus Cuban: Edelstein Enters the Ring David Edelstein from the New York magazine, October 11, 2007

Brian De Palma Gives Up in the Battle Over ‘Redacted’ Darrell Hartman from the New York magazine, October 12, 2007

Conversations podcast: Brian De Palma | Salon Arts & Entertainment Stephanie Zacharek interview from Salon, November 13, 2007

Brian De Palma's Redacted is schlock fantasy. - By Fred Kaplan ... War Porn, Slate, November 16, 2007

Raising Cain Pat Graham from the Chicago Reader Blog, November 16, 2007

Redacted The San Francisco Brian DePalma Theory Collective, a taped transcript of the post viewing discussion, November 17, 2007

Less is more Andrea Gronvall from the Chicago Reader Blog, November 19, 2007

Close-Up Film Interview - Brian De Palma Re: REDACTED

The Nerve Film Lounge: Q&A: Brian DePalma Re: REDACTED

YouTube - Brian De Palma interrupted at NY Film Festival ... October 11, 2007 (6:44)

de Penguern, Artus

GREGOIRE MOULIN VERSUS HUMANITY (Grégoire Moulin contre l'humanité) B+ 91

France (90 mi) 2001

Director Artus de Penguern, playing the lead character himself in a drop dead hilarious farce that is one of the funniest films in years, a film that works in the opening 30 seconds, keeps up a frenetic pace thoughout and continues over the credits, so don't walk out early, again, featuring some quite memorable sequences

de Sica, Vittorio

from DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/reviews.htm

Vittorio De Sica was one of the world's most influential directors, and also held a career as a prolific actor appearing in more than 150 films. Born in 1902, Vittorio was encouraged at the age of 16, by his proud father Umberto, to join a local theater company where his handsome demeanor rapidly made him a matinee idol. During World War II, De Sica turned to directing and his collaborations with author and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini brought the world three of the most significant films of the Italian neorealism movement, 'The Children Are Watching Us', 'Shoeshine' and 'The Bicycle Thieves.' With little funding to produce his films, De Sica pioneered the use of real locations and non-professional actors. He had a natural gift for communication and understood the sensitivities of fellow performers exercising exceptional perceptiveness utilizing children in major roles.

TCMDB Turner Classic Movies

Italian director Vittorio De Sica was also a notable actor who appeared in over 100 films, to which he brought the same charm and brightness which infused his work behind the camera.

By 1918, at the age of 16, De Sica had already begun to dabble in stage work and in 1923 he joined Tatiana Pavlova's theater company. His good looks and breezy manner made him an overnight matinee idol in Italy with the release of his first sound picture, "La Vecchia Signora" (1931). De Sica turned to directing during WWII, with his first efforts typical of the light entertainments of the time. It was with "The Children are Watching Us" (1942) that he began to use non-professional actors and socially conscious subject matter. The film was also his first of many collaborations with scenarist Cesare Zavattini, a combination which shaped the postwar Italian Neorealist movement.

With the end of the war, De Sica's films began to express the personal as well as collective struggle to deal with the social problems of post-Mussolini Italy. "Shoeshine" (1946), "The Bicycle Thief" (1948) and "Umberto D" (1952) combined classic neorealist traits--working-class settings, anti-authoritarianism, emotional sincerity--with technical and compositional sophistication and touches of poignant humor.

De Sica continued his career as an actor with sufficient success to finance some of his directorial projects, playing a host of twinkling-eyed fathers and Chaplinesque figures in films such as "Pane, amore e gelosia" (1954). His later directorial career was highlighted by his work with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in "Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow" (1963), which won the Oscar as best foreign film. After a period of decline in which he came to be perceived as a slick, rather tasteless master of burlesque, De Sica resurfaced with "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" (1971), a baroque political romance which won him another Oscar for best foreign film.

Active to the end, De Sica appeared as himself in Ettore Scola's "We All Loved Each Other So Much" (1975), which was released after his death.

Film Reference Joe Kanoff

The films of Vittorio De Sica are among the most enduring of the Italian post-war period. His career suggests an openness to form and a versatility uncommon among Italian directors. De Sica began acting on stage as a teenager and played his first film role in 1918. In the 1920s his handsome features and talent made him something of a matinee idol, and from the mid-1930s he appeared in a number of films by Mario Camerini, including Gliuomini che mascalzoni!, Darò un milione, and Grandi magazzine.

During his lifetime, De Sica acted in over one hundred films in Italy and abroad, using this means to finance his own directorial efforts. He specialized in breezy comic heroes, men of great self-assurance or confidence men (as in Rossellini's Generale della Rovere). The influence of his tenure as actor cannot be overestimated in his directorial work, where the expressivity of the actor in carefully written roles was one of his foremost technical implements. In this vein De Sica has continually mentioned the influence on his work of Charlie Chaplin. The tensive continuity between tragic and comic, the deployment of a detailed yet poetic gestural language, and a humanist philosophy without recourse to the politically radical are all elements of De Sica's work that are paralleled in the silent star's films.

De Sica's directorial debuts, Rose scarlatte and Maddalena, zero in condotta, were both attempts to bring theater pieces to the screen with suitable roles for himself. In 1943, with I bambini ci guardano, De Sica teamed with Cesare Zavattini, who was to become his major collaborator for the next three decades. Together they began to demonstrate elements of the post-war realist aesthetic which, more than any other director except Visconti and Rossellini, De Sica helped shape and determine. Despite the overt melodrama of the misogynistic story (a young mother destroys her family by deserting them), the filmmaker refused to narrow the perspective through an overwrought Hollywoodian mise-en-scène, preferring instead a refreshing simplicity of composition and a subdued editing style. Much of the film's original flavor can be traced to the clear, subjective mediation of a child, as promised in the title.

De Sica's intense feeling for children's sensibilities led him to imagine how children viewed the failing adult reconstruction of society after the war. Sciuscia, a realistic look at the street and prison life of poor, abandoned children, was the result. It is the story of how the lasting friendship of two homeless boys, who make their living shining shoes for the American G.I.'s, is betrayed by their contact with adults. At the end of the film one boy inadvertently causes the other's death. Although Zavattini insists that his creative role was minimal in this instance, the presence of his poetic imagination is evident in the figure of a beautiful white horse. This horse serves to cement the boys' mutual bond and their hope for a future. Though a miserable failure in Italy, Sciuscia marked De Sica's entry into international prominence; the film won a special Oscar in 1947.

For the balance of the neorealist period De Sica fought an uphill battle to finance his films through friends and acting salaries. Ladri di biciclette anchors searching social documentation in metaphor and a non-traditional but highly structured narrative. Workman Ricci's desperate search for his bicycle is an odyssey that enables us to witness a varied collection of characters and situations among the poor and working class of Rome. Each episode propels the narrative toward a sublimely Chaplinesque but insufficiently socially critical ending in which Ricci is defeated in his search and therefore in his attempts to provide for his family. Reduced to thievery himself, he takes his son's hand and disappears into the crowd. Like De Sica's other neorealist films, Ladri di biciclette gives the impression of technical nonchalance only to the indiscriminate eye, for De Sica planned his work with attention to minute details of characterization, mise-en-scène, and camera technique. During this period he preferred the non-professional actor for his or her ability to accept direction without the mediation of learned acting technique.

The story of Toto the Good in Miracolo a Milano remains one of the outstanding stylistic contradictions of the neorealist period (there are many), yet one which sheds an enormous amount of light on the intentions and future of the De Sica-Zavattini team. The cinematography and setting, markedly neorealist in this fable about the struggle to found a shanty town for the homeless, is undercut at every moment with unabashed clowning both in performance and in cinematic technique. Moreover, the film moves toward a problematic fairy tale ending in which the poor, no longer able to defend their happy, makeshift village from the voracious appetite of capitalist entrepreneurs, take to the skies on magic broomsticks. (The film has more special effects than anyone would ever associate with neorealism; could De Sica have left his mark on Steven Spielberg?) Still, Zavattini, who had wanted to make the film for a number of years, and De Sica defend it as the natural burlesque transformation of themes evident in their earlier work together.

By this time De Sica's films were the subject of a good deal of controversy in Italy, and generally the lines were drawn between Catholic and Communist critics. The latter had an especially acute fear (one which surfaced again with Fellini's La Strada) that the hard-won traits of neorealism had begun to backslide into those of the socalled "calligraphic" films of the Fascist era. These were based on an ahistorical, formal concern for aesthetic, compositional qualities and the nuances of clever storytelling. However, it was their next film, Umberto D, that comes closest to realizing Zavattini's ideas on the absolute responsibility of the camera eye to observe life as it is lived without the traditional compromises of entertaining narratives. The sequence of the film in which the maid wakes up and makes the morning coffee has been praised many times for its day-in-the-life directness and simplicity. Il Tetto, about a curious attempt to erect a small house on municipal property, is generally recognized as the last neorealist film of this original period.

Continually wooed by Hollywood, De Sica finally acquiesced to make Stazione termini in 1953, produced by Selznick and filmed in Rome with Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift. Unfortunately, neorealist representation formed only an insignificant background to this typically American star vehicle. A similar style is employed in La ciociara, which was created from a Moravia story about the relationship of a mother and daughter uprooted by the war. De Sica attempted to reconstruct reality in the studio during the making of this work, making use of a somewhat unsuccessful stylized lighting technique. But as usual, he obtains excellent performances in an engaging dramatic vehicle (Sophia Loren won an Oscar).

The filmmakers returned to comedic vehicles in 1954 in L'oro di Napoli. Human comedy emerges from the rich diversity and liveliness of Neapolitan life. Though still within the confines of realism, the film foreshadows the director's entrance into the popular Italian market for sexual satire and farce. The exactitude with which he sculpts his characters and his reluctance to reduce the scenario to a mere bunch of gags demonstrates his intention to fuse comedy and drama, putting De Sica at the top of his class in this respect—among Risi, Comencini, and Monicelli. Often with Zavattini but also with Eduardo De Filippo, Tonino Guerra, and even Neil Simon (After the Fox), De Sica turned out about eight such films for the lucrative international market between 1961 and 1968, the best of which are: Il giudizio universale, which featured an all-star cast of international comedians; Ieri, oggi, domani and Matrimonio all'Italiana, both with Loren and Mastroianni; and Sette volte donna. Il giardino dei Finzi Contini, based on a Bassani novel about the incarceration of Italian Jews during the war, shows a strong Viscontian influence in its lavish setting and thematics (the film deals with the dissolution of the bourgeois family). Una breve vacanza, an examination of a woman who has managed to break out of the confines of an oppressive marriage during a sanitorium stay, reinstitutes the tensive relationship between comedy and tragedy of the earlier films. De Sica's last film, Il viaggio, is from a Pirandello novel.

All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Ankeny

Sony Pictures Biography and filmography

Nextpix Biography

Strictly Film School Acquarello

De Sica, Vittorio They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

RED ROSES (Rose Scarlatte)

Italy (65 mi) 1940 co-director: Giuseppe Amato

User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

Vittorio De Sica's never-seen and almost totally unknown first film as director is a light-hearted, ironic, tongue-in-cheek dissertation on on marriage and the temptation to adultery. It has some elements of a Lubitsch or Clair comedy. It is based on the 1936 play by Aldo De Benedetti (1892-1970) "Two Dozen Red Roses", a perennial favorite that is probably as often performed in Italy as "Arsenic and Old Lace" is in America.

The comedy of errors (and design) begins when Alberto (Vittorio De Sica) receives a phone call, in error, ordering two dozen red roses. The husband is amused and dreams of an adventure with an unknown woman. His wife Maria then receives the flowers with a card signed "Mystery" and this leads her to want to encounter the man who has sent them. The husband realizes what has happened and sees how far he can push the gag to test his wife's reactions and the strength of her fidelity and continues to send roses every day. He becomes jealous of the "phantom sender", in reality himself.

So does the desire for potential adultery constitute the real thing? Both husband and wife are guilty…but of what? Of desire, but not of any action. All turns out well, but the question remains.

The story is a clever enough one and has a certain appeal but never really rises above its contrivance although it is amusing enough to watch it unfold. Renée Saint-Cyr plays the wife, Umberto Melnati does a nice turn as the husband's friend and accomplice in the wily machinations.

The film is very difficult to see today and has long been considered lost, but a French-dubbed copy has appeared on French television.

MADDALENA, ZERO FOR CONDUCT (Maddalena, Zero in Condotta)

Italy (79 mi) 1940

User comments from imdb Author: (pierrealix@cybercable.fr)

This is definitely one of the best comedy ever made anywhere...In a Technical school girl students learn to write commercial letters to a Mr Doe in Germany...one day one of these letters is posted by mistake..the problem is that this Mr Doe really exists...The exquisite vittorio de Sica was a great performer before reaching stardom in 1946 with "the bicycle theft"...The movie is always charming ,never vulgar nor stupid and you really get off the movie theatre happy with yourself and life in general..Mussolini censors used Cinema to divert people in those black days...its is not the only movie of its kind but it is the best by miles..After 1960 Italian Directors like Fellini or Scola reacted strongly against this type of comedies..Now they dont seem to know how to make them anymore

DO YOU LIKE WOMEN (Teresa Venerdì)

Italy (92 mi) 1941

User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

This minor but winning little filmic treasure from the Italian fascist era was directed by Vittorio De Sica before he made all the films that brought him international fame like SHOE SHINE, BICYCLE THIEF, MIRACLE IN MILAN, and UMBERTO D. De Sica himself plays a young physician in an orphanage for girls where a young girl named Teresa "Venerdi'" or "Teresa Friday" (because that was the day she arrived) becomes infatuated with him. The doctor is carrying on a romance at the same time with a flirtatious singer, Loletta, played by a feisty Anna Magnani in a short but fabulous supporting role. The expressions of boredom on her face as she goes through a tiresome and tacky dance number are a wonder to behold. Teresa, the love-struck heroine, is played by the lovely Adriana Benetti, whom Italian film buffs remember from Blasetti's landmark QUATTRO PASSI FRA LE NUVOLE, made a year later.

A GARIBALDIAN IN THE CONVENT (Un Garibaldino al convento)

Italy (83 mi) 1942

User comments from imdb Author: Sabrina (mgieri) from Toronto, Canada

The film is of particular interest for two reasons: firstly, it is a film about the Italian Risorgimento, and yet a fairly a-typical one among those made during Fascism; secondly, it is a fairly intriguing early film by soon to be Neorealist master Vittorio de Sica, the author of such masterpieces as Shoeshine and Rome Open City.

User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

This early film by Vittorio De Sica, who would later gain enormous world-wide fame for "Shoe Shine," "The Bicycle Thief," "Umberto D" and many other films is a relatively minor film but, nevertheless, a truly pleasing one.

It is about two girls attending a boarding school in 19th Century Italy during the time of Garibaldi's movement to take Sicily and southern Italy from the control of the despotic King of Naples and unite it with the Kingdom of Piedmont of the north, thus creating a unified Italy. This was the movement know as the "Risorgimento" or re-awakening of Italy.

One day, a wounded "garibaldino," or soldier of Giuseppe Garibaldi, is found at the boarding school. He is Franco, played by Leonardo Cortese. Mariella (Maria Mercader), who had known him previously and is in love with him, and her friend Catarinetta (Carla del Poggio) take the risk, with the help of patriot grounds keeper Fausto Guerzoni, of harboring the injured man.

When the conservative nuns who run the school find out this man is a Garibaldi soldier, they are shocked. "Garibaldi, that bandit!" And they make the sign of the cross in choral unison.

The troops of the Neapolitan king come to the school for a search. Franco is found. Some skirmishes occur. One of the girls is able to reach the troops of Garibaldi for help, that is, Nino Bixio, a rebel leader, played in a cameo role by director Vittorio De Sica.

Eventually Franco, who had been taken prisoner, is saved but volunteers to rejoin his comrades in the liberation of Italy.

The whole story is told through a framing device of the two girls many years later as old women. We find out that Franco had died during the course of the struggle and that Mariella had lost her true love forever.

The film exudes a kind of wistful and bittersweet quality, is nicely acted, well-staged, and skillfully performed. It really should be better known.

THE CHILDREN ARE WATCHING US (I Bambini ci Guardano)

Italy (85 mi) 1944

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

The image on The Children Are Watching looks very good - the best I have seen this film ever look. Although made prior to both the Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine it has a superior image than the currently issued DVDs of those films. It is very clean, no real blemishes and the transfer is quite dark with no untoward manipulations. It may possibly have blackness boosting, typical of Criterion in the past, but it is not extensive enough to warrant any visible intrusion on the viewing experience. It is not exceptionally sharp but looks very acceptable considering the age of the film. Audio is consistent with only one minor instance of a brief crackle/gap. Subtitles are again at Criterion usual excellent level. Both new video interviews are excellent, but I would prefer that they were longer - but am very grateful that they are included. The liner notes booklet is beautiful - printed on good quality paper with photos and 2 detailed essays.

This is one of my favorite De Sica offerings and I strongly recommend this new Criterion package. The film is immensely impacting. It is such a pleasure to see DVD production companies that take real care in what they produce. I, personally, consider this an essential DVD.  

filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4.5/5]

In order to achieve true cinephile status you must spend some time watching the classic Italian World War II-era neorealist films of the great Vittorio De Sica. If you've already seen his devastating masterpiece The Bicycle Thief, then move on to one of one of his lesser known but equally excellent dramas, The Children Are Watching Us.

The title alone is a serious guilt trip, De Sica's condemnation of immoral adult behavior that ends up damaging the innocent children who inevitably suffer the consequences of Mom and Dad's bad decisions. In this case, the adorable victim is five-year-old Prico (Luciano De Ambrosis), a wide-eyed only child who revels in the adoration of his parents (Emilio Cigoli and Isa Pola) and his nanny. Though it's wartime, Prico is insulated from the world outside until one day, on a walk in the park, his mother slips behind a tree and chats with a strange man (Adriano Rimoldi).

Prico has no idea who this man is, but he immediately intuits that the stranger is a disruptive force in his tidy little universe. Sure enough, Mom flies the coop with her lover the next day, leaving Dad, who is not a particularly secure or forceful person, devastated not only by his cuckoldry but also by the insidious gossip that sweeps instantly through his apartment block. Meanwhile, Prico just wants to know where Mama went.

Eventually she returns, but a reconciliatory seaside family vacation goes horribly wrong when Dad has to return to the city early, leaving Mom and Prico alone. Her lover shows up, and it all starts over again. This time, her betrayal of her son is even worse.

De Sica elicits a bravura performance out of a child so young he probably isn't even sure what acting is. De Ambrosis is amazing; you simply can't take your eyes off him. Be sure to check out The Criterion Collection DVD's extras, which include an interview with the now elderly De Ambrosis as he fondly recalls the kindness of the cast, the crew, and De Sica himself. Poor kid. He spends most of the movie in abject distress. It's good to know the adults around him were watching out for his well-being.

The final minutes of The Children Are Watching Us comprise one of those searing movie moments, with images you'll never forget. It's at this point that the title of the film really packs its punch. As an adult you'll feel guilty by association, and if you're a parent, you'll walk away from this drama reevaluating your relationship with your kids. Powerful stuff in beautiful black and white from a master storyteller supremely attuned to the tragedies of the human condition.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

People are finally coming around to The Children Are Watching Us, the first collaboration between Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini. Culture vultures dismissed the film at the time of its release because of its protoneorealist sentimentality, but this is precisely what makes De Sica's work so special, if still quite imperfect. The problem with the film, released the same year as Luchino Visconti's seminal, neorealist kick-starter Ossessione, is not that it's told through a child's consciousness but that its mélange of little melodramas is amorphously shaped, though this probably has less to do with De Sica and Zavattini, who were still finding their sea legs at the time, than their shared screenwriting credit with four other hands—busy ones at that, because their effusive work shows in many scenes, not least of which the ones that too often play to the film's title.

In two of the film's lesser scenes, De Sica comes down especially hard on Nina (Isa Pola), who leaves her husband Andrea (Emilio Cigoli) for another man: During the first part of the film, she pauses over the word "decent" in the middle of a prickly outburst, and during the film's superior second half, a captive beachside crowd appears to hold vigil over her failed motherhood. De Sica is above such trite, face-rubbing orchestrations, which are meant to show she's conscious and guilty of her sin. Too often the film displays the seams of too much or not enough screenwriting, but it's almost fitting that the story slobbers over itself in spots and doesn't explode when you expect it to in others, because the film is often akin to a newborn child with a still developing fontanel—soft, sensitive, and incomplete, but always endearing. You forgive the film its flaws because it's always trying to figure out the right thing to do, not unlike the man who alternately screams at and asks Andrea and Nina's son Pico (Luciano De Ambrosis) if he's okay after catching the boy stopped in horror near Rome-bound train tracks.

The Children Are Watching Us is a marvel of complex visual and emotional scope, and its surface is no less simple than the fabulous shells of Shoeshine and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. There's always a sense of harsh movement in the film, lines of action isolating objects and characters into different stratums of the frame. A geometric, spider-like pattern emerges throughout, with little Pico caught in the center, gasping for breath like an ensnared animal, threatened from either side by all sorts of twin pressures. Whisked off to his grandmother's countryside abode, he comes between her aunt and the medicine man she courts by moonlight; during a dinner sequence with his parents, the combination of heads, plates, and buildings and windows in the background cast the boy in the center of an awfully pained, synthetic pieta of family discord; and abandoned by his father at a boarding school, the boy's face is caught between two columns.

There is an elevator in the film that only goes up, a symbol of Andrea's lack of foresight. Similarly, De Sica's camera often travels forcefully in one direction away from his characters. During a wonderfully hypnotic beach scene, an effete gentleman with a little dog tries to seduce Nina with his eyes and the movement of the camera suggests the woman is being torn apart like a piece of taffy—on one side by her pleasure-seekingness, on the other by her dedication to her son, whom she holds in her hands trying to teach how to swim. But the camera always holds on or moves with Pico, as in his vigilant attempt to walk back to Rome from his vacation retreat or, more arresting but equally hopeful, the way he runs along the beach as if holding hands with the stream of dawn's last light. Nature, in essence, is on the boy's side.

In 1944, Italy was a country in transition. Fittingly, The Children Are Watching Us is a film torn apart by fact and fiction, past and present. Beneath every scene there is unease about how characters should and should not act. No one feels this pressure more than Pico. In the film's single greatest scene, father and son lock eyes like hunter and prey, one asking the other for the information he already knows, the other resisting because he knows submission will completely devastate the family. The spiderweb finally breaks in the last scene, in which Pico walks away from his mother and out the door of his boarding school—for once he acts for no one but himself. Osssessione may be recognized as the first neorealist film, but this is the first neorealist gesture, a sign that the Italian film was about to grow up.

DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [5/5] [Criterion Collection]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Ken Dubois

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]

A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Steve Evans) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

SHOESHINE (Sciuscià)

Italy (93 mi) 1946

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

Vittorio de Sica's 1946 production gave neorealism its first popular success, though today--now that we're used to seeing dramas filmed in the streets--it's hard to locate what's "realistic" about it. De Sica has simply adapted studio shooting techniques to open-air situations; the film has none of the freshness and formal innovation of Rossellini's contemporary Open City and Paisan. Cesare Zavattini, De Sica's longtime collaborator, wrote the screenplay: it's about two shoeshine boys who get involved in the black market, are thrown in a Nazi jail, and end by betraying each other. It has plenty of opportunities for easy sentiment, and De Sica neglects none of them. With Rinaldo Smordoni and Franco Interlenghi. 93 min.

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Made for $20,000 in 1946, "Sciuscià," Vittorrio de Sica's film of two shoeshine boys used by the elder brother of one to fence stolen merchandise, was called by no-one less than Orson Welles "the best film I have ever seen." He elaborated, " In handling a camera I feel that I have no peer. But what De Sica can do, I can't do. . . The camera disappeared, the screen disappeared, it was just life." The most passionate American film critic of the day, James Agee, wrote that "Shoeshine is about as beautiful, moving, and heartening a film as you are ever likely to see."

I especially wonder what Agee could have regarded as "heartening." It seems to me that the film is still moving, but heartbreaking rather than heartening. One of the best and most famous of Italian neo-realist films, I also wonder about the screen disappearing and witnessing "just life." That is, the story, particularly the denouement seems very operatic to me. Not the opera of monarchs and warriors, but verismo opera. Verismo opera without a soprano, though probably if Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) sang, his voice would be a boy soprano.

But he doesn't sing (in any sense). Thinking that he is stopping the whipping of Giuseppe, Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) "sings," incriminating Giuseppe's brother. Giuseppe does not forgive this, and does not relent even after Pasquale really is whipped. Giuseppe throws his lot with the bully of the cell in which he is consigned, Arcangeli (Bruno Ortensi).

Pasquale tries to protect another younger boy, who has tuberculosis and is trampled in the fire and riot that accompany the escape of Arcangeli and Giuseppe. More pain and betrayal follows. The reform "school" has transformed the boys from relatively innocent accomplices of criminals into desperate, hardened young men. The destruction of their friendship is only part of the pulverization of their innocence.

The younger (and doughier) of the boys De Sica cast grew up to be a baker. The darker, handsomer fifteen-year-old Franco Interlenghi is still appearing in films (other than "Sciuscià," the best-known of them is Fellini's 1953 "I vitelloni," in which he played Moraldo). Although De Sica went on to win two more Academy Awards (as director of best foreign films "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" and "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" and to play the title role in Rosselini's masterpiece "Il Generale della Rovere"), he never made as compelling a film as "Sciuscià."

I was not entirely convinced by the idyllic opening of the film, when the boys are happy with the horse they have bought together. I wonder if the rhetoric which lawyers produce in Italian movies has any relationship to what is said in Italian courts. The cell-block looks like it was lifted from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" or some other interwar expressionist German film. And the studio-shot finale is a bit pat. However, the loss of innocence is shown convincingly. There is no lecturing, the music is only occasionally a bit hectoring, and the dialogue is far less important than what is written on the young non-actors' faces.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Ian Johnston]

DVD Times [Noel Megahey]

DVD Outsider Slarek

Camera Journal [Paul Sutton]

Epinions [metalluk]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford

PopMatters (Stephen Tropiano) review

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4.5/5] also seen here: Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]

A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]

Strictly Film School (capsule review) Acquarello

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

TV Guide

The New York Times review T.M.P.

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

HEART AND SOUL (Cuore)

Italy (91 mi) 1948 co-director: Duilio Coletti

User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

This film was based on Edmondo De Amicis' 1886 book CUORE, meant to instill patriotic and moral values, and which has been filmed several times. It is set in 19th Century Turin, and its central character is a paternal and caring teacher, Maestro Perboni (Vittorio De Sica) whose young students adore him. This version includes a connecting plot, about the amorous longings of his co-teacher and co-boarder Clotilde (Maria Mercader) and her failed love for an ambitious young Lieutenant Gardena (Giorgio De Lullo). The best things in the film are the portrayals of the young boys and their personal lives. Of particular note among the young performers are Luciano De Ambrosis, who had been so unforgettable in De Sica's "The Children Are Watching Us;" Gino Luerini, the boy in love with Pier Angeli in "Tomorrow is too Late;" Vito Annichiarico, who was Anna Magnani's son in "Open City;" and Carlo Delle Piane, the Jimmy-Durante-nosed performer who would have success as an adult actor as a favorite in Pupi Avati's films. It is said that De Sica himself directed the sequences with the kids rather than credited director Duilio Coletti. This was made, after all, in the same period that De Sica shot his landmark "The Bicycle Thief." Made too at the time of great political turmoil in Italy, there is a subtext here of the need for social justice, as well as an anti-war message, and Perboni is a socialist whose ideas get him into trouble with the school authorities. Excised from the American release version called "Heart and Soul" are some of the political activities of Perboni as well as the patriotic vignettes about heroic boys that are in the uncut version as well as in the book. This is, all in all, a lovable and charming film, although much less rich than Luigi Comencini's 6-hour TV version of 1984.

THE BICYCLE THIEF (Ladri di Biciclette)

aka: Bicycle Thieves

Italy (93 mi) 1948

Time Out review

A working class Italian, out of work for some time, has the bicycle stolen which he needs for a new job; he and his son wander round Rome looking for it. Often hailed as an all-time classic, Bicycle Thieves tries to turn a simple story into a meditation on the human condition, but its greatest achievement is in bringing the lives of ordinary Italian people to the screen. However, like so many of the films grouped together under the heading of Italian neo-realism, its grainy monochrome images and simple storyline never delve beneath the surface of the characters' lives to reveal the social mechanisms at work there. It is as if, just by portraying the events unobtrusively, De Sica imagines that they will yield up their essential truth by a process of revelation - a very appropriate image for a strain of liberal humanism strongly influenced by Catholicism. Observant and sympathetic it is, politically perceptive it is not.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Zoe Grainge) review

Vittorio de Sica directed and cowrote this simple yet moving film. A working class Italian manages to find a job after months of unemployment. The new job is dependent upon his owning a bike and, needless to say, when his bicycle gets stolen his job is jepordised. The film then follows the man's journey as he searches the city for the culprit. Together with his son, he encounters many different characters and situations, some frustrating, some amusing but all a poignant rendition of a working class life.

A brilliant study of ravaged postwar Italy, De Sica's finest achievement is bringing the previously (cinematically) ignored working classes to the screen. Like many of the neo-realist directors, his primary aim in the Bicycle Thieves was to use the camera to show how people lived, whilst maintaining an objective distance. The non-professional actors give fine performances and lend the film a documentary-like air, even though the narrative itself is fictional. The film is a conscious backlash against the Hollywood middleclass melodrama, shown ironically in the film itself when a poster of Rita Hayworth is pasted to an advertising board. However, it won a special Academy Award before the category of best foreign film was invented.

Bicycle Theives contains all the elements of typical neo-realism: harsh cinematography, poverty of the principle characters, urban squalor and, of course, a lack of judgement at the character's predicament. A classic from the Italian neo-realist movement.

Wheels of History - Movies - Village Voicepage 1 - Village Voice J. Hoberman from the Village Voice

The most influential movement in film history consisted of about 20 movies produced between 1944 and 1952. Italian neorealism was the original new wave. The inspiration for Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes, Satyajit Ray and Ousmane Sembene, André Bazin and cinema verité, neorealism was understood as a double renaissance—both the medium's post-World War II rebirth and a means for representing human experience outside the conventions of the Hollywood entertainment film.

Roberto Rossellini's Open City came first. This dramatization of Italian partisans was planned under Nazi occupation and went into production only weeks after Rome's liberation in May 1944. Rossellini shot mainly on the street, using whatever 35mm short-ends he could scrounge. Such pragmatism matched the film's urgent quality—many early viewers thought they were watching a newsreel. After an American GI purchased the rights for $13,000, Open City opened in February 1946 in New York and ran for two years; its reception at the first Cannes Film Festival, in May 1946, was scarcely less enthusiastic.

Open City created the neorealist paradigm—location shoots using available light, long takes, and few close-ups; postsynchronized vernacular dialogue; working-class protagonists played by nonactors (especially children); and open-ended narratives. But it was The Bicycle Thief (1948), directed by the Fascist-era matinee idol Vittorio De Sica from a script by veteran screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, that parlayed that paradigm into what was surely the most universally praised movie produced anywhere on planet earth during the first decade after World War II.

The Bicycle Thief, which opens Friday at Film Forum in a rich, if somewhat dark, new 35mm print, was the latest manifestation of a recurring impulse—the desire to wrest a narrative movie from the flux of daily life. Zavattini had expressed the desire to make a film that would do no more than follow a man through the city for 90 minutes, and, in some ways, The Bicycle Thief is that film. Bazin, who would be neorealism's key celebrant, praised The Bicycle Thief's premise as "truly insignificant... A workman spends a whole day looking in vain in the streets of Rome for the bicycle someone has stolen from him."

If The Bicycle Thief understood neorealism as a style, Bazin appreciated it as "pure cinema… No more actors, no more story, no more sets… the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality." In fact, De Sica created a neorealist superspectacle. Six writers worked on the script; at one point, the project was even pitched to Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, who proposed Cary Grant to play Ricci, the unemployed protagonist given a job putting up posters. De Sica countered by requesting Henry Fonda, a star with a marked resemblance to the eventual lead, steelworker Lamberto Maggiorani.

Although the three leads were all nonactors, The Bicycle Thief's modest $133,000 budget was far larger than those of previous neorealist films, including De Sica's own Shoeshine. De Sica used many more locations and extras—40 market vendors hired for a single scene—and even effects (fire hoses employed to simulate rain-soaked streets). The production was deliberate. The crowds were rehearsed and the camera moves choreographed. Editing took two months.

Scarcely a story found in the street, The Bicycle Thief is an allegory at once timeless and topical. (Among other things, it reflects the battle for the lucrative Italian movie market. The first poster the luckless Ricci puts up is for the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda. There were 54 movies made in Italy in 1948 and 10 times as many imported from the U.S.) Italian unemployment was at 22 percent, but Ricci, who has not worked in two years, is also a version of the urban everyman. As a type, he had inhabited the movies since the dawn of the 20th century.

Ricci is a member of the crowd, a walker in the city. He's one step up the social ladder from Chaplin's Little Tramp in that he has a wife and a child. Throughout, De Sica's mise-en-scène emphasizes the urban mass (waiting for jobs and streetcars) and its mass-produced objects—the piles of pawned linens, the rows of bicycles. Translated correctly from the Italian, the title should really be the more provocatively totalizing Bicycle Thieves.

The city is alternately empty and teeming. Although shot in an authentic environment, The Bicycle Thief is no less stylized in its way than the other European masterpiece of 1948, Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. There are few establishing shots. Unlike Rossellini's, De Sica's Rome is a baffling, decentered labyrinth. The stolen bicycle is swallowed up by the city itself. People disappear to reappear within the urban flux.

Where the optimistic Open City celebrated a potential alliance between Communists and Catholics, The Bicycle Thief parodies both party and church as unable to help the humiliated Ricci. Indeed, the hero's experience of these institutions, as well as the police, borders on the Kafkaesque. There is no justice. Ricci's life is ruled by a catch-22: he needs a bicycle to get the job that will enable him to buy a bicycle. Not for nothing is the bicycle brand-named Fides ("Faith") or the innocent vision of Ricci's seven-year-old son Bruno (one of the greatest kids in the history of cinema) increasingly privileged.

Although not a comedy, The Bicycle Thief was inevitably compared to Chaplin in its content, its structure, its pathos, and its universality. (The mournful music and circular narrative predict the post–neorealist mannerism of Federico Fellini.) The Bicycle Thief looks back at the nickelodeon and forward to the European art film. De Sica's masterpiece was not so much part of a new wave as the crest of an old one—the epitome of movies as a popular modernism.

Reverse Shot [Joanne Nucho]

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DVD Times Anthony Nield

Erasing Clouds (Dan Heaton)

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Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A] also indicating the film is one of the 15 films listed in the category “Values” on the Vatican film list

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DVD Talk - Criterion edition [Jamie S. Rich] also seen here: Criterion Confessions

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MIRACLE IN MILAN (Miracolo a Milano)

Italy (100 mi) 1951

Time Out review

Made the year after Bicycle Thieves, this is a less coherent but more exuberant film, with De Sica injecting a stiff dose of fantasy into what could have been another plangent tale of gentleman tramps and shantytown life: the humble down-and-outs threatened with eviction by business speculators escape - thanks to angelic intervention - to their reward in heaven. Outrageous sentimentality undercut by outrageous cheek.

Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review

Vittorio De Sica's 1951 follow-up to The Bicycle Thief welds a Rene Clair-inspired social fantasy to the precepts of neorealism. Based on a novel by Cesare Zavattini, the film tells of the fight between a band of shantytown poor and the industrialist who wants to explore for oil beneath their village. The leader of the revolutionaries is a visionary young man armed only with his ideals and, for a while, a magic dove. Though the fight proves hopeless, they all fly off on broomsticks to a better life--implying that magic is the only means of rectifying social ills. 100 min.

Flipside Movie Emporium (Gabe Leibowitz) review [A]

Miracle in Milan is a delight. Unlike director Vittorio De Sica's masterpieces The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D, it is not an emotionally gripping film. Rather, it's a satire of an emotionally gripping film. Even during its darkest moments, a cheerful score accompanies the on-screen events and the mood never blackens.

As an infant, Toto (Francesco Golisano) is found in a cabbage patch by an old woman who raises him until she dies. Toto is sent off to an orphanage and emerges from it looking for work. Unable to find any, he joins the army of the homeless and becomes their unspoken leader, spurred by his contagious optimism. They build huts in a vacant lot and develop unity. Even when town bigwig Mobbi (Guglielmo Barnabò) attempts to kick them off the shantytown properties, the smile never leaves Toto's face and he receives some magical aid to foil Mobbi's selfish schemes.

Miracle in Milan represents the dreams of homeless people everywhere -- an angel swooping down and giving them the better life. De Sica treats it as such -- a dream. There's a wonderful scene in the first 30 minutes where the vagabonds stage a sunset at dusk, lining up chairs and collecting money from those who wish to view it. This is as close as we get to De Sica's usual neorealism. From then on, the film comfortably dissolves into fantasy. The final shot of the homeless flying away on broomsticks, quite daring for its time, is an image of the fantastical.

Symbolism that would feel too obvious elsewhere seems natural here. A broken statue is discovered in a car trunk in the junkyard and two of the squatters fix it up and display it proudly at the central square. In Mobbi's office, where Toto leads a group to protest their eviction, a statue of Michelangelo's David stands behind Mobbi's desk. The contrast of sneering wealth versus timid poverty is quietly sarcastic, as is Miracle in Milan at its heart. Aldo Graziati's cinematography alternates between bleak and upbeat, capturing De Sica's visual style; a touch of depression, a large splash of hope. Emphasis is placed on faces; the camera focuses on the eyes of those who look beaten and those filled with hope. By the end of the film, it consists almost exclusively of the latter.

We care deeply for Umberto in Umberto D because his plight feels so authentic. Miracle in Milan is a fairy tale -- it even begins, "Once upon a time." We rarely pity Toto despite his harsh situation. He won't let us pity him for he won't stop smiling. And we smile right along with him.

DVD Times Anthony Nield

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FilmExposed dvd review Andrew Pragasm reviewing the 5-film Neo Realist Box Set

Rome File

Variety review

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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

UMBERTO D A 98

Italy (89 mi) 1952

Everyone takes advantage of the ignorant

Masterful, a heartbreaking portrait of an aging pensioner whose best years are behind him, who now has only the companionship of his dog, featuring a wonderful portrayal by his maid, and an extremely ungracious landlady who only threatens to evict him while surrounding herself with extravagance, typifying the changing, uncaring world. There are memorable scenes such as using burning newspapers to rid the kitchen of ants, or a visit to the dog pound that is more like an enormous death camp, incinerating dogs no one wants, asking what we should do with old people that no one wants any more. There are beautiful scenes of a city in decay as his thoughts drift to suicide, but he can’t find a proper home for his dog, the last love of his life, as all of his friends are gone or are too busy for him. The film was dedicated to De Sica’s father, and is believed to be the director’s favorite film.

Time Out review

Judging by his demeanour, the D stands for Deep Depression. But the old man at the centre of De Sica's famous film from the heyday of Italian neo-realism hasn't got much to be happy about, stripped bare as he is of all money and all friends except a little fox terrier. There's no denying the director's compassion, nor the dignity and strength of Carlo Battisti's performance, but there's nothing so wilting as doom and gloom couched in sweetly sentimental terms.

Reverse Shot review Saul Austerlitz

Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, the director and writer of Umberto D, dreamed of one day making a film that would be the ne plus ultra of Italian neorealism. In it, the camera would follow one individual for exactly two hours. Not possessing any prior knowledge of their history or personality, the spectator would watch a small chunk of their lives. At the end of the allotted time, the film would end. No conflict, no resolution, no three-act storyarc—just the life of the common man onscreen. De Sica and Zavattini never got the chance to realize this dream project, but its closest relative is the effulgent Umberto D. The title character, a retired Roman, suffers the slings and arrows of everyday fortune, buoyed only by the presence of his preternaturally perky dog Flick. The film’s humanist perspective allows it to avoid the Big Statement in an effort to detail the specifics of untrammelled reality. Umberto’s strained circumstances are captured expertly by De Sica’s direction— you can practically touch the peeling paint on the walls of his rooms. The closing sequence, where Umberto loses, and then recovers, Flick, is a release of all the emotion patiently stored up by the filmmakers over the course of the film, and here it becomes evident that Umberto is one of the great characters of the cinema. Even De Sica and Zavattini’s resplendent Bicycle Thieves cannot match Umberto D’s quotidian radiance.

Umberto D. [ideas swiped from Victor J. Morton, with permission] Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

More heartbreaking than The Bicycle Thief, less twee than Miracle in Milan, Umberto D. takes the miserabilist template of Italian neorealism and cranks it up to 11, finding an odd elation in the depths of despair. Impoverished and lonely, convinced that only sorrow lies ahead, the elderly Umberto (Battisti) decides to end it all; trouble is, he can't do the deed until he finds a home for his faithful fox terrier, a tail-wagging bundle of energy named Flick. His subsequent labors, which find him traipsing across half of Rome in a futile effort to put this particular affair in order, have a rugged poignancy that continues to influence socially conscious filmmakers around the world. It's impossible to imagine the climactic scene of the Dardennes' Rosetta, for example, in which the title character stubbornly lugs a heavy propane tank across her trailer park so she can off herself with the gas stove, without De Sica's unflinching masterpiece pointing the way.

Unfairly dismissed by some as too sentimental, Umberto D., unlike many other films of its kind, refuses to traffic in facile notions of victimization. Battisti's resolutely dignified performance in the title role, in particular, lends the film much of its power. Yes, Umberto is down and out, but his economic circumstances aren't half so dangerous as the foolish pride to which he desperately clings. Introducing himself to strangers by his full name and standing at attention, he clearly fancies himself an aristocrat; when he's reduced to begging, he places his cap in Flick's mouth, getting the dog to do the dirty work while he cowers behind a nearby pillar, fearful of being seen. Evidently, many people are under the impression that we're supposed to feel sorry for this pathetic old man, when in fact our empathetic exasperation with the character's narcissistic melancholy is precisely what De Sica wants to provoke. It's significant that the movie ends not in tragedy but in abrupt, unexpected glee, despite the fact that Umberto's circumstances haven't changed in the slightest. If you make it to the end with your eyes completely free of moisture, you might want to consider having your heart professionally thawed.

Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]

The overlooked 1952 masterpiece of Italian neorealism "Umberto D." is enjoying a deserved re-release this summer, opening today at the American Film Institute Theater at the Kennedy Center with a dazzling, newly restored print and soundtrack.

Umberto Domenico Ferrari is a retired civil servant who is barely able to keep alive on his state pension. Living alone with his beloved dog, Flike, Umberto D. clings desperately to the manners and civility that define him as a gentleman, retaining a quiet dignity that only becomes more heartbreaking as his life falls apart around him.

We meet Umberto D. at a demonstration, where his fellow retirees are marching for higher pensions. Umberto and a friend peel away from the crowd, and the camera follows Umberto through his dispiriting day: He is kicked out of the lunchroom where he feeds his dog, he is threatened with eviction by his landlady, and he discovers that the young maid in his rooming house is pregnant. In the ensuing few days, Umberto will become increasingly despondent, trying to find a way to survive without joining many of his friends who have become beggars on the street corners of Rome.

Although not quite a real-time day in the life of a faceless Italian of the 1950s, "Umberto D." has the intimate, spontaneous feel that characterized the neorealist classics. And, like those films, its main character is played by an amateur, in this case a University of Florence professor, Carlo Battisti, who had never acted in his life. As he did in earlier films as "The Bicycle Thief" and "Shoeshine," director Vittorio de Sica elicits an overwhelming wellspring of emotion in "Umberto D.," which with just one main character in the simplest of stories evokes extraordinary depths of pain and loneliness. Although most filmmakers use animals at their peril, in "Umberto D." De Sica manages to avoid cheap emotion with Flike, even when the melodrama becomes absolutely excruciating.

And make no mistake: Much of "Umberto D." is excruciating, especially a sequence in which Umberto agonizes over whether to beg at the steps of the Pantheon, as well as the film's devastating final passage. But filmgoers – even the dog lovers among them – are encouraged to stay the course. Heroes like Umberto D. are hard to find, and your life will be better for having met him.

Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford

In a limited two-week run at The Film Forum in New York City, Umberto D. (1952), one of the key films of the Italian neo-realism movement, is being presented in a newly restored 50th anniversity print with a new translation and subtitles. Directed by Vittorio De Sica, the film depicts a few days in the life of Umberto, a retired bureaucrat facing eviction from his apartment of 20 years. When government institutions and former friends fail him in his plight, he is forced to roam the streets; his only emotional connection to the real world is his beloved dog and his friendship with an uneducated maid who is in desperate straits herself. Although the film arrived at the end of the neo-realism cycle, its narrative about an elderly, poverty-stricken man and his struggle to maintain his dignity in an uncaring society is just as powerful and relevant today as it was when it first premiered in Italy.

In the title role, De Sica cast a non-professional actor - Carlo Battisti (a University of Florence professor in real life) - who delivers a heart-breaking performance without resorting to easy sentimentality or grand theatrics. And the film was truly a labor of love for the director (he often said it was his favorite film) and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who collaborated on most of De Sica's important films including Shoeshine (1946) and The Bicycle Thief (1948).

Unfortunately, Umberto D. was attacked in its own country by the Italian Minister of Culture who accused the film of airing the country's "dirty laundry" in public. Nevertheless, the film went on to international acclaim including an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay and the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film. And today, it's universally recognized as a masterpiece of world cinema. This dazzling new restoration of Umberto D. is due to the efforts of Giuseppe Rotunno, the famous cinematographer of Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers & Fellini's Satyricon, and film stock expert Vincenzo Verzini, known as the "Little Giotto" of Italian movies. Verzini began his film career working for Roberto Rossellini on Open City (1945) and established his reputation as an expert in developing and printing the sophisticated lighting contrasts in films such as Luchino Visconti's White Nights (1957). In addition to Umberto D, he has restored such classics as Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962), Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), Fellini's The White Sheik (1951) and I Vitelloni (1953), and Pietro Germi's Un Maledetto Imbroglio (1959) for Mediaset.

In Il Mio Viaggio in Italia (My Voyage to Italy), Martin Scorsese's passionate new documentary on Italian cinema which airs on Turner Classic Movies in June, the director says, "As powerful as The Bicycle Thief was, for me, De Sica and Zavattini's greatest achievement together was Umberto D....a great movie about a hero of everyday life. That was De Sica's precious gift to his father. And to us."

According to Peter Brunette in a New York Times article, the current print of Umberto D. showing at the Film Forum is a remarkable improvement over past prints: "Damaged or missing frames in the original negative of Umberto D. were replaced, the splicing between reels upgraded and the lighting improved. The soundtrack was also restored by transferring it to digital audio tape and filtering it with modern equipment."

Film as Art [Danél Griffin]

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Review by Umberto Eco [Italian]

INDISCRETION OF AN AMERICAN WIFE

aka: Terminal Station (Stazione Termini)

USA Italy (90 mi) 1953

Time Out review

De Sica started out wanting to film a small scale love story, but the casting of Jennifer Jones brought with it the attentions of her producer husband David Selznick. He insisted on shooting in Rome's grand new central railway station and drafted in Truman Capote to polish up Zavattini's screenplay about an ill-fated romance between a visiting American and an Italian with an American mother (Clift, who gives a tender performance). In the end, though, Selznick reckoned the finished picture too arty and cut it to 72 minutes for US distribution (as Indiscretion of an American Wife).

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Famed Italian neorealist director Vittorio de Sica (The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D.) succumbed to the lure of Hollywood when producer David O. Selznick presented him with Terminal Station, the story of a married American woman (Jennifer Jones) lingering at a train station, unable to completely break it off with her Italian lover (Montgomery Clift). The film succeeds when focusing on small moments, gestures, etc. But De Sica can't resist loading the film up to make it feel more significant than it really is. Selznick, of course, was displeased with the final product, cut 20 minutes and retitled it Indiscretion of an American Wife. Truman Capote contributed to the film's dialogue, and Ben Hecht reportedly worked uncredited on the titles.

Criterion's disc presents both films, but for some reason Selznick's shorter version received more extensive restoration and is the only one with a commentary track -- it looks and sounds much better than the de Sica version.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Margarita Landazuri

Producer David O. Selznick was as avid a film buff as he was a filmmaker, and in the early 1950s he was enthralled by the work of the Italian neo-realist filmmakers, in particular Vittorio De Sica. Looking for a new direction after the critical failures of Duel in the Sun (1946) and The Paradine Case (1947), Selznick persuaded De Sica to make a film with him, starring Selznick's wife, Jennifer Jones. De Sica's idea was a panorama of life in Rome's new railroad station, with a variety of stories going on at once. The central story is the final parting of an adulterous couple, a married American woman, played by Jones, and her Italian lover. Montgomery Clift would play the Italian, and most of the other roles would be played by Italians. The film would be called Stazione Termini in Italian and Terminal Station in English.

Both Selznick and De Sica were used to being in complete control on their films, and both thought they could impose their will on the other. How wrong they both were would become clear as soon as the film went into production at the end of 1952. There were two teams of scriptwriters, one for the Italian version, led by De Sica's usual collaborator, Cesare Zavattini, and another for the English-language version. Selznick hired novelist Carson McCullers for the English version, but was unhappy with her work. Eventually, Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, Paul Gallico and Truman Capote all had a crack at the script, along with Selznick himself.

Clift arrived in Rome to find that De Sica, who spoke no English, had hired a stand-in for Clift. De Sica planned to give direction to the stand-in, and Clift was expected to imitate what the stand-in did. Clift, of course, refused. Shooting took place in the actual Stazione Termini in the evenings and ran late into the night. Tempers frayed, and the language barrier only made things worse. All night long, Selznick sat in the lounge of the station, rewriting scenes and composing 40-page memos on every aspect of the production, memos that he would expect De Sica to respond to the next day. Jennifer Jones, who was emotionally fragile anyway, became more and more distraught. While shooting an intimate love scene, she snapped and ran out of the station, barefoot and hysterical. Selznick followed, and she slapped him, breaking his glasses.

Clift, who had his own demons, was kind and gentle with Jones, and she became fond of him. Truman Capote claimed that Jones fell in love with Clift, not realizing he was a homosexual, and that when she found out about his sexual preference, she got extremely upset and stuffed a mink jacket into a toilet. Clift, however, told friends that Jones was "madly in love" with Selznick, that she still felt guilty about leaving her former husband Robert Walker, and that both she and Selznick were "in deep analysis." When the film was over, Jones gave Clift an expensive Gucci leather briefcase. The brass clasp kept unfastening, and Clift told friends, "it's beautiful, but it doesn't quite work -- how like Jennifer."

De Sica liked a realistic look to his films, and did not do many close-ups. Selznick, of course, wanted the full Hollywood glamour treatment, and complained constantly about the lack of close-ups of Jones. Finally, Selznick and De Sica compromised. De Sica would shoot the film in his customary manner, with his Italian cameraman. Selznick hired English cinematographer Oswald Morris to do close-ups with the full Hollywood glamour treatment.

The film was released in Europe at a length of nearly two hours. Selznick was not happy with De Sica's version, and took the film back to the U.S. to re-edit. He took out the subplots, focused on the love story, added close-ups and a theme song sung by Patti Page. He retitled it Indiscretion of an American Wife, and released it at 64 minutes. In the end, De Sica had his version, Selznick had his, and the result pleased neither the critics nor the public. Seen today, however, it is a fascinating failure, an interesting attempt to mix two distinct and incompatible styles, with intensely emotional, moving performances by Clift and Jones.

The Criterion disc contains both versions of the film and it's fascinating to note how they both differ on both an emotional and narrative level. Of the two transfers, Indiscreet is the sharper looking of the two since Terminal Station was taken from a 35mm dupe negative and features the above mentioned musical short with Patti Page performing two songs inspired by the film. The latter is an elegantly designed short directed by renown art director William Cameron Menzies and photographed by the great James Wong Howe.

Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3.5/5]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2.5/5]

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

IT HAPPENED IN THE PARK (Villa Borghese)

Italy France (98 mi) 1953 co-director: Gianni Franciolini

User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

(Includes spoilers) VILLA BORGHESE is a film consisting of six vignettes (cut to five in its U.S. release) that are all set in the Roman park that bears that name. All the episodes take place within one day. The first episode, taking place early in the day, is called "Servant Girls and Soldiers" and is a trifle about a couple of guys trying to put the makes on a couple of young girls. The second piece is called "The Greek Letter Pi" and is a poignant little anecdote about a schoolgirl (Anna Maria Ferrrero) who is urged by her classmates to approach their Greek professor (François Perrier), so that they can photograph them kissing and perhaps blackmail the prof for a passing grade. It turns out the professor has a sad story to tell the girl…that he is going blind. The tearful girl cannot go though with the plan. The third episode is the funniest and probably the best in the film. It's called "Incident at Villa Borghese" and features tour-guide Vittorio De Sica as an incorrigible over-cologned woman-chaser who comes between Giovanna Ralli and her furiously jealous boyfriend Maurizio Arena. The dramatics that ensue among the three…and others…is absolutely hilarious. In one delicious moment, De Sica sits in the car with the boy on one side of him, screaming at the girl, and the girl's breasts on the other side, pressed against De Sica's face as he barely conceals his lust. In "The Marriage Arranger" Eduardo De Filippo is the father of a girl he is trying to marry off. The discussions between the relatives center on rather selfish interest…money, dowry. Then the increasingly ill-at-ease girl is revealed to have a handicap, involving her foot, and the young suitor comes to the emotionally distraught girl's side and, through simple humanity and kindness, saves the day in a way the crude relatives were not capable of doing. Of all the relationships we witness in the film, this is the only one that seems to have a future. "The Lovers" is a bittersweet episode about a man breaking up his affair with a married woman…as the woman's small children play in the park with their nurse and call out to their adulterous mommy. It is nicely acted by two great stars of the French cinema, Micheline Presle and Gérard Philippe. The final racy episode, "Beauty Contest," is a Felliniesque dissertation about two rival Roman street–prostitutes, who as they are about to be rounded up by the police, wind up at a Miss Cinema beauty contest taking place in the park. The younger of the women (Eloisa Cianni) eludes the police by going off with an older man in his car. The other and older one (Franca Valeri) is not so lucky and the episode and the film end as she is driven off in a police vehicle. It is late at night.

The movie was released in the United States in 1957, inexplicably, in a French-language version, which didn't match the content, despite the presence of some French performers. It was retitled IT HAPPENED IN THE PARK. Furthermore, the first decent-enough episode was shorn, also inexplicably, because the film was already a short one. The direction by Gianni Franciolini is subtle and finely-tuned throughout, and the ensemble of actors in the production makes, of itself, a worthwhile experience of the movie, which should not remain as forgotten as it is.

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

THE GOLD OF NAPLES (L’Oro di Napoli)

Italy (131 mi) 1954 US cut version (107 mi)

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

A four-part anthology (1954), written and directed by the redoubtable team of Cesare Zavattini and Vittorio De Sica. The episodes range from farce to pathos, though the dominant tone is one of strained sentimentality. With De Sica, Sophia Loren, Silvana Mangano, and Toto. 107 min.

User comments from imdb Author: Author: madrig80 from Italy

It is not easy to find a movie like this, that makes you laugh and think at the same time. It is like a trip not to Italy, but to the most precious souls and minds of the people of Naples, the real "gold" of this city. A forgotten masterpiece, with exceptional performances by Toto', Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

User comments from imdb Author: Author: ecaprarie from Italy

I am Italian and I saw this movie on TV a few days ago. I had not seen it in the past. Totò is absolutely fantastic in his role. But the most astonishing episode is that of the 'funeralino', the funeral of a child: that is very 'neapolitan' to me. Sorrow and attention to manners are co-existent and you never know whether it is true sorrow or pure acting. Paolo Stoppa is also excellent in his role as a new widower. Of course, the movie is quoted because of Sofia Loren, who was helping her husband in his job of making pizzas. This is the movie where her nickname 'la pizzaiola' came from. While watching it, I did not realize that it had been made so many years ago. It well deserves to be seen.

User comments from imdb Author: zkasher from Ramat Gan, Israel

"L'oro di Napoli" is the kind of movie which has everything in it. Human emotions, good and evil in Humankind, great sceneries of Napoli and its Golf, great music, great actors and most of all a genius director, Vittorio De Sica.

This is the kind of movie one may watch again and again without getting bored.

As for myself, I even took a trip to Napoli on August 2001, to find out the beautiful sites where the movie took place.

I found the beautiful "Castello Dell'Ovo" and the "Fontana Dell'Immacolatella", which are not mentioned by name in the movie. Amazingly both sites look the same as in 1954, as well as some neighboring buildings.

I managed finding a collection of the most beautiful Neapolitan Canzoni (Songs), including the song `A Marechiaro' which plays at the end of the movie, a song I cherished for long, before watching the movie.

To summarize, as far as I am concerned, `L'Oro Di Napoli' (The Gold of Napoli), constitutes a genuine treasure in the history of movies, which I'll always cherish deep in my heart.

moviediva

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

THE ROOF (Il Tetto)

Italy France (91 mi) 1956

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

VITTORIO DE SICA'S vast compassion for the poor people of Italy, manifested with overwhelming candor in such of his classic films as "The Bicycle Thief" and "Umberto D," comes through again in his modest and wistful little drama, "The Roof" ("II Tetto"), which had its belated American première yesterday at the Trans-Lux Fifty-second Street.

Belated, we say, because this picture, produced in Italy some three years ago, has been awaiting release in this country until such time as it could be arranged to get a sufficient theatre for it, in the light of its somewhat cheerless theme. And that only goes to show how cautious and insensitive some theatre people can be.

For "The Roof" is essentially a happy and valorous little film, for all the evidence it gives of misfortune and material poverty. The young newlyweds, who are its principals, may be dismally and piteously poor and they may have to endure absurd discomforts and inconveniences before they get themselves a meager home. But the point is that they are courageous, they have spirit and they are in love. Out of these basic strengths, De Sica has composed a lovely little seriocomic film.

If we seem to stress the word "little," that is because the dramatic range, as well as the physical production and the human population, is small. This is simply the unpretentious story of how a young married couple tries to live, first in the crowded apartment of the husband's family, until a shattering quarrel occurs, and then temporarily separated, with the husband sleeping in a toolshed and the wife with a servant-girl friend. Finally, they summon their resources and their sympathetic and obliging pals and throw up a shack that will serve them as a private dwelling, all in the course of one night.

The trick is to get the house finished before the police arrive, since the law is that people cannot be evicted from any house on which there is a roof. And this gives De Sica opportunity for a busy race against time, in which serious and poignant complications are deftly blended with comical twists.

Lest credit be piled on De Sica, who merely directed and produced, let a share go to Cesare Zavattini, his favorite writer, who prepared the script. Brilliant bits of pictorial invention, such as people pausing in the middle of a dispute to cross themselves as a funeral passes or a quick shot of a homely girl's soaplathered face, aid the swift communication of penetrating ideas. And, combined with De Sica's sense of pathos, they make for a kind of poetry.

More of same is in the performances of the two "unknowns," Gabriella Pallotti and Giorgio Listuazi, who play the newlyweds. She is a lovely, sensitive youngster with a face as pure and warm as the sun, which reveals, in its clouded moments, the passage of difficult moods. And he is a tall, good-looking fellow with sudden aggressive attitudes that suggest the ambition and frustration of an honorable underprivileged youth.

Gastone Renzelli is excellent as a quick-tempered brother-in-law and Maria Sittoro brings understanding to the role of the mother of the lad. Several others give shape to credible characters in De Sica's famous neo-realist style, which makes "The Roof" a believable, as well as a deeply touching film.

MichaelDVD - Region 4 DVD review [Steve Crawford]

TWO WOMEN (La Ciociara)

Italy France (100 mi) 1960

Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review

Director Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) hits his stride in this powerful 1961 story of a mother (Sophia Loren) and her daughter who meet with tragedy and violence in the waning days of World War II. Loren won a deserved Oscar for her performance as the life force encased in a magnificent body, and De Sica has rarely done better work. In Italian with subtitles. 99 min.

Channel 4 Film capsule review

American cinema never learned how to exploit Loren's voluptuously earthy appeal, as revealed here in her Oscar-winning performance - the only actress to win this award for a foreign-language film. The performance and the powerful narrative made the film one of the few foreign pictures to enjoy real success in the USA. It told the story, set in Italy in 1943, of a widowed mother and her teenage daughter surviving enemy attack, deprivation and rape by Allied Moroccan soldiers. The film is actually a rather old-fashioned melodramatic star vehicle, meant originally for Magnani as Loren's mother, but Magnani flatly refused.

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Really depressing and well done, if that's what you're into. Well done I said, but not great. I would definitely take issue with anyone claiming this as Vittorio De Sica's masterpiece. Umberto D. would be my choice and I wouldn't argue strongly against the consensus Ladri di biciclette, both serious enough to be downers in their own right, but not like this. Sophia Loren portrays strength, yes, but it never looks like it's going to be nearly enough. She's marked, they're marked from the opening frames. It's a remarkable performance and won her the big award but I suspect that the voters were too suddenly taken by her character, and her, more than even her performance. It's not, again, her greatest role or even her greatest performance for De Sica, which would have to be Il Viaggio . Please don't take this as knocking the film too much, only my preference for…feeling good, being happy, art that inspires rather than depresses. May strike others as artistic, strikes me as pointless. I guess it probably took a lot of guts at the time to represent allies of the Allies this way, but it's hardly surprising given what we now know about…well, the taking of Berlin for example. War is bad and a lot of times women are collateral damage. I would hope everyone already knows that, and doesn't need to be reminded in this way.

Turner Classic Movies review Felicia Feaster

In director Vittorio De Sica's acclaimed drama Two Women (1960), set in 1943 Rome, the city is a continual target of Allied bombs. With a fragile, sheltered 13-year-old daughter Rosetta (Eleonora Brown) to protect, widow Cesira (Sophia Loren) decides to leave her small grocery store and return to the relative safety of her native village Ciociara, in the Italian countryside.

Though there are assorted dangers along the way, the women arrive safely in Ciociara where they reintegrate themselves into the life of the community. They befriend Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the earnest, Marxist son of a local farmer and help two British soldiers stranded in the countryside. It is when Cesira and Rosetta decide to return to Rome to escape the food shortages and more bombs that De Sica's film shows the misery of war and how it almost destroys the loving bond between mother and daughter. The villagers scatter, setting out on different paths to safety and Michele is taken by a ragtag group of German soldiers as a guide. In an isolated church where the women stop to rest they are brutally raped by Allied Moroccan soldiers, an act which turns the innocent, loving Rosetta into a blank-eyed stranger to her own mother.

Vittorio De Sica's earthy connection to the real travails of Italians living in postwar Europe helped create the film genre of Italian Neo-Realism and masterworks like Shoeshine (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Umberto D. (1952). The film was adapted from a 1957 novel by Alberto Moravia, La Ciociara, which translates to "The Woman From Ciociara." The novel was inspired by Moravia and his wife's experiences as antifascists during World War II.

Sophia Loren won the first ever Oscar® awarded to a non-American actress in a foreign language film for her role in Two Women as well as the Best Actress Award at Cannes and from the British Film Academy and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Stage fright kept Loren from actually attending the Academy Awards to claim her statuette, so Greer Garson accepted the award on Loren's behalf, heralding "this wildly beautiful and talented girl."

Loren attributed her searing, acclaimed performance in Two Women to "sensory recall" and her own painful memories of wartime when Loren's mother had fiercely protected her two illegitimate daughters from the terror in her hometown of Pozzuoli, near Naples.

In Warren G. Harris's biography of Loren, she is quoted as saying "With my own memories to draw upon, you would think I would have had an easy time of it. But it was very hard for me to relive my girlhood terror and at the same time to transform the reality of my feelings into the role I was acting. In memory, I still looked at my experiences with the eyes and emotions of a girl, but the role demanded that I see them with the eyes of a tortured woman."

Loren credited De Sica with emboldening her "to go far beyond where I had ever gone before." She spoke fondly of the confidence the director gave her to pull off such a difficult role and attested to seeing De Sica crying along with her character at several points during the making of the film.

The great Italian legend Anna Magnani -- an illegitimate child like Loren who had starred in De Sica's Teresa Venerdi (1941) -- was originally slated for the lead in Two Women, with Loren cast as her daughter. But Magnani, who was fifty-three at the time, refused what she saw as the professional indignity of playing Loren's mother. The extent of Magnani's jealousy of being possibly usurped by Loren as the celebrated star of the Italian cinema was affirmed after she finally saw Two Women. Magnani remarked that Loren had copied all of her own gestures and mannerisms.

The film's producer was Carlo Ponti, who had been romantically involved with Sophia since she was a teenager. Ponti eventually obtained a divorce from his first wife in Mexico, a divorce the Italian Catholic Church refused to acknowledge, declaring Sophia and Carlo's relationship bigamous.

The original director attached to Two Women was George Cukor, though Ponti had hoped to film on location in Ciociara with either De Sica or Roberto Rossellini directing. It didn't work out but Ponti compensated Cukor by hiring him to direct Loren's upcoming film, a Western based on a Louis L'Amour novel, Heller in Pink Tights (1960).

To raise the money to make Two Women, Ponti worked on a coproduction with a French company. But French regulations required that one of the stars be of French nationality. And so Jean-Paul Belmondo, who had recently delighted audiences in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), was retained to play the part of Michele. Another actor had to dub the French-speaking actor's lines in Italian, though Loren did her own dubbing into English for the American release of Two Women.

Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review

George Chabot's Review of Two Women (La Ciociara)

Movie House Commentary Tuna and Johnny Web

All Movie Guide [Wheeler Winston Dixon]

TV Guide

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE LAST JUDGMENT (Il Giudizio Universale)

Italy France (100 mi) 1961 ‘Scope

User comments from imdb Author: M. J Arocena from New Zealand

The great duo: Vittorio de Sica and Cesare Zavatine present us with a hyper, neo-realistic, surreal vision of our fears in a magic mixture of horrors and joyfulness. Black and white and color, hope and desolation with an ensemble cast that it's as bizarre as it is extraordinary. Alberto Sordi, Melina Mercouri, Vittorio Gassman, Anouk Aimee, Jack Palance, Ernest Borgnine even Jimmy Durante and Renato Rascel. The interconnecting vignettes have an inexorable point of reference. The end of the world. The film, at times, appears to be a "divertimento" that builds to something apocalyptic and finishes in a hurried fizzling note, but it is in fact a superb exercise playing wittily with the fear of our ultimate and unavoidable demise. Among the many delights that the film offers there is a superlative performance by Alberto Sordi in one the most repellent characters in his long collection of repellent characters. A strange, funny, unsettling and fascinating film.

THE CONDEMNED OF ALTONA (I Sequestrati di Altona)

Italy France (114 mi) 1962 ‘Scope

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

An awful film, but one that will always be remembered for getting Jean-Paul Sartre an Academy Award nomination (he lost). Based on Sartre's play, it's the story of a dying German war profiteer (Fredric March) and his two sons--one a swinger (Robert Wagner) married to an Italian movie star (Sophia Loren), the other a psychotic ex-Gestapo agent (Maximilian Schell). Needless to say, the opportunities for overacting do not go neglected, especially under the laissez-faire direction of Vittorio De Sica (1963).

User comments from imdb Author: BarneyBergman from United States

This is a darkly disturbing film of a Nazi war criminal, still wearing his German army uniform, who is hidden in his father's house, and led to believe that World War II is still going on. The ending of the movie is a bizarre mix of Fellini and Capote. Schell escapes his "prison" and walks around the streets only to be "shocked" that there is no destruction or war raging. He ends up in a local theater and salutes an actor playing Hitler. I won't give the ending away, but it's a shocking surprise ala Play Dirty or To Live and Die in LA. The acting is great, the black and white film make the movie realistic and it captures a time in history which hopefully is gone for ever. An excellent film.

User comments from imdb Author: mlraymond from Durham NC

I only saw this film once, nearly forty years ago, on television. I later read the original Sartre play in a drama class, and found that the movie was reasonably faithful to the original. It is apparently unavailable on home video, unfortunately.

I remember being fascinated by the compelling performance of Maximilian Schell as the former Nazi officer who is believed dead, but actually hiding out in his family's attic. His sister, for some reason ,lets him think the war is still going on, twenty years later. She reads him made-up news bulletins about the Allies' destruction of Germany, feeding his madness.

The most memorable scene was when the recluse Schell left the house, and went out into the city for the first time in twenty years or more. People stare and laugh at him, as he walks around the modern city in his old Nazi uniform. He is bewildered by all the modern buildings and signs of prosperity in a Germany he had believed utterly destroyed forever.In a particularly clever touch, he somehow ends up in a theater, where a Nazi era satire is being performed. The modern German audience laughs at the caricatured Hitler and his followers. As a kid, I realized it was some kind of Hitler spoof, but the whole thing was in German, and I had to guess at its significance. I now believe that it was most likely a play within a play, namely a scene from the climax of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. It's been a long time since I saw this film, but it seems to me that Schell, in his madness and confusion, mistakenly believes it's some kind of real Nazi rally, and starts saluting "Hitler" , while the audience thinks he's part of the show.

It's unfortunate that this movie isn't available for a new audience to appreciate. With any luck, it will come to home video eventually.

Variety review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

BOCCACCIO ‘70

De Sica segment: La Riffa (The Raffle)

Italy France (208 mi) 1962 omnibus film with 4 directors, Vittorio De Sica “La Riffa” segment, Federico Fellini “Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio” segment, Mario Monicelli “Renzo e Luciana” segment, and Luchino Visconti “Il Lavoro” segment

Time Out

Probably the best remembered of that exasperating sub-genre, the portmanteau film, largely because the directors concerned (the undisputed heavyweights of their time) let rip in their most vulgar styles in an attempt to recapture the spirit of Boccaccio. The filmettes also reveal a startling fear of women in general. Fellini's episode concerns an outsize Ekberg who steps out of a billboard poster to torment an ineffectual puritan; while Visconti delivered a vicious tale of a beautiful young wife (a stunning performance by Schneider) who takes revenge on her husband by making him pay for her body. De Sica and Monicelli went for broader, more traditional comedic effect - less pretentious, but perhaps inevitably in this company, less memorable.

Being There Magazine [Nathan Williams]

In 1962, Italy was the envy of the cinematic world. The Nouvelle Vague may have been in full swing, Kurosawa and Ozu may have been at the peak of their powers, and the U.S. continued to churn out some quality product under tough circumstances. But, really, nobody was touching Italia in the early '60s. Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni, Rosellini, Pasolini, Olmi, De Sica; the list of heavy-hitters is jaw-dropping.

Inter-continental super-producers Cesare Zavattini, Carlo Ponti, and Joe Levine dreamed up the idea of matching four top directors with four bombshells, all in the style of the Renaissance poet, Boccaccio. They wrangled Fellini, Visconti, De Sica, and b-level talent, Mario Monicelli, as well as a substantial budget for their four-part (and nearly four-hour) tribute to gorgeous women. The results are mixed, but the total film is better and more thematically coherent than any other of the genre (if, at 208 minutes, a bit of a cinematic endurance test).

Monicelli's segment, "Renzo and Luciana" is a touching depiction of the difficulties of marriage in the modern industrial Rome. It resembles a sweeter, more optimistic Olmi, and while it doesn't quite match his better work, it is a sweet, touching film nonetheless. Newcomer Marina Solinas is excellent as the working girl wife.

Fellini's segment, "The Temptation of Dr. Antonio," produced between La Dolce Vita and 8½ is disappointing. The good doctor is a moralist who becomes obsessed with an Anita Ekberg poster, 50-foot Anita comes to life to torment him, and a victory is won for sexual freedom. Despite some impressive flourishes of style, the whole thing is relatively uninspired, and silly to the point of inducing boredom. Fans of a certain early Scorsese short, however, should note this as a source of inspiration.

Visconti's segment, "The Job," is easily the best of the quartet. Contrasting strongly with the large-budget, on-location competition, Visconti's film takes place entirely in a handful of small rooms. Romy Schneider, as a countess who wants to earn her own living, is tremendous under Visconti's direction. Also fascinating are small hints of the film he would shoot next, The Leopard: (the relationship, the large dog, the novel itself on the couch).

De Sica bats clean-up with, "The Raffle," a depiction of a carnival worker (Sophia Loren) who sells her sexual services via lottery. De Sica gets success with the dangerous combination of the savvy Loren and his usual assortment of non-actors. The dropped jaws at Loren's beauty isn't acting, it's regular Italian men genuinely excited to be sharing space with her. Indeed, without this charm, the film would be nothing more than an above average sitcom episode.

The transfer is unexceptional, but not distracting in any way. The extras are minimal (a mildly diverting interview with De Sica as the highlight) and the sound is fine. Not an especially good introduction to any of these directors, and not among their best work, but far from their worst. For fans of Italian cinema, required viewing.

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

At the height of the craze for European art films when Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni were in peak form, super-producer Carlo Ponti dreamed up this omnibus opus, four lengthy short subjects each directed by a major talent. Clocking in at a whopping three hours and eighteen minutes, American importer Joseph E. Levine immediately lopped off Mario Monicelli opening episode, leaving a more easily distributed film by the three directors with bigger reputations among New York critics: Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica.

Most American viewers have only seen Boccaccio '70 in this tryptich form, and usually pan-scanned in faded Television prints. The new DVD outfit NoShame Films (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) gives us this interesting landmark production at its full length, uncut, and in a brightly-colored transfer.

Renzo e Luciana: The marriage between low-income factory workers Luciana and Renzo (Marisa Solinas and Germano Gilioli) is kept a secret because of company rules. Their home life is frustrated by the lack of privacy, or funds to buy any - that and the unwanted attentions of Luciana's pushy boss, who assumes that she's available to be his girlfriend. Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio: Self-appointed censor and protector of public decency Dr. Antonio (Pippino De Filippo) is scandalized by an enormous poster of "Anita" (Anita Ekberg) promoting milk. He tries everything to get it torn down, but even Vatican officials are mostly unconcerned. While trying to demolish the billboard at night, Dr. Antonio is horrified to discover that the poster image has come magically to life. He's confronted by a 50-foot Anita with an equally outsized sexual appetite to quench. Il lavoro: The tabloids catch the indolent Conte Ottavio (Thomas Milian) in the company of a score of expensive call-girls, a scandal that his lawyers try to neutralize to insure that the money keeps flowing from his rich father-in-law. Ottavio's wife of one year Pupe (Romy Schneider) at first doesn't seem overly concerned about his philandering. But she has secretly contacted the women he's been with, and has a personal plan to determine the truth of her marriage. La riffa: Carnival tout Zoe (Sophia Loren) accepts desperate measures to pay back taxes and keep her traveling shooting gallery from bankruptcy. A confederate is selling raffle tickets to hundreds of love-starved livestock cowboys - and Zoe is the prize.

The American trailer for Boccaccio '70 tries to explain that the title refers to what Boccaccio would come up with if he were to make a film in 1970; in other words, it's meaningless. What we get are four rather good mini-movies by top Italian filmmakers. There was some talk of Mario Monicelli's episode not fitting in with the others, but the obvious reason it was dropped from international distribution was to cut down the length of the film. If Monicelli's show seems different, it's because the other three each have a more exploitable sex element. The producer's natural favorite Sophia Loren does yet another of her big-tease-but-no-payoff farces, Romy Schneider provides some discreet but intoxicating near-nudity, and Anita Ekberg sends up her bosomy bombshell image from La Dolce Vita by appearing as a literal mountain of flesh, a Colossus of Sex.

Each episode presents a different facet of Italian art filmmaking of the time. Mario Monicelli's tale of frustrated newlyweds is a Neorealist exercise, sketching the day-to-day reality of love oppressed by economic concerns. Renzo and Luciana have to sneak across town to marry on a work break. As they can't afford a place of their own, the pair spend a miserable honeymoon surrounded by curious children and insensitive adults. If they want a drink when they dance, they should probably walk home. And all the while they must put up with the unwanted advances of Luciana's loutish office supervisor.

Monicelli's episode is handsomely produced and needs make no excuses, but viewers will probably be anxious to get on to the big names and sexy actresses of the later chapters. The chopping of this section by Joe Levine invites comparison with the Japanese horror omnibus Kwaidan. It was shorn of an entire chapter for American art houses as well. That spirit lived on in the Miramax company's routine editing of their foreign imports of the last fifteen years - Like Water for Chocolate, Italian for Beginners, etc.

The most famous episode is Federico Fellini's The Temptation of Dr. Antonio, the "¹/₂" in 8 & ¹/₂. Here's the first time we see Fellini's "crazy circus" filming style in all its glory, as Nino Rota's bouncy, maddening jingle Bevete più latte ("Drink more milk") provides the music for the mad parade of boy scouts, schoolgirls, nuns, firemen, jazz musicians and ordinary citizens that rallies around the giant billboard of "Anita" holding a glass of milk in a seductive pose. Fellini is taking time out from 'meaningful' epics to have a bit of fun and doesn't mind pulling in references from Frank Tashlin (remember Ekberg's mammary competition Jayne Mansfield holding the milk bottles in the suggestive cartoon The Girl Can't Help It?) and of course American science fiction films with Allison Hayes and Dorothy Provine as fifty-foot females on the prowl. Ekberg becomes the monstrous incarnation of the prudish Dr. Antonio's repressed desires - his 'enemy' is at one point revealed to be a lost mommy figure. Antonio is indulged and tolerated by even his conservative friends and Church officials also consider him a pest; he's as alone as the figure of St. George slaying the dragon that hangs on his wall. The episode is unique, highly enjoyable, and shows Fellini at his fun-loving best.

The most profound episode is Luchino Visconti's Il lavoro, a deft and thoughtful one-act that's modest in production value. The devastatingly beautiful Romy Schneider is the center of the show, before her dilution in comedies like What's New Pussycat? She totally eclipses Thomas (Tomas) Milian, who would later become a fixture in political Spaghetti westerns. This chapter makes a Boccaccio-esque comparison between a wife and a whore, as Schneider's pampered frau discovers her real place in her fairy-tale of a marriage. The husband whines and pleads for his straying to be ignored and his allowance untouched, which prompts Schneider to put him to the test. It's all conveyed through costume changes and elaborate 'business' in their palatial home, with servants serving food, starting baths and rounding up Schneider's collection of kittens. She acts nonchalant and teases her insolent hubby with her body, while revealing several layers of inner disillusion and disappointment. Visconti pulls off an almost perfect character analysis, without the grandiose trappings of his other masterpieces (Senso, The Leopard, The Damned) . Schneider's wife never says explicitly what she has in mind but her crushed, rueful look when Milian thoughtlessly falls into her trap expresses much more. It's a masterful sequence that sums up A Doll's House in just a few telling moments.

The final chapter is a light comedy in Vittorio De Sica's 'down in the streets' mode. If I were Italian I might wonder just how condescending is the director's typing of common folk as mostly sweet but crude buffoons. Sophia Loren's unlikely gutter princess is just another side of beef in a stockyard fair, the grand prize in a blind raffle. Prospective lechers of all shapes and sizes show up to "see the goods" as if they were inspecting a prize heifer. In an inspired bit of sex-play, the writers contrive to make Loren remove her red blouse so as not to arouse a mad bull. The bull calms down but the assembled Italian cowpokes are aroused en masse by the sight of the star's (obviously custom-fit) underwear. As in a number of other sex farces with Ms. Loren the episode has to be all tease. Events conspire to make sure that the meek churchgoer with the winning ticket doesn't collect his prize, and that the naughty girl's profits are returned, etc. The fun here will depend greatly on one's attraction to Italy's sex symbol; there are some cute Rock 'n Roll and cha-cha riffs on the soundtrack. Loren sings a song called "Money Money Money" to round out the package.

Showing up in various bits throughout the show are name actors Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Paolo Stoppa (practically a cameo) and Romolo Valli; the amusing gallery of sad sacks in La Riffa are said to be non-professionals.

Turner Classic Movies Paul Sherman

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5]

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Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [5/5] Daulton Dickey

TV Guide review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVD Beaver Gary W. Tooze

II BOOM

Italy (97 mi) 1963

User comments from imdb Author: kristen skullerud (kskuller@tiscalinet.it) from Rome,Italy

Sweet-sour comedy on Italy's 1950's rage to get rich as fast as possible!! The lead actor (Alberto Sordi) plays the part of a psuedo businessman who to satisfy his wife's craving for luxury and a "respectable life" becomes heavily indebted. In desperation he agrees to sell a precious part of his body for a large sum of money. But just before the crucial operation he panics!

The whole film is a grotesque comedy on Italy's obsession of those times to be "respectable" i.e. be rich, show it, and give the impression of being part of the respectable upper-middle class even though "secretly" you are just another of those "noveau riches". The film is very realistic and at times hilarious! Worth to see!

YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW (Leri, Oggi, Domain)

Italy France (118 mi) 1963 ‘Scope

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [4/5] Daulton Dickey

Late in “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” Marcello Mastroianni plays a business man who’s traveled three hundred miles to bed Sophia Loren’s precocious prostitute. But she has unwittingly become the object of her neighbor’s affection, a young man who is on his way to seminary school. Obsessed with Loren, this boy is ready to give up priesthood in order to be with her. Distraught, his grandmother pays Loren a visit, and Loren makes a vow to give up sex for one week and convince the boy to do the right thing and follow a higher calling.

Now we return to Marcello Mastroianni, frustrated, trying everything in his power to get Loren in the sack. Desperate for sex, he is the comedic gem in this piece, stomping around the apartment, grunting, sighing, and throwing his hands in the air. The poor man wants a lay, and damn it if he can’t get it.

“Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” winner of the 1964 Academy Award for best foreign film, is a comedic anthology of three sex related pieces starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in each of the three shorts. Playing different characters in different parts of Italy, Loren and Mastroianni climb up and down the class ladder, from extremely poor characters to obscenely rich snobs—Loren, anyway—who’s lives seem to center around sex, or the lack thereof.

In the first story, we meet Loren and Mastroianni as two peasants. Loren hocks cigarettes in a local marketplace while Mastroianni is an out of work soldier. Trouble occurs when Loren is faced with jail time for committing fraud. Pregnant, she soon learns that she cannot be arrested as long as she’s carrying a child. So she exploits this loophole and decides to get pregnant every nine months.

Cut to five children later: with a grand total of seven kids, Loren is intent on bearing as many children as possible to skirt prison, but Mastroianni, poor Mastroianni, is sexually exhausted, providing a brilliant contrast to the randy character he plays in the last chapter. His wife’s demands are too great. The poor man cannot “breed” on demand. And when he finds great difficulties in maintaining a sexual relationship with his wife, she is faced with an all-too real reality of going to prison.

The middle story features Loren as a bored, wealthy snob who despises the lower class, even though she is having an affair with a man of limited means. The man, Mastroianni once again, is tired of Loren’s horrible attitude toward lower class men and women, and their back and forth is tense and often subtly rude.

This story is certainly the weakest of the three, and prevents the film as a whole from being an out and out masterpiece. It goes nowhere and seems to exist despite its lack of a real point. It’s just there, which is not always a bad thing, hell, some films work entirely on that level, but viewed in the context of the other two stories, this one just doesn’t hold up.

“Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” is a clever film about relationships without getting heavy handed or ham fisted. The movie works well as a sublime comedy about the battle of the sexes and the variety of reasons people rely on sex. It is a relatively simple film with sharply defined characters who each go through a small change of some kind—though the changes are never ballyhooed or brought to the viewers’ attention.

Vittorio De Sica is a master storyteller who takes his time in developing his characters and situations. He trusts the audience to be as intelligent and as understanding of this world he’s created as he is, and he is in no hurry to second guess the audience, or to speed up the film on their behalf. And the man is a fantastic shooter who knows how to fill a frame without drawing attention to his compositions.

“Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” is a fun, at times charming, film about relationships and the S word. And if that doesn’t sell the flick, then perhaps Sophia Loren doing a striptease will.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow - TCM.com Rob Nixon

Although many Italian reviewers considered the risqué comic anthology Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963, aka Ieri, oggi, domani) beneath the talents of director Vittorio De Sica and writer Cesare Zavattini, it was a big hit with the public at home and abroad and earned an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a Best Foreign Actor Award from the British Academy for Marcello Mastroianni. The director who created the landmark neo-realist works Shoeshine (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948), and Umberto D. (1952) was viewed with "sorrow" by one Italian critic who noted both De Sica's "decline" and the "difficulty in trying new ways" exhibited by Zavattini, who had written those great De Sica works as well as a number of other classics. Another critic said of De Sica, "The great patriarch's sun has set and he doesn't realize it." Not everyone in Italy agreed; the picture was given the Donatello Award (the country's top film prize) as Best Production, and it was one of the biggest box office hits of the year.

Impressive behind-the-camera credits notwithstanding, the real attraction, of course, were the two leads. Sophia Loren was at the time one of the biggest global stars, with tremendous success at home, in Hollywood (where she made a dozen films between 1957 and 1960), and in big international co-productions like the costume epic El Cid (1961). She had returned to Europe in the early 60s, further cementing her stardom there in Boccaccio '70 (1962), another sexy anthology that featured a number of well-known European actors and direction by the likes of De Sica, Fellini, and Visconti. She also won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of the young refugee mother in De Sica's Two Women (1960), based on the novel La Ciociara by the great Roman writer Alberto Moravia.

Mastroianni had also come up through the ranks of the Italian film industry, beginning as an extra in the early 1940s and eventually becoming the epitome of the jaded, smoldering leading man with a keen talent for comedy, achieving global recognition through his work with Fellini and Antonioni.

The two had not appeared together since Lucky to Be a Woman (1956), and their reunion proved to be a delight. They play lovers in three vignettes, each telling a tale set in a different city. In the Naples-based "Adelina" segment, she is a black-market cigarette dealer and he is her unemployed husband, compelled to keep her pregnant to take advantage of an Italian law preventing the imprisonment of expectant mothers. In "Anna," Loren is a wealthy, bored Milanese woman who picks up and discards writer Mastroianni as her temporary lover. And in "Mara," she plays a Roman prostitute who, upon falling for a chaste young seminarian, takes a vow of abstinence, driving her most frequent client (Mastroianni) to utter distraction.

Although there is no evidence of her sorrow on screen, Loren was upset over one of several failed attempts to have a baby with Carlo Ponti, her husband and the film's producer. During production of the "Adelina" segment, she realized she was pregnant. Because of numerous earlier difficulties, her doctor ordered several days of bed rest and banned all automobile travel. To accommodate this, she traveled by train from Naples to Milan. The episode shot in that city, however, took place largely in a car, a luxurious Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud (the actress was allowed to keep it after shooting ended). The scenes were shot in a studio with rear projection, but the car was mounted on a hydraulic lift to simulate the bumps and jolts of driving, and Loren suffered a miscarriage in the fourth month of her pregnancy. Loren and Ponti would have to wait another five years before the birth of their first child.

The "Mara" segment (the first filmed, based on a story by Moravia) contains a scene that has become iconic for both stars: a torrid striptease Loren does for Mastroianni, so sexy and provocative that he howls like a wild animal. The international sex symbol had never actually seen a stripper perform before and was nervous about doing the bit. De Sica arranged for Jacques Ruet, the choreographer for the legendary Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, to fly to Rome and instruct Loren. "I had three or four sessions with him to learn the basic moves, struts, and teases," she recalled. "But then, using those routines, I had to mold them, with De Sica's help, into my own personal interpretation." Clad only in two layers of sexy black lingerie, she insisted the set be cleared the day of the shoot. Nervous as she was, she performed the routine to everyone's great satisfaction, even hers. "No scene ever gave me more pleasure," she said. So fixed was the moment in the minds of audiences, and so sexy and appealing were the stars even more than 30 years later, that Robert Altman had them spoof the scene in his multi-character satire on the fashion industry, Prêt-à-Porter (1994).

Just as the production was about to move to Naples, the real-life counterpart of "Adelina" threatened to shut down production unless she received compensation. Concetta Musscardo, aka "Black Market Connie," was such a local legend for her tendency to get pregnant every time she got in trouble with the law that the filmmakers thought it would be no problem to fictionally recreate such a public figure. Because she reportedly had friends in the feared Neapolitan crime syndicate, the Camorra, Ponti agreed to pay her two million lire (then about $3,200) for her story.

De Sica and His Dynamic Duo Do What They Do Best: Close-Up on ... Jeremy Carr from Mubi, January 8, 2017

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5]

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets

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FilmFanatic.org

DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review

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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

MARRIAGE ITALIAN-STYLE (Matrimonio all'Italiana)

Italy France (102 mi) 1964

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

The interest is all in the cast as Sophia Loren chases Marcello Mastroianni through this predictable 1964 Italian farce, directed by Vittorio De Sica in weak imitation of Pietro Germi's black comedy, Divorce--Italian Style. Devoid of the protective coloring of neorealism, De Sica's style--as it does so often in his late films--seems heavy and sluggish.

Channel 4 Film capsule review

A wonderfully silly comedy about a conniving mistress (Loren) and her stupidly vain lover of 20 years (Mastroianni). He is about to marry his nubile young fiancé but gets a message that Loren is on her deathbed. He dashes to her side and in a weak-minded moment, convinced of her imminent death, promises that he will marry her. Of course, she recovers almost immediately, holds him to his promise - and presents him with three grown-up sons. If De Sica can find a joke, he goes for it, and is gleefully joined by his stars.

User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

MARRIAGE Italian STYLE is a glossy rendition of Eduardo De Filippo's Neapolitan play "Filumena Marturano", which he himself had made into a film in 1951. In this 1964 version Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni take the roles previously played by Eduardo and Titina De Filippo. The story deals with the long love affair between a wealthy, arrogant and selfish Neapolitan businessman (Marcello Mastroianni) and the seemingly ignorant ex-prostitute (Loren) who attempts to trick him into marriage by pretending to be dying and then bouncing back to life. She does all this because she wants to guarantee a better life for her three semi-secret children. One of her children is his, she tells him. Which one, she will never say.

To say that Mastroianni and Loren had on-screen chemistry is an enormous understatement. They are both as marvelous together here as is other films together, most notably YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW and A SPECIAL DAY. For me one of the best moments in the film is Loren's walk down a sidewalk in Naples where the men and boys alike gape at her. That always knocks me out. Loren walks marvelously there and does a magnificent acting job elsewhere in this engaging dramatic farce. The film was directed by Vittorio De Sica, who had directed Loren's Academy Award performance in TWO WOMEN (LA CIOCIARA). It is among her most notable roles ever, along with TWO WOMEN, A SPECIAL DAY, THE BLACK ORCHID, and Lina Wertmüller's Saturday, Sunday, AND Monday.

User comments from imdb Author: Galina from Virginia, USA

"Marriage Italian Style" is director Vittorio De Sica's fourth collaboration with the actress Sophia Loren. Loren's sensual exiting beauty, fine comic timing, combined with a brilliant script and the rare chemistry with the co-star Marcello Mastroianni makes the film an excellent combination of a sparkling and amusing farce and a poignant drama of one woman's life and struggles in the post-war Italy. As Domenico Soriano, a wealthy, arrogant and selfish Neapolitan businessman, Mastroianni is on the verge of marrying a younger woman when he hears that his long time mistress, ex-prostitute Filomena, is on her deathbed. He rushes to her side and agrees to marry Filomena in hopes to soon become a widower but when she recovers "miraculously" he recognizes that her illness was only a trick. Then, in her flashbacks, we learn that she did it for the sake of her three children of whom Domenico knew nothing about and one of them (or maybe all) could be his... Mastroianni and Loren had perhaps the best on-screen chemistry ever; it is delight to see them together in this film as well as in "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" and "The Sunflowers" - little known but wonderful Soviet - Italian film, both by Vittorio De Sica. I also liked them together in Altman's "Prêt-à-Porter" (1994) aka "Ready to Wear". One scene in Marriage Italian Style should be on the list of the best ever filmed - young Filomena walks down a sidewalk in Naples to meet with Dominico and every man, regardless of his age stares at her with desire. I am a woman but I could not take my eyes off her - Cleopatra or Nefertity could've walked like that. My verdict - they don't make comedies like that anymore. 9.5/10

User comments from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States

Starting with "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" in 1963, Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren began a series of films together that were the comic equivalents of the series of movies made by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in the 1940s to 1966. The comparison is an apt one, surprisingly, because the two sets of performers perfectly complemented each other in their films together and literally examined the relationship of man and woman in these films beyond most of their contemporaries. If the Italians were able to be more explicit about sexual relations than the Americans were, I remind the reader that in "Sea of Grass" the paternity of Tracy and Hepburn's son Robert Walker becomes a questionable matter to the former, and in "Adam's Rib" Hepburn's last comments about the similarities of man and women boil down to only one major difference (a small one - she does not say a penis but it is hinted). Tracy's response is to say "Vivre la difference! - Well hooray for that difference!"

"Matrimonio all'italiana" ("Marriage, Italian Style") is based on a play by writer and actor Eduardo de Filippo, and is not a sequel to Mastroianni's great international breakthrough comedy "Divorce, Italian Style". The latter had dealt with a Sicilian baron manipulating events and people to set up an unwanted wife into the position of being adulterous so that he could "legally" kill her and be free to marry a younger female cousin. "Marriage, Italian Style" deals with responsibility and growing old. It's a serious theme actually, and there are moments when the film turns serious with stunning effect (when Loren confronts Mastroianni on his suspicions and behavior towards her and her sons). The conclusion is not funny but given the antics of the entire film understandable and true.

Loren is Filumena Maturiano, a young woman who became a prostitute towards the end of World War II. She meets Domenico Soriano (Mastroianni), a hard headed businessman in a brothel in 1945 and a long term sexual relationship develops (though there is a two year gap at the start). Domenico treats Filumena as a sex object, but she is a smart woman and soon rises to be his business assistant, helping him run a series of stores (several of them bakeries or coffee shops). After twenty two years he tells her he is planning to settle down and marry a younger employee. But Domenico is informed by another employee, Alfredo (Aldo Puglesi) that Filumena is dying. Domenico runs to her bedside, and agrees to her dying wish to marry. But as soon as the ceremony is over Filumena rises from the bed and tells Domenico that she isn't dying, but now they are finally married. Furious Domenico tells her he will get the marriage annulled as it was under false pretenses.

She has her options - Alfredo has known her as long as Domenico, and offers to marry her if she wishes. She thanks her friend but she explains that she has another real secret to unload on Domenico. Eventually she explains to him that she had three sons, and one of them is Domenico's. The boys have been brought up separately, and she is now getting them together for the first time. Domenico is naturally quite interested in this situation, but when he asks which of the three boys is his Filumena acts quite coy, and later more belligerent.

She finally explodes, pointing out to Domenico that if she ever tells him which of the boys is his, the two half-brothers who are not Domenico's will grow up to hate the third half-brother. This doesn't register at first, so Domenico tries to find out by himself, with some very comic results (in trying to compare his hand with one of the boys, all he ends up doing is overhearing the boy tell a co-worker that Donenico must be a homosexual). Gradually it does sink in that he has no right to put the three boys and Filumena through the ringer trying to pick out his actual son. In the end Domenico remarries Filumena, but one sees after the ceremony that while it is her victory it is not a complete one - Domenico is far from totally pleased that he has had to accept a situation that he never had any control over. Our last sight of them is of Domenico looking exhausted and old, and Filumena crying - possibly for joy at her victory, but just as likely out of realization that this is going to be a difficult marriage.

Believe it or not "Marriage, Italian Style" is a comedy but one that is grown up in it's sensibilities. There are no quick remedies here - just like Domenico could not find a quick solution as to which of the three sons was his real son. One likes the final result of the film, as it is a realistic result of the battle of the sexes waged by the two protagonists, but the final results are funny only in the most extreme cynical way. It is hardly a merry ending. Still for a solid entertainment "Marriage, Italian Style" is hard to beat.

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

AFTER THE FOX (Caccia alla Volpe)

Italy USA Great Britain (103 mi) 1966 ‘Scope

Time Out review

Try to imagine a comic farce co-scripted by one of the founding fathers of Italian neo-realism, Cesare Zavattini, and a wisecracking Jewish playwright, Neil Simon. Pretty funny, yes? No! Ill-fated international co-production isn't in it: we are talking turkey here as master criminal The Fox (Sellers) escapes from jail into streets full of excitable Italians, executes a gold bullion robbery and saves his sister's honour. Marginally enlivened by Mature's witty self-mockery as a beefcake movie star fretting over his fading charms.

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: theowinthrop from United States

I recall this film when I saw it once on television in the early 1970s. While I see it has gotten many favorable write-ups on this thread, I have to admit it disappointed me. It was that long, long (too long) series of third rate films that Sellers got involved in after his peak in the middle 1960s, when only an occasional film ("The Wrong Box", "There's A Girl In My Soup") reminded people of the comic and acting genius he was. In my memory the only good performance was that of Victor Mature as the aging actor, who is best recalled by the public in that he is always in a role wearing a trench coat. The highpoint of Mature's performance is when he, Balsam, and several others are stuck in a car that is stalled on a railway track, with a train bearing down on it - and Mature is screaming the most. Finally the train passes them and they are safe. Everyone is just silent and sweaty from their near-thing ordeal, and Mature suddenly smiles and acts as though he could have told them not to worry.

But the best line I remember deals with Sellers and fellow conman Akim Tamiroff. Sellers has to introduce Tamiroff (named "Mr. Okra") to Mature, Balsam, Britt Eckland, and the others on the film set. He says, with great formality, "This is Mr. Okra...inventor of "Okrascope"." I am still waiting to see what "Okrascope" was.

Turner Classic Movies review Genevieve McGillicuddy

Most avid fans of Italian cinema may already be familiar with such Vittorio De Sica classics as The Bicycle Thief (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951) and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971). In stark contrast to those, After the Fox (1966) is an anomaly in De Sica's career - a comedy starring Peter Sellers, then at the height of his international career. Sellers plays "the Fox," a somewhat inept character reminiscent of the famous Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther comedies.

An incompetent thief, "the Fox" breaks out of jail to arrange for the transfer of $3 million in gold from Cairo to Rome. Hiding in various disguises (prison doctor, Italian policeman, New Wave film director, to name a few), Fox cooks up a plan to "film" a movie in which the gold is transferred in a "scene." He crosses paths with an aging star played by none other than Victor Mature, who came out of retirement to poke fun at his own screen persona.

In an odd twist of casting, Britt Ekland, the Swedish model and ingenue, plays Fox's sister, donning a brunette wig to play an Italian. Sellers was responsible for the hiring of Ekland, who was then the second Mrs. Sellers. The final swingin' '60s touch is provided by Burt Bacharach's irresistible score featuring a duet between the Hollies and Peter Sellers on the theme song.

Unfortunately, during the filming Sellers was neurotic and unpredictable. Days after production began, he tried to have De Sica removed from the picture and argued constantly with Ekland. One evening, he even threw a chair at Ekland, who took temporary refuge in the rented home of Neil Simon, who was responsible for the screenplay of After the Fox.

Simon later recalled his screenwriting debut as an experience reminiscent of a Marx Brothers comedy and has acknowledged that the film retains a "cult" following. As Simon notes in his autobiography, De Sica always began shooting late in the day and had a penchant for phoning the local casino to place bets. He and his Italian crew also entertained a host of superstitions on the set -- at one point, when a frustrated Mature threw his script into the ocean, a priest was summoned to bless the soggy sheets.

After the Fox takes its place among the unofficial genre of wacky '60s comedies (such as Candy, 1968; The Magic Christian, 1969; Skidoo, 1968) that feature an unlikely combination of director, actors and offbeat storyline. The results make for a unique, if bizarre, testament to the melting pot that was '60s culture.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review

erratica.co.uk Matt B

Don Ignacio's Movie Reviews (Michael Lawrence) capsule review [C-]

Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni) review

WOMAN TIMES SEVEN

Italy France USA (100 mi) 1967

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Seven episodes putting seven aspects of a woman's personality on display. If watching Shirley MacLaine in all seven roles getting it on (or not) with seven different men sounds like your cup of tea, look no further. However Woman Times Seven is uneven and even the direction by De Sica, who occasionally was too prolific for his own good, doesn't add sufficient wit and charm to make this of more than academic interest to those not doting on MacLaine. After this effort she probably never had to go an audition again, having made the perfect showreel displaying all her possible moods from A to G.

TV Guide review

It's difficult enough doing one role well, but playing several parts in the same movie is a nearly impossible feat requiring the talents of an Alec Guinness or a Peter Sellers. MacLaine had not yet achieved the maturity or the acting ability to bring this off, and the result is just ol' Shirl' in a host of different costumes, hairstyles, and makeup. Shot on location in Paris with interiors at the Boulogne Studios, this set out to be a tour de force but ends up only a tour de France.

In the first segment, she's a widow accompanying the coffin of her late husband to the cemetery; on the way, she finds romance with old friend Sellers. The second piece has MacLaine returning to her home to find her husband, Brazzi, cavorting in the sack with another woman. She storms out and learns some lessons about men from the local streetwalkers. Next, MacLaine is seen as a hippie who attracts the competing sexual attentions of Gassman and Grey, resulting in some lubricious games. In the fourth segment, MacLaine is a grumpy housewife married to Barker, a successful author of trashy novels that feature a wild, passionate heroine. In order to compete with this fantasy figure, she tries to be equally impulsive, but only succeeds in convincing everyone she's gone mad. The fifth episode has MacLaine as a rich Parisian matron plotting to foil a social rival, Adrienne Corri, in a dispute over a designer gown. In No. 6, MacLaine and Alan Arkin are lovers married to other people who make an ill-fated suicide pact. The final section of the film has MacLaine, married to Noiret, out shopping with her best pal, Anita Ekberg. When MacLaine spots Caine watching her, she's flattered that such a handsome man would find her attractive--never dreaming that Caine has been hired to keep an eye on her by her jealous husband.

All of the segments, save the first, run between 14 and 16 minutes. The funeral episode goes about eight minutes, which is all it's worth. Ortolani's music is second-rate, but the rest of the technical credits are all excellent. Special note should be taken of Alex Archambault's hairstyles and the makeup work done by Alberto De Rossi and Georges Bouban. Although Marcel Escoffier gets credit for the well-planned costumes, it was Pierre Cardin who designed MacLaine's gowns.

DVD Verdict (Tom Becker) dvd review

Variety review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

AMANTI (A Place for Lovers)

Italy France (88 mi) 1968

User comments from imdb Author: Alonso Duralde from Dallas, TX

One of the biggest disasters ever to be perpetrated by a major film-maker, Vittorio de Sica's "Amanti" ("A Place for Lovers") is a wheezy romance involving Faye Dunaway -- as an ultra-glam fashion designer -- and Marcello Mastroianni -- as a married man who has an affair with Faye, not realizing that she's dying from one of those mysterious Hollywood Starlet terminal diseases. The production design is fabulous, but the acting and the script are not to be believed.

User comments from imdb Author: Ismar Tirelli Neto (mister_sebastian@yahoo.com) from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

... is a rather odd and thankless task. I never dreamt of thinking about the likes of Vittorio De Sica, Faye Dunaway and Marcello Mastroianni without using the highest of praise, but this uninteresting, plodding 1969 film provided me with a chance to do so.

This film is proof that the unthinkable, what we judge to be impossible and beyond imagination, can happen.

Dunaway is Julia, a peculiar, to say the least, american woman who makes a living out of designing gowns, who has an affair with Valerio, a married italian engineer working on the development of the airbag.

They're rich, they're glamorous, they're beautiful, they're in love... nothing could part them. Except Julia is suffering from a terminal illness, and is bound to die in a matter of days.

Sticking to the basic rules of screenwriting as I know them, this movie is irritatingly plodding. We only discover that Julia is dying towards the end, and we never know whose is the main dilemma - Julia's or Valerio's. Should they stick together and face bravely Julia's last days on Earth? is the main query, I guess. The only problem is that this query, this dilemma, is presented to the audience in the last twenty minutes of film, and resolved - better yet, unresolved - in the last five. The other 70 minutes or so of film are spent as they stay together and play amusing little games with each other. A time in which the five writers of the film could easily delve into their main characters psyches - if anything else - is wasted. Julia's just plain weird and depressed, and Valerio seems terribly cold and unfeeling.

It also clearly aspires to be profound. It aims at being something lyric, but, trapped inside it's own pretentious attitude, it becomes a schmaltzy tearjerker.

The acting is not bad at all, though. But the script provides Dunaway and Mastroianni with little chance to showcase their many talents. Also, the set designs are gorgeous, as mentioned by the first reviewer, and the soundtrack is lovely. The title song, written by Manuel De Sica - hail, nepotism! - is sung by none other than Ella Fitzgerald.

Well, all in all, this movie is a bizarre one, but it is worth viewing nevertheless, mainly as existing proof that nothing - I mean, nothing - is impossible. :)

Movieline Magazine review Edward Margulies

Even if she'd never played Joan Crawford, Faye Dunaway would forever be a Bad Movie goddess for the indelible trio of haute couture hellcats she essayed in three quite terrible films. There was the fashion model in Puzzle of a Downfall Child. Then came the fashion photographer in Eyes of Laura Mars. And utterly in a class by itself is the fashion designer in 1968's deadly A Place for Lovers. The fashionista heroine of this frighteningly European tale has long since fallen victim to ennui by the time we meet her. She spends hours of what feels like real time wandering through the empty halls of a villa in the Italian countryside, meaningfully "lost."

When she spots "just about" married engineer Marcello Mastroianni on TV and recalls that he once tried to pick her up, she impulsively phones him and he impulsively speeds down to the villa. Before he can say a word, Dunaway announces that he may only spend two days with her. "I know you must want to ask me all kinds of questions," she says to him. "Like, why I telephoned you? I had an impulse to see you, maybe because for awhile anyway, I need to be with people I don't know--strangers--in unfamiliar places that don't remind me of anything... Then there are times in life when nothing is important, and everything is important, and the simplest things can be the most confusing." Whew! This blast of existential hot air promptly puts both stars to sleep--and beware, it could have the same effect on you.

Before long, though, Mastroianni gets himself on Dunaway's philosophical wavelength: "Why two days? Why not four or five?" Dunaway replies, "In 10 days I have to go back to America. It's up to you to ask me for the rest." She then shows him consideration not extended to the audience: "I can't expect you to stay if you become bored with me in a day or two."

Because this is a frighteningly European movie, the villa turns out to be overflowing with decadent party hounds straight out of La Dolce Vita. One of them entertains the dinner table with an X-rated slide show depicting statues in various sexual positions, after which everyone plays a parlor game involving mate-swapping for quickie sex. "The seven minutes each couple is given," we're told, "represents a magic suspension from the endless monotony of everyday life." Or the endless monotony of this movie--whichever comes first. When Dunaway looks eager to play, a shocked Mastroianni flees the scene. What kind of woman would cheat on her lover while he's cheating on his fiancee, anyway?

Soon reunited with his lover and showing signs of the wear and tear entailed in keeping company with her, Mastroianni giddily smears greasepaint all over Dunaway's face, whining, "You Americans, the more you paint up, the better you are. You're still Indians--you'll never change." In a frighteningly European way, the mood then shifts, and in an extended happy-lovers montage, Mastroianni, home movie camera in hand, films and films and films Dunaway. Finally, she takes the words right out of our mouths: "Don't you have enough of my face already?"

Such bliss can't last, of course. One of Dunaway's intimates phones Mastroianni to tell him the secret she doesn't want him to know: "She's ill, seriously ill--it's a matter of days." Turns out Dunaway's suffering from Gorgeous Movie Star Malady, that disease where, as the end draws near, the supernova appears lovelier than ever. "Come dance," she coos to her lover, putting on a record. "It's a spiritual. You dance and you pray at the same time." Whereupon she and Mastroianni groove so soulfully to an African-American spiritual that you find yourself praying for her to die immediately. Then, suddenly, Dunaway intuits that Mastroianni knows. "Don't look at me. I can't take any more sad eyes. I don't want a grieving nurse sitting on the edge of my bed in pity!" Not about to leave the overacting to Dunaway, Mastroianni roars, "What pity? I love you, I love you, I LOVE YOU!" Whereupon they make passionate European love on the coffee table.

Dunaway doesn't die nearly soon enough. The fates allow her time to do things like run through the snow in her high heels. The actress wrote of the torrid affair she had with Mastroianni during the making of this film in her 1995 biography, noting, "Oh, we laughed so much, Marcello and I." Faye, darling, so did we.

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1.5/4]

SUNFLOWER (I Girasoli)

Italy France Russia (101 mi) 1970

Time Out review Tom Milne

Excruciating tosh in which Loren plays a bereft Italian spouse wandering over what feels like the whole of Russia looking for hubby Mastroianni, who never returned after serving on the Russian front in World War II. Much picturesque scenery and soul-searching later, she finds him with a Russian wife, a child, and amnesia. Off she slogs back to Italy to forget, marry, have a child. At which point guess who turns up, having remembered? It's much worse than it sounds.

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also seen here: Turner Classic Movies dvd review reviewing the Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection

I Girasole is a bittersweet melodrama definitely out of step with film trends in 1970. Many Italians fought and died on the Russian front in WW2, and Vittorio De Sica's film stars Loren and Marcello Mastroianni as a married couple separated by the conflict. Antonio feigns insanity to keep from being shipped to Africa, but is found out and sent to the Russian front. He fails to return, and ten years later Giovanna journeys to Russia to search for him. She's convinced that he somehow survived, and by a strange chain of events finds him in a small town in the Ukraine. But the story is far from resolved.

De Sica steers the film away from bathos with his straightforward direction, aided by Loren's good acting. It's still a drawn-out handkerchief picture, with every sad scene backed by Henry Mancini's tender music score. The movie also functions as a Russian travelogue, with scenes filmed in Red Square. Out in the countryside we see an immense field of sunflowers (in Italian, Girasoli) covering a mass grave of Italian dead. A poem on a monument asks, "Why did you soldiers from Naples leave your beautiful Mediterranean to die in the snows of Russia?"

The narrative is more than a little lumpy. A stock footage war montage goes on seemingly forever, and the third act wanders aimlessly in search of an acceptable climax. One inessential episode showing a Russian family moving into a new apartment complex might have been imposed on the film by the Russian authorities. Fans of soapy romances will find the show highly enjoyable.

The print of I Girasoli is grainy, with okay color. Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography has an almost documentary look for exteriors but uses expressive shadows in a reunion scene in a darkened apartment. The movie appears to be full-length.

The Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection wraps up with a featurette that discusses the actresses' life, showing only clips from the four films and filling in with largely irrelevant historical detail. A limited number of stills are repeated several times each, as are some stock shots. Loren's children and the producer of I Girasoli appear, along with some knowledgeable historians.

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection

DVD Verdict- Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection [Dylan Charles]

PopMatters [Erik Hinton] Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection

theDVDLounge [Joe Corey3rd] Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection

Channel 4 Film capsule review

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W Tooze]

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS

Italy Germany (94 mi) 1970

Time Out review Tom Milne

De Sica's most watchable film in years of crude farces and coarse melodramas. Based on the novel by Giorgio Bassani and set in Ferrera in 1938, it deals with the net of persecution that gradually closes in on Italian Jews as Mussolini models his state ever more closely on Hitler's Germany. External events hold the film in a vice-like grip, while its dreamy evocation of a doomed way of life ambivalently records the placidity with which the aristocratically wealthy Finzi-Continis - retreating within their walled estate when they are no longer welcome outside - simply wait for fate to overtake them. Formally beautiful, sometimes moving, it's ultimately rather hollow.

Nashville Scene (Noel Murray) review

As lovely and brittle now as it was when it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1971, this newly restored Vittorio de Sica classic deserves to be rediscovered in its latest video release. Set in pre-World War II Italy, the story revolves around a wealthy Jewish family living behind great stone walls on the main street of a village. The protagonist is Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio), a working-class youth dealing with his political awakening and with his romantic feelings for the remote, capricious Micol Finzi-Contini (the lovely Dominique Sanda, who looks as though she were carved into the marble walls of her character's lush estate). On one level, the film is a harsh critique of classism, particularly in the face of an evolving fascist state. On another, more engaging level, it's a film about longing--both for the unattainable things of the present and for the imagined stability of the past.

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Vittorio de Sica's essay on the fate of Jews under fascism, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is deceptively beautiful to look at, deceptively bittersweet in tone. Not accidental deceptions these, but deliberate, calculated constructions by de Sica to put into ironic perspective the history of the time as the story evolves to its inevitable conclusion.    

Two families. The aristocratic and wealthy Finzi-Continis, living behind high walls in a luxurious chateau, retain at least some of their Jewish identity as seen in their observation of Passover. As with many Jews in the diaspora, the family identifies as Italian, as well as Jewish. The same is true of the second, upper middle class family whose elder son has been the friend of the Finzi-Contini daughter, Micol, since childhood and now suffers from his unrequited love for her. Micol, played by Dominique Sanda, is aloof, even teasing; she seems an ice princess.    

From the start, de Sica provides evidence of encroachments by the anti-Semitic fascist regime of Mussolini on this group of privileged Jews, who remain in varying degrees of denial as their freedoms are pared away one by one, until, finally, they are confronted with the ugliest of realities. If the wealth of the Finzi-Continis seems to give them greater protection at first, it becomes clear in the end that those who are different will find no garden in which to hide for long.    

The idyllic settings, lush music, and hot house atmosphere of the film become a stark contrast to the fate of the beautiful and privileged inhabitants within.    

Hailed when first released, and the winner of an academy award, this film seems to some extent to have fallen from current critical favor. While it may not have the tightness, conviction, and sheer power of de Sica's Bicycle Thief, it remains a highly effective piece of work by an always interesting and thoughtful filmmaker.

User comments from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

In this haunting work by Vittoria De Sica an aristocratic Italian-Jewish family, the Finzi-Continis, serve as a symbol of European civilization in the hands of the brown shirts on the eve of World War II. Seeing it again after thirty years I find myself saddened almost as much by the story of a stillborn, unrequited love as I am by the horror of the cattle cars to come.

Dominique Sanda with her large, soft eyes is mesmerizing as the beautiful, enigmatic, but icy Micol Finzi-Contini. Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio) is her childhood friend, a boy from a middle-class Jewish family, now grown up. He's in love with her, but her feelings for him are that of a sister. He is confused by her warmth, and then as he tries to get close, her cool rejection. It has often been expressed metaphorically that Europe in the thirties was raped by fascism. However in this extremely disturbing film, De Sica is saying that it wasn't a rape, that the aristocracy of Europe (here represented by the Finzi-Continis of Ferrara, and in particular by the young and beautiful Micol) was a willing, even an eager, participant in the bestial conjoining.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is far from perfect; some would say it is also far from De Sica's best work. Certainly it comes after his prime. The editing is a little too severe in places, while some of the scenes are too loosely focused. Nonetheless this is an enormously powerful film that finds its climax in one of the most disturbing scenes in all of cinema. There is little point in discussing this film without looking at this scene. Consequently, for those of you who have not seen the film and do not want to risk having it spoiled for you, you should stop reading now and come back afterwards.

Everything in the movie works toward setting up the cabana scene. We see the dog several times, hinting at a crude, animalistic side to Micol. And there is the wall that separates the Finzi-Contini's garden of civilization from the brown shirts in the streets, a wall that also separates the rich from other people, particularly from the middle class who support the fascists (as we are told in the opening scene). We see Micol leading Giorgio by the hand about the estate, but always when he tries to caress her, she pulls away. Finally she explains to him why she doesn't love him. She says, "lovers want to overwhelm each other...[but]...we are as alike as two drops of water...how could we overwhelm and want to tear each other...it would be like making love with a brother..." But hearing these words is not enough. Giorgio goes to the wall one last time, sees a red bicycle there (red and black were the colors of the Nazi party) and knows that Micol is with someone else. He climbs the wall and finds the dog outside the cabana so that he knows she is within. In the opening scene she referred to the cabana with the German "Hütte," adding that now "we'll all have to learn German." What he sees when he looks through the window fills him with a kind of stupefying horror, as it does us. Not a word is spoken. He sees her, he sees who she is with and what the circumstances are. She sees him, turns on the light so that there can be no mistake and they stare wordlessly at one another. She projects not shame, but a sense of "This is who I am. I would say I'm sorry, but it wouldn't change anything. This is what I'm drawn to."

What is expressed in this essentially symbolic scene, acted out in sexual terms, is what happened to Europe. Micol is at once the love he wanted so much, deflowered by an anonymous, but clearly fascist man, and she is also the aristocracy of Europe, polluted by fascism.

I wonder if it is just a coincidence that the famous poem by Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess," is also set in Ferrara. In that poem the narrator reveals himself through the unfeeling brutality of his speech and actions to be, although an aristocrat, an incipient fascist. I also wonder if De Sica is saying that the Jews in some sense contributed to the horror that befell them, and by extension, all of humanity. We see this expressed in the person of Giorgio's father who continually insists that it's not that bad yet, as step by step they lose their status as citizens, a prelude to the dehumanization that is the precursor of genocide. Certainly the closing scenes in which the Jews of Italy are seen to be compliant as they are led to the slaughter suggests as much. I know that the central feeling expressed by Jews after the war and especially in Israel was simply, never again. Nevertheless, there is a certain sense of the inevitable about this film that I find particularly disturbing. Passivity in sexual terms, a "giving in" to one's nature is one thing. A passivity in political terms is quite another, and yet it is part of the power of this film to show us how they are related in our psyches.

Bright Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris, March 1997

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

Epinions [metalluk]

CultureCartel.com (Stephen Murray) review [3.5/5]

Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review

Edwin Jahiel review

Urban Desires review Stan Schwartz, which includes an interview with actress Dominique Sanda

Boxoffice Magazine review Kim Williamson

DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [4/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

Steve Rhodes retrospective [3.5/4]

DVD Verdict (Erick Harper) dvd review

Epinions.com review of Garden of the Finzi-Continis by jrk

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review

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

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

WE’LL CALL HIM ANDREW (Lo Chiameremo Andrea)

Italy (100 mi) 1972

User comments from imdb Author: Chip_douglas from Rijswijk (ZH), The Netherlands

Nino Manfredi and Mariangela Melato are a couple who teach at the same elementary school and are dying to have a child of their own. At this school all the little students wear uniforms that make them look like miniature Austin Powers'. They also accompany the soundtrack with insipid songs that tell you what you are looking at. Whether you understand Italian or not, it soon gets on your nerves.

The couple decide to visit a Swiss sexuologist who uses a gay translator as a go-between. Paolo (Manfredi) does not seem to be having any problems down below, so it must be Maria (Melato)'s fault. He buys a special bed, she tries to commit suicide. Maria prefers old wife's tales over cold scientific facts, making her imagine a pregnancy that is not really there. It takes her a long time to tell Paolo the truth. Too long in fact (for him and for the viewer), since they are already throwing baby showers and decorating a room for little "Andrea".

I suppose actress Mariangela Melato was more popular with women than with men, as she got to play more female friendly parts than her contemporaries. Instead of having to spend the whole film being just a love interest or a object of lust, this large eyed, slender woman actually got to put forth a feminist standpoint (occasionally). There is also some typical early seventies social commentary on pollution, and Nino Manfredi shows he plays a nice guy really well. Still, neither the characters nor the viewer get a satisfactory feeling of closure. Like the similarly themed 'Maybe Baby' (2000), the movie simply ends. 5 out of 10

A BRIEF VACATION (Una Breve Vacanza)

Italy Spain (112 mi) 1973

Time Out review Tom Milne

De Sica and Zavattini administer the last rites over the corpse of neo-realism in this travesty which starts with one of those vociferous Italian domestic squabbles, but soon switches to masturbatory fantasy with a gushy celebration of romance in a mountain TB sanatorium. Bolkan, as the working-class housewife drudging to feed a thankless family who is sent to the clinic at the government's expense, deserves better.

User comments from imdb Author: mdibner from Durham, NC

This is an amazingly beautiful film. The story of a woman of little means and a horrendous family life who learns much about the world in a sanatorium in the Italian alps. It gives her a brief vacation from a hard life. And understanding. And hope. Truly wonderful. Florinda Bolkan is a great actress ... emoting without emotion. This movie has many levels of plot and story rolled into a single, seemingly simple story. There are many levels of relationships in the movie. Of particular interest is the set of relationships formed between patients from the upper class, the 'paying' patients and those who are in the sanatorium paid for by the national health. The juxtapositions between have and have not, happy and sad, sick and healthy, doctor and patient, hardworking and lazy and many others form the basis of what we see as Clara's learning process and set of life dilemmas.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Lang Thompson

By the time Vittorio De Sica directed his first film in 1940 he had acted in about two dozen films with titles like But It's Nothing Serious, I'll Give a Million and The Cuckoo Clock. His earliest films as director continued more or less in this line of mild entertainment until in 1944 he teamed with writer Cesare Zavattini on The Children Are Watching Us, one of the earliest efforts at shaping the naturalist, anti-entertainment genre that would be called neo-realism. Immediately after the war, De Sica made Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief, establishing both his international reputation and neo-realism.

Jump ahead a few decades to De Sica's next-to-last effort, A Brief Vacation (1973) again co-scripted by Zavattini, and you can see both impulses at work. The film focuses on Clara (Florinda Bolkan, a veteran of films by Visconti and Lucio Fulci, surely the artistic extremes of Italian cinema), a harrassed factory worker with a less-than-pleasant home life. She develops a weakening illness and despite fear of losing her job finally visits a doctor who sends her to a sanitarium in Northern Italy to rest. Clara meets a variety of people, has a brief fling with a younger man and basically sheds her cramped thinking. Will she return to her family?

The opening of the film has the feel of something much like neo-realism. The colors are muted, the landscape decayed urban, the weather a continual drizzle and people mostly self-absorbed or mean. Life is a struggle, not red in tooth and claw but more a sombre brown. Once Clara heads north into the mountains the film undergoes an almost Wizard of Oz change into bright soap opera and glossy 60s-styled light comedy. Her fellow inmates have such interesting problems as they dress in solid, sparkling colors and drive around through the clean snow discussing which doctors are most attractive. They chat, flirt, discuss their personal lives, develop even more deadly diseases, argue. Everything changes and moves. You could argue that this stylistic change represents the expansion of Clara's perception of life or you could claim that De Sica and Zavattini didn't really think the whole thing through.

Home Vision's DVD is a solid effort. The image is crisp, capturing mist in the dim light of early morning just as easily as the blaring whites of a snow-coated mountainside. The sound is good though the lipsynching is at times noticably off, most likely a problem from the original production. (Italian films are shot silent with sound added later, essentially making them dubbed even in the original language.) The subtitles appear to be complete. The only extra are a couple of short extracts from De Sica's 1967 English-language Shirley MacLaine comedy Woman Times Seven, possibly to promote a forthcoming DVD.

User comments from imdb Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida

I have never understood why Vittorio De Sica is not thought of as one of our greatest directors. I have heard and read gobs of praise for Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini, Godard and many others but have rarely noticed similar accolades for De Sica--yet he was responsible for many of the greatest films I have seen. Aside from his super-famous film, THE BICYCLE THIEF, few have seen or discussed his masterpieces such as MIRACLE IN MILAN, UMBERTO D. or THE CHILDREN ARE WATCHING US (my personal favorite)--yet these and many more of his films are among the greatest ever made. He was one of the directors responsible for creating a style of film ("Neo-realism") but here in the States, you'd never know this unless you are a crazed film fan (like myself). The trademark of these Neo-realist films are non-actors performing in very ordinary situations that usually are ignored in big-budget films. Despite what you may think, these films are definitely NOT dull and grab the viewer emotionally because he truly learn to love and care about the characters in the films. Generally, these small-budget films are super-true to life and the acting and writing are phenomenal.

I made this little rant to set the stage for A BRIEF VACATION, as it is a late Neo-realistic film by De Sica. Once again, the characters are very simple Italian folk--the sort you'd almost never see featured in a film. In addition, the actors are not easily recognizable to the audience. As a result, you truly grow to care about the central character and root for her. But, also because it's a Neo-realistic film, the ending is true to the character instead of having a Hollywood-style ending where everything works out fine! The plot of the film involves a very over-worked and completely unappreciated working mother. She is the sole provider for a home with three small children, a lazy and obnoxious brother-in-law, a meddlesome mother-in-law and a temporarily disabled husband. When she has trouble keeping up at work, she goes to the local clinic and find out she has TB and needs to go on an extended rest--paid for by the state health care system. However, her selfish family insist she's fine and want her to stay on the job because they are just awful people who want her to stay and take care of their needs. Unfortunately, this nice lady is so nice, she has a hard time standing up for herself. But, when the problem is too much, she does finally go to the sanitarium despite their petty protests.

At the sanitarium, her life changes. Instead of being so quiet and shy, she slowly comes out of her shell and makes many friends. She even attracts the attentions of a handsome younger man who desperately wants to marry her and take her away from her rotten home life. Seeing the lady blossom is amazing but true to the spirit of Neo-realism, the film ends on a less than fairy tale-like fashion but one very true to the characters.

This is an excellent film with exceptional acting and direction. Some might find the subject matter a tad mundane, but believe me, it's worth some patience.

Images (David Gurevich) review

CultureCartel.com (Stephen Murray) review [4/5]

DVD Talk (Don Houston) dvd review [4/5]

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review

TV Guide review

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

The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

THE VOYAGE (Il Viaggio)

Italy France (102 mi) 1974

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

I don't know why the poets and writers keep saying it: follow your heart, don't bother with "duty" as defined by patriarchs. Just because it's true I guess, and because new people are being born. Anyone that still doesn't get it never will, no matter how beautifully it's said. Sophia Loren is a most extraordinary mixture of casualness and elegance. Richard Burton does sincere thinking and stammering thing better than anyone. They both have incredible presence, which in her case more than compensates for the occasional and slight dramatic lapse. Vittorio De Sica films and creates Italy like no one else. Imagine an Italian convertible that can go 20 mph!

TV Guide

This barely tolerable Loren-Burton soap opera takes place among the wealthy classes in turn-of-the-century Sicily. Loren is in love with Burton, but marries his brother Bannen instead. It turns out that Burton had promised his father on his deathbed to let Bannen marry the girl. Bannen is a weak-willed individual who handily ends up dead in an auto wreck. Loren is left free to mourn until Burton shows up to help her out. Since his beloved suffers from dizzy spells, Burton takes her to specialists. In the best of bad movie traditions, the doctors declare Loren has an incurable disease that should do her in by the final reel. Burton spends the rest of the film trying to make her happy. Loren and Burton are boring in the leads, adding nothing to the already wretched material. De Sica, in yet another greatly disappointing effort, manages to evoke the period with some degree of success but the lifeless treatment of the story is something one would expect from a hack director, not a pioneering master in Italian cinema. This may have been the result of De Sica's ill health, which closed the production for a time. His long-time smoking habit had finally caught up with him and he had to be operated on for emphysema. He died after the film was completed, making this the great director's final work, though the far superior A BRIEF VACATION, made previous to this, would be his last film released in America. Burton took off a weekend during production, flying across the North Pole to be at the bedside of his wife, Elizabeth Taylor. Though their well-publicized marriage was coming to an end, she has requested him to come when she underwent emergency surgery. Burton made a 12-hour flight to Los Angeles, spent a night at the hospital, then made another 12-hour flight over the Pole back to the Rome location.

Camera Journal [Paul Sutton]

Channel 4 Film

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

de Their, Thomas

FEATHERS IN MY HEAD (Des plumes dans la tête)             B+ 91

Belgium  (100 mi)  2003

Can humans co-exist with nature?  A film examining life on the fringes of a giant, polluting sugar plant, where exotic birds seem to flourish in the nearby reeds and ponds, featuring exquisite photography, among the best seen in this or any other year, blending truly remarkable exterior naturalist imagery with extremely darkened interiors, with only brief glimpses of light from a door or a window or a dimly lit lamp.  Virginie Saint-Martin is credited as the cinematographer, but the writer-director started out making wildlife documentaries, which is quite evident throughout, including an opening underwater shot of a fish snatched out of the water by a diving bird.  In one scene, kids are outside on the street playing, and they literally stop and look up at the geese flying in formation.  There are really two parts to this film - the opening 45 minutes, which is indescribably beautiful, showing a husband and wife very much in love with their inquisitive young son, and all seem in perfect harmony with their surroundings.  But the boy disappears, a fact of nature that the mother, boldly and tragically played by Sophie Museur, refuses to believe, and she is haunted by his continuing presence even after it is learned he has drowned.  This second half, while featuring some stark imagery, is less remarkable, resembling REPULSION, as in her grief, she downward spirals into dementia, afraid to touch or be touched by her husband, not wanting to lose this contact with her son.  Languishing in this single mood, the film slows to a near stop, perhaps stuck, as the character is, in a state of mental unbalance.  The film loses some of its focus here, lingering too long, leaving the viewer too emotionally disconnected with what we are seeing onscreen, but the director tries to balance interiors and exteriors, things seen and unseen, focusing on the sounds of nature and the silence of someone who is completely cut off from the world, featuring long, wordless sequences.  Sylvain Chaveau provides extremely spare and fragile music, something resembling the moods of Kieslowski.  While dramatically uneven, much of what's worthwhile in this film is the intricate attention to detail, the extraordinary balance and out of balance imagery, and just how fragile it all sounds. Many felt this was the best of the 2003 Facet’s French Fest, as the director had a clear understanding of how to present his material.

de Toth, André

All-Movie Guide Hal Erickson

The son of a Hungarian military officer, Andre De Toth studied law at the University of Budapest. His academic career was shelved when De Toth became involved with the Hungarian film industry, where he served in several artistic and technical capacities before graduating to director in 1938. After completing five features in the space of one year, he was brought to England by fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda, who hired DeToth as second unit director on The Thief of Baghdad (1940). A full-fledged Hollywood director by 1943, DeToth specialized in westerns and adventure films; one of these, Slattery's Hurricane (1949), co-starred the director's then-wife Veronica Lake, whose fame was diminishing even as her husband's was descending. DeToth is best known for his brace of 3-D films of the 1950s, House of Wax (1953) and The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953); the fact that DeToth had lost one eye did not diminish his lifelong fascination with stereoscopic photography, nor his expertise in this field. In 1950, DeToth was nominated for an Oscar for his work on the screenplay of The Gunfighter (1950). Though his last official directorial credit was for 1970's El Condor, DeToth made several significant (and uncredited) contributions to the 1978 big-budgeter Superman: The Movie. In 1994, Andre De Toth published Fragments a memoir.

Senses of Cinema de Toth Adrian Danks, February 2003

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

The Films of André de Toth - by Michael E. Grost

TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES Michael T. Toole, TCM Remembers Andre de Toth

Chicago Reader Article a retrospective film overview by Fred Camper, October 3, 1997

Museum of Lone Pine Film History by Chris Langley

HackWriters: An Appreciation an obituary and filmography by Alex Grant, November 2002

De Toth, André They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Wise Guys roundtable discussion with André de Toth, Budd Boetticher and Jules Dassin by Patrick Francis from LA Weekly

Senses of Cinema Interview (2001) by Alain Silver, originally published in Film Noir Reader 3 on February 12, 2001

NONE SHALL ESCAPE A- 94

USA (85 mi) 1944

Blunt, intense Nazi war trial with flashbacks to events in a small town in Poland, featuring excellent realism

Time Out review Tom Milne

Scripted by Lester Cole (later one of the HUAC 'Hollywood Ten'), this anticipates the end of WWII and the Nuremberg Trials to stage an International War Crimes Commission in Warsaw. The case under consideration is that of Wilhelm Grimm (Knox), former Reichs Commissioner of the Western Region of Poland. Fascinatingly, although 'leniency' is not the order of the day (as the title suggests), and no punches are pulled in detailing his crimes (the term 'extermination camp' is not used, but the script is unique for the period in making it quite clear that Grimm's regime in Warsaw is to implement the final solution), the film is not concerned with zomboid Nazis and their horrors. Rather, tracing Grimm's career in flashback from 1919, when he returned after WWI minus a leg and plus a bitter resentment of Germany's humiliation in defeat, it attempts to probe the psychology of the man; and in so doing, without in any way condoning or sympathising, it manages to elicit a glimmer of understanding. There are naiveties, and the film now suffers from a certain déjà vu; but script, direction and acting all remain impressive.

Chicago Reader (Fred Camper) capsule review

Andre de Toth anticipated the Nuremberg trials in this stunning drama, made in 1944 before the war's end and praised at the time for avoiding anti-Nazi cliches. Set in Poland, it centers on the trial of a Nazi official responsible for many murders, played with cool resolve by Alexander Knox. His brother and ex-fiancee testify against him, their words illustrated with flashbacks that constitute the bulk of the film. Lee Garmes's cinematography has the same delicacy and careful backlighting as his work for Josef von Sternberg, but de Toth uses it to very different ends. The imagery lacks Sternberg's sensuality, the flashbacks starkly blocked and confrontational; more direct and less ambiguous than in de Toth's later films, the visual style echoes the brutality of the action. The film ends with a typically preachy appeal to the "united nations of the world," but the accused Nazi's chilling might-makes-right speech is perhaps more in character than the just-following-orders defense offered at Nuremberg. 85 min.

Turner Classic Movies review James Steffen

At the International Tribunal of War Crimes held after the Second World War, Wilhelm Grimm, a Nazi commandant, is charged with crimes against humanity. A series of witnesses ranging from a Polish priest to his former fiancée recount his bitterness at the defeat of Germany in the First World War, his life in a Polish border village where he is forced to leave after raping a girl, his return to the village after the invasion of Poland, and his role in the deportation and massacre of Jews.

Andre De Toth (1912-2002) is popularly remembered as the eye patch-wearing director of Westerns and the 3-D picture House of Wax(1953), but a closer look at his work reveals a varied career. Not least among his achievements was None Shall Escape (1944), one of the first Hollywood films to address Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Over the years the film has become something of a forgotten work, though it is beginning to receive the attention it deserves. In the third edition to her definitive study Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (2003), Annette Insdorf praises None Shall Escape for its visual dynamism--thanks partly to contributions of the revered cinematographer Lee Garmes--and for its having "the kind of grit found in European films of the 1940s."

The film's unusual "European grit" to which Insdorf refers is hardly accidental. Born in Hungary, De Toth started directing films there in the late Thirties up to the outbreak of World War II, even filming the invasion of Poland as a newsreel cameraman. At that point he left for England and worked as the second unit director on the Alexander Korda productions The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and Jungle Book (1942). Another Hungarian, the actor Paul Lukas, signed an affidavit to allow him to relocate to the United States. De Toth was also helped by his association with Korda, who had strong ties with Winston Churchill. De Toth's first Hollywood feature as a director was Passport to Suez (1943), a hastily shot entry in Columbia's "Lone Wolf" series.

None Shall Escape, De Toth's second film for Columbia, was a project he strongly believed in. Although he liked the basic story by Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than, he felt that the script was weak in characterization. Veteran screenwriter Lester Cole was brought in; he would later be blacklisted as one of the notorious "Hollywood Ten" during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Ultimately, the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Story.

De Toth, still a young and relatively untested director in Hollywood, butted heads with studio head Harry Cohn on more than one occasion. As De Toth recalled in his autobiography Fragments: Portraits from the Inside, initially he wanted to cast four African-Americans in the tribunal jury, but Cohn objected on the grounds that it would make the film difficult to sell in the South. Cohn eventually let him cast one African-American in the jury--Jesse Groves. De Toth enraged Cohn again when he refused, against Cohn's objections, to cast Paul Lukas in the lead, insisting instead on the less well-known Canadian actor Alexander Knox. While Knox had played significant roles before this, including that of Humphrey Van Weyden in the Jack London adaptation The Sea Wolf (1941), what impressed De Toth most was his performance in a Broadway production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. While Cohn was notorious for his temper, De Toth nonetheless stated, "I respected Harry Cohn for his professional understanding and his love of making pictures. Cohn could be rude and crude--he often was--but never phony."

None Shall Escape was released in February of 1944 to mixed reviews. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times complained that it "says nothing about the Nazis that hasn't already been said," and that it was "bombastically directed." The Hollywood Reporter was closer to the mark, noting that "[De Toth's] treatment of the subject, his handling of the actors and his unbelievable ability to create new departures from routine procedure are evidence of his artistry as a director. His work has the fresh tang of unbridled daring in some respects, and in others seems to borrow from techniques we have long known but forgotten how to use."

Senses of Cinema (Sylvie Pierre) review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

RAMROD B 88

USA (94 mi) 1947

Grim, cynical, psychological western where characters each face a moral dilemma, featuring an evil Veronica Lake, who was married to de Toth at the time.

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

Andre de Toth's bizarre Freudian western (1947, 94 min.) features Veronica Lake in drag and Joel McCrea as a fading phallic symbol (you thought the title was accidental?) performing a barely sublimated sadomasochistic ritual--she's a lady ranch owner who teams up with her foreman to put her chief competitor, her father, out of business. With Arleen Whelan, Preston Foster, and Charles Ruggles.

Time Out review Tom Milne

Despite an enigmatic opening reel, the issues soon sort themselves out in this striking 'psychological' Western. Veronica Lake (excellent) is the strong-willed daughter of a rancher (Ruggles) who wants her to marry the man he admires, a ruthless, up-and-coming cattle baron (Foster). Clearly opting for a man she can dominate, Lake rebelliously elects to marry an out-of-town sheepman provided he re-locates on land she owns, careless of the fact that a range war will probably ensue. When the sheepman is scared off by Foster's threats, Lake defiantly decides to go it alone; and violence escalates as Foster, with her father's tacit blessing, sets out to bring her to heel. Caught in the middle as her reluctant ramrod is McCrea, just emerging from a bout of alcoholism after losing his wife and child. McCrea insists on doing things by the law, but finds himself sucked in as evil breeds evil, with Lake gradually emulating Foster, dirty trick for dirty trick. The stark little tragedy whereby Lake wins her war but forfeits McCrea's love is surprisingly persuasive; and all the performances are first-rate, with several minor characters (Crisp's ageing but indomitable sheriff, DeFore's happy-go-lucky opportunist, Whelan's patient 'other woman') adding their strands to the complex moral weave.

User comments from imdb Author: mi6nick from Melbourne, Australia

Contrary to previous reviews of Ramrod, de Toth's film is much more interesting than a "simple cattle vs. sheep" plot-driven western. Just look at Lake's Connie Dickinson. This is a typical femme fatale archetype taken straight from film noir (realistically, the character derives from hard-boiled pulp literature which Luke Short fused with his western story).

Sexually alluring Connie uses her potent sway over men to achieve her greedy ambitions of wealth and power, and is unafraid to send men to their deaths for her cause. Connie's strength of character is atypical of the western genre at this stage, and her strength seems to come from the relative weakness of the film's hero, played by Joel McCrea; who seems to lack the strong sense of moral certainty that the typical westerner was founded upon.

Along with Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947), and Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon (1948), Ramrod stands as one of the few hybrids between film noir and the western. Regardless of your standpoint on the status of film noir, all of these films contain typical elements from the pessimistic noirs of the 40's and 50's, particularly formal and stylistic devices, as well as recurring personnel, especially directors, stars (ie. Robert Mitchum), and cinematographers. Crucially though, the western genre before this stage was a particularly optimistic one; look at Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), Dodge City (Michael Curtiz, 1939), or even My Darling Clementine (Ford again, 1946); the three films I mentioned beforehand, including Ramrod, all offer instances of pessimistic worldviews, and morally ambiguous characters and situations, even though they all end with the hero getting the girl and riding into a westward sunset.

User comments from imdb Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

Veronica Lake in her memoirs said that Joel McCrea was one of the kindest, most decent men she ever knew or worked with. When she was writing that she was talking about Sullivan's Travels which is certainly one of the high points in both of their careers.

Ramrod is light years from Preston Sturges. Based on a Luke Short novel it's a pretty grim and violent film. Preston Foster is the owner of the big spread in the neighborhood and a close ally of his is Charlie Ruggles who has an adjoining piece of territory. Foster's taken a shine to Ruggles daughter Veronica Lake, but she can't stand the sight of him. When Foster bullies her fiancé out of town, Lake wants vengeance.

She's got her own piece of land now and hires Joel McCrea to run it for her. The range war starts, but Lake thinks McCrea is too soft in his approach. She starts some backchannel schemes of her own.

The result of this is a whole lot of dead bodies piling up. A windfall for the coroner.

As always Joel McCrea is the moral centerpiece of the film, he's once again the gallant western hero. Preston Foster is the town bully you love to hate. Foster did a variation on this part again in Law and Order a few years later.

Cast against type are Don DeFore and Charlie Ruggles. DeFore who was usually the hero's best friend and a jovial kind of guy, is a violence prone sort of fellow, who Lake manipulates among others. And it is hard to believe that Charlie Ruggles ever played anyone as serious on film before or since. Our image of him is usually the henpecked husband opposite Mary Boland from the Thirties.

This film is significant for Lake because she married Director Andre DeToth. DeToth claims to have been married seven times, but only three are listed on his page at IMDb. It was not a happy union, but DeToth did get a good performance out of his bride.

Ramrod may be one of the earliest examples of an adult western. It is grim and violent, but fascinating.

Senses of Cinema (Rick Thompson) review

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Matchflick.com [Ben]

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

Channel 4 Film capsule review

The New York Times review A.W.

PITFALL B 89

USA (86 mi) 1948

Leave It to Beaver America meets film noir murder in the form of an obsessed and evil Raymond Burr, who doesn’t murder anyone himself, but causes others to by the mania he has driven them to

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

A grimy, superior film noir by Andre de Toth (1948). Dick Powell is a foursquare family man who enjoys a harmless dalliance with model Lizabeth Scott, unaware that he's risking the wrath of a psychotically jealous private eye, Raymond Burr. An iconographical plus is Father Knows Best's Jane Wyatt as Powell's patiently beleaguered wife.

Time Out review Tom Milne

Rather flatly scripted, but a not uninteresting clash between moral tale and film noir. Powell plays the archetypal suburban man, blessed with family, home and job, but suffering a vague itch of awareness that life hasn't lived up to expectations. His work as an insurance claims agent lures him into involvement with a siren (Scott) and the inevitable aftermath of violence, deceit, and sudden death. From this he is rescued by the exercise of a double standard (Scott pays for her murder, Powell gets away with his); but the film still contrives a troubled intimation that things ain't quite what they used to be in suburbia. Burr, modelling himself on Laird Cregar (who would have made more of the role), gives one of his better performances as the hulking yet oddly pathetic private eye who digs the pitfall in trying to pursue his own hopeless infatuation.

Film Noir of the Week Steve-O

By the time he helmed Pitfall in 1948; Hungarian born émigré director André de Toth had a filmography consisting of a handful of largely forgettable films, and was perhaps better know as the one-eyed husband of the beautiful Veronica Lake. Although he’d have limited success later in his career, most notably with the 3-D horror film House of Wax, a growing number of people, myself included, have come to believe that in Pitfall he has created one of the finest, and most unique, entries in the film noir canon.

Pitfall opens with the seemingly idyllic suburban life of John Forbes (Dick Powell), insurance company claims adjuster, his wife Sue (Jane Wyatt) and their young son Tommy.

It soon becomes apparent that this vision of the American dream is simply an illusion, at least to the melancholy John who dryly complains of the rut “six feet deep” that he feels himself caught in and his longing for something more exciting and less routine in his life.

Forbes finds his excitement through ‘Mac‘ MacDonald (Raymond Burr), a private investigator hired by his firm to track down and recover insurable gains. MacDonald points Forbes in the direction of Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott), possessor of several items purchased for her by her imprisoned ex-boyfriend Bill Smiley using stolen money insured by Forbes’s company. During the course of his investigation MacDonald, known as ‘gruesome’ around the office, has developed an attraction towards Mona. Forbes opts to go and see Mona himself to re-inventory the stolen gains.

After a very rocky start, in which Mona strikes at the very heart of Forbes’ personal dissatisfaction with his current life by calling him a “little man with a briefcase”, the two spend the afternoon boating and sharing cocktails before Forbes returns home quite late into the night after the implied adultery. It is worth noting that Forbes does not offer up the information that he is a married man, nor does he wear a wedding ring. Forbes’ late return is not lost on a lurking, and jealous, MacDonald.

After warning, then threatening Forbes who meets again with Mona, MacDonald takes a more physical approach and administers a brutal beating to him. Hearing that Forbes is sick and out of the office, the faithful Mona attempts to deliver some cheer and chicken soup, only to learn the truth of Forbes’ marital status which leads to severing their relationship. MacDonald, however, doesn’t quite buy into this and continues his stalking of Mona and threats against both her and Forbes, including informing the soon to be released Bill Smiley of the dalliances between his girl Mona and Forbes in the hopes of forcing a confrontation.

This all leads to the ultimate confrontations where an armed (by MacDonald) Smiley heads to a forewarned Forbes’ house and MacDonald, awaiting the outcome of this confrontation in which he expects one man to end up dead and the other imprisoned, heads to Mona’s to force her into leaving with him.

Smiley is killed by Forbes and upon hearing the news over a police scanner, Mona in turn kills MacDonald. Although in the apparent clear, Forbes has a fit of conscience and confesses all to his wife who declares that in the interests of maintaining the illusion of their perfect family he not tell the police. Continuing his need for conscience cleansing, Forbes does tell all to the police. Forbes’ killing is considered justifiable self defense, but Mona may not be so lucky. In the words of the DA, he believes they are “holding the wrong person upstairs”.

Forbes stumbles from the police station to find his dutiful wife awaiting him, willing to give their marriage another chance, while Mona’s fate hangs in the balance.

In Pitfall, de Toth has largely removed the noir film from the urban settings of the large, looming city, populated by gangsters and cops, and placed it firmly in the suburbia of America populated by the everyman (or everywoman). By creating a domestic noir, de Toth taps into feelings of familial incarceration which is more easily related to by, and perhaps more disturbing to, the everyday Joe. While very few of us would act on any of our impulses the way Forbes does, it would be folly to suggest that many haven’t occasionally felt trapped in our own domestic or employment rut. In this context, Pitfall serves as a moral cautionary tale with great effect, even though the ultimate punishments seem misplaced.

One other characteristic standard that de Toth manages to turn upside-down in Pitfall is that of the femme-fatale. In other reviews or comments on this film, I’ve frequently seen Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) referred to as the femme-fatale of the story. My own view is quite different as I view Mona as the doomed innocent. Mona’s lone faults are that she commits with her heart and she attracts the wrong men. Of the three men in her life throughout the film, one is arrested for embezzling in order to provide her gifts, one is a sadistic stalker and one is a philandering husband who manages to place her in further peril. In none of these instances is Mona responsible for leading the ‘innocent’ male characters towards their doom. Instead, it is the actions of the men who lead Mona to hers. Indeed, Mona’s respect for the sanctity of marriage and the family, only further imperil her to the point of requiring forceful self defense in an act that may ultimately mean jail or death for herself, while the cheating Forbes is returned to his loving, though damaged, family. Clearly it is Mona who suffers the most of the pair at the hands of the film’s homme-fatale(s).

In the final retrospective, Pitfall represents something of a zenith on several fronts. As a unique and subtly complex noir, I believe it to be the best work from director André de Toth (at least of the several films I’ve seen to date). It also represents some of the finest acting from the three main leads – Dick Powell in a more nuanced role than that of Philip Marlowe and one in which he hits it perfectly, noir icon Lizabeth Scott in what I consider to be her best role and Hollywood heavy favorite Raymond Burr delivering at the top of his game as well.

Sadly, Pitfall remains without a DVD release on the horizon and while TCM occasionally airs it and collectors copies are available to those that search them out, this is one film that noir lovers should be clamoring to see.

Pitfall Trivia:
• de Toth was originally hired to do a rewrite of the script before accepting the director’s chair.
• Humphrey Bogart was originally cast as the film heavy MacDonald, but was vetoed by de Toth in favor of Burr, an actor he had never seen work before.
• de Toth was also responsible for the casting of Lizabeth Scott.
• Powell was originally attached to the project as an executive producer.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]

SLATTERY’S HURRICANE

USA (87 mi) 1949

Chicago Reader (Fred Camper) capsule review

Director Andre de Toth shapes this 1949 love-quartet melodrama to his own mordant vision with images and camera movements that connect betrayals and their effects, noble gestures and their less-than-noble causes. Will Slattery (Richard Widmark) meets an old buddy now married to his former flame Aggie (Linda Darnell), and he pursues her at the expense of his own drug-addicted girlfriend Dolores (Veronica Lake). When Dolores collapses after learning of his infidelity, a spectacular camera movement changes direction in midshot, linking her ride with Slattery and Aggie as they drive nearby, oblivious to her plight. Here and in the powerful hurricane scenes, de Toth makes all the elements of a shot seem inextricably connected, as if each were part of the same surface. This parallels the drama's traps: every character and image presses itself against the other in a bleak, deterministic web. 87 min.

User comments from imdb Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.

VERONICA LAKE was married to director Andre deToth at the time she made SLATTERY'S HURRICANE, a tale told in flashback by RICHARD WIDMARK as he pilots a plane through a horrendous storm and recalls a love affair he had with his best friend's wife (LINDA DARNELL). The friend is well played by JOHN RUSSELL, an actor under contract to Fox who never got to do much of anything but seemed as competent as any of the other up and coming contract players.

LINDA DARNELL, looking every inch a femme fatale, is only given a minor role in the proceedings and is quite forgettable. VERONICA LAKE, on the other hand, this time playing a good, sensible woman and not her usual femme fatale, is convincing enough as the right gal for Widmark.

Slow in getting started, it actually only gets into high gear once the storm scenes reach hurricane proportions--but by that time, you might have trouble staying awake through a very mediocre plot.

Based on a book by Herman Wouk (THE CAINE MUTINY), it's hardly a distinguished work.

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Based on a novel by Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance) and directed by eyepatched hard-boiled André de Toth (Crime Wave, Pitfall) "Slattery's Hurricane" (1949) was sharply photographed by Charles D. Clarke (whose many credits include the aerial photography in two Korean War Air Force flicks, "The Bridge at Toko-Ri" and "The Hunters").

Although the movies is mostly shot by day, the adulterous passion Richard Widmark has for the very buxom Linda Darnell is very noirish. Darnell looks like a femme fatale here, but is hesitant and has less screen presence than Veronica Lake (who was not a great actress or even a normal-sized one! but a fine femme fatale/ long-haired blonde "dame" for the also pint-sized Alan Ladd in "This Gun for Hire." "The Glass Key," and "The Blue Dahlia").

Lake is surprisingly effective and affecting as the good girl (!) here. She was de Toth's wife at the time, and one or the other of them decided to dispense with her trademark lank, peek-a-boo hairstyle along with casting her in a sweetness-and-light and feet-on-the-ground, sensible part, rather than a femme fatale role.

Richard Widmark plays a heel who is a very brave, very skilled, and extremely insubordinate a commerical, former US Navy pilot (whose his head clears when it is away from Darnell). The supporting cast -- especially John Russell (tv's "Lawman," the villain in Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider") as another pilot who has become Darnell's husband since her earlier affair with Widmark's Slattery) is good.

Widmark, who died a week ago, was a memorable villain/psychoticin "Kiss of Death" and "No Way Out" and very interesting playing lowlife characters who were not completely villans/criminals (and not psychotic!) as in Sam Fuller's "Pickup on South Street" (where he played a pickpocket who would not cooperate with Soviet agents), as the pilot Slattery, and as the shill with ambitions in Jules Dassin's great Night and the City (1950).

The black-and-white hurricane footage with late-40s cars, etc. is interesting, and de Toth brings the aviation and romance action to an obviously censorship-decreed ending in brisk fashion. However, the set-up is slow, so some viewers may nod off or switch off before the hurricane gets going. (In addition to the flashback structure, the multiple betrayals and corruptions, Widmark in his noir days, and the femme fatale, the hurricane provides a sort of particularly perilous darkness, so that the movie is at least "noirish" if not a full-blown cinema noir).

The Films of André de Toth - by Michael E. Grost

The New York Times review T.M.P.

MAN IN THE SADDLE

USA (87 mi) 1951

Time Out review

When the going gets tough, De Toth gets going. The violent confrontations impress most in this otherwise standard Western. Familiar elements set the story in motion, what with rancher Scott losing former sweetheart Leslie to land baron Knox, who has designs on the properties surrounding his own (Scott's included), and isn't above having his dirty work done for him by hired heavies. The screenplay might build friendship and community among the plucky band being cut down as they stand up to naked greed, but the standout scenes are the remarkable gunfight in a darkened saloon and a vigorous punch-up in a collapsing mountain shack. Scott looks the part, as ever, and his affectionate scenes with independent cowgal Drew have an understated warmth he didn't always get to display. The first of six films Scott made with De Toth, before shifting his allegiance to Budd Boetticher and the work which crowned his career.

User comments from imdb Author: loydmooney-1 from United States

It seems that all the comments here are somewhat ordinary, and miss some of the fantastically extraordinary touches of de Toth. True the western drags in places, but there are moments that only a director of the quality of de Toth can create. His humor was always very sly, here no exception. For another instance look at the way he handles Gary Cooper in Springfield Rifle. But back to the case in point. Near the start Scott and Williams are about to leave and this 75 year old lady comes through the door carrying a bundle and says, excuse me gentlemen. Look at it carefully and you will see it is a fantastic grace note, and very funny. Then look at the way Scott is rolling a cigarette when Isham pulls up, talks over his shoulder etc. Also why does Clagg break a stick to get Ellen Drews attention coming up the hill? Its almost perverse and never explained. Then the end in as good a dust storm as was ever filmed short of the one in Treasure of Sierra Madre.

And saving the best for last, the fight scene between Scott and Clagg, is simply stupendous. Over quickly, very real, tense, the long roll down the hill, etc. It may be the best single fight ever on the screen.

These alone raise de Toth into a level reached by very few other directors of westerns. His subtlety is very great: in fact his sense of humor is still, for me, the very best. Nobody better.

Turner Classic Movies review Rob Nixon

When he joined forces with producer Harry Joe Brown in the late 1940s to form the production company Ranown, Randolph Scott transformed himself from a second-string star, with a hodgepodge of leading man roles interspersed with action pictures to his credit, into one of the biggest box office attractions of the 1950s. He became an indelible icon of the Western, a genre in which he worked exclusively until he retired a very wealthy man in the early 1960s.

Man in the Saddle (1951) was the first of six Westerns Scott filmed with director Andre De Toth, and if they are not as fondly remembered or critically acclaimed as the seven movies Scott made with director Budd Boetticher later in the decade, they nevertheless served to establish him in the genre and boost his popularity.

The story casts Scott as a peaceful farmer and rancher who has to resort to violence to defend himself and his property against a powerful and ruthless land baron. In the process Scott's character, Owen Merritt, is caught between two women, the ambitious Laurie Bidwell (Joan Leslie) and the down-to-earth Nan Melotte (Ellen Drew).

The Scott Westerns proved to be a boon for De Toth as well. The Hungarian-born director made his first film in America in 1943 and released only a handful of pictures before his first oater, Ramrod (1947). The Scott Westerns helped establish him as an expert at tough, hard-edged action pictures, whether set in the West or the world of urban crime. He also had a penchant for realistically portrayed violence in his movies.

In addition to his six pictures with Scott, praised for injecting adult storylines and complex characterizations into the Western, De Toth is best known for his noir melodrama Guest in the House (1944); the aviation adventure Slattery's Hurricane (1949), which featured his wife at the time, Veronica Lake; and the 3-D horror film House of Wax (1953).

In later years, De Toth wrote humorously about his professional relationship with Scott, who he described as a "blue-book millionaire...with a hobby which he thought was acting." Of producer Brown, he noted his heavy drinking, "mundane taste" and "nickel-and-dime" approach to his job. De Toth claimed neither Brown nor Scott read scripts (They preferred to spend their time with the Wall Street Journal) so they rarely argued with him over story points. "They were both gentlemen, nice people," he said.

The screenplay for Man in the Saddle is based on a novel by Ernest Haycox, one of the 20th century's most important writers in the Western genre. Through his dozens of stories and novels (many of them were first serialized in popular magazines), Haycox helped to bring the genre into the mainstream of American fiction and pioneered many styles and themes that have now become conventions of the form, adding a deeper sense of realism and historical detail. Films adapted from his work include all three versions of Stagecoach (1939, 1966, 1986), Union Pacific (1939), and Abilene Town (1946), which also starred Randolph Scott.

Man in the Saddle also helped launch the career of singer Tennessee Ernie Ford who appears in a small role and sings the theme song.

DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [3/5]

The Films of André de Toth - by Michael E. Grost

DVD Verdict (Paul Corupe) dvd review

SPRINGFIELD RIFLE

USA (93 mi) 1952

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay S. Steinberg

The Gary Cooper historical actioner Springfield Rifle (1952) has recently made its DVD debut bundled in Gary Cooper: The Signature Collection from Warner Home Video. The firearm of the title is much more a final-act device than the film’s focus, which deals with the birth of military espionage. It’s not top-shelf Cooper, but it’s a serviceable enough vehicle from the latter phase of the laconic lead’s career, and his fan base should be pleased by its arrival.

The scenario by Frank Davis and Charles Marquis Warren concerns the struggles of the Union command to protect its drives of much-needed Cavalry horses through the Colorado wilds from the predations of bands of jayhawkers seeking to provide the stock to the Confederacy. The rebels can’t have their intimate knowledge of the herd movements without inside information, but Washington finds it unseemly to descend to the level of developing counter-intelligence.

Certain officers in the field, however, act on the gravity of the situation by staging a covert ruse. Major Lex Kearney (Cooper) a Virginian whose Southern sentiments are open to question, is transferred to the outpost in the hopes that he can lead a drive past the looters, but turns rather than fight once confronted by them on the trail. He’s summarily court-martialed for cowardice, and the combination of his experience and his apparent bitterness gets the attention of Archie McCool (David Brian), a local rancher who reveals himself as the ringleader of the rustlers.

Kearney’s disgrace, as it develops, was staged solely to gain access to the cabal. The downside is that fact is shared with only a select few, and those on the outside include Kearney’s frustrated wife (Phyllis Thaxter), who can’t understand why he won’t come home and deal with the crisis presented by their young son’s having run away in humiliation. It’s her presence that ultimately tips McCool’s mole to the subterfuge, and places Kearney in jeopardy of execution as a traitor. With the help of the loyalists among the troops, and a convenient cache of the then-new chamber-loading rifle that would “turn one man into five, and fifty into an army,” Kearney is able to confront the rustlers, and the real betrayer, in a well-staged final confrontation.

Director Andre de Toth bears a certain amount of cult cache for efforts like House of Wax (1953) and The Gunfighter (1950), but the workmanlike job that he put forth here was not particularly remarkable. Notables in the supporting cast include Lon Chaney, Jr. providing dimwitted bluster as McCool’s head lackey; as well as Paul Kelly and Phillip Carey for keeping the audience guessing in their respective roles as Kearney’s immediate superior and chief accuser.

Warner’s mastering job on the DVD does no disservice to the rich palette of Edwin Dupar’s cinematography, but the disc is bare-bones in terms of extras. In addition to Springfield Rifle, Gary Cooper: The Signature Collection also contains Sergeant York (1941), The Fountainhead (1949), Dallas (1950) and The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959).

The Films of André de Toth - by Michael E. Grost

Springfield Rifle (1952) has similar subject matter and characters to de Toth's later Crime Wave (1954), even though Springfield Rifle is a Civil War era Western, and Crime Wave is a modern day film noir. Both star decent men who have been disgraced in the eyes of the law. Both men are caught between gangs of outlaws and the authorities. Both men have decent but traumatized wives. They are the only people in the picture with any sort of family or relationship to women: both the authorities and the gang of crooks seem to be part of all-male, all business worlds. The hero and his wife meet in the only domestic spaces in both films; everybody else is seen only in public places or official headquarters. The authorities are a bunch of nasties who persecute the hero in both films, while the crooks are a bunch of no-good low lifes who are unpleasantly vicious. The crooks are into illicit money making schemes in both films. The authorities are elaborately uniformed in both films, and have a militarized environment.

Despite the similarity in titles, there is little resemblance between Springfield Rifle and Anthony Mann's Winchester 73 (1950). In Mann's film, there is a single rifle, and it plays a continuing role in the plot of the entire film from start to finish. In Springfield Rifle, the title rifles only show up at the finale. There are large groups of them, used in the final battle, and no individual rifle is of any importance. The Springfield rifles are only marginally related to the rest of the plot. They might even be considered something of an afterthought, another element thrown into an already complex plot.

Edwin B. Du Par, who photographed the film, had shot numerous Warner Brothers shorts during the 1930's, such as Roy Mack's The Red Shadow (1932). During the 1950's, he became a special effects photographer at Warners. Only from 1950 onwards did Du Par concentrate on the principal cinematography of feature films.

Elements of this film recall the undercover subgenre of semi-documentary films. It is especially close to Gordon Douglas' I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), which was also shot at Warner Brothers the year before. In fact, Du Par was cinematographer on both films. As in the earlier film, the hero is unable to tell his family about his undercover role, thus causing anguish for his teenage son, and problems at his school. Also, in both films the hero tries to leave his undercover role, but is refused by his superiors. In both films, the hero is set up to appear not just as a crook, as was typical of most semi-docs, but as an actual traitor to the United Sates, and as an ally of its enemies, here the Confederacy. However, Springfield Rifle lacks the right wing political propaganda aspects of I Was a Communist for the FBI. The hero's motivation for his actions is to bring the US Civil War to a speedy end, thus saving lives. This sentiment is repeated twice in the picture, and is clearly endorsed by the filmmakers. It is an unusually pacifistic message. There is also a scene where the hero taunts a military officer about the way he led his men to death. Otherwise, the film stays out of the politics of the Civil War. It is in fact careful not to offend the sensibilities of either Northerners or Southerners. Aside from its brief pacifistic sentiments, the film has no political elements whatsoever.

Springfield Rifle unfolds beautifully, like a piece of music. It has great storytelling flow. Many of the scenes introduce a new character, often in relationship to an existing character. In the scene, the viewer wants to find out everything about the new character, and his relationship to the other people and the plot. This desire is usually fulfilled very satisfactorily. Then the whole cycle starts over in the next scene, and another new character. Even when we already know both characters in a scene, we usually get some new relationship between them. Eventually a huge mosaic is built up. Interwoven with all of this is a mystery, which is set forth right at the start of the film: how are the rustlers getting their inside information on the Union soldiers' cattle treks? This mystery runs through the film, and is gradually filled in. Springfield Rifle is more of an actual mystery story than are many crime films. It starts out with a mystery, one that is gradually and logically resolved by the end of the picture.

Each encounter with new characters is staged by de Toth in a visually pleasing manner. This beautiful flow of images seems to work hand in hand with the flow of the plot. It gives the film its musical effect, a cinematic experience that seems to unfold with the sort of inner logic and beauty of a piece of classical music.

Pans

The chief kind of camera movement here is the pan. They are regularly employed by de Toth. The pans often follow the movements of characters. They can be slightly and beautifully out of sync with the characters too, creating a beautiful syncopated feel.

Springfield Rifle shows some of de Toth's spectacular, nearly 360 degree pans. One very fine shot opens with cameras panning across some young horses, gamboling in a field. After the camera has turned through nearly 180 degrees, it picks up people for the first time, including the hero. It then keeps panning, following the progress of the men. It is a truly spectacular shot. Either half would be a well constructed, memorably composed pan. Putting them both together all in one shot gives a thrilling visual experience.

de Toth also moves the camera forward to match the progress of his characters. These movements tend to underscore the motion of the actors.

de Toth loves to show his characters in motion. A film about the Cavalry gives de Toth plenty of opportunities to show columns of men in motion, either on horseback or on foot. Many of the shots have a kinetic quality, with the characters in full tilt motion across the screen. This motion is combined with the frequent pans and other small camera movements to underscore the kinetic effect. The whole can be considered as a work of Kinetic Art, a little device in near constant motion.

Film Freak Central Review [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

Classic Film Guide review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also reviewing the 5-film Box Set Gary Cooper – The Signature Selection

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

Channel 4 Film capsule review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

HOUSE OF WAX 3D

USA (90 mi) 1953

Time Out review Tom Milne

One of the better 3-D epics (Warners' first, pioneering effort). Handsomely mounted and directed with great care, it nevertheless remains oddly lacklustre by comparison with the 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum, despite being an often word-for-word remake. One reason is that where the original acquired an additional charge of bizarrerie by locating its Grand Guignol monster within a private enclave of bustling, contemporary New York, this remake is much more conventionally set in the fantasy world of gaslight, ground fogs and opera cloaks. Still, Price is fun (this was the film that typed him as a horror star), the fire in the waxworks is good for a gruesome thrill, and De Toth brings off one classic sequence with Kirk fleeing through the gaslit streets pursued by a shadowy figure in a billowing cloak.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

The first major studio production filmed in 3-D, André de Toth’s House of Wax wastes an idiotic amount of time showing off its then-nifty special effects (were two appearances by the man with the ping-pong paddle really necessary?). But as was so often the case, Vincent Price brings a touch of creepy class to this otherwise middling B-level horror story. A wax sculptor who loves beauty and loathes exhibitions that depict murder and mayhem, Henry Jarrod (Price) undergoes a monstrous transformation after he is disfigured in a fire started by his insurance money-craving partner. Emerging from the inferno as a maniac with a ghoulish new House of Wax featuring historical and contemporary villains (and Charles Bronson as his sidekick Igor!), Jarrod takes a liking to sweet, financially strapped Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk), who suspects that Jarrod’s Joan of Arc exhibit has been made with the corpse of her recently murdered friend Cathy (Carolyn Jones). Because we’re intimately aware of Jarrod’s cadaver-fueled waxadermic activities, de Toth doesn’t generate much suspense from his scenario (based on 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum). Still, the campy Price, skulking around the nighttime city clothed in a black cloak and hat (an outfit later worn by Sam Raimi’s Darkman), is nonetheless devilishly charismatic as the emotionally and psychologically scarred artist-turned-serial killer.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

The Hungarian immigrant Andre de Toth was an excellent filmmaker who made tough little Westerns and crime stories with maximum efficiency and little waste. He also wore an eyepatch over his left eye and could only see in two dimensions. Nevertheless, he was the only director to take the 3-D medium of the mid-1950s seriously. House of Wax was his only horror film, and it was amazingly well suited to the 3-D medium. (He made one other 3-D film, the Randolph Scott Western, The Stranger Wore a Gun.)

A remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the superior House of Wax stars Vincent Price as the master sculptor and owner of a wax museum in turn-of-the-century New York. Charles Buchinsky (later known as Charles Bronson) plays his assistant. A fire destroys all of his creations, especially the sculpture of a woman to which he is particularly attached. (The fire sequence, with its depth-of-field and the melting faces, is absolutely mesmerizing -- both in 3-D and on home video.) It is assumed that the sculptor perished in the fire, but Price returns as a faceless monster out for vengeance. He begins to collect dead bodies to cover in wax and show as his latest creations. (The film also stars Carolyn Jones, who went on to play Morticia on "The Addams Family" TV series.)

House of Wax is not particularly scary or suspenseful, but it is a lot of fun and effectively creates an atmosphere of dread using bright colors and shadows. One great 3-D effect has Buchinsky leaping from just under the foreground, so that it looks like he has come out of the audience. The movie also has a sense of humor, as shown by the use of the paddleball man in front of the wax museum who whacks the toy into the audience. The movie is also known as Vincent Price's first foray into horror, for which he is now best remembered.

Turner Classic Movies review Lang Thompson and Jeff Stafford

Even though this movie was originally shown in theatres in 3-D with special glasses provided, we are airing the "flat" version.

The year was 1953. The relatively new medium of television had the big motion picture studios scared. How were they going to entice viewers away from the comfort of their living rooms and back into movie theaters? It was going to take a gimmick.

In late 1952, a crude and cheaply made safari adventure called Bwana Devil showcased a new filming technique called 3-D that required special glasses for viewers. A few months later, the honchos over at Warner Brothers decided that they were not only going to make a big-budget 3-D flick, but they were also going to introduce the world to WarnerPhonic Audio, a primitive precursor of Surround Sound. The result of this savvy move was House of Wax (1953).

Directed by Hungarian-born Andre de Toth, House of Wax is actually a remake of Warner's 1933 flick The Mystery of the Wax Museum (interestingly enough, also directed by a Hungarian, Michael Curtiz). De Toth, better known as Mr. Veronica Lake (he was married for eight years to the blonde actress), was an unusual directorial choice because he only had one eye. This handicap made it virtually impossible for de Toth to actually see the 3-D process he was creating but, like other gifted but visually impaired filmmakers of his era (Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang, etc.), his complete understanding of the medium resulted in one of the most effective 3-D films ever made. At the time, though, studio head Jack Warner warned de Toth not to wear his eye patch on the set; he didn't want the director or House of Wax to be the butt of jokes in Hollywood.

The by-now familiar plot of House of Wax, which owes more than a nod to The Phantom of the Opera, goes something like this: sensitive sculptor lovingly creates historical figures out of wax, which he displays in his New York-based wax museum. Sculptor's greedy business partner wants to burn down said museum. Fight follows, fire breaks out. Assuming that sensitive sculptor is dead, greedy partner collects insurance money. But sensitive sculptor isn't dead! Instead he's hideously disfigured and more than a little loony. Wacko sculptor goes on killing spree, fonduing the bodies of his victims in boiling wax and using them as exhibits in his new museum. Will the police catch the fiend before he kills again? Will Scott Andrews (Paul Picerni) rescue Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) from becoming the next wax attraction - Marie Antoinette? Will the busker with the paddleball ever work in Hollywood again?

Vincent Price, who had only dabbled briefly in the horror genre before this film, plays Professor Henry Jarrod and the role marked a major turning point in his career; afterwards, he found steady work in the movies playing a variety of homicidal maniacs and cursed aristocrats. In The Horror People by John Brosnan, Price admitted that House of Wax was "very demanding as I had to get to the studio every morning at 5:30 a.m. to put that makeup on. It took three hours to put on and it was agony, absolute agony." He also added that the film "was made with two enormous cameras photographing in a mirror, so that you could get two tracks, and because of the unwieldy camera I had to do my own stunts. They couldn't do a close-up of me and then cut to a double. The most difficult stunt was at the beginning when the fire starts in the museum, and I run under this balcony that's in flames just before it falls. I actually did that. I worked it out with a stuntman. Anything on the floor that I might trip over or slide on was moved away and we figured out a course for me to take around these burning figures so that I could get into a tiny closet when this 3,000 lbs of burning balcony fell. It was scary."

In addition to Price, House of Wax co-stars Phyllis Kirk, who went on to play Nora Charles in the hit TV series The Thin Man (1957-59), and Frank Lovejoy, in the role of Lieutenant Tom Brennan. Lovejoy made a career out of playing no-nonsense authority figures in films like I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951) and Retreat, Hell! (1952). Also look for Carolyn Jones (aka Morticia Addams of TV's The Addams Family, 1964-66) in a brief but memorable performance as both blonde victim Cathy Gray and wax centerfold Joan d'Arc. And Igor, Professor Jarrod's Neanderthal deaf mute assistant, is none other than Charles Buchinsky. Don't recognize the name? Well, Buchinsky later went on to star in a slew of '70s action hero roles like Death Wish (1974), under the name Charles Bronson.

Today, the then-innovative recording techniques of House of Wax are all but lost on the television screen. As for the 3-D technology? Well, without the benefit of cheap Polaroid glasses, today's audiences won't see what the fuss was all about. Yet, even without the special glasses, viewers will notice camera set-ups where images are thrust toward the screen, such as the wild fight scene in the museum at the beginning which climaxes with a fiery wax meltdown. (This sequence obviously inspired the makers of The Devil's Rain, 1975.) There's also a completely random and overly long paddleball gag. And, of course, what would any period horror movie be without an extended cancan sequence? While the high-kicking chorus line looks dazzling in Technicolor and 3-D, it also brings the plot to a screeching halt. But, House of Wax is great fun, nonetheless. As the film's worldly Scott Andrews says to the prim Sue Allen, "You can't get entertainment like this in Provincetown."

eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]

Cinefantastique Online Steve Biodrowski, also seen here: Hollywood Gothique

DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review

CultureCartel.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [3/5]

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

FilmFanatic.org

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review

HorrorTalk Alien Redrum with plenty of photos

Eccentric Cinema Lyle Horowitz

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]

SEVERE SINEMA reviews

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also reviewing MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM

Variety review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

CRIME WAVE A- 93

USA (73 mi) 1954

Fast-paced, hard-edged crime caper, a thriller noir featuring tough-as-nails Sterling Hayden as a cop on the case who wants to use ex-felons as stool pigeons, a model for CHINATOWN or LA CONFIDENTIAL in the realism and the locations, which features an all-too-jaded LA landscape, also with Charles Buchinsky (aka Charles Bronson).

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

Andre de Toth's 1954 noir is gritty, powerful, and economically told. Sterling Hayden plays a sour, toothpick-chewing LA cop on the trail of an ex-con (a rare dramatic role by dancer Gene Nelson) who's forced to participate in a bank robbery. Among the secondary cast are Crane Wilbur, Brian Foy, Phyllis Kirk, and Charles Buchinsky (later known as Charles Bronson). 74 min.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

His plans for a straight-and-narrow life undone by three escaped convicts (including Charles Bronson, né Charles Buchinsky) who appear on his doorstep in need of a hideout, ex-con Steve Lacy (Gene Nelson) finds himself at the center of a tug-of-war between his former criminal compadres and Sterling Hayden’s determined detective in André De Toth’s neorealist noir gem Crime Wave (aka The City is Dark). The film’s highlight arrives early, during a scintillating tableau of police station plaintiffs and potential crooks that hints at the titular illicit flood, though de Toth’s no-nonsense direction also gives the subsequent action – in which Lacey is roped into his pals’ plans for a bank heist and airplane getaway to Mexico – a hard-boiled poeticism. Regardless of its mildly cynical edge, the upbeat ending doesn’t completely agree with the film’s preceding pessimistic outlook on the viability of positive transformation (Lacey seemingly doomed by his desire to change his stripes). Such a false final note, however, isn’t enough to sully Hayden’s vigorous turn as a no-nonsense cop, nor De Toth’s heart-pounding portrait of moral confliction.

Crime Wave Eric Henderson from Slant magazine

Something like a god looks down over Los Angeles by night, and though he breathes out so much authority there's not enough wind left to raise his voice, he's also betrayed by the pack of toothpicks he smokes every shift. Ink-eyed Sterling Hayden is that god in the form of an seemingly unflappable police detective in André De Toth's Crime Wave, a relentlessly unforced potboiler that gazes at noir through the looking glass. (Or should that be through the glass ceiling?) Hayden's crime-fighting battle plan consists largely of targeting casual miscreants, those most likely to be extorted by bigger, burlier criminals. To track a trio of jailbreak hooligans, Hayden puts the squeeze on a newlywed ex-con who, as luck would have it, actually is being blackmailed by the escaped convicts. De Toth showcases the magnitude of Hayden's pool of potential stoolies in one showstopping traveling shot down a line of interrogation desks, each one a passion play in miniature. Not that Hayden, in his hot pursuit, takes note. If the maxim "crime doesn't pay" is noir's given, then Crime Wave spins it to answer "but virtue barely scrapes up a living wage."

Crime Wave (André de Toth, 1954) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled

A seventy-three minute morality litmus test in the form of a crime caper haiku, Crime Wave’s first and last “lines” are extraordinarily terse and clipped, and the more elongated middle “line” reveals a new shade with each carefully considered syllable. That is to say, the film’s framing story involves Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson), an ex-con trying to maintain his lower-middle class, happily married, one-bedroom flat paradise. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get much help from a trio of prison buds who just busted out of the clink with the blueprints for their ten-years-in-the-making bank heist. Key increments in their titular wave of iniquitous ingenuity include murdering gas station chubbers wanton, bribing a nebbish veterinarian (who’s extremely pervious to the fuzz) to look after their battle scars, and holding Lacey and his private, problem-solver wife hostage so that the certified pilot will fly them across the border after their stick-up. (Because apparently the police would never expect it, aside from the fact that they put the pressure on flyboy Lacey before the con trio even arrive at his grey apartment.) That’s the nutgraph, but one of the film’s longest and most memorable shots shows the P.O.V. of investigative officer Sterling Hayden as he walks down a line of desks providing the backdrop for jittery 1 a.m. interrogations, beginning with an apologetic married couple trying to explain off a moment of seemingly pre-coital domestic abuse and winding up with a teary blonde of the night, which widens out the story’s barely-there noir premise into what is almost Italian neorealism. Like the shot of the warehouse filled with pawned sheets in The Bicycle Thief, it momentarily widens out the scope of the story to suggest that Lacey’s plight is but one of many, that there are tons of relatively innocent people who are (depending on your view) either the police force’s bitches or the only hope for an overwhelming wave of crime. This is the first film by André de Toth I’ve seen, so I can’t yet parse what some of his signature concerns might be. (Of course, there are no doubt some auteurists who would recommend watching films by de Toth while covering one eye with your hand.) Anyway, the director’s zero-flab momentum centralizes the film’s acting to an intimate extent, and the pert casting decisions extend well beyond the expected bulldog professionalism of Sterling Hayden (who gets a winning Sterling Hayden® digression when he jabbers on about having to quit smoking and his swift switch to toothpicks). Protagonistic Nelson exudes an appropriately albino translucence that shoulders the burden of explaining just why three beef-eating thugs would choose a reformed Saint as their mark. And Charles Buchinsky (soon Bronson) puts in an early beefcake appearance here, picking his caps with a page ripped from the Stanley Kowalski method manual.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeremy Arnold

Director Andre De Toth once said, "I saw Crime Wave (1954) as a snake sliding through the night; a small snake with saliva, wanting to swallow big things as it slithers through the gutter of the night of crime... Since the day I started to make pictures, I wanted to shoot one like Crime Wave... I wanted the viewer not only to eavesdrop on life, but to live it as it was happening. There is a big difference, in emotional involvement, between watching from the safety of the shore a man swept away by a raging torrent, and being in that torrent."

Crime Wave, now available as one of the ten titles in Warner Home Entertainment's new Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4, is tough, gritty and first-rate, largely because of De Toth's ability to achieve the realistic effect he described. He shot the picture in 13 days entirely on L.A. locations (mostly the Glendale area), using natural light and on-location sound wherever possible. There's even some handheld camerawork thrown in, which feels visceral instead of showy. For one scene, De Toth efficiently uses only a telephone and two hands (along with off-screen voices) to convey the action. There is not one ounce of fat in the finished product.

The movie tells a simple story. A gang of hoodlums holds up a gas station one dark night, but things go awry and a shootout leaves a cop dead and one bad guy (Nedrick Young) wounded. Young splits from his cohorts and finds his way to the nearby apartment of Gene Nelson, a parolee and old prison-buddy who is now married to Phyllis Kirk and trying to lead a straight-arrow life. Of course, this being a film noir, Nelson finds himself getting sucked into the lives of his shady friends against his wishes. Eventually he is wanted for murder and chased through the city by police detective Sterling Hayden, in one of his best, most scowling performances.

Standard stuff this may be, but De Toth really elevates it into something special. The locations add hugely to the yarn's immediacy. For a climactic sequence in a Bank of America branch, De Toth got permission to shoot in a real one for one night only, and he made the most of it. The opening gas station shootout, filmed in downtown L.A., is straightforward and shocking - superbly staged in every way. Despite its quick shooting schedule, Crime Wave looks quite beautiful, with deep blacks, crisp shadows and carefully framed compositions well-served by the fine DVD transfer. De Toth's cinematographer was the ace Bert Glennon, whose credits also included Rio Grande (1950), They Died With Their Boots On (1941), Stagecoach (1939), Blonde Venus (1932) and many other all-time classics.

Toothpick-chewing Sterling Hayden may be terrific in Crime Wave, but Nelson and Kirk also turn in excellent, sensitive performances, and Charles Bronson (billed as Charles Buchinsky) steals his scenes as one of the bad guys. Tim Carey, perhaps the best-ever player of movie psychos, plays one here, as another of the crooks. The aforementioned Nedrick Young was also a screenwriter who happens to have written the script for the other film noir sharing this disc: Decoy (1946). Young was a fine writer whose career was badly affected when he was blacklisted. Eddie Muller, on his commentary track, fills in the details and provides his usual interesting points on this film. Joining in the conversation is a jokey James Ellroy; between the two of them, they're able to identify just about all the locations used in Crime Wave - no small feat! Also on the disc is a trailer and a brief featurette including filmmakers, critics, and De Toth himself (from an archival interview) discussing the film.

Film Noir of the Week Steve-O

The Films of André de Toth - by Michael E. Grost

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson] brief B-Noir reviews

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Viennale '08 capsules

not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston) capsule review

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 2

DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 2

DVD Verdict [Rob Lineberger] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 2

HorrorDVDs.com [Rhett Miller] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 2

The New York Times review H.H.T.

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze, Film Noir Classic Collection, 5 discs, Ten Films

HIDDEN FEAR

USA (80 mi) 1957

User reviews from imdb Author: GUENOT PHILIPPE (philippe.guenot@dbmail.com) from France

I haver never seen an American film noir shot in Danemark before. That's really the first time.

The story itself offers no great surprises. Payne plays an American cop who tries to clear his sister of a murder charge. He has to fight against counterfeiters. I must admit that we have already seen this before, a thousand times. Especially Payne who is as hard boiled as ever.

But it's a tough thriller, no boring at all with, at the end, a good chase through the country side around Copenhagen.

A rare Andre de Toth movie that deserves to be discovered.

Hidden Fear (1957) Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary

Andre De Toth’s Hidden Fear (1957) is poised between two styles, and enacts the transition between them over the course of the movie’s running time. The first style is the Euro-moody postwar thriller in the vein of The Third Man and Mr. Arkadin, which dominates the first two-thirds of the film; the second style is the Sixties action thriller, which is prefigured in the last third, especially with an extended multi-vehicle chase sequence (car / motorcycle / helicopter / boat).

Hidden Fear was a location shoot in Copenhagen, using Danish technicians and many Danish actors. John Payne plays detective Mike Brent, whose sister Susan has been hanging out with a seedy crowd in Europe and gotten herself pinned with a murder rap. Mike is here to help, but also harbors quite a bit of anger against his ne’er-do-well sibling, and in one memorable scene, actually roughs her up (“You tramp!”). There surely was a lot of violence against women in Fifties crime films, wasn’t there? The mood of these later noirs is decidedly undecorous, and their protagonists are angry, embittered men.

Mike Brent is no exception. “Brennt” is “burns” in German, a language well-known to Danes, and Payne, his career on the wane – this was his last feature film until 1968 – expresses plenty of fiery rage, when he is not merely grim. Payne was 44 when Hidden Fear was made, about to put his time in on one of the ubiquitous TV Westerns of the era, The Restless Gun. He is quite physically imposing; at 6’2”, he towers over his European co-stars, and De Toth often puts him dead center in the frame, striding purposefully in his sharp-cut, shoulder-padded suits. Sneering and potentially lethal, he is a precursor to Dirty Harry.

The local atmosphere in the night scenes is rather fun, with the typically shadowy streets and alleys, and flavorful musical accompaniment (is that an accordion I hear?). But the noirish flourishes are mostly decorative. We do get a tour of the Danish bar scene, including one nightspot with a revolving indoor carousel. We learn, no surprise, that Danish girls like American men, and American men like Danish girls. Had it been made a decade later, the film would have pushed that angle considerably harder!

The plot, such as it is, involves a double-crossing counterfeiting ring led by Alexander Knox and Conrad Nagel. Their scheming is not of much consequence except to set up the cat-and-mouse antics of the film’s final section. It must be admitted that the chase is nicely done, with cool POV and helicopter shots, and a nifty explosion. James Bond beckons.

POSTSCRIPT: Fellow Blackboarder Dan in the MW pointed out that John Payne was actually one of the first actors to take an interest in playing James Bond; he held an option on the novel Moonraker in the mid-Fifties, although nothing came of it. The Payne on display in Hidden Fear would have made a quite credible Americanized Bond, with the anger turned down and the charm turned up.

The very first on-screen Bond was another American, Barry Nelson, in an hour-long adaptation of Casino Royale that aired on the television anthology series Climax! on October 21, 1954.

Hidden Fear Trailer, Reviews and Schedule for Hidden Fear ... TV Guide

DAY OF THE OUTLAW B+ 92

USA (92 mi) 1959

You won't find much mercy anywhere in Wyoming. —Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan)

A spared down, low budget, mercilessly bleak, Black and White American “B” western from the late 50’s, adapted from a Lee E. Wells novel, the last western made by this director known for his grim psychological dramas, this one defined by the tough as nails intractability of the lead characters, none of whom can stand up to the barren ruggedness of the natural outdoor landscape, which kicks human butt in this movie. Shot on location in the Oregon Cascades during the winter, featuring the visibly identifiable Three Sisters Mountains as well as Mt. Bachelor, a lone peak that stands alone. When one thinks of winter movies set in the snow, THE THING (1951) and again in (1982), DR. ZHIVAGO (1965), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), QUINTET (1979), THE SHINING (1980), Fargo (1996), THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997), and WINTER SLEEPERS (1997) come to mind, most all shot in color, but this movie is set at the end of the road, where “the trail ends in this town. There's no place to go but back.” Of course, in this film, back is not an option. One must defy death.

Taking place in a small isolated settlement of only twenty people in Wyoming, the ire of cattle rancher Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) is raised when farmers begin to place barbed wire fences around their property, which violates the original credo of the free and expansive American West. This is no small disagreement, as men’s livelihoods are at stake, where everything depends on protecting what’s theirs, and if neither side backs down, something’s got to give. Femme fatale Tina Louise as Helen Crane is married to one of those farmers, but as women are scarce in this neck of the woods, she’d been carrying on an affair with Starrett before she married her husband. Yet when a shootout looms, she’s willing to throw herself at Starrett if it means he’ll spare her husband’s life. Not so easy. This is the West where men are used to having their way and not letting anyone interfere, especially a “pig-belly farmer.” Just as a bottle is about to drop off a bar spelling the sign for the bullets to fly, they are quickly interrupted by a rag tag group of cutthroat outlaws who grab the men’s guns and immediately take over the town in a psychologically unsettling siege, completely shifting the balance of power.

Led by Burl Ives as deserting Army Captain Jack Bruhn, carrying sacks of stolen gold, they are just ahead of the tracking cavalry but need to ride out the night in a safe and warm place, where Bruhn needs a bullet extracted from his chest, but despite his men’s preference for women and whisky, Bruhn tells the local folk to hide their liquor and protect their women, as both are hands off to his men, claiming he needs them all sober when they leave at dawn. With his men itching to get what they want, knowing there’s a long ride ahead, they continually press the boundaries and tempt fate. Bruhn always seems to magically appear just as his men are about to stray, bullying them into backing off. But they do convince him that there’d be no harm if he’d allow a social dance with the town’s four women. “We only want to borrow them - - we'll give them back.” Diametrically opposite to the grace and sweep of most dance sequences, think of the opulence of Max Ophuls or the legendary grandeur of Visconti’s THE LEOPARD (1963), this one is painfully difficult to watch, as the endless barroom piano music never ceases, growing more and more physically aggressive as the men try to catch a kiss as the women continually back away in disgust. This is as raw and primitive as it gets, but in some strange and delirious way an antecedent to Béla Tarr’s hypnotic but mind numbingly repetitious dance in SÁTÁNTANGO (1994).

When morning comes, Bruhn is barely alive, but he’s too stubborn to recognize it, commandeering Starrett to lead them safely through the mountains, though the snow has made them completely impassable at this time of year, a fact Bruhn comes to realize but withholds from his men, but that doesn’t stop them from what feels like a suicide march, telling Starrett: “I guess every fool has his reason.” If Bruhn’s deteriorating condition is not enough, the elements have turned so hostile, where frozen breath can be seen coming from both the men and their horses, with snow up to their bellies, completely covering the landscape, the horses can barely find a way to take one step after another, yet they’re forced to push on. Rarely are animals seen exerting themselves in this level of difficulty where there are no CGI special effects, they are simply staggering to keep their feet in the brutally harsh conditions. Beautifully shot by Russell Harlan, knowing what’s inevitable only adds to the pounding psychological dread of this death march, as the men soon start to turn on one another in an insatiable display of greed and avarice, where the music by Alexander Courage is heavy handed and amped up to the max. Imprisoned by the snow around them, it’s apparent there is no escape, as first horses and then men do start to die in the blistering winter cold where the wind is too ferocious to even light a fire. It’s telling that in this exceedingly concise rendering, there are no shots of the cavalry, and by the end, no one is pointing a gun at these men’s heads, yet they feel a compulsive desire to follow this mythical trail to that elusive freedom that never arrives, to make that last great escape. Instead they ride into their own trap. The story isn’t entirely bleak, as de Toth even adds an element of dark humor to show the demise of one of the last holdouts. By the end, however, none of the original issues that were worth dying for at the time hardly seem to matter any more.

Cine-File Chicago Patrick Friel

This is, simply, one of the greatest films ever. A towering masterpiece of severe landscapes, existential dread, and psychic pain. A beautiful, harsh, poetic western that rips at your gut and dazzles the eye with its formal brilliance. My hyperbole is warranted. Do Not Miss!

Wednesday 5/4: “Day of the Outlaw” at the Portage Theater Julian Antos

Burl Ives rides into a snowy, isolated town (yeah, just like in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, but he ain’t so jolly here) in the far West as the leader of a murderous renegade cavalry unit, threatening the lives of Robert Ryan and Tina Louise until they agree to lead him out of the town. While it’s claustrophobic tension and bouts of absurdist violence peg it as a quintessential western noir of the 1950s, the Monthly Film Bulletin in England rightly called Day of the Outlaw a western “in the best William S. Hart tradition,” too. It may be one of the bleakest films ever made, with wintry landscapes recalling Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall and a messy sense of hopelessness that predicts Heaven’s Gate, the Western to end all Westerns.

Day of the Outlaw | Chicago Reader Fred Camper

Arguably Andre de Toth's greatest film, this 1959 western combines a hostage situation with a bleak, snowbound terrain to produce a gripping vision of hopeless entrapment. Robert Ryan stars as a rancher who's about to start a gunfight over land when a motley gang of outlaws led by Burl Ives ride in and take over the town. Because it's at the end of the trail, the outlaws become "prisoners of a white silence," in de Toth's words: isolated, surrounded by snow, they're about to run wild with the townswomen when Ryan leads them on a false escape route through the mountains. Their final ride is one of the most despairing visions in all cinema: the turning course followed by the men seems to twist back on itself, and the stark black-and-white background of rock and snow forms a closed, lifeless world excluding all human warmth.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

This is an excellent western by Andre de Toth. It is mainly remembered for its final thirty minutes, an extraordinary ride in the snow where the director makes the best of black and white pictures while he's filming all the tired horses ...Hell freezes over.

But the first hour is absorbing as well with its depiction of an one-horse town lost in the snow,a dead end where one never really knows which ones are prisoners and which ones are guards. The "ball," during which the four women are really having a bad time (particularly Tina Louise) is one of the most violent scenes ever filmed in a western. And all they are doing is dancing. It has to be seen to be believed! Robert Ryan is, as always, excellent, as a tired blasé man who just wants to live in peace.

Metroactive.com [Michael S. Gant]

André De Toth's black-and-white 1959 Western is as stripped down, spare and unsparing as Robert Ryan's powerfully contained performance. Ryan plays Blaise Starrett, a Wyoming cattle rancher warring with the local "pig farmers" who want to fence in his grazing land. Starrett's moral brief for wide open spaces founders on the fact that he's also been trying to steal the wife (Tina Louise) of one of the farmers. The bickering looks petty when a gang of outlaws arrive. Leader Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives) is a decent defrocked military man running from his guilty conscience about the Mormon massacre of 1857. His men, however, look upon the citizenry, especially the women, as a chance for some harsh R&R. As Bruhn explains with pulp-fiction relish: "Pace, he derives pleasure out of hurting people; Tex, rile him and you're going to hear some screaming in this town today." After many tense moments, Starrett mans up and leads the bad guys away on the ruse that he knows a secret passage through the mountains. The interiors have the flatness of a TV Western of the period, but whenever the action moves outside, veteran cinematographer Russell Harlan takes full advantage of the spectacular location work somewhere in the high country. A merciless snowfall covers the ground in this small slapdash burg in the shadow of some majestic peaks. The last section shows the men's horses frantically plunging forward through thick drifts; finally, the bitter cold takes a terrible toll as the outlaws, victims of their insatiable greed, turn on each other. De Toth, a Hungarian immigrant, was an unsung, versatile director. He made everything from House of Wax with Vincent Price to the superior film noirs Pitfall and Crime Wave to Westerns (Man in the Saddle) to Western noirs (Ramrod).

Read TCM's article on Day of the Outlaw Brian Cady

Day of the Outlaw (1959) is one of those little-known gems that hard-core movie fans love to discover. At a time when television and movie studios were grinding out one generic Western after another, Day of the Outlaw added twists that made it unique.

Robert Ryan stars as Blaise Starrett, hard, bitter and remote as only Ryan could play him. A cattleman, he's out to settle scores with Hal Crane (Alan Marshal), head of a small town of settlers putting out barbed wire and starting farms. Complicating the rivalry is the fact that Starrett was once the lover of Crane's young wife (Tina Louise). On the surface, it's rather standard fare for a fifties Western but the first twist comes from the locale. The action is set in Wyoming in the middle of winter. No dusty, sun baked streets here, just white snow and patches of ice lending a deathly quiet and slowing all movement to a slog.

The second twist comes just as Starrett and Crane square off for their big showdown. Before the two men can draw their guns, a gang of outlaws invade the town, collecting all the guns and holding everyone hostage. The gang's leader, renegade Union officer Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), is the only one keeping the gang from drinking all the whiskey and taking the town's women as their prizes. Unfortunately, he may be dying from a gunshot wound. Now the antagonistic cattleman and farmer, along with Bruhn, have to form new alliances to keep disaster at bay. However, it is the freezing cold outside that is actually sealing their fate.

Director Andre De Toth was a Hungarian director who fled to the United States during World War II and is probably best known for having directed the most famous 3-D film, House of Wax (1953), despite being blind in one eye. In Anthony Slide's 1996 book De Toth on De Toth, the director recalled the making of Day of the Outlaw:

"[The producers] didn't understand where I was heading - a sphere I had been exploring for some time: is it worse being the jailer, instead of the prisoner? Is it worse being incarcerated by white snow in white silence, or by the blankness of black silence? Which of the human flock would fall apart first under the tightening band of their communal deep freeze?

"I wanted the town to be built and ready to shoot three, four months before the start date. I wanted the weather, the rain and snow to age the buildings, not painters' spray and cotton wool for snow on the roofs. The weather and the natural snow were cheaper than studio material and labor.

"I built a small Western town in my backyard, Oregon. But when they built it, they ignored the compass headings I had given them for the layout of the streets and they built the town in the wrong direction. Shooting it as it was built would've added additional weeks to the shooting, so I ordered the damned joint to be rebuilt. UA and Bob Ryan understood the short days of winter shooting, the saving it entailed using minimal artificial lights and the quality it gained. I didn't want the virgin snow to be defiled by the tracks of the poor electricians dragging cables and lamps on overtime."

De Toth also had to fight the producers to shoot the movie in black-and-white: "It was a story of tension and fear, survival in a prison of snow. Had I shot it in color, the green pine trees covered with snow, the soft glow of candles, the dancing tongues of flames in the fireplaces would have radiated warmth and safety and the joy of peace on earth. A 'Merry Christmas' card from fairy-tale land."

The director's meticulous care created one of the great Westerns of the Fifties, constantly surprising and creating a bone-deep chill that makes Day of the Outlaw memorable long after so many of the other hastily-made Westerns of that time have been forgotten.

User reviews from imdb Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

"Now listen," says Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), renegade former captain in the U. S. Army, to the frightened men and women of Bitters, population about 20, four of them women. It's deep winter and Bruhn and his men have just barged into the saloon as rancher Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) was about to gun down farmer Hal Crane. "Do as you're told and you can go about your business just like we're not here, almost. But we are here so it's best you know with what you're dealing. Pace here gets pleasure out of hurting people. Tex, rile him and you're going to hear some screaming in this town today. Denver, half Cheyenne. Him hate white man. He doesn't feel half so badly about white women. Vause, bones covered with dirty skin but even half drunk he's the fastest draw in Wyoming Territory. And Shorty. We soldiered together. The young fella, well, he's a fresh recruit but he's learning fast."

For the rest of the day and through the night Bruhn by force of will is going to control his motley, dangerous gang. He'll deny them liquor, deny them the town's women, and undergo an excruciating operation by the town vet to extract a bullet from a lung. They're on the run with $40,000 in gold in their saddlebags. The U.S. Cavalry is on their trail. Bruhn is a complex man with an odd sense of honor. He was responsible for a massacre by soldiers under his command. His justice is ruthless. His authority is complete...as long as he lives. Right now he is the only one capable of keeping his gang of killers from tearing up Bitters by its roots.

And that includes Blaise Starrett, an angry rancher...angry at being rejected by Hal Crane's wife, Helen (Tina Louise), angry with Crane for the barbed wire that Crane will be putting up next to his land, angry at the farmers moving into the town and the territory that he cleaned up and made safe. That showdown with Crane that Bruhn interrupted would have been no more than murder. Crane wore a gun but couldn't use it well, and Starrett was purposely goading him. And in this complex, austere western both Starrett and Bruhn are going to find in themselves a capacity for surprising decisions. For Starrett, it will mean the realization that killing Crane won't solve anything, the realization that Helen Crane will not leave her husband for him, and the realization that the only one capable of outfoxing Bruhn is Starrett, himself...by leading Bruhn and his killers through a way out of town in the deep winter that will most likely kill them all. For Bruhn, he survives the operation. He's given a little morphine. He's back on his feet...and he's starting to cough. Let's just say Bruhn knows what's going to happen

All the while in this achingly cold western, snow is on the ground and the weather is frigid. When Starrett leads the gang out of town there is freezing white mist in the air and the snow is nearly up to the horses' bellies. The last 30 minutes of the movie are exhausting, with the horses struggling through the deep snow, with the wind blowing too hard to start a fire, and with men dying.

It's no spoiler to say that Blaise Starrett survives. It might be a spoiler to say that while he may no longer be the angry man we met at the start of the movie, he'll probably be just as lonely.

You could flip a coin to decide who holds this movie together more impressively, Robert Ryan or Burl Ives. Ryan brings all his impressive presence to his role. Ives, however, by force of acting and authenticity, makes his ability to impose his will on this gang believable. It's a first-rate performance. But, oh, if only this movie could have been made without the women. Two of the four actresses can't act, and those two are ones the story lingers on. Tina Louise as Helen Crane is completely out of her skill range. Her lack of acting ability severely undercuts the notion that a man like Blaise Starrett, especially when played by such a fine actor as Ryan, would ever carry a torch for her. Tina Louise's Helen Crane is too dull to lust after. And while all the men look like they seldom see a bar of soap more often than once a week (and in the case of Bruhn's gang, once a month, maybe), all the women look as clean and groomed as if they'd stepped out of a Sears Roebuck catalogue. Some of their tidy polish gets rubbed off, however, at one of the most ominous dances in a western. Bruhn has decided that the women will dance with his men to lower their resentment over being denied whiskey and assault. Bruhn keeps control during the dance, but these leering, groping villains take advantage of the four women every chance they get, and the women dare not do anything about it. It's a nasty, uncomfortable, well-staged scene.

Day of the Outlaw is a corny title, but even with its flaws the movie is engrossing. I almost put on a sweater while I watched it. It's one of the bleakest, coldest looking movies I've ever seen.

Harsh Master | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Fred Camper

Posts from the Internet Film Discussion Group, a_film_by Fred Camper, July 7, 2004

DVD Savant Review: Day of the Outlaw Glenn Erickson

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The Best Movie I Saw Last Month: Day of the Outlaw Brandon Nowalk from But What She Said

Deja View Becky

Day Of The Outlaw (1959)/Lost film | Oregon Movies, A to Z

The Films of André de Toth [Michael E. Grost]

Swimming to Casablanca

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

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User reviews from imdb Author: rockbroker (rock.broker@gmail.com) from Portland, OR

User reviews from imdb Author: AKA_Paul_Murphy from Scotland

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: westerner357 from U.S.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: JohnRouseMerriottChard from United Kingdom

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

"Deschutes & Ochoco National Forests - Mt. Bachelor Volcanic Chain"

PLAY DIRTY B 83

Great Britain (118 mi) 1968 ‘Scope

WWII desert war drama opens with a jeep speeding through the desert sands to the music of Lili Marlene, featuring lots of camp humor in the choice of music, and interesting desert locations where the absence of morality inside all of us is the ultimate desert experience where “none shall escape,” a DIRTY DOZEN of sorts revealing the price you pay for evil and deception - - terrific photography.

Time Out review

A workmanlike rip-off of The Dirty Dozen, with Caine leading a group of ex-criminals in an attack on a German supply dump in North Africa during WWII. The script, by Lotte Colin and a certain Melvyn Bragg, aims for grand anti-war rhetoric. De Toth keeps the action going well, and the end is great - forgetting that they are wearing German uniforms, our surviving lads break cover to take a bow and get mown down by friendly fire. Ironic, huh?

Chicago Reader (Fred Camper) capsule review

This 1968 desert caper, the last film directed by veteran Andre de Toth, ranks among his best work. An inexperienced World War II captain (Michael Caine) leads a sub-Dirty Dozen crew on a mission behind German lines in North Africa; from the beginning the squad's superior officers are ready to betray them, and they return the favor. Tautly shot and edited, Play Dirty carries to a poetic extreme the betrayal theme that haunts de Toth's strongest films. The endless rock and sand traversed by the crew are a metaphoric treadmill, and small moments of mastery yield only more waste. Though de Toth's camera moves with his characters, zooming in and out of the landscape almost continuously, the film's sense of space never really changes much. From a close pan following a jeep, the camera pulls back to reveal a huge cliff, and the initial sense of space opening up is quickly subsumed by the film's larger continuum: land and sky that seem to consort with the human treachery. 117 min.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeremy Arnold

"War is a criminal enterprise. I fight it with criminals." - Col. Masters (Nigel Green), in Play Dirty

Everyone plays dirty in Play Dirty (1969) - the characters, the screenwriters, and the director, too. "Forget the medals, Throw away the rule book," ordered the posters, and sure enough, that command applies not just to the men on screen but to the audience watching. The result is one of the great under-known combat pictures, one which no less than Martin Scorsese has called a guilty pleasure.

Right off the bat, Play Dirty tells us things will be different. A German-uniformed man (Nigel Davenport) drives a jeep across a rickety desert landscape with a dead body in the passenger seat. A German song, "Lilli Marlene," blares from his radio. As he approaches a checkpoint, he switches his German hat for a British one and changes the music to "You Are My Sunshine." It's a British checkpoint and the man responds to the soldiers suprisingly sarcastically, though he is clearly British and is let through... Very quickly, then, what we think we know to be the case is undermined by what actually happens, and we learn not to believe or trust everything we see - a quality which will keep us on edge throughout the entire movie and will ultimately convey much of the film's meaning.

Because Play Dirty deals with a group of fighting men who are all despicable former criminals and convicts, the movie was and still is often compared to The Dirty Dozen (1967). It's an unfair comparison; the two pictures are more different than similar. Not only does Play Dirty not develop the convicts' characters anywhere near as much as The Dirty Dozen, but it conveys a degree of cynicism and nastiness that The Dirty Dozen never really tries to approach. Further, as film historian Jeanine Basinger has pointed out, the men in Play Dirty never come together to form a cohesive group, instead remaining unsympathetic loners. More generally, The Dirty Dozen unspools as a fairly traditional, albeit superb, Hollywood action flick, while Play Dirty is far more edgy and disturbing, right on through to its final frames.

Play Dirty gives us the traditional elements of a WWII combat movie - hero, group, military objective - but turns all three upside down in a big way. The story, possibly inspired by the real-life Popski's Private Army (a British reconnaissance unit in northern Africa during WWII), has the underqualified Capt. Douglas (Michael Caine) being plucked from his cushy job to lead a unit deep behind enemy lines to blow up a Nazi fuel depot. The group is made up of thoroughly amoral, vile men operating outside of the mainstream military. They look to their own Capt. Leech (Nigel Davenport, outstanding in a role originally meant for Richard Harris) as their true leader, and Davenport and Caine spend the film at odds over power until Caine gradually succumbs to the group's "dirty" tactics and is accepted. The objective [SPOILER ALERT!] turns out to be a fake, a decoy, until the men decide for themselves to find and destroy the real one. What they don't know, however, is that their superiors back at base have decided that the real objective is now no longer an objective at all, and the tables are now turned against the group in a deeply cynical way.

The characters in Play Dirty act out of greed or selfishness instead of national pride or military correctness. The iconography of military uniforms is subverted, too; several times in the movie, characters wear the uniforms of the enemy, which Jeanine Basinger has written "is considered a despicable thing to do" in war and war movies. Even a harrowing attempted-gang-rape sequence, astonishingly enough, is successfully capped by a humorous, ironic - and thus totally unexpected - image. All these and more are examples of a movie that twists, subverts, and comments upon what we all already know from countless other war movies - and it never loses its entertainment value in the process.

Director Andre de Toth would have argued with the word "entertainment." Asked about Play Dirty's comparison to The Dirty Dozen, he said, "The Dirty Dozen was a good and entertaining motion picture. How could it be compared to Play Dirty, a bitter slice of real life and certainly not entertainment? I wanted to rub our noses in the mess we have created and how we shy away from our responsibility to clean it up. I showed what I wanted, the naked truth, the truth of life and war. I wanted to disturb, to open closed eyes and scramble brains, hoping they'll think."

Think we do, even as we enjoy one fantastic scene after another. Two memorable examples: a drawn-out affair in which jeeps are hauled up a steep cliff by means of pulleys and cables, and a well-edited burial montage which, according to de Toth, was originally scored with "the happy voice of a children's choir. The harsh contrast to the macabre scene disturbed [the producers] so much that after I delivered what I thought was the finished picture, the children's voices were taken out the day before the release prints were ordered. Nothing I could do."

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

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Britmovie

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Variety review

de Van, Marina

IN MY SKIN (Dans ma peau) B+ 91

France  (93 mi)  2002

Not since Norman Bates in PSYCHO has someone taken such a passionate interest in the choice of cutlery.  I am admittedly squeamish when it comes to screen horror, but that's not how I viewed this film, which not only deals with self- mutilation, but self-cannibalism as well.  There is a truly loopy dinner sequence where her arm turns into the arm of DR. STRANGELOVE, as it seems to have a mind all of its own.  The degree of excess is mind-boggling, and the young woman is completely oblivious that there's anything amiss, as it produces a kind of calmness in her life that eradicates all outside pressures.  The lead performance by the writer-director is naturalistic, curiously not overplayed, as her body becomes fertile grounds for exploratory territory.  The subject itself is horrifying enough, but I saw this as much more of an interior journey, and herein lies the film's strength; it's completely non-judgmental, perhaps even understated, which lures us into her psyche, as we wonder why – a question the film, very much like Gus Van Sant's Columbine supposition, ELEPHANT, never answers.  Instead, the film raises questions, like what inner turmoil could possibly lead to this, or how is this a reflection of women?  Are women more prone to mutilate themselves than men?  Could this actually be a feminist treatise on exasperation or anguish, as it takes incredible courage to place something like this before the public?  Are there ramifications about a world gone wrong, so wrong that this is an expression of a kind of madness that we have not yet allowed ourselves to even think about?  Despite the disturbing nature of the film, the material is never gratuitous or exploitive. It's intelligently presented and thought provoking, always fully respecting her state of mind.  Not for the meek or timid, the film is underscored by the soft, Bill Evans-style, cool jazz of Esbjorn Svensson, twice voted the Swedish jazzman of the year, featuring the song "Strange Place for Snow."   

In My Skin (Dans Ma Peau) Gerald Peary

Dans Ma Peau/In My Skin is a slasher film for arthouse intellectuals, theorists of "the body," and swimming-against-the-stream feminists. It's a kind of on-film performance piece, written and directed by, and also starring, France's Marina De Van, who has acted for the popular filmmaker, Francois Ozon (Sitcom, See the Sea), and co-written two of his features (Under the Sand, Eight Women).

In My Skin tells the freaky, also undeniably absorbing tale, of Esther (De Van), a thirtyish Parisian research analyst, who, one strange evening, enters a masochistic netherworld when she trips outside a party, badly bloodying her leg. Rather than wipe up or get medical attention, Esther lowers her pant leg, allowing her wounds to fester. She goes home, examines them, becomes absorbed with the hurt, fascinated with the topography of bruises, scabs, and red drips.

Finally, a doctor bandages her injury. In revolt, Esther goes feverishly after the bandage with scissors, so she can liberate her naked, maimed flesh. Grown antsy at her staid office, she races to a subterranean hideout where she can razor more of her body. Back at her computer, she resumes work, but with a stealthy, smutty smile.

As Esther becomes more possessed, private and public space inevitably interact. She attends a formal business lunch, and while her straight-laced colleagues drone on about the beautiful city of Lisbon, Esther hacks at her arm beneath the table. She's so transfixed that she can't really hide what's happening from those intimate with her: her horrified girfriend and office mate, Sandrine (Lea Drucker), and her confused and threatened boyfriend, Vincent (Laurent Lucas).

Why do you do it? Vincent demands. "I don't know," Esther honestly answers. In her haze, she's like Catherine Deneuve's schizoid, murderous protagonist of the Roman Polanski 1965 classic, Repulsion.

De Van the screenwriter/director offers no facile psychological explanation for Esther's pathological behavior, nor does she sanctimoniously condemn it. Interviewed, De Van admitted an autobiographical connection with the character she so intensely plays: a traumatic childhood car accident left her with a deformed leg. "It reinforced my feeling of strangeness," she explained. "During my entire adolescence my body both interested and intrigued me." In contrast, Esther, the workaholic, has cut herself off from her body, until that fateful, bizarre, epiphanic night.

De Van: "...(T)he body is, in effect, a bit absent from our culture. It is a calculated abstract idea, but it is lived relatively little... Self-mutilation is a very elementary and strong way to reconnect with the present, the moment, and with sensation. A re-appropriation of the body comes with pain."

Interestingly, Esther never touches her breasts or genitalia when she's slicing away, never mutilating them, never even masturbating, no matter how blatantly sexual her charge when she's violating her flesh. In My Skin is a potent text for those debating what does, or does not, constitute "pornography." There's a long, juicy section in which Esther's face goes down on her bleeding arm, and she licks it and sucks on it as if she's mouthing a ripe, wet vagina. But it's not a vagina, it's an arm. Does that therefore disqualify as porno?

Those who have argued that horror-movie bloodsucking is displaced oral sex will adore In My Skin, especially since De Van, with her dark, shaped eyebrows and pronounced teeth, looks so prototypically vampiric. Dracula's daughter!.

DON’T LOOK BACK (Ne Te Retourne Pas)

France Luxembourg Belgium (110 mi) 2009

Cannes '09: Day Three Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 17, 2009

Even scary French actress Marina de Van let me down today. Don’t Look Back, her second film behind the camera (and one of my most anticipated films of the festival), screws up everything that her gut-wrenching debut, In My Skin, got miraculously right. A big part of what made the earlier film so intensely disturbing is that its heroine’s descent into obsessive self-mutilation (bring the kids!) has no apparent cause, no glib Psych 101 explanation. Don’t Look Back boasts an equally arresting premise: A professional biographer attempting her first novel (Sophie Marceau) first sees objects in her house in different places than she’s always remembered them, then watches in horror as her husband and two children turn into different people altogether, and then herself turns into Monica Bellucci (obviously an upgrade, but never mind). This time, however, a traumatic and reductive incident from Marceau/Bellucci’s past is to blame—hence the title—which makes the entire film feel like the laborious setup for a dopey Twilight Zone twist. And where In My Skin was clinically detached and matter-of-fact, Don’t Look Back leans hard on a conventionally atonal musical score and cheap shock cuts, as well as some dubious special effects. (At one point the protagonist’s face is half Marceau and half Bellucci, which was clearly intended to be creepy but made half my audience bust out laughing.) That I can easily imagine an American remake is perhaps most damning of all.

Todd Brown at Cannes from Twitch, May 16, 2009

Jeanne’s reality is bending.  The successful journalistic author is loosing her hold on reality - her family becoming literally unrecognizable, her belongings changing and moving without being touched and without any recognition of the changes from anyone else, even her own face is shifting in the mirror.  Is Jeanne going mad or is something else at play here, something connected to the strange girl only she seems to see and the book she is trying to write about the lost years of her childhood - the years before she turned eight, of which she can remember nothing?  This is the world of Marina De Van’s Ne Te Retourne Pas.

Sophie Marceau is Jeanne.  Monica Bellucci is also Jeanne.  But how can this be possible?  And who are this new people who keep replacing her mother and husband and child at odd intervals with nobody else noticing?  What is happening here?  This is the central conceit and device of the film - one that can’t really be talked about at length without diving into spoilers - and one that works remarkably well for the first two thirds of the film.  Sadly the ending is plagued with both some very poor effects work and an unsatisfyingly soft resolution that render this one significantly less than it could have been.

Well shot and very well performed by it’s sterling cast - Marceau and Bellucci are entirely convincing as the same character, which is no easy feat - Ne Te Retourne Pas plays like nothing so much as a genre film intended for people who don’t like genre films.  It dabbles in the same pool here where directors like David Lynch have been known to dive right in and, as a result, is less than satisfying for people who actually Do like genre films.  The concept of perception versus reality and how that affects identity is a potent one - one that has been tackled with varying degrees of success a number of times before - and with writer-director De Van the concept receives a largely surface treatment.  Pretty, well done as far as it goes, but ultimately just an appetizer dressed up as a full meal.

Don’t Look Back (Ne Te Retourne Pas) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

A woman searches for identity. An audience searches for elucidation. Both wind up equally perplexed in Don’t Look Back, an initially intriguing, ultimately incoherent mind-bender from second-time director-writer Marina de Van. Ostensibly a more mainstream project than her previous film, the very personal In My Skin, Don’t Look Back begins as a psychological thriller in a Hitchcock/Polanski vein, then strays into a thicket of distracting special effects, before heading for the far shores of existential nightmare. The film, released in France on June 3, could gross well initially purely on the appeal of its two female leads (Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci), but bad word of mouth will surely limit its life span. Sheer outlandishness might ensure a cult DVD afterlife, but export and festival prospects look equally thin.

A former collaborator with François Ozon, De Van made an eerie impression acting in his films Sitcom and Regarde la Mer. In her own In My Skin, she played a woman addicted to self-mutilation and established an auteur preoccupation with the traumas of female identity, which she explores further, but far less compellingly here.

Heroine Jeanne (Marceau) is a successful biographer and former child prodigy who comes unstuck when branching into fiction. Her publisher brusquely advises her to stick to her proven skills, rather than attempt to fictionalise her life. But Jeanne is fascinated with the mysteries of her past, having no memory of anything that happened before she was eight. At home with husband Teo (Di Stefano) and their two kids, odd details about their apartment become unfamiliar to her, and then she sees the face of another woman (Bellucci) replacing hers in a video.

The next thing she knows, Teo’s and the children’s faces transform, becoming bizarre, mask-like combinations of their own and someone else’s physiognomies. Jeanne changes too, her features getting stuck halfway between Marceau’s and Bellucci’s – to the merriment of the audience at the film’s first Cannes screening, proving there’s a thin line between the nightmarish and the just plain daft, especially when too-literal digital effects enter the mix.

The film takes a moderately revitalising left turn in the second hour, when Jeanne (now completely Bellucci) travels to Italy, and Italian dialogue, to solve the mystery of her past. Some teasing switcheroos are played, with both Di Stefano and Brigitte Catillon (Jeanne’s mother) appearing as different characters entirely. But the film soon slips its moorings, accumulating overtones of Lynch, Cronenberg, M. Night Shyamalan and Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, with a mysterious child, repeatedly glimpsed by Jeanne, guiding her to enlightenment. The solution, such as it is, is both banal and implausible, and the final shot places a kitsch stamp on proceedings.

The film’s failure is all the more disappointing in that the first half-hour hints at an elegant entertainment, with appealingly sleek camerawork and production values. De Van’s left-field sensibilities promise a distinctive Freudian-feminist gloss on the kind of identity-scramble puzzler epitomised by Polanski’s The Tenant. But De Van offers us insufficient signposting, so that we never feel sure whether to take the film as psychological thriller, abstruse parallel-world story or pure reverie. She also pushes her leads too far in the direction of eye-rolling panic, although of the two Jeannes, Marceau is the far more sympathetic and plausible. 

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 15, 2009

Cannes. "Don't Look Back" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 16, 2009

Peter Brunette at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 15, 2009

Derek Elley at Cannes from Variety, May 16, 2009

Deal, Carl and Tina Lessin

TROUBLE THE WATER A- 94

USA (90 mi) 2008

It felt like we lost our citizenship. —Kimberly Roberts

A wonderfully unpretentious film that by tracing the path of one family gets to the heart of the matter of the government’s notorious absence in New Orleans after Katrina leaving residents, but mostly poor and black residents where the greatest damage occurred, to fend for themselves. Without explaining how she happened upon a video camera, apparently a $20 camcorder that feels left over from the CLOVERFIELD (2008) movie set, Kimberly Roberts from her home on France Street in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans starts filming her house and everything around the neighborhood in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina, as she wanted a recording of what it looked like both before and after. Greeting everyone she meets on the street, asking what their plans are, also filming while riding her bike, where you can hear the click click click as the pedal hits the kickstand, we get a good sense of how she sees her neighborhood and the people familiar to her living in it, some of whom, including several in her own family, will not survive the storm. She has a natural ease with people and the good sense to narrate while the camera is running explaining what we are looking at as she stocks up on food, ice and emergency provisions. Unable to afford “the luxury” to get safely out of town (apparently their car had recently been stolen), she and her husband Scott decide to ride out the storm from her home, producing about twenty minutes of some of the most intense footage of the storm in action, where after the levees break a mere three blocks away, she comments “It’s like an ocean out there” as the water rises and her street is flooded as high as a stop sign. Her family is forced into the attic and eventually move to a house across the street that is one story higher, where she and about a dozen others including children, elderly and an infirmed have to be carried over a river chest high by her husband who uses a punching bag as a flotation device. With no help in sight and a 911 operator that tells them the city is not prepared to offer them any rescue assistance at this time, they have to wander through this nightmarish deluge on their own.

As we piece together footage after her battery runs dead where the film is framed with time headings—Two days after the levees fail, or one week after the levees fail, we learn that despite an abandoned Navy barracks several blocks away that had already been closed due to cuts in federal funding, where only a skeleton crew remained protecting the base, this family was turned away from more than 200 empty beds at the point of M-16’s locked and loaded pointed directly at them, ordering them to disperse. Instead they spent several nights in an abandoned school before they found a boat to take them to a Red Cross shelter, which is where they met the documentary filmmakers who were originally attempting to do a story on the travails of the National Guard, over-extended both in Iraq and now back here at home, but the Guard refused to cooperate. Among the most devastating footage captured was the deadly aftermath where in a rented van filled to capacity with 25 of her neighbors they drive past the New Orleans Superdome, where a long tracking shot resembles the look of the Civil War wounded in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), capturing defenseless, helpless people who have no way out, many lying on the ground sick or near death from lack of water while several buses remain idle parked right across the street. While this entire catastrophe is amateurishly documented, Roberts has an amazing ability to offer her own soulful perspective whose raw insight and authenticity adds to the harrowing realism of the moment.

Actual news footage shown on TV is interspersed with what Roberts sees on the ground, oftentimes at complete odds with one another, especially when President Bush or FEMA director Mike Brown affirm their alleged successes, or when we get a good look at the tourist video that the city still proudly uses. The Roberts family exits the city for their first time for a home 200 miles away owned by an uncle which has no running water, where in a typical day in the life scenario, the water department comes out to turn the water on at one point, only to return minutes later to turn it back off again. That uncle lost his mother when she was abandoned in a hospital during Katrina, as the entire staff evacuated and left the patients behind to fend for themselves. From this location they can visit FEMA centers where they line up next to “Gate B – Cattle entrance” and reapply for emergency funds that never came, after which they hope to move to a safer location, believing everything has been lost at home. When they make a return visit several weeks later to obtain what they can, the streets are a sea of mud and obliteration patrolled by neglected, near starving stray dogs. Kimberly feels blessed that a photo of her mother remains intact, explaining her mother died of AIDS when she was 13 and this is her only surviving keepsake. Amazingly their two dogs left behind survived, though they have been living on highly contaminated water, while the corpse of one man seen in the before-Katrina footage still lays dead in his living room. The National Guard is summoned to obtain the body. Again a long tracking shot of several city blocks both a few weeks after the flood and shown again a year later shows one or two houses either rebuilt or still standing on her block while everything else remains a wasteland of utter demolition. Nothing has changed as there is simply no sign of life left there at all.

Instead they set out for Memphis, Tennessee where another relative lives, bringing extended family and the dogs, where in a nice, clean neighborhood it’s clear the additional burden is asking a lot of anyone. At first, the peace and quiet and relative safety is like an oasis after the storm, but after a period of time, having nowhere else to go, they eventually return to New Orleans where Scott gets a job working with a building contractor reconstructing houses. Kimberly has a budding rap career under the name Black Kold Madina which is on full display after she discovers her own rap demo previously believed lost when she provides an audacious, foot stomping performance of her song (I Don't Need You To Tell Me That I'm) “ Amazing,” Black Kold Madina - "Amazing" YouTube (3:54), while standing outside an overstuffed closet in a crowded bedroom with her husband proudly watching which is in perfect synch, a song that offers plenty of insight into her personal history, including that knife scar across her husband’s jaw, their life before Katrina as drug hustlers, and her literal resurrection into a woman with a clean slate and a new attitude about her future. It’s not so much a song as an anthem of joy and triumph in the face of diversity. There’s a defiant “Won’t Get Fooled Again” mentality that Kimberly develops after she’s had a chance to see schools outside New Orleans actually prepare kids for college and the future, while with the highest incarceration rate in the nation New Orleans is instead “preparing us for prison." Kimberly Roberts has come full circle with her before and after footage. Little did she know that what she couldn’t film, the growing maturity inside of herself, is what ended up changing the most. This disaster movie which is filled with first hand observations from an every day black perspective turns into a film of personal triumph, and in a moment of rare humility, Kimberly is brought to tears when one neighbor actually thanks her for the efforts she made on behalf of all her neighbors.

PASTE Review - Trouble the Water Jesse Jarnow

Like a Shakespeare adaptation, Trouble the Water’s plot will be unreassuringly familiar: levee breaches, failed bureaucracy, general awfulness. Even without adding to the well-covered Hurricane Katrina narrative, documentarians Tia Lessin and Carl Deal still get it completely right. Edited around home videos by Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a vivacious 24-year-old resident of New Orleans’ 9th Ward, and subsequent footage by Lessin and Deal, Trouble the Water is an intimate, necessary take on Katrina. Roberts shoots instinctively, portentously capturing the first windblown shingle as the storm builds. Though ignoring backstories until the third reel (and thumbnailing rich 9th Ward culture into the reductive bin of “poverty”), the filmmakers learn from the missteps of their sometime collaborator, Michael Moore, and keep the commentary implicit. (Kim’s reference to “this President Bush character, whoever he is,” is as scathing as it needs to get.) Trouble the Water doesn’t make sense of Katrina or the N’awlins diaspora, but it communicates them wholly.

Indiewire [Howard Feinstein]

"Trouble the Water," the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner by Brooklyn's own Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, is one of the most fascinating documentaries I've ever seen. Serendipity is manna for documentarians. Lessin and Deal met Kim Roberts in Louisiana post-Katrina. Just after another project fell though, Roberts approached them in a shelter in Alexandria, where she and husband Scott had taken refuge. The hustling survivor of not only the hurricane but also of a no-respite life of New Orleans shame, the low-lying Lower Ninth Ward, Roberts picked up a camcorder as Katrina was approaching and recorded scenes that were for the filmmakers, and are for us, shockingly immediate. Lessin and Deal, the savvy, progressive producers of much of Michael Moore's TV and feature work, seized the opportunity and created a film not only around Robert's visual record but also around the charismatic young woman herself.

Roberts, who is African-American in a notoriously racist city, is an aspiring young rapper who embraces all aspects of her life, whether it be past drug dealing, slicing up her husband Scott's face, or committing herself to Christianity. Lessin and Deal follow her and the more low-key Scott while they revisit sites of tragic significance from the Katrina days, when broken levees flooded their neighborhood. Using Roberts's and archival footage, and shooting in 16 mm, the directors wisely opted for a nonlinear approach. The film ends with Roberts singing a rap song she wrote, a testament to fortitude and an openness that we can all learn from. "I've been picked up and let down but I bounce right back," she chants. "Come on and take a look and know that I'm amazing." We know, we know.

Moving Pictures Magazine [Alexis Madden]

America, a land of opportunity and progression: glossy, polished, refined, civilized, cultivated. Or is it? What happens when a natural disaster unveils a dirty secret? "In the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina everything about the social, economic, and racial injustice of American society floated to the surface," writes Bettina Aptheker, professor at University of California Santa Cruz. "Nothing could be hidden from news cameras on the scene; no sanitized 'spin' could be given to the unfolding catastrophe." Suddenly, we, as a nation, were forced to face the skeletons in our closet. 

When Katrina's storm surges breached the levees, water inundated New Orleans and revealed a subculture living in extreme poverty, crime ridden and barely literate. The lower 9th Ward had a poverty level of 36.4 percent. A quarter of the households had an annual income of less than $10,000, while half lived on less than $20,000. How easily this  "third world" county within our own country had been overlooked in favor of the festive, tourist-rich French Quarter only blocks away. Trouble the Water (winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival) is the determined documentary from Tia Lesson and Carl Deal that acts as a light beacon to expose these long-neglected problems - which remain under-addressed three years later.

With a haunting first-person perspective, Kimberly Rivers Roberts (aspiring rapper Black Kold Madina) captures the images and observations of her 9th Ward streets and neighbors in the final pre-Katrina moments with her video camera. After the rain begins to fall and the wind picks up, Roberts divulges her own requiem of the storm. "This is on its way. It's me, reporting live, Kold Madina... here we go."

Kimberly Roberts and her husband Scott continued to film the unforgettable moments as the water swallowed their streets and belongings and while friends and neighbors hid in their attic. "They put it on the news that we should get out, but you got those people that just couldn't leave, like me. Not because we ain't want to, but because we couldn't afford the luxury. I believe in Jesus.  The Lord will send me through this one. Whenever the Lord allow it, I'll be able to tell the story. August 28, 2005, on a nice beautiful Sunday, I ain't go to church, but I pray to the Lord please protect me and my family. People gonna die out here, man. It's real, man. It's like the Lord is upset, angry with New Orleans. And I don't blame him." 

Then the battery goes dead and the screen goes black.

Two weeks later, the couple, followed by filmmakers, returns to New Orleans to tell of their journey from despair to hope, while revealing the failures of our government, the chaotic animalistic actions of the people left behind, and the hollow gap that still divides race and class in this 21st Century.

Roberts remarks on her determination to use the devastation to move forward: "I couldn't see it when I was on the inside, but I can see it now. It was a good thing in a way because it forced us out."

However, without a high school education, moving out of the 9th Ward proves harder than expected, and the film follows the Robertses as they wrestle with their new outlook. Unable to find work in Tennessee, they pack up their belongings and head back home; Scott Roberts still wanting to make a difference, wanting to do something for a place that still was a part of him. Finding a job in construction, he begins to rebuild his post-catastrophe city. "If you can't make a difference in the world, make a difference in your neighborhood."

A hand up, not just a hand out, is what they ask for. It's the only way to truly rebuild a city, a culture and a brighter future for the people of New Orleans. Ms. Roberts explains, "Katrina's not over yet. We're still being affected right now by not educating us, robbing us out of opportunities to be the next whoever. When we got to go see how other people was living, it opened our eyes. I mean, it's like they preparing them for the future. Here in New Orleans, it's like they preparing us for prison."

Yellow tapelines stretch across the final moments of the film to display the staggering post-Katrina facts: The rent in Louisiana has doubled along with the homeless population; the majority of the city's public schools are deemed academic failures; thousands of livable public housing units are being demolished; Louisiana's incarceration rate is still the highest in the world.

Trouble the Water illustrates more than a storm and its aftermath. It illuminates a world moving forward with an important segment of its population left behind. They deserve our determination. They deserve us turning toward them, facing the hard issues together... head on.

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review from The House Next Door

Two days after Bliss, the festival struck gold again with Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water. It isn’t only the best documentary to play at SIFF this year; it isn’t only one of the few genuinely great films to burst through the festival dross: it is a superbly paced and directed, at times ferociously angry masterpiece on the worst moral failure in modern American history—that is, our conservative Christian government’s “response” to Hurricane Katrina—and it is one of the imperative movie-going experiences of ’08.

On August 28, 2005, in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, a feisty young black woman named Kimberly Rivers Roberts took her new camcorder around the neighborhood, filming her husband Scott and the people on their street. Initially, the handheld zooms off in all directions, mostly roving over the floors or feet, as if it were too heavy to be borne aloft and kept slipping. Yet if Kim’s technical expertise takes a while to steady, her storytelling instincts bloom from the first. Nineteen hours before Katrina hit, she videotapes little girls who say they aren’t afraid of a hurricane. The insouciant locals on the stoop or outside a convenience store have an easy-going authenticity. One man’s glad not to have to go to work that day; they joke about the impending storm, “You know the police ain’t gon’ come.” Lessin and Deal’s crosscuts remind us that although an evacuation was called, no one arranged public transit for residents without cars. “We couldn’t afford the luxury” of getting out, Kim says, and so she stays, videotaping, narrating, sometimes in her own persona, noting that if the rains fell on a Sunday she didn’t go to church (yet nonetheless prayed) and sometimes switching to an imaginary newscaster, objectively reporting on what’s to come.

The co-directors, Kim, and their editor T. Woody Richman (he also cut Fahrenheit 9/11) seamlessly move from the everyday to a sense of the inexorable. From within the Roberts’s besieged house on August 29, the camera’s eye captures a front steps view of how the levee system failed, and the dark shots of water rising, especially those where the only light source is a flashlight, are terrifying. Those who stayed behind, garrisoned in Kim’s attic, comment on the rain seeping through windows below, watching the wide swath of waves where paved roads were: “like an ocean out there.” The filmmakers mix in audio of phone calls made to police operators, who tell residents trapped inside their engulfed bungalows, “At this time, they are not rescuing.” The water, meanwhile, has risen nearly to the top of a stop sign; perched above it, a one-way arrow takes on an ominous dimension. As the voices on the phone attest, there was no way out.

Inserted here and there are clips of FEMA figurehead Mike Brown, whose fleeting appearances drew hoots of contempt from the audience I saw the movie with, and George W. Bush, whose colossal phoniness has rarely seemed shriller than in his live broadcast on the day of the devastation. While patients defenselessly drowned in their beds at New Orleans Memorial Hospital (the photo still of this serves as yet another perspicacious memento of our 43rd President’s legacy), there was Bush at an Arizona country club, surrounded by beaming high-whites and cue cards. Bush, of course, refused to bring U.S. troops out of his Iraq fantasy to assist in Louisiana. Kim refers to him as “this President Bush character,” and indeed, that character’s every utterance in Trouble the Water reaffirms Justice John Paul Stevens’s phrase following the Supreme Court betrayal of democratic principles in the 2000 election: “The identity of the loser is perfectly clear.”

A few National Guardsmen show up in the Ninth Ward, long after the waters have receded; Kim and Scott’s friend Brian tells them, “I hope you don’t have to go back to Iraq, ‘cause it’s not our war.” He points along the street to houses full of the waterlogged dead: “This is our war.”

This stunning movie cuts to the quick of each issue it touches on. It implicitly condemns the U.S. military simply by reporting on what the U.S. military so blatantly failed to do. Scott recounts how his flooded-out neighbors sought shelter at an empty naval base, only to be told, facing cocked M-16s: “Get off our property or we’ll start shooting.” Two uniformed officers (one white, one black) don’t exactly dispute this version of events, other than to claim that they, “served the interests of our government,” a statement that tells you everything about the benighted dictatorship we’ve been living under. There’s equal time in Trouble the Water granted to the ignorant views of young white enlistees, seen holding their cigarettes on what appears to be an indefinite smoke break, criticizing the “survival skills” of the flood displaced persons. Kim, in turn, succinctly characterizes these recruits as “sittin’ on they ass waitin’ for a terrorist attack,” instead of serving the people who need them.

Musically, the filmmakers’ choices are spot-on. Citizen Cope’s “Hurricane Waters” underscores tracking shots of thousands of evacuees stranded at a debris-littered shelter, the contrast between the song’s lovely humanity and the reality of how America let everyone down being absolutely bracing. Later, trying to make a go of it in Memphis, Kim finds that her relatives there have the only remaining copy of a CD she recorded, and she turns to the camera and performs for us a song she wrote, the aptly titled “Amazing.” It’s one of those moments in movie history when you unequivocally know that you’re in the presence of the real thing. This profane rap number becomes Kim’s anthem of self-affirmation, just as assuredly as Trouble the Water exalts the heroism of the ordinary men and women of the Ninth Ward who risked their own lives to save a few of their neighbors. A more inspiring portrait could scarcely be possible.

If only all nonfiction features playing at SIFF were made with such integrity. Alas, it is so rarely the case, as our next film, an instance of mere festival filler, so regrettably demonstrates.

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

The Village Voice [Jim Ridley]

indieWIRE review Michael Joshua Rowin from Reverse Shot

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

Film Journal International (David Noh) review

The New York Sun (S. James Snyder) review

Screen International review Colin Bown at Sundance

Zoom in Online (Nathaniel Rogers) review

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson

New Directors/New Films: Part Two · MadisonAvenueJournal.com September 25, 2008

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [4/6]

Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [5/6]

Variety.com [Robert Koehler]

San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

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

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

Study: La.'s incarceration rate leads nation | News for New ... Louisiana leads the nation in overall prison rate, from WWLTV News, December 1, 2006

Deadly lockdown in New Orleans | Salon News Robin Templeton from Salon, August 23, 2007

>: Louisiana's Incarceration Rate "Highest in the World" Mississippi Project, October 25, 2007

Racism in New Orleans Criminal Justice System: Among nation’s worst pre-Katrina, still worse now   Jordan Flaherty from San Francisco Gray Panthers, August 30, 2007

Study: La.'s incarceration rate leads nation | News for New ... WWLTV in Louisiana, June 11, 2008

La.'s incarceration rate leads nation - Law Enforcement News Corrections One News Bulletin, August 15, 2008

D'Alliance New Orleans Solidarity, by Vera Leone September 3, 2008

Dean, James – actor

James Dean biography from the profile page from Turner Classic Movies

One of the most iconic figures in American cinematic history, James Dean remains forever etched as a brooding, romantic figure, the quintessential 1950s teenager thanks primarily to his roles in "East of Eden" (1955) and "Rebel Without a Cause" (1956). Intelligent and projecting a sexual charisma that appealed to men and women, Dean may be best recalled for his three major movie roles, but behind that small output was a serious-minded, disciplined and trained actor.

James Byron Dean was born on February 8, 1931 in Marion, Indiana to a dental technician and his wife. Dean's father relocated the family to California in 1935 but following his mother's untimely death from cancer in 1940, young Jimmy was sent back to Indiana to live with relatives. A star athlete in high school, he also excelled in theatrics and was encouraged by the school's drama teacher Adeline Nall. After graduation, Dean landed his first professional gig, a 1950 TV commercial for Pepsi Cola and then headed West to attend college, but he soon dropped out in favor of pursuing an acting career. After making his TV debut as the Apostle John in "Hill Number One" and landing bit roles in films like "Sailor Beware" (both 1951), he began studying acting with James Whitmore who encouraged the talented neophyte to move to Manhattan and work with famed teacher/coach Lee Strasberg. Heeding Whitmore's advice, Dean landed in the Big Apple in the fall of 1951 and worked odd jobs (including pre-testing the stunts on TV's "Beat the Clock") until he gained a berth at the Actors Studio. He soon was landing roles on stage ("See the Jaguar", "The Immoralist") and in many of the live television dramas of the day.

By 1954, Dean was put under contract by Warner Bros. to star in Elia Kazan's film version of "East of Eden" (1955). As Cal Trask, the troubled son of a wealthy businessman, he perfectly captured the neurosis and jealousies of the character. While Dean did have a tendency toward over-emoting, the cumulative effect of his performance ultimate proves rewarding to viewers and was recognized by the Academy with a posthumous Oscar nomination as Best Actor.

One can only speculate on what heights (or what depths) Dean may have hit had he not been killed in a car accident on the night of September 30, 1955, Combining the sensitivity of a Montgomery Clift with the incoherent, explosive anger and sexuality of a Marlon Brando, James Dean came to epitomize the phrase "rebel without a cause". His hypnotic, angst-ridden turn in the 1955 film of that name (released less than a month after his death) struck a chord with teenagers the world over and solidified his reputation as the voice of his generation. Dean's early death forever froze him as that surly but sensitive teenager and made him the epitome of all that was "cool". His third and last film, "Giant" (1956), was a sweeping generational epic and his strong turn as the lonely tortured Jett (which netted a second Best Actor Academy Award nomination) helped raise the material above its soap opera-ish qualities.

While critics were divided over Dean's work in his own time (Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called him a "mass of histrionic gingerbread" in "East of Eden" but praised his "stylized spookiness" in "Giant"), history has upheld his popularity and seen dozens upon dozens of emerging actors hailed as "the new James Dean". A virtual cottage industry for the literary set with over a dozen biographies, Dean and his life also have been plumbed by filmmakers ranging from Robert Altman (the 1957 documentary "The James Dean Story") to Mark Rydell (2001's TV biopic "James Dean"). Not since Valentino had a film actor attracted such legions of fans in life and in death.

Official James Dean site

James Dean Biography

glbtq >> arts >> Dean, James Jim Provenzano biography from an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture

James Dean, Tribute to a Legend

James Dean Remembered

A Tribute to James Dean Classic Movies

American Masters . James Dean | PBS

Rebel Without A Cause: Movie fan website

Rebel Without A Cause : A tribute to James Dean British fan site

On "Thinking of James Dean" Brad Gooch, from City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara at Modern American Poetry (1993)

James Dean - One of the Gang--The Making of Rebel Without a Cause personal essay by Jack Grinnage, a member of the cast, from American Legends (undated)

Irreverent Iconographer Brandon Yip interviews Warren Beath, the author of The Death of James Dean, from American Legends (undated)

A Historian Looks at James Dean The James Dean Scrapbook introduction by Vagn Hansen from American Legends (undated)

James Dean: A Rebel for All Seasons  The James Dean Story introduction by Ron Martinetti to the paperback edition, from American legends (1995)

PBS: "James Dean: Sense Memories" transcript of a discussion about the American Masters documentary, from The Washington Post, May 12, 2005

Mad about the boy James Dean was the embodiment of young male vulnerability, heroism and torment. Who would have guessed he was gay? Fifty years after his death, it's all too obvious, argues Germaine Greer from The Guardian, May 14, 2005

James Dean. - By John Swansburg - Slate Magazine May 19, 2005

THE THREE FILMS OF JAMES DEAN previously at Film Forum in New York ... July 19, 2005

Remembering Two Icons: James Dean and Bruce Lee : AsianWeek Philip W. Chung, September 30, 2005

Johnny Depp on James Dean ... on Radio 2 Mike Lawson from The Guardian, September 27, 2005

James Dean Gallery site

Image results for james dean

AMC's James Dean Photo Gallery: Living Fast and Dying Young also seen here: 10 James Dean Essentials: Photo Essay

William Bast Dean’s biographer

The religion of James Dean, actor

The Death of James Dean Franks Reel Reviews

BBC ON THIS DAY | 30 | 1955: James Dean killed in car smash September 30, 1955

James Dean MEMORIAL JUNCTION photos and memorabilia

Fairmount Historical Museum artifacts

Cholame - Shandon, CA - James Dean Memorial

James Dean (1931 - 1955) - Find A Grave Memorial

James Dean - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Youtube: 1950 Pepsi commercial (54 seconds)

Paul Newman and James Dean Screentest for East of Eden | Open Culture (1:28)

DeCillo, Tom

JOHNNY SUEDE

USA France Switzerland (97 mi) 1991

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Shallow open-ended subjective allegory that successfully poses as impressionistic and deep for 25 minutes or so. The problem isn't so much that the eccentricity becomes familiar, as that the eccentricity itself lacks focus, consistency, and endodermis level development. Make no mistake, this is a very funny movie, particularly the first half. Brad Pitt is sporadically spectacular as the pompadoured protagonist but just can't carry the burden, or isn't interested in the tedium, of portraying someone with an IQ 100 points lower than himself. The guy that plays Flip Doubt (Peter McRobbie) also did a fine job. The little noises, bird chirping as introductory percussion, etc., are cute but lose their punch once you're conditioned to expect them.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Right from the start, it's clear that the young eponymous hero (Pitt) is madly in love with suede shoes, Ricky Nelson's songs, his plans to become a rock'n'roll idol, the romantic notion of finding a dream girl, and - most of all - himself. So when, after a flattering fling with alarmingly changeable damsel in distress Darlette (Moir), Johnny meets the more down-to-earth Yvonne (Keener), you know he'll finally have to choose between his immature fantasies and the love of a good woman. On to this slim, slightly moralistic fable, DiCillo grafts an appealing veneer of droll slow-burn humour, wacky caricature, and pseudo-hip posing. Much of what is said and done is deliberately and delightfully absurd. But the movie is saved from becoming too knowingly flip not only by DiCillo's sure sense of pace and mood, but by the performances; especially Keener, who displays a fine mix of strength, savvy and vulnerability.

Johnny Suede Movie Review (1991) from Channel 4 Film

Tom DiCillo's surreal first feature provided a breakthrough lead role for the then undiscovered Brad Pitt, with strong support from Catherine Keener

Based upon a one-man show by Tom DiCillo from his earlier stage days, Johnny Suede was the director/scriptwriter's first film. It's a character-lead series of vignettes brought to life by a mixture of material he'd been mulling over since film school as well some autobiographical details (including most of his own wardrobe). Brad Pitt was a little known actor who'd just wrapped a film called Thelma & Louise when DiCillo choose him to play the eponymous slacker who evades reality by conjuring up the life of a would-be 1950s teen idol.

Stuck with decorating apartments for a living, Johnny escapes into a nostalgia trip of rock 'n' roll ballads and hairdos modeled upon his idol Ricky Nelson until divine intervention takes hold and a pair of perfect suede shoes drops from the heavens into his possession. Armed with his dream footwear, Johnny gets serious about forming a band, even more so when his dream girl (Moir) - a manipulative ingénue bedecked in pink - turns out to be the daughter of a record producer. Only when he meets teacher Yvonne (Keener) does Johnny have a chance to find an anchor in real life, even if he has trouble dealing with it.

Set in secluded, decaying New York, with Brad Pitt walking around like he's just stepped off the set of Grease, the film's surrealist tone is set up early on and is clearly influenced by David Lynch and Luis Buñuel. DiCillo tries to make a modern fable, fashioning an off-beat and often darkly humorous tale out of one man's inability to acknowledge the one thing of most value in his life but, to the detriment of the movie, he relies on superficiality a little too often. However, with Pitt on form and Keener bringing an emotional core to the film, there is at least a resonance to the final scenes.

Imaginative and intelligent, this may not be DeCillo's best but as a debut, made under typically demanding indie restrictions, it shows what he's capable of.

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [2/5]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]

Eye for Film (David Stanners) review [3.5/5]

Critical-Film.com (Scott Wood) review [3.5/5]

Cinema Crazed [Felix Vasquez Jr.]

Austin Chronicle (Pamela Bruce) review [3/5]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

LIVING IN OBLIVION

USA (90 mi) 1995

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

DiCillo's second feature gets great mileage out of the simple, familiar premise of an idealistic film-maker struggling to complete his movie. The director is Nick (Buscemi), an arty tyro believed by some to be 'tight with Tarantino' and by himself to be in love with leading lady Nicole (Keener). Nick's main headache, however, is leading man Chad Palomino (LeGros), a petulant hunk whose vanity outweighs his doubtful commitment, and whose philandering inflames rivalries between various women on set, notably Nicole and producer Wanda, whose lover Wolf was never too fond of Chad in the first place. And then, as further irritants, there are the errant booms and malfunctioning smoke-machines, the eye-patches and goatees, the senile mothers, psycho-analysing drivers and hypersensitive extras - a total nightmare. The ingenious narrative, told from differing perspectives and incorporating tales within tales and teasing elisions between 'film' and 'reality', is actually informative about the nuts and bolts of shooting a movie, and not only as a catalogue of technical disasters - through the shamefully under-rated Keener, we get a real insight into screen acting and the way fatigue, memory, stress and surroundings can take their toll. Hers, however, is merely the finest of a whole host of spot-on performances. A treat.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Brian Calhoun) dvd review

I once read an article where musician Steven Tyler exclaimed that he found no humor whatsoever in his first viewing of the rock and roll satire This Is Spinal Tap. Tyler felt that the lampoonery of this lifestyle was too realistic, hitting too close to home to possibly be the slightest bit amusing. Budding independent filmmakers may experience a similar feeling of disillusion after watching Living in Oblivion, a film that humorously but painfully chronicles the pressures and disappointments of low budget filmmaking.

Though irresistibly hilarious, the film is actually more of an ode to the heartbreak of independent filmmaking rather than a parody, a sly wink to all the struggling artists who have "been there, done that." As inspiration for this wickedly realistic send-up, writer/director Tom DiCillo drew from his own experiences in the low budget film industry and created an almost autobiographical tale of his frustrations. Originally penned as a half-hour short, DiCillo later structured Oblivion into a three-part, 90-minute film. While the first half hour is unquestionably the best sequence, the entire film works wonderfully as an hysterical exploration into the horrors and pitfalls of making a motion picture. A credit to the visceral power of the film, I actually found myself becoming as frustrated as the fictional filmmakers when one shot after another went awry.

In addition to DiCillo's shrewd understanding of his subject matter, the film thrives on fantastic performances. From the main players to the supporting roles, all of the characters are wholly indicative of those I would expect to see working on a low budget film. At the top of the ladder is Nick Reve (Steve Buscemi), the frazzled director with big aspirations undermined by faulty equipment and a neurotic cast and crew. Buscemi masterfully portrays the bitter agitation of a struggling director, yet still remains sincere and appealing to the audience. Dermot Mulroney turns in a riotous performance as the cinematographer, Wolf, the type of egocentric "artiste" who unquestionably considers himself the most valuable on the set. Nicole Springer (Catherine Keener) and Chad Palomino (James Le Gros) are also exuberant standouts as characteristically unstable actors; Nicole is ripe with talent but plagued by insecurity, while Chad is a Hollywood big shot whose smug unpredictability turns the lives of the cast and crew into a living hell.

Living in Oblivion is a movie based upon the disappointments of one thing after another going wrong. For 90 minutes, we watch these poor filmmakers endure just about every kind of problem possible. The film may sound dreadfully monotonous, but thanks to the keen sense of realism caught by DiCillo, there is never a dull moment. Unlike many fictional films, the best scenes are those grounded in reality; those that made me believe I was watching a real-life documentary on low budget filmmaking. In contrast, the moments when the screenplay resorts to unnecessary slapstick often feel silly and contrived. However, maybe these instances are also part of DiCillo's nightmarish memoirs. The bottom line is that this production is a thoroughly entertaining and successful comedy. It may not be a particularly profound film, but it is guaranteed to tickle just about anybody's funny bone—anybody with the exception of, perhaps, struggling filmmakers.

Tucson Weekly (Zachary Woodruff) review

AT THE CENTER of the immensely entertaining Singin' in the Rain is a sequence that ranks among the funniest in film history. While silent-screen movie star Jean Hagen attempts to perform in her first "talkie," everything that can go wrong does: the microphone rustles, the sound drops out, and a romantic scene's effectiveness is ruined by the once-mute actress' shrill squeaky voice. Singin' in the Rain has many other pleasures, but this scene has the educational benefit of accurately depicting the real on-set frustrations of filmmakers trying to create sound pictures in the late '20s. For movie buffs it's a must-see.

In Living in Oblivion, director-writer Tom DeCillo takes the rhythm and structure of the afore-mentioned scene and successfully expands it into a full-length movie. His subject matter may be different--he depicts the frustrations of modern-day independent filmmakers--but the source of humor is largely the same. Moviemaking is revealed as a small war between the cinematic dreamers and the multitude of egos, accidents and other irritations that get in the way of capturing their dreams on celluloid. Though Living in Oblivion has a small scope, as far as movie fanatics are concerned, it too is a must-see.

The film is neatly divided into three parts, each one of them detailing the struggle of a first-time director (Steve Buscemi, as fun to watch as ever) to ward off Murphy's Law during the creation of a scene. He's fighting a losing battle: While trying to capture the raw emotion of a revelational mother-daughter conversation, one of the grips drops the boom mike into the frame, a cameraman's assistant loses control of the focus, the uninspired actors forget their lines and the cinematographer becomes ill from some bad milk left sitting around. I won't give away this segment's punchline, but let's just say that even when things finally go right, they still go wrong.

Tom DeCillo got his start as a cinematographer (he worked on Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise). From there he made a terrific independent feature of his own, Johnny Suede--which stars Brad Pitt in one of his most enjoyable performances. Knowing this makes Living in Oblivion's second segment, in which the low-budget crew must contend with the production's sole star--a very Brad Pittish heartthrob played by James LeGros--doubly amusing. LeGros' character is an overconfident dolt who lazily seduces most of the female crew and intimidates the director into letting him steal a love scene with his co-star, played by the appealing Catherine Keener (an alumna of Johnny Suede who starred opposite Pitt). Buscemi, trying to be diplomatic about the soiled off-screen relationship between the actors, aims for appeasement but only alienates them further. This second segment, like the first, ends in hilarious chaos.

What's most satisfying about Living in Oblivion, aside from the spirited ensemble-acting and playful mix of black-and-white and color film, is the accuracy of the picture's mini-reality.

Though I've only hung around a few movie sets in my day, the characters in Living in Oblivion comically represent many of the types of people you might find investing their energy in a low-budget picture. There's the too-cool cinematographer (Dermot Mulroney) who sports a beret and eye patch; the ruthless assistant director (Danielle von Zernick) who affects a phony sweetness with the director while maintaining a demeaning tone with the less-powerful crew members; and a lighting man who dreams of making his own movie, even carrying the script around in his back pocket. DeCillo also nicely touches upon how the uneasy sexual relations of the crew add to the overall tension on the set. All of this he does while maintaining a gently quirky comedic style.

In the third segment, efforts to create a dream sequence with a dwarf go awry wen the dwarf resents being typecast. "Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it?" he asks, making a good case against the formulaic weirdness of filmmakers like David Lynch. By the time this third and silliest segment ends, director Buscemi has become negative about his abilities as a filmmaker, Keener has almost decided to give up acting, and yet somehow everybody pulls together and makes things (sort of) work. In a brilliant coda, we take a peek into each character's final thoughts while everyone waits silently so the sound man can record room ambience. This scene, with its series of brief fantasies, may be the longest 90 seconds ever filmed. And that's somehow fitting, since Living in Oblivion is so fun to watch that it's one of the shortest 90-minute movies I've seen in a long time.

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

PopMatters Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

Film Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw

CultureCartel.com (David Abrams) review [4.5/5] also seen here: Grouch at Epinions.com

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Ben Stephens) review

Eye for Film (Caro Ness) review [5/5]

Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber

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

Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Owen Gleiberman

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

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

San Francisco Examiner (Scott Rosenberg) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

BOX OF MOONLIGHT B- 82

USA Japan (112 mi) 1996

A very whimsical comedy about a middle-aged crisis in the life of an everyday, average Joe, played by John Turturro, who runs into a long-haired, freedom-loving nature boy, The Kid, played by Sam Rockwell, living in one half of a trailer, as the other half is out in the open under the moonlight. The two go skinnydipping with girls, have tomato fights in a farmer’s field, shoot up a warehouse under construction, and just generally act like goofballs while the average Joe continues to maintain his modern armor, still in the midst of his modern male crisis, continuing to call home every day where life is predictable and the same, while life with The Kid is all new choices and new experiences. This is a small film with small revelations, more fun and prankerish than good. Of interest, DeCillo was Jim Jarmusch’s cameraman beginning in 1980 with PERMANENT VACATION, again in 1984 with STRANGER THAN PARADISE, and more recently working on COFFEE AND CIGARETTES.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

After DiCillo's delicious Living in Oblivion, this comes as a disappointment. Turturro's on form as the straitlaced, clock-watching, by-the-book construction foreman who cracks up when a job is cancelled and goes looking for a happy-holiday lake from his youth. Fair enough, but when he falls in with Rockwell, a half-crazed hippy kid into self-sufficient country life and irresponsible behaviour, you know Turturro's in for a trite lesson in living. Not as funny, deep or original as it would like to be, although things pick up with yet another fine turn from Catherine Keener.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Andrew Hesketh) review

Tom DiCillo had a hard act to follow after he left the ranks of Jim Jarmusch (he was the director's main cameraman). But, in Box of Moonlight, he seems to have established his position and rank in the American indie film field. That position and rank are far above those warranted by age or experience.

Box of Moonlight tells the story of Al Fountain (John Tuturro) who, while laying pipeline for his employers, discovers his coworkers' true opinion of him and his first grey hair. DiCillo makes this the final icing on the cake as Fountain undergoes a sort of psychological breakdown; his coffee pours backward and general hallucinations ensue. When his employers lay him and his team off he decides not to return to his wife and instead to retrace his roots in Americana. It is while he is roaming the countryside that he meets Buckie (Sam Rockwell). Meeting Buckie changes Fountain as he values things entirely different things to the solidly middleclass, white American Fountain and so Fountain finds himself reshaping his opinions and attitudes to life and the outside world. This is all thanks to the present the kid gives him: a box of moonlight.

DiCillo's script is as sharp as they come, full of witticisms and observations to make you laugh and cry Empire described it as "an all-talking, touchy feely road movie of sorts"! In its journey to find the self however, it makes close to the bone observations that apply to us all. One might even call this tale moralistic as it presents lessons for today's consumer obsessed society. It is not just a polemic though. Tuturro gives us an unbelievably fine performance as a man on the edge and Sam Rockwell as the forestdwelling hermit Buckie presents us with a character straight out of Twin Peaks, acted and performed faultlessly. Box of Moonlight is a wonderful and rare piece of cinema from the man behind Johnny Suede and Living In Oblivion. Go and see it or spend the next few days kicking yourself in frustration.

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

Alex Fung review [3.5/4]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]

Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

Movie Magazine International [Monica Sullivan]

Entertainment Weekly review [C] Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review

Los Angeles Times (John Anderson) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

Deitch, Donna

DESERT HEARTS

USA (96 mi) 1985

Time Out review

To Reno (in 1959) comes a mid-thirtyish New York teacher, her hair in a bun and her nerves in shreds, in search of a divorce from a stultified marriage. She puts up at a local ranch, and it's not long before she is succumbing to the advances of a much younger woman, though not without resistance. Suspicions that the film will simply be a period piece, viewed through the modern lens of post-feminist wishful thinking, are soon allayed however. Redneck Reno might still adhere to the old frontier notions of anything-goes morality, but it still harbours enough of the puritan spirit to make life uncomfortable for lesbians. Moreover, the ranch is more of an emotional snake-pit than first appears. Deitch is well served by Shaver as the teacher and Charbonneau as the young seducer. Best of all, however, is the way the movie dignifies all its characters. There is also an incendiary consummation of the affair, and Patsy Cline on the soundtrack; two features which had this paleneck by the throat.

Bright Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris, February 2008

Desert Hearts happened because producer-director Donna Deitch wanted to make a lesbian movie "that didn't end in a bisexual triangle or a suicide." This legendary 1986 film, based on Jane Rule's acclaimed novel Desert of the Heart, has only the merest hint of bisexuality and nary a glimmer of suicide. The film wisely replaces such tired tropes with unabashed images of two gorgeous, vibrant women in love.

Set in 1959, Desert Hearts is bookended by train scenes, comings and goings. Uptight Columbia University Professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver), who looks like one of those grim, "glacial" blondes from a Hitchcock movie, has come to Reno to get a divorce. We don't learn the details of her backstory, but we see her consistently struggling to keep her hard mask of composure intact. Soon she meets local wildwoman Cay Rivvers (Patricia Charonnbeau), who'd love nothing better than to remove that mask and spends much of the film trying to do so. Along the way are a variety of subplots involving Cay's friends like ranch owner Frances (Audra Lindley), her chanteuse pal Silver (Andra Akers), and her love-struck boss Darrell (Dean Butler). All this is backgrounded by period country tunes from Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves and some spectacular Nevada desert scenery.

Desert Hearts is not without its problems. The dialog is often stiff and sometimes smarmy. "He reached in and put a string of lights around my heart" would surely fit better on a Hallmark card. And it's a question whether Reno in 1959 could really have been as gay-friendly as it appears. Homophobia is barely evident in this world — even the good old boys at the local casino smile and nod at the gay shenanigans.

But Desert Hearts is about love, not homophobia, and on that basis there's much to recommend, not the least being the acting. Shaver and Charbonneau manage to overcome the script problems to emerge as authentic, complex people, while Audra Lindley is especially effective as a lonely, confused woman whose motherly interactions with Cay hint at deeper needs. Most powerful is the long-awaited love scene between Cay and Vivian. Some recent gay films have reverted to old bad habits in avoiding the details of queer bodies going at it, particularly when the stars are 'fraidy-cat heteros. Happily, Desert Hearts, starring two apparently straight actors, keeps it real in a full-throttle love scene.

Note: Wolfe Video's two-DVD set contains an informative director's commentary, a documentary, interviews, alternate takes, a trailer, and other goodies for the completist.

The hypothetical lesbian heroine Chris Staayer from Jump Cut, April 1990

AfterEllen.com - Lesbian and Bi Women in Entertainment review Sarah Warn

PopcornQ review Lauren King

Reel.com dvd review [Vintage Edition] [3/4] Pam Grady

DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review

Lesbian Flicks

DESERT HEARTS - A Review By Phineaskc - Epinions.com

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean) dvd review also seen here: DVD review page

Variety review

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

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

del Toro, Guillermo

All-Movie Guide Lucia Bozzola

A film prodigy dedicated to Latin American cinema even as his success gave him a ticket to Hollywood, Guillermo del Toro earned a place as one of Time magazine's 50 Young Leaders for the New Millennium before he made his third film.

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised by his staunchly Catholic grandmother, del Toro was already involved in filmmaking by his teens. A fan of such horror masters as James Whale, Mario Bava, George A. Romero, Alfred Hitchcock, and the work of Britain's Hammer Films, del Toro learned about makeup and effects from The Exorcist's Dick Smith as well as studying screenwriting and making Super-8, 16 mm, and 35 mm short films. Though he executive-produced his first feature, Doña Herlinda and Her Son (1986), at age 21, del Toro initially spent almost a decade as a makeup supervisor, forming his own company, Necropia, in the early '80s. He still found time to produce and direct numerous programs for Mexican television, as well as teach film workshops. Doing his part to turn his hometown into Mexican cinema central, del Toro also co-founded the city's Film Studies Center and the Guadalajara-based Mexican Film Festival.

Del Toro's feature directorial debut, Cronos (1993), heightened his prominence as a rising star in Mexican film. A low-key, superbly acted horror movie, Cronos' imagery of the vampire as parasite was at once a smart revision of the genre and a veiled allegory about Mexico and the United States. Winner of the critics' prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Cronos put del Toro on the world-cinema and American-independent map. Along with serving on the selection committees for the Sundance Film Festival and the Independent Spirit Awards, del Toro followed Cronos with his first foray into Hollywood filmmaking, Mimic (1997). Starring Mira Sorvino (who took the role partly on the advice of then-boyfriend and del Toro fan Quentin Tarantino), Mimic mined some great scares out of mutant, shape-shifting bugs terrorizing New York City, but having to acquiesce to Hollywood studio demands left del Toro unhappy about the experience.

Returning to Mexico, del Toro formed his own production company, The Tequila Gang, and set out to make a more personal thriller. Produced by Pedro Almodóvar and his brother, Agustín Almodóvar, and shot in Spain, The Devil's Backbone (2001) was a more ambitious ghost story set during the end of the Spanish Civil War. Using filters and a mobile camera, del Toro created ominous, sepia-toned visuals that evoked a spectral surveillance over the tragic, politically metaphorical events taking place in an isolated, haunted boys' school for Republican Army orphans. Hailed for its chilling atmosphere, intelligent complexity, and excellent performances from Federico Luppi and Marisa Paredes as the school's left-wing leaders, The Devil's Backbone confirmed del Toro's artistic promise and earned him more critical kudos.

Gratified by the experience making The Devil's Backbone and clear-eyed about what Hollywood could offer, del Toro followed his personal movie with the big-budget, Wesley Snipes comic-book vampire thriller sequel Blade 2 (2002). Del Toro also began to develop several other American projects, including works with notable Hollywood mavericks James Cameron and Francis Ford Coppola. Though the prospect of del Toro adapting H.P. Lovecraft's chilling short story At the Mountains of Madness gave fans of the horror author hope that someone would finally get his work right on the big screen (no slight to Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon), del Toro's next project would ultimately be an adaptation of a more contemporary supernatural tale. Adapted from and produced by comic-book artist/writer Mike Mignola, Hellboy told the tale of a demon summoned by Nazis in the waning days of World War II (Ron Perlman) who eventually joins the allies in battling the forces of evil.

Subsequently preferring to pull back a bit from Hollywood and craft another modestly budgeted dark fairy tale in the vein of The Devil's Backbone, del Toro would next focus his attentions on the production of Pan's Labyrinth. Though Pan's Labyrinth wasn't a direct sequel to The Devil's Backbone in the traditional sense, this unsettling fantasy continued to explore the themes of childhood innocence and tyrannical oppression by following the quest of a young girl who becomes convinced by a mythical faun that she is a lost princess of legend. Once again set during the days of the Spanish Civil War, Pan's Labyrinth merged real-world nightmares with otherworldly wonders with a fluidity seldom seen in contemporary fantasy, and critics were quick to praise the director for his assured handling of the thematically complex material.

By this point, Hellboy fans were beginning to wonder whether or not the long-gestating rumors of a sequel to that modestly successful Mike Mignola adaptation would ever bear any tangible fruit. Then, in 2006 Universal announced that they had acquired the rights after Sony withdrew funding from Revolution Studios and were looking to move forward with the film, with director del Toro once again teaming with writer Mignola and stars Ron Perlman and Selma Blair to chronicle the further adventures of everyone's favorite BPRD agent.

Del Toro Films official fansite

Horror Directors Profile

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Angels and Insects: The Cinematic Spawn of Guillermo Del Toro David Greven from 24LiesASecond, December 2, 2005

del Toro, Guillermo They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Film Monthly Interview (2002) by Paul Fischer, March 8, 2002

Film Monthly Interview (2006) by Paul Fischer, September 27, 2006

What is a Ghost? An Interview with Guillermo del Toro by Kimberly Chun from Cineaste

Sight & Sound Interview (2006) by Mark Kermode, December 2006

GreenCine Interview (2006) by David D’Arcy (click on his name), December 31, 2006

Wikipedia: Guillermo Del Toro

CRONOS

Mexico (94 mi) 1993

Time Out review

Luppi, an elderly antiques dealer, discovers a gold gizmo which a mysterious alchemist had hidden inside a statue centuries before. The old man becomes immortal, his body undergoes a bizarre transformation, and he develops a thirst for blood. Resisting the efforts of dying businessman Brook and his henchman Perlman to get hold of the so-called Cronos device (it has strange body-piercing abilities), Luppi struggles to hold on to his humanity even beyond the grave. Del Toro gives an intriguing spin to the time-honoured vampire pic. Out goes gratuitous blood letting, in comes dry wit, a sombre pace and a substantial emotional kick, as Luppi seeks to maintain the powerful bond with his wife and young granddaughter, even though he looks, well, like something from a horror movie. A most startling genre piece: tender, imaginative and wholly its own.

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

What a strange film this is. The second-highest-budgeted Mexican movie since Like Water for Chocolate, this import is an impressive, disturbing rumination on the ancient theme of eternal life, and the lengths men will go to in pursuing its brass ring. In the opening voice-over, we are told that a 16th-century alchemist created a small, palm-sized Cronos device that would bestow the gift of agelessness on its possessor. Naturally, the wizard comes to a bad end (before even the opening titles), and Cronos cuts to modern-day Mexico, where an elderly antique dealer (Luppi) and his daughter (Shanath) discover the scarab-like device hidden inside a grimy and roach-infested wooden archangel. When he puts it in his hand and winds the mechanism, tiny retractable pincers emerge and burrow into his palm. Exactly what drives the Cronos device -- an insectile demon hidden deep within the clockwork innards -- is never quite explained, but the next day, the old man isn't feeling all that old anymore. He isn't looking too badly, either. Meanwhile, a dying, reclusive billionaire and his evil nephew (nicely essayed by Ron Perlman, who's looking more and more like Forties horror star Rondo Hatton every minute) are searching high and low for the device. Their quest ends when they discover the battered archangel in the old man's curio shop, and from this point on it's a deadly battle of wits between the two men, one of them gravely ill and the other extremely deceased. Del Toro has a wonderful eye for this sort of dark fable: his shots are filled with expressive camera angles, pounding rains, and gossamer fogs. Rarely has modern-day Mexico looked so eerie. Shanath as the old man's granddaughter is particularly affecting, caring for her grandfather even as he rots away before her innocent eyes. As a meditation on life eternal, Cronos is a thoughtful, intelligent film, and as a horror movie (which is, I think, its main mission in life) it's genuinely disquieting. Which is all you really need.

Beyond Hollywood review James Mudge

The Mexican movie “Cronos” is undoubtedly one of the better horror films of the 1990s. At times unsettling, at other times moving and compassionate, this is a vampire film that never conforms to any of the given rules or wisdom regarding the genre. Beautifully made, this is a true gem; a thoughtful and creepy experience awaits those who seek it out.

The story follows aging Mexican antiques dealer Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi, also in the director’s “The Devil’s Backbone”), who comes across an odd, beetle-shaped device in an old statue. As he inspects it, the artifact whirs to life, sprouting claws that dig into the flesh of his hand. The next day, Jesus finds himself feeling younger and more energetic than he has in years, a fact that he rightly attributes to the mysterious contraption.

However, this new vitality comes at a terrible price, as Jesus develops an uncontrollable thirst for human blood. His dark voyage of self-discovery is complicated by the violent attentions of the sinister millionaire Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook) and his vicious thug of a son, Angel (Ron Perlman, “Hellboy” himself). Addicted to the use of the device, Jesus comes to realize that he is evolving both physically and emotionally into a monster that may be a threat to the granddaughter he loves so dearly.

Guillermo del Toro is one of my favorite directors of recent years, having been responsible for the underrated killer cockroach flick “Mimic”, the wonderful ghost story “The Devil’s Backbone”, and more recently, “Hellboy”. “Cronos” is a perfect showcase for his skills, and del Toro directs it with a real sense of maturity and patience. This is a film where the horror creeps up slowly, through the seductive guise of a wondrous miracle that turns tragically sour.

Although it is a reworking of the vampire myth, the plotting in “Cronos” is measured and subtle, with no sudden or needless twists. Del Toro skillfully builds the solemn atmosphere without the use of any tacky devices or the unnecessary insertion of artificial set pieces. There’s even very little gore. Having said that, there are a few unpleasant moments, including one disturbing scene where Jesus licks blood from the floor of a restaurant bathroom.

Although suspenseful and quite unsettling in places, “Cronos” is not a film specifically played for sudden frights or shocks. This is the type of movie that sticks in your mind, providing thought provoking chills rather than jump out of your seat shrieks. This might make the proceedings seem somewhat slow to the impatient viewer, but I personally found the story completely absorbing.

Another aspect of this film that I particularly enjoyed was the very European feel to the set design and cinematography. The film has a beautiful look, and great attention has obviously been paid to even the smallest details. Every frame has an unobtrusive and gothic appearance, especially during the scenes in Jesus’ antique shop. This result in the viewer leaving with the impression that they have just watched a sinister fairy tale. The golden Cronos device itself is a real joy to behold, a fantastically crafted item whose baleful whirring heralds doom for all who would make use of it.

The acting in the film is excellent, especially from Luppi. Tamara Shanath, as his young granddaughter, is far less annoying than young actors often are in this sort of situation. Ron Perlman too is superb in the awkward role of a very human thug, whose obsession with plastic surgery provides the film’s only comic relief.

The film benefits greatly from the fact that in Jesus, we are given a well-written and believable character. The audience views the film through his eyes, and we accompany him through the horrors and wonders of the changes that are affecting his body and mind. This is done very successfully, and we come not only to empathize with the man, but more important to care about what happens to him. This of course makes the horror all the more effective.

I would strongly urge any film fans to seek out “Cronos”. A true work of craftsmanship, this film is fascinating, moving and unsettling. Del Toro is definitely one of the most promising directors to emerge from the horror genre in recent years, and given the strength of his recent Hollywood outings, his star will only continue to rise.

not coming to a theater near you review Simon Augustine

DVD Outsider Slarek

Scott Renshaw review [7/10]

DVD Times Anthony Nield

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

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Brian Calhoun) dvd review

Bloody-Disgusting review [4.5/5] Lyle Henretty

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley) review

Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/5]

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DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [5/5] [10th Anniversary Special Edition]

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eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [4/5]

Classic Horror review Jason Jones

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

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2.5/5]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]

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Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

MIMIC

USA (95 mi) 1997

Time Out review

The first US picture from the Mexican director of Cronos is a sci-fi thriller, fusing a dark, poetic allegory about the perils of genetic manipulation with grim, relentless, subterranean horror. Three years after scientists Sorvino and Northam save New York's children from a polio-like epidemic - by tampering with the DNA structure of the disease's main carrier, the ubiquitous cockroach - the results of their arrogant experiments come back to haunt them. Giant fast-evolving insects now lurk in the subway tunnels beneath the city, mimicking and preying upon their sometime predators, human beings. Uncompromising, subversive and occasionally perversely comic.

Movieline Magazine dvd review Joshua Mooney

In the '50s, it was man's arrogant tampering with the secrets of the atom that led to the unleashing of B-movie horrors like The Amazing Colossal Man and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. In Mimic, it's our fooling with DNA that lets loose the primordial nightmares--insects the size of linebackers who threaten to crunch up the Big Apple. Unlike self-consciously self-referential genre flicks like the Screams, Mimic is defiantly, refreshingly true to its formulaic drive-in forebears, from its simplistic setup--Help! Huge bugs are eating everyone. How do we kill them?--to its unabashedly corny climactic romantic clinch. It may be a throwback, but it's not just a cheesy schlock throwback. And Mexican-born director Guillermo Del Toro is hardly content to churn out an A.I.P.-style yuck-fest--he's a soulful cinematic artiste who paints in wide swatches of terror and doom. Judging from his earlier Cronos as well as Mimic, it's clear he's obsessed with all things insectoid--and that he has a Cronenberg-ian knack for generating dread.

Here's the setup: a mysterious epidemic, spread by roaches, is killing New York's kids. Entomologist Mira Sorvino engineers a designer bug that, when released into the subway, wipes out all roaches. But instead of self-destructing, as it was bred to do, the good bug reproduces and mutates at an astounding rate, gradually learning how to mimic its only enemy, man. Helped by Jeremy Northam (Mr. Knightley of Emma), gutsy, vulnerable Sorvino goes down into the ancient, labyrinthine underground train system (the expert production design is by Cronenberg veteran Carol Spier), where a motley crew of Manhattanites (including Giancarlo Giannini and Charles S. Dutton--not your average sci-fi bug food) must make their last stand from a stranded subway car (now there's a nightmare).

Del Toro carries off this basic, primal, make 'em squirm, make 'em jump, make 'em queasy stuff with relentless, insectlike efficiency himself. He attends to the delicious ickiness of it all (the extensive entrails-and-viscera content is not for the weak-stomached) and employs a meticulously crafted, multilayered soundtrack that jolts us with all manner of monstrous skitterings and mandible-grinding horrors. He's also a cunning master of mood: an early shot of an abandoned schoolyard, its fence aflutter with ribbons honoring the lost tykes, is chilling. Later, a body is yanked down a sewer opening it can't possibly fit through--that's Del Toro's subtle yet completely unnerving introduction to the inhuman forces lurking below.

Because Mimic plummets us into the bowels of New York before the midpoint and stays there, the proceedings are relentlessly murky. If you watch Mimic on a 20-inch television screen in a sunlit room, therefore, it tends to devolve into impressionistic shadows. Watch it at night, however, and it scores its ultimate fiendish goal, reminding us why we humans are instinctually afraid of the dark.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [C]

In the interest of giving credit where credit's due, let me first mention that Mimic has great bugs. Under the supervision of longtime SFX maestro Rob Bottin (Se7en, John Carpenter's The Thing), this film's swarm of giant, mutated cockroaches is ravishingly sickening. One shot in particular, which you may have seen when star Mira Sorvino appeared on the Letterman show, is so crazy and startling that it had the audience at my screening breaking into applause. Mimic is evidence that inspired special effects can be their own reward. (Bottin's directorial debut will be, um, Freddy vs. Jason, which pits the epochal slashers of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series against each other, presumably en route to Hell.)

But if you guessed that the bugs are the only good news, you're right. Mimic starts out as a pedestrian thriller and deteriorates slowly into a depressingly bad one. It's not without a few good sequences, and director Guillermo del Toro once again exhibits a great respect for the genre. (Ole Bornedal, whose remake of his own Nightwatch has been sitting on Miramax's shelf for close to a year now, has a producer credit!) But in the end, Mimic turns out to be an apt title for a film that shamelessly snitches its best ideas from better pictures.

Sorvino plays Susan Tyler, a brilliant scientist who, in a prologue, engineers a new "Judas" breed of cockroach to wipe out more traditional New York roaches who have been spreading a deadly disease that attacks children. Three years later, the story picks up as two street urchins sell Susan an impossibly big specimin of cockroach they found at the Delancey Street subway station. No dummy, Susan doesn't waste time deducing that her genetically engineered roaches didn't die out exactly as they were supposed to. Somewhere beneath Manhattan, there's a whole colony of these resilient little buggers, which could spell big trouble for humanity.

So Susan and her husband Peter (Jeremy Northam; they're trying, unsuccessfully, to get her pregnant) venture underground to investigate. Stupidly, Peter goes deep with only buddy Josh Brolin and a cranky transit cop (Charles S. Dutton) for support. Also involved are a shoeshine man (Giancarlo Giannini) and his son (Alexander Goodwin), who can tell the size and style of somebody's shoes just by listening to them, and who learns to mimic the sounds of the big insects.

Del Toro helmed Cronos (released in the U.S. in 1994), which was a fairly interesting Mexican riff on the vampire legend, but he's a lot farther from home this time. The more conventional Mimic moves fitfully, with bracing special effects sequences that are pretty much counter-balanced by the leaden pacing of the stuff in between. For the first half, we're interested enough in learning as much as we can about these critters that the film's herky-jerk rhythms are almost pleasantly off-putting. And the pay-off scenes tend to be creepy-crawly doozies, with ugly little cockroaches leading the way to more distressing looking big ones. (Who is that guy in the trenchcoat, anyway?) The obvious ancestor is Alien, which relocated the slasher movie to outer space. But Mimic has more in common with your garden variety slasher film, where clumsy exposition and character development always lead up to a centerpiece sequence of flesh-ripping, than with Alien's more challenging SF metaphors.

When two of the heroes find themselves isolated in a long-abandoned underground subway terminal, it becomes apparent that del Toro is most assuredly not much of an action director. So Mimic winds down into a tedious cramped-quarters thriller that has so little sense of character that nothing at all seems to be in jeopardy. There's no sense of place, either. For all its reliance on the threat of an infested subway system, Mimic has as much New York ambiance as Rumble in the Bronx -- that is, none at all. All that remains is to watch the characters sacrifice themselves for one another in tag-team fashion. (Sorvino even gets to mar her hand with a symbolic stigmata.) Still, the ending is pretty upbeat. Even though F. Murray Abraham, in a performance billed as a "special appearance," chastises Susan for letting her "little Frankensteins" run amok underground, Mimic wouldn't dream of making her pay for her hubris.

Elsewhere, the picture is simply lacking in new ideas. Graphic designer Kyle Cooper should sue himself for ripping off his own title sequence from Se7en. Co-screenwriter John Sayles (Lone Star) should choose his projects a little more carefully. And I'll look forward to seeing del Toro's next movie. But those bugs are really, really great.

Tucson Weekly (Zamfir Quackenbush) review

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

Alex Fung review [2/4]

Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe) review

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Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel

James Bowman review

Alex Ioshpe review [8/10]

SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2.5/4]

Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [2/4]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]

KPBS Movie Blog [Beth Accomando]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

Urban Cinefile (Australia) Louise Keller and Paul Fischer

Best-Horror-Movies.com Dr. Chills

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]

Movie Magazine International [Andrea Chase]

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

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2.5/5]

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman

Washington Post (Richard Harrington) review

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE (El espinazo del Diablo)

Mexico Spain (110 mi) 2001

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

A classy Hispanic horror pic written and directed by the Mexican cinephile who made Cronos and Mimic. Like many Spanish movies about the Civil War, it filters that traumatic conflict through the partly comprehending eyes of a child. After his Republican father dies in battle, 10-year-old Carlos (Tielve) is left in a desert orphanage, where crippled widow Carmen (Paredes) and kindly Professor Casares (Luppi) hope to protect their charges from advancing Fascists. But danger exists inside the fragile sanctuary, too - not only does Carlos clash with older bully Jaime, but there's surly, self-serving janitor Jacinto (Noriega) to worry about, not to mention chilling rumours about a kid who went missing. If only for its technical aspects, this would rate as a pleasurably superior supernatural psychological thriller, with polished but subtle special effects, painterly, atmospheric cinematography and vivid performances from a top-notch cast. What lifts it, however, is an adept use of generic elements as a poetic/metaphorical gloss on political and historical realities. Hence a ghost mystery becomes a tale of opposing forces building to a deadly, explosive denouement in which concealed passions finally burst forth.

The Devil's Backbone Gerald Peary, also seen here: The Boston Phoenix review

Some trendspotters say the next big thing for international cinema is a swing to the young generation of Mexican directors, post-Arturo Ripstein and post-post Bunuel. Perhaps, but there's a way to go when The Devil's Backbone by Guillermo del Torro (Cronos, Mimic) is touted as a seminal film of the Mexican New Wave. Del Torro is good at spooky atmosphere, and he's utilized a first-rate locale, an isolated, abysmally run-down fort (?) baked under the hot, yellow Mexican sun, and which stands in for an orphanage. But the acting is clunky, and the story is straight-to-midnight movie stunted and not very believable. Why is it set in Spain in the 1930s during the Civil War? I have no idea. A twelve-year old boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), is brought to this odd orphanage run by a weird, moody gothic couple, and where an unexploded bomb dropped by a Fascist plane sits in the courtyard. Other characters: a ghost boy, Santi, who creeps about unhappily each night and provides a few genuine scares; an evil, sadistic handyman, Jacinto (Eduardo Noreiga), against whom all the orphans finally revolt. The distributors have packaged The Devil's Backbone as an arthouse picture. It plays far more like a Franco-North American spaghetti western.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Guillermo Del Toro's films are rabid commentaries on the suspension of time, often told through the point of view of children. In Cronos, a young girl keeps life-giving insects inside her innocent-looking dolly while the "funny shoes" boy from the underrated Mimic prognosticates entomological death without losing a body part of his own. With The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro pulls an Amenábar by dishing out sophisticated war commentary with bone-chilling dread. A bomb is dropped from the skies above an isolated Spanish orphanage, which leaves a boy bleeding to death in its mysterious, inexplosive wake. His corpse is then tied and shoved into the orphanage's basement pool. When a young boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), arrives at the ghostly facility some time later, he seemingly signals the arrival of Franco himself.

The abandoned Carlos learns to put a lid on his prissy behavior with the help of his mentors: Cásares (Federico Luppi), the orphanage's aged professor/doctor, and Carmen (Marisa Paredes), the one-legged ex-wife of a famed leftist poet. The bomb from the film's opening sequence still lies in the center of the orphanage's courtyard; this is Del Toro's remarkable way of displacing the past into the present. Carlos collects the snails that emanate from the school's basement, oblivious to the ghostly wails that allude to some unfinished business. Carmen clings to her nationalist ideals and her hidden bars of gold while promising her youth refuge from the war still going on in the distant horizon. Santi (Junio Valverde) arises from his swampy tomb, seemingly bemoaning his own abandonment. Carmen tells Carlos that many boys run away from her home, unaware that one was unceremoniously dropped into her stagnant pool.

Del Toro's living ghosts are as stuck on the past as are his deadly apparitions. Santi is the devil's backbone: a resurrected ghost never meant for human life, now a mere insect trapped in amber. Santi may represent the stifled Spanish citizen, rallying for the rights of the underclass by taking on the country's political complacency; unlike Cásares, he is an unrealized man of essence. In this home of superstition, a viper is found in caretaker Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega). Loathsome despite his pretty looks, Jacinto beds the one-legged woman that saved him from himself when he was left at the orphanage. She clings to him incestuously while he schemes to take away from her the orphanage's gold bars. Jacinto is not unlike a selfish revolutionary, so insensitive to his war-torn land that he will blow up his own family.

The Devil's Backbone works both as art-house spooker and political allegory. Santi appears and disappears at will—he's feared at night but forgotten during the day. As the sun burns above the orphanage's desert home, young teacher Conchita (Irene Visedo) receives a makeshift ring from the hostile Jaime. Hormones blazing, Jaime could pass for a sympathetic Jacinto-lite—his future as a savior of Spain seemingly predicated on how the world deals with him at this precise moment. Conchita takes Jaime's ring and tells Jacinto that it is nothing but "kids stuff." But it is, though—these are not so much their acts of retaliation as they are signs that they are alive. It is from these actions that they summon their strength and band together against Jacinto. In negotiating Santi's past, they ensure the solidarity of Spain's future.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Devil's Backbone, The (2001) Paul Julian Smith for Sight and Sound, December 2001

The Devil's Backbone combines history with horror for an uncanny take on the Spanish Civil War

The Devil's Backbone, director Guillermo del Toro's masterly supernatural thriller set in an orphanage haunted by the ghost of a young boy, is the latest in a distinguished line of features exploring the legacy of the Spanish Civil War from a child's point of view. It's a tradition that has long combined the domestic and the horrific. Víctor Erice's 1972 The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena), for instance, had its youthful protagonist Ana - a cinematic ancestor of the orphan Carlos at the centre of this film - come face to face with Frankenstein's monster, an all-too appropriate allegory for Spanish dictator Franco.

But two aspects distinguish The Devil's Backbone from such recent UK releases as José Luis Cuerda's saccharine Butterfly's Tongue (La lengua de las mariposas) and Montxo Barrios Armendáriz's Secrets of the Heart (Los secretos del corazón). The first is its status as a Spanish-Latin American co-production, made jointly by Almodóvar's El Deseo and Mexico's Tequila Gang. Until now El Deseo has limited itself to Spanish or Basque directors who, given unprecedented artistic freedom, realised such varied fare as Alex de la Iglesia's coarse science-fiction comedy Acción mutante (1993) and Daniel Calparsoro's taut political thriller Pasajes (1996). But Backbone falls within a rapidly changing Spanish production context distinguished by a two-way transatlantic connection. Augustín Almodóvar's strategic alliance with foreign co-producers (long practised for the funding of his brother Pedro's features) parallels Spanish media giant Sogecable's successful move into English-language production with Alejandro Amenábar's The Others and mirrors Sony's recent decision to launch a Spanish-language production operation in Spain. Increasingly projects are addressed to both Spain and Latin America, territories whose cultural tastes remain diverse. In this context the expert casting of The Devil's Backbone is significant. The two leads (both schoolteachers in the orphanage) are Argentine Federico Luppi, who has frequently worked in Spain, and Spaniard Marisa Paredes, who has starred in Mexican maestro Arturo Ripstein's Deep Crimson (Profundo carmesi, 1997) and No-one Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1998).

The second intriguing feature is the record of del Toro himself. Exploiting his professional background in special effects and make-up, his first feature Cronos (1993) was a brilliant essay in body horror in which a mechanical vampire transforms a mild-mannered antique dealer (Luppi once more) into a rabid zombie. More importantly perhaps, Cronos is set in an eerily deracinated Mexico City where Argentine tangos (associated with Luppi's character) collide with Russian street signs and dialogue alternates between Spanish and English. The vampire machine, brought to the New World by a Spanish colonist, is an uncanny allegory for the mixed and warring roots of Mexican culture. Widely praised, Cronos was followed by the much cruder Mimic (1997) in which Mira Sorvino fights off giant cockroaches in the New York subway. Rescued from Hollywood by the brothers Almodóvar, how does del Toro cope with his first film made in Europe and in a period setting?

The Devil's Backbone features all the visual brilliance that once made del Toro seem destined to be the founder of Mexico's own 'cinéma du look'. The opening montage of a falling bomb, wounded child and body parts drifting in amber liquid is dazzlingly realised. Expert cinematographer Guillermo Navarro alternates the stark day-lit exteriors of the central Spanish plain with nocturnal interiors that either glow warm and brown in Velázquez-hued domestic scenes or shimmer blue and grey in the child's supernatural encounters. The digital swirl of dust and flies around ghost child Santi is executed with panache. And the accomplished visual effects are matched by a subtle sound design, in which the conflict between brutal Spaniard Jacinto (played by matinee idol Eduardo Noriega, now hardened into a convincingly repellent macho) and kindly Casares (Luppi) is played out through their choice of music: the traditional Spanish songs of Imperio Argentina (Spanish collaborator with the Nazis) or the tangos of Argentine national hero Carlos Gardel.

While del Toro reconciles European and Latin American elements in the film, he has more trouble adapting his distinctive sensibility to a historical setting. Casares' opening voiceover suggests a psychological explanation for the uncanny: 'What is a ghost? A terrible moment condemned to repeat itself over and over... a sentiment suspended in time.' And del Toro's narrative (he is one of three credited screenwriters) echoes the conflict between the two Spains played out in the Civil War itself: the scientific rationalism of the leftist schoolmaster versus the supernatural irrationalism implicitly embodied by fascism. This sophisticated approach chimes with Freud's analysis of the uncanny, in which the supernatural is defined as a displaced or repressed version of the real, but it tends to undercut the frisson of the horror genre. While del Toro can faithfully execute a suspense sequence worthy of his master Hitchcock in the scene where the boys fetch water in the dead of night, the appearances of the ghost are too prosaic to satisfy genre aficionados. This is largely because of the interference of the historical setting in the supernatural drama. At the height of the Civil War it hardly requires supernatural intuition to predict, as ghostly Santi does, that 'many of you will die.' Likewise Casares remarks to his beloved Carmen that it is they, the outnumbered and vulnerable Republicans, who are the real ghosts. If the uncanny is diagnosed too well, then surely its potency is lost?

But del Toro's dazzling way with the image pulls him and the picture through: a massive unexploded bomb stands in the centre of the children's playground (one child claims you can hear its heart beat); a mysterious clockwork frog takes the place of Cronos' vampire machine. Perhaps the eerie basement where child and torturer meet their end in a womb-like water cistern also has a particular resonance: Mexican culture is also built over ancient and violent foundations, and it's not too far-fetched to compare the film's doomed Spanish orphanage to the great baroque buildings of Mexico City. In spite of an overextended final act, then, The Devil's Backbone remains the work of a great stylist with a uniquely disturbing attraction to, and vision of, the frontier between life and death.

Senses of Cinema (Julian Savage) review

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

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HELLBOY

USA (122 mi) 2004 Director’s cut (132 mi)

Time Out London review which includes: Guillermo Del Toro Q&A (11/23/06), Guillermo del Toro: interview (01/29/08), and Guillermo del Toro: interview (08/11/08)

Fun. It’s a crucial but often overlooked element in a summer blockbuster comic-book adaptation and it’s in ‘Hellboy’ by the spadeload. How could it not be when the central figure is a grouchy 60-year-old adolescent seven-foot half-human devil with a giant right arm and woman problems? Heartfelt horror is del Toro’s stock-in-trade, and ‘Hellboy’ resounds with the director’s glee at being handed the keys and told to cut loose on Mike Mignola’s cult comic-book creation. But for all Mignola’s vision and del Toro’s panache, this is Ron Perlman’s film: all in red and larger than life (clever photography beating CGI to buggery), he burns up the screen as the eponymous hero. This wisecracking, gun-toting, cigar-chomping, trenchcoat-wearing cross between Humphrey Bogart, Hannibal Smith from ‘The A-Team’ and Clint Eastwood is a long way from Peter Parker. No navel-gazing identity crisis here; the only concession Hellboy makes to the human world is filing his horns ‘to fit in’.

As del Toro rips through the opening half-hour exposition, we learn that Hellboy crawled into this world from another dimension during World War II. He now works for the US military alongside scientist and father figure Professor Bruttenholm (John Hurt, a ringer for Hergé’s Professor Calculus), battling an eternal evil that currently manifests itself in the form of Rasputin, some Nazis and a chilling sand-veined cyborg in a gimp suit. Relishing these absurdities and with no tedious old aunties to accommodate, del Toro gets on with the business of furious entertainment, racking up a sequence of coruscating set-pieces against elaborate, urban-occult backdrops while giving Perlman space to cast a baleful eye over a burgeoning romance between his dream girl (and twisted firestarter) Liz (Selma Blair) and military apparatchik Agent Myers (Rupert Evans). Del Toro, in love with his source but never overawed by it, keeps things moving; Perlman ties it together with some of the driest witticisms this side of Indiana Jones. Like we said: fun.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Hellboy (2004) Kim Newman, September 2004

A film of Hellboy comic has more than its share of fights and monsters. But it brings the character to life with a big red heart, says Kim Newman.

Few comic-book franchises have been brought to the screen by a creator as committed to honouring the original material as Mike Mignola's Hellboy, a project nurtured over several years by Guillermo del Toro. The writer-director's love of arcane mechanics laced with bug imagery makes him perfectly attuned to the world of Mignola, an artist whose major cinema presence to date was as a source for the Jules Verne-styled 'steampunk' design of Disney's 2001 Atlantis The Lost Empire. The bio-mechanical intricacy that has been a del Toro touchstone since the insect-and-clockwork device at the heart of Cronos (1993) is central to Hellboy on the page and on screen, where the devices are bigger -using grinding stone and creaking iron -but as visually delightful.

Hellboy the character has been around for over a decade, appearing first in one-off stories before receiving a proper introduction in the mini-series Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (the source for del Toro's screenplay); rather than being published continuously, the Hellboy comic has been issued in limited series subsequently repackaged as books. Though a few other artists have been allowed to draw the character and Seed was scripted by John Byrne, Hellboy remains essentially Mignola's property, ensuring a visual consistency in the character's presentation along with a gradual revealing of the world in which he lives.

A tall, bulky, red figure with a prehensile tail and bumps on his forehead where he sawed off his demon horns ("to fit in"), Hellboy is one of comics' big kids in non-human bodies (like the Thing, the Hulk or Swamp Thing). He's living proof of the nurture-over-nature theory in that despite his demonic origins, his all-American upbringing has led him to feel like a real boy and act like a regular, grouchy, cigar-chomping action man. The key moment in the comic, reproduced perfectly here, comes after Hellboy has been snatched from the Nazis who would raise him as an Antichrist: the demon baby poses for a photograph with a crowd of smiling World War II-era GIs and the academic foster father who will raise him to live like these regular-Joe heroes.

A 60-year-old adolescent, Hellboy consumes large quantities of pancakes, beer and Baby Ruth bars then faces up to ultimate evils with a comically big gun and an even bigger (though less comical) stone hand. Ron Perlman, often seen under make-up since his debut in Quest for Fire (1981) and a del Toro regular since Cronos, seemed to have found the role of a lifetime in the television series Beauty and the Beast but trumps that lovelorn hero-monster part here. His fed-up-hero mannerisms, nervy crush on Liz and solid presence in the many, many deathtrap scenes bulk out the comic-book character.

The first problem any Hellboy film has to overcome is presenting the big red hunk as a believable part of the real world, and here del Toro goes against the prevailing wisdom (cf: Hulk) that such characters can be realised only with CGI. Though perspective tricks are used to make the full-grown Hellboy tower over regular humans, he is almost entirely a physical presence -first found in a lair surrounded by pussycats and food, with the rasping sound of Tom Waits' 'Heart Attack and Vine' mixed in as a character touchstone. Of course Hellboy is superb in the several action scenes, and we get as many locations for skirmishes as levels in a videogame: a museum of antiquities, a funfair at Halloween, the New York subway and an impressive world of traps and dungeons under Rasputin's supposed tomb outside Moscow. But it's to Perlman's credit that Hellboy works as well in the wry comedy moments and the temptation sequence when his horns regrow (with a flaming crown floating between them) and he has a vision of the position he might hold as a master of a ravaged world.

Having tackled a comics project in 2002's Blade II (with Perlman in a supporting role), undertaken as a demo piece to prove he could make this, del Toro still doesn't quite deliver a script that contains all the comic's great material. The device of using Rupert Evans' Agent Myers (new-minted for the film) as a way into the world of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence (BPRD) and the trigger for an understated love triangle makes some sense, but the long prologue means our viewpoint character doesn't turn up until the mood is already established. Myers is a lot less fun than anyone else in the room (including John William Johnson as the agent he is supposed to be replacing) and is swiftly reduced to a tag-along character with only a few more lines than the Star Trek-style 'red shirts' who are taken into the catacombs to be killed off by deathtraps the higher-billed heroes then cope with.

John Hurt narrates the set-up and has a dignified extended cameo as Bruttenholm (the film doesn't quite understand that 'Broom' is how the name is pronounced, not a separate nickname). Unfortunately, the spiky, indulgent, affectionate but troubled relationship between Hellboy and this human father is given less weight than the hero's more conventional love for Liz. In a brilliant move, Bruttenholm's death not only spurs the emotional climax but makes room for another welcome player in Jeffrey Tambor's officious, wry BPRD commander -who finally bonds with Hellboy by showing him how to light his cigar properly.

The bad guys have great looks, but the conflicted hero shoulders the complexity. Karel Roden's bald, glowering Rasputin -Hellboy's putative mentor who has survived his historical death -is a plot function rather than a person, though he arises magnificently from a pool of blood at the centre of a mandala carved into a temple floor outlined by the spilled gore of a sacrificial guide. The CGI-tentacled entities he brings into the world encourage messy action along the lines of the Blade films; a subway chase echoes one in Stephen Norrington's original Blade; and the big-monster finish seems a polished version of the climax abandoned for that film but included on the DVD. The best of the villains is mime artist Ladislav Beran as Hitler's surgery-addicted assassin Kroenen: a lipless, eyelidless mummy seen in a disturbing gas mask and/or full SS regalia. Like the sensitive Black Lagoon-style creature Abe Sapien (swum by Doug Jones and voiced by David Hyde Pierce), Kroenen is a sinuous, prissy, almost effeminate presence beside the thumping Hellboy and has an elegant human cruelty that makes his final confrontation with the hero more satisfying than yet another squid-squashing effect. It may offer a big battle too many, but Hellboy succeeds because it brings the visuals from the page to life with a beating red heart.

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click HERE for a second opinion on Hellboy by Sheila Seacroft from Jigsaw Lounge

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PAN’S LABYRINTH (El laberinto del fauno) B 87

Spain Mexico USA (120 mi) 2006 Trailer Guillermo Del Toro's Sketchbook

PAN is visually stunning, veering off into the strange and exotic imagination of a young child who is afraid of the real world around her, set during Franco's era in Spain, visually extravagant, but grim, dark, gloomy, and overly sadistic, which certainly detracts from the many positives of this film. In my view, undeserving of the “masterpiece” label that has been hurled in this film’s direction, much of which is obtained through the use of computer graphics. Yes, that is becoming a fairly elementary part of filmmaking, and those that excel at its use deserve praise, but not overpraise. A film must still succeed not through computer skills, but through an emotional connection with the audience, and in that area this film disappoints, as besides the elaborate development of the girl’s persona, who else matters? The melding of real and fantasy is wonderfully intermixed in the mind of the girl, and fantasy is certainly a psychological defense mechanism to avoid the real, but besides the overall impressive look, the interior dimension of both worlds remains a cold, cold place, not one I would care to venture into again, unlike, say, the intersecting real and fantasy mix of David Lynch films, which have infinite appeal, offering greater ambiguity and film poetry.

Ivana Baquero is Ofelia, an 11-year old girl who has lost her father, so she immerses herself in the world of books and fairytales. Set in 1944 just after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s fascist troops are attempting to round up all the Republican militants from the mountains and exterminate them all, led my Sergi López as Captain Vidal in another one of his cherished roles where he is the living personification of evil, the murderous sadistic commander who relishes killing and pain. As the film opens, Ofelia’s pregnant mother is being driven in haste to meet in a remote military outpost with the Captain, her new husband. En route, during a brief stop, Ofelia wanders into the woods and discovers a dragonfly that is aroused by her presence, befriending her throughout the film, leading her into a strange and exotic underworld of fairies and monsters where they believe she is a returned princess. Simultaneous to the vicious world that awaits her under the Captain’s rule, which at least includes one friend, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú from Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN), a helpful housekeeper who sympathizes with the militants, is an equally dangerous parallel fantasy world where the dragonfly transforms into a fairy and leads her to an awakened faun who harshly demands complete obedience under his rule, challenging her to perform three tasks to prove her worthiness as an immortal, each more dangerous than the last.

Ofelia’s connection to each world remains tenuous, as her mother is near term but gravely ill, and as she’s not sure whether to trust the faun or not. Both worlds collide and suddenly become indistinguishable from one another, easily the most terrifying moment in the film, as she has to all at once answer to multiple forces that are compelling her to obey. The captain comes charging into her room and orders her to disregard something the faun has told her she must do, and her mother is at the same time telling her that fairy tales don’t really exist, that she needs to listen to her new father, yet the horrible pain of reality is veering out of control, which is especially terrifying in the mind of a child, interestingly expressed through an ERASERHEAD Lynch-like creation which she has been instructed to place under her mother’s bed, and in her anguish when everything goes wrong, she turns to the fantasy world for help. Eventually she gets her taste of each world, one filled with bloodshed and torture, with demands for blind obedience, and the other leads her into an underground cavern of an ogre with eyes in his hands, who threatens to devour her after she fails to obey her instructions.

Reality never can stand up to the elaborately designed parallel universe in this film, as Ofelia is much more fascinated, as is the director, in pursuing her own curiosity. What she discovers underground is ultimately much more satisfactory than the one-dimensional universe of living under the thumb of a fascist dictator. A rhythm of life under the Captain’s rule is never fully developed, but remains sketchy and overly gruesome, as everyone comes to a terrible unjust end, while the faun as well appears to be luring her into some kind of trap. It’s a terrible predicament for a young child, as she feels the dark effects of both worlds caving in on her instead of any sense of happiness or joy, which fantasy usually brings. When the story comes full circle, bookended by a narrator whose “Once upon a time” story led us into these coinciding worlds, we’re left sympathizing with the girl and her troubling dilemmas, but also with an equally troubling indifference for the rest of them.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

FINALLY delivering on the promise of his 1993 debut Cronos, Mexican writer-director del Toro - who has been moving between arthouse metaphysics (The Devil's Backbone) and Hollywood blockbusters (Hellboy) with largely underwhelming results - hits the bullseye with Pan's Labyrinth. A startlingly full-blooded - at times ferocious - fairytale-cum-horror-fable set in mid-forties Spain, it's a story that occupies two parallel, equally dangerous planes of reality: the brutalities of civil war, and the phantasmagoric realm of myths and monsters.

These are the two worlds between which moves our spirited young heroine, the bookish, eleven-ish Ofelia (Baquero), after she arrives with her mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) at the sprawling rural estate in northern Spain that's to be there new home. With Ofelia's father long dead, Carmen has remarried: her husband is Vidal (Lopez), a martinet captain in Franco's army. Exploring the estate one day, the inquisitive Ofelia stumbles into a large stone labyrinth - the home of  a horned giant who introduces himself as the faun Pan (Doug Jones). This is the start of a series of terrifying adventures for Ofelia - who must also deal with the more earthly horrors of Captain Vidal and his domestic reign of fear...

A glance at the title, poster, stills and synopsis for Pan's Labyrinth might give the impression that the picture was somehow 'kid's stuff' - or perhaps a dark-edged romp in the Tim Burton mould. Such impressions would be far wide of the mark: hardened critics at advance press-shows have found themselves averting their eyes or wincing in discomfort at some of the more horrific sequences of what is often a tough, disturbing watch (the details and atmosphere influenced as much by Bacon, Brueghel and Bosch as Bunuel or Erice.) But proper fairy-tales were never meant to be fluffily pleasant: the beautifully-crafted, engagingly fast-paced Pan's Labyrinth is a startling collision of the Grimm (subterranean beasties) and the grim (totalitarian brutalities) - and its astonishing, ambiguous finale is all the more powerful when you remember just how long it was until Spain was able to wake up from the all-too-real Franco nightmare.

The Onion A.V. Club review Noel Murray

Balancing childlike enchantment with grown-up horror isn't easy, and for a good long stretch at the start, Guillermo del Toro's populist fable Pan's Labyrinth seems bound to fumble. Set just after the Spanish Civil War, the film stars Ivana Baquero as a pre-teen girl who prefers to disappear into books, especially when her pregnant, widowed mother remarries and moves them to a remote mountain outpost to live with the ultimate wicked stepfather: a cruel army captain played by Sergi López. Throughout Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro cuts between López's attempts to smoke out the remaining rebels camped in the surrounding forest, and Baquero's retreat into a fantasy world where she's a reincarnated princess, asked by a towering faun to carry out three tasks and thereby complete her transformation into an immortal.

Obviously, parallels develop between the war story and the fantasy story. Both are about quixotic quests and demanding authority figures, and both have their share of magic keys and special potions. But for most of its first hour, Pan's Labyrinth doesn't fit together neatly. The fantasy sequences are wildly stylized and simplistically plotted, while the war sequences are bloody and brutal. But in the second hour, the stories begin to merge, as Baquero's tasks start intersecting López's mission, and she has to decide whether she can trust the creepy-looking mythological creature who's telling her what to do.

It would be a mistake to read Pan's Labyrinth simply as a heroine's journey, with a little girl representing all the Spaniards who stood up to the fascists. This isn't really a movie about one person or one historical moment; it's about the larger question of how history judges what we do. The republicans lost the Spanish Civil War, yet even though history is written by the winners, almost no one thinks of the fascists as the good guys in that story. In Pan's Labyrinth, Baquero disobeys and makes mistakes, but she's still the heroine. In the movie's moving final lines, del Toro shows a flower blooming, and holds Baquero up as an inspiration to anyone who feels that the world has gotten too dark for any light to break through. He's deliberate in getting there, but after two hours of dazzlingly fantastical images and stomach-turning gore, del Toro winds around, and finds his story's center.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Guillermo del Toro's films do not starve for creatures of baroque ingenuity, and Pan's Labyrinth, the vividly aestheticized tale of a young girl's journey through the gothic rabbit hole of her imagination, is cluttered with insects that morph into faeries, a faun who gatekeeps an unknown dimension, a large toad with a secret in its volatile tummy, and a merciless monster with eyes in the palms of its hands. Not knowing what to make of the film's spectacular collision of glossy reality and gaudy fantasy, some critics have succumbed to ignorance—like Time's Mary Corliss, who described the film as "Lewis Carroll meets Luis Buñuel," as if del Toro shares anything in common with Buñuel besides a Spanish tongue. Del Toro is smart but he's no theoretician, and though he takes aim at fascism, his vision is scarcely surreal; though prone to sensualist shocks, his comic-con aesthetic is so tidy and discreetly alluring Buñuel might have called it bourgeois.

Pan's Labyrinth is a fancy retooling of The Devil's Backbone: the political context is the same, except a girl replaces a boy, a forest subs for a vast desert plain, fantasy usurps horror, and escape is a more prominent obsession than revenge. A young girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), arrives with her sick mother to meet her stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergí Lopez)—a lackey, ostensibly, of the Franco regime—in a hideout secluded in the middle of a woodsy Spanish countryside where rebel soldiers lurk. When Ofelia offers Vidal the wrong hand in order to greet him, the ogre nearly crushes her arm with his grip. Del Toro insufficiently dramatizes the relationship between Ofelia and her pregnant mother and cruel stepfather, asking us to accept her bitter reality at face value, but his biggest mistake is using the film's pretense to fairy tale as an excuse to slip cardboard portraitures past his audience.

When Ofelia walks into a rocky labyrinth near her stepfather's manse for the first time, there is an immediate sense of the girl trying to reconcile her present by slipping into fantasy, yet the child's disconnect from the goings-on around her is so strong the film feels oddly disjoined. Two worlds spar for dominance here (Vidal's slick territory of cruel violence and the ornate cubbyholes of Ofelia's mind), and though each one is meticulously imagined, del Toro doesn't adequately assess the conflict between them. Like the cut Vidal incurs on his face in one scene, giving him a sinister Joker-like smile that he ghoulishly redresses, the split between the story's disparate realms is so clean it's almost pathological. How strange that for all the attention del Toro pays to conveying the callous violence of Vidal's well-oiled political dominion and the gothic splendor of Ofelia's imagination, he pays so little mind to the metaphysical pus that should leak from the fissure that separates them.

Unlike The Devil's Backbone, Pan's Labyrinth's allegories are not so rich, and though sexism might explain why del Toro filters his young female character's crisis through a fairy tale scrim, the film's fantasy sequences remain seductive pageants of spiritual and cultural nuance. Though del Toro allows the war between Vidal and the rebels to transpire in cold, unimaginative autopilot, using moody Aura-like visual textures and transitional swipes resonant of George Lucas's comic-book lexicon, Ofelia's world remains a wondrous and unique place to visit. Proof of del Toro's commitment to detail is how Pan (Doug Jones) relies heavily on the vosotros form when speaking. Such classic touches mean that Ofelia's fantasies work to evoke a strong sense of longing for the past and faith in its bygone traditions. So, while the surface of del Toro's film exudes a chilly, pretentious crispness, one must dig deeper to discover and bathe in the soundness of a warm spiritual center.

Pan's Labyrinth | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

A bold juxtaposition of real and unreal worlds is at the heart of Guillermo del Toro's visually inventive fantasy about Franco-ite Spain. It's so audacious and so technically accomplished, and arrives here garlanded with so many radiant superlatives, that I wish I liked it more. The film's political dimension is never quite as lavishly or as enthusiastically achieved as its fantasy life, however, and its energies are asymmetric: the surface world of history is clogged compared to the sheer energy of its subterranean dreamscape.

Like Del Toro's 2001 picture The Devil's Backbone, Pan's Labyrinth is about the Spanish civil war. It is 1944; the struggle against the Republicans has been won in Spain. D-Day, and Hitler's imminent collapse in Europe, are distant and unwelcome rumours. A fierce Franco-ite Captain Vidal, played by the incomparably sinister Sergi López, prepares to welcome his pregnant bride to the family home in the forest, which he is reinforcing as a military redoubt because it is surrounded by Republican guerrillas holding out in the woods. His new wife Carmen (Adriana Gil) is a widow who has accepted Vidal's proposal of marriage out of loneliness; Ofélia (Ivana Baquero), her daughter by her first marriage, is terrified of this wicked stepfather, as well she might be. On the very first night, Vidal brutally beats and murders two suspected Republicans - a horribly violent scene - putting his bad-guy status beyond doubt.

Ofélia has somewhere to escape. This intelligent, bookish child has discovered a secret labyrinth beneath the house inhabited by a magnificent, awe-inspiring faun who hails Ofélia as a Princess, but tells her she must carry out terrifying tasks to enter into her destiny; this she does, without telling the grown-ups of this strange other world beneath their feet. Nor is Ofélia the only double agent in the film. Vidal's housekeeper and doctor have treacherous Republican sympathies.

Fascism is perhaps the ultimate example of that sleep of reason which brings forth monsters. Del Toro's monsters are pretty extraordinary. He has said that his designs are influenced by Arthur Rackham, the English Victorian artist who illustrated Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare. This description doesn't do justice to the originality of Del Toro's pictorial devices. At the film's beginning, Ofélia has a little pinafore dress recalling Alice; her name echoes Hamlet's love, but her self-reliance and grit far surpass that passive Shakespearian figure. Maybe her name is a female variant of Orpheus.

At any rate, it is an excellent performance from 12-year-old Baquero. Ofélia must confront a giant and loathsome toad in a claustrophobic tunnel. She must square up to the giant and imperious faun, Pan. Most dauntingly of all, she has to approach the nightmarish figure of the Pale Man, whose eyes are in his hands - he is able to see her when he holds his palms up to the sides of his head. That extraordinary image alone is worth the price of admission.

What do these creatures say about fascism? Or, what does fascism say about them? Del Toro asks us to consider Pan's exotic world side-by-side with political history. We have to consume them on equal terms, like chewing cake and cheese together. It's a bold and intriguing proposition, but I'm not sure it comes off. Del Toro does well to remind us of the cruel reality of Franco's Spain: a fascist state tacitly encouraged by many as a bulwark against communism, and seen by many more as an example of the historical inevitability of extreme nationalism. These are the bad guys who were not defeated, and perhaps Del Toro's fantasy of the ambiguous, tyrannical faun is not merely a dramatising of Ofélia's private anxieties, but a way of working through Spain's collective fear and distrust of its own past. Either way, I felt the movie was a series of four or five brilliant images, like illustrative plates from a Victorian volume, or frames from a graphic novel. There was no overwhelming narrative drive or inner dramatic life to animate them. But what amazing pictures Del Toro dreams up.

Pajiba (Dustin Rowles) review

PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review

not coming to a theater near you (Jenny Jediny) review

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review

Reverse Shot [Andrew Tracy]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Beverly Berning

World Socialist Web Site review Paul Bond

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review [4/4] also reviewing CHILDREN OF MEN

Cinefantastique Online Steve Biodrowski

DVD Outsider Camus

DVD Times - Pan's Labyrinth Michael Mackenzie

the 4/27/07 issue of Businessworld Noel Vera, also seen here: Critic After Dark

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

Alternative Film Guide [Andre Soares]

Electric Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

House Next Door [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [A-]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Filmbrain Like Anna Karina’s Sweater

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

Beyond Hollywood review Gopal

Cannes Review: Pan's Labyrinth - Cinematical James Rocchi at Cannes from Cinematical

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/5]

Bloody-Disgusting review [5/5] Mr. Disgusting

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review

Commentary Track [Rishi Agrawal]

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C-]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review which includes: A Symbol of Transition: Interview with Guillermo del Toro

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [4/5]

Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]

Reel.com review [4/4] Pam Grady

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

Best-Horror-Movies.com Don Sumner

Foster on Film - Fantasy

Twitch (Kurt Halfyard) review at Toronto

Twitch review Opus at Toronto

Twitch (Todd Brown) review at Toronto

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

Urban Cinefile review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban

Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann, also seen here: CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review

stylusmagazine.com (Paolo Cabrelli) review

cinemattraction (Brandon Fibbs) review

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

DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD DVD Version]

DVD Verdict (Dennis Prince) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [5/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

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

DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [5/5] [Platinum Series] 2 disc

DVD Verdict dvd review [Platinum Series] Joel Pearce

Reel.com dvd review [4/4] Tim Knight, 2 disc Platinum Series

Monsters and Critics - DVD Review - 2 Disc Ed. [Jeff Swindoll] Platinum Series

eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] U.J. Lessing

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

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

Film School Rejects (H. Stewart) review [A-] also seen here: Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

Crushed by Inertia

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

hybridmagazine.com review Roxanne Bogucka

Three Movie Buffs (Scott Nash) review [4/4]

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

KPBS Online Reviews [Beth Accomando] an interview with the director, January 12, 2007

Variety.com [Justin Chang]

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Guardian/Observer

Time Out London (Ben Walters) review

Time Out New York (Melissa Anderson) review [4/6]

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4.5/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review [4/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

RogerEbert.com (Jim Emerson) review [4/4]

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

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

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY

USA (110 mi) 2008

"It's not about monsters being real—it's about us allowing them to exist in our imagination and our soul. If you allow the magic, it's not necessarily that you're going to transform water into wine, but you'll certainly transform the boring expectations of everyday life into a spiritual one. I believe in the spiritual, but I am not a religious guy. It's a strange conceit, but it's true. If you allow the magical to live in you, [the world is] a better place."

—Guillermo del Toro

Time Out London (Nigel Floyd) review [4/6] which includes: Guillermo Del Toro Q&A (11/23/06), Guillermo del Toro: interview (01/29/08), and Guillermo del Toro: interview (08/11/08)

Guillermo del Toro’s Fabergé egg of a fairytale is not so much a sequel as a fusion of the fabulist imagination of ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ with the witty, irreverent comic-book action of his own ‘Hellboy’. The teeming Troll Market in the film exemplifies his approach, an eye-ravishing spectacle that invests each ‘monster’ with its own personality. Witness the cute infant who, when soppily cooed over, angrily retorts: ‘I’m not a baby, I’m a tumour.’ Virtually a stand-alone film, it pitches the red-skinned, devil-horned Hellboy headlong into a mythical clash between his adopted human world and an ancient underworld of elves, faeries and trolls.

The plot, in brief, concerns the plans of usurped King Balor’s son, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), to awaken the dormant Golden Army, pitiless clockwork uber-warriors commissioned and later mothballed by his horrified father. To prevent this, the prince’s twin sister, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) – to whom he is telepathically linked – elicits the help of Hellboy, his pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair), aquatic empath Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and a newcomer to the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, Johann Kraus, an ectoplasmic mystic housed in a metal diving suit. Together, they battle against the rebellious Prince, seething swarms of ‘Tooth Fairies’, towering troll henchman Wink and the terrifyingly beautiful Angel of Death.

Perfectly cast, Ron Perlman (below) plays Hellboy as an anti-superhero, a blue-collar guy who is happier chugging beers and eating pizza than fighting evil. The fanboy indulgence of the spectacular action scenes sometimes arrests the plot’s forward momentum, but what del Toro calls ‘the bloodline of moral choice’ runs through the richly imagined story like a scarlet thread. Crucially, no distinction is made between the humans, the tame ‘monsters’ of the BPRD and the glamorous ‘freaks’ they are charged with policing. All are capable of the whole gamut of ‘human’ emotions. A thinking person’s ‘creature feature’ graced with two contrasting love stories – Abe Sapien falls for the pale and interesting princess; Hellboy’s hesitant girlfriend Liz is unable to tell him she is pregnant with his child – ‘Hellboy II’ is also a heartfelt plea for bio- and cultural diversity.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Fathers figure prominently in Hellboy II: The Golden Army – their sins, their legacies, and the responsibility that comes from turning into one. In this superlative sequel from Guillermo Del Toro, a cloud of parental duty hovers over Hellboy (Ron Perlman), who – having lost surrogate dad Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm (John Hurt) in the 2004 original – grapples with issues of commitment, allegiance and sacrifice while oblivious to the fact that firestarter girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair) is pregnant. Maturation, though, isn’t quite what Del Toro is after for his horned protagonist in this rollicking, affecting comic book adaptation, as he continues to be the same crass, sarcastic and cantankerous secret government agent of his prior outing. That badass attitude, perfectly in tune with his muscular red-skinned physique, remains grafted to a surprisingly tender heart, with the hero still struggling to prove – to both himself and to the public from which his boss (Jeffrey Tambor) wants him hidden – that he’s more man than demon. His of-two-worlds nature becomes an especially pressing concern once ancient exiled Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) shatters his paterfamilias’ truce with the humans and pursues the key to the unstoppable Golden Army in order to incite war against mankind, a battle in which Hellboy, Liz, and psychic Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) – all supernatural creatures employed by mortal men – find themselves mired.

Del Toro’s baroquely bizarre imaginativeness has never been more mesmerizing than in Hellboy II, its cornucopia of extraordinary creatures (some beautifully melding flesh with metal) seemingly stolen from children’s nightmares, and its preponderance of metal gears intrinsically linked to the saga’s fascination with fate and free will. Tableaus of gorgeously disgusting majesty abound, such as one involving an angel of death whose eyes are situated in its wings, as well as two movies-worth of breathtaking action sequences, each notable for their distinctiveness, propulsive energy, and coherent visual dexterity, this last quality particularly present in Hellboy’s throwdown with the titular battalion. There’s a proficiency to each of the film’s set pieces – including Hellboy fighting a towering forest god while protectively cradling an infant – but, as importantly, a poignant center to the often-frenzied mayhem. Embodied by Perlman with a blustery gruffness that masks a sensitive soul, the rebellious Hellboy is a fountain of hilariously acerbic wisecracks. For all the humor, however, Del Toro consistently focuses his narrative on the crimson giant’s earnest, anguished desire to fit in, a yearning that stems from a conception of himself – formed during a childhood of watching Howdy Doody and clutching shiny toy six-shooters in bed – as fundamentally human.

The pain of outsiderdom and corresponding need for companionship course through Hellboy II’s heroes and villains, with Del Toro bestowing considerate complexity upon Prince Nuada by positioning him as a would-be destroyer driven by desperate self-preservation impulses. Empathy runs deep for these characters, providing the narrative with a sentimental spine that gives meaning and value to their rollercoaster-ride predicaments. Even more than in his much-heralded Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro wields outsized, seamless CG-animated fantasy to amplify internal turmoil, staging hectic, frenzied showstoppers that are emboldened by emotional and relationship dynamics. While the gaunt, acrobatic Nuada too closely resembles Blade II’s baddie (both portrayed by Goss), the director otherwise laces his mythic tale with shrewd cinematic allusions, be they an overt clip from Bride of Frankenstein (“We belong dead!”) or a sly, strange nod to Total Recall-via-Kindergarten Cop (a kid attached to a mutant adult’s torso states “I’m not a baby, I’m a tumor”). Yet abundant references aside, Hellboy II is about a man, a woman, and their attempts to achieve normalcy despite social alienation, identity confusion, and constantly intruding chaos, a story intensely rooted in that most essential of feelings – love – and the mad, selfish, destructive things people will do to both attain and retain it. Thrilling and touching in equal measure, it’s on the short list of great superhero films.

PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review

Ever wonder what it would be like if your favorite filmmaker had the creative freedom to realize his or her own inner artistic aims? Ever lament the fact that directors like Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, or Darren Aronofsky are stuck working within a studio system that demands certain commercial sacrifices over an individual’s aesthetic desires? Well, welcome to the world of Guillermo Del Toro. Here’s a man brimming with imagination and invention, and yet no film has really allowed him the kind of collective carte blanche to fulfill his most outlandish visions…until now. Thanks to the universal acclaim of Pan’s Labyrinth, and a future helming The Hobbit, someone finally gave Del Toro a limitless paintbox. The brilliance that is Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, is the result.

Long ago, when the Earth was green, mankind and the elements of magic battled for control of the planet. Seeing the error of their ways, the two sides came to a truce before the mythic Golden Army (a goblin-made indestructible mechanical killing armada with no remorse) could complete their directive. Now, centuries later, the son of King Balor, Prince Nuada, wants to pay humanity back for its crimes against his fellow creatures. He seeks the three pieces of the royal crown, the device that controls the feared robotic redeemers. Crossing over into the real world, he unleashes his otherworldly minions to help him seek the sections.  Naturally, this puts him in direct conflict with the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. Along with the fire-conjuring Liz Sherman, and the aquatic empath Abe Sapian, it will be up to the heroic Hellboy to stop Nuada and save the day…if he can.

In a summer already overloaded with brash, bravado cinematic turns, Hellboy 2 has got to be one of the biggest and ballsiest. Stamped with a kind of genius rare in today’s Tinsel Town terrain, Mexican madman Guillermo Del Toro has fashioned a kind of supersonic spectacle, an intensely engaging epic that finds a way to keep both its scope and entertainment value legitimate and yet larger than life. Loosely based on the Mike Mignola comics, and clearly the product of its director’s outsized originality, we are treated to two hours of monsters, myth, and moviemaking majesty. Since he no longer has to give us the title character’s origins, and can swiftly bypass any further character introduction, Del Toro goes right for the throat. From the opening stop motion animation that sets up the storyline, to the finale which pits armored automatons against our heroes, this is nothing short of pure visual bliss.

Del Toro has always been a geek, an old school nerd who plies his obsessions with a fetishist’s fascination. You can sense him marveling at his own novelty over the course of the film, his camera capturing the actual awe and inferred wide-eyed wonder. Our synapses shouldn’t fire this liberally or often, and yet Hellboy 2 makes the overload feel like a familiar friend. This is big screen fantasy as a wish fulfillment free for all, a far out fairytale told in the most intricate of celluloid calligraphy. Luckily, this is one director who makes room on his crowded canvas for moral fiber and subtext. This movie is more than just a collection of setpieces showing off the best that CGI and other F/X have to offer. Instead, it’s a deep meditation on magic, and how civilization has lost touch with its ethereal power.

Returning to remind us of how great they were the first time around, Ron Pearlman (Hellboy), Selma Blair (Liz Sherman), and Doug Jones (now also voicing Abe Sapian) provide the nexus for our emotional involvement, and all do splendid work. Especially impressive is our title titan, a muscled bad ass with a soul as sensitive as a little child. This version of Hellboy may not match his graphic familiar note for note, but as a conduit to how Del Toro views the world around him, this link between the various planes of existence remains a remarkable work of fiction. And thanks to how Pearlman plays him - strong yet unsure, macho yet mindful of his purpose - we grow to like him more and more as the movie progresses. Jones is also good at channeling Abe’s inner turmoil, a battle Hellboy fought semi-successfully in the first film. 

Par for his creative course, Del Toro delivers villains who moderate their evil with a sense of purpose and potential decency. Prince Nuada (beautifully underplayed by Luke Gross) doesn’t only want to destroy the human pestilence that populates his world - he wants to reset the order, to regain the respect and dignity the supernatural forces once held among the living and undead. He goes about it in nasty, underhanded ways, but the valiance in his purpose is not unnoticed. Similarly, the various creatures created for the film rely on a Brothers Grimm kind of seriousness to support their sinister purpose. They aren’t just the things that go bump in the night. These are the nightmares meant to remind man, as the movie says, of why they originally feared the dark.

There is a clever, almost kitschy way in which Hellboy 2: The Golden Army delivers its delights. It’s like a freakshow film noir where Men in Black meets Clive Barker’s Cabal (or Nightbreed, for those of you not literarily inclined). There is a telling texture to this filmic universe, a real sense of gravitas and threat. When Hellboy battles a massive earth Elemental, it’s Cloverfield conceived as an old fashioned serial cliffhanger, imperiled infant and all. Indeed, Del Toro keeps the riff references and homages coming, touching on the entire history of horror and fantasy in just under two hours of spellbinding cinema. And we sense the director continuously building on his legend, opening the door for a brain melting final installment/trequel sometime after he completes his trip through Tolkein.

And frankly, it couldn’t happen to a nicer, more knowledgeable guy. It’s rare when Hollywood gives the eccentric and iconoclastic a chance to shine, let along a second one. One misstep and you’re usually sitting in entertainment exile, wondering where your creative cache went. In this case, through a sheer force of will and an unreal amount of invention, Guillermo Del Toro has rewritten the rulebook. All that post-Pan Oscar cred didn’t hurt, but there’s got to be some substance to support a repeat performance. Apparently, this filmmaker has more than enough on his plate to feed an imagery-starved fanbase. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army may say ‘Hell-friggin’-yes’ to another excess time and time again, but when the meal is this ridiculously rich and refined, we’ll gladly indulge. In a summer soaked in spectacle, this dish is just divine.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Hellboy II The Golden Army (2008) Michael Atkinson, September 2008

Critic After Dark Noel Vera

The House Next Door [Jonathan Pacheco] Take 1

The House Next Door [Ted Pigeon] Take 2

Reverse Shot (Andrew Tracy) review

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

Pajiba (Dustin Rowles) review

The Onion A.V. Club review Nathan Rabin

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

The Village Voice [Chuck Wilson]

DVD Outsider Camus

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B]

Mike D'Angelo review

Slant Magazine review Jeremiah Kipp

Cinefantastique Online Steve Biodrowski

filmcritic.com (Brian Chen) review [4/5]

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

Reel.com review [3.5/4] Rudy Joggerst

Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [C+]

The Horror Review [Horror Bob]

PopMatters (Shaun Huston) review [3 Disc Special Edition]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/5] 3-disc Special Edition

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson

DVD Talk (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

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

DVD Talk (Jeffrey Kauffman) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (David Johnson) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

High-Def Digest - Blu-ray Review [Joshua Zyber]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo, High Definition Blue-Ray

DVD Talk (Francis Rizzo III) dvd review [5/5] [Collector's Set]

DVD Verdict- 3-Disc Collector's Set [Brett Cullum]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]

Movie Shark Deblore [debbie lynn elias]

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

Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]

Robert Cashill, Popdose

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

A Nutshell Review Stefan S

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

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

Bloody-Disgusting review [3.5/5] Mr. Disgusting

CBC.ca Arts review Katrina Onstad

CNN Showbiz (Tom Charity) review

Screen International review Mike Goodridge

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

Movie-Vault.com (LaRae Meadows) review

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Critic After Dark Noel Vera

The New York Sun (Steve Dollar) review

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

Beyond Hollywood review Bodhi Grrl

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

Cinemattraction.com [Robert Levin]

CHUD [Nick Nunziata]

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

Bina007 Movie Reviews

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (John Anderson) review

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [3/6]

Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr

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

The Arizona Republic review [4/5] Bill Goodykoontz

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

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

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Leonard Norwitz

Delépine, Benoit and Gustave Kervern

AALTRA A- 94

Belgium (94 mi) 2004

A terrific looking black and white ‘Scope film, that opens with the title on the screen which is so small you can barely see it, then the screen expands to a widescreen image of a bullet train making its way across the screen. One thing this film has plenty of is attitude, and it’s in all the right places, as this slowly developing story, created by and starring the co-directors themselves as two pestering neighbors who hate each other, expands to an entirely different universe, turning into a road film with two despicable subjects that earn no sympathy, which is actually their endearing charm. Yet somehow, through expert placement of shots in a largely wordless film, also demonstrating extreme patience in allowing their scenes to develop, the film slowly grows on you until it becomes hilarious by the end, buoyed by a brief appearance by none other than Aki Kaurismäki, who is simply perfect in his part. The film is a carefully constructed series of Tati-like sight gags, including untranslatable arguments which are not subtitled, immersing us into a culturally mixed European land with no borders, where we are subject to French, German, Dutch, Finnish and English languages at some point or the other.

Two bickering farmers live across the road from one another, with love having deserted them both, so the only love they have is in annoying the hell out of the other one, eventually leading to a tractor accident that oddly leaves them both paralyzed below the waist. When the doctor tells them it’s time to send the “twins” home, they have second thoughts about what they want to do, and both end up at the train station, one wheelchair right behind the other at the ticket office. Traveling together, yet utilizing every opportunity to split from the other one, they end up at a motocross race, where they each budge their way to the front of a fence where they can see, basically driving their wheelchairs over people. The camera is set at wheelchair level, so there’s an interesting scene with a father and son where we never see the father’s head. It’s always out of the frame, but it’s our first hint at dark humor. One gets a ride in a van, and as they’re about the leave the parking area, we see through the front windshield the other in his wheelchair hitching a ride. Somehow the two are taken by a nice family to the beach, wheelchairs comfortably in the sand, where we see them share a bottle of vodka that they stole from the van’s cooler, both eventually falling asleep in their chairs. An argument breaks out in a foreign tongue, no words are translated. Off in the distance we see the van that brought them slowly pull away, leaving the twins alone on the beach. The water rises, and rises. They boys are in trouble, but it plays out beautifully.

When the twins turn up together in a punk bar, we see them off in a corner as the camera scans the entire establishment, and the thought of them in this raucous atmosphere seems plenty ridiculous. Later we see them sprawled on the sidewalk the next morning, their money and credit cards stolen, but this hardly deters them. They somehow steal an electric wheelchair from an unsuspecting elderly couple, they steal an automated motorbike from another serious racer who was generous enough to give one of them a ride, but who afterwards comes after him with a vengeance to get his bike back, but on and on they go, always pulled off to the side of the road, sitting in complete stillness in their wheelchairs waiting for a ride. There’s a wonderful image of them wheeling themselves down a highway while a row of giant windmills, the kind that generate electricity, spin gently in time off to the side of the road.

They wheel into a neatly manicured middle class neighborhood and slowly edge into the back yard where a family is eating outside, gesturing that one of them needs help recharging his electric battery. The other is offered food, and what follows is priceless, as he appears to take food off of the plate of just about everyone there, even out of the hands of the kids straight into his mouth, always asking for another beer, or later, still there for dinner, the camera angle is placed behind his shoulder as the parents stare befuddled, as if caught in a temporary coma, as one of the twins happily mixes the salad, filling his plate, asking if there isn’t any sauce? Later the parents are in bed, wide awake in the middle of the night, as we hear the sound of the electric wheelchair buzzing for more service. The next morning, they are left on the side of the road, their things thrown in the middle of the road as the van pulls away, and we can read the roadside sign, “Highway to Hell.”

The boys have an interest in going to Finland, and improbably, they find a boat that takes them across, as someone kindly wheels them off the boat to dry land. As they wheel through town, we see the cobblestones being carefully vacuumed. They end up at what appears to be a biker bar, with the head of a moose hanging on the wall, as a karaoke performer does his Finnish rendition of Bobby Hebb’s “Sunny” to a startlingly subdued audience which is showing absolutely no reaction. The filmmakers do not cut however, and instead let the singer complete the entire song, as the absurdity of the situation slowly grows and grows until it’s simply hysterical.

But they find their final destination, the Finnish Vaaltra tractor factory, where they make their presence known, demanding 6 million euros each for their injuries. As they yell and shout their demands through a glass enclosed partition, like a currency exchange, behind the glass, a secretary completely ignores them as she idly chats away her time, without a care in the world, as the twins are frantically getting more and more hysterical. We see them parked on the merchandise floor the next morning, nicely groomed and dressed in a tie, expecting to meet the president of the company and settle this once and for all. But they are instead informed they are at the Vaaltra factory, not the one they want called Aaltra which is across town. We see them frantically wheeling through the woods, arriving at what appears to be a dilapidated, broken down auto repair business, inside, nothing but guys in wheelchairs performing who knows what work tasks, welding, soldering, assembling things together, with nothing resembling a tractor in sight. The camera closes in on Aki’s stern face. “I see you’re familiar with our product.” Outside, in a light rain, they all sit in their wheelchairs passing the vodka bottle around, commiserating in their misery. As each brief segment ends, suddenly it fades to black, which is the style that Aki Kaurismäki uses in his films, so one after another we see brief little segments, each fading to black, closing out the film, a nice little tribute to the king of minimalist deadpan comedy.

LE GRAND SOIR

France (92 mi) 2012

Le Grand Soir: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Megan Lehmann at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 23, 2012

Gerard Depardieu and Albert Dupontel star in this punk rock comedy that is up for an Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival.

Punk is not dead but graying at the temples in another screw-the-system comedy from anarchic French directing duo Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern.

Characteristically scabrous but still kind of sweet, this Un Certain Regard entry sends up its soul-deadening strip-mall milieu and takes jabs at the failings of a consumerist society without ever taking itself too seriously. Its humor’s screwball in a minor key and much of the satire is peculiarly French, making this France-Belgium co-production sure to score with domestic audiences on its release June 6 but a tougher sell abroad.

The self-professed “oldest punk in Europe with a dog,” Not (Benoit Poelvoorde) is also, it seems, a bit of a fan of John Cleese circa Fawlty Towers, his chaotic energy periodically exploding into gangling fits of rage.

He’s a forty-something non-conformist who wears the punk uniform of camouflage fatigues, mohawk and jackboots. He sleeps in dumpsters, gets drunk and goes to concerts but mostly hangs about the shopping centre where his parents (the singer Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem) have a snack shop. Not’s brother, Jean-Pierre (Albert Dupontel), is a mattress salesman in a chain store there too and he is Not’s opposite, straight-laced and line-toeing.

When Jean-Pierre’s life starts to unravel and he is threatened with unemployment, the veneer of acquiescence quickly crumples and it doesn’t take long for Not to woo him over to the rebellious side of the street.

Le Grand Soir follows on from Delepine and Kervern’s absurdist 2011 road trip comedy Mammuth (that film’s star Gerard Depardieu has a cameo here as a fortune-teller) and has the same sense of action unfolding organically, thanks to the duo’s fondness for shooting scenes in chronological order. 

Le Grand Soir Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

The latest film by French comic provocateurs Delépine and Kervern (Louise-Michel) could be described as knockabout farce in the name of the Revolution. Proving that you’re never too old to be a punk, however ratty your balding Mohican, Le Grand Soir is the most commercial offering yet from the writing-directing duo, best known in France for their contributions to the Groland satirical TV shows.

Following their languid Gérard Depardieu vehicle Mammuth, Le Grand Soir is a much more focused and aggressive romp, and should crack up domestic audiences, thanks to the genially abrasive presence of popular  faces Albert Dupontel and Benoît Poelvoorde. Exports should be healthy despite some  verbal humour defying translation; luckily the visual comedy speaks its own language.

The opening shot is an extreme close-up of the lizard-like fin on the head of middle-aged punk Not (Poelvoorde), name tattooed on his forehead in ballpoint pen. Not hangs out on the streets of his town, where his parents (respected French musical duo Fontaine and Belkacem) run a cafe specialising in potatoes. Not prides himself on living outside the bourgeois order, with his faithful mutt ‘8-6’ (who gets some of the biggest laughs growling at a cat poster).

In contrast, hyper-conformist brother Jean-Pierre (Dupontel) likes the local soulless shopping malls - for him, they’re a fit place for the “up to standard” people he admires. But Jean-Pierre is in danger of losing his job as a furniture salesman, because he’s not meeting sales targets, and despite last-ditch attempts to sell a ‘smart foam’ mattress, he’s soon out of a job. At which point Ben introduces him to the joys of hardcore punk and showing a finger to the system.

Set entirely in the antiseptic corporate world of the shopping precinct - with interludes at the punk club where Benoit loves to crowdsurf - Le Grand Soir uses vividly coloured widescreen photography to invoke an oddly oppressive and absurd world, albeit one that’s horribly true to daily life.

Flinging impudent grit by the sackload into this world are the two leads: Poelvoorde likeably laidback and shambling as the rebel who believes in saving his energies for moments of confrontation, while Dupontel’s tightly clamped-down nerviness gradually simmers up to a manic explosiveness recalling John Cleese in his prime.

The film has its share of brisk verbal play - there’s a priceless volley of distracted verbiage between Belkacem and B & K regular Bouli Lanners - but the film is boisterously inventive in its visuals too, making terrific use of the CCTV screens on which Ben’s troublemaking  is observed by an unseen security staff. An uproarious sequence has him striking punk poses in front of a mirrored window, not realising that he’s on full view to the pizza eaters on the other side.

Legendary avant-garde chanteuse Fontaine contributes to an oddball soundtrack, and makes a fabulously mannered showing as the brothers’ eccentric maman. Gérard Depardieu offers an unlikely cameo as an unreliable clairvoyant. The displays of two-fingers school-of-77 defiance may come across as infantile, but that’s the point, given that the rebels in question are two middle-aged buffoons.

Cannes Film Festival 2012: 'Le Grand Soir' review John Bleasdale from Cine-Vu

Deleuze, Gilles – film historian

The Green Garbage Bins of Gilles Deleuze Luc Moullet from Rouge

Poubelle, ma belle a response by William D. Routt from Rouge

Delisie, François

TWICE A WOMAN (2 fois une femme) D+ 64

Canada (94 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

While the subject is intriguing, spousal abuse of such severity that the wife must seek the anonymous help of similarly abused women who develop a secret network to safely guide women out of the home into a new identity and new life somewhere far away from their husband’s reach, this Quebec director fails to develop the complexity needed to take this subject seriously, though he claims to have spent two years in preparation for this movie. The director acknowledges he never spoke to abused women, social workers, or even the women’s groups who tirelessly work on abused women’s behalf, but instead relied on police reports and discussions with police officers. As a result, it’s hard to believe this film offers anything new, though the lead character, Evelyne Rompré, is excellent as the compliant spouse who nearly gets killed by her abusive husband, then lies to the hospital staff that is smart enough to offer her help. The mother tells her teenage son Leo (Etienne Laforge), a fragile and reclusive kid with an Ipod in his ear at all times, that they are leaving for a vacation, quickly packing some belongings but leaving the rest, then head out for some northern destination in Quebec near the Ontario border.

What the director fails to realize is the degree of commitment from the women’s network that risk their own lives whisking her away, as in this film they never share their experiences with the runaway mother, and therefore never earn her trust, as instead they demand total compliance and act with the same robotic rigidity as the abusing husband, which is absurd, but this director invents a story where the woman doesn’t really “need” anyone else’s help, preferring to believe that she could resolve this problem on her own. This is really the social conservative’s view, that people don’t need help from government or other help agencies, that they can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. It’s clear, however, that without the help of the similarly abused women, this mother would never have gotten out alive. The director is fond of images in the seclusion of the forest where Rompré swims naked in the rivers and streams, or takes long walks in the woods, and works part time at a food distribution center packaging food. Meanwhile her son has difficulty fitting in at his new school and he’s teased to the point of physical abuse. Where does that leave her? This film borders on reckless irresponsibility in the direction that it takes, suggesting the mom can’t handle it, that perhaps the boy would be better off with his father, as if a bully himself would be better equipped to fend off other bullies, the mere suggestion of which is revolting. While the personal aspects of the story are intriguing, the director’s dereliction of responsibility in addressing this issue is abominable.

DeMille, Cecil B.

Film Reference Eric Smoodin

For much of his forty-year career, the public and the critics associated Cecil B. De Mille with a single kind of film, the epic. He certainly made a great many of them: The Sign of the Cross, The Crusades, King of Kings, two versions of The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Show on Earth, and others. As a result, De Mille became a symbol of Hollywood during its "Golden Age." He represented that which was larger than life, often too elaborate, but always entertaining. By having such a strong public personality, however, De Mille came to be neglected as a director, even though many of his films—not just the epics—stand out as extraordinary.

Although he made films until 1956, De Mille's masterpiece may well have come in 1915 with The Cheat. Even this early in his career, we can locate some of the motifs that turn up again and again in De Mille's work: a faltering upper-class marriage, the allure and exoticism of the Far East, and sexual attraction equated with hypnotic control. He also made a major aesthetic advancement in the use of editing in The Cheat that soon became a part of the repertoire of most filmmakers.

For the cinema's first twenty years, editing was based primarily on following action. During a chase, when actors exited screen right, the next shot had them entering screen left; or, a director might cut from a person being chased to those characters doing the chasing. In either case, the logic of the action controls the editing, which in turn gives us a sense of the physical space of a scene. But in The Cheat, De Mille used his editing to create a sense of psychological space. Richard Hardy, a wealthy businessman, confronts his wife with her extravagant bills, but Mrs. Hardy can think only of her lover, Haka, who is equally obsessed with her. De Mille provides a shot/counter-shot here, but the scene does not cut from Mr. Hardy to his wife, even though the logic of the action and the dialogue seems to indicate that it should. Instead, the shots alternate between Mrs. Hardy and Haka, even though the two lovers are miles apart. This sort of editing, which follows thoughts rather than actions, may seem routine today, but in 1915 it was a major development in the method of constructing a sequence.

As a visual stylist, however, De Mille became known more for his wit than for his editing innovations. At the beginning of The Affairs of Anatol, for instance, our first view of the title character, Anatol DeWitt Spencer, is of his feet. He taps them nervously while he waits for his wife to make breakfast. Our first view of Mrs. Spencer is also of her feet—a maid gives them a pedicure. In just seconds, and with only two shots, De Mille lets us know that this couple is in trouble. Mrs. Spencer's toenails must dry before Anatol can eat. Also from these opening shots, the viewers realize that they have been placed firmly within the realm of romantic comedy. Such closeups have no place within a melodrama.

One normally does not think of De Mille in terms of pairs of shots. Instead, one thinks on a large scale, and remembers the crowd scenes (the lions–versus–Christians extravaganza in The Sign of the Cross), the huge upper-crust social functions (the charity gala in The Cheat), the orgiastic parties (one of which takes place in a dirigible in Dynamite), and the bathrooms that De Mille turns into colossal marble shrines.

De Mille began directing in the grand style quite early in his career. In 1915, with opera star Geraldine Farrar in the lead role, he made one of the best film versions of Carmen, and two years later, again with Farrar, he directed Joan the Woman. Again and again, De Mille would refer to history as a foundation to support the believability of his stories, as if his most obvious excesses could be justified if they were at least remotely based on real-life incidents. A quick look at his filmography shows many films based on historical events (often so far back in the past that accuracy hardly becomes an issue): The Sign of the Cross, The Crusades, Union Pacific, Northwest Mounted Police, and others. When history was inconvenient, De Mille made use of a literary text to give his films a high gloss of acceptability and veracity. In the opening credits of The Affairs of Anatol, for instance, De Mille stresses that the story derives from the play by Schnitzler.

In both his silent and sound films, De Mille mixes Victorian morality with sizable doses of sex and violence. The intertitles of Why Change Your Wife?, for example, rail against divorce as strongly as any nineteenth–century marital tract, but the rest of the film deals openly with sexual obsession, and shows two women in actual physical combat over one man. Similarly, all of De Mille's religious epics extol the Christian virtues while at the same time reveling in scenes depicting all of the deadly sins. Though it is tension between extremes that makes De Mille's films so intriguing, critics have often made this aspect of his work seem laughable. Even today De Mille rarely receives the serious recognition and study that he deserves.

Official Website

Lost City DeMille

All-Movie Guide

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Reel Classics

Images Journal Feature Cecil B. DeMille: The Visionary Years 1915 – 1927, by Gary Johnson

FILM; Winning a Battle but Losing The War Over the Blacklist Greg Mitchell from The New York Times, January 25, 1998

DeMille, Cecil B. They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

THE VIRGINIAN

USA (55 mi) 1914

User reviews from imdb: DLewis from United States

Interesting silent from the very early days of Universal, based on a popular Owen Wister novel and perhaps partly scripted by him. What impressed me the most about it was the command that director Cecil B. DeMille has over feature editing at this early stage. His handling of the principal actors is not particularly outstanding; and DeMille would not further distinguish himself in this area as his long career unfolded. But DeMille understands how to intercut separate scenes so they fold into one another and move the story forward. Also DeMille shows skill in coordinating crowd scenes, which would certainly serve him well in his later biblical epics. In these respects "The Virginian" is one of the most advanced features of it's time, at least of the ones from 1914 which we can still see today.

CARMEN

USA (59 mi) 1915 revised version (75 mi)

Carmen Gary Johnson from Images journal

Carmen (1915) stars opera diva Geraldine Farrar, who had already brought her version of Bizet's Carmen to the stage (singing opposite the great Enrico Caruso). From 1910 to 1920, Farrar was one of the world's top opera performers.

DeMille saw Carmen as the ideal vehicle to introduce her to movie audiences. However DeMille faced a copyright problem if he tackled Bizet's Carmen (the copyright owner demanded outrageous sums). As a result, DeMille turned to the original source material, a story by Prosper Merimee that had long since passed into public domain. The results, while not entirely successful, make for some fascinating drama. Shorn of her great voice by the silent camera, Farrar relied on just her acting alone. She becomes earthy and vivacious in the lead role, but she's less than alluring or exotic--an actress trying too hard to convince her audience of her sexuality. The movie contains few of DeMille's trademark directorial touches: you won't find any strange flashbacks to biblical times or any overt moralizing. The storytelling is uncluttered and straightforward as DeMille rushes through the story in only 59 minutes. A fascinating tale told at breakneck speed.

THE CHEAT

USA (59 mi) 1915

The Village Voice [Ed Park]

"East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet," quoth an intertitle in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915), before the trial for the shooting of a Burmese aristocrat ensconced in Gatsby-land.

The ethnocentric festival's best film isn't even by a member of any of the tribes in question. DeMille's The Cheat stars Sessue Hayakawa as Arakau Haka, a wealthy ivory merchant who throws parties for the smart set at his Long Island estate. When Edith (Fannie Ward), wife of a struggling stockbroker, loses her ladies' group charity funds in speculation, she secretly accepts Arakau's financial aid—and his one delicate condition. When she tries to stop the liaison, he savagely brands her with his signet. Though the premise of a flesh-marking foreigner is textbook xenophobic, Hayakawa (a University of Chicago graduate) brings a refreshing elegance to the role—tails and pocket watch instead of demonic facial hair—while conveying repressed desire in a style subtle for the silent era. The film is a marvel of narrative economy and indelible scenes: the brutal branding, a silhouetted Arakau slumping down a rice-paper screen, the courtroom surging in outrage after Edith's hysterical revelation. "That means it belongs to me," Arakau explains to Edith, upon first showing her his mark. That the AAIFF can embrace a charged masterpiece like The Cheat is no cheat at all.

Turner Classic Movies Roger Fristoe

The silent melodrama The Cheat (1915) was a key film in the early career of Cecil B. DeMille -- one that helped establish his reputation as a top-echelon director. According to DeMille biographer Anne Edwards, the film "set standards of acting, decor, frame composition and lighting which were not surpassed for years." Although D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, released the same year, has received more attention, The Cheat also had a profound influence on filmmaking, especially in its innovative camera techniques and "sexually charged content." The movie was named to the National Film Registry in 1993.

Broadway actress Fannie Ward stars as Edith Hardy, an irresponsible socialite who gambles away $10,000 she has collected for the Red Cross. Without the knowledge of her husband (Jack Dean, Ward's real-life husband at the time) she borrows that amount from wealthy Japanese ivory dealer Tori (Sessue Hayakawa) to cover her indiscretion. The catch is that Tori expects sexual favors in exchange for the loan. The distraught Edith finally turns to her husband for money to repay the loan -- but an enraged Tori calls the poor woman a "cheat," attacks her and, to mark her as his "possession," brands her with a hot iron. After Edith defends her honor with a gun, her husband steps forward to take blame for the shooting and the matter is resolved in a sensational trial.

Re-released during World War I, when Japan was an ally of the U.S., The Cheat so offended members of the Japanese government that Tori's nationality was changed to Burmese and his name became Haka Arakau. A master of subtle understatement at a time when most film acting was flamboyantly histrionic, Hayakawa achieved stardom thanks to his oddly sympathetic performance in The Cheat and an earlier performance in The Typhoon (1914). He formed his own production company in 1920 and enjoyed international success as a leading man and character actor. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).

The Cheat, which was remade several times but never to greater effect, won much critical praise for DeMille, especially for its striking visuals and low-key lighting effects. "Never before has the skillful play with light and shade been used to such marvelous advantage," wrote one reviewer. But the director himself was less impressed by great reviews than in popular acceptance. After The Cheat enjoyed only lackluster box-office success in the U.S., DeMille reportedly dismissed it (despite its commercial success in France). Film historian Kevin Brownlow has written that, after the disappointing reaction to The Cheat and other innovative efforts of his early career, DeMille "lowered his sights to meet the lowest common denominator, so the standard of his films plummeted."

JOAN THE WOMAN

USA (138 mi) 1917

User Reviews from imdb: David Atfield (bits@alphalink.com.au) from Canberra, Australia

All the Demille trademarks are here - huge crowd scenes, wild orgies, torture - but there is also a beauty and imagination here that is lacking in some of his later work. The use of double exposures for Joan's visions, the magnificent use of lighting and colour tinting, reveal a film-maker of greater depth than we might expect.

Opera diva Geraldine Farrar seems a little old and hefty for Joan of Arc, but once you get past that she truly gives an excellent performance. And Wallace Reid as her English lover lends strong support.

The camera is a little static and the "spectacular" battle scene is really just hundreds of people running around waving sticks in the air and falling backwards off walls (and I think very little attention was paid to the safety of the extras and the horses), but this is still a very rewarding and innovative film. And we get the original 1916 score performed on a Wurlitzer.

The historical story is framed by a World War 1 (then currently raging in Europe) scene, which adds poignancy to the piece, but does make the central thesis of the story (that God takes sides in wars) a little harder to take. Ramon Novarro's in this somewhere - can you find him?

Joan The Woman Gary Johnson from Images journal

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Mark Zimmer

New York Times

WHISPERING CHORUS

USA (86 mi) 1918

Commentary Track [Helen Geib]

For a long time I thought Cecil B. DeMille was a talentless hack. Then I saw The Cheat and The Whispering Chorus and realized it wasn’t that he lacked talent, it was just that after 1920 he seldom chose to exercise it. DeMille cruised through most of his exceptionally long and commercially successful career on a popular formula of titillation and censoriousness. It came as a surprise to discover that for a few years at the beginning of the feature era, he was an innovative and critically lauded cinema pioneer.

The Whispering Chorus is a fine example of traditional Hollywood filmmaking, combining strong storytelling, effective performances, good production values and special effects on the then cutting-edge. The protagonist is a non-hero, a weak man who embezzles money from his employer and abandons his wife. He has no real ambitions or positive desires, he simply sees disappearing with a little money in hand as an easy escape route from an ordinary daily life he’s grown tired of. Within a very little time he becomes consumed by a paranoid fear of discovery and arrest. His changing physical circumstances through the film reflect his steady mental decline, culminating in a climactic psychological struggle between right and expediency.

In the film’s most striking sequences, his mental struggles are depicted in a sophisticated variant on the familiar picture of a man with an angel on one shoulder and devil on the other. Visions of people from his past and his present appear to exhort, cajole and excuse his choices and desires. It is an elegant visualization of interior monologue, and a remarkable technical achievement.

A bare recitation of all the twists and turns of the plot would make Chorus sound like a cut-rate melodrama. The reason it is not that is because it is essentially a character study that is grounded in sincere performances and DeMille’s understated and skillful direction. Chorus has a gripping, if admittedly wildly implausible story, but it is not a plot-driven movie.

Perhaps the best evidence for my assessment of Chorus as character study is that the theft is not portrayed as the cause of the man’s troubles, as you would expect in a typical Hollywood crime doesn’t pay melo, but rather as one (and not the first) misstep in a series of wrong steps. While one misstep leads to another and leads the man into increasingly degraded circumstances, the wellspring of his troubles is the essential flaws in his character.

The Whispering Chorus Gary Johnson from Images journal

MALE AND FEMALE

USA (116 mi) 1919

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

Legend has it that Cecil B. De Mille retitled this 1919 version of James M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton because he was afraid that audiences would think it was a navy picture. Crammed with sin, sex, and sermonizing, Male and Female is a perfect opportunity to examine the dominant and most delirious directorial personality of the 20s at its height. With Gloria Swanson and Thomas Meighan. 116 min.

Doug Pratt's DVD Review

The original tale that foreshadowed Swept Away, We’re Not Dressing and other stories where the roles of servants and masters are reversed, James M. Barrie’s The Admirable Chrichton, was adapted in 1919 by Cecil B. DeMille as a silent feature, with Gloria Swanson as the spoiled rich girl who is part of a group shipwrecked on a deserted island, and Thomas Meighan as her former butler and the only one in the group who has any survival skills. There is a wild dream sequence, in which the two imagine themselves in ancient Babylon, allowing DeMille’s true showmanship impulses to surface, but most of the 115 minute film plays upon the relationships between the aristocrats and their servants. DeMille’s technique was often stodgier than his vision, and that is the case with much of the film, but the story strikes a universal and enduring chord, with moments of real humor amid the romantic melodrama.

The picture is in black and white, with some tinted sequences. The tinting tends to go overboard, but for the most part the source material is in very good condition and the picture looks relatively clean, with sharp, well-defined contrasts and minimal wear. There is an adequate stereophonic score, consisting primarily of a piano, backed up by a reasonably good-sized orchestra.

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash)

Male and Female Gary Johnson from Images journal

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

USA (136 mi) 1923

Chicago Reader

When Charlton Heston was still a gleam in his father's eye, Cecil B. De Mille was rolling out this 1923 version of the Old Testament story, which includes several scenes in early two-strip Technicolor. With Richard Dix, Theodore Roberts, Estelle Taylor, and Rod La Rocque. 146 min.

User Reviews from imdb Author: pninson from Seattle, Washington

Cecil B. DeMille's original silent version of the Ten Commandments is mostly a heavy-handed morality play set in 1923. The prologue, which runs just over 40 minutes, shows an abbreviated version of the Biblical story of the Exodus. Most of the dialogue is taken from the Bible. Despite the technical limitations of the era, it succeeds as a fast-paced spectacular. The parting of the Red Sea is just as awe-inspiring in its own way as in the remake, and it's always interesting to see how silent actors compensated for the lack of sound with facial expressions and exaggerated gestures. The musical score is fantastic and everything clips along at a nice pace. As with the remake, it's never subtle, but it's never boring, either.

I wish I could say the same about the main part of the feature. After Moses punishes the Hebrews for worshipping the golden calf, the film moves to the present day (1920s). A mother reads to her grown sons from the Bible. The two brothers are basically Goofus and Gallant. From here, everything is completely predictable.

It's well done so that one can overlook the lack of subtlety. DeMille has a very explicit religious message, and he's not above bludgeoning the viewer over the head with it. That was the style of the day, and the limitations of the silent film force a certain amount of overstatement.

However, unlike most films of this period, this one goes on far too long. It's about ninety minutes but seems far longer. The bad son goes out into the world, declaring that he's going to break all 10 Commandments! Naturally, he becomes a successful businessman... while his humble older brother (a carpenter, naturally) tries not to envy him or covet his wife. There's never any doubt about how it's all going to end: DeMille's message is that "the wages of sin is death", but he takes far too long to get there.

The complete film is about 135 minutes, which must have been an epic length for that era. I would have enjoyed it more if the modern story had been trimmed by about 15 minutes.

In his way, DeMille was the forerunner of Mel Gibson. Both are gifted filmmakers with devout religious beliefs --- short on subtlety, heavy on the bloodshed and headlong action. The 1956 remake of Ten Commandments is a spectacular example of epic film-making, and as this 1923 silent original is now included as an extra disc in the DVD, it's worth checking out. I can't imagine wanting to sit through the modern story again, though; I'll probably shut it off once Moses segues off screen.

THE VOLGA BOATMAN

USA (120 mi) 1926

The Volga Boatman Gary Johnson from Images journal

With The Volga Boatman, Cecil B. DeMille kicks into his extravagant mode--but with a difference. This is a big-scaled epic, but it is also a surprisingly fast moving and exciting romantic melodrama. It's more than a little silly, but that's part of the fun.

The Volga Boatman was influenced by the Russian Revolution. And what was DeMille, a conservative Republican, doing making a movie about the overthrow of the Czar? Well, the situation was ripe with extravagant dramatics. DeMille didn't attempt to politicize the drama; the aristocracy comes off worse, but no one looks particularly good in this movie. The Volga Boatman stars William Boyd of Hopalong Cassidy fame. Brawny and charismatic, he is forced to pull barges up and down the Volga River. With a dozen or more companions, all yoked as they lunge forward, he sings loudly and strongly, so that a Russian princess (Elinor Fair) hears him and begins to secretly yearn for him. She's been dallying with a Russian prince, and she's toying with the idea of marrying him, but then the Russian Revolution kicks into high gear and her castle is stormed. Feodor (Boyd) leads the assault and after one member of the Red Army is killed, the Red Army calls for the princess's death. But when Feodor is locked in a room with her, promising to kill her in five minutes, he sees her strength of spirit and becomes attracted to her. Instead of killing her, they run away together. The preposterousness of the scenario--what leader of a revolutionary army would allow himself to compromise his beliefs and give up his cause after just five minutes with a woman?--gives this movie a delightfully goofy premise. One of the most interesting aspects of the movie is the way that DeMille avoids giving us any completely good or bad characters. Instead, DeMille gives us a variety of men and women who can be alternately petty and noble. For a director who was usually considered to be more interested in creating extravagant scenarios than full-blooded human characters, The Volga Boatman contains a fascinating mix of characters. And the movie also contains several shocking scenes, such as when the White Army captures Feodor and the princess is turned over to the officers, who--not recognizing she is the fiancée of a White Army officer--strip her and begin a gang rape. And when the Red Army storms into the last bastion of White Army power, the camera watches as a Red Army solider forces several ladies in evening gowns to stand still while he paints caricatures on their naked backs. Ultimately, however, the movie isn't about revolution as much as it's about the power of love. As such, it's a ludicrous but wonderfully entertaining fantasy.

THE VOLGA BOATMAN - d: Cecil B. DeMille Danny Fortune from the Alternative Film Guide

The Cecil B. DeMille epic The Volga Boatman should be book-ended with DeMille’s 1929 drama The Godless Girl. Both tell compelling stories without a clear, definite point of view.

Picture it: Russia right before the Bolshevik revolution. The peasants are seething against the ruling class. We see workers slaving to haul a boat to the river. They are starving and oppressed. Along comes the handsome Prince Dimitri (Victor Varconi) and his intended bride, Princess Verna (Elinor Fair). The Prince looks at the peasants with scorn and disgust, but Verna isn’t so smug. In fact, she eyes one of the men with barely contained lust.

The object of her attention is the manly Feodor (William Boyd). He practically glows with his piercing eyes and curly blond hair. He notices her too, but flips her off as one of the bourgeois aristocrats who will soon be defeated and overthrown.

When the revolution comes, Feodor is a leader of the Red Army, intent on wiping out the Royalists. When his troops come upon Princess Verna and her father, they invade the palace and overturn the status quo of the household. The ragtag soldiers order the servants to sit at the table and the Princess and her father to serve them. But when the White Army approaches, Feodor flees with the Princess. (As I said, she had the hots for him.)

The power struggle shifts again and the Princess — disguised as a peasant — is captured by the Royalists. What comes next is probably one of DeMille’s most sordid and perverse scenes. The Princess is forced to dance on a table top while being ogled by the soldiers. One by one, they approach her and remove an article of her clothing, until she is apparently down to her skivvies. They leer and lust at her lasciviously. At first Prince Dimitri, thinking Verna is dead, allows the abomination, but when he recognizes her he is mortified.

The struggle between the Red Bolsheviks and the White Royalists continues. Each side is shown to have its good points and its bad points. But history has shown who the winner is, so Feodor and the Princess are reunited with the Reds, along with Dimitri. But because Feodor is considered a traitor for trying to save Royalty, they are all yoked together to pull the barges to the river, just as in the beginning.

And this is where the movie should end. The tableau picturing the three of them strapped in unison is breathtaking. They were, after all, in it together. Unfortunately, DeMille couldn’t resist a happy ending…

The Volga Boatman is a powerful movie. William Boyd, for one, casts a stunning figure as the leader of the peasants. He is sensitive, yet masculine and strong. And his piercing stare was mesmerizing.

Although DeMille is often accused of being an unapologetic right-winger, his sympathy for the Reds in The Volga Boatman is quite evident — even though they are shown to be just as ruthless as the White Army. (The film’s story was adapted by Lenore J. Coffee from Konrad Bercovici’s novel.) Through it all is a romantic fable of love and passion that fits in beautifully with the real-life drama of the Russian revolution.

KING OF KINGS

USA (155 mi) 1927

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

For many infidels, the Jesus movie of choice remains Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 The King of Kings. This silent blockbuster was recently screened at the American Museum of the Moving Image in a stunning Eastman House archival print and is scheduled for cablecast May 25 on Turner Classic Movies. It's also available on a Kino VHS. More daring than Life of Brian, it features a flapper Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) as the nearly bare-breasted vamp of the Nazarenes (and, it is naughtily suggested, Judas's lady). The madcap vo-dee-oh-doh ambience subsides around the time that Jesus (H.B. Warner) restores a blind tyke's sight. Not surprisingly, given DeMille's own showmanship, The King of Kings is heavy on miracles. It's also thoroughly American—sentimental yet tolerant. DeMille imagined Jews would be pleasantly surprised to learn that Jesus was one of them and was then unpleasantly surprised by organized protests demanding he redress the issue of Jewish culpability. Thus, after Jesus's death occasions a full-scale earthquake, Caiaphas (sometime Yiddish actor Rudolph Schildkraut) runs into the temple and falls on his knees: "Lord God Jehovah, visit not Thy wrath on Thy people Israel—I alone am guilty!" Unlike many of the other interti-tles, this one is not sourced; it's the gospel according to CBD. Mel ought to read it.

Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster

One of the cinema's most important religious epics, Cecil B. DeMille's masterwork, The King of Kings (1927), tells the story of Christ's final experiences, from his meeting with Mary Magdalene, to his Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension.

As with so many other films treating the story of Christ, from Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) to Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ (2004), The King of Kings met with controversy in its day. Jewish groups criticized DeMille's film because they said it condemned them as Christ's crucifiers. Others said DeMille simply pandered to his audience's emotions while some called him a Christian propagandist. Upon viewing the film, John Steinbeck was said to have remarked, "saw the picture, loved the book."

In an attempt to honor the material, DeMille had both a Jesuit Priest and several other members of the clergy (including a Rabbi) on hand during filming to ensure that the proper reverence was being paid to the film's subject matter.

DeMille took a particular liking to the representative from the National Catholic Welfare Council, Father Lord, and tried to play upon his obvious interest in Hollywood by offering to teach him the film business. But Lord was not interested in leaving the clergy and reportedly replied that he wouldn't trade his life "for anything in the world."

The film's first day of shooting was honored with prayers offered by representatives of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist and Moslem faiths. Anxious to set the proper ecclesiastical mood, each morning DeMille entered the set to the strains of "Onward, Christian Soldiers!" and spiritual music was continually piped onto the set during the production. Cast members were all given Bibles and asked to call each other by their Biblical names whenever they were on the sound stage. At one point, an impatient DeMille reportedly demanded to know "where in the hell is Judas?" garnering an angry dressing down from the producer.

So concerned was DeMille with paying the proper respect, that the actor who played Christ, H.B. Warner, was required to endure a fair amount of religious deprivation. Warner was told not to speak to anyone on the set except for the director and told not to be seen in public during the production. Such overzealous attention to "how things looked" might have been due to an early experience on The King of Kings set in which a newspaper photographer snapped a shot of H.B. Warner in full Christ garb lounging in a chair while smoking a cigarette and reading the sports pages.

That's not to say that DeMille did not take some artistic license with the material, even inventing a love affair between Judas (Joseph Schildkraut) and Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan). The opening scene of The King of Kings is pure DeMille, featuring Mary Magdalene in her decadent surroundings, first getting the news that Judas has been "seeing" someone else. Dressed in a revealing jewel-studded bra, Mary sets off in a zebra-drawn chariot driven by a brawny hunk, to confront her rival for Judas's attention.

DeMille had already proven his suitability to the Biblical epic with the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, which many predicted would fail but which instead made an enormous profit despite production costs of $2,265,283. DeMille wanted The King of Kings to achieve a similar success and in an early effort to spike its popular appeal, the film was divided into two parts, the first the Christ story and the second a sin-filled modern story to illustrate human ignorance of Christ's message. However, that modern epilogue was eventually abandoned.

It is said that worldwide, some 8 billion people have seen DeMille's film partly due to the Cinema Corporation's policy of loaning the film to civic and religious groups for a small fee to help replace worn prints. Reportedly no week passes without The King of Kings playing in some corner of the world. Missionaries have carried the film all over the world in support of their ministry. The King of Kings was reportedly the first film Eskimos in Point Barrow, Alaska, had ever seen.

The film debuted, to much pomp, at the newly completed Grauman's Chinese Cinema. The King of Kings was reissued in 1931 with the addition of a synchronized musical score.

But The King of Kings was not a success in all regards. The part of Christ was less than a boon to the acting career of its star, H.B. Warner. Because Hollywood tended to see actors as "types," Warner had great difficulty finding a role that matched the dignity of Christ after completing DeMille's film. He later told friends that his career virtually ended with The King of Kings.

King of Kings: Showman of Piety Criterion essay by Peter Matthews, December 06, 2004

The King of Kings Criterion essay by Charles Musser, May 25, 1992

The King of Kings (1927) - The Criterion Collection

Easter 2014, Part Un: A Tale of Two Kings: DeMille's Silent Classic on ... Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 20, 2014

Review: The King of Kings (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1927) - Patheos Peter T. Chattaway, December 7, 2004

Past Perfect: Criterion Classics - The King of Kings (1927) | PopMatters Bill Gibron, January 16, 2007

King of Kings Gary Johnson from Images journal

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey)

DVD Savant Review: The King of Kings - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, also here: Turner Classic Movies

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

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THE GODLESS GIRL

USA (113 mi) 1929

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

He wasn't right all the time, obviously, but Cecil B. de Mille recognized the immense potential of film as a consciousness-raising device. He panders to the prejudices of his audience, but that's how you get 'em to change: Hey, I'm one of you, and here's a little sugar for your coffee. Atheists and Bible-thumpers unite! Yes, actually, that's the message more or less, one of tolerance, but I think you can look a little bit deeper than that. At its heart the film urges the young (of any generation) to see beyond the prejudices and ignorance of their elders. Radical maybe, but no less necessary and productive. It's Cecil's final silent film-and I'm sure he knew it would be-so it's interesting to watch the nearly ubiquitous "Silence" sign move around the screen, in good times and bad, throughout mental sickness and towards health. However much its heart is in the right place, or near it, as a film it's not really all that much. The faces are all dramatic, and the allegedly true-life (presumably embellished) plot misses few tragedies or triumphs, but none of I it is particularly convincing or even successfully manipulative. It's funny how we've grown exhausted with plots about innocents being imprisoned, as an audience; but no less inclined to keep imprisoning them, as a culture. Repetition just isn't everything. With all the darkness, and efforts towards light, and prisons and escapes of many sorts, it reminds me more than a little bit of the Jim Jarmusch film Down By Law , though Jarmusch handles both the technical and philosophical details with much greater success, and DeMille strikes out on joy whereas Jarmusch busts that move. Banned in Finland , incidentally, like most everything else in those days.

User Reviews from imdb Author: overseer-3 from Florida

The Godless Girl (1929), Cecil B. DeMille's last silent film, has been lovingly restored by George Eastman House from a print obtained from DeMille's estate, and featuring a powerful and moving soundtrack created by Carl Davis; original themes in addition to some classical religious pieces. I am sure that once more silent film fans get a chance to see this beautiful movie it will increase in reputation, and it certainly deserves more than its current 6.0 average rating out of 10.

Of all of DeMille's silents this one is perhaps the most visionary. The title cards are especially beautiful and impressive and topical for our own time. One doesn't have to go back to Bible times to create a spiritual film which can touch audiences, and to me personally therein lies the real appeal of this motion picture. It goes in directions you don't expect it to and it surprises you at every turn. The film is really a plea for tolerance between believers in God and non-believers. Both groups can display intolerance toward one another and then nothing is gained, because nothing is understood when it is cloaked in anger. Whatever someone's faith is, or lack of it, we are all still part of the human family and should treat each other with respect.

Regarding the cast, I thought all the actors were very good and brought pathos and humor to their roles. I liked seeing Lina Basquette in a silent, there isn't much available for her, and I really enjoyed seeing Marie Prevost in sharp focus, acting her heart out as Lina's character's friend (other silents available for Marie tend to be public domain mangled prints). She gives the best performance of her career in this one! Tom Keene looked slightly old to be playing a teenager but he was a good actor and brought many layers to his performance. Eddie Quillan was comic relief and did a great job. Noah Beery played the villain, something he was noted for, and did another outstanding job. Mary Jane Irving was touching as the young girl who dies, which precipitates the others being arrested for involuntary manslaughter and sent to a reformatory.

From video clips I had seen of this film in a DeMille documentary I didn't think I would like it, but this movie surprised me. It has some beautiful moments and glistening cinematography and thoughtful title cards, many with decorative backgrounds. I suspect DeMille's long time assistant Jeanie Macpherson had a lot to do with the latter. I'm not sure but I can imagine that this film was a hard one for 1929 audiences to take, but for us in 2007 it really hits home.

Alternative Film Guide [Danny Fortune]

This one took me totally by surprise! Cecil B. DeMille’s last silent movie (one version has added talking scenes), The Godless Girl, starts out as an intriguing story (by Jeanie Macpherson) about high-school hijinks — but instead of Sharks and Jets, the gangs consist of Atheists and Believers. Fronting the "Godless Society" is Judy (Lina Basquette), a pretty girl who has a crush on a fellow student, Bob-the-Bible-Boy (George Duryea — later known as Tom Keene). She tries to recruit him to attend her Atheist meetings, but being the good Christian that he is, Bob instead forms a gang of hoodlums to invade the gathering and beat those evil non-believers over the head with their Bibles.

At this point, I am siding with the Atheists. At their meeting, the proselytes have to swear allegiance by placing a hand on a monkey’s head (ostensibly representing Darwin’s theory of evolution) and to eschew religion. They are having a peaceful gathering until they are attacked by the Christians. In the melee, one of the Atheist girls falls over the stairway rail to her death — where she miraculously becomes a believer and suddenly calls for the Good Lord.

Then the pace changes. The kids are put into a Juvenile Detention Center and the real horrors begin. The guards are all sadistic and the punishments never fit the crime. And since both Believers and Non Believers are treated with the same cruelty, their differences don’t seem to matter anymore. Judy’s best friend, Mame (Marie Prevost), becomes a shining example of what a good Bible-believing Christian is really made of. She is compassionate and protective of her Atheist friend.

Meanwhile, on the boys’ side of the prison, Bob and his friends are subjected to all forms of sadistic torture. The brutality is convincingly realized as The Godless Girl suddenly becomes an indictment against inhumane conditions in the juvenile penal system.

Despite their religious disagreements, Judy and Bob learn that they love each other — even though they live on different sides of the detention center — when they both get crosses burned into their hands after touching each other through the electrified fence. And the symbolism doesn’t stop there. While Bob changes his prison tag, "7734," by turning it upside down and altering it with a marking pen to read "HELL," Judy alters hers from "3107" to read "LOVE." As he is losing his faith, she is gaining hers.

The lovers make their escape, they are caught, they are tortured. The whole drama climaxes with a conflagration so convincing, so real, that I felt like I was there with them. I have seldom been so caught up in a drama that my eyes have been riveted to the screen — and I never once wanted to look away. That’s how compelling I found The Godless Girl.

In fact, The Godless Girl haunted me for days. I kept thinking of what point of view Cecil B. DeMille wanted his audience to take. Did he want us to side with the Believers? They were the ones who began the attack that killed one of the students. Or are we to side with the Atheists and forever be branded as "godless"? That might have been what I admired so much about this movie.

Granted, Judy becomes a god-fearing believer by the end, but at no time were the Atheists demonized or portrayed as evil. The viewer was free to identify with either side. Thought-provoking movies, such as The Godless Girl, disturb my jaded passivity by thoroughly involving me.

Thank you, Mr. DeMille, for shaking my cynicism and making me a believer once more. Not about religion, but about filmmaking.

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] reviewing Treasures III: Social Issues In American Film 1900-1934

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

USA (152 mi) 1952

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

An apt name for a Cecil B. DeMille film, this one about circus life. It earned him his only non-honorary Oscar, Best Picture, on his only BP nomination; his direction was also nominated and the film also took home the Writing Oscar. However, I think he too benefited from a split vote between High Noon (1952) and John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952). As previously mentioned, Ford won the Best Director award (over DeMille). It stars Betty Hutton, Cornel Wilde, Charlton Heston, Dorothy Lamour, Gloria Grahame, Henry Wilcoxon, and John Ridgely (among others). Great "every man" Jimmy Stewart plays a circus clown never seen without his make-up throughout the entire movie. Bob Hope & Bing Crosby even appear (uncredited) as spectators. A great film, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), wasn't nominated for BP but won five Oscars anyway.

PopMatters Jesse Hassenger

The Academy Award for Best Picture has been bestowed on any number of unworthy candidates over the years, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one less deserving than The Greatest Show on Earth, Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 circus melodrama. Now available on DVD, it is the standard by which all bad Best Pictures can be measured.

It's also a study in empty spectacle before empty spectacle was Hollywood's raison d'être. Even vaunted master of spectacle DeMille comes off as more of a wrangler, assembling a massive production. For the length of the film, DeMille is a cinematic P.T. Barnum, selling the audience a decorated crate full of nothing.

But if Barnum's shams at least made fir good stories, the legacy of this burn is considerably less lively; screen it for anyone lacking a sense of film history, and you might turn her off "old" movies for life. It conforms to virtually every stereotype of a 50-year-old film: The dialogue is unintentionally hilarious, the special effects are primitive, and it goes on for what seems like forever (actually, 150 minutes).

It wouldn't be so long if it weren't for the endless breaks in the action for displays of real circus performances; there are lots of slow, long shots where the camera pans by multiple acts and curiosities, occasionally cutting to slack-jawed audiences. DeMille, ever the innovator, discovers something worse than reaction shots of children or reaction shots of animals (though both are present in abundance here): reaction shots of clowns.

Was the circus really so exotic to 1952 audiences? I suspect not, but the movie nonetheless treats it as a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. The voiceover during the behind-the-scenes passages breathlessly piles metaphor upon metaphor, mixing and matching like some kind of patent-pending random narration generator. Thus the circus crew perseveres, "no matter how tangled the stain of their lives may be." (I rewound the disc several times to check this quote.)

Occasionally, the film pauses for a story that would fill about half an hour in a movie with any kind of economy, centered around Marc (Charlton Heston), a hard-boiled, no-nonsense circus boss. Heston is tossed into a love triangle with ingénue acrobat Holly (Betty Hutton) and smooth superstar acrobat Sebastian (Cornel Wilde). But the only sparks that fly come from a climactic train wreck ("You're not gonna put that guy's blood in me!" chokes Marc, referring to Sebastian, his romantic rival and possible blood donor, with more passion than he ever shows poor Holly).

Appearing as Heston's love interest -- even a young, handsome Heston -- is never easy. Even so, Hutton is singularly charmless here. Of course, it's an awful role: Holly is a screwball without comedy, running back and forth between a grim Marc and an oily Sebastian. Most of her romantic scenes feature some sort of complaining. Gloria Grahame's Angel, the standard sarcastic gal pal, is more appealing, as she seems to regard the activity around her with appropriate disdain.

If The Greatest Show on Earth's flaws can be boiled down to a central failing (and I'm not sure they can), it's DeMille's inability to place these characters in a circus environment with the kind of flimflam that made Barnum so fascinating. The circus crew is depicted as a cross between Santa's Workshop and the U.S. Army; they are impossibly virtuous, toiling endlessly for the delight of children. Even a clown with a dark past (Jimmy Stewart!) regards the big top as some sort of community service. The narrator refers to the circus as a "wild tangle of man, machine, and beast." If that didn't sound sort of entertaining, I'd say it describes this movie perfectly.

Turner Classic Movies Lorraine LoBianco

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The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

USA (220 mi) 1956

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

It takes something special for a motion picture to enter the Biblical canon. But ask any Christian what happened to Moses before age 30, and they'll likely relate to you the plotline of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments.

Surprise! As DeMille himself tells us in a (somewhat silly) opening narration -- where he comes out from behind a curtain and addresses the audience -- the Bible skips Moses' formative years altogether. One minute, as a baby he's fished out of the Nile by Pharoah's daughter, the next he's banished to the desert for killing an Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew man. There's certainly no talk of Moses' rise to power under Pharoah -- which comprises the first two hours of this nearly four-hour film. In DeMille's rendition (based, he says, on the works of ancient scholars), Moses (Charleton Heston, in the role that would define his career) toils under Pharoah (Cedric Hardwicke) as his adopted grandson, working hard building a treasure city for his glory. His rival is Pharoah's son Rameses (Yul Brynner), who isn't only also up for the future job of Pharoah, he's also competing for the hand of Nefretiri (All About Eve's title character Anne Baxter).

Eventually Moses discovers his birthright -- or lack thereof -- and sends himself to the slave pits of Egypt, then out to the desert. He comes back after a time to find Rameses risen to Pharoah, and lets loose with the "Let my people go," plagues of hail, water turns to blood, death of the firstborns, and so on. Then it's out to the desert for the parting of the Red Sea after Rameses has a change of heart once he finally gives in.

Shot in widescreen Technicolor, The Ten Commandments remains the standard by which Biblical epics -- and many epics in general -- are measured. DeMille is heavy handed, but that's DeMille. Heston scowls and Brynner emotes; they are archetypal versions of themselves. Many of DeMille's sets and stunts are obvious fakes(that animated pillar of fire wouldn't scare a house cat), but most are impressive even today. When Moses turns his staff into a snake and back again, the effect is seamless. His turning of the Nile into blood is an impressive camera trick, but his parting of the Red Sea is one of Hollywood's most famous stunts. It's worth sitting through the 220 minutes of movie for this alone.

Say what you will about the factual content here -- as it turns out, the film is based on a collection of novels, not historical texts -- this is a movie about spectacle and excess. It doesn't feel particularly religious or spiritual; it's an adventure on the grandest -- and longest -- scale. Heston may as well be screaming about Soylent Green, but damn if he doesn't make for one hell of an inspiring leader.

A DVD commentary track from Katherine Orrison, who wrote a book about the movie, is nothing short of awful. (She adds little to the flick, just going on and on about how she loves various shots and mispronouncing "Paramount.") This isn't a film that needs much extra though -- in fact, there aren't even any liner notes included. You'll also find a six-part documentary about the making of the film, if four hours just ain't enough for you.

The 50th Anniversary set includes both the standard DVD (with commentary and documentary) plus the 1923 silent film of the same name. Also with commentary from Orrison.

Turner Classic Movies Fred Hunter

The 50th Anniversary Edition of The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille's epic remake of his own 1923 film, tells the story of Moses from the infancy to his receiving of the title documents. When the Pharaoh learns of a prophecy of a newly-born leader springing from the Israelite population, he orders the killing of all Hebrew infants. A Hebrew woman named Jacobeth has recently given birth to a son, and tries to save his life by setting him adrift on the Nile in a basket made of bulrushes and pitch. The basket was found by the Pharaoh's daughter, who named him Moses and took him in to raise him as her own.

When Moses becomes an adult he learns of his true origins, and decides to go among his own people, where he finds to his horror that they are treated like animals. Fighting back on a small scale would be futile, and Moses doesn't know what to do to remedy the situation -- but an encounter with a burning bush would change that. The voice of God speaks from the bush, and tells Moses that he was meant to liberate the Israelites from their bondage. Moses travels back to Egypt and to the new Pharaoh (Yul Brynner), his own former half brother, and tells him that if he doesn't release the Israelites, God will release a series of plagues on Egypt. Pharaoh of course refuses, and Egypt is beset by plagues. Pharaoh remains unmoved until the final plague, in which God kills off the first born of every family.

The Israelites are released in a mass exodus (that literally employs a cast of thousands) and set out into the desert, led by Moses. But it isn't long before Pharaoh hardens his heart again, and mobilizes his army of charioteers to go after them. The chase leads to the Red Sea, where the Israelites' faith starts to fail them, as they watch Pharaoh's men nearing them from the distance, and they are helplessly trapped by the sea. That is when Moses performs one of his greatest miracles with the legendary parting of the Red Sea. Once safely encamped at the foot of Mt. Sinai, Moses climbs up into the mountain where he once again encounters the voice of God, and receives the stone tablets bearing the commandments.

The 1956 version of The Ten Commandments is a time-consuming spectacle that goes an awfully long way to the payoff at the Red Sea. Still, Charlton Heston, as Moses, delivers a powerhouse performance in what he considered "the role of the year," and Anne Baxter and Yvonne DeCarlo are wonderful as Nefretiri and Sephora. But the film is stolen by Edward G. Robinson in his smooth, canny turn as Dathan, and especially Yul Brynner as the new, unrelenting Pharaoh. The much-touted special effects are mainly serviceable by today's standards (particularly the writing of the tablets), with the exception of the parting of the Red Sea, which remains impressive today. At the time of its release it simply stunned audiences. But even in later years, in one of its general re-releases to theaters, some theaters in Chicago actually listed the time the parting would occur!

For any faults the film may have, it delivers something that is rarely seen today: true spectacle. Watching this film with its massive, giant images and hordes of people will prove to you that there really is a difference between an army made up of people, and a computer generated army, which despite improvements in technology still do not look real. On the heels of his success with The Greatest Show on Earth, De Mille set out to make the epic to end all epics, and he fulfilled his wish, going out with a bang.

The 50th Anniversary Edition is rife with extras, beginning with the inclusion of De Mille's original 1923 silent version of the story. This proves to be a faithful retelling of the story, though it doesn't cover as much ground as its successor. It is also quite a odd film in it's own right: it follows the Moses story until the parting of the Red Sea, then reverts to modern day where it attempts to act out the effects of breaking each of the commandments in a story of two brothers, each of whom take separate roads.

Both films include a commentary by Katherine Orrison, the author of Written in Stone: The Making of Cecil B. DeMille's Epic. There is interesting six-part documentary (totally about 35 minutes) about the making of the film with new interviews with Heston and some of the younger cast members. Also included are "The Ten Commandments in New York Premiere Newsreel," three trailers for various releases of the '56 film, and hand tinted footage of the exodus and parting of the Red Sea sequences from the silent version.

The transfer of the 1956 version is splendid, with deep, rich colors and deep, solid blacks. Flesh tones are consistent, and the film is beautifully contrasted throughout. The audio features rich, full-bodied tone quality, deep bass, and dialogue that is crystal clear.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

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

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The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

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Demirkubuz, Zeki

Turkish Cinema Newsletter: 2005 biography

Born in Isparta in 1964, Demirkubuz was jailed for three years at the age of 17 for alleged communist ties. On release from prison he became a film-maker - more, he claims, by accident than by design. After working as an assistant director, he set up his own production company, Mavi Film, deliberately situating himself outside of Istanbul's mainstream Yesilcam Studios (Turkey's answer to Hollywood). Independent and uncompromising, Demirkubuz controls almost every aspect of his films, making few concessions to prevailing trends.

FATE (Yazgi)

Turkey (118 mi) 2001

Turkish Cinema Newsletter: 2005

Fate (Yazgi), the brilliantly accomplished fourth feature of Turkish writer-director Zeki Demirkubuz, is an adaptation of Albert Camus' L’Etranger (The Outsider), transposed to present-day Istanbul.

Musa (based on Meursault, the anti-hero of Camus' novel) is a blank but wryly amused customs clerk who lives quietly with his elderly mother. He seeks no control over his own destiny but simply allows life to take its course. When, one day, he finds his mother dead at home, he shows no sign of emotion and maybe even experiences a sense of relief. But life, driven by fate, has some unexpected twists in store.

Born in Isparta in 1964, Demirkubuz was jailed for three years at the age of 17 for alleged communist ties. On release from prison he became a film-maker - more, he claims, by accident than by design. After working as an assistant director, he set up his own production company, Mavi Film, deliberately situating himself outside of Istanbul's mainstream Yesilcam Studios (Turkey's answer to Hollywood). Independent and uncompromising, Demirkubuz controls almost every aspect of his films, making few concessions to prevailing trends.

Written, directed and edited by Demirkubuz, Fate is austere cinema with a blackly comic edge. Beautifully controlled, with its restrained performances, long takes and sparing use of music (apart from two brief bursts of Mahler), it is a daring and deeply compelling enquiry into the nature of personal responsibility.

Together with the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (whose Uzak [Distant] was released last year to great acclaim), the work of Demirkubuz has sparked an international revival of interest in Turkish arthouse cinema. With two of his feature films, Fate and Confession, selected for the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in 2002, Demirkubuz established himself as a talent to watch and was hailed as an important new auteur. His films were subsequently spotlighted at the Edinburgh, Vienna and Toronto Film Festivals, also receiving a complete retrospective at New York's Anthology Film Archives. With the release of Fate, bfi Distribution is proud to introduce a major new talent to UK audiences.

THE WAITING ROOM (Bekleme odasi) C+ 78

Turkey (94 mi) 2004

It’s unusual to get the opportunity to see a Turkish film, as there are only two playing at this festival, and one, WAITING FOR THE CLOUDS, never showed up. This one might be titled SON OF DISTANT, as thematically, they both reveal such identical, parallel images of the mulishness of men. I kept waiting for this guy to flip on the porn in his apartment, as it so perfectly matched the same scenes in Nuri Bilge Ceylon’s DISTANT (2002). If sullen and uncommunicative men are your thing, then this film’s for you. The minimal plot centers around a brooding, self-loathing film director who is searching for an actor to play Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. Funny that he never thought to look in the mirror. The pace is very slow, and the mood rarely, if ever, changes, and I was reminded of one of the classic porn films from the early days, what is it? THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES, featuring Georgina Spelvin and the director, Gerard Damiano? Anyway, the final shot shows this guy stuck in purgatory, imprisoned, alone in a “waiting room,” apparently never able to get a hard on again. Well this guy isn’t too far off, as his life appears doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again, providing little if any effort in making a relationship work, making the other partner provide it all for him, until eventually, like a disposable partner, he grows tired of her and throws her away until the next one comes along. He’s like defective merchandise. The film does have an eloquent final shot.

Demme, Jonathan

Storefront Demme

Demme Profile

Film Reference Norman Miller, updated by Rob Edelman

Jonathan Demme Keith Uhlich from Senses of Cinema

All-Movie Guide bio from Mark Deming

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Kael on Demme: Reviews excerpted New Yorker reviews on Demme films by Pauline Kael, reprinted on Storefront Demme

"Kael & Demme: Meeting of Two American Film Heavies" by Rob Nelson from the Badger Herald, September 9, 1988

Demme, Jonathan They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

1984 L.A. Weekly Interview Start Making Sense, by Michael Dare, November 9, 1984

Guardian Unlimited Interview by Adrian Wooton, October 10, 1998

BBC: Calling the Shots interview by Stella Papamichael

CAGED HEAT

USA (83 mi) 1974

Time Out review Tony Rayns

The US drive-in audience's taste for renegade women has thrown up some pretty bizarre movies, but few more distinctive than Demme's directorial debut. It starts out as a bare-knuckled women's prison pic and turns into a 'girl gang' rampage, by way of a lot of witty feminist gags and the incursion of what William Burroughs would call a 'technological psychiatry' theme. A percussive, Velvet-y score by John Cale and several casting surprises (including the long-absent Barbara Steele) help keep both pace and interest high. It's no more than passable as a thriller, but the density of invention and energy in other respects is enough to shame a dozen contemporary major studio movies.

Boston Phoenix [Gerald Peary]

On its original 1974 release, Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat became an immediate favorite of Marxist-leaning cultural theorists, who detected a left-wing, revolutionary agenda just under the surface of this steamy women-in-prison exploitation flick: the lumpen gals are multicultural, the honky prison officials (including British cult actress Barbara Steele, in a wheelchair) are insidious behaviorists. Even the apolitical Hollywood Reporter, weighing in on Caged Heat, came on like Foucault: "Prison is a ready metaphor for the repression of modern life, and the women who break their way out . . . suggest a positive, even militant reaction to sexist victimization."

Maybe so. But a quarter-century later, the genre stuff in Caged Heat prevails mightily over the Demme deconstuction of the genre. Comely damsels in jail being strip-searched and showering so that the audience can peep at tits and ass -- that's what the movie is about. Still, Caged Heat is definitely entertaining in a trashy way, because Demme, years before The Silence of the Lambs, is a talented filmmaker, Tak Fujimoto is a top-line cinematographer, and there's an energetic soundtrack by ex-Velvet Undergrounder John Cale. Also, there's an unusually fine ensemble of incarcerated hussies, including rough-and-ready blaxploitation actress Juanita Brown and, my absolute favorite, the ever-disrobing blonde starlet (where is she today?) Rainbeaux Smith.

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

Roger Corman appears to be a man of sophistication if you hear him speak. He looks like a grandfather, even, listening patiently and entirely kempt, the sort of person you can never picture swearing. This impression is unbefitting of a man who has produced over three hundred films, a substantial number of which are titled with either an action verb, an exclamation point, or both.

His prolificacy his comparatively attainable trait, the remarkably exclusive feature of Roger Corman is his fostering of the careers of some of the more critically prominent contemporary directors. Corman has produced the early features of Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha), Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13), Ron Howard (Grand Theft Auto), and James Cameron (Piranha II: The Spawning). Among this string of audacious debuts is Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat, which I find to be the most laudable of Corman’s training wheels.

Within seconds guns fire and people die. Jacqueline (Erica Gavin, the buxotic title character of Russ Meyer’s Vixen!) is caught and taken to a women’s penitentiary. The location is summarized in a tracking shot across the prison cells that finds moans coming from many women.

In the title alone is the implication that this film is set to depict the sexual thirst of repressed women. Caged Heat is, after all, contractual exploitation, an example of Corman’s trademark bargain filmmaking with obligated nudity and violence. For Demme, conclusively, the film (which he wrote and directed) is an opportunity to transcend the genre. His film has interest in subtext and subversion, a film made for men that stands doubly as an affront to them. There is merit in these intentions, as well as the film’s biography, but Caged Heat is diminished in comparison to Demme’s later works. Corman’s done better as well, and worse.

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

When freshman director Jonathan Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto were making the 70's drive-in T&A sexploitation flick CAGED HEAT, do you think they had any inkling that they'd go on to do such impeccable films as SILENCE OF THE LAMBS? Despite the fact that it's a glaring example of the genre, it's also a surprisingly effective and disturbing one that rises above the average B-grade tittyfest.

Caged Heat is yet another gem from the Roger Corman camp, in the tradition of The Big Bird Cage, The Big Doll House, Women in Cages, etc. Films that make up for zero budget and even less thespian prowess with an abundance of pointless and exploitative nudity and, occasionally, a script that is surprisingly clever and effective.

On the surface, Caged Heat is a simplistic "women in prison" tale with the expected racially diverse breast fest and implied (but sadly not displayed) jailhouse lesbianism. It centers on a group of women who have been violated and mistreated by the system, and who escape to wreak their revenge. But when you're not busy trying to count all the hooters, you may notice that there's a rather sharp edge to the script that includes some truly bizarre and disturbing dream sequences, an extended scene of electro-shock therapy that's genuinely unnerving and difficult to sit through, and Warren Miller giving a surprisingly creepy performance as the prison doctor who likes to experiment on the women in his care (including a scene of him taking polaroids of one unconscious and naked young woman that is, tangentially, the most unsettling thing I've seen since Ted Levine's portrayal of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs).

The result is an odd but compelling mish-mash of breast parade and hokey action sequences, combined with dark and visceral imagery that lends caged heat more street cred than it would normally deserve, and makes for one of the finer "chicks behind bars" flicks you're likely to see.

Carnage and Carnality

-New prisoners forced to strip for "medical inspection" while creepy doctor relishes in pulling on a thick latex glove
-More boobs in more shower scenes than I can keep track of
-Nude solitary confinement
-soaped-up and down and dirty catfight on shower floor
-grueling extended sequence of electro shock-therapy.
-Doctor drugs young woman, takes off her clothes, then fawns over her while taking Polaroids and kissing her. GENUINELY DISTURBING!
-hokey shootouts of the "guy stands there shooting rifle as a blood squib goes off in his shirt" variety
-Honorable Mention - Cute blonde Cheryl Smith gets the coveted "worst acting/best nudity" award for her outstanding work in both categories here

DVD extras include a brief interview with Roger Corman, and best of all, the previews for other T&A titles in the catalog that feature the ubiquitous deep-voiced announcer guy spouting lines like "Their bodies were caged, but nothing could shackle their desires" or "Pent up emotions crescending in a violent climax".

God, movies like this make me miss the Drive-In. If there isn't a boxed set of CAGED HEAT, WOMEN IN CAGES, THE BIG DOLL HOUSE, THE BIG BIRD CAGE, HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, and CANDY STRIPE NURSES by now, then tell me where to sign the petition.

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5]

Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) dvd review

Monsters At Play (Bradley Harding) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Ian Visser) dvd review

eFilmCritic.com (Matt Mulcahey) review [3/5]

Prison Flicks review

DVD Drive-In - dedicated to horror, sci-fi & cult film Christopher Dietrich

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

Camera Journal [Paul Sutton]

CRAZY MAMA

USA (83 mi) 1975

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Another slice of opportunism from the Corman stable, melding the kitsch nostalgia of American Graffiti with the less sinister aspects of late-60s gangster films, stealing the charm of Bonnie and Clyde but dispensing with the violence. Three generations of women (Sothern, Leachman and Purl) travel across America from California, picking up men and embarking on a crime spree, as they head for their family home in Arkansas. Demme plays it all for laughs and revels in the 50s clichés of rock 'n' roll and the romance of the road. Cheap and cheerful.

Time Out review

Not so much a sequel to Corman's Bloody Mama, more a good-natured parody of the Bonnie and Clyde family gangster genre, scripted by Robert Thom. Demme took on this riotous Corman production at very short notice, and played up the laughs rather than the violence. Set in the '50s, the story centres on Depression child Melba Stokes (Leachman) and her journey from West to East coast along with mom (Sothern) and daughter (Purl), gathering together en route a motley band united in their sufferance at the hands of the law. Demme brings to the sly social commentary his usual deft choice of rock'n'roll standards, and draws enthusiastic performances from his wacky cast.

User comments from imdb Author: Lee Eisenberg (eisenberg.lee@gmail.com) from Portland, Oregon, USA

Apparently, Roger Corman likes it when "Happy Days" cast members hot rod across the country (he was involved in "Grand Theft Auto", directed by and starring Ron Howard, and co-starring Marion Ross). In "Crazy Mama", Cloris Leachman plays Melba, a woman who runs a beauty parlor in Long Beach with her mother Sheba (Ann Sothern) and daughter Cheryl (Linda Purl) in 1958. Their Arkansas farm was repossessed by the banks in 1932. When slimy banker Mr. Albertson (Jim Backus) tries to repossess their beauty parlor, they decide to return to Arkansas with Cheryl's boyfriend Shawn (Don Most). So begins a crazy car chase across America. In Las Vegas, Melba falsely marries a man (Stuart Whitman) to make it look like she's married, and they also get greaser Snake (Bryan Englund, Leachman's real-life son) to go along. In the process of everything, a lot of cars get wrecked and some people get killed.

I will admit that this is a pretty silly movie, but it is so fun! I never would have guessed that Ralph Malph and Thurston Howell III had ever co-starred in a movie (by the way, Linda Purl also starred on "Happy Days"). And the fact that they all co-starred with Frau Blucher just adds to the wacky factor. Oh, and by the way, B-movie character actor Dick Miller plays a cop. Jonathan Demme just always seems to have something good up his sleeve.

User comments from imdb Author: southpatcher from South Carolina

Cloris Leachman was spinning off from a supporting role on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" to headlining her own series "Phyllis" in 1975, the same year this goofy road movie was released. Leachman stars as Melba Stokes, who runs a beauty parlor in Long Beach, California with her mother Sheba (Ann Sothern) and her daughter Cheryl (Linda Purl). When the shop is repossessed by banker Jim Backus aka Thurston Howell III (a great little cameo) Leachman and ladies head back to Arkansas and the family farm which was stolen away from them when Melba was a girl. Along for the ride is Cheryl's boyfriend, surfer boy Donny Most aka Ralph Malph who finds out he's going to be a daddy thanks to Cheryl. The ladies knock over a filling station, which sets about their plan to rob their way back to Arkansas earning the money to buy back the farm.

Stopping over in Las Vegas, Melba hooks up with Jim Bob Trotter (Stuart Whitman). Cheryl falls for greasy biker Snake (Bryan Englund, Leachman's real life son), and Sheba makes a friend in elderly Bertha (Merie Earle) who believes that the secret to casino winning is to spout cliches before she pulls the handle on the slot machine. Jim Bob and Melba decide to have a phony wedding so the makeshift gang can rob the chapel, and then it's back on the road!

The ladies continue their crime spree, knocking over a grocery store and a bank. Meanwhile, back in Texas, Jim Bob's depressing wife (Sally Kirkland) is startled to hear that he's been kidnapped. Another plan by Melba and company to raise money, this one turns out in a bad way for the group. When Melba and her gang finally return to Jerusalem, Arkansas they are disappointed to see that the farmland of their youth has been turned into a country club. Needless to say, there is a hijacked wedding and more car chases.

This is a funny movie (with a GREAT final scene) that is given spirited performances by Leachman, Sothern, and especially Merie Earle as the nursing home escapee who finds a few thrills in her last days. There is some surprising violence, an eclectic 50's soundtrack, and control over the whole crazy-quilt through the direction of Jonathan Demme. The most touching scene in the film is when the weary travellers stand under a tree and remember their fallen friends by "shouting them into Heaven".

Hopefully, this one will be released on DVD in my lifetime.

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [3/5]

DVD Drive-In George R. Reis

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

FIGHTING MAD

USA (90 mi) 1976

Channel 4 Film capsule review

A terrific little revenge flick from Demme, made while he was still churning out quickies for Roger Corman. A number of Arkansas farmers have been driven off their land by a ruthless developer and are not happy. Fonda is the peaceable man who takes up his bow and arrow after his brother is killed, to become a righteous killing machine. The story is a little slight, but Demme develops it well, making it far more interesting than the premise suggests. Fonda, too, brings an interesting edge to his character, an anxious liberal who has had enough.

Time Out review

Engaging piece of exploitation that manages to both paint in broad colours and pay attention to detail at the same time. It's rednecks vs yellow hardhats as Arkansas farmers find themselves bulldozed off their property by the unscrupulous mining corporation. Into this conflict comes Fonda, who has got scruples, and a bow-and-arrow. Once his brother and sister-in-law and father have been murdered, he wreaks his own vengeance, blowing up, and maiming, and adjusting his liberal spectacles after every killing. Where writer/director Demme scores is in extracting maximum story value from his cast andlocation, so that every scrap of sex and violence is highly realistic, and advances the plot. Altogether, another winner from the House of Corman.

eFilmCritic.com review [3/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine

1976: Bespectacled Peter Fonda is still getting mileage out of his turn in "Easy Rider," plowing through a series of chiefly fair-to-middling action flicks. Young director Jonathan Demme, a decade-and-a-half away from "Silence of the Lambs" and Oscar glory, is still making produce for Roger Corman's sausage factory. Join Subject A with Subject B, and you get "Fighting Mad," a minor footnote in '70s cinema, basically nothing special but certainly not bad as far as these ass-kicking epics go.

Fighting Mad plunges the viewer straightway into Billy Jack territory, as our hero Fonda goes after an evil (of course) land developer in a sleepy rural town. It's another foray into the little-man-battling-for-social-justice genre, exactly the sort of flick that went over like gangbusters on the drive-in circuit in the American South back in the '70s. But it's better made than most.

Fonda, true to the formula, is called upon to kick some ass--often two or three at a time, natch--roughly every five minutes or so. It's a solid enough performance, but if you ask me Fonda's not entirely suited to the action-hero role. It's not just those goofy glasses. He's such a laid-back presence on the screen that he seems to have trouble summoning self-righteous rage--whenever he flies into action, grinding his teeth and staring bullets at his opponent, he looks less like an avenger than some guy throwing a hissy fit.

On the directorial front, Mr. Demme proves to be up to the task, filling the screen with plenty of montages featuring various objects getting blown up. (And I'd swear they were reusing the same shots over and over, a cost-cutting gimmick not unknown to the Roger Corman school of production.) Demme's script does a pretty good job of making the characters three-dimensional. Fonda's rocky relationships with his father (the late John Doucette) and his girlfriend (goose-necked Lynn Lowry) are more carefully developed than is customary in B-movies. Even at this stage in his career, Demme seems to have had a sure hand at the helm, and the film's climax even seems to foreshadow the sneaking-around-the-darkened-basement finale in Silence of the Lambs.

It's ultimately an ode of sorts to pure beer-guzzling machismo and working-class honor. When he's not beating the hell out of people, our hero bonds with his son, makes out like a racehorse with his girlfriend, stands up for the oppressed, does what's right for his family, and finally rides off into the sunset, wrongs righted and mission accomplished.

You've seen this movie before--and if you're a B-movie nut like me, you've seen it many times before--but it's a competently put-together little flick, worth watching on a rainy Sunday.

User comments from imdb Author: Woodyanders (Woodyanders@aol.com) from The Last New Jersey Drive-In on the Left

User comments from imdb Author: Jonathon Dabell (barnabyrudge@hotmail.com) from Wakefield, England

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross) dvd review [2/5]

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

TV Guide

HANDLE WITH CARE

aka: Citizen’s Band

USA (98 mi) 1977

Channel 4 Film capsule review

A graduate of the hard school of movie publicity and Roger Corman productions, Demme knew how to work on a shoestring, and this lively unpretentious film makes the best of its modest idea. Set in the Southwest, it doesn't have much of a narrative but strings engaging people together via the once popular craze of CB radio. Le Mat plays a kind of missionary scout leader who protects the airwaves. The neatest idea is having two women with different personalities who both turn out to be married to the same trucker. Good performances all round stop the humour flagging and the characters falling into stereotypes.

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

The film's original title, Citizen's Band, evokes its origins as an exploitation film designed to cash in on the short-lived CB craze, but, as Jonathan Demme (Melvin and Howard) directed and Paul Brickman (Risky Business) wrote it, the picture was too good for its own good: audiences weren't expecting humor of this degree of piquancy and charm, and it was a failure. The action takes place in a tiny southwestern town, where the residents--among them Paul Le Mat, Candy Clark, Roberts Blossom, and Marcia Rodd--use their adopted radio personas as a means of escape from the dingy identities life has imposed on them. Demme is satirical but never cruel, and sweet but never syrupy: this film marked the emergence of one of the most appealing directorial personalities of the New Hollywood. With Charles Napier, Alix Elias, Bruce McGill, and Richard Bright (1977).

User comments from imdb Author: Woodyanders (Woodyanders@aol.com) from The Last New Jersey Drive-In on the Left

One of Jonathan Demme's earliest and best movies, this quirky, seriocomic, thoroughly amiable and disarming slice-of-Americana gem bombed at the box office, but was widely hailed by critics and has gone on to garner a much-deserved loyal fan following.

Centering on a small rural community populated by assorted flaky eccentrics who gab over the CB radio under outrageous aliases and similar wildly exaggerated personalities to boot (nowadays these folks can be found on countless internet chat-rooms and web boards, so the premise really hasn't dated at all; it's just taken on a different manifestation in the new millennium), this honey stars the outstanding Paul LeMat as Spider, a fervent, obsessive, self-appointed vigilante who wants to get rid of all the nutcases chattering away on emergency channels. Among the targets of Spider's wrath are Ed Begley, Jr. as a zealous priest who sermonizes over the air; the delightfully daffy Alix Elias as sweet hooker on wheels Hot Coffee, who advertises herself over the airwaves and turns tricks in the back of her camper (!); a lewd adolescent male operating under the self-explanatory moniker the Hustler who tells dirty tales of his alleged spicy sexual misadventures over the radio, and a strident Aryan Nazi scumbag. Spider becomes so absorbed with his single-minded mission that loving, but frustrated girlfriend Candy Clark starts cheating on him with his hard-nosed competitive high school basketball coach brother Bruce McGill and even steams up the airwaves speaking raunchy talk over the CB radio to some dweeb who calls himself the Warlock!

The always great Charles Napier contributes a terrific performance as amicable, big-hearted bigamist trucker Chrome Angel; Ann Wedgeworth and Marcia Rodd are likewise excellent as Chuck's flighty, blowzy wife and practical, more down-to-earth better half, respectively. Roberts Blossom (the nutty middle-aged Ed Geinesque lunatic in the supremely chilling psycho knockout "Deranged") turns in a hilariously crotchety characterization as Spider's ornery, batty old coot father who only comes to life while talking over the CB radio. Chiefly addressing the lack of direct, intimate communication between people in contemporary society and the basic need to transcend the drab mundaneness of ordinary life through the assuming of another, altogether more colorful, outlandish and exciting made-up alternate identity (substantial themes which are still quite timely and pertinent even today), Paul Brickman's bright, astute, truly whimsical and episodically structured script offers a wealth of precisely observed little moments and a generous helping of warmth and compassion which accumulate into a totally unique and engaging whole. Demme's peppy, sparkling, sympathetic direction displays an equally heartfelt and heartwarming affection for everyday oddball middle-class Americana, pacing and shaping the deliciously dense and winding narrative with utmost ease and consummate expertise. Jordan Cronenweth's flashy'n'splashy, richly saturated cinematography and Bill Conti's folksy, gently lulling and harmonic score further add to the frothy, gleefully off-center merriment. A fabulously idiosyncratic treat.

FilmFanatic.org

All Movie Guide [Donald Guarisco]

TV Guide

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

LAST EMBRACE

USA (102 mi) 1979

Channel 4 Film capsule review

An ace, offbeat thriller from Demme - compelling early proof of just how innovative and exciting a director he is. Scheider heads the cast as a government agent who, back on the job after recovering from the murder of his wife, is plunged into a maelstrom of paranoia when he begins to suspect that the governments want him dead, too. When a mysterious young woman (Margolin) shows up in his apartment, the plot thickens. Demme infuses the action with twists that could have come straight from Hitchcock and so gives Scheider his best-ever role.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

A delicious excursion into the world of Hitchcockian suspense. A taut, complex conspiracy thriller, it sees Scheider - a former 'agent' for an assassination firm - threatened by mental breakdown (guilt over his wife's death), by his former employers who find him dangerously superfluous, and by an obscure Hebraic society bent on revenge for some unknown reason. Scheider is admirably haunted as the justifiably paranoid gunman (who gets involved with a strange, duplicitous femme fatale), the whole thing is beautifully shot by Tak Fujimoto, and Miklós Rosza's stunning score augments Demme's careful control of atmosphere and set pieces. But what finally impresses is the way that the various references to Hitchcock and other classic thrillers are never used as an end in themselves; rather, they simply add resonance and depth to a film that works perfectly well in its own right.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Jonathan Demme doing Brian De Palma doing Alfred Hitchcock. Emerging from a sanitarium after a breakdown, intelligence agent Roy Scheider has to deal not only with the guilt of having lost his wife in a cantina shootout, but also with death threats sent in Aramaic. Is his former secret government agency (headed by Christopher Walken) trying to rub him out? Or is tag-along gal Janet Margolin something more than Love Interest? Without giving too much away, it involves a string of interconnected murders, cross-generational revenge, and a crabby old Jewish sidekick (Sam Levene, natch). Despite the vaguely corporate paranoia of the early New York scenes, the picture's jaunty tone is far from the somberness of the decade's Watergate-soaked thrillers (The Parallax View, Night Moves) -- from the start, Demme sends his camera sailing into Hitch-quoting territory, with prowling shots marinated to Miklós Rózsa's deliriously obtrusive score. As transparent a genre exercise as Obsession, though lacking De Palma's own obsessive grappling with the tropes of suspense cinema, the film has the feel of an artist bending his own temperament to salute another whose tensions he does not share (not as disastrously as Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, though just as forcedly an act of worship). Accordingly, the movie breathes when Demme is Demme (in his handling of actors, his cherishment of human quirkiness) and dies when Demme strains for the Master (the bell tower shootout and the Niagara Falls climax, both botched by technique applied willfully, unfeelingly). Adapted from Murray Teigh Bloom's novel The 13th Man. With John Glover, Charles Napier, and David Margulies.

The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [1.5/4]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]

FilmFanatic.org

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

MELVIN AND HOWARD

USA (95 mi) 1980

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

A beautifully observed, beautifully performed offbeat comedy. The story is slim: milkman Melvin Dummar (Le Mat) picks up a grouchy old hobo in the Nevada desert one night, lends him a quarter while disbelieving his claim to be Howard Hughes, and then returns to a mundane life of work, divorce, remarriage, and failed songwriting attempts, until eight years later he appears to have been left a fortune by the dead tycoon. But this remarkable (factually based) plot is merely a hook on which to hang an unglamorous account of American working class life. Melvin and his wives' experiences are double-edged examples of the allure and failure of the American dream of success, fame and wealth, although Bo Goldman's script and Demme's understated direction never become overly serious or 'significant'. And the film's delightful humour derives - unusually in these days of brainless Animal House spoofs and one-liners - from the characters, who are affectionately observed but never patronised.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Cox) review

This is the film that landed director Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense, Something Wild, Silence Of The Lambs) into the top grade in Hollywood and marked him out as a director worth watching.

Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) picks up a hobo (Jason Robards) who has crashed his bike in the Nevada desert. He badgers his pissed-off travelling companion into singing Bye, Bye, Blackbird. In the early hours of the morning Melvin drops off his passenger, gives him some loose change and continues home. From then on the film follows Melvin's passage through the rest of the 70s. His wife Lynda (Mary Steenburgen), a stripper, leaves him, divorces him and then heavily pregnant, remarries him. She wins $10,000 on a TV show, he uses the money as down payments on a Cadillac and a yacht, she leaves him again. He moves in with Bonnie and they run a gas station. Then Howard Hughes, the millionaire film producer and flying-boatsman dies, leaving Melvin $156 million: since Hughes was the hobo Melvin had picked up all those years before.

The opening credit sequence, an endless highway unspooling in a car's headlights, hints at a road movie, and with the constant shifts from Nevada to Califomia to Utah and the picking up and dropping of several characters on the way it certainly feels like it. But this is a film about money and relationships not the American dream.

The characters are observed in an affectionate, good humoured, and most important unpretentious way, emphasised by Tak Fujimoto's (Badlands, Philadelphia) casual, free-form photography rather like television reportage. Apart from a few dark moments, the film remains buoyant and enthusiastic just like its central character indicative of this is Melvin's insistence that what really matters, whatever happens to the money, is that "Howard Hughes sang my song". The real Melvin Dummar, for this is a true story, appears as an affable snack-bar attendant.

Reel.com dvd review [3/4] Pam Grady

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson) dvd review

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

Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]

Apollo Movie Guide [Elspeth Haughton]

FilmFanatic.org

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

BBC Films (George Perry) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

WHO AM I THIS TIME?

aka: American Playhouse Theater TV

USA (60 mi) 1982

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Made for television, Demme's adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut story is totally delightful. Sarandon is the new girl in town who joins an amateur dramatics group and falls for local star Walken. The only trouble is that, offstage, he is terminally shy. Finally, of course, she gets her man, but not before Demme has fleshed out the slim plot with vivid, likeable characters (both leads are superb), and a great deal of charm and wit. One of his very best.

Doug Pratt's Laserdisc Review

Susan Sarandon is so enchanting that the disc is worth obtaining for her performance alone. The hour-long romantic comedy is about a woman who joins an amateur theatrical group and becomes enamored with her leading man (played by Christopher Walken), although his personality offstage is a complete cipher. The picture is grainy and unattractive and the sound is uninteresting. Sarandon, however, embodies her part so accurately and so seductively that while you are watching the show, nothing else matters. She makes you root for her character and then passes along the happiness when her character succeeds. Written by Kurt Vonnegut and directed by Jonathan Demme, Who Am I This Time? is a blissful hour of entertainment which puts many longer programs to shame. It was filmed in Evanston and Hinckley, Illinois.

Reel.com dvd review [3/4] James Plath

Seven years after she appeared in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a young Susan Sarandon played a lonely telephone worker whose life takes an interesting turn when she gets involved in community theater.

Airing in February 1982 as part of the PBS American Playhouse series, which presented original films based on literary works, Who Am I This Time? paired Sarandon with Christopher Walken in a role totally different from his usual creepy, menacing parts. This time he's a painfully shy hardware store employee who only comes out of his shell when he's onstage. Whether he plays Cyrano de Bergerac, Abraham Lincoln, or Captain Queeg, Harry Nash gives such a powerful performance that he makes grown men weep and young women swoon. But none of that translates into real life. The minute the curtain falls, Harry retreats, even before the applause has died out. No matter how many of the town's beauties assail him on the street the day afterwards, he acts as if the performance never happened.

All that changes when director George Johnson (Robert Ridgely) persuades Helene Shaw (Sarandon), an itinerant telephone worker new in town, to try out for the North Crawford Mask and Wig Club's production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Nash shows up already inhabited by the spirit of Stanley Kowalski, and his reading with Miss Shaw is enough to make her feel things she hasn't felt before in her lonely life of constant travel. That sets the stage for a sophisticated and understated romantic comedy that's as charming as it is intelligent. Both Walken and Sarandon deliver memorable performances. Walken as Brando as Kowalski is by turns hilarious and poignant, while Sarandon is able to shift effortlessly between the role of Stella and a suddenly smitten woman who, for the first time, thinks she's found love.

Based on a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Who Am I This Time? is both a tribute to community theater and an endearing portrait of small-town life. But be warned: there's nothing warm and fuzzy about the production values. Well, fuzzy maybe. In an age of hi-res this and HD-that, the picture quality is a throwback to VHS tapes. It's extremely grainy and soft-focused, which is too bad, because the production itself is so wonderful. But you can tell it was low-budget to begin with. It appears to have been shot with a single camera using multiple takes, with mostly two-shots to frame two characters at a time and occasional pull-back shots or awkward close-ups. The writing and performances merit 3.5 stars, but the camera work and picture quality aren't nearly as strong.

Those weak production values haunt you again when you try to access the bonus features. After accessing text-only bios for the author, director, and screenwriter, when you click on the bio for either Sarandon or Walken you get a clip of the actor and music that's at least eight notches louder than the production itself. It's enough to rattle the windows. That's all there is in the way of extras—just five brief bios and a "study guide" that's better suited for classrooms than TV rooms.

American Playhouse turned out some interesting productions in the 1980s, with a number of them available now on DVD for the first time. Along with Who Am I This Time?, which is one of the best, Under the Biltmore Clock (1985) is also excellent. Based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, it stars Sean Young and Barnard Hughes. And as with Who Am I This Time?, it was filmed in Chicago, but the production lengths vary considerably. Under the Biltmore Clock runs 79 minutes, while Who Am I This Time? clocks in at only 56 minutes. It's a tribute to director Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia, Silence of the Lambs) that those 56 minutes feel rich and full.

SWING SHIFT

USA (100 mi) 1984

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

A gentle romantic comedy set during World War II, which sees housewife Hawn finding her feet when hubby Ed Harris goes off to fight. First, against his wishes, she takes a job in an aircraft factory, then - after a lengthy courtship - she takes a lover in the form of hunky, helpful, hot trumpeter Kurt Russell. Hawn, atypically cast and supported by all-round excellent performances, proves that she can act. But still this bitter-sweet concoction is very much Demme's: not only in the warming celebration of friendship and community values (the unsentimental generosity extended towards the characters positively glows), but also in the assured handling of period, place, music and mood.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Oh what a tangled web we weave...when we run around fucking everybody. With America in the thralls of family values and good ol' conservatism what could Goldie Hawn do but make a film about cheating on a husband off fighting the Japs? It's another angle to the trevails of war, things can never be dull enough on the home front for the boys on the front lines. And they aren't always. They're both deserving and accomplished actors, and have sustained a lasting relationship in the most difficult place on earth, but the only weakness in Goldie and Kurt Russell's performances is the lack of passion between them. You'd like to think something like "Attention from Kurt Russell and stuck married to Ed Harris, what's a poor girl to do?", but instead it's more like "Why are any of these people acting like this?" This would have to be about the last thing that you'd expect from Jonathan Demme (who directed Caged Heat). Boredom and loneliness have to be part of the equation but that's not the way that the script is working it. Cinematic realism, offering important and specific insights but without the feel of reality.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay S. Steinberg

At the time of its green-lighting in the early '80s, the Goldie Hawn vehicle Swing Shift (1984) bore plenty of promise. A young director on the rise - Jonathan Demme - was chosen to helm a nostalgic exploration of the influx of women into America's manual labor force while their men were in the trenches of World War II. The end product, which has recently made its bow on DVD courtesy of Warner Home Entertainment, went through a mill of backlot intrigue, with the final cut taken from Demme's hands. After twenty years, the film still plays pretty much the same; a middling entertainment, with some nice performances from its principal players, that could have been much more.

The film's scenario, credited to the fictitious "Rob Morton," was originally crafted by Nancy Dowd, and tweaked in succession by Bo Goldman, Rob Nyswaner, and Robert Towne. Hawn is cast as Kay Walsh, a pliant young Santa Monica housewife with little else in her life but tending to her husband Jack (Ed Harris). After the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, Jack enlists in the Navy, and Kay is soon bored waiting at home for his pay envelope. Inspired by a movie newsreel, she signs up for assembly work at a local aircraft plant, joining a long line of similarly situated servicemen's wives.

In spite of the patronizing attitude of the company's remaining male populace, Kay and her peers pick up the skills necessary to perform. Kay also handles the daunting task of bonding with her brassy co-worker and neighbor Hazel Zanussi (Christine Lahti), a struggling nightclub singer who Jack had always snubbed. Her work ethic and other attributes don't go unnoticed by shift leadman Lucky Lockhart (Kurt Russell), a 4F draft reject who moonlights as a jazz trumpeter. Kay struggles with her fidelity to Jack in the face of Lucky's attentions, and it's a war that she ultimately loses. The war years breeze by, with Hazel pretending to be Lucky's girlfriend for the neighbors' benefit, but the consequences are felt when Jack gets an unannounced leave home.

Dissatisfied with Demme's original edit, producer/star Hawn oversaw the final cut. Depending upon whom you ask, she did so in an effort either to make Kay seem more sympathetic, or to keep Lahti (who got an Oscar® nomination) from walking away with the picture. In the form in which it surfaced for the public, Swing Shift isn't without its virtues. Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto and the production design team gave the enterprise a crisp period look, and the central players, particularly Lahti, offer creditable performances. But even though the film had been reworked, the viewer isn't given a lot of reason to care for the characters. Kay's co-workers, who include a young Holly Hunter, don't become anything more than stock figures. The script tries to establish Kay as the textbook Hawn heroine who gets the audience on her side as she gains empowerment, but the character's betrayal of a husband whose biggest sin against her was paternalism works at cross-purposes.

The reviews and returns from Swing Shift's theatrical run were nothing special, but all involved rebounded well; Hawn and Russell still maintain the housekeeping that started on the set, an eternity by Hollywood's standard. Demme, of course, has gone on to better things, and has put the experience well in the rearview mirror. In the late '80s, a bootleg video of Demme's cut had reportedly been in circulation; now that would have been an extra for DVD release.

Unsurprisingly, insofar as supplemental materials go, the DVD of Swing Shift only offers the theatrical trailer. (If you don't like it, you get the principals in one room for the full-length commentary.) Warners provided a sharp mastering job in the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

filmcritic.com (Pete Croatto) review [4/5]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Peterson) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Mark Van Hook) dvd review

Epinions [Nedipooh]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

STOP MAKING SENSE

USA (88 mi) 1984

STOP MAKING SENSE created an energetic synthesis of music and imagery, filled with the off-kilter, poetic interpretations of Talking Heads who seemed a little out of the mainstream, capturing what felt like a spontaneous artistic vision that still stands alone as a concert film.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A]

Ecstatic. Jonathan Demme must have been closest to his element when he made this concert film showing the Talking Heads at the height of their powers. Demme cements the Heads' status as punk-era demigods by reproducing a personal take on their performance and simultaneously remaining absolutely unobtrusive -- a trick many lesser filmmakers would do well to learn. Demme also directed one of my favorite music videos (New Order's "The Perfect Kiss") and captured a Spalding Gray monologue (the riveting and hilarious Swimming to Cambodia) before he started making Oscar-winners (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia). He'll never go hungry, but he also may never direct another perfect picture.

Time Out review

A documentary record of Talking Heads in concert, using material from three shows in Hollywood, December '83. Apart from what artifice the Heads themselves allow on stage, Demme restricts himself to a cool, almost classic style, with the camera subservient to the action. Building from David Byrne performing a solo acoustic 'Psycho Killer', to the full nine-piece leaping through 'Take Me to the Water', its distinction is more what it omits than what it includes. Tacky rock theatre razzle is stripped down to humorously 'minimal' conceits of staging, lighting and presentation. Apart from a few moments of incongruous boogieing, the allegedly over- intellectual Heads are revealed to be human, warm-hearted, and possessed of a sizeable humour. A quietly large achievement.

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

In nearly every shot, STOP MAKING SENSE makes the case that Demme may be the greatest director of musical performance in American cinema. It isn't difficult to convey the joy of making music, but Demme's attention to the interplay between musicians (and, in some inspired moments, between the musicians and their crew) conveys the imagination, hard work, and camaraderie behind any good song. And, needless to say, the songs here are very, very good. By this point (the performances are culled from three concerts from 1983), Talking Heads were the headiest American band to achieve their degree of success, and they made the most of it, doubling their line-up to include back-up singers and a few instrumentalists from the golden years of George Clinton's Funkadelic. It's never openly acknowledged that the five new members are black and the Heads are white; the sheer creativity of the music, which fuses everything from soul to traditional African rhythms to then-advanced electronic effects, is fully utopian in its spirit.

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

FROM the opening frames of Jonathan Demme's ''Stop Making Sense,'' which opens today at the 57th Street Playhouse, it's apparent that this is a rock concert film that looks and sounds like no other. The sound is extraordinarily clear, thanks to the pioneering use of 24-track digital recording. And the film's visual style is as coolly iconoclastic as Talking Heads itself. Mr. Demme has captured both the look and the spirit of this live performance with a daring and precision that match the group's own.

It's worth noting some of the things that are not to be found here: screaming crowds, gaudy skintight costumes, candid scenes of the band members backstage. Talking Heads' performance style is unlike anything that has ever been captured by a standard concert film, and Mr. Demme is very well attuned to the group's eccentricities. Even the first image - the shadow of a guitar neck looming against a white wall - wittily suggests the menacing and mechanistic qualities of Talking Heads' music, as well as the clean, bold visual imagery they manage to make so surprising. The sight of this sexually and racially integrated nine- member ensemble, in white sneakers and neutral-colored playsuits, jogging in place as if practicing aerobics becomes at least as exciting as any standard rock spectacle.

The focus of both the film and the performance is David Byrne, the lead singer, who is one of the group's four core members. With his hollow-eyed stare and bizarre gestures, Mr. Byrne is surely one of the oddest rock singers; he's also one of the most galvanizing. Mr. Byrne, or at least the sight of his sneakers, is initially seen alone, wandering onto the stage to perform the stark and rousing version of ''Psycho Killer'' that begins the show. (The other band members enter one at a time, a new one with each song, as a technical crew wanders conspicuously in their midst. Only in its latter half does the film build into an elaborately staged production, with Mr. Byrne in his Big Suit costume and words like ''time clock'' and ''dustballs'' flashing on a colored backdrop.)

Mr. Byrne's studied casualness is matched by a fierce intensity. Even his most peculiar gestures - darting his head and tongue like a lizard, or dancing with stiff, jerky motions and a perfectly immobile torso - have an originality and a mesmerizing strangeness.

And Mr. Byrne's vocals maintain their lucid, unsettling energy throughout the performance (the film actually draws upon four 1983 concerts at the Pantages theater in Hollywood). The film includes especially fine renditions of such Talking Heads classics as ''Life During Wartime,'' ''Heaven,'' ''Once in a Lifetime'' and ''Burnin' Down the House.''

Mr. Demme, in addition to avoiding any visual monotony, has gracefully tailored the film to suit the band's stage show. Using long, slow camera motions (the handsome cinematography is by Jordan Cronenweth), he captures the group members at close range without losing the overall visual effects they achieve on stage. The show's conception, which is both subtle and sophisticated, is credited to Mr. Byrne.

''Stop Making Sense'' owes very little to the rock film-making formulas of the past. It may well help inspire those of the future.

DavidByrne.com - Stop Making Sense press/reviews - Pauline Kael ... Pauline Kael from David Byrne’s website, originally from the New Yorker, November 26,1984

"Stop Making Sense" makes wonderful sense. A concert film by the New York new-wave rock band Talking Heads, it was shot during three performances at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in December, 1983, and the footage has been put together without interviews and with very few cutaways. The director, Jonathan Demme, offers us a continuous rock experience that keeps building, becoming ever more intense and euphoric. This has not been a year when American movies overflowed with happiness; there was some in "Splash", and there's quite a lot in "All of Me"—especially in its last, dancing minutes. "Stop Making Sense" is the only current movie that's a dose of happiness from beginning to end. The lead singer, David Byrne, designed the stage lighting and the elegantly plain performance-art environments (three screens used for backlit side projections); there's no glitter, no sleaze. The musicians aren't trying to show us how hot they are; the women in the group aren't there to show us some skin. Seeing the movie is like going to an austere orgy—which turns out to be just what you wanted.

Clean-shaven, with short hair, slicked back, and wearing white sneakers and a light-colored suit, with his shirt buttoned right up to his Adam's apple, the gaunt David Byrne, who founded the group, comes on alone (with his acoustic guitar and a tape player) for the first number "Psycho Killer." He's so white he's almost mock-white, and so are his jerky, long-necked, mechanical-man movements. He seems fleshless, bloodless; he might almost be a black man's parody of how a clean-cut white man moves. But Byrne himself is the parodist, and he commands the stage by his hollow-eyed, frosty verve. Byrne's voice isn't a singer's voice—it doesn't have the resonance. It's more like a shouter's or chanter's voice, with an emotional carryover—a faintly metallic wail—and you might expect it to get strained or tired. But his voice never seems to crack or weaken, and he's always in motion—jiggling, aerobic walking, jumping, dancing. (They shade into each other.) Byrne has a withdrawn, disembodied, sci-fi quality, and though there's something unknowable and almost autistic about him, he makes autism fun. He gives the group its modernism—the undertone of repressed hysteria, which he somehow blends with freshness and adventurousness and a driving beat. When he comes on wearing a boxlike "big suit"—his body lost inside this form that sticks out around him like the costumes in Noh plays, or like Beuys' large suit of felt that hangs of a wall—it's a perfect psychological fit. He's a handsome, freaky golem. When he dances, It isn't as if he were moving the suit—the suit seems to move him. And this big box that encloses him is only an exaggeration of his regular nerd-dandy clothes. Byrne may not be human (he rejects ordinary, show-biz forms of ingratiation, such as smiling), but he's a stupefying performer—he even bobs his head like a chicken, in time to the music.

After Byrne's solo, the eight other members of the group come on gradually, by ones and twos, in the order in which they originally joined up with him, so you see the band take form. Tina Weymouth, the bass player, who also sings, comes on next; a sunny, radiant woman with long blond hair, she's smiling and relaxed. (She couldn't be more unlike Byrne—he's bones, she's flesh.) Watching her, you feel she's doing what she wants to do. And that's how it is with the drummer, Chris Frantz, and the keyboard man, Jerry Harrison, and the others in the sexually integrated, racially integrated group. The seven musicians and the two women who provide vocal backing interact without making a point of it; you feel that they like working together, and that if they're sweating they're sweating for themselves, for their pleasure in keeping the music going. They're not suffering for us; they're sharing their good times with us. This band is different from the rock groups that go in for charismatic lighting and sign of love and/or sex. David Byrne dances in the guise of a revved-up catatonic; he's an idea man, an aesthetician who works in the modern mode of scary, catatonic irony. That's what he emanates. Yet when the other Talking Heads are up there with him for a song such as "Once in a Lifetime" the tension and interplay are warm—they're even beatific. The group encompasses Byrne's art-rock solitariness and the dissociation effects in the spare—somewhat Godardian—staging. The others don't come together with Byrne, but the music comes together. And there's more vitality and fervor and rhythmic dance Ion the stage than there is with the groups that whip themselves through the motions of sexual arousal and frenzy, and try to set the theatre ablaze.

It's slightly puzzling that this band's music absorbs many influences—notably African tribal music and gospel (the climactic number here is "Take Me to the River")—yet doesn't have much variety. The insistent beat (it stays much the same) works to the movie's advantage, though. The pulse of the music gives the film a thrilling kind of unity. And Demme, by barely indicating the visual presence of the audience until the end, intensifies the closed-off, hermetic feeling. His decision to keep the camerawork steady (the cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, used six mounted cameras, one hand-held, and one Panaglide) and to avoid hotsy-totsy, MTV-style editing concentrates our attention to the performers and the music. The only letdown in energy, I thought, was in Byrne's one bow to variety—when he left the stage for the Tom Tom Club number. It's a likable number on its own, but it breaks the musical flow. (It's also the only number with a cluttered background, and it has a few seconds of banal strobe visuals.) One image in the film also stuck in my craw: a shot of a little boy in the audience holding up his white stuffed unicorn. It's just too wholesome a comment on the music. But these are piddling flaws. The movie was made on money ($800,000) that was raised by the group itself, and its form was set by aesthetic considerations rather than a series of marketing decisions. (This is not merely a rock concert without show-biz glitz; it's also a rock-concert movie that doesn't try for visual glitz.) Many different choices could have been made in the shooting and the editing, and maybe someone of them might have given the individual numbers (there are sixteen) more modulation, but in its own terms "Stop Making Sense" is close to perfection.

The sound engineering is superb. The sound seems better than live sound; it is better—it has been filtered and mixed and fussed over, so that it achieves ideal clarity. (The soundtrack-album versions of some of the songs that are also on the Heads' 1983 album "Speaking in Tongues" are more up, more joyous.) The nine Talking Heads give the best kind of controlled performance—the kind in which everyone is loose. At the end of the concert, they're still in control, but they're carried away. And Jonathan Demme appears to have worked in exactly the same spirit.

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

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]

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

Reel.com dvd review [4/4] D.R. Jones

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/5]

Philadelphia City Paper (A.D. Amorosi) review

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

DVD Verdict (Dean Roddey) dvd review

DVD Movie Guide [Colin Jacobson]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review

Harvey S. Karten review

FilmFanatic.org

Mondo Digital

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]

DVD Talk (Chris Hughes) dvd review [2/5]

Boxoffice Magazine review Alan Karp

All Movie Guide [Craig Butler]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

Stop Making Sense - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stop Making Sense (album) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LA Weekly interview with Jonathan Demme on the making of Stop Making Sense Michael Dare from The LA Weekly, November 9, 1984

david byrne stop making sense funny dance on YouTube (54 seconds)

Stop Making Sense Original Trailer (1:43)

Talking Heads Video Montage (3:11)

Found a job Talking Heads (3:17)

Talking Heads - And She Was (3:29)

Talking Heads - Heaven (3:40)

Slippery People Talking Heads (3:45)

Talking Heads "Burning Down the House" (4:01)

Talking Heads - Road To Nowhere (4:03)

David Byrne Interview (4:30)

Talking Heads Making Flippy Floppy (4:51)

Talking Heads - Girlfriend Is Better (from Stop Making Sense (5:11)

YouTube - Talking Heads-Psycho Killer- Live! (5:16)

Talking Heads-Once in a Lifetime-live! (5:25)

Talking Heads - Once In A Lifetime (5:42)

"Psycho Killer" - Talking Heads (from Stop Making Sense) (5:50)

Talking Heads - Life During Wartime (5:57)

Talking Heads - What A Day That Was (6:35)

Talking Heads - Take Me To The River (8:02)

SOMETHING WILD

USA (113 mi) 1986

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

When squeaky-clean Big Apple businessman Charlie Driggs (Daniels) walks away from a diner without paying the bill, his brief excursion into crime attracts the attention of Louise Brooks lookalike Lulu (Griffith). This distinctly down-market femme fatale hijacks the lad with the offer of a lift that soon develops into a lunatic weekend of stealing booze and bondage sex. More alarmingly, Charlie's confusion at the woman's wobbly, protean personality is soon aggravated by the arrival of her ex-con ex (Liotta), who abducts the odd couple for his own violently vengeful purposes. A truly original cocktail, mixing Bringing Up Baby-style comedy with the lethal paranoia of film noir, Demme's gem distinguishes itself from other 'yuppie nightmare' movies (Blue Velvet, After Hours) by its very real sympathy for its oddball characters. Demme observes the human eccentricity that underlies the corner-store banalities of Middle America with warmth and loving detail; while a magnificent rock soundtrack and faultless performances from Daniels, Griffith and Liotta ensure pleasures galore.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Ben Stephens) review

Five years before bringing us the haunting, unsettling The Silence Of The Lambs, director Jonathan Demme made this slightly less sombre (yet equally unsettling in its own way) tale of love, abduction, S&M and liberation from the constraints of yuppiedom.

He also pulled off the rare feat of making the only good Melanie Griffith movie ever made. The usually-annoying, whispery-voiced Ms. Griffith brings an energy and charm to this film that she has never really recaptured. She plays Lulu, a black bob-sporting wild child who catches uptight yuppie Charlie Driggs (the ever-underrated Jeff Daniels) walking out of a diner without paying his bill. Under the pretence of driving him back to work, she then kidnaps him, drives him out to a motel and bonks him senseless.

Daniels plays the anal accountant letting his hair down with glee and gusto, after a little initial shock, and his transformation is a joy to watch. As the unlikely pair embark on a prolonged joyride that comes to an abrupt end when they arrive at her high-school reunion and run into her violent psycho boyfriend (played with outward charm and steely menace by the scary-as-hell Ray Liotta). The partially reformed Charlie must now decide where his priorities lie, whether he is committed to his new lifestyle or whether it was nothing but a fun little jaunt.

Never in danger of palling due to a witty and incisive script, colourful, sun-drenched visual style, quirky soundtrack (Talking Heads, John Cale, Laurie Anderson) and, above all, likable characters we actually care about, this bright, breezy slice of the `80s is guaranteed to put a spring in your step.

Movieline Magazine review Jonathan Bernstein

In Melanie Griffith's finest film performance, she's a baby-voiced, bubble-headed, pneumatically cantilevered sex cyborg constructed solely for the purpose of pleasure. Accompanying her infantile enunciation are a toddler's irresponsibility, emotional hairpin curves and self-obsession. Her conflicting components both infuriate and stimulate. She stinks of the stuff that drives men mad. Of course, until someone actually takes the plunge and makes The Melanie Griffith Story, her greatest role is still imaginary.

Offscreen, Griffith apparently has a deadly allure. In Truth or Dare, Madonna aimed herself at Antonio Banderas like an ICBM, but he deflected her advances with a smile, a shrug and a glance at his wife. A whiff of Griffith and Mrs. Banderas was dust in the wind. On-screen, when attempting to portray anything other than a Big Sex Toy, Griffith is mobile milk. But on one memorable occasion that was instrumental in making her a viable star, her private appetites collided with her public persona. The film was Jonathan Demme's 1986 Something Wild.

This pinnacle of the yuppie-in-peril cycle kicks off with newly promoted brokerage veep Jeff Daniels wrangling with the devious notion of skipping the check in a Manhattan diner. Evaluating his dilemma are a pair of eyes peering out from beneath a severe Louise Brooks bob. The owner of the eyes is Griffith's black-clad spider woman who answers to the name Lulu. The moment Daniels summons up the nerve necessary to scuttle from the establishment, Lulu knows she's found her prey.

Within seconds, she's intimidated him into playing hooky from Wall Street, guzzling Seagram's 7 Crown in a speeding car and making a fast getaway from the scene of another skipped check. All the while, Griffith deploys her bitch-baby sexuality to devastating effect, simultaneously mocking and tempting Daniels til he can't make a move without stumbling over either his tongue or his erection. She applies relief to both areas in a motel room handcuff scene that became the boilerplate for a million similar but inferior straight-to-cable sizzlers.

Griffith takes Daniels home to Pennsylvania, and by the time she brings him to her high school reunion, the Louise Brooks bob and spider woman getup are gone, replaced by blonde curls and a summer dress. Lulu has turned back into Audrey Hankel. Griffith is remarkable as a woman attempting to work her way back from the edge and trying to take refuge in a small-town idyll that probably never existed in the first place. The moment Ray Liotta enters the story as Audrey's psycho ex-husband, Griffith's character stops driving the story and the focus is on the previously-submerged duality of Daniels. We're cheated out of knowing how Audrey got to be Lulu and why she wants to go home again.

To say Griffith never recaptured the form she showed in Something Wild is akin to making the observation that Ringo Starr's solo career didn't quite scale the heights of his previous employment. But there's always hope. After all, Jeff Daniels didn't find another partner to taunt him, tempt him, enrage and arouse him enough to unleash his wild side til Dumb and Dumber.

PopMatters David Sanjek

Daniel Fienberg -- Epinions

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review

Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

Brad Laidman: Elvis Needs Boats review

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

Washington Post (Paul Attanasio) review

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

Siskel & Ebert (video)

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA

USA (85 mi) 1987

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

In filming Spalding Gray's mesmerising monologue 'about' his experiences acting in Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields, Demme simply shoots the raconteur seated behind a table and lets him rant. Equipped only with a glass of water, two maps, and a pointing-stick, Gray takes us on a meandering magical mystery tour that encompasses poetry, humour, political education and the confessional. Linking it all is a lucid personal history of US military aggression and Cambodia Year Zero. And it is here that Gray is most powerful: tossing out outrageous analogies, images, conceits and connections for our quick consideration, he paints a portrait of genocide as perceptive as it is original, as scary as it is scathingly funny. Remarkably, Demme does the man justice, utilising only lighting, Laurie Anderson's sound images, and eminently sensible editing to bring the love, pain and the whole damn thing gloriously to life.

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

When Spalding Gray disappeared a few years back, and was later discovered to have committed suicide, a lot of us were shocked without actually being surprised. Gray was a complicated man, wracked with neuroses that informed his famous monologues as much as they likely made his existence a burden. "Swimming to Cambodia," smoothly directed by Jonathan Demme, was the film that broke Gray into the near-mainstream after years of being known mainly to Off-Broadway audiences.

Gray's swooping, neurotic delivery carries us through his story of how he came to be cast in a small role in 1984's The Killing Fields (we see clips of his scenes in the film), his experiences on location (mostly downtime filled with sex shows and "Thai stick"), and his education about the Cambodian suffering under the Khmer Rouge.

Some critics, such as Pauline Kael, questioned Gray's motives in dealing with real atrocities in the midst of generally whimsical material. "It's a superlatively skillful piece of filmmaking," wrote Kael (an admirer of Demme's work), "but at its center is a man who doesn't know that heating up his piddling stage act by an account of the Cambodian misery is about the most squalid thing anyone could do." I can understand the point — what if a monologuist had been an extra in Schindler's List and devoted the middle section of his otherwise comedic performance to describing the conditions at Auschwitz? — but I don't necessarily agree with it.

It's clear that Gray wants us to perceive the arc of consciousness of a non-political man who starts off worrying about trivial things, learns about true atrocity in detail, then gradually goes back to worrying about trivial things again, because he has to. But perhaps now he has some slight perspective on things. I also don't think Gray chose the subject just to "heat up" his act; would Kael have preferred him not to discuss the Cambodian history at all? Gray pulls together genocide, pleasure-seeking, military paranoia, filmmaking, and even an anecdote about rude neighbors to paint a coherent portrait of aggression.

Demme shot the film for $485,000 at the Performing Garage in New York, over the course of three performances. Unlike Nick Broomfield in Monster in a Box — the second of the three Gray concert films (Steven Soderbergh's Gray's Anatomy rounds out the trilogy) — Demme doesn't try to jazz things up with flashy editing; the editing here (by Carol Littleton) feels completely organic, building the kind of rhythm that amounts to a better-than-live experience — the filmmakers know exactly when to pull back and when to move in. John Bailey's smooth cinematography and Laurie Anderson's evocative score help to take us to the mindscapes Gray is describing. (Anderson's score is never intrusive here, unlike in Monster in a Box, where her music verged on overbearing — sometimes Gray seemed to be shouting above it.)

By its talky nature the film is necessarily not as electrifying as Demme's musical pieces, but it's compelling enough. Spalding Gray, we hardly knew ye.

not coming to a theater near you (Teddy Blanks) review

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]

Steve Upstill review

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

FilmFanatic.org

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

Siskel & Ebert (video)

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

MARRIED TO THE MOB

USA (103 mi) 1988

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

When philandering Mafia hitman 'Cucumber' Frank de Marco is killed by his boss Tony 'The Tiger' Russo, his widow Angela (Pfeiffer) decides to abandon her stockbroker-belt home (bursting with stolen goods) and start anew with a job and a dingy room on the Lower East Side. Easier said than done: obsessively amorous Tony (Stockwell) courts her with a vengeance, while FBI agent Mike Downey (Modine) suspects that she planned Frank's death with Tony. If the slim plot of Demme's romantic black comedy lacks the outrageous panache and exhilarating twists of Something Wild, the film nevertheless delights through its sheer good-humoured glee in all that is kitsch or off-the-wall, and its wealth of inventive incidental details. While it's all relentlessly shallow, the performances, music and gaudy visuals provide a fizzy vitality for which many other directors would give their right arm. Amazingly, for all its hip anarchy, it's finally an oddly old-fashioned slice of entertainment. Preston Sturges might have approved.

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

One of the saddest injustices of recent cinema is that this gangster comedy — yet another happy classic from Jonathan Demme — went ignored by the public, probably because its trailer made it look lame.

Everything in it is wonderfully right. Michelle Pfeiffer is Angela, a mob wife whose husband (Alec Baldwin) has just been rubbed out by his boss, Tony "the Tiger" Russo (Dean Stockwell), who wastes no time putting the moves on the new widow. Angela isn't interested, and besides, Tony's insanely jealous wife Connie (Mercedes Ruehl, simultaneously hilarious and frightening) would kill them both.

So Angela takes her young son and dog and moves to a rat-trap apartment, unaware that FBI agents Matthew Modine and Oliver Platt are watching her. In the movie's only real nod to convention, Modine falls for Pfeiffer. It all leads to a climax that gets my vote as the funniest gunfight ever filmed. An inventive and rewarding comedy, with a hip score by David Byrne and wall-to-wall party music, plus the usual eclectic supporting cast (watch for Chris Isaak in the Burger World scene).

If it had been marketed with any competence, it might actually have made some money. Demme's next was 'The Silence of the Lambs,' which made money.

Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Gross]

Married to the Mob, directed by Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense, Philadelphia), is a mob movie spoof about a hit man and his wife who has grown tired of the mob life. Frank the Cucumber (Alec Baldwin) is a hired gun who knocks off the bad guys (or good, depending on your point of view) in between Italian meals with the family. He gets a bit out of line with the head mobster’s moll and finds himself paying the ultimate price. Too bad for Frank the Cucumber. But there’s always a silver lining, and for Frank’s wife Angela (Michelle Pfieffer), this is the perfect opportunity to start a new life with her young son – far from the bad influence of the crime family she married into. But when Angela tries to escape this life, she finds that Tony “The Tiger” Russo (Dean Stockwell), the local boss who offed her dearly beloved has the hots for her and isn’t so keen on her departing.

Angela’s refuge in a dumpy Manhattan apartment is short-lived when she starts getting attention from a cute FBI agent named Mike Downey (Matthew Modine). The competition for her hand becomes extremely complicated with both Mike and Tony interested in her.

There are lulls to be sure, with a few sight gags thrown in for good measure, as Married to the Mob is The Godfather on laughing gas; an anti-Goodfellas look at the Mafia life, with plenty of Joisey accents. This movie features enough laughs and romance to be light popcorn fare for couples looking for a different sort of romantic comedy. It is an amiable, campy and colourful film where only a director like Demme could make so many mob characters likable.

Look for a spot-on performance from Mercedes Ruehl as the very jealous wife of Tony Russo, and decent work by the rest of the cast. Stockwell is also excellent. By the time she took on this role, Pfieffer was well on her way to establishing herself as a major star, and while this isn’t exactly star-making material, it also didn’t hold back her career. Same goes for the other leading players, who aren’t especially impressive here, but nor are they objectionable. Demme uses scenes cut out of the movie’s final version over the end credits. It’s as if he’s purposely spray-painting graffiti on any potential high-gloss finish. This isn’t one of Demme’s more interesting directorial efforts, but his distinctive touch is still evident throughout. As usual, he rolls in a jukebox-load of diverse and rousing music, including reggae, rockabilly, David Byrne scoring, new wave and even Rosemary Clooney pricelessly singing “Mambo Italiano.” Married to the Mob is too often predictable but it manages to avoid many potential satire pratfalls, making it unique in several respects and mostly enjoyable.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

Newsweek (David Ansen) review

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

USA (91 mi) 1991

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

In its own old-fashioned way, this is as satisfying as that other, more modernist Thomas Harris adaptation, Manhunter. When FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Foster) is sent to conduct an interview with serial killer shrink Dr Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins) in his high-security cell, she little knows what she is in for. The Feds want Lecter to help them in their search for homicidal maniac 'Buffalo Bill'; but in exchange for clues about Bill's behaviour, Lecter demands that Clarice answer questions about herself, so that he can penetrate the darkest recesses of her mind. It's in their confrontations that both film and heroine come electrically alive. Although Demme does reveal the results of the killer's violence, he for the most part refrains from showing the acts themselves; the film could never be accused of pandering to voyeuristic impulses. Under-standably, much has been made of Hopkins' hypnotic Lecter, but the laurels must go to Levine's killer, admirably devoid of camp overstatement, and to Foster, who evokes a vulnerable but pragmatic intelligence bent on achieving independence through sheer strength of will.

eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder

I remember just like it was yesterday when I bought this film when I was 14 years old. A film I heard so much about that I just had to see it, whether it was good or bad, and it has stayed on my mind forever once the last frame rolled. Based on the Thomas Harris novel and arguably Jonathan Demme’s best film and armed with a distinct brand of atmospheric suspense, direction, story and stellar performances, The Silence of the Lambs will forever stand high as one of the most intelligent and suspenseful films ever made.

Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is a FBI agent trainee whom has been lured as a bait by Behavioral Science head Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) in order to grill information out of renowned psychiatrist and psychopath Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) on several unsolved cases, most notably the case of the serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). After the kidnapping of a Senator’s daughter in the State of Illinois, Lecter offers a psych profile on Buffalo Bill to Starling in exchange of Starling’s personal feelings. As Clarice treads deeper into the case and into Lecter’s mind, she’ll have to try her best to conquer her fears in order to solve the case before the girl is killed.

At the film’s core it’s a character study of both Lecter and Starling while all the same relying on effect and mood in order to give the film the suspense it demands and pulls it off masterfully. Anthony Hopkins gives the character of Hannibal Lecter a three-dimensional portrait rather than a caricature-like beast; depicting a simple looking man with a deadly instinct hidden but always present within him and an ever-mysterious tone looming across his personality. He’s like a lion, holding calm and still, waiting until the right moment to strike. Thanks to this, Hopkins is clearly believable. Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling is the larger of the two focal points, a determined yet vulnerable person whom is still a child at heart and wants to fight her fears as later revealed in the many conversations with Lecter, in order to become her own woman. The screenshot of Starling looking towards the window reflect of Lecter’s face pretty much summarizes the film’s main intentions.

The rest of the story, which was adapted by Ted Tally, is just as intriguing as its characters. Besides delivering excellent character development and clever symbolisms, it also plunges the viewer down deep into the dark side of humanity and studying its psychological aspects; all of which we encounter in everyday life, and also makes us think about our own personal aspects of our lives. The screenplay is perfectly blended with Demme’s direction which includes the usual a gritty, faded discolored photography courtesy of Tak Fujimoto and Howard Shore’s bold and moody score (which ranks amongst his best scores). These two elements along with the solid acting allow Demme to inject a dark, moody and unpredictable atmosphere which is capable of being as volatile as a hydrogen balloon. Demme’s Oscar is well-deserved though Oliver Stone and Ridley Scott gave him a run for his money that year.

In the end, this film is a certified classic and a kick-ass piece of work which one will enjoy time after time (at least I have); definitely worth seeing at least once in your life. 5-5

Turner Classic Movies review Mikita Brottman and David Sterritt

Ever since movies like Halloween (1978) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) sparked a horror-film renaissance in the 1970s, audiences have cheered for the "final girl," the last survivor of a serial killer's mayhem--usually a young woman, stuck with the grim job of subduing the slayer and returning home to tell her story. Of the many offbeat touches in Jonathan Demme's legendary thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991), none works more effectively than the decision to let the final girl also be the original girl and the only girl, matching her wits against the murderer's from beginning to end.

Not that Clarice Starling is exactly a girl. She's a smart, no-nonsense woman, and she's played by a smart, no-nonsense actress: Jodie Foster, who won an Academy Award for her work. Oscars® also went to Demme for Best Director, Ted Tally for Best Adapted Screenplay, Anthony Hopkins for his chilling performance as Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, and the movie itself as Best Picture of 1991. The film's editing and sound were also nominated. It was almost unprecedented for an R-rated film to sweep the top five Oscars®, and the triumph was taken as a welcome sign that Hollywood was growing up at last—able to embrace a tough, challenging story told in a tough, challenging way.

The first main character we meet is Starling, who's earned a psychology degree and joined the FBI as a trainee. She's assigned to help a senior FBI agent, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), track down a serial killer called Buffalo Bill because he skins his (always female) victims as if they were so many bison on the hoof. Crawford's idea is to figure out Buffalo Bill's thought processes with help from Hannibal Lecter, M.D., a former psychiatrist and world-class fiend who's serving life in prison for his crimes. In their first conversation, Starling mentions that serial killers often keep "trophies" from their victims' bodies. Lecter points out that he never did, and Starling stands corrected. "No," she accurately replies, “you ate yours.”

Her urgent goal is to locate Buffalo Bill before he kills and flays Catherine Martin, a U.S. senator's daughter who's his latest victim. Starling has about seventy-two hours to accomplish this, since after kidnapping a woman BB keeps her for three days in a home-made dungeon, starving her so her skin will better suit his purpose—which is to tailor himself a "suit" that will enhance his hoped-for transformation into a female version of himself. Lecter can help if he wants to, but he'll do it only on his own psychotic terms.

Starling plunges into the case, assisted by enigmatic clues from Lecter that are almost as mystifying as BB's whereabouts. One of the film's most engrossing elements is the contrast it strikes between two different senses of time, as critic Yvonne Tasker points out in her book on the movie. All the characters are passing through a three-day period that will end with victory for either the FBI or the killer. By contrast, Lecter is already in prison, which frees him from the clock and calendar. He never speaks or moves with undue haste, savoring the suspense he's inflicting on Starling by handing her puzzling hints in exchange for personal information about herself.

Hannibal Lecter was born as a secondary character in the 1981 novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, a former crime and police reporter known for his reclusive personality and meticulous attention to detail; he'll spell out the difficulties of working with disembodied skin, for instance, or the condition of a "floater" corpse eaten away by the water it was dumped into. Red Dragon has been filmed twice—as Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann in 1986, and under the novel's title, with Brett Ratner directing in 2002. Brian Cox plays Lecter in the 1986 picture, oozing the same understated weirdness that Hopkins brings to The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, the sequel directed by Ridley Scott in 2001. French actor Gaspard Ulliel plays him with a more aggressive, less effective kind of menace in Hannibal Rising, the 2007 prequel. More actors may take on Lecter in years to come, but Hopkins will always own the character; it's been that way since the moment we and Starling first saw him behind the cannibal-proof glass that shields Hannibal's jailers from his deadly grasp. This is the role that made Hopkins a full-blown star, and deservedly so.

The Silence of the Lambs performed well at the box office, becoming the last hit released by Orion Pictures before the company went into bankruptcy the following year. The film's popularity, due in part to the superb cast and crew, may also have been boosted by real-life associations that audiences brought to it. Many moviegoers remembered that would-be assassin John Hinckley said he tried to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981 as a way of getting Jodie Foster's attention after he saw Taxi Driver (1976) umpteen times; and the real serial killer Ted Bundy wore a cast on his arm to appear harmless, just as Buffalo Bill does on screen.

Not everyone hailed The Silence of the Lambs. It sparked controversy in the gay community for portraying Buffalo Bill as a wannabe transsexual with stereotypical gay mannerisms, and some reviewers found it too violent. Chicago critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that "the purposes to which it places its considerable ingenuity are ultimately rather foul....For creepy, sicko kicks, I'd rather watch the evening news." By contrast, many feminist critics praised it as "a slasher film in which the woman is hero rather than victim, pursuer rather than pursued," in Amy Taubin's words.

One of the factors that put Harris's novel onto bestseller lists was the careful, almost affectionate precision he uses to bring horrific scenes alive. Drawing on research with the FBI and painstaking study of real serial-killer cases, he lends even the goriest matters a morbid fascination that's hard to shake. Demme provides a movie equivalent via gruesome crime-scene photos, graphic filming of a blood-drenched jailbreak scene, and lots of ghoulish dialogue. "A census taker once tried to test me," Lecter tells Clarice in one of his jovial moods. "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti." Lines like this passed instantly into the pop-culture hall of fame, helping the movie become a classic of its genre as well as an Oscar®-winning hit.

It also did a lot for Demme, previously known as an art-minded director (Melvin and Howard [1980], Stop Making Sense [1984], Swimming to Cambodia [1987]) with a liking for quirky subjects and performances. The Silence of the Lambs made him a major Hollywood auteur, and remains the defining work of his career. Foster and Hopkins have also reaped great rewards from its success. Whatever they might accomplish in the future, the may never outdo their unique achievements in this remarkable thriller.

Ted Tally on Silence of the Lambs on the screenwriting adaptation

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer K. E. Sullivan from Jump Cut, July 2000

Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Special Edition]

DVD Journal - Special Edition Dawn Taylor

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [Special Edition]

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

AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [A+]

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]

Movieline Magazine dvd review Christopher Walters

Classic Horror review Chris Justice

Dragan Antulov review [9/10]

outrate.net (Mark Adnum) review

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

CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon) review [5/5]

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

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A-]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib

Encyclopedia Of Fantastic Film & TV

Collector's Corner [Wes Marshall]

The Digital Bits dvd review [Criterion Collection] Todd Doogan

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson, also Special Edition: DVD MovieGuide dvd review

DVD Journal - Criterion Collection D.K. Holm

The Onion A.V. Club dvd review [Collector's Edition]

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Collector's Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Collector's Edition] Colin Jacobson

The Trades (R.J. Carter) dvd review [Collector's Edition]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review Collector’s Edition

Jerry Saravia review

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4.5/5]

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review

George Chabot's Review

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]

Movie-Vault.com (Arturo García Lasca) review

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]

Reel.com dvd review [3/4] Vanessa Vance, Special Edition

All Movie Guide [Mark Deming]

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

Basic Instinct Judith Halberstam essay from Popcorn Q on BASIC INSTINCT and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Movieline Magazine dvd review Chris Phillips, MANHUNTER and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Newsweek (David Ansen) review Of Cannibals and Kinks, February 18, 1991

Newsweek (David Ansen) review The Flowering of a Late Bloomer, January 17, 1994

Newsweek (David Ansen) review The Imitation of Death, November 6, 1995

Newsweek (David Ansen) review Bloody Good Flicks, April 3, 2006

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [4/5]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4] Roger Ebert in 1991

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] Roger Ebert in 2001

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

COUSIN BOBBY

USA Spain (70 mi) 1992

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

It's perhaps characteristic of Demme's quirky integrity that he should follow The Silence of the Lambs with a low-key, 16mm documentary about a long-lost relative. Typical, too, that the film, for all its seeming amateurishness, ends up being far more than a home movie. For the Reverend Robert Castle, the cousin Demme hasn't seen for over 30 years, is not only a colourful figure - a politically radical Episcopalian minister battling against the poverty, racism and drugs that blight Harlem - but a welcome reminder that even in Bush's America the Left has just about managed to survive. If the film's loose structure means it occasionally lacks focus, Demme's relaxed, open narrative style allows him to paint a wide-ranging portrait of America.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

A fascinating and highly moving documentary by Jonathan Demme about his cousin Robert Castle, whom he hadn't seen for 30 years before this film. A 60-year-old white Episcopal minister working in Harlem with a multiracial and multidenominational congregation, Castle is a passionately committed community organizer who started out in Jersey City and forged strong links with the Black Panthers and other radical organizations of the 60s and 70s. He comes across as something of a saint--unpretentious and unself-conscious, though by no means simple--and this unpreachy film, which also shows us a lot of Demme's developing friendship with his cousin, is similarly direct and unaffected. Some of our questions about Castle's peripatetic family life are left unanswered, and it's not clear precisely where home movie is meant to shade off into political document, but such ambiguity carries a certain charm and conviction; at the end one simply feels grateful for having spent some time with these people (1991).

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

THE fact that Jonathan Demme had not seen his cousin the Rev. Robert Castle in 30-odd years is not sufficient to explain "Cousin Bobby," Mr. Demme's documentary account of his cousin's life. Plenty of people have long-lost relatives, and not all of those relatives' stories belong on film. But something special was at work here: a true meeting of the minds, which the film captures effortlessly, and a remarkable family trait both cousins share. Both Mr. Demme, the Academy Award-winning director, and Father Castle, the priest in charge at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Harlem, are avid enthusiasts, and both are fueled by an idealism that elevates "Cousin Bobby" well beyond the home-movie realm.

It seems fitting that Mr. Demme, in one scene, wears a shirt displaying a map of the world. As the major director with Hollywood's most exotic resume, Mr. Demme has explored an enormous range of interests, making a collection of films bound together by the film maker's sheer fascination with his subjects rather than by any unifying themes.

His features are as different as the meticulously chilling "The Silence of the Lambs" and the antic, dreamlike "Something Wild"; his documentaries range from one of the best and most ingenious rock concert films, Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense," to a simple, riveting treatment of Spalding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia" and the political essay "Haiti Dreams of Democracy." "Cousin Bobby," an hourlong film made with what proves to be deceptive nonchalance, shares with these other projects an unwavering intensity and strong sense of purpose. Most important, it shows off Mr. Demme's unusual ability to draw audiences close to the subjects he embraces.

"Cousin Bobby," which opens today at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, gets to know Father Castle the way anyone might explore a new acquaintance: gradually, casually, in a circular rather than linear fashion. Seemingly at random, the film supplies old photographs, relatives' reminiscences and scenes of the priest among his parishioners. The film quickly establishes that he has carved out an unusual role for himself within this Harlem congregation, and searches through his background to explain that aspect of his character. From the film's seemingly random observations -- that Bobby's father, Mr. Demme's great-Uncle Willy, once bowled a 300 game -- to its scorching political invective, "Cousin Bobby" eventually assembles a moving and fully formed portrait.

Father Castle's view of racial politics in America seems to surprise even some of his black parishioners, and the film recounts the ways his radical stance has brought him both satisfaction and trouble. In his Jersey City parish in the 1960's, he was closely involved with the Black Panthers and was particularly influenced by the late Isaiah Rowley, one of the people to whom "Cousin Bobby" is dedicated. Without exploring Father Castle's politics in great detail, the film does visit with his first wife, who recalls the couple's four children asking, "How much is the bail, Mom?," on one of the various times the priest was in jail.

Father Castle himself remembers being told by his Bishop, "Bob, there should be a job for you here in the Diocese of Newark, but there isn't." This prompted a move to Vermont in 1970, where the Castles planned to run a general store. Instead, Father Castle was again drawn to the church, and eventually he returned to the New York area, setting up St. Mary's as a kind of all-purpose community service center for its parishioners. Father Castle is seen doing everything from holding mail for neighbors who are in jail or missing to railing against drugs, poor living conditions and a huge pothole in the middle of the street. The film becomes so intimate with his concerns that the news of this pothole's being repaired becomes a major triumph.

As they stroll together through the settings that shaped Father Castle's life, from the Harlem street corner where he delivers a sermon to the Vermont hillside where one of his sons is buried, the director and the priest share a developing bond that is captured on film. They attend a family reunion; they visit the house where they last saw each other; they share impressions, sometimes terribly moving ones, about relatives who are now gone.

By the time the viewer hears the poignant story of Father Castle's final encounter with his father, and learns the priest's thoughts on his faith and the possibility of an afterlife, the film has achieved a rare degree of intimacy. There's a lot to be learned from the apparent guilelessness with which that intimacy is developed, and the precise modulation of topic, tone and background music used to construct this studiously unself-conscious style.

"Cousin Bobby," handsomely shot by several cinematographers including Ernest Dickerson, concludes on a stark, sobering note with archival scenes of the fiery damage caused by American race riots in the 1960's and bracing sounds of rap "Edutainment" by KRS-1, comparing ancient Greek and Egyptian cultures and stressing the importance of black history. This final touch, eerily timed in light of recent events, fits perfectly with the film's presentation of Father Castle's ideals.

It also suits Mr. Demme's larger mandate in making this film, since it was commissioned by an independent Spanish production company making a series "On Shooting Reality." Reality is seldom found onscreen these days, but it is alive and well here. Cousin Bobby Directed by Jonathan Demme; edited by David Greenwald; music by Anton Sanko; produced by Edward Saxon; released by Cinevista. At the Joseph Papp Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, Manhattan. Running time: 70 minutes. This film has no rating.

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Variety.com [Lisa Nesselson]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

PHILADELPHIA

USA (125 mi) 1993

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Hollywood's first major movie about AIDS is, at the very least, as good as we had any right to expect. The plot is simple: Andrew Beckett (Hanks), a gay lawyer with AIDS, is fired for 'incompetence' and sues his bosses, hiring a homophobic attorney (Washington) to represent him. Less a portrait of gay life or the effects of AIDS, the story serves as a framework to examine associated issues. Why do Beckett's bosses sack him and not a woman employee with AIDS? Should people with fatal or contagious diseases tell their employers about their condition? Is there any occasion when we don't have the right to remain silent about our sexuality? Such questions constitute the film's backbone. More importantly, most of the 'big' emotional scenes we'd expect to see are omitted. Thus, we never feel we're being manipulated into shedding easy tears. The movie is defined by a tone of quiet restraint. Safe and apolitical it may be, but Philadelphia succeeds as a deeply affecting humanist drama.

Turner Classic Movies review Scott McGee

After more than 10 years of dealing with one of the greatest health crises in history, a mainstream Hollywood film finally stepped up to the plate and dealt honestly with the issue of AIDS in director Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia (1993). With a stellar cast that boasted the likes of Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen, and Joanne Woodward, Philadelphia had the pedigree to be a heavy favorite when it came time to hand out Oscars. The popular film did not fail to meet those expectations. Tom Hanks won his first Oscar for his stirring portrayal of a young attorney whose professional and personal life is cut short, while rocker Bruce Springsteen walked off with his first Oscar for Best Song, a haunting ballad entitled "Streets of Philadelphia." It was the first time Springsteen lent his writing talent for a motion picture production.

The film's journey from script to screen was a long, rocky road. At one time under the working title People Like Us, Ron Nyswaner's script went through 25 drafts over a period of five years. Shortly after Nyswaner began writing, Orion Studios, the money tree funding the making of Philadelphia, filed for bankruptcy in December 1991. As a result, the story idea became embroiled in the Chapter 11 proceedings. Ed Saxon, the Oscar-winning producer of Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991), had to go through the formality of appearing in bankruptcy court in order to rescue the film project from oblivion.

The arduous road did not get any easier after that. Once word got out that an AIDS-themed film was in the works in Hollywood, members of the film industry and gay activist groups began to anticipate the movie as the first public statement of how mainstream Hollywood would confront AIDS and homophobia. But after the film was completed and released, those same groups began to harshly criticize the film for sugarcoating the reality of living with AIDS. Despite the controversy created by the film, Philadelphia was a moving experience for most audiences and grossed about $77 million in U.S. after its January 1994 wide release.

While Philadelphia certainly generated discussion about social issues, it also served as the unlikely inspiration for a comedy. In the hit 1997 comedy In & Out, Kevin Kline plays a much loved and respected high school drama teacher who has much to celebrate; an impending marriage to fiancee Joan Cusack and professional pride in his former student Matt Dillon, now an Oscar nominee. When Dillon wins the coveted award, he not only thanks his former teacher, but also inadvertently "outs" him on television, forcing Kline to come to terms with his sexuality and his equally perplexed family and friends. Screenwriter Paul Rudnick came up with this very funny premise after Hanks, in his Oscar speech, graciously thanked his former mentor and high school teacher, Rawley Farnsworth, for being the inspiration behind his performance.

Cineaste magazine (c/o UCB Media Resources) review Roy Grundmann and Peter Sacks, Summer 1993 Cineaste maazine (c/o UCB Media Resources) review

Slant Magazine review Keith Uhlich

outrate.net (Mark Adnum) review

PopcornQ review Mark Finch

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Kevin Clemons) dvd review [Anniversary Edition]

Dragan Antulov retrospective [6/10]

Scott Renshaw review [5/10]

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review

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

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

DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [4/5] [Anniversary Edition]

The Cinema Source (Ray Dademo) dvd review [A] [Anniversary Edition]

DVD Verdict (Maurice Cobbs) dvd review [Anniversary Edition]

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation [Anniversary Edition] Guido Henkel

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Anniversary Edition] Colin Jacobson

DVD Verdict (Dean Roddey) dvd review

Edward Copeland on Film

eFilmCritic Reviews M.P. Bartley

Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]

Epinions.com [AliventiAsylum]

Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

BBC Films (George Perry) review

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

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

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

THE COMPLEX SESSIONS

USA (30 mi) 1994

Movie Vault review Rob Gonsalves

Neil Young has many fans, but I'm not among them. I neither like nor dislike him (though I admired his fuzzbox soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man) -- he neither annoys nor pleases me, musically. He just exists. So I looked forward to seeing Jonathan Demme's footage of him and Crazy Horse as they perform in a studio setting. Would Demme turn lead into gold? Or was my love of Stop Making Sense and Storefront Hitchcock based significantly on my love of the music?

Well, Neil Young fans will probably love the tape. All others, particularly those who actively dislike Young but might be lured on the strength of Demme's participation, should probably pass: this is no Stop Making Sense. Young and Crazy Horse play four songs from their Sleeps with Angels album -- "My Heart" (Young on piano), "Prime of Life," "Change Your Mind," and the aptly titled "Piece of Crap," at the end of which Young wrecks his guitar strings.

Throughout, Young comes across as a self-absorbed furball. Roger Ebert, panning the 1996 Young-and-Crazy-Horse rockumentary Year of the Horse (directed by Jarmusch), ridiculed Young's habit of whomping around onstage like an autistic Cro-Magnon, and Young does the same thing here, making the time-honored Guitar Face all rock guitarists are legally required to display when churning out a masturbatory solo. The songs are ... well ... Neil Young. If I heard them on the radio I'd keep working on whatever I was working on and let the songs go in one ear and out the other. Seeing them performed by the humorless Godfather of Grunge is the annoying part. On the plus side, the video is only 27 minutes long. I watched it once and donated it to my local library.

Demme does what he can. This time he's got Tak Fujimoto (who shot Demme's Silence of the Lambs, and also The Sixth Sense more recently), as well as smooth editing by Andy Keir, but for the most part their combined efforts just made me wish those efforts had been expended on a musician who deserves them. Ani Difranco, say, or PJ Harvey -- maybe it's time for Demme to turn his camera to a female artist. Lacking that, there's always Robyn Hitchcock...

STOREFRONT HITCHCOCK

USA (77 mi) 1997

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Jonathan Demme's off-kilter concert flick features former Soft Boy/Egyptian Robyn Hitchcock. Strikingly filmed outside a Manhattan shop front, it's an endearing profile of one of English pop's most wayward talents. This unlikely collaboration between Philadelphia/The Silence Of The Lambs director Demme and REM favourite Robyn Hitchcock is clearly a labour of love for all concerned, and the result rivals the director's own work with Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense.

For over 20 years Hitchcock, who with eccentric new wavers The Soft Boys declared "I Want to be an Anglepoise Lamp" has ploughed a lonely furrow. His music, a literate blend of psychedelic punk and pastoral folk, is usually characterised as an acquired taste but there's nothing difficult about the sweet, sad, Syd Barret-esque compositions he delivers here, nor his rambling inter-song ruminations. "I don't know what kind of church you like to imagine," he says genially. "But I like to imagine a church full of carcasses."

Most of the tracks come from his excellent 1996 solo album 'Moss Elixir'. Set dressing consists of a light bulb, a mirror ball and a giant tomato, and Hitchcock's own mix of charm and humour is well up in the mix. An intimate portrait of the cerebral surrealist, and one with plenty of low-key thrills.

Verdict
Simple but successful concert movie that allows Hitchcock's idiosyncratic material to speak for itself

BFI | Sight & Sound | Storefront Hitchcock (1997) Neil McCormick from Sight and Sound, January 1999

Cult British singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock stands in a shop window chatting and playing songs to an unseen audience inside the shop. He is joined intermittently by violinist Deni Bonet and guitarist Tim Keegan. A constant stream of cars and pedestrians can be seen passing behind Hitchcock's back. Occasionally someone will stop and peer through the window. During what appears to be one continuous performance, the background shifts from day to night and back again.

Robyn Hitchcock is not exactly a household name. His seminal band, The Soft Boys, surfaced in the late 70s playing what he himself has described as "sedate hippie gibberish" when the music industry was being engulfed by punk rock. Confronted by widespread indifference to such singles as '(l Want to Be an) Anglepoise Lamp' they broke up in 1981, though Hitchcock has continued writing and recording in much the same vein ever since, at first backed by a band called The Egyptians but latterly completely solo. He draws on 60s psychedelic pop as the basis for melodic and emotional compositions, blending bitterness, weirdness and surreal humour in unusual settings. Some critics would argue that Hitchcock's sprawling body of work (he has released over 15 albums) remains one of the great undiscovered treasures of modern pop. But there are probably just as many who think it should remain undiscovered.

Rock superstars REM are among Hitchcock's biggest fans and their endorsement in the 80s helped introduce him to the American college audience who comprise his most loyal fan base.

It was after a typically low-key show in New York that Hitchcock was approached by Jonathan Demme about making a movie. At first glance, the very idea of a feature-length concert film being made about an obscure English eccentric by an Academy award-winning American director seems almost as absurd as one of Hitchcock's off-the-wall monologues. Attempting to explain his appeal, Hitchcock has previously commented: "My stuff is not widescreen. It doesn't look good from a distance. It's more like an etching. You have to get right up close and look at it carefully." So what is he doing on the big screen?

Winning new friends and influencing people, probably. Before the enormous success of Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Demme enjoyed critical acclaim for his simple, performance-based films about author and raconteur Spalding Grey (1978's Swimming to Cambodia) and art rock group Talking Heads (1984's Stop Making Sense). Shot over four days and nights in a storefront in New York, Storefront Hitchcock follows the same stylistic pattern as the earlier films: a stripped-down minimalism that forces the viewer to focus intently on the performer. It is, in this sense, closer to the etching Hitchcock imagined than to anything routinely thought of as a widescreen experience.

Apart from a somewhat incongruous four-panelled split-screen during a guitar solo, Demme employs few of the techniques usually associated with rock videos and performance movies. There is almost no camera movement (discounting the occasional subtle zoom or slight pan), no rapid-fire cutting or extravagant staging (one song is performed by candlelight, another beneath a single electric bulb), no audience-reaction shots. The only distraction is provided by the intriguing setting. The out-of-focus, constantly moving backdrop of the city and the subtle yet peculiar shifts from day to night create a dreamlike sense of distorted time. Hitchcock truly seems to be in a world of his own, which some would say has always been the case.

Hitchcock is an acquired taste - and if you don't acquire it, the film is likely to prove unbearable. His thin, reedy voice will have some wondering whatever might have convinced him he could sing. And his epic monologues (which sometimes resemble jokes without a punchline) are as likely to baffle as many people as they delight. Yet if you have the patience to settle in, relax and slowly adjust to his peculiar point of view, Hitchcock is a revelation. Although there is much humour in his act, he is not a comedian. His songs address a huge span of ideas and emotions and Demme's close-up style allows all Hitchcock's nuance and subtlety to register.

Salon (Mark Athitakis) review

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5] also seen here: Movie Vault review

The Village Voice [Douglas Wolk]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

All Movie Guide [Perry Seibert]

TV Guide

Austin Chronicle [Russell Smith]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

BELOVED A 98

USA (171 mi) 1998

Time Out review

From the breathtaking opening scene, it's clear that Demme won't be content to sit back and preach. Inspired by the true story of a runaway slave driven to commit unspeakable murder rather than re-submit to her chains, Toni Morrison's ghost story takes the lid off the blistering, restless tumult, the 'screaming baboon' that is the legacy of American racism. When Paul D (Glover) arrives at the home of his old friend Sethe (Winfrey), he's confronted with a spectre of violence more powerful than he can comprehend, and peremptorily ousted by Newton's malign innocent, Beloved. On one level, this is pure horror, an extraordinary yarn of the supernatural, torture and abuse, physical endurance, hope crushed, love corrupted. The script has compressed the novel, but in struggling to honour its depth has saddled itself with a difficult and anti-climactic structure which draws you in, but keeps you waiting. That said, the film makes a good fist of approximating Morrison's densely textured, incantatory style, steers clear of sentimentality, and snatches heart-rending performances from Winfrey, Newton and Elise, as Sethe's daughter Denver.

Beloved David Denby from the New Yorker

One of the more high-minded and painful follies of recent years. Toni Morrison's celebrated 1987 novel "Beloved"—difficult, allusive, and filled with ghosts—is probably unadaptable, but Oprah Winfrey, with director Jonathan Demme in tow, went ahead with the project after eleven years of discouragement. Oprah plays Sethe, the former slave who, in 1873, lives in an Ohio farmhouse with her teen-age daughter, Denver (Kimberly Elise), her old friend and new lover Paul D (Danny Glover), and the ghost of the daughter she killed long ago when the girl was about to be retaken into slavery. The ghost, at first an unseen presence, smashes crockery to the floor, then appears as a beautiful young woman (Thandie Newton) who growls and talks very, very slowly. The movie would seem to be completely misconceived: rather than dramatizing the moral condition of people burdened by an unspeakable past, it dramatizes the domestic problems of living with a spirit-demon. For most of the hundred and seventy-four minutes we are stuck inside that farmhouse, and when the filmmakers do cut back to complicated events occurring earlier (during the slave years) we can't always tell what's going on. But there are moments of weirdly poetic natural beauty and also some wonderful actresses—Kessia Kordelle as a half-mad runaway white girl who helps deliver Sethe's baby in the woods, and Beah Richards, who shakes and shouts as the elderly preacher Baby Suggs and momentarily brings the show to life.

Slant Magazine review Jeremiah Kipp

Filled with some of the most extraordinary images of recent years, Jonathan Demme's Beloved was apparently too powerful for audiences to handle back in 1998. Producer and star Oprah Winfrey delivers a strong-willed and richly complex performance as escaped slave Sethe, a free woman who survived the brutality of a Kentucky plantation and now lives free in her ghost-infested home. Preserving her secrets, and keeping her surviving daughter Denver (Kimberly Elise) under lock-and-key, she welcomes former slave Paul D. (Danny Glover) into her home as well as a mysterious, child-like woman named Beloved (Thandie Newton), who may be the lingering spirit of Sethe's murdered child. There's substantial and vital social drama in this three-hour epic, but Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto keep Beloved mystical, spiritual, and emotional. Their stunning, full-on close-ups of actors' faces are not only expressive, they convey the weight of guilt upon these former slaves attempting to move beyond their past horrors and their present strife. When those faces break into smiles, Beloved has already earned the beauty of its fleeting joys and sought adorations. Set against the backdrop of a house and yard cut off from the road, and infused with glistening flashbacks of rich, oversaturated memories (the gathering for prayer, the slaying of a child, the birth of a baby girl), Beloved is filled with visual cues that represent something richer: the fullness of one's life experience. There's also lingering pain, mostly found in Newton's weird shock-performance as Beloved, a freaky girl first seen covered in ladybugs and croaking in anger/agony. Accompanied by a hot red light when she imposes herself upon her newfound family, she smashes through domesticity and confronts the survivors of slavery with what they had to endure, what they still endure, and what they can't ignore. Accused of being hyperbolic and too serious (not unlike the Toni Morrison masterpiece from which it was adapted), Beloved should be praised for treating its subject matter with unflinching temerity and oft-profound visual grace.

Flipside Movie Emporium (Eric Beltmann) review [B+]

Unlike Schindler's List, a picture it has been compared to, Beloved depicts the horrors of its chosen injustice -- slavery -- by concentrating solely on the psychological damage it engendered. Significantly, this underappreciated adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel about slavery takes place in 1873, more than a decade after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. What makes it an exceptional film is the way it illustrates the emotional impact of imposed servitude that must certainly have lingered long after a slave was granted freedom. Using both literal and surreal metaphors, the director, Jonathan Demme, has fashioned the book into a poetic, metaphysical journey through the soul of Sethe (Oprah Winfrey), a former slave tormented by a long-ago backfire of maternal instinct that is, shockingly, both reprehensible and completely noble.

Now free, Sethe is still suffering from the wounds left by slavery; her mind carries psychological scars far more painful than the physical scars on her back. Her previous indiscretion literally haunts her, in the form of a ghoulish apparition inhabiting her home, rattling the windows and tossing the family dog around the kitchen. Eventually, it materializes as a croaking two-year-old in the body of a beautiful, unbalanced waif (Thandie Newton). Demme's phantasmal visualization of this spirit is earnestly far-fetched; it may suggest to you Alice Hoffman crossed with The Exorcist. But it's also an effective metaphor: like her memories, this creature reminds Sethe of her previous life as a commodity, it terrorizes her in bursts of undeserved violence, and it forces her to become stronger.

Somewhere in this process, Demme dares to ask (as Morrison did) whether death was an inviting alternative to life under American slavery. It sounds like sanctimonious melodrama, but in the hands of Demme, one of America's most gifted and humane directors, the matter is handled with intelligence and genuine compassion. In flashback, when one slave kills another, the white masters do not consider the killer to be guilty of murder. Instead, the killer is guilty only of destroying property. When your entire race is considered no more valuable than livestock, what kind of toll does that exact on a person's psyche? That question is the film's true subject, and it's a topic that distended crowdpleasers like Amistad don't even bother to approach. By grasping that slavery had long-lasting implications far beyond abusive physical oppression, and by depicting those ramifications with such poetic force, Beloved becomes the first film to truly get the horror -- the harrowing human repugnance -- of slavery on the screen.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Beloved (1998) Charlotte O’Sullivan from Sight and Sound, March 1999

Toni Morrison's novel Beloved is an extraordinary feat, a version of the judgement of Solomon. In the Bible story we learn that a natural mother would do anything rather than see her child cut in two. Morrison's project is to show how Sethe, a former slave, when pushed to nightmarish extremes could fight for the right to commit the bloody act herself.

Unfortunately, the film of the book seems to have aroused similar passions. Its parentage is also contested: is this an Oprah Winfrey project (Winfrey, one of the film's co-producers, has been nursing this baby for over a decade), or a Jonathan Demme movie? As a result it doesn't quite fit together. It's impossible, of course, to know who exactly did what, but it feels as if Winfrey claimed as her own the parts concerning her character Sethe and Sethe's mother Baby Suggs (Beah Richards), while Demme adopted Beloved (Thandie Newton), the title character who may or may not be a reincarnation of the daughter Sethe slaughtered rather than let her become a slave. Either way, both Winfrey and Demme get a lot wrong. Winfrey, for instance, should never have cast herself in the lead. She is very good in some scenes, but she is never startling or overwhelming, her pleasant, sturdy face capable of projecting only one feeling at a time.

More importantly, she has altered the contexts surrounding Sethe and Baby Suggs. We never learn, for instance, how Beloved's gravestone gets her name carved on it (in the book, Sethe has to have sex with the stonecutter). It's as if such a detail might sully our notion of the noble Sethe. Nor do we see, or even hear about, the magnificent party which in the book alienates the community from the two women. Essentially Sethe and Baby Suggs' beneficence makes the townspeople fizzle with jealous rage. As a result, they don't warn the two women of sadistic slave-owner Schoolteacher's imminent arrival. A crucial passage in the book, the party demonstrates the limits of both the group and the individual. By leaving this out, a myth is kept alive: if you need it, the group will be there for you, while the big-hearted female can never give too much of herself. This is the logic of The Oprah Winfrey Show – too quick and easy by half.

This emphasis on the 'empowering', supportively spiritual female (Baby Suggs' sermons also feature heavily) unbalances the film. Lost are the male stories in the book, an irony given that when Beloved was first published, a number of critics accused Morrison of undermining black men. Denzel Washington allegedly turned down the role of Paul D on the grounds that there was too much bowing and scraping in the role. Such a view bristles with machismo, but in the film, somewhere along the line, black men have been pushed to the sidelines.

Danny Glover plays the part beautifully, but Paul D's individual story (about how he escapes from a chain gang in Georgia, just as he's decided to risk death rather than fellate a white guard) has disappeared. So too has Stamp Paid's explanation for how he got his name. On the written page, the words 'Stamp Paid' can almost explain themselves – heard, their significance can easily be missed. Beloved the film doesn't have room for the autonomous black male, and ironically this makes the triumphs of its black women less impressive. When Glover tells Winfrey, "you your best thing", the uncharitable thought surfaces: she doesn't need convincing of that.

Director Demme is just as guilty of recreating the film in his own image. For Beloved's birth scene, for example, we're plunged into the beautiful, surreal rankness of The Silence of the Lambs (not surprisingly, the two films share the same cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto). Silence's killer's basement hideout crawls with insects; Beloved, similarly, is surrounded by fluttering wings and her body covered inch-thick with ladybirds (not in the book). Later, she drapes herself against a tree and her serpentine awkwardness – a mixture of shamelessness and self-disgust – remind one of Demme's psychopath.

Much work has gone into Newton's Beloved, perhaps too much. Her voice – like something out of The Exorcist – at first works well (combined as it is with bouts of enchanting, wide-eyed sweetness) but soon becomes distracting. In the book, the hope that Beloved can be made happy keeps flaring into life; here, thanks to that monster-voice, it's impossible not to realise she's trouble. Furthermore, it makes her seem culturally rootless. In the book she gradually begins to talk like the rest of the family and develops a poetic, sophisticated point of view. In the film her charisma is entirely other-worldly and we never identify with her. She's just wonderful and scary to watch. This one-note performance, though, is all of a piece with Demme's gothic-horror vision. The wigs get more demented and determinedly unreal by the minute. He even gives her pearly, vampiric teeth. It's as if whenever Beloved is before the camera Demme is back producing colourful exploitation for Roger Corman.

Luckily, there are a number of scenes which seem to belong neither to Demme nor to Winfrey, but to embody the best of both. The family's trip to the carnival, for example, transforms a fairly insignificant part of the book into a bold, haunting set-piece. It looks just right, not a soft thing in sight (even the sky looks like a rough piece of metal). Best of all, potentially big points – such as the irony of ex-slaves being entertained by the sight of white "freaks" – are not rammed home. Chains and rusty prison bars are allowed to sink in slowly or not at all (for once, even the music is low key). It's the bright, grimly carnal colours that stay with you, colours which contrast with the shots of wildlife that crop up throughout the film, of animals roaming free and not a human in sight. Often such visions are beautiful, often they're ugly (such as two tortoises mating, wrinkled necks stretched to breaking point). In either case, the screen feels too full. We pull back, overwhelmed as if by an obscenity. What Fujimoto does so well is to produce a natural landscape that appears unnatural, or too natural. Beloved captures what Morrison has to put into words: that once we become accustomed to slavery, freedom becomes frightening and strange.

Implicating the audience in such thinking is the film's real achievement. Beloved may be as discombobulated as the flesh-and-blood ghost herself, but its various bits and pieces prove fascinating (contrary to advance warning, its three hours do go quickly).

The Haunting - Movies - Village Voice - Village Voice J. Hoberman

Boston Review (Alan A. Stone) review

Nashville Scene (Donna Bowman) review

Salon (Charles Taylor) review The Designated Martyr, October 16, 1998

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B+]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

Images (Crissa-Jean Chappell) review

CNN Showbiz (Paul Tatara) review

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Leslie Dunlap

Scott Renshaw review [9/10]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]

The Providence Journal review Michael Janusonis

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

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

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

Beloved : Review : Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

James Bowman review

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [3/5]

Harvey S. Karten review

Matt Prigge review

Kevin Patterson review [4/4]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review

Oprah gives emotional journey to 'Beloved' Jamie Allen from CNN, October 16, 1998

Entertainment Weekly review [C+] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

The Globe and Mail review [3.5/4] Liam Lacey

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Walter Addiego) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review No Peace from a Brutal Legacy, October 16, 1998

'Beloved' Tests Racial Themes At Box Office; Will This Winfrey Film Appeal to White Audiences? Bernard Weinraub from The New York Times, October 13, 1998

Despite Hope, 'Beloved' Generates Little Heat Among Moviegoers Bernard Weinraub from The New York Times, November 9, 1998

A Literary Diaspora Toasts One of Its Own Somini Sengupta from The New York Times, November 6, 2000

Beloved (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jaunted By Their Nightmares, by Margaret Atwood book review by Margaret Atwood from The New York Times, September 13, 1987

Toni Morrison: Beloved plenty of essays, articles, and web links

THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE

USA Germany (100 mi) 2002 ‘Scope

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

It's all very well Demme wanting to get back to his lighter-hearted roots after message movies like Philadelphia and Beloved, but why rehash the romantic thriller Charade - itself a thistledown affair - when you don't have leads to match Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn? Demme has long been one of America's most appealing film-makers, but Newton and Wahlberg, as a damsel in distress and a chivalrous hero offering help when she's suddenly widowed, suspected of her secretive husband's murder, and menaced by thugs, just don't cut it. It's unfair to blame the leads, however, when the dialogue's clunky and the perilous predicaments are so thick, fast and implausible that we care about neither the solution to the 'mystery', nor the interplay of attraction, trust, betrayal and suspicion that binds the met-cute couple together. But 'there'll always be Paris', or so Demme and his team appear to believe, swapping the suave gloss of Donen's original for a flipper, hipper style intended to echo the New Wave ethos of the early '60s. Tim Robbins alone (as an embassy bod) seems to know how silly it all is, but he and the generally proficient execution can't disguise the film's fundamental pointlessness.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

First the good news: Not only does The Truth About Charlie signal a return to form for Jonathan Demme after the clumsy Philadelphia and the solemn Beloved, but the whimsical iconoclast may have just made the best Hollywood film of the year. Now the bad: This remarkable achievement will likely go unnoticed by anyone unfamiliar with Demme's early work, let alone anyone expecting another Silence of the Lambs. The Truth About Charlie might be the greatest valentine to the cinema since Godard's A Woman is a Woman, not because it's ripe with delicious cameos by Nouvelle Vague figures (Agnes Varda, Anna Karina) but because its aesthetic gumption is completely free of irony and pretense. The film also does justice to its equally delightful source material (Stanley Donen's 1963 classic Charade) while standing apart on its own modernist terms. With The Truth About Charlie, Demme creates a lark so graceful and fun to watch it makes Punch-Drunk Love's many flaws that much more obvious. Thandie Newton stars as Regina Lampert, a young woman thrust into a web of intrigue and thorny romance when her husband is murdered aboard a train. Newton's girlish yet sexy charms make her a perfect candidate for the role originated by Audrey Hepburn almost 40 years ago. As the American in Paris who comes to Regina's aide, Mark Wahlberg has nothing on Newton (let alone Cary Grant) yet Demme does wonders evoking their sizzling chemistry as a byproduct of the prickly situations they get themselves into. Not since Married to the Mob has Demme directed anything so deliriously absurd. And not since Citizen's Band or even Something Wild have any of his films been so effortlessly and spontaneously constructed. Demme's direction is a bit uppity yet the film's rhythmic marriage of sound and image is transcendent, at once bringing to mind the fervor of Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run and the devastating sexual energy of Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love. Thanks in part to Rachel Portman's gorgeous score and a collection of killer tunes both old and new, The Truth About Charlie feels not unlike a moving postcard sent by a group of friends having the most incredible European adventure of their lives.

CultureCartel.com (Keith Uhlich) review [5/5]

Here's the one this year that got away.

Jonathan Demme's The Truth About Charlie is ostensibly a remake of the 1963 Stanley Donen comedy/thriller Charade, and that alone practically guaranteed the film's financial failure. Charade is an example, after all, of the perfect Hollywood film: attractive stars (Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn), ingenious script (by Peter Stone), and memorable setting and atmosphere (using both real and make-believe Paris locations) all combined for an entertainment that fires on all cylinders. If that sounds like too mechanistic a metaphor, then perhaps you've caught onto what we might call the weakness of Charade—it works so perfectly that the pleasures it gives can feel like perfectly placed manipulations, cogs in the wheel of the Hollywood machine. No matter—machines can be beautiful too (and Charade is certainly one of those perfect mechanoids), but it presents a daunting challenge to the crazy bastard who wants to try his hand at revisiting the material. The obvious question: Why remake perfection?

Jonathan Demme, our country's resident crazy bastard moviemaker (I mean this as a sign of affection, Jon), provides an answer; the results, to my mind, are phenomenal. Reveling in his true colors as a humanist cinephile, Demme takes the template of Charade's plot (widowed female harassed by several people who are after her dead husband's fortune) and runs with it through present-day Paris. The whitewashed settings of Donen's film give way to Demme's multicultural playground; all races and creeds make their way in front of Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto's always inquisitive hand-held camera. A street corner passerby may become integral to the story, or he might just be an ephemeral fancy that the camera finds interesting enough to linger on for a moment. One such latter instance yields cinephilic dividends: French New Wave director Agnes Varda unloading umbrellas of Cherbourg in a Paris back alley. If you get the jest, this is your kind of movie.

Demme's is a Paris far removed from the Hollywood factory. Aside from being merely a setting, the city is also a participating character. Quite comically, Demme's Paris often intrudes on Charlie's thriller plot. The monetary reward that was so important to the characters in Charade is subsumed here in the hustle and bustle of the locale. Demme has always seemed an artist more interested in the work itself as opposed to its potential for monetary gain, and his refutation of Hollywood-style greed is on full display in Charlie's light-hearted tone. Most welcome, too, is Demme's benevolent politics. A climactic, guns-drawn showdown becomes a thought-provoking pacifist statement, something akin to Hollywood cliché as rethought by Jean-Luc Godard. In our country's present state of knee-jerk ethnocentrism Demme's "lightweight entertainment," as some have labeled it, has more profound things to say than most politicos and their speechwriters could muster in a years-long campaign.

But back to movie things. The inevitable comparisons between the original Charade's and Charlie's casts make up the crux of the critical naysayer arguments. Thandie Newton as the widowed Regina Lambert has enough of Audrey Hepburn's joie de vivre to get off easy in the critical bashings, but poor Mark Wahlberg as man-of-many-faces Joshua Peters can't possibly live up to the daunting Cary Grant persona. And the truth is, of course, that these two actors are nowhere near Grant and Hepburn's stature. But to that unavoidable fact I posit this question: So what?

The Grant and Hepburn personas couldn't exist nowadays because, to quote an oft-used cliché, "times have changed." And yet there's a level of nostalgia built into a cinephile's life. Movies of our youth often entrance us in the heady rush of adolescent passion that is both a blessing and a curse. Over time we develop stronger critical faculties; we define our specific tastes and make more authoritative choices. Thing is, our honed distinction can often lead to a fuddy-duddy mindset in which we reject what's new because the old guard supposedly did it better. Much harder is it to be open to the ever-changing tide of artistic styles and ideas. Certainly we should never reject the past (it has way too much to teach us), but nor should we lament its passing into the context of history. So where does that leave us?

In Charlie's case it leaves us with Wahlberg and Newton, and it is a testament to Demme's talent that he doesn't attempt to make them into Grant and Hepburn. Rather, Demme uses their physicality and individual personas as a contrast to the Hollywood kind of love Grant and Hepburn embodied. Aside from the film's nonchalant treatment of interracial love, Demme represents this inversion literally by reversing the male lead's name: Grant's Peter Joshua becomes Wahlberg's Joshua Peters. Thus is the character imbued with several levels of contradictions. Wahlberg's brutish, muscular body and off-kilter baby face are at odds with his attempts to be the dashing playboy. An early sequence has him wearing a beret that seems ridiculously out of place. The audience always laughs, and not comfortably so. Yet, like a bullied nerd who's grown a set of cajones, neither Demme nor Wahlberg apologize for the odd dress. They are not uncomfortable, we are. The challenge to the audience comes not from the beret itself, but from the decision that it be worn throughout the movie, perhaps as a jolting reminder of the Peters character's shifting loyalties.

Over the whole of the story Wahlberg changes wardrobes and identities numerous times and only at the climax, sitting alone in a nondescript office in a half-size-too-small business suit (another Demme inversion, perhaps of David Byrne's "big suit" in the director's concert film Stop Making Sense), do we see the character for the sad cog in the bureaucratic wheel that he is. It's a heartbreaking image, a reduction of traditional Hollywood ideas of masculinity to very human proportions. And so it remains for the city of Paris to finally take pity on Wahlberg's character providing, in its own way, the film's needed happy ending.

Newton, a wondrous and glowing dark-skinned beauty, perfectly offsets Wahlberg's pretty white boy. Demme makes full use of his signature shot—the camera staring directly into a character's face as if delving into their souls—on Newton's visage, achieving awe-inspiring results. The power of being young and in love in Paris is reflected two-fold in Newton's eyes. Stuck alone in her ransacked apartment in the early going, she readily accepts Wahlberg's implicit invite for a night on the town. "I need to get out of here," she exhales. Her flirty conversation with Wahlberg in the following scene, observed in reverent silence by a smiling, mustachioed cab driver, ends with an indelible punchline: The characters raise two unseen wine glasses from below frame into a gentle clink. Rhetorical and hyperbolic question: Was there ever a more romantic image in the history of cinema?

Actually, Charlie is bubbling to the brim with romantic images. In addition to the central love story, Demme intends Charlie as a letter of l'amour to the French New Wave filmmakers (Francois Truffaut's gravestone is lovingly caressed by the camera over the end credits) who were making their mark around the same time the original Charade was in production. Imagine Charade as a collaborative effort between Truffaut and Godard, and you'll have an idea of what to expect with Charlie. Demme spices up his film with cameos from New Wave acting icons like Anna Karina, Magali Noel, and Charles Aznavour (who provides several out-of-nowhere and enchanting music interludes). These representatives of cinema's past lovingly guide the new guard through the filmic plot machinations they all know so well. Wandering like ghosts through Demme's vision of Paris, they haunt this dreamscape as both reminders and signposts, pointing the way into a joyous future where all eras of art can co-exist in transcendent purity.

Between Demme's Charlie and Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale it seems that Paris, the city of l'amour, is that transcendent, pure place where two of our best American filmmakers have found the elusive something that results in cinematic greatness. Like De Palma's film, Demme's Charlie is a spiritual experience of a kind, cognizant of its own historical muses while confidently existing in its own time and place, and all the while possessing the power to inspire those viewers willing to look closer. The truth about Charlie is that there's so much more here than you've been led to believe.

New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [4/10]

Images (Gary Johnson) review

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Slate (David Edelstein) review

The Film Journal (Peter Tonguette) review

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

Reel.com review [2.5/4] Tor Thorsen

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Terri Sutton

CultureCartel.com (Becka Lucas) review [1.5/5]

filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [1.5/5]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C] also reviewing 8 WOMEN

The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Gary Mairs

Harvey S. Karten review [2.5/4]

Movie-Vault.com (Carl Langley) review

Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford

DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser) dvd review [2/5]

Newsweek (David Ansen) review

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

hybridmagazine.com review Michelle Fajkus

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2/4]

Entertainment Weekly review [C] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Guardian/Observer review

The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

San Francisco Chronicle (Jonathan Curiel) review

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review

THE AGRONOMIST

USA (90 mi) 2003

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Jean Dominique has been renowned for more than 30 years in Haiti for his fearless, inspirational broadcasts on his station Radio Haiti Inter. During the Duvalier dictatorships, he faced massive, indeed murderous opposition. Dominique is a charismatic protagonist, his personal history colourful not only for his long, evidently satisfying career, his family and his similarly courageous and committed wife Michèle Montas, but for how it intersects with and influences the history of Haiti itself. After a spell in Paris enjoying the nouvelle vague, he returned home to direct films of his own and open a cinema club, inspiring other would-be local auteurs. By broadcasting international news, he heightened awareness among many Haitians of developments in the world outside. In more modest and effective form here than he has been in his recent feature films, Demme treats all this in lively but lucid fashion, acknowledging that Haitian history was shaped in no small way by his own country's leaders and agencies. Chastening, illuminating and rightly affectionate.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

You still can see the bullet holes on the facade of Radio Haiti. Perhaps they were left there as a reminder of the turbulent road to democracy in Haiti, a road that has since taken another detour. Regardless, they are an appropriate memorial to Jean Dominique, the radio broadcaster and human rights activist who defied the despots and military juntas that have plagued Haiti for decades before he was gunned down in 2000.

Dominique was not a journalist by training or trade, but (as the title tells us) an agronomist, without land to cultivate. Jailed for his participation in a land-reform campaign in the late 1950s, he became inspired by the power of cinema while visiting Paris and returned to found Haiti's first cinema club (it was closed in 1965 by "Papa Doc" Duvalier).

Then he bought Radio Haiti in 1965 and turned what previously was simply an entertainment medium into a forum for national and international news in Kreyol, "the language of the people." "A risky business," smiles Dominique in one of the many archival interviews that give him voice in the documentary, for the Duvalier regimes liked to control the flow of information in Haiti.

More than simply a portrait of one man who defied dictatorships and championed grass-roots movements at the risk of his own life, Jonathan Demme's documentary is the story of Haiti's political and social life in the past half-century. Demme reveals Dominique's passion, commitment and courage through a wealth of interviews from the past 20 years, news footage and clips from his radio broadcasts.

What Dominique shows us, however, is the tyranny and poverty that Haiti has endured and America's shameful complicity in Haiti's history. When the despot "Baby Doc" Duvalier flees Haiti in 1986, we are reminded that he is carried to safety on an American plane.

Yet "The Agronomist" is no anti-American screed, but a rousing celebration of a genuine people's hero and a timely reminder that a free press is the greatest weapon in the arsenal of democracy and freedom.

Slant Magazine review Keith Uhlich

A perfect match of interviewer and subject, The Agronomist is director Jonathan Demme's informative and emotional video testimonial to the Haitian radio personality Jean Dominique. Demme, long fascinated with Haitian culture, history, and politics, began videotaping Dominique in 1993 during one of the outspoken activist's self-imposed exiles—a result of Haiti's continual and volatile political upheavals. The Agronomist portrays the country's tensions as an ongoing fatalistic tragedy, cyclical to the point of discouragement. Dominique and his companion Michèle Montas provide an optimistic offset through their involvement in Radio Haiti, which aims to inform the country's lower classes and give rise to a political voice counter to the Haitian elite. Framed in one of Demme's signature direct-eyeline compositions, Dominique's skeletal physique belies his powerful voice and gesticulations. Taking a page from François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Demme freeze-frames his subject during a particularly passionate rant, leaving Dominique goggle-eyed in a way that is uniquely flattering and ingratiating—his rhetoric is hypnotic even in silent close-up. This easy identification helps to carry one over The Agronomist's initial disjointedness. Demme, rightfully so, attempts to encapsulate Haitian history from the slave revolt of 1803 onwards, but the amount of on-screen text overwhelms at times, taking away from the director's expressive use of original and stock video footage. Yet this myriad amount of information is finally appropriate, as it gives us an emotional sense of Dominique's frustration and passion regarding the country he loves. An avowed cinephile, Dominique references Alain Resnais's seminal Night and Fog as the film that turned him on to the political power of the arts, feeding his anger toward the then-in-power Duvalier regime. That great documentary arose out of a need to remember a heinous historical time, so it's perhaps sadly appropriate that The Agronomist never came together as a movie until a similarly tragic event. Jean Dominique was assassinated in April 2000 outside Radio Haiti and it is around this climactic event that Demme's picture finds its poetic soul. The intertitles cease and Demme lets the images of Dominique's funeral play unburdened by voice-over or other easy-way-out filmic concessions. In a particularly bold single-take sequence, Demme lingers on Dominique's ashes being poured into a river before numerous onlookers. The resulting scene reveals profound documentary truths about the weight of a human life that were so recently muddled by the pseudo-mystical metaphors of 21 Grams. The central metaphor of The Agronomist—that Dominique is a cultivator of the earth with no true land to call his own—is itself lovingly disproved by the movie's final sequence. Ever the humanist, Demme uses the political power of cinema to resurrect Dominique and re-contextualize one of his happiest moments. As if in answer to Haiti's continuing cycle of violence, Demme proposes through Dominique a new cycle of hope.

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review

Film Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw and Bill Chambers

indieWIRE review Peter Brunette

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review

eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [5/5]

filmcritic.com (David Thomas) review [4/5]

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

DVD Verdict (Adam Arseneau) dvd review

MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant) dvd review [8/10]

James Bowman review

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [3/4]

Reel.com dvd review [4/4] Tim Knight

DVD Talk (Preston Jones) dvd review [3/5]

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

hybridmagazine.com review Cole Sowell

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review also seen here: SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3.5/4]

eFilmCritic.com review [3/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine

Boxoffice Magazine review Susan Green

Variety.com [Robert Koehler]

Guardian/Observer

The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

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

San Francisco Chronicle [Jonathan Curiel]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

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

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

USA (129 mi) 2004

Time Out London review Geoff Andrew

Major Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) suffers nightmares, related somehow to his experiences in Kuwait in 1991. But only when he’s approached by Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright) does he realise he’s not alone in his psychic turmoil, and begin to suspect that there’s more than meets the eye to the much-vaunted heroic acts allegedly performed by Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) when they were ambushed in the desert: much vaunted because Shaw, with not a little ‘encouragement’ and ‘help’ from his fiercely ambitious mother, Senator Ellie Shaw (Meryl Streep), is running as vice-presidential candidate in the upcoming elections. Marco’s dreams don’t disappear, but Melvin does – at least until he’s found drowned in the Potomac. Time for Marco to talk turkey with Shaw…

Given the classic status of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 movie, Jonathan Demme, his cast and writers Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris were risking ridicule in taking on another version of Richard Condon’s novel. Happily, this extremely timely entertainment matches, even perhaps surpasses its predecessor. Suspense and sly humour are again in abundance, as is political relevance. Here is an America where truth, democracy and proper ethical considerations are imperilled not by Cold War enemies but by unbridled late capitalism itself; dynastic ambition, hollow patriotism, meaningless slogans, the fuelling of fear and paranoia, media complicity and puppet figureheads under the influence of shady, self-serving global conglomerates are the order of the day. Nothing surprising about that, really, except that this is a Hollywood genre movie, and it’s terrific, for once, to see a sharp, slick, adult, darkly comic thriller whose more outlandish aspects – brainwashing by implant, say – succeed so well as metaphors for contemporary reality. The performances (especially that of Streep) are spot-on, the script extraordinarily up-to-date, and Demme’s direction – particularly the creation of unease through the subtle use of sound and odd direct-to-camera dialogue – a real return to form after his last film. Worryingly superior stuff.

Turner Classic Movies review Tom Cappello

I keep having this very strange recurring dream. At first it seems very pleasant as I sit with these elderly women at a quaint garden party, but suddenly it turns monstrous. Strips of classic films hang from trim bins all around me, and a man begins to mercilessly chop them to pieces with a guillotine blade. He has been ordered to do so by one of these genteel old ladies, and it is as if he has no control of his actions. Slicing and dicing at will with sprocket holes spewing everywhere. Why is he bent on destroying these films?

Based on message boards, websites, and Angela Lansbury quotes online, it seems people have been having this same dream. Remaking classic films for modern audiences feels like a nightmarish act. "I'm so unhappy," Lansbury said. "I'm so sorry they had to mess with something that was so perfect." Film buffs are irate. There is no reason to mess with perfection and try to improve upon the original film version of The Manchurian Candidate. Some cinephiles are asking for the heads of Jonathan Demme, Scott Rudin, and Tina Sinatra on a silver platter for committing such a blasphemous cinematic act.

Yet most of the reviews say that the new movie works on its own right and should not be compared to the original. It's more of a straightforward thriller, whereas the original was an intense psychological melodrama with elements of black comedy. Tina Sinatra released the rights to the film for a remake because she says, "(my father) believed, as we do, that premises can be brought into the future."

Jonathan Demme's take on The Manchurian Candidate really works on a new level by bringing the paranoid internal conflict of the Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) character to the forefront and making it the foundation on which the entire film is built. Jonathan Demme creates a claustrophobic world where parental pressure, societal expectations of normalcy, media bombardment, corporate puppetmasters, and bad science impact the characters. Even people in the film who do not have brain implants inside them seem to show subtle signs of brainwashing. Take for instance the opening scene at the Boy Scout meeting where everyone says all the right things and asks all the right questions of Bennett Marco, a man who served his country in Desert Storm. Or look at the Democratic Convention and celebration party where revelers are frothing at the mouth like Pavlovian dogs willing to believe everything they see. It is all staged much like current TV -- an invasive presence that runs throughout the film. Even the visual style supports this internal paranoia with a dearth of tight close-ups and actors talking directly into the camera. Director of Photography Tak Fujimoto explains, "(Jonathan Demme) wanted to give audiences a visual connection between Melvin's room and Marco's mind. In that way, the cinematography is almost documentary-like, with the camera sort of poking around, probing to find something in the center of the frame that's not there."

On an emotional level, The Manchurian Candidate succeeds, but the film fails when it gets caught up in typical thriller trappings. All good thrillers have mad scientists, and there is no lack of them in this one. My personal favorite is the crazy monkey doctor, an Albanian refugee (played by German actor Bruno Ganz) that has some unexplained relationship to Bennett Marco, who knows everything about implanted chips in people and delivers shock therapy as needed. Unfortunately, the emotional tautness of the film goes slack when it focuses on plot rather than the characters' inner turmoil. All of this creates severe credibility problems when men being tracked by the FBI can walk into a political rally, be detected on camera, be followed the ENTIRE movie around every corner of New York City, and then be left alone to commit an assassination. The original version of Candidate works much better on this level, building to a much more disturbing climax.

To say that Jonathan Demme's 2004 version of The Manchurian Candidate lacks merit, however, would be unjust. It's just frustrating to see a potentially great and disturbing political satire sacrificing compelling character development in favor of convoluted plot twists.

Slant Magazine review Keith Uhlich

The thematic heart of Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate is revealed through opposing lines of dialogue spoken repeatedly by former Army platoon members Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) and Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber): respectively, "I have dreams"/"I don't have dreams." Consider the movie surrounding this verbal rhyme as a dream in itself, color-coated (and coded) as a red, white, and blue philosophical inquiry into a country where true progress is blocked by a variety of dichotomous oppositions (Black/White; Republican/Democrat; Civilian/Politician.) "I ain't no senator's son!" sings Wyclef Jean, covering Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" over the film's opening credits. The actors' names wave like defiant American flags in the breeze and Demme disorients us by fading into a cramped interior space where a U.S. military squadron (led by Marco and Shaw) laughs and plays cards. This is a visual template for what follows.

Demme often begins a scene in tight, identifying individual faces and personalities in one of his trademark direct-eyeline close-ups before moving outward and sketching in the space they inhabit. The squadron's card game is an obvious referent to the John Frankenheimer Manchurian Candidate, except here it is what it is—merely a game, not a means to manipulation (and note that the game played is not the original film's isolationist solitaire). Moving outwards, Demme places the squadron within a blood-red digital rendering of the Kuwaiti oil fields, 1991. Questioning our war-torn past (a history the director constantly represents "like a movie") Demme boldly suggests that we all have sanguine hands, a crimson-colored culpability that we must come to terms with at the risk of our own sanity.

The past is constantly being interrupted in The Manchurian Candidate, intruded on by a more pressing and paranoia-stricken present. The film's opening flashback, which culminates in an ambush on Marco and Shaw's platoon, abruptly flashes-forward on an aural disturbance: a question to Marco from a Boy Scout. Sound is the key interloper in this Manchurian Candidate. The steady hum of information, often emanating from crystal-clear, too-lifelike television images, effectively confuses the reality of every situation and action, inducing the mindful among us into a deceptive, yet comforting, white-noise trance (somewhere, Marshall McLuhan cackles.) A trance of sorts is what preys on Raymond Prentiss Shaw, a literal prisoner to his own name which, when spoken in a clear, specific order—last name, first name + last name, first name + middle name + last name—makes him an oblivious slave to corporate wills (here the shadowy conglomerate Manchurian Global.) This diabolic control switch provides a kind of masochistic amusement to Raymond's mother, Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep), who uses it to further her own sinister, semi-incestuous agenda, a plot that, at one point, Raymond unconsciously acknowledges in pun: "I'm a Prentiss. I'm not a Shaw."

Identity is the solitaire-like trigger of Demme's Manchurian Candidate, a frightening update to Frankenheimer's war-as-game scenario—except now the battle is for our very souls. Witness the film's brilliant murder sequence where Raymond unwittingly drowns two characters beloved to him. Dressed to the nines in suit and tie, Raymond partially submerges his body as he approaches the first victim, a forced, half-hearted baptism that eradicates free will from the spiritual equation. Water imagery recurs throughout the film, suggesting the fluidity of memory and acting as cosmic balance to the tempestuous goings-on (the film's ultimate goal is to see the sea.) What Raymond sees in this sequence is a torturous reflection: a modern-day Narcissus recognizes himself as a morally devoid shell of a man, his devastating mirror image shot back like a bullet through a lover's dead gaze. The scene's personalization of both killer and victims (a consistent Demme trope) only deepens the film's sense of tragedy and, breathless from this portrayal of man's mechanistic cruelty, we may be prompted to ask what lies beyond the pitiless mortal coil.

Keeping with his obsessions, Demme answers by making America a prime supporting character, juxtaposing its complexities against Marco and Shaw's individual tragedies and their movie-long philosophical discourse. A sequence where Marco's confidant Rosie (Kimberly Elise) disrupts an elementary school play about the Founding Fathers is a particular kind of triumph, a throwaway transition scene that still manages to contrast an idealized, semi-whitewashed past (as performed by a multicultural company) with the harsh realities of our seething, obscured history of sexism and racism. It's to Demme's credit that his trenchant social criticism is counterbalanced by an effusive love for his country; even with their scathing critiques his films acknowledge and strive for an image of America at its best, and the director rightly believes in a necessary struggle towards that goal's achievement. To this end the film's climax hinges on just such a struggle—Marco and Shaw's verbal resolution of their "dreams" argument is only the first, tentative step. Now mindfully connected, their final solution centers on a silent exchange through the sight of a gun, a transcendent moment of right-thinking. Rewriting their own history in righteous blood, Marco and Shaw ironically inform the film's ominous slogan "Secure Tomorrow Today," giving this facile advertiser's evocation of dreams a suddenly profound and lasting meaning.

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Manchurian Candidate (2004) Stephen Dalton from Sight and Sound, December 2004

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Slate (David Edelstein) review

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

stylusmagazine.com (Jay Millikan) review

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

The Manchurian Candidate Henry Sheehan

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Terri Sutton

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3/5]

Movie-Vault.com (Julian Boyance) review

World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh

In These Times [Michael Atkinson]

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review

Reel.com review [4/4] Sarah Chauncey

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

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/5]

New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser) dvd review [3/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

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

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

eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [2/5]

James Bowman review

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

The New Yorker (David Denby) review

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere, which also includes: Our review of the 1962 version

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [3/4]

eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [4/5]

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

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib

Jerry Saravia review [2.5/4]

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

The Providence Journal (Michael Janusonis) review [2.5/5]

DVD Verdict (Steve Evans) dvd review

Reel.com dvd review [3/4] James Plath

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [3/5]

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [D]

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]

The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review

Alternative Film Guide Review Andre Soares

DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson

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

DVD Talk (Todd Douglass Jr.) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [2/4]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

AboutFilm.com (Frances Nicole Rogers) review [D]

Boxoffice Magazine review Mark Keizer

hybridmagazine.com review Edward Rholes

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

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Guardian/Observer

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr

Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review

Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD B+ 90

USA (103 mi) 2006

An intimate, completely unpretentious, what feels like spiritual tribute, but is in fact more a living testament, the essence of Neil Young in concert, featuring a small band along with occasional contributions from Memphis horns, a small orchestra and a local college gospel choir, filmed over two days at the legendary Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, a small, intimate setting in what was once a tabernacle church, using an old beat up guitar that once belonged to Hank Williams, who last performed on that very same stage with the Grand Old Opry about 50 or so years earlier. Supported by a group of musicians that he preferred to call his “friends,” including his wife Pegi and the irrepressible Emmylou Harris singing background vocals, the entire performance was toned down and spare, without spectacle, nothing controversial, no interviews with family and friends, no images of overzealous fans, simply moving images of performers on stage doing what they love to do. Demme’s 1984 film STOP MAKING SENSE created an energetic synthesis of music and imagery, filled with the off-kilter, poetic interpretations of Talking Heads who seemed a little out of the mainstream, capturing what felt like a spontaneous artistic vision that still stands alone as a concert film. A generation ago, Young himself made a concert film in 1978 RUST NEVER SLEEPS, featuring the incendiary song “Powderfinger.” This film finds him at a different stage in his life, almost as if his life is flashing before his eyes and he is revisiting all the places he has been. Successfully recovering from a recent brain aneurysm operation, this may indeed have been the inspiration behind the making of this film.

Shot with small Super 16 mm cameras, using massive, sliding backdrops painted by Michael Zansky depicting the spare landscapes of a Canadian prairie life from Young’s childhood, adding an extra dimension where each song can be a painting within a painting, capturing close ups and intimate glances between performers who move around after each song, sometimes featuring a glimpse of musicians we rarely get to see on stage, even a roadie watching in the wings, Young sounds so familiar to most of us, his voice so heartfelt and tender, his musical style unchanged since his early years performing with Crazy Horse. With this film, he cements his legend as someone who persevered through half a century, from his early rebellious years to singing on the same stage as the Grand Old Opry, never appearing more mainstream folksy than he does here. Mixing old songs with new, he could just as easily be doing a musical version of Garrison Keillor from the radio show “Prairie Home Companion,” as each song represents a period in his life when he was thinking of someone, reminding us that these people reflect the colors of his life, filled with thoughts of death, family, and friendship, some friends lost along the way, resummoning the places where he spent his time and the people who meant something to him, including his dog, King, an old man Lou who was living on the farm he purchased in Canada, and, of course, his recently deceased father. The film is dedicated “To Daddy.” This is some kind of Father’s Day gift, breaking no new ground artistically, but instead providing a gentle, beautifully understated, humanely elegant ode to life and love, personified by the closing song, “The Old Laughing Lady,” sung with just a man and a guitar to an empty unlit house, a sublime image of craft and musicianship.

Time Out London (Trevor Johnston) review

There are other Neil Young concert films, of course, most notably 1979’s rudimentary but valuable ‘Rust Never Sleeps’ and Jim Jarmusch’s 1997 grungefest ‘Year of the Horse’, but this one is complementary, capturing the long-running rocker at a very particular moment. Diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening brain aneurysm last spring, he recorded the ‘Prairie Moon’ album in a matter of days in Nashville just before surgery – and, after recovery, asked Jonathan Demme to preserve a subsequent live showcase in the C&W music capital. So, the Young we see here is not the raw feedback merchant of the Crazy Horse tours, but a composed veteran reflecting on mortality and core values in a mellow, lightly countrified vein as his band of top musos shuffle along in cruise control.

All of which may sound truly soporific to the unconverted, but even those who haven’t followed Young’s every recent move could well find his performance here surprisingly captivating. Delivered in front of painted backdrops enshrining the prairie, log cabin and church, the new-ish material – a direct testament to the important things in life – proves straightforward, heartfelt and rather touching, while the show’s back catalogue selections affirm Young the songwriter’s impressive legacy. Demme’s low-key, attuned direction keeps the attention on the stage, where the star’s lined features betray almost four decades in the business, yet his glowing enthusiasm attests to the rejuvenating quality of gigs like this. An assured filmed record then, and Young’s affirmation of the centrality of music in his own personal and creative longevity proves authentically infectious, moving even. The old boy’s not ready to burn out or fade away just yet.

Exclaim! review Allan Tong

A year ago, Canada’s most renowned singer-songwriter survived a brain aneurysm and went on to record an album about family, home and remembrance. On the accompanying tour for Prairie Wind, Neil Young played two nights in Nashville, where he invited along family and friends, including country queen Emmylou Harris, Stax hero Wayne Jackson, a choir, his wife and good ole band mates like Ben Keith.

Scattered with personal remembrances and spoken tributes, Heart of Gold is dedicated to “daddy,” respected Toronto writer Scott Young, who recently passed away. Jonathan Demme, who filmed the Sleeps With Angels sessions, captures Young in a humble and reflective mood.

In the first half of the film, Young and his band perform Prairie Wind before backdrops of a golden field and house, which nicely complement the cinematography of Ellen Kuras. Demme’s filming and editing are restrained — no tracking shoots or quick cutaways. Instead, the performances simply unfold. One touching moment is the duet between Young (playing Hank Williams’ acoustic guitar) and the ever-luminous Harris on the deeply symbolic “This Old Guitar.”

The full band kicks loose in the film’s second half. Young offers tributes to his old ranch hand (“Old Man”), his dog (“Old King”), folk pioneers Ian & Sylvia (“Four Strong Winds”) and, poignantly, old flame Nicolette Larson, who had a hit with “Comes A Time.”

Well-crafted and tasteful, Heart of Gold remains a conventional concert film, offering token interviews, while completely ignoring the audience. At times, Young looks like he’s playing in a vacuum. True, Young does speak through his songs and intros, which are largely charming and candid, but sometimes they beg for deeper context.

That said, following the uneven Year of the Horse and the debacle known as Greendale, Heart of Gold restores much cinematic prestige for Young. Heart of Gold may not offer any revelations, but it does present filmgoers with an artist reflecting on his mortality with dignity and grace.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The path from Stop Making Sense to Storefront Hitchcock and now Neil Young: Heart of Gold marks not just a director's trajectory but the progression of life. Each is a luminous work, celebratory of music, art and human potential, all recordings of artists at work yet of a piece with the vision of Jonathan Demme, possibly American cinema's most radiant living humanist. Life and its wondrous flowerings, bright and dark, are Demme's ongoing themes, although the mortality hanging pervasively over the director's lovely film of Young's August 2005 concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville must come from its subject. The singer, now 60, had been diagnosed with a brain aneurism, and his album "Prairie Wind" is crammed with references to the ephemerality of existence, ticking clocks and time lived, "It's only a dream/Just a memory fading away." Young looks wizened in the back of his taxi in the video prologue; a perfectly full moon blesses the event from the sky, and the curtains are parted for Demme's camera to track towards the stage and find Young, burly, sideburned, cowboy hat and wrinkled gray suit, standing tall in front of a big backdrop scrim. "If you follow every dream/You might get lost" goes the song, but to dream is to live, and the man who looked like a serial killer in Year of the Horse is here grizzled yet rubicund, haunted yet tranquil, sorta like Andy Devine in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, another sublime valedictory.

The Stetson is tipped to father ("I'm trying to remember what my daddy said"), daughter ("You might say I'm here for you"), spiritual forefather Hank Williams ("This old guitar ain't mine to keep"), and pooch ("That old King was a friend of mine"), but Twilight Young is scarcely cuddly. This is the same artist, after all, who made Greendale last year, and whose "The Needle and the Damage Done" is one of the most chilling drug laments on record; Demme, himself 62 and responsible for Melvin and Howard and The Silence of the Lambs (and, above all, the mixture of the extremes in Something Wild), stages the "Harvest Moon" staple as a single setup, the camera tracking forward evocatively, as it did backwards at the close of "I Am a Child," into a needle's eye of a spotlight, Young's face obscured by the hat, only words and emotions in the darkness. The gelid Emmylou Harris, Pegi Young, Ben Keith, Spooner Oldham, Rick Rosas, Kart T. Himmel and the Fisk University Jubilee Singers share the stage, but the main focus remains on the Southern Man, literally the "Old Man" now -- Young's rendition of that trademark hit acknowledges the irony, not with bitterness but acceptance of the passage of time and, possibly, even death, as the inside of the Ryman shifts from mock-prairie to stained-glass church. A communal bow to the audience in the shadows, then one final performance, "The Old Laughing Lady," with Young with glasses and no hat, picking his guitar to an empty house as the credits scroll. Keith Uhlich, characteristically alert and soulful, identified it at Slant as Heaven; I see it as Earth, transformed by the serenity of age.

Village Voice (Tom Charity) review

"Old man, take a look at my life/I'm a lot like you were . . . " The young hippie who wrote those lines turned 60 last November. Few popular singers have been as mindful of their legacy as Neil Young, nor as indifferent to the expectations of fans, critics, or record labels. In the 1980s Geffen famously sued him for producing records "unrepresentative" of himself, but representing himself is what Neil Young is all about. "Take a look at my life" might be his mantra.

Endlessly prolific and intermittently prodigious, he has released four original albums, a live disc, an independent film, and a greatest-hits collection since the turn of the millennium. Diagnosed with a potentially fatal brain aneurysm last spring, shortly after the death of his father, Young flew down to Nashville and wrote and recorded the songs for Prairie Wind in the four days before his surgery. Post-op, he picked up the phone. "I'm taking a year off and I'd like to make a movie," he instructed Jonathan Demme. ("That's the kind of vacation I like to take too," Demme claimed at Sundance.)

Recorded at the first public performances of Prairie Wind, August 18 and 19 at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium (erstwhile home of the Grand Ole Opry), Neil Young: Heart of Gold recaps and effectively mythologizes this nugget of modern folklore in brief interviews with Young and a band of old reliables, including Spooner Oldham, Grant Boatwright, and Ben Keith.

Plaintive and valedictory, Prairie Wind unfolds as a testament: Almost all the songs default to the first-person singular, and judging by Young's simple, straightforward intros, he means them to be understood as such. "Here for You" is dedicated to a daughter who has left home. "Far From Home" is about the right resting place, and "This Old Guitar" is a tribute to the instrument he "inherited" from Hank Williams and will pass on in turn one of these days. Mortality and remembrance are abiding themes; abiding is another.

Training eight Super-16 cameras and a Steadicam on the show—and none on the audience—Demme reflects the simplicity of the songs' acoustic country arrangements in a languorous lexicon of slow dissolves and close-ups. DP Ellen Kuras gets her shots (Young and Emmylou Harris spotlit centerstage, the auditorium a sea of shadow before them), but the stitching is befittingly ragged.

Canvas backdrops, spartan but expansive, depict the interior of a log cabin fit for giants, a wide-open prairie, or the elongated stained-glass windows of a church. It's the heartland writ large, and the 49th Parallel might as well not exist. Young himself cuts a big, brooding figure in a gray suit, a Stetson crammed low over his eyes. In a flamboyantly mundane bit of staging, guitar tech Larry Cragg picks up a broom and sweeps accompaniment to "Harvest Moon," one of the evocative back-catalog selections from the film's second half.

It's a sentimental show, sure, but Young's pantheistic hymns to family, friendship, and "the time we share together" are nothing if not heartfelt. Turns out it's better to fade away after all. And as the movie's title acknowledges, old Young is not done yet. The opening lines of "Heart of Gold" promise more to come: "I want to live/I want to give."

Slant Magazine review Keith Uhlich

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

CBC.ca Arts (Stephen Cole) review

American Cinematographer: Heart and Soul John Pavlus from American Cinematographer, March 2006

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

DVD Verdict (Russell Engebretson) dvd review

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

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

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]

filmcritic.com (Pete Croatto) review [4/5]

stylusmagazine.com (Bob Kotyk) review

Boxoffice Magazine review Francesca Dinglasan

Reel.com dvd review [3/4] Gary Goldstein

eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter) review [5/5]

Reel.com review [3/4] Tim Knight

Bina007 Movie Reviews

The New Yorker (David Denby) review Page 2

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3.5/4]

Variety at Sundance 2006 (Robert Koehler) review

The Guardian (Andrew Pulver) review

Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Austin Chronicle (Raoul Hernandez) review [4/5]

San Francisco Chronicle [Joel Selvin]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

Neil Young: Heart of Gold - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED A- 94

USA (113 mi) 2008

She used to work in a diner
Never saw a woman look finer
I used to order just to watch her float across the floor
She grew up in a small town
Never put her roots down
Daddy always kept movin’, so she did too.

Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a harley-davidson
Her long blonde hair flyin’ in the wind
She’s been runnin’ half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Collidin’ with the very air she breathes
The air she breathes.

You know it ain’t easy
You got to hold on
She was an unknown legend in her time
Now she’s dressin’ two kids
Lookin’ for a magic kiss
She gets the far-away look in her eyes.

Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a harley-davidson
Her long blonde hair flyin’ in the wind
Shes been runnin’ half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Collidin’ with the very air she breathes
The air she breathes.

—Neil Young “Unknown Legend,” neil young - 1992 - 'Unknown Legend' [studio] - YouTube (4:33)

Written by Jenny Lumet, Sydney Lumet’s daughter, this is one of those nervewracking, autobiographical searches for the missing pieces puzzle, a fiercely intense movie with a distinct emotional tone, which is that of an impending train wreck about to happen, which comes in the form of a former Disney princess (THE PRINCESS DIARIES), Anne Hathaway as Kym, tapping into the manic energy of early Liza Minnelli, sprung from her recent (and still incomplete) stint in rehab to come to her sister’s wedding. Set in a sumptuous estate in Connecticut, Kym finds the overflowing crowd getting on her nerves before she even arrives, finding little solitude or peace, where every conversation turns jarring or confrontational, where it’s clear there’s plenty of unfinished family business here. While no one else is particularly threatening, in fact the landscape on display is an endless picture of multi-ethnic diversity and tolerance, where the bride, Rosemarie Dewitt as Rachel, is marrying a black groom, Tunde Adebimpe. As he’s a musician (in real life a member of TV On the Radio: Official Website), there are a series of different musicians playing quietly off in a corner throughout the entire weekend, creating the impression of a Rennaissance Fair. In addition, several of his friends provide some extraordinary musical heft, adding a defining musical nuance to the film, all of which are brilliantly filmed and integrated into the whole, including the likes of Robyn Hitchcock and Sister Carol, New Orleans jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr, performing both solo and with a jazz band, a Brazilian salsa band, Fab 5 Freddy, and during the wedding vows the groom inexplicably breaks into a heartfelt a cappella rendition of Neal Young’s “Unknown Legend.”

A disturbingly dark film bathed in sweetness and light, Declan Quinn's jittery handheld camera establishes the nervous tone of Kym’s character, whose acid tongue and incessant rancor with her sister starts out innocently enough, both over-privileged women who are used to having their way, with a befuddled father (Bill Irwin) precariously positioned between the two, where Rachel is sick of her sister stealing the limelight with her largely self-induced world of woe, but it gets out of hand, especially during one of the standout sequences in the film, a long, drawn out rehearsal dinner where the families meet for the first time, which is filled with humor and a spirit of generosity, where the honored couple obviously adore one another, so the toasts and tributes (in real time) feel well deserved and genuine, but the scene of harmony and congeniality curiously extends far too long, which is confusing and at times infuriating. When Debra Winger as the sister’s divorced mother makes her belated arrival, it’s clear she’s part of a troubled past, possibly expressed through her divorce, but also by her jittery mood that feels more like sedated aggravation. By the time Kym grabs the mike, she takes the air out of the room, as the mood strangely turns closer to the horror genre, as the tension becomes near unendurable, like a wedding exorcism. Much of this moment has the aching feel of exposed nerves rubbed the wrong way, reminding one of an emotional authenticity right out of Husbands (1970), featuring the Cassavetes style cinema of discomfort where realism is expressed through the spontaneous combustion of raw emotions, where the director intentionally looks behind the various masks people wear in their awkward and sometimes pathetic search for a sense of belonging. The need for love is paramount, but in this family setting, despite the protection of wealth and the obvious love in the air, the hurt feelings and burrowed insecurities instead reveal a horrific display of dysfunction and human inadequacy, perfectly expressed afterwards by Rachel’s bitter chastisement of her sister for her reprehensible and divertingly indulgent toast.

With Hathaway’s remarkable transformance from her earlier association with the innocent and naïve Cinderella character, this is a raw and harrowing journey with an exquisite sense for editing, as cross-cutting throughout the wedding weekend are scenes at Kym’s AA meetings, where people identify they are an addict before confessing something personal about themselves. With the camera not more than a few inches from her face at all times in a signature extended take, Kym reveals her tragic past in an anguished soliloquy of personal sorrow that is perhaps the most stunning revelation in the film. It’s a haunting moment that defines the personal chaos simmering just below the surface ignited by Kym’s all-out assault on pretentiousness and shrouded family secrets. In the same manner, without Kym uttering a single word, her impact is shown in another drawn out scene of seemingly lighthearted gregariousness in the kitchen that turns on a dime, becoming a searing moment of tragic devastation. Kym and her mother on the other hand have a short scene, a burst of unforgettable power with tragic consequences, the impact of which reverberates throughout the rest of the film, where despite one’s best efforts, imperfections can get the best of us, where failings may end up defining our humanity, as if there are built-in family blinders hampering human development. Kym’s reaction to this is profound, as the love she needs from her mother, something she’s always counted on, may have dried up years ago. When she finally arrives at the door for the wedding ceremony with the look of a long lost, wounded puppy, the moment of intimacy between the sisters is like a baptism washing the sins away. Winger may not have a lot of screen time, as the film clearly belongs to Hathaway from start to finish, but the ambiguity of her character and the far reaching impact her troubles have heaped upon her family leaves everyone involved in a state of emotional disrepair. Balanced against a weekend long party celebration where most everyone else is upbeat and hopeful, featuring so much that is positive, Winger’s forced appearance, as if against her will, and Hathaway’s descent into her own personal hell lead to a series of rude awakenings that threaten to derail the entire proceedings. What we get instead is an incisive study of the human condition, where closure may be an illusion, but love is the best option to fend off all impending doubts that plague our weary and beleaguered souls about our worthiness to stand up to our own worst enemy, ourselves.

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas] at Toronto

Still, at the mid-fest point, Toronto's most crushing blows have been dealt by those filmmakers with the longest résumés and most gilded pedigrees, starting with Demme, whose fatuous Rachel Getting Married chronicles the reunion of a dysfunctional Connecticut clan on the eve of the eldest daughter's nuptials. Call it My Big Fat United Nations Wedding: The bride is Jewish (and possibly recovering from an eating disorder). The groom is black. The wedding is Indian-themed right down to the bridesmaids' saris. The maid of honor (Anne Hathaway) has just gotten out of rehab. A dead sibling looms large over the proceedings. And by the time the reception finally rolls around, Robyn Hitchcock (the subject of Demme's 1998 concert film Storefront Hitchcock) and a New Orleans jazz band show up for extended musical interludes, by which point Rachel Getting Married has long ago stopped making sense. How former president Jimmy Carter (star of Demme's 2007 Man From Plains) managed to avoid a cameo is something of a mystery.

Constantly teetering on the brink of hysteria and frequently tipping over into it, Rachel contains one 12-step program, two face-slappings, a car crash, an accidental drowning, multiple scenes of benevolent black folk (are there any other kind?) delivering soulful words of wisdom, and, before the end credits roll, copious tears and reconciliation. Some have likened Demme's film to Noah Baumbach's recent Margot at the Wedding, which is actually more like the kind of movie Demme used to make—the ones where the characters had edges and dimensions, and could be by turns loving and cruel, noble and deplorable. Here, we don't doubt for a second that we're watching a bunch of virtuous, good-hearted people who will manage to work out all of their problems, live happily ever after, and vote for Obama.

The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias

The Jonathan Demme touch, like the famed "Lubitsch touch," isn't easy to define, because it isn't based on any clear stylistic signatures or some uniform, easily recognizable approach to varied material. At his best—and his new movie, Rachel Getting Married, finds him in peak form—Demme is simply the most humane of directors, capable of projecting warmth, vibrancy, and compassion without the labored earnestness of someone like John Sayles. One of the wonderful things about Rachel Getting Married is that it has no villains; all the major characters have the best intentions yet they can't keep from hurting each other anyway. And as they all convene for the ultimate family affair, a wedding, there's a heartbreaking tension between the bond that brings them together in celebration and the perhaps irreparable fissures that threaten to sabotage the weekend.

Showing depths she's never come close to suggesting before, Anne Hathaway plays an addict newly sprung from rehab and headed to suburban Connecticut for sister Rosemarie DeWitt's wedding weekend. It's a volatile situation: Hathaway has long ago lost everyone's trust and confidence in her recovery, and for her, being around family makes her more vulnerable to backsliding, not less. In a weekend that's supposed to be all about the bride, Hathaway's self-absorption promises to be a huge distraction if she can't pull herself together. Though her father (Bill Irwin) touchingly attempts to cheerlead the family back on its feet, their problems run deep, exacerbated by ex-wife Debra Winger's presence and a past tragedy that still lingers.

Based on that description, Rachel Getting Married sounds like a joyless dirge, but it's actually far from it, and a lot of that is owed to the way Demme harnesses the genuine love and good feeling that buoys the occasion. If he ever retires from directing, he could have a great side business as a wedding planner: The rehearsal dinner, the ceremony, and the reception are brimming with sweet multi-culti touches and great music, including performances by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock and TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. (The cutting of the cake, for one, may be the most moving moment in the whole movie.) With an easy, freeflowing style—owing partially to the Dogme-style approach that has led some to compare the film to The Celebration—Demme captures the group dynamic of the wedding party, with its seismic shifts in mood from celebratory to melancholy and back again. It may be painful at times, but Rachel Getting Married sure is one heck of a party.

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

Here are two arguments against seeing Jonathan Demme's remarkable "Rachel Getting Married." I hope they won't deter you, but in the interest of full disclosure let's get them out of the way. "Rachel" is similar in theme, though only in theme, to last year's "Margot at the Wedding." And you're unlikely to mistake it for drawing-room comedy. The heroine -- not Rachel, but her sister, Kym -- is the living, breathing, smoking, joking, snarling, mood-swinging embodiment of narcissistic desperation. That said, the young actress who plays her, Anne Hathaway, sweeps away all clinical categories with a performance of phenomenal energy and heartbreaking beauty.

The script was written by Jenny Lumet in a loose, graceful style that allows the story to flow -- or sometimes ramble -- freely, and gives the actors all the room they need to invent and discover as they go along. (Declan Quinn's multiple cameras go with the flow as if they were all-seeing eyes.) As the film begins, Kym, who's been in and out of rehab for a decade, leaves a rehab clinic to go home for her sister's wedding. There, her feverish need for attention and atonement threatens to turn her into a human wrecking ball, not that her illness hasn't already inflicted collateral damage on the family. One tacit subject -- in a movie that declines to divide itself by subject matter -- is the intricacy of dysfunction; what is cause and what's effect in Kym's tortured family romance? And what of her future? Not every wounded spirit can be healed; her wounds go fearfully deep.

If "Rachel Getting Married" were about dysfunction and nothing else, you might want to skip it, Ms. Hathaway's brilliance notwithstanding. But the life that swirls around Kym before, during and after her sister's densely populated, wonderfully detailed wedding seems to have been caught on the fly in all its sweetness, sadness and joy. (In its free-form style the film constitutes an elaborate homage to Robert Altman.) Rosemarie Dewitt makes Rachel an intriguing character in her own right. Bill Irwin is the sisters' rigid, earnest father; Debra Winger is their scary, semidetached mother; and the groom, Sidney, is played by the actor and musician Tunde Adebimpe. I've saved him for last because Sidney is a musician, many of his friends perform at the wedding, and music -- Jonathan Demme's faithful muse -- is the force that drives the drama once the ceremonies get under way. It's a life force that plays against Kym's penchant for self-destruction, and the contest is thrilling.

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

There is jagged pain, but joy too; there is love and simmering hatred, laughter and anger, feelings stripped bare and buoyed up. All these opposites compellingly co-exist in Rachel Getting Married. But there's an important omission too. Although the ghost of a past tragedy permeates every frame, not a single flashback appears. None is needed. Instead, like a compulsory guest at the head table, the past is constantly present and, as it does at every wedding, waits for its betrothal to the future - what we were marching down the aisle with what we might become. That's why the marriage ritual, filled with hope and fraught with anxiety, is so resonant, and never more than in Jonathan Demme's intriguing, disturbing, uplifting evocation. In fact, to watch this film is to engage in participatory art - for better and for worse, through sickness and in health, we're drawn deeply in.

Admittedly, many movies have employed the focused lens of a funeral or wedding to peer into the dysfunctions of a troubled family. But Demme, working from a nuanced script by Jenny Lumet (yes, Sidney's daughter), has forged a unique partnership of his own, linking the dramatic flair of his fictional features to the hand-held immediacy of his documentary work. The result combines close-up intimacy with an edge-of-your-seat tension that will have you leaning into the screen, often uncomfortable but always entranced.

The action - I use the word advisedly, this is an emotional-action flick - races over a weekend in an upscale Connecticut house, the site of both the wedding and the attendant turmoil. Granted temporary leave from her latest rehab centre, Kym (Anne Hathaway) shows up for her sister's nuptials toting a whole lot of baggage - an aborted career as an actress; a severe addiction to drugs; and direct responsibility for that tragedy's ghost. She was driving, stoned, when the car careened off the bridge, sparing her but killing her young brother Ethan. The child's death, we infer, led to the demise of her parents' marriage - each has since found another partner. Now this marriage has them all reuniting again, in the same house that used to be a home.

As Kym arrives, the place is alive with the bustle of activity and the strains of violins, guitars, saxophones. Paul the father (Bill Irwin) is a record executive, and counts musicians among his closest friends - they're on hand to provide the music for the wedding and thus, in a lovely display of diegetic sound, the score for the film. Sidney the groom (Tunde Adebimpe) is a musician too and later, poignantly, vows that he feels for his bride the same passion that he once thought only music could inspire. The bride is white, the groom is black, yet the script never mentions their difference in colour. Within this assembly, integration is a given, unworthy of comment. No, the disharmony is elsewhere, and that discord lies deep.

We hear it in the initial encounter between Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Kym, the "good" sibling and the bad. The exchange is sharp, because the responsible lamb shares with the black sheep the same quick mind and caustic tongue, a taste for irony with a sarcastic residue. And the lamb wants this day to herself, unsullied by her sister's chronic narcissism. Their bond is obviously strong, yet so are the accreted layers of anger and resentment. This is the complex stew that bubbles, then comes to a rolling boil at the rehearsal dinner - the first, and longest, of several extraordinarily intense sequences to come.

Intense, indeed. Handling his ensemble cast and their overlapping dialogue with Altmanesque dexterity, Demme sits us down at the table. We're right there for the gaiety spontaneous and forced, for the speeches gracious and cringe-making. Most distressingly, though, we're there for the feared yet inevitable moment when Kym seizes the microphone. She's a mass of good intentions gone horribly sour, unable to stop from embarrassing herself and everyone around her. Hathaway, who hinted at her potential in Brokeback Mountain, is a revelation in this scene, oscillating from bravado to brittleness, revealing the inner hell of a woman doubly mired in guilt, bearing the twin burdens of her addiction and her addiction's deadly legacy.

This charged sequence is a gateway leading to others equally raw. Like the sisters' confrontation, where DeWitt plays off Hathaway superbly, showing us the depth of Rachel's enmity, a hardened crust that she's unable or maybe just unwilling to soften. And like Kym's harrowing confession at a parallel gathering, an AA meeting, which she punctuates with this awful burst of candour: "Sometimes I don't want to believe in a God that would forgive me."

But not everything is gloom. As the wedding progresses, as the crowd swells, laughter can be heard, love can be felt, and there's always the music, an omnipresent gift. The point is not that darkness abounds, but that every emotion contains the seeds of its opposite, and the two can turn in a nanosecond. Watch for a scene that involves loading a dishwasher, where hilarity suddenly ends in despair. And watch for another with Kym and her mother Abby (Debra Winger), where empathy switches instantly to rage. Yet watch too for a silent and gorgeously still tableau, when the sinner returns with her sins compounded, only to find what she least expects - absolution, a literal cleansing from a forgiving hand.

But don't get too hopeful, at least not before pondering a final heartless moment. After the drinks have been drunk and the dances danced, the happy bride and her bruised sister reach out to a mother they've lost, and receive in return only a peck on the cheek that leaves the faintest trace of lipstick, just the shadow of a kiss. Some addicts bury their feelings in a fog of drugs, others in a thick haze of politeness; both are habits hard to kick.

Cinematical (James Rocchi) review

Rachel Getting Married is a terse, smart, funny and tough family drama about forgiveness and failure written by Jenny Lumet; it's also a loose, smart, broad and bright film about family and love directed by Jonathan Demme. When these two things are in sync, the end result is something truly impressive – a moving story that appeals to your heart and soul without insulting your intelligence, a film full of big scenes that never stoops to the most obvious possible iteration of those big scenes, a movie loaded with great and sincere performances from the top down. When the two parts of Rachel Getting Married fall out of synch – as they do, most notably, in the last third of the film during Demme's raucous, joyous post-wedding reception – it's less catastrophic than it is curious, and the final film is still very much worth watching.

Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is getting married; her little sister Kym (Anne Hathaway) is coming for the big event ... which involves getting picked up from her most recent stay at a rehab clinic. A cynic could look at Hathaway's part in Rachel Getting Married and paraphrase Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder: Always go full rehab. And while it's true that the Academy and critics tend to reward gritty, hyperbolic portraits of drug-addiction's misery, the fact is that Hathaway's Kym is not quite as simple as that. Kym knows all the things she's done wrong; she also knows she'll keep doing some of them. Immediately, in the car, the lines of battle are drawn, with Kym going on the offense as part of her defense mechanisms, asking her dad (Bill Irwin) and step-mother (Anna Deavere Smith) about how Rachel's holding up: "Are all of her latent food issues coming up? Is she still hoarding Snickers and Cool Whip under the bed?" Soon, Kym's plunged into the thick of the preparations for Rachel's wedding, responding to the chaos by adding to it. ...

Shot with hand-held cameras, Rachel Getting Married brings us into the heart of a family, but, to screenwriter Lumet's credit, never over-explains itself or says everything out loud. In the rehearsal dinner, Kym offers a toast to Rachel and her fiancée Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe) that starts as an attention-begging bit of showboating ("I'm Shiva the destroyer, and I am your harbinger of doom for the evening ...") and continues as Kym flays herself to the bone in front of the crowd, her self-serving self-loathing punctuated by asides of nervous laughter as if she were terrified of silence. Hathaway may be best-known for her porcelain good looks, but here she digs in to a character, hard enough to show bruises, and she does not make Kym 'sympathetic' so much as she builds Kym into a person who earns our sympathy.

But Rachel Getting Married is hardly a one-woman show; Bill Irwin has a few great moments as Kym and Rachel's father; DeWitt manages to capture both sibling rivalry and sisterly compassion, petty jealousy and rough-hewn forgiveness; as Kym's mother, Debra Winger, much like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, plays a person both cut off from her feelings and captured in the grip of them. On the groom's side, Adabimpe is stalwart as Sidney, while Mather Zickel gives a funny, charming, loose performance as best man Kieran, who has more in common with Kym than just a big role in the ceremony.

Lumet's script is, perhaps, the best thing about Rachel Getting Married; many things are left unsaid, many things are unexplained, and many things are said and explained through the natural ebb and flow of the conversation. Lumet has an ear for dialogue, but she also has an eye for detail, like when Kym steps into "her" room at the family's house; it's preserved as if in amber, still and airless and perfect and dead. Lumet also captures the jumbled, joyous chaos of a modern wedding -- the weird mix of territorial squabbles over everything from seating charts to roles in the bridal party and warm, loving, celebration. And as we go from rehearsal to reception, difficulty to disaster, we learn how much Kym truly has to atone for, and Hathaway, Demme and Lumet bring to life someone who has, through her own fault, earned a crushing sorrow that she will feel every day of her life: Kym notes, of her gravest error, how "I can live with it, but I can't forgive myself ..."; Hathaway makes us believe it. At the same time, Rachel Getting Married is very funny -- from quick-cut gags to smart character-driven asides to a character's explosion of annoyance late in the film that may echo the audience's feelings about one of the film's devices.

Director Demme has spent the past few years making glossy entertainments (The Trouble with Charlie, The Manchurian Candidate) and digital documentaries (Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains, Neil Young: Heart of Gold). Rachel Getting Married offers him a chance to get back to his roots while still displaying all the talent and craft that moved him forward; the decision to shoot the film, in his words, "like the most beautiful home movie ever made," does a lot to help build the intimate, inside mood of the film. If one thing seems at odds with the small-scale, carefully-crafted tone of Lumet's script, it's the excess and enthusiasm that Demme brings to the closing reception scenes.

I can accept that Rachel and Sidney's wedding is full of talented friends and, thanks to Sidney's career in the industry, live music; when Robyn Hitchcock and Sister Carol perform at the reception, I found myself distracted, Demme's desire to include his talented friends undercutting the talent he had shown in telling the story. Even with that minor moment of excessive exuberance -- and, really, who among us hasn't been inspired to an excess of exuberance at a wedding? -- Rachel Getting Married is a rich, real and smart drama, one that doesn't just mark the arrival of an exciting new screenwriter; Rachel Getting Married may wind up being the film that took Anne Hathaway from being a name-brand movie star to being recognized as a talented, committed and gifted actress.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Rachel Getting Married (2008) Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, February 2009

my review. Victor Morton from Rightwing Film Geek

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]

indieWIRE review Michael Koresky

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth]

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

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

Twitch (Michael Guillen) review

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review

Pajiba (John Williams) review

CBC.ca Arts review Katrina Onstad

filmcritic.com (Jesse Hassenger) review [3.5/5] also seen here: Reel.com review [3/4]

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Newsweek (David Ansen) review

Paste Robert Davis

Screen International review Fionnuala Halligan in Venice

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B]

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [5/6]

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/6]

Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [2/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

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

DeMott, Joel and Jeff Kreines

SEVENTEEN

USA (120 mi) 1983

Teen Screen, Winter 2010, Block Cinema, Block Museum, Northwestern ...

Originally commissioned for PBS, this remarkable documentary centers on Lynn Massie, a precocious, sharp-tongued teen, and her hard-partying friends in Muncie, Indiana.  The network ultimately balked at the unflinchingly candid final cut, as filmmakers DeMott and Kreines showed no desire to candy coat the lives of their teenage subjects, covering binge drinking, racism, and other subjects deemed too hot for public television. Seventeen is arguably one of the best (if little known, and rarely screened) portraits of American youth ever captured on film.

Seventeen | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Made for the PBS series Middletown but never aired, this 1983 cinema-verite documentary by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines follows a working-class high school girl from Muncie, Indiana, through her senior year. The filmmakers abandon the distance generally associated with the verite movement: their style is warm, intimate, almost embracing. And yet this approach risks turning their subject into a conventional audience identification figure—a "star." She gradually loses her humanity, and becomes a vehicle for the filmmakers' liberal-humanist values: a real-life Norma Rae. 120 min.

User reviews from imdb Author: djtet from Niantic, CT

Check the demographic breakdown for the user ratings. Fascinating. Apparently young men think this is awful while middle-aged guys (yeah, that's me) think it's great.

What this is, is simply the most intimate documentary ever made, and it's subjects are 'regular people', specifically lower-middle-class teens in Muncie, Indiana. I guess some reviewers feel such folks aren't worth making a film about, and would rather watch movies about wizards and elfin princesses. For those who find reality interesting, 'Seventeen' is 'direct cinema' (aka cinema verite) taken as far as the form can go. It was shot with a fixed focal length wide-angle lens, which means that the camera is basically within 4-8 feet of the subjects most of the time. This yields amazing revelatory moments, and perhaps a sense of queasiness on exactly the same grounds, the subjects are pretty exposed. This caused a fair amount of controversy. The film had been commissioned for a PBS series, and PBS (cowards) dropped it. The film has continued to be largely repressed, and is seldom screened. If you get a chance to see it, DO NOT PASS IT UP. You will never see anything else quite like it, and whether you 'like' it or not it's a unique and thought provoking experience.

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

One of the highlights from Film Comment Selects this year was the screening of Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines's underseen cinéma vérité film, Seventeen, a reverent and candid cross-cultural portrait of working class high school students from Muncie, Indiana that was once deemed objectionable for broadcast on PBS (the film had been commissioned as part of a documentary series on middle America) for confronting such (still) relevant social issues as race relations, drug use, unplanned pregnancy, underaged drinking, and dying young. Loosely centered on a headstrong girl named Lynn and her circle of friends, the film opens to the shot of Lynn and her classmates half-heartedly following the teacher's baking instructions, instead, using the hour to socialize with friends. In a way, the cooking lesson serves as a metaphor for the students' casual preparation for their transition into adulthood as well, having been filmed over the course of a year (the span of time subtly framed between varsity season and the senior prom). In one episode, news of Lynn's flirtation with an African American student named John sends the campus gossip mill abuzz, inciting the burning of a cross in her parents' yard and repeated telephone harassment by a young woman who may be one of John's acquaintances. In another episode, fellow cooking student, Robert confirms to the teacher that he is father of a pregnant student's baby, despite having ended the relationship with the girl earlier, and is unjudgingly counseled by the well-intentioned teacher on parental responsibilities. In still another episode, an alcohol-fueled party at Lynn's house becomes a sobering reminder of mortality when a mutual friend is gravely injured after a car accident. DeMott and Kreines insightfully frame the students within the context of home economics and sociology classes that serve to reflect the teenagers' interpersonal relationships, further reinforcing the integral role of the school experience as both a microcosm of an individual's domestic and social environments, and a real-life civics lesson on the importance of contributing to society.

Joel Demott and Jeff Kreines' 'Seventeen' | International ... Amanda Micheli from Documentary.org

I first saw Seventeen almost 20 years ago, and it took me that many years to find it again. It was my sophomore year of college; I was studying filmmaking in a program at Harvard that exposed me to a wide array of seminal, if obscure documentary films. Seventeen was the one that changed my entire appreciation and understanding of movies. Call it “direct cinema,” call it “cinema vérité” —whatever the label, this is a powerful form of storytelling that contains more truth than any fact-filled historical documentary and more human drama than any Hollywood blockbuster I had ever seen.

This incredible film unfortunately fell victim to a distribution disaster that the filmmakers bitterly resent to this day. It was one of a six-part PBS series slated to air in 1982 called Middletown, inspired by a famous anthropological study of Muncie, Indiana. Things got ugly when Xerox, the corporate sponsor of the series, caught wind that the film showed interracial romance and contained vulgar language. Xerox systematically shut the film down; Seventeen was effectively censored by its corporate sponsor (a real no-no for “public” television) and to this day has never been aired. Today, you can’t find it on Netflix, you can’t rent it at your local video store; it’s a rare specimen sighted only at cinematheques and universities.

The thing that makes Seventeen worth hunting down is the incredible, delicate access that the filmmakers negotiated with the people they were filming. Joel Demott and Jeff Kreines, each armed with a one-man-band 16mm camera and tape-recorder rig (!), would split up; she filmed with the girls, he with the boys. They lived in Muncie for over a year, but unlike those of us now accustomed to burning videotape, they shot at a conservative ratio of 30-to-1. They filmed exclusively hand-held, wide and close, and rarely ever got an establishing shot; they just hung close with the working-class kids of Muncie’s Southside High School.

There are no graphics (not even one lower-third), no dramatic score, no catchy montages; there’s hardly even a credit roll. The only score is what the kids blast in their Lincoln Continentals and request on their local radio station. The film starts unassumingly, at an excruciatingly slow pace, in Ms. Hartley’s loathsome Home-Ec class, much like the start of any dreaded day in high school. The story unfolds with Zen-like patience and grows with powerful momentum into a crescendo of conflict and chaos, without ever sensationalizing.

I was lucky enough to go to one the best public high schools in the country, but even so, the painful scenes of race and class tension, sexual exploits and after-kegger tragedies in Seventeen are all too familiar. Even more than my own experience, the scenes recalled what I witnessed as my older sister, class of 1982, feathered her hair and partied with the townies when rock was really Rock and everybody drove drunk. Neither the canon of fictional teen dramas nor “Reality” TV have even a hint of Seventeen’s authenticity; this is a haunting view into the all-too-real world of working-class teenagers, numbing themselves from the ugly adult culture around them—as the filmmakers say in their own press notes, “fighting and fucking” their way through high school.

The good news is that, 25 years later, the filmmakers are working on getting this film back into the mix. And trust me, it’s worth the wait.

Encore - Film Society of Lincoln Center Rob Nelson from Film Comment, November/December 2008

Learning the Truth at Seventeen in 'American Teen' - July 25, 2008 ... Steve Dollar from The NY Sun, July 25, 2009

40 Frames - Screening Archives - Winter/Spring 2006

Montgomery Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, 2009 – 2010

New challenges for documentary - Google Books Result New Challenges for Documentary, by Alan Rosenthal, pages 354 – 355.

The other side of Middletown: exploring Muncie's African American ... - Google Books Result The other side of Middletown: exploring Muncie's African American community, by Luke E. Lassiter, pages 40 – 43.

'American Teen': Archetype Casting | NevadaAppeal.com Dan Zak from The Washington Post, Juluy 30, 2008

Film Shorts - Portland Mercury March 30, 2006

San Francisco Bay Guardian : Article : GREATER THAN OVER THE EDGE Johnny Ray Huston from San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 15, 2006, also seen here: SF360:Features - Seventeen reasons why "Seventeen" might be the ... Seventeen reasons why “Seventeen” might be the greatest movie about teenagers ever made, by Johnny Ray Huston from SF 360, August 17, 2006 (pdf format)

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

Demy, Jacques

Demy, Jacques World Cinema

One of the outstanding filmmakers of post-war France, Demy is best known for his first feature Lola (1961) and for Les Parapluies de Cherbourg / The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), his first musical proper. Demy was brought up in Nantes, a city he loved (the affection is well captured in Agnès Varda's moving film portrait Jacquot de Nantes, 1991), and where he made his earliest amateur movie. He studied cinema in Paris, training in short films with Georges Rouquier and later in animation with Paul Grimault. Lola, a lyrical poem to Nantes and the cabaret artiste played by Anouk Aimée, shared some of the aesthetic concerns of the New Wave (although Demy was not strictly part of it): location shooting, exuberant mise-en-scène—especially stunning camerawork by Raoul Coutard—and love for the American cinema. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg inaugurated the "bitter-sweet" Demy universe, with sentimental music by Michel Legrand, pastel colour-scheme, and the innovation of all-sung dialogue. The film turned Catherine Deneuve into a star and was awarded a prize at Cannes, but Demy never matched its popular success in his subsequent chequered career, although Peau D'Âne / Donkey Skin (1970), a sumptuous adaptation of the Perrault fairy tale, came near. Nevertheless, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) and Une chambre en ville (1982), like Les Parapluies, beautifully illustrate Demy's original, if not totally satisfactory, pursuit of a specifically French musical genre.

— Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

Film Reference Robin Wood, updated by Rob Edelman

Jacques Demy's first feature film, Lola, is among the early distinguished products of the New Wave and is dedicated to Max Ophüls. These two facts in conjunction define its particular character. It proved to be the first in a series of loosely interlinked films (the intertextuality is rather more than a charming gimmick, relating as it does to certain thematic preoccupations already established in Lola itself); arguably, it remains the richest and most satisfying work so far in Demy's erratic, frustrating, but also somewhat underrated career.

The name and character of Lola (Anouk Aimée) herself can be traced to two previous celebrated female protagonists: the Lola Montès of Max Ophüls's film of that name, and the Lola-Lola (Marlene Dietrich) of von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, to which Demy pays homage in a number performed by Aimée in a top hat. The explicit philosophy of Lola Montès ("For me, life is movement") is enacted in Demy's film by the constant comings and goings, arrivals and departures, and intricate intercrossings of the characters. Ophüls's work has often been linked to concepts of fate; at the same time the auteurs of the early New Wave were preoccupied with establishing Freedom—as a metaphysical principle, to be enacted in their professional methodology. The tension between fate and freedom is there throughout Demy's work. Lola's credit sequence alternates the improvisatory freedom of jazz with the slow movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. The latter musical work is explicitly associated with destiny in the form of the huge white American car that brings back Michel, Lola's lover and father of her child, who, like his predecessors in innumerable folk songs, has left her for seven years to make his fortune. No film is more intricately and obsessively patterned, with all the characters interlinked: the middle-aged woman used to be Lola (or someone like her), her teenage daughter may become Lola (or someone like her). Yet neither resembles Lola as she is in the film: everyone is different, yet everyone is interchangeable.

Two subsequent Demy films relate closely to Lola. In Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Roland, Lola's rejected lover, recounts his brief liaison with Lola to the visual accompaniment of a flashback to the arcade that was one of their meeting-places. In addition, Lola herself reappears in The Model Shop. Two other films are bound in to the series as well. Les Demoiselles de Rochefort is linked by means of a certain cheating on the part of Demy—Lola has been found murdered and dismembered in a laundry basket, but the corpse is a different Lola. Especially poignant, as the series continues, is the treatment of the abrupt, unpredictable, seemingly fortuitous happy ending. At the end of Lola, Lola drives off with Michel and their child (as Roland of Parapluies, discarded and embittered, departs on his diamond-smuggling trip to South Africa). At the conclusion of Le Baie des Anges—a film that, at the time, revealed no connection with Lola—Jackie (Jeanne Moreau), a compulsive gambler, manages to leave the casino to follow her lover before she knows the result of her bet: two happy endings which are exhilarating precisely because they are so arbitrary. Then, several films later, in Model Shop, Lola recounts how her great love Michel abandoned her to run off with a compulsive gambler called Jackie. Thus both happy endings are reversed in a single blow. It is not so much that Demy doesn't believe in happy endings: he simply doesn't believe in permanent ones (as "life is movement"). The ambivalent, bittersweet "feel" of Demy is perhaps best summed up in the end of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, where the lovers, now both married to others, accidentally meet, implicitly acknowledge their love, and return with acceptance to the relationships to which they are committed.

Outside the Lola series, Demy's touch has been uncertain. His two fairy-tale films, Peau d'ane and The Pied Piper, unfortunately tend to confirm the common judgment that he is more a decorator than a creator. But he should not be discounted. A Room in Town, a return to the Lola mode if not to the Lola characters, was favorably received. Demy's final two credits, Parking and Three Places for the 26th, are musicals which disappointed in that they were unable to capture the spark of his earlier work. Agnes Varda, his wife of almost three decades, then directed a film about Demy titled Jacquot de Nantes, which was released a year after his death. The film is a poignant, straight-from-the-heart record of the measure of a man's life, with Varda shifting between interviews with Demy (tenderly shot in extreme close-up), sequences from his films, and a narrative which details the youth of Demy in Nantes during the 1940s and relates how he cultivated a love of the movies. The film works best, however, as a beautiful and poignantly composed love letter. Its essence is summed up in one of its opening shots: the camera pans the content of a watercolor, focusing first on a nude woman, then on a nude man, and finally on their interlocking hands.

Jacquot de Nantes is obviously a very personal film. But it was not meant to be a tribute; rather, it was conceived and filmed when Demy was still alive. "Jacques would speak about his childhood, which he loved," Varda explained at a New York Film Festival press conference. "His memories were very vivid. I told him, 'Why don't you write about them?' So he did, and he let me read the pages. The more he wrote the more he remembered—even the names of the children who sat next to him in school. Most children do not know what they want to do when they grow up. But Jacques did, from the time he was 12. He had an incredible will. So I said, 'This [material] would make a good film.' I wrote the script, and I tried to capture the spirit of Jacques and his family, and the way people spoke and acted in [the 1940s]. We shot the film in the exact [locations] in which he grew up. I also filmed an interview with him. It's just Jacques speaking about his childhood. It's not a documentary about Jacques Demy. It's just him saying, 'Yes, this is true. This is my life.' "He saw most of the final [version]. When Jacques 'went away,' I had to finish the film. It was difficult, but that's the only thing I know. I think the film makes Jacques very alive."

Demy was the subject of two follow-ups to Jacquot de Nantes, also directed by Varda: The Young Girls Turn 25, a sentimental reminiscence of the filming of The Young Girls of Rochefort and The World of Jacques Demy, an intensely intimate documentary-biography which includes clips from his films and interviews with those who worked with and respected him.

All-Movie Guide

Zeitgeist Films Biography

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Jacques Demy Caroline E. Layde from Senses of Cinema

"New Wave Film Guide: Nouvelle Vague & International New Wave Cinema - Where to Start"

Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] The Films of Jacques Demy

Flickhead Article (2004) L’ Univers de Jacques Demy, by Ray Young from Flickhead

young girls of rochefort | imodernreview July 3, 2012

Demy, Jacques They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Wikipedia

LOLA A 98

France Italy (90 mi) 1961 ‘Scope

Time Out

Simultaneously a tribute to Max Ophüls (to whom it is dedicated), Nantes (its setting), American musicals, and the joyous but always glorious romantic roundelay centred on the alluring and enigmatic presence of Aimée's eponymous cabaret-dancer, forced to choose between a trio of lovers. Its breezy tone, narrative coincidences, circling camera, and overall brio suggest a certain superficiality, but at its heart lies a wistful awareness that happiness in love is both transient and largely dependent on chance. Very beautifully shot, in widescreen and luminous black-and-white, it is also formally astonishing, with all the minor characters serving as variations on the central couple.

Lola Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Jacques Demy's first and in some ways best feature (1961, 90 min.), shot in exquisite black-and-white 'Scope by Raoul Coutard, is among the most neglected major works of the French New Wave. Abandoned by her sailor lover, a cabaret dancer (Anouk Aimee) brings up their son while awaiting his return and ultimately has to choose among three men. Chock-full of film references (to The Blue Angel, Breathless, Hollywood musicals, the work of Max Ophuls, etc) and lyrically shot in Nantes, the film is a camera stylo love letter, and Michel Legrand's lovely score provides ideal nostalgic accompaniment. In his third feature and biggest hit, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Demy settled on life's disappointments; here at least one major character gets exactly what she wants, and the effect is no less poignant. With Marc Michel, Jacques Harden, and Elina Labourdette (the young heroine in Robert Bresson's 1945 Les dames du bois de Boulogne).

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Revived at Film Forum in a new 35mm print, Jacques Demy's 1961 Lola is a benign Blue Angel, in which the eponymous cabaret chanteuse and inadvertent heartbreaker (Anouk Aimée) waits patiently for the lover who abandoned her seven years before.

Demy's insouciant first feature—shot by Raoul Coutard in black-and-white Cinema-scope in Demy's hometown of Nantes—is also his most New Wave. Dedicated to Max Ophüls, Lola begins more or less where the more butch Bob le Flambeur ends, with a white Cadillac convertible parked on a French beach. American sailors roam through the port (seemingly played by French actors speaking phonetic English) and a sad young man, just fired from his boring job, seeks solace in an obscure Mark Robson movie with an aging Gary Cooper. This fondness for fantasy America extends to Lola's heroine. Aimée's romantic character may be named for Marlene Dietrich's femme fatale (and look like a ripe Jacqueline Kennedy), but basically she's playing Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return or Bus Stop—at once brazen and vulnerable, full of breathy chatter and giggly innocence. "There's a bit of happiness in simply wanting happiness," she explains.

In between café blah-blah and wistful set pieces, Lola toys with a blatantly underdeveloped criminal subplot, but Demy is far more interested in evoking the excitement of first love and old movies than orchestrating a shoot-'em-up. The sailors on leave have their own On the Town moves and Michel Legrand's score bubbles up under the most banal interactions. Like a Hollywood fairy tale, Lola is always threatening to turn into a musical. Its edge as a film comes from the fact that it never quite does.

filmcritic.com (Jake Euker)

In an time when gunmen walk on ceilings, when men morph into monsters before our eyes, when future governors of California are shorn of their human skin to expose the glistening steel and circuitry underneath, Jacques Demy’s classic 1961 Lola is a breathtaking reminder of what magic in the movies used to mean. Lola is a work of romance, and the magic on view is all of the fairy tale variety. What’s transformed in Lola isn’t a cyborg or a lycanthrope, but rather life itself.

Or maybe I should say “lives.” Set in the dreary French port of Nantes, Lola tells the story of the title character, a cabaret dancer and paid companion to the American sailors who prowl the streets and bars of the city on leave. She’s a single mother, the child’s father having abandoned her during pregnancy seven years before. What sustains her is the hopelessly naive belief that this man will return to her – return to her rich, no less – and that her drab, hardscrabble life will become the vision of happiness she never stops imagining.

Lola’s world is populated by a similarly picturesque group: a young man who falls in love with her upon visiting Nantes, a sailor who is kind to her son and who loves her in his own way, the troupe of “singers” with whom she works in the cabaret, a 14-year-old girl to whom all of life is romance. When Lola reaches its improbable surprise conclusion, the lives of all of these men and women are impacted in a way that literally, in my case, can make a grown man cry. It’s the purest screen magic.

Lola was Demy’s first feature, and it placed him immediately on the roster of French New Wave mythmakers whose ranks included Truffaut and Godard. The story was taken up again by the director in his peerless Umbrellas of Cherbourg a few years later; in that outing, the characters literally sang every line, as though a romance so intense as that depicted in these two films could find no other channel. Anouk Aimée, as Lola (the name is a tribute to Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel), gives a star-making performance; if she never quite equaled it again, it’s less her fault and more the case that a role like Lola is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for any actress. Raoul Coutard, famed for his work with Godard, shot the film in a spotless black-and-white, and that other New Wave stalwart, composer Michel Legrand, provided the rich score.

Screen magic like Lola is rarely found. Its new availability on DVD restores a true classic to the video shelves.

Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014

Lola: Demy’s Paradise Found Criterion essay by Ginette Vincendeau, July 21, 2014

On Set with Jacques Demy photo gallery, August 01, 2014

Lola (1961) - The Criterion Collection

Film Freak Central Travis Hoover

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

The Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray

Criterion Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ... Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray

Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray

THE DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion Blu-Ray

Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Verdict Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray

Reel.com [Pam Grady]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Epinions [metalluk]

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing THE BAY OF ANGELS

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing THE BAY OF ANGELS

Criterion's "The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler)

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]

THE BAY OF ANGELS (La baie des anges) B+ 92

France (89 mi) 1963 ‘Scope

Time Out

Demy's second feature has a ravishing Jeanne Moreau, ash-blonde for the occasion and dressed all in white, as a compulsive gambler who doesn't care what happens to her so long as she has a chip to start her on the roulette tables. Ostensibly the subject is gambling, but the real theme is seduction - with Moreau casting a spell on Mann that turns him every which way - and this is above all a visually seductive film. Shot mainly inside the casinos and on the sunstruck promenades of Nice and Monte Carlo, it is conceived as a dazzling symphony in black and white. Moreau's performance is magnificent, but it's really Jean Rabier's camera which turns the whole film into an expression of sheer joy - not only in life and love, but things. Iron bedsteads make arabesques against white walls; a little jeweller's shop becomes a paradise of strange ornamental clocks; a series of angled mirrors echo the heroine as she runs down a corridor into her lover's arms; roulette wheels spin to a triumphant musical accompaniment; and over it all hangs an aura of brilliant sunshine.

Bay of Angels Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Rarely screened in the U.S. since its initial release at the height of Beatlemania, Bay of Angels is the least musical of Jacques Demy's early films—and, not coincidentally, the least impressive. Demy's talent was for a peculiar sort of melancholy exuberance, exemplified in the candy-colored melodrama The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; even Lola, the title character of his 1961 debut (which just completed its own run at Film Forum), appears perennially on the verge of breaking into song. The casinos of Nice and Monte Carlo, on the other hand, where the bulk of this discursive drama takes place, are home to a more repressed passion, grim and desperate. Accordingly, the weighty silence is only very occasionally punctuated by Michel Legrand's arpeggiated theme. The clash of sensibilities proves jarring, but the film still has its pleasures: Moreau's forthright demeanor; the sound of the metal ball making its circuit of the roulette wheel, played on the anxious faces of those who've made wagers; and did I mention that the action takes place on the Riviera?

Any movie about compulsive gamblers is bound to follow a predictable trajectory, roughly the economic equivalent of yo-yo dieting. Virtually nothing happens in Bay of Angels, at least once callow young Jean Fournier (Mann), taking his first solo vacation, meets the dazzingly capricious Jackie Demaistre (Moreau) at the gaming table. They win, they lose, they win, they lose, they win, they lose. Somewhere along the line, Jean allegedly falls head over heels for Jackie; Mann's far too inexpressive an actor to convey any depth of feeling, though, and the film's ridiculously sunny conclusion is scarcely more believable. What lingers in the memory is the way that Demy's camera prowls around the table: following the lovers as they toss their chips onto the felt without breaking stride, pausing with them as they strain to hear "rouge," moving gracefully aside when the croupier calls "noir" and they saunter away, stonefaced. Admirably circumspect—Demy's masterpieces, however, are anything but.

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

Entranced, romantic, utopian, and utterly French, Jacques Demy has always been the most patronized and underappreciated of the major nouvelle vague voices. Nobody's fave among the New Wavers while he was alive, Demy eschewed brooding enigma and ironic realism in favor of a one-way ticket to Happily Ever After. But he was more than a starry-eyed glosser; Demy was aware, as few directors have ever been, about the similarities between Hollywood and life, be they tragic or joyous. It just so happens that Demy loved it all: love affairs begun, ended, betrayed, and crushed by fate; everyday minutiae accumulating into bursts of swoony heartbreak; real oceanside towns envisioned as slices of candy-coated heaven. He was certainly no less conscious of film history and meta-ness than Godard or Rivette, but Demy became the movement's balladeer rather than another surgeon, and so his films were consumed and enjoyed like mousse and dismissed as insubstantial after the fact.

This singsong fable-spinner seems like an odd choice for revival these days, but ever since the rediscovery of his 1964 lollipop avalanche The Umbrellas of Cherbourg some six years ago, gassed-up Demymania has continued its arc. (You can even find the Miramax-revived The Young Girls of Rochefort in Blockbuster.) But Demy's films aren't merely confections: Lola is Demy's A Woman Is a Woman, thick with hanging song cues, philosophical happenstance, bustling old-movie fauna, and an exhilarating ardor for its characters and itself. Likewise, Cherbourg and Rochefort are self-analyzing bombardments of happiness, always wondering how far and near the formal idealism of musicals is to the genuine flow of life.

Bay of Angels (1963), Demy's second film, is a relatively sober affair. Unseen here since 1964 (when Voice critic Andrew Sarris pronounced it "a piece of cinematic vaudeville"), it's not an un-musical but a semi-noir, a pensive, edge-of-the-law pas de deux between compulsive gamblers. The movie's pilot light, Jeanne Moreau stars as Jackie, an "industrialist's wife" who, we eventually learn, is such an irredeemable demimondaine that she lost custody of her only child. ("I've got the feeling I gambled him away," she says in a chillingly matter-of-fact off-moment.) Crowned by a bleach-blond bouffant, wearing Gabor-sister eyelashes, and drawing on a ubiquitous cigarette as if it were her fuel source, Moreau is emblematic Eurotrash—and Demy's scenario is careful to edge this perfectly conceived social type toward an existential brink. Jackie loves gambling, she says, for its "stupid mixture of poverty and luxury." Blithely beyond loss or gain, hardly caring whether she's rolling in winnings or begging for bus fare, Jackie is exactly the kind of extreme characterization that makes real noirs still throb—she's the blood sister of The Tarnished Angels' Dorothy Malone and Gun Crazy's thrill-fetish lovers.

Shot in breathtakingly vivid black and white by Jean Rabier, Bay of Angels views Jackie's no-future desolation through the placid eyes of Jean (Claude Mann), a mild bank clerk whose roulette windfall sends him on a coolheaded tour of Nice casinos, looking for a lifestyle overhaul. Of course, once he finds Jackie, his vague plans crystallize into a love story; even so, their symbiotic relationship slowly turns into a parasite/host showdown. Demy frames the action with enormous restraint; most of the time, you don't see the roulette wheel during a decisive spin, only the two gamblers distractedly waiting for the croupier's call. But for the cascading Michel Legrand piano score, you're not even aware the movie is a romance until the final tracking shot. Most of all, it's an early chapter of Demy's courtship with the provincial France of his youth, with the most bewitching generation of French actresses, and with movies.

Bay of Angels: Walking on Sand Criterion essay by Terrence Rafferty, July 22, 2014

Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014

The Essential Jacques Demy Packaging photo gallery, July 22, 2014

Bay of Angels (1963) - The Criterion Collection

La Baie des Anges Lindsay Henderson from Senses of Cinema

ToxicUniverse.com (Dan Callahan)

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

The Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray

Criterion Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ... Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray

Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray

THE DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion Blu-Ray

Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Verdict Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

La Baie des anges Acquarello from Strictly Film School

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara reviews the DVD

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing LOLA

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing LOLA

Criterion's "The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski

The New York Times (Eugene Archer)

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) A 100

France Germany (91 mi) 1964

Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, one of the most popular films of the decade which had long been unavailable, but was restored in 1992 by his widow Agnès Varda, the film is unique as it is a film opera, nothing is spoken, everything is sung, which takes a few moments of adjustment in the theater before you can sit back and appreciate the breadth of such an entirely fresh, yet experimental cinematic experience, which throbs with lavish color. Demy was a great admirer of the Golden Age of MGM musicals, but this story is bleaker than the look of the film. There are strands of realism strung throughout this incredibly beautiful production design, which are enormously appealing, much like Puccini’s La Boheme, an opera set in Paris that was famous for introducing elements of realism into opera, a scandalous concept at the time.

This is a stunning contrast of shifting styles, moods, colors, and rhythms, all set to the music of Michel Legrand’s dreamy and melodic score, which feels like a true artistic jazz improvisation, opening to the lilting sound of flutes on a cobblestone street in the rain, situated next to the docks of a river, where all the city’s multi-colored umbrellas open like flowers blooming on the pedestrian-filled streets of Cherbourg. The screen bursts into a pastel of purples, lavenders, blues, reds, pinks, and yellows before the music shifts into a jazz riff that establishes the rhythm and pace of the young lovers in the film, later building to a shattering climax when they sing the love theme “I Will Wait for You” Love theme from "Les parapluies de Cherbourg" (1964) - YouTube (7:01), where they’re seen floating on air at the midway point. Divided into three sections, the Departure, the Absence, and the Return, there are quick movements, brief sequences with quick edits, where the lines are initially only 4 or 5 words, all underscored by a constant beat.

Nino Castelnuovo plays Guy, a handsome garage mechanic, while 20-year old Catherine Deneuve plays Genevieve, his breathtakingly beautiful sweetheart who works in her mother’s umbrella shop. As he’s called away for two years of military service, where in the middle of this romanticized love, the war in Algeria beckons, so they spend a single night together, leaving her pregnant without his knowledge. In the absence, their lives change forever. He gets wounded, but doesn’t write, leaving her heartbroken and alone, so at her mother’s prodding, she reluctantly marries a rich older gentleman (Marc Michel), for whom she shares little affection, but she and her son’s needs are easily provided for. The bursts of color and energy and joy, and their pleas of neverending love from their youth remain a bittersweet memory. The film has a legendary and heartbreaking finale where years have passed and they meet purely by chance at Guy’s gas station, shot above from a high crane shot overlooking Guy’s Esso station, without Genevieve, settled under a white blanket of snow Ending of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" - YouTube (7:03). This is visionary cinema, an enchanting poetic-realist romance that becomes especially poignant with the passing of time. Interesting that, depending on what happens in that final sequence, the audience undergoes a complete emotional shift and transformation, where everything that came before may be seen with an entirely new meaning.

World Cinema: Films -- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) Chris Petit from World Cinema

A novelettish story that in the hands of most directors would be no more than trivial is transformed by Demy into something rather wonderful: a full-scale all-singing musical whose inspiration is Hollywood but whose tone and setting are resolutely Gallic. Shopgirl Deneuve loves a poor mechanic who leaves her pregnant when he departs for military service. During his absence, she is courted by a diamond merchant and nudged into marriage by her ambitious mother... This bittersweet romance—whose underlying message would seem to be that people invariably marry the wrong person—is lavished with affection. Vivid colours and elegant camera choreography are bound together by Michel Legrand's sumptuous score. And never has an Esso station looked so romantic.

Philadelphia City Paper Jerry White

The directors of the French New Wave occupied two fairly distinct branches: those who rejected and re-defined conventions (Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Chris Marker) and those who loved the traditions of classical Hollywood cinema and sought to revitalize the form (Franois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle). Jacques Demy belongs firmly with the latter group, and his 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg serves as a fine manifesto for that school of filmmaking. Demy, like many of his French colleagues, had a longtime affection for the musicals of Vincent Minelli, and the completion of this film marked the realization of a very old dream. But Umbrellas is very far from being Hollywooden fluff: Demy used the form that was so special to him to meditate on the nature of love, loyalty, class and beauty. The way that he mixes idealism (singing, dancing, pledges of eternal love) with cold realism (the downturn of the French economy, the war in Algeria, the fleeting nature of love) is truly heartbreaking. Formally the film is a wonder: Demy's camera is constantly moving, encompassing remarkable amounts in a single shot, and the richness of the colors is unlike anything being done anywhere else, even in the glory days of technicolor, the stock on which the film is shot (be sure to see it in the theaters, which are showing a recently restored 35mm print). The entire film is sung, creating a completely new, magical world that nonetheless feels completely familiar. Demy never equalled the emotional force and visual splendor of this film, and it is truly one of the high points in the cinema of the 1960s.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Closer to opera than to the traditional Hollywood musical, Demy's candy-colored, sung-through ode to the transience of love, starring Deneuve in the role that made her famous, is the kind of movie that either makes you break out in sarcastic giggle fits or leaves you in an anguished puddle on the theater floor. As a representative of the latter group, let me ask those of you who find yourselves in the former to endeavor to remain silent. Indulge our intense emotional involvement in the mundanely tragic tale of shop girl Geneviève (Deneuve) and mechanic Guy (Castelnuovo), separated by war at the height of their passion, only to become genial strangers. Let us exult in the shameless grandiloquence of Michel Legrand's score, which might seem overemphatic backing the union of Queen Elizabeth and God. Avert your eyes when we begin sniffling at what appears to be nothing more than a shot of a pastel-blue wall. (That's all it is.)

Above all, don't be surprised if Cherbourg's heartbreaking amalgam of joie de vivre and malaise gradually wears down your defenses. Yes, it can take a while to adjust to the patter-song format, in which even such humdrum lines as "What are you doing tonight?" are delivered with a cheery trill. Yes, the plot is simple to the point of being skeletal. But rarely, at least since the end of the silent era, have the movies produced such a stirring, unabashedly sincere display of pure feeling, represented in color, movement and song. Even the most cynical viewer, if he's not careful, may find himself overwhelmed.

Time Out

In the garage where he works, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) plans a trip to the opera. His colleague is unimpressed: ‘All that singing’s a pain – I prefer movies.’ ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’, it’s safe to say, would not be for him: every line of dialogue (including his own complaint) is sung to Michel Legrand’s melodious songbird score. That’s not to say Jacques Demy’s 1964 favourite is an exercise in whimsy: it might start in the key of blissful romance – between gorgeous Guy and Catherine Deneuve’s luminous Geneviève, daughter of the widowed proprietress of the titular shop – but it stealthily proceeds to such mundanities as teenage pregnancy, conscription and lives divergent. Like ‘Billy Liar’ – made around the same time – ‘Umbrellas’ makes escapist play with the stuff of kitchen-sink social realism. It’s an approach signalled in the overhead shots of the opening credits, which find pattern and grace in everyday comings and goings, and mirrored by the heightened mise-en-scène: working for the first time in colour, Demy’s supersaturated palette flirts with vulgarity, the wardrobe’s rich hues fabulously coordinated with the decor (Geneviève’s mother is especially well matched to her flock wallpaper). As the story progresses, the tension between romance and reality – between the dreamlike aspiration of the musical mode and the sad getting-on-with-itness of the characters’ lives – only increases. But which life doesn’t sometimes squirm between secret hope and worldly frustration? When the film’s attention turns to Algeria – the action takes place from 1957 to 1963, at the climax of the French colonial crisis – you wonder what kind of songs they sing in the casbah.

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

Jacques Demy is a cinematic alchemist. Ever present in his body of work is an uncanny ability to transform or combine standard, even banal, elements of various genres into 'gold'--or, rather, something so luminous and rarefied that it can only be Demy who's created it. THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is arguably the best of his films, and almost certainly the first film of his to so fully bend genre and style convention. Demy was both inspired by and considered to be a member of the French New Wave, and along with several of his peers, had an unabashed love for Hollywood studio musicals of the era. Demy's most 'New Wave-ish' films preceded THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG; LOLA (1960) and BAY OF ANGELS (1962) were shot in black and white, and dealt more straightforwardly with themes inherent to the movement. Both hinted at Demy's progression, but THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, when viewed in the context of his first three features, certainly stands out. (It's also his first film in color.) In an essay about the film for the Reader, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum admitted that he originally considered it to be a commercial sellout, comparing it to other "corny pretenders" allegedly borne of the New Wave but merely ascribing the label where it didn't belong. Demy's vision, especially in his later films, is understandably confounding, as he uses elements that, when mixed, shouldn't create gold. Virtually undefinable, THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is neither just a musical nor entirely an opera. The film's narrative is completely conveyed through song, with a jazzy score by longtime Demy collaborator Michel Legrand providing the music against which the sung dialogue is set. It's about a young couple, Guy and Genevieve; she's the too-young daughter of an overbearing mother who owns an umbrella shop in Cherbourg, he's a mechanic who hasn't yet served his time with the French military. Their courtship is shown in the first part of the film, titled "Departure." Naturally, he's drafted to fight in the Algerian War and soon thereafter Genevieve learns she is pregnant. In this part, titled "Absence," Genevieve's mother compels her to consider the overtures of a well-to-do jeweler while Genevieve wonders if her and Guy's love is waning. (It was common among the New Wave filmmakers to reference other movies and characters in their own films, and here Demy references himself. The jeweler, Roland Cassard, was a suitor of Lola's in LOLA, and Lola herself returns in Demy's 1969 film MODEL SHOP.) Genevieve soon gives in to Roland, who accepts that she is pregnant with another man's child. In the third and final part, "Return," Guy is back from the war and spiraling out of control, likely due to Genevieve's desertion. The ending is bittersweet and surprisingly cynical, two hallmarks of Demy's romantic pragmatism. It has this in common with his previous films, and somewhat separates it from his 1967 film THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT, in which all is happy in the end despite Demy's overall tone of deceptively joyful endurance. This and THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT are noted for their use of color, but the color schemes in each are distinct. In the latter, the fluffier of the two, sunny pastels and bright whites obscure any hint of grimy realism. In THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, which is more operatic in tone and structure, Demy utilizes bolder, more primary colors. This further allows for hints at the film's fateful bitterness. All that glitters is gold in Demy's world, but his is a gold that illuminates the screen while implying its own artifice.

"The Past Recaptured" by Terrence Rafferty - Reocities Terrence Rafferty from The New Yorker, April 15, 1996

When Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was first released, in 1964, it won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and became an enormous hit in both France and the United States, but the passage of time has been cruel to this lovely and fragile picture. Because the film was shot in the notoriously unstable Eastman colour process, its glorious colours quickly faded. The prints deteriorated so badly that no self-respecting revival-house programmer would dare show them, and the home video that was dumped on the American market in the mid-eighties was a disgrace: Demy's vibrant images look smudged and runny, like Matisse sketches left out in the rain. Some great films can survive any indignity, but The Umbrellas of Cherbourg—a stylized, unabashedly emotional story of lost love, in which all the dialogue is sung—is much too delicate. It is, in fact, just the sort of movie that viewers tend not to trust their memories of, suspecting that the feelings it once stirred up will now seem inexplicable, even embarrassing. And the movie is too eccentric and, for all its formal audacity, too innocent of theory to fit into film historians' tidy frameworks. (James Monaco's 1976 critical study, The New Wave, for instance, dismisses it as an "operatic fairy tale" and compares it unfavourably with Godard's self-conscious, intellectualized musical A Woman Is a Woman.) A completely restored print of Umbrellas, from negatives that Demy prudently saved, is now showing in New York (at Film Forum), and will be circulating throughout the country in the next few months. The revival is gratifying proof that intense youthful passions aren't necessarily foolish ones. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a sight for sore eyes.   

Demy's movie has, in fact, aged as gracefully as its impossibly beautiful leading lady, Catherine Deneuve, who was only twenty years old when the picture was released. Her character, Geneviève, is seventeen when the film begins—a restless provincial girl who rebels against her overprotective widowed mother (Anne Vernon) by stepping out with a handsome auto mechanic named Guy (Nino Castelnuovo). In the early scenes, Geneviève and Guy are idealized, movie-mythic young lovers, rushing across rainy nighttime streets into each other's arms, strolling and singing on the docks of the harbour, and professing their undying passion at every opportunity. The music (by Michel Legrand) that accompanies their courtship alternates between ebullient Latin-accented jazz and swoony Gallic balladry, and thus expresses both the bursting exuberance and the exquisite pain of adolescent love. Everywhere Geneviève and Guy go, they're surrounded by bright springtime colours, as if their story were taking place not in a small, dull English Channel port city but in a kind of garden. And Demy tracks the characters' progress with sinuous gliding camera movements that, like the music and the colours, seem to transform the most mundane details into manifestations of earthly grace. Demy's style, a lyrical refinement of the conventions of Hollywood musicals, is riskier than it appears: romanticism in such a pure form is easy to sneer at.   

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, that is, leaves itself vulnerable to the charge that it's merely a sweet, pretty, gooey confection. It's a picture that dares to evoke strong, basic emotions, and Demy obviously doesn't care if he's considered naïve. Or perhaps he simply couldn't help himself. It was clear from his first feature, Lola (made three years before Umbrellas), that his aesthetic aims were crucially different from those of New Wave peers like Godard and Truffaut and Chabrol. Unlike those directors, he had never been a film critic. He loved American movies as much as they did, but, while they played with and commented on Hollywood genres in their own films, Demy actually tried to re-create the kinds of movies that inspired him: romances, musicals, fairy tales. In Jacquot de Nantes, the superb 1991 biographical film made by his widow, Agnès Varda (he died in 1990), the young Demy is portrayed not as an intellectual cinéaste but as a dreamy, solitary craftsman, teaching himself film technique in a loft above his family's service station and auto-repair shop. Lola, set in Nantes, imagines his home town as the setting of a contemporary fairy-tale romance, in which the heroine, a night-club dancer, pines for the man who left her seven years earlier, and is rewarded for her heart's fidelity: out of the blue, her lost love returns, having made his fortune, and sweeps her away in a white Cadillac convertible. The black-and-white cinematography, by Raoul Coutard, gives Lola the natural-light look of a New Wave film, but Demy's picture has a classical structure and a unity of tone that set it apart from the work of his more freewheeling contemporaries.   

In a way, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a much more pessimistic film than Lola. Here first love turns out to be transitory, and, when it passes, the young lovers—contrary to their romantic expectations—do not wither and die. In fact, the hero of Lola, Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), who lost Lola to her first love, turns up in Umbrellas and gets the girl. While Guy is in the Army, fighting in Algeria, Geneviève discovers that she's pregnant, and, under pressure from her mother, who has serious financial problems, she accepts the proposal of polite, prosperous Roland. (If you've seen Lola, you have to be happy for him.) What's really surprising about Umbrellas is that the movie doesn't condemn Geneviève for turning her back on Guy: Demy shows how anxiety, absence, and the hero's erratic letter-writing combine to erode the force of Geneviève's feelings—not completely, but enough for her to be able to imagine life without him. And Guy, it turns out, can manage quite nicely without her. After his return, he goes through a short spell of bitterness and mild dissipation, then pulls himself together and marries his late godmother's nurse, Madeleine (Ellen Farner), who, once Geneviève has cleared out, is the most beautiful girl in town. The movie's final scene—an awkward, rueful chance meeting of the former lovers, years later—pretty much guaranteed to send audiences out of the theatre in tears, but it isn't tragic. Although the first great passion has faded, this isn't grand opera, in which lovers have to die. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is more like a perfect pop song, in the French style: the disappointed lover survives to declare "Je ne regrette rien" and almost mean it.   

Now that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg can again be seen as Demy intended it to be seen (the restoration, which he began shortly before his death, was completed by Varda with help from Legrand), it's hard to avoid thinking that the movie's reputation as a sentimental, crowd-pleasing novelty item is a gross injustice. And as you watch Deneuve's alert, sensitive performance it seems inconceivable that in the sixties she was often condescended to as merely an extraordinary camera object, cold and inexpressive. It's as if both the movie and its star were being punished for the miraculous simplicity—the sheer obviousness—of their beauty. In the context of the New Wave, Demy's accessibility and scrupulous craftsmanship were always anomalous: his method in Umbrellas—having the actors' movements determined by a pre-recorded score—necessarily precluded the kind of loose-limbed, improvisatory style that made other young auteurs' movies seem so fresh and liberating. Today's audiences might not be as conscious of the differences between Demy and his colleagues, and therefore might be better prepared to accept the idiosyncratic and highly wrought, but very real, imaginative liberation that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg proposes. The film comes now, as it did thirty-two years ago, out of an enchanted nowhere—out of Jacques Demy's dream of an ideal union between movies and ordinary life. It's been a long time since a movie has carried us away in a white Cadillac with the top down, and it was worth the wait.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: A Finite Forever Criterion essay by Jim Ridley July 23, 2014

Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014

The Essential Jacques Demy Packaging photo gallery, July 22, 2014

On Set with Jacques Demy photo gallery, August 01, 2014

Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! photo gallery, December 22, 2014

Restoring The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Criterion video, July 21, 2014

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) - The Criterion Collection

Songs in the Key of Everyday Life - JonathanRosenbaum.com May 17, 1966

Senses of Cinema Peter Kemp from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

not coming to a theater near you Ben Ewing

The House Next Door Veronika Ferdman

The Village Voice [Jessica Winter]

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg | DVD Video Review | Film @ The ... Anthony Nield from The Digital Fix

The Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray

Criterion Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ... Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray

Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray

THE DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion Blu-Ray

Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Verdict Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Kinocite Nicola Osborne

Review for Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) - IMDb Dragan Antulov

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson

digitallyOBSESSED.com Jon Danziger

Thoughts on Stuff Patrick

Epinions [metalluk]

Edwin Jahiel

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - Movie Lists - AMC Mark Athitakis

Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown]

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) - Articles - TCM.com Felicia Feaster

CineScene.com Chris Dashiell

Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz

Movie Habit Marty Mapes

DVD Town Yunda Eddie Feng

Film Monthly Jerome de Groot

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Movie Martyr Jeremy Heilman

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Eye for Film Nicola Osborne

DVD Verdict Bryan Pope

Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson

rec.arts.movies.reviews Jerry Saravia

rec.arts.movies.reviews Steve Rhodes

VideoVista Steven Hampton

Variety

Guardian/Observer

Sunday Telegraph [Anne Billson]

Baltimore City Paper Bret McCabe

Washington Post Hal Hinson

Austin Chronicle Steve Davis

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1996

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] in 2004

Criterion's "The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski

New York Times Bosley Crowther

The New York Times A.O. Scott

DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review by Gary Tooze

THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (Les demoiselles de Rochefort) A 100

France (124 mi) 1967 ‘Scope

Filmed after the international success of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964), one of the most lavishly colorful films ever made, where nothing is spoken, everything is sung, this is another Demy musical with Catherine Deneuve, also long unavailable, lovingly restored in 1996 by his widow, Agnès Varda, and a hit in France, the film was originally released in America with an English dubbed version that was so poorly received in 1968 that Demy’s career never recovered. THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT centers on, of course, the beautiful young girls, where the main attraction is the adorable sisters, blond Catherine Deneuve and her older sister, red-haired Françoise Dorléac, at ages 24 and 25, both stars from their teens, but this is the only time they worked together onscreen. Co-starring as singing and dancing twins, culminating in a show-stopping final number together, both wearing glittering, skin-tight, slit-to-the-thigh matching red gowns, inspired by Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe’s musical duo “Two Little Girls from Little Rock” from GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953) Two little girls from little rock video - Tunesbaby.com YouTube (2:40). Dorléac played Jean-Paul Belmondo’s stubborn girlfriend in Philippe de Broca’s THAT MAN FROM RIO (1964), also Truffaut’s mistress in THE SOFT SKIN (1964), and the young wife in Polanski’s CUL DE SAC (1966) before dying in a car crash the year this film was released. For years, Deneuve was too distraught about her sister’s death to even discuss her. Demy originally contemplated using Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn as the two sisters. Of note, Bardot was paired successfully with Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle’s comic revolutionary romp VIVA MARIA! (1965). Because of Demy’s insistence upon using American singer/dancer Gene Kelly, production had to wait two years until Kelly was free of other commitments, making him 54 at the time of the shoot, yet seeing him effortlessly dancing down the street recalls the vibrancy of AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951). Jacques Perrin also appears as a young sailor and artist who paints his ideal woman without ever actually seeing her, but nonetheless keeps searching for her, looking exactly like Deneuve, though they’ve never met, becoming one of the many missed connections of the film. One of Perrin’s first acting roles was working with Valerio Zurlini in GIRL WITH A SUITCASE (1961), playing a romantic lead opposite an enthralling Claudia Cardinale, becoming an actor/producer on the Costa-Gavros thriller Z (1969), where more recently he co-directed the sensational bird documentary WINGED MIGRATION (2001).

This film reunites director-writer-lyricist Demy with musical composer Michel Legrand, offering one of their finest and jazziest scores, which plays over an odd combination of spoken dialogue mixed with what appears to be spontaneous moments expressed in song or dance, where characters at random form dancing combinations, seen twirling or spinning down the streets, often dancing or skipping out of the frame, where the streets are alive with continuous dance movements, all decked out in pastel colors, where the intoxicating, lighter-than-air mood of musical fantasia becomes the collective mindset of the movie. The film was shot on location in the colorful port city of Rochefort, chosen because of its size and its central square where most of the action takes place, where Production Designer Bernard Evein repainted 40,000 square meters of the city’s façades, where the color white has never been more prominently featured and where every fire hydrant was painted a different pastel color, where Demy treats the town of Rochefort as if the city were a set built specifically for him and his movie. The film takes place over a weekend celebrating the French holiday Fête de la Mer (Festival of the Sea), opening and closing with the arrival and departure of a caravan of trucks, motorcycles and horses, including two American actors, George Chakiris, Bernardo from WEST SIDE STORY (1961) and also Grover Dale, and later Gene Kelly, who choreographs his own dances, seen driving a white convertible, where all arrive on a movable transporter bridge that acts as a drive-on ferry, where cars are seen driving past white clad sailors, white boats, white buildings, men and women dressed in white, until they arrive in the huge white colored city square where the sailors do an improvisational dance in front of the fountains with bright leotarded young girls 『The Young Girls of Rochefort』 Arrival of the Drymen - YouTube (3:34). Demy’s grand, colorful, and unorthodox approach pays tribute to the American musical, yet mixes in French poetic realism, where dreams and reality coexist, though this may be Demy’s most exhilarating and cheerfully optimistic film, literally bursting with life and joy, a delirious expression where pure emotions are translated into motion and music, the essence and lifeblood of a Hollywood musical.

The look Demy was after owes something equally to French filmmakers Max Ophuls and Jacques Tati, his mentor, where the film specifically recalls the charming allure of Tati’s JOUR DE FÊTE (1949), but also Americans Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, as Demy was a great admirer of the Golden Age of MGM musicals, creating a bliss-drenched realm of pinks and gold, where work is viewed as confining, so characters come alive with a kind of French gaiety that refuses to allow anxiety and distress to interfere with their otherwise sunny lives, where life is always upbeat in heavy anticipation of love and romance, not to mention Deneuve and Dorléac, who always seem to be just around the corner. One of the many wonders of the film is watching how each of the women carefully selects some outrageously fashionable hat to wear before they show themselves to the world outside, where they literally decorate themselves in matching colors. Danielle Darrieux, playing the mother to the twin sisters, is the only one of the performers in the film who does all her own singing, while Demy’s real-life wife Agnès Varda can be seen making a cameo as one of the nuns visiting a music shop run by a young Michel Piccoli, seen with dairk hair and thick sideburns. The construction of the film bears an artistic similarity with Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994), another film that features an elaborate choreography of near misses, showing ships passing in the night, where key couples continually criss-cross past one another throughout the story, usually just missing one another as they go about their daily routines, so caught up in everyday life to notice what might be waiting for them just around the corner. This becomes part of the fun of the picture, as lovers meant to be, in the storybook sense, keep missing one another. Certainly a central theme is the frustration of searching for and just missing romance, where so many of the songs express a lost or missing love, yet they all yearn for that elusive kind of love expressed in Hollywood musicals that doesn’t actually exist in real life, where lost in the façade of candy-colored artificiality is seeing through the dream, where as in all Demy musicals there are dark undertones to all the bright sunniness. This hyper-expressive, positively enchanting narcotic of a rapturous, over-the-top musical best expresses that idyllic dream of youth (where one can hope, can’t they?), which may never come true, but when we’re young, catching someone’s eye, or observing someone in close quarters, the instantaneous reverie and fantasia of love has been and will always be there in our collective imaginations, dreamily wondering what may happen, or if this is just another one of those missed opportunities.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Michael Castelle

Jacques Demy, in the preparation for his follow-up to the downbeat psychedelic jazz opera UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, reportedly waited two years to cast Gene Kelly as a love-struck American composer in this symmetrical ensemble of Crayola-coded seaside romantics--a move which helps place the perpetually sunny ROCHEFORT as one of the best "date movies" in Demy's otherwise surprisingly existentialist oeuvre. Taking place over the course of one weekend in and about the town square of the namesake Atlantic seaport, the film literally "transports" us (via the opening crane shots on an extended mechanical gondola) into a harmonious lattice of unresolved heterosexual affinities established through two complete hours of straight-faced song and dance in Iambic hexameter. With each character in the network colored fairly exclusively by garish pastel wardrobe signifiers (e.g. Catherine Deneuve's canary yellow and her sister Françoise Dorléac's lavender), the viewer--at least on the big screen--can relax their focus on the protagonists and enjoy the kaleidoscopic spectacle of public space dispersed into a chromatic orgy of pirouetting passersby. Initially criticized for a level of semi-professionalism unworthy of its ostensive Hollywood musical progenitors, the essentially half-assed choreography remains one of the film's most glorious attributes--a singular mode of expression that attempts to dissolve the distinction between the individual and the collective. And in a tableau that reduces the missed connections of a complex urbanity into the orchestrations of 8-10 amorous souls, Michel Legrand's hyperactive score projects a traditional musical narrative into just four or five essential themes that mirror and overlap each other in tandem; behold, the first (and last) great fugue musical. (1967, 125 min, 35mm)

Girlstown - - Movies - New York - Village Voice Girlstown, by Amy Taubin from The Village Voice, August 25, 1998 (excerpt)

A sequel of sorts to Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort is the most outrageous argument against the little black dress ever committed to film. Made in 1967, just three years after Umbrellas, the film is a showcase for two ingenue beauties, Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac, who twirl through their scenes in sleeveless sherbet-colored frocks, matching shoes, and frothy picture hats that set off their pale skin, huge eyes, and chiseled features.

Building on the international success of Umbrellas, Demy threw caution to the wind in this tribute to the American musicals that the French New Wave adored. There are sailors straight out of On the Town (okay, they're French sailors, but it's the way they strut in their tight white pants that matters). Deneuve and Dorléac don red sequined dresses and make like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Demy even got Gene Kelly to play one of the six leading roles.

The slim plot revolves around the twin daughters (Deneuve and Dorléac) of a single mother (Danielle Darrieux) who refused to marry the love of her life because he had the silly surname of "Dame." Unbeknownst to her, Monsieur Dame (Michel Piccoli) is back in town running the music store where her daughters buy their supplies (they give ballet and piano lessons while dreaming of making it big in Paris). In a medium-size town like Rochefort, it's possible that at least some of the people who are meant for one another will cross paths.

The Young Girls is more optimistic, though not necessarily more convincing, than the bittersweet Umbrellas and the earlier Lola. (Demy considered the three films a romantic trilogy.) Michel Legrand's score is a dull rehash of the one he wrote for Umbrellas (the advantage is that you won't wake up for weeks singing "I will wait for you"), and the script is thin and meandering. The American dancer-actors (in addition to Kelly, there's George Chakiris, of West Side Story fame, and Grover Dale) are game but a bit out of their element. The women, however, are wonderful. Darrieux is rueful and worldly-wise (more than anything else in the film, her character is the inspiration for Chantal Akerman's more radical musical The Golden Eighties, a/k/a Window Shopping). Deneuve and Dorléac are stylish, smart, and spirited, and their awkwardness as dancers makes them even more winning.

Awash in lemon and peach, lavender and baby blue, Young Girls of Rochefort floats from one color-coordinated moment to the next. It earns a place in history by virtue of its production design, which, in this newly restored, wide-screen color version, looks more sweetly camp than ever.

Not the Same Old Song and Dance - JonathanRosenbaum.com one of Jonathan’s very best reviews, ever, November 27, 1998, also seen here (pdf format): Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons - Page 228 - Google B

As eccentric as this may sound, Jacques Demy's 1967 Les demoiselles de Rochefort is my favorite musical. Yet despite my 30-year addiction to the two-record sound track, the first time I was able to see the movie subtitled was a couple of weeks ago--helpful considering my faltering French. It's certainly the odd musical out in terms of both its singularity and its North American reputation--a large-scale tribute to Hollywood musicals shot exclusively in Rochefort in southwest France, and an unabashedly romantic paean to American energy and optimism that's quintessentially French. It has a score by Michel Legrand that's easily his best, offering an almost continuous succession of songs with lyrics by Demy, all written in alexandrines (as is a climactic dinner scene that's spoken rather than sung); choreography that ranges from mediocre (Norman Maen's frenchified imitations of Jerome Robbins) to sublime (Gene Kelly's choreography of his own numbers); and perhaps the most beautiful dovetailing of failed and achieved connections apart from Shakespeare and Jacques Tati's Playtime, shot during the same period.

When it comes to charting movie genres and traditions, most of this film's virtues fall off the map. Joseph McBride invited me to contribute to his recently published Book of Movie Lists, and I opted for a list of the ten best jazz films--neither the best films about jazz nor the best examples of filmed jazz but something more rare-fied: movies in which the aesthetics of jazz and the aesthetics of film find some happy, mutually supportive meeting ground. The Young Girls of Rochefort certainly qualifies: from Legrand's improvised piano solos and big-band arrangements to stretches of scat singing and Demy's allusions to Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Lionel Hampton, this movie swings. Even when the choreography is less than it might have been, Demy's sweeping cranes and extended pans and intricate mise en scene cook as infectiously as a first-rate rhythm section. It's also a musical that periodically defamiliarizes--"makes strange"--the form of the musical. Defying the obsessive symmetry and frontality of Hollywood numbers, dancing extras here move at the periphery of the frame in certain shots. There are two cheerful songs about an ax murder, "The Woman Cut Into Pieces" and another just afterward about policing the crowd near the scene of the crime. And Demy's clear tributes to Hollywood musicals--On the Town, An American in Paris, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes--wind up making the movie seem more French than American.

Most musicals shift back and forth between story (spoken dialogue) and song-and-dance numbers--sometimes creating queasy transitions just before or after these shifts, when we're uncertain where we are stylistically. But The Young Girls of Rochefort often daringly places story and musical numbers on the screen simultaneously, mixing them in various ways and in different proportions. One of the stars may be walking down the street, for example, but the pedestrians around her are suddenly dancing, and she slips momentarily in and out of their choreography. This curious mix produces powerful, deeply felt emotions--an exuberance combined with a sublime sense of absurdity, shot through with an almost constant sense of loss, yearning, and even tragedy. Yet the coexistence of this strangeness and this intensity will inevitably make some American viewers laugh in disbelief and regard the whole spectacle as an esoteric piece of camp. (The same problem exists to a lesser extent in two of my favorite American freak musicals, Love Me Tonight and Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, both of which display a related metaphysical impulse to perceive the musical form as a continuous state of delirious being rather than a traditional story with musical eruptions.)

Some American viewers may find it difficult to feel their way into such an aesthetic overload. In France the film was revived regularly even before its 1996 restoration by Demy's widow, Agnes Varda (who has a walk-on as a nun). And in her wonderful documentary about the film --The Young Girls Turn 25, which I saw at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1993--we encounter a French teenager with a backpack who proudly and calmly informs us that she carries the CD of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion and the video of Les demoiselles de Rochefort everywhere she goes, unwilling to spend even a night without them. Such a degree of passion about art is bound to seem demented in a "utilitarian" (i.e., money-minded) society such as ours, but it's entirely compatible with the degree of passion expressed in the film itself. And surely the reluctance of some American filmgoers to go with that kind of flow partly accounts for Miramax's refusal to allot any advertising budget to the movie's Chicago engagement.

Received opinion on musicals is that the genre's greatest achievements--such as the entertaining Astaire-Rogers steamrollers and Singin' in the Rain--are triumphs of engineering, coordination, and expertise; it's almost as if we judge this art the way we judge our smart bombs and sporting events. This quantitative aesthetic doesn't allow for the possibility that a musician with limited technique like Thelonious Monk might be a greater pianist than a virtuoso like Oscar Peterson. And unless you conclude that the only reason for "technique" is to express what you want to say, the technical shortcomings of The Young Girls of Rochefort are bound to be disappointing. The verdict of critic Gary Carey in the late 70s is characteristic: "Unfortunately Demy, who had been so good at choreographing the movements of ordinary people through his camera, does not know how to photograph the choreography of dancers. (He doesn't have much of an eye as to what is good choreography and what isn't, either.) The film falls to pieces whenever anyone begins to dance, and since someone is always dancing, it ends as a pile of very pretty rubble." Pauline Kael wrote in separate articles that "a movie like The Young Girls of Rochefort demonstrates how even a gifted Frenchman who adores American musicals misunderstands their conventions" and "it was obvious from Rochefort that [Demy] had--momentarily, I hope--run dry."

Made on the heels of Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which enjoyed worldwide success, this extravaganza--which had a much bigger budget than Cherbourg--might well be considered an attempt to do the impossible if one views it as an imitation of the Hollywood musical rather than an inspired appropriation of some of its elements. It would, of course, be unreasonable to expect a facsimile of the Hollywood musical from a filmmaker with no stage or film-musical experience (apart from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and without the resources of a Hollywood studio or an indigenous tradition. But there's no reason to believe that Demy--a filmmaker with a fully developed style and vision of his own when he made Les demoiselles de Rochefort--intended to reproduce something we already have. An English-language version shot simultaneously--which I've never seen, and which has been so scarce since the 60s it may no longer exist--was a commercial prerequisite for the film getting made, but it was the subtitled version that opened in New York in April 1968. It was so poorly received commercially that Demy's career never fully recovered, and we've had to wait 30 years to see the movie again.

The film unfolds over a single weekend. On Friday morning a team of boat, bicycle, and motorcycle salespeople in trucks and on motorcycles and horses, including Etienne (George Chakiris) and Bill (Grover Dale), arrive in Rochefort by ferry. As they set up their stands and stages in the huge city square for the fair on Sunday afternoon, the camera pans, cranes up, then pans again to the studio where Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) and her twin sister Solange (Francoise Dorleac) are giving a combined music and dance class to kids. We discover that Delphine is a ballet teacher and dancer, Solange a composer and singer, and that both dream of meeting their romantic ideals and moving to Paris. (Deneuve and the late Dorleac--who died in a car accident the same year Les demoiselles was released--were real-life sisters but not twins: Dorleac was one year older than Deneuve. This is their only movie together, though both appeared separately in films by Francois Truffaut and Roman Polanski.)

It turns out that Delphine's ideal man, whom she's never met, is an artist and sailor currently stationed in Rochefort, Maxence (Jacques Perrin): the ideal woman he's painted, whom he's been searching for across the globe, is a dead ringer for Delphine. His canvas hangs in a local gallery run by Delphine's unsuccessful suitor, Guillaume (Jacques Riberolles). The sisters have a ten-year-old half brother named Boubou; their mother, Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux), runs the cafe-restaurant in the city square, which Maxence, Etienne, and Bill all frequent. Unbeknownst to the family, Boubou's father has recently moved back to Rochefort to run a music store; Yvonne had backed out of marrying Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli) years earlier, when she became pregnant with Boubou, because she couldn't face the prospect of being called Madame Dame. Though Simon knew she'd had twins by a former lover, he'd never seen them, so when Solange comes to his shop and they become acquainted, he has no idea that she's one of Yvonne's daughters.

It's love at first sight when Solange encounters an old friend of Simon Dame--famous American composer and concert pianist Andy Miller (Gene Kelly)--while she's collecting Boubou from school. She has no idea this man is Miller, whom she wanted to meet so he could hear her piano concerto. They don't exchange names or addresses, but he has a page from her score, which she inadvertently leaves behind. Meanwhile, when two of the young women in the show planned for the Sunday fair run off with a couple of sailors, Etienne and Bill convince Delphine and Solange to stage a number in their stead, promising them a free ride to Paris afterward... Apart from the ax murder and periodic dark reminders of the nearby soldiers in training, both of which further develop the theme of thwarted desire, these are the basic elements of the plot, and Yvonne's cafe on the square is the hub of all the complex comings and goings. (Like many of the buildings in Playtime, this freestanding structure has huge glass windows, allowing us to see much of the surrounding traffic.) But to summarize these intricate moves, characters who are ideally suited keep missing each other as they go about their daily routines; in most cases they don't even realize that they're occupying the same city. And even though The Young Girls of Rochefort is on all counts Demy's most optimistic film--the one in which every character eventually finds the person she or he is looking for--the missed connections preceding this resolution are relentless, and one may still wind up with a feeling of hopeless despair despite the overdetermined happy ending. Indeed, the split second by which Maxence misses Delphine at the cafe before he's shipped away might well be the most tragic single moment in all Demy's work, perhaps even surpassing the grisly suicide at the end of Un chambre en ville. By contrast, when the "ideal couple" do eventually meet (an event represented only obliquely) in the film's final shot, it's a simple concession to musical-comedy convention, registering only as a sort of offhand diminuendo and postscript; what reverberates more decisively is the sense of dreams just missing realization.

In fact the movie overall leaves one in a unique manic-depressive state, a kind of poetic fugue in which boundless despair and exuberant optimism coexist. This is Demy's vision of life--Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are suffused with much the same ambiguous mixture--but thanks to Legrand's buoyant score and the size of the canvas, The Young Girls of Rochefort conveys it with unparalleled vibrancy and luminosity. If songs and dances represent fantasy, and everyday activities reality, it can't be said that Demy ever privileges one over the other; he's more concerned with how fantasy and reality interact, or fail to interact. One might say that the missed connections in the film represent reality--the characters are too engrossed by everyday life to see that their ultimate dreams are only a block or so away--and that the eventual successful connections represent fantasy, the dreamlike closure of musical comedy. But in fact Demy is a much subtler dialectician, converting the Cartesian principle of French life and culture--"I think, therefore I am"--into "I dream, and dreaming is a part of life, therefore I live." Furthermore, by staging all his musical numbers in real locations rather than on sets, Demy deliberately mixes his modes, with the result that the missed connections are as much a function of his mise en scene as the chance encounters. A poetic realist as well as a dreamer, Demy confused some audiences and critics throughout his career, much as his mentor Tati did, by keeping a firmer grip on the realities he was filming than many were prepared to see at the time. For viewers trained to regard fantasy as an alternative to reality rather than part of the reality of consciousness, Demy's mixture is bound to seem jarring--though it may also jar one into perceiving a richer reality than most entertainments acknowledge.

The film's chance encounters and missed connections are expressed not only spatially but musically, in the score and in Demy's delicately crafted lyrics. Maxence's song about his search is reprised as Delphine's song about her own longings; Simon's account of his lost love becomes, with appropriate alterations in the lyrics, Yvonne's own regrets about having abandoned him; Solange's piano concerto takes on lyrics after Andy intercepts the score. Many other reprises are less obvious than these. The song that goes with policing the crowd, for instance, reprises and adds lyrics to a secondary theme from the opening dance number in the city square. Both sequences emphasize community over individual destiny: here, as elsewhere in the film, Legrand and Demy enrich the meaning of other scenes by playing with the emotional and thematic effects of rhyme.

Masterpieces normally connote perfection, but it might be argued that some of the imperfections in The Young Girls of Rochefort enhance the overall experience by bringing it closer to life, making the actors seem more vulnerable. (Other imperfections, like the product plugs during the climactic fair--another parallel with Playtime, given some of its neon signs--are simple reminders of the difficulties of making big-budget French movies.) Darrieux, for instance, is the only cast member who does her own singing, though the dubbing of the others is usually carried out well, with the actors' singing voices carefully matched to their speaking voices (including Kelly's spoken French). More artificial are Delphine's and Solange's performances on trumpet and flute. Yet given some of Demy's original plans for the movie, it's a miracle it turned out as well as it did. Before he selected Rochefort as his location, he considered making "Les demoiselles d'Avignon," "Les demoiselles d'Hyeres," "Les demoiselles de Toulouse," and "Les demoiselles de La Rochelle," among others. Rochefort won out because of the size of its central square, though production designer Bernard Evein found it necessary to repaint 40,000 square meters of the city's facades. (Still, director Andre Techine has cited the movie as one of the best ever made about this part of France.) Even more improbable, Demy originally thought of casting Brigitte Bardot and Geraldine Chaplin as the twin sisters.

Demy also planned to make more extensive references to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg by casting Nino Castelnuovo, the hero of that film, as Bill. When Castelnuovo proved unavailable, Demy had to change the script. But it's worth pointing out that the offscreen victim of the ax murder is Lola, the title heroine of Demy's first feature, and there are many other allusions to earlier Demy films throughout: According to critic Jean-Pierre Berthome, the three successive endings of The Young Girls of Rochefort replicate the final shots of Bay of Angels, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Lola. And both Lola and The Young Girls of Rochefort associate Americans with white convertibles.

Given the extraordinary lift Gene Kelly gives the movie, it's hardly surprising that Demy wanted him from the outset, though he had to wait two years before Kelly was free of other commitments. Indeed, Kelly brings to the movie the kind of boundless elation musicals exist to produce, as do Chakiris and Dale, the other two American dancers featured, though to a lesser extent. Indeed, it's the combination of this spirit with the soul of the French cast that gives The Young Girls of Rochefort its distinctive flavor. Like the pairing of Jean Seberg with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, or the mating of a David Goodis plot with Charles Aznavour's mug in Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, this combination provides the kind of combustion that powered the French New Wave and the general reinvention of movie energy in the 1960s. Godard and Truffaut may have watered the roots, but it was Demy who produced this relatively late blooming flower, combining the virtues of the Hollywood musical with French poetic realism to produce these fresh, colorful petals.

Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014

The Essential Jacques Demy Packaging photo gallery, July 22, 2014

On Set with Jacques Demy photo gallery, August 01, 2014

A Splash of Red photo gallery, May 08, 2014

Demy Monde Criterion video, August 05, 2014

The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) - The Criterion Collection

Senses of Cinema – Les Demoiselles de Rochefort Rodney F. Hill, April 2010

Tao Yue

The color of love - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek from Salon, September 18, 1998

Only the Cinema [Ed Howard]

THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (Jacques Demy, 1967 ... Dennis Grunes

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson

Young Girls of Rochefort (1967, Jacques Demy) | Brandon's movie ... Brandon’s Movie Memory

DVD Times [Anthony Nield]

The Young Girls of Rochefort (No. 59) | Wonders in the Dark James Clark

The Young Girls of Rochefort (no 8) | Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish

The Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray

Criterion Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ... Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray

Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray

THE DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion Blu-Ray

Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Verdict Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray

FilmFanatic.org

rec.arts.movies.reviews Harvey S. Karten

James Bowman

Movie Habit [Marty Mapes]

The Crop Duster [Robert Horton]

young girls of rochefort | imodernreview July 3, 2012

Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz

The Movie Report/Mr. Brown's Movie Site [Michael Dequina]

The Young Girls of Rochefort - Film Society of Lincoln Center

The Spinning Image Andrew Pragasam

The Lumière Reader » Film » The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) Brannavan Gnanalingam

Young Girls of Rochefort - DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen

Les demoiselles de Rochefort Blu-ray (France) - Blu-ray.com

the act of seeing with one's own eyes: the young girls of rochefort Jaime

Movies About Girls Ken McIntyre

The Young Girls Of Rochefort - JonathanRosenbaum.com (capsule review)

The Portage Theater: Events Kyle Westphal

Oscar Movies: The Young Girls of Rochefort - Emanuel Levy

Jacques_Demy_AT2008 - American Cinematheque

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

The Young Girls of Rochefort - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on ... Mubi

The Young Girls Of Rochefort Review TV Guide

Variety

Time Out David Jenkins

The Daily Telegraph Sukhdev Sandhu

San Francisco Chronicle [Octavio Roca]

Criterion's "The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski

The New York Times Renata Adler, also seen here: Screen: Offbeat, Dreamlike Musical; Demy's 'Young Girls of Rochefort'

The New York Times Film Reviews: 1999-2000 - Page 58 - Google Books R

DVDBeaver [Stan Czarnecki]

The Young Girls of Rochefort: Information from Answers.com

MODEL SHOP

France USA (95 mi) 1969

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Demy's only - and underrated - American film may lack the fairytale charm of his finest French work, but the bitter-sweet delicacy of tone and acute feeling for place are at once familiar. Aimée's Lola, abandoned by her lover Michel, has now turned up in LA where, older and sadder, she works in a seedy photographer's shop, and brings brief respite to a disenchanted young drifter (Lockwood) with whom she has a one night stand. Unlike Antonioni with Zabriskie Point, Demy never even tries to deal with the malaise afflicting American youth in the '60s, but gives us yet another (relatively plotless) tale of transient happiness and love lost. It's also one of the great movies about LA, shown for once as a ramshackle, rootless sprawl, where movement on the freeways (accompanied by the sounds of West Coast band Spirit) is seemingly endless.

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Whether positive or negative in outlook—and whether helmed by insiders or outsiders—most of the late-’60s/early-’70s movies that dealt with the American counterculture tended to adopt a tourist’s point of view, treating the long hair, music, drugs, and revolutionary rhetoric as curiosities, to be feared or forgiven. Whatever the failings of Jacques Demy’s lone American film, Model Shop—which is far from perfect—it’s one of the few movies about life in 1969 Los Angeles that feels like a documentary, not a re-enactment. Demy follows unemployed architecture student Gary Lockwood as he drives around the city, trying to bum some cash to make an overdue payment on his roadster. Along the way, he hangs out with his pals at a local underground newspaper, hears the latest from a buddy who fronts the real-life rock band Spirit, and gets into a raging fight with his aspiring actress girlfriend Alexandra Hay, who blasts him for his lack of ambition and for some pictures he took of scantily clad model Anouk Aimée. This all takes place on the day Lockwood hears that his draft board has summoned him to take his physical. There’s big doings afoot, all in some way associated with the turmoil in the culture at large. Yet Demy only treats the times as a backdrop for another one of his studies of delirious, illogical passion.

Model Shop’s main stumbling blocks are its performances and dialogue. Demy reportedly wrote the script in his native French and had it translated, and the result is a talky film in which all the chatter is flat and on-point, with none of the conversational nuance that a native speaker might’ve brought. The movie builds to a long scene where Lockwood talks with Aimée about his dreams, while she lays out her intention to return to France to be with her son. Aimée is playing the same character she played in Demy’s film Lola, and though one of the main points of the scene is to catch Demy fans up on what the character has been up to, Model Shop grinds to a halt while the two actors spend 20 minutes delivering stiff line-readings just past each other. Prior to that though, Demy shows a remarkable feel for the people and the place he’s exploring, and he evokes hippie-era L.A. with none of the heavy-handedness of Michelangelo Antonioni’s similar Zabriskie Point. From the moment Lockwood spots Aimée on the street and follows her from a mansion in the hills to a seedy nude-photography studio, Demy concerns himself with the geographic and architectural diversity of Los Angeles, and showing how the young people of the era were making it their home.

Boiling Sand [Doug Bonner]

The final (and rarest) episode of director Jacques Demy’s Lola film trilogy has made its home video debut this month.   Unlike the first two, MODEL SHOP was in English and shot in Southern California.  

1961’s LOLA was the story of Roland and his love for the cabaret ‘entertainer’ Lola in the director’s hometown of Nantes.   Their affair ended when the father of Lola’s illegitimate son arrived back on the scene.  Then in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, Lola was only referred in song by Roland, who by now was a Parisian jewel dealer.  Roland married Catherine Deneuve’s character, Geneviève, fully aware she was pregnant by another man.  Lastly MODEL SHOP picked up the story of Lola, who had come to the US with a lover who later abandoned her.  She’s now working in a rent-a-model storefront near Crescent Heights Boulevard where can’t-get-laid guys dress her up in fetish-wear and photograph her with cameras rented at the front counter.

The movie has been pretty much universally panned, but those slings and arrows were mainly coming from the popular critical viewpoint of judging movies by the standards of 19th Century novels, where narrative thrust and character development are supreme.   But MODEL SHOP isn’t that kind of movie.   Bay Area filmmaker Jon Jost (ALL THE VERMEERS IN NEW YORK) once said that each film is a worldview.   I agree.   Every movie is a statement on how cruel or forgiving the world is, how dangerous it is or isn’t, how available sex is or isn’t, how much Life supports or roadblocks you, etc.  

MODEL SHOP‘s worldview is a worthy one.  An expansive, accessible, mobile world grounded in an urban SoCal landscape painted with a palette of tabby.   Transversing a more-or-less 24 hour period a guy named George (Gary Lockwood from Kubrick’s 2001) catches sight of Lola (as in the first movie, played again by Anouk Aimée), follows her, beds her, loses her.   [According to IMDB, Harrison Ford was the first choice for the male lead but wasn’t considered a bankable actor yet.]   Demy’s love of classic Hollywood is the springboard for the story, as George’s day begins like William Holden’s in SUNSET BOULEVARD with a couple of guys coming to his door to repossess his convertible.   Driving away from the creditors to ask friends for money to pay the repo guys, he sights Lola and follows her in the style of James Stewart tailing Kim Novak in VERTIGO.  

There is a deep love, not only of movies, but of Los Angeles itself in this film.   Both Lola and George speak of the city’s beauty.   (George is an architect and has some lines about the beauty of its grid.)   Lola is first seen swathed in white walking across a pay-by-the-hour asphalt parking lot; yet through Demy’s eyes the image is pure fantastic beauty.   Even the Car Culture becomes poignant as George parks his beside Lola’s and haltingly, earnestly confesses his newfound love for her as they both stay behind the wheel, comfortably domesticated in their drivers’ seats.   As in real American life, Demy understands the anthropomorphism of autos (hers is a milky-white recent Detroit issue, his a vintage MG, both are convertibles) and what they say about their owners, giving volumes of information about the characters — as much information as a volume filled with Proustian detail.

George and Lola are adrift.   He’s shacked up in a loveless arrangement with a longtime girlfriend.   He’s unemployed because he couldn’t stomach his corporate gig.   And he’s draft-age during the bloodiest time of the Vietnam War.   Lola is stranded, working to save the money for a return ticket to France.   She misses her son back home.   Emotionally hurt, she goes through her life with detachment, keeping her romantic wounds close and life at a distance.

In George’s search to raise money to keep his car, he visits musician friends (the classic ‘sixties band Spirit) and the staff of an underground newspaper.   In 1969, I would have found Demy’s representations of alternative, anti-Establishment Americans superficial; but seeing it now, I acknowledge how many small (superficial?) details were captured by him that convey a deep reality of what 1969 was like.   It reminded me of Chris Marker’s text in SANS SOLEIL:   “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.”   The shots from MODEL SHOP curated a velvety lining of the street-level poetics of late-1960s L.A.

The scenes with the band and at the newspaper office were filmed with real musicians and journalists — in other words, non-professional actors — which, combined with the implausible performance of Alexandra Hay as George’s girlfriend, make the non-Lola/George moments sort of hollow.   (Obviously Demy’s command of English was not strong enough to bring out good line delivery from most of the minor players.)   If performances can make or break a film for you, the supporting cast may make you bail.  Also, the interiors between George and his girlfriend were obviously the last scenes filmed, because Lockwood is shirtless (no complaints there) with a glaringly distracting Farmer’s Tan from shooting exteriors in a convertible wearing the same t-shirt for weeks.

As the film concludes, George’s life collapses in entropy like a Robert Smithson artwork:   his girlfriend has split; his car is repossessed; Lola has left for Paris.   He also gets a note from the draft board to report to the Army induction center for processing into the military:   the qualities of his life are erased in a single day.

More than anything else, the film evokes and parallels the dynamics of a married Gay man’s extramarital one-night stand   (Demy died of AIDS yet was married to fellow filmmaker Agnès Varda):  George’s sudden arresting interest in a passer-by, whom he cruises, eventually breaking the ice; his obsession as he realizes the potential for sex; his rush of emotional liberation when he escapes from his regular life and is alone with the one he wants; the consummated act; then the morning-after of diminished reality as the avenues of his emotional life and personal expression quickly and forcefully are blocked, as he finds the exteriors of his life have sealed him up once more.  

Again, as with most Columbia Studios films released by Sony, the new DVD’s extras are minimal.   Fortunately there are English subtitles (Aimée’s English can be hard to understand at times), and the original trailer is a great artifact of how arty films were marketed in the 1960s.

The Essential Jacques Demy - The Criterion Collection

Next Projection [Adam Kuntavanish]

Jacques Demy's Model Shop and the geography of Los ... Eloise Ross from The Essential

Model Shop - Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

DVD Verdict [Bill Gibron]

DVD Talk Casey Burchby

FilmIntuition.com [Jen Johans]

The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker]

TV Guide

Model Shop | Variety

San Francisco Chronicle G. Allen Johnson

Criterion's "The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski

New York Times Vincent Canby

DVDBeaver [Gary W. Tooze]

Model Shop (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DONKEY SKIN (Peau d'âne)

France (90 mi) 1970

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

Jacques Demy's 1970 musical fantasy, based on Charles Perrault's fairy tale and shot in storybook colors in the forests and castles of the French countryside, could be his answer to Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast." He even casts the Beast himself, Jean Marais, as the King. Though Demy's airy direction is often tongue-in-cheek, his story verges on the perverse. The King promises his dying wife (Catherine Deneuve) that he will only marry someone more beautiful than her, so he settles on his own daughter (Deneuve again, this time in wide-eyed ingénue mode). Fairy godmother Delphine Seyrig sings a song about why girls shouldn't marry their daddies and hides the princess in a forest cottage in a faraway kingdom, where she becomes a veritable Cinderella dressed in a smelly animal hide. It's both innocent and bizarre, with a mischievous sense of fantasy marked by simple but striking cinematic magic (a dress "the color of the weather" with clouds that drift across the material). The film recently was restored and the vibrant costume creations positively shimmer.

Slant Magazine [Dan Callahan]

The films of Jacques Demy have nothing to do with reality; they take adolescent romantic dreams and utterly vindicate them. His first four films (Lola, Bay of Angels, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Young Girls of Rochefort) are all masterpieces. After stumbling a bit with his fifth film, Model Shop, Demy regained his footing with 1970's Donkey Skin, a cool, shimmering version of a classic French fairy tale by Cinderella author Charles Perrault. It features the crème de la crème of French actors (Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Seyrig, Jean Marais, Micheline Presle, and Jacques Perrin) and a score by Demy's frequent collaborator Michel Legrand. For the past few years, Demy's wife, Agnes Varda, has been meticulously restoring Demy's films and then premiering them at Film Forum in New York. She skipped the problematic Model Shop, but hopefully she has plans for Demy's seventh film, The Pied Piper, and Une Chambre en Ville, which is supposedly the best of his late movies.

Donkey Skin begins with the sweet words, "Once upon a time," but the narrator's voice sounds rather detached, almost creepy. Demy focuses intensively on different shades of blue throughout; many in the film's fairy tale kingdom have blue faces, including some dwarves who look like early oompa loompas. The King (Marais) is distraught when his wife (played by Deneuve in a brown wig) dies. In his grief, he turns to his daughter (Deneuve at her blondest) and insists on marrying her, at which point everyone watching should get out their Penguin Freud. Aghast, the Princess is counseled by the Lilac Fairy (Seyrig, wearing her Daughters of Darkness blond marcel wave) to stall her father by asking for lots of specific gowns, then by asking for the skin of his magic donkey, who shits gold and keeps the kingdom in funds. To her horror, he obliges, and the Princess is forced to take refuge as a scullion in the provinces. But a handsome prince in red (Perrin) comes to her rescue, eventually.

Legrand's score is not up to his usual standard for Demy, and there isn't enough of it. But the actors and Demy's color scheme, which includes blue and green iris shots, are striking enough to hide some of the film's weaknesses. Demy's films set in ordinary French seaside towns emphasize the magic of movies and music to romanticize the most provincial locales. In Donkey Skin, he takes a romantic fairy tale and brings it down to earth with prosaic details (modern personal foibles, a late-arriving helicopter). When the old crone the Princess works for spits out toads, it seems the most natural thing in the world, as does the blue and yellow parrot that continually squawks Legrand's anxious love theme.

There's plenty of disguised sex in Donkey Skin. Perrin's prince is addressed by a very vaginal pink rose, the center of which talks at him with a woman's mouth and looks at him with a woman's eyes. When he's trying to find the Princess, he has all the maidens in the kingdom come try on a ring, and the phallic implications are clear. Perrin and Deneuve, who were the perfect blonde couple always missing each other in Rochefort, are pampered and infantile here, but in a way that gives pampered infantilism its due. These spoiled kids are used to indulging themselves; in one wonderful sequence, Perrin does backward somersaults up a hill while Deneuve rolls herself up. Once on top, they stuff themselves with pastries and sing narcissistically of their immortal love. The whole film seems to take place in a refrigerated Disney movie filled with elaborate and cold French desserts and sexual/intellectual French subtexts.

Donkey Skin: Demy’s Fairy-Tale Worlds Criterion essay by Anne E. Duggan, July 28, 2014

Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014

The Essential Jacques Demy Packaging photo gallery, July 22, 2014

On Set with Jacques Demy photo gallery, August 01, 2014

Demy Monde Criterion video, August 05, 2014

Donkey Skin (1970) - The Criterion Collection

Melancholy and Euphoria in the Fairytale: Peau d'âne Fiona A. Villella from Senses of Cinema

DVD Times Anthony Nield

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

The Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray

Criterion Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ... Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray

Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray

THE DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion Blu-Ray

Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Verdict Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]

DVD Town [James Plath]

DVD Verdict [Amanda DeWees]

Mondo Digital

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson)

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

Donkey Skin MaryAnn Johanson

Austin Chronicle [Raoul Hernandez]

The Boston Phoenix A.S. Hamrah

Boston Globe Janice Page

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Criterion's "The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski

THE PIED PIPER

Great Britain USA (90 mi) 1972

Time Out

Pleasence, as the nouveau riche burgomeister of Hamelin, attempts to evade the plague of rats by perching his chair of office in tubs of boiling water; behind him - pulling the strings? - the Church struggles on a knife edge for power. The Pied Piper has everything wrong with it; yet over and over again it will toss up images that take it towards what must have been Demy's intentions. The film is strongest when dealing in his characteristic language of images: the corpse left by the Black Death nestling in the midst of apparent rural bliss, the cathedral-shaped cake that explodes obscenely with live rats. Too often Demy has seemed to be doing little but produce cinematic candy floss; this admittedly imperfect film of Browning's poem is at least trying for more.

Between Productions [Robert Cashill]

One of my movie wishes was fulfilled Monday night. Thanks to Paramount Pictures, which has provided a brand-new archival print, New York'a Anthology Film Archives has been showcasing Jacques Demy's The Pied Piper for what is a de-facto 35th anniversary engagement, which ends this Thursday. My Cineaste colleague and "Anthologist," Jared Rapfogel, tells me that, based on a request from the George Eastman House, Paramount (which almost certainly did not treat the film this cordially in 1972) was happy to provide the print, "so long as more than five people showed up to see it." On a frigid Monday evening, considerably more than five film cultists showed up at the 7pm screening, with many more queuing up in the cold to see the 9pm show; the house was just about full. The opportunity to see one of the great French director's most obscure features (his second, and last, in English) was just too good to pass up, temperatures be damned--though it must be added that the opportunity to see it with its star, the pop troubadour Donovan, in attendance for a Q&A was completely irresistible. Anthology's hook was well-baited for a dead-zone night in February, so out I went.

How far has The Pied Piper fallen off the cinematic radar screen? The plunge is so abyssal I couldn't find a single image on the whole WWW to filch for an illustration; even the star's website has only a single, meager black-and-white photo to show for an experience that he remembers well. [Problem solved, thanks to a reader; see below.] But the image I did swipe (I mean, pick) is at least apt, as the film, co-written by Demy, Andrew Birkin (currently Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which with its mysterious interloper upsetting the bourgeois applecart bears some relationship)and Mark Peploe, of several Bertolucci pictures, quotes from Robert Browning's 1888 poem, as well as the Brothers Grimm story, and applies a critique of 20th century morality to the plotline.

The Pied Piper is one of those pictures that boggles our 21st century minds with its early Seventies G-rating: the atmosphere in the town of Hamelin is seamy, thick with the stench of adult hypocrisy, child exploitation and abuse is rampant, and the most sympathetic character, Michael Hordern's Jewish alchemist (who is unjustly blamed for the rat plague), is burned at the stake at the end--not as horrifyingly as Oliver Reed at the end of Ken Russell's The Devils (1971), maybe, but nothing you'd find as the capper of a Pixar cartoon, either. The entire mood of the piece, indeed, is closer to one of Hammer's pastoral horrors of the time(like Vampire Circus) than any children's film of its (or this) period I can recall, and is much more unsettling than its companion piece, Demy's bizarre and bawdy fable Donkey Skin, which was recently re-released. Today, just the unsavory presence of Donald Pleasence and John Hurt, as the town's most ignoble noble citizens, would land the film a PG-13. But it's Donovan's cheery, reassuring presence that is the film's scariest element; with the rest of the cast, you know where you stand, but there's no telling what goes on behind those mello yellow eyes. (He's no actor, but largely isolated from the rest of the adult cast and given less screen time than you might anticipate, he isn't used for his thespian abilities. His larger contribution, the 15 or so minutes of medieval-flavored score used in the film, is fine.)

And what a supporting cast Demy, the director of one of my very favorite films, the bittersweet and peerless The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) imported to Germany. The late Jack Wild, a Supporting Actor Oscar nominee as the Artful Dodger in Oliver! (1969), had one of his biggest subsequent roles here, aiding Hordern's alchemist. In her first film, 11-year-old Cathryn Harrison (granddaughter of Rex) plays Hurt's intended; believe it or not, it was not her strangest assignment, an honor that goes to Louis Malle's unclassifiable apocalyptic fantasy Black Moon (1975), which will throw you for a loop the next time it airs on the Showtime channels, as it has been lately (every director, it seems, has to make an end-of-the-world type picture; The Pied Piper, which closes with the eruption of the plague and the literal fade-out of Hamelin's children, is Demy's). Burly Peter Vaughan (Straw Dogs and Time Bandits) plays the sanctimoniously red-robed bishop, the one who suggests that Hamelin's rats are a "Jewish problem," and writer-director David Leland (Mona Lisa) has a small part. Roy Kinnear, an indispensable presence in many Richard Lester pictures, is faultless as the fawning, obsequious burgomaster. I especially enjoyed seeing, as his status-conscious wife, none other than Diana "Swingin'" Dors, Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe--that heyday didn't last, but she's funny here, not least when wearing a ram's horn headdress.

The costuming and sets, suggesting a medieval fair, are excellent. But The Pied Piper, as much as I liked seeing it, isn't quite a lost masterpiece. Demy had his DP, Peter Suschitzky (of numerous David Cronenberg films), shoot much of the film at a discreet middle distance, I suppose to capture the actors and settings in different tableaux, like ancient woodcuts; there are few closeups, and little cutting within scenes, and for as stylized as the film is a certain lassitude sets in by the midpoint. And I'm afraid the rats disappoint, as they so often do in movies. On the street, or scurrying about the New York subway tracks, they're properly verminous. But the plump, shiny-coated trained rats used in most films, like his one, are, well, kind of cute. In the film's most memorable image, which I'm sure Werner Herzog had in mind for his Nosferatu remake, they burst forth from a cathedral-shaped wedding cake. That worked, but they otherwise lack menace, a shortcoming of Willard and its sequel, Ben, which were highly popular at that time. There's much to appreciate about this Pied Piper but not much that really appeals. [I should add that the image was lovely but Anthology's sound system couldn't quite handle the audio.]

What, then, of the guest of honor? I've liked Donovan since his song "Atlantis" was used to accompany a ghastly murder in Goodfellas; I don't know if he appreciated that, but as he has no qualms about his biggest hits being recycled in commercials, and being an everthing-is-connected kind of person, I doubt he minded. He resembles a frizzier-haired version of the actor Peter MacNicol, and speaks in a hushed, theatrical cadence, appropriate for a mystic (he and David Lynch are currently odd-coupled trying to get TM taught in schools). He said he had little contact with Demy on set, as he played his part in the overall vision, but that Demy's wife, filmmaker Agnes Varda, was constantly second-guessing him, trying to get Demy to make more of a children's story and less of a modern-day metaphor out of the material. I saw who won that battle.

I asked him about working with the rats. "I had a kind of kinship with them," he said. "One made himself very comfortable on my shoulder. I looked at him and said, 'Who's your agent?'"

BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD Review: Pied Piper (1972) Tim Lucas, July 2008

The Pied Piper Neo-marxist fairy tale, by Reynold Humphries from Jump Cut, 1976

The Pied Piper (1972) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Nathaniel Thompson

Slant Magazine [Dan Callahan]

Film Freak Central Review [Ian Pugh]

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson]

DVD Verdict [Clark Douglas]

DVD Drive-In [George R. Reis]

The Spinning Image [Pablo Vargas]

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings [Dave Sindelar]

allrovi.com [Craig Butler]

TV Guide

Time Out

New York Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W Tooze]

UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE

France Italy (90 mi) 1962

Blood on the Rainbow: Jacques Demy and Une chambre en ... David Melville from Senses of Cinema, April 2010

“There are few films I have so longed to make”, said Jacques Demy of Une chambre en ville. “Few I have dreamed of as much as this.” (1) So it seems oddly fitting that this film – which is rapturously romantic and darkly tragic at the same time – is one of the screen’s all-time great odes to desire. An all-singing opéra populaire set in the director’s home city of Nantes, it tells of the impossible love between a striking metal-worker and an unhappily married bourgeoise. A commercial fiasco on its release (and, arguably, Demy’s last artistic success) it shows desire as an emotion that flourishes where it is most denied – that secret longing inside us that cannot, or must not, be fulfilled.

Although it came late in Demy’s career, Une chambre en ville was in fact his oldest and most long-cherished project. The young Jacques first wrote the story as a novel (unpublished, of course) as a student in the early 1950s. A decade later, established as a filmmaker with Lola (1961) and La baie des anges (Bay of Angels, 1963) – but wholly lacking the resources for such a vast and risky project – he next conceived the story as an opera for the stage. Not until the mid-’70s did Une chambre en ville emerge definitively as a film script. The production was first scheduled for 1976, starring Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu and Simone Signoret. Yet problems arose when Deneuve, whose singing had been dubbed in three previous Demy films – Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964), Les demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967) and Peau d’âne (Donkey Skin, 1970) – now insisted that she and Depardieu should use their own voices (regardless of the fact that both actors were tone-deaf). Not surprisingly, Demy refused, his stars dropped out and the film collapsed.

The project (and Demy’s career) languished for the rest of the ’70s. Hope returned only when he met a more co-operative and less fractious muse, Dominique Sanda. Sanda, a beautiful ex-model turned movie star, was his first choice to play a transvestite swordswoman in his camp French Revolution romp Lady Oscar (1979). Sadly, she was unavailable – but she did appear a year later in Demy’s one film for French television, La naissance du jour (1980). More important was the fact that Sanda, although she was French, was best known for films made in Italian – notably Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970) and Novecento (1900, 1976) for Bernardo Bertolucci – a language she did not actually speak. Hence she had no qualms whatsoever about being dubbed.

By the early ’80s, Une chambre en ville was a reality again – with an all-new cast and a score by Michel Colombier instead of Demy’s long-term collaborator Michel Legrand. Sanda – once described by Pauline Kael as “a Garbo without depth, a trifling Garbo” (2) – gave what is, perhaps, the one performance of her career to seriously challenge Kael’s view. The most extreme in Demy’s gallery of emotionally extravagant women, her character, Edith, flees from an impotent and sadistic husband. Stark naked underneath her mink coat, she trawls the midnight streets of Nantes in search of anonymous sex. (Her costume, or lack thereof, is an echo of Elizabeth Taylor’s in the iconic opening of Butterfield 8 [Daniel Mann, 1960].) Her love for the working-class François (Richard Berry) is clearly doomed from the outset. “In all of Jacques’s films”, observed Sanda, “it’s the only time when a woman dies for love” (3).

The lurid sexual brutality of Une chambre en ville – in which Michel Piccoli, unable to make love to his wife, wields a razor in place of a penis, and Sanda opens her mink to reveal an exquisite body laced by scars – is a subtext hinted at but never explored in Demy’s earlier films. In Les demoiselles de Rochefort, Danielle Darrieux reads a newspaper item about a woman dismembered by her lover and packed into a suitcase. In the Medieval fairytale The Pied Piper (1972), a glistening white bridal cake splits open to reveal a swarm of rats carrying the bubonic plague. With the murder/suicide at the end of Une chambre en ville, Demy consciously echoed the eroticised “love-death” of Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde. “In Les parapluies de Cherbourg, the young girl says ‘I could never live without you’,” recalled Demy. “But when her lover goes off to war, she settles down and marries another man. Here she says ‘I could never live without you’ and she doesn’t. She kills herself. That’s unusual.” (4)

Was it the extreme darkness of the love story that harmed the film commercially in 1982? France in that year was a nation flush with optimism – following the election of a socialist government, led by François Mitterrand, after decades of right-wing rule. Visually, Demy is a world away from the flashy but empty cinéma du look – typified by Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981) and La balance (Bob Swaim, 1982) – that was then coming into vogue. That is not to say the “look” of a Demy film does not matter. The colour palette is as iridescent in Une chambre en ville as it was in Les parapluies de Cherbourg or Les demoiselles de Rochefort. Yet every colour and fabric, every shade of wallpaper on every wall, has been chosen for its precise emotional weight. The blood-red womb of an apartment inhabited by Darrieux – here playing Sanda’s alcoholic, sexually frustrated mother – throbs with all the hues of curdled passion. The pale apple green, festooned with white roses, in the hotel room where Sanda and Berry first consummate their passion, makes us feel the lovers are afloat amid the clouds. Stylistically, Demy is as distinct from Beineix as a Greek tragedy is from a Chanel advertisement.

If Demy’s film seems outmoded or “old-fashioned” in any way, it may be that Une chambre en ville – like so much of his work – can be “read” as an essentially homosexual story in heterosexual guise. Rumours about Demy’s sexuality were not entirely hushed by his marriage to fellow filmmaker Agnès Varda in 1962. In her recent autobiographical film, Les plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008), his widow finally revealed that Demy’s death in 1990 was due to AIDS. Certainly, the basis of Une chambre en ville – an amour fou that ignites while both partners are cruising in a dark street – is remote from most heterosexual experience, but is instantly recognisable to gay men. Indeed, the film evokes Luchino Visconti’s Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957) as a paean to the night city, to the sexual and romantic potential that lurks in darkened doorways or deserted streets. Hence the poignancy of Sanda’s defiant outburst to her cold, tyrannical mother:

Don’t you know what love is? Or passion? Or obsession? Nothing matters anymore. I’m in love for the first time. Words seem so empty to express this feeling. I love his skin, his smell. His strength, his softness, his laugh…. Nothing you can say will make the slightest difference.

Writing these lines, and hearing them spoken by his new muse, is as close as Demy ever came to a public “coming out”.

All this must have seemed a bit quaint, as France in the ’80s saw the advent of overtly “gay” films such as Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982) and L’homme blessé (A Wounded Man, Patrice Chéreau, 1983) – both of which tackled similar themes with a frankness that Demy was unwilling or unable to try. It is not unusual for a film to succeed artistically, yet fail to find its audience, simply because it was out of tune with its time. Indeed, George Cukor’s valedictory film, Rich and Famous (1981), failed in the same year, and for similar reasons.

Yet Demy never did recover from the public’s rejection of Une chambre en ville. His next project with Sanda, Anouchka – an all-singing remake of Anna Karenina – was cancelled when its French distribution deal fell through. Two films that did see the light of day, Parking (1985) and Trois places pour le 26 (Three Places for the 26th, 1988), were marred by artistic uncertainty and – quite possibly, in those days before AZT and combination therapy – by the gradual progression of his illness. Still, Une chambre en ville survives as a darkly magnificent farewell to Demy’s unique and enchanting world. His was films were “as graceful and humane as those of Max Ophuls, as poised between speech and music as Stephen Sondheim” (5). The wonder is not that it ended, tragically, some years before his death. The wonder is that it happened at all.

Une chambre en ville: Love and Death - From the Current ... Criterion essay from Geoff Andrew, July 29, 2014

Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment Criterion essay by Jean-Pierre Berthome, July 31, 2014

The Essential Jacques Demy Packaging photo gallery, July 22, 2014

On Set with Jacques Demy photo gallery, August 01, 2014

Demy Monde Criterion video, August 05, 2014

Une chambre en ville (1982) - The Criterion Collection

Une chambre en ville - Jacques Demy - film review James Travers from French Film Site

The Essential Jacques Demy: The Criterion Collection Glenn Erickson from TCM, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - PopMatters John Oursler, Criterion Blu-Ray

Criterion Confessions: THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY ... Jamie S. Rich from Criterion Confessions, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy: Criterion Collection - DVD Talk Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy / The Dissolve Noel Murray on Criterion Collection, Criterion Blu-Ray

Film Intuition: Essential Jacques Demy Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanosov, Criterion Blu-Ray

THE DVD SHELF: The Essential Musicals of Jacques Demy ... Steven Suskin from DVD Shelf, Criterion Blu-Ray

Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Essential Jacques Demy - Under the Radar Autin Trunick, Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Verdict Review - The Essential Jacques Demy (Blu-ray ... Gordon Sullivan, Criterion Blu-Ray

Criterion's "The Essential Jacques Demy" - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski

Movie Review - Une Chambre en Ville - Review/Film ... The New York Times

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

Une chambre en ville - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deneuve, Catherine – actress

Catherine Deneuve > Overview - AllMovie Rebecca Flint Marx

A model of Gallic elegance, cultivated lust object for art house filmgoers everywhere, and one of the best-respected actresses in the French film industry, Catherine Deneuve made her reputation playing a series of beautiful ice maidens for directors such as Luis Buñuel and Roman Polanski. The daughter of French stage and film actor Maurice Dorléac, Deneuve was born in Paris on October 22, 1943. She made her screen debut at the age of 13, with a role in the 1956 film Les Collegiennes, and went on to make a string of films with directors such as Roger Vadim (with whom she had a child) before getting her breakthrough role in Jaques Demy's charming musical, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) (1964). The burst of stardom that accompanied her portrayal led to two of her archetypal ice maiden roles, first in Roman Polanski's terrifying Repulsion in 1965 and then in Buñuel's 1967 Belle de Jour. Deneuve's startling portrayal of an icy, sexually adventurous housewife in the latter film helped to establish her as one of the most remarkable and compelling actresses of her generation. She further demonstrated her talent that year in Demy's Umbrellas musical follow-up, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, which she starred in with her sister, Françoise Dorléac.

Deneuve continued to work steadily through the 1960s and 1970s in films such as the 1970 Tristana (her second collaboration with Buñuel) and A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973), in which she starred with her lover at the time, Marcello Mastrioanni (who would father her daughter, the actress Chiara Mastrioanni). Despite or perhaps because of her stardom, Deneuve chose to avoid Hollywood, limiting her appearances in American films to The April Fools (1969) and Hustle (1975). Tellingly, her most significant American screen work of that period was probably the series of commercials she did for Chanel perfume in the mid-'70s, which led to the creation of her own perfume a decade later. Deneuve also did prolific work through the 1980s, appearing in such films as François Truffaut's Le Dernier Métro (1980) and Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983). The latter film saw Deneuve playing a bisexual vampire alongside David Bowie and Susan Sarandon, and her performance won her an indelible cult status in the States among lesbians, goths, and artistically inclined teenage boys.

In the 1990s, Deneuve garnered further international acclaim for her roles in several films, including the 1992 film Indochine (for which she won a French Academy Award and a Best Actress Oscar nomination) and two films directed by André Téchiné in which she played Daniel Auteuil's sister, Ma Saison Préférée (1993) and Les Voleurs (1995). In 1996, she paid homage to the director who had first given her fame by taking part in the documentary L'Univers de Jacques Demy. Closing out the final years of the 1990's Deneuve remained consistantly working in numerous films (in 1999 alone she appeared in no less than six, including driector Leos Carax's controversial Pola X) and continuing to turn in compelling performances.

In 2000 Deneuve recieved much critical attention when cast alongside eccentric Icelandic singer Bjork in the Lars von Trier's melancholy musical Dancer in the Dark. Though it polarized critics and audiences alike, Dancer nevertheless won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival and continued von Trier's tradition of creating difficult and challenging films that, like them or not, always seem to provoke a strong response.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Theatre of Complicity Geoffrey Nowell-Smith complete text from Sight and Sound, April 2005

Our series of performers continues with France's most beguiling enigma, a "beautiful apparition" whose ability simply to 'be' on screen disguises the artistry that's made her the best of her era

Catherine Deneuve is the greatest film actress of her generation – and probably (as Orson Welles used to say in those old Carlsberg ads, leaving one plenty of room for disbelief) the best film actress since Lillian Gish, though only time will tell. Yet at first sight there's nothing much to her, in terms either of her appearance or of her performance. She is beautiful, yes, with firm features, upright posture, large dark eyes and thick blonde hair, sometimes worn up but more often sprawling loosely over her shoulders. But this is not the beauty of Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn, or even of many starlets who never made the grade. In motion she has nothing distinctive – no Monroe wiggle, no loose-limbed Bardot walk, no characteristic gesture equivalent to Bette Davis' contemptuous toss of the head or Danielle Darrieux's sceptical raising of the eyebrows. Nor will she be remembered for great dramatic performances like Arletty in Les Enfants du paradis or Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar. Since she rarely plays melodrama, there is nothing in the style of Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas, nor does she do much comedy (the recent Eight Women is an exception), nor villainesses, so she can't be compared with Stanwyck in Ball of Fire or Double Indemnity either.

So Deneuve is an actress with limitations, partly self-imposed. But it's worth taking note of what these limitations are, and what they mean. Both comedy and melodrama are, in their way, forms of theatre or theatricality. They involve the actor and director stretching out across the screen to engage the audience; a little signal flashes up: look, we are shaping this scene to make you laugh or cry. This is not Deneuve's style. She is an actress who always remains behind the screen, drawing the spectator towards her rather than projecting outwards, let alone inviting complicity. She has never done any stage work and has regularly expressed an unwillingness to do any – or even to act with directors who like to employ stage actors and generate stagy performances. Asked by the writer Francis Wyndham in 1968 to name an actor and a performance she particularly admired and would like to aspire to, she chose Roland Young in Leo McCarey's Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) – a remarkably understated way of expressing a preference for understatement as the acme of the actor's craft.

In the same Sunday Times interview, made during the shooting of Alain Cavalier's 1968 La Chamade, in which she stars opposite Michel Piccoli, an actor of a very different type, Wyndham wrote that Deneuve seemed to be "feeling her way towards a style and a technique so transparent that it hardly counts as 'acting' at all." If in 1968 she was still feeling her way in that direction, by now – and indeed for the past 20 years – she has definitively arrived.

To see how much Deneuve can convey without appearing in any obvious way to 'act', it is worth looking at the opening scene of François Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirène du Mississipi, 1969). Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo) has gone down to the port of Réunion to meet the boat carrying his mail-order bride Julie, holding her slightly dowdy photograph. Not finding her among the disembarking passengers, he retreats to a piece of nondescript land overlooking the port. He hears a woman's voice behind him, and turns round. "Don't you recognise me, Monsieur Mahé?" she asks. He doesn't, but the audience does. Facing him is a beautiful apparition: Deneuve, clad in a large sun hat and a Saint-Laurent two-piece and carrying a wicker cage with a small bird in it. She is not like the photograph, nor like anyone one would expect to find in such a drab landscape. The drama to come is set out entirely in a brief sequence of shots in which the camera comes close enough, just, to look at the movement of her eyes as she speaks. She is not the real Julie, so much is clear. But it is equally clear that Louis is bowled off his feet and any doubts he may have about the trick being played on him will be set aside. Indeed, until she absconds with all his money, he pays no attention to those doubts, and even then is shocked into action more by her disappearance than by his financial loss.

Needless to say, it is only in retrospect that the audience will match the upcoming plot events with this opening apparition. But the scene has presented us with the sort of image only a true star can produce, with no apparent effort on her part and not much (or so it seems) on the part of the director.

Deneuve.com fan website

Catherine Deneuve - TCM biography

Catherine Deneuve | Gallery Lenin Imports biography, gallery, and filmography

Catherine Deneuve - Biography from IMDb

Catherine Deneuve bio from 1 World Films

Catherine Deneuve - Filmbug profile page

Cathérine Deneuve Biography - Biography.com

Catherine Deneuve - NNDB profile page

Catherine Deneuve profile page from About.com

Catherine Deneuve - Classic Movies

Catherine Deneuve James Travers FilmsdeFrance profile

Deneuve's New Role: Symbol of All France The New York Times, October 16, 1985

Still Sexy After All These Years The New York Times, August 1, 1993

COCKTAILS WITH: Catherine Deneuve;Woman, Actress, Ice Queen And Icon Alan Riding from The New York Times, April 24, 1996

CRITIC'S CHOICE/Film; Deneuve and Belmondo In Restored Truffaut Gem Janet Maslin from The New York Times, January 15, 1999

Style; It's All About Yves Amy M. Spindler from The New York Times, January 9, 2000

SHOPPING WITH: Catherine Deneuve; One Kind of Beauty, Coolly Measuring Another Guy Trebay from The New York Times, August 13, 2000

Feature: Catherine Deneuve Still Belle, John Patterson from The Guardian, November 23, 2002

Observer review: A l'ombre de moi-même by Catherine Deneuve Book review by Liz Hoggard from The Observer, May 2, 2004

Deneuve and Lagerfeld named in chat show gifts investigation Jon Henley from The Guardian, November 19, 2005

Catherine Deneuve: That Perpetual Object of Desire, Unobscured Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, June 11, 2006

David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film #4 Catherine Deneuve, by David Thomson from The Guardian, September 15, 2006

Catherine Deneuve in Venice Catherine Deneuve from The Guardian, September 16, 2006

Offscreen.com :: The Goddess, French Cinema: Catherine Deneuve's ... Daniel Garrett’s book review of Close Up and Personal: The Private Diaries of Catherine Deneuve, from Offscreen (2007)

France Salutes the Ultimate Couturier Steven Erlanger eulogizes Yves Saint Laurent from The New York Times, June 6, 2008

CRITICS CHOICE; New DVDs: Deneuve and Loren Still Haunt the Screen Dave Kehr from The New York Times, June 10, 2008

Child of the Moon: Catherine Deneuve November 4, 2008 (extensive photo gallery)

Catherine Deneuve - French Film Actress & Star - IFC.com Ten French Film Stars You Should Know, from IFC (2008)

All Hail the Ice Queen: Catherine Deneuve at 65 - Filmcritic.com Don Willmott (2008)

Laura Barton meets Catherine Deneuve | Film | The Guardian Belle Deneuve, Laura Barton from The Guardian, January 16, 2009

Philip French's screen legends No 45: Catherine Deneuve 1943 - Philip French from The Observer, February 1, 2009

French film legend Deneuve booed at Italian festival Breitbart, August 6, 2009

Catherine Deneuve: From Repulsion to Adoration: Vogue's Daily ... John Power from Vogue, August 12, 2009

Classic Maiden: Catherine Deneuve - My 2# Favourite Actress Classic Maiden, September 5, 2009

Hollywood Feminist of the Day: Catherine Deneuve | Women & Hollywood Melissa Silverstein from Women & Hollywood, September 25, 2009

The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson] BAM Honors the Peerless Catherine Deneuve, March 2, 2011

Catherine Deneuve The most beautiful woman in - The whole world ... The Gorgeous Hussy, March 27, 2011, also more seen here: #catherine deneuve

Charlie Rose - Catherine Deneuve 6 TV interviews by Charlie Rose, from June 23, 1995 to September 16, 2002 (from 19 to 60 minutes in length)

CNN Transcript - Larry King Live: Catherine Deneuve Discusses ...- Larry King interview transcript from CNN, July 28, 2000

AT THE MOVIES; Deconstructing Deneuve Rick Lyman interview from The New York Times, September 29, 2000

Catherine Deneuve | Interviews | Guardian Unlimited Film- Geoff Andrew interview from The Guardian, September 21, 2005

Proust Questionnaire: Catherine Deneuve | vanityfair.com Vanity Fair questionnaire, January 2006

Q&A airport questionnaire from The New York Times, July 8, 2008

Los Angeles Film+TV - Catherine Deneuve: Belle De 50 Ans - page 1 Scott Foundas interview from LA Weekly, November 19, 2008

Film Society of Lincoln Center Interview by Arnaud Desplechin, translated by Sarah Françoise from Film Comment, November/December 2008

Ice queen Catherine Deneuve looks back - Times Online Bryan Appleyard interview from Times Online, January 18, 2009

Catherine Deneuve Collection Alain Delon DVDBeaver

Catherine Deneuve - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Image results for Catherine Deneuve

Catherine Deneuve Pics | Actress Archives picture profile

Catherine Deneuve Pics - Catherine Deneuve Photo Gallery - 2009 ...

Denis, Claire

Claire Denis was born in Paris but moved to colonial French West Africa when she was only two months old, living in what is now Burkina Faso, Somalia, Senegal, and Cameroon, where her father was a colonial administrator. Her father moved the family every few years as he wanted them to understand the significance of geography. Her family stayed in Cameroon even after it obtained independence in 1960, where over the next three years her father helped set up a radio station for the new government. At 14, she and her sister both contracted polio, so they were sent back to France, a country they had little recollection of, where Denis made a full recovery, while her sister still walks with a slight limp. Denis spent her remaining teenage years in Sceaux, a suburb of Paris, as her parents wanted their children to complete their education in France. Denis initially studied economics, but found it infuriorating, so she enrolled at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, IDHEC (now École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l'Image et du Son), France’s most prestigious film school where she graduated in 1971, learning the technique of filmmaking at a time that France was still galvanized by the events of the May 1968 uprisings.

Her first job on a payroll was working as an extra on Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur) (1971), where you can see her walking by the Seine in a night scene. One of her film school teachers was Pierre Lhomme, the cinematographer on the film, who recruited students to be extras, a job that led to the attention of Dušan Makavejev who learned she could speak a little English, where he needed a go-between for him and the French crew, especially Viennese Action artist Otto Mühl (now a convicted sex offender) and his Therapie-Kommune, which led to her job as a second assistant on the surrealist dark satire SWEET MOVIE (1974). As Makavejev's assistant, Denis apparently lived with the Kommune members through part of the shoot, where Denis recalls, “They did terrible things. They wanted me to shave my head, drink my blood, eat my shit, things like that. But, in a way, I was not afraid. Maybe because I was smoking pot.” While she is about the same age of Philippe Garrel, whose association with Godard and leftist politics left an imprint on his style of filmmaking, which began at age 16, Denis would not make her first film until the age of 40, deciding instead to work as a scriptwriter and assistant director under a myriad of diverse directors from Jacques Rivette, becoming lifelong friends, where her collaboration with Rivette gave rise to the television documentary portrait, Jacques Rivette – Le Veilleur (Jacques Rivette – The Nightwatchman, 1990), which Denis co-directed with Serge Daney, but also the likes of Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders, making several shorts before obtaining the financial backing needed from Wim Wenders for her debut feature film in 1988 with Chocolat (1988), an elaborate portrait of 1950’s French colonialism in Africa as seen through flashbacks into early childhood memories, which was selected into Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. Since 2002, she has been a Professor of Film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Claire Denis occupies a unique place in world cinema, one not easily categorized or associated with any particular “wave” or style. Both sensual and rigorous, languid yet at times explosively energetic, her films are highly idiosyncratic and often focus on those living on the margins of society usually absent from mainstream work, both in colonial and post-colonial Africa (where she spent her early youth) and in her native France, but also characters existing outside the parameters of a white, bourgeois, European ideal. Her films tend to be internationally financed, multilingual, while outwardly rejecting the cliché’d conventions of Hollywood cinema, accentuating the personal with the historical, advocating lyricism and sensuality over any narrative coherence, where she’s sensitive to issues of exile, homelessness, and border disputes. Denis prefers to work on location, often framing her actors as if they were positioned for still photography, as in Beau Travail (1999), where she is especially fond of the male anatomy, using longer takes that are often captured in perfectly framed long shots, while also relentlessly focusing upon the faces of her subjects. In this way her films are as much about sounds, textures, colors, and compositions as they are about themes or examining social content, where immediate landscape determines her visual style, suffocating and claustrophobic in the Parisian traffic jams and compact hotel rooms that effect FRIDAY NIGHT (VENDREDI SOIR, 2002), or the ominous beauty of the arid African landscape in Chocolat (1988) or White Material (2009), captured in long tracking shots, often set to intoxicating music, where it actually has the transfixing feel of a momentary reverie or dream, where memory is as fleeting as silhouettes, or a streak of sunlight, where tone and texture matter more than words or action. According to Denis, “In Africa, nothing is ever said, but the weight of things is always there.” An evocative and controversial filmmaker that often thrives in complex, non-narrative structure, helped along the way by her trusted cinematographer Agnès Godard, she is known for making emotionally powerful films through haunting and hypnotic visual imagery, where she has a contemplative talent for exposing the beauty of a lingering thought.

Tindersticks - Claire Denis Box Set

Kinoeye Feature (2003) by Steven Jay Schneider (excerpt)

After spending much of her childhood in Africa, Paris-born film-maker Claire Denis assisted such giants of the international art cinema world as Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch before directing her feature debut, Chocolat (1988), at the age of 40.

Since then, she has fashioned a remarkable body of work. Her powerfully emotional films are filled with literary references and the sorts of marginalised characters usually absent from mainstream cinema. In this special issue of Kinoeye, five Denis scholars examine a quartet of the writer-director's most evocative and controversial films, revealing the auteurist vision underlying the apparent diversity.

Foreign Bodies: The Films of Claire Denis Mary Rubin from The Siskel Film Center

Born in Paris in 1948, Denis spent most of her childhood in West Africa, where her father served as a French colonial official. After attending the renowned IDHEC film school in Paris, she served a long apprenticeship as assistant director to such idiosyncratic auteurs as Dusan Makavejev, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch. Her first film, CHOCOLAT, was released in 1988 to widespread critical acclaim.

Aided immensely by the versatility of her regular cinematographer Agnès Godard and screenwriter Jean-Pôl Fargeau, Denis’s output has been adventurously eclectic, embracing a wide range of genres and visual styles. She aptly describes her work as “an open cinema.” Still, certain recurring preoccupations stand out.

Denis’s films tend to center on black characters (especially Africans and African immigrants) and on male characters (especially black males, repeatedly played by Isaach de Bankolé and Alex Descas, but also white males, played by such recurring actors as Grégoire Colin and Vincent Gallo).

“Capturing bodies on film is the only thing that interests me,” Denis has said. An exaggeration perhaps, but the charged presence of the body, especially the male body, as a site of both erotic spectacle and violent struggle, is a major concern (and pleasure) of her films. Actor Grégoire Colin remarked, “She films male bodies as if she were a homosexual man.”

Denis’s films emphasize the perspectives of outsiders, especially immigrants and foreigners (usually Africans, but also the Lithuanian actress in I CAN’T SLEEP and the American honeymooners in TROUBLE EVERY DAY). She has said, “If my films have a common link, maybe it’s being a foreigner.” Her childhood experiences as a white French girl living in Africa (and then returning to an unfamiliar Paris) undoubtedly contributed to this interest, which scrupulously avoids exoticism and fetishization, while her focus on blacks and males also forestalls a too-easy identification.

Whether gritty or elegant, Denis’s visual style is tactile and sensual. As one critic noted, “Her camera doesn’t just capture; it caresses.” Music adds another dimension to that sensuality, as demonstrated by her integral use of both original scores (e.g., her collaborations with British indie rock band Tindersticks on several films) and cannily chosen pop songs (e.g., the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” in NENETTE ET BONI, the Commodores’ “Night Shift” in 35 SHOTS OF RUM).

That all-embracing sensuality also determines Denis’s fragmentary and elliptical approach to narrative, privileging the sensory impact of the moment over clarity of story and psychological motivation, but in ways that are intriguing and invigorating rather than incoherent. As Reverse Shot editors Michael Korensky and Jeff Reichert have written in the preface to their valuable special issue on Denis (Reverse Shot 25: Claire Denis—The Art of Seduction), “She chooses to please rather than pillory her audience, invite them into a dialogue around images rather than read sermons from on high... Denis seems to have decided that, in the long, long shadow cast over French cinema by Godard’s early output, the most radical thing to do is not to eschew or batter narrative, but to wrestle with and redefine it, all without losing sight of the essential satisfactions of storytelling.”

All-Movie Guide Rebecca Flint Marx

A provocative director whose films offer richly textured, contemplative examinations of cross-cultural tensions and alienation, Claire Denis is one of French cinema's most distinctive and humanistic storytellers. A prolific filmmaker who is more concerned with the drive of her characters rather than the plot that weaves them together, she has been dubbed by one critic as one of the only current French directors who "has been able to reconcile the lyricism of French cinema with the impulse to capture the often harsh face of contemporary France."

Born in Paris on April 21, 1948, Denis, the daughter of a civil servant, was raised in a series of African countries until she was 14, when her family returned to France. She learned about filmmaking as an assistant to a number of notable directors, including Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire), Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law), and Costa-Gavras (Hanna K.). She made her directorial and screenwriting debut in 1988 with Chocolat, a lush exploration of colonial life and emotional conflicts in 1950s West Africa as viewed through the eyes of a young French girl. The film, which was inspired by Denis' own experiences in Africa and those of working amongst the stark Southwest landscapes of Paris, Texas, proved to be a very auspicious debut, screening at Cannes that year and earning both a Golden Palm nomination and a César nomination for Best New Director.

Denis followed her debut the next year with Man No Run, a documentary about Les Têtes Brulées ("the Flaming Heads"), a Cameroon band on their first French tour. She then made S'en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die, 1990), a story about two black men, one from Africa and one from the Caribbean, living on the fringes of French society. Like her previous films, it gave specific focus to cultural displacement and racial conflict, themes that would be further explored in J'ai Pas Sommeil (I Can't Sleep, 1994). Set in a multi-ethnic Parisian neighborhood, the film looked at the various tensions — cultural, familial, and otherwise — at work among various immigrants, including a Lithuanian actress and an expatriate Caribbean family harboring a serial killer.

Denis, who occasionally directs for television, next embarked on U.S. Go Home (1994) one part of Tous les Garçons et les Filles de Leur Age, a made-for-TV series depicting the adolescence of nine well-known directors. Denis' section chronicled 24 hours in the lives of three teenagers trying to lose their virginity in the mid-'60s. It marked the director's first collaboration with Grégoire Colin, a dark-eyed, arresting young actor whom Denis would also employ to great effect in both Nénette et Boni and Beau Travail.

The former film, made in 1996, was another coming-of-age drama that centered on the relationship between a lovelorn young man (Colin) and his rebellious, pregnant 15-year-old sister (Alice Houri). It received an enthusiastic international reception and a number of film festival honors, and it was one of the director's most successful films to date. She followed it three years later with Beau Travail, a military drama based loosely on Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor. Set in East Africa, it offered a taut psychological exploration of the increasingly antagonistic relationship between a Foreign Legion officer (Denis Lavant) and a charismatic new recruit (Colin). The film garnered a warm reception, with a number of critics commenting on Denis' ability to capture the gorgeously ascetic physical setting of her story, as well as her success in replacing Melville's verbosity with a silence that communicated volumes.

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Claire Denis - Professor of Film - Biography

Claire Denis - Cinema and Media Studies - Oxford Bibliographies biography

Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis Samantha Dinning, April 2009

Claire Denis | Film Studies For Free

Senses of Cinema – Postcolonial Cinema: Chocolat Fiona Villella from Senses of Cinema, December 1999

“Beau Travail” - Salon.com Charles Taylor from Salon, March 31, 2000

Unsatisfied Men Jonathan Rosenbaum on BEAU TRAVAIL, originally printed in The Chicago Reader, May 26, 2000

Senses of Cinema – Chocolat Diana Sandars from Senses of Cinema, November 2001

Kinoeye Feature (2003) in-depth features on several different films, June 9, 2003

Hilary Neroni, 'Lost in fields of interracial desire: Claire Denis' Chocolat (1988)' Kinoeye, Vol 3 Issue 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Lost in fields of interracial desire

Todd McGowan, 'Resisting the lure of ultimate enjoyment: Claire Denis' J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep, 1994)', Kinoeye, Vol 3, Issue 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Resisting the lure of ultimate enjoyment

Decoding unreadable spaces Corinne Oster on I Can't Sleep, from Kinoeye, June 9, 2003

Elena del Río, “Performing the narrative of seduction in Claire Denis’ Beau travail (Good Work, 1999)”, Kinoeye, vol. 3, no. 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Performing the narrative of seduction

Philippe Met, 'Looking for trouble: The dialectics of lack and excess (Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, 2001), Kinoeye, Vol. 3, Issue, 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Looking for trouble: The dialectics of lack and excess

Senses of Cinema – Travellin' Light: Vendredi soir Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, April 2004

Douglas Morrey, 'Textures of Terror: Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day', Belphégor: Littérature Populaire et Culture Médiatique, Vol. 3, No. 2, April 2004

The Hither Side of Solutions: Bodies and Landscape in L'intrus R. Emmet Sweeney from Senses of Cinema, July 2005

Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet Book review by John Orr from Senses of Cinema, October 2005

Acquarello, 'Claire Denis by Judith Maine', Strictly Film School, January 16, 2006 Book review by Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Joe Bowman, '[on L'Intrus]', Fin de Cinéma, 28 April 2006

Claire Denis and the cinema of the body - La Trobe University Ticket to ride: Claire Denis and the cinema of the body, by Adrian Martin from Screening the Past, November 27, 2006

In The Realm of Work and Play: Claire Denis's Vers Mathilde | The ... Travis Mackenzie Hoover from The House Next Door, January 16, 2007

Senses of Cinema – Jacques Rivette – Le veilleur Paul Grant from Senses of Cinema, February 2007

Senses of Cinema – Beau travail Tamara Tracz from Senses of Cinema, February 2007

Rewriting Documentary: Claire Denis' Jacques Rivette, le veilleur ... Travis Mackenzie Hoover from The House Next Door, April 23, 2007

Eletrik Alchemy: Claire Denis Films Sonic Youth | Film Comment Daniel Stuyck from Film Comment, January/February 2008

"Petit Soldat-Beau Travail" by Justin Vicari - Jump Cut Spring 2008

Douglas Morrey, “Introduction: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)

Open Wounds: Body and Image in Jean-Luc ... - Film-Philosophy Douglas Morrey, April 2008 (pdf format)

Laura McMahon, 'Deconstructing Community and Christianity: 'A-religion' in Nancy's Reading of Beau travail', Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)

Jean-Luc Nancy, 'Icon of Fury: Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)

Martine Beugnet, 'The Practice of Strangeness: L'Intrus - Claire Denis (2004) and Jean-Luc Nancy (2000)', Film-Philosophy, Volume 12, Issue No.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)

Anja Streiter, 'The Community According to Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis,' Film-Philosophy, 11.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)

The Other's Intrusion: Claire Denis' L'intrus Wim Staat, Thamyris/Intersecting No. 19 April 2008 (195–208) (pdf format)

Daniel Kasman, '35 Shots of Rum: In Honour of Changing the World', The Auteurs: Notebook, 13 September 2008

Claire Denis, a Stranger Cinema - Harvard Film Archive November 2 – 10, 2008, Harvard Film Archive

Ryland Walker Knight, '35 Rhums on The Night Shift', The Auteurs: Notebook, 13 March 2009

Senses of Cinema – Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art ... Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression by Martine Beugnet, book review by Saige Walton from Senses of Cinema, April 2009

Joe Bowman, 'The Decade List: Trouble Every Day', Fin de Cinéma, 3 April 2009

Film Studies For Free: 35 Shots of Claire Denis (and more) April 23, 2009

Reverse Shot Symposium on Claire Denis August 17, 2009

Best of the Decade Derby: Video Essay on L’Intrus for the Reverse Shot Claire Denis Symposium Kevin B. Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, August 17, 2009

Reverse Shot 25: Claire Denis—The Art of Seduction Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert from Reverse Shot, 2010

Claire Denis's Early Career Good Work, by Leo Goldsmith from Reverse Shot, 2010

The music videos of Claire Denis: “Incinerate” and “Jams Run Free” Bodies in Motion, by Damon Smith from Reverse Shot, 2010

David Thomson on Claire Denis | Film | The Guardian July 8, 2010

Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, ‘I Can’t Sleep’ Pt. 2, Robin Wood reviewing I Can’t Sleep from Film International, January 27, 2011

‘Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression, Part 1′ 2-part article by Robin Wood, reviewing Chocolat from Film International, April 1, 2011

Films of Claire Denis, text version - Jump Cut Ian Murphy from Jump Cut, Fall, 2012

The Lyrical Space of Claire Denis - nwFilmCenter May 3, 2013

Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis ... Kath Dooley from Screening the Past, September, 2013

Claire Denis' Neo-Baroque Textures of Sensation - Screening the Past Enfolding Surfaces, Spaces and Materials: Claire Denis’ Neo-Baroque Textures of Sensation, by Saige Walton from Screening the Past, October 2013

This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic Marilyn Ferdinand about Chocolat and White Material, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 6, 2013

This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the Nightingale's Christy LeMaster about Nenette et Boni and Beau Travail, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 13, 2013

This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea Gronvall about I Can't Sleep and Trouble Every Day, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 20, 2013

This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia professor Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (and others) about No Fear, No Die and 35 Shots of Rum, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 27, 2013

This week in Claire Denis: A correspondence with ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: A correspondence with Melika Bass and Lori Felker about The Intruder and Bastards, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, December 4, 2013

Wim Wenders On Claire Denis The Ibtauris Blog, September 16, 2014

Denis, Claire They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Claire Denis interviewed by Mark A. Reid - Jump Cut Colonial Observations, Mark Reid interview August 21, 1994, published from Jump Cut, March 1996

The Guardian: Claire Denis Interviewed by Jonathan Romney June 28, 2000, also seen here: Claire Denis Interviewed by Jonathan Romney

BFI | Sight & Sound | Desire Is Violence Chris Darke interview from BFI Sight & Sound, July 2000

Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis: An Interview Aimé Ancian interview from Senses of Cinema, December 2002

Craig Phillips, with Jonathan Marlow, '"Making Film is to Be Inside": a Talk with Claire Denis [on Vendredi Soir]', GreenCine, May 14, 2003 (Continues on Page 2 HERE)

Errata Interview (2004) Robert Davis interview September 2004, published December 9, 2004

Robert Davis, 'Outtakes from Claire Denis Interview', Errata, 28 April, 2008 Robert Davis interview September 2004, published April 28, 2005

Senses of Cinema – L'Intrus: An Interview with Claire Denis Damon Smith interview, April 2005

Annett Busch, 'Claire Denis about Intrusions', (Interview, May 2005), Theory Kit, January 2006

Claire Denis interview | Film Comment Gavin Smith interview from Film Comment, January/February 2006

LA Weekly Interview (2006) by Scott Foundas, March 15, 2006

Robert Davis, 'Interview: Claire Denis on 35 Shots of Rum', Daily Plastic, March 10, 2009

Dancing Reveals So Much: An Interview with Claire Denis Darren Hughes from Senses of Cinema, April 2009

Kevin Lee, 'Spectacularly Intimate: An Interview with Claire Denis', The Auteurs: Notebook, 2 April 2009

An Interview with Claire Denis | Reverse Shot On the Nightshift, by Adam Nayman from Reverse Shot, 2009

35 Shots of Rum': Claire Denis steps into the spotlight Sheila Johnston interview from The Telegraph, July 8, 2009

The Auteurs [interview with Daniel Kasman] Kasman interviews Claire Denis from The Auteurs, October 7, 2009

Q&A: CLAIRE DENIS, Director of White Material :: Stop Smiling Magazine José Teodoro interview, October 8, 2009

Claire Denis: 'For me, film-making is a journey into the impossible' Andrew Hussey feature and interview from The Observer, July 4, 2010

Claire Denis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

CHOCOLAT A 95

France Germany Cameroon (105 mi) 1988

When I was making Chocolat I think I had the desire to express a certain guilt I felt as a child raised in a colonial world […] knowing I was white, I tried to be honest in admitting that Chocolat is essentially a white view of the Other.

—Claire Denis

When you look at the hills, beyond the houses and beyond the trees, where the earth touches the sky, that’s the horizon. The closer you get to that line, the father it moves. If you walk towards it, it moves away. It flees from you. I must also explain this to you. You see the line. You see it, but it doesn’t exist. —Marc Dalens (François Cluzet)

The daughter of a civil servant, Denis spent much of her childhood in different colonial French West African countries in the 1950’s, living in what is now Burkina Faso, Somalia, Senegal, and Cameroon before returning to France where she assisted other directors such as Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch before directing her first feature at the age of 40, so like Toni Morrison in literature who never wrote a novel until her 40’s, she brings an unconventional maturity into her works. She's one of the unsung filmmakers of our era, a director who moves between an experimental, avant-garde style with slight to nonexistent narratives to more conventional narratives fairly easily, usually focusing on the personal lives of marginalized characters usually absent from mainstream cinema (immigrants, exiles, alienated individuals, sexual transgressives), and while rarely calling attention to her impeccable craftsmanship, Denis has a highly individualistic aesthetic that favors poetic texture and visualized style over dialogue and action. Often resorting to fractured time frames, she often blurs the lines between dreams and reality, the past and the present, where memory evokes painful references to history, which she uses to question the ingrained prejudices of the dominant white European culture and its supposed myth of civilization and progress. The film is largely a memory piece that has an aching rawness to it as a young woman in her 20’s named France (Mireille Perrier) returns to the African region where she grew up during her childhood, a nation that has since gained its independence, but her reflections recall when it was under French colonialist control during her childhood in the 50’s. A near hypnotic experience, the film stuns by its ability to express with such banality how easily it is to mistreat an entire nation of citizens, as people are seen as less than human, where the colonialist mentality sees Africans as incapable of being anything other than servile domestics, overly submissive servants that wait on the French hand and foot, mostly living in dire poverty themselves which the French ignore while living their own lives of luxury and ease.

France (Cécile Ducasse) is a young white girl living in a remote colonial outpost in Cameroon, where the French flag is raised to the sound of trumpets each day, as she is raised separately from all the other black children in the village. She is a child of wealth and privilege, where African servants dutifully obey her family’s every wish from the time they wake up in the morning until they’re safely asleep. Her father, Marc Dalens (François Cluzet), is the regional administrator who is always away on important business adventures, where it’s his job to resolve petty tribal disputes while also keeping an eye open for the future, while her extraordinarily beautiful mother Aimée (Giulia Boschi) stays at home and lives a life of bourgeois refinement, usually arguing with the cook as the meals aren’t French enough, but always well looked after by the house servant, Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), a regular fixture in the home, always curteous, whose tall and muscular frame cuts a handsome and imposing figure, and while he’s a man of intelligence and great dignity, his soft-spoken manner and quiet reserve express a certain nobility. Much of the director’s interest lies in what’s never spoken, in the silences that exist between characters, frequently leaving out explanatory information, leaving the viewer to superimpose their own thoughts about what the characters might be thinking. Protée is usually France’s only friend, where she often runs off with him as he attends to errands, growing impatient if he overextends his stay, reminding him that her mother is expecting him. And while the film is seen through France’s eyes, both as a young woman and as a child, it’s more about her recollections of Protée, whose continual acts of kindness are never reciprocated. Perhaps the singlemost allure of the film is Abdullah Ibrahim’s fascinating musical score, offering a mix of sophisticated European jazz with a raw African flavor, almost always used during long tracking shots of the nearby landscape, beautifully shot by Robert Alazraki, with Agnès Godard as the actual camera operator, where the countryside itself becomes a silent character in the film. It’s the exotic feeling of “otherness” that punctuates the music with sublime textures of faraway lands.

A single event disrupts the mirage of harmony, when a plane is forced to land nearby, where they are forced to wait for weeks to get a needed part for repair. During this interlude, the French passengers reveal their true colors, at first grateful for the lavish hospitality, but soon become bored and with nothing else to do turn on the African help with an onslaught of racist invectives that are meant to be demeaning and hurtfully cruel, where one in particular, a spoiled young ingrate named Luc (Jean-Claude Adelin), intentionally tries to penetrate through the passive reserve of Protée, continually mocking him, hoping he will break character. This kind of sick amusement only exposes the racist attitudes about Africans back home in France, but also unleashes unspoken sexual desires, as Protée’s solemn presence attracts the desire of Aimée, especially with her husband away so much of the time. This contrast of demeaning humiliation with idealized sexuality expresses with equal measure the arrogance and pure ignorance of the colonial rulers, who have no respect or any knowledge whatsoever of the African people or culture. Africans are routinely seen grooming one another in the afternoon sun, or we hear the sound of children at play, while the French hide indoors, seeking refuge in the shade, often hiding behind dark sunglasses, drinking themselves into a stupor. Africans must bathe in the “Boys shower,” an open air outdoor facility in full view of the main house, where even their privacy is on full display. Despite this nakedness, it’s ironic how little is known of the world of Africans, who are rarely seen and are given minimal dialogue, continually reinforcing the white perspective. It is only in the relationship between Protée and young France that we see evidence of any developing complexity, a relationship that is abruptly challenged when Protée rejects Aimée’s advances and she has him quickly banished from the house, an act that has lifelong consequences for young France as well. The film is a stark reminder of human contradictions, with so many thoughts left unspoken, every gesture ambiguous. Ultimately the film explores the parameters between ourselves and the mysterious Other, where the camera intrudes across various boundaries of the body, the spirit, and the mind, but also borders and culture, often unwillingly asking us to look at what moral lines are being crossed. The silence of Protée is symptomatic of Denis’s sensitivity, as we know little about his character, and can only guess his motivations. Rather than offering an understanding of the Other, it remains an open question where we are left to determine its meaning and value for ourselves.

Time Out review

A young woman called France (Perrier; Ducasse as a child) returns to the Cameroons, where she recalls (in one long flashback) her childhood as the daughter of a district governor of French West Africa. This idyllic existence is shattered when a plane prangs near her home, forcing the stranded passengers to stay with her parents. The motley crew - all demonstrating various aspects of empire-building - include a white plantation owner and his black concubine, a newly-wed couple on their first visit to the dark continent, and an ex-priest (Adelin) full of Rousseau-esque ideals who turns out to be the worst of the lot. It is his influence that destroys France's friendship with the houseboy (de Bankolé), and prompts her mother (Boschi) to make a pass at the servant. In her amazingly assured debut, Clare Denis draws out the implications of the action with great subtlety. She makes the most of the exotic location, and elicits strong performances from all her cast. Abdullah Ibrahim's excellent score enhances the atmosphere of repression and frustration.

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: AlexLovesKissing (alexlovestorockandroll@yahoo.com) from Chicago, IL

In Denis' debut film, she explores the social dynamics of a French household during the closing days of colonial rule in West Africa. The bulk of the film is seemingly the flashback of a young adult French woman returning to her childhood African home after living abroad - though this perspective doesn't entirely hold during certain scenes. As an American moviegoer - and thus quite familiar with the baggage of colonial rule - I wasn't surprised by any of the themes suggested/addressed by this picture: second class citizenship, interracial lust, varying degrees of loathing of the colonists toward the ruled, the inescapable resentment that the ruled have towards the colonists. Consequently, I found the film less than compelling. Though competently told, the story shed no new light the complexities of colonial rule - the suggestion that the problems of colonial rule are visible in the microcosm of a household as in the macrocosm of a revolution is nothing new. However, these politics were handled in a minimalist fashion that gave the movie a relaxed if occasionally boring pacing - a pacing that was bearable thanks to DP Robert Alazraki beautifully capturing Cameroon's landscape. I quietly recommend this movie if no other reason than the fact that it is the first film from a major new French auteur.

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

“Chocolat,” Claire Denis' surrealistic return to her postwar childhood in Cameroon, may not uncover a comfortably structured story, but it conjures up its own peculiar, affecting sense of myth.

In her first feature, shot on location in West Africa with little money or equipment, Denis (who has worked closely with offbeat talents Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch) shows a sure instinct for the kind of open-ended mysteries that make great movies.

Suffused with sunlit, sensual images, "Chocolat" feels rather than finds out, implies rather than blurts out. Like an odd collection of old-time photographs, it seems to hold enigmatic truths -- ones that can't be expressed but that you have an instinctive understanding for nonetheless.

France Dalens (Mireille Perrier), a young woman traveling through Cameroon, recalls her much younger days when her father (Franc ois Cluzet) was a district officer and she developed a deep friendship with the houseboy, Prote'e (Isaach de Bankole'). Denis (co-scripting with Jean-Pol Fargeau) takes you back to when (while Papa's away on business and colonial wayfarers come and go) young France (Ce'cille Ducasse) and her mother Aime'e (Giulia Boschi) discover different qualities in the nobly elusive manservant.

Aime'e, initially resentful of Prote'e's deadpan efficiency, fights an eerie, sexual attraction to him. But France finds in Prote'e a delicate, fraternal bond. He gives her crushed ants on bread to eat, she feeds him from her dinner plate and, in a beautiful night-sky scene, he carries her on his shoulders into the African night, talking out loud to scare away predators.

As Prote'e, de Bankole' (a performer from the Ivory Coast) gives "Chocolat" its hypnotic soul. He seems menacing and innocent, proud and humble, all at the same time, as he tenderly watches over France, slips out of the sticky sexual situation with his dignity intact and knocks a pushy French racist on his derrie`re.

The performances are uniformly strong, including those from Ducasse and Boschi, and more minor offerings from Donatus Ngala as an amusing house chef, Enoch, who is constantly fending off complaints about his British-style cooking, and Jacques Denis as a Mr. Magoo-faced coffee planter who talks coffee late into the night and travels around with an African concubine.

Denis builds up her movie with such small moments and performances, as well as with moods you want to savor -- the lazy haze of afternoon, the romantic allure of evening. And though she may end with a cynical conclusion about cultural divisions, she also leaves you with enough images and (purposely) unexplained mysteries to last you long after you've left the theater.

Senses of Cinema – Postcolonial Cinema: Chocolat Fiona Villella from Senses of Cinema, December 1999

Senses of Cinema – Chocolat Diana Sandars from Senses of Cinema, November 2001

Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis Samantha Dinning from Senses of Cinema, April 2009

‘Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression, Part 1′ 2-part article by Robin Wood, reviewing Chocolat from Film International, April 1, 2011

Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, ‘I Can’t Sleep’ Pt. 2, Robin Wood from Film International, January 27, 2011

Hilary Neroni, 'Lost in fields of interracial desire: Claire Denis' Chocolat (1988)' Kinoeye, Vol 3 Issue 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Lost in fields of interracial desire

Chocolat Colonial Architecture, by Elbert Ventura at Reverse Shot

Chocolat (1988) Darren Hughes from Long Pauses

Cine Outsider [L.K. Weston]

Chocolat by Claire Denis - Jstor Nikki Stiller from Film Quarterly, Winter 1990-91 (excerpt only) (pdf format)

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Talking Pictures (Howard Schumann)

Cinema Sights [James Ewing]

Memories of the Future [Jesse Ataide]

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

DVD Talk (Phillip Duncan) dvd review [3/5]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Chocolat (1988; Dir. Claire Denis) Film Guide & Resources

Claire Denis interviewed Colonial Observations, interview on August 21, 1994 by Mark A. Reid from Jump Cut, March 1996

This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic Marilyn Ferdinand about Chocolat and White Material, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 6, 2013

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] also seen here: Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]

Siskel & Ebert (video)

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

CINÈMA, DE NOTRE TEMPS – Made for French TV

JACQUES RIVETTE, LE VEILLEUR

France (125 mi) 1990 co-director: Serge Daney

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Jacques Rivette, le veilleur

Claire Denis’ first-rate documentary (1990) about filmmaker Jacques Rivette, produced for French television, has many things to recommend it. The main interviewer is the great critic Serge Daney, who, two years before his death, converses with Rivette while relaxing in a cafe and strolling around Paris (Denis interjects a few questions toward the end); since both men were former editors of Cahiers du Cinema, not to mention groundbreaking and highly articulate critics, they have a lot to discuss apart from Rivette’s filmmaking. Clips from many of Rivette’s major films (some of which remain difficult to see, like the legendary Out 1) are included, as are interviews with some of Rivette’s actors, such as Bulle Ogier and Jean-Francois Stevenin. Best of all, the film beautifully captures Rivette the man, as both solitary cinephile and exploratory filmmaker. Showing as part of the Block Museum’s invaluable series “Serge Daney: 10 Years After,” which started last month and ends in early December. In French with subtitles; to be projected from Beta SP video. 125 min.

user reviews from imdb Author: OldAle1 from United States

The film opens with the always nattily-dressed 62-year-old filmmaker walking through a gallery exhibition devoted to the French painter Jean Fautrier, ironically (or not?) as obscure and unknown as Rivette himself. Then we move to a café where the discussion proper begins with the great "New Wave" critic Serge Danay questioning Rivette about faces and bodies -- the reason that he was invited to the Fautrier exhibit being that the filmmakers saw a link between painter and director in this area. Most of the next two hours proceeds with Danay attempting to elicit interesting responses from Rivette on a variety of topics and themes: the beginning of the New Wave, his childhood, language and literature, Paris, architecture, acting, and most of all, the joys of filmgoing and criticism. This is an exceptionally well-done and involving documentary that shifts between various types of locales within Paris, mirroring Rivette's own fictional explorations of the city....it never quite gets to the depths, the heart and soul of this great filmmaker, but that's OK: we are constantly reminded of how private and solitary an individual Rivette is. No doubt my high rating reflects both my passion for the director's work and the resonance I feel with his solitary intellectual (largely self-taught) lifestyle, but I think that anyone genuinely interested in the Nouvelle Vague who has seen a couple of films by the subject will get something out of this nicely-shot and minimally edited film. Scenes from several of the director's works are included, all rarely scene outside of (maybe in?) France, the longest and most fascinating being from Duelle and L'amour fou. Subtitled, bootleg video from British TV (I think), 122 minute cut.

Rewriting Documentary: Claire Denis' Jacques Rivette, le veilleur ... Travis Mackenzie Hoover from The House Next Door, April 23, 2007

Claire Denis supporters are warned upon approaching Jacques Rivette, le veilleur: the imagery for which we have come to love her is only here in embryonic form. Those lucky few stoked by the fires of her recent documentary Vers Mathilde are in for a disappointment when presented with the less front-and-centre visuals of her second completed work: analysis is also somewhat tricky, as I have no idea how much of the format was inherited from the program Cinéma, de notre temps (of which it is an entry), and how much was influenced by the film's celebrated critic interviewer Serge Daney. Still, Denis' tactile, environmental approach is clearly in evidence here; of a piece with her early work, it suggests both the location specificity and the unmoored personalities that dot films from Chocolat to I Can't Sleep.

The film opens innocently enough with the nouvelle vague master wandering the rooms of an art gallery: the art is that of semi-abstract artist Jean Fautrier, and we alternate between his juicy, sensual canvases and Rivette wandering the vast space of the rooms. This, however, is a ruse, and we suddenly smash-cut to the director and Daney at a café, where the critic reveals that the gallery visit facilitates the interview. Fautrier is discussed in terms of his desire to re-define the face; this is contrasted with Rivette's own refusal to use close-ups or heavy montage to emphasize faces or items close up. The director claims that he never had the interest or the "talent" to do such editing theatrics, and the film goes from there, as Rivette and Daney wander from café to café and points in-between, discussing Rivette's background and his artistic concerns.

The emphasis on locations—on the battery of coffee joints and the streets in between—is where Denis begins to rear her creative head. Where a standard interview program would de-emphasize the location in favor of the talk, here they are part of the talk—influencing our perception of Rivette in subtle ways. At one point, he and Daney are walking down a busy traffic laneway (one wonders why the drivers aren't apoplectic at their slowing things down), and Denis' camera suddenly splits off from the figures to travel down another road. The picture suddenly becomes a shot from Le Pont du Nord of Pascale Ogier circling a lion statue in a scooter; this turns into a shot of Jean-François Stévenin driving up on his own BMW motorcycle and beginning an interview. The insistence on spatial continuity is remarkable in a form that normally uses the visual as bland means to an end—and in its way it boldly rewrites how documentary can be used to comment on subjects.

This relates back to the film's catalogue of Rivette's qualities, chief among which are his lonerish tendencies. Bulle Ogier is seen and heard describing him as the last person with whom you go "on the town" for a "back-patting" good time—he's private and withdrawn, and the film represents this by swallowing him up in the city or otherwise emphasizing his smallness. In the first part, "Day", it's largely performed via the wandering through the streets of Paris and thus explores the transitory nature of existing in a large urban metropolis swarming with architecture and people; in "Night", he's sitting on the top of a building, gazing over its railing or sitting in low light. The effect is to consider this person as a sort of transient with no home or country, wandering about or loitering in public space instead of staking out some personal terra firma.

This makes Rivette of a piece with early Denis heroes. Those initial films are obsessed with overwhelming locations (the remote African household of Chocolat, the nightclub/restaurant/cockfighting complex of No Fear, No Die, and especially the Paris of I Can't Sleep); they're also obsessed with people who don't exactly belong to those surroundings (Chocolat's uprooted whites with "no past, no future"; the equally unanchored black cock trainers in No Fear, No Die; practically everyone with a part in I Can't Sleep). That last film most explicitly parallels Jacques Rivette, le veilleur: both are films about a city that does not notice you and which fills you with a profound loneliness, full of people as atomized as Rivette (though with considerably less cultural capital) lost in an urban no-man's-land that swallows them up.

Sadly, the film is less compelling than most of those works of fiction. Though the intimacy achieved with Rivette is considerable, the overall effect is less decisive; one feels a fumbling for a theme and a style rather than a surgically precise zeroing in. Part of the issue is that Denis has to get out of the way for Daney to impose his own order on the proceedings, meaning she has to constantly adjust to his input instead of simply letting her own freak flag fly. Unlike the genuinely collaborative enterprise of Vers Mathilde, where Denis likened herself to a fellow dancer with choreographer Mathilde Monnier, there seems to be less give-and-take between the two authors of the conversation; though the director betrays no discomfort with the arrangement, there is a sense that two sensibilities are struggling for supremacy rather than working in concert for an organic experience.

But even if the early film doesn't stand up to her recent documentary triumph, the two films together suggest a unified approach to the form that makes her a subject for further contemplation. Neither Vers Mathilde nor Jacques Rivette, le veilleur sits still in its contemplation of its artist-subjects: they are both as concerned with the space surrounding the personalities under review as with the personality itself. And they make Denis' documentary output extremely provocative in what they do with a hitherto prosaic form that strives for objectivity. If nothing else, her Rivette film suggests new paths for a genre more tied down than most to explanation and the illusion of non-interference, and what can happen when dry reportage gives way to the personal essay.

Senses of Cinema – Jacques Rivette – Le veilleur Paul Grant from Senses of Cinema, February 2007

girish: Tous les garçons et les filles

NO FEAR, NO DIE (S’en Fout la Mort) A- 94

France Germany (90 mi) 1990

It’s a film that’s influenced by Frantz Fanon’s Peaux noire, masques blancs (Black Skins, White Masks). I understood something in Fanon’s book that touched me immensely. I am a very sensitive person who can’t stand the feeling of humiliation, regardless if black or whites are the objects of this humiliation. When I read Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), it increased my anger over the social inequities that groups and individuals are forced to endure […]. In S’en fout la mort, I deal with a French West Indian man here in Paris, exploring his psychological weakness and the spiritual tragedy of his life. Fanon describes a special type of neurosis – colonized people feeling psychologically defeated even though they are physically free to determine their future.

—Claire Denis in an interview taking place August 21, 1994 with Mark A. Reid from Jump Cut, Claire Denis interviewed by Mark A. Reid - Jump Cut

A powerful and brutally disturbing film, easily the most dramatically downbeat of all the Denis films, and the most racially charged work in her entire repertoire. Not an easy film to digest, with metaphoric implications, it is nonetheless a work of extraordinary power, but one that keeps its seething undertones beneath the surface. Coming early in her career, after having made the highly acclaimed Chocolat (1988), which is more of a classically structured, visually impressive European art film, this simply isn’t like that, at times feeling infurioratingly subliminal. While both films deal with the effects of colonization, Chocolat (1988) examines symptoms of a colonized occupation, while NO FEAR, NO DIE focuses more upon the psychological impact left behind, where the postcolonial mindset still has traumatic reverberations from having been imprinted by a colonized mentality. These are highly complex ideas that rarely ever translate well to the screen, where even Richard Wright’s Native Son (1951), starring the author as the lead character, comes across as less incendiary than the novel upon which it is based. While Beau Travail (1999) receives heaps of praise, deservedly so, but especially from white critics, who may be less inclined to endorse a complicated and downbeat work about two black immigrants from former French colonies, where racist attitudes are prevalent throughout, making it intentionally uncomfortable and difficult to watch. A work that was clearly inspired by Frantz Fanon, its grim racial implications are so subtly presented that some may miss it altogether, as Denis leaves plenty to the imagination, and there are no explanatory references communicated to the audience, as this is a film, much like psychological neuroses, that largely exists under the surface.

Isaach de Bankolé, who played Protée in Chocolat (1988) is Dah, an African from Benin, while Alex Descas is Jocelyn from the West Indies, where the two are business partners smuggling roosters into France for illegal cockfights. Their destination is an industrial factory district that is little more than a truck stop, a strange and mysterious landscape in the banlieues outside Paris where an abandoned warehouse has been refurbished inside for cockfights. While Dah offers a sparse inner narration, Jocelyn provides the training for the animals, having grown up with them as a child on the islands, and Dah handles the business end with white club owner Pierre Ardennes, Jean-Claude Brialy from early New Wave films, whose sensuous wife Toni, Solveig Dommartin from Wim Wenders WINGS OF DESIRE (1987) and UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991), runs the bar, while the brooding son Michel (Christopher Buchholz) handles the disco. Dah is the more jovial and outgoing of the two and seems unaffected by the callousness of his white business associates, while Jocelyn is silent for much of the film, whose growing resentment only escalates, where his troubling relationship with the whites slowly deteriorates, becoming the centerpiece of the film. Both black actors are superb, perhaps offering the performances of their respective careers, but they do so nonverbally, as so much of the film is expressed through their silent reaction to what’s taking place around them, an often brutal and suffocating world that if they’re not careful would swallow them whole. What’s immediately apparent is the difference in living quarters, as the whites live upstairs in relative opulence, with their own private chef, used to the finer things in life where wine and champagne are the norm, while the two blacks live downstairs in the boiler room in the same cramped space as the caged roosters. One can only imagine the smell.

The film opens with a quote from black American writer Chester Himes, who emigrated to France in the 1950’s, a contemporary of fellow expatriate black writers Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and James Baldwin: “All men, whatever their race, color or origins, are capable of anything and everything.” Denis finds a way of visualizing this expression through the underworld of illegal cockfighting, a savage ritual that exists in order to please the men who bet heavily on the outcome. The intensity of the men screaming on the sidelines with wads of cash in their hands matches the flurry of blurred movement in the pit where the two roosters continually jump around and peck at one another. This violent portrait of exploitation overlaps with the private worlds of the men who run the operation. No one identifies with the animals more than Jocelyn, who feeds and trains them, while also nursing them back to health after a fight, often seen dancing with them in the training ring while listening to blaring rap music. This draws the attention of Toni, who makes unannounced visits into their lower domain, where the underlying sexual vibe suggests these are the men she’s really interested in, as they name their most prized rooster after her, where the extreme physicality of their world is beautifully captured by the director’s approach to making such uniquely sensual films. It’s in scenes like this where the audience realizes these men have no privacy, where the lowered ceilings offer a claustrophobic environment that couldn’t feel more oppressively suffocating and confined, little more than an underground prison. Jocelyn’s attachment to the animals becomes problematic, as he identifies only with the lower life forms, seething with resentment at the brazenly offensive manner of Ardenne, whose arrogance compels him to freely discuss how he had an affair with Jocelyn’s mother, describing how he has her eyes, where one sees hatred brewing in the eyes of his own son Michel, not to mention Toni, where men crudely brag about their sexual exploits.

A word about Michel, as this character figures prominently in Denis films, perhaps best represented by Nicolas Duvauchelle in White Material (2010), the son of the white owner of a coffee plantation in Africa, where he inherits privilege, growing up expecting he can have anything he wants, and that he is entitled to it. His self-centered views, never having to think of anyone else except himself, are in stark contrast to people of color, who always have to make adjustments for white people and grow up wary of people like him, as they are capable of doing just about anything, and getting away with it. In this film, Michel has little screen time, yet he has a powerful influence, as he’s accidentally interrupted by Dah and Jocelyn who arrive in the basement while he’s having sex with Toni, his father’s wife, who stares directly at Jocelyn, which elevates the moral void to tragic Shakespearean proportions, as the Ardennes have no boundaries or shame. When viewed in this context, nothing is more dangerous than slighted masculinity, where in the eyes of blacks, there is no greater threat than white male violence, which is so unpredictable, supposedly your friend one moment, but viciously attacking you the next, where that violence may erupt at any time. Denis’s film pulsates with that untapped rage, ready to go off at any moment, where her film is a choreography of untapped masculinity, sexual desire, violence, and unforeseen danger, where the clash of these forces is like electrically charged objects continually bumping into one another, where it’s only a matter of time before there’s an explosion, heightened by the co-mingling forces of hostility, as represented by the oppressed and the oppressor, the colonized and the colonizer, where every scene deals with one protruding into the other.

Relentlessly bleak and uncompromisingly honest, the film offers a parallel into the dangerous and inhumane living conditions of many black male immigrants living in France. When viewed under the lens of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the colonized are forced to live in disgustingly cramped conditions resembling slave quarters, often made to feel like animals, which has a way of affecting their psychological outlook, as they are drawn to failure, feeling defeated before they begin, where the transience and impermanency of their lives diminishes their human value and self-worth, resembling the cheap, exploitive goods that are a staple of colonial trade and commerce. Ultimately humiliated and ashamed, especially when looked upon by an attractive white woman, where they are powerless to reciprocate, as it was the kiss of death during the slavery era, the colonized black man’s view of himself is extremely pessimistic, as his dignity has been destroyed, where he’s inclined to have a death wish to simply put an end to his misery. Alongside this dour mindset, Denis stages a series of high stakes cockfights, where Ardenne, being the vile and contemptible man that he is, ups the ante, making the fights even more brutal, believing he can make more money if they tie razors to the rooster’s feet, which means instant death, as roosters are suddenly carried out in plastic bags. For Jocelyn, who trains these animals like they were his own, this is the ultimate indignity and disgrace. While he wanted to leave earlier, as he sensed Ardenne’s manic energy was uncontainable, Dah tracks him down and brings him back, where he’s forced to endure this slaughter of the only creatures that hold any meaning in his life, all in the name of greed and money, so reminiscent of the amusement of men obtained by pitting gladiators against one another in the spectacle that was the Roman Colosseum. Slowly, through strangely unbalanced images, like a scene of Jocelyn dancing with a white girl, continually holding her too close, Jocelyn is seen losing his equilibrium, where his ultimate breakdown is heartbreaking, as is Dah’s comforting response afterwards, where the simplicity of childhood memories even under colonization reflect a time of happiness and innocence that had not yet been lost. Once more, though sparingly used, the raw and soulful music of Abdullah Ibrahim offers a perfect compliment.

Time Out review

From the director of the acclaimed Chocolat, this is something else entirely: rough-edged almost to the point of being documentary, it's a look at the world of cockfighting in the Paris suburbs, with de Bankolé as an African lovingly guiding his feathered charges through a casual daily bloodletting. An extremely uncomfortable film to watch - although it was apparently filmed without violence to the birds - it has a seedy, claustrophobic power that says as much about human as about animal exploitation. Wenders protégée Dommartin lends a largely decorative presence, but New Wave veteran Brialy stands out as a slimeball entrepreneur. Abdullah Ibrahim again provides broody, pacy music.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review also seen here: No Fear, No Die | Chicago Reader

S'en fout la mort is the French title of this grim little feature (1990) by Claire Denis (Chocolat). It's the name given to one of the fighting cocks owned by two men; one (Alex Descas), from the West Indies, trains them, the other (Isaach de Bankole), from Africa, takes care of business and narrates this story about their deal with a restaurant owner (Jean-Claude Brialy) outside Paris to stage a series of pit duels. We follow the training, the matches, and the trainer's despondency and drinking after the restaurant owner insists on giving the birds metal spurs. This is basically a noirish B-film with fine, underplayed performances by the two leads (Bankole, who played in Chocolat and Night on Earth, is especially good) and a sordid, depressing milieu; Solveig Dommartin (Wings of Desire) costars.

User comments from imdb Author: liehtzu from Korea

I think, and have thought for awhile now, that Claire Denis is truly a filmmaker to watch. I think that she's one of a sorrowfully small handful of modern filmmakers (including Atom Egoyan and Tran Anh Hung) that may go on to make some truly incredible works of art. With each passing film I think that she gets closer to a fully mature style. I think that "No Fear, No Die" is one of the lesser films she's done - that I've seen anyway - but that's not an insult. Far from it, because I found the film to be an eye-opening depiction of the truly vicious practice of cockfighting. It is also, on a larger scale, a portrait of a man who is surrounded by depravity and violence and who, because he has not totally de-sensitized himself to it like those around him, cannot help but let it affect him until he finally snaps.

Two West African brothers in France make their living training cocks to become killing machines. When recruited by a bar owner who wants to open up his own "ring," the brothers set out selecting and training the animals. Denis obviously did her homework - her depiction of the rigorous training sessions is meticulous. Actually, the film is extraordinarily realistic and also extraordinarily graphic. I was shocked when, at the end of the film, the words "no animals were harmed during the making of this film" appeared on the screen. I'm still a little skeptical. The brothers themselves are both very different, yet they have a very strong bond. Jocelyn is the one who is most experienced at what they do, kind of like the Yoda of cockfighting. Dah is the one that handles finances, etc. Ironically, though, it is Jocelyn who is susceptible to acts of conscious because it is he who is most experienced and it is he who spends all day with the birds - and becomes almost a sort of father figure to them - only to watch them butchered in the ring. The title "No Fear, No Die" comes from the name that Jocelyn gives to the prize bird, the champion, a bird who until the end seems invincible.

Gandhi once said that the true measure of how civilized a society is can be found by looking at how it treats its animals. The message of "No Fear, No Die" seems to be that disregard of and insensitivity towards the lives of animals leads to insensitivity on a greater scale. Jocelyn lets in get to him and leads him to an act of near-homicide. In a modern age in which the peoples of "civilized" nations have become so de-sensitized because of their cultures of excess, we are steadily running headfirst into the brink of our own self-destruction. But no one, it seems, can afford to give a damn.

The Cinema of Claire Denis Review: No Fear, No Die (1990) Matthew Blevins from Next Projection

Claire Denis has the unique ability to expose the hidden poetry lurking beneath the seedy layers of any context. She traverses the full extent of what man is capable of in her controversial exploration of the secret world of underground cockfighting in No Fear, No Die, finding men that hide the content of their hearts at all costs and women who have given up on their secret hopes and dreams. We immediately find ourselves in a clandestine world of mystery and bent morality as we set out into the dark autumn night to find the next job, another secret rendezvous with the lost faces of the night, looking for the next crooked connection that will fatten our wallets and starve our souls.

Dah and Jocelyn know no other world as they drift through life bereft of the essential connections that keep a soul at ease. They survey the streets to the sound of smoky jazz, always on the lookout for opportunity or danger in their cruel subterranean world. They are skeptical as they are brought to the new venue that will soon be filled with the sounds of drunken heathens and well-trained fighting cocks. It is a decrepit venue, adequate for the needs of their cock-fighting show but hidden among the ruins of an industrial wasteland as lightshows clamber with the obtuse movement and gracelessness of an industrial trash compactor. They have probably worked in better venues and for better percentages before, but the road behind them offers no escape from the ugly necessities of this final job.

The two trainers are constantly sizing up their surroundings with a look of detached bemusement, seemingly unaffected by the ugliness of their world as they concentrate on the task at hand with unwavering single-mindedness. Jocelyn trains the birds with an admiration and respect for the birds’ innate abilities but with a dutiful detachment as each bird is merely fodder for the next fight. There is no cruelty in Jocelyn’s patient methods as a well-trained bird can be the essential means to an end in his constant search for the next big score. He cares for the birds with more attentiveness than he cares for himself. The cocks offer the only unconditional attachment in this contrived underworld as both men stay detached from the people that surround them. Distractions would compromise the integrity of their work and they have no time for hopes and dreams in this opportunistic existence as attachments bring only fear, obligation, and ultimately death. There is only now and the immediate needs of the day, and the smoky voiced Toni treads in worlds she has no business occupying as she too has given up all hope of a life of love and satisfaction of the soul. They all live a life of strict heartless necessity from the fear that allowing others to enter their closed-off existence would bring only heartache and loss, starving their souls of the essential connections that make life worth living.

We watch these two men live in an impossible reality as one can only fool themselves into denying crucial human connections for so long before the barriers they have constructed for themselves come crashing down. One cannot evade the fear of loss for an entire lifetime and remain unaffected by the needs and fears of those that surround them as even a “heartless” trainer of fighting cocks has hidden hopes and dreams. We can only suppress those emotions for so long before they demand reconciliation, sometimes at the cost of our sanity as we learn life’s essential lessons after it is already too late.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Desire Is Violence Chris Carke interview from Sight and Sound, 2001

Claire Denis' uniquely sensual films are hard to see in the UK. Chris Darke talks to her about watching men from the margins.

Are the films of Claire Denis French cinema's best- kept secret? It certainly seems so in the UK. While her work is regularly praised at film festivals around the world, her last film to be distributed here was her Cameroon-set debut Chocolat in 1988. None of her subsequent films has made more than a festival appearance until now, yet she remains highly regarded. Denis describes herself as "une fille d'Afrique" (a daughter of Africa): born in Paris in 1948, she was two months old when her family moved to Africa and until the age of 14 she lived in a number of countries during the dying years of French colonialism and the coming of African independence. When we met in Paris in March to talk about her most recent film Beau Travail it became clear her childhood is still a key influence.

Chocolat was the fictionalised account of Denis' experiences as a young girl told from the perspective of a woman named France who returns as an adult to her childhood home in post-colonial Cameroon. Denis' second feature S'en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die, 1990) opens with a quote from Chester Himes: "All men, whatever their race, colour or origins, are capable of anything and everything." The statement resonates across Denis' subsequent cinematic forays into extreme physicality, rendered with an increasing attention to the sensual details of flesh, the body and the borderline between desire and violence. In S'en fout la mort the underworlds of illegal cock-fighting and French immigrants overlap and feed off each other in a portrait of exploitation and barely buried desires that find shape in the savage ritual. Denis' controversial 1993 film J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep) was based on the notorious case of Thierry Paulin, a serial killer who murdered 21 elderly women in Paris between 1984 and 1987. Denis' film is as much about the anonymity that the murderer, a prostitute, drug-dealer and drag artist played by non-professional Richard Courcet, was able to maintain within a fluid demi-monde of drifters and immigrants as it is about his crimes. While the social canvas of Denis' films has tended to depict uneasy micro-communities of underbelly-dwellers, her filmic style has increasingly moved away from a traditional French realism towards more elliptical, poetic and sensual structures. U.S. Go Home (1994) and Nenette et Boni (1996) indicated that she was developing a startlingly singular style - cinema as an aching reverie of sweat and flesh - that reaches its most refined expression in her most recent work.

Beau Travail is Denis' sixth feature but only the second in which she has revisited the territory of her childhood. Freely inspired by the work of the 19th-century American writer Herman Melville, in particular the novella Billy Budd, and filmed in the former French colony on the north-east coast of Africa that since 1977 has been the Republic of Djibouti, Beau Travail immerses the viewer in the world of the French Foreign Legion as seen from the perspective of Galoup (Denis Lavant), a legionnaire devoted to his CO Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor). The names Forestier/Subor will be familiar to Godard aficionados; the actor played a character of the same name in Godard's 1960 film Le Petit Soldat whom Denis has revisited some 40 years later. Galoup's devotion to duty and the life of the legion is tested by the arrival of new recruit Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) whose selfless heroism Galoup sees as a threat to his authority. A war of nerves ensues, culminating in Sentain's near death in the desert and Galoup's court-martial. But this synopsis doesn't begin to do justice to the way Denis tells her story of hothouse emotions igniting under African skies. Since Nenette et Boni (which also featured Colin) she has developed an extraordinarily sensuous style of film-making whose impact derives from its combination of music (Beau Travail mixes dance music and Benjamin Britten's opera of Billy Budd), editing rhythms and the cinematography of her long-time collaborator Agnès Godard.

No one else in France is making films like Denis' and the combination of the release of Beau Travail and a complete retrospective of her work at the National Film Theatre provides the opportunity to catch up with her development. When we met in Paris Denis was hung-over, having just wrapped the shoot of her next film, starring Vincent Gallo, the night before. Small, wiry and, after a couple of aspirins, alert and forthcoming, she told me how a daughter of Africa found a new home in cinema.

Senses of Cinema – No Fear, No Die Gwendloyn Audrey Foster from Senses of Cinema, June 2012

No Fear No Die | Reverse Shot Lost in Spaces, by Nicolas Rapold from Reverse Shot

Strictly Film School Acquarello

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review also seen here: Flicks - December 2005

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Claire Denis interviewed by Mark A. Reid - Jump Cut Mark Reid interview taking place August 21, 1994, published from Jump Cut, March 1996

This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia professor Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (and others) about No Fear, No Die and 35 Shots of Rum, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 27, 2013

David Thomson on Claire Denis | Film | The Guardian July 8, 2010

The New York Times (Caryn James) review also seen here: Movie Review - No Fear No Die - Reviews/Film; The Clash of ...

Frantz Fanon

Black Skin, White Masks

The Wretched of the Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I CAN’T SLEEP (J’ai pas sommeil) A- 93

France Switzerland Germany (110 mi) 1994

A witty and sophisticated drama of interconnectedness, much of this feels like a choreography of missed connections, where even well past an hour or so into the film the viewer still has no idea where this film is heading, and may still be wondering even after the final credits roll, as this is an oddball, character driven story where the characters take on greater significance than any story developments themselves, many of which simply disappear into thin air. A perfect example is the opening sequence, where two helicopter policemen are seen enjoying a joke, including extensive laughter that continues at length, yet the viewer never hears the original joke. Moreover, these two policemen are never seen again in the film and don’t at all figure into the action. Nonetheless, they are the opening shot, flying high above the city of Paris and the connecting highways leading into the city. From one of these random highways, we see an old beat-up car with foreign license plates, presumably Russian Cyrillic letters, where an attractive young (as it turns out Lithuanian) woman named Daiga (Yekaterina Golubeva) has a cigarette dangling out of her mouth as she approaches town, where the radio cuts to a breaking news story about the latest victim of the so-called “granny killer,” a string of murders targeting elderly women, presumably for petty cash. However, another pair of clearly inept policemen *do* figure prominently into the storyline, as they keep popping up unexpectedly, usually in the development of some plot detail. A seemingly disconnected shot reveals a young black man wearing a white suit, who turns out to be Camille (Richard Courcet), getting into a fight with a car passenger, who scrambles back into the car as it quickly drives away, as Camille’s white suit is a stark contrast to the two black garbage men who then pull into the frame, all staring at one another as if each is an alien from another planet.

As Daiga gets her life sorted out, where there is a game of musical chairs played in the Lithuanian community to determine just where she will stay, much of this plays out in exaggerated caricature, comic portrayals rarely seen in any Denis film, where this actually more resembles the strange visit from the Hungarian cousin who arrives unexpectedly in America in Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984), one of the directors Denis worked with before making her own films. Daiga ends up staying with an elderly Latvian hotel owner, Line Renaud (who can be heard singing with Dean Martin in the opening song heard on the car radio) where as it happens, Camille has a room at the same hotel with his boyfriend. Daiga, who speaks little to no French, was led to believe she’d have a job in Paris, but when she sees the theater producer, he’s just been stringing her along in hopes he might get into her pants. Completely in passing, Béatrice Dalle, who appeared in the Paris episode of Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), is initially seen sitting at an outdoor café, where her character is not even introduced. Instead we meet Camille and his brother Théo (Alex Descas) with his young son Harry in another apartment, seen talking through a thin wall separating their beds. Dalle turns out to be Mona, the child’s mother who has a hard time spending any extended time with her husband Théo, who doesn’t appear to want anything to do with her. He plays violin in a Caribbean band, seen here to Kali’s song “Racines” Kali-Racines-JaiPasSommeil - YouTube (4:03), and dreams of returning to live on the beach in Martinique, which completely leaves Mona out of the picture. In a nearby apartment, there are loud cries in the night, presumably from domestic violence, but when Théo goes to investigate, they all look suspiciously at one another.

While it’s a long, novelesque set up introducing all the central characters, working with more than thirteen characters, none of whom would typically figure in films we’re used to seeing, as they would be marginal characters relegated to secondary roles, but here it’s an interesting portrait of the alienating aspects of cultural diversity, something later explored in greater detail in Michael Haneke’s CODE UNKNOWN (2000). In Denis’s film, however, these fragmented, often interconnecting episodes are largely unresolved, perhaps reaching a climax when Camille performs at a nightclub in drag, an intensely powerful performance where the audience stands transfixed, all standing just a few feet away, at his anguished “cry of love,” perhaps the theme of the film, but he never once returns their look, eventually turning his back, hiding the inner secrets to his soul, seen here to Jean Louis Murat’s “Le Lien Défait (The Broken Bond)” (J'ai Pas Sommeil - Claire Denis -1994 ), which casts a strangely mystifying aura over the rest of the film. Camille has a volatile relationship with his own blond-haired boyfriend, mirroring the instability of his brother’s relationship, while the two brothers themselves rarely even speak to one another. There’s a telling scene at their own mother’s birthday party, where each brother vies for their mother’s attention on the dance floor. Everyone leads solitary lives, perfectly expressed by the largely unseen, lonely existences of the elderly who are victims of prey, all just part of the isolated lives of outsiders, where the difficulty to be accepted by the mainstream places particular pressures on this group, as they all appear to be drifters leading aimless lives.

Instead of actions driving the narrative of the film, what’s more intriguing here is what isn’t revealed, what’s clouded under the layers of silences, especially between the two brothers who remain strangers to one another. Camille arrives at Théo’s door with something to tell him, but then leaves without a word, earlier seen at a hospital clinic, where there is a noticeable mark on his cheek, but nothing more is revealed, where one might surmise he is HIV positive, but the director leaves this intentionally ambiguous, adding a brief sequence of Camille dancing in a darkly lit gay nightclub. Daiga, who eventually finds work as a hotel cleaning woman, and who couldn’t be less interested in her work, appears to be the observing eyes behind the film, as we get telling glimpses of what she sees, like clues unraveling the mysteries of the film, where she sees behind the hidden lives, being near invisible herself. This is a film of marginalized lives told through a recent headlines grabbing incident where there was an actual serial killer of elderly women in Paris. While the killer is revealed, rather than deriving pleasure or enjoyment from committing acts of murder, the murderer kills with the same boredom and disconnection that plagues the rest of their life. Denis provides a highly impressionistic, richly textured look at the hidden layers lurking underneath the incident, examining issues of immigration, disconnection, race, and urban alienation, where characters are often asked by authorities to see their papers, but the viewer can be overwhelmed by the loss of intimacy reflected in the film, and how easily the grief and sorrows of the marginalized remain forever invisible to the larger mainstream society at large.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

For this frustratingly opaque French release, director Claire Denis decided to throw in all the Hot Topics (alienation, serial killers, race relations, the fall of Communism, transvestitism) necessary for An Important Film For The '90s, with little success. The struggles of a female Lithuanian immigrant are contrasted (sort of) with the killing spree of an African immigrant and his French lover. There's an underlying and deeply conservative simplicity to I Can't Sleep, presumably unintentional given the director's previous work. While mainstream French culture is portrayed as dangerously banal, all those outside the culture are seen to be given to explosions of violence. The implicit explanation of the motiveless killer's behavior seems to be that, by being a gay, cross-dressing African immigrant, he's pretty much forced to become a killer. While Denis places the blame for the creation of monsters on the community which excludes outsiders, she simultaneously justifies their prejudices and offers little hope for reconciliation. What must have been meant to induce thought is more likely to prompt apathetic shrugs.

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

I Can't Sleep is an eerie, edgy slice of contemporary French life, seen as though through a cracked window. A protegé of both Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, director Denis (Chocolat) earns high marks for originality in this tale of love and death amongst some nighttime denizens of Paris. Daiga (Golubeva) is a gorgeous Lithuanian woman who arrives in Paris without a penny to her name in search of a job acting. Raphäel (Dupont) is an expatriate black man from the Antilles who longs to return home with his young daughter and his shrewish wife. His brother Camille (Courcet) is a gay transvestite who haunts the darkened streets of Paris, vogueing in nightclubs and hanging out with his white lover. Although each character comes from a decidedly different set of circumstances and is pursuing different goals, all three will come into contact with each other and change each other's lives forever. Denis' Paris is shaken by a series of brutal murders committed against elderly women, much like the Thierry Paulin case of the late Eighties. Viewers familiar with that sensationalistic case will know what's going on here before the rest of the audience, but that doesn't detract from Denis' lyrical, haunting film. And while I Can't Sleep may take a while to get going, fussing as it does over the seemingly trivial and mundane, once the film gets up to speed and the characters' relationships become clear, it moves like a bullet towards its inescapable, uncompromising finale. Denis, it seems, has taken much away from her experiences working with Wenders and Jarmusch. Many of their signature techniques pop up from time to time, but the film remains the wholly original work of Denis. Creepy in a very post-modern way, it's a Godard film without Godard: eerie, touching, and fraught with meaning.

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

With I Can't Sleep, French director Claire Denis (Chocolat, No Fear No Die) takes a story from newspaper headlines and creates characters around it. This is a study of three people whose lives crisscross and intersect. There is no beginning and no ending -- only the middle portion upon which Denis has chosen to "eavesdrop." The central event, which comprises the climax of I Can't Sleep, changes the lives of all those involved, but it's impossible to say what will come next, after the end credits have rolled.

The basis for this film was the rampage and capture of the real-life "Granny Killer", a serial killer who terrorized Paris during the late 1980s by stalking and murdering elderly women. I Can't Sleep uses this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty as the background against which to tell three stories: those of Daiga, an exceptionally-attractive Lithuanian visitor to France; Theo, a musician struggling to keep custody of his young son; and Camille, a gay erotic dancer and Theo's brother. One of these three is the Granny Killer, but we don't learn which until about halfway through the movie.

Intellectually, I Can't Sleep can be fascinating. It's essentially a postmodern, existential character study and, as such, it offers a lot to people-watchers. But Denis' style has isolated the characters from us, keeping them at arm's length. While viewing this film, the audience member is an indifferent observer. Involvement on an emotional level is almost impossible. This makes sitting through I Can't Sleep something of a frustrating, not to mention sterile, experience. We want to identify with the protagonists or, failing that, at least understand motivations that too- often are left murky.

In some sense, this film has an incomplete feeling. The characters are not the sort to haunt the viewer after the theater lights come on, but the mood may linger. In fact, the wonderfully melancholy atmosphere is often more tangible than the personalities of the people Denis has chosen to focus on. In the final analysis, I Can't Sleep is interesting, but not involving; beautiful, but detached; and unhurried to the point of somnolence.

User comments from imdb Author: William Ploch (wbploc0@pop.uky.edu) from Lexington, Kentucky

Claire Denis' "I Can't Sleep" is a puzzling movie, one that is difficult to grasp because its simplicity makes it so daunting. The story is actually a study of an individual's ability to go about his or her everyday life while terror permeates the surroundings. The central character is Daiga, a Lithuanian woman who has moved to Paris and is looking for a job. As she moves about the city, she gradually begins to notice how the citizens are reacting to a string of murders that has been hyped up in the media; they do not express their fears outwardly, but instead seem a little detached and edgy. As she becomes settled, she begins to meet a few interesting people; they include a considerate landlady, a struggling musician, and two homosexuals who just happen to be the killers.

Denis takes a tricky approach to portraying the murderers. She does not condone their actions and clearly does not have too much sympathy for them, but still manages to depict them as ordinary human beings who are driven to desperate crimes because they fail to relate to anything in their environment. She does this by first showing the effect their actions have on the rest of the city, with the newspapers blaring sensational headlines and the citizens reacting by retreating into their homes. But, as the story unfolds, the killers are placed on the same plane as the rest of the characters, and we see their problems, insecurities, and apathy fit in with the day-to-day tedium of their lives. They do not have anyone else to care about, and spend their evenings wandering about the various below-level dives and nightclubs in Paris. It is not until later on that we learn these two men are actually the killers. And when we do discover this, it makes sense in a strange sort of way: their alienation from the rest of society has made them indifferent to everyone but each other. It's almost as if they killed not out of anger, hate, or insanity, but out of boredom.

Denis also makes it clear that such crimes have consequences not just for the victims, but for all of society. In the end, it is Daiga, the immigrant who has maintained indifference to the slayings throughout most of the film, who is forced to decide how to expose the criminals. Her `outsider' status gradually diminishes as she realizes that she is the only person who can change the course of events.

Still, the drama to the story is not as involving as it could be, and the characters' different stories are not always well balanced. Nevertheless, "I Can't Sleep" is still an intriguing tale about how people often remain indifferent to brutality until it affects them personally.

Senses of Cinema – Gestures of Intimacy: Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep Saige Walton from Senses of Cinema, October 2012

Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, ‘I Can’t Sleep’ Pt. 2, Robin Wood reviewing I Can’t Sleep from Film International, January 27, 2011

‘Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression, Part 1′ 2-part article by Robin Wood, reviewing Chocolat from Film International, April 1, 2011

Todd McGowan, 'Resisting the lure of ultimate enjoyment: Claire Denis' J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep, 1994)', Kinoeye, Vol 3, Issue 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Resisting the lure of ultimate enjoyment

Decoding unreadable spaces Corinne Oster on I Can't Sleep, from Kinoeye, June 9, 2003, also seen here: Kinoeye [Corinne Oster]

I Can't Sleep | Reverse Shot Jagged Edges, by Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot

I Can't Sleep (J'ai pas sommeil,1994): Network Lives and Non-Sensationalism Auditoire on Film

Cinema Sights [James Ewing]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Pretty Clever Films [Brandy Dean]

Filmsweep [Persona]

Cynthia Fuchs (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [1/5]

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Boxoffice Magazine review Estep Nagy

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea Gronvall about I Can't Sleep and Trouble Every Day, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 20, 2013

Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety.com [Deborah Young]

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

The New York Times (Caryn James) review

U.S. GO HOME – made for TV

aka: Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge, Season 1, Episode 2

France (58 mi) 1994

U.S. Go Home Weve Got to Get Out of This Place, by Ryland Walker Knight from Reverse Shot

Although the curious and internet-savvy cinephile can, without too much hassle, find a way to see Claire Denis’s U.S. Go Home, its perpetual medley of Sixties pop songs (and their consequent licensing headaches) has kept it from easy viewing access in the United States. This is a shame. For starters, the film is a breeze: all that fun music all the time buoys its youthful verve and nudges its tentative exploration forward. For another, it’s a window on Denis’s follow-up, its spiritual sequel, Nenette et Boni, as Grégoire Colin and Alice Houri star in both as siblings. But where the later film shows youth to be a daydream, prone to fantasy as often as violence, U.S. Go Home tells us that youth is a dance. Or maybe it should be.

A dance: following your body, feeling the space around you, always moving, always participatory. Even if you’re dancing alone, you’re still dancing with somebody. It starts from expression. There’s George Bernard Shaw’s quip that dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire, of course, and that’s quite often true, especially among the young and horny. More curious is the elemental teenage desire for self-expression—if we understand that as articulating one’s individuality—though dancing to pop music is so often based on repetition. When teens dance it’s kind of a matching game, where very few try to one-up one another. Part of the game, always, is to impress, but you’ll surely dance yourself into a lonely corner if you can’t dance with anybody but yourself. You can’t force it. You have to feel it, and let it build. You give yourself.

U.S. Go Home is a big-night-out movie. Houri’s Martine narrates, and though it’s her desire to lose her virginity that gets the night, and the film, going, Colin’s Alain opens it with a monologue about sexuality’s risk to one’s honor. They live with their mother in a Parisian suburb near a U.S. army base, far enough from the city that fog/smog smears the horizon and keeps the distant distant and out of sight. We might say that distance locks these people in place. Their world is modest, and there’s little room to vent, it would appear, aside from nights out and that window of freedom that a pop song can open. But the film itself is hardly angsty; instead it renders angst with patient observation. There are rushes of light and movement—it’s unavoidable with kids—and for the most part reflects the Denis style of narrative elision. Its hour-long length alone predicates some of its abruptness, but nothing feels rushed. And there’s that music that keeps playing, keeps getting limbs going, keeps the kids up at night. The music tells the story as much as the (minimal) dialogue or the narrative consequences.

Denis made U.S. Go Home as part of a television series called Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge… which gave nine directors (among them, Akerman and Assayas and Téchiné) an opportunity to make movies about teenagers set in their own adolescent era, though not necessarily culled from autobiography, with one major narrative stipulation: there must be a party scene. So this commitment to dancing is not particular to the Denis film per se. In fact, it’s not limited to this Denis film—bodies and movement are a recurrent motif across her work. After L’Intrus (which we might say is, among other things, her film about the corporeal and metaphysical capacities of the heart), Denis made Vers Mathilde, a documentary about the French choreographer Mathilde Monnier, which is explicitly about how we inhabit space, how we change any space we participate in, and how we compete for space, simply by being present and active. This is perhaps a good way to define her masterpiece Beau travail away from the common “Billy Budd in the French Foreign Legion” tag, however apt that synopsis, for that film, which also stars Colin, shows us scene after scene of half-naked young men, all muscle, locked in ritual performances; it’s a film of training, but it looks like dance exercise, not military conditioning. The sparring involves circling and swimming and hugging; the only punch thrown looks more a magic transference—the ceremonial spell is only broken at the close (maybe the best ending in cinema) when Denis Lavant lets everything loose, flails in pirouette, twirls like a top, and falls off screen in rhythm. There’s a similar scene in U.S. Go Home, but it comes earlier, when Colin’s Alain rocks out solo to Eric Burdon and the Animals’ “Hey Gyp.” He sings along, he romps around his room punching the sky, he bounces on his bed, he delights himself, all in one take. The only problem is that he’s not alone. We come to realize that he’s been watched not just by us but also by his sister, Martine, as we have shared her vantage. She tries to cut him down, calling him crazy, and he, typical teen, asks why he can’t have some privacy.

A dance: an event organized around possibilities, a prelude to plenty, the best way to get laid. Martine and best friend Marlène (Jessica Tharaud) strike out from the first destination—kids dancing with parents, a dad leading a conga line—and find their way to a real party (without parents) with the lights down low and the music turned up loud, where older young people drink booze and smoke cigarettes and make out. On the dance floor, the camera winds around the varied couples while the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” blares; all the girls hang tight on their boys. Then the song changes, picks up speed, and the camera turns around. Among smiles and bobbing bodies, we see Martine and Marlène lost, still wearing their coats, still looking for Alain as a foothold, still standing at the threshold. Our girls don’t belong, but they push into the party. They enter the hive of hip, still onlookers, and Marlène spies Alain dancing, holding a girl close, moving in slow circles. Alain ignores them. He won’t facilitate. The girls will have to, and indeed do, make their own way into the crowd, into this dance. Marlène moves first, quick to let her hair down and bum a cigarette, while Martine sulks. Overall, Marlène fares better simply because she’s ready, she gives in, she lets go, she has some fun with the new rules and the new roles this night initiates. However, Martine is not strictly hemmed in by her behavior: when she asks the same boy for a cigarette, he ignores her entreaty by telling her Marlène is cute and walks away. After all, Marlène is a pale redhead with big lips and Martine an Arabesque waif with kinky hair, which points to the subtle racism in the party’s social dynamic.

The party (the movie) may not be allegory, but the political is hardly an afterthought. The title of the film itself and the repetition of all this commodified pop music begin to sound suspect, or curious. Who’s demanding the U.S. go home, anyway? In the end, we only hear Martine say the line, parroting a protest she could care less about, another sign of teenage flippancy—and the peculiar hypocrisy, or at least irony, of this film’s world. No big surprise that Anne Wiazemsky, that princess of the left, co-wrote the scenario with Denis, casting over the provincial idyll an American shadow and coloring the petulance of a line like, “I’m a Communist, I don’t drink Coca-Cola,” with doubt and a little amusement. The joke’s on the kids, almost, as they’re rootless pinballs. It just so happens that Alain is the right age to be seduced by the Red and that Martine recollects a leftist anthem (that her brother no doubt introduced her to) in the face of an American.

The tragedy in U.S. Go Home, it would seem, is how desire blocks fun, how motivations are always suspect in youth. Though Marlène lays down with Alain, neither looks happy. After walking in on them, Martine seems the most hurt and disappointed, and when Alain tries to console her, to reassure her of their familial bond, Marlène interrupts—and Alain flees. And then the siblings meet Vincent Gallo. Gallo plays Captain Vido Brown. He’s lonely, sitting by himself, drinking bottled Coke with his car door open. When Martine and Alain stroll past, Martine asks for a ride, and though he’s wary, Brown agrees to give them a lift. He even offers them his last two sodas, which Alain denies on the political grounds quoted above. Alain makes it plain he cannot stand the Army man, and Brown implores Alain to chill out, to not wreck his car, but Alain exits, leaving Martine alone. Martine doesn’t seem to care, really, and neither does Brown. He allows her to charm him, though Gallo’s eyes tell us he knows it’s a foolish game. He drives her around, he hugs her, he gets her past the dawn. Maybe he does this because he wants to, more likely he does it because, as he says, he’s miserable.

But the film does not set the American apart any more than it does Martine; each is alone in a world of optimism, which we see is equivalent to (or that such a posture only leads to) a world of disappointment. Alain, on the other hand, seems to live in a world of hurt, always at odds. Put otherwise, his world is his own and he sees threats from every angle, every body, every utterance—anything from a plea of sympathy to an apology. He paws the girls he holds and he eyes them with a lust as intense as his hands are forceful. Funny and apt, then, that he’s most alive when dancing alone in his room, promising one thing after another—things no communist would want, like a Chevrolet—if he could just get some of some girl’s love. And, perfect hypocrite that he is, as soon as he lands some sweetness, he turns his back and stalks off shirtless.

Really, all teen movies are the same at heart because all teens are the same: each longs to fill a type, to fulfill some expectation only she holds onto or knows of inside some private, pretzel logic. And Denis never judges these teenagers’ choices: her style hovers over the world, at a distance (though her camera is far more mobile than, say, that of one of her inspirations, Ozu). She captures life’s richness by observing behavior, and then lets us develop the picture. What Martine learns in the car with Brown is that in order to lose her virginity she will have to give something, and that to flirt can be fun—though the language barrier helps distance herself from the situation and makes interaction more of a game with this older, hurt, less aggressive man. The dance is worth the risk. But that doesn’t stop the world from turning. In the morning he’s still American and she’s still a French teenager and her brother is still hurt, still judging. The spray-paint on the box car behind Brown still reads, “U.S. GO HOME,” and everybody sits alone, half-awake and dazed in the dawn’s pink light, dreaming.

Memories of the Future [Jesse Ataide]

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

rare films of claire denis: us go home & no fear, no ... - pinnland empire Marcus

U.S. Go Home | Dork Shelf

US Go Home - Mubi Film discussion group, May 6, 2011

Review: 'US Go Home' - Variety David Rooney

NENETTE AND BONI (Nénette et Boni) B+ 91

France (103 mi) 1996

One of the director’s more most sensitive, humane and accessible films, what initially appears to be a pair of mismatched lovers only becomes revealed as brother and sister a half hour into the film, where Nénette (Alice Houri) and Boni (Grégoire Colin) share a troubled past, where both have grown distant from living apart following the separation of their parents, each living with a different parent, culminating with the death of their mother, where Boni is living in her house. Both earlier played siblings in Denis’s made-for-French-TV film U.S. GO HOME (1994), reunited here as title characters, a constantly embroiled brother and sister living in Marseilles. Much of their relationship is expressed through constant bickering, often turning ugly, where the one thing they both share is a uniform hatred of their father (Jacques Nolot). While the film is shot in a social realist style, where it could just as easily be a product of the Dardennes brothers, it also contains abruptly strange mood shifts, where we hear 19-year old school dropout Boni go through his rape and domineering masturbation ramblings from his diary entries about forcefully screwing the neighbor’s wife, where he has a fixation on the beautiful baker’s wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, gentle, gorgeously quirky, never better). When his raging male hormone teen sex fantasies blend seamlessly into the real life of his daily visits to the bakery, it casts an absurdly humorous skew throughout the entire film, especially when the vernacular of his sex fantasies becomes intertwined into the bakery world itself, often breaking into utter fantasy sequences, Bakery Scene from Nenette et Boni YouTube (3:27). Ironically Boni’s lustful gaze is counteracted by the director’s own eroticization of Boni, who often becomes the subject of an exploratory pan or a gorgeously held shot. 15-year old Nénette, on the other hand, has escaped from boarding school, where the opening sequence in the pool, especially scored by the Tendersticks, plays out like a reverie of momentary calm quickly interrupted by a harshly intruding reality, Tindersticks - Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009 Nenette et Boni YouTube (2:29), as she spends much of the film as a street urchin, having to fend for herself in a hostile environment.

The explosively charged opening rant sets the tone for the film, which is layered in a relentlessly dreary existence, much of it set in the financially troubled world of the streets where Boni sells pizzas out of a truck, while he and his gang of friends also invest heavily in black market merchandise, resulting in a reverently adored coffeemaker that becomes his most prized possession. The criminal underworld extends to his father’s business as well, where one of the givens of the film is financial insecurity, once more blending into the emotional instability of the characters. Boni actually kicks out his rebellious sister, even after learning she’s pregnant, showing the heartlessness of his situation. What is quickly realized is that both are essentially alone, two emotionally damaged misfit kids without any real support, living a minimal existence in a house that never has any food, where in an awkward way, he begins to care and feel protective of her. Once he realizes she’s actually 7-month’s pregnant, viewing an ultrasound photo confirming there’s a real baby inside, he develops a strangely fascinating curiosity, which surprisingly becomes the most profoundly affecting aspect of the story, becoming an unsentimental and totally unpredictable emotional journey. Having nowhere else to go, refusing to return to or even see her father, Nénette poignantly explores her deceased mother’s bedroom, which prompts grainy flashback images of a happier youth that feels all too brief. As they warily begin to accept one another, the camera’s exploratory gaze offers a hint of their previous relationship with a memorable shot that begins on Boni’s head and shoulders as he sleeps, slowly panning down until we see both he and Nénette’s feet sticking out at the end of the bed, humorously contrasting in size, where one gets the sense that they used to sleep like this in their earlier years. The film’s rhythm and structure is of paramount interest, as the overriding mood of bleak reality constantly breaks into moments of excruciating tenderness, where perhaps the ultimate irony is seeing Vincent Gallo (the baker), usually seen as such an aggressively macho guy become such a gentle and loving soul, where his wife is the adoring object of his gazing affections, beautifully scored to the Beach Boys “God Only Knows” Nenette et Boni Scene YouTube (1:53). Part of the little treasures of the film is the audience knowing Boni’s fierce sexual obsessions that he keeps to himself while neither the baker nor his wife have any knowledge whatsoever, knowing Boni only as a customer, always treating him with kindness and respect.

A distinctly urban film, filled with characters drifting through seemingly aimless lives, living day to day, hand to mouth, where there’s an emphasis on poverty, with people struggling to make end’s meet. In a city where no one knows anyone else, there’s a bit of an abrupt jolt when the baker’s wife (always dressed in baby pinks or blues) runs into Boni at the shopping mall, his ultimate fantasy, while she’s clearly happy to see a familiar face “from the neighborhood.” This is prefaced by scenes of Boni on the street as he stares at the baker’s wife through a store window, becoming one of the most tender scenes ever committed to celluloid, a love fantasia to the baker and his wife set to the music of Tindersticks “Tiny Tears” Tindersticks - Tiny Tears (From the Soundtrack Nenette et Boni) YouTube (5:54), where the clip is misleading, as the song is only used in the daydream sequence, where natural sound and dialogue follow. From this reverie, she latches onto him, grasping for a connection in the mad holiday rush of Christmas shopping where they’re literally crushed from the overflowing crowds. Their conversation couldn’t take on a more bizarre turn, where she nervously rambles on about the mysterious effects of chemicals used in making perfume, where especially the way she describes it makes it sound like a laughable supposition if it weren’t so true, while he can only stare in disbelief, his brain frozen in dream state. These fantasy interludes are outrageously exaggerated dreams of a perfect marriage, like something depicted in the gloriously artificial universe of musicals, perhaps rising out of the painful void of his own existence, imagining an alternate existence that takes the place of his own. By the end, reality veers into alternate universe territory, but in this strange and mysterious way, it poetically magnifies the theme of unwanted children, showing a teen mother so traumatized by the unmentioned circumstances surrounding the unnamed father (with hints that it could be her own incestuous father) that she doesn’t even want to look at her own child, while at the same time revealing a young father figure gloriously adoring a child that isn’t even his own, going to great lengths to make it distinctly and decisively an integral part of his life forever. A tender and touching portrait of damaged lives filled with lingering emotional scars, shot throughout with symbolism, humor, and an intimacy of expression, this is a film doused in a grim reality that seemingly knows no bounds, but is as optimistically uplifting as any fairy tale.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Boni (Colin) is a pizza cook who harbours obscene, even sociopathic fantasies about the local baker's wife; Nénette (Houri) is his younger sister who runs away from boarding school and asks the embarrassed, reluctant Boni to give her shelter. This fragmented, often overly enigmatic film is a study of the two siblings' mostly aggressive relationships with each other, their friends and their estranged father. There are odd, rather contrived fantasy scenes here which sit uneasily with the generally downbeat naturalism of the rest of the film; and since the script seems determined to tease rather than inform, it's a little hard in the end to fathom exactly what director and co-writer Denis is really getting at. The performances, however, are good, and the music appealing

Nenette and Boni | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Not a total loss but not really a finished film either, Claire Denis' 1996 French feature is much too coy and nonspecific for its own good. Gregoire Colin and Alice Houri, who played siblings in Denis' 1994 TV feature U.S. Go Home, are reunited as the title characters, a troubled brother and sister living in Marseilles. Boni is a horny 19-year-old pizza worker lost in masturbation fantasies; his 15-year-old sister Nenette, seven months pregnant, flees her boarding school to stay with him. Both detest their father, and Denis strongly hints but never confirms that the unborn child is his. More defensibly, the film refuses to discriminate between the 19-year-old's fantasies and his daily life. Basically the film is a collection of funky surface distractions, and as such it's quite watchable; just don't go looking for too much more. In French with subtitles.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

If it were lopped into manageable, five-minute chunks, the shimmering neon surfaces and teasingly enigmatic behavior in Nenette And Boni could be turned into a number of fine music videos. But over the course of a full-length film, director Claire Denis' (Chocolat) seductive visuals, however well-sustained, fail to keep frustration from setting in, as characters roam free of motivation and loose ends dangle. Nenette And Boni is most inspired when imagining the vivid daydream fantasies in Confessions Of A Wimp, a diary of erotic scenarios invented by a 19-year-old pizza chef (Grégoire Colin) who lusts after the voluptuous wife (Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi) of a local baker. His private world is ruptured when his estranged younger sister (Alice Houri) re-enters his life, pregnant with a child whose father may or may not be their own. In style, tone, and theme, Nenette And Boni could be mistaken for the work of great Canadian director Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter), who also explores the ambiguous ties of modern families in obsessive, hypnotic detail. But in her dogged refusal to clarify the feelings her title characters have for one another—resentful at times, affectionate at others—Denis is guilty of the chilly aesthetic posturing critics often attribute to Egoyan. Despite an alluring set-up and heartfelt performances from the leads, nothing ultimately coheres, and mood trumps logic on every occasion.

The Boston Phoenix review Gerald Peary

Claire Denis's first film, Chocolat (1988), was an anti-colonialist tale set in French West Africa, but with enough attention paid to the white colonialists, and to the jungle scenery, to attract an American arthouse audience. Since, Denis's films have been as unwanted here as they've been uniformly excellent: hardboiled sagas of France's underweb of Third World illegals and marginals trying to make a go of it in their mother-of-an-adopted country. S'en fout la mort (1989) was about African cockpit workers; J'ai pas sommeil (1994) was a politically incorrect story of an African-in-Paris serial killer.

In her tender, mesmerising new Nenette et Boni, Denis switches locales, to Marseilles, but her sibling protagonists are, again, among society's seeming losers. Boni (Grégoire Colin) is an 18-year-old school dropout who runs a pizza wagon, sells contraband fishing rods from Taiwan, and has vivid masturbatory dreams of fornicating with the baker's wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi); Nenette (Alice Houri) is his sour, darkly beautiful, deeply pregnant 15-year-old sister. They've lived apart, and estranged, since their parents split. He's inherited a slum apartment from his recently deceased mother. She's stayed on with her weak-spirited father (Jacques Nolot), though she runs away when she discovers herself with an unwanted child. As Nenette et Boni proceeds, the reticent brother and sister slowly edge together, though nothing is said. This is a quiet, quiet movie of moods, glances, penetrating looks. Ultimately, there's a lovely, unexpected sacrament, and Claire Denis's most (tentatively) benign ending.

The Cinema of Claire Denis Review: Nenette and Boni (1996) Rowena Santos Aquino from Next Projection

Nénette and Boni is arguably a sequel to U.S. Go Home (1994), Claire Denis’ contribution to the French television series Tous les garcons et les filles de leur age (1993), for several reasons. One, the themes of adolescence and explorations of the body, intimacy, and desire between men and women—in a romantic, sexual sense between someone and his/her object of desire, and a fraternal, platonic sense between siblings. In U.S. Go Home, teenage siblings Alain and Martine end up attending the same party, he dancing with his girl and she in pursuit of losing her virginity to ‘catch up’ with her friend who confides to her early in the film that she has had sex. These situations are stitched together by a corporeal contemplation on longing, understanding one’s emotions and those of others through disillusionment, and a growing sense of responsibility and making choices. Two, the young lead actors Grégoire Colin and Alice Houri as the brother and sister. Once Denis made U.S. Go Home with Colin and Houri, she felt that their film collaboration had not yet been adamantly fulfilled. Thus, she made Nénette and Boni with them playing the titular, estranged siblings who reencounter each other.

…the sensual and sensitive beauty of the film springs precisely from Nénette and Boni’s unbridled, rash decisions, desires, and quirks as individuals and as siblings.

U.S. Go Home’s emphasis on the corporeal and contemplative to represent adolescent longing, understanding and disillusionment, and forging a sense of responsibility also continues in Nénette and Boni. The film begins with fragments of Nénette and Boni’s separate yet equally diaphanous lives, she first presented floating face-up in a swimming pool, shot from overhead, calm and unstressed, and he in the passenger seat of a car that races around in a circle, kinetic and senseless. Such scenes betray their youth, and subsequent scenes betray their lack of responsibility.

At the outset, Nénette reveals her rebellious streak and irresponsibility when she flees her boarding school early in the film. He does the same by spending an inordinate amount of time fantasising about the baker’s wife (Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi), while living in disarray in his mother’s house and managing a pizza truck according to his whims. Further irresponsibility on both their parts manifests itself when Nénette suddenly shows up at Boni’s to stay, he rejecting her presence and she pregnant and undecided.

But the sensual and sensitive beauty of the film springs precisely from Nénette and Boni’s unbridled, rash decisions, desires, and quirks as individuals and as siblings. Denis presents Nénette and Boni in a highly affectionate and curious manner while remaining nonjudgmental towards their troubled situations and relationship with each other. They may lack responsibility in a social sense to each other as siblings, but at the same time, they are absolutely in control of their individual desires, be it in Nénette’s decision to escape the boarding school and her father or in Boni’s all-consuming indulgence in his sexual fantasies of the baker’s wife and trying to forge a life of his own, financially and emotionally speaking.

In this regard, the first sequence of Boni’s fantasy of the baker’s wife in his room, shirtless and narrating to himself a sexual scenario, is both comical and thoughtful in its frank revelation of Boni’s emotional hues and sexual im/maturity (ditto for a later sequence involving Boni and some pizza dough). Concluding this fantasy sequence is the brilliant aural element of the sounds of coffee brewing, which initially could be taken for human moans. The following scene operates hilariously like a parody of the proverbial ‘morning after,’ with Boni waking up and caressing his sexual accomplice at his bedside: his new coffee maker.

Denis sprinkles random shots of immigrants throughout Nénette and Boni’s parallel and eventually intersecting trajectories, as if to stand in for the city’s diversity without actually showing city spaces.

The siblings’ first reencounter with each other in the film is also tempered by the corporeal and intimate, such physical closeness continuing that found between the siblings in U.S. Go Home (in which they hold each other in a tight embrace as they slow dance at the party). Having been let into Boni’s place by one of his friends, Nénette surprises Boni in his bed as he is about to masturbate and initiate another sexual fantasy. Also reinforcing the siblings’ awkward, ambiguous, yet affectionate relationship in its intimacy is their small, physical tangle on the terrace as well as the notebook drawing of ‘Nénette and Boni’ by the former in the latter’s notebook. This same notebook contains Boni’s scribblings of sexual scenarios with the baker’s wife, a subtle detail that expresses how their relationship constantly blurs the lines between romantic/sexual and fraternal/platonic. Further blurring these lines is the scene with Nénette’s doctor (Alex Descas), who thinks that they are husband and wife; neither of them corrects him.

Nénette and Boni’s relationship is a constant mixture of softness and roughness, a delicate and fragile creature, especially because of their youth.

The dynamic of their relationship transforms ever so unassumingly and pushes them to grow up in the world that much more quickly, as they confront a host of situations: their father’s eventual search for Nénette and attempts to reconcile with both of them; Boni’s face-to-face encounter with the baker’s wife (who significantly speaks to him of pheromones and the chemical reaction between men and women while ignorant of his feelings for her); and above all Nénette’s advancing pregnancy and their divergent reactions to it, resulting in an unexpected  act on Boni’s part.

Also contributing, albeit obliquely, to the film’s energy is the port city setting of Marseille. Denis sprinkles random shots of immigrants throughout Nénette and Boni’s parallel and eventually intersecting trajectories, as if to stand in for the city’s diversity without actually showing city spaces. Indeed, these random shots signify an alternative market and cultural flow of bodies, arms smuggling, and stealing/selling phone cards that briefly come into contact with Nénette and Boni, providing an intriguing, larger context in which to locate their insular lives.

Nénette et Boni Living in the Moment, by Matt Connolly from Reverse Shot

Nenette and Boni | Reverse Shot Sidelong Glance, by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

Films of Claire Denis, text version - Jump Cut Ian Murphy from Jump Cut, Fall, 2012

Nenette et Boni - Slant Magazine Bill Weber

The Pink Smoke [John Cribbs]

ArtsScene [Ilse] Ilse de Mucha Herrera

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

James Bowman review

Strictly Film School Acquarello

The Claire Denis Collection - Film @ The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Cinema Sights [James Ewing]

GreenCine Daily: DVD OF (LAST) WEEK: Nenette and Boni Aaron Hillis

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice] also seen here: Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

Sound On Sight Taegan J. Brown

Boxoffice Magazine review Kevin Courrier

Harvey S. Karten review

Siblings struggle with tough questions in Claire Denis's 'Nénette et ... Lindsay Waite from The Examiner

This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the Nightingale's Christy LeMaster about Nenette et Boni and Beau Travail, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 13, 2013

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]

Review: 'Nenette and Boni' - Variety

The Claire Denis Collection, DVD review - Telegraph Mike McCahill

Baltimore City Paper: Nenette and Boni | Movie Review Bret McCabe

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

'Nenette' Celebrates Life, Love and Family - Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] also seen here: Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review a,so seen here: New York Times

The Claire Denis Collection - Grégoire Colin - DVDBeaver.com Eric Cotenas

Nénette et Boni - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BEAU TRAVAIL A 96

France (93 mi) 1999

With banners furled, and clarions mute,

An army passes in the night,

And beaming spears and helms salute,

The dark with bright.

In silence deep the legions stream,

With open ranks, in order true;

Over boundless plains they stream and gleam–

No chief in view!

Afar, in twinkling distance lost,
(So legends tell) he lonely wends
And back through all that shining host
His mandate sends.

—The Night March, Herman Melville from Timoleon,1891

Gold in the mountain

And gold in the glen

And greed in the heart

Heaven having no part

And unsatisfied men.

—Gold in the Mountain, Herman Melville from The Works of Herman Melville, 1924

This film grew out of a French TV commission when Denis was approached by ARTE, the most culturally progressive European TV channel, and asked to make a film for a series exploring the theme of “foreignness.” This is the same company that earlier asked Denis and others, namely Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, Cold Water (L’eau Froide) (1994), and André Téchiné, Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994), to make films about adolescence, which resulted in the one-hour made-for-French-TV film U.S. GO HOME (1994). “Since most of my films deal with that anyway, I worried about how I could avoid repeating myself.” Having spent her early childhood in colonial French Africa, then moving to the Paris suburbs at age 13, she never felt like she belonged in either place, growing up feeling alienated. Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, though altering the themes and ultimately the outcome, including carefully chosen excerpts of music from the Benjamin Britten opera, Denis has transposed the ship’s setting to a postcolonial French Foreign Legion outpost in the desert regions of Djibouti, Somalia, one of the places her family lived in the 50’s, so she already had a familiarity with the region. Shot in just 15 days, what’s so remarkable about the film is the extreme originality, the indirect way of telling the story, reflecting the bad conscience of the colonial occupying power, as almost immediately one detects a solidly abstract visual expressionism, where the near wordless film becomes an intoxicating choreography of ritualized movement, as the group of fifteen muscular men do shirtless calisthenics in formation under the emptiness of the blistering desert sky, drenched with male eroticism and cast in the form of a languorous tropical dream, where a theme of rootless and abandoned men who otherwise have no home adapt to the rigid discipline of the legion. Perhaps more importantly, Denis hired a choreographer, Bernardo Montet (who also plays one of the French legionnaires), transforming the film into a series of carefully constructed scenes, providing a near surreal structure, intentionally blurring the lines between illusion and reality.

A taut psychological exploration of the increasingly antagonistic relationship between a Foreign Legion officer, Lieutenant Galoup (Denis Lavant), and a charismatic new recruit, Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin), Galoup narrates the tale in voiceover, where he is fanatically loyal to his commanding officer Bruno Forestier, Michel Subor, who previously played Bruno Forestier 37 years earlier in Godard's LE PETIT SOLDAT (1963) which was set during the Algerian War, actually banned for three years in France prior to the release due to the presence of torture scenes, where Forestier is now much older, seen with a chiseled face, sitting alone from the rest of the men, constantly smoking cigarettes. The Denis film offers a revisionist perspective by actually engaging in a conversation with that earlier film through a shared character. But when new recruits arrive, Galoup expresses extraordinary vehemence towards the especially attractive Sentain, especially after Forestier has taken an immediate liking to him, overly insecure and threated perhaps by his own noticeable lack of good looks. Galoup's jealousy, like Othello, literally drives him to murderous insanity. With a minimum of dialogue, Denis captures the ritual and repetition of a legionnaire’s life, expressed through beautifully ordered compositions of the men during various maneuvers, crawling under barbed wire, vaulting over bars, walking across elevated parallel wires, marching in formation across the desolate landscape, while also engaged in hand to hand combat. The homoeroticism of the military experience rises to the forefront from the beauty of the visual composition, but also from the inner workings of Galoup’s mind, as he expresses his love of Forestier (carrying around a photo of him as a younger man) and a growing rage against Sentain. While the legionnaires come from all races and hues, the film raises questions about the relationships of whites to blacks, especially given the perspective of a former French colony, highlighted in scenes where the men go into town on leave and dance with the local women, where one particular local beauty, Rahel (Marta Tafesse Kassa), seems to be the exclusive girl of Galoup, though he treats her paternalistically, as his primary interest remains Forestier. While the setting is Africa, the atmospheric mood is one of reverie, spending hot dusty afternoons in the sun, where the monotony of the experience can overwhelm the legionnaires. The voiceover is actually recalling events from a diary in a flashback mode, offering a ruminating calm, even as Galoup’s plans grow more inflamed, where his desire is more potent precisely because it remains unconsummated.

Denis creates a sensuous atmosphere not only with perfectly composed images, but the dramatic power never diminishes between major and minor events, often contrasting close ups with long shots, blending music and natural sound into her film, where she’s not afraid to use silences to match the spacious emptiness all around. What’s perhaps most surprising, despite the focus on the men, is how carefully layered women are into the landscape, becoming a kind of Greek chorus, where their silent presence is everywhere, amusingly seen staring at the men as they carefully wash and iron their clothes, lining the street markets selling their goods, or seen sitting in the buses riding through the endless landscapes. When the legionnaires stream into town on leave, they’re seen dancing at the local nightclub with native women, exchanging physical embraces, but rarely words. The film opens and closes on the dance floor, where the whole film unravels like continual dance sequences, where even in their silence the women are an integral and necessary part of a dance ritual, but their presence is hauntingly ambiguous, silent witnesses, suggesting a potentially unhealthy relationship with the postcolonial presence of the soldiers, who may not be so welcome in the region. According to Denis, “You always have a moment in life when you’d like to start from zero. The Foreign Legion is a place where boys go to do that, where people who have no place to go can find a kind of family, especially because they're not asked what they did before. The legionnaires became an erotic object in film and song—Edith Piaf’s song ‘Mon Legionnaire’ is one of her most famous—but when I saw them walking in the street or going to clubs, their beauty was more sad to me than erotic. You could see that the Legion is about men together. These boys who never belonged before now belong to one another. It’s very touching.” Tribute to Beau Travail YouTube (8:15), featuring the opening dance sequence with African girls in a disco to “Şimarik (Kiss-Kiss)” by Tarkan (0 to 1:24), calisthenics with a Benjamin Britten chorale (1:25 to 2:25), more unscored calisthenics, (2:25 to 3:45), dance sequence with Rahel (Marta Tafesse Kassa) to Francky Vincent “Le Tourment d’Amour” (3:45 to 4:30), more unscored calisthenics (4:30 to 5:23), march in formation to Neil Young’s “Safeway Cart” (5:23 to 6:50), Denis Lavant final dance sequence up to the end credits to Corona “Rhythm of the Night” (6:50 to 8:15), while this extends the throbbing dance music through the final credits, singing almost in defiance, “This is the rhythm of my life, my life,” CD Beau Travail YouTube (4:59).

The full force of the film took critic Jonathan Rosenbaum by such surprise that he had to admit “I must confess that I’m embarrassed by most of my other reviews of Claire Denis films,” claiming the difference between this film and her earlier work “is quite simply the difference between making movies and making cinema,” comparing it to the quantum leap taken by certain exalted artists like Robert Johnson or Charlie Parker in blues and jazz. Some of the glorified images of male bodies during training exercises or on maneuvers are comparable to the idealized images of farmers harvesting the fields in Dovzhenko’s EARTH (1930), Eisenstein’s visually astounding battle scenes in ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938), or the glorified sweep of perfectly sculpted battle formations in Jancsó’s THE RED AND THE WHITE (1967) or Kurosawa’s RAN (1985). While the history of cinema is filled with beautiful young women in various shades of undress being leered at by gawking male directors, male bodies have come under scrutiny before as well, where the term homoerotic suggests it was largely under the gaze of male directors, where the names Derek Jarman or Pier Paolo Pasolini come to mind, or Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), or Fassbinder’s QUERELLE (1982), which has a similar doomed love theme between a superior older officer and a gorgeous looking young sailor. What’s unique here is how rare it is to find similar themes of male bodies visualized so artistically under a woman’s gaze, including the director and her lifelong cinematographer Agnès Godard, where you may have to go back to Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA (1938) for a similar comparison, where one suspects every single German cameraman in 1938 was male. If one examines art history, women have typically been systematically excluded from art training, and this argument is raised every year at the Cannes Film Festival as to why there are so few female directors represented in competition, if any. Only the names of Agnès Varda or the more literary Marguerite Duras are included in the French New Wave, which otherwise produced all male directors, where women were more likely to appear in front of the camera. With alternating images of stark despair and staggering beauty, the suggestion here is not only is it rare, but from women directors it may be unsurpassed aesthetically.

Ernest Hardy from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Claire Denis is one of the most audacious, talented directors in the world, and Beau Travail may well be her crowning glory. Based on Herman Melville’s literary classic, Billy Budd, the film is set in the rugged outback of Africa, where the French Foreign Legion—men or every race and hue—are undergoing rigorous training. The stark desert, with its endless stretch of sand and jagged rocks set beneath a rolling blue sky, provides a breathtaking canvas for Denis, who captures the rituals of men exercising, marching, showering, and bonding with a poet’s eye. In her carefully constructed scenes, the routines of everyday life are transformed into gracefully choreographed dances. But while this ode to masculinity and male beauty is unfolding, the jealousy of a military official, Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant) towards one of the underlings, Sentain (Gregoire Colin), builds towards a tragic ending.

Galoup narrates the tale in voiceover. The homoeroticism of the military experience is neither forced nor shied away from, and it doesn’t really qualify Beau Travail as an example of queer cinema, as so many of the film’s fans and detractors declared upon its release. Denis’s interests are broader than that. In brief but powerful strokes, she raises questions about the relationships of whites to blacks, especially in former European colonies; connections between gender and racial politics are made in scenes where the men go into town on leave and mingle with local women. But the film remains steadfastly ambiguous throughout, never taking any particular stance on these issues. Most importantly, what Denis does, with a minimum of dialogue and with a primary focus on hypnotic visuals that fill the screen in long takes, is capture the beauty of ritual and repetition—as well as the power of monotony to break spirit, which is as much the reason behind military ritual as the aim of physical conditioning.

In terms of sheer beauty, Beau Travail pays off frame for frame, whether it’s the sight of the men in formation performing calisthenics, or the happy accident of Denis capturing a ray of sun as it’s refracted in the window of a moving train—or finally, the disgraced officer, dancing beneath a spinning disco ball at film’s end. Denis tells her stories through images rather than through dialogue and plot, with a gift for color, lighting, and composition that is unsurpassed.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Denis' extraordinary movie centres on Galoup (Lavant) who, while holed up in Marseille, recalls his time as a sergeant-major in the Foreign Legion. In the desert, he drilled raw recruits while quietly nurturing feelings of respect and love for his superior, Forestier (Subor). Then, with the arrival of Sentain (Colin), a soldier Forestier honoured for bravery, Galoup caved in to resentment, envy and hate. Though little is spelt out explicitly in this elliptical tale of repressed emotion leading to murderous jealousy, the film is admirably accessible and clear throughout. The director shows scant interest in the new recruit as an angelic incarnation of goodness - her concerns are with how a wide open colonial outpost may become a prison; how men may cope with an all-male society; how the physical may mirror the metaphysical. Hence, she and her team create a fixed, timeless world of mysterious, balletic rites, rippled with simmering homoerotic tensions. The intensity of mood and thematic resonance both derive almost entirely from the poetic juxtaposition of music and the stunning images of beauty and sustained, even surreal strangeness. Prepare to be blown away.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Tristan Johnson

Claire Denis's BEAU TRAVAIL is a film of sweltering, oppressive heat; a sun-drenched rendering of Melville's BILLY BUDD that unfurls across the deserts of Djibouti, where a troop of French legionnaires perform a dance of drills and exercises as daily ritual. The men are soldiers, athletes, and the embodiment of physical perfection, and Denis venerates their physique with framing that recalls Leni Riefenstahl's ode to human beauty, OLYMPIA. Day in and day out, they adhere to strictly choreographed routine, their mechanized motions made downright hypnotic by the operatic overtones of Benjamin Britten. At the center of this tightly wound fever dream is Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), whose own unflappable façade begins to crack upon the arrival of a new legionnaire, whose inherent beauty and goodness marks him as an object of obsession. It's here that the film's stifling (yet eloquent) discipline begins to clash with deeply repressed desire, and Galoup sets events in motion that will that will bring about his own undoing. Most notable is the unshakable denouement, where one tragic soldier at the end of his rope at last finds his ideal form of expression. Suddenly, Galoup is dancing a very different dance, and as the periodic flashes of local nightlife foreshadow, salvation may just lie in the universal escape of pop music.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

In Beau Travail, Claire Denis stunningly updates Herman Melville's Billy Budd as an allegorical endgame set within a homosocial French Foreign Legion outpost in Africa. The oppressive neocolonialist Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant) is Melville's Claggart and Gilles Sentain (Gregoire Colin) is his Billy Budd. When Sentain saves the life of a fellow soldier after a horrifying helicopter accident, he incurs Galoup's jealousy and challenges the man's notions of brotherhood. Denis and cinematographer Agnes Godard elevate Sentain and Galoup's relationship to sweaty, maddeningly existential levels. When the half-naked men begin to circle each other on a desolate beach, they come to resemble animals locked in a battle for survival and Beau Travail takes on the guise of experimental dance art (see the film's rhythmic workout sequence and final club scene). Art, sex, politics, and commerce converge and duke it out in Denis' best films. Here, she contemplates a sweltering struggle between man's instinctual and conditioned self. The film's men are constantly in training, so much so that they come to resemble the gears of a machine—and throughout the film, they struggle to maintain a mechanism of stability by working (and working out) together. The oppressed African women who live outside the outpost stare into the camp, humored by the way these men learn and struggle to play house. Denis is sympathetic of Galoup's insecurities even when the man's jealousy of Sentain leads to chaos. Denis understands that Galoup was once like Sentain: a young man taught to react like a machine to anything and anyone who threatens his sense of complacency. Galoup is merely a rotten byproduct of a dehumanizing military apparatus, but by film's end he finally learns to let out some steam.

Body Language - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Claire Denis’s Band of Outsiders, by Amy Taubin from The Village Voice, March 28, 2000

Claire Denis's latest film, Beau Travail, transposes the homoerotic triangle of Melville's Billy Budd to the contemporary French Foreign Legion. The film has been acclaimed, not only by those who counted No Fear No Die, I Can't Sleep, and Nenette and Boni among the greatest films of the '90s, but also by those who have barely noticed Denis's existence. Though it shares with those previous films the director's fascination with and tenderness toward men who are outsiders—the black cock-fight handlers in No Fear No Die, the French African gay serial killer and his brother in I Can't Sleep—Beau Travailis different in two striking ways. Although the setting is Africa, race is not a major factor. And compared to the neorealist clutter of the earlier films, Beau Travailseems almost abstract.

"You always have a moment in life when you'd like to start from zero," observes Denis. "The Foreign Legion is a place where boys go to do that, where people who have no place to go can find a kind of family, especially because they're not asked what they did before. The legionnaires became an erotic object in film and song—Edith Piaf's song "Mon Legionnaire" is one of her most famous—but when I saw them walking in the street or going to clubs, their beauty was more sad to me than erotic. You could see that the Legion is about men together. These boys who never belonged before now belong to one another. It's very touching."

Denis was approached by ARTE, the most culturally progressive European TV channel, to make a film for a series about being a foreigner. "Since most of my films deal with that anyway, I worried about how I could avoid repeating myself." Being foreign is a way of life to Denis, who spent most of her childhood in French West Africa and then moved to the suburbs of Paris when she was 13. She never felt as if she belonged in Africa, but in France she found her experience so different from that of her friends that she was doubly alienated. She attended film school and then worked as an assistant to various directors including Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. Her first feature, Chocolat (1988), drew on her childhood in Africa. It made an art-house star of Isaach De Bankole and established her relationship with Agnès Godard, the cinematographer for all her films to date.

"For Beau Travail, I started with things I'd always wanted to try—working with a choreographer and with some Herman Melville poems. The word foreignsuggested the Foreign Legion. I knew Djibouti, a piece of lava and salt in the Red Sea. The Legion trains there so that the men learn to withstand the extreme heat. I chose the landscape because it was so abstract and at the same time a real country. It's iso-lated, a world in itself, like a sailing ship in Melville. People, camels, trucks, they each have their place, and the rules are very clear. The abstraction was in the meeting of the landscape and the rules, and all those bodies doing the same thing. So gradually these elements came together and it became a project."

Since the budget was very small, Denis spent a month before the shoot working with the actors and the choreographer. "It was the only way to mold those 15 boys into one body. In the Legion, the head of the troop is the chef du corps, which means the head of the body. Then, in Djibouti, we shot it all in 15 days. We worked so fluently, always running, putting the camera, shooting, putting the camera somewhere else, shooting. Easy, easy, easy. It was only afterward that I realized it was abstract. I told the choreographer that the first time we see the legionnaires they should be like grass in the desert—burnt by the sun and slowly moving in the wind."

Denis focused Beau Travailon Billy Budd's villain, Claggart. He became Galoup (Denis Lavant), the master of arms who, fearing that a newcomer (Grégoire Colin) has gained favor with his adored captain, goes mad with jealousy and destroys his own career. The spare story is told in flashback, as fragments of memory, narrated by the exiled Galoup. The style of the voice-over, which Denis describes as more a reflection than an explanation, came from Godard's minimalist war film, Le Petit Soldat. Denis cast Michel Subor, the star of Le Petit Soldat, as the captain and gave him the same name—Bruno Forestier—as his character in the Godard film. She imagined that at the end of Le Petit Soldat, Bruno might indeed have joined the Foreign Legion.

"From the minute I decided that I would use Galoup's voice-over, I wanted Denis Lavant to do it. His presence conveys that sense that it's all too late. And that had an effect on us. We made an image and it was gone. We were shooting the past. When we shot the scene in Marseilles at the end when he's making the bed, I was so much with him that I forgot I was standing next to a camera making a film."

BFI | Sight & Sound | Beau Travail (1998) Charlotte O’Sullivan from Sight and Sound, August 2000

An ex-soldier, Galoup, looks back on his days in the Foreign Legion. Stationed in Africa, he enjoys a relationship with a local prostitute and relishes his role as second-in-command to handsome commandant Bruno Forestier. A young soldier, Gilles Sentain, arrives. Fearing his captain will be tempted by this beautiful boy, Galoup tries to tarnish Sentain's reputation. But when the youth rescues a drowning man, his popularity increases.

Galoup decides to take a group of the men, including Sentain, on a series of exercises away from the commandant. After a few days, he provokes Sentain by picking on one of the men. Sentain slaps him. Galoup now has grounds to dismiss him; Sentain goes off into the desert. On return to camp, Galoup faces a court martial and is expelled from the army. Sentain is later found by nomads. Galoup makes peace with himself.

Review

Claire Denis is good with bodies, and in this most spectacularly somnambulant of narratives they do a lot of work. As soon as we see the soldiers Sentain and Galoup, we know they are two forces which can only cancel each other out. Where Denis Lavant's Galoup has a face as rough as a lion's, Grégoire Colin's Sentain's is as smooth as a stone. Sentain's body tells us nothing about what he's thinking, while Galoup's blares out his sexual secrets. As a result, while we can empathise with Sentain, we never identify with him.

We first see Galoup's beloved captain Forestier in a black-and-white photograph. When this is replaced by the 'real' image of him smoking it's difficult to tell the difference - he still looks as mysterious as any noir hero. The same is true, too, of the men in the army and the prostitutes who service them: they're all gorgeous, iconic and remote.

What you realise, slowly, is that this is because they're all creatures of Galoup's memory. When, as a bitter civilian, Galoup presses an iron into his clothes, he looks stiff and ludicrous - a man doing a woman's job. But when the soldiers iron their clothes, they look fluid and complete. As they do their exercises, the camera crawls up their arms and thighs, asking us to breathe in their perfection. Like Galoup, we can't escape these visions of loveliness and begin to feel almost as oppressed by them. Are we and Galoup the aberrations, or are they? As the glowing landscape - yellow sand, green water, white rocks - pulsates behind the men's bodies, we enter into Galoup's masochistic, waking dream in which the answer, over again, seems to be that it's only the beautiful who belong.

Framing her essay on sexual identity like a thriller - "one stays and two are expelled," says Galoup of the trio he forms with Sentain and Forestier, prompting the question, which two? - Denis hooks our attention. Having allowed us to meet Forestier, she then has the screen fade to black, creating a sense of narrative expectation. The commandant's behaviour reveals flickers of nerves (unlike Sentain, he's self-conscious, given to gazing at himself in the mirror) which makes us wary of how he might treat the possessive Galoup. It's important that we don't sympathise with Galoup (or Sentain) too soon; looking for weak spots or the seeds of triumph in all three men, we see both, everywhere. Unable to judge these characters, we just have to stay with them.

The obvious dramatic models for Beau Travail's jealousy-fuelled narrative are Othello, Herman Melville's Billy Budd (Benjamin Britten's music for the opera based on Melville's novella dashes gloomy panic into our ears) and Greek tragedy. Denis clearly enjoys paying homage to other texts: Michel Subor's commandant is called Forestier, the name of the character the actor played in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat (1960). Like the soldiers who never engage in 'real' fighting, but merely prepare themselves, endlessly, the film feels like a dress rehearsal, full of props over-eager to simulate life.

The language in the film is excessively formal. Galoup's diary entries are entirely elegant (unlike the man). And it's as if he's supplying the words for everyone else, too. Thus a languid Forestier tells his men, "If it weren't for fornication and blood we wouldn't be here [in Africa]", while they themselves make clunky reference to the fact that Forestier is the "father" of their family unit. The language here is unnatural, stylised, but that's why it works. Galoup's jealousies are all about the body, but like a puppet master - or even a precious screenwriter - he seeks to control any jerky, commonplace impulses. The dialogue continually alerts us to this controlling desire, and its limitations.

What makes Beau Travail so special - and confounding - is that after all these clotted, self-defeating demonstrations of control, Galoup does find release. Early on, he tells himself that there's "freedom in remorse". It seems like just another sonorous try-out for genuine feeling, but towards the end we suddenly discover a new side to Galoup. He's in a disco, the anthemic club track 'The Rhythm of the Night' is playing and suddenly all the elements we've seen up to now - caged beast, clockwork toy, villain - blaze manically into life. With movements that are almost spasms, Lavant turns Galoup's body into something that takes up space rather than watches others encroach.

It's quite right that Sentain, Forestier and the prostitute should remain loose ends, untouched by reality. Perfect, saintly young boys may not really exist; prostitutes may not lead sleepy, ecstatic lives; captains may not stretch and tease in noir bubbles; but everyone except Galoup already knew that. It's also right that his sexuality should remain an unknown quantity - repression can't be undone in a day. What's important is that, while he may still be invisible to others (the disco is empty), Galoup can at last see himself and like what he sees - a glorious moment for him and for us.

Blood and sand: Beau Travail | The Sight & Sound Greatest Films ... - BFI Hannah McGill from BFI Sight and Sound, November 6, 2013

“Beau Travail” - Salon.com Charles Taylor from Salon, March 31, 2000

Unsatisfied Men Jonathan Rosenbaum on BEAU TRAVAIL, originally printed in The Chicago Reader, May 26, 2000

Elena del Río, “Performing the narrative of seduction in Claire Denis’ Beau travail (Good Work, 1999)”, Kinoeye, vol. 3, no. 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Performing the narrative of seduction

Senses of Cinema – Beau travail Tamara Tracz from Senses of Cinema, February 2007

"Petit Soldat-Beau Travail" by Justin Vicari - Jump Cut Spring 2008

Laura McMahon, 'Deconstructing Community and Christianity: 'A-religion' in Nancy's Reading of Beau travail', Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)

“Control: An In-Depth Look at Claire Denis’ Beau Travail” Matt Mazur from the International Cinephile Society, November 4, 2010

‘Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression, Part 1′ 2-part article by Robin Wood from Film International, April 1, 2011

Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, ‘I Can’t Sleep’ Pt. 2, Robin Wood from Film International, January 27, 2011

Films of Claire Denis, text version - Jump Cut Ian Murphy from Jump Cut, Fall, 2012

Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis ... Kath Dooley from Screening the Past, September, 2013

Reconsidering The Landscape of the Homoerotic ... - Film International Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet John Orr reviews Claire Denis, by Martine Beugnet, from Senses of Cinema, September 2005

Work in Progress - Movies - Village Voice - Village Voice J. Hoberman

Beau travail: Take One Men at Play, by Andrew Chan from Reverse Shot

Beau travail: Take Two The Great Beyond, by Jeff Reichert from Reverse Shot

VideoVista review Michael Brooke

"Petit Soldat-Beau Travail" by Justin Vicari - Jump Cut also Go to page 2, and Go to page 3

World Socialist Web Site review Mustafa Rashid

AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [B]

Beau Travail Gerald Peary, June 2000

Reel.com review [3/4] Rod Armstrong

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

BEAU TRAVAIL Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

culturevulture.net Arthur Lazere

Harvey S. Karten review

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [3/5]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [2/4]

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Leslie Dunlap

PopcornQ review Brandon Judell

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)

Urban Cinefile (Australia) Jake Wilson

eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [2/5]

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Beau travail (capsule review)

Claire Denis interviewed Colonial Observations, interview on August 21, 1994 by Mark A. Reid from Jump Cut, March 1996

The Guardian: Claire Denis Interviewed by Jonathan Romney June 28, 2000, also seen here: Claire Denis Interviewed by Jonathan Romney

BFI | Sight & Sound | Desire Is Violence Chris Darke interviews Denis from Sight and Sound, July 2000

This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to the Nightingale's Christy LeMaster about Nenette et Boni and Beau Travail, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 13, 2013

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Deborah Young) review

BBCi - Films Michael Thomson

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Billy Budd - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

TROUBLE EVERY DAY B 89

France Germany Japan (101 mi) 2001

Following the unanimous acclaim for Beau Travail (1999), arguably the director’s most erotic and deeply romantic work, this boldly challenges viewers with what must be what is described as an adult film, as it’s certainly not for everyone, revealing far more than the eye can see, significant as the only Claire Denis film that dabbles in the horror genre, something of a modern era vampire film, a graphically violent and thoroughly disturbing vision of carnal desire as a form of cannibalism. becoming something exquisitely revolting and truly frightening by the end, equating sex with death, and not like anything else out there. Panned at Cannes and critically dismissed in America, the film has undergone a certain revival among cinephiles who recognize rarity when they see it, but the slow and languid pace of the film will likely turn off horror lovers, while the excruciating blood-letting will turn off art film devotees. Despite the raw and graphic subject matter, this remains a Claire Denis film, expressed with an artful flourish and filled with poetic ambiguity throughout. Only a more recent film like Tomas Alfredson’s LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) conveys a similar attention to detail when it comes to flesh-eating monsters starved for blood, while at the same time offering a haunting sensuality behind the camera. Beautifully filmed by Agnès Godard, this must be viewed as one of her triumphs, as this is a visually stunning film that operates out of its own unique conception, where it lives by its uncompromising rules even as it references vintage horror films. At heart, this is a FRANKENSTEIN (1931) movie, where the tropical experiments of Doctor Léo Sémeneau (Alex Descas) went awry while researching experimental brain medicine and have now altered the human gene pool, creating vampire-like creatures with a ravenous need not only for blood, but for human flesh.

The film may also be traced to THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1977) and CAT PEOPLE (1982), both films with earlier Black and White versions, as the first deals with the grotesque and disfigured effects of medical experimentation gone wrong, while the second deals with erotic transformation, where the sex urge turns humans into blood devouring, flesh eating beasts, returning to human form only after feeding. However, in the hands of Denis, a consummate artist known for her poetic subtleties, much of what’s displayed onscreen is graphically disconcerting. Opening with the music of Tendersticks, it’s one of their better scores, especially the hauntingly beautiful funeral dirge that opens and closes the film and has a way of burrowing under your skin, Trouble Every Day Opening Song Tindersticks - YouTube (3:13), while it’s also extremely effective the way Denis opens with a darkened kiss that fades to black for a lengthy period of time, leaving the audience in a state of suspended animation. Once the picture returns, the familiar face of actress Béatrice Dalle is seen as Coré, flagging down truckers on the side of the road, where all we see is the bloody aftermath, where her husband (Sémeneau) tracks her down and brings her home, tenderly washing the blood off of her, then locking her into a boarded up room in their mansion. Simultaneous to this event, an American couple on their honeymoon are flying to Paris, medical researcher Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and his overly delicate wife June (Tricia Vessey), where Shane is inflicted with the same disease, having to continually hide from her every time he’s aroused. While he’s using the honeymoon as a pretext to track down the infamous doctor, June only knows he’s hiding some deep, dark secret, and when she hears him violently masturbating in the bathroom, her pounds on the door evoke sheer terror.

While this is a thoroughly confounding film, one that makes great use of Béatrice Dalle's physical features, giving her an animal-like presence, the film pushes the boundaries of cinema, much of it without dialogue, but using screams of hysteria, reflective of the Silent era, where it weaves in and out of dream states seemingly at will, and where half of this French-language film, including the title, is spoken in English, contributing to an otherworldy effect, like something out of Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932). When a young man’s (Nicholas Duvauchelle) curiosity leads him to Coré’s door, words can’t describe the sense of grim bewilderment overcoming the audience when they realize she is incredulously eating him before our eyes, smearing his blood all over the walls afterwards. While the audience is aware something is not right with Shane as well, none of the people he meets have a clue, as he spends most of the film popping pills and hallucinating his blood-drenched wife, searching for a cure, but to no avail. A seemingly innocuous event leads to the savage finale, as the maid (Florence Loiret-Caille) lingers in their room after making the bed, leaving her scent on the bedcovers. Throughout the film this scene has been set up by shots of the back of the young maid’s neck, which Shane has obviously been tracking, like wild prey on the loose, eventually unleashing a wild, animalistic hunger that will not be denied. It is this exploration of man’s basest rape instincts that prove to be the most deeply unsettling images of the film, like the horrors of IRREVERSIBLE (2002), complete with blood curdling screams and graphic sexual bloodletting that are among the most difficult scenes to endure in a supremely grotesque finale, as Shane finally gives in to his bloodlust, Claire Denis - Trouble Every Day... YouTube (5:39). A haunting shadow of doom overwhelms the senses along with a Tendersticks refrain, sending the audience out the door in a shivering fright.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Shot and edited with Denis' customary expertise, but disappointing for both its (admittedly ambitious) script and its performances, this is rather too elliptical and enigmatic for its own good. It tells of two individuals consumed by cannibalistic bloodlust, but cared for by loved ones: Dalle, who keeps breaking out of the house in which disenchanted boffin Descas keeps her locked up; and Gallo, honeymooning with Vessey in Paris in the hope that he may make contact with Descas (or should that be Dalle?). Do the killers thirst for blood because they're victims of medical experiments, or are the experiments carried out to cure such impulses? Who knows or even, given Gallo and Dalle's hollow performances, cares. The murders are nasty, the play with genre tradition uneasy, and certain scenes (Descas wandering cool as a cucumber into a blazing house) laughably implausible.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Trouble Every Day, Claire Denis's perverse follow-up to her critical breakthrough, Beau Travail, is another sort of film maudit. This modern-day vampire story is purposefully shocking in its eroticized gore, if unintentionally dull in its lack of poetic frissons.

A tale of parallel afflictions, the movie cuts between the misadventures of two contemporary bloodsuckers. Coré (Béatrice Dalle), the wife of a Parisian doctor, Léo (Alex Descas), is the vampire bat of the highway, luring truckers to their ghastly fate; Shane (Vincent Gallo) is an American medical researcher who flies to Paris with his childlike bride (Tricia Vessey), hoping to find his old friend Léo and learn the source of his barely controllable sexual fantasies—he's a vampire in his mind. For all the cross-cutting, the movie is largely devoid of suspense—too enamored with its gross-out effects to exert the dreamy fascination of Denis's last exercise in lurid psychopathology, I Can't Sleep.

A scarifying Cro-Magnon beauty, Dalle is convincingly feral in gnawing the skin off her lover's face and smearing herself—as well as the walls—with gore. By comparison, the scruffily dandified Gallo comes across as merely petulant. (Descas completes the sense of designer casting with his motorcycle-riding, wonderfully perfunctory doctor: "Cut down on the cigarettes," he tells one patient by way of concluding a physical.) Although not improved by the dialogue (over half in English), Trouble Every Day is helped a bit by cinematographer Agnès Godard's sensuous impressionism and the jagged romanticism of the Tindersticks score.

Review: Trouble Every Day - Film Comment Max Nelson, September/October 2013

Denis has been weaving more or less explicit self-critiques into her films since at least 2001’s polarizing Trouble Every Day. The difference is that where Bastards finds her impressionistic, hyper-tactile aesthetic willfully hemmed in, Trouble Every Day suggests what happens when it’s allowed to run amok. Denis’s films have always been shot through with a current of menace just waiting to be made explicit: it’s present in their off-balance close-ups, faintly unstable camera moves, obsessive attention to the texture of hair, clothes, and skin, and habit of letting the camera slide caressingly around actors’ bodies when they’re at their least self-conscious and most exposed. 

Where other Denis films seem to circle and drift around indecisively, Trouble Every Day itches with a kind of nervous forward momentum. It’s an extended come-on, full of teases and hints and come-hither gestures, finally climaxing—in every way—with two scenes of gruesome sexual violence. Like its characters, the movie can’t get off without (at least metaphorically) consuming its object of desire, and it’s alarming to think that this might be the ultimate end of all Denis’s luminous close-ups and seductive camera-crawls.

The film tries a little too hard, I think, to account for why newlywed Shane (Vincent Gallo) and his wild-eyed ex-lover Coré (Béatrice Dalle) both crave human blood when aroused, and its less-is-more approach to character never goes quite far enough: we learn just enough about Gallo and his chirpy, pixie-haircut bride June (Tricia Vessey) to want more than we get. But quibbles aside, Trouble Every Day feels in retrospect like a necessary step for Denis: the cathartic purge that would then allow her to indulge in Friday Night’s vision of sex as a delicate, momentary attunement of sensibilities, interests, and desires.

It’s the kind of public self-exorcism a director can only get away with once in a career. And even at its most overdetermined, it still reflects its maker’s signature love for intractable contrasts and unresolved ambiguities. It’s hard to forget the way Dalle affectionately nuzzles the cheek of a young man she’s just half-devoured, or the way her stoic scientist husband (Alex Descas) tenderly sponges streaks of blood off her back, shoulders, chest, and lips, or the way Gallo gazes at his young wife with equal parts husbandly affection, feral hunger, and fear of his own power.

Trouble Every Day Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

As elegant and mysterious as Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day demonstrates director Claire Denis' signature obsession with the human body, cultural rifts and the permissions of sex. Rarely does skin look as beautiful, desirable, even delectable, as it does in one of her mystery worlds, visually rendered by Agnes Godard's expressionistic brush. Trouble Every Day is a cautionary love story, one that gives new meaning to "eating in" and "eating out." The film's unnerving use of silence, minimal dialogue and grotesque close-ups emphasizes junkie vampire Coré's insatiable need for blood. Standing somewhere in the French countryside, Coré (Béatrice Dalle) nervously awaits her prey. Never has the hunger of a vampire felt so alive and so necessary as it does in Denis' contemporary France.

Coré is empowered and enraged by sex, rendered helpless once her thirst is quenched. She's an out of control child who must huddle in the fetal position until her scientist lover Léo (Alex Descas) can take her home. Locked inside Léo's bedroom, Coré becomes a mythic creature dangerous to an outside world that fascinatingly yearns to break in and taste her sexual hunger. Of course, this world is oblivious to the fact that Coré's sexual release comes with a price: it must end with what amounts to a vampyric form of sexual asphyxiation. Denis envisions an urban landscape overrun by diseased monsters incapable of loving without killing. While Léo's enslavement of Coré showcases Denis' signature concern for racial rifts, Trouble Every Day works best as an AIDS metaphor.

Newlyweds Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June Brown (Tricia Vessey) fly to Paris. Shane shares Coré's affliction, her claustrophobia and her aversion for the capsules that seem to quench their hunger. Shane and June's dreamy flight to the City of Love provides Shane with a plane full of meaty victims. He too is a junkie in need of a fix—he knows his place, though, skipping the feast for a shaky, come-down session in the plane's bathroom stall. Shane's relationship to June remains fascinatingly unspoken: her wounds (the bite on her shoulder, the mark on her upper lip) suggest he's gone too far in the past while a jerk-off session becomes a sad reminder that their marriage must remain unconsummated. The film's unnerving, languid pace is temporarily deadened by a superfluous subplot that finds Shane attempting to make contact with a fellow scientist.

Trouble Every Day features three incredible bloodletting sequences—one is evocatively suggestive (blades of grass tell the story of the kill), the others unbelievably grueling. The film's final killing sequence could very well be the most brutal rape ever put to film, no so much for the graphic nature of the kill but for its many layers. In a hotel that resembles an immense mousetrap, a nosy cleaning woman toys with the fetish of being punished for overstepping her bounds. She walks through cavernous hallways, close-ups of her neck and nervous eyes seemingly implying her knowledge of the hunt. Permission turns to rape, the cat goes down, a bite is taken and the little mouse is forced to taste its own blood. Shane and June can now love again—that is, until frustrated desire beckons the next extramarital hunt.

Philippe Met, 'Looking for trouble: The dialectics of lack and excess (Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, 2001), Kinoeye, Vol. 3, Issue, 7, 9 June, 2003 also seen here: Looking for trouble: The dialectics of lack and excess

Douglas Morrey, 'Textures of Terror: Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day', Belphégor: Littérature Populaire et Culture Médiatique, Vol. 3, No. 2, April 2004

Jean-Luc Nancy, 'Icon of Fury: Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)

Joe Bowman, 'The Decade List: Trouble Every Day', Fin de Cinéma, 3 April 2009

Deus ex Sanguina: Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day Jeremiah Kipp from The House Next Door

Trouble Every Day Too Close for Comfort, by Kristi Mitsuda from Reverse Shot

Slant Magazine [Chuck Bowen]

The Conversations: Trouble Every Day Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard from The House Next Door

“Trouble Every Day” - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]

Severed Cinema Ed Fir

It All Happens In The Dark [Cody Yoder]

Fin de cinema [Joe Bowman]

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [B+]

Film Freak Central - Trouble Every Day (2001) Walter Chaw

CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon) review [4/5]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4] also seen here: MovieMartyr.com

hybridmagazine.com review Nicholas Schager

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

TROUBLE EVERY DAY Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

PopMatters (Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece) review

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Rob Nelson

Pretty Clever Films [Brandy Dean]

Reel.com review [2.5/4] Pam Grady

Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) review

DVD Times Noel Megahey

kinocite [K H Brown]

indieWIRE review Guy V. Cimbalo

VideoVista review Jeff Young

Kamera.co.uk review Bob Carroll

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

filmcritic.com (Frank Ochieng) review [1.5/5] also seen here: Frank Ochieng review [1.5/5]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [2/4]

Boxoffice Magazine review Chris Wiegand

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [4/5]

Movie House Commentary Tuna

This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Andrea Gronvall about I Can't Sleep and Trouble Every Day, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 20, 2013

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2.5/4]

Entertainment Weekly review [D+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety.com [Derek Elley]

Guardian/Observer review

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

FRIDAY NIGHT (Vendredi Soir) A- 93

France (90 mi) 2002

nearly wordless, has the feel of an experimental film, it's very sensual, not sexual, with subtle textures of sensuality, realized in large part due to the fabulous overlapping layers of unique imagery and music......peculiarly interesting

Time Out review

Nightfall in wintry Paris. Laure (Lemercier), aged thirty-plus, has spent Friday packing up her flat, a prelude to moving in with her boyfriend. Her plan is to drive over to her friends' place for dinner, but streets gridlocked by a transport strike halt her progress. Moments after a radio announcer suggests motorists should offer help to stranded pedestrians, Laure is sharing her vehicle with taciturn Jean (Lindon), and the evening develops from there. Desire in Denis' films has often been a disruptive factor, yet this sensual divertissement offers its fairly ordinary female protagonist a guilt-free liberation, possibly temporary, from the confines of a steady relationship. It's not a matter of transgressive, predatory or premeditated sexuality, however. Rather, it's Lemercier realising she can allow herself a moment of sexual self-expression when circumstances unexpectedly permit. A facilitator rather than a seducer, Lindon lends the movie an inclusive erotic charge very different from that found in standard male-oriented fantasy narratives. This is wonderfully alert film-making, vividly alive to the constant by-play between inner longings and everyday surroundings. Trust me, you'll be stirred in all the right places. (Based on the novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim).

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

On the eve of moving in with her boyfriend, Laure (Valérie Lemercier) gets stuck in the traffic jam to end all traffic jams. Over the radio, a traffic commentator encourages Parisians to carpool. Though seemingly afraid of the people around her, the lonely Laure begins to look for someone to ride shotgun. It's easier to walk but the enigmatic Jean (Vincent Lindon) gets in nonetheless. The sound of car horns, irate commuters and Dickon Hinchliffe's remarkable score work as aphrodisiacs and incite a lovely chain of events: Jean smokes, Laure plays music, they bicker and he runs off. She follows him through side streets and together they rent a room for the night at a local hotel. Think of Claire Denis's mini-masterpiece Vendredi soir (Friday Night) as Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love by way of Chantal Akerman, whose All Night Long and Night and Day similarly examined the possibilities of last-chance love affairs. Friday Night is an evocation of one woman's uncertainties, flights of fancy and elusive joys. The film, based on an Emmanuelle Bernheim novel, brings to mind another startling life-in-miniature: Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour." Agnes Godard's tight framing and ethereal compositions contemplate Laure's sense of claustrophobia, not to mention her fear of becoming unavailable. This magical realist, near-silent translation of Parisian love is at once devastating and ravishingly full of joy.

Vendredi Soir | | guardian.co.uk Arts Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

After the silliness that was Trouble Every Day, Claire Denis has returned to form with this outstanding film: a swooningly erotic, beguilingly romantic adventure. It is a rapturous transcription of an evening in one woman's life, paced out almost in real time and mostly wordless.

Laure, played by Valérie Lemercier, is marooned in a traffic jam and impulsively picks up a stranger, Jean (Vincent Lindon). This is the prelude to an encounter which over just a few hours miraculously assumes the lineaments of a glorious affair in miniature.

Denis focuses on surfaces, textures, details; these are minutely observed and transformed, given life. Laure and Jean's meeting has a piercingly intense, yet gentle quality which was absent from, say, Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy.

One of the most subversive things about it is Denis's refusal to pay the debt to pleasure with a finger-wagging moral: that bogus idea that the lovers must be scared and sobered by some assumed dark side to their experience.

Date movies rarely come sexier or smarter than this.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

"Friday Night," Claire Denis' adaptation of Emmanuele Bernheim's novel, feels its way through the fleeting emotions, excited anticipation and tingling thrill of a one-night stand.

Laure (Valerie Lemercier) is in the midst of moving out of her apartment and in with her lover (who's nothing more than a voice on an answering machine). She's apprehensive about the decision.

There is no voiceover to tell us, only Denis' acute, empathetic observations of Lemercier distractedly packing the last of her belongings, flustered and nervous as she flits back and forth while deciding to keep some item, no, get rid of it, no, wait, I'll keep it.

Laure's slow transition stalls when a transportation strike grinds the city to a halt. Comforted by the gridlock, as if the city's fingers won't allow her to leave just yet, she surveys her fellow vehicular prisoners like one of the angels in Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire" (which Denis also worked on), settling on faces for brief imagined connections.

A handsome pedestrian, Jean (Vincent Lindon), asks for a ride. "Leave me anywhere," he says, but his gentle eyes and seductive smile tell the restless Laure something else. She cancels her dinner and, nervous with anticipation, joins him for a drink.

Where American films are so often self-conscious about physical love and one-night stands, Denis celebrates the tender awkwardness of Laure's brief encounter. We know little of their lives outside of this night, only the sensations of the now: short, excited breaths, the ruffle of fresh sheets, the glow of the morning after.

Denis' camera, always in motion, hovers intimately around Lemercier to drink in the symphony of emotions that play across her anxious, excited face. You can almost feel the textures through the light and shadow and symphony of sounds.

"Friday Night" is the most sensuous and intimate work of cinema of the past few years, a film that luxuriates in the immediacy of the moment. There is no guilt to the act, only exhilaration, joy and freedom. At least for the moment.

Senses of Cinema – Travellin' Light: Vendredi soir Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, April 2004

Films of Claire Denis, text version - Jump Cut Ian Murphy from Jump Cut, Fall, 2012

Senses of Cinema – Making Contact: Claire Denis' Vendredi soir Aimé Ancian from Senses of Cinema, December 2002

Friday Night - Reverse Shot Matthew Plouffe, July/August 2003

Friday Night | Reverse Shot The Eyes Have It, by Eric Hynes from Reverse Shot

Friday Night (Vendredi Soir) Henry Sheehan

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon) review [4/5]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [4/5]

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

DVD Times Noel Magahey

Film Monthly (Jerome de Groot) review

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [2/4]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

Reverse Shot review Matthew Plouffe, January/February 2004 (short review)

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [4/4]

DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review

DVD Talk (Don Houston) dvd review [3/5]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3/5] Rich Cline

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5]

Harvey S. Karten review [3/4]

Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann

CineScene.com (Shari L. Rosenblum) review

CineScene.com (Josh Timmermann) review

Boxoffice Magazine review Kevin Courrier

Senses of Cinema – Claire Denis: An Interview Aimé Ancian interview from Senses of Cinema, December 2002

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Guardian/Observer review

Life in the slow lane Geoffrey Macnab from The Guardian, August 31, 2003

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Carla Meyer) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

THE INTRUDER (L’intrus) A 97

France (130 mi) 2004 ‘Scope

Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadows, in your heart.

—The young Russian girl (Katia Golubeva)

Receiving the stranger must then also necessarily entail experiencing his intrusion.

—Jean-Luc Nancy, L’intrus

An example of utterly fearless filmmaking, Claire Denis has crafted a masterwork that is unlike any other, perhaps recalling the probing, atmospheric density of Wim Wenders UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991), an ultimate road movie that was filmed in 15 cities in seven countries across four continents, while here a similar epic reach may all be taking place inside someone’s head, yet is expressed through external visualization that couldn’t be more ravishingly beautiful, shot by Agnès Godard at her masterful best, where no single shot approaches visual cliché, just as no single edit fails to surprise, where this film rivals and may even top Beau Travail (1999) for sheer originality. What everyone can agree upon afterwards is that this is a headscratcher, as few can follow a near incoherent storyline, yet that is the mastery of the film, leaving out gaping holes in the storyline, where the filmmaker provocatively challenges the viewer to connect the dots on their own. What little we do know is established at the outset, taking place in the deep woods of the Jura mountains along the French-Swiss border, where Louis Trebor (Michel Subor in perhaps his greatest role) lives with his dogs, who offer an enthralling presence in the film, often seen in a heightened state of alert where they live in harmony with the natural world. Louis loves his dogs more than his own estranged family, never seeing his own grown son Sidney (Grégoire Colin) who lives nearby, and is himself a proud new father. According to Denis in an interview with Gavin Smith, Claire Denis interview | Film Comment, she initially intended to open the film with the son’s monologue offering a critique about his absent father, where the focus would quickly shift to being about the father, ending the film in an empty forest, with no people and no snow, with a resumption of the monologue, so the entire film was contained in that monologue. But the actor Grégoire Colin had to leave to work on another film, so they were never able to make that happen. Instead the film opens on Sidney’s wife Antoinette (Florence Loiret-Caille), who works as a border guard, where her drug sniffing dogs successfully find some smuggled contraband, returning home to a husband who has spent the day with two infants, happy to see his wife, becoming sexually aroused by her presence. The film then quickly shifts to the older father living like a recluse in the woods.

The border region is seen as an open frontier where intruders continually attempt to sneak across under cover of the forest, where occasionally we’ll hear shots fired, but the storyline quickly cuts ahead without revealing any outcome, where Denis paints a picture of Louis as a vigorously healthy man in his seventies, seen swimming naked in the lake, biking the mountain roadways, or making love to a much younger woman in town, yet the discovery that he has a diseased heart radically alters his future, changing the entire dynamic of the film. Initially envisioned as a three-part structure, the northern hemisphere, limbo, and the southern hemisphere, with each hemisphere a mirror image of the other, but Denis changed her mind when she realized Jean-Luc Godard’s latest effort NOTRE MUSIQUE (2004) used a similar format, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. As a result, Denis collapsed her three-part structure into one extended dream sequence, where only the existing family seen in the opening, Louis and his son’s family, are real, while all others are a manifestation of his imagination, where people he had previously known in his life reoccur in his thoughts. The idea behind the film is Jean-Luc Nancy's novel L'Intrus (2000), which was inspired by the author’s own experience recovering from a heart transplant operation. Denis became fascinated by the idea of introducing a foreign “intrusion” into the body forced to fend for its own survival, oftentimes rejected by the host, even though the body needs it for its own survival, finding parallels with illegal immigrants crossing the border, as well as the mistreatment of foreigners, migrant workers, racial minorities, and those leading marginalized lives on the edge of society. In Denis’s assured hands, this becomes a life and death issue, where survival depends upon a variety of complex conditions, creating the internalized conditions of reflecting back upon one’s life, even as one hopes to move forward. Recollections are not necessarily in any order, as thoughts and time periods overlap, where one’s hopes and dreams often replace reality.

While this is easily Denis’s most extended vision, the only film to go past the two-hour mark, the path she takes is simply remarkable. And while many will be confused by a lack of coherent narrative, many artists have used this exact same device, including Edward Yang in THE TERRORIZERS (1986), the third part of his urban trilogy, each one more increasingly experimental in form, reducing the narrative as much as possible, or Tarkovsky’s THE MIRROR (1975), which is autobiographical, told as an abstract, impressionistic memory piece, ultimately becoming a defiantly personal film. Artists invent new forms of expression which are meant to challenge existing conventions, like Stravinsky, or Picasso, or atonalism, where Denis takes a Proustian plunge, utilizing a literary stream-of-conscious device to explore memory and consciousness, reflecting upon themes of guilt and moral transgressions, but also personal reconciliation and redemption, where one can be both haunted and inspired by dwelling on the past, creating a hauntingly beautiful dreamscape that plays out like an epic Icelandic saga, told as an extended series of elongated poems that in this director’s hands retain elements of extreme realism, though lushly visualized as an abstract, near wordless tone poem. The film is largely an articulation of man’s alienated existence as viewed through a deeply tormented subconscious. Unable to reconcile the inescapable mistakes of the past, Louis remains deeply haunted by them, revisiting the places of his life, hoping for a different outcome, but plagued by the inevitable results. Since Michel Subor’s original involvement with Godard’s essay on the Algerian War in LE PETIT SOLDAT (1963), he has been portraying the sort of intellectual and moral confusion that individuals have when confronting anguishing events in their lives, where the grizzled expression on his face couldn’t be more eloquently poignant. The film also curiously stars nearby neighbor Béatrice Dalle as the Queen of the North Hemisphere,

Given an epic structure like Homer’s Odyssey, Louis begins his otherworldly journey by attacking an intruder trying to break into his cabin in the middle of the night, a metaphor for the metaphysical adventure he is about to embark upon, starting with a large payment for a black market donor heart to a young Russian girl (Katia Golubeva), who actually provides the opening narration, and with connections, one assumes, to the Russian mafia, asking for a “young man’s heart,” no questions asked, where some have called her “The Angel of Death,” as she actually shadows his movements for the rest of the film, and even comments upon his progress. Perhaps the most startling transitions are scenes in the snow, much of which have a mythological resemblance to an illusory world. A film defined by visual textures, Denis has called it “my vision of a dead man,” where during the shoot she asked Michel Subor to listen to the final recordings of Johnny Cash, which themselves resemble a harrowing near death experience. When Denis wrote the script, she called him A Man With No Heart, a heartless man, stashing his fortune in secret Swiss bank accounts covering up his shady past, disassociating himself from his family, and becoming something of an eccentric Howard Hughes recluse. The unseen operation moves the film to the Southern Hemisphere, drawing inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin’s trip to the South Seas, presented as an idyllic landscape in the Polynesian island of Tahiti in search for a new life where he might recover from his operation, yet his condition takes a turn for the worse and he’s forced to return to the hospital. Complaining of his sick heart, it is the Russian girl who reminds him there’s nothing wrong with his heart except that it’s empty. Including clips of Tahiti from Paul Gégauff’s unfinished film LE REFLUX (1965), starring Michel Subor four decades ago, the film is seen as an endless voyage of a man slowly dying, much like Jim Jarmusch’s DEAD MAN (1995), where one of the more memorable shots is an Antonioni Zabriskie Point (1970) style explosion of colorful streamers jettisoned off the bow of a newly christened ship in South Korea, which he buys for his voyage to Tahiti. The endless sea odyssey provides an ocean vista featuring a horizon without borders, a pathway venturing into a world of multiple possibilities, yet eventually it’s accompanied by the apocalyptic music of Tendersticks that jars our senses awake with a hypnotic guitar loop as the camera simply drifts endlessly at sea. Boldly mystifying and brilliant throughout, this is arguably the most lyrically sensuous film Denis has ever made, a film that traffics in the subconscious, taking us on an ominous journey exploring the mysteries in the heart of the unknown.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Yekaterina Golubeva obituary David Thompson obituary from BFI Sight & Sound, August 14, 2011, a horrific tagline to the story, as Golubeva provided a lyrical and almost angelic “presence” to Denis films.

L'intrus (The Intruder) Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge (short review)

Shady millionaire Louis (Subor) lives in reclusive retirement on the mountainous Swiss/French border. Suffering from coronary problems, he pays for a heart transplant before embarking on a journey halfway round the world in search of the son he's never seen. Or does he..?

Ambiguous and elliptical, the latest from Denis (after Beau Travail and Vendredi Soir) is arthouse cinema with a capital A: challenging and often baffling, it certainly won't be to all tastes. But audiences in search of something different, and willing to go with Denis's flow, may find themselves rewarded with a very special moviegoing experience.     

This kind of dream-logic puzzle is very difficult to pull off on screen - David Lynch's Mulholland Dr was perhaps the last successful example. The trump-card, however, is veteran Subor - his wonderfully gritty performance keeps any hint of pretentiousness or self-indulgence firmly at bay, and helps Denis achieve what may turn out to be her masterpiece.

Time Out London review Geoff Andrew

Louis Trebor (Michel Subor) lives with his dogs in the forest, deep in the Jura mountains close to the Swiss border. A recluse, he seldom sees his grown son (Grégoire Colin), sleeps – occasionally – with a pharmacist from a nearby town, and lusts without success after a local dog-breeder (Béatrice Dalle). That he’s not the warmest of men is clear from how he treats an unwelcome visitor to his home. Still, in his own self-centred way this sexagenarian loves life – so much so that after a minor heart attack, he uses his (possibly ill-gotten) savings to fly to Korea for a somewhat shady transplant: the start of an odyssey of sorts. Be advised that this partial synopsis of Denis’ latest impressionist cinepoem is tentative indeed. Little is spelled out in the elliptical, taciturn narrative; mostly we see faces in wordless close-up, long shots of land- and seascapes and obscure figures flitting through trees in the dark, all rapturously shot by Agnès Godard and mesmerically cut to a meticulous track that includes minimalist music by the Tindersticks’ Stuart A Staples. The ‘story’ is evanescent to the point of becoming a pipe-dream, albeit one grounded in corporeal matter; it’s also remarkably rich in resonance. That’s due to Denis’ unusually open-minded approach to inspiration and creation. Initially working loosely from Jean-Luc Nancy’s eponymous essay on his heart transplant (hence the themes of invasion, rejection and solitude) but also conceiving the movie as a ‘portrait’ of Subor (which in turn, through a few clips from the 1960s film ‘Le Reflux’, ties in with a decision to have Trebor sail to a South Seas paradise), she also inserts a purgatorial Pusan into his journey, presumably to facilitate the film’s funding. Potentially chaotic, this method somehow results in a haunting, enigmatic meditation on life, death, our fragile sense of identity and the wages of solipsism.

Distributor Wanted: The Intruder - Film Comment Amy Taubin from Film Comment, May/June 2005

A man of a certain age is dying. The problem is his heart. Not only does it no longer pump as it should, but it has proven itself a failure in matters of love. Because the man still hungers for love, he decides to buy himself a new heart on the black market. Not just any heart but one that belonged to a young man - as young as the son he refuses to care for. But just as his old heart rejected his son, his body rejects this new heart. And since he was so heedless about how his new heart was obtained - that someone might have been murdered to give him a second chance at life - he will be punished by something worse than his own death. Claire Denis's The Intruder (L'Intrus) is a film as primal and resonant as the myths and fairy tales one reads as a child or the dreams that psychoanalysts call "autobiographical" in that they replay the major events and turning points of one's life in a way that, despite the jumble of time and space, is exceptionally vivid and realistic in its detail. Some viewers seem bothered that they can't sort out the real from the delirium and the memories from the prophecies in The Intruder. But would anyone demand that of an epic poem? Denis is one of cinema's greatest narrative poets, and The Intruder, the story of an adventurer, is her most adventurous cinematic poem. As in Beau travail, dialogue is minimal, but three or four metaphors carry us inward to the associative regions of the psyche and outward from the dense frozen forests of the Jura mountains to the terrifyingly serene expanses of the South Pacific. Agnès Godard's cinematography has never been more focused on the visceral; Michel Subor, Béatrice Dalle, and Grégoire Colin are magnificently present; the film's dogs, who exist between wildness and domesticity, are the sign of Denis's vision - and thieves of the heart as well.

The Intruder Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

I had been warned by several sharp critic-friends going into this one that it doesn't make a lick of sense. So, settling in for a semi-coherent collection of striking images, I was quite surprised to discover that it's just an art-damaged genre flick, albeit an incredibly accomplished one. In fact, the preceding description fails to convey just how compelled I was in the midst of the film, from image to image and scene to scene. It's just that it all adds up to a little less than the sum of its parts. Basically [SPOILERS BEGIN HERE] what we have is a "spy who came in from the cold" narrative, quite linear in its organization albeit with the occasional dream sequence. What it doesn't do is engage in any real exposition. We get a lot of moments in between events, a series of actions whose meaning isn't available until much later. However, that meaning isn't doled out in a plant-and-payoff fashion. It's more like poetry, where we're seeing all the negative space around a problem or an event. This is most notable with respect to the Michel Subor character's son and daughter-in-law. Their sole function is to register their disengagement from his life, and to come into harm's way despite their blatant rejection of Subor from their lives. We don't get a narrative explanation, and I think this is because Denis trusts that the story she's telling, in its broadest strokes, is familiar enough to cinema audiences. (It's like how in Intolerance Griffith didn't bother fleshing out the Christ story. He knows we know.) So this freedom allows Denis to focus instead on texture, long passages of world travel, and several iterations of the theme of intrusion. We begin the film at the France/ Switzerland border. Later, the border guard and her husband play a kind of sex game relating to her work role. And the biggest intruder of all is the lead character's heart; his body rejects the transplant. Still, Denis's gambit relies on the familiarity of the tale, and at several points it just felt leaden and obvious. (At base, it's actually a story about a "change of heart.") But as I said above, it was never less than engrossing, and as an intellectual experiment in the conditions of cinematic storytelling, it successfully outweighs theoretical gamesmanship with pure plastic sensuality. Think of it as the most elliptical episode of Alias ever made, focusing on Jack Bristow instead of Sydney.

Strictly Film School Acquarello

L'Intrus opens to a shot of the Franco-Swiss border as a border guard performs a customs check and inspection of a random vehicle with the aid of a contraband-sniffing dog. The seemingly mundane image of frontier, wilderness, and deception provides a curiously appropriate introduction into the Claire Denis' impenetrably fractured, enigmatically allusive, otherworldy, and indelible metaphysical exposition into the mind of an emotionally severe, morally bankrupt, and profoundly isolated heart transplant patient named Louis (Michel Subor). Idiosyncratically unfolding in elliptical, often reverse chronology (with respect to the heart surgery) through the lugubriously fluid intertwining of Louis' alienated existence and deeply tormented subconscious, the film is a fragmented and maddeningly opaque daydream (or perhaps more appropriately, a haunted nightmare) of the price exacted by his disreputable past, estranged relationships, hedonism, and instinctual quest for survival: his inability to reconcile with his only son and his family; his sexually motivated, yet emotionally distant relationship with a materialistic pharmacist; his dubious, transcontinental past (a suppressed history that may have included murder). Perpetually followed by a beautiful, enigmatic sentinel (Katia Golubeva) - or conscience - who seems to have been instrumental in obtaining his new heart, what emerges is an indelible, elegiac, and poetically abstract dreamscape through the wondrous, alien terrain of unreconciled (and irreconcilable) personal history, unrequited longing, and haunted memory.

Transcribed notes from the Q&A with Claire Denis:

• Denis initially envisioned L'Intrus to be three distinct parts: northern hemisphere, limbo, and southern hemisphere. She then found out that Jean-Luc Godard had conceived of a three part structure to Notre Musique (Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise) at Cannes and consequently, collapsed the three parts into one fluid, hyperextended dream sequence to avoid incidental comparison (or implications of creative appropriation). She envisioned the southern hemisphere to be a kind of parallel (or existential) universe of the northern hemisphere, and therefore, images in the two hemispheres become mirrored converses of each other and together create a closed cyclicality to the film.

• Denis proposes that the only two instances of "real" people in the film are Louis and his estranged son (Grégoire Colin) (and by extension, his son's family). The other characters are manifestations of Louis' imagination, but like all mental constructions, are not purely fictional but rather, based on varying levels of an underlying reality: a "real" person whom Louis has encountered or interacted with sometime during his life.

• Denis describes the film as an adoption rather than an adaptation of Jean-Luc Nancy's novel L'Intrus which, in turn, was inspired by Nancy's own experience after undergoing a heart transplant operation. Denis was equally haunted and fascinated by the idea of a foreign body's "intrusion" into another body, and how that organ(ism) is rejected by its "new" body even as it needs it for survival and viability (Note: This metaphor can also be applied to the image of illegal immigrants crossing the border: a broader social commentary on the pervasive mistreatment (and marginalization) of migrant workers and immigrants in "civilized" countries). Also, intrinsic in this idea of transplantation and rejection is the paradoxical coexistence of life and death that a heart transplant patient's post-surgery life represents (Note: I had also thought that perhaps this coexistence extended to the merging and coalescing of life experiences as well within Louis' subconscious, who begins to daydream seemingly abstract, fragments of personal histories that are not always his own. This may also be an extension of the earlier note on the "variable" degrees of reality, although Denis doesn't mention this idea of "collective" memory/dream).

The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]

Claire Denis's tactile tone poems are premised on the primacy of sensory experience. Beau Travail (1999), her ecstatic Billy Budd distillation, pushed her pictographic style in the direction of a new language, a nonverbal mode that she continued to toy with in films as disparate as the vampire gorefest Trouble Every Day and the hookup reverie Friday Night. Allergic to the dictates of linear storytelling, her movies have grown increasingly convulsive in their ellipses and associations—more than any other narrative filmmaker working, Denis chases the rapture of rupture. Her latest feature, The Intruder, is a decisive breakthrough—her most poetic and primal film to date, as thrilling as it is initially baffling.

It's clear enough that The Intruder is a dying man's long goodbye; whether it's a final accounting of a guilty conscience, a premonition of the hereafter, or a little of both is harder to say. There's a fair chance at least half the movie takes place in the protagonist's head. But Denis declines to distinguish between planes of reality: Fluidly merging an interior and an exterior journey, the film establishes a dreamy parity between memory and anticipation, fact and hallucination. Denis claims as inspiration French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's "L'Intrus," an account of his heart transplant that ponders the existential implications of this corporeal intrusion. Denis, more intuitive than analytical, applies the text's pungent sense of internal foreignness—along with its push-pull of encroachment and rejection—not just to the human body but also to the natural world, border crossings, post-colonial dynamics, fathers and sons.

For what is essentially an adaptation of a metaphor, The Intruder is almost shockingly concrete. Its intractable physicality owes much to Michel Subor, a man's-man presence in the lead role, and the imposing landscapes in which he's often framed. A weathered re- cluse, Subor's Louis lives with his beloved huskies in a mountain cabin near the Franco- Swiss border. Peripheral characters are glimpsed: an estranged son (Grégoire Colin), a dog breeder (Béatrice Dalle), a pharmacist fuck buddy (Bambou). At one point, Louis arranges for a heart transplant, negotiating with a black-market trader (Katia Golubeva), who later assumes the role of his stalking conscience–cum–angel of death.

Nancy terms his transplant a "metaphysical adventure"—and the phrase perfectly describes Denis's film as well. With a new ticker, Louis escapes to the other side of the world, in search of a new life—or a place to die. The Intruderimagines the post-transplant condition as a simultaneous rebirth and afterlife. As the languorous last rites for a man slowly expiring (or already dead), The Intruder at times suggests Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man; echoing Neil Young's ominous score, Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples fashions a hypnotic guitar loop on the soundtrack, an invitation to submit to the film's churning eddies.

Louis has a shady past, lots of money, and blood on his hands. Stopping off in Geneva and Pusan, he ends up in Tahiti, looking for a son he says he once fathered; in a discordantly light and funny sequence, the indulgent islanders hold an audition for suitable candidates. There's a coldness—one might say heartlessness—to Louis's quest, reducible as it is to a series of monetary transactions. He buys a new vital organ, a new ship, and even a new son (though he can't quite shake off the old one).

Intrusion is the theme—as well as the organizing principle—of this subliminally violent film. The identity of the intruder and the nature of the incursion are continually shifting. The title most obviously refers to Louis's grafted organ, a stranger within, but also to the dreams that come with it—hauntings that invade his consciousness so completely that we and he can no longer tell the difference. The second half's hemispheric inversion positions Louis himself as the intruder. In the most astonishing of the formal intrusions, Denis splices in Subor-in- Tahiti from four decades ago, using clips from Le Reflux, Paul Gégauff's unfinished adaptation of Stevenson's The Ebb Tide.

Cinematographer Agnés Godard ensures that almost every image leaves a retinal imprint, even more so the less explicable ones: a heart palpitating in the snow, a sunbathing Louis spooning with his dogs, an infant in a sling beaming up at his father, rainbow streamers billowing off a newly christened ship, two men in knee-deep water hoisting a mattress ashore, a cloth-covered coffin on a forklift. In a shot that lasts nearly two minutes (and feels longer), we see the immense ocean from a bobbing ship deck. The finale, as orgasmic as Beau Travail's Eurodisco exclamation, is a delirious blur of motion, Dalle and her huskies sledding into the snowy wilds. This mysterious object may be Denis's most gorgeous film (which is saying something), but more than that, it's a fearless filmmaker's boldest experiment yet, a direct line from her unconscious to yours.

Interview: Claire Denis - Film Comment Gavin Smith interview from Film Comment, January/February 2006

Just as Claire Denis has staked out a position on the fringes of cinema, so her heroes and heroines are outsiders and outcasts, consigned to displacement, marginalization, and exile, be it literal or figurative. This is a cinema of radical estrangement and obliquity, encompassing extremes of lyrical impressionism in Friday Night (01) and stark brutality in Trouble Every Day (01). From Chocolat (88) to I Can't Sleep (94) to Beau travail (99) and beyond, Denis has steered storytelling into increasingly more abstract, dreamlike, and elliptical realms. Hers has been a sustained—and, from this viewer's perspective, extremely rewarding—effort to explore the tensions between the tenuous interior states of her characters and the sensual external world that encloses and often overwhelms them.

With its cryptic gaps, unpredictable shifts, and daring conjunction of minimal exposition and maximal audiovisual impact, Denis’s latest and most geographically far-flung film, The Intruder (L’Intrus), feels like the culmination of her intuitive aesthetic enterprise. All of her familiar preoccupations are present: the residues of post-colonialism, the imperatives of carnality and the yearning for sensual release, the pervasive sense of temporal suspension. The film’s ostensible narrative is simple enough: a man with a failing heart abandons his reclusive life and estranged son in rural France and arranges for a black-market transplant in Korea; after the operation he travels to Tahiti, attempting to locate another abandoned son and reinvent his life of solitude—until his actions catch up with him, fulfilling the cautionary message contained in the first line in this film of few words: “Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadows hidden in your heart.” It goes without saying that the story is not the main event. The Intruder is far and away Denis’s most enigmatic film, an oneiric narrative filled with baffling, seemingly metaphoric incidents and non sequiturs—visions, encounters, and apparitions that stubbornly refuse to add up, but can only be understood, finally, as the projections of the self-mythologizing protagonist’s own psyche.

The Intruder’s impassive, self-contained main character is played by 70-year-old Michel Subor, rescued from near-obscurity by Denis for his small but indelible role as a Foreign Legion commandant in Beau travail. With his massive, weathered frame and casual, near-reptilian sensuality, Subor is like a Lucian Freud portrait come to life—indeed his commanding yet inscrutable presence is the film’s virtual raison d’être. Denis counters the eroticized topography of Subor’s physique with a poetic progression through a series of similarly eroticized landscapes: the impossibly lush yet brooding forests and hills of the French-Swiss border, the bustling modernity of Pusan in South Korea, the dazzling and humbling ocean expanses and tropical jungles of Tahiti and French Polynesia. The contrast between these dramatically opposed landscapes is simply breathtaking.

Alternately mystifying and deeply moving—and unbelievably vivid from the first frame to the last—The Intruder is cinema at its most wondrously exhilarating.

In your 30s you were an assistant director. What were you doing before that? You were 20 in May 68—what were you up to?

I was already married to a photographer. He worked for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in England. I met him when I was 15. He asked me to model for him, and finally we got married. He gave me a Leica and I worked as his assistant. It was a strange situation: he was my husband and he was teaching me things. It was no fun to have a private life together and to also be his apprentice. I was on the side, on my own, doing my own things, meandering, but it was leading me to cinema indirectly. He was very much a cinephile. It was great for me, really. I had not been to the movies very much when I was a kid. I decided to try to enter film school and was selected in 1971.

How many years were you there?

A couple. IDHEC almost closed. After ’68, the school had been taken over by the students. The school’s director was a French filmmaker, Louis Daquin. He was great, maybe not perfect in terms of tuition and organization, but he had a great spirit. He was a member of the Communist party and his films were very political, about things like the coal miners in the north of France. He started making films rather young, but he was well known, well respected, and very militant. And he was sort of blacklisted. He couldn’t find money to make films. He brought in people like [cinematographers] Henri Alekan and Sacha Vierny. Peter Brook would teach us about directing actors. It was very alive.

A few years ago I spotted your name in the credits of Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie. Was that your first job?

First job on the payroll. I had worked as an extra on Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer. You can see me walking by the Seine in a night scene. One of my teachers was Pierre Lhomme. He was the DP and he recruited students to be extras. One day, I don’t know why, someone told Dusan Makavejev that I could speak a little English. He did not want to speak French and he wanted a go-between for him and the crew, a sort of second assistant. He told production that he didn’t want a professional assistant, he wanted someone who knew nothing about the set. I met him and he really liked my total inexperience. I was his assistant on the film but the production also hired a real first assistant, a tough guy who made all the call sheets and stuff, but who had to hide from Dusan.

It must have been a very unconventional production…

After two years in school working with Peter Brook and Louis Daquin, it seemed normal to me, believe it or not. All these dramatic episodes seem completely normal to me. Pierre Lhomme, who was the DP again and who hated Dusan, told me, “This isn’t how things are supposed to go, this is crazy.” I felt fine. Dusan was a little bit afraid of the Otto Mühl community. They refused to stay in a hotel, so they lived on the set, which was built in a garage. Dusan was tempted to sleep there and have a meal with them, but he was afraid, so he had me try it. It was terrifying.

Their performance in the movie is unbelievable.

But it wasn’t only in the film. They staged everything. And because I was their only audience, they did terrible things. They wanted me to shave my head, drink my blood, eat my shit, things like that. But, in a way, I was not afraid. Maybe because I was smoking pot. I was Dusan’s assistant so I had to be there and I took it seriously. Otto Mühl didn’t impress me at all. Some of the cast and crew were impressed. For me it was a great experience. What I liked was the way Dusan put people together who would probably not meet in normal life. It was like a chemical reaction. And he experienced it with great delight. That kind of fear and delight was an interesting way of making films. I never thought we were making an experimental film.

The Seventies was a time for experiences like that, I thought it was completely normal. What seemed strange to me was that people were still making films like nothing had changed. Sixty-eight was such a big change in France, like an electroshock, but it didn’t immediately affect filmmaking. The directors of the Nouvelle Vague were still young. Of course Godard made that move into militant filmmaking, but he had completely disappeared. The others were just making films. No—I’m being unfair to Jacques Rivette. When I was working with Dusan, I told someone that the only person I wanted to work with was Jacques Rivette. A week later, thanks to Louis Daquin, I was taken to the set of Out One. The DP, Pierre-William Glenn, was teaching at IDHEC. When I became a professional assistant, it didn’t seem so real to me, having worked with Jacques, Dusan-and Fernand Deligny, who I assisted on Ce Gamin là (75) a film about a guy who teaches autistic kids. (Deligny was a sort of French Bruno Bettelheim but with different ideas about how to raise children. He made a few films, he is famous in France. Truffaut secretly gave him a little money because he needed his advice for The Wild Child.)

I didn’t see filmmaking as leading me to a professional life-it became a profession for me because I could pay my rent. But it was always in my mind that if I was going to direct a film, it would not be experimental but… Making a film had to be, not a personal experience, but an experience for the crew and the actors, something we would go through together.

As a director, do you see yourself as kind of a misfit?

I fit in my idea of cinema, sometimes there are connections. I know some people like me, and they help me to produce my films or distribute them, but I never ask them what they think about me. But me, I feel unfit. I don’t like to think I am violent and sometimes bad-tempered. I hate my day when I cannot share it with the crew and the actors, and I hate a situation where I am the only one to believe in a scene. I have to convince everyone. When I cannot, I feel very bad.

Are you conscious of making films about outsiders?

But when people ask me why are they about outsiders, I cannot answer the question because it seems like a political attitude. I told you when I was working with Makavejev, I was always ready to be inside, because I never felt inside. Makavejev told me to sleep with Otto Mühl and I wasn’t afraid because I was unreachable, not because I am a pretentious person but because I have a dreamy distance with reality, which is not a really good thing.

I think it’s very good for films.

But for life it is not.

Maybe not. I have always felt that your films were very difficult for me, maybe because I tend to be rational despite being drawn to the poetic or imaginative work. I look at a film and try to understand its mathematics. But that doesn’t work with your film.

As an audience, I do not ask any questions of the film. The film can lead me anywhere. I can go and see any film, a good or a bad one. In Saraband, when the young girl speaks for the first time about her father and there is this flash image of the father grabbing her. It’s a vision, probably not the vision of the girl, but it blew me away. I say this is the greatest thing I have seen this year. A real vision, a vision of violence, but something that doesn’t tell the exact truth, because it’s kind of hard to speak about the relations you have with your father. It feels like a kind of hidden consciousness. I am not able to do that. But I understand logic. I have been educated to be logical, so I know what logic is.

But you don’t choose it?

No, but I don’t reject it as something I don’t like. I’m the opposite: if I have a discussion with someone, I would not be very tolerant with someone who has no logic.

But when you watch a film?

I ask for nothing.

Do you feel torn between the need to tell a story and the desire to go for something more abstract? It seems anything you can do on a visual level to make the film abstract like a painting, you do.

But I do it in a very honest gesture. I think when the location is right for the story in a very logical way, it’s easy to film. If the location is beautiful but wrong, it doesn’t work. It is very painful to choose a location because it seems good-looking during pre-production then to realize it’s only good-looking. It is completely unfair to the story. Djibouti is very beautiful, but I would have never used Djibouti if it were not a territory chosen by the real Foreign Legion. It is very hot, very dry, and very spiritual place to train their guys. And I told the crew that the beauty is not the purpose for the film. You really have to forget this beauty. The work is elsewhere. When I shoot or choose a frame with Agnès, it’s never aesthetic, it’s always logical.

There is a very unusual shot in Beau travail, which must have been done with a very long lens, where you have the soldiers digging in the foreground and in the middle distance is the sea and then on the horizon there is sky and it’s all one plane. It’s like a Rothko painting.

The sound of the digging is mute because the wind blows it away. But it’s not a long lens. It’s a 50mm, but the heat and the dust makes a lot of smoke. The cliff and sea are in the distance, but with heat waves that kill the perspective.

That’s an example of what I meant about abstraction overwhelming narrative.

Well, I have to tell you, I could have made that shot last 30 minutes. For me it is the most comical shot in the movie. You see that landscape, those stones that are lava from the volcano. It’s 50 degrees [Celsius] and those 15 guys are digging solid rock. I did the film before 9/11, so at that moment I thought the Foreign Legion was of no use anymore. For me it was like Beckett. No, really. It had absolutely no aesthetic purpose. Of course when I got to the editing room, only then did I realize all the variations of blue and the mist, the waves, the heat waves, and the dust. It was staged almost.

Is abstraction in your films a device for getting us inside somebody’s head? I’m thinking of the traffic jam and driving scenes in Friday Night—it all becomes a kind of a blur and it’s there to keep us inside [Laure’s] mind.

It’s like a warning signal for her: maybe this guy is wrong for me.

And perhaps from the moment she falls asleep in the car, nothing we see really takes place. It’s all a fantasy or a dream.

Maybe, yes.

He gets of the car, he walks away, she drives around for a while, then she sees him in a café. It’s unbelievable except in terms of dream logic.

I would say there is something, for someone who experienced the strike of ’95- Emmanuèle was inspired by those long strikes-a very strange thing happened. People meeting, falling in love, changing life. So, yes, it is the language of dream. And yet a moment like a strike creates a suspended moment. The reality suddenly changes. There was a subway strike 10 days ago in Paris. It was the end of winter and was suddenly very warm. Paris changed. People were not going to work, they were in cafés. It was something completely non-aggressive. People were smiling. But it only existed because of the strike, no subway, no buses. I was walking home and I felt something different, like something could happen. Emmanuèle was trying to convey that feeling. I play my part in it. I accentuate it even.

It’s interesting that you bring up suspension because that’s a consistent quality in your films—certainly from Beau travail on. This feeling of being outside time. Where that comes from and is it something you’re conscious of?

I am conscious of it in my real life also. For me a good day is when I dictate time and a bad day is when time dictates me. Days when I have to do something according to time are not very creative and generate a lot of anxiety. But when I can check the time—oh, I still have one hour to do this—it’s always perfect. I think I kind of give that to the characters in the films. They want be free of order. Logic is like a watch. It doesn’t work so much with me. I try to free characters from that. Like the young man in Nénette et Boni works, but the dead of night belongs to him, and when Nénette intrudes on his life, the time becomes different. Because she is pregnant, she has her own time. It completely interrupts his dreamtime.

Why do you begin The Intruder with the main character’s son? Actually, not even his son, but the son’s wife?

[Originally] the first scene in the script was like a monologue of a son who was unemployed, as if he was writing to his father, complaining about his lack of love and his selfishness and pleading with him to be a father. It also explained a little bit about his father’s strange past. We had no time to shoot that scene because Grégoire had to accept another a film and was never able to come back. So it was supposed to begin with the son.

And then shift very radically to be being about the father.

And then the forest. Instead I put in the scene at the border with his wife. And in the original script, it did not end with Beatrice, it ended in the forest—with no people and no snow. As if it was the monologue of the son finishing. As if the whole film was contained in that monologue.

It must have been hard coping after your producer, Humbert Balsan, committed suicide before The Intruder was released in France.

It’d never happened to me that a producer, and a friend, hung himself in his office a month and half before a film is released. I never experienced that before, and I wish I hadn’t. The bank stopped everything. I couldn’t get any more prints made. I had to solve everything. It was an ordeal. But it’s more than that: it’s a pessimistic conclusion to all those years when Humbert surfed on the wave of difficulties. He was so brave, he liked adventure. I knew him from the time when he worked with Bresson [as an actor on Lancelot du Lac], and it was always a running joke—when are we going to work together?

The Hither Side of Solutions: Bodies and Landscape in L'intrus R. Emmet Sweeney from Senses of Cinema, July 2005

Joe Bowman, '[on L'Intrus]', Fin de Cinéma, 28 April 2006

Lisa Downing, Re-viewing the Sexual Relation: Levinas and Film', Film-Philosophy, 11.2, August 2007 (pdf format)

Rosalind Galt, “The Obviousness of Cinema,” World Picture 2 (Autumn 2008).

Douglas Morrey, “Introduction: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)

Martine Beugnet, 'The Practice of Strangeness: L'Intrus - Claire Denis (2004) and Jean-Luc Nancy (2000)', Film-Philosophy, Volume 12, Issue No.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)

Anja Streiter, 'The Community According to Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis,' Film-Philosophy, 11.1, 2008 April 2008 (pdf format)

The Other's Intrusion: Claire Denis' L'intrus Wim Staat, Thamyris/Intersecting No. 19 April 2008 (195–208) (pdf format)

Best of the Decade Derby: Video Essay on L’Intrus for the Reverse Shot Claire Denis Symposium Kevin B. Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, August 17, 2009

Senses of Cinema – The Intruder Kath Dooley from Senses of Cinema, June 2012

6 - Reverse Shot #6 Best Film of the Year, by Adam Nayman from Reverse Shot

L'Intrus | Reverse Shot Phantom Heart, by Genevieve Yue from Reverse Shot

Best of the Decade #7: L'Intrus | Reverse Shot Second Helpings, by Adam Nayman from Reverse Shot

Fin de cinéma [Joe Bowman]

Bright Lights Film Journal :: The 9th Annual European Union Film ... Robert Keser, May 2006

Errata [Robert Davis] including an interview with the director

Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]

“The Intruder” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

The Intruder Gerald Peary

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] (long review)

stylusmagazine.com (Josh Timmermann) review

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

DVD Times Noel Magahey

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [3/5] also seen here: The Intruder : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video

Film-Forward.com [DVD review] Zachary Jones

Offoffoff -- The Guide to Alternative New York Joshua Tanzer

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Cinema Sights [James Ewing]

New York Sun [Nicolas Rapold]

Shadows on the Wall [Rich Cline]

intruder - review at videovista Andrew Hook

Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

The Lumière Reader AY

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] capsule review

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5] also seen here: EyeForFilm.co.uk

Martin Tsai's Blog

Boxoffice Magazine review Shlomo Schwartzberg

This week in Claire Denis: A correspondence with ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: A correspondence with Melika Bass and Lori Felker about The Intruder and Bastards, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, December 4, 2013

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3.5/4]

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson

Guardian/Observer

Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review

San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]

Los Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review also seen here: New York Times

DVDBeaver.com [Henrik Sylow]

VERS MATHILDE

France (84 mi) 2005

Towards Mathilde (Vers Mathilde) | Reviews | Screen

Claire Denis' career as director has seen her bounce back and forth between challenging but well-crafted feature films (Beau Travail, Vendredi Soir) and other, less accessible stories that seem wilfully abstruse (Trouble EveryDay, L'Intrus).

Vers Mathilde suggests that the more experimental, conceptual sideof the director's character may eventually find its true metier in the documentary format. Though it is unlikely to get anything but the mostultra-niche arthouse distribution - in addition to the TV and cable airing already guaranteed by backer Arte - this portrait of French dancer and choreographer Mathilde Monnier is an intelligent enquiry into the dynamics of dance, and the way that a contemporary dance piece evolves from conception to realisation.

But it's also - and this is easily the most interesting thing about the film - a dialogue between two artforms, cinema and dance, and between two women who like to push back the boundaries of their chosen disciplines.

Monnier is the director ofthe Centre Choreographique National de Montpelier, France's leading dance training and research centre. Denis filmed Monnier and her troupe at their Montepelier base during rehearsals for what eventually turn into a series of distinct dance pieces.

An ultra-light crew (consisting of Denis, her camera operator and her brother, Brice Leboucq, who was in charge of the sound) allowed the director to capture the nuances of the dancers' movements or what Monnier refers to as "marks in space".

Purist that she is, Denis refused to shoot on DV, beginning on Super 8 and then - when Arte boarded theproject - switching to an Aaton 16mm camera. Her use of two cinematographers was, apparently, determined by the economics of the exercise, which was filmed in gaps between other projects; but both Denis regular Agnes Godard and newbie Helene Louvart adopt an agile, probing style that interacts with the dancer, sometimes focussing on flailing limbs, sometimes stepping back to chart the interrelations of the troupe members in the large rehearsal space.

The audible whirring of the camera motor is not so much a distraction as a reminder of the filmic artifice: in coming between the audience and the subject, it helps to divide out attention equally between the choreographer whose work we are watching, and the director-choreographer behind the lens.

The rehearsal sequences are interspersed with passages of Monnier talking and theorising her creations. Not always accessible to the layman, these post-modern discourses are saved from pretension by Monnier's obvious devotion to her art, and the way she feels her way towards what she wants to say. But far more effective are the scenes in which Monnier dances, rather than speaks, especially a long, uncut sequence towards the end when she writhes and jerks like a possessed thing. It is the one point where the ascetic, deliberately unadorned style of this rather hard, unforgiving documentary gives way to something like passion.

Vers Mathilde Moving Through Space, by Sarah Silver from Reverse Shot

So much of Vers Mathilde, Claire Denis’s exploration of the work of Modern dance choreographer Mathilde Monnier, can be appreciated by considering what is not there, what was left out. There is no introductory prologue, no “Hello my name is…” exposition or text appearing on screen to tell us a brief history of the person whose voice will dominate the film, a woman we can only assume to be Mathilde. There is certainly no cutaway to a photo of Mathilde as a young girl in pink tights and princess crown with voice over explaining how she “always knew she wanted to be a dancer.”

Instead, the film begins with a female voice waxing poetic on the notion of movement as her disembodied arm cuts through the air. “The movement leaves a mark,” the voice says, and during the course of the film we are given ample opportunity to observe the precise, complex hieroglyphs carved into space by Monnier and her ilk, a diverse group of dancers assembled for her 2004 piece, Déroutes, all of whom move very much like her. Monnier continues explaining her philosophy of dance: “Something clear isn’t always interesting,” comes in the middle of a string of vague references to her methodology. We get the feeling she is grappling with Denis’s desire to document her creative process on film, and in her reticence is something akin to the sentiment often credited to Frank Zappa: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

The interpretation of one art form through another does require a certain amount of translation, and if ever a director was suited to translate Monnier’s aesthetic to film, it’s Denis (whose often abstruse filmmaking proves her unwavering belief that “Something clear isn’t always interesting”). Denis is so attuned to Monnier’s sensibilities that one can’t help but notice that, by observing this avant-garde female artist on the cusp of fifty, Denis, an avant-garde female artist on the cusp of sixty, is simultaneously observing herself. After all, Denis’s is a kinetic cinema, with mise-en-scène and editing invariably evoking their own, distinct rhythms. In fact, her films are almost more choreographed than directed, so frequently is emphasis placed on movement over dialogue. If the studied, repeated gesture of Protée (Isaach De Bankolé) strutting across the porch and slinging his white towel over his left shoulder in Chocolat is too subtle a ritual, consider the series of balletic field drills that take up the vast majority of screen time in Beau travail. By juxtaposing the nightlife of the Foreign Legion soldiers (spent in a dance club, grooving with North African girls) with the disciplined routine of their daily regimen, Denis suggests that their exquisite movements, whether at work or at play, sing the body electric with equal gusto.

Vers Mathilde (meaning Towards Mathilde, for, although we can approach our subject, we will never quite reach her) interweaves logistical scenes (obtaining, building, and testing sets and props) with rehearsals and, eventually, a final performance. As is the case in Beau travail, the training process is just as important, and just as beautiful, as the end result; only the context is different. A distinguished female set designer (echoing the artisanal personas of Monnier and Denis) discusses with Monnier the details of color and fabric choices. We observe the test run of a fabric-covered box upon which the dancers move like collapsible push-up toys, rigid when strung together tightly, and limp when the string is loosened. The box has a second function: a slit in its side allows the dancers to emerge from within, a metaphorical birth. All the while we are reminded of Denis’s off-screen process as we hear the camera rolling and see huge grains of film engage in a gavotte all their own. As Monnier’s team moves closer and closer to the finished product, Denis’s team is analyzing the nuts and bolts of their progress. This creates a tension that runs throughout the film as Denis attempts to deconstruct a constructive process.

Monnier is a rugged sophisticate, all ropey arms and sinewy back in the cotton tank top and khaki pedal pushers that are the uniform for the National Choreographic Center of Montpellier, where she serves as director. Her every posture, even while engaging in simple conversation, evokes a lifetime of study and devotion to the art of movement. During several sequences when we watch her in her element, no longer instructing or directing, but just dancing, she moves like a marionette pulled by invisible strands of taffy, jerked one way, then bouncing back the other. Her body contorts, a human Tetris fitting into precut shapes in space visible only to her. She is a pleasure to watch.

There are moments of self-doubt providing the film with minimal conflict when Monnier despairs mid-rehearsal, “It’s lumbering. It’s shitty . . . I’ve shown them a system and they’re imitating me.” Indeed, her disciples, executing the tai chi and yoga-influenced postures that punctuate the wayward marionette routines, are quite obviously under Monnier’s influence. It is difficult to grasp the abstract direction she gives the dancers: “Let it unfurl from inside . . . Find it in your body.” How does one take what a teacher has taught her, internalize it, and make it her own? The process is so mysterious, it feels impossible to discuss, yet once the dancers respond to her direction, a viewer can instinctually feel the difference, even if the change remains intellectually elusive. The sensation, one of being lost in a sea of intangible concepts, yet somehow subconsciously understanding, or at least accepting, is one that arises during all Denis’s films.

While Denis busies herself translating the choreographer’s process to film, Monnier is, herself, adapting “Lenz,” an unfinished short story by Büchner, into the wordless dance piece that will become Déroutes. In a sense, Denis performed a similar feat when she loosely adapted Melville’s Billy Budd into Beau travail, with its mesmerizing coda, a solo dance number that reads as the total physical unleashing of a glorious soul into the ether, as if any division between body and spirit were illusory.

Vers Mathilde also ends with a solo dance and, although we never quite see the dancer’s face (a white wig obscures it), we have come to recognize by now the signature movements of our main subject. As Monnier performs an otherworldly space glide across a white dance floor, she is moving across a film projection of the very dance she is performing. The effect is disorienting, and there are moments when it’s hard to tell if she is spinning or sitting still. The dance will mean something different to everyone who sees it, but following the film we have just seen, it seems to me to tell the story of confusion alternating with elation, and frustration interspersed with satisfaction; in other words, the gamut of emotions that one encounters when undertaking a creative endeavor.

In The Realm of Work and Play: Claire Denis's Vers Mathilde | The ... Travis Mackenzie Hoover from The House Next Door, January 16, 2007

The Cinema of Claire Denis Review: Vers Mathilde ... - Next Projection Matthew Blevins

Claire Denis' Vers Mathilde | The Dance Current Kathleen Smith

Claire Denis – Vers Mathilde @wshed | - The 24th Frame

Towards Mathilde - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com Mubi

Variety (Leslie Felperin) review

Vers Mathilde [Claire Denis, 2005] - YouTube (7:11)

35 SHOTS OF RUM (35 Rhums) A 95

France Germany (100 mi) 2008 Official site

We could stay like this forever. —Joséphine (Mati Diop)

An affectionate and affirming work. Most great works of literature and cinema seem to be tragedies that continually explore a dark edge of the human soul. What’s so unique about this film is the life affirming warmth expressed from the outset and the positive feeling of optimism, where love is explored with an amazing tenderness and poetic grace. The daughter of a civil servant, Denis spent much of her childhood in different African countries before returning to France where she assisted other directors such as Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch before directing her first feature at the age of 40, so like Toni Morrison in literature, she brings an unconventional maturity into her works. She's one of the unsung filmmakers of our era, a director who moves between an experimental, avant garde style with slight to nonexisting narratives to more conventional narratives fairly easily, usually focusing on the personal lives of marginalized working class characters whose very ordinariness separates them from mainstream movie viewing. This film is a wonderful expository essay on the nature of living, shown from the outset as a series of passing trains, sometimes meeting, sometimes simply traveling in opposite directions, but always running on the same track. In what appears to be an Ozu homage of life in transition, the train montage 35 Rhums.Tindersticks. Train Montage. YouTube (3:43) in the opening set to the music by Tendersticks is a clear sign of moving from one place to another, where nothing remains static, where lives are in constant motion. Alex Descas is Lionel (as in the model trains), a train conductor whose vantage point from the lead car we follow from time to time, a man of few words, but always serious and direct, even as he wordlessly steers his train. He and his fellow workers meet to celebrate the retirement of one of Lionel’s old friends, Réne (Julieth Mars Toussaint), a man who plainly feels uncomfortable about his impending future and the loss of his working friendships. The easygoing nature of this mostly black working class environment is conveyed in the sharing of drinks, where it’s customary at retirements to swig down shots of rum.

Without revealing any background story, Lionel is a widower living in close quarters with his beautiful daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), a student who also works nights in a record store, where one of their special moments together is her dad picking her up on his motorbike after work, or enjoying a home cooked meal together where their intimacy is beautifully expressed in their eyes as well as their accustomed routines. Added to this triangle are two neighbors, Noé (Grégoire Colin), who openly shows his affection for Joséphine, and Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), equally enthralled with her father, an old flame of Lionel’s who still carries a torch while assuming the surrogate role of step-mother. Without ever actually telling the story, instead it unravels in lyrical images detailing the rhythms of life, beautifully shot by Agnès Godard who captures gestures, facial expressions, body language, or silent actions showing the distances between people, but rarely in speech. The film evolves through various vignettes beautifully edited together and in the near perfect music selections by Tindersticks, which includes Basehead’s “Home” (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/basehead) (4:30) which plays in the music store, or Sophia George’s “Can’t Live Without You” Sophia George- Can't live without you- 198X - YouTube (4:01), a reggae song that plays in the car on the way to a concert. But the scene of the film is after their car breaks down in the rain and they ask the proprietor of a small restaurant and bar to stay open after closing hours, where we hear the smooth musical refrains from Ralph Thamar’s “Siboney” and the Commodores “Nightshift” 35 Shots of Rum - Dance Scene.avi YouTube (5:56), where a nice soulful groove takes a wrong turn somewhere, prompted by the music and the open expression of intimacy, where jealousy and body language reveal it all, leaving feelings abandoned and hurt, turning the night sour. The subtleties of this scene typify the fragility of relationships, which seem so solid at one moment, only to discover the moment lasts just an instant.

Despite the various stops along the way, this is really a different kind of love story and is largely a father and daughter journey, as they take a camper to Germany to visit Joséphine’s aunt, who is none other than Ingrid Caven, a scene stealer from Fassbinder films of old, like MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (1975), where they had to tag on three different endings to that film, but she’s in fine form here as well, allowed to wallow in her eccentricities in an extended scene much like Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BLVD. (1950). But this visit also reveals some of the most tender images in the film as well, the two of them visiting her mother’s grave, sleeping under the stars overlooking the sea, observing a strange procession of children carrying lanterns at night, all understated expressions of various stages of life poetically rendered with the most detached reverence. But the ultimate gift a loving father can give his daughter is setting her free, allowing her to move on with her life, which includes a moment unlike any other in their lifetimes, which is shown with exquisite grace and an economy of means, as the film just briefly touches on what the future holds. Denis really gets inside the lives of her characters and is one of the more distinctive filmmakers on the planet. She is a constant reminder that cinema is still an art form, a contemplative study of humanity observing the way we treat one another through rhythm and texture, music, image, and tone. The film couldn’t be more effortless, yet it paints a contemporary face on the modern world by simply focusing on the lives of a few people living in it, all done with an undeniable love and lyrical charm.

Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]

Claire Denis’s (Beau travail) portrait of the affectionate relationship between a father and daughter living in an apartment in the Paris suburbs is one of the highlights of the Melbourne International Film Festival this year. 35 Shots of Rum is a simple film that is part observational filmmaking, part gentle domestic drama and part cinéma vérité. While watching it you almost resist anything that feels like plot development because you are content to simply be in the company of these two characters and their friends, colleagues, neighbours and love interests. It is also refreshing to see a film that almost entirely contains actors of African descent as the representation of Paris’s large African community is rarely depicted in French cinema.

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

In 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums), one character informs another that the university is closing the anthropology department. Because it doesn’t see the value in it. Director Denis thinks differently, and her film serves as a testament to value of studying the everyday lives of a peoples: in this case, the mostly black working-class in a Paris suburb. While some drama seeps into the film—jealous lovers, even a suicide—for the most part, nothing happens: cab drivers gripe, a man broods over his retirement, a family cooks dinner, students debate third-world debt, friends go out for beers, a man shops for a CD, another goes for a run, and everybody rides the trains. Every scene is acted with warmth and humanity, filmed coolly yet sympathetically by Denis; it adds up to a seemingly authentic portrait of the immigrant and children-of-immigrants experience in contemporary France that puts to shame Cederic Klapisch’s recent Paris, with its melodramatic, self-pitying and predominantly white bourgeoisie.

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [5/6]

French director Claire Denis’s marvellous latest feature is a portrait of the close relationship between widowed Parisian train driver Lionel  (Alex Descas) and his affectionate student daughter, Joséphine (Mati Diop). Critics have welcomed it as both her warmest movie and, with its quiet observation of small ritual, her most affirmative and Ozu-esque. But though it’s true that ‘35 Shots’ demonstrates an extraordinary reflective ease and contains possibly more hugs and smiles than Denis’s entire oeuvre to date, that is not to say it is a film free of tribulations, tensions and taboos.

The story is simple, a collection of scenes from the life of this small family who live in a flat in the Rue de la Guadeloupe, a little nest where Lionel escapes from the loneliness of his cab and the memory of his losses, and from which Joséphine, inhibited from fullly developing her relationships with her neighbours, surrogate ‘mother’ Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) and ‘suitor’ Noé (Grégoire Colin), must soon fly.

From this, Denis magically evokes a liberal meditation on family, harmony, loyalty and belonging and their corollaries – loss, transgression, loneliness and separation – and achieves a sweet unity, not least through a beautifully discreet use of symbols, motifs and metaphors. Thus as cinematographer Agnès Godard’s artful visual correspondences (an RER train and a block of  flats shot at night) deepen an understanding of social context, the film’s various vehicles – Lionel’s train thundering into north Paris, his motorbike, the bicycle blocking the hallway – suggest not only specifics of occupation or class, but also journeys of different speeds. The film’s extraordinary economy is typified by a lovely, spontaneous café scene where the principles dance to the Commodores’ ‘Nightshift’, a mini-ballet touchingly evocative of their separate feelings, relationships and destinies.

Mike D’Angelo Wednesday the 10^th at Toronto

[Claire Denis movies tend to be glancing, allusive affairs, and there are moments here -- most notably the titular ritual and the nature of the celebration taking place in the final scene -- that strike me as more willfully obscure than productively ambiguous. All in all, however, 35 Shots of Rum is easily the most direct and transparent film she's made in ages, Victor's cranky confusion notwithstanding. (Apparently Theo didn't get it either.) It must be the way Denis declines to fully define certain key relationships, asking us to infer their history, that's causing the interpretive logjam, because to me the film's theme seemed almost shockingly blunt, albeit kaleidoscopically so: It's about the necessity, and the painful difficulty, of achieving closure and moving on. The grown daughter still living with her dad; the ex-girlfriend and surrogate mom who clearly can't accept that her presence in their lives is now vestigial; the co-worker depressed about what I gather was forced retirement; the ex-lover -- again, you have to infer a lot of this -- who also still lives in the same building and carries the world's most blatantly unextinguished torch (think about how unnatural this whole situation is given the old saw about how nobody in big cities knows their neighbors anymore); the goddamn cat's fate serving as almost comically callous counterpoint (and inspiring its owner's sudden decision, which in turn implicitly inspires the daughter's)...seriously, how many more variations do people require? It's a lyrical mood piece in a very minor key, exemplified by a moment so real and touching and true it nearly wrecked me: ex-couple dancing in a bar after being stranded during a rainstorm; he impulsively kisses her; she briefly responds but then pulls away; he starts to walk off, crestfallen; and she grabs him by the hand and pulls him over to sit beside her -- not intending to renew their passion, or even really to comfort him, but simply because she still wants him near her. It's a movie about irresolution, of knowing what you need to do but lacking the strength to actually do it. And as I write this, I'm starting to think I may have underrated it.]

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

French director Claire Denis is one of the most magical filmmakers in the world, a moody, intuitive artist whose best movies—Beau Travail and Friday Night among them—have a pure, elliptical quality that transcends the page, as if she’s flying without a screenplay. Denis’ last feature, The Intruder, pushed that elliptical style into out-and-out incoherence, but she finds her footing beautifully with 35 Shots Of Rum, a film grounded a bit more in nuts-and-bolts character work than usual. It’s a story still told in pieces, without the narrative spoon-feeding that generally carries an audience through a movie. But once all those pieces fall into place, the film evolves into a simple, intimate, acutely emotional portrait of a family reaching a painful crossroads.

Taking a page from Yasujiro Ozu, 35 Shots Of Rum concerns the relationship between a middle-aged widower and a lovely, devoted daughter who’s starting to inch past the age where she can enjoy a life of her own. For the father, played with great reserve by Alex Descas, the catalyst comes when a fellow train conductor is forced into retirement, but with nothing to retire to; his friends and his identity are tied entirely to the workplace. Though Descas has the good fortune of having daughter Mati Diop at home to look after him, he resolves that she find her own life and love independent of him. It’s a difficult prospect for them both, because they’re happy together; as with Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara in Ozu’s films, their bond transcends mere familial obligation. But Diop clearly has feelings for their upstairs neighbor, a wayward young traveler played by Denis favorite Grégoire Colin, and the time might be right for moving on. 

Though 35 Shots Of Rum is suffused with emotion, Denis avoids the broad strokes of explicit conflict, instead establishing the father-daughter relationship through small kindnesses and the subtle pleasures of their domestic routine. She also conveys the tenderness of the people in orbit, including Descas’ ex-girlfriend (Nicole Dogué), a cab driver coping with her own loneliness and longing. Other Denis films have more overt artistic flourishes—though a bar sequence here, set to a Commodores single, is Denis at her lyrical best—but 35 Shots Of Rum has an enormous depth of feeling, underlined by a gorgeous Tindersticks score that tells the story without words. It pays tribute to Ozu while transcending homage.

Review: 35 Shots of Rum | Claire Denis - Film Comment Dave Kehr, September/October 2009

As many critics have noted, Claire Denis’s work has been drifting toward a “musical” abstraction for some time now. Kent Jones has compared her to Ornette Coleman, and Jonathan Rosenbaum to Charlie Parker, though I don’t find much in her films as deliberately disruptive and dissonant as the work of those two great jazz innovators. Her films seem more in tune (literally) with the smooth, seductive pop jazz sensibilities of the group Tindersticks, which has scored her Nénette and Boni (96), Trouble Every Day (01), and now 35 Shots of Rum.

But Denis has also made films that draw on dance: Beau Travail (99) in collaboration with the choreographer Bernardo Montet (and featuring a bravura dance performance by Leos Carax’s personal Gene Kelly, Denis Lavant), and the documentary Vers Mathilde, about the choreographer Mathilde Monnier (05, and so far unreleased in the U.S.). And Friday Night (02) can be looked at as an extended tango of seduction between two strangers (Valérie Lemercier and Vincent Lindon) played out in the course of a single Paris night.

35 Shots could also be seen as a film about bodies in motion, and more particularly, the impossibility of standing still. The film opens with a lovely, magic-hour montage set to a Tindersticks tune and offering undulating visions of railroad tracks, coming together and moving apart, as seen from the point of view of Lionel (Alex Descas, an axiom of Denis’s cinema since S’en fout la mort in 1990), an engineer for the RER, the rail system that links Paris to its suburbs. Interspersed with shots of the crisscrossing rails (a conventional image, perhaps, but one that Denis and her cinematographer, Agnès Godard, shoot with unusual grace) are close-ups of the middle-aged Lionel; a co-worker, René (Julieth Mars Toussaint); and a beautiful young woman, Joséphine (played by Mati Diop, a niece of the late Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety).

Denis and her scenarist (Jean-Pol Fargeau, another regular in the Denis universe) delay spelling out the relationship between these characters as long as possible. The scene shifts to a cozy apartment beside the railroad tracks where Joséphine is beginning to prepare dinner; when Lionel arrives with a gift for her—a shiny new rice cooker—we’re uncertain whether she’s his wife, his lover, or his daughter. Eventually, an insert shot showing a photograph of a young girl with an older woman efficiently informs us that Lionel is a widower and Joséphine is his child, but the initial ambiguity continues to cast a spell over the rest of the film, binding Lionel and Joséphine together in a special, undefined intimacy (like the brother and sister in Nénette and Boni). But as they sit down to eat, Denis cuts away to two other characters, both neighbors in the same apartment building: Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), an open-hearted taxi driver who seems to have romantic designs on Lionel, and Noé (Grégoire Colin, another member of the Denis stock company), a loner whose interest in Joséphine is awakened over the course of the movie.

Denis has eliminated most of the expository material that would tie together the story in a conventional film, but we hardly miss it: the basic plotline—a dutiful daughter must learn to break away from her loving father, and find a life of her own—is familiar from countless Ozu films, and we hardly need to see it spelled out again. Instead, Denis moves her four characters into a choreographic abstraction of coming together and moving apart (most beautifully in a long scene set in a café, where the characters take refuge from a rainstorm when Gabrielle’s taxi breaks down on the way to a concert). As in a dance, gesture and movement subsume dialogue; we know what the characters are thinking and feeling through the ways they approach (and avoid) each other.

This technique allows Denis to soften and blur the turning points of the narrative (a suicide, a trip to Germany, a wedding); things happen, but without dramatic punctuation. Moving with a sense of continuous flow rather than bumping through a series of climaxes, 35 Shots becomes a sort of ballet of emotions, executed with weightless grace and poise.

The Rumpus Review Of 35 Shots Of Rum - The Rumpus.net Barry Jenkins, director of Medicine for Melancholy

Possibly the most humanistic character study from director Claire Denis: thoughtful, endearing, and rendered with exemplary tact. There is no absolute way to observe a Claire Denis film. In form and theme, her work possesses an openness uncommon in even the hallowed realm of “art” cinema. With 35 Shots of Rum — Denis’ most straightforward and narratively lucid film since Nenette et Boni — this openness is used to render the complexities of family.

Lionel and Josephine are a French-African father and daughter living together in a working class suburb of Paris. When we first view them, it is through the coy gaze of cinematographer Agnes Godard’s 50mm lens. Lionel (a handsome and greying Alex Descas), having just arrived home from work, steps into the foyer and calls to Josephine (Mati Diop as a beautiful grad student of mixed race). Preparing dinner in the kitchen, Josephine rounds the corner, buries her face in Lionel’s chest, kisses him twice and rests her head on his shoulder. As he sits to remove his shoes, she retrieves his slippers and stands against the facing wall, palms down, curls her mouth slightly and waits. They are beautiful together, a perfect couple and then, just as the two sit down to dinner and the thought solidifies, Josephine speaks: “merci, Papa.”

And it’s here that Denis’ intentions begin to focus. The film, though simple as a  narrative, is a study of two people alone comprising an entire family, performing all possible roles with their accompanying dynamics. It’s unknown how long Lionel and Josephine have lived this way, but from the confident manner in which they navigate these roles, the only plausible conclusion is, quite some time — likely, the entirety of Josephine’s life. It’s in this way that, Ms. Denis has reasoned, over time, these people have learned to be both father and daughter, brother and sister, and, as undeniably stated in the opening sequence as thesis, husband and wife.

The ambiguity between them is not slight of hand on Denis’ part, but rather the ambiguity which exists between men and women. Flowing from their first encounter, Lionel and Josephine’s relationship is emphatically posited as that of father and daughter. Yet viewed absent context (as in the opening scene), the familial relation of the two is overwhelmed by the implicit sensuality of a beautiful woman greeting a beautiful man just come home from work. These two love each other absolutely. Living together in this flat as they have for some time, the physical boundaries between them have eroded. Josephine touches her father to communicate her love to him. It is at once unsettling and, in the same moment, completely natural, a thing that happens less as fathers and daughters age. For Ms. Denis’ characters here, it has remained constant.

In much more simple measures, the film is just as curious about the joys and sorrows of work. Set out to study a side of French citizenry little explored in cinema, Denis does her best to root the film in the everyday lives of these people. Lionel is a train operator in the Parisian rail system, his closest friends are French-African train operators, the route he services is filled to standing with people of French-African heritage, and over the film’s opening titles — an extended glide along the rails from the vantage of the operators’ booth — the image winds through neighborhoods most view only on the gray journey from the Charles de Gaulle airport to the City of Lights.

One of Lionel’s closest friends, who has run the rails for the better part of his life, finds himself faced with forced retirement. In a fitting coda, the two men share an exchange that leads to one of the film’s great visual images. Says the friend: “Surrendering … surrendering to this condition is what’s so hard.” Much later, Lionel finally replies: “When I get dark thoughts … I think of my daughter.”

35 Shots of Rum is possibly Denis’ most humanistic character study, thoughtful, endearing, and rendered with exemplary tact, as through it all, there is never any doubt that the two people at the center of this film are a loving and complete family — no more, no less.

The New Republic (Stanley Kauffmann) review

The French director Claire Denis has written, with Jean-Pol Fargeau, a screenplay about Parisians that is different. 35 Shots of Rum concerns a fortyish railway driver, his twentyish student daughter, his ex-girlfriend, and the daughter’s boyfriend, all of whom live in the same apartment house in three apartments. (Father and daughter live together.) The difference is that all these Parisians are black.

Denis began her career in 1988 with Chocolat, which dealt with a French girl and a black man in Cameroon. I haven’t seen all of Denis’s films since then and don’t know how often she has returned to the subject of race, but she does so here, winningly and well, merely by (except for one sequence) paying no attention to it. These people simply are black, living their lives. Even in a sequence with two white women, race is not mentioned. Apparently all these people were originally from the Caribbean, live in a district centered on the Rue de la Guadeloupe, and thrive in their society.

Lionel, widowed a long time ago, and his daughter Josephine love each other and enjoy that love by doing everyday things every day. Their quiet pleasure in each other’s company suffuses the screen. She is a student with a job in a record shop. One of her classes, with a black teacher and all-black students, is charged with racial anger. (Frantz Fanon is inevitably mentioned.) But though the paper being discussed that day is by Josephine, she never utters a word on a related subject outside the class. She, her father, and friends obviously expect their lives to go on like any others.

In a rueful way, this becomes too true--at least for Lionel. The time comes for change. Josephine is to leave, presumably with her boyfriend, who is off to somewhere in Africa. The film assumes a likeness to several Japanese films that are about the particular poignancy in a father whose care and nurture lead, inevitably, to loneliness (even though Lionel has previously asked her to feel free to leave). Woven through the central story is a minatory counterpoint about a colleague of Lionel’s who retired and who finds that the job that filled his life was his life. We don’t see Lionel taking any preparatory steps for himself, but we do see him discovering his colleague’s fate.

Before Josephine leaves, he evidently wants her to be reminded of her mother. They drive to Lübeck in northern Germany and visit her mother’s sister, white, affectionate, very German. Over coffee, race is never mentioned. Father and daughter visit the mother’s grave. Then, back in Paris, comes their own parting.

The story is not exciting, but it is irresistible--because the people are endearing. We keep feeling not only that it is all credible but that we want the company of these two characters, and we wriggle a bit at the thought of their separation.

The title of the film is ungainly but not irrelevant. To drink thirty-five shots of rum in one sitting is a goal that apparently Lionel has set for some reason and has failed to reach. Nineteen is the max so far, done by one of his friends. (When Lionel comes home after one attempt, Jo kisses him and says--matter-of-factly, not reprovingly--"You smell sloshed." It’s simply what Lionel does once in a while.) At the end, when she leaves, he makes it to thirty-five--and apparently holds them. We draw our own conclusions about the relation between that goal, Jo’s leaving, and Lionel’s future.

A cinematic reason for the film’s pleasures is the way it looks. Denis quite clearly envisioned it before she shot a foot of it; and with the aid of her cinematographer, Agnes Godard, she has clothed the picture in mellow tones--nothing bright or cheery to underscore the congenial mood, blues and shadows for the most part, to convince that this good feeling occurs in reality, not a movie. Alex Descas is staunch yet vulnerable as Lionel, Mati Diop is a zephyr as Jo, Nicole Dogué is amiable as the ex-girlfriend, and Grégoire Colin burns appropriately as Jo’s swain. Those who treasure Fassbinder films will be glad to see Ingrid Caven, one of his favorites, as the German aunt.

Along with the post-film glow, however, I’m still wondering about those thirty-five shots.

Daniel Kasman, '35 Shots of Rum: In Honour of Changing the World', The Auteurs: Notebook, 13 September 2008

Ryland Walker Knight, '35 Rhums on The Night Shift', The Auteurs: Notebook, 13 March 2009

Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis ... Kath Dooley from Screening the Past, September, 2013

DVD Outsider [L.K. Weston]

Village Voice (Melissa Anderson) review

Little White Lies magazine Jason Wood

REVIEW – 35 Shots of Rum (2008) « Ruthless Culture Chris Pearson from Ruthless Culture, July 13, 2009

35 Shots of Rum (2009) Directed by Claire Denis Sam C. Mac from In Review Online

DVD Times Noel Megahey, also seen here: DVD Times - 35 Shots of Rum

35 Shots of Rum Goes Straight to Your Head | Film Reviews | The L ... Nicolas Rapold from L magazine, September 16, 2009

/ HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » 35 SHOTS OF RUM - The Letting Go Michael Tully, September 18, 2009

Ruminative '35 Shots of Rum' by Claire Denis Features Wordless ... Sam Juliano from Wonders in the Dark, December 10, 2009

REVIEW | Object Desire: Claire Denis's “35 Shots of Rum” - indieWIRE Michael Koresky from indieWIRE, September 16, 2009

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth]

The Auteurs Ryland Walker Knight

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ignatius Vishnevetsky

theartsdesk.com [Sheila Johnston]

Slant Magazine review Bill Weber

OhmyNews (Howard Schumann)

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Film Friday: Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum and White Material ... Rob Davis from Paste magazine, November 20, 2009

Cinema Without Borders (Ed Yealu) review

35 Shots of Rum | Reverse Shot The Major and the Minor, by Adam Nayman from Reverse Shot, also including: Read Adam Nayman's interview with Claire Denis

The Best Films Of The Decade (2000-2009) | #9 Beau Travail/ 35 Shots Of Rum Tom Hall from The Back Room Manifesto at indieWIRE

Dossier Journal » Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum Jeff Lanza from Dossier Journal, September 15, 2009

35 Shots of Rum – A Film Review « No Ordinary Fool Longman Oz, August 4, 2009

Ray Pride, Newcity review

35 Shots of Rum Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Siffblog [Kathy Fennessy]

Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]

The House Next Door [Vadim Rizov]

Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]

Daily Plastic - Festival Report [Robert Davis]

YEAR IN REVIEW: 2009 #4 Film of the Year, by A.A. Dowd from Wild Lines

Screen International [Dan Fainaru]

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5] also seen here: Jay's Movie Blog [Jason Seaver]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

Twitch (Ard Vijn) review

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3/5]

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

Twitch (Michael Guillen) review also seen here: The Evening Class

Moving Pictures magazine [Mike D'Angelo]

35 Shots of Rum : The New Yorker Richard Brody

35 Shots of Rum Cliff Doerksen from The Reader

35 Shots of Rum (2008) The Auteurs

35 SHOTS OF RUM at Film Forum in New York City Film Forum

Robert Davis, 'Interview: Claire Denis on 35 Shots of Rum', Daily Plastic, March 10, 2009

Kevin Lee, 'Spectacularly Intimate: An Interview with Claire Denis', The Auteurs: Notebook, 2 April 2009

Dancing Reveals So Much: An Interview with Claire Denis Darren Hughes from Senses of Cinema, April 2009

An Interview with Claire Denis | Reverse Shot On the Nightshift, by Adam Nayman from Reverse Shot, 2009

35 Shots of Rum': Claire Denis steps into the spotlight Sheila Johnston interview from The Telegraph, July 8, 2009

The Auteurs [interview with Daniel Kasman] Kasman interviews Claire Denis from The Auteurs, October 7, 2009

This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking with Columbia professor Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (and others) about No Fear, No Die and 35 Shots of Rum, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 27, 2013

The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young at Venice

Variety (Jay Weissberg) review

Channel 4 Film

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [5/6]

Film review: 35 Shots of Rum | Film | The Observer Philip French

The Irish Times (Donald Clarke) review [3/5]

The Daily Telegraph (David Gritten) review [5/5]

35 Shots of Rum, DVD of the week - Telegraph Philip Horne from The Telegraph, October 16, 2009

35 Shots of Rum, Claire Denis, 100 mins, (12A) - Reviews, Films ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent, July 12, 2009

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]

Boston Globe (Wesley Morris) review [3.5/4]

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

Nashville Movies - 35 Shots of Rum may be all mood, but what a ... Phil Nugent from Nashville Scene, November 11, 2009

SF360: Soulful "35 Shots of Rum" is gently intoxicating Dennis Harvey from SF360, December 18, 2009

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [2/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

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

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

35 Shots of Rum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

claire denis, 35 shots of rum, 2008. (trailer) - artforum.com / video Trailer from ArtForum on YouTube (1:40)

WHITE MATERIAL B 89

France Cameroon (106 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

At least partially inspired by the heroine in Doris Lessing’s 1950 novel The Grass Is Singing, this is a film with Denis’ imprint all over it, but also one that struggles to emotionally grab hold of the audience, as much of it has the illusionary appearance of a nightmarish bad dream, perhaps a hallucination, as Denis accentuates the lush, dreamy landscape for an interior story of madness in the midst. Set in an unnamed former French colonial African country that is going through extreme political turmoil with rebel African forces mounting attacks forcing the whites out of the country, demanding that what possessions they leave behind, which they contemptuously call “white material,” rightly belongs to them. Shown in a fractured flashback style that makes free association use of time, jumping back and forth between events, and told from the ever more precariously dangerous point of view of a righteously stubborn and seriously delusional white family that runs a coffee plantation and refuses to be scared off their land, despite signs of vicious brutality all around them. Isabelle Huppert, in her pretty pink dresses, runs the coffee plantation, where even after all her black workers escape in mass to safety routinely hires more workers, claiming they only need 5 days to harvest this year’s crop or all will be lost. Her husband, Christopher Lambert, sees the writing on the wall and recommends they heed the French helicopter that urges them to escape while they can, as the French government is pulling out of the country in advance of a bloody civil war, but Huppert scoffs at the idea of returning to France, which she sees as regimented and overly conventional, mediocre even, preferring the open freedom they have here, even as it is disappearing before her eyes.

Because of the altered time structure, the audience is intentionally bewildered by the disorienting sequence of events, never knowing what actually precedes what is shown onscreen, which adds to the confusion that already exists from the escalating violence. While the family may be blind to events around them, the audience witnesses signs of danger everywhere, much like a ghost story, as armed elementary-aged children enter their house at will, but may as well be invisible to Huppert. Similarly, advancing rebel forces are little more than abandoned or orphaned children carrying automatic weapons and oftentimes fueled by unnamed pharmaceutical drugs which they take by the handful. More telling is the relationship Huppert has with her son (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a lazy, sit-on-his-ass, overly indulged grown kid who refuses to offer any help whatsoever to the growing family crisis, yet Huppert refuses to allow anyone to criticize his overt weaknesses. Instead he is humiliated by well-armed kids who leave him stripped naked on his own property, which sends him into a rage of senseless psychotic behavior, crossing the line with some of the domestics, finding himself without a home or a country that wants him, a metaphor for the whites losing their purpose for being there, especially with roaming gangs in the vicinity so willing to slit their throats, as they have nothing, while the whites have everything to lose and nothing to gain.

This is not an easy story to tell as African civil wars turning into a bloodbath are an all too familiar pattern that western audiences are familiar with, leaving behind images of hands cut off and mutilated limbs, not to mention tribal vengeance that is among the most vicious on the planet. But in Denis’s hands, much like the shirtless imagery of young men in BEAU TRAVAIL (1999), she focuses on the shirtless young boys carrying machetes or the young girls with pistols or machine guns in their hands. These haunting images of children really drive this film, as despite Huppert’s presence in nearly every scene, she’s running around in circles like a chicken with its head cut off, while these lost and abandoned children are supposed to be the nation’s future. Both are equally dysfunctional and have little use for the other, understanding nothing at all about each other’s worlds. The languid pace and dreamlike imagery creeps up on the viewer, where by the end it resembles the French plantation sequence in APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX (2001), where an apocalypse is brought upon by governments or people within an existing society that fail to heed the warning signs, as one can imagine the Vietnamese closing in on them very much like the children coming over the hills in this film, where the horror and bloody aftermath resembles the insanity sequence featuring the murder of Kurtz (Brando), where the only way to combat a growing nightmare is to enter the nightmare itself. Here much of the threat of violence is shown with meticulous detail while the actual murders themselves remain shrouded in allegorical offscreen mystery where the viewer only sees the aftermath. In this film, set to the mournful music of the Tendersticks, sounding much like early Pink Floyd creating a pervasive feeling of everpresent doom, they eerily blend into the same nightmare, losing all touch with reality at some point, becoming more abstract and metaphorical, where the funereal reality is lost in a hallucination of senseless and horrific violence.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

After the elliptical Intruder and 35 Shots of Rum, Claire Denis plays it relatively straight with the story of African plantation owner Isabelle Huppert, who clings to her land despite the imminent native revolt. Those who prize Denis' more abstruse efforts might grumble at the movie's relative lucidity, but there's still plenty left unsaid, not least the story's particular time and place. Denis, the daughter of a French civil servant, was raised in several African countries, and she knows the texture of the land, as well as the stubbornness of colonial holdouts. As the movie takes increasingly bloody turns, it verges on allegory, but Denis never loses her grip on the tactile.

Review: White Material Ray Pride from New City

Claire Denis’ splintered, impressionistic style, leaving much to be fathomed by the viewer, sometimes sparks critical ire. David Denby, for one, writing of “White Material” in the New Yorker, grows bilious at the thought of anyone who might find grace there: “Dreadful, in an aimless, intentionally disjointed way that some people have mistaken for art.” Oh dear. “Some people.” The unbelievable uncouth! Returning to her roots in Cameroon, as well as to her first, French Colonial Africa-set feature, “Chocolate” (1988), Denis’ latest rests on the small yet sturdy shoulders of Isabelle Huppert, as a colonial plantation owner who insists on riding out a revolution as she awaits her family’s coffee-bean harvest. Confusion reigns and the camerawork reflects that, less pointed than the critique of masculinity in “Beau Travail,” less pointillist than the haunting yet near-indecipherable “Intruder,” Denis still works with the suggestiveness of sound and image rather than the flat sum of plot and sociology. Huppert’s character thinks of herself as part of the landscape, unmovable, and Denis photographs her as such: a fact, a feature, and not an interloper—arms stretched to the sky, feet on the dusty red earth. Racial tension seethes, revolution arrives. Some people find it hypnotic. With Isaach de Bankole, Christophe Lambert. 106m.

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

The chief pleasure of Claire Denis’ work is that it’s incomplete, at least in the sense that the audience has to be engaged in completing it. Films like Friday Night, Beau Travail, and 35 Shots Of Rum unfold in glancing, elliptical strands that need some connecting, but the experience is uniquely alluring and intuitive, and only feels like work if you resist it. Denis’ latest, White Material, isn’t one of her best, but her style is exceptionally well-suited to a story about a stubborn woman trying to make sense of the chaos that’s slowly consuming her world. Returning Denis to her childhood roots in colonial Africa, the site of her 1988 breakthrough Chocolat and much of Beau Travail, White Material subtly captures the faith and hubris that keeps a European farmer planted on land that’s shifting beneath her feet. 

Though just as beautiful as in Denis’ other African adventures, the continent here is a more hostile place, swept up by a civil war that spreads not only violence, but madness to the populace. Set in an unspecified country, the film stars the great Isabelle Huppert as a coffee-grower whose determination to stay through the harvest, in spite of signs of imminent danger to herself and her family, is less courageous than stubborn and foolhardy. Meanwhile, Denis follows a charismatic rebel icon, played by Isaach De Bankolé, whose fate intertwines with Huppert’s. 

As usual, Denis assembles the big picture from a series of tiny moments—some involve the striking landscape, others the child-warriors recruited into war, while still more hint at Huppert’s psychosis and countless other ideas and images at play. And characteristically, Huppert doesn’t reveal anything obvious about herself, allowing the audience to guess about her decisions, motives, and fundamental decency. The middle section of White Material could stand to be more purposeful—though Denis likely wants us to feel the character in limbo—and Huppert’s son’s radical transformation in response to personal violence seems too abrupt. But Denis brings it all together for a genuinely shocking finale, unexpected, yet in keeping with the film’s consuming madness.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [4/4] also seen here: Cinematical [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

At a glance, Claire Denis' White Material is probably one of her most accessible movies. It has an actual plot, and a big star in the lead role, Isabelle Huppert, here looking bright and tough, her freckles and blue eyes glinting and gleaming in the African heat. Even the Highlander himself, Christopher Lambert, is here, as well as cult actor Isaach De Bankolé (Casino Royale, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). But it's also one of Denis' grimmest and most pessimistic films, although that doesn't stop me from wanting to see it again.

Denis was born in Paris, but was raised in colonial Africa. She made her debut feature, Chocolat (1988), about French colonialism in Africa, and returned there for her 1999 masterpiece Beau Travail (which was based loosely on Herman Melville's Billy Budd). With White Material she returns a third time, but with a much angrier, darker agenda. Huppert stars as Maria Vial, a coffee grower on a big plantation. The French army flies over her land in a helicopter and informs her over a megaphone that they're pulling out; she'll be on her own, stuck in the middle of a war between the official African army and a band of African rebels, neither of which are very excited to have white people around.

But Maria still clings to a sense of entitlement. It's her land, and she's going to harvest the coffee crop. She has lived there for years, and she knows the locals. All she needs is five days. What could go wrong? Her husband, Andre (Lambert), believes differently and tries to make arrangements to get the family out of the country, meeting with a rebel leader and trying to sell the plantation. Meanwhile, all of Maria's workers leave and she stubbornly goes out to hire more. Things start to get tense, as the rebel army demands payment to use the road to and from town, and as subtle hints are sent, such as the head of a dead cow appearing in a basket of picked coffee beans.

Things grow worse with Maria's grown son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a pathetic layabout who spends most of his days in bed. He won't even help his mother with her last-minute harvesting frenzy. Instead he goes swimming and nearly gets attacked by two angry kids, armed with knives and spears. He follows them, and they catch him and humiliate him by chopping off a lock of his blond hair and stealing his clothes. Later, he snaps, shaves his head, grabs a shotgun and sets out with a haphazard, pathological plan.

But perhaps worst of all is the appearance of a character called "The Boxer" (De Bankolé), who has become a kind of symbol in the ongoing battle. Gut-shot, he crawls into a hut on the coffee plantation to grimly wait, or perhaps to die. He draws yet more unwanted attention to the French plantation. Denis frames all this action in flashback, as Maria vainly attempts to get back home after a terrible incident in town. She hides in the tall grass from some soldiers, can't catch a ride, and winds up clinging from a ladder on the side of a bus; there are no more seats for her inside. The flashbacks provide a sense of inevitability to the proceedings, and they also loosen up what, for Denis, is a fairly straightforward narrative.

The ongoing question is: who lives here? Whose place is this? When some native kids find a gold lighter belonging to Andre, it winds up in the hands of a rebel soldier, who simply dismisses it as the "white material" of the title. Later, Maria's new hired workers ask about her connection to the plantation. She explains that she doesn't own it, but she's still in charge. "If nothing is yours, then it's all just hot air," one worker replies. But if Maria doesn't belong here, then Denis doesn't side with anyone else, either. She repeatedly shows a rebel-supporting radio DJ who plays reggae music and broadcasts messages to the rebels, but then later shows the military taking over the same station; neither broadcaster carries any more weight than the other.

The thing that sets Denis' films apart from ordinary films is their sense of texture. She incorporates the feel of a place and time into her films, and often these sensations can even overwhelm the plot. Here, Africa is hardscrabble, dusty and wearying. (Whereas in Beau Travail, it was more erotically and physically connected with the characters.) We can feel the earth's dire effect on a man's bare feet, and we can taste the dust when the helicopter dips close to where Maria is standing. The tall grass is half-dead, and the water in the pool where Manuel swims is cruddy and brackish. At some point, one rebel makes a comment about how the white woman's coffee isn't even good enough for the locals to drink.

All of these elements contribute to a certain feel and mood in the film; they give it a pure, physical, bodily quality. Denis never films in front of a place; she films inside it. In Friday Night, a chilly Paris night and a traffic jam set the tone, and a globetrotting trip between the snow and the tropics helped shape The Intruder, but in White Material, the land is the source for everything.

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

Early in Claire Denis’s powerful, agonized film “White Material,” you see a woman in a short pink dress, Maria — played by a sublime Isabelle Huppert — hanging off the back of a bus. The setting is a contemporary unnamed African country being torn to pieces by government troops, marauding rebels and the enduring ravages of European colonialism. As she holds on tight, her short-sleeved dress fluttering, the camera moves in close enough for you to see the muscles in Ms. Huppert’s thin arms popping, straining with the terrific effort that encapsulates the will to survive.

Ms. Denis has an extraordinary gift for finding the perfect image that expresses her ideas, the cinematic equivalent of what Flaubert called le mot juste. At her best, as in “Beau Travail” (1999), her radiant retelling of Melville’s “Billy Budd,” the images convey her ideas with more precision than reams of scripted dialogue could. The same holds true of “White Material,” a striking film filled with images that sometimes reveal their full meaning only when their beauty curdles in the chain of signification, as in the seemingly inconsequential shot of Maria’s light hair that inexorably leads to a scene of a man shaving his head and violently stuffing his blond hair into the mouth of a protesting black woman.

But before that horror there is the nightmarish image of running dogs and the unnerving scene of a man caught in an inferno, an opening vision to which the film later returns. When Maria first enters the film, she’s walking in a dusty rural landscape and vainly trying to wave down a fast-moving car. The expression on her face is both terrifying and terrified, and her features look harshly arranged — lips pursed into a lopsided oval, brow bunched, red-lined eyes fixed — as if she had been broken by some unspoken anguish and hastily glued together. Soon after, she hitches a ride on the bus and begins her journey toward the coffee plantation she calls home, a passage Ms. Denis interweaves with flashbacks to the recent past.

It takes a little time to adjust to this dual movement forward (toward home) and back (into the past), if only because it makes it tricky to get a firm footing in the story. Yet this form works because Maria initially appears as unmoored by what is happening as you are. In this sense, the flashbacks, most of which are from her point of view, serve as fragments of a puzzle that you slowly piece together, at least in part. You discover her fierce dedication to the plantation, and you become acquainted with her former husband, André (Christophe Lambert); her adored grown son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle); and the plantation patriarch, Henri (Michel Subor). In time, both you and Maria learn the costs of her ferocious loves.

The price proves lethally high. In some crucial respects, “White Material” is a specific film about white Europeans who, being fully integrated into their African home, insist on the privileges of patrimony, including the right to exploit the land and its people. Though pale as milk, Maria contemptuously refers to “dirty whites,” and her son, now perhaps in his early 20s, was born in Africa. Yet while he is a native son, the country “doesn’t like him,” as an African man tells Maria, and neither does it like her. If she doesn’t seem to grasp this, it’s because she seems to think that her deep, rapturous feeling for the country on which she’s staked a claim is enough to inoculate her. She isn’t a dirty white, though for some she is.

“White Material” is very much a companion piece to “Chocolat,” Ms. Denis’s 1988 directorial debut. That lush, more straightforward film is set in Cameroon in the 1950s, during the waning years of French colonial rule, a subject Ms. Denis, the daughter of a French official, knows intimately, having grown up in Francophone African countries. “Chocolat” centers on the relationship between the young white daughter of a French district officer and the African man, Protée (Isaach De Bankolé), who works as the family’s house “boy.” Ms. Denis doesn’t pretend to speak for the African servant, who remains opaque, but she does insist on showing his point of view — we watch him watching the whites — because she knows that this story isn’t hers alone.

Mr. De Bankolé has a small role in the new film as a wounded, romanticized rebel soldier called the Boxer who takes refuge at the coffee plantation. Maria offers him help, but she barely talks to him, so preoccupied is she with getting her crop of beans harvested. Most of the plantation’s workers have understandably fled (and Maria’s ex wants to do the same), and both the army and the rebels, including a ragtag band of child soldiers, are fast approaching from different angles. The utopian promise of African liberation that reverberated throughout “Chocolat” has been replaced by the devastations of postcolonialism. Power has partly moved from white hands to black, yet much remains the same, including terror.

For the most part, terror creeps through this film quietly, sneaking through tall grass, slipping into buildings and moving with increasing tension among the characters. Eventually, Ms. Denis brings the whole thing to a shocking end with a death blow that is as blunt in its execution as it is in its larger historical meaning. But before then, she shows you an image of such astonishing poignancy and moral clarity that it will haunt you long after the film ends: a handful of child soldiers sleeping in a rumpled bed among scattered stuffed animals. With grave tenderness, Ms. Denis reminds us that these murderous, tragically lost boys and girls are still children, a gesture that doesn’t restore their humanity — which she has no right to restore — so much as remind you of the humanity that’s so easily forgotten.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the month: White Material (2009) Adrian Martin, July 2010

Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis ... Kath Dooley from Screening the Past, September, 2013

Review: White Material Jason Solomons from The Observer, July 4, 2010

White Material Your Friends and Neighbors, by Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot, Fall 2009

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

NYFF09: Claire Denis' White Material Puts the Cycle of African ... Wayne Titus from FilmLinc Blog, October 1, 2009

REVIEW | Running Scared: Claire Deniss White Material Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot at indieWIRE, September 15, 2009, also seen here: indieWire [Michael Koresky]

Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce

The Auteurs [Daniel Kasman] September 20, 2009, including an interview with Denis, October 7, 2009: The Auteurs [interview with Daniel Kasman]

The Auteurs [Johnny Levant] October 18, 2009

Claire Denis: White Material (2009) Chris Knipp from Filmleaf

Claire Denis: Shooting Africa in 'White Material' - indieWIRE Bryce J. Renninger from indiWIRE, October 9, 2009

REVIEW: Isabelle Huppert Stares Down a Revolution in Claire Denis ... Michelle Orange from Movieline

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

The King's Speech, Tangled, Tiny Furniture, White Material ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

Eye for Film (Ali Hazzah) review [2.5/5]

floatationsuite [Sheila Seacroft]

filmsoundoff [Alex Roberts]

Twitch [Ben Umstead]

Filmcritic.com Rachel Gordon

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]

Shadow And Act » Reviews – White Material Tambay, September 8, 2009

Shadow And Act » Thoughts On Claire Denis' White Material ... Tambay, October 11, 2009

White Material | Review | Screen Mike Goodridge from Screendaily

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) review

Richard Schickel: 'White Material': Portrait of the Colonist in a ... Richard Schickel from Truthdig

Armond White reviews Claire Denis' African fetish in White ... NY Press

Movie Review - White Material - eFilmCritic Jay Seaver

PopMatters [Jesse Hicks]

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

Critic's Notebook [Sarah Manvel]

ReelTalk (Donald Levit) review

Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]

alibi.com [Devin D. O'Leary]

Cinespect [Ryan Wells]

Twitch [Ben Umstead]

WHITE MATERIAL  Frank Swietek from One Guy’s Opinion

San Francisco International Film Festival 2010: Dispatch One Joseph Jon Lanthier from The House Next Door capsule review

Daily Film Dose (Blair Stewart) review

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

User reviews from imdb Author: trpuk1968 from United Kingdom

User reviews from imdb Author: Framescourer from London, UK

User reviews from imdb Author: scrumptiously from United Kingdom

ViewLondon (Matthew Turner) review [4/5]

Boxoffice Magazine (Richard Mowe) review

Shoot him again Nick James at Toronto, 2009

White Material J.R. Jones from The Reader

cinemadaily | A Double Dose of Denis Andy Lauer links various reviews of Denis’s last 2 films from indieWIRE, September 16, 2009

Shadow And Act » Reviews – White Material Tambay links to other reviews, September 8, 2009

Back to Africa: An Interview with Claire Denis Daniel Kasman interviews Claire Denis from The Auteurs, October 7, 2009

Q&A: CLAIRE DENIS, Director of White Material :: Stop Smiling Magazine José Teodoro interview, October 8, 2009

Claire Denis on Isabelle Huppert: 'She doesn't want to be nice or compassionate' Video interview by Andrew Pulver and Henry Barnes from The Guardian, July 1, 2010 (6:39)

Claire Denis: 'For me, film-making is a journey into the impossible' Andrew Hussey feature and interview from The Observer, July 4, 2010

This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic ... - Chicago Reader This week in Claire Denis: Talking to local critic Marilyn Ferdinand about Chocolat and White Material, by Ben Sachs from The Reader, November 6, 2013

Entertainment Weekly review Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter review Sura Wood

Variety (Jay Weissberg) review

Time Out Online (David Jenkins) review [4/5] Dave Calhoun

Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney] July 4, 2010

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5]

The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sukhdev Sandhu

Review: White Material - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

'White Material' tells a woman's horrifying story in postcolonial ... Steven Rea from The Philadelphia Inquirer

Review: Danger and dread will dig into your gut - TwinCities.com Chris Hewitt from St. Paul Pioneer Press

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

White Material - Movie review: 'White Material' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze

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

2011 JEONJU DIGITAL PROJECT

An Heir (Un héritier) (22 mi) 2011 France South Korea d: Jean-Marie Straub

To the Devil (42 mi) 2011 d: Claire Denis

Memories of a Morning (Recuerdos de una mañana) (47 mi) 2011 d: José Luis Guerín

France/Spain (112 mi) 2012

I’ve seen great films by each of the three filmmakers, and this was not that. —Patrick Friel, alternative film festival director and programmer

For the past 11 years, this was originally conceived as an experimental collective work, initially featuring Asian film directors, but eventually opening up to Europe, Africa, and the United States where now three different challenging and cutting edge directors are given the green light to contribute short films to the Asian Jeonju Film Festival in what was considered at the time an up and coming new medium. As the world has caught up to the digital age, with Hollywood abandoning actual film by the end of this year, shooting and preserving films only in digital from now on, perhaps this experiment should re-institute the use of 35 mm, which will eventually become the ultimate rarity in cinema.

Jean-Marie Straub worked initially with Renoir, Bresson, and Rivette before meeting student Danièle Huillet in the early 50’s, becoming his collaborative and married partner until she died in 2006. Known for adapting the works of others, they re-worked novels, operas, and plays, but also other original texts, usually with political overtones, stressing intellectual content through an austere and unvarnished style of filmmaking.

Claire Denis is the daughter of a civil servant, spending much of her childhood in different African countries before returning to France where she assisted other directors such as Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch before directing her first feature at the age of 40, so like Toni Morrison in literature, she brings an unconventional maturity into her works. She's one of the unsung filmmakers of our era, a director who fairly easily moves between an experimental, avant garde style with slight to nonexisting narratives to more conventional narratives, usually focusing on the personal lives of marginalized working class characters whose very ordinariness separates them from mainstream movie viewing.

José Luis Guerín is a professor of film studies in Barcelona, beginning his career in experimental films, becoming something of a natural observer, offering meditative, visual essays on ideas that emerge from a given situation, allowing a constantly inventive slow process of discovery to develop what’s interesting and unique. Working without any set screenplay, showing little interest in plot or narrative, Guerín purposefully extends the boundaries of narrative and documentary forms, often reveling in visual and sensory beauty, showing a curious and creative imagination at work.

An Heir (Un Héritier) B- 81

Perhaps a companion piece to an earlier short LORRAINE! (1994), both adapted from the same author, this is a rigid, highly stylized and rather bookish account of life in the French Alsatian region, which borders on Germany, and has historically been a disputed territory between the two nations, annexed to Germany in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War, but returned to France after World War I. Perhaps most unsettling was the German unofficial occupation during World War II, actually drafting as many as 130,000 of the local residents to fight in the German Army as early as 1940, where nearly a third were killed or missing in action. After the German defeat, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France. With this backdrop, the film is a brief conversation between two men, one of whom is the director (born in Lorraine), before the other, physician Joseph Rottner, delivers an extended monologue, where the film consists of him literally reading from large paper documents of text, which offers his personal account of bitter resentment, detailing the humiliating and demeaning treatment that the French suffered at the hands of the Germans during his childhood. Adapted from the 1905 novel by French nationalist Maurice Barrès, In Germany’s Service, a young doctor describes his personal travails growing up in a German-occupied Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War.

While acknowledging he is the heir of an aristocratic landowner known throughout the region, it’s interesting and somewhat amusing that he suggests this gives his cause greater weight, since he can walk through the region from top to bottom and be recognized and respected by the people in the territory, believing he has the skills to communicate effectively with all walks of life who inhabit the region. With this in mind, he then launches into his angry personal diatribe against the atrocities he experienced at the hand of German authorities, where the French were continually singled out for greater punishments. As his family had the economic means to leave, they instead chose to stay, where he rather amusingly portrays himself as a kind of Resistance fighter, an Alsatian patriot. Leave it to the aristocracy to assume credit for all that’s good, aligning their fellow French together against a common enemy, while easily castigating others for their diabolic treatment of the French. While this sends a sympathetic nationalistic message of liberation veiled in the archives of history, one can only think that it would do the French aristocracy a world of good to be reminded of their former subservience, as it duplicates just exactly how they behave when they historically exploit and mistreat their fellow working class.

To the Devil C 74

Using a Jean Rouch style interviewing technique in the wild, Claire Denis flies to French Guyana and Surinam in northeast South America just north of the Amazon region in search of a Rastafari rebel outlaw known as Jean Béna, bringing along a young actor hoping he can learn to emulate him in an upcoming film. The region has a historical significance, as African slaves broke away from the governmental authorities and have remained unshackled ever since, known as the Aluku, an isolated tribe that fled down the Lawa River into the jungle, remaining self-sufficient for several hundred years. Béna is a noted figure from this tribe, one of the more enterprising, as he apparently runs a gold mine operation. Denis interviews a few people in the region who are quick to point out Béna never killed anybody, that the underlying motive is a land grab, as the tribe is slowly being pushed off their land, so his reputation as a wanted outlaw is being exaggerated by the government who want to get their hands on the gold. Denis then finds the man in a backwoods region, visiting the mining operation as Béna explains his life and how he makes a living. Unfortunately, Béna himself is not a particularly charismatic figure, though his defiance of the government’s campaign to oust him and his people is evident, painting a contemporary portrait of colonialism and its aftereffects in an obscure part of the world. Supposedly a small piece of a planned larger work, this section rambles and feels a bit aimless after awhile. Given free reign to say whatever he pleases, Béna never generates much interest or enthusiasm, overshadowed by the unique texture of the region’s history.

Memories of a Morning (Recuerdos de una mañana) B+ 90

Easily the most visually intoxicating of the three, the film opens with shots of leaves continually seen out the window of Guerín’s own Barcelona apartment, moving through various changes in the seasons, through wind, rain, and snow, where the last leaves hold on until they eventually disappear, forming an exquisite montage of time passing, of the leaves dying and falling off the branches, only to be reborn in the spring when they come back again in full force. What emerges afterwards are views from out the window to the apartment building across the street, briefly hinting at REAR WINDOW (1954), where the compartmentalized units are divided and separated from one another, but seen in its entirety from the view across the way, where we see a naked man playing a violin, though his body is digitally covered, also a woman tending to her potted plants, a man playing saxophone, another dancing, where there is a myriad of different activities coming from the outdoor balconies. Through a collection of impromptu street interviews, the viewer is told of how the naked violinist named Manel jumped off the balcony to his death, where each individually recalls the moment. Many offer testimonials to a private but unhappy man, a friend to few, becoming an essay on loneliness, the neighborhood itself, and the tragic consequences of suicide.

Guerín provides a well rounded view of a deteriorating sense of community by the collective voices of the people who live there, including small children who bluntly indicate Manel didn’t play that well, only so-so, and he never said hello to them in the hallway. This sense of disconnect is as much a part of the tragedy as the death itself, as both are revealed through a memory play of human recollections. All the people exhibit a warm and personable flair before the cameras, where one wonders if this isn’t a smiling and idealized view, if once they’re off camera they don’t become lost in the business of their own affairs, basically covering up their own frail insecurities. What distinguishes this film is how the director incorporates a growing sense of inevitability and a natural rhythm of life (and death) into the overall concept, shooting and editing his own film, giving it a distinct shape. There’s an interesting sound design where we hear various people in the building play musical instruments, from a young female violin player who plays furiously on her balcony to a saxophone player who sits on the window ledge and offers jazz riffs to the movement of the pedestrians seen below. These musical backdrops offer a parallel line of reflection, as does the haunting rhythm of Guerín’s editing. While this never unearths anything earthshakingly original about the living or the dead, it instead captures a distinct flavor of the loneliness of modern life through a uniquely impressionistic tone poem.

Jeonju Digital Project 2011: Straub/Denis/Guerín | siskelfilmcenter.org Marty Rubin

Each year the Jeonju International Film Festival commissions three short works by leading world filmmakers. The 2011 selection features contributions by three masters of modern European cinema.

Jean-Marie Straub’s personal and pastoral AN HEIR (UN HÉRITIER, France, 22 min., in French with English subtitles) uses excerpts from a novel by Maurice Barrès to revisit his own painful memories of growing up in German-occupied Alsace.

In TO THE DEVIL (France, 45 min., in French with English subtitles), Claire Denis takes the leading actor of her next film to meet the real-life model for his character, a renegade living on a remote stretch of the Lawa River between Surinam and French Guyana.

The highlight of the triptych is José Luis Guerín’s MEMORIES OF A MORNING (RECUERDOS DE UNA MAÑANA, Spain, 45 min., in Spanish with English subtitles). Utilizing the impressionistic techniques of IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (if SYLVIA was a riff on the “city film,” the more miniaturized MEMORIES might be termed a “street-corner film”), Guerín uses a disturbing incident in his Barcelona neighborhood to thread together a rich tapestry on music, culture, community, the fragility of life, and the tenacity of life. HDCAM videos courtesy of the Jeonju International Film Festival

EXIT ART - Upcoming Screenings | Jeonju Digital Project 2011

Since its launch in 2000, the Jeonju Internaional Film Festival in South Korea has furnished its reputation as one of the world’s most forward-thinking film festivals, not only by programming vital new international cinema but commissioning it as well. Each year, the festival’s Jeonju Digital Project produces and distributes three short digital films by some of the world’s most exciting, uncompromising filmmakers. Initially focused on supporting works by emerging talent around Asia, the festival expanded the Project in 2007 to include directors from Europe, Africa and the U.S. Past participants in the Project have included such key figures as Jia Zhangke, James Benning, Hong Sang-soo, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Pedro Costa, Harun Farocki, Naomi Kawase, Lav Diaz and many others.  he Project’s most recent program features works by three of Europe’s most fascinating directors: adventurous French maverick Claire Denis (Beau Travail (1999), White Material (2009), 35 Shots of Rum (2008)), radical literary-materialist Jean-Marie Straub (Moses und Aron (1975), Sicilia! (1999)) and the endlessly curious José Luis Guerín (In the City of Sylvia (2007)).  

To the Devil – NYC Premiere!

“Denis’ latest work is a digital short that combines documentary, autobiography and essay film. As research for an upcoming feature, Denis travels to French Guiana to meet Jean Bena, a notorious figure celebrated by some and demonized by others. She brings with her the young actor who will play the Bena character in her film. In the process, she weaves in the history of the nearby Aluku, an isolated tribe descended from African slaves who fled into the jungle rather than be pressed into work in the gold mines.” (Synopsis courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive).

(dir. Claire Denis, 45 min, 2011, South Korea, In English and French w/ English subtitles)

Memories of a Morning – NYC Premiere!

“The most successful of the 2011 project is by the least well-known of the three directors. Jose Luis Guerin produced a very personal film about a tragic suicide in his own neighborhood that also works beautifully as a portrait of these people. The result is a moving work, both in its sadness and also in the joy found in the lives of the local residents. What emerges is a portrait of a cold neighborhood where no one says hello to each other that is, Guerin discovers, full of warm relationships and people. Nevertheless, they couldn’t alleviate the loneliness that drove the man to take his life, and in fact may be part of the alienated modern world that caused the man’s death, since we learn there have been many other suicides in recent years. The only small weakness is that Guerin seems to have too many endings, unable to choose one effective note to conclude and instead throwing everything in. But this film certainly makes me curious to see more of his films.” — Marc Raymond, The One One Four

(dir. José Luis Guerín, 45 min, 2011, South Korea, In Catalan and Spanish w/ English subtitles)

An Heir
“Un Héritier (An Heir) compresses Barrès’s 1905 novel In Germany’s Service to profoundly moving effect. An account of an Alsatian’s life under German occupation, it begins with two men walking through a wood. The older (played by Straub), from Lorraine, asks the younger why he remains in Alsace, where he suffers. “I am an heir,” Monsieur Ehrmann replies, recounting his familial and professional ties in long monologues (eloquently delivered by actor Joseph Rottner). He is a doctor devoted to the people, even to the husband who assaulted him when he tried to save the man’s wife. He recalls the humiliations and punishments to which French-speaking Alsatian schoolchildren were subject. Straub moves from a tracking shot in the first section to long shots and close-ups; finally, he alternates between black leader and Rottner’s readings—a catalogue of film syntax as minimal as it is replete. By the end, the weight of history lived through the individual is more complete than in any imaginable reconstruction of the novel. Ehrmann’s remark that he is “assaulted by speeches that arise out of the earth” could easily describe Straub’s incomparable aesthetic and consummately beautiful images, in which sunlit faces, rocks, and trees are at one with the colors and music of the words spoken in their presence.” —Tony Pipolo, Artforum.

(dir. Jean-Marie Straub, 22 min, 2011, South Korea, In French w/ English subtitles)

Jeonju Journal Pt. 1: In a Young Festival, Old Masters Go Digital ... Kevin B. Lee from Fandor

The Jeonju International Film Festival may not be the biggest film event in Asia, much less Korea; both distinctions go to its Pusan counterpart, that massive showcase that dominates the Pacific Rim film scene in the fall. But Jeonju has virtues that Pusan’s programming sprawl and industry din can’t offer. There’s a more specific curatorial focus that gives challenging, independent-minded cinema ample room for consideration. Since its start in 2000, the festival has embraced this century’s digital cinema revolution, showcasing low-budget works on consumer-quality DV or HD camcorders, the only technology accessible to emerging filmmakers in much the world.

Championing the cause of digital filmmaking, the Festival has made a name for itself with its annual centerpiece, the Jeonju Digital Project, where it commissions three filmmakers to produce digital shorts to premiere at the festival. It’s proven to be a brilliant means to bring respected auteurs under the Jeonju tent: James Benning, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Denis Cote all count as JDP “alumni.” This year’s triumvirate – Claire Denis, Jean-Marie Straub, and Jose Luis Guerin – may have been the most prestigious to date.

The three directors also have the greatest median age of any JDP class: 62, well above the thirty- to forty-something profile typical of past participants – and certainly well above the overwhelmingly collegiate demographic of the Jeonju film crowd.  From what I was told, the Festival is timed to the end of spring term so as to attract thousands of movie-loving students to serve as volunteers or audience members (not both, however; volunteers get free room and board, but aren’t allowed to watch the films). Not only is this the youngest film festival audience I’ve ever seen, but also the most well-behaved. At every screening I attend, there are virtually no walk-outs; the kids sit through the credits and applaud when the lights go up.

I had to wonder what these kids thought of the JDP projects, since to appreciate them (with the possible exception of Guerin’s short, the most fully realized of the three) likely requires considerable familiarity with these established directors’ previous work.  And yet, there is a spirit of romantic defiance against oppressive forces in each of the three films that might readily appeal to these youths, say, if it was expressed by Leonardo di Caprio aboard an ocean liner.

Straub’s 22 minute short An Heir is a brief adaptation of a novel by the early 20^th century writer Maurice Barres, about a young French doctor in German-occupied Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War. Interestingly, the 78-year old Straub films himself walking alongside the doctor as he talks at length about his professional and political struggles, as if Straub were his confidante. Like all of Straub’s previous films (most co-directed by his longtime collaborator, the late Danielle Huillet), it’s a work of intractable dignity, unyielding at first glance but surprisingly supple in how it shifts between modes of fiction and documentary, cinema and literary recitation.

Some expressed disappointment with Claire Denis’ To the Devil as less a stand-alone work as a DVD extra for a project yet to go into production. But as a hardline Denis fan, I was glad to get a significant glimpse of what her next project might look like – provided its sensitive subject matter passes muster with French government purse holders. The 44 minute short follows Denis and an actor to the border of French Guyana and Surinam, where Africans descended from escaped slaves have formed their own tribal community in the jungle, but are now being slowly pushed off their land since gold has been discovered. The governments depict them as bandits; Denis deems them heroes, fighting for their future just as their ancestors did 400 years before. There’s not much of the sensual visuals or dreamy, associative editing that have made Denis a top-tier director; the film plays as raw anthropological research. But the premise is certainly promising for a feature replete with some of Denis’ favorite themes: life on the fringes of culture and community, the borders of human comprehension and endurance.

But the unanimous favorite of the JDP shorts was Guerin’s Memories of a Morning. Those who have seen In the City of Sylvia know that few filmmakers today can work their camera through public spaces with as much live-wire energy as Guerin. Here, the space is both public and deeply personal: the street outside his apartment window, where a musician neighbor fell to his death from the opposite building. Guerin opens with archival video he had taken of the man practicing violin at his window. It was a sound that connected everyone on the block, as Guerin proves through interviews with dozens of neighbors that ring with warmth and intimacy, even in sorrowful reflection.

Guerin weaves their testimonials – heartbroken, perplexed, and somewhat fatalistic – with shots of the spot where the violinist’s body landed, returning again and again to the stark mark of absence in his community. He ultimately ends up in the man’s apartment, where traces of his depressed life remain – a volume of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, sketches, a lonely, half-finished wine glass. But these phantom artifacts are cast in an afternoon glow of otherworldly beauty, as if light itself were the last word in the sum effects of our lives. Guerin’s camera is unabashedly romantic, and with it he tries to fathom a darker, deadlier strain of the same yearning impulse. He may not get to the bottom of his neighbor’s fatal mystery, but his attempt is a gesture of near-perfect grace.

Locarno 2011. Old and New Straub Robert Koehler from Mubi, August 9, 2011

In Review: Jeonju International Film Festival (Part Two) at The One ... Marc Raymond from The One One Four

15th EU Film Festival: JEONJU DIGITAL PROJECT 2011 Kevin B. Lee, also seen here: cine-file.info/forum

Straub, Denis, Guerin line up for Jeonju Digital Project | News | Screen Jean Noh from Screendaily

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BASTARDS (Les Salauds) A 95

France Germany (97 mi) 2013

One of the mysteries at Cannes this year was leaving this film out of competition, where easily one of the best films of the year was relegated to the second tier of Un Certain Regard films, especially since Claire Denis is one of the great artists working today, where you’d think France would want to showcase her unique talent. The director herself may have been too modest about drawing attention to herself, which competition films tend to do, at least for the first screening anyway where it’s like the creator is the very center of the universe, as all eyes are on the film while enthusiasts around the word await the critical results. For most, it’s an enviable position, as cinema’s most prestigious festival provides so much free publicity, but Denis shirks the limelight and retains a more private profile, allowing each one of her films to speak for themselves. Due to the narrative ambiguities in nearly all her films, they’re often misunderstood initially and gain more of a critical following only much later. The reasons for this are the inherent complexities of her films, which often take some time to digest, and aren’t suited for one time only, knee-jerk reactions. Nonetheless, the announcement of a new Claire Denis film is always a major cinematic “event,” as the director has simply never made a bad film and continues to make challenging works that are both intelligent and adult in nature. Loosely drawing upon William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1931), Denis raises similar unspeakably dark themes of rampant drug use, corruption, family betrayal, infidelity, incest, lurid sexual crimes, as well as corncob rape sequences, all of which leads the viewer into a downward spiraling cesspool of utterly despicable human behavior. As bleak and downbeat a film as you will see all year, it continually surprises, however, with fractured narrative ambiguity, visual mastery from cinematographer Agnès Godard, and superb leading performances from Vincent Lindon and Chiara Mastroianni.

Working for the first time with a digital camera, the director’s usual methodical long takes, including static wide shots of landscapes mixed with tight close ups are replaced here by the suffocating intimacy of a handheld camera, giving the film a jagged, deeply fragmented syle, shot mostly using claustrophobic interior locations, creating a deeply unsettling, psychologically disturbing look at French sex trafficking and prostitution scandals involving powerful men of great wealth. Denis indicated the film started with an idea she had after watching several Kurosawa films from the 50’s and 60’s starring Toshirô Mifune, which made her think of Vincent Lindon’s body, solid, sexy, “a body you can trust, a solid body you can lean on. In Kurosawa’s films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end. My film started with that body.” Denis also read a news story about a young woman found drugged and naked next to a garbage dumpster. In this film, set in the unrelenting bleakness of a noirish nightmare, she imagines a backdrop to her story. Opening in a torrent of rain that obscures our view out the window, while inside a man is seen through a doorway staring at the image in the shower, creating a sense of intimacy and voyeurism. Then, an intrusion, as if from another world, where a young girl (Lola Créton) in heels is seen dazed and naked wandering down an empty Parisian street at night, stumbling out of the house where her father has committed suicide (never explained), and her mother (Julie Bataille) is being led away by the police, blaming everyone in sight, It happens so quickly we’re not sure of the relationships, only that it takes place in the flicker of a murky gloom, becoming the darkest movie Denis has ever made, where characters are literally submerged in the incessant foul play.

Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon) is a ship captain that receives news of the suicide while at sea, where he’s dropped off to come to the aid of his sister Sandra (Bataille) and niece Justine (Créton), who ends up in a psychiatric hospital. The family business of women’s shoes has gone belly up with bills it can’t hope to pay, where his sister blames it all on the actions of wealthy international financier Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor) who has bankrupted her husband’s business. Marco rents a flat in the same building as Laporte, where he’s immediately intrigued by his sexually attractive partner, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni). The building itself becomes a centerpiece of the film, where the massive interiors are barely lit, suggesting an unfillable emptiness, and an insatiable desire, where Marco and Raphaëlle, who is almost always left alone, begin a torrid affair, with Godard illuminating the faces in close up shots that appear like lurking shadows. While the erotic moments become the most stable aspects of his multi-layered life, Marco becomes the moral center of the film, symbolized as the virtuous, male protective body, taking care of Raphaëlle’s restless insecurities while looking after Sandra and Justine as well. Denis clearly sympathizes with the caged-like plight of the femme fatale character of Raphaëlle, making great efforts for the audience to identify with her complications and moral ambiguity, where she could just as easily be the protagonist of the film, which is why the finale is so shockingly effective.

In someone else’s hands, it would never have the unmistakable poetry, where Denis’s approach is more delicate, subtle, and nuanced. The film is a The Intruder (L’intrus)-like trip into the heart of darkness, where the dysfunctional family element provides a theme of contamination and infection reminiscent of Trouble Every Day (2001), an immaculate noir in the classical sense, dark and convoluted, where Denis offers empathy for her characters throughout.

The voyeuristic aspect of the film intrudes into the audience as well, as we clearly get inside the head of characters who are both being watched and those doing the watching, with both forces eventually brought together in an erotic embrace, where we again project ourselves into the drama without actually leaving our seats. Of interest is the way Denis holds the audience in rapt attention by the way she films the seduction scene. Typically in film noir the femme fatale lures the hero into a compromising position, but here Marco is actively seducing Raphaëlle, shown with his back to the camera, where the audience sees the effects of her sexual longing, often changing the focus and perspective between them, continually sucking the audience into this lurid world of sexual intrigue. But Marco hasn’t a clue what kind of world he’s returning to, having been away at sea, avoiding all family ties and responsibilities, where his family dysfunction, like that of Raphaëlle’s world, is clouded in a maze of secrets and deception, the kind that only money can protect, not best intentions, where he couldn’t possibly understand the deep-seeded ramifications of just how far his sister and her husband would abdicate their parental responsibilities, allowing the film to touch upon issues of sexual exploitation that open doors into horror and terror. By the time the audience gets wind of just how prevalent the danger is surrounding this man, with people driven by base impulses, where particularly odious is a skin-crawling incest subplot, with literally everyone around him synonymous with the film’s title, we realize that he’s doomed, unable to extract himself from this sinking quicksand that is the moral abyss he’s found himself in, which only makes the enveloping dread and anguish more devastating. Played out like a fever dream where love is nonexistent but delusion is everpresent, we watch the slow, poisoned, self-inflicted destruction of two family units, one irreparably shattered, the other hanging by a thread, where the exposure of their secrets rises like a dark shadow out of the ashes of doom.

In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]

The plot of Claire Denis’s latest film is familiar noir material: A ship captain named Marco (Vincent Lindon) is asked by her desperate sister, Sandra (Julie Bataille), to investigate the disappearance of her daughter (Lola Créton) after the death of her husband and the collapse of the family business. His snooping becomes complicated as he develops a romantic involvement with Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni), the wife of the elderly businessman whom Sandra suspects of being involved in the disappearance. As ever with Denis, however, the devil is in the details—in the impressionistic sequences and montages that suggest emotional lives beyond the dictates of the screenplay. Marco, for instance, feels a certain kinship with Raphaëlle as someone else who is part of a rich family but who has no interest in money; their love scenes together are some of the most tender ever filmed, in which one can sense the tingling physical and emotional connection between them without words. In a world where money talks the loudest, though, is such a connection enough to keep them together as the plot thickens? Denis adds to all this a jigsaw-puzzle narrative structure that keeps the audience on its toes. The result could be considered the harshly bleak flip side to the family warmth on display in Denis's 2008 film 35 Shots of Rum—a portrait of the suffocating stranglehold of the ties that bind.

This is noir: The Bastards | Cannes 2013 | Sight & Sound | BFI Amy Taubin from BFI Sight and Sound, May 23, 2013

William Faulkner, always a French favourite, has had a work-out in the past two days, first with James Franco’s dense evocation of the backwoods of mythical Yoknapatawpha County in As I Lay Dying, and then with Claire Denis’s The Bastards (Les Salauds), in which a shack done up as a rudimentary sex dungeon features a bunch of bloody corn cobs straight out of Sanctuary, probably the only Faulkner novel to function as an S&M jerk-off aid for American Lit majors. (It was published in paperback with a particularly lurid pulp-fiction cover.) The novel was the basis for the 1933, pre-Code Hollywood movie The Story of Temple Drake, with Miriam Hopkins as the rich southern belle who becomes a ‘nympho’ after she’s gang-raped.

The Bastards has a more obvious source of inspiration – the ubiquitous French sex-trafficking and prostitution scandals involving men of wealth and power. Denis said she took note of a news article about a young woman found drugged and naked next to a garbage dumpster. The fragmented opening sequence includes just such a naked women (Lola Créton) tottering on five-inch heels out of the darkness near a house where her father has just committed suicide and her distraught mother (Julie Bataille) is being led away by the cops.

Those relationships may not become clear for quite a while. The Bastards trades in obscurity. It is the darkest movie – visually, psychologically and spiritually – that Denis has made. It’s also one of the rarest of cinematic objects – a completely contemporary, disturbingly relevant film noir.

The mother has a brother, a naval captain (Vincent Lindon), who jumps ship to come to the aid of his sister and niece, and get to the bottom of his sister’s story that an international financier (Michel Subor) is responsible for bankrupting her husband’s business. The naval captain rents an apartment in a building owned by the financier, and soon he and the financier’s mistress (Chiara Mastroianni) are going at it hot and heavy. It is a rare actor who can be both the moral and the erotic center of a movie, but Lindon more than fits the bill, which makes it doubly devastating when he’s outmatched by the titular Bastards – being just about everyone else in the movie except a psychiatrist (Alex Descas), some children and their smiling school teachers.

Most of Denis’s usual creative team is in place: cinematographer Agnes Godard, co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau and Stuart Staples, who composed a particularly ominous and sparse Tindersticks score. The new element is the digital camera (the RED Epic) from which Denis and Godard manage to wrest the tactility that is their trademark. Close-ups of faces (incredible faces in this movie) and of bodies nearly submerged in darkness, and not a tortured pixel or any other kind of digital noise in sight.

Exclaim! [Robert Bell]

When Bastards opens, a steady stream of rain obscures our vision. The rain itself is the intended image, but it's consistency and persistence, removed from the associated sound, transforms into other possible interpretations, such as the rapid traversing of a weathered road. A minimalist, synthesized, emotionally conscious score draws us into a room, where we see a man through a doorway, staring at the shower, appreciating the image that precedes him and our awareness of his presence and shared gaze.

There's both intimacy and voyeurism in this composition, inviting the audience to see through the eyes of a stranger while being reminded that we are, in fact, watching someone through a doorway. It's a visual trajectory of character introduction throughout that reiterates the notion of form and perspective framing the often sensual and occasionally horrific imagery about to unfold.

Other snippets of narrative information begin to unravel: an ambulance approaches a dead body; a woman wanders through the streets in nothing but high heels; and another mourns the death of her husband. It all floats by with ease, having a lulling, strangely comforting montage effect despite touching upon distressing subject matter and lacking context.

Eventually, the focus settles upon Marco (Vincent Lindon), a sailor that returns home after his brother-in-law commits suicide. In trying to play hero to grieving sister Sandra (Julie Bataille), he learns that the economy has decimated the business she inherited and that she's borrowed money from a notable affluent businessman, Edouard (Michel Subor). He's also thrown into the middle of an underground prostitution ring, where his niece, Justine (Lola Créton), has presumably been raped repeatedly, needing surgery to repair her vagina.

Oddly, these storylines are mostly eschewed in favour of the love affair that Marco has with Edouard's wife, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni). He sells everything he owns and cashes in retirement savings to move into an apartment adjacent this woman, where his calloused, blue-collar sexuality intrigues her, compared to her seemingly sexless life with a much older man.

Though the title Bastards cheekily implies female subjugation as its thematic trajectory, reiterating this by depicting each female as victim of financial, sexual or otherwise abject manipulation, Denis presents Marco as the subject of the gaze. It's his sexuality and movement that are objectified, though carefully not gratuitously exploited, through the series of encounters between him and Raphaëlle. We're forced into an intimate space with this outsider, watching him try to help, and fix, the lives of the women around him, while his wealth and gruff masculinity are ultimately objectified by the text and dominant eye.

The dreamlike nature of it all evades facile interpretations of gender reversal and money as singular motivators, however. The desire at hand is the focus, just as the deliberate shot composition blended with an increasingly intense soundtrack mask the telling verbal exchanges, where Marco endlessly asserts the loveless nature and impossible passion of Raphaëlle's marriage despite her casual response that it's far more complicated than he might think.

Even more intriguing is the overt, yet still ambiguous, presentation of Edouard as an impotent villain. While his financial stature and role suggest traditional menace, Bastards is careful to reiterate that no one forced Sandra to borrow money from him, just as no one forced Raphaëlle to marry him. How victimhood is dictated by economy and gender is just one of the intriguing puzzles and dichotomies looming throughout this darkly sensual ride.

Though the intermingling of thematic elements is a tad messy, Denis's ability to capture intimacy and tell a story beyond the superficiality of the narrative gives her latest work a galvanic sensibility. How Bastards feels is, in a way, more important than what it specifically says.

Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]

A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists in world cinema--an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic fragments that have become Denis's stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man's body splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L'Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces fit together in a precise way we're simply not allowed to know until we've arrived through the movie's own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis's eleven features--a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.

Vincent Lindon, the sad-eyed, almost absurdly masculine half of the couple in Vendredi soir, plays Marco, a tanker captain whose gilded watch and tailored dress shirts betray a man born into wealth. His days at sea numbered, Marco is drawn into the disturbing world of the family he'd left behind, prompted by the sudden death of a brother-in-law whose debt-ridden final days put him in the pocket of sleazy financier Eduard Laport (Michel Stubor). In exchange for his company's bailout, it's suggested, Laport brought Marco's niece (Lola Creton, the woman we see wandering in the opening montage) into an underground sex syndicate, seriously abusing and brainwashing her in the process. Enter Marco as the disgraced, bankrupted family's official sin eater: Summoned back to Paris, he hocks his Alfa Romero for liquid cash and settles into the same posh building as Laport, hoping to insinuate himself in the bastard's life by striking up an affair with the man's neglected, much younger wife, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni).

Despite its elliptical presentation, which has us holding most of the major narrative blocks in the air until we know where to sequence them, this is a surprisingly linear story for a filmmaker prone to fruitful asides--the young lovers indulging in a long kiss over the opening credits of Trouble Every Day, for example, held and then discarded; or the spectral appearances of Yekaterina Golubeva in L'Intrus. Here, even the initially opaque details--a family heirloom in a pawn-shop window, the body in the street--all have a teleological function in the grand design. Indeed, Denis seems more interested this time in playing with our desire--born of and indulged by the revenge-thriller genre--to see an ostensibly free agent like Marco become a power player, avenging his family against a corrupt man and scoring a point for justice in the process. That desire, the picture suggests, is a fruitless one when the pieces are ultimately all there regardless of the precise order in which they'll fall. Marco, then, is simply playing out his family script, his actions and their ultimate success or failure directed by an indifferent air-traffic controller.

Bleak as that may sound, not even this fatalistic progression (the ominous sense, throughout, that things are winding down to a bad end) prepares us for the dire coda, a sign-off that outdoes the finales of both Olivier Assayas's Demonlover and David Cronenberg's Videodrome, each of which Bastards resembles, for pure, radioactive cynicism. Closing with the video evidence we've long been promised, Denis lands on not justice but its demonic parody, as blurry images of the family's grotesque home movies, in a manner of speaking, play out against the arpeggiated synths of Tindersticks' "Put Your Love in Me," a kind of nightclub anthem for the undead. The most corrosive work of a master filmmaker, Bastards lingers in the mind for days after you've see it, though you wish it wouldn't.

Review: Bastards - Film Comment Max Nelson, September/October 2013

Like the shadows blocking out key areas of the frame in a Val Lewton film, or the requisite locked attic door in a haunted-house story, the narrative ellipses that open Claire Denis’s murky, rain-soaked, profoundly upsetting film noir could be concealing anything—but it’s hard to imagine they’re hiding anything you’d want to see for yourself. Bastards is Denis’s tightest narrative in decades, but that’s not immediately apparent from the film’s opening series of shard-like vignettes: a well-dressed man straightens his tie in a dark, deserted office; a woman is led slowly away from a crime scene; a teenage girl stumbles home through the lamp-lit streets of Paris wearing only a pair of five-inch heels.

As the film continues, little details, shreds of context, facts, clues, and connections start to accumulate at painfully spaced-out intervals. The story, when it eventually emerges, concerns ship’s captain Marco (Vincent Lindon), who goes AWOL and rushes home following his brother-in-law’s suicide and the hospitalization of his young niece Justine (Lola Créton, she of the high heels), only to get caught up in the machinations of a depraved, sunken-eyed financier (Michel Subor). It’s not totally obvious what makes Denis’s trail of bread crumbs so thrilling to follow. Certainly there’s an element of morbid curiosity, but there’s also the urge not to leave any shadows unexplored or any doors unopened.

More to the point: is there, as a handful of critics have suggested, something questionable about Denis’s choice to make a film about victimhood that refrains from exploring the psychology of the victims? For all Créton’s natural, almond-eyed soulfulness, Justine remains an opaque enigma, while Chiara Mastroianni, playing Subor’s mistress, radiates loneliness and desperation but rarely seems to have a will of her own (that is, until she finally lashes out in a last-ditch act). Marco is our entry point into their sufferings, and he’s as much an outsider as we are: a passive, world-weary onlooker who’d rather be floating out at sea; the quintessential noir protagonist in over his own head. But all this, I think, serves to justify the supposed lack of empathy in Bastards. It suggests the extent to which the film’s shadowy corporate Paris is of a piece with Chinatown’s rotten-to-the-core Los Angeles, or the Chicago that told Tony Camonte in Scarface that the world was his: within a thoroughly amoral universe in which women are bought and bartered by men of absolute power, victimhood consists precisely in being commodified, flattened out, reduced to a cipher.

It’s fascinating to watch a filmmaker so sensitive to the expressive potential of faces, bodies, and surfaces working in a genre that denies its characters the freedom to show what they’re feeling (and in some cases, the freedom to feel, period). You can sense Denis straining to read something behind Créton’s classical-statue gaze or Subor’s drowsy movements, or the way the dim hall-light reflects off Mastroianni’s exposed back during a staircase love scene (one of the film’s few moments of genuine tenderness), or above all in the film’s parade of weathered, bleary-eyed faces. But the surfaces, for the first time in any recent Denis film, remain surfaces: closed off, impassive, tight-lipped.

What the film amounts to, then, is an admission of failure—even, perhaps, of guilt. The crudely shot video footage that gives Bastards its final, stomach-churning twist is the piece of evidence the rest of the film has been apprehensively circling, or possibly spiraling helplessly into, and it couldn’t possibly have come from a fixed, ceiling-mounted camera as the film suggests. It’s shot, after all, in Denis’s unmistakable roving handheld style, and from that footage we might infer that there’s still one more bastard to account for in the film’s lineup of victims and abusers: the director, whose camera can’t help but reduce its subjects to manipulable collections of pixels.

Film of the Week: Bastards - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, October 25, 2013

Claire Denis’s films tend to be atmospheric, and Bastards is no exception. In its opening, a torrential rain cascades at night under yellow lighting, like a Biblical plague of piss visited on the world.

With their astonishing density of mood, Denis’s films often register less as narratives per se than as richly realized environments. They are like dramatic aquariums—with all the enclosure that suggests—in which her characters move, although we can’t always quite tell which direction they’re moving in, or why.

Although it’s one of her most atmospherically rich works yet, Bastards initially comes across as a minor or marginal Denis film—not a resounding statement like Beau Travail (99) or The Intruder (04), and hard to know quite where to place in her oeuvre. As a film noir of sorts, it’s akin to her other genre exercise to date, the sort-of horror film Trouble Every Day (01)—the film of hers I like least, but hotly defended by many, not least by people who love the very idea of Denis playing with genre.

Bastards also has the looseness of Denis’s balmily romantic family drama 35 Shots of Rum (08) and her erotic vignette Friday Night (02), although here the dreamy mood turns baleful and subtly toxic. And in its fragmentation, Bastards is akin to The Intruder, Denis’s great jigsaw movie, although it’s nowhere near as extreme and inscrutable. In the end, Bastards may even be her simplest film, almost to the point of narrative banality. But even if it is merely a sketch or fragment, an elegant offhand gesture, this film is pure Denis and richly unsettling.

There’s certainly a streak of casualness about Bastards, in that Denis more or less came up with it from scratch: production company Wild Bunch thought it was time she made a new film and challenged her and co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau to deliver a synopsis in a week. Fueling themselves with some recent headline anecdotes and an idea about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the sexual abuse of power, they responded with something that feels like a pulp readymade. A man kills himself one rainy night, and a young woman is found wandering the nocturnal streets, brutalized and naked except for a pair of high heels. The man is Jacques Silvestri (Laurent Grévill), head of a company that makes just such shoes, and the woman is his daughter Justine (Lola Créton, whose eerie, gazelle-like beauty you’ll recognize from Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air).

Jacques leaves a note for his brother Marco (Vincent Lindon), a tanker captain. Marco comes ashore and dedicates himself to finding out what’s gone wrong in his family—whose ruin appears to be the doing of an intensely nasty business mogul, Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor). Laporte seems as ancient, and as powerful, as the dinosaurs, Subor’s basilisk features suggestive of a malign moral petrification. He has a younger trophy wife, Raphaelle (Chiara Mastroianni), in whose bleakly furnished apartment he only occasionally spends nights: slipping into bed on one visit, Laporte gruffly commands, “Branle-moi” (“Jerk me off”)—so you know that Raphaelle is likely to be open to a bit of relative subtlety from Marco, who’s moved into the flat upstairs.

The slowly unfolding detective plot isn’t much of one—not by Raymond Chandler standards, at least. The main momentum is provided by Marco’s gradual detachment from his own life—his career and his daughters—while pursuing the case. He also becomes progressively less mobile: he first rolls up in Paris in a gorgeous mint-green car, but soon sells it to a friend, and before long is seen waiting at a bus stop at night. That’s nothing short of castration for a hard-boiled investigator.

Also involved in the intrigue are a sinister, arrogant young man (Denis’s young acteur-fétiche Grégoire Colin) and a blowsy, pregnant young woman (Florence Loiret-Caille) who seem to be the proprietors of a secluded orgy room with camera facilities in the ceiling and discarded corncobs littering the floor. If you get the reference to William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, you’ll instantly guess what kind of nastiness is at stake.

The loaded title tells you how thin the basic conception is: in a world of bastards like Laporte, a good man like Marco ends up a bastard too, and it’s precisely by trying to do good that he’ll be tarnished. The film’s payoff, in a final sequence using surveillance footage, provides a morbidly nasty frisson, but it’s not as if we don’t see it coming. But together with the climactic twist which precedes it—and which does, in fact, come as a shock—this ending marks Bastards as something like Denis’s own Chinatown.

The readymade genre aspects of Bastards made me think on a first viewing that this was less than prime Denis, but on a revisit, it really got under my skin. Moderate touches of fragmentation (Denis is working with a new editor, Annette Dutertre) add to the overall unease—the repetition of Créton’s wounded, elegant nightwalk, and a hard-to-place sequence (dream? flash forward?) in which militia search the woods at night. Denis has been compared in the past to various jazz musicians, and Bastards certainly shows her as a director who makes cinematic music—the slender plot, like a well-known tune, serves as basis for a densely colored tone poem. Look at the morbid miasma of the opening rain scenes, the brief precarious clarity of a white sea glimpsed early on, the nightscapes throughout that are all the thicker for the sparse, brooding score by Denis’s faithful soundtrackers Tindersticks. This is, incidentally, Denis’s first digital film, with Agnès Godard shooting on the RED Epic.

Among what you might call her musical motifs, Denis uses faces. Some people that she’s partial to as presences drop in briefly, barely registering as characters proper but making striking impressions, sometimes in close-ups that seem incongruously out of proportion to their part in the narrative. Singer Christophe Miossec has a non-role as a friend of Marco, but you’re mesmerized by his gaunt, eroded features, almost as lived-in as Lindon’s. Also glimpsed are the underrated Hélène Fillières as a bank manager, old regular Alex Descas as a doctor, and Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas, who drops by to offer Marco dire warnings about his career prospects.

Among long-term members of the Denis repertory family, there’s hawk-faced Colin, whose presence, since his former ingénu days in Beau Travail, seems more and more to imply the promise of violence; and Loiret-Caille, peerless in France for embodying faintly deranged, oversexed tackiness. When these two and Créton are seen entangled on in a nocturnal car sequence, the sheerly unsavory sensuality is something that even the David Lynch of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive would envy.

Central to the film is the brooding presence of Vincent Lindon, working with Denis for the first time since he simmered as a muscular romancer in Friday Night. Denis has often celebrated tough men as troubled embodiments of sexuality—most famously in the austere muscle beach party that was Beau Travail—and Lindon’s hard-bitten, proletarian heaviness fits perfectly here. He’s a bit Bogart, a lot Jean Gabin or Lino Ventura, with a hangdog face and an air of having knocked about a bit, and of having been knocked about. There’s a great moody shot of him and Mastroianni early on—profiled in close-up, riding an elevator in the dark—that prefigures their later closeness. Mastroianni—a newcomer to Denis—is terrific too, her Raphaelle elegantly nervy with an edge of jaded perversity (it’s partly in that beauty mark, partly that troubling facial echo of the actress’s dad Marcello). She has a quizzical alertness, as if she’s partly sensing trouble, partly eager for it to kick in. When Raphaelle and Marco finally get it on—after some great tight-lipped flirting over Marco’s white shirt—you feel you’re seeing two mature, don’t-give-a-damn sexualities casting niceties aside and getting down to the rough nitty-gritty.

The film teasingly circles around its dark and ultimately depressing sexual revelations, but there’s something about these two cutting through the sleaze with an animality that’s reassuringly pure—or at least, sweatily, hungrily no-nonsense.

No Sanctuary: Claire Denis on Bastards - Cinema Scope Jose Teodoro interview from Cinema Scope, Fall 2013

The first image of Bastards, a gauzy curtain of nocturnal drizzle, falls on us like a heavy dream—or rather, it drags us under. The rain raineth on a whole lot of eerily beautiful gloom during the wordless, disorienting opening sequence: a solitary older man gazes out a window, seemingly resigned to some nameless despair; a young woman, naked but for a pair of heels, walks carefully along vacant Paris backstreets, as if in a trance. Who are these haunted people? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Nothing is contextualized, yet everything bespeaks some kind of dreadfully premonitory logic—a logic soon realized when we see a body lying in the street, discreetly covered by a white cloth, as police lead a solemn middle-aged woman away from the scene.

Tight close-ups and un-emphatic light; piles of unsold shoes and bloodied ears of corn; flashlights revealing a child’s bicycle deserted in tall grass. This is Claire Denis’ characteristically oneiric, elliptical take on the revenge drama, incorporating elements of Greek tragedy and the western, William Faulkner’s brutal, sordid 1931 novel Sanctuary, and Akira Kurosawa’s claustrophobic corporate thriller The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Written by Denis and her longtime collaborator Jean-Pol Fargeau, Bastards is that rare thing: a true modern noir, doomy and deterministic, though far from heartless. The film radiates deep affection for its hapless hero Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon), a divorced, middle-aged oil-tanker captain whose sturdy reliability (“[He’s] a guy you can lean on,” says Denis) ultimately proves not enough to withstand the terrible weight placed upon him. As Denis expressed it during our conversation, “Sometimes fate is falling on your back and crushing you.”

Though partaking somewhat of Denis’ habitual spatial and temporal shifts, the scenes that follow that oblique opening sequence provide shards of exposition that cohere gradually into a surprisingly straightforward narrative. Abandoning his naval career, selling his vintage Alfa Romeo, pawning his watch and cashing in his life insurance, Marco gives up his peripatetic existence to rent a spacious apartment in a tony Parisian neighbourhood which he doesn’t even bother to furnish, inhabiting it like a detective on a stakeout. His radical change in lifestyle is prompted by the hospitalization of his niece, Justine (Lola Créton)—the naked nightwalker of the first sequence—the apparent suicide of his brother-in-law—the opening’s solitary starer, then corpse—and the collapse of his family’s shoe manufacturing business, all of which has left his sister Sandra (Julie Bataille) in emotional and financial chaos. Sandra holds one man responsible for all these tragedies: Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor), a wealthy, elderly industrialist to whom her husband was in debt, and whom Sandra accuses of both precipitating her husband’s suicide and sexually abusing her daughter.

Upon moving into his new digs, Marco purposefully begins to move in on Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni), his downstairs neighbour—and, not at all coincidentally, Laporte’s much younger mistress. Gorgeous, extremely desirable, and devoted to her young son, Raphaëlle is perhaps pitiable as an apparent “kept woman”—though she insists to Marco that Laporte “gave me a confidence I never had”—but above all she is an asset Marco seeks to either appropriate or despoil in his reckless attempt at retribution. Fixing Raphaëlle’s son’s bike, wrapping packs of smokes in a dress shirt and tossing it down to her from his terrace as she returns empty-handed from a just-closed corner store, coolly and methodically working his way into her life, her thoughts, her pants, Marco is Bastards’ most proactive character, but—as gradual revelations regarding the Silvestris’ catastrophe will prove—he is also its most naïve.

The film’s title evokes fatherlessness, illegitimacy, rot. Indeed, every family in Bastards is broken by male maleficence. Marco himself is a flawed father, generally absent, frequently late for meetings with his daughter—a bastard by someone’s measure. Yet while the men of Bastards, whether sympathetic or nefarious, act in ways that are finally all too comprehensible, the film’s women—Justine, Sandra, Raphaëlle—remain enigmatic, their degree of complicity in the bad business buried in Bastards’ battered heart never made entirely clear. However, a sudden, desperate action performed by Raphaëlle in the film’s closing moments—reminiscent of a similar gesture carried out by plantation matriarch Maria (Isabelle Huppert) at the conclusion of Denis’ White Material (2009)—speaks volumes about where she stands when push comes to shove. While Raphaëlle’s final gesture, like Maria’s, might be read as too much of a reverse deus ex machina for some, the more I reflect on it, the more it rings true. It might seem facile to defer to the Chester Himes quote Denis uses as the opening epigram for No Fear, No Die (1989)—“All men, whatever their race, colour or origins, are capable of anything and everything”—but such an assertion underlies Denis’ entire oeuvre. Murder, exploitation, cannibalism, tenderness, forgiveness: her characters, bastards or no, really are capable of anything.

Bastards opens in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox on October 11, beginning TIFF Cinematheque’s full Denis retrospective. Denis will be present for a Q&A at the October 18 evening screening of the film, and also appears on October 17 with Mati Diop to present her Carte Blanche selection of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973), followed by Diop’s Mille soleils (2013). The following conversation took place in September, when Bastards had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Cinema Scope: Do you still like to travel? I can only imagine how much of the last 25 years you’ve spent in airports, in taxicabs, in hotel lobbies, at film festivals.

Claire Denis: Of course I like to travel. But a film festival is not travelling. It’s very strange: a bed in a hotel room, breakfast, plane. You see nothing. Except when I was in India this summer for a retrospective—I spent almost a month there. Still, that was not travelling, because everything was organized. No, travelling is something I did when I was a child with my family. I was very used to it. Packing and unpacking. Location scouting I like. But festivals are a fake way of travelling.

Scope: Does travel inspire your work?

Denis: Travel is not inspiring. What is inspiring are moments of laziness. Daydreaming. Book-reading. Walking. Listening to music. Going to a concert. Travelling is a job. You can’t be daydreaming while travelling. Even on the plane I can’t daydream. I can read, I can drink too much champagne, I can sleep. But you have only nightmares on planes, because you’re trapped. The best time for imagination is when I have nothing to do, or when I decide not to do anything. To be loose.

Scope: It’s difficult to talk about where work comes from, to trace the origins of the first spark. Bastards has a strong, coherent narrative through-line and well-developed characters. And yet, after seeing Bastards—after seeing any of your films—the thing I walk away with above all is a sense of being transported. Of patterns, impressions, layers of things, the cadences of memories. As time passes I can completely forget the stories in your films, but those other elements remain very clear.

Denis: That’s my way. What I mean is that scriptwriting is one thing, but before that there must have been a sort of transportation to, not a story, but a mood, where I can see people, free or trapped, but in a space, in a mood. It’s not a spark, but rather a moody time. It’s very full of anxiety because I always dream that I will be lucky enough to have a story, fully shaped, come down on me, like the table of the law sent by God. In French we use “transport” to talk of transportation, like in English, but we also use the term to talk of falling on love: transport amoureux. It’s this movement that brings you beyond your will.

Scope: I’m going to appropriate that. Sometimes “falling in love” feels too doomed.

Denis: Ooh, yes, falling in love. [Makes the sound of something crashing] Of course, to be doomed is also part of some mood.

Scope: Perhaps as you get older, as you become more familiar with doom, falling in love feels more like a choice you can make. You’re not as deprived of your will. Sometimes you can see where things are going, how they’re going to go very badly, and choose to decline. Which is similar to making a film, no? An idea or a mood captivates you, sweeps you away, but it could be a dead end.

Denis: Mm. It’s true.

Scope: There were four years between White Material and Bastards. Was it difficult to conceive of or decide on Bastards as your next project?

Denis: Yes. But I want to say something first. You speak about transport amoureux, of falling in love. A few weeks ago I was in Berlin for a Stuart Staples and Tindersticks concert. The concert was in a gallery that held a painting of his wife. He dedicated a lot of songs to her. They met a long time ago. They have children. The music was conveying transport amoureux. It’s not a fall. After years of being together, raising children, not every day is an easy day. But suddenly during this concert I felt myself transported to love. That’s the same with film, you know? You decide on something hoping that it will transport you.

So, Bastards. My life was sad, in a way. My father died, which I expected. He died after five and a half years. He had a very long dying. But suddenly he was dead, and I myself had some little troubles. It’s easy to believe in fate sometimes. Sometimes fate is falling on your back and crushing you. I decided maybe it could be great to go back to Faulkner and fate. And film noir. The future as something you are trapped in. I was transported to a guy, Marco, that had everything: strength, charm, family, education, a good job. Everything is his future looks good. Suddenly, because he believed in his destiny, he comes back to help his sister and he’s trapped. He becomes the victim.

Scope: Doubling back once more to this idea of falling in love, I felt that the storyteller of Bastards is in love with Marco. The storyteller has a love for everything he represents.

Denis: Absolutely. I think I more or less fell in love with most of the characters. It’s hard to maintain a partnership otherwise. You can’t cheat on them. It has to be like that, you know? I know that Marco’s sister and Chiara’s character, Raphaëlle, are hard to love, in a way. Yet I had to be on their side. In the case of Marco, yes, it was very important to me that he was loved until the end. I wanted to be with him all the time.

Scope: The world of Bastards is cruel, but the film doesn’t feel like it’s being cruel to its characters.

Denis: It’s like Denis Levant in Beau travail (1999). When he kills himself at the end, I thought I was going to die.

Scope: The noir elements are rich and deep in Bastards. Lindon’s Marco feels like a Robert Ryan character. But Bastards also plays as a western—so Marco could also be a Ryan character in a western. What I mean is that Marco is an anachronism: he represents an ideal from the past. He’s a man’s man.

Denis: You’re right, but those men still exist, eh? I’ve been on those boats. I’ve been on oil tankers. Those guys have a great life. They have a lot of freedom. They go home three times a year. They make a decent living.

Scope: My father, who’s from Spain, joined the navy at 14, then worked for the German merchant marines. He was married and had a family very, very young, but one day at sea something snapped and he completely changed his life, abandoned everything and started anew in a different country. I’m certain he would never have been able to do that were he not working at sea.

Denis: When I was in Tahiti I remember meeting so many French men from the navy who, like your father, quit everything to start a second life with a Haitian woman. I realized they were not even sad, because they’d seen so little of their families in France. They send them money. Of course they love them, but they were not ever completely a part of their life.

Scope: Tell me about Raphaëlle, about Mastroianni. She’s very fascinating to me for different reasons.

Denis: She’s fascinating to me too!

Scope: As an actress, you mean.

Denis: And as a woman. It’s not easy to be a normal woman when you’re the daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. It’s a hard job, because everyone is always reminding her of this. Catherine Deneuve is the iconic figure of the French woman, and Marcello Mastroianni is an iconic figure of the Mediterranean man. In a way, Chiara’s life is great. She’s received so much. And yet she had to fight to be someone.

Scope: I wonder if we see that fight onscreen in Bastards. “Cagey” is the wrong word; what’s compelling about Raphaëlle to me is that she’s constantly conflicted and contained. It’s only at the very end that, in a flash, she becomes decisive and violent. It seems, in retrospect, like she was hedging her bets. In the end she’s very mercenary, but leading up to this I really felt for her.

Denis: Me too. She accepted to be that beautiful woman with that old guy in a very feminine way. Some people say she’s too passive. But hey, come on! What leads a woman to become trapped in that life? Probably the child, you know? I hate it when perceived passivity in female characters is deemed anti-feminist. I think most women, especially in the past, learn very young that a certain veneer of passivity is a great way to conceal things. To hide, to accept, to not show too much hope in the future. To resign a little bit, without complaining. Passivity in a case like hers is brave, to me.

Scope: Is her character drawn from Sanctuary?

Denis: No. It’s more the doom that’s taken from Sanctuary. That and the fact that the young girl is used as a sexual object. There is something very strange in that character of the young girl. At the end of Sanctuary the father takes her to Paris, as if taking a young girl to Paris will dissolve the scars of what she’s been through, the rape and everything. They are in a garden, in the middle of Paris, and the way Faulkner puts it you understand that the father doesn’t dare to speak a word to her, but the hope is that maybe she’ll feel better. And her way to tell him that he cannot give her this relief, because now she is completely alone, is she takes a little powder box and she powders her nose. And that’s it.

Scope: Something that always interested me about your process is the way that you seem to begin with a set of ideas and then, at some point, with certain films, you might turn to literature for help with story. But based on what you’re telling me now I gather that you’re not even looking for story. You’re looking for gesture. You’re looking for something else in the literature to help you.

Denis: A mood, I would say. There is something in Faulkner that is so human. He had a way to write that makes you feel everything carnally. He brings you into the world of his characters physically and emotionally. It’s very damaging, I guess. I started reading him when I was very young, and for the worst reason. A famous writer of roman noir copied Sanctuary to make his own novel. James Hadley Chase. The novel was No Orchids for Miss Blandish. I was not allowed to read crime novels, but I read it anyway, and it had this rape in it. Shocking. And it led me to Faulkner. I’m not sure I understood everything in Faulkner, but the sense of losing control of your own life was something I immediately understood. As I Lay Dying I read in the college, and, oh, my god. You can feel the nails of the coffin inside your flesh, you know? I guess he’s a very special writer.

Scope: There’s something about the structural device, the narrative disorientation of The Wild Palms that also reminds me of your work.

Denis: Yeah. I think both of Wild Palms’ stories together create, whew, I don’t know, a failure. Both stories. You understand the failure, because they don’t believe, really. The couple falls in love, but the guiltiness is there. The same happens with the prisoner. He feels guilty to have escaped from jail. It’s so rich and brilliant. I think Faulkner is like a painter and a musician and a writer altogether.

Scope: Sometimes people have this idea that in order for a film to be truly cinematic it has to somehow employ effects that are pure to that form. I love that your work is able to draw so much of its cinematic power from music, and also from literature. Literature is, to some thinkers, anathema to cinema.

Denis: This is a joke. Literature is still a model. Literature invented flashbacks and flashforwards. Homer is the master of fiction filmmaking. I really think literature is still the pinnacle of modernity. People refuse to acknowledge this, maybe because they are afraid of the word “intellectual.” But literature and intellectualism have nothing to do with each other.

Scope: Tell me about your collaboration with Jean-Pol Fargeau. Do you discuss and then one of you writes? Are you both doing the actual writing? Do you pass material back and forth?

Denis: We have to be together, in the same room. In the kitchen. We write together, all the time.

Scope: Did you discuss, in this case, what you might want to draw from Faulkner or The Bad Sleep Well?

Denis: It’s not necessary immediately. I describe the mood and how it came to me. I don’t hide anything, but you cannot throw everything you have in mind at the head of someone you’re working with. It’s better to have lunch. Drink coffee. Smoke a cigarette. Walk. Listen to music.

Scope: The plot of Bastards seems airtight, but when you watch the film for the first time the opposite seems true. For a while it gives the illusion of being loose, wayward. It can take a long time to comprehend how the plot is working, yet by the end the film feels very grounded in plot. Does this effect of atmosphere and elision obscuring plot develop in the script or in the editing room?

Denis: In the script. We made the decision that the story will be revealed to the audience as it is revealed to Marco. We know nothing that he doesn’t know.

Scope: The visual refrain of Lola Créton walking naked in the streets could be an image Marco forms in his mind, perhaps an invention, the image he constructs in his mind when he tries to fathom what happened to her.

Denis: It was the leitmotif of the film. Maybe it’s my own image of that girl who comes from Faulkner. She’s young. She’s beautiful. She’s terribly wounded. And yet she seems solid. She’s walking with her head high. In those moments, she’s not a victim. She’s something else. Maybe she’s transporting us somewhere.

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Denis, Jean-Pierre

MURDEROUS MAIDS (Les blessures assassins)

France (94 mi) 2000 ‘Scope Official Website

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

The crazed, homeless man who keeps constant guard at the 7th Avenue subway station on 53rd Street was putting on a show for the rush hour crowd and a small group of Midwest tourists. He waxed Shakespeareian on priests with choirboys on the brain ("Make my bed boy and be quick!") and feminism ("The women's movement is the great lesbian lie of 1850"). Murderous Maids tells the true story of Christine Papin (Sylvie Testud) and Léa Papin (Julie-Marie Parmentier), two sisters who murdered and mutilated their employer Madame Lancelin and her daughter Genevieve. The Papin sisters did wonders for the feminist movement though director Jean-Pierre Denis has less to say about the rationale behind their crime than he does about their alleged incestuous relationship. As maids, Christine and Léa suffered the slings and arrows of bourgeois condescension. Murderous Maids seems burdened by familiarity—forget Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, this story was unofficially told before by Claude Chabrol in his brilliant La Ceremonie. By focusing attention away from the demands of the bourgeois order and onto Christine's burgeoning madness, Murderous Maids is conservative to a fault. The film, though, is incredibly riveting for what comes to resemble a National Enquirer expose. You might forgive Denis for being so unconcerned with the implications and ramifications of the Papin sisters' crime if only for Testud's miraculous performance. The bourgeois order depicted in the film is considerably less ghoulish than one would expect. Testud fabulously taps into her character's humanity, wearing every condescending bourgeois demand like a lashing to the soul. Ripped of her humanity, Testud's Christine becomes a working stiff of Greek proportions.

Murderous Maids Gerald Peary

It was 1933, too early for the Hitchcockian warning about danger at the dark top of the stairs, when, in the French town of Le Man, a bourgeois housewife, Mme. Lancin, and her adult daughter, Genevieve, ascended to the attic quarters to check on what their servants, the Papin sisters, were up to. What did they peep at that day? Something sordid, carnal, unimaginable? Whatever, the invaded siblings, Christine and Lea, turned on their masters like frenzied Furies, hacking them to death, mutilating the beet-red bodies.

Just your typical lesbian incest murder mystery, with Marxist/Freudian overtones? Murderous Maids is the latest in an exhaustive run of takes on this infamous case, from Jean Genet's ritual drama, The Maids, through impassioned essays by Sartre and De Beauvoir, from Margaret Atwood's novel, Captive, through movie variants. One film is based directly on the story, Nancy Meckler's Sister My Sister (1994). Three others seem inspired by it with their symbiotic two-girl psycho killers: Rafael Zielinsky's Fun (1993), Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994), Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie (1995).

Alone among the film dramas, Murderous Maids, directed by France's Jean-Pierre Denis, has an allegiance to the actual facts of the case. It's based on a 1996 book reconstructing the crime, L'affaire Papin by Paulette Houdyer. Characters in this movie, including the murderers and murdered, carry the names of the real-life people. The film also goes back in time, starting with the unhappy, have-not childhood of the Papins. Christine, the older, and Lea are forced by their indifferent mother into servitude, farmed out at her convenience from one stultefying hiring to another. Employment by the ill-fated Lancin family is their last dead-end job.

Murderous Maids leaps ahead of other versions of the story with the explicitness of the sex: bold, hot, two barebreasted sisters lying atop each other in their hellpit of a tiny room, adorned only with a cross on the wall. "Jesus, you forgave Mary Magdalene," Christine prays at church. Despite being made in the most skillful, proficient way, Murderous Maids is a film difficult to really like: a cold story told coolly, with a heroine, Christine (Sylvie Testud), who is hard, humorless, pathological, a walking cherry bomb.

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Lead by the media, the world grows progressively more fascinated with what drives humans to kill. This film attempts to give the famous, often depicted, Papin sisters brutal murders of their masters a balanced treatment by piecing together an analysis of the sisters that was absent at the time of their rushed trial (which led to the introduction of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the courtroom).

Murderous Maids is a model of restraint where nothing is forced on the audience. There's no manipulative music and no scenes there simply to advance the plot. The story just unfolds as a series of scenes from their life. They are ordered, but you fill in the gaps yourself, figure out what's changed with each the new scene. This style creates a great deal of anticipation, allowing the murders to be something of a surprise even though they are a given coming in. The film only shows you that Christine will act out in some way in response to whatever she doesn't like, which is everything that degrades her or keeps her from her sister.

There are no heroes or villians here, and no easy scapegoats. You want to like the sisters, but it does not hide or excuse their dark side. You want to dislike their masters, but none of them are any worse than normal and the ones they kill are the best of them all.

There's no easy person or class to blame for what the sisters went through and the horrible outcome of them becoming murderers. You can blame the bourgeoisie because, though they didn't abuse the sisters, they provide a dehumanizing environment that offers no freedom whatsoever where people are turned into as Christine says, "a dormat for others, without a name." You can blame their mother, who abandoned them early in life then sent them off to work later so she could use their wages to make her life easier. There's also Christine's mental illness, or religious repression that took away the older sister and won't condone Christine sleeping with the younger one Lea (Julie-Marie Parmentier).

Sylvie Testud, an actress worthy of far more attention than she gets, gives an exceptional restrained multi dimensional performance as Christine, her work really allowing for so many interpretations. She's intelligent but she may be a multiple personality and her lot in life combined with an incestuous relationship prevents her from showing her true feelings except in a few private moments. Her dominance over her naïve follower sister, her verbal violence with her mother who also vies for control of the sister, and her subjugation at work, amongst other things all come across without the usual help and gimmicks. Her character slowly boils over with repressed desire and rage until the inevitable lashing out. Though she impulsively explodes from time to time it's more a quietly simmering that only cools when she's alone with her beloved sister and can play around a little. She can be the perfect maid, but she quickly grows obstinate at any dehumanizing element, which makes her the champion of class struggle Jean-Paul Sartre tried to portray her as. She can be perfectly sane, but her paranoia builds up, sometimes rightfully and other times not.

The film is not even in the league with Claude Chabrol's brilliant La Ceremonie, also inspired by the Papin sisters, but I'd rate that among the top 5 films of the 90's. Murderous Maids tries to do different things and is certainly a worthy investigation.

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Dennis, Danfung

HELL AND BACK AGAIN B 86

USA Great Britain Afghanistan (88 mi) 2011 Official site

The timing of the release of this film is not nearly as impactive historically as another previously released Oscar nominated film RESTREPO (2010), shot by photojournalist Tim Hetherington who was recently killed April 20, 2011 during the Libyan uprising to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power. At that time, shot during 2007-08, America was in the midst of leading a military surge into Afghanistan by taking it to the enemy, moving Army troops forward directly into enemy positions in an attempt to draw them into combat. What felt like a suicide mission, troops surrounded on all sides, showed questionable judgment on the part of U.S. military leaders who were inclined to use soldiers as guinea pigs in the hopes that this aggressive military plan might work, where the region shown was at that time responsible for 70 % of all the ammunition ordinance used in the entire Afghan war. After 15 months, the troops pulled back, as they were receiving too many casualties, leaving behind, unprotected, everything they had been risking their lives for. RESTREPO remains the strongest case made yet against this kind of cowboy warfare, where America retains its mindset of arrogance and racial superiority, believing modern weapons and well-trained troops should do the job in wiping the enemy off the face of the planet. Despite the heroism displayed by the soldiers, this has proved to be a foolish endeavor, as little was ultimately gained by such a risky operation. Yet again, at the beginning of this film, shot in 2009 by photojournalist Danfung Dennis who is embedded with the troops, Marines are being reminded of the historical significance of their mission, as helicopters are about to drop soldiers behind enemy lines where it is believed their superior training and firepower should rule the day. These men are the best trained soldiers America has to offer, yet once again their task is daunting, rarely, if ever, seeing the face of the enemy, yet continually subjecting themselves to relentless sniper fire.

Shot using an unvarnished cinéma vérité style, where the camera moves when the troops on the ground move, hearing everything that they hear, which includes the confusion of trying to identify the direction of incoming fire, as they are once again surrounded on all sides. Almost immediately they lose a fallen soldier, once again questioning the wisdom of implementing such a mission. What happens unexpectedly is that the leader on the ground, U.S. Marines Echo Company sergeant Nathan Harris, who commands the unit in the early footage, gets shot in the hip just a day before he is expected to return home from his third tour of duty. The injury blows away part of his hip and leg, where he is seen afterwards back in North Carolina with his wife Ashley, where he has to adjust to the mindblowing ordinariness and mediocrity of regular life, which can’t compare to the intensity that he’s used to. While his injury is not life threatening, he will likely have difficulty walking and leading any kind of normal life, where his adjustment is enormously difficult, especially since his pain medication often leaves him confused and bewildered, where he can be seen waving guns around in the house or in the car, several times pointed directly at his wife. He appears to be an unexploded time bomb just waiting to go off and never once do we see any evidence of psychological counseling being offered, nor do we see the intervention of other family members. It appears this soldier is left largely on his own to deal with such an immense, life-altering injury which carries with it as much emotional as physical damage.

The film moves back and forth between the front lines and Harris’s life on the homefront, where the certainty in his mind of leading the mission, despite losing fellow soldiers and taking incoming fire, makes more sense to him than adapting to life back home under his current situation. In Afghanistan, he’s in control, gladly assuming responsibility for others, but in North Carolina he doesn’t have the clue to recovery, which is filled with uncertainty, as neither he nor his wife have any answers for what the future holds. In the meantime, he can make life miserable for her, where the title refers to his frame of mind after returning home, often becoming a bullying husband who flies off the handle over petty issues, which largely covers up just how weak and insecure he feels inside, something Marines aren’t trained to feel. None of his buddies are with him now, he has little use for a rifle, and he’s completely unsure what the future holds for the both of them, uncertain if they will even stay together. While this film follows a severely wounded soldier back home, a story replicated thousands of times around the country, it also is being released at a time when the U.S. is making preparations to pull its forces out of Afghanistan, having already pulled troops out of Iraq, where the public has grown tired of a lingering war and wants to move on, as the economic climate is threatening everyone, literally kicking us all in the face, changing how people live their lives, where sympathy is not at a premium. We all have to face the facts and make whatever adjustments are necessary to build a new life, one fraught with still more difficulties down the road, without the certainty of financial stability. There is a real question to be asked whether this decade-long war on terror has made America safer or weaker? Despite upgraded intelligence and security measures, it seems the government and the military may have overspent us into financial ruin, likely the exact overreaction that al Qaeda hoped for, financially destabilizing America’s place in the world, where the lifelong sacrifice of death and massive casualties to the surviving young soldiers is a heartbreaking picture of the price to be paid.

Hell and Back Again – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, also seen in photos here: On location in Afghanistan for Hell and Back Again - in pictures

Ten years of military involvement in Afghanistan is a grim anniversary. We have seen two reportage movies about this: Janus Metz Pedersen's Armadillo, about Danish troops, and Restrepo, by Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington. Here is a third; they might come to be seen as some kind of trilogy. Danfung Dennis, an embedded photojournalist and cameraman, begins with his eyewitness film of the military action and then goes home with 25-year-old Nathan Harris, who has been shot in the hip by the Taliban. Pain-wracked, Harris becomes hooked on his medication and on handling, caressing and generally obsessing about his handgun: all too clearly, he is beginning to imagine using it on himself. This pulls no punches.

Hell And Back Again Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Tom Huddleston

It’s an indictment of American news journalism that so many documentary filmmakers feel it’s their job to tell the stories of soldiers both in and returning from the Middle East. In this country, we’re offered a wealth of TV and news features on the subject, so there’s always a danger of overkill. Dennis Danfung’s self-shot ‘Hell and Back Again’ circumvents this familiarity both in its physical intimacy – Danfung’s camera stays just feet away from his subject, returning Marine Sergeant Nathan Harris – and its style, offering up a visually and aurally disorienting portrait of a man on the edge. But this meticulously maintained air of confusion also serves to distance us from the already unsympathetic Harris. The result is beautiful but uninvolving.

TimeOut NY Keith Uhlich

Plenty of documentaries have been termed fly-on-the-wall; Danfung Dennis’s terrific nonfiction feature about U.S. Marines Echo Company sergeant Nathan Harris takes that step-back-and-observe ethos to spectacularly agile extremes. The director’s imagery (he shot the movie himself) is ceaselessly mobile, floating with hypnotic grandeur through both of the film’s interwoven sections: a 2009 mission where the Marine and his fellow soldiers seek out Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, and the more recent home front where Harris recovers from a crippling gunshot wound that’s doomed him to a less quick-triggered existence.

There’s a hint of Kubrick in the vérité cinematography, especially in the way the camera sweeps through the Afghani landscape whenever gunfire erupts (practically a DIY Paths of Glory) or how a Walmart is made to look like a glinting, Shining-like labyrinth. The visuals are consistently bleak, but the film’s engagement with Harris and the often-harsh world around him is clear-eyed and empathetic. Save for a cringingly wet-eyed song at the end credits, any glib partisan sympathies are eschewed for an illuminating on-the-ground approach: Several scenes involving U.S. soldiers conversing with local village elders speak volumes about the miscommunications that undermine both sides’ good intentions. And watching the formerly spry Harris struggle to maintain a normal life (he’s frequently glassy-eyed and jacked on painkillers) emphasizes the underappreciated sacrifices our men and women in uniform make in the name of vaguely defined ideals.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Photojournalist-filmmaker Danfung Dennis’ Oscar-nominated documentary, “Hell And Back Again” is a bracing astonishment, even if it were not opening in a week that’s seen the deaths of three major international correspondents in Syria. (The New York Times’ Anthony Shadid; the Times of London’s Marie Colvin; French photographer Remi Ochlik.) War has consequences, to each and every single participant. It’s not just a battle for hearts and minds. Embedding with a Marine battalion, Dennis follows a single Marine sergeant, from the start of a 2009 tour in Afghanistan to his recovery back home in North Carolina after a sniper “blows half my ass off.” The images are striking in every scene, not only in the exceptionally vivid battle footage, and especially with the strategy of allowing the field of war and a place called home to slip, slip, slip together. The ending is hypnotic, echoing the images that end the “Hurt Locker” but also the narcosis of “Apocalypse Now”: Nathan Harris may casually fall asleep with his pistol in his hand, but what does this recovering solider dream of? Beautiful, measured, wrenching, dramatic, even great, “Hell and Back Again” honors the bravery of both soldiers and photojournalists with its fantastic skills of observation. Dennis has expressed his admiration for the late Tim Hetherington, co-director of “Restrepo,” who was killed in Libya; this is work at the same estimable level. Dennis shot the film on a DSLR, a Canon 5D Mark II camera, and worked as his own soundman. “Hell” won Sundance 2011′s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in Documentary, and the World Cinema Cinematography Award for Documentary Filmmaking. 88m.

Film Monthly.com – HELL AND BACK AGAIN (2011) Sanela Djokovic

Skillfully and fluently, photojournalist and director Danfung Dennis presents us with a poignant panorama capturing the phantoms of the battlefields in rural Afghanistan and those facing a young wounded Marine at home in North Carolina. With polished imagery, unmuddled matter and harsh truths, Hell and Back Again is a salient composition on the war in Afghanistan and the soldiers who live it.

Marine Seargent Nathan Harris is part of a small group of top-notch soldiers (US Marines Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment) anchored in a farming community and Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. Dennis follows Harris and his team on this mission—the daily firestorms with a ghost-like opponent, the struggle to communicate with civilians and the death—and then follows Harris home after he is seriously wounded, where he continues to struggle mentally and physically.

25-year-old Seargent Harris goes from flying bullets on all sides to intense physical therapy and a growing dependency on pain medication, trying to find a sense of normalcy with the help of his young, patient, and loving wife Ashley. The simple life of small-town America suddenly seems too complicated compared to the life he was accustomed to in Afghanistan. His threshold for pain is wearing, as is his patience, and he holds his pistol regularly and hopes for the day he can return to life as a soldier.

Dennis, an acclaimed photojournalist who has covered both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2006, brilliantly entwines the two worlds, transitioning from war coverage—bullets, limbs and refugees—to a deeply personal battle of a soldier returned home to his wife. Without infusing any facts, figures or political rhetoric into the film, we feel we understand the essentials. Scenes where soldiers engage in discussion with the locals of the villages they are breaching are so important in exhibiting the humanity and the efforts that most people do not think about, and never get to see. We see the hardships of hard-working farmers forced to leave their homes for long periods of time and the way that American soldiers stumble between understanding and helping and still doing their jobs.

Items of Harris’ home life are equally telling as he tries to live his life in a fog constituted by the memories of war, the desire to fight and be with his brothers again, and the physical pain that consumes most of his day. Especially moving is the relationship with his wife, a young woman entirely devoted and in love with a man she barely recognizes anymore.

Hell and Back Again is a striking visual experience (winner at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Cinematography category, as well as Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Award in the Documentary category) that reminds us in real-life, gritty terms what war really is, what it really means for everyone.

EdinburghGuide.com [Dylan Matthew]

Edward Copeland on Film

Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

CNN.com [Mark Rabinowitz]

Hell and Back Again - Documentaries - About.com Jennifer Merin

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Scott Macdonald]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

Slant Magazine [Lauren Wissot]

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Erich Asperschlager]

Hell and Back Again (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Ryan Keefer

Onion AV Club Alison Willmore

Georgia Straight [Janet Smith]

The Daily Rotation [Sean Canfield]

Village Voice  Michelle Orange

TVBomb [Andrew Latimer]

Hell and Back Again - BOXOFFICE Magazine Steve Ramos

Cinespect [Ryan Wells]

Corndog Chats [Adam Kuhn]

Chicago Reader Ben Sachs

HELL AND BACK AGAIN Facets Multi Media

MediaMikes.com - Blu-ray [Mike Gencarelli]

NPR Renee Montagne interview with filmmaker Danfung Dennis from NPR, October 18, 2011

Danfung Dennis on Hell and Back Again: 'The experience of war is not simply on the battlefield' - video Video interview by Laurence Topham and Elliot Smith from The Guardian, June 15, 2011 (3:27)

NYT: director interview Michael Kamber interview from The New York Times, September 27, 2011

Variety [Robert Koehler]

TimeOut Chicago Matt Singer

Hell and Back Again – review Philp French from The Observer

Hell and Back Again - Featured Articles From Boston.com Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe

Review: Hell and Back Again - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Gerald Peary

Critic Review for Hell and Back Again on washingtonpost.com Michael O’Sullivan

Battles continue on home front for young Marine in - Las Vegas ... Carol Cling from The Las Vegas Review, December 2, 2011

'Hell and Back Again' review: war's 2 front lines Walter Addiego from The SF Chronicle

Los Angeles Times Robert Abele

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] also seen here: Roger Ebert

Depardon, Raymond

Depardon, Raymond World Cinema

Raymond Depardon has helped revolutionize photojournalism in France over the past 30 years. His first photographs were taken on his parents' farm in 1954. After working for the Delmas agency (19601962), in 1967 he founded the Gamma agency with Gilles Caron, Hubert Henrotte and Hugues Vassal. As a press photographer he has carried out assignments all over the world, from Chile to Chad and Venice to Afghanistan. A witness to the revolution in Chad, in 1978 he published the collectionTchad. Around the same time, he joined the Magnum agency, of which he is currently European vice-president. He has covered nearly all the leading events of the past twenty years, from Vietnam to the fall of the Berlin wall and the Lebanon war. From La Captive du désert (198990) to Paris (1997), from Afrique: comment ça va avec la douleur? (1996) to Amour (commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in 1997), Depardon's films are an extension of his commitment as a photographer to going out to meet the Other. — Fondation Cartier

Lumière, Astruc, Bazin: The Cinema of Raymond Depardon - CineAction 10-page essay by Jerry White, 2012

THE DECLIC YEARS (Les Années Déclic)

France (65 mi) 1984

Striictly Film School Acquarello

Composed of a series of personal archives, commissioned photographs, and film excerpts projected onto a blank screen by photojournalist and filmmaker Raymond Depardon as he provides a humble and self-effacing stream of consciousness biographical commentary on a self-assembled pictorial curriculum vitae to commemorate 20 years of professional photography, Les Années déclic favorably recalls the meditative film essays of Chris Marker, most notably Sans soleil (albeit narrated in first-person), as Depardon interweaves memory (at times, triggered by the recognition of images and at other times, selectively trivialized or highlighted by the benefit of hindsight), captured images, and vocational (and existential) introspection on the toll of his career on his relationship with his beloved parents. Mapping his bold (if not naïvely reckless) career trajectory from introverted hobbyist and reluctant farm beneficiary, to optical and photography studio apprentice, to freelance celebrity photographer, then to international photojournalist, Depardon assembles an equally fascinating and heartbreaking personal testimony of post World War II global crisis and social upheaval: the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, the secession of Biafra, the May 68 protests, the rise of the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia, the civil war in Chad, and (perhaps the most contemporarily portentous and sobering) the Soviet phase of the Afghan War. Integrating objective commentary of international tragedy with the pensive reflection of personal loss, Depardon achieves a thoughtful, distilled, lucid, and articulate introspection on the human imprint of turbulent history.

EMPTY QUARTER: A WOMAN IN AFRICA (Une femme en Afrique)

France (85 mi) 1985

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

The untranslated, partial English title of French photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Raymond Depardon's first feature film, Empty Quarter: Une femme en Afrique provides an early clue into the nature of its indirect structure. Serving as a silent, but perceptive, omniscient, and inalterable translator for the unseen filmmaker's retrospection, the camera functions as a voyeur as well as a subjective filter through which he searches the residual aftermath of a failed relationship in the resigned desire to make sense of it. Proceeding in voiceover commentary, the film chronicles the journey of a displaced, globe-trotting filmmaker who offers a spare bed in his hotel room to an aimless, jilted young woman (Françoise Prenant) - a shared accommodation and co-dependency (if not emotional intimacy) that would inevitably lead her to become his constant companion, erstwhile muse, and eventual lover as they travel on an extended road trip from Djibouty to Alexandria. Hiding behind a perpetually recording camera, the unseen filmmaker becomes an existential paradox of presence and absence, directness and evasiveness, estrangement and intimacy, as the young woman begins to fill the empty silence with mundane, passing thoughts, attempting - often in frustration - to communicate with him through the opaque veil of a refracting camera lens (note the recurring images of her silhouette through translucent muslin curtains and mosquito netting). Rather than using the camera as an instrument of direct truth, the object serves as a safe obstruction for the silent filmmaker. But can the camera conceal the implication of his gaze? Perhaps the key lies in his filming of the young woman at a zoological exhibition where her image is captured, not directly, but through her reflections on a series of glass enclosures. Indeed, Depardon's theme of perspective and reflection can be seen in both the temporal and psychological framework for the film, as the cumulative footage of the trip not only serves as a visual chronicle for the failed love affair, but also as a translating mirror for the enigmatic filmmaker's unarticulated desire - where lingering shots of the contours of the young woman's body, her sleeping form, the nape of her neck, and her disembodied legs wading in the water reveal an intrinsic sensuality, melancholic wanderlust, and ache of longing within the intranscendable, empty spaces of the human heart.

The Auteurs' Notebook Daniel Kasman

EMERGENCIES (Urgences)

France (105 mi) 1988

Gabe Klinger:

As with his film Emergencies, which takes place in the psychiatric wards of hospitals (or is it all the same hospital?), Depardon is interested in the spaces that people inhabit when they are being interrogated, be it for abnormal behaviors or crimes (in Caught in the Act), and how these spaces affect us psychologically. In both the films he takes us through long corridors where the patients/criminals are led through, ultimately cutting to one stable shot in one (usually) barren room, where it sometimes appears that the camera is the last thing on the patients' minds (occasionally this is broken by some of the testier patients). For the most part though, Depardon captures their confessions as though completely invisible, such as a man who wants to be fed cyanide in Emergencies, or, in Caught in the Act, a 22 year-old woman who is HIV+ and steals fast cars for fun.

User comments from imdb Author AugusteB from Berlin, Germany

The film shows several people who arrive in a Parisian psychiatry. Compared to other documentaries this film is not portraying one person and his life, Raymond Depardon gives a portrait of a building. And in this building he stays in the entrance area as if this was a place which separates the normal from the sick. And while you listen to these different stories, see these very different life's and how they try to express their situation you get a strong feeling about our society and how it works. There is a bus driver who got a nervous breakdown. An old man who wanted to kill himself in the hallway of his house. A woman who gives a really strange explanation why she smashed a shop window. And a man who can't even tell his age nor what happened to him. The film rests on these people telling their story and then jumps into the next story so that the only thing which stays is the room and the psychologists who are asking questions and trying to help. After this film I want to see more of Depardons way of looking on our world.

CAPTIVE OF THE DESERT (La Captive du Désert)

France (96 mi) 1990

Time Out review

Based on the experience of political kidnappee Françoise Claustre, Depardon's rigorously understated film is short on event but long on presence. The story is rudimentary - a woman lives in captivity with a desert tribe, makes a desultory escape attempt, and is finally released - but the film is extraordinary in its ability to evoke her experience, with its total dislocation of space and time, and above all its fundamental monotony. The image of the desert here is worlds apart from the spuriously mystical dunescape of The Sheltering Sky. Depardon's own photography depicts a very material place with its own timetable and demands, the wilderness unfolding prosaically across the screen like some austere colour-field canvas. Acquainting us intimately with the life of the tribe, but without ever coming across as an ethnological document, the film's observation of minutiae is quite transfixing.

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

A caravan lackadaisically assembles at the foreground near the site of a desert fortress at dawn, and is spurred into action by the appearance of three figures bisecting the frame as they emerge from the fortress to join the expedition. An extended, medium shot of the cavalcade as they traverse the stationary frame on an undefined journey through the seemingly endless desert reveals the curious sight of a lone, non-native young woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) at the rear of the procession of nomadic tribespeople and camels, as a pair of men dressed in paramilitary gear flank her to prevent escape. A subsequent, sublimely photographed image at dusk taken from an extreme long, axial shot of a crepuscular sun disappearing into the horizon captures the caravan longitudinally traversing the horizon. These establishing images of dislocation, separation, and inevitable transformation provide an understated, yet incisive framework into Raymond Depardon's poetic, elegantly rendered, and thoughtful portrait of alterity and isolation in Captive of Desert. Drawing inspiration from his extensive coverage of the 1974 hostage kidnapping and protracted captivity of French archaeologist Françoise Claustre by Toubou rebels in Chad during the Frolinat Rebellion, Depardon eschews the underlying international politicization, geographic specificity, and social repercussions of the incident to create a broader social exposition on the eternal nature of cultural isolation and assimilation - a sense of timeless division that is established in the introductory sequences of silent migration and decontextualized spaces (note the absence of a specific geographic destination in their tribal migration, only to a series of self-constructed encampments). At the core of the film is the unnamed European woman's paradoxical imprisonment in a land of vast, open - and largely unsecured - spaces, where scarcity of life-sustaining resources and distance from western civilization imposes its own natural and psychological imprisonment. Through recurring aesthetic compositions of intersection, bifurcation, and symmetry, Depardon creates a metaphoric landscape where communion between civilizations is not hindered by ethnography or language, but by the very consciousness of an intranscendable distance of otherness.

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

CAUGHT IN THE ACT (Délits Flagrants)

France (109 mi) 1994

Time Out review

In France, criminals caught red-handed are first interviewed by a public prosecutor to determine how to proceed. Of the 86 such interviews Depardon filmed, he shows us 14. Conventional TV fare, except here it's up on the big screen in 35mm 'Scope. Shot from a fixed position with set focus and no cuts (save for legal reasons: what on earth did those three editors do?) the footage is gripping, funny, hair-raising. Depardon is non-manipulative, leaving us free to muse on anything from the officials' archaic fountain pens to the Oliver Hardy associations of those exasperated, appealing looks to camera. Curiously, from the deaf Arab up for petty larceny at the start, to the HIV+ prostitute on a car theft charge at the end, no one seems vicious or even unpleasant, making you wonder by what criteria those other 72 were excluded.

Gabe Klinger:

A very refined and carefully structured film about 14 people with misdemeanor charges, 3 District Attorneys who interview them, 1 defense lawyer, who appears near the end, and several faceless police officers who handcuff and escort the prisoners. Depardon was first granted access into police bureaus when he made his film Fait Divers, was eventually allowed to film meetings with the D.A.s (in Caught in the Act), and has just recently made a film in the courts that was shown in Cannes (the title is 10e Chambre, instants d'audience).

Caught in the Act has a very logical evolution, but it is subtle and insistent on a few stylistic gestures: the interview scenes must be shot from one angle, where both D.A. and charged suspect are visible, and must not move from there at any time. In the beginning and towards the end, there are long tracking shots through the police bureau basements. At strategic points in the film, Depardon introduces us with new D.A.s, and shows them in their natural setting, on the phone, or giving orders to police officers. There is very little aside from this. For the rest, the story is told by the way the 14 prisoners react to their charges, the stories they tell, the moods and varying methods of the D.A.s, and finally, and most touching of all, an elongated sequence with the young woman who is HIV+ and accused of hot-wiring a car.

In some scenes, the people being interviewed surrender their pride to get through the proceedings with little fuss (in once instance, a middle-eastern man reaches his hand out to the D.A. to thank him, and the D.A. merely gives him a half-smile in return) and in these instances they reveal their true selves, which is sometimes endearing. Other times, the suspects are stubborn, and don't reveal themselves at all (one kid is generously let off by the D.A. and he doesn't even look her in the eye as she tells him this).

Depardon's grace is in his equal focus of the law and of the accused, and in his selection of cases, or "stories" (he had filmed over 80), to meticulously build towards a cathartic conclusion.

Not just an observer, Depardon is an artist in his approach, and I find his view more refreshing than his immediate North American counterpart, Frederick Wiseman.

THE 10th DISTRICT COURT (10e chambre - Instants d'audience) B+ 90

France (102 mi) 2004

The film documents real-life court excerpts as they are taking place in Paris before presiding Judge Michele Bernard-Requin. The viewer is privy to the rhythms of her courtroom, how each session begins, the order of the proceedings, and we’re allowed to witness the rather bizarre and self-centered antics of each defendant, seeing what the judge sees, and we’re able to reach objective opinions. One wonders the impact of the camera, how much it affects the behavior of each of the participants, most notably the judge, who presides over each featured case. She appears to be firm, good-natured, even jovial at times, but there are occasional moments where she starts to lose it. This judge is relatively young, so it’s still new to her, but one could imagine what it would be like to endure this kind of thing over long stretches of time, and how judges with different temperaments might handle the same situations.

Raymond Depardon:

“The respect accorded these people was exhibited in the way we filmed and listened to them. We shot these men and women at eye level so as to be as transparent as possible and the least obtrusive in the structured courtroom. Their facial gestures and words contribute to a collective memory. They were courageous enough to let themselves be examples, to show their humiliation.”

The 10th District Court: Judicial Hearings Jonathan Rosenbaum

Raymond Depardon’s riveting documentary about various routine cases brought before a woman judge in a Paris courtroom may be as brilliant as some of its advocates claim, but only if one’s sufficiently alert to read at least some of the proceedings against the grain of her judgments. Through this procession of middle-class drunk drivers, alienated and/or dysfunctional individuals, and illegal aliens ranging from a pickpocket to an African whose only crime is never having the correct papers, a fascinating glimpse of contemporary France emergesmade apparent as much through the weary responses of Judge Michele Bernard-Requin and various fatuous court-appointed defenders as by the accused. The editing is brilliant. In French with subtitles. 105 min.

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

Perhaps better known for his early career in photojournalism or his austere, yet sublime ethnographic portraitures of the Sahara desert in such docufiction films as Captive of the Desert and Un Homme sans l'occident, Raymond Depardon continues in a similar vein as his earlier exposition into the domestic justice system of Délits flagrants in The Tenth District Court: Moments of Trial. Having been given the rare privilege to film (and use in excerpts) the proceedings of a Paris courtroom presided by an experienced and no-nonsense judge named Michèle Bernard-Requin, Depardon's engaging, animated collage of drunk drivers, harassing ex-lovers, pickpockets, public nuisances, and marijuana dealers is a thoughtful and unprejudiced glimpse into the swift, cursory, and often frustrating prosecution of throwaway petty offenses: defiant motorists who refuse to acknowledge their transgression and realize the potential for tragedy in their reckless, willful actions; mentally ill offenders whose poor, often undereducated immigrant families are unable to seek proper help; undocumented aliens who continue to amass meaningless ten year immigration bans into the country. Inevitably, what emerges is not merely a lighthearted and salaciously humorous snapshot of nuisance crimes, but a complex and intelligently observed portrait of human frailty, self-righteousness, ignorance, marginalization, and disenfranchisement.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

The more pop culture is saturated with films like Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors and television programs like Jerry Springer, Judge Judy, and The Simple Life, the more Americans seem to be losing a grip on their humanity. Not only are contestants on reality shows seemingly picked for their predilections to cause elaborate scenes, gone are the days when psychologists didn't confuse drill training for therapy. Raymond Depardon's documentary The 10th District Court: Moments of Trial is constructed entirely from testimonies given by people inside judge Michèle Bernard-Requin's Paris courtroom. A self-righteous intellectual stands accused of carrying a knife in his pocket, African immigrants are charged with stealing and doping, and others are charged with driving under the influence. Considering the piles of shit she has to dig through, Bernard-Requin is seemingly fair and level-headed throughout, but perhaps I've been unduly affected by our culture of mean that I can't tell if Depardon is encouraging sympathy or contempt for the people who stand before the judge. The director weaves a tapestry of human tragedy from the fragmentary melodramas of these people's lives, and yet a privileged few at the film's New York Film Festival critics screening found the experience hysterical. But there's nothing remotely funny about watching these people—most of them, yes, bullshitters—twisting and squirming to evade punishment. At the very least, there's nothing funny about an obviously ill man accused of shooting an illegal weapon at beer cans and who walks into Bernard-Requin's courtroom under the influence of a tranquilizer, or the testimony of a man charged with harassing the ex-girlfriend he tortured for seven years. Though the audience doesn't get to know Bernard-Requin or the people who stand before her beyond the courtroom, their struggles resonate. When an illegal immigrant is given a one-year sentence for theft, he yells at the judge and wonders if she'll be able to sleep at night. Bernard-Requin is obviously used to these kinds of outbursts, and though the man is probably guilty, it's obvious from the woman's fairness that she's conscious of community standards and her responsibility to the people in her courtroom. I suppose it's easy to laugh at some of the film's tragic moments because Departon likens the legal system to a form of human theater, but the performances the people in Bernard-Requin's courtroom put on—defendants and weasel attorneys alike—are less amusing than horrifying. Because these scenarios illuminate our foibles as responsible citizens of the world, I can't imagine a better film to take someone to on a first date; if they laugh, then you might reconsider a second.

by Jay Kuehner A Man and a Movie Camera: The Recent Films of Raymond Depardon, including an interview from Cinema Scope (link lost)

“My dream is to go roaming with a movie camera, let myself be carried away by the images, to stay curious, free myself from the television news, go and see what's happening in other places, and be alone.” —Raymond Depardon

There’s a fitting irony—reflective of Raymond Depardon’s own methodology—in the discovery of this photojournalist-turned-filmmaker’s vast career: How does an oeuvre of such magnitude reveal itself so inconspicuously, as if its maker had quietly covered his footprints after treading fearlessly where few had before? Watching Depardon’s rare and rarefied 2002 feature Un homme sans l’Occident, and regarding the sun-scorched and sand-swept travels of a lone Saharan hunter, one can see something of its director in the part.

A critical hit at Cannes 2004, Depardon’s 10e chambre—Instants d’audiences (The 10th District Court—Moments of Trials, reviewed in Issue 19 of Cinema Scope) has picked up momentum on the festival circuit while securing North American distribution, a move that could potentially correct an under-recognized career, or at the very least offer American audiences a courtroom spectacle that’s amusingly Gallic but ultimately judicious in its intent. 10e chambre found Depardon with unprecedented access to a Parisian courtroom and the dozen trials brought before an unequivocal magistrate, judge Michele Bernard-Requin, whose terse approach indulges the defendants’ weaker instincts. Depardon maximizes the inherent drama with a minimum of means, using a fixed camera and few angles: an ostensibly impartial approach that turns even the pettiest of crimes into reckonings both existential and political.

Given Depardon’s resumé as a chronicler of (in)justice, one might anticipate his work-in-progress trilogy Profils paysans—a documentary series about small farmers in rural France, and the problems of transmission to the next generation—as a José Bové-incensed exposé of the perils of globalization on agriculture. In Depardon’s less-is-more approach, such a portrait may yet emerge. But for now, with the film’s second chapter, Profils paysans: le quotidian, complete (part one, Profils paysans: l’approch was made in 1991), Depardon seems intent on capturing the quotidian lives of farmers as they face the imminent sale of their land or obsolescence of their labour. More wistful than angry, Depardon nevertheless resists sentimentality as he returns to his place of origin.

Depardon’s contributions as a photojournalist are legion: first as a co-founder of the Gamma agency, and later as a Magnum associate, he has dispatched from such hotly contested areas as Algeria , Vietnam , and Chile . With over 25 books to his credit, as well as nearly 40 films—both nonfiction and narrative—Depardon certainly warrants further consideration. The ever-itinerant Depardon stopped at the 48th San Francisco International Film Festival to speak about his most recent films—visual missives from a witness who believes that you can still change the world with an image.

The 10th District Court: Moments of Trials • Senses of Cinema Michael Da Silva, October 11, 2010

Long Pauses Darren Hughes

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Daniel Kasman

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio]

Bright Lights Film Journal review Megan Ratner (capsule review)

The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review

The Observer (Mark Kermode) review

Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

A Judge Judy for the Parisian Courts - The New York Times Stephen Holden

10th District Court - Wikipedia

MODERN LIFE (Profils paysans: la vie moderne)

France (88 mi) 2008

Facets Features Milos Stehlik at Facets Multi Media from 2008 Festival de Cannes: Part Four

A surreal scene, which can only happen at Cannes: walking out of a screening of Raymond Depardon’s beautiful, moving – and very simple – documentary portrait of French peasant farmers – Modern Life. The film is full of dignity and empathy for its characters, connected to the land and the seasons and to the animals they keep. The scene on the outside of the Palais was the world premiere of the new Indiana Jones film. Huge crowds everywhere, many of those waiting for a glimpse of the stars, Harrison Ford and whomever else, now turned into objects of merchandising by wearing faux Indiana Jones hats, cleverly passed out by the studio. A special public-private moment: the audience turned into a branding mechanism – a diabolical trick of capitalism at its extreme margins. Chaz Ebert told me this morning that Mike Phillips, the film critic of the Chicago Tribune, who gave the new Indiana Jones a mixed-bad review, was deluged within an hour here by emails from angry readers (the review was first posted online) – more proof that the supposedly “critic-proof” Indiana Jones franchise can triumph no matter what. There was an opinion piece in the local daily Variety here in Cannes, basically celebrating the studio’s ebullience at having critics so marginalized that, like processed fast-food, the taste and what others think of it makes little difference.

Cannes Film Festival, 2008: “La Vie moderne” (Depardon, France) Daniel Kasman at Cannes from The Auteur’s Notebook

Produced as part of what I believe is a series of films for television on rural French life, Raymond Depardon’s La Vie moderne (Modern Life) seems very fresh to these American eyes—a film that takes an avid and very empathetic interest in provincial farmers, their states of live and that of their profession. It is also documentary as portraiture, that of people and landscape, a record of a short time—already changed by the end of the film—in the death of a certain kind of rural French farmer. Depardon composes in very wide images to give the work and the land scope and breadth in light of the lonely and diminishing local population, yet also to hold down his interviewees for friendly but somehow constrictive conversations.  His intent and attitude is that of a empathetic comrade, but the way he shoots his friends and acquaintances admits to a minor tremor of uncomfortableness between filmmaker and subject on camera, despite their obvious rapport in person.  This may be the root of the title, as, try as it might, perhaps the cinema is not the best way to understand a way of life and a way of work that existed long before the modernity of moving images.  A work of simple, but very hard to achieve, compassion, let us hope the participants are still around in the future for Depardon to further share their lives with us.

CANNES JOURNAL; Excavating the Past to Set the Record Straight A.O. Scott at Cannes from The New York Times, May 20, 2008

“Modern Life” is the name of a lovely new documentary by the French director Raymond Depardon, and the title, like the film itself, carries a gentle but unmistakable irony. Mr. Depardon’s subjects — as they were in “Profils Paysans” (2000) and “Le Quotidien” (2005), to which “Modern Life” is in effect a sequel — are small farmers who work the land in a remote and mountainous region of southern France where, at first glance, there is nothing very modern at all. Among them are two brothers, both in their 80s, who take an occasional break from tending cattle and sheep to reflect for Mr. Depardon’s camera on the changing world around them and the ways of the younger generation.

Their musings are philosophical but hardly sentimental, and Mr. Depardon resists the temptation to wax elegiac on the disappearance of family farms or to mystify the bond between the land and those who draw their living from it. Agriculture is above all a practical enterprise, as is filmmaking, and Mr. Depardon, from a rural background himself, is more interested in details and personalities than in generalizations. It is nonetheless impossible to ignore the fatalism that hovers over both the elders and their would-be inheritors as they have their taciturn, matter-of-fact say. At the end, Mr. Depardon promises to return, and you can’t help but wonder what will be left of this noble, difficult and ancient form of life when he comes back for the next film in the series.

Agnès Poirier The Profiler of Peasants, Agnes Poirer interviews Depardon from The Guardian, May 20, 2008

"Peasant" is not a derogatory word in French. It has even become noble since the celebrated film-maker Raymond Depardon, himself a farm boy until the age of 16, dedicated the last ten years of his life documenting their lives in three films - the last of which has just showed in official selection in Cannes. The contrast between the hardships of rural life and the Cote d'Azur couldn't be more incongruous. "For me, peasant life is not about pigs, haystack and vineyards," he says.

"For me, peasants are the first pioneers of globalisation as they were the first to be hit and the first to adapt; they are also the first eco-warriors. It has now become fashionable to be environmentalist but they were the first to know and deal with climatic change effects." In La Vie Moderne, Depardon shows men and women, old and young peasants from Ardèche falling in love, following the world news on their small TV set, receiving strangers in their kitchen and tending their sick cows better than their own children.

Depardon isn't interested in big farms run like multinationals. "I just went to the mountains around Lyons, but not too high up, just half-way, where farms are still run the same way as in the 1950s simply because they are still difficult to get to." Some of them still don't have electricity. "Don't tell the British but there are still many bargains to be made, buying out old farms. The quality of living is just incredible: it's calm, beautiful, nature has been left unspoilt, food is so tasty and the feeling of freedom is simply enthralling." With freedom comes loneliness, however. "That's why it was so important for me to let them speak. My work was to catch the moment. If I spoilt a scene with my camera, I could never ask them to do it again. Everything they give is raw."

Variety review Leslie Felperin

JOURNAL DE FRANCE

France (101 mi) 2012 co-director: Claudine Nougaret

Journal de France Fionnuala Halligan at Cannes from Screendaily

Raymond Depardon looks back at the life he captured on camera in Journal de France, assembled by his longtime collaborator (and sound engineer) Claudine Nougaret from, she says, “footage in his basement”. And what footage! From tanks rolling through Prague to deaths on the street of Venezuela, famine in Biafra, and the two years he spend in the deserts of Chad, award-winning film-maker and Gamma agency founder Depardon had documented places and people most could only dream of long before his haunting films began to win awards (including the Un Certain Regard top prize for La Vie Moderne in 1988).

Nougaret, who provides the voiceover, cuts this in loosely chronological order interspersed with present-day footage of Depardon touring around France in a camper van, painstakingly arranging his pictures of a disappearing France with an old-fashioned tripod apparatus. The result, for all its all its impressiveness, is oddly impersonal, however, and Journal de France has a dispassionate air that will restrict it to specialist exposure outside France.

For all that he looks into the soul of subjects, Depardon gives little of himself, and Journal de France is oddly chilly for all the sound and fury the footage showcases.

Early intimations that this might be Depardon’s Of Time And The City fail to materialise, with Nougaret content to deliver footage without much in the way of editorial commentary - the speciality of agencies such as Gamma and Magnum, which Depardon also later ran. Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti is followed by protests in Aden, mercenaries in the Biafran jungle, and the tanks rolling into Prague.

We also see Depardon as an agent provocateur, making his first film about France’s then finance minister, Giscard D’Estaing, as he campaigned for the presidency - displaying some cold cynical politicing which later got the film banned. Depardon also became involved in the Claustre affair, racing off to join the guerillas of Chad for two years before gaining an interview with the captured architect (for which he was later charged). The black and white footage of the desert here is almost tangibly lustrous (Journal de France is comprised of 16mm, 35mm and Super-8 stock transferred to digital).

Everything is here. Asylums in Italy, psychiatric care in France. Alain Delon, Nelson Mandela, Godard, the Paris courts of justice (an amusing sequence from 2003). Depardon’s footage really is the ‘journal de France’, its keen, silent focus speaking volumes as ever. Here, however, more is required from behind the camera to overcome Depardon’s dispassionate manner as the film tracks his professional life. We never get a feeling for the man behind these images, which may be entirely appropriate in his other work, but here it makes a fragile pillar for a 100-minute running time.

Journal de France: Cannes Review Jordan Mintzer from The Hollywood Reporter, May 22, 2012

Acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon and longtime collaborator Claudine Nougaret spend six years capturing France with a large format camera in this documentary.

A comprehensive and intimate introduction to a major contemporary photographer-filmmaker, Journal de France examines the extended oeuvre and working process of Raymond Depardon through his very own eyes, as well as through those of his long-time companion and sound engineer, Claudine Nougaret. Trailing the photojournalist as he drives an RV across the Gallic countryside to shoot a new series of landscapes, the film also intercuts in clips and outtakes from the director’s lengthy documentary catalogue, offering up an enticing amuse-bouche to an artist whose body of work has become essential viewing.

Although he has been well known in France for several decades now, Depardon is far from a household name in the U.S., and only a handful of his most recent films – including the agricultural portrait, Modern Life, and the courtroom profile, 10th District Court – currently exist on DVD. If anything, this engaging and somewhat droll self-study should prompt the uninitiated to seek out his earlier movies, and it could provide the perfect accompaniment for future retrospectives and/or box sets.

Much of the footage of Depardon on the road was shot during a project started in 2004 for which he traveled throughout France’s various regions, capturing the essence of their cafés, factories, forests and highways with a large-format 20x25 camera. (The photos were shown in a 2011 exhibition at the Bibliotheque Nationale entitled La France.) Beyond their ethnographic interest, the richness of those pictures provides a solid argument for the uniqueness and splendor of celluloid, and watching Depardon take his precious time to snap the perfect street scene offers up a powerful antidote to an era inundated with disposable digital imagery.

Mixed in with those behind-the-scenes moments are clips from dozens of documentaries ranging from the 1960s through the present, many of them tackling private and public institutions in a manner similar to Frederick Wiseman, except with more of a visual punch. Memorable excerpts include scenes from Depardon’s fascinating presidential campaign film, 1974, une partie de champagne (for which we learn that its subject, Valerie Giscard d’Estaing, tried to have the movie banned because the director refused to add a soothing classical music score); the paparazzi exposé, Reporters; the petty crimes profile, Delits flagrants; and a riveting piece of combat footage from an unseen documentary about mercenaries in Biafra.

If there’s one tendency that becomes evident after surveying Depardon’s 40-odd years of reportage, it’s his refusal to cut the camera at all costs, to continue filming until he exposes truths and attitudes lying beneath the surface of events. This, along with an approach that never over-aestheticizes its subjects (“Perfect light can be dangerous,” he confides during one photo session), is what gives his oeuvre its rare blend of beauty and veracity – the ability to capture reality in all its grandeur à la Capa or Cartier-Bresson.

Despite Depardon’s no-joke methods, many of his films have revealed a softer side to them, and such lightheartedness is present here in Journal de France’s catchy soundtrack, which runs the gamut from Mahler to Patti Smith, by way of late French rock legend Alain Bashung. The musical interludes accompany the tender backstory of Depardon and Nougaret’s 25-year collaboration, tracing their affair from a first encounter on the set of Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert (for which Nougaret was the sound recordist) up through and including the work at hand.

Dercourt, Denis

THE PAGE TURNER (La tourneuse de pages) B+ 91

France (85 mi) 2006

Deliciously wicked, in the manner of DIABOLIQUE and THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, or, if anyone saw it, Antoine Santana’s 2005 French film A SONG OF INNOCENCE, which had a lead performance of a wet nurse that very much resembled the lead in this film. Opening with a montage of images of a young 10-year old girl playing the piano in her home and a butcher whacking and cutting slabs of beef, as the girl’s father is a butcher, it doesn’t take long to realize that “something is rotten in Denmark.” The young girl enters a piano competition to win a scholarship to the national conservatory and is playing brilliantly, but is then interrupted by the astonishingly rude behavior of someone entering the closed chambers and asking for an autograph of the Jury President Ariane, none other than Catherine Frot, a classical pianist of some renown, who of course willingly obliges, and then acts surprised when the young girl stops playing. Unapologetically, Ariane tells her to play on, but of course, she has lost her focus and stumbles to the finish. The girl leaves the jury room in tears, but offers us a sign, as she slams the piano lid down on the hands of another unsuspecting player during her exit. As her father can’t afford to pay for future lessons, we see her put away the bust of Beethoven and lock up her own piano at home, presumably for the last time.

Advance ten years and the young girl has become a beautiful young woman, Mélanie (Déborah François from L’ENFANT), very calm and assured, extremely polite, who fits right in as an intern at a reputable law firm, while also agreeing to work as a nanny for the head of the firm, Pascal Greggory, the flummoxed husband from GABRIELLE. When he brings her home to care for his own 10-year old son and live at his palatial estate, Ariane turns out to be the wife, who is attempting a career comeback after suffering a severe setback following a hit and run accident. More importantly, she is having problems with her nerves and needs complete reassurance. Mélanie demonstrates a remarkable poise and immediately wins her confidence by the focused manner in which she pays attention to her music during her practice sessions, helping turn the music pages at the right precise moment. Ariane decides she wants Mélanie to accompany her on her comeback trail.

Of interest, it is never in doubt where this film is going, yet the restrained underlying tension builds quite naturally as Mélanie begins her own course of action calmly, resolutely, with an underlying brooding nature which receives its proper due somewhere near the middle of the film. Ariane is a member of a piano trio, accompanied by a husband and wife team at violin and cello. When the cellist privately starts groping Mélanie, she fumes for a moment, but then acts in such a decisive manner it is clear the cellist will never again get the wrong idea. Thus begins her quest for even greater injurious triumphs. Also of interest, Frot appeared to be playing all the right notes during her filmed performances. The film director is also a professional viola player, teaching classes at the Strasbourg Conservatory, so there appears to be little question about his authority on the musical end. The pace of the film is beautifully embellished by the music of Bach Preludes and the piano trios of Shostakovich and Schubert, adding a layer of elegance and refinement to the underlying macabre darkness.

TOMORROW AT DAWN (Demain Dès L'aube)

France (100 mi) 2009

Matt Bochenski at Cannes from Little White Lies, May 20, 2009

What felt like the first ‘regular’ film I saw all day was also the last, Denis Dercourt’s sumptuous Tomorrow at Dawn. It begins with a rousing prologue that sees Jeremie Renier engaged in a duel to defend the honour of the Second Hussars. It’s a deft piece of misdirection, because this is actually a modern, middle-class tale of Renier’s brother, a pianist played by Vincent Perez who is having a mid-life crisis. He leaves his wife and kid to live in his sick mother’s house, where his brother pulls him in to a world of role play that gets frighteningly real. Chicly photographed and well performed, it shares a theme common to several of the films I’ve seen here – about the way in which the true horror and madness of the human condition can show itself in the unlikeliest places. It all leads to a terrific pay off, which was greeted with sustained applause (though not by me – I’m too English to start clapping in a cinema. It’s not a circus. Or, hang on, is it?).

Tomorrow At Dawn (Demain Dès L'aube) Lisa Nesselson at Cannes from Screendaily

Those who assume classical musicians are sissies may have to adjust their thinking after Tomorrow At Dawn, in which classical music meets historical battle re-enactments to excellent effect. As with his The Page Turner - also an Un Certain Regard selection and the most widely sold French film at Cannes in 2006 - writer-director Denis Dercourt establishes a mood of constant unease throughout. The viewer can sense that bad things will happen without ever knowing when or in what form, and the punchline of this tale is a satisfying surprise.

The Page Turner, with its delectably sinister showdown between two women, notched an impressive 725,000 admissions in France before taking over $9million worldwide. Dercourt’s latest, set in a masculine world, has already sold to several French-speaking territories and should readily find additional takers.  By combining a milieu he knows well (Dercourt is a professional viola player who teaches at the Conservatory in Strasbourg) and one he has meticulously researched (the part-nerdy/part-manly and increasingly popular realm of battle reenactments), the filmmaker has hit on an unusual combo that could make a few inroads beyond the art house circuit.

The film starts involvingly with a cluster of men in late 18th century military attire preparing for a swordfight in a misty field. The effort expended by the two adversaries, punctuated by the clang of metal, is thrilling.  One opponent draws blood.

Cut to a contemporary setting in which concert pianist and composer Mathieu (Vincent Perez) is giving a piano lesson in the tasteful salon of the apartment he shares with his wife and young son.

After the lesson, he drives to the suburban Paris house where his seriously ailing mother (Françoise Lebrun) lives with Mathieu’s younger brother Paul (Jérémie Renier). She will soon leave for a long hospital stay and knows Paul’s emotional stability depends on Mathieu’s support

in her absence. Paul works in a warehouse but devotes all his spare time to a clandestine battle re-enactment group centred on two regiments of Emperor Napoleon’s forces.

To say that participants are deadly serious about dressing up and pointing vintage weapons at each other while speaking in the ultra-formal language of a bygone France would be an understatement.

In a deftly written series of interactions, Mathieu attends a weekend bivouac and suits up to humour his brother, only to find himself implicated in matters of honour whose ramifications go far beyond play-acting.

Perez, who has several important costume pictures to his credit (Queen Margot, Cyrano De Bergerac, Fanfan La Tulipe) looks well in uniform and handles vintage weapons with flair, in addition to playing short piano passages well enough to convince as an acclaimed pianist. His elegant manners and controlled anger contrast well with Renier’s boyish enthusiasm.

Aurelien Recoing is spot-on as a military commander not easily satisfied.

Straightforward but effective widescreen filming and editing keep several emotional layers percolating simultaneously. Dercourt doles out information in gradual doses, toggling back and forth between the demands of the Napoleonic Wars and the obligations of everyday life, until the two are intertwined on a level that demands action.

As with Dercourt’s five previous features, the musical score is perfectly chosen and smartly applied.

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 19, 2009

Matt Bochenski at Cannes from Little White Lies, May 20, 2009

Tomorrow at Dawn Dennis Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 24, 2009

Derek Elley at Cannes from Variety, May 20, 2009

Deren, Maya

Maya Deren Collection at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center (biography section)

Maya Deren (1917-1961) has been called "the mother of the American underground cinema" and remains perhaps the most noted female experimental filmmaker in the United States from the 1940s until her untimely death in 1961. In addition, she was a noted theorist whose innovative writings are shamefully not as familiar as those of her male contemporaries.

Eleanora Derenkowsky was born on April 29, 1917 in Kiev, Ukraine, the only child of linguist Marie Derenkowsky and her psychologist husband Solomon. In 1922, the family fled the Soviet Union to escape from anti-Semitism, settling in New York City and shortening the family name to Deren. Reportedly her childhood was not terribly happy as her parents frequently fought or were separated by circumstance. As an adolescent, Deren was sent to school in Geneva while her mother studied in Paris and her father remained in Manhattan.

Deren enrolled at Syracuse University as a journalism and political science major. She married Gregory Bardacke and transferred to New York University where she completed her studies in 1936. She then obtained a masters degree in English Literature at Smith College in 1939. After the end of her first marriage and completion of her education, Deren accepted a position as assistant to dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham and toured the United States with Dunham's dance company. In Los Angeles in 1941, she met Austrian-born cinematographer Alexander Hammid (né Alexander Hackenschmeid in 1907). They married in 1942, the same year she adopted the first name "Maya.” Husband and wife collaborated on the 18-minute silent Meshes in the Afternoon (1943). Noted as the first example of "the poetic psychodrama," Meshes in the Afternoon is a work of surrealism in which time and space are altered to create a world somewhere between dreams and reality. With Deren starring in the lead, the film is considered as the best-known experimental film of the 1940s, and it features the filmmaker’s use of fluid movements and rhythmic editing to create the tone and texture of the piece. There is some controversy over exactly who directed the film, Deren or Hammid, but regardless, it stands as a prime example of experimental movie making.

Over the next four years, Deren made several short films, including At Land (1944), A Study for Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945-46) and Meditation on Violence (1947). Her last completed film was 1958's The Very Eye of Night . One intriguing project that was never completed was a film with artist Marcel Duchamp entitled Witches Cradle (1943).

Deren often self-distributed her films, going so far as to screen them on her living room walls. If she managed to land a booking, she often accompanied the screenings with a lecture. By 1946, Deren began publishing her writings on film theory, including the essay "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film." The following year, she received the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix Internationale, became the first filmmaker to receive a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (which allowed her to begin research on the Voudoun ritual in Haitian culture), and divorced Hammid. Over the course of a period of seven years (1947-54), Deren shot more than 18,000 feet of film in Haiti, but she never completed editing the material. Her third husband, musician Teiji Ito and his new wife Cherel, assembled the footage into the 1985 film Divine Horseman: Living Gods of Haiti, drawing its title from the definitive study of Haitian Voudoun that Deren published in 1957.

There was much speculation about the details of her death at the age of 44 on October 13, 1961 in Queens, New York, fueled partly by Stan Brakage's speculation that her association with Voudon somehow contributed to her demise. It has been noted, however, that she died of a cerebral hemorrhage (brought on by an addiction to amphetamines and sleeping pills) and malnutrition. Ito scattered her ashes on Mount Fuji in his native Japan.

Maya Deren left a legacy as a key figure in the "New American Cinema" movement, and in 1986 the American Film Institute created the Maya Deren Award to honor achievement in independent film and video. Her legacy received a boost with the release of two documentaries: Invocation: Maya Deren (1987) and In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2001).

Film Reference Louise Heck-Rabi

Maya Deren was the best-known independent, experimental filmmaker in the United States during and after World War II. She developed two types of short, subjective films: the psychodrama and the ciné-dance film. She initiated a national non-theatrical network to show her six independently made works, which have been referred to as visual lyric poems, or dream-like trance films. She also lectured and wrote extensively on film as an art form. Her films remain as provocative as ever, her contributions to cinematic art indisputable.

Intending to write a book on dance, Deren toured with Katherine Dunham's dance group as a secretary. Dunham introduced Deren to Alexander Hammid, and the following year the couple made Meshes of the Afternoon. Considered a milestone in the chronology of independent film in the United States, it is famous for its four-stride sequence (from beach to grass to mud to pavement to rug). Deren acted the role of a girl driven to suicide. Continuous action is maintained while time-space unities are severed, establishing a trance-like mood by the use of slow motion, swish-pan camera movements, and well executed point-of-view shots.

In her next film, At Land, a woman (Deren) runs along a beach and becomes involved in a chess game. P. Adams Sitney refers to this work as a "pure American trance film." The telescoping of time occurs as each scene blends with the next in unbroken sequence, a result of pre-planned editing. At Land is also studded with camera shots of astounding virtuosity.

Other films include Deren's first ciné-dance film, the three-minute A Study in Choreography for Camera. Filmed in slow motion, a male ballet dancer, partnered by the camera, moves through a variety of locales. Continuity of camera movement is maintained as the dancer's foot changes location. Space is compressed while time is expanded. According to Sitney, the film's importance resides in two fresh observations: space and time in film are created space and time, and the camera's optimal use is as a dancer itself. Ritual in Transfigured Time, another dance-on-film, portrays psycho-dramatic ritual by use of freeze frames, repeated shots, shifting character identities, body movements, and locales. Meditation on Violence explores Woo (or Wu) Tang boxing with the camera as sparring partner, panning and zooming to simulate human response. The Very Eye of Night employed Metropolitan Ballet School members to create a celestial ciné-ballet of night. Shown in its negative state, Deren's handheld camera captured white figures on a total black background. Over the course of her four dance-films Deren evolved a viable form of ciné-choreography that was adapted and adjusted to later commercial feature films. In cases such as West Side Story, this was done with great skill and merit.

Deren traced the evolution of her six films in "A letter to James Card," dated April 19, 1955. Meshes was her "point of departure" and "almost expressionist"; At Land depicted dormant energies in mutable nature; and Choreography distilled the essence of this natural changing. In Ritual she defined the processes of changing, while Meditation extends the study of metamorphosis. In The Very Eye she expressed her love of life and its living. "Each film was built as a chamber and became a corridor, like a chain reaction."

In 1946 Deren published An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and the Film, a monograph declaring two major statements: the rejection of symbolism in film, and strong support for independent film after an analysis of industrial and independent filmmaking activities in the United States.

Although Meshes remains the most widely seen film of its type, with several of its effects unsurpassed by filmmakers, Deren had been forgotten until recently. Her reputation now enjoys a well-deserved renaissance, for as Rudolf Arnheim eulogized, Deren was one of film's "most delicate magicians."

Deren, Maya profile from Art and Culture

All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Ankeny

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Maya Deren a biography from Mystic Fire Video

Maya Deren biography and overview from BringinItHome

The-Artists.org listing another brief bio page

Women of the Beat - Biography page for Maya Deren

Cosmic Baseball Association more bio material

The Maya Deren Forum newsworthy updates

Maya Deren Wendy Haslem from Senses of Cinema

The Picture Palace: Maya Deren another influentiual site

Films by Maya Deren: Intense Shorts Janet Maslin from the New York Times, May 4, 1978

Gerald Peary Essay February 2003

Some Metaphors for the Creative Process by Maya Deren brief Maya Deren writings

In the Mirror of Maya Deren Rebecca Bachman reviews a documentary film on Deren from Senses of Cinema

Maya Deren and the American Avant-garde Erin Branigan reviews Bill Nichols book from Screening the Past

'Divine Horsemen' at UbuWeb film parts of all of many of Deren’s films may be viewed here

Private Life of a Cat (1947) at the Internet Archive a 22 minute film by Alexander Hammid, Deren’s collaborating spouse, may be viewed here

Wikipedia

MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON

USA (18 mi) 1943 co-director: Alexander Hammid (husband at the time)

All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]

The film that spearheaded the post-World War II American avant-garde film movement, Maya Deren's 14-minute Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) took the traditional concern of Hollywood melodramas with female repression and transformed it into an enigmatic meditation on eroticism and death. Deren and husband Alexander Hammid worked without a script, played all the roles themselves, and built the film out of the repetition of a dream experienced by Deren's character. Most often described as a "trance film" or a "dream film," Meshes derives its power from increasingly charged imagery that turns ordinary household props into signs of sexual desire and self-annihilation, while discordant editing and double exposures literally fracture Deren into several selves. Poetic rather than narrative, Meshes of the Afternoon defies a fixed interpretation, as its evocative imagery collapses the boundaries between dream and reality, alluding to the complex effects of female entrapment and a desire for erotic, lethal release. Shot silent in 16 mm in Hollywood, Meshes of the Afternoon bridged the pre-war Surrealist avant-garde and the post-war European art cinema dreamscapes of such films as Last Year at Marienbad (1961), as well as the "personal" avant-garde films of Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger. The music soundtrack was added in 1959.

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

The first and arguably best experimental short of Maya Deren started the avant-garde movement in America. Deren disregards traditional linear narrative structure, instead employing an amalgam. This gives viewers the idea Deren plays several characters, but duplication and repetition, sometimes with minor variation, are the keys to her rhythms. I believe we are seeing the same woman at different points in her nightmare (even the grim reaper's mirror face reflects her image back at her), and probably different sides of her personality. Starting with dislocated closeups of body parts and silhouettes, the film seems to slowly build by revealing the slightest details, but to some extent that is not the case as it maintains the logic, atmosphere, and cohesion of a dream. Thematically the work is a mix of Freudian psychology with desire, fear, alienation, paranoia, and estrangement. The major theme may be feminine angst, as it delves into the fear of men with then husband Hammid playing both the lover who seems capable of putting her life back together and the grim reaper who she can never catch to stop him from taking her life. The film experiments with space, in a sense it's a chase with the non-linear narrative and dislocating cutting methods providing a new way to show Deren's lack of progress in capturing the reaper. Deren was sometimes thought of as a surrealist, but she's far more toward expressionism, particularly in her first two works because Hammid's exceptional photography features dynamic dramatic lighting, makes exquisite use of shadows, and places much emphasis on the gesture. Originally the film was silent; not only are there no intertitles but there's no dialogue and we don't even get a hint at what type of music is playing on the record player. The traditional Japanese percussion and woodwind soundtrack was added by her third husband Teiji Ito in 1959. Though Deren's work more than holds its own in silent form, this score understands what the film is trying to accomplish so well, fleshing out the physical states, the mood of paranoia and dread. Moreover, it matches the rhythms the segments are cut to so well that it's hard not to rate it slightly above At Land, which remains in and violence, imagination and causation.

Real and Surreal featuring an extraordinary collection of images

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand] also reviewing AT LAND

Kevin Patterson also reviewing AT LAND

Epinions [Ernest Brown] reviewing a series of short films

The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) reviewing a series of shorts

AT LAND

USA (15 mi) 1944

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

An imaginative dreamlike work of perspective and displacement that tells its story through a circling narrative pattern. Small revelations are gradually provided, but the film is far more concerned with structure than clarity. It starts by employing an unnatural rhythm, as although Deren is washed ashore like a sea creature the waves are breaking away from the beach. Deren liked to criticize ritual as well as deal with her outsider status (aside from working completely independent of commercial film she was a Jew who emigrated from Kiev to US at age 5). In this case there's a large dinner party but none of the snobbish guests notice her crawling the entire length of the table. Deren rotates between a series of scenes, all the others taking place on the island. This is a silent film with Deren giving no hint of the words when there is a conversation, but much of the fun lies in the ways she eliminates the need for sound. One example is the use of slow motion, which acts as an alternate heightening method. It also reveals the structure of motion, both physically with the repetition and mentally with the indecision and agony.

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand] also reviewing MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON

Kevin Patterson also reviewing MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) reviewing a series of shorts

RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME

USA (15 mi) 1946

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

After college Deren began working as an assistant to the famous dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, touring the US with her dance company. Her third completed short A Study In Choreography For Camera was a brief experiment in formal dancing that showed cinematically the camera plays a more important role in the choreography than the performers, even in cases where the performance is highly choreographed. The ritual here is probably Deren unwinding wool from a loom, but she is not the main focus here and the silent film is from shy Rita Christiani's perspective. Christiani is always an outsider whether she's entering Deren's apartment or a party, both at the invitation of others who appear to be more outgoing and approachable types. Fear of rejection is a key theme, with the film balancing this negative with the possibility of a friendship or especially sexual relationship as Christiani is constantly pursued by a suitor. At the party Christiani makes her way through the crowd much as a dancer would; it's typical Deren repetition and variation with Christiani growing increasingly more graceful, fluid, and demonstrative. This not only shows the link and similarity between dance and formal social ritual, but conversely that social ritual is ultimately a performance. Deren's post Hammid works are not considered to be nearly as good because they are largely finding varying ways to present the human form in athletic motion. However, this work bears more thematic similarity to Meshes of the Afternoon than it gets credit for. In a sense it's something of a reverse of Meshes with the man chasing the woman allowing for an examination into the internal (subconscious states and parallel realities) and external (wide open and closed in space).

Senses of Cinema Erin Brannigan

Strictly Film School Acquarello

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) reviewing a series of shorts

MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE

USA (12 mi) 1948

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Deren's first sound film uses Shaolin and Wutang forms to examine and obscure the distinction between violence and beauty. It starts out very plainly with a man (Chao Li Chi) in front of a white wall simply doing the fluid movements; it's meant to be relaxing with slower smooth forms to calming music. The film becomes more interesting as we are transported outdoors and the martial artist does similar motions with a sword, Teiji Ito's flute and oriental drum picking up the pace to match the increased speed and violence of the forms. Deren largely employs tight shots, and part of the reason the sword forms are more dynamic is the sword is always going in and out of the frame since it's lengthier than the arm. When she switches back to the weaponless forms the film is rolled in reverse, but with such fluid perpetual motion the difference is barely perceptible. This proves the Wu Tang philosophy that constant motion obscures forms to the point of formlessness. From a technical standpoint, the less interesting first portion was not so much from the man, but due to the more traditional manner in which he was filmed that required him to provide most of the action. Deren begins employing more angles and cuts during the second portion, and soon utilizes tricks such as a freeze frame in the middle of a death blow and alternating speed.

DIVINE HORSEMEN: THE LIVING GODS OF HAITI

USA (52 mi) 1985 co-directors: Teiji Ito (original footage with Deren), Cherel Ito (helped spouse with 1985 production)

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

Maya Deren's examination of Haitian voodoo rites is, according to Ruby Rich, "a film that conveys, perhaps for the first time, the power and beauty of voodoo free of both the false fantasies of Hollywood and the desensualized distance of ethnographers." Filmed between 1947 and 1951, the footage was assembled after Deren's death by her husband, Teiji Ito.

User Reviews from imdb Author: mikel006 from United States

A sublime and extraordinary documentary on Haitian Voudoun shot during the 50's by Maya Deren. While apparently only planning to bring back rare footage of ritual dance, the artist ended up writing a revealing book on Haitian Voodoun (by the same title) and becoming an actual initiate of the practice. This movie is a must see for anyone even the least bit curious about Voudoun religion or Haitian culture. During the movie you will learn about the various major Gods of the religion, their symbols, and their aspects. Most gripping is the drumming, the dancing, and the authentic footage of human possession taking place. Don't expect much of a plot, however expect footage and drumming that pretty much carries the entire film like a sublime adventure.

User Reviews from imdb Author: (andyetris@yahoo.com) from Philadelphia, PA

This is a fascinating look at the beliefs of Haitian Voodoo (or Voudoun) adherents, and explains the cosmology of this poorly understood religion. The "Divine Horsemen" are the gods (Loas) of voodoo. The nature of each Loa is explained, together with footage of rituals and signs dedicated to it.

Experimental filmmaker Maya Deren went to Haiti in the late 1940's and shot some 20,000 feet of film of Voodoo (or Voudoun) ceremonies, together with the attendant sound recordings. She published a monograph on her studies in 1953 under the name "Divine Horsemen," but this film was not actually edited for distribution until after her death in 1961.

Definitely worth seeing!

User Reviews from imdb Author: Ham_and_Egger from Indianapolis, Indiana

If it's Maya Deren you're interested in, and not voudoun itself, then you might want to shuffle this one to the bottom of your list. It's not terrible but it is distinctly reminiscent of those old "film strips" you had to watch in junior high (if you're my age that is).

As an educational film 'Divine Horsemen' gives you some good general knowledge about Haitian voudoun beliefs and practices. It's very sincere and respectful, showing an admirable refusal to sensationalize the material. This isn't voodoo from the movies, some of it may have been being "performed" for tourists but it's definitely the real stuff, including actual sacrifices of chickens, a goat, and a bull.

Somewhat surprisingly for a Maya Deren film 'Divine Horsemen' suffers from being a little too straight forward. It amounts to fifty minutes of a rather dry narrator talking over grainy black and white footage of various dances and sacrifices to the different loa. The biggest problem with the film is that it's almost all shot in slow motion, in stark contrast to the audio. I'm sure Deren wanted to show the grace of the dancers, which is definitely more apparent when they're at half speed, but forty-five minutes of fast drums and slow dancers wore on my nerves a little. It's so one dimensional that your mind can't help but wander a little, which is aided and abetted by the spectacular, and nearly constant, drumming. Not a good tactic if you're hoping to engage both eye and ear.

In the final analysis this film probably will give you a better basic understanding of voudoun than the typical A&E documentary, but it's just a little flat considering it deals with such a vivid subject. Not Maya Deren's most fascinating work by a long shot.

Despentes, Virginie and Coralie Trinh Thi

BAISÉ MOI (Rape Me)

France (77 mi) 2000

Baise-moi Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

It would be impossible to discuss Baise-moi without mentioning Abel Ferrara. Baise-moi is the kind of film that Ferrara would have made during the '70s, when Times Square was something more than a Disney theme park. Baise-moi is an audacious piece of feminist empowerment, a Dogma-style experiment that mixes in Russ Meyer playfulness with dramatic elements from numerous popular films, from Thelma & Louise to Natural Born Killers. It's polemical but completely unpretentious, unlike, say, Catherine Breillat's Romance and Leos Carax's Pola X. Baise-moi may appeal to extremists but this feminist howl is more necessary than ever because of the conservative retrenchment we're experiencing in this country. The film is less polished than Ferrara's Ms. 45 but if Zoe Lund ever aimed her gun lower and, say, into a man's ass, Baise-moi would be the result. Directors Coralie Trinh Tri and Virginie Despentes tell the story of a rape victim who goes on a countrywide killing spree with a female companion she randomly meets on the street. There isn't much of a plot but the attention to detail, however subconscious, is remarkable. While she's being raped, Nadine (Karen Lancaume) refuses to allow her rapist to see her squirm, evoking her reactionary spirit. Far more fascinating is the fact that the man stops raping her because of her act of retaliation. Baise-moi has been called irresponsible when it champions self-respect and moral responsibility. Save for the curious deaths of Nadine's best male friend and a woman on the street, every man in the film is murdered because of his bad behavior. Viciously hell-bent on avenging female scars, Baise-moi likens guns to female tools of empowerment, not unlike what men have between their legs. Even when Baise-moi is seemingly undermined by Thelma & Louise-style self-defeatism, the film ends on a hauntingly ironic note. Evocative, cocky and downright riveting, Baise-moi is exploitative 'til the every end. The directors strip one of their main characters of her final emotional release and suggest that a female's ownership of her body is an ongoing, elusive struggle.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Baise-moi (2000) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, May 2002

Baise-moi Nicole Brenez, translated by Aïcha Bahcelioglu, with assistance from Adrian Martin, originally appearing in Trafic n°39 (Fall 2001)

Baise Moi Gerald Peary

Desplechin, Arnaud

IFC Center Notes on a Desplechin Retrospective

From Arnaud Desplechin's first films in the early 1990s, he established himself as one of the great voices of contemporary filmmaking: a fearless, joyous auteur whose risky, exhilarating movies defy expectation at every turn. Working in a wide variety of genres (sometimes within the same film, or even the same scene), he marshals a dizzying array of references, from classical philosophy to Hollywood hokum, to create a cinema that mirrors the complexity and unruliness of life itself. While making 2004's KINGS AND QUEEN, he taped Francois Truffaut's maxim "Every minute, four ideas" to his wall for inspiration. Looking back at his body of work, it's clear that's been his guiding principle all along.

CINEMANIA MASTER CLASS with ARNAUD DESPLECHIN|LEÇON DE CINÃ

The CINEMANIA master class teaches us what the screen serves to conceal: the true, intimate intent of the director, his point of reference and spheres of influence as well as his style of writing and the directing of his actors.

Arnaud Desplechin is a consummate scriptwriter, a grand master of complex dialogue who guides his ensemble cast through the emotional essence of daily life. He’ll be revealing some of his directorial secrets to film students and the general public, who are bound to appreciate his unique camera work and his uncompromising ear for dialogue. Why and how does life and its depiction so inspire Arnaud Desplechin?

Arnaud Desplechin is the director and scriptwriter of films such as: A CHRISTMAS TALE (2008), KINGS AND QUEEN (2004), MY SEX LIFE… OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT (1996).

Times Square at the Crossroads of the World - The Films of Arnaud ... The Films of Arnaud Desplechin, by Kevin Filipski

The films of Arnaud Despleschin are as close to immersing oneself in a great novel as any filmmaker working today. Although he’s only made seven feature films since his 1991 debut, France’s Arnaud Desplechin has become one of the world’s most highly acclaimed film directors, thanks to his uncompromising, intelligent studies of warts-and-all characters. The IFC Center’s series Every Minute, Four Ideas: The Films of Arnaud Desplechin showcases a director who obviously makes films to please himself—and if viewers want to come along for the ride, that’s an added bonus.

Desplechin has made many types of films: a spy thriller, a period drama, a melodramatic soap opera (his new film, A Christmas Tale, which opens the day after this series ends) and even a cinematic essay about the difficulties of filming a play. But at the heart of his art are two long character studies.

The three-hour My Sex Life ... or How I Got into an Argument (1996) is his best film to date, a most revealing look at a group of twenty-somethings who are finding out what makes relationships work—even as their own are continuous demonstrations of infidelity and romantic failure—that’s among the most intimate "epic" films ever made. Fond of long takes, the director allows many scenes to play out in what seems to be real time; in order to pull this off successfully, any filmmaker has to trust his actors, and Desplechin has several of the best at his beck and call, led by his leading man—and, often, his cinematic alter ego—Mathieu Almaric has an uncanny ability to wring ever more minute gradations of emotion from his astonishingly mobile face. My Sex Life ... is an exhilarating, often exhausting ride through the lives of all-too-real characters who talk far differently than they act.

Kings and Queen (2004) has many of the Desplechin trademarks that illuminated My Sex Life: the presence of Almaric and that excellent actress Emmanuelle Devos, an imposing length (2-1/2 hours), and imaginative analysis of several characters. Yet, the problematic Kings and Queen is only fitfully satisfying, mainly because the two plots—when brought together after a lengthy buildup—don’t resonate as well as they do separately. Although Kings and Queen rarely reaches My Sex Life’s ecstatic highs, it underscores its director as a bold cinematic risk-taker.

Desplechin’s second feature is 1992’s La Sentinelle, a 140-minute mystery that continually flirts with–but never succumbs to–its genre’s clichés. Concentratating its energy on a medical student’s psychological changes once he finds himself in a bewildering situation that begins when he finds a shrunken human head in his luggage.

Desplechin’s lone English language film to date is 2000’s Esther Kahn, a beautifully detailed journey back to early 20th century London, where a young Jewish girl desperately wants to become a stage actress. There is much to admire in this ambitious film–including Howard Shore’s ingenious music and the stunning set design–but Esther Kahn is ultimately insufficient as drama and character study. Most damaging is Summer Phoenix as Esther, the kind of egregious miscasting that buries any well-intentioned film.

1991’s La Vie des Morts, the director’s 54-minute debut, also introduces several of the actors who would become regular members of his cinematic repertory company—aside from Emmanuelle Devos, there’s also Marianne Denicourt—while the 2007 documentary, L’Aimee, looks back to Desplechin’s family memories as his father plans to sell their beloved home. The rarely-seen Playing “In the Company of Men” continues Desplechin’s ongoing experimentation. This 2003 cinematic essay on the twin illusions of theater and film, from Edward Bond’s play, uses Paul Weller’s pop songs as a comment on the action.

It’s difficult to explain why Desplechin’s latest film, A Christmas Tale, ends up woefully short of his very best work. Although this melodrama about several generations of a French family for which “dysfunction” is too kind a description runs less than 2-1/2 hours—and so is short by the director’s standards—it recycles so many manipulative, ill-considered climaxes that it feels like it drags on far longer. For the first time in any of his films, Despleschin cheats, using shortcuts to explain (or explain away) these unlikeable, unlikely people: their predictable verbal and physical battles replace plausible character development and an honest examination of these relationships.

As usual, Desplechin’s cast is led by the always remarkable Mathieu Amalric, with equally formidable acting also turned in by the likes of Catherine Deneuve, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, and even the usually unreliable Chiara Mastroianni. But they cannot overcome their writer-director’s rare misstep.

A Christmas Tale might not be Desplechin at his most memorable, but he is one of the few directors today whose failures still merit our attention, as we await this singularly gifted artist’s next—and, let’s hope, better—film.

Arnaud Desplechin - uniFrance brief profile

Arnaud Desplechin Biography (1960-) Film Reference

Melbourne Cinematheque 2008 Bigger than Life: The World of Arnaud Desplechin

Arnaud Desplechin Filmography

Desplechin, Arnaud They Shoot Films, Don’t They

Soul Searching - Interview with Desplechin on Esther Kahn Andrea Meyer from indieWIRE, February 27, 2002, also seen here: DESPLECHIN, Arnaud

Of Myths and Man: A Conversation with Arnaud Desplechin Tom Hall interview from indieWIRE, May 12, 2005

Arnaud Desplechin an interview with the director by Jeff Reichert from Reverse Shot, Summer 2005

Bright Lights Film Journal | Interview with Arnaud Desplechin Damon Smith, August 2005

An Interview with Arnaud Desplechin | Reverse Shot Eric Hynes, Fall 2008

Twitch - A CHRISTMAS TALE—Interview With Arnaud Desplechin Michael Guillen, November 11, 2008, also seen here: The Evening Class

Interview: Arnaud Desplechin on "A Christmas Tale" | Film News ... By Aaron Hillis, November 11, 2008

Director Arnaud Desplechin Exclusive Video Interview A CHRISTMAS TALE Steve “Frosty” Weintraub, 2 part Video interview, November 21, 2008

Arnaud Desplechin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A CHRISTMAS TALE @ NYFF - Q&A with director Arnaud Desplechin 1/2 YouTube, Kent Jones interview October 11, 2008 (8:39)

A CHRISTMAS TALE @ NYFF - Q&A with director Arnaud Desplechin 2/2 (8:40)

LA VIE DES MORTS (Life of the Dead)

France (54 mi) 1991

Twitch (Michael Guillen) review also seen here: The Evening Class

French Cinema Now revival screening of Arnaud Desplechin’s rarely (if ever) seen first feature film Life of the Dead (La vie des morts, 1991) was a welcome meditation on the presence of the oak in the acorn.  It proved to be a perfect companion piece to A Christmas Tale for prefiguring many of the themes and methods expressed more fully in Desplechin’s critically-acclaimed recent work, including a family gathering pulled into the gravitational field of the death horizon via an attempted suicide.

Where Life of the Dead differs from A Christmas Tale is that the family has gathered for a death watch, instead of a competitive if not hopeful negotiation to save the life of their matriarch.  But the intrafamilial hatred is amusingly familiar in retrospect, including the embittered daughter Pascale (Marianne Denicourt) trying to rule the family brood through sheer animus if not animosity and Emmanuelle Devos as the girlfriend caught unwittingly wide-eyed in the crossfire.

Clocking in at a mere 54 minutes, Life of the Dead sketches characterizations of its immense ensemble but remains attractive for its sheer ambition and Desplechin’s creative compulsion towards stylistic density.  As Desplechin stated to Dennis Lim in a May 2005 Village Voice interview: “It’s a lot of work to have density—to fill the screen with details and small stuff, trying to imagine for each character a past and a future.  I think it has to do with a hunger and it goes back to my first film [La Vie des Morts].  I was scared to death that I would never make another one, and I wanted so much to work with actors, so even though it was very low-budget and we only had five days, I wrote more characters than I could really put in: 25 actors in this one-hour film.  I was hungry—I just wanted a lot of them, quantity not quality, different actors, different ages.” In his earlier review for the Voice, Lim characterized Life of the Dead as “a terse, acrid riposte to The Big Chill.”

”La Vie des morts reflects the existential need for reassurance through self-distraction and the conduct of everyday rituals within the collective crisis of imminent death,” writes Acquarello at Strictly Film School.

I need to commend the San Francisco Film Society for scoring this archival print for their newly-launched French Cinema Now series.  The opportunity to see such a rare film unavailable on DVD is a cinephile’s treat and a wonderful way to appreciate how Desplechin’s work has developed over the past decade and a half.

The Life of the Dead (Arnaud Desplechin, 1991) Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at Mubi, July 6, 2009

Village Voice Review (Dennis Lim) also including: Village Voice Interview (Dennis Lim)

Notes on the Cinema Stylographer: Arnaud Desplechin Archives Acquarello from Strictly Film School

La Vie des morts (1991) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

THE SENTINEL (LA SENTINELLE)

France (139 mi) 1992

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Uneven but fascinating movie in which a medical student from a diplomatic family suddenly finds himself the unexpected owner of a severed head, following which he's plunged into the dark confusing world of espionage. Too long for its own good, but packed with intriguing, beautifully observed details.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

One of a mounting number of brilliant young French directors currently emerging on the international scene, Arnaud Desplechin didn't get much attention in this country until his fourth film, 1996's My Sex Life...Or How I Got Into An Argument, a virtuoso three-hour ode to the romantic entanglements of overeducated, disaffected twentysomethings. Its strong reception has prompted the re-release of 1992's La Sentinelle, an intriguing and assured throwback to such paranoid post-Watergate American thrillers as The Conversation and The Parallax View, in which the lead character's private investigation winds up revealing just how much trouble he's in. Beginning, significantly, during the waning days of the Soviet Union, the film stars Emmanuel Salinger as a lonely student of forensic pathology who discovers a shrunken, mummified human head stowed in his suitcase. Obsessed with its origins, he conducts tests to figure out its identity for proper burial, and the closer he comes, the more outside forces begin to threaten his life. La Sentinelle could hardly be described as taut, but Desplechin's languorous pacing well suits his alarm over the casual, insidious execution of power after the Cold War. But apart from devising a somewhat convoluted thriller, he also provides a fuller portrait of Salinger's troubled social life; his isolation from his peers goes a long way in explaining his peculiar attachment to the shrunken head. While La Sentinelle doesn't end with a conventionally satisfying payoff, Desplechin's thoughtful and meticulously detailed direction offers many other rewards.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review

Anyone who saw the three-hour My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument (1997) when it showed at the Film Center last year knows that, for better and for worse, writer-director Arnaud Desplechin, born in 1960, has a generational voice, speaking for and about French yuppies in their late 20s and early 30s. The same is true of his only previous feature, The Sentinel (1992), an eerie 139-minute espionage thriller that has been accruing a cult reputation here and abroad (it's playing this week as part of Facets Multimedia's New French Cinema Film Festival). My Sex Life, for all its virtues, was a bit conventional and bland, but The Sentinel is genuinely crazy and a lot more interesting, mainly because it has a meatier subject: the end of the cold war and what this means to French yuppies.

"French yuppies" sounds condescending, but a lot more than the Atlantic Ocean separates Americans from the worldview of the French. It's been a long time since we've lived through a foreign invasion or occupation, and the sheer size of our country, like the size of Russia or China, deprives us of the more international perspective Europeans have. "We live on top of a billion corpses," says Mathias (Emmanuel Salinger), the hero of The Sentinel. "It's as if we spit on them. We want to forget them." He's speaking about the casualties of the cold war, but he doesn't use "we" the way Americans would, even when discussing the cold war. For one thing, he includes other Europeans and perhaps even Americans; when we say "we" we mean only Americans. (Case in point: A recent editorial in the Nation reports that UN sanctions against Iraq cause up to 7,000 infant deaths a month. This implies that "experts" have decided that writing off this many babies is necessary to achieve a "healthier" situation in the Middle East, though if someone reached that conclusion about 7,000 American babies a month for the greater good of North America, we might pause a little longer. Of course when the French say "we" they aren't including Iraqis either.) There's a more global use of "we" in Jacques Rivette's first feature, Paris Belongs to Us, made 40 years ago in the depths of the cold war; the tragedies that film alludes to include the communist invasion of Hungary as well as the blacklist that turned some Americans into exiles. Indeed, part of what kept me interested in The Sentinel was all the ways it echoes and contradicts the despairing paranoia of Rivette's film. I was especially intrigued by all the changes both films ring on the meaning of "we" and "us," beginning with Rivette's beautiful title.

Both films are structured around interlocking but separate groups of young people in Paris, who are connected by a central character on an obsessional quest. In Paris Anne is a naive Sorbonne dropout looking for an "apocalyptic" recording of guitar music by a Spanish exile who killed himself for unknown reasons, music she wants to contribute to an ambitious but underfunded stage production of Shakespeare's Pericles. In The Sentinel Mathias, who's less naive--the son of a deceased French diplomat in Germany who comes to Paris to study forensic medicine--discovers that someone has put a man's severed head in one of his suitcases, and he spends most of the remainder of the film trying to discover who the man was.

Both quests intersect with art as well as politics (The Sentinel adds science to the mix): Mathias' sister Marie (Marianne Denicourt) is seen rehearsing classical songs, and his sometime girlfriend studies art history--rough parallels to the characters who have theater rehearsals in Rivette's film. (Both films also highlight extended quotations from Shakespeare in English: The Tempest in Paris, Hamlet in The Sentinel.) Both heroes encounter corruption on both sides of the cold war and become increasingly implicated in the intrigues and counterintrigues and increasingly angry about their largely unwitting involvement. Yet in striking contrast to the familiar poetic Paris encountered by Rivette's characters, Desplechin offers a Paris drained of lyricism and historical nuance, with little atmosphere--only a succession of colorless interiors and exteriors.

Is this because Desplechin wants to comment on the drabness of the present, or is it because he has no lyricism of his own? How much is because of the class difference between Rivette's bohemians and Desplechin's yuppies? It's creepy but characteristic that this movie becomes most energized when Mathias is alone with the severed head--an amazingly convincing prop that, as some French critics have noted, is used in relation to the mystery plot the way the photograph is used in Blowup. The Sentinel also does a lot with the metaphorical relationship between making surgical incisions and defining national borders--it opens with an account of Churchill and Stalin in Yalta cynically slicing up eastern Europe--yet when it comes to creating a multinational milieu, which Paris Belongs to Us evokes so well, it seems stranded in a no-man's-land that seems French by default. Paradoxically its hero seems starved for the kind of metaphysics that menaced the characters in Rivette's film; without a clear system of good and evil--which one character associates with Cain and Abel--even difficult moral decisions seem to rule out the world at large.

A few Russian characters turn up in the plot, including a Russian Orthodox priest, and much is made of the Jewishness of one of Mathias' fellow interns. But no Americans or Germans of any consequence figure in the story, and only a couple of familiar French character actors--Jean-Louis Richard and Laszlo Szabo--link the milieus of this film to an older France. In other words, Desplechin has cultivated a historical and geographical conscience that we're unlikely to find in an American movie, but his remoteness from the lived experience of those vast reaches is part of what this thriller is ultimately concerned with. Like the terse and quasi-abstract chapter headings that structure the narrative--titles such as "remorse," "the ambassadors," "my best enemy," and "lone rider"--The Sentinel is limited as well as defined by an overall sense of being stranded, suggesting that the cold war, for all its horrors, offered a sense of time and place that younger generations no longer find accessible.

Paris Doesn’t Belong to us Anymore: Arnaud Desplechin’s Absurd ... Adam Bingham from Senses of Cinema

La Sentinelle (1992) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

not coming to a theater near you capsule review Evan Kindley

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson) dvd review

Boxoffice Magazine review Dale Winogura

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

MY SEX LIFE...OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT (Comment je me suis disputé...ma vie sexuelle) B 85

France (178 mi) 1996

An overlong examination of a group of intellectuals struggling to find meaning in their lives as they approach their thirties, which is a somewhat compelling dissection of their jealousy, love, and friendships. The central character, Mathieu Amalric, is a part-time philosophy professor who avoids adult responsibilities, confrontations, or relationships, and falls into a psychic neurotic guilt-trip when he falls in love with a beautiful woman, Marianne Denincourt, who chooses to marry his best friend instead, leaving him to grapple with a grad student interested in erotic violence, easily the most interesting person in the film, but also one of the most twisted. So what do we learn from all this? Not much.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

This subtle and startlingly imaginative film concerns the intersecting relationships between a group of 20 and 30-year-old Parisians, notably assistant university professor Paul (Amalric), who's torn between his long-term girl Esther (Devos), his best friend's girl (with whom he guiltily had a fling a couple of years ago), and another woman he meets at a party. Paul's problem is indecision, which is of little use to his friends, colleagues and lovers, and even more damaging to himself. What makes this intimate epic so fascinating is the depth of characterisation - it's beautifully acted - and the way both script and direction use small details to offer telling insights into the lives, emotions and aspirations of the group. Loneliness is economically but expertly evoked with a cup of coffee and Ravel on the soundtrack; a bizarre but highly original scene featuring a monkey, a radiator and an arrogant academic brilliantly blends black humour and psychological unease.

My Sex Life, or How I Got into an Argument Mike D’Angelo

Talky, charming and reasonably witty, My Sex Life, or How I Got into an Argument (** ½) would have made an excellent 90-minute film, I think. Instead, for reasons beyond my comprehension, it makes a so-so three-hour film. No, that isn't a typo; imagine a three-hour Whit Stillman film, only featuring neurotic self-conscious French intellectuals instead of neurotic self-conscious American preppies, and you've got the general idea. The acting throughout is French (i.e., superb -- I think I'll start using this adjective in other contexts), and there are scattered moments of inspiration (particularly a scene involving a pet monkey trapped behind a radiator), but writer/director Arnaud Desplechin's attempt at making an epic romantic comedy/drama simply doesn't work, and Eric Rohmer he ain't. Much of the verbal humor may well have been lost in the subtitled translation, though.

Boston Phoenix [Peg Aloi]

The erotic forays and existential musings of a tribe of Parisian late-twentysomethings unfold compelling under the inventive, hawk-eyed direction of Arnaud Desplechin, who also co-wrote the script. At the heart of a stunning ensemble cast is Mathieu Almaric as Paul Dedalus. Slightly built, fey-featured, Almaric is one of the more charming and mercurial antiheroes in recent movies.

An assistant professor of philosophy who can't finish his dissertation, Paul distracts himself with constant sexual crises. He believes his girlfriend of 10 years, Esther (the astonishingly good Emmanuelle Devos), is holding him back, yet he can't seem to break up with her. He briefly bedded Sylvia (played with diamond-hard sexiness by Marianne Denicourt), the provocative ice maiden girlfriend of best bud Nathan (Emmanuel Salinger), two years back and still guiltily covets her. But once Paul manages to send Esther packing, he hits on the volatile, hyper-needy Valérie (a brilliantly quirky Jeanne Balibar). He also wants ethereal Patricia (Chiara Mastroianni), the guileless girlfriend of his cousin/roommate Bob (Thibault de Montalembert), who constantly regales Paul with hilarious anecdotes of his own infidelities. The friends are together constantly, which makes for some exquisite sexual tension as they breezily quote Kundera and Kierkegaard over their café au lait.

But Paul's existence is not all sexual angst: the "argument" is with his ex-friend Rabier, a pretentious academic who lands a plummy job in Paul's department. Rabier's snubs catalyze Paul's frustration even as he continues his aimless sexual pursuits. Under Desplechin's sure hand, and realized by the actresses' superb portrayals, the complex personalities of Paul's conquests (all leggy brunettes with improbably high cheekbones) come to the fore, suggesting several alternate narratives shaped by their perceptions, not Paul's.

Three hours is a long time to watch a film about anyone's sex life, even one of those scruffy-but-cute French guys. But this intimate epic breezes by like a stroll along the Seine, shimmering with intelligence and intrigue.

Grad Canyon Amy Taubin from Artforum magazine, November 16, 2015

IT HAS TO BE the best movie title ever: My Sex Life… or How I Got into an Argument or, as it was reversed in the original French release, Comment je me suis disputé… (Ma vie sexuelle). But any way you parse it, the film to which the title belongs—Arnaud Desplechin’s second feature, released in 1996 and currently available only in a dark and wan DVD—is a delayed coming-of-age masterpiece and one of the great French post–New Wave films. Desplechin has revisited the central narrative of My Sex Life—Paul Dedalus’s tortured first love affair with the unsuitable Esther—in the 2015 My Golden Years, which will be released stateside in the spring. It would be splendid if My Sex Life were revived at the same time, or better yet, if some canny distributer would bring them out as a BluRay set.

My Golden Years is a cinematically bravura, emotionally rich memory piece about the formative years of a character who might be the director’s alter ego. My Sex Life, on the other hand, is fueled by anticipation. Immersive, wildly romantic (the first sound you hear is a half-second arpeggio straight out of Vertigo), recklessly disorganized, and epic in length, it is the work of a young filmmaker looking at a heterosexual, bed-hopping, near penniless clique of postgraduate Parisians who are not much younger than he was at the time.

At the center is Paul (Mathieu Amalric, looking like a dead ringer for Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network)—brilliant, self-involved, febrile, and terrified of commitment. Paul is five years late finishing his dissertation. Consequently, he doesn’t earn enough money through his adjunct teaching gig to afford his own apartment, which means he has never been able to live with Esther (Emmanuelle Devos), his girlfriend of ten years with whom he’s trying to break up. Paul’s problems are nothing if not overdetermined, and that includes his festering feud with a glib former classmate, Frédéric Rabier (Michel Vuillermoz), who is now the head of the philosophy department where Paul teaches. Frédéric shows up walking hand in hand with a monkey. Bad things happen to the monkey, generating a hilarious depiction of privilege in academia that would be farcical if it weren’t so true to form.

My Sex Life is filled with just such show-stopping set pieces: Paul’s paralyzing panic attack while walking in the woods, the bare branches dotted with ominous bird nests, the ambient music sounding suddenly like Stravinsky; Esther in the shower, watching her menstrual blood flow down the drain, her sudden awareness of her own agency upending the images of the victimized Marion in Psycho and the titular Carrie, the incarnation of the return of the repressed. Paul’s attempts to end his relationship with Esther involve him in guilt-producing affairs with Sylvia (Marianne Denicourt) and Valérie (Jeanne Balibar), the girlfriends respectively of his best friend and his cousin. Sex scenes abound, all of them fast and discreet. Conversations about sex make even more of an impression. In particular, Paul’s admission that what he loves more than anything is putting his hand into a woman’s underpants for the first time—“the surprise of what she feels like down there, the look on her face.” (Please excuse my translation.) I know many men who would agree, but I’ve never heard it said in a movie. It’s the giveaway that Paul, even after he completes his thesis, won’t commit to a relationship until he’s getting on in years and one of those women that he’s feeling up for the first time looks at him as if he’s a dirty old man. Which is the place he has just about reached in My Golden Years.

My Sex Life, which established Amalric as one of the most talented actors of his generation, is screening in the French Institute Alliance Française series “Mathieu Amalric: Renaissance Man,” a nearly complete retrospective of his work as an actor and as a director. It has included two performances of a play, Fight or Flight (Le Moral des ménages), a two-hander for Amalric and Anne-Laure Tondu directed by Stéphanie Cléau (the costar and cowriter of Amalric’s terrifying neo-noir The Blue Room). Literally a psychodrama, Fight or Flight is also a vehicle for Amalric, who is as compelling on stage as on the screen.

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

Arnaud Desplechin's My Sex Life … or How I Got Into an Argument was lavishly praised by several discerning film critics when it played at last year's New York Film Festival. But there was a disclaimer, inasmuch as no one could figure out how an almost three-hour-long film on the lives and loves of young Parisian academics would ever find an American distributor, much less great box-office success on even the rarefied art-house level. Because of time constraints, I missed the movie the first time around, and I was not looking forward to a three-hour expenditure of time with all the constraints still in place. I went, I saw, and I was richly exhilarated. No regrets at all.

Quite the contrary. As an academic and a Francophile, I completely identified with the film's often farcical and yet subtle relationships between young men and women on the same cultural level. Consequently, I was never bored. Still, I think the film has problems besides its length with its targeted art-house audience. For starters, the title is foolishly misleading. There is some sex, of course, but the movie is hardly drenched with it. Nor are the women ever treated as bimbos and brainless sex objects. If anything, they are stronger and more perceptive than the men. Yet, the silly title implies a male narcissistic obsession about getting laid, which is not the central issue at stake.

Another problem is that the film is more novelistic than dramatic, never quite reaching a climax, but spreading its insights around several characters and shifting its point of view with impunity. Since most of the academics are involved with one branch of philosophy or another, there is a natural tendency to theorize endlessly rather than act abruptly or even instinctively. The mind plays games with the senses, and no one is ever quite sure what anything means exactly.

What is fresh and original about the film is its profound respect for academic achievement despite the familiar absurdities of academic careerism. In England and America particularly, novelists, dramatists and filmmakers cannot look at university life with a straight face, particularly when the faculty is the center of attention. I laugh as loudly as anyone at novelist David Lodge's satiric thrusts at my undeniably pompous profession, but I am glad nonetheless that there is at least one young French filmmaker treating the subject seriously, though not with undue solemnity.

Paul (Mathieu Amalric) is introduced to us as a 29-year-old assistant professor of philosophy at a university in Paris. Paul never wanted to be a teacher, aspiring instead to a career in writing. He therefore has been blocked by his own indecision from completing the doctoral thesis that would make him a full professor. In the course of the film, we are given to understand that he is fully capable of writing the thesis, and, in so doing, making a distinguished contribution to his field of study. In Hawksian terms, he is good enough to deliver the goods. This in itself marks a welcome change from the anti-elitist conventions of the genre.

Paul's love life is something else again. He has been involved with Esther, a translator, for 10 years, but he has wanted to terminate the relationship almost as long. Meanwhile, he has had a brief affair with his best friend's girlfriend, Sylvia (Marianne Denicourt), but his conscience wouldn't let him continue the betrayal. This is merely the beginning of a series of adventures in elective affinities swirling around a score of psyches, each with a distinctive approach to the problem of existence in a post-existential world.

The final problem facing My Sex Life at the American box office is the lack of any journalistic catch phrase like "New Wave" to give a cachet to a new generation of filmmakers, among them Mr. Desplechin, who deserves the kind of acclaim granted in the past to Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and the other luminaries of Cahiers du Cinéma and the Nouvelle Vague . Mr. Amalric bears a slight resemblance to Christian Slater, but in a role Hollywood would never consider suitable for Mr. Slater or anyone else. The lack of familiar names in the cast of My Sex Life does not indicate a lack of dazzling talent. The film is running at the Walter Reade Theater Sept. 17-26. It may be your last chance to see it.

MY SEX LIFE... Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Film Scouts (Karen Jaehne) capsule review at Cannes

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review

Boxoffice Magazine review Ed Scheid

DVD Talk (Chris Hughes) dvd review [2/5]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Comment je me suis disputé (ma vie sexuelle) (1996) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

ESTHER KAHN A- 94

Great Britain France (163 mi) 2002 US edited version (145 mi)

This still remains my favorite Desplechin film for the curious originality and sheer unusualness of it, an extremely dense, somber, and complicated costume drama that unravels quite slowly, revealing excruciating detail, like the attention paid in a novel, where watching this film IS like watching a novel unfold. While I didn't care much for the narrator which felt out of balance with the rest of the performances, this film features some of the best ensemble acting I have ever seen, and the lead, Summer Phoenix, is fabulous. Her innocence and naiveté some might find implausible, sort of a cross between Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. I can buy that critique, but she's still fabulous, partially because she's unlike anything I've ever seen before.

This film is exquisitely beautiful, filmed by Eric Gautier, never telegraphing its intentions, remaining oblique, idiosyncratic, and always surprising. Despite it's length, the film never reveals more than it needs to. At 163 minutes, it's extremely concise, to a fault, I'd say, which is one of the wonders of this film. It's filled with brief moments, beautifully conceived vignettes that are simply stunning, some of the best you're likely to see all year, all of which add up to a highly distinctive film experience. The family moments are unique, Ian Holm is brilliant, and what this film suggests about the theater hasn't been seen in films since Cassavetes' OPENING NIGHT (1977) or perhaps Chaplin's LIMELIGHT (1952). But, believe it or not, this film is much "less" conventional. I never knew where this film was going, and now, having seen it, it still has multiple possibilities. This is a powerful, incredibly provocative film.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

A distinct disappointment after Desplechin's earlier work, this is an ambitious but misguided adaptation of a novel about a young and wholly unremarkable Jewish girl, emerging from London's East End towards the close of the 19th century to become, through sheer determination, a celebrated actress. The film founders mainly on Desplechin's shaky grasp of English: the dialogue is full of implausible profanity, the director's brother is less than convincing as a theatre critic, while Summer Phoenix, shaky accent, awkward intonation, shallow performance and all, never convinces for a moment, let alone as a triumphant Hedda Gabler. Holm and Barber, and Howard Shore's score briefly counteract the overall clumsiness, but in the end that's nowhere near enough to save a doomed project.

The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]

A counterexample on the acting front, Arnaud Desplechin's perplexing Esther Kahn is an English-language costume drama set in late-19th-century London. It stars Summer Phoenix as the eponymous heroine, who decides to escape the Jewish ghetto by going on the stage. Given her tight, shrill voice, clumsy posture, and blocked emotional responses, it's inconceivable that she would have been allowed an entry to the English theater of that period. But not only is she accepted into a repertory company, she becomes its star. Desplechin devotees, myself among them, can spin this film (Cahiers du Cinema's favorite of 2000) in any number of ways. Could it be about the relationship between the art of acting and self-discovery through action in the larger existential sense? Is it a deliberate attempt to evoke the dearth of complex characters in contemporary film by creating a personage so unpleasant that we can't help but pay attention to her? Is it about the unimportance of talent compared with the mulish desire to succeed? I've seen Esther Kahn twice, and I haven't come to any conclusions, but I look forward to trying it again, if only for the scene in which Esther, in a paroxysm of stage fright, eats broken glass. That's a moment of truth, even if she never manages to channel her dressing-room agony into her performance.

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

The exquisite yet demanding "Esther Kahn" is one of the most unusual and persuasive explorations of the flowering of an actor. It unfolds in a low-key manner in the mind of its title character, for whom life does not become real until she discovers the theater. It is also a superbly evoked period piece set in London at the turn of the 20th century, where Esther (Summer Phoenix) grows up in grim, industrial East End as one of four children of a poor Jewish immigrant tailor (Laszlo Szabo).

From earliest childhood Esther feels detached from her family, whose home is also its sweatshop. While the rest of the family lives a hard-working everyday existence, she seems as if she is sleepwalking, going through the motions and feeling nothing. Yet as she matures into a dark-haired beauty, she ponders such philosophical questions as "If I am dreaming, how can I know the world exists?" Will she ever experience "real life"? she wonders. Paradoxically, she receives her answer when she attends her first play, a florid Yiddish production staged in a quaintly baroque theater. At last, life seems real to her, but at the same time she realizes the play's leading actress is terrible. In a flash, she analyzes all that's wrong with her performance and suddenly senses she could do it herself and do it right. It's not long before Esther, now a factory worker, has won her first chance to act. Her supreme self-confidence and sure intuition guarantee a swift rise in the theater.

What makes "Esther Kahn" so demanding is that it progresses in such a low-key manner that it risks monotony. But it's worth the concentration because all the while, writer-director Arnaud Desplechin and his co-writer, Emmanuel Bourdieu, in adapting an Arthur Symons short story, are building to a grand climax.

Phoenix meets the challenge of making so reticent and affectless a woman as Esther alive and involving with her beauty and intelligence, and the glimpses we have of Esther acting on stage are also impressive. Desplechin has said he was inspired by Truffaut's "The Wild Child" in the way he views Esther and her coming of age amid such strong feelings of alienation from her family and environment.

Esther may be self-absorbed in her art, but she takes everything in, especially from Fabrice Desplechin's Phillip as a suave, sophisticated drama critic who becomes her mentor and coach. Esther is appreciative of Phillip, but the more captivated she becomes by all that he teaches her, the less attention she pays to him as a lover. Ian Holm has the crucial role of a kindly veteran actor in the "Hedda Gabler" production who warns her that she "can't refuse life."

"Esther Kahn" begins as a shadowy film that progresses from dark to increasing light. It has been stunningly photographed by Eric Gautier and has a wonderfully expressive score composed by Howard Shore.

As an engaging portrait of an actress and life in the theater, "Esther Kahn" recalls William Wyler's masterful, underrated "Carrie," with Jennifer Jones and Laurence Olivier, and John Turturro's 1999 "Illuminata," a rhapsodic celebration of love and life in theater, set in 1905 Manhattan.

But in its understated tone and concern for a performer's interior life and imagination "Esther Kahn" is closer in spirit to Stanley Kwan's "Actress," about the life of a Shanghai film star of the '20s and '30s, Ruan Ling-yu, and also Kon Ichikawa's "Actress," about the great Japanese screen star Kinuyo Tanaka, famed for her collaborations with master director Kenji Mizoguchi. "Esther Kahn" is arguably more venturesome and insightful than any of them.

a review of Esther Dan Sallitt from Tone and Groove

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Slate [David Edelstein]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review

DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [2/5]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

filmcritic.com (Athan Bezaitis) review [2.5/5]

Esther Kahn (2000) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Political Film Society review Michael Haas

Soul Searching - Interview with Desplechin on Esther Kahn Andrea Meyer from indiWIRE, February 27, 2002

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]

Guardian/Observer review

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

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

KINGS AND QUEEN (Rois et Reine) B+ 91

France (150 mi) 2004 ‘Scope

The cycle of woes is over

A film that, in the making of the film, started with the father’s letter, which is read near the end of the film, which is a no holds barred attack on his daughter’s character, a hate letter per se, which she discovers in his manuscripts only after he dies, after she has emotionally endured the exhausting agony of taking care of him during his last hours of pain and anguish, suffering from terminal cancer. Her father (Maurice Garrel) was a writer, the family caretaker, the provider, the patriarch, the one from whom others depended. Without him, she wonders how to fill that void. She, (Nora) the always over-wrought Emmanuelle Devos, is entering into a loveless relationship with a generous and affluent man who can provide for her material needs, a fate she seems destined to meet, as she needs to provide for her eight-year old son who has little affection for this step-father figure who he views as little more than a stranger. The film opens to the quite noticeable soundtrack of “Moon River,” an Audrey Hepburn tribute from BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961), suggesting this character of Nora is overly cheerful in the face of despair, never really acknowledging her inner pain or discontent, always acting like a queen, looking at the bright side, despite the fact she’s had two failed relationships that leave her in the position that she’ll settle for something like comfort and security instead of love.

Enter a side story about Ismaël, Mathieu Amalric, the much more interesting half of this film, who does not appear until nearly an hour into the story, a king who is always the center of attention, who surrounds himself with voyeurs. He is greeted at the door by white-coated mental health attendants who are escorting him to the hospital for an evaluation, a loopy scene of slapstick mixed with the ridiculous, all the while trying to maintain his rational demeanor, suggesting there is nothing wrong with him. But they take him kicking and screaming, and sedate him, despite his claims that he’s allergic to morphine. His doctor at the hospital is none other than Catherine Deneuve, who engages in a tug of war of wits with a less than cooperative patient, who refuses to confide anything, claiming “women have no souls.” Asked for a definition, he responds, “A soul is a way of negotiating on a daily level with the issue of Being” which could easily suffice as setting the moral tone for this film. Apparently, he only wants to get back to his love of playing the viola, but someone has initiated his institutionalization by TPR, third-party-request, which turns out to be his own cousin who is tired of his self-serving antics and uses this overly theatrical and hateful method to kick him out of his musical quartet and basically tell him to get lost.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the two halves of the story meet, much of it, in my view, overly idyllic, continuing to hover in the world of the ridiculous, not particularly honest or real, especially concerning the interests of the child, who, near the end, while undergoing yet another emotional upheaval in his life, accepts it with a surprising amount of calm and passivity, offering little or no complaint. However, much of the film is extremely funny, with several sequences that are brilliant, such as Ismaël’s hip-hop dance therapy, or his indecisive personal involvement with a suicidal inmate (Magali Woch), or the hyper-kinetic scenes with his pill-addicted lawyer who is attempting to protect him from a tax investigation, as he has a history of writing bad checks. There are several key moments near the end of the film where one is unable to distinguish between projections of fantasy and reality, such as Ismaël’s farewell scene at the hospital or the father’s near miracle rise from his hospital bed to finish work on his final memoirs, culminating in his out of body reading of his death letter to Nora, sending her back to the empty existence of Ibsen’s Doll’s House, apparently jolting her into forever spending the rest of her life avoiding confrontations.

The film veers all over the place and just tries to do too much, never successfully coming to terms with its hyper-emotional excess which always prevents us from discovering the inner world of any character. Even the devastating letter which the father reads, which seems to reflect his inner core, as after all, it’s a death message, what could be more honest? Yet there seems to be no justification for this personal outrage. It comes out of nowhere. Is it rooted to anything else in the film? It’s a mystifying peculiarity that’s left to clutter the landscape of unanswered questions with implausible solutions. It’s all inter-connected, yet nothing is really connected. This ambitious film has a stylish way of advancing the story, but ultimately it’s an overblown family drama that leads us nowhere. It’s a film that attempts to tell us something about the tenuous state of relationships, how so much seems to hang on a single thread, using the Jean Eustache confessional mode, but omitting the essential ingredient of raw honesty, replacing it with emotional hyperbole that, while interesting, is no substitute for the real thing.

Time Out London review

Resembling, at least on first glance, the skittish outpourings of a crackpot fabulist, Arnaud Despleschin’s tumultuous return to the form of ‘Ma Vie Sexuelle’ teems with life, art, myth and madness; it’s a careening modern relationships melodrama that undercuts the usual routines of French chamber cinema with left turns into ghost story, bedlam burlesque, cornershop shootout and even a madcap rap moonwalk. The film knocks between two ex-lovers, Nora and Ismael (Despleschin regulars Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric), whose lives have taken paths nearly as divergent as their outlooks on them. Nora thinks that her story is the stuff of romantic literature, and frames it with self-authorial and self-authorising commentary (‘I’ve loved four men in my life; I’ve killed two of them,’ she ’fesses at one point). Persons unknown think Ismael’s recent turns are stuff for the psychiatric ward, and we first meet him failing to fend off two white-coated callers by dropping references to Apollinaire (they’re more interested in the noose hanging in his living-room). Before his drug-popping, live-wire lawyer (Hippolyte Girardot) prises him free, Ismael has a doozy of a scene where he explains to his doctor (Catherine Deneuve, no less) his theory that women have no souls: they live in bubbles, aimlessly, whereas men ‘live to die’. But here he’s the freewheeling radical, whereas Nora seems more the methodical freeloader. Prospecting a third husband, she discovers that her father is full of cancer and bile, which leads her back to Ismael as a caretaker for her son Elias. A jitterbug web of subtly rhyming recriminations, wrong-footing revelations and the odd reconciliation, the film is enrapturing to watch, full of appositely grandstanding performances and tumbling improvisatory technique. It insists that life is large and absurd, that we are gods and monsters, and that we stymie ourselves in our masks and guises; it’s majestic movie-making.

Peter Bradshaw The Guardian, June 10, 2005

Four years ago, French director Arnaud Desplechin baffled us with his calamitous English-language Victorian drama Esther Kahn, a tailor's-dummy of a period piece starring Summer Phoenix. But two years after that, he returned to form with Playing in the Company of Men, an intriguing adaptation of Edward Bond, which in keeping with Bond's neglect in this country, is unreleased in the UK. Now Desplechin has a resounding success with this rich, complex and deeply pleasing movie: a serio-comic diptych showing a pair of ex-lovers' parallel lives.

Kings and Queen errs occasionally on the side of garrulity and whimsy, but its imaginative licence is often superb and it is outstandingly acted by Emmanuelle Devos as Nora, the beautiful art gallery director whose father (Maurice Garrel) is dying, and Mathieu Amalric as her turbulent former partner Ismaël, a manic depressive musician who begins the movie being carted off to an institution, where his fractious mental state is assessed by a droll psychiatrist, played in cameo by Catherine Deneuve.

This is a film about secrets: when she was 20 and pregnant, Nora's boyfriend died, and his violent death is shrouded in a mystery which she has maintained for decades, a deception in which her father has made himself complicit, and he too nurses a festering secret in his heart. Desplechin's great coup de cinéma comes in a strange and beautiful scene in which this dead lover appears to the middle-aged Nora in a dream-vision, in his early 20s, just as when she knew him. It is a poignant confrontation with a miraculously forgiving past. Ismaël's story is more the stuff of knockabout comedy: banged up in his hospital, he gets to flirt and have sex, and is allowed visits from his disreputable and drug-addicted lawyer.

This tangled, painful story is unpicked with easy calm by Desplechin, whose triumph lies in making us care for these difficult characters with their porcupine-quills of personal hurt. I think anyone who loved Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections will love this - and also anyone who loves intelligent French cinema.

Rois et reine Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix, also seen here: The Boston Phoenix review

A woman asks an ex-lover to adopt the young son she had by another man, who died before the son’s birth and whom she married in a posthumous ceremony. That’s one version of the story told in Arnaud Desplechin’s Rois et reine. A second is: while struggling to cope with the imminent death of her father, who has just been diagnosed with inoperable cancer, a woman receives a visit from the ghost of her husband. Questions arise about the husband’s death. Was it an accident? Was it suicide? If the latter, did she somehow drive him to it? Was it murder?

A third version might center on the ex-lover, a violist who is committed to a mental hospital. But his story — a farrago of adventures — is less easy to describe. Now is the time to inform readers (better late than never) that the woman is named Nora and is played by Emmanuelle Devos and that the ex-lover, Ismaël, is played by Mathieu Amalric. And at the same time I might as well admit that the story of Rois et reine, one of the most brilliant films of recent years, can’t be synopsized and that much of the interest of the film lies not just in trying to keep up with it but in trying to formulate it and recount it to yourself as you watch.

Rois et reine is all about tonal shifts and small adjustments in point of view that make it impossible to sum up a character or what’s happening with him or her at any moment. Narrated on multiple planes of present, past, and possible past (and possible present?), Nora’s troubles with the men in her life accumulate more and more-complicated ambiguities as the film goes on. These ambiguities become so sinister that this person who at first seems so easy to sympathize with becomes plausible as the "monster of egotism" she’s charged with being (in a message from the dead that gives the film its most lacerating scene). In a radical and subtle decentering, Desplechin cuts between scenes involving Nora and scenes involving Ismaël, who confronts her descent into moral chaos with his increasing mastery of his own situation.

The head of the mental hospital (Catherine Deneuve) tells Ismaël that his behavior is "excessive." But he isn’t the only one of whom this can be said: in scene after scene, Desplechin’s jump cuts keep aiming the film at one after another form of behavioral excess: a pop-eyed orderly’s theatrical manner; the freakish exultation of Ismaël’s prescription-drug-popping lawyer; the rage of Ismaël’s embittered sister, who may be the mysterious third party who had him committed; a nurse’s overstimulation with Ismaël’s breakdancing skill and his charm; the hysteria of Nora’s lover, Pierre, on being abruptly awakened.

It’s a film of disproportionate reactions, or reactions whose fitness we’re unable to measure because Desplechin never gives us the whole context. (And part of the meaning of the film is that since the whole context can never be known, people must, and do, invent the contexts that suit them,) Nora’s reactions are more inordinate than anyone’s. "I brought you up not to show your feelings," her father tells her. In fact, she shows emotions all the time, three or four per scene; her face changes constantly (Devos’s performance is stunning, as is, in a different register, Amalric’s), but Desplechin makes it a question whether these are the emotions she feels or whether she’s trying them out.

The film begins and ends with a guitar rendition of "Moon River," alluding to Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which introduced the Henry Mancini perennial. The benign song bounds the fragmented, unstable world of Rois et reine within a pastoral frame and suggests another way to recount its story: as a journey of "two drifters off to see the world, . . . after the same rainbow’s end." The sublime and hopeful final section doesn’t deny the distressing tragicomedy that has gone before but puts it in a fresh perspective and lets its contradictory elements resonate with one another. Which is a way of letting the rainbow’s end belong to the viewer.

Gods on Earth: The Players of Kings and Queen Lesley Chow from Senses of Cinema

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Bright Lights Film Journal review Thinking (And Talking) It Through, Part I, Damon Smith, August 2005

Bright Lights Film Journal review The Disturbance of the Real, Part II, A. Jay Adler, August 2005

Reverse Shot (Nick Pinkerton) #2 Film of the Year

indieWIRE review Michael Koresky with responses by Brad Westcott and James Crawford from Reverse Shot review

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

DVD Outsider Slarek

DVD Times Noel Megahey

The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias

eFilmCritic.com (Brad Wilber) review [4/5]

DVD Verdict (Jesse Ataide) dvd review

Bright Lights Film Journal (Robert Keser) review

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Janos Gereben

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review David Ng

Kamera.co.uk review Antonio Pasolini

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson) dvd review

The Cinema Source (Alysa Salzberg) review [B+]

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4.5/5]

Rois et reine (2004) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) review

The L Magazine [Nicolas Rapold]

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [3.5/5]

Boxoffice Magazine review Sherri Linden

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [A]

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [2/5]

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

FilmExposed review Jimmy Razor

About.com [Marcy Dermansky]

Bright Lights Film Journal (Megan Ratner) review

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Deborah Young) review

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]

Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

DVDBeaver.com [Henrik Sylow]

A CHRISTMAS TALE (Un Conte de Noël) A- 94

France (150 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

Desplechin is one of the best directors to come out of France in decades and has never actually made a bad film, though I’m not sure he’s ever hit one out of the park either, so much of his appreciation lies in personal taste. Making relatively few films, he’s already established a reputation for writing intelligent scripts, some co-written by Cahiers du Cinéma writer Emmanuel Bourdieu, that exhibit comic wit and a flair for dialogue as well as unusual character developments, exquisite cinematography from Eric Gautier, and superb performances by individuals as well as ensemble casts. He has spent his life creating vivid characters, but this masterful work actually feels like the summation of his entire career, as he’s working with a Who’s Who of some of the best actors currently working in France. There’s a broad, epic sweep to this film where the story unravels one by one through various character vignettes in circular motion, as if designed using a working method where patience is the greatest virtue, as eventually everyone shares the spotlight. It bears resemblance to Bergman’s family dramas, especially those wonderful family scenes in FANNY AND ALEXANDER (1982). While it doesn’t contain the depth of arguably one of Bergman’s best, it does share a love for placing his own family dysfunction front and center, not looking back in bitterness, but with a wide-eyed adoration of just how wonderfully human family gatherings tend to be during the holidays, where the house is filled with wine and spirits along with special food dishes, mother and grandmotherly affections, sibling rivalries, eccentric uncles, children left to their own devices, but also impressive though amateurish theatrical shows that generate applause along with neverending music filling up the rooms with a special warmth and a lived-in atmosphere. No one described this holiday scene any better than Joyce in his final Dubliners short story, The Dead, a work which finalized John Huston’s film career in 1987, but Desplechin does wonders with his own version.

The storyline of this sprawling work does not bear repeating here, though it’s impossible not to relish Catherine Deneuve in an icy role as the refreshingly candid unmotherly matriarch and Mathieu Amalric as the bad seed of the family, the gloriously ungrateful son she detests the most, as both are utterly sublime together. Think back at Minnelli’s portrait of an American family in MEET ME IN ST LOUIS (1944) and compare that to the profane insults (even toasts!) and down and dirty backstabbing that become the centerpiece of this film, and one has to wonder just what has happened to the cinematic portrayal of the family unit in the last half century? Yet for all the ugliness and turmoil and deep-seeded resentments, there’s a surprising civility expressed in this film, perhaps best represented by Deneuve’s suicidal grandson (Emile Berling) who barely speaks but is highly effective showing the unintentional harmful repercussions of family dysfunction and years of abuse, yet responds with a near angelic gentle disposition. Throw in another gorgeous look at Chiara Mastroianni, as charming as ever, still trying to straighten out whatever it was that happened behind the scenes of her marriage years ago, as it entails no less than three different family members. Emmanuelle Devos deftly plays Amalric’s girl friend, walking a fine line as perhaps the only person on the planet who sees something in him worth holding onto, while Jean-Paul Roussillon plays the jovial, jazz loving patriarch who couldn’t harm a soul. Without revealing more, there are brief literary passages from Nietzsche to Shakespeare, superb examples of American jazz and a rock the house deejay on display, as well as that wonderful opening motif used in Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One can’t help but think of the charm and French humanist cinema of Jean Renoir, as Desplechin blends bitter episodes of dark anguish with utterly surprising moments of spontaneous hilarity, cleverly interweaving the past into the present, creating an exhilarating family portrait seething with life. I was surprised at how easily Desplechin pulls out all the stops in his latest work, a surprisingly dark and obsessive tale that couldn't have been presented in a more positive light, simply a delight. 

George Christensen at Cannes:

Starting the day off at 8:30 with Arnaud Desplechin's 2 1/2 hour “A Christmas Tale” was going to be an early test in the festival of whether I've been getting enough sleep.  Mathieu Amalric of last year's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was among its array of French stars in another movie featuring someone with a very serious medical problem.  It isn't him this time, but rather his mother, Catherine Deneuve.  She seems perfectly fine, showing no signs of the cancer that could claim her within months unless she receives a bone marrow transplant. The problem is she has an extremely rare blood type.  Her doctors have been searching far and wide for a donor.  Amalric is a prospect but he had been banned from his family five years previously, so isn't so eager to cooperate.  There are no earth-shaking plot twists, just a French movie with a lot of conversation that remarkably maintains interest.  This movie won't win any prizes, just the affection of French audiences.

CHRISTMAS TALE, A (Un conte de Noël) Ken Rudolph

This was a very complex story about a dysfunctional family's Christmas time get-together.  Like all the previous Desplechin films I've watched, it is smart, talky, emotionally distancing yet fascinating.  It has a large, fantastic cast, headed by Catherine Deneuve, Mattieu Amalric and (a personal favorite) Melvil Poupaud.  For me, this 2 1/2 hour exercise in family dynamics capped a great day of filmgoing.  But I'll leave it to others to analyse this film.

eye WEEKLY capsule review [4/5] Jason Anderson

The French director’s follow-up to his masterful Kings and Queen can be a right mess at times but this Christmas story’s sheer abundance of wit, warmth and wisdom makes is very engaging. The cast’s evident enthusiasm is also infectious, with Deneuve and Amalric proving to be very worthy adversaries as a mother and son who have a peculiarly hostile relationship. Even though the relations among the rest of the clan’s members are not quite so testy as they gather for the holidays, there’s still plenty of hectic business and unexpected digressions, some of which turn out to be blind alleys. But amid the chaos lie many magical moments, largely conjured up by Chiara Mastroianni as a woman who discovers she might’ve picked the wrong mate.

User comments from imdb Author: postcefalu from Spain

After his impressing "Kings and queen" in 2004, Arnaud Desplechin proves that he's the best director come out from France in the last two decades with this exhilarating, moving, awfully brilliant "A Christmas tale". Following the path of its previous feature, the movie mixtures very hard scenes of desperation and hatred feelings with moments of absurd joy in an structure full of elliptical jumps from the past to the present and back again to the memories of another time. There's nothing new in his cinema and this is perhaps the only problem, that everything is well known yet; this is the first time that happens and today i think i have enjoyed very much the film but maybe it's time to spin around again and cut across another new ground. Desplechin knows the way.

The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) capsule review [3/4]

It sure ain't the Christmas ol' Dickens imagined. The Vuillards are a Parisian family of dysfunctional overachievers, bizarre enough to make The Royal Tenenbaums clan look like candidates for a Hallmark card. As they gather for the festive season, and ghosts of tragedies past compete with demons of time present, the battleground is drawn. Of course, this being France, irony and a certain insouciant hauteur are the weapons of choice. And don't expect a grain of sentimentality — the candour in this crowd borders on the brutal. Led by Catherine Deneuve as the least maternal of mamas, the cast is uniformly sound and the direction always crisp, even through a 2 1/2-hour journey. Yep, this is intriguing fare, illuminating in its very nastiness, but the thing should come with an advisory: For the sake of our seasonal sanity, please open well before Christmas.

Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE

Rainy days here in Cannes may have dampened morale, but the films, and a much-needed burst of sunshine on Sunday morning, have boosted critics' spirits. Aside from "Blindness," Fernando Meirelles' apocalyptic opener, which received a mixed response, this year's competition slate has yielded a satisfying crop of art-cinema--though no masterpieces have yet emerged. Critical consensus has Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" as the competition's front-runner so far, though the animated Israeli drama "Waltz with Bashir," which screened on day two, also played extremely well.

Like "Kings and Queen," Desplechin's previous look at family legacy and dysfunction, "A Christmas Tale" is a carousing, innovative glimpse into the fragmented Vuillard family. After six years away from each other, the clan comes together for the sake of their matriarch (Catherine Deneuve), recently diagnosed with leukemia and in need of a bone marrow transplant from one of her brood: the melancholic, controlling eldest Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), the obnoxious, alcoholic middle-child Henry (a scene-stealing Mathieu Amalric) and the vulnerable youngest Ivan (Melvil Poupaud). Predictably, the family's coming together creates psychological mayhem for all those involved, but Desplechin takes the holiday reunion melodrama and flips its every which way, cutting away from scenes before you expect and utilizing a host of cinematic tricks, from irises to direct-camera monologues to enliven the proceedings. The result is vertiginous and anything but expected. Witty, profound and highly literate--with references from "A Midsummer's Night Dream" to Friedrich Nietzsche, the film is both a uniquely emotional and intellectual experience, as much about familial relationships as death, despair and madness.

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

Arnaud Desplechin doesn't so much direct movies as conduct marathons. Packed with frantic gestures, free-associative allusions and titanic meltdowns, his films are unwieldy, bracingly omnivorous creatures—as exhilarating as they are exhausting. A Christmas Tale crams enough drama in its preamble (sibling rivalry, deaths, a family's history of illness) for two or three productions, and that's just the backstory for this sprawling yet intimate portrait of a tension-cracked familial get-together. The Vuillard household over Christmastime sets the stage—sometimes literally, as theatricality remains one of Desplechin's chief motifs—for a whirlwind of overlapping fights, secrets and reunions precipitated by the matriarch Junon's (Catherine Deneuve) revelation that she has cancer and needs a bone marrow transplant from one of her children. Getting the entire clan to the dinner table is itself a challenge, since playwright daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) has banished her fuck-up brother Henri (Mathieu Amalric) from the family, an uncomfortable surprise threatens youngest son Ivan's (Melvil Poupaud) marriage to Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni), and grandson Paul (Emile Berling) is still shaken from a suicide attempt.

Nominally set in the dysfunctional holiday-gathering provinces of Pieces of April and The Family Stone, Desplechin's tragicomedy is closer to the director's earlier Kings and Queen in its labyrinthine private mythologies and spilling-over energy. Confining itself to the Vuillards' home, however, the film is both more focused and in its discordant way more expansive, finding an unforced metaphor for parent-child dynamics in Junon's surgery and accommodating the cantankerous warmth of paterfamilias Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillion) and the mordant irony of Henri's Jewish squeeze Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos) with equal affection. Desplechin's love for his characters is compounded by his fervidly eclectic filmmaking: There are irises, shadow puppetry, jump cuts, split-screens, and—why not?—an out-of-nowhere Vertigo reference. As befits its sprat-gun approach, A Christmas Tale works best in beguiling fragments than as a fused whole. Even when it has too many plates spinning, however, its emotions still scintillate.

Cannes: "Un Conte de Noel," "Three Monkeys" Glenn Kenny at Cannes from Then Came Running

"Now that is a movie!" I exclaimed to a friend on exiting this morning's screening of Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte De Noel (A Christmas Story). The bourgeois-dysfunctional-family-comes-together-for-a-holiday setup is one of the hoariest in any medium, but if anybody can conjure something fresh out of it, it's Desplechin, and boy does he ever. This famliy's dysfunction, as suits their creator's temperament and perspective, is at an absolute fever pitch as the picture begins. A funeral oration shot from several majestic angles gives way to a shadow-puppet-enacted precis of this clan's situation—the parent's first son is diagnosed with a wasting disease in his first years; his younger sister's bone marrow, a potential solution, doesn't match; a son is conceived, largely for the purpose of curing the first; his marrow's also a bust; the first son dies, only four years old; the couple have one more son.

And now, half a lifetime later mother Junon (Catherine Deneuve) seems to have contracted a similarly wasting disease, and once again bone marrow is called for. Eldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) is a melancholic playwright with a frail, perhaps schizophrenic, teenage son. Youngest brother Ivan (Melville Poupad) is a cheery self-made nonentity with a beautiful wife (Chiarra Mastroianni) and two antic sons. And middle brother Henri (Mathieu Amalric) is a self-destructive half-maniac whom Elizabeth has essentially banished from the family after bailing him out of his last big jam.

And that, as they say, ain't the half of it.

The creation of such a vivid, individualized group of characters and such a compelling roster of dilemmas is a staggering enough feat. But what makes this movie such a darkly exuberant feast is Desplechin's storytelling. Calling his directorial style "eclectic" simply doesn't do. He has packed himself an almost inexhaustible kit bag of cinematic techniques that he deploys here with an ease that makes his previous film, the incredibly impressive Kings and Queen, look relatively forced. Not only is there not a single dull moment in this two-and-a-half-hour family drama; the film practically teems with ferocious moments, and the novelistic detail offered by Desplechin (here collaborating on the screenplay with longtime writing partner Emmanuel Bourdieu) is always spot-on.

To say Amalric is first among equals here is both possibly accurate and deeply unfair. But he is faced here with the challenge of starting out real crazy, and then having to become crazier still. He does it without ever resorting to cliche or overplaying. The bit wherein he literally falls flat on his face after a wobbly sidewalk dance is an instant classic. But by the same token, I not only haven't even gotten into how great the rest of the cast is, I haven't even named some of the other incredible performers giving their best in this picture—so here are two: Emmanuelle Davos, as the mysterious, sardonic girlfriend Henri brings to the family's Christmas gathering, and Jean-Paul Roussillon as the clan's enigmatic, jazz-loving patriarch. Which leads me into the film's staggering use of music...

But I'm gushing. As I will. Un Conte de Noel sets an extremely high bar for the Competition films to come.

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

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

indieWIRE review Leo Goldsmith in yet another review

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] at Cannes

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

Edward Champion

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

A CHRISTMAS TALE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

The Onion A.V. Club (Scott Tobias) review

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

Present Tense: Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale :: Stop ... Mark Asch from Stop Smiling magazine

Cinematical (Kim Voynar) review at Cannes

Reel.com review [4/4] Chris Cabin, also seen here: filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4.5/5]

Where the Hearth Is: Talking “A Christmas Tale” with Andre ... Ray Pride from New City, also seen here: Movie City Indie: Taking a bite from Arnaud Desplechin's patisserie

The Frenzy On... Arnaud Desplechin Noah Forrest from The Frenzy on the Wall

Eye for Film (Adam Micklethwaite) review [4.5/5]

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth]

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

Cannes Dispatch: Day Two: Patrick McGavin from Stop Smiling magazine

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

The House Next Door [Matt Noller] at Cannes

Strictly Film School Acquarello

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

The House Next Door (Vadim Rizov)

Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson

A Christmas Tale (Un Conte De Noel) Lisa Nesselson at Cannes from Screendaily

Erica Abeel at Cannes from Filmmaker magazine, May 19, 2008

Daily Plastic - Festival Report [J. Robert Parks]

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Derek Elley at Cannes from Variety

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [4/6]

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [5/6]

Boston Globe review [4/4] Ty Burr

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

Kenneth Turan at Cannes from the LA Times

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

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

JIMMY P: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN B 86

France (117 mi) 2013 ‘Scope

This is one of the more puzzling films seen in awhile, where the people involved in the making of the film are highly respected, yet this is not the typically appealing dramatic effort with quirky characters and sweeping conversational dialogue that dominates other Desplechin films, yet the entirety of the film’s narrative feels like one long, prolonged dialogue where there’s a flat, unengaging dramatic feel that is often tedious. One of the select competition films at Cannes, this is a confounding experience, and a bit peculiar, as you really don’t know if the film is good or bad, but it’s a somewhat troubling experience to follow, where there are really no guidelines, where you’d think this could be an experimental film, but it’s not. All along it feels underwritten, where secondary characters never materialize into something more, yet this is a film that glorifies the power of conversational dialogue, where words actually mean something, more than in typical movies, yet the viewer is scratching their head trying to comprehend what’s so significant about what we hear. Based on a true story in the late 40’s, Benicio Del Toro is Jimmy Picard, a Blackfoot Indian who suffers blackouts, an army corporal who returns from the war with severe, debilitating headaches, where despite a crack in his skull, doctors at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, the army’s leading psychiatric hospital, are at a loss to figure out the source of Picard’s problems, especially after his tests turn up normal, showing nothing is physically wrong with him. So he’s pushed into the psychiatric ward where a committee of doctors all conclude they’ve never treated a Native American patient before, wondering if there might be unique aspects to his culture that might explain some of his irrational behavior, so they call upon an eccentric Jewish psychoanalyst from Europe, Georges Devereux (Mathieu Amalric), a Frenchman currently living in New York, known more for his work as an anthropologist, having spent two years living in the desert studying the Mojave Indians, where his methods are considered unorthodox.

An isolated patient who is believed to be schizophrenic and psychotic, who refuses to talk to anyone else in the military psychiatric hospital, suddenly blossoms in the company of this one particular therapist who takes a more holistic approach, as he’s interested in the Indian tribe where he comes from, where that knowledge can open up clues that introduce a completely new understanding of the patient’s condition, where he’s not psychotic at all, but simply isolated and misdiagnosed, as Indians are not in the habit of confessing their opinions and personal feelings to white people. Inspired by Devereaux’s book Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, the story itself is fascinating, where the film becomes a meticulous, near clinical exposé, mostly the retelling of dreams, where instead of imaginative, dreamlike imagery, the film retains a near scientific guideline for the narrative to unravel, usually downplayed, where the film is likely to be a virtual recreation of the literary work, taking few liberties, and in spite of superior acting talent, the film presents the material as straightforward as possible. Del Toro, who is Puerto Rican, has made a career playing some version of the non-white character, where this role is reminiscent of his earlier work playing a mentally challenged Indian in Sean Penn’s The Pledge (2001), a role that apparently landed him this job. In each he speaks barely decipherable English, expanding the physical component to the roles where his burly physique actually matches a similar character in Milos Forman’s ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1975), which curiously features a completely silent but large Indian man locked up in the psychiatric ward with nothing apparently wrong with him other than he’s lost the will to act, so he sits quietly among the disturbed patients and makes no judgments until the end, when he decides it’s better living as a free man on the outside. What’s also interesting in each is the European take on what are distinctly American stories, where Forman was one of the most important directors of the Czechoslovak New Wave, while Desplechin is a worthy heir to the French New Wave, whose films often feature some of the best French actors working today. In some ways, this cultural twist becomes part of the narrative storyline, as Jimmy and Georges are both seen as exiled, though they deal with it differently, as both are a long way from “home.”

For Europeans, for instance, the Indian is still a mythical figure, known largely from what was told to them by whites, where this film offered the director a chance to explore deeper into what is admittedly unknown territory. While much of this may feel academic, as Jimmy continually recounts what he can recall from dreams and from his childhood, where mostly Georges listens and engages his patient by taking an interest, where he is genuinely concerned about his welfare, which in turn makes the patient take more of an interest in himself. Using a swirling Hollywood musical score by Howard Shore, but also the superb miniature poetry from the first two sections of Debussy’s Petite Suite, Claude Debussy - En Bateau - YouTube (3:14) and Claude Debussy Petite Suite : Cortège piano - YouTube (3:24), the film was shot mostly in the state of Michigan and Montana, where there is fluidity to the past melding with the present, as the headaches begin to occur less frequently, suggesting they are on the right track. There are a few detours along the road where Jimmy heads for the nearest bar to commiserate about his troubles, but what’s interesting is that it’s a bar that includes Indians, something rarely shown in American pictures. What this really amounts to is a buddy picture, something along the lines of Gene Hackman and Al Pacino in Jerry Schatzberg’s SCARECROW (1973), a couple of unlikely outsiders that end up hitchhiking on the road together, developing an unusual rapport that touched a nerve with the American counterculture at the time. This is a much smaller film where one Indian’s mental collapse is symptomatic for what was done to the entire Native American population, all driven off their land by the U.S. cavalry in the late 19^th century and herded to isolated reservations in the middle of nowhere with little to no resources to survive, often the poorest places to live in the entire United States, where one of the currently existing side effects of this involuntary exile are the highest rates of alcoholism and suicide, reflective of the mental, psychological, and economic depression. While this film is not a history lesson, it simply shows interest in the life of a single Indian, where the interest is in Devereaux’s recollection of every single word of dialogue from those sessions, never resorting to broad gestures, cinematic gimmicks, or adding dramatic embellishments, instead trusting the significance of the material as being historically authentic. While we’re not normally privy to the secret confines of therapy sessions, this film targets the often undiagnosed pain and sadness that accompany the human condition, where it takes some soul searching to find the underlying causes of physical breakdown, trauma, and dysfunction, where in this case 65% of returning World War II veterans were mentally injured, yet few received any treatment.

Jimmy P. - Film Society of Lincoln Center

In the late 1940s, at the progressive Menninger Clinic, two mavericks bonded, not simply as therapist and patient, but as friends united by their personal experiences as outsiders. Arnaud Desplechin’s extraordinarily intelligent and moving adaptation of Georges Devereux’s landmark work of ethnographic psychoanalysis stars Benicio Del Toro as the titular Jimmy P., a Blackfoot Indian and World War II veteran suffering from what initially seems like severe post-traumatic stress, and Mathieu Amalric as Devereux, a Hungarian Jew who reinvented himself many times over before coming to the U.S. to study Mohave Indian culture. Both actors are at the top of their game and their interaction makes the best case for the “Talking Cure” ever depicted in a fiction film.

New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule review)

This adaptation of a book by the psychoanalyst Georges Devereux tells the true story of his work with James Picard (Benicio Del Toro), a Second World War veteran and member of the Blackfoot tribe, whose crippling headaches landed him in the Menninger Clinic, in Topeka, Kansas, in 1948. Picard’s doctors—finding no physical cause for his ailments—summoned Devereux (Mathieu Amalric), a New York-based “ethnopsychiatrist,” to treat him. The story’s intrinsic fascination is amplified by the singularity of Devereux himself, a Hungarian Jew who moved to Paris and converted to Catholicism before heading to the American West to spend two years among the Mojaves. The core of the movie is psychoanalysis itself; the director, Arnaud Desplechin, who is French, turns its contentious dialogue into a sort of real-time screenplay for Picard’s dreams and memories, which emerge as a radically subjective historical drama that fuses political conflicts, family troubles, and erotic tensions. The cinephilic director has discovered an original way to make a Western that both honors the legend and faces the facts. Desplechin co-wrote the script with Julie Peyr and Kent Jones.

JIMMY P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian) Facets Multi Media

At the end of World War II, Jimmy Picard (Benecio Del Toro, 21 Grams, Che), a Blackfoot Indian and World War II veteran who fought in France, is admitted to Topeka Military Hospital in Kansas, an institution specializing in mental illness. Jimmy suffers from numerous symptoms: dizzy spells, temporary blindness, hearing loss... and withdrawal. Due to the absence of any physiological causes, he is diagnosed as schizophrenic, but the hospital management decides to seek the opinion of Georges Devereux (Mathieu Amalric, Kings & Queen, Heartbeat Detector), a French anthropologist, psychoanalyst and specialist in Native American culture.

Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian) tells the story of the friendship which develops between these two men, which would not have occurred under any other circumstances, united by their personal experiences as outsiders. During the sessions, Jimmy P., a very shy man and unfamiliar with psychoanalytical methods, goes along with the proceedings, recounting his dreams and recalling deeply buried memories, thereby allowing Devereux to lead him toward a cure. Filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin (Esther Kahn, A Christmas Tale) has made an extraordinarily intelligent and moving adaptation of Georges Devereux's landmark work of ethnographicpsychoanalysis as we watch the patient and doctor behaving like a couple of detectives on their mutual journey of self-discovery, with an ever-growing complicity growing between them.

Film of the Week: Jimmy P. - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, February 14, 2014

“Don’t be exuberant!” a doctor cautions Mathieu Amalric’s character in Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian—futilely, of course, as Amalric carries on giving, to put it mildly, one of the most exuberant performances of his career. But perhaps the warning is also a note-to-self by Arnaud Desplechin, a director noted for a stylistic exuberance that sometimes verges on mannerism. I must confess that Desplechin is a filmmaker whose voice has somehow eluded me in the past, both in terms of the specifics of his style, and the question of what preoccupies him: yes, relationships, families, people’s indecisiveness, all that sort of thing, but the matter of what Desplechin is really interested in and why somehow has never connected with me. I’ve liked some of his films, particularly the anomalous period piece Esther Kahn (00), and parts of others—My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument (96) feels to me more like an anthology of episodes than an organic film. But we all have blind spots that we can’t explain, and Desplechin has generally been one of mine: on some level, to do with his voice or my taste, I don’t quite get him.

So, in warming quite a lot to Jimmy P, it’s possible that I’ve gravitated to what Desplechin’s long-term admirers might regard as the wrong film. But the simplicity of it, the way that he restrains (some might say: censors) his usual exuberance, is what makes it interesting. This is, in any case, a film about repression and its effects.

The story is drawn from life and based on a case history described by the Hungarian-born anthropologist Georges Devereux (né György Dobó) in his 1951 book Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian. Devereux’s patient was James Picard, a Blackfoot Native American from Browning, Montana, who had incurred a fractured skull fighting in France in World War II. He was admitted to the Winter Hospital in Topeka, Kansas for seemingly inexplicable symptoms including dizzy spells and temporary blindness. In Desplechin’s version of the story, Picard (played by Benicio Del Toro) is welcomed with open arms by the Topeka doctors, but it’s clear that they understand neither him nor his case: “Behold our Indian brave!” smiles chief medic Dr. Karl Menninger (Larry Pine) as Picard enters the room—one of the more benign among several instances of casual racism that Picard encounters throughout the story.

At first, the doctors think that Picard, who is otherwise in perfect health, may be schizophrenic—but there’s another possibility, that he is “simply an Indian, whose personality and behavior we do not fully understand” (and why should they, given that Picard doesn’t understand them himself?). To treat him, the hospital brings in Devereux, an expert who's effectively as alien to the American health system as the patient himself. As an anthropologist specializing in Native American culture, Devereux appears to be the man for the job, although he’s not traditionally qualified to administer a course of psychoanalysis—and while it’s not entirely clear from the film that psychoanalysis proper is what Picard undergoes, that’s what seems to be taking place. Oh, and it’s perhaps Desplechin’s boldest move in the film to put the word “psychoanalysis” in his title: you have to admire a filmmaker who can be so cavalier about box-office common sense.

Picard’s arrival at Topeka, and the brief prelude to it, set up the main body of the film, which is a series of dialogues between Picard and Devereux, increasingly opening up to admit flashbacks to Picard’s past and glimpses of his dreams. It’s the formal restraint of the sober, contemplative dialogues that, by contrast, give the dreams their special charge, and some of these sequences are terrifically haunting, little explosions of imagistic strangeness: Picard’s fight with a faceless figure, in his own “struggle with the angel,” as it were; a bear hunt, the bear being manifestly a stuffed one looming out of darkness; and the sudden gorgeous filling of the screen by a field of multicolored flowers.

As well as the images, key to Picard’s analysis is the Mojave language, Devereux’s knowledge of which encourages his patient to trust him and open up. Picard’s Indian name, we learn, means “Everybody Talks About Him” (which is appropriate to Picard’s clinical diagnosis, since he becomes the subject of the discourse of others). And Picard is surprised that Devereux is conversant with a key epithet applied to women, meaning “manly-hearted”: the adjective is used to describe the patient’s mother and sister alike.

What emerges from Picard’s analysis is almost disappointingly simple. He has trouble with women, displaced into symptoms of bodily trouble with himself, all stemming from unresolved family relationships—his mother, the daughter he has barely known, and the child’s mother. The interesting thing is that Picard himself, although it’s never said explicitly, emerges as what you might call a “womanly-hearted man”: a figure of great gentleness, courtesy, and delicacy. It’s notable that he and Devereux—the cultured, physically delicate-seeming man of the mind—are very different in this respect. It’s Devereux who blithely volunteers that he has slapped women in his time (“It clears the air”) to which Picard responds that he could never hit a woman. And while Devereux comes across, in Amalric’s dandyish performance, as something of an Old World Lothario, Picard seems to have a fuller and more tender regard for women, even if they are the root cause of his anxiety. The scenes in which Picard meets and later courts a woman in Topeka suggest a tender, solicitous lover, while Devereux’s scenes with his inamorata Madeleine Steiner (Gina McKee), who comes for an extended visit, present a man somewhat narcissistically soaking up her admiration; in fact, McKee’s character only rarely emerges as more than a sounding board for Devereux’s ideas and effusions.

The film slightly overplays its opposition between the gentle, monolithic Picard and the manic, elfin energy of Devereux—in fact, looking at a still of the two men walking side by side, you can’t help thinking you’re seeing Of Mice and Men in best Sunday suits. The contrast between the two leads is certainly odd, sometimes awkward. Amalric at times wildly overstates Devereux’s Eastern European “nutty professor” side, not without Desplechin’s collusion: he’s first seen in a diner, leaping up to answer a call from Menninger—“Vot’s new in Topeka?”—to a background of jumping jazz. As for Del Toro, he comparably overemphasizes the slow, measured rhythms of Picard’s damaged being. Some suspicions have been aired, since the film’s Cannes premiere last year, concerning Desplechin’s decision to cast a Puerto Rican, rather than a Native American, actor as Picard, and there may well be pragmatic funding reasons for the choice, although Desplechin has discussed his enthusiasm for Del Toro in an interview with FILM COMMENT. In fact, Del Toro is generally very sympathetic and effective here, and appealingly thoughtful, but his strangely inflected halting delivery is distracting; it’s hard to tell whether it’s meant to reflect Picard’s clinical condition or his origins, although none of the film’s other Indian characters—themselves played by Native American actors—speak remotely like this. You wonder whether Desplechin’s French-attuned ear is simply missing the strangeness of Del Toro’s performance.

But in saying this, I’m getting entangled in the web of cultural assumptions that the film undertakes to unpick. The film is, of course, about two men who are both in their own ways outsiders in official American society—in Devereux’s case, doubly so, as he’s a Hungarian who has reinvented himself as French to pursue a career abroad. Desplechin himself similarly does rather well as a “foreign expert” dealing with a difficult American case. Jimmy P is a French production, rather than American: French-funded but with a mixture of U.S. and French crew, including DP Stéphane Fontaine and composer Howard Shore, while Desplechin scripted the film with two co-writers, one French, one American: Julie Peyr and Film Comment’s own deputy editor Kent Jones.

Desplechin adopts an American identity just as Devereux/Dobó adopts a French one: if the film has a certain formal sobriety that at times approaches academicism, that’s because Desplechin seems to be aiming at a certain American cinema, of the simple, formal, somewhat monolithic kind best represented by recent Clint Eastwood films such as Changeling. His aim, in short, which he pulls off pretty honorably, could not be more French—to make un grand film américain.

Arnaud Desplechin's “Jimmy P” - The New Yorker Richard Brody

Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian | Film ... - Slant Magazine Jesse Cataldo

Review: Meandering & Unsatisfying 'Jimmy P.' Starring Benicio Del ... Kevin Jagernauth from The Playlist

Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy Of A Plains Indian / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

In Review Online [Carson Lund]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Guy Lodge at Cannes from Hit Fix

Paste Magazine [Tim Grierson]

Movie Mezzanine [Ty Landis]

David Jenkins at Cannes from Little White Lies

Jimmy P. Psychotherapy Of A Plains Indian Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: Screen International

Jimmy P. | Film Review | Spectrum Culture Jake Cole

Film-Forward.com [Ted Metrakas]

Village Voice  Stephanie Zacharek

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

EFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

Cannes 2013, Day Three: Cheers for the young stars of The Selfish Giant, jeers for the new films by Hirokazu Kore-eda and Arnaud Desplechin Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club

ReelTalk [Donald Levit]

The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]

Film.com [Jordan Hoffman]

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]

Daily | Cannes 2013 | Arnaud Desplechin’s JIMMY P. David Hudson at Fandor, May 18, 2013

an interview with FILM COMMENT Jonathan Robbins interviews Desplechin, February 7, 2014

An Idiosyncratic Healer From Abroad Soothes a Troubled Indian ... Joan Dupont from The New York Times, May 20, 2013, also here: Director interview

Fabien Lemercier interviews Desplechin at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 18, 2013

Arnaud Desplechin sets his inner Indian free - Agenda Magazine Blog Niels Ruëll interview from Agenda magazine, November 9, 2013

Jimmy P., Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian: Cannes Review Debroah Young at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter

Scott Foundas at Cannes from Variety, also seen here: Variety

Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian) Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London

Like Father, Like Son and Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian Keith Uhlich at Cannes from Time Out New York, also seen here: TimeOut NY

Cannes 2013: Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian) - first look review Catherine Shoard at Cannes from The Guardian

Movie review: 'Jimmy P.' is not ordinary therapy film - The Boston Globe Ty Burr

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Milan Paurich]

Jimmy P. Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz

Rainy Day Blues: Cannes Report: May 18, 2013 ... - Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres at Cannes from The Ebert blog, also seen here: RogerEbert.com

New York Times A.O. Scott, also seen here: 'Jimmy P.' Recounts a Case Study of a Noble Soul in Torment - The ...

George Devereux - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

MY GOLDEN DAYS (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse) A- 94

France (120 mi) 2015 ‘Scope

While not exactly a prequel, but a reimagining of an original story used in an earlier film, MY SEX LIFE…OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT (1996), which was a sprawling three-hour French relationship talkathon, while in this film Desplechin has resurrected the central character of Paul Dédalus, played nineteen years apart in both films by Matheiu Amalric, who opens the film as a present day character remembering events occurring in the late 80’s and early 90’s, where a more accurate French title translates to Three Remembrances of My Youth. Winner of the SACD Prize (Best Screenplay) in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, the director (along with Julie Peyr) has written a memory play that explores the Proustian autobiographical memories of the Dédalus character from childhood through adolescence, told in three segments, where the first two, Childhood and Russia, preface a larger story entitled Esther that blends into the early periods of MY SEX LIFE, a film that falls within a great tradition of French coming-of age-films, having made some of the best, including Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), Téchiné’s Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994), and Assayas’s Cold Water (L’eau Froide) (1994). The brief opening sequences are actually the weakest in the entire film, as the viewer doesn’t have a handle yet on Paul Dédalus, or even a connection to the earlier film. Instead he’s seen as a middle-aged man leaving his lover, returning to Paris for a government post in Foreign Affairs after spending a decade working as a scholar and anthropologist in Tajikistan. It’s only at the airport where he’s stopped and questioned, interrogated by a French official, dutifully performed by Resnais regular André Dussollier, with questions about his passport, which shifts the film into a lengthy flashback sequence, often expressed through a round (iris) frame, a holdover technique from the Silent era, suggesting memories of long ago, recounting three seminal moments from his past. Like Truffaut’s young ruffian alter-ego character Antoine Doinel, a petrified 11-year old Paul Dédalus (Antoine Bui) also ran away from his home in Roubaix escaping from his deranged mother, depicted in a panicked German Expressionist horror scene where he holds her off with a knife (shadows appearing on a staircase), warning her not to come any closer, before running away to his kindly great-aunt Rose, Françoise Lebrun, who played Veronika in The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), looking better than ever, observed by a curious young Paul as the affectionate recipient of a sweet lesbian kiss. While he’s sad to learn of his mother’s suicide shortly thereafter (claiming he never loved her), it has a permanent effect on his emotionally depressed father (Olivier Rabourdin), whose mind is elsewhere and is unable to look after his children, where Paul along with his sister and younger brother share their formative teenage years raising themselves.

However, this does not account for why there is another Paul Dédalus living in Australia with a registered passport using the same birthdate and birthplace. For that, the scene shifts to Russia, where Paul takes an eventful student high school trip to Minsk in the USSR as an idealistic 16-year old, now played by Quentin Dolmaire, turning into an amateur spy thriller when he along with his Jewish friend Marc (Elyot Milshtein) agree to help the Refuseniks (Refuseniks - Jewish Virtual Library), sneaking away from a student tour of the National Arts Museum to help a group of Russian Jews denied permission to leave the country, providing secret packages filled with money, while Paul goes so far as to offer his passport, allowing someone else to assume his identity. To cover for his own lost passport, he gives himself a black eye and claims he was mugged and his passport stolen. Filled with plenty of Cold War tension, including bribing a suspicious police officer that stops them with a pack of American cigarettes, the young boys actually pull it off, blending into his teenage years where he’s with his sister Delphine (Lily Taieb) and brother Ivan (Raphaël Cohen) watching television footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which Paul finds sad as “I can see my childhood ending.” But most of all he remembers Esther, played by Lou Roy-Lecollinet, an absolute delight as the girl of his dreams, the beauty of his eye, and his soulmate, something he realizes from the moment he sets eyes on her, as she’s “the one,” a dazzling beauty who is mature beyond her years, amusingly aware of the effect she has on men, and couldn’t care less what others think of her, an earlier version of the same character played by Emmanuelle Devos in MY SEX LIFE. Inviting her to come to a party at their father’s house (believing he is away), Desplechin perfectly frames her entrance, shifting to slow motion with her initial appearance, where celestial music honors her as the Goddess of Love and Beauty. The same device is used several times, each time more amusing than the next, as this is exactly how high school boys envision their first love. They’re not just “in love,” but the moon and the stars orbit around her very presence. Paul has a clever way of showing his interest, especially when she shows up with somebody else, which is to ignore her while she dances with all the other guys, staring ponderously at her throughout, waiting until the guy she came with decides to leave, expecting to take her home, but she insists upon staying, rudely telling him to scram. Thus begins the long journey of a tumultuous decade-long love affair, but that night, all he does is walk her home, romantically walking through the city streets just before daybreak, awkwardly trying to make clever conversation, confessing whatever comes out of his mouth, which she finds amusing, ending the night with the cinematic perfection of a gentle kiss, conveying in our eyes exactly how he feels and just what she means to him.

These two, Roy-Lecollinet and Dolmaire, both first time actors, literally light up the screen, where their ecstatic combustible energy is something to savor, as Esther is viewed as royalty, where every male in the vicinity is attracted to her, so she quickly learns to fend them off and has become a master in the art of the put-down, showing an instant disdain for people that get on her nerves, believing life is too short for people to waste her time, but she has the whole world beckoning her, wanting to be with her. Initially Paul appears to have little chance, spending his time traveling back and forth between Roubaix and Paris, where it turns out absence makes the heart grow fonder. In an era before social media, where now kids routinely send hundreds of text messages every day, the preferred technique back in the day was writing letters, pouring out one’s heart and soul in confessional outpourings of love (which are read directly into the camera), where every spare moment is dedicated to an idyllic “her,” keeping her foremost on his mind even as he pursues his Parisian studies and a life as an academic, where their exchanges are electric, literally flowing with excitement and energy when they meet, exhibiting all the signs of a sweetness of youth, becoming passionate lovers before long, where they can’t live without each other. The beauty of this film is really the playfulness of Desplechin’s cinematic presentation, the way he mixes it up, showing plenty of offbeat humor, tenderness, moments of despair, crude awakenings, and a world where nothing makes sense except each other, but where their journey together is anything but smooth as she fights to maintain her fiery independence, often shown facing straight into the camera with a cigarette in her hand, where she’s literally posing for the audience, becoming a snapshot in time. On again, off again, she’s put off by the extent of his absences, and freely acknowledges she sleeps with other guys, where they go through a series of breakups and reconciliations, but Paul has a way of charming the pants off her (which happens literally with another woman in the film), where she loves the way he’ll poetically describe a work of art, like one of his favorite paintings, putting her somewhere in the center of its majestic beauty, a sacred, unreachable perfection, while he sees himself as some lonely figure off to the side, but perhaps the only thing in the frame alert enough to notice the power of her staggering presence. It’s a fascinating free-wheeling style that matches the furious pace of his earlier film, literally painting a window into their damaged souls where they have such a special chemistry together that is rare in films today. With a throbbing soundtrack that matches the elevated emotional reach of the film, there’s something bewitching and enchanting about it, where Desplechin’s masterful direction breathes life into an age-old Romeo and Juliet love story, becoming intensely personal, fiercely sincere, especially a scene late in the film, with tinges of sadness when looked back upon because it never lasted, but the thoughtfulness and thorough detail of the remembrances are a brilliant ode to youth, as illuminating as they are intoxicating.

Setting Sun - Film Comment Amy Taubin, July/August 2015

Though the selection of films by women left much to be desired, many of the best films had female protagonists, and actresses, in addition to Zhao, Shu, Blanchett, and Mara, rose to their respective occasions. Arnaud Desplechin’s intricate memory piece My Golden Days is not exactly a prequel to his My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument but a re-envisioning of the filmmaker’s alter ego Paul Dedalus, in love and at crossed purposes. There’s recently been a glut of semi-autobiographical early memoirs by art-film directors, but this one is fascinating in its associative and psychologically rich plot turns and sequencing. It is, without doubt, a young man’s narrative, and Quentin Dolmaire’s Paul has the requisite charm and intelligence

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Max Frank

Arnaud Desplechin’s newest film is a meditation on memories of youth. Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric in the present, Quentin Dolmaire as a youth) recalls his life, first in brief glimpses of disparate early childhood moments; then through a formative adolescent school trip-turned-Jewish Resistance-mission behind the Iron Curtain in Minsk; and finally, the meat of the story, his first romance. Desplechin’s provincial Paris neighborhoods breathe with the lived experience of misfit working-class French teenagers—imported American rap vinyl from Run DMC and De La Soul, house parties, televised westerns, commuter rail rides into the city, and all of their apathy towards and growing awareness of the coming fall of the Soviet Union—in a way that never feels stylized; always gentle, coloring with the ghosts of Truffaut’s cinema rather than overt references as in one of the film’s acknowledged contemporary inspirations, Wes Anderson’s MOONRISE KINGDOM. But what holds MY GOLDEN DAYS together is the play between the film’s grammar and Dédalus’ relationship with Esther (played by an utterly enrapturing Lou Roy-Lecollinet)—a relationship that inspires one’s own reflections on an individual who had such a profound impact on one’s life that they’ve dilated the universe’s time-memory fabric.

Cannes Film Festival 2015: Part One - Reverse Shot Jordan Cronk

Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days (pictured at top), another Fortnight highlight, is a reinvigorating effort for the French filmmaker after the rather cerebral Jimmy P, and further evidence of his seemingly effortless storytelling prowess. Returning to perhaps his two most enduring characters, Paul Dedalus and his girlfriend Esther, the protagonists of My Sex Life . . . Or How I Got Into An Argument (1996), Desplechin appears understandably nostalgic for the couple, as reflected in the ecstatic stride of his filmmaking. Following Paul (in flashback played by Quentin Dolmaire) through his early adolescence, the film looks upon these years from the perspective of a middle-aged Paul (Mathieu Amalric, reprising his role), unmarried and still unsatisfied as he moves back to Paris after years working as an anthropologist in Tajikstan. When he’s stopped at the airport and investigated for a suspicious passport, Paul is sent reminiscing about various memorable episodes in life. And from here, Desplechin takes the viewer on a whirlwind trip through the boy’s youth, from his traumatic childhood to his increasingly sexualized teens. Passion blossoms as Paul transition into high school, where he meets Esther (a luminous Lou Roy-Lecollinet), who takes a liking to Paul and exposes him to a cosmopolitan, liberal lifestyle he never experienced growing up in Paris as the youngest of three children. Using a traditional coming-of-age template as a frame in which he lovingly indulges in his well-honed stylistic touches—subtle iris effects; split screen; voiceover; intertitles—Desplechin is able to breathe life into a tired genre while reengaging with his most potent filmmaking skills.

My Golden Days – first look | Sight & Sound | BFI Jordan Cronk, also seen here: •Stereo Sanctity•: Cannes Review: Arnaud Desplechin's My ...

In 1996 director Arnaud Desplechin made his international breakthrough with My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument. A sprawling three-hour relationship drama starring Mathieu Almaric as Paul Dedalus, a wayward past-collegiate intellectual caught between grad school, his longtime girlfriend Esther (Emmanuelle Devos) and a host of mistresses each pulling at the seams of his unraveling personal and professional lives, the now-veteran French filmmaker’s third feature simultaneously expanded upon and solidified his nuanced, literary-minded approach to narrative.

Nineteen years later, following the premiere of the widely dismissed Jimmy P (2013), Desplechin returns to these most indelible of characters with My Golden Days, a prequel of sorts to My Sex Life… featuring Almaric as a middle-aged Paul Dedalus reflecting on his childhood and the youthful adventures which would ultimately bring him and Esther into their inexorable yet crucial romantic partnership.

As the film opens, we find Paul leaving his latest lover and returning to Paris from Tajikistan, where we soon learn he’s worked as a scholar and anthropology consultant for nearly a decade. When he’s stopped at the airport and questioned about the authenticity of his passport, Paul recounts an episode in his high-school life where he was persuaded to lend his identity to a young Russian Jew who then escaped to Australia and lived until recently as his unofficial ‘twin’. This framing device, which initially suggests the film may move into the realm of a traditional thriller (with Resnais regular André Dussolier appearing to relish his small role as the steely-eyed interrogator), instead allows Desplechin to unfold his most blatantly heartwarming narrative to date as Paul begins to reminiscence about his upbringing and his formative years as a student and cosmopolitan teen.

Told in a series of titled chapters, the film’s episodic structure allows for a number of pivotal events in Paul’s life to take shape against the shifting cultural tides of Europe in the 1970s and 80s. After his mother’s suicide at age 11, Paul (played wonderfully in these younger years by Quentin Dolmaire) retreats from the tyrannical grip of his abusive father, finding support in the warm embrace of his friends and two siblings, Delphine (Lily Taeib) and Ivan (Raphael Cohen). Together they make for an colourful clan, their adolescent exploits ringing familiar yet true: parties, petty crime and the kind of peer-pressured stunts which seem rebellious at the time but are rather innocuous in the grand scheme of things.

It’s only when, in the film’s third and (by a large margin) longest chapter, Paul meets Delphine’s classmate Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), that his path to sexual and emotional maturity is finally paved – though the journey he undergoes is anything but smooth. In the manner of many adolescent lovers (and in anticipation of how their adult life together will transpire), Paul and Esther embark on series of breakups and reconciliations, with her liberated and exotic demeanour consistently testing his passionate yet hesitantly accepting attitude. Meanwhile, Paul’s academic pursuits take him to him to Paris, where he struggles to keep Esther interested as she welcomes the amorous advances of their mutual friends. “I can see my childhood ending,” Paul forlornly states at one point as images of the crumbling Berlin Wall flash across the television set. At its best, My Golden Days effortlessly captures the liminal state between a halcyon past and an unknown yet tantalising future.

Desplechin’s style here is as brisk and lively as it was in the free-wheeling My Sex Life…, jumping from moment to moment with a joie de vivre reflective of his curious and carefree subjects. In an effort to liven the film’s potentially tired flashback conceit, he implements a number of minor yet effective formal flourishes which lightly enhance he and co-screenwriter Julie Peyr’s nostalgic storytelling framework. A subtle iris effect introduces and punctuates many scenes, for example, while consciously dated split screen sequences memorably feature during the film’s turn into the 80s.

Desplechin’s most dramatic formal technique, however, is the use of direct address, a method utilised on just a couple of brief occasions in My Sex Life… but which is here substantially developed. Rather than relegate the couple’s long-distance letters to voiceover or onscreen text, their correspondence is read face-on to the camera by the actors. Save for one key moment late in the film, these sequences are handled by Roy-Lecollinet, whose soft features and silky intonation make for particularly involving and mellifluous monologues.

And despite a third act focused on Almaric’s lovelorn Paul, it’s ultimately with Esther that the film’s interest lies. Roy-Lecollinet is enchanting in the role, her laissez-faire yet seductive poise providing crucial counterweight to Paul’s affectionate, occasionally unreciprocated pleas. When the film ends on a freeze-frame of Esther, the first-person imperfect of both films’ titles seems to suggest a dual meaning, that of Desplechin’s female protagonist not as simply muse but as parallel subject in this touchingly personal, potentially boundless chronicle.

NYFF Interview: Arnaud Desplechin - Film Comment Yonca Talu interview, October 5, 2015

PEER:              Where was I, as myself, as the whole man, the real?
                          Where was I, with my forehead stamped with God’s seal?

SOLVEIG:       In my faith, in my hope, in my charity.

—Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt

Constructed like a symphony which bears echoes from his entire oeuvre, My Golden Days is Arnaud Desplechin’s most elaborate and personal reflection on what it means to be a man. Two decades after the university-set My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument (96), Desplechin reunites with his alter-ego Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric), but time has passed and the young normalien has grown into a fifty-something anthropologist who now resides in far-off Tajikistan. As he prepares to return to his native France, Paul is stopped at customs over an identity issue: “We have found another Paul Dédalus!” the inspector roars. There begins a Proustian journey into the forgotten depths of childhood and youth, all memories pointing towards the quintessential period in Paul’s existence: his love story with Esther (played by Emmanuelle Devos in My Sex Life and newcomer Lou Roy-Lecollinet in the latter film). “Everything is intact,” old Paul repeats as he conjures up his golden days, a utopia centered on Esther and Esther alone, where past and present coalesce in alternating waves of pleasure and heartbreak.

On the day of the U.S. premiere of My Golden Days at The New York Film Festival, FILM COMMENT spoke with Desplechin at the Film Society of Lincoln Center about his writing process, Catcher in the Rye, and Roy-Lecollinet’s magnetic performance.

I have the impression that your relationship to story and your narrative approach have constantly changed. My Sex Life had a very loose, jolting structure, almost determined by the character’s stream of consciousness, and the actors had to put together a puzzle because the story would continually jump around in space and time. And then with Kings and Queen, you once again made a tapestry, a kind of patchwork. But the structure became much more precise: all of the scenes began to converse, to reflect one another. I feel like with My Golden Days, you’ve reached the height of this precision because here you really have a continuous linear progression. And that perhaps has to do with the fact that for the first time you’re examining a process of construction and not of collapse: the construction of love, and love is inextricably linked to duration. What made you want to operate this way?

It’s exactly what you said. I couldn’t describe it better because my writing method is very intuitive. I had this sort of double desire: on the one hand, have something that’s very constructed, very linear, and at the same time, to fracture it into three uneven blocks. So there were these two simultaneous desires. The goal was not to abuse the spectator but to have three pieces of film and paf! a long story, and at the same time to make sure that these three pieces of film would feel like three brutal spurts and still manage to draw a single journey map. And then there’s the tapestry, like you said… I like that the three fragments have a very strong and unique identity of course, that they don’t stick together too well but that they don’t knock into each other either.

And then within the construction, there is an entire work on what I call the motifs, what I called during the writing process “the song of the film”—this idea of having a single song traverse these four or five different films that are glued together. I tried to work with blocks and then obviously to speak to the spectator, I tried to find the song that would fit together these scattered pieces.

It’s as if Paul is saying to us: “I’m going to recount one memory very quickly, then a second a little less quickly, and then with the third, I’m really going to take my time.” And it’s funny because one could compare the form of the film—this three-part division—to the stripping off of clothes. You don’t show everything right away. First you take off your shirt, then your pants, and finally your underwear. At the end, Paul is completely naked in front of us. 

Yes, at the end Mathieu is naked. At the end when he speaks with Kovalki [his childhood friend who tried to steal Esther from him] at the café, he’s taken off all his clothes. It moves me that he gets to that point… That with the third story, he gives way to Esther, that Esther invades and cannibalizes the film. And Paul is only Paul because he gives way to Esther, because he erases himself next to her. I really didn’t construct this film in reference to My Sex Life even though there are motifs and characters that have passed from one film to the other. Yet I remember that at the end, the old Paul was dead because Esther had taken up all the space. And so he has to die and disappear from the picture so that Esther can appear. And it’s when Esther appears that Paul finds a reason to live. He manages to be invented by a woman.

This reminds me of Peer Gynt, which seems to traverse all your films from Esther’s monologue in My Sex Life—where she speaks as Solveig—to My Golden Days, which has a pretty similar arc to the play. Peer’s quest is reminiscent of Paul’s: he travels the globe in search of a home only to realize that home is by Solveig’s side. So he goes back and dies in her arms.

Yes, and there is also the clumsiness. Mathieu says a line at the end of the film that moves me a lot: “All things aside, the only thing I’m not certain of is whether I’ve been good to her or not.” And when he says that, it’s really devastating to me because how could one ever say: “Yes, I’ve loved someone.” You have to be very presumptuous to say that. Because how could you know whether you’ve loved them good or bad? How did you really love them? Maybe you’ve messed up and you’re cheating yourself. And so for Paul, it’s this question, this anxiety that keeps him alive, that keeps him vigilant. And so he asks himself: “Was I capable? Did I succeed in this?” And he never allows himself that certitude.

I know that you work with a “corpus” when you’re writing. What were some of the films that guided the writing process for My Golden Days?

You know, we start the “corpus” with a few films and then it gets bigger and bigger to the point of becoming completely incomprehensible to someone who’s not participating in the script. [Laughs] There was one film that mattered to me a lot and that goes back to a historical memory. Coppola had made two films in Tulsa: The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. At the time French critics thought that Rumble Fish, which was a very European film, was wonderful and that The Outsiders, which was very American, was a very bad film. I was completely shocked in the theater because I thought that The Outsiders was pure genius whereas Rumble Fish to me was more of a poser, a film that I never really liked anyway. I watched it over and over again but it’s not my thing. But in The Outsiders, there was really a momentum, a naïveté that struck me. And also these young people who live without adults, who expel the adult characters from the film. There was this sort of strength in the film that made it very precious to me.

So there was that film, and then there were two Milos Forman films: Loves of a Blonde and Black Peter. Loves of a Blonde is the film that I showed to the crew before the shoot—I always show the actors and technicians a film—and said: “This is what we’ll try to attain.” And then there were other films of course. There is a film that counts a lot for me: Caro Diario. Not even in terms of the writing but for more idiotic reasons: there are three stories. But it’s not the same thing at all because the three stories in Caro Diario have roughly the same duration and they are ruptured. It’s really a Russian doll, that is to say, everything interlocks. So it wasn’t the same thing. But at the same time, you can’t compare apples and oranges, you can only compare apples and apples.

There were two films—perhaps situated at the opposite ends of the spectrum—that I thought of a lot while watching My Golden Days: Larry Clark’s Kids and Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. For me, My Golden Days was really a synthesis of the insolence and rage of Kids, and Fanny and Alexander’s innocence and naïveté.

Larry Clark, especially with Kids but also with Another Day In Paradise, is a filmmaker I love. I’m just stunned by his talent. But at the same time, I kept at a distance because it didn’t correspond to the desire I had. Something I admire in Larry Clark’s cinema is the desire he has for his actresses and his way of being documentary with young people [i.e., his way of documenting young people]. What I shot in my project—which was different from a project by Larry Clark, that I admire—was to say: is it possible for you, young people, to welcome the fantasies that I write? Can I talk about you through myself? Whereas Larry Clark has this genius of talking about them with their own voice, of managing to “steal” them. There is a kind of eroticism in this theft, you know? But my approach was different in that I was asking myself: will I be capable of dialoguing with such young actors? I’m thinking of Lily Taieb [who plays Paul’s sister, Delphine] for instance: she was only 14. So I was asking myself: could we talk as equals, work together, invent gestures, attitudes, emotions together? In life it is obviously very difficult to cross this generational barrier but here there was this sort of utopia that I had dreamed of and that worked.

Fanny and Alexander is the film that’s accompanied me all my life. La Vie des Morts [91] is a complete rip-off of that film anyway. I stole everything from Fanny and Alexander. It’s a film that never stops nourishing me—both the theatrical and TV versions. The whole principle of generational stories comes from there. I watched that film and it allowed me to make films myself. No question about it. Of course, among the most beautiful Bergman films I would count Summer with Monika—which was in the corpus. Wild Strawberries is one of the most beautiful films in the world. But I have a special attachment to Fanny and Alexander, given also the age I saw it and also because I’m French and the film was a French co-production. I saw Fanny and Alexander and then I became a director. Before, I was a technician, and after that film, I became a director.

One of my favorite scenes in the film is the museum scene in which Paul compares the Hubert Robert painting to Esther. First of all, it’s a magnificent text, surely one of your most lyrical pieces of writing. Also this idea of projecting the loved one onto a painting is an act that’s truly worthy of a poet and a candidate for one of the most beautiful love declarations in French cinema. I’m curious to know how you worked on that text—probably the densest passage in the film—with Quentin Dolmaire, and how you generally approached the text with these two young actors who keep saying that people don’t speak like that in real life?

[Laughs] You know I don’t do rehearsals. I just don’t. So we don’t work on the text, we work on other texts. For that one, he was a little young honestly… And there were also all those mythological references. So I had to teach him who Nausicaa and Actaeon were, and I didn’t want to crush him with those because that wasn’t the question. I was more interested in seeing the colors of his emotions and how he takes up Esther’s challenge. Also his fear of speaking, of expressing himself with words. When he begins his tirade, he says to himself: “I may not be able to pull this off.” Also there was this beautiful question of “Will I be able to describe? Will I be able to compare what is not comparable?” So Quentin practiced this text a lot with the first AD to know it by heart. That’s extremely important. It’s something I learned from Mathieu, to really know your text like the back of your hand. And that sounds a bit idiotic and humble as the actor’s work because of course you have to know your text. But really, to know it like the back of your hand. To really be able to say it in one way then in reverse, begin saying it from the middle, from the end, to know it like you only knew that. And that’s the kind of work that reminds me of My Sex Life because it was a nightmare to get Mathieu to learn all those articles. And there Mathieu had two monologues as well, so it was the same work with Quentin to really master the text. Only memorization, only memorization.

When you succeed that—which is a pretty long process—you can begin to work on the seduction, the pleasure, on the vanity also, when Esther says: “You’re a smooth talker.” Quentin’s exquisite response is: “Not bad.” So he’s successfully performed the task. And it moved me also because Hubert Robert was Stendhal’s favorite painter and I thought the film had a very Stendhalian color.

Another moment that struck me was Esther’s arrival at the party. There is something electric in that girl’s presence—she really is Kim Novak in Vertigo! Whenever she goes on stage, she absorbs all the light around her and one wants to watch only her. There is also the fact that your camera is often glued to her face and it’s more her look that tells the story rather than her words. Was this desire to stay close to the faces already present at the writing stage or did it appear with the discovery of the actors?

No, that appears with the actors. I have notes of course. But when I’m writing, I try to make the story work and I have little time to think about how it’s going to look. Of course I have vague ideas about it and I’m going to draw on these ideas when I shoot. But we rarely talk about the fabrication of a film during the preparation. And then when the actors come on board, they’re going to change my perception of the script, incarnate it, give it a shove. When you find actors to incarnate your characters, you know you’re going to film them and I try to let myself be affected by that. I try to get close to them, just like when I asked Quentin to master his text. I’ve got my tricks. So in that scene, I run the camera in slow-motion when Esther arrives and then it returns to normal speed when she meets Bob. So I have my old tricks, things that come from my background as a technician. It’s all about letting yourself be affected by reality and allowing it to modify your breakdown of the scene.

There’s another shot that’s not too far from this idea. It’s a very beautiful shot because I hadn’t rehearsed it. So, you see, Louise [Roy-Lecollinet] didn’t dance. She is a more melancholic girl. She’d just had a difficult year at high school and she was 17, so she didn’t want to dance. And I was telling her “If you don’t dance at 17, when are you going to dance?” So we had dancing lessons, we did the choreography of the dance and all that. But she was still a little embarrassed so I told her “Dance like me and that’ll do it” and it happened progressively. And on the day of the shoot, I had planned the shot and everything but suddenly her face called me and I said to Irina [Lubtchansky, the cinematographer] “Hand me the camera please.” and I went for it. And I had to hurry to get her face, to move close with the camera on my shoulder. I had asked Quentin to play right next to me so I panned to him afterward and he had the most devastating look of the film on his face. When he looks at that girl, she exists so much and he exists so little. And the camera goes back to Esther still dancing and again rushes on her face. So on the one hand, there is a preparation process and on the other, this idea of allowing yourself to be affected by the actors’ performance so that they come and ruin all of the cautious planning you might have done, that they shatter it with their sheer presence.

The final part of the film, which focuses on Esther’s depression, really involves a continuous one-on-one between Esther and the spectator. It must have been extremely tough for someone who’s never acted on screen before to have to confront the camera so directly. 

Yes, extremely. It was crucial that what happens with the character happens with the actress too. So on another plane it was the question of how to make her take control of the film, because that means becoming the film. That is to say that at the end, when Esther has her depression, she is the whole film. All the rest, the childhood memory, the episode in Russia melt away. She’s taken up all the space, she’s swallowed up everything. And I had this image in mind of a girl who takes up all the space in bed.

That’s not true, it’s men who take up all the space.

But that’s precisely Esther’s singularity. She takes up all the space. And he is delighted that she takes up all the space, that she becomes so cumbersome. So how to make her cumbersome? I remember a rendezvous we had with Louise before the shoot. I was telling her that for that section she really is going to have to hold on to me because otherwise she wouldn’t be able to make it. I told her “You have to take control” and she said “I don’t want to take control.” And I said: “But you’re here for that. That’s why I invited you on this film, so that you take control of the film.” And I told her that she had to go for it, that she had to cry, give in, scream, that we needed to get Esther’s song heard. And then it was all about creating that utopia I had dreamed of. This dialogue was forged between us, people from two different generations. It was really beautiful to arrive at that, to film the rise in power of this actress. She allowed herself to ramp up like that and she was surprised at the end, saying: “Damn. I really know how to embody this character. I know how to do it. I know how to use Esther’s distress to talk about my own distress.” And there I had this writer’s pride that my words had served someone else.

It’s very moving that you’re not only shaping a character but also an individual.

Yes, but we’re two in doing that. And that’s what’s magical in cinema, this rise in power. I told her: “You have to cling on to me. I’m the only person who can get you through that scene. I’m sorry but we’re going to have to cooperate.” And so that created a very powerful bound between us. And there’s also something else that moves me a lot. Paul loves Esther because she is indestructible and Esther is crazy about herself because she is indestructible. And then love comes and she wants it to come and suddenly she becomes vulnerable. She hadn’t anticipated that, she didn’t know she wanted to become a heroine. Of course she wanted to become queen Esther. But there is a price to pay and that price is the distress at the end. And in Louise’s performance, I see the price to pay. She has no defense anymore, she’s lost it. She doesn’t know where she is anymore because love has arrived and suddenly she is fragile, this girl who was so unbreakable at the beginning of the film.

And there’s also a moment that moves me a lot. Esther says to Paul “You’ll call me.” but Paul doesn’t have a phone in Paris. So he answers “You’ll write to me.” And there is this tiny second there… We think Esther is not the type of girl who’d write letters. But at the same time, she slowly understands that she is going to write and that she’s going to become a writer. She’s going to become the writer of herself, the novelist of herself. But then again, she didn’t anticipate her vulnerabilities and her armor comes undone and she explodes.

Emmanuelle Devos—who plays Esther in My Sex Life and with whom you’ve worked on practically every film you made—is not in My Golden Days. But there is a very moving moment at the end of the film where she seems to inhabit the frame. When Mathieu Amalric is walking on the street and those Greek pages fly on his face, it almost feels like Devos is the wind that blows that night, that she manifests herself through nature.

Yes, that’s true. She’s missing from the film. And the film was constructed, I had the occasion of telling this once, upon her absence. She had to be absent so that the film could exist. The film is constructed upon Paul’s regret that she’s not there. It’s very melancholic that she’s not there but at the same time it’s necessary. It’s all about Paul’s saying to himself: “It’s very stupid. I shouldn’t have let her go.” But no, she’s not there. And that’s why we finish with the Greek lesson, that moment imperfectly comes to make up for her absence.

Paul Dédalus often reminds me of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. His solitude, his melancholy, his interrogations, his continual battle against life and himself… His way of constructing his identity against society. Even the way he speaks, this mixture of a terribly childish jargon with a raffiné and almost scholarly language. What is your relationship to that book, if any?

Actually, my relationship with Catcher in the Rye happened in reverse. Two people, an editor and my girlfriend, told me not too long ago—it was before this film actually, three or four years ago—“You have to read Catcher in the Rye because you never stop adapting it.” I had never read it before, I guess I’d been too caught up in the books I read at school. And there’s something in what you said that I experienced through different detours and that I discovered much later in Salinger’s book. I always think of this sentence by Serge Daney that’s marked me so much and that seems to inhabit Salinger’s oeuvre as well: “To be in the world but not in society.” This refusal of society, this desire and curiosity that Paul the traveler has to go all the way to Tajikistan to discover the world, to be in the world but not in society. That’s something I learned from Serge Daney and years later, it was an editor—Olivier Cohen from the Editions de l’Olivier, which has a great collection of Salinger—who told me: “Well, read it since you don’t stop adapting it.”

MIFF2015: "My Golden Days" (2015) is a quietly complex ... William Wright from Perks and Peeves

Little White Lies [David Jenkins]

Cannes Review: Finely Honed 'My Golden Days' Is One Of ... Oliver Lyttelton from the Playlist

My Golden Days | 4:3 Jessica Ellicott

Cemetery of Splendor | Filmmaker Magazine Howard Feinstein

'My Golden Days': Review | Reviews | Screen Lisa Nesselson from Screendaily

Cannes 2015 Review: MY GOLDEN DAYS, Nicotine ... Ben Croll from Twitch

Arnaud Desplechin's MY GOLDEN DAYS | Likev.net Mr. General

Yorgos Lanthimos' absurdist dystopia is the best of Cannes so Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club

Cannes 2015. Day 3 on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman

frenchcinemareview.com [Judith Prescott]

Film Blerg [Dan Santos]

My Golden Days : An odyssey of the past - Cineuropa Fabien Lemercier

Day 4: A romantic trio / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo

Cannes film festival 2015 review • Senses of Cinema Daniel Fairfax, June 2015

Cannes: ‘Embrace of the Serpent’ wins at Directors’ Fortnight Michael Rosser

Arnaud Desplechin's MY GOLDEN DAYS - Fandor David Hudson

The Past Isn't Past: Arnaud Desplechin | Keyframe - Explore ... Adam Cook interview from Fandor, May 18, 2015

My Golden Days' ('Trois Souvenirs De Ma Jeunesse ... Boyd ven Hoeij from The Hollywood Reporter

'My Golden Days' Review: Arnaud Desplechin's Marvelous ... Justin Chang from Variety

"My Golden Days," "By Sidney Lumet," - Roger Ebert Ben Kenigsberg from The Ebert site

Review: In 'My Golden Days,' Aching for a Love Left Behind Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Deutch, Howard

PRETTY IN PINK

USA (96 mi) 1986

Time Out review

A pretty superior teen angst movie, with John Hughes (executive-producing and scripting but not directing this time) completing the series he began with Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Being young, Hughes tells us, isn't easy. Red-haired Ringwald has no mother in sight, Harry Dean Stanton for a downbeat father, and an unfortunate high school rep. She wears odd clothes, tools round in a clapped-out Beetle, and works in a record store at weekends (cue Psychedelic Furs, The Smiths, etc). Still, she's got lots of spirit, and by the end even the Nice, Unbelievably Rich Kid with the BMW is beginning to recognise what we've known all along: that she's the best thing around. It's a plea on behalf of upward mobility, and - more remarkable - revolves around a single question: will Molly make it to the high school prom? To be able to give this kind of stuff new and sympathetic twists is a tribute to Hughes' skill with narrative, and to Ringwald's magnetism as a performer.

Slant Magazine [Paul Schrodt]

John Hughes was born in 1950 but connected deeply with the next generation's cultural brooding. With Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink—his ubiquitous "Brat Pack" trilogy—he single-handedly defined teenagers' high-pitched emotional neediness for the country's silver screens: Kids broke from convention—collectively taking the day off, like their hero Ferris Bueller—in order to announce to the world their frustration with being young, bored, and unpopular. Today's young directors reared in the '80s repackage their own iconic John Hughes moments as arrogant insults to their audience's intelligence—for proof, just look at any melodramatic scene in a Kevin Smith movie. In this nostalgia, some critics have recast Hughes's work as mushy nonsense. But while the man's trademarks have become clichés, to re-watch his best work is to realize how much it carried an authentic sense of heartache about high school life. Whereas Mean Girls used a visual metaphor turning students into ravaging lions as a dull-headed joke, Hughes created a lion's den that felt perilously real.

Andie (Molly Ringwald) and Duckie (Jon Cryer), Pretty in Pink's working-class outsiders ("zooids" within the school's hallways, underlining their alien detachment), suffer intimidation from the preppy blonds (typified by James Spader) who encircle them in the school's oppressive white-washed interiors; the laughing is only to soothe the pain. Never is this sentiment truer than in Duckie, played with God-sent sensitivity by Cryer. He nervously fumbles to entertain Andie with queer cocktail puns ("This is a really volcanic ensemble you're wearing") and ecstatic song-and-dances, swooning when she turns her back, "I love this woman. I love this woman, and I have to tell her." It's a diva complex only befitting a gay man, but the rapture and subsequent dejection of his unreciprocated first crush is universal. He bounces off the walls and yanks at the screen like a ball of pent-up hormones, a character any post-pubescent viewer can instantly recognize.

If emotionally invested audiences sense a cop-out in Hughes's re-shot happy-ever-after ending between Andie and her wealthy Prince Charming, it's because Ringwald's persona was always a bit of a cop-out—an outsider cool enough for mainstream audiences (it's no wonder today's Ringwald is Lindsay Lohan). Duckie dealt with sacrifice, letting go of Andie to retain his integrity, where Hughes's Ferris Bueller-lite fans could only register self-satisfaction. In life, as in Pretty in Pink, the real prom king dances alone. And by those standards, the ending is hardly a cop-out but a relieving mark of truth. Hey, there's a reason they call the new DVD the Everything's Duckie Edition. Within the span of Hughes's heyday, he was.

Turner Classic Movies review Eleanor Quin

In 1986 John Hughes hit the jackpot again with adolescent audiences when he released Pretty in Pink, a poor girl/rich boy romantic comedy. Hughes' muse Molly Ringwald starred as Andie, a disadvantaged but proud teenager, who wants more than anything to be asked to the prom. The role was written expressly for Ringwald, who also appeared in Hughes' first two films, Sixteen Candles (1984) and The Breakfast Club (1985). The film also featured Andrew McCarthy as "richie" Blaine, and John Cryer as the lovesick Duckie.

Hughes, already established as the "teenpic maestro", wrote the screenplay but handed directing duties over to first-timer Howard Deutch, mainly known for directing music videos. Deutch would collaborate again with Hughes in Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), a film meant to be yet another project with Ringwald, but she rejected the part. This refusal would mark the end of the Hughes/Ringwald working relationship, and the role eventually went to Lea Thompson. But Pretty in Pink had its share of changes and substitutions as well: the original casting choice for the role of Duckie was another Hughes fave, Anthony Michael Hall. Hall, fearing typecasting due to similar nerdy roles in other Hughes pics, turned down the role and Jon Cryer stepped into the pointy white shoes.

The biggest change of the film, however, was the entire ending, which originally had Andie and Duckie end up together. The test screening did not fare well with audiences, and film execs decided Blane instead should be the lucky guy. The entire cast and crew returned to re-shoot the ending, but in the interim Andrew McCarthy had shaved his head and lost a lot of weight to appear in a New York play. Adept viewers will want to look for a thinner Blane with a bad wig! Another change connected with the revamped ending was the musical selection: originally a song - "Goddess of Love" - by the band OMD was to be featured. When Andie ended up with Blane, however, another OMD tune was used instead - "If You Leave" - a move that guaranteed the song immortality at senior proms everywhere.

Pretty in Pink featured an impressive supporting cast, including Harry Dean Stanton as Andie's warmhearted but deadbeat dad. James Spader was perfectly cast as Blane's sleazy best friend; McCarthy and Spader would star together in two more films, Mannequin and Less Than Zero (both 1987). Annie Potts, from Ghostbusters (1984) and Designing Women fame, played Iona, Andie's kooky co-worker. One of the film's dedications was to Alexa Kenin, featured as Andie's friend Jena. Kenin was tragically murdered by her boyfriend shortly before the release of Pretty in Pink. An up-and-coming actress, Kenin had appeared opposite Clint Eastwood in Honkytonk Man (1982). Other significant bit player parts included Margaret Colin as a teacher, Gina Gershon as a snob, Dweezil Zappa as a stoned-out flake, and comedian Andrew "Dice" Clay as a club bouncer.

By and large, Pretty in Pink was panned by critics at the time of its release (One critic, apparently more taken with the soundtrack, advised "See the album."). Over time, however, it has been recognized as a fine effort from the man now called "The Frank Capra of contemporary cinema." The film made an instant and lasting impression, however, on its intended audience - high school kids. And it worked: one would be hard-pressed to find any child of the 80s not touched by the painfully accurate representations of adolescent angst, whether it be the heartbreak of unrequited love or social rejection by the popular kids.

Lisa Gabriele's pretty amazing essay at the Film Lounge on Pretty in Pink.

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [3.5/5]

CultureCartel.com (Chris Barsanti) review [3/5]

Jerry Saravia review [3.5/4]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

DVDTalk - Everything's Duckie Edition [Jamie S. Rich]

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

PopMatters [Andrew Gilstrap]

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Brendan Babish) dvd review ['Everything's Duckie' Edition]

Movie Vault [Matthew Coats]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Variety review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

MovieScreenShots.Blogspot.com photo gallery of the film

Deville, Michel

VOYAGE EN DOUCE

France (98 mi) 1980

User Reviews from imdb Author: Michael Ross Murphy from Ottawa, Canada

The Voyage in question immerses the viewer in the world of these two talkative yet strangely inarticulate friends without offering easy answers or facile insights. The viewer follows where the Voyage leads, as the characters themselves do, and bask in the summer sunlight of the French countryside. There are answers but the questions themselves are ambiguous and contradictory. Chaplin and Sanda, consummate actors, bring a crackling intensity and (at times) affecting vulnerability to their roles. The soundtrack enhances contemplative episodes with tenderly played bagatelles from Beethoven, which offer ironic counterpoint even while evoking a nostalgia for "lost time".

The claustrophobia-inducing tight interior shots bracketing the beginning and end of the film also intensify the exchange of roles between the two main characters that has gradually taken place during the journey. Elena (Sanda) has helped Lucia (Chaplin) rebuild her confidence and self-esteem but has herself become vulnerable and unstable in the process...

Le Voyage en douce Ray Young from Flickhead

Two intelligent, beautiful women pushing thirty—friends since childhood—take a long weekend together in the south of France, tell each other stories, try on different outfits, eat, take photographs, argue, flirt… Depending on one’s tolerance for such things, there are far worse ways you can spend ninety-five minutes. Directed by Michel Deville, with Dominique Sanda and Geraldine Chaplin at their prime and on screen for nearly all of the picture, Le Voyage en douce is a pastel reflection on memory, aging, sexuality, nostalgia, infidelity, dreams and dashed hopes, all in the guise of a summery, erotic confection.

Deville wrote the screenplay with the help of more than a dozen collaborators, each lending sundry anecdotes to flesh out the itinerant Helene (Sanda) and Lucie (Chaplin). They’re both married, Helene with two young children and Lucie childless, living lives that fall short of their youthful expectations. Admissions and visualizations of disorder and frustration merge with fantasies and vague recollections, and the lines separating fact from fiction soon blur.

As he’d later do in La Lectrice (1988), Deville segues freely between the two, often accompanied by a narration which may or may not be riddled with fabrication. He subtly changes our perception of the narrative form, to a point where we’re no longer concerned about situations as much as we are about the personalities involved. Some of the significant issues that are raised—who’s that man sitting next to Helene at the recital? why has Lucie’s husband removed all the doors inside their home?—go unanswered, enticing us to fill in the blanks, albeit with yet more questions. Is Helene sleeping with Lucie’s husband? Is Lucie a suicide risk?

With serene passages from Beethoven’s bagatelles fluttering on its soundtrack, the attempt to explore the female psyche appears genuine (and Deville couldn’t have cast better players), but Le Voyage en douce clearly stems from a biased perspective. Male characters are distant, one-dimensional and generally lascivious, a convenient means for Deville to avoid scrutinizing his own sex, if not himself. And at their core, Helene and Lucie are undermined by varying levels of confusion, that archaic but pervasive male stereotype of female weakness.

Taking a long weekend away from the controlling men in their lives, they’re hounded by reminders of actual and imagined shortcomings and disheartenment. Far less articulate or worldly than the people you’d find in an Eric Rohmer film, Deville offers Helene as an emblem of determination and sensuality, while Lucie carries the burden of excessive innocence and frailty. Unlike the similarly disparate (and desperate) pair in Thelma & Louise (1991), Helene and Lucie never quite entwine as one—Helene’s masculine side would never allow it and Lucie’s just too scared.

When the film was released in 1981, Geraldine Chaplin (daughter of Charles and Oona, granddaughter of Eugene O’Neill) was in the midst of an odd, burgeoning career, balancing big box office productions such as Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Hawaiians (1970), Z.P.G. (1970), and The Three Musketeers (1973), with Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), and A Wedding (1978), as well as the start of a long, fruitful relationship on and off camera with director Carlos Saura. Her excellent characterization of Lucie in Le Voyage en douce offers a bare vulnerability that nearly fills a void in Sanda’s Helene.

Riding the crest of an auspicious decade that began with her debut in Robert Bresson’s Une femme douce (1969), Dominique Sanda attained international success in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il Conformista (1970) and 1900 (1976), and Vittorio De Sica’s Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1970). She made bids for mainstream stardom in Philippe Labor’s Sans mobile apparent (1971), John Huston’s The MacKintosh Man (1973), Jack Smight’s Damnation Alley (1977), and J. Lee Thompson’s Caboblanco (1980), but they failed to find an audience and Sanda soon retreated to smaller efforts and television work. When she made Le Voyage en douce, the actress had reached a state of physical perfection, flawless, tan silky skin and hair softened by the sun. Sanda uses her appearance to flavor Helene as someone not necessarily vain but aware of beauty as both a blessing and a curse.

Their journey through the provincial villages, afternoons spent in outdoor cafes or lazing about in airy hotel rooms, go by in a succession of warm, inviting earth tones captured by cinematographer Claude Lecomte. He began his long but largely forgotten career on Deville’s Une balle dans le canon (1958; co-directed by Charles Gérard), a partnership which continued into the 1980s: Ce soir ou jamais (1961), À cause, à cause d'une femme (1963), L’Ours et la poupée (1969), La Femme en bleu (1973), Le Dossier 51 (1978), and La Petite bande (1983), among others. Lecomte’s best work, however, was for Jean-Loup Hubert and Le Grand chemin (1987), where he mined the rich hues of rural Brittany.

Despite its flaws, Le Voyage en douce is an engaging look at potential blithe spirits haunted by self-imposed prisons. It may appear to lack an intellectual edge, but Deville works prudently between the lines. And the countryside, Sanda and Chaplin are simply exquisite.

The hypothetical lesbian heroine Chris Staayer from Jump Cut, April 1990

Films of the '80s (part 1) – Long Pauses Darren Hughes

Deville-1980-Le voyage en douce

VOYAGE EN DOUCE - The New York Times Janet Maslin

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Le Voyage en douce - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Devlin, Paul

POWER TRIP C+ 77

USA (86 mi) 2003

Somewhat muddled documentary about how difficult the conditions are in Georgia, the former Soviet state, making the transition to independence, which includes several civil wars as well as the concept of capitalism. What the State used to provide now has to be paid for, and this documentary examines the continuing difficulty one company has trying to provide electricity when no one wants to pay. Newly installed meters are sabotaged, people run their own wires, creating horribly dangerous situations where people can easily get electrocuted. As it turns out, even when they do pay, sometimes there is still no power. Usually running only a few hours a day, the filmmaker examines the Herculean efforts made by an American independent power company AES, which actually tries to reeducate the population, prevent riots on the streets when the power is turned off, and bring a better way of life. But the government continues to provide free electricity to industry and the armed forces, as well as politically connected friends, which prevents ordinary citizens from receiving what they need. Ultimately, this independent venture fails, and a Russian power company takes over, reverting back to the old days, only now, instead of the Russian State, it’s the Russian mafia that holds the power. It was hard to tell the good guys from the bad, much was inferred rather then shown, but the point was made that they were in another world, with conditions as prehistoric as Outer Mongolia. The old Georgian buildings and the Eastern Orthodox music were enchanting, but one wondered what was happening with the water supply or the telephone service. Also, Tbilisi was the featured city. But as I recall, that was the center of ancient Armenian culture as represented by films of Paradjanov. So while interesting, much of the history was left out and would be known only to inhabitants of the region.

Devor, Robinson

POLICE BEAT B 89

USA (81 mi) 2005

An oddly experimental film written by Charles Tonderai Mudede that uses an oblique, existential narration, which includes poetic observations as well as the individual feelings of a black West African police officer in Seattle who covers his rounds on a bicycle. Identified only as Z, played by a non-professional actor Pape Sidy Niang, a former professional soccer player from Senegal (whose team photo may be seen on his apartment wall), it’s interesting that few of Z’s thoughts have anything to do with what we are seeing onscreen. Much of it is subtitled in his native Wolof language from Senegal, some set to the music of Erik Satie or Aphex Twin, as he rambles on to himself as he goes about his police rounds, responding to domestic violence, petty theft, drugs, prostitution, suicides, murders, including a fellow partner in uniform who has this thing for a junkie prostitute, as well as other persons in distress, much of it perfectly harmless, yet as we see him pulling a dead body out of the water, he’s besieged with thoughts about his missing girl friend. As it turns out, each of the circumstances that he responds to is based on actual police radio calls.

Unlike the typical portrayal of police mentality, this officer actually listens to each perpetrator, and identifies with their circumstance, then tries to fix it. As we see him write up a report about a call by an elderly woman who was attacked by an unknown object on her own lawn, which he determined was from a falling branch of a tree, he backs up his sentence and rechooses the words in his report, calling it more specifically a “rude” tree. After reading “Lord of the Flies,” a book someone yells out to him that he better read as he’s being hauled off to jail, Z concludes that’s the way the world would be without police officers. In perhaps the best sequence, a man being arrested starts yelling about the corrupt government, how it’s a police conspiracy, how everyone hates the government, and if given the chance, Hell yes he’d kill Bush, that he’s probably being watched by the FBI right now. Z responds that he already checked, the man is not being watched by the FBI, because it is Z himself that is being watched.

Much of the time, Z stresses over his failing relationship with a young girl who is off camping with another man. Initially he is told they are only friends, but as a few days extend to a week with the guy, she later informs him they have an intimate relationship as well. As time passes, his feelings for her fluctuate and eventually disintegrate, as he realizes she is just a “foolish girl to be saying these things to a man with a gun.” His isolation becomes evident as he becomes more and more lonely, a stranger in a strange land, believing relationships can be cruel, which triggers his feelings that the world can be cruel. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s imagined, as they blend together in the same dreamlike cinematic space, floating, evolving, imagining, thinking, while riding through evergreen-lined parks overlooking Puget Sound, or up a hill with a view of Mount Ranier in the distance, leading to a sense of reverie about everyday ordinary experiences, only to be interrupted by a brutal situation that once again requires his expertise.

Police Beat Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Miles away from Devor's debut film, the faux-hardboiled Patrick Warburton vehicle The Woman Chaser, Police Beat abides by the oneiric rhythms and impressionistic structure one would more readily expect from a European or, fittingly, an African film, although part of the problem lies in an unwillingness to fully commit to this approach. On paper it's simple to the point of obtuseness: Senegalese-born Z (Pape Sidy Niang) is a bicycle cop in Seattle, and his American lover has vanished on a camping trip with an old flame. Z drifts from disturbance to disturbance with earnest concern, but all the while a running interior monologue communicates his lovelorn distraction. The film follows the halting, semi-random ebb and flow of the police calls, some bizarre and others utterly unspectacular. But Devor and co-screenwriter Charles Mudede are clearly allowing these crimes and urban disruptions to function as objective correlatives of Z's psychic state. Within this very successful formal gambit, Police Beat also explores (with admirable subtlety and restraint) Z's slight cultural remove, as well as his ambivalent occupancy of the socially conservative role of police officer. Often the film places the viewer in a spectatorial position analogous to Z's, withholding information or muddying the sound mix just enough to convey confusion and, perhaps even more significantly, the half-conscious drift of emotional detachment, the situation of being on the job and trying to do your best when your head just can't really be in the ballgame. While watching, certain touchstones crossed my mind. Police Beat's genial tone, and Z's committed execution of his duties with just a hint of resignation, suggest an entire film build around John C. Reilly's Magnolia character. And, in its hovering observation of a man at work in the midst of psychological turmoil, this film exhibits strange tonal affinities with Przemyslaw Reut's Paradox Lake, although it bears no hint of that film's misguided pretentions. Sadly, Devor and Mudede do let Police Beat's mood and formal tenor get away from them on occasion. The brief stagings of the crimes and misdemeanors in progress are on the mark about 1/3 of the time, but too often they veer into awkward half-comedy, and their (unprofessional?) performers engage in that odd form of muted overacting that happens when actors are coached to "be natural" but can't help approximating their intuitive sense of what true thespianism looks like. Since, in some way, these events are both "objective" (taken from actual police calls, as it happens) and emblematic of Z's troubled Seattle of the mind, it would take an act of superhuman, pop-Bressonian directorial skill to nail each and every one. The fact that Police Beat is hobbled only slightly by these missteps speaks to the significant level of achievement here. Police Beat operates in a plangent emotional register that most American Indie films (and the twenty-somethings who make them) scarcely know exists. Finally, a memo to Victor Morton: see this film. I can't recall the last time I saw a movie that affirmed conservative values in such a sensitive, intelligent manner.

ZOO B+ 91

USA (80 mi) 2007

A strange and eerily hypnotic film, which has a strikingly vivid opening scene of distant lights moving like stars engulfed in a sea of blackness, where the music of Gustav Holst’s “Neptune, the Mystic” from “The Planets” casts a mesmerizing mood of otherworldly strangeness, where it’s impossible to tell what we’re looking at until just one of those lights enlarges to fill the entire screen, where inside what appeared to be a bright white bubble lies a separate reality all unto itself, as what we eventually see are miners coming out of a darkened mine shaft. This sets the vicinity as West Virginia, a place where not much happens, filled with likable people, but most without much experience or education. We hear the voice of a man describe how he felt trapped in this economically challenged place until the discovery of the Internet, which eventually led him to the State of Washington. Describing himself as someone who is not comfortable in the world of people, who prefers a kind of underworld privacy, connected to others who feel much the same way, where in no time at all we’re whisked into a secret society of people who call themselves “zoos,” lonely and isolated men who feel more comfortable loving animals than people, even to the point of having sex with them. We are suddenly immersed into a world of men living in the remote, isolated farmlands of Emunclaw, Washington where bestiality is not only acceptable, but common, shared by stories and videos about their experiences over the Internet. The filmmaker’s interest, however, only took hold after one man bled to death from a ruptured colon after one such incident with a male stallion, which alerted law enforcement to the discovery of these unsavory practices, which was not against the law in the State of Washington at the time. The film takes great pains to present the story from the point of view of the man who died, known as “Mr. Hands” in the film, as well as several others in their close-knit group who knew him, who may even have been present when the act was committed, in this somewhat fictionalized recreation of a real event.

The subject matter seems to find its way into the story, at times shattering our level of acceptance, but mostly the film does a brilliant job using a highly stylized look casting an almost magical spell over what we see, establishing a mysterious mood of shadowy humans oftentimes seen as silhouettes, living under the looming immensity of Washington’s majestic mountains, which never looked more snow-peaked and impressive, ever, surrounding every sequence with an exceptionally hauntingly soundtrack from Paul Matthew Moore, which includes several uses of “The Planets,” also an uncredited classical piano piece that sounded much like the miniature perfection of a Debussy Prelude, but also sharp, exquisite pacing, using concise, beautifully flowing editing, all illuminated by the impressionistic camera of Sean Kirby that seems to capture a separate universe that comes to life under the darkness of the midnight moon. Depressed after their exposure in the press, believing their lives will be ruined forever, one of the participants uttered “Nobody finds out if you live.” While the incident is never shown, there are brief explicit images shown off in the corner on a TV screen of a video confiscated by the police labeled “Big Dick,” while the crude accompanying cries and moans exasperatingly test our limits. We’re veering into Herzog territory here, where he should have been the only one to view the tapes, then go on to inform the viewers that the material was simply too revolting for public consumption.

Despite the outlandish nature of the material, all is seamlessly integrated into a subtle, understated, yet highly compelling film essay, given a mildly avant garde or experimental veneer, where the picturesque natural landscape is never less than stunning, contrasted against the voice of Rush Limbaugh who chimes in questioning the public outrage that believes animals, like children, can’t give their consent to the sexual act, claiming this story would never have happened if the animal hadn’t expressed consent. There is a veterinary “horse rescuer” who recalls the beautiful sunny day, a rare occurrence in that region, when she received the initial call from the authorities describing their need for someone to take care of the animals after the event, no one really knowing what level of interaction with humans these horses may have had. She did describe her immediate alarm meeting one of the men who owned the horses, as his fondness for them was instantly recognizable when he was told he would have to give them up, reminding her of visible signs of pedophilia (Really? There are such signs?). The capability of humans to grow this attached to animals was entering new territory for her, as the exquisite looking horses showed no signs of abuse or harm, but they were immediately gelded to make sure it never happened again, a gruesome procedure that was difficult to endure. It was certainly not lost on the viewers that no one asked the horses for consent. The mystery of how humans seem to evolve backwards, preferring the company of non-humans, was reminiscent of the finale to Imamura’s THE PORNOGRAPHERS (1966), where a man becomes so enraptured with his wood-carved doll of a voluptuous woman that nothing else matters, retreating from life itself, in the end, becoming more and more detached from his life, lost and alone on a small boat, carving his doll, oblivious and adrift.

Zoo JR Jones from the Reader

Best known for the haunting indie drama Police Beat (2005), writer-director Robinson Devor applies his impressionistic vision to the notorious case of Kenneth Pinyan, a Seattle airline engineer who died in 2005 after his colon was perforated during sex with a stallion. The subsequent police investigation uncovered an underground bestiality club that shared videotapes over the Internet; some of its members granted audio interviews to Devor. Press notes stress the director's ambition to transcend the screaming headlines and late-night punch lines for a more serious treatment of a taboo subject. But his interviewees are too busy excusing themselves to offer much illumination into their desires, and Devor's moody style (silhouettes, reenactments, an ominously throbbing score) only heightens the sleazy Dateline NBC feel.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Amazingly, the most perverse thing about Robinson Devor's documentary isn't its subject matter – no small feat considering that its point of origin was a Seattle man who died of a ruptured colon after getting reamed by a horse. Devor and his Police Beat co-writer Charles Mudede (a staff writer for the alt-weekly The Stranger) stage their inquiry into the dead man's circle of fellow zoophiles as a poetic variation on a theme. Identifying its subjects by their online nicknames (the dead man is "Mr. Hands"), the movie relies on artfully lit re-enactments, turning the fact that two of the three zoophiles interviewed would not appear on camera into an artistic statement rather than a limitation. (Even the one, known as Coyote, who does appear as himself is never seen speaking: His words appear in voiceover as he silently recreates his own life.) By the time Mr. Hands is walking naked through the branches of a vividly flowering bush, you're either watching one of the boldest movies you've ever seen, or one of the silliest. Zoo's attempt to see things from its subjects' point of view is intriguing, but it works so hard to counter the knee-jerk revulsion of the mainstream media that it overcorrects; surely including one person who thinks having sex with humans might not be so great for a horse wouldn't be too much to ask. The closest the film comes is an interview with a self-proclaimed "horse rescuer" who took in some of the animals after the fact, and even she concludes she's "right at the edge of being able to understand" their attraction. The zoos insist they love their animals, and maybe they do, but Devor does them no favors by coddling them. Even vanilla love hurts sometimes.

review Ray Pride from New City

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. "Little Miss Chris Marker" this is not. Robinson Devor’s darkly bruised essay film on taboo, "Zoo," finds him rejoining the writer, Charles Mudede, and cinematographer Sean Kirby, who together made the hypnotic slice of Pacific Northwest weirdness, "Police Beat" (2005). There’s some murkiness about which of the actual participants in the events are heard or seen on film, and I’m content to consider it a fictional essay. "Zoo" follows the reaction in the Washington after a gathering of "zoophiles," who gathered on a ranch to have sex with horses, which was then legal in that state, led to the death of one man, whose handle, possibly from AOL, was "Mr. Hands" from a perforated colon. (There are three incredibly brief and distant bursts of imagery that are explicit in "Zoo.") As a succession of impressionistic reenactments, "Zoo," visually, is one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen this year. The way one image follows another is often majestically constructed, which makes one wonder what they will do next with a less unsavory subject. The fleet, assured, satisfying editing is very busy, with intermittent traveling shots that hold the weight of gravity. Dark color and shadow are bolder in "Zoo" than brightest light. (The ecstatic fracture of Olivier Assayas’ "Demonlover" (2002) also comes to mind.) Perhaps the taboo transgressed here is not bestiality, but the boundaries of cinematic genre. It’s unsettling more in its stylistic extremes than its ostensible subject matter of taboo otherness and self-justifying perversion. At moments, it also resembles a Clare Denis project photographed by fine arts photographer Gregory Crewdson.

Zoo David D’Arcy from Screendaily

The much-awaited Zoo will draw enviable publicity (already evident at Sundance, where it premiered) because of the salacious nature of the story that inspired the film: the death from a perforated colon of a man who had sex with a horse in 2005 at a gathering of like-minded animal-lovers in Enumclaw, near Seattle.

Audiences will find that Zoo is not a feature-length tabloid story, nor is it a chronicle of the police investigation of the group of zoophiles who organised the gathering at which the fatal injury was suffered. Anything but obvious, Zoo is a poetic documentary that examines relations between species that, in this case, lead to sexual encounters. Devor is determined to humanise the men who love horses in the extreme as outsiders doomed to be misunderstood and scorned by society.

Its audience will certainly include arthouse aesthetes who will find similarities in director Robinson Devor's work to that of Erroll Morris, David Lynch and Guy Maddin. The titillation factor – which made stories of the case the most-read articles in the history of the Seattle Times – will also give the film a clear identity in the theatrical marketplace, although those searching for footage of the act itself will have to look elsewhere. Revulsion at the very notion that these acts could take place could lead to public condemnation of the film, and scare off the US mainstream audience that flocked to March Of The Penguins and other films that humanise animals. Yet Zoo as a story that probes a hidden dark side of America could find some interest beyond festivals in Europe and Japan.

Co-written by Devor and blogger and cultural critic Charles Mudede, Zoo has an ambitious aesthetic and a risky moral tolerance. Neither quality usually wins a broad audience, but Devor is sure to please the small committed base that has been growing since his debut feature, Woman Chaser (1999), and Police Beat (2005), a dreamy story of an African immigrant policeman in Seattle co-written with the Zimbabwe-born Mudede.

Zoophiles – or Zoos, as they call themselves – are the real subject of Devor's documentary. In audio interviews, the men, who also film their sex with horses, try to differentiate themselves from practitioners of bestiality by arguing that Zoos' relationships with horses and other animals are bonds of true affection. Here again the film is swimming upstream against preconceptions. If Devor's tone doesn't give credence to what the men are saying, it goes out on a limb by encouraging the audience to view them with dignity.

To complicate the story, sex with an animal is not a crime in the state of Washington, and police seeking to bring animal cruelty charges were stymied, never able to prove that the horse in the encounter was coerced into doing anything.

Cinematography by Sean Kirby frames testimony and recreations of alienated Zoos gravitating toward each other in the lush green horse country of Enumclaw, an Eden in which private desires, however strange, can be fulfilled and filmed. The documentary's original title was In The Forest There Is Every Kind Of Bird.

As Mr Hands, the man who dies "in the saddle," John Paulson plays a Seattle computer engineer whose emotional needs go far beyond what his wife and child can provide. He walks in a stoic dreamlike silence toward the encounter that kills him in re-creation scenes that quote The Thin Blue Line. Uncredited music in the style of Philip Glass heightens the fatalistic mood, as do long gothic shots of ominous skies and light within the dark Northwestern forest.

Recognising that exposure could bring public condemnation and ridicule (the two common reactions when the case came to light), Mr Hands is known, until he dies, by his email address. In deference to the privacy of his wife and son, Devor leaves the man's name out of the film, although it has been published widely in news reports since the case hit the media.

In another fatalistic strand of the story, fellow Zoos played by Richard Carmen and Russell Hodgkinson in recreations are pursued by the police and eventually flee the area.

Howard Feinstein on the most shocking film to ever hit Cannes from the Guardian

A no-nonsense woman named Jenny Edwards runs Help for Horses, an organisation in Washington state, USA, that nurses abused and abandoned equines. After the police, she, along with the father and brother of the deceased, was first to arrive at a farm in the small town of Enumclaw after the demise of a 45-year-old man on July 2 2005. Known to the public only as Mr Hands, his internet handle, he died, according to the coroner's report, from "acute peritonitis ... perforation of the sigmoid colon by a horse". Like others in this bucolic farming region, and in the city of Seattle, an hour's drive away, Edwards was appalled at the discovery of a community of "zoos", or zoophiles - people with a sexual attraction to other species - in the town.

By the end of Zoo, Robinson Devor's film about the zoos and the death of Mr Hands, Edwards has had a change of heart. Remarkably, she comes to believe that her own relationship to horses (we see her spending the night, platonically, among them in the fields) is not so far from those of the zoos. She acknowledges "the love and care they give their animal partners" - comparing that with what "normal" people do to animals, from spaying and gelding, to hunting them for sport and experimenting on them in the name of science - then adds: "I'm right at the edge of being able to understand it."

Cannes has had its fair share of sensations over the years, but Zoo, screening during the Director's Fortnight, looks set to be one of the most controversial films ever shown at the festival. Devor is as much an advocate for the rights of the zoos as Edwards is for those of horses. He and his co-writer, Charles Mudede, a cultural critic and journalist, saw an opportunity to address what they consider "the last taboo", by providing a context in which to give the zoos back their humanity and destigmatise their sexual preference.

Devor decided that a highly stylised approach would be the most effective to counter the widespread dismissal of these men and their orientation. Anyone seeking titillation will be disappointed. "I aestheticised the sleaze out of it," says Devor. You could blink and miss the well-circulated, grainy, explicit clip of Mr Hands being penetrated by an Arabian stallion, taken from the numerous videotapes he and his fellow zoos shot of one another; the camera pans around detectives and the relatives of one zoo, assembled to watch the scene on a monitor. Devor says he was influenced not by other documentaries but by highly stylised fiction films: Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror, Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together, and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

In part, his artistic choices are a result of limitations. The family of Mr Hands - a divorced father outed in the Seattle media as Boeing engineer Kenneth Pinyan, although never named in the film - refused to participate. Only one zoo, known as Coyote, agreed to appear on camera. The two other main characters would only record on audiotape. Devor recreated the essence of the zoo lifestyle with actors, adding haunting music, and he avoided a linear narrative, with its expectations of cause and effect.

The zoos and Devor believe that sex with horses is consensual. We see the zoos engage in affectionate foreplay, the building of trust between man and animal. One zoo claims Mr Hands perished because he and the man who aided him had not built a trusting relationship with the animal. Others in Washington disagreed. Led by Republican state senator Pam Roach, outraged rightwing politicians, religious leaders and animal rights organisations argued that horses do not have the cognitive ability to choose whether or not to participate in sex with a human. "Studies have shown a strong link between sex with animals and paedophilia," said Daniel Satterberg, a deputy prosecutor, in support of Roach's successful bid to introduce anti-bestiality legislation. However, the law was passed too late to convict the zoos, with the exception of one man, known as H, who was charged with trespassing.

Oddly enough, ultraconservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh sided with the zoos. In the film, we hear his voice during a broadcast, asking: "Can it be disputed, given the evidence, that the horse was a willing participant?"

Whatever sense of community the zoos had was shattered when the scandal erupted. Each is shown alone, looking lost. "We always divided the film into two: paradise and paradise lost," Devor explains.

Although the subject matter is the stuff of sensationalist headlines, the decision to forgo a talking-heads documentary in favour of high-end tableaux seems to position the film for the arthouse. Still, Zoo is not devoid of humour, intentional or otherwise, with some characters' statements begging to be laughed at. "We were friends for all these years," says H, decrying the shunning he received when his secret life came to light. "And now all of a sudden I'm no good because I love the horse?"

Interviews | The Dark Horse: Robinson Devor on Zoo - Cinema Scope Rob Nelson interview, 2007

Robinson Devor’s Zoo—written, like his Police Beat (2005), with Seattle alt-weekly critic and columnist Charles Mudede—achieves the seemingly impossible: It tells the luridly reported tale of a Pacific Northwest businessman’s fatal sexual encounter with a horse in a way that’s haunting rather than shocking, and tender beyond reason. So, too, it’s hard to imagine a more cinematic film of this incident than Devor’s suitably crossbred doc-cum-docudrama, which weds the audio testimonies of the dead man’s zoophilic companions to speculatively reenacted, dreamlike visuals that feature both professional actors and real-life subjects—Arabian stallions included.

Zoo, wherein the departed is known as “Mr. Hands” (and played by Russell Hodgkinson), might well be the ultimate subculture movie. The 2005 Enumclaw Horse Sex Incident, as the story was known in newsprint, involved a secret community of a half-dozen men who conversed online and gathered periodically at a rural farm outside Seattle to practice and sometimes videotape bestiality (which wasn’t illegal in the state of Washington at the time). Disarmingly quiet and contemplative, challenging both itself and the viewer to sympathize with a rather different breed of animal lover, Zoo is the opposite of exploitation.

That’s not to say the movie isn’t perverse. Premiered at Sundance in the documentary competition category, Zoo hardly conforms to the standard practice of contemporary indie-filmmaking in any genre. Devor and Mudede began creating their shooting script by splicing a narrative together out of their many hours of audio interviews. (Most of the subjects insisted on anonymity.) The bulk of shooting took place last fall (in Super 16) after TH!NKFilm ponied up production funds for the doc, this on the basis of a mere five minutes that Devor had filmed in a bid to attract investors. Additional shooting and re-editing occurred in November after the film had been invited to Sundance, and Mr. H., the ranch hand, agreed to participate. The film’s chief provocation derives from the style rather than the subject. There’s very little humour in the movie with the exception of a few voiceovers; one “zoo,” as the group members call themselves, hilariously explicates his equine love by saying, “You’re not gonna be able to ask [a horse] about the latest Madonna album.” Pop culture seems to matter even less to zoos than it does to the filmmakers.

After the first Sundance screening, which seemed to render the audience almost hypnotically subdued, Mudede described the movie as a “thought experiment” above all. “If someone can do this [bestiality] physically,” he said, “I should be able to comprehend it mentally.” The film’s lush images of nature, some in slow motion and many in near darkness, are designed to compel the viewer’s calm consideration of the myriad issues that surround this bizarre case. Can an animal give sexual consent? Might a man who has sex with a beast be more human than the rest of us? And what does it mean to be free? The film is articulate in posing these questions even when its subjects aren’t. “Maybe I just want to grab a horse by his balls,” a zoo confesses. “Maybe I just want to feel his nuts.”

No wonder Devor, whom I interviewed on the morning after the world premiere, says the film was difficult to make. The marketing and distribution of Zoo would seem a tall order as well—to the film’s great credit.

Cinema Scope: Everything about Zoo, including the characters, seems to stand against strict classification. Are you at all uncomfortable with the “documentary” designation at Sundance?

Devor: Well, it’s funny. If someone started the Hybrid Festival and put Zoo in it, I’d maybe say, “You know, I don’t want the film to be a ‘hybrid.’” On the other hand, I could understand why someone would say that the film is pushing or even abusing some of the territory of a typical documentary. But that sort of discomfort comes with the challenges of the film, you know? When the subjects’ anonymity is a factor, and you’ve got a lot of audio testimony—that’s what you have to work with—the film is simply going to be what it’s going to be. We had discussions with people at Sundance about the documentary category. We pretty much anticipated that someone would eventually say, “Well, actually, we thought about it, and we decided you can’t be in the Documentary Competition.” But what’s the next step away from documentary? Docudrama? Zoo is certainly not docudrama. You don’t have real people in docudramas, you don’t have real voices going all the time. But I understand the perception that lines are being blurred. It came with the territory.

Scope: Do you think the film functions as alternative journalism? Were those original newspaper articles about the case just horribly sensational?

Devor: I don’t think they were that sensational, actually. But I think readers were coming to those pieces with a hankering for sensationalism. Charles, of course, is a journalist. And I, of course, am not. But I imagine that journalists and nonfiction writers have the kind of freedom to describe, that it’s equivalent to my desire and freedom to create an image. That feeling of latitude comforted me a bit, because while the film is based on actual statements, I’m really creating it out of my own world. I think artists should be able to create whatever they want. I don’t think there should be any rules in filmmaking. But with a film that’s going to be featured in a festival, there’s categorization. We thought we’d end up in the Frontier section—which would have been fine.

Scope: What was your chief motivation to make the film?

Devor: It seemed to be a perfect challenge on many levels. There are very few subjects anymore that are quote-unquote dirty to the average person, subjects that a filmmaker could endeavour against all odds to make beautiful. And this was one of them. I just felt there was some love in this story—some beauty and friendship and emotion. People could say we overaestheticized things. Obviously what happened is a tragedy. It’s not a thing to take lightly. So hopefully it’s not a frivolous beauty in the film, but a darker beauty. The need to strike that careful balance was intriguing—and the fact that no one was digging deeper into the case.

Scope: That’s what I was getting at with the “alternative journalism” angle.

Devor: I see what you mean. I don’t know how the lines of demarcation fall between journalism and filmmaking; it’s difficult to say. Certainly film functions in a way that journalism can’t really resemble, not even with pictures. I’m aware that the film is drenched in an aesthetic approach as opposed to a newsy approach. We’re visual artists. We wanted to try to excite ourselves cinematically. That was the goal, and sometimes that by itself is enough for somebody who likes film. And definitely we were tying to get to the soul of something that, for whatever reason, was not being captured in the news media.

Scope: You wanted to give some understanding and perhaps some sympathy to these people. Devil’s advocate question here: Why is that important?

Devor: Well, in the land of the free, it’s important that everyone has a voice, that people can be allowed to explain who they are. I’m not a flag-waver in that way, but I feel it is definitely valuable to let the audience look through the eyes of people who are different from them, to let them hear what might initially seem an outrageous point of view, to give voice to that point of view. Maybe this wasn’t the driving motivation of the film, but I do feel that it was particularly important to the people whose stories we were telling, because I think the perception is that these guys are sick, irredeemable people. And I just instinctually feel that that’s ridiculous.

Scope: The movie seems to position itself in various ways as a kind of exploration of unknown territory. Is that what you’re getting at with the moon-landing footage that the men are seen watching on TV?

Devor: There’s a couple of reasons for the moon landing footage. These guys forged a very strong bond around technology—not just computers and the internet. The man who died, Mr. Hands, worked for a very successful aerospace company. When the men got together, they would watch sci-fi movies, which are, generally speaking, about possibilities, about ways of expanding the mind. We couldn’t land the rights to a clip from a sci-fi movie, but we could at least get some lunar landing footage that they were interested in—one man in particular was interested in this footage. For a while we talked about running the opening credits over old footage of men walking on the moon. In the end, that seemed a little too self-indulgent. But the idea was to incorporate their love of science and science fiction. And the moon-landing footage is also a reminder that at one point somebody said, “You know, there’s no way that man is ever going to walk on the moon.” Maybe in the future, the story of Zoo will not seem so outrageous either.

Scope: Speaking of sci fi: The first images of the film are barely even images—they’re just colours, lights flashing, almost subliminal in effect. It’s like the Starchild sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): this long tracking shot that works totally on the subconscious, pulling you through space in a way that gives you that feeling of surreal exploration.

Devor: That comes from Charles. His big thing is this: start a story from a place where you just don’t expect to be. So here we start under the earth, in a mine. It’s the idea of an exploration in the dark, yeah. The whole movie makes very deliberate reference—not in a biological way—to long chambers, stretches of space that one fumbles through in the dark. Confined spaces—with a small sliver of light—were really important to us when we were making the film.

Scope: Your cinematographer Sean Kirby, who also shot Police Beat, continues to work on film. Is it getting harder to stay away from digital?

Devor: Yes. For me, it’s all or nothing—and “all” means film, celluloid. “Nothing” is me sleeping on a sofa, waiting for those six months of pure pleasure when I’m immersed in a project. I’m not the kind of person who thinks about sustainable projects—about what will work commercially—so much as I think about just doing something that’s pleasing. At our level of the industry, we have fewer people pulling our strings, and that’s a great benefit. But it’s a struggle when you insist on working in film. I mean, it’s a struggle even to find good ideas for movies—that’s the biggest struggle. You want to find new territory that excites you, something you can be passionate about. But it just doesn’t happen very often. This movie gave us something to sink our teeth into for sure.

Scope: It’s unusual—particularly for a “documentary”—to land a distributor so early in the process.

Devor: That was great. That money [from TH!NKFilm] allowed us to make the movie. I was frustrated because the movie had been set to go with another company, but it was chopped, unceremoniously and without explanation. So we started shooting ourselves. We thought we’d try to put a reel together, show what we could do with it. We shot that sequence we call the “magic journey,” where the men are walking at night. That was the tone we were after: an aesthetic beauty wedded to this outrageous concept, this idea of merging with an animal. We went to L.A. to show footage to people, to set up meetings. Amazingly, it was well received. And that was a great thing. Often we come up with projects where we think, “Can we get local money? What can we do that people will go for?” And we did have some local people who invested. But it was nice to go down and be part of the system, to have a little bit of success in the system with such an odd project.

Scope: I imagine that having Police Beat on your resume would’ve helped.

Devor: The truth is, it was the exact opposite. Often what we’d hear was like, “Well, okay—just as long as it’s not another Police Beat !”

Scope: Zoo and Police Beat are similar in that they both derive from tabloidesque material, from an attempt to enrich that material, to bring another point of view to light.

Devor: Yeah. They’re different in that Police Beat has a protagonist and a kind of moral centre, which is something we sort of groped for in this. But yes, Police Beat was pulp—transcendent pulp. I don’t know if Zoo transcends pulp. Probably it does. We hope so!

Scope: Your original title for Zoo was In the Forest, There is Every Kind of Bird. Not exactly a “pulp” title, huh?

Devor: We had a feeling that title would be axed one day. But it was pleasurable to work on the film for a long time with that title, because it was a signal to the people who were involved that our approach was going to be thoughtful, gentler. It was better than having a movie called Horsepower or something. The title came from a comment I read on a blog, a comment about the case after it had been discovered. In this sea of outrage and laughter in the media, there was at least one person who said, “Well, in the forest there is every kind of bird.” He or she didn’t invent that phrase, but I thought it was a beautiful thing to say in this context.

Scope: Is sexual intolerance on a broader level something you wanted to address and maybe combat with this?

Devor: All you can really do is listen. I listened to these people and that’s very important to them. I’m happy to put their ideas into the film and into the culture. Seattle is a very tolerant place, I think, but there are always forces lurking. It’s an odd tolerance in this case, because you’re dealing with another species, so there are questions of abuse, things that are difficult to make clear pronouncements about. But any kind of intolerance is related to another, so it’s a good thing to work on that a bit. The thing is, those groups who might want to have more tolerance shown toward them wouldn’t necessarily want to be associated with this particular group and their mission. So these zoos find themselves on an island.

Scope: There’s a certain coldness to the film—I mean that as a compliment. The visual tones are cold blue, and the mood is one of loneliness and alienation. Did you feel these guys were seeking a kind of community that they couldn’t find in the human world?

Devor: You can’t necessarily think that, actually. The definition of a zoo is someone who may not need that human interaction as much as the average person. There is still a need for community. But it’s maybe a different kind of community. I think friendships are important to them—and positive human emotions, absolutely. But I don’t think loneliness is a part of that. In terms of the main character, if he’s going to go out in a field and talk with an animal—he would take his clothes off as a sign of solidarity, he would stay out and talk to horses for hours, get stuff off his chest—there’s a certain loneliness in that because you’re trying to connect with another species. It’s not necessarily that you’re lonely in human relationships and you need companionship with an animal. I think there’s loneliness simply in trying to cross over into that other realm of interspecies communication.

Scope: What does the style intend then, principally, if not the evocation of loneliness?

Devor: We were really trying to create a paradisiacal style. These were men who could come and be themselves. They could feel safe. Then the paradise was lost after the death of this person. There’s loneliness in that. But I think the style is trying to say, “Imagine a place—a garden, a field, under a volcano—where you could do the craziest thing in the world, and where there are people you could at least feel comfortable with.” It’s about not just the camaraderie of human beings, but about trying to go off and have a meaningful relationship with an animal. It’s tricky. Or maybe it isn’t so tricky.

Scope: Well, the sex is consensual, right?

Devor: I believe it is, yes.

The Village Voice [Nathan Lee]

indieWire.com [Anthony Kaufman]

Zoo Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

DVD Talk Brian Orndorf

The IFC Blog [Alison Willmore]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

Film Journal International (Maitland McDonagh)

Variety.com [Scott Foundas]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)

'Zoo' finds the poetry in perversity Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

Dhalia, Heitor

ADRIFT (A Deriva)

Brazil (103 mi) 2009

Matt Bochenski at Cannes from Little White Lies

The Vincent Cassel starring Adrift (directed by Heitor Dhalia) played in the evening. With brilliant camerawork, stunning photography and a gorgeous piano refrain, this story about a young girl whose summer on the beach is a time of both sexual awakening and familial dysfunction had all the ingredients to be a smash – and the crowd certainly seemed to like it. It hints at sexual transgression and the tortured confusion of adolescence. Laura Leto is an amazing find as the young girl, Filipa, giving it the full Brook Shields as a budding siren. The way in which she comes to understand the power of her beauty, and the way she explores the limits of that power (not just in terms of her sexuality but morally as well) is intriguing stuff. So too the subtext about the hypocrisy of childhood. When Filipa tells her adulterous father “I’ll never understand you!” she fails to see that she’s already repeating these grown-up patterns of behaviour among her own friends. But where a film like A Brand New Life is about the exquisite agony of childhood, Adrift is simply the story of a spoiled girl learning a few life lessons. And where films like La Zona, Deficit and A Week Alone interrogate the divisions in Latin America’s social strata through the eyes of youth, Adrift is, at heart, a sumptuously produced, feature length episode of The OC.

Alex Billington at Cannes from First Showing, May 22, 2009

I think I stumbled across a big Cannes sleeper hit. From the beaches of Brazil comes Adrift, known as À Deriva in Portuguese, the third film from Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia. I'm going to say right up front - following in the footsteps of City of God director Fernando Meirelles, Dhalia is the next great Brazilian filmmaker on the verge of breaking out. Adrift is his calling card, a gorgeous family drama about a beautiful young girl (seen above) and her parents. It's not a masterpiece, but it is definitely one of the better films I've seen here that offers so much to fall in love with, whether it be the actors, cinematography, or story.

French actor Vincent Cassel stars as Mathias, the loving father of a family of three kids, husband of Clarice (Débora Bloch), and struggling author in desperate need of money. Set in the 1980's on the stunning beaches of Brazil, the story follows the breakdown between married couple Mathias and Clarice as seen through the eyes of their eldest teenage daughter Filipa (newcomer Laura Neiva). While undergoing her own sexual awakening, she discovers that her father is having an affair with an American women (Camilla Belle) living not too far away. Dhalia takes an unconventional approach in telling the story though her eyes.

First and foremost, Adrift looks absolutely amazing, with a slightly muted color palette that captures the beautiful hues of Brazil in ways you've never seen before. It's a love letter to the country, unquestionably, and Dahlia and his cinematographer Ricardo Della Rosa shoot it in such a way that I couldn't help but fall in love with the look of it. Beyond that, the score by Antonio Pinto (who also scored City of God) also carried me so much deeper into the story. This is exactly why I mention that Dhalia is on the verge of breaking out - he's just waiting to unleash his cinematic brilliance upon the world and this film is his precursor.

Where Adrift struggles the most is that it's not anything new, it's not a story we haven't already seen before. And unfortunately it never hits on the emotional level that I was hoping it eventually would. Thanks to all the aforementioned technical aspects, it's still wonderful and occasionally heartwrenching to watch it play out, but it never reaches the kind of brilliance that would make it one of my absolute Cannes favorites. That said, Vincent Cassel again impresses me with an extraordinary performance, as does newcomer Laura Neiva, who could very well be the most talented actor of this entire cast, even if it is only her first major role.

I can't suggest enough that true cinephiles should seek out Adrift. You will fall in love it just as I did, I'm almost certain of that. And although the story may not be the most impressive part, there will be so much more you'll adore, that it'll be hard not to see past some of its minor flaws. It's not exactly a sleeper hit yet, but with some more time and more critical attention (which it's likely to receive), it'll be on its way.

Adrift (A Deriva) Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily

The familiar territory of marital strife and adolescent conflict is explored with sympathy and assurance in Heitor Dhalia’s Adrift. Set in Brazil during the early 1980s, his film offers a bittersweet remembrance of a defining summer in the life of a teenage girl. Dhalia’s sure command of character and performance are the main pleasures in this accessible drama that will be welcomed by Festivals and should attract theatrical interest, especially in territories where Vincent Cassel’s name provides leverage with distributors and audiences.

The director of low-budget, award-winning features Nina (2004) and Drained (2006), Dhalia moves into a different league with Adrift, a nostalgic, quasi-autobiographical rites-of-passage tale that reveals a full control of the medium stretching from the saturated, sun-burnished yellows of the colour palette to the effective deployment of a warm, Nymanesque musical score by Antonio Pinto. The film is handsome and enjoyable, although it still lacks that edge to make the difference between good and great.

The action takes place during a family vacation in Buzios. Filipa (Laura Neiva) is fourteen and the eldest of three children on holiday with their mother Clarice (Deborah Bloch) and father Mathias (Vincent Cassel), a successful French writer intent on finishing his latest novel. This is a marriage in crisis. Clarice drowns her sorrows in whisky and stings Mathias with her sarcastic comments. “Any topic is a pretext for you to attack me, “ he observes.

There is a cruel edge to Clarice that Filipa seems to have inherited when she starts to exercise her newfound power over some of the local boys. When Filipa discovers that her father is having an affair with American holidaymaker Angela (Camilla Belle) she tries to prevent it from prompting the final breakdown of her parents’ marriage. The situation is more complicated than she would like to imagine and the summer becomes a time of lost innocence and a dawning realisation of the complexities that await Filipa in the adult world.

Dhalia casts a very generous eye over his characters, refusing to appoint any one of them as the villain of the piece. Clarice has every reason to resent her husband’s infidelities until we learn of her own affair. Mathias seems more of a loveable big brother than a father to his children until he is forced to accept his responsibilities. Filipa’s desire to salvage her parents marriage reveals the innocence of good intentions rather than any destructive malice.

Dhalia secures solid performances from the entire cast with newcomer Laura Neiva confidently handling the emotional demands of a character in transition from adolescence to adulthood. Cassel, performing in Portuguese throughout, appears to relish a change of pace role far removed from the rascals and rogues that have become his forte in France. He is at his most charming and charismatic as a devoted family man whose special bond with daughter Filipa is the thing he fears losing most through the breakdown of his marriage.

Adrift David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 24, 2009

Dhanraj, Deepa

SOMETHING LIKE A WAR

India (63 mi) 1991

THE LEGACY OF MALTHUS

Great Britain (51 mi) 1994

Feminist documentary in India: Deepa Dhanraj interviewed Julia Lesage from Jump Cut

Di Giusto, Stéphanie

THE DANCER (La Danseuse)

France Belgium Czech Republic (111 mi) 2016

'The Dancer': Cannes Review - Screen Daily Tim Grierson

The inspiration behind great art can be as mysterious as the reasons why great artists are so easily pushed aside by new styles. That’s but one lesson imparted in The Dancer (La Danseuse), an intelligent, thoughtful biopic about 19th century dancer Loïe Fuller that has more on its mind that a strict recitation of her career highlights. Director Stéphanie Di Giusto’s unassuming feature debut portrays Fuller not as a stereotypically tormented genius but, rather, as a dedicated dancer ill-prepared for the ambitious, creative tornado that was Isadora Duncan, a new talent who would soon supplant her.

Screening in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, The Dancer should entice modern-dance fans, who may already be familiar with the rivalry that developed between Fuller and Duncan. A cast that includes Soko, Gaspard Ulliel, Mélanie Thierry and Lily-Rose Depp ought to help drive international sales, not to mention interest among those who’ve never heard of Fuller or her legendary Serpentine dance.

Starting in the late 19th century when Fuller (Soko) is still living on a farm in the Midwest with her alcoholic father, The Dancer follows her as she moves to New York, longing to be an actress before deciding to focus on dance. Soon she develops an avant-garde routine that incorporates long, flowing garments backed by coloured lights, making her movements feel like a whirlwind of pulsating images independent of her body. Success in New York propels her to even more acclaim in Paris, but the seeds of her downfall are sown once she befriends a hungry young dancer named Isadora Duncan (Depp).

While The Dancer adheres to biopic conventions, Di Giusto uses them as a starting point for her inquisitions into art and artists. Soko plays Fuller as someone whose humble background could never have foretold her meteoric rise in the dance world. The actress reveals the quiet, despondent insecurity that eats at Fuller, but never makes it apparent what drove this enigmatic dancer to endure great pain for her physically demanding performances.

Similarly, the film shows little interest in explaining its protagonist, simply acknowledging the innate ability Fuller had to revolutionize an art form by deemphasizing herself in service of the grand spectacle of her movements. Instead of psychoanalyzing her subject, Di Giusto explores how an innovator ultimately gets imprisoned by her innovation, fated to become passé because of changing times and new breakthroughs.

In The Dancer, that new breakthrough is Duncan and Depp gives her an ethereal grace that stands in stark contrast to Fuller’s athletic earthiness. Without overstating it, Di Giusto dramatizes how Fuller felt eclipsed not just by Duncan’s pure dancing talent but also by her beauty, creating a tense, vaguely erotic dynamic between the two characters that transcends the material’s campy, bitchy cat-fight potential.

To be sure, Di Giusto doesn’t pick sides in the ensuing rivalry. But her frank, sympathetic approach, aided by Benoît Debie’s shimmering cinematography (particularly during Fuller’s gorgeous dance numbers), suggests an admiration for the challenges involved in devoting one’s life to a creative passion — and, also, how debilitating it can be to watch that life brushed aside for another’s. 

[Cannes Review] The Dancer - The Film Stage Zhuo-Ning Su

The Upcoming [Joseph Owen]

'The Dancer' ('La Danseuse'): Cannes Leslie Felperin from The Hollywood Reporter

Lily-Rose Depp to Star as Isadora Duncan in 'The Dancer' | Variety Elsa Keslassy, September 24, 2015

The Dancer (2016 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

di Majo, Nina

WINTER (L’inverno) C 72

Italy (97 mi) 2002

In my view, this is a really pretentious film, basically a retread of so many other director’s film styles, and there are many flashy camera images, but again, it seemed designed to draw attention to itself, not to enhance what this film is about. This is truly an unpleasant film experience, as it’s filled with so-called successful, middle-class people whose self-indulgence so pre-occupies them that they are literally unable to hear, understand, or care about anyone else except themselves. No, it’s not about George W or the ugly Americans, it’s the second film from this director following her 1997 debut film AUTUMN. The leading man, a writer who suffers from writer’s block, is insufferably boring, but his girl-friend, the always amazing Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, loves him anyway in her own openly neurotic way. Every relationship here is going bad as no one is investing any of their time or efforts on their own partners, instead they are lured away by the promise of something new. Well, that can certainly backfire. There was an overwhelming presence of the color blue, also there was some interesting use of music. Of note, the sound in this film is like early Pink Floyd, you know when they fooled around with electronic noises and added something like footsteps or frying an egg. Water was dripping, or some other unnecessary sound was present throughout this entire film, which was annoying and distracting.

Diao Yinan

BLACK COAL, THIN ICE (Bai ri yan huo) B- 81

China (106 mi) 2014

A serial killer thriller set in modern era China, winner of the Golden Bear 1^st prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival along with another award for Best Actor (Fan Liao), the film is part film noir and part social realist portrait of industrial city life in Northern China. While it has a moody, quietly powerful style, this is another film that lucks subtlety, that goes for exaggerated often grotesque performances, that veers from gruesome violence, comic absurdity, to utter tragedy, where the lead performance is excellent, but the amateurish supporting cast comes across like a group of bumbling fools. Set in Heilongjiang province, northeast China, 1999, where small-town chief detective Zhang Zili (Fan Liao) discovers detached body parts spread out in unusual places, initially discovered at a coal plant where the human limbs stand out among the dark chunks of coal assembled on an industrial conveyor belt. More remains of the same body are discovered at other coal plants miles away, suggesting the work of a single killer. The personal identification on the body turns out to be Liang Zhijun (Wang Xuebing), a worker of the local coal plant whose wife Wu Zhizhen (Gwei Lun-mei) works at a small dry cleaning shop run by an older man, He Mingrong (Wang Jingchun), who seems to watch over her like a hawk. When Zhang produces two suspects, two brothers that worked with the deceased at the coal plant, one a coal truck driver, all hell breaks loose with a botched arrest when they are apprehended in a hair salon, turning into a bloody, comically absurd shoot-out that is both brutal and chaotic, where both are shot and killed along with two detectives, while Zhang is seriously wounded in the ensuing melee. Zhang is forced to retire from the force in disgrace, taking a menial job as a security guard for another factory.

Conveyed in a single shot, five years pass and the murder remains unsolved. Still traumatized by the incident, a barely recognizable Zhang drinks heavily, drowning his sorrows in guilt and self pity until his former partner Wang (Yu Ailei) provides him with the details of two recent murders that bear a similarity to the original case, their bodies slashed by the blades of ice skates, while both men knew Wu Zhizhen. On his own, determined to redeem the sins of the past, Zhang decides to privately investigate the widow Zhizhen, initially tailing her on the street in secret, but after awhile he’s beguiled by her beauty and develops feelings for her, absurdly allowing his constant presence to be seen. Zhizhen couldn’t be more passive and indifferent, never expressing any hint of emotion, playing the part of an ice princess, trying to warn him away, but he persists until eventually she agrees to go ice-skating together. Wang also warns Zhang of the danger of getting too involved with this woman, as they’ve seen the results of men that come in contact with her, so he follows him to the rink, adding his watchful eyes. It’s in this dreary wintry setting where the film distinguishes itself, as the scenes between Zhang and Zhizhen literally come alive with tension and conflicting energies, including the mainland director’s strange choice to use actress Gwei Lun-mei, who is actually Taiwanese, as his femme fatale, where her Black Widow persona makes her a prime candidate for the murderer, but Zhang distinguishes himself by somehow figuring out the underlying mystery, where he’s instead able to find Zhijun, who is still very much alive, but he’s unable to apprehend him as he escapes through a vacant lot leading into an industrial corridor, a literal wasteland surrounding a popular ice-rink. But Zhang doesn’t communicate this discovery to Wang, who doesn’t get the connection of the lone man he apprehends carrying a pair of ice skates, eventually paying for it with his life in perhaps the most startling moment of the film, all captured in a deserted alley in the silence of the white snow.

While there are tense moments of seemingly choreographed violence, there are also long, contemplative quiet periods that seem to meander into an aimless, inexplicable interior abyss, a kind of psychological void that Zhang has to claw and scratch his way out of, becoming a deeply probing character study, using a 1940’s American film noir style, where the guy constantly has a cigarette in his hand, and he’s seen continually talking to a series of alluring femme fatale women. He’s a complicated product of a misogynistic culture that early on displays inappropriate sexual harassment and then abuse, yet he remains the only sympathetic figure in the entire film, displaying persistence and a quiet intelligence, where the camera loves this guy, where everything else all around him remains a cesspool of corruption and inefficiency. Preferring a more naturalistic approach, the film gains strength with this emphasis on character, yet Zhang is surrounded by oddballs and misfits who aren’t remotely close to solving the crime. As a surreal reflection of just how unbalanced the world around him is, bizarre images appear out of midair, where a horse shows up in an office building, a nightclub owner collapses in mid-sentence during an interview, or fireworks erupt during the daylight hours, while adding the Wong Kar-wai style saturated color of neon lights and red-lit underground sex parlors. Cinematographer Dong Jinsong’s visual palette moves across vast stretches of urban isolation and unhappiness while also drenching the atmosphere in a bleak, wintry freeze, where the coldness and harshness of an industrial landscape is everpresent. Certainly one of the problems is the plot borders on the incomprehensible, where characters place their lives on the line at their own risk, willingly entering hazardous zones, yet all the people feel overly cold and foreign to one another. The film is often erratic, moving in strange directions, where a distraught Zhang follows a mysterious labyrinth of clues, but trusts no one with the information he uncovers, leading him into a dead zone where his dour psychological mindset matches that of the killer, a man completely cut off from the rest of the world. In this world there is sin, but no redemption.

Black Coal, Thin Ice | 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

After a botched arrest in a grisly serial murder case, small-town detective Zhang Zili is suspended from the force, taking a job as a security guard at a coal factory. Five years later, another series of mysteriously similar murders takes place, and Zhang recruits his former partner to finish their investigation. His sleuthing soon leads to a local laundromat proprietor named Wu Zhizhen, whose soft-spoken demeanor and enigmatic aura are compelling to Zhang despite her mysterious connection to the deaths.

Part film noir, part social realist portrait of industrial city life in Northern China, Diao Yinan’s atmospheric Black Coal, Thin Ice is a moody, quietly powerful thriller staged against the quotidian lives of a wintry industrial landscape, and winner of the top prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

Udine 2014 Review: BLACK COAL, THIN ICE Is A ... - Twitch James Marsh

This year's surprise Golden Bear winner at Berlin is a bleak, yet engrossing whodunnit set in the wintry climes of Northern China.

For his third feature film, writer-director Diao Yinan (Uniform, Night Train) evokes both Hollywood procedurals and European arthouse cinema for his story of a disgraced and traumatised ex-cop who continues his search for a serial killer in China's industrialised North. Black Coal, Thin Ice is also the latest in a series of high profile yet independently spirited Chinese films to embrace crime genre sensibilities, while addressing socio-economic issues in contemporary China.

When a dismembered corpse is discovered scattered across a number of different coal depots in Heilongjiang province, Detective Zhang Zili's (Liao Fan) investigation leads him to a pair of coal workers. Attempting an arrest, both suspects and two cops are killed, while Zhang is left deeply traumatised and discharged from the force. Five years later, Zhang is now a full-blown alcoholic working as a factory security guard. When two new victims emerge, disposed of in similar fashion and both known lovers of the original victim's widow, Zhizhen (Gwei Lun Mei), Zhang and his former partner, Wang (Yu Ailei) resume their investigation.

Black Coal, Thin Ice is staged against an incredibly hostile backdrop, where perpetual snowfall reduces visibility to a minimum, the hard, icy ground makes any motion all the more tentative, and the black, dirty coal depots immediately evoke a backward-thinking community hindered by antiquated technology, that dirties everyone's hands just by association. It soon becomes apparent that Zhang's investigation is more about indulging his own haunted past and lingering obsession than a genuine desire to bring a killer to justice. The case has had an incredible effect on him, both physically and emotionally, costing him everything from his career to his family and slowly but surely, his sanity. Perpetually drunk to the point his entire worldview is seen through a blizzard of booze, Zhang locks focus on the pretty young Zhizhen. Perhaps she can help with the case, but more likely Zhang just wants her to save him.

Diao's style is deliberate and measured, yet never feels sluggish or lethargic. He displays an intriguing blend of genres and filmmaking styles, letting the investigative elements of the story unfold in the manner of a Hollywood thriller, while pacing his drama more like a European film, never afraid to let his camera linger on his characters as they slowly reveal themselves over time. All the while, the contemporary Chinese setting depicts a country caught in a massive economic upheaval. From the factories and laundrettes, to nightclubs and housing estates, Diao lets us explore a community where industry, commerce and wealth are crashing together, creating new class divides and widening gaps in wealth, education and affluence.

Zhizhen is understandably traumatised by recent events, but there is a definite suggestion that somehow she holds the key to the case. Under the protective wing of her boss/would-be lover, she lives a simple, solitary life, one which Zhang seems intent on disrupting, for both personal and professional gain. Yet the closer Zhang gets to her, the more danger he is putting himself in from whomever it is lurking out there in the shadows.

Liao Fan took home the Silver Bear award for Best Actor, for an incredibly controlled yet layered performance as the deeply troubled and irrevocably broken Zhang. A man with jaded ideals, clouded morals and wavering judgement, Zhang is a fascinating central character for a detective story, flawed, tragic, possibly even incompetent, yet somehow able to win the sympathy of the audience. 

Liao is matched applaudably by Taiwanese actress Gwei Lun Mei as the icy cold widow Zhizhen. She seems almost completely impenetrable for long periods of the film, yet slowly but surely Zhang is able to thaw her just enough to get himself deeper into trouble with every aspect of the case. Zhizhen's beauty, silence and reluctance to communicate on any level makes her a compelling counterpoint to Zhang's dishevelled, broken antihero.

Needless to say, Black Coal, Thin Ice has bursts of violence and brutality throughout, not to mention one of the most memorable murder weapons in recent memory. There's also a suspenseful cat and mouse element to the film that keeps its audience committed and engaged during its more languid sequences. There is an almost otherworldly mood to the film, perhaps suggested by the far more poetic Chinese title, "Fireworks in Daylight". Referenced overtly more than once in the narrative, it suggests a futility to Zhang's endeavours, a wastefulness of his resources, or perhaps that appearances only reveal themselves once the black of night is upon us. 

Either way, Diao Yinan's film is the latest, and one of the best examples of a growing wave of low budget contemporary crime dramas to emerge from mainland China, taking its place comfortably alongside Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin and Ning Hao's No Man's Land. While less overtly critical of "the system" than either of its counterparts, Black Coal, Thin Ice is perhaps the most accessible, acutely aware of how Chinese cinema can find an appreciative and wide-reaching international audience.   

Berlin: Black Coal, Thin Ice by Shelly Kraicer Cinema Scope

There are aspects of present-day Chinese reality so bizarre that only surrealist-tinged genre films can come close to capturing them. In the press kit for the brilliant noir-mystery-arthouse mash-up Black Coal, Thin Ice, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin, director Diao Yinan observes, “There’s a lot going on in China these days, some of it more absurd than anything you might find in a novel or film. It’s not unusual for artists to find that kind of real-life absurdity getting tangled up with the truths they’re reaching for in their work.” Jia Zhangke would agree: he moved towards genre last year with the baroquely violent A Touch of Sin, which scored its own prize at Cannes.

Although it’s a bit facile to say surreal is the new real in China today, it’s hard to contest that these directors (and others like them, such as Ning Hao, Feng Xiaogang, and Jiang Wen) have hit upon a winning strategy by mobilizing genre-cinema style to do the work of social realism, that traditionally privileged mode of “serious” art cinema in China ever since the classic era of ’30s leftist Shanghai cinema. An added bonus for directors today is that genre play often means audience appeal. The politically engaged realist dramas that thrive at Western film festivals (if they get past the censors) don’t often play well with the increasingly sophisticated, entertainment-seeking Chinese audiences whose ticket-buying power has been growing astronomically with the explosion of the local industry and the increase in the number of screens. So even as they continue to receive accolades overseas, so-called “serious” directors have been learning how to entertain domestic audiences without, hopefully, compromising their artistic integrity.

If Black Coal, Thin Ice (which has American investors), A Touch of Sin, and similar films are actually allowed to be shown to local audiences, we’ll be able to judge the success of this gambit. And it wouldn’t be surprising if Black Coal, Thin Ice were to give the authorities a headache: it’s the darkest shade of noir, replete with dismemberment and sexual violence, though Diao juices it up with a subtly insinuating neon glow, a remarkably daring sense of absurdist humour, and some very witty and stylish flourishes. Taking place in Heilongjiang province in far northeast Manchuria, the film follows a police detective, Zhang Zili (Liao Fan, who won the Silver Bear for Best Actor), who when we first see him is sexually assaulting his ex-wife just after she has amicably handed him their divorce certificate. Shortly thereafter, he’s called to investigate a gory and puzzling murder: a man’s body parts have been discovered in various coal-processing facilities hundreds of kilometres apart. The case leads Zhang down a labyrinthine path to a potential femme fatale, the victim’s widow Wu Zhizhen (Taiwanese star Gwei Lun-mei), as well as to the film’s finest set piece: cornered in a hallucinatory pink-red hair salon, a pair of suspects murder two cops and injure Zhang in a bravura, Coen Brothers-like bit of violent, high-speed (though low-key) slapstick.

In a dazzling coup de cinema, Diao shifts timeframes via a long (split) tracking shot that begins in June 1999 at one end of an underpass and emerges at the other end in the snowy winter of 2004. The camera, moving as if it’s driving through the snow, spots Zhang drunk, slumped on the side of the road beside his motorcycle, circles back to him, and in the middle of the shot switches from a subjective to an objective point of view as a second motorcycle rider emerges from behind, stops, and steals Zhang’s bike. No longer a cop, Zhang has been turned into an alcoholic semi-wreck by his post-shooting trauma, and can now barely hold down a security job. Meeting his former colleagues, he learns of the murders of two more people linked to Wu Zhizhen, and takes it upon himself to conduct a parallel (and none too subtle) investigation of the black widow. As Zhang makes multiple visits to the small laundry where Wu works, the ambiguous relationship between the fixated ex-cop and the almost frighteningly reserved widow becomes ever more complicated, her utter loneliness finding assuagement in his sexual neediness. Meanwhile, Zhang’s dogged investigation unearths further, alternative versions of who has murdered whom, who is still alive, and who might be next to die.

Diao’s handing of his principal actors displays a gendered ontology that is at the root of noir cinema: women and men as two different categories of being, forced through implausible erotic connection to briefly, impossibly inhabit the same world. Zhang is photographed in sharp focus, in shots that leave Wu’s face softly blurred. He’s gruff, solid, always on the move; she, on the other hand, is given a couple of dreamlike close-ups that hint at a beauty that would be inaccessible without cinema’s ability to imaginatively transport us, however briefly, into other people’s worlds.

In his previous films—the brilliant indie satire Uniform (2003), about a young man who impersonates a cop, and Night Train (2007), a Béla Tarr-inspired meditation on lost souls—Diao had proven himself as a master stylist with a streak of wicked wit, and here he deploys the long takes, witty mise en scène, and expressive shot compositions of his “festival” films in the service of a more audience-friendly entertainment. (Though this didn’t prevent some critics at Berlin from complaining that the story was hard to follow. It’s not, really: all the information one needs is ultimately presented rather clearly, though nothing one sees or hears is guaranteed to be “fact.”) The correspondences don’t end there. Diao is clearly fascinated by certain motifs, and Black Coal carries over elements from both of his previous films: like Uniform, Black Coal’s plot hinges on a piece of clothing left in a laundry; and like Night Train it features a poignantly sad (though creepily funny) scene set in a small-town Chinese dance club, where strangers lonely as atoms in a vacuum briefly connect via ballroom-dancing rituals.

Diao is obsessed with the light, the mood, the physical shabbiness of Chinese small-city reality. He perfectly captures the feeling of constantly being bundled against a wintertime Manchurian chill, and the pathetic poignancy of the tacky neon effusions which bathe the mundane public spaces in their chintzy illumination. There’s something grandiose and glorious, in a sad, desperately garish way, about the flashily-lit exterior of the dance club where Zhang tracks down an errant clue, and which appears a second time, standing out like a beacon against a very black night, as Zhang and Wu engage in intimate manoeuvres high up in a deserted Ferris wheel.

That club’s name, Bairi yanhuo (“Daytime Fireworks”), also gives the film its Chinese title, and it anticipates the climactic scene where a fireworks shower rains down on some cops as they wrap up their business. More than a visually striking sequence, however, this scene is perhaps a key to the film’s quietly subversive workings. The filmmakers have said that Black Coal has received approval from the Chinese film bureau, and one wonders to what extent, if any, Diao had to compromise to get that permission. Films involving the police have certain requirements, and outwardly at least, Black Coal does provide a formally and ideologically “well-behaved” denouement. However, the fact that we never learn who has unleashed this harmless, yet still menacing, display against the authorities introduces an unsettling undertone to an otherwise neat conclusion. Whodunnit? Some “drunk” on the roof, as the cops speculate? Our now missing protagonist Zhang? Or, as perhaps signalled by that puzzling subjective shot during the time-jumping tunnel shot described above, is the film itself attacking its characters? All the suppressed anxieties, pressures, and sadness of the film’s disturbed principals, who can’t find a foothold in a barren society, find a kind of apotheosis in this explosive climax. Is it joyous? Violent? Defiant? If what’s going on in plot terms isn’t absolutely clear, the feelings that Diao allows to emerge here are as concrete as light and sound.

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Black Coal, Thin Ice | Reviews | Screen - Screen International Dan Fainaru

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Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai Ri Yan Huo): Berlin Review - The ... Deborah Young from The Hollywood Reporter

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Black Coal, Thin Ice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Díaz Pardo, Christian

GONZÁLEZ (González: falsos profetas) B 87

Mexico (100 mi) 2014

This first time feature was made for less than $100,000, a minimalist portrait of anonymity in Mexico City, as the camera follows a lone solitary figure leading a shadowy existence throughout the entire film who may as well be Kafka’s K, but here his name is González González. Harold Torres is a real matinee idol lead as González, incredibly handsome with a pencil moustache, always dressed in sharp suits, where he looks like he would play the part of a gigolo in conventional movies, which this is not, showing a propensity for changing moods and shifting storylines, continually veering into unpredictable territory, with a remarkable jazzy, bass-heavy musical score from Galon Durán that supplements the tense, moody atmosphere. Like many young single men living alone in a giant, sprawling city, his most precious possession is purchasing a flatscreen TV that he protects with his life, covering it in plastic when it’s not in use, but it plays constantly when he’s at home, taking on a strange, lifelike force which is like his alter ego, offering clues into his thought process. With no back story whatsoever, González is without a job, but does have a tiny room in a dingy apartment complex. Desperate for work, he applies for a job at a Christian Evangelical Church that he sees raising money on TV, where he is assigned to the call center’s outreach program, receiving incoming calls from customers in dire circumstances, where the answer to everyone’s problems is to have faith in the Lord by giving money to the Church. Once God receives the message, he will answer their call, always providing a standard affirmative response to even the most heartbreaking problems, where it’s immediately clear that none of these phone solicitors are qualified in anything except raising money. In no time, González is very proficient in the art of making the sales pitch, dispensing this same kind of pat advice, exploiting people’s real troubles to raise money for the church’s coffers.

The mood of the entire film shifts when González follows the sounds of religious chants, walking through a myriad of hallways and stairways as he finally enters a gigantic auditorium that serves as the church itself, which is given such a build-up of suspense, it may as well have been a space ship, as the anticipation feels ominous. Leading the service is a charismatic Brazilian televangelist Pastor Elías, Carlos Bardem, Javier’s brother, in front of an enthralled audience that is enraptured by his religious message of salvation. González is especially impressed with the way he works the crowd, where they’re in a near hypnotic trance following the rhythm of his every word. More importantly, he spots a shy but beautiful woman that he instantly concludes will be the love of his life, Betsabe (Olga Segura), a devout follower of Elías, who also works at the call center. González introduces himself and begins taking an interest, though initially he’s little more than a casual acquaintance, much like Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle and his infatuation with Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver (1976), building her up to be his white and innocent angel that he could possess and protect, where Bickle is another lone outcast that lives nearly entirely in his own head, rarely being sociable with others. González displays the same demeanor, with pretensions on becoming a pastor once he sees the influence it holds over Betsabe. So in his own mind, he becomes a priest by just thinking it, having recurring dreams where Elías introduces him before his flock as Pastor González, as he begins to incorporate this name and new identity into other casual acquaintances. The satiric tone of the film takes note of the exaggerations and sudden shifts in tone, where there are moments of absurdity in the constantly changing character of González that are simply hilarious. Coupled with this is the discovery that he has mounted a massive debt on his credit card, so his paychecks, in their entirety, are sent to the bank to pay off the debt, leaving him with nothing. With visions of being destitute, unable to pay his rent or send money to his mother, lying to conceal his real dilemma, González turns into a desperate man.

With much difficulty, impassively turned away by his employer and his bank despite his pleas for help, González insists upon seeing Pastor Elías, as he has become obsessed with watching him on TV during every waking hour, where he believes he can mimic exactly what he does and that he’s ready to be an evangelist. Pastor Elías obviously sees things differently, especially when his repeated unauthorized attempts to see the Pastor result in him being thrown out of the building by security and losing his job. Losing his apartment as well, things look bad indeed, where the bluesy music on the soundtrack only accentuates his solitude, where he seems boxed into a corner with no way out, where the bleak images of Mexico City, accentuated by bright yellow hues of an oppressive sun, become a surreal film noir reminder of how the film emulates the streets of New York in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. More and more, González breaks the boundaries of acceptable conduct, where his ever more unstable state of mind defies belief, creating a bizarre storyline that becomes totally unpredictable, where the viewer goes on a roller coaster ride with a sociopath attempting to reclaim his life, hiding in the dark alleyways awaiting the right moment before he makes his move. Inevitably, González needs to go mano a mano with Pastor Elías, cutting the bull and getting right to the point, where Elías amusingly admits he’s not even Brazilian, as apparently they are the expert televangelists in South and Central America, the supposed top of the line, so when he admits to being a fraud, González knocks him down to size, where he’s just another swindler stealing from the poor. González also has pretensions to fame, reminiscent of another Scorsese film, THE KING OF COMEDY (1982), where the delusional ambitions and weird plotline of the two films actually coincide, as González makes an unannounced appearance as Pastor González, wooing his girlfriend in the church audience, holding the audience spellbound with his hypnotic delivery before making his quick getaway, all made possible by the kidnapping of the real Pastor Elías, who has a few unholy phrases directed towards González afterwards. Yes, it’s an unholy alliance, where Harold Torres is terrific as a near silent actor, reminiscent of Lee Kang-sheng, the lead actor in all of Tsai Ming-liang’s feature movies, where the film exposes an ongoing televangelist scam that is huge business in predominately Catholic countries, where the Brazilians are supposedly big business in Canada as well. The film challenges phony religious practices while brandishing its own weirdness and bizarre humor, while also illuminating how fraud and finance mix in the global recession.

Which movies to see—and which to skip—at the 50th Chicago International Film Festival Tal Rosenberg from The Reader

Gonzalez In this debut feature by writer-director Christian Díaz Pardo, a well-intentioned but awkward and shiftless young man named Gonzalez Gonzalez spends his days looking for employment in Mexico City and his nights parked in front of a flat-screen TV that he's purchased on an overextended credit card. Desperate for work, he hires on at a phone bank for a smarmy televangelist (Carlos Bardem, brother of Javier) and gradually becomes fascinated with the cultish church and its guileful figurehead. Pardo tries to forge a connection between religious hucksters and the global recession, but his script is so facile that the comparison feels tenuous at best. The film's biggest asset is Juan Pablo Ramirez, whose haunting cinematography captures an impoverished Mexico City in all its mercilessness. In Spanish with subtitles.

Montreal World Film Festival 2014 Movie Reviews ... Dejan Nikolaj Kraljacic

Mexican Gonzalez, an extraordinary debut film of Christian Diaz Pardo (made for less than $100.000), arguably won Golden Zenith award for best first fiction feature (awarded from a jury headed by film scholar and connoisseur, Iranian filmmaker Bahman Maghsoudlou, author of the great documentary Abbas Kiarostami: A report, which I reviewed last year).

Gonzales is a story about a young man in debt who finds a new job as a call center operator of a Christian sect led by a highly seductive pastor (compelling performance by Carlos Bardem, brother of Javier). Quite disturbing and unexpected is the call center by itself, which looks like any other contemporary teleshop, with a number of employees working inside their inhuman cubicles, yet selling “comfort” to their customers! Always dressed in a suit, charismatic samurai-like Gonzalez, on the path of fulfilling his ambitions (to climb the ladder of power and become a new pastor), leads us through the harsh world of unscrupulous manipulation of religious feelings where the main victims are people living in poverty. What keeps the audience’s attention the most is the very mature Pardo’s directorial style and his clever approach to subject matter, without sentimentality and redundant moralization, which are so often exploited in cinema dealing with this issue (usual images of poverty, etc.).

This intense, well-crafted thriller with a social-issue concern that owes much to its brilliant title role of Harold Torres (also producer of the movie) certainly gives a new hope to Mexican cinema, establishing two great young talents - Pardo and Torres. 

Gonzalez: Morelia Review - The Hollywood Reporter Boyd van Hoeij

MORELIA -- A heavily indebted Mexican youngster finds a job as a call-center employee of a shady Christian cult in Gonzalez, from Chilean-born, Mexico-educated director Christian Diaz Pardo.

Prolific Mexican actor Harold Torres (Sin Nombre, Northless, the recent Potosi), who’s also credited as one of the producers, plays the eponymous protagonist of this cautionary tale of sorts, in which temptation and the devil’s work are much more common than piety -- though there’s some of that, too -- and though he’s rock solid, he’s almost upstaged at every turn by charismatic Spanish character actor Carlos Bardem (Javier’s older brother, from Cell 211), whose portrayal of an oily televangelist is the film’s clear standout.

This beautifully photographed first feature, with its rather unusual theme if unfortunately not all-that-unusual denouement, should have no problems exciting festival programmers and niche distributors alike.

The most precious thing the young and handsome if solitary Gonzalez Gonzalez (Torres) possesses must be his flat-screen TV, which he protects with a plastic cover whenever he doesn’t use it and for which he no-doubt paid through the nose. When the film opens, however, Gonzalez is without a job and the TV, or rather the debts it has caused, are turning into a noose around the protagonist’s neck, forcing him to lie to his mother, who asks for her monthly check from him on the phone, and desperately interviewing for a new job -- any job, as unpaid bills keep accumulating.

His financial dire straits lead him right into the arms of an unnamed church in Mexico City that’s lead by the charismatic Brazilian televangelist Pastor Elias (Bardem). Gonzalez is assigned to work in the institution’s call center, where the standard advice to any sort of woes from the calling customers is simple: if you give (money) to God through the church, God will eventually give back.

Though he’s clearly come to the capital from elsewhere and has no friends or relatives he can fall back on, Gonzalez is far from stupid. He’s initially a pragmatist, simply happy to have a job, and when he’s figured out what the uhm, hell is going on, he wants in on the money-grabbing scheme and tries to convince Elias he can be a pastor, too.

The set-up is surprisingly straightforward and rich with possibilities, especially when Gonzalez becomes interested in the shy and beautiful Betsabe (Olga Segura), a co-worker who, despite her behind-the-scenes job begging callers in distress for cash, is clearly a devout believer and a fan of Elias.

But Diaz Pardo, who wrote the screenplay with Fernando del Razo (Artificial Paradises), makes it quite hard to figure out what’s really driving Gonzalez and whether most of his rash actions in the film’s second half are planned or improvised. In fact, he becomes difficult to read quite early on, when the film introduces something of a red herring when it appears the church isn’t paying Gonzalez his salary, suggesting they're also duping their own employees, which creates fake suspense as this turns out to be untrue.

Still, many individual sequences crackle with a nervy kind of energy, especially those which feature Torres and Bardem together. Arguably, Bardem has never been better than here, as a skilled opportunist who knows what disadvantaged people want to hear while at the same time ensuring that what they do will make him a tidy profit. The audience will also share Gonzalez’s fascination with and attraction to Bestabe, though she remains an unfortunately underdeveloped character.

Technical contributions are very impressive for a first feature. Cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramirez Ibanez, who also shot the beautiful-looking but formally much looser Las lagrimas, here shows off his impeccable sense of composition and a rich use of colors, with velvety reds and rich blacks and beautiful use of light. Galo Duran’s score, quite minimalist and dominated by a jazzy bassline, is refreshingly counter-intuitive. 

González (Dir. Christian Diaz Pardo) | Cine PREMIERE

González (2013) directed by Christian Díaz Pardo • Reviews

Diaz, Lav

NORTE: THE END OF HISTORY (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) B+ 92

Philippines (250 mi) 2014 ‘Scope

The title and 4-hour length of the film makes one presume this will be a long, drawn-out historical drama, but instead it closely follows the lives of a few people in a meticulously detailed, novelesque approach, becoming an intimate character study loosely based upon Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while also covertly paralleling the political influence of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. This director has a history of making films with extended length, where seven of his earlier films since 2001 are over five-hours in length, with three of them pushing the nine-hour mark. Suffice it to say, the director is also his own film editor, which may explain his apparent unwillingness to part with anything he’s shot, but length creates a more relaxed, slower-paced cinematic approach where the director has the freedom to play with the material, to tinker or experiment with his storytelling techniques. What might be surprising is how few characters are featured throughout, spending the majority of the film on just three of them, the most prominent of which is Fabian (Sid Lucero), a disillusioned young law student that drops out, despite being at the head of his class, disenchanted with the nation and its failings, considering himself above the law and any existing morality, where we see him in discussions with two former classmates who remain in awe of his views, particularly his criticism of the establishment, where his results-oriented idea of decisive action is killing the perpetrators responsible for all social ills, simply eliminating them from society, thus cleansing the entire nation of its dead weight. In Fabian’s eyes, Marcos got it right under a brutal dictatorship (1965 – 1986), but failed because eventually he got too soft, caving in to various special interests. While it’s easy to theorize and develop a nihilist view, spouting Nietzschean philosophy to justify why one prefers anarchism to the prevailing order, in the Philippines the current system has produced little else but widescale governmental corruption and greed. While Fabian may pontificate at length on “the destruction of anything that is inimical to morality,” he’s seen more as a loud-mouthed provocateur who enjoys being at the center of attention, especially after having a few beers, while later seen agonizing over his alleged moral conflict by sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend. True to form, as if feeding his own vanity, he gets this off his chest in the most obnoxious means possible, revealing the affair in a drunken outburst embarrassing both the girl and her boyfriend, making him something of a detestable lout.

While the initial discussions are between the young urban elite, there is a parallel story providing a view of the dispossessed, featuring an impoverished family where the husband Joaquin (Archie Alemania) breaks his leg in an accident, preventing he and his wife Eliza, Angeli Bayani from Ron Morales’s Graceland (2012) and Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (Ba Ma Bu Zai Jia) (2013), from being able to start up a food cantina, where instead they are drowning in debt just trying to get the business started. He’s forced to peddle bootleg DVD’s on the street while supporting two young kids and Eliza’s sister. The class distinction couldn’t be more pronounced between their near destitute status, where they’re forced to pawn everything they own, and the supreme arrogance and haughty contempt on display by the wealthy pawnbroker, Magda (Mae Paner, a theater actress and political advocate), who acts like she’s doing them a favor taking these worthless items off their hands, including Eliza’s most prized piece of jewelry. Shortly afterwards, Joaquin revisits Magda demanding she give the jewelry back, realizing it’s value to his wife, going so far as to start choking her when she refuses, but stops himself once he realizes what he’s doing. As the police are called, he’s forced to flee, working a construction job pouring cement in a neighboring town, hiding out in the partially constructed home, seen alone on the second floor looking out over the vastness of the empty fields nearby, where the viewer can all but see him falling into his own moral abyss. Fabian has also accumulated considerable debt with Magda, as she is keeping one of his credit cards. He witnesses the distraught Eliza weeping uncontrollably on the street, not knowing how her family will survive, where out of the blue he generously gives her what money he has. Some time later, he’s seen paying a visit to Magda one evening in her massive home, claiming he’s there to pay off his debt, but instead he brutally stabs her to death, along with the only witness to the crime, her teenage daughter, quickly burying the money, packing his bags and moving into the heart of Manila where he is essentially an exile, living in a self-imposed existential prison, shown with iron bars on the windows, eventually blotting out all light in the apartment in a gesture reminiscent of the final scene of Béla Tarr’s SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994).

The Norte of the title refers to the Philippines’ rich northern province of Ilocos Norte made famous by capitalist clans and political dynasties that perpetuate a culture of social stagnation in the region, making a point of filming the movie in Ferdinand Marcos’s hometown of Paoay, where despite his downfall is still treated like a national hero. Like Fabian, Marcos was a brilliant law student who also committed murder when he was younger. Marcos was tried and convicted in 1938 before successfully arguing his own appeal, winning his acquittal in 1940 while studying for his Philippine Bar Exams, where he achieved the highest score. Fabian acknowledges a certain admiration for Marcos, claiming he was on the right track when trying to eradicate communism, but eventually got distracted later in his career. While Fabian is nowhere as smart or as brutally ruthless as Marcos, who like Stalin before him maintained his rule by silencing and eliminating his opposition, but may be a by-product of his legacy, where this film focuses upon the Raskolnikov-style murder and its effects, where Fabian finally acts upon his own beliefs, murdering a malignant element of society as if it was his moral imperative. His actions, however, change nothing in the “new” social order, where instead he is besieged by grief. Diaz interestingly does not follow the guilty mindset of the criminal, but leaves the predicament of Fabian behind and concentrates instead on the real victims of his crime, Joaquin, who is unjustly charged with the murders and sentenced to life in prison in a seemingly open and shut case, as he was earlier seen making threats to the pawnbroker, where he is imprisoned too far away for Eliza to visit, creating a broken family torn apart by the crime that must fend for itself, as Eliza gets up at the crack of dawn to sell vegetables on the street, barely eking out a living. Returning to color for the first time since BATANG WEST SIDE (2001), a director who traditionally shoots in black and white, the pace of the film is established using long, langorous, often wordless shots by cinematographer Lauro Rene Manda, allowing the audience to familiarize themselves with the emotional interior of each character, where the director eschews the use of music throughout. There is plentiful use of aerial shots contrasting the pastoral elegance and beauty of large plantations with the more squalid beach shanties that are little more than a series of huts strewn together, much like the multitude of fishing boats hugging the shore. Still, there are moments of rapturous beauty, such as a scene of dawn rising over the seaside village.

It’s interesting that the film sustains its momentum throughout, becoming a more ponderous experience, where there are heartbreaking moments, especially expressed by the unusual grace and transcendence of actress Angeli Bayani, who Taiwanese director Ang Lee called a “national treasure” (Ang Lee calls 'Ilo Ilo' star Angeli Bayani a 'national treasure ...) while awarding her the Filipino Gawad Urian Best Actress award, who is seen on the verge of suicide at one point, bringing her children to the edge of a perilous cliff, while also utilizing an effective change of pace through a continuing stream of black and white dream images coming from Joaquin’s cell, as he continually retains a subconscious connection to his hometown roots despite his displacement. While he is forced to suffer the inevitable indignities foisted upon him in prison, he fends off evil with benevolence, where both Joaquin and Eliza are depicted as saints, which couldn’t be a greater contrast than Fabian, the man who gets away with murder. By separately exploring the lives of Joaquin and Fabian, Diaz exposes a glaring gap that separates the economic classes, where the poor are often forced to suffer for the crimes of the wealthy, which serves as a metaphor for Philippine society, which is ruled by a wealthy aristocracy, where power is retained in the hands of a few, that all but ignores the plight of the majority working class. While the film is an impressive achievement, it is not without faults, where the long, sustained build-up is better than the eventual climax. The film sputters with the introduction of a new character late in the film, Fabian’s sister Hoda (Miles Canapi), who embodies an upper class emotional distance and detachment from the real world, living in a self-induced bubble of cheerful religious cliché, protected by the enormity of her inherited estate, including an immense plantation mansion where she lives alone, inviting Fabian to stay and help her farm the tobacco fields. It’s here we learn that Fabian is the product of extreme wealth and upper class arrogance, who often believe they are morally superior, yet staring him in the face is the misery he has inflicted on undeserving souls, leading to a breakdown of moral order. The film is highly rewarding until it resorts to the kind of needless Bruno Dumont brutality and faux spiritualism that we saw in HUMANITÉ (1999), where exaggerated distortions, including levitation sequences, replace hard-earned notions of intellect and social realism. Perhaps the most uniquely impressive visual cue is an unexplained catastrophe late in the film leaving dozens of people lying dead sprawled out over an extended region, shown in black and white where the camera pans over the massive space. While this mysteriously takes the life of one of the major characters, the source of the tragedy, whether it be a hurricane, an explosion, or toxic fumes in the air, is never revealed, left lingering in one’s imagination.

Steve Garden on Norte, the End of History The Lumière Reader

If I had to pick a single standout, it would be Norte, the End of History. The prospect of seeing a Lav Diaz film screened in a theatre again is unlikely—his films are notoriously long, some up to 11 hours (not exactly distributor-friendly). Taking full advantage of the opportunity, I saw it twice—the second viewing more impressive than the first. One of the reasons for my enthusiasm is that Diaz is committed to cinema as a platform for personal artistic expression and socio-political discussion, and is rigorously wedded to the belief that form follows function. Among other things, Norte explores the tenuous line between idealism and fascism, guilt and innocence, crime and punishment, love and forgiveness, fate and justice. There’s much to absorb and plenty ponder in this meticulous, stimulating, magnificent work. A single viewing simply isn’t enough.

In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]

There’s no bathos to be found in the long takes and purposefully distended length of Lav Diaz’s latest cinematic mammoth, the four-hour Norte, the End of History—one of the Filipino filmmaker’s more aesthetically straightforward efforts, but no less rich for that. If ever the term “novelistic” applied to a film, this one is surely it. 

Norte is a journey into darkness and light, and though it contains elements of human cruelty, whether at the hands of individuals or bureaucratic institutions, it evinces a rare and touching faith in the power of good to triumph in an indifferent world. But evil nevertheless still exists in Diaz's universe, and one of the most remarkable things about his film is its depiction of what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.” If there is a villain in Norte, it's Fabian (Sid Lucero), an unabashed intellectual who begins at an admirable place—frustration with his country's never-ending cycle of betrayal and apathy—but gradually, in the manner of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, allows himself to intellectualize his way to outright murder—an act of violence for which Joaquin (Archie Alemania) is wrongly sent to prison for life. One of the film’s narrative threads generates suspense in seeing whether Fabian can achieve some kind of personal redemption as the years go by; some of the more chilling developments at the end, however, suggests that, to borrow a cliché, old habits die hard.

On the other side of Diaz’s narrative-cum-moral/spiritual equation, there’s Joaquin and his arc from self-involved youth worker to Good Samaritan at the maximum-security prison at which he’s held. Diaz maintains enough of a critical distance that the question of whether Joaquin’s goodness is sincerely or calculatedly motivated floats throughout his portion of the narrative; in other ways, though—in jarring aerial shots that suggest a higher being floating above the city, for instance—he suggests that Joaquin is possibly touched by God. Notwithstanding those isolated moments of whimsy, however, Diaz grounds his story in sometimes brutal realism, emphasized by long takes that simply observe his characters interacting and life passing by. His is a world where people are truly defined by their actions. 

Norte, the End of History is certainly a portentous-sounding title for a film, but one of the great achievements of Diaz’s film, though, is that, in many ways, it truly does seem to encompass all of human existence. Life and death, faith and destruction, hope and despair: Diaz touches on it all in this one amazing, wide-ranging epic. It's the film of this year's Cannes Film Festival…

Norte, The End of History review – agony and ecstasy in the .. Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Innocence and punishment come together in this gripping Dostoyevskian epic from the Filipino director Lav Diaz: a gigantic four-hour saga composed with pellucid clarity and simplicity, and a kind of transcendental naturalism. This is a classical tragedy of the modern Philippines and of global capitalism, a story of violence, hate, fear and love spread out on a colossal panorama which extends its reach into the realms of the spiritual and the supernatural.

Diaz's camera depicts everything in pin-sharp deep focus. He appears to frame reality in every quotidian detail, even as it begins to merge into dreamlike unreality. The light in this film seems as clear and calm as a standing pool, and yet there is a blazing emotional turbulence in the picture too. It has a rapture – something weirdly euphoric, and is absolutely unlike anything else around, although you might draw parallels with the quietist achievements of Asian cinema such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, or Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There? and I Don't Want To Sleep Alone. Sergio Leone might have wanted to make his own version of Norte, The End Of History.

The Norte of the title refers to the Philippines' northern province of Ilocos Norte where a certain hothead student called Fabian (Sid Lucero) holds forth on the subject of atheism and anarchism to his long-suffering friends. The terms of the debate have evidently been set by the alleged "end of history": the absolute victory achieved by capitalism and western liberal democracy, famously hailed by the historian Francis Fukuyama in the late 80s, but now leaving Asia's developing world on the losing side. Fabian rages at the corruption and complacency of the Philippines' ruling classes and longs for some Napoleonic individual who — undeterred by the non-existent God and his meaningless sixth commandment — has the courage to carry out some violent revolutionary act.

As it happens, he is desperately in debt to the local moneylender, Magda (Mae Paner) – and so is Joaquin (Archie Alemania) a poor soul whose plans to open a roadside cafe, poignantly named after his children, have come terribly unstuck. Fabian, that sociopath, confuses the personal with the political and decides that the time for violence has come, but the subsequent horrific act is blamed on Joaquin. Yet it is Joaquin who enters into a mysterious state of grace in jail, while Fabian endures an unending calvary of horror while notionally a free man, in parallel with Joaquin's wife and children.

It is a compelling revival of that central idea from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment: the horror, not of being murdered, but of being a murderer. It is the horror of realising that you might be capable of doing it. And if there is no God, and everything is allowed, there is a secondary horror — not of getting caught, but of getting away with it. As Fabian descended into his inferno of fear, I found myself remembering Martin Landau's Judah in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) waking up in a cold sweat, unable to believe what has happened.

Joaquin and Fabian are shaped by economic imperatives: they have grown up in a dysfunctional state where market forces encourage the breadwinner to work outside the country and send money home. Fabian rages against the memory of his parents being absent, in Europe and the United States, and of being brought up by his maid. Joaquin's wife Eliza (played by Angeli Bayani, who herself interestingly played the exploited Filipina maid in Anthony Chen's film Ilo Ilo) recalls the early days of their marriage, when people told Joaquin to work abroad and create a good life for his family – but a fatherless life. If he had followed this advice, she concludes bitterly, he might not be in this situation.

In this film, spiritual agony and bewilderment fall like the rain on the just and the unjust. In prison, Joaquin receives friendship and compassion from a lifer who is a practised murderer, and who calmly says that he is no longer human. Joaquin himself is terrorised, like all the other inmates, by a swaggering prisoner-bully from whom, and with whom, he is to achieve a kind of redemption. His eerie, floating dreams range over his unhappy homeland, taking him back to his family, and his exalted dream state begins to achieve precedence. His subsequent liberation and reunion are extraordinarily moving. What incredible ambition: it is visionary film-making.

Film Comment [Larry Gross]

1. The thematic ambition and complexity of Lav Diaz’s Norte, The End of History is simply astonishing. The comprehensive thematic orientation of the film is political: it examines how cumulative political catastrophes in recent Philippine history have created a society where the gap between rich and poor has created terrible suffering for the poor and moral corruption for the wealthy.

Diaz’s second thematic dimension is psychological: the narrative is organized to show how political and economic dislocations have invaded family life, which is itself made dysfunctional by the traumatic breaking up of families under economic pressure. Parental authority in families is shown as being constantly absent or in disrepair in Norte, to the endless detriment of all family members.

The third thematic dimension of Norte is spiritual. Almost every character in the film addresses the possibility of a spiritual response to the atmosphere of social/economic/familial crisis that envelops them. The film takes a remarkably varied, delicately ambivalent view of these modes of spiritual response, including everything from derisive satire of neuroses unsuccessfully masked by the spiritual, to a tentative embrace of it.

To attempt to seriously braid the political, the psychological, and the spiritual in a single narrative system! Who besides Ford, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, and Rossellini have successfully tried? (And not even their best attempts were flawless.) Norte is a work that deserves consideration in the same terms and contexts as the work of these masters.

2. One could write a small book in delineating the complex conversation that Diaz and his screenwriter are having in this film with Dostoevsky and the whole tradition of Russian realist fiction of the late 19th century. The source for a number of its scenes is Crime and Punishment, though Diaz at the press conference was quick to point out that the book was an “inspiration,” not something he was trying to adapt. 

If you know Dostoevsky, you know that Norte’s depiction of Fabian’s relationship with his intellectual pals owes as much to The Possessed as to Crime and Punishment. Stavrogin is the intellectual who destroys those around him and never stops being shadowed by the demonic appeal of suicide. This is as true of Fabian as is his proximity to the model of Raskolnikov. And Joaquin, who evolves spiritually during his long imprisonment, spontaneously returning goodness for evil, has clear links to Myshkin in The Idiot.

Yet at the same time, in the character of Fabian’s moronic landowning sister Diaz inscribes a ruthlessly clever satire of one of Dostoevsky’s most dubious sentiments, shared to some extent by Tolstoy: that uprooted cosmopolitan intellectuals need to “go back to the land” and get in touch with the peasants and their innate spirituality. So while the film is, in certain ways, dedicated to Dostoevsky’s insights, it announces its independence from them at the same time.

3. Diaz has a visual-narrative style that is unique in its diversity and strangeness. A few of its characteristics: a fondness for filming in long master shots, varied by remarkably subtle reframing camera movements; a constant, brilliant evocation of off-screen space and how it affects us by disorienting our relation to the reality we are seeing and the narrative arcs we are following; the combination of skillful theatrical acting with work by others who seem to be scrupulously chosen nonprofessionals; and harsh contrasts between dialogue scenes of intellectual and psychological complexity, and scenes of wordless behavior. In many ways Diaz is fruitfully an über-traditional realist on the 19th-century model; in other ways his minimalism, austerity, and taste for allegory mark him as a stylized modernist, heir to Mizoguchi, Bresson, Fassbinder, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Edward Yang.

4. I will hazard one more hypothesis about how to think about Diaz's style which I can only characterize as uncanny. Living in both the Philippines and New York City, Diaz is the first great filmmaker to be equally and decisively marked by the West and the East. The West gives him a taste for psychologism and very elaborate narrative construction. The East gives him the taste and talent for impassive allegorical mural-images that compress historical-political themes into single comprehensive images. The combination is not like anything you’ve ever seen before.

Cannes 2013 | Norte, the End of History (Lav Diaz ... Boris Nelepo from Cinema Scope

Nothing is true. Morals are dead. There are no more laws. The end of history is nigh. So says Fabian (Sid Lucero), a law-school dropout who sees no point in legislation in a world devoid of reason. Permanently in debt, he whiles away the hours gabbing and griping about the humiliation his home country has to face now, invoking, by way of contrast, the late 1890s Philippine Revolution against the Spanish spearheaded by Andrés Bonifacio––first executed, along with his brother (see Raya Martin’s 2007 Autohystoria), and later lionized as a national hero. The enraged youth pleads for an awakening of his docile society, issuing, in essence, a call to arms, and proceeds to borrow money from a mean, obese loan shark, a woman seriously drunk on power. But what’s more powerful than money? How about a knife? After stabbing the loan shark to death, Fabian doesn’t hesitate to kill her sweet-spoken teenage daughter while he’s at it.

Shortly before the murder, the late moneylender was visited by Joaquin (Archie Alemania), a DVD peddler, whose wife, Eliza (Angeli Bayani), has pawned one of her rings. When Joaquin’s entreaties to return the ring prove futile, he flies into a rage and tries to strangle the woman, only to come to his senses a moment later and flee. The police, however, are happy to have an open-and-shut case on their hands: Joaquin is sentenced to life without parole. As time wears on, Eliza still sells fresh produce and raises her children, while Fabian moves to another town in an attempt to find his true vocation as a member of a cult. Divested now of his own name and dubbed Rotten Tooth by his cellmates, Joaquin fashions Christmas lanterns in jail and sympathizes with anyone in need of sympathy, even if it’s the notorious sadist, Wakwak (Soliman Cruz). Malicious gossip has it that Joaquin is hoping for presidential clemency, but once the holidays come around he will be graced by a much higher power. Merry Christmas, Mr. Wakwak.

Lav Diaz’s twelfth feature is his first Cannes entry: the festival has finally acknowledged the existence of a filmmaker who is wholly unique in the current cinematic landscape. It is also his first venture into colour in 11 years: as a result, Diaz’s visual splendour is now all the more striking and vivid. Weighing in at a laconic four hours and ten minutes (a short by Diaz’s opulent standards), the tight story of Norte, the End of History manages to address most of the director’s motifs. For starters, the premise itself refers to Dostoevsky, Diaz’s favourite writer, whose works he loosely adapted for the screen in his debut, The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion (1998), a film that opens with an epigraph from Crime and Punishment. Named after one of Dostoevsky’s characters, Lav (Lavrente) Diaz has sustained a great interest in the Russian novelist throughout his career.

In his saintliness, Joaquin reminds us of two of Diaz’s martyrs, Heremias and Florentina. The protagonist in Heremias: Book One––The Legend of the Lizard Princess (2006) challenges heavens as he demands that God manifest His existence; he pleads for his sacrifice to be accepted, willing to fast for 40 days straight to save the life of an innocent girl (Diaz has yet to make good on the sequel that he has promised). In no way an iconoclast, Joaquin, conversely, does not defy God, and humbly withstands the hardship he feels he deserves for the violent outburst that almost resulted in a murder.

In Norte’s predecessor, the subtle and beautiful Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012), Diaz employed voiceover, a technique he had never resorted to before (or, at least, used rarely), to articulate the eternal quandry: what is evil, and how does it arise in man? In this technique, I believe, lies an honest exposure of his method, the method of the only working filmmaker to explore such fundamental categories of the human condition as Truth, Kindness, Morality, Sin, Justice, Nation, History, and God. (All capitalized, contrary to the prevalent ironies of the 2000s). Always solemn but never turgid, Diaz juxtaposes the intellectual and the common man in Norte with peerless elegance, which has the effect of toning down what might otherwise be portentous rhetoric, and elevating his storytelling above the level of cliché. On the other hand, the very same solemnity is what clearly prevented Diaz from fitting in with this year’s Cannes line-up, riddled as it was by convention, conformism, and triviality. An endangered species, Diaz makes a point to treat cinema as a complex, multifaceted art form in which sensual, intellectual, and sacred experiences are inextricably linked.

In an interview, Diaz professed to me in the most unequivocal terms, “I have a pack of issues about metaphysics in the relation to my cultural experience, the Filipino way of looking at the concept of God, the existence of God—it binds all my works together because it’s my culture.” While drawing from the same tropes and exercising the same sparse style, Diaz’s films, on closer inspection, reveal profound differences, thus keeping the viewer on the lookout for the ruptures in his ostensible realism penetrated, all of a sudden, by stray gusts of the ineffable. Such transitions into the mystic are always mirrored in a change of the camera angle, as the distance established by impersonal long shots closes in abruptly to give way to a POV shot, which, granted, envelopes the audience in the fabric of the film, but serves much more extravagant purposes as well. Through the character’s eyes, a whole new dimension is introduced, permitting folktales to leach into the plotlines, lending the gorgeous landscapes a pantheistic flair, and enabling genuine visions rather than mere points of view.

Employing unorthodox running times, Diaz normally assumes full control over the temporality of his films that he feels free to “write” like one would a treatise. In following his characters in their daily routines, Diaz allocates ample time for their mannerisms to grow familiar, and for mundane conversations to unfold unhindered as he traces the minutest transformations in the characters’ selves––a crucial aspect of his filmmaking, since Diaz has a most keen eye for maladjustment, and often chooses to hone in on humans thrust out of their element. In the wake of the murder he has committed, Fabian slowly sheds his human skin, unable to carry the load foisted upon him. As he loses touch with the outside world, his body crumbles, too, and his gaze begins to glaze over; Wakwak the monster undergoes a similar process when his physical presence thins out little by little, his bodily functions no longer efficient. Diaz never fails to underscore moral tribulations with physiological disturbances.

An angry narrative by any definition, Norte portrays a country accursed, whose curse, by extension, spills over onto its people; around this curse, furthermore, the backstories of two families weave a subplot of marked importance. In order to prove that their family was doomed to fail from the start, Fabian torments his sister at the end of the movie (the girl is also in a cult, which seems to be a common practice among Filipinos: see Century of Birthing [2011]). Their parents, as it turns out, had moved to the US, leaving the kids in the care of hired help. Joaquin’s wife blames his subsequent misfortunes on herself for not letting him work abroad. Rejecting those who have left, the country is twice as harsh on those who have stayed, a theme Diaz has developed before, particularly in Butterflies Have No Memories (2009). Operating in a more allegorical register than usual, Diaz first guides us through the degrees of sin, from a petty transgression (Fabian sleeps with his best friend’s girlfriend) to the ultimate wrongdoing (murder); then looks into how the nation’s moral bankruptcy is reflected in one family’s decline; and then, concludes with a disaster––The End of History, indeed.

Diaz never shies away from the many dangers of the present-day Philippines. Set in a land not for the faint of heart, his stories habitually deal with theft, murder, and rape, yet the violence he strives to trace to its root is neither graphic nor gratuitous––more often than not, the violent episodes themselves are actually pushed offscreen. Perfectly capable of reaching his audience in a subtler manner, Diaz refuses to stoop to sensationalism and sends, instead, his camera panning across the fields, rivers, and jungle thickets, cementing the uneasy feel of someone invisible surveying his domain. So, when Joaquin at last ascends to the realm of angels and becomes one himself, the viewer can’t help but wonder if Diaz has mustered the audacity to show us what God––for lack of a better word––sees.

Twitch [Oggs Cruz] also seen here: Lessons from the School of Inattention [Oggs Cruz]

Dostoevsky Variations | Film Comment September/October 2013, also seen here: Critic After Dark [Noel Vera] and here: Film Comment [Noel Vera]

Film of the week: Norte, the End of History | Sight & Sound | BFI Adrian Martin, July 17, 2014

Norte, the End of History | 4:3 - Four Three Film Ivan Čerečina

Keyframe [Michael Sicinski]

MUBI [David Phelps]

The Talkhouse [Zachary Wigon]

Closely Watched Frames [Noli Manaig]

Norte, The End Of History introduces an underseen visionary Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club

Spectrum Culture [Jake Cole]

Little White Lies [Adam Nayman]

Slant Magazine [Calum Marsh]

Norte, The End Of History / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

Grantland [Wesley Morris]

theartsdesk.com [Graham Fuller]

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

Interaksyon [Jessica Zafra]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Screen Daily [Jonathan Romney]

In Review Online [Carson Lund]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

The Lumière Reader [Brannavan Gnanalingam]

Senses of Cinema [Sarah Ward] March 2014

White City Cinema [Michael Smith]

Lav Diaz's NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY - Fandor David Hudson

MUBI [Daniel Kasman] Interview with the director, May 26, 2013

Hollywood Reporter [Neil Young]

JapanCinema.net

Norte, the End of History review - The Guardian Mark Kermode

'Norte, the End of History' movie review: 'Crime and ... Mark Jenkins from the Washington Post

Austin Film Society [Chale Nafus]

Norte, the End of History Movie Review (2014) | Roger Ebert Peter Sobczysnki

'Norte, the End of History,' a Dostoyevskian Fable - NYTimes .. A.O. Scott

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

Norte, the End of History - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dick, Kirby

SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST B- 80

USA (90 mi) 1997

Highly rated, due to the extreme originality of the subject matter, yet this is also a seamy, ugly to look at, and uncompromisingly painful look into the last years of an extremely unhappy, unconventional, and yet very funny action artist who preferred using the extremes of S & M to deal with the extreme pain of cystic fibrosis, revealing an extraordinary humor and rather unflinching, unique strength. This is very graphic material, much of it shot on what was at the time early stages of grainy video, so be warned, some of this material is hard to stomach, especially in the seedy looking images. It was the intent of the subject to be captured at the moment of death on camera, but thankfully, they ran out of film. At the Q & A after the film, one guy passed out and had to be carried out by the paramedics.

Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist Mike D’Angelo

Okay, maybe I'm being unnecessarily cynical, but I just can't imagine many people, even among the hip arthouse crowd, rushing to see a film entitled Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, especially once word gets around that director Kirby Dick -- and how apropos is that moniker?! -- doesn't flinch from depicting Flanagan's acts of self-mutilation in graphic, stomach-churning detail. Yes, this is that notorious movie in which the eponymous subject cheerfully places the business end of a nail on his glans and proceeds to play a rather singleminded game of Whack-a-Mole. Even now, some of you are probably thinking "Yikes, I'll pass," but those who do will deprive themselves of one of the year's most bizarrely moving experiences. In fact, Sick, for all its perversity, is in many respects exactly the kind of movie that Americans, in particular, adore: it is, among other things, a love story, a comedy, a tale of courage, a true-life example of triumph (however temporary) over adversity, and even a disease-of-the-week flick. Though its hero dies at the end, as the title implies, the overall tone is uplifting, even optimistic. It's a Horatio Alger story in which Horatio can't stop coughing and happens to have a steel globe slightly larger than a pool ball shoved up his ass.

Flanagan can't stop coughing because he was born with cystic fibrosis, which the cheapo little dictionary that I keep next to my computer (Webster's New World, 1990 edition, if you must know) defines as "a children's disease marked by fibrosis of the pancreas and frequent respiratory infections." It's considered a children's disease because most of the babies born with it don't live to adulthood, but Flanagan, as it turns out, was the exception to the rule: though he finally succumbed to CF in early 1996, he lived to be 41 -- the oldest CF patient on record, ever. At one point in Sick, while singing a hilarious parody of the Disney tune "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," he wryly notes -- speaking of himself in the third person -- that "the CF would have killed him if it weren't for S&M," and it's this element that allows the film to transcend a mere catalogue of perversity. What initially seems inexplicable to those of us with comparatively white-bread sexual urges (get this: I sometimes like to do it in the shower!) makes perfect sense in the context of Flanagan's pain-wracked existence: masochism, which superficially involves a surrender of power, is oftentimes a means of regaining power -- specifically, the ability to control the pain one feels. And while most masochists don't suffer from anything so concrete as a fatal disease, their likely emotional torment isn't terribly difficult to extrapolate.

All this talk about disease and suffering, however, is misleading, at least with respect to the movie's tone. Whatever I was expecting from a documentary about a dying man inflicting pain on himself, I wasn't expecting a laff riot...yet Sick, when it isn't provoking tears or uncomfortable squirming, is among the funniest movies I've seen all year. Flanagan was an artist -- I guess the vague term "performance artist" is the most appropriate description, though he also dabbled in multimedia -- but what we see of his work (and, to a great extent, his personal life) in Sick looks a lot like a first-rate (albeit unconventional) stand-up routine. Flanagan's specialty, as you might expect, is gallows humor; his parody of "Supercalifragilistic...," which I mentioned a moment ago, begins like so (from memory, so it may not be word-perfect):

Supermasochistic Bob has cystic fibrosis
He should have died when he was ten but he was too precocious
How much longer he will last is anyone's prognosis
Supermasochistic Bob has cystic fibrosis
HumdiddleiddleiddleI'mgonnadie, humdiddleiddleiddleI'mgonnadie...

Sick begins with Flanagan reading his own obituary, which he apparently wrote himself, and ends with his performance of a song entitled "Fun to Be Dead" -- this after we've endured the sight of his agonizing final hours in a hospital bed, mind you. (The only reason that the moment of his death isn't in the movie is that Dick happened to be away when it happened, having been assured that Flanagan would probably last another day.) Midway through the picture, he discusses his idea for a video installation in which spectators would watch his corpse rot over a period of months or years; he ultimately couldn't raise the money. Incredibly, there's no sense of self-pity in any of this tomfoolery, and even the anger, which is unmistakable, is muted. Like any artist, Flanagan used his personal demons as grist for the creative mill, and while Sick is sometimes harrowing and difficult to endure, it's never remotely maudlin or hectoring. Flanagan's creative impulses might have taken a different path had he travelled a smoother genetic road, but his mind is so keen, and his sensibility so imaginative, that I suspect that we'd have heard of him even if he'd lived a healthy fourscore years.

That he survived as long as he did is probably attributable to his long-term relationship with Sheree Rose, the sadist in his life, who in many ways co-directed the movie with Dick; much of its running time is comprised of videotaped footage that she shot long before this project began to germinate. Her psyche, frankly, is even more perplexing to me than is his, but her dedication and courage is beyond question; her permission to include, for example, a candid and personally unflattering sequence in which she berates an ailing Flanagan (on his birthday, no less!) because he's too physically weak to submit to her, is a remarkable gift to both the film's audience and her late partner. (An even more remarkable gift -- this one from the gods -- is extant footage of a ten-year-old Flanagan's appearance on The Steve Allen Show -- not as a guest, just as a member of the studio audience -- in which he manages, during his brief time on-camera, to a) mention that he had just been released from the hospital, and b) declare that he has no interest in being an artist when he grows up.) A long performance-cum-demonstration entitled "The Autopsy" -- you can, perhaps, imagine some of the details -- manages to simultaneously depict the sincere love that Rose feels for Flanagan and the peculiar nature of their symbiotic relationship; like much of the rest of Sick, it's both utterly fascinating and almost impossible to watch.

I've only begun to scratch the surface of this unforgettable film, and I hope that the reluctant among you may have tentatively begun to consider seeking it out. The pertinent question, however, remains: have you the stomach for it? (If by any chance you've seen the terrifying video for Nine Inch Nails' "Happiness in Slavery": that's Flanagan...and most of what you see is not special effects. If you survived that, you should be okay.) The nail-through-the-penis bit is probably the worst moment, especially for the XY segment of the population, but there are several others almost as cringeworthy; when I saw the film a second time not long ago, I opted to close my eyes during most of them. As much as I'd like you to see Sick, I won't kid you: this is not an easy film to take, because you can't reassure yourself by reciting the mantra "it's only a movie." If you decide to go with the computer-animated bugs instead ("it's only a long string of ones and zeros"), I'll understand.

CHAIN CAMERA C 73

USA (90 mi) 2001

Chain Camera Gerald Peary

It was a simple but immensely effective idea: supply students at LA's multi-ethnic John Marshall High School with video cameras to allow them to make mini-movies documenting their lives. After a week of shooting, they passed the cameras to other students. Lots of video-bios, four to six minutes in length, and the most enticing of them, 16 in all, were put together by supervising professional filmmaker, Kirby Dick (Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Super-Masochist, Derrida) into a sympathetic, endearing, sometimes deeply moving 90-minute work. Virtually all the choices are good ones, and everyone watching will have his/her personal favorites. I loved a film showing a once-legally blind boy who recently has gained his sight but who now finds himself, an admitted virgin, shy when girls ask him on dates. Two shorts featuring out-of-the-closet gay and lesbian students are inspiring for their courage, and there's a hilariously raunchy girl-guy collaboration in which the girl keeps laughing hilariously, stopping her from going down on a banana in an ersatz blow job. Then there's cute, smart Amy who talks of her insecurities, not knowing at age 17 how charming she will be as an adult. The most touching short of all: one that shows the symbiotic relationship of a chubby Latino girl and her extremely obese father, and has her crying to the camera when alone, fearing that dad will have a fatal heart attack and leave her alone in the world. Kudos for Chain Camera to Kirby Dick, an indie filmmaker who manages a career of integrity and idealism while residing in Hollywood-owned LA.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

For his extraordinary documentary Chain Camera, director Kirby Dick (Sick: The Life & Death Of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist) took a calculated risk by going beyond mere fly-on-the-wall intimacy, essentially removing himself from the shooting process altogether. With the willful participation of John Marshall High School, an ethnically diverse institution just outside Hollywood, Dick handed out 10 palm-sized digital video cameras to students, who were free to film whatever they wanted about their lives. After one week, the cameras were passed along to another 10 students, and so on; a year later, Dick was left with more than 700 hours of footage from about 500 students, which he then whittled down to 16 mini-diaries with a startling range of backgrounds and personalities. By turns playful, harrowing, intensely moving, and uproariously funny, Chain Camera cuts away all documentary artifice and goes straight to the source, allowing these kids to reveal themselves with the utmost directness and candor. Granted, it doesn't take much to get teenagers in confessional mode, but Dick's subjects are not the sort of pretty, insufferable narcissists found on MTV and reality television shows. Showing remarkable facility with the camera, they shoot their lives like an open book, intrepidly (and perhaps foolishly) inviting an audience of strangers into their world. By design, Chain Camera presents a broad cross-section of students with varying ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation, which makes it tempting to attach sweeping statements about today's youth. But the individuals involved aren't from a cookie-cutter mold. Many come from broken homes, where they're asked to take care of not only themselves, but often their single parents. One girl worries that her morbidly obese father, after recently suffering a massive heart attack, will leave her without her only parent and confidante; another boy, living in an apartment with bullet-holes in the drywall, praises his mother for holding down two jobs while working on a college degree. Other portraits are more frivolous, with sex the common denominator, from virgins to nymphomaniacs to every proclivity in between. Some have bold dreams for life after high school—85 percent of Marshall graduates pursue higher education—and a few are uncertain or worse, such as a former bulimic who wants to become a stripper the moment she turns 18. Chain Camera paints Marshall as a great melting pot, with students from 41 different ethnic groups, yet the 16 subjects don't seem culled from some rainbow checklist (if they were, please bring on Chain Camera II and III). By sampling even the thinnest slice of Generation Y, he finds young people whose humanity calls any simple assumptions or stereotypes into question.

Nitrate Online (Gregory Avery)

filmcritic.com on the Chain gang Rachel Gordon

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Ron Wells

DVD Verdict [Mac McEntire]

Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris (capsule)

Los Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]

New York Times (registration req'd) Lawrence van Gelder

TWIST OF FAITH A- 93

USA (87 mi) 2005

Wrenching look at the aftereffects of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, which becomes extremely personalized as the camera follows Tony Comes, now a thirty-year old firefighter from Toledo with two kids, whose marriage unravels when he realizes that a few doors down from the new house they bought is the priest that abused him repeatedly as a teenager. In an extremely detailed examination, we learn of the step by step process of how since 1950, the Catholic Church’s own records reveal over 10,000 reported incidents of sexual abuse by more than 4000 priests, yet the church uses the power of all their resources to protect their own, maintaining a policy of complete evasiveness, even when that leads to more incidents of abuse, hiring some of the best lawyers to protect the abusers, even utilizing the Church’s own canon which indicates priests may lie in order to protect the greater interests of the church. What results is an extraordinary cover up on one level, and the crumbling family on the other, both happening simultaneously, but on different moral tracks.

In a response to the family’s plea, a supposedly sympathetic Bishop of the church apologizes to the victim, his wife and his mother, but only later do they learn that he then lied when he told the family he was the only known victim from this priest. When they learn otherwise, they band together with several other victims and initiate a painfully public lawsuit against the priest, who was also his Catholic high school dean, who lured young boys to his lakeside cottage for recreational activities, which included plying them with alcohol before molesting them later, leaving them in such a confused state of mind that the entire experience was emotionally suppressed for years. Actual depositions are shown where the priests keep taking the fifth and avoid answering the specifics of the sexually graphic questions, denying culpability, and off camera, an unseen lawyer (a stand-in for the voice of God?) can be heard telling the priest that for the record, he doesn’t have to answer that question. The eventual settlements pay out a pittance compared to the huge monetary reserves in the hands of the church and the ruthless nightmares that stigmatize each of the victims and their families for the rest of their lives.

As the date for their daughter’s first Communion draws nearer, both parents consider leaving the church, but think it may cause even greater irreparable harm to their daughter who has become immersed into the culture of Catholicism. Mother and son argue about whether contributing to the church’s coffers every week is actually funding the legal team he is trying to fight. As the trial is delayed and drawn out over several years, his lone fight to stand up to his family, a community in denial about the charges, and centuries of Catholic traditions results in a rage so all-consuming that he loses 30 pounds, can’t sleep, can’t eat, and is subject to uncontrollable profanity-laden rage along with tears, all of which is captured on camera. To the sounds of Faure’s hauntingly beautiful “Pie Jesu” from his Requiem, the father relents and attends his daughter’s ceremony, insuring that the rituals of the Catholic Church remain solidly in place. Except for a support group of the abused that meets at a national convention, no one comes to his aid. His bitterness and anger at the church is nearly enough to ruin his own life, yet every ounce of his feeling rings true. His initial determination to stand up to the entrenched patterns of deceit by the church, the so-called pillar of the community, crumbles as the years take their toll and it is anguishing to see him relent and return to the church, the source of all his pain which has caused so much damage to so many, and arrogantly refused to take responsibility for their horrid practices. The music is extremely well chosen by Blake Leyh and provides just the right touch of solemnity, providing the kind of dignity the church was supposed to provide, but failed for so many.

THE INVISIBLE WAR A 95

USA (93 mi) 2012 NotInvisible.org Official site

The knife wasn’t for the Iraqis. It was for the guys on my own side.

This guy out there, he told me he thinks the military sends women over to give the guys eye candy to keep them sane. He said in Vietnam they had prostitutes to keep them from going crazy, but they don’t have those in Iraq. So they have women soldiers instead.

—Spc. Mickiela Montoya, age 21

Since the shameful debacle that was Vietnam, a war that divided the nation in the 60’s and 70’s, America has reversed course and applauded veterans, where patriotism and serving your country go hand in hand, where soldiers are publicly recognized as a noble profession, routinely recognized at sporting events and in human interest stories on the local news broadcasts, often showing sympathetic portrayals of the medical hardships so many damaged veterans suffer upon returning home. One subject the newscasts routinely omit is the prevalence of rape in the military, where more than 20% of currently serving female veterans will be sexually assaulted, sometimes with a loaded weapon pointed at their heads and threatened to be killed if they talk, so more than 80% of those will never report the crime (to almost exclusively male commanders), as their careers are effectively tarnished or destroyed just for reporting the crime, where women who report rape are considered traitors, often reduced in rank, singled out by unsympathetic police and subjected to humiliating treatment, forced out of the military or charged for petty offenses themselves, where there are few legal provisions in place to actually charge the rapists or hold them accountable for their actions. 25% of women don’t report because their commander was their rapist, the same person responsible for investigating the charges and rendering an impartial decision, while another third don’t report as the rapist was one of his drinking buddies, where irrespective of the circumstances, if the victim was drinking the case is automatically thrown out. Consequently, commanders often order their subordinates to drink, sometimes involuntarily, before they rape them. With only 3% of the accused ever spending time behind bars, where the punishment is often only a matter of days, like 30 to 60 days of confinement for a felony crime that would receive years of civilian jail time, where the military likes to keep the confinement under a year so offenders never have to register with the National Sex Offender Registry, that’s a pretty hefty number that continue to get away scot free for committing such a heinous criminal act. Astonishingly, the official position of the Armed Forces is to consider this an “occupational hazard,” where under U.S. law, veterans are not allowed to sue the military for potential damages, no matter the severity of the offense.

Similar to Kirby Dick’s insightful film TWIST OF FAITH (2005), revealing decaying moral aftereffects of generations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests ignored by the church hierarchy, the portrait in each case is an insular organization that is more interested in protecting their own, where this vile all-male behavior is allowed to toxically infect the faithful from within, offering no solace or relief, undermining the very values both the church and the military purportedly stand for. Much of the information in this film was first reported in a March 7, 2007 article in Salon by Helen Benedict, seen here: The private war of women soldiers - Salon.com, one of the journalists seen in the film, along with a handful of women who were violently attacked by fellow soldiers, some drugged ahead of time, waking up with someone on top of her, one women with her jawbone permanently broken as a result (requiring reconstruction surgery that the VA refuses to pay for), another gang-raped simply walking down a hotel hallway, grabbed by several drunken aviators who were preying on women. Perhaps the most egregious example of the lack of justice is a woman who is herself an investigator in the Criminal Justice division of the military, a woman who investigates accusations of rape, who was herself raped by her superior officer. In each and every one of these cases the rapist was never charged or even arrested, and in some cases was actually promoted, one of many decorated officers still serving in the military, while the affected women on the other hand, remain physically and mentally traumatized with greater severity than soldiers wounded or scarred from battle, some with permanent, lifelong injuries that affect their quality of life. All suffer severe post traumatic stress symptoms, mostly from a violation of trust, as these rapes have a deep-rooted incestual quality to them, as the military incorporates a psychological system of faith and trust in one another, brothers in arms, leave no man behind, supposedly looking out for one another, where the victims continue to have flashbacks and nightmares, and where sexual attention, even from the intimacy of a spouse, is often still seen, years later, as a threatening act. The damage is visibly apparent just from spending a few moments with each victim, all of whom are smart and sympathetic figures, excellent soldiers, many coming from military families, where it was their dream to proudly serve their country. This film documents how that dream is crushed, not by the intensity or harsh reality of war, but by a military that condones soldiers repeatedly raping and violently attacking fellow soldiers in their barracks without any repercussions to prevent it from happening again, so the problem becomes systemic, attracting a culture filled with repeat offenders.

Amir Bar-Lev’s film The Tillman Story (2010) similarly documents how the Army lied and repeatedly covered up the truth about how pro football player Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, initially glorifying his death, making him a larger than life, mythical war hero, awarding him the Purple Heart, turning him into a poster boy to help recruit young soldiers, only reluctantly revealing afterwards that he was killed by his own group of Army Rangers from unfriendly fire, most likely the over-reactions of trigger-happy 19-year olds, shedding light on the systematic corruption, incompetence, and lack of accountability in the military and in government. Dick’s film is a more harrowing interior journey into horror, given an intense Kafkaesque feel at just how random and unnecessary these nightmarish tragedies are, as they could happen to anyone, even the best soldiers, as there’s simply no concerted effort to eliminate rape once and for all from the military. Part of the problem is the government’s bold public contention, often before Congress, that they have a “zero tolerance” policy in place, while in reality the current system protects the perpetrators, who remain serving in the military even more emboldened knowing they can get away with it in a system that allows them to become repeat offenders, while the victims leave in disgrace, depressed and humiliated, often affected for life. The military has a history of this sort of thing happening before, the 1991 Navy Tailhook scandal where 87 female recruits were forced to run a “gauntlet” of 100 drunken officers that amounted to a gang rape, the Army Aberdeen Scandal in 1996 where male officers were found raping 30 new female trainees, or the 142 allegations of rape uncovered in 2003 at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Statistics reveal the military is waiving criminal and violent records for more than one in 10 new Army recruits, that incoming Navy recruits already have a previous history of rape or sexual assault at twice the rate as the civilian population, suggesting the military is a recruiting grounds for potential serial rapists.

All the rapists in the film happen to be heterosexual, some are married men, suggesting this is not a gay issue, but predators don’t discriminate the sex of their victims, as to them it’s all about exerting control and domination against males or females (because there’s significantly more men in the military, more men are raped than women, but the percentage of women is much higher), using their rank and position to force subordinates into sexual compliance, sounding very much like the repeated sexual assaults within the prison system. In each, the system barely acknowledges the victims, claiming they don’t keep statistics on unlawful and uncontrolled human behavior. Part of the argument criticizing the military’s effectiveness always points out collateral damage, how innocent civilians are killed with greater numbers than the targeted enemy, where much like inner city gangs, most of those killed are unintended victims killed in the crossfire. The unintended victims here are those women serving alongside male sexual predators that are allowed to hide their criminal activity behind a protected and shielded military chain of command. Watching highly decorated female officers publicly defend this system of what amounts to tolerated rape within the military is simply mind-boggling, claiming rape victims who are unhappy with the results of the lackluster internal military investigations could write their congressmen, an outrageous acknowledgment of systematic incompetence, all but suggesting the only avenue to justice is outside the narrow confines of military culture. The film cuts through the hypocrisy of high-level military personnel and government officials while conveying its message of misogyny through victims still living with the pain and trauma with a brilliantly assembled series of personally compelling testimony that collectively amasses in equal degrees both heartbreak and outrage, becoming a fierce indictment against a promising career path that tolerates felonious sexual assault while advocating “Be all you can be.” Army Commercial - Be All You Can Be (1986) - YouTube (29 seconds), Army be all you can be (1994) - YouTube (31 seconds).

The Invisible War Hannah Levintova from Mother Jones magazine

Near the end of this film, former Coast Guardswoman Kori Cioca stands at the women's war memorial in DC wondering why she and others who have been raped by their comrades in arms—half a million since the 1950s, estimates one expert—don't deserve a Purple Heart. By this time, Kirby Dick, the film's Oscar-nominated director, has already introduced us to the Kafkaesque system of military justice that's helped keep an epidemic of sexual assault under wraps. The Invisible War is riddled with jaw-dropping stats, humanized by haunting survivor stories. Dick does interview Pentagon officials, but the stark contrast between their spin and painful reality is impossible to miss.|

Exclaim! [Robert Bell]

Serving as an advocacy film of unique power, detailing a series of blood-boiling accounts of rape incidents in the U.S. Military and debunking their self-purported image of having zero tolerance, Kirby Dick's expose on this shocking epidemic gives new meaning to the word infuriating.

The Invisible War deconstructs a broken system in dire need of modification from inside out, detailing the experiences of the many women and men in the military subjected not only to rape, but the degrading repercussions of an indifferent and often hostile administration unwilling to address the issue.

Kori Cioca (a U.S. Coast Guard seaman) sustained permanent injury from her aggressor when he punched her in the jaw for refusing to acquiesce to his sexual demands. Years later, having been expelled from the military, where her rapist continues to thrive, she can't even get disability coverage for the surgery to have her jaw repaired so that she can again eat solid foods. Add to this the aggressive PTSD, depression, anxiety and suicide attempts resulting from an experience that was dismissed by commanding officers and you get a sense of the sort of horrors unveiled within Dick's astounding documentary.

And Kori isn't the only victim, as we quickly learn when statistics point out that the 3,000-plus reported incidents of sexual assault in 2010 only scratch the surface when you consider that over 80-percent of incidents are never even reported. Other women describe being raped by their commanding officers and being discharged from the military for being considered to have committed adultery as a result, while Navy seaman recruit Hannah Sewell discusses being raped while still a virgin.

It's true that some of Dick's editing decisions and interview tactics are somewhat shady, ensuring that any military official with an opinion contradicting the perspective of change is drawn as either a moron or a villain, but the impetus of solidarity and courage amongst the mistreated remains solid. Their rage leaps from the screen, infecting the viewer with a necessary sense of shock and horror.

It's all you can do not to shout with frustration when rape in the military is eventually defined as a mere "workplace hazard."

Village Voice [Nicholas Rapold]

Kirby Dick's last documentary was titled Outrage, but you could call his newest the same thing. A measured, expertly constructed chronicle of rape in the military, The Invisible War is a humane exposé that does not cease to shock. That includes its own filmmaker.

"After we'd done 40 or so interviews, I would think, 'I know what the stories are,'" Dick recalls in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "But with each new one, I actually couldn't believe this happened to a person wanting to serve their country and that this is how the military responded."

With a discipline matching its milieu, The Invisible War lays bare a disturbing, systemic problem: In the military, rape rates among women number at least one in five, and reporting of the crimes often leads to blame-the-victim retaliation. Dick has assembled a moving litany of testimonials, covering a variety of soldiers and scenarios, giving this heartfelt, steel-nerved, conscientiously argued film an emotional and political maturity rare among "issue" docs. In addition to the voices of the aggrieved (who include men), there are head-clutching interviews with sloganeering military officials. ("Ask her when she's sober!" runs one cringe-worthy awareness campaign.) Braided throughout are verity tagalongs with one fiery young vet, Kori Cioca, who hacks through VA hotlines while seeking medical coverage for a jaw broken by a superior.

Dick and producer Amy Ziering were inspired by Helen Benedict's depressing 2007 Salon article on women in Iraq, which they were surprised to discover no one was already adapting.

"It was almost like The Twilight Zone: Not only how could this be, but why aren't there 100 films being made? Why isn't everyone reacting to this?" Dick mused, sounding dismayed still now. "Even in the process of raising money, it took a while. I was really shocked."

The Invisible War, though revelatory, is perhaps the most straightforward film yet from a director who likes to broach the fault lines of sex and society. Dick has repeatedly examined hard-to-face taboos and hypocrisies: abuse by Catholic priests (Twist of Faith, 2004), closeted anti-gay politicians (Outrage, 2009), and the culturally insidious, frequently moronic, and arguably monopolistic MPAA (This Film Is Not Yet Rated, 2006).

Theory-heads could point to his portrait-of-a-deconstructionist Derrida (2002) as one model for Dick's mode of intelligent questioning. But the fascinating Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997) presented his ethos earlier and made a splash in the pre-boom era of documentary with a penis-nailing scene heard round the world.

"It pushes people to consider a perspective that might otherwise have been considered marginal or even not wanted to think about," says Dick (who, in a neat bit of '90s outsider-documentary synergy, went to see Crumb with subject Flanagan).

Shockingly, the women and men of The Invisible War qualify as marginalized. Soldier after soldier (one even an investigator herself) report being ostracized, hostage/prey to protocols that sometimes saw assailants adjudicating their victims. One lawsuit on behalf of victims was dismissed on the grounds that rape was an occupational hazard ("incident to service"). Given close-quarter fraternity and a hierarchy undergirded by take-a-bullet trust, military rape is a betrayal that one commentator compares to incest.

That doesn't mean that Dick has crafted an anti-military screed. On the contrary, The Invisible War rings out with the rank and file reaffirming the boons and lessons they won from the military. Words of dissent are voiced—among them, Cioca's indelible comment in a military museum that maybe the victims deserve Purple Hearts. But The Invisible War, while unsparing with facts, is never an ideological pile-on.

"Honestly, I think it's the most positive, pro-military indie film ever made, ironically," says Ziering, who conducted the (by all accounts) cathartic interviews. Dick aspires to the evenhandedness of responsible reporting, with an emphasis on evidence and anticipating criticism. "In some ways, documentaries have taken over the role that nonfiction books played up until the last decade or so," he observes. The filmmakers feel this approach is key to reaching the two different audiences they've targeted: not only the public but also policy makers.

"The president, the secretary of defense, the [Joint Chiefs of Staff]—those are the people that I want to feel the most pressure, not a half-dozen perpetrators," Dick says.

In fact, the film, carefully circulated among government muckety-mucks since Sundance, has already achieved the rare documentary distinction of praxis. In April, soon after seeing the film, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced new policies governing rape reporting and prosecution in the armed forces.

It could be a step toward change, though the track record of follow-through isn't great. Dick is careful to be optimistic but cautious. "I'm somewhat hopeful that this could be a positive thing for society in the long run," he says. "But they've got a long way to go."

The private war of women soldiers - Salon.com Helen Benedict from Salon, March 7, 2007

Did “The Invisible War” shortchange the male victims? Mary Elizabeth Williams from Salon, February 8, 2013

Report Finds Military Sex Assaults on Rise Julian Barnes from The Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2013

Obama condemns big rise in sexual assaults in US military Anna Fifield from The Financial Times, May 7, 2013

Sexual Assault in the Ranks Mark Thompson from Time magazine, May 8. 2013

Ending the Culture of Impunity on Military Rape Garance Franke-Ruta from The Atlantic, May 9, 2013

Air Assault Sexual assaults in the military are skyrocketing. That’s because the military still doesn’t understand what assault is, by Kayla Williams and Stephanie Driessel from Slate, May 11, 2013, also seen here: Sexual assault in the military: why it's rising. - Slate Magazine

Horror in Uniform - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Melissa Anderson

The House Next Door [Ela Bittencourt]

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

Paste Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]

SBS Film [Michelle Orange]

Movie Review - 'The Invisible War' - The Visible Costs Of The - NPR Mark Jenkins

The Invisible War | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

The Invisible War - Movie Review - 2012 - Documentaries - About.com Jennifer Merin

CompuServe [Harvey Karten]

IONCINEMA.com [Jordan M. Smith]

Review: 'The Invisible War' A Powerful Look At The Epidemic Of ... Kevin Jagernauth from The indieWIRE Playlist

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]

Boxoffice Magazine [Ray Greene]

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

SLUG Magazine [Jeanette Moses]

LAFF 2012: THE INVISIBLE WAR Miranda Inganni from J Esther Entertainment

INTERVIEW: KIRBY DICK AND AMY ZIERING John Esther interview from J. Esther Entertainment, June 21, 2112

The Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

Variety [Rob Nelson]

More than 70 US service members sexually assaulted each day ... Raf Sanchez from The London Telegraph, May 8, 2013

Review: The Invisible War - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Critic Review for The Invisible War on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

Obama delivers blunt message on sexual assaults in military Craig Whitlock from The Washington Post, May 7, 2013

'Invisible War' on silent enemy - rape in military - SFGate Hugh Hart from The SF Chronicle

Review: 'The Invisible War' a heartbreaking look at military rape Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

Change and validation arise from 'The Invisible War' Rebecca Keegan from The LA Times

Pentagon reports sharp rise in military sexual assaults David S. Cloud from The LA Times, May 7, 2013

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

'The Invisible War,' Directed by Kirby Dick ... - The New York Times A.O. Scott

Assault-Prevention Officer in Air Force Is Arrested James Dao from The New York Times, May 6, 2013

Pentagon Study Finds Sharp Rise in Military Sexual Assaults The New York Times, May 7, 2013

Sexual Assaults in Military Raise Alarm in Washington Jennifer Steinhauer from The New York Times, May 7, 2013

Lawmakers Focus on Measures to Combat Sex Assault in Military The New York Times, May 8, 2013

Military Courts Are Called Outdated on Sex Crimes The New York Times, May 9, 2013

Tailhook scandal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2003 United States Air Force Academy sexual assault scandal

Aberdeen scandal

Dickerson, Ernest R.

STRANGE JUSTICE – Made for TV

USA (95 mi) 1999

User comments from imdb Author: galensaysyes

As usual in Showtime's political dramas, "Strange Justice" dramatizes actual events just far enough to make them unconvincing but not far enough to turn them into drama. Also as usual in these half-plays or sketches, what dominates is preachy melodramatics. The central characters are almost the only ones who come across as plausibly human; the others, apart from Patinkin's spin doctor (a character for the producers and executives to admire), are reduced to stick figures. The few righteous in Sodom, the members of Hill's support group, appear stiff and phony in their "commitment", like TV anchorwomen. The bad guys, including all of Thomas's backers, are cartoons. Although Lindo's performance catches fire, the drama itself never does. Its most obvious structural fault is the choice not to dramatize the central event, the sequence of hearings. So the members of the committee, and the President, are shown in real news tapes, with the faces of the actors morphed in opposite them where necessary. The effect is transparently, transcendently false. These tapes, the we-happy-few discussions in the Hill camp, and the scenes of Thomas's grooming and training never coalesce into a whole. In the Thomas scenes the Patinkin character becomes a kind of public eye and Greek chorus, a master manipulator of opinion with the canniness to see through others' ideological posturing. I thought the film gave him too much credit, but then he's the show-biz standby, the cynic with a heart of gold. His presence would be unnecessary and even obtrusive if the film had a script that had the imagination to use what the raw material had to offer. The two leading actors (who are exceptionally well cast) appear to have got around that lack by basing their performances on the real-life figures as they came across in the real-life hearings. Taylor is not given enough time or space to show her character fully, but Lindo is, and while he doesn't have all the right speeches he has plenty of them and by playing between the lines manages to turn Thomas into a tragic hero of almost Shakespearean proportions, a man in denial of his own weaknesses who reacts by lashing out violently as everyone else. The enlargement of the real man to this scale is perhaps too obvious but is dramatically sound, and if the producers had been less concerned with the facts, as labeled to make sure we saw them in the intended light, and more concerned with the truth as they saw it, we would have got a much more persuasive and significant film.

Apollo Guide (Janet Branagan) review [68/100]

Strange Justice is the true story of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings of 1991. On the verge of being appointed to sit on the United States Supreme Court, Thomas (Delroy Lindo) and his life was put under a microscope. When Anita Hill (Regina Taylor) comes forward with allegations of sexual misconduct, Thomas’ appointment becomes secondary in this he said/she said search for truth.

The film opens with then President Bush’s announcement of his nomination of Clarence Thomas to sit in the enviable position of Supreme Court Justice. Well aware that smut can be dug up in a high profile campaign, the administration hires spin doctor Kenneth Duberstein (Mandy Patinkin) to coach Thomas on the rights and wrongs of the public relations game. Thomas is reluctant to accept the necessity of such a rigorous process, and is determined not to become Duberstein’s puppet. Duberstein on the other hand, wants Thomas to be prepared and repeatedly presses him for anything that could be questionable from his past.

On the other side of the world, Thomas’ former employee Hill watches the news of his impending induction with horror. Torn between telling the truth, which would jeopardize her career and her reputation, and keeping quiet, which would let an unjust man represent justice, Hill decides to come forward, initially attempting to do this anonymously. As the event progresses, Hill’s involvement escalates before the ratification hearings essentially come down to Hill’s word against Thomas’ in one of the most highly publicized and scrutinized political debates of the 1990s.

Since Strange Justice is based on fact, there are no clear answers as to who is telling the truth. The film does shed some light on some of the behind the scenes manoeuvring that could have hurt Hill’s position, such as the efforts of some to stifle other witnesses from coming forward and to feed Thomas the “right” things to say at all costs. In the end, however, the interpretation of the events is just as mysterious now as it was when they transpired.

While Strange Justice is a strong film with excellent performances given by the leads Lindo, Taylor and Patinkin, there is a hint of ‘strange justice’ in its retelling of the facts. There is much emphasis on the drama of the Thomas/Hill hearings, but not a lot of substance is added in the process. The grandstanding of the filmmakers only ends up hurting the tone of the movie – by making it less credible. Only scanty background information is provided on either Hill or Thomas; we know little about them when the accusations start to fly.

Nonetheless, Strange Justice is a movie about an important event in American political history that spoke volumes about many other unspoken truths in the U.S. judicial system. What you choose to believe is a matter of personal opinion; the film at least makes an effort to raise the issues.

Strange Justice: sounding out the Right: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and constructing spin in the name of justice Steve Lipkin from Jump Cut, Winter 2006

The Flick Filosopher's take

Variety (Laura Fries) review

Dickinson, Thorold – filmmaker

Moving At The Speed Of Emotion Martin Scorsese discusses the British filmmaker with Sight and Sound’s Philip Horne

Diegues, Carlos

Diegues, Carlos World Cinema

During his school days, he was active in the political affairs of the academic community and became film critic of O Metropolitano, a publication of the Metropolitan Union of Students. While becoming established as a critic and a poet, he began directing film shorts in 1960. With his first feature, Ganga Zumba (1964), the saga of a 17th-century slave rebellion, he asserted himself as a new vital force in Brazil's Cinema Nuovo movement. After the compelling Xica da Silva, he returned to the historical scene of his first film with Quilombo (1984), one of Brazil's most expensive and elaborate productions to that date. His reputation was later enhanced by such films as Subway to the Stars (1988) and Better Days Ahead (1989). He writes his own screenplays, alone or in collaboration.

— Ephraim Katz, The Film Encylopedia

JOANNA FRANCESCA

Brazil France (110 mi) 1975

Brazil Film Update Robert Stam from Jump Cut

Carlos Diegues' declared goal in his films is to capture the Brazilian Unconscious through his own fantasies and utopias. In JOANA FRANCESA, the director gives us what French critic/filmmaker Pierre Kast calls the "dialectical eruption of Greek tragedy on a Brazilian sugar plantation." Set in the thirties, the film chronicles the disintegration of an aristocratic landholding family. In the background looms the revolution of 1930, an event which transformed the social landscape of Brazil, indirectly leading to the takeover of old farms by new money. The film draws analogies between the thirties and the early seventies in Brazil — repressed morality, patriarchal family — and underlines them with deliberate anachronisms (thirties people speaking seventies slang, smoking contemporary cigarettes, etc.). The story is narrated in the first person by Joana, the Frenchwoman (played by Jeanne Moreau), an ex-madame of a Sao Paulo bordello who opts to live with, but refuses to marry, one of her former clients, a rich sugar-cane proprietor. She becomes involved with his decadent family, composed of his devoutly neurotic mother, his dying wife, two incestuous adolescent children, a decidedly Oedipal son, and a retarded child.

Made at a time of extreme governmental repression in Brazil, JOANA FRANCESA proposes to dig the grave of what Diegues calls an "old civilization without a future in which the dead command the living." JOANA FRANCESA lacks the political clarity and optimism of Diegues' other films, instead eliciting a visceral, in some ways contradictory response. It is not clear whether Joana is to be admired as a strong, honest and liberated woman, or to be despised as the Colonizer who symbolically rides on the back of her black servant. What are we to make of the attractive animal energy of the two incestuous adolescents? How do we reconcile the tragic core of the tale with the lush beauty of Dib Lufti's photography and the bittersweet charm of Chico Buarque's music? Shown in the International Festival in Mexico in 1975, many Latin American critics compared JOANA to Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, 100 Years of Solitude.

"Not even Bunuel," claims Glauber Rocha, has made such a corrosive, terrible, tragic, implacable, violent, paranoid and yet lyric, detheatricalized and moving fun." 

XICA DA SILVA

Brazil (107 mi) 1976

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Xica (Zezé Motta), a black female slave in 18th century Brazil, gains freedom, wealth, and power by seducing the town’s new Royal Diamond Contractor (Walmor Chages).

Peary’s review of this “popular [Brazilian] film by Carlos Diegues” is rather half-hearted. He finds it “not particularly interesting,” and largely “unsatisfying” in terms of its political exposition. Other reviewers have expressed similar opinions (see links below), lamenting the film’s bombastic sexual humor and labeling it thematically “messy”.

It’s true that Xica doesn’t fall into one or two neatly defined cinematic slots. In addition to the above-listed genres, for instance, Xica could be seen as a “femme fatale” film, given that the lead character selfishly causes the downfall of the men she seduces (though her joyous demeanor and intermittent goodwill towards others don’t allow Xica to fall into the classic noir categorization of such women). Also, while the story undeniably involves slavery, it doesn’t dwell on this as any kind of a serious thematic subject – Xica could just as easily have been a lower-class maid rather than a slave, without changing the overall thrust of the story. And though Xica has much of the feeling of a classic “Bedroom Farce” – with Xica bedding several cuckolded men at once — it’s more about sex as a source of power than sex as a harmless flirtation. Finally, while Xica experiences a drastic downfall at the end of the film (thus hinting at a “Rise and Fall” theme), she picks herself right back up and, oddly, seems undefeated — thus belying the traditional heavy-handed morality of most such movies.

Ultimately, then, Xica is more of a character-driven comedy than any kind of a serious statement about political, historical, racial, or gender-based issues. If you don’t expect such an agenda, chances are you’ll have a good time enjoying this film’s broad humor, colorful costumes, and unusual historical setting. It’s truly a unique movie-watching experience.

Xica Da Silva Sex, Politics, and Culture, by Randal Johnson from Jump Cut

Epinions [metalluk]

CineScene.com Review Chris Dashiell

NY Times Original Review Vincent Canby

BYE BYE BRAZIL (Bye Bye Brasil)

Brazil France Argentina (100 mi) 1980

Bye Bye Brazil | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Carlos Diegues's allegorical travelogue (1979) about a Brazil that is vanishing before the camera's eye. A small carnival troupe tours the interior, finding most of its regular stops spoiled by encroaching industrialization. There's something a little thin and easy in using the omnipresence of television and disco music as the ultimate image of modern corruption, but Diegues, to his credit, avoids the expected sentimental plop for traditional values at the end, and stirs some more complex feelings. Jose Wilker is entertainingly mock-satanic as the troupe leader, though Fabio Junior and Zaira Zambelli, as the two innocents he brings along for the ride, are rather cloying. Still, the scenery is wonderfully seductive in Lauro Escorel Filho's cinematography. With Betty Faria and Principe Nabor.

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

The road-movie format is as central to Carlos Diegues's Bye Bye Brazil as it is to Wim Wenders's Kings of the Road, and for the same reasons. Both films are about countries groping for self-definition, and in both the role of cinema as an endangered collective cultural memory is evident: One of the characters in Diegues's film is an aged projectionist who plays Brazilian classics to empty halls, a bit of critique compounded by the cameo appearance of Jofre Soares, an actor closely associated with the country's Cinema Novo of the 1960s. Growing equally forgotten in the modernized landscape is the traveling show, though the amiably tawdry Caravan Rolidei, an itinerant circus troupe headed by the Lord Gypsy (José Wilker) and the Queen of the Rumba (Betty Faria), still boasts enough romantic allure to captivate Ciço (Fábio Júnior). A young accordionist who dreams of leaving his barren, small town, Ciço joins the show with his pregnant wife (Zaira Zambelli), but their dreams of success become unlikely as the caravan putters toward the Amazon and a bewilderingly transitory land takes form. One of the most striking aspects of Bye Bye Brazil is how the movie, originally received as a carnivalesque, typically Brazilian dramedy, seems uneasy about what "typically Brazilian" meant at the cusp of a new decade. When the Lord Gypsy ends one of his performances by summoning a downpour of fake snow on his audience, the magical realism of the moment is tinged with cultural confusion when the magician claims that the people's "most intimate wish" is being like other countries where snow falls for real. (It's no accident that the Caravan Rolidei is named after the Portuguese pronunciation of an English word.) Though his characters bemoan the changes underway, Diegues remains optimistically attuned to the bracing mishmash of races, moods, and attitudes they meet on the road. The title suggests closure, yet the film locates a nation very much still in the process of getting to know itself.

Bye Bye Brazil : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Svet Atanasov

A small troupe of street artists wanders through the Brazilian countryside attempting to make ends meet. Led by Lord Cigano (Jose Wilker) the Circus stops in a small town where Cico (Fabio Junior), a local accordionist, will fall in love with the troupe's Queen of the Rumba (Betty Farria). Cico and his pregnant wife join the artists and embark on a fascinating journey through the heart of a country with an uncertain future.

Carlos Diegues' Bye Bye Brasil (1979) is a film whose breathtaking beauty can not be denied. Filmed over 9000 miles the pic feels as a documentary whose only goal is to reveal to the viewer a side of Brazil which no camera has ever captured. Meticulous, full of color, and charged with political innuendo this is also the work of a man with a vision.

Completed at a time when Brazil was struggling to overcome a military dictatorship pic seems careful in stating the obvious. As the troupe rolls through towns and villages facing stiff competition from the latest technological advancement, the television set, Diegues' camera reveals a country shaken by economic hardship.

Pic's desire to be both entertaining and urgent is achieved through the introduction of a love affair whose end is predetermined - Cico and Salome's romance is short but intense.

Bye Bye Brasil's technical execution is impressive. Cinematographer Lauro Escorel provides a sense of finesse which some may find rather awkward. When the troupe's actions are not the focus of attention Brazil's landscape successfully takes its place.

The finale is particularly intriguing as it unceremoniously draws a line between past and present forcing the audience to reexamine pic's agenda. The juxtaposition of Brazil of the past with Brazil of the present, a colorful mosaic of images revealing a socio-cultural transformation well underway, is in sync with the main protagonists' greater appreciation of life at the end of their journey.

Film Reference [Susana Schild]

PopMatters [Jessica Scarlata]

DVDTown [Christopher Long]

DVD Verdict [Russell Engebretson]

Bye Bye Brasil Review (1979) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Scopophilia: Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]

Bye Bye Brasil Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London

New York Times [Vincent Canby] (registration req'd)

Bye Bye Brazil: Information from Answers.com

QUILOMBO

Brazil France (119 mi) 1984

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

This is almost a by-the-numbers Brazilian film (1984)--the bright colors, bouncy music, teasing eroticism, and political lessons seem like the familiar elements of a formula--but there's some genuine charm and dynamism in it too. It's the story of Palmares, the most famous of the mountain villages (quilombos) formed by runaway slaves in 17th-century Brazil; presided over by the legendary chief Ganga Zumba, it survived for two generations before falling to the Portuguese colonial troops. Director Carlos Diegues (Bye Bye Brazil) does best with the spectacular musical numbers, which seem the work of a Busby Berkeley hopped up on Frantz Fanon; the dialogue passages merely shuffle the usual slogans. With Zeze Motta, from Diegues's Xica. In Portuguese with subtitles. 119 min.

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

In 17th century Brazil, a group of slaves revolts against its Portuguese masters, and then flees to Palmares, a community of escaped slaves in the rain forest. One of the new arrivals, Ganga Zumba (Tony Tornado), is declared king by Palmares' ancient priestess. Under his leadership, the ex-slaves successfully resist Portuguese attempts to conquer them. But one young boy is captured in a raid and becomes the slave of a Catholic priest. When he grows up, Zumbi (Antonio Pompeu) escapes and finds his way back to Palmares, where he becomes a courageous warrior, challenging the authority of the aging Ganga Zumba.

In telling this story, which closely follows actual historical events, Diegues uses a style more akin to that of folklore or mythology than "realistic" narrative. It's not that the events seem supernatural or unlikely -- far from it. But the film is carried along by a rich undercurrent of tribal atmosphere: dance, song, chant, and ritual are part and parcel of the story's progression rather than elements set off against it. The different phases of the tale -- the ascent to prominence of Ganga Zumba, the return of Zumbi, the great debate over whether to accept a peace offering from the Portuguese -- are presented through an emphatic, sometimes even abrupt editing style that raises the material to something close to epic stature. The scenes involving the whole community are wonderful -- Diegues is brilliant at orchestrating large groups of people in convincing and dramatic movement. Although there are occasional missteps and awkward moments, this is a very impressive achievement, a film that succeeds in portraying the subjective quality and agency of an African slave rebellion culture, vividly and seemingly from the inside. The picture illuminates a fascinating episode in Brazilian history, while also attaining a sense of timeless significance. This is an important film -- certainly one of the greatest movies from Brazil, and it should be better known.

Epinions [metalluk]

DVD Verdict [Neal Solon]

Carlos Diegues Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Dieterle, William

All-Movie Guide

A stage actor in Germany and Switzerland as a teenager, William (born Wilhelm) Dieterle began acting in movies by 1913, and appeared in such memorable '20s films as Paul Leni's Waxworks (1924) and F. W. Murnau's Faust (1926). In 1923 Dieterle also began directing himself in a series of films, including Geschlecht In Fesseln (Sex in Chains [1928]). He began his Hollywood career in 1930, directing German-language versions of Those Who Dance (1930), The Way of All Men (1930), and Kismet (1944). At Warner Bros., Dieterle scored with The Last Flight (1931), the W.C. Fields comedy Her Majesty (1931), and the elaborate A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), which he co-directed with Max Reinhardt. In the late '30s he helmed Warners' prestigious biopics for actor Paul Muni: The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), and Juarez (1939). Moving to RKO in 1939, Dieterle delivered two classics with The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), starring Charles Laughton as Quasimodo; and The Devil and Daniel Webster (aka All That Money Can Buy [1941]), with Walter Huston as the Devil. His subsequent Hollywood work of the '40s and '50s was well-crafted but impersonal, notable chiefly for his romantic dramas Love Letters (1945) and Portrait of Jennie (1948), and the crime films Rope of Sand (1949) and Dark City (1950). In the late '50s he returned to Europe and directed films in Italy and Germany.

German 43 Bio

TCMDB

Classic Film and Television Home Page Michael E. Grost

Dieterle, William They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

THE LAST FLIGHT

USA (76 mi) 1931

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

Further clues to the mystery of William (Wilhelm) Dieterle, who acted for Murnau in the 20s and became a director for Warner Brothers in the 30s. The Last Flight (1932) was his first American film, the story of four World War I pilots tenuously returning to society. Dieterle would later be responsible for some of Warners' most sluggish "prestige" pictures--The Life of Emile Zola, Juarez--but there may be some vigor in his early career. 80 min.

Time Out

A study of the Lost Generation more quintessentially Fitzgerald than anything Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote: a doomed, innocently mad-cap frolic over which hangs the aura of despair. Adapted by John Monk Saunders from his own novel Single Lady, it chronicles the dark night of the soul of four young aviators, invalided out as 'spent bullets' at the end of World War I and lingering on in Paris to drown their shattered nerves in dry Martinis and zany banter with a dreamily dotty rich girl in whom they instantly recognise a kindred spirit when they see her in a bar solemnly guarding someone's false teeth in her champagne glass. Nothing happens, and 'nothing matters' echoes as an ominous motif through the brilliantly racy conversations, until suddenly, within the space of a few minutes running time, three of the four have died or disappeared, and a curtain seems to fall on an era as the fourth is left to mourn the comradeship that alone survived the war. With superb dialogue that paints hell in wisecracks and an extraordinary performance by Helen Chandler as the girl, it's a small masterpiece.

ToxicUniverse.com (Dan Callahan)

I have a friend
At the end
Of the world
His name is a breath
Of fresh air

Stevie Smith

A breathtaking blend of traveling, boozing, camaraderie, carousing and romanticism, The Last Flight (1931) is the least known of all film masterpieces. It doesn't circulate much, and its lead, Richard Barthelmess, though a big star in his day, is all but unknown today. Its director, William Dieterle, has never commanded a big reputation, though he has many fine movies to his credit. I've seen my bootleg tape of it time and again over the years, and The Last Flight never seems to lose its freshness and unique flavor. It beats right at the heart of all self-destructive American cinema and plays like a Nick Ray classic rescued from the early thirties.

The Last Flight takes place during and just after World War One and concerns a group of fliers (Barthelmess, David Manners, Johnny Mack Brown and Elliott Nugent) whose nerves have been shattered by plane crack-ups. Manners' Shep has acquired a twitch and wears dark glasses. “What are you going to do now, Shep?” asks Barthelmess, as they prepare to leave the hospital. “Get tight,” says Manners. “Then what?” Barthelmess asks. “Stay tight,” Manners replies.

The group wanders around Paris amusing themselves as best they can, in true Lost Generation style. One night, they meet Helen Chandler's Nikki, one of the weirdest of all screwball movie heiresses. Nikki is small, blonde and so near-sighted as to appear blind. Whenever she opens her mouth, a bewildering non sequitur falls out.

Nikki never understands anything that's going on, and she has no tact whatsoever. First she calls attention to Barthelmess' ruined hands, then she goes over and cries about them. The men are appalled by her, but they soon become fond of her bizarre chattering. Chandler, who never became a star and retired quite early, gives the performance of her life in this part. Actually, she looks so completely in her own world that she doesn't seem to be acting eccentric, in the way Irene Dunne or Katharine Hepburn would be: she is eccentric.

Nikki is the most original character, but she doesn't overwhelm the others (later on The Last Flight was turned into a short-lived Broadway musical called Nikki, starring screenwriter John Monk Saunders' wife Fay Wray and featuring a young Cary Grant). “I'll take vanilla,” Chandler chirps, whenever she can't think of anything else to say. “Why do you always have to be funny at the wrong time?” laughs Manners, after she has offended Barthelmess again.

She keeps turtles in her bathtub and collects shoes. When they ask her where she's going, she says things like, “I'm going to take a Chinese singing lesson.” She's kept in luxury by her mother's money, but they seem to have had a falling out—Nikki explains that she just couldn't accept having a mother named Beulah.

These ruined men have a roaring good time with Nikki, and they love her precisely because she is guaranteed not to get anything. Brown leers over her, good-naturedly, but she is drawn to Barthelmess. When Brown keeps saying what nice legs she has, Barthelmess says, “What do you want me to do about it? Burst into tears?” But his toughness falls away and a burst of lyricism takes its place as he describes his childhood to Nikki in a brief, lovely scene in a café. They then connect further when they talk in a cemetery. Barthelmess, though in pain, still has the urge to live in him, unlike his pals.

In many ways, The Last Flight is a writer's movie, and Monk Saunders' dialogue is highly literate and always unexpected. It was based on a novel of his (unfortunately, I have never been able to track it down). Dieterle's direction is fluid and assured, and the camera is constantly restless and moving, as jittery as the brittle characters. Most of the time, The Last Flight cries out for Cinemascope; in fact, a lot of it plays like a widescreen movie reduced to pan and scan on television.

The Last Flight makes no bones about its ultimate death wish—the film is a steady journey towards death. But there's nothing lachrymose about these people. They're stylish, vital, inventive, and they know how to have a good time. They are models of grace under pressure. “Goodbye! Don't forget to write!” they yell, at no one at all, as their train leaves for their last stop, Portugal. Their motto is the breezy, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” And, in the end, when scores are settled and lives are finished, Barthelmess can survive and he can count on one thing: that Nikki will always miss the point.

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)

JEWEL ROBBERY

USA (70 mi) 1932

Alternative Film Guide (Marcus Tucker)

Film scholars consider the 1932 comedy Trouble in Paradise to be the best work of actress Kay Francis. I disagree. Francis was good in everything she did — and if one particular performance could be named her best, that would be found in another 1932 release, the romantic melodrama One Way Passage.

That same year — no less than seven Francis vehicles were released in 1932 — Kay Francis starred in another naughty and noteworthy comedy, Jewel Robbery. Jewel Robbery, however, is not on the same level as Trouble in Paradise; in fact, it is much superior.

Based on a play by Ladislaus Fodor and adapted for the screen by Erwin S. Gelsey, Jewel Robbery revolves around the affair between a bored (and very married) baroness played by Francis and a suave jewel thief played by William Powell. (See synopsis.) The film has the look and feel of a sophisticated Paramount comedy even though it was made at Warner Bros., home of Hollywood’s tough guys and dames.

Though lacking the “Lubitsch Touch,” Jewel Robbery relies on the savoir faire of the highly capable and underrated William Dieterle, who handled several other racy Warner Bros. Pre-Code features, such as The Last Flight (1931), Female (1933), and Dr. Monica (1934).

William Powell, the man responsible for the film’s title, was the epitome of American elegance in the 1930s — even without affecting a clipped accent. Powell spoke eloquently, but in a distinctly American manner. Since a great deal of Jewel Robbery relies on the flair of the conversations between the two leads, Powell’s and Francis’s suave voices are put to excellent use. Indeed, the couple feel as intimate onscreen as rustling sheets in the dark. (Ironically, Francis was often mocked for her slight lisp even though the tone and texture of her voice — "audible velvet" I’d call it — more than compensate for her speech impediment.)

Today, Kay Francis is, however unfairly, only a minor deity in the pantheon of Pre-Code goddesses. For comparisons’s sake: During the Pre-Code era (1929-1934), Francis appeared in 37 films, whereas Norma Shearer — for some the queen of the Pre-Code era — starred in a mere twelve.

Additionally, Shearer’s vehicles were nowhere near as controversial as Francis’s. No matter how scandalous she was in her films’ first few reels, Shearer, the First Lady of MGM, always turned to convention before The End. Francis, for her part, played characters who could — and still do — surprise us. Watching her films, one can never really tell what fate awaits her heroines.

Jewel Robbery also showcases minor player Sheila Terry, who makes the most of any (literally speaking) walk-on part this reviewer has ever seen. As a sexy blonde decoy, she is on screen for less than 10 seconds, but if Terry could act as well as she could walk she would have become a superstar.

All in all, Jewel Robbery is a delightful confection that outright mocks the moralistic Motion Picture Production Code, better known as "the Hays Code," laid out in 1930. At the time, the Code was all but unenforceable — and for that, this reviewer is thankful.

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)

The New York Times

FROM HEADQUARTERS

USA (64 mi) 1933

From Headquarters Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

From Headquarters (1933) is entirely set in police headquarters in New York City. It is a whodunit, a popular genre of the era, in which we follow a single murder mystery from its inception through solution.

From Headquarters is a remarkably complete and pioneering look at scientific crime detection. It anticipates the many semi-documentaries about police work that would be made starting in the late 1940's. It has a look at Hollerith machines being used to search through police databases of criminals. It shows police radio dispatch and phone rooms, the center of police communications. It goes to the police lab, with a thorough guide to ballistics analysis. And we see a sociological study of a large police station as well, and the many different types of people who interact there.

The FBI will use punched cards and Hollerith machines to identify a suspect by his fingerprints in William Keighley's The Street With No Name (1948). In Anthony Mann's He Walked By Night (1948), the LAPD use similar machines to identify criminals by their modus operandi. Hollerith machines are used to search out bank robbers in From Headquarters, an approach identical to Mann's film. The police also find criminals with certain fingerprints in their files in From Headquarters, but we do not see the mechanism they use in that search.

From Headquarters was made two years after Fritz Lang's M (1931), which also was an early look at scientific police work.

American prose mystery novels that showed scientific detection and police procedure in the early 1930's also tended to be about the New York City homicide squad, such as those by Anthony Abbot and Helen Reilly. Reilly's McKee of Centre Street (1933) will depict the radio room at police headquarters; we see radio dispatches in From Headquarters. Mary Roberts Rinehart will depict police radio cars in her short story "That Is All" (1932); the police radio dispatcher in From Headquarters will use the standard phrase "That Is All" to conclude each radio message.

From Headquarters resembles Elephant Walk in that it focuses on one large building, and the complex organization that takes place inside. Both films show a crisis in the building as a finale: the alarm at the police station, the elephants at the bungalow. The mansion in Fog over Frisco also has a complex layout, with a basement garage and an elevator, and high tech internal organization, with a house telephone and safe.

The narration never physically leaves the station. We do see the crime scene in two ways. 1) We think we are seeing the apartment where the killing took place. Then Dieterle pulls back his camera, and we realize we are looking at a still photograph of the crime scene and body, taken by the police. We are still at headquarters, with the police studying the photo. (Fog over Frisco will contain a scene in which a photograph is taken of the dead body, our first and only look at the murdered corpse.) 2) Various suspects give eye witness accounts of what they saw during the murder night. These are shown as flashbacks. These flashbacks are most unusual. They are mainly Point of View shots, single-take, moving camera shots, which represent what the suspect saw during the murder night. The camera movements are high conspicuous to the audience: they are definitely not the "invisible" camera movements sometimes found in films that quietly follow along with walking actors. Even the most naive spectators would realize that something unusual was going on here with the camera.

The flashbacks break POV paradigm at least once. That is when the camera tastefully avoids showing the actual corpse. Instead, we see the action conveyed through shadows on the wall. Old films had the idea that violence was to be avoided - apparently in might upset and audience, or be in bad taste. How times have changed - and not for the better! The constant gyrating camera movements persist in this shot. But they no longer represent the actual Point of View of a character. It is an odd effect.

In the police station itself, Dieterle will include a shot of a suspect taken from a very low angle. This shot seems somewhat unusual in the world of 1930's Hollywood. High and low angle shots will become standard in the film noir of the 1940's and 1950's.

The New York Times A.P.S.

FOG OVER FRISCO

USA (68 mi) 1934

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

Breathlessly paced gangster melodrama from Warner Brothers' golden age (1934, 68 min.), with Bette Davis as a socialite struggling to rescue her sister from the clutches of the mob. William Dieterle directed; with Donald Woods and Margaret Lindsay.

Time Out

No masterpiece, but a fascinatingly brisk thriller about a journalist (Woods, living up to his name) and a young heiress (Lindsay) searching for the kidnappers of her wayward, irresponsible sister (Davis). The plot is complex enough to hold the attention, the performances by and large passable (Davis unfortunately disappears after about twenty minutes), though the injections of comedy with Hugh Herbert's inept photographer are excruciating. But Dieterle directs for all he's worth, moving the plot along at a furious pace and making excellent use of Tony Gaudio's chiaroscuro camerawork.

Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller

There's more mystery surrounding Fog Over Frisco (1934) than its title and plot. What's intrigued film buffs almost since its release in 1934 is why Bette Davis is so fond of this film. Director William Dieterle never saw anything special in this story of a society girl (Davis) who gets mixed up with the mob as much for the thrill of it as for any monetary reward. As far as he was concerned, it was just another of the potboilers he'd made while waiting for his big break at Warner Bros. And co-star Lyle Talbot, cast as Davis' unlucky fiancÈ, had few kind things to say for the picture. As Talbot would tell Lawrence Quirk, the author of Fasten Your Seatbelts: The Passionate Life of Bette Davis, Davis studied the script endlessly, "as if she had been handed a Shaw or Shakespeare assignment. Her absolute dedication was unnerving." Of course, Davis would go on to win two Oscars for Best Actress while Talbot would end up starring in Plan Nine From Outer Space (1959), so maybe her dedication wasn't such a bad idea.

Part of one's curiosity about Davis' affection for the film comes from her relatively small role. She doesn't even make it to the final reel, and in a film that's only 68 minutes long, that's little screen time indeed. In fact, co-star Margaret Lindsay is the picture's real leading lady. Of course, Davis never objected to smaller roles if they had enough meat to them. Two years after Fog Over Frisco, she fought unsuccessfully to play the one-scene role of Nana, the prostitute who inspires the notorious novel named for her in The Life of Emile Zola(1937). Clearly she saw something in Fog Over Frisco she could sink her teeth into.

But there really was more than that behind her dedication. For one thing, this was her happiest film with Dieterle, a director she had long admired. They had teamed already for the disastrous musical Fashions of 1934 and would get together again for the second version of The Maltese Falcon, Satan Met a Lady, a 1935 film so bad it led her to walk out on her Warner Bros. contract. Their only other teaming was Juarez, in which Davis played Mexico's mad Empress Carlotta, but that film was so dominated by male star Paul Muni that most of Davis' best work ended up on the cutting room floor. So, by default, Fog Over Frisco marked their best experience together.

The film also was her first with cameraman Tony Gaudio, a Warner Bros. stalwart she would later request on such pictures as The Letter (1940) and The Great Lie (1941). She always felt that he and costume designer Orry-Kelly had made her look believably glamorous in Fog Over Frisco, and for an actress fighting complaints from executives that she was lacking in sex appeal, that was a big breakthrough.

Of all the factor's involved in making Fog Over Frisco, however, the most important may have been timing. For months Davis had been fighting to convince studio head Jack Warner to lend her to RKO Pictures to play the role of Mildred, the cheap, two-timing waitress in W. Somerset Maughm's Of Human Bondage (1934). Warner was always reluctant to lend his contract stars to other studios, for fear they'd make too much money for the competition. Moreover, he thought playing such a thoroughly unpleasant character would destroy Davis' career before it even got off the ground. But Davis persisted as only she could. She may very well have accepted the secondary role in Fog Over Frisco to show Warner what a good team player she could be. It must have worked, because two weeks into filming, Warner notified her that he had worked out the loan to RKO (or, as he put it, "Go and hang yourself!"). A week after finishing Fog Over Frisco she started Of Human Bondage - the film that made her one of Hollywood's top dramatic stars. Word of mouth on her performance was so strong, that Warner promoted her from third billing in Fog Over Frisco to the star spot, eager to take advantage of Davis' success in a film he'd never wanted her to make in the first place.

Fog over Frisco Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)

THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA

USA (116 mi) 1937

Time Out

Plodding briefly, inaccurately and somewhat risibly through Zola's early career, this solemn biopic improves no end when it gets to its main course: an account of the Dreyfus affair and how the now prosperously ageing Zola rediscovered his youthful ideals in an impassioned fight for justice. Carefully mounted, well directed and acted, but basically the sort of well-meaning pap out of which Oscars are made.

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

A very interesting film - a somewhat fictionalized biography (per the opening credits) of Emile Zola, whose story I was not familiar with until now. He was a French muckraking writer in the late 19th century. The movie is primarily focused on one particular case (perhaps the most prominent of his life?) in which he is taken to trial (libel) for exposing the Army's conviction of an innocent man for treason, and its cover-up exoneration of the guilty party. Paul Muni does his usual great job (receiving a Best Actor Oscar nomination) portraying this historical figure and there are strong supporting performances by Joseph Schildkraut (who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing the accused, Captain Alfred Dreyfus), Gale Sondergaard as Dreyfus's wife, and the ubiquitous (and always excellent) Donald Crisp and Henry O'Neill. In addition to winning for Best Picture, the movie also won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay (Heinz Herald, Geza Herczeg, and Norman Reilly Raine). It received several other Oscar nominations as well: Best Original Story (for Herald & Herczeg), Anton Grot's Art Direction, director William Dieterle, assistant director Russell Saunders, Score and Sound Recording. It was added to the National Film Registry in 2000.

culturevulture.net Arthur Lazere

Great fiction and great films, it seems to CV, must have at their core a wonderful story, a strong narrative with driving force. Mood pieces or pure character studies can take us only so far; unless the viewer wants to know what is going to happen next, more often than not attention will not be sustained. If a powerful story is there, it will grab the imagination and hold the interest of readers or viewers long beyond the time or style in which it was created.  

The Life of Emile Zola is a sixty year old film that is very conventional in style. It is a fictionalized version of the life of the great French writer and crusader for the poor and dispossessed, a literary champion of truth and justice. The first half of the film is almost formulaic - or seems so now; perhaps in 1937 it was a great deal fresher. We meet Zola as a young man, living in poverty with his great friend, the painter Paul Cezanne. With diligence and integrity, Zola works hard, follows his passion for truth, and becomes financially and artistically successful. Almost too much so, for he is resting on his laurels and the tale would be over - until it soars into life again with the introduction of the Dreyfus case.     

Dreyfus, a career officer in the French army, was framed and convicted of treason, a scapegoat for the military establishment. While he languishes on Devil's Island, his devoted wife pursues his cause, ultimately gaining access to Zola and kindling his instinct for seeing justice done. The film peaks in a superb, long trial scene, always a great dramatic setting for hearing out the pursuit of justice.    

The strong story line is enhanced by intelligent dialogue and first rate performances by a stellar cast. Paul Muni is Zola, as a more modern ad campaign might put it. He is supported especially well by Gale Sondergaard as Madame Dreyfus. In handsomely composed black and white, the film is technically excellent. Editing, costuming, lighting - indeed, all the production values stand up beautifully these many years later.    

If CV has one lingering caution in mind, it is why the crucial anti-Semitic aspect of the Dreyfus case is totally ignored, particularly in a film made at a moment in history when the persecution of Jews was, once again, tragically accelerating. Perhaps there is an answer to that question somewhere in the film history books.    

Meanwhile, if you haven't seen it, The Life of Emile Zola, easily available on video, makes a great evening's entertainment.

Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller

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JUAREZ

USA (125 mi) 1939

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Paul Muni is the title character in this 1939 costume epic, fighting for Mexican independence in the 1860s when France was trying to colonize Mexico. The original script included John Huston among its authors, but Muni had it rewritten by his brother-in-law--to ruinous effect, according to Huston. Reportedly performances by Bette Davis and Gale Sondergaard are the film's main interest. William Dieterle directed; with Brian Aherne, John Garfield, Claude Rains, Gilbert Roland, Louis Calhern, and Joseph Calleia. 132 min.

Time Out

Only Bette Davis and Gale Sondergaard have any fire in this otherwise plodding Warner Bros costume drama about the French attempt to colonise Mexico in the 1860s, the romance between the puppet dictator (Aherne) and the Empress Carlota (Davis), and the exploits of Juarez himself (Muni), the proponent of Mexican independence. The script, by John Huston and historical researchers, was rewritten by Muni's brother-in-law. Huston commented: 'His changes did the picture irreparable damage. In Mr Muni's estimation, his contributions to the dramatic arts were for the enrichment of the world. It was heavy going around Muni'.

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

A biography of a Benito Juarez (Paul Muni), the leader who fought to evict France, e.g. Napoleon III (Claude Rains) and his empire, from his native Mexico. Bette Davis plays Empress Carlotta, wife of Napoleon's newly appointed ruler of the land Maximilian (Brian Aherne, who received his only Academy recognition, a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination). But Juarez is supported by Abraham Lincoln, who urges Napoleon to withdraw his support for Maximilian. Carlotta returns to France to try and influence Napoleon to the contrary, but proves to be mentally unbalanced. John Garfield plays one of Juarez's generals, the somewhat overzealous Diaz who gets to know Maximilian. Gale Sondergaard plays Napoleon's wife. The cast also includes Donald Crisp, Joseph Calleia, Henry O'Neill, Louis Calhern, and more. Could have been better, should have been better, but still pretty good and worth seeing. Directed by William Dieterle (The Life of Emile Zola (1937)), with a screenplay by John Huston, Aeneas MacKenzie, and Wolfgang Reinhardt that was fashioned from Bertita Harding's novel and Franz Werfel's play. The film also received a nomination for Tony Gaudio's (Anthony Adverse (1936)) B&W Cinematography Oscar.

Turner Classic Movies Margarita Landazuri

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THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME

USA (116 mi) 1939

Time Out

Although Laughton doesn't attempt the acrobatics that Lon Chaney performed in the silent version, his hunchback comes across as one of the cinema's most impressive 'grotesque' characterisations. Dieterle directs in a way that reminds you of his background as actor/director in the German expressionist cinema: the visuals here impressively recall earlier movies from Metropolis (the crowds) to The Last Laugh (tracking shots through the shadows). Richly entertaining.

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

This is a fantastic drama (another from 1939!), not to be missed, based on the Victor Hugo novel, adapted by Bruno Frank with a screenplay by Sonya Levien (State Fair (1933)), and starring the gorgeous Maureen O'Hara, Cedric Hardwicke, Thomas Mitchell, Edmond O'Brien, Harry Davenport, and featuring Charles Laughton's classic performance (in the title role) as Quasimodo. It was directed by William Dieterle (The Life of Emile Zola (1937)). The film's Sound (by John Aalberg) and Alfred Newman's Score received Academy Award nominations. O'Hara is the beautiful Esmeralda, Hardwicke the wicked Frollo who covets her, Davenport the aging, manipulated King Louis XI, and Mitchell is the underclass's leader. This remake, subsequently remade many times, is one of the best adaptations of Hugo's classic story. #98 on AFI's 100 Greatest Love Stories list.

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Charles Laughton made a triumphant return to Hollywood playing Quasmido in this lavish RKO version of the Victor Hugo classic. Undergoing an impressively grotesque makeup job, he brings out the pathos of the hunchback character in convincing fashion. Once having seen this performance, you won't likely forget it. Laughton was smart enough to know that he could emphasize the character's idiotic side, and his potential for menace, without diminishing our sympathy. The picture is a glorious, old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle, but he makes it seem like more than that.

Maureen O'Hara, in her American debut, plays the gypsy Esmerelda. She's stunningly beautiful, if not exactly gypsy-like. Thomas Mitchell is on hand as the beggar king, and an impossibly young Edmond O'Brien is quite entertaining in one of his rare chances at a romantic lead -- the poet Gringoire. Rounding out the excellent cast is Sir Cedric Hardwicke as the villain Rollo, who plays his part with a gloomy implacability that attains just the right tone of self-righteous malevolence, in contrast to the usual antics of Hollywood "heavies."

The talented Dieterle lets his impressionistic tendencies run free, with wonderfully choreographed crowd scenes, dynamic moving camera (the picture almost never feels static), and a talent for bringing night scenes to brilliant life (with help from his great cameraman, Joseph H. August). The scenery, costumes, and overall production design represents the studio system at its finest. The screenplay even achieves a certain poetry at times, although there are clumsy elements that break the spell, notably the portrayal of the king (Harry Davenport) as a sort of kindly old liberal grandpa. The script also reverses Hugo's anticlerical message (attacking religion was a no-no in Hollywood), and changes the ending, but this is widely regarded as the best film version of the book, and I would have to agree. The final shot, with Laughton talking mournfully to a gargoyle, is among the most moving cinematic images of all time.

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THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER

aka: All That Money Can Buy

USA (106 mi) 1941

Time Out

A fascinating version of the Faust legend adapted from Stephen Vincent Benet's short story. Craig is the poor New Hampshire farmer in the 1840s driven to such straits that he swears he'd sell his soul for two cents, and up pops Mr Scratch (Huston in a wonderful personification of the devil of New England folklore). A rapid rise to fame and fortune follows, with Mr Scratch's handmaiden (the delightful Simon) temptingly on hand. Things get a little portentously patriotic when the seven years are up, Craig elects to have the famous orator/politican Daniel Webster (Arnold) defend him against Mr Scratch's claim for his soul, and Mr Scratch counters by summoning famous villains from history as judge and jury. But it all looks terrific, directed by Dieterle in his best expressionist mood, with superb sets (Van Nest Polglase), score (Bernard Herrmann), camerawork (the great Joe August), and a township that looks as if it came straight out of a Grant Wood painting. Daniel and the Devil is a cut version running 85 mins.

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

Stephen Vincent Benet wrote several short stories featuring famed statesman, orator, and lawyer Daniel Webster as an American folk hero, sort of a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Paul Bunyan. But of those tales, "The Devil And Daniel Webster" most captured the public's imagination, inspiring a Simpsons parody and two film adaptations. (The still-unreleased second version marks the directorial debut of Alec Baldwin, who reads the short story aloud on the new DVD version of the 1941 original.) Pure cornball Americana, The Devil & Daniel Webster concerns the plight of James Craig, a luckless New Hampshire farmer, husband, and Christian who considers himself a modern-day Job. Craig's fellow farmers urge him to join forces to help fight off predatory loan sharks, but he receives a much sexier offer from the Devil, played with incorrigible glee by Walter Huston. In exchange for his soul, Craig is transformed from a rural everyman into an 1840s Charles Foster Kane, complete with a hauntingly empty giant mansion and a large contingent of bitter former friends. The Devil eventually comes to collect, causing Craig to seek out the services of Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold), a booze-loving champion of the common people equally prone to pitching a friendly game of horseshoes or delivering stirring bits of oratory. Arnold and Huston explicitly represent the angel and devil hovering just over Craig's brawny shoulders, but on a more metaphorical level, they represent the egalitarian promise of American Democracy and the greed that serves as its downside. A textbook example of New Deal populism, the film depicts the Devil as just another loan shark, albeit one whose terms are more draconian than most. Director William Dieterle turned The Devil & Daniel Webster into a highly stylized cross between fantasy pulp and a civics lesson on what it means to be an American, and he heavily underlines his points. The result isn't subtle, but the film's hokey folksiness is offset by its bracing acknowledgment that while its fondly realized old New Hampshire may be God's country, the materialism of its inhabitants makes it the Devil's playground, as well.

filmcritic.com (Jake Euker)

It’s the 1840s, and times are tough for New Hampshire farmer Jabez Stone, just as they are for other New Englanders. He’s a hard-working, God-fearing man, but he’s prone to cursing (“consarn it” is his favorite), and he doesn’t always find time to attend church on Sundays. He has a good wife (named Mary, of course) and a Bible-reading Ma, but when he can’t make his mortgage payments, that just doesn’t seem like enough. In Washington, a heroic Massachusetts senator named Daniel Webster is introducing legislation that will ease his plight. But in the meantime, what’s a working man to do?

In this folklore New England, the devil is a real thing, like a fox that steals hens or a dog that barks at nights, and if you want to make a deal with him, it’s not too hard to do. One rainy day Jabez curses in the barn, and a little man named Scratch (Walter Huston) appears out of nowhere with a bargain to make: Jabez will have seven years’ worth of prosperity and everything that goes with it, and at the end of the seven years, Scratch will get his soul. Jabez signs the contract, and Scratch kicks at the floor of the barn, where a pile of gold rises up from a loose plank. The devil is in the details though, and anyone who’s ever seen a movie knows there’s going to be Hell to pay.

Spooky, light-hearted, and never less than a joy to watch, 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster is one of the major – if overlooked – pleasures of its decade. The film followed on the heels of Citizen Kane, and director William Dieterle avails himself freely of Welles’s rich, deep bag of tricks as he chronicles Jabez’s slide. One of Kane’s primary achievements was to reintroduce German Expressionist technique to the mainstream: evocative, mostly-black black-and-white, high- and low-angle cinematography, innovative lighting design. This was something Dieterle knew something about, having himself acted in such key Expressionist films as 1924’s Waxworks, and almost every frame of Daniel Webster is animated by cinematic sleight-of-hand: Scratch appears backlit amid rolling fog, windows fill with the faces of the damned, a mansion burns in the background like Manderley.

Among the film’s chief pleasures is Huston’s Scratch, a personable devil with a pipe that's always lit and a pointy little goatee that’s far less hipster and much more goat. His sidekick Belle, a homewrecker in the guise of a maid, is played by Simone Simon; when we first see her in front of the hearth, the fire silhouettes her alluring curls into little horns. Or maybe cat’s ears? Her round face, a picture of innocence and evil all rolled into one, begs for whiskers, and when asked about her accent, she purrs “I’m from over the mountain,” or, “I’m not from anywhere.”

In the company of these two diabolical marvels, Jabez’s morals take a slide until he’s doing the unthinkable: playing cards on the Sabbath, hiring out work he should do himself, lending less fortunate farmers money at usurious rates. Virtuous Mary knows that only Daniel Webster, the greatest orator of his time and an unbeatable foe at horseshoes and drinking, can save him. The film’s centerpiece is a trial before a hanging judge and a jury of the damned, with Webster (wonderfully played by Edward Arnold) representing Jabez and Scratch pleading his own case with a contract signed in blood.

Criterion has tricked out The Devil and Daniel Webster with tons of archival goodies drawn from the short stories that inspired the film. There's also a commentary from film historian Bruce Eder and author Steven C. Smith, and Criterion has cleaned up the sound problems that marred video releases. Kick open this box and the gold just keeps rising.

by Tom Piazza Criterion essay

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Mondo Digital also reviewing PORTRAIT OF JENNIE

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PORTRAIT OF JENNIE

USA (86 mi) 1948

Time Out

A companion piece to the Dieterle/Selznick Love Letters, also starring Jones and Cotten; but where the earlier film remained rooted in superior romantic hokum, this one takes wing into genuine romantic fantasy through its tale of a love that transcends space and time as Cotten's struggling artist meets, falls in love with, and is inspired by a strangely ethereal girl (Jones) whom he eventually realises is the spirit of a woman long dead. Direction and performances are superb throughout, but the real star is Joseph August's camera, which conjures pure magic out of the couple's tender odyssey, from the gravely quizzical charm of their first encounter in snowy Central Park (when she is still a little girl, strangely dressed in clothes of bygone days) through to the awesome storm at sea that supernaturally heralds their final parting. Buñuel saw it and of course approved: 'It opened up a big window for me'.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

Portrait of Jennie was a David O. Selznick super-production, and one of his failed follow-ups to his Gone with the Wind (1939). Selznick made the film for Jennifer Jones, an actress he had fallen in love with and tried to make a star out of. He tinkered with the film for an entire year, making sure its complicated special effects were perfect. Though the film is in black and white, the final reel is presented in various tints and, finally, full-fledged Technicolor (for the shot of the finished painting). His efforts paid off--the effects won an Oscar. But the film was doomed to failure. It was too expensive to make its money back.

Joseph Cotton stars as a starving artist who meets a mysterious young girl (Jennifer Jones) in the park. Every time he sees her afterwards she's aged a bit more. Though he begins to suspect that she's the spirit of a dead person, she nonetheless inspires him to paint his greatest picture, a portrait of her.

Directed by William Dieterle, the film has a wistful, dreamy quality (which may be why Bunuel was drawn to it) and even its overabundance of music doesn't spoil this mood. Ethel Barrymore and Lillian Gish appear in wonderful small roles. Strangely, the sound doesn't always match up; Jones' lips sometimes don't match her voice and other sound effects are not quite edited correctly. But it's a wonderful film and well worth the handsome transfer it gets on the new DVD. The extras are slim -- there's only a theatrical trailer -- but for the meager price of $14.98 you can't ask for much more.

Note: The great Ben Hecht reportedly worked on the screenplay without credit, as did producer Selznick.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Salman Rushdie's Orphic-inspired novel of love and death The Ground Beneath Her Feet is told through the eyes of a photographer inextricably bound to two lovers. Rushdie's art-loving hero is particularly fond of 1953's Ugetsu Monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi's imperial ghost tale ripe with autoerotic disruptions. Rushdie's analysis of the Mizoguchi classic is particularly interesting because he targets the self-serving nature of Genjurô's relationship to the film's ghost, the Lady Wakasa. William Dieterle's 1948 masterpiece Portrait of Jennie also supports this idea. Like the impoverished Genjuro, Eben Adams (Joseph Cotton) isn't so much avaricious as he is lacking in self-worth, and his relationship to the eponymous Jennie is seemingly summoned by his need to transcend the desperation of his loneliness and poverty.

A struggling and disillusioned painter, Eben lives penny-to-penny in a New York City apartment he can't really afford. He walks into an art gallery supervised by Miss Spinney (Ethel Barrymore), a wise older woman who's instantly drawn to Eben's emotional plight, and she does more for the young man than most gallery owners ever would. A mere compliment provokes a spurt of creativity and seemingly ushers in his spiritual awakening. Walking through Central Park, he comes across a playful young girl, Jennie (Jennifer Jones), who happily tells Eben of her many relationships with friends and family. She leaves a scarf behind, tucked inside a newspaper mysteriously dated from the early 1910s, the first of many clues that she may not be of this world. Eben, though, ignores this ghostly evidence, using it instead as a means to stir his creative process.

Portrait of Jennie is a haunting evocation of one man's pained artistic process, and the genius of the film is how Dieterle delicately equates the creative impulse to an ever-evolving spiritual crisis. (Is it any coincidence then that the film was a favorite of atheist auteur Luis Buñuel?) Once Eben learns to channel his artistic spirit via his paintbrush, he realizes he can only draw if Jennie pays him a visit beforehand. He walks through the park and sleeps on the park bench where he met the girl, hoping that his muse will appear and inspire yet another creative catharsis. Eben's relationship to Jennie becomes an addiction of sorts and, therefore, an obstacle he must conquer. This is all part of Dieterle's god-like master plan: Eben is repeatedly tested until he can create without the temptation that Jenny comes to represent.

Dieterle establishes a difficult duality between art and life. How does Eben channel Jennie into the reality of his paintings without loosing himself to her ghost? Jennie is seemingly conscious of her not-being but even when Eben goes to visit the locale where Jennie supposedly met her doom, he still refuses to believe that she is not of his world. Not since Murnau's Sunrise had a film so fascinatingly and tirelessly concerned itself with the nature of obsession as Portrait of Jennie. Eben is forced to acknowledge Jennie's true identity by having him witness the recreation of her death. What is Jennie then but a metaphor for supreme creative (read: spiritual) enlightenment? A quick glance at Eben's portrait of Jennie shows that he has yet to finish drawing her left arm. The shot evokes a devastating foreshadowing that isn't lost on Eben. Indeed, he is very conscious of the fact that if he finishes the arm, Jennie will disappear soon after.

Dieterle forces Eben to experience Jennie's death before he can transcend her memory. As such, the film is a unique testament and tribute to every artist who's had to brave creative stasis. By film's end, not only can Eben paint without visits from his muse but he also learns to appreciate the simple pleasures and joys of the world around him. Dieterle's remarkable use of color compliments Eben's spiritual evolvement. The once-dreary New York City milieu comes to life by film's end. For added effect, Dieterle shoots the film's final scenes in color, but perhaps most remarkable is the way his mise-en-scène and rigorously self-reflexive compositions bring to mind the malleable surface of a canvas. Dieterle's stylistic choices also call attention to Eben himself as a work-in-progress. Not until the release of Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer would another film pay such profound and careful attention to the creative process in such spiritual panic.

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ELEPHANT WALK

USA (103 mi) 1954

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

"TELL me about the elephants," Elizabeth Taylor timorously says to Dana Andrews in the first few minutes of the Astor's new picture, "Elephant Walk." The two are casually getting acquainted in an elegant mansion on a tea plantation in Ceylon. Miss Taylor is the new, young wife of the plantation owner and she is just out from England; Mr. Andrews is the plantation boss.

"Don't mention those terrible monsters!" says Mr. Andrews—or words to that effect. His disregard for the creatures is pungent and unreserved. The elephants roam all over the plantation, trampling down the plants. And they'd knock down the house, too, if a strong guard of natives was not maintained.

It seems that the present owner's father—"Old Master," or "the Guv'nor," as he is known—deliberately built his mansion right where the elephants liked to walk. Being elephants, they haven't forgotten.

That's just one of the trials Miss Taylor must endure.

But more disturbing to her peace and enjoyment of the luxury of her new home is the disposition of her husband to idolize the memory of P'pa. Not only is "old Master" entombed in splendor right outside on the lawn, but hubby and his neighboring British planters seem to keep his memory green with nightly sprees. They howl around the house, drinking deeply, riding bicycles and acting like kids.

And there's a dour and sinister-looking major-domo. . . .

Tell her about the elephants, indeed!

Well, that's the situation in this new Technicolored Paramount film — menacing elephants and a father-in-law's dark shadow. No wonder poor Miss Taylor acts so scared. No wonder she soon finds her new husband, Peter Finch, just a bit of a bore and starts riding out with Mr. Andrews to see how the tea plants are coming along. And, we might add, no wonder the picture becomes a bit of a bore, too. This sort of menace melodrama has to be done awfully well to hold.

Unfortunately, the script that John Lee Mahin prepared from the Robert Standish book is lengthy and hackneyed in the build-up, and William Dieterle's direction does not provide anything more than gaudy panoramas of a tropical palace to fascinate the eye.

Miss Taylor's performance of the young wife is petulant and smug. Mr. Andrews is pompous as the manager. And Mr. Finch, as the husband, is just plain bad. Abraham Sofaer as the native major-domo wears moustachios like a Turkish highwayman's and has the best chance to be intriguing. But he does little more than roll his eyes.

In the last fifteen minutes, however, the fireworks are made to explode. Cholera breaks out and the native villages are put to the hygienic torch. Then the elephants, taking advantage of the absence of the native guards, respond to their old frustrated instinct and come lumbering down their ancient walk. Naturally, the beauteous Miss Taylor, exhausted from working as a nurse, is asleep in the great deserted mansion when the angry beasts hit the wall.

For a few hectic minutes, there is Hades. The mansion is knocked down and set afire. Miss Taylor (or a reasonable facsimile) is chased by elephants through the flaming ruins. Then Mr. Finch comes to the rescue. The elephants have had their way, and the ghost of "Old Master" has been wiped out.

Is there anything more you'd like to know?

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

Elephant Walk Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

DVD Verdict [Erick Harper]

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Dietschy, Vincent

DIDINE C 71

France (103 mi) 2008 YouTube trailer

A film that from the outset seems to have a flair for mood swings, as it moves from sex to suicide and from elder care to love and romance at the drop of a hat. Adapted by the second time director from a screenplay written by Anne Le Ny, who herself directed her first film only last year THOSE WHO REMAIN (2007), this takes us on a roller coaster journey of highs and lows that is at least occasionally interesting, though inhabited by largely uninspiring characters. The lead character Didine (Géraldine Pailhas) is a fairly conventional plain and ordinary person (in America she would be known as white bread) who seems to be a born listener, qualities that make for a good friend, perhaps better suited for TV though as she displays few traits that make for an intriguing lead character. Instead, the most interesting character in the film is a senior citizen she voluntarily visits as part of a neighborhood outreach program who turns out to be none other than Edith Scob, who starred in the notorious Georges Franju horror films EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960) and JUDEX (1963) nearly 50 years ago. Here she plays Mademoiselle Mirepoix, an aging woman who never married, is considered an outcast from her own family because she rejected and despised their bourgeois ways long ago, leaving her at the end of her life alone and in near poverty. Her distinction is rejecting every visitor sent over from “the agency,” as she feels they are all utterly useless and a waste of her time. Her bitterness of course is her charm.

Didine’s introduction to this family is a memorable one, blending the bleak reality of the elderly with low key theater of the absurd. After her best friend attempts suicide after a lame breakup with a boyfriend that she’s better off without, they discover an elderly person lying alone in the hospital bed next to hers with no family or friends. On the chair next to her are several teddy bears, apparently her only friends. When she is transported to a nursing home, one of the bears is left behind, so Didine makes it her business to return it to its rightful owner. This leads her to the elder care program where they are understaffed and looking for new volunteers. This new direction opens up possibilities she never imagined, but Didine and her personal relationships with her friends remain typically conventional and hardly worth making a film about. Unfortunately, the film is all over the place and can’t ever make up its mind what it wants to be, as the silliness factor is a distraction, the plot is imbecilic, as so much of it plays out as a light comedy yet it also deals with serious social and personal issues. By the end, it rejects both worlds and chooses to go the romantic comedy route. Not really solid filmmaking, but the emotional upheavals have a distinctive charm about them and there’s brief but effective use of Pérez Prado music.

Festival of New French Cinema Michael Wilmington from The Reader

This comedy-romance-drama is both funny and sad, and its exploration of thirtysomething femininity makes twentysomethings seem immature. Geraldine Pailhas (who got a false start in Hollywood with Don Juan DeMarco) gives a memorably subtle and sensitive performance as the title character, an obliging fashion artist who volunteers for an agency to help the aging. Romantically she’s torn between the somber grandson (Christopher Thompson) of one elderly charge (Edith Scob, who starred in Georges Franju’s Judex) and the irresponsible ex-husband (Benjamin Biolay) of her tormented best friend (Julie Ferrier). The whole cast is good—especially Elodie Bollee as the heroine’s ballsy coworker—and writer-director Vincent Dietschy has a real flair for casual French realism and humor. 103 min.

12th Annual Festival of New French Cinema Facets Multi-Media

Alexandrine Géraldine Pailhas (The Price to Pay, The Cost of Living), known as Didine to her friends, is a quirky, impulsive and antisocial 30-something woman casually drifting through life with little ambition or sense of direction. She is the polar opposite of best friend Muriel Julie Ferrier, a driven, successful and emotionally needy entrepreneur who can't live alone. When Didine finds a teddy bear left behind while visiting her friend in the hospital and makes the decision to return it to its owner, she sets off a chain of events that dramatically alters her life and brings new people into it. As a new volunteer for a charitable organization that visits the elderly, Didine encounters the sharp-tongued, contemptuous and stubborn Mme Mirepoix (Edith Scob, an extraordinary veteran actress who has been in many films, including, Heartbeat Detector, The Ring Finger, Comedy of Innocence), whose friendship and respect must be earned with patience and perseverance. The fact that the elderly woman has a handsome nephew who visits every week makes this perseverance easier to commit to for Didine, and provides viewers with some delightful and off-beat romantic interaction between the two. Light on plot and heavy on charm, this little French dramedy is in love with its characters and conveys the feeling well, following Didine and the emotional entanglements of her friends with generosity, tenderness and humor. Directed by Vincent Dietschy, France, 2008, 35mm, 103 mins. In French with English subtitles.

At the age of 19, Vincent Dietschy entered the famed IDHEC film school in Paris, where he befriended a number of fellow students and future filmmakers (Laurent Cantet, Dominik Moll and others). Eventually, he formed his own production company and worked on a number of collective projects over the years in a number of roles, serving in turn as writer, director, editor and more. All together, he worked on ten medium length films and three features, one of which was Julie est amoureuse, his first feature. It would take seven more years for him to direct Didine, his second feature. Filmmaker Vincent Dietschy will be here for a Q&A after both screenings.

Disney, Tim

AMERICAN VIOLET B- 81

USA (103 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

An interesting “based on a true life story” that exposes Southern justice in a small town in Texas for what it is, separate and unequal, that to its credit features several compelling performances, but unfortunately a movie-of-the-week format which is reduced to black and white good guys and bad guys, where people, irrespective of their race, are all one or the other. Unfortunately, all the law enforcement personnel are white and all the criminal victims are black, turning this into a much more simplistic exercise than the movie calls for. The heart of the film is the practice of plea bargaining in Texas where people can be arrested based on the testimony of a single eye witness, where they are likely to remain in jail for lengthy periods of time awaiting trial unless they plead guilty to a felony conviction, where the conditions may include lengthy probation for first time offenders and an immediate release from prison. In this manner the local district attorney maintains a high conviction rate, the criteria upon which federal money is awarded. Admitted felons however, lose many basic rights, among which includes the right to vote, obtain employment, receive Food Stamps, or even live in public housing where a large majority of blacks live in this rural community. What happens to them is no longer the concern of the state which wipes its hands clean after its interests have been served by so many guilty pleas. As is pointed out, the United States has the world’s largest prison population where 90% of the inmates accepted a plea bargain.

Much of this has the feel of Alan Parker’s liberal-leaning MISSISSIPPI BURNING (1988) where an FBI agent (Gene Hackman) investigates local murders allegedly ordered by the Ku Klux Klan, but finds it near impossible to break the code of silence among the white community where many of the Klan have become prominent citizens. Similarly, in Melody, Texas, the District Attorney (Michael O’Keefe) has a multi-generational history of running drug raids exclusively through the black housing projects, always finding willing victims whether or not they actually committed any crimes. The film opens with one such raid which takes place on a typical morning where as part of a sting operation the police arrest Dee Roberts (Nicole Behaire) at her job, leaving her four children with their grandmother (Alfre Woodard) who is forced to share custody duties with their drunk and abusive father (Xzibit) and his malicious girl friend with a history of child abuse who finds any opportunity to undermine their mother, presumably so the father can receive welfare benefits. The twist here is that the television broadcasts reveal the divisive Florida vote count during the 2000 Presidential election between Gore and Bush where Gore eventually withdrew without a fight. Had he fought for his rights throughout a lengthy appeal process, he might have been shocked to discover that he actually won the majority of the votes cast in Florida. But he accepted what amounted to a deal or plea bargain before all the votes were counted. The case of Dee Roberts catches the attention of the ACLU, largely because she so vociferously pleads her innocence while incarcerated, so they decide to sue the District Attorney, taking depositions from witnesses as well as the primary parties. Tim Blake Nelson is the “northern” ACLU attorney who is typically seen as an outsider from this jurisdiction, along with his quietly brilliant black attorney Malcolm Barrett, where together they enlist the aid of Will Patton, tantalizing in a Rip Torn style role, a local attorney with an irrefutable record who trained most of the police officers that are being sued. Realizing the depths of the entrenched position of the state, and his role in working within that system, it’s especially difficult for him to suddenly take sides, realizing he will forever be viewed differently by the court. Most of the film, however, focuses on the resiliance of Dee Roberts, who has a strong-willed mother and a powerful preacher in Charles S. Dutton, prominent forces that support her throughout her ordeal, all of which tells the story, but in an over-conventional manner.

Director Tim Disney is in fact related to Walt, as he’s the great nephew, grandson of Roy O. Disney. Looking at this story through white-colored life experiences does in fact diminish the power of the film, as the focus is on Dee alone, not the nearly 50 other victims arrested in this single sting operation alone or the decades long list of other defendants who were equally wronged, so a typical one-person lead storyline fails to address how divisive and deep-seeded one entire community has for generations become, deprived of anything resembling civil rights or equal justice simply on the basis of race, wounds that wouldn’t easily heal, where in the film many of the minor roles go unnoticed, like the uncredited Anthony Mackie as a brutalized informant, who, as he did in HALF NELSON (2006), provides one of the more scintillating moments in the entire film during his deposition. This is a film that would have improved dramatically had it actually been shot on location, where the film’s physical presence could have brought money and attention to the inherant injustices the film calls attention to, adding a local authenticity that’s missing here, something like the searing examination of West Texas high school football in Peter Berg’s FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (2004) which perfectly captures the racial divisiveness in Odessa, Texas. Instead AMERICAN VIOLET is a conventional story about overcoming adversity that preaches to the choir, like a movie of the week, feel good message film, where those that see it are already inclined to believe its message of racial abuse of power, needing little supporting evidence. Unfortunately, this film could have made a more powerful impact, but it doesn’t dig deep enough into the habits, routines, and lives of the people who actually live there, choosing instead to accentuate the lives of just a few, making this another well-intentioned movie that happens to contain some powerful moments.

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

If you’re in the mood for a liberal message movie in which the only surprise is no surprise, American Violet is the ticket. I was and liked it pretty well. In Texas, an African-American single mother (Nicole Beharie) is arrested in a drug raid. Innocent but helpless against a racist system, she can plead and live her life as a felon or fight and go to prison. Fortunately, an ACLU lawyer (Tim Blake Nelson) persuades her to sue the zealous district attorney (Michael O’Keefe); unfortunately, his name is Cohen. So he taps an ex-narc turned defense attorney to put a Christian face on the case. You can laugh at American Violet, but most defendants are scared into pleading guilty and need all the poster girls they can get.

Village Voice (Melissa Anderson) review

A docudrama with a good heart but a heavy hand, American Violet isn't shrinking. Changing the real names of the people and town involved, the third film by Tim Disney (Walt's grand-nephew) recounts the true story of Dee (Nicole Beharie), a young African-American single mother of four living in a Texas housing project, who's erroneously swept up in a drug raid. Her mom (Alfre Woodard) begs her to plead guilty and avoid prison, but Dee is persuaded by a Yankee ACLU lawyer (Tim Blake Nelson) and a local attorney (Will Patton, wearing the worst toupee ever) to sue the bigoted D.A. (Michael O'Keefe). Mostly solid performances (the great Anthony Mackie shows up, uncredited, as a mentally ill informant) and admirable attention to detail about legal proceedings forcefully convey Disney and writer/producer Bill Haney's outrage over this nation's virulently racist "war" on drugs, though perhaps "The truth shall set you free" need not have been said so frequently. And while it's unclear whether a subplot involving one of Dee's exes (Xzibit) and his child-molester girlfriend is also fact-based or lifted from the Tyler Perry School of Melodrama, there's no arguing that the truth is always stranger—if not more shamefully appalling—than fiction.

Slant Magazine review [2/4] Bill Weber

A workmanlike slab of agitprop against racially profiled drug sweeps and plea bargains that extort innocents into ruin, real-events-based American Violet has the necessary anger to engage its subject but also the generic topical-telefilm aesthetics that often render it glib and inauthentic. Young African-American waitress and single mother Dee Roberts (Nicole Beharie, attractive and bland) is caught up in a raid on her small-town Texas housing project, falsely charged with narcotics dealing because state law permits indictments based on the testimony of a lone witness. Bailed out after three weeks in jail and refusing to cop a plea that would endanger her apartment, food stamps eligibility, and custody of her four daughters, Dee accepts the plan of an ACLU attorney (Tim Blake Nelson) to challenge the targeting of blacks by the county's anti-narcotics task force and the dictatorial DA (Michael O'Keefe). Lingering on background TV images of the 2000 Bush-Gore endgame, presumably as a caution against capitulating to bullying officialdom, director Tim Disney does well by ace players in stock parts: Will Patton as a good ol' boy lawyer with a bad conscience, and Alfre Woodard as Dee's supportive and skeptical mom. (To her daughter's assertion that pleading to a felony would defy their belief that "the truth will set you free," Woodard snaps, "That's in the afterlife.") Bill Haney's script has its most acute flash of societal diagnosis when, in one of the last reels' numerous deposition face-offs, a sullen narc provides racial IDs to a list of suspects he's busted: "Black, black, don't know, black, I assume black, black, I'm gonna assume black again…" Yet to provide the requisite amount of reformist uplift, Haney and Disney make the hokey implication that manipulating one easily flustered law-enforcement bigot's professionally veiled bias will save the case, change the law, and set all the good folks to hugging in church, minister Charles S. Dutton presiding.

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

Since much of "American Violet" has to do with lawyers and the law, let's stipulate to several matters at the outset. This docudrama, directed by Tim Disney from a script by Bill Haney, is earnest, mostly predictable and candidly didactic. That said, I'm glad it got made -- what's wrong with films that teach? -- and especially glad that a remarkably gifted newcomer named Nicole Beharie got to play the central role.

She is Dee Roberts, a young African-American single mother struggling to raise her four daughters in a small Texas town. After cops swarm into Dee's housing project on a drug bust, she finds herself accused of being a dealer, then indicted on the strength of a single informant. The film, based on a true story, makes it clear that Dee is innocent, and unshakably so. Refusing a plea bargain, she agrees to become the plaintiff in a suit against the local district attorney.

The story raises more issues than the script manages to dramatize: the D.A.'s racist bent, the misuse of police power by drug task forces, the scandal of a law -- subsequently overturned -- that permitted single-informant indictments, the abuse of plea bargains (though that's a far more complicated subject than the movie suggests). Within individual scenes, however, Mr. Disney has great success directing a fine cast that includes Will Patton, who gives the most affecting performance of his career; Michael O'Keefe, Tim Blake Nelson, Alfre Woodard and Anthony Mackie.

I should stipulate to one more thing. When I first saw "American Violet" at last year's Telluride Film Festival, I figured that the filmmakers had airbrushed, if not romanticized, a gritty story by casting Ms. Beharie, and giving her four adorable kids. Then the real-life mother and children came on stage. They were just as engaging, in their way, as their screen counterparts, and I ate my unspoken words.

Cinematical [Eugene Novikov] at Telluride

American Violet opens in the kitchen of a Texas housing project, as a mother makes breakfast for her children. She pours water into a tea kettle; serves eggs; hurries the kids along – a lovely, peaceful scene. Then the film cuts abruptly to police preparing for a raid: they load their weapons (I believe the first shot is of a gun), put on armor, and pile en masse into trucks. The moment we move from the kitchen table to the police staging area, the soundtrack changes too, from a languid, piano-tinged theme to a percussive arrangement that screams evil.

This approach is representative of much of the movie, which is a strident, aggressive polemic against racism in the justice system, as well as the story of a courageous woman who risked much to sue an all-powerful District Attorney. It is straightforward, unambiguous, and often frankly partisan, hitting its talking points hard without ever really peering under the surface. The tale it tells is reasonably compelling, and as a legal thriller the film more or less works. But much of it is obvious and ham-fisted – the sort of Serious Drama you might expect to see on basic cable. Adventurous moviegoers won't find much of interest here.

American Violet does offer a discovery in the form of a young actress named Nicole Behaire, who portrays the scrappy, unyielding protagonist with tremendous sympathy and poise. Her Dee Roberts, a single mother of four, gets swept up in one of District Attorney Calvin Beckett's (Michael O'Keefe) drug raids – dragnets through the all-black projects, undertaken on the say-so of a single, most likely bullied informant. She's given three options: plead guilty and become a convicted felon (and get booted from public housing in the process), put up $70,000 in bail, or rot in prison awaiting trial while her kids remain caught in a tug-of-war between their grandmother (Alfre Woodard) and their drunk, abusive father (Xzibit). At the urging of a well-meaning ACLU lawyer (Tim Blake Nelson), who enlists the help of a local drug-cop-turned-attorney (an almost comically tentative Will Patton), Dee decides to sue Beckett, hoping to change the system that landed her in jail.

The movie is right, of course: the "justice" system that incarcerates blacks at a rate approaching 10%, mostly for drug crimes, is a travesty and a mockery. As American Violet points out, a lot of this happens because "the DA decides what he wants, the cops go get it for him, and the judges bless what they have done." But the movie is largely disinterested in asking the systemic questions about this complicated problem. It provides almost no context about the "drug war" behind Dee Roberts's strife. It feints toward addressing issues like plea bargaining and laws that make drug indictments inordinately easy to obtain, but ultimately settles for this explanation: some powerful people are racist. That's true, but it's not terribly insightful.

The events of the film take place in 2000, and director Tim Disney (yes, there's a relation) occasionally cuts to news footage of that year's infamous presidential election and its aftermath. This is one of American Violet's more interesting moves, since it can be read as making the subtler point that African-Americans have been, among other things, disenfranchised. On the other hand, it can also be read as so much partisan sniping. Disney sure does resort to it often.

As a legal procedural, the film can actually be rather potent. Disney and screenwriter Bill Haney have a nice sense of the way depositions and court hearings go, perhaps from reading the transcripts of the real events depicted. The deposition questions and strategy sessions ring true, though there is one suspicious scene where the villain somehow winds up presiding over a child custody hearing. But even here, Disney can't resist absurd overemphasis: at one point, for example, a witness is asked to identify the races of a bunch of recent arrestees, and as he is reciting "black, black, black..." the film flashes to the faces of a bunch of random (black) arrestees. It may seem hard to believe, but the moment would have been more powerful had Disney left it alone.

The movie is always able to fall back on Dee Roberts' remarkable story. But in the end, this is a very ordinary film about an extraordinary woman. American Violet is entertaining enough, but unlike its subject, it takes the easy way out. The issues it tackles deserve a treatment less maudlin and simplistic. I recommend The Wire as a good place to start.

Finally, a Good Movie to See and a True Story I Can Believe In! Rex Reed from The New York Observer

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

ReelTalk [Donald Levit]

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review

Chicago Tribune (Alexis L. Loinaz) review

Chicago Tribune (Betsy Sharkey) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

Regina Kelly website of the real life person the film is based upon

Tulia, Texas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tulia, Texas The Drug Policy Alliance Network

Independent Lens . TULIA, TEXAS | PBS

Tulia Texas Racist Roundup a compilation of newspaper articles

"The Color of Justice by Nate Blakeslee - The Texas Observer" Nate Blakeslee from The Texas Observer, June 23, 2000

"The Austin Chronicle: News: Color of Justice: An Undercover Drug Bust Opens Old Wounds in Tulia, Texas" Nate Blakeslee from The Austin Chronicle, July 28, 2000

"News & Opinion: Color of Justice (Austin Chronicle . 07-31-00)" Color of Justice, Nate Blakeslee from The Weekly Wire, July 31, 2000

An American Travesty in Tulia, Texas Andrew Gumbel from The Independent UK, August 20, 2002

"Tulia Travesty Covered Up By Texas Prosecutors and Courts" Travesty in Tulia, Texas: Frame-up of 38 Innocent People Orchestrated by a County Sheriff, Prosecutor and Judge, by Hans Sherrer, October 14, 2003

Disney, Walt

from Walt Disney: the Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler, Walt Disney on Mickey Mouse (1933):

He is never mean or ugly. He never lies or cheats or steals. He is a clean, happy little fellow who loves life and folk. He never takes advantage of the weak and we see to it that nothing ever happens that will cure his faith in the transcendent destiny of one Mickey Mouse or his conviction that the world is just a big apple pie...He is Youth, the Great Unlicked and Uncontaminated.

By Robert Koehler All Tomorrowland’s Parties: CalArts in Motion Pictures, from Cinema Scope

'Walt Disney' by Neal Gabler Walt Disney: the Triumph of the American Imagination, a book review by Carlo Wolff from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 12, 2006

Neal Gabler - Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination ... a book review by Michiko Kakutani from The New York Times, November 14, 2006

Walt Disney, The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal ... book review on Pop Matters by Kathleen Krog from the Miami Herald, December 1, 2006

Walt Disney: man or mouse? - Los Angeles Times article written by Disney author Neal Gabler for the LA Times, December 17, 2006

Neal Gabler: Walt Disney biographer: Speakeasy with ...: Arts ... Felicia Feaster’s interview with Disney author Neal Gabler from Creative Loafing, January 31, 2007

Review: Walt Disney by Neal Gabler | By genre | Guardian Unlimited ... a book review by Gaby Wood, April 8, 2007

LRB | Mark Greif : Tinkering Mark Greif’s book review from the London Review of Books, June 7, 2007

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

USA (83 mi) 1937 d: David Hand

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Well, I liked it better as a kid, but I was never crazy about it. The famous nightmare sequence in the forest deserves every bit of acclaim, and the animation is also brilliant whenever it depicts moving liquids or Dopey. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that the dwarfs are really cool. Snow White's facial gestures don't work for me, though, and if it's really between her and the queen to see who's "fairest in the land" I have to wonder just how many cartoon women there are in the land. I didn't see any other ones. Two of the songs are really good, but most of the rest are awful and there are just too many anyway. The woodsman looks a lot like Waylon Jennings, that's cool.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Disney's first animated feature takes the Grimms' fairy-tale and turns it into a generally cute fantasy for American kids: Snow White herself might be felt to be almost unbearably winsome, and the anthropomorphic characterisation of the forest creatures soon becomes tiresome. But the animation itself is top-notch, and in a number of darker sequences (Snow White's terrified entry into the forest, for example), Disney's adoption of Expressionist visual devices makes for genuinely powerful drama. Ideologically, however, what remains most intersting, as one writer has noted, is the way Walt's obvious desire to promote the American Way (off to work we go, indeed!) is married - presumably unthinkingly - to a virtual celebration of polygamy in which, moreover, it is a woman, not a man, who lives with seven members of the opposite sex!

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is an eye-opener the second time around. Grumpy clearly needs counseling and Dopey is an obsessive in need of a voice coach. Prince Charming looks like he's only after a theater marriage with Snow White. And the spirit in the mirror is dead wrong: The Wicked Queen, with those Queenie Dearest eyes and arching body, is the fairest in the land. Snow White may be pure, but she has no real estate, is compulsive about house-cleaning and talks to animals.

But even through '80s and adult eyes, Walt Disney's first full-length cartoon is as rich and fun as it was in post-Depression 1937 -- yes, 1937. And the seven dwarfs (Doc, Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Bashful, Grumpy and Dopey) are every bit as charming as they "Hi-ho" to work at the diamond mine.

In case you've been held captive in Lapland, "Snow White" (as altered and adapted from the Grimms' tale) is about a nasty queen whose magic mirror, which is supposed to proclaim her the prettiest in the land, seeds her No. 2 to stepdaughter Snow White. The jealous queen orders a servant to kill the fair damsel, but the would-be assassin lets her escape into the woods, where she takes refuge with the mighty minis. Nasty queen poisons her with an apple, Prince Charming brings her back to life with a kiss. They live happily ever after, taking over the dead queen's castle without so much as a second mortgage.

Disney's "Snow White" is suffused with song, visual wit and goodwill, and that children will go for it has long been established. Many images stay with us grown-ups, too -- the dwarfs trudging to work against a streaky orange sky with a small waterfall in the foreground; the contorted and shrouded queen as she flees from the dwarfs up a craggy hill -- bone-white raindrops beating against the black rocks; the two vultures that spiral lazily down the hillside to feast on her fallen body; and of course the halo-lit scene where the prince administers the kiss of life.

Like many of the Disney films, from "Pinocchio" to "Fantasia," this film is a cinematic rite of passage -- for children and adults. Although you might want to tell your daughter not to take the song "Someday My Prince Will Come" too seriously. And to be less trusting of bearded men living in group houses.

The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an ... Victoria Oxberry from the Film Journal

Reverse Shot [Nicolas Rapold]

Animated Views [Ben Simon] (May 8, 2002)

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Jack Seiley

CultureCartel.com (Daniel Briney) review [5/5]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Reel.com DVD review [Betsy Bozdech]

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

filmcritic.com (Joshua Tyler) review [5/5]

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Mark Zimmer

DVD Verdict (Michael Rankins) dvd review

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review

The Flick Filosopher's take

Movie Vault [Azazel]

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

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]

Siskel & Ebert (video)

The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent) review

PINOCCHIO A 98

USA (88 mi) 1940 d: Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske

Hi diddle-dee-dee, an actor’s life for me

One of the greatest animated films in history, the story of a wooden puppet who wants to be a real boy, which is filled with character-driven scenes with deliciously evil motives to prevent the poor puppet from ever accomplishing his dream, based on an 1881 story written by Carlo Collodi. But guided by his Blue Fairy and no less than Jiminy Cricket, who takes a stab as his conscious, Pinocchio stands an even chance against the forces of evil, suggested by Cricket’s classic rendition of “When You Wish Upon a Star.” From the opening scenario in the snuggly household of Geppetto, a woodcarver, with Figaro the cat and Cleo the goldfish, not to mention all those chiming cookoo clocks, we’re in for a rousing adventure of singing and dancing (“Let’s have music, maestro”) that is lovingly detailed in precise, glowing imagery. From being tempted by a couple of wise-cracking con artists, an original Penn and Teller act, by the scoundrel Stromboli, the vile puppeteer who imprisons Pinocchio in order to make a fortune, to his improbable escape where he again faces the Blue Fairy, but when asked what happened, Pinocchio can’t seem to get his facts straight, which with each lie, surprisingly makes his nose grow long, and longer, and longer in a wonderful image of naughtiness.

But we’re not done. Our con artists return and sell him to man looking for bad boys so he can whisk them all off to Pleasure Island, a fabulous representation of a child’s wish fulfillment, nothing to do but play pool, smoke, drink, throw rocks through windows, and anything else that you want to do in a place where there’s no rules. However, as the mood instantly shifts, there are horrible consequences, as boys are suddenly seen with donkey ears and tails, eventually turning completely into jackasses, hauled off onto boats to work for the rest of their lives as mules in the salt mines.

Pinocchio has only partially changed by the time Jiminy Cricket finds him, and they miraculously escape. But when they make their way back to Geppetto’s home, he’s not there, and the Blue Fairy sends word that he’s stuck in the belly of Monstro the Whale, lost while searching for the missing Pinocchio. What follows is a wonderful sequence where Pinocchio and Jiminy search the bottom of the ocean floor for Geppetto, which is a marvel of invention, particularly the swarms of fish who are curious about their visitors, until eventually they are swallowed up by the whale and seem doomed with poor old Geppetto. But don’t give up hope, there’s another marvelous sequence to come where Pinocchio proves his savvy, and in a joyous reunion of all the main characters, Geppetto’s family is reunited and Pinocchio is given his wish.

Time Out review

Disney's second cartoon feature is a rum old mixture of the excellent and the awful. The story itself has the harsh morality and cruelty of Victorian children's literature, but Disney orchestrates his queasy material with some stunning animation of a monster whale thrashing about and much delightful background detail (the candle-holders and clocks in the toymaker's shop). However, one also has to suffer the cavortings of a cute goldfish called Cleo, and several appearances of an odious fairy. Pinocchio, in fact, probably shows Disney's virtues and vices more clearly than any other cartoon.

Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]

Carlo Collodi is hardly a household name at the end of the 20th Century, but his novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio most certainly is. To a considerable extent, this lasting fame is the product of Walt Disney’s interest and his use of the story half a century after Collodi’s death to make Disney’s second full-length animated feature.

The story is familiar to many people – a lonely old woodcarver makes a marionette while he dreams of having a son. A fairy brings little Pinocchio to life and promises that he’ll become a real boy if he learns about bravery, loyalty and honesty. Pinocchio embarks on a series of adventures that put these attributes to the test and eventually put his father at risk.

It’s an exciting and sometimes, for younger kids, scary adventure, complete with troublesome cigar smoking and pool-playing young delinquents and nasty adults galore. Pinocchio runs into temptation at every turn and makes the same kinds of decisions most kids make – sometimes safe but often in favour of experimentation.

Ultimately, though, this is a story about the value of family and the desirability of sticking to the straight and narrow. Several of Disney’s most memorable characters can be found here. Of course there’s Pinocchio himself (voice by Dickie Jones), Gepetto (Christian Rub) and the Blue Fairy (Evelyn Venable), but there’s also Jiminy Cricket (Cliff Edwards), Pinocchio’s voice of conscience, who went on to be a staple Disney character.

This film is clearly the product of its era. Its racial portrayal of Roma people (referred to as Gypsies) is the most obvious, and painful, example of this. Presumably in 1940, Disney and his people didn’t know that the Nazis had already begun exterminating the Roma, one of whom the movie caricatures unsympathetically – Pinocchio runs off to a circus that is operated by a greedy and cruel ‘Gypsy’ named Stromboli. Even parents who aren’t especially concerned about political correctness will likely want to explain to their kids in advance what a ‘Gypsy’ is and how they have historically been stereotyped in similar ways to Jewish people.

Except for the racial issue, this is a sweet and memorable film that includes some wonderful Disney songs. The song, When You Wish Upon a Star won an Academy Award, as did the film for best original score. In addition to reaffirming the value of family, Pinocchio also encourages kids to dream – a sentiment that’s as important today as it was in 1940.

DVD Review Guido Henkel, also seen here: DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation

Step by step, DVD is taking one hurdle after the other. As early adopters we have been waiting and seeing Buena Vista, Paramount and 20th Century Fox come around to release DVD titles after a long time of trepidation. We have seen Dreamworks enter the market and even releasing films by Steven Spielberg, and although there are still a number hurdles to be taken by the format, DVD has just made one major step ahead with the release of Disney’s "Pinocchio".
For the longest time, Disney was unwilling to commit their animated feature films to the DVD format, and finally here is their first classic animation release, the beloved tale of "Pinocchio."

This 1940 classic tells the story of Pinocchio, a wooden marionette who comes to life and wishes so badly to become a real boy. It all starts one night when woodcarver Gepetto is finishing is latest puppet, the marionette of a little boy. Lonely, despite the company of his cat and his goldfish, the old Gepetto dreams of having a real boy for company. Then, the same night he observes a falling star and wishes upon it for Pinocchio to come to life. While the old man falls back to sleep his wish is indeed coming true. A fairy appears and breathes the spark of life into the wooden puppet. She tells him to be a good boy and if he remains honest and upright, one day he will become a real boy. She also makes Jiminy Cricket, a small but wise fellow, his conscience, for Pinocchio to draw upon when he is in doubt. When Gepetto awakes and finds Pinocchio alive, he is ecstatic. He sends him off to school the next day to make sure the boy gets a proper education, but before Pinocchio even reaches school he is tempted by two con-artists, who lure the boy into becoming a theater actor despite Jiminy’s advice and eventually cheat him. The fairy reappears and rescues Pinocchio one more time, but admonishes him to stay on the right path from now on.

In the meanwhile, Gepetto is desperate over the loss of his boy who vanished on that morning without a sign, and starts searching all over for Pinocchio. But before Pinocchio can return home from his first adventure, the two spivs cross his path another time, and this time they sell the little boy off to a wretched and evil businessman who turns children into more sell-able donkeys by the dozen. Jiminy can save Pinocchio within a hair’s breadth, but when they return home to Gepetto’s workshop, the house is empty and Gepetto missing, still searching the world for his lost little boy. When Pinocchio learns that his father is trapped inside Monstro the Whale, he immediately sets out to rescue him and begins yet another fantastic adventure.

"Pinocchio" was Disney’s second animated feature and it carries all the trademarks that made Disney the phenomenon they are. It is a charming tale with a moralistic and educational approach, well wrapped up in a singing and dancing whimsical fantasy world that pleases adults as much as it captivates children. The lessons about honesty, obedience to your parents, loyalty and bravery are key examples why practically all Disney animated features have become instant classics, and why their timeless glory never ceases to shine. Combined with the subtle human inaccuracies that can be found throughout these films, due to the nature that they were all entirely hand-drawn, films like "Pinocchio" are simply gems of the visual animation arts and milestones of movie history.

The first thing I noticed when opening the packaging for "Pinocchio"was the fact that this is a dual layer disc, which is slightly surprising given the rather film’s short running length of only 88 minutes. However, remembering that for the longest time, Disney seemed to have issues regarding DVD’s video capabilities, it only made sense that they would use an extremely high bitrate for the best possible image quality on their animated feature releases. The dual layer gives them plenty of additional storage that allows for high quality video and audio, and I believe the increase in price for those animated releases can in part be attributed to the additional manufacturing costs over single-layer discs that may have been anticipated at first. As expected then, the image quality of "Pinocchio" is outstanding. There are some defects visible in the film transfer, and some artifacts that are a result of a previous restoration of the film a few years ago - after all, "Pinocchio" is nearly 60 years old!

The compression itself is flawless and reproduces the picture with a never-before-seen clarity and brilliance. Every little detail is visible on this DVD, every one of the precious animation cels has been flawlessly transferred for this release, and the result is a stunning visual feast for animation lovers. Never has "Pinocchio" looked like this before, probably not even during its original theatrical run 59 years ago, given the technical limitations of that time. The film is presented in its original 1.33:1 fullframe aspect ratio on this THX certified disc, and the color delineation is simply superb. From the deepest black to the bright highlights, the colors run the entire gamut without over-saturation, creating a bold and colorful image. Edges are sharp and don’t show any signs of over-emphasizing.

"Pinocchio" contains the film’s original monaural soundtrack, presented in a surround channel mix in English and French. The soundtrack is not a typical surround mix however, and simply uses the original mono track to spread it across channels. The track sounds very good throughout and I was very pleasantly surprised how low the noise floor on this release turned out to be. Without hissing, noise or distortion, there is certainly little that would give away the soundtrack’s considerable age. Although the frequency response is somewhat limited in this film, the mix sounds balanced and natural throughout. Never muffled or distorted, but always crisp and clear, again due to an increase in the bitrate for the audio.

"Pinocchio" also contains the movie’s original theatrical trailer, but the full-color character artwork that is advertised on the packaging is sadly nowhere to be found on the disc. If there is one thing Buena Vista has to be scolded for lately, it has to be their rather lax attitude towards labeling their releases with features that are not part of the disc. [Editor: I have been informed by now however, that the phrase "Full-Color Character Artwork On Disc" has to be taken quite literal and that Disney is referring to the full-color print that graces the physical disc with this phrase. Although these discs are commonly known as picture discs I am not sure why Disney decided to coin a new phrase for it, but I suspect it just makes a nice sell-sheet bullet point this way.]

As expected "Pinocchio" turns out to be a shining star. Although the complete lack of extras is a bit of a sore spot in that release, this presentation of "Pinocchio" is the best ever. No doubt, this is a disc I will cherish for years to come.

Bright Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris, February 2003

CultureCartel.com (Daniel Briney) review [5/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]

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

UltimateDisney.com - DVD Review with Pictures Jake Lipson

Reel.com dvd review [THX Certified] [3/4] Jeffrey Wachs

Cinemaphile.org (David Keyes) review

The Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review

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

Teen Movie Critic (Roger Davidson) capsule review

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Entertainment Weekly review [A+] Steve Daly

Variety review

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1992

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] in 1998

The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent) review

FANTASIA

USA (120 mi) 1940 directed by 11 directors listed here: more

Time Out review

Renowned abstract film-maker Oskar Fischinger, employed in a distant capacity on the Bach sequence, called this Disney effort a 'conglomeration of tastelessness'. He wasn't kidding. Only the Dukas Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence, with Mickey Mouse, where the storyboard is effectively provided by the composer, achieves a respectable kind of success. For the rest, Disney's attempts at the visual illustration of Beethoven and Co - a dubious exercise anyway - produce Klassical Kitsch of the highest degree. Awesomely embarrassing; but some great sequences for all that, and certainly not to be missed.

Walt Disney: Fantasia Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

"Dull as it is towards the end, ridiculous as it is in the bend of the knee before Art, and taking one thing with another, it is one of the strange and beautiful things that have happened in the world."

Thus spake Otis Ferguson, the American reviewer, of Walt Disney's Fantasia, one of the most admired - and most reviled - animation features ever made. And them's my sentiments exactly. Notwithstanding the fact that I wince whenever I see the dreadful cuteness contained within the section devoted to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and cringe at the awe-inspiring religiosity of the Ave Maria conclusion to Night on Bald Mountain (Mussorgsky mated with Schubert), there are other passages I'll never forget for better reasons.

The wonderfully kitsch Nutcracker Suite, the extraordinary pyrotechnics of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the witty anthropomorphism of Dance of the Hours and the brave attempt to illustrate Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in abstract form render Fantasia an undoubted milestone.

To Disney, it was the most ambitious of his experiments in animation. To Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, it was a "concert feature" attempting to popularise classical music. To Stravinsky, whose The Rite of Spring was restructured, and then made to illustrate what someone described as a "paleontological cataclysm of ponderous didacticism", it was torment. "I'll say nothing about the visual complement as I do not wish to criticise an unresisting imbecility."

The reason for much of the opposition is almost certainly because of Disney's success in not only influencing the course of animation but also infecting us all with his grossly sentimental and often reactionary values. "Our environment, our sensibilities, the very quality of both our waking and sleeping hours are all formed largely by people with no more artistic conscience and intelligence than a kumquat," wrote Richard Schickel.

We should also remember, however, that Disney was once heralded as a serious artist, and praised by no less a figure than Eisenstein as "the most interesting director in America". But after the failure of Fantasia (short-lived since the film has now gone well into profit) Disney decided that "we're through with caviar. From now on it's mashed potatoes and gravy".

Fantasia is mashed potatoes and gravy but there's more than a hint of beluga there too. You don't catch many children these days reading Wind in the Willows. But you can't stop most of them watching Fantasia. Why? Because Disney's storytelling was unbeatable. He was also a supreme innovator and perfectionist who never ceased exploring the possibilities of the medium.

If Disneyland and Disney World are pulse-stopping monuments to his gifts as an organiser and administrator, his best films remain, warts and all, somehow much more than his limited sensibilities would seem to imply.

Washington Post [Henry Allen]

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

CultureCartel.com (Daniel Briney)

Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky]

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review [The Fantasia Anthology] Jack Seiley

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Ted Prigge

Cinemaphile.org (David Keyes)

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

The Digital Bits Greg Suarez reviewing both the original (1940) and the remake (2000) from the Fantasia Anthology

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD Jack Seiley reviews the Fantasia Anthology

Nighthawks: A Celluloid Fantasia Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, June 8, 2006

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times review [Bosley Crowther] (registration req'd)

DUMBO A 96

USA (64 mi) 1941 d: Ben Sharpsteen

It’s a sumptuous feeling to watch a film in Technicolor, as the bright colors just leap off the screen, and here, in an animated classic, Disney’s shortest feature, it’s a delight from the start to the unbelievably imaginative ending. The film has great music throughout, even the train ride has terrific music, eventually featuring the unbelievably sad song, “Baby Mine,” when Jumbo the mother gets separated from Dumbo the infant, but for a brief moment, they reunite in a tears-laden reunion. Dumbo, of course, is despised by the other elephants for having big ears, and is treated as a despised freak of nature. His mother gets sent off to solitary confinement for protecting him from obnoxious humans who are picking on him, and only a little mouse comes to his aid as his only friend, Timothy Mouse, who steals the show with his winning personality and all around good-natured friendship.

The animation is incredible, especially the “Pink Elephant’s on Parade” number, which resembles FANTASIA, as it is constantly inventive in how the images keep evolving into something entirely new, eventually, inexplicably, landing the mouse and an elephant up in the branch of a tree. Leave it to the crows to provide a show-stopping number, “When I See an Elephant Fly,” a jazzed up, comical tribute to African-American culture that many may believe is a racist and stereotyped depiction, but these birds are the best thing in the entire picture, and they teach poor Dumbo how to fly, which becomes his single-most, breathtakingly significant accomplishment, leading him to fame and fortune, as well as a reunion with his mother, where they all live happily ever after.

Time Out review

One of the best of Disney's animated features. An ugly duckling variation, lifted by those unforgettable characters: the ancient, haywire stork who delivers Dumbo late, the circus train reminiscent of the Tin Man, the irrepressible mouse who befriends the rejected hero, the bitchy old elephant troupe ('Hey girls, have I got a trunkful of dirt...'), and the beautifully characterised crows - stolen by Bakshi for Fritz the Cat - who sing the classic 'When I See A' Elephant Fly'. The artwork, of course, is magisterial: aerial views of the States, the erecting of the big top in a storm, and the brilliant drunken vision of pink elephants. Magic.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

The shortest and cheapest of Disney's animated features, Dumbo has long been characterized by its modesty. When it was released in 1941, in the wake of the grandiose and poorly received Fantasia, its simple story and relatively self-contained world looked like a retreat to smallness. Of all of Disney's major films, Dumbo has been the least subject to the studio's calculated reissue pattern, popping up on television and home video with unprecedented regularity. Even now, its release on DVD in an appropriately features-packed edition has been overshadowed by the release of the even-more-deluxe edition of Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. Dumbo lacks the marketing-driven halo of mystery in which Disney shrouds so many of its films; consequently, it's almost easy to forget that it's not only one of the best classic-era Disney features, but also one of the best animated films from any studio at any time. Dumbo himself embodies most of the reasons. As playful and unselfconscious as a toddler in the film's early scenes, the speechless, virtually silent protagonist takes on a wounded soulfulness as his story progresses and his trials escalate. Dumbo evokes more sympathy for an outcast cartoon elephant than would seem possible, or even bearable. There may be more affecting cinematic moments between mothers and children than the one in which Dumbo's mother, from within her cage, cradles her child in her trunk to the accompaniment of "Baby Mine," but they're rare. With Fantasia, Disney explicitly set out to test the technical limits of animation, but with Dumbo, however inadvertently, the studio tested the emotional limits. Though it ultimately provides sweet redemption, Dumbo plunges its hero pretty close to the heart of darkness. Not that its technical achievements should be ignored: From the bizarre, justly famous "Pink Elephants On Parade" sequence to its less show-stopping moments, Dumbo captures Disney feature filmmaking, still near its infancy, at its best. On an informative commentary track filled with the biographical details of the talent behind the film, John Canemaker recounts how the animation was informed by the study of everything from German Expressionism to live elephants trucked to the Disney studio. The homework paid off. Elsewhere, in an introduction from the old Disneyland TV series, Walt Disney himself singles out "the story of the little elephant with the big ears" as his personal favorite. Revisited 60 years after its release, his choice looks as solid as ever.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Neil Chue Hong) review

Filmsoc's mascot takes flight again in Disney's much maligned but ultimately enjoyable satire on American society. Initially shunned because of his large ears, little Dumbo is jeered and laughed at at his home of the big top. But the realisation that he can use his handicap in other ways allows him to get the last laugh. Whilst following the experiences of an elephant's rocky road to fame and fortune it features possibly the first ever (and certainly the best) hallucinogenic experience in a Disney cartoon and maybe even one of the first explicit flying scenes in the history of cinema.

Dumbo can essentially be seen as a small child learning his way through a strange and at times cruel world. Like in our own childhood, he does not know who to trust and the outwardly friendly faces of the clowns hide malicious personalities who thoughtlessly humiliate the poor little elephant but want to take all the credit when his remarkable gift is revealed.

Dumbo is also seen overcoming his fears (of heights, of strangers) and his circumstances (runt of the litter, an outcast almost from birth). In a way, the film was mirrored in that other enjoyable movie about an animal who triumphs over adversity, Babe. In that film, it was a pig trying to break the prejudices of sheep, dogs and humans. In Dumbo, it is an elephant proving that blackbirds ain't the only ones that can soar through the air.

Of course, looking at it from a physical perspective, Dumbo doesn't has as much chance as a bumble-bee of making it off the ground. His ears really aren't big enough to support his bulk (as any grown-up will tell you). However it is not his muscles that power him through the air but his belief in himself which leads him ultimately to break free of his earth-bound chains and glide through the air and, as any child could tell you, anything is possible if you believe in it.

Returning to the animal characterisations which made his earliest films so watchable (and at which Disney continues to be the world leader) the film does not neglect the pathos amongst the humour and laughs - in part provided by a troupe of singing crows, some rather nasty clowns, and of course Dumbo's sidekick: Timothy the mouse. The caricatures are almost all spot on with gossipy lady elephants and the many denizens of the circus.

This film was hampered by the fact that a lot of Disney's animators went on strike during production and this is evident in the slightly grainy backgrounds and simpler cel composition. Recently it has also been accused of being racially bigoted and disrespectful of people with handicaps (patently silly as we see Dumbo overcome his handicap). However the Disney magic still shines through to give a delightful, unique, film about flying elephants.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

A personal confession: I rarely cry at either funerals or weddings and have been known to laugh at dead baby jokes. The string of Disney reviews I've written for this website have only confirmed my standing as, according to one of my editors' reactions to my take on Bambi, "a heartless cunt." But, in its scant 64-minute running time, the big top melodrama of Dumbo reduces me to a blubbering, mucus-drizzling wreck at least once with every viewing. Call it an acute narcissism of the martyr kind, but the social exclusion of young Jumbo Jr. hits a very specific nerve. And if I've already indicated that I insist on reading each Disney parable as a uniquely American rite of passage that ends up forming (or malnourishing) the psychosexuality of every child, then Dumbo represents the singular case in which I'm relieved Uncle Walt was allowed to act as a preschool Dr. Ruth. In short, there's a reason that when Dumbo, in the film's most vivid sequence, mistakenly drinks water from a spiked trough, he sees an eye-popping, boundary-smashing new world in which pink elephants with loosely billowing, phallic trunks go on parade.

From the very first scene, Dumbo radiates a genuine warmth and concern for pariahs, and puts it into a nuclear family context. Sure, the image of a stork delivering swaddled bundles of joy strapped to parachutes isn't, on the surface, any less ridiculous than Bambi's off-screen "twitterpat," but it soon becomes clear that the Disney animation team—taking something of a breather with this film after the monumental, somewhat mixed undertaking of Fantasia—aren't just nursery rhyming. The birds and the bees might be getting the sugar glaze treatment, but, unlike Mrs. Jumbo, they're all rewarded with children in the bargain. Mrs. Jumbo, a notably single would-be mother, looks to an empty sky while every animal pair around her snuggles in their instant families. For one miserable evening, it seems all she has left to look forward to is a life spent pitching circus tents with a gossipy chorus of old maid elephants. When the stork returns the next day to correct his delivery error and Mrs. Jumbo lovingly unwraps her delivery, her baby's massive ears have everyone else fanning themselves as though he were the unexpected product of a secret interracial affair.

According to the P.O.V. shot from the stork's cloud, Dumbo takes place in and around Florida (clearly labeled as though the letters actually appeared on the land below, with the skyscrapers of New York looming tantalizingly on the globe's horizon above). And though a flock of stereotyped black crows show up at the film's climax to shuck and jive and goad Dumbo into believing he can fly, Dumbo's true metaphorical colors resonate stronger when you consider the social implications of its mute, not-asking-and-not-telling protagonist's treatment at the cruel whims of everyone around him. And until he makes his dazzling personal discovery public (i.e. until he comes out), Dumbo marches from one hate crime to the next. The matronly elephant pack makes speculative insinuations by spelling them out under their breath as though burning up Peyton Place's party lines (hint: e-a-r-s spells "homo"). Buck-toothed backwoods boys, barely human, flock around the naïvely trusting elephant and laugh, using their open coats to imitate his ears like they would throw their limp wrist in mock effeminacy. When Mrs. Jumbo, a two-ton Greek tragedy, reacts to her son's denigration, it shakes the rafters of the big tent so decisively that the powers that be have no choice but to lock her away and deny the two any reasonable belief in their own capacity for acceptance as a nuclear family. Like mother, like son. The moment Dumbo gets his big showbiz break in the Circus, waving his little pride flag, he also ends up throwing the entire microcosmic society into total upheaval, actually causing the entire tent to collapse. Apparently, you allow elephants with big ears into the definition of an elephant act and society will crumble. Where have I heard that argument before?

Dumbo visiting his shackled mother at his lowest point so that he can sob into her caressing trunk, the only body part she has that can reach outside the prison car's bars, while she comforts him to the strains of "Baby Mine" is maybe the most emotionally cathartic moment in any kids' film, Disney or otherwise. But it also provides Dumbo with the until-then deferred familial support necessary for him to achieve his actualization as a pink elephant. Which, forget metaphor, happens exactly as it would in real life: a night of drinking, a garish musical number in a tastefully-lit fantasy world, and a dazed hangover in which you discover, while dangling from a tree, just how much of a freak you actually are.

The modern day promotional material for Dumbo trumpets: "The perfect film for every family!" I'll drink whatever the clown brigade's pouring in support of that endorsement. Dumbo remains the one Disney film that doesn't reduce life's lessons down to Kindergarten Cop's infantile mantra of "Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina" and expect the heteronormative indoctrination to take root in impressionable minds dazzled by big-screen paint-by-numbers. I know right now you're probably singing along with the crows: "I thought I'd seen most everything, 'til I seen a critic call a cartoon toddler elephant gay." But, as far as my empathetic tears as an adult viewer are concerned, it's the perfect Disney film for every definition of family.

Animated Views [Ben Simon] (July 13, 2003)

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Big Top Edition

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

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

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [C+]

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Jack Seiley, 60th Anniversary Edition

PopMatters Emily Woodward, 60th Anniversary Edition

Monsters and Critics - DVD Review - Big Top Edition [Jeff Swindoll]

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Aaron Wallace

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review Big Top Edition

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review ['Big Top' Edition]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review Big Top Edition

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

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

Box Office Mojo (Scott Holleran) review Big Top Edition

Eye for Film (Max Blinkhorn) review [5/5]

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review ['Big Top' Edition] Chris Willman

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

THE THREE CABALLEROS

USA (69 mi) 1944 d: Norman Ferguson

Slant Magazine - DVD Review Eric Henderson

Appropriately enough for a pair of films conceived as an attempt to curb flowering Nazi sentiments in WWII-era South America (I guess they thought garish colors and corny Donald Duck tantrums would win more fans than, say, Leni Riefenstahl), Saludos Amigos and its sequel (or, more accurately, expansion), The Three Caballeros, had a shelf life significantly shorter than that of your standard MRE. Together, they kicked off nearly a decade's worth of anthology-based wastes of time and resources that all but derailed Disney's manifest destiny to rewrite children's dreams in the corporation's own latently art deco, actively anti-twat image until Cinderella put the needle back on the record. (Uncle Walt, according to some biographers, couldn't have cared less at this point; Fantasia's heroic failure to achieve Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs's instant pop-cultural canonization reportedly soured the titan's taste for the feature-length format and turned him on, instead, to the idea of buying up cheap land and turning it into overpriced theme parks—and printing his own money in the process.)

Like most anthologies, Saludos Amigos, Three Caballeros, and the four portmanteau features that followed all wobble unevenly without ever matching the alternately heady and misguided highlights of Fantasia. That would be bad enough in itself, but the entire enterprise represented by the bookend films callously summarize South American culture. That too would be bad enough in itself, but then comes the distasteful realization that Disney, when making Saludos Amigos, thought South America could be handily summed up in 40 scant minutes, many of which are devoted to Goofy fucking it up north of the border. That also too would be bad enough in itself, were the follow-up, Three Caballeros (i.e. Disney's chance to validate his already dubious proposition), not even more risible, featuring such opening credits as "Featuring Aurora Miranda of Brazil…Dora Luz of Mexico," women who are at various points manhandled and mentally undressed, as is practically everyone else in the live-action cast, by Donald Duck. (Who knew the hot-tempered duck was nursing a scorching pair of huevos rancheros?) Though pleasantly carefree and occasionally batshit, the two films are sadly no more than footnotes. Call them Dispanic Fever.

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

One of the most underrated of Disney classics, The Three Caballeros probably owes its current less than stellar critical status due to its bucking of many of the clichés that defined the studio’s animated films of its era. Caballeros initially hints at being an anthology collection of shorts similar to Melody Time or Make Mine Music, but after two short, enjoyable segments, it abandons its diversions and shifts its focus to the wraparound story, in which Donald Duck receives a birthday present on Friday the 13th and begins a hallucinatory tour of Latin and South America. The film flirts at first with being a fanciful travelogue of the region by incorporating some suspect live-action location shooting and a few cursory looks at the customs of the countries in question, but it generally abandons that idea and most pretenses of plot to present a stylized version of the land below the border that seems to exist mostly to offer opportunities for hedonistic revelry and sexual abandon. Of course that release is presented in Disneyfied terms, but once the film begins its headlong launch into that abstract fantasia of color and sound, it’s difficult to deny the sexual nature of its characters’ pelvic thrusts and rampant phallic imagery. Clearly, this is Disney’s horniest animated feature.

It’s no mistake that all of the female characters in the film are portrayed by live actresses, but even though they are flesh and blood, they’re less emotionally developed than the cartoons that chase after them. They exist only as erotic spectacle, and even though there’s naturally no nudity, there is plenty of focus on the female form. In this libidinous context, Donald Duck’s slowly escalating frustrations can only be viewed as sexual ones. Despite frequently popping his top in nearly every other Disney cartoon he appears in, here he really only flips out once, after being forcibly removed from a beach populated entirely by scantily clad, eager to please women. For the remainder of Caballeros’ running time, he’s wide-eyed and drunk on the showcase before him, often getting so caught up in the moment that flashes of gender confusion crop up. Because the opening two segments feature Donald as he watches short stories that unfold on film, he becomes a surrogate for the viewer by the time his odyssey begins. His figurative orgasms flash up on screen in the form of fireworks and musical crescendos, and as such his peaks of excitement match the audience’s. Due to that attuned attention to the audience experience, Caballeros’ highly conceptualized flights of fancy don’t feel like animated onanism. The animation and sexual content are so closely alloyed that the visceral joy each element causes becomes indistinguishable from the other.

THE THREE CABALLEROS Pato Donald's Gender Ducking, by José Piedra from Jump Cut, June 1994

UltimateDisney.com - Classic Caballeros Collection DVD Review with Pictures

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Jack Seiley

DVDTalk [Paul Mavis]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

FilmFanatic.org

Big Cartoon Database Review

Projections Jon

theDVDLounge [Joe Corey3rd]

DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review

DVD Verdict- Classic Caballeros Collection [Clark Douglas]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Epinions.com -- review by bonniesayers

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

SONG OF THE SOUTH

USA (94 mi) 1946 (co-directors: Wildred Jackson and Harve Foster)

Time Out review

A plantation in the Old South: young Bobby Driscoll learns of life through the stories of former slave Uncle Remus (James Baskett). This rather mushy combination of animation and live-action remains one of Disney's most controversial efforts. It contains magical graphic work - notably the standout 'Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah' number - but racial stereotyping drew furious protests from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Hollywood's response? An honorary Oscar for Baskett.

Channel 4 Film capsule review

The tale of a young Southern boy who learns about life from the tales of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Bear, told to him by former plantation slave Uncle Remus, remains one of Disney's most controversial works. Chastised for its racial stereotyping, the film gets even more contentious as PC restraints grip tighter. A shame, really, for while Baskett's performance and his talk of a 'tar-baby' are problematic, they are naive mistakes without malicious intent. If only Disney had been as aware of the environment they were depicting as they were inventive in their combination of live action film, cartoon animation and unforgettable songs.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Considering that it's often ranked among the most controversial movies ever made, the most surprising thing about Song of the South is how innocuous it is. Fitting a live-action frame around animated versions of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories, the movie presents an idyllic picture of Reconstruction-era Georgia, complete with smiling sharecroppers and kindly plantation owners. But when you put James Baskett's sly Uncle Remus up against, say, Butterfly McQueen's bug-eyed Prissy, it's hard to see why Gone With the Wind is available as a deluxe four-DVD set while Song of the South molders in Disney's vaults.

Originally released in 1946, the movie won two Oscars, including an honorary statue for star James Baskett, but it has been nearly impossible to see for decades. Despite the studio's penchant for repurposing its back catalog, Disney has never issued the movie on home video in the U.S., and the film has not been seen in theaters since protests greeted its 40th-anniversary reissue in 1986. Rumors circulated in 1996 and again last year that the movie might finally be committed to disc, but after publicly hemming and hawing over a period of months, Disney announced there were no plans to release Song of the South in any form.

Once you've seen Song of the South, it's hard to account for its uniquely untouchable status. It's nowhere near as malicious as The Birth of a Nation, less bizarre than The Jazz Singer and less awful than The Emperor's New Groove. True, Disney has a family-friendly image to uphold, but the studio has owned up to far darker chapters in its history, notably the series of overtly racist propaganda shorts they produced during WWII, reissued with admirable contextual footnotes as part of the collector-oriented "Disney Treasures" series.

Ironically, Song of the South's popularity may be the greatest barrier to its reappearance. But reappear it should, and not only as a historical curiosity. Song is hardly a great movie, but Baskett's lively performance shows the intelligence behind Uncle Remus' tales, here conceived as parables to help the son of the plantations' owners weather his parents' threatened divorce. Even in their animated versions, Remus' tales reveal their roots in African folklore, and Gregg Toland's cinematography ingeniously soups up the live-action colors to match their ink-and-paint vibrancy.

Silver Screen Reviews

MonsterHunter

"NAACP boycott" urban legend

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

FilmFanatic.org

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

USA (75 mi) 1951 d: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske

Time Out review

Bunin, puppetoonist extraordinaire, encountered many frustrations during his lengthy battle to bring his Carroll to the screen (the quaint live action prologue is directed by Bower). First he came up against Technicolor, who refused to handle the processing, thus forcing him to use inferior Ansco Color. Then he was drummed off the screen for daring to release his film in the same year as Disney's all-American version. And finally, Bunin discovered that he sailed too close to the satirical winds by identifying an imperious Queen Victoria (Brown) with the off-with-his-head Queen of Hearts, thus keeping the film out of Britain. Bunin employs a diverting combination of actors and puppets against a simple Klee-like background: purists will enjoy moaning at the songs while acknowledging that elsewhere he maintains the sharpness of the original.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Lewis Carroll's characters lend themselves mightily to animation, and their renderings at the hands of Walt Disney studios is absolutely perfect. They look right, sound right, move right, make the right incidental sounds to some brilliant incidental music. That's the good part. The bad part is that they break out into really lame songs at regular intervals, breeze through the plot as if they're leaping from one one-liner to the next, and the film, generally lacks the mighty intrigue of the original text. Yes, I understand that some may consider it unnecessarily bad form to rant about the lack of depth of a children's cartoon but this, my friends, is inherently more than that. Giggling children could instead be learning life lessons, deep into their little psyches. That's a missed opportunity worth noting. That Carroll found insanity and the immemorial wasting of time to be the currency of political discourse shows us that (1) Carroll was observant as well as witty, and (2) nothing's changed much.

Alice in Wonderland Eric Henderson from Slant magazine

Disney was and is a studio with an impenetrably inflated sense of quality control. Which is why it's still taken at face value that Uncle Walt publicly disowned—make that, flat out apologized for—his 1951 adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic work of British satire. It is undoubtedly true that despite the hard work of over a dozen screenwriters (including ghost work by none other than Aldous Huxley), almost all of Lewis Carroll's intricate wordplay, satirical jabs at Victorian society and memorable poems are obliterated, but it's all in the name of whittling down a dense tome into a svelte 75-minute locomotive. And far worse damage has been done to beloved works of art in service of Disney kitsch (Stravinsky rightly wished bodily harm on whoever was responsible for turning his "Rite of Spring" into an idiots' guide to evolution—admittedly a hot topic in the day). What remains is an ode to childlike wonder over nonsensical fantasies. It might be that Alice in Wonderland's status as being apart from Walt's personal favorites (and no one can argue the evidence that the Mad Hatter's Tea Party is the most vomit-inducing ride in Disneyland) is how much it refuses to adhere to the binding, conservative Disney archetypes. Alice has no real hero (it's really just a girl dozing off during her studies), nor does it have a Madame Satan villainess (the corpulent Queen of Hearts is a terrifying and iconic figure to be sure, but she's got her humorous, Dominatrix moments and turns out to be really no more dangerous than the pack of cards Alice tosses aside). There is no attempt to affirm the supremacy of patriarchal courtship, no real lessons to be learned (in fact, it plays a lot like The Wizard of Oz without the "There's no place like home" homily tagged on at the end). This lack of force-fed moralizing, coupled with its diffuse plot and hazily psychedelic imagery, makes it hardly surprising that the film's revival came about when it developed a cult following. This is Disney's own movie for people who like the reefer (though, the "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence in Dumbo trumps it in that regard).

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review

Alice in Wonderland and In Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Lutwig Dodgson) are two of my all time favourite stories. While they are highly engaging as works of non-sense for children and adults, the contrast between what which we perceive to be sense and non-sense illustrates the weaknesses in our perception when it comes to our ideas of logic and rationality.

Walt Disney's production of an animated Alice in Wonderland mixes parts from these two stories and is bitter-sweet in realisation of the wonders of Caroll's imagination. There are scenes that are pure genius that go beyond anything I could've imagined after reading the words, and there are some that completely disappointed me.

While it is nice that the two stories are mixed, since Disney probably never planned on a sequel, I would have preferred them kept separate and had two films instead. Here's why:

In Alice in Wonderland, Alice follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit-hole, swims in a pool of her tears, meets the Mouse and participates in the Causus-race, ends up at the White Rabbit's house and meets Bill, takes advice from a Hookah-smoking Caterpillar, frightens a pigeon into thinking she's a serpent, encounters the Duchess, the sneezing baby/pig and the Chesire Cat, goes to the Mad Tea Party, plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts, meets the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, does the Lobster Quadrille, and attends a trial to find out who stole the Queen of Hearts' Tarts.

In In Through the Looking Glass, Alice meets the Red Queen, reads Jabberwocky, goes through the garden of Live Flowers, meets the Looking Glass insects (including the Rocking-Horse Fly), encounters Tweedledum and Tweedledee, (who recite the Walrus and the Carpenter), meets the White Queen, the Sheep in the shop, Humpty Dumpty, the Lion and the Unicorn, the Red and White Knights, and Alice finally beomes a Queen, castles, takes the Red Queen and wins (as you can see, there is a great analogy to a chess game here).

Disney's version mixes the two stories above by making some serious changes in Alice in Wonderland: the progress from pool to tears to White Rabbit's house is rushed, the entire sub-plot with the Duchess is eliminated, as is the sub-plot involving the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, and it is Alice who is on trial, not the Knave of Hearts; and takes the following bits from In Through the Looking Glass: the garden of Live Flowers, the Looking Glass insects, Tweedledum and Tweedledee (along with the Walrus and the Carpenter). In doing this mixing and matching, I think Disney corrupts the continuity of the original stories and leaves several important bits. Worst of all, they have the Chesire Cat reciting Jabberwocky (which didn't work for me at all):

"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

and the mome raths outgrabe."

---Jabberwocky, from In Through the Looking Glass

What did work was the hookah-smoking caterpillar---the smoke coming out took on weird interesting shapes a description of which I think should belong in the story! I also liked the croquet game with the Queen of Hearts, the garden of Live Flowers, and to some extent the sub-plot involving Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Walrus and the Carpenter.

The Disney cartoon version is still better than the people featuring Whoopi Goldberg, et al. which I thought was pretty bad and that too mixes up the two stories. So if you want to watch a good version of the film, watch the cartoon.

I highly recommend reading the two stories in their original form and then renting this video out. I suspect that not everyone is as affected by this as I am, but I consider implications in these stories to be the equivalent to the profound ones found in scientific theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics.

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

DVD Times review [Michael Mackenzie]

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [4/5] [Masterpiece Edition]

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Kevin Cedeno, Masterpiece Edition

DVD Verdict - Masterpiece Edition

DVD Town [John J. Puccio] Masterpiece Edition

Lewis Carroll Review Markus Lang

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review

Reel.com DVD review [Carrie Wheadon] Gold Collection

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

Film Freak Central review [Bill Chambers]

The Digital Bits capsule dvd review [Masterpiece Edition] Barrie Maxwell

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

DVDBeaver.com [Henrik Sylow]

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Bill McAlpine]

PETER PAN

USA (77 mi) 1953 d: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske

Time Out review

Having annoyed Carroll purists in 1951 with his cartoon version of Alice in Wonderland, Disney went on to exasperate Barrie fans by using American boy star Bobby Driscoll's voice for Peter Pan, modelling the usually unseen Tinkerbell on Marilyn Monroe, and employing the Sammys Cahn and Fain to compose songs like 'What Makes the Red Man Red'. If you can view it without thinking of Disney fucking about with yet another children's classic and relax in the studio's last decent use of Technicolor, then you're in for a treat.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

Cinderella reopened Disney's floodgates in 1950, busting open the blockbuster box-office that had basically eluded the studio through the 1940s and simultaneously erasing from impressionable young memories the legacy of Rosie the Riveter. Their 1953 follow-up would offer a companion book of Disney Gospel to go with Cinderella's nightmare vision of broken nuclear family units. Peter Pan, in retrospect, seems much more a footnote among the studio's 1950s output. Its most enduring image is that of Tinker Bell swirling around EPCOT and using her wand to send a burst of pixie dust across TV screens to tip The Wonderful World of Disney into commercial breaks. Metaphorically, though, this makes Tink and her wand the single most succinct piece of iconography in Disney's entire commercialized canon. She takes the cash, she cashes the check, she shows Disney what they want to see: product placements, corporate synergy, women reduced to Barbie-doll sizes. Coupled with unconfirmed pedophile (socially, if not sexualy) J. M. Barrie's advocacy on behalf of refusing to act one's age and of keeping your dreams from escaping the playpen, the rhetoric of Peter Pan would be nefarious enough without bringing into the mix the "What Make The Red Man Red" number or the fact that it's Michael Jackson's favorite film. (Fittingly, the 1990s VHS revival of the Mary Martin live television version revealed that production to be as enduring as Disney's film, which only serves to highlight the shortsightedness of Disney's arguments on behalf of fantasy retardation. After all, kids will even accept tits on Peter Pan and a nelly "Mrs. Hook's little baby boy" as a villain, so long as you give then a few catchy numbers.) If the men in Peter Pan are all united in their love of war games (the Lost Boys and Indian tribes repeatedly catch each other and then release their prey so as to perpetuate their derring-do), the women fare no better under their two options. Either they follow the lead of Tinker Bell and the nubile inhabitants of the mermaid cove, forever nursing unfulfilled crushes on the prepubescent boy wonder of Never Land which drive them to pouty, vindictive woman-hatery (Tink, at one point, actually tries to have Wendy killed), or they opt to follow the example of Wendy, who skips from grade school-age to schoolmarm without taking so much as a pit stop in between to address that pleading twitch between her thighs. Never Land? More like Never-Gon-Git-It Land.

Animated Views - Platinum Edition [Ben Simon] (March 16, 2007)

Monsters and Critics - DVD Review - 2 Disc Platinum Ed. [Jeff Swindoll]

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Jack Seiley, Special Edition

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Aaron Wallace, Platinum Edition

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [B+] which includes reviews to multiple versions

DVD Talk (Todd Douglass Jr.) dvd review [4/5] [Platinum Edition]

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

PopMatters (Michael Buening) review [2-Disc Platinum Edition]

The Onion A.V. Club dvd review [Platinum Edition] Scott Tobias

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review 2 disc Platinum Edition

Reel.com dvd review [2.5/4] Jeffrey Wachs, Special Edition

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

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3.5/5] [Special Edition]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

SLEEPING BEAUTY

USA (75 mi) 1959 ‘Scope d: Clyde Geronimi

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Although this rarely achieves the heights of classics like Snow White and Dumbo, it still has its moments. Typical Disney elements abound: polished if sometimes stodgy animation; sugary soundtrack based on Tchaikovsky; a delicate, vapid princess, square-jawed prince, and cutesy creatures of the forest. The early scenes of domestic bliss with the matronly good fairies, interspersed with interludes of romance and regal pomp, are frequently overlong and uninspired. But in the final thundering confrontation with the wicked witch, set in the decaying Gothic splendours of the Forbidden Mountain, the magic works once more. An epic brilliance conjures up impossible monumental castles, shadows and monstrosities, with exciting action marvellously orchestrated across the CinemaScope frame.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

1959's Sleeping Beauty was the final fairy-tale to be produced by Walt Disney himself and remains one of his studio's most undervalued works. A triumph of pre-Renaissance design and celestial metaphors, the film's economical fairy-tale is played for cosmic pathos and staged as pagan ritual. In many ways, this is a far superior film to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Stylist Eyvind Earle and background artist Frank Armitage were more or less allowed free range over the production by Mr. Disney. In the film's sharp and jagged animations and startling use of moving cutouts, Earle and Armitage's crew of animators and painters evoke an expressionistic netherworld influenced by numerous Gothic, Persian and Medieval sources. The familiar story concerns a 16-year-old beauty, Princess Aurora, who dies when she pricks her finger on the needle of a spinning wheel and is subsequently revived by the prince charming she was destined to marry. In her attack against Aurora, the evil Maleficent (voiced by a fierce Eleanor Audley) appears to take on the fairy-tale cliché itself. After the film's three fairy godmothers bestow their cosmic gifts on the baby Aurora, Maleficent curses the babe with death because she wasn't invited to her über-Christening. Maleficent is quite the bitch, not to mention very post-modern for her time. (Dreamworks' overrated Shrek basically reworks the film's meta premise, but to annoying effect.) Just as the film's gorgeous backdrops evoke characters trapped in suspended animation, the many colorful balls of light that frequently circle their heads reinforce the haunting cosmic struggle between fate and love.

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A-]

A worthy successor to the early classics Snow White and Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty is the one great fairy-tale adaptation of Disney’s post-war period, outshining Cinderella and unrivaled until 1991’s Best-Picture candidate Beauty and the Beast. Cinderella’s singalong tunes might be more hummable than Sleeping Beauty’s Tchaikovsky score, but Sleeping Beauty more authentically captures the fairy-tale spirit of the Perrault fairy tale, filling out its third act with a mythic battle of knight versus dragon rather than trotting out cute animal sidekicks.

Compared to Perrault, Disney neglects to establish that the occasion of the confrontation of the fairies over the fate of the infant princess is in fact the child’s christening; but on the other hand incorporates traces of Christian imagery in the climactic battle: The good fairies equip Prince Philip with armor reminiscent of Ephesians 5 — a “shield of virtue” that actually bears the emblem of a cross as well as a “sword of truth” — with which he stands against Maleficent, transformed into a dragon who expressly declares herself to embody “the powers of hell.”

The animation, partly inspired by medieval illustrations but also reflecting 1950s minimalism, makes grand use of its widescreen format — the first time the format was used in a Disney cartoon. Cruelly truncated by fullscreen VHS, the film is newly available in a two-disc plantinum-edition DVD with improved framing over the previous DVD.

Animated Views - Platinum Edition [Ben Simon] (October 14, 2008)

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Platinum Edition

CultureCartel.com (Daniel Briney) review [2/5]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4.5/5] Richard Scheib

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

UltimateDisney.com - Platinum Edition DVD Review with Pictures and SE comparison

Film Intuition: 50th Anniversary DVD [Jen Johans]

DVD Verdict- 50th Anniversary Platinum Edition [Mac McEntire]

411mania.com - 50th Anniversary Platinum Edition [Chad Webb]

DVD Town - 50th Anniversary Platinum Edition [James Plath]

DVD Talk (Jeffrey Kauffman) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Town (James Plath & John J. Puccio) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Reel.com dvd review [Platinum Edition] [3.5/4] Brie Beazley

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Jack Seiley, Special Edition

Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] James Plath, Special Edition

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

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson

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

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [4/5]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

Variety review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Leonard Norwitz

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

USA (84 mi) 1991 d: Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise Special Edition (91 mi)

Time Out review

Disney animation enters the '90s, embraces the stunning technical advances of computer-generated imagery, and updates the traditional dependent heroine. Belle, besides representing a move away from the usual Barbie Doll looks, is resourceful, bookish, and vigorous in resisting the chauvinist advances of Gaston, the character who turns out to bear the true mark of the beast. Gaston was based on LA's Medallion Man narcissists, and is well and truly lampooned in the barroom waltz. Beast, based on a menagerie of brooding buffalo, bear, boar and gorilla, learns to master his temper, and his growing relationship with Belle is infinitely touching. His bewitched castle is enlivened by an antic household including a candelabra with the panache of a French maître d', a neurotic clock, and a mother-and-son teapot and cup. The six musical numbers either reveal character or push the action, with 'Be Our Guest' an outstanding example of cartoon choreography. Dazzlingly good.

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

Disney's new full-length animated feature, "Beauty and the Beast," is more than a return to classic form, it's a delightfully satisfying modern fable, a near-masterpiece that draws on the sublime traditions of the past while remaining completely in sync with the sensibility of its time.

This is a giant step forward for Disney's animation unit -- and a quantum leap past its blandly diverting work in "The Little Mermaid." For the first time in a Disney cartoon, you don't feel as if you've slipped into a time warp. The sense of humor, even the obligatory moral subtext, seems fresh. There's even a kind of impudence in the comedy; you don't feel clobbered with wholesomeness. And yet nothing is lost in bringing a contemporary spirit to this familiar tale of love triumphing over physical imperfection. The storytelling is brisk and engaging, the animation imaginative and deeply textured, the music and the production numbers sublime. Let's not mince words -- it's great.

The animators -- led by producer Don Hahn and directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise -- have truly outdone themselves, not just in the richness of the visual detail they've provided but in the deeper pleasures of characterization and conception. It's been a long time since a Disney animation project has had such an invigorating directorial style. Throughout the film, the creators give a startling perspective on the action; our eye is always excited, always surprised by what's put up on the screen. This picture was made by people who know movies and movie history.

The opening segment, in which a spoiled prince is transformed into a beast who can only be rescued by love, visually evokes the opening shots of "Citizen Kane." And in the musical numbers, particularly "Be My Guest," the filmmakers have referenced -- and then topped -- the lavish eccentricity of Busby Berkeley. Added to that, the music -- by the composing team of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, who also worked on "The Little Mermaid" -- is the most memorable since "Lady and the Tramp."

The main characters, too, are more compelling than in recent years. The heroine, Belle (whose voice is provided by Paige O'Hara), isn't insipid and Barbie-doll cute the way the Little Mermaid was. She's a more worldly girl than Ariel, a bookworm, with gumption and a mind of her own. Physically, she seems more mature, more womanly and less blandly asexual. Her suitor, the handsome but conceited Gaston (read by Richard White), has an almost overbearing physicality; everything about him is comically exaggerated and satirized to the point that you feel as if the cleft in his chin might swallow you whole. The chorus of town beauties that follows him around is hilariously over-ripe too -- more like Vargas girls than the usual Disney dames.

The real stars of the show, though, are the supporting players, in particular the dashy, magical candelabra, Lumiere (Jerry Orbach), and the warmhearted talking teapot, Mrs. Potts (Angela Lansbury). The model for Lumiere seems to have been Maurice Chevalier, and the idea is so choice, and so deftly executed, that it places him immediately among the top rank of Disney characters. Though less inspired, Mrs. Potts is indelibly realized. Their numbers are the movie's best.

If the movie has a flaw, it's the Beast. Perhaps the image of the glorious Beast in Jean Cocteau's 1946 version of the classic French fairy tale is too vividly perfect to allow anything but a literal transcription, but this Beast, who is drawn to resemble a sort of scowling bison, seems completely lacking in poetry. He's a lunk without either mystery or pathos. And for the character to earn our affection despite his ugliness -- and to appear deserving of Belle's love -- he needs some of both. As it is, he's precisely what the rest of the movie isn't -- dimensionless.

Though this is a major component, it's not a major drag on our enjoyment. The rest of the film is nearly flawless. And the marriage of computers to the time-tested and painstaking hand-drawn animation process only enhances our amazement. What "Beauty and the Beast" gives us is the best of the old and the best of the new. We watch the screen with constant wonder.

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Austin Chronicle [Jay Hardwig]

Movie Vault [Le Apprenti]

Animated Views [Rodney Figueiredo] (October 5, 2002) Platinum Edition

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review Platinum Edition

Reel.com dvd review [Disney Special Platinum Edition] [4/4] May Kalin-Casey

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Kevin Cedeno, Platinum Edition

Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers, Platinum Edition

The Digital Bits dvd review [Platinum Edition] Graham Greenlee

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Special Edition

DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review Special Edition

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

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review [Special Edition]

Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald) review [5/5]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

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

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

AboutFilm.com (Jen Walker) review [A+]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

CineScene.com (Kristen Ashley) review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

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Guardian/Observer review

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Austin Chronicle (Kathleen Maher) review [3/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] in 1991

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times IMAX version in 2002

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

THE LION KING

USA (89 mi) 1994 d: Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff

Time Out review

Following the inspired Aladdin and the emotionally involving Beauty and the Beast, Disney caps a hat trick of box-office hits with this breathtaking picture. The story hews to Joseph Campbell's maxim: first act, cosy; second act, despair; third act, redemption and transfiguration. As before, the camera treats the animated material like a feature film with humans - dollies, zooms, deploying the movements you'd expect in a James Cameron movie. How's the little lion king in waiting? Not too yucky. He has to learn the responsibilities of kingship, his father (Jones) explains, but Uncle Scar (Irons) tempts him off course. Villains and irresponsibles always have more fun. The hyenas have sharp one-liners to fledge their jive-ass flight (leader Whoopi Goldberg). The layabout beasts that Simba, Lion King Jr, hangs with in the wasted years are very funny. Pumbaa the farting warthog and Timon the meerkat still offer a viable hippie alternative. Songs variable. Animation staggering. A winner.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

It began in Africa, so to speak. The Lion King starts off nauseatingly enough when the animals of the film's jungle accumulate to bow before their future king, baby Simba (Jonathan Taylor Thomas), who's held up to the light of the sun in a curious celebration of patriarchal rule. Simba's father, Mufasa (James Earl Jones), is murdered by the evil Scar (Jeremy Irons), who takes over the land and allows it to go to seed with the help of his minority hyenas. What with all the lush vistas and references to Hamlet, the animators strive for a certain epic familial melodrama, and though the film's beautiful animation more or less serves as an emotional response to its many hysterias, several unanswered questions remain. At the time of The Lion King's release, some were quick to point out its racist overtones, namely that the evil hyena triumvirate is voiced by Hispanic and Black actors. But that's a miscalculation of sorts, especially when you consider that minority voices are also responsible for some of the film's kinder characters. In the end, the film's racism is mostly subconscious and stems from the animators' elementary attempts to color-code evil for the film's target audience (what other explanation is there for Scar's black mane?). The Lion King is loaded with hoary Biblical references (rays of light, burning bushes) and Shakespearean shout-outs, but that's all they are. The film's experimental musical numbers (however screechy the songs) are gorgeously drawn, but since there's no real conflict implied in the film's mish-mash of styles, The Lion King pales next to the studio's Sleeping Beauty, a film that was able to follow through on the struggle between paganism and Christianity implied in its cosmological smoke and mirrors. When Scar takes over the lion's den, Africa inexplicably turns into a cloudy ghetto where the hyena population runs rampant. When patriarchal rule is restored, light returns to Africa. It's a facile evocation of Good versus Evil that's rendered all the more moot because the animators refuse to explain how these animals are able to inexplicably control the forces of nature. Surely if the deceased Mufasa can appear in the sky in order to offer some wisdom for an older Simba (Matthew Broderick), he can surely move a few clouds over and let the sun shine down on Scar's ghetto.

Hal Hinson The Washington Post

Walt Disney's "The Lion King" is an impressive, almost daunting achievement, spectacular in a manner that has nearly become commonplace with Disney's feature-length animations.

Make no mistake, though: There is nothing commonplace about "The Lion King." Of the 32 animated films Disney has produced, this story of a young African lion's search for identity is not only more mature in its themes, it is also the darkest and the most intense. Shakespearean in tone, epic in scope, it seems more appropriate for grown-ups than for kids. If truth be told, even for adults it is downright strange.

If "Aladdin" was Disney in its comic mode, and "Beauty and the Beast" its romantic, then "The Lion King" is the studio's attempt at a tragic/heroic style. And not only is this last genre the least well-suited to a G-rated children's story, it is also the one that they pull off with the least success.

Though "The Lion King" is being touted as the first of the Disney animations without a literary precursor, the themes and conflicts seem to come straight out of Shakespeare; you wonder why they didn't just go ahead and make a cartoon version of "Hamlet." Disney animations, of course, have always been rich in mythic content, but usually the heavy stuff remained submerged in the subtext. Here, the epic conflicts, plus all the peculiar cultural messages -- the skewed sexual politics, the ecological themes, the pop psychology, the incipient fascism -- are right up front, swamping the characters and just about any entertainment value the story might have had.

The tale begins with the presentation of Prince Simba, son of Mufasa (voiced by the ubiquitous James Earl Jones) and queen Sarabi, to a mass gathering of creatures, great and small, at Pride Rock, the center of the proud lion king's vast domain. The gathering is one of the movie's big set pieces, and it's impressively staged, but the diversity of animal types happy over the arrival of a new boss on the block creates some confusion, even for little Simba. When the adorable king-to-be asks for clarification -- "But Daddy, don't we eat antelopes?" -- Mufasa waxes cosmic, explaining that, yes, the lions eat the antelopes, but when they die their bodies turn into grass and, in turn, the antelopes eat the grass and the whole thing is just one great big circle of life.

Ah, yes. How good it is to be at the top of the food chain.

Not everyone is ecstatic about little Simba's imminent rise to power. Mufasa's lean and hungry-looking brother, Scar (voiced by Jeremy Irons, who plays the character as a vocal extension of Claus Von Bulow), feels that he's been shoved to the end of the royal cafeteria line. And so after he's foiled in his plot to slaughter Simba, Scar sets his sights on Mufasa himself, rigging the murder so that Simba sees himself as the culprit and runs off in disgrace.

Without doubt, the death of the heroic Mufasa will be the most widely debated aspect of "The Lion King," with people taking sides as to whether such things are good or bad for kids just as they did over the killing of Bambi's mother. But, hey, it's all part of the great circle of life.

After the death of Mufasa, Scar takes over the Pride Lands, and the movie takes an even more bizarre turn. As the veld becomes a police state, all the color is bled out of the film's palette, and the camera angles become severe and exaggerated. As a group of goose-stepping hyenas march by in "Be Prepared" -- easily the most dissonant musical number the studio has ever staged -- the iconography appears to come straight out of "Triumph of the Will."

What most kiddies will make of this I have no idea, but in dramatic terms, Scar's ascension to the throne brings the picture -- not to mention the great circle of life itself -- to a dead stop. And while this evil monarch plunders the Pride Lands, Simba is off in a distant jungle having an identity crisis.

This middle section, where Simba (who's voiced as an adult by Matthew Broderick) grows from a cub into an impressive young adult, is dominated by a pair of frolicsome creatures named Pumbaa (an odoriferous hot-pink warthog voiced by Ernie Sabella) and Timon (a wisecracking meerkat brought hilariously to life by Nathan Lane) who teach the tortured prince to lie back and forget his troubles. The audience, too, is happy to get whisked away from the heaviness of the Pride Lands to a jungle so lush and bright that it verges on the psychedelic. Also, Simba's cohorts -- who play Falstaff to his Prince Hal -- are the only genuinely likable characters in the picture; without their comic relief, the movie might have been insufferable.

It's pretty much of a downer anyway. The songs (written by Tim Rice and Elton John) are innocuous enough, or would be if they weren't hammered into your head by the industrial-strength orchestration. Still, none of the numbers really stands out, and without a memorable musical theme to unify the elements, the tale falls into fragments.

Plus, to tell the story of a hero's journey it helps to have a hero, and Simba comes across as the Lion Country incarnation of Fabio. Simba's return to the Pride Lands is prompted by the arrival of his childhood girlfriend, Nala (Moira Kelly), who tells the would-be king that he must return home and assume his rightful place on the throne. To which Simba replies, "That's not me anymore." When the airheaded expatriate does finally confront Scar and his hyena minions -- led by Shenzi (an unremarkable Whoopi Goldberg) -- a sort of kitty Gotterdammerung ensues. With Simba back up on his rocky perch, all is right with the world again. The zebras and antelopes return to the Pride Lands once again to be eaten by the lions, and the great circle of life resumes its turning.

You don't have to get all moralistic to notice that there's a problem here, and that the film's team of screenwriters -- Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts and Linda Woolverton -- haven't solved it. And maybe it can't be solved if your bigger characters eat your smaller ones. As someone once said, the lamb may lie down with the lion, but the lamb isn't going to get much sleep.

The Lion King A Short History of Disney-Fascism, by Matt Roth from Jump Cut, March 1996

Animated Views [Ben Simon] (September 27, 2003)

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Dmytryk, Edward

RAINTREE COUNTY C- 68

USA (168 mi) 1957 ‘Scope

Goodbye, dear friend. Remember me as a man who loves Raintree County, but just happens to loathe most of the people in it.

—Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles (Nigel Patrick)

I have no idea what attracted the studio or the big name stars to this wretched material, adapted from a Ross Lockridge Jr. novel, an author who at age 33 committed suicide after long term bouts with chronic depression, but the barely tolerable writing is horrendous throughout, making this a perfect example of the extravagance and over indulgence of the Hollywood studio system, costing $5 million dollars for MGM, much of it on the lavish costumes, holding the dubious honor of being the most expensive movie ever made at the time of its release. The film is memorable more for its folly than anything else, as even the performances of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift seem mysteriously disconnected. Clift was drinking heavily at the time, arousing red flags from all who knew him, eventually suffering a tragic auto accident halfway through the production which was shut down for more than two months waiting for him to recover, leaving his face disfigured, not to mention a resultant addiction to alcohol and pain killers for the rest of his life. This off-screen tragedy, not the film itself, led to a box office success, as viewers were curious to pick out the scenes shot before and after the accident. In addition, this is the first film to ever shoot Montgomery Clift in color. Shot by Robert Surtees, the last of the Hollywood films to use a super large ‘Scope aspect ratio of 2:55:1, it was meant to be screened on 65 mm film, giving the film an especially luminous quality, but since so few theaters could accommodate this change, it was instead released in traditional CinemaScope. Following their brilliant work together in A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951), making them, according to Clift’s biographer Patricia Bosworth, “the most beautiful Hollywood movie couple of all time,” this is the second film where Taylor and Clift, extremely close lifelong friends, worked together, while the truly bizarre film SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959) would be their last.

Set in a small town in rural Indiana before, during, and after the Civil War, the studio felt this could rival GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) in its epic historical scope, but don’t even think about it. The only similarity is the histrionic over-acting of both Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor, with Leigh winning and Taylor nominated for a Best Actress Award, and the politically incorrect depiction of slavery, which is a little disconcerting in both films. After a 5-minute orchestral prelude, the film opens in an idyllic setting, where star students Johnny (Clift) and his sweetheart Nell (Eva Marie Saint) meet in the forest at a local creek exchanging graduation gifts. Their open minded professor (Nigel Patrick), however, makes no bones about his attraction to a young chestnut haired student (Myrna Hansen) and is eventually run out of town on a rail at the discovery of his attempted indiscretions. Clift is the school valedictorian and his family and the town have high hopes for his future. Elizabeth Taylor arrives a half hour into the film and catches Johnny’s eye as Susanna, a wealthy Southern belle from New Orleans, an aristocrat with slaves and property, whose purring, still girlish voice and heavy accent feel forced and completely unnatural, initially filmed in a heavily stylized and dreamy setting, as if the angels are singing in the background. Lee Marvin makes an appearance as Orville “Flash” Perkins, a loudmouthed braggart and a drinker who challenges Johnny to a race, both thinking they are the fastest runners in the territory, which leads to a 4^th of July fiasco, where they both amusingly get intoxicated before the race. Afterwards, Johnny and Susanna have a picnic in the woods where they go swimming together in the creek, leading her to return several weeks later announcing she’s pregnant.

Johnny, of course, does the honorable thing and agrees to marry her, taking a riverboat journey south to meet her relatives in New Orleans, discovering their views favoring slavery as well as their belief that Abraham Lincoln was tainted with Negro blood. Perhaps the most despicable scene is Johnny’s insistence that Susanna free her slaves, which she announces at a party in front of her relatives, one of whom dons a blackface and prances around as the stereotypical yet horribly demeaning depiction of a darky. At this point, Taylor’s exaggerated over-the-top drama kicks in, revealing she’s a deeply troubled woman hiding family secrets, as her mother slowly went insane, causing her father to bring back a Negro women from Cuba to take her place in the home raising the children, but the two of them were apparently shot in a fire that destroyed her family’s plantation, a traumatic incident from childhood that continues to haunt her. Johnny remains reassuringly supportive, even after Susanna admits she was never pregnant, but desperately wanted his love, but she is possessed by visions, like a dark curse, eventually disappearing without a trace with their son, apparently gone to Georgia following the outbreak of the Civil War, which leads to an intermission at the 2-hour mark.

The final section drags on with the least impact and is not really necessary other than to exploit the war, becoming ludicrous at times, especially when Johnny joins the Northern army largely in a desperate attempt to seek out his missing family in the South. Johnny joins up with an Indiana regiment that includes “Flash” Perkins and his old professor, now a war correspondent, and follows the track of Sherman’s march to Atlanta. Surprisingly, along the way, they run into the home of the Cuban woman that helped raise Susanna, where friendly family slaves have his son safely hidden away. It’s here that Johnny learns Susanna had a breakdown and has been admitted to an insane asylum, Carrying his son on his shoulders, Johnny fends off Rebel soldiers, which even for a soap opera is just beyond belief, as is the rescue scene in the asylum. Unfortunately, in order to bring in the Civil War and tie up loose ends, they extended an already overlong film an extra hour without ever offering a truly gripping scene. In my view, this is one of Taylor’s worst performances, as she’s completely on a different wavelength than everyone else in the film, allowed to over act while embellishing narcissism and nonstop hysteria on camera. This simply doesn’t suit her since she’s such an adult, naturalistic force onscreen, but not here, as she’s continually portrayed as damaged goods. Clift, on the other hand, has much greater screen chemistry with Eva Marie Saint, something that Susanna eventually realizes before bringing the curtain down in dramatic fashion. The director never gets a grip on the material and allows the film to continually meander, presented almost as a fairy tale, never for a moment sensing any urgency or real life emotion.

Raintree County Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

MGM's attempt to repeat the success of Gone With the Wind turned out to be an elephantine bore. Set in the Civil War, with Taylor as a tough Southern belle doing anything to win Yankee teacher Monty Clift for a husband, only to get bored with him, it offers up the usual stew of sordid goings on, but never brings it to the boil. The performances, surprisingly given the cast, don't help either; even Clift, wrecked by drink and the emotional problems (the car accident came during production), fails to convince.

Raintree County Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader

A memorable if generally unsuccessful attempt (1958) by MGM to bring back the glory of Gone With the Wind, adapting Ross Lockridge's best-selling novel about the Civil War as a 168-minute blockbuster with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift (who suffered a nearly fatal car accident during the filming and had to have his jaw wired). Edward Dmytryk's direction gets ponderous over the long haul, but nice visuals (Robert Surtees) and a pretty good secondary cast (including Eva Marie Saint, Lee Marvin, and Agnes Moorehead) help to alleviate some of the slow patches.

User reviews from imdb Author: ecjones1951 from United States

"Raintree County" is one of those movies like "Ishtar" or "Waterworld;" troubled productions remembered as much -- if not more so -- for what went on behind the scenes as in the finished picture. Patricia Bosworth's definitive biography "Montgomery Clift" (1978) is the source of the facts that follow.

While "Raintree County" was in rehearsals, Montgomery Clift's drinking was out of hand, and threatened to hamper production. Elizabeth Taylor had no real influence on him, despite being his dearest friend and soulmate. Many in the cast and crew expressed their concerns to MGM higher-ups. This led to a series of meetings between Clift and MGM Production Chief Dore Schary. "Raintree" had a $5 million budget, the highest of any American film up to that time, so it was up to Schary to solve problems on the set or behind the scenes before they happened.

Schary left the meetings believing Clift was sincere in his desire to straighten up and behave himself. But he was not convinced that Monty would be able to do it. His demons were too powerful; every picture he made was held hostage to Clift's self-destructiveness. Schary decided to take out a $500,000 insurance policy on "Raintree County" just in case there was a halt in production for whatever reason.

Schary had never done this before, but his "funny premonition" tragically came to pass.

On May 12, 1956, half of "Raintree County" had been filmed. Elizabeth and other of Monty's friends had prevailed upon him to stay sober during shooting, and he was trying to live up to his side of the bargain. At a party at Elizabeth's and husband Michael Wilding's that night, Monty was sober and quiet. He had one glass of wine, and made his excuses and left. He was uncertain about driving down the steep hill to Sunset Blvd., and asked his close friend, Kevin McCarthy ("Invasion of the Body Snatchers") to lead him to the road.

McCarthy described many times in later years seeing Monty's headlights move wildly from one side of the road to the other in his rearview mirror. Then he watched in horror as Monty's car slammed into a telephone pole.

Montgomery Clift's impossibly beautiful profile and the planes of a face the camera adored were destroyed. He was crumpled on the floor of the car, his face and jaws crushed. Elizabeth Taylor resisted all attempts to keep her from going to his side. When she got to him, she straightened him up and pulled his two front teeth out of his throat before he strangled on them.

Recovery was long, slow; unbearably painful. Monty had friends sneak liquor into the hospital. Three weeks after rebuilding his jaws, Monty's doctors realized they had done the job incorrectly. They re-broke his jaws and wired them again.

Production was shut down for weeks. With over $2 million already invested in it, MGM was not about to abandon "Raintree," nor replace its star. Resumption of the project was primarily a question of money for the studio, but to Monty and those who loved him it was a question of pride.

Weeks after the accident, Monty was allowed to see himself in a mirror for the first time. He was not elated with the results, but relieved to see he looked enough like himself that he could continue acting in front of cameras. Greater than his pain had been the fear that his career was over.

Montgomery Clift returned to work on "Raintree County" knowing that the picture was no better than when he left. He returned knowing that audiences would come to see it to play a ghoulish game: they would try to spot him "before" and "after." He returned to the production numbed and dulled by painkillers and alcohol.

Despite his horrific ordeal, despite the liquor and the pills that eased his pain and enabled him to complete the picture, I still believe Montgomery Clift's performance of Johnny Shawnessy to be one of his best.

Clift had an unusual voice and unorthodox phrasing. On screen he was intuitive and sensitive, his portrayals always highly intelligent. However much he rehearsed (and he was notorious for doing things to death) Clift's readings always seemed quite natural. The accident changed none of these things. And equally fine performances were to come, in "Lonelyhearts" (1958), "The Misfits" and "Wild River" (both 1960); and "Judgment at Nuremburg" (1961).

Montgomery Clift died 40 years ago this week, on July 22, 1966. He was 45 years old. But part of him had died ten years earlier on a twisting road in the Hollywood hills. The accident that nearly killed him left him prey to his weaknesses but also to the enormous strength and passion that informs his later performances. "Raintree County" divided Monty Clift's life into "before" and "after."

Articles for Raintree County Jay Steinberg from Turner Classic Movies

With his tenure as production head at MGM drawing to a close, Dore Schary wanted to cap it with a project that would be recognized in the class of Gone With The Wind (1939) in terms of sweep and scope. In electing to adapt Raintree County (1957), the popular, sprawling novel of a 19th-Century Hoosier's life journey, Schary took on a challenge that seemed fated to be a lightning rod for adversity.

Ross Lockridge Jr., a preternaturally brilliant literary scholar with an archival knowledge of his native Indiana, invested six years into crafting an opus that would reflect America's development through the two generations flanking the Civil War. Houghton Mifflin conditionally accepted his manuscript in 1946, and Lockridge spent two stressful years paring away roughly half of his original 2000-page submission at his editors' behest.

In 1947, MGM awarded Lockridge $150,000 for the film rights to Raintree County, a prize that eventually escalated to $250,000 due to the novel's being made a Book-Of-The-Month Club selection and emerging as a best-seller. Both the studio and the Book-Of-The-Month Club demanded pre-publication cuts as well. Lockridge had longtime struggles with depression, and the price of compromise proved dear. In January 1948, with his novel topping the charts after two months in print, the author took his own life at age 33. MGM quietly tabled its plans for Raintree County for eight years.

Various scenarists struggled to adapt the screenplay, and Millard Kaufman's 200-plus page final draft eliminated roughly a quarter of the events from the novel. Edward Dmytryk, whose refusal to cooperate with the congressional anti-Communist inquiries of the late '40s resulted in prison time, and whose subsequent decision to name names placed his career back on track, was attached as director. Montgomery Clift accepted the lead after being coaxed by Elizabeth Taylor; the two developed a deep friendship while filming A Place In The Sun (1951), and were desirous of working together again.

The screenplay of Raintree County takes up the life of Lockridge's protagonist Johnny Shawnessy (Clift) at age 20, after he's finished with his studies and is tantalized with the notion of locating the lone, mythical raintree at his homeland's heart. His ambitions are swiftly sidetracked by the efforts of transient Louisiana belle Susanna Drake (Taylor), who wastes little time in duping a proposal out of him. Following her home to the South, abolitionist Clift is appalled towards the prevailing attitudes regarding slavery, and troubled by the increasing evidence of Taylor's mental instability. After the attack on Fort Sumter, Taylor disappears with their young son, and Clift signs up with the Union Army as his only means of searching for them.

On May 12, 1956, with the interior shooting complete and the cast and crew ready to travel to location in Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky, Clift accepted a dinner invitation from Taylor and then-husband Michael Wilding at their Benedict Canyon home. Afterwards, opting to follow friend Kevin McCarthy down the winding, unlit canyon road, Clift lost control of his vehicle and struck a telephone pole. The actor suffered a terrible litany of facial and cranial injuries; broken jaw, nose and sinus cavity, loss of teeth, severe concussion, heavy lacerations on his left profile. The Raintree County production shut down for two months while he recuperated, and film buffs to this day have a grisly fascination about which scenes with Clift were filmed before and after the accident.

Moreover, Clift's injuries went on to spur a painkiller dependency that, coupled with his troubles with alcoholism, ultimately shortened the performer's life. Narratives about the location shooting for Raintree County are rife with incidents regarding the star's erratic behavior. In his autobiography It's A Hell Of A Life, But Not A Bad Living: A Hollywood Memoir (Times Books, 1978), Dmytryk recounted how during dinner at a Danville, Kentucky restaurant, Clift "coated the steak with a thick layer of butter, took the cap off the pepper shaker and covered the butter with pepper, then picked the steak up with his bare hands and started tearing it to pieces...Nor was his image enhanced when a few nights later, blown out of his mind, he ran naked through the upper-class residential area of the town."

Despite his considerable inner turmoil, Clift turned in creditable work, as did Taylor and the strong supporting cast of Eva Marie Saint, Agnes Moorehead, Walter Abel, Nigel Patrick and Lee Marvin. Details from the studio's first usage of 70mm cameras (dubbed "Camera 65") to the painstakingly detailed costuming drove Raintree County's final production costs to a then-considerable $6 million. The film went on to score Oscar nominations for Taylor's efforts, as well as costume design, art direction/set decoration, and Johnny Green's moving score.

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Movie Review - Raintree County - Screen: M-G-M's 'Raintree County ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Tiimes

Docter, Pete

UP C+ 78

USA (104 mi) 2009 co-director: Bob Peterson shown in 2-D and 3-D, seen in 2-D

Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon? —“Up, Up and Away,” The Fifth Dimension (1967), written by Jimmy Webb

A $175 million dollar animated film that opened the Cannes Film festival in 3-D, which must have been pretty silly seeing the cinema elite all dressed up in formal wear uniformly wearing 3-D glasses, like some weird science experiment protecting them from dangerous infra-red light. Using lilting piano music that sounds like Randy Newman’s score in RAGTIME (1981), this plays out with a before and after story, exploring different stages of a man’s life, Carl Fredricksen (played by Ed Asner), initially finding and then years later losing the love of his life. Starting out when he’s just an awkward kid, he and his girl take to one another right away when they discover a mutual affection for one particular explorer, Charles Muntz, seen earlier in black and white newsreel footage, a man who has made his life one long, continuous adventure until one day he faded away in his blimp, The Spirit of Adventure, never to be seen again, his story dutifully detailed in their scrapbook, where they love, in particular, an especially high waterfall called Paradise Falls set in the wilds of South America, shown in a souvenir post card they have collected. Their shared love for adventure leads them into what looks like a very typical marriage, where surprisingly the two of them spend a great deal of time together at home. When he outlives her, their entire life together has been shown in a brilliantly executed montage that lasts only a few brief minutes, reminiscent of TOY STORY 2 (1999) which through a series of flashbacks encapsulates Woody’s life in a song, where in this film his life without her is the after, as he grumpily becomes a recluse mourning her loss, losing all interest in the outside world, refusing to give in to developers rebuilding the entire neighborhood around him, except his house, the last vestiges of his memory with her. While others advise him to move to a retirement community, he insists he will never leave her. When life closes in and won’t leave him alone, he does the only respectable thing, tying a thousand balloons to his house and taking to the skies, sitting back and enjoying the ride, heading for that South American waterfall of his wife’s dreams.

Of course there’s a catch, especially when high in the sky he hears a knock on his door, which turns out to be a motor-mouthed neighborhood kid that has been pestering him trying to earn his final merit badge by offering assistance to the elderly, a request that was soundly denied. Somehow he ended up stuck on the porch when the house made its ascent. They are a friendship made in hell and couldn’t be more extreme polar opposites, especially due to their differences in innocence and age, where one has his whole life to look forward to while the other is content to look back on the life he once had. Ed Asner’s voice as the old man is as gruff as it is dismissive, literally willing to drop this kid off at the first available third world country, but of course, over time, they begin to influence one another, turning this into a buddy road movie, eventually collecting a menagerie of animals as well, one of whom turns out top be a rare breed of bird, resembling a giant, extremely colorful Road Runner. What didn’t work so well for me was the action part of the story, which does get a bit ugly, featuring a pack of deadly killer dogs that speak with voice boxes and a lone mutt that is the butt of their contempt. Pixar made this exact same morality judgment in THE INCREDIBLES (2004), an otherwise terrific action adventure that nonchalantly discards human life with such casual disregard, albeit the bad guys, that it resembles watching the annihilation of the enemy at the video arcade, no different really than watching STAR WARS (1977). Have they learned nothing in 25 years? This movie is no exception, as the tone of the bad guys is really murderous and feels surprisingly out of place in what is otherwise a loving tribute to one’s deceased wife, realized by reliving her dream. Or in other words, what’s a demented serial killer doing in this movie, a guy who should have been dead long ago, and why is that funny?

Despite all the setbacks and some fairly black and white storyline caricature, the action strangely veers into recycled Miyazaki’s CASTLE IN THE SKY (1986) territory, where the enemy is also a power deranged lunatic, taking place almost exclusively in the sky, including requisite air battle scenes, only without the warmth and zany humor of Miyazaki. Not sure why so many others have really loved this movie, and why many critics who take such a hardened stance with regular dramatic features develop such an affection for animated films, as none of the characters here are that interesting and there was little doubt that a friendship would eventually develop. Honestly, for a flying house story the imagery was fairly conventional, especially carrying the weight of the house on his shoulders which eventually had to be released before he could move on with his life, which I thought was much funnier when Asner simply slammed the door on the kid instead of befriending him and all the animals, which is such a Disney-ized wrap up. I felt the spirit of Rodney King: “Can we all get along?” That’s not the true nature of the grumpy faced Asner who develops an affection for the kid only after hearing about what’s missing from his life, so he attempts to be there when others have not, which is like sending money to those late night Christian faith TV ads that show real life faces of orphaned children from third world countries. Is this a real friend or is this the Christian and noble thing to do? What’s the likelihood that the disgruntled Asner would choose the latter? While others love the sentiment, I just found much of the believability factor just too conveniently phony, not the least of which is how suddenly nimble the near eighty-year old guy gets when he suddenly realizes the kid needs him, as if he develops super powers after the kid realizes that the wilderness is really “wild.” There’s nothing remotely natural about this wilderness. Instead it resembles the typical security measures of the enormous mansions owned by the rich and famous who surround their premises with fierce looking guard dogs who are trained to attack. The question is what have those dogs been eating and why does their homeland resemble the recycled hyena graveyards from LION KING (1994)? And what’s so special about that damned bird anyway? While there is a tender suggestion that even the elderly need to keep living their lives, not sitting on the sidelines somewhere wishing things had been different, the gulf between good and evil here is between serial killing and the Christian duty of doing unto others. Given the choice, is it really such a profound transformation?

Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]

Incidentally, the Reaper in Up is a cell phone-wielding real estate honcho, silently razing the land around the elderly protagonist’s house in Pixar’s latest animated film. Said protagonist, Carl (voiced by Ed Asner), is a widowed septuagenarian, a dreamer for adventure whose life has largely passed him by. About to be shunted off to a retirement home, he makes use of his resources as a former balloon-seller and, with a gazillion helium orbs tied to the roof of his house, takes off into the skies. Heading to the Venezuelan jungle to realize a dream he shared with his wife, Carl finds an overeager scout (Jordan Nagai), a rainbow-plumed rare bird, and an army of talking dogs lorded over by his childhood hero, a disgraced explorer (Christopher Plummer). Directed by Peter Docter and Bob Peterson, this has to be the studio’s weirdest project yet -- gags (literal aerial dogfights, chocolate-eating goonies, a Doberman stuck with a chipmunk’s voice) are virtually free-associative. At the same time, Up is Pixar at its most ambitious: It takes the regretful-old-man routine from Ikiru and Wild Strawberries, and the image of a character wandering an abstract desert while tied to his parade float of disappointments from Beckett. It’s very pretty (Carl’s balloons are like translucent gumballs, sunlight shines through them midflight and suffuses a little girl’s room with color), and also surprisingly contemplative of death and loss. (The already celebrated 5-minute montage that follows Carl and his wife from youthful ebullience to geriatric disenchantment is indeed moving, even if it seems imagined by people who never met a real married couple.) Then things fall apart. The action is manically cranked up, lame jokes are repeated, a promising critique of idol-worship gets thrown away. A film that opens daringly ends with a shout-out to Star Wars. Business as usual for Pixar, I’m afraid.

Missives from Cannes: "Up" (Doctor & Peterson) Daniel Kasman from The Auteur’s Notebook

Pixar’s latest film Up (in 3-D!) is the animation studio’s simplest, truest, and strangest film yet.  For the sake of sentimental fancy, it jettisons depth for flashes of brightest melancholy, and a surfeit of what-if craziness about falling off the edge of the world out of sheer loneliness. Wall-E’s opening reel-of-silence is trumped by Peter Doctor (Monster’s Inc.) and Bob Peterson’s daring beginning, a montage of stark emotional simplicity that takes our lead character from boyhood all the way through the elderly mourning of his deceased wife.  From here, as with the last two Pixar films, Wall-E and Ratatouille, the movie increases in audacity in direct parallel to its whimsy.

Grasping for rats, robots, and the stubbornly old, Pixar is becoming more and more able to push the boundaries of both children’s and mainstream narrative cinema.  What we’re talking about here is a children’s film where its lead goes from the age of the target audience to an old shut-in before the story even begins, and, logically, the only place it can go next is up, as the man decides to honor the memory of his wife by flying off in his house (via an cheery fleet of balloons) into the wilderness.  Such a bold—and surreal—journey towards death in a summer children’s film?

Truth be told, with the addition of a simple-minded boy scout helping him drag his house through a desert in South America, both dodging and befriending packs of talking dogs, protecting a wild snipe, and fighting off an eldery wilderness warlord, one wonders if Pixar is remaking Monte Hellman’s The Shooting for the young and the old.  Up is certainly that abstract, if not more so; it sadly leaves behind the richness of character that Pixar is known for (barring a golden retriever that will probably be the truest, sweetest thing projected this year in Cannes) for a bold simplicity that allows half the film to take place suspended from the air.  As predicted with Ratatouille, Pixar has now reached the sublime state of an Old Studio, cranking out small films with none of the hype of blockbusters, and containing if not the personal feel of auteur films, then the roaring idiosyncrasy and heart of artistry.

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B+]

"Up," the new animated feature from Pixar, opens with an extended sequence, lasting no more than ten minutes, that is probably the best thing the studio has ever done. Little Carl Fredericksen meets Ellie, his rambunctious soul mate, and, in quick, lyrical progression, we watch them grow up and marry and live a life together into old age, until Ellie's death leaves Carl a glum widower.

As a piece of poetic compression, it ranks with the opening of Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons."

But Pixar movies have a way of beginning beautifully and then getting lost along the way, and "Up," for all its charm, is no exception. ("Wall-E," for example, was one of the most bifurcated movies ever made – the Earth-bound opening section was transcendent, the rest was attenuated). Sustaining a solid story line is just as crucial for animation as for any other kind of movie, perhaps more so, since it's particularly tiring to suspend disbelief if the narrative is wayward.

"Up" is less visually exuberant than many of the other Pixar films, but in this case that's a plus. Its rather thin plot could not have borne the weight of wing-ding stylistics. Along with his codirector Bob Peterson, Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc.") frames the action with such pictorial clarity that we are never overwhelmed. This may not be the best of the Pixar movies but it's probably the most graceful. (I saw it in 3-D but it can also be viewed, with probably not much visual loss, in plain old 2-D).

Most of the film is taken up with Carl's curmudgeonly decision to literally fly the coop. Hounded by construction crews eager to evict him from his home, this balloon salesman attaches balloons to his home and soars away. His mission: To touch down in remote Paradise Falls, South America, the place Ellie always dreamed of visiting.

Russell, a chubby young stowaway who is proud of his Junior Wilderness Explorer credentials, becomes Carl's helpmate. Pairing an eager-beaver kid with an old crank is not the freshest of ideas – we await the inevitable bond-a-thon. But, as voiced by newcomer Jordan Nagai and Ed Asner, these two characters have spunk to burn, and that helps scour some of the treacle from the concept.

When Carl and Russell encounter in the wilds a legendary renegade explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), and his pack of ravenous dogs, the film takes a vaguely Joseph Conradian turn that it can't begin to sustain. A more daring animator – Japan's great Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away"), for example – might have brought out the frights and the madness. For all their inventiveness, Pixar movies never lose sight of their family entertainment provenance. "Up" ventures into the heart of darkness but the most disturbing thing to emerge from it is a prized rainbow-colored 13-foot bird named Kevin. That's not all bad. Kevin's very funny. And he's actually a she. Grade: B+ (Rated PG for some peril and action.)

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

Pixar’s Up is a small charmer with the studio’s patented brand of cunning: Shock us with an inconsolable woe (predator eats fish’s wife and kids; a trash-heap Earth is depopulated save for a robot whose idea of culture is Hello, Dolly!); then gradually introduce sentiment, riotous chases, and a rousing cliff-hanger. Works for me! If we forgive the more conventional second half of Wall-E (and not everyone does), it’s because we’re grateful; we’re unaccustomed to such devastation in mainstream animation. We’re certainly devastated by the overture to Up, which centers on a loving couple unable to conceive or to live out the spirit of adventure that brought them together as bright-eyed children—then closes with aging and terminal illness. The elderly widower protagonist, Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner), assaults a contractor and elicits actual blood—blood in a cartoon!—and is sentenced to sell his beloved house and finish his days in a retirement facility. When he rips said house from its moorings with the aid of an immense, tutti-frutti bouquet of helium balloons and hightails it for a South American waterfall—the dream destination of his wife—our sad hearts surge.

Directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson are savvy tricksters. The first half of Up is all demented free association, with a dream logic both baffling and hilarious. The second half is outlandish but formulaic: Jules Verne melodrama with a Captain Nemo–like obsessive (Christopher Plummer at his most plangently sinister), plus talking dogs, plus a needy, fatherless adolescent. In search of a merit badge for assisting the elderly, Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), a roly-poly Asian-American wilderness explorer, gets caught on the porch when the house lifts off, then irritates the old man with his chatter. We know that Fredricksen will become a surrogate dad, but Asner has perfected this growly persona: He will turn out to have a tender heart, but it will never be on his sleeve.

The look of Up is a world away from Pixar’s usual CGI intricacies—simple in a way that only artists with a genius for complexity can achieve. The characters are like wittier Cabbage Patch dolls. Has there ever been a human hero as off-putting yet accessible as Fredricksen, with his big square head and big square glasses and big round nose? The geometry is so basic, the impact so startling. Russell, his tiny eyes nestled in a blob of a face, must be the least immediately lovable of animated tykes. But he won me over. As in other Pixar films, the relative immobility of the features dries out the sentimentality and draws us in. The movement from inexpressiveness to vulnerability is inexorable.

By all means, see Up in its 3-D incarnation: The cliff drops are vertiginous, and the scores of balloons—bunched into the shape of one giant balloon—are as pluckable as grapes. The dogfight with canine pilots would have brought a salute from the late Charles M. Schulz. A mammoth, multicolored bird with an uncanny resemblance to the monster of the fifties sci-fi picture The Giant Claw sticks its beak into people’s faces and emits a flabbergasting croak: You can almost feel the air.

Complaints? Once Fredricksen’s wife, Ellie, passes away, there are no women characters—but Pixar has always been a boys’ universe. (More’s the pity: Girls like toys, too, and Coraline demonstrated the fertility of female escape fantasies.) Otherwise, the movie is practically a metaphor for Pixar’s storytelling: down, down, down; up, up, Up.

The Horrific Underbelly of UP | Overthinking It Ferrett Steinmetz from Overthinking It, June 2, 2009

The end of Pixar’s UP is a little disturbing even if you’re not thinking terribly hard: having murdered the dastardly explorer Charles Muntz, elderly widower Carl Fredericksen steals his blimp and his dogs.  Remember, kids, if you can kill a killer you get to keep his cool toys, and no court in the land will ask where you got them!

Yet there’s another aspect of UP which is even more disturbing: namely, the dogs.

Carl Fredericksen has a ship full of devoted dogs.  Those dogs will require a lot of food in the days to come; heck, a shot during the credits indicates that the dogs are now breeding wildly, as Doug and some unknown mate have produced an astounding litter of puppies.  Carl is, ostensibly, in charge of a ship full of at least fifty dogs.  That’s a lot of kibbles to purchase on a balloon-seller’s pension….

…assuming the dogs want to eat kibbles, of course.  There’s evidence that they’re fussier than that.

First off, let’s look at Paradise Falls, the place the dogs have called home for as long as they can remember.  While it is traditionally a South American jungle in some ways, the place we’re shown is oddly barren of life. Aside from Kevin the bird, a toad, and a handful of bugs, we see no other wildlife present in Paradise Falls.  And why would there be?  There is a pack of feral dogs roaming about constantly, forever on the hunt, barely restrained, devouring whatever life is present.

As an explorer, Charles Muntz has no compunctions about putting a small child’s life in danger and he certainly has no illusions about nature, red in tooth and claw; it can be reasonably concluded that Muntz does not feed his dogs, but rather allows them to hunt wild game.

But even more disturbingly, what do the dogs refer to Russell as?

“The small mailman.”

These dogs live in a jungle, for Christ’s sake.  When would they have even seen a mailman for comparison?  Sure, it’s amusing to believe that hatred of mailmen is written into a dog’s DNA, but the truth is that dogs have to live in a city for long enough to interact with mailmen and get to know them before acquiring knowledge of them.  Admittedly, the fairly educated dogs could have read about mailmen, but given that Muntz has to refill his supplies of his champagne and elegant food somewhere, this is a strong indication that Muntz takes his packs of dogs with him when he goes back to town, as is clearly seen in the opening newsreel.

Furthermore, Muntz is heavily implied to be a murderer when he knocks the wooden heads off the table, and one can only suspect from the way the dogs react so eagerly to the word “treat” that, perhaps, a treat is a little more than a bit of beef jerky.  If you’re a murderous explorer, what would be a good way to get rid of the evidence?  Especially when you have a bunch of hungry dogs who love bones?

Yes, folks; those dogs have dined on human flesh.

But it gets worse.  What has Muntz been doing for the past seventy years? He clearly leads an extravagant lifestyle, and yet has seemingly done nothing but hunt his bird for the past seventy years; he’s been disgraced by his community, so it’s unlikely that he can make a living academically. Even a good amount of stockpiled riches would be hard-pressed to weather several depressions… And Muntz is, if anything, a very practical man.

The dogs know what a mailman is.  They have tasted human flesh.  They get brought to town periodically.

All this adds up to the horrific sight of the Spirit of Adventure floating down from the skies over some innocent, rural town with a low population. The locals see the blimp and joyously rush to meet this strange sight… At which point the ramp lowers and a pack of ravenous, bloodthirsty dogs rushes out, eager to kill everything in sight.  The dogs feast, using their excellent sense of smell and communicator collars to track down every survivor—at which point Muntz ambles down to strip the town of canned goods and life savings.

It appears to be a happy ending.  But truth is, Carl Fredericksen is now the captain of a hell ship full of starving, murderous dogs who will, eventually, start to beg for food.  The question is whether they’ll accept Alpo.

Pray, pray for Carl Fredericksen.

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

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

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A]

Pixar's Up: Paradise Lost at Paradise Falls fenzel from Overthinking It, June 3, 2009

Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

DVD Talk - Theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

DVDTalk Theatrical Review [Tyler Foster] (Disney Digital 3D)

Epinions.com [Steven Flores]

The New Yorker (David Denby) review

Twitch (Kurt Halfyard) review

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

Movie Shark Deblore [debbie lynn elias]

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]

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

Movie-Vault.com (LaRae Meadows) review

Reel.com review [3/4] Sean O’Connell, also seen here: filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [3.5/5]

Pixar's Up Soars in Entirely Unexpected Ways Robert Wilonsky from The Village Voice

Screen International review Mike Goodridge at Cannes

CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/5]

BeyondHollywood.com Endymion

eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]

CNN Showbiz (Tom Charity) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter review Michael Rechtshaffen at Cannes, May 12, 2009

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Time Out Online (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6] at Cannes

The Daily Telegraph review [5/5] Sukhdev Sandhu at Cannes, May 13, 2009

The Independent (Kaleem Aftab) review [3/5] at Cannes, May 14, 2009

The Guardian at Cannes 2009 (Peter Bradshaw) review [4/5]

The Globe and Mail (Kate Taylor) review [3/4]

The Baltimore Sun (Michael Sragow) review [4/4]

Boston Globe review [4/4] Ty Burr

The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review at Cannes

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

Seattle PostGlobe [Sean Axmaker]

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

Cannes #1: Up, up and away, in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon Roger Ebert at Cannes, May 11, 2009

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] May 27, 2009

Well-Rounded Boy, Meet Old Square Mekado Murphy in Cannes from The New York Times, May 15, 2009

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review May 29, 2009

Up Up and Away The Fifth Dimension on YouTube (2:29)

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Doillon, Jacques

All-Movie Guide Jason Buchanan

A remarkably humanistic writer/director whose introspective features often dwell on youthful malaise, French filmmaker Jacques Doillon has an uncanny knack for exploring human nature and the impact of people's actions on those most dear to them. Perhaps it was his penchant for directing documentary shorts early on that gave Doillon his insight, but by the time he moved into feature territory in the early '70s he had suitably mastered the ability to tell a solid and affecting story. In 1979, Doillon was nominated for two César awards for his compelling psychological drama The Hussy, and his 1984 film La Pirate was a Golden Palm nominee at the Cannes Film Festival. By the 1990s, Doillon's career had gained effective momentum. His 1990 film Le Petit Criminel, which told the involving tale of a troubled adolescent, was nominated for multiple César awards. After his success with film Le Jeune Werther in 1993, the director scored his biggest international hit to date with the 1996 drama Ponette. The tale of a four-year-old girl attempting to overcome the harsh reality of her mother's sudden and tragic death, Ponette won the hearts of audiences around the world and brought Doillon international acclaim. His youthful 1999 drama Petits Frères, however, didn't fare quite so well on the international scene, and he faltered somewhat with the 2001 drama Carrement à l'Ouest. Nevertheless, longtime fans eagerly awaited the arrival of Doillon's 2003 drama Raja, which detailed the romance between a young Moroccan street woman who doesn't speak French and a cultured French man who doesn't speak Arabic.

uniFrance Profile

TCMDB

Doillon, Jacques They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

PONETTE B 88

France (97 mi) 1996

A film featuring magnificent performances by children, particularly 4-year old Victoire Thivisol, who tries to come to grips with losing her mother, very emotional and filled with a special faith and spirit. The end has a religious significance that was largely panned by critics as cheating.

Time Out

Four-year-old Victoire Thivisol won the best actress award at the 1996 Venice Festival for the title role, a prize which probably belonged more to writer/director Jacques Doillon. Nevertheless, the jury's decision is understandable: Thivisol represents what is pure and honest in the movie, but one may have doubts about the work as a whole. The film begins shortly after the death of Ponette's mother in a car accident. The girl, her own arm in a sling, has only a limited understanding of what death means. At the funeral, one of her pals places gifts in the coffin; another kisses her gently; a third explains that they place heavy stones on top to keep you down. Called away on business for a few days, Ponette's father (Beauvois) leaves her in the country with her aunt (Nebout) and her cousins, but her loneliness is only intensified. Taking her aunt's words of solace literally, she stands vigil, willing her mother to reappear before her. Doillon is after a sense of mortality from the four-year-old's perspective. The result is touching, but not always convincing.

Ponette Mike D’Angelo

If you're in the mood for some phenomenal acting, though, I suggest that you hustle over to the nearest theater showing Ponette, which boasts the finest ensemble cast I've seen to date this year. In one sense, this is unremarkable, since French imports, whatever their other faults, almost invariably feature terrific performances; in another sense, however, it's quite extraordinary, since the average age of the film's principal cast is perhaps five. Four-year-old Victoire Thivisol, who won the Best Actress award at Venice last year for her work in this film, has received the lion's share of the attention -- and understandably so, since Ponette is about how she copes with the sudden death of her mother in an automobile accident -- but director Jacques Doillon coaxes stunningly naturalistic performances from all of the kids, and his script (reportedly fashioned largely from overheard conversations among children) depicts the agonies and ecstasies of toddlerhood -- emphasis on the former -- with a clarity and an absence of sentimentality not seen since...well, Truffaut (and before that, Clement's Forbidden Games). Essentially plotless, the film is sometimes repetitive, and it takes an unwelcome and almost literal turn into Deus Ex Machina Lane in the final reel, complete with absurd homilies that undermine the complexity of everything that came before. Still, the portrait of anguished childhood it offers is so indelible that I'm willing to forgive the hokey, misguided conclusion. My memory, like yours, is hazy, but what I dimly recall of my very formative years looks and feels not at all unlike Ponette. Only with a lot less frolicking in the countryside, and a lot more Underdog reruns.

Memphis Flyer [Susan Ellis]

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I ONCE found a dead bird and tried to bring it back to life. From what I understood, such a thing was possible -- after all, Jesus came back after three days in the grave, didn't he?

A child's struggle to make sense of death is the subject of Ponette, a remarkable French film that tells its story entirely from the viewpoint of a 4-year-old girl. After her mother is killed in a car accident, Ponette (Victoire Thivisol, who won Best Actress at the 1996 Venice Film Festival for her uncanny performance), has difficulty believing that death is permanent. In order to comprehend death, she also has to figure out how God operates, making her task doubly hard. Getting no support from her father, who tells her to knock off the God crap and live in the real world, Ponette tries various tactics to reach her dead mother and talk to her. At the boarding school she attends, a know-it-all classmate tells Ponette she must pass several tests of bravery in order to become a "child of God," which would then enable her to contact her mother. Other children offer her magic spells they believe will conjure up the dead. When none of these methods work, Ponette finally runs off to the cemetery, finds her mother's grave, and begins digging up the dirt with her hands, screaming, "Mommy! I'm here!" But despite this harrowing scene, eventually she finds the strength to endure the pain and go on with her life.

To emphasize the smallness of a child's world, director Jacques Doillon shot most of the film in very tight closeups. The camera appears to be only inches away from these kids, yet they behave so naturally that they seem unaware of its existence. Doillon spent months taping preschoolers in order to write authentic-sounding dialogue, and as a result the script is full of those marvelously bizarre utterances that only a 4-year-old could come up with. These kids aren't dumb, but since they've never been told much about concepts like death, they come up with their own theories to explain what's happening. Ponette is exceptional because it respects children for who they are and acknowledges that their inner life is every bit as valid as our own.

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RAJA

France Morocco (112 mi) 2003

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Jacques Doillon's supremely written, remarkably acted Raja is a romantic tug-of-war that brings to mind both a Shakespearean comedy of errors and Bernardo Bertolucci's undervalued interracial smackdown Besieged. The director's eponymous heroine goes to work with her cousin at a pasha in Morocco owned by a lazy, intellectual Frenchman. The suave, persistent Fred (Pascal Greggory) is drawn to her ordinariness and the 19-year-old Raja (Najat Benssallem) is smitten by his sexiness. Their innocent crush quickly escalates into a war of bitter jealousies, sparring libidos, and brutal miscommunications. Neither can speak each other's language, and as such they turn to others to translate for them. Doillon illuminates Fred's worldview via a series of unnervingly jolly discussions with two portly female cooks who could pass for happy-go-lucky relatives of the three Macbeth witches, but the perpetually laughing women are smarter than meets the eye. They're clearly fond of Fred, but that one of them deliberately miscommunicates Raja's words and intentions suggests that they are mindful of the dangerous power struggle implicit in his affections for the young girl. Doillon makes excellent use of widescreen. His airy, deceptively simple compositions frequently isolate Greggory and Benssallem to either side of the frame, emphasizing the wide economical and cultural split that exists between the two. Both characters repeatedly infringe upon the other's space, but just how much are they propelled by love, greed, and the eroticisation of the other's race? The frequent shifts in power the characters perpetuate throughout the film are remarkably implied (sometimes even prefigured) in the way the actors walk through Doillon's mise-en-scène. Raja makes things hard for the equally coy Fred in part because she doesn't want to be owned by him. But once you remove all the economic and cultural baggage that frustrates the couple's attempts to hook-up, Raja is really just about the thrill of the chase. And judging by Raja and Fred's disappointing sex scene, chasing someone can be more fun than catching them.

Raja Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Critique of Separation -- If the viewer isn't paying rather close attention, Doillon's latest film could be mistaken for an uninflected naturalism, a post-colonial tragedy of position and misunderstanding (sort of a muted meeting of Ibsen and Dostoyevsky) that plays out like theatre before a neutral camera. As many other commentators on Raja have noted, the inexorable failure of the tentative relationship between Fred (Pascal Greggory), a middle-aged Frenchman living in Morocco, and Raja (Najat Benssallem), the 19-year-old Moroccan girl who works in his garden, is not due to ignorance but awareness. They are all too cognizant of the multiple barriers between them -- language, custom, the colonial legacy, a 25-year age difference, and a class divide that has written itself on their respective bodies, in how they comport themselves in the world and imagine their own individual possibilities. So much of this story is communicated through talk, but also reticence, posture, touch, abortive gesture -- in short, the stuff of the stage. On a conceptual level, then, Doillon gives us a picture in interpersonal terms of what, in the political sphere, Althusser called "overdetermination." When one obstacle between Raja and Fred (say, the cultural differences) seems momentarily surmountable, one or two of the other wedges between them flare up like a case of the gout, hurling them back into retreat. On the level of performance, the actors continually give us an insight into how physical want is stymied by society, how Fred, for example, can see himself momentarily reflected in Raja's eyes as someone desirable, only to have that vision erased by the larger world's inscription of him as nothing but a dirty old man, a vision he in part believes. But on the level of filmic construction, Doillon skillfully registers these separations and divides on our vision, with a deceptive transparency that coaxes us into thinking that we, "the enlightened," can successfully see through them.

He accomplishes this through two primary directorial techniques. First, he employs a hand-held, mobile framing in most of the exterior shots, bearing a surface similarity to Renoir. Like Renoir, Doillon achieves the effect of allowing offscreen space to continue to exist, serving to create an open, permeable world that extends in all directions. But whereas Renoir typically does this to afford his characters a higher degree of freedom, in Raja Doillon implicitly posits that larger world as a threat. For example, when Fred first engages Raja in the garden, working alongside her gaggle of Moroccan girlfriends, the camera keeps Fred and Raja together in the frame as it travels, while Raja's judgmental, mocking friends bob in and out of the periphery. One gets the sense of an urge to shake the yoke of social judgment, of a disapproving world that itself extends in all directions, but as such offers anything but freedom. The second, and perhaps most potent, of Doillon's dominant visual strategies is his disruption of conversational two-shots, passages of personal interaction that would otherwise be equally well-suited to the stage. In most every intimate scene between Raja and Fred, Doillon adopts a fractured version of the shot / reverse-shot, shooting not over the shoulder but at about a 30-degree angle to the speaker. The framing is nearly straight-on, and yet Doillon breaks the sequences up into individual shots that subtly align themselves with one or the other character's physical placement. We're seeing something in between the two usual tactics of cinematic grammar. Doillon implies that a two-shot would actually make more sense, but that division imposes itself on the scene. One could offer several different interpretations of where this interceding force comes from, whether it's directorial commentary, or a surrogate for our unconscious cultural coding of the relationship before us. There is really no specific reason for this wholly unnatural fragmentation of personal space, but its effect is absolute; people who should be joined by passion, curiosity, or even just basic human communication are kept apart, isolated in their own lonely sphere. We as viewers physically register this isolation, and feel it to be both artificial and ineluctable.

Jacques Doillon is still not very well known in the U.S., and I myself have only seen one other film by him, Ponette, which at the time made no particular impact on me. But one senses that his position in French cinema is more complex than we'd at first imagine. In his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze actually compares Doillon with Philippe Garrel. Garrel, scarcely better known in the States, at the very least possesses a reputation as a complicated maverick and a major experimental stylist, far removed from the surface affectations of naturalism. Whereas for Deleuze, Garrel recasts all human bodies into a ceremonial function, representing "man, woman, and child," Doillon displays "the postural poles between which the body oscillates" (198). In discussing earlier films by Doillon, such as Touched in the Head (1977) and The Crying Woman (1979), Deleuze describes Doillonian space as that of "the situation of the body caught between two sets, caught simultaneously in two exclusive sets" (202). That is, social comportment dictates that each exclusive social set has its own space, its own cliquish sphere of influence. The desire for a character to move from one to the other sphere, or, more problematic still, to move between two spheres, becomes in Doillon a physical and spatial difficulty, a virtual fragmentation of the body. To quote Deleuze at some length: "It is not that the character finds himself indecisive. It appears rather that the two sets are really distinct, but that the character, or rather the body in the character, has no way of choosing between the two. He is in an impossible posture. The character in Doillon is in the situation of not being able to make out the distinct: he is not psychologically indecisive, he would be even the opposite. But the predominance is useless to him, because he inhabits his body like a zone of indiscernibility" (203). That is, the body receives unwitting social inscription, finding that it is instinctually incapable of acting in accordance with the will, that "will" in the conventional sense is obviated. Deleuze's analysis from nearly twenty years ago seems sufficiently prescient with respect to Raja that in light of it, as well as the intellectual and aesthetic acuity of Raja itself, I can only conclude that Jacques Doillon is a subject for immediate further investigation.

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Dolan, Xavier

Xavier Dolan biography by Mubi, from Wikipedia

Xavier Dolan (born March 20, 1989), sometimes credited as Xavier Dolan-Tadros, is a Canadian actor and filmmaker. Formerly a child actor in films such as J’en suis!, Le marchand de sable and La forteresse suspendue and television series such as Omertà, La loi du silence, he attracted international attention when his first film as a director and screenwriter, J’ai tué ma mère, won three awards from the Director’s Fortnight program at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

After J’ai tué ma mère he directed his second feature film Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats), which was financed privately. It follows the infatuation of two friends with the same mysterious young man. Inevitably, their friendship suffers. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at the 63e Festival de Cannes in May 2010, to standing ovation.

Dolan says that he is planning his third film called Laurence any ways, about a transsexual, with the script already ready. Pending financing of the movie project, production is planned to start in fall of 2010.

As of September 2009, the Québec-specific French-language dubbed version of the animated series South Park features Dolan as the voice of Stan.

Dolan is openly gay, and has described J’ai tué ma mère as being semi-autobiographical. He is the son of Quebec actor Manuel Tadros.

Qui est Xavier Dolan ? | Xavier Dolan - le site The Site on Facebook (Translated from French) [Translate this page]

Son of Manuel Tadros, Xavier Dolan began his career in television, in over twenty commercials ( see commercials ) for Jean Coutu pharmacies, conducted by Andre Melancon. His name appears in the credits of many feature films such as I am Quebecois!, Claude Fournier and The Hidden Fortress, Roger Cantin, and some TV series like Omertà, Ouch!, Mercy and Gold.

In 2006, he played Julien in the short film Mirrors summer of Etienne Desrosiers, selected in Berlin, Festival of New Cinema at Image + Nation, Kiev, San Diego, etc. In 2007 he was Antony in the controversial film Martyrs by Pascal Laugier.

In 2008 he started producing and then producing his first feature film, I killed my mother , which he wrote the script two years earlier, at age 17. Anne Dorval, Suzanne Clément, Patricia Tulasne, Monique Spaziani, François Arnaud and Niels Schneider are in distribution. Submitted to SODEC and Telefilm Canada, the film was initially refused, then funded by SODEC after a second depot in independent component. In April 2009, the film is set at ⁴¹ 'Fortnight in Cannes. On 22 May 2009, he wins three awards by three (the three which he is eligible, the other a European film awards and a short film): the price Arthouse awarded by the International Confederation of cinemas arthouse (CICAE), the price of the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers (SACD) for scenario and price Glance young for feature films. The three panels highlight the uniqueness of its realization, truth, violence and poetry of the language and the "sweat" (Xavier Dolan had a tattoo on his left leg and right, quoting Cocteau: "The work is a sweat. "), the fury of the young filmmaker and his faith in his projects.

The film subsequently become Canada's choice for Best Foreign Film race at the 82nd Academy Awards, but be among the five finalists. However, it is named at the 35th ceremony of Caesar in the same category, but did not win the prize.

In fall 2009, he wrote the screenplay for his second feature film, Heartbeats , he performed with the assistance of three businessmen from the private sector, through his production company Mifilifilms. Carole Mondello and Daniel Morin, respectively executive producer and associate producer of I killed my mother, contend again. Filming lasted 25 days, starting in October in the Lotbinière region, near Quebec City. The rest of the filming takes place in Montreal area, especially in the notorious district of Mile End theater district of Canada's largest city. Xavier Dolan acts for this second work as director, producer, actor and editor in addition to overseeing the departments of costume and art direction.

Selected in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May 2010, when he returned for the second time in a year, the film is given a highly favorable reception from the public (a standing ovation from 8 minutes), and very enthusiastic criticism, despite some flats and mixed paper, including Le Monde, Liberation, Positive and Hollywood Reporter. Criticism and the film industry, despite the irritation that often brings her young age and his insurance, he conceded an undeniable talent. Some would say it raises rival, the New Wave pastiche, adding references, but its adoption by the Cannes Film Festival seems to be obvious. In introducing the film in Un Certain Regard, Thierry Fremaux, general delegate of the event, speaks of a "new generation quite exciting," referring to the style of Dolan, who already requires, in the eyes of many media Blogs, websites, the seal of originality and authenticity, which, although they do not unanimously n'indiffèrent person.

Xavier Dolan now lives in Montreal.

Xavier Dolan - Northern Stars brief bio

Xavier Dolan Biography - Xavier Dolan brief career highlights from Flixter

Dolan, Xavier photo and Video highlights from 123 Nonstop

Xavier Dolan | Facebook

Xavier Dolan's Top Ten All Time Film List (IONCINEMA.com) Eric Lavallee from Ioncinema, May 11, 2009

Xavier Dolan - Explore - The Criterion Collection Xavier Dolan’s Top Ten All Time Films, with brief comments, from Criterion (August, 2010)

Nisimazine | Interview-Portrait: Dolan, Xavier Eftihia Stefanidi from Nisimazine, May 21, 2009

Xavier Dolan sweeps Cannes Fortnight Ryan Adams from Awards Daily, May 23, 2009

Who Is Xavier Dolan? > The Lost Boy. Peter Knegt from indieWIRE Blog, May 23, 2009

"Québécois filmmaker electrifies Cannes" Les Perreaux and Elizabeth Renzetti from The Globe and Mail, May 25, 2009

Xavier Dolan: Quebec filmmaker kills at Cannes Brendan Kelly from The Vancouver Sun, June 3, 2009

CBC News - Film - Xavier Dolan's killer debut is Canada's Oscar pick CBC News, September 22, 2009

Xavier Dolan / Les amours imaginaires by Jason Anderson Jason Anderson from Cinema Scope (2010)

Xavier Dolan - Interview Magazine Jesse Ashlock from Interview magazine, 2010

Xavier Dolan wins the TFCA's new Jay Scott Prize - Brian D ... Brian D. Johnson from Macleans, January 6, 2010

CBC News - Film - Killer debut wins critics' prize for Xavier Dolan CBC News, January 6, 2010

Canada's Top Ten (2009) - J'ai tué ma mère / I Killed My Mother Canada’s Top Ten, January 14 – 21, 2010

Xavier Dolan's long road to instant success - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey from The Globe and Mail, February 4, 2010

Xavier Dolan's I KILLED MY MOTHER Snubbed: Genie Awards 2010 Andre Soares from Alt Film Guide, March 2, 2010

Montreal filmmaker Xavier Dolan cleans up at the Jutra Awards ... The Montreal Examiner, March 29, 2010

CBC News - Film - Cinema scope Jason Anderson from CBC News, April 12, 2010

Montreal Mirror - Best of Montreal 2009 The X files: First-time filmmaker Xavier Dolan is Quebec’s new cinematic demigod, by Matthew Hays from The Montreal Mirror, May 13, 2010

Standing ovation at Cannes for Quebec's Xavier Dolan - CTV News CTV News, May 16, 2010

The Playlist: IFC Picks Up Xavier Dolan's 'Heartbeats' & Antoine ... Simon Dang from The Playlist, May 19, 2010

Celebrities: Film: Xavier Dolan: Celebrities: Wmagazine.com Danielle Stein from W magazine, June, 2010

Heartbeats wins Sydney Film Prize Sydney Film Festival, June 2 – 14, 2010

Canadian director Dolan wins 3rd Sydney Film Prize | Reuters June 14, 2010

Xavier Dolan by Robbie Fimmano | Homotography photos by Robbie Fimmano from Homotography, July 2, 2010

Xavier Dolan :: All About 'I Killed My Mother' :: EDGE Boston Tony Phillips from The Edge, August 9, 2010

Canadian Wunderkind Director Xavier Dolan Is Crowdsourcing Financing For Next Film 'Laurence Anyways' The Playlist, October 8, 2010

Xavier Dolan's Les amours imaginaires a big hit in France ... Brendan Kelly from The Montreal Gazette, October 20, 2010

IONCINEMA.com interview with Xavier Dolan for J'ai tué ma mère Eric Lavallee interview from Ioncinema, May 17, 2009

Michael Giltz: Cannes 2009: Chat With Award-Winning Director ... Michael Giltz Video interview from The Huffington Post, May 24, 2009 (3:55)

Interview with director Xavier Dolan Video YouTube Video interview, October 1, 2009 (4:13)

20-Year-Old Xavier Dolan was a Cannes Sensation. Will Someone ... Kyle Buchanon interview from Movieline magazine, November 3, 2009

Xavier Dolan imitates life - Arts & Culture - Macleans.ca Tom Henheffer feature and interview from Macleans, February 5, 2010, also reprinted at The Rye Diary here: Xavier Dolan Imitates Life « The Rye Diary

Xavier Dolan, Anne Dorval, Patricia Tulasne & François Arnaud / I Killed My Mother Michael Guillen interview from The Evening Class, February 7, 2010

New Directors/New Films Video: Xavier Dolan - NYTimes.com Mekado Murphy Video interview from The New York Times, April 2, 2010 (2:18)

"Xavier Dolan: Flattered, but fretting about Cannes return" Brendan Kelly interview from The Montreal Gazette, May 14, 2010

Cannes: Xavier Dolan on making movies as therapy Chris Knight interview from The National Post, May 16, 2010

Again In Cannes, Filmmaker Xavier Dolan Talks Life, Love ... Brian Brooks interview from indieWIRE, May 19, 2010

Xavier Dolan Wows at Cannes (Again) | Hint Fashion Magazine Donna Tillotson interview from Hint Fashion magazine, May 25, 2010

Xavier Dolan :: All About 'I Killed My Mother' :: EDGE Boston Tony Phillips from The Edge, August 9, 2010

Q&A with Xavier Dolan: “My film is not homework that a critic should correct” Ryan Porter from Toronto Life, September 15, 2010

TIFF Talk | Xavier Dolan Back in Toronto with 'Heartbeats' - indieWIRE Nigel M. Smith interview from indieWIRE, September 16, 2010

Xavier Dolan's mistaken identity Jay Stone interview with The National Post, September 22, 2010

Xavier Dolan -- The Best Director You've Barely Heard About ... Michael Giltz Video interview from Queer Sighted, September 22, 2010 (8:39)

'Heartbeats' Director Xavier Dolan Talks Influences, Age, and ... Michelle Kung interview from The Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, September 16, 2010

An Interview with "Heartbeats" Director Xavier Dolan | Movie ... John Polly interview from Afterelton, October 4, 2010

Images for Xavier Dolan

Xavier Dolan - Zimbio more photos

FUCK YEAH XAVIER DOLAN photos from his first two films

Xavier Dolan - Email, Address, Phone numbers, everything ... photos from 123 People

Videos for Xavier Dolan

Xavier Dolan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Xavier Dolan on being gay, getting bashed" YouTube (3:15)

TIFF 2010: Quebec's Xavier Dolan addresses his critics (4:55)

I KILLED MY MOTHER (J’ai Tué Ma Mère) A 95

Canada (100 mi) 2009

I want to be alone
Stay here, you, and shut your mouth
I can't calm down
Let me rage and storm
I have too many sad thoughts
So I want to scream
I am not happy
Furious like a child

It's mania
It's mania

I am not bothered
I have a troubled spirit
Give my a little time
It'll pass with the wind
I want to be alone
Stay here, you, shut your mouth
I can't calm down
Let me rage and storm

It's mania
It's mania

I want to be alone
Stay here, you, shut your mouth
I can't calm down
Let me rage and storm (9x)

It's mania! (3x)

—“Vive la Fête,” by Noir Desir (Black Desire), Vive la Fete - Noir Desir YouTube (5:55)

Using $150,000 that he earned as a child actor, another $200,000 from Quebec’s cultural funding agency SODEC for post-production costs, and shooting for free in the homes of family and friends, the first thing that should be said about this startlingly inventive youth in revolt film is its resemblance to Jonathan Caouette’s autobiographical TARNATION (2003), an eye-opening revelatory film that documents his troubled adolescence growing up gay while attempting to develop a more personal relationship with his brain damaged schizophrenic mother. Xavier Dolan wrote the script at age 16, initially called The Matricide, much of it autobiographical about his love/hate relationship with his mother, prompting the director himself into the leading role (Who better?), while directing and producing the film at age 19, receiving an eight-minute standing ovation at its premiere at Cannes in 2009, but it was only shown in 12 theaters in Quebec, the director’s hometown, and rarely screened elsewhere, finally shown in a special screening in Chicago nearly two years later at the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Like Caouette, Dolan brilliantly intersperses various film styles, from slow motion to fast motion, confessional video diaries, wish fulfillment reveries, dream sequences, snapshots, home movies, all playing a part in expressing the full range of Dolan’s rebellious 16-year old character, 11th grader Hubert, who from the outset is in full battle mode with his exasperated single mother, Anne Dorval, who is nothing short of brilliant. In Hubert’s mind, his mother is the black plague of his life, as if she was born to irritate him, as she matches his narcissistic, self-centered behavior stride for stride, where for each personality, the world revolves around themselves. Since they both can’t be the center of the universe, they continually butt heads with one another, at times wailing away at each another in full-scale assault mode, oftentimes both screaming at the same time. This might sound monotonously shrill and one-dimensional, but Dolan adds humorous asides, expressing Hubert’s loathsome hatred as a kind of growing personal obsession.

What sets this film apart from other attempts at raw confessional teenage revelations is the joyous energy of youth and the sheer intelligence of the script, which is immediately noticeable, where the audience is willing to put up with the blistering fireworks sequences, which may not be for everyone, due to the hilarity of the language used and because so much more is thrown in, such as a color flourish and exaggerated range of expression of Almodóvar, moments of rare tenderness, observational moments seeing paintings, figurines, and familiar objects lying around the house, intimately personal scenes with Hubert’s free-spirited teacher, Suzanne Clément, who has a parent issue of her own, or the understated ease of the scenes with his gay boyfriend Antonin (François Arnaud) whose house becomes a place of refuge. Dolan’s room looks like any teenager’s room, but the attention to detail is significant, as is each piece of music selected by Dolan for the film, as the music is brilliantly realized, effectively representing his state of mind, especially a fast motion sequence that plays a song that builds from a gay love anthem into an angry punk song in French, J'ai Tué Ma Mère (2009) - Xavier Dolan - Noir Désir - YouTube (3:24), where he goes into his mother’s room when she’s not there and wreaks havoc, literally tearing it apart piece by piece, before he can be seen slowly putting everything carefully back into place afterwards. His unleashed fury symbolizes his growing frustration with his repressed inability to discuss his sexual orientation with his mother, as their incendiary relationship instead leads her to send him to a distant boarding school in the middle of the school year, leaving his life and friends behind, expressed in a surreal dream by Surface of Atlantic’s “No Sleep, Walk” I Killed My Mother ( J ai Tue Ma Mere ) Surface Of Atlantic ... - YouTube (2:15).

The camerawork by Stéphanie Anne Weber Biron is impressive, expressing the changing moods by constantly altering methods of expression, from close ups to medium shots to his reverential shots of the back of the head, which continue in Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires) (2010), using Black and White natural realism with hypersaturated color, where Hubert is the picture of a whining, self-centered youth who feels entitled to be heard, never comfortable in his own skin, showing artistic tendencies but also a disturbing inability to empathize with others, continually dwelling in his own universe with a dissatisfaction of the world around him. One of the other brilliant musical pieces is a drug induced party sequence at boarding school with a new friend Niels Schneider, also from Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires), where to the sounds of Crystal Castles - 16 - Tell me what to swallow (YouTube 2:14), his emotions are ecstatically pulled back and forth by all the new changes and developments in his life, including a love scene with Antonin as they are splatter painting the walls of his mother’s office before making love on the drop cloth, a sequence edited by Dolan. One never quite knows where this film is heading, but it must be said Dolan writes a killer ending, giving Anne Dorval perhaps the scene of the year in one of the more outrageous moments in recent memory, where it’s not just for show, it matters. What follows is an exquisite, amazingly tender finale that is heart provoking and real, that makes everything that comes before essential and necessary in order to truly comprehend the gorgeous understated complexity that we are privileged to witness. I can’t think of anyone else who has had two films initially screened the same year in the same city that were both potentially Top Ten films. It’s impossible not to like this guy who at the moment is a tender 21-years of age, as his stand-out humor and intelligence mixed with his reverence for what makes cinema vibrant and alive makes his films among the most extraordinary viewing experiences of the year.

I Killed My Mother | Cinema Autopsy Thomas Caldwell

The highlight of the day was the French-Canadian film I Killed My Mother about a 16-year-old boy’s turbulent relationship with his single mother. Despite being underlit, I enjoyed this comedy/drama for being so funny, perceptive and painfully familiar. The mother is irritating and the boy is frequently obnoxious and yet I felt sympathy for them both, strongly recognising the dynamics creating the conflict between the two of them. I think a lot of people will also identify with the situations that are present in this film either as parents or as children. It’s the sort of film that you probably shouldn’t see with somebody you are related to.

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

The title of I Killed My Mother (Canada), the feature debut of 19-year-old writer/director/star Xavier Dolan, is not literal but it is accurate. Gay high-school teen Hubert (Dolan), in full rebellion of everything his middle-class mother (Anne Dorval) stands for, especially her middlebrow taste in fashion and furniture (which surrounds his hipster lifestyle in the trapping of a seventies sitcom), tells his classmates that his mother died. It’s not just some laugh line; it hurts when the lie works it way back to her, just as all his lies eventually do. Dolan’s perceptive portrait isn’t particularly nuanced but it does have the slap of honesty in its portrait of both the sneering arrogance and haughty exasperation of youth that knows it all and the emotional fragility under the caricature of middle class garishness that is his mother. And while the numerous awards it has gather on the festival circuit surely have as much to do with the young director’s age as it does his talent, that doesn’t detract from his accomplishment. It’s a promising first film from anyone, let alone a 19-year-old.

I Killed My Mother | 24th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival

Multi-award winning debut from wunderkind Xavier Dolan about the troubled relationship between a defiant teen and his mother.

Sixteen-year old Hubert used to be close to his mother, but over the years their relationship has disintegrated. Living together in their garishly furnished home in Montreal, the pair are at constant war. Hubert finds respite from his turbulent home life in the form of his boyfriend Antonin and sympathetic teacher Julie, and confides in them while distancing himself from his mother. Eventually, relations become so fraught that Hubert is sent to boarding school, with separation proving the only option for the sparring duo.

In Hubert, writer/director/producer/star Xavier Dolan has created an intriguingly complex character. While his erratic behaviour is initially jarring, wunderkind Dolan's witty and articulate script cleverly exposes his vulnerabilities and self-doubts. His outbursts can be uncomfortable to watch in their voyeuristic intensity, but they are presented with such disarming honesty that beneath all the rage and hysteria, a sense of deep affection between this incompatible mother and son still prevails. The fact that Hubert is gay does add further complications to the relationship, although sexuality is by no means the focus here, and it is this matter of fact handling of the subject that makes for a refreshing and distinctly contemporary piece of queer cinema.

At just 20 years old, Dolan clearly has an eye for visual composition, and the film looks stunning. Flitting between different styles and tones throughout, this often unruly blend is perfectly apposite for a tale of uncontrolled teenage frustration, and feels at once the product of an audacious first-time filmmaker, yet still maintaining an impressive maturity and sense of self-assurance.

I Killed My Mother (J'ai Tue Ma Mere) | Reviews | Screen Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily

The turbulent relationship between a mother and a son unfolds with a compelling combination of savage fury and melting affection in I Killed My Mother. A stunning, semi-autobiographical  tour de force from writer/director/producer/performer Xavier Dolan, it is a film with the sting of shrewdly observed truth.

The coming of age drama is a well-trodden genre and Dolan’s film does have similarities with the likes of C.R.A.Z.Y. and Tarnation, but it boasts a caustic humour and some terrific performances which make it stand out from the crowd. Striking enough to win critical acclaim and entertaining enough to attract audiences, I Killed My Mother will have a busy life on the Festival circuit and should also attract substantial theatrical sales.

To say that 16-year-old Hubert (Dolan) and his mother Chantale (Anne Dorval) have a love-hate relationship is a gross understatement. They fight and revisit old wounds with the same relish as George and Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?. Hubert is a petulant, floppy-haired adolescent who has grown to hate every single aspect of his mother’s life from the messy way she eats to the horrible fashion faux pas that constitute her wardrobe. He isn’t shy about telling her. Arguments become shouting matches with Hubert displaying the kind of uncontrollable rage that would have done the late Klaus Kinski proud. “ We used to talk, “ murmurs his mother. “ I was four and had no one else,“ he roars back at her.

If I Killed My Mother was just a succession of vicious arguments it would quickly become tiresome. Dolan is only 20 but shows great maturity and assurance as a filmmaker in the way he captures both sides of this complex relationship. There are times when either Hubert or Chantale are so consumed by righteous anger or frustration that they burst into laughter at the absurdity of their own behaviour. At different moments both of them acknowledge that they can no longer live with each other but perhaps cannot live without each other either.

Dolan creates a smoothly flowing narrative that encompasses sparingly used literary quotations, montage sequences and moody black and white direct-to-camera confessions from Hubert. These all illuminate the central relationship but never seem pretentious as they might have done in other hands.

Dolan’s saving grace is always his acute sense of the comic. Chantale learns of her son’s homosexuality at a tanning salon when the mother of Hubert’s boyfriend casually mentions that they have been a couple for the past two months. Dolan also writes one stand-out scene for Anne Dorval when she berates a boarding school principal for suggesting that her status as a single mother may explain why Hubert has run away.

I Killed My Mother succeeds so well because it reflects a truth about human relationships that any viewer can recognise. The bond between Hubert and Chantale may be more extreme and exaggerated than most but in the pettiness, manipulations, reconciliations and heartache it expertly conveys the way we all have the ability to hurt the ones we love the most. 

I Killed My Mother -- Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Peter Brunette at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 19, 2009

CANNES -- In "I Killed My Mother," 20-year-old Quebecois newcomer Xavier Dolan has given us a somewhat uneven film that demonstrates a great deal of talent. In the vein of "Ma Vie en Rose" (if not quite as polished and mature) and other gay adolescent coming-of-age films of comic rebellion, it's a congeries of brilliantly achieved cinematic moments and repetitive, massively self-indulgent gestures of acting out.

In any case, the film is entertaining enough to attract paying customers and imaginative enough to attract critical support as well. It should be given a look by distributors in all territories and will have a full and happy life on the fest circuit.

Hubert, superbly played by Dolan himself, is a talented 16-year-old who feels superior to his doltish classmates. He's also just discovering his gay sexuality and wars constantly with his mother, Chantal (Dorval), at whom he rails throughout the film. Their mammoth fights are often hilarious, at least at first, as they pile on mountains of mutual insults. Eventually, Hubert is sent to a boarding school, an act which precipitates whatever tension the slim plot manages to conjure up.

The camera obviously likes Dolan, and Hubert comes across as attractive and sympathetic, even when he's screaming. The gay theme is overt and unashamedly offered, but underplayed and handled with enough delicacy to make it seem relatively unimportant in the general scheme of things. The real guts of the movie concern the conflicting feelings that all of us feel toward those we love the most, and in this area, Dolan shows himself to be wise beyond his tender age.

He also has seen a lot of movies, and is not shy about borrowing freely from them. The basic idea of telling his teacher that his mother is dead (the source of the title) comes from Truffaut's first film, "The 400 Blows." Delicate moments that mix accentuated slow-motion bodily movement with a heavily stringed orchestral score were obviously inspired by Wong Kar-wai's "In the Mood for Love." But none of this really matters, because Dolan's delight at having discovered cinema, and immersing himself in it, is infectious.

Dolan also invents a few tricks of his own, some of which work better than others. The many scenes set at dining tables (the locus classicus of cinematic family squabbles) are weirdly shot with mother and son side by side. Perhaps this is because it was just easier for a tyro director to frame the shots this way, but it more likely bespeaks a conscious attempt to heighten the film's artificiality.

Other entries in this vein are character names like Lemming and Rimbaud with which Doland amuses himself. Close-ups also are consistently and intentionally "badly" framed, with large empty spaces to the right or left of the visualized heads.

Another technique is the black-and-white moments of self-reflection that tend toward the philosophical and give the film whatever heft it possesses. The biggest faults are inconsistent characterization, a wavering tone, and occasionally unclear character motivation. But these storytelling problems are relatively easy to overcome, and certainly will be overcome in Dolan's next film. What is more difficult to acquire, and which Dolan already has in spades, is such an exuberant cinematic and comic imagination.

Review: I Killed My Mother - Film Comment Genevieve Yue from Film Comment, July/August, 2010

Much has been made about Xavier Dolan’s age. I Killed My Mother, written when he was 17 and shot two years later, demonstrates the kind of phenomenal precociousness that publicists adore, and the film’s success at Cannes—an eight-minute standing ovation and three Directors’ Fortnight awards—only confirms the debut director’s movie-made mythos.

As Dolan has explained, however, the pressure to complete the film before he was 20 was due less to ambition than the instinct to keep alive the rush of adolescent angst that inspired the project. Shot in his mother’s tchotchke-filled home in Montreal, the film’s looming expiration date was compounded by the semi-autobiographical nature of the story, and it’s what makes I Killed My Mother especially compelling.

Unlike teen dramas such as Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, which, from the farther reaches of adulthood, attempt to recapture something of those turbulent years, Dolan’s still there, speaking directly from his experience. His age matters because it gives him access to that fragile, fleeting moment before a child breaks away from his mother, the pain of which, as the film reminds us in uncompromisingly bitter fights and tense close-ups, is all too easily dulled through distance. I Killed My Mother may be touched by the brashness of youth, but it’s guided by a sensitive, self-assured filmmaker who’s able to go where others cannot tread.

There are signs, to be sure, of Dolan’s inexperience. I Killed My Mother is stylistically mercurial, cutting abruptly from the black-and-white YouTube-ready confessionals of Hubert Minel (Dolan) to stark, symmetrically framed scenes of awkward pauses, stray bits of baroque fantasy (one of which casts his mother as a nun crying solemn tears of blood), and liberal use of speed-ups and slow-downs of the action. The film is uneven and sometimes emotionally off-key, as with an unexplained gay-bashing incident late in the film. But timid it’s not. Dolan’s vision, however distracted, remains strong, and it’s not surprising that the film’s most striking sequence, a lyrical montage of Hubert and boyfriend Antonin (François Arnaud) dribbling paint onto a wall and then having sex on a drop cloth, was edited by Dolan himself. As a writer, director, producer, and actor, he throws himself into the film’s disjointed spaces, highlighting the ways in which multiple and contradictory states can be inhabited simultaneously, from Hubert’s unbearable self-indulgent whining to his nostalgic retreat to a seaside childhood home, captured in 8-mm tinged pink with age. Dolan deserves further credit for his restraint in portraying Hubert’s relationship with Antonin. While I Killed My Mother could very well have become a moralistic coming-out fable, Dolan wisely maintains his focus on the film’s central couple, Hubert and his mother Chantale (Anne Dorval).

Despite the title, there’s no crime here. Unlike the cataclysmic matricide of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, taken up in estranged terms in Werner Herzog’s oddity My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, I Killed My Mother is determinedly quotidian, albeit suffused with betrayal and disappointment. Chantale, whatever we may think of her gaudy taste (some of the film’s best comedic moments come from her literally wild faux fur ensembles), is not the worst mother in the world, and sometimes, when she’s fiercely defending her son to his haughty boarding-school principal, she’s truly admirable. In the midst of the film’s arguments and disavowals, it’s easy to lose track of its dramatic core, which is less about adolescence than moving past it. “I love you,” Hubert tells his mother late one night. “I’m telling you so you won’t forget.” Though the fighting inevitably resumes, the unexpected tenderness of these words lingers on. Dolan knows that as Hubert passes into adulthood, this moment will seal itself off. Its intensity will fade, leaving behind just a few words and images, tokens to remind us of, but also to shield us from, the searing pain of the too-recent past.

Maclean's [Brian D. Johnson]

There’s nothing unusual about a filmmaker launching his career with a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story about troubled teenager. Francois Truffaut did it, most memorably, with his feature debut, 400 Blows. But what’s miraculous about Xavier Dolan’s feature debut, I Killed My Mother (J’ai tué ma mère)—which opens this week in English Canada—is that that he did it while he was still a teenager. Not only that, but this Quebec wunderkind and former child star wrote, produced, directed and starred in the film—after financing it with $100,000 of his own money before convincing others to pitch in. A fellow film critic at Now magazine, my pal Norm Wilner, has compared this feat to the old story of a dog walking on its hind legs. The achievement is so remarkable that whether or not he does it well becomes almost beside the point. Norm goes on to say that Dolan’s feature debut is messy and at times amateurish. I see what he means, up to a point, and now that Dolan has reached the ripe old age of 20, even he looks back on his award-winning movie as “flawed.”

But the naive passion of the filmmaking, like that of the self-absorbed character Dolan plays on screen, is what makes I Killed My Mother so engaging. There’s no shortage of slick, über-professional movies out there. To see an incandescent talent captured in all its raw, youthful vitality is rare. As is so often the case with precocious intelligence, it can seem wise beyond its years. Although I was often appalled by the protagonist’s narcissism, and wondered if the filmmaker shared it, I found I Killed My Mother to be a remarkably assured work, endowed with that preternatural maturity and confidence only the young possess, and which comes but once in an artist’s lifetime.

Dolan stars as Hubert, a gay teenager at war with his mother, a divorced lower-middle class suburban mom (Anne Dorval) who seems to be doing the best she can. Everything about her drives him crazy, from the way she eats to her kitschy taste in clothes and decor. Hubert finds solace with his dreamboat boyfriend, Antonin (François Arnaud), and his mother (Patricia Tulasne), who is so aggressively hip and liberal-minded the film’s portrayal of her becomes almost as cruel as that of mother in the title—which, by the way, refers to Hubert’s attempt to dodge a homework assignment by claiming his mother is dead. Despite Hubert’s relationship with Antonin, the gay romance is quite secondary in the story. Hubert’s most momentous relationships are with women—from the love/hate melodrama with his mother to a platonic, and vaguely inappropriate, friendship that he develops with his teacher (Suzanne Clément), who has a motherly crush on him. (There are so many mother figures it could be an Almodóvar movie.)

Hubert treats his mom so hideously that, that at times it’s cringe-worthy. And even though the film is ostensibly on his side, I found my heart going out to the mother more often than not. But Dolan eventually gives Dorval the best scene in the movie, a fabulous ranting monologue on the phone. And even when it’s hard to take, the drama’s mother-son dynamic feels utterly authentic, and by no means exclusive to a gay teenager.

I Killed My Mother is styled as cinema about cinema—Dolan wears his influences on his sleeve, from Jean-Luc Godard to Rimbaud. But this is ultimately a drama of flesh-and-blood relationships, not ideas. There’s a tradition of this in Quebec. Over the years, even the artiest filmmakers—Gilles Carle, Claude Jutra, Jean-Claude Lauzon, Bernard Emond, Denis Villeneuve—have shown they like to sink their teeth into genuine narrative; in English Canadian cinema, narrative is all too often an armature to support a “higher” conceptual agenda.

After making a sensational debut at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, where he won four awards, and going on to win a bunch more—including the Toronto Film Critics Association’s inaugural $5,000 Jay Scott Prize for emerging talent—Xavier Dolan has given himself a hard act to follow. But apparently his sophomore feature has already been shot. And this one doesn’t sound even semi-autobiographical: it’s the story of a transsexual. Meanwhile this charismatic young man, who looks impatient to be a movie star, says he wouldn’t mind a simple acting job.

Xavier Dolan :: All About 'I Killed My Mother' :: EDGE Boston Tony Phillips from The Edge, August 9, 2010

Alternative Film Guide [Keith Waterfield]

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Sound On Sight Zornitsa

Nisimazine | Interview-Portrait: Dolan, Xavier Eftihia Stefanidi from Nisimazine, May 21, 2009

Jam! Movies Jim Slotek

SBCC Film Reviews » Blog Archive » I Killed My Mother (Xavier ... Byron Potau

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

I Killed My Mother (J'ai tué ma mère, Xavier Dolan 2009)--ND/NF Chris Knipp from Filmleaf

J'ai tué ma mère (Xavier Dolan, 2009) « House of Mirth and Movies Justine Smith

Welcome to Emanuel Levy » I Killed My Mother Emanuel Levy

I Killed My Mother Film Review | Front Row Reviews Emma Green

The Cultural Post (Anh Khoi Do) review

I Killed My Mother | Review, News, Cast | SBS Film Craig Mathieson from SBS

New Directors/New Films MOMA New Director Series, March 24 – April 4, 2010

Cannes '09: Day 11 Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 24, 2009

CANNES REVIEW | Purposeless but Sweet: Xavier Dolan’s “Heartbeats” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 16, 2010

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Donald Munro]

AFI Fest: Bellamy, The Red Riding Trilogy, I Killed My Mother, and ... Veronika Ferdman from The House Next Door

Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]

Movie Moxie [Shannon Ridler]

eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver

Three Imaginary Girls [Imaginary Embracey]

User reviews from imdb Author: pascalpelletier11 from Canada

User reviews from imdb Author: cultfilmfan from Canada

Nisimazine | Interview-Portrait: Dolan, Xavier Eftihia Stefanidi from Nisimazine, May 21, 2009

Cannes. "I Killed My Mother" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 22, 2009

“Your Mother” Sweeps Fortnight Winners Peter Knegt at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 22, 2009

Xavier Dolan sweeps Cannes Fortnight Ryan Adams from Awards Daily, May 23, 2009

Who Is Xavier Dolan? > The Lost Boy. Peter Knegt from indieWIRE Blog, May 23, 2009

Xavier Dolan wins the TFCA's new Jay Scott Prize - Brian D ... Brian D. Johnson from Macleans, January 6, 2010

Canada's Top Ten (2009) - J'ai tué ma mère / I Killed My Mother Canada’s Top Ten, January 14 – 21, 2010

Xavier Dolan's I KILLED MY MOTHER Snubbed: Genie Awards 2010 Andre Soares from Alt Film Guide, March 2, 2010

IONCINEMA.com interview with Xavier Dolan for J'ai tué ma mère Eric Lavallee interview from Ioncinema, May 17, 2009

Michael Giltz: Cannes 2009: Chat With Award-Winning Director ... Michael Giltz Video interview from The Huffington Post, May 24, 2009 (3:55)

Hysteria: Xavier Dolan & his mother at TIFF Peter Knegt from Xtra, September 9, 2009

Xavier Dolan an Oscar contender Matthew Hays from Xtra, incuding a Matt Thomas Video interview from TIFF, September 22, 2009

Interview with director Xavier Dolan Video YouTube Video interview, October 1, 2009 (4:13)

20-Year-Old Xavier Dolan was a Cannes Sensation. Will Someone ... Kyle Buchanon interview from Movieline magazine, November 3, 2009

Xavier Dolan imitates life - Arts & Culture - Macleans.ca Tom Henheffer feature and interview from Macleans, February 5, 2010, also reprinted at The Rye Diary here: Xavier Dolan Imitates Life « The Rye Diary

CBC News - Film - Killer debut Quebec director Xavier Dolan explains his Cannes hit I Killed My Mother, by Patricia Bailey from CBC News, June 5, 2009, reprinted February 4, 2010

Xavier Dolan, Anne Dorval, Patricia Tulasne & François Arnaud / I Killed My Mother Michael Guillen interview from The Evening Class, February 7, 2010

'I Killed My Mother' sweeps Cannes sidebar - The Hollywood Reporter May 22, 2009

Jay Weissberg at Cannes from Variety, May 18, 2009, aslo seen here: micropsia: "I Killed My Mother", de Xavier Dolan (Variety)

"Québécois filmmaker electrifies Cannes" Les Perreaux and Elizabeth Renzetti from The Globe and Mail, May 25, 2009

Xavier Dolan: Quebec filmmaker kills at Cannes Brendan Kelly from The Vancouver Sun, June 3, 2009

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

Montreal filmmaker Xavier Dolan cleans up at the Jutra Awards ... The Montreal Examiner, March 29, 2010

Montreal Mirror - Best of Montreal 2009 The X files: First-time filmmaker Xavier Dolan is Quebec’s new cinematic demigod, by Matthew Hays from The Montreal Mirror, May 13, 2010

CBC News - Film - Xavier Dolan's killer debut is Canada's Oscar pick CBC News, September 22, 2009

CBC News - Film - Killer debut wins critics' prize for Xavier Dolan CBC News, January 6, 2010

CBC News - Film - Cinema scope Jason Anderson from CBC News, April 12, 2010

Xavier Dolan's long road to instant success - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey from The Globe and Mail, February 4, 2010

The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [3/4]

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Charles Cassady, Jr.]

Crystal Castles - Tell Me What To Swallow [video] (without lyrics) YouTube (1:54)

Crystal Castles - 16 - Tell me what to swallow YouTube (2:14)

Crystal Castles - "Tell Me What To Swallow" (w ... with lyrics (2:15)

Vive La Fete - Noir Desir YouTube (4:12)

Vive la Fete - Noir Desir YouTube (5:55)

HEARTBEATS (Les Amours Imaginaires) A 95

Canada France (95 mi) 2010

When they devised Audience Choice Awards, this is the kind of film they must have had in mind, as this is a brilliantly inventive film, hilarious beyond anyone’s expectations, the most enjoyable film seen in ages, infectiously smart, wonderfully acted, devising the most inventive camera movements, original color schemes, and the absolute best use of music of any film seen in years, sensing the urgency, naivety, complexity and depth of passion of the characters. The savagely funny Xavier Dolan writes, directs, edits, provides the art direction, and stars in this comedy of observations, where a host of people speak directly to the camera revealing their own personal insight into relationships, what thrills them about being in a relationship, but also how bummed they are when people don’t meet their expectations, which is shown in that ANNIE HALL (1977) rapid fire style, one closeup face after another. Reminiscent of the colorful and early playful style of Jean-Luc Godard in the early 60’s with Anna Karina, Dolan uses the wacky energy and clever combination of personalities from Truffaut’s delightfully inventive threesome movie, JULES AND JIM (1962), featuring a dazzling display of wit and comic invention. Dolan himself plays Francis, gorgeous, bright, and gay, whose best friend, the acid tongued Marie (Monia Chokri) is straight, but provides a high fashion statement in every shot, always featuring a kaleidoscope of bright colors, while her stylish approach to smoking cigarettes, including the development of an individual philosophy around cigarette smoking, is unparalleled. The two of them fall for the same guy, Nicolas (Niels Schneider), a curly haired blond whose pouty lips and effeminate features seem to swing both ways, so they end up in the same bed together—for awhile, where their love theme seems to be Dalida’s multi-lingual version of “Bang Bang.” Dalida - Bang Bang (Les Amours Imaginaires) - YouTube (2:19). And yes, Dolan loves the use of slo mo and shooting the back of people’s heads.

There hasn’t been a more candy-colored movie since The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cher... (1964), which, by the way, was devastatingly sad and did not end up happy. Here the colors really do reflect the internal moods of the characters, which for the most part is youthfully upbeat. The film is constantly exploring the idea of relationships, where various observations cut into the movie at improbable moments, giving the film a feeling of community, as if everyone commenting is somehow personally involved in the making of this film. Rarely are characters ever seen alone, as almost always they’re seen in groups vying for one another’s affections, where Francis and Marie grow a bit jealous when someone else has Nicolas’s undivided attention, and then step over themselves with embarrassingly awkward talk when it becomes their turn, where being foolishly in love is certainly demonstrated repeatedly with this threesome, especially as the two friends are in competition with one another, each attempting to have him all to themselves. Dolan reveals shots from each other’s imagination, perspectives that show substantially different versions of how they envision Nicolas in love. There’s a hilarious dance sequence where Nicolas is dancing at a party with his mother, Anne Dorval in a marvelously brief appearance, a professional dancer who shows up the next morning with her son’s monthly stipend, where she has occasion to chat with Francis instead, calling him a gorgeously attractive “twinkie,” recalling how she used to bring her young son to dance sessions and all the other dancers would fall over themselves to swarm him with kisses and adoring affection, so affection is something that he’s used to. Despite their best efforts, which includes a trip to the country where Nicolas describes for Francis the proper technique of eating a roasted marshmallow, neither one seems capable of holding his attention for long.

When they inevitably both get dumped, Nicolas is as cold and cruel as they get, where the theme music changes to Fever Ray’s hauntingly atmospheric “Keep the Streets Empty for Me” Les Amours Imaginaires - YouTube (3:26, unsubtitled). The color sequences grow darker and more somber and the mood of introspection is more prevalent. Dolan uses slow motion sequences, where especially effective is a pulsating strobe light segment that shows faces in closeup, including a subtle changing look of the eyes, a technique that was memorable in FLASHDANCE (1983) but may have had its roots in Clouzot's ill-fated yet dizzily experimental L'ENFER (1964), which was never completed.  Much of the film’s appeal is the way the actors relish their roles, especially Monia Chokri who seems to wrap her tongue around some of the dialogue, exuding a witty sarcasm through invented pronunciations. She’s incredibly smart, but she also sticks her foot in her mouth when she gets nervous. Chokri and Dolan are two of the more delightful characters seen onscreen in awhile, and the screenplay gives them a full range of expression while Dolan behind the camera seems to be experimenting with a kind of ecstatic, uninhibited glee. The stylishly impressionistic mood of comic originality continues unabated throughout the entire film, where the energy never sags, and where the finale is drop dead hilarious.  While Dolan’s initial film is more personal and is perhaps the more audaciously accomplished effort, rarer still is one lured into an intelligently written comedy that offers both funny and heartbreakingly meaningful drama, from the superficiality of hip clubs to the despair of self-deception, where this is a free-spirited take on the absence and exuberance of love that is given enormous energy and appeal from both the writer and the performers. While Dolan will appeal primarily to the gay community, because his wit and humor reflect themes of gay tolerance and love, but it should be noted that Dolan may be the only filmmaker on the planet who can make a straight person identify with an appreciation for being gay, and not in any tragic sense, like MILK (2008) or BOYS DON’T CRY (1999), but in the euphoric brilliance of his art.

User reviews from imdb Author: lucyrybicka from Canada

Les Amours Imaginaires is potently beautiful purely based on its plot and the way the story is told. Its content is universal which allows anyone to relate to the story. It speaks about love, loss, rejection, and how love is all about our individual perceptive. This complex story breaks the stereotypes of sexual identity and shows that we cannot always chose who we fall in love with.

Dolans camera use and choice of colour is visually stimulating and beautiful to watch. He captures the beauty of Montreal and the culture that comes with it. The casting is incredible making the story very realistic.

What is even more important is that Les Amours Imaginaires is a story of young love told from the perceptive of a young man. We often see films about youth written or directed by film makers of a different time. This is a film that has a modern perceptive on the complexities of love.

If you have ever been in love, this film will speak to you like no other.

Cannes '10: Day Four Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 16, 2010

Thankfully, two robust, maniacally inventive movies about horny adolescents came along to salvage the day. To say that Xavier Dolan’s sophomore effort lives up to expectations won’t mean much to most of you, since his terrific debut, I Killed My Mother, which swept the awards in the Directors’ Fortnight here last year, has yet to open in the States. So just trust me: This French-Canadian kid (he turned 21 in March) is a born filmmaker, with the potential for greatness once he manages to shake off his many influences and develop a style of his own. Saddled with the lame English-language title Heartbeats—the French title is Les amours imaginaires, or Imaginary Loves—Dolan’s new film, from a narrative standpoint, is a nearly threadbare tale of unrequited love: boy (Dolan) and girl (Monia Chokri) meet hunk (Niels Schneider); both fall for him instantaneously; a pointed rivalry ensues (boy and girl are best friends); hunk remains oblivious and uninterested. But Dolan, plundering world cinema’s entire bag of tricks, makes this familiar tale sing, depicting his characters’ romantic obsession in gorgeous Wong Kar-wai-esque slo-mo and offsetting their lack of self-awareness with Woody Allen-esque direct-camera interviews featuring various people who otherwise play no role in the story. (These interviews are themselves worth the price of admission: “And I thought, if somebody died every time I hit ‘refresh,’ there would be nobody left on the planet, fuck.”) In the end, Heartbeats—man, it’s painful to even type that—feels a bit too thin and derivative for its own good, but it’s still hugely refreshing, given the insane degree to which art cinema is now ruled by what one might call The New Austerity (cf. Aurora, Day Two), to see somebody exploring the medium’s lush, seductive, expressionistic possibilities with such unbridled enthusiasm. Also, Louis Garrel is in this movie, but the movie ends seconds after he appears, which is how all movies featuring Louis Garrel should work.

The House Next Door [Matt Noller]

As a recent college graduate, I kind of hate Xavier Dolan. At Cannes last year, he won just about every prize in the Director's Fortnight for I Killed My Mother, a film he directed when he was 19. One year later, he's returned with Heartbeats (originally known as Imaginary Loves), which at the end of its Un Certain Regard screening received the lengthiest ovation of anything I've seen so far. He's just 21, and he's already directed two—two!—movies that loads of people love. I have completely wasted my life.

But there's no getting around the simple fact about Dolan, which is: The kid is just unbelievably talented. He has a natural sense of cinema that escapes filmmakers twice his age, crafting one indelible image and moment after another. And he's a pretty sharp writer to boot. Aaannd he's a fine actor with a commanding and unselfconscious screen presence.

Of course, being 21, he has yet to quite find his own style outside of that of his influences. Heartbeats draws heavily from the work of other filmmakers (mostly Wong Kar-wai and Jean-Luc Godard, but also, in a series of droll direct-to-camera interviews, Woody Allen), but not in an empty or reductive way. Instead, he uses their techniques to lend his bare-bones narrative—a boy (Dolan) and a girl (the startling Monia Chokri, evoking Anna Karina like crazy), previously best friends, both fall in love with an attractive but dim Adonis (Niels Schneider) and feud passive-aggressively over him—emotional weight and expressive cinematic verve. And it's not like Dolan isn't aware of what he's doing. His rather naïve characters think of their romantic lives in terms of the movies, so his references to Wong's exquisite slow-mo sequences, or to how Godard frames faces or plays with sound-image relations, express his character's emotions in ways that mirror their own thinking. Which doesn't mean that Heartbeats's appropriations don't sometimes feel derivative, just that Dolan's use of them is already so sophisticated that it can't be long before he figures out how to incorporate them into a unique personal vision. And when he does, he'll be the master that some other brilliant youngster is aping.

Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires) Mike Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily

The second film from the precociously talented 21 year-old Canadian Xavier Dolan is alternately infuriating and delicious. While Dolan’s visual tricksiness and mannerisms wear on the patience, he does achieve occasional moments of visual poetry and, appropriately bearing in mind his age, captures the despair and longing of young heartache. This time he also laces the angst with a dose of caustic humour missing from last year’s I Killed My Mother.

A ménage a trois that owes as much to contemporary French cineastes like Ozon, Honore and Lifshitz as it does to Jules And Jim, Heartbeats proves that Dolan is no flash in the pan and should build his reputation on the international festival circuit. Sold by France’s Rezo, it should also score sales and find a following with upscale young hipsters and gay audiences.

The film opens with a series of talking heads, who recur throughout the film, telling anecdotes from their experiences of modern love and dating. This sets the scene for the story of two young twentysomething types in Montreal, Francis (Dolan) and Marie (Chokri). He is a sensitive intellectual gay man, she a sharp-tongued woman who dresses in vintage. Both of them are attracted to a young man in their circle called Nicolas (Schneider), a sexy guy with a mop of blond hair who is new in town and looking for friends.

Both fall hard for the outgoing, intelligent Nicolas and each is led on by his flirtatious and tactile manner but neither can work out whether he is gay or straight or interested in either of them. The two begin a duel of sorts in which they try to outdo the other in his affections - buying lavish gifts for his birthday, vying for time with him on his own, showing up at restaurants where they know he will be. Finally when the three of them go to the countryside for a weekend, Francis and Marie get into an all-out scrap.

The film is a timely look at the longings of young single people, the pain of rejection, the excruciating agony of not knowing whether the object of your love loves you back. Nicolas is not all he is cracked up to be, of course, but both Francis and Marie have projected their own fantasies onto him long before they ever ask him what he wants. Christophe Honore’s muse Louis Garrel gives an amusing cameo at the end as another potential amour imaginaire.

Unlike the Mumblecore movement or any run-of-the-mill Rohmer imitators, Dolan doesn’t rely on dialogue to explore his characters’ relationships. His intrepid experimentation with visual language is not always successful but suggests great things from the young film-maker in the future.

Sound On Sight Marianne Perron

Xavier Dolan: wunderkind, neighborhood pretty boy, purveyor of that specific brand of Franco Mile End hipster stories. Anyone who doesn’t know about Dolan’s rocket to film-fest fame last year with J’ai Tué Ma Mère is at least two steps behind the game. The 2009 flick was released on DVD with a collection of festival stamps across the cover, and gained Dolan the privilege to debut Les Amours Imaginaires at Cannes. Pas pire. Yet despite rumors of standing ovations and having already bagged some prizes, Dolan’s second feature received mixed reviews. It seems everyone agrees on one thing: the 21-year-old is talented and has potential. Everything else is debatable.

Plot-wise, Les Amours Imaginaires – painfully dubbed Heartbeats in English – is sparse. Two BFFs, one male, one female, are introduced to the Adonis-like Nico and fall in love. Nico teases and taunts them into rivalry, they both make ill-fated declarations, hearts are mangled, and the two BFFs come back together in the end.

Visually and cinematically, however, the plot thickens. Slow-mo is used in excess to capture that heart-wrenching combination of beauty, infatuation, and vulnerability that often comes with the young coup de foudre: music is used to echo the same feeling and guide the viewer’s emotional reaction to the film; and cinematic effects are heavily orchestrated in order to play the whole experience like a string puppet theatre. The result is a film that does exactly what it sets out to do.

But how many people are consciously considering what it’s doing? Dolan’s small but notable oeuvre can be exactly matched with the age of the director at the time of creation. Its themes are universal, yet very coming-of-age. But Dolan, I argue, will continue to age gracefully. When one examines the themes and content of both his films, the result is the rough equivalent to a film school education, albeit one mediated by prime audiences and a much more generous budget. And it’s clear that Dolan is doing everything in his power to ensure that the gods of cinema (those people responsible for pesky things like funding and distribution) allow him to continue to grow up on film. For this, the director deserves accolades.

Turning to Les Amours Imaginaires, the hyper-stylized aesthetic that critics have criticized as cliché, the focus on form over content, and the immediately palpable connection we feel to the subject, all seem incredibly strategic. Dolan is using the tricks of the medium to establish that, yes, he can manipulate form, he can be clever and referential with the best of them, and what’s more, he can control your subjective experience and align it with the vulnerability he’s trying to infuse into his picture. He can make a movie. And it will win awards. His whole project is actually very Tarantino. And isn’t that Tarantino, the king of the homage, being referenced with the exoticized version of Bang Bang? Or have you all forgotten Kill Bill?

As for form and content, those are the age-old themes being turned over anew. The material of his films however, now that’s interesting. Aside from the aforementioned coming-of-age tendencies, Dolan’s focus on young queer men (played by himself, of course) is both acutely connected with the spirit of the times, and trying to establish itself within a larger artistic context. And from a gender studies perspective, it’s kind of amazing.

First of all, Dolan shows a daring amount of vulnerability. That’s good. It makes his characters important to us, facilitating this “other side of queer” coin he’s flipping. That’s good too. The world needs this; in the midst of gay movies that are over the top, or too obsessed with their gayness, or just this side of sincerity, it’s a solid step forward. Artistically, it’s echoing a mythological kind of infatuation and hijacking the way film has made that heterosexual. And it’s doing it in a way we can easily digest while appealing to our own personal nostalgia, homo or hetero. Think Margot Tenenbaum arriving to meet Richie by way of the Green Line bus – slow motion, windblown hair, and Nico pulling our heartstrings too.

What really fascinates me, however, is the gender play that’s going on in both Les Amours Imaginaires and J’ai Tué Ma Mère. It hit me midway through the movie: Dolan’s females are really ugly – hideous, even – when juxtaposed with his beautiful and tragically wounded male characters. Once the realization hits, it becomes disturbing and unavoidable in every scene. The female, more specifically the female heterosexual, is grotesque. Everyone is “human,” as they say, in Dolan’s films, but the males are human in a yearning, aching, tender way. They are beautiful, distraught, mistreated. Their potential is crushed under the weight of oppression, and their tragic lives are immediately soliciting an emotional reaction from the viewer. The females on the other hand, are human in the cruel and calculating way. They are the ones who sabotage, selfishly oppress, and seethe with the desire to be vindicated for their suffering.

In Les Amours, Marie swoops in for the kill. She struggles to wedge Francis and Nico apart, and Francis humbly bows his head and gives her space, the sadness in his eyes telling us directly that he’s being wronged. It’s more than a rivalry. Although by the end it’s clear that Nico is a narcissist, the feeling throughout is that he’s rightfully Francis’. Behaviorally, both Marie and Nico’s mother are vulgar. This is reinforced by their individual obsessions with appearance, to the effect that aesthetically, they’re pretty damned vulgar too. Going back to J’ai Tué Ma Mère, the Mère in question, you’ll recall, was crippled by a wicked witch personality and the tackiest style in the universe. The juxtaposition is clear: males are the Adonis, females the crone. This pattern is repeated in the subtle differences in attitude between the female and male “confessors” who describe their obsessive loves in Les Amours. And it’s front and center in the difference between the way the male and female characters wear their clothes: Nico and Francis are stylish, Marie and mother dearest look remarkably like drag queens.

Bottom line: go see Les Amours Imaginaires, and if you haven’t seen J’ai Tué Ma Mère, watch that too. Watch them and meditate on strategy, branding, and the homosexual experience. Then hope to God Dolan learns to be kinder to his women.

The House Next Door [Dan Callahan] incuding an interview with the director, February 23, 2011

Cine Outsider [Timothy E. RAW]

The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson] also seen here: JEsther Entertainment [Don Simpson]

The Lumière Reader [Tim Wong]

New York Observer [Rex Reed]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

exclaim! [Joseph Belanger]

The Village Voice [Karina Longworth]

Spout [Daniel Walber]

In the Realm of Cinema [Joseph Pellegrino]

Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]

Slant Magazine [Bill Weber]

epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

CultureCatch.com [Brandon Judell]

CANNES REVIEW | Purposeless but Sweet: Xavier Dolan’s “Heartbeats” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 16, 2010, also seen here: IndieWIRE [Eric Kohn]

CANNES 2010: Review of Xavier Dolan's HEARTBEATS (Les Amours ... Joseph Proimakis from Quiet Earth, May 24, 2010

Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]

Divine Beauty, Terror, Faith - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Little White Lies Magazine [Matt Bochenski]

Moviefreak.com [Sara Michelle Fetters]

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

Jam! Movies Bruce Kirkland

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jeff Robson]

The Cultural Post (Anh Khoi Do) review

FirstShowing.net [Alex Billington]

Review: Xavier Dolan's 'Heartbeats' Is A Stylish Love Triangle, But ... Edward Davis

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]

Cannes 2010: 'Heartbeats' - Movies Review - Digital Spy Simon Reynolds

GayCelluloid.com [David Hall]

Cinephile [Matthew Thrift]

The Soundtrack to ‘Les Amours Imaginaires’ Might be the Best of 2010 Kaitlin McNabb from Sound on Sight

User reviews from imdb Author: wickest from France

User reviews from imdb Author: oddity94 from Canada

Cannes 2010. Xavier Dolan's "Heartbeats" David Hudson at Cannes from The Auteurs, May 16, 2010

Montreal Mirror [Matthew Hays] An interview with the director, May 13, 2010

Cannes: Xavier Dolan on making movies as therapy Chris Knight interview from The National Post, May 16, 2010

FEATURES: Quebec filmmaking prodigy takes on the critics - CBC Lee Ferguson interview from The CBC News, September 15, 2010

Entertainment Weekly [Lisa Schwarzbaum]

The Hollywood Reporter [Peter Brunette] Peter Brunette at Cannes

Variety.com [Rob Nelson]

Time Out New York [Joshua Rothkopf]

Howell: Quebec's Xavier Dolan shows he's no fluke with second ... Peter Howell from The Toronto Star, May 16, 2010

Quebecer's 2nd film gets award at Cannes - Arts ... - CBC CBC News, May 23, 2010

CBC News - Film - Xavier Dolan wins Australian film prize CBC News, June 14, 2010

Dolan's Heartbeats nominated for César Award - Arts ... - CBC CBC News, January 21, 2011

Canadian director Xavier Dolan wins third Sydney Film Prize ... Reuters from India Daily News and Analysis, June 14, 2010

Heartbeats – review | Film | The Observer - The Guardian Philip French

Heartbeats – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Heartbeats: Puff pastry with a heart - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

Montreal Mirror [Matthew Hays]

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

Xavier Dolan lowers the pulse in his second film ... - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Director's visual style gives pulse to 'Heartbeats' - The Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]

Review: Vibrant love fantasy pulses with imagination - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt

San Francisco Chronicle [David Wiegand]

Movie review: 'Heartbeats' - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Chicago Tribune [Alexis L. Loinaz]

New York Times Stephen Holden

LAURENCE ANYWAYS A 96

Canada France (168 mi) 2012 Official site [Canada]

Two pale figures
Ache in silence
Timeless
In the quiet ground
Side by side
In age and sadness

I watched
And acted wordlessly
As piece by piece
You performed your story
Moving through an unknown past
Dancing at the funeral party

Memories of childrens dreams
Lie lifeless
Fading
Lifeless
Hand in hand with fear and shadows
Crying at the funeral party

I heard a song
And turned away
As piece by piece
You performed your story
Noiselessly across the floor
Dancing at the funeral party

—The Cure - The funeral party - YouTube (4:15), 1981

Easily one of the movie experiences of the year, yet this film was inexplicably chosen to bypass theaters from the entire Chicagoland region and instead played for less than a week in the barren and isolated realm of South Barrington in a 30 theater Cineplex that sits in the middle of an empty field, where at the time tickets were purchased the box office clerk had never heard of this film, where a friend and I were the only two patrons (perhaps all day, perhaps all week) to watch this incredible movie. Only 19 and 21 when he made his first two movies, now 23-years of age making his first film that does not star the director, he nonetheless writes an original script, directs, edits, subtitles, produces, and does the costume design for his third film, something of an epic romance, a film navigating ten years in the complex and turbulent relationship between a couple in the throes of love where at age 35 the man becomes an openly female transsexual, a gender shift that tests the boundaries of love and tolerance. The cinematic reach of this film is simply outstanding, where one would be hard pressed to find a more originally conceived film all year, where the fluidity of the slo-mo and hand-held camera movement by Yves Bélanger is balanced by perfectly composed shots, likely by the director himself, where the look of the film is meticulously shaped. The acting throughout is superb, especially the passionate and powerful performances of the two leads, Melvil Poupaud (who first worked for Raúl Ruiz at age 9 and a last-minute replacement for Louis Garrel) from Ozon’s HIDEAWAY (2009) and TIME TO LEAVE (2005) as the more subdued Laurence and Suzanne Clément as the fiery Frédérique, more commonly called Fred, where there are blown up moments of anger and melodramatic excess, but also heartfelt moments of quiet restraint that express an intimate sincerity, approaching a kind of honesty rarely seen in films today.

Not since Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (2011) has a film delivered so many sensational sequences, where the sheer originality factor is impressive, as every scene is beautifully set up, and Dolan’s exquisite use of music can be jaw-dropping on occasion. Some may feel cheated that the story only tangentially explores gender identification, never approaching a sex change, that it is far more about the tragic effects of an impossible love saga between two strong-willed, artistically inclined characters. Both, however, are clearly defined, where at nearly three hours in length the film is a marathon for all concerned, where the emotional peaks and valleys are explored at length, delivering cluster bombs of emotion, giving the film a novelesque scope, thoroughly taking its time, often lingering far longer with characters than other auteurs might dare, a common criticism of Cassavetes as well, giving the film a few jagged edges and a feeling of imperfection, where this is not the shortened product as a result of studio demands, but already feels like the extended director’s cut. Despite claims of youthful indulgence or exaggerated overstylization that make conventional filmmaking seem like ancient history, it remains one of the best and most convincingly moving films seen all year due to the director’s unflappable persistence in accentuating such a deeply felt, carefully nuanced level of humanism.

Set in and around Montreal during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the story spans an entire decade, using a completely naturalistic film style intermixed with surrealist bursts of inspiration, where perhaps no one uses music to the same dazzling effect as Dolan, expressing the state of mind of the characters while also providing an infectious dose of youthful energy. The film begins in an empty apartment, curtains flapping in the breeze, as a door closes like an ending chapter from a book, as Laurence walks outdoors into the light of day dressed as a woman, drawing looks of curiosity and surprise, perhaps even flirting with danger, set to Fever Ray’s “If I Had A Heart” Exclusive: Watch The Opening Sequence From Xavier Dolan's ... (2:23), where Dolan startlingly provokes the audience with a montage of close-ups and faces, where the viewing audience itself is reeled into this spectator observation mode, becoming part of a collective Greek chorus that bears witness to the events we are about to see. All in all, this is an exceptionally delivered opening sequence, before backtracking and telling the story entirely in flashback. Laurence is a 35-year old award winning novelist and literature professor who asks his students questions like: “Can one’s writing be great enough to exempt one from the rejection and ostracism that affects people who are different?” while Fred works as an assistant director in the movie industry.

All of Dolan’s films are comments on gay culture, where this one may dig the deepest, showing inconsistencies between the progressive idealization and the reality of everyday life, where the shallowness of looks and appearances somewhat unexpectedly is part of the equation, intruding into areas of desire. The couple’s happiness is expressed early on through a black light sequence, Laurence Anyways - Club scene [The Cure - Funeral Party] (1:25), where the untapped joy, energy and exuberance can be unnerving and a bit overwhelming, appearing larger than life, until out of nowhere, on Fred’s birthday, Laurence announces he’s been living a lie, that he can’t go on living as a man anymore, knowing in his soul that he was always meant to be woman, comparing it to holding one’s breath underwater for over 30 years, finally allowed to surface for air. Initially, finding this outrageous, Fred is aghast and thinks nothing could be more cruel, but soon comes around to realizing that whatever it is, irrespective of the abject negativity Laurence has received from both families, especially Fred’s bitchy sister, Monia Chokri, a dour picture throughout of pessimism and gloom, she needs to be there for Laurence, becoming her biggest supporter, helping her through the transition with hair, makeup and clothing. After a few failed attempts, Laurence arrives in the classroom dressed as a woman, to a pall of silence, broken finally by a question asked about homework, but the state of mind is sumptuously revealed to the music of Headman’s “Moisture (Headman Club Mix)” Laurence Anyways (2012) Best Scene YouTube (2:33).

Despite the cruel difficulties that Laurence must endure, where prejudice contributes to a whopping 41% attempted suicide rate among the transgendered, even worse for non-whites or those living outside metropolitan areas, the film exhibits various stages of shaky confidence, where her life is never trouble free, including getting the crap beat out of her, exactly as portrayed in Fassbinder’s mother of all transgender films, In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden... (1978), it also leads to a mental breakdown of sorts from Fred, who is ill-prepared to handle such a major psychological change, as she feels her life literally coming apart, where the camera follows each of them as they go their separate ways, feeling a bit like the tragic end of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cher... (1964), where another all-consuming love gets lost and slowly fades from view, yet remains very much alive in the minds and imaginations of the viewing audience. Fred’s re-entry into fashionable high society is expressed in a surreal entrance to an extravagant society ball, where she literally floats into the party, to the music of Visage’s “Fade to Grey” Laurence Anyways - Scène du Bal - YouTube (2:58), where the director can be seen lighting a cigarette at 17 seconds. Laurence maintains a somewhat masculine look and retreats into the fringe regions of transgender society, including a family of aging drag queens and burlesque singers that feel right out of a Fellini movie, preferring a self-imposed isolation where she can write and heal her own wounds.

Perhaps the scene of the film is set to Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony, a composition of manic and furious energy (“not a revolt, but a revolution”), where after continually being denied entrance back to her parent’s house, for fear of how this radical transformation might effect her father, she finally returns to the front door drenched in a downpour of rain, a truly pathetic sight, where her mother, a picture of chilly, overcontrolled perfection as played by the stately Nathalie Baye, simply can endure no more, picking up the television that her husband is continually planted in front of and slams it to the ground, inviting Laurence into the doorway in full view of her father, deciding straightaway to get a divorce, where instead of ostracizing Laurence from her home, her life will forever include the daughter she never had. For Laurence and Fred, however, attempts to stay together do not end so well, where we are treated to an emotional blitzkrieg of accusations and confessional outpourings, with an incendiary performance by Suzanne Clément (showing at least a dozen different hairstyles) that should elevate her to the cover of fashion magazines and star status, where she ferociously defends the man/woman she loves, Laurence Anyways - Restaurant Scene (English Subtitle) YouTube (2:31), utterly confused herself by what it all means, where Dolan repeatedly drags us through the mud of hopeless despair, rubbing our noses in the derailed aftereffects of a broken romance, until sheer exasperation drives them away. While they do briefly reunite years later, expressed with a giddy Surrealist happiness in the winter snow, Laurence Anyways - Ile au Noir scene (1:48), it quickly fades again into a distant memory, as the film is about how brutally hard it is to survive loving someone, where Dolan’s brilliance in depicting an aura of love transcends the transgender story of what it means to be your true self, as the film ends on a beautiful grace note back at the beginning, with a door opening at the first sparks of love, when “everything was strange and new.”

Cannes Film Festival: Lawless, Laurence Anyways, Beyond the Hills Karina Longworth at Cannes from LA Weekly, May 19, 2012

My big issue with 23 year-old French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan's second feature, Heartbeats, was the lip service the film paid to defining a generation's mating habits, while in practice devoting what seemed like 70 percent of the running time to music video-style montages of his hyper-stylish characters looking really fucking terrific. Dolan's third feature, Laurence Anyways, is the longest film playing in any of Cannes programs -- two hours and thirty-nine minutes -- and it would probably be more like two hours if all the slo-mo enhancing the many, many sexy montages set to early-80s club tracks (oh, right -- Visage was a thing) was run at regular-mo instead. And Laurence Anyways is also a little too loud in its claim to generational summation -- one character actually announces that her generation (the film is a period piece, tracking 30-somethings from the late 80s to the end of the milennium) is the first "ready" for alternative sexuality to be treated as a lifestyle mode, like punk, rather than a socail aberration. What redeems the film, sort of, is the ways in which that proclamation is later called into question by soap operatic, but almost-realistically complicated, human behavior.

Dolan is still crazy self-indulgent, but in Laurence (Melvin Poupaud), a straight man who tells his straight female fiancee Fred (Suzanne Clement) that he wants to live as a woman without ending their relationship, he's also created characters who contain multitudes, within an unwieldy narrative that doesn't always work, but is at times genuinely affecting, and not just affected. If anything, it's a bold manifesto aimed at critics like me who have slagged the filmmaker off as all style and no substance. At one point, Laurence is asked if looks matter to him. He responds, "Are you serious? Does air matter to your lungs?" Well, alright then. Fair enough.

Exclusive: Watch The Opening Sequence From Xavier Dolan's ... (2:23) Exclusive: Watch The Opening Sequence From Xavier Dolan's 'Laurence Anyways' Plus Full List Of All The Songs In The Film, by Kevin Jagernauth from The Playlist

Forget Xavier Dolan's age, forget the charges of overindulgence or reckless ambition and even forget the subject matter, a transgender relationship chronicled across a full decade. If you're looking for one of the most powerful and moving love stories you'll see all year, carve out some time and track down "Laurence Anyways." The third film from the Canadian director is a knock-out, that may overreach, but hits peaks and heights of true emotion that few films ever do and today we've got a little sample for you.

Below, you'll get an exclusive look at two-and-a-half minutes from the opening sequence of the film, in which Laurence (Melvil Poupad) endures the interrogating, questioning eyes of complete strangers to walk down the street as the woman he always believes in his heart he was meant to be. And the movie tells a beautiful story of his decision to live out, the ramifications it has on his girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clement) and how they cope as their journeys take them on separate paths. As we wrote in our review it's "Dolan's remarkably astute and observational eye on how a relationship between two people can evolve, deteriorate, rebuild and implode over time, that makes [the film] relatable and universal." And it's also unique and unlike anything else you'll see anytime soon.

So check that out below, followed by the full list and samples from the soundtrack, which leans heavily on the '90s (which is the era the film is set in) and features some Quebecois pop songs that lend an air of authenticity to the Montreal set film. "Laurence Anyways" is now playing in limited release.

All The Songs In "Laurence Anyways"

Fever Ray "If I Had A Heart"
Kim Carnes "Bette Davis Eyes"
The Cure "The Funeral Party"
Marie-Denise Pelletier "Tous les cris les S.O.S."
Sergei Prokofiev "Montagues & Capulets"
Diane Dufresne "Oxygene"
Johannes Brahms "Symphony no4 IV"
Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovsky "Solemn Overture 1812"
Headman "Moisture (Headman Club Mix)"
Jean Leloup "1900"
Ludwig Van Beethoven "Symphony no5 I"
Duran Duran "The Chauffeur"
Depeche Mode "Enjoy The Silence"
Julie Masse "C'est Zero"
Mitsou "Quel est l'enfant"
Patricia Tulasne "Ni trop tôt, ni trop tard"
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi "The Four Seasons - Summer I"
Moderat "A New Error"
Celine Dion "Pour que tu m'aimes encore"
Stuart A. Staples "Already Gone"
Erik Satie "7eme Gnossienne"
Luce Dufault "Les soirs de scotch"
Craig Armstrong "Let's Go Out Tonight"

Laurence Anyways Soundtrack 20 videos

exclaim! [Joseph Belanger] also seen here: Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]

Laurence Anyways (the third film from Canadian director Xavier Dolan) is a mesmerizing love story of epic proportions and extraordinary circumstances. After astonishing with his first feature, J'ai Tue Ma Mere, Dolan stumbled in his sophomore effort, Les Amours Imaginaires. His latest may need nearly three hours to tell its tale, but it's a testament to just how deep love can run between two people.

Laurence Alia (Melvil Poupaud) is a 35-year-old college professor, who is happily in love with his partner, Fred (Suzanne Clement). Thanks to two passionate and powerful performances, we can see quite clearly what a great bond there is between them. That bond is severely tested when Laurence announces to Fred that he can no longer go on living as a man when he knows, in his soul, that he was, in fact, meant to be a woman.

Naturally, Fred is thoroughly freaked out, but when two people are so intertwined in each other's existences, it can be incredibly difficult to separate from that. Their love goes further than just the physical, but can changes to the body eclipse that love?

Dolan continues to establish himself as a unique and fascinating Canadian voice (some call him Canada's Almodovar). Laurence Anyways spans a full decade ― the '90s, to be specific ― which allows Dolan to take his time with his characters and their relationship.

Transsexuality is still taboo to this day, so setting this story 20 years ago not only highlights how difficult their lives must have been, but also just how brave they were for choosing love and holding each other's hands throughout every moment of this great change.

By the time the film closes, it is clear that Dolan has pulled off a pretty tricky feat: Laurence Anyways transcends transsexuality to become a spectacular lament for love itself.

Review: Laurence Anyways - Film Comment Violet Lucca from Film Comment, May/June 2013

“It gets better, my ass,” a world-weary fag hag quips upon seeing the eponymous Laurence’s bloodied, beaten face after a barroom brawl. This swipe at gay advice columnist Dan Savage’s highly visible awareness campaign appears amid nearly three hours of melodrama interspersed with soaring music video sequences, but comes off as neither glib nor overwrought. As the 41 percent attempted-suicide rate of trans people makes clear, the prejudices confronting trans, homeless gay youth and non-Caucasian gays are more pervasive and entrenched than those faced by their white, upper-middle-class counterparts who live in (or have the economic freedom to move to) gay-friendly metropolitan areas.

Laurence Anyways, Xavier Dolan’s third film, acknowledges the messiness of transgender life, and the sizeable gaps between tolerance, acceptance, and actually going to bed with someone. The film opens with a POV shot of a slow-motion stroll down a Montreal street in which the camera is met with alternately hostile and curious stares. Anatomizing the disconnect between progressive idealist orthodoxy and the realities of day-to-day life, the film tackles the shallowness of broadly defined “gay culture” (parties, fashion, catty wit, sloganeering)—and the shallowness of desire.

Despite proceeding from the premise that the choices people make are largely arbitrary rather than motivated by some greater logic or plan, Laurence Anyways is relatively restrained in emotional terms, all the more so given the arc it describes. At the age of 35, Laurence (Melvil Poupaud), a respected literature professor in a happy, long-term relationship, announces that he has been “stealing the life of the woman [he] was meant to be,” and embarks on the process of transitioning from male to female.

Although family, friends, and co-workers are supportive, cracks open up: his students’ parents successfully petition to get him fired; his lover, Fred (Suzanne Clément), weathers her anger and denial to become a supportive if unfaithful partner, but ultimately leaves him to marry a wealthy lawyer. Now alone, Laurence spends five years writing poems that pine for Fred, and the lovers briefly reunite after the poetry is published as a collection. Yet despite the hollowness of her bourgeois existence, Fred cannot accept Laurence’s “created families” and the isolation of his existence, and leaves for good.

Laurence Anyways has its share of crying fits, screaming fights, and preachy rants (including one in a small-town diner that involves smashing plates), but these sermons are windows on the emotional states of Dolan’s characters rather than soapboxes for the writer-director. And whenever the characters are unable to express themselves, the baroque visuals, which marry Sirkian mise en scène with Eighties MTV aesthetics, do it for them: Fred’s monochromatic living room is flooded with water after she reads Laurence’s book of poems; clothes rain from the sky as the lovers joyously travel to the Isle of Black; Fred’s hair straightens and curls according to her adherence to social norms.

There’s also quite a bit of Fassbinder here: like Elvira/Erwin of In a Year of Thirteen Moons, Laurence looks more like a man with long hair in a dress than a convincing woman; in a scene reminiscent of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, shortly before making his announcement, Laurence takes shelter from the pouring rain while returning home from work and finds himself surrounded by women and girls; and, of course, there’s that pervasive sense of futility. Despite the excessively pretty packaging, it’s clear that there is no Hallmark resolution for the couple’s problems. Fred loves Laurence, but longs for “a man’s arms”; Laurence needs Fred, but can’t continue being a man (or apologize for his decision to become a woman). They remain true to their desires, because that’s the best they can do.

Slant Magazine [Chuck Bowen]

Laurence Anyways is the exhilarating work of a young director who will clearly try almost anything in order to make an impression. Xavier Dolan appears to be testing cinema's capacity to bridge the emotional distance between artist and audience. He wants you to feel what he feels, damn it, intensely and immensely, and his desire for connection and fulfillment as a filmmaker often cannily mirrors his protagonist's own tormented efforts toward self-actualization, both personally and professionally, as a male-to-female transsexual and as a poet and novelist. Dolan follows Laurence (Melvil Poupoud) over a period of about 10 years from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, detailing her struggles to reveal her true identity to her friends and family, particularly longtime girlfriend, Fred (Suzanne Clément), while weathering financial setbacks and pathetically obligatory taunts and humiliations. That's an order tall enough to undo a great many people, and Laurence often finds herself pulling toward Fred for refuge.

Laurence Anyways has the loose, scrappy feel of a movie that's been made on the fly so as to allow an audacious young filmmaker the opportunity to work through ideas that have been storing up within him for a long time. Dolan simultaneously borrows from the French New Wave, the early films of Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar, Paul Thomas Anderson, and, most pointedly, the entire career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The film is a stylistic blow-out of over-saturated colors, which Dolan often heightens even further with intentionally bombastic samplings of opera and kitschy pop songs, as well as extra-slow slow motion. Portions of the film are rigorously stylized, very obviously blocked within an inch of their livelihood, while other moments appear to have been caught in a single take with a handheld camera that wouldn't look out of place in a film by the Dardenne brothers. It's tempting, then, to write Laurence Anyways off as a youthful doodle, a wonderfully indulgent suggestion of greater things to come.

But Dolan's theatrics are ultimately revealed to serve a deeper thematic ambition, as he's fashioned a narrative that initially encourages your complicity with the sorts of prejudices that Laurence and Fred's unorthodox relationship invite: that Laurence might be mentally ill, or at least a tad "off," and that Fred is self-delusional in her conviction that she can remind her lover that he's really a man. We're particularly judgmental of Fred, mostly because it feels, at first, as if Dolan might be regrettably setting her up as an easy punchline meant to encapsulate all of conventional society's ignorance and intolerance. When we first meet Fred, her volume is always pitched at 10, and she strikes us as aggressive and self-absorbed, merely a brief speed bump on Laurence's path to living as she wants and needs to live. But then we see the full-blooded vulnerability underneath Fred's antics, and later the profound emotional bravery.

Laurence Anyways is so moving and romantic because Dolan has the daring to nearly toss off the issue of transsexuality between the couple after a while. He treats Laurence's desire to live as a woman as it would be treated in a perfect world: As no big whoop, and so the problems that remain between Laurence and Fred are the problems of...an everyday couple. In the tradition of Fassbinder, who was in turn inspired by Douglas Sirk, Dolan takes you so deeply into Laurence and Fred's world that you begin to see other, "normal," characters as vicious interlopers. We don't want these outsiders to break the spell these two cast and be denied this unmistakable passion.

Yet that passion, like all agents of anyone's potential happiness, is work; the film doesn't portray love as a birthright in the tradition of most insipidly self-entitled romances. Dolan is as unusually pragmatic about the specifics of a relationship as he is about Laurence's sexuality: It's evident that Laurence and Fred are deeply in love, but they know each other so well, and have fought so many internal wars with one another, that they basically can't even sit down to tea anymore without hurting each other. Laurence and Fred have worn each other out, rubbed one another down to nerves so raw that the lovers' insecurities keep poking out and drawing blood. Dolan uses Laurence's transsexuality as a metaphor without cheapening its practical social implications, as her coming out is an attempt to bridge the gap between how she's seen and how she sees herself, and Dolan understands that this gap, which one certainly doesn't have to be transsexual to contend with, makes connection of any kind difficult.

The two central performances are phenomenal. Poupoud's subtle physicality transcends the kitsch that characterizes the work of too many actors playing transgender roles; as a man he conveys the discomfort of a bug quivering against a corner of a shoebox, but he blossoms into a startlingly beautiful and poised woman who remains aloof and disconcerting. As Fred, Clément exudes a bravura primal intensity that's reminiscent of Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria. You sense these actors reaching out, invigorated by the challenging tonal contortions of this material, willing to try anything to break through the pat barriers of both a standard "issues" film as well as the general limitations of a cinematic romance that normally boils away the exhilarating mystery and pain of love, and Dolan more than honors them. It takes cojones for a filmmaker to chase Fassbinder's ghost, but it takes heart and talent to damn near catch up with it.

Movie Review - 'Laurence Anyways' - Into Womanhood, With ... - NPR Tomas Hachard

Laurence Anyways begins with several close-ups of strangers pinning the passing camera with looks of surprise, disdain or suspicion. The person under examination is the eponymous Laurence (Melvil Poupaud), a noted novelist who at the story's outset is about to embark upon a new life as a woman. Later, after the film has flashed back to show us her whole transition, comes an interviewer's question: "Do looks matter to you?"

We might expect Laurence, and the film, to repudiate such a blunt inquiry — to discount the importance of other people's day-to-day judgments and put their focus on self-knowledge and self-esteem. But such hopeful bright-side thinking won't do for writer-director Xavier Dolan. Laurence Anyways is a film tormented by the other's glances, its characters people who suffer precisely because of how hard it is to escape the shadow of outside perceptions.

Laurence, of course, faces the turmoil of such a gap at her very core. But so does Frederique (a superb Suzanne Clement), with whom Laurence maintains a turbulent relationship throughout Laurence Anyways. The couple's ups and downs are as much the focus of the film as Laurence's identity; they also underpin what becomes a rich and conflicted portrayal of Laurence's gender transition.

When Laurence comes out, Fred panics: "Everything I love about you, you hate," she exclaims. But she decides, in the end, to stick with the relationship, tenderly supporting Laurence — her name, being gender-neutral in French, is one thing that doesn't change — when she puts on makeup before her first foray in public as a woman, or when she struggles to find the courage to wear a dress to work.

"Our generation can take this; we're ready for it," Fred tells her doubtful sister (Monia Chokri), and for a time we believe her.

But Fred's initial acceptance — her excitement, even, at moving into uncharted territory — fades, and she begins to have trouble settling into life with Laurence as a woman. Fred loves Laurence, at times to a point that might seem self-destructive, but she can't completely dismiss her longing for a life unshaken by such upheavals, a life where her partner doesn't suffer from marginalization and often violent rejection.

In short, Fred can't entirely deny that she desires a "normal" life — a term the movie uses without ignoring either its inherent oppressiveness or the appeal of the invisibility that comes with it. At first sight, Fred, with her mildly manic behavior and bright red hair, might seem uninterested in anything as mundane as invisibility, but Laurence Anyways keenly makes the point that standing out might be less attractive when you have no choice in the matter.

Once Laurence emerges publicly as a woman, blending into the background becomes near impossible — though that's hardly the only consequence of her transition. After its opening montage, Laurence Anyways rewinds to trace Laurence's life over the course of a decade, beginning in 1989. At that point, the American Psychiatric Association listed transsexuality (and later gender identity dysphoria) as a mental illness, a fact Laurence learns only when she's fired without cause from her job as a high school teacher.

Laurence Anyways doesn't shy away from portraying these or other, more hostile injustices, nor does it have any patience for those who won't live and let live.

But the film also never judges Fred for her wavering commitment; it even shows Laurence torn between a true self and true love. During a particularly fitful period, Laurence shows up at lunch with Fred, wearing gender-neutral clothes and no makeup, rather than the feminine attire that's become her new normal.

"Why are you dressed like this?" Fred asks. "To please you," Laurence replies.

Laurence Anyways flows naturally, both thematically and stylistically, from Dolan's previous movies; here, though, he succeeds more than ever at incorporating his visual idiosyncrasies into the narrative. In I Killed My Mother and even more so in Heartbeats, the director's long slow-motion sequences and overbearing, eclectic soundtracks could feel like crutches, overused particularly during characters' moments of vulnerability.

In Laurence Anyways, with the exception of one heavy-handed scene set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, similar elements come together fluidly. The slow-motion, the jarring framing, the striking use of color now suggest the distance between Laurence and the world that contains and confines her; more than ever, Dolan's aesthetics accentuate the emotional honesty (and brutality) that he's always been gifted at expressing through dialogue.

Laurence Anyways also makes good on the larger ambitions of Heartbeats, in which Dolan tackled grand themes like unrequited love and obsession, but lost the richly drawn characters that were central to the success of I Killed My Mother. This film is as much a portrait of a loving if dysfunctional couple as it is an examination of identity. Without belittling the challenges and prejudices Laurence faces, Dolan places her story into larger contexts, posing questions about conformity, heartbreak, love and self-fulfillment.

Most of all, perhaps, Laurence Anyways examines what one character calls "the logic of the heart." Such a logic, Dolan pushes us to acknowledge, is nowhere near as impervious to outside influence as we might hope. It's untidy, unstable and most of all fragile — capable of being turned upside down by the simple power of a look.

Interview: Xavier Dolan - Film Comment Emma Myers interview, June 24, 2013

Shot in stylish slow-motion, the opening of Xavier Dolan’s transgender epic Laurence Anyways expresses exactly what it feels like to be conspicuous. Embodying Laurence’s point of view as he struts a powder-blue femme-suit down a Montreal street, the camera boldly confronts each fascinated and fearful face that turns to stare. Fever Ray’s “If I Had a Heart” plays over the sequence, setting the tone for another impeccably selected, pulsating soundtrack from the Canadian wunderkind, in his latest and most ambitious film.

A lavish Nineties “period piece” that indulges in the aesthetics of baroque excess, melodrama, and music video, Laurence Anyways spans the decade that follows the tumultuous, episodic relationship between Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) and his long-term lover Frederique (Suzanne Clément) as he completes the transition from man to woman. Following I Killed My Mother (09) and Heartbeats (10), the film boasts a running time just shy of three hours, and a boost beyond his famously modest budgets ($8 million instead of $800,000 for his debut).

In an onstage talk in March following the Museum of Modern Art’s screening of his feature films, Dolan credited the idea for the script to a van ride in 2008, when a forthcoming crewmember recounted the moment when her boyfriend told her he was—and needed to fully become—a woman. FILM COMMENT spoke with the ultraconfident Dolan, who had just finished shooting Tom at the Farm, on the eve of his 24th birthday.

At MoMA you spoke about two different types of films: those you watch versus those you feel. Yours are very much the latter. A lot of the feeling and mood you create comes through your distinct visual style. Are you thinking in images as you write, or do the aesthetics form during shooting?

When you’re planning a sequence like the ball in Laurence Anyways, you need to think about that before shooting because you have a production designer who’s asking you questions and to whom you’re giving directions. But in terms of the finality of the visuals—I’m talking about frame, movement, light, motion—this really all happens on set, in the spur of the moment. You look at the angle of someone’s face, or the environment around you now that it’s dressed and populated by extras and actors. You see the whole picture, and ideas appear. It happens really fast. I want the frame to be symmetrical—I’m obsessed with symmetry—I’ll frame it and think: “All right, we’ve got a frame and a lens,” and it just happens.

The question of influence dominated the discussion at MoMA. You said that you’re influenced more by still images in magazines than you are by films.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m not that influenced by directors. I was influenced by Paul Thomas Anderson: it happened once. When I saw Magnolia I was shocked by the scene with Julianne Moore and the amazing frog rain at the end of the movie. It’s bigger than nature and I love bigger than nature in movies. But you know, I don’t think to myself: “OK, what am I going to do in my next film? Let’s watch some Murnau and early Scorsese.” I’ve had limited exposure to movies; I’m young and I only started watching films when I was 15, 16. I hate to draw this line, but I’m talking about “serious” movies. Before then it was all very commercial. Whatever happened to be playing in theaters I would go see with my Dad or my mother or my cousins, like X-Men. The first X-Men by Bryan Singer are very good—I re-watched them the other day.

I’ve read basically every review of my films because I’m crazy and I focus on what’s negative and I want to know what people think—and why they think it. So many times I’ve been bullied into references and influences that were never mine by viewers that would project their opinions and associations and assumptions on me. I remember some journalist wrote: “Yes, we got it, you saw Godard’s  2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.” I had never heard of that movie. I know who Godard is, and I’ve seen 2 films by him. But let’s get real: ideas travel and everything’s been done, it’s all a matter of interpreting things again now.

I just shot Tom at the Farm and it was an exercise in humility because we were just restraining: restraining ourselves in terms of indulgence. We were shooting in 35mm and when we were doing closeups, it’s a reflex to lose all depth of field because it gives you this feeling of hovering. It was so strange thinking “that is not the movie we’re doing.” It’s a psychological thriller, and it’s dry and raw and rough and it’s in the country and its ugly. So that was an interesting exercise. And yet some people came to focus groups and were like: “I watched the movie and it was so you!” And I thought: “How is that? It’s impossible!”

I get the sense that you have a pretty strong hand in your own production design. Can you speak a little about the process in Laurence Anyways?

I know directors who are surprised that I do my own costumes, but I really like doing it myself. For Laurence Anyways I think I fitted something like 2000 different outfits. It’s shocking to me that a director would put all of his faith in one person blindly and still call himself a director. People have said to me: “We really liked the music in Laurence Anyways, did you choose that yourself?” Well, who did? No, my mother did. I told my mother: “Here’s the movie, choose the music and call me back, or send me an email.” Of course I did!

That’s what being a director is. You conceive a movie within a collective of people, a community. You work with people but they don’t work for you. It’s ludicrous to think people work for you: “a film by…” doesn’t exist. Directed by, maybe, but it’s a film from a collective, a group of people whom you consult and seek your counsel and advice and vice versa too. I love the way it all happened on Laurence Anyways because every department was colliding and merging into others and that’s the way it should work, I think.

Each one of your films has its own distinct color palette, which feels more stylistic than symbolic.

There’s no color scheme in I Killed My Mother, I can tell you. But yeah. Heartbeats is Marianne red, Francis blue. It’s really little boy, little girl. I was still young, and the only thing I could come up with was, let’s make the guy blue and the girl pink. For Laurence it was a little more elaborate because the way we schemed the film was we decided there would be chapters.

The word spécial comes up a lot in the film—as it did in I Killed My Mother—in reference to the concept of difference. The word doesn’t quite translate from French to English.

We used “special” [in English] in I Killed My Mother and it was a mistake. In Laurence Anyways we used “different,” because that’s our reflex in English. When people think of something abnormal, they’re going to say, “well that’s different.” It’s offensive because its so hypocritical and phony—like we don’t want to offend you but…

It’s hard to translate a film; it’s not about providing the English speaking audience with exact subtitles, it’s about preserving a sense of what the dialogue is like. And there’s nothing like being a dialogist yourself, so I do it with my friends. I do it with Jacob Tierney, a friend of mine from Montreal, and my friend Dave Hamelin who’s formerly in The Stills and now in a band called 8 1/2 who lives in Toronto. We just take a little time and subtitle the entire movie.

The concept of difference is a central theme in your films—looking at difference without necessarily understanding it.

Yes. My characters are always fighting against society—except in Heartbeats. Heartbeats was a little exercise. It was more of a cerebral effort. Heartbeats is to movies what an essay is to literature. It’s an attempt at expressing something, that’s why sometimes it’s a little preposterous.

I don’t find it preposterous at all, but you seem to have a sense of ambivalence toward that film.

I feel ambivalent towards my two first films, yes. I actually watched Heartbeats three weeks ago; I was depressed and I had nothing to do and I had finished all of Friday Night Lights [laughs]. I had seen a clip of Heartbeats on TV—and this is lame but I actually bought it on iTunes because I couldn’t find my DVD. I thought, well, I’m going to help myself… or something. [Laughs]

Patronizing yourself.

Yeah. So I bought it, and I watched it. And I had a good time. I thought it was funny and I was proud of myself and of Monia [Chokri, the actress] and what we accomplished together. Although I had the feeling every scene could’ve ended fifteen seconds earlier and it drove me crazy. I have such a different sense of editing now [after] Laurence Anyways and Tom at the Farm. So when I was watching the film, I was like: “End of scene. Now! End it!” A lot of people said the slow motion was so slow in that movie, and I don’t really agree, it’s fun and it’s ridiculous also and that’s what this movie should be; this movie loves its characters as much as it’s making fun of them.

Yesterday I was strongly annoyed by the movie, and regretted it, because I don’t want to be offensive to the public who love it. But it’s an artistic thing I think a lot of directors have, this sort of shameful thinking: “What went through my mind, why would I frame a shot like this?” But it’s also the proof that confirms you’re evolving and improving as an artist. I’d rather look back at my first films and think “it’s interesting but I could do better” and [actually] get better than watch my first films and think “what the hell happened? I was way better then, I’m horrible now.” The other way around is preferable.

You seem determined to assert something different with each of film and don’t want one film being compared to another, but what do you hope the word “Dolan-esque” refers to?

If you want to use such a word after only three films, I guess it’s strongly tempered women, flamboyant costumes, buoyant colors and kinetic scenes, and clips. I love to make parentheses. To say, let’s take a break now. Here’s a clip, a sort of musical intermission. Music is the soul of the film, so why not enjoy it?

If people say Tom at the Farm is Dolan-esque they would be mistaken. A lot directors out there promote their own signature and their own trademark and I’m really happy for them but its also very distracting when you watch a film to feel that someone is putting himself or herself up front and wont give you a break from remembering that this is a movie directed by someone. When you watch a movie you want to forget this and think this is a microcosm created for you and for the story and not for someone to show off and say this is my oeuvre—it’s tiring.

Last night you expressed frustration with regards to the limited audience in Quebec—and for Canadian films more generally. Do you think you would have succeeded in making the kinds of films you have had you started in the U.S.?

Definitely not. I don’t think there would have been a place for me here. The fights seem to be fixed a lot of the time. In the indie scene, maybe, who knows? I think I really had to have come from such a small industry like Quebec’s to have a margin where everything could unfold, otherwise I would have been swallowed here. There are so many people trying to make movies in the States. Everybody is trying to make a movie here, which is not the case in Quebec. We make something like 30 official films a year, and 60 total, if you include small-scale projects and things that may never be seen, so that leaves a lot of room for people who dream of a “life in the theater.” 

Cine Outsider [Timothy E. RAW] including a video interview with lead actors Melvil Poupaud and Suzanne Clément at the 2012 London Film Festival, March 27, 2013

Laurence Anyways - LFF review Ian Mantgani from Movies Are Better Than Ice Cream

Review: Xavier Dolan's Epic 'Laurence Anyways' Kevin Jagernauth from The Playlist

In Laurence Anyways, love anyways Andrea Gronvall from The Reader

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

Paste Magazine [Joe Peeler]

The House Next Door [Calum Marsh]

Laurence Anyways is Deeply Refreshing and Important - Village Voice Calum Marsh

Movies [Tom von Logue Newth]

EatSleepLiveFilm.com [David Hall]

Laurence Anyways (2013) Review - Film School Rejects Landon Palmer

Guy Lodge at Cannes from HitFix, May 19, 2012

Laurence Anyways (2012) Movie Review from Eye for Film Jeff Robson

ArtsHub [Sarah Ward]

'Laurence Anyways' Movie Review | Rope of Silicon Brad Bevet

Sound On Sight [Simon Howell]

SBS Film [Craig Mathieson]

theartsdesk.com [Graham Fuller]

The Film Stage [Dan Mecca]

Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]

CultureCatch.com [Brandon Judell]

CultHub.com [James Wright]

Flickfeast [Bruce Bailey]

Laurence Anyways Mike Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: Mike Goodridge

Laurence Anyways - Film School Rejects Simon Gallagher

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

Domenico La Porta at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 19, 2012

Cannes '12, Day Four: Bootleggers, transsexuals and falsely accused pedophiles, oh my! Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 19, 2012

CineVue [Joe Walsh]

Bonjour Tristesse (English)

CANNES 2012 | Xavier, Anyways: Quebec's Dolan On Making 'Laurence,' Returning to Cannes and Going Hollywood Peter Knegt interview at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 18, 2012

CANNES 2012 DIARY: For Xavier Dolan, An Unlikely Inspiration Eugene Hernandez interview at Cannes from Film Comment, May 20, 2012

Chris Knight at Cannes: Montreal director Xavier Dolan unapologetic for length of ambitious new film Chris Knight interview from The National Post, May 20, 2012

Interview: Xavier Dolan | Film | Slant Magazine Anna Tatarska at Cannes, May 20, 2012

CANNES Q&A: Canadian Director Xavier Dolan on 'Laurence Anyways' Etan Vlessing interview at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2012

Xavier Dolan on the appeal of Laurence Anyways - The Globe and ... Video interview from The Globe and the Mail, September 19, 2012 (1:39)

Laurence Anyways: Cannes Review Stephen Dalton at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2012, also seen here: Stephen Dalton

Laurence Anyways Rob Nelson at Cannes from Variety, also seen here: Rob Nelson

Laurence Anyways | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Ben Walters

Laurence Anyways - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

Through the Gender Labyrinth - Los Angeles Times Michael A. Holtzik from The LA Times, November 19, 2000, also seen here (pdf format): ai.eecs.umich.edu

Laurence Anyways Movie Review (2012) | Roger Ebert Olivia Collette

A Man Becomes a Woman in 'Laurence Anyways' The New York Times

Anatomy of a Scene Video: 'Laurence Anyways' - NYTimes.com The New York Times

TOM AT THE FARM (Tom à la ferme) A- 94

Canada France (105 mi) 2013

Round like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning
Running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of its own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half-forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Keys that jingle in your pocket
Words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly?
Was it something that I said?
Lovers walk along a shore
And leave their footprints in the sand
Was the sound of distant drumming
Just the fingers of your hand?
Pictures hanging in a hallway
Or the fragment of a song
Half-remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong?
When you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of her hair?

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel
As the images unwind
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

—The Windmills of Your Mind (Dusty Springfield) - YouTube (3:52), by Michel Legrand, initially featured in Norman Jewison’s THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (1968), sung by Noel Harrison

Once more, Dolan continues to dazzle and impress, though here in an altogether different style than anything he’s ever done before, adapting someone else’s work for the first time, a play by Canadian playwright Michel Marc Bouchard that he co-writes with the author for the screen, creating a much more accessible film experience, a Hitchcock suspense drama that is more conventionally restrained and not nearly as experimental as his others, yet it has still been equally ignored by American distributors which, along with his brilliant first two films, were simply never released, even on DVD, until many years afterwards. Despite consistently winning awards at either Cannes or Venice for all but one of his five films, Dolan remains almost unheard of in America, and this for a director who has just turned 25. All of his films are stylistically impressive, where they boldly kick a complacent movie audience out of their usual comfort zone with stunning cinematography, audacious camera movement, novelesque detail, naturalistic acting, and brilliant musical scores, where year after year his films stand out from the rest for his youthful energy, extraordinary artistry, and striking originality. Nonetheless, despite being on the festival circuit last year, this film does not have a distributor in the United States, so when it was being shown at the Cinetopia International Film Festival 200 miles away in Ann Arbor, Michigan, one had to jump at the opportunity, where it was screened as a non-Blu-Ray DVD in an old, run-down theater to a half-filled house as a midnight feature. Every single one of Dolan’s four feature films released so far have been listed among the Top Ten films of the year on this site, and this film is no exception.

The most understated of all the Dolan films, yet highly personalized, where the overriding power of the film all happened in the recent past, where the reverberations from a death play out onscreen, taken from someone else's play, with Dolan's imprint all over it.  It doesn't have the dazzle factor of his other films, as it's not nearly so visually expressive, yet it packs a punch, even if it's expressed with restraint in a kind of unfathomable situation.  Reminiscent of the altered psychological disorientation of German filmmaker Christian Petzold in films like Yella (2007), Jerichow (2008), and Barbara (2012), it's similar in the way it focuses on internalizations, yet uses visual cues to indicate an imbalance, where the world is not as it seems.  Both directors seem to thrive on psychological repression, though the German director is far more minimalist, while Dolan allows a bit of Sirkian melodrama to creep in. Part of the film’s intrigue is how the backstory remains at a distance throughout, where bits and pieces surface, but most remains hidden from view, even by the end, where the downbeat tone feels like it’s picking up right where Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) left off, in a searingly despairing sequence where the surviving partner of a deceased gay lover goes to visit his partner’s family that he has never met for the funeral, where in this case the 25-year old son, Guillaume, never acknowledged he was gay, but instead made up a lie that he was seeing a girlfriend in Montreal. While this eventually becomes known, it’s not at the outset, as instead the director uses a dual track narration in the opening sequence, where we hear a soaring, anthem-like, a cappela rendition by French-speaking Kathleen Fortin singing Michel Legrand’s “The Windmills of Your Mind” Xavier Dolan -Tom à la ferme- "Les moulins de mon cœur" Michel Legrand. YouTube (2:22), which plays as Tom (Xavier Dolan) is driving from Montreal to a rather bleak part of Northern Quebec’s rural flatlands, while simultaneously, rapid thoughts are written on a napkin that lyrically describe his emotional devastation.

With a murky opening set in a hovering fog, Tom arrives alone at a farmhouse, finding no one there, but lets himself inside where he sits asleep at the kitchen table, beautifully set up with interior shots, when suddenly someone is inside staring at him. The starkness of the sudden appearance feels like an awakening, or an apparition, allowing the real story to begin. Lise Roy is Agathe, Guillaume’s aging mother, who is obviously surprised by this intruder, but becomes hospitable once she learns he’s a friend of her son, remaining oblivious throughout about their true relationship, and ominously puts Tom in her son’s bedroom, seen sleeping with an article of Guillaume’s clothing next to his face. But Tom is awoken with a fright, as he’s assaulted by someone’s hands around his throat, where this is Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), the bullying older brother who actually runs the farm, who threateningly tells Tom how it’s going to be, that no secrets will be revealed, that they will play along with the fiction so as not to upset his mother. For the rest of the film, Francis hovers over Tom like a dog that won’t release a bone, slapping him around at will, subjecting him to continual abuse, literally making his life as difficult as possible. Agathe, however, couldn’t be happier by the visit, though she’s seething with anger when she learns the girlfriend is not showing up for the funeral. She asks Tom to offer a few words about her son at the funeral service, the same thoughts that were narrated at the outset by his blurry notes scribbled on a napkin, but when the time arises, he’s so overwhelmed by the violent intimidations of Francis that he’s afraid to say anything. He does choose a musical selection, however, which strangely begins in the middle of the song during a heightened crescendo, Mario Pelchat’s “Tears in the Rain,” Mario Pelchat --Pleurs dans la pluie - YouTube (5:32). Due to his rude welcoming, Tom heads out of town after the funeral, happy to be rid of the “hick redneck farmer,” but has second thoughts, knowing he would hate himself for running away, as his lover’s thoughts remain foremost in his mind, believing he can endure anything, even this fiction that denies his own implicit part in his lover’s life. Agathe expresses disappointment that Tom didn’t speak, but Dolan curiously allows Tom to express his own feelings through Sara, the fictional girlfriend, using a free flowing, stream-of-conscious emotional release that sounds more and more like himself, even expressing graphic X-rated sexual content, a stunning turn of events with Francis staring bullets right through him at the kitchen table ready to pounce at any moment, but Agathe is defiantly unashamed and breaks out laughing, “Sara’s quite the little whore, isn’t she?”

Francis is impressed with Tom’s dramatic revelations, how he kept to the guidelines of the established fiction, and actually introduces him to the chores of the farm, admittedly hard work, getting your feet muddy and your hands dirty, where Tom becomes quite the farmhand in no time, though delivering a calf brings back a rush of memories, where he’s assaulted by the vividness of his recollections in much the same way that Francis continues to inflict punishment. There’s a particularly brutal scene in the middle of a cornfield that leaves him battered and bruised, where the devotion to his dead lover is a horrifyingly painful exhibition, much like the masochistic extremes that Emily Watson endures to please her paralyzed lover in BREAKING THE WAVES (1996), yet there is also tenderness reflected in a scene where Francis and Tom dance the tango in the barn, reflecting the repressed homosexuality of Francis, where a guy with sociopathic tendencies becomes almost human for a moment, where one can see that the torment he inflicts onto others is a mirror into his own broken soul, making him a man who can’t live with himself, who takes it out on others by dominating them physically and inflicting pain. In a completely unexpected turn of events, Tom calls his friend Sara (Évelyne Brochu), the photocopy girl and real-life friend who is the subject of all the imaginary embellishments. Dolan adds a curious element of suspicion and dread about what goes on at the farmhouse, as people in town make reference to this dysfunctional family as if they are concealing an ax-murderer, where no one wants to go near the house itself, as the cab driver leaves Sara a healthy walk away. It’s interesting to see how she fits into her own fictionalized story, driven to tell the truth, but not willing to get pulverized by the psychopathic brother. Agathe, of course, is thrilled by her appearance, but disappointed she doesn’t reflect more sorrow from the loss. She is shocked to discover Tom has literally transformed into a world of make believe, subject to delirious ramblings, where he’s completely under the thumb of a delusional force, as if hypnotized. Perhaps the strangest turn of events is the way Dolan uses Hitchcockian methods of horror to express the psychological shifts taking place, where in one scene Tom actually separates from his face and hair, where he’s literally coming apart and losing himself before our watchful eyes. Dolan also changes the aspect ratio throughout the film, becoming narrowly constricted while also widening to super widescreen, perhaps reflecting the elasticity of the fluctuating emotional states. The musical score by Gabriel Yared is equally hysterical, reflecting an emotional imbalance through dissonance and shrieking strings. Because of the minimalist interpretation, leaving out pertinent details, the film is layered in ambiguities, where the motives never become clear, and where there is no real resolution, as the underlying horror lingers well after the film is over. Of interest, both Lise Roy and Évelyne Brochu performed their respective roles in the theatrical version of the play.

The overriding darkness of the film is quite unusual, reminiscent of Claire Denis’s equally gloomy portrait of a slow, poisoned, self-destruction in 2013 Top Ten List #6 Bastards (Les Salauds), yet also Alain Guiraudie’s gay-themed, sexually explicit Stranger By the Lake (L'inconnu du lac) (2013), another Hitchcock style thriller that examines a homoerotic attraction to danger, exhibiting a kind of precarious self-loathing where one surrenders body and soul, even potentially one’s life, for the dangerous chance at love with someone whose sexual charm is their unpredictability along with the criminal aspects of their personality, someone capable of murder, for instance, who feels no remorse, where loving them is accepting the conditions that you must live in a self-imposed blindness. It is this illusory emotional void that Dolan taps into, where you literally lose yourself for a chance at love, but are then double crossed by the unexpected turn of events when your partner dies, and you’re left with an unfillable emptiness. It’s not shocking that Tom would have a sexual attraction to the brutal behavior of Francis, but it becomes all the more intriguing as an extension of his overwhelming love and grief for his lost lover. Brothers have similarities, their smell, the sound of their voice, their shared rooms, where the allure can be irresistible, despite the sadistic aspects that come with the territory. This back and forth between fluctuating (sometimes invented) scenarios and conflicting emotions guides us through the film, where one has an unmistakable need for connection, irrespective of the consequences. The arrival of Sara alters the landscape with Francis, where their base physical love/hate attraction to the opposite sex allows Tom some cover, a moment to himself, which plays out in what is arguably the best scene in the film, where Tom sits alone at a bar in town and hears, in descriptive detail from the bartender (Manuel Tadros), an event out of the brother’s obscure past that has chilling consequences on the present, a blisteringly intense moment that makes one wonder whether Tom could actually have been part of this living memory, where truth and fiction collide in establishing emotional truth, where everything that came before leads to a new understanding in the form of an unexpected revelation. The film has a Sirkian thread of melodrama about it where the surface reality clouds a stronger, unseen force, where the murky waters of being gay is the underlying context throughout, especially the unmitigated violence that goes along with it, though this is never an acknowledged aspect of the storyline that deals more with issues of grief, anguish, death, deceit, and disillusionment. The way Dolan creates a psychological horror thriller out of being gay is starkly unique and original, like Fassbinder’s epic BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980), where the presence of Guillaume hovers over every shot of the film, like a haunting specter, and Dolan, as he does in every film, takes us places we have never been before, where this is mostly under the surface, displaying a bit of incensed anger at the world (and particularly the United States in its violent anti-gay phobia) in Rufus Wainwright’s song over the end credits, Rufus Wainwright - Going To A Town YouTube (4:06).

Senses of Cinema [Sarah Ward] March 2014

Tom à la ferme came simmering with tension and repression, the fourth film from J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother, 2009), Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats, 2010) and Laurence Anyways (2012)-wunderkind Xavier Dolan, easily reaching the apex of the festival’s entire program. Steeped in a style indebted to Alfred Hitchcock, the writer/director delves deeper and darker than in his previous pieces, whilst reclaiming his place in front of the camera. Desire remains his obsession, but with a thriller-like twist. As the bereaved titular character attending the rural home of his deceased – and secret, to the departed’s family at least – boyfriend, Dolan dances with his inner turmoil, first tormented by the blankness that greets him like a slap in the face, then torn when he finds his lover’s sibling both repulsive and alluring. A game is afoot in the intense, incisive story, examining the need for connection regardless of its consequences. As expressive imagery shows time and time again, while accompanied by a chilling score, the young Quebecois filmmaker has the aptitude and insight to match his sheer audacity. His latest is his most pulsating, pensive and penetrating work to date, and also his finest.

Apr-Jun Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Screw the backlash; I like this Dolan fellow. Granted, it's taken some time for him to hit his stride, which is more than reasonable given his dauntingly young age. (The fact that Dolan has completed no less than five highly acclaimed films by the age of 25 is remarked upon a little too frequently, a bit of the "talking dog" syndrome. It doesn't matter to some what Dolan has said so much as that he has said so much of it so soon. But of course this has its drawbacks. We are all watching Dolan grow up in public, and this Fassbinderian pace of productivity takes its toll over time as we know.) As much as I found Dolan's second film Heartbeats to be a kind of Godardian meringue of empty stylistic calories, the man edged into the terrain of the personal epic, with solid and occasionally staggering results. Lawrence Anyways, some have claimed, was a film Dolan made for the express purpose of getting into the Competition line-up at Cannes. And while the filmmaker may have come up short in that particular professional goal (UCR, baby, but next time, I swear!), this ambition no doubt helped Dolan to forge Lawrence, a rare, intellectually acute dual-character study of a love affair as its participants span a seismic shift. This change -- the man in the pair realizing he is trans* and beginning his life as a woman -- is both central to Lawrence and a prism through which a multitude of other social and emotional inequities are rendered visible. The nearly three-hour length is precisely the sort of "excess" that those predisposed against Dolan's filmmaking pointed to as Exhibit X, proof of the director's hubris and bombast. But it was precisely Lawrence's capaciousness that allowed it to explore class anxiety, feminism, mother / son --> mother / daughter dynamics, and other intersectional matters in sufficient depth. It wasn't the flat-out masterpiece it strove to be, but at least it displayed an all too rare commodity these days: intelligent rage.

This emotion is aimed in a new direction in Tom At The Farm, and Dolan takes an altogether different tack without diluting his fierce energy one iota. This is a film about homicidal homophobia, the sort that is often unconsciously relegated to some unenlightened past. Even though of course we know better than this -- any cursory research will set the record straight -- many of us hold fast to the idea that violence against GLBTQ people has mostly given way to acceptance (especially in liberal Canada) because this self-congratulatory lie, that "it" really has gotten better, makes it so much easier to sleep at night. Tom At The Farm finds Dolan taking anti-gay violence and bullying and doing something rather unusual with it. Rather than making the fully-expected (and frankly tedious) realist tearjerker or talking-heads-and-stats NFB documentary, he concocts a Hitchcock / Chabrol psychological thriller. By doing this, Dolan (ever the movie brat) is banking on affect rather than sympathy. The shock cut, the canted angles, the screech of the Herrmannesque strings -- all of these techniques do more than just bend conventional genres or film-historical signposts to fit a contemporary portrait of gay panic and desire. (That is, Dolan isn't "queering Hitchcock," which would be a reasonable but ultimately rather undergraduate enterprise.) He is calling on their accumulated power to jangle the nerves, to wreak havoc on the spectatorial body. Homophobia, so often relegated to the realm of sociology, becomes in Dolan's hands a matter of collective physiology, a palpable hit.

Exclaim! [Daniel Pratt]

Xavier Dolan, a director that turned heads with Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways, establishing himself as a wunderkind of Québécois cinema, boldly breaks away from themes of impossible love to advance into genre territory with his fourth feature film, Tom at the Farm.

Based on the Michel Marc Bouchard play of the same name, this highly complex tale opens with a hand scratching out a confessional eulogy on to a paper towel, immediately thrusting viewers into a place of sorrow and pity. This captivating moment cuts to a vivid aerial shot of a desolate road traversing the countryside with the titular Tom (Dolan) leaving Montreal to head to rural Québec to attend the funeral of his lover, Guillaume.

Guillaume's mother Agathe (Lise Roy) insists he spend the night, even requesting that he speak at the funeral the following day. Through an exceedingly awkward verbal exchange, it becomes quickly apparent that Agathe is unaware of Tom's relationship to her dead son. In fact, it's obvious she had no prior knowledge of Tom whatsoever. Moreover, while sleeping in his dead lover's childhood bed, Tom is assaulted by Guillaume's brother, Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), who demands he leave and not reveal to Agathe that her son was a homosexual.

Rather than run, Tom makes the decision to stay at the farm, which leads him to further abuses by the hulking Francis. That there's more deception and secrecy looming in the shadows of this family's past is implicit, making Tom's inability to escape, falling deeper into the unspoken background life of a lover he didn't know as well as he thought he did, one of psychological complexity and revelation.

Dolan's style here is to never quite allow the audience to understand the characters' motivations fully, yet, through his constant use of close-up shots and candid angles; the story unfolds through gradual reveals and fractures, eventually presenting a bigger picture.

Much as Tom suffers from a Stockholm Syndrome of sorts while adapting to this rural lifestyle and associated antiquated ideology, there's a simultaneous sense of repulsion and fascination that stems from the ever-shifting power dynamics on the farm. Just as none of the characters ever seem to know the full story, the audience is similarly left in the dark to ruminate in and interpret the inescapable atmosphere of fear and oppression that Dolan generates.

Looking beyond the story itself, Dolan's vision is easily the strongest asset of the film. His compositions paired with the beautiful, predominantly sinister cinematography from André Turpin (Incendies) are beguiling, creating an atmosphere of looming threat. Similarly, the decision to manipulate aspect ratio during heightened emotional sequences of escalating conflict, limiting our perspective to the intimate, forces engagement with Tom's victimization and emotional sense of isolation, reiterating the psychological component of this examination of homophobia.

Tom at the Farm encapsulates the notion that people aren't necessarily horrifying for the things they've done in the past but for what they're capable of doing. Moreover, it's a fresh, notwithstanding alarming, look at the daily threats homosexuals face in rural locales, revealing Dolan as an emerging, significant voice in Canadian cinema.

Film.com [David Ehrlich]

With “Laurence Anyways”, famously young and impressively pompadoured Québécois filmmaker Xavier Dolan proved that he was unafraid to embrace the cosmic drama inside the human heart, his epic three-hour opus believably extrapolating the intimate emotional developments of a challenged couple into the stuff of grand and gaudy opera. Every scene ends with tears and every tear is an aria unto itself, the subtitles like a libretto in blips.

Certainly his (anyone’s?) most extravagant film and arguably still his best, “Laurence Anyways” offers so much from Dolan’s imagination that it leaves almost nothing to ours, observing heartbreak with the same panoptic rigor with which Jeremy Bentham hoped to observe prisoners. The comparatively stark aesthetic of “Tom at the Farm” would be enough to represent a severe new direction for the burgeoning auteur, but Dolan’s latest work most fundamentally feels like a change of pace because of how it internalizes the psychology that he once lived to incept.

Adapted from a play by Michel Marc Bouchard, “Tom at the Farm” begins with the eponymous protagonist (played by Dolan himself, here scraggly and bleach blonde) heading into the vaguely homophobic heart of Canada’s farmland in order to attend his boyfriend’s funeral. The first images briefly locate us in the filmmaker’s usual mode as we see Tom’s hand scratching out a confessional, tear-stained eulogy onto a paper towel, but the title card effectively wipes the slate clean, cutting to a distant helicopter shot that will prove emblematic of the remove at which Dolan keeps us from his characters. That his name was “Guillaume” is one of the only two things we ever learn about Tom’s dead lover, though there’s much to be gleaned from the broken mother (Lise Roy) and brutish older brother (Pierre-Yves Cardinal as Francis) that survive him on the family farm.

When Tom first arrives at the grey and isolated estate, his first inclination is to run, but Guillaume’s mother insists that he spend the night and speak at the funeral. Tom’s sleep is later awoken by Francis’ mammoth arm clamping onto his face in the dark, the musclebound cowhand violently insisting that Tom leave ASAP, and forbidding the sullen visitor from telling Guillaume’s mother that her late son was gay. Francis is obsessed with perpetuating the fiction of Guillaume’s heterosexuality, going so far as to invent a girlfriend for his dead brother despite the fact that his tormented mom never openly suggests that she would have loved her son any less because of his place on the Kinsey scale.

Francis is such a threatening figure that Tom’s intended drive back to Montreal quickly assumes the urgency of a daring escape. But a logistical hiccup (or is it something more?) compels Tom to turn around at the last second and head back to the farm. It isn’t long before the young man is seduced into some variation of Stockholm Syndrome, learning how to milk the cows with lasers (yeah) and enjoying a bruising flirtation with the brutal man who mercurially alternates between playing host and captor.

Rife with the psychosexual tension of a Claude Chabrol potboiler and touched by the stranded unease of Li Yang’s “Blind Mountain”, Dolan’s thriller is a slippery little thing, so unstable that it occasionally even switches aspect ratios when Tom and Francis are tussling, as though the two men only achieve a clear sense of purpose while physically pursuing one another. Dolan is clearly smitten with the idea of putting his own twist on the genre, and the greatest takeaway from this staunchly opaque effort might be that the emerging director can put your heart in your throat as capably as he can tear it out of your chest. If “Tom at the Farm” is occasionally impenetrable as a drama, it’s seldom less than gripping as an exercise in suspense, especially when Dolan’s precise sense of timing revitalizes otherwise familiar moments – the film’s sole jump-scare completely embarrasses the obvious tricks of most contemporary horror directors simply by having the patience to wait a beat longer than expected.

Dolan doesn’t need much plot on which to mount his considerable suspense, and certain scenes feel like they exist only to provide a visual backdrop for Gabriel Yared’s urgently bleating string score. A knowing tribute to Bernard Herrmann, Yared’s music breaks the silence like the sound of someone falling up a flight of stairs, the mess of cellos often arriving almost at random as if the film itself were unable to understand Tom’s psychology. Dolan’s trembling performance isn’t especially exciting by itself, but one of the benefits of starring in the film is that he doesn’t need to betray the interiors of his character. Dolan the actor and Dolan the director are mutually comfortable with Tom being little more than a raw nerve, the two sides forming a closed circuit of expression.

“Tom at the Farm” seems to be drifting into more conventional territory when it introduces a major new character in the third act, but Dolan uses the latecomer only to deepen the emotional abstractions. Every revelation about Guillaume’s family history further complicates our regard for Tom’s actions, and what starts like a thriller about homophobia as a promise becomes, through its own inscrutability, a thriller about homophobia as a threat that’s seemingly always in season. “Tom at the Farm” may not prove that Xavier Dolan has matured (nor does it confirm that he had to), but it’s compelling evidence that the emperor doesn’t always need to wear all of his clothes to prove that he owns them.

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

Queertiques.com (Roger Walker-Dack)

ArtsHub [Sarah Ward]

In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]

TIFF 2013 | Tom at the Farm (Xavier Dolan, Canada)—Special Presentation Adam Hayman from Cinema Scope, September 2013

The House Next Door [Nick McCarthy]

Tom At The Farm - The Playlist | Indiewire Ben Brock

Film-Forward.com [Dionne King]

Movies [Tom von Logue Newth]

Filmmaking Review [Jordan Baker]

Sydney 2014 Review: Taut Thriller TOM AT THE FARM ... Kwenton Bellette from Twitch

Sound On Sight Gregory Ashman

Sound On Sight (Edgar Chaput)

Little White Lies [Sophie Monks Kaufman]

David Jenkins Little White Lies

Canadian Film Review [Alex Hutt]

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

Floatation Suite [Sheila Seacroft]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Daily | Venice + Toronto 2013 | Xavier Dolan's TOM AT THE FARM ... David Hudson at Fandor

Interview: Xavier Dolan | Film Comment Emma Myers interview, June 24, 2013

Tom at the Farm: Venice Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

'Tom at the Farm' Review: Xavier Dolan's Kinky Queer Noir | Variety Guy Lodge, also here: Guy Lodge

Brendan Kelly The Montreal Gazette

MOMMY A 96

Canada (139 mi) 2014 Official site

Hey, I wanna crawl out of my skin

Apologize for all my sins
All the things I should have said to you
Hey, I can’t make it go away
Over and over in my brain again
All the things I should have said to you

Counting stars wishing I was okay
Crashing down was my biggest mistake
I never ever ever meant to hurt you
I only did what I had to
Counting stars again

Hey, I’ll take this day by day by day
Under the covers I’m okay I guess
Life’s too short and i feel small

Counting stars again

Sugarcult - Counting Stars - YouTube (3:31), 2004

Once again, 25-year old Xavier Dolan remains one of the most relevant directors working today, assailing a whole host of social issues as he’s written his most explosive drama yet. Certainly among his most ambitious efforts, even with what may arguably be a few unnecessary moments of melodramatic overkill, but Dolan continues to make some of the finest films being made today, pushing the barriers of dramatic acceptability, where this won the 3^rd place Jury Prize at Cannes, shared with Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language 3D (Adieu au langage) (2014) about the film is how it compellingly lingers through several different possible outcomes, one a rival to that brilliant and unparalleled ending to Spike Lee’s 25^th HOUR (2002), where a lead character goes through a scintillating stream-of-conscious montage (where the screen actually widens) imagining a future that might have been (where her son morphs into an uncredited male model Steven Chevrin), before the dust clears and the gripping power of the present retains its suffocating hold on reality. Certainly one of the unique aspects is the film is presented in a highly unusual 1:1 aspect ratio, a perfect box, more reflective of still photography than cinema, creating a claustrophobic and highly congested box as the center of activity, with both edges of the screen unused, where the characters are continually moving in and out of each other’s cramped physical space, where Dolan’s challenge is creating a choreography of colliding images that match the highly volatile emotional world that is often spinning out of control. As always, Dolan’s actors shine, perhaps more showcased here than any of his earlier efforts, especially fifteen year old Steve Després (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) in one of the more ferocious performances of recent memory, an often violent and out-of-control kid with a severe case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in combination with Intermittent explosive disorder (IED), much of it spent institutionalized, aggravated by the death of his father, spending the last three years in a juvenile residential treatment facility. Similar to Destin Cretton’s unsparing look at damaged teenage youth in Short Term 12 (2013), Dolan’s focus hones in on the teenager’s point of view, bringing the audience front and center into the daily turmoil of his existence, where it’s extremely rare for a film to feature such a socially isolated and combative teenager without a friend in the world, locked up behind bars, kept out of school, so completely dependent upon adult authority, eventually kicked out of the only kind of institutionalized setting he knows, inexplicably leaving him to fend for himself at home with his equally unrestrained mother, Diane, Anne Dorval, who gives another scorching performance, once having played Dolan’s mother in his highly acclaimed first film I Killed My Mother (J’ai Tué Ma Mère) (2009).

The opening sequence adds a bit of science fiction allure, setting the film in the very near future when a new Canadian law makes it legal for parents to institutionalize their children for any sort of behavioral issue. This is like a warning shot across the bow, addressing the unanswered ramifications of a lax society that simply doesn’t want to have to deal with aberrant social behavior, preferring to hide their problems behind the walls of prisons or psychiatric institutions. Due to increasing pressure for schools and principals to measure success through statistical measurement, many of these borderline kids are being pushed out, where the schools don’t want them. Nearly half (approximately 47 percent) of the youth in juvenile detention have a diagnosis of ADHD, where 32% of students living with ADHD drop out of high school, while 50% are suspended. A recent series of articles investigating the harsh and often violent conditions of juvenile residential treatment facilities was written by The Chicago Tribune, Harsh Treatment - Chicago Tribune, revealing a common response to disruptive behavior is for attendants to administer “emergency” doses of powerful psychotropic drugs, with some facilities administering much higher doses than others, suggesting rules and procedures that are not uniform where we’re still at an early stage in understanding the societal impact. The article suggests there are some facilities where these kids come out more violent than when they went in, where the ADHD kids are at higher risk for incarceration, school failure, substance abuse and suicide. Dolan’s alarmist view of adolescent institutionalization is reminiscent to the highly experimental electric shock treatments received in the 40’s by adult actress Frances Farmer (Jessica Lange) in FRANCES (1982), the involuntary lobotomy forced upon Jack Nicholson as McMurphy in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1975), and Kubrick’s futuristic horror film A Clockwork Orange (1971), where it’s the government implementing a highly experimental brainwashing technique, supposedly eradicating the condition of societal violence through Pavlovian behavior conditioning, all films that depict a brash sense of fiercely defiant independence stuck in the hands of overcontrolling institutions that are designed to tame the wild and exuberant instincts out of humanity through psychotropic, sedative-like medications, making patients more manageable in an institutional setting.

Diane Després (Dorval) has been widowed for three years, where her husband’s sudden death led to increasingly unmanageable behavior from her son Steve, causing her to send him to a residential treatment facility, but he’s been accused of setting fire to the cafeteria, where another young boy was seriously burned. While the facility recommends sending him to a more restrictive juvenile detention center, Diane refuses to comply, believing his behavior would only grow worse under a harsher, prison-like environment and instead decides to bring him home. This blisteringly intense drama is fueled by Pilon’s powerhouse performance (which can’t even be imagined in an era prior to Brando or James Dean), enhanced by what are arguably the two strongest female roles Dolan has ever written, where Dorval is an extension of her role in Dolan’s first film, but perhaps more confident and self-assured, where she has a sexual swagger about her, where she’s as audaciously aggressive and bold as her son, both hurling profane-laden invectives at one another in the dysfunctional family manner of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), yet she’s also able to reel back the intensity when he grows overly violent, where her calmness is often due to sheer fright. It’s during one of these overly combative episodes that she hides behind a locked door waiting for him to calm down, when suddenly it grows quiet on the other side of the door. When she comes out, she’s surprised to find her son’s bleeding wounds being attended to by the neighbor’s wife across the street, Kyla (Suzanne Clément, equally superb), a shy and mousy figure with a noticeable stutter, a former high school teacher on a sabbatical, living quietly with her husband and young daughter, where her hesitant speech is reflective of an interior catastrophe that has left her emotionally traumatized, where her hypersensitivity is a perfect counter to Diana’s unhesitating brazenness. Somehow the three click, where they bring out of each other a more perfect balance, where the sheer vitality of Steve’s manic energy seems to fill them all with a needed surge of uninhibited inner release. Dolan expresses these cathartic moments with beautifully choreographed musical selections, including a 3-way dance to Céline Dion - On ne change pas - YouTube (3:45), becoming a ballet of interconnecting emotional spontaneity that literally captivates the viewer with spectacular cinematic force, like explosions of irrepressible joy that come out of nowhere and just as quickly dissipate into something else altogether.

The indefinable and continuously shifting mental state of Steve is in a constant state of flux, unpredictable from moment to moment, yet what is undeniable is the unconstrained brashness of his emerging masculinity, where he has no sexual outlet, so his flirtatious manner is inappropriately expressed with his mother and Kyla, often crossing the line, but it’s also clear they both absolutely adore this kid and want the best for him, where love exists in a minefield of unanticipated accidents and even further setbacks, where he can frighten the hell out of them, sending them into a distressed panic, followed by moments of unsurpassed joy and exhilaration. The audacity of the film, with its slo-mo shots, operatic use of 90’s music, and the sheer range of emotions, the tragedy, the hope and heartbreak, the shattering experiences that comprise the narrative storyline, where despite the bombastic melodrama that is like adrenaline racing through the veins, there are also more subtle, nuanced clues that exist in a quiet reverie of their own, fleeting images that have the capacity to affect the viewer, like Steve riding his skateboard wearing headphones as we hear Counting Crows “Colorblind,” Mommy Movie CLIP - Colorblind (2015) - Xavier Dolan Movie HD YouTube (1:25), where the music exudes a distinct feeling of alienated disconnection in this depiction of living in a world all his own, or a more euphoric sequence set to Oasis - Wonderwall - Official Video - YouTube (4:40) that opens with Steve literally opening the frame with his hands to widescreen, where he skateboards through the streets alongside Diane and Kyla on their bikes in a rush of momentary elation, or a dim, unlit moment standing in the middle of the road when Steve tries to pour out his heart to Kyla while she’s being called inside to dinner, both existing as if in another dimension, pulled from different directions, or a photograph in Kyla’s bedroom of herself and her son, who is never mentioned or referred to, but who is obviously the source of insurmountable loss in her life. Defined by her selflessness and vulnerability, Kyla is the near-mute reincarnation of Giuletta Masina’s Chaplinesque Gelsomina in LA STRADA (1954), who bares her soul each and every day, somehow finding herself back at ground zero in another human catastrophe, where by putting out the fires they are only postponing the inevitable, as Steve is literally an accident waiting to explode—it’s only a matter of time. A passion play of volatile emotions and combustible energy, the futuristic implications extending to society-at-large pervade throughout the entire film, casting a lengthening shadow over the whole glorious affair, creating an underlying layer of moral incertitude that will continually plague our contemporary existence. The allure of Dolan’s film is the free-spirited message of tolerance and openness, where nothing is hid in the closet to fester and grow ugly, as political incorrectness exists throughout this film, as if intentionally placed, where human flaws are exposed as the bread and butter of life, as everyone is not dealt an even hand, but you live with what you’ve got. This confounding and often messy affair is a throwback to the Cassavetes view of art, a modernistic and completely ahead-of-it’s-time credo that thrives on the beauty of individual expression, where dealing creatively with the complexities of life’s problems is accompanied by a liberating feeling of giddy exhilaration. The torch has been passed.

Movie Mezzanine [Tom Clift]

25-year-old wunderkind Xavier Dolan has been a favourite at the Sydney Film Festival since his sophomore feature, Heartbeats, won the top prize in 2010. His fifth feature is Mommy, an unbridled domestic melodrama about a mother and her troubled teenage son. But what really makes Dolan’s latest stand out is the director’s bold decision to restrict the edges of his frame. Shot in 1:1 aspect ratio, this movie takes place inside a perfect square.

Anne Dorval is phenomenally good as the brassy widow Dianne, as is Antoine Olivier Pilon as her bombastic and unpredictable Simon; together, mother and son are truly a force to be reckoned with. Dolan paints in big, audacious brush stroke, filling his film with plenty of humour and sweeping emotional stakes. The heights of the drama make the framing choice that much more baffling. That is, until a moment of truly transcendental cinema, when the reason for the decision becomes clear. A stunningly affecting piece of filmmaking.

The House Next Door [Tomas Hachard]

For a director whose characters regularly display an abundance of melodramatic sentiment, Xavier Dolan leaves himself plenty of emotional cover in his movies. His stance isn't ironic exactly, but he employs an assortment of stylistic elements—long, pop-soundtracked montages, exaggerated scene-ending slow-motion shots—that, through their extravagance, stop him just short of owning his characters' emotions. In Mommy, his Cannes-anointed film about the dysfunctional relationship between the titular mother, Diane (Anne Dorval), and her ADHD-suffering son, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), Dolan brings in a new aesthetic quirk. He films almost entirely in a square aspect ratio, which immediately recalls an Instagram frame and presses the characters together, heightening the tension in a mother-son relationship that's already at a fever pitch: Steve calls Diane a whore, bitch, and much more, and the two are always on the verge of violence.

Dolan does let his images splash across the entire screen twice in the film, in one instance with a flash of heavy-handed self-awareness as Steve puts his hands to the edges of the frame and pushes the shot into widescreen. The moment is worth mentioning because it inserts a wink of artificiality into an otherwise exuberant scene, and becomes yet another hesitation on Dolan's part to embrace sincerity. The success of Dolan's movies has always depended on whether an honest emotional core can eventually rise above such tendencies. That happened in Laurence Anyways, far and away his best film, largely because of its performances, including one from Suzanne Clément, who in Mommy has another exemplary turn as Diane and Steve's neighbor, Kyla.

There are other standout elements in Mommy: a touching dance scene in the kitchen where, for a moment, confidence and joy prevail over a frail life; a tender and quiet conversation between Steve and Kyla; a euphoric montage toward the end. In these moments, Dolan conveys an overwhelming care and love for life, which isn't surprising because he's a director with tremendous heart—his most endearing quality when he chooses to present it. But he's also a director too prone to putting on airs, and in Mommy these two sides of him struggle for supremacy, neither quite winning the day and leaving the final outcome to be settled in his next film.

In Review Online [Calum Reed]

At the age of just 25, French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan has already directed five feature films, with four of them having played at the London Film Festival. His new film Mommy chronicles the testy relationship between Diane (Anne Dorval) and her volatile son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon). Having been expelled from boarding school for his behavior, Diane takes it upon herself to homeschool Steve, enlisting help from her teacher neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clément).

Following the relatively concise Tom at the Farm (2013), Dolan appears to be quelling the impulsivity that dragged Laurence Anyways (2012) to an unnecessary 160-minute length. While well over two hours, Mommy doesn’t feel nearly as overextended, in part due to the magnetism of the performances, but also because Dolan has chosen to prioritize story over style this time around. The music-video-style montages present in Laurence Anyways are back, however, as Dolan manages to fit the entirety of Dido’s “White Flag” and Oasis’s “Wonderwall” as accompaniment for shopping trips and skateboarding excursions. And though it’s generous of Dolan to pay tribute to fellow French-Canadian artist Céline Dion by having Steve dance to “On ne change pas” in one scene, there doesn’t seem to be an especially compelling reason for its inclusion in this film. Aside from the pop music on its soundtrack, the most notable style choice in Mommy is Dolan’s bold decision to present the film in a 1:1 aspect ratio. Designed to emphasize the claustrophobia of a new familial situation, and the difficulty of these two off-the-wall characters being forced into the same living space, this risk works wonderfully, recalling the early work of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne in making domestic struggle seem as contained and inescapable as possible.

Even if it’s likely that Mommy comes from an autobiographical place for Dolan, that doesn’t make some of the plot mechanics feel any less forced, most egregiously when, late in the film, two of the characters take needlessly drastic actions which force the film into an unnecessarily overwrought climax. Still, the characters are often so richly drawn, and the performances so convincing, that its clumsy plotting matters less than it might have in lesser hands. Dorval—who embodied another maternal figure in Dolan’s debut feature I Killed My Mother (2009)—is especially sensational, eminently easy to root for as a flawed, erratic, crucially well-meaning woman with little real idea of how to put responsibility into action. Dolan's ability to write a character as audacious as Diane proves that, for all of his reckless self-indulgence, he may yet have a long and distinguished career ahead of him.

Slant Magazine [Chris Cabin]

Toward the end of Xavier Dolan's Mommy, Diane (Anne Dorval), a middle-aged, widowed single mother, loses herself in a reverie of suppressed desires. The film charts a period of fervent stress for the titular matriarch in the wake of her son, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), being released from an institution. As their time together draws to a close, Diane is swept away in a dream of familial tranquility, wherein she's the ideal maternal figure and Steve, who's prone to violent tantrums and other aggressive behavior as a result of his severe ADHD, is the happy, adoring son, with a steady job and family. This wordless sequence is devastating for the way its depiction of a "normal" life ends so abruptly and initially suggests more than just a fantasy. It's one of a handful of times where Mommy and its rush of feeling rises above the narrow narrative scope that's irksomely augmented by the film's technical presentation.

Indeed, Diane's daydream happens to be one of two or three instances where the film isn't presented in a 1:1 aspect ratio. This is a deliberately overbearing and literal expression of the story's volatile drama and Diane and Steve's boxed-in realities, as well as the perspective of Kyla (Suzanne Clément), their friendly, stuttering neighbor who becomes the teen's reluctant homeschooler. This trio is seen locked in antagonistic, scarcely passive-aggressive stand-offs throughout, until they manage to slowly break out out of their self-restraint, or self-obsession, and become a makeshift, almost functional, family. In a scene set to Oasis's "Wonderwall," a skateboarding Steve, momentarily freed from his negative emotions, literally opens the frame with his hands, an expressively stylistic touch that emblematizes just how much the euphoria of Dolan's sense for melodrama is succeeded by technical gimmickry.

Dolan's script is almost pessimistically obsessed with the outside world almost willfully testing the happiness these characters etch out for themselves. Curiously, the filmmaker even roots the story in a fantasy, explained in a series of opening title cards, wherein parents are allowed to lock up their troubled children against their will. It's a cop-out of sorts, a means for Dolan to avoid a myriad of challenging questions about mental disorder and parental responsibility, that also allows him to cockily assert his interest in articulating life as full-tilt melodrama. But it's a mode that often suits him and his actors well, as in a scene where Kyla looks after Steve and the berating teen brings out the unnerving fury that she clearly holds back on a daily basis, a venting of vitriol that straightens him out to an extent. It's an electric exchange of emotion that Dolan captures in a thrilling close-up of Kyla throwing her bratty charge to the ground, getting nose to nose with him and barely being able to speak coherently through her anger.

As often as the writing tends toward the histrionic and sentimental, Dolan and his actors conjure a few poignant moments of scarring hurt and weakness, including a pull-back shot of Steve, isolated and stuck in a straitjacket, leaving a phone message for his mother. Individually, these scenes are visceral, moving, and remarkable, but they draw attention to the aimlessness and redundancy of the overextended scenes of characters conversing and '90s pop-fueled montages that make up the rest of the film. Mommy feels perpetually uneven throughout its runtime, but when Dolan's tremendous empathy for the abandoned, medicated, and economically stressed is given full visual flight, it's easy to get lost in the rush.

Review: Mommy | Film Comment Joumaine Chahine

It’s difficult not to get a little irritated by Xavier Dolan. Barely 25, with five films already under his belt and a Cannes Jury Prize last year shared with Godard, the hyperactive, immodest, and prodigiously talented French-Canadian filmmaker can be exasperating. It is even harder, though, not to be dazzled by his precociousness, his ravenous energy, and the emotional intensity of his work.

In the five years since he burst onto the scene at Cannes with the angry, semi-autobiographical I Killed My Mother (09), Dolan has worked ceaselessly, sampling and remixing various styles and genres, throwing himself into film with the creative appetite of a child venturing into a vast imaginary playground. From the light musings on youth and love of Heartbeats (10) and the oddly sober cross-dressing saga of Laurence Anyways (12), to the poignantly gay and creepily Hitchcockian Tom at the Farm (13), a distinctive, striking, and exceptionally assured cinematic voice has emerged. Unsurprisingly, Dolan has also managed in that time to do what many take their entire adult lives on the couch to achieve: come to terms with his mother. And so we come to Mommy.

Mommy is Diane (Anne Dorval), widowed, tattooed, and freshly out of a job when her psychotic teenage son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) is foisted upon her, having been thrown out of the state care facility to which he had been committed after attempting to set fire to its cafeteria. An angel face with the temper of a grizzly bear, Steve is a living nightmare, a Gordian knot of raging and libidinous impulses barely held in check by his medication. But he is her son, wrathful yet adoring, and Diane is a fighter, determined to save him against all odds. To temper the manic and claustrophobic co-dependence of this explosive oedipal duo, Dolan introduces a strange and attractive neighbor into the mix, the withdrawn and stammering Kyla (Suzanne Clément) who will try to homeschool Steve. 

Tragic yet luminous, Mommy is a film of astounding violence and grief punctuated by bursts of unmitigated glee. The pace is relentless, brimming with all manner of heightened emotion, frustration, and never fully acknowledged desire, made all the more wrenching by the stupendous trio of actors. Dolan leaves us little time to catch our breath. The ride is wild, loud, drenched in pop music. Excess fuels the film, without ever derailing it—for Dolan is equally capable of holding back. Steve’s libidinal urges, for instance, though omnipresent throughout—and fusing in a myriad of potentially taboo directions—are never satisfied, nor even explicitly stated. Keeping a lid on them, of course, only serves to intensify the pressure.

Beyond the devastating tale of mother-son love, Mommy is also an invigorating display of cinematic inventiveness, starting with the device of a square 1:1 aspect ratio. Dolan also experimented with aspect ratios in the tenser moments of Tom at the Farm, though the effect then still felt tentative and somewhat gimmicky. It works rather beautifully here, forcing us into the core of this tight, unhealthy huis clos and, like Steve’s mind, offering no escape save in fleeting moments when the frame temporarily expands to a standard aspect ratio. A little too “beautifully,” his detractors will say, rather unjustly, for the contrast between aesthetic formalism and raw content never diminishes the impact.

Mommy is an exhilarating 134 minutes of cinema. Xavier Dolan has that enfant-terrible attitude of a young Lars von Trier or Leos Carax, the flair for melodrama of a Northern Almodóvar, and a fearlessness in plumbing the depths of ordinary people that evokes even Cassavetes. The references and comparisons could go on. But the end result is entirely his own. Warts, irritations, and all, he continues to be one of the most exciting new voices in film today. 

Next Projection Corina Rottger

Xavier Dolan, the 25-year old French-Canadian director, has an impressive Cannes history for such a young filmmaker. His critically acclaimed first feature I Killed My Mother premiered in 2009 in the “Quinzaine des réalisateurs” section of the Cannes Film Festival. He then returned the following year with his second film Heartbeats and celebrated the Cannes premiere of Laurence Anyways in 2012. This year he is back on the Croisette to compete for the Palme D’Or for the first time with his fifth feature Mommy.

Typically for Dolan, the family drama Mommy focuses on human interactions with its concentration on the mother-son dynamics of Diana “Die” Després (Anne Dorval), a widowed single mother and her charming but special son Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon). The film shares its theme of a difficult mother-son relationship with Dolan’s debut I Killed My Mother. However, this time the point of view is turned around and while I Killed My Mother told the story through the eyes of the teenage son and his puberty problems, the figure of the mother and her actual serious, existential problems are at the center of Mommy.

The relationship of the duo is characterized by tremendous troubles due to Steve’s ADHD condition. The dramatic struggles are about to start once Steve is expelled from his boarding school, an institution for children with behavior problems. Left with full custody for her son, Die has to arrange and manage her new life in order to work around her son’s problematic state. Although left alone at first, Die receives unexpected help from her new neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clement), a good-natured ex-teacher who is surprisingly able to handle Steve’s outbreaks and help out wherever she possibly can.

The emotional rollercoaster of Mommy is pretty much related to Steve’s condition. Because of that, he is constantly on the verge of an explosive outbreak, turning from this sweet, almost innocent but yet loudmouthed, cocky teenager into an aggressive, violent, vulgar and uncontrollable rowdy. With his explosive behavior, Steve is unable to control himself which becomes very clear when he is choking his own mother in an impulsive reaction during a fight. His illness threatens the dynamics of the oedipal mother-son dynamics, a fact Steve is aware of. Especially because of his immense love for his mother, he is scared of their possible alienation.

Although the drama is often heavy with fights and tragedies, the visuals of the film suggest flickers of hope for all the characters involved. Set during the Canadian Fall, cinematographer André Turpin uses warm and golden colors by setting the scenes against the yellow-orange warmth of sunsets or the bright interiors of the house. One of the most impressive scenes takes place during a cycling trip with the setting, orange sun in the background. In this scene, the aspect ratio changes from the unconventional squared 1:1 used throughout the film into the widescreen format, highlighting the importance of it. Steve is riding his bike in the middle of a heavy traffic road to the tunes of Wonderwall, lifting his arms up in the air, being genuinely happy. This energetic feel-good moment made the audience applaud in awe in the middle of the screening.

Music, as Dolan explained during the film’s Cannes press conference, is the soul of the film. Instead of using it on the film, he decided to use diegetic music within the film. The compilation of various 90’s songs, including Eiffel 65, Dido, Counting Crows and Canada’s “national treasure” Celine Dion, was made by Steve’s father before his death and emphasizes the absence of this father figure. The popsongs are usually being played in their full length and add to the light atmosphere before another outbreak threatens the dynamics of the relationship.

Dolan is perfectly capable of keeping the film’s balance despite its constantly switching and contrasting tone of bittersweet, even humorous sequences with heartbreaking and devastating tragedies. This works thanks to the human portrayal of the main characters. The compelling performances, especially by the unrecognizable Dorval, portraying the cursing and loudmouthed Die, are impressive and completely in character and make it much easier to get drawn into the story and attached to the characters.

Imaginary Love: Xavier Dolan's Mommy - Cinema Scope Adam Nayman

In 2014, in a fictional Canada, Xavier Dolan’s fifth feature Mommy doesn’t get much attention at all…

It’s a fine line between utopia and dystopia. To say that the world (of cinema) would be a better place without Xavier Dolan might be pushing it. But would it really be worse than the current state of affairs, where this slender talent stands taller and casts a longer shadow, after five films and at the age of 25, than any Canadian director since…well, since who, exactly? Atom Egoyan played his hand slow, cards close to the chest, for more than a decade before the world outside the Greater Toronto Area really took notice; David Cronenberg made sick-fuck films that got him threatened with eviction (and worse) en route to becoming a national treasure. This year at Cannes, however, it was the precocious Dolan who led our nation’s heroic trio, and what’s more, he was positioned shoulder to shoulder with Jean-Luc Godard (not that JLG was actually there to stand for the comparison). As journalists from Canada and elsewhere clamoured that Dolan should have won the Palme d’Or, there was a swelling of national cinematic pride that for once seemed to transcend the English/French divide (Adieu au langage).Here, finally, was one Canadian movie—and moviemaker—to rule them all.

How good a filmmaker is Xavier Dolan? This has been the question since the much-hyped arrival of J’ai tué ma mère (2009), a literally adolescent melodrama (selected for the Quinzaine when its writer-director-star was all of 19 years old) about the difficult relationship between a headstrong single mom and her hyperactive teenaged son which Dolan has now essentially remade in his new, Montréal-set Mommy,except that this time he’s cast a surrogate in his own place opposite Anne Dorval (whose performances in both films are the best things about them). Palpably undisciplined in a way that suggested a filmmaker not yet grown into his talent, like an eager, energetic puppy wobbling around enthusiastically on oversized paws, J’ai tué ma mère promised plenty and delivered less; underneath that scratchy surface was a pretty tidy pathos play. Still, that film looked like a masterpiece when measured against Les amours imaginaires (2010), a self-infatuated tale of three-way amour fou without much going on in it at all; stripped of all its Wong-ish slow-motion, it would have been a short film. By contrast, the much-acclaimed Laurence Anyways (2012) was pompously overlong: inside this bloated tale of a woman trapped in a man’s body (very well played by Melvil Poupaud) there was a healthier, less obese melodrama yearning to breathe free.

Last year’s Tom à la ferme promised a refinement of Xavier-Mania, but while the film (adapted from a play by Michel Marc Bouchard) was in many ways a change of pace, the problems remained, rooted in the filmmaking itself. If in his first three films Dolan was obviously trying to outdo himself, Tom saw him play-acting at self-effacement (as much as possible when he literally played the lead role) and maturity. The leaner narrative, the darker tone, the relative paucity of pop-music cues (except for one admittedly funny usage of Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night”)—these were all signifiers of an artist manfully growing up, and Bouchard’s Québécois Gothic scenario had the makings of a strong thriller. For the most part, though, Tom à la ferme was frustratingly slack, filled with missed beats and opportunities on top of all the obvious symbolism. The Dark Knight-derived aspect-ratio trickery (enter Xavier Nolan) called attention to itself rather than ratcheting up the tension; watching the film’s final chase scene alongside the somewhat similar climax of Alain Guiraudie’s inestimably superior L’inconnu du lac (2013) illustrates the difference between the mere idea of style and truly precise, masterful directing, blocking, and editing.

Which brings us to Mommy,and another question: If Xavier Dolan was not a great filmmaker before, does this one finally get him there after a long, arduous, soul-searching journey of five years?

The first image: a pair of shorts, hanging from a clothesline—an invitation to the haters to go ahead and eat them. Recall that the filmmaker told the critic from The Hollywood Reporter to “kiss [his] ass”after the magazine published an unimpressed review of Tom à la ferme, and suddenly the idea of Dolan vengefully offering up his dirty laundry for delectation isn’t so far-fetched. But as an opening shot it’s clever enough, introducing the idea that this is a movie about a woman, Diane (Dorval), who is literally and figuratively cleaning up after her teenage progeny, a wife-beater-clad skidmark named Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), whose greatest talent is making messes. Like most of the shots in Mommy, this first image is framed head-on and dead-centre, which is typically all that Dolan’s decision to shoot in an Instagram-derived frame allows. While it initially seems like a shame to constrict the excellent cinematographer André Turpin (who worked so well with Dolan’s spiritual predecessor Denis Villeneuve) to this squared-off format, the cramped compositions do work to establish a serviceable sense of claustrophobia for this story about close-quarters combat.

More problematically, however, the aspect ratio mirrors the film’s dramaturgy, which is similarly and strictly 1:1. Never a subtle filmmaker, here Dolan doubles (and triples, and quadruples) down on the basic strategy of J’ai tué ma mère, which is to have two damaged characters fly at each other in rage at regular intervals, and to use the brief spaces in between their arguments to take the measure of their true, wounded natures. This is a vey dangerous way to make a movie, as it can have the effect of devaluing the story’s emotional currency: when nearly every scene is inflated it’s hard to tell which ones are actually worth anything, and one begins to suspect that it’s all pretty cheap. It’s not as if Dolan is a judicious storyteller: introduced stumbling out of her dented driver’s-side door after a suburban-street smash-up, Diane (whose nickname is “Die”—D-I-E, get it?) is dazed and confused right off the top; meanwhile, all of Steve’s early scenes are paced like car crashes, with him running his motor mouth at a million miles an hour until he finally collides with some immovable object, including a black cab driver whom he hysterically bawls out as a “macaque.”

Basically, Steve is a nightmare, a hulked-up and even unrulier version of Dolan’s own character in J’ai tué ma mère. But the casting here of the underwear-ad beautiful Pilon suggests that we’re supposed to see him as beautiful as well, and not simply from Diane’s possessive, implicitly quasi-incestuous point of view. In lieu of hallucinatory fantasy (which might have worked better), Dolan adopts an objective, omniscient-yet-intimate perspective that is less about balancing his narrative than controlling audience sympathies down to the millimetre. It’s easy enough to say that Dolan “loves his characters,” which is a calorie-free form of film criticism that creates humanist hierarchies that are in and of themselves exclusionary and reductive. Love is a prerequisite for filmmaking, and if, as Love Story (and Mommy) teaches us, it’s also never having to say you’re sorry, why should any filmmaker—from Stanley Kubrick right on down to Alex Ross Perry—apologize for offering their creations (and their audiences) a slightly colder shoulder than their warmer and fuzzier peers? What’s irritating about Mommy is not its theme (which is, basically, “love”), but that Dolan insists we love his characters as much as he does, in the exact same way, no questions asked. This pushiness is exactly what makes the movie an overwhelming emotional experience for some and insufferable for others.

It is by now an established fact Dolan that drenches his movies (even Tom à la ferme) in signifiers of tackiness, a French-Canadian strain of dated pop culture and fashion referred to en français as quétaine.To wit, the main emblem of Mommy is a golden necklace spelling out the film’s title, and gifted by Steve to Diane in advance of their biggest blow-out fight; following a five-minute stretch of uninterrupted screaming, swearing, and choking, the fact that the latter re-emerges proudly wearing her new bling indicates her Mama-Bear pride in both her persona and her borderline-personality-disorder progeny. And it’s not just Diane who owns the necklace: it’s Dolan, who pays obsessive attention to his characters’ wardrobes and musical tastes, possibly because of his own role in their bestowal. Sometimes, this shared custody is charming, as in the interlude where Diane, Steve, and their neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clément) partake in a group dance to a Céline Dion torch song (Carl Wilson would surely appreciate the unrepentant voguing on display). But when Dolan shoots Steve pirouetting on a stolen shopping cart for five minutes to the tune of the Counting Crows’ “Colorblind,” or Steve clowning around over top of Oasis’ “Wonderwall,” or Steve throwing a tantrum backed by Eiffel 65 (with all of these songs blared in their entirety), it’s exhausting in a way that goes beyond counterintuitive into the realm of aural torture.

Even if one is willing to see (and hear) the Now That’s What I Call Music roll call of the soundtrack as endearingly dorky in accordance with Dolan’s (or Steve’s) ’90s upbringing, the fact is that Dolan actually doesn’t extend nearly the same generosity to his whole ensemble. In one of this 140-minute film’s few actual plot points, Diane contrives a dinner date with a single fortysomething male neighbour who works as a lawyer, hoping that he can help smooth over an assault charge Steve picked up during his time at school. The trio end up at a karaoke bar, where Steve picks an Andrea Bocelli number and is homophobically catcalled by a bunch of ugly townies—a taste of his own medicine after the racist encounter with the cab driver, except that Dolan lingers over it to the point where our hero’s violent response is entirely justified. Similarly, Steve is totally in the right to suspect Diane’s neighbour, not only because he’s a broadly written and acted caricature of beta-male vanity, but also because he says he loves Scarface and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” which are apparently unforgivable sins despite the fact that the latter would fit in nicely in a film that contains what feels like a half-dozen pop-music montages.

Where Mommy really starts to get annoying, though, is when it finally begins to pay off its bizarre title card, which describes a “fictional Canada” where controversial legislation has been passed allowing parents to deposit disturbed children in government institutions without fear of reprisal. Leaving aside the fact that Dolan could have made basically exactly the same movie without introducing this element of speculative fiction into the equation—the scene where Diane drives Steve to the slate-grey institution and watches, agonized, as he’s chased and tasered by the staff is free of any pesky specifics about what sort of place it is—this attempt at social commentary and/or national portraiture nevertheless reveals something about the director’s worldview. Xavier Dolan is hardly the first and won’t be the last heralded young filmmaker to trade in solipsism for its own sake, and the arrogance he’s displayed as an interviewee shouldn’t come to bear too heavily on criticisms of the films themselves. Yet it’s telling that the first overt instance of politics in his movies is vague, underdeveloped, and self-serving: the implication is that any law that would permit a parent to cut ties with their child is unnatural and appalling.

And yet I wonder how people with troubled or mentally disabled children—not movie-gorgeous ones like Steve, who is consistently romanticized as a kind of noble savage—feel about Dolan summarily dismissing while simultaneously refusing to actually address the sorts of systems and institutions that Canadians are uniquely fortunate enough to have access to. Dolan probably doesn’t mean the scenes of a straitjacketed, medicated Steve to be especially realistic, but if they’re fantasies they’re facile at best, yet another case of this filmmaker’s convenient sense of abstraction when the stories of his films take him six inches outside his comfort zone. In fact, most of Mommy,from its determinedly underpopulated cast (Kyla’s husband and child are almost entirely MIA, and neither Diane or Steve have any other friends to speak of) to its selfie-sized aspect ratio, is so cut off from reality—and any interest in other people—as to feel like a missive from a very different “fictional Canada.” Even with its teasing scenes of mother-son attraction (which it never quite confronts in the end) and bubblegum-punk creative sensibility, Mommy is hardly out of place in Harperland.

So again, a question: If Xavier Dolan is not a great—and arguably not even a particularly good—filmmaker, how to account for the enormous international acclaim of his work, of which Mommy feels like an early culmination? It’s partially to do with that love/hate equivalence, which for now falls more widely on the love-it side of the divide, possibly because Dolan’s films have more zip than a lot of what comes out of Canada (and even Québec) and thus have been seized on by critics and programmers as signs of life for a national cinema that had to an extent flatlined in the mid-2000s. It’s partially to do with Dolan’s age and the irresistible narrative hook of the boy wonder, which is why James Franco (who is too old to be Dolan’s evil American twin; he’s more of an avuncular bad influence, like Alien in Spring Breakers) gets so much press as well. And, it must be said, it’s partially—and maybe even mostly—because Dolan’s shamelessness at fastening his hiply unfashionable movies together with hot buttons and then pushing them as hard as he can has a genuine effect (and affect) on viewers. Dolan has gotten a lot of hype, but it’s not hype that’s making audiences cry and cheer. I saw the movie in Karlovy Vary amidst a throng of twentysomethings who seemed delighted and overwhelmed by the whole thing: by Diane and Steve’s screaming matches; by the script’s stacked emotional deck; by the moments where the image goes widescreen to underline supposedly expansive emotions; by the unbelievably transparent and bathetic dream sequence where Mommy imagines her son straightening up and flying right (even transformed in her fantasies into Herr Director himself) before she comes to her senses and carts him off to the loony bin; even by the musical stylings of Dido, who will hopefully enjoy her incoming royalties.

The last question: Is it possible that Xavier Dolan actually is a great filmmaker, and those of us who believe that he is not are wasting our time seeing the movies (because we know we’ll hate them) and our breath on criticizing them? And, besides wasting our time, are we not also being perhaps a trifle self-important in trying the case at all? It’s not as if these movies have set the national box office on fire, and Dolan is still not a household name on the order of David Cronenberg, or even a well-known studio hand like Denis Villeneuve, the latter of whom he may yet follow to Hollywood (Cronenberg having really still only gone there, onscreen, in Maps to the Stars). If he gets to those benchmarks and becomes a superstar, that might even be a good thing for Canadian cinema in general, since it creates more interest, at home and abroad, in trying to suss out the next Xavier Dolan, and maybe finding somebody even better in the bargain.

This is all stuff beyond the films, however, and it’s the films themselves that should matter, at least when trying to answer the question of whether and why this filmmaker, or any filmmaker, matters. And it’s the films themselves—Mommy included and perhaps especially—that tell me, at least, that Dolan matters in a way that’s not especially positive, that make me feel watchful and anxious, and that make me want to say something about it instead of taking the path of least resistance and saying, à la Cannes, to each his or her own cinema. I can’t leave well enough alone, and so I will say, along with the great pop sage Dido:

I will go down with this ship / And I won’t put my hands up and surrender. / There will be no white flag above my door.

Cannes Review: Is Xavier Dolan's 'Mommy' His Best Film ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, May 21, 2014

Little White Lies [David Ehrlich]

Review: Flashes of brilliance overcome Xavier ... - HitFix Guy Lodge

Xavier Dolan's Heartbreaking, Heartswelling Mommy Is Our ... Richard Lawson from Vanity Fair, May 22, 2014

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

Cannes 2014 Review: Xavier Dolan's MOMMY ... - Twitch Jason Gorber

Xavier Dolan's Mommy Nears Excellence but Is a Little Much Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

Cannes Review: MOMMY Is Very, Very Good | Badass Digest Jordan Hoffman

The Film Stage [Peter Labuza]

CultureCatch.com [Brandon Judell]

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

ArtsHub [Sarah Ward]

Wesley Morris Grantland

Sound On Sight Trish Ferris

Film Racket [Matthew O'Connell]

Xavier Dolan delivers the year's most hyperactive film, Mommy Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

Dog And Wolf [Mark Wilshin]

DVDTalk.com [Jeff Nelson]

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

Mommy | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

Film School Rejects [William Goss]

Film-Forward.com [John Brady Hamilton]

Grolsch Film Works [Flossie Topping]

Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]

Reviews Mommy Xavier Dolan - Exclaim! Matthew Ritchie

Georgia Straight [Janet Smith]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]

'Mommy' Trailer: Get a Peek at Xavier Dolan's Cannes ... - Film Angie Han from /Film

Daily | Cannes 2014 | Xavier Dolan's MOMMY | Keyframe ... David Hudson

The ASC: Mommy - Interview with Xavier Dolan - The Film ... Benjamin B interview from The American Society of Cinematographers, February 6, 2015

'Mommy' Director Xavier Dolan - Huffington Post This Is Why Everyone Is Talking About 'Mommy' Director Xavier Dolan, by Erin Whitney interview, January 22, 2015

Xavier Dolan, Mommy | Features | Screen John Hazelton interview from Screendaily, December 12, 2014

Cannes: Jury Prize Winner Xavier Dolan on Balancing Style ... Interview with the director by Boyd van Hoeij and Rebecca Ford, from The Hollywood Reporter, May 28, 2014

'Mommy': Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Dalton

Why Xavier Dolan's 'Mommy' - The Hollywood Reporter Why Xavier Dolan's 'Mommy' Was Shot as a Perfect Square, by Chris O’Falt, January 8, 2015

Film Review: 'Mommy' - Variety Peter Debruge

Cannes 2014 review: Mommy - dearest work yet from Xavier ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Review: Mommy is Xavier Dolan's dearest movie yet Brendan Kelly from The Montreal Gazette

Cannes: Is Palme d'Or Contender 'Mommy' Xavier Dolan's ... Ryan Lattanzio from Thompson on Hollywood, May 21, 2014

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

'Mommy' movie review - Washington Post Ann Hornaday

In Mommy, Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan sides with a ... Michael Sicinski from The Nashville Scene

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Film Review: Xavier Dolan's 'Mommy' - L Style G Style Megz Tillman

Los Angeles Times [Robert Abele]

Los Angeles Times [Mark Olsen]

Mommy Movie Review & Film Summary (2015) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny

Xavier Dolan's 'Mommy' Depicts a Clashing Mother and Son ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times, also seen here: New York Times [A. O. Scott]

Mommy (2014 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NAMI | ADHD and Juvenile Delinquency National Alliance on Mental Illness

Learning Disabilities, ADHD and Deliquency: Is There a ... Kathleen Ross Kidder, 2002

Violence at Rock River Academy: 'I was getting punched ... David Jackson and Gary Marx from The Chicago Tribune, December 2, 2014

At Lawrence Hall, vulnerable kids terrorized, learn life of crime David Jackson and Gary Marx from The Chicago Tribune, December 4, 2014

Harsh Treatment - Chicago Tribune The Chicago Tribune, January 28, 2015

IT’S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD (Juste la fin du monde)

Canada France (97 mi) 2016

It's Only the End of the World, directed by Xavier Dolan | Film review Catherine Bray from Time Out London

French-Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan brings together an A-list cast, including Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel, for a disappointing 'screeching melodrama'

At what point do we stop referring to prolific Quebecois director/writer/actor Xavier Dolan as a wunderkind? He's still only 27, but with six feature films under his belt, he already feels like a veteran. But perhaps that moment comes when the wonder goes. His latest, 'It's Only The End Of The World', is unfortunately his worst by some distance, a talky unsatisfying anticlimax. It has none of the precocious daring of 'I Killed My Mother' (2009), the cutting-edge style of 'Heartbeats' (2010), the arch charm of 'Laurence Anyways' (2012), the psychosexual thrills of 'Tom at the Farm' (2013) or the considerable playfulness of 'Mommy' (2014).

What is does have is a wonderful cast, sadly wasted on a screeching melodrama which sees a 34 year old who has been away for 12 years decide to pay a visit to his family, with whom he subsequently argues, and that's about it. Nathalie Baye, Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux and Gaspard Ulliel - any one of these actors is enough to make a film fly, but clustered together into a fractious ensemble with little to do but carp at one another, there is scant sense of who any of these people are or why it might be interesting to spend time with them. They mostly come off as terrible but tedious sorts whose problems are uninteresting.

So what went wrong? With the exception of 'Tom at the Farm', Dolan's scripts have all been original works until now - here, he's adapting a play by Jean-Luc Lagarce, and its theatrical roots are visible. Dolan is usually a visual stylist as good as any working today, with a fantastic pop sensibility, able to fashion enduring images from a magpie mixture of high fashion, elevated kitsch and white-trash ephemera. Here, there are still moments of transcendence, with some beautiful chiaroscuro close-ups of almost drag queen-like make-up on some of the women, giving rise to a sort of Caravaggio-meets-Ru Paul effect that would work wonderfully as a painting. Unfortunately, because it's so cinematically inert, all that craft and talent seems wasted. Let's hope his next film sees him working on another Dolan original.

'It's Only The End Of the World': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen Charles Gant from Screendaily

It seems only fitting that Xavier Dolan, the fêted prodigy of the arthouse film world, should choose as his latest project an adaptation of a play by Jean-Luc Lagarce, the French actor, director and playwright who formed his own theatre company aged just 21, and had completed 25 plays by the time he died of AIDS in 1995 while still in his thirties. Now at the ripe old age of 27, Dolan returns to Cannes Competition with sixth feature It’s Only the End of the World, arriving two years after Mommy shared the Jury Prize. Lagarce’s intense family drama feels thematically consistent with much of the French Canadian’s existing work, although the dynamic this time feels more conventional.

Despite consummate filmmaking skill, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this is minor Dolan: an inter-course palate cleanser between the giddy, audacious Mommy and his upcoming starry English language debut The Death and Life of John F Donovan.

An opening caption tells us that the events we are about to witness occurred “somewhere, a while ago already”, suggesting a tone of mischief that turns out, after an hour and a half of family reunion, to be rather a miscue. Successful gay playwright Louis (Gaspard Ulliel) has flown home to see his nearest relatives after 12 years of self-imposed exile. Louis’ voiceover informs us that he is doing so to tell them the news that he is about to die.

Most excited to greet Louis are his high-spirited, funkily attired mother (Nathalie Baye, reuniting with Dolan after Laurence Anyways) and younger sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux), the tattooed rebel of the family. Elder brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel – at 49, perhaps a little old for this role) resents the fuss being made over the return of the family’s celebrity prodigal. But his constant undermining of his wife Catherine (Marion Cotillard) suggests that his issues go deeper, and he’s revealed to be an insecure bully with a nasty habit of repeating everyone’s words in a mocking accent.

Ensemble scenes are interspersed with a succession of conversations between Louis and a single family member, typically framed in tight, claustrophobic shots with cinematographer André Turpin’s saturated inky tones. Directorial flourishes include inter-scene pauses, free of dialogue, and with the volume of Gabriel Yared’s score turned up, as the camera contemplates Louis’ face – a filmic corollary, perhaps, of the original play’s scene changes.

Dolan’s authorial stamp is felt most vividly when Louis investigates a storage room containing his own possessions, and a flashback brings a moment of adolescent sexual discovery thrillingly to life. Soundtrack cuts have Dolan’s refreshingly anti-cool fingerprints all over them, from Blink 182 to Moby and horrifyingly catchy, defiantly cheesy 2004 Euro disco hit Dragostea Din Tei by O-Zone.

The film’s dialogue has ample tang of real family discourse, but it often fails to rivet. There’s pain, to be sure, watching Catherine stumble through a seemingly endless explanation of why she and her husband named their own son Louis, while Antoine snipes from the sidelines, but there’s also a dullness here. Although there is scant development and mere gestures towards a story, tensions do bubble over in a final scene, which probably needs a live stage performance to reveal its full dramatic potential.

Louis, his mother chides him, is a man who refuses to give himself, sitting there smiling at them and saying just three words. It’s a fair criticism, and it takes all of Ulliel’s striking presence to hold the film’s centre. It’s a delicate balancing act for both actor and director, investigating tricky source material that, on the evidence of this film, fails to penetrate the enigma of its most intriguing character.

It's Only the End of the World review: Xavier Dolan's nightmarish homecoming is a dream Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness – and yet a brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction: a companion piece in some ways to the epic shouting match that was Dolan’s earlier movie, Mommy. This is a pressure cooker of anxiety, a film with the dials turned up to 12. Watching it, listening to it, is like having your head in the speaker bin for a Motörhead concert.

That’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve heard it denounced as “insufferable”. Dolan has made insufferable films in the past – his fey, musing films like the interminable Laurence Anyways, in 2012 – but this isn’t one of them, and the uncompromising ear bashing here is an intentional, black comic effect.

It is an adaptation of a stage play of the same name by the prize-winning French dramatist Jean-Luc Lagarce, who died of an Aids-related illness in 1995. It is the story of a prize-winning French dramatist who returns to his hometown after an absence of more than a decade, with the intention of telling his family that he is dying.

For this, Dolan has assembled an A-list French cast: Gaspard Ulliel plays Louis, the writer in question; Nathalie Baye is his genial, wittering widowed mother. Léa Seydoux is Suzanne, his sullen, punky sister who respects what Louis has achieved, albeit in a mood of resentment that he has not carried her along with him as a kindred spirit. Vincent Cassel – his inverted triangle of a face permanently set in a scowl – is his brother, Antoine, who has a blue-collar job as a tool-maker and is married to mousy and submissive Catherine, played by Marion Cotillard in a style not far from Olivia Colman. However much these family members might have wanted to keep things nice and polite, it is of course futile. The moment Louis steps through the door, the screaming starts.

It is a nightmare: stylised, unreal. We see them in the woozy way Louis sees them. Or perhaps this is the dream that he is later having about the family reunion. For most of the film, Dolan brings his camera tight in for extreme closeups on the characters’ faces. In fact, the action is almost just a sequence of faces, either square on or in profile, and they are almost always quarrelling or shouting. And Dolan keeps a clamorous orchestral score surging through the querulous dialogue. Occasionally, his own memories will cause a power surge of euphoria to crash through, but these are soon submerged again in the ongoing melee. Louis looks very ill, but it is not merely his illness. It is a form of nervous breakdown, mingled with guilt and fear. Being back among his family is causing something like anaphylactic shock.

The point is that they are not always like this. Dolan shows us that Louis’s family probably rub along reasonably well in Louis’s absence. He has caused this pain, whether he wanted to or not. They resent his success, to some degree. But it is more that they are hurt that he refused to contact them while his career was exploding, except in a supercilious series of cryptic little postcards. By returning home, he has triggered an outburst of precisely that toxic discontent which drove him away, only a hundred times worse, as if saved up for him: a kind of mass Tourette’s aria of anger.

Louis has to find the right moment to tell them that he is dying – a revelation of victimhood that will reverse their status relationship and possibly make them resent him more than ever. And perhaps he feels that staying in this family felt like dying, and leaving them felt like living. The paradox is unbearable.

It’s Only the End of the World is a deeply pessimistic film on the subject of “family”: which emerges as not a supportive, nurturing institution, but something unbearable and clinging. The movie might appear to raise the possibility that we can soothe the pain by talking about things – and that talking about things is dramatically inevitable. Yet these assumptions are also upended. It’s Only the End of the World is confrontational absurdism: a fascinating, sustained assault.

Cannes Review: Xavier Dolan's Shrill, Shrieking Drama 'It's Only The ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist

It’s a fairly prevalent fantasy among petulant teenagers to avenge themselves on their families, who are stupid and mean and don’t understand anything, by imagining just how sad and sorry everyone would be if it turned out they were dying. Xavier Dolan‘s Cannes Competition title “It’s Only The End Of The World” is basically that fantasy, filmed. Although apparently adapted from a play by Jean-Luc Lagarce, it’s simply impossible to believe that a story this stridently self-pitying could not refer, more or less explicitly to writer/director Dolan himself. And indeed if, as the framing, dialogue, voiceover narration and basically everything else about the movie encourages, we read a degree of self-referentialism into the story, it suggests a level of martyred self-involvement on Dolan’s part that is tantamount to a persecution complex. Why and where exactly the 27-year-old Cannes Jury Prize-winner (for the thrillingly gonzo, indelibly vibrant “Mommy“) gets the impression that he is so hard done by is a bit of a mystery, but ironically, “It’s Only The End of the World,” reinforces the very negative impressions he may have designed it to address.

Successful writer and playwright Louis, played by Gaspard Ulliel with the damp eyes of the deeply misunderstood and the condescending wistfulness of the soon to perish, is on an airplane flying home for the first time in 12 years. This we hear from his opening voiceover, which comes after the irritatingly offhand and completely pointless text “Somewhere, a while ago already,” and which fills us in on the important stuff, namely that Louis is visiting his family to tell them that he is dying. We never find out what of, or how soon it will occur, but presumably it’s from something non-disfiguring such as might have afflicted a Romantic poet, consumption maybe, or The Vapors.

Anxiously awaiting his arrival are his mother Martine, a nightmare of overcoiffed hair and tacky manicure played by Nathalie Baye; Suzanne, the younger sister he scarcely saw grow up played by Lea Seydoux in a performance of pouty hero-worship; Antoine, Louis’ hair trigger thundercloud of an elder brother embodied by one-man weather system Vincent Cassel; and Antoine’s wife Catherine, a nervy little startled fawn of a person whose main function is to bleat “Antoine!” pleadingly when her verbally abusive husband gets verbally abusive. This last, amazingly, is played stutteringly by Marion Cotillard in one of the great actress’ very least great performances.

No sooner has Louis arrived, all hesitant embraces and stumbling half-kisses, then, one by one every single relationship under that roof self-immolates in one dubiously motivated firestorm of shrieked recrimination after another — saintly, doomed Louis can only look on with Messianic compassion as these shouty narcissists unleash a dozen years’ worth of resentments on each other and on him. If only they knew… he seems to be thinking to himself with the long-game wisdom of the terminally ill, but he can never seem to find the right moment to drop the bombshell. Though if you look at it from the audience’s point of view, we’re already enduring such an ongoing blitzkrieg of hysteria, that it’s hard to see how many other civilian casualties could possibly have been incurred, and in fact it would have been far kinder to have dropped the A-bomb early and been done with it. But then, of course, Louis would have no excuse for that exquisite air of “I’ve got a secret and it’s suuuuper tragic” and it really seems like that would be something hard for him to part with.

It’s a very difficult visit (understatement), punctuated by occasional quiet spells when Louis locks gazes with Catherine (for some reason) or reminisces about his first love, or simply takes seeming eons, and a multitude of shot/reverse shot cuts, to answer the most straightforward of questions. But mostly, every interaction is fraught with regret and resentment and turns on a dime from loving to hateful, in the most mystifyingly high-anxiety manner. As tortured as he is by it all (everyone is scared of everyone in this household, which we know because almost everyone delivers the line “I’m scared” at some point) all the drama actually just serves as another big ego trip for Louis: it confirms just how very, very important he was to these people, even while he was off being successful and celebrated far, far away. None of the other characters have any depth, they’re simply sounding boards and reflective surfaces for him, constantly telling or showing him just how much his departure wounded them, and presumably winking out of existence the second he leaves the room, or blinks.

Dolan’s undeniably exciting filmmaking craft, however, far outstrips his storytelling here, and everything from the saturated palette to a few nice surreal flourishes with a cuckoo clock, to the now-trademark use of appalling pop music blared out like it’s the “Carmina Burana” gives ‘The End of The World’ at least the look and feel of something much better. But having recruited as fine a cast of French-speaking thesps as has ever been assembled, and marshalled a strong behind-the-camera team, Dolan’s usually exuberant egotism is here taken so seriously that what we’re left with is a shrieking bore, without a single character worth rooting for, least of all the puddle of maudlin self-pity at its center.

Wunderkind and enfant terrible  are sobriquets often appended to Dolan’s name, but in fairness the screechy, mawkish “It’s Only the End Of The World” does suggest that the time for comparing him to a child is past. Here after the leap forward in maturity that “Mommy,” for the most part, represented, this does feel like a regression, but not to childhood, instead it appears to be the work of a sulking, self-conscious teenager, locked in his bedroom with his music blaring, feeling like the most misunderstood genius who never asked to be born. [C-]

Xavier Dolan's It's Only the End of the World Is the Most Disappointing Film at Cannes Richard Lawson from Vanity Fair

It's Only the End of the World | 2016 Cannes Film Festival Review ... Nicholas Bell from Ioncinema

The House Next Door [Sam C. Mac]

The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]

Cannes 2016: It's Only the End of the World Review | Indiewire Eric Kohn

SBS Movies [Fiona Williams]

The Upcoming [Jasmin Valjas]

Romanian drama, a Dolan dud, and more Jim Jarmusch on day 8 of Cannes Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

CineVue [John Bleasdale]

It's Only the End of the World Reviews: Xavier Dolan's Ca | Indiewire Michael Nordine

'It's Only the End of the World' Cannes Review: Marion Cotillard and ... Ben Croll from The Wrap

It's Only The End Of The World (2016) Movie Review from Eye for Film

Daily | Cannes 2016 | Xavier Dolan's IT'S ONLY THE END OF ... - Fandor David Hudson

Xavier Dolan Is Going To Focus On Acting, Even If It Slows Down His Directing Efforts Chris O’Falt interview from indieWIRE, May 20, 2016

'I was screaming inside': Xavier Dolan reacts to his latest film's ... Chris Knight from the Cannes press conference at The National Post, May 19, 2016

Cannes: Xavier Dolan on His Competition Entry and His Love of 'Home Alone' Scott Roxborough interview from The Hollywood Reporter, May 17, 2016

'It's Only the End of the World': Cannes Review Jon Frosch from The Hollywood Reporter

'It's Only the End of the World' Review – Cannes Film Festival 2016 ... Peter Debruge from Variety

Cannes 2016: It's Only the End of the World is a perfectly hellish ... Tim Robey from The Telegraph

It's Only the End of the World Cannes review: the festival's largest disappointment so far Donald Clarke from The Irish Times

Xavier Dolan's It's Only The End of the World earns mixed reviews at Cannes Barry Hertz from The Globe and the Mail

"The Unknown Girl," "Inversion," "It's Only the End of the World" Barbara Scharres from The Ebert site

It's Only the End of the World - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dolezal, Rudi

FREDDIE MERCURY: LOVER OF LIFE, SINGER OF SONGS – THE UNTOLD STORY B+ 91

Great Britain Germany made for TV (59 mi) 2000 in progress director’s cut (95 mi) 2007

This was probably the event of the 2007 Chicago Film fest, a one-time-only screening to a sold out audience, a revised director’s cut of the earlier 2000 time restricted TV documentary (59 mi), adding more footage of Freddie Mercury performing onstage. Chicago fest director Michael Kutza made a few opening remarks before introducing the director, claiming he got the idea from Roger Ebert, who screened the film at his earlier 2007 Overlooked Film festival in Urbana, Ebert’s home town, inviting Michael to come see the film. That fest has evolved online to the name of Ebertfest, goading Michael, who claimed he didn’t have the balls to name his fest Kutzafest. At any rate, all of the festival judges were there, even though the film was not in competition, including the infamous Udo Kier. Dolezal claimed when he was contacted about the screening that he didn’t want to play the same older film that he was unhappy with, as it did provide the artist’s background, but not enough of the singer himself. This time around, it felt overly long, so this “director’s cut” is still a work in progress. If anything, the work either needs to be significantly longer or shorter, as the filmmaker will have to decide whether he wants to leave everything in, creating a definitive 3-hour or 6-hour Ken Burns style documentary, or whether to whittle it down to size. However, if ever there was a cinematic rock n roll star, it was Freddie Mercury, so all the footage of him remains nothing less than electrifying. As one of his friends indicated, he gave extraordinary parties, one of which was a costume ball where guests were urged to come as one of their favorite people, so of course, Freddie came as himself. Frontman for the band Queen, which is sort of a blend between the harmonic vocals from the Beatles Abbey Road and the powerful crooning of Roy Orbison, Freddie also had a solo career, which really took flight during the late 70’s and early 80’s during the sexual androgynous stage, where performers like Lou Reed, David Bowie or Iggy Pop blended their sexual orientation onstage, which led to Freddie’s coming out and ultimately showcasing gay liberation onstage, providing an electric stage presence that even Elvis Presley or Liza Minnelli could admire, eventually succumbing to AIDS in 1991.

Opening with concert footage of a white-suited Freddie Mercury singing “The Great Pretender,” you realize how much we miss this kind of bona fide star power, Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar on a small island off the East African coast of Tanzania, his baby picture became infamous as being the best photograph of the year, a studio that remains exactly as it did then, retaining its humble origins, but at age 8 he was sent to a British boarding school in India, where he remained for 7 years, excelling in art and music, and even joined his first band playing piano there called The Hectics, making his first performance onstage, which was recreated here resembling the screaming fans at the childhood performances in Edward Yang’s BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY. One of the girls that loved that band, Gita Choksi (still gorgeously beautiful) was interviewed and was the recipient of one of Freddie’s first kisses. Due to a change in political climate, the family moved to England, where Freddie entered the Ealing School of Art, attended by notable musicians Pete Townsend (The Who), Ron Wood (Faces and Rolling Stones), and Ray Davies (The Kinks), excelling in fashion design and graphic arts, where his participation with the musical group Smile lead to the formation of Queen, which this film suggests may have actually originated in the school bathroom, as it had such excellent harmonic echoes, a group that allowed the antics of the lead singer to just keep growing more and more outlandish. It was curious to hear from Jane Austin, who was perhaps the love of his life during this period, as they had a heterosexual relationship for about 6 years before he announced his was gay. Her acceptance of his sexual orientation is one of the high points of the film, as she was probably expecting marriage and children with him, claiming he was obviously happier and more comfortable with himself for it, and who could deny anyone that kind of happiness?

The saccharine Hallmark card moments with an overly somber narrator and French pianist Thierry Lang doing his variations on a Queen theme cannot match the actual performance energy that brings this film alive, while the odd back and forth editing between his childhood years and his early years as a performer grow tedious as well. My guess is that they spend too much time from his early Queen period, along with too many comments from his band mates, which are necessary but overplayed, never really linking what led to the gay fantasia that he came to represent, exemplified by his explosion in the record industry, his stardom and his wealth, all of which led him to New York City where the sexual decadence of that era rivaled anything that Andy Warhol had experienced a decade earlier because it was saturated in an excess of money. There is a German version of this film that features Barbara Valentin (from Fassbinder films ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL and FOX AND HIS FRIENDS), also romantically linked with Mercury in the mid 80’s, but her comments were difficult to translate, so were ultimately dropped. Some of the best stories in the film come from people describing what happened at his extravagant parties, which were described as like being on the set of a Fellini film, with dwarfs and trolls and transsexuals galore, where he might fly 80 people to Spain just to celebrate divine excess and the party may last for days on end, where his legendary 39^th birthday party went on for weeks. The joy that people have describing their experiences with this man is exemplary cinema. Easily the best example of this is Mercury’s one year binge in the opera industry, mixing rock and opera, where he met legendary Spanish opera diva Montserrat Caballé, who was described as a volcanic presence onstage, whose voice could soar into the stratosphere, matching Mercury’s onstage theatrics with her own opera training, so when the two go at it onstage in their live rendition of “Barcelona,” it’s simply brilliant, not to mention drop dead hilarious. Caballé’s comments describing Mercury’s announcement to her that he was incurably sick is among the film’s better moments, along with those from his personal fashion designer Diana Moseley, especially when describing the last day she spent with him. This is a heartfelt celebration of one of the true originals, a man whose bold, onstage theatrics are so paramount that his songwriting prowess isn’t even mentioned in the film. Nonetheless, the filmmaker made all those early featured videos for Queen, which may account for their dominant presence in the film.

Daily Illini Movie Guide

Review by Rudi Dolezal, Director

My DoRo-Team and I spent five years making this exceptional documentary, gathering the individual bits and pieces together to weave a rich tapestry in months of shooting in Africa (Zanzibar), India (Bombay/Panchgani), New York, Montreux, London and Munich.

My ambition was to portray Freddie Mercury from an angle unknown to the public. Most of the film is composed of new or as yet unreleased footage, including recreations of certain aspects of Freddie Mercury's life.

Young Freddie Mercury, who was born Farrokh Bulsara, was played by actor Zal Bahardurji from Bombay. We filmed him in historic locations in Zanzibar where Mercury was born, the son of two federal employees of the British Government. With the support of his mother, Jer Bulsara, sister, Kashmira Cooke, and various school friends, we reconstructed the first years of the young boy who later was to become a worldwide star as Freddie Mercury. Research and shooting were quite difficult in Zanzibar, because, to this day, the official Zanzibar/Tanzania government has taken no notice of having being home to this "famous son."

In Zanzibar, we showed his everyday life close up, such as his daily walk to school, Freddie's favorite playgrounds, religious rituals, his first photo session as a child and his first contacts with Arab, African and Indian music that were to prove formative for him later on.

Many of these scenes were shot largely using subjective camera, giving the audience the opportunity to relive Freddie's experiences first hand. Our second major stopover was India. For 7 years, Freddie attended boarding school in the small Indian town of Panchgani. Here we ferreted out Freddie Mercury's 96-year-old aunt who encouraged his artistic talent: she arranged piano lessons for him that led to Freddie's first band, a school band named "The Hectics."

Aside from interviewing teachers, schoolmates and Freddie's first love, Gita Choksi, we helped stage a concert before hundreds of fervent students, in which the "Hectics" performed on precisely the same stage where Freddie Mercury experienced his first moments as a performer more than 40 years ago — this hall has remained unchanged since then.

In London, we tracked down schoolmates of Mercury from the Ealing School of Art where he studied graphic design. They told us, among other things, of the way he used to indulge himself by going down to the men's rest rooms and singing harmony vocals in their echoey environment.

We also unearthed sensational new material from this period of his life: a sheaf of original sketches and paintings by young Mercury of his idols and role models at the time, like Jimi Hendrix, Elizabeth Taylor, Cliff Richard and many more, artwork which had been thought lost since his school days. We found them in the possession of a former classmate and the film presents them to a wide public for the first time.

When it comes to his musical development, we give ample space to the members of Freddie's band Queen: Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon, members of his earlier bands "IBEX" and "Wreckage" and also later superstar colleagues like Mick Jagger (Rolling Stones), Phil Collins (Genesis), Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), Roger Daltrey (The Who), Slash (formerly with Guns N' Roses), Liza Minelli and the opera diva Montserrat Caballe and Andrew Lloyd Weber partner, Sir Tim Rice, who wrote the lyrics for several songs with Freddie.

Freddie's private life and sexuality are discussed openly by the people who were closest to him and who talked about this for the first time: Freddie's longterm girlfriend, Mary Austin, to whom he left his luxurious home in London; his companion of many years, Jim Hutton who was Freddie's last lover; and photographer Mick Rock, producer of the famed Freddie images, particularly in the early days.

Our film also features:
- Excerpts from a total of 6 hours of unreleased interview footage in which Freddie, who rarely and unwillingly gave interviews, speaks about intimate,
personal subjects.
- Excerpts from unreleased studio sessions of previously unreleased Freddie Mercury songs.

Freddie Mercury - The Untold Story

Filethirteen Review

Dolgin, Gail and Franco, Vicente

DAUGHTER FROM DANANG A 95

USA (83 mi) 2003

I particularly liked John Petrakis’s Tribune review where he writes in bold print: not recommended for young children. There is no blood, no violence, no profanity, but this rating is due to the high emotional content. You have to search through your vocabulary for superlatives here, featured throughout are extraordinary glimpses of faces framed in their own natural environment, the underlying original music is superb and perfectly balanced, there is a wonderful golden-orange sunrise on a quiet riverbank following her first night in Vietnam where the camera finds a dragonfly resting atop the highest leaf, when her Vietnamese childhood memories return they appear to be almost sketched onto a canvas in an impressionistic blur, all beautifully layered together.

This film begins in 1975 as the Vietnam War was ending with Operation Babylift, (an event which, on it’s own, is worthy of it’s own documentary, particularly the newsreel footage seen here of an American social worker attempting to convince Vietnamese women to send their children to the USA under the guise of an airlift for war orphans), when a 7 year old Amerasian girl is separated from her family and sent to the USA for adoption, supposedly for her betterment, and she becomes “101% Americanized.” Yet in her 20’s, when she yearns to meet her real mother, she discovers her mother feels the same way about missing her, so after 22 years of separation, she travels back to Vietnam in what turns out to be one incredible re-unification, beautifully capturing unanticipated depths of an experience that even the filmmakers could never have imagined. Both the mother and daughter are immensely appealing and couldn’t express more genuine affection, but both are overwhelmed and completely flabbergasted by the personal and historical abyss that exists between them, leaving them both reeling, as if stepping on a land mine, from the unseen, misunderstood emotional scars left behind from the aftermath of the war. What starts out as a well-meaning attempt to wipe away bad childhood memories only ends up compounded with still more complicated, bad adult memories. One irony here is that her Vietnamese name means “united.” Sometimes in a documentary, the most difficult decision is to let the cameras continue to roll when you know you are intruding into the personal regions of someone’s private anguish. But here, it is the best part of the film – a heart-wrenching, emotional jolt for the whole world to see that is simply unforgettable. What this film has to say about love, that it is so much more than just saying words, that sometimes you are called upon to demonstrate your love with deeds, is indescribable.

There may be an inclination to consider the girl too naive and spoiled and to disregard her out of hand. But I would urge people to reconsider this view, as she was unexplainably (to her) separated from her own family, raised instead by a single mother who eventually had no use for her at all, was also raised in one of the more racially intolerant communities in America, which might explain why she was so unprepared emotionally to handle something as simple as affection, a family notion completely alien to her, and which she found, at the time, completely suffocating. ("Get away from me!") Is it any wonder that she might prefer the more emotionally distant relationship with her adopted American family, as that's all she really knows? It should also be viewed in another perspective, as the translator reminded her, that the family pressure and the cultural differences would diminish the longer she stayed. Contrarily, by shortening her visit, which she herself chose, she put even more pressure on herself and her Vietnamese family to finalize what was missing for 22 years into one final day - a sheer impossibility. From a Vietnamese perspective, they were simply trying to include her, permanently, as a member of the family, not just in words, but in deeds.

But what I found so compelling in this girl, who was born in Vietnam, was that she really had no more sensitivity or understanding of Vietnam than the US government, namely none, which certainly demonstrates how easily we can learn to drop bombs on one another, and how inadvertently, by being so Americanized, besides living in material comfort, she was also taught the arrogance and narrow-mindedness of our American values when it comes to understanding the importance or significance of cultures from other nations. What have we learned since Vietnam? Look at our Government in action today, and the contempt we show to other nations unless they agree with us in lock step. What I found so compelling about this girl is how she represents, through no fault of her own, a new image of the ugly American, that looks different but thinks so much like the old image, how little progress we've made on that front, and how far we have to go.

Dominik, Andrew

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD B 88

USA (160 mi) 2007 ‘Scope

The latest Jesse James venture, for all it's so called invention, is a throwback to a style of film that was made 30 years ago or more, when westerns were portrayed by quiet, near incoherent people living in the enormity of the landscape, which is the case here as well, the problem being it's another character sketch where the people being examined just ain't that interesting.  A grim, morose portrayal throughout of the last days of the Jesse James gang, which feels like it’s told in slow motion, with the use of a narrator who sounds like he’s entirely bored with the retelling of this story, as if he’s told it a million times before. While praise is due to the cinematography by Roger Deakins, not so much for the actual story itself, very little of which is memorable. Unlike Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS, which features a powerful lead performance to match the dramatic power of the natural imagery, beautifully set in a specific period of time, commenting on that time, this film features a disappearing act from nearly every character, people trying to crawl back into their skins for fear Jesse James might actually notice something about them, see through their secrets, discover something about them that would make them his enemy, people who fade from sight literally before our eyes. This does not always make for interesting cinema, as there’s zero amount of charisma displayed other than variations on fear and very little action to hold our attention, instead we’re stuck unraveling the artificiality of this world, where people make it their business to hide from the law, but end up hiding from each other and themselves. So while they’re busy slinking in their own shadows, we’re expected to find something to hold our attention. For the most part, this film just doesn’t have that, as the characters are never that interesting.

Brad Pitt plays Jesse James as a dandy, a dapperly dressed man one might even call stylish, a huge contrast from Robert Duvall’s portrayal in THE GREAT NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA RAID (1972), where James is so drenched in rural dialect and idiosyncrasies that his charm is in how peculiar he is and how distinctively different he is from the other men. But in this portrayal, the difference is only in fashion, as James is the best dressed among them, one of the few who actually has a wife (Mary Louise Parker) and children, and despite his tendency to retreat deep into his thoughts, he rarely speaks about anything directly, but instead offers his skewed thoughts through some angle that disguises his meaning, which places in people’s heads their own set of fears, as they’re scared of getting killed by this man, and they’re afraid in some roundabout way that he’s talking about them. So this is a film of inferences, of subtle glances, of double meanings, and of some dark interior world of ever rising suspicion that reveals the consequences of what people do for a living, which is rob trains and kill people. The casting of Pitt is interesting, as the film is layered in celebrity status, where he’s a man surrounded by yes men, as no one wants to disappoint Jesse James, while at the same time the entire country is fascinated by his growing legend.

Casey Affleck, on the other hand, as Bob Ford, is one of the more despicable lead characters seen onscreen in quite some time, as the story turns to him and his ignoble act, where he thought he would hear applause for his deed, shooting a notorious outlaw in the back, a man whose legend was renown, while Bob Ford, well what we remember about him is that he shot a man in the back. The film really explores how he creeps around in the shadows of his own love affair with the image of Jesse James which keeps recycling itself through his own delusional mind, where he initially was so impressed with Jesse James’s fame, where he himself expected notoriety and fame, the kind he read about in storybooks, but all he received was contempt. To his dismay, even after his death, the legend of Jesse James only expanded, turning a vicious outlaw into some kind of folk hero, as if he was a man of the people. Sam Rockwell is interesting as Bob’s brother Charlie Ford, two entirely unreliable men that the James brothers were forced to recruit when so many of their own men were either arrested or dead. Rockwell is his brother’s accomplice, a man who hides his real intentions through artificial smiles and pretended stupidity, the kind of guy who would always look down instead of stare the alpha dog straight in the eyes.

Despite the widescreen visual sweep of the film, it’s all about the interior world, where Jesse James killed with a single minded purpose in mind, something people grew to respect, as he was the last of his breed, a frontier legend, while Bob Ford was likened to John Wilkes Booth, a man who slunk around behind the scenes afraid of everything he saw. While James never really trusted the man who followed him around like a pestering kid, he seemed to play a cat and mouse game with his head, as everyone routinely made fun of the guy, but James liked having him around, as if he was genuinely interested in the depths of his peculiarity, as he was so far removed from everyone else, it was a bit like Jesse himself, but for exact opposite reasons. One was ignored because of his murderous temper that built him fame and notoriety, while the other was ignored because he was a bit of a village idiot. The best scene in the film was when Jesse James’s brother Frank (Sam Shepard) sizes him up in about two seconds and tells him to get lost. Unfortunately, he didn’t, but the interest factor just wasn’t there in this long, rambling narrative about a wretched man who was driven to kill Jesse James much like the Columbine kids, because he was treated like shit all his life. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis add the gloomy music that resembles the liltingly sad portrait of men’s lives during Ken Burns’s epic Civil War documentary, whose dreary nature becomes so second nature to this film, that it’s eventually accepted as part of the landscape.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

The "glory days" of the James Gang were long past, the Youngers and the Millers all either dead or captured, when Jesse and Frank were forced to recruit new men from the dregs of the local populace. Yet their fame and notoriety were higher than ever, thanks to the dime novels that glorified their exploits and catapulted their robberies and outlaw life into romantic legend. According to Andrew Dominik's long, somber Western epic, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," that frontier myth was what drew the star-struck Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) to Jesse James (Brad Pitt).

Pitt won the Best Actor award at Venice for his Jesse -- a jaunty, talkative fellow in the beginning who bathes in Bob's praise before paranoia turns him increasingly obsessive and feral, his grin a threat that he flashes like a dare.

Yet it's Affleck who impresses most as the wary, skittish Bob, desperate for Jesse's attention. With a twitchy smile and a nervous way of talking when he should shut up, Bob spews promises of "courage and daring" (a practiced phrase stolen from his beloved pulp stories) with equal parts romantic illusion and calculated ploy. He's desperate for some of Jesse's glory, even if it's just reflection by association.

This cinematic folk song embraces and celebrates the chasm between idealized outlaw myth and the unglamorous realities of frontier thievery. Dominik gives the petty figures behind the myth a vulgar grace and the prosaic details of criminal endeavors become almost poetic under his direction.

His imagery is rich and deep, with colors tinged in a nostalgic sepia, giving the film the feel of a ballad, albeit one that at times loses the melody in lazy riffs of mood and atmosphere and unnecessary verses charting the paths of minor characters. Otherwise it's a criminal life idealized by memory and glorified in the telling, even in the face of its tawdry realities.

Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]

There are scenes in The Assassination of Jesse James which take your breath away, and by that I mean moments when what's on screen is so beautiful or captivating you literally hold your breath. You only realize you're doing this when the moment ends and you find yourself silently gasping for air.

Andrew Dominik's film could be America's response to The Proposition. Interestingly, both of these atypical, poetic westerns were directed by Australians, and both feature a soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. It is also reminiscent of the contemplative style of filmmaker Terrence Malick, particularly in its depiction of man's place within his natural environment.

Adapted from Ron Hansen's 1983 novel of the same name. The film stars Brat Pitt as legendary outlaw Jesse James and Casey Affleck as his young Ripley-esque protégé Robert Ford. It was announced today that Pitt has just won the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival, a prize he could have shared with Affleck, a revelation as the creepy, shifty-eyed accomplice.

The style here is contemplative and the action is scarce but brutal. Though it's nearly three hours long, it's easy to surrender to the film's hypnotic rhythm. Those expecting spectacular shootouts and cowboy heroics will be disappointed. Like Zodiac and Michael Clayton, The Assassination is less interested in the crime itself than in what the crime says about our culture.

The film begins with James at the peak of his fame as an outlaw, and charts his descent into depression and paranoia. The threat comes not from the authorities but from within his own gang, a group of fearful men haunted by the gunslinger's murderous temper. The man who eventually takes his life is, ironically, the one who admires him the most. Robert Ford is a 19 year-old misfit whose adoration for his leader exposes him to constant humiliation on the part of the psychopathic, undeducated thugs who make up the James gang.

The Assassination is first and foremost a meditation on American myths and the nature of fame. Unfolding like a greek tragedy, it examines the debilitating impact of violence on the killer's soul and its parallel, opposite effect on his reputation. It also charts the transition from a time when one's exploits were widely celebrated, to an era when one could be famous simply for being famous.

More interestingly perhaps, it is also a love story between two men who, unable to acknowledge it for what it is, channel their impulse into something volatile and violent: depression, anger, despair. What these men find in themselves as they examine their innermost desires is not lust for wealth or recognition, but something darker and unfathomable. These pulsions of sex and death are unreconcilable with their sense of self, can only be expressed as self-loathing. They are intelligently echoed in the ambiguous relationships between members of the James gang: fear quickly turning friendship into betrayal, admiration into jealousy.

Shot in Canada by cinematographer Roger Deakins, the film in bathed in mournful autumnal hues which add to the dark tone of melancholy. This is underscored by some excellent sound design, which gives the harsh landscape a menacing voice. Dominik's direction is assured throughout, deliberate and meticulous.

The Assassination of Jesse James is a throwback to the elegiac westerns of past eras, and joins the current crop of American studio films made with a sense of adventure which has mostly been missing since the 70's.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Calling all pundits. It's a baffling caprice of the zeitgeist to have two studio westerns released in the same month, 30-odd years after the genre basically gave up the ghost. James Mangold's better-than-competent and highly crowd-pleasing 3:10 to Yuma has provided a harmonica fanfare for something more ambitious and polarizing. Written and directed by 40-year-old, New Zealand–born Andrew Dominik, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a deeply, unsentimentally nostalgic movie—but nostalgic for what exactly?

Premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival, The Assassination of Jesse James was hailed by Variety as a magnificent anachronism, "one of the best Westerns of the 1970s." But unlike, for example, the echt 1972 Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, a soggy, autumnal affair in which the James brothers appear in the guise of tattered, mystical quasi-hippies, Dominik's film isn't revisionist nor, as with Mangold, is Dominik's desire revivalist. Gritty but mythic, a dirty western with clean shirts, oblique in some ways and obvious in others, Jesse James is a bold, even wacky, reinvention. This is a psychological chamber drama in which the wide-open spaces are geographic as well as mental.

Unfolding mainly in the aftermath of the James Gang's last hold-up, the movie specifically concerns the paranoid relationship between charismatic Jesse (Brad Pitt) and Bob Ford (Casey Affleck), the Judas who will murder him. They meet at a woodland conclave where the gang is planning its final train robbery. This creepy, strangely smiling, young kiss-up gives Jesse's brother Frank (Sam Shepard) the willies. But if Ford is star-struck, so is the movie. The gang is shown laboriously blocking railroad tracks with debris so that Jesse can less-than-realistically leap atop the barricade to face down the locomotive himself. A star must have admirers. "You want to be like me or you want to be me?" Jesse asks Bob, fixing him with his clear, and clearly insane, gaze. (The question jumps out of the narrative: Pitt may have won the Best Actor award at Venice, but the movie belongs to awkward, whiny Affleck.)

Jesse James runs a leisurely two and a half hours. For what seems like half of it, members of the James Gang, who include Bob's get-along brother Charlie (Sam Rockwell), lay low in a desolate farmhouse somewhere beyond the Ozarks. Speculation on their moody leader's doings aside, the main source of entertainment is teasing the creepy little guy with the odd smile and treasured shoebox of Jesse James dime novels. Eventually, the gang disperses and, increasingly nutty, Jesse begins dropping in on his old associates' lairs, trying to ascertain whether they're likely to betray him. The suspicious outlaw is a psyche-out artist as well as a psycho.

Meanwhile, Bob develops his own delusions of grandeur, planning to liberate himself from the tyranny of his erstwhile idol and demanding an audience with the governor (no less than James Carville). Unlike Sam Fuller's 1949 I Shot Jesse James, a low-budget western noir in which Ford is portrayed as a stubbornly single-minded, insolent fool, Jesse James presents the assassin as an aggrieved fan boy: "I've been a nobody all my life . . . and Jesse James has been as big as a tree." Inexplicably tolerant of Bob, Jesse seems to invite martyrdom; he presents him with a new six-shooter, and later his back. The actual shooting occurs on Palm Sunday; it's marked by signs and portents and has a ritual, preordained quality. Afterward, the narrator notes, "a thousand people would make the spellbound pilgrimage to the cottage" where Jesse breathed his last.

The relationship between crime and celebrity clearly interests Dominik; his only other feature, the 2000 Chopper, was a visually strident and powerfully absurdist portrait of an Australian career criminal—the self-dramatizing author of nine autobiographical bestsellers, one titled How to Shoot Friends and Influence People. That's more or less an ironic description of Bob Ford's fate. A year after shooting Jesse, he's re-enacting the deed on a New York stage, condemned to relive his crime until, inevitably, he's dispatched by another irate nobody.

Jesse James was shot largely in midwestern Canada, but there's something suggestively Australian about the way the movie dramatizes empty space and loneliness. Full of slow dollies and haunted close-ups, this is a film of Rembrandt lighting and Tarkovsky weather. The sun pours down like honey and Vaseline limns the lens. The skies shimmer with onrushing clouds; the fields dance with waving brown weeds, for which Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have provided a suitably spacey score.

Although not as radically defamiliarizing as Jim Jarmusch's avant-western Dead Man, Jesse James has the feel of an attic ransacked for abandoned knickknacks. There are intimations of what Greil Marcus called the "old weird America"—a sneaking sense that Dominik might have preferred to shoot the whole thing through a pinhole camera or fashion his story out of musty daguerreotypes. But then, as demanding as the movie is, maybe it's just old-fashioned crazy.

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

european-films.net (Venice Film Festival review) Boyd van Hoeij

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)

Screen International Lee Marshall

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Reel.com [Pam Grady]

Austin Chronicle [Josh Rosenblatt]

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

KILLING THEM SOFTLY B 86

USA (104 mi) 2012 ‘Scope Official site

America is not a country, it’s a business. —Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt)

Dominick is a New Zealand-born Australian film director and writer, adapting the screenplay from the 1974 George V. Higgins novel Cogan’s Trade, described by The New York Times "No Innocents in This Jungle" article as “the seamy netherworld of the savage seventies” where none of the characters can be considered good. In fact, like Don Siegel’s CHARLEY VARRICK (1973) or the Coen brothers NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007), the premise is stealing money from the mob, where they send a guy to track down the money, a kind of avenging angel fixer who cleans up the mess left behind. While the story is set in Boston, the movie was shot in New Orleans, much of it resembling an urban wasteland, where a good deal of time is spent navigating their way through this urban jungle. While the story concerns a couple of small time hoods, Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), who think they can make a big score by ripping off the mob, the film is a series of character sketches defined by lengthy scenes of endless talking, where at times it can be clever or hilarious, but there’s also a running thread throughout that comes from continuous television or radio news reports in 2008 announcing both Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama’s vision for America, followed by President Bush describing the first signs of an unraveling, economic freefall that defined Obama’s first 100 days in office, as reality forced his hand and co-opted his feelgood vision of change, forcing him instead to bail out the banks, Wall Street brokerage houses, and the auto industry, forcing him to clean up the mess left behind by the unfettered deregulation run amuck during the Bush administration. While this offscreen political narrative always seems to protrude into the scene, like a necessary evil, it parallels the theme of a professional mob enforcer cleaning up after the reckless behavior of undisciplined, small time punks.

Who has a more recognizable face of the mob than Ray Liotta from Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), playing Markie, a local mobster that runs an underground card game. Having bragged once that he ripped off his own card game to make a big score, Frankie and Russell figure if he was negligent once, he’s sure to be blamed again, taking the heat off of them. What’s interesting about this duo is their colorful flair for lamebrained ideas. Frankie is the kind of hood that can’t keep his mouth shut, nervous and twitchy, where he’s just a bundle of nerves, while Russell, taking a page out of Seven Psychopaths (2012), earns a living by stealing dogs and then reselling them on the black market. Russell has an everpresent layer of sweat and grime on his face, where he’s such a lowlife junkie that it’s immediately apparent he’s not to be trusted, but for Frankie, he’s his best and only friend, so like an idiot, that’s his chosen partner in crime. The two pull off the scam and a price is immediately placed on their heads, where even as they’re pulling off the heist, Markie tells them matter-of-factly, “You know you’re dead, don’t you? Are you sure you want to do this?” All we see initially is just the boots, and then an offscreen voice, but the fixer sent in the clean up the disarray is Brad Pitt as Jackie Cogan, the title character, exactly like Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, something of a throwback to Harvey Keitel’s original clean-up guy, Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe, in Pulp Fiction (1994). While Dominick, like Tarantino, shares a love for outlaws and quirky dialogue, Dominick’s characters are less fantasy and more grounded in reality. What’s amusing is the continually running scene with Pitt in the car with Richard Jenkins, known only as the Driver, where the two have a discussion about murders for hire, but the Driver reflects the modern era mob mentality, as he’s a legitimate businessman who answers to what amounts to a collective board of trustees that has to vote on everything they agree to before it’s authorized. Cogan would rather make things quick and easy, save time and trouble for everyone, where his motto is “I like to kill them softly—from a distance,” but not this group, as they hesitate and agonize over every little detail in what amounts to a stalling tactic. Cogan goes along with it, as it seems like easy money once these guys actually make up their minds.

Cogan brings in an out-of-town partner, James Galdofini as Mickey, who drinks like a fish and screws every hooker in town, yet his colorful language is absolutely killer material, easily the best thing in the movie. At heart, he seems to represent the viewer’s idea of a typical mob operator, as he’s all brass and balls, the kind of old-school mobster whose gutter mouth feels like a character pulled out of a David Mamet play. But Cogan doesn’t see it that way, expecting something professional, where all the guy wants to do is drink and tell stories, where he’s as evasive as the Driver, guys that continually procrastinate and never get down to business. As we hear the background sounds of Washington politicians promising a new world, they all seem to talk the same game about a united country, but then can’t agree among themselves how to make it happen, reduced to squabbling and incompetency, all while the country’s economic woes spiral out of control. Cogan has to cut through this haze of pie-in-the-sky bullshit, which he finds almost mocking in tone, a kind of doublespeak that amounts to a paralysis of inaction. He, on the other hand, after undergoing the agonizing, exhaustive, soul searching conversations about restoring the rightful, unlawful order of the criminal underworld, which are themselves a graphic picture of gangster slang, has a fairly lethal yet simplistic approach—just put a bullet in the guy’s head and be done with it. The conversations are actually funny, but there’s plenty of empty space between action scenes, plenty of down time where you’d think instead there’d be chase scenes and action galore in a movie about gangland slayings. There are plenty of graphic scenes of violence here, given an almost ballet-like slow motion choreography, but the picture is really about probing the interior mindset of hardcore criminals, displaying a unique ability to capture the rhythms and textures of their language, heard in parallel with flowery political rhetoric espousing the nation’s ideals, all while observing the subculture of mob capitalism at work, apparently not that different from Washington, where “In America you’re on your own,” a place where selfish interests rule, where the bottom line is every action is a negotiated business decision designed to make the most amount of money. What’s different about the mob, however, is they actually collect on their overdue debts.

Exclaim! [Kevin Scott]

"It's only money," Frankie reassures the group of men he's robbing. The engine driving Killing Them Softly is fuelled by the simplistic notion that men will go to desperate lengths to get their hands on some, while others will commit terrible deeds to protect it. In the midst of bursts of stylized violence and stretches of rambling, occasionally amusing dialogue, the actors are stuck in a few disparate films.

Frankie (Scoot McNairy, doing his best Ratso Rizzo) is a small-time hood who drags along his junkie friend, Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), to rob a poker game for Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola), a bigger fish with the inside information on the high-stakes, regular event. It's run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta) and is an attractive proposition because Trattman has recently robbed his game and then blabbed about it, making him the chief suspect to the shady powers-that-be.

That's why Jackie (Brad Pitt) is brought in to sort things out; it's the kind of thinly sketched cold-as-ice killer Pitt can effortlessly embody without having to show any of the range of his more challenging roles. With a structure revolving around a series of emotionless, graphic murders, it would be easy to draw comparisons to Drive, if not for the fact that Jackie has a driver (Richard Jenkins) relaying the orders from higher up.

Throughout, there is the constant reminder of the setting ― a recovering New Orleans leading up to Obama's election in 2008 ― and much talk of the ongoing recession, in some hollow attempt to link the economic climate to the crimes being committed. James Gandolfini arrives at one point as a hired gun that's fallen on hard times. He drinks incessantly and holes up in his hotel room with hookers, embarrassing Jackie with his uncouth behaviour, lamenting the passing of the good ol' days.

It could be that he's meant to symbolize a bygone era of decadence, but instead comes across more as the perfect emblem for a movie painfully unsure of its intentions.

Killing Them Softly | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

In Andrew Dominik’s previous film, the superb revisionist Western The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, he staged the last days of an iconoclastic gangster with a strong feeling for how his story could take root in the American imagination. Dominik’s follow-up, Killing Them Softly, makes that subtext text, wondering aloud what makes America America, and exploring the greed and avarice that cannot be extricated from the freedom and opportunity that’s supposed to make the country great. While it isn’t unusual for nasty little genre movies like Dominik’s stylish heist thriller to smuggle such themes under the surface, Killing Them Softly makes them startlingly explicit. All the criminal mayhem that composes it—an audacious robbery and the bloody retribution that follows—is mere prelude to a thesis statement, support for a grim assessment of the country on the eve of the 2008 Presidential election. 

“In no other country on Earth is my story even possible,” Barack Obama said in stump speeches from ’08 to the present. Dominik sees his vision of American exceptionalism from a glass-half-empty perspective. Just as Obama took advantage of opportunities unique to this country, the hoods in Killing Me Softly, operating in the looter’s paradise of New Orleans, are keen to find their own angle. In the film’s most exciting section, Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn, two low-level crooks who resemble human sewer rats, take the assignment to knock off a mobbed-up card game for $100,000. Should they get away with it—no small feat, given two tables full of glowering men of violence—McNairy and Mendelsohn are hoping the blame falls on the host (Ray Liotta), who was caught robbing one of his own games in the past. Brad Pitt plays an enforcer brought in to find the men responsible and clean up the various messes they’ve created. 

The entire affair unfolds in the period between the 2008 economic collapse (and subsequent Wall Street bailout) and Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park, and Dominik never misses the chance to note the disconnect between the lofty rhetoric of campaign speeches and the feral dogfight taking place on the ground. It often seems like Dominik is playing against his own strengths: The robbery sequence is an instant classic, an agonizingly patient white-knuckler in which armed halfwits go swimming with sharks, but Killing Them Softly settles into a portentous conversation piece that makes too much of a show of its own significance. Dominik will be damned if he’s going to make some run-of-the-mill shoot-’em-up, and the film certainly isn’t that, for better or worse. 

Set in a New Orleans still raw from the federal neglect following Katrina, Killing Them Softly emphasizes how far removed the hand of government—whether it’s Bush selling the bailout or Obama’s hope-and-change—is from the way people go about their business. Dominik is careful not to play ideological favorites—he dispenses fodder for people on both ends of the political spectrum—because he’s more interested in measuring the distance between the professed ideals of modern-day America and the outlaw past it never fully left behind. For a genre film, Killing Them Softly goes to an awfully strange, none-too-subtle place, but the choice to move the ’08 election from background to overlay is unusually bold and thought-provoking, too. Dominik knows his way around a breath-stopping suspense setpiece, but his ambition to do more is encouraging, even when it isn’t wholly successful.

theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray. The film takes its name from a piece of dialogue uttered by Pitt: “I like to kill them softly - from a distance.” Dominik turns the machinations of the criminal element into a blackly comic microcosm of American society – a critique of an unravelled economy, keeping the story bare and the action unfailingly brutal.

Killing Them Softly is the New Zealander Dominik’s follow-up to the critically lauded but commercially disastrous The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and is an adaptation of the novel Cogan’s Trade by the underrated George V. Higgins. Set and shot in New Orleans, it tells the story of two bottom-of-the-barrel hoods Russell and Frankie (Ben Mendelsohn and Scoot McNairy, pictured below right) who hold-up a mob-protected poker game on the instruction of Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola).

The intention is to frame the game’s organiser, Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who is known to have robbed one of his own games in the past. The actions of these seemingly insignificant men throw the underworld into chaos as the high-stakes games grind to a halt. Richard Jenkins plays “Driver”, a lawyer and go-between for the unrevealed top dogs. He recruits a local enforcer, Jackie Cogan (Pitt), to hunt down the perpetrators and restore (unlawful) order. Cogan in turn brings in his own man, Mickey (James Gandolfini, pictured below left) to assist him with the task.

Dominik makes films which have a clear relationship with reality – both Chopper (2000) and The Assassination of Jesse James… (2007) were based on true stories and, while you might not be able to say the same about his third feature, it positions its story in our world. Killing Them Softly deals in real politics, making a thunderous commentary about the miserably selfish state of modern America. Though Dominik and Tarantino share a love of crooks, westerns and quirky criminal banter, Dominik makes it as clear that his characters are of our world, just as Tarantino makes it clear that his aren’t.

Killing Them Softly is impeccably cast from its guttersnipes to its suits: Pitt delivers his characteristic cool, with shades of Tyler Durden and Aldo Raine; Gandolfini revisits the darkest side of Tony Soprano, or is Mickey closer to Virgil from True Romance? Since everyone else is doing what they do best (and what we’ve seen them do many times before), the real pleasures here are the performances of two relative newcomers: Mendelsohn was memorably chilling in Animal Kingdom and goes to the other end of the criminal spectrum here; and the similarly versatile McNairy shows us a different side from his more romantic roles in Monsters and In Search of a Midnight Kiss.

Although it’s sleekly shot, Dominik directs with a furious flair. He wants you to feel every blow, every bullet, wants to make you squirm or laugh nervously at every line of rough-house dialogue and recoil at every ominous sound; as Cogan steps out to claim a victim and tosses back the door the whole car shudders. Characters are followed right through to their mortuary slab toe tag.

This is America under a microscope, defined by the dirt under its nails: mucky, murky, murderous. It may be crude (likening those who brought the world economy to its knees to criminals, and Pitt’s near-sociopathic enforcer to the government response) but Killing Them Softly is largely satisfying. The opening heist for instance is horribly tense and poor Ray Liotta (usually a man who can take care of himself onscreen) has two memorable sequences during which he’s subjected to excruciatingly slow and noisy punishment.

Though set during the Bush administration’s dying hours, referencing the recession rescue plan, Killing Them Softly is book-ended by Obama’s speeches promising change. Here Dominik’s message couldn’t be clearer: whoever the man in The White House is, as Jackie Cogan puts it, “In America you’re on your own.” It’s a message deliberately hammered home with a mallet, delivered alongside thrills as slick as Pitt’s barnet.

Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 22, 2012, also seen here: The Playlist [Keith Jagernauth]

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Cannes Film Festival 2012: Killing Them Softly | The House Next Door Budd Wilkins

Killing Them Softly, starring Brad Pitt, reviewed. - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

'Killing Them Softly': Junkyard Rubbish of a ... - The Atlantic Wire Richard Lawson

“Killing Them Softly,” “Rust and Bone” Reviews : The New Yorker Anthony Lane

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Killing Them Softly argues crime is just business - Page ... - City Pages Karina Longworth

'Killing Them Softly' Review — Brad Pitt - Movieline Alison Willmore

'Killing Them Softly?' More Like Talking Them to Death | PopMatters Elena Razlogova

'Killing Them Softly': Stylish but Slight - Christopher Orr - The Atlantic

Killing Them Softly Review: When the Man Comes Around - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

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Review: 'Killing Them Softly' uses Brad Pitt as a blunt instrument Guy Lodge at Cannes from HitFix, May 22, 2012

Cannes Check: Andrew Dominik's 'Killing Them Softly' the assessment before the screening, Guy Lodge from HitFix, April 28, 2012

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Cannes 2012: Brad Pitt Says His New Crime Film Isn't an Attack on Obama Gregg Kilday interview with Pitt from The Hollywood Reporter, May 22, 2012

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"No Innocents in This Jungle" O.L. Bailey book review from The New York Times, March 31, 1974

Donato, Nicolo

BROTHERHOOD (Broderskab) C 73

Denmark (90 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

A beautiful looking ‘Scope film that goes awry almost immediately, despite terrific performances all around by some excellent Danish actors, there is still something seriously flawed about this film, which is something of a BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005) story within the Aryan brotherhood, reminiscent of an early Ryan Gosling film, THE BELIEVER (2001), which was based on a true story where a rabidly anti-Semitic leader of a neo-Nazi movement in America is discovered to have Jewish roots, exposed in an article by the New York Times. The film opens with a brutal beating of a young gay man looking for sex by a gang of skinheads, an incident which comes back to haunt them. Simultaneously, Lars, Thure Lindhardt from FLAME & CITRON (2008), is quietly released from the Army when it was revealed he made homosexual overtures off base, a move he’s not entirely honest about, and one which has his morally upright family in a state of alarm, as he begins hanging around with skinhead hate groups, with whom he shares a hatred for foreigners, but he never dreamed he’d take it to their extreme, which he initially finds outwardly foolish. But as the group makes overtures to him, as he’s an Army man with intelligence and an ability to express himself, he begins feeding off their group culture, where as a group they perform hate crimes that they might not otherwise do alone. In this way, Lars gets sucked into the groupthink, and even shows off his ability to annihilate an unsuspecting victim, which earns him raves all around.

The problem here is the story sticks within the neo-Nazi group, without offering any other societal perspective, unlike Shane Meadows’ brilliant film THIS IS ENGLAND (2006) which shows the blistering effects of poverty and unemployment and the subsequent rise of British nationalism during the Margaret Thatcher inspired Falkland crisis of the early 80’s, where racism was the only reality and Nazism was associated with Nationalism. But there’s nothing like that here, as an otherwise intelligent but pissed off Army man who ought to know better starts getting his kicks hanging around thugs and other idiots because he hasn’t got anything better to do. He starts picking up on their anti-social behavior, as it seems like a way of getting back at his super straight parents, but this hardly seems plausible. When he’s teamed with another Army outsider, Jimmy (David Dencik), a brooding loner with a Nazi swastika tattooed on his back, they initially can’t stand one another, as Jimmy is the alpha male for the group, while Lars is the latest discovery by the team leader Fatty (Nicolas Bro), one of the few who reads books and thinks Lars could help expand their ranks.

Like BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, the two are sent to a remote outpost where Jimmy is expected to show Lars the ropes, familiarizing him with Nazi strong-armed tactics, but what develops instead is a tender love story. The tone of this love affair is accompanied by naked dips into the ocean, plenty of beer, and hauntingly sensitive music, which makes for gorgeous pictures, but the guy we’re talking about is a brute with a swastika on his back. What happened to heavy metal and bottle bashing? This is where the film simply escapes into its own fantasia of gay love infiltrating the ranks of the Aryan brotherhood, one where there’s no other eventual possibility except getting caught, so the film ploddingly spins its wheels as these two guys are so inflamed with love that they’re blind to the reality of exposure, which of course comes crashing down, much like that opening scene. The film makes little or no social comment other than disenchanted skinheads can come from any social background, though primarily the culture feeds on the uneducated. Offering no sympathetic characters throughout, this movie takes some getting used to, as the film unintentionally sympathizes with the Aryan movement simply because no other point of view is offered and both leads offer such compelling performances. But in the end, it’s time to move on and this film doesn’t.

13th Annual European Union Film Festival | Gene Siskel Film Center Martin Rubin

"A piercingly intense drama with an impressively taut control of structure and pacing."--Lee Marshall, Screen

Ever since winning the top prize at the Rome Film festival in October, BROTHERHOOD has been drawing attention on the festival circuit as a remarkable debut that transcends its potentially sensationalistic subject matter with superb acting and insightful direction. After being forced out of the army for homosexuality, Lars (Lindhardt of FLAME & CITRON) finds an outlet for his resentments by joining a neo-Nazi group with a fondness for bashing Muslims and gays. Keeping his sexuality secret, he finds himself dangerously drawn to a seemingly straight comrade (Dencik) whose reciprocated passion takes them both by surprise. The love scenes, involving great emotional and physical risk, crackle with tension and conflicted desire. In Danish with English subtitles. Special advance screening courtesy of Olive Films. 35mm widescreen.

Screen International (Lee Marshall) review subscription required

Variety (Jay Weissberg) review

Though Nicolo Donato's impressive debut, "Brotherhood," inevitably will be called "the gay neo-Nazi movie," such a reductive description does the film a disservice. While the film does track the unlikely sexual relationship between two members of a violent racist organization, it's Donato's assured direction, plus the superb thesping on display, that sets "Brotherhood" above what could have been either fetishistic or far-fetched. The winner of Rome's top prize, the pic could see strong Euro and bicoastal arthouse play, though some auds may be uncomfortable with the theme and the palpable passion.

Donato (a Dane of Italian descent) doesn't shy away from discomfort, opening with a troubling scene in which a gay man lured into a cruising area is set upon by a pack of skinheads. Cut to Lars (Thure Lindhardt), a low-ranking army officer facing allegations that he's made drunken passes at some of his men. Though Lars refutes the charges, he's denied promotion and quits the military.

At a party, Lars meets Michael, aka Fatty (Nicolas Bro), the leader of the local neo-Nazi group, who speaks of the "unnatural" presence of Muslims in Denmark. Lars rejects the group's violent ways but not their rhetoric: Michael sees potential in the articulate young man and urges him to get involved. At a beach get-together, Lars is wooed by the comradeship as well as the respect Michael shows him; less pleased is Jimmy (David Dencik), part of the earlier neo-Nazi posse, and Jimmy's troubled younger brother, Patrick (Morten Holst).

For Lars, who lives with his overbearing mother (Hanne Hedelund) and weak-willed father (Lars Simonsen), the deference is head-turning, and he moves into a guest house Jimmy occupies while renovating. Following a latenight swim, the men's mutual attraction cannot be contained, and though fearful of what's happening, they fall in love. When Patrick discovers the relationship, their secret is disastrously revealed.

Some may find the script's refusal to explain the reasons for the characters' racism troubling, but Donato is too clever to believe it stems from some easily divined formula. Lars' affinity for the neo-Nazis stems from the way they bolster his bruised ego and reinforce his masculinity: Group leader Ebbe (Claus Flygare) proudly declares, "We've got ourselves a real man." One plot flaw is the use of the old domineering mother/milquetoast father scenario, but otherwise, Donato and co-scripter Rasmus Birch get the psychology right.

The helmer also makes the most of spatial positioning, emphasizing separations as well as tight fraternal camaraderie. The passion between Lars and Jimmy is powerful, the sense of liberation they feel in each other's arms a heady mix of desire and support. Credit must go to the actors, all perfectly cast: Lindhardt nails the deep insecurity masking Lars' paper-thin confidence, while Dencik is a master at conveying worlds of confusion with just his eyes. As always, Bro delivers an excellent performance, capturing Michael's creepy insidiousness, and Holst leaves a deep impression in the smaller role of the unstable Patrick.

Excellent night-time shooting goes hand-in-hand with the camera's slight movements, subtly emphasizing a sense of unease. Music is used with unexpected discretion, such as when the presumably ear-splitting noise of a neo-Nazi rave is covered by music (also used in the first sex scene) that more accurately reflects the characters than their environment.

Camera (color, HD-to-35mm), Laust Trier-Morch; editor, Bodil Kjaerhauge; music, Simon Brenting, Jesper Mechlenburg; production designer, Thomas Ravn; costume designer, Ole Kofoed; sound (Dolby SR Digital), Jason Luke, Niels Poulsen, Jens-Peter Storm-Ringstrom; line producer, Barbara Crone. Reviewed at Rome Film Festival (competing), Oct. 21, 2009. Running time: 101 MIN.

Donen, Stanley

Stanley Donen Spotlight by Martin Scorsese

Any way you look at it, Stanley Donen is one of the greatest entertainers we’ve ever had in American movies, as TCM’s 21–picture month long tribute proves. If you look closely at the barn dance in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Fred Astaire’s famous gravity–defying solo dance in Royal Wedding, or the climax of Charade, you’ll see a pure movie sensibility at work, with a seemingly natural feel for space and for matching the relative size of the people in the frame with whatever action they’re performing. You’ve probably heard the expression about the camera being “in the right place.” You don’t know how true it is until you’ve seen it in the wrong place during a musical number, where every angle and every cut has to be perfect. Of course, when it is in the right place, as it always is in Donen’s movies, you don’t notice it because everything moves with such fluidity. The shooting of the famous title number in Singin’ in the Rain, one of the greatest moments in film history, was a logistical nightmare, and the fact that Gene Kelly was running a fever throughout is the crowning touch. But when you’re watching the scene, it seems effortless — transcendently so. This tribute includes quite a bit of Donen’s work as a choreographer before he became a director, including a favorite of mine, Living in a Big Way, a comedy directed by Gregory La Cava in which the musical numbers by Donen and Gene Kelly were shot after the fact. There are also some terrific lesser–known pictures, like the romantic comedy Love is Better Than Ever with Larry Parks (his last picture before he was blacklisted) and the underrated musical Give a Girl a Break. And for those of you who don’t know it, It’s Always Fair Weather, the last Donen–Kelly collaboration, is a beautifully melancholic and sharply satirical musical, written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and starring Kelly, Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse and the incomparable Michael Kidd.

Film Reference: Stanley Donen Greg Faller

Stanley Donen is most frequently remembered for his work as a musical director/choreographer at MGM under the Arthur Freed Unit, a production team that Donen claims existed only in Arthur Freed's head (Movie, Spring 1977). With Gene Kelly, he co-directed three of the musical genre's best films: On the Town, Singin' in the Rain, and It's Always Fair Weather. Kelly was, in a sense, responsible for giving Donen his start in Hollywood; their first collaboration being the doppelganger dance in Cover Girl. Donen followed a path typical of that time, from Broadway dancer to Hollywood dancer and choreographer to director. As solo director, he won recognition for Royal Wedding (his first effort), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Funny Face, The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. Andrew Sarris believes that Donen always seems to function best as a hyphenated director or a genial catalyst; that any personal style he may possess is usually submerged under that of the performer (Kelly, Astaire, Fosse) or choreographer (Michael Kidd, Eugene Loring, Bob Fosse) and hence is difficult to assess. This view may simply reflect that period of studio production (mid-1940s to late 1950s), when there was a constant melding of creative personnel. As Jerome Delamater explains: "Performers, choreographers, and directors worked together and in many instances one cannot discern the auteur, as it were, or—more accurately—there seem to be several auteurs." Donen credits Astaire for his inspiration and it comes as no surprise that he feels his musical work is an extension of the Astaire/Rogers format (which itself is derived from the films of Clair and Lubitsch). This format is not logically grounded in reality, but functions more or less in the realm of pure emotion. Such a world of spontaneous singing and dancing can most accurately be presented in visual terms through forms of surrealism.

Donen's oeuvre demonstrates a reaction against the presentation of musical numbers on the stage, choreographing them instead on the streets of everyday life. It is this combination of a visual reality and a performing unreality (a performing reality is some type of stage that is clearly delineated from normal, day–to–day activity) that creates the tension inherent in surrealism. Donen geared the integrated musical towards the unreal; our functional perception of the real world does not include singing and dancing as a means of normal interpersonal communication. As he said in an interview with Jim Hillier, "A musical . . . is anything but real."

Musicals possess their own peculiar internal reality, not directly connected to everyday life. Leo Braudy points out that Donen's musical films explore communities and the reaction/interaction of the people that dwell within. Even though Donen left the musical genre after Damn Yankees (returning to it in 1973), he continued to explore the situation of the individual in a social community, and the absurd, occasionally surrealistic experiences that we all face, in such deft comedies as Bedazzled, Two for the Road, and Charade (the last in homage to Hitchcock).

All-Movie Guide: Stanley Donen Lucia Bozzola

TCMDB: Donen Turner Classic Movies

Reel Classics: Stanley Donen

The Gene Scene: A Gene Kelly Home Page

All-Movie Guide: Gene Kelly Jason Ankeny

TCMDB: Kelly Turner Classic Movies

American Masters: Gene Kelly a nice essay profile

Gene Kelly and His Many Faces

Llydien on Gene Kelly

Donen, Stanley & Gene Kelly They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Stanley Donen Wikipedia

LIVING IN A BIG WAY

USA (104 mi) 1947 d: Gregory La Cava

from imdb Author: lzf0 from United States: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039574/usercomments

No, this is not "Singin in the Rain" or "On the Town" or "Cover Girl" or "Anchors Away"! It's a simple black and white comedy with a handful of musical numbers thrown in. Kelly does an eye popping dance number on a construction site and does another cute number with a dog. These are as inventive as his numbers in more expensive films, but the "B quality" of the film does not do them any justice. He also sings "It Had to Be You". The plot is totally forgettable comedy fodder and since Kelly was never really known for his comedy playing, it falls a little flat. However, the dance numbers are terrific.

Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller

Stanley Donen came to the rescue of good friend and frequent collaborator Gene Kelly during the making of the 1947 romantic comedy, Living in a Big Way, Kelly's first picture since serving in World War II. Before he pitched in, Living in a Big Way was a pleasant comedy about a veteran who returns from war to discover the woman he wed on leave is a) an heiress and b) a snob. With his help, the film became a semi-musical, with innovative numbers that pointed to such later Kelly-Donen collaborations as On the Town (1949) and Singin' in the Rain (1952).

Kelly didn't really want to make Living in a Big Way. Since his release from the Navy, MGM had had little for him to do. The studio was focusing on bigger male stars who had been kept off the screen longer by military duty. In addition, executives weren't sure if the brash persona he had already developed in films like his debut, For Me and My Gal (1942), and Anchors Aweigh (1945) would play well in peacetime. Still, he had enough of a fan following that his presence could bolster beauty queen Marie McDonald, whom MGM was trying to turn into a star to rival Lana Turner. Kelly didn't like the colorless role the script offered or the fact that he'd be teamed with an actress best known by the nickname her press agents had created, "The Body." Finally, studio executive Benny Thau appealed to his loyalty by reminding him that the studio had given him a boost by pairing him with Judy Garland in his first film. Now he could return the favor by agreeing to co-star with McDonald.

Fortunately for Kelly, the film's director was far from the usual studio hack. Gregory La Cava had built a reputation for himself with a series of stylish comedies that showed actors to their best advantage. After a string of '30s hits, including My Man Godfrey (1936) and Stage Door (1937), La Cava had directed only sporadically in the '40s, mainly because of his heavy drinking. He also tended to alienate studio executives with his seemingly chaotic working methods. He rarely followed shooting scripts, preferring to use improvisation and inspiration as a source of new material while shooting. Although this usually led to extended shooting schedules, the results could be stunningly creative. Even though he had written the story for Living in a Big Way, he refused to nail down the script, working with Irving Ravetch to re-write scenes as the film was shooting. Producer Pandro S. Berman, who had fought to keep La Cava on Stage Door when studio executives were in a panic, gave La Cava his head.

La Cava's improvisatory approach was a boon to Kelly. When the dancing star suggested adding some musical numbers to the film, La Cava was all too willing. Kelly and Donen staged a romantic duet for the courtship scenes with McDonald, a comic dance with a dog who, like Kelly, has been rejected by the leading lady, and a lengthy sequence in which Kelly seemingly improvises an athletic dance to entertain some children while he's building a house. The dog dance gave Kelly a chance to choreograph around the character's persona, something he and Donen would explore further in the "Day in New York" ballet for On the Town. The improvisatory feel of the house-building routine would become a Kelly staple in films like Summer Stock (1950), An American in Paris (1951) and Singin' in the Rain.

Shooting on Living in a Big Way dragged on for nine months, partly because the studio gave Kelly, an officer in the Screen Actors Guild, time off to help negotiate an end to a strike against the studios by the Carpenter's Union. When the film was finally finished, it did poorly at the box office. Later critics have noted that La Cava's directions revealed a comic dimension to Kelly's acting that had not been exploited well before and that the film fits well with the director's other comic treatments of class warfare. But contemporary audiences didn't take to a musical with just three numbers and were even less enthusiastic about McDonald. The studio later gave up plans to make her a star, and her career petered out. Eventually she would be more famous for a series of scandals, including seven marriages (two to shoe magnate Harry Karl, later Debbie Reynolds' second husband), drug arrests, nervous breakdowns and a mysterious death at the age of 42.

ON THE TOWN

USA (98 mi) 1949 co director: Gene Kelly

Time Out

In 1948, Jules Dassin used New York as one big location for The Naked City. The following year, to Louis B Mayer's incredulity, producer Arthur Freed turned the city into a sound stage for the movie of the Broadway musical of the Leonard Bernstein/Jerome Robbins ballet Fancy Free. Taking as its premise 'New York, New York, it's a wonderful town', the show looses three 'gobs' on the women (including the imperishable Alice Pearce), the sights, and the nightlife of the town. The most cinematic of film musicals and the one most given to dance, On the Town is exhilarating, brash spectacle, all rip-snorting, wisecracking attack, and maybe just a teensy bit unlikeable.

CineScene.com Chris Dashiell

Arthur Freed, MGM's great musical producer, gave Donen and Kelly their first chance at directing in this adaptation of a hit musical. It's about three sailors (Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin) on shore leave for one day in New York. Kelly sees a subway ad featuring "Miss Turnstiles" (Vera-Ellen), falls for her, and then spends much of the day looking for her. Sinatra hooks up with a sassy cabdriver (Betty Garrett) and Munshin with an anthropologist (Ann Miller). Of course it's all an excuse for various song and dance numbers.

Freed decided that most of the songs - music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green - were too offbeat for a mass audience, so he had veteran Metro tunesmith Roger Edens write new ones. Such were the times - exemplified by "it's a helluva town" in the "New York, New York" number becoming "it's a wonderful town." It's too bad, really, because the songs that were cut are better than the new ones, and the numbers that were kept - "New York, New York," "Come Up To My Place" (Sinatra and Garrett), and the delightfully funny "Miss Turnstiles Ballet" are among the film's high points. Yet, despite this handicap, the directors created a film of great charm and exuberance, one of the very best postwar musicals.

Most of it was shot in the studio, but they managed to get in some excellent location shooting, especially in "New York, New York," the number that starts the film. This dazzling bit of virtuosity shows the trio of Kelly, Sinatra, and Munshin singing the song at different city landmarks - the sequence beautifully times its jump cuts with the movements of the actors and the song's rhythm, and features a breathtaking 360-degree pan atop the RCA building, followed by a sudden tilt down to the sidewalk. Nothing could ever beat this opening, but there are still some marvelous moments, such as the "Prehistoric Man" number in the Museum of Natural History (Ann Miller, to whom I'm usually allergic, is great here) and the title tune on top of the Empire State Building.

A couple of the Eden songs cross the line from fun to dumb, and there's a subplot with Alice Pearce as Garrett's homely roommate that I find insulting. But Kelly is in top form, the underappreciated Garrett is a joy, and overall you could hardly ask for a more entertaining romp than On the Town. The Kelly-Donen team would top themselves three years later with Singin' in the Rain.

Turner Classic Movies James Steffin

Gabey, Chip and Ozzie have exactly 24 hours' shore leave in New York and are determined to see all the sights and find some romance along the way. Chip is pursued by Brunhilde, an aggressive taxi-driver. Ozzie hits it off with Claire, an anthropologist, while visiting the Museum of Natural History. Gabey, on the other hand, has his hopes pinned on a seemingly impossible dream: "Miss Turnstiles," whose poster he sees on the subway. However, this is New York and a lot can happen in one day.

On the Town (1949) is undoubtedly one of the key works in the development of the Hollywood musical. Up to that time, musicals were entirely studio-bound, with rare exceptions such as the Brooklyn Bridge sequence in It Happened in Brooklyn (1947). Directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly wanted to use extensive locations, but the studio allowed only one week of shooting in New York. It proceeded at a breathless pace, often using hidden cameras to avoid crowd problems. Another innovative feature, also part of the Broadway stage production, is their use of modern dance to advance the plot in sequences such as "Miss Turnstiles" and "A Day in New York." Kelly's interest in using modern dance would develop further in the climactic ballet of An American in Paris (1951) and Invitation to the Dance (1956).

In fact, the two aforementioned dance numbers, along with the songs "New York, New York" and "Come Up to My Place," were the only musical numbers retained for Bernstein's original score. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who wrote the book and played Claire and Ozzie in the Broadway production, were hired by MGM to write new lyrics. Roger Edens composed six new songs, receiving an Academy Award (along with Musical Director Lennie Hayton) in the process. The Breen office forbade the use of "helluva" in the song "New York, New York," which MGM eventually changed to "wonderful." Alice Pearce was the sole holdover from the Broadway cast. Produced for $2,100,00, On the Town grossed over $4,400,000, reflecting the continuing profitability of the musical genre at that time.

Sinatra, who was 34, resented having to wear hairpieces and special padding in the buttocks to fill out the sailor outfit. After playing a sailor previously in Anchors Aweigh (1945), also starring Gene Kelly, he is said to have vowed never to wear such an outfit again; we should be thankful that he changed his mind. It's Always Fair Weather (1955), a later Kelly/Donen effort, was intended as a sequel to On the Town, but Sinatra and Munshin weren't available for the production.

For the record, Sinatra gets to sing on five numbers in On the Town and they include the two previously mentioned songs - "New York, New York" and "Come Up to My Place" - as well as "You're Awful," "Count on Me," and the title song.

Widescreen Glory Article On Stanley Donen and On the Town, by Devanshu

Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

Apollo Movie Guide [Cheryl Northcott]

DVD Talk Chris Hughes

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

ROYAL WEDDING

USA (93 mi) 1951

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

One of Stanley Donen's early solo efforts (without his Singin' in the Rain partner, Gene Kelly), this 1952 musical doesn't have quite the coherence of his best work. One moment, though, is enough to redeem it--this is the one in which Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling, an impeccably executed bit of movie magic and a sublime expression of Donen's love for the medium. With Jane Powell and Sarah Churchill.

Time Out

Not, thankfully, a documentary about a couple with cotton wool in their mouths, but a lively Technicolor musical (produced by Arthur Freed), with Astaire and Powell as a brother-and-sister musical act who travel from America to London at the time of the Queen's wedding (then Princess Elizabeth, of course), and both find romance, he with a dancer, she with a lord. A pleasant enough score by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, helped out by Donen's stylish direction; best number is 'You're All the World to Me', with Astaire energetically dancing his way round the walls and ceiling of a hotel room.

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

The first film by director Stanley Donen, though he'd co-directed On the Town (1949) with Gene Kelly, was written by Alan Jay Lerner (released the same year he earned his first Oscar for writing An American in Paris (1951), which featured Kelly in the title role). This Arthur Freed production stars Fred Astaire and Jane Powell, replacing Judy Garland who was finally fired by MGM management for repeatedly missing or delaying rehearsals. Except for a couple of memorable sequences featuring Astaire's unique talent, one in which he dances with a hat-rack and another in which he dances on the walls & ceiling of a room, the only other noteworthy items in this otherwise average Musical are its colorful production numbers (one is staged on a rocking ship), the longest song title in a Hollywood film ("How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I've Been a Liar All My Life"), and its Academy Award nominated Song, "Too Late Now". The film's title refers to its setting, in London during the Princess Elizabeth-Prince Philip wedding season.

Astaire & Powell (their only film together) play the brother and sister song & dance team, Tom & Ellen Bowen, famous for their stage show "Every Night at Seven". He's a confirmed bachelor who won't let love interfere with his work, she's a shameless flirt who refuses to be tied down, or give up the act. But Ellen meets another flirt, Lord John Brindale played by Peter Lawford, while Tom spends time with an engaged dancer in the show, Anne Ashmond (played by Winston Churchill's "actress" daughter Sarah), who's estranged from her American fiancé. Keenan Wynn plays twin brothers of different nationalities (?), American Irving & British Edgar Klinger, the Bowen's manager; Mae Clarke (uncredited) plays a telephone operator who connects their transatlantic phone call. Albert Sharpe plays Anne's pub owner father James; Viola Roache (uncredited) plays his separated wife Sarah. Multiple wedding bells (and a reconciliation), other than just the titled one, are predictably in the works.

Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller

The real-life love story of England's Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip, who married in 1948, provided the plot hook for this 1951 musical, but the script actually was loosely based on the life of Hollywood musical royalty, Fred Astaire. Either way, the results were sheer magic, but as so often happened with Hollywood's great musical, the road to the screen was a rocky one.

Broadway lyricist Alan Jay Lerner had just scored a hit with Brigadoon when MGM producer Arthur Freed convinced him to give screenwriting a try. He was only supposed to spend ten weeks exploring story ideas at MGM but ended up staying six months. During that time, he crafted an Oscar-winning script based on George Gershwin's An American in Paris (1951) and explored his own idea for a musical based on Fred Astaire?s early days on stage, when his sister Adele was his dancing partner. The team had broken up when Adele married a British lord she fell in love with during a tour to England. That gave Lerner the idea for a film musical about a brother-and-sister act who find romance when they take their show to England for Princess Elizabeth's Royal Wedding (1951).

Initially June Allyson was assigned to co-star, with former dancer Charles Walters directing. The role was a big thrill to Allyson, who had long wanted to work with Astaire. But when she fell ill during the first days of musical rehearsals, her doctor informed her that she was finally pregnant after years of trying. She called Astaire first, breathlessly informing him that, "I want you to be the first to know, I'm pregnant." After a stunned silence, he asked "Who is this?"

Then somebody decided to give the role to Judy Garland. Given her frail mental and physical health at the time, it was hardly the wisest choice. And after spending a year-and-a-half nurturing her through her pervious film, Summer Stock, Walters begged to be spared a similar ordeal. Instead, Freed decided to make Royal Wedding the first solo directing assignment for Stanley Donen, who had helped stage some of Gene Kelly's best dance routines and had co-directed On the Town (1949) with Kelly.

But it would take more than a new director to get Garland through the film. After a few days of rehearsal, she protested that she couldn't work mornings and afternoons, so Freed let her cut back to half day. A few days before filming was to start, she started calling in sick. Freed reluctantly had her dropped from the film, which led MGM to cancel her contract after 14 years with the studio. The move made headlines and triggered Garland's first suicide attempt, but Freed still had a movie to make.

Fortunately for him, Jane Powell had just finished work on another musical. Astaire urged Freed to snap her up but was less than happy to learn during rehearsals that Powell had been born the year he and his sister had stopped dancing together. Powell would become pregnant during filming, too, but so late her condition did little to interfere with shooting.

Garland's departure brought one unexpected boon for Astaire. One of the songs written for her, "You?re All the World to Me," didn't seem right for Powell, so it went to Astaire, who sang it to a picture of leading lady Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston). He had long dreamed of doing a number in which he would dance on the walls and the ceiling, and this provided the perfect opportunity. To accomplish it, the furniture and fixtures were all nailed down, and the room was placed in the middle of a rotating barrel. Cameraman Robert Planck was strapped to a large ironing board, along with his camera, so he could rotate with the room. Then Astaire simply danced rightside-up as the room revolved around him, creating one of the most fondly remembered routines in movie musical history.

Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

Royal Wedding (1951) at Reel Classics: a review

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] reviewing Classical Musicals from the Dream Factory, Volume 2

InsidePulse [Corey3rd] reviewing Classical Musicals from the Dream Factory, Volume 2

DVDTalk [Paul Mavis] reviewing Classical Musicals from the Dream Factory, Volume 2

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

LOVE IS BETTER THAN EVER

USA (81 mi) 1952

Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller

In a just world, the 1952 romantic comedy Love Is Better Than Ever would have marked Stanley Donen's solo directing debut, hot on the heels of his success co-directing On the Town (1949) with friend Gene Kelly (who made an unbilled cameo as himself). The blacklist got in the way, however, when leading man Larry Parks' refusal to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) brought an end to his once-promising career. MGM put the film on the shelf for two years, allowing Royal Wedding (1951), Donen's second solo directing assignment, to become his official debut picture.

Starting small was only natural for a first time director. Although Donen had done outstanding work as a choreographer and had co-directed one of MGM's biggest hits of 1949, the studio had to make sure he could handle a film on his own before giving him any of their bigger projects. So Donen got to strut his stuff on a simple romantic comedy about a small-town girl (Elizabeth Taylor) who believes the line thrown at her by a Broadway press agent (Parks), then sets out to trick the womanizer into realizing she's his ideal woman. Making the slender story believable was hardly a challenge. At the height of her beauty, Taylor was already the ideal woman to large numbers of adoring fans. Love Is Better Than Ever went into production after her move into adult roles in the comedy Father of the Bride (1950) and the suspense film Conspirator (1949). In addition, she had been the darling of the press since her highly publicized wedding to hotel heir Nicky Hilton just as Father of the Bride was playing in theatres around the U.S.

Parks was also a hot commodity. He had been building a fan following at Columbia Pictures when studio head Harry Cohn decided to cast him rather than a major star to play legendary singer Al Jolson in The Jolson Story (1946). The film was a surprise hit, partly because of Parks' dynamic performance and partly because of Jolson's dubbing on the songs. Not only did the picture bring Parks an Oscar® nomination, but it made him one of the studio's top male stars. Three years later, the sequel, Jolson Sings Again (1949), was just as successful. When Cohn agreed to loan Parks to MGM for Love Is Better Than Ever, it seemed a smart move for all involved. Each star would get a boost from the other's popularity, and Donen would make his directing debut with two marquee names.

Then HUAC initiated a round of hearings into alleged Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry and called Parks as their first witness. He had actually been subpoenaed during the first round of hearings in 1947. But the first group of "unfriendly" witnesses, the Hollywood Ten, created such an uproar that the hearings had been suspended, and Parks' career had gone on without problems. When he was called in early 1951, however, he knew there was no way out, and MGM put Love Is Better Than Ever on the shelf while they waited to see how things would come out. Rather than take the Fifth, as many other witnesses were to do, Parks admitted to having been a member of the Communist Party, then explained that, like many other progressives in the '30s, he had been disillusioned by the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact at the start of World War II. When the committee demanded he name names, however, he refused. His statement made headlines: "I don't think this is American justice to make me choose [to]...be in contempt of this Committee...or crawl through the mud for no purpose. You know who these people are." (Quoted from the biography Betty Garrett and Other Songs). At first, it seemed he had gotten through the meetings unscathed. Even John Wayne, one of Hollywood's most outspoken supporters of the hearings, said he had done himself proud. Then gossip columnist Hedda Hopper went on the attack. By the time she was finished Wayne had apologized for his statements, and Park was unemployable. Columbia dropped his contract, and MGM held back Love Is Better Than Ever for another year. Even Parks' wife, Betty Garrett, was unemployable for a time.

When the film finally came out, critics were less than thrilled with what they saw as a tired rehash of overused romantic clichés. By that point, however, Donen had scored a hit with Royal Wedding and was working on his best film, Singin' in the Rain (1952). The film's main selling point was Taylor, whose star had risen even higher after her love scenes with Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951) and the publicity generated by her divorce from Hilton and her famous statement, "I'm just a girl in a woman's body." Fans today are mostly drawn to the film for the chance to see her youthful beauty.

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN

USA (103 mi) 1952 co director: Gene Kelly

"Gotta sing! Gotta dance!"

Singin' in the Rain Dave Kehr from the Reader

One of the shining glories of the American musical, this 1952 feature was fabricated (by screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green) around a collection of old songs written by producer Arthur Freed and brought to bright, brash, and exuberant life by directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. The setting is Hollywood's troubled transition to sound, and there is just enough self-reflexive content (on the eternal battle between illusion and reality in the movies) to structure the film's superb selection of numbers. The tone ranges from the lyrical (the title number) to the burlesque ("Moses Supposes") to the epic ("Broadway Melody"), but through it all runs a celebration of movement as emotion. Kelly's costars include Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, Millard Mitchell, Cyd Charisse, and Rita Moreno. G, 102 min.

Time Out

Is there a film clip more often shown than the title number of this most astoundingly popular musical? The rest of the movie is great too. It shouldn't be. There never was a masterpiece created from such a mishmash of elements: Arthur Freed's favourites among his own songs from back in the '20s and '30s, along with a new number, 'Make 'Em Laugh', which is a straight rip-off from Cole Porter's 'Be A Clown'; the barely blooded Debbie Reynolds pitched into the deep end with tyrannical perfectionist Kelly; choreography very nearly improvised because of pressures of time; and Kelly filming his greatest number with a heavy cold. Somehow it all comes together. The 'Broadway Melody' ballet is Kelly's least pretentious, Jean Hagen and Donald O'Connor are very funny, and the Comden/Green script is a loving-care job. If you've never seen it and don't, you're bonkers.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer)

Hollywood’s changeover from silents to talkies is the backdrop for MGM’s most perfect musical, a vehicle for Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O'Connor, who gotta sing, gotta dance. When production is halted to switch the newest Don Lockwood (Kelly)/Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) feature from a silent to a talkie, the filmmakers are stymied not only by the rigors of sound recording, but also by Lamont's nails-on-a-chalkboard speaking voice. "You Were Meant for Me" is the romantic highlight, sung by Don to Kathy (Reynolds) on a nearly empty yet gorgeous soundstage, all colors and wind. The romance is the love story between Don and Kathy, but it's also the act of filmmaking, which the two collaborate on (and consummate). All but two of the songs in the movie were written for movies in the early sound years, and in this way the film is a self-conscious history of the MGM musical. Shot on the cusp of the widescreen era, when movies evolved from one sort of entertainment into another, Singin' in the Rain is a celebration of the grand tradition of filmmaking that was canny enough to know it was also the bell-ringer at the end of an era.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Beth Capper

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's self-reflexive musical about the introduction of sound and, soon thereafter, singing, in Hollywood feature films is, hands down, one of the most inventive Hollywood musicals ever made. Sure, it's brash and brightly colored but, as far as mainstream Hollywood studio musicals go, it's not simply a rote number. To begin with, it pre-empts the popularity of post-modern strategies in Hollywood cinema even before Jean-Francois Lyotard had diagnosed the condition and it was also heavily inspired by Powell and Pressburger's THE RED SHOES (1948); the surreal and fantastical dream sequence for the song "Gotta Dance" undoubtedly borrows from the 15-minute long production of the Red Shoes ballet. Although SINGIN' IN THE RAIN is in many ways inferior, Donen and Kelly's desire to bring some of Powell and Pressburger's inventiveness to Hollywood was a courageous move. Comparisons aside, SINGIN' boasts its own impressive repertoire of brilliant performances, particularly Donald O'Connor's incredible physical comedy routines, sure to make even the most griping curmudgeon crack a smile. Although the most widely remembered scene in the film is Gene Kelly splashing around in the puddles and singing the title song, Debbie Reynolds' steals the show from him on more than one occasion—particularly her performance of "Good Mornin'" (which contrary to popular rumor she does sing herself). Throw in the fact that the Technicolor is stunning and the jokes still pack a punch 50 years later, and you have a clever, comic masterpiece. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN is a theater-going experience not to be missed—watching it on TV just doesn't do it justice.

Singin' in the Rain Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Nothing less than the greatest movie musical of all time, Singin' in the Rain, like many classics, was slow to achieve its reputation. Passed over for a Best Picture nomination (in favor of such enduring masterworks as Ivanhoe and eventual winner The Greatest Show on Earth), it was viewed at the time of its release as a pleasant trifle, unworthy of being mentioned in the same reverent breath as the previous year's ambitious, Oscar-winning Gershwin pastiche, An American in Paris. The film's breezy wit and unpretentious joie de vivre—the very qualities that endear it to us today—made it seem trivial, frivolous, a bantamweight. Have we learned from our mistake? Do we now value David's nimble finesse more than Goliath's epic bloat? Check back in 50 years or so, when critics will no doubt be peppering their reviews of the "cryogenically remastered" Toy Story with sarcastic remarks about the artistic legacy of Mel Gibson's Braveheart.

In any case, this glorious entertainment—digitally remastered, of course, and with its soundtrack needlessly remixed into Dolby stereo for the first time ever—has never required the imprimatur of critics to convulse audiences with laughter and send hearts soaring into the stratosphere. (A little breathless, I know, but it's that kind of movie.) Kelly's blissfully soggy soft-shoe number and O'Connor's hyperkinetic shtickfest ("Make 'Em Laugh") tend to get the attention when it's time to cull clips, but Singin' in the Rain's savvy skewering of the transition from silence to sound makes it one of the few musicals on stage or screen with a book that doesn't seem merely to be marking time between musical set pieces. (Only 25 years had passed since The Jazz Singer, so this was roughly the satirical equivalent of something like Undercover Brother—a fond tweaking of the not-so-distant past.) Sure, you've seen it on TV a dozen times or more, but trust me—seeing this movie with a packed house is more fun than Calvin Coolidge. Put together!

Turner Classic Movies Roger Fristoe

If TCM host Robert Osborne had his way, the winner of the Oscar® as Best Supporting Actress of 1952 would have been Jean Hagen for MGM's Singin' in the Rain (1952), not Gloria Grahame for the same studio's The Bad and the Beautiful. In the classic musical about the early sound days in Hollywood, Hagen plays Lina Lamont, the glamorous "Queen of the Silent Screen" whose voice unfortunately sounds like chalk on a blackboard. Hagen's hilarious performance owes something to Judy Holliday, who developed a similar character in routines worked up with Singin' in the Rain screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green when all three were part of a New York satirical troupe called "The Revuers." Holliday had since become a movie star, thanks to her Oscar®-winning performance as Billie Dawn, another squeaky-voiced character, in Born Yesterday (1950). Because a supporting role no longer was appropriate for Holliday, the Singin' in the Rain producers went after Hagen, her understudy in the stage version of Born Yesterday.

That Oscar® might have proven the shot in the arm Hagen appeared to need in her film career. A versatile actress who could switch with ease from musical comedy to drama (The Asphalt Jungle, 1950), she never again got the great opportunity afforded her in Singin' in the Rain. After several minor film roles and a three-year stint on TV's The Danny Thomas Show, she made her final movie appearance in Dead Ringer (1964) and died at age 54 in 1977.

Two other female performers were luckier in building on their success in Singin' in the Rain. The movie elevated Debbie Reynolds to full-fledged MGM stardom after small roles in such musicals as Three Little Words (1950) and Two Weeks With Love (1950). An inexperienced dancer when she began making Singin' in the Rain, Reynolds had to drive herself mercilessly to keep up with hard-driving costars Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor. She recalled later that after one strenuous number, she had to be carried to her dressing room because she had burst blood vessels in her feet. Cyd Charisse lucked into her small but star-making role in the film when O'Connor was not available for the climactic "Broadway Melody Ballet," providing an opening for a female dance partner for Kelly. Charisse had been hovering on the edge of stardom at MGM for some years. The unforgettable moment, when one of those long legs shot up with Kelly's hat balanced on her foot, turned the trick. Within a year Charisse was starring in her first musical lead in The Band Wagon (1953), opposite ideal partner Fred Astaire.

Ironically, in view of the fact that many feel Singin' in the Rain is the greatest of all screen muscials, it won only one other Oscar nomination - for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. It lost to Alfred Newman's score for With a Song in My Heart.

The Boston Phoenix [Steve Vineberg]

Among the jewels that Arthur Freed’s musicals unit turned out at MGM in the ’40s and ’50s, Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is the Hope diamond. Set in Hollywood in the late ’20s, at the moment when the unimaginable success of Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer sent the other studios into a desperate furor of nervous activity as they closed down all production of silents and wired their stages for sound, Betty Comden & Adolph Green’s screenplay burlesques the movie business with as much deadly accuracy and outrageous wit as anyone ever has. There they all are: the hamstrung mogul without an original thought in his head; the dyspeptic director in his beret and jodhpurs; the gushy columnist; the vain matinee idol thrown into a tailspin when someone suggests he may not be the world’s greatest actor; the territorial star threatened by the fresh-faced ingénue who steals her thunder. And, of course, the narcissistic silent-movie diva who’s so dumb that she believes her own publicity.

Jean Hagen’s Lina Lamont is hands down the most hilarious character in any movie musical. She’s not the protagonist, but the plot revolves around her. Forced to turn the latest costume vehicle for her and her co-star, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), into a talkie, Monumental Pictures struggles to find a way around her voice, which sounds like a cross between a crippled foghorn and radio static. Elocution lessons don’t make a dent in it, and she’s such a dope, she can’t even remember to talk into the microphones the sound technicians have planted all over the set. The resulting picture, The Dueling Cavalier, is a fiasco when it’s previewed before an audience, in a sequence that still makes viewers sick with laughter. At the 11th hour, Don’s old vaudeville partner, Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor), comes up with the answer: he invents lip-synching, and Don’s girlfriend, Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), a rising contract player, lands the job of providing Lina Lamont’s voice.

The credits list Kelly as co-director, as on his other collaborations with Stanley Donen, because he staged and shot the musical numbers, many of which are classics. Freed had won an Oscar the year before for producing An American in Paris, which showcased the music of George Gershwin, and in Singin’ in the Rain he recycled a handful of tunes he and lyricist Nacio Herb Brown had penned at MGM in the early days of the talkies. The title song had been introduced as the finale of an all-star musical spectacle called Hollywood Revue of 1929, but in movie lovers’ minds it’s forever associated with the image of Kelly swinging from a lamp post, umbrella in hand, and sloshing about merrily in several inches of rain water while proclaiming his new-found love for Debbie Reynolds. The pas de deux for Don and Kathy, "You Were Meant for Me," takes place on a soundstage: it’s a tribute to the irresistible artifice movies create to stylize romance. Donald O’Connor, one of the two most gifted comic dancers in the history of movies (the other, Ray Bolger, also did his stint at MGM), cheers up his downhearted pal with a peerless piece of vaudevillean brio, "Make ’Em Laugh," that climaxes when he dances up the wall of a movie flat and somersaults off it. O’Connor and Kelly duet on "Fit As a Fiddle" and again on "Moses Supposes," a tongue twister set to music. And in "Good Morning" (borrowed from the Judy Garland & Mickey Rooney Babes in Arms), Kelly, O’Connor, and Reynolds express their bottomless joy at solving the Dueling Cavalier problem by dancing over an upended sofa.

If choreographic athleticism was Kelly’s trademark, show-biz satire was Comden & Green’s. They would take on the Broadway musical in The Band Wagon the following year, and TV bathos in It’s Always Fair Weather, another Donen-Kelly picture, in 1955. But Singin’ in the Rain was their finest hour. It’s fitting that a new, 50th-anniversary restoration should open at the Regent mere weeks after Green’s death. Wherever he is, I hope he can hear the audience roaring with laughter.

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GIVE A GIRL A BREAK

USA (82 mi) 1953

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

The main claim to fame of this low-budget, mainly mediocre 1953 musical, an early effort by Stanley Donen, is that it was shot on sets built for another picture--a ploy Jacques Rivette consciously emulated in his 1995 Up Down Fragile. Maybe this is why Donen disowns the film, though Dave Kehr has remarked that, in spite of "its saccharine story and saccharine players (Debbie Reynolds, for one) . . . [it] still has its points of interest, including a madly overdone production number involving balloons, confetti, reverse motion, and an impossibly young Bob Fosse, at the start of his career." Marge and Gower Champion are also present, and the latter gets a chance to dance with Fosse. 82 min.

Turner Classic Movies Lorraine LoBianco

New York dancer and future superstar choreographer and director Bob Fosse had idolized Fred Astaire but wanted to be the next Gene Kelly. Had he been born twenty years earlier, he might have become a big star, but when he arrived in Hollywood to be in Give a Girl a Break (1953), MGM was at the end of the Golden Age of Hollywood, a time when musicals were losing popularity and the industry as a whole was losing viewers to television. Studios were cutting stars from their roster and downgrading productions in an attempt to save money. Give a Girl a Break is one such example.

Originally intended to be a major MGM film starring Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Ann Miller, the unavailability of the stars and the changes occurring at the studio turned it into a much smaller production for MGM's young star Debbie Reynolds, the dancing team of Marge and Gower Champion, and the newly arrived Fosse, who had quit the Broadway production of Pal Joey to come to Hollywood.

As Martin Gottfried wrote in his book, All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, "There were residual elements of the big project it had once been, a score by Burton Lane and Ira Gershwin [their only collaboration] , for instance, direction by Stanley Donen and musical supervision by Saul Chaplin. The screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, were estimable too, although in this instance they had written a slender story involving three unknown actresses competing for a Broadway role that becomes available when the star walks out."

Rehearsals started in September 1952, but, as Gottfried wrote, "The Champions [Marge and Gower] and Debbie Reynolds, having played small parts in previous MGM movies, snobbishly formed a clique and sniffed at the newcomer....Donen and [the film's musical director] Saul Chaplin, and Fosse were left to become a trio of pals. In fact, Stanley and Saul were to be Bob's only close friends during the lonely, infertile, and frustrating year that lay ahead."

Fosse had rented pal Buddy Hackett's Hollywood home and bought a red sports car, but he was still unhappy. He realized that his looks were not those of a leading man, and that he did not want to end up a musical star "wearing a toupee". He also knew, as did everyone else on the picture, that it was not going to be an important film, as Stanley Donen later said, "The idea for the story is so puny that it's not worth spending a year of one's life on it." Still, Fosse put his all into it and as Gottfried wrote, "Donen gave him a good-sized role in Give a Girl a Break, almost as big as Gower Champion's, and the two young dancers had several numbers together. Bob was also to dance with Debbie Reynolds, and Donen found him not only cooperative but 'the hardest worker I've ever known". Like almost everyone who ever worked with Fosse, Donen was awed by his perfectionism, the tireless repetition until he got something right. If there was any problem, it was a back flip that Donen had decided would be the climax of one of Bob's big numbers, and Fosse was scared to try it. The young man had not yet discovered his particular dance style "but when he did," Donen said, "it would be delicate and small with no major physical or athletic moves. He didn't want to do the back flip, but I staged the number doing what I knew, not what he did." A back flip is a backward somersault achieved without touching the ground, "just throwing your feet up in the air," Donen said blithely. It lends the illusion of momentary suspension, the head hovering above the ground, and Donen practiced with Bob for hours, holding an arm behind the small of his back as he flipped. Finally, the director said, "Okay, we're going to do it for the camera, the whole dance right up to and including the flip." And for the one and only time, with nobody behind him for support, Bob did the flip and it was perfect. They had it on film, and that is how it appears in the movie. Donen never did know that Bob flew to New York and spent two days working with Joe Price, an acrobatic teacher, to get the flip right before coming back to do it on camera that one time."

Donen also resorted to tricking Kurt Kasznar to get what he wanted for the Nothing Is Impossible number. Donen wired Kasznar so that he would not fall when he bends over so that he is nearly touching the floor with his nose. Donen also nailed Kasznar's shoes to the floor so that he could not move, and had the stagehands drop a sandbag above his head that would stop right before it hit him. As Donen remembered, "He almost had a heart attack, but it got him to move."

Predictably, the critical response to Give a Girl a Break was lukewarm, but the most devastating criticism seems to have come from Ira Gershwin's wife Leonore, as Stephen Silverman wrote in his book Dancing on the Ceiling, "True, the picture was nowhere near Academy Award nomination, but it wasn't this bad," said Ira Gershwin in regard to MGM's denying the picture a New York opening and national reviews. Others shared the studio's opinion. "On leaving the studio projection room after seeing a rough cut of the film, my wife asked me if I owned any stock in the film company." Gershwin did, one hundred shares, which he had purchased the previous year, and this he reported to his wife, Leonore. Her response: "Sell it."

SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS

USA (102 mi) 1954

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

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a profoundly sexist and eminently hummable 1954 musical – supposedly set in the great outdoors, but mainly filmed on soundstages – with some terrific athletic Michael Kidd choreography and better-than-average direction by Stanley Donen. Based on a story by Stephen Vincent Benet, who took his plot from the rape of the Sabine women, it concerns six mangy fur-trapping brothers who go to town to find wives after big brother (Howard Keel) marries Milly (Jane Powell). They wind up following their frontiersmen instincts by kidnapping the women, but then have to mope through the winter until their impromptu mates get around to forgiving them in the spring.

A fascinating glimpse at the kind of patriarchal rape fantasies that were considered good-natured and even “cute” at the time, performed to the catchy music of Johnny Mercer and Gene DePaul, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers includes Russ Tamblyn, Virginia Gibson, and Tommy Rall. Among the most memorable tunes, some of which accurately pinpoint the movie’s sexual politics are “Bless Your Beautiful Hide,” “Sobbin’ Women,” Goin’ Courtin’,” “I’m a Lonesome Polecat,” and “Spring, Spring, Spring.”

Time Out

Circuitously derived from the tale of the rape of the Sabine women, this rather archly symmetrical movie musical is best seen as a dance-fest, with Michael Kidd's acrobatic, pas d'action choreography well complemented by ex-choreographer Donen's camera. Gene De Paul and Johnny Mercer's score is cosy ('Spring, Spring, Spring' and all that), and Keel, avoiding even the odd faked toe-step, is at his least expressive, but it's vigorous and colourful if you can watch the Anscocolor process which also marred Brigadoon. The bearded Matt Mattox went on to become something of a legend for his jazz classes at London's Dance Centre.

filmcritic.com (Pete Croatto)

There are a few things I don’t understand: physics, women, and how Seven Brides for Seven Brothers gets excluded from the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest movies of all time. Quite frankly, I’m bound to figure out the other two topics sooner.

Watching Stanley Donen’s exuberant, musical masterpiece again gives me more reason to picket the next AFI event. This movie has aged better than Susan Sarandon. The songs are still great, the dancing still dazzles, and the whole family can enjoy it. Parents, forget whatever kid-friendly fare disguised as a toy commercial is playing at the multiplex this week, and go back to a simpler time.

Well, 1850 to be exact. High from his farm in the rugged Oregon Territory countryside, Adam Pontipee (Howard Keel) makes a trip to town to pick up some goods for the long months ahead, including a wife. He’s able to find most of what he needs at the general store, but his afternoon is looking fruitless until he stumbles upon a serving girl (Jane Powell) with passion and sass to spare.

It also doesn’t hurt that she has a sweet voice to match his booming baritone, and looks like a young Jane Powell. The girl, named Milly, falls for Adam’s sweet talk about the farming life and she’s soon married quicker than Britney Spears in Vegas. However, Adam fails to mention that he lives with his six younger brothers, who seem content to live like barnyard animals.

Since this is the 1850s, Milly doesn’t look for an annulment or a good divorce lawyer. She rolls up her sleeves, seeks solace in her Bible and gets to work. She cleans the house, sets Adam straight and soon becomes a surrogate mother to the six brothers, teaching them manners, proper grooming and dancing. This being a musical, the gents take to the dancing pretty quickly. The result: the girls in town (including a pre-Catwoman Julie Newmar) start to take notice, much to the annoyance of their suitors. Can the brothers curb their tempers and impatience to win the girls’ hearts, even with Adam’s barbaric advice?

Well, of course we know the answer, but the nuts and bolts of the story isn’t what gives Seven Brides for Seven Brothers its evergreen status. For one thing, Michael Kidd’s choreography, executed by a nimble and sure-footed cast, is brilliant. If you liked Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” scene in Singin’ In the Rain (another Donen classic), you’ll want to marry Seven’s barn raising scene. The songs are catchy, and courtesy of Keel’s cannon boom of a voice and Powell’s gentle trill, they are often memorable.

Aside from her singing, Powell also delivers a great performance as Milly, making her alternately feisty, compassionate, and motherly. With the presence of singing and dancing farmers, Powell provides the movie with a much-needed human center. And here’s the best part. For those who find the movie to be short sighted in its treatment of women (even though the musical takes place pre-Ms.), Milly is the most assured, independent and complete character on screen. She’s the antithesis of most female leads in today’s romantic comedies. That’s just one more reason to watch one of the greatest musicals, if not movies, of all time, regardless of what the AFI and its voters say.

Turner Classic Movies Roger Fristoe

Saul Chaplin and Adolph Deutsch won Oscars® for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture for the sprightly score of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). This MGM musical is based on the Stephen Vincent Benet story about a family of Oregon backwoodsmen who abduct a collection of not-entirely-unwilling maidens for purposes of marriage. Chaplin and Deutsch, who remained faithful to the movie's frontier spirit by favoring banjos, accordions and harmonicas in their orchestrations, had some great source material in the collection of witty and rousing songs created by composer Gene de Paul and lyricist Johnny Mercer. Among the outstanding numbers are "Goin' Courtin'," in which Jane Powell, as the wife of the eldest brother (Howard Keel), instructs her brothers-in-law in the ways of wooing; "Lament (I'm a Lonesome Polecat)," in which the boys give voice to their lovesickness; and "Sobbin' Women," in which Keel gets his brothers fired up for the kidnapping by relating the story of the rape of Sabine women by Roman soldiers.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was nominated in four other categories: Best Picture, Color Cinematography, Film Editing and Screenplay. Although they lost in the latter category, Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Dorothy Kingsley did share a Writers Guild of America award for Best Written American Musical. The movie proved a box-office smash (later becoming a perennial hit in revivals and on television, and spawning a stage version that also starred Powell and Keel). It won glowing critical notices, including Time magazine's claim that "It's the liltingest bit of tunesome lolly-gagging to hit the screen since An American in Paris," and appeared on almost every major "10 Best" list of its year. Director Stanley Donen's concept, with musical numbers developing from and advancing the plot, won favorable comparisons to the groundbreaking stage musical Oklahoma! (which would be filmed the following year). Michael Kidd's spirited and inventive choreography was singled out for special praise.

The attention and adulation heaped upon Seven Brides for Seven Brothers came as a major shock to MGM, which had relegated this film to a relatively low budget and back-lot shooting while lavishing a great deal more time, effort and expense that year on such other musicals as Rose Marie, Brigadoon and Jupiter's Darling. The Best Picture Oscar nomination was a particular distinction. During the 1940s and 1950s, generally considered the Golden Age of the Movie Musical, only three others of that genre from MGM earned such recognition: Anchors Aweigh (nominee, 1945), An American in Paris (winner, 1951) and Gigi (winner, 1958).

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IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER

USA (102 mi) 1955 ‘Scope co-director: Gene Kelly

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] capsule

For the last of his MGM musicals (1955), Stanley Donen tried to bring something different to the genre--melancholia. Three old war buddies (Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Michael Kidd) meet for the first time in ten years and find that life has disappointed their ambitions. The film is one of Donen's most formally perfect works--innovative, involving, and, in case there's any doubt, finally optimistic. With Cyd Charisse and Dolores Gray. 102 min.

Time Out

Donen and Kelly's last musical together, and an exhilarating - if rather odd - follow-up to the marvellous On the Town. Dealing with three soldier buddies who reunite ten years after the war, only to discover that they now have nothing in common, it features some great dance numbers (Kelly on roller-skates, the trio dancing with dustbin-lids for shoes, Charisse and a chorus of plug-uglies in the gym), and a strangely cynical sense of humour about their incompatibility and about television.

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] part of a 5-DVD box set Classic Musicals from the Dream Factory

The movie musical's greatest era lasted from roughly 1944 to 1958, and by the end, the genre's top directors, stars, and choreographers had figured out how to use the form to create ethereal poetry one moment and off-the-cuff social commentary the next. The five-disc box set Classic Musicals From The Dream Factory contains one of those late-period masterpieces, It's Always Fair Weather, co-directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, and starring Kelly as one of three World War II buddies who meet up again a decade after the war, only to find they have nothing in common. The song-score by Betty Comden and Adolph Green contains only one really memorable number—"Baby, You Knock Me Out," sung by Cyd Charisse with a chorus of pug-ugly boxers—but It's Always Fair Weather is an excellent showcase for dancing, marked by innovative, impressionistic routines that have Kelly tapping in roller skates, then with a trashcan lid attached to one foot, then in the middle panel of a three-way split-screen. Throughout, the movie maintains a mood of sorrowful post-war disappointment, as the men who opened the movie dancing together spend the rest of the film dancing alone.

The bulk of the Dream Factory set is taken up by lesser musical biographies: 1946's Till The Clouds Roll By and Ziegfeld Follies, and 1950's Three Little Words. Each has its highlights, but none is as consistent as It's Always Fair Weather or 1950's Summer Stock, which stars Judy Garland as a bachelorette farmer who lets Gene Kelly's theater troupe rehearse in her barn. Director Charles Walters keeps Summer Stock's singing and dancing grounded in real spaces, unlike the revue-style films of the '30s and '40s, where theater stages seemed to stretch to infinity. Here, Walters and company make magic on small, bare stages: Kelly with just a squeaky board and a piece of newspaper, and Kelly and Garland inside a tight circle of square-dancers. Summer Stock has its dry spots, but its highs rival the best of the MGM golden age, especially in the show-stopping finale "Get Happy!", where a stocky, sensual Garland single-leggedly kicks the musical into maturity.

Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster

A lighter approach to the difficulties of readjusting to normal life after war, It's Always Fair Weather (1955) is that rarest of creatures: a cynical musical.

Stanley Donen's third pairing (along with Singin' in the Rain, 1952, and On the Town, 1949) with co-director Gene Kelly and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, It's Always Fair Weather follows three soldiers as they are released from their wartime service at a former favorite neighborhood pub. The bosom buddies make a vow to return in 10 years to that same pub, to renew their undying friendship. Clever use of montage and split screen techniques follows the men on their individual courses as the years tick by. Ted Riley (Gene Kelly), a sharp-as-a-tack big-talker moves into the lowlife world of gamblers and bookies as a promoter of second-rate fighters. Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey), a talented artist, has traded in his dreams to rise in the soulless corporate world of advertising. And aspiring chef Angie Valentine (Michael Kidd) starts up his own Schenectady hamburger joint, absurdly called The Cordon Bleu.

But the real meat of the film follows the misadventures of the trio after their 10-year reunion and their mutual disappointment at how far each has strayed from their dreams and youthful integrity. Though they take an almost immediate dislike to each other at their reunion, the three reluctantly agree to have lunch at an uncomfortably swanky New York restaurant where they are observed by one of Doug's advertising colleagues, Jackie (Cyd Charisse). Sensing a marketable story, Jackie decides to feature the "happily" reunited chums on the saccharine TV show Midnight with Madeline (a parody of fifties "reality" programs like This Is Your Life) hosted by phony, effusive glamour-puss Madeline (Dolores Gray). As Jackie attempts to keep the three alienated friends around for that night's performance (and begins to fall in love with Ted), the film veers into an arch comedy about the constructed sentimentality and crass manipulations of television and the advertising business.

Like other films of the fifties, anxious to distinguish themselves from the new entertainment form stealing all the movie industry's profits, Donen's film used a CinemaScope format to satirize the TV invasion. Donen proved to be a deft manipulator of the rectangular CinemaScope frame, breaking up space in innovative ways. On several occasions in the film, as in the hilarious "I Shouldn't Have Come" musical number set to "The Blue Danube" waltz, Donen splits the screen into a triptych, to show the different perspectives of the three leads lamenting their misguided luncheon reunion. And in a climactic fight at the Midnight with Madeline TV studio, where some of Ted's outraged mobster rivals come after the promoter, Donen shows the brawl through the windows of the control booth and the multiple perspectives of the television monitors.

It's Always Fair Weather melds elements of homefront disillusion found in films like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) with the widescreen media-satire of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957). In fact Weather began as an effort to capitalize upon the success of On the Town, starring Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin, by picking up where that film left off, and following the lives of the sailors after they've settled back into the homefront. But after unsuccessful attempts to reunite that original cast, It's Always Fair Weather was reconceived as the tale of Army buddies coming to terms with how much their lives and personalities had, unhappily, changed since their youth.

Alongside its more somber and satirical elements, It's Always Fair Weather features a host of memorable musical numbers, including Kelly, Dailey and Kidd hoofing with garbage can lids on one foot; Kelly gliding over the city streets on roller skates in a love-drunk stupor; Dolores Gray decimating a male chorus line via trap doors and exploding stage props; and Charisse in a sexy dance ("Baby, You Knock Me Out") with Ted's fisticuffs brethren at Stillman's Gym.

Though it was critically admired - placed on the New York Times' yearly top ten list (above Oklahoma!, 1955) and called "a winning show" by Times critic Bosley Crowther - the film never really took off with audiences, who were perhaps under-wowed by the film's blend of cynicism and dance numbers and its far less opulent production values. The film was riding the tail end of the musical wave, and MGM executive Dore Schary's imposition of budgetary restraints on the faltering musical genre showed in the film's final look.

But It's Always Fair Weather's clever spoof of television and the advertising business, ebullient musical numbers, melancholy observations about the transistory nature of friendships and some fiendishly clever performances, notably Dolores Gray's, make the film a continual favorite with contemporary audiences.

Bright Lights Film Journal Victoria Large

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DVD Verdict [Bryan Pope] also reviews the 5-DVD box set Classic Musicals from the Dream Factory

The Hollywood Musical Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 131 pages, book reviewed by Jeremy Butler from Jump Cut

Austin Chronicle [Louis Black]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

FUNNY FACE

USA (103 mi) 1957

Funny Face Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Writer Leonard Gershe, director Stanley Donen, and producer Roger Edens take on French existentialism in this colorful and sumptuous 1957 musical, set largely in Paris and starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, with a dreamy Gershwin score. Although the anti-intellectualism gets thick in spots, the visuals are consistently stylish. Astaire is a fashion photographer (Richard Avedon supervised his photo sessions), Hepburn a Greenwich Village bookworm transformed into a model (clothes by Givenchy), and Kay Thompson plays their fashion editor. The film's sophistication is compromised by the rather dumb plot, but some of the numbers--especially "Think Pink" and "Bonjour Paris"--are standouts. 103 min.

Time Out

The musical that dares to rhyme Sartre with Montmartre, Funny Face - surprisingly from Paramount rather than MGM - knocks most other musicals off the screen for its visual beauty, its witty panache, and its totally uncalculating charm. The beauty is most irresistible in the sylvan scene, shimmering through gauze, when Astaire and Hepburn find they 'empathise', to use the film's joke. The panache is most sustained in the 'Clap Yo' Hands' number, in which Astaire and Thompson shuffle on as a couple of beats and develop a dazzlingly inventive send-up. The charm is everywhere. Love triumphs over capitalist exploitation, joyless intellectualisation, and all things phony; and the thesis persuades because of the commitment and skill of the team and the lightness of the underrated Donen's touch.

Turner Classic Movies Margarita Landazuri

Pygmalion story set in the rarefied world of high fashion, Funny Face (1957) is an irresistible combination of music, style, and star talents: top production staff from MGM's fabled Freed unit; legendary dancer Fred Astaire; enchanting gamine Audrey Hepburn; and photographer Richard Avedon. Astaire plays fashion photographer Dick Avery, who turns a scruffy Greenwich Village intellectual (played by Hepburn) into a supermodel, takes her to romantic Paris, and falls in love with her.

The source for the story was an unproduced musical play called Wedding Day by Leonard Gershe, loosely based on incidents in his friend Avedon's life. Freed unit producer Roger Edens bought it for MGM with Astaire and Hepburn in mind. But at that time, Hepburn was Paramount's most valuable star, and Paramount was not about to loan her to MGM. Astaire, who was by then freelancing, also owed Paramount a film. With uncommon generosity, producer Arthur Freed not only allowed Edens to take Funny Face to Paramount, but also to take some key Freed unit talent with him: Director Stanley Donen, musical director Adolph Deutsch, arranger Conrad Salinger, choreographer Eugene Loring, and cinematographer Ray June. Edens bought the rights to the Gershwin score for the 1927 stage musical, Funny Face, from Warner Bros., although the plot of that show had nothing to do with Gershe's story. (Astaire and his sister Adele had starred in Funny Face on Broadway.) Edens added another Gershwin song, "Clap Yo' Hands," plus three new ones that he co-wrote with Gershe.

Hepburn, who had idolized Astaire since she was a child, was thrilled to be working with him, but very nervous. Although she'd had dance training, she was by no means on Astaire's level, nor was she a trained singer. But at their first meeting, he soon put her at ease. "Fred literally swept me off my feet," she later recalled. Putting an arm around her waist, he twirled her around, and his ease dissolved her nervousness. The perfectionist Astaire practiced with Hepburn for many hours, but made it so enjoyable that Hepburn didn't mind.

Kay Thompson, a nightclub performer, composer and arranger, was a Freed unit vocal coach for Judy Garland and others, as well as a close pal of Edens. Both he and Gershe knew Thompson was the only person who could play the flamboyant magazine editor, which she did, brilliantly. Funny Face was one of only a handful of films in which Thompson appeared, and the only one in which she played a significant role. The character is said to have been based on both Vogue editor Diana Vreeland and Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow.

Richard Avedon, whose innovative photographs of haute couture had inspired Gershe's story, was hired as "special visual consultant" for Funny Face. He worked with director Stanley Donen to create one of the film's centerpieces, a five-minute montage of Hepburn posing all over Paris for a fashion layout, as well as the witty fashion sequence in the "Think Pink" number, which featured two of his favorite models, blonde Sunny Hartnett, and redhead Suzy Parker. (The latter would soon begin her own career as an actress.) Avedon also designed the opening titles, based on some of his most famous photographs, and the darkroom sequence.

Another Avedon favorite, Dovima, appeared in Funny Face as the whiny-voiced model Marion, who poses and preens in Hepburn's bookstore. The character was given one of Dovima's own traits: a fondness for comic books. In spite of her exotic looks and name, Dovima was actually born in Queens. Her name was a combination of her given names, Dorothy, Virginia, and Margaret.

Donen's visual inventiveness was a good match for Avedon's. As he had done with New York in On the Town (1949), Donen took one Funny Face number, "Bonjour Paree", into the streets of Paris in an exhilarating travelogue that splits the wide screen into three parts and culminates at the Eiffel Tower. But filming in Paris wasn't all glamour. The crew had to contend with unpredictable weather during much of the outdoor shooting. In some of those scenes, the drizzly weather gave the film a very effective Impressionist effect. But by the time they shot the bridal gown number "He Loves and She Loves" at the country chapel in Chantilly, it had been raining for so long that the ground on which Astaire and Hepburn had to dance was a swamp. Dancing was difficult. Hepburn's expensive white satin shoes kept sinking in the mud, and getting ruined. The delays were making everyone tense, until Hepburn joked, "Here I've been waiting twenty years to dance with Fred Astaire, and what do I get? Mud!"

Hepburn had met French designer Hubert de Givenchy when he designed her Parisian wardrobe for Sabrina (1954). Unfortunately, Edith Head received sole screen credit, and when that film won an Academy Award for costume design, the Oscar® went to Head alone. For Funny Face, Givenchy did all of Hepburn's Paris costumes, and she made sure he received equal billing (and an Oscar® nomination) with Head. The film also earned nominations for original screenplay, cinematography, and art direction, but did not win in any category.

With a few exceptions, the reviews for Funny Face were very good, and the film did well in the big cities. However, it may have been too sophisticated for mass audiences, and did not make back its four million dollar cost. Today, in an era of celebrity-fashion worship, Funny Face looks better than ever, and remains one of the treasures of the American film musical.

Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz

Silver Screen Reviews

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THE PAJAMA GAME

USA (101 mi) 1957 co-director: George Abbott

Time Out

A truly joyous screen adaptation of the Broadway musical, with Doris Day heading the union in a clothing factory. The real star of the show is arguably Bob Fosse's stunning choreography, in particular the tour de force sequence of the workers' picnic. No opportunity to use the bright colours and props offered by the setting is missed, and the songs by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross are memorable ('Hey, There' and 'There Once Was a Man'). An enthusiastic young Jean-Luc Godard dubbed it 'the first left-wing operetta'.

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)

Sleepwear, a labor dispute, and singing come together for maybe the first and only time in film history in the Doris Day vehicle The Pajama Game.

Why is it called The Pajama Game? Doris makes PJs but she's underpaid. She leads the workers to revolt and demand a pay raise of 7 1/2 cents an hour. Management refuses. Love ensues. Don't forget the singing, and don't tell poor Doris she's going to get her butt outsourced to Indonesia in about 20 years.

Some of Pajama's tunes are memorable -- most notably the famous "Hernando's Hideaway," which I would never have expected to appear in a movie that takes place in a sweatshop. (Incidentally it's not sung by Day either, but by scene-stealer Carol Haney, who appeared in the original Broadway production.)

Other tunes are memorable but not as iconic, such as the show-ending "I Figured It Out," which has an accountant adding the amount of the raise to determine that, yeah, it might be a good thing for the seamstresses. It's altogether a fun romp, but Day particularly overdoes her schtick and sends the movie too often into self-parody.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

It's going to prove fairly difficult for those who, like me, are strongly inclined to assign authorship outside of auteur-ship to reckon with The Pajama Game, a spunky, simultaneously neon-dingy musical about a garment factory showdown between the headstrong leader of the workers' Union (Doris Day, sporting a fetching bull-dyke pompadour) and the hunky factory superintendent (John Raitt, sporting in every conceivable way) attempting to bridge the widening gap between the plant's workers and boss over a proposed seven-and-a-half cent raise. The author struggle is heady not so much because of the physical roadblock representative in two directors taking the helm—one of which, Stanley Donen, also split the directorial billing for his most critically acclaimed film (Singin' in the Rain) with a different collaborator, Gene Kelly—but more so because of the centrality of Bob Fosse's choreography, transposed from the hit Broadway production that won the hoofer his first of a mile-long string of dance Tony awards.

Though only one routine stands tall in Fosse’s pantheon ("Steam Heat"), the narrative momentum of Pajama Game is punctuated far more often than most musicals by musical numbers. (By my count, there had already been no less than six songs just past the first half hour.) And most of those musical numbers seem to serve as introductions to extended, vocal-devoid interludes featuring soft shoe, stomp n' clap, and those inimitable Fosse proto-vogue, angular-jointed contortions. In fact, as directors, it could be said that Donen and George Abbott's main contribution to the film's mise-en-scene was to cart over as much of the Broadway troupe as possible. (Abbott was the stage director.) Visually, the artifice of Pajama Game's sets is reminiscent of oil-paint backdrops of vaudeville yore, and the insistent swatches of color that cut through the grime complement Fosse's limber body architecture.

As the two leads' swiftly flowering romance begins to grow further apart with the pressures of the labor war, the strain is conveyed through the mechanized perfectionism of the choreography, which isn't, incidentally, confined by the musical numbers. At one point, when the workers object to their maltreatment, they grind their physical routine to a slow-motion display of protest. The centerpiece "Steam Heat," performed by the quintessentially Fosse-lanky Carol Haney and two Runyon-worthy mugs (the one on the right of the frame seems to be the only one who wears the bowler hat correctly, though), tellingly takes place at a union meeting. The precise, almost masochistic tension-release dynamic of the dancer's movements (bodies lean back at a perfect 45º angle, combinations that involve standing on one's ankles) mirror Day and Raitt's dangerous liaison, and their guarded hope that the alliance will tip the scales of the conflict their way. Fosse's movements hadn't quite calcified into the nightmare of bondage and strain that would thin out the air in his 1972 film version of Cabaret. Here, as with most musicals of the era, the exertions are rewarded with good health, a condition endorsed by the closing spectacle of Day's nude gams and Raitt's bare barrel chest.

The Lumière Reader (DVD) Tim Wong

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DAMN YANKEES!

USA (111 mi) 1958 co-director: George Abbott

Time Out

A musical lumbered with too much plot and tiresome Walston as the Devil who tempts an ageing baseball fan into rejuvenation for a year (in the person of Tab Hunter). But it also has scintillating choreography by Bob Fosse (his duet with Verdon, 'Who's Got the Pain?' is an eye-opener), and an equally brilliant score by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (a songwriting team also responsible for the marvellous The Pajama Game, and only prevented from becoming the best on Broadway by the latter's untimely death).

Turner Classic Movies Jay S. Steinberg

What with Major League Baseball making an imminent return to the nation's capital, the timing seems perfect for the film adaptation of Damn Yankees (1958), the popular Broadway musical that blended the national pastime with the Faust legend, to have its debut on DVD. The enduringly engaging nature of the show's story and score have been demonstrated by its several successful revivals over the years, and this recent release from Warner Home Video should be a regarded as a grand slam for its devotees.

By and large, the film retained the players from the show's initial stage run to reprise their efforts for the camera. The narrative opens in the suburbs of D.C., where middle-aged Washington Senators fan Joe Boyd (Robert Shafer) is resigned to another interminable summer of watching his team spiral downward in the standings while those insufferable New York Yankees make their inevitable run at the American League pennant. Joe's frustrated offer of his soul for just one Senators championship spurs the arrival on his doorstep of a dapper gent answering to "Mr. Applegate" (Ray Walston), reeking of brimstone and ready to take him up on the bargain.

A savvy businessman, Joe demands and receives an escape clause on the deal, leaving him until September 24th to back out. Applegate holds up his end of the bargain by transforming Joe into a young Adonis (Tab Hunter) with a MVP-caliber hitting stroke, and re-dubbing him "Joe Hardy." Leaving only a vague note for his baseball-widow spouse Meg (Shannon Bolin), Joe follows Applegate to the Senators' home field, where his "agent" wrangles him a tryout. A few prodigious shots into the bleachers later, the Senators decide to take a chance on the unknown. Within a matter of weeks, Joe has placed the team on his back, and the perennial sad-sacks find themselves playing with a confidence they'd never before experienced.

Applegate, for his part, is kicking himself for leaving Joe an out, and is less than thrilled that the sudden superstar continues to pine for his abandoned wife; Joe goes as far as to knock on his own door and ask Meg if she needs a boarder. Applegate counters by summoning his top-rated seductress, the statuesque Lola (Gwen Verdon), in order to entice Joe into missing the deadline. Joe's challenge to save his soul as well as the Senators' postseason carries the story to its conclusion.

Playwright George Abbott shared director's credit with Stanley Donen, and their matched sensibilities (together with the hummable Richard Adler/Jerry Ross score and the customarily nifty choreography of Bob Fosse) ensured that the play's verve would be well preserved in the adaptation. Damn Yankees offered two of the principals from the show's original Broadway run what would be their best showcases in Hollywood. In committing her Tony-winning performance to celluloid, Verdon is sinuous and smoky, almost palpably fogging the lens with the show-stopping "Whatever Lola Wants", and demonstrating her chemistry with future spouse Fosse in the mambo number "Who's Got The Pain." Walston is consistently amusing in his gleeful malice, never more so than in the staging of the darkly hilarious "Those Were the Good Old Days."

While Hunter's status as the hunk of the moment began to decline after Damn Yankees, he looks the part of the star jock, and he's more than serviceable in bringing across the film's gentler moments. Other nice supporting work was delivered by Rae Allen as the lady sports reporter desperate for dish on Joe's too-shrouded past; James Komack, Albert Linville and Nathaniel Frey as the teammates; and Jean Stapleton, seen in her film debut as an annoying spinster friend of Meg's.

Thankfully, Warner provided a exceedingly rich video transfer for this DVD, presented in its original 1:85.1 aspect ratio; the colors pop, and the definition is remarkably sharp. If any fault is to be found with this release, it's in the relative lack of extras; the only inclusions is a theatrical trailer, ostensibly for the British market since it bears the film's U.K release title of What Lola Wants.

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filmcritic.com Pete Croatto

commentary by musical number

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

CHARADE

USA (113 mi) 1963

City Pages [Noel Murray]

This 1963 comedy-thriller from director Stanley Donen is a mood piece of a very strange and specific type: a star vehicle so weightless that it sometimes threatens to float away, though it sports a plot that turns on gruesome murders and climaxes with one of the most exciting cat-and-mouse games ever filmed. Audrey Hepburn plays a young widow in Paris who finds herself pursued by a gang of unsavory characters who claim that her late husband has stashed away a fortune somewhere. Cary Grant steps in as Hepburn's protector and guide, but although she's attracted to him, she's not quite sure she can trust him. Their playful romance makes up the core of Charade, distracting from a convoluted and at times grating plot. The dichotomy between Hitchcockian capering and lovey banter can be jarring, and throughout the film there are comic beats and acts of violence that play equally shrill. But Grant and Hepburn knock around some witty, memorable lines ("You might not be able to lie down for awhile, but then you can lie from any position, can't you?"), and are so at ease with one another that they carry the audience right along to the moment when the movie's surprise villain corners them in an empty theater. Donen generates real tension as the endgame plays out on a bare stage dotted with trapdoors--a perceptive metaphor for slick Hollywood entertainment.

filmcritic.com (Pete Croatto)

I don’t understand why directors decide to remake perfectly good movies. This thought races through my head because I recently saw Charade, the 1963 Stanley Donen gem featuring Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and an endless amount of thrills, chills, and sweet goofiness. It’s an unabashed delight, featuring two screen legends whose charisma is unmatched whether they're fleeing from danger or feeling each other out.

Jonathan Demme remade Charade in 2002 as The Truth About Charlie, starring Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton. I haven’t seen Charlie and though I’ve enjoyed Demme’s past work, I’m in no rush to see it. The casting confuses the hell out of me. Wahlberg either gives you befuddled naivety, which he’s now too old for, or reserved cool, which comes across as sheer boredom. Just check out The Italian Job. And when did Thandie Newton become the heir to Audrey Hepburn? Was I out sick that day?

Watch Charade and you’ll understand where my anger comes from. Regina (Hepburn) is living the high life in Paris, but everything crashes when her husband, Charles, is murdered. It turns out that this man of mystery made quite a few enemies along the way, namely a group of former WWII army buddies (which include old pros George Kennedy and James Coburn) who believe Regina now has the money that her husband supposedly stole years ago. Regina is stupefied.

Grant, whose character’s name changes throughout the movie, rushes to Regina’s aid, though they know each other on only the flimsiest of terms. With no other allies and fear surrounding her, Regina turns to this other mystery man for help. Soon, she’s alternately doubting and falling in love with him as their pursuers -- one by one -- turn up dead.

What’s so neat about Charade is its unconventionality. Neither relentlessly dark nor smothered in hipster irony, like so many of today’s action/suspense movies, Donen masterly weaves romance and scares to create an original and entertaining treat. The combination of two distinct, different elements never feels forced. Credit must be given to the two stars, who roll with the material, their charm and bravado in tact.

Now out on Criterion DVD, Charade shows off its strengths with a crisp transfer, plus a commentary track from Donen and writer Peter Stone. Other minor extras round out an exceptional disc.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

It's got all the ingredients of a classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller: A convoluted plot involving mistaken identity and murder; a beautiful woman in peril; an assortment of frightening villains; a dapper gentleman hero; posh settings; witty dialogue; a memorable music score and theme song; and one of the most attractive screen teams of the sixties - Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant (in their only film together). In fact, Charade (1963) has everything you'd except from a Hitchcock film except the famous director's name above the credits. That's because this is a Stanley Donen film that works as both homage and a send-up of Hitchcock's past collaborations with Cary Grant. In the biography Audrey Hepburn by Barry Paris, Donen said, "I always wanted to make a movie like one of my favorites, North by Northwest [1959]. What I admired most was the wonderful story of the mistaken identity of the leading man. They mistook him for somebody who didn't exist; he could never prove he wasn't somebody who wasn't alive. I searched [for something with] the same idiom of adventure, suspense and humor."

It was inevitable that two iconic stars like Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, renown for their on-screen sophistication and elegance, would be teamed together at some point in their careers and they had come close to it three times prior to Charade. Grant had been offered the male lead in three of Hepburn's best films, Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954) and Love in the Afternoon (1957) and turned them all down because of the quarter-century age difference between them. And for a while, it looked like he wasn't going to do Charade either. At the time, it was rumored that he didn't want to work with Hepburn because he had turned down the role of Henry Higgins in the screen version of My Fair Lady (1964) but that decision was made out of respect for Rex Harrison who created the role on Broadway. In the Barry Paris biography, Donen recalled that "Cary thought he was going to do a picture with Howard Hawks called Man's Favorite Sport? [so he] said no to Charade. Columbia said get Paul Newman. Newman said yes, but Columbia wouldn't pay his going rate. Then they said get Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. So I got them and Columbia decided they couldn't afford them or the picture. So I sold Charade to Universal. In the meantime, Cary had read Hawks's script and didn't like it. So he called me and said he would like to do Charade."

Hepburn and Grant had never met professionally before Charade but Donen had worked with them both separately in previous films. He had directed Audrey in Funny Face in 1957 and with Cary as a business partner he formed an independent company called Grandon which produced their two features together, Indiscreet (1958) and The Grass is Greener (1960). So it was Donen who also introduced the two stars. In Audrey Hepburn: A Biography by Warren G. Harris, the director recalled: "I arranged a dinner at a wonderful Italian restaurant in Paris. Audrey and I arrived first. Cary came in, and Audrey stood up and said, 'I'm so nervous.' He said, 'Why?' And she said, 'Meeting you, working with you - I'm so nervous.' And he said, 'Don't be nervous, for goodness' sake. I'm thrilled to know you. Here, sit down at the table. Put your hands on the table, palms up, put your head down and take a few deep breaths.' We all sat down, and Audrey put her hands on the table. I had ordered a bottle of red wine. When she put her head down, she hit the bottle, and the wine went all over Cary's cream-colored suit. Audrey was humiliated. People at other tables were looking, and everybody was buzzing. It was a horrendous moment. Cary was a half hour from his hotel, so he took off his coat and comfortably sat through the whole meal like that."

Despite their awkward first meeting, Hepburn and Grant loved working together on Charade, often improvising some of their dialogue. The screenplay was by Peter Stone, a writer who had once lived in Paris on the Ile de France near Notre Dame and he knew the city well, incorporating its visual splendors into the plot. Stone later revealed that Grant was initially nervous about his part. He was almost sixty and Audrey was only 32, making him worry that audiences would view him as 'a dirty old man.' The screenwriter said Grant "made me change the dynamic of the characters and make Audrey the aggressor. She chased him, and he tried to dissuade her. She pursued him and sat in his lap. She found him irresistible, and ultimately he was worn down by her. I gave him lines like "I'm too old for you, get away from me, little girl.' And 'I'm old enough to be your father.' And in the elevator: 'I could be in trouble transporting you beyond the first floor. A minor!' This way Cary couldn't get in any trouble. What could he do! She was chasing him."

Indeed, a great deal of Stone's dialogue has a humorous zing to it, not unlike the witty banter found in Hitchcock films like North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief (1955). In one scene, Hepburn teases Grant about his dimple, asking him, 'How do you shave in there?' His response in the original script was 'Like porcupines make love. Very carefully,' but the censors considered it too risque so the line was altered.

Charade was filmed in Paris during October of 1962. The weather was unseasonably cold and made outdoor location shoots difficult because of the freezing temperatures. Despite this, cinematographer Charles Lang gives the film a rich Autumnal glow while cleverly exploiting such distinctive Parisian landmarks as Les Halles, Notre Dame, the Champ Elysees, and the Palais Royale. The end result is a first class entertainment, full of visual delights including the colorful geometric opening credits, a great introductory scene at the jet set ski resort of Mont d' Arbois in Megeve, Switzerland, Hepburn's stylish wardrobe by Givenchy, and an unforgettable rooftop struggle between Grant and George Kennedy, a menacing thug with a steel claw for a right hand. Audiences flocked to see Charade, making it the fifth most profitable movie of the year; it also broke the box office record of any previous film at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Henry Mancini's theme song won an Oscar nomination and critics sang the film's praises in print. Pauline Kael called it "probably the best American film" of the year, Newsweek proclaimed it "an absolute delight," and Look magazine said "Grant, Hepburn and Paris never looked better." In fact, Charade, which was favorably compared to the best of Hitchcock's work, was much more successful, both financially and critically, than The Birds, Hitchcock's thriller from the same year

Charade: The Spy in Givenchy Criterion essay by Bruce Eder, September 21, 2010

Charade (1963) - The Criterion Collection

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TWO FOR THE ROAD

Great Britain (111 mi) 1967 ‘Scope

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

Arguably Stanley Donen's masterpiece, and undoubtedly one of the most stylistically influential films of the 60s, Two for the Road (1967) follows a couple (Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney) through four successive trips through the south of France, telling the story of the dissolution of their marriage by cutting from one time level to another. The literate script is by Frederic Raphael, and Eleanor Bron contributes a hilarious cameo as the ultimate University of Chicago graduate. 112 min.

Time Out review Tom Milne

Old-fashioned romantic comedy tricked out with some new-fangled ideas. Donen does some tricksy time-jumping between past and present as a couple (Hepburn and Finney) look back over their twelve years of marriage, while Frederic Raphael's script provides some crisply disillusioned dialogue for their quarrels. The trouble is that smart direction and smart dialogue slide off the glossily idealised couple like water off a duck's back. Arid, crowd-pleasing stuff, in which the soul-searchings take place very conveniently on annual holidays in France and in a variety of luxuriously furnished interiors.

The Onion A.V. Club dvd review Mark Phipps

"What kind of people just sit in a restaurant and don't say one word to each other?" Albert Finney asks Audrey Hepburn as they head upstairs to consummate a relationship formed on a carefree European hitchhiking venture. A beat passes, then comes Hepburn's reply: "Married people." The same question surfaces throughout 1967's Two For The Road, a clear-eyed, openhearted, and ultimately open-ended portrait of a marriage. The answer remains the same. But even after spending years sharing, at least occasionally, a marital table of uncomfortable silence, Hepburn and Finney don't really understand why it has to be that way. Is it just them, or does the institution eat couples alive?

A product of the same remarkable moment in '60s cinema that brought editing to the fore and produced John Boorman's Point Blank and Richard Lester's Petulia, Two For The Road unfolds from many points at once, following Hepburn and Finney at several moments in their relationship as they make their way across Europe. In one scene they ask, "What do people have rows about?" In another, "When did it all go wrong?" But Singin' In The Rain director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Frederic Raphael are after more than simple irony here. The film's surface is made up of familiar '60s romantic-comedy elements, from Hepburn's haute wardrobe to the Henry Mancini score to the breezy interaction between the stars. They banter, bicker, and make up with witty repartee. It's what movie love is supposed to look like, which makes it all the more heartbreaking to know that it's destined to sour. "I'll never let you down," Hepburn tells Finney as they get engaged. "I will," he replies, but we already know this. It's heartbreaking.

But it isn't hopeless. Even in the scenes of their late-marriage crisis, when youthful exuberance has given way to arch discomfort and the teasing has developed a dry, mean undertone, the couple remains recognizably a couple. It's impossible to imagine them apart from each other, if only because memories and habit bind them together, as the film's mix-and-match chronology brilliantly illustrates. The seeds of their pleasant unhappiness can be seen in the past, but so can their potential salvation. Put together, the pieces make up a shared life. They might even make up love.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Fred Hunter

Plenty of 60s-style sophistication is on display in Director Stanley Donen's bittersweet comedy/drama Two for the Road. Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn star as Mark and Joanna Wallace, a couple who have been together for so many years that they have become the "old married couple who sit at the table in silence" for which they have always had so much disdain. As they cross Europe by car with their marriage seemingly on the rocks, the story alternates between the present and memories of several other similar trips they have experienced together over the years throughout their relationship, slowly revealing the flaws and foibles that would both draw them apart, and at the same time inextricably bind them together.

They first meet when Mark is hitchhiking across France and Joanna is traveling with an all-female singing group led by a beauty named Jackie (Jacqueline Bisset). Mark is instantly attracted to Jackie, and when the rest of the girls are fortuitously stricken with chicken pox, Mark plans to spirit her away to join him on the road. Unfortunately, Jackie herself succumbs to the disease, and Mark is left with Joanna, the only one in the brood who is immune to it. They manage to fall in love as they make their way across the country, while Mark expounds at length on his natural antipathy toward marriage.

Another thread finds the pair now married and traveling across Europe by station wagon along with family friend Cathy (Eleanor Bron), her husband Howard (William Daniels), and their nightmare child Ruth, the product of a permissive upbringing that has the quartet bowing to her whims. This trip is contrasted with a much later one during which Mark and Joanna go on the road with their own young daughter, whose behavior is decidedly better than that of her parents, who bicker about everything, including whether or not they're bickering ("Just because you're using a silencer doesn't mean you're not a sniper," Mark quips early in the film).

Little by little, through these small and telling moments, we learn the trurth behind Mark and Joanna's troubled marriage: that these are people who are most comfortable communicating with each other through barbs and insults, and despite outward appearances they were made for each other.

Two for the Road is a difficult movie to warm up to, since its central characters are so doggedly unpleasant; and the screenplay, which aims for elegance and sophistication has a tendency to come off as smug: despite its self-consciously challenging structure, the story itself is surprisingly conventional, and one that was told much more concisely and with more heart and humor in the Cary Grant/Irene Dunne film The Awful Truth.

The film really owes its success to sheer star power: Hepburn gives what is perhaps her best performance in a part that requires more subtlety than most of the other roles she would play. She meets the challenges of the material with great finesse, particularly given Frederic Raphael's deliberately repetitious script. Finney is probably incapable of giving a bad performance, and his work here is so richly textured and so completely believable that he provides layers to the role of Mark that are missing from the screenplay. Of the supporting cast, The one true standout is Eleanor Bron, who most will recognize from The Beatles' film Help!, and more recently from her role of Joanna Lumley's demanding mother on Absolutely Fabulous. The characters of Cathy and her husband are an obvious sendup of A.S. Neil's Summerhill school of permissive child-rearing that was popular in some quarters in the 60s, but the eminently talented Bron takes the role of the mother beyond stereotype, letting us see the angry woman seething beneath the surface.

For their Studio Classics release to DVD, Fox has performed a massive digital restoration to the film, cleaning and color-correcting it to bring it back to its original glory. The result is nearly pristine source material that yields a lovely transfer that does full justice to Christopher Challis' beautiful cinematography. The same is true for the full bodied audio presentation, which gives a crystal clear presentation of Henry Mancini's score. The disc includes a feature length commentary by Donen.

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The City Review [Carter B. Horsley]

Epinions - Macresarf1 Review

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nate Goss

The Lumière Reader  Tim Wong

Silver Screen Reviews

Urban Cinefile dvd review Keith Lofthouse

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2/4]

Variety review

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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Donner, Richard

SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE

USA (143 mi) 1978

Superman to Sylvia Scarlett Pauline Kael

Christopher Reeve, the young actor chosen to play the lead, is the best reason to see the picture: he's immediately likable, with an open-faced, deadpan style that's just right for a windup hero. The film is likable but disappointing--it gives the impression of having been made in panic, in fear that style or "too much" imagination might endanger its appeal to the literal-minded. Though one of the two or three most expensive movies made up to that date, it's cheesy-looking, and the plotting is so hit-or-miss that the story never seems to get started; the special effects are far from wizardly, and the editing often seems hurried and jerky just at the crucial points. Directed by Richard Donner, though there's so little consistency that each sequence might have had a different director and been color-processed in a different lab. (Richard Lester was said to have worked on parts of it.) With an enormous cast that includes Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder, Valerie Perrine, Ned Beatty, Glenn Ford, Phyllis Thaxter, Terence Stamp, Susannah York, Jeff East, Marc McClure, Trevor Howard, Harry Andrews, Maria Schell, Jackie Cooper, and Aaron Smolinski, who plays Superman as a child. The writers involved in adapting the comic strip created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster include Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman, Robert Benton, Tom Mankiewicz, and Norman Enfield. Cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth; music by John Williams. An Alexander & Ilya Salkind Production. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book When the Lights Go Down.

The Current Cinema: The Package: The New Yorker Pauline Kael from the New Yorker

Donzelli, Valérie

DECLARATION OF WAR (La Guerre est Déclarée) C 75

France (100 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

A stylistically interesting but overly cute depiction of a grave autobiographical subject, the discovery of a brain tumor of an 18-month old child, told with a lighthearted flair by the parents, given a stylistically superficial flourish that simply wipes the grim reality away, out of sight, out of mind, as this contemporary love story instead accentuates the journey of the parents, focusing all the attention on them. Written and acted by the real parents, directed by the mother, this feels like a somewhat deluded, self-congratulatory story, where the pretentious, overly exaggerated French tone feels wrong from the outset, yet this film was invited to open the Critics’ Week at Cannes, was nominated for 6 César Awards in France, the equivalent of their Academy Awards, and has received much critical acclaim. So what gives? One would have to compare a similarly morbid story by Gus van Sant in Restless (van Sant) (2011), a romance of young adolescent lovers where one is terminally ill, which received some of the worst critical reviews in his entire career, yet what van Sant does is reveal the fragility and tenderness of two damaged souls who have no one else on the planet, capturing their alienated spirit with a kind of clever teenage goofiness that endears us to their characters. But these two, given the melodramatic names Romeo (Jérémie Elkaïm) and Juliette (Valérie Donzelli), star crossed lovers from the outset who lock eyes across a crowded room in a punk bar, never for one second feel authentically real, always pretending to be upbeat and happy, where their romance is accentuated by the frenzied string music of Vivaldi Antonio Vivaldi - The Four Seasons: Winter YouTube (8:19) before they discover the news, where the jolt of reality takes years before it finally hits them.

The film details every step along the way of the grim journey, including the initial medical procedures and surgery, which leads to an evolution from the less serious initial prognosis to the discovery of a rarer, more rapidly spreading kind of cancer, leading to revised doctor reports from more thorough tests, where breaking the news to the awaiting family with high hopes that gather after the initial operation is an exasperating expression of utter delusion, where the parents refuse to hear what the doctors are communicating and instead delude themselves and their entire families into believing a successful operation means a full recovery, but recovery time literally takes years, with follow up radiation and chemotherapy, where the child’s life is in danger the entire time, with only a 10% chance of recovery. But instead of focusing on the truth, the young couple continues to lead their life as if nothing has changed, where they go out drinking and dancing and partying with their friends, visiting their son in the hospital during the day. Eventually the economic reality takes its toll, with neither parent working, as they have to sell their home and move into the hospital wing which provides a bed for the parents. There is little effort made by this film to come to terms with the harsh realities of cancer or death, where instead the parents put on a brave face as if nothing has happened, which hardly seems like an effective battle plan, yet it’s all dressed up in multiple music video segments which reflect a New Wave flourish, where the reckless parents continue to waste all their energy on themselves rather than save it for their child, drinking and partying until dawn, where the filmmakers fall in love with the idea of stylistic experimentation, which includes a split screen musical duet between the parents that superficially recalls Christophe Honoré, but without the novelistic detail and rich character development.

And therein lies the problem, as this is an example of a film that barely scratches the surface, that uses multiple narrations to describe the inner feelings of the lead characters instead of deeply expressive performances. The entire cast fails to distinguish themselves, where they may have missed the boat by going for exaggerated comedic farce or lip synched musical numbers instead of drama, where at one point at a party the mother breaks into a French cancan, which is about as far removed from the subject at hand as one can get. Lost in all the shuffle is any thought given to the kind of resolve needed to care for such a critically ill child should he survive, as no relatives or grandparents ever visit him at the hospital, which one would think would be an essential step towards a successful recovery, and no treatment plan is ever devised or shared by hospital staff. Instead, all we see is the continued befuddlement of the parents who remain oblivious to the needs of their son, perhaps jotting down daily journals that were eventually used for the screenplay of this movie. Who knows? Suffice it to say, this is a comically enhanced, style over substance movie, as the heart of the matter, developing a relationship with impending death, continually gets short changed, often expressed by repetitious walks down empty hospital corridors, where it’s the daily monotony over time that eventually wears the couple down, sapping the energy out of their marriage, which eventually loses importance, something that is revealed in narration, almost as an afterthought. The offhanded manner in which such significant personal details are revealed only distance the audience from these scarcely developed characters, whose inner lives remain a mystery even by the end of the film, leaving them complete strangers, yet they continue to be rendered as affectionate and captivating lovers onscreen, as if they visualize themselves forever lost inside a perfume commercial.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

The bold, hyper, often wondrous “Declaration of War” is a very personal project for director Valérie Donzelli and co-writer Jérémie Elkaïm—who also star—as a couple who find out their newborn boy is very ill. Their response is as much comic as tragic: how do we battle for the very life of our child in every possible way? In their autobiographical drama, Donzelli and Elkaïm go so far as to name their characters “Romeo” and “Juliette,” their son “Adam,” but insist that their fates are not fully written. How does this beautiful couple challenge ugly possibilities? In the press kit, Donzelli shrugs: ” They meet at a party, they fall in love at first sight, they can’t believe their names are Romeo and Juliette, and wonder about their tragic destiny together.” Among the elements that make the nouvelle vague-inflected “Declaration” both an eccentric drama and a moving one is the oddly optimistic selection of songs on the soundtrack and a visual style, shot with a Canon stills camera that is always darting and fleet. And the ending, combining music and a family by the sea, is a tumble into what will be: what will become of a family of three, tried, tested and true through a war against terrible things outside and inside themselves. “Declaration of War” was France’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. With César Desseix, Gabriel Elkaïm, Brigitte Sy, Elina Löwensohn, Michèle Moretti, Philippe Laudenbach, Baptiste Bouillon, Bastien Bouillon. 100m.

Village Voice [Katrina Longworth]

The gorgeously scruffy Juliette (director/co-writer Valérie Donzelli) and Roméo (co-writer Jérémie Elkaïm)—yes, the improbability is noted—move from dive-bar love-at-first-sight to proud parents of a newborn boy in the first few minutes of Declaration of War. Then their 18-month-old son, Adam, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. Shot in the actual hospital where Donzelli and Elkaïm's actual son was treated for cancer, Declaration of War turns autobiography into thrilling expressionist art.

In other words, it's a "true story" that steers clear of aesthetic realism, up to and including a love-ballad interlude that splits the difference between Jacques Demy and a late-'80s music video. Always privileging feeling over story, Donzelli answers key narrative questions via anonymous, clinical voiceover and condenses the passing of huge swaths of time into montage. This then frees her up to explore specific moments in the couple's struggle to cope with their son's sickness in microscopic detail, heightening Juliette and Roméo's moment-by-moment reactions to each ensuing obstacle.

Adam's diagnosis coincides with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a fact Donzelli mentions outright once but mercifully doesn't strain to parallel—even as Roméo and Juliette declare mission accomplished to friends and family after Adam's tumorectomy, while well aware that the fight is just beginning. Although inherently narcissistic, Declaration of War is more generally about the emotional chaos of a prolonged struggle against an unfathomable threat. In classic wartime psychology, the reckless young couple seeks refuge from their trauma in self-destruction—chain-smoking just outside the hospital walls, partying until dawn. With baby Adam's fate a foregone conclusion (Donzelli and Elkaïm's real-life son plays "himself" in the first scene, clueing the audience in to the fact that both he and his fictional counterpart survive), the film is most successful as an exploration of the incomprehensibility of death in the minds of the living.

Cannes 2011. Snapshots: Critics' Week Opening Night Film & Two Special Screenings from Directors' Fortnight Marie-Pierre Duhamel at Cannes from Mubi, May 14, 2011

It’s a love story, an action and war movie, where fantasy fights against a descent into hell. After La Reine des pommes (The Queen of Hearts), her first feature with a hint of Chaplin and French New Wave, Valérie Donzelli proves with La Guerre est déclarée (Declaration of War) that we were right to bet on her. The film is the hand-to-hand fight between a carefree couple – his name is Romeo (Jérémie Elkaïm), her name is Juliet (Valérie Donzelli) – and their son’s brain tumor. A declaration of war on this enduring illness, devouring cells, all kinds of cells and even family units. Donzelli films this moral and physical marathon (running, fainting, slipping from a French cancan to an open kiss, a tender version of the open bar) like a comedy. People sing like in The Queen of Hearts (“I like your knees and your brains”) when they should talk, they establish the sacred union of social environments (well-adjusted lesbians on one side, bourgeois family on another) and empirical defence strategies (“no half-assed speculations and no Internet), and they always give a final extra kick to keep hoping despite the odds. This Full Metal Jacket of hospital hallways brings tears to your eyes but portrays a contagious vitality for life. They won the War. Spread the word. —Critics' Week

Something like a quiz for cinephiles, perhaps?  Truffaut (the voice-over), Varda if not Demy (the songs), Rohmer (the dialogs and the off-beat acting)...but also Sautet (the family and friends), or even Moretti (The Son's Room's version of acting oneself in one's own drama). Lost in quotations and "in the style of," the cinephile viewer may miss the point: in various moments, Donzelli (also her own lead actress, and good too) does try to make a film of her own. Her excellent casting and directing for the doctors' characters, the melancholy of the ending, the close-to-documentary way of dealing with the illness...something there says that the director is struggling to make a film—an interesting and brave one. The filmmaker is still struggling though, because taking directly from the "masters" can be a trap. Unless, that is, the choices are radically dealt with—come anarchy, come non-conformism, come some showdown with the fathers' figures.  But Donzelli is not the type. Yet—elegantly dancing around her own risky choices, Donzelli does tackle a challenging film project.

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

The surest sign that a filmmaker recognizes the insularity of his or her project is the presence of perfunctory attempts to hint at a wider political context. The clearest indicator that a director understands the insufficiency of his or her investigation into the film's characters/situations/themes is a reliance on seemingly randomly applied aesthetic frippery. Valérie Donzelli's Declaration of War gives strong evidence of both tendencies.

A comedic drama about the stresses a young couple faces when their young son is diagnosed with a brain tumor, Donzelli's film takes place in a world of hospitals, comfortable apartments, and occasional getaways to the ocean. But a brief snippet of a radio broadcast about the Iraq War and a man sitting on bench plastered with a Vive la Grève (Long Live the Strike) sticker don't so much ground the film in a wider context as point up the narrowness of its concerns.

Far more problematic, and more complicated, is the film's near constant visual/aural experimentation, mostly because it rarely heightens our sense of the material, but instead feels imposed on the project by a director looking to impress. So there's superfluous narration, trickily employed ellipses, lip-synched sing-alongs, intercut Brakhage-like abstractions. The film's misguided nadir comes when Juliette (Donzelli herself) receives her son's diagnosis and immediately runs through the hospital corridors as an assaultive ambient drone and shaky, blurry camera work attempt to approximate her mental state. Finally, she collapses on the floor, the soundtrack goes silent, and the screen regains clarity. As an experiment in subjectivity, the scene registers as both dimly imagined (Donzelli picks the most obvious aesthetic correlations) and completely unnecessary (our understanding of Juliette's anguish is increased not one jot by the way in which it's portrayed).

But not all of Donzelli's aesthetic choices are so ill-advised. If there's one thing the film does well, it's to suggest the alternating sense of hope and hopelessness and the feelings of repetitiveness experienced by parents with a gravely ill child. As Juliette and (yes) Romeo (Jérémie Elkaïm) navigate their eternal trips the hospital, deal with the resultant stresses in their relationships, make endless calls and visits to family members, and enjoy a precious few stolen moments of oblivion (playing in the snow, going to the beach), the film effectively suggests that it's not the sharp pangs of grief that characterize the couple's situation so much as the daily repetitious grind that, in their case, carries on for years. Furthermore, Donzelli succeeds in placing her often unfocused cinematic technique in service of this sense of endless dislocation, concocting a series of montages in which the couple perform the same tasks over and over again, often several times within a single three-minute collection of snippets.

But even when the film hits on some shrewd truths, it always feels timid about digging too deeply into its characters' inner lives. Too much is either conveyed by narration, which covers far too large a portion of the central relationship's eventual dissolution, or papered over with one more round of visual flair. It's as if, having finally nailed something essential about the actual process of perpetual, deadened grieving, Donzelli felt constrained from looking too close and instead fell back into her perceived comfort zone, flooding the screen with one more cinematic trick plucked from the brain of a hyperactive, overly ambitious film-school freshman.

REVIEW: French Import Declaration of War Examines ... - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek

Ciné-vu Noel Megahey

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Time Mary Pols

New York Observer [Rex Reed]

The A.V. Club [Alison Willmore]

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Declaration Of War Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]

Review: 'Declaration Of War' Is The Swooning Of A First Love, The ... Gabe Toro from The indieWIRE Playlist

Reeling Reviews [Laura Clifford]

Battleship Pretension [Scott Nye]

The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

The Wrap [Alonso Duralde]

Declaration of War - BOXOFFICE Magazine Sara Maria Vizcarrondo

DECLARATION OF WAR Facets Multi Media

LA Times: Donzelli & Elkaïm Mark Olsen interview from The Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2011

IndieWire: Donzelli & Elkaïm Nigel M. Smith interview from indieWIRE, January 26, 2012

Interview Chris Knipp video interview with Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm at Cannes, May 25, 2011

Entertainment Weekly [Lisa Schwarzbaum]

Time Out New York [David Fear]

Declaration of War movie review -- Declaration of War ... - Boston.com Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe

'Declaration' of love rescues hard-luck tale - BostonHerald.com Stephen Schaefer

Review: Declaration of War - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Alicia Potter

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

Declaration of War (La guerre est declaree) - The Washington Post Ann Hornaday

'Declaration of War' review: Son battles illness Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle

Movie review: 'Declaration of War' Betsy Sharkey from The Los Angeles Times, also seen here: Chicago Tribune

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

New York Times Stephen Holden, also seen here: Parents Waging a Battle Against the Ultimate Foe

Doremus, Drake

LIKE CRAZY C 70

USA (90 mi) 2011

Inexplicably, this was the film that won the prize for Best Dramatic Film at Sundance this year, while Felicity Jones also took home top honors for Best Dramatic Actress. Having already seen MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (2011) just a week ago, which won the Best Director prize and is easily one of the best films seen all year, one can only scratch one’s head in disbelief, as a Jury consisting of actress America Ferrera, film critic Todd McCarthy, noted cinematographer for director David Gordon Green, Tim Orr, and directors Kimberly Peirce and Jason Reitman made this choice for a film that bears no semblance of greatness. In fact, this is a barely tolerable film, feeling overly formulaic, filled with standard cliché’s, very much in the mode of mediocre television, where one of the biggest problems is the insipid dialogue, much of it supposedly improvised, and the fact that the lead actress can not carry the film, as her maturity level is more appropriate for Gossip Girls. What this feels like is Bridget Jones, the Early Years, as lead actor Anton Yelchin bears some resemblance to a younger version of Colin Firth, and the film makes such a big deal in the beginning about a whirlwind, rhapsodic love affair that never actually materializes, as they rarely, if ever, actually talk to one another. Instead they’re seen in the typical montage of happy moments, smiling on the beach, ramming one another with go carts, staring at one another over coffee, reading aloud personal poetry in bed about “the semi-precious eagerness” of feelings that lead to embraceable moments under the sheets, plenty of “I love you’s,” which turn into fast speed sequences (still in bed) which show the dizzying joy of happiness. Since all this comes in the opening half hour of the film, that leaves only one direction to go, and this film uses the standardized formula that has been used in the television industry since its inception, episodes that begin sad end happy, and episodes that begin happy end sad. That’s the generic system and this film makes no effort to break from the norm.

There’s nothing in this film that you can’t find on television, as it’s never dramatically involving, and it never evolves to anything more complex that what you see onscreen, as the material remains on the surface level throughout. The couple is likeable enough, British native Felicity Jones as Anna attends college in LA studying writing while local boy Jacob (Anton Yelchin) has a thing for building furniture. He enjoys hearing her read some of her writings which sets the romance in motion. But she’s on a Student Visa which requires a return to England after she graduates, which she and her family talk about and plan for, discussing all the ramifications, which everyone expects is a mere formality, where she can return again using a Tourist Visa. But love is in the air, and youth, where literally the morning of her departure she decides at the last moment that she’s much too in love to leave, over-extending her stay. Now this is a college graduate we’re talking about, with smart parents, where only a fool fails to understand how deep rooted the post 9/11 problems of immigration are in the United States, where the issue is tossed around like a political hot potato, everyone trying to get tougher than the rest. But love is bliss, leaving the poor girl stranded in a holding pen after a brief visit back home as she attempts re-entry to the States and is immediately returned to Britain. Some people are locked up in prison or detention centers for years as they sort out the intricacies of their immigration status which can remain in limbo for years. For an excellent film on that subject see the British film LAST RESORT (2000) or the American film THE VISITOR (2007). Those films express real personal dilemmas, so it’s hard to feel sympathy for a spoiled kid with a teenage maturity level that intentionally chooses to ignore the consequences of her decision.

Nonetheless, this is not an exposé on immigration, but turns into a long distance, trans-Atlantic romance, where Jacob opens his own furniture store while Anna gets a job writing for a magazine blog, where Jacob’s forced to travel to England if he wants to see her, where all signs suggest the heat has gone out of their relationship, as he senses something is weird, and it is, as she all but ignores him in front of her friends, but he doesn’t trust his own instincts.

This back and forth dilemma becomes repetitive, as America refuses to drop the ban on Anna’s travels into the country, so she is effectively exiled back to her own country, where she has friends, family, a job, even a boyfriend, and a life. Meanwhile Jacob has a girlfriend of his own, the incredible Jennifer Lawrence from WINTER’S BONE (2010), who kicked ass in the Ozarks and is now devoted to him. What’s there not to like? Rather than choose the obvious, Jacob is stuck in this circular chain of events that just goes from bad to worse, all supposedly in the name of love, where he drops everything to reunite with and accommodate a girl he no longer loves and probably never loved in the first place. So much is made of their supposed craving to reunite, which continues throughout the film despite the fact both have significantly moved on with their lives and there’s absolutely no sign of passion between them. In fact, other than brief text messages they barely contact one another, yet in the throes of tunnel vision, they continue on the hope they will feel the same way they did when they graduated school. But several years have passed, a fact the writers of the film simply fail to acknowledge, as time changes the way people feel. The last two-thirds of this picture feel endless, continuing to repeat the same cycle of frustration and then having to move on with their lives, where the two barely have anything to say to one another, yet then on the spur of the moment they drop everything to get back together again. This film fails to ever establish a reason to care about either one of these individuals who are simply never fleshed out as characters but remain one-dimensional cardboard cut outs, never for a second relying upon any hint of naturalism. One is at a loss to comprehend what others are seeing in this film, as it is a blandly artificial exercise of mediocre acting and poor script writing that never rises above average.

Lovers on opposite sides of the Atlantic JR Jones from The Reader

A vivacious young Englishwoman (Felicity Jones), attending college in Los Angeles, strikes up a passionate romance with the gentle teaching assistant for one of her classes (Anton Yelchin). But their love affair is interrupted when the woman, having foolishly overstayed her student visa, briefly returns to London and then finds herself barred from re-entering the U.S. Written and directed by Drake Doremus, this indie drama starts off as a sexy little date movie, but once the lovers have been separated it grows steadily more complicated and mature: despite their best efforts to surmount the immigration snafu, life keeps moving onward, and before long each of them is tempted by career opportunities and other romantic partners in their respective cities. The question ultimately becomes not when they'll be reunited but how long their love can endure before it's hopelessly compromised by time and their own individual desires. With Jennifer Lawrence.

Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]

Anna (Felicity Jones) is an aspiring journalist, a wee wisp of a girl come from Britain to study in Los Angeles, where she meets cute with Jacob (Anton Yelchin), a local boy learning furniture design. Like Crazy follows Anna and Jacob’s whirlwind romance, then their subsequent breakups and makeups, staged on both sides of the pond, as they’re kept apart by diverging career paths, Anna’s recurring visa problems, and intervening relationships of convenience. (Playing the second-string love interests are Jennifer Lawrence and Charlie Bewley, in a well-turned small part as an oblivious, ardent yuppie.) Director Drake Doremus distills Anna and Jacob’s story into fleeting moments and nonverbal cues—transatlantic texting on hesitantly fondled iPhones, uncertain glances, introspective lulls, and charmless improvisations—caught by a handheld camera that’s forever blunderingly announcing its presence. The idea is to show love in incidentals rather than big scenes, but the fragments selected do not build to any significance—this is a rote story, arbitrarily scattered into abstraction. Neither of the lovers, as embodied by Jones’s and Yelchin’s aggressively average, “naturalistic” performances, are particularly interesting, neither alone nor together, and the duo is moreover incapable of generating erotic friction. Lain on a bed of treacly piano music, this l’amour fou is l’amour tepid.

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

I get the sense that Like Crazy wants to be this year's Blue Valentine, but it's far too flimsy and underdeveloped for that. This transatlantic romance charts a couple of years in the life of young couple Anna (Felicity Jones) and Jacob (Anton Yelchin), who meet at college in LA. Theirs is a whirlwind romance, only halted by Anna's need to return to England for the summer, but when a foolish immigration hiccup delays her return, the pair have to make some tough decisions about their future; is their relationship based simply on youthful impetuousness, or is there something deeper to it? Cutting back and forth between the UK and the US, director Drake Doremus shoots his film with a great sense of intimacy and an eye for small but telling moments (credit to cinematographer John Guleserian, who finds some beautiful shots), but Like Crazy's style doesn't come packaged with a real sense of emotional weight. The characters are too thinly drawn and too much time is spent observing their relationship rather than being allowed to understand it. Doremus seems to take it as read that we'll believe in this relationship, and if we do then it's primarily down to the efforts of the two leads. Yelchin and Jones have a tangible chemistry and they expertly detail their characters' ups and downs, their moments of rapt infatuation and their guilt-tinged dalliances with other lovers, with Jones in a particular doing some subtle, affecting work. Like Crazy is ambitious effort but one that feels oddly fragile and it's unlikely to linger long in the memory, despite offering numerous moments of pleasure.

Time Out New York [David Fear]

Boy meets girl, they fall in love and face obstacles before bliss can be achieved; you know the drill. Drake Doremus’s twentysomething romance initially doesn’t give any indication of being different from its punch-drunk predecessors: Curly-haired, hunky Jacob (Yelchin) and wispy Brit Anna (Jones) start a typical collegiate courtship (Poetry! Whiskey! Montages on a beach!). Anna’s student visa expires, she stays on anyway and after returning to England, discovers that such bureaucratic negligence will cost her dearly. Separated by thousands of miles, the couple must negotiate the loneliness of the long-distance relationship—and that’s when Like Crazy reveals its true self, following a puppy love that withers as the dog days of adulthood and absence push the duo further into the periphery of each other’s lives.

If Doremus’s previous feature, the curdled sibling bromance Douchebag, did little to distinguish him from the mumblecore pack, this quantum leap forward demonstrates a filmmaker who knows how to use looseness to great advantage. Time is denoted by unexpected shifts—facial hair, fresh romantic partners—while every semi-improvised interaction between Yelchin and Jones brims with a jagged, off-the-cuff authenticity. If the occasional bum note gets struck (the soundtrack, that “Patience” bracelet), the film drowns them out with echoes of hearts pitter-pattering and breaking. Screen romance has become a saccharine affair; Like Crazy proves it’s still possible to make a love story that’s both genuinely sweet and bittersweet.

Critic's Notebook [Sarah Manvel]

“Like Crazy” is the story of an attachment, but without the glue. It is meant to be a romance between British journalist Anna (Felicity Jones) and American furniture maker Jacob (Anton Yelchin), who meet cute as students in Los Angeles and rapidly fall in love. Drake Doremus’s direction styles the film in a series of brief vignettes, skipping forward like a highlight reel, with the unfortunate result that we never get under Anna’s or Jacob’s skin. After a problem with American border control, they text; they call; sometimes they even meet in her cramped London apartment. But beyond the scenes of their initial attraction, their relationship is oddly hollow.

Ms. Jones and Mr. Yelchin are not strong enough actors to furnish their criminally underwritten characters with interior worlds of their own. Apart from Anna, we only really see Jacob interacting with Sam (Jennifer Lawrence, having a rest from superhero roles, but who should know better than to iron someone else’s jeans). Although she is forever leaving rooms in tears due to Jacob’s behavior, her character raises many more questions than the movie answers. Not least, how are characters this thinly-drawn meant to hold our interest?

What “Like Crazy” really is about is Anna and Jacob’s sense of entitlement. They believe they are entitled to a relationship with each other without working at it. They believe Anna should be able to ignore the rules of her visa without consequence. They believe they can have other relationships without emotional damage to anyone. And why does the audience come to believe Anna and Jacob feel so entitled? Because Mr. Doremus’s direction and the script — which he co-wrote with Ben York Jones — show us nothing else about them. Cinematographer John Guleserian even filmed them to emphasize their alienation from each other; and Anna’s and Jacob’s faces are rarely shown together in a shot — some romance.

At least Anna has her parents. And at least the audience has Alex Kingston and Oliver Muirhead as Anna’s parents, who here show the kids how it’s done. The movie slowly becomes a master class by them to demonstrate how great acting can rise above banal dialogue and paltry screen time to create real, vibrant characters. Take the disastrous dinner party near the end, where Ms. Kingston and Mr. Muirhead use little more than glances to show us not only how they feel at that moment in time, but also the entire history of their family. If Mr. Yelchin and Ms. Jones had been equally able to surpass the challenge of the script, they could have turned “Like Crazy” into a remarkable romance. As it is, long before the end, they wear out our interest.

AdvanceScreenings.com [Matthew Fong]

Unless you want to watch someone else’s relationship, don’t go see this movie. Like Crazy is somewhat real which is usually a good thing for nonfiction work, but in this case, it’s so real you feel like you’re watching an actual relationship you care nothing about. It’s like watching facebook happen in real life. The movie is the story about two young adults battling the first world problems of a long distance relationship…and immigration laws. I hated the beginning of the movie – it’s as awkward and silent as a first date; but later on, there are actually some good scenes but they’re not entertaining enough to redeem this movie from boredom.

Like Crazy stars Anton Yelchin (Jacob) and Felicity Jones (Anna). Get ready for a cuteness overload as this couple falls head over heels for each other in the first minutes of the movie. They’re perfect for each other: he draws chairs and she writes stuff. One problem though: she’s English! Wait, that’s not a problem? Well it is for these two and they’re forced to struggle through a long distance relationship. But not after a couple montages of them getting close so we can feel the anguish they must have when they’re separated. “And uh, yeah.” The acting and dialogue fall along the lines of a teenage soap opera and a reality tv show. It sounded like most of the supporting actors didn’t learn their lines and they were just phoning it in. It feels genuine at times but stale in other moments. As for the main actors, there’s a lot of giggling.

The movie tries to leave you in the dark about different situations but then overtly has the characters dive down various story lines. You can guess what’s going to happen and then you’re proven right. There’s obvious symbolism for the dullest crayon in the toolbox and the drawn out indie soundtrack will certainly put you to sleep if you let it. Date movie this is not as it will bring out the insecurities of any relationship. Girls night out movie this may be as it will allow you and your girlfriends to glare angrily at the screen and be catty towards the main couple’s decisions as you eat Ben and Jerry’s while wondering about that one guy in and out of your life. I wouldn’t recommend seeing this movie in theaters and I wouldn’t recommend watching this movie at all unless you’re into boring characters and tedious issues…or feel like you relate.

The only greater evil than the characters themselves is the immigration laws exposed in this movie. If there’s one lesson to learn from Like Crazy, it’s to not violate your student visa. Can true love conquer all? No. It can’t conquer visas. Oliver Muirhead (Bernard) kept me from totally hating this movie because you couldn’t help but laugh during the scenes with Anna’s parents. Bernard’s lines and expressions will have you laughing and enjoying the movie after thinking you want to walk out of it. Writer/Director Drake Doremus does set up some scenes for the audience that are really enjoyable to see play out but for the most part, you don’t care for the characters or their devotion which seems to come from nowhere and therefore, you don’t care about the movie itself. I felt like I had a relationship with this movie…a long and rough relationship.

Christian Science Monitor [Peter Rainer]

Gaga in Love With Like Crazy - Time Magazine Mary Pols

New York Magazine [David Edelstein]

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]

LIKE CRAZY - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Like Crazy Review | Long Distance Runaround - Pajiba Seth Freilich

The A.V. Club [Alison Willmore]

The Wrap [Alonso Duralde]

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

Review: 'Like Crazy' Drove Me Nuts | Film School Rejects Nathan Adams

Battleship Pretension [Scott Nye]

Wall Street Journal [Joe Morgenstern]

New York Observer [Rex Reed]

Sound On Sight Susannah Straughan

Critical Movie Critics [Howard Schumann] also seen here: Like Crazy (2011) - CineScene

Eye for Film : Like Crazy Movie Review (2011) Anton Bitel

indieWire [Eric Kohn]

EFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

We Got This Covered [Blake Griffin]

cinematical Erik Davis

Spout [Daniel Walber]

Boxoffice Magazine [Ray Greene]

Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

The Film Pilgrim [Sara Hemrajini]

GordonandtheWhale.com [Allison Loring]

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

The Film Stage [Jordan Raup]

New York Post [Sara Stewart]

Anton Yelchin on His Role in Like Crazy Logan Hill interview with the actor from New York magazine, October 23, 2011

'Like Crazy' explores loneliness of long-distance relationships in Drake Doremus' bittersweet drama Joe Neumaier interviews the director from The NY Daily News, October 26, 2011

Entertainment Weekly [Lisa Schwarzbaum]

The Hollywood Reporter [John DeFore]

Variety.com [Andrew Barker]

A 'Crazy' little thing called love - BostonHerald.com James Verniere

Review: Like Crazy - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Betsy Sherman

'Like Crazy' movie review -- 'Like Crazy' showtimes - The Boston Globe Ty Burr

'Like Crazy's' love affair doesn't seem like true love | Philadelphia ... Gary Thompson from The Philadelphia Inquirer

Philadelphia Inquirer [Carrie Rickey]

Like Crazy Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

'Like Crazy' review: Love goes the distance Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

Michael Phillips's Chicago Tribune review...

Like Crazy :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

The New York Times [Manohla Dargis]

Dörrie, Doris

Dorris Dörrie Rob Edelman from Film Reference

Doris Dörrie's most consistent cinematic themes are sexual politics and the chasms existing between men and women. In her films, it almost is as if the opposite sexes have evolved from different species. Women are looking for emotional honesty and sexual pleasure in relationships, and attempt to connect with men in what are fated to be hapless, luckless searches for everlasting love. Men, on the other hand, are emotionally unavailable. They are obsessed with the power of their sex organs, yet become sexually unresponsive once they are married (or, for that matter, regularly sharing the same bed with the woman they have so ardently pursued). Dörrie's heroines may be unable to break through to the men in their midst, but they are not perfect either. They might be flaky or self-absorbed, and this adds resonance to her work. Furthermore, Dörrie's films are consistently offbeat. Her characters in the best of them, while existing in real worlds and facing genuine emotional dilemmas, respond to situations in altogether humorous, original, and unusual ways.

Men . . . , Dörrie's biggest hit to date, is a razor-sharp feminist satire. It is a farcical portrait of the manner in which a pompous middle-class married man responds upon learning that he is being cheated on by his sexually ignored wife. By having this affair, she has struck a blow for independence after years of devotion to a womanizing husband. An outlandish scenario unfolds, involving the cuckold befriending his wife's lover and transforming him into a clone of himself, knowing full well that his wife summarily will become bored. Men . . . is an astute portrayal of the casual attitudes many men have toward women and the manner in which men view each other, all filtered through the sensibilities of a woman writer/director.

Unfortunately, Dörrie has been unable to repeat the international box office success and win the critical raves achieved by Men. . . . Me and Him, her follow-up to Men . . . was a major let-down: a stupefyingly unfunny parody—based, no less, on a novel by Alberto Moravia—about an architect whose penis begins offering him guidance on how to live his life. In In the Belly of the Whale and Paradise, Dörrie repeats the plot structure of Men . . . : a third party comes to play a key role in a less-than-sound two-person, opposite-sex familial relationship. The cornerstone of In the Belly of the Whale is the sadomasochistic connection between a fifteen-year-old girl and her policeman father. The girl runs away in search of her mother (who also was physically abused by her father), and becomes involved with a young man who previously had conflicted with the father. Paradise is the story of a married couple who are more concerned with their hobbies and professions than with each other; furthermore, the husband is disinterested in satisfying the wife sexually. The third party here is the wife's former schoolmate.

Men . . . , however, is far from Dörrie's lone artistic success. Straight through the Heart, her debut feature (completed after working for German television and making shorts and documentaries), is a sharply observed exploration of the relationship between a pair of lonely neurotics: a 20-year-old woman seeking her identity and a reclusive middle-aged dentist. While the latter is willing to pay the former to move in with him, he offers her no companionship; he is interested solely in a lively female presence in his life. She becomes psychologically connected to him, but is unsuccessful in her attempt to make him love her.

In Happy Birthday, Turke!, an entertaining noirish detective film (as well as Dörrie's one major thematic departure), the filmmaker touches on the issue of ethnic identity. It is the story of a Turkish-born private eye who was raised by German parents and speaks only German; as a result, he is mistrusted by the Turkish community and subjected to ethnic slurs by Germans. He is hired by a Turkish woman to locate her missing husband, and becomes immersed in a scenario involving murder, prostitution, and police corruption.

Nobody Loves Me is a quirky chronicle of the trials of a lonely, death-obsessed airport security officer who is about to turn 30 and senses that life is passing her by. She declares she does not need a man, but still is desperate to find one. Her gay next-door neighbor (who is a psychic, as well as her kindred spirit) declares that she momentarily will meet the love of her life. Could he be the new manager of their apartment building, whose primary interests are seducing attractive young blondes and the compensation to be gained by redoing the building into an extravagant living space?

In the end, Dörrie's heroine is left only with the companionship of her neighbor. One of the points of Nobody Loves Me is that, within the framework of heterosexual relations, it nearly is impossible for a man and a woman to be friends. In fact, the only male who can express compassion and remain loyal to a woman is a gay male; the emotional honesty that exists between the heroine and her neighbor is able to flourish because of the absence of sexual expectation.

In the films from the first decade of Dörrie's career, the heterosexual men do not change. But the women evolve. The heroines in Straight through the Heart and Nobody Loves Me each may be unsuccessful in their quests for love. In the former, the result is tragedy, while in the latter the heroine undergoes a transformation, becoming less self-indulgent and more independent. This is her triumph, and it is one that reflects the evolution of Dörrie's view of the plight and fate of women.

Dörrie's most recent film, Am I Beautiful?, is as incisive as Nobody Loves Me, while offering a more expansive view of humanity. Its story is reminiscent of Robert Altman's Short Cuts in that it spotlights encounters between strangers who collectively are kind, or cruel, or manipulative, and who come together, clash, and drift apart. They include a young woman who is hitchhiking and playing at being deaf because she wishes to change her destiny; an elderly man who was married for 40 years and whose wife died three days earlier; a woman who obsessively tries on wedding dresses, in preparation for her own nuptials (which may or may not ever happen); and a woman who meets the man with whom she was in love three decades before. He, in turn, does not remember her, because he has just had a stroke.

All the characters seemingly are unrelated, but the film takes on a surreal quality as their connections, however tenuous, eventually emerge: they are in the same family, or share the same profession, or have the same life experience. More to the point, however, they are lonely, and have unfulfilled needs and desires. They are depicted as wanting to be married, or getting married, or at mid-marriage (where they often are bored and unhappy, and involved in affairs), or recently widowed.

Am I Beautiful? is a mature film, a philosophical film. As she herself ages, Dörrie seems to be increasingly aware of the passage of time, and the fleetingness of life. One of her points in Am I Beautiful? is that you may not know what your future will be, and for this reason it takes courage to live—and to love.

"New German Cinema" bio

Doris Dörrie | Biographies Fem/Bio

german films - Director's Portrait: bio section from larger site here: All 1 entries tagged Doris Dorrie, Kinoeye

allmovie ((( Doris Dörrie > Overview ))) Sandra Brennan

Doris Doerrie informational website

Doris Dörrie - Fembio literary site

Author Information and Book Reviews for Doris Dorrie Publisher’s Weekly

Doris Dörrie: Clowns without borders - Goethe-Institut Clowns Without Borders

Goethe-Institut Boston - Film - 2008 bio information for film retrospective, with brief film synopsis

german films - Film Archive brief profile

Film and Feminism in Germany From the Outside Moving In Marc Silberman from Jump Cut, July 1982

German Women's Movement and Ours Renny Harrigan from Jump Cut, July 1982

Feminism and Film Helke Sander from Jump Cut, July 1982

Women's Cinema in Germany Claudia Lennsen from Jump Cut, February 1984

LOVE, PAIN, AND THE WHOLE DAMN THING by Doris Dorrie | Kirkus ... literary review from Kirkus Review, May 1, 1989

Who Are You? The New Yorker, April 27, 1998

"Women Filmmakers Refocusing" text version - Jump Cut Angelica Fenner, Spring 2007

Doris Dörrie to direct Handel's Admeto, re di Tessaglia | Edinburgh ... Claire Prentice from Edinburgh Festival, July 13, 2009

Berlin 2012: German Directors Doris Dorrie and Klaus Lemke Attack ... Scott Roxborough from The Hollywood Reporter, February 6, 2012

Doris Dörrie: A Buddhist-Inspired Chronicler of the Present - Goethe ... Birgit Roschy from The Goethe Institute, September 2014

Dance Audition for a Butoh piece "A Woman's work is never done" with ... Art Connect, September 28, 2016

Doris Dörrie | The Case for Global Film Roy Stafford, November 7, 2016

Spirituality & Practice: Film Feature: An Interview with Doris ... Interview from 2007

SPIEGEL Interview with Director Doris Dörrie: 'Death Can Make ... Lars-Olav Beier interview from Spiegel, February 6, 2008

Doris Dörrie, Cherry Blossoms - Filmmaker Magazine Interview by Nick Dawson, January 16, 2009

SXSW Women Directors: Meet Doris Dorrie | IndieWire Melissa Silverstein interview, March 11, 2014

Doris Dörrie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

STRAIGHT THROUGH THE HEART (Mitten ins Herz) – made for TV B+ 91

Germany (91 mi) 1983

A wonderful, off-beat look at some rather stunning amorality as portrayed by Anna, Beate Jensen, a blue-haired punkette, a young grocery store clerk who doesn’t mind giving food away and lives a no-strings-attached way of life until she meets Armin, a stocky, middle-aged dentist at an auction who offers to share his suburban house with her. After a brief orgy of self-indulgence, Anna spends her days doing nothing, becomes bored, and then rather curious when she realizes Armin has no physical interest in her whatsoever. The challenge of the impossible becomes too much to bear, so she stops at nothing to get the attention she wants, including a faked pregnancy and a kidnapping. Anna moves effortlessly from seduction to violence to satisfy her obsession with a man who has the audacity to remain disinterested, concluding with an off-the-wall ending.

Chicago Reader (Pat Graham) capsule review

German director Doris Dorrie's 1984 debut feature is a bright and slightly acrid social/sexual comedy about a woman whose every change in hairstyle--from brunette to blue-haired renegade to blond--inaugurates a sea change in social and domestic fortunes. It's a slighter effort than Dorrie's later Men . . . , scaled more to character than ambitious sociology, though the execution is, if anything, more vigorous and active, less given to garrulous rumination. The material suggests an affinity for Sirkian soap and the kind of social nastiness that West German compatriot Robert van Ackeren (A Woman in Flames, Purity of Heart) customarily favors--there's a false pregnancy, a baby kidnapping, a bathtub electrocution--though the economical stylization (flat, colorful, precise) and sense of contemporary engagement are distinctly Dorrie's own. Not a work of full maturity, but a remarkably assured beginning. With Beate Jensen, Sepp Bierbichler, and Gabriel Litty.

User comments from imdb Author: Lalit Rao (cpowerccc@yahoo.com) from Paris, France

Anna Blume is a supermarket cashier.Her life takes an abrupt turn when she meets Armin Thal -a dentist.He makes her a strange offer of moving into his comfortable house.She accepts as she hopes of finding happiness in his company. Her happiness is short-lived as Thal's gruffness forces her to kill him.Doris Dorrie's astonishing debut "Mitten ins Herz" will always be remembered as a point of reference in judging the intensity of male-female relationships.Loneliness is the film's underlying theme. Anna Blume was always positive that she would captivate Armin Thal. The only common element in Anna Blume and Armin Thal's liaison is the fact that they employ different methods in order to deal with their loneliness.Doris Dorrie never anticipated that loneliness would become the focus of almost all her films.An indifferent spectator might find it hard to fathom how an advanced German woman like Anna Blume accepts Armin Thal's bizarre proposal.Anna Blume was not bothered about money as it can be surmised that she accepted his offer hoping that it would help her get rid of her loneliness.It must have been easy for Doris Dorrie to make Mitten ins Herz as as the film has traces of autobiographical elements in it.The narrative is rather quaint as it is hard to believe that such an event would ever occur in a highly industrialized nation like Germany.One should still watch Mitten ins Herz regardless of its melodramatic stance.

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

MEN (Männer…)

Germany (99 mi) 1985

Men from Time Out London

Love me, love my double standards, that's what Julius (Lauterbach), a power hungry packaging magnate and habitual seducer of secretaries, expects from his wife. He gets it too, until their 12th anniversary, when a love bite on her neck suggests that an equaliser is at work. At this early point in Doris Dörrie's concise and sharply observed satire, you might be forgiven for thinking that a feminist attack is under way. Not so. Julius, who hasn't come to own a Maserati simply by waiting for things to happen, takes leave of absence to strike back. Concealing his identity, he persuades his wife's lover (Ochsenknecht) to accept him, first as a lodger in his squalid bachelor apartment, then as a partner in his low-achieving hippy life. It's the start of an unpredictable friendship that puts both men's motivation under the microscope. The screenplay requires a certain suspension of disbelief - would a wife be so easily deceived by a gorilla suit? - but she turns the tables neatly so that each gets his just deserts. Hers not to stick in the knife, rather to entertain with insight and mirth.

All Movie Guide [Richie Unterberger]

The German film Men... has several elements common to the screwball comedy: a romantic triangle, an odd-couple type pairing of two guys sharing an apartment by circumstance rather than choice, and a scenario whereby two apparent opposites come to resemble each other more and more. It might not be innovative, and it's a bit hammy in the protagonist's quick manipulation of his doppelganger's weaknesses to put his world right again. But, within those boundaries, it's very snappy, sharply paced, and fairly amusing, though falling short of being truly uproarious. The two male leads both excel in bringing some dimension to a couple of stereotypes (Heiner Lauterbach as the workaholic ad executive, Uwe Ochsenknecht as the free-spirited drifter); Lauterbach brings far more imagination and zeal to the task of winning his wife back than he brings to his dreary job, and Ochsenknecht is obviously not as bright a know-it-all as he thinks he is. There's a bit of a mean-spiritedness to the horseplay between the two characters -- as well as a certain cluelessness to Ochsenknecht's failure to catch on to his roommate's machinations -- that keeps this from being realistic. That's not what everyone demands from a farce, however, and Men... delivers enough well-timed yuks and twisting ironies to keep the humor afloat.

Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review

Read the New York Times Review » Walter Goodman from the New York Times

PARADISE (Paradies) A- 93

Germany (100 mi) 1986

The battle of two opposing female friends, svelte Angelika and her frumpish friend Lotte, as Angelika’s husband Viktor, a zoology professor, is bored in bed, so Angelika encourages her to have an affair with Lotte, assured that she was too off-beat and eccentric to pose any real threat. But they run away together and Viktor falls head over heels for down-to-earth Lotte, leading to a turn of events, which leads to an emotional roller coaster of madness and murder.

User comments from imdb Author: walesgvdh from Delft, Netherlands

If you have seen Männer (1985), you might wonder which side Doris is exploring here. Compared to, e.g. Something Wild and Blue Velvet (both 1986), I think she wasn´t the only one who tried to come to terms with (self)destructive passion on film. But the scene I definitively like best, is the one where Lotte and Angie really hate eachother, when (near the end of the movie) Angelika visits Lotte, just escaped from the hospital, in her room, the room where Viktor is driving himself insane (because he cannot decide, choose, nor see clear why he got himself in this situation). Here, Katharina Thalbach is at her best, reminiscant of her performance in Der Blechtrommel (1979, I was about 12 then, and was quite shocked by her luscious presence). Unfortunately, I must say, this film just doesn´t deserve a 7, a 6 at most. The characters just refuse to come to life and their choices seem too random to express any real passion. Maybe because I travelled a road not too far from the picture drawn, or at least think I have a right to judge (with about 1500 movies in the back of my head). A good picture of Doris her development, but other moviemakers also deserve your attention (e.g. Pia Frankenberg, Brennende Betten - 1988).

NOBODY LOVES ME (Keiner Liebt Mich) B+ 92

Germany (104 mi) 1994

A truly original and inspiring film about Fanny Fink, Maria Schrader, who as her 30^th birthday approaches, starts to fret about her future and begins to attend self-help classes, listening to self-affirmation tapes, as she feels isolated in her high-rise apartment building as well as her ordinary job. She focuses most of her energy on the one thing she lacks, a relationship with a man, until one day on her elevator she meets her neighbor, Orfeo, Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss, a psychic, palm reader, drag queen, bon vivant cabaret singer who counsels her to take the initiative. So she does, but the man she falls for is having an affair with another woman. So Orfeo provides compassion and emotional support along with a little black magic, but he is such a bizarre and audacious character himself, rising above his own personal tragedies, that Fanny learns through him the importance of living life in the present, and that in order to receive love, you must give it. Orfeo gives it all in a magical and mystifying final scene.

Doris Dörrie:

“I wanted to tell the story of a young, self-centered woman who lives alone and is unhappy even though she has all she needs. This, to me, was the situation many young people find themselves in today, and furthermore, I saw it as a synonym for Germany’s current position in the world...I am preoccupied with the fact that Germans seem unable to be happy with what they have and as a result are isolating their country from the rest of Europe. I believe that multi-culturalism is the only way forward in Germany, this alone can teach compassion...”

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Yet another German 'comedy' that lives down to the stereotype, this centres on 29-year-old, death-obsessed Fanny Fink (Schrader), who despairs of ever meeting a man; encouraged by a gay African 'psychic' who lives in the same tenement block, she tries to get it on with her new landlord, but things go awry. Dörrie's predictable plotline, derived from the unappealing premise that her heroine's happiness depends on the company of men, relies excessively on supposedly weird and wonderful characters. Actually, it's hard to care about them, especially as it's also hard to believe Schrader - intelligent, pretty, vivacious - would be in this predicament anyway.

Boxoffice Magazine review Lael Loewenstein

German filmmaker Doris Dorrie ("Men") has created a gem of a film with this offbeat, touching and surprisingly funny story of a woman's search for love. Maria Schrader plays Fanny, 29 and desperate, who's mired in the belief that (as a friend puts it) "a woman over 30 is more likely to be hit by an atom bomb than get married." Though attractive and bright, Fanny is socially inept; her days are spent as an airport security officer, her evenings in a class on conscious dying, and her nights alone listening to a self-esteem tape. Things change when she meets Orfeo (Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss), an odd neighbor in her Cologne apartment building. Black, gay and a self-professed psychic, Orfeo seems in every way to be Fanny's opposite; he prophesies that Fanny will soon meet the man of her dreams. Convinced that man is new building manager Lothar (Michael Von Au), Fanny conspires to make him fall in love with her. Only when she recognizes that this lothario is an arrogant womanizer does Fanny discover truly selfless love--with, of all people, Orfeo.

Schrader and Sanoussi-Bliss are magical, infusing their performances with the empathy, humor and passion needed to make their extraordinary friendship utterly persuasive. Dorrie deserves credit for elicting such winning performances and for penning a witty and compassionate script that also sheds light on racism and homophobia in her native Germany. Much more than a love story, "Nobody Loves Me" is a moving and life-affirming film about a woman's journey toward self-acceptance.

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

Fanny (Schrader) is 29 years old and German. She has a decent but unfulfilling job in airport security frisking passengers prior to boarding. She lives in an urban housing project that is in the process of being renovated into upscale apartments. She desperately searches for meaning in her life and for true love and happiness. As she pushes 30, Fanny feels her life is passing her by, and she reaches out for any solution. She lights candles in a church; she takes a class called Conscious Dying in which she builds her own coffin and attends her own funeral. Thus, when, in her apartment elevator, she meets the curious Orfeo -- a tall, gay black man who is decorously covered in elaborate body paint and whose strange chant exerts power over the malfunctioning elevator -- it's not long before Fanny is knocking on his door in response to Orfeo's claim to be a fortune teller. Orfeo predicts and describes Fanny's true love; it's not Orfeo's fault that Fanny misidentifies the man when he finally shows up. While Fanny is busy chasing love and happiness, we begin to see the unraveling of the fragile underpinnings of the “all-powerful” Orfeo's life. Not only is he marginalized as a gay black man in Germany, he is desperately broke and five months behind on the rent. He works as a drag performer lip-synching pop standards; his lover, a famous TV newscaster, won't help him out financially; and his health is failing dramatically. It's only when Fanny's mistaken romance goes sour that she begins to see the reality of what is happening to Orfeo. And through her devotion to her friend, she finally comes to discover a sense of love and purpose in her life. Despite the potential sappiness of its plot, Nobody Loves Me generally works because it's played as a comedy rather than a lament. Fanny is somewhat ridiculous, though Schrader's radiant depiction of the character keeps her from succumbing to caricature and buffoonery. The expressiveness of Schrader's face and body movements, combined with the inbred theatricality of Sanoussi-Bliss' Orfeo, keeps the movie hurtling forward with its own internal logic and focus. In many ways, Fanny brings to mind the American TV character Molly Dodd -- another single woman grappling with modern complications to the age-old questions, and she uses humor, perseverance, intelligence, and life's absurdities as her shield. Writer-director Dörrie is best known in this country for her 1985 hit Men, a biting comedy that achieved quite a bit of international success. For women who have found their biological clocks to have gone digital, they may have no better spokesperson.

User comments from imdb Author: da critic (es008g@mail.rochester.edu) from Rochester, NY

Pierre Sanousi-Bliss, the actor who plays Orfeo in Keiner Liebt Mich, said of his role that he thought it was symbolic of pre-Wende years, when "East Germans lived alone in a world they had created." Orfeo, enigmatic psychic and gay Black tenant, is five months behind on his rent, and facing eviction. He spends his days telling fortunes on the street, or alternately, asking for money to get "back to Africa" and his nights as a drag queen in a bar, where his white businessman boyfriend smugly watches him. It is not difficult to make a convincing case in Sanousi-Bliss' favor, as Orfeo definitely exists in his own world, steadfastly creating a space in which he alone can exist, both by nurturing himself and pushing others away. When his apartment is repossessed and he begins to cohabit with Fanny, his mysteries unearth themselves and the two learn to share and depend on one another, approaching deeper issues of bonding and appreciating the present time. Dorris Dorrie, the writer and director of the film, said that it addresses the way "Germans seem unable to be happy with what they have." When Orfeo compares his state of living to Fanny's it is painfully evident how much she has that he does not, including job, house, and the "right skin color." Within this visual difference of race however, is a more probing study of German sentiment. Indeed, Orfeo is discriminated against in Germany: his fellow tenants don't want him living there, and passersby are more likely to give him money to leave the country than to read their palm. But Dorrie is not simply addressing racial tensions through the character of Orfeo, but as noted above, he is symbolic of a greater struggle in the German people. This struggle is the same one that Fanny faces in a more direct way, to rectify her existence with her imaginary ideal life, and to learn to appreciate what is real and surrounds her. In their final moments together before Orfeo 'dies,' he shares with her the secret of never wearing a watch, because it is always the same time, Now. Interesting then, that several years later Maria Schrader, who plays Fanny, is playing a lesbian woman in the midst of WWII in Aimee & Jaguar. And her final words in that film? That she wants plenty of Now's. Not memories, not futures, but now, and now, and now. It seems there is some form of spiritual integrity emerging through the minds of German directors. For in the final cathartic moments of German films, the feel-good lines are telling us what Eastern religions of meditation and mindfulness have preached for thousands of years. I recently attended a lecture by Professor Muhammad Bamyeh about post-nationalism, which interestingly enough, made some similar conjectures about the emerging solidarities throughout the world. One of the four noted was the spiritual, in which seemingly disparate peoples are actually approaching similar coping mechanisms, reaction and movements to the trends of post-national identities and globalization. It is possible that in this small word, "now," is the seed of cross-cultural understanding. An American may see Fanny Fink's plight and view it only in terms of the desires and unrequited loves, a German may see the representation of her culture. But both can comprehend the immediacy of understanding the moment, regardless if the moment is one person's or one people's. In the ongoing spiritual dialogue of the film we are given two disparate approaches: Fanny practices 'conscious dying' while Orfeo is arguably more busy with consciously living, at least in the time he's got. But when these two meet, their common points are made stronger, drawing from the other and reaffirming the other as well.

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

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

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Margaret McCarthy - Teutonic Water: Effervescent Otherness in ... Teutonic Water: Effervescent Otherness in Doris Dörrie's Nobody Loves Me, by Margaret McCarthy for Camera Obscura, also seen here, which reveals more from that article: Teutonic Water: Effervescent Otherness in Doris Dorrie's Nobody ...

Review in English Peter Keough from The Boston Phoenix

San Francisco Examiner (Barry Walters) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

AM I BEAUTIFUL? (¿Bin Ich Schön?)

Germany (117 mi) 1998

Chicago Reader (Ted Shen) capsule review

Doris Dörrie wrote and directed this angst-ridden 1999 social comedy, an Altman-esque tapestry in which a motley assortment of Germans wreak emotional havoc as they bump into each other in Munich and Seville. Like many characters in her earlier films (Men . . . , Me and Him), they're unhappy eccentrics enthralled by the past who babble endlessly about identity and fulfillment; the men are romantic, deceitful idiots preying on vulnerable but realistic women. Some of the vignettes are biting, but the plot careens so wildly that it's hard to sort out the various dalliances and dilemmas. As usual, Dörrie relies on a fine cast--including Franka Potente (Run Lola Run) and Senta Berger--to supply the emotional depth missing from her script.

Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) capsule review

A dazzling display of virtuoso multilevel storytelling (with one of the better Dolby digital mixes in recent memory), this new film from Doris Dörrie -- a low-key mainstay of German cinema since her audacious 1983 debut Straight From the Heart and director of the popular 1985 art-house hit Men... -- will inevitably be compared to Robert Altman's Short Cuts for its audacious and demanding storytelling style. Outside of Seville, Spain and in Munich, Germany, more than a dozen seemingly unconnected characters meet, conflict and drift apart again. As the film progresses, the relationships slowly become more apparent, and each character comes to a graceful, if rocky, epiphany. When she isn't filming she's writing fiction, and Dörrie brings to this film all the leisurely complexity of a good novel; even when it strays you know you're in the hands of a compassionate and focused storyteller. Am I Beautiful? is precisely the kind of movie that should be fought over by distributors hungry for quality acquisitions; let's hope that's happening as you read this.

User comments from imdb Author: cetaylor3 from Los Angeles, CA

Dorrie seems to have mellowed since Men and Nobody Loves Me, both of which were fresh and delightfully uncharted-water, passionately warm takes on one of her overriding concerns and themes, an exploration and advocacy of an existentialist philosophy of life. This time out, perhaps just for being another decade out post-existentialism, her labyrinth of expatriate German adventurers in exotic Spain ultimately feels oddly somewhat less fresh or less fully emotionally engaging but nevertheless is a solid and intellectually engaging new set of contexts and characters through which to examine more turns of the die. A child's-captivated-ear indoctrination into the myths which so easily lead us astray (into false hope, then deception, then dried-up going-through-the-motions stub-toed, danceless mere existence) frames what is broader in scope in this film compared to the previous two: there is no age or gender delimitation of focus here as we see random-encounterers young and old, female and male, show their vulnerability to idealized visions which leave them floundering. Through one particular children's tale which begins and ends the film, Dorrie implicitly observes that it is in the stories we are told that our false expectations of life take root, here a tale about a tiger and a bear who conjure up a ballyhooed idyllic land to set their sails for-a banana-growing nirvana named Panama. We adults know, wink-wink, the folly of the tiger and bear, but we love such stories and we crave expectation-building stories like an addiction, she seems to say...and thereby in childhood learning sets the stage for evaluating the ensuing adult ventures toward their own mirage-like horizons. So feed us stories, Doris: ...about a lost lover--or two, a lost wife or two (one mortally, another spiritually), a lost identity or two (one intentionally, another accidentally), a lost fantasy or two... or a dozen. The title would have us ask to what extent these losses of illusion, of dreamed-of perfection, impact our ability to see and feel true untrammeled pleasure in both ourselves (am I beautiful?) and in others (can I delight in making another happy? to realize and throw off the layers of claptrap that keep me/us from casting onerous cognition to the wind and instead to indulge the heart and the moment--from literally throwing one's possessions out the window to indulging what might have been an offputting fetishist's fantasies to singing out to engage the spirit of a foreign exotic spiritual procession and be willing to acknowledge in song one's fears and quests). It's not a new theme but it's reworking works, albeit keeping us a bit at arm's length from the subjects, perhaps (wittingly?) to mirror the arm's length from the fullness of engagement in life that is the nature of existence for her characters until varying quiet epiphanies open their paths to new alternative ways of perceiving. (In some ways, this medium-is-the-message reflection on the chagrins of a life lived at arm's length parallels that of the more recent French film Under the Sand.) As the path taken by Linda (Franka Potente)--one of the younger and central questers--displays, the search for the keys to existential truth, to 'be here now', can too easily alight on answers >that look programmable and can lead to 'false gods' along the path, most unacceptably that of inauthenticity. Just as Linda learns that she can derail herself entirely if she is not honest or tries to manipulate (trying to control others or their feelings with her bag of tricks whilst living in disguise from and thus not owning herself), so others learn how easy it is to kid themselves into thinking they've found the elusive 'peace' or 'simplicity' which they perceive in an ostensibly uncomplicated lover who then proves suicidal, or other escapist plan which goes awry. Almost nothing is what it, he, or she seems-until they learn to be vulnerable, self-accepting, sentient and thereby empowered. There lurks complexity and pain, just more buried in some than in others. There is no carefree Panama banana republic, but there is pleasure in honesty of spirit. And the voices of this realization come in some curious packages (further fleshing out the wisdom-where-you-least-expect-it notion whose fascinating messenger in Nobody Loves Me was the voice of a marginalized, lovelorn but lovingly unselfish transvestite): here an overweight chef who is blissfully married to his young-love sweetheart with a passion for her soul that knows no parameters or criteria but is unabashedly unconditional, a Spaniard who refuses to indulge his German girlfriend's need to hear spurious pledges of eternal love, the errant husband/father who seizes the moment to respectfully respond to Linda until her deception forces him to draw his line in the sand and thus startles her back to self-acceptance, another errant husband/father whose Caribbean indulgences have actualized his spirit of "to dance is to live" and who finally lures down the encrusted wall behind which his wife has been taking sullen refuge. Here it is most often the women who have internalized the childhood idyllic stories to their peril, having sold themselves a flurry of fantasies that focus on the future or the past, who with well-meaning enchantment see heaven in a red cashmere sweater they sell or buy, a stereotypically fanciful wedding gown, a notion of storybook romance, and who--with considerable blindness--stumble in seeking their way back to themselves. But they do listen, and learn.

ENLIGHTENMENT GUARANTEED (Erleuchtung Garantiert)

Germany (109 mi) 2000

User comments from imdb Author: Lalit Rao (cpowerccc@yahoo.com) from Paris, France

Doris Dorrie has got the uncanny knack of rendering us speechless with her serious comic sagas which depict mundane human foibles.Erleuchtung Garantiert recounts a few mirthful episodes in the lives of its "crazy about spirituality" protagonists Uwe and Gustav.Uwe has never meditated in his life but still believes that it would help him in lessening his conjugal distress.The problems arise for them as they foolishly spend all their money in Tokyo.Things come to such a pass that they are forced to spend a few restless nights on the streets.Uwe and Gustav seem to have lost themselves completely in a metropolis like Tokyo where everyone is busy chatting on their mobile phones.The path to enlightenment is tricky for them but they happily tolerate all inconveniences in order to find spiritual bliss.They finally reach the Monzen monastery where they comprehend their innate strengths and weaknesses.Uwe overcomes the agony arising out of his failed marriage.Gustav realizes that he was never happy leading the life as a heterosexual male.He grasps that he has always been a homosexual person.Even though Erleuchtung Garantiert has been shot on Digital Video,it still manages to retain its ineffable charm. Erleuchtung Garantiert's biggest positive feature is that it reveals how one should move away from the hustle and bustle of a materialistic society in order to gain inner happiness.

Central Europe Review - Film: Doris Doerrie's Erleuchtung Garantiert Elke de Wit

Usually "coming of age" stories centre around the young, but Doris Dörrie's Erleuchtung Garantiert (Enlightenment Guaranteed, 2000) could be classified as a coming of age story for 40-year-olds.

Uwe (played by Uwe Ochsenknecht) and Gustav (Gustav-Peter Wöhler) could hardly be more different as brothers: the former is an utter slob and the latter a practising feng shui expert. When Uwe's wife leaves him suddenly, taking the entire contents of their flat and the children with her, he turns to his brother for a shoulder to cry on. As Gustav is about to embark on a Buddhist retreat to Japan, Uwe has no choice but to tag along - much to his brother's alarm.

Almost as soon as the pair arrive in Tokyo, trouble starts to brew. Their credit cards are lost to a "vicious" cash dispenser and they cannot find their way back to their hotel. In desperation, they resort to stealing a tent, which they pitch in the middle of the city on a vacant lot. In order to leave Tokyo, the brothers work in a German-style beer hall, where they earn enough money to make their way to the monastery.

Dörrie could quite easily have got cheap comic mileage by mocking the Buddhist community and Western perceptions of them. Instead she manages to handle this subject with unusual delicacy, and the joke is decidedly on Uwe and Gustav, whose inadequacies of coping in the monastery, with each other, and with their own lives are highlighted. We by turns laugh at them, with them, and feel sorry for them. They learn much and change considerably, but the plot never becomes over-romanticised.

The grainy opening sequences to Erleuchtung Garantiert give the feeling of watching an old-fashioned computer screen. It is only later on that you realise that the lo-fi images, which are intercut with scenes of a more conventional image quality throughout the film, are what Uwe himself videos.

In fact, Erleuchtung Garantiert is - remarkably enough - shot entirely on video. Dörrie switches back and forth between the extremely grainy home video made by Uwe and her own much more sophisticated techniques with you only ever feeling you are experiencing video as a medium when you see the world through Uwe's camera, such is her skill.

This is not a film which could be called intellectually challenging, but I laughed frequently at both the visual and scripted humour. Furthermore, the plot, flicking between the subjective view of Uwe's home video and the more objective eye of Dörrie, holds your attention throughout.

Dörrie shot to fame with her Männer... (Men..., 1985), in which she also worked in her trademark light-hearted style reminiscent of American films and which also starred Uwe Ochsenknecht. Apparently though, Erleuchtung Garantiert was a particular source of pleasure to this fun-loving director as Dörrie has stated with pride that in making it she was finally able to realise a long-standing ambition of fitting an entire cast and film crew into one vehicle. They must have got on well together, if the fun had by the actors on screen is anything to go by.

Nitrate Online (Elias Savada) review

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Reel.com review [2/4] Rod Armstrong

eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Thom

Killer Movie Reviews (Andrea Chase) review [4/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [2/5]

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review

Apollo Movie Guide [Ryan Cracknell]

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

Variety.com [David Rooney]

The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Austin Chronicle (Marrit Ingman) review [2.5/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review

NAKED (Nackt)

Germany (100 mi) 2002

Naked Doris Dorrie - Exclaim! Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Back in my days as a fine-arts major, I used to roll my eyes when some would-be writer would claim to be writing something "about relationships," because the phrase is usually code for "I have no frame of reference beyond my own love life." I was reminded of this by the people in the "relationships" drama Naked, who are very good at talking incessantly on the topic of their partners but not about anything else. The subjects are a trio of couples in various states of torpor: one at the bottom of the economic heap and broken up, one in the middle and unwed (for now), and one at the top and uneasily married. Everyone is dissatisfied but nobody's talking in public until the dinner party that brings them all together explodes, that is. On the surface, this is a reasonably watchable talkathon, sort of a 30-something Woody Allen movie with better jokes and more hip-now production design. But while you nominally buy the plot, ogle the sexy actors and enjoy the colourful look, you have to admit that things don't get beyond the universe of these very small people. The lines ring true but not beyond themselves, the actions have no greater significance than the moment and the look seems more designed to line up with current trends than to express anything about the environment they're assigned to. Thus when the sextet rig a thoroughly meaningless contest to prove their love for each other, it has the impact of a fly hitting a windshield, with the only real advantage being that it gets their clothes off. Eleventh-hour attempts to say something about money come late indeed, too much so to save it from being an elegant time-waster.

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

"Naked" is a touchy-feely-talkie German film about six friendships and three romantic relationships, all in various stages of decay. The movie has the integrity of sincerity and is buoyed by passionate performances and genuine insights, even if the endless prattle can sometimes become wearing and the movie's central gimmick -- though titillating -- is a little far-fetched and contrived.

The movie gets its title from that gimmick. Three 30ish couples are sitting at a dinner party, and one suggests that if two of the couples were to take off their clothes and put on blindfolds, none of the partners would be able to recognize his or her beloved's body just by touch. (No face touching or hair touching allowed.) The couples jump at the opportunity to prove themselves and to touch and be touched.

It's hard to see what the experiment is designed to prove, and anyway it's absurd: Of course the partners would recognize each other. Still, what better way to liven up a dull dinner party, or inject some life into a movie?

Aside from the party, the movie is arranged as a series of two-person scenes in which characters delve into their relationships. Emilia and Felix, who are broken up, talk about what went wrong (everything). The nouveaux riches Charlotte and Dylan, who are resented for their money, talk about what's going wrong (everything). And Annette and Boris, who are about to become engaged, talk about what might go wrong (these two have hope).

It's in the nature of movies about relationships to show that relationships are hard work but worth salvaging. "Naked," which opens today at the Rafael and moves to the Roxie Cinema in February, does the same, but Dorrie shows us enough to make it clear that two of these couples don't belong together and ought to cut their losses. It's hard to say if that's the filmmaker's intention, but the film's honesty is its saving grace.

Movie Magazine International [Moira Sullivan]

AICN Review (English)

CHERRY BLOSSOMS (Kirschblüten – Hanami) A- 94

Germany France (127 mi) 2008

cherry blossoms in bloom, the most beautiful symbol of impermanence

Dörrie’s riff on Ozu’s TOKYO STORY (1953), combining that with yet another variation of LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003), where a German couple in the twilight of their lives hypothetically ask themselves what would they do if they knew there was little time left in their lives? Actually, one of them is given the news that their spouse has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, a fact that is never shared with their partner. When they decide to revisit their grown children, they are shocked at the degree of difficulty the children have with their arrival, as they are so wrapped up in their own lives, actually arguing among themselves over who should have to actually spend time with them as it’s such a major inconvenience, a shocking revelation, as it’s apparent they barely know their own children anymore. One daughter pawns her lesbian lover off on her parents, forcing her to show them the sights of Berlin, where they happen to see a profoundly moving dance performance by Budoh dancer Tadeshi Endo who seems to be embracing his own death. This performance plays a part of the rest of the film, as does the Japanese woodprint artist Katsushika Hokusai and the book “One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji,” which was a favorite of one of the parents. Suffice it to say, both Elmar Wepper and Hannelore Elsner as the parents provide genuinely moving performances of their own, while their ingrate children who have obviously been given the best opportunities in life couldn’t be more despicable. So the story goes.

There’s a beautiful transition from Germany to Japan, as there’s yet another ungrateful child living in Tokyo leaving them lost and adrift in a strange land, but here the behavior of the son, perhaps the most loathsome of all, barely registers, as there are suddenly more important things on the agenda. In particular, the Tokyo Cherry Blossom Festival is in full bloom and daily visits to this astonishingly gorgeous park while the son is at work take on greater significance, as a piece of something missing in their lives is found there, an understanding of life’s impermanence, and yet it’s shared with total strangers. There’s a shocking discovery of a young Budoh dancer in the park, Aya Irizuki as Yu, who turns out to be open, loving, and surprisingly wise beyond her late teen years. She’s lost her own mother but dances to reconnect with her mother’s life. Yu’s gentle spirit and appealing nature dominates the last half of the film, as it’s so uniquely incongruous from the discordant chords heard from their own children. Irizuki is in her first role and blows the professionals away in this film, though so much of her appeal is the way she’s presented by writer and director Dörrie, surrounded by gentle music from Claus Bantler in a sea of cherry blossoms, where the gorgeous cinematography by Hanno Lentz continually frames her in the best possible light. But even out of costume, she’s an animated, mercurial force who loves to act out what things mean, so she’s a surprisingly free-spirited artist, feeling almost imaginary, perhaps even angelic, yet also so selfless and down to earth (described as a manic kewpie doll by a friend Fred Tsao who claimed he heard that description used on someone’s blog). Finally, Mt. Fuji comes into play, initially not seen as it’s covered in clouds, showing an illusory face. Yet when Fuji finally sheds the clouds, the film is nothing less than transcendent. And unlike some, Dörrie knows how to end her film, on a grace note with quiet poignance before sarcastically allowing those kids once more to impale themselves on their own bile. This film, along with the Canadian STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY (1990), should be mandatory viewing for those who wish to work with elderly people, as they are eventually looked upon in near reverence, where the elusiveness of fleeting memories and the desperate need to hold onto them is brilliantly examined in this exquisitely beautiful film.

I always enjoy the way German feminist filmmaker Doris Dörrie audaciously deconstructs and emasculates the German male, which is especially effective in CHERRY BLOSSOMS, using an almost ethereal spirt to accomplish the task. 

Special note: according to this: The official website of Tadashi Endo - Home, in April/May 2009 Doris Dörrie and Tadashi will work together to create an outstanding new version of the Handel-opera ADMETO. Doris Dörrie as director and Tadashi Endo as choreographer and dancer. The production is a coproduction of the International Händel Society Göttingen and the Butoh Centrum MAMU Göttingen. The premiere will be on May 26, 2009 at the Deutsches Theater Göttingen – so if you’re in the neighborhood…

CHERRY BLOSSOMS - HANAMI Ken Rudolph

The SIFF program book says this is Dorrie's updating of Ozu's Tokyo Story.  It's been too long since I watched that film; but I'll take their word for it as unlikely as I find the prospect.  In any case, this is the story of a German family:  hidebound, work obsessed, absent father; nurturing mother who defers her own lifelong love of the art of Japanese dance to her husband; and three ungrateful grown-up children who have no desire to be burdened by their parents.  Circumstances take the film to Japan...and the film becomes a reverie of life and hope, symbolized by the perfection of Mt. Fuji coming out of the mist and reflected on the nearby lake.  No further spoilers from me.  This simple, reflective story of the possibilities of redeeming a self-involved life in old age was both heartening and moving.

User comments from imdb Author: Juja1 from Germany

This movie was deeply touching. It is a movie about how a man copes with mourning, about the impermanence of being and the permanence of memories, still very funny in places, and often very tender. Equal amounts of laughter and nose-blowing in the audience, an audience which was very silent and in thought in the end of the movie. I appreciated: the great acting in this very well-cast movie, with outstanding Elmar Wepper and Hannelore Elsner but including the very fitting supporting cast - the artful to-the-point wording - the quiet yet well-timed pace of scenes and shots - how very well the movie conveyed the feeling of loss - the use of background scenes that carry meaning which unobtrusively reflects the foreground action (e.g. marching duck, sand castles washed away, fly trapped by window glass without being aware of it etc.) - the contrast of the inner search of a man for happiness leading him to consequential, necessary and healing actions that are being perceived as ridiculous or crazy by outsiders who do not share his perspective. I was shocked to some extent by a funeral scene near the end of the movie. 1 point off for some slight lengths in the middle of the movie - but then weren't these lengths somehow fitting as the main character had just then reached a dead end in his life?

User comments from imdb Author: alex_smithee_on_film from Seattle

Cherry Blossoms was just one of 15 films I have seen this year at the Seattle International Film Festival, and it has beaten my previous favourite from the festival this year, 'The Home Song Stories', into first place. Cherry Blossoms was not just my favourite film of the festival, it has probably got to be the best film I have seen in a long time hands down.

To be honest, when the film opened up with the cartoon like drawings of Mount Fuji I was a little dubious, but as soon as the first scene kicked in I was hooked! We are slowly drawn into the life of Rudi and Trudi Angermeier, opening up with Tudi being told by doctors that her husband does not have long to live and that maybe they should go on a vacation, an adventure. Through Tudi's character and voice over we begin to learn about who her husband is and what might make him tick. This is all done at the top end of the film before we move on to see Rudi and Trudi visit their children, now grown up adults with their own busy lives in Berlin. They have another son who lives in Tokyo who we meet later in the film.

What follows is a very heart-felt exploration of an older couple very much in love. It was interesting to see how badly their children seem to treat them. We later find out in the film that is because their children believe that Rudi had kind of suppressed Trudi throughout her life and not let her do what she really wanted to do, instead she devoted her life to her husband and children. Whilst that may have been true on some levels, we also see a very different side between Rudi and Trudi in their intimate moments. They seem very much in love with one another and Trudi in particular seems to have been happy to have spent her life looking after the ones she loved. It seems like the children thought it was one way, but the reality was very different. I wonder how often that kind of assumption can come up in real family life? Probably quite common I would think.

So just when we are enjoying the movie, and smiling as we get to know these people, a big twist happens. I won't tell you what it is, but I will say that I did not see it coming at all and it changes everything from that moment on.

And here my friends, is where I have to stop incorporating elements of what happened in the film into my review, for fear of spoiling it for you.

The film incorporated a lot of threads and various symbolic elements along the way, but none of them ever seem forced. They all fit nicely into the flow of things.

There is a massive transition between where Rudi's character in the film starts out, and where he ends up. His journey is wonderful and it seems very natural. There isn't some kind of sudden flip, it is very gradual and perfectly done. Often in films when you let a scene drag on or spend too long telling one element of the story it can obviously seem very tedious and boring, but this was not the case here at all. Everything had it's own place and played it's part it helping to tell the story in a very natural and honest way.

It takes a lot for me to cry when watching a film (I'm a guy!), but Cherry Blossoms did it for me, and I cried more than once. The reason for this I believe is two fold. The first being that as I watched this couple, I couldn't help but make my own personal connection to it. Thinking about my own relationship with my wife and how we may be when we get to Rudi and Trudi's age. The other reason is that you begin to care for these characters so much that when something happens to them, it makes you just want to physically reach out your hand and help them. This is all VERY powerful cinematic stuff! If a movie can take you on a sweeping ride where you laugh and cry, then that is a REAL movie! So many films you see are OK, fine, whatever, etc, etc, but it is very rare that you come across a film which really gives you something back in such a powerful way.

I can see that the writer/director had a very intimate understanding of the people and places. Whether that be from personal experience or just observation and thought. Whatever the case, it was brilliantly executed. The film was so perfect, that when I go back and think about the film, I remember other elements I had forgotten about, elements which just make it so much more perfect in my mind. It really felt like the writer just sat down and poured out the film onto paper, not over thinking or analysing it all. The truth I would guess may be quite different, but I think that's part of the charm when you see a perfect film. It's so flawless that it looks almost effortless!

From this moment forward, I shall be furiously stalking the works of the writer/director, because this is an artist to be reckoned with. Cherry Blossoms is a masterpiece which shall immediately be going on my very small list of all time top films that everyone should see!

Bright Lights Film Journal | Doris Dörrie and Natasha Arthy Karin Luisa Badt, May 2008

FIPRESCI - Festival Reports - Berlinale 2008 - Cherry Blossoms, Hanami Hassouna Mansouri in Berlin, February 2008

Early Spring: Doris Dorrie’s “Cherry Blossoms” Jeff Reichert from Reverse Shot on indieWIRE

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [3/5] also seen here: Reel.com [Chris Barsanti]

CompuServe [Harvey Karten]

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

Screen International review David D’Arcy in Berlin for Screendaily

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review also seen here: The House Next Door [N.P. Thompson]

Cherry Blossom Time: Germany’s Doris Dörrie ventures to Japan for ... David Noh from Film Journal, including a brief interview

Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review

The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]

The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young

Variety (Eddie Cockrell) review

Time Out New York (Mark Holcomb) review [4/6]

FILM; Seeking the Essence of Japan? Look to Germany Jan Stuart from The New York Times, January 9, 2009, also seen here: Doris Dörrie, German Director, Again Inspired by Japan in 'Cherry ...

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review Insights Arrive at the End of a Life, January 16, 2009, also seen here: In a Doris Dörrie Film, Insights Arise at the End of a Life - The New ...

The official website of Tadashi Endo - Home

Tadashi Endo biography

IDANS Tadashi Endo dance description

YouTube - Tadashi Endo (42 seconds)

YouTube - Tadashi Endo "MA" by AZATEGUI (4:49)

THE HAIRDRESSER (Die Friseuse) B 85

Germany (106 mi) 2010

Something of a tour de force performance from Gabriela Maria Schmeide as Kathi, the plump and heavily oversized Berlin hairdresser who finds herself suddenly out of work and on the unemployment line. Her perpetually cheerful disposition is reflected by her choices of earrings to wear, bananas, oranges, strawberries, or various other fruit, which can also be strung together in an equally colorful necklace. The film has truly hilarious moments, not the least of which includes a Wallace and Gromit style rope to pull in order to get out of bed in the morning, where Schmeide pulls out all the stops, is not afraid to poke fun of her ginormous size, and even includes several tasteful nude scenes. There is a wild style to this film, more openly free-wheeling than anything Dörrie’s done in ages, certainly more comic-tinged and light hearted, but in typical Dörrie fashion, she balances the tone with a devious poke on dreaded foreigners, where Kathi, in need of hard cash to open her own shop after getting rejected at upscale hair salons for not looking aesthetically pleasing enough, crosses the border into Poland and picks up a carload of illegal Vietnamese workers to transport back into Germany. When the plan goers awry and Kathi has to improvise, the initial devastation of the world turning upside down and dumping all of its troubles directly onto her head, slowly shifts gears through the patient persistence of Tien (Ill-Young Kim), one of the illegals, a German speaking Vietnamese whose kind-hearted assistance becomes the needed friend just when she needed one. Instead of illegals being seen as criminal offenders who should be thrown out of the country, which of course is the nation’s official position, Dörrie humanizes each and every one of them, as they are responsible for turning her world around when no one else would. Kathi’s initial discovery of the taste of Vietnamese food is sublime, as if a long lost treasure had mysteriously arrived.

Using a Carla Bley sounding oompah band called LaBrassBanda with an accordion and tuba, the music literally romps through this movie with a sense of unbridled abandon, giving a bounce to every bit of the plentiful physical comedy. This is the first Dörrie film that she didn’t write herself, adapting a story written by Laila Stieler, yet it still contains the personal intimacy associated with the director’s vision, where she finds characters who may as well be stuck inside someone else’s body, feeling so trapped in a prevailing society adrift in mediocrity and petty callousness. Kathi feels like “discrimination” is written on her forehead like a bulls eye, as she is subject to continuous attack, yet she comes back each day with a new fruit in her ear, with red and/or blue highlights in her hair, and an infectious lust for life, where she even has a sex scene that’s done with an uproariously sexy tone of delight. Nestled somewhere inside is a dance sequence of gigantically endowed women which is not the least bit exploitive, but done straight, where they obviously have as much fun as anybody else, and given the chance, can be just as playful and sexy. Much of this film’s success can be attributed to its indefatigable attitude, as there are the usual littany of obstacles to overcome, including divorce and a rebellious teen daughter who can’t figure out her mother’s eccentricities, the continual setbacks of opening her salon, and of course the issue of human trafficking, but Schmeide carries the film with considerable aplomb and unending likeability which has a way of winning over even her toughest critics. The film does meander a bit and feels too long, but by the end, in Bollywood style, it’s Schmeide and a group of other supersized hairdressers hoofing wildly and enthusiastically over the end credits.

User reviews from imdb Author: mail-25

Hairdresser Kathi is fat but good-spirited. This is the plot. There is nothing else going on. Instead this movie tries to tell you very hard and very unconvincing that you're a winner if you're in a good mood and you smile everything away. Really. There's nothing going on there. Except a subplot about illegal vietnamese immigrants. Kathi helps them, they leave, nothing really happens between them, end of subplot. Oh yeah, and a subplot about her daughter who hates her mother. Suddenly, without apparent motive, she loves her. Then the little one leaves her mom behind for America - beside the fact that Kathi becomes seriously ill. At the end, Kathi is TOTALLY alone. Kathi doesn't seem to care, she stays optimistic. We don't know why. We do not care, either. Nothing works in this movie. Nothing - not even Kathi's business plan for her own hairdresser salon - makes ANY sense at all. And before you ask: All this is god-awful UNFUNNY!

User reviews from imdb Author: bernd-64 from Germany

I am very astonished, when I read in a review that this movie is completely unfunny. As a German I consider this film to be quite funny and at the same time also reflective. It is a plot about people who are not on the sunny side of life. It is shown how they try to survive. The message is that this is easier with a positive spirit. And even when your acting is not completely legal you still remain a good hearted person. Some exaggerations are used to make this movie also funny. Obviously you need German humor to like this film. It is clear that it is difficult to translate the mood of this film into another language. There are many details which a viewer who is not familiar with German mentality and history may not understand.

User reviews from imdb Author: Pippi_langstrumpf from Germany

Kathi is an unemployed hairdresser in Berlin. She is divorced and tries to scratch a living for herself and her daughter.

In a hypermarket she applies for a job as a hairdresser but she is told that they need someone "aesthetic", that is, no-one with a fat bottom or a flabby belly. This sets a whole series of events in motion when she tries to open her own shop, because that requires a business plan, venture capital etc.

This, of course, is not easy to obtain; however, setbacks do not prevent Kathi from trying and trying again. Attempting to make some money, she gets involved in smuggling Vietnamese people from Poland into Germany and has to host them in her little flat. And things go from bad to worse.

Nevertheless, she always fights her way back with optimism and charm. Even though this film shows life as difficult as it can be, the optimism this story exudes is contagious.

Definitely a feel-good movie for a rainy evening and a kick in the butt for anyone on the dole who does not even try to find work anymore.

Variety (Alissa Simon) review

Broad in more ways than one, the colorfully styled blue-collar comedy "The Hairdresser" is German helmer Doris Doerrie's first outing with someone else's script. Written by Laila Stieler ("The Policewoman"), this likable tale of an obese, out-of-work Berlin hairstylist with heaps of gumption and a positive attitude received a Berlinale Special gala in advance of its upcoming theatrical rollout in Germany. With much of the humor dependent on wordplay and Berlinerisch accents, it will probably prove commercial only in German-lingo territories, but should receive plus-size love from the many international fests where Doerrie has a following.

Boasting the theme that in life, as in beauty, it's not one size fits all, the screwball narrative unfolds in extended flashback as chatty coiffeuse Kathi Koenig (Gabriela Maria Schmeide) recounts her past to a client.

Newly separated, Kathi returns to the working-class Marzahn neighborhood in Berlin's former East where she grew up, with sulky teen daughter Julia (Natascha Lawiszus, hitting all the right notes) in tow. The two move into a tiny apartment in a socialist-era high-rise where the elevator is constantly on the blink.

Sent by her local job center to fill a vacancy at an upscale salon in the modern Eastgate mall complex, Kathi faces one of the many indignities she suffers because of her weight. The snooty owner (Maren Kroymann) tells her, "What we sell is beauty, and you're not beautiful, my dear."

Annoyed but undeterred, Kathi decides to open a competing salon directly opposite. Here, what at first seemed a fairly predictable story starts to take some eccentric byways, as the path to achieving her dream meanders through a stint as a mobile hairdresser in a senior center and an unlikely turn as a people smuggler.

Displaying, as always, a finely honed visual sense, director Doerrie finds clever ways to exploit physical comedy throughout, although the number of times it comes at the expense of Kathi's size may seem a tad mean-spirited. Nevertheless, the pic also features many shots of protag in her birthday suit -- including a sex scene -- defiantly making the point that in spite of our size-obsessed culture, big is beautiful, too.

Full of warmly conceived oddball characters, Stieler's screenplay recalls Doerrie's own writing. Script also includes some spot-on jabs at Teuton bureaucracy.

The pic belongs to Schmeide (wearing extra padding), with her fine comic timing and way with an aphorism. Appearing late in the tale, Kim Ill-Young makes a strong impression as a helpful Vietnamese illegal who does some heavy lifting and boosts Kathi's confidence.

As usual with Doerrie's work, bright, cheerful craft credits are essential to the package. An amusing "hairdressers' ballet" under the end credits provides a final bonus.

Camera (color, HD-to-35mm), Hanno Lentz; editors, Inez Regnier, Frank Muller; music, LaBrassBanda, Ivan Hajek, Coconami; production designer, Susanne Hopf; costume designer, Sabine Greunig; associate producer, Ruth Stadler; sound (Dolby SR), Rainer Plabst, Max Rammler. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Special), Feb. 13, 2010. Running time: 106 MIN.

The Hollywood Reporter review Ray Bennett

GREETINGS FROM FUKUSHIMA (Grüsse aus Fukushima) B+ 92

aka: Fukushima, Mon Amour

Germany (106 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official Facebook

I often fall into a state of panic when I think about the direction my life is taking.

Am I spending my life with the right person?

Do I have the right job? Do I look right?

Do I earn enough money?

Am I making enough of my life? Am I happy? Should I live differently?

And so on and so on.

A permanent flood of questions crashing over me and filling me with anxiety.

I can‘t help but worry all the time.

What if? What if I lost everything I care for?

How far might I fall?

How do I start over?

—Marie (Rosalie Thomass)

In the manner of Rossellini’s GERMANY, YEAR ZERO (1948), a neorealist film shot in the bombed out ruins of Berlin after the war, revealing the utter destruction, causing such a public outrage after the initial screening that it was not shown again in Germany for another 25 years, and Kiarostami’s AND LIFE GOES ON…(1992), another superb film shot in the rubble of the 1990 Koker earthquake in northern Iran that killed some 50,000 people, a wrenching drama that shows the resiliency of people who have lost everything, German director Dörrie brought a small camera crew revealing similar devastation affecting the Fukushima district in Japan. On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake off the eastern Japanese coast lasting 150 seconds created a tsunami with 15 meter tidal waves causing interior flooding that destroyed 260 coastal settlements, killing more than 19,000 people. Among the affected areas hit was the nuclear power station of Fukushima Daiichi, where three of the six reactors experienced a core meltdown, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986, unleashing 750 tons of radioactive water contaminating 30,000 square kilometers of land as well as 110,000 tons of water, where 170,000 people in the region (residents living within a 20 km radius of the plant) had to be evacuated while more than two million are subject to regular radiation testing. Even now, five years later, more than 80,000 people still live in emergency shelters, while a rise of lymphatic illnesses among children and leukemia in adults has been attributed to people in the region, where conservative estimates are that it will take another forty years before the power station can be totally secured, creating substantial trauma for a nation that already had to endure the horrific effects of the Hiroshima (90,000 to 150,000 deaths) and Nagasaki (40,000 to 80,000) nuclear bombings that ended WWII. Japan is the only nation to have ever been targeted with nuclear bombs, making this a unique part of their culture. It’s interesting that Germany and Japan share WWII tragedies, both with difficult memories of the past, where having to overcome self-induced trauma and admit to mistakes is painfully difficult, both destroyed nations that had to be rebuilt at considerable international expense, each becoming superpowers of capitalism, infatuated with American culture, where in the wake of the disaster, Germany shut down their nuclear power plants, as German Prime Minister Angela Merkel is a physicist well aware of the potential hazards, where the underlying spirit of the film is a meditative rumination of empathy.

Dörrie has a fascination with Japan, having traveled there as many as 25 times, where this is her fourth film made there, including her Ozu tribute, CHERRY BLOSSOMS (2008), arguably the best one, shot during the full bloom of the Tokyo Cherry Blossom Festival. While this film has an alternate title, FUKUSHIMA, MON AMOUR, an obvious allusion to the Alain Resnais film HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959), though there is no budding romance at the center of the film, but both deal with the trauma of a nuclear catastrophe while using a unique approach of weaving memories and archival footage with contemporary events to create an altogether different contextualization, where illusory ghosts haunt the living, leaving a profound impression of regret and personal torment. While the Resnais film uses a French woman on a “peace and reconciliation” mission to Hiroshima to remember the devastation caused by the atomic bomb, this film sends a young German woman, Marie (Rosalie Thomass), on a similar mission, joining the organization Clowns4Help with Clowns Without Borders co-founder Moshe Cohen to cheer up the survivors of the Fukushima disaster. The arrival scene in Japan is reminiscent of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982), particularly the hand-held cinéma vérité techniques witnessing the crowds intermingling with the public festivities at Shinjuku Square and the overflowing traffic from Shibuya Station, one of Tokyo’s busiest railway stations, where Marie, dressed in a clown’s outfit, encounters someone wearing a giant cat head that is so utterly surreal she has to acknowledge its presence and pay tribute. But before any of this happens, there is an opening soliloquy with Marie asking questions of herself, caught in an existential moment of reevaluation, wondering how she could start over again? Distracting herself after the embarrassment of having to flee from her own wedding, Marie is not in the best psychological state, having little confidence in herself, where she often breaks down into moments of personal anger and disgust with herself. Making matters worse, she’s an amateurish clown that doesn’t make people laugh, unable to make any connection with them, which only further exacerbates her own self-doubts. So what we do have is a fairly troubled young woman who wants to help make a difference, where clearly she’s traveled great distance to do so, which is to her credit, but awkwardly keeps stepping on her own feet, which only demoralizes her even more. Packing up her bags, she decides to give up and leave, yet she’s faced with the devastating realization that these elderly residents (as all the young people already left the region), predominantly women, have few options, living in “Temporary Housing Communities” consisting of hastily built Porta cabin shelters, as they have nowhere else to go. Perhaps more importantly, no one is providing care for the residents there, instead they are dominated by boredom and stagnation, living out the rest of their lives as undesirables exiled to an all but uninhabitable 12.5 mile Exclusion Zone.

As we enter the zone, the stark Black and White images shot by cinematographer Hanno Lentz of the barren and flattened landscape are striking, removed of all vegetation or any signs of life, with the large presence of the evacuated Fukushima power station looming nearby, with uniformed security personnel manning guard stations, where it really appears that they are literally at the end of the world. Perhaps the most haunting image is seeing more than 9 million bags of contaminated dirt meticulously stacked on top of one another on the land of former farms of Fukushima, millions of bags that nobody wants, creating an immense, geometrically precise Zen garden of toxic waste. Brief archival images of the tsunami’s raging floods are seen washing away buildings, houses, and cars, followed by excavating crews of workmen wearing masks and carrying Geiger counters, common behavior for all the residents living nearby in Government approved safety zones, leaving a bleak picture of utter devastation and loss. From this community, a stubborn old woman, Satomi (Kaori Momoi) asserts herself, coercing Marie to drive her to her former home, which is still standing, but in shambles, perhaps the only structure that survived, along with a barren tree, where she brings with her jugs of water and all her belongings in plastic bags, refusing to budge now that she’s finally “home.” Marie decides to join her, helping her clean up the mess, discovering photographs underneath the dust, and connections to her former life, where she calls herself the last of the Geisha, having mastered the art, where she was teaching a former student Yuki at the time of the floods, surviving by hanging onto that battered tree. While the two women clean, then sit and sip tea together, signs of a relationship develop, though reluctantly, as Satomi finds the blond Marie overly loud and clumsy, yet they seem connected by their human imperfections, carrying a lot of emotional baggage that is largely left unspoken, as neither one talks easily about the path that brought them there, as both are scarred by painful pasts. It is in these wordless exchanges that Dörrie excels, full of empty spaces and changing moods, as each is curious in their own way, trying to be helpful, but bogged down by ghosts of the past that visit them at night, illuminated figures in the surrounding blackness, but partially blurred, shattered memories struggling to come into view, accompanied by eerie piano music by Ulrike Haage, GRÜSSE AUS FUKUSHIMA, Soundtrack Ulrike Haage (excerpts ... YouTube (21.21).

Satomi:

When I got home there was nothing left.

What would you do if that happened to you?

Bodies lying around?

Clothes and books, photographs and furniture.

If there was nothing left anymore?

If your world had completely ceased to exist?

If you had lost everything?

What would you do then?

A film about friendship, grief, and forgiveness, the performance by Kaori Momoi as Satomi is among the best of the year, revealing surprising depth, particularly as the film progresses, uncovering layers of hidden attributes that come into view, yet with little fanfare, remaining subtle and understated. Satomi, more introverted, familiar with the world of spirits, is hardly the repressed Japanese stereotype of a refined woman, instead she is harshly critical of her German friend, referring to her as an “elephant,” instead of elegant, as she’s incapable of the dainty Japanese etiquette of a Geisha, often referring to her condescendingly, where the essence of her humanity is her complete lack of tact. Thomass as Marie is a beautiful presence, always photographing well in close-up, but nearly amateurish by comparison, where her awkwardness is a true reflection of who she is, which allows viewers to focus all their attention on Satomi, who does not disappoint, as she is the heart and soul of the picture, as much of the later stages of the film are seen through her eyes. Marie has her moments, perhaps the biggest is a nighttime dancing scene set to car headlights, where Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground sing “Here She Comes Now,” The Velvet Underground Here she comes now - YouTube (2:05), an homage to Terrence Malick in BADLANDS (1973), where a car radio plays Nat King Cole’s “A Blossom Fell” in a pitch black night, Badlands - A Blossom Fell - YouTube (3:00). The language barrier is an additional wall of separation, as Marie is simply removed and left out from overall Japanese conversation, yet this is typical of foreigners in a foreign land, as understanding does not easily reveal itself, but must be sought after with persistence. Tainted souls struggling to survive in a contaminated land, Dörrie finds poetic means of expression, utilizing smaller moments to magnify larger themes, where the everyday give and take adds an element of healing and repair, eventually gaining confidence until their spirits grow indefatigable. Satomi decides they need a “Radiation vacation,” hopping on a miraculously repaired moped to visit the bright lights of the big city, discovering a revitalized new energy, and a secret surprise, as Satomi reconnects with her daughter in yet another strange and puzzling relationship, with Dörrie continuing to communicate in an unorthodox style, where dealing with the trauma of the past is a neverending struggle that can feel overwhelming, consuming all your energy, yet humans have the capacity to survive. Dörrie has written and directed more than 30 films during her career, also written novels and children's books, while also staging operas, revealing a wide artistic range, where her earlier films dealt with a disconnection between men and women, probing the problems in existing relationships, creating eccentric but loveable characters, while her later films remain offbeat, but seem to recognize the value of personal intimacy, creating small, poignant moments that have the capacity to become universally transcendent, poetically filling the empty spaces that separate us all.

FilmDoo [Sarah Jilani]

It’s been five years since the inhabitants of the Japanese town of Fukushima and its surrounds suffered a triple catastrophe. Europe looked on, shocked and unnerved in equal amount – then the news slowly faded to the occasional coverage of the after-effects and the no-go zone of radiation. But what of those who lost everything in the earthquake, the tsunami and then had to evacuate the environs of the Fukushima nuclear plant leak? In Fukushima, Mon Amour, acclaimed German director Doris Dörrie takes us back to the human disaster in a black-and-white film that is touching, experimental and eerie in equal measure.

Dörrie shot the film right in the heart of Fukushima’s Exclusion Zone only months after the catastrophe. It tells the story of Marie (Rosalie Thomass), who travels to Fukushima shortly after the earthquake and tsunami to escape her own heartbreak. Marie goes to Fukushima with the organization “Clowns4Help”� to cheer up the elderly refugees living in makeshift pre-fabricated housing – the young have already left for the cities. In addition to the demoralising nature of the task, Marie herself is not entirely up for either the culture shock or the solitude – she frequently wakes up in the middle of the night with panic attacks, finding solace in accompanying a rather zen and drunken monk in his nightly vending-machine sake binge.

It’s hard to feel too sorry for Marie, as Dörrie paints us a picture of a relatively sheltered woman seeking to alleviate a mixture of First World guilt, her own insecurities and a self-indulgent seeking of purpose after a failed relationship. Yet things take a turn when Marie, about to give up and leave for Tokyo, meets the last geisha left in Fukushima. The old woman is adamant about staying in the forbidden Exclusion Zone to rebuild her home. Soon, the labour and companionship involved in this daily task means the geisha Satomi (Kaori Momoi) helps Marie put her pain into perspective, and Marie helps Satomi forgive herself for surviving the disaster while her pupil Yuki perished.

Throughout this film, there are dreamlike sequences that allude to Marie’s fears, Satori’s guilt, and the spectre of the tragedy that still haunts that landscape. Peppered with archive footage of tsunami waters submerging homes and land, Fukushima, Mon Amour purposefully echoes with both the current Syrian refugee crisis and, with its title, the previous disasters in Japanese history – Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are the most exciting and promising aspects of Dörrie’s film: it jumps through genres easily. The sequences where Marie dreams she is seeing Yuki’s ghost are sure to excite any fan of Japanese horror – but it pulls back before it gets too caught up in spooky effects. The at times disjointed and looming actions of the camera, meanwhile, remind us of Surrealist and Dadaist cinema. The Marie-Satori relationship, though, has a somewhat predictable path; for example, it’s a familiar oversimplification of Japanese culture when Marie, the tightly-wound Westerner, learns a kind of mindfulness through Satori’s Japanese tea ceremony.

This doesn’t stop Fukushima, Mon Amour from being a thought-provoking film that plays with its storytelling tools to delve into human psychology, the aftermath of disaster, and how we can survive through small everyday ways. Definitely one for fans of human stories and of experimental film, it’s clear to see why it scooped two awards at the Berlin Film Festival.

Doris Dörrie | The Case for Global Film Roy Stafford

Writer-director Doris Dörrie is well-known for a series of comedy-dramas among a total of thirty films. She also writes novels and directs operas. I very much enjoyed her 2008 film Kirschblüten (Cherry Blossom) and I was therefore looking forward to her new film, her fourth made in Japan. She says she has visited Japan 25 times but that she still doesn’t understand everything Japanese. That may be so but the Japan she depicts in her films looks recognisable as the Japan of films and novels that I am aware of. It may still puzzle audiences in Germany and North America on the basis of IMdB comments and that’s a shame, but it works for me.

Kirschblüten took an older German to Japan where he develops a friendship with a young Japanese woman to their mutual benefit. Something similar happens in Greetings from Fukushima, but this time it’s a young woman from Germany and an older Japanese woman who build a relationship. Marie (Rosalie Thomass) is heartbroken when she is jilted on her wedding day and she makes the decision to join an aid organisation offering entertainment to the almost forgotten victims of the Fukushima disaster of 2011. A small area of the Japanese coast suffered three disasters all at once – an earthquake, a tsunami and a radiation leak from a nuclear plant. The younger people from the area have already moved to the city. Only a few older people are left in temporary accommodation. Marie joins a pair of entertainers, supposedly as a clown. She isn’t a very good clown and her own misery doesn’t help. She wants to go home. One day an older woman among the survivors persuades (forcibly) Marie to drive her to her old home in the ‘zone’. Marie is a reluctant assistant but eventually begins to help Satomi to patch up and clean the house and then to stay with her. Slowly it emerges that Satomi (Kaori Momoi) was a geisha whose American customers had taught her enough English to enable her to converse with Marie. Slowly, she begins to teach the gawky (and very tall) young German to be more ‘elegant’ (she refers to Marie as an ‘elephant’ because of her clumsiness – and the fact she eats so much). Eventually we learn that at the time of the disaster, Satomi had a pupil Yuki who was swept away by the tsunami and that this memory haunts Satomi.

The film is also known as Fukushima Mon Amour – seemingly a reference to Alain Resnais’ 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour. The earlier film sees a French woman on a ‘peace and reconciliation’ mission to Hiroshima to remember the devastation caused by the atomic bomb explosion and the intense relationship she has with a Japanese man. The similarities in the narratives of the two films was also there in Kirschblüten which to some extent ‘riffed’ on Ozu Yasujiro’s 1953 film Tokyo Story. Dörrie makes these references sensitively and carefully. Greetings from Fukushima is shot in black & white CinemaScope recalling that favourite Japanese format of the early 1960s (I haven’t yet found Dörrie’s explanation as to why she chose it). She begins the film with almost surreal shots of Marie’s trauma after rejection on her wedding day. Later, she includes sequences with the ghosts that haunt both women. Yet her presentation of Fukushima is essentially ‘realist’ and at times like a documentary. She used the real location of the Exclusion Zone, explaining in an interview that she was shooting alongside the workers who were lifting the radiated soil (which is stored in bags along the roadside). I recognised the landscape from Sion Sono’s Himizu (2011) which also used locations associated with the impact of the tsunami. The documentary feel and the narrative of a European observer of Japanese customs also suggests the remarkable ‘essay film’ Sans Soleil (1983) by Chris Marker. I was reminded of this by the cat figure (a man with a large cat’s head) who Marie meets at a Tokyo station. Marker’s film includes a sequence exploring the various local rituals and ceremonies associated with animal statues around Tokyo. Dörrie’s film is rich in provocations such as these. Though her film might be seen as conventional and therefore predictable – young woman learns from older woman and becomes a better person – I enjoyed it very much because it most of all justifies the director’s interest in observing and recording her impressions of Japan, its cultures and the lives of ordinary Japanese people. It is a gentle and slightly absurdist comedy as well as a sensitive commentary on a combination of disasters and their impact on a local community. By default, it may also be a critique of how both Japanese and international authorities have responded to the plight of the victims.

Grüße aus Fukushima was released in Germany in March 2016 and has appeared at various international film festivals since then. I’m really pleased that the Leeds International Film Festival has managed to show it. It screens again at the Hyde Park Picture House today and again on Wednesday 9th November at 15.30. I can’t find anything about a UK distribution deal for the film but I hope that someone does take a chance. This is an enjoyable and thought-provoking film with excellent cinematography (by Hanno Lentz) and music (score by Ulrike Haage).

Fukushima, Mon Amour is shot through with the shadow of Hiroshima ... Edmund Lee from South China Post, September 27, 2016

Beyond obvious allusion to Alain Resnais film, German director Doris Dörrie’s poetic drama, shot on location, about two women bonding in wake of 2011 nuclear disaster makes link between civilian radioactive power and its destructive wartime use

Doris Dörrie has no rational explanation for why she took a trip to Fukushima just six months after tragedy struck the Japanese prefecture. “I went there because I was so shocked,” the German filmmaker says of the earthquake and tsunami that struck the country’s Pacific coast on March 11, 2011, triggering the meltdown of four reactors at Fukushima’s nuclear power plant, and a long-running national crisis.

As her gentle yet poignant films have shown time and again, the Hanover-born, Munich-based 61-year-old is ruled more by the heart than the mind.

“I have many friends in Tokyo, and they were so desperate and disappointed in the Westerners and foreigners – because they’d all left Japan and never returned,” she says. “So I thought, ‘Well, OK, I should go and visit my friends; I should also go and see for myself what this means’. And I must say it really blew my mind: it’s very different to be actually standing there and seeing what it meant.”

During that first visit, the idea took shape in Dörrie’s head that she had to talk about what she saw and tell a story about it. She would eventually come up with the fiction feature film Fukushima, Mon Amour, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. It will be screened at the KINO/16 festival in Hong Kong and Macau, which opens on September 29.

The poetic black-and-white drama follows Marie (Rosalie Thomass), a young German woman frustrated with life, as she joins the Clowns4Help circus troupe (based on the real-life non-profit Clowns Without Borders) to share a little joy with the Fukushima survivors residing in temporary housing. Marie ends up staying with a cranky, elderly geisha, Satomi (Kaori Momoi), in her damaged house in the radioactive exclusion zone, and they form a bond that helps both of them let go of their troubled pasts.

The title of her film makes obvious reference to the cinema classic Hiroshima Mon Amour, a landmark of the French New Wave. The black-and-white 1959 film, directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Marguerite Duras, contemplated the trauma of war through an elliptical romance in post-war Hiroshima between a French actress and a Japanese architect.

“There’s the connection, of course, of a European going to Japan, talking and filming about a radioactive disaster,” says Dörrie, who has spotted a more significant link in the Japanese psyche. “Because Hiroshima was the bad nuclear energy,” she says with a dramatic emphasis on the word ‘bad’, stretching it out for a full second.

“It was a catastrophe – bad.” Again the emphasis. “And then radioactive energy was always called the clean energy in Japan. And now it’s another catastrophe with radioactivity, and for the Japanese there’s this instant connection to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although for 50 years they were led to believe that there is one radioactivity which is good, and the other that is bad.”

After her first visit, Dörrie returned several more times to research her story. “Then I thought, ‘My god, who’s going to come with me to shoot this story – because of the radioactivity?’,” she recalls with a chuckle.

“So I started measuring everything with my Geiger counter. I tried to find the locations [for the shoot], and I measured the locations, took dust samples, and had them analysed in Japan and in Germany. I compared measurements because I wanted to see whether they were the same. During the catastrophe, a lot of Japanese relied on German measurements [of radiation levels] because the Germans were measuring very early on.”

Dörrie attributes German involvement as “an attempt to be open and transparent about it, but also to help – we have had the experience with Chernobyl”. Although she has not peppered her film with political statements on nuclear power, Fukushima, Mon Amour does conclude with scenes of a demonstration she witnessed in Japan.

“Well, I’m German, you know? We are the only country in the world that decided to pull the plug,” she says of Germany’s decision to switch off its nuclear power plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. “It is again a very strong connection to Japan, because we are ‘profiting’ from the catastrophe: we learned the lesson. Our prime minister, Angela Merkel, is a physicist, and she understands the danger of it. So we are all, more or less, anti-radioactivity, because the people supported her decision.

“But in Japan it’s the contrary. The last shots were [at] a demonstration march and there were only old people. They are the ones who have developed a conscience; they know what radioactivity meant during the war, with the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they make the connection. Not too many people make the connection with the radioactive nuclear plants today.”

The filmmaker spent “months and months” in the disaster-stricken region to prepare for what subsequently amounted to a seven-week shoot. “We lived there. We shot there. We never left the zone through the entire shoot,” Dörrie says. “Everything [you see in the film] is the real thing. Our main location is 11 kilometres away from Daiichi, the nuclear power plant.” For the record, evacuation was requested of residents within a 20km radius of the plant.

Although the filmmaker admits she feared for her safety, she soon put her concerns aside. “I figured that all these people who had been evacuated [from their own homes], they had to stay there [in the shelters] every day. And then I thought, ‘Well, I shouldn’t be too worried about my own safety when everybody else had to put up with it.’”

Dörrie cast the actress Rosalie Thomass – “a very brave girl” – as her film’s protagonist to introduce a German perspective to the story, because she “cannot pretend to tell the story from a Japanese angle”. But the filmmaker holds a far deeper affection for Japan than her modesty allows. It was with her first film, the relationship drama Straight Through the Heart, that Dörrie was invited to the Tokyo International Film Festival in 1985, her first visit to the country.

“Japan and Germany have so many historical parallels, and you sense it,” she says. “We started the war; we lost the war; we then became this supermarket for capitalism; we had the so-called economic miracle in the ’50s; and then we were infatuated with America in the ’60s and ’70s; then in ’68, the student revolution was, again, happening in Japan and Germany. There are many, many connections.”

Dörrie feels like she is discovering a different country every time she goes to Japan, where she even worked as a professor for a period. “In Japan, the whole country is like Germany, I think. It’s like a Mercedes-Benz in a garage, which gets polished but doesn’t move much,” she says, offering the analogy with a laugh.

That Mercedes-Benz has been treating Dörrie well – at least creatively. Fukushima Mon Amour isn’t the first time she let her characters find peace and closure in Japan. A pair of German brothers learn to rise above their midlife crisis in her 1999 comedy Enlightenment Guaranteed, while 2008’s Cherry Blossoms – the filmmaker’s best-known work of the past decade – took a page from Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story to tell a tender story of love and grief.

“I’m a writer – maybe I’m primarily a writer – and so it’s to a certain degree that all I do is autobiographical,” reflects Dörrie, whose husband, cinematographer Helge Weindler, died of cancer in 1996.

Apart from writing all her own screenplays, the filmmaker has been publishing her novels, short stories and children’s books since the late ’80s.

“The big theme of loss is something that I struggle with – like most people,” she says. “Loss and love, death and love: those main themes of humanity, of human beings. So I try to learn for myself, with every project that I make. I try to be a witness to what’s going on around me.”

Dörrie is set to learn about something else entirely in her next project. “Again, it’s a tough one,” she says with a sigh. She’s developing a Spanish-language production about women wrestlers in Mexico. “Well, I did a lot of research. I know Mexico City quite well – I shot a documentary [2014’s This Lovely Shitty Life] in Mexico. I’m writing the screenplay right now. Then we have to start financing; it’s just always difficult, always.”

Yet if Dörrie could make a film in Fukushima so soon after the disaster, there’s presumably little else that could stop her.

Six years after Fukushima - women and children still suffer most | DW ... DW magazine, March 10, 2016

Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]

J.B. Spins [Joe Bendel]

American Women's Club of Hamburg - Review - Grüße aus Fukushima ...

'Greetings from Fukushima': award-winning drama about broken ... Wolfgang Spindler from Euro News

Review – Greetings from Fukushima – CAROLIN BRÜDERLE

Review: Grüße aus Fukushima | BRWC Esme Betamax

'Greetings From Fukushima' review by Chris Hormann • Letterboxd

Fukushima, Mon Amour - The Match Factory

Cultural reflections on disaster after Fukushima | Arts | DW.COM ...

Nothing has changed′ in Fukushima: German filmmaker Doris Dörrie interview from DW magazine, March 10, 2016

An Interview with Doris Dörrie: “I Would Like to Shoot in Japan Again ... interview from the Goethe Institute, April 15, 2014

'Fukushima, mon amour' Review: Doris Doerrie's Latest Japan-Set ... Maggie Lee from Variety

Radioactive Boars in Fukushima Thwart Residents' Plans to Return Home Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura from The New York Times, March 10, 2017

Struggling With Japan's Nuclear Waste, Six Years After Disaster Mokoto Rich from The New York Times, March 13, 2017

Greetings from Fukushima - Wikipedia

Dorsky, Nathaniel

"Searching for Balanced Vision: Dorsky's Devotional Cinema." Glen Norton from Film-Philosophy

SONG AND SOLITUDE

USA (21 mi) 2006

Song and Solitude Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Without a doubt, Dorsky has produced his best and most visually enthralling film since Variations, the masterpiece that placed him at the forefront of avant-garde cinema. Song and Solitude is instantly recognizable as a Dorsky film, however it marks a new direction, away from the present-tense, anti-associational montage work he began with Triste and Variations. Although I have yet to see Dorsky's previous film Threnody, Song is jarring in that Dorsky is engaging in a new, thoroughgoing level of visual abstraction. Instead of clearly depicting isolated elements of the everyday world, and asking his viewer to encounter them as pure form through their rhythmic juxtaposition, Dorsky is here entering a nearly exclusive realm of light and color, using modulated focus and spatial density to produce concrete images of the sort the naked eye can typically register only fleetingly. In this regard, Song and Solitude resembles Brakhage's Arabic Numeral Series, although the dazzling, variegated palette of yellows, greens, and burnt oranges is unique to Dorsky's vision. (Small moments, however, did call other makers to mind; there is a flat, plasticky green sequence that recalls Lewis Klahr, and one shot of tactile red-and-gold light was reminiscent of Hou Hsiao-hsien.) Song and Solitude, according to the program notes, was made for a friend of Dorsky's in the final year of her life, and although I lack the basic information to adequately divine the specific circumstances of her death, I must say that the film struck me deeply as a visual poem on the temporality of terminal illness. That sounds maudlin, I fear, so let me be specific. One always hears, and knows to be true if you have been with someone at the end of their life, that there are "good days and bad days." The hovering degrees of abstraction in Song and Solitude, its tendency to pull back into pure disintegration of the visual field, then move back into semi-distinct images and forms, put me in the state of experiencing the pain, but also the beauty, of the world coming close and slipping away. This is, without question, one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen, not at all a rage but rather a whisper against the dying of the light.

Dos Santos, Alexis

Another World: Rocky + Lulu (working title) by Alexis dos Santos ... Cinema Reloaded, director weblog

Alexis Dos Santos The Auteurs

CBC.ca - Arts - Film - After the crash Inside the new wave of Argentine filmmaking, Sarah Elton from CBC, February 7, 2007

Cows #2: Alexis Dos Santos indieWIRE, March 22, 2007

New Directors/New Films: Director Alexis Dos Santos on Imagemaking ... Jon Robbins interview from New Directors/New Films March 29, 2007

UNMADE BEDS. Sundance 2009 Preview With Director Alexis Dos Santos ... Karina Longworth interview from Spoutblog January 12, 2009

ND/NF: An interview with Unmade Beds director Alexis Dos Santos ... Brandon Harris interview from the Film Society of Lincoln Center March 27, 2009

Tousled Hair and Threesomes: A Talk with Unmade Beds Director ... Kyle Buchanan interview from Movieline magazine, June 26, 2009

ALEXIS DOS SANTOS, UNMADE BEDS - Filmmaker Magazine | Director ... Nick Dawson feature and interview from Filmmaker magazine, August, 2009

The Lumière Reader » Film » Making Unmade Beds Brannavan Gnanalingam interview, August, 2009

Cineuropa - Videos - Alexis Dos Santos - director Video interview (undated) of the director from Cineuropa (9:55)

GLUE (Historia adolescente en medio de la nada)

Argentina Great Britain (110 mi) 2006

Tiger Beat Dennis Lim from The Village Voice at Rotterdam (excerpt)

If anything, the closest thing to a discovery, Alexis Dos Santos's Glue, turned out to be a quintessential "festival film"—a quasi-autobiographical coming-of-ager, albeit one enhanced considerably by its desolate Patagonian setting, insistent Violent Femmes soundtrack, and almost Ken Park–like sexual frankness.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Glue is no landmark, but there's a striking candor to Alexis Dos Santos's artful doodle about a boy and his seething hormones in Argentina's dreary Patagonia region that recalls some of the seminal works of the New Queer Cinema movement. The writer-director's camera is as fluid and sticky as the sexuality of his characters, coolly traveling with Lucas (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) as he rides to and from excursions with his buddy Nacho (Nahuel Viale), pulling back as the boy's bike swings around obstructions only to become distracted by the sight of an older man sunbathing on a park bench. Much like the improvisational charms of the film's young cast (one uses a glass shower door to practice kissing her fantasy lover; another puts on the mask of a cat as a pretext to cuddle against his friend), Dos Santos's aesthetic is a great enticement, sinuously slip-sliding between DV and Super 8 as if it were traveling between states of consciousness, approximating through bold movements and angles the raptures and depressions of adolescence.

Though he relishes in the emo-ish Lucas's carnal knowledge, Dos Santos doesn't do so in the leering fashion of Larry Clark, setting up a transfixing relationship between the camera and his characters that feels at once intimate and critical, looking at everyone closely but almost as if he were peering around corners and through two-way mirrors. There's always a sense that Dos Santos is remembering his own youthful experiences through Lucas, a hot young thing who is no dork but who also isn't very popular (the water balloons that get thrown at him and blow out the film's soundtrack tell us as much), though he probably should be, what with his incredible head of hair. Suggesting a fugue state, Glue doesn't ignore the tensions of its characters so much as it keeps them simmering at the corner of the frame—an evocation of the cocooning teenager's quest to protect him- or herself from the reality that would interfere with his or her modes of self-preservation.

Alive with truth and discovery, the story (what there is of it) concerns Lucas and Nacho's attempts to simultaneously woo Andrea (Inés Efron), who, in the film's most modestly arresting moment takes off her retainer just as she lets the two boys into her house for chocolate milk and idle chatter. With a potent mixture of longing and amused embarrassment, Dos Santos taps into our infatuation with regressing into childhood. Not everyone may relate to Lucas's punk lyrics or the way he uses a drug experience (consciously or not) to seduce his best bud, but the director sees something very essential in the seemingly banal moments of this boy's life, like the way he carefully peels apart pieces of notebook paper drenched by bullies. A striking reminder of how simultaneously wonderful and miserable the teenage experience can be, Glue seems to come undone whenever it looks away from the hornied relationship between Lucas, Nacho, and Andrea and toward the strained relationship between Lucas and his family only to remind us that we behave a little differently around friends than we do around family.

JWR (James Wegg Review)

Fipresci [Antonia Kovacheva]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival report

DVD Talk (Chris Neilson) dvd review [3/5]

Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]

kagablog » 335. Glue (Alexis Dos Santos 2006 ar) René Veenstra at Kagablog, February 26, 2009

Oasis Magazine [Jeff Walsh]

Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review

User reviews from imdb Author: larry-411 from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: tye thomas (aboutscripts@yahoo.com) from United States

Glue (Glue–historia adolescente en medio de la nada) | Frameline31 ... Shannon Kelly from Frameline 31

Variety (Jay Weissberg) review

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

UNMADE BEDS B+ 92

Great Britain (92 mi) 2009 Official site

Not to be mistaken by the Nicholas Barker film (1997) by the same name, an edgy, yet hilarious and at times creepy voyeuristic comedy risqué, this is something else altogether, a sprawling free for all of urban subterranean melancholy perfectly captured by cinematographer Jakob Ihre, whose stylish work helped bring to life the recent Danish film REPRISE (2006). Here he uses a combination of video formats, HD and Super 8, still Polaroid photographs, whimsical animation, flashback sequences in hypersaturated colors, and even live music and dance performances that add a variety to the look of the film, which is highly energized even as it often changes speeds to near stillness. Dos Santos separately follows the lives of two characters, Déborah François as Vera and Fernando Tielve as Axl, who happen to end up at the same bohemian apartment in London, but only have a single scene together near the end, yet their coming of age journey couldn’t be more vibrantly alive, captured beautifully using a French New Wave mindset wrapped around today’s world, where the ever pulsating musical soundtrack provides energy to burn, and where François feels like the quirky reincarnation of Ana Karina in her early Godard phase. Fernando Tielve, on the other hand, creates his own persona and couldn’t be more charmingly irresistible as a young Spanish drifter searching in London for the father he’s never known, who has a habit of waking up in other people’s beds without the foggiest idea how he got there, where both discover a gigantic apartment complex, more like an empty warehouse, that charges no rent, that keeps a ready supply of mattresses in storage, and where people come and go with such frequency that no one keeps tabs on who actually lives there.

The film is a tone poem of missed connections, where Vera jots down notes in her diary about recovering from a recent heartache, a girl who takes photographs to remind her of her journey, usually of the empty bed after her partner has disappeared, establishing the melancholic mood of longing, a feeling that is everpresent throughout this film. Axl believes he’s found his father, but is surprised that he bears no family resemblance and is comfortably normal without any apparent creative urges or impulses, so he never lets on that they might be connected, choosing instead to feel out the situation for himself from a distance. Both leads spend a large part of the film disappointed at where they find themselves in life, as if their lives are in a state of permanent transition. The kicker here is the nearby underground club (called the Lost and Found) where young kids gather to hear live music, which is, in fact, really live music being filmed in performances, where Axl gets blitzed by the end of the night and ends up in the arms of total strangers, but part of the inventiveness of this film is the camaraderie and warm embrace between the characters, where the music is a magnet drawing them all closer to one another, where at least for a moment, they can all bask in the glow of youth. The film’s true originality is how well it succeeds in doing exactly that, as the free spirited mood continues well into the next day and throughout the entire film, as despite having separate agendas, they’re all looking for something, giving this a kind of interior road movie feel, as all are seeking an ulterior path.

Both Axl and Vera narrate various segments about their lives in their subtitled native languages while in London they speak English, so both have heavy accents that can at times be hard to understand, but this difficulty becomes part of the storyline linked to their sexual curiosity, where only fragments of thoughts are communicated, the rest is submerged in heavy alcohol consumption. Many will quickly recognize the singularly unique music from Kim Dawson, which was also used in the indie blockbuster JUNO (2007), so despite several well chosen songs, the playful familiarity with her music from that film actually detracts from the originality of the rest of the film where music plays such a prominent role, in particular Axl’s mirror dance to Black Moustache’s “Hot Monkey, Hot Ass,” which becomes his musical theme ("Hot monkey, hot ass, cheap thrills, live fast"). Vera’s theme is more representative of the Tindersticks near spoken version of “Cherry Blossoms,” which has a more spacious, Leonard Cohen feel. The uniqueness of their character works wonders when they finally do meet, which is during the making of a musical video where the audience is wearing animal heads, where both couldn’t be more adorable, but especially Axl has that hurt puppy look that makes one feel he’s lost and wandered away from home, while Vera’s lost romances lead her to exactly the same place, as if aligned by the stars. But the tender story takes an unexpected turn at the end that actually brightens the skies, creating a vividly fresh picture of youth in transit, featuring vulnerable characters whose sadness permeates every frame of this film, yet it couldn’t be a more uproariously glorious ride.

Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel

Unmade Beds joins the familiar genre of twenty-somethings finding themselves and romance, like in Cédric Klapisch‘s L’Auberge Espagnole (which shares one of Bed’s attractive and lively cast members) and Joachim Trier‘s Reprise (which shares the same cinematographer, Jakob Ihre). But writer/director Alexis Dos Santos (Glue) exudes an exuberant energy as he brings together a cross-section of the European Union in a London squat where the occupants wake up sometimes with the same person and sometimes not, sometimes with the opposite sex and sometimes not, sometimes pretending to be someone else and sometimes not. A strong selling point is the terrific soundtrack of up-and-coming indie bands (including Kimya Dawson, prominently heard in Juno). More palpable than the sex here is the longing for connection, and Dos Santos keeps coming up with different visual styles and sounds to signal their feelings.

UNMADE BEDS Facets Multi Media

With his startlingly visceral and original second feature, Unmade Beds, Alexis Dos Santos (Glue) manifests an exuberant London where unbridled longing and zeal plunge nubile expats into lusty adventures and momentous encounters. When wide-eyed Spaniard Axl (The Devil's Backbone's Fernando Tielve) comes to London on a quest for the father who abandoned him, he lands in the middle of a creative hotbed -- an underground polyglot squat filled with colorful free spirits. Among them is Vera (The Page Turner's Déborah François), a beautiful Belgian girl recently dumped by her boyfriend, who seeks to restore her faith in romantic destiny after meeting a charismatic stranger. As Axl and Vera separately pursue these bittersweet and elusive connections, they circle each other's orbits -- their fates almost inevitably intertwined. Alongside this lush story of youthful awakening, Dos Santos conjures a rhythmic stream-of-consciousness mood collage. Axl and Vera's world vibrates with visual and sonic energy and an effusive score aptly express the characters' mercurial interior states. Meanwhile slapstick moments and musical performances puncture the melancholy, buoying the film into irreverent whimsy.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

“Unmade Beds” twines together two journeys of pretty young drifters, Axl (Fernando Tielve) and Vera (Déborah François), gone to ground in modern-day East London. He’s a towheaded, bright-eyed little Spanish twink; she’s a Frenchwoman tentatively abandoning one love for another whose name she refuses to learn. He’s come to London to find his English father, he claims, and couch surf-safaris his way into an immense squat the bright chaos of which looks like a Redmoon Theater production hit by a bomb, so sprawling the pair don’t realize they’re both living there. They’re artists who haven’t found their art, unless you count their wanderings. Hipster quirk, yes, but Argentinean director Alexis Dos Santos’ exquisitely shot second feature is a genuine charmer, moving in and out of focus like emotional liqueur. These characters are made of real stuff. Like Jonás Cuarón’s little-seen coming-of-age “Year of the Nail,” “Unmade Beds” makes cost-effective, poetry-heightened use of montages of still photographs, and like two still unreleased American movies, Ry Russo-Young’s “You Wont Miss Me” and Bradley Rust Grey’s “The Exploding Girl,” Dos Santos uses a heightened digital palette to brighten and heighten and to stay very, very close to characters who don’t yet understand that the bleary, febrile moments they’re finding and feeling will define themselves. The sexy bits are tense, vulnerable, believable and sometimes lightly surreal. It’s playful, grotty Utopia. 98m.

User reviews from imdb Author: larry-411 from United States

I attended the World Premiere of "Unmade Beds" at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. This is the second feature from writer/director Alexis Dos Santos, whose first film, "Glue" (from Argentina), was one of my Top Picks of 2006 after having had its debut in Toronto. So naturally "Unmade Beds" was a must on my list and I had high expectations. It met and exceeded them.

The film stars Déborah François and Fernando Tielve (Carlos in "The Devil's Backbone") as two naivé young expatriots living in London, wandering souls in search of a home. Axl (Tielve) is also looking for his mysterious English father, whom he hasn't known since his hazy early childhood. His nights consist of drinking, dancing, and waking up in strange beds with even stranger people. Meanwhile, Vera (François) has her sights set on a mysterious man as well -- someone with whom she can spend a night without commitment. She is equally lost in a cold world where eye contact and a smile are a rare commodity. This is the big city, and it can be cruel as hell. Their goals are different, or are they? The pulsating indie rock soundtrack seamlessly blends with the live music performed onstage in the concert club which doubles as their crash pad. Some tunes are reprised, with common themes paralleling the pair's progress (or not) in finding what they're searching for. Watch for Tielve's mirror "performance" of Black Moustache's "Hot Monkey, Hot Ass!" It was a crowd pleaser in all the screenings I've attended, especially since its boldness is in such stark contrast to the puppy dog innocence he displays through much of the narrative.

The visuals are especially notable, as cinematographer Jakob Ihre captures the trippy, frenetic atmosphere of the concert hall. Using mostly hand-held camera and stage lighting, with its strobes on the dance floor flashing across his staggering frame, the viewer is made to feel just as drunk and clueless as Axl. Vera is constantly in motion as well, looking equally lost and vulnerable, as she glides through crowded London streets looking for companionship. The viewer is always a close observer, almost within arm's length. We want to reach out and hug these lonely strays but we can only watch helplessly and hope they'll each end up in someone's arms.

Writer/director Alexis Dos Santos has grown tremendously as an artist -- while "Glue" was mostly improvised, "Unmade Beds" is not although it still retains a loose unscripted feel. That's a tribute to his insightful writing as well as the sensitive performances of Tielve and François. As a team, the three have crafted a wonderful little gem that is close to perfection.

Choking on Popcorn Mariken

Axl moved to London from Madrid in order to find his father. Vera just broke up with her boyfriend. Together with Mike, Hannah and a number of other people they occupy a squat in 21st century London and over the course of a few weeks/months they drift together and apart through life.

Unmade Beds is a film written and directed by Argentinean auteur Alexis Dos Santos, which has found its way to the IFFR, Sundance (where it collected a nomination) and a number of other festivals in 2009.

Unmade Beds is an exceptional film. It is vibrant and full of emotional, musical and visual stimuli but at the same time appears to be taking place mostly inside the characters’ heads. That is not an exaggeration, for there is no plot other than the few lines I wrote above. But this is of no consequence because instead we get to follow the two main characters around and see, and hear, and feel with them as they experience hesitation, bewilderment, desire, grief, anger, (falling in) love, estrangement, joy, rapture, doubt and pretty much any other emotion available on the human palette. To achieve this Dos Santos uses an abundance of styles and methods. Traditional storytelling would only have gotten in the way.

And so Unmade Beds is the film of a director who is completely in control and at any given times appears to know exactly what he is doing. It is full of deliberate choices. Dos Santos gives his actors a lot of reign and lets them improvise, following their movements with tracking shots that grant them all the liberty they may require. Sometimes the sequences are dreamlike and soft, sometimes realistic, almost voyeuristic and sometimes rough to the point of looking like jump cuts. Through these tools Dos Santos underlines every atmosphere, emotion and sensation he wants to express, making the viewer part of the film rather than just a spectator.

A special mention should go to the way Dos Santos uses music. The songs are mostly alternative in style (you’ll find no mushy Coldplay cliché’s here) and they range from haunting to silly, but always underline the point he is making. Because the music is so rooted in punk and alternative music, Unmade Beds is given a timeless quality. If it weren’t for Google and mobile phones, one could easily believe this film takes place in the eighties and this gives the feelings and occurrences that we are experiencing with the characters a universal feel. They are of all times and of all people, not just them, there, then, but also you and me, here, now.

My one point of criticism is that Dos Santos haphazardly steers towards a happy ending of sorts, which feels forced and clumsy. The characters assemble regularly at a club called Lost and Found. Aptly named, because all of them are both lost and found at any moment in the film. And just as they drifted into our and each others lives, it would have felt more natural to just leave them where we last found them, rather than creating an unscratchable itch by forcefully connecting the dots and tying up imaginary loose ends.

All in all, with Unmade Beds, Dos Santos paints portraits that show us what it is like to be young and living at the underground fringe of today’s London. Or perhaps even just young and living. Or perhaps even just living. Either way it is a beautiful thing to behold and hear and feel. You might not want to miss this film.

Colossal Youth: Alexis dos Santos's 'Unmade Beds' - indieWIRE Jeff Reichert from Reverse Shot at indieWIRE

Hammer to Nail [Brandon Harris] also including an interview from Film Linc March 27, 2009: ND/NF: An interview with Unmade Beds director Alexis Dos Santos ...

Days of Being Wild in Unmade Beds Anthony Kaufman from The Village Voice

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

The FSLC's ND/NF Series: UNMADE BEDS No sophomore slump for Alexis Dos Santos James van Maanen from Trust Movies, March 29, 2009, also a September 1, 2009 follow up here: TrustMovies: Alexis Dos Santos' UNMADE BEDS opens at Lincoln Plaza ...

Dreamlike Images Bring Undeniable Sparkle to London Romance Unmade Beds... Steve Ramos from indieWIRE

Quiet Earth [Marina Antunes]

Little White Lies [Laurence Boyce]

Paste Magazine [Robert Davis]

Eye for Film (George Williamson) review [3/5]

Slant Magazine review Bill Weber

Edward Champion

theartsdesk.com [Ryan Gilbey]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival 2009

Hipster Trash | Film Reviews | The L Magazine - New York City's ... Benjamin Mercer from The L magazine

Film School Rejects [Neil Miller] at Sundance

Sundance Journal 2009 Day 2: Alexis Dos Santos' Unmade Beds ... Eric Lavalee from Ion Cinema (with photos)

ViewLondon (Matthew Turner) review [3/5]

Screenjabber.com [Doug Cooper]

New York Post (V.A. Musetto) review [3/4]

ALEXIS DOS SANTOS, UNMADE BEDS - Filmmaker Magazine | Director ... Nick Dawson feature and interview from Filmmaker magazine, August, 2009

Variety (Justin Chang) review also seen here from Micropsia, January 24, 2009: micropsia: "Unmade Beds", de Alexis Dos Santos (Variety Review)

TimeOut Chicago Hank Sartin

Time Out London (Tom Huddleston) review [2/5]

Time Out New York (Kevin B. Lee) review [2/5]

The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Tim Robey

The Times of London Online (Tom Charity) review [4/5]

Guardian UK Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5]

Chicago Tribune  Michael Phillips

Chicago Sun-Times Bill Stamets

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

Doueiri, Ziad

WEST BEIRUT (West Beyrouth, À l'abri les enfants)

France Lebanon Belgium Norway (110 mi) 1998

West Beirut Geoffrey Macnab from Sight and Sound

Beirut, Lebanon, 1975. As fighting breaks out between the Lebanese Muslims and the Christian militias, the city is split in two: East Beirut is Christian-controlled and West Beirut is Muslim. The social and political upheaval has a dramatic effect on the life of Tarek, a teenager at school, and his parents. His mother wants to leave Beirut but his father is determined to stay.

At first, Tarek relishes the disruption since it means he can escape school. He runs amok in the bombed-out streets with his friend Omar and May, a beautiful young Christian girl. Tarek and Omar have a Super-8 camera, but the store which develops their films is on the other side of town. Tarek ventures across 'no man's land', a dangerous zone. On one of his missions, he comes across a famous brothel where Christians and Muslims alike are welcome and where he meets Madam Oum Walid, who is amazed by his audacity and treats him with kindness. The months pass and the war shows no sign of ending.

Review

Bombed-out cities make wonderful playgrounds, and it's this paradox which writer-director Ziad Doueiri (who himself grew up in the war-torn Beirut of the mid-70s) explores to such rich effect in his debut feature. While their parents are tearing their hair out in grief and fear, the children run amok, relishing the anarchy which war brings. Doueiri's background as Quentin Tarantino's assistant cameraman has been much hyped by the publicists, but West Beyrouth owes less to Reservoir Dogs than to the kind of naturalistic, street-level cinema patented by the Neo-Realists in the 50s. Doueiri is equally adept at showing the tensions between neighbours living on top of one another and the divisions within the city as a whole.

There is also conflict between generations – while Christians battle against Muslims, adolescents are pitted against their elders. In one of the very first scenes, the teenage protagonist Tarek refuses to sing the French anthem at his school assembly. Robustly played by the director's younger brother Rami Doueiri, Tarek is a renegade with the same disdain for authority that Truffaut's Antoine Doinel showed in The 400 Blows (1959). For all his bravado, he is sensitive enough to understand the strains the war is placing on his parents' marriage. Doueiri never lets us forget what a calamity the war is. Tarek's long-suffering but philosophical father insists it is just another episode in the chequered history of Beirut, a city riven by violence many times before. He seems to believe that if the family endures long enough, the violence will go away but, of course, that's not going to happen.

Without going into exhaustive detail about why the fighting between Beirut's Muslims and Christians broke out, Doueiri shows its effects. Militia men mount roadblocks at street corners. We see a massacre of bus passengers. As bread becomes short, crowds swell outside the bakery. Rows break out for almost no reason. The war zone has its own conventions, some of them painfully absurd. In no man's land, bras stand in for white flags and no sniper will shoot at anybody brandishing one, which fascinates Tarek, his curiosity about sex quickly mounting.

West Beyrouth is not only a chronicle of a city at war but also a rites-of-passage story and as a study of young friendship. Tarek and his friend Omar roam around the city in search of adventure, sometimes with a young Christian girl in tow. This is very much an insider's vision of Beirut. The director knows the city as intimately as the people who inhabit it. The storytelling isn't exactly impressionistic, but we're given little sense of time passing or of a narrative building up to a conventional ending. Instead, Doueiri offers us a series of lyrical snapshots of the world of his childhood. The film finishes in oblique fashion, with the implication that one of Tarek's family died in the civil war. Doueiri doesn't need to spell matters out – the sense of loss and yearning felt by those caught in this divided city is always apparent.

Douvlis, Vasilis

THE HOMECOMING (I Epistrofi) C 74

Greece (98 mi) 2007

Douvlis is a first-time director who takes THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946) theme and sets it in his home town of Yannena, Greece, reflecting prevailing views of a remote rural locale. What we discover is that the Biblical era stoning of Irene Pappas in ZORBA THE GREEK (1964) still has resonance in modern Greece as well, as the conservative sentiment is much the same, an aversion to adultery. The film doesn’t address religious views, either traditional orthodox or small town, but instead presents the story by introducing a foreigner, a convenient scapegoat for society’s ills. Despite winning the FIPRESCI critics award at the 2007 Thessaloniki Felm festival, the director claimed it did not translate to the box office where the film has not done well, which he attributes to continuing racist strains within Greek society who refuse to see an Albanian lead character at the movies. My own views lean towards religious conservatism, as a movie about adultery may still be considered off limits and out of bounds. Either way, the film has plenty of other shortcomings, such as a meandering narrative that has difficulty maintaining the audience’s interest.

Divided into three segments, each focusing on a single character, we follow the viewpoint of the rigidly overcontrolling husband Ilias (Arto Apartian) who had to work in Germany to learn what it took to become a successful businessman in Greece, his beautiful wife Eleni (Maria Skoula), who feels like her life and marriage have reached a dead end, feeling totally isolated and “buried alive,” and also Albanian actor Artur Luzi as Petro, an illegal Albanian immigrant looking for work despite having no valid work permit, who ends up as an all purpose handy man for Ilias. Difficulty ensues. Ilias becomes jealous of his wife when she actually talks to this new hired hand, as everyone else openly excludes him. But as time passes, a sexual chemistry develops, largely expressed onscreen through passionate kisses and hugs and by taking indiscreet opportunities. While the film focuses more on the relationship between the men, as Petro is more of a son to Ilias than his own son who continues to live in Germany, Eleni’s repressed dissatisfaction is far more fascinating, as she sacrifices everything to live in a place that provides her no happiness at all. When the husband resolutely discounts her point of view, she has no way out, as divorce is such a socially unacceptable option. Her confusion in a society that offers her so few choices, along with an illicit sexual awakening with Petro, all add more electrical charge than the rest of the film. While the attention to local detail is well observed, this is a beautifully photographed but largely uninspiring film with fairly conventional male characters that never builds dramatic tension and instead relies on more formulaic devices. It was curious to see duplicate subtitles when characters spoke Albanian, as the English subtitles were not on top or below, but actually squeezed in between the Greek subtitles.

Variety.com [Derek Elley]

The long-running antipathy of Greeks toward Albanian migrants -- generally depicted as criminals or hijackers in movies -- finds a much more solid dramatic base in "The Homecoming," a notable first feature by writer-director Vasilis Douvlis. Chamber drama centered on a handsome young Albanian who's employed by a Greek couple clearly draws some inspiration from "The Postman Always Rings Twice," but is much more than just a yarn of sexual betrayal. This is quality, and accessible, festival and Euro tube fare.

Pic falls into three sections of roughly equal length, each focused on one of the three main characters but continuing the story in a linear fashion.

Opening half-hour follows Ilias (Armenian vet Arto Apartian), a proud father celebrating the marriage of his daughter in his home village in central Greece, whither he's returned with his younger wife, Eleni (Maria Skoula), after a long spell in Germany. When he left, in '69, the village had nothing; now he's bought a small gas station-cum-taverna that he wants to bequeath to his son-in-law.

However, it's soon clear all is not right beneath the happy-family surface. As soon as they're hitched, both daughter and son-in-law skedaddle back to Germany, which they consider home. Eleni, too, isn't happy about being "buried alive" in the village, preferring to live in the nearest city, Ioannina. Then one day, Ilias gives a lift to an illegal immigrant, Petro (Artur Luzi), and ends up employing him.

Pic then switches to Eleni's viewpoint, as the lonely, still attractive woman finds a fellow soul to talk to in Petro. Their cautious, incremental relationship, under the stern eyes of the autocratic Ilias, is beautifully written and played.

Final section fills in the background on Petro and ramps up the simmering drama of whether or not Petro will betray Ilias' help and trust.

Though the relationship between Eleni and Petro provides the dramatic fireworks, pic is more about Ilias' own attempts to be accepted back into the village he left for economic reasons, plus his de facto adoption of Petro as the son he never had. Apartian's terrific performance as the proud but secretly wounded paterfamilias anchors the movie, matched by an equally skillful but quieter perf by Skoula as the wife who's slowly dying inside.

Douvlis, himself born in Ioannina, sketches the landscape and suppressed currents of local life with natural ease, aided by Kostis Gikas' fine summery lensing. Other credits are smooth.

Camera (color), Kostis Gikas; editor, Ioanna Spiliopoulou; music, Thodoris Abazis; art director/costume designer, Ioulia Stavridou; sound (Dolby Digital), Spyros Drosos, Thimios Kolokousis; script advisor, Nikos Panayatopoulos. Reviewed at Thessaloniki Film Festival (Greek Films '07), Nov. 20, 2007. Running time: 97 MIN.

Dovzhenko, Alexander

Dovzhenko, Alexander World Cinema

Ukrainian Soviet director and writer. Trained as a teacher, Dovzhenko worked as a civil servant and diplomat, then studied painting in Munich and became a newspaper cartoonist. He began film work in Odessa in 1926, directing the comedies Vasya-reformator / Vasya the Reformer (his first feature film) and Yagodka lyubvi / The Fruit of Love, and the thriller Sumka dipkur'era / The Diplomatic Bag. His major films, beginning with Zvenigora (1928), are characterized by a unique combination of lyricism, social commentary, gentle satire and powerful echoes of Ukrainian folklore. Arsenal (1929) was his first film to achieve widespread recognition outside the Ukraine. His next film, Zemlya / The Earth (1930), a highly poeticized version of collectivization and a powerful evocation of nature and landscape, made his international reputation. His first sound film, Ivan (1932), traced the transformation of the hero from an unenlightened peasant to a committed Communist shock worker against the background of the construction of the Dnieper dam, one of the key projects of the first Five Year Plan. After this Dovzhenko's career went downhill, as he became little more than a loyal "servant of the state." Aerograd (1935) affirmed his faith in the future of the Soviet Far East; Shchors (1939), set in the Civil War, was made at Stalin's suggestion as a "Ukrainian Chapayev" and won a State Prize in 1941. Osvobozhdenie / Liberation (1940) celebrated the reunification of a western Ukraine with Ukraine proper following the Nazi-Soviet pact, while Bitva za nashu sovetskuyu Ukrainu / The Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine (1943) and Pobeda na pravoberezhnoi Ukraine / Victory on the Ukrainian Right Bank (1945) dealt with World War II. A number of Dovzhenko's unfilmed scripts were later made by his widow Yulia Solntseva. Dovzhenko also taught at VGIK (Vsesoyuznyi gosudarstvennyi institut kinematografii / All-Union State Cinema Institute) and wrote articles on film. — Richard Taylor, Encylopedia of European Cinema

All-Movie Guide Sandra Brennan

Alexander Petrovich Dovzhenko stands beside Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin as one of the Soviet Union's greatest early filmmakers, noted for his passionately poetic, serious and extremely personal films. He is best known for the second film in his distinguished "Ukraine Trilogy," Earth (1930) an exquisitely photographed tribute to Nature and Ukranian village life; it is the story of a peasant revolt spawned by the actions of a cruel landowner. The film is still often ranked among the top 10 best films of all time. Dovzhenko was born to an uneducated Cossack worker in Sosnitsa, Ukraine. It was his grandfather, who could only read a little, who encouraged young Dovzhenko to study hard; by the time he was 19 the young man had become a teacher. Because Dovzhenko had a bad heart, he did not serve in the military but continued teaching through WW I and through the revolution. He joined the communist party in the early 1920s and served in Poland as an ambassador's assistant in Warsaw and Berlin until 1923 when he came back to Kiev and began illustrating books and drawing cartoons. Three years later moved to Odessa to work with his new passion--films. He knew very little about how they were made, but was excited by the new medium, which he felt could effectively provide the masses with highly innovative and original art. His first attempt with script writing failed to get produced, but he had success with his second screenplay Vasya the Reformer, which he also co-directed. His first important film was Zvenigora (1928). A tribute to a typical village, it was a rich, lyrical mixture of historical fact, local legend, Soviet propaganda and subtle satire. This film did well in Moscow and established Dovzhenko as a major filmmaker. The following year he began his trilogy with Arsenal, a visual poem filled with exquisite, haunting images of the years leading up to the great revolution. Though Earth became his best-known film, it was not widely accepted by official Soviet critics, who found some of the scenes of death and the realities of life contrary to the ideals of the revolution. They insisted that several of the grittiest scenes be removed. The final film in the series was Ivan (1932). He went on to create a few more films, and then served as a wartime journalist for the Red Army during WW II. Afterward, he began writing, co-writing and producing films at Mosfilm studios. During this time Dovzhenko felt oppressed by the bureaucracy of Stalin's government; he was unable to finish many works in progress because of this interference, and several of his films were never made. The depth of his bitterness can be found in his diaries where he wrote that he felt his life had been wasted; he helmed a mere seven feature films though he worked in the film industry for over 20 years. Following WW II, he began writing novels. In 1956, he died of a heart attack at age 62. Later his wife Yulia Solntseva, who learned filmmaking by assisting her husband, made a few films from his writing, the best being Poem of the Sea, the first in a new Ukranian trilogy Dovzhenko had been planning to make. Dovzhenko was posthumously honored by having the Kiev studio named for him.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

The great Soviet filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko (1894-1956), subject of a current retrospective at the Walter Reade, was both a sophisticated revolutionary artist and a Ukrainian tribal bard; his name epitomizes a cine-lyricism so passionate as to verge on pantheism.

Dovzhenko, the son of illiterate peasants, became a village schoolteacher, studied economics during the Russian Revolution, and entered the Soviet diplomatic service before reinventing himself as a graphic artist. Breaking into movies in 1926, he made his debut with a short slapstick satire, Love Berry. Compared to his peers Eisenstein and Vertov, Dovzhenko proved to be a man of many genres. His first feature, Diplomatic Pouch (1927), was a spy thriller, as was his 1935 Aerograd; his breakthrough came with the political folk tale, Zvenigora (1927), and was consolidated with the grotesque and frenzied war film Arsenal (1929). Some 15 years later, Dovzhenko was documenting the German invasion of the Ukraine.

After the critical attacks on his enraptured, startlingly aestheticized tractor-paean Earth (1930) and beginning with his first sound film, Ivan (1932), Dovzhenko was largely constrained to Stalinist bio-pics, including Shchors (1939) and Michurin (1948). But even his most doctrinaire movies are marked by personal eccentricities, including his last, the unfinished and blatantly propagandist Farewell, America (1950). Showing here for the first time, it's stocked with over-the-top imperialist warmongers, including a capitalist toilet manufacturer who has a stroke when he hears the name "Stalin."

Dovzhenko suffered more frustration than persecution during the Stalin period, but his current reputation rests mainly on his last three silent features. Zvenigora is a masterpiece of magic realism made well before the term was invented. Arsenal's powerful use of repetition, cartoonish images, mad angles, fondness for close-ups, and frenzied parallel action suggests a talented Eisenstein follower's attempt to blast his mentor off the screen.

The astonishingly beautiful Earth is unlike anything else in movies. Drafted to make a film on rural collectivization, Dovzhenko produced a myth presenting the creation of the kolkhoz as a natural phenomenon, part of a cosmic cycle of birth and death. Murdered by a crazed kulak (or wealthy peasant), Earth's young hero is a martyr to the fertility of harvest. Released amid the campaign to liquidate the kulaks, Earth is ultimately a pagan myth made to celebrate a tragic social experiment. As exotic now as a Mayan temple or a Sienese altarpiece, it will screen four times this weekend, twice accompanied by the energetic cacophonists of the Alloy Orchestra.

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Alexander Dovzhenko - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... profile by Rob Edelman from Film Reference

CINEMATIC POETRY OF ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO (Marking the 105th birth anniversary of the film director) a profile essay by Olga Bobrova from Russian Culture Navigator

Eye Weekly - Delirious Dovzhenko - 11.14.02 an overview by Jason Anderson from eye WEEKLY

Alexander Dovzhenko Neglected Giant, an overview by Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix, Nov 28 – Dec 5, 2002

Alexander Dovzhenko Answers.com

DOVSHENKO Classic Russian Films by Dovshenko

Kinema Feature Death, Birth Order and Alexander Dovzhenko's Cinematic Visions, by George O. Liber, Spring 2000

Undercurrent Article (2006) Collective Dreams, by Marco Carynnyk from Fipresci magazine, July 2006

Alexander Dovzhenko Virtual Exhibition extraordinary gallery photos (that enlarge when clicked) by Marco Carynnyk

Dovzhenko, Alexander They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Chris Fujiwara's Top 10 Directors

THE DIPLOMATIC COUCH (Sumka Dipkuryera)

Russia (50 mi) 1927

User reviews from imdb Author: thecatsmotheruk from Somewhere on a rainy island

I could tell this was going to be good in the first few minutes.

A Soviet diplomat is being pursued by the evil British police and is fatally injured by a railway line (incidently the visuals certainly hint at what Dovzhenko was to achieve in the way of memorable imagary) and finds shelter with a railway worker. He dies (naturally having a vision of Lenin as he passes) and entrusts the eponymous pouch to the worker - who just happens to have a relative heading to Leningrad with his ship and all the sailors just happen to be Soviet sympathisers. Will they escape the evil Bourgeoisie police?!?!?!?

Ok it is a naive film, and some of it might irritate those who were not pro Soviet (though in its defence it was far less rabid than say Eisenstein's efforts) but it is entertaining and an interesting period piece.

User reviews from imdb Author: FerdinandVonGalitzien (FerdinandVonGalitzien@gmail.com) from Galiza

"Sumka Dipkuryera" ( Diplomatic Pouch ), directed by the great soviet film director Herr Aleksandr Dovzhenko, is based on the true-crime assassination of Soviet diplomat Teodor Nette, and it's an excellent spy thriller. It tells of the harrowing attempts to retrieve the slain envoy's pouch in order to return it by boat to Russia before it can be found it by the British secret police.

The pace of "Sumka Dipkuryera" is taut and the film is full of classic suspense situations typical of the detective /spy type genre. The varied and claustrophobic backgrounds enrich the story in a compelling way. Some longhaired critics claim that "Sumka Dipkuryera" was influenced by the German Expressionist film but this German Count sees the inspiration coming more from the different avant-garde European film movements, especially the Frenchified films.

Herr Aleksandr Dovzhenko , besides being one of the most important film directors in the history of the cinema ,was a ( Russian ) avant-garde pioneer and this film is a great example of this assertion. We can see Herr Dovzhenko's modern techniques in his use of the camera which creates some astonishing and remarkable moments. With great subtlety the camera becomes another character of the movie, moving in perfect coordination with the action of the boat crew (At one point, a sailor hoses down the camera and another one throws coal to it ) The camera-work is sometimes very stylish ( the port/train sequence ) and at other times experimental ( the accomplished sense of movement entwining shots of the power engine with sailors tap-dancing amidst the heaving of the sea ) This German Count has been always astonished too by Herr Dovzhenko's mastery in depicting human physical suffering in all its tragedy. The beginning of the film with the wounded Russian diplomat shows his pain and death in a direct way with powerful but stark imagery.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must hide something important in his particular diplomatic pouch that must be delivered secretly to a German fat heiress in the next soirée.

ZVENIGORA

Russia (90 mi) 1928

Chicago Reader (Fred Camper)

Hailed by Sergei Eisenstein for its originality, this 1927 silent feature by Soviet director Alexander Dovzhenko is both a folktale and a paean to industrialization, its multiple stories and meanings turning propaganda into poetry. Dovzhenko weaves together several different periods of Ukrainian history with a narrative involving an old man who wants to protect a fabulous treasure that's buried in a mountain. The various stories suggest that machines are beneficent, workers should throw off their chains, and invaders should be repelled, yet the mystical, quasi-religious framing device celebrates the Ukrainian nation in a way that seems to contradict Soviet ideology. As always, Dovzhenko's brilliant montages are full of double meanings, with each shot undercut by the next: in one spectacular presentation of mining, agriculture, and metal work, the images seem to fuse together and tear apart, suggesting both the glory of man-made structures and the destruction necessary for their creation. 73 min.

eye WEEKLY [Jason Anderson]

Channel 4 Film

ARSENAL

Russia Ukraine (70 mi) 1929

Arsenal (link lost) Pacific Cinematheque

The Ukrainian Alexander Dovzhenko stands, with Eisenstein and Pudovkin, as one of the giants of the Soviet silent era. Many consider Dovzhenko the most radical, innovative, and intensely personal Soviet filmmaker of the period; Georges Sadoul has called him "the cinema's greatest epic poet." Arsenal, one of Dovzhenko's two great masterpieces (the other is Earth), is a work of breathtaking lyrical beauty. Set in the Ukraine during the final years of the First World War and the beginnings of the Russian revolution and civil war, the film uses folklore, caricature, comedy, allegory, agit-prop, drama and myth to expose, in highly symbolic, imagistic, and non-narrative fashion, the horror of war and the misery of oppression. Arsenal has been compared to Picasso's "Guernica" for its "belief in human progress despite the barbarism of war, expressed in metaphors of pain and anguish that repel and attract at a first seeing." (Jay Leyda, Kino) "The film is as lyrical as it is piercing and pointed . . . Arsenal is the first feature in which the totality of its content rises to the height of pure poetry" (Rob Edelman). "A dazzling display of visual virtuosity whose vivid images linger long in memory . . . both a deeply committed political manifesto and a passionately lyrical film poem" (Ephraim Katz). B&W, 16mm, silent. 99 mins. (Pacific Cinémathèque print)

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

The lyrical poet of the silent cinema Dovzhenko is usually seen as a second to Eisenstein, some lesser technical virtuoso of the same era who also made memorable use of visuals and editing. Though this is probably his most Eisensteinian work, in many ways the linkages are superficial. While both made "propaganda" films, Dovzhenko's didn't fit clearly into any scheme or subscribe to any dogma. His work has far more depth and ambiguity than Eisenstein's, and much of that comes from his readiness to stray from what he was commissioned to do. In this case that's glorify the Bolshevik revolutionaries stand against the nationalist troops at a munitions plant in 1918. Dovzhenko's film is as much a celebration of Ukraniane folklore and a condemnation of at different times fighting and peacetime conditions through the traumatizing of women. The editing is awesome, surpassing Eisenstein, with rhythms driving the piece (that the orchestral score on the Kino version actually seems to understand). While Eisenstein was often content to show the masses in action, Dovzhenko is always linking, often through crosscutting. With Eisenstein we want to lead the charge, but with Dovzhenko we understand the moral dilemma, that there's no one left to work the factory and more importantly that the living are often left lifeless through the loss of loved ones. Dovzhenko will give you a brilliant tracking shot of soldiers marching alongside train tracks then almost imperceptibly cut to a tracking shot of the men lying dead alongside the tracks like a group of collapsed dominoes. The film has very little dialogue (there aren't too many intertitles and half of them are explanatory), but doesn't need it because it uses faces for characterization. The lighting is exceptional, highlighting and hiding areas for dramatic effect. Another reason the piece is so visually impressive is it incorporates so many terrains and times of the day, giving each segment a different texture. The brilliance of Arsenal is not it's verve, though it's driving energy is amazing, but how much it's able to say simply by showing statuesque individuals; the contrast between the kinetic (representing communism) and the static (representing Tsarist inequality) is what makes the film so dynamic. It's perhaps interesting that the heroes are slaughtered in their final stand (unlike the triumphant Eisenstein works), which has been compared to the Alamo for US audiences I'd say for lack of an alternative example. It's really an example that the heart and spirit of the revolution cannot be extinguished. That being said, I don't come out feeling like I've been asked to sign up, but rather I've been given an idea of what it's like to be in the midst of a society undergoing major transitions through battles and equally been shown what cinema is capable of.

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)

Imaginatively conceived and cleverly photographed though the scenes undoubtedly are in "Arsenal," a Soviet symbolic argument against war which is now holding forth at the Film Guild Cinema, a little of this sort of thing goes a long way. Before it is half over, it becomes more than slightly wearisome, except possibly to those who have spent part of their lives in Russia. Yesterday afternoon the little theatre was filled with Bolshevist sympathizers, who applauded loudly references to "a worker" and also sequences satirizing the Ukrainian bourgeois.

This picture, a silent one, of course, is presumed to deal in a more or less vague way with the struggle in the Ukraine between the Bolsheviki and Petlura's forces, but it has no real drama as it makes no pretense of telling a story. It is a sketch penciled by the director and there are patches which only those concerned in the making of this production could explain.

So far as the dead are concerned, little is left to the imagination. The director revels in calling attention to a lifeless soldier with a grin on his countenance and on several occasions he swings his camera on the physiognomy of a supposedly dead soldier, calling special attention to the man's glazed eyes. These glimpses of victims of war strike one as being far too real to show on a screen in a place where one hopes to find entertainment.

In an early episode there is an old woman who is forced to stagger over the ground, sowing the soil with seeds. She drops exhausted and then the director, who is Alexander Dovzhenko, turns to a scene of a man in uniform, evidently intended to resemble the late Czar, who is in the throes of writing a letter announcing that he has killed a crow.

These are some excellent examples of camera angles, but at the same time M. Dovzhenko tries too often to make his scenes on a slant for effect, possibly to show the "cock-eyed" state of the world in that quarter.

M. Dovzhenko, himself an Ukrainian, pokes fun at the bourgeois of his own locality and in one episode depicts the cowardice of the bourgeois and the courage of a worker, by portraying the former afraid to pull the trigger of a pistol on a proletarian and then showing the proletarian snatching the weapon from the bourgeois and killing him. This part of the offering is shrewdly done, for the bourgeois is made to appear so dazed that he does not know that the pistol has been taken from him and with an empty hand he makes a motion of pulling a trigger with his forefinger.

In the last passage the Man, who goes through the horrors and deprivations of war, is to be shot as a deserter. The soldiers fire without effect and then the Man, a symbol of bolshevism, bares his chest and declares that "there is something there that bullets cannot kill."

It is a film that defies criticism in many respects, for if one writes that the actions of some of the participants are woefully exaggerated, the director would naturally argue that it is symbolism. At the same time, although one is impelled to be in thorough sympathy with its argument against war, one cannot but help feeling that one-fourth of the footage of this production would be ample for one sitting.

Senses of Cinema (Miguel Marias)

Images Movie Journal Craig Fischer on the Soviet Avant-Garde from Images

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

eye WEEKLY [Jason Anderson]

Channel 4 Film

Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

EARTH (Zemlya) A 98

Russia (88 mi) 1930 distributed version (62 mi)

The version I saw was a 62 minute silent film made in 1930, Eisenstein's POTEMKIN, by the way, is also about 60 minutes in length. Initially, the film resembles Carl Dreyer's PASSIONS OF JOAN OF ARC, never have I seen any other films that rely so exclusively on extreme close ups, that emote such painterly detail in such a variety of faces, however, here these faces are contrasted against the towering sky, each landscape image shows the tiny people at the bottom one-fifth of the screen, while four-fifths is all sky and clouds, a similar pictorial device was used in YELLOW EARTH, a film that bears uncanny thematic similarities, including the challenge of progress in the unreachable rural areas, the use of song to extort the Party message, and the unbelievably rich landscapes from which people draw their nourishment and the necessities to survive. Of course, Tarkovsky comes to mind, especially his relentless use of similar imagery, especially apples, horses, and the rain, also Vertov, a contemporary filmmaker whose ENTHUSIASM in 1931 is a remarkable abstract avante garde homage to the Worker State, one of the first Russian sound films, also featuring the first sound interview, depicting an idealized, every day, ordinary worker state, filmed in a vast industrial area, the Don Bassin, using sounds of the workers, a symphony of sounds, no dialogue, alternate title:  SYMPHONY OF THE DON BAS, Chaplin observed: "I would never have believed it possible to assemble mechanical noises to create such beauty.  One of the most superb symphonies I have known."

Vertov was fascinated by factories, machinery, motion, locomotives, steel mills, coal miners, agricultural collectives, featuring dancing and plenty of marching, with bold, striking imagery. Vertov was the founder of Kino Pravda, later re-invented in the 60's as cinema verité, cinema of the truth. Vertov invented the newsreel in 1918 using subtitled commentary, sending a reporter with a camera to capture news events, then sending the film to the newsroom for editing, a style still used in newsrooms today, Vertov, like Dovzhenko, was also a futuristic poet, much admiring the works of both Miakovsky and Walt Whitman, he deciphered a new way to see the world, life as it is lived, reality, truth, as evidenced by his 1929 documentary A MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, a film about the making of a film: "I, a machine show you a world such as only I can see...a study in film truth on an almost philosophical level. It does deliberately what others try hard to avoid - destroys its own illusions in the hope that reality will emerge from the process not as a creature of screen illusion but as a liberated spirit."

One must also mention the Russian filmmaker Pudovkin, whose 1926 film MOTHER is a landmark film companion to Eisenstein's POTEMKIN. Like Dovzhenko, Pudovkin studied science, he was a student of chemistry and physics, and actually made documentary films of Pavlovian experiments. While Eisenstein used non-professional actors to depict heroes to the masses, Pudovkin used professional actors trained in the Stanislavsky method, hoping to obtain a non-professional documentary feel focusing on the role of individuals. All three were members of the Russian avante garde in the 20's which included total artistic freedom before Stalin gained control, all three completely embraced a new vision of Communism and were fighting against Gorky, who represented the old vision. MOTHER was actually an adaptation of a Maxim Gorky novel, Gorky, although revered, was initially opposed to the Bolsheviks and was appalled by this adaptation. But the freedom of this first-time filmmaker choosing NOT to adhere to the contemporary literary product suggests the courage of this film. 55% of the Russian population was illiterate by WWI, Lenin instructed his Cultural Minister to use cinema to educate the masses, as it was otherwise difficult to effectively get through ideas to what was largely a peasant country. Lenin believed in a peasant revolution directed by a small intellectual party, cinema was a major instrument of propaganda and education, revealing a particular insight on Lenin's part, as cinema was, at that time, a 4th rate entertainment, similar to the circus. Marxism is anti-religious (religion is the opiate of the masses) but Marxist cinema, like religion, creates images, in this case propagandistic images, to teach and instruct a new morality for a new mass culture, rather than the old, aristocratic, bourgeois culture for the individuals, the rich, only those who could afford it. Political propaganda revealed the Communist party's own aims and goals, themes purposefully exaggerated in a very unambiguous manner.

Pudovkin was the first to use musical inventions such as Wagnerian leitmotifs, re-occurring symbolic images, and actually constructed this film in a sonata form, fast movement followed by slow, then another fast. The father in this film is a drunk, and represents the reactionaries, the son is a member of a Communist youth group, while the mother represents the patient and long suffering Mother Russia. There is an abundance of symbolic imagery in this film, used with great effectiveness, pillars of liberty and justice followed by heavy black boots of a soldier, leather gloved hands of soldiers, sabers, horses trampling through mud with the camera effectively placed below looking up, revealing the threatening power - there were many similar camera shots of humans and animals in EARTH. This film has a romantic, painful depiction of the realism in the characters, focusing on individuals, on human problems with universal meanings, with great effort to find people who perfectly fit Pudovkin's idea of each character, which adds a warmth and a more affecting dimension to the striking images on screen. Rather than explaining concepts through montage, like Eisenstein, Pudovkin orchestrates his shots on the basis of their emotional charge, raising and lowering the pitch of the action according to his desired effect. Pudovkin also poetically adds ice flows, rushing streams, trees and sky, spring, melting snow, the thawing of ice, a natural force about top be unleashed against the concrete and steel images of the mill, where forces of nature will eventually prevail, very similar to the final shot in EARTH.

There is, in EARTH, similarity to Eisenstein, particularly with his montage of the tractor harvesting the fields, contrasting against the humans bare handed in the fields, and how months of time are reduced in cinematic space to a few seconds, machines are cutting the wheat, separating the grain, machines are making the dough, making the bread, finally realized in a multitude of loaves of bread. But the single most effective scene is the son who, with the help of others, pools their collective resources to obtain this tractor, basically eliminating earth's borders there isn't any further use for land owners there is only endless land and there is a beautiful scene of this son walking alone down a moon-lit road, the landscape around him is all bushes and trees alongside a warm, comfortable street on the outskirts of the town, and it sort of sparkles in the moonlight, and he's so happy with his accomplishment that he breaks into a little dance, which is actually an extended sequence, shot after shot, from differing angles and perspectives, close ups, medium shots, then from afar when he suddenly drops to the ground from a bullet.

A short time later, the father calls out for his son's murderer, which is followed by a single image nine-tenths of the screen is an empty sky, tall, meaningless telephone poles line one side of the landscape there is, obviously, no reply. But instead of bringing in the deacons and the priests, this family decides the entire town will bury him, accompanied by songs and slogans, so again, there is this wonderful Eisenstein-style montage, or perhaps more correctly DW Griffith as in INTOLERANCE, where he pulls all the story lines together at once, we have the priest in his highly over-decorated church, an image right out of the not yet filmed IVAN THE TERRIBLE, calling out for God to "punish the Godless," we have the sea of humanity, the marching mourners all dressed in white, oddly enough, where the dead body passes under the apple trees, the leaves actually touching his face, we have the grieving widow who strips her clothes off and anguishes over their lost life together, we have the killer who is confessing his sins from a distance but no one seems to care, so he actually does a little dance of death in a cemetery, next to the crosses on the graves, suggesting all the religious imagery has no further use in this new society, it is as good as dead, followed by horses running free, and rain washing the old world away, the collective fruit of the tree is featured prominently the tree of life, the water sparkling and dripping from the fruit, a couple looks at one another, held lovingly in each other's arms, a collective love will prevail over all.

Richard Peña from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Arguably, Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth is the single greatest achievement of the ever-more impressive Soviet silent cinema. A modernist who drew deep inspiration from folk art – not unlike his contemporaries Marc Chagall and Sholem Aleichem – Dovzhenko’s ode to the beginning of collectivization in the Ukraine is a riot of delirious imagery of swaying wheat fields, ripening fruits, and stampeding horses. The arrival of a tractor is greeted with joy by the peasants, who begin to imagine new lives for themselves, but surviving kulaks (landowners) conspire to assassinate the inspiring young head of the Party’s village committee. His death, though, only makes the villagers stronger in their resolve; in a mind-boggling finale Dovzhenko brings together themes of birth, death, harvest, progress, and solidarity as the dead man is reunited with the land he loved so well.

No summary, however, can really do justice to the extraordinary sensuality of the film, a quality not much appreciated by the Soviet censors. Among the choice bits removed from earlier released versions are a scene in which in a symbol of communion the village men urinate on the tractor’s radiator, and a shot in which men draw strength and comfort by putting their hands inside the blouses of the women at their sides. Anyone looking for the origins of Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema must start with Earth.

Earth Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Alexander Dovzhenko's ravishing and lyrical 1930 film about life on a collective farm in the Ukraine, the last and best of his silent features, shows his pantheism and poetry at their most exalting. The compositions are breathtaking, the evocations of death and social transformation powerful, the eroticism remarkably potent. Incontestably one of the greatest of all Soviet films. In Russian with subtitles. 62 min.

Time Out

One of the last of the silents, and though increasingly an absentee from Ten Best lists, a very great film indeed. The director's trademarks - a field of sunflowers all waving goodbye, a lowering sky filling three-quarters of the frame - remained well nigh constant throughout his career, but he seldom recaptured the pantheistic phosphoresence of this hymn both to nature and to the gleaming new tractors and ploughs which aimed to transform it. Such is the authenticity of its pictorialism, in fact, that one has to remind oneself that it was actually shot like other films.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Also out from Kino is an edition of Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth (1930), which belongs to a uniquely Soviet genre: tractor porn. Commonly regarded as an expressionist masterwork, Earth, whose title translates more literally as "dirt," was commissioned as pro-collectivization propaganda, but rejected as too abstract to appeal to the peasants who were its intended audience. It would be generous to say Dovzhenko's interest in narrative is slight and the film's overwrought poetry will catch unprepared viewers off-guard. (A montage shows villagers greeting the arrival of their first tractor with fits of quasi-sexual energy; a murdered organizer's wife clutches frantically at her naked chest while his assassin climbs to the top of a hill and shouts his guilt to the world.) But with all the bajillions being spent on samey CGI-imagery, it's worth reflecting how much Dovzhenko was able to get out of a black-and-white camera and a handful of wheat farmers. So much for technology improving our lives.

Earth (link lost) Pacific Cinematheque

"Dovzhenko's most famous film, and one of the great achievements of world cinema" (Rob Edelman), Earth is a remarkably rhapsodic, celebratory portrait of Ukrainian peasants in the process of collectivization, resisted at very turn by reactionary kulaks who oppose the new Soviet order. If the subject sounds didactic or socialist-realist dreary, this movingly beautiful film -- described by the director as a "biological, pantheistic conception" -- is anything but. "Dovzhenko's cinema is poetic, lyrical, possessed of a Blake-like somber innocence and a burning passion for existence . . . Earth is a stirring symphony of pastoral life and the calm acceptance of death . . . Dovzhenko loves his subject, making the camera the means for transmitting his emotion. The natural vitality of the faces, sunlight on hay, animals in a meadow -- these are Dovzhenko's bases for hope. Today they look subtler and more credible than all of Eisenstein's violent juxtapositions of the crowd and outrage, or Vertov's exultant comparisons of machines and happiness" (David Thomson). "One of the last of the silents, and though increasingly an absentee from Ten Best lists, a very great film indeed" (Gilbert Adair, Time Out). B&W, 16mm, silent with musical score. 81 mins.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

In Aleksandr Dovzhenko's orgiastic paean to Soviet collectivism and tractor-ism Earth there is nothing more beautiful than the untainted countryside. After 75 years of servitude to the land, an old man teasingly bids farewell to his countrymen amidst a field of apples, a serene but nonetheless subversive evocation of pastoral rejuvenation that may or may not have inspired Julien Temple's insipid, award-winning music video for Enigma's "Return To Innocence." Dovzhenko envisions a jittery disconnect between the film's older and younger generations during a period of transition that sees rich landowners exploiting the area's commerce. Before the arrival of the film's celebratory tractor, Dovzhenko's daring use of montage likens a group of grazing cattle to ravenous countrymen scavenging the landscape for terrain to pillage. Unlike Eisenstein's equally subversive Strike, Earth never really explodes but nonetheless threatens to do so for 60-plus maddening minutes; for that, it's all the more impressive than anything Eisenstein ever made. There's no mistaking the film's propagandistic chutzpah: characters don't talk and scream to each other as much as they do to the wind, and the infamous tractor whose arrival is ghoulishly celebrated by an entire populace becomes a delirious symbol for an encroaching, technological future. Though the tractor noticeably improves production, Dovzhenko recognizes the machine as an anti-cosmic terror—via a rhythmic, almost kaleidoscopic montage of churning gears and rivers of plant seed, he evokes the death of the land's pagan spirit. There's a sense here that characters move in order to ward off evil. The death of one countryman effects all, and the entire community exorcises their grief in perfect sync; it's a startling ritual of primordial restoration Earth is silent but there's so much vitality in any given frame as to suggest a non-stop primal scream.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Earth (1930) (Russian title: Zemlya), the fourth and final silent film from Ukrainian director Aleksandr Dovzhenko, is generally considered his greatest work and a landmark of early Soviet revolutionary cinema. The story is a simply told but lyrical celebration of life in a Ukrainian village. On the eve of collectivization in the Ukraine, a young farmer - Vasili - has a unique vision: the village council will buy a tractor to be shared among the farmers. The rich landowners - "kulaks" - are threatened by Vasili's proposal and the idea of any sort of unity among the peasant farmers. Eventually, Vasili meets a tragic end on a moonlit night (one of the film's most visually impressive sequences) but the dawn brings forth the promise of prosperity to the poor village.

While the idea of watching a silent film that revolves around one farmer's campaign for a communal tractor sounds like a bad cliche of Soviet cinema, Earth is surprisingly poetic and visually astonishing at times. Renown film critic Georges Sadoul in his Dictionary of Films wrote "Though its basic story (collectivization in the Ukraine and kulak defiance) is very much set in its own time, Earth has universal themes that transcend this: the fruitfulness of the earth, its annual rebirth, life, love and death. It is Dovzhenko's portrayal of these themes that gives Earth its moving lyrical power.....The deceptively simple photography, reducing every element to its essential meaning, has incredible beauty and brilliantly captures the sense of vast plains, fruit trees, and enormous sunflowers under an overpowering sky. And over everything lies Dovzhenko's love for his native Ukraine."

Dovzhenko later said in a 1930 interview that the reason he made Earth was because "I wanted to show the state of a Ukrainian village in 1929, that is to say, at the time it was going through an economic transformation and a mental change in the masses." He also added that "It is necessary to both love and hate deeply and in great measure if one's art is not to be dogmatic and dry. I work with actors, but above all with people taken from the crowd. My material demands it. One should not be afraid of using nonprofessional actors because one should remember that everyone at least once can act out his own role on the screen."

When Earth first played movie houses in Russia, it quickly developed a controversial reputation, dividing critics and government officials over its merits. Those who condemned it felt that the film's intense lyricism was politically incorrect and did not fully advance the drive for agricultural collectivization. Demian Bedny, who was officially recognized as the "Kremlin poet," attacked the film for being overly "philosophical." "I was stunned by [Bedny's] attack," Dovzhenko later wrote, "so ashamed to be seen in public, that I literally aged and turned gray overnight. It was a real emotional trauma for me. At first I wanted to die."

Before Earth was released abroad, Russian censors removed at least three offending sequences - the grief-stricken fiancee ripping her clothes off, a woman giving birth during a funeral, and a tractor radiator being filled with urine. Even in an edited version, however, Earth was universally praised during its premieres in Paris, Berlin and New York City. And Dovzhenko had another reason to be happy. It was during this period that he married Yulia Solntseva who would become his most important collaborator. Later, during World War II, it was reported that the Germans destroyed the negative of Earth but luckily a copy of the original release print was found and preserved.

Earth Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]

eye WEEKLY [Jason Anderson]

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) also including a brief review of BEZHIN MEADOW

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray] not feeling the peasant love

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review from 1930

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

IVAN C 76

Russia (90 mi) 1932

Dovzhenko's first sound film, very overrated in my view, predictable, unimaginative and largely forgettable, though the dreadfully poor quality of the print may have contributed to these negative views. Of interest, however, the film is constructed around a multitude of hierarchal meetings and platitudinous speeches surrounding the building of a dam which is never shown in the film. The reel broke in several places, so it’s possible much was inadvertently cut in the projection booth. This alleged 90-minute film was screened in less than an hour, even with the reel breaks.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Alexander Dovzhenko's first sound film, revolving around the construction of a giant dam on the Dnieper River, is one of his greatest, though it was poorly received in the Soviet Union when it came out in 1932. It's only one of the eccentricities of this lyrical and monumental feature that the title refers to three different characters, and it's telling that the father of one of them, an illiterate peasant who proudly spends his time fishing and loafing while everyone else works, is treated with considerable warmth. (A sequence in which he's frightened when addressed by an outdoor loudspeaker evokes Chaplin as well as Tati.) As in all of Dovzhenko's best work, the style veers closer to lyrical poetry (its opening sequence about the river) and portraiture (a later segment introducing us to various workers) than to narrative, though it's innovative in other respects as well: the final sequence includes some striking jump cuts almost 30 years before Jean-Luc Godard purportedly invented them in Breathless. In Russian with subtitles.

Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]

Following Earth, a two year lull came in Alexander Dovzhenko's career. The next 20 years might as well not have happened as far as film history goes: Dovzhenko was forced, like all Soviet cinematic artists, into the uninspiring field of socialist realism, and his ouevre was subsequently ignored. But Ivan, coming as it did at the relatively early point of 1932, is a work of "socialist realism" like no other, a bizarre inverted world of propaganda whose obligatory happy ending feels like sarcasm, and which rings endlessly, weirdly hollow at all times. For your die-hard buffs of early Soviet propaganda, this is knee-slapping stuff.

The titular hero is your typically earnest, humorless worker. In this case, naive farm worker Ivan, with his boyish good looks, should be a rallying point for the film, serving as an example for those around him as his honest labor inspires those around him. Somehow though, it doesn't work that way: after a typically sweaty and homoerotic montage of energetic railway work, pounding spikes into the ground, Ivan is reprimanded by his supervisor for his sloppy work, and subsequently gets lost somewhere in the film while Dovzhenko concentrates on his more interesting comrades, and gives an unusual amount of screen time to dissidents. The results are ambiguous, to put it mildly; they lack that idiotically pure sense of uplift which the typical propaganda film is supposed to give. In one sequence, for example, we see a parade of workers standing grimly still, with a title card extolling each one's attributes ("old patriot," "best worker on the site," etc.). Suddenly, this tribute to proletarian pride is interrupted by a man who announces "And I'm a waster. Here's my profile." He turns to show us his profile, and goofs off for a while before finally yelling "Quit harassing the Soviet people!" No matter that at the end, he is thoroughly and somewhat conventionally rejected by the entire community - he's made his point, and disrupted the momentum of the entire sequence in the process.

Most notable is the ending. Here, a group of workers, after an invigorating speech, rush off to blaring music to repair a dam in jeapordy. We see them rush out of the hall, and a massive parade of Jeeps on their way to the site. The next thing we see is the return of all these people to the hall, and another self-congratulatory speech - no actual results. Rhetoric triumphs over visible results, and we have no choice but to be suspicious of the alleged triumphs of Sovietization, as Dovzhenko presumably was by this point as well.

Other sequences aren't as outright subversive, but even so the film is consistently engaging in a weird way. There's cartoonish humor, straight satire and even a stab at absurdism, as two old men pointlessly chuckle their way through a substanceless reunion. The results are too mixed to be effective agit-prop, and that's probably the point. Unable to deliver a straight propaganda film (i.e., propaganda without doubts as to whether a moral victory is achieved) earlier, here Dovzhenko provides an unambiguously pro-Soviet film that feels incredibly snide and sarcastic. Weird and challenging from beginning to end, Ivan is a fascinatingly mixed statement of protest, a last gasp before socialist realism definitively hijacked Soviet cinema for the next 20 years.

The New York Times H.T.S. review from 1933

After several semi-private showings in New York," "Ivan," the widely heralded first dialogue picture directed by Alexander Dovzhenko, one of Soviet Russia's leading film-makers, is on view at the Acme Theatre.

Spectators looking for much of a story are likely to be disappointed, as Ivan, the fine young peasant lad who leaves his native village in the Ukraine to become a skilled worker on the construction of the mighty Dnieperstroy dam, is merely the personification of the millions of Ivans being lined up by the Soviet Government in its struggle for the establishment of a new order of society. Consequently, there is hardly a hint of "romance," unless Ivan's rather prolonged glances at an attractive girl operating a crane on the dam might be so construed. And in the end, when Ivan addresses a big meeting of workers called to honor the memory of a young man killed in an accident, he only emerges from the mass for a moment or two to voice their faith in the ultimate triumph of Socialist reconstruction.

An impressive incident at this meeting is when the mother of the dead youth recognizes finally that her son has fallen in a battle for the benefit of the people and realizes that the struggle must be continued. At the same meeting the slacker father of one of the "shock brigaders," with some preliminary bravado, slinks out of the hall after being disowned by his son and denounced by Ivan as a disgrace to the village from which they came.

In this scene and several others Stepan Shkurat's representation of the typical old-style muzhik—a shifting combination of stupidity, common sense and craftiness—is excellent. The acting of Peter Masokha, as Ivan, and of Elena Golik, as the bereaved mother, is adequate, as is that of several unidentified principals. Naturally, the director places the emphasis upon the mass scenes. As usual in Soviet films, the last reel shows the Red Army in all its branches ready to protect the achievements of the workers.

Technically "Ivan" ranks with the best Russian pictures. Many of the photographic effects are striking in their simplicity. English titles help out spectators unfamiliar with either Russian or Ukrainian.

AEROGRAD

aka: Frontier

Russia (82 mi) 1935

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

The first feature Alexander Dovzhenko made outside his native Ukraine (1935, 93 min.) takes place in a vast Siberian forest on the Pacific coast populated by religious villagers, hunters and adventurers, and Japanese spies, where the Soviets planned to establish an airfield and a city. Frankly operatic in its portraiture and poetic sylization, this Soviet masterpiece began as propaganda but veers closer to pagan fantasy than any of Dovzhenko's other sound films, and it quickly became a favorite of both Elia Kazan and James Agee when it opened in the U.S. under the title Frontier. As always in Dovzhenko, the depictions of death are especially memorable. In Russian with subtitles.

The New York Times A.S.

The U.S.S.R. issues a defiant warning to her enemies on the Far Eastern borders in "Frontier," the new Russian film at the Cameo Theatre. Frequently able to merge didacticism and drama so expertly as to make for vigorous and powerful motion pictures, the State-controlled Soviet cinema fails rather badly this time. Although some of its individual episodes are fine, the work as a whole is confused in its story-telling and hysterical in its assault upon Japanese imperialism. Out of the potentially promising union of Alexander Dovjenko as director and Edward Tisse (Eisenstein's former associate) as cameraman comes a muddled and generally incomprehensible tract.

"Frontier," in its straightforward dramatic conflicts, is the tale of Red Army frontier guards who suppress a counter-revolutionary movement of White guardists led by a Japanese. The film draws a sharp contrast between the conflicting forces, demonstrating on the one hand the virility and boisterous assurance of the loyal Bolsheviki and on the other the decadent, religion-worshiping fanaticism of their enemies. It abandons all semblance of formal dramatic structure in the climax, when it becomes a glorified newsreel account of the Red Army's ability to concentrate military units on the Eastern frontier on short notice.

SHORS (Shchors)

Russia (92 mi) 1939

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

A rarely shown late effort by Alexander Dovzhenko, made in 1939 at the specific request of Stalin, who wanted a Ukrainian epic to pair with the Vassiliev brothers' rousing Chapayev. The chosen hero was Nikolai Shchors, who commanded the Red Army in the Ukraine during the civil war. The results lack the lyrical intensity of Dovzhenko's silent films (Earth, Arsenal), but the furious swirl of his images is still potent. In Russian with subtitles. 140 min.

User reviews from imdb Author: jgcorrea from Rio, Brazil

An earthy, epic historical drama set during World War I and the Russian Civil War, Shchors is a biographical portrait of the partisan leader and communist Nikolai Shchors, one of the few indisputable Bolshevik icons of Ukrainian origin. The work was commissioned by Stalin himself, who asked Dovzhenko to "give us a Ukrainian Chapayev" - a reference to the popular (though mediocre) 1934 film by Sergei and Georgi Vasiliev depicting the heroic exploits of a folksy Russian Red Army commander. The prolonged production of Shchors proved a nightmare for Dovzhenko, who was forced to submit every creative decision and every episode for high-level political approval, and who found himself accused of Ukrainian nationalism by Stalin's increasingly paranoid henchmen. There is one remarkable, picturesque sequence of burial. Nothing else. Shchors represents the glory of socialist-realist restrictions imposed upon an artist, the ultimate product of Zhdanovist canons. Nothing left of Dovzhenko's dynamic energy and fervent poetry featured in his best picture, 'Earth.'

BATTLE FOR SOVIET RUSSIA (Bitva za nashu Sovetskuyu Ukrainu)

aka: Ukraine in Flames

Russia (80 mi) 1943

User reviews from imdb Author: Ecnerwal from London, England

This is a simply wonderful documentary about the fighting in Ukraine during the Second World War. First of all, we see the Germans invading, driving the Ukrainians out of their land. Then the Ukrainians, with the help of the Red Army counter-attack driving the Germans slowly backwards. The film centres on the battle for Kharkov. It ends with the Germans being driven back across the river Dneiper.

The narration of events in this film is not particularly interesting. What makes this film wonderful are the images Dovzhenko uses. Near the beginning of the film we have beautiful images of the Ukrainian countryside and the people working and living in it - huge fields of wheat and sunflowers, swaying in the wind; orchards in blossom; reflections of the landscape in the clear river; people working the land in happiness. This strongly contrasts with the destruction we see when the germans invade - cities in ruins, villages destroyed, people fleeing the homes. One powerful image is of a woman lighting her stove, when that is all that is left of her house. At one point we see footage of german soldiers laughing as they march intercut with shots of destruction and death.

The battle scenes themselves are understandably a little confused and not particularly involving, although Dovzhenko does use some good shots of the smoke around the cannons, and his rapid editing is very effective. Some of the most powerful scenes come after the recapture of Kharkov, which lies in ruins. Various inhabitants are interviewed, telling of the cruelty of the germans, and we see truly disturbing shots of charred corpses, murdered children, and bodies heaped in ditches.

The whole film is narrated in voice-over, which understandably seems to be excessively keen on killing germans and a bit over the top in praise of the motherland. The subtitles, at least on the version I saw, were terrible: some scenes were not translated at all, and the english throughout was ungrammatical and badly spelt.

'Victory on the Right Bank Ukraine (1945)', also by Dovzhenko, follows straight on from where this film left off, but its imagery is not generally as powerful. 9/10

The New York Times T.M.P.

Row upon row of white wooden crosses dot the Ukraine from the banks of the Don to the rugged slopes of the Carpathians; the fields have been blackened by fire, pitted by shells and soaked with blood; the great cities of Kiev and Kharkov stand like mountains of crumbled masonry; the little white cottages of the villages and towns no longer are white or whole, where they remain at all. Nothing much is left of the Ukraine but the indomitable spirit of the people, and it is that spirit which is the heart and life of "Ukraine in Flames," the new Soviet documentary motion picture which opened on Saturday at the Stanley Theatre.

The Germans buried their dead under those neat wooden crosses when time permitted, but not so the thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians whom they murdered. They were tossed into mass graves, hurriedly covered over with a few feet of soil. Others were left against the sides of ditches or piled grotesquely upon one another in the city square where they had been executed by firing squads. All this and more of the Nazis' barbaric deeds was photographed by twenty-four combat cameramen who accompanied advance units of the Red Army back into the Ukraine.

That we might better realize the devastating effects of war, the film opens on the rich, abundant wheat and cotton fields, the well-kept orchards and the newly developed steel factories which were the pride of the Ukraine. And the camera wanders, too, through the ancient city of Kiev, through the bustling little towns and villages, the while the narrator briefly recounts the history of the region. Incidentally, some of these views of village life resemble early sequences in the recent Samuel Goldwyn production, "The North Star," even to the operatic flavor of the latter.

"Ukraine in Flames," assembled under the supervision of the noted director, Alexander Dovzhenko, is not nearly as effective in its battle sequences, however, as were the previous "Moscow Strikes Back" and "Stalingrad, the City That Stopped Hitler." This, perhaps, can be attributed to the fact that on the screen most battle scenes take on distressing similarity and that a good portion of the footage already has been in the newsreels. Moreover, the quality of the photography is not quite as good as in the previous films, nor is the commentary as well done. But these are mere technical deficiencies. It is the faces of the civilians, old and young, etched with sorrow, defiance and courage, which, make "Ukraine in Flames" a vital document.

VICTORY ON THE RIGHT BANK UKRAINE

(Pobeda na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine i izgnaniye nemetsikh zakhvatchikov za predeli Ukrainskikh sovietskikh zemel)

Russia (73 mi) 1945

Chicago Reader (Fred Camper)

This 1944 documentary, which focuses on the Red Army's campaign to retake Ukraine from the Germans, is arguably propaganda. The German soldiers are described in voice-over as a "crossbreed of hangmen with gorillas," and Stalin is treated worshipfully. And the horrendous destruction caused by the Germans--shown in stark images, some of them captured from enemy forces--is imperfectly described: we hear of the 200,000 murdered at Babi Yar, but no mention of the fact that they were Jews. Yet director Alexander Dovzhenko's intercutting of diverse moving shots and static images that show movement is frequently brilliant, bringing the chaos to life, and there's a stunningly visionary cut from a close-up of a man whose sight has been surgically restored to a montage of the Ukrainian countryside, transformed from devastation to arcadian splendor. In Russian with subtitles. 64 min.

User reviews from imdb Author: Ecnerwal from London, England

This is basically the sequel to Dovzhenko's earlier film 'Battle for Soviet Ukraine'/'Ukraine in Flames'. It is not as powerful as its predecessor, with fewer of the beautiful and disturbing images, but it has its moments.

The film describes the Russian attack against the Germans, which drove them away from the Dneiper river, and finally out of Ukraine. The film tends to explain the events in excessive detail, listing the towns and cities as they are recaptured, and far too much screen-time is taken up by a map with arrows moving around it. Having said that, there is one amusing moment on the map, where the arrows, representing the Russian attacks, stab a Nazi swastika, representing the German forces, and the swastika writhes a little before blood pours out and it disintegrates, with only one of its arms escaping.

In spite of its boring narrative style, there are some beautiful scenes, notably of Ukrainian soldiers coming home to their families and rebuilding their lives and their homes. And again there are some wonderful images of nature, in particular some shots of the moon and sun against the horizon. We also see some more disturbing depictions of the brutality of the Germans - more bodies of soldiers, women and children. However, what is slightly odd is that we are shown similar images of dead germans, but yet are supposed to feel proud and happy at these images. I suppose only when you have been through what the Ukrainians had could you feel such hatred towards the Germans. 8/10

MICHURIN

aka: Life in Bloom

Russia (103 mi) 1949

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Alexander Dovzhenko's first color film and last completed feature (1948, 103 min.) was based on his play Life in Bloom, a biography (verging on hagiography) of the celebrated Russian botanist Ivan Michurin. Both the play and its screen adaptation attracted the interest of Joseph Stalin, who dictated various revisions; in fact Dovzhenko may have removed his name from the film in protest, as the credits list his wife, Julia Solntseva, as director and identify him only as the producer and screenwriter. Certain characteristic touches show up here and there--some signature landscapes, a powerful passage evoking John Ford that shows Michurin's grief over his wife's death--but generally this is a feel-good Stalinist biopic. Perhaps the most interesting propaganda comes in the opening scene, when a wealthy American (speaking in English) attempts to lure Michurin to the States with untold riches. In Russian with subtitles.

The New York Times (..A.. W)

Revered by many Russian and non-Russian horticulturists as the practical breeder whose work in hybridization resulted in some 300 new varieties of plant life, Ivan V. Michurin also planted a seed of war between his followers and geneticists the world over. But "Life in Bloom," the Soviet-made biography of the quondam "Soviet Luther Burbank," which came to the Stanley on Saturday, is a singularly placid account, which reveals little, except by casual inference of his scientific methods and the dissension they caused then and now. And, the work of heredity and environment of his scientific heir, Prof. Trofim Lysenko, which recently officially replaced that of Mendel and Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan in Soviet texts, is not specifically mentioned.

But the highlights of Michurin's career, as we know them here, are admiringly caught by writer-producer Dovzenko, who, following the party line, stresses his subject's common man qualities, his "discovery" by Lenin and the accolades accorded him by Stalin and Kalinin. His love of Russia, even Czarist Russia, is illustrated in the opening sequence when he is shown turning down an offer made by two Americans—who speak English, incidentally—to transfer his nursery and operations to this country.

Scientically the film accentuates Michurin's position as a follower, not an opponent of, Darwin. In developing his theory that acquired characteristics can be transmitted, Michurin is shown in the process of growing many hybrids including a cross between an apple and a pear. The story is climaxed when Kozlov, the town where he nurtured his strange crops for many years, is renamed Michurinsk in his honor. But his death at 80, some three years later, is not pictured.

It is apparent that Dovzhenko and his director, Y. Solntseva, more than appreciated the color medium in which they worked. Their preoccupation with the polychromatic effects of gardens in bloom, cloud formations and seasonal changes, does not give speed to the story. But the naturally soft, pastel shades caught are truly beautiful and compare favorably with our own color films.

The score by Shostakovich and the English titles are unobstrusive and helpful. Grigori Belov, looking remarkably like photographs of the scientist, makes, except for declamatory lapses, a wholly plausible Michurin, harassed and misunderstood by fellow scientists and officialdom. Alexandra Vassilieva, as his wife and associate researcher, and Feoder Grigoriev, as an unbelieving geneticist, contribute the major supporting roles in what is, to all purposes, a one-man show. It is not too much of a show for those not interested in Michurin.

FAREWELL, AMERICA (Proshchay, Amerika!)

Russia (73 mi) 1949

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

In 1950, after seeing his own ideas rejected time and again, the great Soviet director Alexander Dovzhenko undertook this grotesque piece of kitsch, which was inspired by the defection of U.S. journalist Annabelle Bucard after she discovered that the U.S. embassy in Moscow, where she worked, was a nest of spies. Dovzhenko's script went through countless drafts, and when Stalin terminated the project (for reasons that are still obscure), the director learned the news only when the electricity was abruptly shut off on the soundstage where he was working. The film was finally released in 1995, with commentary on the missing pieces and material about its arduous birth, and it's morbidly fascinating as an example of Stalinist filmmaking (Dovzhenko's style is nowhere in evidence). Considering the director's stature, the most depressing aspects of this are that even the commentator isn't sure whether it's sincere and that ultimately it doesn't much matter. In Russian with subtitles. 73 min.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Ecnerwal from London, England

'Farewell, America' is the last film Alexander Dovzhenko worked on as director. Production was stopped by the government half-way through (like many films under Stalin's regime) and the footage that had been shot was stored away somewhere in Moscow. Only recently (in the 1990s) was it rediscovered. The version I saw (and probably the only version 'available' to the public) is a reconstruction in which the scenes that were shot have been interspersed with some Russian man, with the help of Dovzhenko's original script (including some sketches he'd drawn), describing the scenes that are missing.

The basic plot concerns an American woman, Anna, who goes to work at the American embassy in Moscow just as World War Two is ending. There she finds that everyone has an extreme irrational hatred of the Russians, bordering on fascism, and they all want to start a new war against Russia. She and one man are more sympathetic towards the Russians, and even are friends with a Russian family, much to the disapproval of the embassy. She goes on an assignment to Ukraine to investigate collective farming and show how unhappy the masses are with it, but finds only kind and happy farmers. Not satisfied with this report, the embassy orders her to change it, before she is sent back to America. Here she finds the same bias and hatred, and when she returns to Russia she does not return to the embassy, but becomes a citizen of the Soviet nation. It must be noted that this for the large part, is a comedy, poking fun at Americans.

The only scenes that were shot were those taking place in the American embassy and a few of those set in America. This is a great shame, since from the evidence of his earlier films, and from a few seconds of footage of Dovzhenko walking through fields (included in this reconstruction), the scenes set in rural Ukraine would have undoubtedly been the most beautiful. As it is, the remaining scenes are heavily studio-bound, which makes it incredibly difficult for Dovzhenko to display his skill and beauty and as a director. Nevertheless, to a certain extent he does succeed.

His use of colour, which for obvious reasons is not seen in his earlier films, is very good, much better than most colour films this early. He has a powerful sense of shade, often tinting the whole scene with a subtle red. Also good are his close-ups, particularly of Anna. But Dovzhenko's real success is as writer. Given an extremely unsubtle and obvious propaganda piece, he has turned it into a clever and often very amusing comedy, much in the style of American comedies of the late 30s. Of particular note is a hilarious scene depicting a completely absurd American band, each man making a different sound to create a tune. Most of the jokes make fun of the Americans, but obviously that was necessary for Dovzhenko to have any chance to be allowed to make the film.

The reason for the abandonment of the film seems a mystery to me. This is by far the most anti-American, pro-Russia film I have ever seen. Perhaps Dovzhenko's attempts once more to focus on Ukraine, his homeland (about which he had been previously reprimanded) angered the government. Or perhaps comedy was just not acceptable - they wanted obvious to-the-point propaganda. Either way this film remains a sad reminder of the unjust fate of yet another great director - Dovzhenko himself once said it saddened him how few films he completed during his lifetime. Even after stooping to a film so unsuited to his style - he was desperate for any job he could get behind the camera - he once more had the project snatched away from him.

POEM OF THE SEA (Poema o More)

Russia (95 mi) 1959

The New York Times (Howard Thompson)

THE extremely rambling and long-winded "Poem of the Sea" is a disappointing swan song by the last of the Russian "big three" movie directors, the late Alexander Dovzhenko. According to Artkino, the sponsors, the director's wife, Yulia, completed it after his death in 1956. The Mosfilm Production arrived on Saturday at the Cameo.

Far and away the best thing about it is the excellent color photography, credited to G. Yegiazarov. The picture we get of a dusty Ukrainian village, surrounded by wheatfields and thrusting toward the sky, is a haunting one and a fitting final canvas for Mr. Dovzhenko. If only his confusing scenario had matched it.

As nearly as we can make out, the film is pleading for peace, Russian brotherhood and a continual look toward the future. Most of it is seen through the eyes of two World War II veterans, whose home village is about to be turned into an artificial sea.

As a few sequences come to life in flashback, the two men, played by Boris Livanov and Boris Andreyev, contrast the war years to the present. Very few of the villagers come into clear focus as real people, including the one culprit, a young man about to commit bigamy. For the most part, the players simply stand and listen to the oratorical rantings of their two leaders, the village "chairman" and a visiting general.

For good measure, Mr. Dovzhenko has even tossed in a couple of montages dramatizing incidents that might have happened. And very little does happen, with the exception of one tingling, recounted battle sequence. The director has posed, continually, some people we barely get to know, for all their fanciful talk (and the flowery English titles). And the magnificence of Mr. Yegiazarov's recurring horizon dwarfs them.

Dragojevic, Srdjan

PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME (Lepa sela lepo gore)

Yugoslavia (115 mi) 1996

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame Mike D’Angelo

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, which confines itself to the current civil war, is much less ambitious than Underground, but it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to accomplish, which is to be the Serbian equivalent of The Steel Helmet -- tossing a conveniently diverse group of soldiers into a tight corner and demonstrating via their predicament that war is hell. It's familiar, predictable, and blatantly jingoistic. I loved it. Moment for moment, this is the most cinematically audacious film I've seen so far this year, with the possible exception of The Pillow Book; Dragojevic expertly juggles four different time frames (and without color-coding them, as Steven Soderbergh did with a similar structure in The Underneath), using their juxtaposition to provide an emotional and narrative impact that linearity couldn't begin to approach. All of the jumping back and forth, in other words, has an actual purpose, for a change. The script, meanwhile, is if anything too well-written; my main quibble is that some of the recurring images and lines of dialogue are a tad precious, that the wheels can too often be detected churning beneath the rough-and-tumble surface. Still, this is a problem that I'd love to encounter regularly -- I'll take calculation over mindlessness at least six days out of seven. And did I mention that this grim, harrowing, ugly depiction of man's inhumanity to man is also intermittently funnier than Men in Black and Austin Powers combined (if we omit Dr. Evil, that is -- nothing is funnier than Dr. Evil)? It's true that in order to fully appreciate it, you'll need to temporarily accept, and even sympathize with, its somewhat troublesome worldview -- Pretty Village demonizes and/or objectifies the Muslims in the same way that even the most liberal American films about the Vietnam War demonize and/or objectify the Vietnamese -- but if you're willing and able to indulge in a bit of mild doublethink (and "mild" is the correct adjective; Muslims exist in the film mostly as offscreen voices, and the film is offensive only by omission), you'll enjoy the most riveting and hallucinatory war film since Apocalypse Now. If, that is, you have the opportunity to see it at all; like almost every kickass foreign-language film in recent years, it is currently sans distribution. Keep an eye out.

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame Gerald Peary

Draper, Deborah Riley

VERSAILLES ’73: AMERICAN RUNWAY REVOLUTION B 87

USA France (91 mi) 2012 Official site

While this is a film that clearly describes a moment in history when the American fashion industry went toe to toe with the French, and surprisingly it was the Americans that came out on top, something altogether unthinkable until that most surprising moment. Since the date was 40 years ago, there’s been plenty of time for fashion minds to ruminate over the subject, and the conclusion is this was one of those miracle moments, like the American amateur hockey team beating a veteran Soviet professional team for the Gold Medal at the Winter Olympics in 1980. These are such career defining moments that the world is never the same afterwards. The American fashion industry, up to that point in time, always emulated the French, considered the top of the line in world fashion, where even American fashion critics themselves set the tone for this view, always deferring to the French, who universally were considered the model for high fashion. But in 1973, a unique event was planned to raise money for the crumbling Palace of Versailles which was in dire need of renovation, when American fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert and Versailles curator Gerald Van der Kemp suggested a fundraiser, organizing a fashion face-off inside the luxurious opulence of the palace itself, Le Grand Divertissement à Versailles, inviting an audience of American celebrities and European royalty, where there were 650 millionaires in the room, including Princess Grace of Monaco, Christina Onassis, Andy Warhol, and all the titled dukes and princesses. But what upped the ante was a planned showdown between the high fashion industries of New York and Paris going head to head, pitting 5 designers from each continent displaying their latest fashion designs on the runway. From France, the crème of couture, five legendary Parisian designers: Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, and Emanuel Ungaro, while New York was represented by 5 American sportswear designers: Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Anne Klein, Oscar de la Renta and Halston. The only surprise in the mix was Stephen Burrows, a black designer who was not exactly an international name.

What’s unique about this film is the delicious language used to describe the event itself, including an eloquent narration by vintage retailer and Bravo Reality TV star Cameron Silver, where people in the fashion industry express themselves with such vividly distinctive language, spoken with perfect diction, revealing a colorful flair for description, where just hearing them describe the event is an experience in itself. Using an array of participants in the show, designer Stephen Burrows, fashion photographers, many of the performing models, including the now legendary (but unheard of then) Pat Cleveland, Marisa Berenson, Alva Chinn, Bethann Hardison and China Machado, former U.S. Vogue editor-in-chief Grace Mirabella, socialite Simone Leavitt, and several fashion historians, they recount their recollections of the event, starting with the cool reception the Americans received upon arrival. Since the French arranged the rehearsal time on the palace stage, they scheduled themselves first and rather routinely ran over their allotted time each day, leaving the Americans to stand around the rather drafty palace doing nothing, where there was no food, no heat, and even no toilet paper in the rest rooms. As they were chaperoned by bus to and from the hotel, they were stuck there until the French were good and ready, so by the time the Americans got to practice in the evening, many of the French electricians went home, claiming union rules. This less than equitable arrangement made many furious, creating a certain amount of infighting among the American designers, convinced they were being sabotaged, where the choreographer hired exclusively for the American models abruptly quit and went home. Despite these setbacks, the show must go on. What is indisputable is how magnificent the evening was, where literally hundreds of hand-lit lamps, each one held aloft, created an unforgettably stunning entrance to the palace, and once inside, no one had ever seen such a glamorous setting, before or since.

When the French took the stage first, they had magnificently designed sets, creating a luxurious and intoxicating environment for their models to display their wares, including Jane Birkin in white underwear, with the nude dancers from the infamous Crazy Horse Saloon wearing glamorous furs, and nothing underneath, occasionally flashing for the audience. For sheer star power entertainment, Rudolf Nureyev performed while a 67-year old Josephine Baker in a skin-tight sequin designed catsuit brought the house down. The Americans countered with Liza Minnelli singing “Bonjours Paris.” which set an upbeat tone for what followed, which was a minimalist review with no stage design or props, just 12 fabulously designed black models strutting their stuff on the runway, where the audience went crazy, throwing their programs in the air and cheering excitably, as in that era black models were a rarity both in France and in America. The women projected strength with a fiercely positive attitude that just filled the air with a force to be reckoned with, something fashion houses had never seen. With names like Pat Cleveland (soon to become a famous Halston model), Alva Chinn (the face of Valentino for a decade, who spotted her that night), Bethann Hardison, Billie Blair, Norma Jean Darden, Barbara Jackson, Jennifer Brice, Charlene Dash, China Machado, Romana Saunders and Amina Warsuma, they strutted and twirled and sashayed their way into international prominence, putting American designers on the map, where New York didn't really become a fashion capital until the mid-1970’s. They literally stole the show in a breathtaking 35-minutes compared to the languorous-paced French spectacle, requiring lengthy set changes between each of the 5 designers, a program that lingered on for two and a half hours. The Americans were such an instant success, the models were invited upstairs for a luxurious dinner in the Hall of Mirrors, where they playfully paraded in front of the mirrors drinking the world’s finest champagne. Not only did they make a statement about fashion, where the American designs could be worn by everyday ordinary people, as opposed to the French which were created exclusively for millionaires, they made a statement about race as well. This was a turning point for black models, something historical, where the following year Beverly Johnson became the first black model to appear on the cover of American Vogue and Givenchy hired an all-black modeling review. Harold Korda, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Curator summed it up this way, “When you have a black woman sashaying and then throwing her train, it becomes something that is different than the more polite expression of standard fashion runway style of that period.” Interestingly, when all is said and done, little was mentioned about the amount of money raised for the event, which after all was a fund raiser, as the talk would forever be about the event itself.

VERSAILLES '73: AMERICAN RUNWAY REVOLUTION Facets Multi Media

For the second time in history, the Americans stormed France in an epic battle. Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution documents the now legendary war between French and American haute couture designers at the Chateau de Versailles on November 28, 1973 in a runway rumble for industry dominance.

On the stage where Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette, in front of a who's who audience of royalty, jet-set millionaires, and icons (including Princess Grace of Monaco, Andy Warhol, Christina Onassis, and Josephine Baker), the American designers claimed victory. Anne Klein, Stephen Burrows, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, and Halston exhibited against the lions of haute couture—Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, and Emanuel Ungaro—and turned it into ready-to-wear's iconic coming out party. The American contingent relied heavily on Black fashion models for the first time ever and the beauty, poise and attitude of these women turned the tide for the U.S, turning the fashion world on its ear. This extraordinary evening left an unforgettable imprint on the fashion industry and forever changed fashion history.

Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution - Pink Clouds for Grey ...

The 1973 Grand Divertissement à Versailles was the idea of Eleanor Lambert, the famous publicist. It would put the five most well-known American designers of the time: Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Oscar de la Renta, Halston, and Anne Klein; to design for a fashion show competition against five French design houses: Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, and Emanuel Ungaro. The contest was to be held at a gala for the Palace of Versailles. American celebrities and European royalty were all in attendance. At the time, American fashion was seen as a poor comparison to the French designs. The French came armed with fantastic sets and music, while the Americans seemed, at first, poorly prepared. But somehow, the American underdogs came out ahead. Their simple set seemed sleek and modern compared to the overdone outer space theme that the French had designed. The American designers also included many African-American models in the show, such as China Machado, Bethann Hardison, Pat Cleveland, and Alva Chinn, a move unheard of in Europe. Even French critics agreed: America won fashion's "Battle of Versailles." Though no complete footage of the show exists, filmmaker Deborah Riley Draper has released "Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution," a documentary about the Versailles fashion show, currently screening. Back in January, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a reunion of the American models who walked in the show. Here's a peek at some of the key moments from the show, the people, the fashion, and the legacy of American high fashion.

Film Journal Intl David Noh

On November 28, 1973, the palace of Versailles found itself host to more gorgeous women than had been seen since the heydays of Louis XIV and XV, with their legendary courtesans, Mesdames de Maintenon, Montespan, de la Vallière, Pompadour and du Barry. The difference was that many of these ’70s ladies were American and black with names like Pat Cleveland, Billie Blair and Bethann Hardison, and they had descended on the royal habitat to participate in a fashion show that was touted as “The Battle of Versailles.”

Ostensibly held to earn money for the palace’s much-needed restoration, the event—a joint defilé with two carefully selected teams of French and American designers—became swiftly hyped in the press as a “battle” between the two nations for fashion eminence. It was an occasion fraught with nerves and creativity, and Deborah Riley Draper‘s documentary Versailles ’73 scrupulously details this once-in-a-lifetime, game-changing event of the style world. Draper tirelessly tracked down seemingly every survivor of this occasion, both French and American, and these interviews, from a flamboyant assemblage of couture insiders, paint a colorful, you-are-there depiction of that most beautiful and ephemeral of human endeavors, the fashion show.

The French forces put on the most elaborate spectacle imaginable, which encompassed everything from Josephine Baker, Rudolph Nureyev and Zizi Jeanmaire doing their respective things to pumpkin carriages and rocket ships going off onstage. The presentation of the clothes themselves—by Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin and Emanuel Ungaro—however, was stiff and old-fashioned, redolent of a time when unsmiling models simply paraded garments, holding a card with a number on it.

The Americans, by contrast, who had been the victims of notorious Gallic rudeness with little rehearsal time allotted them and miserable conditions (“Freezing cold, no food and no toilet paper” according to at least a dozen witnesses), triumphed with a fluid, snazzily modern, no-props show, led by no less than Liza Minnelli, directed by her talented godmother, Kay Thompson, singing “Bonjour, Paris.” These designers also made effectively funky, full use of the then-burgeoning disco music, as well as the irresistible, compelling, sexy movements of those aforementioned black girls. Ebony supermodels like Billie Blair as an arm-wafting genie and deliriously spinning runway goddess Pat Cleveland captivated the largely French audience (including Princess Grace), who reacted by screaming like Beatles fans and throwing their expensive programs up in the air.

The American styles also put this country’s fashion business, long kept in the shadow of the French, on the map for all time. The easy, ultra-wearable and strikingly colorful modes by Anne Klein, Halston, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta and talented black tyro Stephen Burrows suddenly made ready-to-wear as desirable as haute couture. Additionally, those models helped break the color line on the runway, making “Black is beautiful” a dominant fashion industry idea for the next decade. In the ensuing years, it is clearer than ever that, as the business became increasingly concentrated on the bottom line and, once more, white-bread, this truly was one shining moment of fiercely individualistic—and democratic—glory for America.

Versailles ’73 fully captures the excitement of that evening, which entailed a lot of amusingly bitchy infighting for pre-eminence among the American designers themselves, as well as a wild, hard-partying airplane flight from the U.S. As such, it’s an absolute must for fashion devotees, and will also, like the Valentino doc The Last Emperor, deliver rich, informative entertainment to everyone else as well.

Versailles '73 – American Runway Revolution - Fashion School Daily

Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution explores how black ... Alison Cuddy from WBEZ radio

Marie-Helene de Rothschild with Princess Grace of Monaco. Joelle Diderich from Women’s Wear Daily, July 9, 2012, also seen here: Famous Runway Showdown Revisited in 'Versailles '73' - Fashion ...

Denver Westword: director interview Bree Davies, January 2013

Fashion Doc 'Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution' Now ... Elizabeth Snead from The Hollywood Reporter

New Documentary Revisits Famed Fashion Face-Off at Versailles Merle Ginsberg from The Hollywood Reporter

Variety [Dennis Harvey]

Los Angeles Times Gary Goldstein

New York Times

Dresen, Andreas

SUMMER IN BERLIN (Sommer vorm Balkon) B 88

Germany (105 mi) 2005

A bouncy little film that features an attractive and exceedingly likable Nike, Nadja Uhl, one of the more upbeat characters of recent memory, who wears pink and lime green tank tops with matching thong underwear while providing in-home care to needy seniors, who is best friends with the dour and more desperate, and currently unemployed, Katrin, Inka Friedrich, a divorced mom who recently came to the city looking for work, with an independent-minded young son, Max, who pretty much raises himself. The two women sit on Nike’s balcony every night and drink, seemingly without a care in the world. It’s the days that get in their way. The film has a yo-yo effect, sometimes humorous and quirkily happy, with upbeat music that expresses a kind of interesting liberation, particularly Max who likes to take a cute girl on the roof, or Nike who strangely falls for the simple pleasures of an ordinary trucker, noticing how he neatly folds his clothes, so she neatly sets the table with breakfast each morning to the happy radio sounds of “Good morning! Good morning!” – music that could easily have been played in the hallways of von Trier’s THE KINGDOM. While their mindless relationship is oddly of interest, what works here is the dynamic between the two attractive and intelligent women, who are refreshingly candid and open with each other, with occasional bursts of terrific dialogue, but whose worlds fall apart one right after the other. The film seemed long, as if they could never figure out an ending, unable to decide if it’s perky and happy, or swamped by a tidal wave of anguish, as it works both angles. By the end, I’m not sure if they ever figured it out. Even the music playing over the credits is both sad and moody followed by upbeat and happy. Take your pick. Both actresses were chosen for the Best Actress Award at the Chicago Film Fest.

CLOUD 9 (Wolke 9)

Germany (95 mi) 2008

Cloud 9 (Wolke 9) Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

Love hurts – even when you're over sixty. That's the message of German indie director Andreas Dresen's tough new drama, which follows with stark handheld directness the confusion, joy and suffering of apparently happy-married Inge, a woman in her mid-sixties who begins an affair with an older man. The camera does not shy away even when things get steamy, but this sex film for the Saga set draws its strength from its tight dramatic focus rather than any shock value.

This will suit an older demographic with resilient arthouse tastes and within this niche, media coverage should benefit prospects along the lines of Roger Mitchell's The Mother.

This is easily Dresen's most austere film, though the talent for unforced humour that came through most strongly in 2005's Summer In Berlin breaks the surface tension more than once. There are times when the script is a little too raw and pared-back – things sometimes drag, and it comes as a relief when the script's relentless focus on the senior triangle is broken by a couple of scenes between Inge (Werner) and her daughter Petra (Kuhnert).

The action kicks in quickly: within the first two minutes, home-based seamstress Inge is making out on the couch with Karl (Westphal), a gentlemanly 76-year-old whose trousers she has altered. It's only later that we realise Inge has a husband – gruff-but-decent Werner (Rehlberg), also in his sixties, who likes to watch videos about diesel engines in the evenings. The catch is that Inge is still attached to her sprightly, still virile husband of thirty years, and leaving him for another man is not going to be easy.

Though the film is all about relationships, there are long passages of silence: Inge doesn't need to say much to Karl, and after thirty years there's not much she hasn't said to Werner. When Inge's decision to reveal her affair forces them to speak, they sound like twenty-year-olds rowing. The dialogue is spot on, and Werner's performance as a woman surprised by passion when she thought there were no surprises left, is outstanding.

Dresen finds a new visual calm here, and even a touch of Vermeer in a recurring shot down a corridor into a sunlight-filled kitchen, which is a long way from the jerky, grainy aesthetic of the director's award-winning Grill Point (2001). A couple of recurring motifs are neatly and sparingly used and include trains, which play a role – we infer – in the film's devastating denouement.

STOPPED ON TRACK (Halt auf freier Strecke)

Germany (110 mi) 2011

Stopped on Track (Halt auf Freier Strecke): Cannes Review Kirk Honeycutt at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 15, 2011

Andreas Dresen's film, about a cancer victim, is a tough slog through the process of physical and mental deterioration.

As much as one may admire the effort taken to present death by brain cancer in a realistic, unsentimental and dignified manner in Andreas Dresen’s Stopped on Track (Halt auf Freier Strecke), the fact remains it’s still a movie about death by brain cancer. And at Christmas time to boot. Yes, you admire the movie but do you want to subject yourself to this when bad times, ill heath and death itself await us all?

You might actually if a movie offers a startling insight into the process or a flight of metaphysical fancy that takes death to another realm where you can consider this ultimate life passage in a new light. But the director, whose previous films have given audiences insight into the characters, mind sets and foibles of eastern Germans after the Wall came down, brings nothing startling or metaphysical to his movie.

There are occasional moments that come close: The cancer victim, very well-played by Milan Peschel, imagines his tumor as a guest on a TV talk show and another time a radio news bulletin seems to report on the growth of said tumor. There’s a good joke about a doctor with two pieces of bad news for a patient and funny developments such as the need to post stickie notes about the toilet’s location and his family’s first names on foreheads to jokingly remind poor dad of these facts.

But mostly this movie is a tough slog through the awful process of physical and mental deterioration that is the consequence of this particularly awful disease.

Before the film’s Cannes debut, Dresen told the audience the film was completely improvised without a script. Strangely, it doesn’t feel that way at all as scenes are cleanly acted and the dialogue feel true and close to the bone. Bringing real doctors and health care professionals into the cast undoubtedly helped the actors playing the family and certainly gives a strong documentary flavor to every scene involving treatment and homecare.

Steffi Khunert is particularly good as the wife at wit’s end, portraying weariness and heartbreak mixed with flashes of anger that are thoroughly convincing. So too with the two youngsters, Talisa Lilli Lemke as the older daughter and Mika Nilson Seidel as the young son, who create characters unlike those one usually sees in “death” movies: These kids are still caught up in their own worlds and somewhat disconnected from their dad’s ordeal even though they understand what’s happening.

Dad takes a lot of video from his iPhone but nothing much comes of this, no video diary of a dying man — that would have been a cliché anyway — or a process by which the man can distance himself from his own suffering. The movie feels like its maker was continually searching for a key to unlock a philosophical raison d’être behind the movie but never really found it.

All technical credits are smooth and the lack of music is a welcome relief for such a subject.

Stopped On Track Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily

A good life is measured by the quality of its passing in Stopped On Track (Halt Auf Freier Strecke), an emotionally intense, dramatically compelling account of a dying man’s last months. Director Andreas Dresen puts the viewer through the wringer in a film that is unrelentingly heartbreaking but also life-affirming.

The value of a loving family, loyal friends, fond memories and strong connections never seems as important as in the moment when all of these things disappear forever. There is a commercial price to pay for the commendable candour of his approach. Most audiences would rather watch Johnny Depp chase the fountain of youth than attend a film in which they are confronted by their own mortality.

Director Andreas Dresen has a fondness  for boldly going  where others fear to tread from septuagenarian sex lives in 2008’s Cloud 9 (Wolke 9) to terminal illness in Stopped On Track. Dresen’s growing reputation and strong critical support  should help Stopped On Track to overcome resistance to the subject matter and attain a respectable theatrical life in line with his previous films.

Dresen’s working methods on Stopped On Track adhere closely to the principles of Mike Leigh with all of the dialogue improvised by the actors, genuine members of the medical profession woven into the story and situations culled from a truthful distillation of life rather than the imagination of a screenwriter.

The sledgehammer blow is delivered in the opening scene as a (genuine) doctor informs 40 year-old Frank (Milan Peschel) that his brain tumour is inoperable and that he has a matter of months left to live. His wife Simone (Steffi Kuhnert) must decide how to break the news to their children, 14 year-old Lili (Talisa Lilli Lemke) and eight year-old Mika (Mika Nilson Seidel). The son offers simple, unconditional love whilst the daughter’s response is more complex.

The film progresses through all the expected stages of terminal illness from anger to fear, denial and acceptance showing the physical decline of Frank and the impact on his nearest and dearest.

His behaviour becomes unpredictable, his presence a burden as they must attend to practicalities like funeral arrangements. Neil Young’s Dead Man is the music of choice for his funeral as long as they can play the entire album.

The film is realistic apart from occasional moments that stray into fantasy-Frank’s tumour takes human form - shades of Bertrand Blier’s 2010 fllm The Clink Of Ice (Le Bruit des glacons) - and he hears radio bulletins offering progress reports on its development. Those moments feel a distraction from the overall tone but do provide brief and acceptable respite from the unutterably sadness of what is unfolding before our eyes.

Milan Peschel is an effective, everyman presence as the dying Frank whilst Steffi Kuhnert rises to the more emotionally demanding role of the wife coping with everything that life and death throws in her way.

Sex, death, rape, murder: Just another day at the movies Barbara Scharres at Cannes from the Ebert blog, May 15, 2011

Cannes 2011. Un Certain Regard and More Awards David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 21, 2011

AS WE WERE DREAMING (Als wir träumten) C 74

Germany France (117 mi) 2015 Official site [Germany]

While it’s unusual to find East German stories before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this anything but subtle film is adapted by Wolfgang Kohlhaase from the 2006 Clemens Meyer award-winning novel by the same name that covers the evolving lives of five friends from the East in Leipzig where the reunification has an unwelcome effect on each of them. From the outset, one might question the director’s use of a heavily commercial stylization, featuring an in-your-face, high octane adrenal rush amped up by a pulsating techno beat, becoming a coming-of-age, punk rock anthem about a group of hell-raising friends that ends in shattered dreams and despair, as one by one each is on a collision course with destiny. The relentlessly bleak narrative erupts with such an extreme degree of violence that the film is more of an assault to the senses, excessive to the point of gratuitous, causing a major disconnect between the audience and any of the characters, as the slick stylization supersedes any emotional involvement with the story. Using strobe lights and bold chapter headings like “Gutter Hound,” “Street Dog,” “Murder in Germany,” “Always Ready,” “Rivalry,” or “Thunderstorm in the Brain,” the film literally revels in delinquent behavior followed by brutal fight scenes where the overall viciousness is hard to describe, where it’s difficult not to think much of this is brought on by their own adolescent stupidity, as a good part of the film is devoted to drinking, stealing, heavy drug use, hot-wiring cars, continual joyrides with drunken screaming and bottle-throwing, even wrecking an entire street full of cars, as these seem to be youthful expressions of rage, rebellion, and a perceived liberation. The author Clemens Meyer has described himself as a “child of the street,” spending time in and out of youth correctional facilities, as does a featured character in the film, but writing offered him a way out, something that is altogether missing in this film, which is more about a stagnated path to alienation and destruction.

As a 13-year old in the late 80’s, during an era of the young Pioneers all dressed in red scarves, a new generation indoctrinated with the socialist ideals of Soviet-style communism, Dani (Chiron Elias Krase) wins a poetry competition, raising hopes that he may one day be a reporter, while Rico (Tom von Heymann) dreams of being a boxer, and Mark (Nico Ramon Kleemann) a musician. The rest are ambivalent about their future, where a depressed economy greets them four years later after the Soviets are gone, leaving behind a crumbling infrastructure of a city in decay, while whatever authority was once present has all but disappeared, where gangs and anarchy fill the void. Not sure how historically accurate this picture is, though the director was born in East Germany not far from Leipzig, as the film has absolutely no political presence whatsoever other than a reference to the fall of the Berlin wall, as if the entire city is seen as a black market underground where everyone is forced to fend for themselves. In the absence of an existing political and economic structure, what was East Germany became an open market free for all, where this group decides to open an underground music club in an abandoned building, which is merely an excuse to gather in one place for parties and large scale alcoholic binges. The story concerns Dani, Merlin Rose from Wetlands (Feuchtgebiete) (2013), the central figure and unofficial leader of the group whose interior voiceover guides us through the action, along with Rico (Julius Nitschkoff), a bruiser on the streets and in the ring who sees it as an opportunity to fight his natural enemies, Porno Paul (Frederic Haselon) who loves stealing cars, drug addict and official group anarchist Mark (Joel Basman), and Pitbull (Marcel Heuperman), the bouncer of the club who also deals drugs on the side. Their dilapidated hell-hole of a club becomes the target of a neo-Nazi skinhead group headed by gang leader and neighborhood terrorizer Kehlmann (Gerdy Zint), who after a few street skirmishes decides to annihilate this group once and for all, overwhelming them with superior force and beating them up badly in a graphically raw and protracted fight scene while demolishing their club, suggesting an era of complete lawlessness.

In the grim aftermath, Dani spends time in a youth detention center while Mark becomes strung out on heroin, leaving their splintered group a somewhat tattered remnant of what it once was. While Mark tries to pick up the pieces after his release, the entire focus of the film changes from a chaotic group effort of misspent youth to solitary moments of otherwise abandoned souls who are struggling to survive. Accordingly, Dani shifts the focus of his attention to Sternchen (Ruby O. Fee), the sexy girlfriend of the skinhead leader who remembers him from the neighborhood growing up, as he was the one who supposedly had potential. But even they have little chemistry together, where their relationship is distant at best, reflecting the disjointed overall feel of the film, where there’s little connection between who they were as children and what they’ve become as young adults, where the hyperkinetic style prevents any identification with any of them, as it’s more a collection of isolated incidents than a coherent storyline, all thrown together in a jumbled mess of anarchy and rebellion. While they all fail miserably in attempting to make a decent life for themselves, adults or authority figures are noticeably absent, where there is no one showing them the way, while connecting family members are equally missing. All of which suggests the film is really a portrait of a lost generation of children at the end of the Cold War that were abandoned and neglected, literally hung out to dry by a Soviet government that simply packed up and left, leaving them to live or die on their own. While their explosive teenage energy is misdirected and problematic, there is nothing to suggest anyone ever came to their rescue and offered them half a chance at a better life. Instead Leipzig is portrayed as a desolate post-war city in ruins, the last vestiges of a crumbling political system that has failed in its entirety, leaving behind a landscape of abandoned warehouses and empty factories, a wasteland of streets that are continuously void of life, as no one shows their faces except to hurriedly get where they need to go, where there isn’t an ounce of joy anywhere to be found, instead only dark, deserted streets that may as well be an expression of their sadly relinquished futures.

Berlin: Every Thing Will Be Fine, As We Were Dreaming ... Corina Rottger from Next Projection

Based on Clemens Meyer’s novel of the same name, As We Were Dreaming is a young and powerful portrait of five teenagers in Leipzig during the early 90s, directed by Andreas Dresen and adapted by Wolfgang Kohlhaase. The recent reunification offers Dani (Merlin Rose), Rico (Julius Nitschkoff), Paul (Frederic Haselon), Mark (Joel Basman) and Pitbull (Marcel Heuperman) a newly won freedom and encourages a life in which dreams might come true. The five guys open their own underground nightclub, becoming the youngest club owners in Leipzig, dancing to heavy techno beats until dawn, drinking and using drugs. Soon their world is shattered by skinheads who feel threatened by they guys’ new business and Dani’s affection for Sternchen (Ruby O. Fee), the girlfriend of the skinheads’ leader. Additionally to that criminal offenses, violence and heavy drug abuse dictates their everyday life. As We Were Dreaming reflects on a disoriented youth, caught between two opposing political systems, which is highlighted by the alternation of two timelines. One taking place during the socialist system of the GDR when the boys were 13 years old and the other concentrating on the 17 year old teenagers struggling to grow up in the new world after the German reunification. Dresen’s film is an upbeat, rebellious and ruthless take on the unfulfilled hopes and dreams of a group of friends in Eastern Germany during the early 90s.

Lost Horizons - Film Comment Olaf Möller, May/June 4, 2015

The Berlinale appears again in the final act of Graf’s documentary. Over images of an inhospitable Potsdamer Platz and other equally unwelcoming sites in the capital, the director quotes extensively from a fantastic 2002 Althen essay, written after Dieter Kosslick’s first Berlinale as festival director. Back then, hopes ran high that the festival would change for the better and the 52nd edition’s four-film bonanza of German competition entries was taken as a promising sign. Althen makes a joke about Andreas Dresen—something about him making a jealous remark about another director, which is unlikely as Dresen’s among the most warmhearted of his peers, sometimes to a fault. But middlebrow darling Dresen has fallen on hard times: his latest, As We Were Dreaming, received a frosty reception, although it’s actually his best film in years. A bleak story about a group of Leipzig youngsters in the immediate post–Berlin Wall years who fail miserably in their attempts at making a decent life for themselves, it has a grimness and violence rarely found in Dresen’s cinema, as well as an equally unusual sense of splendor and spectacle. Profoundly disconsolate, it’s a portrait of a lost generation, who discovered that their new nation doesn’t give a flying fuck about them if they don’t fit into the neoliberal workforce.

Althen’s text also quotes with amusement an acerbic comment from the website newfilmkritik.de that compares the local critics’ favorable coverage of the 2002 German competition entries to the domestic press reports about the Wilhelmian-era naval maneuvers. From today’s vantage point, this reads like a tacit endorsement of the role of the critic as an unquestioning and well-behaved supporter of the national project—a stance that the German Film Critics Association tried to challenge this year with its Critics’ Week section.

As We Were Dreaming - Review - Cineuropa Bénédicte Prot

BERLIN 2015: Andreas Dresen recounts the dangerous life of five inseparable teens from the East before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A humorous coming-of-age story against a techno backdrop

After the heartrending Stopped on Track [+] (2011), which recounted with remarkable sobriety a terminal cancer, superb German director Andreas Dresen rediscovers in As We Were Dreaming [+], in competition at Berlin, the less naturalist approach found in the other focus of his filmography, and the humour that goes with it, in his fastest-paced work to date. Techno music typical of the early 1990s is so present in this coming-of-age tale that, in many respects, it could be classed as an East German Trainspotting, with gall to beat – because the five friends from the Leipzig suburb whom we follow, from their youth as young pioneers of communism to their years of explosive delinquency in a reunified Germany, really live the dangerous life.

Regrets and drugs are also present, once the communist idyll is swept away with the colourful memories of the time when the boys were ten years old and wore red scarves around their necks, once the enthusiasm for reunification ends. That’s even how the movie begins, in the semi-darkness of a closed down cinema theatre where Dani (played by the very handsome Merlin Rose) meets up with his friend Mark (Joel Basman), now a drug addict. In a desperate attempt to save him, Dani becomes our guide in the tale of their carefree adolescence and dreams.  

We enter this vast flashback via a luminous portal: fevered dancers’ hands are waving in the spotlights of an underground nightclub, the history of which is explained to us afterwards. What follows is divided into chapters with hard-hitting titles that arise unexpectedly, posted in big capital letters and bright colours: Be Ready, Rivalry, Thunderstorm in the Head, Always Ready, the Lotto Fairy, the Great Fights, the Big Dipper... Episodes, which are not always told in chronological order (producing a kind of to-ing and fro-ing between the period before the fall of the Wall and after), are at times sweet, at times thrilling. In the first category, we have the combat training of the young pioneers that transforms the school into a war zone and the children into the injured (allowing them to touch the fake nurses who dress their wounds, and Mark to pretend to shoot up for the first time), as well as the moment when DJ Frog (David Berton), the trainspotter, falls in love with the young woman who sells lotto tickets, and all the scenes in which our young friends are aroused by girls (or kind to the elderly ladies living in their building, as eccentric and alcoholic as they may be). In the second, we find car chases, the regular and rough clashes with a gang of quasi neo-Nazis, Rico (Julius Nitschkoff)’s boxing matches and above all the amphetamine-fuelled nights in the techno nightclub that the five boys manage to set up in a disused factory, while they are hardly even of age, with Frog on the decks and Pitbull (Marcel Heuperman) as the bouncer.

What makes the story so moving and thrilling is the unconditional friendship that over all those brazen and off-the-wall years unites the five "brothers", their cohesion to and against everything – because that’s also youth: to be inseparable, like the five fingers of your hand. The end, where dreams crumble, corresponds undoubtedly to the exact moment when we’re torn from those with whom we grew up and, in the moment that follows, we find ourselves already looking back, full of regret and nostalgia. This chapter doesn’t bear a mighty name, it’s rather a sad, solitary one, like a whispered murmur: Abschied, "Parting".

As We Were Dreaming, written by Wolfgang Kohlhaase (who previously wrote for Dresen the scripts of Summer in Berlin [+] and Whisky with Vodka [+] as well as that of The Legend of Rita by Volker Schlöndorff), based on a best-seller by Clemens Meyer, was produced by Rommel Film, co-produced by Iskremas Filmproduktion and French production company Les Films du Losange, and supported by German regional channels ARD, BR, MDR and RBB, and former director of the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Olivier Père, for ARTE. International sales are managed by The Match Factory.

Berlinale 2015 Review: AS WE WERE DREAMING ... - Twitch Patrick Holzapfel

As We Were Dreaming - Screen International David D’Arcy

Film revisits youth after German reunification - Deutsche Welle

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

Flickfeast [Stephen Mayne]

CineVue [Lucy Popescu]

The Upcoming [Benedict McKenna]

KinoCritics.com Review of Als wir träumten Marinell Haegelin and Birgit Schrumpf

toomuchnoiseblog.com (Greg Wetherall)

Dog And Wolf Berlinale 2015 [Mark Wilshin]

Daily | Berlinale 2015 Diary #5 | Keyframe - Explore the .. David Hudson from Fandor

Hollywood Reporter [Boyd van Hoeij]

Variety [Jay Weissberg]

Dreyer, Carl Theodor (1899 – 1968)

from DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/reviews.htm

Peering under the surface of Carl Theodor Dreyer's controlled and strictly organized cinema exposes consistencies of a deeply-rooted psychological nature. These fuse into his film's heterogeneous styles whether he was experimenting in the genres of drama, comedy or horror. His character's conflicts were often based in personal moral spheres - occasionally religious crises - overlapping onto society's more conventional and ethically-centered interpretations. Austere expressions of human suffering figured prominently in his sporadic oeuvre. His narratives frequently evolved stalwart, virtuous and martyr-like female figures who were intensely oppressed and/or devoutly prepared to surrender themselves for a perceived moral betterment. Dreyer's meticulous attention to detail imbued his film language with a profound transcendental quality, marking him as not only the greatest director ever to emerge from Denmark but as a prominent, and universally recognized, master of cinema.

Facets Multi Media - FACETS FILM SCHOOL -> FILM SCHOOL ARCHIVES ... Charles Coleman, Facets programming director

Carl Dreyer is one of the most uncompromising filmmakers in cinema and along with French filmmaker, Robert Bresson, his films are primarily known for their austerity and mysticism. His reputation was established with his silent film masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc which was commissioned by French producers in France who wanted to create a film portrait of a French historical figure, and the result was this seminal work. Renee Falconetti, in her only film role, is impeccable as the 15th-century war heroine whose leadership of French forces against England ends in her capture and trial on charges of heresy and sorcery. Vampyr, Day of Wrath, Ordet (The Word), and Gertrud constitute his sound films (which were made independently), and shot mostly with actors unknown outside Denmark. Dreyer's reflective tales about vampires, witch trials, resurrection, faith, and infidelity seemed to have been made by someone from another time period, yet his legacy has influenced many contemporary filmmakers His films are now are seen as ambitious visionary masterworks with a hypnotic power.

Film Reference Ib Monty, director of Danish Film Archives

Carl Theodor Dreyer is the greatest filmmaker in the Danish cinema, where he was always a solitary personality. But he is also among the few international directors who turned films into an art and made them a new means of expression for the artistic genius. Of Dreyer's feature films, seven were produced in Denmark, three in Germany, two in France, two in Sweden, and one in Norway.

If one tries to understand the special nature of Dreyer's art, one can delve into his early life to find the roots of his never-failing contempt for pretentions and his hatred of bourgeois respectability, as well as his preoccupation with suffering and martyrdom. In his biography of Dreyer, M. Drouzy revealed the fate of Dreyer's biological mother, who died in the most cruel way following an attempted abortion. Dreyer, who was adopted by a Copenhagen family, learned about the circumstances of her death when he was eighteen years old, and Drouzy's psychoanalytical study finds the victimized woman in all of Dreyer's films. But of what value is the biographical approach to the understanding of a great artist? The work of an artist need not be the illumination of his private life. This may afford some explanation when we are inquiring into the fundamental point of departure for an artist, but Dreyer's personality is expressed very clearly and graphically in his films. We can therefore well admire the consistency which has always characterized his outlook on life.

Like many great artists, Dreyer is characterized by the relatively few themes that he constantly played upon. One of the keynotes in Dreyer's work is suffering, and his world is filled with martyrs. Yet suffering and martyrdom are surely not the fundamentals. They are merely manifestations, the results of something else. Suffering and martyrdom are the consequences of wickedness, and it is malice and its influence upon people that his films are concerned about. As early in his career as the 1921 film, Leaves from Satan's Book, Dreyer tackled this theme of the power of evil over the human mind. He returned to examine this theme again and again.

If the popular verdict is that Dreyer's films are heavy and gloomy, naturally the idea is suggested by the subjects which he handled. Dreyer never tried to make us believe that life is a bed of roses. There is much suffering, wickedness, death, and torment in his films, but they often conclude in an optimistic conviction in the victory of spirit over matter. With death comes deliverance. It is beyond the reach of malice.

In his delineation of suffering man, devoid of any hope before the arrival of death, Dreyer was never philosophically abstract. Though his films were often enacted on a supersensible plane, and are concerned with religious problems, his method as an artist was one of psychological realism, and his object was always the individual. Dreyer's masterly depiction of milieu has always been greatly admired; his keen perception of the characteristic detail is simply dazzling. But this authenticity in settings has never been a means towards a meticulous naturalism. He always sought to transcend naturalism so as to reach a kind of purified, or classically simplified, realism.

Though Dreyer occupied himself with the processes of the soul, he always preserved an impartiality when portraying them. One might say that he maintained a high degree of objectivity in his description of the subjective. This can be sensed in his films as a kind of presentation rather than forceful advocacy. Dreyer himself, when describing his method in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, once employed the expression "realized mysticism." The phrase indicates quite precisely his endeavours to render understandable things that are difficult to comprehend, to make the irrational appear intelligible. The meaning behind life lies in just this recognition of the necessity to suffer in order to arrive at deliverance. The characters nearly always suffered defeat in the outward world because Dreyer considered defeat or victory in the human world to be of no significance. For him the triumph of the soul over life was what was most important.

There are those who wish to demonstrate a line of development in Dreyer's production, but there is no development in the customary sense. Dreyer's world seemed established at an early period of his life, and his films merely changed in their way of viewing the world. There was a complete congruity between his ideas and his style, and it was typical of him to have said: "The soul is revealed in the style, which is the artist's expression of the way he regards his material." For Dreyer the image was always the important thing, so important that there is some justification in describing him as first and foremost the great artist of the silent film. On the other hand, his last great films were concerned with the effort to create a harmony between image and sound, and to that end he was constantly experimenting.

Dreyer's pictorial style has been characterized by his extensive and careful employment of the close-up. His films are filled with faces. In this way he was able to let his characters unfold themselves, for he was chiefly interested in the expressions that appear as the result of spiritual conflicts. Emphasis has often been given to the slow lingering rhythm in Dreyer's films. It is obvious that this dilatoriness springs from the wish to endow the action with a stamp of monumentality, though it could lead dangerously close to empty solemnity, to the formalistic.

Dreyer quickly realized the inadequacy of the montage technique, which had been regarded as the foundation of film for so many years. His films became more and more based on long uncut sequences. By the end of his career his calm, elaborating style was quite in conformity with the newer trends in the cinema.

Watch with mother | | Guardian Unlimited Arts Jonathan Rosenbaum essay from the Guardian, May 30, 2003

For roughly two decades, my three favourite dramatic features have all been the work of the same man - and my favourite among these depends almost entirely on which one I've seen most recently. I came to know and love them in reverse order: first the incandescent and subtly erotic Gertrud (1964), discovered in my early 20s shortly after it premiered; then the gut-wrenching Ordet (1955), which I initially hated when I first saw it in my teens, misconstruing its climactic miracle as a tool of religious propaganda; and finally the voluptuous and mysterious Day of Wrath (1943), which I didn't appreciate or understand until my 40s, when I finally saw it in a decent 35mm print.

Like all the greatest artists, Carl Theodor Dreyer demands to be taken as a figure whose work continues to grow and change, quite irrespective of the fact that he died in 1968 at the age of 79, with many of his most cherished projects (most notably, a film about Jesus) unrealised. Fresh insights about his life and career keep coming to light: not only through biographical research; the emergence of new prints (such as the remarkable 1981 rediscovery of the original 1927 version of The Passion of Joan of Arc in an Oslo mental hospital); but also through the uncanny fact that his films seem to grow more multilayered, ambiguous, and complex over time. Though I've never been fortunate enough to attend a Dreyer retrospective, and envy those who'll soon be able to, I've managed to see most of his films several times, and have found that his work seems to become more modern and contemporary with every passing year.

Even after Vampyr (1932), his other best-known film, is added to the four masterpieces cited above, you are still some distance from defining the breadth and range of his work. Who would guess from the various kinds of gloom contained in those films, or the tragic overtones characterising all of them apart from Vampyr, that three of his greatest silent films are basically comedies about the war between the sexes? In their very different ways, The Parson's Widow (1920) and Master of the House (1925) both involve the humbling of chauvinist husbands by their wives, while the recently restored Once Upon a Time (1922), which starts off as a Lubitsch-style palace farce before turning into a rustic melodrama, runs variations on The Taming of the Shrew. (Only half of the latter survives, but the Danish Film Archive has recently done an expert job of telling the film's entire story with the help of stills and intertitles, a version that they have also released on DVD.)

Yet obstacles in recognising the full measure of Dreyer remain, for ideological as well as practical reasons. An obsessional artist who was an enemy of all institutions, cinematic as well as social, and whose principal theme was intolerance, he invariably gets delivered to us today by institutions - most recently the National Film Theatre, which starts a Dreyer retrospective this month - that can't always be counted on to represent him in all his complexity. This problem is especially acute in English-speaking countries, where the late Maurice Drouzy's essential 1982 Dreyer biography, available only in Danish and French, has yet to be translated.

Without this crucial resource - as well as additional discoveries by Drouzy that postdate his biography - various false impressions tend to get recycled and perpetuated. The first biographical sentence of the NFT's notes contains only one slight error, but this hoary chestnut has already misled several generations of Anglo-American viewers: "Born illegitimately in Copenhagen in 1889 to a poor and abused mother who died painfully two years later, Dreyer endured an arid childhood within a strict Lutheran adoptive family."

The inaccurate word is "strict". In fact, Dreyer's adoptive parents, Carl and Marie Dreyer - a freethinking leftist typesetter and a wife who already had an illegitimate daughter by another man - never set foot inside a church unless they had to, and their adopted son was a non-believer who attended occasional services at a French reform church, but only in order to teach himself the language. Ib Monty - director of the Danish Film Archive and one of the film-maker's few friends - once told me that Dreyer wasn't especially religious, despite his frequent recourse to religious themes, and this observation immediately shot down at least half the received notions I had about him at the time. Challenges to belief as well as to disbelief, faith as well as lack of faith, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, and Ordet all take place in a highly sensuous material world where the mysteries of human personality supersede and arguably overwhelm most questions about the supernatural.

What made Dreyer's childhood emotionally arid by most accounts was lack of familial affection, partly motivated by his real mother, Josefina Nilsson, a Swedish maidservant, having failed to leave the Dreyers any money for child support. Her accidental and hideously painful death came from sulphur poisoning - swallowing the ends of a box and a half of matches in order to abort a second illegitimate child. Dreyer - who didn't learn about her fate until he travelled to Sweden, shortly before he turned 19, to discover whatever he could about her - grew up idealising her while despising his adopted mother so much that when she died during his late 40s, he refused to attend her funeral, declaring that she had already long been dead for him.

An intensely private person, Dreyer has remained elusive largely because he was so successful in covering his tracks, so that other discoveries about his troubled life - such as Drouzy's report on his brief phase as a homosexual in the early 1930s, culminating in a nervous breakdown - surfaced over a decade after the publication of his biography.

Quite plausibly (albeit somewhat obsessively in his own right), Drouzy has divided the major women figures in Dreyer's work between good mothers (most of them suffering saints) and bad mothers (most of them perverted by different forms of intolerance) - with the possible exceptions of the title heroine of Gertrud, who embodies both types simultaneously, and Anne in Day of Wrath, who might be said to undergo a complex social transformation in 17th-century Denmark from guilty saint to innocent witch. (Made during the German occupation, Day of Wrath can be read as a definitive account of 20th-century witch-hunts - which helps to explain why it almost certainly served as a major influence on Arthur Miller's The Crucible.)

No less significantly, Inger in Ordet dies in childbirth, the saintly Joan of Arc is burnt as a witch, and all these women, along with the lesbian sisters in Vampyr, are entirely carnal beings. (After Inger dies, her father-in-law declares, "She is dead... She is no longer here. She is in heaven," and his son replies, "Yes, but I loved her body too.")

According to Drouzy, the key inspiration for Gertrud, based on a play by Hjalmar Söderberg, was Dreyer's discovery at 73 that Maria von Platen, Gertrud's real-life counterpart, spent the last years of her life in a house only 10 miles from the site of his own conception. Some of the interiors of this house were meticulously reconstructed for the film's final scene, an epilogue that Dreyer added to the play.

A comparable kind of personal fixation about origins as well as destinies can be seen coursing through Dreyer's entire oeuvre, arguably accounting for its slow-burning intensity and many of its formal and stylistic eccentricities as well as its thematic constants. His intransigence about maintaining absolute control over his work largely accounts for why he made so few sound pictures, and the one occasion when he lost that control - over the casting of his two-actor chamber drama Two People (1945) - proved so disastrous that he often refused to acknowledge the film's existence.

Yet apart from that misstep, it's hard to think of many film-makers who sustained as high a level, reinventing himself with every feature while obstinately remaining the same. From the lyricism and folksy humour of The Parson's Widow to the expressionism and bisexuality of Michael (1924), to the feminism of Master of the House, to the stark and spare tragedy of The Passion of Joan of Arc, made respectively in Norway, Germany, Denmark, and France, Dreyer's silent pictures are remarkable for their mastery of decor, lighting, camera movement, and editing. Concentrate on the way he constructs the space of an interior or orchestrates a sensual camera movement that he invented himself - the camera gliding on unseen tracks in one direction while uncannily panning in another direction - and you perceive how each Dreyer film almost brutally reconstructs the universe rather than accepting it as a familiar given. Nothing can be taken for granted in these works - except their passion.

carl theodor dreyer Masters of Cinema site

carldreyer.com - life Dreyer’s life biography by Acquarello from Masters of Cinema, also here: Carl Theodor Dreyer from Senses of Cinema

TCMDB Dreyer bio from Turner Classic Movies

All-Movie Guide bio by Sandra Brennan

The Great Dane: Carl Theodor Dreyer Talking Pictures profile piece, by Allen Pavelin

Carl Th. Dreyer bio from Denmark Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Chains of Dreams: Carl Th. Dreyer in depth look at DAY OF WRATH, ORDET, and GERTRUD by Tag Gallagher from Senses of Cinema

TSPDT - Carl Dreyer a profile page from They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Dreyer's Art a section of Ray Carney’s website devoted to Carl Dreyer

The Ensemble Sospeso - Carl Theodor Dreyer Joshua Cody

Strictly Film School's Carl Dreyer Page reviews by Acquarello

DREYER, Carl Th. [01] [02] [03] [04] 4 Dreyer essays from EuroScreenwriters

Nikolaj B. Feifer: An interview with Henning Bendtsen (cinematographer for Ordet and Gertrud), On life in films and working with Carl Th. Dreyer, March 17, 2002

Carl Theodor Dreyer UXL Newsmakers, 2005

Corruption & transcendence: the films of Carl Dreyer Commonweal ... Corruption & transcendence: the films of Carl Dreyer, by Richard Alleva from Commonweal, March 25, 2005

Dreyer: From the Real to the Transcendental Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA, August 14, 2008

kamera.co.uk - feature article - Career Retrospective - Carl ... Carl Dreyer, by Antonion Pasolini from kamera

Carl Dreyer: Jonas Mekas Jonas Mekas short video film portrait

Reviews and responses to Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer Ray Carney website

Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer a review of Raymond Carney’s book, by Acquarello

My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer a review of Jean Drum and Dale D. Drum’s book, by Acquarello

DVD Savant Review: Carl Theodor Dreyer Box Set Glenn Erickson on the Carl Theodor Dreyer Box set of DAY OF WRATH, ORDET, GERTRUD, and the documentary CARL TH. DREYER: MY MÉTIER

Filmmaker Magazine | Fall 2001: LOAD + PLAY Scooter McCrae on the Dreyer Box set from Filmmaker magazine

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

Reel.com DVD review [Bill Schwartz] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

digitallyOBSESSED! [Mark Zimmer] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

The Film Desk [James Kendrick] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

BFI & Carl Dreyer this Spring Dave Foster reviews the 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection from DVD Times

DVD Times - BFI & Carl Dreyer this Spring (Part 2) Dave Foster from DVD Times

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet - Day or Wrath - Gertrud - My Métier ... Gary W. Tooze reviews the Box set from DVDBeaver

-Carl Theodor Dreyer

-Torben Skjødt Jensen

-Ulrich Breuning 3 Criterion essays on Torben Skjødt Jensen’s 1995 documentary, CARL TH. DREYER: MY MÉTIER

Carl Theodor Dreyer x 3 a Dreyer film program, and more on Torben Skjødt Jensen’s 1995 documentary from Pacific Cinematheque

Carl Theodor Dreyer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born out of wedlock under the name Karl Nielsen, infant son of an unmarried Swedish housekeeper Josefine Bernhardine Nilsson, given up at birth in a placement curiously arranged by her employer, passing through two foster homes before finally adopted at the age of 2 by a Danish Lutheran typographer named Carl Theodor Dreyer and his wife, Inger Marie, a strict, middle class family that was disengaged and unsupportive. Despite the fact he succeeded brilliantly in his studies, he always felt abandoned and unloved. His separation from his adoptive mother was so complete that he didn’t go to her funeral. Instead he idealized his real mother, who, as it turned out, was again carrying a child out of wedlock and accidentally killed herself in a botched and misguided attempt at abortion, swallowing sulphur and half a box of matches. Consequently, the Dreyers were never properly compensated by Nilsson, as had been agreed upon in the adoption proceedings. Based on the untimely death of his birth mother and the emotional distance of his adoptive mother, it is evident these haunting childhood circumstances left an indelible mark on this intensely private and humble man. Dreyer remained an ardent feminist, which was consistently reflected in his work, manifested in his highly idealized, and idealistic, characterization of the inexorably virtuous, self-sacrificing, and oppressed woman, who are seen as martyrs of great suffering in a male universe.

In his late teens and early twenty’s, he became a journalist, even served as a hot-air balloon technical adviser before landing a job with Nordisk, the Danish film industry, at script doctoring and editing. As the most provocative filmmaking in the world at that time was taking place in Germany, he went to Germany and made his first film in 1919, THE PRESIDENT, which he wrote and directed, depicting a woman pregnant with a child out of wedlock, who became ostracized, realized with a very clinical eye. It is interesting to note that this film broaches a personally relevant subject for Dreyer, the issue of a biological parent's moral responsibility for a child conceived out of wedlock. In the film, a prominent and well respected judge is forced to decide the fate of his adult illegitimate daughter, a governess named Victorine, when she is brought before the court to face charges for the death of her newborn child. Ironically (and perhaps, uncoincidentally), Victorine's circumstances – a good woman seduced by her unethical and irresponsible employer – provides a intriguing plausible theory to Dreyer's paternity. This was followed by LEAVES FROM SATAN’S BOOK, very much influenced by DW Griffith’s INTOLERANCE, which sketches Satan’s path and his disruptive social influence over different historical periods, the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Spanish Inquisition, the French Revolution, and the Russo-Finnish War.

Of Dreyer’s 14 films, 9 were silent. He disciplined the audience to reconfigure their conceptual vision of film, similar to Japanese filmmaker Ozu, who used only one lens, one camera angle that never moved, or moved very slowly, causing the audience to acclimate to that style, or French director Bresson, who used actors merely as models, who over-rehearsed his actors so they were automatic and could carry out their roles without thinking. Both shared similar views that actors would not show heightened emotions, using a grammar of glances to bring out the emotional content. Dreyer caressed the face in soft shadow, bathing it and framing it in softness so the viewer was obligated to view the face, usually speaking quietly to the actors ahead of time, building up their confidence. Dreyer was known for using no-name actors who were chosen based on the look of their face, as his specialty was communicating to an audience by knowing how to frame a face. He reinvented the use of close-up through expression, nuance and gesture, through visual sculpting and strategic lighting, by his use of space and attention to detail.

Film is not photographed theater. He collaborated with extraordinary cinematographers, where the lighting is oblique, expressionistic, angular, where the design of space conspires against the people contained within that space. His style dictates a “perceived reality.” Film is a visual media, so the camera is a writing instrument, where the tension and emotional affectations are highlighted. His characters react differently than what we expect. They exist within their own world where they follow their own rules, giving validity to the ideas and values contained within each film. True to the means of the media, he liberates his actors from dialogue, uses a visual means to express ideas, yet while we are always aware we are watching a movie, Dreyer enhances the story through his use of the medium, documenting human nature through fiction. Interestingly, there would be no Ingmar Bergman without Carl Dreyer.

Dreyer died in March 1968 in Denmark at the age of seventy-nine, leaving behind fourteen feature films and five documentaries over the course of half a century of desperately personal filmmaking. Nine of the features were silent films made between 1918 and 1928, culminating with THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928). After that he made VAMPYR (1932), DAY OF WRATH (1943), TWO PEOPLE (1945), ORDET (1955), and GERTRUD (1965), all earning considerable critical acclaim, but very little financial backing.

from The Cinema of Carl Dreyer by Tom Milne:

“...a Dreyer film is always a Dreyer film, recognisable from its style, its tempo, its subject matter, attitudes, setting, even its lighting. Ideas, themes, and images recur so persistently that it is perfectly possible to define a typical Dreyer film. The period is almost invariably the past. The subject is a small, self-enclosed group – a family, a village, a victim and her judges – with the action rarely moving outside an extremely restricted area, and rarely stretching over more than a few hours or days; and within the group, a lonely figure gradually detaches itself, the object of either deliberate or unconscious cruelty. Stylistically, there is a marked emphasis on close-up (actual in THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, elsewhere more an impression deriving from his closeness to his characters and insistence on his images); the solid presence of the décor (a preference for real locations, or failing that, sets faithfully reconstructed in every detail, even when, as in JOAN OF ARC, only small segments would actually be used in any particular scene); soft-toned lighting, playing with a range of greys rather than high contrasts, (even in a film of black-and-white juxtapositions like DAY OF WRATH); inexperienced actors, amateurs, worn old faces, all chosen for their presence (their ‘mental resemblance,’ Dreyer has called it) and ability to merge with the atmosphere, setting and story, rather than for their proven acting ability. The tempo, above all, is a slow, stately cadence, vigorous but unhurried, and moving ineluctably towards the final catharsis of tragedy. But the real key to Dreyer as a creative artist is, precisely, his vision. No matter how closely he adheres to his original material, the film is metamorphosed into something Dreyer’s own, his own creation, because even in sound films his vision is wholly visual...

Here one comes close to the heart of Dreyer: the tension between inside and outside, between reality and fantasy, darkness and light, natural and supernatural. It is a commonplace nowadays to point out that the suffering in Dreyer films is almost invariably done by heroines, not heroes. Less so, perhaps, to observe that these heroines are invariably witches or vampires in one sense or another...

The wildfire spread of industrialism through the world over the last hundred years has produced a materialistic, technological civilisation, dominated by reason in the shape of the machine, but still undermined by the anachronistic persistence of man’s primitive fears, beliefs, hope, and superstitions. Modern man may evolve in a glittering conurbation of glass, steel and concrete, but his inner world is still more of a shadow than substance, and more accurately defined for the imagination by Dreyer’s prolongation of a timeless past than by, say, the soulless industrial landscapes of an Antonioni.

In this inner world, the mystic powers of both good and evil are very real, and although Dreyer’s work is ostensibly dedicated to acceptance of the Christian faith, its undertow is altogether darker and more impenetrable, oddly akin in spirit to man’s primitive worship of the moon goddess, revered as the repository of infinite desire but reviled for the inconstancy of her favours. Thus, as the natural source of all bliss, the Dreyer heroine is adored; as the temptress who sins and causes to sin against the man-made laws of puritanism, she is made to suffer; and in either case, she unconsciously wields a power that is inbred, incalculable, purely supernatural. Call it what you will – witchcraft, vampirism, or simply the nature of love – Dreyer’s heroines all live or die by this power, from old Dame Margaret in The Parson's Widow, who simply arranges to die one day in order that two young lovers may be happy, down to Anne in Day of Wrath, Inger in Ordet, and of course Gertrud, that arch-vampire of them all, relentlessly pursuing her hopeless quest for perfect love in Gertrud, and somehow at last achieving the impossible in the solitude of her memories.  Her choice of epitaph is Amor Omnia, Love is All, and it would serve as well for any of the Dreyer heroines, each of whom models for a detail - self-sacrifice in The Parson's Widow, fidelity in Master of the House, suffering in The Passion of Joan of Arc, ethereal grace in Vampyr, passion in Day of Wrath, joy in Ordet, purity in Gertrud - in the great mystic portrait of womanhood offered by his oeuvre.”

carldreyer.com - life Acquarello from Masters of Cinema (excerpt)

“During a radio interview for New Perspectives on the Arts and Science on October 23, 1950, Dreyer addressed the criticism against the seeming paradox of his meticulous adherence to realism and his use of creative inaccuracies to sustain the claustrophobic anxiety of THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, proposing that ‘there must be harmony between the genuineness of feelings and the genuineness of things.’ In defining the role of cinema, not as a medium for capturing absolute reality, but as a means of articulating perceived reality, Dreyer not only reconciles the strange surreality of Vampyr as Allan Grey's (Julian West) subconscious truth, but also accepts Anne's potential for invoking the supernatural in DAY OF WRATH, the existence of miracles in ORDET, and Gertrud's physical and spiritual retreat into an unrealizable, operatically grandiose emotional ideal (perhaps a reflection of her former career as a soprano) in GERTRUD, as valid and natural phenomena within the context of the characters' psychological reality. In short, Dreyer does not seek to document reality, but to capture the ephemeral essence of its underlying truth.”

BFI | Sight & Sound | Bewitched Mark Le Fanu, July 2003

Carl Dreyer's films are both breathtaking experiments in cinematic form and overwhelming emotional experiences. Mark Le Fanu salutes the sublime mysteries within the Danish master's work.

Among the work of all the great masters of cinema, the filmography of Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer must be one of the sparest. Not that his career started unpromisingly: eight films (all of them interesting) were completed in the eight years between 1918 and 1925. But by the mid 1920s the Danish film industry had collapsed and after that everything this great director attempted had to be struggled for. In the four decades between the release of The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc) in 1927 and his death in 1968 he managed to produce only five further full-length works. One of these - Two People (Två Människor), shot in Sweden in 1944 - is generally considered a write-off (though possibly it has its admirers). But the remaining four, like Joan, count among the strangest and most beautiful films in existence - films that every generation of film-lovers needs to meet and puzzle over. For it's pointless not to admit that these are difficult, uncompromising objects, as far distant as it's possible to be from a cinema of pure entertainment. Still, there's no art without some solicitation towards pleasure. And the pleasures of Dreyer are perhaps not as rarefied as his formidable reputation might make one fear.

The tendency in film criticism devoted to Dreyer has been to turn him into some kind of formalist, and one can see why the approach is attractive: the experimental aspect of his cinema is inescapable. In Joan of Arc there are the extraordinary close-ups of Renée Falconetti - indeed, the whole film is a close-up, as if the director were attempting to sketch a metaphysical grammar of the face. Even if you knew nothing about the stage of development silent film had reached by the end of the 1920s, you would suspect this film (in some magnificently bold way) was in breach of the rules.

Vampyr (1932), the film that followed Joan, is in some ways even more avant-garde. There's an emphasis on shadows, doubles and all sorts of ghostly trompe-l'oeils. The constant de-centring of the action towards the edges of the frame pushes the film at times towards the limits of readability. Further, perhaps, than Dreyer wanted it to go: the total critical and commercial failure of the movie issued in a nervous breakdown, and amounted, I think, to the biggest single set-back in his career.

He spent the rest of the 1930s quietly, in study and writing. (Dreyer is a superb theorist of cinema.) His next film Day of Wrath (Vredens dag, 1943) is more 'classical', as befits a come-back work. Still, classicism itself, in all the arts, has elements of formalism. The long travelling shots across the faces of the bowed and attentive 17th-century inquisitors attired in their black robes and white ruffs signal the profound visual affinity this movie bears to the universe of Dutch and Danish painting. The film is 'hieratic', composed, superbly lit and balanced: in some (not necessarily derogatory) sense, a monument of aestheticism.

By the time we arrive at Dreyer's two last films, Ordet (The Word, 1955) and Gertrud (1964), those long travelling shots become themselves the paramount point of formal interest. It's well known that in a certain kind of art cinema after the war (also in Hollywood, especially following the introduction of Cinemascope in the early 1950s) shots grew appreciably longer than in the heyday of editing in the 1930s. So what Dreyer was attempting in his magisterial eight-minute takes was not in itself contrary to the spirit of the age. Yet the exceptionally rigorous way he exercised the style introduces, again, an element of formalism that's unavoidably part of both films' interest. Everything is slowed down to walking pace - until it seems that walking itself (or sitting in or rising from chairs) becomes the very subject of the movies. Both Ordet and Gertrud were adapted from stage dramas, and one can see in these films a highly abstract meditation on the dialectical relationship between cinema and theatre. What is it, Dreyer seems to be asking, that makes a film different from a play - granted that you give yourself the licence to bring into film (through the use of these exceptionally long takes) something of the experience of real time and live performance that is the property of the stage?

Theatrical: yes, that is what Gertrud is (even more than Ordet). The somnambulistic languor with which Nina Pens Rode broaches the central role is extraordinary. Then there's the strange way the characters, ensconced on their sofas or sitting upright behind 19th-century escritoires, seem to be talking not to each other but past each other (or else to themselves, from the depths of some symbolist reverie). All these aspects bespeak a more heightened level of stylisation, an even greater concern with pure form than anything Dreyer had so far attempted. One reaches for the phrase - and hesitates. Could this be the thing called 'pure cinema'?

One hesitates, of course, because as a critical approach formalism has its limits. The work of art, if it's going to be a work of art, ought to possess some content other than its own form. There must, in short, be other reasons to admire Dreyer than his technical mastery of mise en scène - extraordinary as that is. And maybe it's not too difficult to find them.

A key thing is that Dreyer is one of the few really great cinéastes (Bresson, Tarkovsky and Bergman are three others) able to deal in a serious way with the claims and pretensions of religion. It's a subject Dreyer meets from the inside not the outside - and not because he was brought up within the church. On the contrary, his home and academic backgrounds seem to have been staunchly anti-clerical. (The café and journalistic circles he mixed in, in Copenhagen, in the early years of the 20th century were socialistic and free-thinking: Georg Brandes was the group's intellectual hero, Social Democracy their rallying cry.) Nonetheless, Dreyer seems always to have been fascinated by religion. One of the first films he directed (after years of script-writing at Nordisk) was Leaves from Satan's Book (Blade af Satans Bog, 1919), in which he follows his then idol D.W. Griffith in attributing the main cause of intolerance over the ages to the machinations of organised state Christianity.

This is the central theme, of course, of The Passion of Joan of Arc. No one who has seen that film can forget the chilling psychological authenticity of the scenes of torture and bloodletting; also the dignity and humility - the Christ-like forbearance - with which Joan faces her clerical captors. This is a point that seems to me sometimes in danger of being overlooked (or misunderstood, or even wilfully ignored). For just as the bishops and priests who presume to judge Joan are shown, unambiguously, to be in the grip of a false and evil Christianity, so, equally, the conduct of Joan under the torment of her torturers testifies to the fact that goodness does exist in the universe, and that Christianity can be lived truly. The deposition of Joan's trial on which the film's dialogue is based was, according to Dreyer, "the greatest document of our history". He means, I think, not only the greatest, but the most inspiring.

Sixteen years later Day of Wrath returns to the subject of Christianity's role as a persecuting agent. We are in Denmark in the mid 17th century, at the time of the notorious witch trials. Anne (Lisbeth Movin), who has just married a widowed priest old enough to be her father, falls in love with the priest's son from his first marriage, who is visiting the family home during a break from his theological studies. Cue for the priest's elderly but still formidable mother to accuse the young home-wrecker of witchcraft - an accusation made the more plausible (in her eyes at least) by the fact that the girl's mother, at some time in the distant past, had shown signs of harbouring a similar disposition, and had been spared retribution only through her son's (misguided) intervention.

So is Anne a witch or isn't she? Naturally, Dreyer doesn't believe in witches - and neither do we, the modern audience. But neither is Anne timid or innocent. In her smouldering glances, no less than in the sincerity of her love for the young theological student who has stumbled into her life, Anne dramatises (most beautifully and subtly) a defiance of convention that can only be called bewitching or witchlike. In some profound, moving and tragic way she is a witch (as perhaps, in another way, Joan is too). And since she is a witch, she will perish for it... As for organised Christianity, there's no mistaking Dreyer's indignation at the crimes that have been committed in its name, for the best and worst reasons imaginable (there's no pity here for superstition or foolishness). Yet it's part of the film's realism, and of Dreyer's historical scrupulousness, that the dignitaries of the church are presented as whole human beings, in their own shades of grey, and that the church itself, as an institution, should be painted with a weight and eloquence that resist the reductiveness of caricature.

If these two earlier films pay a qualified respect to religion (in the midst of unanswerable criticisms), what is the modern viewer to make of Ordet? Can anyone define the film's true meaning? Everything about it (but nothing so much as its stupendous climax) is swathed in an impenetrable mystery. And at the centre of the film, untouchable, are the Christian mysteries themselves: the incarnation, the resurrection, the promise of eternal life.

Inger, the good country wife, dies in childbirth, leaving her family inconsolable. At the funeral there appears, after an absence, her mad brother Johannes, seemingly cured of the religious mania which for years has tormented his family, and which has taken the form (quite common among schizophrenics) of the delusion that he is, or speaks for, Jesus Christ. Yet his cure, it seems, is illusory. In front of Inger's grieving husband and the rest of the family he offers to bring the dead woman back to life again. Naturally, the onlookers are horrified. But turning to Inger's young niece, and speaking to her the words Christ spoke to the little children, Johannes makes the miracle happen. Inger breathes, slowly opens her eyes, and from within the confines of the coffin wakes up dreamily from the sleep of death. And we, the audience, believe it.

What can belief mean in this context? Neither you, nor I, nor probably Dreyer himself can say for certain. The only thing relevant - the only thing the audience can hang on to - is the beauty, power and rightness of the outcome. Everything bows, as it were, to the scene's sublime and overwhelming emotional force, which penetrates and demolishes even the best-protected scepticism.

Ordet is one of the world's cinematic masterpieces. The viewer still doesn't know, after it's over, (and I'm sure it doesn't matter) whether it 'proves' Dreyer was a Christian or not. It's not, after all, an original work - being adapted from a play by Danish pastor Kaj Munk (at first a Nazi sympathiser; later shot by the Germans).

Neither Vampyr nor Gertrud in any case is the remotest bit Christian. About Vampyr it's sufficient to say that this strange, unsettling fable, taken (very freely) from Sheridan Le Fanu's 19th-century ghost story Carmilla, is one of the key horror movies in film history - as important as Nosferatu in establishing the archaeology of the genre. (The finest analysis of the film is probably still that of S.S. Prawer in his 1980 book Caligari's Children: Film as Tale of Terror.) But we do need to return to Gertrud, if only to set it up for a final comparison with Ordet. For ever since the notorious reception given Dreyer's last film at the Cannes film festival in 1964, when it was barracked and booed by the audience, it has been the work that has most divided his partisans: some (such as Lars von Trier) claiming it as a supreme final testimony, others as evidence only of the director's senile self-indulgence. It is indeed an extraordinary exercise in style. But what about its content?

The relevant context for Gertrud seems to me to be late-19th-century feminism. The film follows the path of the eponymous heroine in her search for a love object (a husband, a lover: she has no bourgeois prejudices) who can be met with, and lived with, in terms of spiritual equality. The Swedish dramatist Hjalmar Söderberg wrote the original play in 1906 after he'd broken up with his mistress Marie von Platen, and one might be tempted to consider the transmutation of this still-living woman into Gertrud as a pointed act of revenge. For undoubtedly there's something monstrous, even castrating, about the self-absorption of the heroine's high-minded idealism. Dreyer took only what he wanted from Söderberg, but some of the dramatist's ambivalence towards the feminist project survives. Thus the message on the medallion Gertrud shows her elderly admirer in the final scene bears a retrospective irony: "Love conquers all." But what kind of love has left the woman lonely and celibate?

Yet the serenity Gertrud shows is neither false nor self-deluding. Within the framework of a lifetime (and, says the film, what is life anyway but a dream?) who shall say what victory or failure means? The exemplary beauty of Gertrud's concept of love is that, for all its high-mindedness, it is anchored in the erotic - it belongs inescapably to the body. So this stately, slow-moving and 'old-fashioned' film that was famously mocked at its opening contains - to win over even the most sceptical viewer - one of the most beautiful screen kisses in cinema. The entire sequence of Gertrud's tryst in the park with the young pianist, and their subsequent afternoon love affair, is imagined, incarnated and executed with a delicacy that defies paraphrase. True to its symbolist aesthetic, the film seems to be hinting that there are concepts and feelings that are beyond reason or reasoning. Gertrud's profession is singing, and in the musical counterpoint set up between voice and piano (as equally in the wonderful connecting interludes which the film's composer Jørgen Jersild scored for string quartet) the movie finds its true language. Woven into its cadences are hidden the characters' passionate, tormented and ultimately unknowable destinies.

THE PRESIDENT (Præsidenten)

Denmark (75 mi) 1919

Time Out

Dazzlingly restored in 1999 with the original colour tinting, Dreyer's first feature is, like much of his work, a tale of love, bigotry, cruelty and (mostly female) suffering. A sophisticated interlocking narrative tells of the fates of three 'commoners' made pregnant by aristos of high repute; since patriarchal tradition and self-interest outweigh honour, the seducers, willingly or otherwise, tend to abandon the women to their fates. Familiar melodramatic material, then, but Dreyer mostly underplays things, with naturalistic but intense acting, elegant but stark designs, and a keen eye for cruel irony and moral nuance. Very watchable, and often very beautiful: a torchlight procession is especially impressive.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Sorsimus from Kaarina, Finland

Praesidenten is a film about the crucial conflict between the (conservative) codes of society and individual moral.

It tells the story of a grandfather, father and son of a well respected family who all make the same mistake and fall in love with a common girl.

They all have to resolve the problem in a way acceptable to the society they live in but must consequently suffer the inner guilt that inevitably follows.

Finally, late in his life the son, whose a respected judge in a small town, gets a chance to redeem himself and his ancestors by doing the right thing morally but also severely breaking the law in doing so.

This highlights the conflict between the personal and the societal spheres of right and wrong in a spectacular way, especially as Dreyer depicts the other local men of power as only concerned with how the incident would affect their status in society.

Dreyer uses flashback- structure in a very efficient and economical way to build the comparisons between the different times portrayed in the film. Furthermore: in this our digital age of fast editing and overflow of image it is most gratifying to see a film that has a complex point to make and manages to do that almost effortlessly with a minimum of "hassle". The direction is so economic it almost hides the mastery of cinematic vision behind it to the untrained eye.

The President Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Præsidenten/The President Danish Film Institute

DVDBeaver.com [Nick Wrigley]

THE PARSON’S WIDOW (Prästänkan)

Denmark Sweden (71 mi) 1920

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

Completist Dreyerians cannot live by Criterion discs alone—Image does DVD justice to cine-history with the restored release of this 1920 masterwork, the first film by Danish heavyweight Carl Theodor Dreyer to embody his signature wisdom and formal rigor, and in virtually every frame. The story, from a tale by reformist Norse clergyman Kristofer Janson, entails a young pastor's confrontation with the tradition of his new parish, which demands that he marry the last pastor's elderly widow. The Dreyer dawning of humanist awareness is preceded by a thoroughly atypical irreverence; the initial bulk of the movie couldbe taken as Dreyer's only comedy. Even so, the spatial beauty of the film, often composed like medieval woodcuts, is classically his. The disc's supplements are the best kind—rare, freestanding shorts, one a sponsored documentary about the 19th-century Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen, the other, "They Caught the Ferry," a startling and almost wordless PSA about driver safety that intersects with Vampyr and Day of Wrath.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Scandinavian sourpuss Carl Theodor Dreyer isn't known for his sense of humor, but that's only because his later sound features are so much better known than his early silents. Released eight years before Dreyer's canonical The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Parson's Widow (1920) begins as broad comedy, shades into the supernatural and finishes with bittersweet humanism. Söfren (Einar Röd) covets a small-town parsonship, both for his own ambitions and because his girlfriend's father won't let her marry until he gets the job. When the parson dies, Söfren ably climbs over the competitors, but discovers his dream gig comes at a price: He must marry the late parson's widow (gloriously gaunt Hildur Carlberg), a wrinkled crone who's rumored to be a witch to boot. The gusto with which Söfren devours his first meal in her house suggests either witchcraft or his own insatiable lusts, but Dreyer eventually counters Söfren's fear of the old woman, though only after he's allowed it to ripen. Dreyer's clever fable also features one of the most erotic sequences silent cinema has to offer, where Söfren woos his beloved by passing his fingers through the weave of her loom. (At least that's what he thinks he's doing; the erotic turns comic when it's revealed that it's one of the widow's cronies on the other side.) Image's disc is filled out by two later shorts: the mildly revealing Thorvaldsen: Denmark's Greatest Sculptor (1949) and the live-fast-die-young morality play They Caught the Ferry (1948), which might be the most artful driver's-ed movie ever made.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Fans of Dreyer have been quite spoilt recently. In addition to the superb Criterion releases of his most famous works, Day of Wrath, Ordet, Gertrud and The Passion of Joan of Arc, we have recently seen the release of some early films from the Danish director giving us a fascinating look at his silent-movie work. Eureka’s release of Michael shows intriguing glimpses of themes and styles that would be developed in his greater films, while Image’s US Region 0 release of The Parson’s Widow (1920), a relatively minor work for Dreyer, is a good, accessible and indeed – something we wouldn’t normally associate with Dreyer – a humorous example of early European silent cinema that doesn’t get the same recognition as the works of the German Expressionists.

Sofren has just finished his studies and has come to the village with his fiancée, Mari, hoping to be appointed parson at a little Norwegian village where the previous parson has just died. The village has two other candidates for the post, both learned gentlemen from Copenhagen. One bores the congregation to sleep and the other is subjected to one of Sofren’s pranks, which makes him a laughing-stock. Sofren succeeds where the other two failed by relying on the old tried and trusted method of putting the fear of God into the people of the village. He is hired, but upon his appointment he discovers that the widow of the late parson, Dame Margarete, through some strange local custom, has the right to marry the new parson. Needless to say, she’s a formidable-looking ancient battleaxe who is reputed to have witch-like powers. Sofren has no choice however – he must accept the tradition, as Mari’s father will not allow her to marry him unless he has a post. All he can hope is that the old woman, already three times married, dies soon – with perhaps a little help from outside forces if necessary...

The Parson’s Widow has little of the formal style that Dreyer would later employ in his work and certainly little of the psychological detail of those later films. Surprisingly it shows a lighter side to a fairly serious director, with a fair degree of humour, a strong situation and some good character detail – although it is a little on the broad side. As in Dreyer’s other film dealing with witchcraft, Day of Wrath, the film uses the elements of people’s belief in superstition and the supernatural to draw out the true human characteristics that lie beneath them. Certainly, those characteristics are less dramatic in The Parson’s Wife and the tone is markedly different, but it draws out the human elements superbly nonetheless.

The Parson’s Widow is not a typical Dreyer film, operating on a lighter level with a quicker pace and a fair amount of humour, but it is a fine film nonetheless, showing a deeper interest in human nature, behaviour and spiritualism that would be more fully explored in the director’s later films. The Image release is excellent, using a fine well-tinted print, an appropriate music score and containing a few rare short films as extra features.

"The Parson's Widow" (1920) John DeBartolo

Senses of Cinema (Miguel Marias)

Turner Classic Movies Stephanie Thames

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen

DVD Talk (John Sinnott)

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)

DVDBeaver.com [Ole Kofoed]

LEAVES FROM SATAN’S BOOK

aka: Blade of Satan’s bog

Denmark (146 mi) completed in 1919, not released until 1921

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

When Carl Theodor Dreyer migrated from journalism to filmmaking in the 1910s, he quickly established himself as an artist interested exclusively in big themes such as fate, faith, and mortality. For his third feature, 1921's Leaves From Satan's Book, Dreyer spent two years making an Intolerance-inspired anthology of four stories, spanning four eras, all about temptation and the resistance thereof. In 30 A.D., Judas agonizes over whether to betray Jesus. In 16th-century Spain, a monk joins the Inquisition and is party to the torture of a woman he secretly loves. In 1793, a young worker becomes a player in the French Revolution and breaks a promise to his kindly former employer. And in 1918, a Finnish woman whose husband is away fighting the invading Russians has to decide whether to save his life by fighting alongside the enemy. Satan (played by Helge Nissen) appears in each vignette, urging the heroes to make the wrong choices. But Dreyer has sympathy for the devil. The movie begins with an explanation that Satan's on assignment from God, and that he urgently hopes the souls he's targeted will refuse him.

Like a lot of Dreyer's later work, Leaves From Satan's Book is deliberate in its historical pageantry. It's expressive, but without the extreme forced perspectives of The Passion Of Joan Of Arc or Vampyr. Of the four stories, the best are the first—highlighted by a poetic montage of a woman playing a harp, a sky full of fluffy clouds, and Christ standing amid a field of sheep—and the third, which is a more detailed examination of how revolutionary times turn neighbor against neighbor. When the fervor hits, where does loyalty lie: with the cause, or with the people? The naïve revolutionary of 1793 (played by Elith Pio) gets his answer when he sells out his friends and reads this note: "Judas' reward falls to Judas."

Beyond the general indictment of human greed, Dreyer doesn't position Leaves From Satan's Book as any kind of blanket statement. It's more "something to think about." In the first two sections, Dreyer considers sin in a Christian context, and asks whether people who are faithful to a false ideal have really committed any evil. The third and fourth sections are more troubling, as Dreyer moves the notions of good and evil away from religion and asks, coolly, whether wrong is always wrong, or if it just depends on the circumstances.

TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES Bret Wood

As a consequence of World War I, the flow of American films to Denmark was choked off for several years. After the war, a flood of films commenced and Nordic filmmakers feasted on the features they had been denied. Because the film's reputation had preceded it, the Nordisk Films Compagni held a special screening of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) at a theatre in Copenhagen, attended by its most promising filmmakers. Due to the length of the film, the screening did not end until 4:00 am, but one viewer was especially energized: Carl Theodor Dreyer.

He was more fascinated by the intimacy Griffith conveyed in the tales rather than the spectacular form in which they were presented. Dreyer proposed an Intolerance of his own, comprised of four historical dramas: the betrayal of Jesus (Halvard Hoff), the Spanish Inquisition, the French Revolution and the "modern" story of Finland's 1918 revolution. Entitled Leaves from Satan's Book (1921), each "chapter" would depict a particularly dark moment in the history of humanity. Rather than interweaving the stories the way Griffith had, Dreyer would assemble them end-to-end as an anthology.

Presiding over each of these episodes is Satan himself (Helge Nissen), who oversees these moments of epic cruelty with grim remorse. In a curious variation on the typical depictions of evil, Satan is disheartened by the tragedies he witnesses. Rather than trying to undermine God's authority, Dreyer's Satan is attempting to regain God's favor by performing his assigned duties, doomed to spend eternity corrupting the innocent and watching their fall from grace.

Few directors resisted compromise and convention the way Carl Theodor Dreyer did. Leaves from Satan's Book was just his second film but already he was rigidly defiant against anyone who might tamper with the purity of his vision. Nordisk was artistically progressive by Hollywood standards and planned that Leaves would be a prestige film that privileged art over commercial appeal.

The film was approved for production in the spring of 1918 at a budget of 120,000 kroner, but the Leaves turned slowly. At this point in film history a director tended to make two to three (or more) films a year. But Dreyer was not the typical filmmaker. He personally visited libraries and archives and collected illustrative material to be used as visual references. Nordisk assigned the prestigious playwright Edgar Hoyer to collaborate on the script but the two men essentially wrote two different screenplays. Once the official script was completed, Dreyer continued to revise the text for an additional three months, much to Hoyer's chagrin (the Finnish sequence is entirely Dreyer's creation). The film grew more ambitious in scale and elaborate in design. The start of production was delayed until summer of 1919.

"It is my conviction that Leaves from Satan's Book is the best script that Nordisk has yet had in its hands," Dreyer proudly informed the producers, crusading for more money for the project, "I daresay I can argue that never has such preparatory work been done in this country, and probably never before has a director been as prepared for directing as I am now... the black pigs, the guinea fowl, and the monkeys which I shall use sometime in July had already been reserved in January...I have scoured the town to find original Southern Europeans as extras in my Spanish story and I have gotten everybody moving to find Finns for my Finnish story...I have been sitting in the library for months seeking out every detail of my sets... I have left nothing to others, I have taken care of everything myself...Nordisk Films Kompagni wants to make a 'film-product' (which in my eyes is the same as a bad film) while my goal is the film which sets standards." He asked for 240,000 kroner. Nordisk, not entirely pleased with Dreyer's attitude, counter-offered 150,000. Dreyer grudgingly accepted, adding, "I solemnly deny any responsibility for the finished film." Nordisk responded with the announcement that Dreyer would be released from his contract. Realizing he had overplayed his hand, Dreyer dismissed his disclaimer as a misunderstanding and agreed to the studio's terms.

The crew traveled to locations selected by Dreyer, including the Frederiksborg Castle of northern Zealand for the French Revolution sequence. Much of the Finland sequence was shot in the snowy forests near Kagerup forty miles north of Copenhagen.

Dreyer's epic finally premiered in Oslo on November 17, 1920 and did not play in Denmark until January of 1921, almost three years after it was initially approved for production. It ran a full two hours in length, making it the longest film ever made in Denmark at that time. When Leaves played in Oslo, an impatient projectionist accelerated the speed of the projector in order to shorten the running time of the film. "Jesus hopped across the screen like a grasshopper," Dreyer angrily complained.

The film won positive reviews and marked Dreyer as a director clearly capable of greatness. He and Nordisk parted company, partly due to hurt feelings over the budgetary squabble, but also the clear realization that the Danish film industry was not large enough to finance and support risk-taking films of such a scale. He moved to Norway and began working for a major Swedish company: Svensk Filmindustri.

Even at this early stage in his career, Dreyer's gift for expressive closeups and formally composed images was evident. The program at the film's premiere proclaimed him "the man who strings pearls, stringing shot after shot in the knowledge that even if the string should break a thousand details would remain as small masterpieces by themselves. Carl Th. Dreyer is the first Danish director for whom the method is the natural one."

One sequence that particularly interested Dreyer was that depicting the life and death of Christ, lengthening this portion in relation to the others. As decades passed, he continued to be drawn to the story. He was brought to America, circa 1950, to write a screenplay on the life of Christ, and in 1951 published the essay "Who Crucified Jesus?" He devoted the last four years of his life to reviving the project, but died before it could reach production.

DVD Talk (John Sinnott)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

DVDBeaver.com [Ole Kofoed]

ONCE UPON A TIME

aka: Der Var Engang

Denmark (75 mi) 1922

MoC - DREYER'S DER VAR ENGANG Nick Wrigley from Masters of Cinema

This DVD heralds the start of a planned series of important releases by the Danish Film Institute. It was widely reported [in both Tom Milne's "The Cinema Of Carl Dreyer" (1971) and David Bordwell's "The Films Of Carl-Theodor Dreyer" (1981)] that in 1964 a "Nordisk" employee found portions of Carl Th. Dreyer's Der var engang deep in their vault - and indeed, up until this find, the film was thought long lost. Thomas Christensen, who along with Casper Tybjerg was responsible for this DFI DVD release, believes Milne and Bordwell may have been referring to the DFI's own lab at the time - Nordisk Film Teknik. However, after researching the history of the film he now thinks it was perhaps Filmmuseum Berlin who were responsible for this important find. Thanks to whoever did find the remaining reels we now have over an hour of the finished film, an unedited scene (here presented edited into the film, and as an unedited extra) and missing scenes replaced by production stills with explanatory intertitles to a total runtime of 75 minutes on one incredibly important DVD.

In circumstances similar to the miraculous find of Dreyer's The Passion Of Joan Of Arc [in an Oslo mental hospital in 1981] the DFI have decided to tackle the neglected Der var engang first (there are tentative plans to release one Dreyer silent a year for the next few years, fingers are firmly crossed for Mikaël). The DFI, having access to the best materials, have taken it upon themselves to preserve Der var engang for future generations by creating a new film restoration (a complete 2K digital intermediate restoration on 35mm film) and thus the DVD really shines (click the actual DVD grabs on this page).

After shooting Love One Another in Berlin, Dreyer returned to Denmark in 1922 to shoot Der var engang for the theatre owner Sophus Madsen. The original play by Holger Drachmann had been adapted for the screen before in 1907 and it is a loose variation on The Taming of the Shrew, part fairytale and part folklore. In a land called Illyria, a princess repeatedly rejects all her suitors - even the visiting Prince of Denmark who is clearly smitten with her. Keen to continue vying for her attention, the Prince takes on a "less royal" identity and together with his assistant "Smokehat" they plan an elaborate ruse to win the princess's heart.

The film is full of fairytale atmosphere and imagery. A world where a tinker wanders the woods carrying a strange magic kettle with supernatural powers; where exquisitely dressed ladies-in-waiting dance with their princess in sunlit manicured gardens; and where a man who tends charcoal fires in the woods is cruelly hanged from a high tree for poaching: yet it is this atmosphere which Dreyer believed outweighed any other aspect of the film - and he thought it one of his weakest because of it. He is quoted by Neergaard as saying, "[Der var engang] taught me the bitter lesson that you cannot build a film on atmosphere alone... Just when it should have increased its dramatic tempo and culminated in a stormy struggle between two people, the action suddenly stood still like a windless summer day. From that film I learned that people are primarily interested in people." Dreyer made these constructive comments in the 1950s, 30 years after the film was made. With the benefit of (even more) hindsight, it's clear that this film is a remarkably important piece of Dreyer's oeuvre - perhaps a mistake he had to make in order to avoid making it again in the future, and by that virtue it is a fascinating jigsaw piece. It is the first really successful attempt by Dreyer to incorporate German expressionist lighting (it pre-empts Dreyer's work with Karl Freund on Mikaël) and George Schnéevoigt's photography is especially gorgeous in the later forest scenes. Although the atmosphere is strong, the humour is occasionally rather unsubtle and I agree with Tom Milne when he remarks that Dreyer seemed much more at home with the rustic humour of The Parson's Widow (which actually feels like it was made a few years after Der var engang, rather than earlier, in 1920).

According to Ebbe Neergaard, Dreyer planned a huge "chinese box" system of housing the sets within each other for Der var engang. The largest sets were to contain a smaller one within it, and so on - but the actor Peter Jendorff (who plays the King) couldn't make the shooting schedule and the plan was abandoned. Interestingly, Dreyer was allowed to indulge this idea to great effect in France whilst making The Passion Of Joan Of Arc just five years later.

Dreyer cast Clara Weith Pontoppodan as Der var engang's princess (she was also in his Leaves From Satan's Book three years earlier). At the time she was one of Denmark's most popular stars and she said of Dreyer, "He is wonderful... so certain in his style." The actor who plays the prince of Denmark, Svend Methling went on to direct over 20 Danish films, and star in over 30, but Der var engang was his first recorded experience in film.

The picture quality on this DVD is mostly superb. Certainly the film-to-DVD transfer has been done to the highest standards and is problem-free, but there are a few moments where the surviving film elements look as if they've had a hard life. Thankfully, these moments are very rare, and I'm glad the DFI left them in instead of excising them on the grounds of picture consistency. The unedited sequence (referred to as "The Kitchen Sequence") is very thoughtfully added as an extra. Seeing unedited silent film footage is a very rare event (usually it is only the finished films that survive) and the DFI must be commended for their approach here with this 80 year old film. Intertitles are split into Danish text at the top, and English text at the bottom.

Neil Brand's specially commissioned piano accompaniment deserves much credit. It is sensitive, melodically interesting, unclichéd, well recorded and I couldn't imagine a more fitting accompaniment to the film.

Der var engang/Once upon a time Danish Film Institute

MICHAEL B+ 91

aka: Mikaël

Germany (92 mi) 1924

From the German Art Studio UFA in Berlin, the story was based on a novel with a gay subtext by Herman Bang, who was an avowed homosexual and able to live openly without condemnation, co-written by Dreyer and Thea von Harbou, the wife of Fritz Lang, who also wrote the script for METROPOLIS. Dreyer couldn’t tolerate her, so he undermined her by allowing her to make changes, then convinced the producers of the film to cut them out of the film without telling her. As this is adapted from a novel, nearly all of which takes place as an interior chamber piece, this film uses Baroque backdrops where every ounce of space on the wall is decorated and covered with something, creating a claustrophobic feel, where the world of the characters is intertwined with the set design, similar to many modern playwrights such as Sartre or Beckett, who set their plays in a single room. Put people in a room and let’s see what they will do.

Likened to a Kammerspiel, intimate chamber pieces of the 1910’s and 20’s, this art film depicts a triangle, the most dangerous human dramatic film form potentially lending itself to disaster. An aging Master painter (Benjamin Christensen) utilizes the services of his adored protégé, Michael (Walter Slezak), who indulges the Master, yet follows his own pleasures. Their relationship, the formative years or any degree of homosexual intimacy that may exist between them, is all suggested, as it is never shown onscreen. Michael poses for the Master’s most successful paintings in varying states of undress. Enter a Princess, a penniless Russian Countess (Nora Gregor from RULES OF THE GAME) who wants her portrait painted, hoping this will improve her financial as well as social situation, who immediately seduces the protégé, causing the Master to become jealous, and consequences ensue. Hugo Härring was an architect who never worked in the cinema either before or since. There is as much concentration on Härring’s fantastically elaborate expressionistic decor as there is to the isolation of the characters, where Dreyer uses archways or doorways as frames, in contrast to his stunning close-ups.

While it’s clear the Master has always loved Michael, expressed by his refusal to sell his paintings, even after being offered $30,000, which was quite a sum in those days, “How can we sell our finest memories?” which offers the audience high expectations in return, it is not realized. Instead it is met with the low means by which Michael’s character is expressed. This is very much the picture of an ingrate. People have a great ability to elude their own vigilance, to seek out a primitive self-interest instead of an enlightened self-interest. Michael fumes when he is not invited to dinner with the Master and the Countess, claiming he has never been treated this way before, so he has a moment of reflection, of jealous instability, thinking – how can he reassert his masculinity? The Master has been unable to complete the portrait of the Countess, troubled that something is not the way he sees it, perhaps a reflection of his own sexual limitations, as he’s only attracted to men, so Michael, who has no such limitations and is wildly attracted to the Countess, completes the painting by painting her eyes, seeing her as she is. Using light transference, Dreyer actually moves the Master into the dark while the light moves over to Michael, eventually placing him in a spotlight.

From this point on, Michael comes and goes as he pleases, even resorting to stealing and selling several of the Master’s paintings to support his lavish lifestyle while the master seems to never leave the house, where everything is insulated and contained, surrounded by opulence, yet he’s still morose. Michael and the Countess, meanwhile, go to a ballet performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” (which is interestingly seen here in silence, without the music), which was filmed by the initial cinematographer, Karl Freund, who also plays the art dealer, his only acting part in his career, who left the film halfway through in order to work on Murnau’s film THE LAST LAUGH. Rudolph Mate, who also worked with Dreyer again on THE PASSION OF JEAN OF ARC, completed the film. Michael’s continued absence leads the Master to shut himself away and paint in total loneliness his final masterpiece, called “The Vanquished,” a picture of an old man (himself) who has lost everything, which receives considerable acclaim, but the Master grows ill. Despite his grave condition, Michael ignores him, and can be seen in the arms of the Countess. Even after leaving all his personal assets to Michael, his adopted son, wealth and devotion he obviously doesn’t deserve, he smiles for the first time in the entire film just before he dies, leaving the audience in a state of melancholic ambiguity. “Now I can die in peace, as I’ve seen true love.”

from The Cinema of Carl Dreyer by Tom Milne:

“It is this persistence of love, beyond physical proximity, beyond time, beyond the grave even, that is to become the emblem of the Dreyer heroine – saint, witch, housewife and vampire alike...

The tragedy is not so much that Mikaël leaves Zoret, or may never even have been aware of the older man’s feelings for him, as that by his behavior he destroys Zoret both as man and as artist...from that moment on, as though robbed of his talent as well as his love, Zoret begins to decay, concentrating on his last moments of life and his last energies on his testament: a nightmare vision, half-Blake and half Gustave Moreau, of an old man, bearded, naked and oppressed, lying on a rock under a storm-beaten sky. As redolent of despair as the lamenting Job in Blake’s painting, the picture is lent a curious dimension of joy, illuminating the truth of Zoret’s last words, when it is revealed at a public unveiling shortly before his death to be merely a central panel of a great triptych: on either side, angelic, bright and upright, the portraits of a naked woman and boy.”

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

The DVD-ization of Carl Theodor Dreyer continues apace with the release of this forgotten 1924 German Expressionist treasure, as antiquated by 19th-century ideas about art and class as it is thoroughly 21st century in its subtle depiction of gay love. Co-written by Thea von Harbou—Mrs. Fritz Lang—and shot by Karl Freund and Rudolph Mate, the film plumbs a tragic love triangle between a "master" artist (filmmaker Benjamin Christensen), his young model-boyfriend (an unrecognizable Walter Slezak), and a penniless Russian countess (Nora Gregor, before Renoir found her) they both fall for. Brimming with what might be the most beautifully shot interiors of the silent era, Michael is addictively watchable, given the various poetic uses of spotlighting and Christensen's startling performance and grand, Mephistophelian visage. Typically for Dreyer, what could've been a breast-clutching melodrama is instead a meditation on aging and sacrifice. Kino is simultaneously releasing two other gay-centered German silents, Richard Oswald's Different From the Others (1919) and William Dieterle's Sex in Chains (1928); all are irreplaceable cultural landmarks.

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

The remarkable Carl Theodor Dreyer once again manages to be decades ahead of his time, this time delivering a homosexual film about the 19th century that's still viable and modern in the 21st. An aging master painter (Haxan director Benjamin Christensen) "adopts" Michael (Walter Slezak), the muse he's had his greatest success painting. Though purportedly a father figure, he's attracted to Michael, who willingly goes along now that the master is putting him up and funding his own attempts to be a painter. The film follows their shifting fortunes, centered around Princess Zamikoff (Nora Gregor), who the master struggles to paint (his successes were all men) and Michael falls in love with, funding her whims by stealing a lot more than her from the master. Though most of Dreyer's masterpieces focused on women, the biggest weakness here is the Princess is portrayed as little more than a distracting nuisance. With Michael growing increasingly distant, the master is back to only Switt (Rob Garrison) truly caring about him. The master not only refuses to notice his real friend, but is always at odds with him because Switt attempts to point out the ways Michael is taking advantage of him. The situation could easily lead to very negative portrayals of one, even both painters, but Dreyer instead focuses on the fact that both men get what they need out of the relationship. It's a very enigmatic film, no doubt partly due to its gay theme. Though Dreyer made it for German UFA, he managed to pull off something even the natives rarely could, simply giving Thea von Harbou screen credit without having her actually revise the script. Stylistically it's very different from the Dreyer people are familiar with. He not only has yet to adopt long takes, but actually edits constantly. Though his later style was much more impressive, the constant editing does work in silent film because it allows for far more naturalistic performances. The story is predominantly told through fairly tight shots of the actor that would be talking, seen from the waist or neck up. I say would be talking because even though they have dialogue they rarely move their mouths, instead conveying everything through a glance of an eye, tilt of a head, point of a finger. The film was shot by the brilliant duo of Karl Freund and Rudoph Mate, the former handling the bulk (interiors) and making a cameo appearance as an art dealer. Their expert lighting and framing brings forth the subtlety of the performances.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

The two final works of Danish titan Carl Theodor Dreyer economically cover the two poles of his attitudes towards love: Ordet is a sober celebration on the ability of love to accomplish the impossible and Gertrud is a hysterical lament for a woman who insists on fixating on the impossibility of love. Dreyer's early silent film Michael (based on a turn-of-the-century novel by the controversial gay Danish author Herman Bang) concerns itself with the gloomy latter proposition, and it resonates strongly as not only one of Dreyer's greatest early accomplishments (not long after the comedy The Parson's Widow, which utilizes both elements of the love continuum) but also as one of the most daring early expressions of gay-themed melodrama. Benjamin Christensen is the drama queen at the heart of the story, playing the middle-aged artist Zoret. Success (artistic if not popular, judging from his beyond-opulent digs courtesy of production designer Hugo Haring) appears to have eluded Zoret for the entirety of his career until the moment that Michael (Walter Slezak, who looks distractingly like Eraserhead's Jack Nance) entered and rocked the homosexual artist's world with his dapper looks, vivacious temper, and tantalizing unavailability. ("Gay for pay" is about as much as Dreyer was undoubtedly allowed to suggest, and even then only indirectly.)

With Michael serving as his model, Zoret's muse gets stiff and unleashes a spate of painterly accomplishments that turn him into the toast of the town. Unfortunately, and in keeping with Dreyer's unforgiving, nasty sense of fatalistic humor, his increased critical stock attracts the attention of Princess Zamikoff (Nora Gregor of Rules of the Game fame), who commissions Zoret to paint her. He is unable to correctly draw her eyes (i.e. her soul) and hands over the brush to Michael to see if his protégée has actually learned technique from the master. A few swift brush strokes and the painting is completed. But, in a situation which mirrors Zoret and Michael's creative relationship, the Princess appears to have Michael eating out of her hand, as well as out of Zoret's pocketbook. Zoret responds by painting a devastating self-portrait of himself, totally wasted away and propping himself up against a violent twilight sky in the background of the painting as Michael and Zamikoff lock eyes in the foreground on either side of his near-corpse.

Many critics have chosen to downplay the film's gay subtext, but to do so would deny the power of Dreyer's fastidious attention to the polarity of love's vicissitudes mentioned earlier. If stripped of the notion that the artist's attraction towards Michael (whose alleged bisexuality is clearly of a solely opportunistic strain) is physical as well as social, the film essentially becomes an embittered (and fairly rote, despite the astonishingly suffocating mise-en-scene) tale of two cuckolds. Regarding the second, it actually feels like Dreyer was attempting to throw more reactionary viewers off the gay overtones of the mainstage drama with an otherwise unrelated subplot depicting the married Alice Adelsskjold's affair with the Duke of Monthieu. In both cases, however, suffering becomes the catalyst for surprisingly secular religious epiphanies. If the bumper stick adage is to be believed, God answers knee mail. But, if Dreyer's deliciously masochistic eroticism is to be believed, the dominatrix deity might prefer it delivered with a blowjob.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Matthew Kennedy]

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen

MICHAEL page at Eureka. from Masters of Cinema, including a revolving photo display and an essay by Nick Wrigley

DFI Archive & Cinematheque presents "Michael" (1924) by Carl ... facts about MICHAEL, from the Danish Film Institute

Michael - Kino on Video

DVD Times Noel Megahey

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey)

Turner Classic Movies Roger Fristoe

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Mikael Carl Dreyer 1924 - Torrent Reactor NET a site that allows you to download the film

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)

DVDBeaver.com [Nick Wrigley]

MASTER OF THE HOUSE (Du skal ære din hustru)

Denmark (118 mi) 1925

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Formally and politically decades ahead of its time, Carl Dreyer's wonderful silent Danish comedy (1925), his first substantial commercial success outside Scandinavia, recounts what happens when a working-class wife and mother, prompted by an elderly nurse, walks out on her tyrannical and demanding husband, who then has to fend for himself. Restricted mainly to interiors, Dreyer's masterful mise en scene works wonders with the domestic space, and his script and dialogue make the most of his feminist theme. Passionately recommended.

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Dreyer's household comedy where the wife leaves after taking far more than her share of abuse from her once loving husband upon him losing his business was decades ahead of its time in it's valuation of women and in urging them to stand up for themselves. It was Dreyer's first international success, but he treated female torment much more maturely and truthfully in his later serious films and unfortunately this one doesn't really gain from being a comedy in other respects. This plot is, outside of it's subject matter, far too standard feel good material with the much of his film being the tyrant getting his comeuppance from the nana until he finally gives in and stands in the corner, making it safe for the wife to return. What's interesting is the similarity the wife has to Dreyer's later heroines, she's a steadfast, determined, self sacrificing provider, but in this case someone steps in and solves her problem so she doesn't take it to the grave. Dreyer, of course, wanted to shoot it in a real two bedroom apartment but had to settle for having one constructed on a sound stage, which still proved very difficult for his cameramen. Nonetheless, while visually it's among the least of Dreyer's films, it manages never to come across as a play. All Dreyer is recommended and this story was so far ahead of it's time it could just as easily have been made last week (though now it's sitcom material rather than socially conscience), but I find Master to be one of the master's least interesting works.

Kamera.co.uk Antonio Pasolini

It is one of film history's injustices that the work of Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968) is not as firmly and conspicuously in the European canon alongside Bergman, Renoir, Godard and Rosselini, among others, where it doubtlessly belongs. He enjoys a reputation among the pastures of the cognoscenti, but Dreyer's name does not have the same ring of recognisability as the aforementioned directors. This may explained by the irregularity of his output (he directed 13 features) and periods of unemployment. But credit is due to him. He is the artist who, after all, made The Passion of Joan Arc (1928), often ranked as one of ten best films ever made, one of the items in such lists that everyone seems to unquestionably agree with.

As the works of the director become more widely available on DVD, the situation may improve. The silent Master of the House is one four DVD titles by Dreyer that the British Film Institute is releasing this spring. It is accompanied by Ordet (1955), Day of Wrath (1943) and Gertrud (1964).

Dreyer started his career as a journalist and then swapped it for work at the Nordisk Film, where he worked as scriptwriter and editor. His directorial debut took place in 1919 with a film called The President, financed by Nordisk. Artistically ambitious from the start, he seized the opportunity to put into practice his cinematic vision characterised by attention to detail, contemplation, atmosphere and psychological realism. Dryer understood that cinema is a visual medium. He used text as support and kept the narrative as simple and straightforward as possible, in a fashion not dissimilar to the economical narratives of Ozu (although each one of them pursued different moods that were informed by their own cultures). Looking at his films is like looking at a natural landscape, rather still but full of life.

Master of the House, Dreyer's first feature for Palladium pictures, bears some of those characteristics, which would later be honed in films like The Passion and Days of Wrath. Based on Svend Rindom's stage play, it anticipates soap opera style domestic drama by decades, even on formal terms, as the acting is prematurely naturalistic in an age when silent films favoured expressionist exaggeration. It was a big success in France and led to Dreyer being invited to work there and the eventual commission of The Passion..., his first big budget movie.

In a way, Master of the House shares the theme of the Maid of Orleans with Dreyer stating in the first card title of the film that women who toil away at home without any recognition are true heroines. The first image shows us this typical old-world, Northern European household, with the young and beautiful Ida (Astrid Holm) manically going about her domestic chores while she looks after her two kids. Her husband, Victor (Johannes Meyer) is a failed businessman who turns his bitterness into patriarchal tyranny: always complaining about everything in the house and putting the scares on the children. His entrance in the film is a metaphor for male dominance: sullen and threatening, which sends women and children scurrying about the place, fearfully eager to please.

Ida is helped by Victor's elderly nanny, Mads (the superb Mathilde Nielsen), who, fed up with the bad treatment that Victor is giving to his wife, sends the ailing wife back to her mother's to be nursed back to health. This is when the film turns into comedy. Mad's plan is to discipline Victor so that he can appreciate his wife again and stop taking things for granted. Having helped to bring him up, she knows that underneath his stern carapace is a mellow man and that there is a lot of love between him, Ida and the children. He just needs a re-education by good, old and witty Mads, who really is the star of this superbly constructed domestic tale. Nielsen's Mads is the archetypal maid, with heavy-lidded eyes, a penetrating gaze that scrutinizes the world around her with moral certainty, but, of course, she is also a woman with a heart of gold and in the case of Mads, a very cheeky gene.

A feminine (rather than feminist) film, Master of the House is about the reconciliation of genders as well as an ode to female comradeship. Mads, Ida and her mother form a loving, supportive trio, a refreshing antithesis to cinema's tradition of showing women being hostile and bitchty to each other. It is a light-hearted comment on the failings of the patriarchy and how men really are just little boys who need some discipline - the scene of the couple's reunion at the end is a witty and sweet illustration of that.

The DVD contains two short films, a documentary he made in 1942 about the Mother's Aid Institution and They Caught the Ferry, which was financed by the Road Safety Council and contains superb action sequences. Dreyer was involved in 13 state-commissioned documentaries and short films up to 1956, on subjects ranging from art and architecture to road-safety and these films leave it clear that even when dealing with most run-of-the-mill subjects in which he was not that interested, he could invest them with his directorial touch and unique cinematic translation of reality. But the most relevant extra is My Metier (Torben Skjødt Jensen, 1995, 94 mins), a documentary on Dreyer's life and work, including rare archival footage, film clips, and interviews with key actors and associates, stills, scripts, newspaper clippings, letters and Dreyer's own words. Beautifully put together, My Metier chronicles Dreyer's life with the artistry that he deserves.

Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Channel 4 Film

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

BFI | Books & DVDs | DVD & Video | Films by Carl Theodor Dreyer BFI also reviews DAY OF WRATH, ORDET, and GERTRUD

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

THE BRIDE OF GLOMDAL (Glomdalsbruden)

Norway Sweden (70 mi – 1998 Norway restoration) 1926 original release (115 mi)

User Reviews from imdb Author: (aandersen@landmark.edu) from Putney, VT

BRIDE OF GLOMDAL is a lovely pastoral film. The Romeo and Juliet theme of the script- lovers kept apart by male parents - would be echoed and developed further in his ORDET. There it was conflicting religious views of the patriarchs that prevented the smooth coupling. Here it is simply that the feisty heroine's father has promised her to a neighboring farmer's son, rather than settle for the poorer inheritance her Romeo would bring.

She is a strong heroine and won't be bought. She runs away and is brought to her betrothed's family, later shifted to the priest's house out of delicacy. The priest is the go-between, visiting and berating both the heroine's father and the father-in-law/husband, the latter would have chosen for her.

There is a bit of D.W. Griffith melodrama on the wedding day, when the rebuffed suitor sets adrift the boats that join the two families across a dividing river and our hero, in his attempts to cross on horseback, is swept into the current, but all comes right in the end.

This is an extremely rare film - the only print I know of is housed at the Norsk Filminstitutt and I viewed a video copy of same without musical score and with Norwegian/Danish? inter-titles. The print was 74 minutes in length, shorter by far than the original 115 minute release.

For Dreyer fans, this is worth seeking out. He is already laying plans and exploring human feeling, movement and facial expression for use in his later masterpieces.

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (La passion de Jeanne d'Arc) A+ 100+

France (82 mi) 1928

Following the huge success of his 1925 film MASTER OF THE HOUSE, a drawing room melodramatic comedy that played on every screen in his country, and 57 screens in Paris alone, Dreyer was commissioned to do the story of Joan of Arc, and was granted complete artistic control, so he moved to Paris. In this film, he extended his “realized mysticism,” finding the face to express the emotion, using spiritual and transcendental elements.

carldreyer.com - life “Realized Mysticism” by Acquarello from Masters of Cinema (excerpt)

“As in his earlier films, Dreyer's primary interest was in capturing the indefinable essence of human suffering. In addition to the inherently religious and spiritually transcendent depiction of Joan's tragic and uncompromising ultimate sacrifice, Dreyer's humanist sentiment also transforms THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC into a socially relevant and harrowing reflection of the senseless persecution of women in a patriarchal society. Moreover, by distilling the scope of the film to the trial process, Joan's oppressive environment and inescapable fate become acutely palpable. By concentrating on the physical toll of Joan's psychological ordeal, Dreyer translates the unattainable and resolute piety of Joan the saint into the accessible language of compassion for the pain and suffering of Joan the human, achieving a coexistent and symbiotic relationship between the metaphysical and the corporeal that Dreyer defines as realized mysticism.”

Long considered one of the greatest films in cinema history, this is the only Dreyer work not adapted from a novel or a play, here he enlisted a historical archivist so that the characters in the film were based on the actual historical transcripts recorded from the trial of Joan of Arc by Rouen’s ecclesiastical court, shot over four months, compressing a trial that took seven months into a single day.  Dreyer took filmmaking seriously, as he toiled for 5 years with the editing, which is where some would say real film is made, starting slow, then building violent momentum for the conclusion. The cinematography, editing, and rhythm of the film are all superbly integrated to create such a lasting imprint of this historical event. Of interest, he left in the film a priest wearing glasses, which hadn’t been invented yet in that age, but may represent an act on Dreyer’s part to transcend this 17^th century period. The original negatives were destroyed by a fire, so Dreyer created a workable 2^nd version from outtakes, which were later burned as well, leaving Dreyer to believe that he was cursed by the Furies. The original film prints were later rediscovered, as if by an act of Joan resurrected, in a Norwegian mental asylum in Oslo during the 1980’s having been lost for half a century, as other circulating versions consist entirely of outtakes, and even that version was considered one of the greatest films of all time.

Joan is played by Comédie-Français member Renée Falconetti, who has one prior film listed, LA COMTESSE DE SOMERIVE (1917), never making another film after THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, as it was considered a one-of-a-kind performance, completely grasping what the filmmaker was trying to do, believing it could never again be equaled. Later she inherited a fortune, wanted to work in America but was denied a visa, so she went to South America instead where she died impoverished. Bresson used actors only once, believing they could never recreate the experience, but Dreyer saw each project as unique and separate, so he reused certain actors. Dreyer found Falconetti when she was dancing the charleston performing a burlesque comedy routine and decided then and there that this was the face he wanted for Joan of Arc, giving one of the most memorable performances on record. Reference is made to it in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 film MY LIFE TO LIVE, where actress Ana Karina wants to experience Joan of Arc’s suffering through Renée Falconetti’s intense performance, and Godard crosscuts Karina’s tears with Falconetti’s. Known for the stark, dark sets, and for extreme close-ups that remind the viewer of a painter’s eye for detail, this slow, austere masterpiece integrating history and art truly gets to the heart of good and evil, perhaps the most poignant, terrifying, and emotionally unrelenting historical document ever filmed, which includes Antonin Artaud as one of the monks.

Filmed by cinematographer Rudolph Mate, Dreyer dug seven foot trenches in order to use his famed low angle shot. His film style is called action of choice, where by providing fewer options, such as the use of close ups to exclude what you don’t need to see onscreen, it enhances the viewer responsibility to choose the right choice, to select the one that embraces the director’s vision. Continuing to use the Kammerspiel style, where within a confined space, specific things happen, Dreyer’s strategy was to show Joan in close ups, which take up the entire screen, gaining empathy for Joan, who is always surrounded by the faces of the judges, where they initially seem filmed on a higher incline, always looking down on her, where they can impose their will upon her, exacerbating her situation, until the end, at the hour of her execution, she is seen high above the rest, where only the flittering birds flying above are higher. The camerawork is extraordinary, with experimental touches throughout, with oblique camera angles, striking film composition, and swift camera movements veering in and out, including a camera swung on a pendulum, using frenetic, agitated camera movement to reveal what she’s going through, where truth exudes through the pores of her skin. Joan’s face is plain and pure, while the judge’s faces are rough and craggy and resemble the craters of the moon. The all-male jury was following the laws of man, where their emotional aggression attempted to undermine the purity on her face, threatening to crucifying her, causing her to grow weary and beleaguered, to actually face doubt, becoming all too human, feeling a certain ambiguity, but her convictions are never undermined. I was most struck by the utter simplicity of one of her remarks: “His ways are not our ways.” Dreyer shows this by taking a human body, adding a transcendental belief, then unifying it into one form, a mystic conviction.

How do you divine the real? Dreyer wanted to present an authentic experience of a spiritual crisis taking place on screen, using pan chromatic film stock and using light sources in a very dramatic way. Joan’s humble nature, shown in her hesitant speech and short, direct answers are in sharp contrast to the blistering hostility that is shown towards her by the prosecutors. She was a simple farm girl, only age 19 and illiterate, and yet she held her own against the finest educated judges and lawyers from England. What the film doesn’t show is the duration of the actual trial, how the many months of relentless personal assault eventually took its toll and physically wore her down. That cruelty, in Dreyer’s film, is reflected in the faces of the laughing jailers and the hostile prosecutors who believed in themselves, in their own sense of purpose, who couldn’t fathom that she could realize the divine by avoiding the church’s aid and instruction, who felt compelled to lecture her about religious faith, to test her mettle under dire circumstances, forcing her to show them her divinity. According to George Bernard Shaw, he called Joan the “first Protestant.” Bresson’s last shot in his Joan of Arc film was a still shot of the stake, smoldering, while Dreyer’s showed Joan burning, while off in the corner one can see a cross. By the end of the film, however, what we remember are the huge close-ups on Falconetti’s face, her head shaven, dressed in plain garments, her eyes etched in pain and sorrow, images that, according to Michael Wilmington, “are among the century’s most memorable visual icons of human injustice.”

from The Cinema of Carl Dreyer by Tom Milne:

“...since Dreyer spent fourteen films denouncing the cruelties, prejudices, superstitions, hypocrisies, and dogmatic assertions that make up so great a part of the history of so many established churches, it is difficult to imagine him being seriously involved in any debate as to whether Joan of Arc was or was not a witch, was or was not a saint. This, of course, is the stumbling block in any film or play about Joan: it is virtually impossible to engage the mind in any discussion about the whys and wherefores, rights or wrongs, of her trial, since the dice are so completely loaded from the very start. All one can do is wait for the outcome, harrowed to a greater or lesser degree by the portrayal of her suffering.”

From film critic Andrew Sarris:

DAY OF WRATH ran for only one week at the Little Carnegie despite raves from Archer Winston and the late James Agee. VAMPYR never achieved the vogue of such inferior horror films as James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN and Tod Browning’s DRACULA. GERTRUD concluded Dreyer’s career on a note of critical scandal and commercial disaster. His difficulties with financiers made such intransigent individualists as Buñuel and Stroheim seem like Dale Carnegies by comparison. Buñuel and Stroheim could at least promise the titillation of shock and sacrilege; Dreyer, like Bresson, could afford nothing but austerity and eternity.

Dreyer was never so much ahead of his time as out of his time. No critic ever described him as “modern.” THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC seemed backward in its period, not only because it was a silent movie released in the midst of talkies with all the self-consciousness of an “art” film but because Dreyer’s enormous close-ups lacked the structured dynamism of Eisenstein’s dialectical montage in POTEMKIN and OCTOBER. DAY OF WRATH struck most critics of its time as too slowly paced for the demands of an art film. The sin of GERTRUD was that it dared to be deliberately slow and stately in an era in which film critics worshipped the cinematic virtuosity of elongated television commercials. For Dreyer, unfortunately, there were no shortcuts or even jump-cuts to eternity.

Dreyer was never as interested in jazzy film techniques as in the subtlest feelings that could be expressed through the human face by a staring camera. He was therefore less a dramatist than a portraitist, but a portraitist gifted with a metaphysical urgency and implacability. His gallery of witches, bigots, persecutors, sensualists, and perverts never became a rogues’ gallery, simply because Dreyer saw the torments of his characters in terms of a world still governed by God. For Carl Theodor Dreyer, man, not the medium, was the message.

World Cinema: Films -- The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) Tony Rayns from World Cinema

Dreyer's most universally acclaimed masterpiece remains one of the most staggeringly intense films ever made. It deals only with the final stages of Joan's trial and her execution, and is composed almost exclusively of close-ups: hands, robes, crosses, metal bars, and (most of all) faces. The face we see most is, naturally, Falconetti's as Joan, and it's hard to imagine a performer evincing physical anguish and spiritual exaltation more palpably. Dreyer encloses this stark, infinitely expressive face with other characters and sets that are equally devoid of decoration and equally direct in conveying both material and metaphysical essences. The entire film is less moulded in light than carved in stone: it's magisterial cinema, and almost unbearably moving.

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Dreyer takes an unglamorized and unsentimentalized look at the French icon from trial to death, as Robert Bresson later did in his underseen Trial of Joan of Arc. Otherwise, these legitimate Jeanne films could not be more different. Dreyer's is a tour de force of expressionism, utilizing all its haunting distortion in an attempt to present the inner truth through grotesque exteriors. Meanwhile, Bresson's is about as strict as anything ever attempted, essentially eliminating everything and simply having the characters go through the actual lines from the trial text, the lack of gimmicks allowing for a transcendent finale. Maria Falconetti is amazing as Jeanne, so sad, so tortured, so rundown, yet of unbending belief; it's the essential performance of silent cinema. Rudolph Mate films almost entirely in closeup during the interrogation, allowing the expressive unmasked faces to show it all. It's probably the best proof that (with the exception of Lon Chaney and Orson Welles, the only two that actually used it for purpose) paint automatically eliminates at least half the dramatic value because all the character and uniqueness is hidden. Film is supposed to be an intimate medium, but what intimacy can you have with a walking mannequin? Mate's cinematography is the stuff of legend, but what makes his work and the editing by Dreyer and Marguerite Beauge so impressive is the camera rarely changes distances; if Mate's framing were not so perfect, this would result in the edits being too noticable. Amazing finale intercutting the burning stake with the mob riot. The only downside to this seminal silent is there's too many intertitles, but given the subject matter I don't know how it could have been avoided.

Realized Mysticism in The Passion of Joan of Arc Criterion essay is Dreyer’s own on “Realized Mysticism,” November 08, 1999

The virgin of Orleans and those matters that surrounded her death began to interest me when the shepherd girl’s canonization in 1920 once again drew the attention of the public-at-large to the events and actions involving her—and not only in France. In addition to Bernard Shaw’s ironical play, Anatole France’s learned thesis aroused great interest, too. The more familiar I became with the historical material, the more anxious I became to attempt to re-create the most important periods of the virgin’s life in the form of a film.

Even beforehand, I was aware that this project made specific demands. Handling the theme on the level of a costume film would probably have permitted a portrayal of the cultural epoch of the fifteenth century, but would have merely resulted in a comparison with other epochs. What counted was getting the spectator absorbed in the past; the means were multifarious and new.

A thorough study of the documents from the rehabilitation process was necessary; I did not study the clothes of the time, and things like that. The year of the event seemed as inessential to me as its distance from the present. I wanted to interpret a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life. What streams out to the possibly moved spectator in strange close-ups is not accidentally chosen. All these pictures express the character of the person they show and the spirit of that time. In order to give the truth, I dispensed with “beautification.” My actors were not allowed to touch makeup and powder puffs. I also broke with the traditions of constructing a set. Right from the beginning of shooting, I let the scene architects build all the sets and make all the other preparations, and from the first to the last scene everything was shot in the right order. Rudolf Maté, who manned the camera, understood the demands of psychological drama in the close-ups and he gave me what I wanted, my feeling and my thought: realized mysticism.

But in Falconetti, who plays Joan, I found what I might, with very bold expression, allow myself to call “the martyr’s reincarnation.”

The Passion of Joan of Arc by André Bazin André Bazin’s 1952 film review

Those who have the opportunity of seeing Carl Dreyer's masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc are actually seeing a print made from the original negatives. They were thought to have been destroyed but were miraculously discovered among the out takes of sound film at Gaumont Studios. There is perhaps no other film in which the actual quality of the photography is more important.

The Passion of Joan of Arc was filmed in France in 1928 by the Danish director Carl Dreyer, using French writers and a French crew. Based on a script by Joseph Delteil, the film is in fact inspired by the actual minutes of the trial. But the action here is condensed into one day, conforming to a dramatic requirement that is in no way a distortion.

Dreyer's Joan of Arc will remain memorable in film annals for its bold photography. With the exception of a few shots, the film is almost entirely composed of close-ups, principally of faces. This technique satisfies two apparently contradictory purposes: mysticism and realism. The story of Joan, as Dreyer presents it, is stripped of any anecdotal references. It becomes a pure combat of souls. But this exclusively spiritual tragedy, in which all action comes from within, is fully expressed by the face, a privileged area of communication.

I must explain this further. The actor normally uses his face to express his feelings. Dreyer, however, demanded something more of his actors—more than acting. Seen from very close up, the actor's mask cracks. As the Hungarian critic Béla Balasz wrote, "The camera penetrates every layer of the physiognomy. In addition to the expression one wears, the camera reveals one's true face. Seen from so close up, the human face becomes the document." Herein lies the rich paradox and inexhaustible lesson of this film: that the extreme spiritual purification is freed through the scrupulous realism of the camera as microscope. Dreyer forbade all makeup. The monks' heads are literally shaved. With the film crew in tears, the executioner actually cut Falconetti's hair before leading her to the stake. But this was not an example of real tyranny. We are indebted to Dreyer for his irrefutable translation direct from the soul. Silvain's wart (Cauchon), Jean d'Yd's freckles, and Maurice Schutz's wrinkles are of the same substance as their souls. These things signify more than their acting does. Some twenty years later Bresson resubstantiated this in Diary of a Country Priest (1950).

But there is still so much more to say about this film, one of the truest masterpieces of the cinema. I would like to enumerate two more points. First, Dreyer is perhaps, along with Eisenstein, the only filmmaker whose works equal the dignity, nobility, and powerful elegance found in masterpieces of painting. This is not only because he was inspired by them but essentially because he rediscovered the secret of comparable aesthetic depths. There is no reason to harbor false modesty with respect to films. A Dreyer is the equal of the great painters of the Italian Renaissance or Flemish school. My second observation is that all this film lacks is words. The only thing that has aged is the intrusion of subtitles. Dreyer so regretted not being able to use the still frail sound available in 1928. For those who still think that the cinema lowered itself when it began to have sound, we need only counter with this masterpiece of silent film that is already virtually speaking.

Voices of Light Liner Notes by Richard Einhorn, author of the music VOICES OF LIGHT that now accompanies the film:

Joan of Arc was deeply religious, utterly chaste, and astonishingly brave in the face of horrific abuse. She certainly deserves the sainthood the Church bestowed upon her. But Joan challenges the very meaning of holiness. True, this image of the virginal shepherd girl called to a divine mission by angels is part of her story, but it is only one part.

It seems to class with the fact that her closest companions were brutal soldiers with names like The Bastard of Orleans or Le Hire (The Rage). It seems impossible that another of Joan’s close intimates was Gilles de Rais, the infamous “Bluebeard” who was burned at the stake for the serial murder of young boys. And the humble pious image simply cannot accommodate a woman who, when asked about one of her childhood neighbors, a man who sympathized with her enemies, responded that she would cut his head off (“God willing,” of course).

She was born in about 1412 in Domremy, France, a tiny farming village in the Meuse Valley. When Joan was 13 or so, she began to hear voices. At seventeen, her voices told her that she had been given a divine mission to reunite France. At the time, in the middle of the Hundred Years War, much of France was in the hands of the hated English and their Burgundian allies. Charles, the uncrowned king or dauphin, was in exile and his path to Reims, where all the kings of France had been crowned since time immemorial, was blocked by the English troops. Orleans, a city that lay in a strategically important area of the strife, had been besieged for over a year and had begun to weaken.

Spurred on by her voices, Joan implored Robert de Baudricourt, the governor of nearby Vaucouleurs, to permit her to travel to Charles’s court at Chinon. Initially reluctant, even incredulous, Baudricourt finally granted the permission and Joan, “borrowing” some men’s clothing to disguise herself during the journey, left with two friends for the court of the uncrowned king.

Joan’s powers of persuasion must have been remarkable. She managed not only to arrange an audience with Charles but also to convince him she should travel with an army to help lift the siege of Orleans. Within days of her arrival, the French army, with Joan’s active participation, had destroyed the besieging English forces, a turning point in the war. Although seriously wounded, Joan helped lead the final assault on the Tourelles, the English garrison, an attack that resulted in the deaths of two of England’s most important military commanders.

With Orleans secure, Joan and the army cleared a path to Reims for the coronation, recapturing numerous towns along the way. Joan was so feared by the English and their Burgundian allies that the mere announcement of her presence outside the walls of a town would elicit a quick surrender. Charles VII was crowned in Reims on July 17, 1429, with Joan of Arc by his side. It had been less than seven months since she had left her farm village, and Joan was seventeen years old.

For about a year or so, Joan was a mercenary knight, fighting (and winning) numerous battles. However, after she failed to take Paris in September of 1429, her fortunes began to wane, and in may of 1430, outside the walls of Compiègne, she was dragged from her horse by a Burgundian archer and captured. She was subsequently sold to the English and transported to Rouen, where the English and Burgundians had arranged for a court of the Inquisition to try her for heresy. The trial’s purpose was not only to discredit her among her people (as she was already a legend in France), but also to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the king whom she had helped to crown. While in prison, Joan refused to give up her male clothes, was kept in a tiny call and was always in chains (she had tried to escape earlier in her captivity by leaping from the turret of a castle).

In Rouen, arraigned before a panel of learned judges, priests, and lawyers, Joan was questioned repeatedly about her voices, her male dress, and her sense of her mission. After months of resistance which left her ill and exhausted, Joan was dragged out into a courtyard of the church of St. Ouen and publicly coerced into signing a statement of abjuration in which she denied that her voices were from God. She was sentenced to life imprisonment and her head was shaved. Three days later, however, she retracted her abjuration and affirmed that her voices were divine. She was promptly excommunicated for heresy and burnt on May 30, 1431. Joan was nineteen years old when she died.

Twenty-five years later, Charles VII and Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée, petitioned the pope to restore her to the Church. Many of the women and men who knew Joan from Domremy and from her career as a soldier were interviewed. The transcripts (which, like the trial transcripts, have survived) provide substantial corroboration for a story that would otherwise seem unbelievable. In 1920, nearly 500 years after her death, Joan was declared a saint, the only saint who was first excommunicated and burned.

Joan’s refusal to conform to our normal categories of behavior creates many apparent paradoxes and contradictions. Yes, she was a great warrior, but she was also a pious mystic who would halt her soldiers simply to listen to church bells. She was an illiterate farm girl, but she had no problem consorting with royalty. Although she was the most practical and skeptical of leaders – she had quite a reputation for debunking fraudulent prophets – she heard voices that today would probably earn her a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.

Her powerful, complex personality has attracted an amazingly disparate group of admirers over the years, from George Bernard Shaw to Andrea Dworkin, to name just a few. She is a beloved Catholic saint and a hero for many young girls, regardless of their religious background. But in the course of my research, I also met with members of covens who worshipped Joan as a great witch. In the United States and England, numerous feminist and lesbian authors have written eloquently on Joan of Arc. Meanwhile, in France, her role as the supreme symbol of French nationalism has been co-opted by the extreme right wing. And, of course, Joan embodies the romantic myth of the misunderstood, uncompromising artist: true to her/his inner voices until death.

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The strange history of THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928) nearly equals Joan’s itself. It has many of the same elements, including obsession, madness, and even fire.

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC was the next film made by Société Générale, the studio that had produced Abel Gance’s NAPOLEON. In fact, Dreyer himself was on the set of the Gance film and used many members of the technical crew and several of the actors (notably Antonin Artaud, the stunningly handsome enfant terrible of the avant-garde theater, who was later incarcerated in a mental institution). The original screenplay for JOAN was by Joseph Delteil, who had written a rather hyperventilated book about her. For one reason or another, Dreyer chose to forgo most of Delteil’s ideas and instead used actual excerpts from the trial transcripts as the script (the film, which is set entirely at Joan’s trials, and burning, compresses the action of the trial from seven months into a single day).

To portray Joan of Arc, Dreyer cast against type Renée Falconetti, a leading member of the Comédie-Français. Rumors abound about the excruciating ordeal Falconetti suffered during the shoot; when her head was shaved for the final sequence of the film, apparently the entire crew wept for her and she broke down; the shooting ground to a halt while she recovered.

The film, censored somewhat by the Catholic Church prior to its release, was soon hailed as one of the greatest films of all time. Falconetti’s performance was (and is) considered one of the most extraordinary ever filmed. With its extreme close-ups and bizarre camera angles, with an editing rhythm that breaks nearly every rule of the craft, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC makes virtually every movie critics and scholar’s short list of masterpieces. It clearly influenced such filmmakers as Bergman, Fellini, and Hitchcock, and echoes of its intense style appear in the work of such contemporary masters as Martin Scorsese. Shot without makeup and with “natural” acting, JOAN looks like it was finished yesterday.

But a few months after the premiere, Joan’s judges descended upon Dreyer’s film. The negative and virtually all prints of THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC were destroyed in a warehouse fire. Dreyer, referring in all likelihood to his workprint for the original cut, painstakingly reconstructed the entire film from outtake footage that had survived the fire. This second version was destroyed in a second fire! Devastated, Dreyer gave up and moved on to his next film, VAMPYR.

From here the history of the film becomes confusing. Highly corrupt prints that somehow managed to survive the fires circulated for awhile. In addition, the Cinémathèque Français unearthed a copy of the film in its vaults (at the time, it was unclear which version it was). In the late forties and early fifties, a French film historian by the name of Lo Duca pieced together his version of the film (apparently using prints from both versions) and added a score that was a montage of Albinoni, Vivaldi, and other Baroque composers. The result so horrified Dreyer that he completely disowned the “Lo Duca” version.

Then, in 1981, several film cans from the 20’s were discovered at a mental institution in Oslo, Norway, stashed in the back of a closet. They were shipped, unopened to the Norwegian Film Institute. Inside the cans, in nearly perfect condition, was a copy of THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC with Danish intertitles. The accompanying shipping information made it clear that it was, in fact, a print of the original version of Dreyer’s great film. ––R.E.

Tony Pipolo, Joan Of Arc: The Cinema's Immortal Maid, Cineaste v25, n4 (Fall, 2000):16. (excerpt)

To judge from the track record, canonized saints are among the rarer subjects that narrative cinema has tackled with any degree of success. Two standouts--Roberto Rossellini's works on Francis of Assisi and Augustine of Hippo--are almost impossible to see and go unmentioned in film histories. No doubt, it is the assumed otherness of such creatures--their membership in a select and unknowable caste, and the explicit or underlying virtue believed to be at their core--that makes the prospect of characterizing them so daunting. While biographers and historians, with a myriad of resources at their disposal, can flesh out the humanity through the details, narrative filmmakers (and probably playwrights) must inevitably dramatize and psychologize--processes not readily compatible with saintlike features. In other words, the filmmaker faces the dilemma that one of Graham Greene's novelist/characters identified (in The End of the Affair) when he complained that "Goodness has so little fictional value."    

All the more surprising, then, that not one or two, but at least a dozen feature films (and a number of one or two reelers during the silent era) have been made about Joan of Arc. To be sure, the appeal that her story has had and continues to have--crossing national, cultural, and gender boundaries--predates the movies. She was treated, not always sympathetically, through the centuries by no lesser figures than Shakespeare, Schiller, Voltaire, Verdi, and Twain; and in the twentieth century by Shaw, Brecht, Anouilh, Bernanos, Peguy, and Honegger. Joan was the subject of numerous paintings and of folkloric pageants that continued long after her death. In fact, with the exception of Christ, few historical figures--and no other canonized saint that I can think of--have prompted such an array of attention.    

Most likely it is the combination of elements that made up her brief but blazing public career--her age, her sex, her determination, her inexplicable ease with soldiers, royalty, and churchmen, her uncanny ability to move them to trust her, their ultimate betrayal, her ignominious death, and eventual rehabilitation--that keeps us wondering how such a child could have achieved such fame on such precarious grounds only to be destroyed in the names of the very things--faith and nationalism--for which she fought. In her excellent new biography, Mary Gordon says that "any understanding of [Joan] will be partial...that so compelling a figure will constantly demand new visions, new revisions...she will not stand still for us."    

What makes her so compelling, the writer A.J. Dunning suggests, in an essay comparing Joan and Gilles de Rais--the notorious child abuser and murderer who accompanied her to Reims for the coronation of Charles VII--is our fascination with those with "the burning desire to live or die for a cause, no matter how unusual or extreme...In our average comfortable circumstances, we admire extremes or are repelled by them, but in either case have difficulty finding a satisfactory explanation for them." Art, sometimes even mediocre art, has always been the instrument for expressing and exploring that fascination--perhaps, at times, even compensating for the absence of such figures in our midst. It places them before us at a safe remove and in their most compelling mode. And, throughout the last century, for better or worse, we have produced no more compelling means for doing so than the movies.   

 Three recent films on Joan and one reissue of a silent classic have made their way to VHS and DVD--rivalling the output in the 1920s spurred by her canonization (1920) and its anticipation. Then, as now, the subject inspired filmmakers of widely different esthetic sensibilities: on the one hand, Cecil B. De Mille, whose Joan the Woman (1917) was one of his first big-budget spectacles; on the other, Carl Dreyer, whose The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), as the reissue attests, remains one of the quintessential avantgarde masterpieces of the cinema. The same contrast is echoed in the new releases: both Luc Besson's The Messenger (1999) and Christian Duguay's Joan of Arc (1999) are more or less in the De Mille vein, while Jacques Rivette's Joan the Maid (1997) is a model of intelligence, modesty, and reserve. (Equally poles apart are the Victor Fleming/Ingrid Bergman epic of 1948 and Robert Bresson's austere Trial of Joan of Arc of 1962.)…    

No film ever made on Joan, however, is as bold or as genuinely disturbing as Dreyer's. While Dreyer, like Bresson and Rivette, did rely on the scholarship available at the time--including the trial record which the film's intertitles dutifully record--and employed historian Pierre Champion as adviser--it was ultimately a different kind of truth that he was after. To reach it, he reduced Joan's story not only to the trial itself, but to an almost primal rendering of her literal situation--that of a young woman in a world of men, confronted with the most powerful patriarchal forces of her day. To accentuate Joan's experience, Dreyer completely avoided the spectacle approach--exposing precious little film on the meticulous replications of the medieval city of Rouen--and conceived an unconventional visual style, which continues to unsettle spectators. Through a relentless, almost suffocating use of close-ups and medium shots--many of them so decentered compositionally as to almost fall off the edges of the frame--he created a continual sense of fracture and disorientation that parallels the discordant, fraudulent nature of the trial; the equivalent of zoom-ins and-outs to hostile figures--an infuriated Cauchon, an English soldier--embody the very notion of assault; the initially insulated space that Joan occupies quickly becomes a danger zone, as when D'Estivet, one of her judges, rises in anger, looms over her, and spits on her face. The threat of torture is concretized as fragmented images of wheels, spikes, blades, and teeth-lined objects are rapidly intercut with Joan's swooning and eventual faint. And, as one might expect, the burning scene is graphically represented and prolonged with repeated images of Joan's heated face through the flames and shots of her slumping body behind smoke at almost every stage of its descent. In short, Dreyer's film comes closest to conveying both the horrific nature of Joan's plight as well as the barbaric forms of punishment available to the medieval Church. It is no wonder that upon completion, the film was greatly objected to by leaders of the French Church, who wanted many cuts, and that several prints still in archives are missing some of the more graphic images.    

As if this were not enough, Dreyer boldly parallels Joan's story with that of Christ, signalled immediately by the film's title--The Passion of Joan of Arc--and reinforced by its condensed structure, which collapses several months of the trial into what seems one, long, uninterrupted day, much the way Jesus's arrest, imprisonment, and appearances before Herod and Pilate are often rendered. Even the incident of Joan attacked in her cell by English soldiers serves the purpose: instead of the near-rape--which Rivette's film makes explicit--Dreyer has the men place a mock crown of thorns on Joan's head and scepter in her hand, and taunt her as the soldiers did Jesus as the 'King of the Jews.' For Dreyer, in other words, Joan, like Jesus, was another figure of spiritual individuality, who could not be tolerated by the established forces of Church and State.    

Heavy going some would say. On its initial release the poet H. D., while impressed by the film, found it unbearable to be a helpless spectator before the tortured Joan, a sentiment that has been echoed by others since. This has always seemed curious to me, as if there should be a less heavy, more bearable way to create disturbing art. Singling out the Dreyer as possibly sadomasochistic ignores the truly horrific elements of Joan's story as it neared its finale. In analogizing it to the story of Christ, Dreyer was recreating a significant aspect of medieval life and art--described so eloquently in Johan Huizinga's masterly study The Waning of the Middle Ages--in which the individual believer modeled her or his life very closely on that of Christ, conceiving everything from mundane activities to manners of dying as valorized experiences to the degree that they did so. Indeed, as the film's architectural design and mise-en-scène--based on illustrated medieval manuscripts--connote, The Passion of Joan of Arc itself might be viewed as one would a series of narrative friezes on a medieval French Cathedral. Its characteristic look--a three-dimensional head sculpted against a spare background--suggests as much.    

The recent reissue of the film comes as close as any digital or video image probably can to conveying the visual quality and intensity of the original. No film scholar or serious collector should be without it, preferably in the DVD format, which includes extras in the way of information on production design and print history, although not all of this, as we shall see, is accurate. A perhaps minor, but revealing example of the lax scholarship reflected in this material is the repetition of an error made by all but a few scholars. The great French actor Michel Simon is erroneously identified as the judge Jean Lemaitre, when, in fact, the actor who portrays this role is Gilbert Dalleu; Simon appears in exactly two brief shots. The extra material also includes brief--too brief, in my opinion--excerpts from an interview with Helene Falconetti, daughter of Renée Falconetti, whose performance as Joan surely ranks as one of the half-dozen most astonishing in the annals of film history.    

One serious drawback, however, is the speed at which the film is run, which, while perhaps mainly of interest to scholars, will affect anyone's experience watching it. Some archivists and scholars insist, quite rightly to my mind, that the film should be projected at sixteen or eighteen frames per second, consistent with the speed at which it was shot; others claim that this is far too slow. Projected at that speed, the virtually complete prints available up to now and screened periodically at places like The Museum of Modern Art and Anthology Film Archives run between 110 and 120 minutes. The present reissue--which does not include any new material nor any substantial cuts--runs eighty-two minutes. According to the brochure enclosed in the DVD edition, the "digital transfer was created, at 24 frames per second from a 35mm fine-grain master positive made from the restored negative." What this claim blithely ignores is that since the film was not shot at twenty-four frames per second, transfering it at this speed could only result in those jerky, unnatural movements typical of silent films projected too fast--i.e., at sound speed.    

The reason for this is simple, since a selling feature of the reissue is the score written for the film by composer Richard Einhorn. A choral and orchestral work entitled "Voices of Light," the score itself is lovely, its text a composite of many writings, including biblical passages, and songs and poems by medieval female mystics. When I first heard it as live accompaniment to a screening of the film at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I resisted it because I thought it out of synch with Dreyer's work. Since then, I have come to appreciate it as a sensitively conceived complement to the film. Nevertheless, no score, no matter how brilliant and moving, should dictate the film's rhythm, which is what has occurred here. Nor does the option to watch the film silent affect this. With or without the soundtrack, the tape or DVD runs at the same speed and this is a disservice to the film's own magisterial pace.    

Concerning the "master print" from which this copy is derived, a lot of unfounded assumptions have circulated since it was discovered in 1981 in a sanatorium in Norway, where it had presumably been sent in 1928 for purposes unknown. (One story--recounted in The Manchester Guardian in 1985--had it that Dreyer, who had suffered a nervous breakdown after shooting Jeanne d'Arc, was friendly with a doctor at the sanatorium and sent him the film to use as shock therapy for his patients!) On the basis that the print was believed to have been struck from the original negative, long thought lost in two separate fires (the irony here is almost irresistible), the magazine L'Avant-Scène Cinéma published a dossier on the film in 1988, including a shot by shot analysis of this print, and an essay on the print history of the film. In the absence of any conclusive evidence, it was assumed that the Norwegian discovery was a case of the phoenix rising from its ashes. Ever since--and still without any conclusive evidence--the print has been proclaimed as 'definitive' or 'original' by newspaper and magazine commentators, a few archivists, and, of course, the marketers of this release.    

We are fortunate to have this print since it is of beautiful visual quality. But, the people responsible for this release, in a perhaps overzealous--but completely unnecessary--attempt to sell their product, have distorted part of the film's print history. We are shown (in the DVD format) a clip from a ludicrously corrupt print of the film as an illustration of the "pale" and "mutilated" (read "only") versions of the "original" available for sixty years to film scholars. Such a claim is either the result of inadequate research or simply an advertising lie. Scholars have worked on this film for years with access to prints of varying, and very good, visual quality, at many institutions, including those mentioned earlier.

Realized Mysticism in The Passion of Joan of Arc Criterion esay by Carl Theodor Dreyer, November 08, 1999

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) - The Criterion Collection

Realised Mysticism: La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc Thomas Beltzer from Senses of Cinema

Senses of Cinema [Michael Koller]

The Passion of Joan of Arc Gary Morris from Images Journal, or here: Bright Lights Film Journal [Gary Morris]

Film Commentary by CGK

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen

Epinions.com [metalluk]

The Passion of Joan of Arc by Ib Monty by the Director of the Danish Film Archive, from World Cinema

FILM STUDIES: Ready for your close-up? Well, sure, as long as it's ... Film Studies: Ready for Your Close Up? by David Thomson from The Independent on Sunday, June 1, 2003

Contrasting Visions of a Saint: Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan ... Contrasting Visions of a Saint: Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Luc Besson's The Messenger, by Bill Scalia from Literature Film Quarterly, 2004

CIRCA Art Magazine - Online review - Carl Dreyer: The passion of ... Carl Dreyer: The passion of Joan of Arc (La passion de Jeanne d'Arc), 1928, by John Graham, August 20, 2005

CINETEXT The Passion of Joan of Arc The Evidence of Things Not Seen, by Daniel Garrett, March 28, 2006 (also, see below)

The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion ... (pdf) by Daniel Garrett, March 28, 2006, or here: View as HTML

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DVD Times [Gary Couzens]

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

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All Movie Guide [Elbert Ventura]

Christian Science Monitor [David Sterritt]

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Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]

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Erasing Clouds [Dan Heaton]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films

http://www.myspace.com/maidofheaven the entire film may be viewed on YouTube

Guardian/Observer

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Mordaunt Hall’s original review from March 31, 1929

DVDBeaver - Review [Gary W. Tooze]

VAMPYR A 97

Denmark (75 mi) 1931

“There exist certain predestined beings whose very lives seem bound by invisible threads to the supernatural world. They crave solitude...they dream...their imagination is so developed that their vision reaches far beyond that of most men. David Gray’s personality was thus mysterious.”

In order not to be typecast as a “saint” director, Dreyer moved in the opposite direction, creating a film that was influenced by the Surrealist art movement that was prevalent in France where he lived at the time, that reflected his propensity for experimentation, not critically acclaimed, some called it a 9 million franc goose egg, a project that some critics thought was a not technically important horror film coming between the high points of PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC and DAYS OF WRATH. Yet the film is quintessentially a Dreyer film with its theme,“Vampirism is a sickness of the soul,” based on the Sheridan Le Fanu story Carmilla, one of the stories in his collection In a Glass Darkly which actually has strong lesbian overtones, where a girl becomes prey to a beautiful vampire, changed here, as the lead vampire is an older woman who doesn’t want to be alive or dead anymore, who feels exhausted by the weight of her existence, caught in a Dante-esque limbo in a place between heaven and hell, where one can’t be saved by divine forces, so the allegiance is to the world of the vampires. This is a dreamy evocation of individual consciousness, a film where Dreyer asks: “Imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant the room we are sitting in is completely altered; everything in it has taken on another look; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed and the objects are as we conceive them. That is the effect I want to get in my film.” What if you are caught in an outside universe, where you could not connect with the forces and objects all around you, where reality, as you know it, has changed? Dreyer has created a film about the relationship between man and his environment by undermining the way we perceive intensely unpredictable information, by utilizing oddly placed symbols and German Expressionism to express this disconnection. After WWI, the German consciousness felt afflicted by circumstances beyond their control, hyper-inflation, joblessness, civic instability, creating a heightened sense of anxiety that was very camera conscious, as it could easily be exploited through art. So Dreyer created a visual demonstration, sculpting oddly cast shadows, using shots from odd angles, changing how objects are placed in space, where the canvas of the screen resembles a painting reflecting the consciousness of the Germans themselves. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Hermann Warm, one of the set designers responsible for THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, was the film’s Art Director. However, not one set was built for this film, which was shot on location near Paris at Senlis and Montargis, filmed at a real inn and an unused ice factory. Although Expressionism ended in the late 20’s, Dreyer still utilized this eerie strangeness, including the discovery of film stock that was over-exposed to light, but which he chose to keep in his film, giving a surreal context between shadows and light, a very mannered style, but it was what he was looking for, creating a netherworld, using the portal of the camera lens to navigate the viewer through, led by the lead character Allan Gray, also known as David Gray, allowing us to see the world as he sees it.

Dreyer likes putting people into places they are totally unprepared for, where they haven’t a clue what’s in store for them. Here the entire universe is undergoing protean shifts, designed through ghostly textures, where the whole world of the vampires is deprived of anything resembling good. When young traveler Allan arrives at a remote castle in the woods, unbeknownst to him, an old innkeeper and his two daughters are under siege by vampires, who are looking for victims to create new vampires, whose influence permeates everywhere, but whose actual identities remain unknown to the potential victims, such as the eccentric family Doctor, who always seems to be there to help invoke a needed suicide, considered a sin beyond redemption, leaving the victims eternally damned and subject to the rule of the vampires. Gray doesn’t belong there in a world that was prefigured before his arrival, where everything around him resonates instability. The first image we see is of an old man with his ferry boat silhouetted against the misty river carrying over his shoulder the scythe of Death, but Gray lacks the sensitivity to recognize any sense of fear or danger. He is surrounded by a swamp of immoral souls, yet he doesn’t recognize how dangerous it is. Dreyer has created a fear of the intangible, a world where there is no boundary between states of being and its shadow, “a symphony of the unreal,” where there is no anchor of reality to hold onto, where you recognize the shape of something, but it’s been deprived of its use, where there are shadows literally dancing along the walls that don’t belong to anyone we can see, including a one-legged man climbing a ladder, or sounds of dogs and children that don’t exist. Gray is in one state, becoming another state, where we wonder is he dreaming or is this real? In the vampire world, death is normal. Everything around it lacks shape and form. How do you judge this world? Gray brought with him his knowledge of personal relationships, love, redemption, but they have no usefulness here. He must adapt to the conditions of this world before he can cross back to the world he knows, where he can be restored back into the world from which he departed. Gray couldn’t recognize if he was happy or sad. Instead he’s in a state of neutral, optically observing. Dreyer is revealing the social state. We routinely find things around us that are insidious, a world surrounded by corruption and temptation, but we cope with it as if it’s normal, developing an apathy and indifference to its evil nature. Gray was blind to the complexity of forces trying to destroy him and had to find a point of reference before he could act to change his situation.

Gray was divided, he was fascinated by the bizarre nature of what he sees, but he couldn’t clinically detach himself until he witnessed his own death. Without using special effects, everything was done on camera. Dreyer utilized two cameras, one shooting Allan as an actual person, the other his ghost, devised by continuously changing the lighting until his figure was barely there, then placing the image simultaneously on top of the other. In this manner, Dreyer created one of the most powerful moments in cinema, where Allan becomes a ghost himself and sees himself lying in a coffin, where his ghost joins the body there, where the camera is placed inside the coffin and we share what he sees, as we witness the lid being screwed on through a glass window, wax drips from a candle onto the glass, and an old woman peers in. He’s awake to witness his own burial, cognizant of all he sees, feeling this whole experience, his own death. We share his helpless, silent anguish as the coffin is placed on a horse drawn cart and driven past rooftops, with the leaves of trees overhead, following the route to the cemetery, where we can hear the peeling of the church bells. The film is shot as a silent film, but it utilizes basic elements of sound. This scene was so powerful, that out of fear, the German distributors deleted this sequence from the film. Dreyer wanted to restore art to its most purified form, immune from the forces of corruption and commerce. He created a very progressive film that influenced other optical effects in later films, but this coffin sequence, which took him the greatest amount of time to film, was largely unrecognized in his body of work, which caused him considerable despair, actually leading to a nervous breakdown.

Notes of interest: one of the daughters in the film, Léone, whose blood was sucked by a vampire and who spent much of the film sick in her bed moaning things, like “Oh, if I could only die...” is played by Sybille Schmitz, also appearing in DOES NOT ANSWER (1932), later rumored to be one of the mistresses of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, later blacklisted by Goebbels, and she allegedly committed suicide in 1955.  Fassbinder was reportedly looking for Schmitz to play the mother in PETRA VON KANT, apparently unaware of her fate, and when discovered, decided to make her story into his film VERONIKA VOSS, which mirrors the long downfall of Veronika Voss, an aging Third Reich actress.  The film actually begins with Voss watching alone in a theater witnessing one of her old, lurid screen performances where her character is injected with drugs, a scene that shadows both her final days in the film and Fassbinder's fate, as he is also in the same theater watching the film.  In the film, her own doctor, a sado-masochistic lesbian Dr Katz, mercilessly exploits her by feeding her morphine habit, signing over all her life's belongings as payment, leading to her suicide.  When investigated, the real life Schmitz had been living in her doctor's house at the time of her suicide.  She seemed to be assisted by another doctor, an official working in the Munich Health Department, who issued the prescriptions.  The two supplied hard drugs in exchange for cash, specializing in celebrities from the Nazi period, covering for each other when their patients committed suicide, supposedly when they could no longer pay.

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

The greatness of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first sound film derives partly from its handling of the vampire theme in terms of sexuality and eroticism and partly from its highly distinctive, dreamy look, but it also has something to do with the director’s radical recasting of narrative form. Synopsing the film not only betrays but also misrepresents it: While never less than mesmerizing, it confounds conventions for establishing point of view and continuity, and inventing a narrative language all its own. Some of the moods and images conveyed by this language are truly uncanny: the long voyage of a coffin from the apparent viewpoint of the corpse inside; a dance of ghostly shadows inside a barn; a female vampire’s expression of carnal desire for her fragile sister; and evil doctor’s mysterious death by suffocation in a flour mill; and a protracted dream sequence that manages to dovetail eerily into narrative proper.

Financed and produced by a Dutch cinephile, Baron Nicholas de Gunzburg – who was cast in the leading role of David Gray under the pseudonym of Julian West – Vampyr was freely adapted from a short story by Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla,” that appeared in his collection Through a Glass Darkly (not a novel, as stated erroneously in the film’s credits). Like most of Dreyer’s other sound features, it flopped commercially when it came out, then went on to become something of a horror and fantasy (as well as art movie) staple, despite never fitting snugly or unambiguously in any of these generic categories.

The remarkable sound track. created entirely in a studio, in contrast to the images, which were all filmed on location, is an essential part of the film’s voluptuous and haunting otherworldliness. Vampyr was originally released by Dreyer in four separate versions – French, English, German, and Danish. Most circulating prints now contain portions of two or three of these versions, although the dialogue is pretty sparse. If you’ve never seen a Dreyer film and wonder why many critics regard him as possibly the greatest of all filmmakers, this chilling horror fantasy is the perfect place to begin to understand.

Deep Focus [Bryant Frazer]

Pushing the boundaries of cinematic representation, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s expressionistic marvel includes a transcendent sequence where the audience itself is put in a coffin and carried through town to the graveyard. Vampyr is a sound film (the dialogue was postsynchronized in several different languages) with something of a silent sensiblity that adds to its eerie atmosphere. Haunting and beautiful, Dreyer’s horror film is both essential viewing for vampire buffs and one of the most inscrutable yet rewarding experiences in movie history. Naturally, the movie was ignored by critics and audiences alike, and it was a decade before Dreyer made another film.

All Movie Guide [Todd Kristel]

Vampyr isn't the easiest classic film to enjoy, even if you are a fan of 1930s horror movies. It was originally shot as a silent film and later dubbed with a limited amount of dialogue; the performances are uneven (with some stylized acting that's reminiscent of the silent era), the disjointed plot would be considered confusing in any era, and the sparse dialogue makes the film seem even more vague and disquieting. Cinematographer Rudolph Mate provided a foggy, washed-out look to this black-and-white movie by allowing extra light to leak onto the exposed film; the blinding whites and muted grays fit well with the dreamlike nature of Vampyr, but some people may find these ghostly visuals hard to watch, particularly if they are viewing a scratchy print with poor subtitling. The use of long takes enhances the film's sense of eeriness, but it also deadens the pacing; the movie is too slow and ambiguous to be considered much of a thriller. But Carl Dreyer, whose other films include the silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, isn't that type of director anyway; he has more in common with filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman, who openly admired his work, and David Lynch, who has also shown a fondness for dreamlike movies that emphasize mood and imagery over an easily comprehensible plot. If you're patient with the slow pacing and ambiguous story line of Vampyr, you'll find that this film offers many striking images, including a man who sits down before his shadow does, a man who's buried under tons of flour, a room that gets darker as the door opens, and a funeral procession that's shot from inside a coffin. Although not exciting in terms of pacing, it's a good choice if you want to see a film that establishes a compelling mood.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]

Like much of early 1930s cinema, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr exists in a strange limbo between silent and sound film styles. Originally shot as a silent, with sound added later, the film is a peculiar mix of visual and aural narration. Lengthy intertitles and agile camerawork by frequent Dreyer collaborator Rudolph Maté combine with minimal (and largely superfluous) dialogue and atmospheric sounds.

Fortunately for Dreyer (or perhaps as the director had intended), the effect of this odd, transitional style is thoroughly disorienting and therefore very much in keeping with the subject matter of the film as a whole. Nearly all of Dreyer’s films concern the cinematic representation of interiority (through camera movement, lighting, close-ups, sound, and especially performance), but Vampyr is surely one of the most extreme, expressionistic examples.

The film follows Allan Grey, a young man whose studies of devil worship have robbed him of a firm grasp of the “boundary between the real and unreal.” Given to “aimless journeys” (which usually have him wandering in and out of houses unannounced), Grey is like a more decadent version of Ordet’s Johannes, whose sense of the real was upended by his reading of Kierkegaard. Like Johannes, however, Grey also wakes from his reverie to help a woman rise from the dead, although this time the woman is the victim of an insidious outbreak of vampirism, which has even seduced the village doctor.

Vampyr plays upon a number of the archetypal fears of modern horror (science, doctors, disease, women, insanity, premature burial), but the film’s power lies in its range of disorienting visual effects. Characteristic of Dreyer, a particularly active camera (as yet unencumbered by the complexities of sound recording) creates a sense of maze-like spaces with 360° pans and tracking shots that prefigure the dreamlike steadycam work of late Kubrick. As a German co-production, the film borrows much from the light design of Weimar cinema, suggesting the skewed sense of reality that characterizes the protagonist’s consciousness.

A Film Odyssey [Rob Humanick]

Through a hallucinatory combination of desaturated images and muffled audio (as if implying that the viewer themselves is in the state of a trance), Vampyr exercises its muted horror not in the form of a traceable narrative but by means of the lingering vision of a haunted and often logic-defying dream. It’s cloudy visual aesthetic the result of an accidental stock exposure (which, when discovered in the dailies, impressed director Dreyer so much that he chose to repeat the process for the entire film), the film’s ever-gliding camera effortlessly creates an overwhelming sense of place, even while that place is ever-shifting and just out of grasp. Bodiless shadows, unseen spirits and other suggestions of the unreal cumulate in a nerve-racking sense of menace, the conflict manifesting less in physical violence than a dreadful unease. We never really see the vampire at the source of the film’s death and misfortune (at least not in expected fangs-and-cloak form), but the presence of the undead is unmistakably felt throughout.

Given the emphasis placed on mood, it is unsurprising that the scenes committed to narrative exposition are among Vampyr’s least compelling, yet even these approach a level of tonal mastery. The loose, loose story concerns a wandering philosopher, David Gray (Julian West), who comes upon a country manor, his arrival immediately foreshadowing some sense of doom when an old man inexplicably enters into his room, leaving behind a note marked “Do not open until after my death.” Compelled to explore his bizarre surroundings, David bears witness to the bizarre murder of the old man and subsequent attack on one of his two daughters. The shadowlike spirits abound and mysterious folk suggest deeper threads of foul play, although David has less of an active role in the matters than he does simply act as an audience surrogate. The story here is beside the point; what we’re watching is not unlike some metaphysical duel between the spirits of good and evil in a pseudo-physical manifestation.

If Vampyr is but a dream on film (which is to say it’s not nearly as complex as any of Lynch’s dream-within-a-dreams, although at times its just as seductive as his Mulholland Drive), then Dreyer’s camera acts as the dreamer’s floating presence. Tranquil pans convey a sense of action beyond the limits of the frame, often happening upon dreadful deeds just committed. Characters themselves act as if in something of a trance, hardly sedated but nonetheless acting as if controlled by forces other than their own. This languished tone conveys the spiritual chaos at the core of the film, but its use of inexplicable and eerie imagery – from a funeral procession seen from inside the coffin to a person buried beneath a pile of purifying flour – is equally foreboding. Dreyer – fresh off his masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc – again uses his composition to its fullest potential, the characters and their surroundings positioned in manners most suggestive of ill will lurking about. That some consider it one of the finest horror films ever made is both a blessing and a curse - Vampyr is a masterwork, but more than simply being frightening, it penetrates deep into the psyche to carry out its menacing, ethereal lurk.

Turner Classic Movies [James Steffen]

When Allan Gray arrives in a small town and rents a room at an inn, he finds himself caught up in a series of uncanny occurrences. A stranger enters his room at night and leaves him a sealed book with the inscription "to be opened in the event of my death." Allan learns that this man is a local nobleman with two daughters. One of the daughters, Leone, is suffering from a mysterious illness. The cause, Allan discerns, is an aged vampire, Marguerite Chopin, who controls the forces of the night with the help of a sinister doctor. Together with the nobleman's faithful servant, Allan must find a way to rid the village of the vampire and free Leone from her spell.

For many years Vampyr (1932) was regarded as an unfortunate detour in the career of Danish director Carl-Theodor Dreyer between his two masterpieces, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Day of Wrath (1943). At the time of its release, Vampyr had a mixed critical reception; like Dreyer's previous film, it lost money and Dreyer was unable to make a feature film again for over ten years. Since then, thanks to the efforts of film historians and critics such as William K. Everson and Tom Milne, the film's reputation has risen dramatically; today it is often considered one of the most artistically accomplished horror films ever made.

After the financial disaster of The Passion of Joan of Arc, the Societe Generale de Films, with whom Dreyer had a contract, refused to fund his next project. This was due no doubt in part to the company's weak financial state after expensive failures such as Dreyer's film and Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927). Dreyer sued the company for breach of contract and won the case in 1931.

Eventually, the Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg, a young Dutch nobleman with a passion for cinema, was cast in the lead role under the pseudonym Julian West. He also agreed to produce Vampyr when the original backing fell through. Work progressed slowly; shooting lasted for approximately a year, starting in the spring of 1930. The sound was recorded by July 1931 and the film was released in May of 1932.

An international film if there ever was one, Vampyr was directed by a Dane, produced by a German studio (Tobis-Klangfilm), and filmed entirely on location in France, in the towns of Senlis and Montargis outside of Paris. Separate German, French, and English-language versions were prepared for distribution. The Baron de Gunzberg recalls: "Each scene was shot three times for the French, English and German versions whenever there was any dialogue involved. It was shot silent with all of us mouthing the words. The sound was put in later at the UFA studios in Berlin, as they had the best sound equipment at that time." Today the film survives in a variety of cuts, most of them incomplete to varying degrees - including a severely cut, redubbed 60-minute English-language print entitled Castle of Doom. The print being shown on TCM is the German-language version, the one Dreyer reportedly preferred.

Vampyr is above all a stylistic tour de force. Dreyer and his cinematographer Rudolph Mate made effective use of the morning fogs rolling through the landscape and the mist rising up from the ponds to add to the ambiguous mood of the picture. Dreyer also insisted on filming the exterior scenes only at dawn because, according to Baron de Gunzberg, "the light gave the best effect of sundown." The film's unique look came about accidentally; Dreyer says: "We had begun shooting on the film - starting with the opening scene - and after one of the first screenings of the rushes we noticed that one of the takes was gray. We wondered why, until we realized that a false light had been projected on to the lens. We thought about that take, the producer, Rudolph Mate and I, in relation to the style we were looking for. Finally, we decided that all we had to do was deliberately repeat the accident. So after that, for each take we arranged a false light by directing a spotlight hung with a black cloth on to the lens." Dreyer's use of sound is equally remarkable; what little dialogue the film has is fragmented and at times difficult to hear, becoming part of the hazy sonic landscape of tolling bells, barking dogs, and echoing calls. The soundtrack was constructed entirely in the recording studio; even the animal cries were created by skilled human imitators. Dreyer also deliberately plays with the concept of a cinematic point of view throughout, especially in the celebrated sequence where the protagonist dreams of his own burial, which he witnesses as a gaping-eyed corpse through a small window in the lid of his coffin.

The Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg moved to the United States in 1934 and worked for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and Town and Country, before becoming the longtime senior fashion editor for Vogue. Sybille Schmitz, who plays Leone, the sister who falls under the spell of the vampire, is one of only two professional actors in the cast; the other is Maurice Schutz, who had worked with Dreyer previously in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Schmitz started her career in silent films such as G. W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and later became a favorite actress of Goebbels during the Nazi era, but she fell out of favor and later became a drug addict, committing suicide in 1955. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, fascinated by her story, used it as the basis for his film Veronika Voss (1982). Wolfgang Zeller, who composed the haunting score for Vampyr, worked with some of Germany's most accomplished directors in the late 1920s and early '30s, among them G. W. Pabst for the film L'Atlantide (1932). Zeller later composed the score for the Third Reich's most notorious anti-Semitic propaganda film, Jud Suss (1940).

Vampyr is often described as an adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla, part of his popular 1872 collection of stories In a Glass Darkly and an enduring classic of vampire literature. While the film retains the novella's lesbian vampire motif (with less of the original's strong sexual overtones), just about everything else is changed. It would be more accurate to say that Dreyer's film borrows freely from motifs in Le Fanu's collection as a whole. Later films such as Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses (1960) and Hammer productions such as The Vampire Lovers (1970) are arguably closer to Le Fanu's Carmilla - at least in terms of plot, if not psychological depth. Chief among Dreyer's many inspired inventions is the film's protagonist Allan Gray; in the novella, the tale is told from the point of view of the young girl who falls under the vampire's spell. In Vampyr, through the film's probing camera movements we share the unsettling passivity and incomprehension of Allan Gray as he witnesses the supernatural events unfolding around him.

Vampyr’s Ghosts and Demons Criterion essay by Mark Le Fanu, July 21, 2008

Vampyr (1932) - The Criterion Collection

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Classic Horror [Chris Justice]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

DVD Times [Michael Brooke]

Carl-Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1931) and Lucio Fulci's E tu vivrai nel terrore—L'aldilà (1981) Michael Grant from Kinoeye

Film as Art Danél Griffin

1000 Misspent Hours [Scott Ashlin]

Movie Vault [Mel Valentin]

Oggs' Movie Thoughts: Vampyr (1932)

Silent Film Sources Review David Pierce

Epinions [metalluk]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

YouTube - VAMPYR 1932 the film may be seen in its entirety on YouTube

Vampyr Gary W. Tooze from DVDBeaver

GOOD MOTHERS (Mødrehjælpen)

Denmark (12 mi) 1942

DVD Times Anthony Nield (excerpt)

It’s the extras, however, which may be deemed most important especially as they contain two of Dreyer’s public information shorts from the 1940s and Torben Skydt Jensen’s 1995 feature-length documentary Carl Th. Dreyer: Min Metier.

Elsewhere, the two shorts prove equally intriguing. Good Mothers looks at a refuge for single mothers and the manner in which they are taught to look after their newborns, whilst They Caught the Ferry is an anti-speeding piece shot, somewhat surprisingly, in a manner akin to Claude Lelouch’s C’était un rendezvous!

DAY OF WRATH (Vredens dag) A 99

Denmark (105 mi) 1943

“Who are they hunting now?”

DAY OF WRATH, along with THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC and ORDET, the three films for which Dreyer is chiefly known, the narrative takes the upper hand dictating the somber texture of these films, earning Dreyer his undeserved reputation for spiritual gloom and misery. Shot during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and premiered in November 1943, at a time when the country was without a government, having resigned August 29^th in protest over the Nazi demands to remove all Danish citizens of Jewish origin, considered by the beleaguered Danes to be a symbol of resistance, an allegory of the Nazi occupation, though Dreyer indicated the political overtones of this thought had never occurred to him in the making of the film, which is about repression, religious hypocrisy and fanaticism. While American, British, and French films were banned in Denmark during the occupation, allowing the Danish film industry to flourish, this opened up an opportunity for Dreyer to make another film. Based on a play by the Norwegian playwright Hans Wiers-Jenssen, a drama of sexual torment, gorgeously shot, this is a haunting, austere story of an old woman accused of being a witch in 1623 and the affect her burning has on her small town, cursing the pastor who judged her before she dies. While the film never establishes what crime she allegedly committed, suffice it to say it was enough to be accused. Witchcraft was used by rational intelligent tribunals to offer their judgment in their particular areas of intolerance. Meticulously recreating the material details to document this period in time, this film is not about religious convictions, it is about how the church at the time kept people in line, how in their cloistered environment, unquestioned institutions forced people to believe in something that was contrary to their own natural beliefs. In this case, the delusional was normal, as people believed the improbable by accepting the supernatural. In this time period where everyone was a Lutheran, everyone knew witchcraft was true, no one questioned it. People were declared witches simply because they didn’t belong, and in this film we see that the rules were disproportionately applied. The witch trials were an elaborate backdrop for how people saw themselves, opening up a turbulent cauldron of less than admirable behavior that comes forward in full force. What we see in the opening sequence is the witch being tracked down in her darkened hut, where we see her leave through a trap door outside the pig pen, an indication that she was already labeled subhuman, lower than low.

In the actual sentencing scene, which follows shortly after a scene of the clerics brutally torturing the witch until she confesses, causing one of them to remark, “That was a good confession,” the camera moves left as it pans right, looking past all the townsfolk who have come out to witness the public burning of a witch, creating an odd visualization that remains on a horizontal plane, while the witch they are regarding remains still in the center, which helps us identify with her plight. When a vertical insertion of an object is thrown into the mix, in this case the witch strapped to a ladder, we see her thrown into the fire face first, falling directly into the center of the flame, which is a shocking strategy as it’s so visually abrupt, that to watch it is nearly unbearable.

Absolom is a huge religious cleric who holds in his hands the power of life and death. He is married to a young, beautiful blond wife, Anne, played with a brazen sexuality by Lisbeth Molven, whose darting, alert eyes express her mood, and they live together in a loveless and sexless relationship in the church rectory under the eyes of his aged mother who rules the house with an iron fist, who makes a point to hold all the keys to the house, and who firmly believes motherhood takes precedence over a young wife that in her eyes is an unbearable outrage. Her controlling character remains indoors at all times, and sees nature and the outdoors as abhorrent, a venal place to avoid at all costs. However, this film is about guilt patterns, and how, when one tries to expunge the guilt, it only creates a domino effect which leads to inevitable results. We learn from the burned witch that Absolom abandoned his own principles to pardon Anne’s mother, who was also declared a witch, in order to marry Anne, who may be 40 or 50-years younger than he, so he’s already tainted. What follows is a film about betrayal, male power, and female desire, where society as a whole, but men in particular, have an instinctual fear of independent women empowered by their own sexuality. Add to this household Absolom’s returning son, Martin, who is nearer to Anne’s age, probably the only person she’s ever seen near her own age, and she is immediately smitten with him, falling in love, becoming so infatuated with love and her burgeoning sense of eroticism that she is hauntingly oblivious to the consequences, constantly taking risks, undermining the power of the matriarch, expressed through her smiling glances, her laughter, and their open display of affection outdoors.

But carnality has palpable consequences. As much as Anne’s sexuality was extremely repressed before, now her candid openness has moved to the opposite extreme, she becomes insatiable, living in a euphoric free-for-all, expressed through her eyes in an elaborately choreographed indoor scene where she is literally stalking Martin like a panther after his mother goes off to bed. Dreyer then cross-cuts the duality of nature, showing the abandonment of Anne and Martin frolicking in the fields as Absolom broods on his own mortal sin, eventually fulfilling his responsibility by paying a visit to a dying man, constantly cutting back and forth between the two extremes. While Anne’s passions are unleashed, asking “Is it a sin to love?” Martin is hesitant, there is a boundary he won’t transgress, as he doesn’t wish his actions to be known by his father, who is then seen praying for the dead. Anne mentions she has thoughts, wondering what her life might be like if she weren’t married to Absolom, wondering what if he were dead. Absolom, walking on his rounds, immediately feels a cold brush with death. And when he returns home, Anne, in a momentary revolt, reiterates this same theme. Absolom keels over dead. At the funeral service, the pastor’s aging mother, shrouded in black from head to toe, denounces her as a witch and accuses her of using witchcraft to ensnare Martin under her spell and kill her husband. Abandoned by Martin, who now believes she is a witch, Anne, the only one wearing white other than the children’s choir who open the scene in a slow and solemn procession, testifies to her guilt filmed in a white light, as she has been utterly demoralized enough to believe she might actually have the power, by thinking of one’s death, to cause their death. Using a pace that is entirely Dreyer-like, great atmospheric intensity and visual beauty with Vermeer-style interiors, there is a sense of nature and anguish, love and fear, with extraordinary acting by old people, particularly the old peasant woman who is burned at the stake, contrasted against the brilliance of Lisbeth Molven’s performance portraying carefree youth and the beauty of innocent love which is crushed under the callous weight of the authorities.

from The Cinema of Carl Dreyer by Tom Milne:

“If DAY OF WRATH may be characterized as a study of the struggle between good and evil, or a powerful plea against intolerance, it is also – and perhaps primarily – a deeply probing exploration of the driving power of sex; and the strange resignation with which Anne finally confesses to her crime of witchcraft is occasioned less by her recognition that it is a crime than by her knowledge that her love is now doomed.”

Download this essay David Bordwell from Film Art

Many films pose few difficulties for viewers who like their movies straightforward and easy to digest. But not all films are so clear in their form and style. In films like Day of Wrath, the questions we ask often do not get definite answers; endings do not tie everything up; film technique does not always function invisibily to advance the narrative. When analyzing such films, we should restrain ourselves from trying to answer all of the film’s questions and to create neatly satisfying endings. Instead of ignoring peculiarities of technique, we should seek to examine how film form and style create uncertainty — seek to understand the cinematic conditions that produce ambiguity. Day of Wrath, a tale of witchcraft and murder set in seventeenth-century Denmark, offers a good test case.

Carl Theodor Dreyer x 3 Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Made in 1943, during the darkest days of the Nazi occupation, Day of Wrath exemplifies the deliberate, intense, and beautifully austere style for which Dreyer's films are celebrated -- a style often described, with the work of Ozu and Bresson, as "transcendental." In a small Danish village in the early 17th-century, an aging pastor has an elderly woman burned at the stake as a witch, and is cursed by her as she dies. The pastor's young wife is the unhappy Anne (Lisbeth Movin, in an extraordinary, anguished performance), daughter of an accused witch he had once spared. When Martin, the pastor's son by a previous marriage, returns from sea, Anne falls in love with him -- and ultimately finds herself accused of witchcraft. Many of the director's key concerns and preoccupations here find expression: questions of faith; problems of good and evil; suffering and martyrdom; the psychology of victimized women (Dreyer's own mother had died a horrible death after an unsuccessful abortion attempt). Day of Wrath is "the masterpiece of a genius of cinema . . . the use of extended silences and ambiguity, the portrayal of states of being, and the poetic inflections of the whole presage the modern cinema and set it a standard of excellence seldom surpassed" (Amos Vogel). Denmark 1943.

Introduction BFI Screen Online (link lost)

Day of Wrath is a stark drama of love and witchcraft in the 17th century. It marked Carl Dreyer's return to directing in the midst of World War II after a barely explained hiatus of 11 years since he made the haunting Vampyr. Demonstrating that he had lost none of his powers of precision or uncompromising rigour as a film-maker, it became the first in the trilogy of late, great masterpieces with which Dreyer ended his career.

Inevitably seen as an allegory of Nazi occupation, Day of Wrath is set in a Danish village in 1623 against a background of fear, superstition, betrayal and religious cruelty. Anne, a young woman who has married an elderly preacher responsible for sending an old peasant woman to the stake, falls in love with his son and wishes her husband dead. When he obliges, she is accused by her mother-in-law of witchcraft and condemned to be burnt... Dreyer's persistent theme of women suffering sacrificially at the hands of malicious and sanctimonious men is writ large in Day of Wrath, whilst his austerely beautiful compositions, camera movements and instrumental close-ups reach perfection in a film of unparalleled visual brilliance and profound emotion.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Car-chase lovers need not apply, philosophers of the world...recoil. Rather than denying the existence of witches and the evil one, Carl Dreyer predicates his action on their reality and the premise that evil brings everyone down in their own way. Clerics lie to each other to protect themselves, lovers lie to each other to protect their love, children prepare new and beautiful a capella hymns for the witch burning, "suspects" are tortured for "the glory of God," condemning priests pray extra hard for the souls of the damned to compensate for their complicity, it's remarkable that Scandinavian style was ever able to overcome any of this. It's easy enough to understand how Anna Svierkier falls so hard for Preben Lerdoff Rye after we get a good look at Thorkild Roose-severe and pompous in righteousness derived by position and robe, well meaning but afraid and cutting deals that he has to, and that terrify him. Svierkier is only brilliant, the most sympathetic and empathetic figure despite (or because of) her rationalizations of dark yearnings, with her head bowed and her eyes raised, fighting only for her love at the expense of all else, how can there not be heavy metal songs written in her honour? (answer: illiterate cro-magnons still trying to find a rhyme for "Lugosi") Betrayed by love and condemned by her own truth. It's a helluva argument that man will go wrong whatever situation we're put in, but an even better one, inadvertently I think, that we're being manipulated into situations that we can't handle. It's the most Protestant thing I've ever seen.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

As a film about the persecution of (so-called) witches in 1620s Denmark, made in that country during the Nazi occupation, Day of Wrath was never likely to be a barrel of laughs. And, indeed, it’s as stark, austere, grim, downbeat and intense as you’d probably expect. The pace is by no means fast, and there’s a staginess to some of the performances and direction - the script, by Dreyer and Poul Knudsen, is based on a play. But this is probably an accurate reflection of how life did proceed the best part of 400 years ago – as much as it’s a result of how film-making styles have evolved over the past six decades.

Dreyer has been notably influential on other directors over the course of those decades, both in terms of the spiritual/psychological complexity of his concerns, and also in more mundane ways: the way the ‘witches’ are lowered onto the flames suggests that Michael Reeves was aware of this film before making Witchfinder General, while the creepy chorus of children joyfully belting out the hymn ‘Day of Wrath’ as the flames consume their victim foreshadows Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Lars von Trier, meanwhile, has seldom missed the chance to pay tribute to his countryman: the sternly disapproving village elders from his Breaking the Waves are close kin to the similarly forbidding figures in Day of Wrath. And the final twist – in which love proves to be far from enough – prefigures the Tom/Grace relationship in von Trier’s Dogville.

Like von Trier, Dreyer subjects his heroines to daunting physical and mental trials – most famously in his 1928 Passion of Joan of Arc. Here it’s Lisbeth Movin’s Anne who goes through the wringer: trapped in a loveless marriage to a much older man, Reverend Absalon Pedersson (Thorkild Roose), she seizes her chance of happiness when the pastor’s son Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye) arrives home after several years’ travel. But things start to go awry when elderly Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier) is tried as a witch and burned alive – the repercussions of this event will have dire consequences for all concerned, bringing to light certain uncomfortable facts about Anne’s late mother...

Though the second half of the film drags a little in its concentration on the sappy Anne/Martin romance, the first hour is a compellingly intense experience as the sexual tensions in the Pedersson household mount in parallel with the harrowing trial and execution of the seemingly-benign Marte. Seventysomething Sigrid Neiiendam is the dominant presence as Absalon’s indomitable mother, a glowering battle-axe who scarcely bothers to conceal her contempt for her ‘wanton’ daughter-in-law. Filming almost entirely indoors and (with cinematographer Karl Andersson) often deploying slow tracking-shots through the house, Dreyer crafts a powerfully convincing tale of claustrophobic family life - lit by candle-light that illuminates but casts very dark shadows.

It’s a heady mix of jealousy, guilt, hypocrisy and suspicion, full of repressed private emotions which we see surfacing in public in the form of the witch-hunt hysteria. But while the Christians’ methods are horrifyingly barbaric, Dreyer makes it clear that there are witches at work here – indeed, in this world witchcraft is a much more powerful and effective than orthodox religion. We see two instances of ‘witches’ casting spells (both, interestingly, against ‘holy’ men) and in both instances, the result is death, although their success brings no happiness to the witch. Then again, pretty much everyone ends up burning, either physically or psychologically – and in this society witchcraft seems to offer women their only real opportunity of power. Anne, we’re told, wasn’t even consulted about her ill-advised marriage to Absalon.

In terms of the specific political situation under which the film was made, however, the subtext of Day of Wrath isn’t quite so straightforward. While Denmark under the Nazis was obviously an environment marked by paranoia, suspicion and denunciation, Dreyer’s film doesn’t really hold up as a specific allegory for wartime events. Arthur Miller, of course, often denied that his play The Crucible was principally intended as an allegory of McCarthyism. Both Dreyer and Miller, although writing at a particular juncture in history and looking back to another, are making universal points about human fallibility, ones that transcend the grim particulars of their own dark decades – and ours.

Figuring Out Day of Wrath Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 20, 2001

Day of Wrath (1943) - The Criterion Collection

Bright Lights Film Journal [Gary Morris] Gary Morris, also here: Images - Carl Theodor Dreyer

Derek Malcolm's Century of Films Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

Dan Schneider on Day Of Wrath from Cosmoetica

Catching the Classics [Clayton L. White]

Epinions [metalluk]

Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag)—A Parable for Critics by Ray Carney

DVD Times [Anthony Nield]

Long Pauses Darren Hughes

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

The Film Atheist Reviews - Day of Wrath

Seraphic Secret: Day of Wrath Robert J. Avrech

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

The New Pictures - TIME Time magazine

All Movie Guide [Mark Pittillo]

Channel 4 Film [Jamie Russell]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Guardian/Observer

BFI | Books & DVDs | DVD & Video | Films by Carl Theodor Dreyer BFI also reviews MASTER OF THE HOUSE, ORDET, and GERTRUD

DVD Savant Review: Carl Theodor Dreyer Box Set Glenn Erickson on the 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection, also including ORDET, GERTRUD, and the documentary CARL TH. DREYER: MY MÉTIER

Filmmaker Magazine | Fall 2001: LOAD + PLAY Scooter McCrae on the 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection from Filmmaker magazine

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

Reel.com DVD review [Bill Schwartz] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

digitallyOBSESSED! [Mark Zimmer] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

The Film Desk [James Kendrick] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

BFI & Carl Dreyer this Spring Dave Foster reviews the 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection from DVD Times

DVD Times - BFI & Carl Dreyer this Spring (Part 2) Dave Foster from DVD Times

DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

THEY CAUGHT THE FERRY (De nåede færgen)

Denmark (11 mi) 1948

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

The disc's supplements are the best kind—rare, freestanding shorts, one a sponsored documentary about the 19th-century Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen, the other, "They Caught the Ferry," a startling and almost wordless PSA about driver safety that intersects with Vampyr and Day of Wrath.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] (excerpt)

Scandinavian sourpuss Carl Theodor Dreyer isn't known for his sense of humor, but that's only because his later sound features are so much better known than his early silents. Image's disc is filled out by two later shorts: the mildly revealing Thorvaldsen: Denmark's Greatest Sculptor (1949) and the live-fast-die-young morality play They Caught the Ferry (1948), which might be the most artful driver's-ed movie ever made.

DVD Times Noel Megahey (excerpt)

Another of a number of the short films Dreyer made during this period when the director was having difficulties getting finance for his films. They Caught The Ferry was financed by the Road Safety Council. A couple on a motorbike, in a hurry to catch the ferry in Nyborg, go to dangerous speeds to make it before the ferry leaves. This is a simple little idea, but one that is well made with some good bike photography. The picture shows quite a number of tramline scratches that are visible throughout, but otherwise the quality is excellent, showing a clear, sharp black & white image.

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) (excerpt)

This disc includes a couple of shorts that Dreyer directed.  The first is They Caught the Ferry (De Naede Faergen) from 1948.  A man and woman get off a ferry and find out that they have 45 minutes to catch the Nyborg ferry that is 70 km away.  They hop on his motorcycle and speed through the Dutch countryside.  The scenery is beautiful, and Dreyer's direction is interesting.  He has 1st person POV shots taken from the moving motorcycle, and shots looking down on the moving front tire which really creates the illusion of speed.  The ending of the film was unexpected and worked very well.  A very good short.

DVD Times Anthony Nield (excerpt)

It’s the extras, however, which may be deemed most important especially as they contain two of Dreyer’s public information shorts from the 1940s and Torben Skydt Jensen’s 1995 feature-length documentary Carl Th. Dreyer: Min Metier.

Elsewhere, the two shorts prove equally intriguing. Good Mothers looks at a refuge for single mothers and the manner in which they are taught to look after their newborns, whilst They Caught the Ferry is an anti-speeding piece shot, somewhat surprisingly, in a manner akin to Claude Lelouch’s C’était un rendezvous!

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

Legendary director Carl Theodor Dreyer never made a hit movie in his life. Of course, he never made a bad movie either. But after several flops, including The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), and Day of Wrath (1945), he had real trouble getting financing. So, just after World War II he took a job making public service shorts financed by the government of Denmark, provided that he himself was able to write the scripts. The most famous of these shorts today is the 10-minute They Caught the Ferry (1948), a driver's safety film.

They Caught the Ferry played at the 2000 San Francisco International Film Festival as part of a series of silent shorts accompanied by live music by guitarist Tom Verlaine (who played with the seminal 1970's rock band Television). The other films were fine, but this one took my breath away.

It begins with a man and a woman riding a ferry about to dock. The man revs up his motorcycle, the woman climbs on back and they take off. The farther they get from the ferry, the more rural the roads become. They pass cars, motorcycles, and eventually cattle and horses. Dreyer does an amazing job of conveying speed, with quick cuts to the speedometer, and the movement and clarity of the road and the roadside. Of course, Verlaine's music helped tremendously with its adrenaline-pumping chords.

The twist comes when the man passes a black car with a strange looking skeletal pattern on the back. After maneuvering a fork in the road, the car passes them up and the man really pours on the steam to pass once again. But the car keeps speeding up. As he finally gets side-by-side with it, we can see that the driver is none other than Death, a pale, cadaverous looking fellow dressed in black. At that point, the man and the woman smash into a tree. And we in the audience have presumably learned our lesson.

Of course They Caught the Ferry lacks the supreme elegance and artistry of something like The Passion of Joan of Arc or Vampyr, plus I have no idea now what the film was originally supposed to sound like or what music went with it, but I was thrilled just the same. What a great way for newcomers to be exposed to a master filmmaker!

I was unable to find They Caught the Ferry on video anywhere. It's possible it may be available on some video collection of short films somewhere. I'd like to think that a print has turned up in some driver's training class somewhere in the midwest and a group of lucky young drivers are watching it right now. It's a sublime experience.

Senses of Cinema (James Leahy)

The Evening Class [Michael Guillen]

THORVALDSEN: DENMARK’S GREATEST SCULPTOR

Denmark (10 mi) 1949

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) (excerpt)

The second short is Thorvaldsen: Denmark's Great Sculptor (1949.)  This short gives a short biography of the artist and then examines many of his works.  They note changes in his style and discuss the meaning and feelings in his work.  After seeing this film, it is easy to understand why Dreyer picked Thorvaldsen as his subject.  The sculptor's work is similar in feeling and outlook as much of Deryer's output.  There are both English and Danish audio tracks, with the former having a lot more hiss than the later.

DVD Times Anthony Nield (excerpt)

Elsewhere the disc also finds room for two short films which Dreyer made between 1949 and 1950, Thorvaldsen and Storstrom Bridge, both of which will no doubt prove fascinating to completists. Admittedly, the former never really demonstrates its director’s talents to any formidable degree, although the latter – especially for an industrial film – is wonderfully expression and deserving of repeat viewings. Furthermore, both of these pieces arrive in fine condition and also come with optional English subtitles.

DVD Times Noel Megahey (excerpt)

This is a short documentary on Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770 – 1844), whose subject matter was built around depictions of Greek gods and classical figures. The film follows the progression of his work which is quite breathtaking. The picture quality is quite superb, the lighting allowing you to see the tremendous detail of the statues and reliefs. English and Danish audio tracks are included for the narrative commentary. The English audio track is a bit crackly, but can be understood clearly. There are no English subtitles provided for the Danish track. The opening titles of the film are in English.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Tryavna from United States

This very short film offers a brief consideration of the major works of Bertel Thorvaldsen (ca. 1770-1884), one of the most famous of all Danish artists and arguably the greatest sculptor between Bernini and Rodin. Resting squarely within the Neoclassical tradition, Thorvaldsen's great talent was his ability to perfectly balance his sculptures, giving them a sense of weightlessness. (Of course, the sculptures are also extremely beautiful, but in our post-WWII era there's something disquieting about admiring a northern European artist's conception of ideal physical beauty. I suppose that's unavoidable, but Thorvaldsen's reputation has happily escaped associations with Nazi ideology.) There is a museum in the center of Copenhagen dedicated solely to Thorvaldsen's work, and it's well worth a couple hours' visit -- even if you don't normally like sculpture.

Over the course of its 10 minutes or so, this film examines about a dozen of Thorvaldsen's largest and best-known statues, including "Hope," "Venus and the Apple," and his own self-portrait. The narrator gives us a refresher course on Thorvaldsen's career, style, and thematic concerns. Basically, it serves as a good introduction to the artist and his work. Since alternate English-language narration was recorded at the same time, I assume that this film was made by and for the Danish tourist industry in the late 1940s.

What makes this movie worth a second glance, however, is the fact that it was directed by yet another great Danish artist, the film director Carl Theodor Dreyer (best known for his silent "Passion of Joan of Arc"). It's not an important part of Dreyer's canon; throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Dreyer produced many short films to keep himself occupied (and to earn some money) between feature film projects. But the fact that Dreyer took the time to reflect on a fellow Danish artist, especially one who shared his own interest in depicting biblical figures and various forms of religious experience, gives this film an added level of interest. And of course, Dreyer's masterful use of light and shadow and close-ups show off Thorvaldsen's work to great advantage.

If you're interested in seeing this short film, it's available on Image Entertainment's DVD release of "The Parson's Widow," a genuinely funny comedy that Dreyer made in 1920. Unfortunately, "Thorvaldsen" is not in particularly good condition, but "The Parson's Widow" is OK. Best of all, the DVD also includes Dreyer's finest short film, the surprisingly effective "They Caught the Ferry," a short driver-safety film.

THE STORSTROM BRIDGE (Storstrømsbroen)

Denmark (7 mi) 1950

DVD Times Anthony Nield (excerpt)

Elsewhere the disc also finds room for two short films which Dreyer made between 1949 and 1950, Thorvaldsen and Storstrom Bridge, both of which will no doubt prove fascinating to completists. Admittedly, the former never really demonstrates its director’s talents to any formidable degree, although the latter – especially for an industrial film – is wonderfully expression and deserving of repeat viewings. Furthermore, both of these pieces arrive in fine condition and also come with optional English subtitles.

User Reviews from imdb Author: lestermay (lester.may@blueyonder.co.uk) from Camden Town, London, England

Carl Th. Dreyer's beautiful documentary uses no words to show different aspects of this beautiful bridge in Denmark. It is one of over a dozen state-commissioned documentary shorts made by the famous director.

The Storstrom Bridge was built between 1933-37 to the designs of Anker Engelund with construction under the direction of civil engineer Guy Anson Maunsell.

Storstrom Bridge connects the island of Sjaelland (Zealand) at Vordingborg to the smaller island of Falster to the south. Some two miles long (3199 metres or 3520 yards), at the time it was built it was the longest bridge in Europe.

It is an arch bridge with a suspended deck with both a road and railroad. The reinforced concrete central section was built on shore and floated out to be sunk in position.

Carl Dreyer shows the bridge from afar and in close up, from the air and from a ship in the Storstrom, with trains, vehicles, cyclists and a fisherman using the bridge.

This is a delightful short and Dreyer lets the viewer imagine being a sightseer in silent awe of this beautiful structure.

For some more information about the bridge, and photographs, visit http://en.structurae.de/structures/data/index.cfm?ID=s0004540.

This documentary is available on DVD, as an extra, on the British Film Institute's 2006 release of Dreyer's classic feature film "Ordet" (1955).

ORDET A 100

aka: The Living Word

Denmark (126 mi) 1955

Art unsettles, rather than defines.

The Danish government’s way of honoring artistic achievements was to award recipients a lifetime lease of one of the Copenhagen cinemas until their death. In 1952 Dreyer was so honored with the Dagmar Bio, one of Copenhagen’s biggest and most luxurious cinemas. Two years later, Dreyer produced one of his undisputed masterpieces, based on a play by Kaj Munk, a Danish Lutheran pastor and social activist murdered by the Nazis in 1944 for preaching against them, who believed religion should not have a passive role when an occupying force demands adherence to a foreign or imposed social order, who in his play provided first hand knowledge of the hard, primitive farm life that he witnessed in Jutland, first filmed in Sweden by Gustav Molander in 1943, featuring a remarkable performance by Victor Sjöström. Despite incorporating less than half the dialogue from the actual play, which was written in 1925, seen by Dreyer in 1932, it is unusually talkative for a Dreyer film and features a brilliant cast. Dreyer again simplified the strategy, where the integrity of the content is preserved, actually shooting the film in the same village where Munk was born, but he adheres to his own ascetic principles. The original story features a religious feud between two neighboring families, the Borgens and the Skraedders, the rich farmer against the poor tailor, which takes Lutheranism to task by pitting one view that celebrates life, that believes the world has an abundance of resources that are available to all against a more severe, intransigent, fundamentalist, often fanatical sect from Western Jutland known as the Interior Mission (the real villain of the original play), also featuring the madness of Johannes Borgens from overzealous religious study, his brother Mikkel mentions from reading too much Søren Kierkegaard, but he hears voices and is attuned to a spiritual agency, perhaps with divine insight. By the end of the film, Inger Borgens dies from childbirth, but is resurrected from her coffin, which purifies the village of their doubts and quarrels. While it might be seen as a scientific phenomenon, Dreyer leaves little doubt that this was a divine miracle. Filmed with a theatrical style, it takes place largely in one farmhouse in a rural Danish village, it paints a portrait of true faith, whose deeply moving and transcendent ending has to be seen to be believed, the cinematic equivalent of experiencing a state of grace. Somewhat in the vein of Lars von Trier’s BREAKING THE WAVES, for which it served as an inspiration, it raises the question of where the limits of love lie.

Dreyer believed human nature has a factor, which has yet to be located, that notices activity outside our natural world. Our accepted habits unconsciously prevent us from seeing. Our sensibility has been so atrophied that we can’t see outside our own system – like religion – where people believe in their idea of faith only as an idea, while the meaning has been lost, and must be demonstrated through their actions. Only when we suspend the laws of nature do we accept or recognize something outside our experience. One of the factors drawing Dreyer to the material was Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein could not scientifically explain actions which he had no knowledge how to explain. For Dreyer, there are forces outside our sphere of knowledge that have an influence over us.

Unlike the close ups, short takes and rhythmic editing style of his prior films, Dreyer decided that wouldn’t work here, so he uses long takes, using almost all medium shots, creating extended sequences that do not camouflage the theatricality of the play. Using off-screen sound, like the sound of farm animals or the everpresent sound of the wind, the long takes are disciplined to contemplate an aesthetic reality within the shot space, creating fewer cuts, where more scenes are shot in real time reflecting the naturalness of an everyday rhythm. The film is simplicity itself, enhanced by the spartan use of space, where there is nothing in the frame that doesn’t need to be there, that is without purpose, expressing how the characters are defined therein, expressing how they see themselves, typified by the caged birds in Peter the Tailor’s home, which accurately reflects how he treats his daughter, or the open fields and pastures outside the Borgen farm, which accurately reflects the free spirits of the Borgen household. Dreyer’s mastery of light and shadow is unparalleled, and he shifts the emphasis in the play from Johannes to the character of Ingrid, the most tolerant force of good in the play, who is seen as the healer of opposite forces, and who provides the ultimate spirit of reconciliation. Of interest, the actress was really pregnant, so she suggested to Dreyer that he sound record the actual sounds of her childbirth, which were utilized to an extraordinary degree in the film.

carldreyer.com - life Acquarello from Masters of Cinema (excerpt)

“Perhaps the most representative of Dreyer's feminine ideal, however, is not the inexhaustible conviction and impractical idealism of Joan or Gertrud, but Inger's (Birgitte Federspiel) role in the Borgen household – maternal, yet sensual; spiritual, yet practical; unshakable personal conviction, yet conciliatory and tolerant. Her pragmatism, spirituality, and warmth serves as the unifying force for the family, reconciling the ideological and emotional division among her morally good, but agnostic husband Mikkel, his brother Johannes, a theology student who has suffered a mental breakdown and believes that he is Jesus Christ, her stern and religious father-in-law, Morten who is disheartened by his sons' eroding and misdirected faith, and Morten's youngest son Anders whose love for the daughter of a fundamentalist family has strained his relationship with his father.”

Central to the film are the closely observed family relations of the Borgens, where nothing is hurried, where their home feels lived in and warm, where there is an undercurrent of love and a very spare humor, such as the scene with Inger Borgens, the wife of Mikkel, appealing to his father by serving him coffee, bringing him sweets, fetching his pipe, asking him to hold the wool she is using, all in an attempt to persuade him to let the youngest brother, Anders, marry Peter the Tailor’s daughter despite their religious differences. As the scene meticulously unfolds, the stoical old Borgens, Morten, quietly muses, “Is that why we have been having coffee?”

The older Borgen prays ardently for a prophet to come, to renew Christendom to his farm, but feels his prayers are unanswered. Inger reassures him that he needs to keep praying. Johannes is consumed with passages from ancient scripture, suggesting people believe in the dead Christ, but not in the living one. And once the two old patriarchs have at it, the older Borgen tells the Tailor, “I can’t stand your undertaker faces,” calling their faith one of sullenness and torment instead of one representing the fullness of life. After a lengthy doctor visit that features the actual sounds of childbirth, the doctor leaves after losing the baby but pronouncing the mother healthy, yet Inger dies moments later, where the pastor affirms “She is no longer there...she is in heaven,” to which Mikkel responds, “Yes, but I loved her body too.” Johannes, a failed preacher himself, accurately predicts her death, then promises to raise her from the dead through prayer, but is denounced as dysfunctional and insane by church elders and family alike, as he constantly preaches his sermon on the mounts to the grasses and the winds, as they are all that will listen. His continued insistence at preaching his own Gospel sounds foolish and is belittled, even by the viewer, and his first attempt to resurrect her fails, causing him to faint and then flee. But the tone changes when Johannes returns at the visitation of Ingrid’s dead body, laying in the coffin dressed completely in white. Johannes appears to be sane, he’s gotten a hair cut and he has a clear gaze. Instead of confidently promising, he agrees again only to try, touched by her little daughter’s faith, a child believer, an uncorrupted source, considered “the greatest in the kingdom of heaven,” the only other person in a sea of black mourners that is dressed in white – two uncorrupted souls. In this quiet setting, Johannes is allowed to put into practice his faith, turning into a true prophet, begging the question: Is love a force of controlled repression or a promise of infinite expansion, sex or a spirit? The film concerns the moral and metaphysical shadings of love, slowly building to a brilliantly conceived transcendent realization that is austere, yet utterly moving. The spareness is extremely sensual, as is Dreyer’s style, with the camera exploring the emptiness and silences with a profound expressiveness, a brilliant cinematic perfection.

from The Cinema of Carl Dreyer by Tom Milne:

With Ordet, one also believes completely in the reality of the family, their love for each other, their roots in the land they live in; but at the same time those roots disappear into a strange soil which is beyond reality, so that the miracle of Inger’s rebirth is both less and more than a miracle...

Ordet may be a demonstration of the miraculous power of faith, but the eager, devouring kiss, almost a ravenous bite, with which the wife reclaims her husband on being brought back from the grave, has nothing to do with spirituality. It is the slow, stately cadence of Dreyer’s style, allied to a theme of somber tragedy, that tends to make these films seem as though they were concerned exclusively with higher things, with abstract notions of justice, faith and mercy, whereas their life blood is inevitably the characters themselves, their need to live and love...

Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that in Ordet, the most unequivocally pious work by this supposed master of spiritual values, the bereaved husband who is consoled with the thought that his wife’s soul is now safe in Heaven, answers with a cry that echoes not only through the film but through all of Dreyer’s work: “But I loved her body too!”

Geoff Andrew from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

An extraordinary work, and arguably the finest achievement of this great filmmaker, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s adaptation of Kaj Munk’s play is a cinematic rarity in that, with the simplest of means and no special effects whatsoever, it manages to persuade the viewer that a miracle can happen.

Ordet concerns the Borgens, a farming family, loving and close but also beset by tensions arising from a number of disagreements and misfortunes – notably the wayward behavior of one of the grown-up brothers, seemingly insane due to excessive travails while studying religious thought. Not everyone thinks Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) mad, however, and when Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), another brother’s wife, dies, her child asks him to bring her back – which, at the end of the film, he appears to do. In fact, Dreyer leaves it to the spectator to decide whether her revival is a matter of mere scientific inability to understand the improbable or of strength of faith, but the scene is remarkably powerful, precisely because he refuses both to explain and to rev up the film’s dramatic engines; the scene convinces thanks to its own air of tranquility and that of everything preceding it.

Indeed, this is in many respects the most “realistic” or “naturalistic” of films dealing with the power of faith, love (in every sense), and the supernatural; Dreyer eschews any kind of trickery. Though Henning Bendtsen’s paired-down yet outstandingly beautiful black-and-white images do endow the Borgen’s cottage and pastures with a lustrous quality, Dreyer’s quiet rhythms, long takes, and deceptively simple mise en scène may suggest that the movie is a straightforward chamber drama about ordinary farming folk. Only Johannes’s wheedling voice appears at all unusual, and he, after all, is not quite right in the head. Wherein lies Ordet’s greatness: by the time the “miracle” occurs, the film has earned our respect for its integrity – we understand the people on screen, because their actions, emotions, thoughts, and doubts are like our own. And when Inger opens her eyes once more, we probably feel much as they do: astonishment, happiness, and genuine wonder. For even if Ordet fails to convert us to religious belief, we have, at least, witnessed cinematic art of the highest order.

Carl Theodor Dreyer x 3 Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Dreyer's penultimate feature was one of his greatest successes: Ordet was named Best Film at Venice in 1955, and is generally regarded as one of the chief masterpieces in the director's small oeuvre. Based on a well-known play by Kaj Munk (a Danish pastor and poet executed by the Nazis in 1944), this exploration of orthodoxy and faith is set in the remote West Jutland farmlands, and concerns an authoritarian widower with three grown sons. Mikkel, the often-rebellious eldest son, is married to Inger, who acts as mistress of the farm. Johannes, the middle son, is a brooding former theology student unbalanced by his study of Kierkegaard. Anders, the youngest son, wants to marry the daughter of his father's sworn religious enemy. The religious tensions that fuel the piece come to a head when Inger dies in childbirth, and the half-mad, half-visionary Johannes prays for her resurrection. Ordet is a powerfully effective, deceptively simple work, distinguished by restrained acting, strangely becalming camera techniques, austere geometrical sets, and a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Its utterly unsettling closing sequence is one of the most extraordinary and enriching in the cinema, and has been the subject of much contention. Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves was a 1996 tribute. Denmark 1955.

Turner Classic Movies Brian Cady

As World War II ended, movie director Carl Theodor Dreyer had reason to give thanks. He had survived and his homeland Denmark had been restored after suffering under Nazi occupation for years. His financial outlook, however, was bleak. His previous films had been hailed as masterpieces: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), considered the definitive film on the Catholic saint, and Vampyr (1932), his highly influential horror tale turned art-house classic. The critical praise did nothing to help the movies at the box office, unfortunately, and further funding for a new Dreyer film was nowhere to be found.

Then in 1952 the Danish Government placed Dreyer in charge of the Dagmar, a state-run movie house in Copenhagen. Now with a steady income, Dreyer began saving for his next movie and since he did not have much to spend, the movie would have to be inexpensive yet powerful. Dreyer fulfilled both requirements by turning to a play by the Danish hero Kaj Munk.

Munk hardly set out to be a hero. A Lutheran pastor, Munk took a parish on the bleak, harsh island of Jutland where some remote Danes were members of a very strict Lutheran sect called The Inner Mission. In his spare time, Munk became a poet and dramatist, turning the events he witnessed in Jutland into plays that became popular hits in Denmark during the 1930's. During the Nazi occupation, Munk moved from playwright to patriot. Appearing at pulpits all over the country, Munk called on Danes to remember that their duty was to God and not their Nazi overlords. In 1994 Munk paid for his defiance. Three plainclothes Gestapo officers took him from his house, led him to a ditch and shot him in the back of the head. His death became a rallying point for the Danish Resistance and his works gained a new popularity.

It was one of his biggest hits, Ordet (1955), that Dreyer chose for his next film. Ordet, meaning the word, concerns two families brought together by two children in love. But as in Romeo and Juliet, the families do not get along because the boy's family believes in the modern Lutheran church while the girl's family follows The Inner Mission. Religion rather than romance becomes the theme of the story as part of the focus is on the boy's brother, a theology student driven mad by reading too many philosophy books by Kierkagaard; he develops the delusion that he is Jesus Christ. This all leads to a highly controversial ending, the meaning of which is debated by filmgoers to this day.

After enduring storms while filming on location in Jutland, Dreyer finished his movie and premiered it at the Dagmar Theatre in January 1955. The result was a hit in Denmark and garnered universal critical acclaim, winning both the Golden Lion and the Special Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival, a Golden Globe and a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Despite all this, Dreyer still found difficulty raising money for movies and managed to direct only one more feature, Gertrud (1964), before his death.

Long Pauses Darren Hughes

Ordet is, quite simply, one of the most beautifully photographed films ever made. Dreyer's cinematographic trademarks are all on display: slow, elegant tracking shots and pans; stylized, almost expressionistic lighting; meticulously orchestrated movements and compositions. Favorite images: those clothes blowing in the wind, Morten Borgen isolated (as in his life) in the lower right corner of the frame, Peter the Tailor's family arriving at the funeral a la The Searchers (also one of my all-time favorite music cues), and, of course, any number of shots from the final sequence.

Politics is easy. So are history, biography, and formal technique. But transcendence is tough. That sudden, strange, and fleeting encounter with something beyond ourselves, something almost otherworldly, transcendence is both the aspect of the arts to which I’m most drawn and about which I feel least capable of writing. Which is why it is only now, two years after I first saw Dreyer’s Ordet and instantly declared it one of my favorite films, that I’m making an attempt to explain its peculiar power. If you haven’t seen Ordet, please stop reading. This response will likely touch upon the film’s closing sequence, which really should be experienced for the first time free of prejudice. It’s one of film’s truly remarkable moments. Don’t let me spoil it for you.

Based on Kaj Munk’s play of the same name, Ordet tells the simple story of Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg), a prosperous farmer whose three sons have each laid a particular burden on their father’s shoulders. The eldest, Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen), has renounced the religious beliefs of his ancestors, claiming that he no longer has even “faith in faith”; the second, Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye), has gone mad from too much study and now claims to be Jesus of Nazareth; and the youngest, Anders (Cay Kristiansen), has disobeyed his father by pursuing the hand of a young woman whose religion puts her family at odds with the elder Borgen. On the surface, Ordet is primarily concerned with the Romeo and Juliet-like Anders plot, along with a more dramatic sidebar involving Mikkel’s wife, Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), who dies with her infant son in childbirth.

Ordet is really about faith, though. It’s about the mysteries and contradictions and beauty of such irrational belief. Unlike any other film I can name, though, Ordet treats this subject with both measured skepticism and reverence, forcing us to distance ourselves, even if only temporarily, from our personal beliefs so that we might reexperience “true faith” (whatever that is) free of cultural baggage and biases. Dreyer accomplishes this by way of something akin to the Verfremdungseffekt, Bertold Brecht’s “alienating” approach to theater. John Fuegi has described the purpose of the V-effekt as disrupting “the viewer's normal or run of the mill perception by introducing elements that will suddenly cause the viewer to see familiar objects in a strange way and to see strange objects in a familiar way.” Ordet does both, defamiliarizing the now-mundane words of Christ, while also making perfectly acceptable the probability of miracles.

We first see Johannes in a low-angle long shot, his right arm outstretched over a knoll of tall grass. He announces his mission in slow, measured tones: “God has summoned me to prophesy before His face,” he says. “For only those who have faith shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.” His words are familiar, as he echoes or recites-in-whole passages from the Gospels, but his delivery and his movements are stylized, strange, disconcerting. A typical audience’s response to Lerdorff Rye’s performance is mirrored onscreen by all who encounter Johannes. My favorite exchange is with the town’s new parson:

Johannes: “You don’t know me. . . . My name is Jesus of Nazareth.”

Parson: “Jesus? But how can you prove that?”

Johannes: “Thou man of faith, whose own self lacks faith! People believe in the dead Christ, but not in the living. They believe in my miracles from 2000 years ago, but they don’t believe in me now. I have come again to bear witness to my Father who is in Heaven, and to work miracles.”

Parson: “Miracles no longer happen.”

Johannes: “Thus speaks my church on earth, that church which has failed me, that has murdered me in my own name. Here I stand, and again you cast me out. But woe unto you, if you nail me to the cross again.”

Parson: “That’s absolutely appalling.”

Again, capturing in words such a purely cinematic and transcendent moment is difficult and perhaps even counter-intuitive. I can only describe how these moments, which honestly seem to be particular to Ordet, make me feel. I grew up in the church, so the parables and teachings of Christ are barely distinguishable in my social/cultural memory from any number of myths, parables, fairy tales, and stories. They all seem to occupy the same part of my brain, formed some time during childhood, where they continue to shape the ethics and morals (and something like faith) that determine my behavior. Christ isn't really real to me, or my life would be radically different. I imagine that is probably true of many Christians.

But something happens to me during the last twenty minutes of Ordet. Johannes walks into Inger’s funeral chamber, emerging from the shadows of the doorway, and I experience an overwhelming gratitude, a peculiar emotion that I don't recall ever feeling in any traditionally religious context. I mean real gratitude, mixed with shame and joy and awe and any number of other emotions and desires that I so seldom feel for things not of this world. I guess, in a word, that is transcendence, and I'm so grateful for this film for giving me that. It's like a gift. Inger’s restoration to life suddenly feels not only possible here, but inevitable. And I’m left to wonder why, in the “real” world, I actually identify most with the obnoxious Parson, for surely miracles don’t really happen anymore.

For Brecht, the use of the V-effekt in a film or play like Ordet would be a political tool, a means by which audiences might be wakened to their slavish acceptance of hypocritical or oppressive religious dogma. And, in a sense, Dreyer does just that. But, if I might slip into a hackneyed analogy, whereas Brecht would completely dismantle faith as a dangerous ideological construct, leaving it in ruins, Dreyer strips it to its foundations so that each viewer might potentially rebuild that faith, and rebuild more strongly.

Ordet Criterion essay by Chris Fujiwara, August 20, 2001

Carl Th. Dreyer Criterion essay by Armond White, August 20, 2001

Ordet (1955) - The Criterion Collection

Mise en Scène as Miracle in Dreyer’s ORDET Jonathan Rosenbaum

Senses of Cinema (Thomas Beltzer)

Bright Lights Film Journal | Carl Dreyer Gary Morris, also here: Images (Gary Morris)

The Vagrant Café - Christian Cinema [Seth Studer]

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

Ordet (The Word)—Thinking in Space and Time Ray Carney

Epinions [metalluk]

Ordet / The Word; La Parole / Carl Theodor Dreyer / 1955 James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Carl Theodore Dreyer's Ordet Greg Nyquist

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Ordet Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

Kaj Munk a profile on the Danish playwright and social activist by Books and Writers

Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films

YouTube - Ordet: The final scene (SPOILER) the last 8 minutes of the film on YouTube

Fulldls.com - Download Carl Theodor Dreyer - Ordet 1955 torrent allows for a download of the film

BFI | Books & DVDs | DVD & Video | Films by Carl Theodor Dreyer BFI also reviews MASTER OF THE HOUSE, DAY OF WRATH, and GERTRUD

DVD Savant Review: Carl Theodor Dreyer Box Set Glenn Erickson on the 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection, also including DAY OF WRATH, GERTRUD, and the documentary CARL TH. DREYER: MY MÉTIER

Filmmaker Magazine | Fall 2001: LOAD + PLAY Scooter McCrae on the 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection from Filmmaker magazine

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

Reel.com DVD review [Bill Schwartz] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

digitallyOBSESSED! [Mark Zimmer] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

The Film Desk [James Kendrick] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

BFI & Carl Dreyer this Spring Dave Foster reviews the 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection from DVD Times

DVD Times - BFI & Carl Dreyer this Spring (Part 2) Dave Foster from DVD Times

DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

GERTRUD A- 94

Denmark (119 mi) 1964

Amor Omnia,

Love is All

Dreyer wanted to make this film in color, but the producers insisted on black and white. Based again on the strategy of medium shots and long takes, where, like other great directors such as Tarkovsky, Bresson, Ozu, Kurosawa, or even Hitchcock, he shot on camera what he had in his mind first, so he actually finalized the editing in just 3 days after he finished shooting. Dreyer’s final film was immediately met with derision, one critic called it, “a 2 hour study of couches and pianos,” perhaps his most spacious film, as characters keep staring off into space that is rarely, if ever, filled, leaving us an impression, simply by the look of the film, of disconnection. Dreyer has again taken someone else’s play, then subtracted from it, redesigned it, and transformed it into his own aesthetic. This is a play about predeterminism, not by acts of fate, suggesting instead that things will happen to you by the kinds of things you tolerate, by the traits you recognize in the people you associate with. You acclimate yourself to these traits, which helps shape the choices that lead you to your destiny. The character Gertrud is a mature, intelligent woman, a former opera singer, still very attractive, a woman men find desirable. Here, she is looking for idealized love, Dreyer is perhaps drawn to this material as he idealized his love for his own birth mother, and she goes through three lovers and finds each lacking in some regard. Since her role in society has been predetermined, where her husband views her in a submissive and supportive role, secondary to his governmental role, and as he has recently been offered a job as a cabinet minister, rather than remain submissive, she has decided to empower herself, to follow a path of deprivation, if necessary, one of dispassionate loneliness, but one which doesn’t renounce her ability to make her own decisions.

For Dreyer, he utilizes woman as the primary focus, as we can empathize through their vulnerability simply by the world that surrounds them, victimized by the affliction of the day, such as faith in the divine, misjudged by an all-male court that could not see in JOAN OF ARC, an unrecognized vampyrism in VAMPYR, or witchcraft in DAY OF WRATH. In each, women are attempting to live a certain kind of life, while the men around them have different levels of faith in them which doesn’t match their own, leaving a void, an inability to make a decision based on how they feel. This forces the women to go on their own, creating a sense of anguish and discomfort, an unresolved tension, a series of conflicts by which they live their own lives. Gertrud is surrounded by seismic waves of dissatisfaction, reflected in a recurring dream, where she is running down the street naked chased by wild dogs, realizing when she awakens, “we are completely alone in the world.” A poet in the film introduces Gertrud to thoughts of a French philosopher: “Pure truth is without predisposition. A true soul need not hide his thoughts.” Art can be a disruptive agent that can help you revise your own perception, or help you make a life-altering choice.

Much in the style of August Strindberg, there is extraordinary use of interior space, which is intimately inhabited by the characters. Dreyer employs the use of a grammar of glances, where Gertrud reveals her state of mind by glances of disdain, an air of disregard, by revealing what’s NOT being said through a discourse of trivia, a shorthand for something else, where interpersonal connections are tragically and ruthlessly efficient. In her marriage, her husband views her as a trophy, a means by which he can ascend the social ladder, so she is defined through objects in the apartment, paintings, sculpture, poetry, and in particular, mirrors, a means by which she decorates herself. Dreyer incorporates a series of double framings, visual cues, highlighting the way she enters and exits a space, where doors have a greater sense of importance. When her husband reveals, “Your door has been closed to me for many months,” we know exactly what’s not going on. Dreyer attempts to expose irreconcilable factors where disparities exist, where problems need to be resolved. The design of the film is to take things firmly familiar, then make them unfamiliar, such as the way the characters read their dialogue, using a principle of abstraction, which transcends dialogue, or using divisive metaphors to highlight the contrast between her own idealism, where her commitment is total and absolute, with the reality of the world around her. Unlike Bresson, Dreyer never gave up on the world around him, preserving the humanity of his characters, no matter how plagued they were, they still refused to give in to their surroundings.

Gertrud wants to be a free and independent woman, but detects a lack of feeling worse than indifference creeping into her marriage by her husband’s placing work before love, which he believes is the nature of the universe, suggesting love alone is not enough in a man’s world. But this creates an irreconcilable difference in her eyes, as she believes there’s nothing else in life but love. So on the eve of the ceremony, a gala affair where he is expected to be offered the government position, which turns out to be a dazzling cinematic spectacle, where in one shot the camera pans the length of a banquet table following a boy’s choir holding candles, then ascends a staircase, moves down a hallway and back, and continues again back down the flight of stairs until they stand and face the guests, revealing pageantry on the order of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, she announces her plans to leave him. Later, she has a rendezvous in a park with a brilliant young pianist she’s attracted to and professes her love, claiming “I couldn’t imagine living not having been with you.” He takes her to his apartment where he plays her a nocturne, and in the adjoining room, expressed only in shadows on the wall, we see her undress, committing herself to him fully. But the next day, she learns from the lover she left before marriage, now a celebrated poet, that the pianist was drunkenly bragging about his sexual conquest the night before, leaving her no choice, at least in her eyes, but to move on.

A relationship or social system may overwhelm your quest for individuality, where the system, not the individual, prevails, denying your quest for self-realization, or for an enriched consciousness. In taking responsibility for her own actions, continuing to believe in her choice of free will, Gertrud retains an absolute faith in her idealized love, and is forced to make harsh decisions, where she may in turn feel a perpetual disappointment, loneliness, isolation, a sense of closure through deprivation. Happiness is a quest with no closure, as the path is filled with the possibility of mistakes and error. The men in the film continue to project onto her a kind of woman they want her to be, precisely what she is trying to avoid, as it leaves her feeling loathsome, but she continues to believe love should not be camouflaged, that the pursuit of happiness is an authentic desire. The final image in the film, after she and a friend wave goodbye, is simply a door, a drawing easel, and the sound of church bells, suggesting the path for all who follow will include doors of perception, or thought, art, and religion. So by the end of the film, both Gertrud and the filmmaker have made their most personal, authentic, and true-to-themselves choices.

from Philip Kemp:

In Gertrud, his final film, Carl Dreyer brings to its logical culmination the process of fining down, of attenuation, that he had been pursuing for some 40 years. It’s an old man’s film in its sense of quiet renunciation, yet at the same time, a very modern one. The film’s ascetic simplicity, the introspective minimalism of its style, aligns it with the approaches that far younger directors like Michelangelo Antonioni and Miklós Janscó were exploring during the same period. But Dreyer was never interested in following fashion: the 75-year old director had arrived at the same point by his own wholly individual route.

Gertrud is adapted from a 1906 play by the Swedish playwright Hjalmar Söderberg, whose heroine is closely based on a woman with whom he’d had a passionate affair. Dreyer’s adaptation purges the play of its more misogynistic elements (Söderberg’s lover had just jilted him for a younger man) and presents Gertrud as an erotic idealist, a woman who will accept love only on her own exacting, single-minded terms. Three men – her husband, a poet, and a young musician – love her, but because none of them will put his love for her before everything else in his life, she rejects them all, preferring to live celibate in Paris and devote herself to the life of the mind. In an epilogue, grown old and still alone, she speaks her epitaph: “I have known love.”

Dreyer shoots his film with mesmerizing restraint. Nearly two hours long, it consists of less than 90 shots. For long periods the camera remains motionless in medium shot, observing two people as they talk. The characters, though driven by strong passions, love, and despair, rarely raise their voices. There are few sets and only one exterior scene; decors are paired down to basics. Of major directors, perhaps only Ozu ever dared risk such austere stylistic economy. At its premiere in Paris, Gertrud was received with uncomprehending hostility by press and public alike. Since then, it has come to be recognized as the last lapidary statement of one of the most individual filmmakers – a film, like its heroine, to be approached on its own terms.

from The Cinema of Carl Dreyer by Tom Milne:

On the surface, Gertrud looks, if not like an opera, at least like some quaintly charming and slightly creaking Pinero drama in which the characters face the audience rather than each other, eternally sitting down and getting up again, speaking and moving with slow, stylized deliberation...in Gertrud...the words are pure incantation. (There is, of course, a good deal of dialogue in Gertrud, but what is said is much less important than the way it is said). Surface appearances have never meant much in Dreyer's work, but in Gertrud, they are not merely deceptive but positively mendacious.

The film is about a rather tiresome woman mid-way between an Ibsen bluestocking and a Strindberg shrew whose behavior seems almost like an advertisement for women’s right. An atheist, a believer in free will, intellectually curious about the new philosophies and sciences being studied in Paris at the turn of the century, she is constantly asserting her freedom to do what she will with her life, and walks out on three men because they fail to live up to her expectations. Following some sort of obscure resentment – perhaps because she once gave up a promising career as a singer to devote herself to a starry-eyed love affair with a poet – she accuses each of her lovers of failing to live up to her dream of love: “The man with whom I live must belong to me entirely. I must come first. I don’t want to be an object to be played with from time to time.”

Ignoring her husband’s plea that “Love alone cannot fill a man’s life,” she walks out on him just when his career is to be crowned with a ministerial position in the government, exactly as she had walked out on the poet Gabriel Lidman years before on realizing that he really preferred writing about passion to experiencing it, and that her presence interfered with his work. Then, on the crest of the wave of the great passion which she feels has always eluded her in the past , she offers herself body and soul to a young musician, Erland Jansson, but though he loves her, Erland proves to be tied to a woman who helped him in his career, who is now pregnant by him, and whom he refuses to abandon. Erland begs her to accept what love he can offer; Lidman pleads with her to return to him, since he has never ceased loving her; and the husband, Kanning, implores her to remain his wife. But for Gertrud it must be all or nothing, she abandons everything and leaves for Paris to devote the rest of her life to the pursuit of knowledge.

So much for the argument, treated with almost dogged literalness in a series of long takes where the camera rarely moves from its original vantage point as the characters deliver themselves of a series of quiet, introspective threnodies on what might have been; but beyond, one re-discovers Dreyer and his obsession with the mysterious nature of love...

Perhaps the most perfect epitaph in the entire history of the cinema comes in the last scene of Dreyer’s last film, when Gertrud, now old and gray and solitary and awaiting death in the serenity of her memories, murmurs with the majestic quietude of complete self-fulfillment, “I have known love.” Not, one notices, “I have loved,” or “I have been loved,” but the all-embracing, almost Olympian splendor of “I have known love.” No better phrase could be found to define the profound involvement that bound Dreyer to the cinema in a relationship which spanned nearly fifty years but only fourteen films, each one painfully squeezed out of reluctant financiers while millions were being squandered in Hollywood, in Paris, in London, and each one quietly adding its chapter to the greatest and most loving voyage of exploration of the human soul the cinema has yet witnessed.

Gertrud Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Carl Dreyer's last film (1964) is for me the most beautiful, affecting, and inexhaustible of all narrative films, but it's clearly not for every taste--not, alas, even remotely. Adapted from a long-forgotten play by Hjalmar Soderberg, it centers on a proud, stubborn woman (Nina Pens Rode) who demands total commitment in love and forsakes both her husband and a former lover for a young musician who's relatively indifferent to her. It moves at an extremely slow, theatrical pace in long takes recorded mainly in direct sound (though shot principally in a studio) and deserves to be ranked along with The Magnificent Ambersons, Lola Montes, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as one of the great haunted-memory films. Its meaning hinges partially on the refusal or inability to compromise and what this implies over the range of an entire life. (in this case Dreyer's as well as his heroine's). It's exquisite, unbearable, and unforgettable.

DVD Times [Anthony Nield]

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s cinematic swan song, Gertrud could be viewed as the perfect expression of the director’s oeuvre. It’s a film which at once ties into his previous efforts and strives to move their themes and techniques forwards. Here we find the strong female protagonist à la The Passion of Joan of Arc or Day of Wrath, the essentially domestic setting à la Master of the House or Ordet, and a cinematic approach which continues where the earlier sound films left off, namely one of utter purity - both in terms of style and content - and one which presents a complete disavowal of anything even remotely extraneous.

Such an approach makes perfect sense given that the plotting is really quite remote. Gertrud, a retired singer in her forties, meets three men whom she has loved in her life over the period of a few days and must effectively choose between them: the husband for whom she no longer has feelings; the young artist with whom she is conducting an affair; and her first, and perhaps true, love whom she hasn’t encountered for a number of years. Indeed, this is all the film offers in the most concrete of narrative terms, yet Dreyer’s command of our attention is such that he holds us utterly rapt. The smaller focus allows him to concentrate all the more fully and as such attain the grander results. In fact, you could compare him to Gertrud herself: both are striving for utmost perfection, although only one of them achieves it.

Of course, the intensity with which Dreyer approaches the film is mirrored by that which the onscreen drama creates. The director here employs his usual long take method (a mainstay, at least, in the sound pictures) and pushes it to the near maximum. The effect is akin to that of Dreyer - and therefore the audience - staring at his characters and never once letting them escape. Certainly, there’s also a degree of detachment in this approach - the stance would appear to be unashamedly non-judgemental, that of a clear observer as opposed to a participant - yet this too perhaps heightens the drama inasmuch the film never once holds back or flinches away from the details. Furthermore, Gertrud is a work which is almost defiantly quiet. Music is rarely employed and, when this is the case, emerges via onscreen events as opposed to the soundtrack. The effect is that we’re drawn in to the smaller moments all the more and as such they become utterly enthralling; every look and avoided glance takes on a weight which would almost certainly disappear in another director’s hands.

It’s this catalogue of looks and glances which mark out Gertrud as a key Dreyer work. More so even than Ordet, it’s the lack of eye contact which is the more important. On the surface the effect can appear stilted and a little too dislocated, yet it also makes perfect emotional sense: these are people who are stuck in their own thoughts and their own ideals, and as such are never really going to connect despite their previous/current relationships. Indeed, it’s within the non-communication where the tensions - and therefore the true dramas - lie. Certainly, Dreyer dresses up his film with the artful tableaux and spot-on period design which we should expect from the director (the latter having such precision that it becomes almost invisible), yet it’s this emotional core which proves integral no matter how beautiful Gertrud is to look at. Furthermore, as with Dreyer’s finest achievements, there’s an almost crushing inevitability to events which makes this centre all the stronger. Rarely has a film which appears so immediately cold on the surface been so dramatically heavyweight.

Gertrud Criterion essay by Phillip Lopate,, August 20, 2001

Gertrud and Light in August Jonathan Rosenbaum October 26, 2010

Gertrud (1964) - The Criterion Collection

GERTRUD as Nonnarrative: The Desire for the Image Jonathan Rosenbaum

Epinions [metalluk]

Gertrud Eric Henderson from Slant magazine

Bright Lights Film Journal | Carl Dreyer Gary Morris, also here: Images - Carl Theodor Dreyer

Gertrud—A World Elsewhere Ray Carney

CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule review)

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

All Movie Guide [Tom Wiener]

The Kill by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, February 1965, from Rivette’s website

BFI | Books & DVDs | DVD & Video | Films by Carl Theodor Dreyer BFI also reviews MASTER OF THE HOUSE, DAY OF WRATH, and ORDET

DVD Savant Review: Carl Theodor Dreyer Box Set Glenn Erickson on the 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection, also including DAY OF WRATH, ORDET, and the documentary CARL TH. DREYER: MY MÉTIER

Filmmaker Magazine | Fall 2001: LOAD + PLAY Scooter McCrae on the 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection from Filmmaker magazine

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

Reel.com DVD review [Bill Schwartz] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

digitallyOBSESSED! [Mark Zimmer] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

The Film Desk [James Kendrick] The 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection

BFI & Carl Dreyer this Spring Dave Foster reviews the 4-DVD Carl Dreyer Collection from DVD Times

DVD Times - BFI & Carl Dreyer this Spring (Part 2) Dave Foster from DVD Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Dror, Duki

RAGING DOVE B 83

USA (66 mi) 2002

A short, uneven look at culture shock, as seen through the life of Israeli citizen, Nazareth-born, Palestinian boxer Johar Abu-Lashin, who becomes lightweight champion of the world, but despite having the distinction of being the only Arab champion, he draws heat for carrying an Israeli flag into the ring, and playing the Israeli national anthem at ringside. Adding to the mix, he becomes an American citizen, marries a lovely Southern fight promoter who is drawn to his physicality as well as his boxing skills, and the two of them live on a horse farm in Tennessee, which is seen near the film’s opening while we hear Lou Reed’s “Heroin,” his punishing assault to the senses “...and it makes me feel just like Jesus’ son.” Eventually, he boxes in front of his hometown of Nazareth, but is lied to and betrayed by Palestinian President Yassar Arafat himself, thwarting his dream to fight before his own people on the Gaza Strip. This sense of personal mission, making himself whole by re-establishing himself as a Palestinian champion, takes a horrible toll out of his life, as in his wasted efforts to make this dream come true, he loses his boxing titles, which must be defended within 6 months, as well as his marriage, which becomes bogged down in debts. Johar is an extremely appealing young man, and has a very sensible attitude about rising above the petty, racist taunts of being called a “sand nigger,” of being, literally, a world champion, but the boxing world was never ready to accept an Arab in a sport dominated by blacks and whites, never giving him the respect or financial rewards that he so obviously craved and deserved.

Duffell, Peter

THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD

Great Britain (102 mi) 1970

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge

An enterprising if cash-strapped rival to Hammer, British independent studio Amicus made half-a-dozen ‘portmanteau’ horror movies in less than a decade - Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), Torture Garden (1967), this one, Tales from the Crypt and Asylum (1972) and Vault of Horror (1973) – most of which featured Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee. Though the two 1972 entries are the pick of the bunch, all were hit-and-miss affairs and House that Dripped Blood – based on short stories by Robert Bloch, author of the novel on which Hitchock’s Psycho was based – is more hit-and-miss than most.

The limp ‘framework’ story sees a jaded copper (John Bennett) investigating the mysterious disappearance of horror-movie star Paul Henderson (Jon Pertwee), who’d been renting a large detached house on his patch. One of the copper’s junior colleagues relates a trio of grim tales about events that befell the house’s previous tenants. The local estate-agent then provides the fourth story.

1)     Method for Murder. A writer (Denholm Elliott) starts to believe that one of his fictional creations – a maniacal strangler – has come to life and is lurking around the house with homicidal intent. Pretty standard sting-in-the-tail stuff familiar to viewers of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected from TV. One or two effective shock moments when director Duffell zooms into the strangler’s deformed face, but somewhat underpowered and plodding.

2)     Waxworks. A solitary old gent (Peter Cushing) becomes fascinated with a waxwork of Salome in the town’s wax museum. Problems ensue. Easily the most incoherent, cobbled-together and dated of the quartet. Fails to deliver suspense or shocks, but campy laughs are fairly thick on the ground – Cushing’s pseudo-trippy, dry-ice-infested dream sequence has to be seen to be believed. Groovy threads sported by both Cushing and Joss Ackland as his old pal who pays a visit. The moment when they greet each other at Cushing’s door will be of interest to football fans, especially adherents of Manchester United.

3)     Sweets to the Sweet. A hyper-strict father (Christopher Lee) employs an attractive widow (Nyree Dawn-Porter) to look after his mollycoddled little girl (Chloe Franks). But why is Daddy so scared of the moppet? Despite the meaningless title, this is an effective little chiller in the mould of The Innocents and The Others. Lee has played unpleasant characters for decades, but this one beats the lot: Saruman, Dracula and Dooku would surely cross the road to avoid this martinet. The scene where he hurls his daughter’s new doll into the fire prefigures Mommie Dearest. Dawn-Porter suggests this action is somewhat cruel. “But necessary!” Lee shoots back. Dawn-Porter struggles to get a handle on her role, but big Lee and teeny-tiny Franks go at it – and each other – hammer-and-tongs.

4)     The Cloak. “I’m afraid, sir, I do not patronise the kinema” rasps Geoffrey Bayldon as a very Transylvanian costume-shop proprietor, engaging small-talk with Pertwee’s Henderson as the latter, filming Night of the Bloodsuckers nearby, purchases an unusually authentic vampire’s cloak. Problems ensue. Pretty much played entirely for laughs, this is the most enjoyable of the four episodes with Pertwee – in a dry-run of the dynamic-dandy mode later seen in Doctor Who – a scream as a British Vincent Price type. The greatest Who there never was, Bayldon only appears in the one scene, but it’s a classic – and not just because it’s Worzel Gummidge sharing the screen with Catweazle. Ingrid Pitt pops up essentially playing herself, and there are some nice little throwaway gags on the set of the exceedingly tawdry-looking Bloodsuckers movie. Not exactly Targets, of course, but it’ll do.

A film of two halves then, with the latter two stories making the whole thing worth the bother. Obtaining the services of Cushing and Lee (though this is one of those annoying films that features both but never together in the same scene) presumably took a massive chunk out of the available budget. Special effects are of the shoestring variety, when they exist at all – the ‘bat shadow’ technique during The Cloak pretty much defines ‘cheap-and-cheerful.’

We get a reprise of this not-so-speciall effect at the end, when the hard-headed copper unwisely pays a visit to The House and finds more than he’d bargained for. Then the estate agent appears to address us directly: “Have you worked out the house’s secret yet? Precisely!” Nobel Prizes have been awarded for solving less complex puzzles. Because the main problem with The House that Dripped Blood is that the house doesn’t drip blood at all – the premises in question are, at best, tangential to the film’s ‘action,’ and in the Waxworks story, the house barely features at all. At least the framework was trying something different from the inevitable “they’re all dead and/or damned” used in Dr Terror, Torture Garden, Crypt and Vault – but it isn’t a patch on the genuinely creepy framing-device from Asylum. While this one never convinces as a chiller, it remains serviceable late-night-TV fare.

Duffy, Alicia

ALL GOOD CHILDREN A- 93

Ireland France Belgium Great Britain (80 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

Irish director Alicia Duffy writes and directs her first feature film, a sad and haunting tale that is likely to divide audiences with her decidedly arthouse style, which some may appreciate as it delves into a free form, non-narrative approach to filmmaking, while others may think her style is pretentious, copying the much superior techniques of Lynne Ramsay with an over reliance of style over substance which covers up her narrative weaknesses because she hasn’t the ability to tell a decent story. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I’m inclined to think she made the movie she wanted to make, much of which takes place in the confusion of a child’s mind, loosely adapted by the director from British author Sam Taylor’s novel The Republic of Trees, this is largely an atmospheric mood piece layered in psychological ambiguity, leaving multiple interpretations available to the audience. The abstract, experimental style is reminiscent of the imagery of Jennifer Reeves in THE TIME WE KILLED (2004), which weaves in and out of dreams, fantasy, and personal experiences, including her highly personalized reaction to her own suicide attempt at age 17. This film opens with a similar trauma, as the suicide of the mother of two young pre-teen boys, Dara (Jack Gleeson) and Eoin (David Brazil), leads the father to return them to their aunt’s house in rural France while he attends to funeral arrangements in Ireland for a few weeks. Feeling abandoned and alone, the boys are immediately terrified, where Eoin tries to run away, which moves the rest of the story almost completely into the forest, where in the absence of parental authority figures, who are almost entirely non-existent while their father is away, Dara’s mental state deteriorates and grows more irrational, drifting in and out of fantasy and reality.

In the forest they meet a precocious young English girl near their same age, Bella (Imogen Jones), who lives in a large estate in the woods and who immediately befriends Dara. The two of them race around the forest together playing imaginary games which feel magical and seem to last all day long, which helps immensely with the shock of displacement. But everything changes after Bella kisses him, as if a kind of psychosis sets in, where Dara becomes fixated on brightly lit, angelic images of her at that point while she’s simply a free-spirited young girl who expresses a momentary feeling but moves on, afterwards befriending his little brother Eoin, which sends Dara into a psychological sinkhole of jealous turbulence, believing there is no one left who understands him, retreating further and further into a dark and mysterious forest, a hallucination-tinged world of madness. Dara’s personal expression grows more violent, as he can’t contain the apparent rejection he feels from Bella, leaving him spinning in a paranoid retreat, afraid of anyone coming close to him, believing everyone is out to get him, where his imagination starts to get the best of him, feeling lost and abandoned, losing all semblance of reality, largely expressed by an eerie electronic sound design that feels right out of Nicolas Roeg, where speech and voices and memories merge in his head all at the same time, where a weird expressionist canvas onscreen expresses his personal terror of the world closing in around him, using original music by Steve Stapleton and brilliantly edgy camerawork by Nanu Segal. The director makes sparing use of Dara in a poetic voiceover, which gives a quiet expression to his inner desperation, but it’s hard to know just what happens at the end, none of it good, as it’s all told in a language of irrationality, with Dara’s mental state completely detached from the world. The film is a tone poem of trauma and horrible tragedy, which attempts to convey through the haunting use of beautifully edited, mysteriously abstract imagery just how quickly seemingly innocent children can become lost to us.

Scott's Movie Comments [Scott Larson]

Yes, the title is ironic. Presumably, it comes from the nursery rhyme and would be completed by “go to heaven.” The film is freely adapted from (maybe “inspired by” would be more accurate) British author Sam Taylor’s novel The Republic of Trees, which was something of a variation on The Lord of the Flies. But Alicia Duffy’s film is less a societal allegory and critique than an adolescent entry into that good old movie subgenre l’amour fou. After their mother’s death, a pair of Irish lads are landed on their aunt in rural France. They soon befriend a nearby British family, and young Dara becomes drawn to their daughter Bella. She is played by Imogen Jones, who easily makes us believe that she could bewitch a boy with her sphinx-like eyes and smile. Dara is played Jack Gleeson, who already has a blockbuster under his belt with a brief role in Batman Begins. He too is well served by his distinctive eyes, which convey all kinds of need and vulnerability and, ultimately, dire confusion. Much of the action takes place in a forest and, inevitably, the camera lingers longingly on nature shots, alerting us that the most primeval of forces will be at play here. Auspiciously, the movie debuted at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes.

The Guardian at Cannes 2010 (Peter Bradshaw) review [3/5]

The debut feature from the British film-maker Alicia Duffy, which premiered in the directors' fortnight, is a disquieting tale of obsession and violence in the French countryside. Duffy's movie has the trance-like evocation of mood and detail to be found in the work of Lynne Ramsay and Duane Hopkins; it is a parable for the emotional discrepancy between male and female adolescence, for the loneliness of boyhood and perhaps, at a deeper level, the combustible proximity of Ireland and England.

Jack Gleeson plays Dara, an introverted teenage boy from the Irish Republic who, along with his older brother Eoin (David Brazil), has been brought to France one long, hot summer by their French father after the death of their mother. Rambling in the local woodland, Dara comes across a derelict mansion that has been bought by a well-off English family; the couple have a daughter, Bella (Imogen Jones) who befriends the shy, thoughtful Dara, and with her bewitchingly spoiled, flirtatious manner encourages Dara to fall painfully in love with her. She has a very English sense of casual entitlement and a patrician incomprehension of her new friend's feelings.

Gleeson's sky-blue eyes have an unearthly look, suggesting eerie depths, and his face is a picture of pain, wonderment, frustration and resentment. The violence that finishes the story is not exactly predictable, but it does take the movie pretty close to a certain sort of arthouse cliche: a dreamy eroticism and languor that must be snapped shut with a violent act. But Duffy's intelligence makes this film a success; with daring, she holds on to the feeling and texture of the visual scene.

All Good Children Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily

A rich and moody sense of dread permeates British writer-director Alicia Duffy’s debut feature All Good Children which screens in Director’s Fortnight. It is a hypnotic and beguiling film that could well appeal to art house distributors.

The film, which is the first production for Caveman Films, the company set up by producer Jonathan Cavendish and actor/director Andy Serkis, makes great use of its French locations and blends a gritty rural reality with a certain dreamlike quality as its tells its story in that strange territory between childhood fantasy and adult reality.

Young Irish boy Dara (Jack Gleeson) and his older brother Eoin are moved to rural France after the death of their mother, and within days Dara befriends the charismatic red-haired Bella (Imogen Jones), whose English parents are restoring a crumbling chateau in the woods near to where he lives.

The pair form a close bond and start to playfully rebel, but after Bella shyly kisses Dara he becomes increasingly obsessed with her and she begins to pull away from him. Completely enraptured by her, Dara becomes more and more troubled and his obsession propels him towards a series of dreadful incidents.

Alicia Duffy, who has made several prize-winning short films, has crafted a delicately atmospheric film, that while relatively straightforward in structure, tackles complex emotions. In the opening scenes she makes it very clear that this is a story that will not end happily. Jack Gleeson is perfectly cast as the gently obsessive Dara, while Imogen Jones (long red hair and no eyebrows give her face a strangely watchable quality) is the perfect counterbalance as the playful Bella, who veers between boredom and flirtation as she childishly manipulates Dara initially.

All of the adult roles are written in such a vague way that it is clear that there are issues in their lives, but these issues are never fully developed…merely hinted at as Duffy focuses on the children’s antics in the ramshackle houses and stark woodland. The film is a bold debut, and one that demands attention.

The Hollywood Reporter review Peter Brunette

Irish first-time director Alicia Duffy offers us, in "All Good Children," a stirringly poetic take, gorgeously photographed, on preteen love and obsession. When the film turns more openly generic in its final third, becoming a full-blown thriller, it loses some of the subtle power it had taken such meticulous pains to create.

Nevertheless, it's still very well done, and niche distributors, in North America and elsewhere, might see some steady if modest returns from the film.

Dara, who looks to be about 12, and his slightly older brother Eoin, are taken from Ireland to the French countryside when their mother dies. There, they come in contact with an English family living in the area, and Dara becomes completely mesmerized by the dazzling Bella, a girl who seems to be about his own age. Forging a strong secret bond, they laze away the summer days exploring the world and their own budding sensuality. After a while, however, Bella begins playing with other children and, worst of all, flirting with Dara's older brother. As Dara becomes increasingly obsessed with her, tragic consequences ensue.

Director Duffy has a marvelous ability to convey a feeling of mystery and dread by poetic means, both visual and verbal. She sparingly employs a fragile voiceover supplied by Dara, a brilliant choice that provides us with an index of his inner feelings. Like poor Dara, Duffy's camera is itself obsessed with Bella, and the film revels in close-ups of her that create a bizarre desire on the part of the viewer as well. The wild rebellious of youth is also well captured by Duffy, and it seems that the wondrous days the children share will never end.

In another poetic gesture, nature and its mysterious power are invoked in the presence of a dead fox being eaten up by maggots and other tiny creatures that live on death, in a shot that will remind some viewers of Lars Von Trier's dead fox in last year's "Antichrist." (Happily, this one doesn't talk.)

Inevitably the two brothers tussle violently over Bella in a scene that rhymes nicely with an earlier moment in which they wrestled with one another, but playfully. In a unique depiction of a child's mind starting to unravel, Dara searches restlessly for Bella, and it's no wonder, because Imogen Jones, who plays Bella flawlessly and with fantastic expressiveness, clearly has a wonderful career ahead of her.

It's difficult to know how else the film could have ended, but several murders ensue as we enter thriller territory and a subsequent diminution of the film's uniqueness. Even here, though, director Duffy's control of formal technique is complete, as she increases her use of extreme close-ups and distorted angles that make manifest the deterioration of Dara's mind.

Cineuropa - News - Production – France/Ireland/Belgium - Alicia ... Fabien Lemercier from Cineuropa

Nisimazine | Interview-Portrait: Duffy, Alicia Erzsébet Plájás interviews the director from Nisi magazine, May 19, 2010

BBC News - Alicia Duffy: From opera singer to film-maker Fiona Pryor interview from the BBC News, May 20, 2010

Variety (Leslie Felperin) review

Duigan, John

FLIRTING

Australia (99 mi) 1991

Edinburgh U Film Society [Michael Morrison]

For all you hard-bitten cynical students, here's a film to make you believe in love again. If you already believe in love, here's a film to bring a tear to your eye. The rites of passage/teenage love story would appear to be unpromising territory for a fresh and uplifting work - boy meets girl, girl plays hard to get, boy perseveres, girl gives in etc. etc. It's all been done before. But this film is refreshingly original. Flirting is intelligent, witty, tender and beautifully understated.

This is the middle installment of writer and director John Duigan's trilogy about growing up in Australia. Danny Embling (Noah Taylor) is a bright young man with a mild stammer who sees himself as a bit of an existentialist. Maybe that is why he doesn't quite fit in to the rugby playing, boxing world of his remote public school (a piece of England Down Under) but he's got a droll sense of humour... Maybe that is what attracts the striking Ugandan played by Thandie Newton from the girl's school (actually it should probably be called a lady's school) across the lake. They flirt with each other. But not too hard. They are mature for their years. The filin convincingly traces their relationship as they are drawn together by their shared outsider status - hers is on account of the colour of her skin (which is a beautiful dusky brown). The consummation of their relationship is handled delicately in contrast to so many films of this genre. Mmmmmm love... it could almost make you forget about the woes of the world.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

In his new film, "Flirting," Australian writer-director John Duigan continues to show the same mastery of delicate emotional states that he displayed in his previous movie, "The Year My Voice Broke." And if that film displayed his promise, this one announces his arrival.

This brilliant sequel -- it's more of a continuation, really -- furthers the story of Danny Embling (Noah Taylor), the troubled young hero who came of age in "The Year My Voice Broke" and who now finds himself an underclassman at St. Albans, a prestigious boarding school in rural Australia. The prissy boy's school setting is so familiar as to be cliche; the film's scenes of boys growing into men together under the oppressive thumbs of their headmasters have been staged a thousand times -- so many times, in fact, that I didn't think I could sit still for yet another tilling of this overused ground. But Duigan brings such originality and pure insight to his subject -- including Embling's gossamer courtship of a spunky Ugandan beauty named Thandiwe (Thandie Newton) -- that it seems spanking new.

In the years since the first film, Embling has grown into a rather odd sort of duck. He stutters, but in his mind this condition exists only to signify his innate superiority; he bears the abuse heaped on him by his schoolmates as a natural aristocrat, secure in his ranking at the bottom of the ladder.

Embling cultivates this air of romantic existentialism. His heroes are Sartre and Camus and Cassius Clay. (The year is 1965.) And he takes strength from being thought of as a weirdo and a loser because it confirms his status as the "loner," the "stranger." He likes it that his pigeon-brained, rugby-playing classmates can't figure him out.

The truth is that Embling is smarter, more mature and more sophisticated than his classmates, and it takes about two minutes for Thandiwe to figure this out. Because she is black, Thandiwe is also something of an outsider, and immediately each recognizes the other as a soul mate, a fellow soldier in the private war against the real fools and losers of the world.

This kind of emotional precision -- that is, this ability to make the subtlest psychological distinctions -- is a rare gift, and Duigan gets full mileage out of it, especially in the intimate scenes between these star-crossed teenage lovers. Moments like the one in which Embling and Thandiwe have their first private time together, and agree only to "touch and kiss," are exquisitely sexy, a romantic's erotic dream come true. (Thandiwe says, guiding his hand up her thigh, "Welcome.") Every event has that urgent desperation of adolescent hyperbole when every sensation is a new one, and so the whole movie has this drunk-dizzy, head-over-heels quality.

Both Taylor and Newton are marvelous in their roles, but the magic touch here is a special tone, a uniquely personal color, that only Duigan can contribute. Though his movies start out seeming small, even miniature, they always seem to blossom before your eyes. With Duigan, what you see, at first, is not what you get.

Flirting Lorie Palmer from Senses of Cinema

Epinions [metalluk]

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

Movie Vault [Scott Spicciati]

DVD Verdict Dan Mancini

Austin Chronicle [Pamela Bruce]

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

WIDE SARGASSO SEA

Australia (98 mi) 1993

Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber

Jean Rhys's novel--a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre, the back story of the first Mrs. Rochester, the mad-woman in the attic--has been transplanted by director John Duigan into Wide Sargasso Sea, an imperfect but haunting movie. Karina Lombard and Nathaniel Parker don't have quite the star magnetism to make the romance memorable, but the evocation of Jamaican culture in the mid-19th century is richly detailed alluringly sensual.

Time Out review

Jean Rhys's last novel unlocked the secret behind the door: who was the mysterious madwoman in Rochester's attic in Jane Eyre? Rhys imagined her as a Creole Jamaican plantation-owner's daughter and voodoo-child who becomes a victim of clashing cultural loyalties, degenerate family inheritance and disappointed love. Duigan's version retains much of the period detail, but wisely avoids getting swamped by diffuse political allegory, and settles instead as a full blown bodice-ripper. Presumably Karina Lombard was cast as the daughter to embody sensuality and suggest mixed-blood inheritance, but her limitations as an actress forbid audience identification. Likewise, Parker's Rochester, shipped from Albion for the fateful arranged marriage, is merely a dashing cad. There's little sense of any of the proceedings, but the movie has a fascinating charged quality: Geoff Burton films the Jamaican locations in an intoxicating profusion of colour, and the colonialist soirées and the plantation-house fire are superbly mounted. A strange, dark, muddled dream of a movie, occasionally risible but rarely boring.

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Sometimes a vast fortune, doting servants, great sex and a Jamaican hideaway just aren't enough. That's the gist of the softly pornographic, luridly metaphoric "Wide Sargasso Sea," an uninvolving island idyll based on Jean Rhys's Gothic prequel to "Jane Eyre." Though rated NC-17 for its naked truths, an SPF-15 would be enough: The hottest thing about the movie is the strong Caribbean sun.

Like "The Lover," this literary adaptation wants to be more than a bed-rattling moaner. It wants to tell the world that colonialism probably wasn't really a good thing for either the weak white usurpers or the variously hued servants and slaves they economically abused. Ooooohhh, hmmmm, unnnn ... but the sex was better than a plateful of scones. All those 19th century fine washables to unlace, all those natives drumming away night and day.

The lovers are star-crossed from the start. Sugar heiress Antoinette Cosway (Karina Lombard) is an aristocratic, convent-schooled Creole who turns out to be a pillowy-lipped passion fruit who is starved for love. She falls hard for Edward Rochester (Nathaniel Parker), a repressed Englishman who marries her for her dowry.

Edward, who is in fact destined to become Mr. Jane Eyre, has the stereotypical British reaction to warmth: It makes him want to take off his pants, then he feels guilty about it. But the oft-supine Antoinette worries: "Is it possible to die of happiness?" "Die, die, die," screams Edward, while thumping away.

Alas, Edward's Britishness resurfaces and he becomes afraid of losing himself in sensuality. He dreams about strangling in Sargasso seaweed and becomes repelled by his urges, the bugs, even the local produce. He almost barfs on a servant who peels a mango in his presence: "I just don't like fruit," he complains. "It's all squishy and overripe."

During a six-week honeymoon in the lush Jamaican mountains, Edward grows restless and returns to the British enclave in the port city for an evening of tea dancing and palaver. Antoinette, the daughter of an alcoholic and a crazy woman, reacts with inappropriate anger, which only drives Edward further from her. In hopes of winning him back, she asks her former nanny, Christophene (Claudia Robinson), a voodoo priestess, for a love potion.

Christophene, who looks as if she escaped from an old Tarzan movie, warns, "Obeah is too strong for a white man," but Antoinette feeds the erotic elixir to Edward anyway. Unfortunately Antoinette's lifelong rival, a saucy child of the plantation (Rowena King), benefits -- if that is the word -- from his reaction to the black magic. That does it for Edward.

The intriguing premise of Rhys's novel and its poetry are lost in the swollen screenplay co-written by Australian director John Duigan of "Flirting" fame. Duigan, like Edward, is torn between the manly need for control and orgiastic abandon. He grapples with the yin-yang thing: Woman is a sticky tropical punch board, and man is afraid of getting his peg permanently caught. Deep.

"Wide Sargasso Sea" is really just coffee-table pornography with sound effects. The characters are fickle wraiths, less substantive than those spokesgeeks for Calvin Klein's Obsession.

Wide Sargasso Sea Imperial Travesty, by Carey Snyder and Eric Anders from Jump Cut, March 1996

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]

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

DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [2/5]

DVD Talk (Gerry Putzer) dvd review [3/5]

DVD Verdict (Bill Treadway) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Christopher Kulik) dvd review

Frank R.A.J. Maloney review

Urban Cinefile dvd review Andrew L. Urban

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]

Epinions [Stephen Murray]

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Lawrence Cohn) review

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

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

Dulac, Germaine

Dulac, Germaine Art and Culture

The first Surrealist filmmaker. The first female French filmmaker. The first female-French-Surrealist filmmaker. Add to this the fact that "Germaine Dulac" was an ardent feminist (some say lesbian, too), and we’ve got quite a title. Like her Hollywood contemporary Dorothy Arzner, Dulac upheld each part with aplomb.

Dulac was a driving force among Paris bohemians. As editor of the publication La Française, she came into contact with the French suffragist movement. And as a film critic, she approached cinema with an eye to opera and music.

In 1915 Dulac and her husband opened a tiny production company, Delia Films, where she directed highly inventive films on a small scale. She applied her theoretical passion for "films made according to the rules of visual music" to her own work, from the abstract "Disque 927" (1928) to the documentary "Germination d'un Haricot" (“Germination of a Green Bean,” 1928).

Dulac’s 1923 "La Souriante Madame Beudet" (“The Smiling Madame Beudet”) is a shining example of her commitment to experimentation. This Impressionist piece about a psychologically tortured housewife has been hailed one of the first truly feminist films and one of the finest examples of psychological drama in silent cinema. Working within a traditional narrative, she nevertheless used visual distortions to represent Madame Beudet’s memories, dreams, hallucinations, and fantasies.

In all, Dulac worked on at least 20 films, though her name-recognition falls far behind one-time collaborator Antonin Artaud. "The Seashell and the Clergyman" (1928) featured Artaud’s writing and Dulac’s direction -– as well as open disagreement between the two over everything from production to marketing. The film marked Dulac’s most complete foray into Surrealism, setting the visually immersive effects of Impressionism within a disjointed structure. In one scene, for example, a police officer dressed in infant’s clothing appears to split in two.

Dulac flourished in the silent film era, and was silenced by the "talkies." With the advent of sound, she was unable to continue financing her films independently. But instead of selling out to commercial filmmaking, she chose to disseminate information and encourage interest in films via numerous cinema clubs. Later she moved into newsreel production.

THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET (La souriante Madame Beudet)

France (54 mi) 1922

User Reviews from imdb Author Sylvia Marciniak (sylviastel@aol.com) from United States

I studied Women and Film with author, Dr. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis at Rutgers University and this is one of the many films that we watched in the viewing. Germaine Dulac provided us a glimpse into the life of women in France during Pre-World War II era and Post World War I world. Paris was a city who loved the arts at the time and was thriving with literary salons and American expatriates as well. Germaine Dulac never captured as much attention but she should have been on league with her male counterparts like Jean Epstein and others. Sadly, the war and the depression may have ended her career like so many others. We can only imagine what might have been if Germaine Dulac had been given the same advantages that her male counterparts received during that time. But she was one of the lucky ones to get the experienced to direct such films like this that are controversial and eye opening as well. Language is not necessary since sound didn't come until the 1930s and Germaine's career went elsewhere.

THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN (La coquille et le clergyman)

France (41 mi) 1928

User Reviews from imdb Author: amjad qureshi from Pakistan

The predecessor of Un Chien Andalou and directed by the lone woman filmmaker of her time, La Coquille et le Clergyman is one of the most celebrated of French avant-garde movies of the '20s, partly because Antonin Artaud wrote the script, partly because the British censor of the time banned it with the legendary words 'If this film has a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable'. Artaud was reputedly unhappy with Dulac's realization of his scenario, and it's true that the story's anti-clericalism (a priest develops a lustful passion that plunges him into bizarre fantasies) is somewhat undermined by the director's determined visual lyricism. But the fragmentation of the narrative and the innovative imagery remain provocative, and the film is of course fascinating testimony to the currents of its time.

Dumont, Bruno

SCREENVILLE: Bruno Dumont on filmmaking Harry Tuttle from Screenville

Discussion with Bruno Dumont

by Marie Vermillard, Philippe Grandrieux, Khalil Joreige from the filmmaker club at Le cinema l'après-midi, on June 10th 2006

Really interesting discussion among filmmakers who get into the artistic concerns of filmcraft, and the ideology of Dumont's aesthetics. Although the atmosphere is friendly and Grandrieux is clearly in total connivence. They are not promoting a commercial product with complacent questions here. This type of live radio show winds up a little confusing and disorganized, leaving us frustrated by interrupted sentences and spontaneous digressions that never answered a question raised along the way. The interview would gain in intelligence if written down and edited, structured without this urge to say too much at the time. An interesting approach to interview resulting in a richer, deeper material than the press conference digest in Cannes for instance (partial transcript).

The art of cinema is the center of discussion. They talk of his relationship with actors and viewers, how a film commands and alter perception of reality. Dumont doesn't explain his synopsis here but confesses why he makes films.

Former philosopher, turned autodidact director, he speaks with self-confidence and a certain authority that could be alienating if he didn't place the audience at the core of his theory. It does sound a little all-knowing and condescending, maybe a feeling prompted by his recent win of the Grand Jury Prize for Flandres at Cannes 2006.

Which brings the question : "How to speak of cinema?"

Sometimes putting delicate images into words desacralizes the poetry in them by an excess of vulgar materiality. I mean filmmakers aren't always the best persons to explicit their instinctive inspiration, but they are the first people to go to.

Cinema

Dumont admits "intellectual/illustrative cinema" is boring, he doesn't believe in Cinema of Emptiness. Cinema = Time. Closest art to life itself. Primordial sensibility. Cinema isn't imaginary. What he wants is a simple cinema of reality : the metaphysics of banality. Going beyond intellectual complexity (desires, will, ideas of cinema) in order to make the shot a beginning : nothing. There is nothing to see. No preconceived ideas, no intentions, no established meaning, just a "nothing" that will reverberate into the audience and make sense then through the articulation of montage that echo one plan with another.

Cinema is a powerful but complicate art. Plans, aesthetic values, positions of actors in the shot, light, camerawork, sound... A complex art requiring a lot of upstream work, which paradoxally allows to reach ultimately an apparent simplicity. He humbles before great masterpieces (without citing any films or auteurs in particular). "Cinema isn't technical, I learn when I walk down the street, by meeting people" he says. Cinema is about patience, humility, a look upon others. Today's cinema is overwhelmed by codes, clichés, references to other films. Dumont believes in "decodage".

A film is an experience of astonishment (to be flabbergasted). The subject isn't the object in the film, but the gaze on this object.

Screenwriting

To write a film is to wait for images, sensations to come up, and to reject silly images. (In this he meets David Lynch's own method)

To grasp a scene Dumont writes down the description of a sensation in a literary style, like a novel. But this is only a preparation, literature cannot be filmed. Only remains the emotion summoned, refined by its wording yet devoid of any constructed sense, and will be the raw substance to work on during shooting. Working hard to go beyond clichés. There is nothing to see. The contemplation of a cinema story is secondary. The audience needs a motif however, a basic love story for identification, to relate to the work. Mise-en-scène can never go too far into abstraction.

Set

The most difficult is to make the set designer understand he shouldn't touch anything on location. After a long location scouting, the right place imposes itself and should be preserved intact, thus dismissing all the intentions mentionned in script. Any accentuation, characterization is out of question. The scenes will adapt to the real location instead, to maintain the authenticity and truth of a living space with genuine history.

Acting

Dumont prefers the ingenuity of non-actors who do not ressort to performance tricks. They don't bring in a "prepared color". Non-actors convey with their real-life personality (which belongs to the story) everything that is needed for the film credibility. He regrets his experience with professional actors on Twentynine Palms, and made it despite their active acting. Acting virtuosity is prohibited. "I expect nothing, I await for a miracle to happen, an accident" he declares.

He knows exactly what he wants from the actors, so improvisation is not welcomed. And he makes sure the actors do not know too much about the action planned in a scene to preserve spontaneity and surprises. He's very demanding with actors, pushing them to their limits, against their resistance, insisting, making several takes (up to 15). And then being able to give up when it fails to happen, dropping the scene altogether. There are a lot of wasted out-takes. He's not constrained by script imperatives. He lets chance and accidents rewrite the course of the story, according to what succeeds or not during shooting. For instance the actress on Flandres cried instead of saying her lines and he kept the scene as is. But another actor abandonned the set, because of the directorial (dictatorial?) pressure. "We cannot shoot with maximum security", he says, speaking of the shooting conditions with bomb stunts on Flandres, "the possibility of risk saves a part for lively events".

Sound

Direct sound, mono, without much sound mix at all. Recording reality, out of control, waiting for something to happen, the accident. (same moto)

Mise-en-scène

Like a painter who paints a mountain that ultimately blends in on the canvas where there is no mountain to be seen anymore. Sense is no longer at stake, what he likes is to work where the sense is gone. Reality offers the presence of things that do not imply a narrative construction. Dumont struggles against construction. Dissipate sense. Prevent an actor to formulate meaning. Make the auteur (Ego, gaze) vanish. Because the non-neutral audience is there, coming in with their own emotional load (desires), and a need of sense. The viewer is "full". Cinema must balance the equilibrium with a whole audience, and provide a full film, finished, ruled, moral, political. The heart of the work is in the story (conveyed by actors and scenes), the goal is to carry this story. Takes can be or should be mediocre, unfinished, spontaneous, real, away from the overstated stylization. He says "cut" when he feels the exposition of the audience was sufficient. Cinema is in the montage, that's where Dumont input a suggestive meaning.

Montage

The art to compose cinema elements together. A shot doesn't matter for itself. Shots too pretty, with an overt aesthetization are discarded. What interests him are the transitions obtained in editing opposition. Associating banal shots that will surge with an extraordinary exposure on the editing table by ways of confrontation with another flat shot. Imprevisibility sparks up on the editing table, long after a shooting "out of control", after watching the dailies. Contemplating the exact transition between shots, the right timing, he feels intuitively the shots to be alright.

Grandrieux and Dumont discuss the opening sequence of Flandres: A wide stationary shot of a distant farm to generate a great force. Cut to an extreme close up of a body part, an arm just hurt by the opening of the gate. The close up enters abruptly "inside" the previous shot, and the viewer is pulled in alongside.

The film is a "viewer montage". What is edited isn't what is seen on screen but the sensations, culture, experience, sensibility inside the audience. The viewer is captured into the screen. The thrill is generated by an alteration of the viewer's habits by projecting something unusual. The film is a go-between which leads the scenario and mise-en-scene to operate from the audience.

* * *

This theoretical talk is fascinating, I like most everything he says (non-actors, importance of montage, script improvisation, neutrality, emotional tabula-rasa, learning cinema in the street...), although the only film I saw (L'Humanité) doesn't yield as much visual power as other minimalist films by ascetic filmmakers. Bresson's system (albeit different) is very constraining and rigorous too but develops a much stronger and coherent language. I find it ironical to elaborate such a "populist" speech for such an elistist cinema. I'm not sure what audience he targets his films for but the popular success doesn't quite follow. I mean it seems contradictory to focus on this "universal viewer" waiting to be mesmerized if such viewer rarely responds to these films. I would always defend minoritary cinemas that never find their niche despite their overlooked quality. But what's funny there is the rational of intellectual films supposedly made to reach for the guts...

* * *

acquarello said...

Thanks for the transcription, Dumont's theories are always interesting to hear. I've caught a couple of Q&A's with Dumont for his earlier films, and he does seem to be fixated on the idea on the physical "meaninglessness" of images (that they only serve to extract the sensation and are disposable), and the idea of disengaging the image from conventional coding. I don't always see that his theories necessarily coincide with what I see in his films, though. :)

For instance, there's already a "coding" in the physicality of his non-actors (Domino is a voluptuous woman in L'Humanité which already implies a carnality to her personality, David rides around in a Hummer which pretty much symbolizes every American excess macho trip). Then there's also the coding of his locations, like rural Northern France or the California desert which already implies a kind of desolation.

Grandrieux is probably the closest to Dumont in terms of tossing conventional notions of narrative cinema (or at least, the "morality" of having to make sense of it) out the window, so I'm not surprised that they were feeding off each other's comments during the discussion. I wonder if he's been working on anything since La Vie nouvelle. Like Dumont, I don't quite know what to make of him yet, I see things that make me think one way, then he says (or does something) that makes me think another. Humanist? Provocateur?

HarryTuttle said...

I haven't read much about Dumont, and wasn't even tempted to watch Twentynine Palms after the critical pan. So this post was just my notes from this only interview, and putting it all back in order thematically.

You put it into words better than I could. ;)

"the idea on the physical "meaninglessness" of images (that they only serve to extract the sensation and are disposable), and the idea of disengaging the image from conventional coding."

Like you say, I find his theory a little dubious compared to what he actually achieves on film. And I'm rather disturbed by his manipulation of non-actors.

I could imagine Bresson was similarly estranged when he came up with his cinematographe theory. So maybe Dumont and Grandrieux make a cinema too "new" that we cannot properly appreciate it. Although without enough distance to judge, there seems to be more "theory" than transcendence in this difficult fringe of cinema. Still very interesting but not landmarking.

I haven't heard about Grandrieux's recent projects either.

I still haven't managed to catch a screening of Sombre yet, even though it has popped out a couple times since I first discovered Grandrieux with La Vie Nouvelle.

He's one of the highlights of this Filmmakers Club show, with Pascal Bonitzer. They talk about films in a very profound way.

HarryTuttle said...

What's self-contradictory in his words is that he's a White Elephant trying hard to sound like a Termite (borrowing Farber's taxonomy).

He says he refuses thoughful intentions, meaning, construction, aesthetic sophistication, acting virtuosity, that he welcomes accident and happenstances just like a Termite would. But in fact his cinema is very much rigorous and only HIM is in command, to achieve his auteurist vision, with a thoughtful formalist montage (which defines a very constructed aesthetics no matter what he says), like every White Elephant does.

I think he's just shy to admit he's a dictator type of director (maybe because of the bad publicity? I don't know).

acquarello said...

Heheh, yes! During the Twentynine Palms Q&A, he was very articulate about how we should view the film, not in terms of narrative, but as an abstract work, where the only thing that matters is the sensation. So if he's even structuring the audience's way of seeing, that's not exactly serendipity or happenstance.

The funny thing is, after pretty much a skewering by one hostile audience question after another, he then kept repeating that we should stop trying to assign meaning to the images because they don't exist, they're chance and incidental: the people, the landscape, can be erased. Then when someone asked (paraphrasing) "If the people aren't important, then why didn't you kill them off at the beginning of the film?", his answer was something like "because the audience needs a crutch, someone to identity with, or they won't get it". Anyway, it sounded as though he had all these lofty ideas, but he still knew that he had to work within this preset audience coding to be able to get this abstract sensation. So how abstract is it really if he admits to coding it for the audience's sake? There's the conundrum! ;)

HarryTuttle said...

Revealing story about this Q&A. ;)

As a former philosopher he should be able to articulate a lucid and honest theory of his work, without projecting too much expectations in the audience.

In this interview he sounded almost embarassed to be refered as a philosopher, thus why he promptly dissmissed "thinking cinema".

It's a curious posture for a philosopher, even a rebellious one...

THE POLARIZING, MAGNIFICENT CINEMA OF BRUNO DUMONT Nick Wrigley reviews Dumont films from Masters of Cinema

Bruno Dumont's Bodies Darren Hughes from Senses of Cinema

Bruno Dumont by Philippe Tancelin, Sébastien Ors and Valérie Jouve book review by Maximilian Le Cain from Senses of Cinema

THE LIFE OF JÉSUS (La vie de Jésus) B+ 90

France (96 mi) 1996 ‘Scope

Interesting film reminiscent of Fassbinder’s KATZELMACHER, a sharp examination of small town teen angst stored up from no jobs, no future, just mopeds and a pent-up hatred for foreigners, becoming violent when an Arab goes out with a French girl. Set in Dumont’s hometown of Bailleul in Flanders, the film’s “precise rhythms and spare storytelling build to a shattering, and beautiful, final scene.” —Film Comment

Time Out

Making use of locals instead of professional actors lends authenticity to this impressive look at a group of otherwise innocuous teenage lads in a boring northern French town (Bailleul in Flanders), driven to violence by a mixture of boredom, jealousy, macho pride and ingrained racism. Essentially it's a work of low key 'realism' in the Bressonian tradition (albeit less obviously 'spiritual'), though it includes odd touches, such as the local marching band's unexpectedly dissonant music, and a couple of brief sequences (involving body doubles) so sexually frank they look like out-takes from Ai No Corrida. Perhaps strangest of all is that the protagonist's girlfriend seems for most of the film to be the only young female in town, but that's a very minor criticism when compared to writer/director Dumont's tough, confident handling of mood, milieu, pace, performance and theme.

Bruno Dumont-The Life of Jesus Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

"A luminous and disconcerting feature debut" (Lisa Nesselson, Variety), Bruno Dumont's powerful La vie de Jésus was a critics' favourite on the international festival circuit in 1997, and was honoured with France's prestigious Prix Jean Vigo, awarded for "independence of spirit and quality of directing." Hardly the religious picture promised by its confounding title, La vie de Jésus is instead a blunt, dispassionate, ruggedly beautiful portrait of unemployed, uneducated, and not always sympathetic youth in a small northern French town. Mixing impressive widescreen vistas with intense close-ups, featuring a uniformly excellent cast of non-professionals, and very much bearing the influence of Bresson, the film centres on Freddy, who still lives with his mother, dates supermarket cashier Marie, and rides motor bikes with his pack of also-going-nowhere pals. When a young Algerian immigrant crosses paths with this bored, frustrated and inarticulate lot, events take an explosive and troubling turn. "La vie de Jésus is startling and masterful . . . Dumont paints a damning portrait of a segment of society where there is little education, chronic unemployment, and a despair of the future: a breeding ground for racism, hatred and violence . . . Without ever boring his audience, Dumont makes the boredom of unemployed youths in a small town palpable . . . This is indeed [an] auspicious debut" (Dimitri Eipides, Toronto I.F.F.). "Its precise rhythms and spare storytelling build to a shattering, and beautiful, final scene. This is a religious film, all right . . . The idea of the life of Jesus, as an example of goodness and light, floats over the movie like a barely conceivable standard" (Robert Horton, Film Comment).

Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]

La Vie de Jesus, a film by Bruno Dumont, is an unconventional look at marginal young people living in Bailleul in northern France. They spend their time without much purpose, riding around the drab Flanders town on motorbikes or playing in a marching band. One of Dumont's greatest strengths is the uncanny ability to capture the sense of emptiness of the town and the people who inhabit it. With little dialogue and no musical score other than the sounds of nature to break the stillness, we are forced to relate to the characters by observing their eyes, their physical movements, and the facial expressions that reveal an inner pain. 

In La Vie de Jesus, unemployed, uneducated, and epileptic 20-year old Freddy (David Douche) lives with his mother Yvette (Genevieve Cottreel), a café owner. Douche gives a haunting performance as the sensitive but not very bright Freddy, his body scarred from repeated falls from his motorcycle and his face mirroring the fear of not knowing when his next epileptic seizure will come. Freddy has a girl friend, Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), who works as a cashier at the supermarket but their relationship lacks an emotional pull and their graphically depicted sex feels mechanical. Dumont does not judge his characters and they are fully three-dimensional, both guilty and innocent, displaying tenderness one minute and cruelty the next, searching for human connection. Freddy trains his finch to sing and takes the boy who just lost his brother to the beach to cheer him up, yet shortly afterwards he and his friends humiliate an overweight girl who plays in the band. 

One of the most moving scenes takes place at a hospital where the friends stand around a hospital bed watching one of the boys' brother who is dying of Aids. On the wall there is a picture of Jesus described as "about a guy who comes back to life". They do not talk but wait and watch silently and we wait with them as if expecting momentary redemption. Freddy and his friends are not "bad" people but each one is tightly wound, looking for a reason to explode and the film seethes with tension. When a young Arab boy Kader (Kader Chaatouf) foolishly tempts fate by making a play for Marie, the underlying racism of the society transforms an ordinary love story into a tragedy of transcendent power.

eye WEEKLY [Tom Lyons]

Set in a small town in the north of France, Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus) looks at a gang of unemployed teenagers who cope with boredom by tearing through the countryside on scooters and hurling racist insults at the town's few Arab residents.

The tone of the movie is simple and austere, and Dumont occasionally pulls the camera far back from the action, leaving the youths as little more than tiny silhouettes on the broad horizon. The image indicates not only the futility of any sort of endeavor in such an empty environment, but also the emotional distance separating the director from the action itself. The amoral youths are presented in an amoral fashion, and even when the camera closes in on their violent and animalistic behavior, there are no cues from either the script or the soundtrack on how the audience is to respond.

The townspeople are also depicted in a cold, ironic light, and their hearty gestures of fellowship seem as hollow and pointless as those in a Flaubert novel. Even the central character, an epileptic skinhead who becomes increasingly violent toward his girlfriend and his Arab rival, is presented in a calm and emotionless fashion. He says little, and no helpful explanations are included in the script to make him more obviously sympathetic and accessible.

The film's sense of boredom and alienation seems completely real -- perhaps a bit too real for some viewers, who might find themselves longing for a train wreck or armed robbery or UFO invasion or even a Leon's commercial to break up the monotony. But those viewers who are able to sink into the slow rhythm of the movie should find themselves not only experiencing the youths' sense of alienation, but also understanding why they would resort to any sort of action -- good or evil -- to escape it.

"Interview with Bruno Dumont, Director of The Life of Jesus." David Walsh from World Socialist website interview with the director

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Epinions [David MacDonald]

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

Nitrate Online (capsule) Lyall Bush

Boston Phoenix [Peter Keough]

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin

L’HUMANITÉ

aka: Humanity (Humanité)

France (148 mi) 1999 ‘Scope

Film Scouts (David Sterritt)

Like many others, I laughed at parts of "L'Humanite" when it became so slow, pallid, and pretentious that one couldn't imagine watching it spun out at feature length, much less a whopping 150 minutes. Also like many others, I found myself held by it in a strange sort of way (there were few walkouts at the press screening I attended) and thought a good deal about it afterwards. It is an insufferable film in many ways, like a Robert Bresson soulodrama made by someone with no idea of how to do it right; and then there's Emmanuel Schotte's weirded-out performance, oddly touching at moments yet so maniacally monotonous that it becomes one of the picture's most glaring liabilities. At the same time, the movie has more philosophical ambition and spiritual resonance (especially in the mysterious shots at the very end) than almost anything around these days, and even Schotte's "acting" takes on a peculiar fascination when the film is over and one doesn't have to actually watch him anymore. It's clearer now than after "La Vie de Jesus" that Bruno Dumont is a directorial talent to watch, and perhaps his picture's wildly unexpected Cannes awards will encourage other, more assured filmmakers to take up the challenge posed by Bresson's great legacy.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

An intensely studied, Bressonian religious allegory disguised as a numbingly deliberate police procedural, Bruno Dumont's Humanité was controversial at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, where David Cronenberg's jury gave it an unprecedented three major awards, including runner-up to Palme D'Or winner Rosetta. A few vocal critics, primarily Americans, felt it epitomized the sort of pretentious, impenetrable European art film that had lost all relevance. (The same argument was made the year before, again wrongly, when Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity And A Day won the Palme.) While the jury's decision to give acting awards to blank non-professionals Emmanuel Schotté and Séverine Caneele does border on the perverse, Humanité is a strange, unsettling, profound meditation on the existence of evil. Slow-witted and hunched over, with an inscrutable face and big, hollow eyes, Schotté is a compelling screen presence, capable of suggesting compassion and cold-bloodedness with the same expression. Set in a small seaside village in northeastern France, made hauntingly remote by the vast Cinemascope frame, the moral dilemma begins when an 11-year-old girl is found raped and murdered in the countryside. Schotté, more idiot than idiot savant, is the police detective assigned to the case, and he's so affected by the unspeakable crime that his own innocence is subtly called into question. Reluctant to do the task at hand—nearly 40 minutes of screen time pass between the discovery of the body and the beginning of his investigation—Schotté hangs out with his brusque next-door neighbor (Caneele) and her obnoxious boyfriend (Philippe Tullier). His attraction to Caneele and her explicitly carnal relationship with Tullier lends a disturbing undertone to Humanité, which is ultimately concerned with nothing less than the meaning of capital-E existence. At times, Dumont's ambitious allegories get the better of him, particularly during a ridiculous sequence in which Schotté actually levitates above a field. But his slow, deliberate human epic rewards the patient, building to an unforgettable final shot that condenses the entire film to a single poignant image.

Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]

"The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth" —Bruno Dumont

In L'Humanite, by Bruno Dumont (La Vie de Jesus), Pharaon de Winter (Emmanuel Schotte) is a Police Superintendent called upon to investigate the murder and rape of an 11-year old girl. Flaunting almost every cinematic convention, the film is not about solving a crime but a 2 1/2-hour poem of mood, time, silence and spirit. Set in northern France in the director's hometown of Bailleul, the characters are unglamorous members of the working class. Dumont devotes long stretches of the film to simply observing Pharaon going about his life: eating an apple, tending his garden, watching a soccer game on television, interacting with his mother, or being a friend to his neighbour Domino (Severine Caneele), a rugged factory worker and her obnoxious bus-driver boyfriend Joseph (Philippe Tullier). He is an unlikely cop, a passive, stoop-shouldered, and empathetic man who would sooner kiss a prisoner on the lips or stroke his neck as browbeat him. Pharaon sees the suffering of the world and wants to hold it in his hands and stroke it. Schotte's performance is so expressive that his best actor award at Cannes was criticized because most people thought he wasn't acting, just being himself. 

As the film opens, a man is walking in the distance alone across a grassy hill. Suddenly as the camera moves in for a close-up, he collapses in the mud and just lays there for a while. Is he dead or alive? Did he commit the crime? In the next scene, he is sitting in his car listening to harpsichord music and we discover that he is a policeman talking in a barely audible voice to his superior. The film cuts away to the battered body of an 11-year old girl, her torn and bloody vagina graphically shown as the police gather. Pharaon maintains the same anguished, enigmatic look on his face throughout that makes us uncertain if he is the murderer or the Second Coming of Christ. We know very little about him except that he "lost" his wife and child a few years ago, but it is never made clear whether he lost them or they lost him. Signs of passion or involvement are rare but come with a sudden ferocity, as when he is walking across the crime scene and starts to scream at the top of his lungs, a sound drowned out only by the passing Eurostar train. 

L'Humanite is an involving and disturbing film that you cannot feel lukewarm about. It is profoundly moving but often agonizingly slow and virtually unwatchable in some of its graphic details (you may never want to have sex again after watching these mechanical exercises). The climax of the film is as perplexing as the beginning with an ambiguous resolution that I'm not quite sure what to make of. What I do know is that I felt as vitally alive watching this film as I did the first time I saw Leolo by Jean-Claude Lauzon. L'Humanite is a breath of fresh air on the turgid cinema landscape and Dumont is as honest and challenging a director as I've seen in quite a long time. His film continually forces us to question what we are looking at and, as the title suggests, keeps bringing us closer and closer to the core of what makes us truly human. 

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

Where Time Regained feels effortless and supple, the scarcely less ambitious Humanité makes a more muscle-bound bid for greatness. Bruno Dumont's outrageously deadpan police procedural Howard Schumann from Talking Pictures: http://www.talkingpix.co.uk/ReviewsLHumanite.html a scandal at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, where it won second prize toRosetta—flirts boldly with the ridiculous in bringing a Bressonian gravitas to life on the coastal plain of northeastern France.

Site of battlefields and massacres, this is a landscape to drive the peasants mad. Set in what could be the same bland red-brick town as Dumont's 1998 Life of Jesus—a place as tense and empty as an audition stage—Humanité exudes a similar sense of belligerent time-wasting. But where Life of Jesus was strong, classical filmmaking, a subtly stylized form of low-key naturalism, Humanité is more visually grandiose. For most of its two and a half hours, the film walks the line between the abstract and the concrete, opening with the tiny figure of the protagonist—an ununiformed policeman named Pharaon—running across the wide-screen windswept ridge. The images are bracingly crisp and sometimes, as when Dumont cuts first to Pharaon slipping in the mud and then to the violated corpse of a prepubescent girl, unforgettable.

Pausing periodically so that the frustrated Pharaon can observe the long, graphic sex scenes between his young friends Domino and Joseph, Humanité is confidently absurd. Pharaon rides a bicycle into the countryside, arrives home, chomps down on an apple, and, in more or less real time, begins retching into the sink. Is he simpleminded or merely sensitive? The detective's method for interrogating a suspect is to grasp him by the shoulders and sniff like a dog—which may be the way Dumont finds the extraordinary nonactors who populate his films.

Dumont's performers seem to have crawled from the margins of a Bosch painting, and thanks largely to them, Humanité is a movie of intense physicality. (It's the meta that's the matter.) Severine Caneele, who shared the best-actress prize last year at Cannes for her uninhibited portrayal of Domino, is a big-shouldered girl with a jaw to match and eyes set deep in a Cro-Magnon brow. No less a human potato spud, Cannes best actor Emmanuel Schotte's Pharaon looks perpetually dumbfounded—as well he might be. Humanité suggests that the cop is, above all, searching for himself.

The inert thereness of Schotte's being and Caneele's body holds the screen, but the illumination of inner life is a flickering candle at best. As the filmmaker told the audience at the Toronto Film Festival, "All characters partake of the allegory." His own role is something like a cosmic caption writer. Unlike Bresson, Dumont burdens his creatures with announced significance and leaves them on camera to take the rap.

indieWIRE Mark Peranson

Soon to be the most controversial film released this millennium -- the courageous folks at WinStar plan a limited booking this Spring -- Bruno Dumont's relentless, unique "Humanity" has divided critics since its debut at Cannes last year, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. As enough time has passed since jury head David Cronenberg's wacky decision, I'm eager to examine the film on its own merits, not in the maelstrom of unduly warranted, American-centric Cannes criticism.

A painting that moves as slow as life itself, "Humanity" is an intellectually rigorous, powerful, philosophical work about the basic metaphysical issues that concern us all. Dumont shows what is often left unseen, and shocks with the way he chooses to depict us. Set in the picturesque countryside town of Bailleuil where Dumont lives, and where the action of his acclaimed debut "La Vie de Jesus" takes place, "Humanity" is a ‘policier’ with a difference: the detective on the case, Pharaon de Winter (Emmanuel Schotte), grandson of a true-life, realist Flemish portrait painter, is a bit slow. (See also, "Return of the Idiot.") Jam-packed with too much humanity and pretty well inept as an investigator, he can’t handle the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl, preferring to bike through the countryside and feel the squishy earth with his own hands.

Alternately Bressonian and Felliniesque in his manner, Dumont uses the crime genre to undertake both an intimate examination of a man (Pharaon) and place this man within the context of a greater entity (humanity). In other words, he approaches the universal through the particular, always seeking out the truth. He also explores the roots of humanity through that which defines us most of all — the corporeal, often seen through a brute physicality. And sex is just as important as violence: the once-married, living-with-his-mom Pharaon lusts after the girl next door, Domino (Severine Caneele).

At Cannes, scenes of Pharaon sniffing suspects to discover what lies under their skin and playing the electric organ like a tone-deaf Phantom of the Opera, caused unrestrained laughter among some members of the international press. (In Rotterdam, I learned that this uncalled for response, a vagary of the film festival circuit, can be traced back to a number of tired and overworked British and Australian journalists who shall remain nameless.)

Perhaps most controversial was the Cannes jury's decision to award acting prizes to both of the film’s leads, made even more confusing by the bug-eyed Schotte’s Forrest Gump-like acceptance speech and generally befuddled appearance, which gave the impression that he, like actress Severine Caneele, was not acting and merely being filmed. The director spent months searching -- like Bresson -- for models who best fit the characters he had designed. Whether or not the two are actually "performing" in the traditional sense (and Dumont has said most of his direction consisted of telling Schotte how to move), it’s hard to imagine more recognizable faces in either part.

Much has also been made of the film's running time, made even more tendentious by its meditative, molasses-dripping pace. The real question, though, as it is a film about an eternal, unending exploration, is why isn’t "Humanity" longer? Separating the hardcore art-film nuts from the great pretenders, it’s a complete work with trenchant philosophical underpinnings, fully realized and uncompromising. The discomforting consistency of tone in its 150 minutes -- an outgrowth of drawing on both Vermeer and Duchamp for one’s visuals -- differentiates it from "La Vie de Jesus," and is what, in the end, I find most appealing. But maybe I’m just perverse. Walk, don't run (maybe bike), to see "Humanity" and find out for yourself.

Humanite Gerald Peary

Bruno Dumont's Bodies Darren Hughes from Senses of Cinema

BFI | Sight & Sound | L'Humanite (1999) Tony Rayns from Sight and Sound, October 2000

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

L'humanité an essay by Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Reverse Shot Andrew Tracy

The Nation [Stuart Klawans]

Images Movie Journal David Ng

DVD Times Noel Magahey

here Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge

filmcritic.com reviews Humanite Jeremiah Kipp

Nitrate Online (Dan Lybarger)

HUMANITE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion, or here: City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Steve Erickson in an entirely new article focusing on the director

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

eye WEEKLY [Jason Anderson]

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams)

Humanité Mike D’Angelo

All About My Mother in Japan: A Boy's Bottomless Sorrow | The New ... Andrew Sarris from the New York Observer

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Stephen Holden)

DVDBeaver.com [Per-olaf Strandberg]

TWENTYNINE PALMS B 84

France (119 mi) 2003 ‘Scope

A minimalist immorality tale spawned from nothingness, a veritable RED DESERT, featuring a long, drawn-out opening sequence which takes nearly all of the screen time, followed by a quick, abrupt ending, which leaves the audience jolted and exasperated, as it is intended to do by this filmmaker provocateur. The story features a couple driving out of Los Angeles into Death Valley and the Joshua Tree Desert in a landscape resembling Antonioni’s ZABRISKIE POINT, staying in the town of Twentynine Palms at a local motel with a pool and a view of the distant mountains. While the couple appears to be affectionate, holding hands, extended kisses, what results instead are extended sex sequences with very little interplay between the two - sex in a pool, sex on the rocks out in the desert, sex in the motel room, all amounting to something resembling loveless sex. Eventually this on again off again insipid and immature romance leads to a lovers spat, causing the girl to be kicked out into the night, where she appears to be stalked by a car, causing her to hide behind an old truck trailer with worn out letters spelling out Twentynine Palms, which has transformed itself from a place representing comfort and safety into one of danger lurking behind every moving object. This sequence is unusual, as it is the only night sequence in the director’s repertoire thus far, alerting us to trouble and danger, as they have a physical fight, slapping each other around, all out in the middle of the street, eventually returning back to the motel room together. Again, the next transition is out into the open desert sun, as they are back onto the back roads exploring off-the-beaten-track locations in their oversized Hummer vehicle, listening to a bizarre Japanese folk song which played earlier in the film. What happens next is obviously the reason this director made the film, as his films all feature the reprehensible behavior of men subjecting others to humiliating acts of violence, in this case, jolting the audience out of the established sense of mindless complacency, something akin to DELIVERANCE meets IRREVERSIBLE, where sound is used to stunning effect, equating the screams of sexual rapture with the depravity of senseless violence, while also heightening the tortuous sense of violence with helplessness and doom. In the end, the police are clueless and directionless, and in an immoral world, they are pointless and unnecessary.

Bruno Dumont:

“Isn’t every real work of art about the same things? Really, there’s nothing but sex, love, and evil.”

Time Out

With his third feature, the director of ‘L’Humanité’ joins Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noé in exposing the violent, sex-crazed beast allegedly lurking inside us all. Scouting locations in the Joshua Tree desert, an American photographer (David Wissak) and his equally volatile French-speaking girlfriend (Katia Golubeva) drive, fight, eat ice cream (‘It’s not good, but it’s good,’ she opines) and fuck – a pastime that occasions screaming, moaning, barking and a certain dying-cow noise. (A pool poke pays homage to ‘Showgirls’.) When I saw the film at Venice 2003, the barnyard clamour incited chortling, applause and walkouts, even as this stormy immersion in a seemingly airtight universe sunk from the preposterous to the unfathomable. The film is a covert operator: its languorous vérité gait and braying banality culminate in a documentary immediacy that pays horrifying dividends. Indeed, it left this viewer with a bewildering case of Stockholm syndrome. Without giving anything away, ‘Twentynine Palms’ provoked the most messily subjective response I’ve ever experienced at a movie, and you can call that either a recommendation or a warning to steer clear.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

A philosopher turned filmmaker, Dumont most recently made 1997's The Life Of Jesus and 2000's Humanité, which viewed human behavior from an almost anthropological perspective, looking past basic civility in order to see the primitive and often violent instincts that lurk just under the surface. Leaving his native city of Bailleul for the first time, Dumont transplants this same queasy mix of ennui and brutality to the arid region of Joshua Tree National Park, where the remote isolation breeds a special intensity and danger. Lovers on the brink, David Wissak and Katia Golubeva leave Los Angeles to scout the area for a magazine shoot, but most of the time they're either fighting or fucking, with few moments of real tenderness to salve a relationship that's clearly in its death throes. In returning to nature, the problems between this dysfunctional Adam & Eve find expression in their increasingly aggressive (and unintentionally silly) sexual acrobatics.

It's hard to get past the pervasive awkwardness of Twentynine Palms—including the immortal line, "Someday, I want to see you pee"—and it's even harder to swallow the shockingly gory finale, which unloads some view of human nature known only to Dumont. But for most of the way, the film is perceptive about the hot-and-cold volatility of wounded relationships, when couples are struggling to communicate yet familiar enough to exploit each other's weaknesses. Dumont has referred to Twentynine Palms as "an experimental horror film," which it most definitely becomes in the closing minutes, but his superbly controlled and disorienting atmosphere functions best in support of a troubled love story, rather than arbitrary spasms of violence. At the very least, it's an experience guaranteed to leave viewers shaken, if not exactly grateful.

Twentynine Palms by J. Hoberman Village Voice

Lost Highway

Euro auteur finds America's heart of darkness in noisy desert trysts and motel-pool fucks

Hell is where you find it, boy. In the nutty Euro-art tradition of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and Wenders's Paris, Texas, Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms is a movie by a European auteur gone looking for America and discovering its heart of darkness in the highway, gas station, and motel room moonscape of the limitless West. And in the more recent, even nuttier Amerindie manner of Gus Van Sant's Gerry and Vincent Gallo's still unreleased The Brown Bunny, it's a provocatively minimalist exercise constructed from chunks of real time and drafts of nothingness.

Dumont's trademark, established in his previous features Life of Jesus and Humanité, is a sense of belligerent time-wasting. He makes the aimless visceral. Thus, although pointedly devoid of social context, every action in Twentynine Palms is given enormous weight. Driving toward Death Valley with their Hummer radio tuned to Hawaiian ethno-funk, shaggy-haired David (David Wissak) and his petite amie, Katia (Katia Golubeva, the memorable succubus in Leos Carax's Pola X) are captivated by the sight of a distant wind farm. The pair, who converse in limited French, pull over for a closer look. "Someday I want to see you pee," David muses. That desire is coyly frustrated, but Dumont soon treats the spectator to David and Katia's strenuous tryst in the motel swimming pool—the first of their many uncomfortable-looking and increasingly noisy fucks.

David, it would seem, is scouting locations. He and Katia drive off the road into the desert to clamber naked through the primordial landscape like Adam and Eve. He's monosyllabic and she's high-strung. Communication comes and goes like a distant radio station. Katia's helium squeak rises to hysteria when David inadvertently sideswipes a stray dog—which eventually limps off on three legs. (Introducing Twentynine Palms at the Toronto film festival last September, Dumont compared cinema itself to just such a creature—asserting that the audience is the missing limb.)

Irritating improv and bad acting are crucial to the Dumont experience. In an interview with Mark Peranson in Cinema Scope, the director gallantly characterized his leading lady as a "pain in the ass" and a "strange person." Working like a junk sculptor with a particularly recalcitrant piece of bric-a-brac, he realized that he'd have to modify his conception of the couple's relationship in order to accommodate the actress's lack of passion. Not that her combative nature isn't convincing. After some relatively relaxed sex, Golubeva's easily offended Katia wanders off alone into the night—setting the stage for a petulant lovers' tussle in the middle of the highway. Twentynine Palms might have been titled The Screamers—and not just because David telegraphs his orgasm with a Tarzanic bellow. Eros inevitably merges with violence in Dumont's world. The filmmaker shifts gears for a denouement that combines aspects of Deliverance and Psycho.

Dumont's Life of Jesus was a most impressive debut, and many critics found the outrageously deadpan, visually grandiose police procedural Humanité some sort of great movie. I look forward to their response to Twentynine Palms. Dumont's taste for the elemental has always flirted with the moronic. But this time, he's dozed off at the wheel and drifted well over the line.

Twentynine Palms Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Twentynine Palms is precisely the reason why Bruno Dumont is the only living director that could have made The Passion of the Christ work not as a torture mechanism of unaddressed brutality but as a provocative examination of the relationship between violence and the divine. Dumont's latest gem will surely draw endless comparisons to other lost-in-translation desert romances, from Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabiriski Point to Sue Brooks's Japanese Story and Gus Van Sant's Gerry, but this existential story of a couple who love, fight and fuck their way through California's Twentynine Palms also has God on its side. If you're looking to seriously understand the purity of what Dumont is after here, it's probably best to approach the story as an allegorical study of original sin.

Dumont is clearly fascinated by America's wide-open spaces, and much of Twentynine Palms is a love poem to the way we look at the world. No matter how tedious the film can get (and it can!), it's difficult to turn your head away from it. When asked by an interviewer about his relationship to the film's desert landscape, Dumont stated in part: "Matisse said that the most important thing in a painting isn't the subject but the positioning of the different objects." Dumont is a great painter (surely his gorgeous images tell us that), but he's also a great philosopher, because he uses the space under, over and around people and objects to question the way we absorb images while simultaneously calling attention to the fine line between love and hate, the rational and the irrational, pain and joy, and so on.

David Wissak is the Adam to Katia Golubeva's Eve. He talks to her mostly in English and she speaks to him in a French that he appears to understand. There is an obvious language barrier here, but it's one that they're able to transcend because they communicate easier via the body-politic. No one else exists, and their isolation not only alludes to Adam and Eve and their original sin, but it intensifies the threat of the outside world. All David and Katia do is fight and fuck, and though their verbal exchanges seem trivial and nonsensical, the logic here is logic itself. When the naked couple stare into the vast desert horizon, you get a sense that their journey is the beginning of something (or is it the beginning of the end?) and that their loopy exchanges are attempts to deconstruct the laws of communication and the nature of the world itself.

When Katia is hungry, she asks David for ice cream. She says it tastes good, but then says it doesn't. He's confused. Naturally. She thinks Marines are sexy but doesn't think David should shave his head. (This baldness symbolizes a form of emotional nakedness that is very important if you wish to understand what David does to Katia and himself during the film's final moments.) He's even more confused now, and he predictably flies into a tizzy. Logic has failed him, and if it seems as if she's trying not to make things clearer for him, that's probably because she understands that this is a journey he needs to make on his own. (Certainly this is a journey Dumont wants us to take with him.) The ice cream may not taste good, but by virtue of satiating her hunger, it qualifies as a different kind of "good." David may look sexy with a Marine's haircut, but he's still not a Marine.

Dumont has said that he's intrigued by the way people in Europe are attracted to American films, and he uses the sex and violence in Twentynine Palms as a pretext—not only to address the "nature" of American violence but to dissect the way audiences intellectually and emotionally respond to it. In the film, David is seen pleasuring himself while watching an episode of Jerry Springer where a man confesses to his wife about raping their daughter. (The word "confesses" is crucial here, because every reaction in Dumont's films serves as some kind of ritual of enlightenment.) When Katia asks David if he would ever do something like that to his own daughter, he naturally responds with disgust. David ignores or forgets that he was pleasuring himself, and Dumont daringly correlates the vulgarity, attraction and relevance of an episode of "Jerry Springer" to a seemingly irrational art film: the one the plays earlier on the same television and the one that is Dumont's Twentynine Palms.

Jerry Springer exploits and distorts pain for big ratings, and Dumont uses this immoral spectacle to tap into the nature of our emotional and physical relationship to graphic images. The sex in Twentynine Palms is very explicit, and it won't come as a surprise to anyone who's seen the director's brilliant Life of Jesus and Humanité. You can call it pornography—it's okay, Dumont almost wants you to. David and Katia obviously love each other, and it shows in their fucking. When David reaches orgasm, he unleashes a primordial wail, a physical and emotional purge of his feelings for this woman. Dumont dares us to laugh, though, because he's out to question the way filmmakers have forced audiences to watch material like this in the past and the way many of us choose to reject this confrontation. Twentynine Palms questions the link between sex and violence and how we react to each differently.

Sex, like violence, can be vulgar, pretty, fantastical and emotional—it can also be political. More times than not, though, it's a private exchange and Twentynine Palms poses many interesting questions to people who violently react to its images. Pornography, typically, is a solo pleasure, so watching Twentynine Palms in a theater with a roomful of strangers obviously tests our comfort levels. Since David's orgasm is so clearly born out of his supreme love for Katia, why is it that so many people have laughed at it? Is it because they don't recognize the love in his wail or because they haven't experienced that kind of love-that-sounds-like-hurt before? If you walk out of Twentynine Palms, not only are you failing the film and the people around you, but denying yourself an aesthetic and emotional release.

Because the film's final rhetorical shift is reminiscent of the political act of resistance that closes Catherine Breillat's similarly confrontational Fat Girl, Twentynine Palms has naturally attracted controversy. David and Katia are rear-ended before, well, I won't spoil the surprise. For those who laughed at David's raw, emotional orgasm, what will they do now when confronted with this fascinating distortion of sexual release? This is a different kind of orgasm, because not only does it look like pain, but it also sounds like it. It's a perverse moment, but it's also a humanist one, because Dumont suggests that there is a fine line between love and pain, and it's a line that we must not only recognize but negotiate as well. Just as David and Katia expose themselves to nature, Dumont asks us to emotionally expose ourselves to the world around us.

Interview: Bruno Dumont Ed Gonzalez interview with the director for the Village Voice

Senses of Cinema Darren Hughes

Reverse Shot (Michael Koresky)

Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert

The New Yorker (David Denby)

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Twentynine Palms Gerald Peary

filmcritic.com Jeremiah Kipp

The Lumière Reader - DVD

Darkmatters [Matt Adcock]

DVD Talk (John Wallis)

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]

Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)

Offoffoff.com Joshua Tanzer

d+kaz . intelligent movie reviews [Daniel Kasman]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Guardian/Observer

"Feral Essence of Living (Few Words Are Needed)" Stephen Holden from the New York Times

Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]

DVDBeaver.com [Nick Wrigley]

DVDBeaver.com [Henrik Sylow]

FLANDRES B+ 91

aka: Flanders

France (91 mi) 2006 ‘Scope

When you film a landscape, it represents the character's interior mood. I do not film Flanders, I film what the character has inside. When you have a subjective shot of Demester looking at the landscape in front of his farm, we are inside Demester. —Bruno Dumont

Location, location, location is everything in Bruno Dumont films, opening this film in familiar territory, as he has done in all three of his films shot in France, conjuring up his home town of Bailleul in Flanders near the Belgium border, with an almost SATANTANGO-like opening, hearing only the natural sounds of a rural farm as the camera peeks around corners of a barn or stares off into the distant horizon past a vast landscape of well ploughed farmland, where as far as the eye can see is the faint outline of a town with church steeples rising high above anything else. The pillars of morality are a constant reminder looming off in the distance. But what we are witness to here is anything but moral, as a promiscuous young girl Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux) sneaks off into the woods or into the barn for 30 second fucks with a strangely Neanderthal, nearly non-verbal guy, André Demester (Samuel Boidin, who was also in THE LIFE OF JESUS), neither showing any affection or satisfaction of any kind, instead it’s just a break in a stifling routine of boredom in her case or chores in his, as he otherwise spends all day ploughing the fields or shoveling pig manure. Perhaps because she can, a new guy is invited to enter the picture, and Barbe becomes infatuated with hanging out with them both, but she displays more overt affection for the new guy, which leads to an internalized slow burn of jealousy and resentment in Demester of an almost biblical proportion. Everything is filmed with Dumont’s ominously slow pace where every foreshadowing scene feels like grim foreboding.

Once more, using the Bressonian template, it’s not about the acting, as Dumont is known for his brilliant use of offscreen sounds and for using non-professionals, whose silent expressionless gazes could be interchangeable throughout his films. The opening fifteen minutes is all about the sounds of feet walking through the mud, or trampling down a country road or through the brush, allowing the camera to dwell on shots of feet, slowly building a rhythm of bleak monotony. Oblique reference is made to a letter Demester received, which instructs him to report for military duty to fight in a war he knows nothing about, not even where it is, but it’s his letter of introduction to join the war on terror. Strangely, Barbe’s other friend will join him as they are both ushered into a foreign country of unknown origins that features Arabic speaking, dark skinned people, a stand in for Afghanistan or Iraq (shot in Tunisia). Immediately we witness fisticuffs between black and white soldiers on the same side, with the white man asserting his dominance, which is the new world order, the pre-condition for 21^st century wars fought by highly developed industrialized nations against impoverished third world countries. The white dominated nations always establish their military strength with a brazen display of superior sophisticated weaponry (shock and awe), but it doesn’t help them much, as they are fighting a war against an unseen enemy. Exquisitely shot by Yves Cape, there’s a gorgeous John Ford-like panoramic shot across a vast desert expanse with low lying mountains dotting the landscape, utterly beautiful, with six heavily armed men crawling across this emptiness on horses, reduced to just barely seen dots on the screen. When we move in close, all we see is the movement of the horse’s hooves.

What follows is a breakdown in moral order, where murder and rape are acceptable conditions of war, perpetrated by the men in Demester’s unit in which he is a willing participant. But the intensity of war is brilliantly demonstrated in short order as we are witnessing the slaughter of men by unseen forces, very similar to the searingly intense scenes in FULL METAL JACKET (1987), perhaps intentionally so, using that same kind of austere filmmaking style of Kubrick, where everything in the frame is surgically precise, exactly where it's supposed to be. An abrupt tonal shift in battle confidence takes place from being top cock on the block to instantly being the hunted, dehumanized, shamed, and brutalized in retaliation for the horrors they themselves inflicted without so much as batting an eye. The overriding mood is one of insane fear, as the inexplicable reality of death hovers over every man, even the ones who survive. The brutality of war is shown on dual fronts, both home and abroad, shifting abruptly between continents and even psychological wavelengths to establish how externalized violence gets internalized like secondhand smoke, the kind of devastating anguish that may linger around for years to come or even for the rest of your life, while the actual bomb blast or rifle shot takes place in mere seconds. It’s a shocking depiction of how we are all implicated and harmed, no one is spared, not even in this sleepy rural farmland, the site of some of the worst fighting in WWI, but where decades of uninterrupted peace seem like light years from the traumatic horrors that inhabit the front lines of war. The film lacks the unique insight or originality of his earlier films, but does a much better job implicating the everyday, ordinary citizens into what has become the overriding world condition, the war on terror, perhaps leading us to a place where we’ve already been, but through a different path we've never taken before. 

George the Cyclist George Christensen at Cannes

Bruno Dumont's "Flanders," a tale that begins in the northeast of France that two of this three previous films examined, ventures off to to an Arabic war zone, where his French conscripts go berserk inflicting holy terror upon the innocent and undeserving.   But before they are sent to war, Dumont depicts rural life with the gritty realism that marked his much-acclaimed "Life of Jesus" and "Humanite."  This film doesn't probe the insidious depths of those films, but it still is an unapologetic study of man's inner recesses.

Facets Multi Media - FACETS FRONT PAGE -> Film Festival Diaries Milos Stehlik at Cannes 2006 (Day 6) from Facets Multi-Media

The screening of Bruno Dumont's FLANDERS, by the very talented director of L'HUMANITE and LIFE OF JESUS, and the misstep of 29 PALMS. Set in his native Flanders. Sex, (never love, until the end), landscapes, mud, then the Flanders boys go to war in what we assume to be Afghanistan. Brutality, betrayal. All the elements and Dumont's great use of non-professional actors are there, but not that much of a theme and the film seems rather disconnected, missing a tight completely worked out structure.

Latinos make a big noise at Cannes Mike Brown from the Guardian, May 24, 2006

On Tuesday there was also much praise for French director Bruno Dumont's ultra-depressing Flandres, which tells the story of young French soldiers who leave their bleak lives to fight a war in an unnamed Arabic-speaking country. While the soldiers commit atrocities, the already messed-up girlfriend back home becomes an emotional wreck. Chuckles are rare and the sex scenes enough to put people off bedroom activity for life.

Nerve@Cannes 2006 But Not For Me, from New York's grumpiest reporter, Mike D'Angelo, May 22, 2006

And then there's Bruno Dumont's Flanders. This is a film by Bruno Dumont. I do not like films by Bruno Dumont. This is because Bruno Dumont possesses the most repellent worldview this side of Todd Solondz, and this repellent worldview informs everything he does. He managed to fool me for most of Twentynine Palms, only revealing its essential ugly Dumontness in its final reel, but lesson learned: I'll never let my guard down again. If you're looking for a movie that depicts all of humanity as rutting, vicious, unthinking Neanderthals held captive by their animalistic urges, Bruno Dumont is your man. Here, Bruno Dumont goes to war. It is hell, predictably, though not necessarily that much more hellish than life back on the farm. There is passionless sex and wanton violence a-plenty, performed by nonprofessional actors who seem to have been chosen for the harsh cruelty of their features. There is also, shockingly, a moment of what appears to be sincere tenderness. But the film cannot bear it, and instantly concludes. Flanders may well be a fine motion picture, but like all of Bruno Dumont's work, it made me feel assaulted rather than edified. I kind of hate Bruno Dumont.

The French Connection: TOC’s Cannes Film Fest blog, day 6 from Helen Gramates, Chicago Film Fest programmer, from Time Out Chicago, May 23, 2006

Also screening tonight was the premiere of Bruno Dumont’s Flanders, another competition film that divided the press. I and the rest of the Chicago team really liked it, but Bruno Dumont is most definitely not for everyone. I recall when we screened L’Humanite in 1999 to a full theater at the Music Box—there were numerous walkouts. Recalling his most recent film, 29 Palms (a U.S. release in 2003), the last 10 minutes of which are just brutal, I was prepared to face a most unpleasant experience at the screening, especially since the film is, in part, a war drama.

Dumont uses a non-professional cast and, as he has done in his other works, films actors’ (mostly stoic) facial expressions rather than their words to convey their raw emotions. The story: A simple, young farmer goes off to a unnamed war in a desert land, leaving behind his childhood friend, whom he secretly loves. When asked which war he is summoned to fight in, the farmer says that he doesn’t know. The war on the screen seemed to reflect our current situation in Iraq, with a small troop fighting off village insurgents. The violence is depicted very matter-of-factly: An atrocity happens and the drama doesn’t overflow with emotional sentiment. This is not how you typically see war treated in your standard American movie. Dumont relies on the viewer to actively make connections with his images to get inside the minds of the characters. When the soldier returns home, the question is whether his brutality can be redeemed by love. The ending was a hopeful one for me; I felt it, but others didn’t.

CANNES JOURNAL; One Auteur's Bumpy Festival Trajectory Manohla Dargis from the New York Times, May 24, 2006

CANNES, France, May 23 — Consider the strange case of Bruno Dumont. In 1997 Cannes showed that French filmmaker's feature debut, "Life of Jesus," outside the main selection in the parallel program, Directors' Fortnight. The film, which follows a group of unemployed young people in a desolate town in Normandy, received a special mention and subsequently hit the festival rounds. Like critics, festival programmers tend to have a proprietary relationship with directors they feel they have had a hand in discovering, so when Mr. Dumont was invited back to Cannes two years later with his second film, "Humanity," it was no surprise that this time he was welcomed into the main competition.

During its first press screening "Humanity" suffered a fair share of critical derision, telegraphed with choruses of giggles, but nonetheless picked up three major awards. Cannes understandably passed on Mr. Dumont's follow-up film, "Twentynine Palms," a violent folly about two Europeans tooling around the California desert in a symbolically overloaded Hummer. Now Mr. Dumont is back in competition at Cannes with "Flandres," about a young French farmer named Demester who goes off to fight in some unnamed war in an unspecified Arab country. Once again, the filmmaker's favorite themes and tropes are mostly present, notably the narcoleptic pacing, human faces as cragged as landscapes, ritualistic rutting and, regrettably, allusions to Robert Bresson, one of the art's holy men.

His Bressonian aspirations are evident in the film's uninflected performance style (by nonprofessionals), the unadorned yet carefully framed compositions and a lack of melodramatic incident. Unlike Mr. Bresson, however, Mr. Dumont seems uninterested in spiritual journeys or in representing how the ineffable equally touches the human face, a donkey's ear, a crown of flowers. The only mystery here is how Mr. Dumont has gone so quickly from promising young director to such an unsteady, unhappy talent.

One answer may lie in his characters. As uncommunicative as the animals he keeps, Demester is one of Mr. Dumont's false Everymen, a man whose thick brow and silences are meant to reveal an interior state that the filmmaker has no interest in beyond the decorative and entomological.

If nothing else, Mr. Dumont's nearly 10-year Cannes trajectory from triumph to disappointment indicates that the burden of the auteur hangs over European directors as heavily as it does any digital savant hungry for Sundance. In an interview about 1970's cinema, Francis Ford Coppola once suggested that an auteur was a filmmaker who wrote the scripts he also directed, rather than a filmmaker with a personal vision. It's hard not to wonder how many generations of young filmmakers have been similarly mistaken, not understanding that in cinema the Mac that writes the script is less important than the camera that is wielded as freely as a pen. Mr. Dumont may have something to say off camera, but on camera all he can offer now are fine technical skills and recycled gestures.

* * * * * * * * *

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

Bruno Dumont creates films both brutal and tender, with stark imagery and impassive characters whose faces register little but whose eyes radiate pain, yearning and need. "Flanders" is a return to his strengths. Samuel Boidin plays our point-of-view character, a taciturn farmer who loves the promiscuous Adelaide Leroux. The drama spans four seasons as the local Flanders farmers are called to military service in an unnamed war (it has echoes of Algiers and Iraq and resonates with the American experience in Vietnam) and Leroux awaits their return facing her own trauma. The war scenes could be Dumont's version of "Full Metal Jacket," in which the moral foundation of the citizen soldiers is ground up in the ordeal of killing and being killed in an alien land. It's more provocative than realistic and his naturalism is contained in an arch structure, but his directness is affecting and he refuses to judge his characters, preferring to watch them fumble their way back to grace.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Considering the bleakness of Bruno Dumont's worldview, it's a bit of a surprise that it took him four movies to reach the battlefield. Then again, there's no rush to his neurasthenic existentialism: It's off to war (off to War, rather) for the Paleolithic blobs of Flanders, but not before a slow tractor drive through the Flemish countryside, rabbit traps being set up, the spectacle of logs burning in the bonfire. Dumont prefers his characters ugly, brutish, and stupid, and here he boasts his ugliest, most brutish and stupid yet -- the main barnyard dweller (Samuel Boidin) is a thick peasant trudging in the mud under overcast skies, tending to pig shit, occasionally mounting the local girl (Adélaïde Leroux) he's sort of seeing. Leroux cozies up with another guy (Henri Cretel), but any triangulation is put on hold as the fellas are sent to a vague yet unmistakable Middle East war; stranded in a battered desert prone to sudden shelling, their platoon shuffles from dune to dune, pausing for a gang rape. A hail of bullets receives them at a village, where insurgents are barely in their teens -- Dumont cuts from the blood on a young rebel's head to the blood bubbling between the thighs of a farm slag back home, moments before she gets doggied in the barn by some Gallic Joe Dirt. Having just discovered parallel editing, the director presses on. While Leroux is sent to the psychiatric yard, Boidin and Cretel dodge explosions in the sand, until they're captured and sent to an enemy camp, where the rape victim gets revenge by castrating the only grunt who didn't actually rape her earlier on. D'oh!

Flanders proves how "Bressonian" is even more of a red flag than "Tarantinoesque." Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket can't be reduced to slowed-down rhythms and glaring nonprofessionals -- there's a mystery to Bresson that can never be reproduced, a curiosity about the world that escapes Dumont's fastidiously intellectualized view of life and film, which remains trapped in a stasis of grief. With characters this beastly, the filmmaker excuses himself from having to examine their faces, instead maneuvering them through a dingy road where the climactic dab of emotion is squeezed like a miser's coin onto a collection plate. Dumont's cinema, indeed, is like a forbidding temple, the kind that makes one want to fart in the middle of mass: When he put bloodied cooches and fruit upchuck on the screen and called it L'Humanité, Humanity should have sued for defamation of character. Oddly enough, his "worst" film is the one that came closest to something profound. Bricks were hurled at Twentynine Palms, yet, whether due to the change of scenery or to characters that were maybe a notch or so higher in the evolutionary line, Dumont's drive through wasteland America engaged him into a more exploratory approach to the world. Back in his turf, he's content to choreograph flabby bellies and grimy humping. Flanders, with its battleground-as-extension-of-life and inescapable topical links, could have given Dumont a perfect stage to take stock and expand; instead, it's his most unnecessary work, an entirely gratuitous project, a congealed shrug.

-Bruno Dumont's Flandres Jeff Reichert from Reverse Shot posting on indieWIRE

Like Gaspar Noe with a colder, reptilian eye, or a brutalist Robert Bresson, Bruno Dumont cut a divide through contemporary cinematic circles with his first three features. That this swath is tiny and both his detractors and supporters fall largely within that camp we could label "serious cinephiles" is a shame ("Twentynine Palms" may be the best psychological thriller in recent memory), but understandable: Dumont's is a singularly unpleasant body of work. But don't think for a second that unpleasantness precludes magnificence. A critic once wrote of his own inability to climb onboard with (and therefore show much interest in) Dumont's vision of a blank, empty humanity most often caught painfully rutting and rutted in an existence generally not far removed from the average wild beast. To each his own, but to allow a certain kind of species-bound egoism to deny a priori the validity of Dumont's query, the idea that perhaps we're not so far removed in aspect from the beast we eat for dinner or watch on "Planet Earth," seems a touch naive, or at the very least close-minded. And whether you agree with this taciturn French filmmaker about humankind's prospects as a species or not, the extreme dourness of his narratives undeniably make his rare moments of spiritual uplift all the more earned.

Dumont's fourth film, "Flanders," may be a war film, but even with the addition of tanks, helicopters, mortar fire, and weaponry, the milieu still feels uniquely his own, which is to say that of the rural lower class in France. He starts by watching (even at its most fluid moments, the filmmaker's camera is nothing if not an observer, or perhaps more appropriately, an intruder) a love triangle play out amongst three youngsters in Flanders: slow, brooding Demester (Samuel Boidin, who also starred in "La vie de Jesus"), his girlfriend Barbe (an almost translucent Adelaide Leroux), and the handsome interloper, Blondel (Henri Cretel), who picks up Barbe after she fights with Demester in a pub. Both of the men have been assigned to the same unit in an ongoing war that rages in a land none of them know for reasons none of them can articulate. Their impending departure weighs heavily on the slow-build of tension amongst the three which the angelic Barbe seems almost able to deflect, but once the two boys are shipped off to a seemingly Middle-Eastern (most will reduce down to Iraq, but it might as well be some neverland-Algeria - a physical landscape for an abstract state of mind) country, atrocities and violence mount and the film grows simultaneously terrifying and sickening.

Abruptly intercut with the action on the battlefield are scenes of Barbe fighting her own battles - with loneliness, with her reputation as the town slut, with Blondel's child growing in her womb, and, most compellingly, with the possibility that her increasing madness is caused by her ability to witness her suitors' disturbing acts abroad. Delving too far into the plot mechanics of "Flanders" would be tantamount to giving away the shockingly scary ending of "Twentynine Palms," in short ruinous; there's nothing like watching a Dumont film the first time around for visceral, lasting jolts. It's a cinema that's almost unbearable to watch but that exists ecstatic in the mind long after viewing. Comparisons to Bresson are rife and easy given Dumont's employment of nonprofessional actors, decidedly bleak, questioning outlook, and flashes of queasy spiritual bliss. But in some ways, and especially in "Flanders," Dumont reminds me of no filmmaker as much as Stanley Kubrick, similarly masterful at cataloguing the myriad forces which impinge upon the stability of the human psyche. In that way, Dumont's lingering shots of his protagonists' blank expressions aren't really attempts to delve into a roiling mental life, or allow us a space to imprint our own ideas of character, but rather to suggest that the high self-estimation mankind affords itself as a species is based on little more than falsity and wishful thinking. Pretty radical stuff, and the kind of investigation that deserves to be seen and debated.

Los Angeles Times [Kevin Crust]

Bruno Dumont fills his movies with foreboding, ennui and frank sexuality, seen through a lens that finds profundity in ordinary surroundings. The unseen menace that haunts his stories nearly always materializes in the form of shocking violence that introduces evil into seemingly banal circumstances, forcing us to consider whether it was there all along.

After the irredeemably disturbing "Twentynine Palms," Dumont returns to the north of France for "Flanders," a harrowing drama that appears to look at the effects of war on a group of young people but ultimately reaches for something more internal. As with his other films, which include "Life of Jesus" and "L'Humanité," the writer-director combines the patience of a landscape painter with the descriptive abilities of a prose writer in creating his images

"Flanders" tracks like a novel in which the writer spends paragraphs articulating the way a plow churns through the earth. It doesn't sound very interesting but it can have an almost hypnotic effect on the viewer. Dumont has stated that his landscapes are externalizations of what is happening within his characters, and cinematographer Yves Cape's camera lingers across the farmland setting, slowly soaking up every visible detail as it slowly reveals the vague contours of a story.

André (Samuel Boidin) is a young, blank-faced farmer with dark, expressionless eyes. Barbe (Adelaïde Leroux) is his coquettish young neighbor. Together, they slog off through the mud to a remote field where they engage in uninspired sex on the cold, wintry ground. Though Barbe obviously has feelings for André, he remains emotionally remote.

This may have something to do with his imminent report for military service, though André's friend Mordac (Patrice Venant) has no problem expressing his passion for his girlfriend, France (Inge Decaesteker). A third young man, Blondel (Henri Cretel) arrives at the local pub and flirts with Barbe, who leaves with him to punish André for his lack of reciprocity.

The setting is bleak, the skies are gray, but what lies ahead is even more threatening. All three young men have letters calling them to duty and they are soon off fighting a war in an unspecified desert. Unlike previous Dumont films in which the violence often arrives swiftly and bluntly, the atrocities in "Flanders" accumulate.

Dumont cuts from the war, where André, Mordac and Blondel serve in a small regiment that gets smaller with each sequence, back to Flanders, where the seasons change and the expressionistic landscape grows more welcoming, but the fragile Barbe is not handling the departure of the men well.

Nonprofessional actors Boidin and Leroux deliver intense performances which shoulder the emotional weight of the film. Leroux, in particular, expresses yearning and hurt, along with an awkward sensuality, with great subtlety and even brings a certain amount of restraint to the larger gestures required in the film's second half.

"Flanders" is a discomfiting film which is oddly poignant for its human scale. Dumont's brutal, non-heroic view of war reduces the subject to a construct that simply manifests the turmoil within the characters.

The savage acts that occur in and around battle reveal anamorality that infects everyday life.

It is finally less a movie about war than something that anesthetizes us long enough to stop and feel. We are programmed to see war as the main event, but here it recedes to the background becoming a bridge to life's broader struggles. This deeply felt vision of the human condition has more resonance than yet another movie concluding that war is hell.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Flanders (2005) Hannah McGill from Sight and Sound, July 2007

Electric Sheep Magazine Sarah Cronin

Slant Magazine [Jeremiah Kipp]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Phil Hall

filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

CineScene [Chris Knipp]

d+kaz [Daniel Kasman]

FLANDERS Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Flanders Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

The Village Voice [Nathan Lee]

Reel.com [Pam Grady]

Guardian/Observer

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

HADEWIJCH A- 94

France (105 mi) 2009

The best-laid plans of mice and men

Go oft awry

—Robert Burns, To A Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, with the Plough (1785)

I see there is all kinds of misinformation being circulated about this film, as unlike the current IMDb listings, this is the first Dumont film not to be shot in ‘Scope, shot instead with a 1:66 aspect ratio by the same cinematographer (Yves Cape) who shot FLANDRES (2006), yet it retains a luscious 35 mm color palette, also the length of the film varies from 120 mi (IMDb), 100 mi (Toronto), to the correct 105 mi (London, Hong Kong and Pyramide Films). According to the IMDb message boards (Aspect ratio), Dumont is quoted October 4, 2009 at a New York Film festival Q & A that he decided not to use ‘Scope because “It’s a very complex subject, and for that I wanted to use simple means.” Indeed, on the surface this may be the simplest of all the Dumont films, a faith based parable on the meaning of God and how to apply that meaning to our everyday human existence. Non-professional newcomer Julie Sokolowski plays Céline, a modern day Joan of Arc, a true Bressonian character right out of DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST (1951) who has given her life to Christ, a deeply religious young teenage girl initially seen living in a convent as she intends to become a nun, but her refusal to eat and other acts of self-denial are so extreme that her alarmed Mother Superior suggests she is confusing abstinence with martyrdom and is not yet ready to live a cloistered life, suggesting her burning intensity needs a chance to mature, sending her back out into the world where she immediately meets a few young Arab boys who try to pick her up, amazed that she is so agreeable to their requests. There’s a gorgeous scene where they watch some musicians play down by the river featuring an accordion and sax player, which is followed momentarily by her entry into an exquisitely beautiful and lavishly adorned church, where the sacred music playing is more to her liking, which turns out to be a solo voice and stringed quartet playing André Caplet’s “Le Miroir de Jesus.”

We soon realize Céline comes from a highly privileged background, that her emotionally distant father is a government minister, but her life with him shows a cavernous emptiness, quite a contrast to Yassine (Yassine Salime), one of the boys from the projects outside Paris that takes an interest in Céline, where she’s often seen joy riding on the back of his motorcycle through the streets of Paris, a far cry from the director’s beloved Bailleul, the setting of his earlier films. Yassine is a guy that would just as easily steal a bike as run red lights simply because the urge hits him, curious yet a little dejected that she clearly states upfront that she is a virgin with no interest in sexual relationships with men, as she’s only interested in the love of Christ, so Yassine introduces her to his brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis), a devout Islamist teacher who invites her to one of his religious discussion sessions. But when she does appear, the stares of men make her feel uncomfortable. However, these two have extended conversations throughout the rest of the film that interestingly lay out philosophic principles that challenge the audience’s own humanity to embrace and love the differences in others as easily as they accept themselves. Céline has a harder time feeling God’s love in the real world away from the convent, and she misses that intimacy, while Nassir expresses to her that God is never absent, but is everywhere, that humans are never separated from his love. But he also believes God is more than love, that religion is the means to obtain social justice in an unjust world, even if that leads to violence, understanding that throughout human history, violence begets more violence. What’s intriguing here is the allure Islam has to Céline, and their interest in her, drawing a fascinating parallel between the extremism of an austere, cloistered life and a similarly devout Muslim believer who is willing to die for a cause, seen here as an awakening, especially after she gives a daunting speech about her readiness to Nassir, expressed while illuminated by a brief passage of sunlight, as if she is suddenly willing to accept God as action where humans are soldiers in the army of God, vessels transmitting God’s love in order to bring about justice. It’s an amazing moment, as the audience doesn’t know if she’s in full complicity or if she’s being duped by the malicious interests of others. While she walks with an air of innocence and purity, Céline seems to have a pretty good understanding of how the world works and the people in it, though it is in her nature to be trusting of others, as she sees in herself an open vessel for others.

Without any explanation, Céline is whisked away outside France somewhere to a place resembling Lebanon, where Nassir shows her a village under air attack, where many are injured or die from this seeming atrocity, an event that leaves her devastated and hurt, as those on the ground are powerless to change the circumstances which likely repeat themselves with regularity. Just as quickly, again with no explanation, there is a violent retaliatory act, as a bomb explodes in a public metro station, where the audience may be quick to assume as Céline was riding on the train that she was used as a suicide bomber martyr, that perhaps her faith was too easily manipulated by the violent fanatics. This could easily have been the end of the movie, a statement on how easily the innocent are misled, like lambs led to slaughter, but what follows is another view of the Catholic convent on the hill, set in a luscious pastoral setting, with an open green field surrounded by forests leading up a hill to the convent. What happens next is open to interpretation, whether it’s told out of sequence or even whether it’s real or imaginary, but it’s a powerful and emotionally cathartic final sequence as the real world remains a blur from which Céline can find no relief, returning to the solace of the convent where she is seen taking shelter from the rain, praying inside the church until someone taps her on the shoulder and tells her someone wishes to speak to her, where police are seen off to one side of the screen as Céline is moving offscreen in the opposite direction, reflecting dual possibilities, dual moralities, the human and the Divine, and of course life or death. Similar films that come to mind are Bresson’s utterly despairing MOUCHETTE (1967) and the Dardenne brother’s similarly downward spiraling ROSETTA (1999), each with different outcomes, where “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry leaving nothing but grief and pain,” or possibly something else altogether. There's sparing use of André Caplet’s “Le Miroir de Jesus,” Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,”and perhaps even Mahler is heard over the final credits which come to an abrupt halt, perhaps the suggestion of a simulated death, another new wrinkle from Dumont whose prior films, except for radio playing, eschew the use of a musical score, and this may be Dumont’s only film that does not feature any sex scenes. Late in the film, Céline assumes the name of Hadewijch, calling it also the place where she was born, but the name is based on a female historical figure from 13^th century Belgium, a contemporary of St. Francis of Assisi, a highly educated saintly mystic whose manuscripts include visions and poetry that initially express a perpetual longing for an unattainable worldly love before sublimating all earthly passions to the eternal love of God.

Postscript Thoughts [To be read only after seeing the film!!!]

The most cynical reading I've discovered so far is that the construction worker/jailbird went to jail for what likely happened immediately following that rescue and hug in the lake, raping her ("at least you didn't kill anybody"), which possibly led to the kind of extremist anger leading to Islamic martyrdom and her choice to become a suicide bomber, which is the chronological end.  If so, like the first use of soundtrack music in a Dumont film, also the first film that does not *show* sex onscreen but may brutally suggest it offscreen, and may also be the first Dumont film to make use of a hugely significant flashback sequence. 

This reading is aided by the use of music over the end credits which does come to an abrupt halt, like a death, which is certainly a significant clue, because if the film was shown in sequence, she was alive at the end. 

The shot in sequence scenario is obviously a more hopeful and optimistic view, one that suggests what we're searching for in God and religion can certainly be found within ourselves, that humans are our own salvation.  The use of Bresson may only be the surface, while Dumont may be more interested in the primal instincts under the surface, both of which play out against one another in pretty much all of Dumont's films. 

Nonetheless, what's truly unique is that Dumont has made a film that plays equally well into both endings.  Again, this may be a reference to his own finale of HUMANITY (1999) where there are again two possible endings, one where Joseph confesses to the hideous crime, and yet another where it was Pharaon, who is the one seen in handcuffs afterwards, though perhaps either one could confess out of love for the other.  Still -- most confusing.  After seeing HADEWIJCH, the most likely reading is that in HUMANITY both are responsible, and in HADEWIJCH both endings are true. 

Eye Weekly [Adam Nayman]

Typically, Bruno Dumont’s films shock first and prompt questions later. In Hadewijch, the famously confrontational French director inverts his methodology to tell the story of a young girl, Celine (the superb Julie Sokolowski), who is expelled from a Parisian convent for excessive devotion to Christ. Her experiences in the “real world” only serve to strengthen her belief and Dumont draws us into her spiritual dilemma rather than keeping us alienated and at arm’s length (one of his specialties). There is surely some incendiary material here — especially once Celine hooks up with a pair of fundamentalist Muslims — but Dumont’s patient, suggestive approach transcends mere provocation: this is a film about absence with some real weight to it.

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch departs from his familiar aesthetic of landscapes as abstract manifestations of internal states to create a spare and intimate, yet equally provocative exploration of absolute faith, martyrdom, and God's silence. From the opening shot of an ascetic postulant, Céline (Julie Sokolowski) making her way across the woods to visit a Pietà at a nearby church, Dumont channels Robert Bresson's cinema, suggesting an updated version of the frail country priest in Diary of a Country Priest walking to his new parish. Sent back to live in the "real world" after disobeying the Mother Superior's entreaties that she end her self-imposed mortification, Céline's reality proves to be far from the terrestrial grounding that the nuns had in mind, returning to a comfortable, if aimless bourgeois life as the daughter of a cabinet minister. Befriending a young man from the banlieue, Yassine (Yassine Salim), Céline becomes increasingly drawn to his older brother, an imam named Nassir (Karl Sarafdis) whose theological discussions on the Koran mirror her own unrequited quest - a connection that would lead her further into spiritual darkness. In its portrait of disaffected youth in the aftermath of traumatic history, Hadewijch converges towards The Devil, Probably, where revolution is borne of uncertainty and displaced passion. However, inasmuch as Dumont invokes the spirit of Bresson throughout the film, the concluding shot of Céline by the river proves to be a subversion of the iconic sequence from Mouchette, achieving transcendence, not from immolation, but from salvation.

User reviews from imdb Author: tentender from France

This will be barely a stub, but I've just seen this film at the NY Film Festival, and found myself quite startled by its powerful effect on my mind and emotions. Dumont is a bit of an enigma in that his stories deal with events and issues that seem to be inflammatory (child rape in "L'Humanite", Islamic fundamentalist terror in this film) and yet manages to cloak these issues in such enigmatic human behavior that one's own opinions (or prejudices) are put aside, at least while viewing and thinking about the films. In "L'Humanite," for instance, the identity of the rapist/murderer is completely obscured. One character (who seems very possibly a likely suspect) confesses to the crime, at which point the inspector (the film's leading character and a very odd bird he is) leaves the room -- and in the final image it is he, not the man who confessed, who is seen in handcuffs. Very startling indeed! And it has confused me for a long time. But watching "Hadewijch" tonight, it occurred to me that this ending is meant to convey that both characters are responsible: Joseph (the confessed rapist) may have committed the crime (or was it really Pharaon -- the inspector -- and Joseph has confessed out of love for him? -- they have a very intimate almost sexual moment after the confession) but Pharaon assumes, as Joseph's friend, the responsibility. In reading Dumont's published script, it is clear that he intends Joseph to be the guilty party -- but of course that is just a script -- "L'Humanite" is a film. Similarly, in "Hadewijch" we get close enough to all the characters to feel that their obsessions come out of their basic human needs (however distorted) and thus we are slow to judge them. Dumont revealed, when asked at a post-showing discussion, that he does not believe in God, but that he does believe in man's spiritual life, that the spiritual is found IN life. Somehow, I found this very much in tune with my own perception of his intentions. It is a very beautiful, humanistic cinema that Dumont is creating, but I wonder how many viewers feel comfortable with this level of ambiguity (including, perhaps, me!).

TIFF - Toronto International Film Festival - Hadewijch

Bruno Dumont has never been afraid to explore the extremes of behaviour, whether through the analytical study of a homicide in L'Humanité or the dark side of sexual passion in Twentynine Palms. His timely and magnificent new film Hadewijch initially appears to be a portrait of a deeply religious young girl, intensely devoted to Christ and Christian values. But in Dumont's hands, this complete commitment gradually takes a fascinating turn – with dire results.

Céline is not only a theology student. She believes. Her single-minded devotion arouses the concern and suspicion of her Mother Superior, who decides to expel the intense young woman, sending her out into the world to discover her true self. Céline is young and impressionable, and her sacrifices are extreme. Her family is haute bourgeois – her father is a minister in the government – and their lifestyle is lavish and refined. But Céline is eager to explore her surroundings. She meets a young man named Yassine, an Arab from the projects, and is soon attending concerts and whizzing around Paris on the back of his scooter. Céline doesn't want sex, however, and when she resists Yassine's advances, he is hopelessly confused. The young man has a brother, Nassir, who is a fervent fundamentalist believer in his own religion. It is when Nassir meets Céline that Dumont lets the drama begin.

In Dumont's hands, Hadewijch becomes an entirely hypnotic study of the possibilities and consequences that arise from an absolute belief in the love of God. As Nassir and Céline find that they share considerable common ground, despite the fact that one is Christian and the other Muslim, a fascinating dynamic emerges. A trip to the Middle East sets the two down the road of action. Yet in this remarkable film, not even this journey provides the climax. Beautifully conceived and rigorously developed, Hadewijch speaks to the present with care and insight.

not coming to a theater near you review Mike D’Angelo

Reporting from Cannes in 2006, I began my review of Flanders with two sentences that friends and colleagues have been quoting (and often lightly mocking) ever since: “This is a film by Bruno Dumont. I do not like films by Bruno Dumont.” The simplistic, Sam-I-Am cadence was partly a joke (I think the previous review had been a tad abstruse), but it was also intended to convey the gut level on which I’ve always found Dumont’s work repellent. From a strictly formal standpoint, the guy has few peers, but for me his visual mastery has always been poisoned by his thoroughly noxious worldview, in which any intimation of beauty or grace will inevitably turn out to be a prelude to bestial cruelty. And so it’s an understatement to say that I was unprepared for the troubling loveliness of Dumont’s latest film, Hadewijch, about a young woman’s genuinely sincere crisis of faith — a faith that Dumont, incredibly, doesn’t feel compelled to gang-rape out of her.

Not that there isn’t reason to be concerned, mind you. Indeed, the movie isn’t more than ten minutes old before its protagonist, Céline, has been kindly but firmly bounced from a convent by the head nun after taking abstinence and mortification to worrisome extremes. Instructed to find her calling out in “the world,” Céline returns to the palatial estate of her fabulously wealthy parents, which makes it immediately clear what she’s working so hard to renounce. Still passionately committed to God but remarkably open to experience, she forms a tentative friendship with a young Arab man, Yassine, who unsuccessfully hits on her in a café. But it’s Yassine’s older brother, Nassir – a devout Muslim who leads a regular prayer meeting – with whom she ultimately forms a more meaningful and potentially alarming relationship.

With the notable exception of the bickering couple in Twentynine Palms – itself something of an anomaly in his oeuvre, though he reverts to sickening form in its final few minutes – Dumont’s protagonists tend to be almost Neanderthal in appearance and behavior, the better to suggest the animal within. Céline, by contrast, moves between soul-searing anguish and a weirdly beatific acceptance, and newcomer Julie Sokolowski gives her an air of genuine mystery that proves crucial when the story swerves in a direction some may find ludicrous, offensive or both. I have my own reservations, to be honest, but this is the first Dumont movie in which it’s even possible to ascribe a shocking turn of events to the mindset of an honest-to-goodness character, and it was such a relief not to feel as if nihilistic i’s and t’s were being dotted and crossed that I found myself surprisingly receptive to the film’s more outré fillips.

Plus, it’s not entirely clear what actually happens in Hadewijch, or even to what or whom the title refers. (Céline tells Nassir it’s the name of her family’s estate, but the closing credits identify Solikowski as playing Hadewijch, not Céline, and Dumont took the name from a real-life poet and mystic who lived in the 13th century.) I’ve read at least three different interpretations of the film’s perplexing coda, which makes no logical sense unless you conclude either (a) that it precedes certain other events chronologically (my initial assumption), or (b) that certain other events weren’t real. Dumont even seems in a playful mood vis-á-vis his reputation, introducing one of his standard slope-browed, brutish males early on and then repeatedly cutting to that apparently irrelevant character’s misadventures in and out of jail, encouraging the audience to steel ourselves for the inevitable nightmare we’ve come to expect from un film de Bruno. Instead – assuming in particular that option (a) above is correct, which is still my working hypothesis – he offers up the loveliest sick joke imaginable. In any case, this is a film by Bruno Dumont. I sometimes like films by Bruno Dumont.

Film review: Hadewijch [Thinking Faith - the online journal of the ... James Hanvey from Thinking Faith

Those who have been more adventurous in their tracking of films at the London Film Festival might have detected the number of foreign films that have dealt with religious themes and questions (cf. reviews of, Lourdes, Eyes Wide Open and As God Commands). These films have been quirky but serious interrogations of faith, grace and nature – that undetectable line that runs through human reality – and the human search for and openness to God’s presence or absence.  This latest film from Bruno Dumont covers all these fields. At its centre is the radiant and yet inscrutable character of Celine, played with considerable skill by Julie Sokolowski. Again, as with Lourdes and As God Commands, the setting is spare and austere. We first encounter Celine as a novice in a convent filled with a quiet but passionate intensity for God. Her real exemplar and mentor is the 13^th century Beguine mystic from Antwerp, Hadewijch.  Hadewijch – about whom we know very little except for her writings – is a mystic of God’s love whose visions are often expressed in the most bodily images. Indeed, her visions represent a controlled almost performative art and she represents an important tradition in medieval female mysticism which does not shrink from understanding and experiencing the intensity of the Divine love in the most physical and nuptial way.

Dumont does not caricature life in the convent. Indeed, he presents it as a haven of common sense for the nuns recognise this intensity in Celine and wisely suggest that she needs to return to the world to mature. We follow Celine in her journey which is also a search for this God - or is it the experience of an all consuming love - that haunts her life. We also learn that like so many of the Beguines that Hadewijch both guided and wrote for, Celine comes from a very privileged if dysfunctional family – her father is a minister in the Government. Visually, the family apartment with its echoing, immaculately poised and polished spaces with its 18^th and 19^th century style, appears more empty than the convent. Indeed, the secular modern world in which Celine must now make her way is made to feel more like the dessert than anything she encountered in religious life. This subtle inversion is part of the play that Dumont constructs throughout the film. It is part of Celine’s own character as we are constantly kept on the interpretive edge about her passionate search for love – Divine or human?  The moments when she seems to experience it or loss of it and appropriates the language of Hadewijch which both intensifies but may also create the experiences as much as it describes them, such is the danger of all language in the field as the mystics themselves knew.

When Celine meets Yassine (Yassine Salim) and his theologian brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis), both devout Muslims, we feel that her search for love, in all its forms, might be resolved and yet we are faced with another reversal as Islam takes over from Christianity. Here the film moves in an oddly clichéd and incongruent way. Has Celine simply become a convert finding in the passionate Islam of Nassir a substitute for her own religious and human need? Is Nassir pushing her towards the ultimate performative act of fanatical love to become a martyr in carrying a bomb on the Metro?  These must remain questions because although we see Celine in the Metro and witness the explosion there is a sudden cut and transfer of place and time back to the convent. Again the confusion is deliberately part of the technique that Dumont employs to break with the normal narrative structure of time and place. With echoes of Bergman and Passolini, he forces his audience to experience the layered dislocation of such desire for an experience of God which is both in the world and beyond it. As an audience we are forced to live or perform the difficulty we have in reading and understanding these experiences and the people who have them. We set up our categories either of mystical theology or psychological pathology, but somehow they remain inadequate for the strangeness and the experiential reality they are meant to describe and explain. Naming fails to make the strange familiar and knowable. The danger is, of course, the important cognitive and experiential mechanism of dislocation we are left with bewilderment which stops us thinking and engaging. Instead of standing on the threshold of insight the film risks teetering on the brink of incoherence.

Yet, there is something teasing and playful in the final scene with its deliberate ambivalence  – is it a resolution or dissolution? Have we slipped from realism to fantasy?  We see Celine, post explosion, running from the convent and coming to a deep dark pond into which she throws herself. Is it abandonment at last to the all consuming love of God or is it suicide? Just as the question hangs, unanswerable, it is interrupted by the figure of a rehabilitated criminal. We saw him at the very beginning of the film working on repairs to the convent brick work. He rescues Celine from drowning. As she bursts into life and consciousness in his wiry arms has Dumont been playing with us?  Is Hadewijch too much for our postmodern sensibilities? Must the passionate search for God simply lead to a Mills and Boone ending? Or in losing her life, has Celine finally found it in this world through a sort of baptism of extremes? Has God finally answered her desire through the most unnoticed, unobserved ordinary character in the film? Is God like a French film director who occasionally lets us see his ironic smile?

Spotlight | Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch - Cinema Scope Scott Foundas, April 29 – May 9, 2010

Like The Sound of Music without the music, Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch opens in a present-day convent, where the eponymous young novitiate—a girl of about 20—has run afoul of the mothers superior. She confuses abstinence with martyrdom, they say, as evidenced by her acts of starvation and self-mortification. And she has taken the idea of becoming a “bride of Jesus” altogether too literally. How do you solve a problem like Hadewijch? By returning her to secular society, the sisters agree, in the hope that she may find her “true self.”

Dumont’s typically uncompromising fifth feature—in part, a continuation of his career-encompassing study in the origins and varieties of human violence—follows Hadewijch on her journey beyond the convent walls, from the Left Bank of Paris to the West Bank and back again, as she becomes radicalized in her search for divine grace. Like her namesake, the 13th century Flemish mystic and poetess who wrote at length about her own sublimated love for the Almighty, Dumont’s Hadewijch, whose actual name is Céline (played by newcomer Julie Sokolowski), hails from an affluent family, the daughter of a government minister with a richly appointed apartment on the Île Saint-Louis. Thus, for the first time in his films, Dumont trades his beloved Bailleul for the City of Lights, which he shoots ravishingly (albeit not in his customary widescreen), rarely more so than when Céline catches a ride on the back of a stolen motorcycle with Yacine, the Arab youth she meets in a neighborhood café. Yacine steals the bike as payback for what he perceives as a disapproving glance from its proper owner—a moment that calls to mind the casual humiliation of the young Arab man in Dumont’s debut feature, La vie de Jésus (1997), here rendered in similarly sharp relief.

Although Yacine clearly has eyes for Céline, she rebuffs his advances, claims she’s saving herself for you know who. Still, in Dumont’s interpolation of Stanley Kramer, Céline invites her new friend over for dinner, to the obvious discomfort of her distant, withdrawn mother and the complete obliviousness of her father, who makes patronizing small talk about job prospects with the unemployed Yacine. In Act 2 of this cross-cultural exchange, Yacine introduces Céline to his older brother, Nassir, who invites her to join his Islam-centric religious discussion group—current topic of discussion: the significance of “the invisible.” “You must act if you have faith. You must continue the Creator’s work,” Nassir advises. And with that, Céline/Hadewijch begins her transformation into a full-fledged soldier in the army of God.

Dumont’s film arrives on the heels of a series of movies devoted, in part or in whole, to the subject of armed religious fanaticism, including Paradise Now (2005), The Hurt Locker, (2008) and Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night (2006) (to which it could almost be considered a prequel). But where those films have all been, elementally, procedurals—how-tos in bomb making and prevention—Dumont aspires to make the audience share in Hadewijch’s awakening; to make us feel physically, spiritually something that we may not at all agree with, or even entirely comprehend; in short, to make the invisible, if not exactly visible, then at least tangible. Dumont is working closely here to the Dreyer of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and the Bresson of Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951) and, like them, he has cast a lead performer of an almost metaphysical intensity, who has a face fit for Medieval painting and who seems to experience sensations and emotions more acutely than other people. Her acting, like Hadewijch’s faith, seems to spring from some deep inner recess that few have the ability to access. The latest in Dumont’s gallery of neo-religious icons—which also includes the epileptic gang member of La vie de Jésus, the forlorn detective Pharaon De Winter of L’humanité (1999) and the hulking, soft-spoken soldier Demester of Flanders (2006)—she is the first to be presented in a distinctly religious context.

Although Hadewijch travels with Nassir to Palestine (or somewhere where bombs rain down from the skies—as in Flanders, the particular war zone is never named), it would as grossly reductive to view Dumont’s intentions through such a narrow political prism; some will no doubt suggest Dumont himself is being by conflating Islamic fundamentalism with Catholic theology. Originally a philosophy professor by trade and still very much one at heart, Dumont and his expansive interest in human barbarism know no temporal or geographical boundaries. Indeed, time and again he reminds us that we are all, in so many ways, still cave people warming by the fire. In this respect, Hadewijch will make few new converts to Dumont’s oeuvre, despite the filmmaker’s repeatedly stated desire to broaden his audience.

On some fundamental level, Dumont is probably too insular and idiosyncratic a director to ever command a large public, even the arthouse hoi polloi—a filmmaking autodidact who, despite his two Grand Jury Prizes at Cannes, remains very much an outsider figure even in his own national cinema, committed to filming people and places far removed from the fashionable circles of bourgeois Paris and, despite his reputation for extreme and controversial content, unfailingly sincere in his efforts to parse the moral complexities of the human soul. When Dumont provokes, it is not to get an easy rise out of the audience, but to bring us closer to some shared understanding. And if Hadewijch isn’t one for the multiplexes, Dumont does seem to have seized on a new economy of means here, in the speed and precision with which he moves through the visual and narrative space of the film, and in his willingness to break from old habits that might have begun to verge on the self-parodic. (Among its other novelties, this is the first of Dumont’s films lacking in a single episode of violent, animalistic fucking.)

The movie ends with a bang—or seems to—after which Hadewijch returns us to the convent for what at first feels like a flashback, and then like a dream (both of which would also be Dumont firsts), and which, even taken literally, ranks among the most haunting and profoundly beautiful sequences in all of Dumont’s work. It is a sequence that begins with an act of penance and builds to the long-delayed meeting between Hadewijch and a grubby-faced construction worker (Henri Cretel, who was the cuckolding friend in Flanders) labouring on the convent grounds. Like so much in Hadewijch, what happens between them can be seen as something entirely of this world or as an act of divine intervention. Either way, it reaffirms that Dumont himself is a cause very much worth believing in.

Tativille: New Film: Hadewijch & A Prophet (Co-written by Michael ... co-written by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad

Writer-director Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch (2009) provides key contributions to two of the more distinctive trends to have emerged in the European cinema of the previous decade: first, Dumont's current feature entails a further modification of the iconography of Robert Bresson, whose style has become something of a default mode for the continent's dramatic film art in the years surrounding and following the master's death in 1999. Hadewijch, no less than Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999) and L'Enfant (2005) specifically, represents a modification of the director's universe to its own adjusted worldview, which here is expressly humanist. Second, the filmmaker's latest continues the recent engagement with Europe's Islamification that works such as Michael Haneke's Caché (2005) and Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven (2007) portended previously. Once again, Dumont does not simply rehash the films that preceded his, but rather offers his individuated take on this civilization-redefining transformation. Dumont's work accordingly belongs to that very rare breed: it is a cinema of ideas that seeks to and indeed succeeds in provoking thought.

Dumont grounds his provocation - both in the above sense, and in the more conventional definition of an act of incitement (to which the director of L'humanité, 1999, is certainly no novice) - in his representation of Céline (Julie Sokolowski), a heavily-devout Catholic of collegiate age who opens the film inside a country convent. She is present from the film's opening, panning take, where the young nun rushes between moss-covered trees to a closed chapel gate, covered in the remnants of earlier votive offerings. From the first, Dumont and cinematographer Yves Cape saturate their images in deep blues similar to those of Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan (1987), one of the film's viable points of reference. Following shots of a crane in the midst of the cloisters - thereby establishing its modern setting - and of the pock-marked face of day-laborer David (David Dewaele) working in the grounds below, the film cuts to Céline kneeling beside as she offers supplication. As Céline prays, a box suspended by the crane hovers almost expectantly outside her window. When she finishes and rises to her feet, the crane mimics her motion, pulling the box upwards and out if view. With this doubled rising motion, Dumont presents a visual analogue to her silent act of prayer, and underscores Céline's connection to David whose life seems increasingly predestined to intersect with her own. Almost immediately thereafter, Céline's mother superior expels the young man from the religious community, claiming that she is a caricature of a nun and insisting that Céline's self-mortifying behavior is a mark of her narcissism. The older woman's craggy visage dominates the mise-en-scène, just as the nuns' corporeality, beneath their habits, dominated a previous, longer framing - in this respect, Dumont's film recalls Bresson's Les Anges du Peche (1943) rather directly. The elder nun speculates that Céline would be better off in the world. (David also leaves the cloister, though in his instance it is as a result of his incarceration for a parole violation.)

Now on the outside, the viewer is quickly introduced to Céline's aristocratic circumstances: she lives in an opulent Île de Saint-Louis flat with her mother and cabinet minister father. In a chance meeting at a café, Céline becomes acquainted with a young, unemployed Muslim immigrant Yassine (Yassine Salime), who invites Céline to an outdoor concert that consists of the rock stylings of an accordion player and saxophonist. (She will introduce the young man to her parents subsequently, and will ride with him after he steals a motorcycle to punish a Parisian for his profiling gaze.) In contrast, Céline subsequently attends the performance of a stringed quartet in a beautifully-appointed baroque church - and before a very sparse crowd. Dumont presents their piece in its entirety, echoing Eric Rohmer's similar musical set-piece in My Night at Maud's (1969), released forty years prior to Hadewijch. In both of Dumont's concert sequences, the camera lingers on long close-ups of Céline's face, which conveys both thoughtfulness and abandon in equal measure. Much like her experience of music, Céline's star-crossed love for Christ is mysterious and profoundly internal; because the object of her desire is absent (or at least invisible) her actions provide its only manifestation.

The meager crowd size combined with the richness of the setting contrasts even more distinctly with a religious meeting conducted by Yassine's brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis) in the back of a Middle Eastern food stand. (In the same way, the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century luxury of Céline's Parisian home compares with the stark, suburban high rise that Yassine and Nassir occupy.) In the meeting to which Nassir has invited the very-committed Céline, the former emphasizes "the notion of the invisible" in the Islamic faith, that Allah is "present in absence"; in this respect, his tone proves highly ecumenical. Unlike Céline's fellow Catholics, she finds others in the back room who are as committed to their faith as she is hers - Hadewijch clearly makes the point that spiritual devotion is essentially the purview of Muslims alone in contemporary France; in an exceptionally conflationary moment, the viewer will see Céline on her knees as Nassir and Yassine bow to Allah. Nassir consequently chastises one of the comparatively large number of attendees who stares at Céline's bra-less chest through her opaque t-shirt. Dumont's mise-en-scène in fact often underlines the young woman's pert physique. This incident prompts Céline to rush out of the room, and the group leader to follow her with an apology. Céline then claims to her new religious mentor that she cannot stand anyone looking at her other than Christ.

Céline then tells Nassir that "I love him and I know he loves me. He has come to me often," but will later admit that she no longer feels God's presence. In this regard, Céline's faith is expressed as particularly feminine in its emphasis not only on faith, but in the shared feeling between the former "bride" and her "husband." Hers is l'amour fou de dieu. With Nassir insisting that Céline must act if she has faith - his Islamic faith is presented as masculine in juxtaposition to her feminine, "love"-foregrounded Catholicism - she concedes to join Nassir in what proves ultimately to be a terrorist act. As such, Nasser's previously enlightened tone dissolves, as does the politically-correct inference that Islam is a religion of piece. (Likewise, Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, 1996, and its perverted ethical calculation provides another clear point of reference.) Céline's motivation, only lightly sketched by Dumont, derives principally from her feeling of loverly neglect, from the absence she now feels outside the cloister. Indeed, it is as though Céline decides to test her God in aiding Nassir's slaughter of innocents - which Dumont depicts in an uncharacteristically CGI explosion; she will be unfaithful in doing the will of Allah in order to generate a reaction for her God.

After her participation in this act of violence, she indeed returns to the cloister, where along with David (recently released from prison) and a third young nun, Céline finds relief from a sudden downpour within a greenhouse attached to the church. When the elderly nun finds the three, she scolds the group, insisting that they leave the shelter. The church, in other words, proves no respite for this metonymic torrent. At this moment, the police likewise arrive, prompting Céline's flight into the surrounding woods. After returning to the chapel once more where its gates continue to be locked, and after pleading for God's intervention accordingly, she reaches a pond in which she attempts to drown herself. In this moment, Hadewijch directly adopts the iconography invented by Bresson's most despairing work, Mouchette (1967), and repeated in the Dardenne's Rosetta. Dumont, however, provides his variation as David seizes the submerged Céline, pulling her above the surface. Whether or not it is God who has answered her prayer, Céline's earthly salvation comes thanks to the humane action of her fellow man. It is here, rather than within the protective confines of the church, that Hadewijch's figures find respite from the contemporary reality with which Dumont's film confronts its spectators. Thrown into a very dangerous world, humanity has only itself.

Hadewijch | Reverse Shot Michael Koresky

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [2.5/5]

indieWIRE (Michael Koresky)

Hadewijch — Toronto Screen Shots James McNally, which includes an audio of the Q & A with Dumont at the film’s premiere in Toronto (27:10)

Slant Magazine review Nick Schager

NYPress (Armond White) review

Spirituality and Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

User reviews from imdb Author: starrychloe from United States

Boxoffice Magazine (Barbara Goslawski) review

Night on Planet Earth [Alex Barrett]

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]

13th Annual European Union Film Festival | Gene Siskel Film Center Martin Rubin

Screen International (Dan Fainaru) review subscription required

The Auteurs Daily: Toronto and NYFF. Hadewijch David Hudson from The Auteurs, September 24, 2009

The Auteurs [Michael Guillen] Michael Guillen interview from The Auteurs, September 30, 2009

The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young

Variety (Justin Chang) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review[4/4]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

Hadewijch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hadewijch : Poems and Biography

Hadewijch Other Women’s Voices

Hadewijch of Antwerp Criticism e-notes

Spirituality Of Hadewijch - My Love Is All Squidoo

HORS SATAN B- 82

aka: Outside Satan

France (110 mi) 2011 ‘Scope Official site [France]

In keeping with a current trend of high profile filmmakers that fail to invent new ideas and instead intentionally revisit their own works, such as Béla Tarr in The Turin Horse (2011) or Aki Kaurismäki in Le Havre (2011), where one could also include David Fincher in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Dumont has returned to familiar themes from L'HUMANITÉ (1999) mixed with a heavy dose of Dreyer’s ORDET (1955). While something of an experimental and mostly wordless film exploring the mystical ramifications of good and evil, blending them together so that one can look very much like the other, the film is set in the lush greenery of Northern France not far from the coast (seen here: Images for Parc Naturel régional des Caps et Marais d ...) where most of the film feels like a road movie. Beautifully shot in ‘Scope by Yves Cape, the film is immersed in the natural world, where humans are seen as tiny creatures that occasionally dot the landscape, but otherwise barely alter the worldly design. The featured character is Guy (David Dewaele), who spends most of the film slowly walking through the fields and hillsides, where he can also be seen camping outdoors. He is joined by Elle (Alexandra Lemâtre), a young girl that follows him on long walks through a good part of the film, where they are friends, but remain distant, showing no intimacy of any kind. Early on, Guy offers a strange and bizarre form of help, the kind that will send a jolt through the audience, as it seems boldly disturbing, yet she is obviously appreciative. Nearby, there is a young girl that seems caught in a psychological paralysis, as if her brain is nearly dead, where Guy offers a kind of hands on assistance to heal her, behavior right out of L'HUMANITÉ.

Something of a drifter along the lines of Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine as “Grasshopper”), the Shaolin monk from the Kung Fu TV series (1972 – 75), the audience senses an otherworldly dimension to Guy, who never expresses his thoughts and seems to perform both good and bad deeds, never changing his facial expression, never eating much, and spending nearly all of his time outdoors, as if gaining strength by the sun’s rays. Much of this resembles the character of Johannes in ORDET, a slightly disturbed character that is mentally touched in the head but believes he is a living Christ, spending much of the film roaming the countryside reciting scripture to the winds, afraid people believe in the dead Christ, but not in the living one, a fragile creature mysteriously attuned with divine insight. Here, in contrast, villagers believe Guy holds divine powers, where it’s the audience that may remain suspicious, especially witnessing his willingness to perform brutally violent acts, very un-Jesus like, where it’s hard to apply rational laws to an irrational situation, where he does not fit the church’s assessment of a saintly creature. Instead, like Pharaon in

L'HUMANITÉ, it feels like he comes from beyond or outside human comprehension. This alters the landscape of the film, suggesting nothing is as it seems. The natural splendor of the world outside, however, remains constant and unchanged, where characters continually walk through verdant grasslands that remain untouched by human development, suggesting there is an Edenlike perfection, but humans, along with the other animals, are not part of it, as they are the beasts that inhabit the earth. In perhaps the strangest scene of the film, Guy is joined by a female traveler (Aurore Broutin) on the Boulogne Road, a girl looking to camp nearby, where their behavior together borders on beastly, offering a strangeness and peculiarity simply unseen in other films.

Dumont allows the audience to dwell upon Guy’s (and God’s) impact on the landscape, where one wonders what motivates either one of them into action, as mostly both remain a passive, inert force with an unseen darker side that may attempt to help in mysterious ways, where mostly Guy (seen) and God (unseen) simply share time on earth with humans in need, as they’re the ones likely to call upon them. While we’re clued into the fact both possess unworldly powers, we’re not sure why or under what circumstances either one is prepared to use them. Mostly nothing happens in this oddly familiar world, set in the isolation of a remote rural landscape where anyone familiar with L'HUMANITÉ, ORDET, or even the most recent Carlos Reygadas film SILENT LIGHT (2007) will have an acute recognition, a déjà vu moment, where Dumont and others have already taken us down this road, where it’s hard to find anything new in this version. Unlike the other films, which offer an open-ended sense of transcendence, Dumont’s apocalyptic universe is stiflingly predetermined, where humans are no more than specks on the landscape in a cold and indifferent environment, seemingly abandoned by God, having lost their way long ago, where they are seen continually pecking at one another’s open wounds, becoming grotesque, nihilistic irritants in an otherwise Edenesque world. Like Béla Tarr, it’s this sense of nagging fatalism, that humans are bound to destroy and fail miserably, that one finds continually disturbing in a Dumont film, where despite all mystic and Godlike possibilities, optimism is quickly negated by the darker impulses of the human condition.

Outside Satan  Thomas Caldwell from Cinema Autopsy

Bruno Dumont’s latest stark piece of French rural miserablism Outside Satan also features characters symbolically wandering around a barren landscape. However, while the pace and mood of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia was a case of the form and style being dictated by the film’s content, Outside Satan is a bit like End of Animal where the obtuse style seems to have come first. It is a difficult yet intriguing film with deliberately strange and ambiguous characters who challenge notions of good and evil, and how we perceive spirituality and madness. At times the leading male character, a sort of avenging angel drifter, reminded me of Martin from the Dennis Potter written telemovie Brimstone and Treacle, whose act of evil results in something good.

User reviews from imdb Author: Vladimir Novikov from Canada

Avant-garde movie exploring issues of good and evil, their interdependency, and transformation of one into the other. The pace is extremely slow and script mostly uneventful, so that viewer could focus on the truly meaningful scenes. Landscapes of Northern France along with visual and sound techniques are intended to capture viewer's attention during long scenes of walking amidst green scenery that take large part of the running time. Yet movie's overall slowness, which could be an allegory for mundane daily life of an average person, provides good counter-balance to several naturalistic scenes that are intense, and even shocking. The dialogue is scarce, which also serves to illuminate important plot twists. It is obvious why general public might not like the movie, however I enjoyed it at TIFF11 and my biggest regret is not being able to stay for the Q&A session with director Bruno Dumont after the screening.

Hors Satan Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London David Jenkins

2009’s masterful ‘Hadewijch’ saw divisive Belgian auteur Dumont delivering a film which – somewhat out of character – related directly and unambiguously to modern political concerns. With ‘Hors Satan’, he retreats into the spiritually oblique realms of early works such as ‘La Vie de Jesus’ and ‘L’Humanite’, and like those films, where one person might see a mellifluous and profound spiritual parable, another will just see a parade of ugly rubes tottering around fields with no real rhyme or reason. Dewaele plays a mystifying deity who wanders the drab uplands of France’s Opal Coast, shooting both people and animals with his poacher’s rifle, but also in possession of strange healing powers. If you give yourself over to the material, it’s an intoxicating experience, and Dumont’s slovenly characters, expertly measured pacing and crisp photography only heighten the mood of intense unease and the potential for philosophical shock and awe.

The House Next Door [Aaron Cutler]

I saw Bruno Dumont's 1997 film The Life of Jesus and liked it, but shortly afterward grew tired of Western European filmmakers showing me how awful the world was, and how awful I was for living in it. (I also grew tired of them citing Bresson.) Years later, Dumont's Outside Satan didn't change things. In one scene, a woman tells a man he can have her, then strips naked in full view and lies down, vagina facing the camera. It's sex, folks, and he goes for it, which means we do too. Then he strangles her. What does that say about us?

Yet what's so irritating about Dumont's film is the way that it wastes not just time, but also space. Over and over we see people walking through vast, empty fields, their bodies either filling the frames like giants or lost as tiny pale specks among a sweep of bright green. But the grass, trees, rocks, and lakes are ultimately parts of the background here, impassive, indifferent observers to the monstrous human drama. The film isn't alive to nature's movement, and by shooting in the 2.35:1 widescreen ratio, Dumont has given himself a lot of space to do nothing with. Life may suck, but it's never empty. The best widescreen films and filmmakers know how to fill their frames with detail.

15th EU Film Festival: BEYOND SATAN Candace Wirt from Cine-File Chicago, also seen here: cine-file.info/forum

In an unknown rural town along the coast, Guy (David Dewaele) kills Girl’s (Alexandra Lematre) stepfather who frequently abused her.  Guy goes on to perform both good and bad deeds, including a miracle that concludes the film.  With BEYOND SATAN, writer/director Bruno Dumont wants the audience to actively participate within the film.  Dumont creates the character of Guy for the viewer to interpret only through his actions; Dumont does not share the thoughts and feelings that drive him.  The camera does linger on Guy’s face and the beautiful coastal landscape at which he often stares, but each appears unreadable in its own distinct way.  Guy’s actions suggest that he is religious and possibly beyond human.  He disobeys society’s law as well as God’s law, however he may also be beyond our particular conceptions of good and evil.  In this way, Dumont encourages the viewer to speculate on the emergence of such conceptions and how they change over time.  It does appear that Guy and possibly Girl are a type of pilgrim, because they spend the majority of the film walking toward somewhere.  For Guy, his journey is to save Girl.  In an interview on the film last spring, Dumont said, “There is no God.  I am an atheist.  It is up to us to become God.  We need to be elevated, to become saints.  God alienates people from themselves.  Yes, my films are mystical, to make people feel the mystery, to inspire them to experience for themselves the miracle of existence.”  In BEYOND SATAN, the viewer can contemplate this miracle of existence and in particular how it forms (in) his or her mind.  (2011, 110 min, 35mm)

2011 Toronto International Film Festival Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

I'm starting to think that Dumont is the unholy arthouse cross between Robert Bresson and M. Night Shyamalan. How many times have I been completely on Dumont's wavelength, prepared to defend his ideas and artistry against all gainsayers, only to have him pull some ridiculous last-minute "twist" that not only recodes all that came before it, but practically defies you to organize it into any meaningful interpretation? Granted, I have quite a bit more faith in Bruno Dumont than I do in latter-day M. Night, and I am being (somewhat) tongue in cheek. Dumont's films, of course, bear certain ineluctable commonalities of style and worldview, but I don't think for a minute that the man has self-consciously turned himself into a "brand." If anything, I believe Dumont's philosophy relies too heavily on a kind of sudden jolt of nihilism as a way to shake loose of an otherwise deterministic universe, one forever buoyed by our animalistic drives and the pull of gravity on our flesh. But, as it plays out in the actual dramaturgy -- see Twentynine Palms and Flandres, and to a lesser extent Hadewijch -- these reversals come to feel like deus ex machina devices for a thoughtful director who has effectively painted himself into a corner. (L'humanité remains Dumont's masterpiece in part because its finale is both conclusive and utterly open-ended, an image-event that can only be read on the symbolic plane.) And so it was with Outside Satan, a film nearly as brutal, graceful and uncompromising in its rendering of the tie between the spirit and the earth as L'humanité, and even more aggressive in its unwillingness to assign firm identities among its main characters. This was essentially the case, anyway, until the final ten or so minutes of the film, when [SPOILER] a fairly straightforward Christian miracle confirms that we have been in the presence of someone or something, if not Divine, then at least sent from Somewhere Else, all along.

David Dewaele plays an unnamed, unkempt outsider who lives on the periphery of the local village. He seems to have some kind of connection to the land, as he encamps behind a particular rock as though it were his home. Similarly, he frequently goes down on his knees in prayer before various natural features and vistas, not in an obviously pagan manner but more along the lines of an ascetic St. Francis, witnessing God's glory in His creations. The man, who resembles Vincent Cassel if his features were elongated like pulled taffy, has a young companion / acolyte in the similarly unnamed "Elle" (Alexandra Lematre). She has short black hair, pale skin, and a vaguely Goth aspect, marking her out as both visually and socially at odds with her rural surroundings. Early on in Outside Satan, the self-styled mystic helps this girl in trouble (although Dumont has not yet revealed anything by this point) by taking a rifle and murdering her stepfather. The mystic is a sniper. He is also flatly uninterested in pursuing sexual relations with his young charge, despite her occasional come-ons. By contrast, a local boy pursues her quite aggressively, with disastrous results. Up through the vast majority of Outside Satan, I found myself rather more entranced with Dumont's formal approach -- his patience, his post-Bressonian hypnosis mode, his brute physicality -- than I had with anything he'd done in years. Given the fact that Satan was, for most of its running time, not clearly "about" any particular moral framework or firmly identifiable social structure (e.g., the fog of war, or the existential drive of fervent belief, or even, as in the case of Twentynine Palms, the world-canceling power of raw lust), I found Dumont able to let us think. Should this charismatic drifter be understood as a holy man, or a psychopath, or is there a meaningful difference therein? Presuming the absence of feminist empowerment, does a young girl's sexual awakening necessarily entail an index of possible repressions, from which she must select the most benevolent, or the most seductive, or the one which holds out the most hope for the subversive exercise of will? And what of the sheer materiality of bodies, the pull that earth and sky exert upon our physical selves, or the way we cup our hands and "collect" the rays of the sun as we sit and pray, knowing that we are more than just our thoughts alone? The girl's repetitive gesture of sticking her hand out of her door and presenting the older man with a daily sandwich is a perfectly Dumontian emblem: cyclical, humorously mundane, concentrated on minimal action as a synecdoche for broader social interaction.

So, when all of this philosophical "white space," this nearly plotless meditation on companionship (as opposed to "sociality," and its implied scripts and constraints), becomes, finally, a sort of Evil-Angel-Teorema-Ordet affair, I sort of want to slap Bruno upside the head. But I'm pretty sure that's the point. So there you go. Consider me properly punk'd.

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Howard Schumann - Cinescene

@ Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Ciné-vu Noel Megahey

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anton Bitel]

CANNES REVIEW | Bruno Dumont’s “Outside Satan” Lacks Inspiration Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 22, 2011

Tree of Life: Lyrical, spiritual, kitsch Barbara Scharres at Cannes from the Ebert blog, May 16, 2011

Outside Satan Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily, May 16, 2011

The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]

Screen Fanatic [David O'Connell]

Cannes Review: Bruno Dumont's 'Hors Satan' Is Devilishly Dull Kevin Jagernaut at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 16, 2011

Cannes '11, day six: The Tree Of Life and other things calling themselves movies Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 17, 2011

Quickflix [Simon Miraudo]

Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth]

Cannes 2011. Bruno Dumont's "Outside Satan" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 17, 2011

Hors Satan: Cannes 2011 Review Kirk Honeycutt at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 16, 2011

variety.com [Rob Nelson] also seen here: Rob Nelson

Cannes '11 Day 7: Songs in the Tree of Life Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 17, 2011

CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915 B 89

France (95 mi) 2013 ‘Scope

There is always something missing that torments me.

Madhouses are houses made on purpose to cause suffering…I cannot stand any longer the screams of these creatures.

—Camille Claudel in letters to her brother Paul

Another realistically severe Bruno Dumont film that seems designed to inflict as much misery and punishment on the audience as is humanly possible, an arthouse trend that is happening all too frequently these days, as if forcing the viewer to experience such extreme degree of discomfort is somehow a doorway into artistic perception, as if the rigors of sadistic horror from Pasolini’s SALÒ, OR 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975) or Michael Haneke’s punishing Funny Games (1997) have somehow been unleashed upon the industry, and what was once considered rare and extreme is now more commonly accepted. Violence has made its inroads into the human psyche to the point where no one blinks anymore at human torture. While no one is accusing these uncompromising artists of exploitation, but Dumont joins a growing field of highly acclaimed directors, like Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy, Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe) (2012, 2013), or Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), who are perfectly willing to unsettle and extinguish any comfort zone with the audience, where if the expression is slavery, humiliation, or human torment, by God that’s what they will make the audience feel. Perhaps it’s this insistence that the director must inflict trauma into the lives of the audience that comes into question, as art has the unique capacity to get “inside” a subject and explore internally without making the audience personally experience subjects like war, for instance, or suicide, incest, or murder, but instead poetically explore the subject through psychological implications. One of the very best war movies ever made is Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1976), which powerfully examines the unending dread, fear, and madness associated with the conditions of war without accentuating the graphic nature of battle scenes, where the audience is lured into this dizzyingly intense psychological state of mind without forcing the audience to endure spilled guts and mutilated bodies. Nowhere in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, perhaps his darkest tragedy, are we placed on the front lines, as the human drama takes place almost entirely behind the protected walls of a castle under assault—the point being, we don’t remember the blood of the battlefield afterwards, but are instead riveted by the human torment. Somewhere along the line modernism has become associated with emotionally browbeating audiences, forcing them to capitulate to the director’s terms of emotional assault. Thankfully, freedom of choice still offers us the capacity to say no to these rules of engagement.

Dumont is perhaps the closest practitioner to the Bressonian school of cinema, a formalist whose minimalist structure reflects an economy of means, known for reducing film to its bare essence, something of a perfectionist in filmmaking, where questions of faith constantly arise throughout his body of work, and this is no exception. Up until this film, Dumont never used a name actor before, preferring to use unknowns, as his films are more about ideas and concepts and not about performances, a view shared by Bresson, where instead their artistic greatness relies upon the meticulous construction of their work, paying great attention to detail, where the viewers begin to identify with the world as the characters do, literally transporting the audience to a different time and place, where it becomes immediately recognizable and familiar, effectively using silences and long, observational gazes. Veering away from the animalistic brutality of his earlier work, this is a thoroughly undramatic historical drama based on actual events, drawing upon the life of Camille Claudel through letters and medical records, much as Bresson relied upon actual historical trial records in The Trial of Joan of Arc (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc) (1961), yet where Bresson’s Joan remains impassive and overly detached, Dumont uses perhaps the most internationally acclaimed and highly expressive French actress Juliette Binoche in the role of Camille, where in keeping with Dumont’s portrayal of realism, he has chosen an artist to reflect the life of another artist. While Dumont doesn’t concern himself with the backstory, Camille was 19 in 1883 when she became a student of French sculptor Auguste Rodin, 24-years her senior, which developed into a passionate but stormy love affair where she inspired Rodin as a model for many of his works while also assisting him, as the two artists mutually influenced one another. Rodin also had another longterm mistress, Rose Beuret, the mother of his son, and despite Camille’s pleas, Rodin refused to leave the stability of his family, so Camille left him in 1893 after a 10-year symbiosis of art and romance, continuing to communicate for another five years before a final break up, moving into her own studio and working feverishly, exhibiting her works at recognized art galleries. Camille’s mental outlook, on the other hand, deteriorated, suffering from paranoid delusions, developing a persecution complex where she believed that Rodin and his supporters were plotting against her, becoming obsessed by the injustice of her mistreatment, suddenly finding herself alienated from the inner circle of artists, with Rodin taking credit for her works, she felt betrayed and persecuted by Rodin until her dying day, believing she was exploited as a woman.

While she lived in a filthy art studio with her cats, broken sculptures, and her shutters sealed from the light, Camille remained critical of Rodin even as his fame and public prominence grew, believing Rodin wanted her voice silenced and was trying to poison her. Her family, on the other hand, found her behavior intolerable, believing her “scandalous” actions only undermined the family’s reputation and good name, and just three days after her father died in 1913, the man who largely supported her and was her biggest defender, the family placed her in an asylum, where the perception is she was literally driven insane by the prejudice and discrimination of a male-dominated art world that was incapable of accepting a woman’s talent as equal to a man’s, where like so many other neglected women artists she was perceived as threatening. Even today she is largely considered to be the most gifted female sculptor that ever lived, yet her accomplishments remain overshadowed by her infamous relationship with Rodin, who went on to fame and glory afterwards, apparently at her expense. While this background history is a footnote, it is not included in the film which opens two years later in 1915 with Camille inside the Montdevergues Asylum, a Catholic run mental institution with Dumont using actual caretakers and mental patients from Saint Paul de Mausole, the institution in the south of France where Vincent Van Gogh stayed for a year in 1889 creating numerous works of art, where a similar device was utilized decades earlier by John Cassavetes in A Child Is Waiting (1963), which includes handicapped children from the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California, one of the first State facilities for mentally impaired children. In both films, professional actors are seamlessly integrated into an actual hospital setting. The audience is immediately pulled into the noise and incoherence of the sounds of an inexplicable madness, where Binoche sits silently and plays uncomfortably off other patients. Dumont creates an impressionist, near wordless work where sound alone is so oppressive that one instantly senses a need for relief, yet Camille is stuck in the suffocating atmosphere of endless rooms with no relief, made worse by being unheated, so one can only imagine the cold in these massive rooms where humans tend to get lost in the enormity of the empty space where time can only linger, becoming a matter of little consequence, as no one is “living” a life here, but instead exists in a state of mental paralysis. The only way to survive in this madness is to lose one’s humanity, as you can’t allow yourself to feel the forcible oppression without being reduced to tears. Powerlessness is everywhere, as patients can’t control their disturbing behavior, where one can’t help but be affected by it, as in this setting there is no place to escape from the surrounding madness.

Much of the first half of the film simply captures the rhythm of the daily life, where despite having the freedom to walk the grounds as she pleases, the interactions with others are mostly unpleasant, and the overwhelming feeling of boredom and endless confinement pervades every moment. Camille, while profoundly unhappy, is not as seriously disturbed as the others and is often asked to look after some of the other patients, while it’s obvious she seeks solitary quiet and reflection every moment she can, simply overwhelmed by the unending noise and the horrifying effects of being stuck there. When it’s announced that her brother Paul will be visiting in two days, it’s the first time we see her smile, where it gives her something to look forward to, changing the focus, as for her this moment offers a glimmer a hope. Through the incessant unpleasantness of her confined life, it’s quite clear how important this opportunity is and Camille looks forward to being released, something even the doctors are recommending. When we are introduced to Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent), a Christian poet, playwright, and diplomat, the point of view shifts, no longer seen through Camille’s eyes, but through diary entries and a few lengthy monologues about Christianity from the brother, an ardent believer whose beliefs border on mysticism. While his presence is altogether bizarre, seen having dumfounding conversations alone in a room, as if conversing with his own soul, casting a dark shadow across an already dour picture, this inner narration is difficult to stomach because of the sheer fanaticism it exhibits, where the viewer is likely to be put off by the otherworldy tone of his outbursts, yet he is the rational member of the family, and the only one the family allows to have any contact with Camille. But once he gets into a room with his sister, where the viewer is highly sensitized to the ramifications, Camille literally pleads for her life, but faraway brother Paul is unmoved and undaunted, convinced more than ever that her Godless sins have not yet found the light, that she still needs to accept God in all his crooked wisdom, not always easily ascertainable, even as she questions His existence anywhere on the premises, as what kind of God would allow people to suffer so? It’s a cruel fate, made even crueler by the devout Christian rationale of her brother who insists she still needs time to get well, and exits unceremoniously, where imprisoning his sister is his way of saving her, reflective of the tortuous struggle for women to find a voice and a place in art history. Twenty years later she would write, “I live in a world that is so curious, so strange. Of the dream which was my life, this is the nightmare,” where Dumont’s portrait of doom expresses the reality of that nightmare in just three days. Camille would spend the rest of her life (nearly 30 years) in that asylum, dying of malnutrition at age 79 during the height of WWII, where her family refused to retrieve her body, eventually buried in a communal grave.

Camille Claudel, 1915 | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

That date in the title of Bruno Dumont’s ‘Camille Claudel 1915’ is doubly crucial. Not only does it reflect the story’s focus on a specific moment in the life of the sculptor, but it differentiates this film from an earlier movie of almost the same name from 1988, starring Isabelle Adjani. That was a fittingly energetic account (deploying Adjani's raw intensity) of Claudel's younger years, as a successful artist taught by, romantically involved with and rivalling Rodin. Unsurprisingly, this film from the director of ‘L’Humanité’ and ‘Hadewijch’ is an altogether more restrained affair, depicting her later incarceration in an asylum near Avignon.

It’s arguably the writer-director’s finest achievement yet. Atypically, he makes use of professional actors in the lead roles, and is rewarded by fine work from Jean-Luc Vincent as the hapless heroine’s poet brother Paul and by a wonderful performance by Juliette Binoche as Camille. Conveying the intelligence, anxiety, anger and isolation of an artist abandoned by her family, unable to work and forced to live with women mostly far less capable even of surviving than herself, Binoche displays both eloquent expertise and an admirable control wholly in keeping with the simplicity and clarity of Dumont’s uncompromisingly authentic script and direction. (Rightly, if perhaps controversially, the other inmates of the asylum are mostly played by non-professionals who are themselves severely disabled in real life.)

Such story as there is deals with Claudel’s despair at her situation and her forlorn hope of release. Mercifully, even though the last third of the film allows Paul to discuss – at perhaps too great length – his passionate Catholic beliefs, this is not one of Dumont’s woolly ventures into mystificatory abstraction; sticking to various historical documents, he simply focuses on Claudel’s painful predicament as a woman, an artist, a depressive, and a sentient, intelligent human being. Eschewing metaphor and mysticism (save insofar as his characters adopt them), he has for once given us a film of immense visual beauty, thematic clarity and subtle resonance.

Paste Magazine Jeremy Mathews

Art and madness have always coexisted, but Camille Claudel, 1915 is about what happens when you take away the art and stifle a troubled, extraordinary mind. Built around a poignant, controlled performance from Juliette Binoche, French writer/director Bruno Dumont’s film looks to understand the darkness that covered Camille Claudel in 1915—and the remaining 30 years of her life.

This is by no means a conventional biopic. We don’t see Claudel’s youth, or her time as famed sculptor Auguste Rodin’s assistant and mistress, or her emergence as a bold, brilliant artist. Dumont isn’t interested in building a conventional narrative around the short timeframe that the film does explore, let alone her entire life. Instead, he journeys into alienation and desperation, demanding and rewarding his audience’s attention.

As the film begins, our heroine has already sculpted her last work and been confined to an asylum in the south of France. Her family has sent her there against her will, and she lives with a mix of confusion and paranoia. She waits for the visit of her brother, Paul, the famed poet, mystic and strict Catholic, although it’s unclear what that visit might accomplish.

Dumont and Binoche present Claudel as a woman who is not entirely in her right mind, but is no more at home in the asylum than she would be in the outside world. Her mental lapses are definitely real. She believes Rodin is somehow plotting against her and trying to steal her work, even though their relationship ended 20 years ago. She’s liable to abruptly succumb to fits of anger or depression. But much of her time is spent in melancholy quietude, trying to keep a grip on her mind while madness swarms around her. She remains intelligent and articulate throughout her travails, while most of her fellow inmates are too disabled to speak.

Dumont’s formal compositions emphasize the contrast between Binoche’s demeanor and the grotesqueries of the sanitarium. The asylum feels like a convent, with a sunny courtyard juxtaposed against dingy interiors. Her fellow inmates, played by actual patients, feed her madness. They laugh and smile through their missing teeth, bang spoons against tables and compound her feelings of coming unglued. It does little to help the reticent artist. Dumont often films Binoche straight on from behind, static in the center of the goings-on, and the actress’s body language is every bit as affecting as her facial expressions.

Dumont may be courting controversy by using real mental patients, but the decision yields results that couldn’t have been achieved otherwise. The film avoids veering into exploitation by simply showing the patients as they are and not sensationalizing the material. Claudel’s feelings are often tied to the patients around her, sometimes subtly, as they smile at her, other times overtly, as she watches a rehearsal of Don Juan.

Two-thirds through the film, Dumont jarringly shifts perspective to Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent) as he prepares to finally visit his sister. Paul spews out a lengthy monologue about his relationship with Catholicism and his mystic motivations. Parts of it amount to a whole lot of talking that quickly grows tedious given the reticence that prevails for much of the rest of the film, but that’s kind of the point.

We spend so much time in Camille’s head that it’s perhaps necessary to take a break and hear another point of view. The contrast of the philosophies is key to the film, and intellectually, the structure is justified. In practice, however, it feels a little stunted. The material with Paul isn’t quite compelling enough to make the shift satisfying. The longer the film goes without Camille, the less engaging it is.

That may, however, simply be a testament to how good Binoche is. In one scene, she picks up a hunk of clay from the ground and nudges it around with her thumb, hinting at an urge to work, to create. We can see all her feelings up there on the screen—her passion, her fear, her frustration. Camille Claudel, 1915 is a poem to a hopeless situation, and it’s these moments of yearning that really bring out its beauty.

fipresci.org [Dana Linssen] 2013

Look at that hand. It peels a potato. It picks up a stone. It holds another hand. And it is there. Directing the action in Bruno Dumont's Camille Claudel, 1915. A film about hands. A sculptress' hands. A cinema of gestures.

Sculptress Camille Claudel (1864-1834) is probably best known for what is not known about her. The period of her life in the 1880s and 90s is well-documented: we know that she worked in Auguste Rodin's Parisian atelier and became his student, muse, and eventually, his mistress. But it would be a mistake to reduce her to the role she played in someone else's life, or to the tragic, yet captivating fate that befell her when their relationship ended and Claudel withdrew from the world into "in-sanity" and the imprisonment of her own mind. That episode has served as an inspiration for many books and films (notably the 1988 Camille Claudel by Bruno Nuytten, with a young Isabelle Adjani in the title role): films and books that were ultimately more about Rodin than Claudel.

In contrast, French director Dumont (La vie de Jésus, L’humanité, Flandres) became interested in Claudel's life in the aftermath of all those events, during the thirty years she spent institutionalized in a mental asylum in the South of France. In the documentary Camille Claudel 2012, he explains that it was the notion of nothingness which especially attracted him to Claudel: the reality that we know nothing (or almost nothing) about her incarceration, the fact that he had to write a screenplay starting from nothing, the suggestion that (most likely) nothing much happened in that Vaucluse asylum in Montdevergues, and most importantly, the way that this idleness and inactivity appealed to him cinematically. How does one film the passing of time? Not even in terms of temporality, just stasis?

Even though Camille Claudel, 1915 takes place over only three days, these three days feel endless and out of time. They are days spent in expectation. Camille awaits a visit from her younger brother, the writer Paul, whom she anticipates will hold the key to her release. There is little dialogue, little explanation, but every split second is filled with hope, to the extent that we viewers are led to believe that this film will hold the power to undo history and see to her release.

In a way, it does. It liberates Camille Claudel from the myth and the stigma of the artiste maudite, the accursed artist, the outsider, from her tragic claim to fame. Here in Montdevergues she is not an outsider, but an insider; most significantly, she is an insider within the universe of the film, within the eye of the camera which moves around her with a sculptor's hand.

Camille Claudel, 1915 is as much about hands as it is about faces. These faces are, in the end, what appear and re-appear under the gentle, observant camera's touch. They are Bressonian faces, blanks that stare back, faces that recall Dreyer's Joan of Arc. In one of her most courageous roles to date, star actress Juliette Binoche allows us to look at her unmasked face: no glamour, no cute little blush, no make-up. Just her skin as transparent as skin can be. Not a buffer against an outside world, but a nude and uncovered and vulnerable membrane that exhales all her character's pains and neuroses. She is not different from the other "actors": real people suffering from mental illnesses, the inhabitants of the present day Montdevergues. They do not play (except in a play-within-the-film); they are not directed. It is the "unexpected" which directs this film, allowing Dumont to capture their pains and joys and shrieks and shudders, allowing him to apprehend the reality of the situation.

Thus the film transcends the traditional biopic. Camille Claudel, 1915 is not "about" Camille Claudel, but within her. And there we encounter the questions. Unbroken, unspoken questions about the way wayward women were (and are) marginalized, pushed outside of society, about the socio-political usage of "madness", about the way we are (in)capable of looking at the "other" and their "otherness" in the eye. About art and life. Are we repelled by our own convictions and morals and taboos as they blind our eyes and make our hands numb and senseless?

Look at that hand. It picks up a stone. It sculpts the empty space, the nothingness around it. And then drops it. With that image Bruno Dumont recreates the best piece of art Camille Claudel (n)ever made.

Film of the Week: Camille Claudel 1915 - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, October 17, 2013

Among highly regarded auteurs, France’s Bruno Dumont may command the least affection. It’s not because his films are severe; there are other filmmakers who cultivate extreme austerity yet invite viewers to partake of the bleakness in a way that’s somehow inclusive. That’s why it’s possible to emerge oddly elated from, say, Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse—you feel pleasure at having shared a vision, however pessimistic.

With Dumont, you suspect that he doesn’t give a damn whether you share his vision or not; there’s an often icy self-containment about his films, which in any case elude being pinned to any clear meaning. When Dumont’s endings appear to offer closure—as in the redemptive embrace that closes Hadewijch (09)—it’s hard to know whether he isn’t actually deriding the very notion of catharsis and conclusion. And while his films invoke spirituality and transcendence, there’s always the suspicion that he’s proposing a bitter critique of such notions as merely sentimental.

Dumont’s career has been uneven, ranging from the spare brilliance of his debut The Life of Jesus (97), a quasi-naturalistic drama of working-class youth, to the overblown existential thriller Humanity (99), in which he seemed fatally mesmerized by the idea of his own auteur loftiness. Let’s not mention Twentynine Palms (03), a draggy, deranged remix of Zabriskie Point. Hadewijch and its successor Hors Satan (11), however, were controlled, intensely surprising minimalist narratives—and they seemed to offer a workable format for the “Bruno Dumont film” that the director might have comfortably continued with indefinitely. Instead, he’s now blindsided us with Camille Claudel 1915, which is both a departure and a consolidation, in that it pushes his characteristic spareness and seriousness into emotionally charged new terrain.

It’s the first film in which he’s cast a bona fide star, Juliette Binoche, and his first about a real-life figure. Camille Claudel was a hugely talented sculptor, sister to the Catholic poet-playwright Paul Claudel, and for many years the companion of Auguste Rodin. Her relationship with Rodin was the subject of a stormily romantic 1988 biopic, Bruno Nuytten’s Camille Claudel, with Isabelle Adjani. Dumont, however, addresses not the public life but Camille’s withdrawal from it; the film depicts the period of Camille’s incarceration in an asylum in Montdevergues, near Avignon. Based on extracts from the Claudels’ writings and correspondence, and the medical records of Camille, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic, this concise (95-minute) film is low on incident, apart from the final third, in which Camille receives a visit from her brother. Largely it evokes the strange mixture of monastic calm and crushing monotony of Camille’s long confinement (her family never agreed to release her, and she died in Montdevergues in 1943).

Dumont shows us what appears to be a set of typical moments in Camille’s residency. She boils the potatoes that seem to be her only diet, prays in the asylum chapel, writes to a friend, and most often sits in the garden and in the house, usually alone. She gazes at other patients, at a leafless tree that resembles a modernist sculpture, and—in a series of shots all the more emotionally charged for their utter mundanity—at sunlight through curtains, on a wall, and on a carpeted floor. Camille also angrily protests against her family’s mistreatment of her in a session with her doctor—a five-minute scene of two long takes joined by a brief reaction shot. While this meeting comes across as a unique event, we might also imagine it as a single instance of an episode recurring over and over, week after week, perhaps word for word, in Camille’s life. Who knows whether Camille didn’t spend her life ritualistically acting out the same script, without hope of ever achieving a final cathartic curtain call? The element of theatricality is underlined when Camille watches other inmates rehearsing Don Juan: an awkward, childlike performance, but one which first amuses her, then moves her, and finally causes her bitter distress with its mention of love and deception.

Camille relates to the other patients tenderly, like an indulgent older sister, although at one point she loses patience and rages at them. Her fellow inmates mostly have physical impairments, as a result of Down syndrome or similar conditions, and are played by real-life mental patients. One of the film’s provocative insights is the reminder that although they may look classically “mad”—in the vein of 19th- and early 20th-century clinical illustrations of hysteria—we can’t rely on appearances to tell us that Camille, with her composed beauty, is any more mentally robust than her peers.

Dumont’s casting of mental patients is a confrontational gesture, and not only because these people are, initially at least, uncomfortable for the viewer to spend time with. It may seem a cruel stunt to place a star—one famously identified with grace, beauty and intelligence—among people with severe learning difficulties and physical deformities. Dumont might be accused of exploitation, but he addresses his theme in a very concrete fashion that shows how mental suffering affects, and is rooted in, the body and its relation to the world. He shows the patients, apparently, as they really are; it’s never clear in what sense they are acting, or to what degree they’re capable of doing so.

The film certainly requires us to examine romantic received ideas about mental illness. Given Camille’s semblance of calm, which we know conceals profound inner turmoil, it is all the harder to assign to the ever-present beaming smile of inmate Mademoiselle Lucas (Alexandra Lucas) any connotations of natural joy. Any spiritual or poetic values traditionally assigned to madness, especially in literary circles—insight, illumination, innocence—come under the cold light of dramatic scrutiny.

Indeed, the figure who seems least equipped to participate in any balanced social order is Paul, whose assertion of the values of divine exaltation makes him inhuman to a degree approaching derangement. The film shifts tack some 55 minutes in, to show the poet en route to visit Camille. We see Paul (Jean-Luc Vincent) intoning a severe, joyless prayer by night (“You are the given Word, studded with iron nails”), then writing about his sister in a way that suggests a punitive rather than compassionate attitude (“Is it possible to exorcise her at a distance?”). He tells a priest about his spiritual conversion: first an epiphany on discovering Rimbaud, later a dramatic illumination in Notre-Dame Cathedral. In the context of Camille’s story, the Paul interlude carries a bitter ironic thrust. For all his beatific talk, it’s clear that Camille—who weeps tears of joy at news of his coming, decking herself in flowers and ribbons to meet him—will get a cold reception when the siblings meet, in a crimson-walled room that might have been painted by Munch. She makes an impassioned protest against her imprisonment and against what she sees as a male conspiracy by closed minds who “stole her genius”—an extended tour de force of lucidly impassioned argumentation. The distant Paul can only respond by plying her with coldly pious cant: “Everything is a parable, Camille.”

But Dumont’s film is not a parable; it’s intensely real and concrete. It doesn’t allow us to see into Camille’s mind or feelings—nothing so intrusive—but it communicates a powerful sense of how her incarceration might have felt, in all its monotony and its strange calm (Montdevergues comes across, with unsettling ambivalence, as both prison and safe haven). The film’s concrete power comes partly from Guillaume Deffontaines’ observational photography, lingering on faces, on the hardness of stone, the drabness of interiors, the sun-baked starkness of the Vaucluse landscapes (you can almost smell the dry heat).

Then there’s Binoche’s extraordinary presence. She has shown us some awkward turns in recent years: ingratiatingly mercurial in Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, farcically skittish in Malgorzata Szumowska’s hollow Elles. But she gives a monumental performance here, not least because it’s so contained. The moments of protest and anguish are all the more moving and painful because the Camille we mostly see is an observer, with impassive, barely changing features—gazing calmly ahead, or turning to the camera with an implacable, borderline-haughty look. With her dignified physical composure, her gaunt features lit by harsh daylight, suggesting the subtle ravages of torment on Camille’s face, it’s a very exposed performance, devastating in its simplicity, tiny facial nuances standing for profound surges of emotion.

Camille Claudel 1915 is a film of stark, sober rewards, and possibly Dumont’s finest. And it offers something new from him, apart from the fact that it’s his first outright feminist statement. His films often show something like distaste, even contempt for their characters, whose physicality and limited intelligence can appear as detached embodiments of the brutishness of the human condition. But in Hadewijch and Hors Satan, Dumont seemed to have opened up to solidarity and compassion, if not tenderness per se—yet that’s what he finally seems able to voice fully here. In this extraordinary film, Dumont has perhaps belatedly made his Humanity.

A Sculpted Homily: Bruno Dumont’s Camille Claudel 1915 Michael Sicinski from Cinema Scope, also seen here: extended review for Cinema Scope

Not long after the release of Bruno Dumont’s third film, his infamous American folly Twentynine Palms (2003), James Quandt published his equally infamous polemic against the “New French Extremity” in the February 2004 issue of Artforum, where he placed Dumont on the naughty list right alongside Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, and Philippe Grandrieux. Nearly ten years later, we can now of course see both Quandt’s article and Twentynine Palms rather differently—who, for instance, could have predicted at the time that Breillat would get over her Rocco Siffredi fetish and begin producing such intricate, fascinating work? Or that Noé would be the proverbial one-trick pony? But in light of Dumont’s later trajectory, his California foray Twentynine Palms can be seen as a significant transitional work, one that not only summons the spirit of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) but squelches that film’s measured optimism. Ending as it does with the murder of Russian émigré Katia (the late, great Katerina Golubeva) by her American lover David (David Wissak) after 115 minutes of fucking, fighting, and driving, Palms demonstrates that the generosity of the untamed West extends only so far. No matter that Katia is about as even a match for David as one could hope, the vast maw of Manifest Destiny swallows her whole—and, not to put too fine a point on it, Dumont further takes the romanticized lustmord so beloved of cine-modernism (cf. the Sada Abe story) and restages it as the man-on-woman violence that it almost always actually is.

Dumont’s work has, of course, evolved over the years, while still retaining his signature materialism, a focus on how his characters are both burdened by and manipulate the physical stuff of the world around them. This has led to endless Bresson comparisons, and while Dumont is without a doubt a student of Le Maître Robert, the very opening of L’humanité (1999) demonstrates Dumont’s specific cinematic rendering of gravity’s force. Det. Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté), running away from a crime scene, stumbles and lies with his face in the mud; the man is brought to earth with a thump, and then he simply settles, as if absorbed by the earth’s force of stasis. This is miles away from the lithe, balletic movement of objects or gestures in Bresson.

I take this detour through Dumont’s old backroads as a circuitous way of arriving at his latest effort, the micro-biopic Camille Claudel 1915, a film sufficiently different from the auteur’s previous efforts that it is winning him new admirers. The presence of a genuine movie star in the title role (Juliette Binoche) surely accounts for some of this uncharacteristic interest, but Claudel also evinces a sheen of placid professionalism and a tamped-down directorial style never before seen in the Dumont filmography. Only Hadewijch (2009), with its steely cinematography and somewhat conventional editing rhythms, comes close—and much like Hadewijch, Claudel is a portrait of female anxiety in extremis with an actual thespian at its core, and Dumont organizes both films into a fairly strict three-act structure. But this is where the similarities end, since Hadewijch’s polished, seemingly less feral approach was a red herring, designed to show how Julie Sokolowski’s poor little rich girl could truly shuttle off this material world and transubstantiate through fanatical love and fire. She was the softer side of suicide, which made her sacrifice all the more disturbing, as if we didn’t really believe she or Dumont would be crazy enough to blow all that beauty to smithereens. By contrast, Claudel is a well-manicured curio designed to showcase not only Binoche’s star turn, but also a not especially illuminating position-paper in French intellectual history.

We know, thanks in part to Bruno Nuytten’s 1988 white elephant, that Claudel (Isabelle Adjani in that film) had a tumultuous relationship with Rodin (Gérard Depardieu), who left her and became Rodin™ while she slipped into obscurity and, according to her family, hysteria and paranoia. As the “1915” in the title indicates, Dumont’s film hones in on a narrow but significant band of time within Claudel’s life, thereby avoiding the flabby aesthetics that almost always obtain where biopics are concerned. Instead, we witness a year of Claudel’s confinement to the Montdevergues Asylum near Avignon, an intensive focus that renders “Rodin” an idea rather than a presence (and, as is mentioned several times, a distant image of persecution at that). We never see Claudel sculpt. (There is one brief scene of Claudel drawing a lattice gate in a sketchbook, which she promptly scribbles out in frustrated rage.) She is seen wandering around the grounds; she is asked by the personnel to assist with other patients; she takes walks with groups, and on occasion goes to the chapel to pray. But there is very little in Claudel’s daily life that moves in any way beyond the basic frustrations of a relatively sane woman driven to the edge of madness by an unjust confinement.

While Dumont predictably, and thankfully, spares us the agonizing Tradition of Quality histrionics of Nuytten’s film, on a formal level Camille Claudel 1915 also lacks the raw materialism of other Dumont films. There are reasons for this, as there is a complex semiotics at work here. To begin with, Binoche, glammed-down though she may be, operates as a bit of a special effect in this context, as the supporting players who people Montdevergues are actually performers with various mental disabilities, non-professionals who worked with Dumont along with numerous medical and mental health consultants. I should specify from the outset that I take issue with some reviewers who have zeroed in on this casting decision and held it up as evidence of exploitation. There is no reason whatsoever to assume coercion, or to think that individuals with Down syndrome or other cognitive disabilities would be incapable of participating in such a production with informed consent. Even the suspicion that the non-professional performers may be on hand to provide the physicality and grit that is so often the hallmark of Dumont’s cinema—the mottled carnality of Flandres (2006) or the weather-beaten farmland of Hors Satan (2011) giving way to missing teeth and squinting eyes pushed close together by permanent baby fat—is not really the worst of it. Exploitation is pretty banal these days, after all. Spare us the fainting couch: we can handle it, and we know that everyone got paid. (Besides, compared to films by Ulrich Seidl and Crispin Glover, Dumont’s work with cognitive-atypical actors is fairly tame.)

No, the real trouble begins when it becomes clear that some of these performers are onscreen in order to provide a kind of instant complexity to our otherwise one-note heroine. The “real” mental cases (who of course are not insane but disabled, and so are no more deserving of this particular fate than Claudel) are there not to make Claudel/Binoche more beautiful by comparison, but uglier—they are the pure souls of infinite patience, and as they “torment” poor Camille, we observe her rage spilling over into an overt lack of empathy. One of the only noteworthy scenes in this shockingly inert film occurs when Claudel runs crying from a play rehearsal, overwhelmed by the tragic absurdity of the whole affair. (Before this she was laughing patronizingly, perhaps trying and failing to will herself into some rarefied realm of the Surreal.) One of the other inmates, Mrs. Lucas (Alexandra Lucas), rushes out to comfort Claudel. Lucas has been trying to befriend her throughout the film, but this does not stop Claudel from making her the target of every ounce of her pent-up fury. “Get away from me!” she screams. “I don’t want to see you!”

Although Lucas (the actress) provides a suitably shocked reaction, one can tell that she has been prepared for Binoche’s Method madness; she is performing, and there is no sense whatsoever that Dumont has duped an innocent into providing a “real” horror for his rolling camera. Nevertheless, what this scene and several others do provide is a counterpoint to Claudel’s victim narrative, a touchstone for guileless human compassion that Claudel, the “sane one,” has come to lack. Thus, Camille Claudel 1915 “complicates” its title character by recourse to one of the hoariest clichés of the humanist art cinema: the idea that the simpleminded are purer of heart than the worldly and, in this Catholic context, perhaps closer to God as well. (Compare the scene in the chapel between Claudel, praying for release, and the woman who chants “Hallelujah” for no reason in particular.)

If Dumont wants to place Claudel’s historical betrayal by Rodin at a distance, and ends up depicting the artist herself as a woman pushed beyond the brink of charity or even basic decency, the film makes its arguments regarding Camille’s younger brother, the poet and playwright Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent), even clearer. This is the point at which Camille Claudel 1915 relinquishes any pretense of being a dramatic exercise and moves quite fully into polemical intellectual history, tinged with a kind of rampaging presentism that can make of Paul Claudel only the most simplistic kind of villain. As if to produce a burned-in afterimage upon his very appearance, his sister continually praises him like a potential saviour in the long hour before his arrival; then, just as the third act begins, Dumont stops the film cold (which is saying something for such a torpid film) to allow Paul to articulate his supplicant right-wing Catholicism, first in prayer, then in a scathing letter “from a brother,” discussing the sin of abortion. Is it to Camille? Someone else? A letter he’ll never send? Or something he will incorporate into one of his plays? We cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that Paul will ignore his sister’s entreaties, assume a supercilious tone, and refuse to help release her from Montdevergues. (Even the head physician counsels Paul that Camille could live an independent life, but he will hear none of it.)

Given the sheer volume of Paul Claudel’s intellectual biography that Dumont provides in the film’s final third, it is fairly evident that Camille Claudel 1915 is a declarative statement disguised as a work of aesthetic ambiguity. Paul’s religious and political beliefs, which are juxtaposed with his decision to abandon Camille to lifelong incarceration, are implicitly to blame for his sister’s fate. Patriarchy is given a name and a face, and it isn’t Auguste Rodin. Whatever crimes of the heart and mind he may have committed against Claudel, Rodin remains a giant of progressive humanism; hence, his rehabilitation is far more necessary for the dominant narrative of French modernism than the purely optional Paul Claudel.

It’s not my intention here to defend Paul Claudel: I am just noting that Dumont’s project is one that seems to commit two interconnected errors that are worth examining, especially since the film resulting from said project is so mundane and unassumingly dull as to divert much interrogation. The first is to restage old tropes of intellectual impurity—the unstable, selfish Romantic and the misguided Fascist-Modernist—within a framework that naturalizes them, namely a drab but highly professional cinematic style. (We know that Paul Claudel was an anti-Fascist, but his stringently conservative Catholicism scans here as a kind of dictatorship of male bodily renunciation, and this style of being has a stereotypical tenor in the spectatorial imagination.) The notion that creative types aren’t like the rest of us is driven home by the counterweight of cognitive-atypical individuals whose broader subject positions are effaced so they may represent an ahistorical vision of Christian kindness. The second, related error is that the story of Camille Claudel, who didn’t “deserve” to be locked away in a mental hospital, is organized by Dumont for maximum present-day resonance. Paul Claudel the right-wing patriarch vs. Camille Claudel the inconvenient woman labelled a hysteric, with holy fools scattered between them: this is crass movie typology combined with a contemporary urgency that seeks to make Camille stand in for all the women who, even today, are trapped by their families in psychiatric care for reasons having to do with their desire for independence, their rejection of religion, their sexual orientation, or their political beliefs.

All of this makes Camille Claudel 1915—which, it should be evident by now, is really Camille Claudel 2013—a “good” film, one that cares about things happening around it. But that, sadly, does not make it any less reliant on simpleminded notions of good and evil, mind and spirit, sacred and profane. Before now, Dumont has made films that I would consider wrongheaded or ill-conceived, even offensive; such is the journey of a complex artist. But Camille Claudel 1915 is the first Dumont film I would truly consider boring. Everything it works so hard to convince us of, we have heard so many times before.

Sound On Sight [Justine Smith]

Tiny Mix Tapes [Lorian Long]

Camille Claudel 1915 / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

In Review Online [Carson Lund]

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones]

Screen International [Jonathan Romney]

DVDTalk.com [Jamie S. Rich]

Movie Metropolis - DVD [Christopher Long]

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

IndieWire [Eric Kohn]

Review: Juliette Binoche in the Heartbreaking 'Camille ... Caryn James from indieWIRE

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jeff Robson]

Slant Magazine [Diego Costa]

Little White Lies [Violet Lucca]

Filmmaking Review [Jordan Baker]

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

theartsdesk.com [Demetrios Matheou]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Daily | Bruno Dumont's CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915 ... - Fandor David Hudson

Hollywood Reporter [Jordan Mintzer]

Variety [Guy Lodge]

Museum rescues sculptor Camille Claudel from decades of obscurity ... Maev Kennedy from The Guardian, March 24, 2017

'Camille Claudel 1915' movie review - The Washington Post Ann Hornaday

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Milan Paurich]

Review: 'Camille Claudel 1915' an austere portrait of the ... Sheri Linden from The LA Times

'Camille Claudel 1915' with Juliette Binoche revisits artistic torment ... David Ng from The LA Times

RogerEbert.com [Sheila O'Malley]

'Camille Claudel 1915' Stars Juliette Binoche - The New ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Camille Claudel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Camille Claudel (French artist) -- Encyclopedia Britannica

Camille Claudel | Rodin Museum - Musée Rodin

(If Tortured) Works of Camille Claudel

19th October 1943 – the Death of Camille Claudel | Dorian Cope ... Dorian Cope from On This Deity

Camille Claudel ~ Woman Genius, A Revolt Against Nature ... Country Woman Paints

LI’L QUINQUIN (P'tit Quinquin) – Made for TV B 89

La bet’humaine (The Human Beast), Au coeur du mal (The Heart of Evil), L’diable in Perchonne (The Devil Incarnate), and Allah akbar! (Allahu Akbar) ─ 4 episodes, 50 mi per episode)

France (197 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official site

In a Bruno Dumont film, we are never far from a horrific evil whose disturbance seems to define the center of his universe, coupled with the unspoken beauties and mysteries of rural life, as Dumont himself was born in Bailleul, a small town near Calais in the Nord-Pas de Calais region of Northern France where each of his earliest films were set. Returning to the Boulonnais coastal region where the farmlands meet the sea of the English Channel, where on a good day you can see the White Cliffs of Dover, Dumont is listed in the credits not as the writer, but the “creator” of this sprawling work, a 197-minute murder mystery told in four parts of nearly 50-minutes each for French television. As a result, the story unfolds in an even more leisurely manner than usual, filled with deadpan humor and comical overtones (What’s next? A musical?) where a small seaside town is besieged by a series of bizarre murders, with a touch of the grotesque and dark comedy attached to each. Seen through the eyes of a young boy named Quinquin (Alane Delhaye), who we meet on his first day of summer vacation, seen as something of a troublemaker and instigator as we follow him on his bike as he declares his everlasting love to his girlfriend across the street Eve (Lucy Caron) while also taking a keen interest in the particularly gruesome nature of the murders. Like a play on the opening helicopter sequence in Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (1960), where a helicopter is seen transporting a statue of Christ through the city of Rome, dolce vita first sequence-desktop.m4v - YouTube (3:10), capturing the rabid interest of a street filled with kids chasing after it, not to mention the curiosity of innocent bystanders, Quinquin races after a helicopter on his bike when he spots the surreal Buñuel-like image of a helicopter transporting a dead cow from an abandoned World War II bunker, where he soon learns the grisly details, that the headless corpse of a woman was stuffed inside the cow. Called to the scene of the crime are police inspector Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) and his trusted partner Lieutenant Carpentier (Philippe Jore), something of a heavy foot on the gas pedal, especially in response to the inspector’s directive to “Let’s roll,” where immediately the audience can see something is not right, as even more bizarre than the murder itself are the quirky idiosyncrasies of the police inspector himself, beset by chronic stuttering along with uncontrollable head movements and nonstop facial tics, where the guy can barely utter a comprehensible thought without constantly getting interrupted by a series of mental hesitations and strangely off putting body contortions. While he and his partner are caricatures of the bumbling smalltown detectives that couldn’t appear to be more incompetent, spouting worthless banter back and forth to each other that leads them absolutely nowhere, while the lead cop is a walking example of a physical and possibly even a mental deformity. His prominent role in what develops into a police procedural belies his actual input on the case, as he never seems to be making progress but is instead lost in a series of neverending cliché’s and hunches that seem to represent the mindset and local prejudices of the region. In a master stroke of ultimate irony, however, for three hours plus, he *is* the face of the region. Not to be outdone, Quinquin is a peculiar looking kid himself, where the perpetual scowl and distraught look on his face belies his age, making it seem like he’s been given an adult head on a kid’s body, exhibiting more leadership skills than the befuddled cops, where his natural inclination is to be a bit of a bully, leading a group of dimwitted farm kids who amuse themselves by taunting strangers with racist or homophobic remarks while also throwing firecrackers at them. Moving easily between the perspective of the police or the children, the audience is treated to a strange duality that exists in the human condition, where society overall has to continually come to terms with elements existing from within that are part good and part bad, while an unseen sinister presence lurks everywhere.

Named as the #1 Film of the Year for 2014 by the prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma magazine (Cahiers du Cinema's Top 10 Movies of 2014: 'Goodbye to ...), it marked the first time a TV mini-series rose to the number one spot in the rankings. Listed as one the most favorably acclaimed films at Cannes, Cannes critics ratings, the film has perhaps surprisingly received some of the strongest reviews in Dumont’s career. What Dumont has continually done best in his films is capture the essence of the region, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines, who also shot Dumont’s previous film Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), where the physical characteristics of the land and its inhabitants become second nature to the viewer over time, where the natural world often overwhelms, given an almost Edenesque view of an earthly paradise spoiled by the darkest urges of human nature, with the director adding his own philosophical layering to his material. This is the first Dumont film to offer a children’s perspective, where one leaps to autobiographical conclusions, whether deserved or not, as one can easily see the “creator” within his own creations, especially in the goodhearted nature of a curious kid that continually disobeys and screws up, is something of a terror in the neighborhood, but is also an altar boy and a steadfastly loyal and devoted friend to Eve, almost always seen together, regularly embracing or kissing each other, but that’s as far as their preteen relationship goes. While they remain a portrait of innocence, the devil is on the loose outside creating havoc, each crime more hideous than the last, leaving the surrounding community in a state of helpless shock and outrage. While you would think that would be the case, life seems to go on as usual in this provincial community, where each subsequent chapter reveals a little bit more about the most prominently featured characters onscreen, where everyone becomes a little less likeable as their prejudices and deficiencies are exposed. The same can be said, to a certain extent, about a film filled with crude language and racial slurs, mixed with intentionally disfigured or mentally challenged human beings that populate the screen. More than any other Dumont film, the entire cast seems to be chosen on physical characteristics alone, which at least in this film feels like a gimmick, where disabilities are used for comedic purposes, like an outrageous scene showing a couple having difficulty dealing with their mentally handicapped son during a meal, becoming parodies on people with legitimate physical deficiencies, some of whom are cast specifically because of their condition. While the bumbling detectives make a mockery of everything they get their hands on (coming around one sharp turn on only two wheels, where the police car is nearly vertical with the other wheels pointed straight up into the air for several sustained seconds, an otherworldly, virtual impossibility without CGI effects, something this director abhors), using their authority to snub their noses at others, contemptuously looking down on the local residents while every shot exposes glaring deficiencies of their own. This smalltown class snobbery is part of the make-up of rural isolation, where views of intolerance are particularly noticeable. The use of children, however, exposes racist and xenophobic leanings in parallel with similar views expressed by adults, where in both age groups there’s a particular objection to Arabs or Muslims or anyone of North African descent, who are seen as dark-skinned laborers doing little more than minding their own business, where they are the targeted object of scorn and ridicule, where the hatred is all ingrained into the fabric of society. This is viewed as a completely normal response in this town, as to think any other way would subject one to ridicule and scorn themselves. What this film provides are serious social conflicts submerged into a collective subconscious that rise to the surface through the confrontational behavior of precocious kids, where fighting is part of their normal development, while it would be inexcusable and possibly criminal for adults to display this same behavior. It’s one of the fascinating aspects of the film, where what accounts for human behavior on display is personified by physical deformity and hostile racial attacks. The one is something that can’t be controlled, while the other feels more like learned behavior, where they lead to the same place, a gross intolerance for others who are different.

When seen in this light, children inherit the collateral damage of the previous generation, beautifully expressed in several scenes where Quinquin and Eve are off on their exploratory adventures, especially the area around the bunker where the body was discovered, left untouched since the war, where bullets, grenades and other military materials have simply been abandoned with little regard for any potential hazards or consequences. Yet another dead cow is discovered on a nearby beach with more human remains stuffed inside, where purely by accident a narrow passageway through the rocks is discovered by Quinquin, explaining how a farm animal can manage to wander from their pasture onto the beach, but this leads the detectives no closer to solving the murders. However we do get a feel for the town residents through Quinquin’s interactions and the ongoing police investigations, which are more like character inquiries, allowing bits and pieces of information to enhance the overall atmosphere. One of the best early scenes is witnessing the funeral services for the first body, where Quinquin serves as the altar boy in church accompanying the priest and other holy figures, yet the ritual they perform turns into a hilarious, Monty Python piece of physical comedy, where the ridiculous nature of each precise act performed in Catholic ritual only grows more absurd in Dumont’s hands, repeated to the point where each of them can’t stop themselves from laughing uncontrollably in front of the bereaved family. What better way to express Dumont’s true feelings about organized religion. In the middle of this orchestrated fiasco, Eve’s older sister Aurélie (Lisa Hartmann) sings a heartfelt song called “Cause I Knew” for the occasion, Bruno Dumont : P'tit Quinquin - Lisa Hartmann ... - YouTube (2:55), a musical theme that figures prominently throughout the film, later learning she’s rehearsing the song for a talent competition, which brings all the young forces, black and white, together, where her impressive talent seems to make everyone stop and take interest in seeing her perform onstage, " Lisa hartmann " - Cause I knew - YouTube (3:06), but racial divisions quickly trump any cultural harmony, where Quinquin orders his troops to attack a young black kid named Mohammad (Baptiste Anquez), “Those dirty Arabs can’t go after our girls,” yet the same kid is seen sometime later talking at the bus stop with Aurélie, where Quinquin drives him away with more racial vitriol, adding exaggerated ridicule by mocking her with a repeated chorus of her song sung wildly out of tune, mad at her for actually befriending a Muslim boy. Mohammad’s fragile psyche reaches a breaking point, tired of all the bullying and racial epithets, where he goes on a shooting rampage holding off the cops, where under his breath the Inspector reveals this is typical of “Arab psychology.” While more deaths pile up, none of them are ever shown, as the audience only hears about it afterwards with the detectives on the scene scratching their heads, but whoever is behind it seems motivated by a kind of religious fanaticism, performing a kind of neighborhood ethnic cleansing. It’s a weirdly strange atmosphere of built-up toxicity, as if the population has been tainted by original sin, creating a town of slightly deformed misfits and miscreants that suggests genetic alteration, where the human condition has been permanently damaged by their own heinous actions and deeds. In the end, the bumbling detectives are no closer to resolving any of the murders, where humans are clearly out of their element, forced to pick up the pieces and make what they will out of these abominations of human depravity, where the real world of today is not any safer, with various regions around the world under constant attack by ideological zealots of one kind or another who murder with impunity, paralleling Dumont’s films where evil dominates our existence. There’s some question about whether this material ever rises above what we’ve seen before from Dumont (actually resembling a reconfigured collection of his greatest hits), or if television is simply a more accessible and entertaining way to reach a larger audience. The film doesn’t pretend to provide answers or dwell in the realm of spirituality, and instead seems to exist in a godless void, as yet another bizarre variation on Pharaon, the holy fool, the slow, possibly dimwitted yet emotionally challenged police detective from HUMANITÉ (1999), whose power of levitation and otherworldly inclinations left him no closer to solving equally grotesque crimes, opting in the end to assume the collective guilt of mankind in a Christ-like gesture to save all of humanity. Yet here, like Hors Satan (2011), and possibly TWENTYNINE PALMS (2003) before that, Dumont seems to be siding with the devil and leaning towards fatalism, where the added comic dimension doesn’t alter his stiflingly predetermined world that offers little chance for hope, where humans mixing with the beasts are doomed to exist in a purgatory of their own wretched misery.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Edo Choi

Li'l Quinquin is a little shit. He taunts his girlfriend with a dead mouse, harasses tourists, and plays at blowing up a house, the blast accompanied by a shout of "take that, ragheads." Unmoored by the summer holidays, Quinquin trails a pair of detectives on their blundering investigation of a series of bizarre murders. But the film is less a murder mystery than a grotesque portrait of contemporary rural life in the Boulonnais, and the murders themselves don't seem to arouse much fear or intrigue. The first is marked by a burlesque of a funeral; giggling priests play peek-a-boo before a congregation composed, in part, of a troupe of costumed baton twirlers and a balaclava-clad man. Much of the humor comes from director Bruno Dumont's brand of distorted naturalism. Here, as in most of his films, the cast is composed of local non-actors, chosen in no small part for the quality of their faces (Quinquin has the face of a veteran boxer, the bumbling Commandant Van der Weyden is all bushy eyebrows and unexplained facial tics), which he exploits to the full with lingering close-ups. The landscape combines bucolic beauty with the marks of violence past and present. Quinquin's favored haunts are abandoned seaside bunkers, remnants of war prized for their hidden supply of grenades. Dumont so deftly mixes comedy with a sort of existential horror that perhaps what's most surprising are the moments of real tenderness and warmth--Quinquin's unhesitating defense of his mentally handicapped uncle, his loving relationship with his girlfriend, Eve. This is the film's greatest strength (and what keeps it engaging for all of it's three hours and seventeen minutes) --characters who are at once monstrous, ridiculous, and deeply touching.

Hot Property: Li'l Quinquin | Film Comment Nicolas Rapold, September/October, 2014

Is he Clouseau or Columbo? The bumbling rural police detective in Bruno Dumont’s Li’l Quinquin appears to have only the most tenuous grasp of the grisly mystery uncovered in his sleepy farm community: human body parts are turning up inside the corpses of massacred cows. Monsieur le Commandant—sporting a cartoon mustache, clad in granddad windbreaker, constantly and ineffectually announcing his presence—is played by a nonprofessional equipped with a neck-straining assortment of tics that waylay every other line he utters. He takes his place among Dumont’s gallery of misfits and weirdos, united in clueless buffoonery or endearing mundanity; it’s kind of a one-joke conceit, but a reliable one.

To be broadcast this fall in four parts on French television, Dumont’s latest creation was shown in The Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes as a 197-minute feature where it commanded the wide screen. The title (borrowed from a French nursery rhyme) refers to an oval-faced rascal who, with his beloved girlfriend and Hardy Boy gumshoeing, is something of a mascot of backwoods independence and righteous values. The Nord-Pas-de-Calais setting brings us back to Dumont’s L’Humanité (99), but Quinquin’s gleefully protracted comedic sequences suggest that the filmmaker may have a better (or deeper) sense of humor than critics have credited him with.

While Dumont layers in and declares themes of good and evil, the traces of violence are treated less like the moral rot of other rural detective sagas, and more like a bloodily organic outgrowth of primitive human nature. In that context, M. le Commandant’s ridiculous air of wide-eyed bafflement seems more and more like a kind of idiot-savant wisdom. 

Slant Magazine [Clayton Dillard]

Li'l Quinquin is a milestone achievement for writer-director Bruno Dumont, whose typically austere mediations on people in the midst of moral and existential uncertainty have given way to absurdist underpinnings that have always been nascent in the filmmaker's work, but never explicitly actualized. Outwardly, Li'l Quinquin resembles a satirical treatise of self-reflection, functioning simultaneously as a summation of Dumont's thematic interests over the previous two decades and as a bonkers remake of his breakout 1999 film Humanité. Yet neither tract quite works for categorizing the film, since its sensibilities consistently finagle their way free from reductive classifications. Originally aired as a four-part miniseries, the film is divided into four chapters and follows two storylines throughout, both set on the outskirts of Boulogne in northern France: the rambunctious, if borderline criminal, activities of Quinquin (Alane Delhaye) and an inept police investigation headed by Commandant Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) and Lieutenant Carpentier (Philippe Jore). The latter two are investigating a series of murders, in which victims have been dismembered and stuffed inside cows, each of which has been left in desolate locations throughout the countryside.

Yet the basic narrative is merely a placeholder for Dumont to weave an intricate web of curiously farcical sequences in which characters are incapable of traversing either generational or ideological gaps in order to compromise with one another. Quinquin raises hell with his friends, who light firecrackers and ride their bikes in the streets, much to the dismay of der Weyden, who yells from his police car about "traffic codes" while Carpentier floors it to their next stop for the investigation. Dumont makes the two officers thoroughly cartoonish, as Pruvost's bushy eyebrows and constantly contorting facial expressions and Jore's toothless grin and perpetual befuddlement seem yanked from Blake Edwards's The Pink Panther and implanted into Dumont's realm of punishing sociological forces. If the murders are "the heart of evil," as der Weyden claims, he and Carpentier have no capacity to theorize beyond naming what such a locus entails. As der Weyden says to Carpentier early on: "We're not here to philosophize."

Thankfully, Dumont is, and once all of the film's pieces have been introduced nearly halfway through, it's clear that everything about Li'l Quinquin is rigidly philosophical. In fact, the film is in many ways a thematic continuation of Dumont's woefully underpraised Camille Claudel 1915, in that it effectively questions religious and moral conviction when faced with evidence of bodily or mental deformity, whether through intellectual development disorder or psychological deterioration. Dumont lingers on faces in close-up, such that even a scene where Quinquin simply teases his girlfriend, Eve (Lucy Carron), from afar is made devastating by her amused, affectionate reaction, isolated in the shot. Faces are everything for Dumont: gateways to the soul, even when those faces are bereft of expression, like that of cow owner Mr. Lebleu (Stéphane Boutillier), whose tilted head is consistently captured wide-eyed, mouth agape, and to startling effect.

Further examples abound, but most important is Dany (Jason Cirot), Quinquin's mentally handicapped uncle, who roams around the countryside with minimal tabs kept on him, except when a local bully causes him to fall down. Dumont has always placed typically taboo or unsightly cinematic faces at the fore, daring viewers to laugh or snicker at their expressions. Think of the O-face motif in Twentynine Palms, which is made shockingly violent by the film's end. A similar horror persists here, though like in Camille Claudel 1915, that horror derives from primordial essences rather than rational explanations. When language breaks down, the face is all that remains.

Yet Dumont has never been this blatantly off-the-rails; when Quinquin asks his pappy (Lucien Chaussoy) whether it would be possible to stuff a human being inside a cow's ass, he responds: "Cows go inside a barn." Tonally, the film makes nothing of the collapsed exchange, but its significance is implicit when understood in direct comparison to other sequences, namely a funeral that's as much a tour de force of scathing irreverence as anything in Dumont's oeuvre. As an organist mashes the keys with fervor more fitting a concert than a time of mourning, Quinquin smokes a cigarette out back with one of the fathers, while der Weyden scours the church for suspects. Dumont plays the sequence with Buñuelian flair, thoroughly lambasting the waywardly broken ritual, but intimating the functions of religious ceremony to be little more than a series of jingling bells and musical serenade. In one of the film's most haunting through lines, an aspiring pop singer (Lisa Hartmann) performs a song as a eulogy, which she later performs again during a local competition, with hopes of appearing on TV. The funeral is a space to build a following, no different than the county fair, which for Dumont signals a humorous, but potentially dangerous collapse between physical (local) and mediated (global) resonances.

The dynamic between local and global slowly transpires throughout the film in other ways, particularly Quinquin's racist hatred for Mohamed (Baptiste Anquez), whose presence infuriates Quinquin out of a basic xenophobia that Dumont renders along gender lines, so that their initial rift involves Quinquin's claiming of two white girls Mohamed talks to at a local bumper-car arena. Yet Dumont allows these tensions to boil into explicitly religious conflicts, with the film's final chapter, titled "Allah Akbar," hinging upon Mohamed's violent actions as a consequence of being consistently "othered" by Quinquin and his friends.

Through these various chess pieces, Dumont reveals his interest in the ways both ideology and cinema are necessarily predicated on fine lines separating polarities, where religious ritual melds with pop fodder and austere drama quickly gives way to slapstick shenanigans. Most impressive, then, is that all of the principal characters are first-time actors, with Dumont finding Bressonian inspiration amid Pasolinian grotesqueries. There's an epitomizing scene early on in which Quinquin is told by one of the church's fathers that "children are our only hope." Der Weyden, listening nearby, shouts in response: "Hope my ass!" Such an incendiary moment amid Dumont's monumental tapestry of humanist frustrations is staggering and condensed in such a precise manner, that it's hard not to understand Li'l Quinquin as a potential apotheosis for European art cinema.

Dead Meat: Bruno Dumont’s P’tit Quinquin Michael Sicinski from Cinema Scope, also seen here: Michael Sicinski

P’tit Quinquin, the four-part miniseries that Bruno Dumont made for the ARTE network, had its world premiere earlier this year at Cannes as a 200-minute theatrical feature before screening to a record audience on French television in September. (It screened as a special presentation in the Fortnight, sort of a P’tit Quinquinzaine, I suppose.) Quinquin seems to be the latest in an often exciting recent trend of ineluctably cinematic auteurs turning to short-form television, and its far more reliable funding stream, to realize projects that fall very much in line with the artists’ primary bodies of work. To name only the most obvious: Olivier Assayas (Carlos, 2010), Todd Haynes (Mildred Pierce, 2011), Kurosawa Kiyoshi (Penance, 2012), Jane Campion (Top of the Lake, 2013), and, depending on your point of view, Steven Soderbergh (The Knick).

Yet despite its origins, P’tit Quinquin clearly functions as a long Dumont film. In certain respects it returns to many of the director’s most familiar visual and thematic tropes following the highly successful departure of his previous film (and rare star vehicle) Camille Claudel 1915 (2013). That film played quite shrewdly with both above-average production values and the somewhat glammed-down image of Juliette Binoche, often backing her fiery performance into a kind of demonstrative corner. Binoche’s clarity of vision, pitted against the mentally disturbed or cognitively impaired non-actors surrounding her, at times became subject to Dumont’s high-minded stuntsmanship, a gender studies rendition of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! At the same time, Camille Claudel 1915 is certainly sensitive and liberal-minded. It rattles the cage as a gesture toward its own seriousness, only to retreat into conclusions regarding women and madness that were fully articulated long ago.

With his new film, Dumont is back on solid ground, tilling it rather doggedly at that. One of the surprises of this year’s Cannes was that the frequently divisive Dumont had delivered a near-consensus critical darling. There were explanations for this: P’tit Quinquin was touted as Dumont’s first comedy, and there’s no doubt that over the course of the first two episodes especially, one can see the series lurching in odd directions in pursuit of unexpected black humour. Whether or not something is funny has historically proven to be one of the most obdurate questions of taste, irksome in its apparent resistance to analysis. Of course, one can rather clearly demarcate the moments and especially the patterns whereby Dumont is attempting to employ comedy as a structural element, to disrupt the type of horrific seriousness that has so often characterized his previous films in both theme and representational style.

It’s an open question: Is Dumont trying to “lighten up?” Well, there are plenty of comedic moments in Dumont’s earlier films. Many unsympathetic critics felt sure they were laughing at Dumont when they saw a cop float in midair or a couple flailing in ecstasy in a public swimming pool, but it seems that the man’s carnal sense of the absurd has been there all along. Still, P’tit Quinquin is a project that perhaps connects more broadly than some of the auteur’s other works for another reason. While, yes, this “TV series” is a Dumont film through and through, it is also one of his most thematically open efforts. While there is a narrative mystery that remains to be solved in P’tit Quinquin, Dumont has used the patient, expansive plotting and characterization possibilities of TV (or at least the three-hour-plus running time, broken into four discrete episodes) to make the thematic content of the film/show fairly evident. This is a work that gradually, but quite definitively, lets the audience know what it is “about.”

In its simplest terms, P’tit Quinquin is a policier, a detective series that is about a pair of cops and a rural community dealing with a serial killer. And so, true to form, we begin with a pair of crimes that appear both random and bizarre but are revealed, in time, to have been the result of secret connections between the victims. This concession to genre format is but one of several ways in which P’tit Quinquin operates as Dumont’s more accessible crypto-sequel (if not remake) of his masterwork L’humanité (1999). Where that film treated murder and criminality as a kind of viral contagion, if not simply the existential condition of a filthy, fallen world, P’tit Quinquin quite obviously has a “killer.”

And yet, L’humanité ended with a man in handcuffs, and Quinquin ends [SPOILER ALERT] with the murderer still at large. (All aboard for a rumoured sequel.) We never learn for sure if Joseph the brusque, macho truck driver is really the child killer in L’humanité, but by the film’s conclusion, downcast detective Pharaon (Emmanuel Schotté) sits in cuffs as a Christ-like perp, taking the rap for the human condition. In stark contrast, in P’tit Quinquin Dumont shows us a world bigoted and illiberal enough that most anyone would harbour sentiments similar to those that prompted the murderer to kill. However, the world of Quinquin, in the rural zone around Bailleul and Lille (the land of Dumont’s youth), is just so rotten as to cleave to traditional notions of law and order, ones that L’humanité had rejected in favour of larger spiritual concerns. That is, even if it takes a village to kill an Arab, it’s still every man for himself.

The killings, to be clear, all involve humans stuffed into dead cows. The first is discovered in a recessed concrete drainage cistern, a place too steep for a cow to enter. Autopsy results find that the first victim is the wife of the local dairy farmer, Lebeau. The coroner on the scene, along with the two chief detectives, Carpentier (Philippe Jore) and Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost), initially think the woman was carved up and shoved up the cow’s ass. Then they change their theory, deciding she was stuffed in through the throat. But by the time of the second victim, the woman’s Arab lover Mr. Bhiri, it has been concluded that the bovine “accomplices” have not been selected at random. They have mad cow disease, and the killer chopped his victims up and fed them to the deranged ruminants, strict herbivores, of course, under ordinary circumstances.

In time, as cow-stuffed murders pile up, we find that Victim 1 (the farmer’s wife) was having an affair with Victim 2 (a Muslim immigrant). In the course of this discovery, several other things occur in P’tit Quinquin. Dumont allows us to get a feel for the village and its sullen, time-weathered inhabitants, but mostly our identification is split between two groups. On the one hand, we have Quinquin and his roving band of mischievous truants, including two male buddies Kevin (Julien Bodard) and Jordan (Corentin Carpentier), both loyal but slow on the uptake, and his girl neighbour/love interest Eve Terrier (Lucy Caron). Dumont stages their antics in classic “Our Gang”/Stand by Me (1986) manner, their mobility restricted to the fringes of the adult world but always much shrewder than that world’s adult inhabitants. On the other, the cops: twitchy, irritable Van der Weyden and the soft-spoken, long-suffering Carpentier (who has a habit of driving away from every location by making an unnecessary 360° curlicue in his Citroën, like a dog turning circles before lying down). Several of the moments of ostensible comedy come from the direct confrontations of these two incompatible cohorts, with Van der Weyden and Quinquin locking horns with a particular ’80s/’90s, fist-shaking, nose-thumbing irascibility. They’re Dennis the Menace and Mr. Wilson separated by a body count.

Once he has firmly established these seemingly well-meaning antipodean posses as the anchorage points for P’tit Quinquin, around the end of episode two and the beginning of episode three, Dumont lowers the boom. They are all truculent racists, the unthinking reflexiveness of their anti-Arab bigotry making it no less repugnant. We see Van der Weyden go to a construction site where Bhiri worked, trying to find out more about the man. He finds that nearly all the workers are Arab or African Muslim immigrants, and he shouts at them about their inability to speak French in France. Even the more even-tempered Carpentier makes a disparaging remark of this sort. But Van der Weyden is particularly disdainful towards the Muslims, and later on, when Bhiri’s adolescent son Mohammad (Baptiste Anquez) is holding off the cops in a suicide siege, Van der Weyden remarks that this kind of act is typical of Arab psychology.

Granted, Dumont is familiar enough with TV genre patterns to recognize that cop shows and policiers employ racist cops as a matter of course, both to underline the corruption of the system of law enforcement and to add a dash of “realism” to a milieu that is generally dominated by masculine bravado—part and parcel of which is a misguided notion that the use of racial stereotypes reflect a sort of “straight shooting” or unvarnished truth borne from real-world experience, instead of just exposing the filter through which that experience was processed all along. It’s considerably more shocking when Quinquin and his boys see Mohammad and his friend (Yacine Kellal) chatting up some local girls (Camille and Céline Cazier) in town and, à propos of nothing, decide to charge after them. “Those dirty Arabs can’t go after our girls,” Quinquin declares, and suddenly he and his pals morph into a pint-sized version of Alex de Large and his droogs. (Eve, who was with the boys, simply walks away.) Mohammad and his Arab friend escape, but they are caught later on by the gang. Part of what’s so shocking about this is that Dumont has played his cards so skillfully in order to craft this xenophobic scenario. Up to the point when Quinquin spies Mohammad, he is depicted as an affable lunkhead, liable to get in trouble but essentially harmless. (His shyness around Eve is adorable.) He is as close to a point of identification as we get in P’tit Quinquin, formally speaking (as if the title weren’t already driving us in that direction).

But by the time we have reached the final episode, and the fourth murder, there is no hope for identification, and certainly no hope for resolution, much less justice. The last to die is Eve’s older sister Aurélie (Lisa Hartmann), who over the course of the series becomes a pivotal figure, even as she remains an enigma. At Mme Lebeau’s funeral, fiasco that it is (with the presiding clergy wearing idiot grins throughout and barely able to conduct themselves with the most basic decorum—random, pseudo-Twin Peaks humour that is eventually recoded as contempt for the deceased), Aurélie gets up and quite awkwardly sings an impassioned love song. It doesn’t fit, but its sincerity is welcome in context.

Later on we find that she has been rehearsing this English-language song, “Cause I Knew,” for a local talent competition. The prize? Performing in Paris, far away from the provincial hellhole of her birth. Dumont gives Aurélie/Hartmann a showstopper of a number. In one of the most powerful shots of the entire film, we see her singing on stage, eyes closed, holding the mic, in left profile. In the background, the entire expanse of the village rolls out beneath her. Her creativity towers above the cows and the shit, the violence, and the bigotry.

Eve and Quinquin watch Aurélie in silent awe. But this awareness doesn’t last. Next time we see Aurélie, she’s at the bus stop hanging out with Mohammad, who she likes. The boys, led by Quinquin, chase Mohammad off with an anti-Arab epithet, and then mock Aurélie by imitating her falsetto vocals. By the end of P’tit Quinquin, both Mohammad and Aurélie will be dead, he for refusing to accept the murder of his father with appropriate diffidence, she because she dared to be friends, and maybe more, with a Muslim boy.

So in the end, Dumont cannot be any clearer about the motives of the murderer. He shares the rampant bigotry of the village, but is simply more fanatical about it. The coupling of white and brown, Christian and Muslim, represents an abomination, something unclean, not kosher. So those responsible are reduced to bloody fodder for sick farm animals, their bodies so mutilated that detectives can’t tell whether the victims were shat out by the cows or stuffed up their asses to begin with. These murders are the ultimate culinary perversion, twisted meat-in-meat that reverses the food chain and sullies all concerned. In this regard, it is hardly inconsequential that Bhiri worked nights at a slaughterhouse, and that his friend informs Carpentier and Van der Weyden that the two of them were the only abattoir workers who slaughtered the animals in accordance with halal requirements. There’s an old song, “Sixteen Tons,” that says, “a poor man’s made out of muscle and blood.” The people of P’tit Quinquin certainly fit that description, even if many of them look a bit more like desiccated jerky. But above all, they are meat, and someone has taken it upon himself to “cook” for the entire community, to embody their xenophobic values with a rancid desecration of bodies that stepped out of line. But who is committing the slaughter? Will this mystery be solved?

In this regard it is once again useful to consider P’tit Quinquin as a kind of reconsideration, if not a remake, of L’humanité. It is possible to think of Van der Weyden as an older, disillusioned version of Pharaon de Winter. The younger detective was a wide-eyed naïf given to slow, deliberate movements; he also had a strange habit of trying to smell the guilt on those he brought into the station, almost as if he were trying to take it on himself. Rogier Van der Weyden, on the other hand, is a goggle-eyed bundle of tics, wobbling nervously when he walks and seeming on the verge of exploding from a barely contained restlessness. He is like a combination of Columbo and Joe Cocker, bobbing and weaving like a fighter who has taken too many blows to the head.

It must also be observed, of course, that Dumont named both detectives after painters. Pharaon de Winter was a late 19th century neo-Baroque realist, partial to portraits and religious themes. Figures emerge from the dark in Pharaon’s extant works. This echoes the temperament of the detective in L’humanité, whom the film described as the painter’s grandson. There was a peace that permeated Pharaon, even in the face of horror. (This is part of what made L’humanité such a bizarre film, and such a beautiful one.) In the end, it is both surprising and natural that he would “solve” the case by taking on humanity’s collective guilt.

By contrast, Rogier Van der Weyden was an early Flemish painter, a contemporary of Jan Van Eyck and Robert Campin. Working mostly in altarpieces and religious oil paintings, Van der Weyden tended to employ a flattened, pre-Renaissance organization of space and thick, weighty outlines to demarcate bodies and objects. In other words, these paintings are masterworks of a flawed, pre-analytic vision, one that compensates for imprecision with raw force. We can assume that Det. Van der Weyden will use the same limited perspective in solving the Cow Killer case. The clues will eventually point to someone, even though virtually everyone in the community he serves does share in the murderer’s guilt, since they accept the racism it represents as a basic template for organizing their world. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the detective, his assistant Carpentier, and the whole countryside will continue looking for the killer. Even as he acts from a dark place in their id, they will not recognize him. He must be excised, like flesh from bone.

L'il Quinquin - Reviews - Reverse Shot Adam Nayman, January 3, 2015

Now Streaming: Li'l Quinquin | White City Cinema Michael Glover Smith

Viennale 2014 Review: Bruno Dumont Reinvents ... - Twitch Patrick Holzapfel at Twitch

Li'l Quinquin / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo

LI'L QUINQUIN Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

[Review] Li'l Quinquin - The Film Stage Forrest Cardamenis

Writing: Movies [Chris Knipp]

Cinema Review: Li'l Quinquin | Under the Radar - Music ... Sara Winshall from Under the Radar

Michael Pattison Fandor

Love's Labours - The New Yorker Richard Brody

Adam Nayman from Cinema Scope

Jonathan Romney BFI Sight and Sound

Girish Shambu

Cannes critics ratings

Dennis Lim on the 67th Cannes Film Festival - artforum.com / film Dennis Lim from Artforum

Daily | NYFF 2014 | Bruno Dumont's LI'L QUINQUIN - Fandor David Hudson

Cannes: Bruno Dumont Fascinates With Ambitious 3 ½ ... Nikola Grozdanovic interview from the Playlist, May 23, 2014, also seen here: READ MORE: Cannes: Bruno Dumont Fascinates With Ambitious 3 ½-Hour Comedy Series 'P’Tit Quinquin'

Cracking Up: A Conversation on Bruno Dumont's "Li'l ... - Mubi Michael Pattison in a conversation with Neil Young from Mubi, September 9, 2014

Li'l Quinquin Bruno Dumont - Indiewire Alexandria Zawia interview from indieWIRE, September 10, 2014

Mubi.com [Ricky D'Ambrose] (Interview) Mubi, February 3, 2015, Video (11:24)

Hollywood Reporter [Boyd van Hoeij]

Variety [Scott Foundas]

Li'l Quinquin - Roger Ebert Scout Tafoya

'Li'l Quinquin - The New York Times Stephen Holden

SLACK BAY (Ma Loute) C+ 79

France Germany (122 mi) 2016 ‘Scope

This is a film that will scramble your brains, leaving nothing but mush afterwards, a surreal remix of L'il Quinquin (P'tit Quinquin) – Made for TV (2015), where again people mysteriously disappear in a small seaside village on the coast of Northern France, while the befuddled and constantly inept police inspectors on the scene make no progress whatsoever in solving the crimes, yet this version is more over-the-top, as everything’s done to such horrific excess that bad taste is essentially the theme of the film. Ironic, then, that what is arguably the worst film in the Dumont repertoire will have the most commercial success, as theaters, for no apparent reason, are willing to book this film as an outlandish, cutting edge comedy, and people are flocking to the theaters in droves. Is there no accounting for bad taste? Perhaps this, in itself, is a comment on the current state of arthouse cinema, where Dumont in the past was a Bressonian disciple, one of the most ardent masters of bleak and austere dramas, yet then somehow in mid-career he completely altered his style, as he now makes proletariat comedies, as if they are an essential component to modern life, using escapism as an alternative to the brutally harsh realities of his earlier films, like Flandres (2006), 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #5 Hadewijch, and Hors Satan (2011). Dumont was known for his use of non-professional actors, but all that changed with Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), where actress Juliette Binoche’s understated performance was the centerpiece of the film, a punishingly uncomfortable historical drama. You’d never know this is the same actress in this new film that features a collection of highly recognizable French actors, none more pretentiously overwrought than the forever swooning, high-pitched histrionics of Binoche, just one of the lunatics in the asylum of this exaggerated comic farce, an apparent revival of sorts to Buñuel’s THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (1972), a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of the middle class. Honestly, this film, as written, may have been better served by the minimalist experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin, whose silent era homage and subversive humor is more in line with the ridiculous aspect of the material, where actors aren’t nearly as accentuated as the surrealist production values.

As is, the film is like an experiment gone wrong in a highbrow acting class, pushing actors well beyond the comfort zone, each making contact with the grotesque in bizarre and wildly grandiose performances, where each one has some sort of noticeable physical impairment or deformity that is played for effect, where humans become caricatures instead of real, as if playing in front of mirrors in order to amuse themselves for heightened pleasure. Viewers may find this kind of shtick overly ridiculous, especially since it continues throughout the entire film, growing tiresome after a while, lacking the subversive wit of Monty Python style comedians who do this kind of thing for a living. The French title, by the way, also the name of one of the lead characters, loosely translates to “my dick,” used to great effect in several of the overly raucous group scenes, causing near mayhem, but never resorting to pie-throwing incidents. Set in the summer of 1910, the film is a comedy of manners, a satiric dissection of class structure, with the poorer class living along the seashore, having to collect oysters in the bay and scavenge for what the sea has brought in at low tide, led by a rugged seaman known as “The Eternal” (Thierry Lavieville), whose Keatenesque face is filled with world weary crevices, the patriarch of the Bréfort family that includes his hardened wife (Caroline Carbonnier), usually seen with a butcher’s knife in her hand, as she carves and cooks human flesh for her family, taking tourists out on boat rides and knocking them unconscious with the boat oars before serving them for dinner, also 18-year old Ma Loute (Brandon Lavieville), a seaman following in his father’s footsteps, recognizable by his gigantic ears, and three young ruffian brothers that seem to fight all the time. Living high atop the hill overlooking the bay is the aristocratic Peteghem family, never seen doing a bit of work, with servants to prepare everything for them, including the overly anxious matriarch Isabelle (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, sister of the former First Lady Carla Bruni), her nitwit husband André (Fabrice Luchini), who walks hunched over with a cane speaking utter nonsense, but smiling to everyone, as if in post-lobotomy mode, the wayward brother Christian (Jean-Luc Vincent), who seems demented, all supposedly creatures of a degenerate family history of incest and inbreeding that has wreaked havoc with their brains and genetic make up, with two near identical daughters in braids that are always dressed alike and never speak, but just make faces all the time. Visiting her sister is the elegant and always glamorous Aude (Juliette Binoche), wearing a feathered boa and a shamelessly ostentatious, flowered hat, bringing along with her a young androgynous daughter Billie (Raph) with transgender tendencies, though she may simply be a punkish cross-dresser who enjoys altering her sexual identity.

Like a variation of the Montague’s and the Capulets, Ma Loute and Billie are romantically inclined from the first moment they lay eyes on each other, where their rhapsodic moments together require no words, just rapturous expressions on their faces, causing extreme consternation on the faces of their less than amused families, where each reviles the other. The film is largely a slapstick choreography of human misfortune, where despite the comic overtures, Dumont continues along the same misanthropic path, exposing the worst side of human behavior, where humans are little more than carnivores feeding on one another, reduced to cannibalism to survive. Deeply separated into a society of the haves and the have nots, the Bréfort family have become human ferries, carrying individuals in their arms, transporting them across the shallows in order to reach the other side, where it seems all but impossible that the haves would actually get their feet wet. This silly ritual is repeated at least half a dozen times, and is how Ma Loute and Billie met in the first place, as he seemed to take great delight in hoisting her in his arms, while she viewed him as her great protector. Adding to the comic absurdity is the highly illogical services of the town constable, Machin (Didier Desprès), an oversized gentleman wearing a dark suit and bowler hat, accompanied by a miniature version that follows him around, Malfoy (Cyril Rigaux), a sounding board that allows him to test his dubious theories, a Laurel and Hardy team where the two remain oblivious to what’s happening right under their noses. With law and order firmly resting in their hands, perhaps it’s no surprise that all hell breaks loose, with the inflated looking Machin actually floating into the sky, with Malfoy keeping him tethered to a rope, or he would simply fly away. Similarly, there are other levitation sequences, a preposterous and surreal response to the subtle use of this device in earlier Dumont films, like HUMANITÉ (1999), containing a brief, almost overlooked moment that represented a transcendence from earthly matters. While the cinematography by Guillaume Deffontaines is superb, expressing a gorgeous array of brilliant colors on the northern Pas de Calais coastal region that are only brightened by the sunlight, the storyline is slight, to say the least, seemingly intent on grotesque physical comedy, where going for laughs and guffaws take the place of ideas. The film is likely to be extremely divisive, in the love or hate category, with the French film magazine Cahiers du cinema naming it the 5^th best film of 2016, though the crude humor may alienate many viewers, none more than when Ma Loute realizes he’s been conned, discovering Billie is a boy, where he savagely beats him, holding nothing back, becoming a sick comment on a brutal reality that is all too prevalent in society, as transgenders are often targets of abuse, known as Trans bashing, and to the actor’s credit, this androgynous identity was maintained throughout all Cannes public appearances. Nonetheless, Billie is the heartbeat of the picture, where the malicious treatment leaves viewers feeling violated, where the lawless, anarchistic tinge of lunacy prevails, like an ill wind sweeping the landscape, supposedly wiping away all sins, yet the residue of moral rot remains.

Slack Bay - Film Society of Lincoln Center

In a postcard-perfect seaside village in 1910, an eccentric (to put it mildly) leisure-class family whiles away the summer. But something troubling is afoot: what’s behind the string of tourists gone mysteriously missing? Former enfant terrible Bruno Dumont continues his surprising foray into farce—which began with 2014’s acclaimed Li’l Quinquin—with this surreal, oddball mix of slapstick and detective story. The director and his cast (which includes Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and a very game Juliette Binoche) stretch each joke to its breaking point, resulting in a winking, weirdly captivating comedy that’s in on its own absurdity.

Slack Bay | Chicago Reader | Movie Times & Reviews Andrea Gronvall

Cannibalism may not be everyone's idea of funny, but French director Bruno Dumont (L'Humanité, Hadewijch) elevates it to ghoulish camp in this slapstick skewering of the French bourgeoisie. Fabrice Luchini and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi play fatuous aristocratic wannabes summering on the Channel coast in 1910; they enjoy the "beauty" of the local fisherfolk, who in turn view tourists as their next plat du jour. Adding a surrealistic dimension are Didier Després as a rotund detective and Cyril Rigaux as his shrimpy sidekick—clad in black suits and bowlers, they're Laurel and Hardy by way of Magritte. Dumont tips his hat to Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but this fanciful satire lacks Buñuel's bite. With Juliette Binoche, hamming it up as the Luchini character's imperious sister. In French with subtitles.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Ben Sachs

In an interview conducted around the release of his sixth feature, HORS SATAN (2011), veteran provocateur Bruno Dumont explained that the average shot length in that film was deliberately shorter than in any of his other films. Dumont felt that too many contemporary art house directors relied too heavily on long takes, and, being a prominent art house director himself, he decided to work in opposition to this trend. This insight into Dumont’s process is revealing—it speaks to how deep his oppositional instinct runs in his work. Dumont’s recent turn to absurdist comedy with his TV mini-series P’TIT QUINQUIN (2014) and MA LOUTE (aka SLACK BAY) represents this instinct writ large. These works still look and feel like Dumont movies (the stark, minimalist compositions remain, so do the rural, northern French setting, and the detached, quasi-spiritual perspective on human cruelty), yet there’s none of the self-seriousness that defines so much recent art cinema. Everyone overacts with comic gusto, and the narrative is deliberately outlandish. (At times the results feel as much like Monty Python’s Flying Circus as they do Dumont.) This takes place around 1910 and revolves around an upper class clan visiting the countryside, a local family of cannibals, and a pair of inept police inspectors, all of whom interact in unexpected—and frequently garish—ways. There’s little else like it out there, and it once again confirms Dumont’s skill at using cinema as a tool to mess with our heads.

Review: Slack Bay | Bruno Dumont - Film Comment Adam Nayman, March/April 2017

Don’t we all have enough on our plates?” That’s the central question in Slack Bay, a comedy with a Buñuelian fascination with mealtime: this story of two families uneasily cohabiting on the windswept Pas-de-Calais coast circa 1910 digresses at regular intervals to show the characters gathered around their respective dinner tables. While members of the bourgie-tourist Peteghem clan slice daintily into massive sides of beef, the Bruforts, indigenous fishermen, pick bloody morsels out of a boiling cauldron—more specifically the ears, arms, and feet of plump, unlucky weekenders.

“Eat the rich” is the theme here, and Dumont—whose apparent mid-career transformation into a slapstick existentialist is a welcome twist—expresses it with a mix of mastery and eccentricity. By splitting his cast between big-ticket French movie stars (Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and Juliette Binoche play the Peteghems) and nonprofessional locals—including 18-year-old Brandon Lavieville as Ma Loute, the most soulfully conflicted of the cannibals—the director cleverly embeds the theme of class warfare. But what makes Slack Bay so magical are its surfaces: cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines’s widescreen compositions conjure up a sun-blind paradise of aquamarine skies and endless horizon lines.

The result is a surpassingly serene film about brutality that also offers a modest proposal that reconciliation between rich and poor is possible, provided the elders on either side don’t let their skepticism and resentments swallow them whole.

Cinema Scope: Andréa Picard June 27, 2016

“I don’t really care so much what people say about me because it usually is a reflection of who they are. For example, if people wish I would sound like I used to sound, then it says more about them than it does me.”—Prince

It’s a hit! Released in a whopping 300 French cinemas the day of its Cannes Competition premiere, Bruno Dumont’s latest comedy is his most successful film yet at the French box office. (As of early June, it has, unbelievably, more than 500,000 admissions.) Long considered brooding and Bressonian, a staunch proponent of naturalism with a predilection for non-actors, spartan dialogue, and primal gestures, Dumont has nevertheless sprung a few surprises over the years in a body of work that has consistently been ripe for auteurist reading. First came the English-language Twentynine Palms (2003), which, despite the underlying cruelty and simmering violence lacing the film’s surface, still registered as a shock, both within and outside of the film’s diegesis, as critics and audiences debated its supposedly outlandish conclusion. The mythic American desert landscape and tangled naked bodies as land art in full nod to Zabriskie Point (1970) were new to Dumont’s cinema, though the materialist and metaphysical binaries and general coarseness of tone were very much in keeping with his two previous films, his enormously influential debut, La vie de Jésus (1997), and L’humanité (1999). Later came a star, as Juliette Binoche took on the title role in Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), adding uncanny celebrity wattage to a film which also notably included real-life patients from a mental facility who not only play alongside her, but with her—her body and face the loci of hugs, kisses, gropes, pokes, and the occasional deposit of spittle.

But the greatest surprise occurred two years ago at the Quinzaine’s premiere of P’tit Quinquin, the oddball four-part made-for-Arte television policier, when the packed audience repeatedly burst into laughter, stayed the course for nearly five hours, and stuck around to ask Dumont about his intentions. “To make people laugh,” he replied rather dryly. When an older woman very touchingly commended him for a wonderful film “worthy of high art,” but confessed to finding it dark, despairing, and not funny at all, the filmmaker shrugged and told her that such an assertion revealed more about her than it did his film. It sounded unduly harsh on the spot and she seemed crushed, but it was simply a candid and confident response that rang true—and typical of Dumont, who is ever the embodiment of steely intelligence and discomfiting calm. P’tit Quinquin was subsequently seen by over 1.5 million viewers on French TV and proved without a doubt that France’s most austere auteur could not only make terrific television, but also television for the masses (unlike, say, Alexander Kluge). P’tit Quinquin is funny, strange, moving, and deceptively sadistic all at once. The Arte commission was a worthwhile risk for the broadcaster as much as for the filmmaker, and Dumont’s cinema would likely never be the same again.

Case in point, Ma Loute. That his latest film, his eighth feature, returns to the environs of la Côte d’Opal in northern France where P’tit Quinquin takes place, and redeploys comedic narrative lines that are similar, such as a detective plot with two bumbling officers (locals who are most definitely nordistes with heavy accents) and a story of young love at its centre, suggests a desire to expand his TV experiment into full cinematic form, which he achieves with great aplomb. Those similarities, however, have been used to criticize—hastily, lazily, and laconically—the film as an unoriginal replay, as reductive variations on a theme ratcheted up a notch or two, if not three. But not only is Ma Loute in another register altogether, it is, most significantly, a work for another medium: cinema. P’tit Quinquin revealed new talents in Dumont (especially as a director of physical comedy and a capacious writer of serials) and is a raw, shape-shifting work whose strengths in part stem from its constraints and the filmmaker’s will, desire, and adeptness to experiment within them.

But with Magritte-like compositions and eye-popping colours, Ma Loute is extremely beautiful to look at. By its very grand design, it declares its interest in the cinematic image, and rides an outré and uncomfortable line between bloat and bite. It’s definitely a Dumont film, deceptively literary like all of his other works—one senses the locations and mise en scène are deeply imbued by the author’s writerly descriptions. But with an added emphasis on mischievous wordplay like homonyms and double entendres, the provocative Ma Loute is in parts subversive, perverse, and politically incorrect, while it fashions a bifurcated study of good and evil, love and hate, and, ultimately, social injustice and the sheer vulgarity of vanity itself.

Precariousness is a state that unites many of Dumont’s characters both on-screen and off. He often casts non-actors from poor or working-class regions in the north of France, their rugged physicality serving as photogenic markers of experience and sometimes exhaustion. His allegiances are eminently clear in Ma Loute’s entangled class clash, which strikes an urgent resonance in contemporary society (especially in France, where cycles of oppression/privilege have come home to roost). Hyperbolic accusations of exploitation have periodically shadowed Dumont, who has repeatedly said that he returns to the north because it is where he’s from (the town of Bailleul) and that he feels more comfortable among the locals. The social schisms existing between his ‘”actors” and the filmmaker (a former philosophy professor, no less) are ones that separate so many artists and their subjects, and are systemic and deeply engrained in the modes of production. Just look at the history of Flemish iconography (and patronage), which has left a solid imprint upon Dumont’s work.

When Dumont shows how non-actors harbour an intensity and presence unmatched by professionals, he is holding up a mirror and not being disingenuous about it. He’s being frank. The broad-stroke caricature, which forms the portrayal of the gargantuan Inspecteur Machin (machin means “thing” but also of course conjures “machine”) and his sidekick Malfoy (phonetically, “bad faith”) stems partially from traditions of northern representation and the folkloric carnival, where exaggerations are used to induce laughter through parade and parody. As the Laurel-and-Hardyesque duo investigates “mysterious” disappearances in the region (revealed to us early on, they are hardly mysterious!), the characters themselves become comedic set pieces, Machin’s rotund silhouette a helium-filled replica of Magritte’s top-hatted man. With squeaks and creaks, Machin is like a rubbery balloon, whose physical movements are limited by his corpulence; he rolls down a hill, falls over, and eventually, in one of the film’s most jubilatory gags, floats like a balloon cut loose, careening across the sky.

The story itself is rather bare-boned for a period-piece/cannibalism comedy. It is the summer of 1910 and the Belle Époque is in full swing—a mere five years before Camille Claudel. Several tourists have vanished near la baie de la Slack, a stunning, big-sky landscape comprised of sand dunes and oyster parks. Inspectors Machin and Malfoy are on the case as the Van Peteghem family, an upper-bourgeois clan from inland Tourcoing, descends upon the Bay with froufrou cacophony. They settle into their vacation home, the imposing, high-upon-the hill Typhonium, a real location iconic to the region for its faux Egyptian architecture. Fabrice Luchini plays the pater familias, practically deformed by his costumed prosthetics, with a perpetual hunched back and a vocal range that never quite settles on a chosen accent. Draped in chiffon and lace and corseted to the nines, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi embodies a role not so distant from her patrician pedigree, and is convincing as a perpetual lady-in-suffering or mater dolorosa. Reined in by her corset, she gives a superb performance (much to her own consternation, her lost look often pierces the film’s fiction) and is the foil to Juliette Binoche’s tante Aude, haughty to the latter’s jaunty. With histrionic flair, impressive, wide-mouthed over-articulation, voluminous hats containing both flora and fauna, and prone to swanning gestures worthy of a silent Sarah Bernhardt, Binoche is pushed to the edge of decency and drollery. It is as if the three big stars are perpetually hanging from the Bay’s cliffs, jagged and eroded, trying to steady their footing in order to transcend the grotesqueries of their characters. Together, the Van Peteghems—the children aside—are a real pack of nerves, especially in the presence of the locals whom they exoticize yet from whom they wish to keep a healthy distance, as art once again imitates life.

And, yet, the women and girls depend on the Brufort men, L’Éternel and his adolescent son Ma Loute (a term of endearment, though a northern dictionary also makes reference to sexual innuendo), both oyster farmers, and passeurs who literally ferry women in their arms across the river. Often squealing with delight, the parasol-wielding belles relish the experience, and Billie, the ravishing Peteghem niece, quickly falls for Ma Loute, he of the dewy brown eyes and Dumbo ears. Played by newcomer and one-namer Raph, Billie is gender-amorphous—more than the disappearances, her sex is the film’s central mystery, sustained by Raph’s interviews and attire in Cannes—but is ultimately revealed in the film to be a boy who dresses as a girl, making impossible the reversal of social codes and transcendence that their burgeoning cross-class love implies. Despite his hurt and rage, Ma Loute cannot bring himself to kill and eat her (though his beating of her is beyond brutal), as the Bruforts are of course responsible for the “mysterious disappearances” and are seen, in full gore, gorging on well-bred human limbs.

Ma Loute is completely off the wall, an anarchic mix of gore, grotesquerie, and burlesque that reaches melodramatic heights with burnished close-ups and soaring music—a haunting aria by unknown Belgian composer Guillaume Lekeu, who died in 1894 at the age of 24. The film is rampant with forced comedic pratfalls and enough hysteria to get under one’s skin, but it also features scenes of supernal cinematic beauty and heartbreak. Irreverence aside, the film was inspired by a series of turn-of-the-century postcards, which depict the region, evidencing class divisions as proletarian passeurs carry corseted, floppy-hatted women across the river. One was inscribed with the name “Ma Loute.” Using the archival images as a point of departure, along with hand-tinted photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue guiding choices by cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines, Dumont recreated the era, not only through meticulous costuming and props, but also via elaborate post-production effects. Before P’tit Quinquin, all of Dumont’s films were shot on 35mm, but Ma Loute’s mise en scène was perfected in digital post, as were all of the comedic sounds. All post-1910 construction at the shooting locations was erased (especially the houses which dot the Bay) and the colours were bumped up and outlines crisped. Not unlike Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) and Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), Ma Loute is an astonishing colour film, except the hand-painting occurred on the digital images rather than on the objects and faces. Widescreen, with foreshortened, cropped, and deeply silhouetted people and objects, Ma Loute mixes the compositional rigour and surreal, fatal beauty (and fading glamour) of Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) with Tati’s physical, sonic, and repetitive gags and Buñuel’s black humour. (There are also passages of breathtaking, pop-infused lyricism reminiscent of Sirk.) The violence, transcendence, and transgression that have been the hallmarks of Dumont’s cinema remain, but the filmmaker has refused stasis and exploded his formula—unlike, say, the Dardennes, whose paint-by-numbers, station-of-the-cross schema has come to ironically mimic the dehumanized factory lines they are critiquing.

Ultimately, Ma Loute is a work of ludic imagination, harbouring the awesome sense of discovery that attended the age of mechanical reproduction, and thus the birth of photographic and cinematic images. As the Bruforts could be ripped from one of August Sander’s typological series and the Van Peteghem women from a Lartigue photograph or a Eugène Boudin tableau, Dumont stays true to his vision, elevating the profane and denigrating the sacred, while taking artistic risks and re-investing in the power of the cinema. The underlying implications of the film, beyond the gags, the hijinks, and the genre-bending, are undoubtedly relevant to today and scarily prescient. Though Dumont would deny any social reading or relevance to the film, taking two steps outside the Palais confirms the presence of the gaudy and carnivalesque, i.e., the creatures of Cannes. (Les Malouciens are everywhere!) At a time when frivolity and vanity have reached new heights, the gaps between rich and poor are forever widening, and society at large can seem so damn vulgar and ridiculous (certainly on the Croisette, but also elsewhere, everywhere; there must be selfies in hell), deranged humour, abstraction, aesthetic beauty and the destabilization of the real can be temporarily restorative in this mad, mad world. Next up for Dumont is a Jeanne d’Arc musical with music by Igorrr. Three Rs, and I cannot wait.

Cannes Interview: Bruno Dumont - Film Comment Jordan Cronk interview, May 16, 2016

French filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s follow-up to his acclaimed four-part 2014 television film Li’l Quinquin, is a work of madcap inspiration—the second in a fresh comedically minded phase of the notoriously austere director’s career. Starring a roll call of seasoned actors—Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jean-Luc Vincent—alongside a Dumontian clutch of amateurs, Slack Bay pits the upper-class Van Peteghems, vacationing for the summer on the coast of Northern France, against the working-class Bruforts, a lowly clan of fishermen. The Bruforts’ strange traditions and macabre rituals peg them as prime suspects in an ongoing series of unsolved disappearances. Investigating the crimes are a pair of detectives, Machin (Didier Desprès) and Malfoy (Cyril Rigaux), a Laurel and Hardy–type duo as prone to pratfalls as they are to misreading clues. Together these characters descend upon the Channel Coast for a carnivalesque romp inspired as much by the comedy stylings of cinema’s earliest stars as by detective yarns and the grotesquerie of early-20th-century expressionist painting.

Dumont sat for an interview soon after Slack Bay premiered in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Though much of your prior work has featured darkly humorous elements, these last two films have been much more explicitly comedic. How are you conceptualizing these films differently from before?

If, as you say, it was dark then and there is light now, the light only comes from the darkness. The comedy is only the other side of the drama. Comedy comes from drama. I just realized these are different sides of the same thing. So I have no problem being in the same locations, with the same people, telling more or less the same story, but from the other side.

You once again shot this film in Northern France, on the Channel Coast, in an area around where you grew up. Can you talk about how some of the specific aspects of that region and that culture may have made their way into the film? 

First of all this is the land of Flemish painting, which, as part of the expressionist trend in painting, has been a very important part of Western art. This is an era in which God was a significant subject. And while I don’t believe in God, I paint similar landscapes hoping for the light to arrive.

And if you compare Flemish painting to Italian painting, you can see that the cinematic industry of Italy is very much inspired by the legacy of these paintings. Their tradition and their view is much more idealistic, much more for the sake of the beauty, and to express beauty. Whereas our tradition—the Flemish tradition—deals more with an existential approach to things. So in trying to reach God through painting, the manner which is chosen is exaggeration, through a more grotesque approach, by making the features bolder. And this provides an aspect of existence that can help us reach God. The way I paint human beings relates to that tradition. So territory is also worth being worked on. It has a value in itself.

What about the film’s relation to early cinema and comedy? The story is set in the 1900s, and there are many references to classic comics—most obviously Laurel and Hardy, but I also sensed the influence of Mack Sennett and Max Linder, perhaps even Harold Lloyd.

In order to be able to make films I need to be nurtured—I need to watch films. And I don’t really find this inspiration in my contemporary directors. I would rather plunge into early cinema, which happens to be comic. All the names you mentioned are people who worked on the cinematic mechanism of how to make one laugh through film. I did watch a lot of Max Linder films, and the character in many of his films is this very bourgeois character who is made fun of. And so this aspect, which is a kind of anarchy of the time, as well as a surrealistic aspect, is where I feel you can sense this legacy in my own artistic journey.

Same with the soundtrack. Comedy is a matter of exaggeration, of making the features bolder than they are. And if that’s the case with the image and the costumes, then the sounds too must be exaggerated, so that we hear the sound—the music—of each character. And that’s not to say it’s not their sound anymore, but it allows us to have a closer look, or to hear better, the characters’ expressions. We do laugh at them, but we can hear them better.

Like Li’l Quinquin, there are still some rather dark moments and significant themes at work here, ones not uncommon to your prior films. Within this story of the Van Peteghems and the Bruforts, the film deals with, among other things, issues of class, wealth, and gender.

The material for me is always the same. If the material is dark or the material is serious, my approach might be different. But this is not a total shift. It’s just an evolution that seems all the more relevant, in that it allows me to get closer to something that is fundamental in human beings: the ridiculous aspects of our existence and our behavior. So I chose this material, and I put these two families in confrontation, as just their own beings. So I’m filming something that is sacred, and seeing how they can stumble, how they can all of a sudden lose their gravity. The comedy is what allows this fall.

The whole process, including directing the actors, is a process of distortion. First the actors act normally, or they walk normally. And then I ask them to do something abnormal. I tell them, “You’re not funny like this. You’re not making me laugh.” So I tell to them to be different—such as having them walk aside from how they would normally walk. And this is how Fabrice Luchini, for example, begins to offer a performance that is distorted. And that’s when the comedy happens.

You’ve worked with Juliette Binoche before, but this is your first film with multiple well-known actors, in addition to what appear to be amateurs in the role of the locals. How do you find it working with professional versus amateurs? 

Let’s say it’s not the same tools, or maybe not the same aircraft. A professional actor is a Boeing 747: there are buttons everywhere, you’re not sure how you’re supposed to use them, and they’re extremely complex and sophisticated. Whereas a nonprofessional is like a single-motor plane, with just one handle—so it’s much easier.

Where did you find Brandon Lavieville (who plays the Bruforts’ oldest son, named Ma Loute)?

It’s always the same. I consider that there’s a correspondence between people and the place. So once I know where my location is, I always work with local people, local actors. So I settle there. I found Brandon in Calais, which is about 20 kilometers from the location of the film. But then we started working with unemployment offices. And from there we look at their faces. But it’s not only a matter of their face. They have to be photogenic, which you can tell immediately. Then once they’re on the screen I can see if they can express emotion, if they can act—if they can act somehow differently than they really are. If they have both these aspects, then I have them.

The Brufort family doesn’t really have to perform anything. They’re not that comic. They’re just themselves. So the acting I needed from them was more naturalistic, whereas the bourgeois family is much more exuberant in their being. So I needed actors to perform. I needed them to come in and invent something. It’s a matter of performance, and there are no people like this in real life. And if they do exist, they would never be in the film industry.

Bruno Dumont’s Self-Surpassing Inventiveness in “Slack Bay” Richard Brody from The New Yorker, also seen here: Richard Brody: Movie News and Reviews - The New Yorker

Letterboxd: Michael Sicinski

International Cinephile Society [Marc van de Klashorst]

Film @ The Digital Fix - Slack Bay Noel Megahey

Cannes Review: Bruno Dumont's Absurd & Decadent 'Slack Bay ... Nikola Grozdanovic from The Playlist

Ma Loute - Slack Bay - Bruno Dumont - 2016 - film review James Travers

Cannes 2016 Jour 3 : Ma Loute de Bruno Dumont (Compétition) - ARTE Olivier Père

Cannes 2016: 'Slack Bay' Review | Indiewire Eric Kohn, also seen here: Cannes Review: Bruno Dumont's 'Slack Bay' is a Middle Finger to ...

Chris Knipp • View topic - Bruno Dumont: Slack Bay/Ma Lute (2016 ...

Cannes 2016. Bruno Dumont's "Slack Bay" on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman, also seen here: MUBI's Notebook: Daniel Kasman

Cannes Film Review: Slack Bay | The House Next Door | Slant Magazine Sam C. Mack, also seen here: Slant: Sam C. Mac

Slack Bay – first look review - Little White Lies David Jenkins, also seen here: Little White Lies: David Jenkins

'Slack Bay': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen Jonathan Romney from Screendaily, also seen here: Screen Daily: Jonathan Romney

Sight & Sound: Nick James May 19, 2016

Senses of Cinema: Daniel Fairfax July 10, 2016

Reverse Shot: Jordan Cronk May 18, 2016

The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia] also seen here: The Film Stage: Giovanni Marchini Camia

Cannes Film Festival - Ma Loute (Slack Bay) - Bruno Dumont ... French Cinema Review

Bressonian Comedy Fail Dustin Chang from Floating World

Slack Bay | White City Cinema Michael Glover Smith

'Slack Bay' a Delightfully Absurd Affair | Arts | The Harvard Crimson Steven S.K. Hao

Some Cannes regulars get weird, but only one of their curiosities thrills Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club, May 13, 2016, also seen here: The A.V. Club: Mike D'Angelo

Flickreel [Craig Skinner]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]

The Upcoming [Joseph Owen]

Dog and Wolf [Alexa Dalby]

CineVue [John Bleasdale]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]

Cannes Film Festival 2016: Part One - Features - Reverse Shot Jordan Cronk

Cannes Dispatch #1: Sieranevada, Staying Vertical, Slack Bay, Toni Erdmann Blake Williams from Filmmaker magazine, May 16, 2016, also seen here: Filmmaker: Blake Williams

20th Chicago European Union Film Festival (March 3-31, 2017), Report No. 2 (SLACK BAY and THE UNKNOWN GIRL) Scott Pfeiffer from The Moving World

Daily | Cannes 2016 | Bruno Dumont’s SLACK BAY David Hudson from Fandor

Ma Loute director Bruno Dumont: 'You can't make a "European film ... Henry Barnes interview from The Guardian, May 13 2016

Cannes: 'Slack Bay' Director Bruno Dumont Says European Films Are ... Graham Winfrey interview from indieWIRE, May 13, 2016

'Slack Bay' ('Ma Loute'): Cannes Review - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

'Slack Bay' Review ('Ma loute') – Cannes Film Festival 2016 | Variety Peter Debruge

Time Out London: Guy Lodge

Ma Loute (Slack Bay) review - Juliette Binoche goes mesmerically ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Cannes 2016: Slack Bay's comedy cannibals prove hard to swallow ... Tim Robey from The Telegraph

Ma Loute/Slack Bay Cannes review: gorgeous, funny and a bit infuriating Donald Clarke from The Irish Times

Film review: Slack Bay – ultra-austere French director Bruno Dumont ... James Mottram from South China Morning Post

Cannes 2016: "Slack Bay," "The Student," "Toni Erdmann" - Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres

Slack Bay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dunye, Cheryl

PopMatters [Sarah Hentges] The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye (2008)

THE WATERMELON WOMAN

USA (90 mi) 1996

Time Out review

A witty exploration of black American culture, past and present. Shooting in breezy, boppy fashion, Dunye soon has two narratives on the go: her quest for the 'truth' behind 'the Watermelon Woman', a beautiful, undocumented '30s film actress forever cast as a 'black mammy', and her own life working in a video store, bickering with her pal Tamara (Walker) and finding a girlfriend. Both these criss-crossing Philadelphia stories work in their own right. Dunye is fiercely charismatic, and while Tamara may seem like the stereotypically hardline, 'narrow' best friend, she also gets some great lines. It's the search for the Watermelon Woman, though, that really engrosses, throwing up a host of Looking for Langston-style images, as well as marvellous clips of Dunye's camera-shy mother suddenly denying all knowledge of the subject at hand. (Camille Paglia is a hoot, delivering patronising pearls of wisdom with irritable gusto.)

Bright Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris, May 2004

Cheryl Dunye's first feature also has historical significance: it's the first feature by an out black lesbian. Dunye plays a Philadelphia video jockey and budding filmmaker obsessed with uncovering the hidden history of the title character, a fictional 1930s actress who specialized in mammy parts, had a second career as chanteuse Fae Richards, and had an affair with a white female director apparently based on Hollywood dyke director Dorothy Arzner. Dunye's film mixes archival material, both fabricated and real, with interviews and analysis, including a witty take on the "positive cultural meaning of the mammy figure" by Camille Paglia. Along the way Cheryl bickers with her best friend Tamara (Valerie Walker), has a steamy affair, and cons her way into the lives of those who knew the elusive Fae. Watermelon Woman slyly comments on issues of race representation without being too heavy-handed, though Dunye's relaxed rendering of the title character is less than convincing. A highlight is one of Cheryl's pals demolishing Minnie Ripperton's shriekfest "Loving You" at a local club. How this promising director went from Watermelon Woman to the appalling My Baby's Daddy eight years later is a mystery. Available on DVD and VHS.

The Watermelon Woman Mike D’Angelo

I'd intended to write at length about Cheryl Dunye's ambitious The Watermelon Woman last week, but was foiled by an unusually hectic schedule and the depletion of my energy reserves. Just as well, perhaps, because most of my lengthier review would probably have been wasted on a convoluted description of the film's insane agenda: it's a fake documentary, a lesbian romance, a meditation on racial and sexual politics in Hollywood's golden age, a meditation on racial and sexual politics today, a making-the-low-budget-movie comedy, a personal essay film, and about six other things besides. (The title refers to an invented black actress of the 1930s, with whom filmmaker Dunye, playing "herself," becomes obsessed.) Much of this is skillfully done, and I applaud Dunye's courage and fortitude (sorry, no trophies), but her reach exceeds her grasp -- while The Watermelon Woman works marvelously in bits and pieces, the film as a whole is utterly incoherent. Plus, her primary source of inspiration, as explicitly noted in the film itself, is Rose Troche's 1994 lesbian hit Go Fish -- a movie I thought almost totally inept -- and consequently her movie suffers from many of the same flaws that plagued Troche's, notably terrible acting and aggressively literal dialogue. (A lesson from Mamet, who understands this if he understands nothing else: "The guy says to the girl, 'That's a lovely dress' -- he does not say, 'I haven't been laid in six weeks.'") Not bad, but I'm still waiting eagerly, and patiently (as a straight male, I can afford to be patient), for a lesbian film with something stronger than good intentions to recommend it.

Hoax of the lost ancestor in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman Thelma Wills Foote from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

PopMatters [Sarah Hentges] The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye (2008)

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Movie Magazine International review Andrea Chase

Philadelphia City Paper (Jeannine DeLombard) review

TV Guide Online

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

Dupieux, Quentin

RUBBER

USA (84 mi) 2010

Rubber Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily

Who could possibly resist the lure of a movie about a serial killer tyre with lethal telekinetic powers? It sounds like a dream night out for Stephen King. The sheer novelty value of the concept should provide a degree of commercial traction for Rubber even if the deliciously daft premise seems more suited to an eye-catching short than an overextended feature.

Quentin Dupieux’s second feature after Steak (2006) is an irreverent throwback to the 1970s heyday of terror by inanimate object as typified by Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) or The Car (1977). Festivals in search of offbeat, talking-point fare will jump on Rubber and enterprising distributors should be able to exploit its off the wall qualities even if there may be more mileage in ancillary than theatrical.

Dupieux acknowledges and embraces the folly of the film’s central idea with an opening monologue from the local sheriff (Stephen Spinella) explaining that all great films from E.T. to Love Story rely on plot elements that have no logical reason for their existence.

An audience is then assembled to observe and comment on events as a tyre emerges from the California desert sand and starts to wreak havoc on the local wildlife (stomping on a scorpion, exploding a rabbit etc) before turning its attention to the human populace. We never learn what inspires the subsequent killing spree-a traumatic puncture buried in the past or some fatally unbalanced tread perhaps? We will never know.

Dupieux shows that B-movies can be beautiful by capturing and framing desert images that wouldn’t seem out of place in Gus Van Sant’s Gerry. The effects are equally polished with a collection of exploding human heads to satisfy gore fans but more importantly a convincingly independent tyre that books into a motel, showers, settles down to watch television or just keeps rolling inexorably down the highway.

The humour throughout is knowing and self-aware with interruptions from the gathering of viewers and the sheriff that break the spell of the narrative to comment on whether it is living up to expectations or to suggest some alternative plot developments. Stephen Spinella is especially droll in his role as the cynical, tetchy law enforcer who believes that the events are all part of some stage-managed spectacle until the blood and death become very real.

The film starts to fade after the first hour but Dupieux creates an ending that leaves plenty of scope for a more ambitious sequel in the style of Hitchcock’s The Birds. Even if that doesn’t come to pass, Rubber’s originality and winning humour combine to make it one of the guilty pleasures of Cannes 2010.

CANNES REVIEW | Bad Ideas In Close Up: Quentin Dupieux’s “Rubber” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 17, 2010

The selling point of “Rubber” sounds like the whole story: A tire comes to life and goes on a murderous rampage. But Quentin Dupieux’s utterly zany slice of narrative subversion transcends that singularly goofy premise to create one of the more bizarre experiments with genre in quite some time. With playful self-reflexivity, Dupieux uses his central gimmick to satirize the nature of cinematic conceits.

Minimalism has become a hot commodity for contemporary horror, with newer releases like “Buried” (Ryan Reynolds trapped in a coffin) and “The Human Centipede” (figure it out) deriving much of their appeal from a single tantalizing idea stretched out to feature length. “Rubber,” however, comments on this trend rather than simply embracing it.

Despite a reputation to the contrary, the movie holds very few horror conventions, instead moving into a realm of sheer absurdity. Dupieux’s barren desert setting begins with the introduction of spectators ostensibly watching the movie itself from a remote position through binoculars. A police officer arrives and delivers an extensive introductory monologue about the importance of “no reason” in motivating virtually every movie ever made (although he mainly cites icons of pop culture like “E.T.”). This movie, explains the cop, exists solely as a homage to the importance of “no reason.” Does the upfront confession signify earnest self-justification or pure surrealist commentary? What comes next suggests that it’s both.

In a scene of epically comic personification and an unsubtle nod to “The Red Balloon,” the circular villain rises to life as the spectators watch from afar, then proceeds to roll through the landscape and slowly build toward its killing streak. The curious tire learns a few dirty tricks, vibrating in masturbatory glee as a means of blowing up remote targets ranging from birds to human heads. The body count creeps up as the tire makes its way to a local motel, where it encounters several potential victims and an inquisitive child. And then things really get weird.

Cutting back to the spectators, Dupieux puts them in the position of skeptics. “Shouldn’t a tire float?” wonders one when it rolls into a pool and sinks. “The way I see it,” another man later concludes, “this scene makes no sense at all.”  By its third act, “Rubber” has moved to a place of sheer lunacy, with the head police officer showing up at the scene of the crimes and explaining to his troops that the entire situation “is not real life” and once the spectators cease to exist, their world does, too. (Film theorists can play around with that one all night.) Needless to say, he’s still wrong by the end of the movie—maybe because he didn’t account for us.

Even with its bizarre satiric perspective on the nature of the viewing experience, “Rubber” does begin to wear out its welcome around the sixty minute mark, but you can’t blame Dupieux for giving it a shot. The more overly ambitious aspects of the movie are also the parts that make it fundamentally hilarious. The final shot serves as a serious indictment of the Hollywood machine. If “Rubber” truly contains a political statement about the dangers of ill-conceived storytelling methods, then its intentions are as ambitious as its marvelously farcical high concept.

Cannes 2010: RUBBER Review Todd Brown at Cannes from Twitch, May 17, 2010, also seen here: Todd Brown

Cannes 2010: Angry Tire! Exploding Bird! Quentin Dupieux's RUBBER Is Headed For Instant Cult Greatness! Todd Brown at Twitch, April 29, 2010

Quentin Dupieux Redefines The Road Movie With RUBBER Todd Brown at Twitch, January 21, 2010

Is Matt Damon's Narration of a Cannes Doc a Sign that Hollywood is Abandoning Obama? Plus, Reviews of Two More Festival Films Logan Hill at The Vulture, May 16, 2010

Cannes 2010. Quentin Dupieux's "Rubber" David Hudson at Cannes from The Auteurs, May 19, 2010

WRONG COPS: CHAPTER 1

France (13 mi) 2012 official site

Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 24, 2012

While for many, the Cannes Film Festival means reading about it from afar, wishing all the buzzworthy films would arrive in theaters near you soon. But there's at least one entry this year that won't be exclusive to those on the Croisette. Edgy filmmaker Quentin Dupieux has ventured to the Directors' Fortnight sidebar with his short film "Wrong Cops," and just as it premiered in theaters there today, it landed online at the same time. How 2012.

Starring Marilyn Manson, Mark Burnham and David Lynch fave Grace Zabriskie ("Mulholland Drive," "Wild At Heart," "Twin Peaks"), the story follows Duke, a crooked, weed dealing, and music-mad cop who crosses paths with a young techno lover, David Dolores Frank (Manson). Appalled by the musical tastes of the young adolescent, Duke decides to give him a good music lesson. So yeah, it starts with a dead rat with duct tape around it and gets weirder from there.

It is referred to as "Chapter 1," so we presume there is more to come from Dupieux in his latest venture, but either way, he's off to the zany start fans expect and love from the helmer.

Directors' Fortnight - card-index

DAILY | Cannes 2012 | Watch Quentin Dupieux’s WRONG COPS » David Hudson at Cannes, May 24, 2012

Dupont, Ewald André

PICCADILLY

Great Britain (109 mi) 1929

Introduction Sight and Sound

One of the pinnacles of British silent cinema, Piccadilly is a sumptuous showbiz melodrama seething with sexual and racial tension. Chinese-American screen goddess Anna May Wong stars as Shosho, a scullery maid in a fashionable London nightclub whose exotic dance routines catch the eye of suave club owner Valentine Wilmot. She rises to become the toast of London and the object of his erotic obsession - to the bitter jealousy of Mabel, his former lover and star dancer (played by Ziegfeld Follies star Gilda Gray).

This delirious evocation of Jazz Age London, directed by the great German émigré E A Dupont, boasts the dazzling cinematography of Werner Brandes and atmospheric sets by Alfred Junge - ranging from the opulent West End nightclub to the seedy Limehouse district. Piccadilly's impressive credits also include a screenplay by novelist Arnold Bennett and a cameo role for Charles Laughton, making one of his first screen appearances as a greedy nightclub diner.

Piccadilly was a star vehicle for Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American star and one of the first non-white actresses to gain international celebrity. Best known for her role as Marlene Dietrich's sultry sidekick in Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express, Wong's career was stymied by racial stereotyping. Until recently all but forgotten, she now seems poised for rediscovery. As her centenary approaches in 2005 she is the subject of three new biographies, as well as two forthcoming documentaries and recent retrospectives in New York and Los Angeles.

The Barbican screening showcased the bfi National Archives's beautiful restoration of Piccadilly, complete with blue and amber tinting. It also premiered Neil Brand's dramatic new score, specially commissioned by the bfi and performed by some of the UK's leading jazz players. Passionate about silent cinema, Brand is internationally acclaimed as a master of improvised silent film accompaniment.

Piccadilly Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Racial prejudice thwarted Anna May Wong's career in Hollywood, but if critics have their way, people will remember her in the same way they do, say, Luise Rainer, who won an Oscar for playing an Asian woman in The Good Earth, a role Wong desperately wanted. (Today, the actress is mainly remembered for her supporting role in Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express alongside Marlene Dietrich.) After the success of Variety and Moulin Rouge!, E.A. Dupont left for London to make Piccadilly, a scintillating melodrama starring Wong, Gild Gray, Jameson Thomas, and featuring a power cameo by Charles Laughton (an unknown Ray Milland also appears as an extra). Restored and released last year in anticipation of the centennial of Wong's birth, Piccadilly begins with an opening title sequence inventive for its time, and though Dupont manages an expressionistic angle or two during some early scenes, the film remains a slave to its plot: In Jazz Age Britain, Shosho (Wong) sells her soul to a nightclub owner, Valentine (Jemeson Thomas); she becomes a star but angers both her lover (King Ho Chang) and her benefactor's wife (Gray), both of whom take their jealousies out on the woman. But what the film lacks in razzle-dazzle it more than makes up for with Wong's performance. Maybe that's why Dupont's direction is uncredited: because Wong truly feels as if she is the author of this work. Valentine offers Shosho a job shortly after he catches her seductively dancing in the scullery of his nightclub. It's a brilliant sequence: After a patron (Laughton) complains about a dirty plate, a series of men under Valentine's watch shift the blame onto others ("The kitchen is the kitchen and the scullery is the scullery," one says), who lead Valentine to Shosho as if he were following a trail of breadcrumbs. It's difficult to imagine a Hollywood production allowing an Asian star to be as commanding as Wong is in Piccadilly, which is race-conscious without ever being racist. If this isn't Wong's best performance (see The Toll of the Sea for that) it's because the actress doesn't so much act here as she contrives a political resistance: Shosho is scarcely complex, though you wouldn't know it from Wong's gaze, which evokes a woman in complete control of her own destiny. Because Wong never had this power in real life, it makes the performance all the more devastating.

Dupreyon, Francois

MONSIEUR IBRAHIM (Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran) B 85

aka: Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran

France (94 mi) 2003

The film opens and closes with the music of Timmy Thomas’s “Tell me why, tell me why? Everybody wants to live together, why can’t we live together?” In between, there is also some terrific music of “La Bamba” and “Wooly Bully,” as well as the Bar-Kays. Adapted from a novel by the same name, set in the 1960’s in a narrow Parisian street where the streetwalkers are as common as the local street shops, an abandoned and neglected young 16 year-old Jewish boy, Pierre Boulanger, befriends a wise, elderly Turkish shopkeeper (Omar Sharif), and together they set off to see the world with a common understanding of brotherhood. While the streets and neighborhoods are alive with the music and energy of the young, and while the relationship between the two is often exquisitely personal, inspired by their strong performances, the film is led by a simplistic heart to bring peace and understanding by living good lives, by acts of kindness, and while it’s sweet and heartwarming, it’s all a bit too neat and predictable.

Monsieur Ibrahim Gerald Peary

Rudolph Valentino pretended to be one in The Sheik (1921) and The Son of the Shiek (1926), though he was Italian-bread, but it wasn't until the 1960s screen ascendancy of Omar Sharif that the West possessed a genuine Arabic hearthrob. Alexandria-born in 1932, Sharif appeared in sixteen Egyptian melodramas, 1954-1962, before his inspired casting in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), as Sherif Ali, T.E.'s macho-but-loyal Arab ally. Dark-eyed and deliriously handsome and with an exotic accent, Sharif was steered quickly away from the oasis of Islamic roles. Gone international, he played, among many romantic leads in the 1960s, the lady-killer physician in Dr.Zhivago (1965), Barbra's Jewish gangster squeeze, Nicky Arnstein, in Funny Girl (1968), and the exiled revolutionary, Che Guevara, in Che! (1969).

However, the next three decades found the sexy desert fox treading water in meaningless costume dramas and sluggish TV movies, taking his dough and marching with far more purpose to the bridge table. There, rather than Hollywood, Sharif reigned as one of the world's great contract players. Post-2000, it's been years and years since anyone's really noticed Sharif in a meaningful movie. Maybe that explains the ridiculous to-do by the press- -Omar's Second Coming?-- about his modest performance as the titular lead in Monsieur Ibrahim, the pleasant new French-language film.

For Monsieur Ibrahim, Sharif's polished, jet-set Monte Carlo look is dirtied down a bit. He sports a four-day beard and there are gaps put in his teeth, so he makes some sense as a weary Parisian grocery-store owner. But beyond agreeing to the cosmetic alterations, he really doesn't push his acting much in Monsieur Ibrahim. Now in his 70s, Sharif still looks good in the frame, and he brings a certain command to the part just by showing up.

To me, that's a saving grace, that there's so little shtick by Sharif in a role which, in the wrong performer's hands (a Roberto Begnini, for example) could be a long bumpy night of scenery-chomping and grandstanding. It's all there waiting to be exploited in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's sticky 2001 novella and play, Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran: a lovable old Muslim who reads the Koran for daily wisdom, who adopts a Jewish boy, who dances the Sufi dance, and who says things such as "...the Seine likes bridges, like a woman who's crazy about bracelets."

But the film from director-writer Francois Dupeyeron goes easy on Ibrahim's philosophizing, gives dignity and elegance to the scene of Sufi whirlers, and, happily, keeps the sentimentality subdued.

The story is an intentionally retro one, Nouvelle Vague lite, set in the early 1960s of Francois Truffaut's and Louis Malle's cinema tales of youth. The central story is inspired by Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows (159): a sensitive Parisian adolescent boy, Moses (Pierre Boulanger, a less obsessive Jean-Pierre Leaud), is more-or-less abandoned by distracted parents. More New Wave, with a scene at Ibrahim's grocery store in which an unnamed movie is being shot in the street. Unmistakeably, that film is Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963), with its familiar red convertible, a Michel Piccoli look-alike in the driver's seat, and a nameless blonde star (an Isabelle Adjani cameo) who can only be Contempt's slinky Brigitte Bardot.

Moses shares a Paris flat with a self-absorbed, workaholic lawyer dad (Gilbert Meki), who's been morose since his wife left them behind. Moses craves erotic contact, going with local whores the way of Truffaut's libidinous Antoine Doinel, though pining for the neighborhood nice Jewish girl, Myriam (Lola Naynmark). His father leaves him, Myriam cheats on him, so Moses turns all his attention to the rock of his life, Ibrahim. There's an adoption, Jewish Moses becomes Muslim Momo, and the two of them decide to embark on the Road of Life. Adieu, Paris!

There's a dreadful cutesy part where Ibrahim learns to drive, acquires a license. But the auto trip across Europe is handled as economically as a ten-day-wonder, Hollywood "C" movie (shots only of the sky as they supposedly traverse Albania and Greece); and who can resist all those otherworldy landcapes as they tool through Eastern Turkey, Ibrahim's homeland? One can almost forgive the so-so, bland ending.

Duran Cohen, Ilan

THE JOY OF SINGING (Le Plaisir de Chanter) B 84

France (99 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

A quirky comedy that borders on farce and the ridiculous in this comic caper on international espionage that makes little sense, but is a pleasure to watch anyway just for the terrific performances from high caliber actors. Taking itself quite seriously in the thriller mode, this is really a hilarious romp that from the outset is just totally weird. Perhaps only Hal Hartley comes close to this inventive style of comedy, but he hasn’t yet written a musical. This one takes us by surprise when an initial character breaks out into song, as he’s advertising singing lessons provided by his mother (Evelyne Kirschenbaum). Meanwhile, there’s a ridiculous story afoot about top secret information currently in the possession of the widow of a recently deceased bank financier, a woman named Constance (Jeanne Balibar) who is currently studying opera with the aforementioned singing instructor. French intelligent agents, who are secretly having their own affair, Philippe (Lorant Deutsch) and his boss Muriel (Marina Foïs), that they attempt to keep concealed as they both register for singing lessons, as do members on the other side of the political equation also looking for the same information, filling up the class with international agents, all of whom are called upon to sing. Therein lies the premise. Soon, however, class members are shot at while others turn up dead, none of which makes any sense except it does reduce the class size, where one wonders what will happen if eventually everyone is killed?

All the music sung in this movie is completely uncredited, from the classical Schubert lieder, including the melodious “Standchen” from Schwanengesong to opera arias to the popular song “I’ll Stand By You” by the Pretenders which was sung in French, translated as “Love Is Crazy.” The selections are all excellent, and what should have been very amateurish singing (secret agents?) was most likely sung over by uncredited singers, so the voices actually sound pretty good until Balibar decides to drop opera and become a pop star, where her ordinary voice sounds pretty ordinary. Nonetheless, all the selections are a bit startling as despite the rash of murders, they keep right on on singing. The story itself just gets sillier, as the men try to seduce Balibar in hopes of obtaining what they’re looking for, and she couldn’t be a more brainless nitwit, but charming all the same, as if channeling the eccentricities of Blanche DuBois. All the performances are excellent, especially Marina Foïs, whose comic prowess is her blunt demeanor in taking herself so seriously all the time, but her mind is obsessed with her maternal cycle and her need to get pregnant, thinking she’ll never feel fulfilled unless she does, so she gets naked and sleeps around a bit, but so does everyone else, so there’s this musical chairs aspect to who will be the last one left standing, or sleeping together? Despite the political intrigue, there’s also an existential slant to most of the characters, who are all undergoing some personal crisis of one kind or another that ends up revealing itself in song. Monty Python might have done wonders with this kind of nonsense, but this comedy troupe does as well, even if it doesn’t amount to much except a few laughs—still and all, very entertaining.

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

For a film that melds violent spy games, softcore business time and musical numbers, the French The Joy of Singing (B-) holds together a lot better than it should. The radiantly unamused Marina Foïs stars as a spy infiltrating an opera singing group to see if one of its members (the great Jeanne Balibar, in an awesomely bubbleheaded turn) has a sought-after USB key. Eventually everyone sings, everyone screws eachother and everyone gets naked. Director Ilan Duran Cohen is aiming for a fairly unique tone that could be described as tough-minded absurdism. Should Christophe Honoré (Love Songs, The Beautiful Person) decide to move his polysexual retro films into the spy arena, it might look a little something like this.

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

There seems to be a current vogue in French cinema for adding songs to what otherwise would be non-musical films. Faubourg 36 has some sort of excuse inasmuch as it is centred on a Music Hall but Agathe Clery and this one would have worked quite as well as straight films. Of the two this, a tale of espionage, is the least likely candidate but they attempt to justify the songs by having virtually all the principals taking singing lessons with the same tutor; clearly writer-director Ilan Duran Cohen figured he'd been switched as an infant and his real name was Ilan Duran Duran. If the plot is silly to tedious the playing is mostly top drawer especially where Marina Fois and Jeanne Balibar are concerned. Though I saw it with a capacity audience no one has seen fit to comment. Weird.

THE JOY OF SINGING Facets Multi Media

Muriel (Marina Foïs) really wants to have a child, but she does not have any luck with men. One possible candidate for fatherhood is Philippe (Lorànt Deutsch), but there is a problem: she is his superior in a secret service spy cell and he is too intimidated to make a pass at the boss. They are assigned to track down Constance (Jeanne Balibar), believed to possess a vital USB key that may reveal her late husband's history as a uranium trafficker. She is also the star pupil in a class for amateur opera singers and Muriel and Philippe decide to enroll in an effort to get close to the widow. They soon discover their vocal chops (as well enjoying the class) and a labyrinthine plot ensues, with a collectively duplicitous nest of spies, significant bed-hopping and some interesting songs (the highlight being Constance's re-write of the Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You" as "L'amour est fou"/"Love is crazy.") Will the alternately quarrelling and loving spy couple find the key? That may not be the point in what novelist and filmmaker Ilan Duran Cohen (Grandsons, Confusion of Genders) calls an "anti-romantic comedy." It's actually much more than that: it may be France's first sexy musical/comedy/spy caper/thriller.

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

"Confusion of Genres"--the title of a previous Duran Cohen film--is a good way to start looking at this one. The two main genres being "confused" this time being (screwy) romantic comedy and (peripheral) spy story. The take on relationships both social and professional is consistently wacky and the laughs are many. A spy-counter-spy hunt for a USB drive computer file that has something to do with illegal uranium trading is one plot line; the other is the intermingling of the students of Eve (Evelyne Kirschenbaum), an opera singer who gives voice lessens in her Paris apartment. The two plots are joined in a single big tangle when two partnered French intelligence agents, Muriel (Marina Fois) and Philippe (Lorant Deutsch), are commanded by their haughty boss (Dominique Reymond) to join the class in order to spy on the widow of a recently murdered banker/uranium dealer, Constance Muller (Jeanne Balibar). She may know where the USB drive is.

Something of the droll Gallic ill humor perfected by the team of Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bakri has rubbed off on Duran Cohen. Most of the characters are kvetches, except maybe Constance, and except that this time they all can sing, or try to. And their kvetching is consistently amusing. This film isn't a masterpiece, but it's fun to watch.

The director says "I like characters who don't take their own story seriously, they refuse to get totally involved with their destiny because they are either scared or refuse to grow up, although others always catch on to them, forcing them to shatter their cynicism." It goes without saying that Muriel and Philippe have sex, but Philippe isn't really interested, and Muriel annoys him and turns him off by constantly fretting about growing older and getting wrinkles.

It's not always clear whether these two are tracking the other singing students or just getting embroiled with them, because everybody's looking for sex, or love, or a mate. They think their fellow voice student Anna (Caroline Ducey) may be connected with the Israelis or the Russians. Rejected by Philippe, Muriel becomes interested in voice student Julien (Julien Baymgartner), a male prostitute who is having sex with Constance's sister-in-law Noemie (Nathalie Richard) and also the hairy gay "bear" and radiologist-terrorist Reza (Frederic Karkosian). And Reza and Noemie are in cahoots with each other. Julien is worried about getting old too--he's 29, ancient for a hustler. At a moment when everyone unloads before a class, Muriel reveals she wants to have a baby. Eve's oversensitive son Joseph (Guillaume Quatravaux), despite his lovely voice, wants to give up singing and leave his mother and her classes.

All his may be too complicated to follow, but it's held together by Duran Cohen's sense of rhythm, and by the sublimely ditsy Constance--that is, Balibar--who has no clear-cut direction in life--at the end she will drop opera singing for pop and enter a French variation on "American Idol"--but nonetheless is mellow about everything. It's she above all who helps us to understand Duran Cohen's idea about people not taking their story too seriously. And obviously the hunt for the computer file isn't more important than each person's search for happiness. Or a good blow job, or anal sex. (There's male frontal nudity, and some droll sex scenes.) Jeanne Balibar is ditsy, but with inner composure. It's a combination that's hard to explain, but very appealing. I'd never really understood Balibar's appeal till this film; now I get it. If she was annoying in Rivette's 'Duchess of Langeais' (though many loved her), in this you want to hug her, or at least I do. Constance is naive, and doesn't even know what a USB drive is. Or is she? Or does she? For Balibar agnostics like myself, this is a revelation; for believers, it takes her up a notch. Her naturalness and subtlety with the other actors are astonishing.

Philippe Lasry and Noemie Lvovsky collaborated with Duran Cohen on the writing, which keeps things too complicated without it really mattering. I don't know who among the various cast members is doing their own singing, but there's plenty of enjoyable music, and some beautiful voices, and even some nice piano playing. Constance not only has a large, attractive apartment in Paris, but a Steinway. I guess this shows that a French sex comedy can be funny (unlike the slick and labored 'Girl from Monaco', the other 2009 Rendez-Vous comedy).

Both were shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center in March 2009. 'Le Plaisir de chanter' opened in Paris theaters November 26, 2008 to some good reviews--though not all critics were convinced.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Variety (Jay Weissberg) review

Chicago Tribune  Michael Philips

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

Duras, Margarita

WOMAN OF THE GANGES (La femme du Gange)

France (100 mi) 1974

Jump Cut [Barbara Halpern Martineau]

Dialogue on Woman of the Ganges by William VanWert, John Hess, and Barbara Halpern Martineau from Jump Cut

New York Times (registration req'd) Nora Sayre

Durgnat, Raymond – film writer and professor (1932 – 2002)

'Culture Always is a Fog' a 1977 interview conducted by UCLA Ph.D Film students, reprinted from Rouge

Letter to Jean-Pierre from Durgnat to Jean-Pierre Gorin, from December 1988, reprinted from Rouge

Red Psalm the final major essay written by Durgnat, from his estate (2002), reprinted from Rouge

Durkin, Sean

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE A 95

USA (101 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

Well she, she's just a picture
Who lives on my wall
Well she, she's just a picture
And the reason, reason, reason it is so small
With a smile so inviting and a body so tall
She, she's just a picture
Just a picture
That's all

Well you stand there, stand there with the nightshade
Her dripping ripping down your hands
And you ask me, ask me about the lightning
And the lady, lady, lady she understands
It's a dream for the future and the water for the sands
And the strangeness is wandering
Through many callin' lands

I'd give you, give you quite freely
All the clothes on your gipsy bait
And I'd suffer, suffer so long in prison
If I knew you'd have to wait
With the wind scouring sandstone
And the ashes in your grate
Somewhere no devil emperor
The great whale's gone
The holy plate

And this caravan it becomes an alter
And the priests, the priests are big as none
And I'll share, share our time together
Until our time together is done
But your skin it was pretty
And I loved, I loved another one
Now she, she's just like some picture
That has faded in the sun

Well she, she's just a picture
Who lives on my wall
Well she, she's just a picture
And the reason, reason, reason is so small
With a smile so inviting and a body so tall
Well she, she's just a picture
Just a picture
That's all
Just a picture
That's all

—“Marcy’s Song,” by Jackson C. Frank from Martha Marcy May Marlene

Marcy's Song by John Hawkes - YouTube (3:49)

Marcy's Song - Jackson C. Frank. YouTube (4:31)

Winner of the Best Director Award at Sundance, Durkin has crafted a mesmerizing piece of cinema that insists upon naturalism and simplicity, revealing just how effortless it feels to be under the spell of good direction that doesn’t rely upon computer graphics for special effects, creating a murky interior atmosphere that slides back and forth in time, never knowing just where you are at the beginning of each shot. The idea behind the film is imagining what would happen in the first few weeks after fleeing from an emotionally abusive cult, where your real family has no idea whatsoever what you’ve been through, creating a culture clash or a psychic rupture. This is a film that also uses darkness and light, also the edges of the screen throughout, shot by Jody Lee Lipes, where characters move freely in and out of the frame, where often the focus is only in a corner or in a small piece of the larger picture shown onscreen, where occasionally a human face remains split along the edge. There’s a beautiful visual scheme that is heightened by a brilliant sound and editing design, where it’s the intelligence of the filmmaking itself that distinguishes this edgy feature as the creepiest film experience of the year, reminiscent of Polanski’s REPULSION (1965), where the initial innocence of getting back to nature and living on a farm commune in the Catskill Mountains of New York becomes a psychotic break from reality for Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) when the women become the exclusive property of the cult leader Patrick (John Hawkes), a Charles Manson like persona whose motivation seems to be to redefine the entire world around him in his own image, where everyone and everything belongs to him. He even takes her name, calling her Marcy May, where she quickly loses all sense of who she is. Martha is initially confused by an initiation rape sequence from Patrick, where it is the women afterwards who reveal this as the spreading of communal love, that all must remain open to it, as it is a special moment to cherish. In this way they break her spirit and her conception of free will, and in doing so accept her into their community, offering her a place where she belongs.

Early in the film, however, we see Martha methodically step over her sleeping roommates one morning in an attempted escape, where a near indecipherable phone call for help reveals her jangled state of mind, overwhelmed by the circumstances and unable to make any sense out of it. She is soon safely in the comfortable upscale surroundings of a heavily windowed vacation home on a lake owned by her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her British architectural wizard for a husband, Hugh Dandy as Ted. Neither have heard a word from Martha in the past two years and she’s not eager to share her personal experiences, remaining glum and depressed, uncommunicative, sleeping most of the time, not fitting in here at all, as she finds all the monetary wealth and exhibitionism on display personally revolting, knowing a dozen people could live in this vast amount of space that is currently used by only two. Her thoughts continually drift back and forth, filling in some of the intimate details of just what happened during her two years, followed by equally inhumane treatment by her more conservative and socially uptight family who find her abnormal behavior morally intolerable, as she just sits around doing nothing, or makes odd behavioral choices that send them into a rage of disapproval, where they continue to be harshly judgmental instead of supportive, not having a clue what she’s endured. At the farm, Patrick singles her out, making her the girl that matters most of all, but only so long as she latches herself onto him, even writing a song in her honor, Marcy's Song by John Hawkes - You Tube (3:49), making her feel wanted and special, the exact opposite of how she feels with her sister where she feels utterly helpless, growing more paranoid, completely alienated and alone.

The theme of the film seems to rest with Martha’s haunting confession to her sister: “Do you ever have that feeling where you can't tell if something is a memory or a dream?” Unable to reassemble the broken pieces of her life, her spirit remains crushed and shattered, where Olsen is excellent portraying that glum expressionless stupor, much like the other women at the farm, none of whom ever smile or have anything to be thankful about, yet they carry out Patrick’s wishes with few missteps, as he brings the wrath upon anyone who disobeys or even questions his authority. The deeper she sinks into this world of repressed anger and self-loathing, the harder it is to recognize herself, where what she thought was freedom has turned into involuntary servitude. Long after she escapes the farm, she continues to imagine that she sees the cult leaders everywhere she goes, believing they are after her, that they will never let her be. Durkin beautifully interweaves the two threads, where what’s real and what’s imagined become indecipherable, creating an all but unbearable mounting tension and suspense. This is a powerful film that defies predictability and the norm by using thoroughly self-absorbed and unlikable characters, where the world becomes even more despicable with an unloving family who finds fault with everything she does, becoming holier than thou, super moralistic, symptomatic of their own shallow interests that can’t tolerate differences. You never really know where this is going, a world with no escape, as Patrick starts spouting Manson gibberish about love is death after awhile, advocating violence and murder, perhaps rationalizing in his own mind some of the evil that is done in his name, where Martha in her mind never stops seeing them, as if they’re about to burst through the next room. The audience senses they are there, the barbarians gathering at the gate, an ominous threat that pervades both the past and the present, elusive, yet all powerful, expressed through an abstract palette consumed in disturbing imagery. The spare indie score by Saunder Jurriaans and Danny Bensi haunts the already tense and creepy atmosphere with melancholic counterpoint for a poetic memory play of a woman under relentless psychological assault that couldn’t be a more exquisite offering.

Martha Marcy May Marlene « Cinema Autopsy Thomas Caldwell

The more I think and talk about Martha Marcy May Marlene, the more I am appreciating it as an extremely well-crafted and powerful piece of American Gothic cinema. Despite my initial reaction just after seeing it, it’s so much more than a film that says cults are bad as it explores the way emotionally vulnerable people can be seduced by New Age or religious rhetoric. It also draws a curious comparison to the type of cult the film depicts with the ‘cult’ of capitalist materialism. The editing is astonishing, deliberately blurring the time periods depicted in the film so that the recent past continually bleeds into the present, representing the lingering psychological damage done to the protagonist. The final scene is the most chillingly and suggestive since The Boys.

The Reel Deal [Mark Sells]

More than an alliterative mouthful, Martha Marcy May Marlene is a psychological thriller about the paranoia that plagues a young woman after she leaves an abusive cult. After being out of touch for several years, Marcy reunites with her older sister and her sister's husband at their Connecticut lake house. However, the details of Marcy's disappearance remain mysterious until her nightmares and memories are relived in vivid detail. Starring Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of the famed Olsen twins, Martha Marcy is a smart depiction of the lingering effects of brainwashing and control, the verbal and physical abuse of cults, and the difficulty in breaking free. With terrific, lucid scenery and a mesmerizing performance from Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene is an ambiguous, yet startling tale of post-cult trauma.

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

A young woman (Elizabeth Olsen, sister of Ashley and Mary Kate) awakes in a crowded room, filled with other women who are still asleep, and slowly makes her way out of the room before heading out the front door. Someone calls out her name but she ignores it as she hurries her way into the dense thicket of woods across from the small commune she has been living on for an undisclosed amount of time. She begins to run as shouts of "Marcy May!" and galloping footsteps grow closer, but she is ultimately safe, making her way to a diner. One of her pursuers finds her but lets her go (assumedly), allowing her to call her protective, privileged older sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson).

Thus begins Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin's genuinely haunting debut feature, and the lack of exposition and uneasy, paranoid tone set by the film's overture remains palpable throughout. The young woman, who was born Martha, enters her sister's vacation home for an indeterminable amount of time, as well as her sister's marriage to Ted (Hugh Dancy), a wealthy man who, like Lucy, often has to commute from upstate New York to NYC. As tensions begin to emerge -- between Martha and Lucy, Lucy and Ted, Ted and Martha -- Durkin begins to seamlessly weave in memories of Martha's time at the small commune, where she was known as Marcy May and was under the psychological control of seductive cult leader Patrick (the great John Hawkes).

The scenes at the commune are integral to the scenes at the vacation home, as it presents an intriguing, wholly immersive dichotomy between two utterly disparate yet similarly constrictive social structures. On the commune, not only is Martha seen being officially initiated into the commune through rough sex with Patrick, but she is also seen having to adhere to a hard-nosed, quasi-socialist sense of shared living, wherein simply popping a bite of food during preparation is met with physical abuse and a harsh scolding. At Lucy's place, food is plentiful and every amenity imaginable is provided. But there is also a sense of social conservatism, as Martha's nude swimming is met with panic from Lucy; her lack of drive, initiative, ambition or movement is also scrutinized and construed by Ted as laziness.

That the basic political backdrop of the film never overrides the stormy mood is a testament to both Durkin, who also wrote the perceptive, if a bit dull script, and his leading lady. The ruptures and outbursts of fear that Martha experiences emerge naturally through Olsen, spurred by such minor encounters as a familiar-looking party bartender and a dropped phone call. Much of this, however, emanates from a terrifying home-invasion scene in which one of Patrick's more devout followers butchers a man in his own home.

Durkin smartly leaves a great deal of the presumable abuse unseen but we feel it in Olsen's beguilingly strong debut performance. It is by every measure a smartly executed, beautifully understated thriller, moving fluidly from suspense to dread and back again. Still, I can't help but notice a hesitancy joined to Durkin's consistency, a first-timer's understandable siding with a safe, tight aesthetic over more wildly personal touches, liberated character trajectories and shifts in emotional strength. In this case, the restraint works and certainly makes me anticipate Durkin's next feature, but I maintain a certain modicum of suspicion in my anticipation. 

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

The materialist view of the world, which I share, holds that human brains are nothing but ultra-complicated computers, all of our traits and emotions and insecurities and hang-ups and loves – indeed our entire consciousness – just manifestations of purely physical processes within that amazing organ. When there’s a glitch in the programming, things can go wrong in ways fascinating, terrible, or both: schizophrenia, sleep paralysis, narcolepsy, synesthesia, etc. If you ever feel like you’re not in control of what you’re thinking or feeling, that’s because you aren’t, not really. They say that “the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master”; the jury’s out on the former, but the latter can certainly be true.

Just as a computer can be programmed from the outside, so can the human brain, and that’s where Martha Marcy May Marlene – the best and most nerve-wracking movie of the year so far – is a Viking. The title represents the various identities of a young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) who, in the opening scenes, hightails it away from a cult led by a charming, magnetic, obviously dangerous maniac (John Hawkes). The rest of the film jumps back and forth between her life as part of the cult (whose members live, with dreams of eventual self-sufficiency, in a dilapidated New England farmhouse) and her subsequent attempts to readjust to a normal existence with her estranged sister (Sarah Paulson) and prim English brother-in-law (Hugh Dancy) – who both think that Martha has spent the last few years living with some boyfriend.

The doctrine of the cult is fairly generic pablum about purity and spiritual cleanliness and living in the now. The substance is not the point. The leader, Patrick, subordinates his followers not with threats, or even with promises, but with confident authority and subtle attacks on their self-esteem. It is not obvious that Patrick is any sort of true believer; nor does it matter. Everyone else believes in him. Early in the film we see a meal; the men eat first, with Patrick at the head of the table issuing cool supervisory glances; the women wait outside without complaint. Later we see Martha – whom Patrick has dubbed “Marcy May” – drugged and raped, and afterward her female minder comes over to calm her: “I know you’re feeling something bad just happened,” she says. “But we’re all together on this. You have to trust us.”

Back at her sister’s posh country house, Martha has trouble readjusting. Invited to take a swim, she takes off all of her clothes and jumps into the lake. (“There are families here,” yells her horrified sister.) In a scene that nearly gave me a panic attack, she lectures her brother-in-law – who has been housing and feeding her for weeks – on his bourgeois capitalist way of life. When she has trouble sleeping, she climbs into bed with her hosts. “I need you to understand why this is not okay,” she is told. And these are not just oddball habits that she’s picked up. There’s something else, something deeper.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is about the fragility of the psychological constructs that we rely on, day after day, to function in our idiosyncratic, sometimes inexplicable human society. Martha has been “brainwashed” in a much more insidious sense than the one we usually mean. It’s one thing to convince someone that an alien named Xenu has seeded the earth with his malevolent minions; it’s another to systematically break down the foundations of that person’s mind, the adaptations that allow her to meaningfully exist in our world. Here, we see brainwashing of the latter variety, and it’s bone-chillingly plausible.

The movie is unremittingly tense. It has not a sentimental bone in its body. Durkin is a collaborator of Antonio Campos, whose disturbing Afterschool attempted a similar kind of harsh, gnawing suspense but was undercut by Campos’ formal trickery. Here, the compositions are simple and precise; the camerawork unshowy and mostly functional. The screenplay is incredibly impressive in the way it captures the dynamics of the cult; watch for how much is accomplished by tone of voice, body language, subtle deception. Elizabeth Olsen’s tough, nervy performance anchors everything.

Here’s a film that gets at something deeply unsettling about the human condition. Martha Marcy May Marlene is not “fun” to watch, though it’s engaging and the 100 minutes fly by. The ending provides no relief, suggesting that the protagonist is forever stuck in a terrifying purgatory between “Martha” and “Marcy May.” (The nature of “Marlene” I leave for you to discover.) If the movie “says” anything, it’s this: none of us are truly secure in who we are. We are vulnerable. This could happen to you.

The Perils of Communal Living in Martha Marcy May ... - Village Voice J. Hoberman

REVIEW: Elizabeth Olsen Beguiles in Martha Marcy May Marlene ... Stephanie Zacharek from Movieline

Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey] also seen here: DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

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

Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]

DCist [Ian Buckwalter]

Paste Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]

eFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

“Martha Marcy May Marlene” Review : The New Yorker Anthony Lane

The House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima] New York Film Festival

Rich On Film [Richard Haridy]

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day Five – The Artist, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and House of Tolerance Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from the House Next Door, May 15, 2011

Cannes '11, day five: Our favorite film at Cannes so far turns out to be our favorite film from Sundance, too.  Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 16, 2011

Noel Murray @ Sundance '11: Day Five  The Onion A.V. Club, January 25, 2011. also seen here: Martha Marcy May Marlene | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club

SBS Film [Lynden Barber]

Martha Marcy May Marlene Review | Like "Full House," Only ... - Pajiba Dustin Rowles

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a Cult ... - The New York Observer Rex Reed

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Dave Wilson] at Austin

Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

Picture Show Pundits [Juan Nieves]

Cinefile.com [Nelson Carvajal]

Screen Comment [Lita Robinson]

Sound On Sight Ricky D

Bloody Disgusting Horror - "Martha Marcy May Marlene" Movie Info ... Evan Dickson

Review: Martha Marcy May Marlene offers subtle, creepy cult - HitFix Drew McWeeny

'Martha Marcy May Marlene' Review | Screen Rant Ben Kendrick

Battleship Pretension [Scott Nye]

Temple of Reviews [Nathan Adams]

Digital Spy [Simon Reynolds - Cannes 2011]

David Edelstein on Martha Marcy May Marlene also seen here: David Edelstein on 'Margin Call' and 'Martha ... - New York Magazine

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

Celluloid Heroes Radio [Charlotte Skeoch]

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Martha Marcy May Marlene - ReelTalk Movie Reviews Diana Saenger

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DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]

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Review: 'Martha Marcy May Marlene' is ... - Film School Rejects Robert Levin

Martha Marcy May Marlene: movie review - Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Combustible Celluloid Review - Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011 ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

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exclaim! [Robert Bell]

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Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian] at Sundance

Sean Durkin and His Collective on Their Breakout Film Jada Yuan interviews 3 directors from New York Magazine, Octtober 16, 2011

Elizabeth Olsen: 'Martha Marcy' Breakout Star on Fear, Fame and That Confounding Ending Steve Pond interview with the director and lead actress from The Wrap, October 22, 2011

Martha Marcy May Marlene: Film Review David Rooney at Sundance from The Hollywood Reporter, January 21, 2011

Variety [Peter Debruge]

Martha Marcy May Marlene - Time Out David Jenkins

Martha Marcy May Marlene: Anatomy of an identity ... - Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

Elizabeth Olsen's haunting performance in 'Martha ... - Boston Globe Ty Burr

Review: Martha Marcy May Marlene - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Martha Marcy May Marlene | Philly | 10/28/2011 Gary Thompson

Elizabeth Olsen mesmerizes as a traumatized woman | Philadelphia ... Steven Rea from The Philadelphia Inquirer

Critic Review for Martha Marcy May Marlene on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

'Martha Marcy May Marlene' review: lackluster Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle

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Martha Marcy May Marlene ... - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

Martha Marcy May Marlene - Movies - New York Times A.O. Scott

Durringer, Xavier

THE CONQUEST (La conquête)

France (105 mi) 2011

The Conquest Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily, May 18, 2011

Corridors-of-power satire The Conquest (La Conquête) may not be the most trenchant of current-affairs studies, but it’s still a classy, witty portrait of French president Nicolas Sarkozy - and a very rare example of a political biopic made while the subject is still in power.

Closer to Stephen Frears’s Blair-and-Brown drama The Deal than to either Oliver Stone’s W. or Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, Xavier Durringer’s film is a realistic but mischievous portrait of Sarkozy, successfully blending a dash of cartoonishness with a still-fresh-from-the-front-page energy.

Headline-generating subject, plus a terrific lead from Denis Podalydès, will provide significant box-office clout in France, where the film’s release coincides with its Cannes debut. But while The Conquest is immensely watchable for non-initiates, many elements will be opaque to non-French viewers, limiting export potential to upmarket niche outlets and festivals.

The film, framed as a series of flashbacks, begins on May 6 2007, the day that Sarkozy was elected president. As he awaits the result of his electoral duel with Ségolène Royal, the centre-right politico wonders where his wife Cécilia (Pernel) has got to, a series of episodes covering his ascent  and the breakdown of his marriage.

In 2002, he has a meeting with president Jacques Chirac (le Coq), who tells him that he’s offering Sarkozy the No. 2 job on his cabinet, as Minister of the Interior. “Why can’t you trust me to be No. 1?” carps Sarkozy, who has his eyes on better things - setting a note of insolence and insecurity that define him from then on.

Sarkozy tells his staff that he intends to get ahead by being hyper-energetic and permanently visible - ’ Headline Minister’, in fact - and becomes a master of media spin, with Cécilia helping mastermind the public profile which presents him as a dynamic, down-to-earth executive type.

Sarkozy, however, is condescended to, and distrusted by Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin (played with silky condescension by Labarthe), who increasingly becomes both rival and arch-enemy. Sarkozy is later elected leader of the UPM party, triumphing at a flashy rally that he hopes will come across as his equivalent of a Johnny Hallyday concert.

By this point, however, his relationship with Cécilia is fraying, and by the time the presidential elections come round, Sarkozy knows his only chance of winning is by pressurizing her into returning, however briefly, to his side after she has left him for her lover. Meanwhile, Sarkozy’s own extra marital affairs are hitting the headlines. The film, an opening title announces, is based on facts but categorically a fiction - a statement greeted by much laughter at its Cannes screening.

Throughout, the film’s many political in-jokes are guaranteed to tickle local audiences. French viewers will also relish the impersonation factor, Le Coq in particular raising chuckles with his repertoire of high-statesman gestures as Chirac.

Witty but sometimes oppressively wordy, the film has a major selling point in the always excellent Podalydès, who brings Sarkozy a certain tormented grandeur, even while playing up his tetchiness, narcissism and savage self-importance.

Easily rivaling Michael Sheen’s celebrated Tony Blair, the performance isn’t just a series of bang-on mannerisms, but captures the essential insecurity of a man who’s desperate to sell himself less as a series of principles, but as a product - tellingly, boasting of his energy, he compares himself at one point to the Duracell battery bunny. You get less sense of Sarkozy’s political values - but that may be part of the film’s argument.

Slickly mounted and energetic, the film is executed with pace and smarts by director and co-writer Durringer. Nicola Piovani’s music, heavily alluding to Nino Rota’s Fellini scores, highlights the folly of the whole political circus.

The Conquest (La Conquete): Cannes 2011 Review Jordan Mintzer at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 18, 2001

Xavier Durringer’s highly anticipated chronicle of current French president Nicholas Sarkozy’s rise to power is an amusing yet lightweight political farce.

CANNES -- As if France didn’t already have one major scandaleon its hands, out comes The Conquest (La Conquete), writer-director Xavier Durringer’s highly anticipated chronicle of current prez Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to power. But the Elysee should have little to fear from this amusing yet lightweight political farce, which adds nothing new to a story that most Frenchies followed closely throughout the five-year period ending on election day in May 2007. While local buzz will boost early ticket sales, outsiders will only take a passing interest in the squabbles that saw the Machiavellian “dwarf” take on a gang of “old farts” – these are the film’s words – as he barreled his way to Gaul’s highest office.

Kicking off with the caveat, “Although based on real people, this film is a work of fiction,” The Conquest functions entirely on the viewer’s pleasure in seeing many of France’s most famous contemporary political figures lampooned onscreen – an event which is quite rare in a movie industry that normally shies away from attacking its leaders head on, especially in works of fiction. (Perhaps France’s many public filmmaking subsidies have something to do with this… Va savoir.)

Yet while the scenario by Durringer and co-writer Patrick Rotman (L’ennemi intime) has a grand old time depicting all the conniving, backstabbing, and fork-pointing which are part and parcel of any electoral battle, it never cuts deep in the way that, say, Nanni Moretti’s The Caiman did when it portrayed the bludgeoning hypocrisy of Silvio Berlusconi’s media and political empire.

Perhaps there’s a reason for this: While “Sarko” is certainly despised by many, it’s mostly due to his bling-bling style, infamous temper, and tendency to run off his mouth in public. As for his politics, well, they’re skewed towards the right (in French terms), yet not always easy to pin down. And as Durringer shows how the man’s message is based purely on the latest poll numbers, the film glosses over any real commentary on the current state of French affairs, opting instead for a chatty, Grand Guignol spectacle that at times seems better suited for the stage.

Anchored by talented Comedie Française actor Denis Podalydes’ pitch-perfect imitation – he nails everything from the duck-like shuffle to the erratic hand gestures to the gruff speech patterns – the story cuts back and forth between the hours on May 7, 2007, which show Nicolas Sarkozy awaiting the results of an election he was sure to win, and the years leading up to that moment, which explain how he got there.

While a handful of subplots deal with inside politics only locals may care about, the narrative maintains two main lines: Sarkozy’s fight against president Jacques Chirac (Bernard Le Coq) and his dauphin, Dominique de Villepin (Samuel Labarthe), to capture the UMP ticket; and his troubled relationship with then wife Cecilia (Florence Pernel), who’s presented early on as a Lady Macbeth-like consultant, until she grows tired of the whole shebang and runs away with an advertising executive (Yann Babilee Keogh) involved in the party’s rock concert-style conventions.

Although the film tries as it may to demonstrate how the affaire de coeur impacted Sarkozy’s psyche (a shot of him wallowing in a dark room – with his aviator glasses – is meant to convey that), their relationship never feels like much more than the tale of two power-mongers who seem to have little actual love for each other. If Cecilia is meant to be to Nicolas what Erica was to Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network – another contempo biopic that is everything but farce – her betrayal doesn’t resonate in the same way, and like most events in The Conquest, it can only be taken so seriously.

Much more enjoyable is the behind-the-scenes chatter between Chirac and cohorts as they try to outsmart the rising candidate, who always seems to be one step ahead of them, working the media with a frenzy that these old school politicians can’t compete with. As the sleazy former president, Bernard Le Coq (Joyeux Noel) provides the film’s most laugh-out-loud moments, many of which involve the use of the term “balls” in various contexts. Such trash talking is finely matched by Podalydes (Le Mystère de la chambre jaune), who delivers a slew of one-liners with ease.

The dialogue-heavy film reveals Durringer’s roots as a successful playwright in the 80s and 90s, before he went on to direct a short and eclectic filmography that includes the gangster yarn, Bat out of Hell, and the kickboxing flick, Chok-Dee. Though much of the action involves people talking in rooms or moving cars, a few impressive Steadicam shots show Sarkozy making his way through roaring crowds as he takes the stage, conveying his rise to the top in purely visual terms.

Such moments are accompanied by Nicolas Piovani’s very Fellini-esque score, which only adds  to the overall feeling that what we’re watching, as one character explains, is the making of a clown in chief.

Dutt, Guru

Manas: Culture, Indian Cinema- Guru Dutt

Guru Dutt is remembered in the history of Indian cinema as the brooding intense romantic who attempted to reflect the changing social situation in India in the fifties. Within his short life, he created some of India's most socially-conscious movies like Pyaasa (Thirsty, 1957), Kaagaz ke Phool (Paper Flowers, 1960) and Baazi (1951). He also introduced Waheeda Rehman in CID (1956) and propelled her to stardom through his films.

Born in Calcutta in 1925, Guru Dutt worked as a telephone operator before he embarked on his career as an actor and director in 1944. The fifties was the time when India, under Nehru's brand of state socialism, was embarking on massive industrialization. The conventional wisdom has it that rapid changes introduced by industralization were undermining 'traditional values'. What is certain is that industrialization, and the accompanying migration from rural to urban areas, was creating -- as it still does in India -- anomie, dislocation, and new social norms. In the urban enviornment, new social relations developed. It is, therefore, not surprising that a recurring theme in his films is the attraction, bound to be fatal, that develops between a middle class girl and a tough but likeable character from the lower class. His most memorable movie in this genre is probably Pyaasa. Inspired by Sarat Chandra's novel, Srikanta, it depicts the romance between a poet and a prostitute. The genuine poet cannot survive amidst philistines and publishers interested only in profiteering: the spectre of the big city is everywhere in Guru Dutt's films.

Guru Dutt's films are also said to be marked by a certain nostalgia, most evident in Sahib, Bibi aur Gulam (Master, Mistress, and Servant), a film that explores the decline of feudal landed family. An aristocratic demeanor, a flair for style, characterize this film. Yet in all of his films, Guru Dutt was to show mastery over cinematic elements, from lighting and camera-work to film composition; and every films bears the unmistakable imprint of his work. Though not known widely outside India, Guru Dutt's work compares with that of any director working at that time around the world. His brilliant career came to a premature end with his suicide, following a protracted struggle with alcoholism, in 1964.

The Guru Dutt - Geeta Dutt Page biography and filmography

Guru Dutt | Upperstall.com extensive profile

Biography from www.screenindia.com

Bollywood Best - Legends - Guru Dutt biography from Bollywood Best

Bollywood501 - Guru Dutt portrait profile page

Compilation of songs from Guru Dutt movies from Bollango

Thirst and mourning Urbain Bizot, In Memory of Guru Dutt, Paris 1987

Guru Dutt: Beautiful Dreamer Bollywhat Forum, December 9, 2004

An article from Hindustan Times One Should Live the Moment and Look Ahead, Pankaj Vohra, September 25, 2007

The Meloncholic Genius of Guru Dutt | DearCinema: World Cinema ... Vidyarthy Chatterjee from Dear Cinema, September 22, 2008

Interview with Dev Anand Guru Dutt: The Man Who Couldn’t Digest Failure, interview by Dinesh Raheja from Rediff, march 4, 2002

An article by V K Murthy from rediff.com Patcy N interviews V K Murthy, noted Guru Dutt cinematographer, from Rediff, October 8, 2004

'Nobody really knows what happened on October 10' Raja Sen interviews Guru Dutt leading lady, Waheeda Rehman, from Rediff, October 11, 2004

Dev Anand Remembers Guru Dutt Laalit Lobo interviews Dev Anand about Guru Dutt, from Dear Cinema, June 11, 2007

'Suicide was always on Guru Dutt's mind' Patcy N interviews Sathya Saran on her new book, Ten Years With Guru Dutt: Abrar Alvi's Journey, from Rediff, July 14, 2008

Review of Ten Years with Guru Dutt: Abrar Alvi's journey Sathya Saran’s book reviewed by R Rajesh Kumar from Sify Movies, July 15, 2008, which includes four web pages from the book: The reason why Guru Dutt died, and a web page tribute: Reading a page from Guru Dutt's life

The Complete List All-Time 100 Movies from Time magazine (2005), chosen by Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel, which includes Pyaasa (1957)

1st Filmfare Awards 1953 Filmfare Awards nominees and winners through 2005 (pdf format)

Guru Dutt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Guru Dutt Waheeda Rehman - Scene from 12 O Clock on You Tube (1:32)

Waheeda Rehman Guru Dutt - Scene from 12 O Clock

Guru Dutt Waheeda Rehman - Scene from 12 O Clock (1:58)

Guru Dutt DARD Ki Awaz (1:59)

GURU DUTT-KAAGAZ KE PHOOL (2:15)

Koi Door Se Awaaz De - Geeta Dutt in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (2:40)

Tribute to Guru Dutt and Geeta Dutt. (2:55)

Mohd. Rafi - Is Bhari Duniya Mein - Bharosa (1963) (3:01)

Geeta Dutt - Tadbeer Banaa Le - Baazi [1951] (3:11)

Waheeda Rehman Guru Dutt - Song from 12 O Clock (3:15)

DEV ANAND IN JAAL(GURU DUTT FIRST SCREEN PRESENCE) (3:21)

tribute to guru dutt and waheeda rehman! (3:24)

Babuji Dheere Chalna Aaar Paar (3:27)

"Aaj Ki Mulakaat Bas Itani" - Lata Mangeshkar & Mahendra Kapoor (3:30)

Rafi & Geeta Dutt - Ankhon Hi Mein - CID [1956] (3:46)

Waheeda Rehman Guru Dutt - Song from 12 O Clock (3:47)

Hemant Kumar - Jaane Woh Kaise - Pyaasa [1957] (3:53)

Waqt Ne Kiya-Kaagaz Ke Phool (3:59)

A Tribute to Guru dutt (True Legend) (4:01)

A TRIBUTE TO GURU DUTT. (OLD CLASSIC HINDI FILM SONG) (4:01)

Waqt ne kiya kya haseen sitam (4:05)

Geeta Dutt - Jaane Kya Tune Kahi - Pyaasa [1957] (4:05)

AAR-PAAR - SUN SUN SUN SUN ZALIMA (4:07)

Chaudvin Ka Chand (4:08)

Udhar tum haseen (4:16)

dekhi zamaane ki yaari bichhde sabhi bari bari good sound (4:33)

Pyaasa - Jaane Woh Kaise Log (4:40)

Yeh Mehlon Yeh Takhton - Mohd Rafi (4:49)

DEV ANAND KISHORE RAFI DILIP RAJENDRA GURU DUTT (5:01)

Pyaasa - Jine Naaz Heh Hind Par (6:09)

Opening of Guru Dutt's film Kaagaz Ke Phool-Paper Flowers (8:29)

Shikar (1968)A GENIUS CALLED GURUDUTT (10:58)

BAAZI (The Gamble)

India (143 mi) 1951

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

Guru Dutt's career in Bollywood is a result of his friendship with Dev Anand. The two, then struggling to rise up, made an agreement to help each other when one gets a break. Anand promised that if he ever produces a film, he would ask Dutt to direct it, and Dutt promised that if he ever directed a film, he would have Anand to star in it. Anand hit it big, and produced his first film, and as promised, asked Dutt to direct it --- Baazi (The Wager). The agreement between the then no-name artists would result in two of India cinema's hallmarks. After Baazi's success, Dutt would produce, and direct undeniable cinematic masterpieces, Pyaasa (Thirst) and Kaagaz ke Phool (Paper Flowers). Anand would continue to star in big Bollywood productions, among which are several greats from different directors.

Baazi centers on the life of Madan (Dev Anand), an unemployed young man who is taking care of his ailing sister. Madan is a sympathetic fellow and he seems to attract many friends despite his very playful attitude. Moreover, Madan has the gift of luck. He is often found in gambling places in the underbellies of the city trying his luck in earning a few bucks to buy medicine for his sister. A representative of a huge gambling circuit, masquerading as a night club, invites him to work for them, luring rich businessmen and royalty to their den and cheating them off their cash. Rajani (Kalpana Kartik), a public doctor and the daughter of a millionaire, meets Madan while tending to his sister. The two slowly fall in love, but because of their huge difference in standing, neither of the two can make a move. Because of dire circumstances involving his sick sister, Madan accepts the shady job offered him, and would have to wager his life, his love, and his honor to gain the little things his poverty has prevented him from getting, including much-need treatment for his sister.

Baazi, being the directorial debut of Dutt doesn't show much of what the director is capable of. However, it is distinct from the film that Dutt is gifted in setting up an atmosphere that is appropriate to the film's mood. There's much budgetary constraints that do show up in the final product. Much of the film is shot in sound stages, and one can instantly observe poorly painted sets. However, Dutt takes control of such constraints and still manages to come up with tight visuals --- mainly focusing on close-ups on his actors and actresses, or clever blocking that takes the eye away from the lack of scenery. Baazi is an urban crime tale and its structure is very similar to the film noirs that are very popular in America. Naturally, Dutt doesn't sway by giving second-rate visuals to his Bollywood noir. The opening sequence in itself shows a director who knows what he wants --- the camera following a mysterious character down the dark alleyways of the city leading to damp, dangerous, and potentially creepy place for gambling. Gutt sets his audience up for a tale of mystery, of danger, where each and every character is capable of treachery. Truly, Gutt creates an urban world that looks and feels much like a gambling den, where every move requires a wager, and oftentimes there is a need to bluff and a need to just fold and give up, and rely on the impression that lady luck is with you.

However, Baazi is not entirely a noir. It has noir elements, though much of the downward spiraling of the protagonist happens in the last thirty minutes. There are no femme fatales --- the nightclub dancer Leena (Geeta Bali) is arguably this noir's femme fatale, but I disagree since Dutt has always had a soft spot for women, especially misunderstood women in professions of low stature. The mood is much more cheerful than its American counterparts, mostly due to the fact that scenes are separated by song and dance numbers (composed by S. D. Burman). The body of the film is really not the criminal elements, but the metaphorical wager of Madan of everything he has in exchange for monetary comforts, and his sister's welfare. The heart of it, however, belongs to the romance-against-all-odds between Madan and Rajani.

Baazi (1951) Upperstall

Baazi ( 1951 ) from the Guru Dutt Page

User comments from imdb Author: Queen_of_pentacles from India

JAAL (The Net)

India (165 mi) 1952

User comments from imdb Author Suresh C. Verma from Mumbai, India

This was Guru Dutt's second movie, after Dev Anand's production "Baazi". Guru Dutt was sort of finding his bearings through commercially successful movies. And after "Baazi", this was the second film in which Dev Anand also came through as a confident star/actor, with a style uniquely his own. Geeta Bali, the most gifted actress of the Indian screen ever, gave a scintillating performance. But what stood out most was the musical score of the film. Till date, the sweetness of the melodious "Yeh raat yeh chandni phir kahan, sun ja dil ki dastaan", sung by the heavenly voices Hemant Kumar has not been equalled by any song of this type, composed by any music composure. Most other songs were based on the Goan folk music, probably first time used by a music director.

Jaal (1952) Upperstall

BAAZ (The Falcon)

India (180 mi) 1953

User comments from imdb Author chorima75 from Galicia

As a little girl, I was a big fan of matinée movies, which my father and I watched together on TV. Before the age of ten, I had already seen almost all John Ford westerns and a lot of Errol Flynn sword adventures. And of course, the pirate movies: "The Black Swan", "The Crimson Pirate"…However, I was always disappointed at women's passive role. Unless you were so lucky to have vivacious Maureen O'Hara as the heroine, you were usually stuck with a screaming, weak, pretty idiot that you would like to kill yourself.

I wish I had seen "Baaz" then. The gender politics in this old Hindi black and white film are still modern.

The Falcon ("baaz") of the title is a female pirate captain: brave and beautiful Nisha, played by Geeta Bali. She rebels against the Portuguese colonisers, who treat her people worse than slaves while local princes look the other way. Nisha openly confronts the Queen, accusing her of allowing commoners to suffer in order to keep her privileges. Little she suspects that the "gentleman in distress" she has rescued from a Portuguese ship is no other than the Queen's son (played by – who else? – charming Guru Dutt).

A love-hate relation blossoms, which is depicted in surprisingly equal terms. Their two physical fights have no clear winner and, more important, Nisha is not "domesticated" after falling in love (which was usually the case in Hollywood films). When her men reproach her that she is falling for the Prince, she defiantly sings: "Why do you think I am weak just because I am in love?" She is even willing to renounce him in order to pursue her quest. As the last scene proves, she certainly does not need to be saved.

"Baaz" was not very successful film, but the songs became very popular. Rosita's ballad is sweet and romantic, while Nisha's dance dressed in falcon costume is impressive. We can only regret that both Guru Dutt and Gita Bali died too young.

The Illuminated Lantern review [3/4] Peter Nepstad

Kalu Birju (Guru Dutt) is a former prisoner, in jail for reckless driving but out early for good behavior, trying to make a fresh start. On the one hand, there is his job at a garage and his romance with the owner's daughter Nicky (Shyama). It is all he could wish for, but Nicky's father throws him out for presuming to start a relationship with his daughter. On the other hand, there is the crime boss a convict friend told him to visit who grants him his own taxi, provided he will use it to take the boss somewhere when he asks it of him. Unfortunately, it turns out he wants Kalu to take him away from a bank heist he is planning. Which way will he turn? A decent job or a crooked one? It all hangs on a single moment when he could go this way or that, heads or tails, AAR-PAAR.

Guru Dutt is widely regarded as one of the best directors of Bollywood cinema. This is not however a deeply profound film, rather it is a crisp thriller, a highly successful entertainer.

The best moments of the film come early, on his first visit to the crime boss' nightclub, he sees the floor show, a seductive cabaret song and dance by a woman never named in the film but played by Shakila (and sung by Geeta Dutt).

Her beauty is intoxicating, and after Kala saves her from some creeps at the bar she falls for the plain spoken taxi driver, though her love is not reciprocated, leading her to ever more desperate measures. Their dialogue is full of pauses, as she throws out lines but can't reel him in. She wants him to work with the boss and be with her, for his part, he can't see much point in it.

Shakila: You make so little?

Kalu: I blow whatever I earn and I'm happy.

Shakila: Are you?

Kalu: Absolutely.

Shakila: Be happy then. [She leaves.]

The character actor Johnny Walker, a regular of Guru Dutt films, plays another of the gang. It is perhaps a sign of watching too many Bollywood films when you find the comedic sidekick actually amusing, but such is the case here. He also has a romance, and a song, at the zoo where he had hoped to go on a quiet date that ended up being attended by his girl's five screaming younger brothers.

There are several suspenseful moments, including the moment of AAR-PAAR, when Kala Birju makes Nicky decide whether to elope with him or not in the face of her father's angry refusal to consider their marriage, and of course the planning of the bank robbery. Guru Dutt's direction is extremely competent and stylistic, as would be expected from his statue in Bollywood cinema. And while Dev Anand would perhaps have been a better choice for the lead role than himself, Guru Dutt is acceptable, though he certainly improves in later films.

[The Yash Raj Films DVD has an acceptable picture quality and subtitles even for the songs. However, the subtitle timing is slightly off for the middle portion of the film, occassionally making it difficult to follow conversations properly. Making up a little for this flaw, the DVD also contains a 90 minute documentary about Guru Dutt that includes many clips from his films, and interviews with his surviving family and film companions, including Johnny Walker, Raj Khosla, and Waheeda Rehman.]

Baaz (1953) Upperstall

AAR PAAR

India (146 mi) 1954

Aar Paar ( 1954 ) from the Guru Dutt Page

It was with Aar Paar that Guru Dutt really arrived as a film maker to be reckoned with. The film was a crime thriller in the genre of Baazibut by now with Jaal and Baaz also behind him, Guru Dutt had polished his skills and Aar Paar stands out as among the best of the genre. The plot of the film may now seem formulaic but scores in its treatment. It's great strength lies in the way even the minor characters are fleshed out - be it the barman, the street urchin or the newspaper vendor. ( This was one of the strong pointsof Guru Dutt's films. And since he repeated artistes he worked with, the minor roles done in his films by artistes like Kum Kum and  Tun Tun standout for their individual wit and integrity ) And for once characters spoke with a language that reflected their background. The hero is from Madhya Pradesh in central India so he speaks in a particular style. The garage owner, a Punjabi, spoke with a punjabi slang. ( Actuallya glimpse of this was seen in Baazi itself when the hero is asked for his last wish before hanging and in true and typical Bambaiya street language says " Ek special chai." )

Taking a further cue out of film noir, the city is very much a character in Aar Paar. Much shooting was done on actual  outdoor locations of Bombay rather than confining oneself to the studios. In fact even the garage where the hero worked was shot on location at the South Indian Garage in Parel, a locality of Bombay.

In Aar Paar Guru Dutt took his talent for song picturisations to several notches above the commonplace.  Many directors choose to enhance the fantasy elements by setting it in unreal and glamorous locations but in Guru Dutt's films, the songs are rarely separate from the personalities who enacted them. Songs in his films often take place in locations inhabited by the characters in his films. A fine example here is the romantic duet 'Sun sun sun sun zaalima.' The song is set in the stark and unromantic atmosphere of a garage with a car providing the centre-piece but the way the two lovers circle around each other within this restricted space is a brilliant piece of  choreography. Further, Guru Dutt was very particular in sticking to the vocabulary of his characters even in the songs. And often started songs without any  introductory music using it as an extension of the dialogue. Thus beyond considerations of language and space, the songs in his films appear better integrated than in most Indian films. Aar Paar was a major turning point in the life of composer O.P. Nayyar who wenton to become an extremely successful  music director.

Last but not least Guru Dutt reveals a zany sense of humour. There is a wonderfully staged sequence in the film wherein it looks like a major gang operation is on only to be revealed at the end of it that it was a test run!

Aar Paar (1954) Upperstall

Rediff.com Dinesh Raheja

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MR. & MRS. ‘55

India (157 mi) 1955

User comments from imdb Author: Fatehsher from New York

The chemistry between Guru Dutt and Madhubala is fantastic. Johnny Walker proves once again that he is the best side-kick of all time. The tone of the movie is ambivalent in that it is very depressing and optimistic at the same time.The music is incomparable. Simply put: an excellent all around film.

User comments from imdb Author: dpunia from Philadelphia, PA

One of my favorite films of the black&white era. For its time it starts off in a surprisingly modernistic spirit and tone. It is peppered with lighthearted dry humor and some witty dialogs (unusual for a Hindi movie). Madubala is delightful as ever, portraying naiveté and spiritedness - at the same time. There are all-round excellent performances by all, from the main characters to the supporting actors and sidekicks. The songs are classics in their own right.

It leaves you with a wholesome feeling and you are likely to recommend it to others. A more catchy title would have perhaps made this movie better known that it is.

User comments from imdb Author: Gary170459 from Derby, UK

I always thought "Mr & Mrs '55" was a terrible title and surely there were better possibilities – it makes it sound pretty ordinary. Whereas it was a nice little romantic musical comedy and better than most of its contemporaries with some memorable upbeat music from O.P.Nayaar.

Anita, played by the gorgeous Madhubala, is forced to marry Preetam played by dashing Guru Dutt purely on her aunts orders but falls in love with him - much to her aunts disgust and opposition. It's engrossing enough a story but the jaunty yet earnest songs sung by Rafi and Geeta Dutt are the thing, especially Thandi Hawa (my all-time favourite Madhubala moment at the lido), Johnny Walker's infuriatingly catchy Jaane Kahan Mera, and the Rafi/Dutt duet Chal Diya Banda Nawaaz - beautifully sung beautiful lyrics always make me wish it had gone on another 10 minutes. Favourite bit; the amazingly heartrending scene where Anita realises how much in love she is, just before Udhar Tum. As a counterpoint to the overall optimism of this film it's sad to remember 9 years afterwards Dutt committed suicide at 39 and in 1969 Madhubala died of heart disease at only 36.

Overall, great stuff, wish I had a cleaner copy, and don't let the title put you off.

MR. AND MRS. 55 Comedy of Gender, Law, and Nation, by Jyotika Virdi from Jump Cut, July 2000

Mr and Mrs 55 (1955) Upperstall

PYAASA (Thirsting)

aka: Eternal Thirst

India (146 mi) 1957

What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? —Mark 8:36

Revived in France in the mid-1980s, this 1957 melodrama by Indian filmmaker Guru Dutt placed high on Cahiers du cinéma's ten-best list.

Chicago Reader (Fred Camper) capsule review

The great poet Vijay (played by director Guru Dutt) has only two admirers, his mother and a prostitute who discovers his poems at a rag dealer's shop after his brothers sell them for scrap. The final third of this 1957 Indian musical is convoluted but also moving, as dramatic compositions heighten the narrative conflict between artistic idealism and an avaricious society. Unfortunately the print being shown lacks subtitles for the frequent musical numbers, which seem important to the story--some of them are settings of Vijay's poems. With Waheeda Rehman. In Hindi with subtitles. 146 min.

Turner Classic Movies review Richard Steiner

Among the pantheon of great early Bollywood directors is the wonderful Guru Dutt, whose 1957 film Pyaasa marks a high point in pre-sixties era Hindi filmmaking. Dutt ranks among the best filmmakers of this time, which includes the likes of Raj Kapoor and Mehboob Khan, in developing new modes of Hindi storytelling. Pyaasa bridges the very best of the great classical era, which was beginning to flourish under the leadership of Satyajit Ray and his Apu Trilogy, with the developing populism and themes which would define the more formulaic Bollywood films. In some ways, Dutt's film is as expressive and poetic as Ray's Aparajito (1957) or Parash Pathar (1958), and represents a sophisticated blend of music into the film's narrative (sung poems by the tortured protagonist) which today strike the viewer as inspired.

But Dutt's career was to span only a little over a decade, as he committed suicide only 7 years after Pyaasa was completed. Guru Dutt had become the very real example of the lonely, isolated poet Vijay he himself had played in Pyaasa, having lost or isolated himself from so many of the people he had once dearly loved. As Dutt's character in Pyaasa foreshadows for Dutt himself, slowly harmonizing in a scene about his continually agonizing life, "Even my shadow eludes me as it fades away...."

The film's story concerns the poet Vijay, a celebrated student in his school days, he now floats ghost-like through the streets of a bustling Indian city, broke and mystified. He clings to poetry in the hopes the world will some day read it, but the harsh streets and businessmen of the city are a cruel lot. Only two fellow outcasts, a massage oil salesman and a local prostitute, befriend him. He still pines for an old-flame and former classmate, but she is unfortunately concerned with status and privilege, and Vijay struggles with how to orient his feelings for love. It's clear the prostitute is the woman who truly loves him, but can this fill the void inside him? When the poet is mistakenly believed to be dead (a possible nod to Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, 1941), his fame bursts wide upon the public. But now he must confront what his poetry, if anything, will mean to him and the world.

The music in Pyaasa is another wonderful example of Bollywood thematic storytelling. The songs for the most part appear at critical narrative moments where Vijay is compelled to express his inner most thoughts - essentially song poems. The director uses these moments to make an impact, with expressive lighting, numerous tracking shots, and other lyrical camera devices to accentuate the music and rhythm as it unfolds. One scene, where Vijay returns to his own en masse memorial only to be horrified by the greed and hypocrisy on display, is a tour de force of lyrical filmmaking.

Dutt's life and his film Pyaasa reminds one of the talented French filmmaker Jean Vigo and his film L'Atalante (1934); this is a richly rewarding forgotten work from a director who died too young.

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

My introduction to Guru Dutt's works is Kaagaz ke Phool (Paper Flowers), a film about a filmmaker trapped in the middle of a love triangle between a former wife and his muse, and choked by the public's overwhelming expectations of him. It has been said that the film (a box office failure in India) mirrored too much the life of Dutt, whose successes ended with his untimely death due to suicide. I was beholden by the film, which was an almost perfect marriage of beautiful black and white photography, understated musicality, lovely lyricism, orchestrated by Dutt's perfectionist direction. I thought Kaagaz ke Phool is Dutt's masterpiece, until now. Pyaasa (Thirst), made a few years before Kaagaz ke Phool is even lovelier, more lyrical, and more fine tuned.

While Kaagaz ke Phool's hero was a filmmaker, Pyaasa focuses on a different kind of artist --- the poet. Vijay (Guru Dutt), is a poet whose works are quickly dismissed by publishers. Driven out by his brothers, Vijay lives in the streets where he meets Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman), a prostitute who accidentally buys Vijay's poems from a junk shop. Vijay's thirst for recognition, both from the public and his former sweetheart Meena (Mala Sinha), leads him to work for rich publisher and Meena's husband Mr. Ghosh (Rehman), who jealously dismisses Vijay after knowing of his wife's former relations with the young poet.

From the start of the film, Dutt introduces us immediately to his character's poetry, and slightly opens our knowledge to the film's theme. Vijay is lying beside a pond, poetry is sung in the background --- about a bee being intoxicated by nectar, and how we cannot contribute to this world. The visuals move from Vijay to a bee gathering nectar from a flower, only to be crushed by a man walking past. Vijay is startled and travels to his publisher's office. Dutt populates his film with this kind of rich mixture of imagery, poetry, and music. It's as if Dutt has so much to say that his intentions cannot merely be covered by plain cinematics. Another moving scene is where Vijay, intoxicated after learning that his mother has died, goes out with his friends to Calcutta's red light district. Dutt's camera wildly motions as a street dancer feverishly dances as her baby is suffering from sickness --- then Dutt segues to a song number about prostitution and how a noble land can withstand such treatment. The lyrics is powerful enough to move, but mixed with the lamentful music, Dutt's expressionistic acting, and of course, his brilliant directing, and the fluid camera movement and gorgeous lighting, you have one of the most telling, most emotional cinematic sequences about prostitution ever put on screen.

Pyaasa is the film wherein Dutt found collaborators who would fit his film style perfectly. Before that, it was only Dutt and screenwriter Abrar Alvi who crafter their magic together. Of course, V.K. Murthy's cinematography has given Dutt's previous films topnotch visuals. In Pyaasa, Dutt discovered S.D. Burnam's wonderful music, music that does not require itself to be the centerpoint of each scene. Dutt also discovered his lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, whose poetry (or at least their translations) can be regarded as first class literature by themselves. Burnam and Ludhianvi's songs mix very well with Dutt's style of putting his musical numbers as backdrops to his cinematic style. An example here is when street performers sing a song about the thirst for love, while Gulabo has finally realized that she is in love with Vijay. There are no loud instruments, or intricate choreography, just a melody that can distinctly mold into the film's scenery, and lyrics that pertain directly to Dutt's intentions. It is that marriage of all these elements that make Pyaasa a perfect film.

However, it is not only technical department of the film that merited in Dutt's skill for discovering talent. Mala Sinha, who beautifully balances a materialistic exterior and an interior longing to love the poor poet, is also a newcomer. Also, Waheeda Rehman, that beautiful woman with perfectly sorrowful chestnut eyes, was handpicked personally by Dutt to portray the prostitute with the heart of gold. Years later, in Kaagaz ke Phool, Rehman would portray the director's love interest, who is curiously, a newly discovered actress. Here in Pyaasa, Rehman provides the film with the focal point for Dutt's rich emotions and perfectly drawn melodrama. She gives Dutt's themes a visual form.

It is quite interesting to note that Pyaasa is not really original in its storyline. It resembles timeless tales of poets and sages falling for women of lower classes. The love triangle here is similar to that of Devdas, which was filmed two times by two different directors, before Pyaasa was released. In fact, Dutt's themes aren't all very new. They've been the topic of stories, novels, epics, poems written ages before Dutt's time. However, the magic here is that Dutt borrows plots, themes, and characters, and breathes into them his personal touch and perfectionist eye, and the result is simply, the most beautiful (probably greatest) musicale ever made.

Pyaasa (1957) Upperstall

Rediff.com Dinesh Raheja

Pyaasa ( 1957 ) from the Guru Dutt Page

Planet Bollywood - Film Review Shahid Khan

100 films Lucas McNelly

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review

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Chicago Reader capsule review

DVDBeaver.com [Fred Patton]

KAAGAZ KE PHOOL (Fake Flowers)

India (148 mi) 1959 ‘Scope

Channel 4 Film capsule review

The tragic tale of a once great film director's slide into alcoholism and despair, set against the backdrop of Bollywood. A haunting rumination on the price of artistic greatness from a director who knew what he was talking about

In a short but dazzling career Guru Dutt produced some of Hindi cinema's most innovative films. Wilful, romantic and suspicious of populism, here he draws on a theme he knew well - the anguish of the maverick artist.

Told largely in flashback, the story follows director Suresh Singh (Dutt) as he struggles to recapture his former glory. Separated from his disdainful wife he discovers beautiful starlet Shanti (Ruhman), but not even she can protect him from his own self-destructive impulses.

It's a film laced with irony, both fictional and real. The alcoholic Singh is directing 'Devdas', the story of a hopeless lover who drinks himself to death. Dutt himself really did discover co-star Ruhman, and when Kagaaz Ke Phool bombed at the box office he fell into a long depression which ended with his suicide.

This was the first Indian film in CinemaScope and the visual elements alone suggest Dutt was justified in casting himself as the gifted director. But the most enduring image is the simplest - Dutt alone in a cavernous sound stage, remembering the days when he still mattered.

Verdict
An unusual but deeply rewarding Bollywood classic. Moody, melancholy and still astonishing to look at, it's a powerful profile of the romantic, rebel outsider.

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

I initially thought Pyaasa (Thirst, 1957) is the greatest musicale ever made, until I decided to watch Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) again. These two films by the great Indian filmmaker Guru Dutt have affected me tremendously. While Pyaasa is the more perfect film between the two, Kaagaz Ke Phool is more poignant, more memorable, and more beautiful to look at and listen to.

The opening is probably the most tragic entrance ever put in celluloid. An old man (Guru Dutt) passes through the gates of a film studio, stops by the imposing structure of the film studio. The framing of the old man's entrance to the studio shows the man made minuscule by a statue that marks the building. The man finally enters the studio. Beams of dust-littered light give the studio an eerie, forgotten atmosphere. The old man climbs up a flight of stairs, then starts singing of his fate. We become aware that it is not the studio that has been forgotten, it is the man who has been forgotten by the studio, the industry, the crowds that once adored him and his work. The old man, Suresh Sinha, used to be a very successful film director. Superimposed on his defeated teary face were moments of his former glory, with the elegance of the cinema where his film is met with applause by a crowd of cheering moviegoers.

Despite the successes in his field, there is something that is lacking in his life. Estranged from his wife (Veena) and daughter (Kumari Naaz), he focuses on his craft, with a project of adapting the tragic tale of Devdas. One rainy night, he chances upon Shanti (Waheeda Rehman). He offers the girl his coat, which she then returns to him one shooting day. Sinha notices virtues of innocence and simplicity in Shanti, requisites to the Devdas heroine and thus recruits her to star in the film, unknowing that he is starting to fall for her.

The film is beautiful. V. K. Murthy's cinematography adequately captures the film's melancholy and sadness through evocative framing and purposeful lighting. Giant shafts of light are utilized during the film's resonant moments such as during the film's love theme Waqt ne kiya (sung by Geeta Dutt), wherein Sinha catches Shanti knitting alone one early morning in the film's studio. The two at once recognize themselves as two lonely people who uniquely understand each other and such recognition, and given their difficult circumstances, becomes for them "sweet calamity," in a way that social norms and their respective fates prevent themselves from being with each other. Murthy's shafts of light give a quietly hopeful quality to the film's doomed lovers. It visually makes the aches more poignant as a tinge of unnatural beauty is revealed for an equally beautiful relationship prevented by the cruelty of human life.

Accompanying Murthy's grandiose visuals are the music composed by S. D. Burman, with lyrics written by Kaifi Azmi. One of the more notable songs is performed by Shanti, who relates to a group of kids a story about how the numbers kept on fighting to the detriment of the youngest number (1), forcing it to meet up with a same-fated number (0) to create a ten, which is again forcedly separated by other numbers. The melody, which is utterly simple and gratifyingly jovial, actually sounds like a nursery rhyme. However, it is burdened with the task of summarizing the entire film to little children. The result is a fascinating summary that is successful, embarrassingly too simple that the children relate to the message, singing and dancing along the happy rhythm of the song. Yet, it feels like that simplicity cannot exist in a world that is more interested in fame, success, class structures, and norms, something still alien to Shanti's wards' innocent minds.

If there is such a thing as imperfection in a film that perfectly captures the treacherous movements of life, more specifically life that is involved in movie-making, it is the side plot of Rocky (played by wonderful Bollywood comedian, Johnny Walker), Sinha's brother-in-law who constantly travels to Mumbai to race horses and hang out with movie people. He is disdained by his family for his unusual ways. Walker gives a welcome comedic air to the tragic affair but his inclusion in the film itself is more of a distraction rather than a pertinent entry. Seeing the film again, my initial reactions to Rocky's side plot remains. However, this narrative hiccup (by director Dutt and writer Abrar Alvi) makes the film mysteriously interesting. For sure, Rocky is that single character that connects the two impenetrable classes. He's the only important character who's free to choose his fate, certainly unlike Sinha or Shanti who are trapped with their tragic fates, and persistently evades anything that will take that freedom away.

Kaagaz Ke Phool is Dutt's most personal film. It is prophetic as it is autobiographic. Pyaasa may be the better and more coherent film, but if I were asked point blank without given any time to think, I would probably say that this film is my favorite of Dutt's films. It is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, film about filmmaking ever made.

Kaagaz ke Phool | Upperstall.com

University of Iowa - South Asian Studies Program [Philip Lutgendorf]

Rediff.com - The making of cult classic Dinesh Raheja, suggesting you might also want to read: How Nutan manipulated Saraswatichandra

Kaagaz ke Phool ( 1959 ) from the Guru Dutt Page

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Duty, Claude

HYPNOTIZED AND HYSTERICAL (HAIRSTYLIST WANTED) (Filles perdues, cheveux gras) C+ 79

France (100 mi) 2002

From the giant bowl of brightly-colored paella featuring dancing peas in the opening credits, we know this is an over the top comedy, and early on, when a young girl is fired from her job and breaks out into a hilarious song about how depressed she is, this turns into a musical farce that resembles models on parade, as it stars three beautiful women who are always dressed in fashionable attire, as if designed by Yves St. Laurent. The women include Amira Casar, the JAP, as she is affectionately name-called, an art saleswoman who quits her job and breaks up with her sleazy, coke-snorting, womanizing boyfriend, Charles Berling, discovers a new boyfriend, Sergi López, a sleazy would be swami who can lead her to discover her inner path, and Olivia Bonamy the angry, overly negative girl who loses her job and loses her daughter to social services, so hating everybody and everything, she hooks up with the same womanizing sleazeball, and Marina Foïs, pretty much everybody’s friend so long as there’s a drink in her hand, a lush with a fondness for vodka and hairdressing, as well as swimming and cute little animals. The three are miserable and commiserate with one another throughout the film. Some of this is hilarious, there’s even an animated cartoon section, which leads to a fanciful fantasy sequence at the end, as if life could be this silly. While it’s a terrific cast, and the initial songs and sketches are very funny, but they all sound alike after awhile, and as the silliness drags on, they seem to run out of new ideas.

DuVernay, Ana

SELMA B 87

USA Great Britain (127 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official Site

The movement is a rhythm to us
Freedom is like religion to us
Justice is juxtaposition in us
Justice for all just ain't specific enough
One son died, his spirit is revisitin' us
Truant livin' livin' in us, resistance is us
That's why Rosa sat on the bus
That's why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up
When it go down we woman and man up
They say, "Stay down" and we stand up
Shots, we on the ground, the camera panned up
King pointed to the mountain top and we ran up

One day, when the glory comes
It will be ours, it will be ours
Oh, one day, when the war is one
We will be sure, we will be here sure
Oh, glory, glory

[HD] Common & John Legend - Glory (Selma) - GMA ... YouTube (3:12)

One supposes that each generation needs to revisit their relationship with history, especially events recent enough to still be fresh in our minds, where the release of this film comes on the heels of the marches in Ferguson, Missouri, precipitated by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, an unarmed 18-year old black youth shot by a white police officer. Written by first-time white screenwriter Paul Webb, with considerable uncredited rewrites by the director herself (specifically some of Martin Luther King’s speeches, as the rights had previously been obtained by other film studios), SELMA is a historical drama of events during the Civil Rights movement, African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–68), taking place in the early months of 1965, coming after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination, but the powers to enforce the act remained weak, making it difficult for blacks to register to vote, where the film documents the non-violent methods of civil disobedience implemented by Martin Luther King in the voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama that turned into an all-out assault by the local police, smashing heads with Billy clubs and beating several marchers unconscious, images broadcast across the nation that eventually lead to an outpouring of support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed into law several months later on August 6, 1965. The film shows how the past is still relevant to the present, and that progress is never guaranteed, especially because the events of the past bear an uncanny resemblance to events of today, particularly the number of young black men being shot and killed by police officers, making this essential viewing. Just as importantly, on June 25, 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (Oyez: Shelby County v. Holder) essentially struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws overnight without Federal oversight, where incredibly Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that the law was “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.” With Republicans making dire warnings of predicted “voter fraud,” even with no evidence or previous history of fraud, 13 states quickly passed more restrictive voter ID laws, as scores of election laws were suddenly enacted banning same day registration, a common practice in some states, and requiring voter ID’s in a blatant attempt to thin the ranks of poor and minority voters, where according to this November 5, 2014 article, How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make, by Wendy R. Reiser, a former NYU Law School professor, the changes already had a significant impact as recently as the November 2014 elections that ushered in a Republican landslide, where once again millions of disenfranchised voters across the country were legally turned away from polling booths, 600,000 in Texas alone, exactly as they were half a century ago.

While SELMA is considered a “black” film, largely due to the historical civil rights subject matter, where this is the first fictional film depicting Martin Luther King and is actually that rare Hollywood film directed by a black woman, but only three out of eleven producers backing the film are black, including billionaire television mogul Oprah Winfrey, the director herself, and Paul Garnes, an executive producer from the Tyler Perry Studios. With one Latina working out of Hollywood, all the rest are white, including Brad Pitt and two other execs from his Plan B Entertainment studios, and four British/Irish producers associated with British film director Danny Boyle. While this is as racially diverse as Hollywood allows, an industry where black history is almost exclusively projected through an all-white lens, using blacks in front of the camera with whites thoroughly entrenched behind the scenes, much like Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013), although recent low-budget independent films like Fruitvale Station (2013) have attempted to change that perception by showing a day in the life of a young, unarmed black kid eventually shot by police before the night is over, where at the moment it is estimated that police kill a black man, woman, or child every 28 hours. Nearly half have no weapon on them, or anything resembling a weapon when they are killed, though in more than a third of the cases the police allege the victims displayed a weapon, often disputed by witnesses on the scene, as only 18% (less than one in five) are actually armed. Blacks are arrested at nearly 3 times the rate of other Americans, while the likelihood of black males going to prison in their lifetime is 28% compared to 4% of white males, and if that black male drops out of high school the number skyrockets to 50%. While other films like The Central Park Five (2012), In the Land of the Free... (2009), and The Trials of Darryl Hunt (2006) document the lengthy prison terms served by blacks who were wrongfully convicted, according to The National Registry of Exonerations, since 1989 blacks constitute nearly half of all wrongfully convicted cases, where the disparity is greatest in sexual assault cases, as black defendants constitute 25 percent of prisoners incarcerated for rape, but 61 percent of those exonerated for such crimes. Still, according to a December 31, 2014 article published by the Chicago Reporter, Data: Black Chicagoans at higher risk of being shot by police, Chicago police are 10 times more likely to shoot blacks compared to whites, where the city pays out millions of dollars in damages each year to settle related lawsuits involving police misconduct (specifically $45.5 million from 441 lawsuits between January 2009 and November 2011), most based on excessive force and false arrest allegations, where a third of these cases involve repeat police offenders, with 4 out of 5 of them retaining their jobs, as rarely are members of the police force found culpable.

With this in mind, SELMA is not a new radical approach in cinema, but seems more instrumental in becoming a teaching moment to reacquaint a new generation of viewers to this recent chapter in Civil Rights history, a timely look back, drawing parallels into our modern world, using the Spielberg model of emotional manipulation in an attempt to hook the most amount of viewers. Spielberg is a contentious director to cineastes and art film devotees as the measure of his success has largely come in dollars and cents instead of artistic accolades, where he has always ridden the wave of convention instead of carving out new roads. Spielberg always associated his historical dramas like AMISTAD (1997) and Lincoln (2012) with teaching moments, which included handing out educational materials with the release of his films, much like blockbuster films use merchandising. Similarly, pamphlets and free educational materials have been made available to the teaching community with the release of this film, where the director Ana DuVernay has indicated the film is a teaching tool that she hopes will trigger curiosity in students, though she cautions that the film condenses 13 years into 120 minutes, where she hopes educators will fill in the history gaps in classrooms nationwide. The film is not without controversy, however, as President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), after an early career voting against racial equality became a strong proponent who helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but was more interested in advancing his War on Poverty agenda that he introduced in his January 1964 State of the Union address and felt the time was not yet right for Selma or voting rights, believing this could undermine the southern votes needed for passing his own legislation. While taped conversations between King and Johnson confirm that the President supported King’s cause, many watching the film will assume that Johnson was an obstacle for civil rights leaders, as the film shows Johnson meeting with King ahead of time and is adamantly against his intentions to march in Selma, fearing it could lead to a bloodbath, while also well aware of the divisive racial power of voting rights in the South, that passage of the bill would for all intensive purposes hand the mostly Democratic South over to the Republicans for generations to come (which indeed it has). The film actually demonizes Johnson, suggesting he attempted to sabotage King’s efforts in Selma by endorsing the dirty tricks of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker) to discredit King and his wife, where the timeline of the movie events are set by FBI agent surveillance reports where King and his supporters are referred to as agitators and black militants. While Johnson certainly had access to these files and no doubt listened to FBI tapes (as do all Presidents), there is no evidence suggesting Johnson directed or controlled the sinister and malicious actions of J. Edgar Hoover and his illegal spy operation known as COINTELPRO. The FBI campaign to discredit and destroy King was marked by extreme personal vindictiveness, where as early as 1962 Hoover himself penned an FBI memorandum, “King is no good,” claiming he was “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” Shortly afterwards in 1963, Time magazine chose King as the “Man of the Year,” and later in October 1964 at the age of thirty-five he won the Nobel Peace Prize, at the time the youngest recipient to ever win the award, an honor which elicited Hoover’s comment calling King the “most notorious liar” in the country.

The opening sequence blends together the FBI smear campaign against King, his trip abroad to receive the Nobel Prize, the racially motivated 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of a Birmingham church in September, 1963 killing four young black girls, and the eerily cruel attempt of Selma resident Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) to register to vote when the white registrar makes the outrageous demand that she name all sixty-seven names of the Alabama county judges before he’ll grant her request, stamping “rejected” on her application. While highlighting the role of King, the film is not a King biopic, but a snapshot of a particular place and time, a moment in history that still resonates today with astonishing power. David Oyelowo, a classically trained British-Nigerian actor spent seven years campaigning for the role of Martin Luther King, but Lee Daniels, the original director on the film didn’t believe he was right for the part. Due to the slowness to materialize, most of the original cast and Daniels eventually left the film project, where it was Oyelowo who suggested Ana DuVernay as the director, as they worked together in an earlier film she directed, MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (2012). What Oyelowo brings to the role is the familiar cadence of King’s speech that the audience immediately recognizes, while another British-Nigerian actress Carmen Ejogo plays Coretta Scott King, where each bring the required level of dignity and reflection to their relationship, which is tested throughout by continued FBI leaks to King’s wife. By the time King arrives to Selma with religious leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in January, 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a collection of white and black volunteers, mostly college students, had already been leading a voter registration drive since 1961, having received considerable resistance in their efforts from white county law enforcement officials, where in the summer of 1964, three SNCC workers, James E. Chaney of Mississippi, and Michael H. Schwerner and Andrew Goodman of New York, were killed by white supremacists. While Selma had a population that was 50 percent black, only 1 percent of the town’s black residents were registered as voters. King proposed the two organizations work together, combining forces against Selma’s racial intransigence, organizing a series of demonstrations in front of the Dallas County Courthouse, bringing national coverage to their efforts, hoping to build momentum from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to win federal protection for voting rights. On February 17, protestor Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) was fatally shot by an anonymous Alabama state trooper in a full-out night assault against marchers, events that were not captured by television cameras due to the cover of darkness.

In response, a protest march from Selma to Montgomery was scheduled for Sunday, March 7, where six hundred marchers assembled in Selma, including Rev. Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce) from SCLC and John Lewis (Stephan James), then SNCC chairman, now a prominent U.S. Congressman from Georgia who has been re-elected nine times since 1986, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge (now a U.S. National Historic Landmark) over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery, the state capitol. On the other side, however, they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police led by Sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston) who ordered them to turn around. When the protesters refused, to the cheers of white bystanders the officers shot teargas and charged the crowd on horseback, beating the nonviolent protesters over their heads with Billy clubs, including John Lewis who still bears the scars, knocking several unconscious, including one of the organizers, Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint), a longtime friend of both Martin and Coretta King, where a picture of her lying on the Edmund Pettus Bridge was broadcast around the world, ultimately hospitalizing over fifty people, a day now commonly referred to as Bloody Sunday. Outraged by the events, King called upon supporters to come to Selma for a second march two days later, where he was encouraged by the outpouring of support from clergy and other sympathizers across the nation, but also warned by the Justice Department to wait until the courts could rule on whether the protesters deserved federal protection, as Alabama Governor George Wallace (Tim Roth) refused to intercede. Still conflicted, King led the second march on March 9, but after kneeling in prayer he turned the marchers back before crossing the bridge, a momentary pause for mutual reflection. That night, however, a white group beat and murdered civil rights activist James Reeb (Jeremy Strong), a minister from Boston who heeded King’s call to come to Selma for the second march. King’s actions exacerbated the tension between SCLC and the more militant SNCC, who were pushing for more radical tactics that would move from nonviolent protest to active opposition against racist leaders and institutions, where in the late 60’s SNCC changed their name and eventually became a black nationalist group advocating black power, where an attempt to align themselves with the Black Panther Party failed, with the organization largely disappearing after that in the early 70’s, where only small local chapters remained. Several weeks afterwards on March 21, however, the historic final march included federal protection, leading to the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 several months later.

While the weakness of this film is an uneven script that often stumbles into poor melodrama substituting for history, one of the real surprises is how King is not portrayed “only” as the noble hero, like he’s always been depicted in history lessons or Black History month, but as an ordinary man who takes out the garbage and appreciates a lively conversation over a home-cooked meal, while he’s also a great orator with unique abilities to stand up to extraordinary pressure, whose human flaws are exposed alongside an acknowledgment that the movement under his direction made plenty of mistakes, often paying too high a price by underestimating or miscalculating damaging outcomes. History is never a perfect picture, but DuVernay does do an impressive job revisiting this unique moment in history, making a compelling case for remembering the hard-earned lessons of the past and learning from those mistakes, as otherwise those same problems are likely to reemerge and haunt future generations. The film quite clearly demonstrates how a nation’s past shapes its current form, where there seems to be a strong urge among many, including Supreme Court Justices, to dismiss any disadvantage minority groups still have today by ushering in phrases like “that was 60 years ago,” but films like this show that national policies made hundreds of years ago still have consequences that are being felt today. One can’t talk about race, or even poverty or social injustice, without acknowledging how we arrived at this point in time. It is essential, therefore, that we examine our own unvarnished history without a Hollywood lens. The LBJ inaccuracies in the film are no worse than Ben Affleck’s intentional distortion of the truth in Argo (2012), dismissing the role of the Canadians and once again creating a fictitious version of Hollywood heroism, yet that film won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In American Sniper (2014), audiences are clearly willing to whitewash history in the Hollywood style and overlook the racist component of the American soldier in their zealous rush to support our troops and label the film heroic and patriotic, while in SELMA it’s a much harder sell to stare into the face of American racism and see how it impacts upon our lives today. In attempting to be honest about history, whatever SELMA may be, it’s not the condensed or sanitized version that Argo and American Sniper are, fictitious Hollywood films that feed into a false mythological impression of America. The disinterest in SELMA at the Cineplex suggests America is not yet interested in reliving the past or in addressing the message of racism while instead preferring movies with a toned down and mostly white Hollywood view. Yet only by conscientiously acknowledging our past and seeing how it shapes the present do we have any hope of understanding the myriad of complex racial problems that continue to plague us in the present.

Film Racket [Bill Gibron]

What has happened to our country? Where did it all go so very, very wrong?

A little over 50 years ago, people took to the streets to defend their inherent human rights while politicians played policy games in closed door backroom strategy sessions. Once both sides could see the bigger picture, there was compromise and advancement. Now, less than a lifetime later, we seem to be going backwards.

Case in point: The Voting Rights Act, the groundbreaking legislation at the center of the surprising contemporary-feeling movie Selma. In 1964, the Rev. Martin Luther King and his followers used non-violent protest to earn minorities the unencumbered ability to vote. In 2014, it looks like everything they achieved has been drained of its meaning.

The focus is very narrow in Ava DuVernay’s amazing motion picture. Instead of taking on Dr. King’s (a brilliant David Oyelowo) legacy, she concentrates on the famous march from Selma to the Alabama state capital at Montgomery. The “I Have a Dream” speech has already happened and Lyndon Johnson (an equally effective Tom Wilkinson) has gotten Congress to pass his all-important Civil Rights Act. Both sides want more. Johnson wants King’s help to wage war on poverty. King, on the other hand, wants clarification and enforcement of the Act’s provisions, including easier access to the ballot box for Southern blacks.

What’s stopping things? Well, local officials, empowered by pigheaded politicians like Alabama governor George Wallace (Tim Roth), are creating barriers and obstructions to voter registration, such as poll taxes, intelligence tests, and other such non-white oriented nonsense. King wants to rally the citizens of Selma, and with the help of other grassroots activists, they take to the streets.

This bothers Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo). She fears for her husband’s safety. She also believes he has lost his way and is enamored of the attention given to her man by the powers that be. Eventually, the March happens, and the racist sheriff and his men proceed to beat the participants. After an important court case, King joins the rally, taking his message all the way to the Alabama capital steps.

Selma is an astonishing work. It’s insightful and important, entertaining without being preachy or predictable. Even those of us who grew up in the time and remember the history firsthand can learn something here. If all change is about sacrifice, then the events that played out in Selma cost everyone something significant. The loss to the participants is obvious. Too many broken and bloodied bodies. Too many dead. But King is also shown losing his “innocence,” becoming as much a tool for change as a manipulated pawn in a bigger political game. There’s a telling scene where Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch) shows up in Selma to offer his help as a “buffer.” “Let me be the one they all fear,” he tells Mrs. King, “So they will run to your husband as the one they can trust.”

Indeed, within all the indelible images of bigotry and fear (the film offers up one of the most devastating looks at the 4 Little Girls case you’ll ever witness), Selma stays centered on the people. Johnson and King have a great series of casual debates, each one proposing and then countering before coming to some conclusion, good or bad. Neither is inflammatory, but matter of fact. The President wants to do more for minorities. King’s argument is, give them all the tools possible and then maybe they can fend for themselves. The Voting Rights Act, the same Voting Rights Act that the 2014 Supreme Court just dismantled, was the crux of this coming together.

And when you factor in events like Ferguson, when you see how racially motivated most of the political discussion is today, it makes Selma all the more difficult to watch. Five decades ago, people paid with their lives for change in this country. Now, under the guise of such “progress,” we’re backsliding into bigotry, albeit in the name of “taking America back from the government.” Selma shows us where we were going. Watching it now, it’s depressing how far from that path we’ve strayed.

PopMatters [Chris Barsanti]

Ava DuVernay’s Selma is at once powerful and thoughtful. In presenting Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo), it focuses on the difference between his private and public faces, as well as his efforts to keep them separate. These efforts were never more difficult than during the weeks leading up to March 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Rather than try to paint a definitive portrait of the man or the Civil Rights movement, the film instead makes the case that this march was one of many battles in a long struggle, and moreover, that King was all too aware of that long view.

King first appears in mid-speech, Oyelowo’s cadences impeccably mastered to evoke our own memories. DuVernay manages a neat trick here by pulling her camera back to show that he’s speaking into a mirror, rehearsing with the help of his wife Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo). It’s a down-to-earth scene played by Oyelowo and Ejogo with a warm ease that is all the more impressive given what comes next: King’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964. It’s a critical moment, one that might be the culmination of another person’s life, after all the hard work was done. But King received the Nobel just before the build-up to the Selma march, and still, the international honor provided no protection in the Old South. While trying to check in to a white hotel in Selma, King is punched by a random white man enraged by the mere appearance of an outside agitator.

Selma celebrates King and other leaders in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) who were agitators, including their role in the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination in schools and employment. Afterwards, President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) meets with King repeatedly, trying to slow the building energy of the movement. “This voting rights thing,” he says, “is just going to have to wait.” The movie showcases the problem that waiting presents, in a scene where Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey), trying to register, is humiliated by a sneering white county clerk in Selma.

Johnson, like many white leaders at the time, sees King as a nuisance but, because of his dedication to nonviolence, a useful ally to have for tamping down expectations of rapid civil rights progress and warding off “these militant Malcolm X types.” But even when Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch) makes a brief appearance, assuring a King confederate that while they disagree on methods, he’s willing to play the radical alternative that could help push white opinion toward King, the SCLC decides that a highly publicized clash is needed to force the issue. “Selma it is,” announces Dr. King. 

Throughout the film, King makes no apologies for inciting trouble. His detractors in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), including a young John Lewis (Stephan James), initially resent the SCLC showing up in Selma where they’ve been working on voter issues for years. When they suggest that King is a publicity hound, he doesn’t disagree. To him, the motivating principle of nonviolent protest is not only its moral imperative, but also its demonstration to white Americans the persistent costs of racism and segregation. To do this, he and his colleagues seek news coverage, to reveal stories of violent repression in their morning newspaper headlines and evening TV broadcasts.

For King, the march from Selma is tactical, particularly after Cooper becomes a movement hero when she slugs the brutally racist sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston). King knows that blood will be shed, and, we see in several debates as well as in intimate scenes at home, that this tears him up. But he also knows that a smarter and less overtly racist sheriff couldn’t be counted on to overreact in a way that would make dramatic news. The film doesn’t dodge the violence but places it in contexts. The violence here isn’t just personal and immediate, demanding revenge or justice. It’s systemic, in need of long-term changes.

That said, the film presents the “Bloody Sunday” assault in a series of urgent, visceral images, as the police take after protestors at night, with the lights suddenly turned off and officers charging as though they are taking on enemy combatants, shooting Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) dead in front of horrified witnesses. Later, when marchers in Selma first approach the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they’re greeted by ranks of masked troopers brandishing clubs. Showing both instances of such oppressive tactics is crucial to the film’s approach. It doesn’t care so much about individual racism as it does about an entire population being terrorized by official representatives. King lays out the scope of this system when he tells Johnson that he’s seeking support for “citizens under attack”.

Both contemplative and combative, Selma presents a number of historical turning points in a style that might be called impressionistic. It skips from one moment to the next with no interstitial webbing, trusting in viewers’ ability to follow along without extraneous exposition. This depiction of different critical moments with important people can lead to some Lee Daniels-style stunt casting, particularly featuring white performers. Tim Roth’s campy George Wallace impression seems to come from a different film, while lesser known black leaders gathering in Selma have more time on screen to develop. Scenes where DuVernay tracks King and his team, including James Bevel (Common) and Andrew Young (André Holland), as they strategize or goof off, are some of the finest in the film. Even more potent are those between Martin and Coretta, particularly one where she confronts him with FBI-supplied evidence of his infidelities.

Selma’s showcasing of individual moments over the educational arc helps to make this saga feel immediate, not preordained but unfolding as a series of actions, planned and unplanned. While the dramatic final Selma to Montgomery march is only shown via news footage, the focus on events leading up to the march is in tune with how history might be experienced by those in the thick of it. In this way, the movie illustrates what British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said when he was asked to describe the most difficult part of his job: “Events, dear boy, events”.

Slant Magazine [Steve Macfarlane]

While the real-world exigencies of Ava DuVernay's Selma need no elaboration here, what will make the film essential for future generations isn't mere flashpoint topicality, but the way it aligns an old struggle with a current one—and, remarkably, manages to do so without completely losing its sense of optimism. Shaking the dust off of a storied chapter in U.S. history, the film is as much about the "imperfect union" alleged by Barack Obama back in 2008 as it is about the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march spearheaded by Martin Luther King, which precipitated the passage of the Voting Rights Act. (It should be noted, too, that said federal legislation was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013, handing keys to voter discrimination back to the governments of 15 states—the majority of them in the South.) Selma isn't just in theaters this Christmas because we're long overdue for a King biopic, then, but also because a major Hollywood studio is willing to acknowledge how little things have really changed for black people in this country.

Credited to Paul Webb, but widely understood to have been ghost-rewritten by DuVernay, the screenplay leads off by juxtaposing two touchstones: the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama bombing that killed four young black girls, and King's acceptance of the 1964 Nobel Peace prize. As embodied by David Oyelowo, this MLK can be both a purveyor of healing words and, when necessary, a sharp-elbowed political operator. His Southern Christian Leadership Congress (SCLC) converges in Selma in January of 1965, drawing up a battle plan with the counsel of Rev. Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce), Andrew Young (Andre Holland), and Diane Nash (Tessa Thompson); each hashed-out step toward announcing the march is tenuous at best, and these contentious strategy sessions allow DuVernay to avoid the foregone conclusion-ism that haunts nearly every other film of this type. The reformed, post-Nation of Islam Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch) even makes a quick appearance, contextualizing the SCLC's work within the broader black struggle and enriching DuVernay's vision of the movement as all-too-human.

Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) summons King to the White House a handful of times, hoping that the civil rights leader will give his public blessing to the Great Society reforms. With Alabama's voter suppression problem on his mind, King refuses—at which point LBJ, after browbeating him for missing the bigger picture, reluctantly seeks an assist from J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker). King's trajectory across the South is thus framed in FBI surveillance dispatches typed out on screen; that the same government that would name a holiday after King once sent him letters recommending he kill himself is one of many necessary myth-correctives stuffed in this decidedly mainstream film's text. After a tape with muffled sounds of King cavorting with another woman is mailed to his house, he denies to his wife, Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), that it's him—to which she responds with the film's most loaded single piece of dialogue: "I know...I know what you sound like." Shot with velvety stillness by cinematographer Bradford Young, their late-night confrontation may well be the film's most nail-biting scene.

If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, it's because it is—not that Selma lacks for sequences of blistering, cringe-inducing power. After a rally, activist Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) and his parents hide out in a diner; when a state trooper fires on the unarmed Jimmie at point-blank range, the young man's eyes bulge and hollow as he slumps to the floor, dying in slow motion. DuVernay and Young are ever-scrupulous in calcifying the state's violence without losing the thread, avoiding the droves of faceless victims so many prestige pics rely on as safe, distant fodder from which viewers are encouraged to wince. But strictly as a piece of filmmaking, Selma's eyes are bigger than its stomach. During one late scene, Young indulges no less than five disparate camera angles on King as he speaks, and while they all look great, the abortiveness of the editing is distracting. Worse, the all-important final passage feels rushed, even a little perfunctory: Like sand in the hourglass, those details DuVernay clearly relished in the film's early scenes slip away as King and his team start seeing an actual breakthrough. Before contracting, the narrative is only allowed to be so complicated.

On the day of the march, Young's camera quietly snakes up the skeletal, rusted Edmund Pettus Bridge at dawn, a vista with the dreamlike serenity of a flashback and yet queasy foreboding to spare. Following a fruitless huddle with Alabama's white-supremacist governor, George Wallace (Tim Roth), LBJ has an epic about-face and initiates the Voting Rights Act before Congress; white and black protesters alike rush to Selma from across the country, and the march proceeds nonviolently. And this is where, after stockpiling so many sociopolitical complexities, Selma makes the worst of its (relatively minor) stumbles: Did this retelling—both epic and intimate, lush and brutal—really need to wrap itself up with a PBS-worthy montage? The film loops back around for a coda during King's victorious Montgomery address, with supertitles detailing the destinies of its many characters; the roll call includes white activist Viola Liuzzo, who, the film notes was murdered by white supremacists mere hours after the speech depicted—a commendable note of discontent embedded within an otherwise triumphalist ending. DuVernay claims the version in theaters is her own cut, but the finale is so restrained that it's jarring, rendering the actual march—which took four days—something of an afterthought. You're left wondering what kind of Hollywood needs three consecutive three-hour Hobbit features, but can't cough up another 30 minutes for Martin Luther King.

PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]

"Selma" is the perfect title for Ava DuVernay's brilliant new film.  It crystallizes a seminal moment in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in America through demands for justice, non-violence and a radical transformation of the collective conscience.  "Selma" goes behind key moments and through specific points of an arduous, deadly Bloody Sunday journey of March 7, 1965, in a mosaic of nuance, terror and triumph. 

Pulsing with humanity, grace and power, "Selma" is a grand yet intimate look at process: the process of achieving justice, the process of a time, place and evolution of a people and, crucially, of a movement and a country.  Ms. DuVernay's film is an immersive, tactical, strategic colloquy and at times an electrifying public debate about the question of a people's very existence and their right to exist and participate in a supposed democracy.  And "Selma" is extraordinary. 

Violence punctuates and competes with the film's verbalized de jure injustices: Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) faces barriers to entry in enfranchisement at her voting precinct in Selma to register.  The scope of these two polar opposite cadences -- violence and vocalization -- are given large, unblinking canvases as movies in their own right, magnified in their American time and present.  The issue of the right to vote for Blacks in 1965 is the centerpiece upon which "Selma" stands.  This issue is the Old Glory flag in the sand that Ms. DuVernay, and the Civil Rights Movement of yesteryear (and now) plants. 

The U.S. Supreme Court however, yanked from the soil the American flag that Ms. DuVernay has now metaphorically re-planted, when it struck down a key part (Section 4) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013, thereby keeping alive the questions "Selma" re-establishes and, hence, Black people's enduring struggle for justice.  The U.S. Supreme Court decision of 2013, which said that voting was no longer an impediment to Blacks in states where a legacy of discrimination existed, relied on the idea that because President Obama was elected, times were therefore different.  One of the states the Court's evisceration of what Dr. King and so many fought for?  None other than Alabama, the state from which the city of the film's title belongs.

The decision, Chief Justice Roberts wrote in 2013, is "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day."  Justice Roberts' tone-deaf view of progress is a satellite view held by large numbers of people about a continuous struggle and illustrates why Ms. DuVernay's film is so important, and why she uses "Selma" to sound the alarm to spark and awaken a new generation and energize, edify and inspire them to action.  Given recent events, pride and emotion will swell even more so within all who watch "Selma".  "Selma" is an instant classic, a film that will be revered and applauded throughout the annals of American history, long after we are gone.

It is in its renewed and fully-calibrated look at very recent American history in this fertile and volatile present-day American social and political climate that "Selma" achieves its greatest heights.  The film is a vitally necessary reeducation of an American public, some of whom, like Chief Justice Roberts, may insist that enduring progress has been made.  Progress and process are key measuring sticks.  And as "Selma" shows, for Blacks and for America, steps are gained, but can also be quickly knocked down or scuttled, either by violence or a decision.

In setting the table of its tense, atmospheric stage, "Selma" covers America's systemic and centuries-long attack on the Black body and the Black body politic.  There's a series of psychological and physical punishments (mostly the latter) that burn holes through your heart.  Some of these episodes arrive without warning, which is usually how violence strikes.  Shocks to the system.  And your conscience.

If there's Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln talking in 1863, then, 100 years-plus later, Martin Luther King and Lyndon Baines Johnson are talking.  "Selma" shows the process of discussion, the stages of graduation upon which Blacks have had to fight for to be afforded the basic dignities of America's promise.  In Mr. Douglass's day it was the question of a graduation from enslavement.  In Dr. King's, the right to vote and exercise the preciousness of the franchise.  In Barack Obama's day, the right to vote unencumbered in the South (through Chief Justice Roberts' decision) and elsewhere (through voting machine manipulation by corporations) as well as the continuing violence by the state (in Missouri, Ohio, New York, Arizona, Utah and everywhere) against Blacks.

The poster for "Selma" keenly reflects Barack Obama's day, as well as 1965, and it, like the film itself, is timeless.  "Selma" illustrates the Black non-violent civil disobedience struggle in an innately violent society.  Each element of that struggle has distinctly identified names and faces of people many may not know.  These brave, determined and often unsung individuals are calibrated and given full voice, through Paul Webb's screenplay, lensed through Bradford Young's great cinematography and Ms. DuVernay's superb direction, in the best-directed film of 2014.  "Selma" covers all the bases.  So does Aisha Coley's magnificent casting.

Ms. DuVernay never seeks to canonize Dr. King, nor make him a hallowed icon of perfection.  She gives him the dimension and respect America at large has never completely and honestly afforded him.  (Distilling him to a single speech, or holding Dr. King holiday mattress sales today seem awkward at best, and disrespectful, for example.) 

That said, Mr. Oyelowo's stunning performance is rich, and he breathes life into Dr. King by allowing King to breathe as a human being.  Mr. Oyelowo's King is measured, unwavering and very unlike the staid, safe-for consumption portrait the media often cultivates.  "Let me hear God's words," he intones to a famous singer when times get perilous.  We see the toll, the price, the physical and mental travails on Dr. King. 

Strikes of violence are not isolated or limited, and exist as distinct punctuations amidst a verbal percussive and persuasion to America, and to the White House, where Dr. King has been assiduously lobbying LBJ (Tom Wilkinson, in good form here).  There's layers of voices and layers of violence, and throughout "Selma" these clash as discordantly as possible.  Voices?  Or violence?  Which of those will ultimately win out?

Much of the director's own fresh breath of life for Dr. King is to correct the hagiographic rendering history has often bestowed upon him.  The Dr. King that America and the world has heretofore known is a safe, polished man, viewed as perfect -- as destructive a packaging as Sidney Poitier's character in "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" (1967) ever was.  Ms. DuVernay humanizes Dr. King in a way that no previous film on television incarnation (even that of the late, great Paul Winfield).

"Selma", a cultural touchstone and restorative film, is a careful update and inclusion of the expanded spectrum of players on a global stage.  King, and the Civil Rights history gets a fulsome replenishment for today.

The director also gives the movement its proper respect and perspective, placing us squarely inside the intricacies and internecine aspects of its different methods and personality clashes.  This declarative authenticating and personalization of individuals -- Black ones -- is a notable distinction in Hollywood studio film, and a refreshing, resolute rejoinder to a long-held view in some white circles that Blacks are a monolith.  (Just look at the recent Amy Pascal-Scott Rudin Sony emails if you doubt me.) 

That Ms. DuVernay gives diverse voices (women, young, old, white and Black) their proper place on the mantelpiece of Americana and as American patriots, is not only significant but reaffirms the unassailable truth that a movement never dies, even if some of its figures do, but even more to the point -- that the fallen are always remembered.  Fittingly, the film is titled "Selma", which gives Ms. DuVernay the appropriate latitude to make an even greater, salutary and impactful film that encompasses the contribution of all towards making America a greater, more hospitable place. 

One reason "Selma" is so very alive is its dual activist parchment: it retools and more accurately depicts the realities of the people then who fought for today, while portending and galvanizing the present generation that fights for tomorrow. 

"Selma", even apart from today's headlines, is constructed as a very vivid and present experience.  Its unflinching look at state violence and its pictorial representation of what some today argue so fervently for --"state's rights" -- aka the right of the state to brutalize and block Black voters at will and pervert the very process some white Southerners then (and some whites in all places today) claimed to believe in, ring deep and true.  The film is a salute and reaffirmation of the most quintessential American right: the right to protest and the enduring right to non-violence.  This principle flies in the very face of the violence America was founded on.  And it is boldly and defiantly displayed in "Selma", one of the year's very best films.

In "Selma" amidst the violence and racist recrimination is an intellectual discussion, organization and strategy, and it is riveting.  The film not only behaves as a self-referencing as living, breathing 1960s drama it self-identifies to the present as a document placed squarely and unabashedly in the lap of today's younger generation. 

Sight & Sound [Ashley Clark] February 5, 2015

World Socialist Web Site [Fred Mazelis and Tom Mackaman]

National Review Online [Armond White]

Ava DuVernay's Urgent Selma Speaks to the Now | Village ... Stephanie Zacharek

Martin Luther King film Selma, reviewed. - Slate Dana Stevens

Slate [Jamelle Bouie]

Movie Review: Selma -- Vulture David Edelstein

"Parallels Between Selma and Ferguson are Indisputable" CBS News, December 15, 2014

“What ‘Selma’ Gets Wrong” Mark K. Updegrove, presidential historian, author of Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency, and director of the L.B.J. Presidential Library and Museum, from Politico, December 22, 2014

How Accurate Is Selma? - Slate Dee Lockett from Slate, December 24, 2014

Washington Post op-ed Joseph A. Califano Jr. December 26, 2014

Film fact-checking is here to stay. So let's agree on some ... Film fact-checking is here to stay. So let’s agree on some new rules, by Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post, January 3, 2015

Washington Post Film Critic Ann Hornaday on “Selma” Jack Marshall from Ethics Alarms, January 3, 2015

Ava DuVernay And Gay Talese Challenge Claims Of Historical Inaccuracies In ... Matthew Jacobs from The Huffington Post, January 7, 2015

What 'Selma' Can Teach in the Classroom Mia Toschi from The Huffington Post, January 8, 2015

Eyewitness: What ‘Selma’ Got Right Richard Valeriani from The Daily Beast, January 10, 2015

Selma - Salon.com Elias Isquith interviews Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, author of “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress and Battle for the Great Society, January 13, 2015

What the Hell Happened to 'Selma'? - Grantland Mark Harris, January 15, 2015

PopMatters [Bill Gibron] Why the 'Selma' Snub Matters, January 21, 2015

How 'Selma' Got Smeared « - Grantland Mark Harris, January 28, 2015

Americas black body reality: How Selma, Scandal ... America’s “black body” reality: How Selma, “Scandal” & Ferguson reveal an ugly truth, by Brittney Cooper from Salon, March 11, 2015

“America's Third World”: The marchers have gone, but ... “America’s Third World”: The marchers have gone, but Selma is still mired in poverty, by David Masciotra from Salon, March 15, 2015

The New Yorker [David Denby]

ErikLundegaard.com - Movie Review: Selma (2014)

SELMA Movie Review - Badass Digest Devin Faraci

Movie Mezzanine [Russell Hainline]

'Selma' Review: Rarely Is So Pivotal A Moment In ... - Pajiba TK

'Selma's' Star and Director Weren't Snubbed -- They Were ... Selma's' Star and Director Weren't Snubbed -- They Were Ignored, by Sarah Carlson, TK, and Genevieve Burgess from Pajiba, January 15, 2015

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 2014 [Erik Beck]

Little White Lies [David Jenkins]

ArtsHub [Sarah Ward]

Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

Flavorwire [Jason Bailey]

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

Critic After Dark [Noel Vera]

'Selma' Review: Martin Luther King Gets His ... - TheWrap James Rocchi

Review: Selma is a powerful portrait of Martin Luther ... - HitFix Gregory Ellwood

Alt Film Guide [Tim Cogshell]

The Film Stage [Jordan Raup]

Writing: Movies [Chris Knipp]

outlawvern.com [Vern]

Review: SELMA Is Far More Than Just A Martin ... - Twitch Jason Gorber

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

Selma: MLK in Masterful Microcosm - The Atlantic Christopher Orr

DVDTalk.com [Jeff Nelson]

Selma : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Olie Coen

AVForums [Steve Withers]

DVDizzy.com [Luke Bonanno]

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

ReelTalk [Diana Saenger]

Cinemixtape [J. Olson]

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

Selma - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

[Review] Selma - The Film Stage Jordan Raup

Hannah McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie] and here: Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Hannah McHaffie]

Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]

Dog And Wolf [Mark Wilshin]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

New York Observer [Rex Reed]

Spectrum Culture [David Harris]

From The Balcony [Bill Clark]

Hollywood Reporter [Stephen Farber]

Variety [Scott Foundas]

'Selma' Showcases Civil Rights Struggles // The Observer Jimmy Kemper

Selma review - The Guardian Steve Rose

Selma review – Martin Luther King, a lover and a fighter ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Westender Vancouver [Curtis Woloschuk]

Examiner.com [Jana J. Monji] also seen here: Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson]

Examiner.com [Ben Kenber]

Examiner.com [Michael Adams]

Albany.com [Jay Matthiessen]

Selma - Washington Post Ann Hornaday

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Oregon Herald [Oktay Ege Kozak]

Selma Review - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

'Selma' a vivid historical drama and a timely reminder ... Oliver Gettell from The LA Times

L.A. Biz [Annlee Ellingson]

Selma Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Odie Henderson

New York Times [A. O. Scott]

New York Times [Jennifer Schuessler]

New York Times [Maureen Dowd]

They live by night: Selma: Of Moral Arcs and Men Bilge Ebiri from They Live By Night

Oscar Films & the Prison of Historical Accuracy -- Vulture Bilge Ebiri

Maybe "Selma" is too smart to be an Oscar movie anyway Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running

"On Voting Rights, a Decision as Lamentable as Plessy or Dred Scott" Andrew Cohen from The Atlantic, June 25, 2013

Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia Matt Novak from Gizmodo, January 21, 2015

Why Malcolm X Should Be Recognized in Selma This Weekend Kristen West Savali from The Root, March 5, 2015

Memories of Selma and 'Bloody Sunday': 'They came with nightsticks' Ann M. Simmons from The LA Times, March 5, 2015

Selma's message on civil rights 50 years later Carmen K. Sisson from The Christian Science Monitor, March 6, 2015

Comparing Selma To Ferguson: 'Mike Brown Is Our Jimmie Lee Jackson' Rahel Gebreyes from The Huffington Post, March 6, 2015

Urging Persistence on Racial Gains, Obama Recalls Sacrifice in Selma The New York Times, March 6, 2015

Fifty Years After Selma, America Retreats On Civil Rights David Love from Progressive.org, March 7, 2015

Obama marks 'Bloody Sunday' anniversary: 'Our march is not yet finished' Christi Parsons from The LA Times, March 7, 2015

Obama: Selma marchers gave courage to millions, inspired more change Sima Shelbayah and Moni Basu from CNN, March 7, 2015

On the Selma Anniversary, These North Carolina Activists Will March Backwards Allie Gross from Mother Jones, March 7, 2015

Selma, Half A Century Later Arun Rath from PBS, March 7, 2015

Thousands Flood The Streets Of Selma To Honor Landmark Anniversary Of March Lilly Workneh from Huffington Post, March 7, 2015

Obama, Bush, civil rights icons retrace Selma march Aamer Madhani and David Jackson from USA TODAY, March 7, 2015

Transcript of President Obama's Selma Speech Bloomberg, March 7, 2015

Lewis leads huge congressional delegation on Selma anniversary Mike Lillis from The Hill, March 7, 2015

Hey GOP Leaders: Get Your A** Down to Selma Ron Christie from The Daily Beast, March 7, 2015

GOP leader headed to Selma after all Athena Jones and Deirdre Walsh from CNN, March 6, 2015

Duvivier, Julien

PÉPÉ LE MOKO

France (94 mi) 1937

Pépé le Moko | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes, movie ... Time Out London

A touchstone film for cinema historians trading in literary labels like 'poetic realism' and often mistakenly said to be a transposition of the Hollywood gangster movie, Pépé le Moko deserves to be reassessed for what it is - a vigorous thriller about a French gangster hiding out in the Algiers Casbah. Full of sinuous camerawork, dingy sets, deep shadows, and even darker motives, this is also the film that fixed Gabin's image for keeps as the outsider condemned to a life in the underworld. See it for the edgy, suspenseful climax where Gabin, tempted out of hiding by his femme fatale, runs to meet death. Film noir as we know (and love) it is just around the corner from here. (Adapted from a novel by Ashelbé.)

Pépé le Moko Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Come wiz me to ze Casbah," implores Pepé Le Pew in numerous Warner Bros. cartoons, and while kids watching on Saturday mornings won't recognize the character as a parody of Charles Boyer in Algiers, they certainly come away with the idea that the Casbah, wherever and whatever it may be, represents something impossibly romantic—the French equivalent of Niagara Falls, perhaps. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that Pépé Le Moko—the fatalistic French melodrama of which Algiers was Hollywood's nearly shot-for-shot remake—depicts the Casbah in Algiers as a gloomy, claustrophobic prison from which the title character longs to escape. Indeed, the entire movie amounts to a billet-doux to Paris, even though the City of Light is never so much as glimpsed; the most erotic scene finds suave thief Pépé (Gabin) and his upper-class paramour, Gaby (Balin), reminiscing about the Metro stops in the neighborhood where they both grew up, their faces aglow with a dreamy nostalgia that easily trumps the pro forma smoldering looks they toss at each other.

Still, the film's true love object is clearly its leading man. Gabin never achieved Boyer's level of stardom in the United States, but he's a much more compelling screen presence; you can imagine Bogart, who was still several years away from his big break, taking careful notes. Duvivier gives the actor red-carpet star treatment here: The supporting cast spends most of the first reel speaking of Pépé in hushed, awestruck tones, and when he finally turns up, the camera deliberately avoids his face, letting the tension build and build before finally revealing Gabin's broad, intelligent features. Look past the era's rampant racism and misogyny—the Algerians are portrayed as subhuman; Pépé's treatment of his "native" girlfriend verges on the sadistic—and you'll find a moving portrait of a man for whom the notion of freedom has become a double-edged sword. You will nevair look at ze cartoon skunk ze same vay again.

Pepe Le Moko (1941) - Articles - TCM.com Margarita Landazuri

Pepe le Moko (1937) is one of the masterpieces of the poetic realist movement that flourished in French cinema of the 1930s, and a film that became an inspiration for American film noir. Like other poetic realist films, Pepe le Moko deals with characters living on the margins of society. Jean Gabin plays a criminal known as "Pepe le Moko" ("Moko" was a slang expression for a sailor from the French port of Toulon) hiding out in the Casbah, the labyrinthine ancient quarter of Algiers, where police rarely venture. Pepe is a charismatic figure, dapper, charming, and beloved by the underworld denizens. As an admiring character tells us, he always has "a smile for his friends and a knife for his enemies." But Pepe is also lonely and isolated. His shelter has become his prison, because leaving the Casbah means certain arrest. Pepe's longing for home intensifies when he becomes involved in a doomed romance with Gaby, a Parisienne who is the mistress of a wealthy Frenchman, and the affair ultimately leads to his downfall.

Director Julien Duvivier shot some of Pepe le Moko in Algiers, but he felt that shooting in the actual Casbah would be a distraction, so he built a large stylized set at Pathe's Joinville studios. Duvivier, an expert craftsman, created a moody, atmospheric film, and Gabin's tough-guy allure and romantic melancholy made for a potent combination. The film made Gabin, already an important actor in France, a top international star. The script, the music, and a terrific supporting cast added to the film's appeal, and Pepe le Moko was a huge popular and critical success in France and around the world, including Japan, where it was the top-grossing film of 1937. Jean Cocteau declared it "a masterpiece." In his review, British novelist Graham Greene, who also worked as a film critic, called it "One of the most exciting and moving films I can remember seeing...I cannot remember seeing one which has succeeded so admirably in raising the thriller to a poetic level."

Pepe le Moko was not released in the United States until 1941, a victim of its international acclaim. MGM immediately bought the remake rights to the film, but had second thoughts when confronted with the characters' straightforward amorality, and sold the rights to independent producer Walter Wanger. As was the custom then, the original was kept off American screens until after the American version, Algiers (1938), was released and had ended its run. Wanger reportedly wanted Gabin to star in the remake, but Gabin demurred, saying that, like French wine, he didn't travel well. (Gabin's instincts were correct. The two films he made in America during World War II were flops.) Charles Boyer took on the role of Pepe, with Hedy Lamarr playing Gaby. Director John Cromwell allegedly had a moviola on the set of Algiers so he could copy the setups from Pepe le Moko. Cromwell also used location footage from the French original in Algiers. Pepe le Moko was remade as a musical called Casbah in 1948, starring Tony Martin as Pepe. Over the years, Pepe le Moko has been the inspiration for countless films, from Casablanca (1942), to the Warner Bros. cartoon character, Pepe le Pew, and an Italian spoof, Toto le Moko (1951), starring beloved comedian Toto.

Algiers was a box office hit, and its success led Wanger to finally release Pepe le Moko in the U.S. Audiences loved it. Critics rhapsodized. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it "the most distinguished 'new' French film in months and months...Jean Gabin's tough, unsentimental performance of the title role is much more credible and revealing than Charles Boyer's sad-eyed mooning in Algiers...Without criticizing Algiers, which was an exciting film in its own right, it can be fairly said that Pepe le Moko tells the same story more trenchantly and with decidedly more true flavor." The Time magazine critic was equally impressed. "By rights, the film should just be a dated straggler on the U.S. screen. Yet director Julien Duvivier's camera has caught such an accurate X-ray of a tortured mind, it deserves a gold star on any list...Having a copy from Hollywood for comparison, serious cinema students will find in Pepe le Moko an excellent example of a prime Hollywood weakness -- obeisance to its technical proficiency. With no scenic splendors to distract its attention, the French film studies its character with thought and patience."

Pepe le Moko was a high point of the poetic realism movement, and a defining moment in the careers of Jean Gabin and Julien Duvivier, a prolific and versatile director who began his film career in 1916, and worked until his death following a car accident in 1967 at the age of 71. But it was that very versatility that led to his dismissal by New Wave film critics of the 1960s as a polished hack, an empty technician who did not leave a distinctive imprint on his work like a true auteur. Yet Duvivier made some of the most memorable films in French cinema, from his own personal favorite, the silent version of Poil de Carotte (1925), to Pepe le Moko and Un Carnet de Bal (1937), to his last great film, Pot-Bouille (1957). As fellow director Claude Chabrol noted, "He was an auteur who didn't declare himself one. An auteur is someone who, whatever the subject, always manages to appropriate it; that's exactly the case of our friend Duvivier." In a tribute to Duvivier following his death, Jean Renoir wrote, "If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Duvivier above the entrance...This great technician, this rigorist, was a poet."

Pépé le moko Criterion essay by Michael Atkinson, January 06, 2003

Repertory Pick: Quality Cinema video, August 16, 2012

Ready for His Close-up photo gallery, December 07, 2012

Pépé le moko (1937) - The Criterion Collection

Criterion Reflections [David Blakeslee]

Pépé Le Moko (1937) | PopMatters David Sanjek

moviediva

Epinions [metalluk]

The Village Voice [Elliott Stein] Oedipus in Overalls, on Jean Gabin, June 25, 2002

Pepe le moko (review) essay from The Moving Image, Spring, 2003 (first page only)

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

DVD Savant Review: Pépé le Moko - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson

The QNetwork [James Kendrick]

Digital Retribution [Captain Red Eye]

Pepe Le Moko (1941) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Paul Tatara

Review: 'Pepe le Moko' - Variety

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

Movie Review - - 'Pepe Le Moko,' or the Original French Version of ... The New York Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Pépé le Moko - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE FEMALE (La femme et le pantin)

France (101 mi) 1959 ‘Scope

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

"La femme et le pantin" is the most distressingly mediocre Duvivier film. It was absolutely bland, not even distinguished by the professionalism that came to stamp his later work. It was exactly his professionalism that provoked the derision of the young Turks of the Nouvelle Vague for whom "carrying on the tradition" was not the road to follow. But when even professionalism is in question, what can be saved?

"La femme et le pantin" found the director lost in the folklore for tourists and hiding behind Brigitte Bardot's sensual body. BB is the only thing worthwhile in the whole movie. She is probably the ideal actress cast in the wrong movie. She is sadly unsupported by a very poor cast:her lover is not even handsome, her father acts like a zombie and her mother's overplaying is thoroughly unbearable.

This is the third version of Pierre Louïs's novel; for the record, there was also De Baroncelli's (France,1928),Von Sternberg's ("The Devil is a Woman" ,US,1935) and Luis Bunuel 's( "Cet Obscur Objet du Desir" France,1977)

Do not get me wrong: I am a big Duvivier fan and I have written more comments on his films than on any other director 's works. This is the only one of which I cannot say something nice.

User reviews from imdb Author: shepardjessica-1 from United States

Another vibrant creature in Ms. Bardot's growing gallery of young temptresses is a joy to behold. Filmed in Spain in glorious technicolor, her beautiful golden hair cascading around her shoulders, she proves once again that no man is her match. Teasing and flirting with a well-to-do bull-breeder (who has a lovely invalid wife), this flamenco student is the ultimate sex kitten and proved she was the most irresistible sexual creature ever put on film. She plays him like a fiddle as well she should. Dressed in various bolts of red, yellow AND black, usually barefoot or wearing tiny slippers, flaunting her trademark dancer's walk, Ms. BB is at the top of her game with her confidence shining through.

A melodrama similar to THE NIGHT HEAVEN FELL ('58 as well) with beautiful locales that are exceptional. I don't think this did well at the box office with many bloated critics sneering at her blatant sensuality. Don't watch a dubbed version of this where they stick Ms. Bardot with a terrible voice, as they did many times.

A 7 out of 10. Best performance = B. Bardot. Gorgeious and seductive, holding out until it suits her needs, this young woman should be applauded for showing true sensuality in those censor-ridden and repressed 1950's. Bravo BB! The 1st truly independent woman in film at a relatively young age; 23 at this time. This film surprised me. Very few actresses nowadays, even in their thirties could project a maturing young woman's inner workings. Most of them still seem like teenagers. Oh well.

Dvortsevoy, Sergei

PARADISE (Schastye) B- 80

Kazakhstan (25 mi) 1996

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] also reviewing HIGHWAY

Russian director Sergei Dvortsevoy's mesmerizing documentary shorts are rooted in the primitive beginnings of the form, when American explorer Robert Flaherty first turned his camera on the Eskimos in 1922's Nanook Of The North. Like Flaherty, Dvortsevoy is held rapt by barren, forbidding landscapes—in his case, the dusty steppes of remote Kazakhstan—and is primarily an ethnographer, more interested in behavior than psychology. Through long takes and stark, artfully composed tableaux, Highway and Paradise gather impressions of nomadic life without shoehorning them into a conventional narrative framework. Along the 2,000-mile stretch of dirt road leading to Uzbekistan, the lone time marker in Highway is a downed eagle, slowly recovering under the care of the Tadjibajevs, a traveling family circus. Dvortsevoy shows a couple of their routines, performed for a smattering of impoverished villagers: One involves the eldest son holding a 70-pound weight by his teeth while his father whacks it with a sledgehammer, while the other has a 3-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl walking on a pile of broken glass. But the director is more interested in those long stretches when the troupe crams into a stubborn, hand-cranked bus and travels for countless bumpy miles with no other goals than a wealthier audience. Despite the harsh conditions, Dvortsevoy captures a feeling of intimacy and warmth in close quarters, defined at one point by an affecting mother's lullaby that sets the entire family at ease. The 25-minute Paradise is less concerned with people than with documenting behavior in general, drawing basic parallels between wild animals and the humans who shepherd them through the steppe. To cite a typical example, Dvortsevoy juxtaposes a funny scene in which a cow gets its head stuck in a milk jug with the strikingly similar image of a baby boy devouring a bowl of sour cream face first. But Paradise spends much of the time hammering home the irony in its title, amping up the sounds of swirling winds, perpetually buzzing flies, and the agonizing screams of a camel getting its nose pierced with a pocket knife. As with Highway, Dvortsevoy is compelled by natural beauty but not by judgment, and his willingness to let the living world unfold for the camera produces moments of transcendent beauty.

The New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder) review also reviewing HIGHWAY

Even a lifetime circusgoer is unlikely to have come across a troupe as remarkable as the Tadjibajev family circus. Not because one of the acts requires the eldest of the family's six children to grip a red kerchief with his teeth and lift an attached 70-pound weight to chest level before his father smites it repeatedly with a sledge hammer. Or because that feat is followed by lying on a bed of glass, using his forearms to support a metal plate over his upper body while his father drops that selfsame weight on him.

No, the remarkable things about the Tadjibajev family circus are the way it lives, aboard a crowded, faded, rust-scabbed, hand-cranked minibus, and the route it plies, a desolate stretch of more than a thousand miles of road. And both are brought to vivid life in "Highway," a splendid documentary that is one of two mesmerizing films by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Dvortsevoy sharing a double bill through Jan. 11 at Film Forum.

Each is a testament to the magical power of film to transport the onlooker into other lives and distant lands, to kindle contemplation, offer perspective and excite with the poetic beauty of exotic images.

Like its companion piece, "Paradise," the 57-minute "Highway" immerses the onlooker in both life and landscape. Besides the crowded bus of wailing babies, bickering boys, exhausted mother, devout Muslim father, there are the miles and miles of dusty, uneven road; parched Kazakh land; scarce, sere vegetation; and an occasional settlement or truck stop where the rolling beat of a drum summons an audience that at best seems to be numbered in the 10's.

After the performance, which includes the smallest boy, 3, and the smallest girl, 2, walking on broken glass, the children pass among the onlookers, seeking contributions. "If you're broke," goes a translated comment by one of the performers, "watch free."

At a roadside stop a snake slithers into some rocks. A young eagle, fierce looking and huge but unable to fly, is captured by the boys and becomes part of the family. In a meal beside the road, one of the children wipes a plate clean with his fingers. As the babies fret aboard the bus, their exhausted mother cries: "Why do you cry all the time? I'll kill all of you." But at night, she sings a lullaby to her sleeping brood as the eagle keeps watch.

The strength of Mr. Dvortsevoy's filmmaking is to make the viewer want to know more about this family, to know their history and to hear their thoughts. But his style is revelation through watchfulness and not through interview.

In the 25-minute "Paradise," a title susceptible to literal and ironic interpretation, Mr. Dvortsevoy descends on a nomadic shepherd and his family on a steppe before a mountain backdrop in Kazakhstan. In a succession of found moments, the filmmaker makes the most of a curious cow that sticks her head in a milk can and can't get it out, a young man who has had enough of isolation, a woman baking bread and washing her hair, a pink-cheeked baby boy making the messy most of his bowl of sour cream before falling asleep, and a penknife operation on a camel before the family packs up and moves on.

Mr. Dvortsevoy is a nomad, too, and one can only hope that he will return soon with more trophies of his travels.

BREAD DAY (Chlebnyy Den) A- 93

Russia (55 mi) 1998

An impressive work, where the bleak realism resembles scenes from a Béla Tarr film, a minimalist exposé of a day in the life, featuring the unforgettable image of elderly people pushing by hand an old abandoned railroad car filled with bread along a seemingly endless track for miles, a routine they repeated once a week despite the cold, barren conditions.  These were truly people that time, and Russia, had forgotten.  The expert filmmaking, however, has insured that I, for one, have never forgotten those chilling, likely imprinted-for-life images.   

Time Out

There's not a lot to distract from the bottom-line routines of life in snowbound Township 3, Zhikharevo, 80km from Saint Petersburg, which is why the predominantly elderly villagers are understandably exercised by the once weekly arrival of the bread. It's loaves all round, unless the shop runs out, or, like pushy Volodya (playing hard to the camera), you crave an extra order of black bread. This minimalist meditation on life and landscape was seen on the UK's Channel 4 TV several years back. Propose such a calm, considered film to them now [2003] and you wouldn't get past security, which is a pity because Bread Day's approach still compares with that of C4, at least in respect of its reality TV fetish. That writer/director Dvortsevoy turns the absolute concentration of his camera on goats, dogs and sheds as much as on people should not obscure the work's central interest in how to maintain one's place on earth.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, Ireland

A throwback to the methods and assumptions of Robert Flaherty, 'Bread Day' is a documentary recording a day in the life of an isolated snow-crowned former Soviet settlement, now sparsely populated by testy old people and some mangy animals. The title refers to the day when a supply of bread is sent to the settlement - the old folk must push the carriage themselves for the final miles of the journey. There are very few scenes in the film, the rigid camera focusing relentlessly on the tableau in hand, be it a vicious row in the bakery, or the methodical munching of a goat. We are supposed to pretend the camera isn't there, but drunks and animals keep drawing attention to it. This contrived 'unmediated' style is supposed to give us a genuine taste of the life of a community abandoned by the powers that be - all I could think was, why doesn't the cameraman help the old people push the carriage?

User Reviews from imdb Author: ivan from Barcelona, Spain

Well, I just want to comment the one that wrote that dumb last question. How long do you think the old people have been pushing that wagon? What do you think it's more important?: to help them, for a few minutes, maybe an our, an only for one day (the day(s) the director went there), or to film it, and show the conditions that those people had to live with?. I think, that the filmmaker's duty it's very clear. Don't miss the point, the help that Dvorstevoi provided those people was probably much bigger and complex than help them pushing a wagon. After I saw this film, I understood where cinema have to go nowadays, and no just for the theme, the form, extremely long takes, almost (and sometimes) a whole reel, avoiding the over saturation of cutting and shots, adopted in commercial cinema, video clips and -supposed to be- art and essay films. That's what I think.

Chicago Reader

Every Tuesday a small group of old men and women push a train car containing what will have to be a week's worth of bread into their small community, a nearly abandoned workers' settlement north of Saint Petersburg. In the marvelously relentless opening of this 53-minute 1998 documentary, they push the car along a seemingly endless length of track--the long take filmed from behind makes you feel as if you're helping, and you may even wonder why the filmmaker doesn't drop the camera and pitch in. Similarly staunchly held camera positions show other interactions of people (and dogs and goats) in the community, while acknowledging the intrusion with unusual elegance. One man stops bickering with a woman to yell at the camera operator to stop filming, yet he's obviously, almost eerily comfortable with being observed and having his behavior recorded. He and another man, who wants to buy what the bread seller considers an unreasonable number of loaves, play roles in one of several found dramas, as director Sergey Dvortsevoy reveals a lyrical relationship between the natural beauty of the area and the conflict among its inhabitants. 53 min.

Educational Media Reviews Online Robert Freeborn, also seen here: MC Journal (Robert Freeborn)

Sergey Dvortsevoy’s film Bread Day is a stark look at the forgotten face of the new Russia. Set in the remote village of “Township #3,” located some 50 miles north of St. Petersburg, the film focuses on a group of elderly pensioners and the weekly arrival of a freight car full of bread to their town. Dvortsevoy turns an unblinking eye on this ritual known by the locals as “Chlebni den” (Bread day), and the heated, almost animalistic interaction between the villagers as they struggle to obtain their portion of the life-giving bread. From the slow panning by the camera across a desolate winter landscape, to visions of stray goats wandering through empty streets, the director strives to emphasize the bleakness of the pensioner’s environment.

The film opens with a small group of townsfolk meeting the bread train at a nearby rail junction. After disconnecting the freight car from the train, they then begin the arduous 2 hour task of pushing it by hand all the way back to their village. Dvortsevoy trains his camera on this scene for a good 5-10 minutes, rather than a 1-2 minute shot followed by a jump cut, in order to emphasize the difficulty of this labor. Once back at the town, the work of distributing the bread begins. Dvortsevoy attaches his camera to the counter of the local grocery store, placing it so that it covers the interaction between the bread seller and her customers…and there is plenty to be seen. As the bread supplies begin to dwindle, tempers start to flare. Customers rant and curse at the seller, yet she gives as good as she gets. One elderly man even takes time out of his verbal assault on the grocer to yell at the camera operators. Though the film’s dialog is entirely in Russian, the English subtitles leave nothing at all to the viewer’s imagination. The language is very explicit at times, and is likely to offend those with delicate sensibilities. The film comes to an end with the image of several townspeople pushing the now empty freight car back up to the junction.

Bread Day has received many awards, such as the 1998 St. Petersburg Film Festival’s Golden Centaur Award for Best Festival Film, the 1998 Leipzig DOK Festival’s Golden Dove Award for Best Long Footage, and the 1998 Taiwan International Documentary Festival’s Special Jury’s Prize. It was also well received at the 1998 Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York, and the 1999 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

Due to its adult language and candid portrayal of rural poverty life, this video may not be suitable for high school or lower level undergraduate students. Highly recommended for upper level undergraduate or graduate courses in Russian History or perhaps even Sociology/Anthropology.

HIGHWAY B 83

Kazakhstan (57 mi) 1999

An über-realistic documentary from Kazakhstan, much of it in long, extended takes capturing the immense empty space of Kazakhstan, resembling similar images from the outer regions in PLATFORM (2000), yet more raw, earthy, and desolate, depicting people traveling for miles to see a primitive traveling road show that was literally set up on the side of the road of a giant, endless highway. 

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] also reviewing PARADISE (excerpt)

Through long takes and stark, artfully composed tableaux, Highway and Paradise gather impressions of nomadic life without shoehorning them into a conventional narrative framework. Along the 2,000-mile stretch of dirt road leading to Uzbekistan, the lone time marker in Highway is a downed eagle, slowly recovering under the care of the Tadjibajevs, a traveling family circus. Dvortsevoy shows a couple of their routines, performed for a smattering of impoverished villagers: One involves the eldest son holding a 70-pound weight by his teeth while his father whacks it with a sledgehammer, while the other has a 3-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl walking on a pile of broken glass. But the director is more interested in those long stretches when the troupe crams into a stubborn, hand-cranked bus and travels for countless bumpy miles with no other goals than a wealthier audience. Despite the harsh conditions, Dvortsevoy captures a feeling of intimacy and warmth in close quarters, defined at one point by an affecting mother's lullaby that sets the entire family at ease.

The New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder) review also reviewing PARADISE

TULPAN

Germany Switzerland Kazakhstan Russia Poland (100 mi) 2008

Tulpan Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Shy courtship, stark landscapes and a spirited supporting cast of livestock make Tulpan a vivid, intensely enjoyable debut feature from former documentarian Sergey Dvortsevoy. The Kazakhstan-set film hardly breaks new ground, in both setting and mood pitching its tent very close to The Story Of The Weeping Camel. But it similarly blends intimate, gentle fiction with a strong dose of ethnographic observation, to immensely charming effect. Received rapturously at its screening in Cannes' Un Certain Regard strand, the film will be an audience-pleaser at festival s and, though not specifically targeted at children, should play well at events with a kids' angle. Theatrical exposure is likely to be modest, but robust ancillary life seems likely.

The setting is a windblown, dusty plain - Betpak Dala, or 'Hunger Steppe' - in southern Kazakhstan, where young Russian-speaking sailor Asa (Kuchinchirekov) has travelled from Sakhalin to join his sister Samal (Yeslyamova) and her family. Samal's husband Ondas (Besikbasov) is a herdsman tending a large flock of sheep. Asa's dream - which he has illustrated, as per tradition, on his sailor's collar - is to have his own herd one day. But to do that he needs to find a bride. The film starts with his nervous courtship of the coy Tulpan, daughter of a neighbouring couple, whom Asa tries to impress with his tales of the sea. But the couple are apparently deterred by Asa's wildly embellished description of encounters with marine life, while the bashful Tulpan, who stays stubbornly out of sight throughout the film, is turned off by the size of Asa's ears. The courtship scenes are a hoot, with photographic evidence produced to show that Asa's ears are smaller than those of England's Prince Charles.

Getting nowhere with Tulpan, Asa is also falling foul of his brother-in-law, who's not convinced the lad has the makings of a herder. Meanwhile, Asa's breast-obsessed, tractor-driving buddy Boni (an exuberantly entertaining performance by Baisakalov) tries to persuade the landlocked mariner to try better times in the city. But Asa sticks to his guns, and eventually wins his spurs as a shepherd by delivering a lamb - and giving it the kiss of life - in an extraordinary extended take that's shot for real, and that combines the 'yuk' and 'aah' factors to showstopping effect.

Sense of place is intensely vivid. Dramatic weather - lightning in stormy skies, a massive recurrent whirlwind - and the minutiae of the characters' harsh living conditions are conveyed with lightly-worn intimacy, adding up to a strong evocation of the family's yurt (tent-like movable house) as a womb-like protection against the stark landscape. Ondas's three children are a winning presence: a daughter who sings traditional songs at ear-splitting pitch, an older son with a talent for memorising radio news bulletins, and a toddler who just runs around cheerfully doing what toddlers do. A supporting cast of sheep and goats, plus the odd cat, dog and camel, gives Tulpa as high a livestock factor as the average Kusturica film, and Dvortsevoy is often able to hang back on the narrative safe in the knowledge that animals and small children are just inherently entertaining. Still the occasional eccentric - but hardly contrived - image takes us by surprise, notably the priceless sight of a bandaged-up camel in a motorbike sidecar.

Even if Tulpan, the film's nominal subject, is only ever briefly seen once from behind, Kuchinchirekov's winning performance as the lovelorn Asa persuades us that she's surely worth his attentions. Main cast members are not actually from the type of nomadic community portrayed, but are more than convincing.

Dworkin, Jennifer

LOVE AND DIANE B+ 92

USA (155 mi) 2002

Love and Diane Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Jennifer Dworkin's documentary Love and Diane follows a recovering crack addict and her troubled daughter as they navigate the obstacles of joblessness, parenthood, welfare, and public housing. Though shot entirely in and around New York City, the distress cataloged in this 155-minute epic is archetypal of any human tragedy. Diane Hazzard struggles to keep her family together despite the resentment of her daughter Love, whose son Donyaeh was born HIV-positive and subsequently removed from the home after one of Love's fits of anger. Remarkably, Dworkin avoids taking easy pot shots at any number of government organizations that may or may not be directly irresponsible for contributing to the Hazzard family's constant grief; instead, she reveals the family's tragic legacy of pain and their relentless struggle to conquer personal demons. Among the many tragedies Diane has had to persevere: her mother's abandonment, the alcohol-related deaths of twin siblings, her brother's demise from AIDS, and her oldest son's suicide. Dworkin assembles Love and Diane with great articulation and a human compassion worthy of Frederick Wiseman. Just as patient are the legion of lawyers, therapists, teachers, and social workers struggling to help Love win her child back. The film's tearful finale reveals that as difficult as the system may be to navigate for the underprivileged, forgiveness and determination were Love and Diane's ways to bliss. Love and Diane received its U.S. premiere at this year's New York Film Festival and is still without a distributor.

Love & Diane Gerald Peary

Dylewska, Jolanta

Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising According to Marek Edelman

Poland (72 mi) 1995

Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising According to Marek Edelman Anthony Lane from the New Yorker

During the early forties, Nazi cameramen filmed the life that was being led, and lost, inside the walls of the Warsaw ghetto. The young Polish director Jolanta Dylewska has fashioned some of this archival footage into what feels like a concentrated act of mourning: as figures move through the streets or walk toward the trains that will transport them to the camps, portions of the frame are blown up so that individual faces can be scrutinized, and the film slows, often to a dead stop. Over these scenes we hear music that is sometimes too insistent (although there is a moving lullaby at the end); intercut with them we see the face of Marek Edelman, who was one of the commanders of the resistance movement (a bunch of "grown-up children," he calls its members, grave and resolute far beyond their years) that rose up for a few months in 1943. His manner is as pugnacious and unsentimental as the acts of courage that he recalls. Many Holocaust movies approach their task with a dutiful grandeur, an encyclopedic attempt to encompass the breadth of the crime. Dylewska's work leans the other way, toward absolute specificity: she relies on single images, and on Edelman's astounding memory for names and fleeting details, to suggest a world of suffering and endeavor. Her seventy-two-minute film shows in New York only until September 12th—an absurdly short run. In Polish.