THE LAST FILM I'VE SEEN. I TOOK A COUPLE OF BREAKS IN THE LOBBY THOUGH.
Last film I've seen: currently showing in theaters, Hans Petter Moland's The Beautiful Country, one in a long line of coming-to-America films, this about a Vietnamese man who comes to look for his American father. Poorly written and edited, draggy, incomprehensible in parts and disjointed, an ordeal to watch, but almost saved by the last quarter hour where Nick Nolte comes in as the father and the two play off each other in Texas ranch country like a couple of laconic Cormac McCarthy cowboys. Also featuring Tim Roth in as usual an interesting, but this time wasted, performance. Why this was directed by a Norwegian I can't guess. Maybe that's why everybody starts speaking English after a while. Nolte has not lost his touch.
Swann in love ( Un amour de Swann, 1984)
Now that I may be getting Netflix flicks regularly I'm going to have more and older films that I can't write reviews of. This is one. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff, in French, presumably with Jeremy Irons as Swann just moving his lips and somebody else's voice dubbed. Twenty years ago, Irons was a very good looking man, yet he also looks rather like Marcel Proust only taller, and he manages to look very ill toward the end when he seems to be turning from Swann into Marcel. The lady who plays Odette may be dubbed too, since her name is Italian -- Ornella Muti. It's interesting to see Alain Delon as the Baron Charlus after having seen John Malkovich do the role for Raoul Ruiz in Le temps retrouvé. Now there's a difference. I prefer Delon, though Charlus is an unsavory character, and there's some justification for making him seem as ugly as Malkovich, still, since he's gay, why shouldn't he be rather good looking, as he certainly would have made every effort to be? This is the way Delon plays him, aging and painted like Achenbach in Death in Venice, but still quite presentable. Lots of splendid clothes and settings and reacreations of period gatherings at Mme de Verdurin's and the Duchesse de Guermante's (Fanny Ardant, charming and noble, if not quite aristocratic), and lots of nice coach rides. I don't think you can take this entirely seriously as a recreation of Proust, but on the other hand it's not crude or philistine in its treatment of the material; it's just that 500 pages of the subtlest psychological analysis of love in 20th century literature can't be conveyed in a pretty historical film. But I wasn't distrubed by it, rather I got into the lushness of it. I've rarely seen a more elegant recreation of this period. A little too perfect, maybe, but it is like the paintings and photographs of the period. Something between Caillebotte and Renoir. The music is very interesting too -- it's "modern", i.e., modern for that period, as the theme of the two lovers should be since it's by a contemporary composer, Vinteuil. Sorry to keep referring to Proust's novel, but hey, they'd never have made this movie without it, nor tried so hard with such success. I'm not really comparing the two. It's just that if you've read a book and you see the movie, you do remember the book. Roger Ebert says something perfectly justified, but unfortunately he says it in a philistine way:
Quote:
All of the reviews I've read of Volker Schlöndorff's SWANN IN LOVE treat it like a classroom assignment. The movie is described as a version of one of the stories that make up Remembrance of Things Past, the epic novel by Marcel Proust, and then the exercise becomes almost academic: "Compare and contrast Proust and Schlöndorff, with particular attention to the difference between fiction and the film." Imagine instead, that this is not a film based on a novel, but a new film from an original screenplay. It will immediately seem more lively and accessible. Because not one person in a hundred who sees the film will have read Proust, this is a sensible approach; it does away with the nagging feeling that one should really curl up with those twelve volumes before going to the theater.
That would be fine, but as a the most famous movie critic in America, he might have done a little research and found out that they're six volumes, not twelve, and this isn't "one of the stories that make up Remembrance of Things Past," but one of the novels. He doesn't have to read them; maybe his eyes are shot from all that time in the dark. But he can afford a fact-checker.
Or course the movie has to work on its own. I think it does; Ebert seems to understand it. But it means a lot more actually if you've read the novels. Different from Ruis's film, which I can't imagine making much sense at all to anybody who's unfamiliar with Proust; it just jumps in in medias res and throws tons of complex stuff at you. Swann in Love focuses on Swann and Odette, and anyone can understand it -- even Roger Ebert.
THE LAST FILM I'VE SEEN: NELLY & MONSIEUR ARNAUD
Directed by Claude Sautet of Un Saison en hiver, with Daniel Auteuil, which made a good impression on the US arthouse audience for understandable reasons. This one is almost equalily good and likewise features the gorgeous Emanuelle Béart, this time along with one of France's most seasoned actors, Michel Serrault. It doesn't have quite the mood and focus on the internal nature of a central character that Saison en hiver has -- or the strong focus on music (which Sautet can handle very beautifully, but eschews for conventional movie music here). M. Arnaud is a rich old man with a mildly interesting past who persuades Béart to come and type a memoir, but you wonder if he doesn't just want to have her around and pry into her private life, and you can see why. It's funny how elegant and reserved everybody is and yet how nosy Arnaud is and frank Nelly is. Are French people reserved or passionate? Both, I guess, and you get both here. There's a drollness about the portrait of this grumpy but sometimes charming man. Charles Berling and Jean-Hugues Anglade provide young male interest, Berling as Béart's estranged husband and Anglade as her new boyfriend. And there's the eternally odd Michel (AKA Michael) Lonsdale as .... an odd fellow who wanders in and out. Elegant, talky, intellectual stuff not for the Michael Bay fan, this could be used to illustrate a friend's assertion that French films are nothing but people talking and not feeling very strongly. Deftly done, and this got a higher rating on metacritic than Un saison en hiver, but I'd go the other way, because of the touching portrait of the emotionally shut down man provided by Auteuil in Hiver.
