the LAST FILM YOU'VE SEEN thread

[Chris Knipp]

Francois Ozon, See the Sea/Regarde la mer (1997). Netflix DVD.

A scruffy girl backpacker Tatiana (Marina de Van) shows up at the beach house of a Parisian young mom, the English Sasha (Sasha Hails), who has a 10-month-old baby--and demands permission to pitch her tent in the back yard. The dad is working in Paris and only shows up at the end of the film's 52-minute running time. (De Van was to appear again in Ozon's Sit Com). The mom preceeds to trust the obviously suspicious and ominously aggressive and affect-less outsider far too much--to the torment of nervous viewers. A rather minimalist horror flick, this shows Ozon's characteristic visual elegance and economy but leans dangerously far toward the more glib aspect of his rarely absent desire to shock. One of the hardest of his films to watch, but not one of the more convincing ones. Various elements strain credulity and others are not even really made clear. Roger Ebert wrote a very good (if typically over-kind) review.. This was Ozon's longest film so far. Though not well reviewed in this country his Criminal Lovers/Les amants criminels (1999), with the naturally combustible couple of Jeremie Renier and real-life girlfriend Natacha Regnier, was longer (96 min.) and a huge improvement.

[Chris Knipp]

Gérard Depardieu, Frédéric Auburtin, The Bridge/Un pont entre deux rives (1999, US release 2001). Netflix DVD.

An early-Sixties French provincial adultery tale that lacks energy despite its good cast, Gérard Depardieu, Carole Bouquet, Charles Berling, plus the alluring young Melanie Laurent in her first role as the rich friend's daughter who gets involved with the sweet Tommy (Stanislas Crevillén), 15-year-old son of George (Depardieu) and Mina (Bouquet). Tommy is the unwilling co-conspiritor in Mina's affair with bridge engineer Matthias (Berling). There is doubt, but neither rage nor guilt. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the mother and young son can discuss her affair frankly between themselves.

Mina falls for the married, relatively glamorous Matthias, but when he's first in bed with her and holds his hand over her shoulder saying "Do you feel the heat--feel the energy?" we don't. Depardieu casts himself against type as a hangdog blue collar man who puts up no fight--which does not add to the energy level either; but he is vulnerable and real as rarely before. Berling is always interesting and Bouquet is subtle. Yet the film has no style and no fire.

[Chris Knipp]

Claude Chabrol, A double tour/AKA Leda, 1959. Netflix DVD.

An interesting transitional work, Chabrol's third film, in color, with Madeleine Robinson (Best Actress at Venice for this), about an adulterous husband who's a rich vineyard owner with problems. He's fighting with his wife (Robinson), he's out of touch with his son Richard (André Jocelyn) and daughter Elizabeth (Jeanne Valérie), and he has a young artistic girlfriend Leda (the voluptuous Antonella Lualdi) who gets murdered. Bernadette Lafont is Julie, the maid. Full of Sirkian and Hitchcockian elements, this is Chabrol's bridge from the New Wave to his own brand of bourgeois crime story. This was also a film featuring the young Jean-Paul Belmondo (as "Lazlo Kovacs," an alias he uses in Breathless; he's Elizabeth's disreputable, freeloading boyfriend) just before he became famous, and he's got all the rude grace he put into Godard's debut. Some sequences play too long, but the murder scene is amazing. Not altogether successful, but worth seeing. Probably essential viewing for any Chabrol fan. Somewhat under the radar in its 1961 first US release, this was not available on DVD till recently.

[Chris Knipp]

Three recent French films on DVD each seemed to have slipped by the radar, yet each exemplifies in its own different way some of the best aspects of contemporary French filmmaking: individuality, elegance, and emotional honesty. With small budgets, they achieve authenticity that eludes more elaborate productions, yet they are all three stylish and assured.

Raja (Jacques Doillon 2003) Fred (Pascal Greggory) is a rich Frenchman living in Morocco who falls in love with a tomboyish young Arab girl, Raja (Najat Benssallem). Since she's an orphan with a very rocky past and Fred discovers her doing gardening in his yard, how can he and she possibly meet on an equal basis, or with anything other than money as a consideration? This little film is frank about the colonialist aspects of the situation, but it is far more authentically emotional than you might expect (though come to think of it, Greggory is always emotionally raw). This raises its issues with astonishing intimacy. Doillon is the director of the 1996 Ponette.

Clara et moi (Arnaud Viard 2004) In this directorial debut, Viard deals with a cheery, if self-centered 33-year-old actor, Antoine (Julien Boisselier), who falls for Clara (Julie Gayet, of Confusion of Genders and the recent My Best Friend), a young woman he meets on the Metro. Things are wonderful until she develops an unexpected and serious problem. The film is cute, and even bursts into song, and then devolves into a grim reality check. The tone gets over-mixed, but the result is a fair portrait of growing up, and Viard, who also wrote the screenplay, has the courage to present a hero who's by no means altogether appealing. Boisselier's laughs and smiles charm, but do not compltetely convince.

Petite Jerusalem, La (Karin Labou 2005) Focuses on an orthodox family in a Jewish and Jewish immigrant community in an outlying district of Paris. Laura (Fanny Valette) adopts an intellectual pose, but her rationalism is challenged when she becomes attracted to an Arab co-worker, Djamel (Hedi Tillette de Clermont Tonnerre). Her married older sister Mathilde (Elsa Zylberstein), has problems with her disloyal husband (Bruno Todeschini). A spiritual adivisor, played by Aurore Clement, tells her having fun in sex is okay with Hebrew law, even required. Sonia Tahar is the sisters' earthy, but also troublingly superstitious Tunisian-born mother. With lucid, well-lit camera work and actors this good, this can't fail to be subtle and interesting.

[oscar jubis]

I love Raja. It tied for 5th among my favorite foreign-language films of 2004. Here's what I wrote a few years ago:

Jacques Doillon is known in America for Ponette, the only film he directed to receive wide distribution. Raja had an official US premiere in March 2004, but it appears to have had a commercial run only in NYC. It's been rescued from oblivion by the organization "Film Movement" as part of their monthly series of quality dvds. (I've posted about this org before, go to filmmovement.com if curious).
Raja is a 19 y.o. orphan living in Marrakesh who catches the eye of a middle-aged rich Frenchman while working in his garden. The melancholic Fred lives alone and seems adrift in his beautiful estate. Raja has a traumatic past and alternates between a friend's apartment and the room where her boyfriend-cum-pimp lives. Raja's relationship with the latter is rather vague and ambivalent, perhaps all her relationships with men are complicated by negative past experience. Her relationship with Fred is further complicated by disparities in culture, language, age and financial status. Actually, I don't recall another film that depicts with such honesty a more complex, hard-to-pin-down relationship as the Raja and Fred's. What each wants and how they go about getting it changes rather frequently. Yet the film never grows tiresome, it's extremely engaging, compelling even. The political subtext is obviously there, but never made explicit. Fred is played by veteran actor Pascal Greggory. Najat Banssalem won an award for Best New Actress at Cannes '04. Doillon's script and direction are truly special. I need to find room for Raja on my list of favorite foreign language films of 2004.

Many of Doillon's films are unavailable on home video.

[Chris Knipp]

Here's what I wrote a few years ago:

Thanks for the reminder. Where did you write this--on Filmleaf?

The relationship between Fred and Raja is troubled and troubling and tormented and messy and confusing to them and us, but not complex in the way of a relationship between people who can really communicate verbally and know and intereact with each other for a long time. But it has a fresh, alive, feel--to the extent of seeming so personal it's embarassing, which is kind of unusual in a movie. Fred as a foreign resident breaks all the rules, even hugging and snuggling with his two fat middle-aged cook/housekeepers all the time, and in fact he's completely wacky in his behaviror (and has no apparent occupation or other amusement than running his small estate and fooling around with Raja, so the movie has little context other than the implied two remote--but long interactive--cultures), but Greggory plunges into his role completely and makes it real.

I would also recommend the other two films, especially to anybody who finds the subject matter interesting.

[Johann]

Last film seen was Primeval with Orlando Jones.
I thought it was fuckin' awesome.
Giant-ass Crocodiles going berzerko in Africa.
Lots of freaky action and blood.
A true horror movie that reflects the social and political climate of the continent with giant-ass crocodiles!
What more do you need?
The editing is awesome.
I want to know who edited this movie.
Whoever edited it knew what the hell they were doing.
Seriously- watch this film and pay attention to the editing. And the SFX are pretty boss too.

I though this was a great actioner.
Check it out if you can.

[Chris Knipp]

Cinematography by
Edward J. Pei (director of photography)

Film Editing by
Gabriel Wrye


From IMDb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0772193/fullcredits#cast

[Chris Knipp]

Diane Kurys: La Baule-les-Pins (1990)

French divorce, Fifties style

The is a slice of late Fifties middle-class French life as seen during summer at the seaside when the kids' parents' happen to be breaking up. The looks, the behavior, the attitudes in their particularities could only be French. In that sense the film has a certain sociological and cultural interest, and, hopefully, a degree of period accuracy (it's set in 1958). These seem like quieter, more expansive times. The narrator is Frederique (Julie Bataille), the teenage daughter, reading from her diary of the time. However, the film never really gives pride of place to her (or the children's) point of view, but doesn't come in close on the adults either. Consequently the plot lacks a center, as many have noticed.

The subtext behind this diffuseness perhaps is that for a young teenage girl at the seaside with the mother initially absent and the father present only at the end, with a sister and brothers and a pleasant uncle and aunt and an annoying nanny and a young boy she's falling in love with becoming interested in kissing her and a close relationship with the imaginary addressee of her daily diary, the disintegrating marriage of one's parents is by no means the only thing going on. There's a lot to think about and feel about in a teen girl's life, most notably the changes in herself. This is probably the film's and Kurys' real subject--only it's a difficult one to put across and she doesn't quite succeed. Lindon, Bruni-Tedeschi, Bacri, Berry, and Baye have all subsequently been in better films (and some had already). However, they're interesting actors, and the child actors are fine. This film is watchable, even though the action doesn't really go anywhere--develops no real momentum, and winds up with the inevitable: the parents breaking up. La Baule-les-Pins is a sincere effort, and isn't by any means a disaster, but neither is it very good storytelling, nor does it provide a memorable experience. In fact many of the scenes seem clipped from other films.

The Netflix DVD version I watched is entitled C'est la Vie, which is colorless and meaningless. The American distributors couldn't think what this was about either.

[Johann]

The Matrix


Everybody and their dog has seen the Matrix by the Wachowski Bros, and it has a certain status/place in film history.
I saw it again last night on Showcase Action.

It's an impressive visual achievement and a real benchmark for special effects in the movie industry.
There are so many sequences that have extremely complex effects and intricate cgi- and the brothers pull it off. Total exhileration and entertainment.

The idea of it is also why it's such a popular film.
Reality and our perception of it is challenged.
The nature of life itself is deeply pondered, while alien machines cultivate humans to use as batteries.

Characters have strange mysterious names, Neo is supposed to be a type of Superman, a Jesus Christ who saves the world.

Characters plug-in to the Matrix with a weird cyber-socket on the back of their heads while they sit in apocalyptic barber chairs.
Notice the sound of the jack when they plug into the back of their heads? It's sick, man!

The costumes are really stylish. Style is what it's all about.
Can't have no Herb Tarlick shit in this!
Gotta be Airwalk boots and black leather coats and armless/frameless shades.
Not to mention the accessories: semi and fully automatic weapons.

This film is still cool and still amazing as an action film.
A lot of work went into making it, and if you don't like the story (I know a couple people who are sick of the Matrix movies) you still have to admit it's a hit film that influenced a lot of others.

I could write a lot more about it, but you get my gist.

[Chris Knipp]

Something for everyone, I guess, for the techie geek and the intellectual, for kids and grownups. However Keanu makes a somewhat blank hero. I like him much better in Pointbreak.

I delved into the topic a bit in connection with Baudrillard and September 11:

http://baltimorechronicle.com/jul03_matrix.shtml

Remember our previous discussion of Matrix Reloaded-?

[Chris Knipp]

Christian Faure: A Love to Hide/Un amour a taire (2005). Netflix DVD.

Writing credits: Pascal Fontanille, Samantha Mazeras.

That a movie is painful and disturbing doesn’t make it a good movie. Christian Faure did a wonderful job with emotionally intense gay content in his made-for-TV coming of age/coming out film, Just a Question of Love/Juste une question d’amour in 2000; this was about a contemporary young gay couple. One guy is happily out to his mom. The other is struggling and hasn’t told his parents. This is material Faure handled beautifully. But Un amour a se taire loads the dice too much. This movie develops a love triangle that becomes a love quadrangle and blends in the Holocaust with Nazi persecution of homosexuals along with the “normal” problems of being gay in society and in the family, Forties style. A Jewish girl (Sarah, later called Yvonne: Louise Monot) in flight after her family has been allowed to die by someone supposedly helping them escape (as happens also in Verhoeven’s acclaimed The Black Book) takes refuge with Jean (Jeremie Regnier), a young man she knows from summer vacations at Baule-sur-Mer—who she just happens to be in love with. He’s already in a live-in relationship (how common was that in those days?) with a somewhat older man, Philippe (Bruno Todeschini)—so that’s the triangle.. Jean also has a crooked Nazi collaborator brother, Jacques (Nicolas Gob), who is disturbed when he gets out of jail and learns Jean is gay but still loves him—in his fashion. Only that fashion turns out to be completely destructive. Things end in complete horror. The movie apparently wants to remind us that gays too were sent to camps and killed by the Nazis. We knew that, and it has been represented in movies several times in recent years. Did we need all the love complications and the Jewish girl—and her getting involved with the collabo brother—leading to the quadrangle? All this is way too much, and never seems emotionally believable. It is also harder imagining the better-known Jeremie Regnier and Bruno Tedeschini as a gay couple than it was in Just a Questtion of Love with the less familiar Cyrille Thouvenin and Stéphan Guérin-Tillié, who, in story less overloaded with plot twists and historical atmosphere, also have a better chance to establish their relationship for viewers. As Sarah/Yvonne, Monot is beautiful and soulful, gamely negotiating plot twists that leave her character's personality a mystery. Gob as the bad brother, who eventually marries Yvonne, has no depth, but maybe he doesn't need any for his confusingly written part. The production values and acting in both TV films are fine. But Un amour a taire is just too ambitious and overwrought.

[Chris Knipp]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Bright Future/Akarui mirai (2003). Netflix.

The elusive invertebrate

Whatever Kiyoshi Kurosawa is to the Japanese audience, for Americans he's distinctly an acquired taste. Cure struck me immediately however as haunting, creepy, and drably beautiful; it's just that one can't imagine a steady diet of such stuff. Pulse, typically stylish and moody, is completely different (and too similar to the "Ringu" franchise), but the only other Kurosawa I've seen so far, Bright Future is something else again. Symbolic interpretations of the two aimless, dangerous boys as some kind of statement about Japan's youth seem simple-minded and naive, though surely the ironic title makes that possibility all too obvious. Anyway, the presence of young people both does and does not mean anything in Kurosawa's films. He works very loosely within genres that appeal to youth, but his approach is consistently indirect and enigmatic. What strikes me is the relationship between Nimura and Mamoru--roommates and buddies on the surface, but underneath slave and master, follower and sensei, or symbiotic zombie couple--whose "child" is the symbolic poisonous jellyfish. Their lack of affect turns modern Japanese youth on its head because they're quietly terrifying and somehow also super cool, Nimura's ragged clothing a radical fashion statement and his wild hair and sculptured looks worthy of a fashion model.Mr Fujiwara is the ultimate bourgeois clueless work buddy jerk (he combines two or three different kinds of undesirable associate); but we don't usually kill them. Kurosawa films seem to usually go in the direction of some kind of muted apocalypse, but they proceed toward it casually, as if he didn't quite care where things were going.

That's because the atmosphere and look of his films are the real subjects; like any great filmmaker he begins and ends with image and sound. Note the bland, cheerful music that pops up at the darnedest places. The relationship that develops between Nimura and Shin'ichirô, Mamoru's father, after Mamoru is no more, and the scenes of Shin'ichirô's cluttered yet desolate workshop/dwelling recall Akira Kurosawa's Dodeskaden but also Italian neorealism and the clan of directionless but uniformed young bad boys who wander through the street in the long final tracking shot evokes Antonioni and the mute clowns in Blow-Up. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's framing, his use of empty urban long shots, is akin to the vision of Antonioni. If it's true that this cool stuff is all too appealing to film school dropouts ready to concoct a deep interpretation of every aimless sequence, it's also true that Kurosawa like no other living director creates his own haunting and disturbing moods, and it would be fun to compare this movie with Bong Joon-ho's boisterous The Host.

[Chris Knipp]

Bertrand Bonello: The Pornographer/Le pornographe (2001). Netflix.

I have to give credit to Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy) on a website called "Movie House" for his spot-on summing up of this film by a French Canadian Fema prof: as "basically Boogie Nights, as reimagined by Dostoevsky and directed by Ingmar Bergman." The style is austere, elegant, and very French; also very detached from reality. I was interested because it stars Truffaut icon Jean-Pierre Leaud and new young star Jeremie Regnier (of the Dardennes' La Promesse and L'Enfant). Interesting to see the two generations together, but it's just looking. The story, despite an actual live sex scene involving a well-endowed stud and a real porn actress called Ovidie( money shot cut by the Brits for theatrical screening but not from this DVD) is slow and gloomy, but pretty. Regnier's scenes with fellow student radicals are something more out of 60's Godard than anything in 2001 (but without Godard's energy and mental stimulation) and the whole film is arty and out of touch, but, as I said, pretty. Given his age I kept wondering of Leaud dyes his long lanky black hair--or even if it was a wig. In the story, he has abandoned porno and then goes back to it. His son Joseph (Regnier) has abandoned him after learning his occupation, but they start meeting again. Meanwhile he moves out from his wife, though he can't for the life of him say why he does that. It's suggested that today's porno makers are more soulless than those of Leaud's character's working heyday; however, the contrast of styles and technologies isn't worked out. Another onliine DVD reviewer, Scott Weinberg, wrote that the movie contains a short episode of "hardcore sex-making, and a whole honking lot of pretentious navel-gazing and middle-aged angst blatherings. If French films have a reputation for being slow and ponderous and more than a little self-indulgent, it's because of examples like this one." Well, I have a great deal of tolerance for these aspects of French film so I had no trouble. But the film seemed more style than substance.

[Chris Knipp]

Claire Denis: Beau travail (1999) Netflix.

This I had to re-watch because I clearly undervalued it when it was first shown. I thought it was silly playing around, and beefcake. A woman director luxuriating self-indulgently in male bodies. After seeing Denis' L'Intrus/The Intruder I got a skeleton key to her vision; I realized she's a fantastic filmmaker whose work can be complex, allusive, and demanding of one's fullest attention. And she has about as much panache and originality as any director. Given the high general critical rating of Beau travail (Rosenbaum called it a "masterpiece"), I saw I had to go back to it. The editing is poetic and impressionistic. Only Denis could put together her images and sequences as she does. This minimalist reworking of Billy Budd only enters its main plot in the last twenty minutes. The earlier sequences of the Foreign Legionaires in remotest Djibouti are almost plotless, but in their abstract way they give you the feel of military life (as I knew it as a lowly soldier in the US Army, & as I came to imagine it from that perspective) better than almost any other movie. Making a bed with perfect precision and then getting drunk and dancing disco, washing out your skivvies and ironing them and digging a trench fifteen feet deep in hard ground till your hands are bleeding--that's indeed military life. So are the lovingly nurtured irrational resentments. The music (particularly Benjamin Britain's Billy Budd) makes the movie austerely operatic. And there's also disco and a weird Neil Young song about a shopping cart and a ghetto smile that somehow fits with men marching across the desert. Only Clair Denis could make this work. One could also say a lot about the casting. The men are all extremely fit. The three leads are perfect. There is something noble but also provocative and annoying about Gregoire Colin, as Servain, the young legionnaire hated by Galoup (Denis Lavant); and one feels it in his other roles, all of which are memorable (he also appears in L'Intrus). Lavant is enigmatic, tough; his gnarly, strangely damaged looking face seems to hide an interior that's not quite right. Subor as the commander, Forrestier, is perfectly urbane, wise, and above it all (Subor was to star in L'Intrus). L'Intru is the more complex and exciting film, but not necessarily the better one. Beau travai is as beautiful as its name. The director knows wherof she speaks, being a military child who grew up in Africa, including Djibouti.