the LAST FILM YOU'VE SEEN thread

[Chris Knipp]

Dominik Moll: Lemming. (2006) Netflix DVD.

Moll's earlier With a Friend Like Harry, with the scarily gregarious crazy character played by Sergi Lopez, was somewhat immprovisational but each sequence was powerful and the whole thing worked well because it was unified by the character and didn't go on too long. This has too much and goes on too long and situations are more uneasy than scary. There is the interest of a movie with the two Charlottes, Rampling and Gainsbourg, and Laurant Lucas is appealing and nicely neutral as the central character. But what's the point of the lemmings, really? Are they needed? The simple device of a nightmare guest is carried to an extreme, with some kind of cosmic crossover of her personality to the wife's later. And the gimmicky house-surveillance equipment is another distraction. Too much going on and too little focus--with a too-violent climax and a too-easy, too-rosy denoument. Hope remains that Moll will put together a more coherent story next time and make better use of his echoes of Hitchcock and Highsmith.

[Chris Knipp]

Eric Rohmer. Boyfriends and Girlfriends/L’ami de mon amie. 1987. Netflix DVD.

I’ve seen this before, but Rohmer is always worth returning to. A word about the title. Various American critics such as Roger Ebert or Jonathan Rosenbaum have translated it, but missed the point. The proverb is “L’ami de mon ami est mon ami,” “my friend’s friend is my friend,” which in the French is sex-neutral. But the film title means “the [male] friend of my [female] friend,” which is ironic: the point is that when sex is involved the rules change and the proverb becomes problematic. The English titles for many of Rohmer's films lose an essential point--this one particularly.

It’s a little bit easier to confuse Rohmer's later films, the Proverbs/Proverbes series, with one another than is true with the earlier ones like My Night at Maude’s or Claire’s Knee, the Moral Tales/Contes moraux; and the Proverbs are accused of being superficial or “fluffy.” True, nothing Rohmer's made since has (on a certain level anyway) the depth of My Night at Maude’s, with its complicated philosophical, moral, and religious discussions. But though their dialogue may seem simpler, the Proverbs are subtle. In this one (L'ami de mon amie), the somewhat shy, sensitive Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet) is convinced she is in love with the dashing, accomplished Alexandre (François-Eric Gendron), even though he never gives any sign of more than a polite interest in her. Her new friend Lea (Sophie Renoir) is more down to earth and relaxed, and Lea seems at odds with her boyfriend, Fabien (Eric Viellard). Lea also happens to know Alexandre and be on friendly terms with him, which turns out to be significant later. The truth is that from the start the sweet, affectionate Fabien is enormously attracted to Blanche but it takes her a long time to realize that the way they click together not just in conversation but later in bed means they ought to be girlfriend and boyfriend, because she cherishes the fantasy of Alexandre. She also allows herself to be deterred by the fact that Lea and Fabien are nominally “together," and by the rule that the boyfriend of one’s friend is off limits, whatever that proverb says. But the signs have always been there that Lea and Fabien don’t really care for each other—or get along very well; but Fabien is too polite and well-behaved for either that, or his passion for Blanche, to be immediately obvious. A recurrent theme is how good manners are necessary but can slow the paths of love. The subtlety of the film is in every line and every expression of the actors, especially Vieillard, whose expressions and body language show his attraction to Blanche from their first encounter.

American reviews of Boyfriends and Girlfriends have made much of the fact that the film takes place in one of the New Cities/Nouvelles Villes outside central Paris, but very different from the ghetto-like banlieux where the riots have taken place. These New Cities are posh, elegant, but slightly sterile complexes where one can live and work and shop tantalizingly in view of La Defense and the Tour Eiffel. This new environment is interpreted by several American reviewers as corresponding to a "yuppie" superficiality in the characters, but nothing much is made of the setting in this film. It’s just a given, something more useful to neutralize the background and thus focus more completely on the nuances of the dialogue and the freshness and perfection of the young characters than to make any sociological point. There were superficial yuppies in the Moral Tales world too, even if most of those characters had messier hair and smoked more cigarettes. This is the difference between the Seventies and the Eighties. In Rohmer's 1984 Full Moon in Paris/Les nuits de la pleine lune the suburbs vs. central Paris issue is made important, and raised as an issue and there is where Fabrice Lucchini’s (highly articulate and intellectual) character declares that Paris (meaning the old central Paris) is “the center of the world.” Admittedly that is a more complex film, but often, as in Rohmer’s 1986 Summer/Le rayon vert, a delicacy is achieved, which should definitely not be confused with superficiality, that highlights the sensitivity of a female character, memorably in Le rayon vert that of the actress Marie Riviere. Later, in 1996, this character is Margot (Amanda Langlet), the sweet girl whom the fickle Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) discounts because she isn’t sexy or hard-to-get enough, rather like the way Blanche discounts Fabien. These permutations and combinations are not so simple when you watch all Rohmer’s films and see the way he continually brings up a certain kind of character and kind of behavior and looks at it each time from a different angle, with different results.

[Johann]

I'm checking out Antonioni's 1975 film The Passenger in about 1 hour.
I'll post after I see it.
(Haven't seen it before. Looking very forward to it...)

[Chris Knipp]

Antonioini's The Passenger/AKA/Prefessione: Reporter I saw a couple years ago at the NYFF and liked it quite a bit more than I remembered when it was new(er) as I wrote in the Festival Coverage section for the NYFF. See what you think of that long final take, and the young Jack. Did you ever see him in Five Easy Pieces?

[Johann]

Yes I've seen Five Easy Pieces. It's amazing.
And so is The Passenger, which I just saw.

Some breathtaking imagery is on full display.
There are some absolutely glorious shots in this film, from the architecture inside cathedrals to rooftop panoramas to a bird's eye view from a tram.
(I was in awe of that shot of Jack pretending to fly, arms outstretched above the water- what an amazing bit of cinema.)

The editing is wonderful too- my favorite sequence was the shots of Jack driving with Maria, through the tree-lined road. What cinema nirvana to me.

Jack Nicholson is quite svelte here, and a woman sitting behind me commented that he had a nice bum.
He's in Chad, he's in Spain, he's in Barcelona, he's here, there and everywhere after stealing some dead dude's identity.

The landscapes that Antonioni captures are awesome.
The architecture also gets his special eye.
He was in some kind of artistic groove here, giving serious flavor and ethnicity to the scenes. I loved this film. So happy I got to see it properly, with a print that was on loan from the U.S.

[Chris Knipp]

Some people don't like Blowup. I think it's a classic, and a tighter story than The Passenger. But with Zabriskie Point it seemed like Antonioni, in America working with a couple of young unknowns (like Bruno Dumont making Twentynine Palms), had lost his touch. So coming to The Passenger after Zabriskie Point I was in an anti-Antonioni mindset and did not like it. Then much later, in fall of 2005 at the Walter ReadeTheater where everything looks a little better, i was very impressed. And liked the young Jack Nicholson.

[Chris Knipp]

Alain Giraudie. No Rest for the Brave/Pas de repos pour les braves. (2003) Coauthors: Alain Giraudie and Frederic Videau. Starring Thomas Suire as Basile/Hector, Thomas Blanchard as Igor, and others. Netflix DVD.

I just ran across this by chance from Netflix. I will just quote the description by Shadows on the Wall's Rich Cline, because I couldn't put it any better:

This elusive and thoroughly strange French concoction is for adventurous moviegoers only. Blending satire and thriller with a heavy dose of absurd surrealism, it's almost impossible to figure out. And yet it's still intriguingly enjoyable.
The plot is open to interpretation: 24-year-old Basile (Suire) thinks that if he goes to sleep he'll never wake up. So he runs away, pursued by his soulful best friend (Blanchard) and a cool-guy bounty hunter (Soffiati) who's the self-proclaimed "King of Hide & Seek". Basile has changed his name to Hector and is now living with an old guy (Guidone) in the village Dying. On the run again, he's pursued by two gangs of thugs, led by feuding leaders (Martin and Nouvel). Maybe it would be better to just go to sleep after all.
Confusing but engaging, this film is like a dreamy lovechild of Fellini and Lynch. Characters are both vivid and indefinable--never realistic, but hilariously fascinating (such as the guitar-playing goatherd who barks out English punk). We never have a clue what's happening, but this swirling strangeness actually adds a sense of unpredictability and expectation, spiced up with outrageous humour and bracing observation. As well as some terrifically nuanced performances. The characters are funny and endearing, often rather violent and strangely omni-sexual.
The dialog is full of existential rambling; the conversations have little context but loads of witty banter. Much of this is about nothing at all, like a Tarantino-style parody of pretentious French art films. Meanwhile, director-cowriter Guiraudie fills the screen with bizarre imagery and situations. This is beautifully filmed and edited in a comical, freewheeling style.
The way he makes it both nonsensical and genuinely involving is also a comment on mindless Hollywood blockbusters that do the very same thing. But in the end what emerges here is a startlingly meaningful coming-of-age story about a guy realising some truths about human nature and the world around him: happiness is elusive, work is essential, death is inevitable. Not a new message, but definitely an original way to say it.

Website, Shadows on the Wall.

[Chris Knipp]

TURN THE RIVER.
I saw this on a Netflix DVD. It was atmospheric, but i didn't feel like watching the whole thing. Whan an enterprise is doomed, it's hard to follow it through to the end. Jaymie Dornan is the boy actor who plays the son. He has a sensitiive-preppie Kieran Culkin quality and deserves to be seen more often.I love Whit Stillman's movies; Chris Eiggeman was a mainstay in them. From David Edelstein, New York Magazine May 2008.

The movie, the directorial debut of the actor Chris Eigeman, has a mixture of edginess and melancholy that’s beautifully sustained until the climax, when the tang of realism becomes the cudgel of melodrama. But the actors around Janssen are up to her: the droopily expressive Dornan, the prize ham Rip Torn as the pool-hall owner and surrogate papa, and especially a hangdog Terry Kinney in a role that’s all subtext—he’s making her fake passports but seems to be carrying a whopper of a torch for her. It’s no wonder he’s smitten. I’d be prepared to lose a lot of money just to watch her clear the table.

[oscar jubis]

No Rest For the Brave is now on my extremely long Netflix queue. But I'd like to refer to your previous post re: Rohmer, in particular: "nothing Rohmer's made since has (on a certain level anyway) the depth of My Night at Maude’s". I'm not writing to disagree with this statement, especially due to the qualifier "on a certain level". I'm writing to call attention to Rohmer's A Tale of Winter, the one Rohmer film out of several I just re-watched which improved its previous standing.

Rohmer's inspiration stems from a performance of Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale" he attended. The result is a film that illustrates, as well as any film I've seen and that includes Rivette's, the way art and philosophy inform life, and viceversa. There is an astonishing sequence in which the single-mom protagonist (Felicie) and her philosopher boyfriend attend a performance of the play and Felicie makes a connection between the play's premise and her own situation, gaining a great deal of insight (not unlike the bullying dad in D.W. Griffith's A Drunkard's Reformation). Rohmer goes on to link Felicie's daughter Elise drawings to the little girl's psychology in the most natural , graceful manner before creating correspondences between the pronouncements of Plato and Pascal and Felicie's intuitions. There's a lot more and it's depicted in a more dynamic manner than the more static mise-en-scene of the brilliant My Life at Maude's.

Boyfriends and Girlfriends is delightful, perhaps a good introduction to Rohmer because it is characteristic yet it has a most naturalistic premise and the scenes tend to be shorter than those in other films by Rohmer.

[Chris Knipp]

No Rest for the Brave is unique and should be seen. I can't offhand remember Rohmer's Winter Tale. Your description is more analytical than descriptive. I've seen everything by him that I ccan get my hands on but it's a bit hard to keep them all straight after a while --like Woody Allen-- and the last one I watched, I realized (but not immediately) that I'd seen before. Since Rohmer is mostly talk, I don't think one shojuld look for a more "dynamic mise-en-scene"--it's not what he's about and anyway, that would be very relative. The thing about My Night at Maud's is the solid religious and philosophical content in the talk. Some more lightweight intellectually are also memorable, such as Chloe in the Afternoon. American films that approach being as civilized as Rohmer's are, to come back to Chris Eigeman, Whit Stillman's.

[oscar jubis]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
Since Rohmer is mostly talk, I don't think one shojuld look for a more "dynamic mise-en-scene"--it's not what he's about and anyway, that would be very relative. The thing about My Night at Maud's is the solid religious and philosophical content in the talk.

That sounds dangerously close to the argument made by certain critics to dismiss Rohmer as a major filmmaker. I am aware that it's not your intention to do so. And you are half right, after all Rohmer's manifesto, written for Cahiers before he shot a single scene is titled "For a Talking Cinema".
His is a "talking cinema" but it's still cinema. Not simply a way to share his narratives with a larger audience than he would in printed form, and not filmed theater_the key scene from A Winter's Tale is filmed theater, it doesn't transcend the proscenium arch; it follows the so-called 180-degree rule as all the shots inside the theater where "The Winter's Tale" is being staged are taken from the points of view of members of the audience. Mostly from the p.o.v. of Felicie, with whom we must identify if the film is to affects us deeply.
No one can be a good film director without being "about" mise-en-scene. Not acknowledging Rohmer's attention to the mise-en-scene and the editing diminishes him and limits the viewer's understanding of what he is doing.

This is an excerpt from "Letter to a critic: Concerning my Contes Moraux" which is found on Rohmer's book The Taste for Beauty:
"What I 'say' I do not say with words. I do no say it with images either, all due respect to the partisans of pure cinema, which would 'speak' with images like a deaf-mute with his hands. After all, I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do."
In order to "show" people move and speak, Rohmer must pay attention to their displacement about the frame and the world of the film in which they exist. The editing, and even the use of non-diegetic music in his films (more powerful perhaps because of its infrequency) are also worthy of attention.

[Chris Knipp]

I can't comment. So kind of you to say I'm "half right." You made my day.

[Chris Knipp]

Claire Denis, The Intruder/L'Intrus (2004). Netflix DVD.

I highly recommend this film. With its emphasis on the physical/sensuous, sights and sounds, and its very wide aspect ratio, it's far preferable to see it on a theatrical screen. However the US DVD is of very good image and sound quality. Sharp. So-so subtitles.

You can find a discussion of Denis and L'Intrus by Damon Smith on SENSES OF CINEMA, which includes an interview with CD . Though if you just watch the film, it's all there. Since the essence of L'Intrus is that it's atmospheric and mysterious, it's best just to soak it up.

I've compared it to Arnaud des Pallieres' Adieu, which however is unavailable in the US, so far (French DVD) It feels similar to me, with a shared class- and globe-hopping mystery. Actually the two films are quite different in specifics but it would be interesting to play them off each other, watch them together.

This is the film that made me a Claire Denis convert. Probably it's Trebor (Michel Subor's character), who is both charismatic and repellant. Subor is a strong presence. He has a sullen macho elegance. I'm also a fan of Greoire Colin, who figures here. He is noticed in Beau Travail and pops up in other Denis films. I already liked Nenette et Boni, in which he is the main character. He started acing very young and was first noticed in Agnieszka Holland's Olivier, Olivier. He's also in Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy, so he seems to appeal to women directors. He is very physical, which makes him good for CD, I guess. Subor is most known for Godard's Le petit soldat. He also has a central role in Beau Travail.

[oscar jubis]

Here's a link to your review and my comments about L'Intrus posted in 2005. I haven't watched it again so I don't have anything to add.

[Chris Knipp]

I love this movie. The essence of it is that it's visceral. You understand it with your heart not your mind and figuring out what this or that scene means isn't too important, though if you enjoy that, fine. At the same time as I said in that other thread, once you've thought about it and read about it some good discussions, such as Dennis Lim's, it is no longer at all puzzling, though the cutting really keeps you on your toes because it slips back and forth from one place and level to another so fast. I love the cutting, which is also swifter than the wings of thought and visceral. Naturally CD should not want to explain the film because that kills it.
I did like that you said it intruded on your psyche, but not that Louis was like the old guy in Wild Strawberries. They're just utterly different people, the comparison is off the wall. The Wild Strawberries guy is saying goodbye to life, and Trebor is fighting to stay alive, and not reminiscing about stuff.

What's not clear is exactly how Trebor got all that money. A weakness of the film is that it doesn't really show very well that he has trouble with his heart; in fact it shows him being very physically active. He does have some trouble swimming, but it's not very clear that would mean he needs a heart transplant, for God's sake.

But this is a great movie and it shows what you can do with a lot of thought and tremendous effort and determination and independence of mind and not a whole lot of money.