CALIFORNIA MOVIE JOURNAL (January 2022)

[Chris Knipp]

LE BONHEUR/HAPPINESS (Agnès Varda 1965). About a supposedly happily married young man, a joiner by trade, with two sweet young children, with a nice wife who's a seamstress. Blissful times out of doors. And then he falls for a blonde clerk at the post office and starts sleeping with her. And he tells his wife about it. He imagines she will be as okay with it as he is. She isn't. Not at all convincing, and the depiction of the people is simplistic in the extreme. Life is rarely this uncomplicated, and when it is, it's uninteresting. I hated Jean-Claude Drouot, who plays the young man, by the time it was over. He moves the new girlfriend in and she takes on parental duties after the disappearance of his wife. This begins to confirm my sense that there's something off about Varda. There's something off about her gay husband Jacques Demy too, but he made a couple of pretty strong films. Criterion Channel Nouvelle Vague series.

[Chris Knipp]

CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (Jacques Rivette 1974). A last gasp of the Nouvelle Vague that is considered the late-blooming Rivette's best work, its 3 hours and 13 minutes provides nothing in the way of enjoyment but as a cinematic sacred cow must be seen. So I've now seen it. I recommend Armond White's 2012 review where he cites Kael's walkout at the 1974 NYFF and wrote that the film "has gained prestige among a particular breed of cinephile – the Kael-haters who also pompously decry a particular kind of accessibility and sensual or kinetic cinematic gratification in favor of 'smartness.' These legions control today’s discourse." In other words this is for those (like Dennis Lim, who writes of Céline in awed tones) who think a film can't be good if it's enjoyable or immediately comprehensible. White points out Altman did some of the same things with far more formal mastery (and more prolifically). Rivette was a sweet man, an enthusiast for what he did; but he has limited technique. The subplot here is more rich and interesting than the main plot - but still makes too little sense. Criterion Channel's Nouvelle Vague feature.

[Chris Knipp]

THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE/LES OLIVIERS DE LA JUSTICE (James Blue 1962) I'm mostly including films in this journal that I didn't write reviews of, but this one, which is being reissued in new print by Kino Lorber, is a beautiful, complex film I'd never seen about the moral complexity of colonialism and the Algerian war for independence that deserves to be seen beside Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers. I hope people get to see it.

[Chris Knipp]

CALIFORNIA MOVIE JOURNAL (FEBRUARY 2022)

NADJA IN PARIS (Eric Rohmer 1964, 13 minutes). Those who are looking for a "film" at all here as several IMDb citizen critics do seem to me mistaken. And if they find little of interest they may just not know what to look for, what they are seeing. This is an ravishingly fresh picture of 1963-64 Paris street life, and an autobiographical sketch of a foreign student in Paris resident in the cité universitaire with pretty good French who's a flaneur, a wanderer, a people-watcher - the best thing to be in this ciry - a hanger-out in Saint Germain and Montparnasse cafés who's blended in, at least enough so she gets invited to hang out at tables and chat. On top of that she's doing a thesis on Proust. It's almost as classic as sitting in the shadow of Notre Dame reading Madame Bovary while eating a croissant. The narration (penned and voiced by her) flows beautifully, conveys the sense of just being, running around, hanging out, in a city that's supremely well-tuned to just such a lifestyle. It's like an advertisement fore French culture. It would be nice to know more about the making-of than simply who wrote, shot, and directed but also what discussion went into it. Criterion Channel, not the current "Nouvelle Vague" special listing, comes up under "Rohmer."