CALIFORNIA MOVIE JOURNAL (January 2022)

[Chris Knipp]

BAY OF ANGELS/BAIE DES ANGES (Jacques Demy 1963). Not to be confused with Manuel Pradal's 1997 Marie Baie des anges (in the Favorite Films section). I don't know if it's right to say this is "like a French effort to purify, to get to the essence of, a Warners movie of the thirties" as Kael says in her enthusiastic New Yorker thumbnail review, but she grasps the beauty and perfection of this glittering little portrait of the glamour and destruction of gambling addiction. Everyone rightly dwells on Jeanne Moreau's platinum blonde roulette diva but they miss the importance of her impromptu ingenue male partner, Jean Fournier (Claude Mann), the young bank employee who gets the gambling bug from his colleague and winds up at Cannes and Monte Carlo with "Jackie" (Moreau). Mann is easy on the eyes too: tall, lean, chiseled, loose limbed, slightly resembling Steve McQueen, he is essential to the success of this relentless journey to hell and back with its ambiguous happy ending. Jean gets the bug bad, especially when he falls for Jackie, but we feel he could return to his senses while she can't and that saves this surprisingly elegant and restrained melodrama from teetering into hysteria. This to me is another profoundly distasteful subject, like adultery in Malle's La Peau Douce, but a beautiful film. It shows the irrationality of gambling in a pure form. I have to add Jean Rabier to the list of wonderful Nouvelle Vague cinematographers along with Nestor Almendros and Raoul Coutard. This which I had never seen is both painful to watch and continuous aesthetiC pleasure. Criterion Channel.

[Chris Knipp]

WEST SIDE STORY (Stephen Spielberg 2021). Rewritten by Tony Kushner, Arthur Laurents; acted and sung by Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose. Long anticipated, finally seen in person on the big screen (but in a small auditorious) Sat. Jan. 22 at Berkeley Regal UA Theater with two other people, a couple sitting masked in the corner. This was disappointing, even inexplicable. Despite Kushner's efforts this has little new and nothing new that's good in it. Perhaps best seen as a Spielberg vanity project. As expected there is more Spanish heard: but this is still a Fifties white American musical, so: So what? The songs are altered and their order is rearranged in a manner less effective than that of the Robert Wise film, in particular making the last third feel interminable. As expected I liked Ansel Elgort and he and Rachel Zeglder as Tony and Maria reportedly are singing with their own voices and they sound lovely. But the film as a whole did not have the fresh energy I had expected. I don't know what Spielberg thought he was doing. I don't think you can make a movie that's a revival; stage revival, sure, but not screen. On screen it has to be something new. Worst error: the radical, super-energetic Jerome Robbins choreography of the 1961 film has been replaced by something more conventional, making this a tamer and duller film than the one of sixty years ago. But is that so surprising? Look at the French films of the early Sixties I've been reporting on and look on what we have coming out today.

[Chris Knipp]

CHRONIQUE D'UN ÉTÉ/CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch 1960) A pioneering - Mike D'Angelo calls it "seminal"- work of cinéma vérité (the term coined by Morin in homage to Dziga Vertov's "Kine-Pravda") on which the anthropologist-filmmaker Rouch and sociologist-film critic Morin collaborated in Paris and briefly Saint Tropez first doing street interviews ("Are you happy?") and later embedding with friends, colleagues, an African student, a Renault car factory employee, a French Jewish woman concentration camp survivor, and others including an apparently emotionally disturbed Italian expatriate woman who later becomes involved with filmmaker Jacques Rivette. Notable for a complex self-questioning about whether anyone can be "natural" when on camera and included critique by a preview audience of the edited film. Seems ordinary till you realize it's a pioneering and uniquely self-aware work showing, as D'Angelo says, that "Cinéma vérité originated as a more complicated idea than it subsequently became." The images became an influence on New Wave fiction features. Part of the Criterion Channel's current Nouvelle Vague offering (quite new to me).

[Chris Knipp]

LOLA (Jacques Demy 1961) I once saw this, but it left a somewhat evanescent impression, being as much an idea of how movies should look as a movie. Demy's first feature, about a beautiful but dumb dancer called Lola ((Anouk Aimée, certainly strikingly gorgeous) pining for a sailer, who returns after seven years without a post card, rich now, and sweeps her away, with their little boy, in his big white Cadillac. There is also a directionless young man, Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) in love with her (with a widow in love with him) and an American sailor on leave called Frankie (Alan Scott, with platinum blond bleached hair and a white sailor suit) enamored of Lola too. And there is Raoul Coutard's cinematography (but in this print it looks too dark sometimes) and insistent music by Tchaikovsky and Bach, and the lip-synching shows at times. Demy's next feature Bay of Angels (1963) is more effective: its protagonists may not quite be real people either but their gambling obsession makes them seem real. Lola is a fairy tale. In her New Yorker blurb Pauline Kael calls it "a lovely, quirky mixture of French-movie worldliness circa 1939 and the innocent cheerfulness of M-G-M musicals of the forties." More Criterion Channel Nouvelle Vague.

[Chris Knipp]

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG/LES PARAPLUIES DE CHERBOURG (Jacques Demy 1964). John Farr has a tribute to this all-sung (and all actors' voices dubbed) all-pastel MGM-style musical love story scored by Michel Legrand here. And he opens by citing Pauline Kael's lament in an interview nowadays "that so many people find a romantic movie like this frivolous and negligible. They don’t see the beauty in it, but it’s a lovely film — original and fine." Are this and Demuy's other musical Nouvelle Vague films? I'd say they are. Their debut to Hollywood - together with their bold differences, being all sung; dealing with unweb pregnancy, not a forties Hollywood topic, make this work New Wave, and they came from the milieu, with Demy married to Agnès Varda. As Farr explains, it was hard getting Umbrellas produced, but it would up being a big French and international hit that for early admirers like him, whose family was still living in Paris when it was made, it has only grown more and more lovely and meaningful.

[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.