Criterion Sunday 648: Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960) (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961)

It’s weird the way that films from the 1960s, and particularly the French New Wave, feel so much more contemporary than films from even a decade before, partly I suppose because a lot of the techniques which that movement made commonplace are ones that are still heavily used today, and the ideas they created inform so much of contemporary media culture and modernity itself. Look, I’m not a philosopher or a sociologist, so I can’t really speak to this in depth, but suffice to say that when watching this film from a mere 62 years ago (further ago than the turn of 19th century was to the film), it’s difficult to take in what a break it represented, as the film which begat the term cinéma vérité, extending New Wave ideas of location shooting on the streets of Paris to the documentary form (though Rouch had done plenty of documentaries before this which use some of the same techniques, so it wasn’t exactly the first). However, as the first film to claim this description, it’s also more nuanced and more self-aware than we might expect: the directors are frequently referenced, and the film ends with a sequence wherein the participants are shown the film and asked to comment on themselves and how they are represented.

All that aside, it’s of more than just film historical interest. The filmmakers begin with some simple vox pops asking people if they’re happy, but quickly spin off into more in-depth discussions. Most notably, they have Marceline Loridan (who would go on to work with and marry documentarian Joris Ivens, being integrally involved in some of his grandest works, like How Yukong Moved the Mountains). A young woman in 1960, she speaks of her childhood spent in a concentration camp, in a moving sequence that spins off from discussion of the tattoo on her arm, though it’s employed in the context of racism against African students she’s speaking to, so it all becomes quite complicated to parse.

Certainly there’s a constant dialogue in the film between its supposed veracity and how much of this is constructed or performed, further brought out in the final sequence of its interlocutors speaking to their own appearance on film. My point, garbled as it is, may merely be that there’s a lot here to unpack, and I think it demands active engagement, but it’s quite an achievement as both a film and an advance in documentary practice.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin; Cinematographers Michel Brault, Raoul Coutard, Roger Morillière and Jean-Jacques Tarbès; Length 90 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 28 May 2023.

Criterion Sunday 609: ¡Alambrista! (aka The Ilegal, 1977)

For all that this is from a different era of filmmaking — when earnest, socially engaged white men made films about the immigrant and Black experience (the director of this film was also writer and cinematographer for the excellent 1964 Nothing But a Man) — this also feels like a prescient film, and a contemporary one too. It’s about a young Mexican man who goes to America to get work to help feed his family, and there becomes entangled with forces intent on preventing him from working, cops and traffickers (including a memorable small role for Ned Beatty) and such. It’s a film that without making any grand speeches, eloquently lays bare the way that migrant workers (who may have illegally entered but are so clearly necessary for many industries) are treated and the lack of rights afforded to them. At some point, these kinds of stories became less trendy to depict, perhaps, and nowadays the creative talent behind the cameras would likely have the personal experiences of those on screen, but this is a fantastic bit of engaged 1970s filmmaking that deserves a wider audience. It must surely be one of the more overlooked standalone Criterion titles.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Robert M. Young; Cinematographer Tom Hurwitz and Young; Starring Domingo Ambriz, Trinidad Silva, Linda Gillen, Ned Beatty; Length 96 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 21 January 2023.

Spencer (2021)

Following up the reviews of my favourite films of 2022 (full list here). This isn’t the only film on my list to have been comprehensively talked out already. You don’t need another review of it, you got everything you needed about a year ago. But it wasn’t released in NZ until into 2022, and despite all my many reservations, I really enjoyed it. Not because of any fondness for its subject, but because of the way it was done, the atmosphere it evoked. So here we go, another review.

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This film is a whole vibe, and either you get with it or you don’t, I somewhat suspect. I did, but I can understand people who go the other way. In terms of its felicity to ‘real life’, well I think that’s a fraught question at least; I’ve seen some people marvel at the accuracy of Kristen Stewart’s performance. I’m not enough of a devoted royal watcher to really know how much she captured Diana, but I don’t really see her specifically in Stewart’s portrayal. But this is as much a story about a woman in a particular situation, imagining how it might go down; it’s a fable and a fantasy, it’s shot in a hazy, gauzy, pastel-hued way yet somehow also manages to channel gothic horror. But Stewart’s Diana is trapped from the start, a doomed woman, even if around her the royal family seem nothing so much as zombies, not least Charles (Jack Farthing) and Her Majesty, who have the deadest of eyes. So she only has her head to delve further into; she gets visions of Anne Boleyn and increasingly dissociative fragments of an alternate reality, which we know is not her own because she’s giddy and happy, moving down endless corridors like Kubrick’s The Shining, cautiously at first perhaps, but with an increasing abandon as the film progresses. Against my best instincts — because I really do not like or want to hear about the British royal family — it manages to be a beautiful film, and an excellent performance as ever by Stewart who goes in fully and bodily to the whole thing. Whether it captures Diana per se, I can’t say, but it captures something fleeting, somehow both archly camp and deeply felt, about an impossible life.

CREDITS
Director Pablo Larraín; Writer Steven Knight; Cinematographer Claire Mathon; Starring Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Jack Farthing, Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins; Length 117 minutes.
Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Sunday 6 February 2022.

Benediction (2021)

Following up the reviews of my favourite films of 2022 (full list here). Maybe I missed the gathering of the Terence Davies fans last year, but I don’t recall many people listing this on any year-end best-of lists for some reason, and that perplexes me. He’s never exactly been fashionable, but this was a really strong film, an evocation of the past and the movement from youthful impetuousness into a conservative older age, set against the backdrop of WW1 and the ensuing interwar period.

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Nobody is out here making films like Terence Davies. As it opens, this comes across like a combination of archival museum video that you watch in hushed silence in a media centre before entering a memorial to a horrifying past, along with the kind of TV drama which feels boldly experimental sheerly out of budgetary necessity (such enterprises usually restricting themselves to a handful of sets in old buildings sparsely populated by actors in costumes). And yet, for all that this seems like exactly the kind of thing cinema should not be doing, I really do mean it not in a bad way — for example, Raul Ruiz’s magisterial Mysteries of Lisbon very much had that latter kind of quality, and it doesn’t even feel like cost cutting but about cutting away the pointless aggrandisements of the costume/period genres to get to something essential.

In this film, Jack Lowden is fantastic as Siegfried Sassoon, who has a tender impish charm alongside a bitter seriousness (though it’s really only the latter quality that Peter Capaldi as his older version gets to show, his youthful esprit having been thoroughly dissipated). Not being familiar with Sassoon’s story, I was somewhat surprised he lived past the First World War (I think in my head I had conflated him rather too much with Wilfred Owen), but this film captures something of the turmoil of the early-20th century, while cataloguing popular/gay culture of the period (Ivor Novello, Edith Sitwell, and quite a parade of handsome slightly bland looking chiselled youths that flit through Siegried’s life).

It’s a fascinating way to tell this story, which gives as much time for him to read a poem to himself as it does to rather more melodramatic goings on, but it’s an effective story that neither panders to its period nor to us as modern viewers, and is all the better for that.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Terence Davies; Cinematographer Nicola Daley; Starring Jack Lowden, Simon Russell Beale, Peter Capaldi, Jeremy Irvine, Kate Phillips; Length 137 minutes.
Seen at Light House, Petone, Sunday 24 July 2022.

Catherine Called Birdy (2022)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. I recently covered Lena Dunham’s breakthrough feature film Tiny Furniture in my Criterion Sunday supplement (which led to her getting the Girls TV show), and in some ways she still struggles as an artist with growing up. Hence we get this feature in which she really throws herself into childhood, but with a middle ages twist, and it’s rather sweet really: almost brutal when it needs to be, but never really getting bogged down in the filth, at least not too much.

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Lena Dunham directed (and wrote and produced) this adaptation of a young adult novel, but she isn’t in it at all, which is something worth pointing out to the sadly numerous anti-fans of hers. And though it may seem quite different from artsy studenty metropolitan lives, perhaps its mediæval setting isn’t so far removed from that spirit of creative jouissance she usually tries to cultivate. It’s certainly not far from the darker and more depressive concerns because for all its lightness of touch, quirky colour and spirited performances, there’s an underlying grimness to life itself which haunts the film. Of course the key is that for the most part the characters don’t dwell on this (perhaps because it’s something they can never escape), but it adds something grounding to what could otherwise come across as altogether too twee. There are memorable turns from all kinds of supporting actors, not least Andrew Scott (unsurprisingly) as Birdy’s father, or Paul Kaye as “Shaggy Beard” (some kind of Yorkshire nouveau riche), as well as from Bella Ramsey in the lead role who gets across her childish energy as she is thrust into an altogether more adult world (or rather, perhaps there is no such distinction; certainly there was no concept of being a teenager, and that’s part of what the film gets across well: you’re a child until you’re not).

CREDITS
Director/Writer Lena Dunham (based on the novel by Karen Cushman); Cinematographer Laurie Rose; Starring Bella Ramsey, Andrew Scott, Billie Piper, Lesley Sharp, Joe Alwyn, Sophie Okonedo; Length 108 minutes.
Seen at home (Amazon streaming), Wellington, Thursday 20 October 2022.

Aftersun (2022)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a non-Criterion Collection review, but as 2022 is done and dusted (well, the year, not my viewing of films from that year, which will undoubtedly stretch out for years to come), it seems like a fitting theme for my first few posts of this year would be to cover some of my favourites from last year. This small British indie film was my favourite, until I eventually catch up with everything else. You can see my full list here though.

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After a year of watching fairly unchallenging films at the cinema (sadly I missed my city’s annual film festival), it’s nice to see one that properly challenges audiences. Which is, I suppose, one way of saying it’s slow and sad — and thus probably not for everyone — but I think it has depths to it, and I miss a film with depths. Texturally, it reminds me of the early work of, say, Lynne Ramsay and that’s not just because its period setting reminds me a little of Ratcatcher in its lugubrious mood (though where that film went back a few decades to the 70s, this one takes us back to the 90s). Partly too that’s the way that the evocation of the era doesn’t rely on period hairstyles and music, but rather on some far more oblique signifiers of the era like the grain of the camcorder films (though, okay, there’s also the “Macarena”).

However, the more resonant aspect of the film is that sadness that haunts its tale throughout, though is never explicitly reckoned with. There’s the feeling evoked by the dark, heavily strobing club dancefloor sequences that punctuate the narrative, the emptiness of the video framings being watched by someone looking back on this period of life, and the quiet moments in the story of a young dad and his 11-year-old daughter on holiday in Turkey that are punctured by the dad’s attempt to be upbeat and positive. (It should be said up front that the darkness isn’t anything to do with sexual abuse, so don’t go in worried about that. The relationship between these two is clearly loving and strong, in both directions.) But there are strong hints throughout of the elegiac nature of this 90s holiday, and the way it resonates in the present, such that in a sense this is a coming of age film that goes beyond the innocuous flirtations on the beach or the innocent kisses by the poolside with teenage boys, into more delicately shifting psychological territory.

I imagine it will hit a long more strongly for those who are parents, but it feels beautifully cathartic in a way that relies on the audience to make the connections and draw out the emotional threads, and that’s just a nice change of pace.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Charlotte Wells; Cinematographer Gregory Oke; Starring Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio; Length 101 minutes.
Seen at Penthouse, Wellington, Sunday 11 December 2022.

Criterion Sunday 600: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama stands up even today as a pretty intense piece of work, not least because it was breaking several taboos for its time — in detailing a fairly horrific crime in scientific detail, they were making a film that wasn’t for all ages, and indeed there’s plenty of incidental details to suggest a rather troubling existence. It’s Lt Fred Manion (Ben Gazzara) who’s on trial, for the murder of his wife’s rapist, but it might as well also be Laura Manion (Lee Remick) who is too, given the extent to which she is subjected to scrutiny also (I can’t think of any movie, old or new, which has so relished repeating the word “panties” quite so many times). Of course, the focus is on James Stewart’s defence counsel, who is seen putting on a performance to try and get his client off the charge, and when put together with the rather dubious nature of the reality being deconstructed in this small Michigan courtroom (and this is one of the few films I’ve seen set on the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of that state), it’s a compelling black-and-white drama that leaves us with no clear conclusions about who’s in the right and who is in the wrong, but it’s an essential film for fans of the courtroom drama.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Otto Preminger; Writer Wendell Mayes (based on the novel by Robert Traver); Cinematographer Sam Leavitt; Starring James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, George C. Scott, Arthur O’Connell; Length 161 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 24 December 2022 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, April 2000).

Criterion Sunday 581: Les Cousins (1959)

For his second feature film following 1958’s Le Beau Serge, Claude Chabrol takes the same leading actors and remixes them in a Parisian setting. Jean-Claude Brialy is still the affected intellectual, as Paul, this time sporting a goatee that clues us in right away that he probably listens to jazz and is pretentious, though in actuality what he listens to is Wagner, and he loves to party — plus his hobby is to collect antique guns — so he’s a whole lot more dangerous a character. And again it’s Gérard Blain who plays the provincial type, as Charles, who shows up to his cousin Paul’s swanky Parisian apartment and moves in to study law. He’s committed to the studying; Paul is, of course, not, and he tries to tempt Charles by bringing a number of women through his life; when Charles falls for Florence (Juliette Mayniel), things get competitive between them. This is a sort of twisted psychodrama in the end, a ménage à trois that none of them really seems to be aware of — or certainly not Charles — and Chabrol has a streak of nastiness running through his plotting that means none of them are going to get away with it in the end.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Claude Chabrol; Writers Chabrol and Paul Gégauff; Cinematographer Henri Decaë; Starring Jean-Claude Brialy, Gérard Blain, Juliette Mayniel, Claude Cerval; Length 109 minutes.

Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 20 November 2022.

Criterion Sunday 580: Le Beau Serge (1958)

Claimed by some to be the first film in French nouvelle vague, I think there are enough caveats to make that debatable — Varda made her debut a few years earlier, albeit that it was barely screened at the time — and stylistically this is still only moving towards what Godard and Truffaut would do a year later with their debuts. However, in applying some of the feeling of Italian neorealism to a story of ordinary people filmed on location in a small village, there’s certainly something of that incipient film movement in Chabrol’s debut feature. It concerns François (Jean-Claude Brialy), who’s returned to the small village where he grew up after a few years of study in the metropolitan centre, to find that his titular former best friend (Gérard Blain) has become an alcoholic layabout. The film is filled with darkness in its exploration of relationships (especially with Bernadette Lafont’s teenage Marie) and homecoming, almost judgemental in the way it makes out French provincial life and with a heavy sort of cynicism in its key relationships, which can make it all a bit of a slog.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Claude Chabrol; Cinematographer Henri Decaë; Starring Jean-Claude Brialy, Gérard Blain, Michèle Méritz, Bernadette Lafont; Length 99 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Tuesday 18 October 2022.

Criterion Sunday 571: Black Moon (1975)

Louis Malle was not a director who was scared to try things out on film, however strange or unpleasant they might be. This film, in particular, feels like it’s drawing from a lot of sources. Some of it may be Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as there are a lot of animals in this film, and a certain dollop of surrealism (it’s never quite clear what’s real and what’s imagined, but it seems like a lot may be in the head of its Alice-like young woman at the centre, played by Cathryn Harrison). But there’s also a brutal apocalyptic scenario apparently playing out, as the film opens with gender-separated gangs murdering people of the other gender, and an old woman acting as some kind of rebel leader from her hideout in a garret. Within this scenario there’s a deep sense of English country life (it reminded me a little of the underappreciated Saoirse Ronan film How I Live Now in that respect), yet the edge of strangeness comes from being filmed in France. Indeed, it’s very much not an English film despite being in that language, and that creates an extra layer of the uncanny to it. I can’t say I exactly understood or always liked it, but it does seem like a very distinctive vision, a strange and disturbing one, with hordes of feral naked children and an old woman being suckled like a baby, and a lot of clearly deeply-felt symbolism that makes it feel like a personal film to Malle. Someone early on asks what’s going on here, and that’s all I’m really left with at the end, but it’s compelling all the same.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Louis Malle; Writers Malle, Joyce Buñuel and Ghislain Uhry; Cinematographer Sven Nykvist; Starring Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Joe Dallesandro, Alexandra Stewart; Length 100 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Melbourne, Thursday 23 February 2023.