Recently Watched Films 2022

[Dan Warburton]

André Delvaux, Un soir, un train, 1968

This is so damn good I feel like writing a whole essay, but that would necessarily include some serious spoilers so I'll have to refrain, or make judicious use of the dark red colour button. Anyway, here goes. Yves Montand plays Mathias Bremen, a lingustics professor in a Belgian university - seems to be Louvain, where anti-French language protests by Flemish students flared up in 1967 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_de_Louvain - whose partner Anne (Anouk Aimée) is a theatre director trying to stage Mathias's adaptation of a medieval mystery play Elckerlijc https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elckerlijc but is having a hard time settling in a bilingual environment. They quarrel and go their separate ways on the way to the station where Mathias has to take a train to lecture in another university, but Anne, seeking some kind of reconciliation, turns up surprisingly in Mathias's compartment as the train leaves. OK, you say, sounds pretty dull so far. But a quick flashback (in Mathias's mind) to an earlier visit the couple made to London and Anne's sudden disappearance from the compartment lead to a series of temporal and spatial dislocations worthy of Alain Resnais (Cocteau's Orphée is in there too), as Montand finds himself (or are we in his head?) in a world where he's incapable of communicating, as nobody understands him, whatever language he speaks. If you haven't read Ferenc Karinthy's magnificent Epépé I can recommend that, it's the same nightmarish predicament. (The problem of language is central, not surprisingly for a Belgian director, and I assume it was a key element in the short story the film is based on, written by Flemish author Johan Daisne, cf Delvaux's earlier The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short) Surrealism is such a silly word (limp wristwatches and elephants on spindly legs come to mind); maybe Magic Realism is a better word for it, you decide. Let's just say Delvaux has come up with the filmic equivalent of a Magritte. One of the key lines is delivered to one of Anne's actors early in the film, and, unsurprisingly, it's a bitch to translate: "l'écran entre le soi et le moi" (the screen between the self and the ego? that's not what the subs say, but never mind). Whatever, I hope this magnificent work will be reissued and dusted down (Ghislain Cloquet's cinematography is terrific) soon. Here's James (but beware spoilers)
http://www.frenchfilms.org/review/un-so ... -1968.html

[Dan Warburton]

Jacques Dupont, Les Distractions, 1960

Now here's an interesting little oddity. Dupont's little more than a footnote in cinema history but he has an interesting backstory - practice yr French https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_D ... alisateur) - coming from the curiously French milieu of l'anarchisme de droite and serving two stretches in prison, the second of which for being involved in the Complot de Paris in 1961. There's an Algerian War backstory here too, as Laurent (Claude Brasseur) is an ex-paratrooper who apparently saved the life of Paul (Jean-Paul Belmondo). At the beginning of the film we see Laurent being chased through Paris by police motorcyclists, one of whom he eventually runs over and kills. We never find out why he being pursued in the first place - but the fact that the police end up organising an enormous manhunt in the forest of Fontainebleau, complete with a helicopter, would seem to indicate he's wanted for considerably more than running over a traffic cop. Paul learns the identity of the wanted man when sent to report on the story (he works for a magazine that closely resembles Paris Match) and hides Laurent first at his place and later at a girlfriend's (he has plenty of them) south of Paris. So it's a buddy movie, basically - and we're talking friendship between men, because women obviously don't count: as in several early nouvelle vague outings by the likes of Chabrol (Les godulereaux..), Doniol-Valcroze (L'eau à la bouche, Le coeur battant...) et al., women are glamorous, well-off, well-dressed and well-madeup but basically rather dumb, there for men to play with. Hard to believe, for example, that Paul's lover Véra (Alexandra Stewart), on learning that her "friend" and fellow model Arabelle had invited an already shitfaced Belmondo chez elle at 3am and let him fuck her, would attempt suicide. Watching this in 2022 it certainly feels dated, but what's interesting here of course is Belmondo and the character he plays, which is similar in many respects to Michel Poiccard, the mythic antihero of Godard's A bout de souffle. That film was shot in the summer of 1959, but I haven't been able to find out exactly when Dupont filmed his. Afterwards, I'm assuming - but I'd be curious to know if either Truffaut and Godard were aware of Dupont and what he was doing. Clearly Chabrol was, as he has a cameo in Les Distractions. Anyway, much to research. Suffice to say that, despite some super locations in and around Paris and a rather good soundtrack by Richard Cornu, it's far from being a lost New Wave masterpiece. The ending's predictable, but if Belmondo doesn't drive you crazy long before you get there, bravo.

[Dan Warburton]

Asghar Farhadi, A Hero, 2021

The only problem about trying to review this latest fine offering from Farhadi is one of finding something halfway intelligent to say about it without spoiling the whole shebang and revealing the plot. Take your pick of online reviews - this one was my favourite https://decider.com/2022/01/24/a-hero-o ... r-skip-it/ - suffice it to say, it's one of those "no good deed goes unpunished" tales of a man trying to dig himself out of a hole by doing the right thing and ending up in an even bigger mess. Much to admire, especially the performance of Amir Jadidi as our hero (I could have done without the stuttering son but I realise he's essential for the plot), and another illustration, if you ever need one, of how social media have really fucked up the world.

[Dan Warburton]

David Gladwell, Memoirs of a Survivor, 1981

An honest and, to my mind, quite successful attempt to adapt Doris Lessing's dystopian sci-fi novel about a future wartorn Britain where scavenging for food and anything of exchangeable value in the waste-strewn streets is commonplace, semi-feral kids live in the darkness of an abandoned Underground station, and Julie Christie plays D, a middle-aged woman (widow?) who from time to time travels through the wall in her living room back in time to when the house was occupied by a straight-laced Victorian family (this, though well executed, is probably more convincing in the book, which I haven't read). The only thing that spoils it somewhat is an obtrusively loud (and not very good) synth soundtrack by somebody whose name I can't remember and can't be bothered to find out. They say the book's better - they usually are - but this isn't bad at all.

[Dan Warburton]

Costa-Gavras, Amen., 2002

Yes, the full stop is part of the title, in case you were wondering. To celebrate (celebrate?) the anniversary of the "liberation" of the camps, I thought it was time to check out another chilling slice of life à la Costa-Gavras, this one based on a play by Rolf Hochhuth and based more or less on the true story of Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), a no doubt well-meaning but spectacularly naïve chemical engineer who joined the SS (see what I mean, spectacularly naïve) to find, to his horror, that the gas he'd been working on to eradicate vermin was being used to, well, eradicate vermin of a different sort. As a good Catholic, he tried to get the Pope to condemn the atrocities he'd witnessed in the camps, through the intercession of a Jesuit priest, Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassowitz). In vain, of course. The baddies got away with it - and the baddy par excellence is played by the late great Ulrich Mühe. Fine performances all round.

[Dan Warburton]

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others, 2006

Funny how we change. Having spotted that Messrs Tukur, Mühe and Koch were all in Amen., I decided to give this one a return visit and found it a lot less impressive than I did a decade ago (re-reading an earlier post). As was pointed out at the time by fellow posters here who know much more about these things than I do, the historical inaccuracies are glaring. German author Christoph Hein, whose story formed the basis of Donnersmarck's script and whom the director interviewed back in 2002, asked for his name to be removed from the opening credits, writing "the movie does not depict the 1980s in the GDR", but is a "scary tale taking place in a fantasy land, comparable to Tolkien's Middle-earth." Fair enough, but that doesn't stop the three abovementioned actors from turning in solid performances. I doubt Donnersmarck ever wanted to be Costa-Gavras anyway. How are his other movies? I haven't seen the last two.

[Dan Warburton]

Byron Haskin, Too late for Tears, 1949

Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas indeed. When a bag of money is lobbed into her car, Lizabeth Scott - gee, such a nice speaking voice, how could she be such a bitch? - has no scruples about getting rid of anyone who stands in the way of her spending it, starting with her husband. I guess the perfunctory "happy" ending, when her first husband's brother turns up to spoil everything, was imposed on the crew by the Code people - shame, as I thought a really nasty Jim Thompson ending would have suited the story better.

[Dan Warburton]

Abel Ferrara, 'R Xmas, 2001

Seems some people out there liked this, but I didn't and I managed to find a write-up by someone who liked it even less than I did https://moviemavericks.com/2013/12/r-xmas-2001-review/ - Ferrara's good when he's good, but when he's bad he's bloody awful, and this meandering tale is a case in point. OK, we always knew Ice-T couldn't act (he wasn't all that great as a rapper, though I still have a soft spot for "You Played Yourself"), but Lillo Brancato and Drea de Matteo usually can. Except here they have nothing to work with: he's as thick as two short planks and she has nothing to do but scowl and fume (as in the French verb: she smokes almost as many cigarettes as she says "fuck"). Not much music from Schooly D either. It's a real mess, skip it.

[Wombatz]

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others, 2006

Funny how we change. Having spotted that Messrs Tukur, Mühe and Koch were all in Amen., I decided to give this one a return visit and found it a lot less impressive than I did a decade ago (re-reading an earlier post). As was pointed out at the time by fellow posters here who know much more about these things than I do, the historical inaccuracies are glaring. German author Christoph Hein, whose story formed the basis of Donnersmarck's script and whom the director interviewed back in 2002, asked for his name to be removed from the opening credits, writing "the movie does not depict the 1980s in the GDR", but is a "scary tale taking place in a fantasy land, comparable to Tolkien's Middle-earth." Fair enough, but that doesn't stop the three abovementioned actors from turning in solid performances. I doubt Donnersmarck ever wanted to be Costa-Gavras anyway. How are his other movies? I haven't seen the last two.

this was generally well-received over here (though i hated it because not only is it historically inaccurate, but these historical inaccuracies serve certain anti-easterner blame games ascribing responsibility for the state of society to the moral decisions of the individual). donnersmarck received a little more flak for werk ohne autor (never look away), which was also quite successful but as the story was based on actual persons (e.g. painter gerhard richter), the hollywoodization of german history seemed in bad taste even to the german feuilleton (who don't love standard hollywood films but adore german films that manage to look and taste like hollywood films).

[henriq]

I'll tell you, Jeffrey Bernard really got me going with the Irishman...



Peter Medak - The Ruling Class (1972)

Well, I’ll start out with a lengthy quote from writer Ian Christie:

“But what makes The Ruling Class exceptional (and difficult for some) are its outrageous mixing of genres and its sheer ambition. Not only are there allusions to Shakespeare and Marlowe, but also to Wilde and Whitehall farce; to the gentility of Ealing Studios, with a plot that distantly evokes that other great black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, and to Hammer’s gore-fests. It is perhaps all very un-English, as William Mervyn’s cynical Sir Charles says of Dr. Herder, but only in terms of a very censored notion of Englishness. And among its starry cast of great character actors relishing their chance to go over the top with Peter O’Toole in what is surely his greatest role after Lawrence, there are also some remarkable purely filmic inventions. The image of Dr. Herder embracing the police cut-out silhouette of Lady Claire has an eerie pathos, and the chilling final scream that rings out over the brooding exterior of the Gurney mansion after Jack has stabbed his wife, flushed with his acclaim in the House of Lords, seems to unite the bloody poetry that Hammer aspired to with a real protest against Britain’s decaying aristocratic tradition.”
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts ... ling-class

just to get me going a bit about this brilliant film. Indeed, Englishness is evoked, from Harry Andrews’ opening address to the Society of Saint George through his autoerotic strangulation and accidental death, to Peter O’Toole, back from the asylum and flitting about the garden like some cross between Francis of Assisi and Daniel Paul Schreber, deliriously attaining to “sanity” and the identity of hangman and Jack the Ripper. O’Toole is of course amazing - never has an angel been so demonic, nor a demon so bright eyed and seductive. And the supporting cast… Coral Browne! James Villiers! Graham Crowden! ALASTAIR SIM! I find I’m shouting… Englishness as country estate, as garden, fox hunt, blood-soaked tradition, dome, terrordome. Brilliant!



Roger Michell - Venus (2006)

And some late career brilliance from the actor. Two friends and actors, O’Toole and Leslie Phillips - Phillips gets a live-in maid, his niece’s daughter, Jessie, played brilliantly by Jodie Whittaker. Phillips’ Ian can’t stand the girl, chavvy teen that she is, but O’Toole’s Maurice gets quite taken. And so a sort of love story gets going. What I find most fascinating about the film is the strange rhythm that carries it, of themes and lines telegraphed well in advance only to get cut short, turned on their head. Yes, there is a Pygmalion feel to the onset of the affair. Maurice takes Jessie out to the theatre, but there is no need for a lengthy schooling or pedagogy, she is immediately smitten with what she sees. Then she takes HIM out to a club, and he lets her. O’Toole is a lot to do with what makes this work. He plays his part with an openness, a kindness of sorts, without a trace of condescension. Chuffing Bacardi breezers at some club with kids a fourth his age? Yes, why not, might be fun! And neither is it played with him finding Life again with this child, not at all. The brilliance of the performance is that he plays Maurice as a sexual being as much as anything, steely will and lust peeking through the doddering façade. And she lets him near, but the attraction is never consummated, and never feels cheap or salacious. It gets a bit unpleasant, even graphic at points. Put that down to writer Hanif Kureishi - he scripted this and The Mother for the director, as well as of course Intimacy for Patrice Chéreau. The same interest here in the confusion of boundaries and propriety, sex and desire. And what arises from all these stops and starts, attraction, sympathy, tenderness, and then revulsion and rejection, is a lengthily distended image of the Venus of the title, Velasquez’s Venus. It ends on that image, in a beautiful finale that would probably have looked cheap and easy in any other director’s hands. Michell is a cut above, a lovely film.

[Dan Warburton]

I look forward to your thoughts on Rogue Male - but maybe you already wrote on that, too lazy to look Meanwhile -



Alex van Warmerdam, The Last Days of Emma Blank, 2009

I love AvW's jet black comedies - only Marco Ferreri comes to mind if I look for a comparison, and even that's not close - and this crazy tale of - no, I won't spoil anything, but you can read this if you like http://anutshellreview.blogspot.com/201 ... atste.html - is as funny as it's disturbing. Not, however, his best imo, but certainly a good way to spend an evening. Or afternoon, or whatever.

[Dan Warburton]

John Frankenheimer, Story of a Love Story, 1973

IMDb: "Harry is a married writer who has an affair with a woman whose husband knows that she is unfaithful. As a result of his work, Harry has trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality leaving us to wonder whether the affair is real or just a figment of Harry's imagination." This oddity, which has never been properly released as far as I can make out, is based on a novel by Nicholas Mosley (yes, son of that Mosley in case you're interested) called Impossible Object, and is the closest Frankenheimer ever got to Resnais. No problem with Dominique Sanda and Lea Massari, but the otherwise excellent Alan Bates seems somewhat miscast and comes across as too cheery and chirpy. And Frankenheimer made a mistake by casting his then wife Evans Evans (now there's a name, boy bach) as Harry's wife. But see what you think, if you can hunt down a copy (you know where to find one).

[Lao Tsu Ben]

I have been rather eager to watch that for a few years - probably a decade actually tbh - since I like the Mosley novel. But I'm waiting for a good enough copy.

[Dan Warburton]

Oh the KG rip isn't as bad as all that - go for it! Would love to hear what you make of it, Ben. Meanwhile...



James Whale, The Old Dark House, 1932

...we've just spent a weekend being battered by the same kind of weather that forces five people to seek refuge in a house in the Welsh mountains inhabited by the wonderfully weird Horace Femm, his half-deaf sister, an ancient grandfather bedridden upstairs and a deranged brother locked in the attic. AND Morgan, the scarily violent mute, alcoholic butler (perfect for Boris Karloff!). I haven't read J.B. Priestley's post WW1 novel Benighted on which this hilarious gothic horror romp is based, but I doubt the characters in it (with the possible exception of Charles Laughton's Sir William, with his muck'n'brass Yorkshire accent) are as wild as these folks are. But - despite a limp ending - it's great fun.

[Dan Warburton]

Roger Corman, A Bucket of Blood, 1959

Yep, shot in five days. Corman special. He should have stabbed the poet instead of the cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bucket_of_Blood

[Dan Warburton]

Patrice Chéreau, Judith Therpauve, 1978

Simone Signoret is absolutely magnificent as the ex-Resistance heroine who takes over an ailing local newspaper, half out of a sense of duty, half to escape the family - complete with thoroughly obnoxious grandchildren, at least four of the little buggers - who comes to squat her country mansion every weekend. There's a lot of juicy dialogue here, and alas (for my man Henrik who's a great Chéreau fan) there are no subtitles available yet - live in hope: with time a better version always pops up. Great performances from a fine cast (special mention for Philippe Léotard once again). Fine fine film - but you know from the opening shot how it's going to end up (no spoilers)

[Dan Warburton]

John Cromwell, Caged, 1950

Wiki: "The film portrays the story of a young newlywed sent to prison for being an accessory to a robbery. Her brutal experiences while incarcerated, along with the killing of her husband, transform her from a meek, naive woman into a hardened convict. The film's subplot includes massive prison corruption. Caged was adapted by Virginia Kellogg from the story Women Without Men by Kellogg and Bernard C. Schoenfeld. The studio had originally intended the film to be a vehicle for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, but reportedly Davis had said she did not want to make a "dyke movie" (a film with lesbian content) and turned it down." Probably just as well - I have a hard time imagining Bette as Marie Allen, but (assuming Joan had landed the part of Harper) it would have been fun watching her slug it out with her nemesis. For that we had to wait until Baby Jane.. Meanwhile, Cromwell's film is a fine piece of work, pretty stark and hard-hitting for its time: for you to decide how closely it corresponds to the guidelines set down by the Motion Picture Production Code.

[Dan Warburton]

Jacques Dupont & Pierre Schoendoerffer, La passe du diable, 1956

Merde, is this the only decent screenshot? Looks like it is: which is one hell of a shame, because Raoul Coutard's photography of the landscapes of Afghanistan (including the awesome and now destroyed - cheers, Mullah Omar you c*nt - Buddha of Bâmiyân) is simply sensational. You can probably forget the Joseph Kessel story altogether (though it did inspire John Frankenheimer's later The Horsemen) and just thrill at the magnificent landscape and the people who live in it. Now that we've turned Afghanistan into failed state par excellence, it's worth reminding ourselves of what it used to be like. Stupendously good 1080 rip over at KG. Meanwhile, if your French is up to it https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Passe_du_diable

[Dan Warburton]

Gilles Grangier, Le sang à la tête, 1956

Gabin is - as usual - superb at inhabiting his role, here as François Cardinaud, who's worked his way up from simple docker to shipowner and wholesale head honcho at the port of La Rochelle, sporting enough cash to support a household including a maid and a governess and to help out his mother-in-law to pay the gas bill when brother-in-law gambles away the housekeeping money. All would seem to be hunky dory until one day his wife doesn't come for dinner... Based on a 1942 novel by Simenon (who else?) and with dialogue by the ever impressive Michel Audiard (good luck hunting for English subs that could do it justice), it's a magnificent character study. Hard to select a Gabin top ten but if I had to, I think this one would definitely in there.

[Dan Warburton]

Bo Widerberg, The Man from Mallorca, 1984

Wiki: "A robber calmly holds up a post-office in at 13 December. The policemen Johansson and Jarnebring are the first on the scene and they chase the robber, who escapes. Shortly after, someone dies in a car accident and a dead body is found at a graveyard. After a while it is clear that these incidents have something to do with the robbery, and when the policemen are investigating further, they are beginning to reveal a bigger scandal. Meanwhile it seems that there is a cover-up going on." You can say that again - I nearly fell off my chair at the ending! What a cracking good film - maybe even better than Widerberg's earlier splendid The Man on the Roof - and I'm tempted to read the Leif Persson novel Pig Party it was based on (and maybe swot up on the real backstory of the Geijer affair, unless our resident Swedish cinéphile Henrik wants to provide a brief commentary). Widerberg admits being influenced by Friedkin's French Connection (and as films go, that's a good one to be influenced by): buddy cops, great action sequences, Christmas setting, ambiguous ending. Excellent stuff, well recommended.