2023

[Dan Warburton]

Marco Bellochio, Gli Occhi, la Bocca, 1982

Apart from a fleeting appearance as an extra in Il Gattopardo, Lou Castel (né Ulv Quarzéll, Swedish but born in Bogota) made his stunning debut in 1965 in Bellochio's magnificent I pugni in tasca ("Fists in the pocket"), and neither the director nor the actor has forgotten it, as an extract from the earlier film (its most memorable scene, in fact, so I won't spoil it by describing it here) pops up in Gli Occhi, where Castel plays Giovanni, the (now struggling) actor who made his debut in.. yep, you see, it's very self-referential here - one writer can't decide if it's a film about Bellochio himself or about Castel.. Anyway, the story such as it is is as follows: Giovanni has to return home in a hurry to attend his recently suicided brother Pippo's funeral (there's some smashing in-the-casket violence worthy of Ferrara's Funeral) and ends up with Pippo's ex, Wanda, more or less. It's a good cast - Piccoli and Riva are worth watching even if dubbed into Italian - and the script, co-written by Catherine Breillat incidentally, has its moments, but the storyline and Castel's performance are (deliberately, I assume) decidedly volatile and unstable, which leads to a conclusion that intrigues but somehow fails to satisfy.

[henriq]

Shall I give it another try? Tried to watch it in 2021, only to be put off by the hipster snarky doomer tone of the beginning.

Oh I think so, but then again, I fell in love with it completely. If and when you get to the twist things will pick up, and then there's the song, and Emily Skeggs is wonderful. And I liked the doomy tone, the energy of it, genteel but goony straight out of John Waters. My take on it, at least.

OK, couldn't resist snatching something my esteemed pal from Stockholm enjoyed so much. So did we! That said, both the lead actors are considerably older than the characters they're playing, and it shows from time to time - but it's fresh, frothy and fun. Love the three dinner scenes (and especially Patty's parents stoned immaculate on hash brownies). John Waters comes to mind, but it's not quite trashy enough for him. Hipster snarky doomer indeed, but I didn't mind that all that much. Bloody song got stuck in my head though, like a watermelon.. wtf!

John Waters, indeed:

https://www.artforum.com/print/202210/j ... 2022-89642

[Dan Warburton]

Frank Cassenti, Le chanson de Roland, 1978

How can a film with a cast that includes Klaus Kinski, Alain Cuny, Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Jean-Claude Brialy and Dominique Sanda have fallen so spectacularly off the radar? Like Cassenti's earlier L'Affiche Rouge, it's a tale of actors playing actors in play within a play, though whereas that was set in WWII, this one takes as its starting point what's probably the earliest piece of French literature, the chanson de geste known as Chanson de Roland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Roland, a text itself whose authorship and reception history (was it intended to be read or played out on stage?) is sufficiently complex enough to warrant a decidedly arthouse treatment, which is what the director indeed gives it. Hence I suppose its relative obscurity. But it certainly deserves to be dusted down and reissued, not necessarily for its medieval authenticity (there isn't much) but for some fine performances, notably from Kinski (who, I think, is not dubbed). Dominique Sanda doesn't do much, unfortunately (but looks great), and the intercutting between the "real" pilgrims en route to Santiago de Compostella and their performances of the Chanson isn't always easy to figure out, but Antoine Duhamel's score is excellent. Worth a look.

[Dan Warburton]

Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Tori et Lokita, 2022

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/d ... in-belgium Nice to see that the Dardennes haven't lost their touch after all these years. Their distinctive no-frills tight close-up handheld camera style adds a real sense of urgency and panic to this desperate tale of two young African migrant kids newly trafficked into Belgium and forced to deal drugs (and worse) to try and get by. It's brutal stuff, but superbly acted (hats off to young Pablo Schils and Joely Mbundu) and excellently filmed. Bleakly magnificent.

[Dan Warburton]

Luis Saslavsky, La neige était sale, 1953

I was blown away by the director's later Les louves a while back, based on a typically twisted Boileau Narcejac (Les diaboliques, Vertigo...) tale, and here he tackles another spectacularly dark novel of the same name by the outrageously prolific Georges Simenon. From the opening frames, we know that our principal protagonist Franck is going to be shot, and we're told why too. So we simply have to sit back and try and understand how the hell he got that way. We see him as a kid with his foster parents, as his mother and one of her beaus pays a visit, so we're not surprised to find out that she later runs a bordello catering for the Nazi occupiers, and her son has found a niche in the black market of occupied France, quite unflapped when it comes to killing a German to steal his revolver, robbing and shooting his erstwhile foster mother to steal her clocks and even pimping out the girl who lives across the hallway, who, for some reason, has really fallen in love with him. Daniel Gélin is simply awesome as the cynically detestable antihero (no, scratch that, he's not even an antihero, he's a total ***t). Dark stuff, for sure. Well worth a decent reissue, as was Les louves.

[Dan Warburton]

Jean-Christophe Meurisse, Oranges sanguines, 2021

Just before anyone sends in one of those despairing "what happened to Dan?" posts, this is just to let you know I'm alive, well, watching more movies than ever, and not as lazy as the rest of you lot when it comes to writing them up. Well, almost. But here's one if you like your comedy pitch black and heavily Tarantino-influenced (not wishing to spoil much kids, but think of the two most "shocking" scenes in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and you'll have a clue as to what to expect here...) Fred Blin (above) is a revelation, deserves the Michael Madsen Sicko Prize all right, and there's also a hilarious scene with French standup comic Blanche Gardin as the kind of gynaecologist you'd probably not want your daughter to get chummy with. Add a healthy dollop of French political cynicism (you'll need subs, but they're there) and you're all set for a smashing evening of fun for all the family. Bring your own booze.

[Dan Warburton]

Damian Szifron, Wild Tales, 2014

"Six short stories that explore the extremities of human behavior involving people in distress," says IMDb. Yup, spot on there. Only one of these sketches ends well (sort of... maybe two, we can discuss that last one), and you may find yourself laughing out loud at some of the atrocities and then feeling guilty about doing so. From rat poison to apocalyptic road rage to seriously twisted blackmail, with a smashing soundtrack and some great performances, it deserved the awards it got. Pretty fucking bleak picture of humanity though, but I reckon that's about right for today's world. Of course, you can always read a freshly airbrushed Roald Dahl story if you're offended

[Dan Warburton]

Hugo Santiago, Les trottoirs de Saturne, 1986

Exiled - in Paris - Argentine bandeonista Fabian (played by real life bandoneon wizard Rodolfo Mederos: a nice touch, like Heimat 2, casting real musicians), puts the finishing touches to his latest septet album which features music by early tango composer Eduardo Arolas (who in fact died in 1924 but is, Fabian believes, still wandering the streets of Paris by night... though that could just be the booze talking) and decides to return to the home country, here called Aquilea, but the maps on the walls make it perfectly clear which vicious junta is being referred to. Not a good idea, as it turns out. Rather long - 2h20 - but a fine study of the artist in exile. Which was what Santiago was, escaping to France in 1959. See earlier reviews of the director's Invasion and Le ciel du centaure, if you're interested. He also worked as assistant director to Bresson and made fine documentaries on Maurice Blanchot and Maria Bethania (shame he didn't live long enough to do Michelangelo Buonarroti, Marlon Brando, Mel Brooks and Martin Bormann ).

[Wombatz]

i need to see chanson de roland ...

anyway, since our marriage contract obliges me to watch each and every isabelle huppert vehicle, i saw la daronne, 2020, by one jean-paul salomé. so this is isabelle breaking bad ...



well, a little (also i can't tell because i switched off half an episode into bb). my wife loved it (or maybe the small print in our contract says she has to like one of them now and then not to forfeit the clause). i could see no reason why anyone would want to watch this or why such a lukewarm hodge podge of familiar scenes had to be made except the french are a cinematic people and support the industry to keep their movie stars in the limelights. the only thing we agreed upon is that isabelle looks great but it's really silly to still cast her as a 50-year-old (especially as that's kind of one of the topics).

then i found a dvd of the million pound note, 1954, by ronald neame in one of those giveaway boxes in the street ...



it's not bad. it looks and feels very stuffy (yeah it's a period piece), but then actually the anti-capitalist satire works rather well ... or maybe one should say it undercuts the film, undermines the characters (as really supposedly honest soul gregory peck has no way of knowing if he represents a proper investment scheme or not). so i looked up the screen writer and indeed jill craigie had socialist involvement. interesting. i wouldn't highly recommend it but compared to the above clearly there were some intentions involved in the making of this film.

the funny thing is that while my wife had seen several gregory peck movies before (including the snows of kilimanjaro), somehow he never registered (how does she do that, am i that pretty?), but here he did, and so a few days later we went for



roman holiday, 1953, by william wyler. and you know what, i'd never seen it before, i would have sworn that i had! dalton trumbo involved in the screenplay here, but not a shred of satire on royalty in this story of a princess' day of freedom (well yes, her routines and entourage are made fun of, but her sense of proper duties is never in doubt). so this is good clean fun. such watchable faces too, though audrey hepburn's is till a bit rigid in her first role. peck has the most caddish motives (he's after the story, not after the girl) far into the film and notices his feelings only after they've been in a brawl together, so this strikes a nice balance and one can watch it without heartburn.

[Dan Warburton]

François Ozon, Peter von Kant, 2022



Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant, 1972

Sigh, I wish I didn't have to do tedious things like work for a living etc. and had enough time to write something really substantial on Ozon's gender-flipped take on Fassbinder's earlier film. I don't, but here are a few thoughts (and there are several intelligent and insightful reviews online so have a browse if you're interested) specifically aimed at those of you already familiar with the Fassbinder. If you're not, you bloody well should be, but that's just like, my opinion, man. Denis Ménochet netted a César (French Oscar, quoi) for his Steigeresque scenery-chewing performance as film director Peter von Kant, clearly based on Fassbinder himself, complete with excessive coke and booze habits - whether RWF himself was as wild as this in real life I can't say, not having read any biography, though anecdotes are legion - and it's a virtuoso performance indeed. Ozon uses whole chunks of the original Fassbinder play, but the fact that his principal protagonists - Peter, his long suffering servant Karl and his love interest Amir - are men sheds a whole different light on Fassbinder's text. When a man (Peter) instead of a woman (Petra) confides in a woman (Sidonie, played in the Ozon by Isabelle Adjani, of whom more later) about how his spurned lover fucked him "like a bull does a cow" the resonance clearly isn't the same Casting a young maghrébin as Peter's love interest Amir, instead of a local girl (Karin, in the Fassbinder) is presumably a deliberate reference to RWF's turbulent affair with El Hedi ben Salem, and the icing on this cake of metatextual genderbendery is Ozon's casting of Hanna Schygulla - the original Karin in the Fassbinder - as Peter's mother. It's a thrill for cinéphiles - for that is, after all, whom Ozon seems to be making his movie for - to see Schygulla face off with Adjani. Ozon has deliberately written up, or camped up, the role of Sidonie from the mousy, rather inconsequential Liza Minnelli-lookalike waif in the Fassbinder to a pampered preening primadonna, and Adjani (who from the middle distance doesn't look like she's 67 years old, though she's wearing so much makeup you could hit her in the face with a shovel and see no difference) is melodramatically wonderful. While the original Petra, Margit Carstensen, with her collection of shifting identity wigs, channels her emotions into a chilly Fassbinderian underground (love is colder than death, indeed), Ménochet is a fuming, tearful wild animal; Petra stomps on a teapot while Peter trashes most of his apartment. Curiously, as a result, Ozon's film feels more like filmed theatre than Fassbinder's, with its exquisite geometrical camera movements and mirror play. It seems pointless to try to decide which film is better, as some reviewers have attempted to do. I enjoyed them both very much. See what you think.

[Dan Warburton]

Mariano Llinás, La flor, 2018

It was our own Lao Tsu Ben who recommended I spend the idle hours of lockdown watching this thirteen-and-a-half hour long metafilm (though I had, out of curiosity, already snatched it over at the other place), and I've finally got round to it. Or got through it, rather. Where to begin? Weeeell, if you've seen it (bravo!), the following scribbles won't tell you anything new, and if you haven't, they'll undoubtedly contain spoilers, which I'll try to keep to a minimum. Actually, as far as spoilers go, the director's pretty good at those himself, opening the film by telling us the following:
“There are six stories. Four of them have a beginning but not an ending. That is to say they stop in the middle: they have no ending. Then, there is episode five, which like a short story has a beginning and an end. Finally, there is episode six, which begins in the middle and ends the film. Each episode has a genre, so to speak. The first episode could be regarded as a B movie, the kind that Americans used to shoot with their eyes closed and now just can’t shoot any more. The second episode is a sort of musical, with a touch of mystery. The third episode is a spy movie. The fourth episode is difficult to describe. Not even I, in the moment of making this prologue, have a clear idea. The fifth is inspired by an old French film, and the last is about some captive women in the 19th century who return from the desert, from the Indians, after many years. The punchline of the whole movie lies in the fact that all the episodes star the same four women in different roles. Valeria, Elisa, Laura and Pilar. I’d say the movie is about them and, somehow, for them. OK, I think that’s about it – for now…"
Llinás pops up an hour or so into episode three to inform us that there are still more than three hours to go (!), and again before episode five, before driving off and leaving us to his silent (almost, see later) remake of Jean Renoir's 1936 Une partie de campagne (itself a famously unfinished film based on an 1881 short story by Guy de Maupassant), the fuzzy enigmatic episode six and a credit sequence that lasts longer than both put together. Yes, 39 minutes of credits which roll lazily over footage of the crew breaking down the set out in the pampas, but shown upside down and accompanied by an extended version complete with rehearsal outtakes of a song. May the force be with you, indeed.
The word "trolling" inevitably comes to mind, but despite its many frustrations there are some beautiful moments, notably the extended portrait of the four actresses at the end of episode four accompanied by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli's playing of the slow movement of the Ravel piano concerto and the footage of the aerobatic display in episode five (accompanied by dialogue culled from the Renoir). Like the director, we end up becoming curiously attached to the four actresses, Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa and Laura Paredes; it's touching to see a visibly pregnant Correa in episode six, to remind us that this crazy project took the cast more than a decade to realise. If, however, you're expecting some sort of resolution and tying up of loose ends, forget it. The labyrinthine third episode spy thriller is the most, erm, coherent (providing you can keep track of the flashbacks within flashbacks and can remember who's double crossing whom): watch out for a cigar-chomping Margaret Thatcher halfway through (ha, wonder if the director ever saw those old Spitting Image episodes). My favourite was the headscratchingly weird episode four, whose wild "plot" I won't even attempt to describe (suffice it to say you'll find various inmates of a psychiatric hospital, Casanova and... killer trees (??)).
The idea of a 13-hour film no longer seems all that wild nowadays, now that many people routinely spend all weekend glued to their screens watching entire seasons of shitty television series, though I wouldn't necessarily advocate watching La flor from beginning to end (unlike, say, Sátántangó). You can quite easily watch episodes one and two separately, but I'd try to tackle three all in one go (it's much more fun than Sátántangó too). Even so, you might find yourself flagging once you've passed episode four. If anyone else here has made it to the end (Ben?) and wants to chip in, feel free. It's a trip, all right.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

I don't remember much about the film to be honest: of course, I left the theater just a few minutes into the ending credits. My fave episode was the second one, where the broken couple reunites to record a song. The spy thriller I found a bit too durassian in its French parts for its own good, but impressive overall. And yeah the fourth is the second best. All in all, Llinas, like any maximalist, knew from scratch that the sum would be better than the parts. What is interesting his how his maximalism expresses itself with minimal means.

Saw recently an Argentinean movie, one which regularly trusts the first places in polls about best Argentinean movies,


Tempo de revancha, Adolfo Aristarain, 1981

Watched with friends, one of whom found it lousy. I begged to differ, this is a gripping thriller/courtroom drama/political movie that speaks volumes about the military dictature that clasped at Argentina at the time of the release. A revolt plays out, which has no other weapons of choice than passivity. Because of that, the patience and frustration of the viewer are tried in a way that you can't hold against the film, cruel, and replete with tragic irony. Still relevant (see the battle of the Mapuche in Patagonia against Benetton), bearing the stigmata of attitudes that hold back the country to this day, the film deserves his reputation, which seems limited to its country of origin.

[Dan Warburton]

Have you seen Les trottoirs de Saturne (see above), Ben? Would be good to hear your thoughts on that one. Meanwhile, Lutz, as it seems you're contractually obliged to see every film with Isabelle Huppert in it , I was wondering what you (and your wife) made of Yves Boisset's Dupont Lajoie. And, gulp, Haneke's Piano Teacher

[Wombatz]

i was still single in 1975, so i haven't seen the boisset film. sounds ugly, so i won't alert anyone. rather unsurprisingly, i absolutely hated the piano teacher. my wife found it more interesting, but then she's a pianist, maybe that helps.

over the last week we saw



hitchcock's family plot. it's fun! the plot is totally bonkers, of course, but enjoys its improbabilities. every scene is chewn by itself. so we thought we'd combine hitch and gregory peck (and the dalí book i'm polishing the commas for) and see



spellbound. it's not a good movie. the psychoanalysis stuff is treated ponderously then quickly discarded for some hackneyed thriller twists. the quasi real-time interpretation of dreams is very silly. too many too clever shots (like, the camera drinking from milk glasses and shooting itself). the actors are mostly cuddly though.