Jacques Demy
Lola and Model Shop (the ‘sequel’)
Lola- 1961, B&W, french w/subtitles, Anouk Aimee, set in Nantes
This was Demy’s debut film. A note – the version I saw had bad subtitling, so that by the end of the film the subtitles often did not match the person speaking, it was very disconcerting by the end, however an excellent movie. 1.5H.
Model Shop- 1963, Colour, English, Set in low-rise 1960’s LA. Anouk Aimee and Gary
Lockwood, who was in 2001 A Space Odyssey. A surprise – colour and America, and pop music. 1.5H.
Viewed at Cinematheque Ontario, Aug 11/05, a double-header. Alone for the first film. I had thought Rosalind would come – she had wanted to when She, Darren and I saw Une Femme Est Une Femme on Tuesday PM and went over to ‘The Village Idiot’ for a couple glasses of wine afterwords. However I could not reach her and she did not call.
Pierre and Georg from Knox (Pierre: from Montreal, philosophy PhD studying Federalism, Georg from Frankfurt, last evening of his 2 month stay in Canada as placement from his Medical degree). Very pleased to see that Pierre and Georg both very much liked the film (Georg: Gay-org). See review below. Afterwords the three boys went and had a drink at the Idiot and than finished off Georg’s Molson Canadian and peanuts while playing cutthroat three-man elimination billiards in the basement of Knox. See photo.
(In Canada, we explained to Georg, all one needs for a good time is a six pack of Molson’s, a poorly lit basement and a pool table. We are a simple country, and this, for us, is the height of luxury).
Lola –
The attractive and almost frail Aimee is in Nantes, I think, although one might think it was Paris. She is in a Cabaret, chased by a straightforward and disarming sailor. He likes her very much, and must be leaving for America, so they are having a ‘romance’ while the other sailors visit the cabaret to dance with the leggy women ‘on demand’ (it is not a whorehouse). Lola has a young boy, blond hair, and 7 years ago her man left, without marriage. And yet – faithful Lola waits for his return expectantly, with a stringent yearning. Her childhood friend is a sort of cynical intellectual who gets fired for not caring about his work, for not liking his city or his time: he is an interesting disillusioned young man. Lola – her stage name, she is Celine, I think – and he are charmed to see one another again. He wants to take her away with him. But at the last moment, who shows up? and so she drives off, seeing her childhood friend on the street, walking, not knowing that he will not see her and that his suddenly declaration of love, out of nowhere, will be just as suddenly unrequited.
A very nice little film, with a sort of sedate enigmatic quality to Lola especially, but to the other characters as well. It is like the ‘gap’ in life is being filed, the spot between what we know and what we feel, and what we don’t know and what we don’t know we are feeling. Something like that, in any case. These characters do not ‘know’ what they want, as a business manager does: however they have a longing, and they go directly after whatever it is when it presents itself before them in circumstance.
A lovely musical score and footage.
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Model Shop.
1969
Pierre, Georg and I all admired the driving sequences as we follow the American around, for the whole movie. It’s like we see everything he does, and the music kicks in while he drives his little convertible MG through old LA. The pop music, by some band called ‘Spirit’ (featured as friends in the film) is rested from with classical sections, a great relief from the turgid swirl of 1960.
And Lo! There is Lola, from Paris, her son left behind her, and it has been, I believe, another 7 years. The young man is about 24, an architect, who has just quit his job as he cannot be bothered to wok on ‘plumbing’ when he wants to make something real, something definitive.
Dir Delmer Daves, 1947, B&W, USA
Bogart and Bacall
Viewed at Cinmatheque June 2004
Tremendous plot, very clever camera work. Figure, whose face we are not allowed to see (using in some cases some ‘first person’ camera work, seeing through the man’s eyes), escapes from prison and is picked up mysteriously by the beautiful and stern L. Bacall.
She has been watching his case, and has a personal interest – he is an accussed murderer. He gets, on a tip from a taxi cab driver, an ‘underground’ plastic surgeury facelift – and low and behold, when the bandages come off, it is Bogart. The final scene is ridiculously and artlessly sentimental; however a supurbe and in several ways innovative film. Five Stars.
Henri-Georges Clouzot, France 1953, BW subtitles
Grande Prix from Cannes, 1953. Best Film from British Film Group, 1954.
Viewed at Nathan/Justus’ house, March 2004. Rented as a guess.
A Latin America suspense masterpiece. 4 men stranded in a dead end town loaf all day on the porch of a local tavern. An accident occurs at the oil wells, and they need a delivery of tonnes of nitroglycerin. It can only be delivered, over three hundred miles, by two old trucks with antique suspension…our four disposed suddenly become would be heros, or would-be dead men.
Clouzot’s suspense is very very good. The slowness of the trucks, and visual build-up in the streets of the small town, and the harrowing scenes on the journey so full of risk. If this movie does not thrill one, if it does not deserve five stars, if it does not plumb the depths of these desperate men and turn them into9 magnificent possibilities – than what will?
*****
Chaplin
1940
2 Hours
Not bad, funny, with sound. The moralizing speech at the end shows the quixotic frailty of Chaplin himself; an odd, beautifully simple-minded idealist; one in great erst.
four stars, but no more.
Chaplin
1947
2 Hours
I just erased, in error, a very through review, and do not have the wakefulness to repeat it. A magnificent film, a critical and commercial failure that Chaplin described as “the cleverest and most brilliant of my career”.
Verdoux loses his position as a bank clerk to the depression: a position he has held for 30 years. He becomes a ‘blue bears’, a serial killer, seducing middle aged women and making the disappear when he is able to obtain their assets. This all to support, in middle class comfort, a young son and disabled wife.
The marvelous horror of it comes when the final market crash ruins hinm completely, despite his disparate methods of seduction and murder. The film than jumps to him as older, and worn out, and he describes how his wife and so did not survive the market crash. One suspects that, having used the most desperate measures to obtain the ignorant tranquil happiness of his family, he himself killed them to spare them the impossible but inevitable downturn that would have followed. Thus we see, like a great tower, the pride, even in his middle class standing, of this middle class hero and villain.
Filed under: 1970's, Audran, Stephane, Chabrol, Cinematheque, French, Huppert, Uncategorized
Violette
Claude Chabrol 1978
Isabelle Huppert and Stepahne Audren
Audran is the mother; Huppert is Violette – the notorious Violette – the daughter.
Her mother wishes her to be prim and sophisticated, and has ambitions for her. “You wish you’d married a train engineer, instead of a car man” says her husband, affectionately. Violette has affairs, sneaks out of her racy street clothes in the bathroom half way up the stairs to the apartment, and devotes herself slavishly to worthless me who bleed her dry for money. She is infinitely needy, but iron in her will for – something, at the same time.
Very good, like a still life on moving film. The two women are great, and the husband is a very nice backdrop. Their tiny apartment, which is nevertheless well furnished, embeds you in the frenzied psychological state of, in any case, two of the inhabitants. Violette wants more, but she does not know what it is she wants, she wants it too soon, and most of all, it is not a want a need, but a compulsive, dangerous, immediate need.
Chabrol as always, pulls no punches, and his knowledge of the hidden operations of the human mind is alarming because he makes no mistake, and makes it all natural, even when the results are so unexplained and disagreeable.
Chabrol, Claude (master of suspense)
Merci Pour le Chocolat
(Nightcap)
2000, France/Switzerland, colour w/ subtitles
Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc
Cinematheque, Nov 07th 2005, late film, by myself. Sent out a invite at last minute to Adrienne, Nathan and Guilia, but none showed.
A great film – Chabrol loses nothing, but perhaps has become – more subtle?
This review gives away the whole plot.
The heiress of a Swiss chocolate company remarried her ex husband, a piano teacher, now established in his fame. She id Mika Muller.
It is crossing of two families – a beautiful young girl, who looks like Liv Taylor, is a piano player who was, for a moment, mistakenly switched in the hospital for the Pianist’s son, when the child was being presented to the father. (The Pianist’s son by a former wife, now deceased from a car accident, and Mika’s prior close friend). There is something mysterious here, it causes tension, which is explained through he revelation that the daughter is born from artificial insemination – her father was sterile (not impotent). Thus when blood tests were used to ensure that the children were switched back correctly the mother had obscured the tests, as it was kept from the daughter that the man who raised her was not her biological father.
In any case the crux comes in that this sharp eyed girl, staying at the house for a few days to study with the pianist, sees the wife, Mika, spill the evening liquid chocolate on purpose. Something is afoot! Perhaps – a young girl’s imagination? Or perhaps more.
The girl’s boyfriend works for her mother- a forensic scientist. The spilled chocolate is on her sweater, and is analyzed, and contains – a drug! And the Pianist can only sleep when he takes a drug. And the girl is staying at the house – the same house that the Pianist’s first wife was staying at, the night she dies, as they were friends and always stayed there when the Pianist and his wife were in Switzerland. And that night the wife had to drive out for the sleeping pills, and first had her customary drink of cognac, and than crashed, and died. Her system was full of alcohol and the sleeping drug – which she never ever took! The mystery has never been settled.
But the Pianist feels something afoot. It is all too the same, too disturbing. The beautiful young girl is like his dead wife, staying as well at the house, going out to purchase the drug late, like his dead wife – because Mika ‘forgot’. And Mike also – poured the coffee (the maid, it seems, suddenly to her fortune had the night off”.
“You are washing the cups!” says the Pianist.
“Why are you washing the cups?” – “What have you done!”
“What do you mean. I am washing the cups because…”
“You washed the cups that night too!”
And it is all true. It is reconstructed. And the young girl is getting sleepy at the wheel, and crashes the car, with the son beside her. But they are OK. The Pianist gets the call. “Are they dead?” asks Mika. “No”, he says, “you were unlucky this time.” He is not angry, but now he knows all, and Mika admits it. “I am nothing” she says – not artist, not drivin. “But you have helped me so much” the Pianist says – a humane and thoughtful man. “Yes, always others. I say ‘I love you’ but I do not love. Everything for me is so calculated.”
So we have our brilliant and subtle psychological model. She is obsessed with the possession of her husband. The attraction of her friend, his wife, was unbearable, as is the connection to the young girl. She is fond of his son, who is likewise directionless. She destroys the wife, and it seems is keeping the son drugged regularly. Perhaps she preserves his lack of ambition in this way. They must be like her, or belong to her.
But – and here is the interesting part – she is not really evil as some would think of it. She is pathetically evil, tragic and flawed. She is calculating but not in intention — only in action! Quite a model, quite a film.
Filed under: 1950's, Bresson, Robert, Cinematheque, French, Uncategorized
Robert Bresson
France 1959 BW
Disappointing film. Loosely and poorly based on Crime and Punishment. Plot bad – filmmaking worse.
Horrible trait of presenting the characters on screen and than narrating all their actions and thoughts, rather than allowing the scenes to present themselves (in the first person). Thus he stands: thoughts are narrated. He walks: the narrator describes where he is going. He goes to the racetrack: the film contains not a single shot of a racing horse.
Fortunately the film forgets Dostoevsky at some points, forgets to be clever, and produces some rather effective and exciting scenes of various pick-pocketing methods, in particular in very clever sequences with three pickpockets working together. These scenes are what must account for the status and description of this as a remarkable film. I have seen worse – I have seen far better.
Filed under: 1960's, Bergman, Ingmar, Cinematheque, Sweden, Uncategorized
Ingmar Bergman
BW, 95 min, Swedish w/ subtitles 1964
Cinematheque, June 2005
Went alone however ran into Zsuzsa on the way out.
Two sister, beautiful, one ill, one with a son perhaps 10. They are on a train, than a hotel. Zsuzsa said that what she liked about it was that it portrayed people as we very rarely see them portrayed – when ill alone, dying. The woman I assume had cancer or something. Ester is sick, Anna feels revenge against her and finds solace in going out and sleeping with some random man. The boy runs in the halls of the extremely elegant hotel.
I didn’t like the movie very much, although a fair amount of it was beautiful to look at. The suffering was dwelled on too much; the close-ups are too close and too long. It becomes not only a picture of morbidity but somewhat morbid itself. I do not mind the portrayal of sickness – but I do not want me, and the director, to be a part of that sickness as well. Some bland/over-wrought/affected European-art sexuality, between the sister and with regard to the escape to the random sexual partner.
OK. Nice to see Zsuzsa.
Zsuzsa says to see CRIES AND WHISPERS on June 25, I do not know if I will go or not.
Filed under: 1960's, Cinematheque, Cukor, George, Loren, Sophia, Quinn, Anthony, USA
Dir George Cukor
1960, USA
Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn
Costumes Edith Head, Producer Carlo Ponti
Novel by Louis L’Amour
A technicolour pseudo-Western. It is the story of Quinn, an itinerant producer of theatrical productions, and his wayward, headstrong and beautiful young star, Loren. Quinn’s character is 43. It is the free-ranging, rambunctious west from the point of view of non-ranchers, of non-gun slingers. And it’s good. The productions are florid, and the characters are over-drawn, as one would expect from L’Amour, but it also has all of that theatrical charm. nd there is a real story, as the troop runs into trouble but also manages to find a home, and become ’settled’. For is that not the goal of all westward bound homesteaders?
In particular, Quinn is very good, and Loren has a few very good moments. It’s very entertaining, which is clearly what it was intended to be. The opening titles give you a clue – they are cleverly drawn, a giant scroll as from an old western movie marquee sign. They let know that the filmmaker a good story to tell, are going to do it with style, and everyone is going to enjoy themselves. Myself and the 30 or so old people in the Cinematheque did enjoy ourselves.
IMDB gives it a 5.6, but it’s much better than that. Liek the L’Amour books,dower souls will overlook their historical quality because of the simplified dramaticism and the typecast characters, but that in part is the strength of the narrative – it is very unaffected. And the Anothony Quinn fist fight is one of the best I have ever seen.
