Bienvenue chez les ch'tis

2008, France, directed Dany Boon

France's most successful domestically-produced release (at least since the advent of reliable records in the mid-1950s), Bienvenue chez les ch'tis is a very enjoyable comedy liable to prove a bit of a head-scratcher to much of the overseas audience - not so much because it's not entertaining but rather because it's hard to understand exactly what enabled it to wash away all before it (save for the unsinkable Titanic, the country's "all-time" number one film).

The film's plot is pretty simple: a postal employee is transferred, for complex reasons, from his home region in the south of France to the dreaded Nord - not just the northern half of the country, but the area nestled right up near the Belgian border, painted in such grim tones in everything from Zola's Germinal to Bruno Dumont first two films, La Vie de Jésus and L'Humanité. Indeed, I couldn't help thinking that Boon's film was conceived as a conscious antidote to the latter pair of films, both of which I found relentlessly grim; like Dumont, Boon is a native of the area, with more of a rehabilitative cast of mind.

The film is resolutely of the provinces: about the only thing more dreadful than being sent to the Nord is the idea of a transfer to Paris, and our fish-out-of-water first proves he's settling in when he gets a laugh at the expense of a Parisian transplant to the area. That, indeed, may be one reason for the movie's appeal: in many ways it looks back to a more gentle France, of small-town welcomes, where even La Poste is seen more as an extension of family than as a business. The fault lines of present-day France, at least as they are expressed in newspaper headlines, are completely absent (though the lead performers, Boon himself and Kad Merad, are of mixed ethnic heritage; both have Algerian fathers and French mothers).

The film is very nicely shot by Pierre Aïm, with fluid widescreen compositions; although the plotline has a sitcom predictability, many sequences were clearly conceived with the big screen, or at least a generous widescreen, in mind (as we see in the first shot above), and Aïm does an especially nice job of contrasting the southern light with its northern counterpart. The two leads are infectiously enjoyable, too, with their early scenes together especially amusing - it's not hard to imagine having an awfully good time in a receptive movie theatre - even if the end is altogether too rushed after the exposition gets away from Boon-as-director.

Body of Lies

2008, US, directed by Ridley Scott

This is Ridley Scott's fourth film with Russell Crowe, which makes it hard to understand why he uses the actor so poorly on this occasion. It's not that Crowe isn't suited to buttoned-down roles - Michael Mann's The Insider gives the lie to that idea - but simply that he's offscreen for far too much of the film, and when we do see him his character, one Ed Hoffman, is a relentlessly simplified caricature. In almost every scene of his domestic life, Hoffman has an earpiece to carry on incessant conversation whether he's driving his children to school or wandering around his home; after the first few instances of this we get that he's an obsessive workaholic, and it's time for a degree of character development.

Of course, that addiction to technology is part of Hoffman's distance from other human beings: they are best observed under distant surveillance rather than seen up close in their messy reality, the side of the spy business that concerns, in every sense, his field agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio). It's notable that Hoffman appears deeply resentful about those occasions when he must actually travel to the locations about which he's making decisions.

For a film dealing with life and death and, however superficially, contemporary geo-politics, there's also a curious lack of excitement in the film; Ridley's brother Tony gets more thrills out of the weaponry of surveillance in both Enemy of the State and Déjà Vu. It seems to me that it's ultimately a desire to be taken seriously in artistic/political terms that separates the brothers Scott: notwithstanding the derivative, even junky aspects of both of the Tony Scott films, they seem to succeed in unveiling something more essential about the ways in which humans are transformed by observing other humans from a distance (emotional, spatial - even temporal).

Jamaica Inn

1939, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Judged as a 1930s entertainment, Jamaica Inn is perfectly serviceable: it's fleet of foot, with several memorable performances, while smugglers and their evil-doings make for inherently rip-roaring misadventures. The problem is that it's a Hitchcock movie, and by 1939 the director had already set the bar pretty high for himself. With a few exceptions, Jamaica Inn doesn't feel like a Hitchcock, particularly following directly on from his sextet of British thrillers. There are several striking shots of Maureen O'Hara - who's wonderfully energetic in her first major role - near the end of the film, and occasional bits of business that showcase Hitchcock's extraordinary ability to create against-the-clock tension (for instance in a hanging that O'Hara's character witnesses) but otherwise the film seems to conform entirely to adventure convention for long stretches.

That seems especially true in the sequences featuring Charles Laughton. While the actor is treasurably hammy, delivering his lines with genuine relish, and occasionally penetrating to an extraordinarily superior state of mind not unknown among the British aristrocracy, his performance belongs in a different film. Each time he appears on screen he unbalances the whole affair, distracting from rather than enhancing a film already over-stuffed with larger-than-life characters (most notably Leslie Banks and Emlyn Williams, the smuggler-in-chief and his sidekick).

The Squid and the Whale

2005, US, directed by Noah Baumbach

In its quiet way, The Squid and the Whale is an extraordinarily violent film, though here the violence is largely psychological and usually involves two young sons being used as weapons in an increasingly bitter separation. Given that the film is drawn at least partly from Noah Baumbach's own life, it's hard to avoid the occasional wide-eyed response as you wonder whether people really do these things to each other and their own children. But of course they do, and often far worse, though at least Baumbach is able to mine his own experiences with considerable blunt humour, relentlessly exposing his parents (or their surrogates) for the self-obsessed people they apparently were - while not sparing the younger generation.

Like Baumbach's earlier Kicking and Screaming, the film has a very loose plot, and yet there's nothing accidental about the way in which he stitches his scenes together: the tapestry of incident builds in power as he subtly but insistently demolishes the apparent honest, open approach of these two self-consciously liberal parents (very well played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney).

Kisses

2008, Ireland/Sweden, directed by Lance Daly


The Swedish presence in the production credits for Lance Daly's third film seems more than simply an acknowledgment of the film's funding, for Kisses draws very much on the traditions of a Scandinavian cinema that has dramatised stories of young people with great skill and honesty, and which has proved remarkably adept at finding talented actors to assist in telling those stories (in films like My Life as Dog, The Ice Palace and Zappa, from Sweden, Norway and Denmark respectively).

Kisses focuses on twenty-four hours in the lives of two children from an impoverished Dublin suburb, who run off to the centre of Dublin following an unexpected windfall. As frightening as the prospect of the city might be in other respects, it's also a refuge from their terrible day-to-day routine, although Daly's depiction of their home lives does lack much in the way of nuance (residents of Dublin's less heralded areas might feel justifiably aggrieved that they're all depicted as feckless and abusive ne'er-do-wells). The film underlines the sense of the city as a sanctuary through a slow shift from black and white to colour as they get closer to town. It's not an entirely original device, but the very gradual introduction of colour - mirrored partly in the choice of transportation - works more effectively than a sudden switch.

The plot is occasionally a little over-stuffed - the pair has a very busy night indeed, packed with random encounters - but the film has a real feel for Dublin's streets: Daly generally insists on geographical plausibility, and he picks up on the kinds of conversational snippets familiar to any resident of the city. The performances of the two young actors are critical to that: both non-professionals, their backgrounds aren't all that dissimilar from those of their characters, and they're extremely lively, committed performers (by all accounts they were a handful on set; their DVD commentary is well worth listening to, and at times it's almost an extension of the film, particularly in the tart language employed).

Although there are moments that briefly suggest alternative lives - a lovely sequence where the two half skate through the Jervis Street shopping centre, their home lives clearly forgotten - Daly avoids easy outcomes, being blunt about the realities from which this occasionally magical twenty-four hours is plucked. Nonetheless, he's always aware of the ways in which his characters differ from the adults around them; if there's something resigned in the youthful expressions at the end of the film, there's also a deeper complicity between the pair, suggesting that they are better armed to deal with the complex, sometimes unpleasant world around them.

Seven Pounds

2008, US, directed by Gabriele Muccino

Seven Pounds owes some debt to the Lost school of dramatic structure, slowly dispensing information, often in deliberately misleading fashion, to form a portrait of a highly unusual person. That's not, of course, a criticism: the first season of Lost, with its fine character portraits, remains for me the strongest aspect of the show to date, and while the producers have killed off various characters it seems to me no accident that they've largely stuck with the group we first identified with. However, the framework of a single episode - or feature film - means we're constantly waiting for the big reveal, since the filmmakers can't extend that out to a future segment.

Although I confess that I might have emitted a gasp when it all finally clicked into place in Seven Pounds, somehow the trick overwhelmed the material, unlike in the previous collaboration between Smith and director Muccino, The Pursuit of Happyness, which, for all of its occasional sentimentality in telling the central story of father-son redemption, was grounded in a very real setting, whereas here we're in wealthy anywheresville, and we've lost that connection to a vivid sense of place and daily reality. It's a pity, because Will Smith is, again, very good, the more so when he's pushing further against the bounds of his Mr. Nice Guy persona.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt

1982, New Zealand, directed by John Laing

A docudrama that recounts one of New Zealand's most famous murder cases - and more to the point one of the country's most notorious legal proceedings, the trials and pardon of Arthur Allan Thomas - Beyond Reasonable Doubt is also a key early film in the development of the New Zealand film industry, whose modern incarnation began around 1977 with début features from Roger Donaldson (Sleeping Dogs) and Geoff Murphy (Wild Man). Prior to that date, feature production was intermittent in the extreme (I'd love, though, to see the 1964 Runaway, featuring a very young Kiri Te Kanawa), which meant that there wasn't much of a local talent pool. When production began on this film, director John Laing was enticed back home from Canada, having spent time both there and in the UK honing his craft; it's nice to see that he was subsequently able to carve out a career at home in New Zealand, moving between TV and movies.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt was Laing's first feature assignment, and it's generally a very confident bit of work. The story is presented as a procedural, and yet one with an unresolved mystery at its heart, since the murderer of Harvey and Jeanette Crewe has never been identified. In that respect, at least, the film has something in common with David Fincher's Zodiac. Neither film attempts to provide the audience with a truly satisfying resolution, although Beyond Reasonable Doubt does jettison the question mark which appeared in the title of David Yallop's book, which he adapted for the screen, perhaps because by that point real-life events had vindicated Yallop's thesis that Arthur Allan Thomas was not the murderer, despite being convicted on two separate occasions (in one of those odd coincidences, a man by the name of Arthur Leigh Allen was a suspect in the Zodiac killings).

Although the film presents events in generally straightforward fashion, Laing creates a mood of deep mistrust in the farming communy where the murder took place. The area seems riven with rivalries and slightly off-colour characters, where strange behaviour is quickly given a sinister spin. The Lower Waikato landscapes are shot in flat and uninviting terms (the photography is by Alun Bollinger), a radical contrast to the use of landscape in Sleeping Dogs and in so many subsequent New Zealand films. The Price of Milk, for instance, which takes place in similar farming country, uses the landscape as a jumping-off point for magical happenings.

The state of the New Zealand film industry in 1980 was especially apparent in front of the camera, with three of the key roles allocated to imported actors: Englishman David Hemmings, who does a very fine job as the over-zealous Inspector Bruce Hutton, walking right into the abyss marked miscarriage of justice, along with Australians Tony Barry, as Hutton's right-hand man, and John Hargreaves as Arthur Allan Thomas. Still, there are appearances from soon-to-be-more-familiar local faces like Martyn Sanderson, Marshall Napier and, especially, Bruno Lawrence, the oddball and much-missed star of films like The Quiet Earth and Smash Palace.

One scene in particular caught my interest for the way in which it contrasts with a similar sequence in There Will Be Blood - a scene analysed, as I've already written, in a fascinating blog post by David Bordwell. Both scenes involve a group of men standing in front of a map: in There Will Be Blood the men are looking at an area that holds the promise of oil wealth, while in Beyond Reasonable Doubt they are examining the distances between different farms as they try to establish whether various individuals might have been capable of committing the Crewe murders. Paul Thomas Anderson holds a shot of his actors, carefully positioned, with the map spread out in the foreground. Laing establishes his scene in near-identical terms, the police carefully assembled around the map (below). However, he chooses to insert several quick shots seen from the perspective of the lead detective, whose hand surveys the map, before returning to that same larger view. At first, the inserts seem to punctuate an increasingly tense scene - which begins with the police moving purposefully toward the map as ideas start to crystallise - but the key difference is the fact that Laing is dealing with an actual setting and a true-crime event, and feels the need to establish the literal placement of the farms so that the audience is fully informed of the facts. That desire to provide accurate information - something that the police signally failed to do at Arthur Allan Thomas's trials - is fundamental to the entire purpose of the film, which later uses voiceover to add details of evidence that the police (or at least some of the police) either concealed or misused.

Ian Conrich makes a somewhat apologetic case for Laing's standing as an auteur in New Zealand Filmmakers, a 2007 collection he co-edited with Stuart Murray - with whom I once took a class on the other side of the Atlantic - and I can't help thinking that even Conrich isn't entirely convinced; that Laing might not be an auteur is no knock against this compelling film. The Conrich/Murray book is, however, essential reading for anyone with an interest in New Zealand film.

Tokyo Chorus

1931, Japan, directed by Yasujiro Ozu

I assume that the prominence of Tokyo Story, which seems to get far more repeat exposure than other Ozu films, explains why the director is so persistently associated with an entirely melancholy view of life; it's almost a pity that the later film casts such a long shadow given that Ozu is equally adept in comic mode (or, as here, in melding both comic and dramatic treatment); ultimately, his nuanced, humane view of the world shines through irrespective of the means of expression.

Even where Tokyo Chorus compiles wonderfully extended gags about, say, salarymen receiving their wage packets or the adventures of troublesome children, Ozu never loses sight of the social reality of his films. Thus, while the film's lead actor exchanges slapstick blows with his overbearing boss, another employee deals with a shoe that's falling apart (which punctures the boss's alleged generosity while also underlining how precarious things were in the early 1930s). Ozu has an exceptional eye for the minor details of life - the street dwellers who make use of the remains of a cigarette butt, a former teacher who suddenly realizes he can't fund dinner for all of his students, or an elderly, suddenly unemployed, salaryman with healthcare concerns that are strikingly contemporary: one of the most worrisome aspects of job loss in the US is the simultaneous disruption in health insurance, if you ever had it to begin with.

Although those poignant moments linger long in the memory, they are balanced with Ozu's wonderfully light work with his child actors; the interactions between brother and sister - a punch here, an argument there - are entirely natural, while there's an undercurrent of comment on family ties and obligations that takes fuller flight as Ozu's career developed.

Note: For some reason, my usual computer program/screen capture software didn't work with the Criterion/Eclipse DVD; the images above came from DVD Beaver and Criterion. I also made use of David Bordwell's detailed account of the film in his Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, originally published in 1988, and now available online. Update July 2010: Craig Keller has put up a very interesting, personal take on the film, complete with numerous screen captures.

Away We Go

2009, US, directed by Sam Mendes

Away We Go often feels like two different movies roughly shoehorned together, the one a string of (often amusing) caricatures, the other a surprisingly nuanced portrait of a young couple facing parenthood. While the juxtaposition works on occasion, at times there's a little too much of a gulf between the main characters, played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, and many of the people they encounter on a peripatetic odyssey across North America (if journeys involving air travel can be termed peripatetic). The central couple are, for all that they worry about being "fuck-ups," two pretty normal people who hold down apparently decent jobs and wonder, not unreasonably, whether they'll do right by their unborn child. But the outlandish, and even clichéd, characters they meet up with only serve to underline their own pretty solid foundations.

To Mendes's credit, he doesn't insist on introducing each location with a series of routine establishing shots; that choice emphasizes that the characters are in search of a sense of place and community rather than just attractive monuments. There's a little more looseness, too, to his filming style on this occasion; as much as a shot that straps a camera to a car in Montreal is a little showy, there's something exhilarating about the moment, too, as if the city has treasures in store for us.

Young and Innocent

1937, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock


Young and Innocent is surely the least known of the sextet of brisk thrillers that Hitchcock reeled off from 1934 to 1938, perhaps partly because it is saddled with a title that possesses neither the intrigue of something like The Man Who Knew Too Much nor the punch of a Sabotage. At least it's a bit more catchy than A Shilling for Candles, the Josep hine Tey novel from which the film is drawn. Tey's fine work seems remarkably under-appreciated by filmmakers, incidentally, with only The Franchise Affair prompting frequent attention.

The film opens on a scene of almost brutal marital strife, with a couple arguing bitterly as their union very obviously disintegrates; the scene is so fraught that I expected the camera to cut away and reveal that we were watching a stage play or a film set, since there's nothing quite as scalding in any of the other Hitchcocks from this period. After the scene's dramatic finale on a storm-tossed cliff we cut almost immediately to a much more light-hearted treatment (leaving aside the discovery of a body), with a young man (Derrick De Marney) so incredulous about his arrest that he simply doesn't take the whole affair seriously.

The central sequences recount the young chap's adventures on the lam as he and the local police chief's daughter (Nova Pilbeam, the kidnapped daughter from The Man Who Knew Too Much) try to establish his innocence, and the increasingly enamoured pair roam across the countryside and into the city in search of a vital clue. There's a phenomenal crane shot near the end that arcs across a hotel room to focus unsparingly on the killer, paired with an almost equally audacious shot out from the now unmasked killer back to the bustle of the hotel. What's key to both shots is the way in which they contribute to the momentum of the film rather than being mere directorial flourishes - the first sequence is desperately tense, ending up almost in the actor's eyes despite starting its journey far across the room. Earlier, Hitchcock derives similar tension from a shot of De Marney as he walks into a dorm in a men's hostel, the camera dollying back in front of him and then moving from left to right as he scans the beds in search of his man. As technically dazzling as the work is, it's again fully justified by the needs of the film, with Hitchcock adeptly moving from the drama of the mystery plot to the comic relief of the police chief's dinner table.

Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake

1942, US, directed by John Cromwell


A very brisk adventure in the ripping yarns mode, Son of Fury packs an extraordinary amount into its 98 minutes, during which the eponymous Benjamin Blake (Tyrone Power) becomes a bonded servant, deals with tangled parenthood and inheritance issues, goes into exile, frolics on a tropical island, and goes on trial to clear his name. There's plenty of vigorous action, too, with several exciting fist-fights marred only by the very obvious use of stunt doubles in ill-fitting wigs.

The film has a sterling cast to spin the tale: Power is more than capable of holding the attention whilst he's on screen, and gets formidable support from George Sanders (the consummate villain, who utters every line with wonderfully ripe disdain), Gene Tierney as an island beauty, and Frances Farmer - and on to the likes of John Carradine, Elsa Lanchester, Dudley Digges, and Halliwell Hobbes in supporting roles. Lanchester's brief scenes, as a Bristol prostitute, are especially memorable.

While the sequences in England that bookend the film are generally very successful, with the aristocracy coming in for their usual pasting, the island segment is less memorable in large measure because it's so rushed: no sooner has Blake arrived on the island than the needs of the plot have him looking to leave again, even though the film does attempt to account for the passage of several seasons. Director John Cromwell also seems more at home in the atmospherically-shot nooks and crannies of (studio) Bristol streets and country houses than in the sunny climes of the South Pacific.

Note: This film is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. Son of Fury was exhibited in Kisumu, a city in western Kenya, in 1944.

The film attracted the particular ire of the District Commissioner (DC), the local British colonial representative. In a letter to the Chairman of the Board of Censors, who was gathering opinions regarding the possible liberalization of Kenya Colony's film censorship regime, the DC wrote: 'I am personally of the opinion that the vast majority of films have nothing but a harmful effect and I addressed the Municipal Board on the subject of scenes depicting depravity, brutality and violence in "Son of Fury"' (November 8, 1945). This appears to be a reference in particular to a sequence of whipping. The Chairman of the Board of Censors responded rather tartly, noting was the film was passed and exhibited widely throughout the United States and United Kingdom.

At the time, censorship in Kenya included a racial element: films could be placed off-limits to black African audiences, although in practice this appears to have been a rare occurrence. However, as soldiers returned from wartime postings where they could watch whatever films they liked, the administration was concerned that racially-based censorship could be inflammatory, and sought opinions, mostly from white Kenyans, before proceeding to a revision of the rules. By 1947, race-based censorship had been abandoned, but the censor more frequently banned films outright, for audiences of all races -- particularly after the beginning of the Mau Mau insurgency in 1952.

Prendre femme

2004, Israel/France, directed by Shlomi Elkabetz and Ronit Elkabetz

Set in 1979, Shlomi and Ronit Elkabetz's debut film is inspired by their own difficult childhood, during which their parents were constantly at war; the film is set at a time of growing rapprochement between Egypt and Israel, but that period detail only serves to remind the viewer that other conflicts continued to simmer. Apart from the very brief indication of the date, there's almost no reference to the outside world, however, with much of the film taking place in a small apartment where an elderly mother and four children are witnesses to a troubled marriage.

Although there's no doubt that there are other problems in this relationship, the couple's deepest fault line is between religious tradition and secular interests: husband Eliahou (Simon Abkarian) structures his life around weekly services and other obligations, while his wife Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) chafes against what she perceives as old-fashioned restrictions. As with other Israeli films I've seen, Prendre femme portrays life as an inherently communal experience, with close-knit extended family groups feeling empowered to intervene in personal disputes. This is most strongly emphasized in the exceptional opening scenes, during which Viviane's brothers try to persuade her to take Eliahou back. There's nothing culturally unique about this, of course - there's a striking photo in Elliott Skinner's 1974 book African Urban Life: The Transformation of Ouagadougou which depicts an almost identical situation - but Israeli filmmakers seem to dramatize this experience with some regularity.

What makes Viviane compelling as a character is the fact that she's not depicted as a domestic martyr: while her husband often seems inflexible and certainly doesn't help to defuse certain situations, she's prone to dramatics (giving Ronit Elkabetz ample room to display her formidable acting talents; during these scenes, Viviane's reality seems absolutely convincing), and quick to use her children as a gambit in the back-and-forth with her husband. That, indeed, is one of the film's strongest cards: the faces of the children as they see their parents shred each time after time (the film is set over just three days but you sense that this is an all-too-familiar routine).

Sabotage

1936, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock


After the somewhat more expansive The Thirty-Nine Steps and Secret Agent, Hitchcock reverts to the very brisk pacing of The Man Who Knew Too Much here, with not an ounce of fat in the 76 minute running time. The opening scenes are an especially clever montage of sabotage attacks and their aftermath, effectively capturing the mood of London's simultaneous paranoia and stoicism - characteristics that would be raised to the level of national mythology after 1940 but which are already present here.

As in his other 1930s British thrillers, Hitchcock blends comedy and action, with a love story thrown in to the mix too as a Scotland Yard agent attempts to gather intelligence on a network of (unidentified) foreign terrorists, but he over-reaches here in swinging abruptly from tragedy to romance; the horror of the film's central act of violence is credible and dreadfully tense, but the aftermath doesn't hold together as well.

Hitchcock films this sabotage sequence, involving the delivery of a bomb, with a series of cross-cutting shots between the passengers on a bus, close-ups of what we know to be the bomb, clock-faces as we approach zero hour, traffic lights going from green to red; even though I was familiar with the film, the suspense by the climax of the sequence was almost literally unbearable, and it's one of the darkest moments from this period of Hitchcock's career.

Although very much a studio film with occasional inserts of the "real" London, it's a fascinating glimpse into the English mindset of the mid-1930s, with the spectre of war already very much on the horizon: between Hitchcock's films and their literary inspiration (Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham), London must have been a very nervy place to live - especially for those from Germany and beyond, who can't have found the place all that welcoming, however innocent their motives.

Hidalgo

2004, US, directed by Joe Johnston

Joe Johnston has carved out what seems a self-consciously old-fashioned niche, making family-friendly films long on entertainment value if not necessarily on profound insight. Ostensibly based on a true story, Hidalgo might have made its real-life inspiration, the fabulist Frank Hopkins, proud, for it tells a rip-roaring tale of exotic adventure - with plenty of the clichés of Hollywood intact, such as the demise of a trusted "native" - without lingering too long on the details that might make the seams show too clearly. This was Viggo Mortensen's first role after the Lord of the Rings films, and while he's moved on to far stronger starring material since, he's well able to hold the screen even with a pretty silly script that denies this rough-and-tumble horseman all but the most chaste of romances.

The Hangover

2009, US, directed by Todd Phillips
The weather in Boston was irredeemably awful for the month of June, and when July started on the same note it seemed like the only thing to do was take refuge in a crowded pre-Fourth of July movie theatre. The Hangover was, ironically, the appropriate cure for wet-weather blues, with the audience proving highly receptive to what was one of the most consistently funny films I've seen in a long while. At times, you almost wish that the filmmakers didn't feel the need to explain some of the more bizarre aspects of the aftermath of what appears to have been a truly epic drinking bout - they do leave a few details to the imagination, such as the role played by a chicken - and one or two of the crudest moments seemed to leave the audience cold, but the script is well-served by the three lead actors, with the shambolic Zach Galifianakis - not generally to my taste, particularly in his repetitive "Between Two Ferns" web series - especially well cast.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

1934, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

The first of the half-dozen breezy thrillers that Hitchcock made in the 1930s, the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much clocks in at just over 70 minutes. Hitchcock found an extra 50 minutes of material for his 1956 remake, a very different kind of film, as much a study of a family under pressure as it is a thriller, but the snappy pacing and memorably ghoulish touches are more to my taste than the expansive 1950s take on the material.

Hitchcock wastes no time plunging us into the action, with the film's precipitating crime - a shooting death in Switzerland - taking place just a couple of minutes' in, before we've really learned much about protagonists Bob and Jill Lawrence, who manage to become embroiled in international intrigue without knowing why. Before we know it, we're back in London on the trail of the criminals, who've kidnapped the Lawrences' daughter, and it's here that the film really comes alive, as the pursuit takes us to the studio streets of Wapping.

While the film is best remembered for the scenes in the Albert Hall, it's the earlier sequences, in a bizarre revival hall and a creepy dentist's office, that give the film a darker twist; while both sequences have comic touches, they both ultimately descend into often brutal violence. The film's latter sequences, centered on a lengthy shootout with the police (which did not make it into the remake) could have been lifted from a Warner Brothers gangster picture of the period, except that the key shot is fired here by a woman (Edna Best), helping prove that crime certainly doesn't pay.

The film was Peter Lorre's first English-language role; he didn't spend long in England, appearing the following year in Karl Freund's wonderful Mad Love for MGM, before shuttling back for Hitchcock's Secret Agent. Hitchcock seems to have felt the need to up the ante on Lorre's already unusual appearance by giving him a skunk-like hair stripe, though no-one dares to mention this unusual feature to the sinister mastermind.

I was amused to note that David Cairns and I picked the same shot when choosing screen captures to illustrate the film; his shadowplay write-up is highly recommended. The shot in question, with half-a-dozen fingers pointing at a bullet hole, has a mate in Hitchcock's 1936 Sabotage.

Summer Hours

2008, France, directed by Olivier Assayas (Original Title: L'Heure d'été)

Funded in part by the Musée d'Orsay, Olivier Assayas's film functions both as a drama of family life and as an allegory for French concerns about the preservation of the country's patrimony. The set-up is a little artificial, given that the two of the three siblings at the heart of the film live at opposite ends of the earth (Shanghai, New York): while this serves the film's dramatic purposes well it nonetheless creates the sense that the family, even by French middle-class standards, is hardly typical. That said, it also allows Assayas, resolutely international in outlook himself, to explore the idea that France's influence spreads in different ways in the modern world - not simply through art but through design and business sense to take two examples.

The film is bookended by two gatherings, the first a final extended get-together at the old summer homestead, with children running between tables while adults open wine, smoke cigarettes, and recall the history of the house, the second a teenage party to give the place one last whirl before it's sold - a sequence very obviously reminiscent of the epic party at the centre of Assayas's 1994 L'Eau Froide/Cold Water. Assayas films both gatherings with a remarkably mobile camera, sweeping through gardens and around corners inside the house, constantly following his characters, whether they're playing or taking a careful inventory of the place (the conversation between the matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob) and her eldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling) prefigures a later visit by museum curators browsing for treasures).

I was struck by critic Adrian Martin's comment on a blog post at Girish Shambu's site that Assayas, among other directors, is "comfortable only with adults and older-teens-who-are-already-adults: the teen part of [Summer Hours] is its weakest, and the little kids are just anonymous bodies who tear around playing indistinctly." It's certainly true that the youngest children are entirely anonymous, but I would be interested to understand how he concludes that the teen sequence is the weakest element of the film: not only did it seem to me full of life, and an appropriate way to celebrate what the house represented, but it also felt like a successful update of the concerns of L'Eau froide, set among a very different generation of teens in the 1970s; these teens feel like our contemporaries, not like those of the earlier film. But it also seemed a somewhat misplaced criticism, for this film's concerns are those of adults, not teens: how to preserve youthful memories long after youth has passed, how to keep families, in the broadest sense, knit together, or how to negotiate the delicate terrain of family finances, concerns that the teenagers at the end of the film can barely conceive of in their lazy, hazy celebration.

The Bank Job

2008, UK, directed by Roger Donaldson

Although it's entertaining enough as a caper, and zips along so briskly that it's essentially impossible to deal with the plot holes as they occur, The Bank Job is disappointing as an evocation of the 1970s, particularly given that Roger Donaldson's previous film, The World's Fastest Indian, captured a certain atmosphere of devil-may-care innocence, specific to that story's setting, rather well.

The production team gets many of the details right (the clothes, the cars, the street signs, even if the blue truck in the image above looks to be the production vehicle for Arri cameras) but there's very little feeling for the specific moment in English life, at the tail end of "Swinging London" and the beginning of a rough 1970s, even though the film's complicated plot grapples with the country's power structure (political and royal) and London's seamier side. The characters are rarely able to transcend quick-drawn caricature, whether it's Jason Statham as an archetypal Cockney wide boy or Peter Bowles as a spy mandarin; indeed, it's mostly in the film's side story, concerning the real-life revolutionary/criminal (perspective is all) Michael X that you get a sense of the real political stakes.

Late Marriage

2001, Israel/France, directed by Dover Kashashvili


I'd only seen the Israeli actress Ronit Elkabetz in one previous film, The Band's Visit, but there's no mistaking her voice: her first scene opens with her character, Judith, offscreen, talking to her daughter from down the hall, but she controls the screen even before she emerges. That voice is a crucial part of Judith's arsenal, and it's significant that a later scene renders her literally speechless when her home is invaded by the relatives of her lover Zaza, who want to separate the pair so that Zaza can embark on a respectable marriage.

That communal assault is typical of the film, with extended families demanding conformity to tradition: though the characters are able to contemplate the idea of a life outside the community and its rules, they would really rather avoid such an outcome. There's a barely concealed violence in many of these interactions that contrasts sharply with the tenderness and sincerity of the relationship between Zaza and Judith, whose easy, often humorous interactions are exemplified by an extended sex scene that's remarkable both for its frankness and its warmth.

The film is shot like a series of fixed tableaux, often beautifully composed, lending the film a limpid appearance that contrasts with the often stormy events narrated onscreen. The camera almost never moves, and Kashashvili often holds the shot for an extended period as the actors move around the frame, crowding the edges for the familial discussions.

Claude Chabrol and Inspector Lavardin

Jean Poiret gets ready for a day of detecting in Poulet au vinaigre (1985)

This piece is a contribution to Ten Days' Wonder: The Claude Chabrol Blogathon, hosted by Flickhead.

Although Claude Chabrol ended up making four films featuring the character of Inspector Lavardin, he had a hard time getting the first project off the ground. Coming out of a fallow cinematic period –he’d kept busy with various TV projects - Chabrol was unable to find a TV co-producer, and wasn’t even able to benefit from the “avance sur recettes” mechanism that’s employed by so many French filmmakers. The script eventually ended up on the desk of Marin Karmitz, who was just flowering into a producer of considerable power, and Karmitz proposed a budget of 6 million francs (about $700,000 at the time), about half the average cost of a French film in the mid-1980s.

Dominique Lavanant in Poulet au vinaigre (1985)

Chabrol, never one to turn down the opportunity to work, said yes, and Karmitz ultimately signed him up as a salaried employee, going on to produce most of the director’s films during the subsequent two decades. That kind of off-screen fidelity is reproduced in many of Chabrol’s casting choices in the Lavardin films. Poulet au vinaigre and L'Escargot noir both feature Stéphane Audran, who has appeared in more than twenty Chabrol films – and was, not incidentally, married to him for sixteen years - as well as Michel Bouquet, a stalwart of Chabrol’s work in the late 1960s/early 1970s, while Inspecteur Lavardin reunites Dominique Lavanant and Jean-Claude Brialy, who appeared together in two key early Chabrol films, Le Beau serge (the director’s debut) and Les Godelureaux.

By contrast, Lavardin himself is played by the comic actor and playwright Jean Poiret, who had never worked for Chabrol before; few of Poiret’s films are familiar to English-speaking audiences given that French comedies don’t tend to travel well. Chabrol and Poiret both appeared in a 1964 film (Les durs à cuire, directed by Jacques Pinoteau), and I believe they shared the screen in a climactic scene, but that was the extent of their prior collaboration. Poiret, like Chabrol, was coming out of cinematic mothballs in 1985. After making roughly three films a year from 1956 to 1970 he more or less disappeared from the screen and spent much of the 1970s on stage in La Cage aux folles, which he also wrote. He credited a role in Truffaut’s Le Dernier métro with giving him “the desire to make movies again,” and he remained active in films until his death in 1992 (his one film as director, the minor but rather enjoyable Le Zèbre, which features his wife, Caroline Cellier, was released three months after his death).

Lavardin turns on the charm in L'Escargot noir (1988)

It’s hard to avoid comparison between Hitchcock and Chabrol, and the casting of Poiret seems very much of a piece with Hitchcock’s use of an actor like Cary Grant - that is, a player known for lighter roles who reveals a darker side. Chabrol uses Poiret’s Janus-like ability throughout the four Lavardin films. It’s consistently unsettling to see the often jocular inspector suddenly turn on a suspect, unleashing verbal and occasionally physical violence, and the character himself is aware of the alarming impact of the transformation, carefully cultivating an unruffled demeanour the better to demolish it when necessary.

Jean Poiret and Michel Bouquet in Poulet au vinaigre (1985)

Still, despite Poiret’s lengthy experience as a performer, it’s not clear that Chabrol knew quite what he had on his hands when making the first film. Poiret doesn’t appear until 40 minutes have elapsed, and then proceeds to walk away with the movie. Chabrol doesn’t mess about on the second occasion, even though the script for that outing wasn’t originally conceived with Lavardin in mind, and Poiret appears as soon as the opening credits begin to roll. While Lavardin flew solo in the first film, in the sequel Chabrol pairs him with a Watson character, a local cop who helps to orient him. That pattern is repeated in the two telefilm outings, and in Inspecteur Lavardin, the inspector even refers to his sidekick as Watson.

Lavardin and his local Watson in Inspecteur Lavardin (1986)

Although made for a cinema audience, the structure of Poulet au vinaigre reminds me of a good British television mystery, and the late arrival of the detective is very much part of the pattern. Chabrol using the first section of the film to set up a complex web of local relationships in P.D. James or Ruth Rendell style (hardly surprising, then, that Chabrol turned to Rendell’s A Judgment in Stone as the source material for his 1995 La Cérémonie). Cinematically, the most obvious forebear is Henri-Georges Clouzot. If the resemblance to the acidly-drawn village of Le Corbeau, a place riven by poison-pen letters, wasn’t already obvious one of the key characters in Poulet au vinaigre is an employee of the postal service who, along with his mother (a very unglamorous Audran), steams open the correspondence of the local bigwigs. The film is not without references to Chabrol’s own earlier work, too: the film’s first victim is a butcher, in whose shop window appears the sign “Closed Because of Murder”!

The plot of that first film is the most twisted and the most satisfying of the quartet; Chabrol and Dominique Roulet wrote the script from Roulet’s novel, and it’s a tight interweaving of murder and small-town loyalties and betrayals, allowing Chabrol ample room to peel away the onion layers of relationships and class distinctions. It’s also the one film that transcends the Lavardin character rather than being dependent on him for much of its interest.

Jean-Claude Brialy in Inspecteur Lavardin (1986)

After the first film's success, the Lavardin character was injected into a pre-existing, and apparently rather poor, script after Chabrol’s plan to make a film about Camille Claudel fell through. Isabelle Adjani had contacted Claudel’s family and snapped up the reproduction rights to her artwork, but Chabrol had a measure of revenge, alarming Adjani's producers by initially retaining the title of his Claudel project for the second Lavardin film so that they thought he was pressing ahead. As Chabrol himself admits, the plot on the second occasion is “a banal whodunit, it’s plot 12b,” probably because there was a bit of a rush to get the project moving to capitalize on the first film's success.

Indeed, the main point of Inspecteur Lavardin is not to solve the mystery but rather to have Lavardin attempt to bring a measure of moral justice to the lives of old friends (credibility goes out the window, since he stays in the home of some obvious suspects, one of whom is an old flame). It wouldn’t be entirely unfair to apply Chabrol’s plot judgment to the two telefilms, L’Escargot noir and Maux croisés, although the first of the pair does at least have an appealingly twisted motivation, and Chabrol assembles a nice gallery of players from Chinon’s bourgeoisie.

There’s nothing rote about Chabrol’s visual approach, however. Even in films that many rate as fairly lightweight, he is careful to create a coherent visual style. On the DVD extras for his 1988 film Une Affaire de femmes, he speaks about the issue of finding an appropriate style during the first few days of shooting a new film (Une Affaire de femmes was released the same month that L’Escargot noir was broadcast, which provides an interesting illustration both of Chabrol’s work ethic and of his diverse interests), and on the Lavardin films he also sets himself playful technical challenges. Thus in Poulet au vinaigre he decided that “there would only be a single shot/reverse shot,” and in Inspecteur Lavardin that “there wouldn’t be a single shot at exact eye level” – an apt choice for a film so obsessed with looking and seeing that it features a character (played by a very fey Jean-Claude Brialy) who paints human eyes mounted on stands! The shot choices also serve as a constant prelude to the film’s stunning climactic shot, which shows a death from the perspective of an overhead camera that has been placed in a bedroom.

L'Escargot noir (1989)

Indeed, cameras – artificial eyes - and high-angle shots abound in the four films. The first three minutes of Poulet au vinaigre are shot through the lens of a camera, which takes pictures of the guests at a party in a provincial town (introducing to many of the key players in the process), while Maux croisés centers around a TV quiz show, giving ample opportunity for Chabrol to play with shots of television screens; Lavardin watches one key sequence on a television in a hotel room while the reality plays out down below. Similarly, L’Escargot noir has several important scenes that appear to be filmed from close to ceiling-level - a meeting between two potential suspects, a shot of Lavardin interviewing a chef – or from high above the scene, such as the shots from Lavardin’s hotel room down to a square where one of the suspects owns a pharmacy.

Maux croisés (1989)

Beyond these shots, I wasn’t able to discern a consistent technical challenge in the telefilms, except to note that Chabrol makes his camera exceptionally mobile, constantly tracking down streets and moving from one character or object to another. The dolly crew, crane operator and steadicam operator all earned their keep on the films. Even where the mobile camera is especially notable – following a woman down a street, or or panning to show us Lavardin's destination – there’s nothing gratuitous about such shots, which are almost always designed to add additional information through camera movement rather than through a cut. It’s a technique that Chabrol frequently favours in other films, even where the subject is much more sober – as in Une Affaire de femmes, for instance.

That said, the telefilms are a significant fall-off from their cinematic counterparts, and the final outing in particular commits some familiar bottom-of-the-barrel sins: bringing back a character from a previous film (André, the barman played by Albert Dray in Poulet au vinaigre) in absurdly coincidental fashion, and sending Lavardin to an exotic location, the Italian spa town of Montecatini, for no apparent reason other than the needs of co-production with Italian television. Lavardin’s outlandish behaviour towards suspects hardly marks him as the kind of cop who would have been entrusted with a sensitive cross-border mission (he’s transferred between the first two films, for dunking a suspect in a basin of water). Still, as Chabrol points out in an interview, Lavardin might be outrageous but he’s never stupid. He’s aware that almost everyone he speaks to has something to hide, and as a consequence as long as he doesn’t go too far over the line no-one is likely to complain. In the third film, he sits his various suspects down and when they aren’t as forthcoming as Lavardin would like he says “I feel like I’m going to make a blunder,” adeptly making reference to the widespread image of the French police at the time, while having no intention of actually doing something foolish. Claude Zidi’s films Inspecteur la Bavure (1980) and Les Ripoux (1984) capture, and perpetuate, that negative image, albeit in largely comic terms. Throughout the four films, put-upon suspects threaten Lavardin with lawyers or sputter sentiments like “You’re crazy, you’ll go to prison,” though both they and Lavardin know that nothing serious is likely to happen.

Don't trust those innocent faces - Poulet au vinaigre (1985)

As the cycle moves along, the greatest pleasures come from the ways in which Chabrol references earlier incidents and re-works them. For instance, Lavardin is properly introduced to us over his breakfast at a bar in Forges-les-Eaux (a small town in Normandy), and breakfasts form a key part of his routine. There’s an amusing scene where Mario David (the Watson character in Maux croisés) brings croissants for breakfast and proceeds to dunk his pastry in Lavardin’s coffee, a compliment that Lavardin returns when he breakfasts with his Italian Watson in the final film. More spectacular repasts are at the centre of the investigations in Inspecteur Lavardin and L’Escargot noir, which has numerous references to the culinary possibilities of a good snail, while most of the policework in Maux croisés appears to take place at a hotel dinner table.

Lavardin and his Italian Watson hard at work in Maux croisés (1989)

Poulet au vinaigre (1985, France, directed by Claude Chabrol, written by Chabrol and Dominique Roulet)
Inspecteur Lavardin (1986, France, directed by Claude Chabrol, written by Chabrol and Dominique Roulet)
L'Escargot noir (1988, France, directed by Claude Chabrol, written by Chabrol; for television)
Maux croisés (1989, France, directed by Claude Chabrol, written by Chabrol and Dominique Roulet; for television)

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Chabrol's old friends at Les Cahiers du cinéma gave the two Lavardin cinema films fine coverage: the first film was on the cover of the April 1985 issue, while the second was the lead article in March 1986. The following articles were particularly helpful in writing this piece:

"Éloge de la fantaisie. Entretien avec Jean Poiret (Interview by Olivier Assayas and Marc Chevrie), Les Cahiers du cinéma, April 1985, pp. 38-43.

"Attention les yeux! Entretien avec Claude Chabrol" (Interview by Marc Chevrie and Serge Toubiana), Les Cahiers du cinéma, March 1986, pp. 9-14.

“Claude Chabrol de A a Z” (Interview by Thierry Jousse and Serge Toubiana), Les Cahiers du cinéma, Spécial Chabrol, October 1997, pp. 6-31.

“Masques et bergamasques: Entretien avec Marin Karmitz” (Interview by Thierry Jousse and Serge Toubiana), Les Cahiers du cinéma, Spécial Chabrol, October 1997, pp. 72-77.