Shame

1988, Australia, directed by Steve Jodrell

A very strong 1980s film that sadly feels equally relevant today. It's grounded in a sharp analysis of toxic masculinity, grounded in a specific rural Australian reality but not in any way restricted to that environment, and features an excellent central performance by Deborra-Lee Furness, as an unapologetic, self-confident lawyer taking a solo trip through the outback. Her character draws on Western tropes, literally riding into the dusty small town and introducing a new vocabulary of justice. The film neither shies away from nor revels in its depiction of violence, and the conclusion comes as a genuine gut-punch.

Bad Blood

1981, New Zealand/United Kingdom, directed by Mike Newell

A fairly straightforward retelling of the mass murder perpetrated by Stanley Graham in 1941, a series of crimes that was the culmination of a lengthy standoff with police over the surrender of weapons in wartime. There's a broader resonance in the New Zealand context of the man asserting himself in relation to the authorities, as well as the relationship with the bush, both a source of refuge and a threat (already explored in films like Sleeping Dogs and, later, in more sophisticated pictures like Utu). While the film is centered on Jack Thompson's character, Carol Burns, as Graham's wife, matches him beat for beat as his mental state collapses. The sense of a tight-knit, yet poisonous, community is very well drawn, and was surely influenced also by the aftermath of the Crewe murders, which would have been in the news throughout the 1970s (and which formed the basis for the film Beyond Reasonable Doubt).

Police Story 2

1988, Hong Kong, directed by Jackie Chan

A letdown -- the film opens with a summary of the exceptional stuntwork of the first film, but very little of what follows has the same rhythm and verve.

A nos amours

1983, France, directed by Maurice Pialat

Perhaps the most unsettling film in the Pialat canon, in large part because of the director's extraordinary onscreen presence. The genuine rigours, both emotional and physical, through which the actors are put are very apparent here, with them forced to react to Pialat-as-actor's incredibly unpredictability and even violence, not least in the extraordinary dinner-party scene where his character returns to the family home after a period of exile and throws what seems like a new equilibirum utterly off-balance. Pialat is a terrific, though challenging, actor in his own right, and on the strength of this film it's not hard to see why others might not have wanted to direct him, though he seems to have enjoyed considerable loyalty from several actors who returned several times to his sets.

Malcolm

1986, Australia, directed by Nadia Tass

Very light, and interesting mostly as a time capsule these days, including of Melbourne's trams of the era, though the performances are generally quite pleasing (even if Colin Friels's character would likely be handled differently in 2018), and the set pieces mostly well-paced.

Die Hard

1988, US, directed by John McTiernan

Winter of our Dreams

1981, Australia, directed by John Duigan

A mixed bag of a film, with the central drama perhaps less interesting today than the Sydney backdrop, with Bryan Brown trying to retrace the life of an old flame in the aftermath of her suicide, and connecting with a mutual friend, played by Judy Davis. Brown's character is frustrating in his emotional closure (some critiques appear to fault the actor for this, and perhaps he and Davis didn't hit it off, but his character's affect is clearly motivated by the plot), a contrast to his usual garrulous charm of the period, whereas Davis is much more engaging even if her character lacks nuance. The sense of characters reliving and re-evaluating their youthful enthusiasms is at times quite sharp, as is the sketch of Sydney politics/development of the time, however much in the background.

Police Story

1985, Hong Kong, directed by Jackie Chan

A film I hadn't seen since a UK TV outing 25 or more years ago, with an intro designed to educate the viewer as to the wonders of Hong Kong action cinema. The set-pieces are as jaw-dropping as ever, but the connective tissue is harder work, especially since Hong Kong humour is very much an acquired and/or locally-specific taste. Still, the chutzpah and Keaton-esque physical grace linger long in the mind. 

A Summer at Grandpa's

1984, Taiwan, directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien

The mid-1980s produced some very fine coming-of-age films from very varied locations -- Bille August's Zappa and Twist and Shout, Lasse Hallström's My Life as a Dog, or Hou's delicate film, based in part on his screenwriter's memories of a summer spent away from home. As with My Life as a Dog, there's a parental illness in the background, casting an immediate shadow over events, though for the most part the carefree overrides the storm clouds, with the children testing the boundaries of their independence while gathering an understanding of the somewhat different boundaries that apply to adults. Like all of Hou's films, the pace is quite leisurely, with the director allowing scenes to expand in ways that permit the viewer to spend a good deal of time contemplating scenery, sound, and the often picturesque details of small-town life in which the kids make their own schedules. Absolutely absorbing throughout, with Hou drawing lovely performances from the younger cast members.

Big

1988, US, directed by Penny Marshall

As charming as it was on release, with Hanks' sweet, wonderfully physical performance the absolute center of the film. Also very much of its era, with eye-popping shoulder pads and New York a haven of crime -- though some things, notably the depiction of grasping business types, never go out of style.

La Balance

1982, France, directed by Bob Swaim

A solid French policier, pretty good as a depiction of the gangster milieu of Belleville in the early 1980s but most notable for the strong performances by Nathalie Baye, Philippe Léotard, and Richard Berry, all of them playing compromised characters in one way or another (there's an interesting back story, too, in that Baye and Léotard had just ended a long relationship). However, I didn't find the direction to be inspired: Swaim films in pretty flat fashion at times, and his sense of rhythm that comes and goes, but the climactic gun battle is staged with a good deal of panache. 

The Boys from Fengkuei

1983, Taiwan, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Very much a film where we see Hou's style coming into being, in particular with respect to the measured pace and the careful framing -- especially in the urban sequences, where the use of doorways (and other openings) or balconies foreshadows his later use of space. However, he also manages to capture a good deal of the vibrancy -- both good and bad -- of urban life: the film is certainly not stately in its progression. The main distraction is a classical soundtrack that's without subtlety -- very obvious choices, though apparently this is a step up from the film's original pop backing.

Les Fugitifs

1986, France, directed by Francis Veber

The third and final of the films that paired Gérard Depardieu and Pierre Richard, this is to my eye the tightest of the trio, and also the most pleasing to the eye, but it's also pretty heavy on the sentimentality, as so often with films featuring children... Still, both leads are solid on this occasion -- Richard's status as an inheritor of de Funès seemed especially clear on this occasion. There's also an enjoyable cameo from one Michel Blanc, the same year as he and Depardieu set things alight in the far superior Tenue de soirée. 

Le Gendarme et les gendarmettes

1982, France, directed by Jean Girault

This is a contribution to the Late Films Blogathon hosted, as every year, by Shadowplay-er extraordinaire David Cairns. 

A picture that counts double in the late film stakes: director Jean Girault died during filming of star Louis de Funès's swansong, the last of their dozen collaborations stretching back to the 1960s. Though their work was never of the highest cinematic order, it's still hard to imagine anyone choosing this particular picture as an epitaph. De Funès looks visibly aged, diminished by the heart condition that plagued him for some years, and indeed he's offscreen for lengthy chunks of the film, suggesting that the script was constructed very much with his absence in mind.

The sixth in a series of films that began in 1964, to which the law of diminishing returns applied with brutal effect (imagine the Pink Panther films, without the benefit of starting at a reasonable peak), Le Gendarme et les gendarmettes scrapes the inspirational barrel utterly dry, and de Funès is very much an old dog going through his old tricks. I've always struggled with his particular schtick, almost always preferring his more subtle onscreen partners, most famously Bourvil in the 1960s, though here he’s paired with Michel Galabru, who has roughly the physiognomy and the subtlety of a warthog, and Girault doesn't make any attempt to rein him in (whereas a director like Jean-Pierre Mocky could deploy Galabru's features to more sophisticated comic ends).

Both actors played in all of the Gendarme pictures, which made for some pretty superannuated cops by 1982, though the plot doesn't bother clarifying why they're still hanging around the station house when they should have been pensioned off. Ah, yes, plot, or in this case a device engineered purely to fill the screen with a succession of comely women who play a quartet of gendarmerie cadets as part an "innovative" training program. One of the four is African, and the daughter of an African president to boot, which provides the cue for a ham-fistedly offensive sequence in which she is depicted in tribal garb -- dancing, of course, as a prelude to a cannibalistic feast. Fans of workplace harassment -- all of it cheerfully tolerated, naturally -- will be heaven here, as will those who believe that female police officers are best attired in garb that looks like that of a Pan Am stewardess circa 1965. That the cadets, entirely predictably, emerge victorious over both their criminal adversaries and their lecherous supervisors doesn't quite excuse all that has come before...

Truth be told, this is not the first year I planned to write about this particular picture but getting through this kind of thing is a slog -- there really are astonishingly few redeeming features, not unlike Jean Gabin's final film, also directed by Jean Girault -- a real career-end specialist, that one.

Signé Furax

1981, France, directed by Marc Simenon

The film derives from a 1950s radio show with which I have no familiarity whatsoever and thus no sense of fidelity to the original. Absent that knowledge, the film came across as something close to a French Zucker-Abrams-Zucker film, with the scattershot approach to visual jokes, verbal gags of both high and low levels, absurd plotting, and general zaniness, though the hit rate was a good bit lower than in the best ZAZ outings. In other words, for every decent part there were a couple of sections that just didn't work for me, although the bit-part appearances kept the interest up (Coluche's appearance was abbreviated in the extreme, two quick scenes). I had not made the connection before but the film was directed by Georges Simenon's son, and there is a brief and reasonably subtle reference to the paternal oeuvre near the end. Simenon fils did not have a distinguished directorial career, mostly assisting on a variety of (high-profile) comedy films in the 1960s before a short career as a director himself.

Loulou

1980, France, directed by Maurice Pialat

A film that follows very much in the steps of its predecessor, Passe ton bac d'abord. While the social milieu is different -- a combination of characters drawn from both slightly lower and slightly higher tranches than the earlier film, with the socio-economic specificity of Paris also added in -- there's a great deal of continuity between the late-adolescent mistreatment of friends and lovers and the adult version of the same thing in Loulou. There's also a continued sense of a terrifically depressing drift in the France of the Giscard era, despite the often positive social liberalization of French life in that period. Not for the first time, I have the sense that Mitterrand's 1981 election was as much as anything a desire to move on from the grey decade of the 1970s, during which it became increasingly difficult to take seriously the promises of French social life. From such unpromising social turf you often get wonderfully interesting films, of course. It was an exquisite pleasure to see Jacqueline Dufranne as Depardieu's mother here: she was both wonderful and heart-breaking as the mother/foster-mother in La Maison des bois, one of the warmest and, as that film progressed, most distressing performances I've seen. 

Une Etrange affaire

1981, France, directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre

An extremely successful marriage of biting satire and fantasia, which might make a good double bill with Bartleby in terms of its analysis of work/life balance -- indeed, this seemed to me to be at the heart of the satire. Michel Piccoli is at the peak of his considerable powers at this point in his career, and Gérard Lanvin proved something of a revelation: he's a capable lighter actor, and did particularly well in some successful buddy pictures of the period, but many of his later roles do little to stretch him as an actor. 

Les Fantômes du chapelier

1982, France, directed by Claude Chabrol

Simenon and Chabrol are well-matched: highly productive artists who were also voracious consumers on a great many levels, and with a shared set of thoroughly mixed feelings when it comes to the bourgeoisie. Thus here the killer himself isn't so much  the target of Chabrol's ire as is the milieu in which he exists. In an environment where carefully-regulated sexual infidelity and domestic inattentiveness are tolerated, or even encouraged, what more profound transgression than casting oneself out through indulging in a spot of serial killing? While Serrault's performance is certainly showy, occasionally even distracting, I loved his very precise work throughout: the little dances with his hands, the exactitude of almost all of his actions, the very controlled delivery of the dialogue. Chabrol also makes fine use of the off-season Breton locations, in Quimper and Concarneau -- the rain is virtually a character in its own right.

Tchao pantin

1983, France, directed by Claude Berri

1983 was the high point of Coluche's not-all-that-distinguished cinematic career, between this film, which won him a César, and Bertrand Blier's La Femme de mon pote, loosely based on Coluche's own complicated private life (and particularly his relationship with Patrick Dewaere, originally supposed to play opposite Coluche in the latter film). Very few directors seemed to have known what to do with Coluche's raucous, populist comic persona -- while their comedy is quite different, it reminds me to some degree of the challenge that Robin Williams' manically energetic improvisation posed to directors right through the 1980s. Like Williams, Coluche could tone it down when required, sometimes to rather syrupy effect, but here the tone stays spare and generally unsentimental. Claude Berri is no cinematic innovator but the first half of his film is strong, sketching in the tentative and spiky friendship that develops between a night-shift petrol station attendant and a young North African (played by Richard Anconina). The second half proceeds in an increasingly obvious and rather less credible direction, despite the welcome insertion of Philippe Léotard, though this is partly due to the structure of the picture: we go through the first half of the film with essentially no information about Coluche's character except for a loose architecture that allows us to project a variety of troubles on him, and the second half fills in a good deal of the missing detail. Coluche doesn't have to display an enormous range but he does jaded very effectively, his downbeat demeanour well-matched with the overall vibe of Paris noir. 

Love Brewed in the African Pot

1980, Ghana, directed by Kwaw Ansah

Kwaw Ansah was the victim of some awful timing, starting his cinema career just as Ghana's cinemas went into terminal decline in the early 1980s: the arrival of the VCR combined with an extended curfew to close many of the venues that were already struggling after a decade of economic upheaval. There is almost no hint of that offscreen turmoil, though: the film is set at a vaguely-defined point shortly after independence and focuses on the confrontation of tradition and modernity (intermingled with issues of social class). Like Sembène, Ansah is blunt about the ways in which many leading figures in post-independence Africa echoed their colonial predecessors, even striving to emulate them (thus the tragi-comic figure of the father with his pith helmet and his insistence on certain forms of dress and address). For the most part, Ansah displays a fine observational eye for the tensions between different views of the world, zeroing in on the distaste of the educated elite for traditional observances (a theme that was common in Ghanaian newspapers of the 1950s), though the film shifts gears quite radically in the final twenty minutes, and the move to a more consciously Shakespearean/metaphorical register is jarring.