Anthony Zimmer

2005, France, directed by Jérôme Salle

I'm a sucker for this kind of thing -- sleek movies about master criminals and mistaken identities, and the first half of Jérôme Salle's film is a thing of beauty, a little like watching a BMW accelerate smoothly through the gears. Unfortunately, it can't quite sustain that momentum, reverting to something rather more conventional as things wrap up, but I was tempted to watch the thing all over again from the beginning just as the end credits rolled just for the visceral thrill of seeing the well-oiled cinematic machine at work. The central intrigue hinges on a young woman -- Sophie Marceau channelling Monica Bellucci so well that a few years later she was essentially cast as Bellucci in the doppelgänger movie Ne te retourne pas -- who attempts to divert the attentions of the authorities from her lover, the titular M. Zimmer, by taking up with the vaguely sad-sack Yvan Attal.

The film doesn't play fair, of course, suggesting entirely different motivations at times through its shot choices, but that's part of the game. Salle's approach suggests something of a Hollywood calling card -- crisp car or foot chases of the kind that crop up subsequently in Guillaume Canet's Ne le dis à personne or multiple overhead shots of trains and cars criss-crossing the south of France -- but several of the most enjoyable sequences hinge on the precise little details of conversations -- between Marceau and Attal in their first encounter, or Attal and a young police lieutenant, or any of the scenes with Sami Frey, playing the Javert-like cop who has devoted his career to tracking down Zimmer.

Forfaiture

1937, France, directed by Marcel L'Herbier

Although the film is a broad remake of Cecil B. DeMille's 1915 picture The Cheat (which I've not seen, though the film was apparently very influential on French filmmakers), I was struck more by the thematic and plot correspondences with star Victor Francen's later film L'Homme du Niger. As in that film, Forfaiture takes place in an exotic, quasi-colonial setting, with Francen responsible for a grandiose construction project and in love with a much younger woman.

In this case, said younger woman is played by Lise Delamare, an early appearance by an actress who was, from what I can tell, most frequently a stage performer. The young woman gets herself in all manner of bother when she makes some rather poor decisions at the local gambling parlour, though her behaviour seems to stem as much from boredom -- old Victor's character is always more interested in his work than in his women despite his protestations of devotion -- while her problems are compounded by the ill intent of the local prince, played by Sessue Haykawa, who reprises his own role from the DeMille film. His character is a fairly typical untrustworthy oriental, of predictably inscrutable motivations, and oily enough that his often amoral French fixer, played by Louis Jouvet, appears as a relative man of virtue.

I'm not familiar with Marcel L'Herbier's work -- I don't think I've seen a single other film by the director -- so I've no idea how typical it is, but he has a sure sense of atmosphere in the overseas locations, whether it's the dusty exterior shots or the smoky interiors of the gambling house, and there's terrific tension in the later stages in the courtroom, with carefully constructed flashbacks that gradually reveal a kind of truth. The film provides a rather interesting glimpse into the functioning of the French legal system, at least the screen version thereof, which is quite different to its more familiar American counterpart. Victor Francen really isn't my cup of tea as a performer -- there's a gritted-teeth sincerity to his delivery at times that I just don't buy -- but Louis Jouvet is quite wonderful as the suave go-between, ever flexible in his politics and his self-interest save for a late stab of conscience; his line deliveries in the courtroom are wonderfully precise, as he tries to comply with the requirements of the legal system while adhering to his own private code.

Cobra Woman

1944, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

Wow. Where to begin. I'd previously only known Robert Siodmak as a director of noirish material so this lurid Technicolor frenzy came as something of a surprise. Even with Hollywood's loose approach to historical and geographical accuracy, this is fevered stuff, set on a series of isolated islands that feature both snake charmers and chimpanzees, not to mention both young Sabu, forced to utter his lines in a rather hideous pidgin ("I are..." etc.), among the "natives."

The film was one of a series featuring Maria Montez and Jon Hall (and Sabu in some installments), and the emphasis is on lavish escapism. Where others were already delving deeply into noir territory in 1944, including Fritz Lang in The Woman in the Window, this is pure distraction, completely goofy and unsurprisingly now treasured as a camp classic. The eye-opening cobra dance, performed not once but twice by the estimable Ms. Montez, is worthy of the price of admission by itself; Siodmak must have experienced severe whiplash shuttling between such material and the same year's psychologically acute Phantom Lady.

Note: This is part of my Watching Movies in Africa project. Cobra Woman was screened numerous times at Kumasi's Rex cinema in January 1951. The Ashanti Pioneer of January 18, 1951 includes a brief piece credited "By Our Film Critic," though the terminology employed owes more to the vocabulary of advertising than that of journalism: “Do you like the beautiful, are you fascinated by the mysterious, do you take to the colourful? If so, you cannot spend a more entertaining time than by being at the Rex Cinema to-night.” A number of Ghanaian newspapers were owned by entrepreneurs who also had interests in the cinema business; the same may well have been the case here though I've not yet tracked down direct evidence of the link. Update: I've since found evidence that the film was showing in Accra's Rex theatre as early as June 1946. That venue was owned by the same company that later screened the film in Kumasi, and by all accounts the contemporary rental system used in Ghana allowed exhibitors to keep films for up to five years.

The image above is taken from FilmFanatic.org.

Crazy, Stupid, Love.

US, 2011, directed by Glen Ficarra and John Requa

With much of its action taking place in and around a single location, and the main characters all implausibly interlinked, Crazy, Stupid, Love comes across like a stage farce at times or, perhaps less charitably, like a sitcom: despite the various outings to malls, restaurants, and schools across Los Angeles we're continually drawn back to the bar in which an unlikely friendship develops between sad sack Steve Carell and ladies man Ryan Gosling, both playing very much to type, though that's not to say their interactions aren't enjoyable.

Still, the film's real spark comes from the presence -- rather sparingly doled out -- of Emma Stone, who has an extraordinary capacity to light up the screen even in her quieter moments (the lovely, extended conversation between her character and Gosling's, for instance, which hints at en entirely different film). As is entirely typical in Hollywood cinema, Carell's character gets to have his cake and eat it, too, tending the flame for his spouse and looking put upon while learning to play the field with Gosling's sage advice; there's not much that even a game performer like Marisa Tomei can do with her role as one of his conquests, although she gives it the old woman-scorned try. Still, the big reveal is pretty fun, even if the latter sections try rather too hard to milk the tear ducts.

Drôle de drame

1937, France, directed by Marcel Carné

Louis Jouvet had several memorable actorly face-offs over the course of his screen career, and while his character here is deeply unsympathetic he has one treasurable scene over the dinner table with Michel Simon, in which he probes relentlessly to satisfy his curiosity as to the unexpected absence of Simon's spouse (Françoise Rosay). Simon's increasingly convoluted explanations set the plot's farcical ramifications on their way, and Jouvet, for his part, is gifted with the line "Bizarre, bizarre," rolling the word around in his mouth as he ruminates on the information supplied to him.

It doesn't sound as though Jouvet enjoyed himself to any great degree on the production, objecting in particular to the ridiculous, if comically effective, costume he has to wear near the conclusion, though the experience can't have soured him entirely on Marcel Carné, making his second feature here, since he appeared in the director's subsequent film, Hôtel du Nord, the following year. Still, he and Simon apparently both set out with the intention, not necessarily declared out loud, to drink the other man under the table during said dinner scene. It takes quite a man to even contemplate engaging with an opponent of Simon's legendary appetites: perhaps he looked like an easy mark since he played characters far beyond his years for much of his career; sadly, I've no idea who won this particular battle, though the actors renewed their combat in La Fin du jour a couple of years later.

As for the film itself, Drôle de drame is chiefly concerned with appearances and disguises, especially the gulf between the public face and the private man; Jouvet plays the hypocrite-in-chief, and while he's by no means the only person hiding something, in the film his moral failings far outweigh the bloody crimes of Jean-Louis Barrault, perhaps cinema's least likely serial killer, bouncing around the screen between offing the occasional butcher when he's not flinging himself at an eyelid-batting Françoise Rosay. The disguises adopted by one and all are intentionally absurd, in line with the farcical turn -- Simon applies a bit of fake beard, and renders himself completely unfamiliar to every single person in the film such that he can wander around his own home while suspected of being on the run for murder. Realism, though, is hardly the goal here.

The Descendants

2011, US, directed by Alexander Payne

In its own small way, a film of some historical moment: it marked the first time we managed to attend the same cinema screening since the birth of our son. After about twenty minutes, we were reflecting that the choice of film was perhaps inapt, given that much of the film revolves around a foundering marriage -- albeit with one of the parties in a hospital bed, beyond reach of any words -- and the challenges of dealing with children. The early sections are only very lightly leavened with humour, as the film sets up both the familial dynamics and the film's other major plotline, regarding a swathe of pristine Hawaiian property primed for development.

The opening is strikingly low-key, as if reflecting the shock that George Clooney's central character is presumably working through, and it's his slow re-emergence and emotional re-connection that gives the film much of its narrative momentum. Still, between Payne's previous films and the bait-and-switch trailer, we hadn't expected to feel quite so glum, and it's not until the arrival of an unexpected newcomer, in the form of a high school goof, that the film finds a new tone with which to play, gradually blending together the entirely serious familial themes with a vein of oddball humour that's further amplified by the irascible, and sometimes plain asshole-ish, father-in-law played by Robert Forster. Clooney tamps down his charm, at least in so far as he can, creating a rather fine portrait of middle-years confusion that looks rather more effortless than it presumably is; he's starting to remind me a little of Clint Eastwood in his gradual growth into an older persona, looking forward rather than back to his youthful glories.

The Woman in the Window

1944, US, directed by Fritz Lang

When the Siren dispenses advice I find that it's worth following, and thus I watched The Woman in the Window before reading her recent piece on the film's ending; I second her counsel for anyone who would prefer not to find the film's dénouement unknotted before its time (in other words, stop here if you want to enjoy the ending unspoiled).

Although that conclusion has been much discussed across the decades, I'd successfully managed to avoid any knowledge about the outcome until this point, and was drawn into the film's hypnotic rhythm unawares. Although less sweaty than films like The Window or Rear Window -- the window in question here is of a different order, but still, what is it about windows in New York? -- it's very much a classic of the New York summertime, with unexpected occurrences multiplying in the humidity.

The entire film flows from one small decision, wherein Edward G. Robinson, who plays a married college professor -- "Assistant Professor," his character insists at one point -- takes an attractive woman up on her offer of a little conversation. The professor quickly finds that he has bitten off much, much more than he's bargained for but also discovers within himself a surprising seam of ice-cool criminality, all rendered the more ironic since his academic specialty is supposed to be the murderous mind.

The aforementioned ending reveals the entire film, virtually from this crucial moment, to have been a dream in the professor's apparently fevered mind -- if only he'd take off that jacket, perhaps he'd have avoided all of his problems. Retrospectively, the dream framework renders much of the film more logical, particularly the presence of a friend who also happens to be a DA feeding Robinson information on the case, and giving him the sense of an ever-tightening noose. From what I can tell, the framework -- revealed in a beautiful bit of camera trickery in which Robinson's face is framed, silent-movie style, while the room around him is transformed -- was always intended by Lang, rendering the film, in a sense, as the lengthy buildup to a terrific punchline. His delivery is spot on -- the sense of gathering doom is seamlessly constructed, while the apparently inoffensive Robinson's turn toward amorality is one of the film's nicest frissons.

Un Carnet de bal

1937, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

I hadn't realized that Duvivier's film has an episodic structure, so my hopes for scenes in which Louis Jouvet faces off with Harry Baur, Raimu or Fernandel came to naught -- each plays in his own discrete segment, as another of the men featuring on a long-ago dance card wielded by the lovely Françoise Rosay. Jouvet does play in later films with all three actors, so there is that to look forward to; this is ultimately hardly the best showcase for all of the various players, since some of their sequences are very thin indeed. Jouvet, as Jo, a lawyer turned criminal, gets one of the best parts -- the kind of thing that Humphrey Bogart might have played in an American film a couple of years later, layered with world-weary gestures, though there's something very Jouvet-ian about the precise way in which Jo outlines the various articles of the criminal code, which he cites to his partners in crime as a means to ensure the lightest possible sentence in the event of a criminal mishap.

The Baur and Fernandel segments are fairly unmemorable, at least as far as the actors are concerned, though the ecclaesiastical backdrop in the Baur section makes for some interesting set design; Raimu's segment is rather stronger, not least because the sequence is constructed in such a way as to actually give his character some depth. The whole affair threatens to go in an entirely different direction in the startling section featuring Paul Blanchar as a back-street abortionist and tortured addict, wrung out from years in the colonies; the entire segment is shot off kilter, in keeping with Blanchar's state of mind, and it's as though the tale drifted in from an entirely different movie that happened to be shooting on an adjacent, and much grimier, sound stage. The segment is so distinctive that I looked back through the rest of the film to see whether or not Duvivier had used similar, if less obvious, ways of marking the visual signature associated with each entry on the dance card, perhaps like the technical challenges Claude Chabrol assigned himself when shooting his Lavardin films, but I didn't pick up on anything obvious.

The Lady Vanishes

1938, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

I hadn't seen Hitchcock's zesty comedy-thriller for nearly twenty years, and so had completely forgotten the opening of the film in a small alpine town: fully a third of the film unspools before the characters ever make their way aboard the train where the plot kicks into full gear. There's nothing wasted in that extended prologue, though: the overnight antics in a crowded hotel set up a multiplicity of later onboard relationships, while it's also a healthy reminder that Hitchcock had a surprisingly light touch with comic business, at least in this phase of his career, whether in the form of the buffoonish Englishmen abroad duo of Caldicott and Charters or the delightful Margaret Lockwood as the eponymous lady, utterly unflappable in any circumstances.

There's constant back and forth between the films in Hitchcock's 1930s output -- spies, overseas jaunts, dramatic train rides all feature in other decades, though the director varies the tone across films, going from high seriousness in much of a film like Sabotage to an almost farcical note here. After seeing most of those other films again in fairly ordinary small-screen versions it was wonderful to see the film in a crisp big screen print: the opening scene-setting shot in the mountains is particularly impressive on the larger canvas, the camera moving down from an overview of the snowy town to the ground-level details with a dash of humour.

La Belle équipe

1936, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

I'm starting to see Bertrand Blier every time I cue up a French film from the 1930s. First Les Bas-fonds put me in mind of Tenue de soirée, and now Jean Gabin has me thinking of more or less any of Gérard Depardieu's roles for Blier -- Gabin's opening scene here, full of bluster and physical energy is like every entrance Depardieu made for Blier, a force of nature constantly pushing at the bounds of the screen. Gabin plays a much more reliable type than that generally essayed by Depardieu in oafish mode, but the similarity perhaps owes something to both actors' origins in the music halls (or their rough 1960s equivalent the café-théâtre): they're always ready to improvise to catch the eye, and are as adept with movement as they are with dialogue. Gabin even throws in a song and, later, a dance, lovely moments that recall the versatility of a Cagney on the American screen. Even with company like Charles Vanel or Raymond Aimos, another Duvivier regular, Gabin commands the attention: although the film wasn't a huge success in its time, it's a terrific vehicle for the actor's particular charm.

More or less from its release in 1936, and increasingly so as the decades advanced, La Belle équipe was co-opted as a film of the Popular Front, even though director Julien Duvivier denied any political intention. I can certainly accept his contention that the film wasn't intended as an analogy for the Popular Front itself -- whether with its original, wholly tragic ending or the bittersweet replacement, it's not constructed in any sense as a blunt allegory. However, it's hard to avoid the regular references to the politics and policies of the time, or the celebratory references to earlier republican ideals (the toast to Léon Gambetta, for instance) -- as though Duvivier, a highly adaptable filmmaker, and his fellow script-writer Charles Spaak breathed in something of the air of the times and infused it into their film almost without realizing.

Mystery of the Wax Museum

1933, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

The second and last of Michael Curtiz's eerie two-strip Technicolor films, Mystery of the Wax Museum reunites much of the talent from the first such outing, Doctor X, including players Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray. Like the earlier film it's a somewhat unlikely mix of creepy horror -- sometimes very creepy indeed, between macabre plotting and some hair-raising makeup work -- and rat-a-tat Warner Brothers comedy. Where Doctor X featured Lee Tracy in the role of a newspaperman, Mystery of the Wax Museum uses Glenda Farrell in similar fashion, though Farrell emphasizes her character's street smarts rather than the Tracy pratfalls that were such a distraction in the previous film. Indeed, her character is much more engaging than Fay Wray's despite Wray's higher billing; the scream queen has so little screen time it's hard for her to do much with the part except squeal for all she's worth when Curtiz gives the signal.

Warners weren't best known for their horror movies, and the script uses the competition for comparative purposes: the monster at the heart of the film is likened to Universal's Frankenstein, though the horrific visage on display here makes that fellow "look like a lily," presumably to prove that Warners did everything better. As was the case on Doctor X, art director Anton Grot runs riot. The wax workshop above looks like it something that could have cropped up in a villainous lair from a Bond movie, while the waxwork tableaux are wonderfully weird -- even more so when they use actual people rather than wax figures. Grot was one of the first people inducted into the Art Directors Guild Hall of Fame, hardly surprising given his obvious influence on later generations (Ken Adam, I'm looking at you, among others); there's a Rube Goldberg-esque craziness to some of the contraptions on display here.

Les Bas-fonds

1936, France, directed by Jean Renoir

I'm slowly watching my way through Louis Jouvet's filmography, and Renoir's film is the first I've seen that really gives extended rein to Jouvet as a film performer rather than as an actor replaying stage material; I haven't see his performance in Robert Siodmak's Mister Flow, which appears to have been filmed earlier the same year, though it sounds as though it was something of a troubled production [I've since plugged that particular gap]. Here, he's paired with Jean Gabin, who plays more or less the same -- immensely charming -- character from films like the same year's La Belle équipe.

It's an apposite match: despite their differing acting styles, both Gabin and Jouvet were originally men of the stage, albeit the music hall stage in Gabin's case, and there's a joyous complicity to their work together. Both, too, were fairly careful in their choice of work: so many French actors of the period seemed to say yes to every role that came their way it makes Gabin and Jouvet seem cautious by comparison, though each probably had the occasional regret. Their scenes together crackle: they're first brought together in a scene of attempted robbery that foreshadows Blier's Tenue de soirée, in which the putative victims try to get in on the action.

Renoir underlines their complicity with a pair of mirror-image scenes, the first in which Jouvet stands impassively while on the receiving end of a lengthy brush-off by an unseen official, the second with Gabin talking up a storm to a silent police commissioner, again unseen until the soliloquy concludes. The difference between the scenes is key to the characters: Jouvet's Baron ultimately accepts his fall from aristocratic grace, serenely acknowledging an inner truth about himself, while Gabin's hard-scrabble Pepel is always on the make, trying to leave an unwanted life in the lower depths behind. He's almost jealous of his unlikely friend's inner peace, though they do share one treasurable sequence of riverside idyll, where life slows down and the sun and the peacefully flowing Marne come to the fore, washing other cares away for an hour or two.

Kill List

2011, UK, directed by Ben Wheatley

There's no doubt in my mind that Ben Wheatley achieves what he sets out to do here: he's a skilled filmmaker with a terrific degree of control over his material, but ultimately I wasn't quite sure of the point of the exercise, beyond attempting to re-construct a challenging puzzle. It made me wonder if this is how those who don't like Quentin Tarantinto feel, although at least some of those who can't abide Tarantino's worldview -- not a difficult argument to make at times -- don't grant him any filmmaking skill, either, which oversteps the mark. Wheatley's film opens on a jarring note that recalls Chabrol's La Rupture: a frightening eruption of domestic violence, although the scene ultimately plays out in quite different ways.

Still, the Chabrol film isn't a bad reference point: like Kill List, it's a are deeply disconcerting film, which ultimately concludes in bizarrely unexpected territory. The comparison only holds to a certain point,of course; Wheatley emphasizes sound in the creation of atmosphere, constantly keeping the viewer/listener off balance with both the use of sudden intrusions of grating noise and then contrasting that with moments of striking calm. He's also blessed with a number of very fine performances -- as unpleasant as their characters might be, Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley achieve a certain kind of naturalistic charm, at least in their friendship. And while I remain skeptical about the film's overall effect, I must acknowledge that while it was unspooling I was unsettled enough that I briefly became convinced there was a rat running around the cinema; while admittedly this is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility given the venue I suspect that it was a figment of my imagination-under-the-influence.

La Kermesse héroïque

1935, France, directed by Jacques Feyder

David Cairns wrote about La Kermesse héroïque recently for his "Forgotten" column, and I don't have much to add to his account of the film's extraordinary shifts in tone. It's an odd film that only becomes odder when watched with the knowledge of France's subsequent Occupation, although Feyder and screenwriter Charles Spaak, both Belgian, surely weren't attempting anything along the lines of prophetic commentary on their host country. The film opens on the eve of a carnival that's quickly adapted to welcome the Spanish army, which is passing through the region. The women of the town give themselves over fully to the notion that the carnival marks the overthrow, if only for a night, of bourgeois convention. What's subversive is not so much the idea of sacrifice in the service of long-term good but rather that such sacrifice might be welcome and pleasurable given the restrictions of life in this rather dull town ruled by a rather pathetic collection of men. Indeed, the women's sacrifice might not be that great a sacrifice at all...

Feyder gives us a wonderfully rich portrayal of both the town and the visiting Spaniards, finding time to insert numerous piquant details, such as the soldier and townsman who find themselves exchanging needlework tips. It's very consciously a series of tableaux, with the opening sections and later tavern sequences evoking Breughel's paintings of exuberant village life; Breughel the younger appears in the film as both a painter and a young lover, giving Feyder the opportunity to create a literal tableau vivant as we watch the young artist attempt to wrangle a collection of town busbybodies into place for posterity.

I initially watched the film as an early entry in Louis Jouvet's oeuvre. Jouvet's role is minor, if arresting: he plays a less-than-pure monk, assigned a number of delicious speeches, but it's hardly more than a cameo. Still, it's the first time that he played a character who wasn't drawn from one of his stage roles, and while the stage is never far from his performance style -- particularly the way he rolls words around in his mouth -- his work feels more relaxed, and less bound-up by stage business, than was the case in his previous screen performances.

Welcome to Nollywood

2007, US, directed by Jamie Meltzer

As with Mascarades, I watched Welcome to Nollywood primarily to conceal my complete ignorance from a fellow conference panelist next month. Jamie Meltzer's documentary is an enjoyable entrée into the Nollywood world, focusing on a couple of polar opposites while giving the broad facts and figures for the industry as it stood in 2007. At one pole, there's Chico Ejiro, king of the quickie, who had churned out around 80 films by the time Meltzer caught up with him, and who boasts of being able to shoot a film in as little as weekend. At the other end of the scale there's the extraordinary ambition of Izu Ojukwu, whose artistic ambitions are on an entirely different scale, and whose film Laviva, which is extensively documented here, turns into a kind of Nigerian Apocalypse Now, both for the subject matter -- the chaos of war -- and the massive cost and time overruns. The Laviva story is fascinating, though it does unbalance the film to some degree: while there are a few more ambitious Nollywood directors out there, it's pretty clear that Chico Ejiro is the more representative director -- making films on the fly, getting them quickly to market, and moving on so fast he can't remember the plots of some of his films.

Mascarades

2008, Algeria/France, directed by Lyès Salem

I know next to nothing about Algerian cinema, but I'm on a conference panel next month with someone who presumably knows a whole lot more given that her paper is on the topic. Mascarades was my attempt to not seem completely clueless: I'd never heard of the film before, but it's a terrific discovery: Lyès Salem is mostly known as an actor, and this was his first feature, but you'd never guess it from his complete assurance with camera and narrative. The film opens with an impressive extended shot around the central square of a small town, just before the arrival of a fast-moving wedding cavalcade that sprays dust over the inhabitants before peeling out of town again.

Weddings are at the heart of the film -- fictional weddings, remembered weddings, potential weddings -- and Salem uses the events as a means to explore both tradition and modernity in the Algerian context, though he never sets the two up in simplistic opposition. Salem himself plays the central character, Mounir, a jumped-up fellow who tries desperately to exercise control over his family. The director-actor takes great delight in puncturing his character's arrogance and while his sensibility is very different from Sasha Baron Cohen's it's hard not to be reminded of the latter's Borat in one of the early scenes, with Mounir's moustache front and center in a close-up shot. Salem has an altogether more subtle set of tools at his disposal, though, bringing Mounir's small town to vivid life in a brisk 90 minutes, and retaining an underlying affection for his character. The remainder of the cast appear to have virtually no screen credits, either before or afterwards: I'd be interested in discovering whether they are experienced Algerian actors or non-professionals, since they're an entirely convincing ensemble here.

Limitless

2011, US, directed by Neil Burger

The drug at the centre of Limitless seems ripe for the corporate picking, irrespective of those nasty side-effects: it's a sort of American dream pharmaceutical which allows the consumer to magically work harder, faster. You kind of expect it to transform the economy and consign China to second place with reinvigorated American productivity, when ultimately it just turns unkempt Bradley Cooper back into, well, Bradley Cooper, and conveniently ignores the various side plots. While the central ride is slickly enjoyable -- and it comes up with intriguing new ways to depict the impact of this particular drug on the brain -- the film ultimately poses far more questions than it's either capable of or interested in asking. In that, it's nothing like Burger's most enjoyable film, The Illusionist, which neatly (too neatly?) ties its narrative together. Burger extracts good performances from Cooper, who remains somehow charming despite his character's deep-seated narcissism, and perhaps even more notably from Robert De Niro: there's all manner of scenery-chewing potential in the role of a high-flying financier, but Burger reins De Niro's latter-day instincts in, reminding us that the actor can radiate menace even without a barrage of tics.

Moneyball

2011, US, directed by Bennett Miller

So many mainstream American movies more or less ignore the actual mechanics of working -- much of the time, even the allegedly gainfully employed seem to have unlimited free time and resources -- that it's quite surprising to come across a film that is essentially about watching a man work for two hours, whether it's dealing with superiors, making personnel decisions, or dealing with lingering frustrations long after the working day should be over. More surprising still is that Bennett Miller finds a way to create compelling tension from this material -- while the ostensible narrative centers on the actual 2002 season for the Oakland Athletics as recounted in Michael Lewis's original book, what's really on the line throughout the film is Billy Beane's job.

Miller shoehorns plenty of material from the original book -- from relatively abstract concepts about player value to specific players who were the subject of draft and trade decisions in 2002 -- without overloading the film with dry onscreen detail, mostly because he relies on the easygoing charm of his lead actor to hold the attention, and to act as an audience surrogate when Beane's assistant (Jonah Hill, who's excellent) delves beneath the statistical surface (just) a little. Beane, as played by Brad Pitt, is bright and eager to master new concepts, but also, crucially, has just enough of a background as a player to speak to the playing staff with some authority (it reminded me of my own workplace: I work with faculty and the simple fact of "not being faculty" can diminish one's authority in the eyes of some professors). There's something slightly broken in Beane, which the film suggests is deep in his own background: he can no longer enjoy the games themselves. Unlike the fans, whose belief often defies the rational, Beane is aware that even the hottest streak is doomed to end in a game built on failure, so it's always about working to do the best with what he has on hand. It's a melancholy idea, but hardly a new one in baseball, which always seems to have a sense of the elegiac in its seasonal structure.

Midnight in Paris

2011, US/Spain/France, directed by Woody Allen

Anyone who cranks out films as regularly as Woody Allen -- the last year he didn't have a film appear was 1981 -- is unlikely to knock it out of the park every time around, and I've found some of his post-2000 films to be rather a slog even if I keep pulling for him to get back on his game. Midnight in Paris takes him back to his stand-up roots, during which he told amusing anecdotes about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and going back to the original well of inspiration seems to have given him an extra spring. The timing is brisk, Owen Wilson is a fine stand-in Woody Allen -- not to mention a less jarring match for Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard and Léa Seydoux-- and Paris is a vision.

Woody's version of the city has about as much realism as Owen Wilson's take on the place -- where Wilson projects back to the 1920s and beyond, Woody carefully sanitizes out every gritty corner and virtually every non-white face (Josephine Baker would be as much of a novelty in Woody's Paris 2011 as she is, very briefly, in his film). The anachronism of the film is even more obvious given that Allen's script, for once, actually makes reference to the contemporary world, with cracks about the Tea Party giving the film a very up-to-the-minute flavour on one level.

West of Zanzibar

1954, UK, directed by Harry Watt

Ealing Studios made a series of pictures filmed in Australia and the African colonies in the 1950s, and for the most part Harry Watt was the go-to director for these overseas jaunts; The Overlanders, with Chips Rafferty, was a pretty enjoyable Aussie cattle drive affair, but this film is rather less successful, at least in dramatic terms. The script is pretty awful -- the actors sound pained at times, delivering the most obvious of lines, and there's not much they can do with the gaping plot holes either -- while the seams in the mixture of location footage and studio material are painfully obvious.

Watt's background was in documentaries, one of the many filmmakers trained with John Grierson, and the location footage is often rather good: the wildlife sequences are arresting, never more so than in the footage of a crocodile trying to munch on some daredevil storks. Unfortunately, the human drama is much more problematic, and often blatantly idiotic. As with all colonial adventures, the white man has to be seen to be in charge, leading to such absurdities as Anthony Steel pointing to a hippo and helpfully observing to his African companion that they need to be alert to danger; said hippo is so ridiculously fake that it makes Bruce the shark, from Jaws, look a model of special effects genius. It's not clear whether the film has any self-awareness of these absurdities; at another moment Steel insists, despite arguments from African sailors, on leading a boat across a reef. Disaster inevitably ensues but no one observes anything along the lines of "I told you so," however justified such a sentiment might be, nor does the fiasco appear to shake Steel's very English confidence for a moment. It's not all bad, of course: Edric Connor gives a very dignified performance as Ushingo, the chief of an African tribe under threat, while there's so much unsubtitled Swahili that the film could well be used with some success in a language class, as long as you knew the Swahili word for "patronising as all hell" for the subsequent discussion. And, I suspect entirely inadvertently, the film provides a rather excoriating view of the contempt in which whites held most of their colonial subjects in a scene with an untrustworthy lawyer, an unpleasant but incisive man.

Note: This is another entry in the Watching Movies In Africa project. Despite its limited intrinsic interest, West of Zanzibar managed to cause quite a stir in several colonial locations, including Kenya, where Harry Watt did much of the location shooting. Watt filmed parts of his earlier adventure Where No Vultures Fly in Kenya, apparently without incident. For the sequel, the Kenyan administration debated for some time whether or not to grant him a filming permit, eventually giving Watt permission to tour the territory in 1952 with his crew. When the film was scheduled for release two years later there was chaos, however. The Governor was to attend a gala premiere of the film in Nairobi but the censors were dealing with objections from the country's Arab community. In the end the premiere was cancelled and the film banned, although it was eventually shown -- after more debate -- on Zanzibar. While the film was banned in at least some other "settler colonies," like Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), it was shown with some fanfare in Nigeria because of the presence of the Nigerian-born actor Orlando Martins in one of the major African roles.

Many thanks to DC for tracking down and passing along a copy of the film.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend

2006, US, directed by Ivan Reitman

The central conceit of the film -- a superhero who you really don't want to break up with unless you're interested in much more than a bruised ego -- might make for an amusing short film, but stretched out to feature length it's dreadfully over-extended stuff. I'm not the brightest at anticipating plot developments and even I was sitting there waiting for the inevitable twists to kick in, while wondering what prompted Uma Thurman to accept such a needlessly unpleasant part; even by the standards of Hollywood romances, the character sets gender stereotypes back several steps.

The Three Musketeers

2011, Germany/France/UK/USA, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

I read Dumas's original novel twenty years ago in college and while the years may not necessarily have been kind to my memory, I had no recollection of the zeppelin-like air war that features in the climax of this version. I imagine that any re-telling of a much-filmed tale has to find something in the way of novelty, but changing the core intrigue so completely and tacking on CGI silliness to compensate for often bland actors, didn't work for me even when trapped on a plane with no other entertainment to hand. It really is a pity because there are very occasional hints of a more interesting film: Anderson makes good use of the sumptuous interior spaces of the palaces where much of the film takes place, and the swordplay sequences are for the most part brisk and clear.

West of Zanzibar

1928, US, directed by Tod Browning

Remade a few years later, with sound, as Kongo, it's hard not to draw comparisons between Tod Browning's version and the later film, so closely do they hew to the same template. There are a few substantial differences -- the remake cuts out the extended stage-magic prologue that no doubt fascinated Browning, always a fan of unusual theatre folk, and also adds in a significant character -- but for the most part the narrative is almost jarringly similar, entire scenes playing out with near-identical results. The sound version is, if anything, rather more thoroughgoing in its seediness, layering further outrages on the manifold moral excesses already onscreen in 1928.

Ultimately, though, the films come down to something of a comparison between the differing acting styles of Lon Chaney, in one of his final screen appearances, and Walter Huston. There's no doubting the physical commitment of either actor, although Chaney is particularly arresting as he drops, animal-like, down the rope that leads to his sleeping area. He allows his withered legs to drop before him, before slinging the useless limbs one by one into a wheelchair: it's a fascinating bit of physical acting, which Browning repeats a number of times with variations. Chaney achieves an entirely different, subtler effect in the key scene where he realizes just how mis-guided his vengeance has been; the transition on his face from feral outrage to heartbroken sorrow is extraordinarily multi-layered, and no speeches from Huston in the later version can hold a candle to the intensity of the moment.

Note: This is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. The film was shown in some locations in East Africa in the late 1920s/early 1930s, although white audiences objected to the film on the grounds that it suggested that whites were less than moral paragons, and also implied that white civilized values could not overcome African superstitions.

Topaze

1933, France, directed by Louis J. Gasnier

The first of a great many versions of Marcel Pagnol's 1928 play, which also appeared in an American incarnation the very same year, Louis Gasnier's film also marks actor Louis Jouvet's first screen appearance. Jouvet was already a major theatre star who had been in the running for the original stage production of Topaze, and not surprisingly, given both the origins of the material and the star, the film has a certain theatrical feel. That's especially true of Jouvet's character, who accumulates numerous tics, whether it's the pigeon-toed walk or the constant business with his hands. I couldn't help thinking of David Bordwell's recent piece on the use of hand gestures by actors, but as impressive as some of the detailed work is here Jouvet's constant hand movement eventually becomes rather distracting; it probably didn't help that the sound of the film was so poor that I had a hard time making out some of the lines.

Gasnier had a rather fascinating film career, starting off in 1905 with Max Linder's first cinematic appearance -- he directed dozens of early Linder shorts -- before heading off to the US, eventually ending up directing oddball exploitation features in the mid-1930s, the most notorious of which was the ostensible cautionary tale of marijuana use Reefer Madness. There are occasionally interesting flourishes here, even if Gasnier mostly lets the lines and his lead actor draw the attention -- there's a very amusing transition involving a literal horses's ass, and a curious shot in which Jouvet's face shares the screen with Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, though it's not clear if the director is suggesting any parallel between M. Topaze and the Dutch girl.

Charade

1963, US, directed by Stanley Donen

Notwithstanding the startling opening, in which a body is flung from a train, and the presence of James Coburn as a particularly nasty customer, the terrifying question at the heart of Charade is really whether Cary Grant could possibly be a Baddie. Donen takes the germ of an idea bequeathed him by Hitchcock and adds several extra layers of audience-confusing intrigue to keep us in is-he-or-isn't-he suspense until the very last moment, with the entire edifice depending on our sense of Grant's terrific screen charm. Despite the occasional moments of menace, there's an essential playfulness to the entire film, foregrounded in the verbal jousting between Grant and the equally appealing, if rather younger, Audrey Hepburn.

Although set in Paris, the film is blessedly free of the usual tourist fantasia -- shots of the Eiffel Tower out every window -- and indeed many of the most memorable moments are on studio sets. The sequence where Hepburn arrives back to her marital home, early on, to find it stripped bare of every possession is both dramatically powerful and visually striking, with Hepburn becoming increasingly frantic as she runs from room to room. The scenes in Hepburn's hotel are equally clever: Donen makes much play with the ways in which the characters move from one room to another within the establishment (it occasionally reminded me of the precise mapping of space in another Hepburn film, Breakfast at Tiffany's).

The Boy Kumasenu

1952, Gold Coast, directed by Sean Graham

The Boy Kumasenu was the first feature-length project produced by the Gold Coast Film Unit, led by Sean Graham. In comparison with other colonial film units -- the Bantu Educational Kinematograph Experiment (BEKE) or the Central African Film Unit (CAFU), for instance -- Graham's outfit was pretty broad-minded, rejecting the idea that Africans needed a special film language, that is, a film language that the colonial masters thought would be simple enough for "primitive Africans" to understand. Where other film units, over time, adopted an extremely static, slow style, Graham's film is full of traveling shots, quick cuts, atmospheric night-time scenes, and the occasional interesting angle; it's much more technically sophisticated and, by the standards of these things, entertaining than other colonial films. There's also a clever finale shot with two kinds of boats used to make a metaphorical point about change.

All that said, Graham's liberalism -- he strongly advocated locally interesting stories and local involvement in front of and behind the camera, complaining about the contributions of visitors like Montgomery Tully and Louis MacNeice -- had its limits: while there is synchronized sound in much of the film, the overriding voice is that of the British narrator (Russell Napier, though the actor was Australian-born). The narrator not only speaks about the African characters we see but in several scenes he actually speaks for them, as though he's saying their lines.

Note: This is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. The Boy Kumasenu was released in the Gold Coast in July 1952 and there was considerable interest in the film, at least in the local press, which highlighted numerous screenings and printed several reaction pieces. The film is available online at Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire; that site is an extremely valuable source for films about the Empire.

13 Assassins

2010, Japan, directed by Takashi Miike

Before I headed off to the screening, my colleague commented, "there are a lot of... assassinations," as indeed you might expect with so many men at work here. At the time it didn't seem like an especially insightful observation but I understood afterwards her loss for suitable words. The entire second half of the film is an extended, extraordinarily energetic action sequence, a virtual barrage of swordplay, blood, and destruction -- the people responsible for making those swishing sword sounds were very, very busy on this project.

I'm not familiar with Takashi Miike's earlier work, except by reputation, but on the strength of this outing I'm kind of glad that he elected to remake The Thirteen Assassins (the original dates from 1963 and I've only been able to find a trailer) rather than The 47 Ronin. The problem with the climactic battle royale is that notwithstanding an hour of measured setup, most of the assassins are barely distinguishable from one another: the crazed, hilarious mountain man who becomes the final addition to the happy few is the most diverting of the good guys, while the villain of the piece is the film's most memorable character. He's a truly evil man, prone to using peasants for target practice, and so twisted that he revels in the film's bloody finale even though the purpose of the attack is to kill him and all who surround him.

Beginners

2011, US, directed by Mike Mills

There's a lot of talk about the canine performance in The Artist this year, and while Uggie seems like a thoroughly charming fellow I wonder if he's being singled out for most acting as opposed to best acting, a little like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. I was rather taken with Cosmo's admittedly smaller turn in Beginners: he underplays to considerable effect, and it's the kind of work that would be forgotten if they handed out dog Oscars, which they probably should. It doesn't help his cause that he's subtitled.

I'm not sure I quite get some of the objections to Beginners as a depiction of warm-hearted late-in-life coming out (though that's really only a fraction of the film): the movie never pretends to universalize the experience it depicts, nor is it seen through entirely rose-tinted glasses. A man internalizes his sexuality for most of his life and then gets a few good years before cancer takes him? It's not quite a fairy tale affair (pun not intended), and I liked that Mills gave Plummer's character a brittle, temperamental side rather than romanticizing him as either a father figure or gay man.

Something of Value

US, 1957, directed by Richard Brooks

There are numerous similarities between Something of Value and Simba, with both films delving into black-white relations in Kenya during the Mau Mau period. Unlike Dirk Bogarde in the earlier film, Rock Hudson did actually spend some time in Kenya so the film has a greater sense of authenticity in many of the outdoor scenes, and doesn't have to make quite the same use of back projection and long-shot trickery.

Although the tone is still very paternalistic, with the white characters attempting to "solve" the problems of Africa -- many of which they created -- the film also has a touch more subtlety in its exploration of race relations even if the conclusion is remarkably similar, down to the suggestion that only future generations will be able to live peacefully. The American film is certainly much blunter on the fact that Mau Mau was much more likely to result in Kikuyu deaths than European deaths, though, even if those European deaths get far more screen time; one sequence is especially terrifying as a bloodthirsty mob methodically destroys everything in a settler farmhouse, closing in gradually on their human prey.

Brooks's film reminded me at times of Ken Loach's films Land and Freedom and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, using devices such as a settler meeting to outline many of the issues for the audience's benefit, with the poles of opinion clearly demarcated. Loach used a courtroom to similar effect in the latter film, and indeed the device of two brothers on separate sides of an issue re-appears in the Loach film, too (near-brothers in the case of Hudson and Sidney Poitier; the two men grew up together).

Note: This is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project, although like Simba this film was banned by the Kenyan censorship board even though large portions of the film were shot in Kenya, including scenes of actual Kikuyu internment camps. Records in the national archives in Ghana suggest that the film was initially passed for release in that country, but that it was subsequently withdrawn and examined a second time, in the middle of 1960, resulting in a ban -- and a hefty loss for the company that had imported the film, since they couldn't get a refund on a film they had been able to screen at least once.

Tenue de soirée

1986, France, directed by Bertrand Blier

I don't think there's a wilder, funnier twenty minutes in the entire Blier oeuvre than the opening of Tenue de soirée, and while the film can't sustain that extraordinary momentum it has a fine time trying. Gérard Depardieu hurricanes into the lives of small-time losers Michel Blanc and Miou-Miou, spinning them into a world of criminality and romance, though the target of Depardieu's affections is the mousy Blanc rather than his girlfriend. Blier makes hay with the physical differences between the two actors, Depardieu looming barrel-chested over the scrawny Blanc, who is cast very much to type at this phase of his career, ever the pathetic loser (with Patrice Leconte, perhaps surprisingly, the director to find something darker in that persona a couple of years later).

The Depardieu-Blanc couple is the logical extension of much of Blier's previous work going back as far as Les Valseuses, which dances around the idea of a gay couple "liberated" from the need for a woman, although this being Blier there's no time to pause for domestic bliss -- conflict is hard-wired in almost all of his characters, no matter how magnetic their attraction.

The Woman from Monte Carlo

1932, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

It's nice to see Warren William back in the caddish saddle after his relatively benign turn in Three on a Match, although he's by no means the naughtiest fellow in this shipboard melodrama; that honour goes to John Wray, playing a nasty martinet (is there any other kind?).  Though it's pretty brisk, and there's the occasional shot of interest, especially in the gangways between one part of the ship and another, this is pretty thin gruel for Curtiz, even with some fine players. I hadn't realized that Walter Huston appeared in the film -- though he appeared in just about everything else that was released in 1932 -- but the second he opens his mouth that voice is unmistakable. Lil Dagover was almost as busy that year, but this stands as her one and only Hollywood foray in a very long European career. The script seems to suggest Dagover is a flighty young thing hamstrung by a marriage to a much older man, but since the actress was herself 45 and Huston was only a few years her senior there's a fundamental casting flaw that the film can't overcome with heaped spoonfuls of drama.

Notre Histoire

1984, France, directed by Bertrand Blier

Not for the first time in his filmography, Bertrand Blier finds his ideas running ahead of his ability to execute them onscreen, and Notre Histoire runs almost entirely out of steam about halfway through -- after, admittedly, a wondrous sequence in which the men of an Alpine town assemble in the middle of the night for a collective reminiscence. While the staging of that central section yet again underlines Blier's unerring ability to navigate space, as well as his fascination with filming parts of the action from behind windows, the sequence is so overextended that it's awfully easy to drift away.

Still, the final twenty minutes, kicked off with a hilarious scene in a florist's in which Blier seems to acknowledge his own love of stage and artifice, renew the interest; near the finale, too, there's an amusing shot in which a slowly approaching Mercedes advances to the sounds of what might be a lost fragment of the Jaws score. Notwithstanding Nathalie Baye's luminous presence, this is very much Alain Delon's film, another in his gallery of difficult, unlovable men -- the actor looks dreadful much of the time, jowly and unshaven -- and there's also much pleasure in seeing a collection of French actors at the outset of their respective careers, everyone from Jean-Pierre Darroussin to Vincent Lindon to Jean Reno.

Simba

1955, UK, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst

Amazingly, the British administration in Kenya seemed to be quite happy to allow overseas film crews to traipse through the colony throughout the 1950s "Emergency", so-named after the imposition of a state of emergency in 1952 in response to the Mau Mau insurgency. Stranger still, officials in Nairobi granted filming permits to three films which had Mau Mau, and race relations more generally, as their primary subject matter, only to turn around and ban the films when they were then submitted for censorship in Kenya a couple of years later. Indeed, they ended up banning most films shot on Kenyan soil during the decade, whether or not the subject matter had anything to do with Mau Mau -- and banned dozens of other American, British and Indian films to boot.

Fake Donald Sinden, Dirk Bogarde, Orlando Martins in real Kenya

Dirk Bogarde plays a young colonial who inherits a Kenyan farm after his elder brother is brutally slaughtered by Mau Mau. Unexpectedly thrust into the role of white farmer, Bogarde's character wavers between a distaste for Africans, some of whom killed his brother, and the liberal white condescension of his inamorata, Virginia McKenna. Of course, Rank wasn't about to let its hottest property jet off to Kenya in the middle of a violent insurgency -- leaving aside the safety concerns, they had to keep him hard at work churning out several films a year at Pinewood. Instead, director Brian Desmond Hurst took a small crew to Kenya in early 1954 to shoot location footage, employing an ersatz Bogarde in long shot and then making heavy use of back projection to create the illusion that the star was sweating under the hot sun rather than the studio lights. I'm not sure what the audience made of this in 1955 -- when they showed up at all, since the film wasn't a big hit -- but it looks awfully unconvincing today, especially given that the stand-ins are clearly different heights than the original articles.

The real Sinden/Bogarde/Martins, with back-projection Kenya

Although it tries for a more liberal slant on matters colonial, the film's account of the origins and functioning of Mau Mau is typical imperial propaganda: atavistic tribalism, with little or no acknowledgement of the impact of a huge wave of postwar white settlement and expansion on the Kikuyu in particular. Indeed, for many Kikuyu, Mau Mau had more of the characteristics of a civil conflict than an imperial revolt, with land resources a major bone of contention. In other respects, though, the film is entirely accurate: the Kenyan administration assigned an officer to work with Hurst and his crew and they seem to have had access to all kinds of prison camps and military posts so the film provides a compelling glimpse into the actual logistics of late imperial control in Kenya. Indeed, Hurst and crew may have taken the quest for authenticity rather too far. They got in some major hot water when they returned from their Kenyan jaunt after newspaper reports revealed that several of the Africans featured in a Mau Mau initiation scene were prisoners at the time, and three of the men had apparently been hanged days after their scenes were filmed.

The film has a similar sacrificial attitude to its major African characters -- when not actively malevolent, they remain in the service of white interests, sacrificing themselves for the good of their white masters. Even the film's most complex and sympathetic African character draws the short straw, although in its own way this outcome underlines the fact that the Mau Mau conflict was far more likely to result in African rather than European deaths; 32 settlers died, sometimes in terrible circumstances, but that figure is dwarfed by the thousands of African deaths. Nonetheless, the film dramatizes half a dozen European deaths, tipping the scales very much in favour of interest in the settler population.

Note: This is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project, although in this specific case it should probably be re-titled "Not Watching Movies in Africa" given that Simba was banned by the Kenyan censorship board in 1955. I haven't been able to find any evidence that it played elsewhere in Africa, although given the presence of Nigeria's Orlando Martins in a small role, I wouldn't be surprised if it was released there. Numerous films banned in Kenya were released in Nigeria, and other West African locations, without apparent incident.

La Femme de mon pote

1983, France, directed by Bertrand Blier


The central problem of the film -- a woman disrupting the friendship between two men -- is such concentrated eau de Blier that it's something of a disappointment to find that the film itself feels rather flat. It's inhabited only rarely by the flashes of humanity that make his characters resonate, and lacks much of the visual and narrative surprise of his other work. It's as if Blier is so focused on getting right down to the elemental level of his obsessions that he's somehow forgotten to craft a film around it.

Where most of his films set out to de-stabilise the viewer, either through outrageous setup or play with the cinematic form -- direct conversation with the camera, interplay between real and unreal, bizarre juxtaposition -- La Femme de mon pote is almost conventional by his standards; the most outrageous element is Isabelle Huppert's character, though it's hardly a shock to encounter a female portrait that's less than complimentary in Blier's films. Still, even by that standard she's a piece of work: untrustworthy, careless with others' emotions, self-centered, and ultimately ridiculous. Huppert gives the role her all, but the character is denied virtually everything in the way of actual human emotion. By contrast, Coluche, in a rare fairly serious role that nonetheless makes use of his standard comic persona, is pretty good: his character actually has the occasional nuance, and Blier constructs several fine visual jokes around his rumpled character/actor.

Days of Heaven

1978, US, directed by Terrence Malick

Surely one of the most visually beguiling films ever made, with the stunning Alberta (playing north Texas) landscapes complemented -- even surpassed -- by Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and Sam Shepard in their respective primes. It's hard to know whether Nestor Almendros's camera (or is that Haskell Wexler's camera?) is more in love with the setting or the players, observing fields of wheat swaying gently in the breeze or the detail of a hair falling across Adams's face with equal intensity. And Richard Gere just looks so young - twenty-seven when filming began, though he seems even more youthful, despite his character's tough years.

"Story" is not Malick's overriding interest; the action is in many ways rather slight, with the director far more focused on atmosphere, chronicling first the oppressive heat and noise of an iron production plant before opening up the wide vistas of the agricultural heartland, with its own entirely different, though perhaps equally implacable, set of rhythms, driven by weather and ripening crops. Malick captures the sudden bursts of energy inherent in the agricultural cycle with acute care, the landscape suddenly crawling with humans driving everything else before them, before the season ends and the crowds hitch rides to the next crop and the next paycheck. He's equally skilled, though, at delineating the quiet interactions between his characters, the charged moments that join the adults together.

The unfolding story is observed by young Linda (Linda Manz), whose laconic voiceover provides its own counter-narrative; this odd young woman's inner voice often seems disconnected from the events unfolding before her. The film derives most of its humour from her eccentric commentary, though by the end there's great pathos to be found in the disconnect between Linda's version of the world and what we see onscreen.

I hadn't seen Days of Heaven since an arresting small-screen viewing years ago, so the screening of a beautiful print at the Brattle theatre felt almost like I was seeing the film for the first time. However, somewhere along the line my mind had confused the ethereal Saint-Saëns music used in this film with a more percussive Carl Orff piece employed in Malick's previous Badlands. As Days of Heaven was unspooling I kept getting distracted by the thought that Malick was going to have a hell of a time managing the shift in tone to accommodate the Orff music until the penny finally dropped.