Intouchables

2011, France, directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano

I found the basic plotline -- exuberant black man from the banlieue gives wealthy, quadriplegic wealthy white man new reason to live, often by mugging within an inch of his life -- rather discomfiting, and the fact that the tale is ostensibly based in fact doesn't really function as a saving grace, not least because the model for the black character was Algerian, and considerably more rough-edged than his screen incarnation. The film tries to garner some credit from filming in the banlieue itself, though its attempts to add a layer of grit flounder when the crowded public housing projects are used as just another source of comedy.

Trading Places covered a surprising amount of the same ground with a good deal more perceptiveness nearly thirty years ago; Omar Sy is as magnetic here, though, as Eddie Murphy was in his prime, and I hope that Sy gets some better outlets for his charm in his subsequent projects (there are, admittedly, several genuinely funny sequences, particularly when the film emphasizes Sy's lack of sentimentality rather than his background, and François Cluzet makes for a fine foil). No matter how good they may be, Sy's future films are unlikely to be near as successful, of course -- this is now France's second-most successful homegrown hit of all time, on the heels of yet another odd-couple comedy, as reliable a genre as they come in terms of the French box office. 

Barbara

2012, Germany, directed by Christian Petzold

Christian Petzold's previous few films were all set very firmly in modern Germany -- indeed several of them might be read as an indictment of that modernity, at least in terms of what Petzold takes to be the superficial nature of many contemporary interactions and obsessions. Barbara, by contrast, is set in a small town in Eastern Germany in 1980, though it's unmistakably a Petzold film -- an intense character study, extraordinarily observant of small details of both psychology and setting, with much of the communication elided.

As with films like Wolfsburg, the setting of the film is strangely depopulated -- Petzold's towns seem to be barely inhabited, enhancing the claustrophobic sense that one is always likely to run into someone one knows, though not necessarily for the better. It's an idea given a new resonance in Barbara, where the nature of small-town life brings the titular character, an exiled-from-Berlin doctor played by Petzold favourite Nina Hoss, into contact with the local Stasi man as both object of study and potential provider of healthcare. There's no romanticizing of such interactions, however, as in, say, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck's swift decamping for Hollywood comes as no surprise; it's much harder to imagine Petzold making such a transition).

Petzold's characters are frequently rather poor communicators, or at least they don't say a whole lot on occasion, and yet Petzold's own style is crisp and clear -- a shot of that Stasi man in the building where a family member lies ill tells us all we need to know, while the film's final shot similarly manages to compress a great deal of unsaid business between the two main characters, capping this particular onscreen narrative while opening the way to a new, untold story. Petzold also stitches his story together with what seems to be the world beyond his film, having a character recount the story of an actual book, or describing in great detail the story of a painting; the warmth of these sequences, among the more verbose in the film, suggest that the director is using them to share with us some particularly personal pleasures.

La Charrette fantôme

1939, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

I've been gradually watching my way through as much of Louis Jouvet's filmography as I can, although I've been coming to the conclusion that using Jouvet as the unifying feature isn't the most productive way to view many of his films. A great many of the actor's appearances, at least in the 1930s, are rather brief supporting roles, barely more than cameos in some cases, so using him as a starting point can end up being a fast track to disappointment as he disappears so quickly from the screen. That's true, yet again, in Duvivier's remake of Victor Sjöström's 1921 film: Jouvet steals scenes early on from actual star Pierre Fresnay, and leaves an indelible trail behind that Fresnay, whose character is a rather hard-to-like fellow, can't compete with; it's never a good sign when you're being one-upped by your offscreen co-stars, though in this case Fresnay also has to deal with Micheline Francey, who goes all-out in a role as a Salvation Army sister who's not averse to a touch of martyrdom.

The sequences featuring the eponymous phantom carriage are eerie -- the use of sound is especially good, evoking something like the macabre ticking of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart -- but I suspect that Duvivier lifted the double exposure imagery pretty directly from Sjöström, at least if the screen captures I've seen are representative; though memorable in patches, particularly in those sequences capturing the grinding poverty in which so many of the characters live, as if foreshadowing the privations of the war, the film ultimately doesn't feel like a project in which Duvivier (or Jouvet) is fully invested, unlike their previous collaboration on La Fin du jour.

Hôtel du Nord

1938, France, directed by Marcel Carné

I hadn't seen Hôtel du Nord for more than a decade and had completely forgotten the tale of youthful amour fou that initially sets the film's plot in motion -- a lapse of memory that I suspect affects many a viewer given that the young couple, played by Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont, is so straightforward in comparison to the parallel couple played by Louis Jouvet and Arletty.

Even though neither of the latter pair had yet cracked true stardom, the comparison between the actors seems entirely unfair in retrospect: no audience was very likely to identify with the melodramatic Annabella at the expense of Arletty, incarnating one of the true Parisian heroines, playing a ballsy street urchin of a kind also incarnated around the same time, on the music-hall stage, by Edith Piaf (both women had unapologetic professional personas that seemed, frequently, to mesh with their offscreen lives). Similarly, Jouvet takes such pleasure in the lines provided for him by Henri Jeanson that even a performer as solid as Aumont could only ever come off worse in the comparison; Jouvet's character is very much in the world-weary vein that he made something of a specialty as the decade wore on, but here he has the screen time and the script to flesh the character out in ways that are rather more satisfying than some of his earlier blink-and-miss-it appearances.

Though the film also gained fame -- even infamy -- for its extraordinarily elaborate sets, recreating the Canal Saint-Martin in extraordinary and entirely convincing detail on the studio backlot, the more straightforward interiors of the titular hotel also serve as backdrop to some of the most memorable sequences -- even an apparently simple scene in which Arletty takes her leave from the hotel, wrapping a fur around her neck, is meticulously constructed with actors placed strategically in depth away from the camera, while Carné finds a wonderful warmth in the various mealtimes, whether it's the convivial dinner enjoyed by the hotel residents or the bustle of a noonday meal for local workers, all of them competing for the attentions of Annabella, an unlikely if effective waitress.

Le Drame de Shanghaï

1938, France, directed by G.W. Pabst

Pabst's film is an oddball mixture of fairly straightforward 1930s exoticism featuring the Shanghai underworld and torn-from-the-headlines political intrigue related to the Sino-Japanese War of 1937. Where a later film like Casablanca kept the historical specifics pretty loose, one of the many reasons that film remains so fresh 70 years on, Le Drame de Shanghaï is rather dated for an audience not exposed to news from the front. Still, while the segments on Chinese nationalism are pretty stodgy fare, there are several memorably atmospheric sequences in and around the nightclub on which much of the action centers -- especially those sections featuring, all too briefly, Louis Jouvet in what is, by his standards, an unusually despicable role. He plays a gangland figure who appears to come back from the dead, and the scene where he reappears, tilting a lamp toward his interlocutor, is the kind of detail that might have caught the eye of a Jean-Pierre Melville; there's also a genuinely creepy scene in which Jouvet and other criminal bigwigs preside over the death of an unfortunate coolie, brought to the club merely to demonstrate the effectiveness of an assassination method the men are considering.

Sunrise

1927, US, directed by F.W. Murnau

I'm always a little lost for words when dealing with the true masterpieces, mostly because it often seems as though everything's already been said -- even when writing mostly for myself, I have the strange sense that my thoughts are more than likely just repetitions or reworkings of things I've read along the way.

Murnau's film carries the sub-title "A Song of Two Humans," and that's as good a description of the film's effect as anything else -- despite the difference of medium, there's a direct, intense lyricism that reminds me of the best popular music, which functions as a kind of emotional essence in three of four minutes. Though the running time is rather longer here, as with the subsequent City Girl, Sunrise has the simplicity of mythology: a man yields to the temptation of another woman, a visitor from the city, before rediscovering his love for his wife. It might be a country song -- and there's no dismissive sarcasm in the comparison.

The point, of course, is what Murnau does with this bare skeleton: while preserving that straightforward narrative, the director finds complexity in the emotional shadings of the central couple as they stumble toward some form of reconciliation, a reconciliation embarked on in the most unpromising of circumstances. The director's effect is achieved particularly through the mastery of shifts in tone, from the leading man's darkest hours -- as he struggles with murderous thoughts -- through to the extraordinary explosion of joy both at the moment he realizes the depths of his love for his wife, and in the film's final granting of a kind of redemption just when things seem once again to be lost. There's a intentional universality to the setting, too: filmed in the US, the scenery transitions from what looks like a gloomy European village through bucolic landscapes to the razzmatazz of the vibrant 1920s city, as if to underline that this particular story could play out against any backdrop; the tram that marks the passage from country to city is almost like the tornado of The Wizard of Oz, whirling its passengers to a new and different world.

Entrée des artistes

1938, France, directed by Marc Allégret

As in so many of his films, particularly from the 1930s, Louis Jouvet is offscreen for much of the running time of Entrée des artistes, and his absence for long stretches here only heightens the sense that much of the remainder of Marc Allégret's film is rather routine. The narrative mostly focuses on the petty, even vicious, love squabbles between a group of theatre students overseen by M. Jouvet, who is presumably playing a role not a million miles from his offscreen professional life at the head of a theatre company. The moments when he seems to be most fully inhabiting that real-life role are wonderfully rich, as he gives gentle direction to his charges and takes an interest in their home lives; there's nothing of the Svengali about this particular man of the theatre, though the students clearly regard him as possessing great power.

The sequence where Jouvet visits the laundry where one aspirant spends her days is an absolute treasure, with his character tamping down a distaste for the surroundings only to find it erupting again in the face of blatant philistinism he encounters when attempting to persuade the girl's relatives of the value of her new career choice. As he departs, he mutters "quel atmosphère," a word made immortal a few months later by Arletty in Hôtel du Nord -- and in Jouvet's presence. The two films share a writer (Henri Jeanson, author of many an immortal word) and I wonder if Jeanson liked the sound of the word so much he reused it soon afterwards, as the two films were made in quick succession. Jouvet gets most of the best lines here, but his supporting cast is also filled with treasures -- Bernard Blier in a very, very early role though he's already portly and bald, Julien Carette, the poacher from La Règle du jeu, Roger Blin, a very sinister heavy in L'Alibi, Marcel Dalio... It's all testament to the extraordinary richness of the French cinema in the era, with even the bit parts seemingly played by actors of some consequence.

Mona Lisa

1986, UK, directed by Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan's films often have a tendency toward the fairy tale, and I had a bad feeling about the direction Mona Lisa seemed likely to take when Bob Hoskins' small-time gangster started falling for the high-end hooker (Cathy Tyson) he's employed to drive around. It's a relief, then, when Jordan goes down less obvious paths, concocting something that's a vaguely London variation on Paul Schrader's Hardcore, with Hoskins, who has just emerged from prison, descending into the tragically cheap underbelly of the London sex trade.

This is territory on which many a filmmaker has foundered, caught between ogling the seamy goings-on and finger wagging: Jordan uses the Hoskins character as an oddball surrogate, with Hoskins generally more repelled than engaged by what his pre-prison colleagues do to make money, while there's barely a hint of glamour in the sex trade here. Hoskins's glimmers of conscience set the stage for a redemption that manages to be simultaneously a touch too neat -- shades of the fairy tale again -- and surprisingly convincing. Hoskins finds ways to make an initially unsympathetic character far more nuanced, with the character's growing awareness of how others see him both tragic and oddly triumphal, while Michael Caine does a fine job with the part of Hoskins' terrifically seedy boss, desperately trying to swim in more exalted waters but undone by his baser instincts.

The Sign of Four

1932, UK, directed by Graham Cutts

The transition from Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock for the 2010s to Arthur Wontner's 1930s edition is a little disconcerting -- and certainly not kind to Wontner, who comes across as older than his already middle-aged years, and entirely unlikely as a purveyor of fisticuffs (perhaps that's why Graham Cutts speeds up the action sequences, since otherwise Wontner might have looked rather lethargic while swinging his fists). Wontner appeared in five Holmes vehicles between 1931 and 1937, one of which is entirely lost; while Wontner isn't my cup of tea as Holmes, it's amazing to me that the remaining films all available only in dreadful public-domain copies, and that no-one has attempted to market cleaned-up versions to the presumably large Holmes fanbase. For the most part, this is pretty routine stuff, with a very pallid Watson in the form of Ian Hunter, though Cutts makes nice use of sound to enhance the suspense, and there are a few agreeably lurid supporting roles -- Graham Soutten, as the villainous Jonathan Small, looks as though he might have seen Lon Chaney's performance in West of Zanzibar, though Soutten's onscreen disability -- a missing leg -- was entirely genuine.

Hitch and Lye

This is a contribution to the (third annual) For the Love of Film Blogathon, co-hosted by the Self-Styled Siren, Ferdy on Films, and, for the first time this year, This Island Rod. Please read the posts, participate as a poster or commenter, and, most important of all, donate!

The cause this year is an especially fine one: the blogathon aims to raise the funds needed to put recently rediscovered reels from the 1924 film The White Shadow, a hitherto-lost component of Alfred Hitchock's early career, online for all to see Free of Charge.

The aftermath in Secret Agent

Though the discovery of several reels of The White Shadow in a New Zealand shed is understandably being celebrated as Hitchcock's most notable antipodean connection -- unless we count the backlot Australia of his film Under Capricorn -- there is at least one other New Zealand association buried deep in the master's filmography. Sadly, though in the spirit of this particular blogathon, the snippet of screen history on which I'll focus is lost to film viewers; in the event that someone can rectify the loss, perhaps with dusty materials from a London attic on this occasion, the film preservation community will have another coup to fête...

Len Lye, in movie villain mode

Back in 1936, as Hitchcock was putting the finishing touches to his film Secret Agent, he employed the services of a New Zealander filmmaker/artist by the name of Len Lye, who had been in London for a decade after making his way across the Pacific and eventually northwards, his perambulations the partial inspiration for his film Tusalava, which got the British censors in something of a lather because they just knew that Lye was up to something funny with his weirdly biological imagery even if they couldn't figure out quite what was going on.

Lye was very much an artistic polymath, in the midst of one of his most productive periods as a filmmaker at the time he crossed paths with Hitchcock: in the mid-1930s he made several wonderful and wildly colourful films for John Grierson's GPO Film Unit as well as advertising shorts for clients ranging from Shell to Imperial Airways, with the occasional foray into the commercial cinema. Hitchcock somehow came across Lye on the London film scene and asked Lye to try his hand at some special effects for the climactic train-crash sequence of Secret Agent. Roger Horrocks' wonderful biography of Lye doesn't go into great detail on the encounter between the two men, and most of the very many Hitchcock volumes don't mention Lye at all, though perhaps Secret Agent star John Gielgud, of whom more below, had a hand in arranging the encounter; equally, that GPO Film Unit experience surely helped open doors at the time.

In any case, however the two men ended up meeting, Lye delivered as requested, and apparently his efforts made quite an impression. As the train disaster unspooled, Lye created a colour effect in this otherwise black-and-white film that gave all the appearance of the celluloid itself going up in flames, to further underline the point that the sequence marked a radical, emotionally wrenching break for the characters -- the shattering impossibility of going back to the world before the crash. However, it had occurred to precisely no-one that this apparently very realistic visual trick might cause alarm for the unfortunate projectionist, who initially assumed that there was a fire in his booth.

The incident came to the attention of the higher ups at Gaumont British, who were concerned that audiences, well aware of the flammable properties of film at the time, would similarly panic when they saw Lye's trickery -- with potentially grave consequences (not an empty fear: as an example, I came across reports of a stampede at a New York cinema in 1913 caused when a film caught fire, with two women killed in the ensuing panic). Hitchcock was apparently quick to agree with the higher-ups request that the sequence should be cut, not least because he seems to have thought the idea was a bit pretentious to start with, although he makes use of a similar idea in Spellbound a decade later, with a couple of tinted red frames at a key moment. Hitch's  producing partner Ivor Montagu wanted to make a stand on artistic grounds -- or just because he wasn't willing to comply with the bean counters -- but once the master had made clear he wasn't too worked up about the cut, the sequence was inevitably if unfortunately discarded. Apart from that one test projection, the Lye-enhanced version of the train crash never seems to have been seen by an audience, not even the press corps, and so the Hitchock-Lye connection sadly remains in the realm of the curious anecdote.

Lye's signature from Free Radicals

Much of Lye's other film work has survived, and indeed the 1979 version of his film Free Radicals, reworked in several iterations after Lye relocated to the United States, was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2008. However, there are still key gaps, perhaps most notably his 1935 short film Full Fathom Five, which featured a pre-Secret Agent John Gielgud as narrator. Gielgud read three passages from Shakespeare over images from Lye's first "direct" film, where he manipulated the film stock itself to achieve his effects, a departure from the more conventional animation techniques he had previously employed. Full Fathom Five film is virtually lost, and other of Lye's works exist only in fragmented or partial form, while still other portions of his filmography are in need of preservation -- future projects all!

I can't help but spare a thought for poor old Graham Cutts, too, as film-lovers across the globe shunt him stage-left off his own project in favour of the youthful, yet-to-be-rotund Mr. Hitchcock (it's nice to see Cutts get a little bit of his due from David Cairns in this very blogathon). As much as I bow to the reality that the preservation of The White Shadow is a priority in large measure because of its illustrious connections, I'd argue that it's ultimately worthy of preservation in and of itself, even if it is of more limited interest as "a film by Graham Cutts" -- as an illustration of what was being made, and watched, in 1924.

Cutts has some history with the experience of being written out of his own films: The Sign of Four, his 1932 Sherlock Holmes adventure, is noted chiefly for the credits of a variety of behind-the-scenes American contributors who went on to greater things, though the film is a solid adventure with the occasional dash of genuine flair, and Cutts makes nice use of sound to generate suspense (in other words, it's pretty typical early sound fare, a little creaky to be sure, and the available prints are in parlous condition).

The Sea View Hotel, Accra, long past its days of glory

Similarly, when Cutts' 1935 Oh Daddy! is remembered -- which is rarely -- it's largely as a film to which Michael Powell made some early contributions rather than for Cutts' own work. Oh Daddy! is intriguing on at least another level, though -- it showed up a couple of years later in a colonial movie theatre in Accra, advertised with some fanfare at the Sea View Cinema as an attraction in December 1937, presumably one of many locations the world over where the by-all-accounts rather modest film was eventually seen. That's the kind of out-of-the-way, end-of-the-line place that films like The White Shadow eventually found a home so perhaps there's an overheated room somewhere in the Ghanaian capital yet to yield a treasure for a future blogathon -- or even just a copy of Oh Daddy!

Click on Hitch to donate!

The Karate Kid

1984, US, directed by John G. Avildsen

My wife took it upon herself to rectify this gap in my cinematic education -- and since my family didn't get a VCR until well in the 1990s, she has her work cut out to catch me up on some of the hits of the 1980s in particular. Nearly 30 years on, there's not a whole lot of point in taking on a cultural phenomenon -- I finally know where some of those lines come from! -- but not much interest on my part either: despite much silliness, and a ridiculously cheesy ending, I thoroughly enjoyed the screening. It's hard to imagine the people behind the Karate Kid equivalents of 2012 adopting such a relaxed approach to the central narrative, or providing so few actual fight sequences -- high school romance is at least as important here, and there are a couple of sweet sequences between Ralph Macchio and Elizabeth Shue before we finally get to the main event. Admittedly, I'm not about to test this theory by watching a slew of recent films directed at the teen audience.

Although the film is hardly an ad for subtle analysis of Asian-American history, it's still somewhat notable that the villain of the piece is the Vietnam-vet soldier with the kill-kill-kill attitude, in contrast to the quietly heroic Japanese-American, played by Pat Morita, who does what he can to deliver his various aphorisms with as much good sense as possible. If you ever wanted to teach a class on how Hollywood films ignore boring old reality, this wouldn't be a bad place to start -- no-one ever bothers to explain the almost complete disappearance of Ralph Macchio's mother from the film for a good hour, nor how Macchio is apparently released from school obligations to train all day at his personal dojo (the film takes place over the course of the fall semester).

La Marseillaise

1938, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Renoir's film begins in the same spirit as Ken Loach's much later pair of historical features, Land and Freedom or The Wind that Shakes the Barley, as an attempt to dramatize some sense of the actual lived experience of a major historical event, in this case the French Revolution. The intention is ostensibly democratic, bringing us both to Louis XVI's bedside in Versailles and the lower levels of revolt in the south of France, though there's never a moment of doubt as to where the film's sympathies lie (and perhaps there's a little cheating in the decision to halt proceedings well before the Revolution's bloody excesses begin, when sympathies become much more complex).

As the film progresses, and particularly after our introduction to the titular song (then an unknown air that was to grow in popularity), the film becomes much more didactic, with rather obvious conversations about the meaning of France's new sense of citizenship that are clearly more in the spirit of 1938, in the shadow of fascism, rather than explorations of the meaning and reality of 1789 and beyond. Of course, the notion of participatory citizenship is key to the French social ideal, so the debates between the newly-anointed citizens function in two different time periods, but they are occasionally rather heavy-handed, a matter not helped by the fact that the two main actors are not the weightiest of performers.

Andrex, most often seen at the side of his pal Fernandel, isn't able to do much with some of the stodgier lines, while Edmond Ardisson, making his debut here, occasionally seems to be acting in an entirely different movie, perhaps a broad comedy -- his goofy expressions appear to have been shipped in from a Revolution-era spoof, while his fey manner, perhaps unremarkable in 1938, tends to undermine his romantic exploits (see the first image!). Many of the supporting players are rather stronger, including Renoir's older brother Pierre as Louis XVI (particularly in a terrific moment, late on, when the king suddenly understands how his world is about to change), or Louis Jouvet in a small role as the government representative Roederer, tasked with persuading the king to appear before the parliament.

Il Sorpasso

1962, Italy, directed by Dino Risi

Through the luck of the draw, I've come across a handful of films with stings in the tail of late, but nothing tops the finale here -- an utterly jarring conclusion to a generally breezy film, filled with throwaway Italian pop music of the era. The film opens on a note that recalls Nanni Moretti's wonderful 1994 Caro diario, in which Moretti drives the empty Roman streets during the height of the summer, before the film develops into a picaresque account of the open road, replete with enjoyable minor characters and a constant onward momentum -- the next town, the next adventure, the next corner -- that's fundamental to the character played by Vittorio Gassman. He's a man whose apparently joyful view of life gradually reveals itself to be a cover for his fundamental inability to follow through on anything serious or worthwhile; there's fear rather than delight at the heart of the character. That said, the film's way of resolving this problem is, to say the least, a slap in the face; if the analogy is to Italy of the post-war era, the film takes a dim view indeed of the state of the country circa 1962. Gassman is terrific -- finding the tenderness in a character who might otherwise just have been boorish, while Jean-Louis Trintignant is an enjoyable foil, gradually, if very tentatively, loosening his self-imposed restrictions in the company of a man incapable of taking no for an answer.

Scarlet Street

1945, US, directed by Fritz Lang

The other entry in Fritz Lang's diptych of films with Edward G. Robinson/Joan Bennett/Dan Duryea, Scarlet Street flips everything in The Woman in the Window on its head: where the first film is all in the mind, with the consequences purely on the level of the salutary warning, here we see the full, frightening splendour of the whims of fate at work, with devastating consequences. Both films kick off with apparently minor decisions that quickly spiral beyond the protagonists' control -- and Robinson takes everyone down with him on his brutal descent.

Loren K's take on Edward G. Robinson*

It's a re-working of the novel and play originally brought to the screen by Jean Renoir as La Chienne, a film with which it shares one central weakness, namely that the wife at the center of both films is such an unbearable shrew for her entire onscreen time that it's difficult to believe that not one but two (very different) men could have agreed to marry her. I felt myself dreading each scene in which she features -- Rosalind Ivan plays the thankless role here -- simply because the character is so completely without nuance; while Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea are hardly the most subtle of bad guys, their characters at least have some character arc, nicely adapting to the lucrative situation that so unexpectedly presents itself to them as the film evolves. Though ultimately utterly bleak, it's as morbidly compelling a film as its predecessor -- if likely to make the viewer rather queasy as you watch the irredeemable fall of a fellow creature.

* The second image is lifted from Loren's blog Woodcuttingfool, where he documents his carving projects; I'm a big fan of woodcut prints generally, and black-and-white stars seem a natural subject for the medium. His recent portrait of Lauren Bacall is one of my favourites.

City Girl

1930, US, directed by F.W. Murnau

On the narrative level, Murnau's film is pared down to almost mythic levels -- boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy struggles to win father's acceptance of marriage. That's hardly the point, though -- Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, directed inspired by City Girl, similarly transcends the simplest of narratives to strive for emotional resonance, again among the hypnotic wheat fields of the heartland. The early sections of the film take place in the big city, where a young man has been sent to sell his family's crop. Murnau's unpicking of the city experience is as acute as Chaplin in Modern Times -- he re-casts a city restaurant as a a virtula factory, each widget, or diner, quickly slotting in to replace the last, every minute frantically assigned a purpose by the streams of workers. It's an overwhelming experience for a man used to rhythms dictated by the seasons and the elements rather than by the daily clock, and the joyful return to the land as the film advances is surely not just the joy of a young man in love but equally an embrace of another way of living. His run through the wheat fields, new wife in tow, is the high point of the film, an apotheosis of filmmaking romance as the camera is in exhilarating motion with the pair.

Senna

2010, UK, directed by Asif Kapadia

It's more than a little strange to watch a film that's essentially focused on the inevitability of someone dying -- not as a plot point or as the natural end to any biography of a deceased person but as an actual event that takes place in front of our eyes. The fact that I'd seen this same event in real time in 1994, a collision so fast and jarring that you immediately knew nothing good could possibly come of it, even before the screen filled with emergency vehicles and the race at Imola was (temporarily) halted, didn't blunt its effect here, not least because the film creates such an intense impression of Ayrton Senna as a vibrantly alive young man, albeit a young man who seems constantly to be questioning his own goals and reflecting on his (extraordinarily comfortable) life. I'd forgotten just how eloquent and interesting Senna could be -- though as the film makes clear, Formula 1 is not short on figures capable of compelling commentary -- and certainly had no recollection of his expressions of religious faith, which seem at odds with the technological and commercial image of his chosen sport.

Perhaps as a result of the degree of cooperation from Senna's family, Senna doesn't probe too deeply into controversial subjects -- Alain Prost comes across as the relative villain of the piece, at least on the track, but even in a sport with a degree of inherent recklessness it's at least possible that Senna's motivations and behaviour in some of his duels with the French driver crossed the line into heedlessly dangerous territory. It's hard, for instance, to imagine either driver suggesting that they trusted and respected each other in such confrontations -- unlike the memorable encounter between Gilles Villeneuve and René Arnoux at the French grand prix in 1979, when their cars repeatedly touched as they vied for second place.

The Lincoln Lawyer

2011, US, directed by Brad Furman

I enjoyed Michael Connelly's source novel, even if it's not quite Connelly at the peak of his form, and Brad Furman's adaptation is pretty faithful, perhaps even too faithful given the plot-cramming required by the running time. That does a particular disservice to the crucial backstory that becomes central to the evolving plot, and which has considerably more space evolve on the page. Matthew McConaughey is well cast in the central role -- there's a certain charm-offensive continuity with his early lead role in A Time to Kill, though his lawyer character here is light on the liberal guilt and heavy on the self-interest -- but it's the support that really shines, even if many of the players have barely a scene or two in which to shine. I'm not quite sure what Furman was offering to convince fine actors like Marisa Tomei and Michael Peña to accept minor parts, but they make the most of their limited screen time; I'd rather have Tomei as a luminous supporting player than not at all.

L'Alibi

1937, France, directed by Pierre Chenal

Pierre Chenal is one of those directors I'd earmarked for further consideration, but while L'Alibi has the occasional visual idea of note it's memorable largely for the performances of Erich von Stroheim and Louis Jouvet -- and jumps up several notches in their scenes together. Von Stroheim plays a stage medium with something of a gangland backstory, and the film opens with him dispatching an enemy from his American days; that sequence, shot in back-projected fashion as two cars race across Paris, is quite arresting, both in visual terms and because we're not generally accustomed to films that eliminate the whodunit aspect so early on.

Josée Cathala suggests, in her book on Louis Jouvet, that the film's tension then comes from wondering when one of the main characters will crack, though for me the real frisson lies in the actorly confrontation between Jouvet and von Stroheim, a deliciously careful waltz between two experts in both their on- and offscreen incarnations. The more I see of Jouvet's filmography the more I'm convinced that he only rarely had vehicles worthy of his extraordinary talent -- though his busy theatrical schedule and his own rather dismissive view of the cinema, especially in the 1930s, didn't help -- but he's quite wonderful here as a Javert-like policeman, tenaciously on the trail of his man. The sequence in which he and von Stroheim speak partly in English is perhaps the highlight, though the language surely wasn't much of a stretch for Jouvet, who spent nearly two years in New York on a theatrical tour years earlier.

Bridesmaids

2011, US, directed by Paul Feig

Anyone to whom it came as a surprise that women might both concoct and enjoy a raunchy comedy with bodily functions front and center clearly hasn't spent a whole lot of time in the company of actual human women, though Hollywood apparently falls into the "who'da thunk it?" category. While Bridesmaids hardly re-invents the romantic comedy -- it likes to have its cake and eat it by mocking wedding excess while nonetheless cataloguing in all its expensive glory, in ways that have served Hollywood well for sixty years -- it takes the genre in welcome new directions, exploring its characters' faults and insecurities in ways that occasionally veer into noticeably less comic territory. Indeed, at times I couldn't help feeling that there was some The Break-Up-style bait-and-switch at work -- the wild antics of the trailer replaced by a close-to-the-bone examination of the main character's less than admirable behaviour.

The hand of producer Judd Apatow is never far away: director Paul Feig has Apatow's generous instincts with his performers, granting everyone a scene or two in which to shine, though he also has the same Apatovian tendency to allowing some of those scenes to go on rather longer than necessary. Feig/Apatow introduce the American audience to several overseas TV treasures in the process, whether it's the bizarre sibling duo played by Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson (despite the actors audibly hailing from opposite ends of the English-speaking world) or the local cop played by Chris O'Dowd, though the script does at least throw in a line to explain the regular eruptions of broad Roscommon accent. Somehow, though, all of the support complements rather than distracts from Kristen Wiig, who makes a fine leading lady more than willing to catalogue her character's flaws without begging for the audience's sympathy (she's sensible enough to realize we're probably all on Melissa McCarthy's side anyway; McCarthy seizes her own role with extraordinary and unapologetic relish, ultimately finding a genuine and deserved truth in her character).

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.