Nouvelle vague

1990, France/Switzerland, directed by Jean-Luc Godard

I'm not at all familiar with post-1970 Godard, but Nouvelle vague was featured on the first issue of Les Cahiers du cinéma I ever purchased, when I was sixteen, and the images from that issue have remained with me since -- I wouldn't quite say that I'd constructed my own mental version of the film, but I certainly formed a clear sense of what I thought it would be like, and it was nothing like this.

I'd forgotten almost completely how beautiful, even painterly, Godard's films can be -- images composed with exquisite care, but also finding much of their beauty in movement, such as in the wonderful shot, near the end, of a couple emerging from the woods and wandering across a lawn, the camera fluidly tracking their progress over fifteen or twenty seconds. In the opening segment, though, the soundscape is often even more striking, with clinking glasses, a car, or even a snippet of music often used to distinctly unsettling effect.

As expected, there's the usual abundance of references -- within cinema alone contributing everything from Pagnol to echoes of Alain Delon's own filmography (Plein soleil, most obviously, and perhaps Notre histoire among others), but also music and books, whether they appear within the shot or are quoted in voiceover. At one point, Delon -- who has perfected, over several decades, the trick of looking utterly exhausted -- fixes the camera and asks, in response to (yet) another apparent non sequitur, "What's he talking about?" It's hard not to assume that Godard is winking in our direction, aware of his own obtuse and pretentious reputation and able, just a little, to bring himself down to size.

Le Caporal épinglé

1962, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Though it shares affinities with Renoir's own earlier La Grande illusion -- the survival of fellow-feeling in the midst of war, most obviously -- this late entry in the director's filmography feels more in the spirit of other popular hits of the period dealing with the wartime experience, most obviously Henri Verneuil's 1959 La Vache et le prisonnier, one of Fernandel's major successes, and even Gérard Oury's subsequent blockbuster La Grande vadrouille, with Louis de Funès and Bourvil. All three films move, with varying success, between comic and serious registers, as seems to befit the shared wartime setting, though Renoir, as one might expect, manages the transitions pretty seamlessly, particularly in a suspenseful section where prisoners listen for news of an escape. The terrific group of then-largely-unknown actors like Claude Rich, Claude Brasseur and Jean-Pierre Cassel combine to create a wonderful series of portraits of Frenchmen from across the spectrum thrown together by the circumstances of war. The comic Guy Bedos is also amusing in a small role, the opposite of his logorrheic stand-up persona, while Jean Carmet provides a little more experience in one of the most broadly comic roles, a farmer obsessed by the care of his cows, perhaps an explicit nod to Fernandel's character mentioned above.

Looper

2012, US, directed by Rian Johnson

Perhaps it's the influence of parenthood, but as the credits rolled the first thing that popped into my head was to wonder whether director Rian Johnson has a child with a propensity to apocalyptic tantrums; to say more might rather spoil things, though.

I watched Johnson's film as I was in the middle of Stephen King's weighty 11/22/63, a book that ran out of steam for me long before the actual end, though it did provide some nice counterpoint to the ways in which Looper handles the mechanics of time travel. Johnson is more interested than King in teasing out some of the very specific consequences of the phenomenon, many of which he addresses in Joseph Gordon-Levitt's narration, though that voice-over also gives us a critical window into the character's thinking since he's otherwise a fairly laconic presence. Where King is concerned to re-create and explain a very specific part of the world from 1958-1963, Johnson leaves many of his details intriguingly unexplained -- the paraphernalia extending from the fuel tanks of cars, for instance -- while nonetheless giving us a precise sense of the dystopian turn of the earth (or at least Kansas) circa 2044.

Johnson is a terrifically confident filmmaker, whether it's in his visual approach -- the camera that travels with Gordon-Levitt in the early going as his character becomes embroiled in a hellish routine of killings, nightclubs and drugs -- or his shifting of tone from the caffeinated initial phase to the more bucolic central section, having the faith in his own storytelling skills to tamp down the rhythm and send the narrative in a more reflective direction. He's also quite clearly having an awful lot of fun with the genre aspects of his film, and particularly with the casting; Bruce Willis's character comes across as a kind of distillation of Willis characters past, all action and few words, to the point that I wondered for a while if Johnson would grant the man any lines at all, while Jeff Daniels looks like he's having an absolute blast as a Svengali-esque dean of criminal enterprise, attempting to lull his charges with his rolling cadences.

La Règle du jeu

1939, France, directed by Jean Renoir

I've little to add to the enormous amount written about Renoir's film, surely one of the most dissected in all of cinema, except to note, once again, the wonderfully loose feel -- it feels as spontaneous, despite its perfection, as the vaudeville-esque stage show that takes place during the second half of the film. What astonishes me time and again (though it has been too long since my last viewing) is the delicacy of touch, the way in which farce can share a stage with high drama, or melodrama, and violence, without the juxtapositions ever seeming awkward. As the film approaches its climax, one set of players cavorts through the sets in a manner reminiscent of the Keystone Cops, or perhaps the Keystone Gamekeepers, sharing space with others attempting to resolve romances that span the spectrum from fleeting to lifelong. It's hard to resists framing any reading of the film against the backdrop of 1939 -- as catastrophe looms, Renoir seems to suggest that many are oblivious, dancing and playing on as blithely as those aboard the Titanic as the iceberg loomed, except that while those on board ship had no way to predict what was ahead France's citizenry in 1939 had no such excuse.

I last saw the film on the big screen, and my abiding visual memory of that viewing was the depth of many of Renoir's compositions, characters strategically placed into the far distance, whereas this time, on the smaller screen, I was struck most by the two shots, particularly those involving the character of Octave, played by Renoir himself -- two faces almost completely fill the screen at times, abstracted from the overall setting. I'd never noticed before how Octave, spilling great torrents of verbiage, might be seen as a precursor to later, comic, characters in the French pantheon, particularly someone like Coluche: for all the latter performer's different social standing, there's a similarity in the ways which both Renoir and Coluche employ words as a kind of battering ram while also making canny use of their size for both comic and serious effect.

À bout portant

2010, France, directed by Fred Cavayé

After I watched Nuit blanche, Netflix thought I might fancy À bout portant too -- unsurprising given that they are both pretty relentless actioners, with kidnapping at the core of the action, though this film is rather more fanciful in some of its set-ups, and occasionally recalls some of the delirious construction of a late 1980s John Woo flick, where credibility takes a firm back seat to adrenaline. With the exception of the pregnant-woman-in-peril sequences, which add almost nothing except a vaguely TV vibe, the first hour is very strong, sketching out the consequences for an ordinary man (Gilles Lellouche) caught up in extraordinary crime as well as the unlikely partnership he forges, reasonably credibly, with a criminal (Roschdy Zem) with whom he has crossed paths. Cavayé can't quite keep it all in the air as the movie advances, though -- there are a few too many racing-against-the-clock sequences, while it's sometimes very hard to tell when people are truly in danger given that we have no sense of their proximity to each other (Nuit blanche was much stronger on this score, with shots more carefully structured to show us the relationships between the characters as they progressed through the film's main setting). The end result, disappointingly, is all too neat, much closer to Hollywood on the Seine than the grittier opening might imply.

Kickstart the Brattle

The Brattle Theatre is a venerable Cambridge cinematic institution, operating as a movie theatre since 1953, though it has a much longer history as a house of entertainment, and one of the few places in the Boston area where you can reliably see older and genuinely non-mainstream cinema.

A few years ago, during a major funding crisis, I decided I had to finally put my money where my mouth was: if I wasn't going regularly, I could hardly lament when the venue shut down due to lack of funding. The Brattle weathered that challenging period, thankfully, and shortly afterwards Sarah inaugurated an annual tradition -- a Brattle membership for my birthday. It's one of those gifts that never gets old: there's a new selection of pictures every time, and my only problem, as each year draws to a close, is that I've not been able to get to more of their screenings! With Sarah's essential parenting support I've still been able to go regularly since Shay arrived in 2011; we do miss making the trip together due to the hassles and expenses of babysitting, but we hope those days will return before too long, and I hope that Shay, in turn, will enjoy something of the magic I've always found in outings to the movies.

The Brattle has now launched a Kickstarter campaign to upgrade its HVAC and projection systems, to take it well into the 21st century. I'd urge you to pledge whatever you can to the cause: this is a great venue, with imaginative and unusual programming and a real desire to stay affordable and open to all. One of the things I love about their bi-monthly schedules is the sense that it is catering to many different publics -- local filmmakers, documentary obsessives, black and white fans, and oddball genre fiends (the genres are oddball, though the fiends may be, too).

As a small tribute, I've compiled a top ten of memorable Brattle outings, including double- and triple-bills -- going back through my notes and realizing I've had the chance to see these treasures on the big screen is a treat in itself. Well, perhaps The Goonies isn't a treasure, but it was hard to beat seeing it with a nostalgic Friday-night audience.

A Day at the Races / A Night at the Opera
House
Meet Me in St Louis
The Goonies
Red Riding
The Harder They Come
Week End
City Girl / Sunrise
Sherlock Jr.
Wake in Fright

Oh, and a special mention for the night we watched the finale of Lost at the Brattle -- the staff went all out and decorated every single piece of the venue in Dharma Initiative symbols, and threw in a whole range of entertaining and imaginative games to pass the time during commercial breaks. It's that kind of quirky gathering that makes this a place I want to see survive for another generation to enjoy.

Update (February 25): The Brattle made it to their very ambitious goal today, with an amazing array of people contributing over $140,000!

Marianne de ma jeunesse

1955, France/Germany, directed by Julien Duvivier

A wonderfully strange film that evokes Cocteau's La Belle et la bête at times, particularly in the sequences in a reputedly haunted house, with mirrors and walls not what they seem, and frames within frames to trick the eye. The whole film indeed, feels like a series of frames within frames, all of them centering on memory and its tricks -- Vincent (Pierre Vaneck), the character with the lion's share of screen time experiences that in a literal sense, but the narrator, Manfred (Gil Vidal), constructs his own version of the story in nostalgic flashback that can't be dissociated from his admiration for his friend.

Indeed, when the film opens I assumed that it was going to take a different tack, more focused on that Manfred's hero worship/love for Vincent; there's an intense and immediate bond between the pair but the film is rarely interested in exploring that, except, perhaps, through Manfred's elegiac and admiring commentary. The instant attachments and passions of youth underpin everything in the film -- Vincent's exotic background immediately makes him the star of the oddball boarding school where he has been sent, while he's quick to become both the object and subject of romantic fixations.

As captivating as Duvivier's atmospherics can be -- he's blessed, of course, with some magnificent set design for his exteriors -- there are a few weak points: his two central male actors are clearly far older than the characters are intended to be, which undermines the credibility of their youthful obsessions, while there's an awkward blending of studio "exteriors" with actual location work, a mishmash that's particularly odd since the location shooting is excellent, with Duvivier's camera alive to the energy of the story as it tracks characters racing through the forest or reveals the approaching dawn through an eerie mist. I'm curious to see the German version, shot simultaneously with different actors in several of the major roles.

House by the River

1950, US, directed by Fritz Lang

House by the River starts out in what seems like classic Lang/noir territory -- a man making one foolish decision that threatens to unravel his otherwise routine life, but we fairly quickly realize that there's something more sociopathic than fate-battered about this particular protagonist, and the film veers into territory that's altogether creepier than The Woman in the Window or even the far bleaker Scarlet Street. The setting is a bizarre southern-Victorian-suburban mishmash, and Lang apparently wished to render the film considerably more explosive by casting a black actress in a key role as a maid, but had to abandon the idea. Indeed, there's not a single black face anywhere in the film, in even the most thankless of roles, rendering the setting even more unsettlingly strange in cinematic terms. It's terrifically atmospheric stuff, though -- the night-time boat ride in search of a body is masterful, while Lang exploits angles and corridors within the main character's old, dark house to unsettling effect. He's adept at worming an idea into our heads, too: when his protagonist glances at a drain and imagines where the water is coming from -- the maid's bath -- we realize that we, too, have made the same connection, rendering us somehow complicit in the lascivious mental processes of this despicable man.

Nuit blanche

2011, France/Belgium/Luxembourg, directed by Frédéric Jardin

A nifty French crime thriller, set over the course of 24 hours, most of which we spent inside a cavernous night club where cops -- of the good and the bad varieties, though we're not always sure which is which -- and multiple robbers try to outwit one another as a major drug score/bust (depending on your perspective) comes to a head. There are a few rather obvious touches -- the bent cop who listens to classical music -- but for the most part this is a very inventive genre variation, turning the nightclub into a theatre of nightmares for the protagonists, where just getting from one place to another is a fraught experience, while the clubbers blithely enjoy the night. One of the cleverest, funniest sequences sees hero/antihero Tomer Sisley, a captivating presence, suddenly forced to join in the coordinated dancing in the middle of the dancefloor, in the hopes of eluding his pursuers.

Monty Python's Life of Brian

1979, UK, directed by Terry Jones

Though it was first released in 1979, this was the backdrop to my teenage years in the late 1980s, since the Irish censor saw fit to ban it, and it wasn't until almost a decade later that we could get our hands on the film with minimal hassle. Having watched and re-watched the movie on poor VHS over the years, it was a little startling to see it on the big screen -- a few of the sequences felt a little flatter, sketches that never quite soared, whereas others, from the unexpected intrusion of a spaceship to the in-truth-rather-gobsmacking final shots of a couple of dozen crucified unfortunates singing their way into the afterlife, really pop in the larger format. Indeed, I had't quite grasped how striking those final images could be on previous viewings, remembering the song but not the visual impact. For the rest, the constant absurdist invention is as endearing, and hilarious, as ever -- just a shame that the audience I saw it with wasn't bigger to really have lift off.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

2012, UK/US/UAE, directed by John Madden

Perhaps it was the presence of Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton, but The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel reminded me of an extended offsite episode of Downton Abbey, with its multiple storylines frantically piling up at times, though John Madden does allow his scenes to develop for more than a few minutes where the story requires it (those odd inserts of one storyline into the other in the television show, as if the producers have no faith whatsoever in our memories, always prove jarring). Still, Madden leaves himself with a lot to juggle here, and the film wouldn't have suffered greatly if, say, the subplot involving Celia Imrie had been quietly excised, perhaps giving a little more time to prepare the ground for Maggie Smith's late-breaking character arc. The cast, though, are uniformly charming, and Madden leavens the fairly straightforward narratives with occasional unexpected twists -- the heartfelt resolution of Tom Wilkinson's story, or the moment where Ronald Pickup delivers an entirely sincere response instead of the off-colour joke we might expect. The greatest pleasure, of course, is just watching this cast of seasoned thespians at work -- it's a little like a parade of Rolls Royces in procession, a sight to behold.

Ceddo

1977, Senegal, directed by Ousmane Sembène

Like Sembène's earlier Emitaï, this film is focused more on the collective than the individual -- while we become familiar with several specific faces, the director's primary interest is in exploring social forces more generally, and particularly the confrontation between Christianity, Islam and traditional African religion (at some unidentified point in, most likely, the late nineteenth century). The film is structured largely around several extended debates, set pieces of intense rhetorical interaction that foreshadow Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako.

At least on this occasion, Sembène is much stronger on discussion than on physical action, and I wonder whether the decision to allow those sequences to unspool at such length is something of a tacit admission as to where his strengths lie: it can be very hard to tell what is happening, or where the characters are in relation to one another, in the brief action scenes, but he is capable of extracting great tension from sequences in which only words are exchanged. There's an especially powerful moment late on when one leader asserts his authority by appointing a new person to speak publicly for him; while the previous speaker is clearly upset, he is silenced by the need for absolute obeisance, and moves meekly to his assigned place in the background. Sembène also denies some of his characters any speech -- the European merchant and priest never intervene in the debates, though the latter does intone some portions of the religious service in Latin, even if the camera frequently picks them out as they observe the exchanges between the African characters.

Ceddo is an often angry denunciation of outside influence, in this case religious-political influences, which reminded me of Sembène's tendency to reject outside filmmaking influences as he proposed an authentically African way of making films. It's one of the most problematic aspects of his filmmaking philosophy to me, for it seems to me to forgo the opportunity to insert African cinema in a larger global conversation -- it somehow condemns the continent's cinema to a hermetically sealed space. Whatever the director's views on cinematic influences, he makes clever use of his resources to avoid complex effects, using careful angles to deal with moments of violence without requiring much in the way of fakery, for instance, though there is a very brief and inexplicably sped-up sequence that recalls silent slapstick at a moment when humour surely wasn't intended.

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

1922/1968, Sweden/Denmark, directed by Benjamin Christensen

A true oddity, this one. Christensen's film purports to be a quasi-academic discourse on witchcraft from antiquity through the present, with the opening section quoting from a variety of manuscript sources and quickly sketching in the apparent ubiquity of the notion of witchcraft, before settling into some kind of ill-defined European middle ages location and unveiling its true purpose, a series of often lurid vignettes depicting the depraved reality of the phenomenon, complete with lascivious devils, torture chambers, and slavering inquisitioners, the better to point up the church's role in creating and sustaining that which it purported to condemn. Christensen shows himself to be a very nimble director, using all manner of effects, from a sort-of live-action tableau of hell to several extraordinarily atmospheric night-time sequences (the most chilling of all perhaps that where a woman mistakes the activities of two anatomists for something rather more sinister -- the scene has none of the wilder elements that are more amusing than alarming to a contemporary audience, and thus retains all of its power).

Ted

2012, US, directed by Seth MacFarlane

Every now and then, there's a clanger of a line that's just a little too gross to be funny, but for the most part this is consistently funny, if entirely silly. The set-up is sitcom-esque, perhaps inevitable with a director with a background in episodic TV, but the performers are more than game, although Mila Kunis is a touch too long-suffering for my taste, and the film employs an I-can-see-this-coming-a-mile-off deus ex machina to avoid having to play her storyline out as it might work in, you know, the real world. Though admittedly such considerations are hardly on point when you're talking about a film featuring a real-life, profanity-prone teddy bear.

Knight and Day

2010, US, directed by James Mangold

There's a moment, somewhere in the lengthy midsection of the film, where Cameron Diaz turns to Tom Cruise and implores him to stop shooting people, to stop the noise, the excess, the stupidity of it all. I half wondered if it was director James Mangold's cri de coeur -- he's directed several very solid genre pieces, especially Cop Land and Walk the Line, but he must surely have realized at some point that this jokey action flick was not in his wheelhouse. His apparent solution, to push everyone, including his two game stars, to dial things up to cartoon levels does nothing to salvage the situation. A genuine waste of talent, in front of and behind the camera.

How to Survive a Plague

2012, US, directed by David France

It's hardly unexpected that How to Survive a Plague provides a moving, often angry account of several central years in the efforts of AIDS activists, especially those of ACT UP, to transform official attitudes toward HIV/AIDS from 1987. Archival footage and talking heads interviews, the latter introduced gradually as the film evolves, take the viewer back to a time of increasing desperation for those afflicted by AIDS in the 1980s, particularly gay men (there are only occasional references to other affected groups, and to the international scope of the scourge). What's more surprising, though, is the genuinely fascinating insight into the workings of the movement, which self-documented to a striking degree: the film could function as a primer for any activist group, particularly those dealing with the difficult transition from initial, energetic participation to increasing professionalization. The tensions are never sugar-coated -- some of the most electric footage in the film is from around the time when the Treatment Action Group, or TAG, was striking out from Act Up, with angry denunciations and a sense of betrayal vivid on the faces of some speakers (the window into organizational dynamics reminded me of Patu!, the New Zealand documentary about anti-apartheid protests in that country).

Madame Brouette

2002, Senegal/France/Canada, directed by Moussa Sene Absa

While Moussa Sene Absa's films tend to occupy a good deal of the same socially-conscious territory as those of Ousmane Sembène,  his methods are rather different. Unlike Sembène, Absa is open about drawing on influences from more commercial cinema in the service of telling an engaging story that is nonetheless fully grounded in the social problems of Dakar life, and his camerawork and editing are brisk and incisive -- and often endowed with considerable humour, particularly here in the exploration of different kinds of dressing up, whether it's a man getting ready to impress a new girl or the same man selecting a dress to wear during a Senegalese carnival feast.

Absa's serious point comes through a little too insistently at times, as though the didactic urge breaks through the eye-catching surface -- there's the occasional rather obvious line, such as the titular character expressing the hope that her daughter "has a better life," a pretty mundane observation in the context of what we see onscreen and invested with more drama than it can bear. For the most part, though, Absa does a fine job of both treating his characters with respect and weaving around them a kind of magical realist texture, of bright colours and zesty personalities, in which a Greek chorus seems an entirely natural presence. There's a striking use of recorded music, too, particularly in a scene of cross-border smuggling that's fraught with both danger and absurdist commentary on the Senegalese state and its agents.

The White Shadow

1924, UK, directed by Graham Cutts [Assistant Director Alfred Hitchcock]

The streaming version of this film was made possible in part by the 2012 For the Love of Film Blogathon, and I'd urge you to watch the film at the National Film Preservation Foundation site, while it lasts -- streaming is an expensive business, and the site is unable to host the film on a permanent basis.

The White Shadow was originally a six-reel picture but only the first three reels survive -- or I suppose to be more accurate only the first three reels have been found thus far. The picture is in many ways a pretty standard melodrama from what we can judge, though based on surviving plot descriptions the potboiler aspects really kick into high gear in those lot reels.

I won't pretend to see too much of the nascent Hitchcock in what's available here -- my knowledge of his silent work is very limited, and there's a considerable gulf between the style of this film and 1930s sound films like The Man Who Knew Too Much (particularly when it comes to framing and camera movement); Hitchcock had learnt much in the intervening years, and the art itself had evolved. There's also another important presence, of course -- the actual credited director Graham Cutts, and while it's not hard to imagine Hitchcock's vision contributing to, say, the striking staging of the scenes in The Cat Who Laughs nightclub in Paris, or the effects that show Betty Compson in a dual role as very different sisters, Cutts was a competent and occasionally imaginative director himself, and shouldn't be entirely dismissed from the picture. Still, it's an intriguing glimpse into the great man's apprenticeship, and wonderful that such historical treasure still crop up from time to time in distant corners of the globe.

Das Leben ist eine Baustelle

1997, Germany, directed by Wolfgang Becker

I lived in Berlin for two years, from 1999 to 2001, and no film better captures the feel of the city as I experienced it, as a place where anything could happen, at any time -- there's a magical realist feel to certain scenes in the film that nonetheless seems entirely grounded in the city of the time. The first weekend I was there, some new acquaintances invited me to an art show in a former butcher's shop. For some reason, someone had filled shallow trenches on the floor with flour, and by the end of the evening everyone's clothes were white up to the knees: little clouds trailed behind us as we walked out into the chilly November night, and yet it was all entirely normal.

One major difference between the film and the city as I experienced it, though, and not a minor one: while I could never quite figure out how some of my friends stitched together a living, they still seemed pretty comfortable, whereas the characters here are visibly more hand to mouth, and much of the film centers around the jobs that they take and the schemes they concoct. For all that, though, there's a verve and a chance-taking about their lives, and a warmth in their fumbling efforts to create a new sense of family. That's not an uncommon cinematic theme, but it's handled convincingly here -- in halting, sometimes ham-fisted steps rather than in any simple progression, such that we learn of the characters' frailties along with them, as it were. In the end, though, it's hard to maintain any critical distance from the film -- the people and the streets feel like part of my own life in some odd way, and I'm overcome with a confused sense of nostalgia and heartache as I watch the characters work through their stories.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

2012, UK, directed by Lasse Hallström

I know the romantic comedy template calls for an eleventh-hour impediment to true happiness for one and all, but they really go overboard here with the destruction and resurrection, piling on not one but two major developments in quick succession when something rather simpler would surely have done the trick. Silly stuff, but the central performances are generally charming, and I fear the satiric portrayal of the UK civil service is rather closer to the truth than they'd like.