The luminous and streaky light rippling in the waters of the Inland Sea has the subtle power of a desert mirage. Pellucid like those of an atoll or a sea-green lagoon, these waters fill up an internal space connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Sea of Japan, also making possible the shipping industry integral to an island nation that until the nineteenth century was closed to the world. It hid its secrets from its neighbors…
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I’m not sure that the wry and half-baked experimentation of Alain Resnais’ movie, Mon oncle d’Amérique, succeeds according to the lavish praise heaped on it by its receptive critics in 1980, the year of its release in France. It is an uneven movie that becomes more and more questionable as the story advances, its deadening thud timed to the smarmy interludes of its clean-cut figure of authority, the writer and neurobiologist Henri Laborit, who lectures…
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It can be interesting to think that the fortuity of your birth and the socio-economic circumstances foisted on you from the first are so decisive and for some so life-ending and catastrophic. Some people seem to strike gold out of the womb and enjoy the benefits of a lavish lifestyle, a wealthy family, and all the assets of the developed world; others find themselves in an immediate hailstorm of fire and brimstone, bullied and brutalized…
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A part of the creative artist that tends to be as inseparable from his work as from his personality and character, a certain egotism often comes with the territory. Immersed in the creative process and the material of her work, drawing from the murkiest depths of her mind as a creator, she finds herself face to face with a creative legacy teetering on the ledge of absolute oblivion but with the possibility of some kind…
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It is in the bubbling turmoil of the burned-out banlieues of Paris that the feelings of its characters and of their apparent oppressors become clear. But La Haine distills these feelings into a curt and undeniable one-word message, played out during something less than twenty-four hours on the streets: hate. This is the takeaway that the moral center of the film, Hubert, describes in a recurring joke in which a man plummeting to his death…
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About the smooth-flowing tracking shots inside what appears to be a seamy and enchanted grotto, with all the buttery and naked flesh that accumulates in this kind of establishment, not much need be said. Sumptuous and apparently sexy—it was first marketed as a titillating thriller—Exotica takes on the suggestive challenge of a strip club and all its associated stereotypes and layers its script and plot with one emotional revelation after another, changing what we’ve seen…
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It is said that great art often contains an element of contextual weirdness, a bit of the outré or taboo that contributes to a lasting impression that remains with us for years, even for a lifetime. If such an adage is true, then Léolo, a film directed by the meteoric filmmaker Jean-Claude Lauzon, endures in the cinematic annals as a masterwork of the very kind. The narration in voiceover is that of a man reflecting…
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Between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Midtown Manhattan, pullulating with hawkers and dealers and prospective patrons, the Diamond District is a prominent interchange of the global diamond industry and an economic mecca for those intending to buy diamonds, jewelry, or various trinkets containing the same. As a bastion of brick-and-mortar enterprise in an era dominated by both the internet and pristine commercial shopping centers, it is the streetwise economic sibling of New York counterparts such…
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For the fragmentary uncoiling of the memories that he had of his childhood, director Terence Davies found with his creation—his stirring British landmark—Distant Voices, Still Lives a form that brought them to vivid and vivifying life. This is cinema as a high-order process of recreating what had been destined to make no sense at all, a mishmash of half-remembered things and yesses and noes and fears and images that sink back into the darkness after…
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As if to indulge the glittering and fanciful dreams of the young, adolescent girls of the world—they’re out there, they’re hiding, they often can’t help themselves and really, I can’t see the harm in it—the long fluttering coattails of the gallant and half-savage Mr. Darcy make this man into a mythical creature. That long-drawn-out approach at dawn is so superb, so dreamlike, so perfect a romantic image that it brings the whole film to a…
