It happens all too frequently that even when they’re worth the trouble—and God knows there are plenty of different kinds of trouble—too many books appear on the shelves to announce themselves with the fanfare of their packaging, a fine illustration, or the sheer volume and heft of their multitudinous pages, often with some kind of pretentious adornment like deckled edges. It wants to scream to the potential reader: I am important and goddamn it I’m the worth price, or however long I’ll be gathering dust in your library. And I’d be willing to bet that we’re all convinced the price tag reflects this kind of pompous importance. So when it…
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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 us on the hard-wired evolutionary impulses and drives that determine our actions and in consequence our lives. This is behaviorism at its worst, its most specious, and the saving grace of the movie is the…
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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 has the consolation or the distraction that everything, as long as he’s still plummeting, is going just fine. As suggested by the movie, if it isn’t the plummeting itself, hate is the feeling of this…
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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 on his childhood as Léo Lauzon, the poetic protagonist who uses his imagination to flee from the squalor and madness of his blue-collar home in the Mile-End neighborhood of Montreal. Making known early in the…
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The image of a charming twosome, slack and romantically engaged, each leaning toward the other in one of those countless Parisian cafés to whose notability the cinema has made a profound and immemorial contribution: it is Frédéric with his potential lover Chloé, a holdover from his youth having returned to say hello, to reminisce, and maybe to get something out of this long-forgotten friendship with a wealthy and successful attorney. And so it is—they are man and woman. He is there to enjoy the tantalizing benefits of a mistress without the guilt of infidelity, and she to bask in his gentlemanly largesse without the burden of a sexual relationship. This…
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What could be more egocentric than wanting from the sensation of another person the full throttle of desire, passion, and every shade of transcendent experience? And what could be more ridiculous, more naïve, more dreamy-eyed, and more shamelessly hopeful? And what more human? Around this and its associated myths Pauline at the Beach revolves like a frozen planet, setting its face to this and that side of the question without becoming too committed to any one point. The steely core of this human madness of a planet is the titular character, Pauline, who takes part in the fateful—and fatal—adult game of love as an initiate of this dangerous word and…
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As a man of surrealist extraction working on it with another notable surrealist of the time, Luis Buñuel—who was to go on to complete his fantastic corpus starting with that one pristine surrealist sally, Un Chien Andalou—Jean Epstein directed and produced The Fall of the House of Usher with the result that, bringing alive the eerie gothic ambience of Poe’s short story, he committed to film a visual tour de force: a funhouse of style and atmosphere. The film is chilling, for its time visually ingenious, and a pleasure to look at, despite the want of other compelling cinematic elements and the graininess of the film (owing perhaps to the…
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Two men working in a business for violin restoration play squash together and dine together at a local bistro, but they otherwise keep to themselves—at least the voiceover, heard once in the beginning of the story, would have us believe that this is the case. Uttered by the laconic and emotionless Stéphane, this voiceover reveals more than anything else in the story the attitudes and the personality of this vaguely ascetic man. A master craftsman of all things violin, Stéphane works in the shop at the back of their workplace with the stolid patience of a visionary, someone so deeply immersed in his work that the outside world disintegrates as…
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How well do the members of a family really know one another? A Sunday in the Country seeks to dredge up from a distant, indistinct, but halcyon past the feelings and memories of one family convening for a day outside Paris toward the end of the summer of 1912, with the far-off rumble of thunder as the uncertainty of the First World War billows like a menace. It is a quiet film that is all the more intense for its quietness, carrying with it the heaviness of the past as it contrasts with the delightful but uncommunicative family dynamics that leave so much unspoken, and that have produced years of…
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“What does marble think when it’s being sculpted? It thinks, ‘I am struck, insulted, ruined, lost.’ Life is sculpting me. Let it finish its work.” The ancient myth of the spouses Orpheus and Eurydice has a time-honored and immemorial place in the arts, in literature, and during the twentieth century in the cinema, where Jean Cocteau put to use his pullulating and vibrantly artistic mind to make Orpheus, one of his greatest films. This is a dreamland that adheres to its own logic and makes for itself a playground of the mind, heavy with symbolism and mythological parallels. It is also a great entertainment. With his heavy-browed and smoldering good…
