Just Watch.

Le Amiche

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1955

It occurred to me in the shower (I'd tell you it's where I get my best ideas, but I don't know if that's strictly true) that this film might be to movies what "Prison Girls" is to songs. I don't know if you're familiar with the Neko Case ditty, but it's more subversive than the "Telephone" video ever dreams of being because it deals with real passion and pain. At any rate, what made me draw the comparison is that in both cases the titles promise something flashy and lurid and tawdry but the actual text delivers something richer, more complex.

Download 11 Prison Girls

My next impulse is that Le Amiche can't be the "Prison Girls" of movies because I don't love it enough, and furthermore because I can't relate to it in the same way. The song has a powerfully lilting, dream yet driving riff, it's a drunk's riff and with it you can loll around in the beauty of the song. I thought I could loll around in the beauty of the melodramatic emotion, but instead I found myself anxiously involved in the characters' business, very preoccupied with what I thought each one should do and what should happen to each of them.

Of course any film with such strong, diverse women is something to celebrate (and let's face it, still something of a rarity.) Our main protagonist, Eleonora Rossi Drago's Clelia, defies all expectations of the harried, hardened career gal; she projects a womanly confidence along with a delicacy and surprising passion. Yvonne Furneaux's sophisticated, cynical Momina is more of a cliche but a helluva lotta fun. I normally take exception to wronged women in film -- talk about cliches! -- but Valentina Cortese's Nene was by far my favorite. I warmed to her face -- she looks a great deal like my mother when she was young -- and she draws a careful line between pain and elegance. The scene where she confronts her friend who's been sleeping with her fiance is marvelously subtle and yet full of that emotion that Antonioni sometimes surprises us with. I

Closely Watched Trains

Jiri Menzel, 1966

I don't know how you feel about movies (or books or whatever, for that matter) where young characters are on a quest to lose their virginity. I expect to older people they can seem either twee or banal, but for me that was a very extended, painful period of my life that in all honesty I'm probably not entirely over (and are we really ever?) so I tend to enjoy and also cringe. Although female characters don't get often to approach this time of their lives with the same sense of epic adventure; we still have a bit of a double standard about that.

Speaking of women, I feel that this is the kind of movie women -- at least some women -- aren't supposed to like, because it treats its female characters with a mixture of simplicity and fetishized reverence. But I can never work up the energy to tut with disapproval; especially here, where the joy the male characters take in women is so flattering and infectious. At times it's hard to imagine a face less made for cinema than poor little Václav Neckár's, but early in the film when he sees a pretty girl and he just lights up, his face and body are infused with the winning, transformative glow of elation and desire. It occurred to me how full of vitality that moment it is, and what a crime that we so often try to choke that vitality out of people we're in relationships with.

L'Eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962

I've been on something of an Antonioni kick recently, and what struck me about this, the final installment of his trilogy, is how much it deviated from the standard Antonioni formula. The alienation -- far and away the #1 Antonioni attribute, is undoubtedly present here, but so are moments of effusiveness and warmth. The scene between Vittoria and her mother at the stock exchange has such passion and tenderness, it was downright Italian, which is not an adjective I usually associate with Antonioni even though it obviously technically applies. And though it speaks to alienation in a certain way, the breakup scene is full of tender heartbreak, and the painful relatability of the poor schmuck refusing to accept that it's over, not realizing that sometimes there is no reason. Stranger still are the moments of laughing joy and romantic ardor, which, as so often in life, occur even when we don't have high hopes for the relationship.

Monica Vitti is, of course, a mainstay of the Antonioni universe. She's not quite as tender and vulnerable as she is in L'Avventura, nor as twitchy and weird as she is in Red Desert, although elements of both come into play here. Contradictions run rampant in Antonioni, and here she's an incredibly feeling woman who can't feel, and it is to Vitti's credit as an actress that she easily communicates all this in the extended close-ups Antonioni asks her to hold.

Vitti's got a face you could watch forever, but Alain Delon gives her a run for her money here. He does wonderful things with his face here that I didn't know him capable of after his staid, blank performances in Melville's films. Before I'd thought of him as a beautiful actor, yes, but never sexy. Here he moves through the stock exchange with such an alluring combination of elegance and vitality that you can't take your eyes off him. Even objectively "bad" things, like financial irresponsibility here and environmental damage in Red Desert are rarely painted in stark moralistic shades in Antonioni's universe, and Delon grants the stock market an undeniable seductive power. And then he's kind of an asshole, and because of that appealingly resilient, and then suddenly he's vulnerable.  Both he and Vitti are beautiful, but their beauties don't mesh together; hers is sensual, his refined. When they collide -- now passionately, now tentatively -- the result is thrilling, even though we know in Antonioni's world that it probably can't last.

Mon Oncle

Jacques Tati, 1958

This was, to be blunt, a disappointment.

I wish I could say this was because I came in with baggage, but I don't think it's true. A few months ago my editor said to me bluntly "I hate Tati." And while I certainly respect his opinion, I took it with a grain of salt, mainly because "hate" is a word I mistrust in the analysis of film, maybe just because I'm too cautious and intellectual, I don't know. At any rate, I've seen M. Hulot's Holiday and it has a great deal of charm. And I think I maintained something of a pro-Tati bias for the totally legit reason that this guy I had a crush on for a nanosecond in college was a Tati scholar.

So nil pour, nil contre, going in. Going out, I certainly don't hate Tati, I'm just severely underwhelmed by him.

I wondered, much to my surprise, if I didn't like Tati because his comedy wasn't broad enough. Yes, it was a little bit of that, but it's also a question of knowing to lead with your good stuff. Why does it take 37 minutes to get to Hulot's first truly funny sight gag?

Women Without Men

Shirin Neshat, 2009

Read it here.

Le Cercle Rouge

Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970

Even if he'd never gotten behind a camera, you'd have to love Melville for his cameo as the celebrated author in Breathless. It's such a delicious confection of pomposity. But thankfully he did get behind the camera, and gave us wonderful movies like this one.

My very first thought on seeing this film was that it seems cruel to give Alain Delon that bushy mustache and those big bags under his eyes. But then I realized it served a purpose: everything you need to know about five long years in prison you know from that mustache. Delon gives something different here than he did in Le samouraï, he's softer, more vulnerable, but only just. 

If you've seen Le samouraï (and, really, if you haven't, what are you waiting for?) you're ready to be fully immersed in the Melville milieu. (Bob le flambeur bears similarities, but the black and white ultimately renders it a different animal.) Steely, muted palette, lots of deadpan cool, and a sophisticated but sparse visual economy. He's also got a penchant for shiny nightclubs and drool-worthy interiors -- there's some striped wallpaper in this one that's absolutely to die for.

Lola Montes

Max Ophuls, 1955

About halfway through this review I came to a rather startling realization: I have made every single boyfriend I have ever had watch Lola Montes, the final film by Max Ophuls, restored in 2008 and just released on DVD by Criterion. And I immediately knew that this was not a simple case of wanting to share something you love with someone you love, no this was something borderline pathological.  In my alarmingly persistent, naïve belief that films can express things humans sometimes can’t, I was desperately trying to communicate something across that rocky chasm of gender difference: watch this, and you’ll understand.  Now given that Lola is the story of a dancer/courtesan whose exploits are turned into a circus act, one might deduce that I have a rather aggrandized opinion of myself, and that may still be true. Neverheless, I’ll maintain that, with Lola, Ophuls manages a highly successful marriage of the thematic and the visual, and in so doing makes a point about being a woman that no other film has made.

The whole circus milieu sets up the dialectic between authenticity and deception; and Ophuls make stylistic choices to heighten a sense of unreality. He uses supernatural colors to metaphorasize emotion, and treats them in arresting ways. In some places the colors are washed out, in others they are supersaturated. The result is a rather engaging sense of depth. If you'll excuse the rather unOphulsian conceit, the whole thing has the look of a video game space you can penetrate and move around in. It all adds up to one of the most uncanny cinematic experiences I've ever had.
            Color is just one of the aspects of the film deployed to further the look and theme of artificiality. Ophuls also adorned the trees with gold paint and inserted cardboard cutouts among the live extras in the circus tent.  (It is a testament to the quality of the restoration that I could finally see this flourish, much rhapsodized over by my professors, with my own eyes.)  This all ties in to Ophuls's commentary on the performativity and artificiality of femininity, made manifest on the narrative level. Few women will have to answer questions about their underwear and their measurements in front of a full house, or climb on an escalating series of balance beams while their love affairs are detailed, or take a swan dive while they are literally dying. But the emotions these scenarios incite speak to a universal feminine.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

Jan Kounen, 2009

I saw this at the Paris -- I'd never been there, what a great theater! -- where the crowd was divided fairly evenly between the French and the Russians. I actually had a pretty interesting conversation this week about the French influence on the Russians, and I wondered if that history could shed some light on the dynamics of the relationship portrayed in this film. Not sure I have an answer to that -- just something to ponder.

Part of the challenge this film faces is that we know what's coming. Adultery is as old as the hills and mostly banal; we expect the scenes of meaningful, increasingly charged glances, only somewhat accidental touches, the eventual capitulation, tenderness, getting caught, strife, rupture. Beyond that, we know what's going to happen at the Rite of Spring premiere. Some of the strident atonality and freshness of the music still thrills; there's something provocatively sexy about the driving beat at the beginning. But modern audiences are not equipped to understand the revolutionary power of this moment; this is Dylan going electric, this is Donita Sparks chucking her tampon into the crowd. It would be nice if it could be portrayed and filmed in a way that could telegraph that power and immediacy. I'm not exactly advocating a twirly buzzing Baz Luhrmann number (or maybe I am; I not-so-secretly kind of love that) but I don't know if slow stately camera movement is the way to go.

This is the kind of period film against which movies like Lancelot and Bluebeard define themselves: big production values, meticulous attention to detail. Fortunately Chanel's aesthetic remains modern if not contemporary, and the interiors of her country house are done with the same bold yet elegant chic that define her clothing designs. It all creates the "I want to go to there" feeling that comprises much of the pleasure of the well appointed period piece. On top of all that, I've fetishized the hell out of the 20s since early girlhood, but my pleasure in seeing it recreated always accompanies an anxiety-ridden moment of "Hey maybe if I had a body like a boy's and wore those clothes, I'd be awesome." In another context, this feeling is known as The Charlotte Gainsbourg Effect.

And in a dark brown voice she said...

..."Lola," Jack Demy dir., 1961

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you’re judging a movie on what it is rather than what you expected or hoped it would be.  I’d been staring at the DVD box with Anouk Aimée in her corset, imagining the confectionary delights held within. But I never rented it until last week. And when I read the back of the box and discovered it was something of an homage to Max Ophuls, a director I have grown to adore ever since I have taken a course on him in college, and that the protagonist was named after Marlene Dietrich's character in The Blue Angel, I was practically drooling.

 

I loved Anouk Aimée ever since I saw a picture of her in some movie magazine sometime in my teens. How could you not be bewitched by those almond-shaped eyes, the distinct, elegant nose, and that intriguing and surprisingly pleasing disparity between her upper and lower lip? (The rest of her isn’t too bad either: those long limbs, a figure slender yet curvy.  My first instinct was to compare her to a Modigliani, but now that I think of it she looks more like the women of Robert McGinnis, the artist who did pulp covers and film posters. She does a little song and dance number in the aforementioned corset and a top hat, but the real pleasure is just walking around, her stride fluid and something a little less obviously sexy than “slinky,” her carriage conveying a casual confidence.) Somewhere along the line I saw her in Pret a Porter and Festival in Cannes and was dazzled and admired her grace and ease.  But it was watching her in the two films she made with Fellini – La Dolce Vita and 8½ -- that really sealed the deal for me.  These two women -- though very different and each deeply sad in her own way – conducted themselves with a kind of assured gravitas.  They were women of stature, you knew they had things – important things – to say.

 

And here…well, let’s just say we’re seeing a paradigm of femininity that hasn’t exactly fallen out of fashion (I’m sure some men still like it), but that has become less acceptable to portray in mainstream media.  It’s that breathy, tittering-little-laugh sort of job…almost Marilynesque but more demure, less molten and dripping in sex-flavored honey.  So I have to admit my first urge was to paraphrase Greta Garbo and yell, “Give me back my Anouk!”

Lancelot du Lac

Robert Bresson, 1974

Yet another Bresson film with an uncanny ability to keep me riveted, in spite of being a wee bit dull. It's kind of like Godard's work where the characters speak theses rather than anything resembling naturalistic dialogue. I would say Bresson uses this technique less often, and on the whole less audaciously than Godard. (Think of the young man reading Mein Kampf in the bookstore in One Plus One Is One/Sympathy for the Devil.) It produces the good-for-you, not entirely unpleasant kind of boredom, like what David Foster Wallace was trying to write about in that book on the IRS. 

I knew that Bresson expressly wanted to strip the glamor from the Middle Ages and the Grail story, but when I was in middle school I along with all of my friends, read this book called The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It's basically a feminist retelling of the Arthurian legends with lots of juicy sex scenes thrown in for good measure. (Though I must add that, upon rereading later on in my sexual development, they seemed significantly less juicy. On top of that, I recently read Lady Chatterly's Lover and was not nearly as titillated as I had hoped I would be. Are there any really good sex scenes in literature?) But anyway, that book, for better or worse, has become the Arthurian Urtext for me, and I can't completely quell the expectation will provide the same degree of empowerment and excitement.