Unfinished Business: Anthology Film Archives, Saturday and Sunday, January 28-29, 2012

Anthology Film Archives seemingly just decided they wanted to show some Gregory La Cava films this weekend, and I applaud the impulse, especially as one of the movies is the 1941 Unfinished Business, one of Old Hollywood's most mature and nuanced achievements. (The other La Cava on display, She Married Her Boss, is also well worth seeing, with an extremely nice last half-hour.) You've missed the first screening, but the film turns up again tomorrow, January 28, at 8:30 pm, and on Sunday, January 29, at 6:30 pm. To get you in the mood, here's David Cairns' very nice piece at the MUBI Notebook; and here's a link to a little research I did some years back on the film's unknown but clearly exceptional screenwriter, Eugene Thackrey.

Assorted Screenings in NYC: October 2011

1. MoMA's ninth annual To Save and Project festival includes a few strong Italian films that could be better known. The pick of the October screenings is Elio Petri's startlingly good 1961 debut L'Assassino (Sunday, October 16 at 5:45 pm and Thursday, October 20 at 7:15 pm), starring Marcello Mastroianni as a shady operator whose life is shaken up by a police investigation. Petri's stock on the international film scene would peak almost a decade later with his excellent 1970 Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion; but the more classically constructed L'Assassino, with its impressive command of point of view, still seems to me Petri's greatest achievement. More modest in scale, Alberto Lattuada's 1954 La Spiaggia (Friday, October 28 at 4 pm and Monday, October 31 at 8:30 pm), built around the visual appeal of Martine Carol, the Riviera, and carefully composed Academy-ratio color photography, is a melancholy, atmospheric film that first tipped me off to the talents of this underrecognized director, who is probably best known as the co-director of Fellini's 1950 debut Variety Lights.

2. The Doomsday Film Festival & Symposium, held at 92YTribeca and dedicated to movies about the end of the world, has a strong lineup this year. Steve DeJarnatt's 1988 Miracle Mile (Friday, October 21 at 8 pm) has become a bit of a cult film since I caught it on its fleeting first run, but is rarely revived in theaters. If memory serves, the film takes a while to establish its tone, but never loses track of its casually affecting love story as it whips through the decline and fall of Los Angeles in 87 minutes. Screening the same evening (Friday, October 21 at 10:30 pm), Don McKellar's appealing 1999 Last Night has no problem at all scaling the apocalypse down to an opportunity for two total strangers to have a really good first and last kiss. Colossus: The Forbin Project (Saturday, October 22 at 6 pm) was made for TV but deemed worthy of a 1970 theatrical release, and was the first clear sign of director Joseph Sargent's talent for tense, fast-paced ensemble work. The film could have used a good computer science technical advisor, but Sargent and scriptwriter James Bridges keep the focus small and human despite the fascination of malevolent supercomputer Colossus. Wrapping up the catastrophic weekend is one of Larry Cohen's best films, 1977's crazy but compelling God Told Me To (aka Demon) (Sunday, October 23 at 7 pm).

Nikkatsu

This year’s sidebar program at the New York Film Festival is so exciting that it threatens to overshadow the main slate: a retrospective of the Japanese studio Nikkatsu, whose opportunistic shifts of focus always seemed to open doors for some of Japan’s most creative filmmakers. Compare film magazine Kinema Junpo’s 1999 and 2009 lists of all-time greatest Japanese films to the Lincoln Center series schedule, and count the overlaps.

You’ll have to move quickly to catch my strongest recommendation in the series, Sadao Yamanaka’s delightful 1935 Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo, which screens once more on Wednesday, October 5 at 8:45 pm. Yamanaka, who died before his 29th birthday, made only three films that survive today, but the evidence that he was one of the greatest of filmmakers is present in any five minutes of his work. A Pot Worth a Million Ryo is a class-crossing light comedy, not especially interesting on paper, that shows off Yamanaka’s comprehensive command of cinema: contained, somewhat distant compositions with unusual architectural elements that often narrow the frame horizontally or vertically; an irreverent use of psychology to modify familiar character types; confident timing that owes something to American comic rhythms; a gentle sense of the absurd and outrageous that is unobtrusively pitted against social quietude; and a throwaway flair for action direction.

Screening just before the Yamanaka, on Wednesday, October 5 at 6:20 pm, is Tomu Uchida’s impressive Earth, which I wrote about last year at the MUBI Notebook.

Most film buffs won’t need to be pointed to Shohei Imamura’s superb 1964 Intentions of Murder, playing Tuesday, October 11 at 8 pm and Friday, October 14 at 4:30 pm. But this film buff, at least, wasn’t hip to the considerable talents of Tatsumi Kumashiro until a few days ago. Best-known for his work in the “pink film,” the soft-core pornography that Nikkatsu churned out in the 70s, Kumashiro inhabits the genre so naturally that there is no conflict (well, almost none) between its commercial requirements and his semi-immersed, semi-detached artistic personality. His remarkable 1973 The World of Geisha, which screens once more on Friday, October 14 at 1 pm, shows the social and psychological repercussions of a single night of sex, which is extended through two-thirds of the film’s length with the aid of interpolated material and a superimposed layer of Brechtian play. Honestly erotic yet shot through with chilly pessimism, the film shows simultaneously the mundane destructiveness and the lingering gravitational pull of heterosexual coupling, with something of the tone of the Fassbinder of Pioneers in Ingolstadt or The Merchant of Four Seasons. Advance word is good on the other Kumashiro film in the Nikkatsu series, 1979’s The Woman With Red Hair, screening on Friday, October 14th at 9 pm and Sunday, October 16 at 6:20 pm.

Of the many films in the Nikkatsu series that I haven’t seen, I’m most excited by 1985’s Love Hotel, a pink film by the superb Shinji Sômai (Moving, Wait and See), whose fluency with scene-long tracking shots is well matched with his interest in quirky characters who preserve their mystery. Love Hotel screens only once, on Saturday, October 15 at 6:30 pm.

All films mentioned here, and all but one of the remaining films in the Nikkatsu series, will be projected in the 87-seat Howard Gilman Theater in Lincoln Center’s new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

Mint Julep: Theatre 80 St. Marks, June 8 through 10, 2011

One of my favorite American indies of recent years, Mint Julep, will have its long-delayed New York premiere at Theatre 80 St. Marks, screening from Wednesday, June 8 to Friday, June 10 at 7:30 pm each night. My review of the film, with a few comments on its unusual history, is up at MUBI.com.

La belle endormie (The Sleeping Beauty): IFC, March 6, 2011; Walter Reade, March 8, 2011

Catherine Breillat's fans probably don't need a nudge to see her films, and her detractors should ignore all recommendations. But: wow, her 2010 La belle endormie (The Sleeping Beauty) is a major work even by her high standards. Starting from the premise of Perrault's fairy tale, Breillat contrives that the titular princess shall fall victim to her sleeping curse at age six (Carla Besnaïnou, showing off Breillat's distinctive manner of directing young children) but awaken at age sixteen (Julia Artamonov), and that she shall enjoy an active dream life. Once the plot is sprung, Breillat plunges into dreamland, and the film takes on more resemblance to Chabrol's Alice ou la dernière fugue (1977) or even Resnais' Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) than to her more modest Perrault adaptation Barbe Bleue (2009). But not until the credits roll can we be completely sure that Breillat is after bigger game than fairy tales or even dreams... Her wide-ranging, tender interest in the contradictory twists of the human psyche is fully engaged by the unrestricted subject matter - and she has never made a film that demonstrates more clearly her great gift for operating on multiple levels of abstraction, a game that for her has always meant breaking the cage of narrative closure instead of seeing us safely to solid ground. Practically a trailer for our second viewing, La belle endormie screens twice more in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series: on Sunday, March 6 at 1 pm at the IFC Center, and on Tuesday, March 8 at 1:30 pm at the Walter Reade. And I believe it's been picked up by Strand for a spring 2011 theatrical release.

Bas-Fonds: Walter Reade, Saturday, February 19, 2011

I have no time to write about this at any length, but if you can muster some tolerance for in-your-face cinematic depictions of depravity and malevolence, you should really try to see Isild Le Besco's remarkable third feature (barely so, at 68 minutes) in the Film Comment Selects series at the Walter Reade. I personally didn't think I could bear keeping company with these characters for a whole film, but Le Besco's control of the experience is extraordinary: on one hand, she stylizes her people into absurdist archetypes, and on the other she carefully disengages the spectacle from drama and identification. The crazy dichotomy between the behavior shown and the religious tone introduced via voiceover commentary is gradually and inevitably resolved. Bas-Fonds screens once more, on Saturday, February 19 at 4 pm.

My Girlfriend's Wedding and Pictures from Life's Other Side: Union Docs, January 15, 2011

Sorry about the short notice, but tomorrow, January 15, I'll be participating in a discussion of Jim McBride's films at Union Docs in Williamsburg after a 7:30 pm screening of McBride's documentaries My Girlfriend's Wedding (1969) and Pictures from Life's Other Side (1971). Jed Rapfogel of Anthology Film Archives will lead the discussion.

Audrey the Trainwreck: reRun Theater, through July 29, 2010

Wow, here's an interesting twist on the (admittedly loosely defined) mumblecore concept: lightly guided, improvisatory performances, encased in an almost transparent but carefully engineered formal structure. Frank V. Ross, whose four earlier features I haven't seen, tells a story that is dramatically charged but fragmented by elisions: a young man with a dead-end job (Anthony Baker), in some kind of intense relationship with his male roommate (Danny Rhodes), arranges meetings with a series of women, one of whom (Alexi Wasser) gradually emerges as a potential partner. Story connections are not underlined: it's possible that a second viewing would unearth more clues to the workings of this mysterious triangle. What is underlined is a system of stylistic coups that create emotional harmonics outside the story. Ross's formal ideas are almost direct address to the audience, asking us to reformulate our feelings or to assume a commentative position on events. Example: the protagonist opens the refrigerator door, and an egg rolls to the edge of the shelf and stops; much later in the film, his roommate opens the same door, and the egg breaks on the floor. Or: in one of a series of scenes in which the protagonist meets different women in restaurants, Ross surprisingly switches his attention to another couple in the room, who take over the movie with their conversation until the end of the scene, when they are never seen again. Or: on her rounds as a delivery person for a FedEx-like company, the woman is mysteriously menaced by a passing car whose close approach to her is heighted with editing and soundtrack manipulation, though the incident has no consequences. The suggestion of incipient violence in this last example is not isolated: unsettling incidents rend the fabric of mundane life from the first scene to the odd ending, which both makes urgent demands on our empathy and enforces a comic distance. I'm still not sure about how to respond to that ending, but, like so many other moods that the film engenders, the overtones of violence are largely perpendicular to story and character, existing in a philosophical fourth dimension that Ross creates purely through style. Audrey's mumbly surfaces conceal, at the least, a director of great ambition and unusual virtues. The film screens at the new reRun Theater in DUMBO through Thursday, July 29.

She, a Chinese: Asian American International Film Festival, July 19, 2010

One of the best films on the 2009 festival circuit, Guo Xiaolu's She, a Chinese, will have its New York premiere at the Asian American International Film Festival. In my Senses of Cinema wrapup for Toronto 2009, I wrote:

"The Golden Leopard at Locarno went to She, a Chinese, the second feature from the expatriate Chinese novelist Guo Xiaolu. Advance word skewed toward the negative, and a flashy trailer increased my pessimism. But the film dazzled me. It becomes clear almost immediately that its organizing principle is not story or even style, but the force of Guo's personality, which whips together diverse materials into a fluent commentary that transcends form. As the sullen, deadpan young protagonist Mei (Huang Lu) rides over assorted trials in rural China with a combination of strength and obliviousness, and then bolts from a guided tour to try her survival skills in the UK, Guo narrates her passage with funny chapter-heading intertitles, bursts of loud rock music (John Parish's score is excellent), and comically rushed transitions. The emotional gap between the story upheavals and Mei's inner life reminded me of several major filmmakers: Godard for the playful exploitation of the audience's distance from the fiction; Sternberg for the loving fascination with surfaces that reveal nothing; and Renoir for the way that philosophical perspective is used to lighten a dark story's mood. I have no idea why Guo's considerable talent is lost on so many critics."

She, a Chinese screens on Monday, July 19 at 6 pm at the Clearview Chelsea Cinema.

Le père de mes enfants: IFC Center, starts May 28, 2010

I hesitate to proclaim Mia Hansen-Løve's Le père de mes enfants (The Father of My Children) the best film of the year so far, or Hansen-Løve as the strongest French director to emerge in the last decade: not because I have doubts, but because her films creep up gradually, and might be harmed by excessive fanfare. Still, publicity first.

Like Hansen-Løve's equally good first feature, 2007's Tout est pardonné (All Is Forgiven), Le père de mes enfants devotes its entire first half to a development that only in retrospect can be perceived as prologue. French film producer Grégoire Canvel (Louis de Lancquesaing), modeled after the late Humbert Balsam, is introduced via a comic device - as he wanders the streets of Paris and drives to his provincial home, Hansen-Løve cuts between his mobile phone conversations with a myriad of professional contacts - that synopsizes his character, creates expectations of forward narrative motion, and, along with soundtrack music, sets a light-hearted tone. Charming, intelligent, reasonably sincere, and seemingly impervious to chaos, Grégoire oversees three simultaneous productions while trying to stave off a financial crisis, the dimensions of which are only gradually revealed. His wife Sylvia (Chiari Caselli) and his three daughters inevitably must make do with the leftover scraps of his time. But Hansen-Løve characteristically mixes her signals here, sometimes showing Grégoire's bond to his family in a pleasing light, other times emphasizing the strain that his consuming work life places on Sylvia.

If you haven't seen the film, stop reading, as I'm about to spoil the entire plot. (Spoiler space follows.)






























The flow of the story in the first half almost suggests a relaxed American comedy marking time before its second act breaks into hijinks or plunges us into drama. When it arrives, the story break is not a plot escalation, but a startling game-changer. In retrospect, we can see that we had been amply prepared. But the foreshadowing does not feel like prophecy, due to Hansen-Løve's taste for letting contradictory information pile up without authorial comment. Because she does not like to organize information about people into thematic shapes, she subtly undercuts the fiction's predictive power.

Facing bankruptcy, Grégoire shoots and kills himself on the street, right on the splice of one of Hansen-Løve's disarmingly casual cuts. Hansen-Løve's elisions deny us access to his deliberation or hesitation. Before the act, he burned some personal papers; we will never learn what they were.

Grégoire has been in every scene thus far: where does the film go now? As it happens, the film truly begins here. Deprived of its motive force, the unbound story line expands and diversifies until the keynote of Grégoire's struggle merges into the background noise of life. Sorrow and anguish dominate at first (one of Grégoire's young daughters is especially unnerving to watch, in that her raw pain is not aestheticized to match the grade of audience reaction); but Grégoire has left behind a raft of practical matters that must be attended to in haste. Sylvia steps into the breach, with the aid of Grégoire's friend Serge (Eric Elmosnino), to assess the dire financial situation and to decide the fate of the stranded productions, which Sylvia sees as Grégoire's legacy. All the pieces cannot be put back together again; but the family's effort to process its loss produces some good results as well.

Hansen-Løve's observational skills were apparent in the film's first half, but they are on center stage in its second half. She is a brilliant director of actors, specializing, not in big emotions that drive the fiction, but in coaxing out detail and ambience across large casts, and in selecting key moments that provide convincing randomness. A single example: Sylvia mentions to Serge, in front of her two youngest children, her desire to move back to her native Italy, observing that her middle daughter is dead set against the idea, but that the youngest might want to go. Asked for confirmation by Serge, the youngest wrinkles her face and says, "No, not really," with just enough diffidence to confirm the mother's judgment.

Unsurpassed as a director of children, Hansen-Løve takes a particular, and optimistic, interest in teenage female characters. In Tout est pardonné, the burden of carrying on in the face of loss fell lightly on the shoulders of a 17-year-old, played wonderfully by the non-professional Constance Rousseau; here, the focus of the family's renewal is Grégoire's oldest daughter Clémence (Alice de Lencquesaing). Working through an understandable anger at the problems that Grégoire has left behind, Clémence begins to sneak away from her family to pick up the scent of her father's passage through the world. Discovering a half-brother from one of Grégoire's prior affairs, she visits his home, without agenda; she starts watching her father's films in Paris theaters, showing signs of budding cinephilia; and she forms a possibly fleeting relationship with a young filmmaker (Igor Hansen-Løve) whom Grégoire had wanted to produce. None of these physical and mental peregrinations affects the story: Clémence is set in motion because she is of the age to be set in motion, and to transform her pain into self-discovery. The heart of the film is the plotless scene in which Clémence, having left a note and crept away from her first night with the still-sleeping filmmaker, sits alone by a window in a café, stumbling over her coffee order, then waiting and reflecting in the light of dawn.

It's a sign of Hansen-Løve's stature as an artist that she is as intrigued by the intricacies of Grégoire's film business as by the dynamics of his family. In a quiet but superb scene near film's end, Grégoire's heroic accountant (Antoine Mathieu) recounts for Sylvia and the stakeholders of the company the details of the financial apocalypse, with a rundown of what can and cannot be salvaged. As usual, the imperatives of fiction do not seem to have any bearing on the outcome: some of the projects that Sylvia and Hansen-Løve have devoted the most time to are unceremoniously pronounced dead; a few small achievements stand out among the general wreckage. Grègoire's children, having recovering their capacity for happiness, joke with the liquidator as they pay a final visit to the doomed production office on Faubourg-Saint-Denis, before a taxi whisks them away from the city that we have seen Grégoire pace out. On the taxi radio, we hear the first famous song used in the movie: Doris Day singing "Que Sera Sera."

Barking Water: MoMA, May 12 through 17, 2010

Sterlin Harjo's films might be a tough sell to hardcore cinephiles: they tell emotionally direct stories that verge on sentimentalism, and their visuals aren't especially formally ambitious. Still, Harjo is one of the most appealing American directors to come along in recent years, and Barking Water, which premiered at Sundance 2009, is even better than his 2007 debut Four Sheets to the Wind. The personal story, of a dying Native American man (Richard Ray Whitman) who enlists his estranged lover (Casey Camp-Horinek) to help him cross Oklahoma to pay a last visit to family and friends, dovetails beautifully both with the conventions of the road movie and with Harjo's understated vision of a community scattered across space and struggling against its inevitable unraveling. Harjo has a rare knack for weaving fictional and documentary elements together so that the seams are hard to spot: presumably the cast is a mixture of professional and amateur performers, but the fine, effortless lead performances blend so perfectly into the ensemble that it's hard to be sure where acting takes over from existence. Barking Water screens at MoMA six times this week: Wednesday, May 12 at 6:30 pm; Thursday, May 13 at 4:30 pm; Friday, May 14 at 7:00 pm; Saturday, May 15 at 2:00 pm; Sunday, May 16 at 2:30 pm; and Monday, May 17 at 4:30 pm.

Assorted Screenings in NYC: April 2010

Just a few quick recommendations for end-of-the-month action on the NYC film circuit:

• South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-ok made her debut in 2002 with Jiltuneun naui him (Jealousy is My Middle Name), a droll, intelligent movie with fascinating characterizations, which struck me at the time as the best Korean film not made by Hong Sang-soo. Paju, Park's second feature, premiered earlier this year at Rotterdam, and advance word has been good. It will screen four times at the Tribeca Film Festival: Thursday, April 23 at 6:30 pm; Saturday, April 25 at 1:30 pm; Sunday, April 26 at 6:45 pm; and Thursday, April 30 at 1 pm. The first three screenings are at the Village East; the last is at the Clearview Chelsea.
  
• My very favorite Swedish films were made, not by Bergman, Stiller or Sjöström (though those guys did some pretty fair work too), but by Alf Sjöberg, a once-celebrated director whose reputation waned after his disciple Bergman ascended to art-film superstardom. One of Sjöberg's greatest works, 1949's Bara en mor (Only a Mother), screens in the Walter Reade's valuable Northern Exposures series on Saturday, April 24 at 9:15 pm and Monday, April 26 at 1 pm. Built around a powerful lead performance by Eva Dahlbeck (Smiles of a Summer Night), Bara en mor strikes an exciting balance between pictorial and social realism (the story is set in the world of migrant farm peasants) and a theatricality that spotlights the emotional struggles of its beset but formidable protagonist.
• In The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris wrote that "nothing much happens" in Phil Karlson's career until 1953's 99 River St.. But research reveals several distinctive works in Karlson's early filmography, with at least one - 1952's Scandal Sheet - that ranks for me with Karlson's best. The film is based on Samuel Fuller's novel The Dark Page, but Fuller's personality is somewhat diluted in the adaptation, whereas Karlson's abrasive but humanist brand of urgency is in full flower. Scandal Sheet plays in Film Forum's series "The Newspaper Picture" on Friday, April 30 at 1, 4:35 and 8:10 pm.

Barbe Bleue (Blue Beard): IFC Center, until Thursday, April 15, 2010

Catherine Breillat now has a solid international reputation, but I wish she was regarded less as a sexual provocatrice and more as an artist whose powerful personality filters and interprets all aspects of experience. Barbe Bleue (Blue Beard), her most recent work, helps the cause, in that it is based on a Perrault fairy tale, and shows Breillat imposing her world view through a story written for children.

Here is a checklist of moments I noted in Barbe Bleue that are strongly inflected by Breillat's sensibility, that other filmmakers would be unlikely to write or direct the same way. My impulse here is analytic rather than synthetic, but patterns will no doubt emerge: identifying them is left as an exercise for the reader.

There will be plot spoilers below.

1. The heartless Mother Superior (Farida Khelfa) who dominates the film's first scenes is cast against type as a young, beautiful woman.

2. The sisters in the fairy tale, Anne (Daphné Baiwir) and Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton), shed tears upon being given unceremonious notice of their father's death. They are then expelled from their convent school and sent home in a carriage. Showing the process of departure would for many filmmakers provide an excuse to ramp down the film's level of sadness, so that the sisters' grief will be nearly as moderate as the audience's when we next encounter them. But Breillat prefers to resume the story in the carriage with the sisters weeping, showing the audience the mourning that it has already gotten over. Only then does Breillat ramp down the grief, by letting the sisters veer into a discussion of marriage and the future. By placing the transition from mourning to the mundane in mid-conversation, Breillat makes the sisters own the mood change, which now seems slightly unfeeling. Acknowledging the dissonance that she has created, Breillat lets the sisters name it: "We shouldn't laugh. Papa just died." "It's nerves."

3. At home, the differing reactions of Anne and Marie-Catherine to their father's death are emphasized by Breillat and given equal weight, even though Anne is not a structurally important character. It is unusual for a supporting character not to have a supporting opinion. Breillat is making a small break with narrativity, digressing into a mode she likes, in which sisterly conflict resembles warring aspects of the same mind.

4. And both these opinions are uncomfortable, expressing forbidden aspects of the parent-child relationship. Anne violates the spirit of mourning with her fury at her father, who died saving a stranger's life. Whereas Marie-Catherine fetishizes her dead father, clearly enjoying the power she now has over him: "You aren't intimidating now. I love you." Breillat maintains sympathy for both characters; neither emotion seems to alienate her.

5. Even while she reproaches Anne, Marie-Catherine understands her, and explains to both her mother (Isabelle Lapouge) and her dead father that Anne's insults are the result of her pain.

6. Barbe Bleue's emissary (Adrien Ledoux), who informs the family that the rich noble wishes to choose a wife from among the young women of the area, is a handsome, arrogant young man, an attractive predator who will have no occasion to cross swords with any woman in this story. As in the case of the Mother Superior, Breillat invests with sexuality even the most functional representatives of power.

7. The sisters in the modern story, Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites) and Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti), while quarreling over the fairy tale that they are reading, have a brief but digressive discussion of free will versus determinism, in which Marie-Anne blames her squeamishness on her head ("cerveau"). "Your head is you," says the younger Catherine. "No, I was born with it," protests Marie-Anne. As usual, Breillat does not seem to want us to take sides, or to characterize the sisters via their opinions: the dispute merely shows that the sisters encompass both sides of the issue.

8. Slipping away from Barbe Bleue's reception, Marie-Catherine whiles away the time in the fields surrounding the castle, playing with a praying mantis, then watching the beheading of a chicken. The camera lingers upon the death agony of the unfortunate chicken: the gaze of the camera is presumably Marie-Catherine's gaze. Breillat, and by extension Marie-Catherine, seem interested in and accepting of the horror.

9. Meanwhile the youth of the area take part in a group dance outside the castle. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the music and the dancing, but the film at least suggests that the instruments and the choreography are of the period. Breillat focuses on the saucy dance moves of the young women, who smile and wag their fingers ceremonially at their male partners. She seems to enjoy emphasizing that the old ways look modern, that these people acknowledge and play with sexuality much as we do today.

10. The massive and scary-looking Barbe Bleue first talks to Marie-Catherine while resting under a tree. He is surprisingly unthreatening in his demeanor, suggesting a tame bear. His voice is soft and gentle.

11. Discussing the fairy tale in the modern story, precocious Catherine insists that, in the old days, women could get married even at age 5. "It's not like adult marriage," she says in qualification. Pressed for details by Marie-Anne, Catherine demonstrates that she's vague on the whole subject. Like much of the modern story, this scene exists only to show the children's imagination reaching out boldly into the world of sex.

12. Marie-Catherine's engagement to Barbe Bleue is simultaneously a weapon against her older sister Anne and the sad occasion of their separation. Breillat likes to compress the two feelings. After a harsh outburst against Anne, Marie-Catherine suddenly hugs her tenderly.

13. Similarly, as Marie-Catherine is leaving her home with her new husband, Anne says to her, "Now we needn't fight anymore." Marie-Catherine replies, "But I liked that." Hatred and love between the sisters are repeatedly depicted as compatible emotions, not requiring resolution.

14. At the sisters' post-wedding goodbye, Barbe Bleue sits silently on his horse in the background, waiting for his new bride like a liveryman. In the spirit of counterpoint, Breillat will depict the fairy-tale monster as gentle and domesticated throughout the film.

15. In the modern story, Catherine shows off her incorrect understanding of the word "homosexuality." Her exasperated older sister gives her the correct meaning, but Catherine is obstinate. Again, the subject connects to the narrative only in that it shows the young girls' interest in sex.

16. As she is installed in Barbe Bleue's castle, Marie-Catherine suddenly becomes imperious and demanding about her living arrangement, trying to assert her power over her husband. Marie-Catherine is not generally characterized as imperious, and does not test her power in this fashion again. Breillat seems to assume that a war for power lies just under the surface of love relationships. The filmmaker shows no sign of disapproval, and our identification with Marie-Catherine is not affected.

17. Sneaking around the castle at night, Marie-Catherine peeks in her husband's room and spies on him removing his tunic and sitting on his bed bare-chested. The gigantic Barbe Bleue does not provide the sort of nudity that movie audiences are likely to welcome. Both Marie-Catherine (who is not yet sleeping with her husband) and Breillat have no reaction to the naked man other than fascination with the spectacle; Marie-Catherine's feelings toward him do not seem to be altered.

18. In the modern story, young Catherine insists that she is more intelligent than her older sister Marie-Anne, and mercilessly exploits Marie-Anne's having stayed back a grade because of illness. Marie-Anne has no good defense, and seems beaten. The conflict will have no obvious repercussions.

19. Marie-Catherine confides to her husband, "I miss my sister, but I'm glad to be rid of her." The contradiction does not require resolution.

20. Breillat repeatedly puts visual emphasis on the absurd difference in size between the gigantic Barbe Bleue and his tiny wife Marie-Catherine: for instance, by framing them side by side at the dinner table. Though the couple will have no sexual contact in the film, that outrageous, unspoken fantasy is the motor of the story. Never one to avert her gaze, Breillat forces us to imagine such an act.

21. After a time in the castle, Marie-Catherine tells Barbe Bleue that she is now accustomed to luxury. The statement does not signal a problem with Marie-Catherine's values; Breillat seems accepting, as she so often is.

22. After a solar eclipse gives Barbe Bleue the opportunity to display his knowledge of history and science, an impressed Marie-Catherine says to him avidly, "Teach me everything you know." Marie-Catherine shows no other interest in learning: she seems to regard knowledge as a form of male power that she wishes to acquire for herself.

23. After Marie-Catherine discovers the bodies of Barbe Bleue's other wives, she must hide the discovery from him and eat dinner with him upon his return from a trip. The tone of this scene is difficult to fix. Barbe Bleue has become threatening to us; and Marie-Catherine begins to lie to him in self-protection. However, Breillat declines to give us images of Marie-Catherine's presumed fear and repulsion. Further, Marie-Catherine participates willingly in the communal aspect of dinner, taking bites out of the huge leg of lamb that her husband shares with her. Though the story mandates that Marie-Catherine now fear Barbe Bleue and regard him as an enemy, Breillat manages through Marie-Catherine's behavior to create the interesting impression that the horrible murders have not destroyed the marital bond.

24. Breillat gives us a bare indication that the accidental death of Marie-Anne at the end of the modern story is the fantasy of the traumatized Catherine: surely Catherine's mother would have spotted Marie-Anne's body on the floor below if the fall had actually occurred? False alarm, all is well, except that Catherine's desire to kill her older sister has been made manifest.

25. Breillat ends the film with an image of Marie-Catherine caressing the severed head of her husband. She is victorious, and simultaneously she is sad.

26. The sad music accompanying this gruesome ending yields, as in other Breillat films, to happy dance music under the end credits. Like her characters, Breillat will not pretend that contemplating her atavistic impulses is gloomy business.

Barbe Bleue is scheduled at the IFC Center only until tomorrow, Thursday, April 15.

La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore): NYU, Monday, March 22, 2010

If any of you have three and a half hours to spare on the evening of Monday, March 22, I'll be giving a ten or fifteen-minute introductory talk at a ciné-club DVD screening of Jean Eustache's monumental 1973 film La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore). The show starts at 6:30 pm at NYU's 20 Cooper Square building (at Bowery and E. 5th St.), in Room 471. The notice for the screening says, "ALL WELCOME. Refreshments - stiff, copious - provided."

Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng (The Search): Maysles Cinema, Saturday, March 20, 2010

I didn't find out about the Tibet in Harlem series until today, its opening day. One of the titles in the program, Pema Tsaden's Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng (The Search), made an impression on me at last year's Toronto Film Festival. In my Toronto 2009 wrap-up for Senses of Cinema, I wrote:

"Screened at Locarno after winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Shanghai Film Festival, Pema Tseden's Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng (The Search) is allegedly the first Tibetan film made openly in China. Structured around a film crew's search for rural performers for an adaptation of a traditional Tibetan opera, Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng is actually an elaborate riff on the theme of performance, stringing together stories within the story and impromptu auditions, and exploring various dryly comic ways to interrupt, contextualize, or serialize them. Tseden's remote visual plan, keyed to the expansive terrain and hanging back at important moments, is gradually revealed as a important component of his mission to restore the uncanny aspect of performance by subtracting its direct appeal to the audience. (In the film's climactic scene, we see that the film crew's cameraman has a more conventional dramatic sense than Tseden, slowly zooming in on the singer that the film crew has been pursuing, while Tseden's camera remains stubbornly locked-down.) By the time the search reaches its conclusion, song and theater seem to be springing unbidden from the Tibetan landscape. The print of Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng that screened in Toronto contained awkwardly translated English subtitles that improved after fifteen minutes or so, but made it difficult to perceive the film's formal and verbal intelligence."

Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng shows at Maysles Cinema (at 343 Lenox Ave., two blocks away from the 125th St. stop on the 2/3 trains) on Saturday, March 20 at 7:30 pm. I haven't seen the other films in the series, but two other Tseden films are included: his 2005 feature Lhing vjags kyi ma ni rdo vbum (The Silent Holy Stones) on Wednesday, March 17 at 7:30 pm; and his 2004 short The Grassland, as part of a program on Friday, March 19 at 7:30 pm. Kevin Lee (who will be doing a Q&A with Tseden after the Wednesday screening) compares Tseden to Abbas Kiarostami, and I can see the connection: both filmmakers hide a droll, cerebral formalism behind naturalistic surfaces.

Le Roi de l'évasion (The King of Escape): Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 15-16, 2009

Little by little, the international film community is catching on that French director Alain Guiraudie is one of the most distinctive and confident voices in today's cinema. His latest film, 2009's Le Roi de l'évasion (The King of Escape), can look like either a bold surrealist gesture or the last gasp of classical widescreen filmmaking, depending on where one focuses. A plot description - a gay, plump, 40-year-old tractor salesman (Ludovic Berthillot) in the south of France yields enthusiastically to the overtures of the beautiful 16-year-old daughter (Hafsia Herzi) of his boss - doesn't begin to convey Guiraudie's wild, rapid storytelling style, nor the extraordinary ease with which the filmmaker depicts a set of social groups that even adventurous filmgoers are unlikely to encounter on screen often. There is an amazing opposition, almost a contradiction, in Guiraudie's approach: he stylizes the social landscape into an idealized vision of sexuality freely expressed and tolerated; and yet the comic compression of the plot suggests a paranoid dream of punishment and persecution for the slightest and most concealed sexual impulse. That Guiraudie is aware of this bizarre split, and presents it to us simply and lucidly without resolving it, marks him as a major artist. Le Roi de l'évasion (The King of Escape) plays twice more in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema program: on Monday, March 15 at 3:45 pm at the Walter Reade, and on Tuesday, March 16 at 9:30 pm at the IFC Center.

The Youth of Chopin: Walter Reade, Sunday, January 10, 2009

Polish director Aleksander Ford is one of those names who pop up in film history books, but rarely appear on American screens to take the test of time. His 1952 The Youth of Chopin, which screens once more on Sunday, January 10 at 3 pm in the Walter Reade's brief celebration of Chopin's bicentenary, has everything going against it: not only the unrewarding conventions of the biopic, but also an apparent governmental mandate to cast Chopin as a people's revolutionary. And it's a knockout anyway, a film that only gradually reveals how unorthodox and experimental it is. The project's central problems are confronted by writer-director Ford with unusual intelligence and formal transparency. The historical narrative is not so much blended with great-man mythology as juxtaposed with it, with self-aware cuts and tracking shots shifting Chopin and the class struggle from foreground to background and back again. Even more strikingly, Ford embraces the episodic aspect of biography, and the film often takes the form of a series of dazzling, disconnected set-pieces, with supporting characters bearing much emotional weight, then vanishing like comets. In some ways, Ford calls to mind the great French director Jacques Becker, in that his visual skill and sensitivity to ambiance is in the service of sharp but unbiased social observation. I could easily have been persuaded that Becker was responsible for the beautiful scene where Chopin attends a Paganini concert, or for an orgiastic party scene in which a political assassination is counterpointed with frenzied dancers ripping off their shoes. Still, Ford is somewhat more inclined to symbolism than Becker, more likely to turn the flow of reality into coolly observed friezes. I've never seen anything else by Ford, but it's hard to believe that a director who is at once so analytical and so instinctive could not have made many other worthwhile films.

Sita Sings the Blues: IFC Center, through January 5, 2010

The distribution of Nina Paley's 2008 animated feature Sita Sings the Blues has famously been obstructed by music publishing copyright protection. WNET-TV broadcast the film via a loophole in the copyright laws for public television: I'm not sure whether its screening at the IFC Center (through this Tuesday, January 5) is a defiance of copyright law, or a side-effect of the WNET alliance. The film is freely available on the Internet, but it's actually a terrific film to watch with an audience: many of us in the theater interacted vocally with the screen, but at different moments and in different ways, as befits the complexity of the work. And, for a film that Paley presumably hand-crafted, it's a surprisingly spectacular big-screen experience.

Not to mention a great movie. From the first few moments, where a campy but oddly droll and restrained tableau of Indian goddess with phonograph player suddenly explodes into the dynamic credit sequence, we are in the presence of an artistic personality with so many dimensions - purely formal play, cerebral comedy, parody of popular storytelling modes, balance among personal and cultural perspectives - that we reduce it by considering any one of them at a time. Paley's Rube Goldberg postmodern conception/contraption is ultimately a demonstration of her ability to integrate an uncontrollable variety of effects into a complex but whole sensibility.

Návrat idiota (Return of the Idiot): Walter Reade, October 24 and 27, 2009

No sooner do I discover my all-time favorite Czech director than I learn that he's dropped out of sight. Does anyone know where Saša Gedeon has been keeping himself for the last ten years? He was just 24 when his wonderful short feature Indiánské léto (Indian Summer), an adaptation of Fitzgerald's short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair, was released to national acclaim. He followed in 1999 with the Dostoyevsky adaptation Návrat idiota (Return of the Idiot), which confirmed his star status in the Czech Republic, and even made its way to A-list festivals. Since then, nothing, except for a short segment in the 2004 omnibus film Visions of Europe. He turned 39 this August.

I hope some of you will visit Návrat idiota when it plays the Walter Reade on Saturday, October 24 at 8 pm and Tuesday, October 27 at 4 pm in the "Ironic Curtain" program of recent Czech cinema. In a sense, Gedeon continues the tradition of 60s Czech comedy, with its focus on the inarticulate eccentricity of its characters. But he has an immense gravity that moves his films away from outright comedy and toward a tone of revery and melancholy. Návrat idiota stays close to Dostoyevsky's paradoxical view of human nature, and Gedeon's excellent script maintains the mystery and dignity of a large cast of characters who circle the eponymous, naive hero (Pavel Liška). This is a major work from a director who should be much better known outside the Czech Republic.

Bam gua nat (Night and Day): Anthology Film Archives, October 23-29, 2009

My favorite film of the last two years, Hong Sang-soo's Bam gua nat (Night and Day), is getting a one-week run at Anthology Film Archives, starting this Friday, October 23. It screens each day at 6:30 pm and 9:15 pm, with added Saturday and Sunday screenings at 3:30 pm.

I noted in my previous blog entry on Bam gua nat that Hong had restrained in this film his usual impulse toward narrative doubling, and adopted a more conventional narrative structure. The spine of the story resembles that of Rohmer films like Le genou de Claire (Claire's Knee): protagonist Sung-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) is emotionally committed to his life with his wife Sung-in (Hwang Su-jeong), who is primarily a telephone presence in the film, thanks to Sung-nam's temporary exile in Paris for fear of drug charges. The main focus of the film, however, is Sung-nam's transitory emotional life in Paris, and particularly his intense, dubious passion for young artist Yu-jeong (Park Eun-hye). Therefore the story creates a tension between what matters most to the protagonist (his married life in Korea) and what matters most to the audience (the Parisian interlude which is developed in detail for us). Somewhat surprisingly, Hong diligently follows the narrative rules of this format: the phone calls to Sung-in occur at regular intervals, and give us enough information that we should be able to predict Sung-nam's behavior at the film's climax. Hong also develops the theme of life in exile with regularly spaced observations about cultural differences between Korea and France, and about Sung-nam's reactions to the life choices that face an expatriate. It's odd that Hong should take up an almost literary organization of his material at this stage of his career.

Hong's approach to generating content is much the same as in his earlier films, but the surprises and disjunctions that he loves take on a slightly different contextual meaning here: they are subsumed in Sung-nam's story and reflect the vicissitudes of his inner life, whereas often in earlier films Hong's formal play is from an authorial stance, a manipulation of story lines rather than an acceptance of their confines. As usual, Hong's raw material is so freeform and arbitrary that we suspect that he took the events directly from real life. What's most unusual about the almost random flow of quotidian occurrences is that Hong coaxes out the latent narrativity in each scene, and presents each event with the emphasis usually given to plot points, even though most of these storytelling seeds will fall on barren ground and have no narrative consequences. There's skill involved in balancing the presentation of these micro-events, which can be construed either as bits of characterization or as red herrings in a surrealist mode. For instance, when Sung-nam picks up a Bible after hearing a stranger talk about its life-changing properties, we are getting a droll glimpse of Sung-nam's thought processes, half-inquisitive and half-superstitious; and we are also getting a potential story development. In this particular case, Hong's emphasis on the Bible is mostly red herring: all Sung-nam does with his experience is to use it to strengthen an excuse not to have sex with his former lover Min-sun (Kim Yu-jin). But Hong will generate many such emphases over the course of the film. Some will go nowhere at all (like Sung-nam taking up tai chi); some will develop large-scale story momentum (like Yu-jeong's exaggerated fear of people plagiarizing her art work). All these small but weighty developments harmonize with or reveal the characters' psychology: Hong is a psychologically accountable director. None of the developments, perhaps, affect the narrative deeply enough to change the film's outcome. If we take a long enough view, all these portentous events can be said to be red herrings, and Hong can be placed in a surrealist tradition.

This ambiguity – are the disjunctions merely a reflection of the disorder of real life, or are they sabotage of good storytelling practice? – is at the heart of Hong's style. If he were not a faithful recorder of the messiness of human behavior, his rather hostile play with form might not be very interesting; if he didn't use narrative tricks to create absurd story shapes, his insights into people might be less compelling.