La Belle Saison (Summertime, Catherine Corsini, 2015)
I spent a day grumbling about the sense that this was two films which didn’t quite dovetail together — but then I read an abstract about Nancy Astor and thought about her niece Joyce Grenfell and things slid into place.
Continue reading →Un amour de jeunesse (Goodbye First Love, Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011)
(Spoilers in final paragraph)
So here the first love is between Camille (Lola Créton), 15, and Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), 19, and this doesn’t seem to bother anyone. He’s an artist, apparently, or a builder, possibly, but he’s going to drop out of university and go to South America for nine months. She’s going to sulk, because she doesn’t want him to go, and doesn’t seem to want to go either. Or he won’t let her.So, whilst he’s off channelling his inner Angel Clare, she goes through a series of objectifying jobs and trains to be an architect, taking up with a Norwegian architect. Lorenz (Magne Håvard-Brekke). Then Sullivan comes back.
Continue reading →Les amants ([The Lovers] Louis Malle, 1958)
In the opening credits of Malle’s second feature film there is an engraving of the Map of Tendre, an imaginary land on which can be reaced the route to true love. So, here we have Jeanne Tournier (Jeanne Moreau), in a difficult and encouragedly open marriage with newspaper proprieter Henri (Alain Cuny) in Dijon, who regularly visits her friend Maggy (Judith Magre) in Paris so she can hang out with polo-playing hunt Raoul Flores (José Luis de Vilallonga). When Maggy and Raoul are invited for a meal in Dijon — against Jeanne’s better judgment — she breaks down in the sticks and is picked up by archaeologist Bernard (Jean-Marc Bory). Whilst you’d expect her to slip into Raoul’s room, it is Bernard who snags her attention.
This was released just before the French New Wave and appears in a crisp black and white, especially the magical night scenes in the third quarter of the film. At times I felt a twinger of the river sequence in Charles Laughton’s directorial masterpiece, Night of the Hunter (1955). The camera, meanwhile loves Moreau, although she is repeated reflected in mirrors. The film doesn’t seem to judge her character, although at times you might judge her — oscillating between impatient and not getting the hell on with it. It anticipates the adulteries of Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur ([Happiness], 1965), where I also expected Judgment to wreak havoc. But this is how the other half live — and it’s not entirely clear whether Bernard will fund her lifestyle.
Apparently this caused no end of kerfuffle when released in the States, leading to a pornography trial — although I’d be sceptical that anyone could get their rocks off to this. Indeed, Justice Potter Stewart ruled it wasn’t pornographic at the Supreme Court, saying that he knew hardcore porn when he saw it.
I wonder what he had seen?
I somehow missed Pawlikowski’s Cold War (2018) by blinking at an inopportune moment, but I remember enjoying his Margate-set, faintly post-apocalyptic immigrant drama Last Resort (2000) with Dina Korzun and Paddy Considine. There I might have reached for Ken Loach and Lindsay Anderson, but here there is a feel of Tarkovsky without quite so much striving for poetry, in glorious black and white. Continue reading →
Tangerine Dream – Revolution of Sound (Margarete Kreuzer, 2017)
I guess there’s always been a contradiction at the heart of appreciating bands which go through multiple line ups. I don’t hold to the school of thought that Pink Floyd stopped when Syd left — but I think I prefer a Yes with a Jon Anderson to one without, even if, say, Chris Squire drove the sound. For me the best Tangerine Dream albums are the Froese-Franke-Baumann ones, broadly speaking the Virgin years, but those with Schmoelling come close. And I like Klaus Schulze and Steve Joliffe’s solo works more than Franke or Baumann’s.
Are they always Tangerine Dream? Continue reading →
Apparently it takes the end of the world to see a female-directed film released, and here we have another one. I seem to recall some quibbles about the director’s Suffragette, but this is a remarkable piece of work in the Ken Loach tradition.
23 Walks (Paul Morrison, 2019)
In this romantic comedy for pensioners, you have the collision of two film styles.
Hope Gap (William Nicholson, 2019)
Curiously, for a film set in Seaford in East Sussex, parts of this were filmed in Yorkshire. And this is just a couple of weeks after what may well be the same East Sussex cliffs stood in for East Kent. I look forward to Folkstone being the location for a remake of Wuthering Heights. Continue reading →
Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy, 2019)
Based on a stage play by Rita Kalnejais, this is a black comedy and a coming of age story and a Fault in Our Stars cousin. It is by turns hilarious and scary and moving, although it skips over something at its heart. Continue reading →
The Truth (La verité, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2019)
Tucked away in the credits is the detail that the film that veteran actor, Fabienne Dangeville (Catherine Deneuve), is making with starlet Manon Lenoir (Manon Clavel), Memories of my Mother, is an adaptation of a short story by Ken Liu, in which a space-travelling mother visits her daughter every seven years.
I’d quite like to see that film, which is not to dis this one.
Dangeville’s son-in-law, Hank, a struggling American actor who may have a drink issue, is played by Ethan Hawke, possibly best known for the Before … movies, made every seven years with Julie Delpy.
Well, actually, every nine years, but Juliette Binoche as his wife and Dangeville’s daughter, Lumir, is not that far from the Delpy role. Hawke, to be honest, does little, but be awkward about how much French he speaks or understands.
The two of them are visiting their mother on the occasion of the publication of her autobiography, called, natch, The Truth, although it is plainly nothing but. Noses have been put out of joint, pasts libelled, and there is a dark secret from decades ago involving a rival actress.
Deneuve is, as you’d expect, radiant, as she’s been since The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. You never quite know when her character is helpless or actually just artful.
Subject to Change 