FILM FREAK ABROAD '15.

 Going back to Europe was confronting. It’s become more sinister. I never even saw a Libyan refugee, let alone got to interact with one but traveling over night on the Thello train was a was a disturbing experience. Last time I did that was an extended fun conversation with a Paris family and a regular who pointed out that the rats in Venice outnumbered the people, probably the longest time I’d ever had to speak French.    

Now I walked past the line of single black men that the police had lined up at the rail station to get into a compartment where an African couple decided to giggle in Wolof all night, despite my suggesting it was time to get some rest. When I finally did go to sleep, the door flew open and there was a Glock automatic six inches away from my face as the French border cops came in, threatening to deport the girl who had been breast feeding her baby. I was glad to get out of there.  

The street musicians seem to have vanished, though Chatelet Metro managed a Russian choir in full voice.  The spectacle of entire beggar families sleeping on the street in the rain was an off-puter but they can be a surprisingly up beat element.  One clochard was stretched out absorbing the warm air from a Metro grating while he made calls on his cell ‘phone. Another had paper streamers anchored to the grating providing a twirling display round his spot. 

In Paris, the Institute of Arab studies did one of the several Omar Sharif retrospectives running there. This time it was the films he made with Youseff Chahine at the start of his career. I had to go through metal detectors, which were turned off fortunately, because I still had the blister pack with my new Opinel knife in in my bag . The films were so so but that was an important gap filled.

 Movies are still all around. I was walking along the barge mooring area and found a German Graffiti artist doing a Flip the Frog themed painting on the wall. He was intrigued to learn that the character existed in colour and we had a conversation about purloined imagery.  The time I turned on French radio, someone, who had made a study of Leni Reifenstahl, dismissed the idea that she got it on with Adolph Hitler. Goebels did put the hard word on her and was speedily dismissed, which made relations icy. Leni was into physical
types. The Olympics film gave her access to stud athletes. Screen Tarzan Glenn Morris was apparently one of the recipients of her favors. 

All the old ambiance remained spaced by Greek Sandwiches eaten on the Seine Bank but  film-going was not as good as it had been. The rue Champollion still comes up with screenings of vintage Gary Cooper. Cloak & Dagger has been running there for sixty years, though it hardly scores a footnote in English language film writing. However  appealing one day  screening outfits seem to be always canceling sessions. My beloved Le Desperado announced a Belmondo season but Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine couldn’t be found and démons de l'aube didn’t show for their Simone Signoret retro, though they did locate a warming Eastmancolor copy of Michel Drach's grim 1981 Guy De Maupassant, a truly bad movie mixing  high culture references and T&A. Miou Miou proves to have had a great build, as does (who would have believed it?) a young Catharine Frot. 

 Which brings us to Gaspar Noé’s new, English language Love, the most explicit movie to get mainstream showing that I’ve seen . If you like close ups of penises coming in  3D, it's certainly better than Last Tango on which it's modeled. I figured that it was unlikely to push through Oz attitudes and regulation but I understand the Underground Film Festival did a run while I was away. I’d seen Tsui Hark’s Zhì qu weihu shan/ The Taking of Tiger Mountain in the same theater earlier in the week and chatted with the manager about its great scene of the digital tiger chasing the hero up an ice covered tree. On the way out I suggested to him that the Noé film could have used a tiger.

Last time the Cinémathèque provided Conrad Veidt in Le  Jouer des Echecs, Maria de Medeiros’ first movie, a beautiful surtitled copy of Helmut Käutner’s Unter den Brücken and Sylvie as a teenager in André Antoine’s Le Coupable. 

 

This trip their only rarity was a Reginald Barker from the teens that I missed. They were doing a Sam Peckinpah season. Ho Hum I thought (been there, done that) but it did include a large selection of his TV work - good news bad news. A lot of the showings were  from old murky VHS tapes. After a few of these, I told the desk that I had better copies on film. They said come back when the program department was there. I did and was referred to a young woman who said down the ‘phone they were prepared to accept them as a gift. The suggestion of a deal meant the end of that conversation. I never cease to wonder at the way people who are paid to deal with serious film expect other people to give them things for free and couldn’t help thinking that Henri Langlois would have been into the foyer like a flash, thrown an arm round my shoulder and starting working on a plan to steal them from me. I miss Langlois.

Chevalier

 The competing Forum des images did it’s Fantasy Movie and Korean seasons, which certainly provided unfamiliar material. Best thing I saw was Girls' Night/ Out/ Chunyudleui jeonyuksiksah, a nicely handled 1998 skin flick along the lines of the Hong Kong Erotic Nights. It was  the first film by Sang-soo Im, who did the Housemaid re-make. I would have liked to put in more time on these.

The price of a ticket to a movie there also gets you into their Mediatheque which currently has nine thousand allegedly Paris related items. I watched Kurt Bernhadt’s Le Vagabond Bien Aimé, the parallel French version of the Maurice Chevalier Beloved Vagabond, which was minor for a film with the talents of Darius Milhaud, Franz Planer, and André Andrejew, and Portraint d’un assassin another disappointing  use of celebrities - Maria Montez, Erich Von Stroheim, Pierre Brasseur, Aletty, Jules Berry & Dalio no less, in a  noirish post war French circus drama.

Fondation Jérome Sedoux

They are actually still building cinemas in Paris and Pathé, who now seem to own all the movie houses in Amsterdam, have moved into the serious movie business in a big way.  They set up their The Fondation Jerome Sedoux auditorium in a Building with an Auguste Rodin entrance near Place d’Italie to run silent archival movies and show a permanent exhibition of photo materials. With four hundred films running in Paris on a Sunday, I and a colleague I hadn’t seen in years met when we both homed in on same showing of a Lev Kuleshov serial there. Across the way Pathé are finishing a new main street cinema which will run seasons of Archival hits. Interesting to see how that goes.

I did see a bit of film making - hand held with a man walking through the Luxembourg Gardens and in the restaurant where they still have a photo of Woody Allen shooting Midnight in Paris, down stairs from the Hotel.  That was a big production - seven trucks including a generator van for the make up trailer on it’s own. Couldn’t work out what the films were because we don’t have the clapper board which gives the information any more. I saw a unit shooting in Milan and hopped out of the tram to watch. Turned out to be a Bollywood crew filming five shivering playback dancers in skimpy outfits between bursts of rain.

 

New French film was uneven. Pick of the batch was Benoît Poelvoorde in Le Tout Nouveau Testament. Benoît is a cranky old God (capital G) living in Brussels and tyrannizing his wife and child by confining the TV watching to the sports channel. Jesus is a one foot devotional statue who animates to give his sister advice. She revolts, steals the key to Benoît's computer and sends everyone in the world a text message giving them the date of their death, before escaping through linked washing machines. When Benoit follows indignantly, he arrives during a wash cycle and the alarmed house wife maces him.  On the record of Poelvoorde's great Le Boulet and Nouveau Monde this one is unlikely to surface here.

The Michel Gondry Microbe et Gasoline  is a fun departure with the kids taking their home built car on the road disguised as a timber shack; The Arnaud Despechin Trois Souvenirs de Ma Jeunesse/My Golden Days is also substantial, with Mathieu Amalric (himself currently getting a Cinematheque retro) remembering his youth. Yves Angelo's new Sylvie Testud movie Notre Fils takes a while to assert as it shifts between soap and issues. The Joann Sfar 2015 The Lady in the Car with the Glasses and the Gun (as well as the Anatole Litvak film made in France in 1970, there is a Baltic version) is mainly a voyeurist exercise with  leading lady Freya Mavor in various stages of undress, though the Japrisot plot occasionally asserts.

Marco Bellochio introduced his new Sangue Del Mio Sangue in person and I understand it even less well after he explained it. Great Carravagio styled images, a deliberately disorienting change of tone, terrific performances (Alba Rowacher does a walk on - just to be perverse). Attention grabbing stuff, but ultimately frustrating as all this significance loaded material proves to mean something only to Marco and his mates. I was tempted to be one of the people he went on talking to outside the Lumina but I figured I'd look doubly dumb not understanding the movie and not understanding the language.

My last night the Belmondo film didn’t show so I watched the new Jean Pierre Mocky Tu es si jolie ce soir in it’s place. The cashier was surprised I took on that. It turned out to be a barely competent slasher film.

 Rather that let that be my final impression I caught the last session of Kuroshi Kurosawa’s Kishibe no tabi/Journey to the Shore/Vers l’autre rive  which proved to be atmospheric and intriguing. The release of that had been supported by a retrospective of the director’s work.  

So I arrived at Pordenone after a battle with  cut price Ryanair who bring a full force to the term cattle class. It's really no faster than  the train or bus, with all the traveling to their chicken wire depots and waiting time. This was to be followed by another struggle with Trennitalia who specialize in making things not work. The flat share I was booked into proved to be a mile out of town, as the accommodation people explained indicating a point about a foot outside the map they gave out, and when I got there (after the taxi had left) there was no one home. That meant I was stranded somewhere I didn't know in a country where I didn't speak the language with a pile of luggage and rain looming. I thought things couldn't get worse and then I dropped my glasses and the lens fell out.

I guess I rose to the occasion because I got it all sorted out in time to catch the two O’clock session. Alessandro Blasetti's life's work in DVD was spread out on the dealer table at twenty five bucks a time. Being in terror of running out of cash I only bought one and the next day they were all gone - shades of the Sydney Ethnic Video hire store whose Blasettis all got stolen on their first week?

Anything after Pordenone was going to be an anti-climax but Milan was an abrupt return to movie goer reality. The DVD business, which was a major incentive to hit Italy, has shrunken out of all recognition. Ricordi Galleria had the best selection I ever saw but they have sold out to Feterinelli, who filled the space with (!) books. There was one shelf of familiar title discs. Feterinelli did have a more substantial selection in their store in the Stazione Feroviere but all the rare and unexpected material has vanished along with most of the outlets. There goes Salvatores, Tornatore and Aldo Giacomo and Giovanni from my understanding.  Whether movie enthusiasts have died out or shifted into the Internet ether I can't tell.

The so elegant Odeon Space Cinema has reverted  to the old Primo Tempo routine, inserting a sales interval arbitrarily into the middle of their movies. Subbura was the pick of what I saw, playing a pre-9/11 plot in a scenario of excesses - naked B girls O.D'ing on smack (I think), name stars, elaborate production and a victim hit by vehicles in two opposite traffic lanes. They were doing a red carpet gala while I was in the building. I left a movie early and found my only way out was UP the red carpet among the glittering celebrities. I wonder whether I made it into the TV coverage. Well L'Arlechinno around the corner is also a beautifully appointed auditorium, despite it's unassuming street level foyer and they didn't feel the need to flog Pop Corn and Coke in the middle of the movie but in both theaters I found myself sitting next to people who were texting through the show and couldn't be persuaded to stop.

When my wheelie bag (I felt that made me one of the people I always felt like hitting with their selfie sticks when they trundle the things down marble stairs)  rumbled round the luggage Carousel at Kingsford Smith, I had the sensation that I'd survived. By that time I had advanced disentery (again) hadn't slept for thirty hours, been on three trains and  three planes being directed to five different departure lounges in Jakarta, so I wasn't accentuating the positive.

 

Barrie Pattison