Scary movies - the early ones.

The Horror Movie - think Poe, Hoffman and Aleister Crowley mixed in with strip cartoon, has pretty well always been a subject of reverence for some. Over many years it was all the transgressive entertainment those who had no access to porn knew about.  There were more than a few never watched anything else. 

Even with its dedicated literature, outlets and producers, complete with devoted followers, surprisingly little was known about its evolution. How many could tell you about Sheldon Lewis? 

You Tube, as might be expected, has come to the rescue with significant, neglected material. A just about watchable copy of Roland West’s 1925 The Monster is there. 

West was an established producer-director in silent Hollywood, an associate of Joseph Schenk and William Cameron Menzies. Now, you are more likely to hear about the scandal that swirled around him and actress Thelma Todd, than his movies, though his horror titles the silent The Bat and 70mm. sound re-make The Bat Whispers still get the occasional showing.    

The Monster - Chaney, Austin, Arthur & James

The Monster is a signpost to the Horror Movie Cycle to come. It places comedy in an Old Dark House years before The Cat & the Canary. It’s an early monster movie Lon Chaney did without Tod Browning, making it easier to separate the contributions the pair made to their work together. 

We’re back in the Twenties American rural town where long lasting comic Johnny Arthur and Hallam Cooley, the two clerks in Watson’s General Store both have their eye on owner Edward McWade’s daughter Gertrude Olmstead. Arthur is mad on becoming a detective and has sent off for his mail order diploma, cuffs and gun. Cooley however has an advantage having used his savings for a dress suit to wear at the McWade’s dance party, where the attraction is a keg of cider.

However on the dark highway, a hooded figure has lured Dr. Herbert Prior into the ditch, with the mirror across the road routine, which is hard to make out in this copy. The abandoned nursing home is nearby. Is help available there? When the Doc. goes missing, city detective William H. Turner shows up and is scornful of Arthur’s interest in crime fighting.

Back out at the nursing home at night,  the hooded man sends the leads cascading down a chute into the subterranean chambers under the Institute. (like Cameron Menzies cutaway decor in The Bat) There they are greeted by Chaney’s Dr. Ziske in a white coat and sunken eyed make up and Walter James, his shirtless assistant Caliban (!) in a turban, along with crazy Knute Erickson who has this nice line in miming rolling an imaginary cigarette. 

Monster - Chaney & Olmstead

The doctor insists they stay the night - cranking down the steel shutters to make his point and he makes off with the revolver Arthur has given Coolley to protect fearful Olmstead. A door leads to an underground chamber sealed by a rock raised by a winch. Olmstead is rescued from the Terribly Strange Bed in the alcove only to have hands emerge from the sofa to drag her down and the clerks find themselves menaced by the doctor’s electric Death Chair, while Arthur’s attempt at escape, walking the telegraph wires, is frustrated by George Austin in the hood. Olmsted is wheeled in unconscious in a gauze cocoon for Chaney to perform his fiendish operation (don’t show this one to the kids) but Arthur proves resourceful and summons help with his detective school Roman Candle in a so so model shot.

With all this ground breaking it’s a pity The Monster isn’t a better movie. Chaney is of course in his element, all but turning to the audience and rubbing his hands while giving fiendish laughter. West’s handling offers a basic technique with the action mainly played in “American Shot” three quarter length figures. There are a couple of bad eye lines but the piece has generally competent direction. Production values get by. This is one of the few circulating Metro silent films not designed by Cedric Gibbons and W.L. Heywood’s decoration is notably less flamboyant than we might expect. Performances are broad but titles by Thomas Ince’s accomplished writer C. Gardner Sullivan get the most out of the mix of hick comedy and Gothic. “Bowman’s disappearance was Danburg’s biggest thrill since the milkman eloped with the bootlegger’s wife.”

This one wasn't the only silent film with a debt to Poe’s “The System of Dr. Tar and Professor Fether.” Maurice Tourneur did a Le système du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume / The Lunatics in 1913 and it was a source for German filmmaker Richard Oswald’s two Unheimliche Geschichten films.

Uncanny Tales - Schünzel, Oswald & Veidt.

Gaining a certain status from making 1919's Anders als die Andern, the first film to show homosexuality, Richard Oswald was never a master craftsman or a subtle artist but he was a major player in the German film Industry from the beginning of WW1 till he fled the Nazis and he got to work with the country’s best acting talent. Many of his performers would outlast the 3rd Reich or shift to Hollywood. Oswald's son Gerd Oswald would go on to make indifferent Hollywood features and some exceptional TV there - Robert Culp in the Outer Limits : Demon with a Glass Hand. 

In Oswald senior's 1919 Unheimliche Geschichten, called Uncanny Tales in English, customers leave the antiquarian bookshop at dusk and the owner hugs his volumes. However comes midnight in the deserted shop, the three paintings on the wall come to life – Conrad Veidt as Death, Reinhold Schünzel as the Devil and the then notorious Anita Berber as a Harlot.  They open five macabre stories in which we see the trio play out triangle plots.

The first episode "The Apparition" has traveler Veidt rescue Berber from her abusive ex-husband Schünzel, who dogs their steps checking into a hotel. When Veidt returns, he finds Berber’s room wrecked and the staff all deny she ever existed - OK montage dissolving between their faces - one of the few pieces of effective editing in the film, though  they manage well matched cuts and dissolves closer. The piece is mainly played by the cast opened out to camera in front of flat studio decors. It is only when he stops the top hat undertaker following a horse-drawn hearse that Veidt learns Berber died of a plague attack that the hotel wishes to conceal.

This is credited to “Die Erscheinung" a 1912 story by Anselma Heine but is a version of the often filmed Paris Exhibition story, seen as Veit Harlan’s Christina Soderbaum version Covered Tracks/ Verwehte Spuren, Terence Fisher’s So Long at the Fair from Anthony Horne’s 1947 novel and Joseph Newman’s 1953 Dangerous Crossing from a John Dickinson Carr radio play.

Second up is "The Hand" by Robert Liebmann (later to co-write Congress Dances) where Veidt and Schünzel throw dice for dancer Berber, who they both desire. Loser Schünzel kills his rival, but the specter of Veidt’s ghostly hand turns into a Beast with Five Fingers and haunts the murderer.

Eerie Tales: The Hand - Schünzel & Berber.

The third episode uses  Poe’s "The Black Cat", having drunken Schünzel kill wife Berber clinging to her cat. Admirer Veidt becomes suspicious and brings the silk hat cops. The dastard’s crime is revealed by the mewing of the animal he had walled up with the body (which we don’t see) in his cellar - very “Tell Tale Heart.” The shot of Berber, carried head downwards with her hair streaming, strikingly anticipates many monster movie compositions to come. 

Next, adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club” has detective Schünzel penetrate a secret society who execute losers in their card game, the ones who draw the Pique As/ Ace of Spades. Again we don’t see the playing cards though the dominating wall clock catches attention. Oswald himself is credited with the last story “The Spectre”, played in powdered wigs, where chatelaine Veidt allows his wife Berber to dally with braggart nobleman Schünzel, after he is found injured in the grounds (which we also never see). The intruder is psyched out by the fittings moving without explanation. 

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Eerie Tales: Berben, Schünzel & Bernhard Goetzke

 

In the book shop, the three apparitions have studied these stories with derision and, at day break, they retreat back into their frames only to terrify the bookseller when he find his paintings have come to life.

For 1919, this is accomplished, with the leads giving animated and carefully differentiated performances and got up in distinctive costumes. Oswald, who also has bit parts, does get traction of out of close-ups where we see passions blaze in a young but assured Veidt’s eyes. The infamous Berber does one of her Dances of Vice (fully clothed but managing the splits) and is not outclassed, though her bad teeth are a distraction. 

The copy doesn’t do their work justice (on You Tube one with English captions is best) but we can see that cameraman Karl Hoffmann and forgotten designer Julius Hahlo are already on top of their game. Oswald and Schünzel both would go on to direct indifferent musicals and emigrate to Hollywood.

Veidt - in The Last Performance.

 

 

 

 For Oswald, his 1932 second go round at Unheimliche Geschichten starred Paul Wegener, a genuine founder figure of the Horror Cinema, clocking up one student of Prague, three Golems, Rex Ingram's The Magician and this one. Released as The Living Dead, it may well be Oswald's best movie, though his loss of status as a leading film maker was accelerated by his unsteady control of  sound technique. Here journalist hero Harald Paulsen (also in Alrune with Paul Wegner and again together in Der fall Molander) is implausibly unconcerned by the devilment around him in some shots and he's able to hear a distant scream from his car off on the road. There's a disturbingly obvious jump in the music and the hissing track fades with the picture. The studio built exteriors are notably small scale. 

As in the 1919 film,  this one cobbles together “The Black Cat” and “The Suicide Club”, here made one continuous narrative. At night, reporter Paulsen is driving his actress lady friend Mary Parker (what happens to her?) to her performance when his radiator boils. The isolated house where he goes for water belongs to Mörder / Paul Wegener whose home is filled with his morbid inventions. He’s working on a miniature electric chair. 

Having heard a woman's scream,  Paulsen summons  Police Inspector Gerhard Bienert (in Lang's M) and his officers to the scene. They are re-assured by Wegener, until they hear the yowl of her cat, which he unknowingly walled up with the body of wife Roma Bahn.

Wegener escapes into John (Noseratu) Gottowt’s next door Mechanical Museum of Horrors, where the attractions include (clumsy) animatronic displays of the Executions of Emperor Maximilian and Marie Antoinette - along with The Captain from Köpenick (!) which Oswald would film twice. Paulsen gets into a fight with Wegener who brings down an exhibit’s guillotine, slashing the journalist’s arm.

Paulsen goes into Paul (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) Henckels' adjacent Unfallstation (spooky neighborhood this) for treatment, not aware when sheet covered Wegener is wheeled past him on a gurney, sent on his way to the Irrenanstalt where they are practicing The System of Dr. Tarr & Prof. Fether. 

Wegener in flight.

There, head doctor Eugen Klöpfer (Grune's Die Straße) assures Paulsen that Gretel Berndt, the blonde girl singing “The Last Rose of Summer” at the key board, is not an inmate but his niece. They pass the cells where the prisoners claim to be the staff - scarey. He invites Paulsen to diner, where suspicions are raised when the diners crowd round and Berndt starts doing her number over again at table, while Klöpfer waves a knife and offers to shave our hero. Flat Cap Porter Carl Heinz Charrell has been making random calls from the switchboard and the bobbies burst in to save Paulsen.

Wegener has escaped again and Paulsen starts investigating an institution at 13 Old James St. which seems to have no entrance. Climbing the fence he finds himself in Wegener’s Suicide Club, where the members are reacting variously to the practice of  sorting through a deck of cards till a member draws the Ace of Spades, calling for his execution. One jokes about having participated for five months, while young Viktor de Kowa (Kaütner's Des Teufels General) is falling apart with the stress.

“Das speil begin” with the diner suited members nervously picking cards from Wegener’s deck to be torn up when they prove not to be the fatal choice. Sure enough Paulsen gets Piq-As and is trapped in his chair by encircling metal bands, which prevent him operating the panel of controls out of reach in the table in front of him. Wegener watches from safety as the giant pendulum clock (Poe mixed with his hobby gadgets) counts down till the room fills with poison gas.

Paulsen makes an unexplained escape and imprisons Wegener in the chair and the cops break in again, with club members and staff being assured that they need not fear the outside world.

Paulsen in pursuit.

Despite its crude technique and illogicalities, this may be Oswald’s best film. In this nocturnal environment, Wegener’s shadow precedes him, studio moonlight throws the outline of the paling fence on the wall and sequences offer replicas of the giant dial of Metropolis, the asylum of Caligari and the tableaux of Waxworks. While the technicians are second rank, it is clear to see the tradition to which they belong.

Extraordinarily atmospheric still today, The Living Dead gives off the the sense of “evil” which the cycle will inject into the films noirs to come. We are long on violence to women again. These films have in extreme the feeling of menace that characterises the "Expressionist" cinema, the thing which Theodore Roszak's novel "Flicker" attributes to a Catholic conspiracy. It survives into Edgar Ulmer's work and it's what I found disturbing about Metropolis when I saw it at the age of thirteen. This is something which makes this body of work memorable whatever other qualities it may lack.

 
Oh - and Sheldon Lewis was a D.W. Griffith actor who notched up the villain parts in Pearl White serials, like The Clutching Hand, and a couple of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hydes.

 Barrie Pattison 2023

The Mating Game - Avati.

The Italian Cinema that we know begins post WW2, when a few Americans like Arthur Knight started reporting back from the scene, and it breaks up into overlapping periods - the realist movies, the Festival hits (think Fellini and Antonioni), Hercules/ Django/ the Mafia, Italian comedy, joined in the seventies by Gianni Amelio, Giuseppe Tornatorre, Etore Scola, Daniele Lucchetti and Pupi Avati. These are not mutually exclusive. Marcello Mastroianni plugs in pretty well anywhere on the spectrum. There is however no room for the pop musicals. Tough luck Adriano Celantano.

I was thinking about this because Palace has started a series of one-offs at Norton Street and they aired Avati’s 2011 Il cuore grande delle ragazze / The Big Heart of Girls. Watching this again reminded me how much I’ve enjoyed his work and how hard it is to come by it in sub-titled copies - and of course it’s a strain to keep focussed when you have to dust off the notes after four year gaps.

The Big Heart of Girls (a bit more effort on an English title there fellers) is pretty much unclassifyable. Titles play over the shot of the horse cart with the bride’s white veil trailing on the road behind it - nice image. It’s a nostalgia piece based on Avati’s grandmother and set in the thirties. The land is worked by share croppers under a proprietor. The film seems to have no beef with Musollini, whose cousin visits local beauty Isabelle Adriani and whose Blackshirts figure inconclusively from time to time.

However the contented rural setting is already accommodating photography and early motor cars. Narrator Alexander Haber's character is  seen, as a school boy played by Patrizio Pelizzi, teaching his older brother to read. The brother is musician Cesare Cremonini, his brief acting career peaking. We see a photo where Cremonini is surrounded by the local women he made out with. They have difficulty fitting them all in the frame.

The fillm’s key note is the forgiving attitude it takes to Cremonini’s womanising. However it looks like this is going to be enough of a good thing and land owner Gianni Cavina has a proposition. He offers “The Gargoyles,” his two  plain daughters living at home and derided as unshiftable now that they’ve passed thirty. He wants Cremoni to marry one. The incentive is that the groom’s family will get the security of their tied cottage for another ten years. Cremoni also has his price, a brand new Guzzi. With an eye on the clock for the one hour mandated wooing sessions, he keeps on asking “When do I get the motorcycle.”  Just as it looks settled, Cavina’s “semi virgin” second wife’s daughter (got that?) Micaela Ramazzotti comes back from the convent. Her golden curls stand out in the sea of dark hair and black shawls. Creepy middle aged men keep on asking her if she has a fiancé. Cremoni is immediately hooked.

The sisters, rather endearingly, take it well and, after some raised voices, it’s a done deal. There are problems however. Michaela’s sex education comes from the nuns and her trousseau dress maker, none of whom have any practical experience. Cremoni is stressed about keeping it in his pants and his family has to sell everything in sight to raise the cost of the big church wedding. Nevertheless Cavina’s Bridal motorcade sets off with him firing his rifle when passing the landmarks custom designates (front gate, highway, entrance). Unfortunately when they get to the church they booked, it’s closed with the priest in hospital with tonsilitis. This is your classic Avati scene with Cremoni chomping at the bit and half the feast his family has impoverished themselves to provide uneaten - while the blind musicians (very Shimazu) are fed in the loo where they can’t see their surroundings and they won’t put off the guests.

Avati

However there is a last act to come, with the Duce’s cousin’s squeeze showing up at the so nice honeymoon hotel Termine, which offers the newly weds the suite where a famous pederast died and sends Ramazotti fleeing South to her aunt in Bari, where she lays out her (sort of) husband’s name on the beach in sea shells, until an ending which should be gross but is rather winning. We find our perception at odds with Haber’s dismissive recollection. This is Avati's act - turning round our pre-existing attitudes. I don't think it would fly today.

The film’s notion that sex is grotesque can be found in the Italian Comedy entries of Pietro Germi and Lina Wertmuller but Avati’s sympathy with his characters makes his work unique. I’m always amazed that he doesn’t occupy one of the spaces reserved for the Viscontis and Almodovars.

Cremoni gets by but he was smart not to give up his day job. Ramazotti, married to Paolo Virzi, was beginning her career as an object of desire in Italian film, notably in Daniele Luchetti’s 2013 Anni felici. Among the mainly unfamiliar faces, spot former glamor stars Erica Blanc and Sydne Rome. The colour on the copy viewed was a bit dupey but there were good English sub-titles.

Barrie Pattison 2023

More French Film Festival 2023

In the tradition of Costa Gavras and L'attentat, Cédric Jimenez' Novembre, an account of the French authorities' response to the Bataclan terrorist massacre, proves to be the most substantial film in the event. We never see the atrocities but focus on the security services.

 Location shooting in Athens shows a failed attempt to arrest their terrorist suspect.  Under a black Balaclava there's Department Head Jean Dujardin and pretty soon we are back in Paris at his headquarters, where calm of the night shift is shattered when the ‘phones go crazy with calls about the Stade de France & Bataclan attacks. Overwhelmed with information, his room full of operatives struggle to organise this into something useful and track down the ISIS agents responsible.

Sandrine Kiberlain is manning the ‘phones but doesn’t have much to do. Anaïs Demoustier gets more attention. When she makes a connection that everyone is too busy to follow up, she goes off on her own talking on her phone as she walks past the suspect home with her dog. The subsequent raid with body armored agents pouring through the smashed in door nets an undercover narc. whose boss is indignant and Dujardin chews her out for not following procedure. 

One of the convincing features of this film is the way that despite the best training and equipment, human errors keep on intruding. A raid has the team moving on the wrong floor of the target block. Dujardin loses it interrogating an arrogant arrested Arab suspect, whose confidence is only destroyed when a search of his wallet reveals a Shiite girlfriend photo which Jean threatens to post on social media destroying the pair’s lives. He flies off to talk to the uncle of one suspect and Belgian cash transfers add more information. 

Sorting through Metro surveillance camera data nets visuals of suspects jumping turnstiles in tell tale orange sneakers which leads the operators to believe young Lyna (The French Dispatch) Khoudri ’s account of having spotted the wanted men associates of her girl cousin Sophie Cattani among the homeless under a motorway. She’s brought in for questioning, starting a process that means the frightened cousin’s death and, despite the undetakings Anaïs has made her, lands Lyna in jail for acting responsibly.

For a big action finale, Dujardin leads the balaclava men attack on the flat where the suspects have been located. The valued element of surprise is lost, after their plastic explosive blast fails.  “The door is intact.” The cousin’s screams can be heard and a detonated blast takes out anyone close. The robot camera they send in to check among the debris reveals the scale of
the destruction.

The pacing and staging are superior, giving the piece both conviction and interest. There is a feeling that it would be more plausible without the recognisable faces but the stars are excellent and there’s the discovery that demonstrating that he can do John Wayne as well as L’artist, validates Dujardin’s star status. The poster is him in a flack jacket and the finale is his grave address to the troops. This one is getting an extended run.

 

Also an attempt to generate a film worthy of a significant event, Notre-Dame brûle / Notre-Dame on Fire comes logically from Jean-Jacques Annaud  (Quest for Fire).

The opening locating material, with historical charts, airials and the personnel going through their daily routine is really more involving than the real Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral tour used to be. The casual depiction of activity is made more plausible as we share it with a new security man being inducted for his first day. Workmen doing restoration, over age personnel struggling up ancient stairs, shonky emergency systems and performing a mass that is a tourist spectacle, all set up what will prove a historic event.

As the seriousness of what is happening filters through to Generals Sam Labarthe and Jean-Paul Bordes at Paris Fire HQ, calls from alarmed witnesses are spaced by ones from an anguished woman whose cat is sliding down the steep roof outside her window.  The speeding fire trucks are obstructed by road work and desperate priests demand the rescue of relics which literally cost a king's ransom. Meanwhile the holder of the only vault key is on a day trip to Versailles and has to dash to the scene via defective coin in the slot push bikes.

Absurdist events alternate with genuinely disturbing material, ratcheting up the tension impressively - the blazing roof crashes into seats in the familiar public space, drops of melting lead puncture fire hoses while out of date stand pipes fail and firemen risking their lives have to be withdrawn to safety. Emanuel Macron makes an appearance and needs attention while the fire crews are flat out. The "forest" roof with its timber supports blazes away and there is a genuine risk that the belfry may crash and bring down the famous facade. Crowds gather on the Seine banks. Some are photographing events with their phones while others are praying. Technicians and engineers mix with clerics. In the middle of blazing destruction, the Pompiers chaplain rescues The Host. Saving the Crown of Thorns (twice) gets to dominate events in an dramatically unsatisfactory way. However the scene of a devoted officer putting forward a possibly suicidal plan, to be joined by unhesitating volunteers, is genuinely irresistible.

Arnaud reproduces this, shooting in other Cathedral locations. He often splits the frame - sometimes between actuality and his own staging, without the difference being visible. He manages some extraordinary images - the gargoyle that seems to be emerging from it's own hellish environment and the virgin with the tear on it's face, which surprisingly makes more impact edited into the trailer.

He succeeds in putting up imposing layers of meaning but I've got to go with the critics who dismiss his last scene with the little girl as anti climactic. The girl firefighter, at the end of of her first day of duty saying her next fire won't be anywhere near as good, is a better last thought. What happened to the cat?

Clovis Cornillac's  Couleurs de l'incendie / The Colors of Fire is a big French period (between world wars) drama which show cases it’s design, camera and performances but doesn’t really deliver as drama, with it’s Count of Monte Christo structure predictable from the moment that heiress Lea  Drucker spurns manager of the family banking empire Benoît Poelvoorde, when he moves on her after her father-founder dies.

There's an impressive opening, where the camera weaves among the crowd in the courtyard of the banker’s manor, around his funeral cortege. It travels without edits up the stairs with masochist tutor Jérémy Lopez to the first floor and into the room where young Octave Bossuet  is hiding under the bed. Events are shaped when the boy high dives out of the window onto the coffin.

We get the conspiracy between Poelvoorde, the tutor and her failed banker-uncle Olivier Gourmet and their undoing at the hands of Drucker in alliance with ex-chaufeur cab driver Cornillac in a Lenin beard and cap (bit obvious) who gives her a talking-to for assuming that, because he is working class, he’s also criminally inclined. Benoît’s scheme of bringing Lea down by giving her reliable information on Rumanian and Iraqui oil shares (compare Les brigades du Tigre with both Cornillac and Gourmet) knowing she will be ruined by her distrust, is an nice piece of fiendish infamy, complete with the ego trip bronze bust he's had sculpted, and he is impressive in departing from type. The comic element of his characters here  is suppressed until the moment he finds himself deafened and wiped out.

The Atliers Aeronautiques background with the development and demonstration of the prototype turbo jet motor is possibly the film’s best and most original feature. On the other hand, the digression of the sub-plot with Fanny Ardent as the opera singer, who the son idolises (bravely first revealed caked with her stage make up) giving a command performance for Hitler is just weird but the the dissolved aging on the boy is a striking piece of effects work. 

With it's ambition and skill, it's a pity this finally isn't a better film.

 

Eric Lavaine's Plancha / Happy 50 is yet another French study of the group. Think Vincent, Paul, François et les Autres,  Les petits mouchoirs or Un éléphant ça trompe énormément. When their flight to sunny Greek weather in Paros to celebrate Guillaume de Tonquédec’s fiftieth birthday is cancelled (the travel agent will give back their deposit one forlornly observes) the couples, who holiday together, shift to his ancestral home in Brittany to be greeted by rain. The only wasp in Brittany stings Lambert Wilson’s testicle and and foot in mouth complications are mainly engineered by him while Frank Dubosc is strung out waiting to see if the reorganisation of his work place means that he’s been fired. A blissful Jérôme Commandeur back from business success in Spain with a winning wife & child only aggravates tensions. Wilson running a secret DNA test through an ancestry service creates serious problems. The host staring at a wheelbarrow is the film's best gag - you'll see.

Wilson is top billed with Dubosc (Tout le monde debout / Rolling to You). the pair are on top of their game and surrounded by appealing women and OK second bananas to go with the scenic detail. We even run to an open air dance in local costume.

Umani is the second Gerard Depardieu film in the event. In this one master chef Gerard (first seen in the steam room starkers - note a by-pass scar) has not found happiness despite his up-market M. Quelqu’un chateau restaurant getting three crystal stars. Second wife, a suitably harried Sandrine Bonnaire, is doing the food critic on whom Gerard’s reputation depends and his two sons are not meeting his standards. Sky diving doesn’t fill the void in his life. He’s still haunted by the fact that during his ascent to fame, his demo meal was beaten out by a Japanese competitor’s umami - which introduced him to a fifth taste. Meanwhile old friend fisherman hypnotherapist Pierre Richard has found his first ever pearl in the oysters he’s been harvesting since the Japanese fishermen saved his business by providing a new strain of the shell fish.

Umami - Depardieu & Richard

What does Gerard do, with the assessment by key Internet influencer elegant Assa Sylla looming, but fly off to Japan to seek out the chef who mastered him. Cue cultural dissonance like automatic taxi doors, sleeper lockers, sled dogs, kimona, three wheel bikes and shared volcanic pool baths.

Gerard’s old opponent Kyôzô Nagatsuka has problems of his own and is not interested. He now proves to be reduced to a hole in the wall noodle bar and has a pill popping daughter crushed by her old flame’s revenge porn. However the nips finally prove winningly prepared to open out the secrets of their cuisine to the frog visitors, including playing violin to the pork meat animals. 

 Director-producer-writer-editor-designer and drone pilot Slony Sow also comes on as a thoracic surgeon. His thing is making multiple stories run simultaneously. It’s not as difficult to follow as it might be but, after a while, we realise we are not all that interested in any of them.

The contrasted settings are convincing enough but the character conflicts and resolution are too sketchy and attention wanders. Cast are good and Depardieu is on top of his game once more - watch the unfamiliar flavor experiences reflect on his features in close shot. We are not going to have him all that much longer. French film should come up with vehicles closer to his over sized talent.

Dany Boon is everywhere at the moment - repeating his inspector character in another Adam Sandler - Jen Annison Murder Mystery feature, producing The Black Pharaoh and doing an uncharacteristically serious turn in Christian Carion's La belle course / Driving Madeleine.

He’s a taxi driver who is having trouble meeting the bills. His radio operator calls him out for a job on the far side of Paris, over his objections. This turns out to be ninety two year old Line Renaud whose career goes back to Erich Von Stroheim and La foire aux chimères. She's taking a last look at her house before she’s shuffled off to the old folks' home. Line cajoles Dany into driving her to the places that were important to her. Vincennes has changed beyond recognition prompting flashbacks where her character young is played by Alice Isaac (also in Colors of Fire) - her romance with a WW2 GI, alone raising their child who is all she has to remember the Yankee Soldier, until her new welder boy friend roughs up the kid and she goes all Lorena Bobbitt. Her facing le Palais du Justice becomes subject of very Twenty First Century protests.

As the leads bond, Line manages to save Dany’s license and he takes her to diner as a sentimental gesture. Roll on a suitable tear jerker finale. The film is a pleasant enough showcase for a couple of nice performances, which give the stars a chance to depart from type.

Some French film makers seem to have only one exceptional film in them. Vera Belmont and Rouge Baisir, Yves Boisset’s L’Attentat (though I will admit with some guilt to enjoying Le Taxi mauve) and Cristian Carion’s later work can’t shade his powerful Joyeuse Nöel.

Docteur / The Good Doctor is four years old and gives the impression of having been shoved into the event to make weight. Now-veteran Michel Blanc manages to merge his former knock about comic and commanding character actor personae into one here. He’s a failing doctor, the only one left on call over Xmas and his plea to dispatcher Chantal Lauby for a replacement is treated dismissively. With his back going out, Blanc finds Uber Eats delivery guy Hakim Jemili arriving simultaneously at one of his appointments, with the door code that Blanc has forgotten 

Stretching the imagination, we find one time trainee medic Jemili recruited into doing Blanc's rounds, getting instructions over the 'phone ear piece. Wearing Michel's leather jacket and smart shoes is enough to bluff one of his pizza customers on a return visit.  The duo even acquire unwelcome celebrity status when they avert a mass carbon monoxide poisoning but their limits are tested when Jemeli has to piggy back the good doctor in to perform an unscheduled birth delivery.

The sodium lamp lit streets at Xmas are a plausible setting and the agreeable leads are on top of their game but I can't help feeling that French studios must have rolled out something more impressive during four years.

 

... and far from least we get animator Michel Ocelot's new Le pharaon, le sauvage et la princesse / The Black Pharaoh.

At first, with the instructor voiced by  Aïssa Maïga (in films by Michael Haneke and Michel Gondry) telling her stories to her silhouette class ( a familiar Michel Ocelot device) and then going to the no perspective, subdued colour Egyptian material, this one looked like it would be a cut price effort.

Black Pharoah - Ep. 3

Big mistake! Ocelot’s reproduction of hieroglyphic wall painting is setting us up for spectacular moments like our first view of the galley with its banks of rowers or his traveling sideways through the ranks of the massed army.

Egypt is ruled by a queen mother regent whose strategy to retain power is to insist that only a Pharaoh will be good enough for her Princess daughter. Young Sudanese suitor Tanwekamani is rejected out of hand, so he sets out with his followers, beseeching the giant animal heqded regional Gods of the country to grant him victory. Scarlet Osiris is particularly imposing. Tanwekamani unites the country bloodlessly, when the old rulers flee at his approach. There’s no question but that he’s the match for the princess and he promises his new mother in law a suitable retirement.

The second part of the familiar Ocelot episode format is set in medieval France and makes use of his Lotte Reinger like silhouettes, here adding shadowy facial detail. In his father's castle, the lonely boy makes contact with a captive in the dungeon and hears about the daughter the prisoner misses so much. Guilty of aiding his break out, the boy is condemned to death by his own father but, with the aid of associates, grows to be the Robin Hood like "Wild Beau”, going about dressed in folliage and giving to the poor. The once prisoner returns at the head of his own force and all ends happily.

The three-parter winds up in eighteenth Century Turkey, where a young prince forced to live as a pastry cook, makes a rendez-vous in the abandoned palace catacombs with the sultan's daughter. Forget Snow White or Kristin Bell's Anna in Frozen. This one with her independence and flowing scarlet hair breaking loose, instantly becomes our favorite toon princess. 

Ocelot has the skill of the best children's film makers in reviving the fairy tale world which we have forgotten as adults but still has the power to captivate. Each new film puts up another exquisitely realised ambiance - or as here, three. It's disturbing that he has not reached the public that prizes Disney or Miyazaki. It was these French Film Festivals that revealed him to me and I shall always be grateful.

Barrie Pattison 2023


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Shadows of Chinatown

Time was that you could see half a dozen new Chinese films running each week in Sydney (and Melbourne). Some weeks I did and quite a few of them made it into my year's best lists. Well that was them and this is now. A trickle of mainland product does still make its way into Event George Street. 

Sometimes I nerve myself up for a taste in the hope they'll deliver another Wolf Warrior - no such luck lately.

Since the eclipse of  Feng Xiaogang, Zhang Yimou has asserted himself as the major figure of Chinese cinema. He’s added Olympic spectaculars to his status as fifth generation survivor and he is the country’s one director whose work is likely to hit our cinemas. After the agreeable Yi miao zhong / One Second, yet another hymn to the past of cinema,  hopes rose with the appearance of his new Manjianghong / Full River Red, the current Chinese New Year box office champion, though we hear disquiet about the way it was given IMAX outlet monopoly distribution.

Zhang Yimou

There’s no doubt about authorship. It has the near monochrome colour scheme of  Zhang Yimou’s Ying / Shadow. The bright red of the cherry they offer close-ups is arresting in this setting and the arrival of dawn after two hours of gloom is sufficiently striking to have been given more significance. There’s court intrigue in the manner of his Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia / Curse of the Golden Flower and it’s as morbid as his Da hong denglong gaogao gua / Raise the Red Lantern.

The opening grabs attention, with the downward drone shot racing with the squad of soldiers seen running through the alleyways between the tiled roofs  of the Chancellor's residence. This one is another leather armor piece, military costume given special significance. It’s Song Dynasty (circa 1146 AD) China, and the Chancellor has set up a negotiation with the opponent Jin Kingdom, only for their ambassador to be murdered and the secret document, in the leather purse equivalent of a Diplomatic bag, to go missing.

 Manjianghong / Full River Red -  Jackson Yee, Shen Teng.

The order has gone out from prime minister Jiayin Lei for an immediate investigation supervised by deputy, misleadingly rotund-comic Yunpeng Yue. The scene with TV personality Shen Teng as the corporal, cheating execution by the drawing of straws, suggests we are in for a conman comedy. Turns out the murderous commander is his uncle Jackson Yee (the Lake Changjing films).

After some fast talking by Shen Teng, the pair are allocated two hours to unravel the mystery on pain of death, with them rapidly figuring that they will also be executed for knowing the state secrets involved.

Things then get to be increasingly complicated. The camera speeds through the lane ways backed by striking bursts of Chinese Yu Opera. The caged raven becomes significant and edged weapons are held to throats. No one is what they seem and there’s an accumulation of bodies. Any character shown sympathy is doomed. The film is big on violence to women.

Some of it is quite ingenious, like a “Purloined Letter” scene where the missing document is sitting on the table in full view as the characters mill about, though only one of them recognises it. 

What starts as a comedy becomes a detective story and ends with a patriotic oration about recovering lost territory (hint, hint) as the massed troops shout the now classic poem by the late General Yue Fei. Despite the considerable film making skill and big budget on display, two and a half hours of all this murder, plotting and betrayal is unpleasant viewing.

It doesn’t leave you curious about those hundreds of Chinese movies we are not getting to see.
 

Of course S.B.S. is another source and they are currently recycling director Shunji Iwai's 2018 Ni hao, Zhihua / Last Letter. Finding a Japanese director at work on a mainland production already seems a novelty but what would I know. I see maybe a dozen of their six hundred title annual output and it turns out Iwai was actually raised in China. 

 He's someone who occasionally figures on the fringe of our awareness. His 1996 Swallowtail Butterfly and 2001 All about Lily Chou-Chou got a few runs and The Last Letter recalls elements of his first movie the 1995 Love Letters, though the place of letter writing in our lives has shifted to the point where they have to have a motivating scene with star Zhou Xun (this film's producer Peter Chan's 2005 Perhaps Love), where her husband destroys her cell phone and they do cutesy communication on Apple symbol cups linked by string.

The plot is complicated to the point of confusion.  Even Hao Quin, the on screen writer, is thrown when he finds the school girl sisters he knew as a child wandering round the building with their large white dog. Turns out that Zou Xun had gone to the thirty year class reunion intending to announce that her sister Zifeng Zang (Aftershock) had died but Xun was immediately mistaken for her by everyone, including Hao Quin, who had a crush on the deceased, then upsetting her sibling survivor, who had fancied him. 

Last Letter - Zhuo Tan, Ge He.

After the funeral the children had re-distributed themselves among their relatives and we get their activities, cross cut with scenes twenty years previous. They find letters to which they fake replies. Hao Quin's obsession with the Zifeng Zang character, who had become the subject of his one autobiographical novel, gets to dominate this welter of sub plots and the film's most effective scene and possibly-unintended focal point is his meeting with Shanghai singer Hu Ge playing Quin's one time object of desire's worker husband who had courted her while working at her University kitchen ("While you were listening to lectures, I was cutting vegetables"). Ge's failed attempt at upward social mobility had left him a violent alcoholic. The dialogue between two men, who had fixated the same woman, is the most compelling element of the film and brings some clarity to what we are seeing.  

Most interesting is the setting in Dalian town in Northeast Chian Liaoning province, once part of Manchuria, with which the director has a family connection. The letters, a pivot of the plot, are written in calligraphy across the page, old people have a dance class in the park, the homes and businesses could be in a modern American or Australian town and the largely available-light winter photography by Japanese cameraman Kanbe Chiqui gives the piece a look different to the other Chinese films we see.

Last Letter, itself largely a remake of director Iwai's earlier work, which was in turn distantly derived from a Murakami Haruki novel, is now scheduled for another filming. It's one for the curious.

Barrie Pattison 2023