Tavernier - Voyage

Voyage à travers le cinéma français/  Journey Through French Cinema 

Script & directed by Bertrand Tavernier     

   

 It’s kind of suitable that the end of my European movie excursion should be Bertrand Tavernier's Voyage a travers le cinema francais his three hour plus answer to the Martin Scorsese films about Scorsese’s discovery of US and Italian movies. The Taverrnier documentary arrived with a Gaumont logo stating “from the very first...” and packed the 2.00 o’clock at UGC Les Halles.

The opening montage, of great shots from key movies beautifully reproduced, immediately wins over an audience. We are going to see usually exceptional material in the correct format. The film isn’t an account of Tavernier’s own work or a run through of French cinema history. It’s about the director’s discovery of French movies. We kick off with the story of WW2 shortages leaving young Taverier with TB for which he was sent to a sanatorium where they ran Le Dernier atout long before he became aware of it’s director Jaques Becker and his career, of which we get an analysis. We learn that Jean Paul Gaultier watches Becker’s Falbalas every year for it’s analysis of the fashion industry.

Starting with Tavernier’s dad filmed in the family garden the director used for l'Horloger de St. Paul, autobiographical elements like the Nickleodeon Cine Club and the time spent in the now demolished Cinémas du Quartier, along with Tavernier’s work on enthusiast
movie writing get coverage, in with his job as assistant to Jean Pierre Melville, who told Tavernier he was the worst assistant he’d ever had and introduced him to a producer friend who put him to work as a press officer. Missing is the story about Tavernier telling Sam Peckinpah that he might be a great director but he was a total menace to publicity, winning Tavernier the choice of promoting any film the approving  producer had on his books.

Also under the microscope are Jean Renoir (“How could the nephew of Auguste Renoir become an American citizen?”) and Jean Gabin, with whom Tavernier did a long interview and whose career is analysed giving as much time to films like Gas Oil as the acknowledged masterpieces. Tavernier finds it revealing that Gabin produced the reviled le Chat. 

Jean Gabin late career.

The Von

 Particular emphasis goes to Edmond T. Greville (“the ultimate cult director” – well his
1937 Mlle Docteur is better than the Pabst film it cannibalizes). I loved the story of
Greville being told by Von Stroheim that the actor intended to play an amputee in  his role in Menaces and the director, desperate, coming up with the half  mask to cover the character's WW1 injuries - the Janus face, War and Peace. The Von was totally absorbed with the mask idea and forgot about the amputee thing.

The surprise is when we get to Eddie Constantine, whose films are to Tavernier a break with the tepid French crime movies that precede  them. The punch up with the director in John Berry’s 1955 Ça va barder - gets as much time as Alphaville.

Voyage ends surprisingly with a long section on French film music repeating Trufaut’s endorsement of Maurice Jaubert, though I’m puzled how Tavernier can say that Le Jour se leve has no theme when the same nine note phrase repeats from the titles to the ending even coming up as the music behind Jules Berry’s music hall dog act.  Tavernier rightly picks out the great Joseph Kosma (triply forbidden to work on Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis as a Jew, a Communist and a fugitive, but still providing the music for the mime scenes) and resolves the question of why, earlier in this production, the ending of Renoir’s Partie de Campagne wasn’t shown when Tavernier described it as the most touching scene in the cinema.

Watching his documentary is like talking to Tavernier himself. I keep on wanting to disagree with what he's saying while admiring the passion and effort behind his choices and there's always the odd moment of connection - our shared delight in Delannoy's 1939 "Von Sternbergian" Macao, l’enfer du jeu which gets early prominence equal to Renoir and Gabin - and Eddie Constantine and Jean Sacha.

I sweat on it turning up locally with subtitles. Part Two is said to be on the way.

KOREA AT THE CROSSROADS

Ahn Jong-hwa’s 1934 Cheongchun-eui sipjaro / Cross Roads of Youth, the one surviving Korean Silent Movie, has become the subject of a great night out restoration which comes not only with a Byeonsa Talker (Korean equivalent of a Japanese Benshi narrator), a four piece orchestra and (hey this is new!) a couple of accomplished musical theater vocalists who step into the spot light and do songs in Korean to accompany the action.

We kick off with yet another train entering a station, a brief montage of passing rails Berlin Symphony of a City style and disembarking passengers, among whom we spot hero Lee Wong-yong who has traded village life and carrying loads of firewood for a job as a porter at Gyeongseong (now Seoul) Central Station. An upright youth, he helps and old woman and her daughter rather than well dressed foreigners.

His luck is changing however as he catches the eye of cheerful “Gas Girl” service station attendant Kim Yeon-si. Meanwhile his aged mother has died in the village and his young sister Shin Yil-sun comes to the city in an attempt to find him. However villainous mustached sharpies are on hand. Money lender Park Yeon is there to prey on vulnerable girls and he manages to detour both the sister and the Gas Girl via the beach to his swank apartment, where he attempts to have his evil way of the sister.  Learning of the pump girl’s attempt to re-schedule her ailing dad’s debt with the dastard, Lee Won-yong goes to the low life’s home only to be humiliated, trampled and sent on his way without realising that both the young women who hold a place in his affections are inside.

However our hero discovers the awful truth and sets out to meet out justice to the slicker-usurer at his swank club, where the bouncers are ineffectual in stopping him. Our lead’s two comic side kicks seem to only function as observers.

Catching up with the bounder, who thought he had escaped unmarked, the burly hero gives him what for before being restored to the adoring females.

In fact the actual movie, which was a poll-topper in it’s original market, is the weakest element of the show. Murkily reproduced and having some technical flaws and a creaky melodrama plot, it ranks below the Japanese classics or the best of the Shanghai movies of it’s day.

The glimpses of  Gyeongseong are less that revealing but we can spot the same contrast between the innocents of the countryside and the decadence of the city, where women smoke in bars and the well off drive cars. It’s not too far away from what we see in thirties Australian films. Along with the sustained shot that’s out of focus and the uprights that are not quite vertical we can notice a few touches of visual sophistication - the side kicks adding chalk tears to their drawing of the heroine in adversity, a pan to a mirror which shows the distressed girl in the heavy’s flat or a striking close over the shoulder filmed downwards on a stair case.

The restoration was a major effort as all the archive had was untitled picture which baffled them confusing the female characters until they got in a lip reader who spotted Shin Yil-sun articulating the word “brother” and found other clues and they delved into newspaper files which put the plot together for them. I’m still puzzled about the faithless sixteen year old fiancée who makes the hero carry water for her?

The copy which came with good English subtitles was backed with the full voice over, not just doing the characters’ speeches but adding comments on the action and setting, deep breaths, the odd sound effect and even some critical comment like noting that Lee Won-jong emerges from the big fight with his make up smeared or that all the girls that the Byeonsa is re-voicing himself sound the same. That one got a big laugh. We are not all that far away from Robert Youngston’s 1950s silent movie compilations.

The score, which might have fallen back on wood blocks and single string fiddles, instead
goes for a Tango sound, at first seeming anachronistic but on reflection correct for a country then under Japanese occupation with overseas musical influences flowing in.

All this delighted a mix of Korean and other nationalities who turned up, not a full house but a good showing. The movie enthusiast community was as usual conspicuously absent.

2016 SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL.

Córki dancingu / The Lure,  Down Under, Everybody Wants Some!!  Grüße ausFukushima /Greetings from Fukushima / Fukushima Mon Amour, In the Sadow ofthe Hill, Juste la fin du monde / It's Only the End of the World,  Mahana,Magallanes,  Miss Sharon Jones & Hot Type, Mul-go-gi / A Fish,  Raman Raghav / Psycho Raman, Saint Amour, Smrt u Sarajevu /Death in Sarajevo, Toni Erdman. 

What the good citizens who put up the few hundred quid it took to set up the first Sydney Film Festival with the help of the films societies (remember film societies?) more than half a century back would say about the current event is speculative, with their two
hundred plus movies in a dozen venues and flags flapping on civic lamp posts. Once the total gets past fifty movies of course it is impossible to take in everything. It becomes half a dozen film festivals. I picked my way through the program and probably saw more worthwhile material than ever at one of these - until I got into the ten dollar dazzlers they were selling off. This is not they way to get the best value out of the event. Often the best material and the films that justify film festivals are surprise discoveries. I checked my selection against the prize winners and the Herald coverage and there was minimal overlap - In the Shadow of the Hill which I saw for a comparison with Tropa de elite.

The couple of films with Madman’s logo on the front should show up at popular prices and quite a bit of the material I ignored is gone for ever. Trouble is that those arrive without documentation and you make expensive mistakes if you just wade in.

Also though the festival is now the only local organisation with the dollars to handle this, they continue to ignore the chance to offer the ground breaking retrospectives that still surface from time to time in international Cinematheques. Maybe it’s just as well, as the ability to screen vintage material correctly is fast fading here without anyone much worried. Also it looks like there still are people who haven’t seen all Martin Scorsese and they are a better financial risk. The great man was not freighted out to present his work though the film maker introductions were one of the more agreeable features of the event.

Agnieszka Smoczynska’s Córki dancingu/  The Lure proved to be a handsome ‘scope production mixing punk numbers, excess and fantasy, with Splash and “The Little Mermaid” mashed in. Not what you might expect of a Polish film with Agnieszka Holland’s consultant credit buried in the titles. 

Córki dancingu : Michalina Olszanska, Marta Mazurek denurely poised.    

At night mermaids (or more accurately Sirens) Silver Mazurek and Gold Olszanska surface to do their duet, causing to the musicians playing on the shore to invite them out of the water before Preis (Four Nights with Anna) lets out a scream. Back at the decadent night club, the duo are accepted as back-up singers and there’s a demo of pouring water on their legs which transform into long fishy (undivided) tails.

The club acts include a stripper, Preis’ songs and eating the head off a budgie. Things get rough with Olszanska coming in covered in gore which she passes off as a victim cow, though we know better. She bites the thumb off one of the clubbers who displeases her and the sisters get dumped off a bridge wrapped in rugs.

Menacing mermaids must be in at the moment with this one and Stephen Chow’s Mei ren yu. It’s kind of unsatisfying that the makers can’t come up with something more involving than the fairy tale story line that they keep on losing in gross out detail but having a couple of appealing young women go topless for a large part of the action does get attention.

An ocker comedy about the 2005 Cronulla riots - maybe - but that needs real finesse. Think the Farrelly Brothers.

With Abe Forsythe’s Down Under we kick off with the actual text message that called for patriotic Australians to drive the menace of the Lebanese off  the Beaches sent the day before, and we get into actuality or re-staged actuality of the streets engulfed with rioters in “Ethnic Cleansing” shirts and police driving back hoon attackers.

The film’s action takes place the next day, with Ockers and outraged Lebs recruiting (“There’ll be fuck loads of cars”) to patrol the streets that night. The Aussie lead is more worried about his missing brother and looking after the high functioning Downs Syndrome kid cousin who just slammed the family car into the garage roller door. Uneasily enlisted by a gung ho friend, they are given a WW1 303 with one bullet and a grenade held together with Blutak. A Lebanese car lot do better, scoring a hand gun from a luxury meths lab. who demand the driver’s trousers - “to make sure you’re not wearing a wire.”

The film is planting the elements for the ending rather obviously at this stage. There are a few successful blackly comic moments, like the new car load of hard case racists demanding the boy beat up a passing Leb (he turns out to be the Chinese news agent they know, out walking his dog) or the car diverting from it’s Patriotic mission with the takeaway kebabs the driver’s pregnant girl friend demands, under the penalty of three maintenance orders.

The night time suburban beach atmosphere is quite well set up with the observation that it’s Gallipoli, except this time it’s our turf, but the development is marred by that familiar movie character ability to take beatings undamaged and the fact that the people fronting it remain fugitives from local sitcoms in which they were recruited.

Music is particularly destructive to the balance between cautionary tale, movie suspense
and knockabout they are trying to establish.

Even writing about a film using the Cronulla riots as a subject is a delicate task. TV director Forsythe  (the “Ned Kelly was Irish” gag recalls his earlier Ned) needed to bring more than the sensibility of a Housos episode to pull this off. It will be interesting to see what sort of a response his  film gets.

Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! ( Dazed and Confused 2) opened the next week and doesn’t really require comment. It kicks off  like a slicker 1980 edition of Porkies, complete with gross out banter among the arriving college baseballers and a scene of girls mud wrestling.

 The film’s got an off putting mood of endless competition - “practice as you play” while the undercover scout may be painting the roof outside the fence. It also runs to technical
flourishes like the one take (?) gross out scene in the locker room or a nice split screen ‘phone call. Everything is a bit too shiny and clean.

However Linklater shows in the relationship between jock Blake Jenner and theater major Zoey Deutch, who he suspects may have taken a faked interest in him to put down the louder guys in the car. Nice common ground scenes in knowing the difference between Rod McKuen and Walt Whitman and being used to being the best at what they did in college, suddenly finding themselves surrounded by other people with that same experience. The film is genuinely likeable.

Anything from from Doris Dörrie is an event though her new film Grüße aus Fukushima /Greetings from Fukushima / Fukushima Mon Amour is not her best work. It repeats her attempt to come to terms with Japanese culture that we saw in Erleuchtung garantiert/ Enlightenment Guaranteed  and Cherry Blossoms but moves us into the new area for her, scary ghost movie, done in striking ‘Scope black & white.

After a disaster that leaves her trying to hang herself in her bridal gown, very blonde Rosalie Thomass leaves Germany for what proves to be a gig as clown entertainer in a hostel for aged refugees from the Fukushima melt down. Unlike her Japanese mentor’s plastic bag ballet, Thomass’ Hula Hoops exercise routine fails to engage the oldies. One gives her a demo and comments “Bullshit.”

Our heroine is about to give up when she’s recruited by another resident, Kaori Momoi (Memoirs of a Geisha, Sukiyaki Western Django), into driving her into the “safe” zone which has now been re-opened, though no one wants to be there. Turns out that the ex-geisha has repeatedly tried to move back into her old, derelict house. The hostel people are angry but Thomass does a U-Turn seeing her new mission as working with the Japanese woman on restoring her home.

There is complication in the form of the girl spirit of  Momoi’s former pupil who sheltered with her on the one leafless tree during the tidal way. Momoi’s blames Thomass for her grief attracting the spirits and puts salt on her shoulders to drive them off. They are like the ghosts in Kyoshi Kurosawa’s eerie Kishibe no tabi/ Journey to the Shore refusing to believe they are dead - why didn’t we score that one here? 

Turns out that there’s more to Momoi story than she’s letting on.

The spooks, done in stretch printed high contrast, are effective and the film carefully emphasises the striking imagery it places in the frame - the fields of black bags filled with contaminated soil, white compressing gates with arrows, the sash still hanging on the tree branch, Thomass’ dress dwarfing Momoi’s daughter when she holds it up to put it in the wash or the cat headed man. 

As always Dörrie manages to make her bumbling characters endearing (the saki drinking session with the bald priest is particularly nice) though here the veneer of charm over disturbing material is stretched thin in a couple of places.

Australian Dan Jackson’s In the Shadow of the Hill is a handsome documentary and effective special pleading. Following FIFA’s World cup and anticipating the Olympics “one stupid white man with a camera”, as he characterises himself,  is drawn into the affairs of  Rocinho the Rio hillside favella  in the process of a “pacification” program.   A local man last seen being taken away by the police becomes the subject of a campaign by his family, run despite police threats and parliamentary offers of protective custody.

The world wide “Where is Amarildo?” campaign finally unites the slum dwellers, the  media and the aware population in a massive demonstration in front of the parliament.“All Brazil is come together.” A police Captain and twelve of his associates go to jail.

While this is happening, a local artist stages his Via Sacre / Way of the cross street theatre piece despite being told that all available funding is going into the Sports Events, and a dispossessed healer with cancer makes herself over into Miss Passionfruit, a recognised public entertainment figure dragging herself out of poverty.

Interviews include Amarildo de Souza’s family and civil rights lawyer Jao Tancredo who are seen facing off the police. Jackson manages to include a shot of a dog walking over a “Where Is Amarildo” poster, an actual fire fight, one distant view of Christ the Redeemer on his hill and a single night time glompse of  advancing black beret BOPE troops, the only police force which carries no handcuffs.

Put this to gether with José Padilha’s alternate view Tropa de Elite movies, which are briefly excerpted, and you still only get an incomplete account of the favellas but it’s enough to leave you profoundly disturbed.

The event’s most hyped film was Xavier Dolan’s Juste la fin du monde / It's Only the End of the World based on a play by one Jean Luc Legrace previously filmed in 2010.

This kicks off in a plane taking Gaspard Ulliel to the family he hasn’t seen for twelve years. Arriving by cab he is immediately assailed by complaints that he should have had them drive him and manages to get into close over the shoulder two shot dialogue with each member of the family in turn - sister in Law Marion Cotillard, mother Natalie Baye in a red wig, sister Léa Sedoux and resentful tool maker brother Vincent Cassel. It would be hard to make a bad film with this cast but Dolan gives it a go.

There’s muted colour, some Goddard (Jean Luc not Paulette) style driving with thecamera in the back seat behind the silhouettes of the brothers, a misleading flashback, a ‘phone call that sets up the disturbing information that the family don’t have and a bird appears to fly out of the cuckoo clock. The most exciting thing to happen is serving desert.

I found myself dozing, which meant I missed a key plot point.

Dolan is agro about the bad notices his cast have received and with him getting the Cannes Grand Prix you’ve got to wonder what came in second.

Hispanic film is always the major tradition we know the least about.  Salvador del Solar’s Magallanes is remarkably assured for a first film. This one kicks off  with chauffeur lead Damián Alcázar driving wheelchair bound Colonel (the great) Fedderico Luppi and, with his “Taxi” sign stuck back on the windshield, picking up Magaly Solier (Blackthorn) taking her to what proves to be a product rally for a something called U-Life where, like a hot gospel preacher, the MC flogs the cosmetics line she can’t sell in her beauty salon. We’re just getting interested in this when it turns out to be a misleading digression.

In his rat hole cellar home, Alcázar has a sketch of the girl and a photo of her with a younger Luppi. This triggers an intriguing low tech. scam which evokes sequences by Kurosawa (Tengoku to jigoku / High and the Low) and Brian de Palma (Body Double). The most audacious set piece however, even if it doesn’t fully succeed, is Solier giving Alcázar a haircut and shave. His schemes unravel with rejection and violence leaving him increasingly isolated.

The ugly portrait of seedy Lima in its growing prosperity, after a period of Shining Path terror and ferocious military reaction, is effective but the movie’s strongest moments are it’s shots of the characters’ faces. Alcázar, Solier and the support are exceptional but it’s aged Luppi who dominates each of his brief scenes, projecting unquestioned authority run to seed. The cut to him with a chock ice is beautiful. The progress of the yellow envelope of in the final reels is also great story telling.

Remarkably articulate on film and in person, Del Solar’s proposes art as the way to address the area’s violent past rather than polemics or the courts. He uses talents from across the “Ibero American Industries" is an attempt to reach a wider public.

Intriguingly the film has the same conclusion as John Lvoff’s also remarkable and under screened 2001 L'homme des foules - the secret policeman denied punishment. It would be interesting to know if  del Solar was aware of the precedent.

Mahana proved to be New Zealander Lee Tamahori’s best movie - to date - and his most memorable effort since Once Were Warriors launched him and its star Temuera Morrison as internationally recognised  personalities.

We’re soon into the vintage car race between the Mahana and the Poata Maori families. There’s tension between Morrison and grand son Akuhata Keefe, who was fourteen when he was cast in the part. Morrison has him slopping out the barn at the house rather than going out with the older members shearing distant farms.

The kid is at “that damn Pakhea school” where he’s memorised George Bernard Shaw’s “A family is a tyranny dominated by it’s weakest member” as well as a suitable John Wayne quote and he speaks out against the severity of the justice system, instead of thanking the judge, on the class excursion to the courts where no Maori is spoken. White settlement gets a mixed report card in this film but it’s not the subject. This one is about holding families together in the face of the change that new culture, the impending shift to cities will bring.  Morrison is the man who kept his own from fringe life and digging
roads, giving him an ambivalence like the one Jake the Muss had.

The climax comes when the boy defies him and his father defends the kid against the old man’s brutality. His family are banished but grandma gives them her run down house and land (communing with digital bees there). After an impressive storm rips the sheet iron off the roof and his dad is injured young Keefe takes charge, getting shearing work and entering the Golden Shears competition against his own and the rival clan - another set piece. It would be interesting to know if Tamahouri taught his actors to shear or found shearers to act.

These characters were watching The 3:10 To Yuma and Flaming Star the same time that I was, which has a personal relevance to go with all the unfamiliar material. The flying wedge formation making their menacing haka like entrance to the Tungee funeral at the community hall (which contrasts with the white man’s church) is particularly disorienting.

Mahana Temuera Morrison

Mahana has an exploratory feel like The Learning Tree, where Gordon Parkes became the first black American to direct a Hollywood movie. It is not without self consciousness and the occasional irritation (why don’t they clear the cobwebs before they hang curtains at the rundown house) but his is a great looking film and it is saying something about families that has a whole lot more conviction than Juste la  fin du monde.

In there with Michael Moore and Ken Burns, Barbara Kopple has entered the Brahmin cast of the documentary world with her two Oscars, (Harlan County USA & Wild man Blues) and thirty productions behind her. She got two films into the current even.

Miss Sharon Jones covers a performer called a female James Brown who was told she was “too fat, too black, too short and too ugly” to be a singing star, but managed to run up a three decade headliner career.

We start of  with Jones holding a handful of her own hair as her head is shaved in preparation for the treatment that may save her life from pancreatic cancer with the question of her recovery for the demanding world tour that has been booked for the following February looming. “I’m responsible for everybody’s pay roll.” 

Intercut with performance and interview footage, we see her receiving chemotherapy and home care. The film weaves back through her life, starting in a district where the store had a parrot trained to scream “nigger stealer” when a black customer came in. After entry level jobs (including a run as prison guard) she managed to work up star status. She gets a float in Macy’s parade and her dream of dancing on the show with Ellen is realised (with minimal coverage.)

The people around her seem devoted and there is no hint of resentment when one of her musicians gets a regular spot in the Jimmy Fallon Show’s band. Jones performance energy is extraordinary.

A handsomely mounted film, to a soul music fan this one would be a treat.

Also on show is Kopple’s three year filmed coverage of Nation Magazine Hot Type, which has been stating the anti establishment case in the US since 1865, a subject with a built in following among her potential audience. Foreground are the magazine’s current editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, and her predecessor and mentor Hamilton Fish.  Heuvel describes her experience of guidance from Fish as Talmudic ”You’d leave the office more confused than when you went in.”

The film emphasises the internship program (apparently everyone there started as an intern) and shows them following the advise that they were given about not having a professor write about Venezuela instead of sending a reporter to Venezuela, showing their journalist (and Kopple’s crew) on the ground in Haiti, (three hundred thousand still homeless after the earthquake) Wisconsin and North Carolina where the Civil Rights campaign is struggling to hold the ground won in the sixties - protesters with duct tape over their mouths.

This comes with a historical sketch showing that the magazine began as the voice of the
Republican party speaking for the dispossessed after the civil war, shifting to it’s present
stance in WW1 and getting up steam about “(Senator) McCarthy’s disloyalty to the
truth.”

As revealing as their treatment of the Big Issues, are marginal touches like the complaint that editorial passed copy with the question mark, that should have been inside the quotation marks, outside them or the writer who wants to do Breaking Bad saying cultural criticism is  relevant too.

The film is amusing and holds attention. The craft aspects, cutting, recording, graphics and  narration by Susan Sarandon and Sam Waterston impress. It makes it’s subjects seem smart and appealing. You’ve got to feel recruited when you see one of their ten year olds leading protest chants on a bull horn. They double this up by closing with the clip of vanden Heuvel leaving the normally super articulate John Stewart at loss for words when she lists the shifts in attitudes the magazine has seen.

As much as her skill as a film maker, you’ve got to admire Kopple’s ability to get her work out to an audience.

Also a first film Mul-go-gi / A Fish  comes from Hong-min Park it’s Korean director who spent a year preparing, absorbing the atmosphere of the location.

It’s a mistake to try and construct a plot out of the non consecutive glimpses of a Professor whose wife has left him and a private detective claiming to have located her as a Shaman, intercut with two fishermen in a fog bound studio row boat having a  Beckett like conversation about the stupidity of fish. When that pair decide to sashimi the catch, it chants in protest and the characters all get to meet in a shack where the reflections in the mirror are wrong. Throw in a bit of Cocteau (the character looking over the side for the one who isn’t in his boat anymore) and some Buddhist ritual.

Well, weird can be all right and there are a few moments and images that do intrigue in this one but not enough to reward viewing at length. The 3D photography makes the textures of  waves & straw matting striking and achieves the floating image quality we don’t get much now, making it the film’s major feature. 

The Indian Raman Raghav 2.0 / Psycho Raman is a grim mash up of Crime & Punishment and le
Juge et l'assassin in greenish, grainy colour from the director of Gangs of Wasseypur .

Nawazuddin Siddiqui is doing it tough, eating garbage and having nowhere to stay so he retrieves a bent iron bar and moves on his sister who has escaped his advances and started a family - which he promptly offs. The (fuzzy) image of him running in his bike helmet dragging the pipe along the floor is genuinely disturbing.

Detective Vicky Kaushal recognises his photo as the man who used to hang round the police station confessing (“I am God’s own CCTV camera”) to his previous murder and not believed. His associates fail to trap the fugitive in the back alleys when he kills a police informer, and hides under the surface of a fetid pool emerging covered in muck.

Kaushal proves to have problems of his own getting dope from the Nigerian whose side kick he doesn’t hesitate to blow away and treating his attractive socialite mistress badly.

Siddiqui offs the Dhulipala’s maid, getting her house key, and when Kaushal brings a girl he picked up at a festival to her flat, the cop ends up killing the mistress observed by his quarry who permits himself to be brought in and explains that they are now in a symbiotic relationship determined by the Death God and the only thing which can prevent him taking the blame for the cop’s killing is the testimony of the festival girl. Ends with Kaushal at the witness’ door.

It’s really too nasty to be entertaining and too ritualised to be convincing but it does have atmosphere and menace. The division between the poor who sleep out of doors and the well off with cars and well furnished homes is obvious.

Benoît Delépine &  Gustave Kervern (Aaltra, Mammuth) are among the best we have now. They have become the heirs to Marco Ferreri and Bertrand Blier, doing their great balancing act between art movie and Grands Boulevards big picture.

The pair’s Saint Amour has an univolving start with farmer Gerard Depardieu grooming his giant cow while son Benoît Poelvoorde goes drinking round the regional wine pavilions at the agricultural show. He alarms Picardie region hostess Marthe Guérin Caufman, who he failed to pick up the year before, and ends up sleeping in the straw with penned pigs. 

It’s fascinating to watch Depardieu and Poelvoorde meshing, - stars from different generations and traditions. Father and son soon pile drunk into the taxi driven by  stroppy Vincent Lacoste and start out on a two thousand Euro cab fare tour of the real French countryside route that is till now only represented by wine bottle labels stuck on their map. This sets up sets up misleading comparison with the agreeable local Paul Hogan - Shane Jacobsen Charley and Boots and a few more. However it’s not long before the film escapes into the funny-quirky zone where we find Delépine-Kervern

The first clue is that Lacoste reproaching Depardieu for his raucous snoring in the hotel room proves unjustified when they go into the next door garage and find a complete family in sleeping bags. Benoît enters the W.C. where his recently widowed dad is making an intimate phone call from one of the stalls and the film’s cell ‘phone becomes one of  its best inventions.

Their travels get to involve Benoit getting picked up as “Mr. Misery” by a car full of green wig drunken merry-makers and waking in drag. Lacoste detours to find old flames disastrously. He has the travelers confidently charge a hotel breakfast to a random hotel room number and as they tuck into the lush buffet, the aged diner at the next table (Andréa Ferréol no less, confirming the Ferreri connection) rumbles them. It’s her room number they picked.

That works out OK for Gerard with the driver commenting “I though it was only in movies that old guys got laid.” Benoit gets action too with the well built Ovidie, the Real Estate saleslady he’s trying to scam and he performss the 12 stages of drunkeness montage. When they ask directions from red head Céline Sallette on horseback, she heads them into the tree top cabins park where they have to break the eggs for her omlette before she confides she needs the help of all of them.

Sallette riding past the Tour Eiffel is a great image and the farm work ending is a warmer variation on what we expected from Blier at his peak.

Danis Tanovic comes from the heart of Film Festival / Ethnic broadcaster land and represents a kind of film that is losing ground to Saturday Night Fever and Apocalypse Now on SBS. Why the tax payer should fund showing Saturday Night Fever and Apocalypse Now, when Insurance Companies and the Fresh Food People are only too willing to bank roll them on the commercials, is doubtful. After the fate of Channel 44, SBS must feel the need to demonstrate their importance with viewer numbers.
Tanovic's new Smrt u Sarajevu /Death in Sarajevo is from the Boznia-Hertzogovenia film
industry with which, on the other hand, we can't claim an over familiarity.

The action kicks off with trim concierge Snezana Vidovic making her way, accompanied
by the snaking Stedicam, through the corridors of manager Izudin Bajrovic’s failing
Serajevo luxury hotel. It becomes the major character. 

An E.U.congress is scheduled and their inspector is rejecting the clapped out Olympic cutlery that V.I.P.s, including Bill Clinton, used in better days. No one, including the manager has been paid for three months, and the staff are going on strike. The children’s chorus of welcome is practicing in the lounge and has to be fed cheese sandwiches while visiting French V.I.P. Jacques Webber is rehearsing his speech watched on the CCTV cam, that shouldn’t be there, by the security guy who does lines of coke off the cell ‘phone he uses to argue with his wife about buying a new couch.

Meanwhile on the roof, a TV reporter is doing  interviews for her program on Balkan history (the real life authority even gets a name caption on screen). Her next subject is Hadzovic, an agro descendant of the Arch Duke’s assassin. The discussion becomes heated to the point where she leaves her assistant to continue the recording and gets into an on-going rant with that “Chetnic Assassin” finally reaching to the stage where they seem likely to get it on.

Everything of course goes pear shaped

The dispiriting recounting of Balkan history they jam in is the most interesting element. The personal stories aren’t bad but the everybody fails ending is antic climactic and a downer.

Performances are strong and the muted greenish colour gets by. Nice to see authoritative Webber (the Depardieu Cyrano) getting top billing.

Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann  is too long and not clever enough. It’s mainly a star turn for Sandra Hüller who commands on camera, sings and gets naked.

We kick off with grey haired  Peter Simonischek joking with the German postman about mail bombs and leading his blind dog around. He goes off to visit his daughter Hüller, who is with a firm consulting on outsourcing in Romania and she fits him in around her day, taking him to the American Embassy reception where he passes himself off as a diplomat.

They have a fight and she watches him take a cab to the airport.

However at the hens’ night with her friends, where she says dismissively that his visit was because his old dog died in earshot, he turns up in a shaggy wig with false teeth and goes about with fake business cards presenting himself  in various identities to her embarrassment.

Her affair with a colleague and the meeting with the clients are all going badly. The Naples job she was promised is postponed again and she gets stuck with organising a gathering for their Romanian associates.

Back at her apartment preparations are in hand for the reception and she (for no particular reason) answers the door bare assed and tells everyone that it’s a Naked Reception sending her woman friend off hostile and her boss out to get a stiff drink before he participates. Only the well built young secretary gets with the program. At this point dad shows up in the eight foot fur man suit the Romanian family they visited had. When he goes, Hüller in a wrap follows and embraces him, leaving the Romanian guests to face the unclothed associates.

Film making is routine. Without Fraulein Hüller, the film would be super bland. The business manoeuvring and family relations are under documented. It’s the raunchy material that gets this one the attention.

The Sydney Film Festival used to be the high light of the year. Now it's hard slog. Maybe the only reason it's still about is that it turned into big business while all those now vanished enthusiast activities stayed fun. Sobering thought.

REDISCOVERING SAM WOOD.

Natalie Kalmus and Sam Wood examine the Technicolor camera.

 

 

 

If you started serious movie going in the last years of re-issue cinemas and the first years of  Australian TV, director Sam Wood was inescapable - Night at the Opera, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Gone With the Wind, Our Town, Kings Row, The Devil and Miss Jones, Kitty Foyle, For Whom the Bell Tolls - he seemed to be the major source of quality film on offer. When I began dealing with movie literature, I was amazed that his name wasn’t on every other page. It was a long time till I found out why.

Wood had been Hollywood’s leading anti Communist and widely detested over it. That situation is re-visited briefly in the new Trumbo movie. Knowing this gives an emphasis to details in his films that wouldn’t register in other directors’ work - Robert Armstrong cautioning the police “This ain’t Russia” in Paid or the contrast between diner jacketed G-Men and proletarian hoodlums in False Faces.

It had two consequences. No one was game to admire Wood’s work and no one went looking for the missing films, which dated back as far as 1920. No archive restorations here or Cinematheque seasons, like the ones that honored John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock or Raoul Walsh. As collateral damage, his associate, designer William Cameron Menzies, seemed to have vanished along with Wood.

Late night TV did occasionally offer us an accidental glimpse of his 1930s MGM house style films and pretty ordinary they proved to be too - Lord Jeff, Navy Blue and Gold, the Gladys George Madam X included. Not that there was anything unprofessional about the handling but most prestige directors would have refused those lemons. Determined salaryman Wood just made lemonade.

Wood’s silents and early sound films remained a void in everyone’s knowledge. Eighty years after they first hit the screen however, early Sam Wood movies are bubbling up to the surface. National collections, bootleggers and the Warner Archive are coming to the party.

You can now find a murky copy of his second film, the 1920 Wallace Reid movie Excuse My Dust centering on the LA to Frisco road race and having possibly the first fiction movie aerial shot included in the coverage. That’s quite enjoyable as is 1921’s Peck's Bad Boy, resurfacing after its years as a rare Kodascope sixteen millimeter silent,  still a polished and engaging vehicle for Jackie Coogan, following his success as Chaplin’s The Kid. More notable, in Milestone’s nicely restored copy, is Beyond the Rocks of 1922. Rudolph Valentino and regular Wood leading lady Gloria Swanson were made to share star billing as a disciplinary measure, which backfired when they got along a treat and would go off and play tennis together after the day’s shooting. The Eleanor (“Three Weeks”, “It”) Glynn original novel and some early process photography inserting the leads in post card scenics don’t help but it’s nice to see the pair at work, even if she is far more at ease doing comedy romance than Rudy. 

Beyond the Rocks: performer, set musician, Wood, Swanson, Valentino & Glynn.

Slim pickings for a near thirty silent movie career.

Like most of the upper echelon Hollywood directors, Wood didn’t make the transition to sound easily. Europeans had the precedents of the American talkies to learn from and didn’t plow under anything like the amount of  awkward or misjudged productions when they got into the act. Delmer Daves, who worked on the scripts of several of Wood’s films, was there the day Wood became infuriated when the sound man told him he couldn’t have the performers continue speaking while starting a car and ordered them to climb in and drive off, getting a few words before the car pulled the microphone cable out of the wall. Wood’s first sound films are  interesting as much for the screw ups as for the things he got right.

Hard to tell the order in which his talkies were shot, some possibly being held back to soften the impact of their failings on their stars’ careers. Most likely the dreadful Way for a Sailor came first, though it’s dated 1930. Ambitious enough, with back lot Asia and whore littered London docks, process photography, fire scenes and mechanical zooms, it is defeated by technical limitations, as where only the close ups in the sea shore dialogue between John Gilbert and Leila Hyams are in synch., the mike not being able to get close enough to them to record dialogue in the long shots which had to be added unsynchronised. Gilbert must have been a fast learner because his performance is dreadful here and assured in the sound films which followed. He has no chemistry with Hyams and Wally Beery is confined to dumb ass comedy.

So This Is College is dated 1929 probably correctly. It has curious features like opening scenes with the screen empty of action and the thumping of feet as the performers run in  or rough matching on the football actuality and new shooting. One of Wood’s college movies (1932’s Huddle with Ramon Navarro is better), it features young Robert Montgomery and Elliot Nugent (director to be on remakes - the Bob Hope Cat & the Canary and the Allan Ladd Great Gatsby and the stage & screen versions of his own college story, the winning The Male Animal from the play he wrote with James Thurber). Set at a scary USC, the big game gets far more footage than any class room. Comedian Max Davidson is a Jewish tailor they delight in swindling and a young Joel McCrea gets the girl. Script is by Del Daves and Nugent.

Probably Sam Wood’s second sound film, It's A Great Life, billed as "all talking", opens misleadingly with a lively comic chase in the silent manner, the film's only exteriors. It stars the winningly awful sister act The Duncans, then peaking on the success of their teeth grating Topsy and Eva act. They dream of Playing the Palace but are working in Mandlebaum’s giant emporium, where show business is represented by a store show put on by Laurence Gray, head of  sheet music. The show is a two strip colour inset shambles.

The Duncan Sisters - It's a Great Life

The girls do get to their pleasant enough hit “I’m Following You” which is plugged through the film relentlessly and resolve to go on Big Time Vaudeville, getting as far as Brooklyn. “It’s just across the bridge from Broadway.”  When Vivian marries Gray who the strident Rosetta detests. The sisters split and the act that Vivienne does with her now husband is paid off before the end of the run. (“I never heard so much silence in my life”) Here the film goes maudlin. Vivian gets pneumonia motivating the second two colour section big stage climax “the Hoosier Hop” before a slightly weird finale with dancers sliding on slippery dips past the girls on a cloud.

Numbers like “Rainbow Round My Shoulder” play in the background track without getting a performance. Benny Rubin shows up late and doesn’t have much to do, not even a song. Un-billed Ben Blue as a stage hand has nearly as much prominence. Wood gets his camera onto the stage among Sammy Lee’s dancers and seems to be shooting the dramatic material the same way as the numbers, from a stalls position and cutting in closer angles instead of close up - medium shot. The pacing is quite fair until the soggy end. It’s a drab looking film. Designer Gibbons hasn’t entered his all white phase.

Things pick up with They Learned About Women (1930) the first version of the Gene Kelly Take Me Out to the Ball Game which used mainly the conflicting baseball and vaudeville careers element of the plot. Top billed variety duo Schenk & Van are quite presentable as the buddy Blue Socks team members. Van is engaged to bubbly Bessie Love at her ukulele playing zenith but he is fooling around with eighteen carat gold digger Ann Doran, so Schenk steps in at the cost of his own career. The story is passable and there is some interesting uses of sound (jazz under the Metro lion, the sports commentator on the silent movie style title etc.) The piece is uneven, having been begun by Jack Conway. They Learned About Women was never shown to the press and bombed at the box office. The lead duo made only this one film. 

William Haines & Leila Hyams

 At this stage William Haines’ brassy leading man was the biggest earner in movies - incredibly. Acceptable as a fresh faced juvenile, he was plausible in silents by King Vidor, James Cruze, Victor Seastrom and Wood himself  but when you add his voice doing “Sez you!” dialogue the character was grating. Wood’s film The Girl Said No turns Haines, the small town’s cut up, into George Amberson Minifer as, at the calamity of  his father’s death, he is reduced to clocking on with his packed lunch at the local factory to support his family and trim blonde Leila Hyams is drawn to his new humility.

Given false hope of a new career in a stock broker’s office, Haines is sabotaged by rival Ralph Bushman (son of Francis X) with an assignment to flog the Denver City Bonds she has already rejected to mean plutocrat Marie Dressler. Her one scene, coming late in the picture, anchors the piece, with Wood impressively making human and appealing the two grotesquely unsympathetic star personalities. That leaves a slapstick ending anticipating It Happened One Night. Hyams warming to Haines is surprisingly plausible and when he snaps back into his bullying persona it comes as a shock, followed by the winning revelation that this was a trick.

Seeing Wood handling the ham fisted Haines in physical comedy here (the pursuing dog, auto and improvised kilt scenes) leaves you wondering what would have happened if Metro had paired the director with Buster Keaton, a comic who was genuinely funny and inventive. That was not to be, with Keaton having his own people manage his then flagging sound career. Wood worked with Haines in another two films.

Paid (1930) is entirely different. Promising start with a close up of the court docket opening out to fill the screen with the sentencing of shop girl Joan Crawford falsely accused of stealing from her slave wage employer Purnell B. Pratt, with the attorneys, Crawford and her accuser arguing over one another. Compare this with the gives-up opening of Metro’s 1929 The Voice of the City where Willard Mack just shows a guard listen outside the court room we never see.

Paid: Montgomery & Crawford.

However hopes are rapidly dashed when the piece turns into a tedious transcription of  a play by Bayard (“The Trial of Mary Dugan”) Veiller previously filmed in 1917 with Alice Joyce. Having suffered indignities in the big house, like having to share showers barefoot with Louise Beavers, Joan comes out hard bitten and uses the criminal contacts of fellow prisoner Marie Prevost (so good in Lewis Milestone’s The Racket)  to wreak her revenge on Pratt by marrying his son Douglas Montgomery (the James Whale Waterloo Bridge, Way to the Stars). The support cast are carefully chosen not to overshadow Joan, who gets lots of soulful close ups. Mainly played in windowless interiors, this one is a long 81 minutes. Crawford and Wood never worked together again. 

 
Surprisingly a sentimental, assimilationist fable proved to be the peak of the cycle. Wood’s The Sins of the Children of 1930 is both innovative and touching. Broadway actor Louis Mann made only this one sound film and Wood appears to have tailored the production to him. Instead of breaking his scenes into a variety of angles, they are played in carefully planned, unedited wide shot which gives the performers the chance to move at will and talk over one another. They do this in the dialogue Mann plays with character comedian Henry Armetta. The abrupt close up of the bowl of porridge introduced into the family breakfast scene appears to be there to cover a transition.

Mann is about to put his earnings into a Savings and Loan business with neighbor Robert McQuade but has to use them to send his young son to a Sanatorium. Years later the boy is grown to be Bushman jr. who changes his German name for his career as a doctor. The film is full of people from Wood’s other films - Armetta, Elliot Nugent as the mechanical minded son, eternal mum Clara Blandick and particularly manicurist Ann Doran whose seated, one take monologue totally overshadows Leila Hyams, the daughter character with her remarkably delicately suggested pregnancy.  Robert Montgomery, as McQuade’s no good son, is responsible (compare “Hindle Wakes”) and the scene where he makes his life changing decision is played effectively with him in the background.

Louis Mann: Sins of the Children

In the best MGM manner the problems are resolved at a Xmas family gathering and the outcome is genuinely endearing. The excessive sentimentality and studio artificiality of the company’s out put have not yet choked the life out of it’s product. Much of what followed at Metro for Wood was mediocre with the odd hiccup like the particularly ripe Ramon Novarro The Barbarian but it’s agreeable that we can glimpse the major talent which would emerge. Spot the bridal party cascading into the boudoir in Girl Said No anticipating Night at the Opera’s cabin scene. That film's the wrong back cloth gag is anticipated in It's a Great Life - hauled up to show the pyramid of gymnasts we never see again or there's Mann ageing like Mr. Chippings. That’s as rewarding as the curiosity value and entertainment the films offer.

These early Sam Wood Productions do have a unity as they show the makers coming to terms with the new medium and Wood and his regulars meshing - from writer Charles MacArthur soon to form a tandem with Ben Hecht for “The Front Page” and their own films, master editor Frank Sullivan (Fury, Terror in a Texas Town) and Metro chief designer Cedric Gibbons, who is anything but unobtrusive, contributing the dark beamed Grove Cafe Night Club and Dressler’s Aztec themed study to The Girl Said No or John Miljan’s office with the blinds that lift to show the corridor action in Paid. - even walk-ons like Armetta and unbilled comedian veteran Herbert Prior, the mute General in Paid and victim diner in The Girl Said No.  Soon to drop out of his films, these are not the people that would accompany Wood in the years of his mature and acclaimed work, where Menzies, Hal Wallis, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman carry the load.

It seems unlikely that we’ll ever get the full length study of Wood’s imposing thirty plus
year career and this article is only a snapshot of one section of that. 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2019

French Film Festival 2016

The 2016 French Film Festival

This one  remains a big ticket scene here - forty eight movies. On the plus side the booklet and celebrity comment trailer were nice this year but visiting film makers were sadly missed. You can query some choices, opening with the inoffensive Rosalie Blum when they had material like Dheepan and Le Tout nouveau testament in their line up,  and they don’t seem to learn. Philippe Garrel’s drear Les amants réguliers held the Academy house record for walk-outs, but they went ahead and programmed his new L'ombre des femmes / Shadow of Women while omitting material like Clément Cogitore’s admired Ni le ciel ni la terre.

In a previous post I covered Arnaud Desplecin’s My Golden Days / Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse account of Mathieu Almaric’s past triggered by the discovery of his passport, given to a Jewish refugee years before, and Michel Gondry’s endearing Microbe & Gasoil with the kids hitting the road in the home built timber car.  Since then Jaco Van Dormael’s great  Le Tout nouveau testament has been up for the Oscar it should have had. The copy in the festival appears to have been slightly modified since the Paris opening. It totally overshadows the other Benoit Poelvoorde movie, Jean Pierre Améris agreeable enough Family for Rent /Une Famille a Louer with isolated rich Benoit hiring Virginie Efira’s battler family to give him the common touch. 

le tout nouveau testamant - Poelvoorde

Also excellent is Stephan Brizé’s The Measure of a Man / La Loi du marché which kicks off with scruffy, fifty something Vincent Lindon being told he’s wasted him time doing a crane driver course as his benefit entitlement ran out, and follows his struggle to survive among the working poor with the plot taking an unexpected twist when he turns up as a security man at the giant Hyper Mart.

The film is compared to the Dardennes but it connects back earlier, to seventies German arbeiter films like Schneeglöckchen blühen im September or Ken Loach’s hymns to the Unions.  Here the focus on the personal is greater and more effective. Convincing minimal production values. Mainly first time actors and technicians producing a grainy long lens look, with some scenes a single take.

Director and star have built up a body of these (Mlle Chambon, Quelques heures de printemps) but this is better.

Also superior and also unexpected is Xavier (Quand j'étais chanteur) Giannoli’s Marguerite with Catharine Frot coming back gangbusters as an heiress who sings worse than Florence Foster Jenkins without anybody being game to stop her giving recitals. The actress has nailed a spot among the notables of French cinema here.

The dark, detailed bad taste - good taste privileged class settings contrasted to the lively decadence of the arts community, all realised in unfamiliar Czech filmed production values, create a kind of early Twentieth Century Sunset Boulevard 

The most imposing scene comes when the mean spirited anarchists have Frot  perform at the Cabaret Marot, where she does the Marseillaise, complete with rosette, trident and three corner hat, behind the sheet on which they project (untinted 16mm.!) battle atrocity footage for an audience of bearded nuns, politicians and affronted soldiers. They can’t match this in the finale they construct. Appealing Christa Théret (Déa in the Depardieu Homme Qiu Rit) seem to have a monopoly on sympathy.

Then I got two exceptional movies in a single day.

Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan has raised controversy on it’s home turf by the contrast between its depiction of grubby hostile France and sunny welcoming Britain. It’s one of a handful of films which tackle the refugee experience with conviction, whether you put it in with outsider views like Dirty Pretty Things or Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma or participant cinema like La Pirogue and the Hong Kong film where they train the leads with street maps of Hanoi to pass themselves off as Vietnamese refugees.

Jesuthasan Antonythasan ; Dheepan

Here we kick off in a camp where Kalieaswari Srinivasan searches among the refugees for a nine year old girl needed to complete the family listed on the dead  man’s passport they plan on using. The translator coaches leading man Jesuthasan Antonythasan on the back story he has to invent to be plausible for the interviewing authorities and the newly blended family are accepted as immigrants to France. There Antonythasan becomes janitor to a run down housing project, witnessing the violent behaviors of  gangs that he dismisses as less dangerous than the ones they knew in Sri Lanka - an observation that motivates the savage climax - the girl in the seat next to me was near hysterical watching that.

Paralleling the real life experience of it’s lead, the film uses non pros and a few familiar faces like Vincent Rotttiers, with unobtrusive film craft.  It appears to have a straight forward narrative but also runs on a complex, conflicting perception of their reality by the characters - bogus father, mother, daughter, gang leader wearing a home detention bracelet and Tamil Tiger general. It may be considered Audiard’s best work to date.

You could not get a more different film to Samuel Bentechrit’s Asphalte / Macadam Stories.  Bentechrit has been off the radar since his passably eccentric black and white J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster - that’s a translation of the opening line of Goodfellars incidentally. His two subsequent movies have gotten little attention but now he’s back gangbusters.

We kick off with another dilapidated housing  project, with a couple of skin heads lounging at the entrance, and get into a meeting with the Body Corp, where Gustave Kerven (Aaltra, Dans la cour) gets a laugh by just sitting there. He’s the only one who doesn’t want to pay for a new elevator because he’s on the second floor. He’s excused with the proviso that he can’t use the new lift. Impressed by the chairman’s exercise machine he gets one which puts him in hospital, to be sent back in a wheel chair. Kerven’s enforced nocturnal life style brings him into contact with night nurse Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi.

Meanwhile director Bentechrit’s son, as an abandoned teen, finds ex star Isabelle Huppert moving in next door and the space station insets lead to an escape pod landing astronaut Michael Pitt on the roof in front of the bemused skin heads. He shelters with Arab mother Tassadit Mandi who pretty much steals the picture (she’s also glimpsed briefly in Dheepan) turning him out in her imprisoned son’s Marseilles soccer shirt and feeding him couscous, without them having a common language.

Notice that three by four, the old Academy frame, is creeping back - Imax films, Carlos Reygadas and Grand Budapest Hotel. They use it here for the body of the movie, the image only going into wide screen for Huppert’s video audition, where her performance is modified under Bentchiret the younger’s direction - a considerable set piece in itself.

This one is pretty much unique though it’s been compared inadequately to Woody Allen and Jim Jarmusch. It’s enormously enjoyable and likable.

Belle & Sebastian : the Adventure Continues was better than it needed to be for  a sequel to a popular kids entertainment spun of the book by Cecile Aubrey, once H.G. Clouzot’s Manon.

In the picturesque alpine settings of the first film (the Nazis have gone home) Gramps Tcheky Karyo is raising orphaned Felix Bossuet when the plane bringing aunt Margaux Châtelier crashes into the burning forest. The pair seek out grumpy WW2 survivor pilot Thierry Neuvic who doesn’t like dogs, eyeing Belle the giant white Pyrenean.

Their adventures include the plane crashing, Belle fighting an agro bear which could have strolled in from The Revenant and Neuvic using dynamite to blast a path through the fire, the way he learned from WW2 Americans.

Impressively filmed scenes of Alpine life, great air to air material (it looks authentic) and the depiction of the forest fire would all be notable in a production aimed at any age. The cast are all more than equal to the task. We can chalk this up to strong production values and the injection of  Cristian Duguay jobbing director of the surprisingly accomplished Wesley Snipes Art of War. Pity the kid film conventions bend plausibility. Someone should have given that brat a good thumping every time he put someone’s life at risk.

Throw in  Franck Ekonci’s Avril & le monde truqué  from the Persepolis lot, which establishes a fascinating animator’s premise - after the assassination of Napoleon III, the war of 1870 never occurs and the world remains in the steam age, so that in 1947 Paris is a soot blackened low rise metropolis with wood burning automobiles and steam cable car cables. Intriguing to compare this to the cartoon Paris sky lines of  Gay Puree & Monstre á Paris.

The second half strays from this great exposition, which is unfortunate. Figures are closer to bande desiné than the digital detail we get now days. Marion Cotillard and Jean Rochefort do voices.

Rosalie Blum itself an eccentric French small town comedy, from Jean Paul Rapeneau’s son Julien, with Rapeneau jnr.’s brother doing a pleasant score, defies expectation. 

Balding Kyam Khojandi has loser stamped firmly on him.  He bikes around the small town streets he knows blindfolded, having inherited Salon Marchot, his dad’s hair dresser business. This comes with  mean widowed mum Anémone who manages to blight his life in most known ways. “Up tight old ladies quickly become bitter.” His unseen lives-in-Paris girl friend hasn’t been around for a while and his hearty cousin is scornful.

In the neighborhood store small store he is so struck with the belief that owner, mousyNoémi Lvovsky is familiar that he starts stalking her - to the Japanese movie, the local Centre Penitentiaire, her church choir practice and the bar where Luna Picoli-Truffaut sings in English and plays guitar.

He’s beginning to enjoy this but strange things start happening to him. Then Lvosky ‘phones to make a hair appointment. We think this is the point where she is going to take off those ugly glasses.

Here the narrative switches to unemployed and aimless niece Alice Isaaz who shares the flat of a wannabe street entertainer with his own pet crocodile, and events start to take shape.

This all holds up nicely until it’s twisty construction gives way to romance melo. Good local atmosphere and appealing leads, who register above the demands of the slight, agreeable material. Pity it loses drive when the trick double narrative cuts out.  

Christian Vincent's L'Hermine / Courted is a presentable French ‘scope A feature with “ten up” (his sentences) judge Fabrice Luchini wracked by flu but still conducting the trial of surly Victor Pontecorvo, accused of stomping his seven month old to death. One of the selected jurors turns out to be Sidse Babett Knudsen (After the Wedding), the nurse he came on for after his hospitalization.

This gets to be two movies wrapped in with one another. The court material outlining unfamiliar French legal rituals is intriguing - the judges and lawyers assembling at the court door to make an entrance, the Juge d’instruction in with the jury during deliberations and Luchini, fresh from doing one of his Racine style interventions in the case,  entering the jury room to dismiss the notion of certainty and saying that a trial is to assert law. This can stand with the best of André Cayatte’s legal dramas. Think Gabin in Le verdict.

However the mature age romance complete with lingering fades on Knudsen and glimpses of their home lives has the conviction of a TV soapy despite the excellence of the performers.

One disappointment I did catch was actor Clovis Cornillac’s director debut Un peu, beaucoup, aveuglement / Blind Date  which labors to make a silly premise into another endearing rom com.

Cornillac and Melanie Bernier have apartments either side of a wall which transmits any noise. They battle (she wins with an amplified metronome) reconcile and become lovers without physically meeting, before her big piano competition.

The people are appealing and the filming is glossy. The audience seemed to swallow it all.

L'attesa / The Wait soon gets to the half close up of Sicilian mother Juliette Binoche with the sound of hammering - crepe being nailed over the mirrors where the family have gathered for a funeral. Binoche’s son’s French speaking fiancée Lou de Laâge is driven in and the film gets to be about the two women (“Sono suo madre”). Language switches from Italian to French as Juliette delivers the film’s central lie. They stress the contrast of the pair - Lou swimming in her scanties which Juliette refuses. “I’m used to seeing some parts of my body only in the dark.”

Two strong lead performances, great images and a remote link to Pirandello but does it have to be so boring?

Director Piero Messina was an assistant on Il Grande Bellezza and he wants us to know it, with significance writ large - for openers the somber lit Christ on the cross which foreshadows the Madonna we see being trucked in for the Sicilian religious festival, with the penitents in KKK hoods. However he film is really a clearer demo of the lingering influence of Antonioni with static, still photo like insets - the pink inflatable mattress blows about the courtyard of the so nice beige wall villa, the distractingly appealing meal run up from home made carob flour pasta, two glasses on their sides roll on a table, a helicopter scoops water out of the lake, the distant hair pin bends with no traffic on them.  It’s even got a missing lover - I mean - Jeez.

Director René Ferét’s last film Anton Tchékov 1890 also has high seriousness stamped all over it. Hollywood gave up on these Great Artist bios in the fifties after Moon & Sixpence, Song to Remember or  Lust for Life - all right maybe Amadeus. I think of Bright Star as the tail end of the Ken Russell comet.  French film makers hang in there Guy De Maupassant, Camille Claudelle, Renoir and the rest.

Anton Chekov 1890 joins the tradition - weighty themes (should Nicholas Giraud/ Tchékov serve humanity as a doctor or writer?), men in frock coats and beards, classical music, sustained shots of writing long hand on brown paper, and (very little) nudity - which will look good in the trailer. They even provide a walk on Leon Tolstoy.

The opening isn’t bad with  the film’s two familiar faces Philippe Nahon and Jacques Bonnaffé appearing at the provincial home, where the family has to shut up religious dad doing prayers at meals. However it doesn’t get any better. Married Jenna Thiam joins sister Chammah’s literature classes to get it on with Giraud but that, like his friendship with hair cut short for lice Shikhalin Pentitentiary Island teacher Marie Féret doesn’t go all that far. When his formerly dissolute brother dies of TB Giraud undertakes his “devoir” to the icy prison island where he witnesses flogging, meets murderers and tends the ill (“Il faut agir”) coming back to write “The Seagull”, for which we see him giving not particularly helpful stage directions to the cast.

Craft aspects are good. Ferét achieved his aim in making a Chekovian art movie. It’s a bit much to expect an audience to enjoy the result.

Claude Lelouche is the great survivor of French film and, despite aberrations like his dippings into mysticism, he’s provided an enormous amount of quality entertainment.  Hopes were high for the new Un + une in which the shape of  his Un homme et une femme can be vaguely seen.

Zylberstein and Dujardin : Un + une

It kicks off with ‘Scope shots of pilgrims river bathing at Benares and shifts into a girl’s failed Indian Dance audition and a non sequential coverage of a Silver Store robbery and chase intercut, the two becoming the subject of a B&W "Juliet & Romeo" production by Rahul Vohra an Oscar winner art film director, who hires in French movie musician Jean Dujardin to score it. Elsa Zylberstein shows up sitting next to Jean at French Ambassador Christoph Lambert’s diner and we get to the concept of her spirituality against his pragmatism, with Elsa off to enable her to have a child after being hugged by famed woman  healer Mata Amritanandamayi Devi.

Jean is diagnosed with the life threatening tumor and follows to the healer, catching up with Elsa a  rail station and traveling by train, bus and small boats through all the scenics. The leads are ultra charming but  all the will they or won’t they strains patience.

Coda has Jean encounter Elsa on the so nice Seine house boat. The film stops at the start like Toute une vie.
 It comes arrives full of set pieces like Dujardin asked by Zylberstein how he’d put music to their real life encounter and his suggestions being used as the scene runs or action broken up with unexpected flashbacks. Technically exceptional - great scope images, Francis Lai score, the monochrome film in a film getting video vignetted into subsequent action. It’s kind of like thumbing through a glossy woman’s magazine for two hours at a time.

Julie Delpy was such an endearing presence in  that it would be nice to find her films as director were equally appealing - or at least better than the new Lolo.

It starts out as another glossy rom com (bring back Annie Giradot or Michele Morgan!) with long divorced sophisticated Paris designer Julie on holiday in Biarritz, where she gets to meet local Danny Boon when he dumps the giant tuna caught for the barbecue that night in her lap. They make out, with her seeing him as a hoon fling only to find herself jumping on him at any opportunity and the pair setting up together when he moves to Benugravelle in Paris with an impeded view of the Eiffel Tower.

So far so so with the talking dirty with friend Karen Viard the best element.

However the film takes a right turn with the introduction of  Julie’s nineteen year old son Vincent Lacoste, who turns out to be a “vrai psycho” sabotaging mum’s relations with men since he was in kindergarten. I didn’t like this format all that much in Tanguy a few years back

George Coraface shows up briefly as Viard’s Greek squeeze. The talented cast deserve better material. Best element is location filming with material shot in the Pompidou Centre, Place de la Republic, Paddington Station etc.

At fifteen bucks a time for largely unfamiliar material, mistakes rapidly become expensive for the viewer and I only sampled about half of what was on offer but that did suggest that new French film remains the most approachable of current national cinemas and one spiced with innovative and accomplished material. A bit of civilisation in our movie going is welcome.

The Dalton Trumbo Story

 TRUMBO

Trumbo - Cranston & Mirren.

 

 

   Now, curiously, the heroes of my distant youth are coming back as characters in movies - John Houseman and George Coulouris in Orson Welles & Me, Orry George Kelly in Women He’s Undressed, a couple of 2012 Alfred Hitchcocks (Hitchcock & The Girl)  and even Sam Wood (fleetingly) in Trumbo.

Actually Sam Wood was a more significant figure and a more interesting story than Dalton Trumbo but getting into that would require a talent more substantial than the new movie’s Jay Roach, director of Meet the Parents and the Austin Powers movies. That’s full bore Sidney Lumet material.

Trumbo shows Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo back from a stint as WW2 correspondent signing an MGM contract that made him the best paid writer in the world. However the Cold War gives leftists public enemy status and he becomes one of the “Hollywood Ten” sent to jail when they tried to use their First Amendment freedom of speech rights as a shield against the attacks of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The fifth amendment doesn’t get a look in in this movie.

Cranston & Roach

The film has a total disinterest in accuracy. It kicks off in black & white with Edward G. Robinson about to fill a stoolie with lead under Sam Wood’s direction, while writer Dalton Trumbo is hovering on the set. Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, the film Trumbo wrote for Robinson was a weepy and the 1939 modern girl drama Kitty Foyle was the only recorded time Wood and Trumbo worked together.

The Trumbos didn’t retreat to suburbia with a fink neighbor. They settled in Mexico City. Dalton Trumbo was working for the King Brothers long before 1953’s Roman Holiday though it would be nice to think that Frank King did see off the man from the IATSE by waving a baseball bat. The most off-putting material is in the depiction of Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg excellent again) disturbing for the things it misrepresents. The star has been composited with people like Sterling Hayden and Lee J. Cobb to the historical figure’s discredit, though Stuhlbarg does get the film’s best line, offering to sell another painting to fund bribing the jury.

All this information is easily found and the makers of Trumbo must have had it and chosen to play footsie with the facts because they thought that would make what they were doing more involving or more relevant. Their story was the iniquity of the Hollywood black list.

Most unsettling is the film’s handling of Bryan Cranston’s Dalton Trumbo himself. Inexplicably they sideline “Johnny Got His Gun”, Trumbo’s pacifist signature work as book, play and finally the self directed 1971 movie which all the friends I shipped off to watch, in its one week, one theater London release, wanted to go back and see again. That comes with the film’s side step on the acceptance and rejection of Moscow directives, which had the real Dalton Trumbo suppressing that text at one stage.

Well it’s only a movie, Ingrid.

Cranston in Trumbo

They do have Trumbo’s swimming pool socialist coming up against the reality of Adewale Akinnioye Akbaje’s jailed black murderer. However the film’s one fully shaded character is Helen Mirren as the odious Hedda Hopper. Her authoritative defiance and decline is an arc that balances Trumbo’s triumph in a way that is more striking than what is going on around it. I wonder whether the actress had any input into the scripting. It makes an intriguing comparison with Ilka Chase’s rendition of Clifford Odets’ version of Hopper in the Robert Aldrich film of Odets’ The Big Knife.  There are a couple of TV adaptations of that one too.

It is nice to see Cranston’s Trumbo playing the giant egos of Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger off against one another, though people like Stanley Kramer and Edward Lewis miss out any nod for their work in breaking the Hollywood blacklist. The committee screwed up big time. They wanted to have celebrity subjects to get publicity for their accusation and they are the reason people are still deriding their blunders.

The film making is undistinguished, with just the odd flourish like Diane Lane meeting Cranston at night on his release from the Kentucky prison. Technically the integration of new footage into HUAC news coverage or Spartacus is impeccable. Performances are good enough and occasionally, as with Louis C.K., Mirren and Stuhlbarg, better than that.

Dalton Trumbo in the bath

 They have a go at the creative process with Cranston doing liquor and pills with a typewriter in the bath to sustain the killing output of black market scenarios stuck together with scotch tape.

Cranston’s reconciliation with Elle Fanning is genuinely touching and his watching TV surrounded by the family who have suffered with him, when his name is read out at the Oscars is rousing.  Roach’s ambition to extend his range pays off. He does ultimately turn the notion that the Red Scares of the fifties were a battle between freedom of expression and dim witted right wing bigots into Twenty First Century multiplex entertainment.

We do however have more penetrating accounts of the events of the blacklist from writers who lived through it - Arthur Miller’s essay on Elia Kazan’s participation, Walter Bernstein’s script for The Font and Trumbo’s own take on it, represented here by Cranston delivering his great Writer’s Guild acceptance speech  (“no heroes and villains - only victims”) nicely prefaced by the uncredited Ring Lardner jr. introduction. It was Lardner who met the chairman of the HUAC committee in jail and, rather that zap him with a sharp one liner, they didn't speak.

Kitty Foyle, Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave, along with Gordon Wiles’ The Gangster, the Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy and Terror in a Texas Town and his own Johnny Got His Gun - Trumbo’s is a formidable body of work. 

There are so many other narratives that beg to be explored here - the left’s disenchantment with the Moscow line, the relation between ideology and serious (or indeed frivolous) art. How come films which Dalton Trumbo wrote for cheap jack production are so much better than multi million dollar spectaculars like A Guy Named Joe, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Hawaii made from his scripts?

Well we had two Hitchcocks, two  Truman Capotes. How about another Dalton Trumbo?

Barrie Pattison