EVEN MORE FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL

Patrice Leconte’s first theatrical film in 5 years, Depardieu as Inspector Maigret - this was always going to be an event. It asserts, despite lacking many of the features of the standard French policier.

Leconte, a devotee of author Simenon, sees Maigret as “une personne emblematique.” The movies have provided us a small army of Inspector Maigrets. Depardieu is the newest in a line winding back to Abel Taride in his brother Jean‘s 1932 Le chien jaune / The Yellow Dog. French directors seem to have liked putting their brothers in the role. Jean Renoir got Pierre to front his La nuit du carrefour -  followed by Albert Préjean, Charles Laughton, a cheery Jean Gabin, Jean Richard, Bruno Cremer, along with implausible TV Britons, Rupert Davies, Michael Gambon and, would you believe, Rowan Atkinson.

Maigret is a dour detective. He doesn’t carry a gun and ride in a police car with a screaming siren. When he needs to travel here, Depardieu takes taxis. As he explains, he doesn’t interrogate suspects by beating them with a telephone book. What he does is listen to people. It makes a hard act to follow. Refuse all substitutes - that’s you Hercule Poirot and Columbo!

What the current film offers is an aged Maigret, like Harry Baur from the formidable Duvivier La tête d’un homme,  still the character’s best incarnation. Gross Depardieu is now barely recognisable as the energetic juvenile of Les Valseuses and the Truffaut films. The currently scandal plagued actor is a resonant match with the character, which we can add to his Great French Movie Star catalogue - Jean Valjean, Cyrano, the Count of Monte Cristo.

Actor and role both evoke a long and demanding work life. This Maigret is first seen being told by his doctor to give up his signature pipe smoking to spare his heart. Throughout the film, he is greeted by characters who he encountered in investigations he now barely remembers. Anne Loiret’s Mme Maigret mentions the couple’s grown daughter, which further motivates Depardieu’s interest in his new case - echoed in the resonant scene with André Wilms describing the devastating effect of an offspring’s death, which has no other function in the plot.

This all motivates Depardieu’s intervention in the life of Jade Labeste, one of the case’s miserable girl victims, who contrast with the drunken privileged class crowd found celebrating by singing “C’est si bon”, that avenger Depardieu faces with his damning coup du théatre.

They drop in odd Simenon detail like Maigret only drinkling one brand of liquor during each case. Though Lukas and Janvier are marginal in the film’s constant engulfing shadow, we do get a telling scene in Police-Secours with its light-up wall map of Paris, introduced by the shattering of a call box glass.

The film claims to be adapted from “Maigret et la jeune morte” but many of that one’s features have been ditched, including the rival Inspector  (think Philo Vance’s hapless Segeant Sgt. Ernest Heath and quite a few more). Discovering the killer is replaced with elements of “Maigret tend un piège.”  As a detective story, Maigret is unremarkable with the outcome telegraphed from our first glimpse of matron Aurore Clement peering from the background.

The film opens with Clara Antoons naked and vulnerable, as it turns out for an evening dress fitting. We see her arrival produce consternation at a society engagement reception and shortly later her disfigured body is found in a public square. Depardieu doubles back to take the call and we cut to her body being turned over.

His inquiries reveal the film’s real core, the murky, evocative universe of author Simenon’s crime stories, the luxury homes of the well to do and to the miserable accommodation of peniless girls. Though subtly placed by details - the big china coffee mugs, the no handle loup magnifyer with which Depardieu examines the event photos, they only run to one vintage car. There are no street vistas with authentic traffic and extras in period costume. We hear about the train station but when Jade Labeste makes her departure it is from a grubby bus depot. The home of Jules Maigret, Inspecteur brigade criminel, Quai des orfevres 36, as Depardieu announces himself, is is a Paris without bateaux mouches and the Champs-Elysées. It’s streets are as mean as anything Philip Marlowe ever went down.

The downbeat material is relentless. Depardieu asks the reception hall manager whether a table cloth like the one the body was found wrapped in went missing and is told that, where silver wear is routinely stolen, they haven’t bothered to check the linen. A victim of a lesbian procuress observes “I should have kept the money.” The coroner describes the mutilation the duck they will have for diner was subjected to.

 Patrice Leconte’s  film deliberately references cinema with a visit to Studio Billancourt where Antoon’s roommate Mélanie Bernier, in front of the painted decor, comments everything is false. The ending repeats the device used strikingly with Louise Brooks in Prix de beauté and Carol Landis in I Wake Up Screaming, where characters watch a film of the now dead victim.  Maigret constantly recalls perversely resonant moments from other movies. Dress maker Elizabeth Bourgine, shown her creation soaked in the life’s blood of it’s owner, comments that it’s sad to see her work treated so badly, recalling  Barbara Leigh-Hunt in Frenzy telling her rapist and killer “Don’t tear the dress”. We saw the story of young girls arriving in Paris with a suitcase in La rozière des Halles, Dactylo and Club des femmes. It is part of the film’s scheme that rather than finding a colourful artist’s garret, she ends in a miserable room up the six flights of stairs which both the aged Maigret and the housekeeper negotiate reluctantly. Rather than a scenic interlude, Depardieu walking with Jade Labeste by the Seine has him recall his first murder where he couldn’t forget the girl victim drowned in the river. It’s like Al Pacino in Sea of Love, telling Ellen Barkin that they are passing buildings where he investigated killings, transforming the ordinary street into a haunted setting.

It would be interesting to know how much of this citation is conscious.

Maigret is a milestone in the history of it’s star, director and long dead author. The final image emptying to leave the grim Paris alley way is an indicator of it’s intent.  I’ll be surprised if the so far excellent French Film Festival can come up with anything better.

Curiously French critics, who see Leconte as a light weight, despite pieces like his other Simenon subject M. Hire or his imposing La veuve de saint Pierre, have been largely unsympathetic.

A few months back Jérôme (Anthony Zimmer) Salle’s new Kompromat would have looked like a bit of formulaic Ruskie bashing, harking back to the Crimean campaign. At the moment, it plays like topical contemporary issues drama.

Gilles Lelouche works hard as the family man Alliance Française director on Irkutsk station in Siberia. His productive life proves to be a sham. Gilles’ wife plans on leaving him and the ballet he books as a local theatre attraction works out as gay men wrestling half naked in red light. The local hunting fan sponsor is not amused.

Before he knows what is happening, the fur hat cops are marching Gilles, doubled over by hands cuffed behind his back out of the house in front of his terrified daughter, and his wife has made a video deposition claiming he’s a pedophile who flogs kiddie porn on the net.

The cell full of tattooed bald men susses that he’s on a 424 sex crime warrant and beat him up, causing him to be shifted to solitary where he chokes on his bread and water. His French diplomat associates get him “le meilleur avocat au cité” who proves to have limited English and outlines the grim fate awaiting Gilles now that he has run foul of FSB, successor to the KGB, who have faked his incriminating Kompromat dossier.

Things pick up when supermart bags of groceries with a smiley face receipt arrive in his cell before the lawyer proves smarter than he looks and gets Gilles release to home detention with an ankle bracelet - no phone, no net, no contact with people associated with the case. Using a bit of ingenuity our hero finds out that the groceries came from Joanna Kulig, a girl he danced with at the show’s after-party. She is as conspicuous here, in an underwritten role, as she was in Cold War.

Kompromat - Kullig & Lellouche.

Faced with fifteen years in a Russian slammer, Gilles takes the advice the lawyer confides while the kitchen appliance drowns out the room’s surveillance bug and does the runner we’ve already seen in the pre-title.

The escape has a few inventive touches - the cell phone on the long distance coach is nice and Gilles outfoxing his pursuers gives us an interesting glimpse of diplomatic assistance in action. However it’s disturbing to see the featured use of cell phones, which should have given the game away. Kulic’s one legged Chechen war veteran husband is also a promising element but his character is poorly deployed. A traveling Orthodox Patriarch is better but the action material is implausible.

The suggestion that Gilles must really be a spy because of all the attention he’s getting and his skill in dealing with the blundering secret policemen has a spurious plausibility. ”What does a spy look like?”

The film is well made and the cast are good but the film they prop up is old fashioned and unconvincing - even though we are assured that it’s “loosely” based on reality.

This one is the only disappointment I’ve had out of the French Film Festival so far.

 

Emmanuel Carrère’s Ouistreham / Between Two Worlds is a challenge because it’s hard to say anything about it without giving away the revelation which sets it up, though the publicity and reviews don’t feel inhibited about that.

The opening establishes an unfamiliar setting where we see Juliette Binoche lost in the confusion of the French coastal Caen social security office, where a woman indignant about the her missing paper work jostles her out of her turn with the case worker. Juliette accounts for the gap in her work record as representing a failed marriage.

We see her interviewing for a bottom of the employment ladder spot - no insurance, no holidays, no security. After one dismissal, she ends up sharing the shuttle bus with the women who clean the Ouistreham ferry. The scenes of mastering the rapid turnaround methods and the company of the fellow women cleaners are vivid and make the best element of the film.

Part of the authenticity is that Juliette is the only professional in the cast. She blends in impeccably. The others are the real deal. They even come up with a transgender worker whose farewell party is a highlight. The casting director must have lit a candle in thanks.

The film making is accomplished. The business of the women snatching any happiness that happens to present is new and involving and the night time port setting (again) makes for striking images.

However Ouistreham has a personal rather than social agenda and when they lay this out things become less interesting. It ends up being the movie where we see the admirable Binoche clean toilets.

Barrie Pattison 2022

More French Film Festival.

French movies are everywhere at the moment. After Lou Jeunet's  Curiosa on SBS - about the Pierre (Devil Is a Woman) Louÿs and Marie de Hérédia's letters and photos, and Jacques Audiard's Olympiades,  I wait for Noémie Merlant to turn up naked every time - an impressive build that hasn't been distorted by training like Brigitte Bardot or Bo Derek who trod this path before her. My viewing on the current French Film Festival has been uniformly rewarding. Consider these Noémie Merlant free movies. 

Samuel Benchetrit’s Cette musique ne joue pour personne / Love Songs for Tough Guys offers an atmospheric first image of a blue plastic bag fluttering in the sea shore breeze. We’ll see the bag and the ocean again.

Starr, Lanners, Damiens, Bedia, Kerven.

Director Benchetrit gets better as he goes but you can still recognise the director of his 2007 J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster / I Always Wanter to Be a Gangster in his new film where the excellent François Damiens (also in the interesting Les Cowboys on S.B.S.) has inherited the family small time racketeering empire in a bleak French container port. Things are not going  well for François.The punk kids are stealing his cocaine shipments and his labor force is ageing. However his attention is elswhere as he struggles in the poetry class to prepare love verses. A scornful fellow class member gets duffed up for laughing. Tutor Thierry Gimenez is however at ease re-wording his death threat as an Alexandrine.

Henchman Gustave Kervern with an axe (thanku I’ll Never Forget Whats’isname) is sent on a debt collecting job and the targeted accountant dies in the process. This leaves the man’s wife, played by a mature Vanessa Paradis (currently Benchetrit’s wife), struggling to find her co-star for a local theatre piece based on the lives of Sartre and De Beauvoir as a musical. Kerven ends up reading her in  De Beauvoir’s lines and when the company’s Sartres keep on meeting violent ends he gets rung in - including the exercise with the imaginary feather. (“Oh, non! La plume”)  Kerven is great in this part but so are the rest.

Paradis & Benchetrit.

François has middle aged orphan henchman Ramzy Bedia (from the comedy duo Eric and Ramzy and also in Hommes au bord de la crise de nerfs) deliver his verses to fresh faced Hyper-Mart check out chick Constance Rousseau but she spots the improvement when Ramzy starts authoring them himself.

Aging stand over men Joey Starr and Bouli Lanners (some cast!) are recruiting school mates by force for Damiens’ chubby daughter’s party.  As a consequence, one guest turns up in a surgical collar. That works out nicely too.

Meanwhile wife Valeria Bruni Tedeschi discovers his poems and decides she is Damiens’ muse. She stops lazing about the house. One of her scenes is a sustained, vanity free, no make up close-up of her face as her hair is washed. You have to have a lot of trust in your director for that and she is rewarded with gleaming gold lit mid shots, alternating with Damiens in her final big appearance, a contrast with his meeting with Rousseau played in a full height single take.

A class act, this one places it’s dreadful characters in a setting of overwhelming drabness and we become totally involved. It’s a long way from Sascha Guitry but I feel he would have gotten it.

 

 Yohan Manca's Mes frères et moi / La Traviata, My Brothers & I is another housing projects piece where eleven year old Maël Rouin Berrandou is itching to quit school like his brothers, who he barracks in their beach soccer games and goes lookout for in their small time drug deals. Dali Benssalah (in No Time to Die) the oldest, wants him to get a real job like Pizza delivery. Sofian Khammes is concentrating on body building to pick up middle aged women at the tourist hotel pool while rebellious Moncef Farfar is into small time crime, including stealing the money they use for meds for Fadila Djoudi their comatose mother retained on a drip in her bed room despite medical advise and the wishes of her brother who contemptuously subsidises his nephews' petty schemes.

Benssalah, Berrandou, Khammes & Farfar

Berrandou is fascinated by the opera recordings inherited from his his late father. He plays them for the mother. causing more friction at home (“That’s not Pavarotti!”) While painting the corridor of the school, where he’s still enrolled, as part of a bogus holiday cultural program, he runs into a small class run by opera singer Judith Chemla, (a real life item with  director Manca). Seeing his aptitude she recruits him and shapes his enthusiasm. “You have to sing to someone.” When Berrandou does the aria Chelma has rehearsed him in for his mother, he becomes convinced she responds.

Berrandou & Chelma

There’s a nice scene of  Chelma running late and her and the kid riding with Khammes on his motor bike.

Of course, in one of these nothing is easy. The authorities take Djoudi away and she has to be liberated in a commando style raid. Berrandou becomes infuriated with the demands Chelma makes of him, associating her with the luxurious life of the Europeans he glimpses and rejects her “rich bitch” lessons and the cops hit the flat while she’s come to check on his absence.

We don’t get a dramatic break though to send the audience out on a high but the kid’s visit to the concert hall where Chelma is performing shows him fascinated by the stage machinery - the rows of now empty seats and this goes with his final resolution and provides a surprisingly up beat ending. This one has been called an Arab Billy Elliot but it's really closer to  Ladj Ly's imposing 2019 Les Misérables showing the lives of immigrants mis-shaped by tenement living.    

 

En corps / Rise comes from Cédric Klapisch  who has been one of the most engaging French film makers since the nineties and his Un air de famille. We associate him with winning ensemble pieces like his L'auberge espagnole /The Spanish Apartment cycle but there is another line running through his work, his dance films, his Aurélie Dupont or Paris Opéra documentaries. His clip of the their dancers working out at home during the lock down is really winning.

Cédric Klapisch

Klapisch’s new En corpse / Rise is a peak in this activity and, from it’s elegant opening titles, pretty much the most handsome film the director has done. It is on the way to being the most involving dance film we have and full of unfamiliar touches which add conviction. We hear the dancers’ feet in performance, where the sound is usually muted for effect. The climax shows the performers still on a high from their success, breaking into their moves out on the deserted night time square. Star Marion Barbeau’s run through the streets ends with her partner catching and twirling her. We see not only her routines but exercises - twisting her feet back on themselves in a way that is painful just to watch. The Red Shoes this is not.

Klapisch’s film has her play a twenty six year old première danceuse distracted in her star performance oriental theatre spectacle and falling. Hospitalised she is put in a cast, which has to come off immediately if she is to dance again, and told by her doctor, her physiotherapist bearded François Civil (Klapisch's Ce qui nous lie / Back to Burgundy) and her uncertain, widowed lawyer dad Denis Podalydès (also in Les amours d'Anaïs) that she may have to abandon the career she has built her life round.

As the film progresses we see her always dealing with this possibility while watching a (dazzling) hip-hop dance battle or hearing her associates discuss the contrast between classical ballet and modern dance - the performer’s relation to the floor.

Barbeau finds herself helping out in Pio Marmai’s epicure catering van at Muriel Robin’s resort where Hofesh Shechter’s company is rehearsing - nice moment of her doggedly peeling carrots as she watches his dancers go through their moves on the other side of the glass partition.

One gets her to replace the chair he’s using to simulate a dead person and Shechter has her join in their work outs. Civil comes back from his stint at the ashram in Goa and punches the red cushions in frustration finding she’s already paired with the hip-hop dancer. We get comic cutaways to Marmaï’s red van rocking as he gets it on with his squeeze and end with it rocking for Gautier and the dancer, to go with nice scenes of her joining the company’s activities - leaning into the wind or eating Marmaï’s non vegan haut cuisine. Include sunsets.

Finally Garnier is invited her to join the company and Podalydès takes time off from the case he’s working on in Paris for a lunch to deny neglecting her. Comedy of him nervously observing their rehearsal, the dancers passing in front of him from the fixed camera position.

The big show which we are waiting for is not an anti climax with the happy ending not Gautier’s romance or her reconciliation with dad but her beginning a new dance career. “You have to learn to move in a different way. It’ll never be perfect”

In with this there’s the appealing relation with Barbeau's sisters and the featured players showing Klapisch’s familiar skill in putting group dynamics on the screen. Barbeau is winning in her first major screen role. The film needed a plausibly twenty six year old dancer lead and pivots on her performance. That was a big ask for anyone.

That makes three superior films about the interface of (high) art and real life. Maybe that's a co-incidence or maybe that's what the European movie audience is buying now. It's certainly getting a remarkable work out.

Barrie Pattison 2022

 

 

 

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2022.

Another French Film Festival confirms the impression that these are the only thing the fringe film houses can make money with. They've chosen to bring on this one level with The Batman. Well see how that goes. The scale is ambitious - forty films dominated by the work of celebrity performers and directors. Yea Frogfest!  It would be nice if other sources got this kind of coverage. What are the busy Phillippino or Egyptian industries up to?

After Dheepan and The Sisters Brothers, a new film by Jacques Audiard, latest member of his film making dynasty, fronted by rising star Noémie Merlant (Le retour du heros, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), is eagerly anticipated. I'm surprised Les Olympiades, Paris 13e. / Paris, 13th District is not getting more sessions.

This one was always going to be an event and they try to fulfill the promise - titles in the now forgotten A Man Is 10 Feet Tall style (these don’t quite work), well built young leads getting naked regularly, the director’s own unfamiliar Les Olypiades home environment rather that the impoverished projects or the exclusive central Paris that we are used to seeing. There's and an attempt to give us a cross section of the city’s life - house hunting, call centers, the Sorbonne, Aged Care, home maintenance, discotheques and a glimpse of the porn industry. 

Encouragingly, this is also the third Black and White movie I’ve seen recently, along with The French Despatch (partly) and Ablaze.

Paris, 13th District - Lucie Zhang, Makita Samba

For the first half, it all plays quite well, as harassed Lucie Zhang tries to get by rent sharing her granny’s flat, which she has moved into, and working on Tele-Marketing from a crowded office, while her mum  harasses her with split screen ‘phone calls about getting married. Despite looking for a girl flat mate, Lucie takes on black student tenant Makita Samba and it’s hot sex on and off. It's surprising that in such a raunchy movie they fuzz the one 'phone dickpic.

Complications ensue when Samba’s friends buy him a Birthday phone sex session with the legendary "Amber Sweet" - fade to black and bring up the brief colour section. At this stage attention switches to thirty year old Merlant who is trying to re-make her life by becoming a lawyer after ten years working in the Real Estate office run by her uncle (by marriage).

Things come to a head when her younger fellow students, who aren’t all that welcoming, decide that, in the character defining blonde wig and scanties, Lucie is Amber Sweet and start asking for selfies with her. The film’s stand out scene is when the misidentification is shared round the Tobiac lecture hall via the students’ phones, during Merlant's call-on to demonstrate her understanding of  a difficult point of law for the class.

Paris 13th District - Lucie Merlant & Samba.

The rest concerns her prickly relationship with Samba, now running an Agence Imobilier where she knows more about the job than he does. We get to fill in their back stories, including running into one of the kids he taught in school now in a low skill manual job, as happened to too many, and Merlant’s having a ten year affair with the uncle.

Merlant is fascinated by her porn star lookalike and starts to buy time to talk to her, while Samba is faced with relationships with Lucie and Zhang, which is laid out in unlikely terms of true love and commitment.

The people are engaging and the film is ambitious enough and shows considerable skill but its central proposition is not as interesting as those of Audiard’s other movies and I rate it as his least rewarding. Also, despite the title,  it tells us disappointingly little about Les Olympiades, offering nondescript footage of streets and apartments where the elevated Métro provides the most distinctive visual they can come up with.

Frank Dubosc has been around for a long time. He was a continuing character in Coronation Street in the eighties.  His Tout le monde debout / Rolling to You however moved him to stage center, directing himself and starring as a character who the Me Too lot would cheerfully hang from a lamp post but we kind of get to like.

Well Dubosc and his character are back again with variation in the new Rumba la vie / Rumba Therapy.

We kick off with Frank alone, making himself a meal meal like Yves Montand in Police Python and with much the same connotation. Fellow driver Jean-Pierre Darroussin seems to be his entire social circle. Frank dismisses ball room dancing, and by implication movies like Strictly Ball Room and Shall We Dance, as effeminate. Turns out he's a chain smoking school driver using the bus P.A. to teach the kids to swear in English on his run and advising one “If you don’t want to go to school, sign on for the dole. It saves time.” The gags beat the old larf a minute in this one, before it predictably shifts into sentimental in the final section.

However a heart attack and double by-pass (explaining stents) causes a major mid-life crisis and Frank starts evaluating his past, seeking out old Hispanic flame Karina Marimon in her estate house with the slow opening gates and long ringing door chimes which her meek husband waits to subside.

 After some dialogue about how long Frank took to show up, she reveals that twenty years ago she carried his baby full term and now the girl’s grown to be Rumba instructor, the winning Louna Espinosa. He decides to seek his daughter out at the dance studio where she teaches and turns to African neighbor Marie-Philomène Nga (also in the new OSS ll7 movie) for advice on Afro Cuban dance - nice scene where she insists that Frank eat with her family and he makes every culturally insensitive move. We find that she’s actually a French teacher named after Pagnol’s "Fanny" which she promptly quotes to him. 

He finally rolls up to the dance academy full of people decades younger than him and is directed to Espinosa's class in the Salle Noureev only to be confronted by scantily clad Las Vegas dancers including a guy with a hairy but. He tells the instructor that he’s her dad only to find she's another girl who used the room for the day.

Frank finally enrolls in the daughter's class without telling her. Jokes about him turning up in Fred Astaire tap shoes and being ordered into his socks. He squirms through her sexy dance and his tongue-tied approaches are taken as a come on, getting him invited to meet in her favorite South American restaurant where he fails to recognise Guacamole and she explains her attraction to older men, embarrassing the heck out of him. Her fiancé regards Frank with suspicion but later proves to have a key role, with his speech about not failing Espinosa again. 

Frank Dubosc

Meanwhile sex with a middle aged class member puts Frank back in the hospital with her in the room with Dr. Michel Houellebecq, who had advised masturbation as better exercise than walking. It's that kind of picture. “Dying is something everyone can do. Living is hard.”

Turns out  that, like Alexandra Lamy in Tout le monde debout, Louna has tumbled his masquerade and is protracting the agony and (this is the point where the style and pace of the film changes) she has a plan for Frank to connect by partnering her in the World Rumba championship in Brighton - OK scenes of him rehearsing with her transferring his hand from her shoulder to her rump in the dip move.

Prepared they  arrive and get togged up but the stress hits Frank and he breaks out that last cigarette he bumpered to convince Lourna he was serious. Calamity strikes where we were expecting an up beat ending.

 This one is funny and very much in contact with contemporary attitudes.  The re-invented Frank Dubosc is someone more people should know.

Barrie Pattison - 2022

ABLAZE.

Time was we were seeing quite a bit of New Zealand production and things like John Reid's Middle Aged Spread, Geof Murphey's Goodby Pork Pie and Murray Ball's Footrot Flats were lively and unexpected - better than the films being made in Australia. Well, those days are gone but the odd New Zealand film still makes it’s way onto TV here - usually in the middle of the night, like 2019’s Ablaze directed by Joshua Frizzell and crewed by people whose background like his was in series TV.

Ablaze - Bruce Hopkins, David Van Horn.

This one is a scaled-down disaster movie dealing with a Xmas 1947 fire which engulfed Ballantyne’s department store in Christchurch. It gets some attention immediately for being in black and white ‘scope and attempting accurate period.

However it looks as if the makers have overreached themselves in trying for a big store movie. What they put on screen is less convincing than Ladies in Black or even the Marx Brothers and Norman Wisdom, let alone the three exceptional French films of  Zola’s “Au bonheur des dames” - Julien Duvivier’s late silent, André Cayatte’s 1943 turn and Pot Bouille by Duvivier again in 1957.

The New Zealanders seem to be working too hard, foregrounding a snotty floor walker who snubs a visitor in shirt sleeves and isn’t above making off with stock, putting moves on the shop girls and having a quiet smoke in the store room. By contrast, dress maker Hannah Marshall is concealing her pregnancy and is relieved when her severe supervisor re-assures her that she’ll be re-hired after her confinement. The girls are shown to be exploited (“I’ve never been to the races. I can’t afford it”) The dressmakers and milliners are at panic stations because they have to outfit current Miss New Zealand Mary Wootton and the auditors are in, getting all owner Mark Mitchinson’s attention.

Despite considerable effort, we never have the feeling that all this is happening in a sprawling three story fire trap. The elevator with it’s light up indicator is clearly the art director’s show piece but it comes as a surprise a couple of reels in to find that the store has a spacious Tea Room.

However at the point where I was losing interest, we get the fire disaster, which does play effectively in character terms with the cast gradually realising the situation and reacting differently to the circumstances they find themselves in as the ingrained store discipline restrains them.

Parallel with this we get the fire service in shiny brass helmets struggling after an inadequate preparation. The warden has to use the street pay kiosk to phone the fire in and they discover

Alison Bruce, Janine Burchett, Jared Turner, Serena Cotton, Mark Mitchinson, Manon Blackman, Nick Davies, and Brittany Clark.

with alarm that the doors are being locked to prevent pilfering while the fireys are restrained because they need the owner’s permission to enter private property.

The actual scenes of rising smoke and corridors blocked by flames, while the characters we have been induced to make usually bad decisions, do hold attention not the least because this is not a Towering Inferno but a small retail business menaced on a scale beyond their anticipation. 

Even here the cut price film making limits efforts. Through the window we see the dress maker escaping on the roof opposite without watching the stunt jump which we are told landed her there. Shots of figures on the smoke-filled stairs don’t prepare us for the body count which is more effectively conveyed in a final title listing the names of victims.

The use of actuality of the building blazing, its flag still flapping in the wind while the fire crews pour water into the flames, and the subsequent memorial carry the real charge, along with the news that the Ballantyne’s fire led to major changes in regulations and, since they were introduced, there hasn’t been a comparable disaster.

Ablaze is sufficiently accomplished to make you wonder about the other current New Zealand films, including the work of the people that contrived this one. I should watch those other unsocial hours transmissions to check.

Ablaze - Hannah Marshall, Manon Blackman and Ella Hope-Higginson 

 

 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

More Lake Gangjin.

Water Gate Bridge.

Though the official credits remain the same as those of  last year’s Zhang jin hu  / The Battle at Lake Changjin, the all time most expensive, most lucrative Chinese film ever, the current release Battle at Lake Chanjing II  : Water Gate Bridge  is alleged to be the footage left over from part one, largely shot by Tsui Hark, whose 2014 3D Zhi qu wei hu sha /Taking Tiger Mountain this one resembles. It offers the Chinese People's Volunteer Army's 7th Company arriving at the Water Gate Bridge in the Funchilin Pass with instructions to frustrate the retreat (“advance in another direction”) of the American 1st Marine Division - adding to the humiliation of the allied forces fresh from their triumphs in the WW2 Pacific. We are still waiting for the Poles, Turks and (pause) Australians to show up.

The action focuses on the fighting round a spectacular set of  mountain side six foot diameter pipes and their pumping station, glimpsed in the earlier film and featured in the promotion for this one.

Questions around the new film pretty much obliterate the one about whether Water Gate Bridge  is worth your fifteen bucks and two and a half hours of your time.  In the current charged atmosphere it looks like a warning shot, though this is largely repudiated by the fact that they have been working on it for five years. I still watch uneasily, considering the way these military spectaculars have come to dominate the current Chinese films we are being offered and their enormous attendance figures on their home turf.

As an example of the state of Chinese movie making art it is generally imposing with odd lapses - obvious model planes or the show piece truck crashing down the mountainside  interrupting impressive battle action material - the drone shots moving through arrested motion action with bullet tracks arching round them, characters crashing through levels of buildings, napalm victims running encircled by globes of flame. Hard not to worry about turning agonising death into a handsome piece of kinetic sculpture.

One top of this there’s the question of credibility. The imposing combat footage is again spaced by historical context material. We’ve lost that pensive Chairman Mao but James Filbird’s General Douglas MacArthur is back, looking ridiculous puffing on his corncob pipe at a formal reception. He’s clearly the villain, urging the use of the A Bomb to Ben Z Orenstein’s not very lookalike Harry Truman who is seen pondering next to his Napoleon portrait, like heavies in U.S movies - think Ricardo Cortez in Bad Company or Lionel Barrymore in It's a Wonderful Life. While the American troops are generally shown with some plausibility, they have to have a psychopath G.I. lurking in the shadows with a sharp screw driver to take out the upright Chinese soldiers.

   Jing Wu in action.

We pick up our guys - er - their guys (it’s an effort to remember who you are supposed to be rooting for) in the middle of the advance on the Chosin Resevoir, determined to impede the U.S. withdrawal despite their air supremacy and the support of the U.S. Carrier Strike Force. The Seventh have already taken away American artillery pieces only to have them bombed intro scrap metal. The response is to hand over the souvenir side arm and tell their commander to immediately go and capture some more from the invaders. Despite chipping their teeth on frozen beans and having their radio batteries ice up, the Chinese forces are inspired when the cloud clears to reveal the snow capped mountains “That’s our motherland” - more convincing in the last film and that was a special effect.

The action peaks on getting into the empty pipes by cutting a hole and shooting the pumphouse with a rocket along the cavity. Ha! The yanks didn’t expect that one! More spectacular action including placing explosive satchels under the enemy armor. Against orders, John F. Cruz’ General Smith pulls out. The blazing fires of the battle dissolve into chill morning ashes. This has not been without cost. Only nine party members survive. No one takes prisoners in this picture. We’ve had a flashback to Jing Wu’s home life to get the only woman into the movie and we end on a down beat note, repeating the opening of part one.

There is no doubt that the action staging can hold it’s own with Hollywood efforts like Saving Privare Ryan which is almost certainly an influence but the unrelenting assaults are numbing, dissipating a good part of the effect, and there is the old problem - one muddy guy in a uniform looks pretty much like another one, meaning it’s hard to differentiate characters and give the audience a chance to relate to them.

In many ways this is more accomplished than Part One but it’s impact is less because
we have already seen some of the makers’ tricks and because it pretty much abandons
the attempt to flesh out the would-be sympathetic characters.

 

I’d suggest diving on this one immediately, as it may move out of our grasp forever.
On the other hand it may become a permanent feature of our interface with Asia as
people draw positive and negative inferences.

Barrie Pattison 2022

Lulu’s Sister -

Blogspot Sprocketed Sources : Lulu’s Sister.  

 

Betty Amann

Alright - which Hollywood starlet trooped off to Weimar Germany to give one of the all time great silent movie performances, worked with Hitchcock and Ivan Mozjoukine and hung around to make more European hits before quitting the country to make B westerns back home?

If you said Louise Brooks you failed. Virtually no one now remembers Betty Amann. She’s not even in Ephram Katz' exhaustive Film Encyclopedia, though her career paralleled the now legendary Brooks, peaking in Amann’s lead opposite Gustave (Metropolis) Frölich in Joe May’s 1929’s Asphalt, one of the great physical performances in one of the last great silent movies.

She was spotted as Bee Amann, a minor Hollywood starlet, and signed by Germany’s ever talent conscious Erich Pommer for the Joe May film, where she was too conspicuous to ignore. Through the early thirties Amann had leads in other German, British and Polish films playing opposite stars like Heinrich George and Hans Albers without repeating her success. She’s notably ill served as the would-be exotic Princess in Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange. With the German situation becoming ever more tense, Jewish Amann decamped for the ‘States, where she was relegated to minor parts in minor movies.

  In Rich & Strange - with Henry Kendall.

I was surprised to find her as second female lead in In Old Mexico of 1936, the Hopalong Cassidy entry which she made on her return. She’s assured speaking English and she steals her scenes from the regulars. Amann even rides a horse. Why no one chose her for more substantial parts is a good question.

I found no answer looking at her other accessible performances. Most of her European movies are gone or at least out of reach. Still in her mid twenties when she made Asphalt, she comes out of 1929’s Der Weisse Teufel well enough as Mozjoukine’s Slavonic squeeze and she’s awful in Rich & Strange but so is everyone else.

The one new piece of data is her last European film Schleppzug M 17 / Tugboat M17, which looks like a personal venture for star Heinrich George, who you will have seen as the spanner-waving foreman in Metropolis. He was the leading sound era Emile Jannings imitator, notably in the 1940 Der Postmeister and a major star in the Nazi era, dying in a Russian prison camp at the end of WW2.

 George began the direction of Schleppzug M 17 himself and his wife Bertha / Berta Drews co-stars. He plays the Captain of Tugboat M17, first seen penetrating the fog off the German coast with him at the wheel, singing. His family, wife Drews and his two sons live on board. We are in the then-current river world cycle of Jean Gremillon’s Maldone, the Vigo L’atalante, Helmut Kautner’s Unter den brücken, Marcello Pagliero’s Les amants de Bras-Morts or Ingmar Bergman’s Skepp till India land and most of the memorable material shows life on board - passing through he locks to the Berlin mooring,  showering the kids with a watering can on deck, loading the cargo of timber.

However the film also reflects completing director Werner Hochbaum when the action moves into a seedy bar, like the one in his Razzia in St. Pauli, and George meets city floozie Amann, abandoned by her gangster associates. Heinrich punches out a bar fly who tries to move on her. Nice moment of Betty admiring his bicep, which her hands will just fit round. The woman bar singer does her number and soon Heinrich and Betty have moved into a curtained alcove.

Our hero goes back to his disfunctional family on the boat but when he takes them walking on Potsdammer Platz, he leaves to squire Betty and we are back in Werner Hochbaum territory complete with a riverside Grosen maskenball offering phones on the tables, accordion music, a girl chorus line, with Betty whisked off by a sailor leaving the Captain engulfed by streamers and girl revelers, to slump back by day light with gifts of chocolates and balloons for his family. That doesn’t go too well, with firemen rushed to the scene, and Heinrich is left stoically poling his ship through the shallows, his back to camera.

The film has not fully absorbed the conventions of sound film, retaining montages -  the seedy chorus line, passing the Berlin buildings and factory chimneys or the effect of quick cross-cutting, cutting George’s glasses-to-eyes views of Amann and Drews. It is occasionally technically rough with jerky tilts and scene setting that outstays its welcome and it could be dismissed as gloomy ersatz Jannings melodrama. Outside of the interest it offers as an example of the undershown German cinema of the thirties it is particularly interesting as the one occasion we can now hear Betty Amann speak German, the language of her greatest successes. Her femme fatale role is quite brief but she registers as film’s most intriguing element - alongside the Berlin settings.

That pretty much leaves us with In Old Mexico which proves a routine entry in the redoubtable sixty six Hopalong Cassidys. Robert Mitchum recalled doing nine of these these as an agreeable living, shooting two at a time with the crew filming the studio segments of the first before going off to out doors location for that one and the next and coming back to do the remaining interiors. Mitchum shared billing on these with such celebrity participants as musician Victor Young, cameraman Russell Harlan, who did major Howard Hawks movies, and To Kill a Mocking Bird and designer Lewis Rachmil, who ran Universal Studios for a while.

   Amann & William Boyd - In Old Mexico

However, director Edward D. Venturini‘s most notable credit is the silent 1922 Will Rogers Headless Horseman. He’d been doing Spanish versions of Hollywood films at this stage.

Paramount and producer Harry “Pop” Sherman had woken up to the fact that they were on to a good thing and pumped up the production values on the series adding music through out and not just on the action climaxes and taking advantage of the scenic possibilities of  locations like the California Joshua Tree National Park used here. Harlan is on top of his game with great trackings of riders against the distant mountains and even a few shadowed foreground compositions. Unfortunately Harrison Jacobs’ script - evil master of disguises Paul Sutton plots revenge on Hoppy and Rurales Colonel Trevor Bardette - is plodding in Venturini‘s hands with the action broken up by maudlin buddy comedy and Jan Clayton’s song.

Betty Amann takes full advantage of having the film’s one shaded part, before Hoppy sends her riding North because he doesn’t jail women. Even here she has authority and looks good. It’s surprising to finally hear her use the English of her New York childhood, making her a pioneer of the club of foreign speaking movie stars who revealed English as a first language. Include Eddy Constantine, Maggie Cheung and Jeanne Moreau. By the time she gets to Edgar Ulmer’s awful 1942 Island of Lost Men, Amann’s given up. That’s a genuine movie tragedy.

Transit’s excellent transfer of Asphalt (right Amann with Freulich), a tinted Tugboat M 17 without sub-titles and a soso copy of In Old Mexico are on You Tube.

Barrie Pattison 2022

Chinese Movie Time.

Yi miao zhong / One Second is something of return to form for Mainland Chinese Cinema heavy weight Yimou Zhang, with his personal take on the Cultural Revolution front and centre again.

Yi miao zhong / One Second - Wei Fan & Zhang Yi.

 

 

 

 

Coming over the bleak dunes, Zhang Yi (in Zhang Yimou's 2021 Xuan ya zhi shang / Cliff Walkers), the ragged lead gets into the dusty strip mall town in time to see an equally scruffy figure steal a reel of film from a courier’s motor bike left outside the bar. It takes some time to find out why this is so important while they fill  in the back stories of the characters.

The thief is Liu Haocun (also Cliff Walkers), one of those “My goodness - you’re a girl” characters familiar from the Kung Fu movies and earlier and wider. She’s a companion to Minzhi Wei  in Zhang Yimou’s best film, the 1999  Yi ge dou bu neng shao / Not One Less, both children called on to carry adult responsibilities with their Cultural Revolution backgrounds a key element of the plot.

Zhang Yimou

Along the way the purloined reel gets to to change hands as the protagonists flannel truck driver Yang Yu with conflicting stories and Newsreel Nunber 22 falls off a truck to be dragged along a dirt road.

The damaged reel is important for each of  the leads - income for the impoverished girl (lampshades made of movie films are trendy), his Mr. Movie  status and that of his tiny Community 2 for Town movie house operator Wei Fan (I Am Not Madam Bovary) and the powerful significance of one second (actually several) for Zhang Yi, who proves to be on the run from a prison camp.

The film’s most memorable passages is set in Wei Fan's undecorated district cinema where he involves the entire tiny community in the work of restoring the damaged film reel, preparing bowls of distilled water and drying racks to clean it while stressing to the stranger the importance of his work to his family and his community.

Heroic Sons & Daughters.

The film takes immense care with the technical stuff, finding a fifties hand joiner, utilising film cement with a steel blade and wooden applicator stick and contriving a looping set up, which Wei Fan proudly tells Zhang Yi his fellow operators are unable to manage, so you've got to wonder why the restored reel shows negative damage when it should have been black scratching marks. 

They have to wait till the house empties after Wei's regular showing of  Zhaodi Wu’s  Ying xiong er nü / Heroic Sons and Daughters  (1964) which the clips make look livelier than the few movies we get to see from that era. Wei explains that the audience will stay watching anything he puts on the screen with a hint of pride.

The security division are on the trail of  Zhang Yi and it is the film’s most poignant concept that neither they or Haocun Liu are able to understand when Wei slips frames of the image to the fugitive.

There is another tacked on happy ending, when the now scrubbed up and freshly clothed protagonist is given his liberty and returns to the village. It has been suggested that this tampering is the cause of the delay in the film’s release.

Not the least appealing aspect of the piece is it’s place in the line of movies lingering on the importance of the movie shows of the maker’s youth - obviously Cinema Paradiso (1988) along with  The Last Picture Show (1971), Etore Scola’s  Splendor (1989)  Australia’s 1997 Picture Show Man or the 2007 Hong Kong Lo kong ching chuen / Mr. Cinema. One Second is not disgraced in this company.

Barrie Pattison 2022