Memory Lane

In 1982 when I made I Am No God, the documentary about their healers, in the Philippines, that country had the number six film industry in the world - remarkable for a population of that size. There were blankets under the cutting room benches, where the editors would stretch out and catch a nap rather than leave the premises before their film was finished and the entire national production went through the one Eastmancolor processor at LVN. Their best directors - Lino Brocka, Eddie Romero and Gerry de Leon made polished programmers, sometimes in collaboration with Hollywood operators like Roger Corman and American International, while the rest managed a consistent standard of competence.

I've tried to keep tabs on the country's production since but very little has made it through the Ethnic/Festival filter - oddities like Olivia M. Lamasan's 2004 Milan - so I was charged up at the prospect of the well-received Metro Manila, offered by  SBS Online. Well, tough luck. They took it down before I had the chance. However all was not lost. A slightly washed-out copy can be retrieved from YouTube. I can't say that this really counts as a 2012 update on Filipino cinema. The driving force (instigator-director-camera man) was celebrity British documentary maker Sean Ellis, who wrote a script in English, which his native-speaker actors translated into Tagalog for the performances, recorded in their lightweight video process which allowed inconspicuous location filming and freed them from stock ratio limitations.

I'm not sure that Filipino authorities would be all that anxious to claim this one either. It shows an irredeemably corrupt and merciless environment. 

Banuaue province rice farmer Jake Macapagal's family don't even get enough for their crop to buy seed for the next year and resolve that their only hope is to try Manila in the claws of Neon (Ellis acknowledges the impact of Brocka) They set out in a Jeepney bus which always survives its breakdowns ariving to be awed by the urban traffic and construction - seeing a girl dragged off the street into a passing car on their first night. A meeting at the Quezon City labor exchange gets the offer of an empty flat cut price but that proves a scam and the cops throw them out as squatters. Casual work only earns a bag of cooked rice and a soda. Desperate, Macapagal applies for the most dangerous job in Manila, driving an armoured cash van. Spotting his military unit tattoo, driver John Arcilla (particularly good) pulls him out of the applicant line, where fake tattoos are commonplace. He loans  Macapagal a clean shirt and prompts him to tell a joke the way that boss Moises Magisa will expect. 

Metro Manila - Macapagal & Vega

Arcilla takes the raw newcomer in hand for the month of training. He puts music in the "coffin" red van's casette player and introduces his new partner to the ritual of the keys they never see for the transported, ink-bombed cash boxes, along with foil wrapped take away, nights boozing with the drivers and the ritual of (oh, oh!) being the "Postman" who takes a dead partner's possessions to the widow after a robbery. Learning he is living in a Tonda squat, Arcilla slips Macapagal the key to a secret love nest he uses, where the family can now experience the thrill of running water (cf. Brocka's Bona).   A kitten joins the family. Planes fly overhead. An ominous black Honda is trailing the van  - kids trying to spook the drivers? 

Metro Manila - Macapagal & Vega

Metro Manila - Macapagal & Vega

Macapagal's pregnant wife Althea Vega has taken a hostess spot in Angalina Kanapi's tourist girly bar. The manager is eyeing the pre-teen daughter who sleeps in the back room, waiting for Mum Vega.  Metro Manila  is one of the most unremittingly cynical films ever made. Even the veneer of worker solidarity proves a trap. The film is sustained by a realist detail which will only crumble in the ingenious but not so plausible finale. This one made its way to Sundance.

Even if Metro Manila is a suspect progress report on Pino film-making, it makes a notable extension to the international heist movie line. Think Richard Fleischer's 1951 The Armored Car Robbery, Antonio Isasi Isamendi's 1968 They Came to Rob Los Vegas, Nic Boukhief's 2004 Le Convoyeur and the rest. 

However, while checking out S.B.S. On Demand, I did score another nostalgia blast - taking me back to  those endless discussions of the difference between eroticism and porn - not unlike dividing religion and superstition. The service was offering the late Jean-Claude Brisseau's last movie, the 2018 Que le diable nous emporte/Tempting Devils.  I wasn't even aware that one existed, though I'd followed Brisseau's career with some interest after meeting him in 1989 on the already controversial release of his remarkable Noce blanche with Bruno Cremer and Vanessa Paradis.

Brisseau had been a schoolteacher making conspicuous amateur movies. These got the attention of Éric Rohmer, who backed Brisseau's l988 feature success De bruit et de fureur, launching Cremer & establishing the director's mix of urban realism and raunch. Aproving critics singled out its pioneering depiction of the housing project kids' gangs, anticipating Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 La Haine and Romain Gavras' 2022 Athena.

However, as with Walerian Borowczyk (La Bête, Contes immoraux), no matter how welcoming the art movie community had been, Jean-Claude Brisseau's interests lay more with exploitation film.

Popular sensitivities moved on and Brisseau was dragged into court by a couple of women he auditioned naked for parts in an upcoming movie and didn't give them. He was found guilty, fined and handed a suspended sentence, which didn't stop him using the incident in his 2007 Les anges exterminateurs. 

Made closer to the present, Tempting Devils opens with a now mature Fabienne Babe, who played a teacher in De Bruit & de fureur, ringing the owner of a cell phone she has found. Offering to drop it off at a police station, she is told that is the last thing owner Isabelle Prim would want and they arrange a meeting. Babe checks the messages and finds naked selfies - we are already in a Jean Claude Brisseau film.  The meeting of Babe and trim young Prim takes place in the apartment of Anna Sigalevitch and, sure enough, we don't take all that long to get into a bare assed threesome. The condition these women maintain is impressive. It's not the grotesque surgical sculpture we see with porn stars. 

The plot is amplified by the arrival of pistol-waving rejected lover Fabrice Deville and yoga master uncle Jean-Christophe Bouvet, who is into apporting himself round the flat (actually Briseau's own home - spot a They Drive By Night Poster, the Bruno Cremer Maigret box set and Night of the Hunter disk. Brisseau himself does a walk-on.

Tempting Devils - Prim, Babe at home with Night of the Hunter & Maigret.

For better or for worse, the pornographic aspects of this one are its best. The dramatic content is just functional, the photomontage artworks we are supposed to admire are unremarkable and the climax floating vision is equally trite. Brisseau's work is near the definition of a guilty pleasure - part of a notably French tradition with Christian Jacques' jokey Adorables créatures, Roger Vadim's polished Sait on Jamais? and Liasons dangereuses, David Hamilton's Bilitis, eventually to degenerate into the work of the seedy José Berazareff, the isolated Jean Rollin, the talentless Radley Metzger and the dreaded Bernard Manduco.

It takes a certain amount of courage to declare yourself a fan of Jean Claude Brisseau. I'm trying to picture the negotiations that led to the purchase and playing of this one on Australia's national ethnic broadcaster. Not meaning to dismiss Brisseau's film itself, but that could be something a whole lot more interesting. 

Barrie Pattison 2026

Salt Mines & Garages

Public domain is catching up with movies and Hollywood movies in particular. This is not a new development. Glitches in copyright procedures have made many titles like It's a Wonderful Life or Night of the Living Dead skid in and out of protection for years, to the delight of fringe operators and the frustration of corporates who considered them their property. However the assumption that the first all-talking motion pictures are now fair game is now widespread and films with 1929 or 1930 on the credits are beginning to proliferate in streaming and legacy media. 

Victor Sjöström's Tower of Lies -  Norma Shearer, Lon Chaney, William Haines.

I can't say my sympathies are divided on this matter. The studios have been indifferent to the fate of vintage material too often. MGM appear to have lost three of Victor Sjöström's films - the equivalent of burning three Picassos and hardly a sound business proposition. The lack of value in vintage film has become a self-fulfilling prophecy as titles that were not being shown never develop the new fan base that would create demand. Film Museums have a patchy record here, with horror stories about nitrate masters being burned as a fire hazard after making inferior dupes. Particularly series comics were considered to be beneath their dignity. That's you Bob Hope, Ossi Oswalder, Pierre Laquey and Jack Hulbert, on down through Adam Sandler. There were notable exceptions. Think London films or Agnes Varda with their impressive re-issue records. 

Well, there is some good news as a combination of profit seeking and serious scholarship is producing a current restricted demand for vintage film. Titles that we thought were gone forever are being re-printed from laboratory masters that have been entombed in salt mines or garages for a century, a heroically random process. We may have lost Victor Sjöström but Ben Stoloff is still with us.

 I rate Strictly Dishonorable a find. I can only attribute its low profile to the long term slackness of Universal’s re-issue mechanism and the laziness of the viewer community. That leaves us with the copy on You Tube, a TCM rip-off  - not ideal.

This one is Preston Sturges’ first screen credit, a barely adapted 1931 film version of the hit among his prolific Broadway offerings of the day. Even more significantly, it ushers in the succession of John Stahl sound melodramas, which are among the great pleasures of that early period - Back Street, Only Yesterday, Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life - less raucous than the Warner output, less ossified than the MGM prestige product. Stahl had been a significant figure during the silents, both as director (Memory Lane) and producer, heading up the Tiffany operation. Unfortunately, it is his later, largely machine-made Fox films (Leave Her to Heaven, Oh You Beautiful Doll!) which viewers are now likely to encounter.

Strictly Dishonorable opens not all that promisingly in a process screen car, with an argument between engaged couple Sidney Fox and George Meeker who are at the point where, having landed her, he doesn’t feel the need to be gallant any more, a message-heavy exchange (“marriage - it’s like going to jail”) It’s also the only sustained part of the film occuring outside the studio-built Speak Easy below apartments, which presumably takes the place of the original stage setting. There is a disconnect finding Meeker, a familiar face heavy in post war westerns and serials, charming the leading ladies of the Stahl films. He and ethnic comic William Ricciardi playing the manager, we are told were in the stage original.

Strictly Dishonorable - Ricciardi & Stone.

The bar decor, with the characters making entrances and departures and the vocal delivery af a cast not allowing pauses for laughs, lacking the clue of live audience feedback, suggest that we are in for one of those inadequately adapted theatre pieces as which early sound films were dismissed. Upstairs resident Lewis Stone drops by the bar, coming in for the night, and is persuaded to take a drink before turning in. Stone is the one who proves to be most in his element here, the star of several of Stahl’s silents he manages to provide the film’s most nuanced character and do it while becoming inebriated and recovering as the film runs.

Like the bickering couple in Merven Le Roy’s contemporary First National Playing Around (an interesting comparison), Fox and Meeker drop in but are about to blow the joint when she takes an interest in the arrival of fellow tenant, fresh from his opera singer gig, top billed Paul Lukas. He doesn’t actually kiss any hands but you get the idea. The body of the film is a comparison between the lives offered down home Mississsippi girl Fox by the contrasting potential partners. One of the more interesting dynamics is her Pre-Code willingness to be corrupted by the glittering urbanite, with upright ex-Judge Stone trying to protect the virtue she is losing interest in. I’m not the only one to be struck by the comparison with The Moon Is Blue.

Strictly Dishonorable - Lukas & Fox.

Another surprise casting touch is Sidney (my favorite Charlie Chan) Toler’s Irish (!) beat cop, manipulated by Judge Stone to provide further complications. We get a single inset of Meeker in a cell. That’s better than their other tries for film form, shots of the characters on the stairs linking the bar and the flats, conversations between the rear windows, the glimpse of the moon or jarring sound motivated close-ups of a phonograph disk or a ringing ‘phone. Actually more effective is the dialogue’s suggestion of a teaming Manhattan just outside the doors - Fox’s joyful visits to the Met, buying rail tickets ar Pen Station a block away, Lukas’ professional engagements. These possibly unconsciously linger from the Broadway origins. 

The film's strength is in the performances. Charm was Stahl’s stock in trade and the leads deliver that by the bucketful. Fox, made even more sympathetic by our knowledge of her short life, is irresistible, even if she comes on a bit decolette for the sweet thing character and Lukas nails the lady killer who is really a softie. It’s a delight to watch them come together despite Stone’s protective instinct. The film making (Karl Freund on camera, Jack Pierce make up) is in the hands of master craftsmen even if they haven’t quite figured sound out yet. The imperfections actually give it a kind of patina. The shonky but sharp copy still shows that. It might be an idea to catch this one fast. These tend to vanish.

The piece was remade in 1951 with Janet Leigh and Ezio Pinza. I remember that as agreeable but the only point in common I recall is the actual “strictly dishonorable” exchange.

The Devil's Holiday, from previous year 1930, looked even more promising, an ambitious Paramount talkie with a celebrity cast, coming from the accomplished Edmund Goulding

Effective opening in a featureless Chicago Grand Hotel switch room with operator Zazu Pitts, of whom we could have seen more, and sharpy Ned Sparks. His stone-faced interpretation effectively insulates him from the excesses the rest get lured into. Resident and hotel manicurist business owner Nancy Carroll is not taking calls and Zazu has Ned admitted to her suite, while Hotel security Wade Boteler sees off Nancy’s insistent “fiancé” Morgan Farley. Turns out that Ned has a business proposition. He wants Nancy to vamp a country visitor to sew up an agriculture machinery deal with a big-time Wheat Farmer (“He’s got so much money the bank won’t take it. They don’t have the room. They’d have to pay storage.”) where it looks like Ned’s time is being beaten by competitor Jed Prouty. 

Phillips Holmes, Jed Prouty, Nancy Carroll

Nancy pushes up his offered commission with an eye on financing her proposed trip to Paris and soon callow heir Phillip(s) Holmes is in the barber shop with Nancy dipping his fingers into her bowl. Phillip(s)’s stern brother James Kirkwood takes a dim view and has one of the film’s strongest scenes telling Nancy she’s predatory. She comes back “I’ve got people in this town that would cut your tongue out for half what you said to me, see?” 

Sure enough, there’s a fakey montage of wheat stems in front of a back cloth and Holmes is introducing new wife Nancy to stern dad (eminent silent actor and producer with a speciality in Jack London) Hobart Bosworth. (“His home, his church and his books - that’s father”) who, despite Kirkwood’s warning, is pondering that there must be some good in the girl if his son has married her. About now we O.D. on sin and redemption. Conviction wilts.

Director(producer-writer-composer) Edmund Goulding was one of the Hollywood greats, first for silent film scripts, including Tol’able David. His writing the Swedish En Kvinnas morgondag contains elements of The Devil’s Holiday plot. As a director, he headed up three decades of major studio productions, including multiples with Garbo and Bette Davis. Joan Crawford said she’d have gone on dancing on tables if it hadn’t been for Eddie Goulding. A lot of his work was ordinary (Sam Fuller wouldn’t believe Goulding had made Down Among the Sheltering Palms when they were both at Zanuck’s Fox) but Goulding hit substantial peaks with Sally Irene & Mary, Grand Hotel, Jezebel, The Old Maid, the Errol Flynn The Dawn Patrol and the Tyrone Power Nightmare Alley. Try and draw a straight line through that lot. His versatility made him the opposite of the auteur filmmaker model.

  Devil's Holiday - Kirkwood & Caroll

Goulding had planned on filming Devil’s Holiday with Jean Eagles in the lead but her substance abuse death prevented that. Gloria Swanson had headed up his previous and more accomplished The Tresspasser and was considered. That would have been a major re-write. His eventual production has a camera technique with trackings and selection of angles equal or superior to the work around him and his picture of the Grand Hotel as a busy enclosed world intrigues, anticipating his major MGM success but the rural community only gets near token delineation - Bosworth discussing threshers with Prouty or dismissing the urban idea of a Sunday off as the Devil’s Holiday. The interiors are particularly cheesy. The structure contrasting the two settings is submerged in the hysterics. Even the physical insertion of Viennese shrink, Paul Lukas again, into the final confrontation - his restraining hand coming into edge of frame when the leads emote, doesn’t provide a significantly sophisticated presence and of course the Marriage Bond is sacred.

This one does have all manner of interesting features but is still bogged in the early sound plot conventions that the front-runners were already shedding. It is one for the curious and a whole lot more are piling in behind it as copyrights become shaky. It's a good time to be a movie completist.

 

Devil's Holiday - Sparks & Carroll.

Strictly Dishonorable - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfrUDWTA6UI

Devil's Holiday - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkYdQcGmrzg

also Playing Around https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6YYDHHcPS4

Barrie Pattison 2026

Film 2025

Thought I'd do a films of the year list again. Way back when I started these, I felt confident that I was considering the whole menu.  It was possible for someone determined to look at everything likely - particularly everything likely that made it to Australia. Anything else was merely commercial or local consumption product. Of course, Asian, South American and Arab material only got a look in by accident.  Moving out, I ran into people who felt that their access to film festivals meant that they had it nailed down.  This of course excluded trash movies/ cinéma bis and "third world" efforts. Physical media and now Streaming have buried this illusion. Without doubt, there is now more material being produced and more material made accessible than any one person can hope to do justice.

It's tempting to just view legacy theatrical exhibition or the material mentioned in the press - or what meets your ideological criteria - and there are people who do that, offering a suitable amount of scorn for anything else. I've been around long enough to know any of those standards will eliminate most of what I'm looking for. It will take another five/ten years for a lot of what I value to reach me. Kinugasa's An Actor's Revenge was made ninety-one years ago and I only this year caught it in a Cinémathèque event -  severely mutilated at that.

The best I can do is nominate titles which I saw for the first time this year and impressed me. I enjoy doing that and it would be nice if it encouraged anyone to seek them out.

Let's have La Grazia Paolo Sorrentino Italy, One Battle After Another Paul Thomas Anderson USA, Histoire de Souleymane Boris Lojkine France, Anora Sean Baker USA, Yukinojô henge: Kaiketsu-hen / An Actor’s Revenge Teinosuke Kinugasa Japan (1936), Straume / Flow Gints Zilbalodis Latavia,  Xiang yang Hua/We Girls Feng Xiaogang China, Les trois mousquetaires: I D'Artagnan & II Milady/The Three Musketeers Martin Bourboulon France, Sinners Ryan Coohler U.S.A. Amance en Samana Rafa Cortés, Spain, 

La grazia - Tony Servillo, Anna Ferzetti






Barrie Pattison 2026

New Wave

Nouvelle Vague, the new Richard Linklater film, has arrived. It is an Academy frame black and white effort, in English sub-titled French, claiming to present the break out film-making of the sixties as we follow Jean Luc Godard putting together À bout de souffle/ Breathless.

Lookalikes appear as the celebrities of the French film making scene - Jean Cocteau, (“Art is not a business. It’s a priesthood”) Jean Pierre Melville in his cowboy hat or Roberto Rossellini hitting up his driver for a loan. They are filmed in the original locations in the Paris of Linklater’s After Midnight. There's Guillaume Marbeck / Godard’s contemporaries grouped outside the Le Champo display with a Jerry Lewis poster prominent, a script conference on a bench in Richelieu-Drouot Metro, wheeling Matthieu Penchinat/Raoul Coutard’s camera concealed as a baby carriage  down the Champs Elysées following Zoey Deutch  in her Jean Seberg Herald-Tribune T-Shirt or the unit playing pin ball in (is that?) the bar where they launched into spontaneous dance in Bande à part. Visitors on the nude scene shoot include Georges de Beauregard because he’s the producer and José Bénazeraf because he’s a letch.  There is a nice moment where Benjamin Clery, their Pierre Rissient, has a camera set up calculated to film the Latin Quarter street lights coming on. 

Aubry Dullin & Zoey Deutch at Arc de Triomphe

Linklater was clearly aiming at evoking Godard’s free-wheeling style, which was so electrifying to those sixties audiences I saw sit stony faced through the earlier, master-crafted classic French films which I absorbed with such enthusiasm.

 Linklater is likely to bluff viewers who didn’t live through that era but I’m continually distracted by departures from narratives with which I’m familiar. The story was that Godard made off with Cahiers du Cinéma’s petty cash to bankroll his first attempt at filmmaking, while here he uses it to get to the Cannes festival. We heard Truffaut’s credited original story for A bout de soufle was a handwritten page which he scribbled to provide his name prestige from the bonanza success of 400 coups to fund raising. I haven’t handled a film print but wide screen was firmly established by 1959 and the film's projections that I watched all seemed to fit comfortably on that.  We heard that Godard’s first cut was stunning boring, so he just went through and lopped out the bits he didn’t like, joining up what was left and claiming to have invented the jump cut, which incidentally was already part of the classic film vocabulary. Look at William Wyler’s 1958 achetypically traditional The Big Country! What about the nose job Belmondo got before his Godard short? Throw in an inexplicable glimpse of Françoise Arnoul’s birthday party.  What did credited colorist Yov Moor do on a monochrome picture?

History is repeating itself here when unknown Aubry Dullin and lively visiting U.S. starlet Zoey Deutch get to animate the original movie star characters. 

Guillaume Marbeck & Richard Liklater

I’m a fan of Linklater and I can see the appeal of his version to the director of Dazed & Confused or Boyhood but personally I’m getting over-familiar with the Godard narrative - the Richard Gere Breathless, Kristen Stewart in Seberg. By and large, I find Michel Hazanavicius’ 2017 Godard mon amor, with Lou Garrel as a  cantankerous Jean Luc, battling middle-aged celebrity, more convincing. He always struck me as someone disturbingly undisciplined, who lucked out because he recruited talented people like Seberg and Belmondo, Raoul Coutard and Michel Legrand and I don’t know that we need two Godard bios, while Agnes Varda’s beautiful study of Jaques Demy,  Jacquot de Nantes, is all but unknown.

Maybe I’d have regarded the uneven JLG output with more sympathy if he hadn’t been unable to come up with the names of any of the Monogram movies he’d dedicated  À bout de souffle to, when called on, a plausible test of poltroonhood.

Barrie Pattison 2026

 

More Italian Film Festival 2025

The 2025 Italian Film Festival became even more remarkable when they fronted the new Paulo Sorrentino-Tony Servillo La grazia.

La Grazie - Servillo.

La grazia opens (surprisingly) effectively with jets distant in a clear sky and captions outlining the duties of the Italian Presidente.  Any viewer will be struck by the lack of connection to the powers the Trump administration has appropriated. However, the film is really apolitical. Long-time Sorrentino collaborator Toni Servillo’s lead character, Mariano De Santis’ ex ex-judge is a President coming to the end of his final term - after surviving five. Italian Presidents are familiar ground for the star and director, who have already made the Silvio Berlusconi biography L’oro and Il divo on Giulio Andreotti but this one leaves those in its dust. In fact, it’s so good that I forgive them for their Il grande belezzia.

Servillo’s major challenge is a decision on three petitions put before him: clemency for two convicted spouse murderers and the legalisation of euthanasia. The grace of the title has the double legal and religious meaning and becomes a central, complex philosophical concept. Now if this sounds heavy, it is but Grazie is not a downer. It is in fact one of the most approachable current productions and its mix of intelligence and superior film craft puts it in the top bracket.

 We catch up with Presidente Tony sneaking a cigarette on the Quirinale Palace roof, though he now has only one lung. His day is arranged round ceremonial events - a meeting with Portugal’s ancient  Prime Minister, whose progress down the red carpet is disrupted by a cloudburst (very A nous la liberté - they liked the same bit I did), a meeting with Alexandra Gottschlichm, the flirtatious Lithuanian ambassador or the lavish La Scala climax performance in his honor.  Attending the Alpini Regimental dinner, where Tony stands up at the head of the table and sings their anthem, had me feeling I should cheer. His dialogue with black Pope friend Rufin Doh Zeyenouin shades into a confession, pointing Tony’s Christian Democrat background.  It’s also a reminder of Sorenntino’s accomplished Young Pope streaming series.

 The character’s private time is spent with lawyer daughter Anna Ferzetti, one of the film’s many clearly talented performers whose work hasn’t come our way.   They share his fish and quinoa meals and we get a hint that taking care of him has consumed half her life, while her musician brother has escaped those demands. The scene where Tony finally decisively edits the assisted suicide petition with Ferzetti, though it will stress his relationship with his Prelate friend, is a nice way of bolstering our regard for the character.

  La grazie - memory

However, all is not well with Tony. He stands unexpectedly at a church service or in a frenetic modern ballet video presentation, inserting him immobile into the furious dancing, (which was the one good idea in Grande bellezia). His prescient Major Domo Orlando Cinque (he carries an inhaler in case Tony gets a cough) is in charge of Elvis (!) the President’s horse which  has failed to respond to care and needs to be put down. Tony’s persistent neurosis is the knowledge that his late wife took a lover, confiding in acid tonged family friend Milvia Marigliano, sworn not to reveal the name. The wife’s silhouette distant in the fog haunts him and  how the film resolves this conflict is nothing short of brilliant.

Also unexpected is the film’s introducing the conflict of popular and classical music, running to rapper Guè Pequeno towering over other recipients at the comic awards presentation and giving Servillo a second change to sing unaccompanied, which he does impressively. The film’s real strength however is a succession of set piece dialogues, particularly those with the jailed petitioners. Ferzetti visits Black Widow Linda Messerklinger only to be insulted but the lawyer meets Messerklinger’s devoted admirer in the commissary. Tony’s investigation of wife-killer Vasco Mirandola proves less intense. Interviewing the convict’s mayor inverts expectation.

 This is part of the film's structure, the thing which would make it outstanding even without the master crafting. What we accept as being part of movie shorthand exposition is subverted. When Tony sees Mirandola in jail, his democratic gesture of refusing the special ante room his daughter had used, finds the prisoners’ waiting relatives as embarrassed as he is. Mirandola dismisses the esteem his pupils had for him, saying he only acted out what was in their text books. What they admired was his performance. Tony telling Marigliano he keeps on sleeping in church, has her dismissing his complaint, saying he’s lucky. It takes her two sleeping pills. The Major Domo prompts that Tony gives too much importance to truth, which Tony, twenty years a judge, finds confronting. After rejecting symbolism for two hours La grazie tracks back to the astronaut who’s tear fell in zero gravity before he broke out in laughter, while Tony watched the live feed from space. 

 La grazie - Servillo.

There’s no doubt that Servillo’s performance confirms his status as the great film actor of our time (he lucks out with The Illusion too). Even when he is immobile, listening or watching the action, he owns the scene. Sorrentino had immense luck in finding him and the actor has pounced on the opportunity their work provides.

The film has been bought by Madman locally and should turn up in theaters shortly. It will be interesting to see if their efforts receive recognition.

Sorrentino filming

It's not all that big a jump to Andrea Segre’s Berlinguer: La grande ambizione/ The Great Ambition, even if this one is closer to a history lesson than an entertainment. Its subject, Enrico Berlinguer headed the Italian Communist Party, during the period in the seventies and eighties, where it was the largest in Europe, finally commanding forty percent of his country’s vote. This is a subject neglected by media and education. Too much of it is embarrassing for them and their support base. Berlinguer managed to tick off both the Soviets and the ruling Christian Democrats with his brand of what they called Euro-Communism,  a balancing act between the opposing camps, holding the line against US Imperialism but wanting Italy in NATO, rather than the Soviet bloc. There is a nice half-comic scene where Berlinguer and the Soviet Premier agree a deal where they won’t publicly criticise the others’ positions. This manouvering gets so much attention that The Party doesn’t seem to be getting stuck into legislation, with fighting the conservatives’ restrictive divorce reform being just about the only thing on show. 

Great Ambition - Elio Germano

However, The Great Ambition does work hard at reaching a wide public. The film fronts Elio Germano impressively  submerging his star persona in the Berlinguer character, first seen narrowly avoiding death in a Bulgarian highway pile-up for which the Soviet authorities are suspected. There’s also a difficult balance between public and private life - Germano gathering his children to warn them that, if he is kidnapped like Aldo Moro, his position, forbidding any deal with extremists, may remove him from their lives. The film is at pains to select unfamiliar support players whose presence doesn’t undermine presenting them as captioned historical figures. There’s enough dramatisation to offer Roberto Citran as a relatable Moro and Nikolay Danchev as a comic Leonid Breznev - a reincarnated Stalin whose mustache has metamorphosed into eyebrows. The Great Ambition gains conviction using the device we saw in Marcel Barrena’s Spanish El 47,  yellowing the tone of the photography so that it matches the 1970s stock footage into which it is integrated - or at least doesn’t jar on transitions. Actuality of the funeral, attended by Marcello Mastroianni and Mickael Gorbachev, gets to be the comment they wanted to make. 

 Andrea Segre’s film manages to hold attention to the extent than an audience which has no stake in events remains interested, something we’ve seen failed often.  It’s welcome to find the director of 2011’s Io sono Li/ Song Le & the Poet back again with another involving but still thoughtful production  

I suspect I’m the only person who ever sought out this one because it fills in the background I’m missing in all those Years of Lead thrillers that make up a significant section of Italian cinema. Include Bellocchio’s 1972 Slap the Monster on Page One, 2007 Good Morning Night & 2022 Exterior Night, Bolognini’s 1972 Chronicle of a Homicide,  Francesco Rosi’s 1976 Illustrious Corpses & 1981 Three Brothers, Damio Damiani’s 1976 I Am Afraid, Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child and Segio Corbucci’s 1991 Women in Arms. Watching those, I've always felt I needed footnotes.

As if to make the point, the event offered Il tempo che ci vuole/The Time It Takes.  One startling scene has pre-teen Anna Mangiocavallo sitting in a class that hears a loud hailer truck announcement of the  Aldo Moro murder from the street below and immediately bursts out in cheers, horrifying their teacher.

The film is Francesca Commencini’s autobiographical account of growing up the daughter of movie director Luigi Comencini (Proibito rubare, Pane, amore e fantasia). It narrows its focus to this central pair. Francesca's mother or her fellow-director sister Christina are curiously absent. Starting with Mangiocavallo as an eight year old on the set of Luigi/Fabrizio Gifuni’s TV Pinocchio series (Giuseppe Lo Piccolo and Luca Massaro  as Franco & Ciccio) we watch her perception of him metamorphose from master & commander of a film making fairy land - on horseback,  a ball of light in his hands - till we reach the pair in his old age, having seen a life time of turbulent history.  

Filmmaking is interlaced with the personal material. Fleeing Red Brigade terror, Gifuni proposes a shift to Paris. The grown Francesca, now Romana Maggiora Vergano, asks what they could do there and is told they will watch movies. This shades into his recollection of being stood up in the city by an early love object and going dejected to a movie house running the Pabst L’Atalantide,  which they mis-quote (that’s Vladimir Sokaloff as Brigite Helm’s father calling out “Paree, Paree!” before the cut to the Can Can dancers in the French version, a moment which also lodged in my own memory bank) 

Vergano & Francesca Comencini

The Time It Takes is exceptionally dense. I'd need another viewing to absorb it fully.  It runs through Neo Realism, the Red Brigade, addiction, tough love, Film Festival glitter, age and infirmity, all with a stylistic complexity that finds room for the motif of the sinister whale red mouth fantasy, the film clips and family dominance that shifts between father and daughter as she is engulfed by the drug scene and age takes his stamina. 

Francesca, determined to make her own films, announces an autobiographical project and her father comments that in a long career he never felt that need himself and forbids her to show him the result. He sits watching her subsequent award presentation, directing her TV image from his chair.  

Performances are excellent. Use of the actual family home adds another connection and the technical work, with Luca Bigazzi again impressive on camera, effectively slots the piece between documentary and romanticised memory. The ending is quite magical, merging Helm's backward glance and the flying whale. Film clips (include a silent Pinocchio & Paisa again) are made tellingly relevant with the final revelation that they come from the copies that a then young enthusiast Luigi hoarded under his bed after they were abandoned by their holders, later to present to the Milan Cinematheque, of which he was a founder.

The Time It Takes is exceptionally dense. I'd need another viewing to absorb it fully.  It runs through Neo Realism, the Red Brigade, addiction, tough love, Film Festival glitter, age and infirmity, all in a stylistic complexity that finds room for the motif of the sinister whale red mouth fantasy, the film clips and dominance that shifts between father and daughter as she is engulfed by the drug scene and age takes his stamina. The film is unsparing and frequently touching. One particularly effective passage has Gifuni describe his coming to terms with the fact that his efforts in the area he loved were largely mediocre. I recalled an interview with grindhouse specialist Fred Olen Ray describing the same realisation - we are into strange comparisons. I found it hard to find a match for this one. The Barrets of Wimpole Street would be a grotesque choice. Ann Hui’s mother-daughter Song of the Exile comes closer. 

The Time It Takes is a film that I hope gets wider showing, not just because it connects with me on a quite alarming number of levels but because I feel it communicates the movie experience probably better than anything else I can recall.

On Diamanti director Ferzan Özpetek is back working with colleagues from twenty years ago, when his Ignorant Fairies was big (Stefano Accorsi, cameraman Gian Filippo Corticelli) and faults from that period persist and accelerate here. The polished, movement-full texture drawss attention and Luisa Parthenope Ranieri’s all-women theatrical fashion house looks like a promising setting. Unfortunately what we get is a portmanteau of soapy sub plots as we come to know the personnel - the Ocar-winning designer, who feels she has lost her touch,  withdrawn son, abused wife, the memory of a dead nephew, failed performer channelling all her energies into the kitchen, the demonstrator-niece hiding out in the workshop where she just happens to reveal a superior fashion sense and (give me a break) the driving force who never overcame being left in the rain by her lover at the station in Paris. Anna Ferzetti is in this one too, along with Jasmine Trinka and Milena Vukotic no less.

Diamanti - Smutniak

It’s not the performers. It’s the dumb material they are given. However, there is one stand-out. It is telegraphed the first time they spread the scarlet fabric on the workbench. The crunch is the dress which glamorous Kasia Smutniak has to wear in the key final scene of the production they are pouring all this effort into it. Several of the plot lines converge on this and there is the feeling that whatever they come up with will be an anti-climax. No way. They nail that one. On its own, that pretty much makes Diamanti worth wading through.

Follemente/Somebody to Love shows the hand of director Paolo Genovese, the creator of the twenty-five times foreign versioned Perfect Strangers. Several of the performers from that one turn up again and we get more contemporary sex politics. Here in the place of a gay coming out, it’s feminist promptings - Frida Karlo cushion covers and "Who the fuck is Carla Lonzi?”  

 Edoardo Leo with his bunch of flowers sets out for his date at Pilar Fogliati’s flat, where she is flustered at trying to get the meal and the illumination right. From street level, he is puzzled by lights blinking in her upstairs window.   

Follemente - Leo & Fogliati.

However this time we are nodding to Inside Out. In an in-joke, which would have been lost on viewers, Fogliati did the voice for one of the characters in the Italian dub of that one. We become privy to the inner workings of the leads' minds where their character traits are visualised as the support cast play their operating in suitable guy and girl surroundings, analysing and barracking the stars’ decisions. 

Actually personifying the leads’ multiple emotions on screen goes back further than Pixar, with Johnny To’s 2007 San taam/Mad Detective or, if you’re really digging, the strip cartoon adventures of Buck Rogers in the Twenty First Century, who the evil scientist sent off leading a group of all his cloned personalities.

Here they get quite some mileage out of the this tricky structure - Fogliati’s lot cheering to discover that the mother of the daughter who ‘phones Leo is his “ex” or turning simultaneously accusing on their romantic member, when someone asks who introduced dogs into the conversation. This goes with the cut to all the Leo members desperately working their shelves of system cards as he tries to come up with the right word to reassure her. The glimpse of his team, seen though the door spy hole by her thinks people, as they pile back, goes with the scene of the support joining in the title song together. Then there’s the round of applause when Edoardo decides to go down on her. We didn’t get that in Inside Out.

The charm of the co-stars comes with the director’s best comic touch and superior production values to make this presentable date night movie stuff.

Remembering that Director Alessandro Genovesi's 10 Giorni con i suoi is a second sequel to a re-make of Ariel Winograd's 2017 Argentiean  Mamá se fue de viaje/ Ten Days Without Mom, you've got to give  it credit. The characters are still involving and enough of the jokes land sufficiently well to get laughs. 

The new production, now trading as When Mum Is Away ... With the In-Laws, finds dad Fabio De Luigi again heading up his growing family. Daughter Angelica Elli has achieved college age and wants to go live with her student boy friend Gabriele Pizzurro while studying.  To ease mistrusts, the kids' parents Giulia Bevilacqua and Dino Abbrescia  propose sharing a holiday at their sunny Apulian farm house. Complicating matters mum Valentin Lodovoni is pregnant again at 45 and not sure about telling Fabio. 

Not all the plot elements shake out. We could have seen more of the wolf that shows up snarling. Recruiting De Luigi to play Christ in the local passion play, complete with a priest who's into scourging is pushing their luck, like Fabio crushing the kid brother-in-law's year-long Lego project and suspicion that Pizzurro maye be getting some action on the side. However Bevilacqua proves a real find - moments like her adoringly comparing her pot-bellied spouse to Poseidon, as he emerges dripping from the family pool. The sub plot of the youngest children losing patience with the oldies' antics and packing a tent to take to the shore,  connects both with their families and the audience. Not interrupting their first kiss gets the intended sympathy.

This one is an agreeable enough Italian comedy. It's easy to understand why it cleaned up on its home turf.

 The event's idea of a retrospective was a run of giallo thrillers. Normally I'd be on board with that - the cinema bis & Drive Ins of the seventies. Once, with a single night in Paris and three hundred films to  chose from, I'd homed in on Dario Argento's splendidly bonkers Profondo Rosso, which turns up again here. 

The one I hadn't seen was Sergio Martino's Tutti i colori del buio / All the Colours of the Dark/ Day of the Maniac, which proved an incoherent mystery. It opens with a clumsy attempt at a surreal dream sequence (big close-up of eyes, laughing woman in doll outfit, knife plunged in gut - all on limbo background) supposed to tell us that fleshy Signorina Edwige Fenech is in shock after losing a baby and being involved in a car crash. We are suspicious of her pharmaceutical salesman husband George Hilton, who is treating her with some blue liquid. (“You didn’t take your pills again”) Everywhere she goes, sinister Ivan Rassimov, in clumsy blue contact lenses, is watching. Edwige's sister, Nieves Navarro recommends seeing badly dubbed Dr. Jorge Rigaud but Marina Malfatti, the neighbour in their massive housing project, drives our heroine off to a castle, where open robe cult leader Julián Ugarte wears a medalion in the form of the cabbalist eye in triangle symbol, which is tattooed on his followers. This palely anticipates Eyes Wide Shut.

Turns out that Malfatti has become world weary (or something) but can’t leave the cult until someone replaces her. Given the dagger that killed her mother (!) Fenech dispatches her. Hilton reappears and may or may not be complicit and cops with cult tattoos carry off Fenech during a maximum of finding slashed bodies and non-scaring jump scares. The real Scotland Yard surfaces belatedly and there’s a slack rooftop chase and rather better use of the housing’s sinister lift well.

     All the Colours of the Night - Fenech

Best element is Bruno Nicolai’s score, which at least reminds us it’s a giallo. There’s the odd piece of show-off camera - the 'Scope frame accommodating two close-ups, anticipating our heroine's three-face mirror. Familiar from other Euro trash slasher films, skin flicks and westerns, the cast are wooden while all the fashion mannequin women get to appear in (or out of) low cut outfits. Plot developments usually make no particular sense, like the use of London setting represented by wide shots of the block of flats, black Diesel cabs and panoramas of Thames bridges.

This one was run in a sub-titled digital transfer of the 35mm. original and for once might have been more acceptable in the English language version, The’re Coming to Get You. It threw into relief the quality entries.  

As usual, doing the whole event was too expensive and time-consuming but I did particularly regret missing the new Gianni Amélio Campo di battaglia. So much quality film in a short period was on the way to being indigestible and was another reminder of the need for a National Cinémathèque - as if we needed another reminder. 

 

Barrie Pattison - 2025