Kino Biff: June 2024

Best Performances of 2023

Virginie Efira

Actress Virginie Efira -- Madeleine Collins, Paris Revoir

Hannah Gross -- The Adults

Rachel McAdams -- Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

Julie Ledru -- Rodeo

Jeon Jong-seo -- Ballerina

Actor Jorma Tommila -- Sisu

Ralph Fiennes -- The Ratcatcher

Harris Dickinson -- Scrapper

Ryan Gosling -- Barbie

Willem Dafoe -- Inside

Supporting Actress Lucy Halliday -- Blue Jean

Zoe Lister-Jones -- Beau is Afraid

Antonia Buresi -- Rodeo

Kerry O'Malley -- The Killer

Mimosa Williams -- Sisu

Supporting Actor Bouli Lanners -- La Nuit Du 12

Pascal Greggory -- One Fine Morning

Benny Safdie -- Oppenheimer, ...Margaret

Robert De Niro -- Killers of the Flower Moon

John Magaro -- Showing Up, Past Lives

Jorma Tommila

George Cukor's A Double Life is an intriguing backstage thriller from 1947. As a psychological study and an example of classy Oscar bait, I am somewhat dubious of the film, but Cukor milks the most that he can from the somewhat hackneyed script by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. Some have called this a noir and Milton Krasner's cinematography certainly offers brooding shots of the New York locales. Whenever Ronald Colman wanders the streets at night (see above) with the elevated trains thundering overhead, we are in a world that is as close to noir as the respective oeuvres of Cukor, Kanin, and Gordon would ever get. Still, with no missing persons, gunplay or femme fatale, the film's resemblance to noir is only superficial.

Colman plays Anthony John, a titan of the Broadway stage who is finishing up a run in a Noel Coward type comedy entitled A Gentleman's Gentlemen. The opportunity arises to hit the boards in Othello with his ex Brita (Signe Hasso), who he still holds a torch for, set to play Desdemona. The production is a smashing success running, unbelievably, for three years. However, John begins to identify with his character in a psychotic manner. A press agent's (Edmond O'Brien) courting of Brita makes him jealous and prone to murderous rages. Cukor includes numerous mirror and reflection shots that trumpet the film's theme: two faces have I.

The theatrical bona fides of Cukor, Kanin, and Gordon bear fruit in A Double Life in the relaxed ease with which they present the backstage camaraderie of a production. Thespians and crew support each other, but have a love/hate relationship with their audience which one character waspishly refers to as "the beast with a thousand faces". As in their later scripts for Cukor, Gordon and Kanin provide some entertaining periphereal delights that the supporting cast takes advantage of. A group of cops and reporters kibbitzing at a crime scene provides some pungently delivered ripostes, especially from Millard Mitchell. A scene at a wig shop gives some choice little bits for Art Smith, Sid Tomack, and Betsy Blair; the latter of whom was on the rise before being blacklisted. Sometimes, the script tangos with cliche. I groaned when Colman gives a monologue reflecting on his early theatrical days and lamenting that he was stuck saying that immortal line, "Anyone for tennis?" Worse is Colman's strangulation of a chippie in an act of emotional transference that beggars belief.

That chippie is played by Shelley Winters who encounters Colman in a red checked tablecloth Italian restaurant where she is waitressing. Winters' character, Pat, says she is also masseuse, then as now a euphemism for a sex worker. Winters throws herself at Colman in an entertaining fashion and not only gives the film a dash of vinegar, but also its best performance. A performance that gave great impetus to her fledgling film career. Ms. Hasso has never been one of my favorites, though she appeared in such fine films as Heaven Can Wait and A Scandal in Paris. Here she is serviceable, but not memorable. O'Brien would never get the girl in any film I can think of, but is good here in a thankless role.

Colman's highly praised performance, for which he won his career Oscar, is a different kettle of fish. Kanin and Gordon originally wrote the role for Laurence Olivier who decided to tackle Hamlet instead. Kanin was fairly chummy with Olivier at that time, having been one of the witnesses to his wedding to Vivian Leigh. Colman didn't have the range that Olivier had and knew it, but gives a decent effort. Some things are out of his ken. The boogie woogie piano playing moment is ludicrous and Colman's attempts at indicating madness by staring at the camera bug eyed seem as dated today as his wearing blackface to play the Moor. The character of Othello needs to exude the musk of a vain warrior, something Colman cannot summon. He is, however, perfect for the matinee idol half of his bifurcated character.

I don't want to overly criticize A Double Life. It has a sense of craft largely absent from commercial filmmaking today. Harry Horner's (The Heiress, The Hustler) production design gives us believably seedy tenant buildings and luxe townhouses that help background their inhabitants. Miklos Rozsa won an Oscar for one of most subtle and effective score. The editing by Robert Parrish is joltingly effective. The cascading series of close-ups that Parrish and Cukor use during performances of Othello do more to create an aura around Colman's acting than Colman's own competent but effete efforts. The lion's share of my bouquets go to Cukor. Whether elegantly framing the goings on at the (now gone) Empire Theatre or generating suspense as the camera navigates the scummy streets of nighttime New York, Cukor creates a felt environment that helps A Double Life rise above its limitations.

Warm Water Under A Red Bridge

Misa Shimizu and Kōji Yakusho

Shohei Imamura's Warm Water Under A Red Bridge, his final feature film from 2001, is an odd and affecting comedy that, on the surface, seems unrepresentative of the director's work. Kōji Yakusho (Shall We Dance, Perfect Days) plays Yosuke, a down at his heels salesman dealing with unemployment and a broken marriage. Through flashbacks, sprinkled throughout the film, we get glimpses of Yosuke's relationship with Taro, a homeless senior with a philosophical bent. Just before he dies, Taro tells Yosuke of a valuable golden Buddha that he has secreted in a house in an obscure town on the Noto Peninsula beside the Sea of Japan. The broke Yosuke goes in search of the object, but the quest he embarks on will uncover something more valuable than treasure.

The house with the valuable Buddha is occupied by the proprietress of a small candy store and her grandmother. Yosuke first encounters the woman named Saeko (played by Misa Shimizu who appeared with Yakusho in Imamura's The Eel) at the grocery store where she shoplifts some cheese and leaves behind a large puddle that has seemingly emanated from her nether regions. Fascinated, Yosuke soon becomes intimate with Saeko and learns her secret. Warm water wells up inside the woman which she must release in a gush, preferably through coitus. Soon the two are having at it with gushes of water inundating them and the sites of their trysts. Yosuke joins a local fishing crew, finding his place in life with Saeko, the true treasure.

The film's attempts at belly laughs earn a guffaw or two, but Saeko's repeated ejaculations seem mechanical after the initial deluge. Similarly, comic seasickness, tossed buckets of bilge water, and senility gags fall flat. However, if the film is not funny enough to elicit chortles, it is certainly funny in the peculiar sense. Here, as in all his later films, there is a greater warmth and humanism than Imamura displayed as a young tyro. His direction of his supporting cast emphasizes individual vignettes and communal activity and it breathes life into a gentle comedy that tiptoes precariously on the edge of twee. Over a dozen characters register as more than types, greatly enhancing the feel of a small seaside community. I especially enjoyed Mitsuko Baishô's demented Granny. The scripts addresses environmental issues, the toxic legacy of a cadmium plant is interjected somewhat clumsily and the lead duo visit a particle collider in the film's most transcendent sequence. The message is as clear as spring water: we are not only part of the environment, but it is part and particle of ourselves. Respect must be paid.

Despite the warm glow serenity of this fable, which ends with a rainbow, the Marxist satire of an early film like Pigs and Battleships is still in evidence. The character of Taro is a virtual stand-in for the director and he offers a critique of the capitalistic treadmill of success that Yosuke is on along with other philosophical asides. Taro obtained the gold Buddha amidst the turmoil of post-war Japan. Imamura depicted the black market that existed after the war in Pigs and Battleships and admitted to a little side hustling himself. Warm Water... has its flaws, I didn't find Ms. Shimizu to be enough of a force of nature, but it is an assured and personal statement, warts and all.

The Best of Donald Sutherland

1935-2024

I don't think I have one iota of cynicism about acting

1) Eye of the Needle Richard Marquand 1981

2) Klute Alan J. Pakula 1971

3) Don't Look Now Nicolas Roeg 1973

4) M*A*S*H Robert Altman 1970

5) Kelly's Heroes Brian G. Hutton 1970

6) Six Degrees of Separation Fred Schepisi 1993

7) Ordinary People Robert Redford 1980

8) Invasion of the Body Snatchers Philip Kaufman 1978

9) Space Cowboys Clint Eastwood 2000

10) Animal House John Landis 1978

More of an actor than a movie star and certainly a better actor than most movie stars. Sutherland could be an ice cold villain or a charmer. I think I enjoy his performance in the underseen Eye of the Needle the best because he gets to show off those two aspects of his screen persona. Sutherland plays the chilliest of Nazi spies, but utilizes a sotto voce allure to seduce Kate Nelligan. For a man who was not conventionally handsome, Sutherland was remarkably deft and appealing during the rare times he was called upon to play a romantic lead. Certainly his tryst with Julie Christie in Don't Look Now is one of the most scorching love scenes in the history of cinema.

The surprise success of M*A*S*H vaulted him to leading man status. Without that role, Sutherland would have been stuck playing psychos or eccentrics like the aptly named "Oddball" in Kelly's Heroes. Sutherland truly had an adventurous spirit which led him to accepting roles in projects as disparate as Animal House and Bethune. I also appreciate his performances in The Dirty Dozen, Little Murders, Alex in Wonderland, Steelyard Blues, The Day of the Locust, Heaven Help Us, JFK, Fierce People, The Italian Job, Pride & Prejudice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cold Mountain, and Ad Astra.

Barking Dogs Never Bite

Bae Doona

Bong Joon-ho's Barking Dogs Never Bite, his debut feature from 2000, is a quirky black comedy with elements of horror. If you are a dog lover, you might want to skip this one, since the plot revolves around the torture, murder, and consumption of our canine friends. Lee Sung-jae plays Yun-ju, a struggling academic, who lives in an large apartment complex in Seoul. Yun-ju is under the thumb of his pregnant wife and is anxious about whether he will get tenured. The incessant yapping of a dog, supposedly not allowed in the complex, drives him over the edge and he resolves to eliminate the mutt. Yun-ju's story is paralleled by that of Hyeen-nam (Bae Doona), a young woman working as a Girl Friday for the company managing the apartment complex. Hyeen-nam coordinates the unofficial investigation into the missing dogs, things have spiraled out of control, and almost nabs the culprit. Hyeen-nam dreams of a moment of heroism that will redeem her humdrum life. A culprit is apprehended, but not the one expected by the audience.

What strikes me as the most consistent attribute of Mr. Bong's work is the quality of his writing, particularly his skill at crafting multi-dimensional supporting characters. Barking Dogs Never Bite contains a number of vivid and memorable supporting roles, especially Byun Hee-bong's janitor. In a nod to Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", the janitor is given a spooky monologue in the bowels of the apartment building's basement. Indeed, all of the acting in the flick is superb.

Despite horrific notes, the film's tone is primarily ironic. When Yun-ju thinks he has rid the building of dogs, his wife comes home with a toy poodle. Each character is shown compassion and regarded ambivalently. Bong elicits sympathy for Yun-ju by showing him scraping together a $10,000 bribe for the dean in order to earn tenure. Even the shrewish wife of Yun-ju is allowed a moment of grace when she loses her job due to her pregnancy. Barking Dogs Never Bite addresses a number of societal ills, from sexism to binge drinking, but never feels sanctimonious or preachy. No one is totally good or evil in Bong's cosmos, despite the world being shown as dog eat dog, but the rich fare better than the poor. I recommend Barking Dogs Never Bite which is currently streaming on Tubi.

Empire Records

Liv Tyler and Renee Zellweger

Allan Moyle's Empire Records, from 1995, is an unsuccessful teen flick centered around an independent record store. Carol Heikknen's script is strewn with cliches, though, in fairness to her, Warner Brothers lopped off a half hour of footage and some additional supporting characters in order to shorten the film to a more marketable 90 minutes. The teenaged employees learn that their beloved store is about to be sold to a franchise and react by doing exactly what Mickey and Judy did years ago: they put on a show. Moyle, best known for the cult film Pump Up the Volume, does help the youthful cast project a vibe of communal synergy that makes the predictable proceedings move along pleasantly. Unfortunately, the dire commercial fate of the picture crippled Moyle's career in Hollywood.

Part of the reason for the failure of the movie is the extremely uneven quality of the youthful cast. The females fare better with a quartet that was sprinkled with stardust: Liv Tyler, Debi Mazar, Renee Zellweger, and, best of all here, Robin Tunney. The male juveniles have fared worse since Empire Records, though most still work steadily in the biz. Generally, the males come off as more obnoxious than charismatic. Anthony LaPaglia was top-billed and he is a fine grounding presence as the store's fatherly manager. An overly bronzed Maxwell Caulfield is a hoot as a fading and rancid teen idol: sort of a combination of Bobby Sherman, Richard Marx, and Robbie Nevil.

Another of the problems with Empire Records is its lack of engagement with actual music. The grunge era had ended and no new wave had arisen to supplant it. In retrospect, rock was in decline and, despite a brief spurt of millennial era retro rock (The White Stripes, The Strokes), the record charts would soon be dominated by Hip-Hop and American Idol style pop or amalgams of the two. The Empire Records soundtrack is dominated by anonymous jangle rock provided by groups that are forgotten today and deservedly so: The Martinis, The Innocence Mission, Drill, Lustre, Ape Hangers. The discourses about music that enlivened 2000's High Fidelity are largely absent. An exception is an entertaining debate about the relative merits of Primus versus The Misfits, which is buried under the closing credits.

One of the ironies of Empire Records is that today, in 2024, it is the chain record stores (like Tower and Sam Goody) that have disappeared after the rise of Amazon and other online retailers while the independent Mom and Pop stores are tenaciously hanging on. As a habitue of those stores, I wanted to like Empire Records more than I was able to. Don't blink and you will be able to enjoy brief glimpses of Gwar and a young Tobey Maguire.

Piotr Szulkin

The War of the Worlds: Next Century

I've been gorging on Vinegar Syndrome's two disc set of four science fiction films that the unheralded Polish director and writer Piotr Szulkin released, or tried to, in the 1980s. The discs have only a few special features, but the color transfer and image quality of the films are superlative. This is key, as they prove Szulkin, who trained as a painter, was a master at using color expressively. The palette of his first two features, 1980's Golem and 1981's The War of the Worlds: Next Century, alternate censorious reds with bilious greens to create queasy nightmare realms. Golem, his first feature, is a loose reworking of the Jewish fable. In all of Szulkin's scripts, the basis of the story and its genre trappings serve as a springboard for films that addresses life under totalitarianism. The protagonist of Golem, Pernat (Marek Walczewski), exists in a confused condition because he is the result of experimental gene splicing by the powers that be. Pernat wanders in an absurdist world of grotesqueries: murky tenement corridors, interrogation rooms, and doll repair stores. The tone is absurdist and slightly funny if one laughs at Dostoyevsky and Kafka. Szulkin shares the black humor of many 20th Century Poles: Polanski, Zulawski, Has, Kosiński, Gombrowicz, Lem.

Marek Walczewski negotiates the nightmare realm of Golem

Golem is an impressive first film with many memorable moments and images. It meanders a bit too much, but that is the price you have to pay when your protagonist doesn't even know his identity. Szulkin's next feature, The War of the Worlds..., is more effective, chiefly because it has a more extroverted protagonist, television commentator Iron Idem. Roman Wilhelmi's terrific performance as Idem gives the film a sharper focus than Golem which wanders down too many dark corridors. This time Szulkin borrows very little, except for the theme of vampirism, from his source, H.G. Wells' novel. The Martians arrive in Szulkin's film in 1999 and proceed to conquor us humble earthling not by zapping us with a death ray, but by media manipulation. Iron Idem is part of the media machinery that the Martians take charge of. He dons a goofy mod wig on air, to appeal to the youth I suppose, and is forced to extol the virtues of our visitors. They establish a Gestapo and force citizens to donate blood to their overlords. The film gives a throwback visual feel to the villains, similar to Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 or Cocteau's Orphée, hearkening back to Poland's experience with the Nazis. Despite this, the Polish authorities could not help but link the film's allegory to its own regime. The film was suppressed and only given a limited release in 1983.

The man known as Iron eventually rebels and is harshly punished. When the Martians leave, things get even worse as he is branded a collaborator and executed. Wilhelmi's deft performance saves the film from teetering into hysteria. Even when he is sweating bullets and cursing his enemies, Wilhelmi provides a believable and empathic locus for a movie which, from its first shot (see above), revels in its portrait of subjugation. The War of the World... flirts with overstatement, but it is never dull. On both Golem and The War of the World..., Szulkin utilizes the rock music and screen presence of Jozef Skrzek, founder of Polish favorites, the Silesian Blues Band. The fabricated music group "the Instant Glue" offers up their "Ode to Martian" for the youth in the film. The presence of the rock interludes display how art, no matter how rebellious, can be co-opted by authoritarian regimes eager to lull the masses. Skrzek is still with us today and provided the striking scores for a number of Lech Majewski's films.

If anything, the four decades that have elapsed since The War of the Worlds... was filmed have given the flick and its portrait of media malfeasance added resonance. Despite its lack of Hollywood production values, The War of the Worlds... is a more nuanced and thoughtful condemnation of viewer complacency than Network. Szulkin's next film, 1985's O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization, is set in an underground bunker after a nuclear holocaust. The protagonist, Soft (Jerzy Stuhr), is an apparatchik helping to oversee the care and feeding of nearly a thousand survivors. Hygiene and other vestiges of civilization have disappeared. The cave dwellers have regressed to a non-verbal, pre-humanoid state. The film's title makes plain the devolution into baby talk babble. Literacy has disappeared, we later learn that this is partly because all paper and pulp have been turned into foodstuffs; soylent green is books! The masses hold out for the promise of an "ark" to deliver them from their misery. This ark had been the invention of the powers that be, but is disavowed by them now. The masses don't believe what they are told, mirroring the climate of 1985 Poland. Soft and his fellow elite fall into despair or madness. O-Bi, O-Ba is shot in a monochromatic blue-green soup. It has the feel of monotony, but that is the point. Szulkin's camera heightens our sense of confinement. Szulkin starts with a circle dolly around Soft's cramped quarters. Steadicam shots whizz through the corridors and shambolic rooms, but there is, despite the ambivalent ending, no exit.

The monochromatic blue-green soup of O-Bi, O-Ba...

The final title in the Vinegar Syndrome collection, titled Piotr Szulkin's Apocalypse Tetralogy, is 1986's satire GA-GA: Glory to the Heroes. The opening combines the themes of confinement and brutality found previously as we witness a half-assed farewell ceremony aboard a space based prison. The protagonist, Scope (Daniel Olbrychski), has won the honor of being sent into space aboard a rocket, a mission the authorities view as tantamount to a death sentence. Happily, Scope lands on an inhabited planet named Australia 458 which looks very much like midwinter Poland. Scope is greeted by a government toady (Jerzy Stuhr again) who caters to Scope, greeted everywhere as a hero. However, Scope soon learns that the 'hero' is doomed to be sacrificed in excruciating fashion at a public spectacle. Scope is pacifistic, his only crime is 'disobedience', but must take up arms to free himself and an underaged hooker with a heart of brass. GA-GA... is Szulkin's most audience pleasing and straightforward film, chiefly a satire of authoritarianism. The film's rehearsal for Scope's sacrifice spectacle, a parody of state socialist pageants, is a little too Felliniesque to my mind, but GA-GA is fairly riotous if you have a taste for digital amputation humor.

Daniel Olbrychski in Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes

As Scope, Daniel Olbrychski deftly underplays the taciturn hero, a fixed focal point in the film to the surrounding madness. He functions like Eastwood in an action film or Michael Biehn in The Terminator, a flick whose conventions GA-GA parodies. One thing that strikes me about Szulkin's films are the consistently high levels of the performances. He was able to assemble a stock company of superb performers. Not only Stuhr, but Marek Walczewski returns for GA-GA.... Recurrently, across these four films, we encounter Mariusz Dmochowski (always a heavy), Krystyna Janda (a muse), and Krzysztof Majchrzak; and are glad we did. Szulkin had a minor career, but these films show intimations of a major talent. Vinegar Syndrome deserves credit for bringing him to the attention of American cinéastes.

Piotr Szulkin 1950-2018

Passing Fancy

Takeshi Sakamoto

Yasujiro Ozu's Passing Fancy, from 1933, is good comedy that doesn't quite reach the heights of his masterpieces from this period. Set in a working class district in Tokyo, the film chiefly concerns the relationship between Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto), a brewery worker, and Tomio (Tokkan Kozo), his latency aged son. In a child is father to the man twist, Tomio is a model son whereas Dad is a drunken and illiterate lout. The movie begins with Kihachi and his brewery buddy Jiro (Den Obinata) toting an sleepy Tomio along as they make the rounds of the local drinking establishments. The next morning it is up to Tomio, wielding a baseball bat as the totem of his authority, to rouse his Dad and get him ready for work.

The love/hate relationship between father and son is the strongest element of the film. Takeshi Sakamoto's boozy bravado holds together the disparate elements of the film. Tokkan Kozo, who had appeared in Ozu's I Was Born, But with Sakamoto, is equally effective. The plot contains a melodramatic love triangle between Kihachi, Jiro, and homeless waif, Harue (Nobuko Fushimi). Kihachi eventually realizes that he is too old for Harue and that his feelings are merely the passing fancy of the title. Jiro and Harue are fairly dull characters with few foibles to latch onto. Worse for the viewer is Tomio's near death experience after gorging on sweets and experiencing "acute enteritis".(!) Kihachi, reeling from his son's shame at his father's lack of status and respect, tries to spoil him with candy money, but this backfires and sets up a climactic act of redemption.

Passing Fancy lacks the visual complexity and invention of his previous feature, Dragnet Girl. The few scenes of juvenile mayhem are choreographed in a less impactful fashion than in I Was Born, But. Still, there are wonderful moments only a master like Ozu could elicit. Intimate close-ups evoke the characters' feelings of vanity, shame, and loss. Still life shots of household items give the film a nice tactility. Ultimately, though, this is little different from the Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper potboilers of the era.

Hit Man

Glen Powell

This review contains spoilers...

Richard Linklater's Hit Man is a moderately entertaining film that left an unsatisfying aftertaste for me. The film, written by Linklater and its star Glen Powell, is loosely based on the real life exploits of one Gary Johnson, a New Orleans based philosophy professor who moonlighted as a fake hit man in stings concocted by the local constabulary. The first third of the film works the best as Powell gets to display his acting chops as Johnson dons different guises suited to each individual prospective client. Interwoven with this, we get to see Johnson lecture his classes on the malleability of individual identity, offering us a meta commentary on one of the film's themes. The incisive character vignettes and the pungent local color play to Linklater's strengths, best displayed in another study of Southern criminality, one of Linklater's masterpieces, Bernie.

However, the film changes tack with the introduction of Gary's love interest, played by Adria Arjona, Maddy. Maddy wants to hire Ron, Gary's swaggering hit man guise, to bump off her abusive fiancée. Gary dissuades her, temporarily, and the duo soon act upon their mutual attraction. Since Maddy has fallen for the virile Ron, as opposed to the mild-mannered Gary, we are viewing identity as a construct in action. The element of fantasy is the central aspect to Gary and Maddy's relationship. Their trysts primarily consist of sexual cosplay. Arjona and Powell are talented and attractive, but it is hard for the audience to emotionally invest in characters that seem divorced from Linklater's realistic framework.

Another problem I had with the film is that the supporting characters of Gary's police squad are uninteresting compared to the future felons seeking to hire Gary. As the film shifts its focus to the central romance, we leave behind the colorful murder for hire miscreants and are left with a police team of under sketched minions. The exception is Austin Amelio who gives the film's best performance as Jasper, a corrupt and venal cop. Amelio's skeevy performance grounds the film with a reality that is for the most part absent. When Jasper learns that Gary and Maddy are in cahoots and that Maddy has murdered her fiancee, he attempts to blackmail the duo. They respond by drugging and murdering Jasper.

This action is knowingly counterpointed with a sequence of Gary lecturing his class on moral relativism. I'm no moral absolutist, but this seems to me an overly tidy approach to bumping off (another) villain and offering a happy ending for the lead romantic duo. The film ends with Gary and Maddy in domestic bliss with a to die for house and two cherubic children. The implication is that the ends justify the means, but I don't think so. Perhaps I am expecting too much from a film that ultimately is a light entertainment, a lark. However, Linklater and Powell have introduced a number of interesting themes that they fail to come to grips with. Hit Man offers us, early on, a close-up of the contents of Gary's bookcase. Like the weighty themes, these tomes are merely a tease. Whatever pretensions the film has are discarded for a conclusion that is purely a fairy tale ending, they all lived happily ever after, designed to signal that it is time for children to enter dreamland.

Quick Takes, June 2024

Jussi Vatanen and Alma Pöysti in Fallen Leaves

Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves is his most memorable and effective film in some time. A typically deadpan take on the travails of two lovers, the film boasts gorgeous color and a host of incisively drawn supporting characters. The depredations of the working class are displayed in unsparing fashion, but Kaurismäki is too committed to his cockeyed and singular humanism to resort to polemics. One of the few films to really earn the description Chaplinesque. Highly recommended and currently streaming on Mubi.

Anna Hints' Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is a documentary, of sorts, about Estonian women bonding during a sauna retreat. The women swap stories from their lives with an emphasis on body image and society's expectations of women. The film is a little too distended for a feature, but the images, which both celebrate and demystify the female form, are gorgeous. I've never believed objectivity is a requirement for good documentary work, so Ms. Hints calculated approach did not rankle me. The film functions as an incantation to evoke the power of sauna as a purifying ritual.

Yeon Sang-ho's Seoul Station is the animated prequel to Yeon's zombie classic Train to Busan, both films were released in 2016. The animation is so-so, the zombies as rendered as scarily as a Scooby-Doo villain. However, this is not fatal to a project in which the zombies are not the personifications of evil, but humans are instead. Seoul Station's plot is never predictable and the pacing is expert. Recommended to all zombie film aficionados. Currently streaming on Tubi.

Michael Mann's Ferrari is a handsome, yet curiously unengaging film. The racing scenes are terrific, but the domestic scenes, detailing the the love triangle between Enzo Ferrari, his wife and his mistress, are torpid rather than operatic. Patrick Dempsey gives the best performance.

I've been foraging through a slew of recent B Horror films and the best of the batch was John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser's Hellbender. A home schooled, vegetarian adolescent finds out her mother is not keeping her isolated because of a supposed auto-immune disease, but because she is some kind of combination of witch and alpha predator. Once the gal gets a taste for flesh and blood, her needs become insatiable. The film is a crude parable of sexual awakening in which the child becomes mother to the woman. The film has little plot and gives away its secrets too early, but it is an impressive technical achievement for its level of filmmaking.

Ján Kadár's The Other Side of Evil, from 1978, is a respectable TV movie starring Alan Arkin. Arkin plays a troubled man voluntarily committed to a Montana Institution for the Criminally Insane. The film is a cut-rate ...Cuckoo's Nest, but it is all the better for its limited ambitions. Whereas Cuckoo's Nest onscreen was turned into a high falutin allegory, with Nurse Ratched as Big Sister or sumthin', The Other Side of Evil is a modest exposé about institutional corruption. While Kádár's socialist realism is not my cup of slivovitz, it is ideally suited to the material. Arkin is very good and there are fine contributions from Morgan Woodward, Roger E. Mosely, Leonard Stone, and Tony Karloff. Currently streaming on Tubi.

Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain, from 1967, is the third Len Deighton adaptation that Harry Saltzman produced in the 1960s following The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin. In all three films, Michael Caine plays British secret agent Harry Palmer who Deighton left unnamed in his novels. Billion Dollar Brain is a feeble film, unable to find a consistent tone. It varies from being a straight espionage caper to a mod send-up of the Bond films. Russell's direction fluctuates from leaden, in the expository sequences, to hysteric, especially the Texas square dance party shot to resemble a Nazi rally. Caine, Karl Malden, and Oscar Homolka try their best, but only Ed Begley Sr's performance matches the cartoonish flair of the visuals. This film contains the final performance of Françoise Dorléac, wasted in a role that is pure window dressing.

Une femme mariée

Jean-Luc Godard's Une femme mariée, released in France in late 1964 after a protracted censorship battle, is, ostensibly, a love triangle. Charlotte (Macha Méril) is married to successful businessman Pierre ( Philippe Leroy), but is dallying with Robert (Bernard Noël), an actor. There is very little plot to speak of in the conventional sense. At minute 72, Charlotte finds out she is pregnant and is perplexed by her options or lack thereof. The issue is unresolved and the film ends as it begins with two hands caressing. So, the film is more a variation on a theme or, given that this is Godard, themes.

We have a passel of them: the eternal triangle, sexual freedom, the sexual double standard, the strictures of capitalistic consumerist society, memory and amnesia, and, of course, cinephilia. As in most Godard of this era, there is too much of everything. We are bombarded by texts: record album covers, signage, billboards, advertisements (mostly, as Bob Dylan put it, of women's undergarments), newspapers, books, magazines, and comic books. The paper thin characters seem buffeted by the barrage of ads. Each superficially becomes a capitalist cog by expressing their desire for products: be they televisions, astrology charts or breast enhancing cream. The message is, one that found its culmination and dead end in Two or Three Things I Know About Her in 1967, that we are all prostituting ourselves out to the highest bidder.

Une femme mariée isn't as compelling a film as Breathless or My Life to Live because it is a film about Women rather than about a woman. The characters themselves are not compelling, they are bourgeois straw figures. Charlotte is such a ditz that she can't (or won't) drive a car and doesn't know what Auschwitz represents; talk about amnesia. None of the three leads, who all deliver good performances, has the charisma of a Belmondo or Karina. This is by design because Une femme mariée is a film more concerned with structure, note the chapter divisions, and allusion than characterization. The allusions are dense and rich and strange: Hitchcock, Apollinaire, Dietrich, Beethoven, Cocteau, Shakespeare, Racine, Moliere, Rossellini, Fantômas and many more are invoked.

I understand the frustration some people feel about Godard. His Marxist elitism is chilly, anti-humanist, and ultimately unfathomable. He professes to be a feminist, but the numerous close-ups of female flesh in Une femme mariée, especially the negative image sequence of models cavorting in a pool, makes it seem like horndog Jean-Luc wanted to have his cheesecake and eat it, too. However, there are more ideas and visual energy in a middling mid-60s Godard movie like this one than in the entire canons of Philippe de Broca, Claude Lelouch or Roger Vadim. A recent piece on the Quillette website amounted to prolonged putdown of Godard and displayed that the philistinism about Godard is as entrenched in the English speaking world now as it was in the 1960s. Godard is one of cinema's titans possessing, as one character in Une femme mariée puts it, "...French invention developed by a Swiss specialist." Columbia Pictures briefly released this film in the states in 1965, but not even Raoul Coutard's gorgeous black and white cinematography could entice viewers.

The Taste of Things

Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche

Tràn Anh Hùng's The Taste of Things, which the director adapted from Marcel Rouff's 1924 novel La Vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet, is an almost perfect marriage of director and subject. Mr. Tràn, whose films have rippled with sensual delight since The Scent of Green Papaya, has found an ideal vehicle for his skills in this evocation of two gourmands creating culinary magic at a French country estate circa 1890. Dodin (Benoit Magimel) and Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) have shared a passion for food and each other for twenty years, but despite Dodin's entreaties, Eugénie has been adamant about keeping her single status. They know that their romantic idyll will end, as all romantic idylls do, but are united in a shared avocation and passion. We hear little of the world outside their estate, only snatches of gastronomic news. This might strike some as bourgeois indulgence, but Tràn has always stressed domestic intimacy over political statements. The graceful pans and propulsive tracking shots place us at elbow's length from a couple that is living for the moment. Once the moment is gone, a circle dolly transports us through time and Tràn once again ponders the transience of moments.

The Taste of Things production design is exquisite, as are the costumes which have a lived-in look. The restraint in the spare use of music is admirable. Ms. Binoche and Mr. Magimel, who have collaborated before on an even more magnificent endeavor, project a delicious rapport. Magimel has to do the heavy acting lifting, for reasons I shall not disclose, but is superb. Binoche is also quite impressive with none of the diva preening that marred her recent performances in Both Sides of the Blade and High Life. The supporting players are uniformly excellent, most particularly Emmanuel Salinger as Dr. Rabaz and the two young actresses that play the manor's kitchen staff and apprentices, Galatéa Bellugi and Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire. The theme of apprenticeship, of carrying on a legacy bequeathed by your elders, is a theme that has resounded through Tràn's career. Such a legacy can transcend time and space, surely a lesson that the director, who immigrated to France from Vietnam at the age of twelve, has taken to heart. As to The Taste of Things lack of political and social relevance, well, the preparation and consumption of food is central to all humans. Man doth not live on bread alone, but food is love, baby.