Les Herbes folles

André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma

Alain Resnais' Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass) is an adaptation of Christian Gailly's novel L'Incident that was released in 2009. The film is a cockeyed study of a late age l'amour fou between Georges (André Dussolier) and Marguerite (Sabine Azéma). The two meet after Georges finds Marguerite's stolen wallet in a shopping center parking lot. Georges becomes fixated by Marguerite and, even though she rejects his advances, ends up stalking her. Marguerite is initially horrified by this, she even calls in the police to get Georges to desist, but ends up becoming similarly infatuated and ends up stalking Georges in turn. The two, with the help of family and friends, end up finding a suitable rapprochement. 

A summary of the plot, however, does little to capture the Gallic flavor of the film. The picture starts with fixed shots of grass that has sprung up in the cracks of pavement. We next see the feet and legs of pedestrians as they move hither and tither. As the adventures of Georges and Marguerite confirm, the stasis of flora is in counterpoint to the movement of the fauna. Likewise, the emotional states of people in the film fluctuate and do not remain fixed. Resnais also creates a counterpoint between his main characters, both of whom are portrayed by longtime collaborators (Azéma was the second Madame Resnais). Georges is unemployed and married. There are hints that some sort of misdeed has led to the end of his career. He is very bourgeoise and a bit OC. His character is associated with the color blue. Marguerite is single and works as a dentist. She is more of a free spirit than Georges, there always seem to be dirty dishes next to her sink in contrast to Georges' immaculate living quarters, and she even pilots small aircraft as a hobby. Her character is associated with the color of her Orphan Annie type hair, red. 

Of course, these signposts of Cartesian dualism don't guarantee that viewers will enjoy this film. Resnais' humor is extremely rationalist and very hit and miss in Les Herbes folles. A police interrogation done in burlesque style falls flat, as do the stuck zipper and dental discomfort gags. Resnais attempts at grounded humor are in conflict with his personality. Has there ever been a film in the history of the cinema less grounded than Last Year at Marienbad? Resnais tends to view his characters at an icy remove. That's why there are so many crane shots in Les Herbes folles looking down upon the characters as if the French bourgeoise were laboratory mice. Thus, watching this film may be an alienating to some, but the film is rewarding on a number of levels. 

The acting, of course, is superlative. Resnais does indulge Ms. Azéma a bit, but can you blame him? The supporting cast gives what could seem like a superficial affair some texture, especially Emmanuelle Devos as Marguerite's business partner and Mathieu Amalric as a police officer. Édouard Baer is wryly apt as the narrator. I also appreciated Resnais' use of the Cinemascope format in the film. He pushes characters in cars to one corner of the frame, causing us to view the characters in monologue as to be encased in their own thought bubbles. Resnais use of whip pans has a snappy insouciance. The main element in the film that I haven't touched on is that whatzit, picture above, known as the cinema. 

The film is replete with film references and gags. The most obvious is Resnais overlaying Fin over Georges and Marguerite's first kiss as the Fox logo music plays: the Hollywood ending. The French ending seems a reference to Jean Grémillon's Le Ciel est à vous which also is concerned with a female aviatrix. I responded to Resnais' use of Mark Robson's The Bridges at Toko-Ri, particularly Georges' different attitude towards it as he has aged. Resnais recognizes the dream like state of the theater going experience in which a suspension of disbelief lets us be at one with the collective unconscious. A suspension of disbelief is also the best way to experience Les Herbes folles which flows with many unconscious currents. It is an aging artist's serene meditation on what fools we mortals be. 

In a Violent Nature

                   
Chris Nash's In a Violent Nature is an extremely gory horror film that, while it falls short of being a satisfying picture, displays promise. A group of youngsters partying in the woods find a gold locket in a disused shed and pocket it. This resurrects a long dead perp who arises from his grave to stalk and kill those he believes have stolen his beloved memento. That's about it plot wise and the film's longueurs are sure to alienate a lot of viewers. Long stretches of the flick are dolly shots with the camera positioned behind the vengeful fiend as he slowly comes upon his victims. This maximizes the film's mood of dread, we usually see the victims before they realize what calumny is about to befall them, but it also gives the film an uncannily meditative feel. The viewer is forced to follow the protagonist in his relentless quest, passing by and ignoring the gorgeous scenery of Ontario.

The victims are barely sketched as characters. There is a long circle dolly sequence around a campfire that gives us a glimpse of them and the back story of the legendary killer. The sequence may seem unnecessarily showy, but it serves a few purposes. It serves to camouflage the dramatic inadequacies of the cast of this B movie. More importantly, it serves as a contrast to the vertical tracks of the killer. The vertical movement of the camera behind the camera emphasizes his solitary single mindedness. The circular track of the young people around the campfire emphasizes their sense of community. It is Nash's attention to visual detail that intrigues me, though I will admit that Nash's direction of dialogue is mostly woeful. A long monologue that functions as the film's coda pretty much stops the picture in its tracks. Still, there is enough intriguing footage in In a Violent Nature to make me look forward to another feature from Mr. Nash. 

Wicked

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande

I will admit that I was not predisposed to enjoy Jon M. Chu's film version of Wicked, but I will cop to finding the end product to be watchable. I found Gregory Maguire's source novel to be a interesting twist on the Baum universe. The musical, however, I consider a slog, chiefly due to Stephen Schwartz's pedestrian score. The teacher in charge of the glee club at my children's school was a fan and, thus, I was forced to hear numbers from it annually for about a decade. The tunes never have won me over. Schwartz displayed little melodic range in Godspell, but the rah-rah energy of that score and youthful vigor of the cast made for a palatable evening when I saw it on the stage in 1973 or so. Besides Wicked, Schwartz followed up Godspell with Pippin and a number of dreary songs for DreamWorks animation features. I'm not going to enumerate his flops. The number of memorable tunes he has written are scant. Of the tunes for Wicked, the only one I can remember is "Popular" and that is probably due to its ubiquity.     

I'm also not a big fan of director Jon M. Chu's work, though I will admit that his fondness for bold color schemes makes him a pretty good fit for this film. That said, the enormity of this production does not make it a good opportunity for the personal vision projects that this aging auteurist craves. The film bogs down in its expositional and transitional scenes. The choreography of the dance sequences is mediocre and Chu's camera placement for these sequences is worse. Wicked, especially because of its boarding school sequences, resembles the lesser Harry Potter films in that it seems an advertisement for a future theme park rather than a fitting setting for a fantastical story. Chu, like Chris Columbus before him, shoots the sets nicely, but at the expense of his players. The supporting players are fairly anonymous because of this with the exception of Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard. Michelle Yeoh and Peter Dinklage's attempts to vocalize are mercifully brief.

So what the heck did you like about this film, Biff. Chiefly, the casting of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. They warble nicely and have a better chemistry together than with their potential romantic interests. Ms. Grande is a particularly good choice for the vain and bubble headed Glinda. I also liked the inclusion of Wicked alumni Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel in the show within a show sequence that gives us some backstory. A nice touch for fans of Wicked. I'm not one, but this film version could have been a lot worse.       

The Best of Val Kilmer

1959-2025

                                        "There are a thousand ways to play any role"    

                                                                                                                                   1)     Tombstone                      George P. Cosmatos, etc.                          1993

 2)     Heat                                    Michael Mann                                          1995

 3)     Kiss Kiss Bang Bang                   Shane Black                                  2005

 4)     Top Secret!                                 Abrams - Zucker                              1984

 5)     Alexander                                      Oliver Stone                                  2004

 6)     True Romance                                Tony Scott                                   1993

 7)     The Doors                                      Oliver Stone                                 1994

 8)     Red Planet                                   Anthony Hoffman                          2000

 9)     The Salton Sea                                D. J. Caruso                                2002

10)    Wonderland                                    James Cox                                  2003

It is remarkable, beginning with his debut in Top Secret!, how many of Kilmer's top-billed films were flops or financial disappointments. Even in an industry notorious for its worship of mammon, though, the respect for his obvious gifts meant that he never lacked work. Not that he made it easy on himself, as he himself copped to in a loopy memoir entitled I'm Your Huckleberry. Certainly. his on set contretemps with directors, especially with Joel Schumacher on Batman Forever, hurt his reputation in the industry. His filmography after 2005 is dotted with almost as much direct to video dreck as those of Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis. 

Still, even in such mindless entertainments as Red Planet and Kill The Irishman, Kilmer could provide astonishing moments. He did not have the career of a Tom Cruise, but he is a much better actor than that empty vessel. I also enjoyed Kilmer's work in Real Genius, Willow, Kill Me Again, The Ghost and the Darkness, The Saint, At First Sight (in which he plays a blind masseur...), Spartan, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, The Snowman, and both Top Gun films. 

What Did the Lady Forget?

Michiko Kuwano

Yasujirō Ozu's What Did the Lady Forget?, from 1937, is a slight and short, yet engrossing domestic comedy. Komiya is a mild-mannered medical professor who is hen-pecked by his wife, Tokiko. Their domestic routine is upended by the appearance of their niece, Setsuko (Michiko Kuwano), who is visiting from Osaka. Setsuko's behavior and appearance, she wears Western style clothes while smoking and drinking openly, is an affront to the more traditional femininity displayed by the housewives in Tokiko's bourgeoise circle. They live a life of circumscribed routine that Setsuko finds stifling. She gets Komiya to loosen up a bit, he agrees to take her to a geisha house, and assert himself more in his relationship with his wife. Tokiko, for her part, responds positively to her more self-assured husband and domestic tranquility and equilibrium are regained.  

If that summary was all there was to What Did the Lady Forget?, then it wouldn't be all that different from most other domestic comedies of the 1930s, be they made in Japan or Hollywood. However, the exactitude of Ozu's camera placement and mise-en-scene is breathtaking. Scattered amongst the bric a brac on the screen, we see and hear repeated signs of Western influence upon Japan: baseball, Marlene Dietrich, Johnny Walker, Vat 69, Frederic March, William Powell, etc. Ozu also perks up this fairly staid  and set bound affair with little doodles of life as it is lived: lingering over a boy throwing a ball at a wall or Komiya playfully balancing a newspaper. 

What really sets this film apart is Ozu's inventive use of the of the fields of view within the frame. Almost every shot utilizes the foreground, middle ground, and background. The virtuosity displayed is not an end in itself, but is used to comment on the action. When Setsuko stumbles through the house after a drunken revel, from background to foreground in a fixed shot, she is literally and figuratively upsetting the domestic order. A later shot from the same angle, of the lights going off in the house, celebrates the repair of that domestic order. When his characters go out of doors, Ozu's tracking shots express the exhilaration of people moving freely.

Some of the acting is constrained by conventional nature of the story. Komiya's meekness and Tokiko's dourness are overly typed. That makes Michiko's transgressive performance as Setsuko seem all the more like a breath of fresh air. It is obvious that Ozu was entranced by this refreshing new type of woman, though the scenario suggests she might just have to knuckle under when she accepts the proposal of her suitor. The ruptures that modernity would cause to traditional Japanese society would be further explored by Ozu in his post-war work, but What Did the Lady Forget? is a harbinger of things to come. Sadly, Ms. Kuwano's contributions to Japanese cinema would be cut short. She would die from the complications of an ectopic pregnancy in 1946. She was only 31.

Stray Dogs

Tsai Ming Liang's Stray Dogs nimbly balances upon the fine line between cinematic sublimity and art film monotony. I'm still kind of on the fence about this film myself. This 2013 film ostensibly follows the travails of homeless Taiwanese family of four struggling to survive. Dad is a sign waver at a busy intersection, Mom has a McJob at a Costco type emporium. They live in an abandoned apartment building. They scrounge what they can: the kids scarf up free samples at the super mart while Mom stocks up on toilet paper in the public facilities. Somehow they barely uphold their dignity within a bustling and unyielding capitalistic market place.

Yet, this film is not as cut and dried as a plot summary would make it appear. The takes are almost all long and fixed, sometimes lasting five minutes or so. Continuity is eschewed to the extent that three different actresses portray "Mom". The film is truly defined not by its fleeting narrative but by the director's utilization of space. The shots of the sign holders emphasize how little territory they are allotted in the sprawling metropolis. Every man is left to himself to burrow their own warren. Yet, Tsai Ming-liang also shows us beauty within negative space. The camera pans along a pock marked concrete wall as a fairy tale is read or focuses on the rustling river instead of a child. It all adds up, at least, to one distancing technique too many. 

As John Berryman in Dream Song #14 put it, "Life, friends, is boring." and modern art cinema has often explored boredom. Warhol looms large in this, of course, but Stray Dogs' sequence with Mom #2 scrubbing the tub reminded me of the numerous chores Delphine Seyrig plods through in Chantal Ackerman's Jeanne Dielman.... I'm sure most viewers will want to check out of Stray Dogs after the first hour and I will admit that I didn't get much out of the film conceptually after the first sixty minutes or so. Some surreal beauty emerges, though. Because the director shoots in real time with an objective, even dull gaze, the dream sequences are especially unsettling in their realness and tactility. Stray Dogs is an unsparing film the viewer must meet halfway, as if at an art installation. 

Quick Takes, March 2025

Mikey Madison

Enough bouquets have been bestowed upon Sean Baker's Anora that I am not going to belabor the point. The players are uniformly superb. As with the ignored and equally gripping Red Rocket, Anora points towards the growth of Baker as a visual artist. However, it is Mr. Baker's editing that gives the right amount of propulsion to what is essentially a tale concerning transactional relationships and romantic disillusion. It is not a romantic comedy, it upends romantic comedy.

Cody Calahan's Vicious Fun, from 2020, is a Canadian comedy horror film that aims for yuks rather than chills. A nerdy horror scribe (oxymoronic?) stumbles upon a serial killer support group in 1983 with fatal results. Calahan lovingly apes the tone and look of 80s horror in this slight, but winning film. The ensemble work is first class, particularly Evan Marsh, a master of spit takes, Amber Goldfarb, Ari Millen, and David Koechner.

Gints Zilbalodis' Flow, the Latvian film which recently won Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, follows the adventures of a cat a in flood filled world devoid of humans. The film meanders pleasantly. The lack of a strong narrative lets the viewer be immersed in Zilbalodis' 360 degree world building which is similar to that of a video game.

Scott Derrickson's The Gorge, currently streaming on Apple+, is mindless, yet enjoyable sci-fi pulp. The film stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Taylor as professional assassins tasked with culling mutants which were the result of a chemical weapons mishap. Thanks to the chemistry of the two leads, the film succeeds as a romance even though its premise is thoroughly idiotic. Ms. Taylor-Joy, in particular, has never been as playful and frisky. Sigourney Weaver is in support in a paycheck role.

Errol Morris' Chaos: The Manson Murders is a succinct summation of the notorious cases. Youngsters with little knowledge of these examples of grisly true crime and 60s paranoia will be the most edified. Morris is still a nervy director and he gives the film the tabloid style the subject demands: the viewer is treated to shots of glass eyes and maggots. The primary talking head (Tom O'Neill), a co-writer of the book which is the basis of the film, attempts to link Manson with the CIA's MKUltra program. The direct link between the two, even Mr. O'Neill admits, has not emerged.

Ken Loach's The Old Oak, like all the British veteran's films, teeters on a tightrope between warm humanism and sententious socialist solidarity. A northern English community welcomes Syrian refugees, some warmly, like the owner of a titular pub, and some not so warmly. Loach types his nationalistic villains so broadly that they resemble cartoons. The acting varies wildly. I did like the Durham Cathedral sequence and the concluding glimpse of that town's Miners Gala. The latter would prove to be a fitting cap to his career if this should prove to be his swan song. I will give Loach credit for staying true to his Marxist principles even to the point of getting tossed out of the UK Labour party.

Dominque Abel and Fiona Martin's The Falling Star is a lame Belgian comedy, seemingly a mixture of Tati, Kaurismäki, and Quaaludes. The cinematography and production design are assuredly smart, yet the picture is thoroughly unenjoyable. The spirited cast is up for anything, especially dance numbers, but the plot wouldn't pass muster for a Monogram Pictures musical. A film that strains for humor. 

Edward Berger's Conclave is a thriller that doesn't thrill. Full of middlebrow musings on impotent issues, it is the most boring commercial film to feature the Sistine Chapel since Carol Reed's The Agony and the Ecstasy. The elderly actors make this static spectacle watchable, particularly Stanley Tucci, but Berger's direction is as anodyne as it was in his version of All Quiet on the Western Front. The film's moral stands, against religious fundamentalism and gender rigidity, are feeble rather than febrile. Ultimately, an underwhelming filmic experience.

Aram Avakian's 11 Harrowhouse, from 1974, is a British based heist film that lands with a resounding thud. Part of a brace of films from that era that attempted to rethink noir conventions (including but not limited to Play It Again, Sam, Chinatown, Gumshoe, Pulp, The Sting, and The Long Goodbye), the film's attempts at humor and suspense are woeful. Leads Charles Grodin and Candace Bergen have only a negative chemistry. Trevor Howard overacts as if he was in a hurry to leave the set. Grace notes are provided by James Mason and John Gielgud, but this disaster finished Avakian's career as a commercial director. He was a very good editor. A flick to avoid.

Best Performances of 2024

Ilinca Manolache

Actress

      Ilinca Manolache     Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World 

      Carol Duarte                 La Chimera

      Léa Seydoux               La Bête 

      Mikey Madison           Anora

     Margaret Qualley        The Substance

Actor

      Raphaël Quenard      Yannick

      Sebastian Stan           The Apprentice

      David Dastmalchian  Late Night With The Devil

      Josh O'Connor           La Chimera, Challengers

      Deniz Celiloğlu         About Dry Grasses

Supporting Actress

      Maja Ostaszewska    Green Border

      Iazua Larios              Tótem

      Niecy Nash               Origin

      Guslagie Malanda     La Bête

      Isabella Rossellini     La Chimera, Conclave

Supporting Actor

      Jeremy Strong           The Apprentice

      Jack Gleeson          In the Land of Saints and Sinners

      Louis Koo            Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

      Elias Koteas               Janet Planet

      David Costabile         Snack Shack

                                       

Raphaël Quenard

      

              

Pursued

Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright, and Judith Anderson

The Freudian Western par excellence, Raoul Walsh's Pursued, from 1947, features Robert Mitchum as a man with hellhounds on his trail as a result of boyhood trauma. Walsh fashions this moody piece as a deterministic nightmare where the characters are dwarfed, in James Wong Howe's wonderous cinematography, by monumental rock formations and thunderous skies. Niven Busch's script baldly trumpets its morbid psychology whilst copping out with its ending. This is mitigated by Walsh's handling of his players. Mitchum was rarely better and the supporting players are all perfectly cast: including Teresa Wright (Mrs. Busch at the time). Judith Anderson, Alan Hale Sr., Dean Jagger, and Harry Carey Jr.        

Seraphine

Yolande Moreau as Séraphine de Senlis

Martin Provost's Séraphine is an interesting biopic of the French painter Séraphine Louis better known as Séraphine de Senlis. The film pictures her life through her interactions with her primary patron, Wilhem Uhde, a noted German critic, collector, and art dealer who also championed the works of Braque, Picasso, and Henri Rousseau. Séraphine painted vivid, colorful images of flora and fauna, at one point in the film Uhde compares her work to that of van Gogh and that seems to be apt. Because of her lack of training and mental health issues, Séraphine is often pigeonholed as an outsider artist (aren't they all), a modern primitive, an example of Art Brut or a naive artist; the latter a term Uhde disliked.  

Séraphine was orphaned at seven and trained by the local Sisters of Providence for a life of servitude. This was how Uhde found her in the town of Senlis, just north of Paris in 1914. She was eking out a meagre living as a cleaner and washerwoman. Provost stresses the hardships of her life, but also her resourcefulness. We see her Séraphine wandering the countryside on her off hours, utilizing the local flowers and plants for her pigments. Séraphine is devout in her religious beliefs. Her paintings reflect the ecstasy she feels gazing upon God's creations. Uhde is the first to recognize the vitality and passion of her work. He is eager to bring her work to wider recognition, but the First World War intervenes.

                                            

The real Séraphine

The film jumps to 1927 by which time Uhde has resettled in France with his sister and the painter Helmut Kolle, Uhde's protege and lover. Fate reunites him with Séraphine who has continued to paint, but who is having increasing trouble making ends meet as she ages. Uhde's patronage buttresses Séraphine for awhile, but her behavior becomes more and more unhinged. Uhde is desolated by his lover's death from endocarditis and cannot protect Séraphine from her wilder impulses. She takes to the streets of Senlis in a wedding dress (shades of Miss Havisham) and proceeds to leave her silver on the doorsteps of her neighbors. This lands her in an asylum which Uhde visits, but she is lost to him forever.  

Séraphine falls just short of being a masterpiece because it lacks the audacity of its subject. However, Yolande Moreau's performance as Séraphine and Ulrich Tukur's as Uhde are two for the ages, a contrast between two very different creatures united by a love of art. Séraphine was warmly received by American critics and won the César award for best picture, but has been unjustly forgotten in the intervening years. It is a small treasure that I highly recommend.

King Lear

Jean-Luc Godard in King Lear

I enjoyed Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, but would hesitate to recommend the film to the neophyte Godard viewer. This 1987 film is truly an odd concoction, one of Cannon Films brief forays into art films during that era. The film uneasily alternates pretentious twaddle with sublime genius. Godard does not present us with an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, but a fragmented meditation upon it. The film has no straightforward narrative, but is an visual-audio collage that assays both the lowbrow and the high. The film is pitched as a dialectical exercise: Cordelia versus Lear, virtue versus power, youth versus age, feminine versus masculine, and, the ultimate struggle for a purveyor of images, light versus dark.

King Lear started out as a commercial seeming project, but the end product was so obtuse that it did not open in France until 2002. Norman Mailer, at one point, was collaborating on the script, but (quelle surprise) locked horns with Godard and vamoosed. He appears briefly in the film's prologue. Woody Allen was supposed to play the fool and shows up in the film's coda. There are remnants of a gangster script that Godard unsuccessfully peddled to Hollywood. Lear, played with gusto by Burgess Meredith, is dubbed Don Learo and recites from Albert Fried's The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. He and Molly Ringwald's Cordelia rehearse their lines at a lakeside resort in Switzerland. Godard's camera is usually fixed like the images we glimpse from Sargent, Fra Angelico, Goya, Doré, Fuseli, and scores more.

I can't tell you that it adds up because obfuscation is Godard's goal. As he put it, "the most important will be the most hidden." Not only is the array of images only semi-decipherable, so is the soundtrack. Recitations are garbled or tweaked electronically. Dialogue overlaps with vocal narration to the point of unintelligibility. Godard appears as "Professor Pluggy", an augury of the switched on era of the internet and an inscrutable mentor to the young. The Godard who loves Jerry Lewis is in full evidence here, but Godard's clown, Peter Sellars, doesn't have the comic chops necessary for his pratfalls. If the scene of Sellars slurping soup is the film's nadir, a scene of Julie Delpy ironing is worthy of either Renoir. Leos Carax, who appears here as "Edgar", is one of the few living French filmmakers able to conjure the playful mischief of Jean-Luc Godard. It is this spirit that I value in King Lear and one wholly appropriate for a film that is both a burlesque and an unfathomable critique of pure reason. The recently released Criterion Collection disc is immaculate.

Last Summer, Queen of Hearts

Samuel Kircher and Léa Drucker

I was about halfway through Catherine Breillat's Last Summer (L'Été dernier) when it finally dawned on me that it was a remake of a Danish film I saw a few years ago, May el-Touky's Queen of Hearts. In both films, the attorney wife of a successful, if somewhat boring business man has a fling with her teenaged step-son. Both films are well acted and appointed, but I thought Ms. el-Touky and her collaborators did a better job of coming to grips with the implications of the material than the makers of the French film.

Ms. Breillat quickly and forcefully establishes her female protagonist, Anne, played by Léa Drucker, as capable and compassionate in her profession. She has a warm relationship with her older husband and their two adorable adopted daughters. The only fly in the ointment is surly step-son, Theo, who is living with them after getting tossed out of his Geneva boarding school. However, after we see the perfunctory sex between Anne and her husband, the audience knows it is only a matter of time before Theo and Anne cross the Rubicon of transgressive love. 

As Theo, Samuel Kircher is appealing in his youthful cluelessness. Ms. Drucker is adept at showing both the steel and vulnerability of Anne. Ms. Breillat is successful at both evoking and sending up the French bourgeoise (or as Anne calls them normopaths) here, a scene with Anne and her charges riding through the French countryside in a Mercedes convertible while blasting Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots" is both sublime and ridiculous, but she skirts the issue of what results when society's spoken and unspoken laws are trangressed. Abuse is papered over in Last Summer and treated with silence. Perhaps this accurately reflects Ms. Breillat's feelings towards how French society deals with such issues, but, compared to how Queen of Hearts deals head on with damage done by social ruptures, it is a cop-out.

Two Claudette Colbert Features: Three-Cornered Moon and Maid of Salem

Claudette Colbert in Three Cornered Moon

Elliott Nugent's Three Cornered Hat, from 1933, is a successful opening up of Gertrude Friedberg's play, a good early example of screwball comedy. As in most screwball comedies, there is overlapping dialogue, physical schtick, and a wacky and wealthy family. Mary Boland plays the ditzy matriarch of an antic clan, three immature adult brothers and a sis played by Ms. Colbert, who live in a mansion in Brooklyn. The brothers roar around the house engaging in hijinks while Colbert ponders the romantic advances of a starving artist and a stable doctor. After the first reel, the family learns that they are destitute and must now labor for their bread and board like the rest of a US locked in the Depression.

Each of the three brothers struggles with employment while Colbert suffers from sexual harassment. Eventually barriers are overcome, inhibitions are discarded, and true love emerges triumphant. The male actors, including Richard Arlen and Wallace Ford, are forgettable, but the distaff half shines. Boland plays an idiot charmingly and Colbert really swims in this kind of fare. Nugent always displays a good sense of pacing and blocking with his players, but there is a rare friskiness to his direction here, particularly in his use of sight gags. The film's sexual politics and Polish jokes have dated, but I found the film to be a tonic. It unspools in 77 minutes.

             

Donald Meek and Colbert in Maid of Salem

Unlike the charming Three Cornered Hat, Frank Lloyd's Maid of Satan is dire. This 1937 version of the Salem witch trials changes the names of all involved (except Tituba) to protect the guilty, out of kindness I suppose. We know that Colbert's character will be fingered because she loves frippery, dancing, and Virginia cavalier Fred McMurray. As with the later Drums Along the Mohawk, Colbert is not entirely at ease in a period role. The only time she gets to show off her apple cheeked charm is a scene of her practicing the gavotte. McMurray is even more at sea in a role that seems more based on Errol Flynn than any historic character. Bonita Granville effectively reprises her These Three role as Maid in Salem's number one fink. The direction is leaden. One reason to see the film is a choice roster of supporting players: Sterling Holloway, Russell Simpson, Donald Meek, Gale Sondergaard, Beulah Bondi, J. Farrell MacDonald, William Farnum, Donald Meek (a perfectly cast Puritan), and, as Tituba, the legendary Madame Sul-Te-Wan. I also enjoyed Victor Young's score, but the verdict is... beware. 

Heretic

Hugh Grant

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' Heretic is a slightly above average horror flick. The film's initial premise is intriguing, but the film soon degenerates into more standard fare. Two Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) are invited into the house of an older man who initially seems charming, but soon proves to be throughly sinister. This character, in an inspired bit of casting, is played by Hugh Grant who has always been a fount of surface charm. Grant's character has an axe to grind against organized religion and Mr. Woods and Mr. Beck's script provides him with witty rants that are one part pop culture and one part The Golden Bough. Mr. Grant is up to the challenge and eschews vanity to finally look his age, in stark contrast to the very young damsels in distress.     

Ms. East and Ms. Thatcher are also both quite effective. I rate Ms. Thatcher, so good in Yellowjackets, to be a real comer. Her fierceness reminds me of the young Nicola Pagett. Unfortunately, by the time the two young women discover the nastiness in Mr. Grant's basement, the film peters out into a routine thriller. It is too late to count them out, but it seems that Mr. Beck and Mr. Woods' talents lay more in script writing than direction. With a few exceptions, the images in Heretic tend to evaporate in one's mind's eye rather stick. The climax of Heretic, thus, seems more pro forma than terrifying.   

Yella

Nina Hass in transit

Christian Petzold's Yella, from 2007, is a knotty German thriller that established Petzold as one of the leading directors of this century. Nina Hass plays Yella, a young woman who we soon learn is attempting to leave her marriage. However, the husband, named Ben (Hinnerk Schönemann), refuses to accept this and spends the film stalking, badgering, and abusing Yella. He even drives his car off a bridge rather than drive Yella to the train station. Yella leaves her home town of Wittenberg to accept a job in Hanover, moving from the former East Germany to the more prosperous west. That job turns out to be a mirage, all her crooked boss wants is some slap and tickle. However, she runs into a cocksure business man named Phillip (Devid Striesow) at her hotel's restaurant. Phillip, who susses Yella's accounting skills, invites her to be his number cruncher at a business meeting the next day and a new stage in Yella's life has begun. 

It turns out Phillip is a liaison for a shady financier who loans out money, at exorbitant rates, to capitalists who cannot get bank loans. Yella takes to her new life well and even starts falling for Phillip. However, she eventually grasps that Phillip is stealing from his boss and is heading for a fall. The vision of capitalism is that of the art of the scam, everyone is on the make. Yella concludes with a fatalistic ending that has been previously foretold. Throughout the film, Petzold weaves themes (transit, surveillance) and imagery (especially that of water) that would recur throughout his later work. If you enjoy Yella, I strongly urge you to seek out Petzold's later masterpieces with Nina Hass, Barbara and Phoenix, both of which contain sublime acting and filmmaking.

Spoiler Alert

I cannot fully grapple with Yella without spilling the beans about the ending. Earlier in the film, when Ben drives the car containing he and Yella off a bridge and into a river, both passengers survive the plunge and collapse on the river bank. Somewhat improbably, Yella is able to retrieve her bags and make her train to Hanover. The film continues with her further misadventure until the accident is repeated at the end of the film. This time Yella and Ben are dead, their bodies covered by rescue workers. One interpretation I'll offer is that Petzold is offering us a variation of Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in which the narrator imagines an escape and homecoming in the few moments before he dies from a hanging. It would explain the weird migraines and or psychotic breaks Yella experiences, always accompanied by liquid imagery, where she hears a high pitched sound and water rushing.

Symphonie pour un massacre

Jean Rochefort

Jacques Deray's Symphonie pour un massacre is a tightly constructed and cold eyed crime drama from 1963. Derived from Alain Reynaud-Fourton's novel, Les Mystifiés, the adaptation was written by Deray with help from Claude Sautet and one of the film's actors, José Giovanni. The flick centers on five gangsters who band together as partners in a narcotics deal. However, we are clued in from the start that there is no honor among these thieves. The nominal protagonist, Jabeke (Jean Rochefort), is revealed within the first reel to be having an affair with the wife of one of his criminal cohorts, Claude Dauphin's Valoti. Jabeke is also keen to rip off his brothers in crime. He stalks the gangster Moreau (Giovanni) who is taking a large satchel of cash to Marseilles in order to initiate the narcotics deal. Jabeke murders Moreau on the train to Marseilles and steals the cash. Needless to say, Jabeke's plan eventually goes awry and the film ends in a cascading wave of violence promised by its title.

The film is firmly entrenched in the shady milieu of bars and gambling clubs seen in the films of Jacques Becker who had adapted Giovanni's first novel, Le Trou, in 1960. Deray shoots his players from a low angle conveying the menace of an underworld in which no one can be trusted. Symphonie... is unhurried in showing us the machinations of its plot. The audience is fully clued in to the perfidy of the characters. Deray percolates his drama at a slow boil never resorting to jump scares or concocted suspense. The fact that we can see the dénouement of this film a mile away does not lessen its fascination, but works to tighten the snare Deray has fashioned for his characters. The tightness of the movie's construction, particularly its editing, results in marvelous moments of ironic counterpoint. 

Symphonie... is a feast of Gallic film acting. Rochefort, known primarily up to that point as a light comedian both on stage and in films like Cartouche, was given a career boost by showing he could be equally equally effective as a dramatic lead. His stoic mien is the focal point of the film. Claud Dauphin is affecting as the cuckolded Valoti and Charles Vanel, most famous for The Wages of Fear, is equally superb. Claude Renoir's vivid black and white cinematography of Paris, Lyon, and Brussels is reason enough to see the film. Léon Barsacq's art direction hips us the personality of the characters more, unfortunately, than some of the performers do. Deray's use of space is tightly controlled and largely static. When he does move his camera, whip pans and tightly coiled dollies, it is a cold smack to the viewer. 

I will conclude with a bit on José Giovanni because it will be the proper chilly end note for this short review. Giovanni wrote over twenty noir novels and many film scripts, including Melville's Le deuxième souffle. He had a real life appreciation for crime and moral depravity. Before assuming the pen name Giovanni, he was born Joseph Damiani, a French citizen of Corsican descent. The son of a gambler, Giovanni was twenty when he began collaborating with the Vichy government and its Gestapo henchmen. He belonged to the German Schutskorp which hunted camp escapees and dodgers. When not capturing Jews and other undesirables and pilfering their loot, Damiani would blackmail Jews in hiding. And there was more, including murder. After liberation, Damiani narrowly escaped the hangman's noose and ended up serving eleven and a half years in stir. He was unrepentant when he died a Swiss citizen in 1986.

The Devil and the Daylong Brothers

Three Brothers: Jordan Bolden, Brendan Bradley and Nican Robinson

I could pick nits with it from now till Doomsday, but Brandon Mccormick's The Devil and the Daylong Brothers is bold and inventive. A Southern Gothic musical set in the pre-cellphone era, the film function as an update of Supernatural  with the addition of an extra brother. The songs are serviceable country blues pastiches, but writer Nicholas Kirk, the co-auteur of this flick, imbues them with doom and propulsive energy appropriately leading us to the inexorable climax. Mccormick frames the pitiless violence and songs with handheld immediacy sometimes lapsing into hysterical overkill. On the whole, though, this approach bears fruit as Mccormick and Kirk have constructed a narrative of superior craft that all comes together like a fine timepiece

The mythology of The Devil and the Daylong Brothers is Satanic gobbledygook. Three brothers from different mothers are paying off their Dad's debt to his satanic majesty by dispatching those whose time it is to pay for their Faustian bargains. Last on their list is Dad who sold his soul to be the ultimate blues singer. Now that said father is played by a veteran actor/singer most famous for crooning the excruciating "I'm Easy" to various femmes in Nashville is problematic to say the least, but I'm not going to pick the nit of the white bluesman here and Keith Carradine acquits himself extremely well. Most of the acting is quite good for a B movie, though Jordon Bolden seems to be doing a bizarre Rami Malek impression. The best vocals are provided by Rainey Qualley, Margaret's sis and the sole femme (fatale) here, better known in music circles as Rainsford. The Devil and the Daylong Brother has opened to little fanfare by streaming on Apple TV, but it is vigorous cinema for those who don't mind an impaled eyeball or two.

La bestia debe morir

Narciso Ibáñez Menta and Laura Hidalgo

Román Viñoly Barreto's La bestia debe morir (The Beast Must Die), released in 1952, is a terrific melodramatic mystery from Argentina. The screenplay, by Barreto and leading man Narciso Ibáñez Menta, is adapted from Nicholas Blake's novel. Blake was the pen name of English poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis who concocted mysteries, usually following the exploits of detective Nigel Strangeways, in order to earn the income his poetry could not generate. The book was also adapted in 1969 by Claude Chabrol for his film This Man Must Die. The two films are an interesting contrast. The Chabrol film is shot in color in a realistic fashion with many outdoor sequences. Chabrol marshals his characters like chess pieces in an essay on determinism. La bestia debe morir is in black and white and shot on soundstages. Barreto stresses the traumas of the characters by expressionistically heightening the claustrophobia of the interiors, which contain a nest of vipers.

Barreto and Menta stress the inevitability of the film's tragic denouement by rejiggering the story's structure. The story is a revenge tale in which a bereaved father, author Felix Lane (Menta), vows to take retribution for those responsible for the demise of his son, who died in a hit and run accident. La bestia debe morir starts off by having the killer, a rich landowner named Jorge (Guillermo Battaglia), be poisoned in the first reel, though we do not know by whom. The main part of the narrative, Felix's search for his son's killer, is told in flashback, a device that helps the film's plot seem as foredoomed as its look. Lane finds his son's killer through Linda (Laura Hidalgo), Jorge's sister-in-law and a film actress, who was with Jorge when Felix's son was run over. Felix initially uses Linda to get at Jorge, but finds himself falling for the saucy, but troubled dish.

His relationship with Linda gains Felix an invitation to Jorge's estate, a sick house with secrets like in many works of horror, Poe's ...Usher for example. Jorge is a domineeringly sadistic host, truly a beast. He beats both his wife and her child from a previous union mercilessly with a belt. He openly pursues Linda and has installed a former, and perhaps current, mistress as the wife of his business partner. The manse is presided over by Jorge's aged mother, a tart tongued and self-righteous biddy played with sulphuric majesty by Milagros de la Vega. Barreto and cinematographer Alberto Etchebehere's camera usually regards these grotesques from a low angle, at knee level. The perfect angle to warily regard serpents.

                            

However, Barreto is up to more than prodding the snakes in his terrarium. In this film, Barreto shows and evokes how traumatic events smack into people and leave their mark. When Jorge's auto is about to smash into Felix's son, the camera does a quick dolly into the frightened lad from the car's point of view. At the moment of impact, Barreto cuts to a shot of waves crashing on the rock coast. The surreal charge of this carries over into the sequence recording Felix's memories of the aftermath of the accident: distorted images superimposed on one another as an expression of mental distress (see above). This is audacious cinema poised at the point of hysteria.

Hysteria is also what most of the acting skirts, but I find it appropriate to the melodramatic excesses of the scenario. The exception is Menta playing a character willing to watch and bide his time before striking. Menta deftly underplays his role, which is accentuated by all the eye rolling and lip quivering going on around him. Menta was a Spaniard who became the equivalent of Vincent Price to a generation of Latin American moviegoers. A devotee of Lon Chaney Sr., Menta would subsequently appear in scores of Latin horror films. I relished his performance here and will seek out both more of his and Barreto's work. La bestia debe morir and Barreto's El vampiro negro (a remake of M) are both available on spiffy Flicker Alley discs. I commend them to all.

Quick Takes, February 2025

Something is askew in Dos Monjes

Juan Bustillo's Dos Monjes (Two Monks) is a near masterpiece from 1934. This sound film is a delirious, expressionistic melodrama that verges on the surreal. Two monks are in conflict at a monastery, the fallout of a collapsed love triangle. The events of the past are told twice from the perspective of each combatant. This schizoid film is full of technical wizardry: swooping cranes, bifurcated wipes, and oblique angels. Even the grandfather clock is crooked in this one. Highly recommended.

Rich Peppiatt's Kneecap is a lively look at the rise of the titular Irish hip-hop group whose tunes, which feature Gaelic lyrics, offers a middle finger to British imperialism. The tone is delightfully rude and cheeky. Peppiatt's visual stylings, which includes animated overlays, are consistently inventive. Currently streaming on Netflix.

Ana DuVernay's Origin is one of the more neglected American releases of 2024. The film traces the origins of Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. Wilkerson's book intertwines vignettes about Jim Crow America, Nazi Germany's racial laws, and India's treatment of the Dalit caste (known popularly as the untouchables) into an indictment of social hierarchies. The scenes of Wilkerson conducting her research do occasionally bog down in didacticism, but the scenes of Wilkerson's family life are moving and well acted. Origin contains one of the past year's best acting ensembles: especially Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Connie Nielson, Nick Offerman, Blair Underwood, Audra McDonald, Niecy Nash, and Emily Yancy. Ultimately, Origin is a moving meditation not only about caste, but also mortality.

Nathan Silver's Between the Temples is the most moving and funny exploration of Jewish identity (and self-hatred) since Lemon. Jason Schwartzman stars as a troubled cantor in upstate New York who falls for one of his mitzvah students, the always welcome Carol Kane, to the disgruntlement of his family and community. The film, purposefully, provides more cringe worthy moments than laughs. Silver's supporting players are all in fine form, especially Robert Smigel. The film's visual approach, it looks like it was shot on video, is continually and disarmingly creative. 

The Zellner Brothers' Sasquatch Sunset feels like an extended, R rated version of the "Messin with Sasquatch" beef jerky advertisements, yet manages to transcend its lowly aspirations with humor and warmth. The flick is a decided advancement over their previous one, the stillborn Damsel. Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg and their fellow Bigfoots are to be commended for the all out zeal they bring to their performances. In the tradition of Keaton's Three Ages. 

Francis Galluppi's The Last Stop in Yuma County snuck into a few theaters in late 2023 to little notice, but it is a solid B film. Disparate strangers are stranded at a remote diner with two bank robbers in this desert noir which is beholden to Hemingway, The Petrified Forest, Hitchcock, Tarantino, and numerous B pictures from the 1950s. Galluppi's saving grace is a sense of humor and film craft. The fine acting ensemble keeps things from getting too cartoonish, especially Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue, and Gene Jones.

Yasujirō Ozu's That Night's Wife, released in 1930, is a silent crime melodrama that features a sickly child, a loving wife and a tortured husband driven to robbery in order provide for his family. The scenario is hokey, undynamic, and bathetic, the pacing extremely slow for a 65 minute picture. A kindly policeman corners the miscreant in his apartment where we are stuck for half of the picture's running time. Intimations of future genius are apparent, but this is lesser Ozu.

Frank Perry's Ladybug Ladybug is nuclear war drama that opened after the Kennedy assassination in 1963. A rural elementary school in Pennsylvania sends its charges home under the threat of annihilation. The film gauges the various reactions as the teachers and students face the prospect of impending doom. Nancy Marchand and Estelle Parsons have their moments, but Perry's juvenile cast is shaky. The film captures the dread and paranoia of the Cold War era, but I found it to be a painfully earnest and thin anti-nuke screed.

The Best of Gene Hackman

                         

                                                                        Gene Hackman

                                                                            1930 - 2025

"I was trained to be an actor, not a star. I was trained to play roles, not to deal with fame and agents and lawyers and the press."

1)   Unforgiven                                      Clint Eastwood                              1992

2)   Night Moves                                    Arthur Penn                                   1975

3)   French Connection II                John Frankenheimer                           1975

4)   The Conversation                     Francis Ford Coppola                          1974

5)   The French Connection               William Friedkin                               1971

6)   Downhill Racer                              Michael Ritchie                               1969

7)   The Birdcage                                   Mike Nichols                                 1996

8)   No Way Out                                  Roger Donaldson                             1987

9)   The Royal Tenenbaums                 Wes Anderson                                2001

10) Scarecrow                                      Jerry Schatzberg                             1973

11) The Firm                                        Sydney Pollack                                1993

12) Bonnie and Clyde                            Arthur Penn                                   1967

He quit while he was ahead, but, still, the number of good to excellent performances he gave is astonishing. I could have easily added his performances in Young Frankenstein, Eureka, Enemy of the State, and Under Fire to the above list. His lack of a fixed image may have hindered him from vaulting into the stratosphere of superstardom, but he was always in demand and I don't think he gave a darn about the trappings of stardom. I also treasure his performances in Lilith, I Never Sang for My Father, Cisco Pike, The Poseidon Adventure, Bite the Bullet, Superman, Hoosiers, Postcards from the Edge, The Quick and the Dead, Crimson Tide, Get Shorty, Twilight, and Absolute Power. 

Oh, Canada

Richard Gere

I may be mistaken, but it seemed that Paul Schrader's Oh, Canada was received underwhelmingly by American critics. Conversely, I think the film, along with 2007's The Walker, is one of his better efforts in this century. I am far from an admirer of Schrader as a director, recent films like First Reformed have struck me as overly tortured and derivative, but Oh, Canada's screenplay is the best text Schrader has had to work with in a while. The screenplay is based on the late Russell Banks' novel Foregone, a great writer Schrader mined successfully with his film version of Affliction in 1997. Oh Canada is concerned with a documentary filmmaker based in Montreal named Leo Fife and played by Richard Gere. Fife has terminal cancer and he has agreed to a filmed interview with documentarians he has taught and mentored. This device allows Schrader to investigate Fife's past with Jacob Elordi impersonating (sometimes) Fife as a young man. 

The films flits back and forth through time, sometimes in black and white, sometimes in color. A lot of critics found this presentation "muddled", but I thought it was an honest attempt by Schrader to portray the mental decomposition of Fife. Schrader has never been a visually supple director, so he succeeds only partially here, there are too many shots of Gere furrowing his brow, but he does end up conveying Fife's confusion. At least his visual flubs are sins of commission and not omission. I did like the bits we see of Fife's documentaries, all period appropriate. Fife has a sterling reputation as a liberal crusader after, supposedly, fleeing his home country and the draft for Canada. However, he makes plain that his motives were not so idealistic. Fife was also bailing on two wives (one an ex), each with a child. Fife has rejected advances to reconnect with his children and wallows in guilt, here as elsewhere Schrader's main thematic interest.

What helps this tortured memory play is Gere's underacting. He nails Fife's grandiosity and testiness, but also manages to convey, confined to a wheelchair for much of the film, his character's rage at his own imminent implosion. Gere could always move through the frame as though he owned it, but this largely immobile performance is evidence of artistic growth. Elordi and the supporting cast are spot on, but Uma Thurman, as Fife's last wife, is disastrous. Only with Tarantino and Philip Kaufman has she looked relaxed and in character onscreen. Oh, Canada is a weird mixture of good and bad, Phosphorescent's score is both lyrically appropriate and soporific, but Russell Banks tortured realism once again proves a good fit with Schrader's reformed Calvinism.