Monday, December 31, 2018

BEST FILMS OF 2018

1. Roma




Roma

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Cast: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta

I loved this film!! It became for me a close to portrayal of my own family domestic structure, although I didn’t grow up in the Colonia Roma where the film takes place. Alfonso Cuarón's intensely personal, dreamy black-and-white ode to his childhood in 1970's Mexico. It is a profound act of empathy for his childhood housekeeper/nanny (as played by first time actor Yalitza Aparicio), taking the story of one bourgeoisie family and juxtaposing it with the revolutionary changes in the city at the time. The city sequences are absolutely perfect, every detail is considered. The movie is filled with comically inept or absent men, delicately choreographed long takes, the intricacies of cleaning up dog poop, unforgettable set pieces (the New Year's Eve party, the Corpus Christi Massacre), and the kind of lived-in details that could only be drawn from memory. Some sequences like the one Cleo is looking for her boyfriend reminded me of Fellini’s 8 ½. The movie, which spans a tumultuous year in the family's life, sneaks up on you with a series of moments, until the emotional weight of the entire thing crashes down on you like the waves at Tuxpan in the climactic ocean scene.

The film is a technical craftsman of the highest order, the Children of Men and Gravity director has an aesthetic that aims to overwhelm -- with the amount of extras, the sense of despair, and the constant whir of exhilaration. Cuarón's artful pans aren't just layered for the sake of complexity: he's often placing different emotions, historical concepts, and class distinctions in conversation with each other. What are these different components in the painstakingly composed shots actually saying to each other? The movie is filled with compositions like that, tinged with careful ambiguity and unresolved tensions. I think is what I will call a greatly modest masterpiece.

2. First Reformed


First Reformed

Director: Paul Schrader

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles, Victoria Hill

I have to confess I have been a huge Ethan Hawke fan so I felt I was compelled to like it, the film really stands on its own. Ethan Hawke plays an angry and bitter minister in a small and historic upstate New York church, who directs much of his bitterness at political leaders and much of it at himself.

This is Paul Schrader’s drama about an alcoholic ex-military chaplain going through a profound existential crisis. Ethan Hawke stars as Reverend Ernst Toller of the First Reformed Church in New York in this thoughtful film, which tells the story of a church with a dwindling congregation, striving to adapt to a new age. When pregnant parishioner, played by Amanda Seyfried, asks Reverend Toller to counsel her husband, a tormented radical environmentalist who doesn’t want to bring a child into a world which climate change is poised to destroy, Toller is plunged into dealing with his own tormented past, until he finds redemption in an act of exceptional violence.

It’s been a long time since we saw another great Paul Schrader’ smovie, and with First Reformed, the writer-director provides a magnificent companion piece to that earlier triumph. Also indebted to Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Ingmar Bergman, Schrader’s religious drama) fixates on Reverend Toller ongoing crisis-of-faith is accelerated by an encounter with an environmental activist beset by hopelessness and anger. Toller’s ensuing relationship with that man’s wife as well as the leader of a local mega-church forms the basis of Schrader’s rigorously ascetic and occasionally expressionistic film, which is guided by Toller’s journal-entry narration about his fears and doubts. Formally exquisite and led by a tremendous performance from Hawke who can’t quell the darkness within, it’s a spiritual inquiry made harrowing by both its mounting misery and its climactic ambiguity. The ending, which almost veers into magical realism, is a leap of faith for the audience and characters, adding up to nothing less than the most moving shot of 2018. This is a true masterpiece I recommend everyone check out.

3. Annihilation


Annihilation

Director: Alex Garland (Ex Machina)

Cast: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson

Annihilation is a mind-blowing trip into an inscrutable heart of darkness that marks writer-director Alex Garland as one of the genre’s true greats. Desperate to understand what happened to her soldier husband (Oscar Isaac) on his last mission, a biologist (Natalie Portman) ventures alongside four comrades (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, and Tuva Novotny) into a mysterious, and rapidly growing, hot zone known as the “Shimmer.

This film is an unapologetically radical adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's hit book. Both visually and intellectually, it was nothing less than a psychedelic horror movie about aliens, communication, and people's capacity for self-destruction. It was also an environmental allegory in a way few films dared to approach, an unsettling and hallucinatory tale of destruction and transformation, division and replication—dynamics that Garland posits as the fundamental building blocks of every aspect of existence, and which fully come to the fore during a climax of such surreal birth-death insanity that it has to be seen to be believed. The film combines elements of numerous predecessors (Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Thing) to create something wholly and frighteningly unique, it dares to dream in a language we can't quite comprehend.
It is also an environmental allegory in a way few films dared to approach, an unsettling and hallucinatory tale of destruction and transformation, division and replication—dynamics that Garland posits as the fundamental building blocks of every aspect of existence, and which fully come to the fore during a climax of such surreal birth-death insanity that it has to be seen to be believed. 

4. Black Panther


Black Panther

Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira

Director: Ryan Coogler

The film is an amazing mythical, cool superhero drama that confronts modern political agonies in complex and resonant ways. Marvel's first black superhero finally gets his dues, leaping from the page to his first solo movie. After debuting in Captain America: Civil War, Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa gets the origin treatment in director Ryan Coogler's standalone effort. With the Black Panther not only being a superhero but also king of an entire country, stands to bring something new to the tone of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wrapping it all in fantastic afro-futuristic visuals.

Coogler's skillful balancing of a high-tech spy gadgetry, ceremonial palace intrigue, fantasy action mayhem, and subversive political critique is unparalleled in the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe that Black Panther springs from. In the same way Creed, his propulsive and knowing reboot of the Rocky franchise, paid tribute to and upended boxing iconography. Coogler's take on superhero-dom is both pleasing and probing. Basically, he's got Soundcloud jokes, rhino battles, and takes on imperialism. The larger ideological conflict between the new king T'Challa (Boseman) and the American revolutionary Killmonger (Jordan) has been seen before in the pages of history books and comics, but it's never been given this type of eye-popping, brain-scrambling, heart-pounding blockbuster treatment.

5. BlacKkKlansman


BlacKkKlansman

Director: Spike Lee

Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace

Ron Stallworth was the first black police officer in the Colorado Springs Police Department and in the late 1970s he went undercover to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. The story is relatively straightforward on the surface, the cop skillfully played by Washington, infiltrates the local chapter of the Klu Klux Klan by phone and attempts to gather intelligence info on the organization. The officer teams up with white officer Flip Zimmerman, who was a stand-in when a white version of Stallworth was needed. The infiltration was a success with the duo being invited to lead the Klan's local chapter. The film first debuted at Cannes where it competed for the Palme d’Or and eventually won the Grand Prix.

This drama is among Lee’s most politically passionate films. No movie better connected today's shameful social and political realities with America's history better than Spike Lee's latest movie. The fact he was able to do so using the prism of the (mostly real) story of a black police officer who infiltrated the KKK is incredible. The fact it was often righteously funny—even when it was interrogating race, religion, and deep-seated hatred was even more remarkable. Often, the film plays like the pilot episode of a TV show given an essayistic overhaul. In addition to drawing connections to cinematic history, from Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation to Super Fly and Cleopatra Jones, he makes more than a handful of knowing nods to the political present, having characters mimic the catchphrases of President Donald Trump and ending the film with actual footage from last year's Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Lee's message is proudly, defiantly blunt; his stylistic approach is multi-layered and tonally ambitious.

6.The Ballad of Buster Scruggs


 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Director: Joel and Ethan Coen 

Cast: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Zoe Kazan

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs lavishes the classical genre with love while nonetheless dissecting it with a sharp analytical eye. Laced with a fatalism that’s emblematic of their finest work, the Coens’ six tales progress from jaunty to gloomy, although there’s plenty of humor and pessimism to be found in each of these captivating installments.  A six-part Western anthology, centered upon a common theme: the Wild West’s relentless cruelty, wanton violence, deadly recklessness, and cavalier abuses of unchecked power. As with much of their best work, the stories all revolve around absurd twists and fatalistic endings, but with an uncanny visual sheen that gives it the weight of beloved old folk tales. Even for experienced film makers like the Coen Brothers, the anthology format, where a series of shorts are presented as a feature, is a tough challenge to conquer.

A bountiful anthology of Western tales, from James Franco’s desperado trying to rob a remote prairie bank and Tom Waits’s prospector searching for gold, to Liam Neeson’s showman endeavoring to make a living with an armless-and-legless performer, and Zoe Kazan’s single woman struggling to survive during a wagon-train trip across the plains, the absurd and the mournful constantly converge in unanticipated and striking ways. That’s most true of the dazzling opening discharge, in which Tim Blake Nelson’s crooning gunslinger Buster Scruggs proves a simultaneous homage to, and critique of, the Roy Rogers archetype and, by extension, the myths of the West it helped create.

The chapter starring the title character played by Tim Blake Nelson is a little ridiculous and the Franco-led bank robbery tale is too brisk but soon enough the movie finds its footing. In addition to finding death, cruelty, and despair in the West, the Coen's also find romance in the people and beauty in the landscape. What's the best chapter? Probably "The Gal Who Got Rattled," an achingly moving epic in miniature starring Zoe Kazan as wayward traveler Abigail and Bill Heck as soft-spoken cowboy Billy. In a movie that's not afraid to make you laugh or make you ponder some deep existential questions. 

7. Widows



Widows

Director: Steve McQueen

Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Kaluuya

 The great director Steve McQueen brought his trademark seriousness to a "fun" genre film, remaking a British TV show and turning it into one part feminist movie, one part social and one part Viola Davis acting showcase. It opens with a confrontational open-mouthed kiss, and only gets bolder from there, with lots of twists piled up toward the end. Daniel Kaluuya is spectacular in a supporting role as a psychopath. And it was also an important reminder that Elizabeth Debicki is really tall and really good at acting.

The powers of the moral universe of daily Chicago life is what we see in Widows: innocent lives are snuffed out by gunfire; public resources are funneled through nefarious means; land rights and business arrangements are finessed by ruthless violence and political favor-trading; and, to top it off, there's a carefully planned heist at the center of the story. Some characters, like Colin Farrell's oily alderman candidate, are motivated by pride; others, like Cynthia Erivo's babysitter turned getaway driver, by economic scarcity. Occasionally, it feels like McQueen’s style is capable of turning scenes of mechanical exposition into clever examinations of race and class, is more interested in exploring the larger moral questions than the relationships or the genre details. To put it lightly, he has a heavy touch. But the makeshift gang formed by former teachers union rep Veronica Rawlings (Davis) after her master thief husband (Liam Neeson) is killed in a robbery-gone-wrong is a joy to root for and the script. In an era of over-praised TV series that could afford to lose an episode (or eight), this sprawling and tough-minded crime saga knows just how to get out when the heat is around the corner.

8. You Were Never Really Here



You Were Never Really Here

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alex Manette, John Doman

Lynne Ramsay was the perfect person to make a gritty hit-man thriller, as she upends every contrivance and cliche of the genre. It was more intense, more visceral, more in tune with psychological realism, and more hammer-ific. Whether it was Joaquin Phoenix holding hands with one of his victims and singing a song, or the way the camera artfully avoided showing the bloodiest set pieces inside a brothel, images from this film still linger with me. Joaquin Phoenix reconfirms his status as his generation’s finest leading man.

This crime story, adapted from a novella by Bored to Death writer Jonathan Ames, is about an ex-soldier named Joe (Phoenix) who finds himself tasked with recovering a kidnapped girl amidst a sinister political conspiracy involving human trafficking. The tone of creeping dread and fixation on violent revenge recalls Taxi Driver, last year's X-Men shoot-em-up Logan, there should be nothing new to see here. Between Phoenix's muted performance, Jonny Greenwood's string-drenched score, and Ramsay's expressive jump-cuts, every image crackles with energy, style, and possibility. It's a death-obsessed movie vibrating with life.

There’s plenty of bloodshed throughout that underworld quest, yet Ramsay’s treatment of violence is anything but exploitative; rather, her film resounds as a lament for the trauma of childhood abuse, which lingers on after adolescence has given way to adulthood. Reminiscent of Taxi Driver, and energized by Phoenix’s magnetic embodiment of masculine suffering and sorrow, it’s a gut-wrenching portrait of a volatile man’s attempts to achieve some measure of solace from his inner demons sometimes via the use of a ball-peen hammer.


9. First Man


First Man

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler

I love movies about astronauts particularly this story and I wasn’t disappointed. With Steven Spielberg serving as an executive producer, Ryan Gosling as the lead character, and a plot based on James Hansen’s biography of Neil Armstrong, First Man was always set to be a winner and so it proved. Back in a time when the idea of walking on the moon was as ludicrous as flying cars or teleportation, the film follows the story of the man who accomplished what seemed impossible. It is the tale of the giant leap for humanity. But it’s not all about going down in history. Armstrong is also shown as he has to face tough questions – a heartbreaking “Do you think you’re coming back?” from his son – to show the human side of the national hero who went on one of the most dangerous missions ever. It’s no easy game being an astronaut.

Damien Chazelle explored the emotional sacrifices artists must make for their work. His latest, a flame-kissed Neil Armstrong biopic starring a tightly coiled Gosling as the mythical moonwalker, is similarly a film about emotional repression and simmering male anger, but this time the canvas is bigger (Literally: The movie switches to IMAX mode when Armstrong and crew hit the surface of the big rock.) Chazelle's cold approach to examining individuals with an unhealthy work-life balance has often felt overwrought to me, but here, with Gosling stoically burying his feelings in pursuit of celestial glory, he's launched himself into a different artistic stratosphere. The flight sequences are visceral; the domestic scenes are no less tense. 

10. Isle of Dogs


Isle of Dogs

Director: Wes Anderson

I am a Wes Anderson fan but this film is visually cool but not as compelling as others. This stop-motion animated comedy, about children’s efforts to thwart the extermination of dogs, is Anderson’s third film in a virtual trilogy of revolt. With none of the richness of his Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s gorgeous new stop-motion tale is a funny, touching, doggy delight.  The concept of sick dogs abandoned on a Japanese garbage island seemed so self-consciously, yet Isle of Dogs is a delight: funny, touching and full of heartfelt warmth and wit. With breathtaking visuals and an uncanny eye for canine behavior, it transposes the kid-friendly charm of The Incredible Journey to the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Mad Max via the Japanese cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, and, most notably, Akira Kurosawa.

Despite its ghoulish details, Isle of Dogs retains a soft, slapstick heart. The regular fights are animated like a Tex Avery cartoon, with random limbs protruding from a swirling dust cloud. Like the dogs themselves, the stop-motion has an endearingly scratchy quality, a textured roughness contrasting with the symmetrical perfection of the frame. Working primarily at London’s 3 Mills Studios, Anderson’s team of animators keep things admirably physical with cotton-wool clouds and cellophane rivers. Images on TV screens are rendered as old-school, hand-drawn cartoons. As always, the imagery is the best part of any Anderson film. “Isle of Dogs” engages an aesthetic of the ugly.  

On one level, Isle of Dogs can be read as a parable of disenfranchisement, a story of people (rather than pets) being pushed to the margins. On another it’s a simple tale of a boy and his dog, a heartbreaker with overtones of the much-loved Hachikō story. There’s also an animal rights echo.  Interpretations are necessarily open-ended. While all barks are translated into English, the human language, much of it Japanese, is largely unsubtitled. “You don’t understand the words but you understand the emotion.” Some have argued that, rather than foregrounding canine conversation, this technique casts the Japanese characters in particular – rather than humans in general.

Perhaps a better question would be “why aren’t the Japanese people translated?” Atari, who is the catalyst for this story, remains untranslated until the very end, where most of his speech is in deference to how hot he finds Tracy, with whom he has had no prior interaction. I suppose Anderson thought he was being respectful toward Japanese speakers by giving them something only they could enjoy. Instead, it only adds an “Otherness” to Atari and his compatriots. Why can we understand Atari’s canine cohort, but not him?

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Blow UP 1966


Action minded Architectural Association Types, such as Koolhaas and Tschumi hoped to deliver architecture as a tool for radical social and political reinvention by using it to nourish unexpected events, with film providing an alluring model. Passolini shooting hand held on the streets. Nemec documenting the Russian invasion of  Czechoslovakia, Godard and Marker, Russ Myers, montage, jump cuts, sex, violence, real life, stars-film was cool as shit. It is no coincidence that Michelangelo Antonioni opened Blow Up with a car full of Architectural Association students/hippies carousing through London on their way to Alison and Peter Smithson’s radical new building for The Economist

Jeff Kipnis. Perfect Acts of Architecture


The main plot is about Thomas (David Hemmings), a professional photographer of great popularity, progressive and Apollonian, who lives immersed in his chores as an artist on top of his game, he ends up being in a strange way involved in a murder. On the other hand, the fact that it is an enlargement of a photograph that he discovers is perhaps the most interesting part of the whole plot. We see a Thomas who, after having photographed a couple in Maryon Park on a seemingly calm morning, he is fascinated by the curiosity that lovers produce him. A restlessness that, like Thomas it will also be awaken in the viewer. We do not know what there is in the environment that smells rotten, but we know that there is something that unbalances reality, and as Thomas goes undressing the this mess, it is when we realize that there is some mastery in the film particularly in this part of the story.

What is it that our eye sees or actually invents, what is the reality that the retina stores? How many filters are needed before reality is finally observed by the human eye? What possibilities does a fragmented image of reality provide in support of the memory of a particular fact, as an affirmation that the objective is the extension of an eye? as if it were a store of memories in which the lack of vivid continuity, characteristic of a frozen image is not enough but it is capable of spraying some type of reality, helping to create optical deceptions that support universal theories about human psychology and their interpersonal ways of communicating, capable of being grasped even by a small focus of an open diaphragm. Because, no matter how deeply hidden something is, in order to give meaning to any search, we have to rely on something.
What we know for sure is that, although Blow Up begins taking imprecise steps, showing off in order to show, wandering without an apparent sense, it is at that moment when it seems that it ends up becoming aware of itself and its objective, suddenly equipping itself of an interest that, although it arrives late, it stays for a while, giving us, among others, the scene of the park, in which the photography is so majestic that it reinforces the mystery to the plot.

Thomas may be a hero, maybe a villain or maybe it's simply a matter of finding a reward for the emptiness surrounding his hedonistic life, but the point is that this mysterious aura seems to be a product of himself, as Julio Cortázar said in the story Las Babas del Diablo (belonging to the book Las Armas Secretas):  “It is curious that the scene had a disturbing aura. I thought that I had to do that myself, and that my picture, if I took it out, that would restore things to its foolish truth.“ ---The story that Blow up is based on, in any case doesn’t obscure the film, because the master of timing, as how Cortázar is sometimes referred to, knows how to measure the words, balancing it drop by drop to stimulate the reader’s expectation without slowing down the story leading to the reader’s yawning.

That is why Antonioni uses ornaments that contextualize the main plot, make it credible and, incidentally, illustrate what came to be called the “swinging” London, a term coined by Time magazine in 1966 that was taken as reference by the popular pirate radio station Swinging Radio England. It is therefore, because of this context, on which of the sidewalks of London flourished in culture, fashion and 'intellectuality' in equal parts, without all this our photographer would have no reason to be.


It was a very fertile time for hedonism, experimentation, psychedelia, drugs, the avant-garde in all areas of art, where music groups such as The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks and many other groups that were part of the so-called British Invasion in 1963 after the release by Capitol Records of the single “I want to hold your hand” by The Beatles, which made possible their entry into the charts of the American music scene, where the new trends were called out by Queen Magazine, as well as the pop-art of Richard Hamilton, famous for the use of discarded photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol. Fashion photographers like Richard Avedon, not to mention the revolution that marked the entry to the fashion market, Mary Quant's invention, the miniskirt. A success that turned King Cross neighborhood into Chelsea (which was where the Quant boutique called 'Bazaar' was founded) at the core of London fashion.

The dominant aesthetic, as the character of Thomas shows, was the mod image, fitted jackets with three buttons, striking colors, fashion designers such as John Stephen or Ossie Clarck. We only need to observe how every one of the models that Thomas, with that arrogant air of a professional photographer, directs with superiority, forces to straighten their posture to highlight the fabrics, the body of the garments and the importance they had in the 'hipness' of the moment, how to show it, how to wear it and, above all, how to create fascination and beauty. Some models will have to succumb to the charms of the protagonist in favor of fame on the catwalks.

Interesting and unprecedented is the fact that the Yardbirds - later Led Zeppelin with Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton at the front - will star in the film with their song Stroll On, a rewrite of Train Kept on Rollin’ to which they changed the title and lyrics and featuring a young Jeff Beck who ends up smashing his guitar in a psychedelic distortion attack. The same distortion, although closer to American rhythm & blues of the time, by which Herbert Hancock, greatly influenced by his close collaboration with Miles Davis, composes a great soundtrack, he called the music score diegetic (about presenting an interior view of the world.  Thanks to the sensuality of the Austrian model/actress Verushka, the film immerses us in the first minutes in a photo shoot that could well be a sexual act, with its resulting visual zenith.

A show for the senses in which Antonioni's taste for the sensuality of his characters is revealed, as shown in other more successful titles such as his trilogy L'avventura (1960), La note ( 1961) and The Eclipse (L'eclisse 1962) or The Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964), where his fetish actress Monica Vitti reappears making a brutal speech about fear. A round film that shelters in itself, like Blow up, the visual concupiscence of Carlo di Palma as director of photography.

Although the film contains great scenes to remember, like the tennis game of the 'clowns'. Antonioni himself confessed, after the premiere, that he would need to make another film to be able to explain with precision the meaning of Blow Up. It is not enough to suggest analysis, it is necessary to suggest stimulating the spectator to introduce himself, to be hooked by the plot so that the audience ends up being interested in this game of self-knowledge about the gaze and the target of the gaze, about the emptiness and the human uprooting, about the incapacity of people to deal with an environment that they distrust and that, above all, they do not understand. The director already explains it in an interview: “Our drama is the growing lack of communication and the inability to conceive authentic feelings; this particular problem dominates all my characters.”

Nevertheless, this film had a great repercussion, filmmakers like Francis F. Coppola confessed to having been inspired by it. In his case to write the script of his film The Conversation (1974), in the case of Mel Brooks in High Anxiety (1977), a driver makes so many enlargements of a photograph in which the killer appears until he has one the size of a wall. In others, as in the Indian film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983), its director Kundan Shah, making identical use of the plot of Blow Up, conveniently decides to call the park where the murder occurs “Antonioni Park”.

In the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, Blowup won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, the festival's highest honor.


Direction: Michelangelo Antonioni.
Country: United Kingdom and Italy.
Year: 1966.
Duration: 108 min.
Cast: David Hemmings, Vanesa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Peter Bowles, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, John Castle, Verushka.
Script: Tonino Guerra & Michelangelo Antonioni, based on the story by Julio Cortázar “Las Babas del Diablo”, from the book Las Armas Secretas, 1959.
Production: Carlo Ponti.
Executive production: Pierre Rouve
Artistic direction: Saetón Gorton.
Photography: Carlo di Palma.
Assembly: Frank Clarke.
Sound: Robin Gregory.
Costumes: Jocelyn Rickards.
Makeup and hairdressing: Paul Rabiger and Stephanie Kaye.
Music: Herbert Hancock.
 Producer: Bridge Films.
Distributor: MGM.
Locations: Maryon Park, Plaza of the Economist Building, Stockwell Road, Regent Street, Heddon street.







Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Rear Window 1954



Alfred Hitchcock once said: "If you do not experience a delicious terror when you watch Rear Window, then pinch yourself ... You may be dead."

"Rear Window" was one of Hitchcock's favorite films, as it has been for the audiences as well as critics since it was released by Paramount Pictures in 1954. For the director it represented the extraordinary opportunity of having a whole film seen from the point of view of a character. As for the audience, it gave him the opportunity to do something that many would have wanted: To be the "voyeur" and spy on your neighbors.

Alfred Hitchcock's film "Rear Window" is a Universal Classic, featuring James Stewart and Grace Kelly as protagonists, accompanied by Wendell Carey, Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr. Produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the screenplay belongs to John Michael Hayes, based on Cornell Woolrich's short story "It Had To Be Murder." Robert Burks was the director of photography.

The argument is very simple: An immobilized man (James Stewart) watches his neighbors through the back window of his apartment to pass the time. He feels fascinated by one of the departments in particular, until he slowly realizes that his owner has killed his wife. What follows is how the protagonist convinces the other tenants that there has been a murder, and then tries to have the killer caught, but not before he attempts to kill again. However, in the hands of "The master", a simple story line becomes a humorous and macabre tale able to play with the emotions of the viewer with only the camera movement.

Hitchcock has always been a "voyeur", his camera is the audience’s eyes. With "Rear Window" he exploits a weakness of ours, which is to find out what the neighbor does ... and the problems that this can cause.

The idea for the film came from different sources, especially the infamous case of Patrick Mahon. In this case the murderer dismembered the body of a girl and threw it piece by piece from the window of a train, except the head, which he burned in his fireplace. Hitchcock assigned the task of writing the script to John Michael Hayes, a former radio writer. The director was so pleased with the finished script that Hayes would write three of his following films: "To Catch a Thief", "The Trouble with Harry” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much”.
Hitchcock also knew who he wanted for his leading man: James Stewart who had worked with him on "The Rope" and felt that Jimmy could be perfect to play Jeff, the photographer confined in a wheelchair who is convinced that a murder has been committed in his apartment building. Hitchcock also casted Grace Kelly to play Lisa Freemont, Jeff's girlfriend and "legs". Completing the cast are Wendell Corey as Tom, Jeff's partner in the war and now a detective; Thelma Ritter as Stella, Jeff's nurse, and Raymond Burr, who plays Lars Thorwald, the accused of murder.

The film was shot entirely on set 18 of Paramount Studios. The monumental decoration was 100 feet wide, 200 feet long and 30 feet high, with structures that raised five and six floors. It was the result of months of planning and construction. There were 31 apartments, with most of the action taking place in eight fully furnished rooms, plus a maze of fire escapes, terraces, an alley, a street and the back of the city.
It took more than a thousand arcs of giant lights to illuminate the set from above, while more than two thousand varieties of small lamps were used to have supplementary light. In fact, "Rear Window" was so meticulously planned and calculated before starting the shoot itself, that only a few hundred feet of film with disposable shots were discarded at the end. For their movements, the actors playing Stewart's neighbors received their instructions and directions through a shortwave radio with hidden microphones.

Actually, Hitchcock found himself filming two movies, one with sound and the other silent. The most elaborate shot was a long shot that had to show the whole set at the beginning of the film. The camera had to be raised high above the courtyard of the building, go from one window to the other until, eventually; it stopped at Stewart's apartment. There, Hitchcock made the camera run down his sweaty face until he was seen in the wheelchair, grabbed a thermometer, slid down the casted leg, collected a group of magazines and a shattered camera and then moved to the wall to show a picture taken at the Indianapolis circuit.

This suggested that Stewart's character was a bold photographer who had broken his leg when taking the picture that was on the wall. It also established most of the elements that subsequently developed into the action. There is a constant identification between the character of Stewart and the audience-everything he sees is also seen by the spectator, everyone is exposed to the dangerous potential of "voyeurism." The audience is involved from the beginning given the fact that the credits are projected over closed shutters that a will open one after the other. Then, the viewer is led to identify with Stewart when he identifies with the suspect he is spying on. Enjoying his leisure and wanting to find adventure, he is snooping in a less innocent situation than the viewer watching a movie. And, naturally, the viewer feels as frustrated as Stewart whenever the facts do not justify his deductions.
Everyone likes to know what is happening around them. In "Rear Window", James Stewart has an insatiable curiosity; so much so, that at the end of the film not only has his other leg broken, but it also almost manages to get himself killed. With a camera you can get into someone's personal life and invade their privacy. However, Hitchcock always felt that in reality he was never being an intruder in what he photographed. Instead he thought that his function was to illuminate a situation and then let everyone draw their own conclusions from what they saw.

Rear Window is one of the most memorable Hitchcock’s films. After the credits, the camera slowly approaches the window and makes a first superficial tour of the community's patio that ends with a close-up of Jeff (James Stewart), asleep and sweaty, following an insert of the thermometer indicating that the temperature is, in fact, very high, and without a single word, Hitchcock has already given us a lot of data about the character, as well as about the community in which he lives ".

Architects love this film in particular and it has been analyzed under different lenses in studios and seminars. The film certainly discusses issues of voyeurism; however other topics like architectural section, event structure, the problem of front and back. -There is no apartment building in NYC that has that middle courtyard, so the problem of a second façade comes into the game.


Synopsis
For seven weeks, magazine photographer L. B. Jeffries, whom everyone calls Jeff (James Stewart), has been confined to a wheelchair during a New York heat wave. His leg and hips are immobilized in a cast because of the accident he suffered when the wheel of a racing car he was photographing was released from the car.

To pass the time in his Greenwich Village apartment, Jeff likes to watch what his neighbors do. It is an extremely humid summer, so the blinds, which would normally hide the view of the other tenants' private lives, are rarely lowered.

During his constant gaze, he learns several things, including that marriage is not something he wants to venture on anytime soon, especially now that he feels pressured by his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), a sophisticated editor of a fashion magazine. When it comes to the neighbors, it seems that either they are emotionally unstable or tragically confused when choosing a partner: There's Miss Lonely Hearts, an eager spinster of men who has candlelight dinners with an imaginary lover; there is also a middle-aged couple without children who turn their love into a small dog, and also a couple of newlyweds who spend the day making love behind the curtains. Miss Torso is a curvaceous dancer who practices her exercises in her underwear, much to the delight of her neighbors.

Then we also find the eccentric mature artist who is completely dedicated to a new sculpture, while a frustrated music composer tries to find inspiration in alcohol. And then there's Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), a traveling salesman who sells jewelry, who constantly has heated arguments with his handicapped wife.
Jeff's boredom makes him crave some excitement: "At this moment I'd love to have a problem," he tells Stella (Thelma Ritter), an ingenious nurse who comes to give him a massage every day. However, he does not have to wait long to see his wishes fulfilled, since that same night Jeff hears a horrifying scream and sees Thorwald making several trips carrying an aluminum suitcase.
Armed with binoculars and a powerful camera, Jeff watches Thorwald clean the suitcase, wash the walls of his bathroom and wrap a saw and a kitchen knife in newspaper. Jeff begins to suspect that the salesman has murdered his wife, chopped up her body and then disposed of her in the little garden part of apartment’s courtyard. But his evidence is too unsustainable to convince his girlfriend Lisa and Tom (Wendell Corey), his comrade-in-arms during the war and now a detective in the homicide section. Jeff's suspicions increase when he watches the little dog sniffing in the garden.

It also intrigues him to see Thorwald rummaging through his wife's bag and jewelry. Lisa deduces that if the woman has gone on a trip, which is quite possible and this would explain her absence. She would have to take the wedding ring with her so she decides to do a little detective work; shortly after  the small dog is found strangled, and all the neighbors have a horrified reaction confronting the fact.
All except Thorwald, who sits alone in his dark apartment. Finally, convinced by Jeff's insistence that a crime has been committed, Lisa and Nurse Stella become the photographer’s legs.

Stella begins to dig in the garden, while Lisa goes to the suspect’s apartment during his absence, trying to find some clues. But she is surprised by Thorwald, who is about to kill her if it wasn’t for the police intervention, Jeff is the one that calls them in complete desperation -; Lisa is taken to jail on charges of attempted theft, but not before she can make Jeff understand that she has found the wedding ring - the necessary evidence -; but the killer has seen where the girl was beckoning at, and that's how he starts to harass Jeff. At Jeff's apartment, Thorwald confronts him and also tries to kill him.
Unable to move from his wheelchair, Jeff's only defense is to use his camera and blinds Thorwald with the flash light. Just at the moment when Thorwald has managed to catch Jeff, the police arrive and shoot the crazed assassin, but not before Jeff has fallen through the window. Although he now has both legs broken, Jeff feels happy, cared for and accompanied by Lisa.

Cast
James Stewart as L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies
Grace Kelly as Lisa Carol Fremont
Wendell Corey as NYPD Det. Lt. Thomas "Tom" J. Doyle
Thelma Ritter as Stella
Raymond Burr as Lars Thorwald
Judith Evelyn as Miss Lonelyhearts
Ross Bagdasarian as the songwriter
Georgine Darcy as Miss Torso
Frank Cady and Sara Berner as the husband and wife, living above the Thorwalds, with their dog
Jesslyn Fax as "Miss Hearing Aid"
Rand Harper and Havis Davenport as Newlyweds
Irene Winston as Mrs. Anna Thorwald
ted, Lisa and Nurse Stella become the photographer’s legs.





Tuesday, October 9, 2018

L'Avventura 1960



In order to contextualize the importance of Antonioni and L’Avventura, I would refer to Martin Scocerse’s list of favorite films. Without a doubt, Martin Scorsese is one of the most recognized directors in the history of cinema. Films like Taxi Driver, Casino or The Wolf of Wall Street, the New York filmmaker has more than enough work to create his own list of the best films ever. Invited to elaborate on this privileged ranking, Scorsese quoted great classics such as Paisà (Comrade) by Roberto Rosselli (1946). Another Italian classic is the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, undoubtedly, one of Scorsese's favorite filmmakers. In regards to L’Avventura he said; "It's hard to think of a film that has a more powerful understanding of the way people are linked to the world around them, because of what they see, touch, taste and hear," and concludes "visually, sensually, thematically, dramatically, in all senses, is one of the great works of cinema".

Michelangelo Antonioni, L’Avventura is one of the key milestones of the cinematographic modernity, in addition to the international fame and of its director, Michelangelo Antonioni, especially at the root of the enormous scandal that surrounded this masterpiece. When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, the film was heavily booed and attacked mercilessly. It was because of this failure that a series of critics and it was the filmmakers with an affinity to this new cinematographic wave who demanded a second showing, in which it received a Special Prize of the Jury "for its new cinematographic language and the beauty of its images", from here on cinema had a new masterpiece. 

It seems to me that the central theme, which Antonioni decided to discuss through this film, is human relationships and their lack of communication. The director emphasizes the construction of the characters and their dialogues. We can appreciate the way in which, in several sequences, the characters Claudia (Monica Vitti) and Sandro (Gabriel Ferzetti) are completely silent, while they walk through a room, or the exteriors of the great white island. At other times, within a completely superficial dialogue, we can have another level of reading, below which the real feelings of the characters are hidden; those who cannot communicate.

In this film, the narrative construction is a very attractive point. L’Avventura begins with some bourgeois characters that make a trip on a yacht. After hours of travel, the crew stops on a small uninhabited island, where some disembark, among them our protagonist trio: Anna, Claudia and Sandro. Anna and Sandro are in a relationship, although she is very dissatisfied with her partner, as her friend Claudia will later prove in the film. During her stay on the island, Anna disappears; it is here where we find an interesting moment, because a few minutes (considering that it is a long movie), the main character disappears. This moment in the film reminded me a bit of Psycho from Htichcock, a film in which something similar happens, the protagonist disappears after thirty minutes of film. The film from that moment on is about absence of the presence creating the metaphysical complexity of the narrative.

ey milestones of the cinematographic modernity, in addition to the international fame and of its director, Michelangelo Antonioni, especially at the root of the enormous scandal that surrounded this masterpiece. When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, the film was heavily booed and attacked mercilessly. It was because of this failure that a series of critics and it was the filmmakers with an affinity to this new cinematographic wave who demanded a second showing, in which it received a Special Prize of the Jury "for its new cinematographic language and the beauty of its images", from here on cinema had a new masterpiece.

One thing that is extremely interesting about the film, is that Antonioni was a part of Italian Neo-realism, having worked as a screenwriter, among other things, for directors of the stature of Roberto Rosellini. But, unlike the neorealist style where the important thing is to film on the streets, not to use sets, as well as to focus on the less "favored" classes of the country; Antonioni focuses his gaze and speech on the Italian bourgeois class, making a cruel portrait and a critique to this well-to-do class, the characters are boring, empty, hypocritical and amoral.

This film was very popular at the time, because it was a work of unusual transgression, one could almost say revolutionary. Perhaps modernity was so obvious to the common spectator then, but still today remains one of those films that has both that praise and detract this film as a work of art. L’Avventura completely escaped the most elementary bases of film narrative by showing a brutally sincere portrait of human relationships and their lack of communication. Antonioni narrative style is clearly portrayed in the other two films related to L’Avventura, the so-called "Trilogy of non-communication”; La Notte (1961) and The Eclipse (1962).

All of them will search every smallest corner of the tiny island but eventually give up. When the police arrive, they continue with the search, also investigating along the waters of the rocky areas in case she had decided to commit suicide, but there is no sign of Anna. It is impossible that Anna, alive or dead, could remain on the island, so Claudia and Sandro decide to continue looking for her on the mainland.

Following the analysis of the narrative construction of L’Avventura, the fact is that we never learned what actually happens with Anna. This is an excuse to unleash the main plot, just as Hitchcock did with Psycho. After the disappearance, Claudia and Sandro begin to look for their friend. But behind this, there is a hidden feeling that the two characters never express (a resource that works for Antonioni to emphasize lack of communication), and that is that they begin to have a romantic adventure and, simultaneously, carry out the search for the lost friend.

What becomes more controversial of the film even today is the fact that at no time is explained to us what has happened to Anna. Antonioni does not care what happened to her character, but the consequences of her disappearance, because while Sandro and Claudia seek for Anna they end up falling in love. Therefore, what was supposed to be the central conflict of the film fades away until it disappears in favor of what Antonioni really wants to show us: the strange relationship between Sandro and Claudia, the fact that they live a romance while they are looking for this woman. Who are they really betraying? In a scene that takes place in the final stretch of the film, Sandro goes away from Claudia to make an inquiry and when he returns she is terrified because she was afraid that he had found Anna. She herself recognizes that she has gone from fearing for her friend's life to being afraid that she is still alive. This sick contradiction is one of the bases of the film.

Another controversial point is Antonioni's fulminating portrait of the well-to-do and idle bourgeoisie; he would also attack in his next film, La Notte. In particular, the initial scenes of the yacht trip are especially cruel. All the characters are presented as boring, empty and even pathetic. One of the couples, Giulia and Corrado, is especially shocking because absolutely all their dialogues end up in an insult from him towards her ("The weather has gotten worse" "Please, do not be so didactic, I see that the weather has worsened ";" Formerly, the Aeolian Islands were volcanoes "" When we came here 12 years ago, you made exactly the same comment "). In the middle of Anna's frantic search, Giulia suddenly talks to Claudia at a certain moment about how badly her husband treats her, as if she was not aware of the seriousness of Anna's disappearance. Later, Giulia cheats on her husband with a young painter, but before giving herself to him she makes sure that Claudia sees her, as if she wants to compensate for the ridicule she has suffered before. It seems that she is cheating on him more for revenge than for a real desire. In fact, all the characters give off an amorality that is really annoying. They have no problem whatsoever committing adultery among them and in fact this is what Claudia and Sandro do, with the difference that they seem to really want each other while the rest do it almost out of boredom.

It is remarkable the way that Antonioni has to show us the existential void and the lack of communication that surrounds these characters. The film begins with a conversation between Anna and her father in which that lack is clear, but it is something that runs throughout the film and affects even Claudia and Sandro. Although they are sincerely wishing, at all times there is something underlying that gives us to understand that not everything works as well as it should, that the characters are not completely united and there is still something that separates them. Maybe Anna's ghost? Or, Claudia and Sandro are simply destined to understand each other as little in the future as Anna and Sandro did?
Despite the risk involved in carrying out such an abstract film in its content, Antonioni does a tremendous job of direction that makes L’ Avventura an absolutely fascinating film. His obsession with landscapes, not only natural but also urban, is evident here: the planes of the island and the sea, the buildings of the towns visited by the protagonists and even the characters themselves. Antonioni pampers each frame making his work look especially beautiful and evocative, something that would lead to its maximum expression in the last minutes of The Eclipse, in which it completely leaves aside the plot to show a succession of almost abstract planes of a city. Few directors have been able to work as well as he does the form the objects when placing them on a plane.

Some of these landscapes become so abstract that they even look like nightmarish images, like the empty town or the square where Claudia is suddenly harassed by men who look at her maliciously. Like the disappearance of Anna, there are elements that have no rational explanation, but this serves to increase the unhealthy climate of tension that the characters live.


Perhaps one of the aspects that I liked the least was the ending, in which Claudia finds Sandro with another woman and he, scared, gets covered in the womb of the female, while Claudia leaves. Finally they are on the roof of the hotel and Sandro cries, causing Claudia to put her hand on his head as a symbol of forgiveness. It seems to me that, in this end, the reactions are not very credible, something mechanical and implausible; above all, it is difficult for me to believe and understand Sandro's final cry, as well as Claudia's forgiveness. However I think that this also defines very well the theme of the film; despite of the deceit, the weeping and other issues that we could appreciate, both characters remain silent, without giving an explanation of their actions and feelings, which emphasizes and summarizes very well the lack of communication that the director wanted to present.

In this plane is reflected all the non-communication that surrounds the two, their inability to solve their problems verbally; their condemnation to love and at the same time hurt each other as the rest of the characters in the film. This problem has seldom been exposed so beautifully and simply, something that has such a dramatic meaning: the ineffectiveness of human relationships and the inability not to harm the people we love most. Under that apparent visual beauty, L’Avventura hides one of the most visceral and disenchanted portrayals of human relationships in contemporary society.

Cast:
Claudia (Monica Vitti)
 Anna (Léa Massari),
Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti)
Release date: June 29, 1960 (USA)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cinematography: Aldo Scavarda
Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini


Antonioni and Monica Vitti during the filming of L'Avventura



Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Band of Outsiders 1964


This is a film about three characters: Odile (Ana Karina), a rather naïve young girl, lives with her aunt in a house on the outskirts of Paris and attends a course to learn English, there she meets his two companions: Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey). Actually the two men are full-fledged criminals who will take advantage of Odile's confidence and convince her to steal from her old aunt's house.

With Band of Outsiders we could write several pages about the avant-garde and the cinematographic aspects found in one of the most important films of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague)  of which Godard is one of the main players. Conceived as a very personal review of American film noir, Band of Outsiders (Bande à part 1964) is surely his freest film and the one that contains the most moments of authentic "film joy" of Godard's entire filmography. In fact, it seems that the director had the need to radically change the record after the tough film Contempt ( Le Mépris 1963) when addressing this story of cops and thieves (the script part of the pulp novel  "Fools' Gold" by Dolores Hitchens ). This film is a cinematic game full of scenes, dialogues and images that run in the form of digressions to the police plot and focus on the triangle formed by  its three protagonists: the candid Odile, the opportunist Arthur and the introverted Franz. These relations whose evolution Godard is allowed to preview in the vertiginous assembly in parallel to the visuals of the initial credits (something practically impossible to perceive in a first viewing), this is the first of the many games within the film.

For the spectators who are getting involved in the film, we can mention some phrases chosen at random that could frame the film: 3 weeks ago. A lot of money. English classes. A house by the river. A romantic girl.  Through the voice-over, Godard continues playing with the idea of chance and the banality of the plot, the story of the relationship between the three characters. Arthur, sure of himself, starts his strategy of seduction towards the "romantic Odile", before the helpless look of Franz (who discovers with disappointed how Odile refuses again and again his cigarettes and immediately will accept those from Arthur). As Godard tells us: "Now we could digress and talk about the feelings of Odile, Franz and Arthur, however everything is already clear enough. So let the images speak and close the parentheses. "




And the images certainly speak, show, suggest and play; Arthur caressing Odile's cheek, Odile putting on Franz's hat, Franz and Arthur reading news of robberies and crimes in the press, the three characters successively exchanging their position (and the relationship between them) around the coffee table. And, of course, the already legendary sequence with Arthur, Franz and Odile dancing in synchronized choreography one of the wonderful musical themes of Michel Legrand (sequence quoted by Tarantino, fervent admirer of this film, in Pulp Fiction). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1MKUJN7vUk  Also American director Hal Hartley uses this scene as reference for his film” Surviving desire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y4ATS5RTeg

After the sequence in the cafe, Franz and Arthur play flipping a coin up in the air and bet who will stay with Odile: "Arthur chose face. Odile screamed "heads" when she picks up the coin that had come out tails. Franz drives away sad and lonely, with feverish eyes "while Arthur continues his game of seduction. In the subway ("Arthur and Odile descended to the center of the earth"), Odile sings J'entends, j'entends, a song by Jean Ferrat from a poem by Louis Aragon, in one of the most beautiful sequences of the film: the images of the metro and the streets of Paris, its travelers, passers-by and beggars, dialogue with the poem of Aragon to take us to the plane of Franz, sleeping alone, which Godard sets against the plane of Arthur and Odile in bed.

Once Arthur, impelled by his sinister family (plotting to betray Franz), decides to put his plan into action, Franz begins to open up with Odile: asking her to decide between him and Franz to flee after the robbery (they would go north, to "the land of Jack London: a new digression, with Franz telling the story on camera), giving her the book of the novel that makes him think about her as well as reading to her a fragment of the novel. On her way to the house, Odile looks at the Louvre, Franz explains that he once read that an American had taken 9 minutes 45 seconds to visit the museum. So, while they wait for the night to fall and be able to commit the robbery (all according to Arthur, and referring to the tradition of bad B movies, they decide to do the same). The brief but magnificent sequence of Franz, Arthur and Odile running through the galleries of the Louvre is another of the playfully magical moments of the film. This memorable scene was directly referenced by Bernardo Bertolucci in his film “The Dreamers” 2003, the story of another love triangle.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4MV1NLejQ0

The scene lasts less than 40 seconds but has become an icon of world cinema. In fact, the whole movie is full of poetry made. This is mentioned in the special DVD launched by the the criterion collection, it has references of Paris in Cinq jours (Pierre Colombier-Nicolas Rimsky); in it Godard invented a character named Jimmie Johnson, an American from California who toured the entire museum in 9 minutes with 45 seconds. At the end of the scene, Godard's voice reports that Arthur, Franz and Odile broke the record by two seconds.

The scene can be interpreted in different ways. There will be some critics who commented that Godard simply presents the shots, without establishing any logical relationship with the whole film.. Jean Luc Godard, being an important figure of the transgressive avant-garde group "The French New Wave" (Nouvelle Vague), expressed his ideology and the conception of his time in an open manner. In the scene, the friends run in the opposite direction to the circulation of the assistants, and they mock the security guard when he tries to stop them in their run. The image could have all the burden of freedom young people dismissed in those years, a desire for a different world.

This will be the last moment of play between the three characters: the plan must be executed and, after a failed first attempt, in which Odile begins to be aware of the true feelings of Franz and Arthur towards her, the theft is consummated and Arthur finally exposes his treason pretending to hide most of the loot. When Franz and Odile return to the house (like the hero of a legendary novel, Franz has a dark premonition), they witness the shooting between Arthur and his uncle, in which both of them die, Arthur's last thought before dying was Odile's face.

The game is over. The shy Franz has finally gotten the love of the candid Odile and both flee "to the warm countries" on board a ship (in a wonderful tribute to Chaplin’s The Immigrant) in search of new adventures. Godard makes an ironic promise, he will see it in one of his next films, this time in Cinemascope and Tecnicolor called “Pierrot Le Fout”

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Original Title: Bande à part /
Year: 1964 / Country: France / Production Company: Columbia Films / Duration: 95 min. / Format: B / N - 1.37: 1
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard / Photography: Raoul Coutard / Music: Michel Legrand
Cast: Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, Louisa Colpeyn, Chantal Darget, Ernest Menzer
Release date: 07/29/1964 (Locarno Film Festival)


Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Antoine and Collette 1962


L'amour à vingt ans (1962) is a film composed of five episodes directed by Renzo Rossellini, Shintarô Ishihara, Marcel Ophüls, Andrzej Wajda and François Truffaut. Antoine et Colette, the episode made by Truffaut, is a little wonder of barely half an hour, something like the missing link for many of the followers of the character Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who since The Four Hundred Blows (1959) starred in several of Truffaut’s films.

Here we meet Antoine at age 17, independent, employed and with a fondness for cinema, literature and music. While attending a Berlioz concert he meets Colette (Marie-France Pisier), a girl somewhat older than he, He falls irremediably in love with her and tries to conquer her by building friendships through her parents, moving to an apartment whose balcony faces the girl's, but she does not seem to correspond.  Colette accompanies him to the movies and concerts, accepts him as a friend and introduces him to his parents, who welcome him almost like a son, but Antoine can’t go beyond sending him a love letter and stealing a couple of kisses. In the last scene, at Colette's house, she introduces her boyfriend. While the two go out to have fun, the poor and disillusioned Antoine stays with the parents to watch television.

One could say that Antoine and Colette was largely autobiographical in some respects. When Truffaut was seventeen years old, he fell in love with a girl named Liliana Litvin that he met at the Cinematheque francaise. He was so taken with Liliana that he left the suburbs where he worked and moved to Paris so he could be closer with her. Liliana, on the other hand, had an active social life and enjoyed the companionship of several admirers (among them were Truffaut's friends, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Gruault), all of them competing for her attention.

Film Comment editor-at-large Kent Jones wrote, that "the half-hour Antoine and Colette is among the most beautiful things Truffaut ever committed to film. There is something bracing about its swiftness alone, and about the way Truffaut slices confidently through his material, both expository (Antoine's modest living situation, his job, his determination to land Colette) and emotional (a love of Paris, a deep attachment to music, and a burning desire for women, all three traits shared by the director and his alter ego).

It would take six years to meet Antoine and Colette again, this time in Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés, 1968), a wonderful film scored by Que reste-t-il de nos amours, by Charles Trenet, one of those songs that will accompany them for the rest of their lives: Baisers volés / Rêves mouvants / That reste-t-il of tout cela ... Colette, taking a walk with her husband and son, meets Antoine, who is working as a disastrous private detective. They greet each other, cross four words and say goodbye. C'est la vie!

Producer: Pierre Roustang
Director: Francois Truffaut
Screenplay: Francois Truffaut
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film Editing: Claudine Bouche
Music: Georges Delerue
Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud (Antonie Doinel), Marie-France Pisier (Colette), Patrick Auffay (Rene), Rosy Varte (Colette's mother), Jean-Francois Adam (Albert Tazzi).

BW-30m.


The 400 Blows 1959


Young Antoine Doinel looks at the camera in the final shot of the film but also he’s looking at us. He is interrogating us: what should I do? What can I do now? We do not have the answer. We have no idea. The anguish that boy’s rugged and sad vicissitudes reach their climax of impotence. What will become of me? he seems to ask. What will become of him? we ask ourselves. We have taken care of him and we have to abandon him to his uncertain luck. He has the sea in front, he has freedom and life ahead, but, like the immensity of water, freedom and life appear before the child with the paradoxical feature of a limit.

François Truffaut, in one of the most unusual and exceptional stories in the history of cinema, will continue to tell us the life of Antoine Doinel over the next twenty years - as his interpreter, Jean Pierre Léaud, grew up - in a short film and in three more films plus the short Antoine and Collette. We know about his jobs, his hobbies, his loves, his marriage, his heartbreak. Upon the director's untimely death, in 1984, forever suspended the narration of the adventures and misadventures of that boy with the soul of a child-minded adult who always did the thousand and one antics, which is what he means, in French, by the title “Les quatre cents coups”.

Antoine traverses his childhood through the emotional desert of his family and through the hostile jungle of the school. He is an unloved child. His mother became pregnant of him without wanting it. She is always nervous, resentful in the presence of an unwanted child that reminds her of her mistake, her life that went wrong. Antoine will soon discover that his father is not his real father. Neither does he want to or is interested in him. Antoine becomes a glob, a bulge that remains and annoys in the small space of the apartment and in the burdened life of his parents. He has learned to get out of the way, to disappear, to be submissive and diligent to go even more unnoticed. But always fatally commits an error that materializes his existence as something annoying to others.

At  school, and not infrequently due to chance, he is caught as the body of crime and punished unjustly, as he writes. In that authoritarian and farcical school that is so far away from educating under the republican motto of equality, freedom and fraternity that the camera shows us, with acid irony, in a short shot. Stuffed in a merchant's robe, the teacher that aspires to be in a police uniform, behaves like a prison guard. And between both prisons, the home and the school, between the emptiness of the lack of love and the weight of a blind law, the bitch of his life elapses with two small oases of freedom: the street and his inner world.

The street represents the friendship with René, the companionship, the opening to the world of dreams that the cinema represents. The cinema is Antoine's great hobby, and if one day he borders on happiness with his parents, it is the day when he is taken to the cinema. The other great hobby of Antoine is reading. The books allow him to survive in a corner of the unpleasant domestic landscape. The books and films nourish the inner universe of Antoine, expand it and enrich it, they provide a refuge from the aggression and the inclemency of the outer wastelands. The books and the movies are the real home and the real school for Antoine.

It is important to say that in spite of the scattered elements,  the four hundred blows is a film of autobiographical content. François Truffaut was also a bastard son who was slow to discover that the man who had given him his last name was not his real father. The misfortune of Antoine was the misfortune of Truffaut, delivered, first, to the care of a nurse and, later, to the successive care of his grandmothers. Bad student, expelled from several schools, Truffaut also ended up in jail and in a juvenile facility. Behind Antoine's taste for Balzac - for which he builds an altarpiece - is Truffaut's love for books, expressed in numerous quotations and tributes throughout his filmography, materialized in the adaptation of many novels, sublimated to the end in Fahrenheit 451, the film based on a story by Ray Bradbury, which showed a future cold and unlivable world in which the books were banned and burned and an endeavoring group of men and women secretly memorizing the masterpieces in order to transmit them to posterity.

The Antoine who sneaks into the cinema and who steals a poster of “Summer with Monika, by Ingmar Bergman, is not far from the François who at the age of fifteen already had founded a cinema-club and who, just a year later, wrote movie reviews thanks to the support of André Bazin, the true father figure in his life, to whom Truffaut dedicates his first film. Bazin, critic and film theorist who sponsored the The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), died of leukemia in November 1958, the month in which the shooting of The Four Hundred Blows began, without actually seeing the great harvest that resulted from his support for the enthusiastic group of young people that would change the direction of French and world cinema.

Autobiographic? The movie could be like a novel, like a poem, like a memory? Could a film be a personal testimony, a confession of one part, an intimate chronicle? Until the arrival of The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), no one had considered such a thing with a vocation and impetus for continuity. And of course not under a stylistic guidelines related to such endeavor: realist documentary , reflection of the everyday, low budget, lightness and simplicity in the staging, recourse to non-professional or unknown actors, spontaneity in the dialogues, flexibility in the follow-up of the script, rejection of non-natural sets, refusal of academic rhetoric.

Truffaut and his first-time companions gave a new twist to neo-realist postulates from Rossellini's proposal in particular-and transgress the sclerotic and old narrative of French cinema for a few years, with films like The 400 Blows, giving way to a domino effect with the help of their English contemporaries, they renew everywhere the vision of world cinema injecting it with an unknown freshness and freedom that, despite the regression suffered in the following years, still spreads everywhere.

Truffaut, gave a new light to modern cinema, tells us the life’s episodes with a distance, with a lack of emphasis, with an informative dryness and with an instantaneity that not only does not veil his touching and moving vision, but he lets them flow until we, the spectators, capture all the pain of the unfortunate Antoine Doinel, woven by the treacherous threads of chance. Young Antoine gets entangled more and more in a chain of insignificant crimes with punishment, robberies and lies that never deny his innocence and whose serious consequences worsen his position with a deep strength, forged by the previous suffering and by his condition as a survivor.

The desolate and questioning look that Antoine Doinel directs us in the final scene (freeze frame) is not pathetic because it anticipates new misfortunes, with not a few disadvantages, but also with resources, the child knows, and we know, that he will have to address, from his confusion and helplessness, the arduous task of becoming a man without love.

Cast.
Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel
Albert Rémy as Julien Doinel, Antoine's stepfather
Claire Maurier as Gilberte Doinel, Antoine's mother
Guy Decomble as Sourpuss, School teacher
Patrick Auffay as René Bigey, Antoine's best friend
Georges Flamant as Monsieur Bigey, René's father
Pierre Repp as an English teacher
Daniel Couturier as Betrand Mauricet
Luc Andrieux as Le professeur de gym
Robert Beauvais as director of the school
Yvonne Claudie as Mme Bigey

Marius Laurey as L'inspecteur Cabanel