Inspired in part by the death of French filmmaker Francois Reichenbach, this 1998 feature by Patrice Chereau focuses on the funeral of a bisexual Parisian painter (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who’d asked to be buried in the city of Limoges, adding Those who love me can take the train. The train takers consist of former lovers, friends, a brother (Trintignant again), and their current mates, and emerging from the crowded comedy-drama, mainly through the funeral’s preliminaries and aftermath, is a portrait of the painter and his largely gay circle. Cinematographer Eric Gautier won a deserved Cesar (French Oscar) for his graceful handheld ‘Scope camera work, which seems both spontaneous and assured, and the directorial orchestration of the portmanteau plot by Chereau (who also won a Cesar, along with supporting actress Dominique Blanc) is also impressive. Daniele Thompson and Pierre Trividic collaborated with Chereau on the script; with Pascal Greggory, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Charles Berling, Bruno Todeschini, Sylvain Jacques, and Vincent Perez. (JR) Read more
Not to be confused with Alan J. Pakula’s 1987 film of the Lyle Kessler play, this is the directorial debut of Peter Mullan, the striking and charismatic Joe of Ken Loach’s My Name Is Joe. Mullan also wrote the script, which seems semiautobiographical, but he doesn’t act in his movie. Four adult siblings in Glasgow (Gary Lewis, Douglas Henshall, Rosemarie Stevenson, and Stephen McCole) deal with their mother’s death, with varying degrees of inchoate rage and grief, the night before she’s buried. The view of life in general and working-class Scots life in particular is so grim that I was reminded at times of Last Exit to Brooklyn. There are comparable moments here when Mullan’s sense of the hyperbolic spills over into excess, but I was moved as well as shaken by the experience. (JR) Read more
A rather overextended and dull 1996 tale about a Spanish soil fumigator, his work at a vineyard, and his relationship to two women. Julio Medem directed. (JR) Read more
This 1934 feature is as silly and as sexy as much of Cecil B. De Mille, probably not as good as some of his other early talkies but considerably more fun than the four-hour Joseph L. Mankiewicz blockbuster of the 60s. Claudette Colbert plays that naughty lady of the Nile amid posh settings and Oscar-winning cinematography (by Victor Milner). As Dave Kehr suggested in an earlier Reader capsule, the actors, alas, are a bunch of stiffs (Warren William, Henry Wilcoxon, C. Aubrey Smith) spouting lofty sentiments in phony British accents, but you can’t have everything. 100 min. (JR) Read more
This feature-length 1997 video from Russian master Alexander Sokurov is basically a documentary about Umeno Mathuyoshi, an old woman who sews and embroiders kimonos in an old house in the mountains in Nara, Japan, given a narrative and semifictional framework by Sokurov’s own presence as unseen visitor. Like much of Sokurov’s work this is quite slow but has the effect of taking the viewer somewhere and inviting him or her to savor the textures. 76 min. (JR) Read more
William Inge’s play about an Oklahoma family in the 1920s, directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan at his near best, was quintessential Inge psychodrama. But this 1960 film was marred by censorship, and Delbert Mann’s direction is less inspired. Screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. carried out the required cosmetic surgery. With Robert Preston, Dorothy McGuire, Eve Arden, Angela Lansbury, and Shirley Knight. (JR) Read more
There’s little about this likable movie that makes me want to read the Michael Chabon novel it’s adapted from; by all indications, it belongs to the grungy-artist-as-lovable-slob genre, a la The Horse’s Mouth, even if the screenplay (by the underrated Steve Kloves) makes it seem relatively fresh. The casting of Michael Douglas against type as an over-the-hill novelist and writing professor is the sort of clever move that wins undeserved Oscars, yet the realization of at least half a dozen of the other characters is full of unexpected pleasures. This movie about writers and editors hasn’t much of a clue about the processes of either profession, or even much feeling for literary types, but the storytelling is so good-natured and assured I didn’t really care. What’s finally so agreeable about this ambling farce, set over a sordid weekend in snowy Pittsburgh, is all the things it’s uncharacteristically relaxed about, including frumpy middle-aged adultery (between Douglas and Frances McDormand), smoking pot, gay sex between an editor (Robert Downey Jr.) and a much younger writer (Tobey Maguire), an interracial couple, and the laughs that can be derived from a dead dog. Producer-director Curtis Hanson’s follow-up to L.A. Confidential has all the warmth I missed in that movie and then some. Read more
A genuine curiosity, this 1965 horror feature starring William Shatner, written and directed by Leslie Stevens (Private Property, Hero’s Island), and shot by the great Conrad Hall is the only film ever made in Esperanto, a language optimistically invented in the late 19th century to foster world peace. In 1968, after failing to find a distributor, producer Anthony Taylor stored the masters and what he thought were all the copies at an LA lab, which lost them. But in 1996, years after giving up on the project, he learned that the Cinematheque Francaise had a print and had been showing it since the 70s. After a year of negotiations, he obtained a copy, restored it, added English subtitles, and put it out on video, which is how it will be shown here. Not to be confused with John Hough’s 1981 horror film The Incubus. 78 min. (JR) Read more
Short works by the Austrian experimental filmmaker, known for his manipulation of images from Hollywood’s studio period. I’ve seen Piece touchee (1989), which is derived from brief snatches of The Human Jungle (1954); Passage a l’acte (1993), which makes similar use of To Kill a Mockingbird (1963); and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), which does extremely creepy things with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. The last is the most impressive; its manipulations simultaneously dehumanize the stars and highlight the repressed subtexts of their actions and interactions. I’m not sure what kind of artistic or technical accomplishment these short works represent, but there’s no question that they’re very scary. (JR) Read more
This 1999 French film by actress Nicole Garcia is striking above all because of its lead performanceCatherine Deneuve as a recovering alcoholic who springs back into action when she discovers seven diamonds squirreled away by her late husband, a big-time jeweler. What transpires after that may have some of the trappings of an exotic thriller, but it’s basically a character study, and Deneuve and her fellow actorsin particular Emmanuelle Seigner and Jean-Pierre Bacri (Same Old Song)shine in these circumstances. 117 min. (JR) Read more
A typically deceitful but fairly absorbing 1953 biopic about the famous magician and escape artist, mainly made bearable by costars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. George Marshall directed. (JR) Read more
Werner Herzog’s surprisingly slim and relatively impersonal 1999 feature charts his relationship with the mad actor Klaus Kinski on the five features they made together. Though Herzog has plenty to say about Kinski’s tantrums on the Peru locations of Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo and even interviews other witnesses on the same subject, he says next to nothing about his own involvementsuch as why he hired Kinski in the first place or how the overreaching heroes Kinski played for Herzog were clearly modeled after the director, metaphorically speaking. Like many other Herzog features, this carries a certain morbid fascination but provides little edification; Kinski’s extensive career apart from Herzog is barely acknowledged. 95 min. (JR) Read more
This 1998 Portuguese film is a searing cri de coeur on behalf of Lisbon’s homeless children. Rejected by dysfunctional families, often escaping from heartless institutions, they’re victimized by others (Pedro and Ricardo by pornographers, Andreia by a boyfriend who leaves her pregnant) and not surprisingly victimize one another as well. Director Teresa Villaverde makes their plight come alive with a variety of isolating compositions: a boy arriving home appears framed in the front doorway against the landscape, his family invisible, and more than once a kid riding in a vehicle is shot from above, the character’s head backed by the moving roadway. In one terribly painful sequence a variety of unbalanced compositions show Andreia screaming as she gives birth to her child in a lavatorywhere she then abandons it. These decontextualizations convey the children’s separation from society, making them the pained subjects of our gaze, and the film’s warped visual spaces make that separation seem unnatural, even wrong. (FC) Read more
Lasting only 65 minutes, The Little Thief, Erick Zonca’s lean and purposeful 1999 second feature (after The Dreamlife of Angels), confirms his talent while pointing it in a somewhat different direction. He continues to focus on the lower economic strata, but this time he explores the progress of a baker’s assistant who decides to join a band of thieves. The results are gripping. (JR) Read more
A major washout. One might think that a campy, 50s-style showbiz biopic about best-selling sleaze novelist Jacqueline Susann written by Paul Rudnick, directed by Andrew Bergman, and starring Bette Midler couldn’t miss, but in fact this misses on just about every level. Maybe it’s because camp is defined by lack of self-consciousness, or because coherent comedies of any kind have to be built on consistent premises, or because biopics that lie or evade the truth about their subjects have to come up with some other story to tell. This seems at times to be trying to emulate John Waters’s Female Trouble (with Midler standing in for Divine), and it periodically comes up with bouts of WASP bashing (David Hyde Pierce, as Susann’s editor, is the butt of most of these jokes), but without much passion or unity of purpose; the signs of studio committeethink are everywhere. Everyone must have been afraid of a lawsuit, because genuine irreverence and vulgarity are ultimately avoided like the plague — which is not to say that we get reverence or good taste either — and nothing of substance from Susann’s work is ever really evoked. Check out the 1975 movie Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough for a few clues about what this could and should have been like. Read more
