Alain Resnais’ 2006 adaptation of a British play by Alan Ayckbourn is a world apart from his earlier Ayckbourn adaptation, Smoking/No Smoking (1993). That film tried to be as English as possible, but this time Resnais looks for precise French equivalents to British qualities, and what emerges is one of his most personal works, intermittently recalling the melancholy Muriel (1963) and Providence (1977). A bittersweet comedy of loneliness, shyness, and repression, it was shot entirely on cozy sets, with a continual snowfall outside, and its interwoven plots feature Resnais standbys Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi, Andre Dussollier, and Lambert Wilson. At 85, the director is not only a consummate master but arguably the last great embodiment of the craft, style, and feeling of classical Hollywood. In French with subtitles. 120 min. (JR) Read more
Few recent films have left me feeling more conflicted than Valeska Grisebach’s second feature (2006), which is sensitive, moving, accomplished in its extraordinary direction of nonprofessional actors but also a little bogus. A gentle, happily married metalworker in a tiny village goes away for a weekend to train as a volunteer fireman and has a drunken fling with a waitress, which leads to tragic consequences. The most telling points in this story register in the faces rather than the dialogue, but it’s conceived like a folk ballad and feels self-conscious in some of its plot developments and in its neo-Brechtian finale. In German with subtitles. 88 min. (JR) Read more
A struggling Prague family loses everything in a flood, which pushes the husband into crime and imprisonment and his beautiful wife (Ana Geislerova) into the arms of the kind and wealthy Tuscany-based winegrower who sent him away. Writer Petr Jarchovsky and director Jan Hrebejk collaborated on the formidable Up and Down (2004), and this 2006 feature, which takes its title from a Robert Graves poem, is equally impressive for its mastery, intelligence, and ambition in juggling intricate plot strands and memorable characters. It also treats class difference and right-wing intolerance in the Czech Republic as ferociously as Mike Leigh has done in depicting Thatcherite England. In Czech with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) Read more
The principal characters in this 2005 German feature are two troubled, rebellious teenage girls who meet in a Berlin park and fall in love and a Frenchwoman who’s persuaded that one of them is her long-lost daughter, abducted as an infant. All three are lost souls who sometimes project their fantasies onto other people. Initially director Christian Petzold appears to be cross-referencing Celine and Julie Go Boating with the two girls, but the lack of any humor or sense of fun makes the allusion feel pointless. The enterprising experimental filmmaker Harun Farocki collaborated on the script, said to be derived from one of Grimm’s fairy tales, but I found most of this intractable. In German with subtitles. 85 min. (JR) Read more
James Farentino stars in this 1981 shocker set in a mysterious coastal town. Director Gary Sherman did the fine Raw Meat (aka Death Line) nine years earlier. 92 min. (JR) Read more
