Pascal Aubier directed this sweet and winsome 1995 French comedy. A 20-year-old tour guide (Gregoire Colin) in charge of Georgian singers giving a Paris concert pretends to be the son of a famous (but fictional) French New Wave director named Gascogne alleged to have left behind an unseen masterpiece when he died in the mid-70s. This impersonation momentarily gains him admission to the French film world, an identity, and even the love of a young Georgian woman, who accompanies him around Paris in a giddy sequence in which they reenact famous scenes from French New Wave classics. Part of what makes Aubier, a middle-aged filmmaker, tolerant about this deception is his hero?s tender years; charmed and intimidated by the mythology of the New Wave, the boy finds that the only way he can become heroic, to himself and to others, is to become part of something that ended around the time he was born. This reveals a telling postmodernist dilemma for cinema as a whole, not just the French cinema: directors like Quentin Tarantino require allusion and imitation for their very existence, not simply as a means of getting ahead or being fashionable, and this romantic and alluring story dives gracefully yet forcefully into the heart of this dilemma. Read more
From the October 5, 2007 Chicago Reader. I was pleased to find this review quoted in the expanded second edition of Richard Porton’s Film and the Anarchist Imagination (2020) — J.R.
In this 50-minute political documentary (1974) by Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella — made the year before Franco’s death, on the same night that the militant anarchist Salvador Puig Antich was executed — five former political prisoners, four men and a woman, whose combined prison terms lasted over 50 years, are seen meeting over a meal in a Catalonian farmhouse (the title means The Supper in Catalan) to discuss political strategies and the effects their prison terms have had on their political commitments. This is mainly a political and historical document, but just as Portabella’s more experimental films (Cuadecuc-Vampir, Umbracle, Warsaw Bridge) are never entirely divorced from politics, this political film has its own formal concerns, most of them related to camera movements and sound recording, as well as the pregnant silences that eventually overtake the conversation. In Catalan and Spanish with subtitles. (JR)
This was written and submitted in 2020 to the editor of an Iranian film magazine called Cinéma Vérité, at his request.
A few thoughts about documentary films and film criticism, recapitulating some ideas recently expressed in a brief online interview with the Cinéma Vérité International Film Festival in Tehran:
All documentaries have certain fictional elements, just as all fiction films have certain documentary elements (e.g. by being documentaries about the actors and places that are filmed and the times when they were filmed). In Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, which most people regard as a “pure” documentary, we now know that the woman purported to be Nanook’s wife was in fact Flaherty’s girlfriend, whom he enlisted to play that part.
An excellent illustration of this principle is Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s recent U.S. feature A House is Not a Home: Wright or Wrong (2020), which I was privileged to be involved with, as a documentary subject, assistant, and advisor. I grew up in a house designed for my family in Florence, Alabama, by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is owned today by the city, which is now a museum open to the public. Mehrnaz, who already recounted the story of her life in Tehran and Chicago through Jerry Lewis clips in Jerry and Me (2012), explores in this case the issues of what it means to live inside a work of art and how this might divide as well as unite members of a family, seen through the experiences of her own family in Iran and the U.S.Read more
I’m not the only one to considar A.I. Artificial Intelligence [https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/11/a-matter-of-life-and-death-ai-artificial-intelligence-tk/] a very great and deeply misunderstood film; others as disparate as Andrew Sarris and the late Stan Brakhage have more or less agreed with me, as well as my friend and favorite academic critic, James Naremore. (Click the link above to read my full review.) But it’s also clear to me that any ordinary auteurist way of processing cinema can’t begin to handle this masterwork adequately: Reading it simply as a Spielberg film, as most detractors do, or even trying to read it simply as a Kubrick film, is a pretty futile exercise with limited rewards, even though the fingerprints of both directors are all over it. Seeing it as a perpetually unresolved dialectic between Kubrick and Spielberg starts to yield a complicated kind of sense — an ambiguity where the bleakest pessimism and the most ecstatic kind of feel-good enchantment swiftly alternate and even occasionally blend, not to mention a far more enriching experience, however troubling and unresolved. As a profound meditation on the difference between what’s human and what isn’t, it also constitutes one of the best allegories about cinema that I know.
Unavailable just about everywhere — except for on a SECAM French video that is now so scarce it sells for 100 Euros on French Amazon — Renoir’s gorgeous, sexy, and scandalously neglected second sound feature, a Simenon adaptation with Pierre Renoir as Maigret that is arguably the first film noir ever made anywhere, has finally made it onto DVD, with English subtitles no less, and available here. Thanks to Connor Kilpatrick for making me aware of this. (For a paragraph about this movie that I once wrote for DVD Beaver, go here and page down.)
Perhaps the biggest revelation of this film (and there are quite a few) is the young femme fatale lead, Winna Winfried, who according to Renoir was only 17 when she made it, her film debut. Her other film appearances were so few and far between that I’ve never met anyone who has ever mentioned seeing any of them. [8/24/10]
Written in May 2021 for Il Cinema Ritrovato’s July catalog. — J.R.
RUAN LINYU
Traditionally, history in China is something that belongs only to the emperor (or to his latter-day near-equivalents, such as Mao). So it isn’t surprising that a yearning for a lost past can be felt in much of Chinese art cinema, whether it comes from Taipei (City of Sadness), Shanghai (Spring in a Small Town), Hong Kong (In the Mood for Love), or Beijing (Farewell My Concubine). And even though cinema offers us an imperfect means of capturing and preserving part of that past, few film subjects are more fragmentary yet fragrantly suggestive than that of silent star Ruan Lingyu, the glamorous working-class “Chinese Garbo” who committed suicide before reaching her 25thbirthday, and whose funeral drew a larger crowd than Valentino’s.
Director/cowriter Stanley Kwan, who worships female stars and is mesmerized by the ways they view themselves as much as George Cukor was in Sylvia Scarlett, Camille, A Star is Born, It Should Happen To You, and Bhowani Junction, confronts our incomplete grasp of Ruan by creatively miscasting comic action star Maggie Cheung (as a last-minute replacement for Anita Mui) in the title role, by enlisting film historian Peggy Chiao to collaborate on his script, and by combining biopic fiction with exploratory documentary.(Cheung Read more
A “critic’s choice” from the Chicago Reader (November 8, 1996). — J.R.
This 1995 film is the only feature by Hal Hartley that has the same degree of formal playfulness as his overlooked short films — perhaps because it was made as if it were three separate shorts, all recounting the same story but set in different cities (New York, Berlin, and Tokyo) and told mainly in different languages, with certain differences regarding gender, race, ethnicity, and milieu. Though it lacks some of the behavioral charms of Hartley’s Trust and The Unbelievable Truth and even announces its own likelihood to fail as an experiment in the second episode, this is in some ways my favorite Hartley picture — not only because it takes the most risks, but also because it gives the mind more to do in the process. The actors include Martin Donovan and Parker Posey in New York, Dwight Ewell, Geno Lechner, and Elina Lowensohn in Berlin, and Miho Nikaidoh, Kumiko Ishizuka, and Hartley himself in Tokyo. The whole thing unfolds in an economical 85 minutes. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, November 8 through 14.
From the February 18, 1994Chicago Reader. I wrote this before I had a chance to see the film’s original rough cut, when it was still a musical, which I continue to regard as far and away James L. Brooks’ best movie, more than twice as good as what he finally released.. By contrast, the release version reminds me of Erich von Stroheim’s comment about the release version of his Foolish Wives: “They are showing only the skeleton if my dead child.” [2021 afterthought: This now strikes me as more than a little hyperbolic. Some of the musical version of the film is great, but a fair amount of it is weak and/or doesn’t work very well. For more on the subject, go here.] — J.R.
** I’LL DO ANYTHING
(Worth seeing)
Directed and written by James L. Brooks
With Nick Nolte, Whittni Wright, Julie Kavner, Albert Brooks, Joely Richardson, Tracey Ullman, Jeb Brown, and Angela Alvarado.
First riddle: How can a movie about Hollywood professionals also be a movie about learning to be a parent? Answer: When all the Hollywood professionals in the movie act like kids or parents.
However disjointed it felt the first time I saw it, James L. Read more
Conceivably the most anti-American Hollywood picture ever made — I certainly can’t think of any competitors — Cy Endfield’s brilliant and shocking thriller (originally known as The Sound of Fury) was adapted by Jo Pagano from his novel The Condemned, which was inspired by a lynching that occurred in California in the 30s. A frustrated and jobless veteran (Frank Lovejoy), tired of denying his wife and son luxuries, falls in with a slick petty criminal (Lloyd Bridges), and the two work their way up from small robberies to a kidnapping that ends in murder. Apart from an unnecessary moralizing European character, this masterpiece is virtually flawless, exposing class hatreds and the abuses of the American press (represented here by Richard Carlson as a reporter) with rare lucidity and anger. At once subtle and unsparing, this may be the best noir thriller you’ve never heard of, perhaps because Endfield’s American career was cut short by the blacklist the same year it was released (1951). With Kathleen Ryan, Katherine Locke, Adele Jergens, and Art Smith. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, July 17, 7:45, 443-3737)
This highly original existential black comedy (1991) charts the real-life exploits of William Douglas Street (played with a great deal of charisma and wit by writer-director Wendell B. Harris Jr.), a Detroit con man. From the late 70s to the mid-80s Street carried off a number of impersonations, presenting himself as a Time magazine reporter, a surgery intern (he performed 23 successful operations), a Caribbean exchange student at Yale, and a civil rights attorney; various other scams landed him in prison. Without wasting any time on facile psychologizing, Harris uses his subject as a means to explore the paradoxes of acting (some of Street’s real-life victims play themselves) and the invisibility of blacks in the U.S.; Street is also the source of some very funny comedy. In all, this disturbing yet compelling rogue’s progress calls to mind an 18th-century picaresque novel. Harris’s eclectic directorial style doesn’t always sustain itself, but it’s brimming with inventive ideas. R, 94 min. (JR) Read more
With Forest Whitaker, Gregory Hines, Robin Givens, Zakes Mokae, Danny Glover, Badja Djola, and John Toles-Bey.
THE OBJECT OF BEAUTY
** (Worth seeing)
Directed and written by Michael Lindsay-Hogg
With John Malkovich, Andie MacDowell, Joss Ackland, Rudi Davies, Peter Riegert, Lolita Davidovich, and Ricci Harnett.
OSCAR
* (Has redeeming facet)
Directed by John Landis
Written by Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland
With Sylvester Stallone, Peter Riegert, Joey Travolta, Elizabeth Barondes, Tim Curry, Vincent Spano, Ornella Muti, and Joycelyn O’Brien.
With at least three new comedies around at the moment — four counting the semicomic Impromptu — it seems like the silly season is fully upon us. Although the three urban comedies under review are set in different decades (Oscar in the 30s, A Rage in Harlem in the 50s, The Object of Beauty in the present), they all appear at first to be equally concerned with money — the thing that keeps the wheels of their complicated farcical plots turning. All have something to do with sex and romance as well, but it’s clearly money that holds the sex and romance in place. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 22, 1989). — J.R.
SHIRLEY VALENTINE
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
Written by Willy Russell
With Pauline Collins, Tom Conti, Julia McKenzie, Alison Steadman, Bernard Hill, Joanna Lumley, and Tracie Bennett.
I had my first experience of English theater in London’s West End around the mid-1960s–a program of three one-act plays written by and starring Noel Coward. (I no longer remember the show’s title, but I believe it was Coward’s last theater piece.) [2011 postscript: this was Suite in Three Keys, in 1966.] The plots of all three plays were fairly slender, and the mise en scene, as I recall, was strictly conventional. What was remarkable about the overall performance, and quite characteristic (as I soon discovered) of the English theater in general, was the extraordinary, almost conspiratorial rapport between Coward the actor and his audience — a very cozy kind of intimacy that reflected the appeal of the three characters Coward was playing and very little else. The stories and direction were nothing more than the recipes and the cooking necessary to serve these characters up to the public for its delectation, and once combined the ingredients retained no attributes of their own; all that remained was Coward’s plump, juicy, quirky personality. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (October 14, 1994). — J.R.
**** SATANTANGO
(Masterpiece)
Directed by Bela Tarr
Written by Tarr and Laszlo Krasznahorkai
With Mihaly Vig, Putyi Horvath, Erika Bok, Peter Berling, Miklos B. Szekely, Laszlo Fe Lugossy, Eva Almasi Albert, Alfred Jaray, Erzsebet Gaal, Janos Derzsi, and Iren Szajki.
If great films invent their own rules, reinventing some of the standards of film criticism in the process, Bela Tarr’s Satantango surely belongs in their company. Showing Sunday as part of the Chicago Film Festival, this very dark Hungarian black comedy has more than a few tricks and paradoxes up its sleeve. Shot in black and white, with a running time of just under seven hours (it’s designed to be shown with two short intermissions), it boasts a decrepit, squalid rural setting enveloped in constant rain and mud and a cast of about a dozen greedy, small-minded characters, none of whom has any remotely redeeming qualities. Yet over two separate viewings it has provided me with more pleasure, excitement, and even hope than any other new picture I’ve seen this year.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. Since the film surfaced at the Berlin Film Festival in February and was enthusiastically heralded by J. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 28, 1994). — J.R.
** THE ACCOMPANIST
(Worth seeing)
Directed by Claude Miller
Written by Miller and Luc Beraud
With Richard Bohringer, Elena Safonova, Romane Bohringer, Samuel Labarthe, Julien Rassam, Nelly Borgeaud, and Claude Rich.
“About six years before the disappearance of Ambrose Small, Ambrose Bierce had disappeared. Newspapers all over the world had made much of the mystery of Ambrose Bierce. But what could the disappearance of one Ambrose, in Texas, have to do with the disappearance of another Ambrose, in Canada? Was somebody collecting Ambroses? There was in these questions an appearance of childishness that attracted my respectful attention.” — Charles Fort, Wild Talents (1932)
The Accompanist can be viewed as a producer’s film, as a writer-director’s film, and as a quintessentially French film. As a producer’s film, it is the latest in a recent cycle of French art movies involving classical musicians and including extended stretches of classical music — in other words, as a spin-off of Tout les matins du monde and Un coeur en hiver, both huge commercial successes, especially in France. As all three films have the same producer, Jean-Louis Livi, they can be regarded as “Livi films” rather than as the discrete expressions of three directors. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 1, 2000). — J.R.
The Tic Code
**
Directed by Gary Winick
Written by Polly Draper
With Gregory Hines, Draper, Christopher George Marquette, Desmond Robertson, Carol Kane, Carlos McKinney, Dick Berk, John B. Williams, and Tony Shalhoub.
Writing about Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s most musical book, the late William Troy had the perspicacity to point out that “a word, in the terminology of modern physics, is a time-space event. It is not too much to say that for the poet no word in a language is ever used twice exactly in the same way.” Since a musical note is also a time-space event — repeatable on paper, CD, or tape but not in live performance — existentially speaking an improvised jazz solo is a journey, a dramatic and social act that can happen only once.
It’s possible to capture certain aspects of jazz performances in words, as critic Whitney Balliett and novelist Rafi Zabor (in the wonderful The Bear Comes Home) have amply demonstrated. But what film can do poetically with jazz solos is much less certain. It might be argued that most films and most jazz solos have stories to tell, but getting their stories to coincide is not an easy task. Read more
