When Pigs Fly

From the Chicago Reader (October 1, 1994). This film is available on a wonderful two-disc DVD release in Canada, Driver X 4: The Lost and Found Films of Sara Driver (see below), which includes (full disclosure) an extended interview with Driver about this film that I conducted in Ron Mann’s office in Toronto. — J.R.

Sara Driver’s principal films are surrealist works whose images tend to linger like half-remembered dreams. The ferocious You Are Not I (1982), adapted from a Paul Bowles story, unfolds inside the mind of a schizophrenic; the much gentler Sleepwalk (1986) is a dreamlike fairy tale set in lower Manhattan. The still gentler When Pigs Fly (1993) — set in an east-coast port town, though filmed in Gemany — is a whimsical ghost story inspired by Topper. If the tone seems light, the images, filmed by the great Robby Muller, nevertheless persist. The hero, beautifully played by Alfred Molina, is a sweet-tempered jazz musician who subsists mainly on the money he earns from giving music lessons and is sustained by the companionship of a dog (whose jazz-inspired dreams, rendered by Driver in full, are as lyrical as the hero’s). Some of the action takes place in a shabby Irish pub lorded over by Seymour Cassel, and when a barmaid gives Molina’s character an old rocking chair, he inherits a pair of ghosts (Marianne Faithfull and child actress Rachel Bella) along with it. Read more

Divertimento

From the Chicago Reader (August 1, 1994). — J.R.

Jacques Rivette’s alternate version of La belle noiseuse (1991) — running only a little over half as long (at 130 minutes) — uses alternate takes to tell basically the same story, though it and begins and ends somewhat differently and its tone is much lighter and more brittle. Freely adapted from Balzac’s story The Unknown Masterpiece, the film concerns a once-famous, long-inactive painter (Michel Piccoli at his best), living in the country with his wife and former model (Jane Birkin, ditto), who’s inspired to reembark on his most ambitious painting by the mistress (Emmanuelle Beart) of a young painter and admirer who comes to visit him. For all its limitations as a depiction of the way artists work, the longer version owes much of its power to its sense of duration, which ultimately brings one closer to the characters; this snappier, slicker version, more fluid as storytelling, has plenty of virtues of its own, but it’s less likely to linger as long in the mind. Both versions can be read as a sort of apologia on Rivette’s part explaining why he’s backed away from the obsessive intensity of his 60s and 70s work. Read more