The first and last parts of what follows are taken (and in a few cases adapted) from my book Discovering Orson Welles. — J.R.
In spite of my five years of living in Paris, my grasp of French has always been mediocre — a weakness that over the years I’ve come to regard as a sort of disability, because I’ve made many efforts to overcome it. That François Truffaut had a similar (and similarly embarrassing) problem with his English set the stage for a rather awkward and uncomfortable afternoon in London between the two of us — with his assistant Suzanne Schiffmann often serving as mutual interpreter — after I’d signed with Harper & Row to carry out a translation of Bazin’s book on Welles, as well as a new Foreword to that book that Truffaut was writing. Truffaut undoubtedly came away from that afternoon with some understandable skepticism about why I’d been hired to do this job, while I emerged, somewhat defensively, with the impression that he was closer to being a nervous and irritable businessman than the sort of critic and director that I had formerly revered.
I hasten to add that I wasn’t bluffing when I’d praised in print Bazin’s 1950 monograph on Welles in 1971 as the best criticism published about him —- or at least not entirely. Read more
From the December 15, 2000 issue of the Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Quills
***
Directed by Philip Kaufman
Written by Doug Wright
With Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Caine, Billie Whitelaw, Patrick Malahide, and Amelia Warner.
Smoking
***
Directed by Alain Resnais
Written by Alan Ayckbourn, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Agnès Jaoui, and Anne and Georges Dutter
With Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma.
No Smoking
***
Directed by Alain Resnais
Written by Alan Ayckbourn, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Agnes Jaoui, and Anne and Georges Dutter
With Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azema.
Quills is an American adaptation of an American play about the famous 18th-century French libertine the Marquis de Sade, starring Australian, English, and American actors. It is also, in part, an unacknowledged mainstreaming of a more intellectual German play that became famous in the mid-1960s because of an exciting and inventive staging by avant-garde English director Peter Brook — Peter Weiss’s The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, popularly known as Marat/Sade. (Brook’s 1966 film adaptation of this intensely theatrical play is a pale shadow of the original.)
Smoking and No Smoking — not a double bill but a pair of interactive features that can be seen in either order, both playing at Facets Multimedia Center this week — are French adaptations of a cycle of eight mainly comic English plays by Alan Ayckbourn. Read more
This originally appeared in the August 15, 2003 issue of the Chicago Reader. — J.R.
The Gatekeeper — produced, directed, and written by someone you’ve never heard of, with a cast that’s equally unknown — is a realistic, no-nonsense independent feature about Mexican immigrants enslaved just after crossing illegally into the U.S. Masked and Anonymous — a Bob Dylan vehicle packed with stars, directed by a sitcom veteran, and produced by the BBC — is a fantasy about a legendary singer giving a benefit concert for wounded counterrevolutionaries in a slum-infested city where the country’s dictator is dying.
These movies have little in common, apart from being grim commentaries on the corruptions of the American dream that use impoverished southern California locations. Yet I had the same sensation after seeing each of them: I felt I’d just received a jolt of contemporary reality, something I rarely can say about commercial movies nowadays.
Even if only indirectly, both movies have something to say about global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer, government and crime, the torrents of spam flooding e-mail accounts, the relentless aggression of telemarketing, the political chaos in Iraq and other places (including California), the misery of the poor and homeless, and the almost random casualties arising from heat-crazed and trigger-happy cops and soldiers surrounded by people who despise them. Read more
