From the Chicago Reader (September 20, 1991); reprinted in Placing Movies. — J.R.
I have noticed that people who were loved or felt they were loved seemed to lead fuller, happier lives. All of my own work in theater and film has been concerned with varying themes of this love.
A Woman of Mystery has to do with an unexplored segment of our society, referred to as the homeless, bag ladies, winos, bums — labels that are much easier for the public to deal with than the individual.
It has been difficult to explore this particular woman of mystery. She is not only homeless (if homeless means without the comfort of love) but she is nameless, without the practical application of social security, or any other identity. Alone, she clings to her baggages on the street.
Our heroine enters into a series of encounters that challenge her isolation, her inability to communicate. A young woman passerby seems to feel that this woman with the suitcases is the reincarnation of her dead mother. An emotional dismissal of the younger woman causes the woman’s memory to play tricks on her. A young man seems to touch unexplained dependency in her and a clerk at a travel bureau gets dangerously close to exchanging love.Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 15, 2006). — J.R.
Half Nelson
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Ryan Fleck | Written by Anna Boden and Fleck | With Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mackie, Monique Gabriela Curnen, Karen Chilton, and Tina Holmes
This Film Is Not Yet Rated
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Kirby Dick | Written by Dick, Eddie Schmidt, and Matt Patterson
Half Nelson is open about its radical politics — remarkable at a time when most mainstream movies are being marketed as apolitical. But of course most movies have biases, the most common of which is a belief that the world can be meaningfully divided into good guys and bad guys. The real issue isn’t whether there’s pure good or pure evil in the world, as Bush keeps insisting. It’s whether we’re willing to view the world as nuanced and complex. If as Americans we believe we’re the good guys regardless of what we do — even if that includes torturing and killing as many innocent people as we deem necessary to defeat the bad guys — then we’re more likely to lose sight of what’s actually being done. It’s not hard to conclude that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are bad guys, but when Americans helped arm them both did that make us bad guys too? Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 8, 2006). — J.R.
13 (Tzameti)
* (Has redeeming facet)
Directed and written by Gela Babluani
With Georges Babluani, Olga Legrand, Philippe Passon, Aurelien Recoing, Vania Vilers, and Nicolas Pignon
An English-language remake of this French thriller is already in development. But the film recycles so much I’d be surprised if it doesn’t get recycled in turn.
Fight Club has been cited as one of the key models for Gela Babluani’s 13 (Tzameti), but Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) seems far more relevant, at least for its first half. In The Passenger an American journalist (Jack Nicholson) on an aborted assignment in North Africa encounters the corpse of a man he met earlier in his hotel and decides on impulse to take over the man’s identity, turning up for all of his appointments and seeing what happens. They lead into espionage and arms sales for a terrorist group, and as the journalist proceeds to Spain to keep the appointments, he does his best to elude people who are chasing him down in one or the other of his two identities.
The hero of 13 (Tzameti), a 22-year-old Georgian laborer named Sebastien (Georges Babluani, a younger brother of the filmmaker), struggling in a French seaside town to support his family, is replacing the roof of a neighbor’s house when he overhears that the neighbor (Philippe Passon), a feeble morphine addict, is expecting a package in the mail that will make him and his wife (Olga Legrand) wealthy. Read more
From Film Comment (May-June 1976). For much, much more about Renoir, go here. — J.R.
JEAN RENOIR BY ANDRE BAZIN; translated by W. W. Halsey and William H. Simon. Delta Books, 1974. $3.25, 320 pages, illustrated, index.
JEAN RENOIR BY RAYMOND DURGNAT University of California Press, 1974. $16.50, 429 pages, illustrated, index.
JEAN RENOIR: Essays, Conversations and Reviews BY PENELOPE GILLIATT McGraw-Hill, 1975. $2.95, 156 pages, index.
MY LIFE AND MY FILMS BY JEAN RENOIR; translated by Norman Denny. Atheneum, 1974. $10.00, 287 pages, illustrated, index.
REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
“. . . Renoir directs his actors as if he liked them more than the scenes they are acting and preferred the scenes which they interpret to the scenario from which they come. This approach accounts for the disparity between his dramatic goals and the style of acting, which tends to turn our attention from these aims. This style is added to the script like rich paint liberally applied to a line drawing: often the colors obscure and spill over the lines. This approach also explains the effort required to enjoy half the scenes Renoir directs. Whereas most directors try to convince the viewer immediately of the objective and psychological reality of the action and subordinate both acting and directing to this end, Renoir seems to lose sight of the audience from time to time.Read more
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .” reads the opening title, over vast interstellar reaches of wide-screen space. “I’ve seen the future and it works!” declares a happy teenager on his way out of the movie to a TV reporter in Los Angeles — oddly parroting what Lincoln Steffens said about Russia over fifty years ago, before Ford Motors gave the slogan a second lease on life. “Another galaxy, another time,” begins the novel’s prologue more noncommittally, carefully hedging all bets. But confusion between past and future, however useful to the tactics of George Lucas’s STAR WARS, seems almost secondary to the overriding insistence that whenever this giddy space opera is taking place, it can’t possibly be anywhere quite so disagreeable as the present.
“Rather than do some angry, socially relevant film,” Lucas has said, “I realized there was another relevance that is even more important — dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing and all that real stuff like stealing hubcaps — that you could still sit and dream about exotic lands and strange creatures.” Although garbage and killing are anything but absent from STAR WARS, and stealing hubcaps is around in spirit if not in letter, Lucas’s aspiration is easy enough to comprehend, even after the social interests of his THX 1138 and AMERICAN GRAFFITI. Read more
The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties
by J. Hoberman (New York/London: The New Press, 461 pp., 2003.
“You know, I’m not someone who ever survived the Depression,” the great American film critic and painter Manny Farber once said to me, back in the late 1970s. “It’s not the sort of experience you ever really get over.” This was in part a gentle rebuke to someone born after the 1930s who tended to romanticize that era —- seeing glimmers of communal warmth and common cause leaking through all that picturesque poverty, especially in Hollywood pictures. For me, the 1930s were a legendary period —- the time in the U.S. when socialism came closest to being a mainstream position. Indeed, the next two decades in American history might be viewed as a series of desperate holding actions against the dreams nurtured in that epoch.
By contrast, the 1960s was a period of prosperity that nurtured outsized utopian dreams of its own —- dreams so grandiose that the succeeding decades up to the present could be viewed as another set of fearful responses. Read more
In Godard’s 2 OU 3 CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D’ELLE, Paris is shown and described undergoing a series of strange mutations. One of the most evident of these changes is the monstrous high-rise housing complexes that are being put up in the suburbs, la région Parisienne (the “elle” of the title). Certain housewives living in these new acres of concrete, in order to help ‘make ends meet,’ spend their afternoons in the city as part-time prostitutes. Read more
From The Bard Observer, May 7, 1963. For me, one of my formative experiences of film as an art form was a screening of Sunrise at Columbia University’s Macmillan Theater during one of my first three semesters of college, at New York University, before I transferred to Bard College, two hours up the Hudson River, in early 1963, where I soon took over the Friday night film series. This particular screening, late in my first semester, may have actually been the second time I screened it rather than the first, because I recall it being greeted by hoots of derisive laughter the first time I showed it at Bard (which was quite unlike the screening I’d attended at Columbia, at least as I remember it), and I suspect that the defensive tone of this piece was provoked by that unhappy experience.
I believe it was at this screening of Sunrise (although it may have been at the previous one) that Stan Brakhage, visiting the campus with P. Adams Sitney in order to meet Robert Kelly, asked me if he could screen his Prelude beforehand. I agreed to show it (probably the first Brakhage film I saw, unless this was Desistfilm) afterwards but not before, because the mimeographed film series schedule had already listed Sunrise’s starting time.IRead more
Written in early February 2012 for “En Movimiento.” my bimonthly column for Caiman Cuadernos de Cine. — J.R.
The unexpectedly huge acclaim accorded to Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation in the U.S, appears to be motivated by something more than an appreciation for a better-than-average feature. Is this a sufficient reason for it to be the most successful Iranian film to be released in America to date? Why was it named the best foreign language film of 2011 by the Golden Globes, the National Board of Review, and the New York Critics Circle, and the best picture of the year by the most popular American film critic (Roger Ebert), meanwhile placing third as the best picture by the National Society of Film Critics (which rarely considers films for this category in any language but English, and included only one other such film in its latest top ten, Ruiz’s Mistérios de Lisboa)? Why was it nominated for two separate Academy Awards?
I suspect that an important reason for this sort of enthusiasm is the desire of many Americans — or at least Americans who see foreign-language films — not to go to war again, shortly after the (very) belated return of American troops from Iraq, and during the incessant and frightening beating of war drums by all of the Republican candidates for President except for Ron Paul (who still isn’t taken seriously by the mainstream media–and not because of his radical economic positions, but, to all appearances, because he refuses to support another American invasion in the Middle East). Read more
There’s certainly a lot more footage — 53 minutes, to be precise — which makes this better in certain ways than the original Apocalypse Now, though the flaws are also magnified. (Kurtz’s Cambodian savages slaughtering a caribou — actually, it’s a Filipino ceremony — and kneeling before Willard and then laying down their weapons en masse seems even more insulting and ludicrous than it did in 1979; and the pan to The Golden Bough and From Ritual to Romance remains the most pretentious shot in the history of cinema, far worse than anything ever perpetrated by Antonioni.) Francis Ford Coppola’s guilty-liberal rethink of John Milius’s right-wing update and transplanting of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” to the war in Vietnam is above all an environmental experience, a theme-park ride enhanced by what may still be Walter Murch’s best sound editing (including some great use of the Doors) and Michael Herr’s second-best writing after Dispatches for Martin Sheen’s voice-over (all of it written long after the movie was shot). Looking for a responsible or even coherent account of that war here would be barking up the wrong tree, and the best way of glossing over this embarrassing lack would probably be to pretend, as many Western viewers do anyway, that this movie has no Vietnamese spectators. Read more
From the Chicago Reader, 2/15/02, and tweaked today, 9/4/23.
With Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, and Ousman Sembene still active, one can’t call Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira the only old master we have left in cinema. But how remarkable to see someone in his mid-90s enjoying one of the richest and most productive periods of his career–five extraordinary and very different features since Inquietude in 1998. This is partly thanks to the resourceful producer Paulo Branco (who also sponsors Raul Ruiz); unfortunately, none of the five has found U.S. distribution (unlike de Oliveira’s previous releases, The Convent and Voyage to the Beginning of the World, which were less interesting but had bigger stars). The fourth and fifth (I’m Going Home, a superbly unsentimental story about an aging actor, and Oporto of My Childhood, an imaginative documentary about de Oliveira’s hometown) haven’t even made it to Chicago festivals yet. Word and Utopia (2000) offers another example of how de Oliveira has enlivened his stately style through vigorous direction of actors, mainly through Lima Duarte’s performance as Antonio Vieira, an outspoken 17th-century Jesuit priest who championed the rights of Brazilian Indians and won the support of both the pope and Queen Christina of Sweden. Read more
From Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1974 (Vol. 41, No. 490). — J.R.
U.S.A., 1973 Director: Eddie Saeta
Before dying from an accident, Laura Saunders’ last words to her husband Fred are, “I’ll come back”. Unable to accept her death, Fred visits a number of fake spiritualists and death cultists until a classified ad (“Control your own reincarnation”) leads him to Tana, a friend and former lover of Dr. Death who brings Fred to one of Death’s ‘demonstrations’: a girl scarred by an accident is willingly sawed in half so that her soul can pass into the undamaged body of another women. Death dubs the reawakened corpse Venus and promptly becomes her lover, incurring the jealousy of Tana, who subsequently throws acid in Venus’ face. At a later meeting with Fred, Death explains that he discovered his power — based on a formula kept in an amulet around his neck — 1000 years ago, and his soul has survived ever since by passing into a succession of bodies of various races and both sexes belonging to his murder victims, He offers to revive Laura’s corpse with another woman’s soul for $50,000 and Fred agrees; but when Tana is garishly murdered for this purpose, Fred is appalled, and after Death fails to animate Laura’s body, asks him to keep the money and abandon the project. But Read more
Arguably Louis Malle’s best work (1960). Based on Raymond Queneau’s farcical novel about a little girl (Catherine Demongeot) left in Paris for a weekend with her decadent uncle (Philippe Noiret), this wild spree goes overboard reproducing Mack Sennett-style slapstick, parodying various films of the 1950s, and playing with editing and color effects (the cinematography is especially impressive), all in an effort to create equivalents to Queneau’s extravagant wordplay, though gradually it becomes a rather disturbing nightmare about fascism. Forget the preposterous claim by at least one critic that the movie’s editing influenced Alain Resnais, but there’s no doubt that Malle affected Richard Lester — and was clearly influenced himself by William Klein, credited here as a visual consultant and responsible for much of the wide-angle look. A rather sharp, albeit soulless, film, packed with ideas and glitter and certainly worth seeing. In French with subtitles. 93 min. (JR)
From Time Out (London), Sept. 27—Oct. 3, 1974. –- J.R.
‘Amarcord’ (Curzon, Warner West End) is Fellini at this ripest and loudest, which is not to say always at his best. Recreating a fantasy vision of his home town during the fascist period, with generous helpings of soap opera and burlesque, he generally gets his better effects by orchestrating his colorful cast of characters around the town square, on a boat outing, or at a festive local wedding. When he narrows his focus to individual groups, he usually limits himself to corny bathroom and bedroom jokes which produce the desired titters but little else. But despite the ups and downs, it’s still Fellini, which has become an identifiable substance like salami or pepperoni that can be sliced into at any point, yielding pretty much the same general consistency and flavor. There are the expected set pieces (family dinner, fascist rally), the customary cartoon cut-outs (a blind accordionist, a tobacconist with breasts the size of watermelons), and the tearful tones of Nino Rota, as evocative as ever. Fellini’s home town would have liked it. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
From Film Comment, Winter 1971-72. This was my second Paris Journal for that magazine, and my first extended effort to write about Playtime. -– J.R.
All five of Jacques Tati’s films have musical backgrounds of such surpassing unsubtlety that they are insipid even by Muzak standards; processions of cute kids, dogs, and middle-class nonentities that are not so much mildly parodied (on the surface) as embraced and advertised; the kind of comic ambiance that usually attracts either a Saturday afternoon family crowd or no one at all. Of the four that I have seen, two (MON ONCLE and TRAFIC) repeatedly grate on my nerves, and one (LES VACANCES DE MONSIEUR HULOT), after several viewings, has come to seem like an enduring classic. For the other, PLAYTIME, I would gladly trade the collective works of Fellini, Bergman, and all but the best of Godard.
Four years after its opening in Paris, PLAYTIME remains, at this writing, unseen and virtually unknown in the states. The European reception has generally been so cold that distributors are probably afraid to go near it. To speak even of its existence here is to conjure up a ghost: unquestionably Tati’s most expensive and ambitious film — requiring, according to Télé-Ciné, “ten years of reflection, three years of preparation and shooting,” and filmed in 70 mm and stereophonic sound — it already seems destined to share the fate of extravagant commercial failures of the silent era like INTOLERANCE, GREED, and SUNRISE. Read more
