Four tales about Reinette (Joelle Miquel), a country girl who paints and operates according to certain principles, and Mirabelle (Jessica Forde), her less rigorous friend from the city; they meet in the country in the first episode and share an apartment in Paris during the remaining three. This feature was shot in 16-millimeter by Eric Rohmer in 1986, shortly before he completed Summer in the same format and with the same method of letting his leading actors improvise dialogue rather than strictly following scripts. Not part of Rohmer’s Comedies and Proverbs series, and deliberately light and nonambitious (very little of consequence occurs in any of the tales), this nevertheless shows the filmmaker at nearly peak formsharply attentive to the sights and sounds of country and city alike and to the temperamental differences between his two heroines. (JR) Read more
The boldest and arguably one of the best of Peter Greenaway’s fiction features, this extremely odd and perverse conceptual piece (1986) certainly isn’t for every taste, although Sacha Vierny’s cinematography makes it so luscious that you may be mesmerized in spite of yourself. The title refers to a European zoo; the curious plot involves two brothers who work as the zoo’s curators and who lose their wives in a freak auto accident. Only partially a narrative film, this elegant puzzle also involves amputees, painting, a menage a trois, and decomposing animalsalong with many other thingswhich are intricately interrelated thanks to Greenaway’s icy brilliance. Definitely a one-of-a-kind movie. With Andrea Ferreol, Brian and Eric Deacon, Frances Barber, and Joss Ackland. 115 min. (JR) Read more
The first feature (1985) of Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (Family Viewing, Speaking Parts) is probably his least-known work. But thanks to its dynamic camera style and its bizarre premise, it is in many ways his most immediately engaging. In the course of undergoing family therapy with his parents, a young Canadian WASP (Patrick Tierney) comes across a video of an Armenian family (Berge Fazlian, Sirvart Fazlian, and Egoyan regular Arsinee Khanjian) who put their son up for adoption 20 years ago. Flying to the city where this family lives, the hero poses as the missing son and becomes much better integrated in their family than he is in his own. As in Egoyan’s subsequent films, video not only has an important function in the plot but is also employed metaphorically. Egoyan’s use of realistic details often proves deceptive; just as we’ve settled into accepting his plot on a literal level, he starts unhinging our expectations with ambiguities and details that don’t fit comfortably within a realistic scenario. (One particular ambiguity that is never resolved is the young man’s relationship with his “sister.”) The result is a very impressive debut, beautifully acted by all the leads and engaging and provocative in its treatment of the differences (as well as the similarities) between role-playing and pretending. Read more
