Written for the Metrograph Chronicle in January 2020. — J.R.
There’s an unfortunate habit among some Yankee cinephiles — including distributors — to limit our perceptions of some overseas trends to single figures, so that Spanish cinema initially consisted of Luis Buñuel, then Pedro Almodóvar, Swedish cinema became synonymous with Bergman, and Hong Kong art cinema begins and ends with Wong Kar-wai. This helps to explain why I haven’t had much luck in keeping up with the careers of two other favorites of mine among Hong Kong directors, Peter Ho-Sun Chan and Stanley Kwan, whose finest work is every bit as important to me as Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love. If you haven’t yet seen Chanr’s Comrades: Almost a Love Story and/or Kwan’s Rouge, they’ll do a good job of suggesting what you might be missing.
Rouge, made in 1987, is set alternately in that year and in 1934. Comrades, Almost a Love Story, another Hong Kong not-quite romance shaped around two superstars, was made in 1996, opens in 1986, and ends first in Manhattan in 1995, then back again in 1986, when the title characters are arriving in Hong Kong, still strangers to the city and to each other. Read more
Gaspar Noé’s 2002 follow-up to his remarkable I Stand Alone is stupid, vicious, and pretentious, though you may find it worth checking out if you want to experiment with your own nervous system. As in the overrated and similarly misanthropic Memento, the episodes of the story play out in achronological order, from violent murder in a gay S-M club called the Rectum toward the rape and beating that motivated it and beyond that to earlier and happy times for the heroine (Monica Bellucci) and two of her lovers (Vincent Cassel and Albert Dupontel). The dialogue is mainly improvised, the sequences are mainly ten-minute takes (either real or simulated), and the aggressive 360-degree camera movements at the beginning are so disorienting that one can barely follow the action — though Noé grinds to a respectful halt to contemplate the rape and brutality. In French with subtitles. 99 min.
From Film Comment. In a few slight particulars, I’ve taken the liberty of editing my 30-year-old self 47 years later. I’ve also omitted the remarks about several recent French film books (apart from Benayoun’s) that concluded this column. — J.R.
The admiration of French cinéastes for Jerry Lewis continues to be in evidence everywhere. In an interview in the current Time Out [in London], Jean-Pierre Gorin pays his own respect to Lewis’s greatness – over the protests of his interviewers – for the “experimental” and “scientific” ways that he deals with sound and image, cutting and plot construction, adding that Godard has seen WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? (which “is almost mathematical if you look into it deeply”) five times. And in DOCTEUR POPAUL, Chabrol’s latest film, Mia Farrow is furnished with eyeglasses and buck teeth to make her resemble Julius Kelp in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, while Jean-Paul Belmondo is run through a series of sight-gags that are clearly Lewis-inspired.
To my mind, Chabrol’s pastiches are vastly inferior to Lewis’s originals, and DOCTEUR POPAUL is less worthy of American release than Chabrol’s earlier OPHÉLIA, LA RUPTURE, or JUSTE AVANT LA NUIT (the last-named, a perverse and elegant companion-piece of LA FEMME INFIDÈLE, is probably the best of the lot). Read more
