The strangest by far of Jacques Rivette’s films (1976), and perhaps the last gasp of the modernist strain that infused his work from L’amour fou to Out 1 to Celine and Julie Go Boating, this is a violent and unsettling fusion of a female pirate adventure (filmed on some of the same locations used for The Vikings and inspired in part by Lang’s Moonfleet, but set in no particular place or period), mythological fantasy, Jacobean tragedy (with many lines borrowed from Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy), experimental dance film (with live improvised music from a talented trio of musicians), and personal psychodrama. The eclectic cast includes Geraldine Chaplin, Bernadette Lafont, Kika Markham (Two English Girls), and a few members of Carolyn Carlson’s dance company. While the mise en scène and locations are often stunning, the film seems contrived to confound conventional emotional reactions of any sort. It’s a movie where the casual slitting of someone’s throat and the swishing sounds of Lafont’s leather pants are made to seem equally relevant — a world apart from Rivette’s more recent La belle noiseuse. Yet Rivette’s feeling for duration, immediacy, and moods of menace are fully present here, and days or weeks after you see this chilling conundrum of a movie, sounds and images may come back to haunt you. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (April 21, 2006). — J.R.
The Notorious Bettie Page
*** (A must see)
Directed by Mary Harron
Written by Harron and Guinevere Turner
With Gretchen Mol, Chris Bauer, Jared Harris, Sarah Paulson, Cara Seymour, David Strathairn, Lili Taylor, and John Cullum
Basic Instinct 2
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Michael Caton-Jones
Written by Leora Barish and Henry Bean
With Sharon Stone, David Morrissey, David Thewlis, Charlotte Rampling, Hugh Dancy, Flora Montgomery, Indira Varma, and Heathcoate Williams
The Notorious Bettie Page — about the pinup and soft-core-bondage film and magazine star of the 50s — mixes archival black-and-white and color footage with re-creations. The mix of materials evoking the period is far from seamless, and we can’t always be sure what’s archival and what’s simulated because sometimes the filmmakers are trying to fool us. But their preoccupation with the manufacture of images keeps this exercise in exposure and concealment interesting.
Page, effectively played by Gretchen Mol, is shown as a cheerful airhead who loves her work as a model and maintains a good-natured innocence about it. That is, until the puritanical Senate porn investigation of Estes Kefauver (whom David Strathairn makes almost interchangeable with his Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck) drives her back to the religion of her childhood, which the movie persuasively suggests was the only logical place for her to go at that point. Read more
