Jonathan Rosenbaum

Like almost every other year within recent memory, I wind up seeing a masterpiece after I can vote for it or include it in any poll. Alice Diop’s first fiction feature is a classical example of a film that asks questions more than provides answers, and one of its best ways of posing or suggesting questions is not cutting to a reverse angle whenever you’re expecting it to. This is a film carried largely by its close-ups and its dialogue, and many of its reverse angles are between its two protagonists, two young and black Senegalese women in France who never meet, although they do exchange glances at one climactic, privileged moment. It’s a film devoted to a trial whose outcome is never recorded, but it has generated enough questions by the end to make a verdict seem either impossible or superfluous. Consciously or not, it carries more than one echo of Ousmane Sembene’s great La noire de… (Black Girl, 1966). [1/3/2023]

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From the Chicago Reader (February 1, 1992). — J.R.

A dirgelike Hungarian thriller by Gyorgy Feher about the search for a serial killer whose victims are little girls. The striking visual style (high-contrast black-and-white cinematography by Miklos Gurban) and creepy pacing tend to dominate the plot so thoroughly that I found myself tuning the narrative out and not being terribly worried about what I was missing. While the slow-as-molasses dialogue delivery and camera movements superficially suggest Tarkovsky (or, closer to home, Bela Tarr’s Damnation), Feher’s script and mise en scene are considerably more mannerist — employed more to conjure an atmosphere than to convey a particular vision or a distinctive moral universe. The closest American equivalent to this sort of exercise might be Rumble Fish: sumptuous visuals that impart more filigree than substance (1990). (JR)

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THE LAST HUNT (Richard Brooks, 1956, 108 min.)

A very dated but absorbing – and, in its own terms, effective – liberal CinemaScope western, all the more interesting for its dated qualities. In anticipation of Jim Jarmusch’s DEAD MAN, an explicit correlation is made between genocide of Native Americans and the decimation of buffalos, personified in this case by a racist and wanton killer played by Robert Taylor -– contrasted with the humane, reluctant buffalo killer played by Stewart Granger, who grew up with Native Americans and respects both them and their own respect for white buffalos, unlike Taylor. Lloyd Nolan plays the Walter Brennan part, a drunken old geezer who also comes along on the last hunt and winds up siding more with the good guys (i.e., everyone except Taylor, a dyed-in the-wool villain throughout).

The politically incorrect monkey wrench tossed into this scheme, at least by today’s standards, is the fact that the two major Native American characters are played by Russ Tamblyn (a half-breed) and Debra Paget, who function as Granger’s son figure and romantic interest, respectively. In short, no real Native Americans to be seen anywhere, making this movie a good target for the kind of conservative, anti-liberal scorn that a critic like Manny Farber might have had towards such a film. Read more

Fiddle-diddle-dee, fiddle-diddle-day,

All the mice are feeling gay,

Fiddle-diddle-dee, fiddle-diddle-day,

Herman’s gone this way.

And which way is that? Surely not the gay way if it’s any way at all. All the characters in these awful 1950s Herman and Katnip cartoons, at least all the mice and the single predatory and macho cat, are male, and sex is the very last thing on their minds. The cat wants to eat the mouse and the mouse wants to torture the cat, but rightly or wrongly, neither eating nor torturing is being presented as a sexual activity. Territorial privilege and imperial dominance are what’s on the limited menu.

Fiddle-fiddle-dee, fiddle-diddle-dough,

He’s the bravest mouse we know,

Fiddle-diddle-dee, fiddle-diddle-die,

Herman’s quite a guy.

Can a mouse be a guy? If not, why not? tFiffle-diddle-dee, fiddle-diddle-day,

It’s just like a holiday,

Fiddle-diddle-dee, fiddle-diddle day,

Herman’s come to stay.

Come to stay where, exactly? In this episode, he and the other mice are actually  on a train bound for Florida, “the vacation paradise,” on the “southern route” (Indeed, this particular cartoon is called “Rail-rodents”.)

Katnip, now bagless, but stretched out with a pillow on a slat directly below the mice’s RR car, is still in pursuit. So if he’s left the house, so has  his prey. Read more

This column for the 100th issue of Caimán cuadernos de cineis (Enero 2021) is basically an excerpt from and preview of a much longer essay about Kira Muratova written for the English feminist journal Another Gaze, and scheduled to run in its next issue early this year. Note: Arsenii Kniazkov has pointed out to me that Muratova is Ukrainian, so calling her Russian is a bit like calling Ousmane Sembene French.– J.R.

What is most provocative and sometimes pleasurable in both art and life can also sometimes be most maddening and aggravating. Kira Muratova’s films provide a good illustration of this principle because they have a disconcerting way of flirting with us and then slamming a door in our faces, sometimes even simultaneously. I’d like to suggest here that there’s a meaning and message behind her seeming madness — that a double-edged attitude of love/hatred towards both repetition and various institutions that promote an overall sense of continuity, security, and coherence, including family and the state, lies at the heart of her cinema, accounting for much of its bipolar energy.

In her Chekhov’s Motives (2002, also known as Chekhovian Motifs), perhaps the strangest and most aggressively eccentric of all her black and white features, her incantatory uses of repetition are especially evident. Read more

From the May 6, 2002 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Since I regard Claude Chabrol’s quintessentially French La femme infidele (1968) as one of his greatest films — making it all the more unfortunate for us (and fortunate for the authors of this remake) that it’s been unavailable for years — I was fully prepared to detest the Adrian Lyne version. Yet for roughly the first half of this 124-minute feature, I was pleasantly surprised, especially by the decisive shift in emphasis from husband to wife. Diane Lane, as the unfaithful wife of Richard Gere, gets to show off her magnificent legs at every opportunity — especially but not exclusively on her trips from her suburban home to the Soho loft of a young French hunk (Olivier Martinez) who sells rare books — and Lyne’s fancy cutting, honed on and still often resembling TV commercials, keeps this sensual in a way that the Chabrol movie never was. But then violence, guilt, and the husband’s viewpoint take over, Lane’s legs are sheathed, and the movie doesn’t have a clue about how to proceed. The original was a classically balanced and ultimately very satisfying work held in place by Chabrol’s love-hatred for bourgeois domesticity; the remake doesn’t reflect anyone’s love or hatred for anything, just a lot of anxiety about test marketing, which means it takes a nosedive when it goes shopping for an ending (I counted several, all of them ham-fisted). Read more

From the May 1, 1995 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Trying to figure out why this interminable, hammy piece of Russian nostalgia by Nikita Mikhalkov (director, cowriter, associate producer, and star) won the Oscar for best foreign film of 1994 and the grand jury prize at Cannes, I came up with four hypotheses: (1) there are no Asians in it; (2) set over one long summer day in the country in 1936, it provides a wake-up call about the dangerously underhanded doings of Joseph Stalin; (3) the hero appears to be well over 60; and (4) the elegiac Chekhovian style recalls Ingmar Bergman by way of Woody Allen, thus making the film seem trebly familiar. Indeed, apart from intermittent bursts of Edouard Artemiev’s bombastic music, this 134-minute period piece offers the ideal opportunity for a long, peaceful snooze. With Oleg Menchikov, Ingeborga Dapkounaite, and Nadia Mikhalkov. In Russian with subtitles. (JR)