By reputation, this glorious 1934 feature by Marcel Pagnol is his very best, though it’s atypical in that it adapts the work of another writer, a novel by Jean Giono. Set in Provence, like most Pagnol works, and filmed exclusively on location and in direct sound, it recounts the story of a farmer’s daughter seduced by a pimp from Marseilles; she follows him to the city, has an illegitimate child, and becomes a prostitute, which leads to serious conflict with her father when she returns to the farm. With Orane Demazis, Fernandel, and Jean Servais. (JR) Read more
In addition to being a good many other things, Francoise Romand’s first three feature-length films are poetic and highly original meditations about personal identity. Neither as dense nor as inventive as Mix-up (1985), the film that preceded it, and without the degree of experimentation and lyricism that makes Past Imperfect (1994) such a haunting experience, Call Me Madame (1986) is nonetheless a provocative and memorable work. It’s a multifaceted portrait of Ovida Delecta communist poet and novelist living near Rouen who’s published close to 40 books. Tortured by the Gestapo at 17 as a member of the French underground and honored by Paul Eluard, she’s a 60-year-old who had a sex-change operation at the age of 55. Formerly known as Jean-Pierre Voidies, she continues to live with her former wife and 20-year-old son, both of whom reveal some of the difficulties they’ve encountered living with such a singular and egocentric individual. As with Mix-up, Romand labels this film a fictional documentary because its subject and style relate to Delect’s self-image as well as her objective reality. Indeed Delect controls Call Me Madame just as she controls her own persona, depriving the film of the free-ranging imagination of Romand’s other two features. Read more
Experimental animator Lewis Klahr’s most impressive workan eerie, suggestive 43-minute assemblage of advertising and consumer images from the 50s and earlier that slides across the screen like emanations from the American dream, or perhaps the American nightmare (1994). (JR) Read more
This 1994 film may be the best of writer-director Atom Egoyan’s slick, Canadian carriage-trade productions (the other two are Speaking Parts and The Adjuster), though it’s also a regression, both formally and thematically, compared to his previous film, Calendar. The central locationa triumph of lush, imaginative set designis a sort of strip club where young female dancers sit at male customers’ tables and verbally cater to their psychic needs; at the center of this faux-tropical establishment is an odd little house where the club’s pregnant owner hangs out with the jaundiced announcer (Egoyan regulars Arsinee Khanjian and Elias Koteas), voyeuristically overseeing the voyeuristic clientele. The main customer is still mourning the death of his young daughter, and other significant characters include a dancer who sits at his table, a baby-sitter, and an eccentric smuggler whose path briefly crosses that of the bereaved father. As a narrative this is something of a tease, building toward a denouement straight out of Freud; its structure both benefits and suffers from Egoyan’s customary splintered focus and repetition compulsion, and there’s an unmistakable sadness in its pornographic luster. But as mise en scene it’s rich and accomplishedfor better and for worse, a place to get lost in. Read more
Filmed in Glasgow and Edinburgh, this dark Scottish comedy follows the misadventures of two men and a woman who advertise for a roommate and wind up with a guy who dies of a drug overdose, leaving behind a suitcase of money. What ensues after they decide to keep the money and get rid of the body determines the rest of the plot, in which the sexual and psychological ambiguity of this heartless trio gets run through a good many changes. Directed by TV veteran Danny Boyle from a script by one Dr. John Hodge, this is a fairly accomplished first featureperky, visually inventive, and unusually nasty, though I suppose a humanist message of some sort lies vaguely at its core. With Christopher Eccleston, Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, and Keith Allen. (JR) Read more
Not a horror movie, at least in the usual sense, but a disappointing feature by writer-director Preston A. Whitmore II about four black marines dropped into a combat zone in Vietnam in 1972. Even if one accepts the absence of Vietnamese in the storya standard omission in Hollywood movies about Vietnam, ratified by Forrest Gump and sadly indicative of a continuing blind spot in this country’s post-60s imaginationthe flashbacks to what the four marines did back in the States are especially perfunctory and feeble. And after a promising early stretch that offers some lively, raunchy dialogue, the movie quickly settles down to formulaic speeches and music-video pacing. With Joe Morton, Eddie Griffin, Allen Payne, Vonte Sweet, and Roger Floyd. (JR) Read more
The second remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent classic, directed by John Brahm in 1944. A Jack the Ripper tale, it’s something of a spin-off of Brahm’s Hangover Square, made the same year and also starring Laird Cregar as a demented villain. Effective in terms of atmospherics, the film also features Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Cedric Hardwicke, and Sara Allgood; Lucien Ballard is in charge of the impressive cinematography. 84 min. (JR) Read more
An interesting, if somewhat class-bound, documentary (1994) by Jyll Johnstone and Barbara Ettinger about two nannies, one of them an exile from Nazi Germany, the other a black woman from the rural south. Intelligent, searching, and often touching, the film still suffers from a certain distance from and condescension toward its subjects, though it remains fascinating in spite of these limitations. As critic Georgia Brown points out, the film can be read as a scathing critique of the mothers the nannies replaced. (JR) Read more
This begins promisingly as A Nightmare on Elm Street meets Pirandello, as Heather Langenkamp, star of the original Nightmare, begins to notice various sorts of domestic disturbances involving her family that seem provoked by the plans of writer-director Wes Craven and actor Robert Englund (both also playing themselves) to attempt yet another sequel in the series. Unfortunately, without even the most cursory effort to establish some notion of normality, the movie progressively gets duller and duller as its mechanical horror fancies spin themselves out; unlike Renny Harlin’s masterful and imaginative A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which used the series’s baggage only as an excuse for its own fun and games, this one’s defeated by the rigid formula (1994). With Miko Hughes and John Saxon. 112 min. (JR) Read more
In its latest act of trail blazing, the Film Center is offering the first U.S. retrospective devoted to Jacques Doillon, a post-New Wave French director whose singular movies have received next to no attention here. Emotionally unbridled and extreme in their depictions of passion and familial tensions, they are not for every taste, but it’s hard to think of many other films like them. La pirate (1984), probably the wildest in the bunch, centers on the amour fou of an anguished lesbian couple (Jane Birkin and Maruschka Detmers) reigniting their affair, with the former’s husband (perversely played by Birkin’s brother), a mysterious little girl, and an eccentric friend named Number Five (Philippe Leotard) all in tow. Family Life (1985), which begins with a comparable amount of screaming and thrashing around, eventually settles down into a quieter studythis time of a broken family and the efforts of an estranged father (Sami Frey) to establish rapport with his ten-year-old daughter (Maro Goyet) during an extended car trip to Spain. Aiming for the intensity of a Racinian tragedy, La pirate sticks so closely to the hothouse atmosphere generated by its five characters that we’re made to feel like intruders on a cryptic, brutal psychodrama; the more naturalistic Family Life allows us and the characters to breathe more freely, but a sense of emotional impasse is equally present. Read more
A narrative of life cycles by Alan Berliner, composed from home movies and family conversations on the sound track (1986). To be shown with Barbara Hammer’s Optic Nerve (1985), which uses an optical printer to represent the approaching death of the filmmaker’s 97-year-old grandmother. Read more
I didn’t make it to the end of this unthrilling thriller about an American photographer in Brazil (Peter Coyote) pursuing the villain who murdered his prostitute friend (Giulia Gam); it may have got better, but I wouldn’t stake money on it. Dozens of Eurotrash thrillers like this get released overseas every year and almost never reach American shores; why this one did is anyone’s guess. Directed by Walter Salles Jr., a Dutchman, from a script by Rubem Fonseca based on his own novel High Art; Tcheky Karyo, Amanda Pays, and Raul Cortez costar. (JR) Read more
France’s foremost contemporary novelist, Marguerite Duras, wrote and directed (with the help of Jean-Marc Turine and Jean Mascolo) this philosophical fable about a ten-year-old boy (played with a Keaton-like innocence by 40-year-old Axel Bougousslavski) who refuses to go to school because he doesn’t want to learn what he doesn’t know. The child’s attitude poses a threat not only to the educational system but, as the film’s issues wittily expand, to the basis of Western civilization itself; he is examined by a teacher (Andre Dussolier) and a journalist (Pierre Arditi) but neither is able to refute his reasoning. If you’ve never seen a Duras film, this graceful, calmly subversive work is a wonderful place to start: though it doesn’t have the formal complexity of her most ambitious films, it does reflect the qualities of mindan implacable honesty, a cutting skepticism, a deep concern for human freedomthat make her such a significant figure. With Daniel Gelin, in a gruff, funny turn as the boy’s accepting father, and Tatiana Moukhine. (JR) Read more
Japan’s most compulsively commercial avant-gardist, Nagisa Oshima (Boy, The Ceremony), makes a companion piece to his In the Realm of the Senses. A rendition of the Double Indemnity plot told as a ghost story, it’s said to be a lush, formal exercise. Read more
It’s hard to know who, if anyone, is borrowing from whom, but it seems singularly odd that the theme of older and younger male blood relations switching bodies should occur three times in the history of cinema, all within the space of about six months. The main distinction of this entry in the body-swapping sweepstakes is that this time it’s a grandfather (George Burns) and grandson (Charlie Schlatter) rather than father and son (Like Father Like Son, Vice Versa), and the grandson with his grandfather’s body spends most of the movie in a coma. Otherwise, Schlatter does his best to mimic Burns’s cigar-chomping manner, but Josh Goldstein and Jonathan Prince’s script is only fair, and Paul Flaherty’s direction is downright feeble. Both of the female leads (Anita Morris and Jennifer Runyon) are treated like bimbos, and Red Buttons has little to do in a secondary part. (JR) Read more
