by Dean | Mar 4, 2013 | General
Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful (2002) is loosely based on a good 1969 Claude Chabrol film, La Femme Infidele. There are many things wrong with it, but for the most part Lyne’s directing is not one of them. He and film editor Anne V. Coates understand pacing and suspense, while actress Diane Lane understands worry and guilt.
The movie’s two screenwriters convince me, without moralizing, that adultery and existential bleakness go together. According to Mark Steyn in The Spectator, the film communicates that “sex is not just a passing fancy, but profoundly disruptive, not life enhancing but life shattering, and what’s broken cannot be remade. The fling cannot be unflung.”
Unfaithful (2002 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 27, 2013 | General
The Robert Bresson picture, Mouchette (1967), is an adaptation of a short novel by Georges Bernanos.
The novel, a successful one, is about a preteen French girl living in harsh, awful surroundings. Dirt poor Mouchette is disliked by her peers and has an insensitive, criminal father and a dying mother. Worse, she is eventually raped by an epileptic poacher. It is easy to suspect she is en route to becoming a wicked young adult, but after hearing from an old woman, a layer-out of the dead, that the dead used to be worshipped as gods and that the woman herself “understands” the dead, Mouchette decides to drown herself. She escapes a hopeless world by dispatching herself to a realm where the dead are not merely dead, to God’s realm.
It is no surprise that the Catholic-born Bresson would be drawn to filming another Bernanos novel after directing Diary of a Country Priest many years earlier. However, what he does with his customarily nonprofessional actors seriously harms Mouchette. He insists on their being dry and undemonstrative, which of course means they’re histrionically sleepwalking. It doesn’t work. The film doesn’t work—it’s unconvincing—although certain shots and details are meaningful, even spiritually so. That is, they have a “religious” power, such as the shot of the pond, and the simultaneous Magnificat music (by Monteverdi), where Mouchette’s suicide occurs. We feel sure the Deity’s grace has reached this unsaved, terribly oppressed child. Bresson’s movie could have been a winner, but a few things for which we can be grateful do characterize it.
(In French with English subtitles.)
Mouchette stands at the gate of the rides of the fair, looking at the people in the rides. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 26, 2013 | General
Dark Blue World (2001) is a Czech World War II film with a nifty story and well-known themes. The dramatis personae includes Franta, a Czech pilot imprisoned by the Communists of his homeland because he fought German aircraft for the RAF and is now feared to be dangerously pro-freedom.
Flashbacks to the Forties exhibit Franta and his best friend Karel leaving Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for England in order to join the British armed services, and after a number of months they and other Czech pilots are allowed to fly missions. One of them leads to Karel having to bail out of his plane and meeting an English lady whose soldier husband has been missing in action for a year. Karel, liking her, puts the moves on her but Susan, the lady, is unattracted to him. As it happens, she wishes to ease her loneliness with nice Franta, who, though he knows of Karel’s love for Susan, acquiesces. The missing husband is forgotten.
What all this means is that Franta mistreats his best friend even after Karel valiantly saves Franta’s life in an air battle. When the truth about Franta and Susan becomes known, the friendship dies; Karel is unforgiving. There is, though, an instance of magnanimity which I must be sufficiently decent not to disclose. After the war Franta, the lost soul, returns to a different Czechoslovakia. It appears the pilot’s purgatory is right around the corner since he suffers in a Communist prison. 1951 is when Czech pilots like Franta were set free from the prisons, although the film tells us they perforce lived as outcasts. In truth, Dark Blue World honors them.
The movie was directed by Jan Sverak and written by Zdenek Sverak. Ondrej Vetchy, as Franta, is capable of force but has an easy manner. Krystof Hadek displays boyish anger and purity of heart as Karel. With now womanly good looks Tara Fitzgerald (Susan) is compellingly grave and as English as they come.
Dark Blue World (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 22, 2013 | General
Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) is excellently directed rubbish, without even the gripping force of Psycho and The Birds. Anthony Shaffer’s script has to do with a psychopathic rapist-murderer in London, and there’s nothing wrong with the movie’s realism per se. But, directorially, the man obsessed with and rebuffed by Tippi Hedren (and others?) is intent on getting even with women, and this renders the film loathsome. Murdered females lie dead with their tongues hanging out. The corpses of women are desecrated in one way or another, and female nudity is somewhat overdone. Every woman but Vivien Merchant—Merchant is too good for this tripe—is at least close to being bitchy.
Shaffer’s writing is far less than first-rate, but morally the film itself is barely third-rate.
Cover of Frenzy
by Dean | Feb 20, 2013 | General
The 1965 short film, Black Girl, is the only feature I’ve seen by the late Ousmane Sembene, a Senegalese writer and director.
Mbissine Therese Diop, who plays Diouana, the black girl of the title, is not much of an actress and the voiceover narration is awfully repetitive, but BG‘s subject matter is formidable and the direction sophisticated without artiness. Something else the film is without is the once fashionable Marxist beliefs Sembene held, for all it attacks is racial pride and condescension among postcolonial Europeans.
In Dakar, Senegal jobs are hard to get. Eagerly, then, Diouana goes to work for a white couple that hires her to care for their three children. Some time later the couple leave the Senegal the French had once colonized for the glorious Riveria, taking Diouana with them but also—a thousand pities—turning her into a virtual slave. She cooks and cleans, nothing more, and is for a long time unpaid.
Never is the white couple caricatured, which makes their free-floating racial pride, their racist state of mind, that much worse. A basically harmless rebel in a state of despair is what Diouana becomes; she accomplishes nothing. Her rebellious streak does her no more good than do the pretty dress and glamorous wig she wears for her time in France.
Despite some defects in Black Girl, and despite its being low-budget, it is nice to see an African work of art. Sembene takes a situation with ordinary hopes and desires, with mundane necessities and activities, and turns it into something tragically grotesque.
Black Girl (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
