Falkner1976 Reviews

Guns of the Trees (1961)

Experimental missfire, fresh and innovative, tedious, pedantic and melodramatic

[5/10 · 22 May 2024]

Shortly after Mekas criticized Cassavettes' reconversion of Shadows, the critic and experimentalist made a film that may point us to the lost virtues of the first Shadows.

Guns of the trees is a film with a very interesting approach, with a much less conventional character than the final Shadows, less enslaved to a conventional development plot, to characters developed in a conventional way, with a rhythm and a much fresher visual image than the remade half of Shadows.

But that's where the virtues end. Mekas's film collapses like a house of poorly linked cards. There is an insufferably pedantic and outdated tone in the theme, with an unbearably bombastic, and finally melodramatic, way of dealing with the existentialist obsessions of the characters. There are wonderful shots, very attractive scenes, but drowned in an ocean of presumptuousness, especially when the Barbara/Gregory couple appears.

Mekas dominates documentary experimental cinema, the small moments of almost unintentional poetry, but once again it is demonstrated how complex it is to superimpose a novelistic plot of tormented characters and suicide attempts over a freshly documentary style, which avoids theatricalization. In fact, Mekas stops interesting us when he superimposes some explanatory content on his images, or inhis other films, when he starts speaking in off-screen.

The best scenes are those with Argus, because fortunately Mekas does not try to show us an artificially complicated character, and shows us an attractive normal girl.

The result as a film would seem to agree with Cassavettes, although we suppose we would all like that first Shadows much more than both the definite Shadow and this Guns of the trees.

Shadows (1958)

An important film in American cinema, a must see. But it leaves a feeling of disappointment

[7/10 · 22 May 2024]

One cannot help but understand Jonas Mekas, imagining what the film could have been, and possibly was, in its first version.

As in other American "experimentals" of the time, there is a discouraging contrast between the freshness and modernity that the images often give off, the directness of refreshingly "unprofessional" cinematography and sounds, the authenticity of other interpretive patterns and the choice of actors who have not gone through the glamorization process of Hollywood (all this, as well as the choice of real exteriors and interiors instead of sets, a direct inheritance of neorealism), and the content often deficient and clumsy (for too much and too badly) worked.

A hybrid as innovative as it is disappointing, the result makes clear to us everything we have lost. It wasn't (or shoudnt be) about trying to achieve the same thing in another way. Faced with the complex narrative and artistic proposals from Godard, Cassavettes seems to limit himself to wanting to provide a breath of new air and update the plots with themes of racial discrimination that were already being treated in other commercial films of the time.

So, for example, when we want a boy and a girl to meet, we have a contrived and ridiculous scene, which would only happen in the cheesiest comics.

The freshness of the improvised moments (the credits scene, some parties and nighttime revelry) only increases the falsetto that we detect in the face of everything minimally planned.

With its outdated rebellious touches (rebels who, of course, have stupid conversations in the courtyard of statues), sentimental touches (girl meets boy, things go wrong, girl meets boy and they dance in love), and intellectual touches (of course jazz), each type assigned to one of the three brothers (and in a traditional way, the sentimental plot to the little sister) the film plays too safe.

At the end a sign says that the film we saw was an improvisation, I suppose in the jazz sense, which is obviously not the case in most of the scenes.

An important film in American cinema, a must see. But it leaves a feeling of disappointment. Still, among the best of Cassavetes.

Panic Room (2002)

Boring and routine thriller that, faced with a plot that is a gigantic plot hole, aims to interest with hilarious and stupid camera movements.

[4/10 · 22 May 2024]

Yes, Fincher starts moving the camera like crazy through bars and even the handle of a coffee pot, crossing walls and floors with no other result than the most absolute ridiculousness.

A thriller without characters, with Jodie Forster with nothing to do as a newly separated mother and Kristen Stewart as a daughter, who move to a spectacular house in the center of Mannhattan, which appropriately enough has a safe room so stupidly designed that it isolates you from the world outside without being able to make a call to the police. Needless to say, such a useless room is used just a few days after moving into the mansion.

The dialogues, the development of the scenes, the jokes, everything is hackneyed and ridiculous. The chases in the house make it turn into a department store at times, the elevators can be desperately slow or teleport you from one floor to another depending on the needs of the script.

The cool color aesthetic so typical of the 90s doesn't help either.

L'été (1968)

very interesting, very small, somewhat pedantic, cinematic experiment with great ideas but not totally satisfactory. It deserved more impact

[6/10 · 22 May 2024]

Another unknown Hanoun film, the first of its four seasons. Shot in a week with limited resources and in an almost amateurish manner, it is a small film of great interest due to the cinematographic ideas it contains.

Close to the world of the nouvelle vague, although with a transcendental tone very much like the first Bresson (the debt is recognized in the quote to the little donkey Baltazhar).

An attractive young woman has ended her relationship with an attractive young man and decides to "find herself" during the summer in a lonely house in the middle of the French countryside. The film is a collage of images and themes as she writes letters to a friend, thinks about her old boyfriend, caresses herself naked in bed, runs through the garden, tells us about the music she hears and the books she reads, worries about political news and remember quotes from Hegel. It is therefore very much like a small cinematographic diary.

The aim is to give structure to this hodgepodge in a purely cinematographic manner and not through a standard written script (a traditional plot, the development of a character...). This apparently translates into shaping it through rhythm, montage, repetition of images and cinematographic techniques (the use of photography alternating with the moving image, certain uses of voice-over and its relationship with the image... ), but above all in the tireless and cyclical repetition of the same motifs, as if it were a musical composition (which ultimately resorts to somewhat narrative elements).

There is no progress until the abrupt ending, and the film could continue for another hour insisting on the same motifs, or end half an hour earlier. The duration does not imply a gradual advance, but simply a greater familiarization with the motifs that it repeats and weaves over and over again.

The young protagonist is a beautiful model, but Hanoun abuses interesting poses, affected looks into space, with too much of a "rural vogue" tone. Naturally, she is a young progressive intellectual, committed, liberated, who takes photographs on the street in front of revolutionary graffiti on the walls, who explains to us the dangers of an incomplete proletarian revolution and who sends us a string of philosophical quotes.

In the first scenes she introduces us to the motifs that will be repeated throughout the film: resting in the countryside, memories of the police attacks in May '68, communist news, meetings with her ex-boyfriend, Kleist's book that she is reading, the music records she listens to, the letter she writes by hand to her friend, the texts she writes on type... and throughout the film these motifs will be developed successively: long quotes from Michael Kohlhass, Monteverdi and the baroque to Liszt that will play successively during the film, her German friend reading the letter she writes to him, the naked girl in bed remembering the sexual encounters with her boyfriend, many political and poetic quotes, her wanderings through the wheat fields and the neighbors' farms, notes on the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

There is, as in much French (and not only French) cinema of the time, a whiff of pedantry that is about to ruin the film and a lot of affectation, a typically (and ridiculously) cool vision of May '68, and of course baroque music to accompany the images (a Magnificat by Monteverdi...exactly like Bresson in his Mouchette); but at the same time there is a pleasant humility (far from the bombastic Godard) that at times gives us a certain sense of inventiveness that is less inconsequential and gratuitous than in much nouvelle vague. Above all, there are many interesting ideas and an innovative formal treatment that tries to explore more purely cinematographic paths than in the usual commercial cinema, although we struggle to find the necessary rigor to make it totally satisfactory.

It is difficult to give an assessment of a film that appears to us as a very small artistic object that is as purely cinematographic as the result could be improved.

Rear Window (1954)

Hitchcock looks at what Jeff does when he looks out the window...or what we do when we watch movies?

[10/10 · 22 May 2024]

Jeff, a photographer specialized in capturing news in high-risk scenarios, recovers during a hot summer from a spectacular accident that has left him with his leg in a cast. His apartment overlooks the inner courtyard of the block and the protagonist has nothing else to do but look out the window.

That interior patio is a bunch of windows that are like a multitude of small movie screens (in different aspect ratios: fullscreen, widescreen...), which narrate different films in the manner of the first silent cinema: one or two fixed shots ( one or two small windows) that frame what is happening and in which the characters enter and leave. There are small plots that are comical, erotic, sadly romantic, spicy, apparently funny (from his position as a confirmed bachelor) marital disagreements... all of this as Jeff's gaze interprets and simplifies what is happening on the other side of the windows.

Jeff maintains a romantic relationship with Lisa, a young woman from high society, sophisticated, beautiful, wealthy, intelligent, friendly and in love...everything a man could want...except what Jeff is looking for: a little adventure, a less conventional spirit, an older ability to adapt to the realities of hard life outside the bubble of the New York gentry.

Jeff tells the nurse who visits him daily, the realistic and pragmatic Stella (who, between surprised and distrustful, always tries to instill some common sense in him because...she smells trouble), that he may have to break off his relationship with Lisa, before her demand for greater commitment in the relationship, and the unaffordable difference between their interests and ways of life.

When Lisa arrives at her apartment at dusk, we see a young woman in love trying to smooth over rough edges, mitigate Jeff's irritability, and put an end to his coldness and resistance by kissing him passionately. Jeff's behavior is reminiscent of Cary Grant in Notorious (even the famous, long, and equally awkward kiss on the hotel terrace).

As soon as Lisa disappears from the apartment, Jeff returns to what has become his favorite entertainment. But there are two things that break the placid contemplation of the lives of his neighbors: on the one hand, one of those little movies that he enjoys so much seems to be about a murder story, and on the other hand...Jeff begins to become obsessed with what he sees and to question himself and the ethics of his behavior.

There is another thing that he also does not know, although Lisa hints it to him on one occasion: he is not aware that Hitchcock is showing him to us through that other little indiscreet window that is the movie screen, and also in the much more sophisticated cinema of the 50s: with sound that captures the dialogues, camera movements that capture the characters from all sides and follow them everywhere without them being able to escape (well, Jeff can't move too much, and unfortunately for him he can't escape nowhere), close-ups that reveal the most unforgivable thoughts...

Then there are us, the viewers, apparently safe in our private, non-broadcast lives... although the stories that Hitchcock tells us in his film, and the interest in spying on them, do not stop reflecting ourselves. Naturally our excuse is that...what we see is cinema, a fiction, and those characters do not really exist, those intimacies are invented. But... is that really an excuse? Is it an excuse not to look away from images of moments of special intimacy? A sexual encounter? A suicide attempt? Is the repugnant behavior of a murderer an excuse for precisely those moments to be the ones that interest us the most?

Naturally the film is very loosely based on a short novel by Cornell Woolrich, and the script is by John Michael Hayes (one of his four scripts for Hitchcock in the 1950s), to whom of course we must largely attribute not only the dialogues but also the development of the plot and the characters. But we cannot doubt Hitchcock's personal involvement in the approach and development of the themes and plot, in such a way that they served to capture moral, personal and cinematographic concerns that are obviously his and his alone.

In the script there are of course a couple of scenes in which the verisimilitude may be blown up (as in so many great scenes in so many Hitchcock films, including the small plane in North by Northwest): at the moment of greatest danger For Lisa, Jeff can do more than just call the police, just shout for help and the neighborhood will come out to their windows. But Hitchcock shoots the scene as if he wanted to show us Jeff as just another film viewer, vulnerable in that he is unable to alter what happens on the screen, forced to accept and suffer what is shown to him "on the other side."

Beyond the very interesting questions that the film raises, we are faced with one of the greatest examples of Hitchcock's mastery as a cinematographic narrator, one of his most refined and experimental exercises, with some certainly surprising and risky solutions (for example that initial panoramic that runs through from side to side the patio to end up inside Jeff's apartment, which is repeated almost exactly below).

The leading trio (Stewart as Jeff, Kelly as Lisa and Ritter as Stella) is unforgettable; the characters have an overwhelming humanity; their behaviors and dialogues are seasoned with an exquisite sense of humor that is absolutely natural; the set is extraordinary and really fun; the music of Franz Waxman as brilliant as in the rest of Hitchcock's masterpieces (for whom, by the way, he composed the unforgettable melody of Rebecca... in the antipodes of the music of Rear Window); and an aura of unsolved mystery that is realized in Ritter's final look directly at the camera: what is buried under the flowers?

The Beast (2023)

When the Inland Empire is contaminated by artificial intelligence, you may end up being little more than a replicant

[6/10 · 20 April 2024]

With RKO's horror films, Van Lewton, discovered a new cinematic terror, darkness, what you can't see. Now artificial intelligence, the metaverse, can create a reality that stalks you in an empty space, the invented reality, which can be an advertisement in which you end up hit by an invisible car or an acting test for a film in which you defend yourself with a knife from you really don't know what. Or it is a reality manufactured to satisfy our dreams, to erase misfortunes, to disguise that "other" reality in which our expectations are not met.

A world in which the objective is not to suffer, not to desire, to achieve an emotionally stabilized, more productive life, without error in decisions; a world where emotions are better left for dreams and that creates past lives tailored to your dreams, lives in which what goes wrong can always be eliminated, reworked into a better dream. A world in which the proof that you do not exist is that you have no digital footprint on the internet (well, this is no longer science fiction).

The protagonist is a pianist from the beginning of the 20th century who does not dare to abandon her husband and start a relationship with the man she has fallen in love with, because she has the feeling that a strange misfortune will destroy her or her lover if she does (again as in the RKO Cat People classic).

She is an aspiring actress model at the beginning of the 21st century, strangely incapable of maintaining the romantic relationship she needs, who makes a living taking care of other people's homes, just now a very luxurious one), in a world in which, once again, she finds herself, surprisingly, with the same man she always falls in love with, now another young man unable to dare to maintain a relationship.

Time and time again things seem to put love within reach, but for whatever reason, those realities end up being somewhat tricky, and readjust themselves until tragedy always arrives.

The protagonist is also (especially?) the young woman of a future with empty streets, advised by artificial intelligence, whose friends are robot dolls, and who wears virtual reality glasses. This young woman is dissatisfied with her job, unable to promote to a better one for being too human, and does not know whether to opt for an erasure of her past lives and eliminate traumatic experiences, at the risk of... ceasing to be herself. She is a young woman for whom that ataraxia is not really atractive, who does not want to renounce to imperfectly authentic emotions, and in that world of the future...there is that nightclub that dresses up in a different decade style every night, and where she surprisingly finds again the young man with whom she is obsessed.

La Bete is clearly indebted to the universe of David Lynch, especially Inland Empire and its matryoshka game (dolls within dolls, realities within realities), although now explained for all audiences and with a bath of conventionality, without the background, authenticity nor the infinite number of interpretations of Lynch (and certainly without his poetry), a safer and less authentically unsettling territory. We also get the awakening of Mulholland Drive, Roy Orbison's songs as in Blue Velvet, and even Laura Palmer's final scream.

There is also something of the existential terror of Blade Runner (or Do Androids dream of electric sheep?) and we could continue with many other borrowings.

But the truth is that these three hours fly by and keep you continually intrigued in a plot that never gets lost in ramblings and that likes to tie up all the ends. An intelligent science fiction film, with a very attractive and careful aesthetic, and which benefits from the magnificent performance of Léa Seydoux.

India Song (1975)

Bloodless, ultra-sophisticated, languid and artificial, another frighteningly exquisite version of Anne-Marie Stretter's story.

[7/10 · 16 April 2024]

Once again Duras uses what she considers her great discovery in La femme du Gange, the timeless voices that comment with a certain independence on what is shown in the images.

Again Duras and her favorite characters: Anna-Marie Stretter, the vice consul, Michael Richardson, Lola V Stein...

Once again, a past story that comes to life before our eyes, told in a somewhat convoluted way, with jumps back and forth, with insistence on the same episodes, as in memories, but which becomes difficult to follow in all its implications if you do not know previously this little world created by Duras.

Now we have Anne-Marie Stretter back in Calcutta, to the palace of her ambassador husband, dragging behind her that Michael Richardson who has abandoned Lola Valerie Stein in S Thala. Back in Calcutta, Anna continues to lead a promiscuous life in total agreement with her husband, and now with a more or less official lover, Michael Richardson. During a reception, she is introduced to the outlawed former consul in Lahore.

Again the voices narrating, although not exactly, what we see in the images. In this case Duras creates a more complex soundtrack, a mix of timeless voices, the leprous beggar from Savannakhet, society voices at a reception for the ambassador, the author herself in dialogue, and finally the dialogues of the characters themselves that we see dancing without moving their lips...

The images show an essential illustration, sometimes reduced to its fundamental gestures, and languidly dedramatized, a kind of setting in style of what we are told, completely devoid of blood, in endless dances, glances at the voice-over space, or pantomimes of some especially important scenes.

Most of it takes place during a reception for the ambassador, Anna Marie's husband, but what we see in the images is an idealized recreation, where the environment disappears and only remain the disembodied voices of the attendees and a small space of a room, duplicated by a huge wall mirror and overlooking the terrace.

The characters wander through it, dancing while their off-screen voices slowly pronounce their dialogues, while the characters we see refuse us those dialogues on their lips and only contextualize them in glances. It is a past that is shown to us as the images that summarize it in our memory or dreams.

Delphine Seyring is magnificent and beautiful as the focus of attention, the dissatisfied and capricious woman who attracts all the men around her. To announce her story as a woman subjected to various systems of oppression, it seems to us that she enjoys quite a few freedoms, if she simply decided to make a decision. Delphine looks wistfully out the window of the luxurious hotel, aware of life out there, and of life in her Venice past, but unable to break her bonds. Leprosy...

Michael Lonsdale as the former vice-consul, deeply ridiculous, with teary eyes, avoided by everyone because of a previous scandal in Lahore, in love with the protagonist and feared by her as if it were a Jack the Ripper in a tuxedo. He has to pronounce phrases like "Lahore, c'est moi", which is not easy for him either. This self-destructive and crazed guy proposes to Anne-Marie a scandal during the evening, which seems to be the only thing that can breathe some life and passion into this environment of mannequins.

We are not very sure of the authenticity of the love between Michael and Anne-Marie, of course Michael likes to caress Anne's red hair, which we know is a wig, but something must not be going very well, it definitely tastes too little for both of them. , and we learn that they have tried to commit suicide before in a brothel room.

Mathieu Carrière is another young man who seems to want to join Anna's list of lovers. All we can say about him is that he is a awfully bad dancer.

After the disastrous reception, we have Anna in her red party dress, reclining in a chair and surrounded by her lovers in their evening tuxedos. All of enormous theatricality while Duras tells us about the lady's destiny, her trip to the islands, the flora, fauna, landscape and population of the area, generally answering a man's questions in a strange dialogue in which sometimes it seems that Duras is guiding him through a story and images that she creates little by little, answering his questions... until in the end the man seems capable of accompanying Duras in continuing to tell the story.

In the next scene we have Anna arriving with her boys at the "White India" Hotel, the Prince of Wales. We see her walking down the luxurious hallway with a distant smile. And the ex consul appears again.

In the last scene, the characters seem tired of their erotic stories, and their menage-a-trois, and decide to end the situation.

The tone is desperately and exquisitely kitsch, of a sought-after artificiality, of great formal beauty that is somewhat repugnant. Technically it is much more sophisticated than the more authentic La femme du Gange; the images here revel in the luxurious interiors, in the texture of the dresses and curtains, in the beauty of the nights in the gardens surrounding the ambassador's palace, the sophisticated interiors of luxury hotels, in the body of Anne-Marie Stretter languid with desire, dissatisfaction and heat.

The voices, as always, remember or discover the story with their Oui, cest ca, je me rappelle... the usual taglines of Duras' recitations.

The music alternates the danceable India Song with a very languide playing of one of Beethoven's Diabelli variations.

Another emotional zombie film, with a suffocating luxury atmosphere, of a small group of privileged people obsessed with their navel, and enjoying without enjoying their rich people's paradise, while out there it is 1937, the war continues in China, Shanghai bombed, the Spanish civil war, the Nuremberg Congress... the voice of the beggar from Savannakhet.

The film can seem laughable and ridiculous or fascinating, or at times one thing and the other, or both at the same time. But we cannot deny that it is one of Duras's most notable works, within her very special conception of narrative. Based on a play that was never performed.

Woman of the Ganges (1974)

One of Duras best efforts. For once a really fascinating retelling of her usual story. Great Catherine Sellers.

[8/10 · 16 April 2024]

We already have Duras in an environment that will be common in others of her films, the beaches of the Normandy coast, the row of fin de siècle hotels. There are also other common themes in her films: the melodramatic story of lost loves, abandoned young girls, a dance in the invented spa town of S Thala, bicycles abandoned in tennis clubs, nostalgia, broken lives, a lot of mention of the memory...

It begins with two little voices whispering something about past loves, about a man who revisits the untraceable city of S Thala where an ephemeral love relationship developed. And we see a man heading to a lonely coastal hotel out of season. A lady dressed in an elegant black fur coat sees him arrive, as do two young men (one of them Gerard Depardieu). There is another melancholic young woman, also in a fur coat, who likes to spend time sitting on the sand with her gaze lost.

Duras talks about how they are two independent films, one with images and the other with dialogue, that the two young women who dialogue do not appear in the images, and that the characters who appear in the images do not know the young women who dialogue.

This is as disconcerting and objectionable as everything else in this film, and if the author intended it, it must be recognized that she makes every effort to make it difficult for the viewer to dissociate the two stories.

To begin with, because there is an obvious relationship between the images and the dialogue: the young women often faithfully describe the places, the characters and the looks between the characters in the images; The voices refer to the beach wanderers as beings who have lost their memories (or who remember memories that are outside, that are not theirs), something that these same wanderers affirm at the end of the film; They also speak of S Thala as the place where the hotel is, and both the wanderers and the traveler refer to the space of the images as S Thala (even the traveler in the letter to the wife). The voices refer to Richardson as the traitor lover who reappears in the story to remember past loves, and Gerard Depardieu addresses the salesman as Richardson.

The lady in the black fur coat hums an old song (which we will later learn that she does not know), typical of the years of the old love story. It is India Song, the same song that is hummed in the first images of the film, as soon as the traveler approaches the hotel. And then we hear it on the piano, the song that Richardson played in S Thala, the voices tell us.

While the voices recall the dance in which Richardson betrays the young woman by dancing with the woman who comes from the Ganges, we see Depardieu in a trance dancing that old melody and Sellers watching him desperately.

There is therefore an undeniable relationship, although the traveler may not be Richardson, nor may the wanderers be the protagonists of that past story that is the object of the dialogue between the voices, nor possibly do the images show us S Thala but another spa city (a sign at the entrance of the hotel refers to Deauville).

To make matters worse, halfway through the film the lady in black (Catherine Sellers) appears in an elegant red suit and begins to behave like the abandoned wife who has come with her two children to confront her husband. The traveler's wife, or the wife of Michael Richardson? And meanwhile the fire engine sirens go by because there seems to be a fire in the vicinity (caused by the wanderers to expel the wife and children?)

When it seems to us that we have unraveled something from these two stories, everything remains very simple: voices that refer to a love betrayed in S Thala many years ago, disembodied voices that we do not see and that we do not even believe are in S Thala , voices that apparently observe, as if enchanted, the wandering of some characters along the beach and the hotel of a Normandy spa town in the low season; while, in the images, the traveler who goes to that hotel to remember his loves (Michael Richardson or another man who also remembers other loves for an equally lost woman, who we only see in photographs) and gets away from his family, is stalked by wandering beings who have lost their memory and recovered an impersonal memory, memories of other people in other places, memories of that ancient couple to which the voices refer. The traveler himself, if not Michael Richardson, seems to fall into the spell by merging the memories of his own lost love, with the lost memories of that love in S Thala, and will respond like Michael Richardson to the greeting of the lady in the black coat who seems inhabit the memories of the abandoned young woman.

And it turns out that everything is part of a common imaginary in the work of Marguerite Duras, that this ball is a mythical moment in her work, narrated over and over again in her works, that Anne-Marie Stretter, Lola Valerie Stein, Michael Richardson are recurring characters, and that S Thala is her own invented setting for her novels, now a place of memories, a mental space in which the voices and characters of the images are lost, enchanted.

The dialogue of the voices develops in a languor that at times can be comical in its mannerisms. Duras has always liked those sweet voices, but they have never been as moving as Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima, mon amour. Here we have the magnificent Lebrun (La maman et la putain) and the unknown and almost catatonic Nicole Hiss who is sometimes almost an extreme parody of the Duras style of recitation, with her Oui? Je me rapelle...

The images of the beaches of Normandy and its abandoned hotels and spas, of some lost characters wandering on the shores, the slow pace, the general confusion until we can connect some ends, the presence of Catherine Sellers, the ingenious use of two overlapping narratives , make us forget the melodramatic nature and the almost non-existent content, and make this film possibly the most attractive of Duras' work.

But it is true that the film depends too much on the entire mythical world that Duras creates in part of his work, on his melodramatic love stories, on the knowledge of the world invented in the rest of his work.

For such a personal work, Duras collaborates with her husband (Dyonis Mascolo, who plays the traveler) and her son (who signs the cinematography). Furthermore, another of her regulars, Carlos d'Alessio, composed the song India song, which has fortune afterwards and Jeanne Moreau sung unforgettably.

For once an experiment that fascinates, bores, exasperates, surprises, but in the end is overall very attractive and unforgettable. Highest recommendation to start with this author's work, if you think it necessary.

I, You, He, She (1974)

Experimental, innovative, absurdist, superficial, coherently boring.

[7/10 · 13 April 2024]

Four pronouns, three parts, two types of narration (the one we hear and the one we see) in a single provocatively minimalist film.

The first-person narration we hear would be the Je, the images of Je that we see in response to the narration would be the Tu. Il and Elle would be the two sexual relationships that Je maintains in the second and third parts of the film.

The first part shows an interest in confronting two modes of narration, auditory and visual, exposing curious discrepancies. Akerman seems as if she wants to show the inherent discrepancies between the subjectivity and the needs of recited verbalization and those of cinematic visual narration.

There is a sense of necessity, of complete justification in the minimalist artistic approach adopted, totally in agreement with the content. And the innovative and experimental nature is beyond doubt.

Another thing is whether these contents convince us or not. The truth is that it is enormously difficult to interpret what we are seeing, or the implications that the director wants to assign to them.

For example, in that first part, we do not understand the behavior of the protagonist (Je, and even more Tu), and there does not seem to be an attempt to justify it in any way (depression, existential crisis or any of those things). She is simply a young woman who seems idle and bored and who at some point casts an intelligent and knowing look at the camera. Like the rest of the characters that will appear, she does not earn our sympathy nor does she intend to, rather she seems to convey a proud superficiality that makes us uncomfortable. The girl tells us that she has not left her room for almost a month, feeding exclusively on sugar, but misteriously maintaining her full physical condition. We see her nonchalantly writing some letters while she puts the spoon full of sugar in her mouth again and again. The most we can say is that Chantal Akerman has no idea what it is to paint a flat, or the nutritional needs of a person. At a certain moment it snows (by the way, Akerman doesn't pay much attention to these technical aspects...), but the girl walks around the room naked without the slightest shivering.

The second part begins with the girl who finally decides to leave home to visit a girlfriend. While hitchhiking, she is picked up by a truck driver with whom she begins to become sexually intimate, although there is hardly the slightest conversation between them. We see them eat together in a restaurant while watching television, or have a beer without starting any conversation. But in any case, the young woman feels attracted to the boy enough to masturbate him and then listen to his confidences regarding his family relationships and his increasingly uncomfortable sexual obsessions.

The third part begins when the girl arrives at her destination, her friend's house. Once again the meeting turns out to be cold and the behavior of the two young women capricious. If there are tensions between them, they seem as emotionally superficial as their desires, and entirely physical. Little by little they dedicate themselves to a silent mutual seduction, and (as we think should usually happen to them), after the apparent initial irritation, they smooth things over and end up sleeping together. The sex scene is a mixture of Greco-Latin wrestling, display of sexual positions and artistic recreations of unknown ancient marble groups in motion.

As insubstantial as in everything else, the next morning, the young woman gets out of bed and abandons her friend without even the slightest comment, we understand that to spend another month eating sugar in her room.

An inmensely interesting film, disruptive in showing the artistic posibilities of radical minimalism in plot and style, experimental in its rhythm and innovative in some of its themes, to show us an attitude towards life that does not seem to go beyond a very basic and inconsequential hedonism.

The young director seems here to be playfully in accordance with this attitude towards life.

N. Took the Dice (1972)

Some impresive beautiful images, a companion piece to L'Eden et après

[6/10 · 27 March 2024]

Robbe-Grillet chooses a character, N from Nemo or the narrator..., to play with the material shot between Tunisia and Paris for the film L'eden et après.

N plays dice and invents his story with each roll.

The material ranges from beautiful images of the Tunisian coast to the usual female nudes in repulsively tortured poses.

The intention is first of all to disconcert, but some scenes are ridiculously comical (that funeral, those seventies dances at the Mondrian café...). It is a problem shared with L'Eden et après, with other works by Robbe-Grillet and with many films (especially French) of the 70s.

Obviously there is a lot of eroticism, sometimes downright unhealthy, and the beautiful Catherine Jourdan once again walks around in a trance or writhes in terror, dressed mainly from knees to toes and occasionally soaked.

Everything seems to be based on the appeal of images that have a vague narrative load, but without ever becoming part of a coherent story, or being able to start saying the opposite of what we imagine, the interest of scenes that at most mean in themselves, without ever being able to definitively fix them in a context.

Everything has a tone of play, of intelligent mockery, has frequently an undeniable beauty and is a very interesting curiosity to accompany the viewing of L'Eden et après.

Memories of Murder (2003)

a comedy about a tragedy that turns into a tragedy about not being able to stop a criminal

[7/10 · 27 March 2024]

It begins as an unacceptable crazy comedy that seems to take the horrible crimes of a serial killer as a joke, as well as the unacceptable police routines, which mix the most absolute ineptitude with the most repugnant corruption, all seasoned with habitual torture of the most defenseless suspects.

With the arrival of a new detective from Seoul, the film takes on an increasingly tense, desolate and desperate character. The responsible Seo Tae-yoon and the scoundrel Park Doo-man evolve throughout the film, and while the latter becomes aware of the responsibility of his position and the impact of his decisions, the former gradually wears down his initial ethics in the face of impossibility of resolving the case through the usual means.

Visually the film is very careful, and there are absolutely extraordinary scenes. The pace is slow, but never loses interest. The transition from the comic to the dramatic, from the bizarre to the desperate is very graduated and accomplished. The actors, especially Song Kang-ho, are magnificent.

Regardless of the director's intention, who in the most inadmissibly comic moments clearly intends to outrage and scandalize us, the film can offend, especially due to the treatment given to mental disabilities, torture and murdered young women.

It appears to be based on South Korea's first serial killer.

It's hard to believe that the director who gave us this magnificent film, and the amazing Parasite, could also have directed the impossible Snowpiercer.

The Seventh Victim (1943)

Very interesting but finally minor Lewton effort for RKO

[6/10 · 27 March 2024]

Curious horror film by Val Lewton for RKO, again as if two films at two differetn levels were superimposed, although on this occasion it is not as well resolved as on other Lweton masterpieces.

On the one hand, we have the horror film of the sweet young woman who puts herself in danger to discover what could have happened to her mysterious sister. The search makes her meet a series of sinister characters who threaten her and other people who try to help her, among them some attractive young man with whom she will fall in love. In the end the girl has to face a sinister criminal organization, in this case a satanic lodge a la Rosemary's baby.

On the other hand, there are surprising deviations from this hackneyed scheme:

The young girl is able to force a man to face an unknown terror and abandon him when he returns mortally wounded.

The sister is chronically dissatisfied, searching for some transcendent happiness and has a rope ready to hang herself if one of her existential crises comes.

The young girl's love interest turns out to be her sister's husband, which, however, does not seem to pose too many ethical problems for any of them.

The satanic sect is a group of crazy people who advocate evil but nevertheless maintain the principle of no violence. Satanic sect could be replaced by any particularity not socially accepted.

The problem is that these peculiarities, in a 70-minute film crammed with plot, remain unexplored at best, purely tangential without really interweaving into the horror story (except perhaps the plot of the dissatisfied sister); and most of the scenes are shot on autopilot, a matter of fact style focused on advancing the plot, visually unappealing. The elimination of several scenes from the script could have been fatal, since some of them developed these more original aspects.

The authors focus on giving more prominence to certain scenes that visually recall the great moments of Cat People, disguising or hiding the source of horror in the dark or behind a shower curtain.

A very estimable and highly interesting film, which with a little more care could have resulted in a great film.

Sonámbulos (1978)

In the 70s when they wanted to be pedantic...they could indeed be so!

[3/10 · 24 March 2024]

Political militancy disguised as fairy tales in a film full of symbols and allegories.

With the 70s came openness and intellectual aspirations to Spanish cinema. Directors were now committed left-wing authors and, mainly under the production of Elías Querejeta, and with the direction of Erice or Saura, some of the great masterpieces of Spanish cinema emerged.

But in a world of intellectual pretensions, obsessed with new European currents, much of that cinema is of a pedantry and stupidity that causes blushing and stupor.

At the head of this delirious current we can put this Sleepwalkers by Gutiérrez Aragón.

Ana Belén participated in many of these messes. Her acting abilities are not exceptional, her declamatory voice has a theatrical whiff, but her presence is interesting.

The film has an interesting beginning: left-wing groups demonstrate in front of the security forces resisting the last blows of the dictatorship, and a young woman who works at the National Library begins to suffer headaches.

The headaches are the beginning of a serious neuronal disease and her uncle, a doctor incapacitated by the regime who is now dedicated to staging Strindberg (in English!), and who we are not sure why he lives with Ana's mother, makes a kind of Mephistophelian proposition to the young woman. Ana and her son go to live with her mother and uncle.

Everything begins to become very allegorical and symbolic: the death sentence of the protagonist is identified with the death sentences of the dictatorship, and even eating a plate of lentils seems to mean something else.

Gutiérrez Aragón obviously likes fantasy and theater. There is a book that seems to reproduce personal and political history in a fairy tale style. There is a key that opens the drawer of surprises, and a moon cabinet where the queen and the wizard keep their artifacts. But all this with a more picturesque than functional character.

A maid appears, played by Lola Gaos, who we are told was a sinister former lover of Ana's father, and the characters suddenly begin to drop phrases from Strindberg's Ghost Sonata in home conversations. Now Strindberg's somnambulant drama seems to serve as a reflection of Ana's family.

The dialogues are increasingly absurd and pompous. The book that seems to hold the key to Ana's survival disappears. And since the cinema of the time had to be daring and show adult content, these films abound in deliriously scandalous situations: here, of course, Ana has been repressing her sexual desire for many years, and in a scene that is hilariously absurd and disgusting at the same time, the guy and the maid decide to return her sexual desire.

In other disastrous scenes, Ana suffers persecution and mistreatment by the military apparatus and officials of the dictatorship, who are also searching for the book and the key.

The most interesting moments take place during Miguel Narros' performance of Strindberg.

Sleepwalkers was filmed after the death of the dictator in a difficult time of searching for a social pact, a transition to a stable democracy, resignations and concessions everywhere. Clearly there are intellectuals who did not agree.

The director, however, was more virulent and less cryptic in his attacks on the extreme right in his previous film Black Lime.

A Gentle Woman (1969)

Probably Bresson's best film?

[10/10 · 24 March 2024]

Bresson is one of the great artists of cinema. Une femme douce a masterpiece and probably his most satisfying film.

Une femme douce is enigmatic, subtle, full of ellipses and misunderstandings. It is a moving analysis of the loneliness of a marriage and the unsatisfactory human condition: on the one hand there is blindness to reality, and on the other the intuition of a need and an impossibility to transcend that artificial reality that we construct for ourselves.

The characters are locked in a life of sufficient economic relief, in a complacent conformity that suffocates the young woman. The film narrates this chronic dissatisfaction with a life that is reduced to systematically improving material conditions.

Without stridency, without effects, with profound humility, Bresson's style was never more suitable, never more static and transcendent than in this film of two solitary beings: a man locked in his own prison and a woman caged in the golden cage of economic security.

The first scene shows us the girl's suicide in a static and unforgettable shot: the table that seems to collapse eternally on the balcony indicates that the girl has just jumped into the void and at the same time gives the sensation of an unfinished action, which It seems to stop in time.

Next the husband remembers before the corpse how he met her, fell in love with her, and saved/bought her.

The girl has had a past of economic hardship, of squalor; the boy has had a setback that has taught him how fragile prosperity is.

There is something of a hunted and trapped beast in Sanda's gaze. From there everything is mystery and conjecture in the marriage relationship.

Une femme douce is the great leap in Bresson's style towards his final maturity, that of works in color. Afterwards there will be no substantial purges.

I only have one scene left over: that awful representation of Hamlet, with its subsequent commentary, seems like a declaration of principles, an aesthetic creed enunciated without any elegance. An incomprehensible beginner's mistake in an author in full maturity.

The Zone of Interest (2023)

A small paradise built with its back turned, looking straight ahead and taking advantage of the horror.

[7/10 · 6 February 2024]

Hedwig and Rudolf Höss are a couple of humble origins. Rudolf is promoted as head of a facility and moves with his family to a place in Eastern Europe. Little by little Hedwig has managed to create a small paradise in her new home, with beautiful gardens and even a swimming pool with a slide.

The marriage relationship seems idyllic and both take care of the education of their beautiful and healthy offspring.

The husband's work allows the family a comfortable standard of living, to which they were not accustomed, they even receive numerous gifts.

But the relationship between Hedwig and Rudolf faces a separation: Rudolf has been appointed to a new position to manage the company's new expansions to the east, and Hedwig does not want to leave home. The marriage faces a painful separation.

While this crisis is occurring, Hedwig's mother comes to pay them a visit and is amazed: she would never have imagined that her daughter could live like this. She has won the lottery!

The lottery for this family: Auschwitz.

But Auschwitz has another side beyond the walls, although it does not seem to affect everyone in the same way. At night you hear screams, there is a continuous flame that lights up the sky and the clothes hanging in the garden get dirty with ashes. Bathing in the river is now not as healthy as on the first idyllic excursion. Rudolf certainly has an upset stomach.

Hedwig doesn't seem to care what happens beyond the walls, and the children assimilate reality in a somewhat chilling way; but the baby doesn't stop crying and the grandmother finds the home environment unbearable at night.

At night, while the father tells children's stories to the children, images of another reality sneak in, in negative: a young local girl secretly goes out to place apples in the work areas.

The Zone of Interest is a film with an original and very interesting approach (I don't know if it comes from the novel or was devised by the director). We have seen many films about concentration camps, mostly focused on showing the horror inside the walls. We have seen movies about what was happening outside the walls, but in the distance: and what did the people think of all this? The people ignorant of the final solution? Were the military as they tell us simply carrying out orders from the Nazi elites?

Of course there were always the elites, what were those elites like? We have seen in movies degenerate monsters with aberrant sexual behavior, criminal psychopaths, and mad dogs. In some cases based directly on real Nazis. And it is clear to us, they are monstrous exceptions to what we would call the human condition.

The Zone of Interest is based on the historical figure of Rudolf Höss and is original in that the Höss family believe they lead a normal life, they believe they are normal people, they behave formally outside the walls like normal people. They do not abuse their children, they do not have clearly unhealthy gestures: they talk, they laugh, they take care of the garden, they educate their children, they gossip, they celebrate their birthdays... they are authoritarian and classist, but in general no more than so many rich people who believe they can do whatever they like with their subordinates. But in moments of tension they may explicitly use the threat of death, or sexually abuse a defenseless young woman.

The film surely avoids the darker side of Höss, but it wants to show the normalization of the monstrous from normality.

The film presents three attitudes towards horror: the brave and merciful people who risked their lives trying to help the victims; the people aware of the existence of concentration camps for those other people they have been told are just criminals, but who never imagined the horror of extermination (a relatively merciful solution for the German people) and who are helplessly horrified by the discovery; and the selfish careerism that only thinks about profiting no matter what, accessing a standard of living that would be unthinkable in other circumstances, being productive even if it is in massacring if with it you get recognition from your superiors, adapting with apparent success their moral principles to the new situation and enjoy the years that are presented to them as prosperous.

The aesthetics adjust to this ordered and sanitized world surrounding horror, almost always adopting Hedwig's vision. I was lucky enough to see the film without knowing absolutely nothing about it, and this is how the director's trick in the first scenes can be interesting: we start from an idyllic excursion to the river, from the arrival at the beautiful house with a pool, and we only contextualize that paradise when in reverse shot, the walls and chimneys appear in the background. The images are methodical, cold, balanced and functional like Hedwig's hard-working and unemotional personality.

At the end of the film there is a temporary break and a scene sneaks in in which a routine is again shown in the face of the horrors of the past. Some employees are dedicated to cleaning some facilities, and we impassively continue their cloth and mop tasks, each time with more explicit images of the extermination. They walk among the ovens, cleaning the windows behind which the clothes and belongings of the thousands of victims are piled up. These are the dangers of routine exposure to horror. It may seem in bad taste to include these images in this context, but it would be absurd to infer that the director intends to assimilate, or simply relate, the criminal normalization of Nazi society with the supposed trivialization or apparent insensitivity of the employees who daily have to expose themselves to those images of horrors to carry out the necessary cleaning tasks in a place that has become a World Heritage Site, or incidentally the trivialization of the thousands of tourists who visit these monuments of suffering that precisely try to preserve the memory of so many horrors.

There are certainly scenes that break the tone, that are unnecessary, generally since Ludwig takes charge of his new duties in the east and is absent from the family home. Meetings of high military commanders take place, balls of the highest Nazi leadership... Although criminal trivialization is once again insisted upon, there is a change of scale that makes the film lose strength and enter more well-trodden terrain. We were more interested in Hedwig's optics than Ludwig's optics.

Overall, a very interesting film, which is built scene after scene, full of nuances, which avoids the direct impact of showing horror and proposes less obvious, but no less chilling, approaches.

North by Northwest (1959)

Hitchcock's World: Glamor and elegance have never been so spectacular, exciting and moving

[10/10 · 19 January 2024]

North by Northwest is a maximum exponent of a way of filmmaking, of a type of film that can never be made again, that creates a world of emotion that more than simple escapism enriches our lives. A planet where you can reach north by northwest is Hithcoks's planet. It is a planet that can reveal our world, but that turns out to be substantially different, decanted, filtered, intensified by the most exquisite art, and as a result everything is more impressive, there is more color, more emotion, more rhythm.

Our visual range is fuller of simultaneous information, the different visual planes of the image interact generating more tension, infinite details are revealed to us, gestures are more expressive without being deliberate, more plastic without being affected.

In this world, strong emotions sneak in, like in our dreams, into the most anodyne of our routines: a man can be kidnapped when he responds to a notice addressed to another person in a hotel restaurant; you meet murderers in a crowded elevator and a few minutes later without knowing how, you are holding a dagger stuck in the back of a man you have just met; there are mysterious appointments in the middle of spectacular and lonely rural landscapes, and when you least expect it you are chased and shot down by crop dusters.

With our hearts in our fist we see how a man has to climb a stone wall to the room of the woman he is in love with to warn her that her life is threatened, and he has to be quick because at the same time we see the girl up there, through the windows, in the illuminated room, finishing packing her suitcase and we know that as soon as she finishes that task she is going to leave the room and irrevocably hand herself over to her murderers.

The emotional level and the situations in which life puts you are a couple of degrees above normal. You may have to try to kill the person you are falling in love with (and fall even more in love because you have no choice but to kill him) or fall in love with a person who you know is going to try to kill you again without you being able to understand why.

In this world, a love scene is accompanied by a beautiful violin melody by Bernard Hermmann and a vibrant percussion fanfare accompanies you as you flee descending Mount Rushmore.

Like other Hitchcock films, it is a film in which many exceptional talents come together but is dominated by the magical trio formed by the director and his two stars: in this case Hitchcock, Grant and Eva Marie Saint. It is a glamorous formula that already worked in Spellbound, much more so in Notorious and Vertigo, and that will be a failure in Torn Courtain.

The film is unimaginable without its two protagonists. Eva Marie Saint is possibly Hitchcock's definitive sophisticated blonde, with all the haut couture beauty of Grace Kelly but giving her character much more flesh and weight, and the ability to reflect complex emotions. She brings that plus of being an absolutely exceptional woman, not simply an American socialite. And of course the hairstyle of that blonde hair is not to be forgotten.

Grant represents what comes after 30 years of being an absolute star. His personality, his natural elegance is striking even in the way he looks at his watch. The expressive adjustment to achieve the ideal effect to awaken in the viewer the exact emotion that the scene requires. Again a perfect balance between the glamour of the star and the emotional capacity to build an unforgettable character. And naturally the suit helps.

Hitchcock populates his world with many other fascinating people: James Mason, Jessy Royce-Landis above all, or the menacing Martin Landau.

The locations are wonderful (in this case even the reconstructed ones): exquisite hotel lobbies, crowded New York streets at rush hour; the bustling Grand Central Terminal that contrasts with the silent and desolate plain of cornfields and straight roads that stretch to the horizon, where you can barely hear an infrequent bus or a small plane spraying in the distance; Mount Rushmore that we will be allowed to visit in ways we could never have dreamed of; the modernist house on the cliff that allows you to see through its enormous windows the exciting plots that unfold inside, or the classic and luxurious country mansion that surprisingly serves as a temporary refuge for a gang of criminals; and of course the 20th Century Limited express, in whose limited spaces the protagonist has the opportunity to fall in love with a mysterious and fascinating woman while managing to hide from the police.

The "plot holes", which there are and many, would be considered so in our routine world, on Planet Hitchcock they are justifiable and even necessary poetic licenses, that is, they serve to increase the visual or emotional impact of the scenes or streamline the plot. The plot could develop without them, but the scenes would be much more bland or too many boring explanations would be needed.

This plot does not stop insisting on many classic themes of Hitchcock's films, and is basically a kind of Notorious revisited (although in North by Northwest the viewer identifies mainly with Grant, and in Notorious with Bergman), but preserving its intimate side, it now gives rise to a great show of totally new dimensions.

A miracle of a film.

The Turin Horse (2011)

Absolute desolation has rarely looked so beautiful.

[10/10 · 15 January 2024]

The Turin Horse begins with a voice-over telling us a sad anecdote from the philosopher Nietzsche, which in a way introduces many aspects of the film. Who that voice-over is is a mystery, given that even more surprisingly, it closes the film.

But the use of the anecdote, like the two subsequent comments that are inserted around the existence of God, the suffering of man and the presence of evil in the world, seems to me to be intentionally ambiguous.

With or without anecdote, everything takes on metaphysical dimensions: a father and daughter surviving in a lonely house surrounded by absolute nothingness. A humanity subjected to increasingly harsh and desperate conditions. A humanity without art, without creativity, without illusions, without aspirations.

The two protagonists have only what is absolutely essential and use all their skill acquired by tirelessly repeating the same essential tasks day after day, to overcome the challenge that is this survival routine. The most fascinating thing is how Tarr's camera follows these routines with the same skill and absolute knowledge, resulting in a perfect choreography of dazzling beauty.

How many rehearsals must have been necessary! The film is a succession of some of the most splendid and fascinating sequence shots in the history of cinema. An example: the father chopping wood for several minutes, the camera zooms out showing the daughter washing clothes in close-up, the camera zooms out a little further when the father gets up and approaches to tie a rope to a nail on the wall in extreme close-up, then and while the father disappears to tie the other end of the rope off-camera, the daughter finishes washing and approaches to hang the freshly washed clothes on the rope, which spread out in front of the camera covers the space of white. Well, it's Bela Tarr.

There is hardly any dialogue. This survival routine makes any verbal communication unnecessary, moving forward is only possible through perfect rapport to carry out each day's tasks. The few words are almost grunts, only necessary in the face of errors, which must be avoided; and in the face of the unexpected, and in a disappearing world, everything unexpected must necessarily be bad. As day after day passes, father and daughter witness how creation is reversed: the woodworm disappears, the horse no longer eats, there is no more water... if six days were necessary to create paradise, six days are enough to abolish this hell.

In the absence of words, the sounds of actions and utensils remain, and the noise of the deafening wind that whips the house from all sides. And the music remains: hypnotic, devastating, repeated tirelessly as a sound image of that routine of suffering and acceptance of suffering.

Aside from work, leisure time becomes seeing the father lying in bed, in a foreshortening that recalls Mantegna's Dead Christ, or sitting for hours and hours, both father and daughter, looking through the window the desolate and ominous exterior. And more and more that window becomes a cross window, but a cross window that is no longer a means to see beyond the heavenly city as in a painting by Friedrich, here beyond there is only the white of nothingness and the deafening noise of the wind sweeping the void.

The idea of filming some of the same routines each time from a different perspective (the meal of the boiled potatos), means that we also see the daughter at the window from the other side, from the outside of the house, from that emptiness that surrounds the shelter, in one of the most chilling shots of the film.

Halfway, father and daughter begin to receive enigmatic visitors, like messengers from who knows who, proclaiming the imminent destruction of the world.

First a man comes to buy brandy. And he starts talking and talking. Afterwards, a group of gypsies give the daughter a book, as payment for the water from the well that will dry up that same day.

As I said, the visitor's speech and the gypsies' text, together with the anecdote with which the film begins, seems ambiguous to me.

We cannot ensure that a universe without God is shown, a humanity alone that can decide its own fate. It is not the triumph of the man that Nietzsche was selling. We see a punished humanity, forced to learn to survive with the minimum, only to then lack that minimum and have to try again to survive with even less.

The destruction shown in the film, the visitor who comes to buy brandy tells us, is not the exclusive result, or even mainly, of the action of man: he could assure, he tells us, that there is much of the hand of God. The triumphant proclamation of "God is dead" becomes a path to ruin when man's own judgment of his own being changes, when "they" take over heaven, all dreams, even the immortality of noble, excellent and sublime men, when "these" decide not to fight and finally understand that God does not exist. When "they" buy everything and "these" disappear.

Later the gypsies give the young woman a book, and the girl slowly spells out a text that proclaims the abolition of religious rites, of the alliance between God and man, until the crimes committed in the temple (in His name?) are purged.

No, the metaphysical discourse of the film does not seem simple or easily determinable to me.

As for the actors, the three protagonists are extraordinary: the father with the face of a Moses with the crazy look not because he has seen God but because he has lost hope of seeing him; the daughter is it seems the director's favorite actress (the unforgettable girl from Satantango, who also appears in The Man from London) and competes with the horse to be the performer with the greatest ability to keep her gaze on one of Tarr's endless shots.

In short, absolute desolation has rarely looked so beautiful. Ironically for such a hopeless film, The Turin Horse is one of the few miracles that gives us hope in cinema's ability to create enduring and dazzlingly new works of art.

Hide and Seek (2005)

Kind of Lifetime film. A real cheater. The real surprise is what is De Niro doing here.

[2/10 · 7 November 2023]

Probably one of the stupidest and trickiest movies ever made. We are facing another case of the "crazy about the surprising plot twist" syndrome. The kind that poses a lot of enigmas, and then ignores them in the hope that the viewer has forgotten about them, and the assurance that no one is going to waste their time watching this rubbish a second time. One of those that present characters so uninteresting that the scriptwriters themselves have no problem changing them drastically and without any justification in the outcome of the film. The kind that has as many traps as shots.

Speaking of enigmas, the only truly surprising one is what could have made De Niro participate in such trash.

The film is slow, it does not generate tension, and if it were not for the presence of De Niro and Shue, it could be confused with a Lifetime film.

Close Your Eyes (2023)

The return of one of the great masters, with a very good and very interesting movie, even if far from his masterpieces.

[6/10 · 2 October 2023]

The film begins with a clearly symbolic shot of a sculpture of the god Janus, the god of beginnings and endings, the double-faced month that looks to the past and the future, but the film shows little future, its ambiguous ending reveals few glimpses of any beginning, and its characters are totally devoted to the past: to their memories and their losses.

It begins with a scene from the film The Goodbye Look, directed in the 90s by Miguel Garay (played brilliantly by Manolo Soto) and starring his friend, the alcoholic actor Julio Arenas (played by José Coronado) as a detective hired by the decadent Mr. Levy, with the poetic nickname Triste Roi, to find his daughter, lost in Shanghai. He wants, he says, to be able to meet his daughter's gaze before he dies, the only gaze that at this point can mean something to him. It is clear to us that both Mr. Levy and the detective are two men who have lost contact with their daughters and that they both want to get them back. As a clue to identify the young woman, Mr. Levi gives the detective a photograph of his daughter, dressed in oriental fashion.

The scene ends (and by the way like so many other scenes in the film is beautifully shot but somewhat elongated with endless dialogue), and we already have Miguel Garay, the protagonist, already attending in the 21st century (it is not very clear when the film takes place and the age and appearance of the actors is not always consistent with the available chronology) to a television set to talk about the disappearance of Julio Arenas, which took place just after finishing filming those only two scenes of the film The goodbye look that came to be filmed before the actor's disappearance canceled filming (the first with which the film begins and the last, which we will see at the end of Close Your Eyes).

So we have an actor Julio Arenas who has lost contact with his daughter (an extraordinary Ana Torrent) playing the role of the detective also estranged from his daughter and in charge of searching for Mr. Levy's also lost daughter. As if that were not enough, the protagonist of Close Your Eyes, Miguel Garay, director of The Goodbye Look, has also lost a son in a traffic accident.

There is therefore enough room for melodrama, for many shots of the pensive, tearful, depressed characters. The entire film insistently revolves around losses: loss of daughter, loss of friend, loss of love, loss of vocations and dreams.

As I said, in the face of so many endings and so much past, the beginnings that are shown to us are however marginal, impossible or inconsequential: the protagonist's neighbors are going to have a daughter, the protagonist reunites with an old lover, the actor Julio Arenas begins his new life in an asylum, but without memories or hopes, almost idiotic by alcohol.

Everything seems impeccably put together, but insistence and redundancy is one of the problems of Close Your Eyes. Erice's previous films were a miracle of concision, of modesty, made of ellipses, silences, essential dialogues; they were films where no scene was repeated twice, nor was the same emotion of an actor insisted on twice.

Close your eyes, despite having an obviously very well-worked script, is somewhat rambling, very long and too consciously meditative. There is a lot of dialogue here, often apparently superfluous, there are scenes that one feels could have been deleted (one example among a dozen, the phone call on the fishing boat where there is no signal), a lot of timeouts and a lot of nostalgic songs, a lot of secondary characters with no greater significance than to make the protagonists aware of their irreparable losses at every moment, many tin boxes full of remnants of the past and we have the feeling of seeing Miguel Garay's pensive and sad look too many times. There are many obvious symbols (the chess piece, the sculpture of Janus, the photograph of the girl...), many mannered phrases (and not only in The Goodbye Look).

There is also a lot of homage to cinema, and again to the cinema of the increasingly remote past: Erice's own cinema, classic cinema (Chaplin, Sternberg, Río Bravo), going back to the Lumiere cinema itself; the closed movie theaters, the old projectors going back to that most basic form of animation which is the flip book.

In the end, we do not know if Julio Arenas finds on the screen, when watching the final scene of The Goodbye Look, sitting in the cinema with his real daughter, that only meaningful look from the screen with José Coronado and the girl, we are not sure that he recognizes himself on the screen, we do not think that he realizes that he sitting in the cinema with Ana Torrent is a mirror image of the screen where he is with the girl who has come to represent his daughter in his subconscious (duplicated, in the story of the protagonist in the photo booth photo with his lost son), but we do see him deeply moved. Something has struck a chord in him, perhaps a dark need that is difficult for him to put into words, the same emotion that has made him keep that photograph of the lost daughter of Triste Roi, with whom he seems to have identified so much of his own loss at the end of his filming of The Goodbye Look.

The film is visually impeccable, the performances at a very high level, often brilliant. But, nevertheless, despite so much melodramatic display, so much poeticization of loss, the film seems somewhat cold to us, its characters very distant. In The spirit of the hive, a little music from a wristwatch and an exchange of glances confronted us with a breakup and a misunderstanding between father and daughter much more exciting and moving than anything we see in Close Your Eyes. Ana's adventure had a universal meaning that gave reason to the entire film. In Closing Your Eyes we do not feel that justification, that transcending melodramatism and that the experiences of the protagonists become those of the viewer and therefore universal.

This is a good film, but far from his previous masterpieces. Anyway we must be thankful to the master for a very interesting film, and hope he will give us another in the near future.

Holiday (1938)

Theatrical, correct, somewhat unfriendly and dull. Hepburn and Grant in not very atractive roles.

[5/10 · 27 September 2023]

Very theatrical comedy, professionally directed by Cukor and with a legendary leading couple. And not a screwball comedy at all.

But the comedy is unfriendly and dull, since both Hepburn and Grant are in roles in which we do not want to see them.

Cary Grant is a promising young man who could make more money than any conservative, but he simply wants to find himself (with a sufficiently full bank account, of course). He does not tolerate etiquette or protocols, every now and then he starts walking upside down and if possible he does not wear a tie.

The correct and restrained Nolan and the unruly Grant meet and fall in love, and without knowing too much about each other, they get engaged. When they return to New York and the lives they each lead, Grant discovers that his fiancée is the daughter of a Republican billionaire who of course only thinks about making money. We don't need five minutes to realize that Nolan has a certain affinity, at least, with those ideas, and is far from pretending to live on the road "to discover herself." Nor do we need five minutes to know that Hepburn is the black sheep who wanted to be an actress, because she herself is in charge of shouting it from the rooftops. There is also another brother, apparently enormously creative, but a republican family stifles creativity and the poor guy has taken to drinking.

Grant, although he is engaged to Nolan and they had time to talk about how much they love each other, does not seem to have spent his observation skills on listening or looking closely at his girlfriend, and the truth is that he believes that she is also going to spend her life giving cartwheels and hand walking. He is so convinced that their ways of being coincide, that he has not considered it necessary to tell her that he is satisfied with the savings he has, that he does not plan to work again, and that he wants to really enjoy life.

He soon realizes how unhappy Hepburn is and that, locked up in her mansion for some reason, she only endures her loneliness in the games room. He empathizes when she throws an incredible tantrum because the intimate engagement party she had planned for the couple is ruined.

Of course Nolan will become increasingly unfriendly, Hepburn more noble and in love, and Grant more indecisive and confused, until everything is resolved just as we expected from the first scene.

In the 1930s it doesn't seem that people were too concerned about looking for themselves and were content enough with finding a job, so we understand that Grant and Hepburn's problems were at least foreign to them.

Among the rest of the cast, Lew Ayres (the unforgettable protagonist of All quiet in the western front) stands out as the alcoholic brother and Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon as Grant's eccentric couple friends.

Cukor's direction is as tight, correct and polished as ever, the quality of his films depends on the material, which in few cases was truly exceptional. This is not one of his great films.

Number 17 (1932)

Better no plot that such a stupid plot. Anyway Hitchcock is Hitchcock..

[4/10 · 20 September 2023]

Hitchcock had a wonderful way of telling things, here the best that can be said is that he has a wonderful way of telling nothing. Or it could just so this during its very slow and contentless first 20 minutes. Once the plot begins the film goes straight to disaster. It's certainly not The Cat and the Canary.

A lot of uninteresting characters, a plot that is not so much unintelligible as stupid, scenes of slapstick as ridiculous as the fast-motion fights.

The best thing is that desolate three-story house with surprising passageways, and a good handful of images.

After Blackmail this failure is just incomprehensible.

The Square (2017)

Very good comedy of stupid manners

[7/10 · 16 September 2023]

Satirical comedy about the stupidity, hypocrisy and absurdity of so many social and individual behaviors, about our need to integrate into the masses, about the ridiculousness of our most sophisticated intellectual constructions, about our submission to the dictatorship of slogans, and the dubious authenticity of our emotions.

In any case, it is not a pessimistic work, and it does not try to dehumanize the characters, but rather to show us their helplessness in the face of so many receiived ideas.

Mocking modern art and galleries is already a cliche, but it is still fun and absolutely reflects reality. The lack of authenticity in galleries premises, which in the end try to flatter groups, is clear in the scene in which the protagonist has to explain his resignation before some journalists who blame him in the face of radically opposite things

It is a slow-paced comedy, the director likes to take his time in each scene to show us the indecision, discomfort and conflict of the characters in situations where they no longer know what behavior is required of them.

Happily refuse to enter dramatic terrain. The very revealing scene of the accident, what we expect is a plot turn towards more tragic terrain, ends up being a joke to show us the degree of inhumanity that we have fully accepted.

Some scenes may be somewhat obvious in their development, such as the simian performance at a celebration banquet. It is a tendency of the author that will become more pronounced in Triangle of sadness.

Even so, a remarkable film with a style that is personal and interesting enough to make us look for the rest of the author's works and we can say that it is among the most valuable of recent years.

Une simple histoire (1959)

Very interesting storytelling through voice over and image relationship

[7/10 · 16 September 2023]

Bresson's influence is clear in this small and surprising film that already announces the nouvelle vague. But it is so quiet and modest that it seems to have gone unnoticed.

If Isidore Isou proposed a few years earlier the total dissociation of image and sound, here it is the opposite, the text and the image complement each other, they are two testimonies of the same reality, the voice-over a first-person vision, and the image generally the third person point of view (not always, sometimes we see through the woman's eyes). Both visions often overlap, repeating phrases of dialogue, describing exactly the same thing we are watching, while other times they provide complementary information, or present a clear gap.

There is a very brilliant moment that shows this ambiguity in the function of the image: the camera shows a waitress making a strange gesture while the woman is opening a door, which we do not identify, and then the voice-over clarifies the interpretation that the protagonist has given of that gesture with the image of what she sees reflected in the glass.

Sometimes it seems that the image is an illustration of what the voice-over says, and the montage of images reproduces what the voice comments, but manipulated here precisely in that montage, thus the repeated shot of her entering and leaving a place were she ask for a job.

The image is very Bressonian, with that characteristic purity, although there are frames and movements that give greater volatility and a less deliberate character, which brings it closer to the first babblings of the nouvelle vague. But everything has that marked transcendental accent (the usual baroque music helps), like a via crucis, so characteristic of Bresson.

The music, as in so many French films of the time (the first Bresson, Les enfants terribles, then Godard etc...), is the usual baroque classics in those very romanticized versions of the time, in this case especially Bach and his violin concerto.

The plot is minimalist, in fact it is a long flashback that does not reach the moment of the first scene of the film.

A simple and beautiful film, but dithyrambic comments like Noel Burch's are ludicrous.

Amélie (2001)

Excess of saccharine and good intentions.

[5/10 · 16 September 2023]

A postcard-perfect Paris, with saturated colors, sunny Montmatre, picturesque neighborhoods, sweetly infantilized characters.

Completely blended into the setting, Amelie is a postcard character, colorful and friendly, picturesque, full of empathy and good wishes.

A display of inventiveness as eccentric as it is inconsequential. This taste for the funny and endearingly abnormal, as a sign of appreciation for the diversity of life, ends up being as capricious as it is repetitive.

After three quarters of an hour we may find ourselves saturated.

I miss the disgusting nature of Delicatessen (not that I like it very much either) compared to the cloying sweetness of Amelie.

Duck Soup (1933)

Brother's best

[9/10 · 16 September 2023]

The most funny, dense, tight and coherent with the spirit of the famous brothers among Marx Brothers films, before leading to their much inferior although more famous forays with MGM.

But talking about authorship of the Marxes, or of the Marxes with McCarey, is again an unfair example of simplification of author theory. The style that is defined in the film is the one marked by the Marxes, that's clear, but obviously they must be given content, somebody is providing the jokes and the result is a hodgepodge of marked brother's personality, of very fast dialogues, parody, allusions, frenetic rhythm, choreography, and any tune or idea that may occur to a group of creators (basically Kalmar and Ruby, Sheekman and Perrin).

And well...the irreverent dangerously looms over what is considered unacceptable today: Harpo clearly wants to abuse pretty women...or anybody, psychological abuse is sustained by Groucho towards poor Margaret Dumont, or parodies of negro spirituals...but thanks heaven till now you can enjoy the film without cuts.

The musical numbers are hilarious, there are no boring interludes in which the brothers show off their musical skills, there is no cloying romantic story, the brothers are absolute protagonists of the film, and Margaret Dumont is unforgettable.

Favorite moment: all the team's number "This Country's Going To War".

It doesn't matter that some of the puns aren't very good, these people are fast and when they are nor saying something funny they are doing something hilarious.