vwild Reviews

Underground (1928)

Dazzling British Silent

[10/10 · 22 February 2017]

Anthony Asquith, a rather dull stalwart of British cinema, kicks off his career with a dazzling tale of "work-a-day" folk in and around London's Underground. Asquith seems to have absorbed everything going in the cinema of the late 1920s and throws it all at this film. Here is a film maker determined to make his mark and every scene is crammed with visual ideas. These ideas may have been borrowed from Lang, Ganz, Murnau, Eisenstein and the rest, but Asquith brilliantly puts them to work telling his story of working class Londoners.

Underground uses real London locations and authentic looking sets as a back drop for the melodramatic goings on (love, jealousy, murder) of the story, and the supporting cast are given ample screen time and bits of business to portray "real" Londoners. This makes for surprising and refreshing viewing. Perhaps this is more Ealing Comedy than social realism, but the action does seem to have broken free from the studio and taken to the streets. The film opens on the Underground of course, with trains, tunnels and escalators, and engaging scenes of the social behaviour of people crammed into too small a space. Our hero and heroine (Bill and Nell) meet cute on an escalator. Later on we get a London pub complete with a grumpy barmaid observing a punch-up with the detachment of bored familiarity; imagine Clara Bow's It Girl if she'd ended up serving bar for thirty years. Bill and Nell's first date starts on the top of a real omnibus with streets swooping past in the background. They picnic in a park. Their relationship is touchingly wholesome and their scenes take place in the outdoors and the fresh air in a real live London.

Bert and Kate, the other couple in this story, are far more dysfunctional. They live in the same boarding house, which has an expressionist, claustrophobic horror about it. Kate, a seamstress, live and works in her shadowy room, and expresses her unrequited love for Bert in contorted, bird-like gestures. All her actions are laced with desperation and fragility, culminating in a frantic dash draped in a huge black coat in the shadow of a monolithic power station. Norah Baring is particularly unnerving in this role. Bert, Cyril McLaglen in a vigorous performance worthy of Lon Chaney, works at the power station in a futurist room of dials and levers, and the final confrontation takes place in this surreal space before we chase across the gantries and up the ladders of apparently real locations. At the height of this pursuit a door is pushed open, and the streets of London are arrayed heart-stoppingly below us. The film thrillingly takes to the roofs and cranes of Lots Road Power Station.

Underground is a hugely entertaining film with excellent performances, but Asquith is the star here. He gives us the avant garde cinematic styles of the day and mashes them up with a consummate grasp of silent film language into one of the very best British films of the silent period.

Anni difficili (1948)

A Comedy About Fascism

[9/10 · 16 January 2017]

Anni Difficili is a very funny comedy about Fascism. The difficult years from 1934 to the end of WW2, are seen through the eyes of Aldo Piscitello, father of four and local government employee, played with a bewildered, hang-dog humanity by Umberto Spadaro. Piscitello has somehow failed to join the Fascist Party and if he wants to keep his job he's going to have to do something about that. The anti-logic of his corrupt superiors demands it. He's not keen, but his Leftist friends at the pharmacist can offer no useful advice, so reluctantly he joins up and unenthusiastically puts on the ridiculously saggy uniform and carries out his new duties as a member of the Fascist Party – mostly involving marching. So begins a series of moral compromises viewed against a background of escalating militarism and war.

Piscitello's son Giovanni (played by the awesomely chiselled Massimo Girotti) returns from military service to find his father in his new uniform. All Giovani wants to do is get out of uniform, marry the pharmacist's daughter and set up home, but he is soon called up for the invasion of Abyssinia and then goes from battlefront to battlefront for the remainder of these difficult years. As time goes by Piscitello sees that his moral compromises are keeping his son at war and away from his wife and child. Wouldn't it be better to protest against Fascism and go to prison if necessary he asks the Leftists at the pharmacy? But, they are hopelessly divided and fearful, and spend their time listening to Radio London and revelling in Italian military defeats. It's not easy to go against the grain however. The whole community gathers to cheer the speeches of Mussolini, Piscitello's wife is thankful the trains run on time, his daughter is enthusiastically teaching Fascist ideology in school, and the twin sons have joined a Fascist youth organisation.

To begin with all this is viewed with an amused irony by Zampa and his screenwriter, the novelist Brancati, but as the film proceeds, and Italy staggers from crisis to crisis, the humour becomes increasingly dark and bitter. Zampa and Brancati are determined that Italy faces up to its recent past. All society is culpable and is subjected to their withering comic gaze. Giovanni and his wife, Maria, remain curiously untainted by Fascism, albeit increasingly worn down and traumatised by war and separation. Girotti in particular is a taut and pale centre of gravity, his increasingly tragic presence a counter-point to the humour. There are no laughs at Giovanni and Maria's expense.

Anni Difficili was released in 1948 and must have been uncomfortable viewing for audiences of the time. It's a powerful film today, a perfectly judged mix of fun, satirical ire and loss.

Cinema Paradiso (1988)

Paradise Lost - Cinema Paradiso is overshadowed by film classics it celebrates

[6/10 · 11 January 2017]

The films of the golden era of Italian cinema breathe life into the first half of Cinema Paradiso. Without them the film is a soulless affair with no sense of reality or place. It is a tourist trip to a fantasy Sicily of the 1940s and 50s decked out in nostalgic glowing colours and accompanied by nauseatingly sweet and persistent music. However, for the first hour or so we get to imagine the impact of legends of the silver screen on small town, post-war life and this is diverting enough.

The first film we watch being watched at Cinema Paradiso (the picture house that gives the film its title) is the 1930s classic The Lower Depths starring Jean Gabin at the height of his doomed, working class glamour. The priest (a welcome appearance by Leopoldo Trieste) is censoring the film for the community. He rings a bell and Alfredo, the projectionist, slots a scrap of paper into the reel on the projector to remind him what to slice out later – usually kissing. Also in the background is Toto, a kid who will become Alfredo's assistant, and whose memories we are viewing from thirty years into the future. More films follow and the village audience's uninhibited reactions are depicted through the years. We get John Wayne in Stagecoach and the children whoop like "Red Indians." We get a Matarazzo melodrama and the whole audience weeps. We get a Totò movie and they are fighting to see it over and over again. A host of great stars flicker beguilingly in the background of this story – Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman, Vittorio de Sica, Brigitte Bardot, Alberto Sordi, Kirk Douglas – and they bring star power to Cinema Paradiso.

Without them we have a rather tired tale. Toto, the kid projectionist, grows up to be a famous film director. The death of Alfredo, his surrogate father and friend, brings back memories of his childhood and youth spent at the cinema in Sicily. He returns to his home town for the first time in thirty years to relive memories of lost teen romance and to bury his friend. Cinema Paradiso is deeply impregnated with nostalgia and sentimentality, but is lacking in genuine emotion. It's kitsch. The characters are oddly blank and lacking inner life. It's difficult to feel anything when Alfredo is blinded in a projector fire, when mother finally hears that papa has died in Russia, when teen Toto loses his first love, despite the constantly hectoring soundtrack. The dialogue is leaden (particular mention should be made of the hackneyed folk "wisdom" dished out by Alfredo) and the film has no sense of time or place. For the most part the old movies shown at the cinema distract us from these faults, but sometimes they highlight them.

In the late 40s the Neo-Realist classic la Terra Trema comes to Cinema Paradiso. The power of the Neo-Realist films was that the audience saw their own lives on the screen, but the Sicily of La Terra Trema and that of Cinema Paradiso are vastly different. Visconti attempts to depict the real, savage poverty of the Sicilian fishermen using non- professional actors. He shows us the life and culture of the community. He even shows us how the economic structures are fixed against working people. The Sicily of Cinema Paradiso is like a theme park by comparison, a glowingly quaint town peopled by lovable Italian types in a mythical past. It looks like a nice place for a holiday. The theme park Italians of Cinema Paradiso are disturbingly unmoved by seeing La Terra Trema. For the viewer, the contrast between the two films' visions of 1940s Sicily is a jolting reminder of Cinema Paradiso's hollowness.

Having seen the "Director's Cut" of Cinema Paradiso it is easy to see why the producers hacked away at the film and reissued it. An hour or so in we leave Toto's memories of the 1950s and the old film classics behind and jump to the present day. Without their glamour Cinema Paradiso finally has to stand on its own merits and we are left with a turgid soap opera. Time would be better spent watching the Italian classics that Cinema Paradiso celebrates than with Cinema Paradiso itself.

The Conversation (1974)

What is the truth about The Conversation?

[8/10 · 6 November 2016]

The Conversation is much misinterpreted.

The jumping off point for the film is the attempt by Frank Caul, a surveillance man, to record the conversation of two people in a busy park. This presents some technical problems, but Caul manages to capture three partial recordings of this conversation and, using multi- tracking and other thingummybobs, he produces a seamless whole.The conversation drifts about as conversations do, but the significant part appears to be that the participants, a man and a woman, are lovers and they believe the woman's husband is capable of killing them if he finds out about their affair. Putting aside their fears they arrange to meet in a hotel that weekend. Caul realises that he might be the agent of their destruction and , despite his professional code of neutrality, he tries to prevent the husband, the Director of some organisation, getting the finished tape. He fails. Caul bugs the hotel room expecting to witness the couple's murder (though seemingly psychologically incapable of taking action) only to discover that it is the husband who is the victim. The couple murder him and the wife inherits his business and fortune. The taped conversation has lured the husband to his death. So much for the story.

The Conversation is generally interpreted thus. This is a film about truth and perception. Caul has allowed the horrific outcome of a previous job coupled with his own bizarre obsession with privacy and consequent self-isolation, to interfere with his work. He has projected his own emotions onto the material (the three partial recordings) and deceived himself. He has recorded a murder being plotted and heard it as the conversation of fearful lovers. In fact, the sense is, that he has distorted the content of the finished recording through his subjectivity. His mistake has tragic consequences.

This interpretation is incorrect. What happens is this.

The fearful lovers are actually plotting the murder of the husband. To do this they stage a conversation, which they know is being recorded by a surveillance team, in which they provide a time and place for the jealous husband to catch them together. On hearing the recording the husband will go to the hotel at the appointed time and be murdered. What the murderers haven't banked on is that Caul becomes emotionally involved and will meddle ineffectively with the plan. Contrary to the received interpretation of The Conversation , Caul has not imagined things, but has actually heard what he was intended to hear, or, more accurately, what the husband was intended to hear through him. He has been duped and used, but he has not created a lie through his own distortions of the material.

The Conversation is viewed as a film that takes crime film tropes and uses them to talk about something other than the mere crime story, in this case about truth and perception amongst other things. But, if Caul has not really corrupted the results of his investigation with his subjectivity – and he hasn't - then truth and perception are intact and unquestioned, and the film becomes just another crime story. It has not really transcended its base matter in the way that Vertigo does to talk about obsession or Bladerunner does to talk about humanity. This is disappointing because the early scenes with their whoozy uncertainty and Caul's strange behaviour suggest interesting things are ahead. The makers could even be accused of giving the viewer false hopes of existential questioning in order to disguise gaping plot holes. What we end up with is a very stylish thriller with a dramatic though unconvincing twist.

Ironically, viewers have watched an arty crime movie and seen an art house film. They have even altered the plot to suit this perception. How's that for the mutability of truth?

Love (1971)

Emotionally intense scenes: please remember to breathe.

[10/10 · 25 October 2016]

Szerelem has a simple story, but to scribble down a summary is somehow to attempt to fence in with words a film that throws off definition. This is not to say that Szerelem is vague or impressionistic, rather that it is so acute a rendering of particular emotions in a particular time and place, that any description can only damage that specificity. Similarly, to try to express Szerelem's "meaning", is to attach crude slogans to its complexity. It must merely be experienced.

No harm can be done by telling you that the story takes place in 1950s Hungary, that the cinematography and performances are wonderful, that the unfurling of the narrative is constantly surprising, and that the final half an hour or so is almost unbearably emotionally tense. Please remember to keep breathing during these scenes.

The Conformist (1970)

Stylish Freudian Kitsch

[6/10 · 24 January 2016]

The Conformist is very stylish in the way that fashion advertising or New Romantic music videos are stylish. It's self-consciously stylish. Dominique Sanda walks along a corridor and strikes a scornful pose in the doorway of a room like someone parading on the catwalk. Jean-Louis Trintignant walks along the pavement in front of an art deco building as the camera tracks with him in a wintry twilight. At the corner he stops, turns, gestures. A vintage car rolls up. So chic. The acting is stylish. It has that operatic largeness that we get in Visconti's later films. You can see the actors' performances from the balcony. At first all this attention to style is beguiling. There is a strange scene in an insane asylum filmed in the EUR complex. It looks oppressive and futuristic and dream-like, like a scene from 8 ½, but it becomes apparent that all this attention to style has no meaning. It is style for styles sake. At the end of one scene a shot is stitched on of autumnal leaves blown ominously along. What could it mean? Is it the "Wind of Change"? No, it's just leaves whisked about for visual pleasure. Who are we to scorn visual pleasures you may say, but the problem is that, at its worst, the visual pleasures begin to lead the action. The viewer begins to sense that a beautiful image was visualised and then a scene written to incorporate it. The characters' motivation is apparently to complete compositions or visual effects.

Unfortunately for the viewer The Conformist is not content with stylish shallowness and tries to achieve depth or insight with what turns out to be a Freudian kitsch. There is a veritable cesspool of confusing childhood sexual experiences giving rise to bizarre adult behaviours. Fascism itself is some kind of psycho-sexual fantasy. It's all so very chic and depraved. Sadly we don't so much witness character development as a bunch of ids bumping against each other. It makes for tiresome viewing and tells us nothing about the psychology of Fascism or anything else that might give the film purpose.

The Conformist looks good, sometimes thrillingly so, but it is weighed down by its rather dated psycho-sexual approach to character. The story suffers worst of all, being completely squeezed out by these other dominant elements.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Herzog goes Cecil B. DeMille

[6/10 · 17 May 2015]

In Fitzcarraldo the eponymous hero dreams of bringing opera to an Amazonian backwater. To raise the money he must drag a huge river steamer from one river to another over a hill in the depths of the jungle thereby avoiding dangerous rapids and giving him access to untapped rubber trees. The Important Fact about this film is that Herzog (the director), his crew and a few hundred Amazonian tribespeople (apparently hunter gatherers with a traditional way of life) actually dragged that boat across the jungle for real. They really did it and this changes how the viewer feels about the film.

For much of its running time Fitzcarraldo comes across as an old colonial spectacular in the mould of Hollywood of the 1950s, with the merest sprinkling of Heart of Darkness, but not so you can really taste it. Fitzgerald (Kinski improbable as the likable dreamer) is thrilled by opera and he realises that if he can only get a transport ship to a remote part of the jungle cut off by dangerous rapids and collect the rubber there he can make a killing and build an opera house. He buys a ship, hires a crew and heads off into uncharted waters. Soon they encounter Amazonian "headhunters" and, terrified, most of the crew desert, leaving Fitzgerald to persuade the native people to aid him in his grand scheme. Up to this point the film seems clumsy. It's badly put together and acted, not particularly good to look at, even dull. But, then they begin to drag this huge ship out of the water and over a jungle covered hill, and it is immediately obvious that they are doing this for real. It's jaw dropping stuff.

Trees are hacked down to whoops from the native people, cuttings are blasted and they recoil in terror, stones are passed from hand to hand, winding equipment is built from great trees, an immense pulley is carried by people gasping under its weight, and then miraculously the ship begins to inch its way out of the water in scenes reminiscent of Salgado's photographs of silver miners. The cast (professional and amateur) swarm around the ship covered head to foot in red mud. The physical strain and exhilaration are all real. Kinski, suddenly perfect with his grubby linen suit and shock of blond hair, is almost dwarfed by a spectacle equal to his mad persona. It's akin to seeing Buster Keaton at play with a steam locomotive. It's amazing and entertaining - but surely someone is going to get hurt? Once the ship hits the water again sadly the power of these scenes begins to dissipate and the film floats on bumpily to its ridiculous conclusion.

The role of the Amazonian tribespeople in Fitzcarraldo is troubling. They are heralded in the time honoured fashion of safari movies. Before we meet them we hear tales of murdered missionaries and shrunken heads. We hear strange drumming and chanting from the forest. Ominous figures stand in wooden canoes. Finally we see dozens of little boats and mysterious visitors fill the ship. They are baffled by Fitzgerald's extreme blond, whiteness. None of these characters have a name, none get to utter dialogue comprehensible to the audience, and none are differentiated individuals except one apparent leader. They are just a conglomeration, a collective entity, an alien otherness. This is a shame because they bring some much needed gravity and screen presence to the film. Herzog makes ineffectual attempts to counter this colonial taint through the script. The native people have their own agenda for engaging in this task (appeasement of river gods) and the film concludes happily for them having sent the ship over the rapids Fitzgerald has been at such pains to avoid. For once colonialism has been co-opted to someone else's ends and thwarted in the process. This is not enough to restore the film's balance.

In Fitzcarraldo we are offered a rather tired colonial yarn that seems thrown together, but which culminates in a spectacle worthy of Cecil B. DeMille. The film does flip from clumsy fiction to electrifying reality and back again, but the sight of this huge ship being dragged over the red mud using ropes and muscle power makes compelling viewing. However the viewer is left to question the film's attitude to colonialism and whether doing it for real really turns this mostly leaden film into gold?

Adua e le compagne (1960)

Hungry For Self Determination

[10/10 · 18 April 2015]

Adua e le Compagne has a simple story. It's Rome 1958 and brothels have just been outlawed. Four prostitutes take their savings and invest in a country restaurant to use as a front to cover their usual trade. In time they discover they like the restaurant business and - what do you know - they are good at it. It's not easy for these women with shady pasts and shady connections to reform themselves. Can they make it?

Pietrangeli somehow takes this story and, avoiding the many pitfalls of cliché and stereotype, makes an engrossing and moving masterpiece. This is no story of "good hearted hookers", nor a bland feel-good movie, nor a neo-realist lecture, nor a trite girl flick. The story is sympathetically handled by Pietrangeli, the screenplay is subtle and sophisticated, the cinematography is beautiful, the supporting cast are excellent, but it is the wonderful performances of the four leads, Simone Signoret, Sandra Milo, Emmanuelle Riva and Gina Rovere, that make this film soar. Emmanuelle Riva's performance is a detailed account of brittle self-loathing and as good as pretty much any performance you will see, except that in Adua e le Compagne we have a simply peerless star at the height of her powers in Simone Signoret.

Simone Signoret seems to be living the part - the awkward walk, the toughness and occasional viciousness, the knowing self delusion in her romance with a no-good car salesman, the capable and determined leader who forgets to get the gas connected, the fears for the future, the optimism and self-destruction, the strength and lack of sentimentality. Signoret is subtle and real with unequalled empathy with this character. It feels telepathic at times as if Adua's thoughts are being transmitted to you.

Adua e le Compagne is a profoundly humane and compassionate film about women that is neither sentimental nor condescending. A must see.

Head Against the Wall (1959)

Odd but uneven.

[6/10 · 10 April 2015]

La Tête Contre les Murs is an odd mixture of film genres. It begins with our hero Gérane riding his motorbike across wasteland on the outskirts of Paris. He seems to be rebel without a cause, two thirds James Dean and one third Marlon Brando. But, we learn, he's a twenty-five year old who refuses to settle down to bourgeois french life. There's a strange "decadent" scene on a river boat where the middle classes throw off the restrictions of everyday life and dance the Charleston. Gérane needs money to make good on gambling debts and is caught stealing from his father's desk. Held at gunpoint by his father (they don't get on) he is committed to a psychiatric hospital/lunatic asylum. The rest of the film deals with his life at the hospital and his attempts to escape.

The early part of the film is now discarded except for the visits of Stéphanie who Gérane met in the opening scene and who now seems inexplicably attached to him. The film takes a cursory interest in the mental state of Gérane and whether he's actually ill. It contrasts two psychiatric methods, humane and inhumane, mostly through tired dialogue between two doctors, but isn't quite a searing indictment of mental health treatment. It seems to be going to talk about patriarchy and social repression but doesn't really get anywhere with that either. The film is confused and sometimes dull, but it has a couple of redeeming features.

Although it is difficult to believe this rather flat, grey film was shot by Schüfftan, it is occasionally visually striking. An ambulance drives out from an avenue of trees whose foliage looks like a huge heart in the twilight. In a billiard hall the punters watch in an agony of expectation as a ball rolls ,endlessly it seems, around the holes on a roulette table. These visual flourishes are emphasised by odd clashing musical accompaniment from Maurice Jarre. Often the music is loud and intrusively in opposition to the content of a scene. It often expresses dread through clangs and drones. There is jaunty piano in the depths of the night and twangy banjo at a funeral. This gives La Tête Contre les Murs the atmosphere of Hammer Horror film at times,the sense that the ordinary conceals some disturbing unknown. Unfortunately this is not enough to rescue a film that doesn't seem to know what it's purpose is and which at times is very clumsily put together.

By the Bluest of Seas (1936)

Cute Commies Sing, Play and Work on the Shore of the Caspian Sea

[8/10 · 1 April 2015]

By the Bluest of Seas is a surprisingly warm and funny film from Soviet Russia. The story is rather slight. Two shipwrecked sailors wash up on an island in the Caspian Sea, set to work for the local fishing commune and vie for the affections of a local lass. There are jokes and songs, all handled with a light and joyful touch. Meanwhile the sun beats down, the wind blows and the waves roll, and this looks wonderful. You can almost feel the warmth and taste the salt. The small issue of who gets the girl brings the odd shadow, but all in all life on the commune is just grand. And that's about it apart from a tiresome communist moral at the end, which I suppose qualifies as propaganda, but is only as intrusive as the moral correctives at the end of Hollywood movies of the same period. By the Bluest of Seas is a tremendously warm hearted film that seems to come from a different world to the well known Soviet classics of the 20s and 30s.

The Informer (1962)

Show Don't Tell!

[5/10 · 13 March 2015]

Near the end of Le Doulos Belmondo sits in a bar and explains the entire plot of the film to Reggiano. This takes ten minutes or more and involves numerous brief flashbacks which force Reggiano and the viewer to reassess all Belmondo's perverse and vicious acts of the last hour or so of screen time as an expression of profound friendship. This is a very dull scene. It's also a useful scene because it reveals the true nature of this film, not a French film noir besotted with the American 40s films, but a Miss Marple mystery in noir clothing.

Melville has captured all the surface qualities of film noir. Check out the marvellous opening sequence of Reggiano walking to the beat of the title music (rather like Travolta in the opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever) along some railway lines to arrive at the kind of weird little house peculiar to french films. But, Melville's film doesn't seem to get hold of the deeper sensibility of the 40s classics in the way that Chinatown and Bladerunner do (for example). The central character is not experiencing a crisis of morality and/or identity in an incomprehensible and amoral world, rather he is a scumbag in a scummy world. It makes for unengaging watching.

Maybe this is a world Melville wanted to depict, but in the end Le Doulos is a tiresome whodunnit. It's gritty, or more accurately misogynist and nasty, and often great to look at, but this is not a lesser known should be classic.

The Overcoat (1952)

Could have been a classic but marred by clunkiness.

[7/10 · 17 June 2014]

Il Cappotto is a surprisingly faithful rendering of the Gogol short story. The Overcoat is happily relocated from bureaucratic nineteenth century Russia to corrupt post war Italy. There are many wonderful and original scenes; a succession of lodgers trying to listen to the heartbeat of a dying man through a stethoscope; a hearse interrupting the mayor's self-congratulatory speechifying at a public meeting; a tailor ducking down alleys to get a further look at his beautiful coat being worn by its new owner. The film is also funny, but the comedy is sometimes jarring. There is what can only be called a Chaplin-esque central performance though without Chaplin's mischief, some rather broad satire of Italian political life, and a more bleak, savage humour that is perhaps more faithful to Gogol. Some of this is marvellous, some of it rather dated. As the film progresses it picks up momentum but unfortunately the clunkiness of some of the first half hour hangs over the rest of the film leaving a feeling that it could all have been a little tighter and maybe a little tougher. The end in particular exchanges Gogol's horror for spiritual uplift and is a disappointment.

In the end, Il Cappotto feels like a film that doesn't quite hold together its disparate elements, but has some unforgettable scenes worthy of de Sica or Fellini. Enjoyable but frustrating.

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

A mix of early silent comedy, 70's soft porn and daytime soap - but not in a good way.

[1/10 · 18 May 2014]

What a queer film this is. It appears to be about the hypocrisy and apathy of the middle classes, particularly their sexual hypocrisy, as expressed through the infatuation of a rich business man (of a certain age) with a young and beautiful Spanish dancer.The hero, Mathieu, spends the film time trying to get Conchita into bed and more specifically trying to achieve penetration. Sometimes she seems up for this, sometimes she doesn't. In any case there is always a problem when they get down to it, much to Mathieu's frustration. This obsesses him to such a degree that he is almost oblivious to the acts of terrorism that are happening all around him. It's not just in the paper, on the radio and on the PA in the shopping centre. He's mugged in a park, there's a shooting on his doorstep, he's held at gunpoint and his car stolen.To Mathieu this matters little compared with his ongoing bedroom antics with Conchita. Conchita is an unpredictable woman. Is she deliberately torturing Mathieu? In the end Mathieu thinks so and things turn violent. Even then, they remain somehow bound together.

How did this film come to be so critically lauded? Is it simply due to the crude gimmick of having Conchita played by two actresses who switch between and within scenes? Oddly this quirk loses its strangeness as the film progresses and really adds nothing. The two actresses don't portray different sides of the same person (there are no fully realised characters in this film) as has been suggested. Conchita is as changeable and contradictory regardless of who she is played by. The film in general feels thrown together.It looks and plays like a mix of early silent comedy, 70's soft porn and daytime soap - but not in a good way.

This is the broadest satire and not particularly insightful or funny. It has surreal touches. Is Bunuel messing with us?

The Visit (1963)

A warm and funny Italian movie that deserves to be better known.

[10/10 · 15 October 2013]

I bought La Visita having watched Adua e le Compagne and then wondered what else Pietrangeli had directed that I could get hold of with English subtitles. La Visita is at least as good as Adua and features another great performance from Sandra Milo. She is a thirty-something small town woman called Pina who decides that the time has come to get married and so places an advert in the paper in the hope of finding a suitable man. After some correspondence with Adolfo she invites him to come to her home for the day so that they can get to know each other and it is this day, along with a few flashbacks, that provides the whole of the movie. We are introduced to Pina as she prepares to meet Adolfo at the railway station – heavily made up, sashaying around in a white suit and adjusting the poster of the Tower Of Pisa in the waiting room so it doesn't lean. Pietrangeli sets up a caricature of a slightly dim and frivolous woman then spends the rest of the film subtly undermining it as we come to realise that Pina is shrewder, more capable and yet more vulnerable than at first glance. Sandro Milo is an intelligent comic actress and gives her character a great deal of warmth and humanity so that we root for her all the way. She makes us will Adolfo to be the man she wants him to be and then, when he clearly falls short, makes us desperately hope that she will see through him. After a day of incident where the two get to know each other and Adolfo meets all the friends and neighbours in Pina's life, the film culminates with great sympathy and insight in a way which is just about perfect. This is a very funny and ultimately moving film which deserves to be seem by a much wider audience.