A 30s musical with the twin talents of Jean Gabin and Josephine Baker set in the circus looks too good to be true and indeed it is. Not enough circus, nowhere near enough Baker singing and dancing and Gabin hasn't settled into his sublime world weary persona yet (too young?) but never mind. A few good times are to be had and Baker just explodes with star power and charisma, you can see why the world went mad for her. The plot is silly - the idea of Gabin and Baker being brother and sister is pretty ridiculous in itself for obvious reasons, though the film plays with this incongruity and their characters real relationship to each other is kept ambiguous, but it doesn't really work. The wild plot swerve where Gabin is arrested for murder is ludicrously abrupt (though I quite liked that about it). Also includes one of the most risible deathbed scenes I've witnessed, and most of the "comic" actors involved are hamming it up like its still the silent age, which I guess it nearly was. A couple of big production numbers at the end attempting to channel Busby but failing due to naff songs and wonky choreography (I like the huge bed set though). I guess the 60s model/singer/new wave actress got her name from this, and its well worth a look but I think if you edited it down to just Josephine's numbers (especially the amazing shadow dance), it'd be even more worth a look.

Post-Godard, post-feminist and post-May '68 (anti)biopic of George Sand with Anne Wiazemsky in the lead role, plus appearances from Bulle Ogier, Ghedalia Tazartes and, in his only acting role, Gilles Deleuze (!!). Even if you know as little about Sand and French history as me, this is far more accessible than you'd expect, and in fact I found it excellent and very enjoyable. Anachronisms abound, with various other figures and bystanders (some "from the future") popping up at frequent intervals to editorialise or explicate. Sand's life and ideas as a pop art comic book, at times bridging the gap between Straub-Hulliet and Monty Python. Lots of great and brave visual gambits - a memorable sequence where the French Revolution is presented as alternating black and red screens with voiceover, and lots of wit. This is the kind of apres-nouvelle-vague shit I can't get enough of, and I won't be able to picture Sand ever again without thinking of Wiazemsky's mischievous portrayal.

Rosier continues to impress with her 2nd film, which I loved even more than the George Sand "biopic" (see prev.). One of the few films starring Francoise LeBrun of Eustache "Maman Et la Putain" "fame", this actually resembles Eustache quite a bit, being attuned to the pace and rhythms and speech patterns of life-as-lived and a sequence of events large and small, rather than the dramatic dictates of a plot arc. Not that there is no drama, and (as with "George Qui?") there are several ages of poetic/theatrical stylisation. LeBrun's character flaneuses her way around Paris as a market researcher interviewing women about make-up. She picks up Ghedalia Tazartes (RIP). Rivette star Hermine Karagheuz falls off her bike in front of her and has to be taken to hospital and it looks like we may be about to be served up a "plot" but nope this too es. A long discussion of motherhood and feminism in a daycare centre. More meetings with extraordinary people. A young girl is talked out of motherhood as the idealised feminine destiny. Then we have possibly the longest and best bathtub scene in cinema history. "Mon Coeur Est Rouge" ends with documentary-like footage of a feminist arts fete. One performance involves a group of women dressed as historical male figures, who are marked according to their sympathy to the feminist cause (Rimbaud gets a halo and a round of applause, Marx, Freud and most others get bunny ears to wear). Rosier seems to have a completely unique, totally free cinematic style. She made very few films and I hope to get to see them all. I'm nostalgic for the days when folks could walk around interacting with random strangers without worrying that they'll cough on you and kill you. I could also watch LeBrun walk around wintery 70s Paris maybe forever.

This is easily the most conventional and accessible film of the four MR films I've seen - maybe even your mother would like this one? It even almost has a plot, or at least a central conflict, though it is still recognisibly in Rosier's free/wandering style. Our flaneuse this time is a roller-skating 11 year old named Louise, played by Sophie Rochut in probably the most skilled and subtle performance I have ever seen by a child actor (she doesn't seem to have done anything since, sadly). Louise is at a loose end in the summer holidays, especially since her mother (a famous pianist) has hooked up with a young pretty boy saxophone player (jazz, and specifically jazz soundtracks seem to be a thing with Rosier. Keith Jarrett and Mal Waldron provided music for the earlier films and it is Aldo Romano this time). Divorced Dad seems to spend all his time at the office, as divorced dads tend to do, though the characters tend to evade easy stereotyping here, and Grandma spends all her time playing poker. What's a bored 11 year old to do other than skate around Paris randomly interacting with ers-by? These type of meetings are Rosier's main thing, and she handles them in a unique and empathetic style. An example is an early scene with Louise and a piano tuner who we (and her) gradually realise is blind. Whereas in most films ,this would result in a scene of extreme awkwardness or a lengthy conversation about the fact. Louise merely desribes the colour of the drink she brings heim, then closes her own eyes.
The "story" kicks in about halfway through as Louise tires of playing gooseberry on her mother's dates with her hot boyfriend, feelings of neglect set in and drastic actions are taken. No spoilers here, but the ending is absolutely PERFECT, and the two superb mirror scenes which bookend the film reinforce Louise's transformation from the daughter of a famous mother into her own kind of human.

An enraged-to-the-gills, seething and immensely disturbing assault on war, patriotism, male "heroism", male everything, Japan, everything, made at the time when Wakamatsu should have been reaching for his pipe and slippers. Set in 1945, a Japanese lieutenant returns from the front minus arms, legs, hearing and voice and with a severely burned-up face. He's declared a "war god" by the people in his village but can't even take a leak without help from his distraught, long-suffering wife, who the film's sympathies immediately focus on. Especially as we learn pretty much from the outset that our military man is a monster, a rapist and former wife-beater (and later on the implication is that he received his injuries doing something nobody would consider heroic). Not that he has any limbs left to beat his wife with now. And so the tables are turned...kinda. But its more subtle than that. The short story (inevitably long-banned in Japan) that this is apparently based upon makes more of the wife's sexual humiliation of her former oppressor. However, Wakamatsu has a lot more on his mind than one man's villainy and comeuppance. Caterpillar, which is as unsentimental and unforgiving as its title suggests, takes pot shots at an entire country, and especially its rulers, with Emperor Hirohito right at the top of the cake, the supreme representative of the whole militaristic/religious/patriarchal shitshow. Radios spew vile propaganda and lies, most characters are shown to be deluded and brainwashed flag-waving village idiots. The use of harrowing wartime footage (tinted red) and endless recitals of historical facts and statistics could be seen as to be over egging the pudding ordinarily, but here they work pretty well, if only to signal that Wakamatsu cannot keep a lid on his rage as he rubs his own country's face in its own shit over and over again. Filmed with a no-frills TV movie aesthetic, in stark contrast to the earlier psychedelic sexploitation misanthropy films Wakamatsu is best known for, with just enough period trappings to make it believable but without falling into the "costume drama" trap. This is not in any way "fun" but gotta give a round of applause for something so uncompromising and abrasive.

Pollet was an unlucky guy. He's hardly known in and never really was.In English film circles, absolutely nothing. Several of his films were never released in their time (including this one) and worst of all his career was severely hampered (though not completely finished off) when he became severely injured after being hit by a train. There have recently been some restorations of his (surprsingly numerous) works, but needless to say the resulting DVDs are expensive and lacking in English subtitles. You'd think that a 1966 gangster film starring Francoise Hardy and Sami Frey ("A Bullet In The Heart") would have been a huge career-making success, but nobody seems to have even seen that one. To cap it all, a big career retrospective at the Cinematheque Francais was scheduled for precisely the month that the place (and everything else) shut down due to the current pandemic.
A few of his films seem now to be "unofficially" circulating with English subs, and they all seem to be well worth a look. This would have been his first feature, shot in 1959. Pollet's work is situated somewhere between the narrative "auteur" cinema and the poetic/essay end of the avant-garde, never fitting fully into either category, which is probably one reason for his neglect. A lot of his films seem to consist of experimental rethinks of commercial genres, and I guess "La Ligne Du Mire" is his take on the film noir, but its a million miles away from A Bout De Souffle which emerged around the same time. The story is deliberately evasive and hard to pin down - a nightclub singer/guitarist named Pedro dreams of returning to a chateau that he shared with his uncle and two brothers, but he cannot return following an incident with gun runners who used the place to conceal weapons. Whats more interesting than the vestigial story is the structure. The film (which last just slightly over an hour) is a roundelay of alternating, repeating scenes which harshly juxtapose city/country, winter/summer etc. The narration (there is some dialogue but not that much) also repeats in circles, gradually inching forward to suggest a series of deep recollections. What we see and hear is diametrically opposed - the narrator talks of winter, we see scenes of summer etc.To me, it looks like a psychological investigation of the noir flashback, but a flashback that keeps encircling, the central character repeatedly locked in his trauma. A scene in a Parisian bar with a South American style and the name Pedro evoke the "south of the border" trajectory of a lot of classic noir stories. There's also quite a bit of the vibe of Resnais' Marienbad in here, which this pre-dates by at least a year. La Ligne Du Mire is a bit of a frustrating experience if its a precise story you are after. As an experiment in the abstract, somewhat musical potential of noir narration, its a very intriguing experiment indeed. And the appearance of Edith Scob is not the only thing here that made me think of "Holy Motors".

The Nouvelle Vague legend's only directed feature and a longtime holy grail for me finally arrives with English subs and did not disappoint. Though this is a small-scale and humble film, that's exactly what I expected it to be and I wouldn't want it any other way. A little like "Pierrot Le Fou" as revisited by Cassavettes (who I would guess is a major influence here), "Vivre Ensemble" is "actors cinema" par excellence as it tracks L'Amour Fou betwixt a grumpy teacher in the early stages of a divorce (Michel Lancelot) and a free-spirited bohemian actress (Karina). Karina's character drags her new amour's square ass through the early 70s remnants of the sixties counterculture in Paris and New York, encountering a whole array of rival boyfriends en route, until her pregnancy forces a devastating change in priorities and personalities. The story is neatly divided into a series of tableaux each introduced by a title card, deliberately recalling that other "Vivre" film Karina was in. A showcase for faces and places first and foremost, Karina films precisely the scenes she wants to film (a children's food fight, May 68 posters, an anti-war rally, a crimson-lit sex scene) like brightly-painted steps on the narrative ladder. Some real visual flair too, with an emphasis on expressive faces filmed shot/countershot and a superb wandering camera (climaxing in the magnificent closing scene, a leisurely pan across the Paris rooftops). Great performances and characters thoughout. The only major flaw for me was the endless repetition of the same piece of incidental music (I love fender rhodes-led early 70s lite jazz as much as the next sap, however...) but lets put that down to the low budget. Wouldn't an alternative universe where (amongst other improvements in quality-of-life for us all) this was just the first of a whole run of Karina-directed pictures be a nice place to live?

Continuing my non-chronological trawl through Sganzerla's films since their recent appearance in gorgeous-looking HD quality copies. This is one of the Jimi Hendrix themed films, and maybe his most "difficult" work overall. I'd seen this one before (in less than optimum quality ittedly) and kind of forgotten it, dismissing it as a bit of a plotless mess and a throwback to the late 60s psychedelic underground with its nods to mysticism and copious outer space imagery. On second viewing (and in vastly improved picture quality), it would seem to be structurally very complex indeed,and the exploration of counterculture trappings is measured and deliberate. Full comprehension of everything here would probably need a crash course in Native American mythology at least. But here we go. We have several B movie archetypes: Jose Mojica Marins aka Coffin Joe as a mad prof with a Hendrixian wardrobe peering down a huge telescope. His assistant is a suicidal noir villain. We also have some kind of explorer/mystical seeker and "Madame Zero", a strange magic lady with no fear of heights. Brazilian TV comedian Jorge Loredo does his usual character (a clown who thinks he's a ladies man) but as a trickster God archetype proclaiming his bizarre speeches to the sound of on-site drum soloing by bossa nova legend Edison Machado. The characters blur and blend into each other and control each other like remote control cosmic puppets. Hendrix music plays throughout (especially the wonderful "Pali Gap") and the man himself puts in an appearance at the end (looks like the Isle Of Wight concert, though whether this is the footage Sganzerla himself shot there or just the regular concert film I'm not sure). We have maps, pictograms, some fine looking vintage cars, more "Touch Of Evil" framing. Sganzerla is collecting and arranging some of his favourite fetishes (B movies, Welles, Hendrix, Egyptology and native Brazilian mysticisms) for the purposes of a magical working here, the details and ramifications of which are always kept beyond our reasoning. However, the visuals and dynamics are truly beautiful and this is so affecting, sincere, witty and downright bizarre that it greedily swallows up and sures the "Jimi kitsch" that we are all familar with. Could be THE acid road-movie, Easy Rider be damned...

I bet I am not alone in having an growing urge, which has been gathering force over the last few months, to run into the streets jumping around and screaming my head off. You too? Well, dunno about you, but I am far too timid and downright fucking boring to do something like that for real (yet?) so the vicarious thrill of seeing a bunch of late 60s crazies from Rio de Janeiro do it on my behalf will have to do for now. Anyway, the context: After Julio Bressane's great "Killed The Family And Went To The Movies" was banned for its blatant taunting of Brazil's military government (see my post on it from a while back), the producer offered to fund another film to put in the cinemas in its place. Instead, he teamed up with Sganzerla and Helena Ignez and offered to set up a production company that would make six feature films in six months for the same amount of money. With their usual scathing sarcasm, this no-budget third world poverty row enterprise was to be called Belair Films, named after the mega swanky Los Angeles district. This air of mock-opulence stretched to making Copacabana Mon Amour, one of Sganzera's three Belair productions, as a full colour anti-extravaganza and Brazil's first ever film in cinemascope. Or rather "strangleoscsope" as the credits call it, which probably means it was actually some kind of homemade anamorphic lens contraption rather than the official deal. Its also probably the first ever film to use cinemascope ratio with a handheld camera. Maybe even only time this has been tried. It looks great.
The brilliantly-titled Copacabana Mon Amour kicks off like an ethnographic film depicting some sort of trance ritual with chants and candles lit and chickens twirled. Then we are introduced to the skinny white woman at the centre of proceedings, the "peroxide wild woman" Sonia Silk (played by Ignez, of course), a part time prostitute who also sings on the radio (!) and who is, the narrator tells us, the direct descendant of a dynasty of gods and other mythical figures (the names of which I would guess have been mostly invented by Sganzerla though some references to genuine Brazilian folklore probably figures here). Her extravagantly gay brother seems to like playing around in a garbage chute, or running around screaming at people (the sight of many bemused/amused of the public here are a hoot as always, and these scenes have an additional potency given the fact that filming in the streets was strictly verboten in military Brazil at the time). Actually, everyone runs around screaming a lot in this, not to mention begging for money from US military personnel in scenes which appear not to be staged. Silk and her brother are in a love triangle with each other and with the brother's boss, a certain "Mr.Cricket", the solution to which turns out to be revolutionary homicide. Thats about it in of plot, here Sganzerla is aiming at a deranged and colourful anti-spectacle above all. This really really REALLY looks like an early John Waters film with its juxtapositioning of the countercultural queer underground with religious (some of it even Catholic) imagery, Sganzerla's obession with finding mythical significance to trashy B movie archetypes in a "third world" context also suggests some kind of lost collaboration between Jack Smith and Jean Rouch, if you can picture that. Soundtrack by Gilberto Gil (his loosest and most stoned-sounding jams ever, recorded in London whilst in exile...pretty much everyone else involved in this joyous provocation would soon be ing him in that), plus a repeated samba about the pleasures and pains of love and even a tune by Little Richard, a man who also knew a thing or two about the power of the scream.

Glum and shadowy Brit noir in which Jim Ackland (John Mills) hides out in a rundown boarding house, in recovery from a head injury sustained in a bus accident which killed a child he was looking after. He becomes number one suspect after another boarder is murdered. Problem is, he can't much of that night himself, he still has these blackouts you see... Yes, basically a Freddy-style wrong man/degrees of guilt thing, but a bit more underplayed than Hitch gets and none the worse for that. This is definitely NOIR and is happiest when creating impressive chiaroscuro effects which may or may not reflect our hero's state of mind. Boo hiss to the enforced and tacked-on happy ending though. Take out that last shot and this would have a magnificent and ambiguous conclusion. I'd like to see Abel Ferrara remake this, with that in mind. An oddity: this film, despite the country of origin and the year, does not "mention the war" even once!

The only film directed by this legendary French actor , this is a somewhat literary, even Biblical tale of love, leprosy and religious obsession set during the time of the Crusades. Despite the 1991 release date, this looks very much like something made 20 years prior, bringing to mind a mix of Pasolini, Straub-Huillet and "Lit De Vierge" era Garrel. Stir in a pinch of "Colour Of Pomegranites" too. The script and performances are very bound to the stage, fitting as this is an adaptation of a play. However, the visuals more than make up for it, with some stunning and inventive framing and compositions going on. The action is also interspersed, "pillow shot" style, with a series of brief but quite audacious visual conceits, my favourite being a short scene depicting a big happy dog sitting on a chair being dragged across a frozen pond, for no apparent reason. Another odd anachronism is the prominence given to one of those Chinese waving cat ornament things which sits atop an otherwise spartan medieval fireplace. Maybe someone was giving a nod and a wave to Chris Marker? By far the strangest thing about this pretty strange but beautiful and hypnotic film is the appearance of none other than Ulrika Jonsson in a starring role. Yes, that one. I know very little of the Jonsson ouvre, but I must say I would have been less surprised to see her in my local Aldi than in something like this. What the fuck. She does a nice enough job, but everyone here seems to be dubbed with other voice actors anyway. Sadly, despite the celebrity casting, this only does the rounds as shoddy VHS rip (you can see it on youtube), I'm sure if someone issues it in HD, the visual upgrade will merit giving this more than the 3/5 I'm dishing out in its present state.

"Forest" was shot with a bunch of friends on cheap DV without a budget, after Fliegauf was rejected by the Hungarian National Film School. If you are looking for evidence to make a case that film schools are a complete and utter waste of time, Exhibit A...
A brief prologue shows a diverse bunch of folks milling around what looks like the entrance to a department store. After a few minutes, someone leaves a bag on the floor then walks away. Which of course has us all wondering "what is in the bag?". We actually find out what is in the bag pretty quickly (a CD player and some porno mags), and the film gets to work on what is the more pertnient question: what is in the people?
The bulk of "Forest" consists of short, isolated scenes featuring the folks we glimpsed in the prologue. Filmed in oft-blurry and handheld mega close-up, these sequences all tend to feature two people discussing (or more frequently arguing) about a third party who we cannot see, or only glimpse. These range from the sort of realistic situations you'd expect from an arthouse drama film (a father is distressed by his young daughter's early puberty) to situations that are dark but slightly absurd (a man planning to immolate himself tries to give his dog away to a total stranger) to outrageous encounters with a touch of sci fi or the supernatural (two young guys discuss an unseen and mysterious machine that one of them has purchased which appears to be sentient and is learning to talk). Fliegauf is pursuing a high stakes game of courting the absurd here which, if you've read a few of my write ups here, is the sort of thing I love.
By the end, we literally see the titular forest (despite all the trees? I wonder if that's a saying in Hungary too?) and the prologue runs again. Only this time we recognise the faces and can put a story to them all. And the bag? You'll have to see for yourself. You should.

Further catching up with the films I've missed by this great/unappreciated Hungarian director. This is his most recent. And he's sort of made a horror film! Sort of. It certainly looks like horror, from the striking and weird prologue in which a child empties ashes into a box and places it inside a lego castle surrounded by creepy dolls/toys. Like the previous two films I've seen by Fliegauf, "Lily Lane" (which I gather is a place near Bucharest and not a person) has either a lot of stories to tell, or no real story at all. We have a mother and 7 year old child, a divorce in progress and grandma either dead or dying, but the narrative is largely centred around the morbid bedtime stories which punctuate the film. Not that the stories are ever cleanly visualised, but their dimensions and supernatural obsessions haunt the rest of the narrative. "Lily Lane" is somewhere between a child's fairytale/nightmare view of the adult world, or a horror film made out of what is REALLY horrible and frightening in life (family traumas, death, depression etc), but to restrict it to either of these summaries would be severely reductive. This is a film of visual ideas, Fliegauf's favoured cinematography (close and sensory, the camera ever-moving) dominates and some of the visual effects here are breathtaking. The look of "Lily Lane" is very reminiscent of Agnes Goddard's work with Claire Denis, especially (appropriately) "Trouble Every Day". OK, so this runs out of steam a bit halfway through (the other two Fliegauf films I've seen have a large-ish cast, this only features two or three people) though it certainly redeems itself with the stunning final scenes. Also, the sound design is often very inventive but there's a bit too much heavily-reverbed electronic droning which is becoming too much of a cliche in both contemporary horror and "art" cinema and it started to grate after a while. These niggles aside, if you like the look and iconography of horror films but are totally bored with the inane and predictable storylines, this should hit the spot. It did with me. Hope Benedek Fliegauf gets to make another film soon. He its he's "no good at business or selling films" and coupled with the fact that this is easily the most experimental and poetic film I've seen by him, despite the horror trappings, that maybe doesn't bode too well in the present marketplace.

French TV film from the somewhat legendary 90s "Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles..." series in which a bunch of directors were commissioned to make hour-ish long films set in the era of their adolescence, using the pop tunes of each era (it seems to have been some sort of co production involving Sony)… and the important stipulation that there had to be a party scene in each film. The Denis, Techine and Assayas films are especially revered (and about the only ones circulating with english subtitles, until now). This one, by former Agnes Varda assistant Mazuy (who has made several superb but alas largely unobtainable cinema films) is easily every bit as great.
Our heroine is the teenage daughter of a small town baker, and its the Saturday Night Fever era, so of course she's obsessed with big JT of the title. Until a mysterious Nietzsche-obsessed boy appears on her horizon (whose bizarre pick-up technique consists of stealing her shoelaces while she's wearing them) and he's now the great romantic obsession. The fact that he's an obnoxious and self-obsessed little turd fittingly does little to allay this believable situation. What starts off as a nicely-observed and acted, probably semi autobiographical but pretty typical coming of age type story gradually begins to drift into a zone of dreamlike unreality (which has been the case in the other two films I saw by Mazuy), and the second half pulls some pretty wild and audacious moves. By the last act, which of course is the party scene (and not only that but a party on ice, presided over by a giant metallic sculpture of an abstracted monster skater) we are in a mysterious but delicious neverland, pitched somewhere between events which are credible but barely-so and the purely metaphoric. I'm not going to spoil it because its quite a jolt, and looks forward to the kind of death 'n' desire/mythology tricks that Yann Gonzales tends to pull, especially in his superb short films. Its also pretty damn funny, at least until that ending hits you like a block of ice. Loved this.

The ultimate epic (6 hours!) film diary which I watched piecemeal over several nights, which was was a pretty strange experience. I'm sort of used to seeing all the freedom that the people who live in the past on the other side of the screen have, meeting friends, going to bars, not maintaining two meters distance etc, but an incredibly long film privileging just those kind of things at (sort of) real life tempo... But anyway... Lehman is best known in non Francophone circles (if at all) as the producer of some key early Chantal Akerman works (and she is thanked in the credits to this), and I guess he is a similar kind of film-maker that I would best describe as "patient". Which means you the viewer have to be too. However, the shots here are not punishingly long and its fairly brisk paced overall. "Babel" basically excerpts several years in the life of Boris Lehman, a scruffy and somewhat melancholic film maker, who probably bears at least a slight resemblance to the real life fellow who made the film. And the mostly unspectacular events it chronicles probably have a similar relation to "real" (i.e "no-camera-present") life. Of course, in the digital era this kind of stuff fills up youtube. In the analogue film era its undertaking would have required much more in the way of planning and resources. Babel exists in some kind of zone between self-documentary and what could be described as "dramatic reconstruction". The presence of a camera and film crew (however small) is not acknowledged by anyone here, except at key moments. Whether Lehman is re-staging real events and conversations from his life, and if so whether he is reconstructing events and conversations from hours ago, days ago, years ago or whatever is a question that is never answered, but one which Lehman plays with, a joust with the viewer's sense of equilibrium that runs through the film and transformed, for me, what could have been a bit of a grind to sit through (as pleasant as it was to watch someone else's life, or a simulation of such, in another time and place) into something quite gripping.
For example, the "big event" in Lehman's life here (and/or this film), a trip to Mexico to make an ethnographic film, is skirted around in hilarious fashion. We witness Lehman's interminable preparations for the trip, his oft-comic hesitations and deliberations and failed attempts to persuade various women to travel with him, but we see nothing of the actual trip to Mexico for ages, the film merely cuts to his return with a bagfull of touristy souvenirs. Then, just when we are certain that this whole voyage was a complete fabrication, several reels of Mexican footage (is this an Eisenstein joke?!) arrive in the mail and we see Boris, in Mexico, complete with sunburn. The beginning and the end of Babel also focus on these kind of ontological tightrope acts, but thats all I'll say for now. This was really great and I'm still processing it, basically and I don't want to "spoil" a brilliantly apposite ending for anyone else willing to take this long journey into the past.

A wild and deliberately uneven tale of L'Amour Fou at maximum fou, with the tone somewhat "off" from the very start. A classical music-loving garage mechanic (shades of Demy?) becomes obsessed with an older woman he glimpses at a music recital and immediately puts his other uncomplaining ladyfriends to work in tracking her down to a pharmacy that she runs. Our pharmacist is intrigued but unconvinced, until she is given a three-months-to-live diagnosis, and the tables not so much turn as continually rotate... The big question here is how seriously are we to take all of this, and thankfully its one that the film refuses to answer. Its partly a loving tribute to 1930s melodrama and proletarian cinema, maybe more than a little campy too, but way more idiosyncratic and welcoming of human follies than, say, Fassbinder would be when handling similar materials. The emotions are real enough,and taken seriously enough, but the situations are often absurd, and the "ing cast" (the other characters who live on the same street as the leading duo) are often more interesting than the central pair. In fact, at times they pretty much explictly tell us that. What could be a cliched story changes both tone and focus on a whim, the same unmotivated whims that the characters themesleves love to follow, crashing into a series of hilarious non sequitirs en route (the spontaneous song that the cast sing at the party at the end commenting on the plot and the foolishness of the leading man was a highlight). I've raved about Vecchiali here before (obscure, but still working hard at age 91) and the more of his stuff I see the more I'm impressed. This one refuses to settle in your mind and is hard to forget.

A famous but creatively-blocked pianist (Rüdiger Vogler) takes a sabbatical in a small village in southern and encounters the usual Vecchiali roll call of characters, who recognise him immediately. Jam sessions in the local bar ensue, as do piano lessons for the local boy genius. A (sort of) femme fatale, a widowed landlady, a toy farm, a piano in the barn with flies crawling over it. Nothing so much as a plot, but some magnificent performances (including Jacques Nolot, a formidable director himself) and lots of onscreen music making. As in people actually playing pianos, guitars, drums etc onscreen and not faking it. As close as you can get to a holiday these days, I reckon.

Polar/Noir fare, largely devoid of the liberties and imaginative flights Vecchiali would take with the genre in "L'Etrangleur". A prodigal son returns to investigate his junkie sister's murder. We have the usual dishes on the well-stuffed menu: a heroin ring, corrupt cops, a labyrinthine who's-doing-who plot, a wheelchair-bound avenger carrying his piece in a violin case, Michel Delahaye's corpse in a fridge freezer, athletic shootouts, some pretty wild action/stunt sequences (especially given the low budget) and a Deus Ex Machina in the form of a mysterious videotape which gets the hero off the hook. If you like this sort of stuff (and I sure do), its a hoot. Everyone seems to be having a blast and (unlike the ambiguous tone of the best Vecchiali films), theres an air of the fatuous about the whole thing, and a refusal to take very much of this shit seriously at all. Unless I am mistaken, the director himself plays the kingpin here, uncredited.

Odd for sure, but I don't see the lost masterpiece here that others have seen. First up, what I liked about this. I love the premise, with Burt Lancaster swimming his way home through his wealthy neighbours' backyard pools, all the while losing his mind as he realises suddenly he's not half the man he used to be. I like the road movie/odyssey variant: the roads here are mostly chlorinated and instead of meeting strangers he meets a bunch of people he already knows, most of whom can't stand him. But, blimey, the execution... The orchestra are wailing and pumping away throughout - did the director owe the conductor money or something? Either way, its completely intolerable and we had to ride the volume switch cos when the orchestra plays it always screams and when the people talk they usually mumble.
Themes, symbolism, plot points and "message" (predictable stuff about failed masculinity and rich white people being superficial) are all laid on so thick you can imagine a whole convoy of mechanical diggers doing it. The whole project emits a typical late 60s "square counterculture" vibe, down to the double exposure photography and faux-trippy sights such as Lancaster's nipple bouncing up and down in psychedelic slow motion as he and his Hollywood flower child babysitter leap over showjumps (if you haven't seen it, I am not making this up). You can predict the ending and its inevitable "message" after half an hour. I pictured a whole load of Columbia executives sitting around going "let's show those pesky independents and Europeans that we can do "deep" too". Hmmm... (question: did this come out before or after "Faces" which treads similar grounds with much much much more intelligence?).
Another great, great low-highlight was Burt pumping his fist and screaming "YOU LIKED IT!" when his former mistress criticises his shoddy sexual performance. By the time we get to the ending, the histrionics and melodrama have been pumped up to preposterous proportions with the orchestra grinding away and (spoiler!) Burt hammering away for seemingly hours at the door of his abandoned house. The camera pans in through the broken window and I really expected to see the cobwebbed skeletons of his wife and daughters sitting at the dinner table. Yes, it was all a bit like that.
However, I did quite enjoy the absurdity of it all. Believe it or not, I really do hate to laugh at a movie as opposed to with it, and I accept the premise that all of the oddities and excesses here may be deliberate - are we to take this purely as a deliberate and gloriously over the top piece of "hetero camp" (a la Bat Out Of Hell?), on which level I could actually quite dig it...or was I meant to be actually moved by this? I'd love to know.

Very glad to see blu ray quality copy of this WAY under-rated early Godard for a re-watch, and it looks better than it ever has (I love the gritty no-budget feel to this one). The little soldier, a photographer and a man entirely without convictions, finds himself implicated on both sides of the Algerian conflict while on the run in Switzerland, setting up the cultured individual vs. grand forces of history theme which would be a constant in the JLG ouvre from this point on. But its also very funny, and the clearly unsimulated torture scenes are more eye-watering and downright affecting than all the CGI/rubber dummy horror shit in the world.

First off, what a gorgeous and utterly evocative title. This one doesn't seem to be too popular with Bressonians, especially ones who uphold him as some kind of priest (albeit a "christian atheist" priest). Not much of an R.E. lesson in this sensuous and music-filled tale of love and longing. Based on a Dostoyevsky story, this is virtually a rom-com by Bresson standards, ittedly a very terse, (yes...) dreamy and efficient one. The story is pretty basic - a reclusive and self-obsessed but voyeuristic painter helps a suicidal woman reconnect with her missing beau - but that is not to its detriment at all. The (non)acting is your typical R.B. deadpan. Theres lots of the usual shots of people slowly going through doorways. A hilarious scene where the painter is visited by an old friend who expounds his portentious manifesto of art for 5 minutes then abrupty leaves. A samba trio blast it out aboard a boat. Leos Carax's early career is basically an inferior copy of this film. If you ever wondered how Bresson would go about shooting a "kiss kiss bang bang" action thriller, you can get a glimpse of it here (and its one of the funniest scenes). Best of all, Paris by day and especially by night is gorgeously photographed in a way that connects with my recollections of the feel of the place, and I can take a late night stroll along the banks of the Seine any time I like without getting off my arse thanks to this. Probably my favourite Bresson of the ones I've seen