Le jour se lève

October 1, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Le Jour se lève (1939) movie poster

(1939) director Marcel Carné
viewed: 09/30/10

I ended up queuing Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève after seeing it listed among a number of other films as early non-American film noirs.  While aspects of it could be considered somewhat proto-noir, it doesn’t really bear out the film noir but rather as “poetic realism”, a style that had brief popularity in France in the 1930′s that later influence Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave.  Certainly, when it comes to styles, few films are so pure that they can be quite simply classified in a number of ways, utterly exclusive of other categories.

The film stars the ubiquitous Jean Gabin as a factory worker who falls in love with a woman from a flower shop.  She, however, falls under the sway of an older gentleman with a silver tongue, who stages an act with performing dogs and speaks of travel and a life far removed from her urban experience.  Gabin takes up with the dog trainer’s ex-lover in the meantime, but still loves his flower shop fille.  But the cad continues to harangue him, gibe him, and make life miserable.

But the film actually opens with Gabin slaying his oppressor.  The film follows Gabin who has locked himself in his top floor apartment, holding off the police with a gun, and the story comes about in a series of flashbacks, leading to understand how Gabin’s character wound up in this situation.

I’d never seen any of Marcel Carné’s films, even though his Children of Paradise (1945) is popularly considered one of the best French films of all time in France.  The film fits well with Jean Renoir’s  La bête humaine (1938) or The Lower Depths (1936), which might also be considered a representative of poetic realism as well, featuring humanist stories, steeped perhaps in a literary tradition, depicting life on the lower echelons of the social structure.  And like those films, it’s quite well-done, featuring a number of interesting camera techniques and weaving a compelling fatalistic yarn.

Filed under DVD, France, proto noir

A Prophet

September 13, 2010 by Leave a Comment

A Prophet (2009) movie poster

(2009) director Jacques Audiard
viewed: 09/11/10

This gritty prison drama (are there any other kind?) from France received a lot of praise and was a favorite to win the Foreign Film Oscar this year, in competition with Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009), though they both lost out to the Argentinian film The Secret in Their Eyes (2009).  Stiff competition.

The story follows 19 year old Malik, a youth of North African descent as he is installed into prison for a six year stretch.  No family, no connections, illiterate, he has only the wadded up bank note in his possession when he moves from a long string of youth imprisonments to the big time.  It’s the kind of story that prison reformists would cite.  He goes in a petty criminal, but comes out a masterful thug, learning how to survive in the racially divisive and brutally racist gangs in jail.

From the very get-go, he is forced at the threat of death to kill a fellow inmate for the Corsican gang that has most of the run of the prison.  The Corsicans are led by brutal César, who is played with rich malice by Niels Arestrup.  After completing this assassination, Malik receives the Corsicans’ protection but not their friendship.  To them, he is an Arab, and thus scum.  To the Arabs, he is a traitor who has aligned himself with the racist Corsicans.  Besides his rehabilitation training in learning to read, what Malik learns in the prison is how not only to be an effective criminal but how to manage all the varying racial groups, playing his way in the deadly game to the top of the heap.

I’d be lying if I said that I knew first-hand how volatile and poisonous the racial mixture in Europe really is.  But from the varying films that I’ve seen, books that I’ve read, and other media, the picture is one of a melting pot that is far more a crucible than a homogenator.  While there have for centuries been people from the same varying regions entering France and its many facets of culture and life, the state of things at the present is as nasty as perhaps it ever has been.   Malik, the protagonist, is torn in his identity, not having ever known his parents, nor what any “culture” could signify to him.  He plays the game for himself and his one true friend and ally, but he is haunted as well by the man that he killed.

The film is an interesting mixture of realism and surrealism.  Clearly, most of the film is dramatically naturalistic and visceral, but director Jacques Audiard plays a bit with Malik’s perscpective, occasionally shrouding the screen as if looking out through a peephole at reality.  But additionally, Malik is haunted by dreams and a ghost of the man he killed, a recurring theme of something other than realism.

It’s a solid film, quite powerful, quite telling.  But I have to say that the one image that I might come away from the film with the most pointedly is the French inmates being given their daily baguettes.  The prison might be a hellhole, but at least there’s baguettes everyday.

Filed under DVD, France

Breathless

July 27, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Breathless (1960) movie poster

(1960) director Jean-Luc Godard
viewed: 07/26/10 at the Embarcadero Cinema, SF, CA

In junior college, I took “Film 101″ three times.  The first two times I took incompletes, only finally getting a grade for it in the last go around.  “The 3rd time’s the charm,” as they say.

It was in the second of these Introduction to Film classes that I was introduced to Jean-Luc Godard and his seminal 1960 film, Breathless.  And I didn’t like it.  I was 18 probably, and despite the context that the teacher gave to the film, implanting the concepts of “jump cuts” and the general dissonance that Godard brought to “break” with traditional film techniques, I didn’t enjoy the film.  I found Jean-Paul Belmondo annoying, didn’t care for the misogynistic or chauvinistic attitudes, and just, perhaps, wasn’t “ready” to appreciate Godard or the tropes and concepts of the French New Wave.  I know, not very open-minded of me.  But there you go.

Oddly enough, some 20+ years later, after graduate studies in film and any number of movies, books, classes, experience, this is actually only the second time that I’ve watched Breathless.  And here the film is now, in it’s 50th anniversary release, in a newly restored print overseen by cinematographer Raoul Coutard.  And, for me, the experience is a world apart from that of my 18-year old self, watching the film on video, in the confines of a junior college classroom.

One striking aspect of Breathless, which I’ve noted in other French films of the period, is the fascinating “capture” of the world of the film’s present, apprehended largely in the locations in which the filming took place.  And this is powerfully evident in Breathless.  From the Champs-Élysées to Montparnasse to the Place de la Concorde and the many roads and avenues and cafes, the film comprises a multitude of snapshots of a now distant Paris, which of course would have been utter contemporary at the time.  Consider the automobiles, the many that Belmondo’s Michel steals throughout the play of the film, and the dapper styles of Belmondo and the uber-stylish and beautiful Jean Seaberg, the film has an air of pure style and aesthetic that is transporting and almost quaint.

While this is a matter for the present, to look back on a Paris of 50 years ago, to people who are in some cases long-gone, is an element of cinema true in perhaps many old films (if not all), and it may not be the most purely relevant gaze to cast on Breathless, I would say it’s awfully hard not to have a reaction to that style and character.  Godard chose to shoot in the streets of Paris with a film crew pared down like that of journalists of the time, so this capture is not by any means entirely accidental or lacking meaning.

Godard’s more radical cinematic techniques, not simply the jump cuts or the dissonant street noises that obscure the dialogue or the off-screen dramatics that would normally take the foreground in a narrative, but his wholly politicized approach to breaking down the narrative devices of traditional Hollywood cinema still seem quite radical even today.  Because big feature cinema production is still adherent to the traditions and practices established prior to Godard’s film; these discordant approaches, breaking the audience’s connections to the characters and the story still jar us, they still make for a different cinematic experience, one of the self-awareness of sitting and watching Breathless, rather than being caught up and lost in the world and story of the diegetic film world.  While some elements of these techniques became absorbed into the language of film, and this film influenced filmmaker upon filmmaker, film upon film, it’s still quite uncommon to see a film made that is so intentionally challenging of audience pleasure and engagement.

Not that Breathless is the extreme for Godard in this respect.  Far from it.  The film has much of the joy and beauty and pleasure still deeply within it that make many of Godard’s early films quite charming and fun, discordant yet enjoyable, and why they aren’t just a burden to endure as some of his other films might be argued to be.

Godard’s Breathless is well worth seeing for the first time or the second, or simply again.  It’s modernist and modern, post-modern and complex, a glimpse of a Paris now long past, a riff on love and crime and perhaps a cynical existentialism.  It’s pleasure and displeasure, and will probably not strike any two people the exact same way.  And in many ways, this is a testament to the power and innovation of this film, even 50 years later.

Godard has grown on me over the years, and while I’ve come to like some of his films better, or still dislike others of his films more, I have the pleasure of seeing Breathless now and still seeing how understandable it was to react negatively back many years ago was.  But how much better it is to appreciate it here and now.

Filed under France, Jean-Luc Godard, Theatrical

La bête humaine

April 8, 2010 by Leave a Comment

La Bête humaine (1938) movie poster

(1938) dir. Jean Renoir
viewed: 04/05/10

As I noted about a year ago when I watched Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths (1936), I’d had an introduction to Renoir when I had been living in England, but since that time I haven’t really seen any of his films.  La bête humaine is actually not entirely different from The Lower Depths in that it’s a literary adaptation, this time Emile Zola not Maxim Gorky, and also one with some change of setting.  In this case, the story is modernized a bit, which was a choice for production costs, according to some of the extras on the Criterion Collection disc.

La bête humaine plays out a bit like film noir though film noir wasn’t to come for another decade almost (though there are debates about its origin if such a thing can be clearly defined).  A humanistic approach to the story of love and murder among the working class, the films stars Jean Gabin and Simone Simon, the doomed lovers of this tale.

The cinematography is quite striking, set amongst the world of steam trains and the engineers and other workers in this world.  The film opens, interestingly, with no dialogue, but with the images of the train, the work that it takes the men to make the train run, and the physicality of the entire milieu.  Apparently, Gabin learned to run the trains himself, and there was much put into the verity of the work situations, the realit of the work and effort, not simply into the characters’ personas.

Always interested in class, Renoir here is actually much more situated within a single class, not demonstrating many characters from othere walks of society, with the key example of the corrupt godfather of Simon’s character, who was a womanizer and user of women, using even his relationship with Simon as her godfather to have an affair with her until he’d tired of her.  He meets a ruinous end, but at the hands of Simon’s jealous, small-minded husband, not purely for moral flaws.

Simone Simon, who I’d only ever seen in Cat People (1942) and The Curse of the Cat People (1944), is a lovely woman, yet again a victim.   Though in this case, she’s a victim of the strange, psychological urges of a man possessed of the blood poisoned by the sins of his forebears.

A great film, truly.  Renoir was a humanist above all and a great teller of story.  All is apparent here in this film.

Filed under DVD, France, proto noir

The Beaches of Agnès

March 24, 2010 by Leave a Comment

The Beaches of Agnès (2008) movie poster

(2008) dir. Agnès Varda
viewed: 03/22/10

It’s been a little over a year since I saw Agnès Varda’s documentary The Gleaners and I (2000), which I had long planned to see, but in that year, and largely from inspiration of seeing that film, I have caught a few more of her earlier films and have grown to really like and appreciate her work.  Varda is perhaps most famous for being the lone female director who was associated with the French New Wave, in particular her films Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Le bonheur (1965).  But when I had read about The Beaches of Agnès, her autobiographical documentary, I was pretty excited to see it.

It’s hard not to think of this film without considering The Gleaners and I, because that film seems to have kicked off a renaissance of sorts for Varda, who fell in love with the light, mobile, digital camera that she used to make a documentary, freed from much of the production requirements of a big shoot and allowed to find this particular voice, this same voice with which she turns the camera upon herself.

The film opens with the first of many staged installation-like settings, on a beach with a multitude of various old mirrors set to reflect at angles and vantages.  This is one of her two large metaphors for the work of this film: she is reflecting upon herself, liking the mirrors, as she does personally, but also comparing the interior being of hers to that of a beach, being that her life has so long revolved around or near them.  She also spends time in many of these settings walking backwards.  For her, self-reflection or at least a dwelling upon the past is not a comfortable habit, but God knows she has the material for it.

She looks back to her childhood, born in Belgium, and raised in parts of France, partially during WWII, to her experience as an 18-year old, traveling to the south and taking a job repairing fishing nets.  It is after this that she studies photography and begins to develop her interest in the world of both still and moving images.  Her approach is largely chronological, light, humorous, flitting, full of play and puns and visual jokes.  In some ways, these two films (of hers that I have seen) have the most pronounced “voice”, literally too because she narrates them.

One has to wonder, now that Varda is 82 and has made films about both her life and the life of her late husband, the filmmaker Jacques Demy, whether this is the end cap to her career, some final comment cinematically at least.  Her life is certainly interesting, from the provincal beginnings to the Cannes and other film festival awards, living briefly in California, marriage, children, social activism, and art.  She is a lovely character, fun and funny, someone that you’d love to spend an afternoon with.

Another thing that struck me was that how in Hollywood, only this very year, it was the first time that a woman was ever recognized by the establishment (the Oscars) as Best Director and how Varda (who was hardly the first important female filmmaker) started making films in the 1950′s and had won international acclaim by the 1960′s.  It’s truly shocking that women haven’t had more opportunities for recognition, even 50 years later, that such a trailblazer, who blazed a trail more out of happenstance than pure drive, would be still such an anomaly.

For me, The Gleaners and I is still a preferred film, in that its play and discovery are so fresh, and while not like jazz in the literal sense, it is also freeform and flowing and clever.  The Beaches of Agnès also has great charm and character, though much the same character as the other film.  The subject matter is both more singular and more expansive, heart-warming, largely, but less “new”.  And I have renewed my vows to watch more of her films this year.

Filed under Agnès Varda, Documentaries, DVD, France

Le deuxième souffle

December 2, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Le deuxième souffle (1966) movie poster

(1966) dir. Jean-Pierre Melville
viewed: 11/30/09

There is no such thing as a bad Jean-Pierre Melville film as far as I can tell.  From Bob le flambeur (1955), Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967), Army of Shadows (1969), and Le Cercle rouge (1970), the French filmmaker crafted his own breed of films noir.  All of his films that I have seen have been remarkable, and it’s easy to understand how his style influenced and impressed the French New Wave, with his fatalistic films about the criminal world, of doomed characters in intractable situations, and his strange traits and characteristics.

Le deuxième souffle (which roughly translates to “Second Wind”) is based on a novel by José Giovanni and offers a strange disclaimer about its treatment of the characters of both the criminal and the corrupt detective who hunts him down.  The film starts with a wordless escape from prison, shot in stark angles, in which a notorious criminal known to friends and foes as “Gu” (Lino Ventura), makes good his getaway.  In returning to Paris, he meets some old friends and a lover who help him hole up in preparation for leaving the country.  But Gu is lured back for one last heist, but one in which he has been set up on both sides to take the fall for.

Melville used location shooting, giving a strong sensibility of Paris and Marseille, and this aspect, as well as the fatalism and tragic romance of the criminal, were so appealing to Jean-Luc Godard and others.

The opening sequence, which is quite striking, with the three men leaping over a wall (one to his death) and then racing onto a moving train and then departing company, all wordless, though not silent, is something that Melville approached in a more extreme way later in Le Cercle rouge, in which an entire 20 minute heist sequence plays out without a spoken word.  And while I see reference to this style as being considered “reporting”, I think more he has a focus on the craftsman or professionalism of the criminal, process-oriented, workmanlike.  While not necessarily noble souls (they are killers and thieves), they have skill, intelligence, and aspects of loyalty.

But crime does not pay, not here, nor in France.  These characters are not perhaps truly tragic, just simply doomed.  They never really had a chance, nor did they have another way out.  What is interesting to me as well is that I started reading a more modern series of French crime novels by Jean-Claude Izzo, his series referred to as “The Marseille Trilogy”, and this film in particular strikes me as consistent with his themes and locations.  These characters of the underworld who live and die by crime, walk the same streets, drive the same roads.

Melville’s films are aesthetically pleasing and engaging, really quite something.  If you haven’t seen them, you should.  There is much to be appreciated in this filmmaker, himself a craftsman.  And perhaps one of the best of his time.

Filed under DVD, France, Jean-Pierre Melville

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

August 25, 2009 by Leave a Comment

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) movie poster

(1964) dir. Jacques Demy
viewed: 08/23/09

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of those films that a lot of people love, and it’s one that I’d long planned to wait to see on the big screen, which wound up putting it out further and further from ever having seen it.  So, finally queueing it and finally seeing it, I can say indeed that I can understand how this film evokes such positive feelings, sad in many ways that the story is, this is a charming, lovely film, beautiful and in some ways, quite timeless.

It had been ages since I’d seen a musical, and I certainly can’t begin to recall when the last two films that I’d seen were both musicals, but it was a happenstance pairing with having watched the marvelous The Music Man (1962), and in some ways helps inform director Jacques Demy’s vision, his lushly colorful love poem ode to the Hollywood musical, but one made with a particular French sensibility, and taking a page perhaps more from opera than the traditional musical.  While this film is a musical, every line of the film is sung and often sung to rhythms and tunes, one would not say that there is necessarily a “song” in the film.  It’s a bit of a deconstruction in that.

That and that the story is a bit of a standardish sort of love story, girl meets boy, girl gets pregnant, boy goes off with the military (to war?), girl ends up marrying someone else…  Well, I won’t give the whole story away, but I use that sketch of the narrative to suggest that there is nothing outstandingly unique in the storyline, but the novelty of the music, the gorgeous set designs and cinematography, the amazingly lovely dresses and costuming, and Catherine Deneuve!  It’s eye candy of a different sort.

Unlike a musical such as The Music Man, there are no set-piece songs, no stagey dance numbers, and no talking in between to set them up.  In many cases, the story could have just as well have been spoken as sung, not requiring rhyme nor meter to pattern to the music.  But this film is charming and lovely, hard to not take a shine to.  And it’s easy to understand why it is well-loved by many.

I’m not so utterly familiar with Jacques Demy beyond the fact that he was married to the also amazing Agnès Varda (Le bonheur (1965), Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)).  Varda did make a film about her late husband, The World of Jacques Demy (1995).  Certainly there is more to see.

I would definitely say that this film is worth seeing on the big screen.  I would be interested still in seeing it that way, but I can certainly say that I enjoyed it.

Filed under DVD, France, Musicals

Le bonheur

June 16, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Le bonheur (1965) movie poster

(1965) dir. Agnès Varda
viewed: 06/15/09

Le bonheur is another really interesting film from the great Agnès Varda, the lone woman affiliated with the French New Wave.  As I’ve mentioned in past comments, I’d first seen her film Vagabond (1985) back in film school, but for some reason didn’t get around to really exploring her work until last year.  But after watching Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) and The Gleaners and I (2000), her unique style and vision and her very singular films are beginning to make her a bit of a favorite.

It’s not that Le bonheur seems a masterpiece, or even that I feel like it’s fully yet sunken in, but rather it’s the way she uses the camera, the way she “sees” things, frames them, both visually and within the narrative that is strange, striking, and hard to catergorize.  It’s easy to suggest a Feminist stance virtually for any female director whose work was by the happenstance of her gender pioneering.  And it’s not to say that the film doesn’t potentially have a distinct Feminist reading perhaps even deeply within it.  But it’s something that arises to an extent, though not in a pedantic or unambiguous way.

The film opens on a pastoral scene, a young family, man, woman, toddler and baby, picnicking in the gloriously colorful summer woods.  It’s almost a standing cliche of an image, but the film whose title translates as “Happiness” lends one to both drink in the visual beauty and the image of familial bliss.  But also, there is a concern that this image, as genuine as it is portrayed and as beautiful as it is, is doomed at some point.

Color is so alive in the film that it’s amazing.  Varda “fades out” scenes to bright hues of blue, green, yellow, red, pink, violet, and then the scenes are alive with natural colors and also the painted hues of bright primary colors as well as the colors throughout the clothing of the characters.  I was reminded of the way that Jean-Luc Godard used colors in Made in U.S.A. (1966), but in his film it felt much more random and pop-arty.  In Le bonheur, there is a grand logic and an elegance to the utilization, not that I understand it as a “code” but as something, much like the music, Mozart, that comments upon the story and pervades and creates the mood or tone.

The story follows the young couple in their simple, beautiful lives.  The husband is a carpenter, a traditional, non-modern job, and the wife is a seamstress, taking jobs of sewing wedding dresses.  Their small home is lovely, their life is almost something from a past era, pre-modern, simple, happy, and idealized.  Until the husband starts an affair with another woman, though he sees the affair as potentially something outside of the traditional family unit, something that could work and be good and expand their lives.  And ultimately, he tells his wife about the affair, hoping for acceptance.

It’s one of those kinds of films which you could discuss and discuss because the meanings are open and even some of the events are mildly questionable.  And what is the ending, with more muted autumnal colors?  Just a part of the passage of time, the seasonal change?

At times, especially at first, I was thinking how much I would recommend this film to people because of the beautiful aesthetic and the charming world.  But as the story darkened, the mood changed and it’s more complex and not necessarily so cheerful.  And that is not to say that I wouldn’t recommend it, because it’s quite amazing, really, just complex and vaguely or potentially tragic.

Varda is a fascinating director, with a unique eye, capable of making the camera “see” the way that she sees.  And the feeling, this film, a femine voice, so different an experience, fresh, vivid, and beautiful.

Filed under Agnès Varda, DVD, France

Made in U.S.A.

April 9, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Made in U.S.A. (1966) movie poster

(1966) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
viewed: 04/04/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

I don’t know why it’s taken so many years, but I’ve finally become smitten by the French New Wave.  Mostly, actually, via the films of Jean-Luc Godard, particularly his earlier works, starting with Band of Outsiders (1964) and most recently with Pierrot le fou (1965).  And while I’ve actually seen about half of the films he produced in the 1960′s.  Mostly, I am catching up on DVD, but when opportunity arises, I like to see these films theatrically.

So, when Made in U.S.A. was being shown at the Castro Theatre, I thought to myself “I am so there!”  And I was.  But oddly enough, Made in U.S.A. actually harkened more of one of the first of Godard’s films that I’d seen, his 1967 film Weekend, which I saw in film school and then again on some other trope, probably film school again, and I really didn’t care for it.  It’s a more politicized film, less romantic, full of chaos and random “noise”, a dissonant film that was not meant for “pleasure”.  And really, in Made in U.S.A., you have a similar sensibility at work, not yet as fully as we see in Weekend, but one that is moving in that direction.

I think that this is what set me away from Godard initially.  I think that I assumed that all his films had a politicized, unromanticized, anti-cinema aesthetic that went with them, one in which visual pleasure or cinematic enjoyment were incisively challenged.  And it’s not that there are not aspects of his working against many of narrative cinema’s mechanisms in all of his films, but in some, especially Band of Outsiders, you see joy and love amidst the critique, and there is visual pleasure, comedy and fun as well.  It’s this sort of character of his films that has drawn me towards his work more of late.

Made in U.S.A. is really a half-way point between these two sensibilities.  This showing of the film in the United States is essentially the film’s first release here.  Godard borrowed a narrative from a Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake) crime novel and reanimated it with uber-irony and comic play, a lens through which his critiques and ideas are formed here.  Apparently, due to having never paid Westlake for the rights, the film was never allowed into the United States, perhaps furthering the irony of the title and possibly part of the film’s critiques.  It’s also the final feature film of his that starred his beautiful then-wife Anna Karina, with whom he was going through a divorce at the time of the film’s production.

Shot in vivid color, the film does in fact “play” a lot.  At one point, there is a comment that the film is like a crime film directed by Walt Disney or something.  It’s saying quite literally what it’s playing with, Americana and the detective genre, but strange, cartoony perhaps.  Karina is usually wearing bright colors and is often off-set by bright background colors, often primary colors, of painted building facades, or signage.  Advertising imagery, pinball machine decorations, pop art, all played out against a paint-by-colors detective story, yet still one where information needs to be uncovered.  There stands the simple genre structure, deconstructed, yet utilized.  Of course, the mystery is much less about what happened to Anna Karina’s lover Richard (as the narrative tries to unfold), but the mystery is much more about what the heck is going on in the film?

Godard drops cultural references all over the place from characters named David Goodis and Otto Preminger to Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara.  There are stabs are broader humor, which are (intentionally) flat.  And ultimately there is a politicized dialogue/monologues about “the left” and “the right”, the Communist Party, and a was in Algeria.

The mixture is also interspersed with acutal noise.  Richard’s last name is always bleated out by airplane noise, car horns, or machine gun noise.  Airplane noise is a constant as well, and the taped recording of a voice is highly dissonant as well.  When contemplating the film’s qualities, the question arises about the amount of intended pleasure versus the amount of intended displeasure.  And the other question is about how much of the film’s actual “meaning” is meant to be understood.  Or is the film mainly playing to open dialogue, inspire questions, or just make one constantly aware that they are watching a film that is nothing like a relaxing movie-going ride that one might be more used to.

Like Weekend, I think the film has much intentional dissonance, visually, audiably, and even intellectually.  From some early moments, it feels like it still wants to have fun.  Perhaps they were having fun in making it.  But the experience on the outside is one of not so easy answers, not so easy responses, and certainly no belly laughs.  Do I “get” this film?  I don’t know.  Did I enjoy it?  Not so much.  Does that mean I think it was not good? Not necessarily.  Would I recommend it to anyone? Serious filmgoers only.  Not the casual approach to the French New Wave.  Perhaps this is a place in which the French New Wave starts waving goodbye, moving into the politicized late 1960′s, influenced by the Vietnam War, and the social revolutions and changes taking place.  It’s no longer the suave and hip late 1950′s and early 1960′s, the honeymoon (and the marriage) is over.  The social criticism is ripe, and cinema is no longer as beautified and idolated.  It’s time to get radical.

Filed under France, Jean-Luc Godard, Theatrical

The Lower Depths

March 20, 2009 by Leave a Comment

The Lower Depths (1936) movie poster

(1936) dir. Jean Renoir
viewed: 03/19/09

Back in 1995, when I was living in England, the BBC and Channel 4 were celebrating “a century of cinema” with documentaries and lots of “the greatest” of world cinema.  It was a pretty good time to be there and not have a lot to do.  It is when I was introduced to the word of Jean Renoir, through The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939).  But oddly, through time, I don’t think I ever ended up seeing any more of his films, nor seeing those films again.  It was an interesting time, the period that got me inspired to study cinema and really exposed me to cinema, as well.

The Lower Depths is Renoir’s adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s play of the same name, adapted to France, of course.  The film stars the ubiquitous Jean Gabin, who I am really getting to know of late, from such films as Pépé le Moko (1937) & Touchez pas au grisbi (1954).  Little did I realize what an important film actor Gabin is/was in France, something of a Humphrey Bogart/John Wayne icon, and here, in The Lower Depths, he’s perhaps the most charming that I’ve seen him.  Playing a good-hearted thief from the poorest ranks of society, he is looking for a woman to give him a reason to be good.

Like the other of Renoir’s films, The Lower Depths is very much about class, or “the classes” of society.  It’s an odd thing for me to relate to the way that culturally is much more imprinted on Europe, especially a Europe of the 1930′s, when class-consciousness was more a full-on structure.  The idea that you can tell someone of the “upper class” who is “slumming” simply by the way they carry themselves, a sense of one class being better than another.

One of the best scenes in the movie is when Jean Gabin is burgalizing the flat of a baron and is caught in the act.  The baron, however, largely through gambling, has winnowed himself out of money to the point that the next day everything he has is going to be repossessed, so he pleasantly treats Gabin to dinner, drinks, and cards, and tells him to take anything he likes.

While the thief wants out of “the lower depths”, away from the dirt, poverty, crime, and death, the nobleman yearns for the freedoms that come from owning nothing.  He is charmed by the notion of sleeping in the grass by the river, though even his butler is shocked that anyone would do such a thing.  The class consciousness is clearly a dated thing, though an interesting one, and really, it’s the characters who make the film live.

There is an Akira Kurosawa film adapted from the play as well.  In fact, Criterion compiles them in packaging.  So, I guess that I’ll be seeing that one fairly soon.  Vive Renoir!  Vive Gabin!

Filed under DVD, France

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