[Maybe, in the interests of accuracy, I should change the name of this feature to “Pic of the Month,” or perhaps “Pic of the Millennium”…]
“Belle de Jour” (1967)
Given my four years of high school French, I translated the title literally – “pretty woman of day.” The actual idiom is translated more like “Morning Glory,” which also happens to be a much cooler title. From the opening sequence, you know this is a Luis Bunuel film. I’m not really into his whole surrealist movement, but here Bunuel uses surrealist elements like fantasy sequences to illustrate the main character’s state of mind so well that it seemed totally organic to me. Catherine Deneuve is a bored, and apparently frigid, housewife who won’t even sleep in the same bed with her adorable, adorably square and endlessly patient husband. Poor sap. Because the unfulfilled wife finds her way to a super-discreet brothel that allows her to work the day-shift, and she gets into all kinds of trouble. I’ve never been a big fan of the “self-actualization through adultery” genre, but there’s more than that going on here. Our heroine, and several other characters, have issues with balancing fantasy and reality. I thought the ending was unsatisfying, but I do like how Bunuel handled the material.
“Last Tango in
…picking up in the whole degrading sex meme where “Belle de Jour” leaves off, this is the movie that leaves my mother foaming at the mouth…though now, having seen it, I’m not sure if that’s because of the aforementioned degrading sex, or the fact that it’s boring as hell. Maybe that’s not fair. It was released at the height of the 1970s “who gives a sh*t?” era of filmmaking, and Pauline Kael loved it, so one should go into viewing this expecting a certain amount of built-in nap time. Basically, Marlon Brando’s a shockingly recent widower whose wife was cheating on him. Maria Schneider (whom I loved in “The Passenger” – she’s the sole reason I ignored Mom’s warnings and rented this) is a young French woman about to be married to Jean-Pierre Leaud (more on him later). They meet randomly in a vacant apartment for rent, have random sex and then continue to meet in said apartment for even more random sex. If that were the whole movie…hey, I’m all for depictions of random sex, since Antonioni says my eros is defective. But this is not erotica. It’s more like sex is a tool for the characters degrading one another. More precisely, for him to degrade her, as if he can avenge himself on his wife by sexually humiliating a woman who’s too naïve to know what’s happening until it’s too late. The acting is brilliant – I’ve never believed Brando more, with the possible exception of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” But still, a film that will disturb a lot of people. Coupling this with “Belle de Jour,” one wonders - Is meaningless, soul-destroying sex all French people care about?
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Of course not! They’re also into looooooo-ve, with or without sex. I hesitated to include this one, since I didn’t actually watch it all the way through. I carry a certain amount of guilt for this. First of all, I consider quitting on a movie to be a character flaw. Second, “Paris je t’aime” was a film fest darling, what with its innovative use of some 20 international filmmakers, each producing a five-minute short about life and love in a different Paris neighborhood. The stories don’t link together at all. They’re just laid out there in all their five-minute Parisian glory. Theoretically, this should be my kind of movie because I have the attention span of a gnat. But it’s precisely because I have the attention span of a gnat that I need some structure, dammit. What I saw was pleasant. But in six weeks of Netflix “did you receive…?” e-mails, I couldn’t sit through all 20 segments. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a bathroom book. So, I’m obviously film fest-darling-deficient. Maybe you’ll like it better than I did.
…Lucky for me, French people are into food, as well. But I wouldn’t recommend eating what’s on the menu at this joint…It takes place in an unspecified post-apocalyptic time that looks curiously like the 1950s (surely the post WWII years weren’t this bleak…) where food, particularly meat, is in short supply. The action centers on a carnival-creepy apartment building that also houses a butcher’s shop on its lower floor. The building’s tenants get their sustenance by luring itinerate workers and then, well, pretty much grinding them into sausage. Things go about their merry way until an out-of work clown (Dominique Pinon) moves in and falls for the butcher’s geeky daughter. Since “Delicatessen” is brought to you by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (co-directed by Marc Caro), you should expect a slightly distorted perspective, along with lots of hugely entertaining, laugh-out-loud details. (Jeunet also did “Amelie” and “City of
“The 400 Blows” (1959)
But lest we forget, the French also gave us neo-realism, developed and popularized by, among others, my Dead Celebrity Crush #47, Francois Truffaut. “The 400 Blows,” aside from being one of those films that looms toward the top of any number of “Must-See if You Want to Call Yourself a Film Geek” lists, brings us another French idiom. “Striking one’s 400 blows” is an expression roughly akin to the American expression “sowing one’s wild oats,” and that’s what our scruffy, juvenile delinquent hero, Antoine Doinel, is doing here in the first of several Truffaut films featuring that character (supposedly a fictionalized version of Truffaut himself). I have to confess that I didn’t feel a great deal of sympathy for Antoine, because I didn’t identify with him. He does stupid sh*t, then digs himself even deeper by doing progressively more stupid sh*t. I was not a particularly stupid sh*t-doing kid, myself. But Jean-Pierre Leaud, in his debut role, is marvelous as Antoine (and would reprise the role in the later films). And there are some pretty neat film-geek tricks to pick up here. For one thing, Truffaut shot much of the film MOS, or without sound, which makes production cheaper because you can just shoot without having to worry about keeping the set quiet. But, it means that you have to go back and re-record all the dialogue and then dub it in, which has massive Samurai Mouth potential. However, the dubbing looked pretty seamless to me – remarkable, considering that more modern MOS attempts (“El Mariachi” comes to mind) had to cut like crazy to avoid Samurai Mouth. And, oh yeah…in any film textbook you’ll read a lot about the famous last shot of the film. It’s cool. But not necessarily any more well-done or fraught with meaning than the rest of the film.
Now, this one has a special place in my heart because, not only was it the first film I watched in a bona fide college film class (the only thing that ass-hat UNCG professor did for me), but Dead Celebrity Crush #47 himself actually appears on-screen. Yep. Truffaut directed, and plays the director of a “film within a film” – which had to make for some interesting moments on-set. No, the plot’s not terribly consequential – some people are trying to make a movie – but it’s still a marvelous, and thoroughly entertaining, film. And it brings us yet another idiom, though this one’s not particular to
Pic of the Week: You know, I know so many film geeks who swear by the 1995 flick “Living in Oblivion” as the ultimate depiction of life on-set. They obviously have not seen “Day for Night,” and they’re missing out.
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