La Amiga de Mi Amiga

Zaida Carmona's Girlfriends and Girlfriends is a cute bit of lesbian fluff. I wish it had been a little more laugh-out-loud funny, but maybe I’m just not enough of a lesbian.

The title, incidentally, does not quite correctly translate La Amiga de Mi Amiga, but it is a reference to Éric Rohmer's L'Ami de Mon Amie, which was released in English as Boyfriends & Girlfriends.

Le Doulos

If you do not know the films of Jean-Pierre Melville you need to go rent some immediately. Melville was a part of the French New Wave, but instead of opting for portraits of disaffected youths and urban ennui, Melville chose as his subjects the men and women of crime life: assassins, police, gangsters, thieves, gamblers, fences, molls, bartenders, chanteuses, safecrackers, spies, and con-artists.

I saw a great many of Melville's films years ago when I was living in Los Angeles. My friend Karen and I became slightly obsessed with his genius film Le Samouraï, and from there watched Le Cercle Rouge, Bob le Flambeur, and the Cocteau adaptation Les Enfants Terribles. We were fortunate enough to be able to cap off our obsession when Army of Shadows, which was released in France in 1969 but had never been released in the U.S., finally made it to theatres in early 2006.

Since, as you know, I have been obsessed lately with 1930s gangster pictures, I got a hankering to watch the old master at work, to see the genre as it was so gorgeously updated by Melville in the '50s and '60s.

And so I rented Le Doulos, which is a slang term referring to a stoolie, someone who plays both sides and rats out his friends to the police. Melville is just. so. good. Anyone who loves movies simply has to rent this man's work.

Le Doulos is a clean, sleek, cold film noir with a fascinating set of characters, a surprising series of twists, and gorgeous photography. It stars Jean-Paul Belmondo (the sexpot star of Godard's Breathless) but Le Doulos is truly an ensemble film with a whole bunch of fabulous actors.


One of the things I love about Melville's work is that his criminals are always career-criminals. People who have been in prison before, men who have been fencing stolen jewels for forty years, women who are never surprised when their boyfriends show up with a gunshot wound and don't bat an eye when they are asked to case a house. These people are often attractive, likable, even sexy, but they are also always exhausted. The years of working as hard as they have to stay ahead of the law and away from the assassin's bullet have always taken their toll on their bodies and you can see the weariness in their eyes. These are films about latter-day Hamlets, men and women who have seen too much of life and who are no longer delighted by its charms, who have come instead to see the whole thing as kind of pointless and absurd. In this way, the movies remain, for me, powerful and deeply moving. They're gangster films, sure, but they are also fundamentally about life in the 1950s and 1960s, and if they are formally very different from the films of Godard or Resnais or Truffaut, their content seems, to me, very similar, and just as profound.

Because I Am Procrastinating...

I am supposed to be re-reading Hamlet so that I can teach it next week. But I don't really feel like working, and tomorrow is a day off... at least until rehearsal at 6:00p.

Anyway, a few movies that I have watched recently but not yet written about:

I had been missing Bette Davis. I have seen a ton of her movies (by which I mean twenty-two), and since I usually only rent films I haven't seen before, Bette is generally on my backburner. Still, there are a couple of classics I haven't seen and since I hadn't seen Edmund Goulding's The Great Lie (1941) or Anatole Litvak's All This, and Heaven Too (1940), I rented them and had a mini-Bette Davis fest at my house. Both films are quite enjoyable. The Great Lie is a kind of high society soap opera with a husband who "dies" in a plane crash and a baby who Bette passes off as her own. Mary Astor won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing the "other woman" in the scenario. The film is cute and funny, but Bette's character isn't all that much fun. She's earnest and sweet and always tries to do the right thing. Still, it's a good movie. The leading man is George Brent, and he's appropriately dapper. All This, and Heaven Too is much better. It (of course) is also a soapy melodrama, but All This takes place in France, where Bette is a governess to four children who love her dearly. They are the children of a duke and duchess in France (Charles Boyer [so gorgeous] and Barbara O'Neil [over the top.]) Anyway, Charles begins to fall in love with Bette (he isn't in love with the wife anymore, because she's a total nutjob), but they never act on anything and are always above board and proper about things. Of course, all this is doomed to end in tragedy. The thing is, the tragedy in ll This, and Heaven Too really works. I found it sweet and rather moving. Boyer and Davis are both very good in the film, and the story succeeds on its own merits. I liked it rather a lot, and I think it's worth the rental. Not as good, perhaps as The Letter, from the same year, but still quite good.

Dans Paris (Inside Paris) is a Christophe Honoré film (the guy who brought us Ma Mère). Dans Paris, however, is much more engaging than Ma Mère, and I liked it quite a bit. It's a small film, with not too much to say, but it says what little it has to say with panache and verve. It stars Romain Duris and Louis Garrel as brothers who live with their father and are trying to solve the problems of Duris's depression (which mostly has to do with how much he loves his ex-wife. It's an interesting little story about sadness and parenting and brotherhood. Worth the rental if you're into off-beat French stuff with fairly greasy young men (like I obviously am.)


Michael Apted's Gorillas in the Mist: the Story of Dian Fossey was appropriately dry, melodramatic and rooted in 1980s politics. I was mostly bored but I didn't hate it. It's a serviceable kind of thing that runs out of steam and has nowhere to go. I've seen worse.

Also from 1988, today I saw Beaches. I had never seen it. It's a big movie in gay culture, right? I'm not quite sure why it's such a big movie in gay culture, but I liked it a lot. The direction is absolutely terrible (Garry Marshall wasn't good in the 80s either, turns out) but Beaches is a surefire tearjerker. Let's be honest about things. I was crying way before we got to the end.

I think the reason I was so sensitive to Garry Marshall's inadequacies as a filmmaker while I was watching Beaches was that Ryan and I watched Zabou Breitman's The Man of My Life (L'Homme de Sa Vie) this afternoon and it's just lovely. It's a very showy film in terms of movie-maker's tricks, but also very beautiful. L'Homme de Sa Vie is the story of Frédéric, a man with a wife and little son who is on vacation in Provençe (or somewhere) for the summer but has a long conversation one night with his gay next-door neighbor, and the neighbor just gets under his skin. A bit like that Éric Rohmer film Ma Nuit Chez Maud. But The Man of My Life tells the story sort of backwards. We never see the whole conversation between the men. Instead, we move forward with the story and then as Fred thinks about his life, etc, he remembers the conversation in little bits and pieces. It's quite interesting and I recommend it to anyone who likes showy movies... or pretty movies.

One more flick. After seeing his brilliant George Washington, I rented David Gordon Green's All the Real Girls, and I want to move it to my list of all-time favorites. It's ponderous and sweet. I have been feeling affectionate toward love stories of late and All the Real Girls is a really nice one: very cute but never cloying. And I am totally in love with Paul Schneider. I want him to marry me.

Ma Nuit Chez Maud

I guess I don't know anything about Éric Rohmer and his Six Moral Tales series. Rohmer also has a series of films that have to do with the seasons, right? Do other people know about this and I'm just out of the loop?

After I watched Bertolucci's Il Conformista a week or two ago, I thought I would try to catch another movie with the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant. So when I looked for one, I found Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night at Maud's). Now, for years in my head I had equated My Night at Maud's with Last Year at Marienbad. I don't know why, but they were the same movie in my head and had been for a long time. (Does anyone else do this? Some people are the exact same person in my head and some movies and books, too. Like Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy. I know what they both look like, but I am always getting the two of them confused. I feel the same way about Red Buttons and Burgess Meredith. They might as well be the same exact person. Is it just me?)

That was a digression, geez. Anyway, I finally saw My Night at Maud's and it's kind of wonderful. It's a movie about talk and how our relationships are built on what we say to one another: the lies we tell and the images we project. Rohmer has crafted the film, too, so that nothing on screen feels alive—or, rather, the audience is completely distanced from the character—until they actually begin to talk to one another. Trintignant is great and I loved his friend in the movie, Antoine Vitez (he's much more my type :-), but the one to love in My Night at Maud's is Maud herself: Françoise Fabian. She's an alluring, beautiful vision: impossible not to dislike even a little (not that you'd want to.) She's mysterious and beguiling and beautiful. The movie is interesting on its own merits, but with Fabian as the star, the movie got under my skin and I began to feel as conflicted as the main character.

I don't know what the other movies in Éric Rohmer's series are about, but I'm going to add them to my queue.

(P.S. I'm on page two hundred of Deathly Hallows and I needed a break. I love Harry. Love Love Love. And Ron, too. Ron is my new favorite.)