Pastorale 1943 (1978)

Pastorale 1943 is a very intriguing portrait of the Dutch resistance movement into the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. It’s told in careful scenarios and the main characters are a high school teacher, a florist, and couple of other small town denizens. Wim Verstappen's movie is tense and scary and always very interesting but also occasionally stupid, petty, and awkward, rather like a Chekhov short story without any biting satire. There’s a Rutger Hauer cameo at the end that is absolutely glorious.

Coma (1978)

I watched Coma as part of a Criterion Channel series called 1970s Horror because... like...who knew – Michael Crichton directed a movie??? This stars Genevieve Bujold, who is compelling and beautiful and should have been the star of more films. She's so great! The movie itself is not a horror movie at all but is more like a thriller with science fiction overtones – akin to Frankhenheimer's Seconds. I quite liked it, but it's a straight genre picture except for the really great intertextual nods to Sidney Gilliat's Green for Danger. Michael Douglas and Richard Widmark are good, too, and there are lots of cool people in tiny roles, including Ed Harris, Lois Chiles, Tom Selleck, and Rip Torn.

Girlfriends (1978)

I loved Girlfriends. It's a delightful Mazursky-esque comedy that seems to prefigure the Noah Baumbach–Greta Gerwig collaborations of the 2000s. Bob Balaban and Christopher Guest both have key roles, but this is just a hilarious feminist film about singlehood and marriage and having a career and being an adult. This should be a classic. Its obscurity is undeserved.

...and two weeks later Criterion announced it was releasing this on DVD!

La Vie devant Soi

La Vie devant Soi might be my favorite movie of 1978. That's kind of a difficult claim to make 40 years later, so I'm having trouble committing, but this film is gorgeous. I absolutely loved it. The movie stars (the incomparable) Simone Signoret as Madame Rosa, an aged prostitute and survivor of the Shoah who now takes care of prostitutes' children during the week so that they can work.

The movie, like all Moshé Mizrahi movies, is actually, however, about a young boy coming of age. One of the kids that Madame Rosa has taken in is a boy whose parents were Muslim, and his parents never come back for him, so he and Madame Rosa stick it out together as she grows old and infirm and he becomes a young teenager.

This is easily Mizrahi's best film, and this one manages to cover so many intriguing topics and describe so many fascinating characters. I found it beautiful and very moving even if I have become impatient with Mizrahi's greater interest in young men coming of age than the women in those boys' lives. (The women in his films always seem more interesting to me, but Mizrahi's movies are less interested in them.)

As for Simone Signoret (1921-1985), La Vie devant Soi is a crowning achievement in a long and superb career.