Two from Alain Resnais

I recently watched two very different films by Alain Resnais (who made the very, very serious films La Guerre Est Fine, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Last Year at Marienbad in the late 1950s and early '60s). The 1980 film and the 1998 film were downright quirky, and they've cemented for me just how experimental and interesting a filmmaker Resnais actually is.

Last week the unseen movie club chose Same Old Song (On Connait la Chanson) as our film. It is odd and charming and actually sort of wonderful. This movie involves a bunch of characters who lipsync to older pop songs as a part of their dialogue, which (as it happens) is mostly about depression and love and loss. The characters look for love and fight with their spouses and then burst into song, but it isn't their voices we hear at all but those of Josephine Baker and Charles Aznavour and other older singers. It's pretty strange and totally fun.

On Connait la Chanson was released in 1998 in France (1999 in the U.S.), two years after Woody Allen made Everyone Says I Love You, in which the characters actually sing the older torch songs – and in Paris, no less. On Connait la Chanson is not a romanticized version of love, though, and doesn't have the Woody Allen fantasy veneer over it. Resnais's film is a film about depression, and it's interesting and weird.

And then a couple days ago I saw that Mon Oncle d'Amérique was on the Criterion Channel, so I decided to watch that film too. This film stars Nicole Garcia, Gerard Depardieu, and Roger-Pierre, and it is a very strange movie. It follows these three characters and then also a scientist who is telling us about human behavior and social psychology. It's an odd choice. There are a lot of mice who learn particular behaviors... and then there are humans in mouse costumes re-enacting their behaviors. It's super interesting and very strange.

Mon Oncle d'Amérique is, however, marred by an unfortunate casting situation: I suppose it is awful to say, but I found Roger-Pierre's character unlikable mostly because I didn't believe him to be attractive enough to inspire the absolute drama he inspires in this movie as Nicole Garcia and Nelly Borgeaud fight over him.

Overall, though, I found this movie troubling. I don't think I emotionally identified with any of the characters, but the movie is so strange that it really did get under my skin.

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.

Memories of the Bomb

I loved Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, which I saw last week.

The plot (such as there is one) centers around a French actress from Nevers, France, who has a brief affair with a man from Hiroshima, Japan in the late 1950s. The couple fall in love gradually, but spend the entirety of their time together talking about both Nevers and Hiroshima. They exchange memories of their beloved cities and memories of the war that separated the two countries in the 1930s and 1940s. In this respect, the film is a lot like Resnais's L'Année Dernière à Marienbad because it is about memory and how memories of the past bleed into life lived in the present. The film is filled with imagery of the city of Hiroshima and its people, both ravaged by the destruction of the atomic bomb. Strangely, Hiroshima Mon Amour is as much a film about horror as it is one about passion. There are some terrifying images in the movie, but it is mostly a story of letting go, of love and of pain.

If you love Japanese cinema you must see it. It is basically a Japanese movie made by a Frenchman. Highly recommended.

A Few Flicks

I am not getting much reading done, I must confess. Reading theory is so much harder than reading plays. I get through ten pages or so and I'm tired, even of really interesting stuff like the book I'm reading. But I have been watching movies. My friend Catie even roped me into going to see the new Spidey by offering to buy my ticket for me. Far be it from me to turn down pre-paid invitations to things.

So the new confection from Sam Raimi (i.e. Spider-man 3) is about as good as the second one. Actually I may have liked it a little bit better (the villains are sexier in 3 than in 2—and you know how my criteria roll). Spider-man 3 is hampered by the same things that hampered Spider-man 2, namely the insistence of the filmmaking team on stressing the importance of the moony, idiotic and completely boring relationship between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. I know I've complained about the tendency in Hollywood action movies to want to tell stories that aren't action-related, but I feel it bears repeating. The reason I want to attend a Hollywood action movie is so that I can watch a lot of fun Hollywood action. It is wholly unnecessary to insert into this perfectly good genre a plethora of scenes where we explore character and watch our action heroes stare out of windows and wish for better, less complicated lives. Zzzzzzzz. Let's get to the action! I want violence, speed and wit from my action movies. There is also a truly bizarre sequence in the middle of the film where Peter Parker gets taken over by an alien force and it makes him all emo-looking. He styles himself some bangs and then dances down the street, making his hands into imaginary pistols and winking at a number of tall, gorgeous models who pass by. Then he plays the piano and dances on the tables at a bar. It's one of the wierdest cinematic sequences I've seen in a while. (At least the "Age of Aquarius" number at the end of The 40-Year-Old Virgin operated outside the context of reality.) One more thing, though, before I close on this Spidey discussion. Topher Grace is fantastic! He is great in every single scene: funny, clever, totally natural. He inserts a kind of wicked irony into this campy super-hero universe. He lights up the screen and it all seems tongue-in-cheek. Like he's having a blast. It's a performance that's miles away from the three leads' desperate earnestness.

Two more (French) films:
Jean Renoir's La Règle de Jeu (The Rules of the Game) is a 1939 film about class conflict, at least that's what it seemed to be about for me. It's the film that Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy clearly gets its inspiration. Evidently, the film was very controversial when it was first released, but it is now widely considered a classic. It follows a couple, both of whom are having various affairs, who invite an entire troupe of others down to their house in the French countryside for a week or so. It's about decadence and decorum and what it means to really be alive (and/or in love—are they the same thing?), and it's excellent.

I also finally saw Alain Resnais's L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), which is an extremely cool mood piece (I guess) about memory and love and power. The film really has no plot, and the characters aren't really clear—who they all are, I mean, is unclear. Their relationships to one another are muddled, and the time frame of the piece is just as confused. Never mind where the film is set (Marienbad is, as far as I can tell, a red herring). The film is a giant mystery. I quite nearly loved it, and I found its wierdness and mysteries fascinating. This is a famous image from the film:

Notice that the figures on the boardwalk cast long shadows toward the viewer, but the topiaries cast no shadows at all. It's so cool! But the film really is meditating on the fluidity of memory and it became, for me, a piece about how our relationships with others (especially those we love or fetishize) are defined (of course) by what we think we know about what the other person has said to us. But when you can't really remember what someone else said or felt, or when the other person denies that he or she said those things or that you felt those things, everything can become so confusing. If you can't remember certain things, who is to say that you are mis-remembering entire sequences of time in your relationship. Anyway, if you like esoteric, you can't get much more so than this film. Definitely worth a look.