Me and You (2012)

Io e Te, this final Bernardo Bertolucci movie, is quite sweet. It maybe could be a play, actually, since it takes place mostly in a confined space, but it has some truly lovely, sensitive touches to it. I quite liked this.

Fists in the Pocket

I know that I frequently complain on this blog about movies about disaffected young people who don't have any direction and mope about their houses. I recently complained about Jean-Pierre Melville's Les Enfants Terribles for doing this, and my distaste for Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers is well documented.

But recently I saw Lindsay Anderson's If...., a very cool story about kids who are unhappy with their status quo and rebel, and today I watched a film by Marco Bellocchio called Fists in the Pocket from 1965. It's about a young man who lives in a villa in the mountains with his younger sister, blind mother, and retarded younger brother. He is sick of this family life and so he rebels against it in an intriguing, vaguely horrifying way: by pushing his mother off a cliff. The boy is such an interesting character, too. I mean, he's obviously pathologically disturbed and all of that, but he's quiet and sad and Bellocchio pays very close attention. We watch his every move and never have a clear idea of what he's going to do. He could really kill anyone at any given moment in the film. It's a very interesting character study.

The extras on the DVD include some cool interviews with the cast and director, and a tribute to the film by Bernardo Bertolucci, which is a fascinating watch.

Les Enfants Terribles

Jean-Pierre Melville's 1950 film Les Enfants Terribles was finally released on DVD last week. It is based on a Jean Cocteau novel (subject matter that differs considerably from Melville's usual output.) Following the format of our discussion of Susanne Bier's After the Wedding, I discuss the film with my friend Karen. (She liked it a lot and I rather disliked it.) The following doesn't contain anything major in the way of spoilers.

(As a side note: , I think we should have one of these discussions on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Email me and we can set it up!)
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Karen: I watched Les Enfants Terribles today. A bizarre movie, even by my standards. I was surprised at how different it is from the other Melville movies – the Cocteau influence. I definitely liked it. All those creepy incestuous undertones, the dead mother, the messy, messy room, the strange mansion, the car wreck, the dream sequence, the Vivaldi. It sure wasn’t Bob le Flambeur though. Did the voiceover bug you? To me it just added to the bizarreness of the film. It was Cocteau’s voice.

Me: I didn't like it. Yes, the voiceover bugged me. It always bugs me in films. I don't understand why a filmmaker can't show me the things that the voiceover has to say. I know it solves certain storytelling problems, but it has the effect of flattening everything out.
I think the main thing is those annoying kids. You remember my reaction to Bertolucci's The Dreamers? I very quickly get irritated with disaffected, bored children with nothing interesting to say. Their relationship was interesting and weird, but the manifestations of that relationship mostly grated on my nerves.
I was expecting something very different from Melville with this film—the Cocteau subject matter is obviously so very different from the other stuff of his we've seen—but I guess I was expecting something a little more, well, mysterious. Any more thoughts?

Karen: Annoying kids – you didn’t see that coming from the title? I wonder why annoying children bug you so much. You seem to do ok with annoying adults. Is it because their boredom leads so easily into mindless cruelty?
I think the voiceover is intended to flatten things out in this film and separate the brother and sister further from normalcy and reality. I think that’s why it was all spoken in a monotone. I certainly didn’t care very much about them, and I had a very hard time understanding why Gérard and Agathe were attracted to them. The sister was scary and the brother was completely self-absorbed. Well, she was self-absorbed too. I was fascinated by the strange way she dressed – high heels and a bathrobe, for starters. But she sure didn’t dress like a 16 or 17 year old girl, ever. That’s maybe what interested me about the film – I was fascinated and a little repulsed by their bizarreness. It wasn’t eccentricity, it was psychopathological. I do remember wondering where the film was going with all this, and thinking that it could only end in tragedy.
I like Melville’s storytelling much better. I wonder what his other early movie, Silence de la Mer, is like. It also is based on someone else’s story. My love for Melville remains with his gangster movies and Army of Shadows.

Me: Yeah. I am going to have to put Les Enfants Terribles in a sort-of different category of Melville film in my head. "Early Melville" sounds like a good enough title. There really is no comparison for the kind of gothic brooding, histrionics and head games in this film with his colder, more detached character studies of adults in Bob le Flambeur and even Le Cercle Rouge, which, though not my favorite Melville, is infinitely more absorbing and tension-filled than the Cocteau adaptation.
Melville is obviously a master (that room! the snowball fight!), but Les Enfants Terribles is uneven. I'm thinking of Michael's pop song at the piano: what a strange moment! And the theft of the watering can; to what end? These things made me impatient with Melville's work this time around, and longing for the cool detachment of Le Samouraï, where I have to work a little harder to make meaning of the film.

Karen: Oh that song violently clashed with the entire rest of the movie. I forgot about that. There was a lot of controversy about how much it was Cocteau’s film and how much Melville’s – in the interviews on the disk and stuff I’ve read about it. But it’s clear to me that Cocteau was really driving this story because it is so different from the later Melville. Make it Cocteau-Melville for your separate category. There were some wonderful scenes in the film (that I attribute entirely to Melville). Also the ending was Melville’s. Cocteau wanted some dumb thing where they were laying on the bed together in each other's arms or something. Melville had the whole screen-falls-down thing. Not that hard to figure out the symbolism there. The stealing was part of their game. The watering can part was weird because it really should have been an initiation for Gérard, but it didn’t seem to function that way. Well maybe –didn’t he start sleeping on their floor after that?
I can definitely see how this movie disappointed you if you were expecting it to be like his other stuff. That has happened to me more times than I can say. I realized immediately that this was going to be a totally different kind of movie – partially because the voiceover starts explaining everything right off the bat – and somehow was able to switch gears. But I’m sticking with my “like” vote. Not love, but not dislike. But you’ve actually had a while to think about it so you’re probably not going to feel that much different about it. And you’re right about it being uneven.
There are movies that stick with me for days and others that fade almost immediately. The other Melville films were stickers. This one begins to fade already.
I only vaguely remember you talking about The Dreamers. Is it as different from Bertolucci’s other work as Les Enfants Terribles is from the rest of Melville’s?

Me: No, that's the thing. It's just that Dreamers is about disaffected young people whining about stupid shit. My sympathies run very thin with those kinds of movies. Give me a hard-boiled criminal any day over a miserable teenager.

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.)

New Favorite Movie

I feel like I wasted the whole day. Mostly because I actually did waste the whole day. I spent a lot of time watching John Schlesinger's 1975 film The Day of the Locust. The movie is boring and tiresome and I kept getting irritated and confused with it (a lot like I would if I were watching one of David Lynch's ridiculous nonsensical films). Some of the performances are good. It stars William Atherton, Karen Black, Donald Sutherland and Burgess Merideth. Geraldine Page makes a cameo as a faith healer (in a weird sequence totally typical of this film.) I pretty much hated it. It reminded me a lot of James Ivory's The Wild Party, actually. It's set in the same time period and it has a very similar look as far as light goes. More than Ivory, though, Day of the Locust reminded me of Lynch. And I don't like to be reminded.

But YESTERDAY, I finally saw Bernardo Bertolucci's Il Conformista (The Conformist) which is one of the best movies I've ever seen in my life. It was shot by Vittorio Storaro and stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as the eponymous conformist, a Fascist sympathizer in Mussolini's Italy. It's a gorgeous-looking film with beautiful performances and fabulous costumes. It's filled with symbolism, too. Evidently Bertolucci was a little obsessed with symbolism at the time, but as I was watching I kept thinking that I was watching a master filmmaker. This movie is superb!

3 Hommes / Ultimo Tango / Goblet o' Fire

Do I complain a lot in this space? I probably do. OK, movie reviews first and then complaining:

Last night I caught 3 Hommes et un Couffin, that is, Three Men and a Cradle, that is, the original film on which the Leonard Nimoy-directed American farce Three Men and a Baby is based. Coline Serreau's original 1985 film (she wrote the screenplay in addition to directing) is just as funny if not funnier than the 1987 film (quick remake: those folks at Touchstone were on top of things in the late Eighties), and the plot is nearly identical. I understand the reasons for remaking a very charming French farce into a slightly-more-saccharine-but-still-charming American farce with big American stars, but it seems a shame to me. The original film is artistically a superior work and hasn't a false note in it. I didn't recognize the three guys in the movie, but all are fun and funny and the movie doesn't have a big American Romantic Comedy finish the way Nimoy's version does, a flourish I didn't miss one bit. Anyway: 3 Hommes et un Couffin is highly recommended.

I said The Killers was awesome, right? It is. Rent it. I also finally (after many months) watched Bertolucci's much touted Last Tango in Paris. I half liked it and half didn't like it.
It wasn't boring so much as there just isn't anyone to root for. Brando is this asshole for the entire film, never changing. And you want to love him and you understand why Maria Schneider does, but he's just a creep and he proves to us (and Maria) again and again what a creep he is and just how wrong he is for her. It's shot nicely, and I suppose it's interesting in its way, but I felt frustrated. Plus Maria already has this very nice boyfriend who, while a little slow, and perhaps a tad selfish, really loves Maria, is smitten by her (whereas Brando is so clearly using, abusing and dependent on her.) For me this is the main problem with the movie, I guess, because it's not like Maria Schneider is cheating on her creeped out boyfriend who also has a mistress. She's cheating on a sweet, adorable young man: the same young man who plays Antoine Doinel, for chrissakes. It's Jean-Pierre Léaud and she's screwing him over for creepy (old) Brando. Maybe I'm too young to get it. I think that happens sometimes.

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So I have a (long) list of schools to which I will apply in the next month and a half. I hate doing this, though, and so I am rebelling against it. I just hate all of the applications and I hate the questions and I re-read my Statement of Purpose from last year and I hate that too. I feel like I'm not good enough and I hate having to click "Caucasian" (I'm not even from the Caucasus.) Plus I'm going to have to ask people for letters of recommendation again and it's just such an imposition for them that I just hate to ask.
I don't know. Doing this depresses me and I don't really have anyone to push me but myself and we all know just how well I do with self-motivation because I do yoga so often nowadays.

Thank goodness. Ashley just called and I just bought a ticket to the 12:20a showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Thursday night/Friday morning. Cheers. Now if only I could get this grad school shit together...

The Dreamers

This evening I saw Bernardo Bertolucci's newest film The Dreamers, with Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, and Ms. Eva Green.  The film is an NC-17-rated exploration of the 1960s, cinephilia, incest, and politics.  I didn't hate it.  I thought it was pretty much crap, though.  I guess I really think it didn't have much of a point.  It is well made, there is no denying that.  It is shot extremely well and the actors are fine, though Michael Pitt will never be anything other than annoying to me after playing that rat bastard Tommy Gnossis.  He is forever ugly.

What is this NC-17 thing about?  I mean... so there's nudity, so what?  There isn't really anything that explicit in it.  The gross-out factor is about the same here as it was in, say, American Pie, so I guess I'm not sure what the whole scary rating is about.  At any rate it doesn't matter, since I'm over 17 and I went to see a movie made for adults. 

I have to say this, though.  The movie is an extended study of complete silliness.  It is about these university-aged fools who, I suppose, really embody the spirit of the 1960s by not working and having sex all day long [that's sarcasm, folks].  This is what the 1960s were about: sitting in a bathtub with your lover and your brother while your parents are away and talking about Chairman Mao and Jean-Luc Godard.  These kids fight over whether Keaton is funnier than Chaplin and they reference Top Hat and Scarface and Queen Christina.  The parts where the old films are spliced in with the new are really cool... especially the Bande à Part sequence, which is very fun.  But mainly they are silly little people who don't do anything at all. 

There is plenty of nudity, though, and it is equal opportunity, though the bisexuality present in the book doesn't find its way into the film (much to my chagrin.)  It's the sixties after all.  I mean, how is kissing your girlfriend and getting her menstrual blood in your mouth any more risque than having sex with a boy?

Today I saw a play that had an infinitely more interesting view of the 1960s than this film: The Wind Cries Mary.  It is an adaptation of Hedda Gabler set in 1969 with Hedda as a Japanese immigrant married to an Academic at a university at a time when Academia was being called into question as part of the problem of the 1960s instead of part of the solution.  The play is fierce and vicious and unrelenting.  It was excellent.  I recommend it heartily: www.eastwestplayers.org.

After the play I had dinner with Linda Bisesti and we caught up.  It was very nice.  I haven't seen her in a while.

I guess I will sleep now.  I do not want to go to work in the morning.