Tirez sur le Pianiste (1960)

I loved Shoot the Piano Player, and I'm not even a huge Truffaut fan. In fact, I often say that I don't really get the Nouvelle Vague, but this was really a good time. I adored Charles Aznavour in the lead role, and his character Charlie is scripted beautifully by Truffaut. The movie itself is a kind of tribute to American movies, but it's also sexy and fun and funny at times, while winding up being quite serious and sad in a typical crime–melodrama sort of way. I was really into it.

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.

Duet du Cinema Française

Today: no movie. Instead another three episodes of Planet Earth, another fifty moments where I register complete disbelief at what I'm watching. This show is amazing. Today's episodes: "Shallow Seas", "Jungles" and "Great Plains."

Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose, a biopic of Edith Piaf, is an early contender for a Best Actress Oscar nomination next January. People are raving about Marion Cotillard's performance. I quite liked Cotillard as Piaf. Her physical transformation is astounding and her portrayal is rough around the edges, difficult, glamorous and very complex. The film, however, is a mess of formal devices. Dahan has decided to tell Piaf's life story without a narrative. This serves a couple of functions. It refuses the standard biopic narrative structure where a down and out performer makes it big, is brought low again and then rises back to the top in triumph. We've seen a hundred films that work in exactly this way and Dahan's narrative construction (which is to string events in Piaf's life together in what seems like a very haphazard manner) subverts this standard construction of the biopic. Consequently the audience is not allowed to credit Piaf's rise to the top to any one person, nor are we allowed to blame her early death on any one of her afflictions. The problem with all of this is that I never knew who many of the characters in the movie actually were because I wasn't introduced to them in the standard way. Pascal Greggory is in the movie and I still have no idea what his relationship with Piaf is in the film. Dahan's narrative structure also never allowed me to emotionally identify with Piaf.
I am sure this was his aim: unconventional storytelling, unconventional woman, avoid standard narrative tropes. But it all just served to confuse me. The movie jumps back and forth in time with such frequency thatI started to get really frustrated. I think, too, that I would have just allowed the change in times to wash over me and just go with the flow except that before some of the scenes, the date and location is shown onscreen. This tells me that it is important that I know both when and where I am. So I try to keep track as I'm watching the movie. Dahan seems to want it both ways. He wants me to care when and where I am while I watch, but he also wants me to think that time is unimportant in this phantasmagoria of scenes from Piaf's life. After a while it started to drive me crazy. I wanted to connect with Edith Piaf, but Dahan just wouldn't let me.

The other day I also watched François Truffaut's Baisers Volés (Stolen Kisses), the second in the series of Antoine Doinel films. I loved Baisers Volés. It doesn't pack the emotional wallop of The 400 Blows (the first in the series), but it is incredibly romantic. Antoine Doinel can't seem to hold down a job. He keeps taking on different careers and each seems funnier than the next. He just gets himself into difficult situation after difficult situation. I've never liked Jean-Pierre Léaud more than I liked him in this film. He is adorable and idiotic. This is a very funny comedy with all kinds of ridiculous farcical business and silly activity. I was charmed.

Unwinding

Everybody riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise!

That last note courtesy of Elaine Stritch. I'm listening to Company, if you can't tell.
This morning afternoon I woke up at 1:00p. I think it's been about a year since I did that. But I have nothing that I have to do and yesterday I smoked, and didn't get home until 3:00a, so there you have it. I'm healing from all of those days of not getting enough sleep because I was up late reading about the medieval theatre. Thank god I'm done with that. I'm done with all of my grading too. I finished all of that yesterday, so I'm more or less free.

I watched François Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night) a couple days ago, by the way, and I absolutely loved it. It's a zany comedy about making a film and it is completely, totally charming. Truffaut himself even plays the director of the film. I loved it. Jacqueline Bisset stars along with Valentina Cortese, Nathalie Baye (who is gorgeous in the film) and Jean-Pierre Léaud (from the Antoine Doinel films). It's great.

I also saw The Ruling Class, which I pretty much hated. It's a black comedy, satiric kind of thing from 1972 with Peter O'Toole. It's supposed to be very very funny and it is ever once in a while, but I was mostly just irritated by the whole thing. Firstly, it's about an hour too long (it clocks in at 154 minutes). But my problem was the central character, who's a nutcase. You know I have trouble watching films about people who don't act rationally. I don't know what it is, but I have real difficulty sitting around watching somebody act like a jackass for two and a half hours. I don't like Forrest Gump and I didn't care for Being There, which I know the entire world loves, but these things aren't my cup of tea. I have a lot of trouble investing in a complete idiot, no matter how pointed the satire in the movie is.

You Look Like a Monkey...

Birthday was very fun. I got phone calls throughout the day, I watched The Last Metro, which is sturdy Truffaut, but mostly just a vehicle for Catherine Deneuve and the (then young) Gérard Depardieu. Then around 5:00p, Julie, Lisa, Anna, Jaime, Scott, John and Aaron Cohen came over to my place, we walked up to the Gold Line (where we bought tickets that were never checked by anyone), and we rode downtown to Union Station where we met Simon and Sarah for dinner on Olvera street. I was buzzin' on the train, but after half a pitcher of margaritas, I was extremely talkative. Nice.

I, of course, wanted to go dancing after this, but my friends seemed to have other plans and they all said good night to me back at my house before 11:00p. Kinda lame, but it was a very fun night anyway and Jai promised to take me dancing soon.

This morning I am goin' out for dim sum with Debs and Mike and my aunt and uncle.
Tonight I'm going out with R&J again for Romeo's birthday. Hooray for my favorite people.

And I will definitely be applying to Mary Baldwin College. I asked my dad what he thought and he responded "HECK YEAH APPLY!" Then, I kid you not, last night after I got home from my birthday soirée, I got the mail and what did see but an application. They snail-mailed me an application. They really want me to apply... So apply I shall.