Clouds of Sils Maria

Rich, complex, Chekhovian, and very sexy. Talkier than other Assayas movies, but Clouds of Sils Marie deals with the problem at its center through circumlocution, spinning around and around it, talking about it, certainly, but then, as it turns out, the important stuff is never what is said.

Clouds is all about desire, and the clouds at the film's center (or are they at the film's peripheries?) are a perfect metaphor for the desire(s) the film attempts to describe in roundabout, impossible ways. These eponymous clouds are known for a phenomenon where they come down through a mountain pass and shape themselves into the form of a snake, coalescing for a very brief moment before going off on their own and becoming simply clouds again.

Clouds of Sils Maria is also, in many ways, an All about Eve for 2015, discussing our desire to live other people's lives, the difficulties of embodying the lives of others, and the ways that other people's lives can take over our own, both by eclipsing them and through sheer force of the other person's will.

The acting is flat out superb. Juliette Binoche knocks it out of the park yet again, and Kristen Stewart is flawless. I was really into this picture.

Dans Paris

In Paris, the film I see advertised the most is Populaire. I have seen the ad so many times that I am starting to want to see the movie. Also, I love Romain Duris. I have no idea what this movie is about, but the poster makes it look charming.

Another film advertised in Paris right now is Une Nouvelle Chance (A New Chance/Opportunity/Possibility), which doesn't even attempt to translate the USAmerican title Trouble with the Curve. One assumes there is no real translation for the curveball metaphor we have in American English.

There's also L'Odyssée de Pi, probably a slightly better title than its English counterpart Life of Pi (which is a title that pops but doesn't quite make sense). I have to be honest: the more I see this movie advertised, the less I want to see it. The book (which I recently finished) left me sort of cold. It isn't only that I didn't care for the (much discussed) ending section of the book, but the entire way through it just reminded me of those old epics Robinson Crusoe and (especially) The Swiss Family Robinson. It was nice to be reminded of those books – I liked them when I was a kid – but Life of Pi finally reads like a kids' book, actually, and though it purports to be about religion or spirituality in some kind of way, I didn't really get it. Life of Pi has this theory that Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism are all essentially the same thing, but once the boy is sharing a boat with an enormous Bengal Tiger in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the book stops being about religion completely. The movie looks like it's going to be a CGI-fest: not necessarily bad in and of itself, but part of the plot of the novel is about whether or not the young man's story is believable. Do we believe him or do we not? If we do not believe the images on the screen, it seems to me the decision is probably already made for us. I'll stop talking about the film now, because I haven't seen it, and my analysis is, therefore, obviously precipitate.

Après Mai, a new film by Olivier Assayas looks hipster-ish and depressing, but it's Olivier Assayas, so I want to see it anyway. Even if that boy's hair clearly needs a trim.

Even more exciting to me is Mads Mikkelsen in Thomas Vinterberg's La Chasse or The Hunt. I loved Mikkelsen in A Royal Affair and that and The Hunt will both be out at the same time in Paris – not sure when either is coming to the U.S.

This is not all I have to say about Paris, obviously. I love it here. And I don't speak enough French to actually go to the movies, but I can stare at the posters and grin, anyway...

Some More Spring Break Movies

I liked Marc Forster's The Kite Runner better than his last film Finding Neverland, but like that film, The Kite Runner is also rather a sentimental mess. Mind you, I cried about six times. It's a sad story, but it isn't moving, if you know what I mean. It's a kind of surface sadness based on situations. I haven't read the book, but I bet it's really good. Not to stray too far from my thesis topic, too, The Kite Runner contains a scene of male rape and the film's villain, in addition to the Taliban, is a kind of homosexual pervert who looks like an Afghan John Lennon. I should mention that I loved two things about the film: the credit sequence, which is beautiful, and the score (which was Oscar-nominated) by Alberto Iglesias, which is complicated and intelligent as well as very pretty.

Pascale Ferran's French film Lady Chatterley of D.H. Lawrence's novel John Thomas and Lady Jane is a long one (2 hours 40 minutes) and a rather boring one. The most interesting thing about the film is the way that it subvert's the male gaze. This is a film made by a woman about a woman and I'm not sure I can explain exactly why but it feels like it. Everything is from Lady Chatterley's point of view. This is not a film where the central female is still an object. Lady Chatterley is a sexual subject. Still, the filmmaker makes a lot of bad decisions: title cards to show passage of time and to tell us things she can't figure out how to show us. She also yadda-yaddas what could have been a beautiful sequence in the film, Lady Chatterley's trip to Paris and Italy. The director uses a kind of hand-held home video camera to relate this period in the book and it makes her journey abroad seem unimportant in her transformation. It's a very bad decision. The performances are good in Lady Chatterley, but this is not a very exciting movie.

I really, really liked Paris, Je T'aime, though. This film consists of 21 short films by world-renown directors (the Coen Brothers, Olivier Assayas, Gérard Depardieu, Gus Van Sant, Alexander Payne, Tom Tykwer, Richard LaGravanese, Gurinder Chadha, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuarón, Christopher Doyle, you get the drift) all about Paris, and the film stars about a million people you know and love: Gena Rowlands, Juliette Binoche, Willem Defoe, Nick Nolte, Gaspard Ulliel, Miranda Richardson, Steve Buscemi, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Natalie Portman, Javier Cámara, Hippolyte Girardot, Bob Hoskins, Fanny Ardant, Ludivine Sagnier, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Elijah Wood, Emily Mortimer, Rufus Sewell, Alexander Payne (as Oscar Wilde), Ben Gazzara. I pretty much loved almost every sequence, and none of them lasts very long. The best short film among the troupe is Oliver Schmitz's sequence Place des Fêtes about a would-be romance and tragedy. It's a perfectly contained little story and it's excellent. Anyway, this one is definitely a renter: romantic, lovely, filled with good miniature movies.

Four Reviews

After the Thin Man, the sequel to the film classic The Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy sees our two stars return to the screen along with the director of the first, W.S. Van Dyke. The second film also boasts a very good pre-Mr. Smith Goes to Washington performance by Jimmy Stewart. The film is sturdy and silly and exactly what I'd expect from this franchise. It's a little too silly for my taste, but it is what it is and I quite liked the film, particularly the surprise ending. I also love William Powell's Nick character in these films. He's cynical beyond belief and drunk most of the time. It's very fun and I find its casual mood actually rather refreshing.

Mogambo is a fairly stupid love triangle drama about a big game hunter in Africa (Clark Gable), a chanteuse who joins the hunting party by accident (Ava Gardner) and a twenty-something anthropologist (Grace Kelly) with a husband. The plot is ridiculous and the film is cut with wildlife footage that looks nothing like the rest of the film and makes the editing look shoddy. Ava Gardner is absolutely great in the picture, but Clark Gable is slightly past his prime and doesn't quite have the matinee-idol look anymore that would make any woman swoon. Grace Kelly is annoying as Hell (but then, she usually annoys me if I remember correctly.) The script, as I said, is very, very weak, so even though Gardner does stellar work as the lonely, desperate night-club singer, she hasn't hardly anything to work with and the picture feels shallow and over-budgeted.

Snakes on a Plane. I can't even believe I'm talking about this movie. My roommate made me go, so... Suffice it to say that I liked it more than I disliked it, it's plot is laugh-out-loud ludicrous, and it's edited very poorly. There is a lot of squirm-in-your-chair grossness from the whole "snakes on a plane" thing, but the film isn't particularly funny and definitely isn't clever. The male romantic lead gives a terrible performance. Julianna Margulies is beautiful and pretty good in the movie, Samuel L. Jackson is his usual badass self and... well there's nobody else really in the movie, so there isn't much else to say about the performances. Oh yeah, Bobby Cannavale is in it for, like, 10 seconds, too. I love him, but I have nothing to say about his performance in this movie. The plot and the title are the same: snakes on a plane. It's either your thing or it isn't. It isn't particularly my thing. My roommate loved it, though. Bought the sountrack, is going to go see it again. You get the drift. Snakes on a Plane is really a throwback to those old Irwin Allen disaster movies (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Fire!, Flood!) and I think I should just probably have a break from them. One of these concoctions every eighteen months or so is okay and I think I've had my fill for a while.

Olivier Assayas's Clean is a movie about a woman trying to get her life back on track after her rocker-husband overdoses on heroin and she is charged with possession of narcotics and goes off to prison. Maggie Cheung is wonderful in the lead role and Nick Nolte does really superb work as Cheung's father-in-law. Nolte's character is raising Cheung's son (his grandson) and trying to keep it together, teaching the boy about his parents and trying to bring him around to loving his mother as much as he loves his grandparents. They are both excellent performances and the film is sensitive, hard-bitten and feels very honest. It contemplates the life of a troubled artist who can't use drugs if she wants to keep her son: the decisions she makes about her life become the subject of the entire film. What do we choose as artists? When does family take precedence over other things? How much pain can we take? It's a beautiful film. I'll have to rent Irma Vep, Cheung and Assayas's other collaboration, very soon. Recommended.