La Grande Illusion (1937) [StudioCanal Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1930s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama, FFC Must-Own, War

Grandillusion1

Grand Illusion
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak
directed by Jean Renoir

by Bryant Frazer If you watch it cold, the opening scenes of La Grande Illusion (hereafter Grand Illusion) make for a confounding experience. The film opens in a French canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain calls a working-class lieutenant to accompany him on a routine reconnaissance mission. One short dissolve later, without even the narrative pleasantry of a stock-footage flight over enemy territory, we’re in a German canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain announces that he’s shot down an enemy plane. Another fade-out, and the Frenchmen are quickly welcomed at the German dinner table. The German captain even apologizes for the French lieutenant’s broken arm.

TIFF ’12: Leviathan

Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, TIFF, UK

****/****
directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

by Angelo Muredda What is there to say about Leviathan, a nearly-wordless maelstrom of ravenous seagulls, blood-red waves, and severed fish-heads piled to the horizon? Colleagues at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel take the sensory as seriously as the ethnography here, producing a truly singular documentary account of a commercial fishing vessel off the New Bedford coast that puts the so-called immersive quality of 3-D baubles like Avatar to shame. Their work more than lives up to the biblical title, delivering what might be described as a fish-eye view of the Apocalypse.

TIFF ’12: Tabu

Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Portugal, Silent, Spain, TIFF

****/****
directed by Miguel Gomes

by Angelo Muredda Tabu opens, fittingly enough, at the movies, with an old melodrama about an explorer who’s just been turned into a brooding crocodile. That’s the first of many transformations in a protean film that shifts gracefully from ironic postcolonial critique, to essay on the cinema as a means of appropriation and reincarnation, to thwarted love story. While those layers may seem impossible to navigate, take heart: Director Miguel Gomes’s great coup is to let this complex material flow instinctually from its emotional core. Fluidity is key to Gomes’s aesthetic, which pairs the breathless momentum of a page-turner with the non-sequitur progression of a dream. Case in point, a moment when Pilar (Teresa Madruga), the first half’s protagonist, sees a movie with the stuffy man who loves her. Pilar is visibly moved by what’s on screen, but we never see it, hearing only a Portuguese cover of “Be My Baby” on the soundtrack–a thread left dangling only to be gingerly picked up in the second half. “You know what dreams are like,” as one character tells us: “We can’t command them.”

Gray’s Anatomy (1996) [The Criterion Collection] + And Everything is Going Fine (2010) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2000s, 2010, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Documentary, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

Graysanatomycap

GRAY’S ANATOMY
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
directed by Steven Soderbergh

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN THEATER
***½/****
directed by Skip Blumberg

AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE
****/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras A
directed by Steven Soderbergh 

SEX AND DEATH TO THE AGE 14
***/****
directed by Dan Weissman and Brad Ricker

by Walter Chaw The first ten minutes of Steven Soderbergh’s Gray’s Anatomy are obnoxious, and though there are few artists as interesting to me or as influential in my own life as Spalding Gray, the last 109 don’t exactly blow my skirt up, either. Let me back up. I tripped over Swimming to Cambodia in English class, Freshman year, then procured my own copy at Boulder’s invaluable The Video Station so that I could go back to it and, sure, impress Liberal Arts girls with it on a double-bill with Stop Making Sense. You might say that Gray and David Byrne were my wingmen for a couple of years there; it’s fitting that my VHS copies of both those pieces are now and forever in the possession of ex-girlfriends and love interests. I wonder if I would ask for the tapes back were I to run into them again. I know that one of them, after I was married, tried to return Swimming to Cambodia, and I asked her to please keep it. If you don’t know what Swimming to Cambodia is, it’s Spalding Gray’s unbelievably great performance-“monolog” about his time on set, on location, shooting Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields. I’ve never heard Joffe speak, but I have Gray’s impersonation of Joffe–calling out to a tripping-balls Gray, floating in shark-infested surf in the South China Sea–lodged in my brain. I pull it out once in a while at a party, just as a sonar ping to see if anyone could possibly identify the echo of the echo.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2012, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, FFC Must-Own, UK, War

Fullmetaljacket1

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Ermey
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on Hasford’s novel The Short Timers
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson One of the most noticed Stanley Kubrick trademarks is a scene in a bathroom. I haven’t read too much about why there is always a scene in a bathroom, but rarer still are comments related to what goes on in the bathroom. Different activities have different meanings. Urination (A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut) is a sexually arrogant act. It’s the one bathroom activity in Kubrick’s films that is done with the door open. Bathing (Spartacus, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange again, The Shining) is a hedonistic, bourgeois indulgence and an escape to a safe place. Kubrick is not beyond exploiting the bath’s mythological, symbolic connotations as the unexplored subconscious (the subversion of Aphrodite iconology in The Shining) or the womb (Star Child Alex in A Clockwork Orange); bathing is largely a private activity, you see. It is sometimes interrupted, but when that happens the invasion of privacy has significance. (James Mason’s interrupted bath in Lolita, for example, had purely narrative- and character-based implications. He regarded it as just another humiliation to add to the pile.) Defecation is even more private, so private that a Kubrick character has never interrupted it. To defecate (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey) is human, you see. Everybody has to take a shit, but to shit is shameful. The perfect human being would not shit, would indeed be beyond shitting. The HAL computer doesn’t shit, does it? Does the Star Child shit? I sincerely doubt it!

Jaws (1975) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Spielberg

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary
screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, based on the novel by Benchley
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw What’s not mentioned in very many conversations about Jaws is the pleasure it takes in work. That it’s one of the most influential films of all time–a picture commonly identified as the one responsible for the studio summer-blockbuster mentality–is a given by now. The miracle of it, though, is that it gets better every time you see it. I have the movie memorized at this point; I can recite it like a favourite song. I still jump when Ben Gardner appears in the hole in the hull of his boat, and I still laugh when Hooper helps himself to Brody’s uneaten dinner. More than a fright flick, Jaws is a beautifully rendered character piece, establishing Spielberg as–a little like Stephen King, oddly enough–a master of the easy moment. (They’re artists I’ve conflated in my head for their popularity with and influence on a generation of people my age.) It’s a little nasty, too, Jaws is, in throwaway moments like the one on the beach where, after a giant fin appears in the water, Spielberg cuts to a group of old men picking up their binoculars. They’re there to looky-loo; they’re expecting carnage. It’s not a Hitchcockian moment of audience critique (though it functions that way), but a brilliant character beat expressed with Spielberg’s savant-like visual genius. But above all, Jaws is about function and work–not unlike Star Wars, the final nail in the New American Cinema, will be two years later.

The Sweet Hereafter (1997) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, DVD

Sweethereaftercap

****/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Ian Holm, Maury Chaykin, Peter Donaldson, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Russell Banks
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Bryant Frazer For anyone left reeling by Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, with its sexualized miasma of grief and longing lingering in the mind, the very first shot of The Sweet Hereafter is vertigo-inducing. Once again, the camera tracks very slowly from left to right as the titles appear on screen–a signal, perhaps, that more human misery awaits. Egoyan eventually alights on a scene of tranquility, as a family of three–mother, father, child–sleeps on a bare wooden floor. Beyond the stylistic link to the opening of Egoyan’s previous film, I’m not sure what it is about this tableau that should be so disquieting. Partly it’s the slow, deliberate camera move that brought us here. Partly it’s the voyeuristic viewing opportunity. (Sleeping families are, of course, vulnerable, and the casual exposure of most of the woman’s breast puts the audience in the place of intruders spying on a private moment.) And partly it’s that the God’s-eye P.O.V. suggests the omnipotence and indifference of the universe at large when tragedy is the subject.

Deliverance (1972) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD/(DigiBook) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

****/****
DVD – Image B Sound C Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox
screenplay by James Dickey, based on his novel
directed by John Boorman

by Walter Chaw Deliverance is mesmerizing. Emerging fully formed from the rich, black loam of the best period of filmmaking definitely in the United States and possibly in the history of cinema, it pistons its roots unerringly into the darkest corners of our species’ memory. In the second-most memorable moment of the film (the one where kind-hearted city-slicker Drew (Ronny Cox) eases into a guitar/banjo duel with a local kid (Billy Redden)), Boorman dangles the possibility that there could be civility between the spoilers and the spoiled before retracting it for the remainder of the picture’s running time. If Boorman is our pre-eminent keeper of the Arthurian legend, it’s useful to wonder in this particular quest undertaken what are the dark spirits of the wood, and what is the grail? The final image of the piece, after all, suggests a corruption of the Excalibur iconography offered from some fathomless underneath. The essential Western phallus is perverted in Deliverance into the promise that the primal will never be repressed for long.

Being John Malkovich (1999) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

Beingjohnmalkovichcap1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw The moment you realize that Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich is more than just another ultra-high-concept indie calling-card is right at the end, when all that quirk reveals itself as bleak, desperate, lonesome. It’s the first time most of us conceptualized the idea of Charlie Kaufman, in fact–the moment that any follow-up became a cause célèbre. It’s silly, really, to bother trying to synopsize the film, but for the uninitiated, it’s about a failed puppeteer’s discovery of a portal behind a file cabinet on the low-ceilinged floor of an office designed for the dwarf wife of a sea captain. (“Curs-ed t’ing,” he calls her.) The portal leads, of course, to the inside of John Malkovich’s skull for around fifteen minutes before expelling the interloper to the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Looking here, it’s possible to begin to trace Kaufman’s auteur obsessions with interiors, with language (in a job interview hinged on malaproprisms and miscommunications), with doubling, identity, surrealism, systems of belief, and, sneakily, science-fiction. What’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, after all, but a fairly extraordinary SF piece that just happens to be one of the best movies about love ever made?

Exotica (1994) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD

Exotica (1994) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery

****/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Bruce Greenwood, Mia Kirshner, Don McKellar, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Bryant Frazer When Exotica debuted at Cannes in 1994, Atom Egoyan had already earned a reputation for curious, low-key explorations of memory and alienation. His Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, and The Adjuster leaned on video as a kind of metaphor showing how relationships become dependent on individual frames of reference that each move in only one direction–how one person’s blank tape is another’s cherished memory, or how one person’s pornographic display is another’s lifeline. Exotica represented Egoyan’s commercial breakthrough in part because he found an enticing venue for those observations. It’s one of the most fundamentally despairing movies that I know, and yet there is in the precision of its craft, the bravery of its conception, and the depth of its empathy something fundamentally uplifting.

World on a Wire (1973) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Television, The Criterion Collection, West Germany

Worldonawirecap1

Welt am Draht
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Klaus Löwitsch, Barbara Valentin, Mascha Rabben, Karl Heinz Vosgerau
screenplay by Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye
directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

by Jefferson Robbins If computer engineer Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) doesn’t realize he’s a digital simulation, you can forgive him for not having seen The Matrix. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s two-part 1973 movie for German TV, World On A Wire, populates Stiller’s environment with so many characters who are obviously automata, of greater and lesser sophistication, that he really should get a clue. Most of the people he encounters are over-painted, pancaked and rouged to the point of looking like mannequins or clowns. There are the beautiful women who materialize exactly when needed and stand by for male appreciation. There’s the bartender who stands waxen until, as if activated, he lunges forward to offer a cocktail. Even Stiller’s own responses to stimuli seem at times posed and inauthentic. But we suspect Fassbinder’s satirizing a notoriously affectless society. The distant miens of Stiller’s peers and strangers could simply reflect a heart-freezing German ennui–or a universal egotism, in which we mentally reduce everyone not in our immediate circle to the status of clockwork extras.1

Looney Tunes [Platinum Collection – Volume One] – Blu-ray Disc (Incomplete Review)

Posted in****/****, 1940s, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Looney Tunes

Looneytunesbg

by Bill Chambers It’s been fun to skylark about a Blu-ray release of vintage Looney Tunes since the format’s inception, but until Warner announced this “Platinum Collection” box set, I don’t think anybody truly expected it to happen. And while the DVD transfers that graced the “Golden Collection”s were more than adequate, the truth is that a taste of Bugs, Daffy, et al. in standard-def–via recycled “Behind the Tunes” featurettes–after seeing them in all their HiDef splendour is a lot like Dorothy’s unintentionally depressing return to Kansas at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Presented pillarboxed in their original 1.37:1 aspect ratio, these shorts pop like never before but have not, unlike Disney’s animated features, undergone a digital repainting–though I remain skeptical of a radioactive shade of green that crops up in Daffy’s Robin Hood outfit and on the bars of Tweety’s cage in Tweetie Pie (to cite two examples), because it looked so revisionist when applied to the title character of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” on Warner’s Blu-ray version of same. Nevertheless, the restorers use a gentle touch, dustbusting and correcting damage to the prints while leaving grit trapped between the cels alone. The dark Scaredy Cat is dotted with so much white you might think the background plate doubled as a coke tray.

Vertigo (1958) – Universal Legacy Series DVD

Vertigo (1958) – Universal Legacy Series DVD

Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore
screenplay by Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor, based on the novel D’Entre Les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
directed by Alfred Hitchcock 

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. What Vertigo lacks that others of Alfred Hitchcock’s undisputed late masterpieces do not, just in terms of sheer bulk volume, is scholarship. Weird, because the film is Hitchcock’s most complex, albeit in many ways also his most opaque. It’s as if it defies analysis by being at once too obvious and too obscure, enough so that critical reads of it are inevitably both naïve and pompous. It’s true that attempts at unlocking the film are akin to diagnosing a particularly disturbed patient’s dysfunction: that you’re fucked up is right there on the surface for everyone to see, but the reasons why are damnably difficult to beat from the grey bramble. Attempts to articulate what works about the picture invariably wind up describing the technical mechanism (the perspective distortion, the monumentalism, the voluminous and self-announcing rear projection) rather than the ineffable, perverse rapture that it provokes.

Shame (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Shame (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, UK

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+
starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, Nicole Baharie
screenplay by Steve McQueen and Abi Morgan
directed by Steve McQueen

by Walter Chaw Brandon is a cipher from beginning to end, and while that’s usually a detriment, in Steve McQueen’s extraordinary, gruelling Shame, it’s key to why the whole thing works. Even better is that Brandon, a widely-presumed sex addict (to my mind, the film works better without a pop diagnosis), is played by Michael Fassbender, he of the matinee-idol looks and piercing green eyes. It’s interesting that what he plays best is ambiguity (next up: a robot in Prometheus), an unknowable quality that inspired McQueen’s previous installation piece, Hunger, making the lonesome protest of hunger-striker Bobby Sands into a holy mystery, a relic unknowable and his English bull tormentors Romans with spears knowing not what they do. No less ecclesiastical, Shame is a feature-length indulgence and scourging, making it fair to wonder if McQueen’s aim isn’t to assail each of the Deadly Sins in due course–his own septet on glowing, adjoined celluloid panels. It’s a great explanation of the title, and makes me wonder if the next one won’t be “Avarice.” Anyway, the film only works because Fassbender is beautiful. Ugly guys don’t get to be ashamed of sex.

Rebecca (1940) – Blu-ray Disc

Rebecca (1940) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama

****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Judith Anderson
screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison;
adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
–“The Idea of Order at Key West,” Wallace Stevens

Let’s take a moment to talk about water.

A Man Escaped (1956)

Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, France, Theatrical

Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut
****/****
starring François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock, Roland Monod
written and directed by Robert Bresson

by Angelo Muredda “This is a true story. I’ve told it as it happened, unadorned. –Robert Bresson.” So begins A Man Escaped, with a handwritten statement of purpose that throws down a gauntlet to itself. Based on the memoirs of French Resistance member André Devigny (here rechristened Fontaine (François Letterier)), who escaped from Lyon’s Fort Montluc prison just hours prior to his execution, the film delivers on its ambitious promise. It stays faithful to this claim to tell the story unadorned except with the light garnish of Fontaine’s cool descriptions of the task before him–really an ever-unfolding expanse of smaller tasks like chipping away at a doorframe with a spoon over a month’s time. Its focus is almost strictly on matters technical, to the point where even its spiritual ruminations spring organically out of moments of real labour. When a fellow prisoner’s escape attempt is undone by his overeager hope for his next life to begin, he passes his knowledge of the precise spot he went wrong onto Fontaine with the solemnity of a wizened gamer delivering an annotated walkthrough to a novice. If these men are going to be reborn, we’re assured, it’ll only be by their own hands.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) – Two-Disc Special Edition DVD + Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, FFC Must-Own

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
BLU-RAY Image B+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw Marlon Brando is liquid sex in A Streetcar Named Desire, molten and mercurial. He’s said that he modelled his Stanley Kowalski after a gorilla, and the manner in which Stanley eats, wrist bent at an almost fey angle, picking at fruit and leftovers in the sweltering heat of Elia Kazan’s flophouse New Orleans, you can really see the primate in him. (Imagine a gorilla smelling a flower.) Brando’s Stanley is cunning, too: he sees through the careful artifice of his sister-in-law Blanche (Vivien Leigh, Old Hollywood), and every second he’s on screen, everything else wilts in the face of him. It’s said that Tennessee Williams used to buy front-row seats to his plays and then laugh like a loon at his rural atrocities; he’s something like the Shakespeare of sexual politics, the poet laureate of repression, and in his eyes, he’s only ever written comedies. In Kazan’s and Brando’s, too, I’d hazard, as A Streetcar Named Desire elicits volumes of delighted laughter. The way that Stanley’s “acquaintances” are lined up in his mind to appraise the contents of Blanche’s suitcase. The way he invokes “Napoleonic Law” with beady-eyed fervour. And the way, finally, that he’s right about Blanche and all her hysterical machinations. The moment Stanley introduces himself to Blanche is of the shivers-causing variety (like the moment John Ford zooms up to John Wayne in Stagecoach), but my favourite parts of the film–aside from his torn-shirt “STELLA!”–are when Stanley screeches like a cat, and when he threatens violence on the jabbering Blanche by screaming, “Hey, why don’t you cut the re-bop!”

Belle de jour (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Italy, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page
screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Jefferson Robbins It’s fitting that a film about a woman agonizingly balanced between sexual repression and sexual freedom depicts an inner life balanced between two different periods in history. The opening moments of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour lead us to believe it will be a period piece. In a static wide shot, a black horse-drawn coach on a country lane leisurely approaches. Two bystanders appear to root in the hedges along the path, too distant to be clearly made out: Are they peasants? Estate groundskeepers? Our eyes are programmed now to expect something Edwardian, or, more applicable to the subject matter, Victorian. Only when an automobile makes a turn in the distance do we realize the setting is contemporary. The modernity comes as a jolt, but from this sequence we will return to some kind of imagined past again and again as the heroine–a very modern woman, one whose frightened explorations map the sexual realms of our own later decades–slips between the cracks in her own mind.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt
screenplay by Bridget O’Connor & Peter Straughan, based on the novel by John le Carré
directed by Tomas Alfredson

by Walter Chaw The easy thing is to say that Tomas Alfredson has followed up his tremendous vampire flick Let the Right One In with another vampire flick, a story of Cold War British Intelligence as men in shadows, exhausted, living off the vibrancy of others. Yet Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the Swedish director’s adaptation of John le Carré’s seminal spy novel, is something a good deal more than a clever segue from one genre film to another. Less a companion piece to the latest Mission: Impossible than a bookend to Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world Melancholia, it’s a character study, sure, but more accurately it’s an examination of a culture of gestures and intimations, where a flutter of an eyelid causes a hurricane in another part of a corrupt, insular world. Naturally, its timeliness has nothing to do with its literal milieu (all Russian bogeys and ’70s stylings)–nothing to do with recent world events that have an entire CIA cell blown up in Iran and Lebanon–and everything to do with its overpowering atmosphere of feckless power and utter resignation. It’s a spy thriller that Alfred Lord Tennyson would’ve written–the very filmic representation of acedia.