France Archives - Page 5 of 19 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Venus in Fur (2013)

July 17, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Theatrical

La Vénus à la fourrure
***½/****
starring Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric
screenplay by David Ives, based on his play
directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw If it's stagebound, Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur, an adaptation of David Ives's play that is itself an adaptation in part of the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel, is at least not stagebound without a purpose. It reminds of Adaptation. in its awareness of itself as an object open to deconstruction (and Derrida is mentioned in the text to make it metacritical in that sense as well); the fact that it's a play captured on film only underscores its conceit. Venus in Fur is also a career summary for the octogenarian director at a point where his contemporaries are declining steeply in their dotage. Spry and clever, surprisingly funny at times, and at all times indisputably alive, it finds Polanski's themes of gender subversion in high dunder, opening with a quote from the Apocryphal Book of Judith where the titular heroine seduces enemy general Holofrenes and decapitates (read: emasculates/castrates) him as he reclines in post-coital bliss. Polanski casts an actor who could be his younger doppelgänger, Mathieu Amalric, and opposite him in this two-person drama Polanski's own wife, Emmanuelle Seigner–transparent, vulnerable, courageous casting that reminds very much of Hitchcock in his late masterpiece period. Venus in Fur is Polanski's Marnie: a grand survey of all of his sexual peccadilloes that works as apologia, confession, and explication, eventually conveying Polanski's acceptance of himself as deeply flawed, but better for the wisdom.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – Blu-ray Disc

May 21, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, France, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras A
BD – Image D+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, Roland Topor
screenplay by Werner Herzog
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Nosferatu, the Vampyre isn’t scary so much as it’s just delightful; it’s not topical so much as it’s an extremely competent, sometimes inspired tribute to F. W. Murnau and his classic 1922 Nosferatu. Werner Herzog’s hand at the rudder is steady and Klaus Kinski’s performance as Count Dracula is definitive, but the picture is an exercise in style generally lacking in the New German auteur’s main throughlines, i.e., representation, class, and the vagaries of the creative process. What does survive relatively intact is Herzog’s nascent surrealism, which flowers during the picture’s endlessly disturbing tableaux of plague victims celebrating the last of life with rat-infested banquets and danses macabre. One could extend a little and support that the film’s scenes of apocalypse and pestilence hint at a loathing of immigrants and the perception of cultural corruption, but there’s a damning ornamental emptiness at the centre of Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (henceforth Nosferatu) that places it forever out of time–without a father, as it were. The film’s reason for being (it’s a shrine to Herzog’s favourite German director) is also the end of the conversation.

Ernest & Celestine (2012) + Jodorowsky’s Dune (2014)

April 10, 20142012, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Family, France, Luxembourg, Theatrical

Ernest et Célestine
**½/****
screenplay by Daniel Pennac, based on books by Gabrielle Vincent
directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE
**½/****
directed by Frank Pavich

by Walter Chaw Broad, earnest, unassuming animation from France, Ernest & Celestine is the tale of a little girl mouse, Celestine (voice of Pauline Brunner), and gruff bear Ernest (Lambert Wilson), who overcome their cultural prejudices to become fast friends. Celestine is outcast because she’d like to be an artist instead of a dentist; Ernest is outcast because he’s a busker struggling to eke out a subsistence living. Over a series of misadventures, the two end up doing the Badlands in Ernest’s ramshackle hideaway, awaiting their fate and trying to enjoy their borrowed time. It’s all leading to a grim ending, but it’s not that kind of movie.

Tess (1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

March 30, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Nastassia Kinski, Peter Firth, Leigh Lawson, John Collin
screenplay by Gerard Brach, Roman Polanski, John Brownjohn, based on the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
directed by Roman Polanski

by Bryant Frazer In the annals of feel-bad literature, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a corker, pitting natural beauty and goodness against a battery of opposing forces–the church, the aristocracy, modern technology, human avarice–and finding beauty debased. It was a loaded area of study for Roman Polanski, who adapted it as a Hollywood artist in exile, working in France rather than nearer the book’s setting of Wessex, England, for fear of his deportation to the U.S. on rape charges. Just as Polanski’s bloody Macbeth has been interpreted as a howl of pain following the murder of his beloved wife, Sharon Tate, his Tess can be read as an act of penance, if not a bid for rehabilitation.

Weekend (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 30, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Road Movie, Satire, The Criterion Collection

WEEK END
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Georges Staquet, Juliet Berto
written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

by Angelo Muredda “The horror of the bourgeois can only be overcome with more horror.” So says a militant cannibal as he stands over the remains of one such bourgeois husk late in Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s farewell to the alienated pop art and American genre gerrymandering of his early period. As the line about horrors piled upon horrors implies, Weekend is nasty, as valedictory addresses go–a scorched-earth attack on France under Charles de Gaulle that finds nearly all of its citizens massacred in car crashes of their own design and converted into consumable products, namely food. The humanism of minor tragedies like Vivre sa vie and the heedless joy of Frank Tashlin homages like Une femme est une femme has here curdled into a new, ugly form. Although its title suggests a world of leisure and free play, one doesn’t enjoy Weekend so much as one endures it.

Eyes Without a Face (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 5, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Les yeux sans visage
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin, Edith Scob
screenplay by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon and Claude Sautet, based on the novel by Jean Redon
directed by Georges Franju

by Walter Chaw Five films changed the conversation in 1960. They were the fire, though the embers were stoked in the years leading up to them. Looking for signposts in the Eisenhower Fifties, you find the juvenile-delinquent cycle, plus the outré horror flicks of England’s Hammer Studios, or Japan’s tokusatsu, or France’s Nouvelle Vague. More directly, you find a pair of films based on works by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Diabolique and Vertigo. But in 1960, there was this quintet, each the product of parallel genesis, each proof after a fashion of a Jungian collective unconscious, perhaps, certainly that things long-simmering inevitably boil over. There’s an idea in my head, put there by Ethan Mordden’s Medium Cool, that everything that happened in the arts in the United States throughout the Fifties points to what was about to happen in our culture in the Sixties. Mordden is the source of my favourite teaching point when it comes to the two eras: that in the Fifties, if you didn’t listen to Mother, society was doomed; and in 1960, if you listened to Mother, you were Psycho.

Bastards (2013)

October 11, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

Les salauds
****/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Lola Creton
screenplay by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards
is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists
in world cinema–an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a
straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic
fragments that have become Denis's stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in
the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of
beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring
out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels
roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man's body
splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background
as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L'Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part
of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view
of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces
fit together in a precise way we're simply not allowed to know until we've
arrived through the movie's own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate
pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis's eleven
features–a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then
reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.

TIFF ’13: The Past

September 4, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, TIFF

**/****
directed by Asghar Farhadi

by Angelo Muredda The Past is a heartbreaker, a badly
misjudged project that retraces each major step of Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation but arrives at the finish line with
little to show for itself. Like Farhadi’s previous film, we start with a
divorce, this time between Parisian Marie (Bérénice Bejo, channelling Marion
Cotillard’s more hysterical performances, especially for Christopher Nolan) and
the now Tehran-based Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), who flies back into town to sign the
papers and see his ex off into her new relationship with Samir (Tahar Rahim).
That Samir has his own troubled past with a woman in a coma for reasons as-yet
unknown doesn’t surprise us as much as Farhadi seems to hope it will, since A Separation also culled its dramatic tension from
a pair of mirrored couples, and made similar symbolic hay of offscreen
characters in extreme states. (There an unborn child and an unspeaking parent
with dementia.) Those who went along with that instrumental use of characters
and rigorous structural doubling did so because the situations in which the
leads were put were so convincing and their reactions to their impossible
situation were almost unbearably moving. Here, one feels trapped in an aggravating
Philip Glass sonata, where each scene exists solely as a foil for the next and each
revelation becomes a transparent set-up for the ensuing real revelation, and so on ad infinitum. The point seems
to be that one never knows in love, but surely some lovers’ actions are less
ambiguous than others. The absurd final shot, which has us reading a motionless
body for either an actual or an imagined emotional response, is the most
maddening example of this noncommittal gamesmanship, a case of a talented but
lost filmmaker having his cake, eating it too, and then proclaiming, “There
is no cake–or is there?”

The Attack (2013)

July 11, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Lebanon, Qatar, Theatrical

L’attentat
***/****
starring Ali Suliman, Remonde Amsellem, Evgenia Dodina, Karim Saleh
screenplay by Joelle Touma and Ziad Doueiri, based on the novel by Yasmina Khadra
directed by Ziad Doueiri

by Walter Chaw Lebanese-born Ziad Doueiri, an assistant cameraman on Quentin Tarantino’s first three features, demonstrates as a director the kind of elliptical reserve more commonly associated with Terrence Malick. Indeed, the most powerful stretches of his sophomore effort, The Attack, recall the fragments of The Thin Red Line that elucidate Pvt. Bell’s wife’s betrayal through a series of voiceovers, remembered conversations, and gauzy/idealized images of a bucolic existence that may or may not have ever existed. An adaptation of a novel by Yasmina Khadra, The Attack details the discovery by an Arab emergency-room surgeon based in Israel, Amin (Ali Suliman), that his wife Siham (Reymond Amsalem, who has the quality and pitch of Illeana Douglas–a wonderful thing) is the suicide bomber responsible for an attack in Tel Aviv, the casualties of which we watch Amin try to save. Amin has been “accepted” by the Jews, we understand, though there’s tension throughout the early scenes as his friends and colleagues awkwardly navigate around him in a way that reads initially as condescending, then increasingly hostile as events unfold. Hannah Arendt would have something to say about this; so would Paula Deen and her legion of insensate followers. When Amin receives an award for his work, his acceptance speech includes the platitude that all Arabs have a little Jew in them and vice versa; by the picture’s last words, “Every time you go away, a little piece of me dies,” one wonders if he means the little piece that has empathy for the opposition’s point of view.

Band of Outsiders (1964) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 3, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

Bande à part
****/****
Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur, Danièle Girard
screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard (uncredited), based on the novel Fool’s Gold by Dolores Hitchens
directed by JeanLuc Cinéma Godard

by Bryant Frazer For the casual observer, Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande à part) may as well be titled The Eyes of Anna Karina. The famously radical director’s follow-up to the hit film Contempt isn’t a favourite of American movie buffs for its politics or its thematic rigour. Instead, it’s a veritable spoof of film noir–at times a near-farce–involving a couple of small-time schemers who take their cues from Hollywood. Though Band of Outsiders is thought of as one of Godard’s most accessible works, it’s also one of his most dissonant. It’s a gritty crime drama wrapped around a light romance; a breezy comedy shot through with intimations of the geopolitical landscape of the 1960s; an homage to U.S. culture that incidentally imagines the decline of the American empire. In Godard’s body of work, Band of Outsiders–its story based on a novel by American mystery writer Dolores Hitchens–can be read as the connective tissue between the bones of Breathless, which is full of loving references to American cinema and pulp fiction, and the later Weekend and Tout va bien, which are explicitly critical of western culture in general and capitalism in particular.

Youth Is Heavy: FFC Interviews Olivier Assayas

May 24, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, France, Interviews

May 23, 2013|"We didn't really know where we were heading," Olivier Assayas writes of his generation's amorphousness following the civil unrest of the late-1960s, "but the journey was exciting, charging time with meaning and offering a horizon all the more desired for our having had foretaste in May that had left a nasty feeling of unfulfillment." An anarchist preteen during the general strikes and student occupations that rocked Paris in May of 1968, Assayas came of age in the countercultural afterglow of the early 1970s, as part of a splintered youth culture struggling to realize the intellectual and political work of their predecessors in radically different ways. Surely owing to that belatedness, Assayas's reworkings of this historical moment, both in his memoir A Post-May Adolescence and in his films set during the same formative years (1994's Cold Water and 2010's Carlos), are shot through with ambivalence: They're as interested in that nasty feeling of unfulfillment as they are excited about the freedom of travelling without a map.

Tristana (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

April 24, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, France, Spain

***/****
Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Catherine
Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos
screenplay
by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Julio Alejandro, based on the novel
by Benito Pérez Galdós
directed
by Luis Buñuel

by
Angelo Muredda You might not think it from overdetermined
schlock like Simon
Birch, but disability is a tough trope to wrangle, an
errant bodily signifier that doesn't always play nice. Just think of
Million Dollar Baby,
which tries and fails to use Hilary Swank's
impairment as a
narrative shortcut for Clint Eastwood's transformation into a tender
father,
troubled Catholic, and euthanizer-turned-agent of transcendence all at
once.
Eastwood the director has to stumble over the mechanics of his scene
partner's
newly-maimed body and horizontal status, fudging the timeline so that
her
bedsores appear to sprout within minutes of her injury and puzzling over
how to
frame her, whether as a head poking out of a hospital bed in the
background or
a wheelchair-sporting cyborg parked in dead centre, staring out her
hospital
window like a forlorn puppy. That representational awkwardness is so
common that
in disability studies, it even has a name: Ato Quayson calls it
"aesthetic
nervousness," meaning a text's tendency to collapse in a fit of nerves
before the matter of how to represent a disabled body.

Like Someone in Love (2012)

April 12, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Rio Kase, Denden
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your
guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It's clear
enough that Like
Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it's
harder to say at first what we're looking at and why. The closest voice we hear
belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who's a little too preoccupied with lying her way out
of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young
revellers in front of her. Whether she's our lead takes a couple of false tries
to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a
table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the
foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes
her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with
first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp
directing his employees. Somewhere in-between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who's even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of
vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used
to be after she's vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets
back.

A Man and a Woman: Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva – TIFF Cinematheque Retrospective

January 15, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blog, Film Festivals, France

by Angelo Muredda When Michael Haneke’s Amour met its first wave
of hosannas at Cannes, the press seemed eerily unanimous with respect to all
but the film’s place within the German-Austrian taskmaster’s oeuvre. Although
some were quick to call it the warmest of his many portraits of couples in
crisis (it would be hard not to be), others saw it as of a piece with his
austere horror films about complacent bourgeois hoarders reduced to ashes by
external invaders–in this case, not the home intruders of Funny Games or Time
of the Wolf (though there is a break-in, for those keeping
score), but the more insidious threat of age-related illnesses. The truth is
probably somewhere between those poles. It’s no surprise that the key
players in this two-hander are named, as they always seem to be in Haneke’s
pictures, Anne and Georges Laurent–sturdy middle-class monikers for tasteful
piano teachers. But it’s difficult to wholly ascribe the universal quality we often
associate with Haneke’s Laurents to the familiar, if weathered, faces of
Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, who–far more than the chameleonic
Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert, other Haneke collaborators–recall a
bygone era of French cinema.

Les visiteurs du soir (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 17, 20121940s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

a.k.a. The Devil’s Envoys
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Alain Cuny, Arletty, Marie Déa, Jules Berry
screenplay by Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche
directed by Marcel Carné

by Jefferson Robbins Fairytale is the oldest way we know to exorcise trauma or repurpose it to didactic ends. The moving image, probably the newest. So Marcel Carné’s Les visiteurs du soir (literally, The Night Visitors, though its international title is The Devil’s Envoys), created in France during a period of repression equalled only by the Terror, pulls both tricks. It’s a film, therefore it’s not reality, but it’s also shaped as a magical courtly romance and set in a distant past where romances were both entertainment and cultural transgression. Gilles (Alain Cuny) and Dominique (Arletty) are figures out of a medieval fresco or some monk’s illuminated pages, from Gilles’s suggestively forked mullet to Dominique’s graceful, benedictory poses. The two are minstrels on horseback in 1485–when troubadours carried news, gossip, and forbidden literature from one feudal estate to the next, singing songs of organic, passionate love for nobles trapped in arranged marriages. A long way from Vichy France, under the Nazi occupation, yet either world offered death as punishment for dissent, and both found succour in art that trespassed boundaries.

TIFF ’12: Something in the Air

September 16, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, France, TIFF

Après mai
**½/****
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Angelo Muredda Those who see Olivier Assayas’s new film
stateside will be met with an ambivalent gesture right from the title card,
which juxtaposes the Godardian red and blue of the French title, “APRES
MAI” (“After May”), with the mousy English translation,
“Something in the Air.” The French is the more precise, referring to
the dispirited state of radicals following the events of May, 1968, while
Thunderclap Newman’s yearning anthem about armed insurrection evokes only a
roughly simpatico version of late-’60s American idealism falling into ’70s
cynicism. Vague as the English title reads by comparison, though, it turns out
to be the more fitting of the two. Indeed, for all of Assayas’s personal
attachment to this material, Something in the Air isn’t significantly more illuminating
about the period than something like Almost
Famous, which uses the titular song to roughly the same effect, evincing
the same impossible nostalgia for a time when everyone was supposedly moving
together on one big bus, so to speak.

TIFF ’12: Leviathan

September 15, 2012****/****, 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: Amour

August 30, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Palme d'Or Winner, TIFF

***½/****
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Angelo Muredda From the moment it screened at Cannes, Amour became the odds-on favourite to win the Palme d’Or, and no wonder: Terrence Malick worked more or less the same formalist-auteur-goes-humanist formula to great success just last year. But while The Tree of Life‘s cosmic drama was hardly a stretch for Malick, you have to think Amour, which ultimately did cop the big prize, was a harder nut to crack for Michael Haneke. He was, of course, first awarded the Palme for a thuddingly obvious Village of the Damned knockoff designed for people who don’t do horror. Would he prove himself human after all?

TIFF ’12: Rust & Bone

August 30, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

De rouille et d'os
**/****
directed by Jacques Audiard

by Angelo Muredda On paper, the most troubling thing about Rust & Bone is the suggestion, right from the title, that we're in for a yarn about maimed bodies that go bump in the night, grinding their way into oblivion. You have to give some credit to Jacques Audiard–who's otherwise taking a decisive step back from A Prophet–for going surprisingly easy on the figurative potential of a love story between Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), a whale trainer turned double-amputee after a rough day on the job, and Ali (Bullhead's Matthias Schoenaerts), a brutish security guard and distant father who moonlights as a back-alley boxer. Based on two short stories (it shows) from Toronto-born author Craig Davidson, the film puts itself squarely in the specious Paul Haggis tradition of the crisscrossing tragedy but keeps the stakes pretty low much of the time, mostly sparing us the usual tortured hymns about how we're all connected at some primal level. As a disability film, a problem genre that finds little middle ground between triumph-of-adversity celebrations and euthanasia apologies, it's also fairly attuned to mechanical matters that usually lie outside the bounds of melodrama. Consider Stephanie's insurance-paid apartment, a smartly-organized space for a wheelchair user, down to the widened doorframes and easily-accessible washer and dryer. Ephemera counts for something.

Barbarella (1968) – Blu-ray Disc

August 5, 20121960s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, France, Italy, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Marcel Marceau, Ugo Tognazzi
screenplay by Terry Southern and Roger Vadim, based on the comic by Jean Claude Forest and Claude Brulé
directed by Roger Vadim

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer Barbarella begins in the fur-lined cockpit of a space-faring starcraft, fabulously appointed with a statue of a moon goddess and, inexplicably, what looks to be a full-sized replica of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. Despite the high-flown frivolity of its conception and the infectiously groovy theme song, this tableau does not represent the most quintessentially with-it of all possible sci-fi worlds. That changes when the astronaut who has floated into view starts pulling off the different panels of her moon-suit to reveal, underneath the shapeless layers of scuba-like gear, a naked strawberry-blonde with slender, delicate fingers and legs that don't quit.