the deer hunter (w&d michael cimino, w. deric washburn, louis garfinkle)

When I got home I thought it was incumbent to look up the discourse on ‘Deer Hunter Racist’. There was not as much as I might have anticipated. Cimino’s film occupies a curious space. Known as a Vietnam war movie, the Vietnam sections of the film actually feel like background for the director’s real interest, which is is the dissolution of the immigrant American dream. It might be that twas ever thus, but this is effectively a buddy movie, about three men from a close-knit community who stray into a nightmare. A nightmare which just happens to have been caused by the demented actions of their government. Cimino’s film is always at its purest when the action occurs in the Pennsylvania mining town that Mike, Nick and Steve come from. First names as common as any in the Anglo-Saxon world, but their surnames are of Russian descent, a telling choice, given that it’s the commie Russians that the USA was supposedly trying to defeat in South East Asia. A Russian Orthodox Church looms over the small town, looking like something out of the Donbas, and it’s here that the citizens are married and buried. The first hour of the film is locked into the creation of this world and the personal relationships that lurk there. This could be American Graffiti, or The Last Picture Show.

Vietnam is the fly in the ointment. It’s not an unreasonable position to criticise the film for not reflecting the Vietnamese experience, or indeed for portraying the Vietnamese characters as bloodthirsty gamblers, hooked on Russian Roulette, an idea which was apparently the invention of Cimino and his screenwriters. But it would also be to miss the point. The Russian Roulette is a device, which ties in with the band of brothers’ love of hunting, guns and violence, a violence which does a 180 degree turn, turning the gun back on themselves. The deer aren’t going to provoke that, but the Vietnam War will.

Through all this De Niro gives a magisterial performance. Vaguely normal, vaguely handsome, vaguely ugly with his sailor’s beard, he has the air of a leader and a survivor, a man who is of the world he inhabits and yet is not. It’s intriguing that in the credits, the last image is of De Niro’s Mike falling over. For all his capacity to control and lead, he is unable to rescue his friend from the trap that has been laid.

So Deer Hunter is a film which opens itself to perhaps deserved criticism, whilst at the same time providing a coruscating vision of American Imperialism. It has been over thirty years since I last saw the film. Its impact was telling then and its power has not diminished. It’s also instructive to think that the chances of a similar film being made about more recent US adventures is minimal. As though the military PR men sat down and watched the ’Nam movies, and then told Hollywood: no more next time round. The scenes of the US Saigon embassy is in its final days could be mapped on to events in Kabul. A critique of a government willing to cripple and kill its own in pursuit of its imperialist ambitions is no longer the kind of thing the studios are willing to finance. Instead we get the false war wish fulfilment of Tarantino or the vapid escapism of the Marvel franchise. (Or “ancient Greece”)

ugetsu (d. kenji mizoguchi, w. hisakazu tsuji, akinari ueda, matsutarô kawaguchi, yoshikata yoda, isamu yoshii)

Mizoguchi’s fable is far darker than one might expect. It’s a long way from Disney, in spite of its fantastical nature. The film shifts through the gears as it narrates the story of an ambitious potter, caught up in the wars of medieval Japan. Moving between comic and tragic registers, it finally settles in a fantasy world of spirits, incorporating a spiritual embodiment of death and what death might mean. The director delights in the spectral, the ghost ship that drifts through the mist to find us all, sooner or later.

pasolini (w&d abel ferrara, w. nicola tranquillino, maurizio braucci)

Ferrara’s biopic offers Dafoe one of his finest roles. This is clutch material for the director, and the film feels assured, confident, but surprisingly safe. It opens by presenting scenes from 120 Days, suggesting it will investigate the darkness or hell that Pasolini will speak of in an intriguing interview. But the film is almost too well shot and acted. Everything feels pitch perfect. Ferrara’s rough edges have been smoothed out, there are no moments that either shock or disgust. Having said which, the film, set over the course of the day of Pasolini’s death, is educative, an effective introduction to the life of the Italian poet-cineaste. 

magnolia (w&d pt anderson)

Cine Universitario has a healthy, youthful turnout on a Friday night. I guess I’m the oldest member of the audience. They seem to drink it all in, PTA’s grandiose, operatic epic, which swoons through the course of a single night. There’s more than one reference to opera in the film - Stanley even sings opera at one point. The whole film is underscored to an extreme degree, as though the director is suggesting he is not so much writing a film as composing one. I read a Wikipedia quote of Anderson’s saying that looking back on the film he would have cut twenty minutes, which isn’t such a ridiculous suggestion but also seems irrelevant. The movie could be an hour shorter or twelve hours longer. Certainly some storylines could have been teased out more - Donny’s and Phil’s to name but two. But this isn’t so much the film of an LA night as the symphony: the characters are instruments who have their solos, but are part of a wider whole, one that can mess with the logic of time; (whilst Claudia cleans her apartment waiting to open up for the cop, half a dozen storylines are running ahead, but it doesn’t matter, within the geometry of action, all that matters is that she will open the door); with the logic of chance, as the bookending narrator declares, laying cards on the table; all of this without in any way jeopardising the coherence of the music of the film. Anderson even does this with the score, willing to lay music over music, music over dialogue, noise on noise, the parts constantly subsumed to the whole. It is indeed operatic, exhausting, but also moving, portentously moving, perhaps, Yankee style, but moving nonetheless. And as the credits rolled and the final Mann song played, the youthful audience, as though in an opera house, burst into spontaneous applause. 

reminiscences of a journey to lithuania (d.jonas mekas)

Mr Amato urged me to accompany him to watch a film by Mekas, a name I have often come across without ever sitting down to watch a film of his. The film takes places in three sections. Mekas in New York, post war, seeking to come to terms with exile. Mekas’ return voyage in 1971 to Lithuania. And, as a coda, a short section on the visit to Vienna which followed the Lithuania trip.

The filmmaking style is informal, homemade. Mekas went everywhere with his camera and filmed everything. His elderly mother, a trip to the Catskills, the dance after the meeting of the collectivist farm. In many ways it seems prophetic of the current era, where everyone documents everything, and lives are captured and mapped out as they are lived. Or at least, a curated version of a life. The images are grainy, beautiful, jagged. It is an assemblage, an act of editing, pulling together the loose strings of the journey to form a tapestry. It is also a cine pobre, stepsister to the Poor Theatre or Arte Povera. Mekas reveals you don’t need a team and lights and gaffers to be a filmmaker, and as such the film reveals how cinema is capable of becoming an egalitarian art form. The other side of that coin is one no-one foresaw in 1972: everyone in the whole wide world is a filmmaker now. What Mekas reveals in the film is the need to both edit and curate. Images acquire another kind of weight/ humour/ magic, when juxtaposed with other images. There’s a difference between a visual information soup and a visual poem. 

güeros. (w&d. alonso ruizpalacios, w. gibrán portela, alan page)

In some corner somewhere I had been advised that Güeros was one of the top films of the 21st c so I went on an expedition to the underbelly of cinema, the Sala Chaplin, which is a story in itself, and caught it, running into Felix, both of us noting that the Cinemateca was un poco flojo in its programación this week. If this is an anecdotal, cotidiano entrance to this review, then that feels just right. Güeros is more or less a 24 hour trip through a day in the life of Mexico City (DF), from the badlands to the occupied university to a posh restaurant to the out of town high rise estate. And much more beside. Ruizpalacios endows the film with a visual poetic which means a cabbage can have as much weight as a brick. There’s the best of the  film school aesthetic at work, a joy in detail and the close-up, all lovingly framed in black and white. The narrative feels like it owes a debt to Los Detectives Salvajes, as Tomás, his older brother, Sombra, their friend Santos and finally the charismatic student leader, Ana, go on a mission to find a lost singer with a stylised name, a man who made Dylan cry. The story goes round bends and down dales (with the use of a beaten up car fundamental in the sprawl of DF) and the film retains a lyrical, affectionate feel. There are some very simple get-outs - ie at once point to escape from danger the crew just run away and get in a car and drive off, which reminds us screenwriters that sometimes you don’t need to overthink the narrative: if the film has engaging characters, visual flair and the sense of an ending, you can cut the odd corner. Ruizpalacios, I note, went on to make the arthouse hit, The Kitchen, co-written by none other than Arnold Wesker, so he’s a shrewd customer, and a great addition to the amazing Mexican canon of the 21st century. 

pat garrett and billy the kid. (d. peckinpah, w. rudy wurlitzer)

A strange, episodic masterpiece from Peckinpah. Two hours that rumble along towards a long-awaited climax, which is inevitably anti-climactic, and deliberately staged as such. One of the two protagonists has to die, this much is known, only the manner of their death will be revelatory. That Kristofferson’s Billy is killed in such an unheroic fashion speaks to the filmmaker’s sympathies. There is no glory in Pat Garrett’s victory. As in the case of The Getaway, Peckinpah is rooting for the outsider; the villains are the cattle barons who have seized the land and with whom Garrett has made an uneasy alliance. He has sold his soul, his wife tells him, and no matter how much James Coburn’s implacable countenance might try to hide this truth, he knows and we know that she’s right. The existential struggle that underpins their conflict is artfully related by a director whose subtlety is masked by the vigorous masculinity of his films. This is as insightful a deconstruction of the western myth as you could hope for, and its relevance  in an era of snake charming capitalists is as valid as ever.

A note on Dylan. His puckish performance counterpoints the machismo of the other characters. He isn’t just acting: he’s infiltrating his whole cryptic take on art into the performance. A character that goes by the name of Alias, who doesn’t use a gun, who instinctively sides with the outlaw. 

le samouraï (w&d jean-pierre melville, w. joan mcleod, georges pellegrin)

Some films radiate a kind of perfection. They delimit their boundaries and ensure that everything within them is honed and chiselled and ticks like a Rolex. Le Samourai is one of those. Its structure is straightforward. Delon’s Jef Costello is a hired assassin who kills someone in the first act. In the second act the police and the gangsters who hired him close in. The third brings the tightly worked denouement, which contains only one potential flaw (how do the police know that Jef is going to show up at the club when he does?). Melville directs with an extreme economy, his washed- out pallet reflecting a desire to sand the film down it its bare essentials. Having said which, the film isn’t averse to taking the risk of shooting on the streets of Paris, with these less controlled moments acting as a counterpoint to the carefully mounted studio scenes. The metro, the cafes, the cars: the film smells of a time and a place, and Delon’s hired killer moves through this world like a ghost. 

crash (w&d. cronenberg, w. j.g. ballard)

Crash is a movie which is constructed upon a brilliant premise. About forty minutes in, Elias Koteas’ mysterious and charismatic psychopath introduces a staging of James Dean’s fatal crash, using identical cars, which actually collide. The world of the movie and technology fused in a single moment. The love of speed, which has driven the twentieth century, impaled on the steering wheel of the fixed punctum of the cinema frame. This moment seems to connect Hollywood with Marinetti’s Futurism, with Ducournau’s Titane, the automobile as the death drive of progress. The fact that the characters all want to have sex in cars, all the time, the cars being their potential murderers, only exacerbates the Freudian connotations where sex and death are all part of the same turbulent psychological crisis towards which modernity, and us, its guests, is constantly accelerating.

Having reached this point, 45 minutes into the film, it then feels as though Cronenberg wasn’t entirely sure where to go next. The tension that is laced into the film like a corset in the opening, a place where anything might happens, starts to slip as the characters settle into a playful Schnitzler-esque ronde, seeking to either screw or kill one another in the next car accident they can provoke. The film seems to decelerate rather than accelerate, and the brilliance of the opening forty five minutes becomes a tail light moving out of range, speeding away into a parallel film in another dimension, a dimension Cronenberg’s film would die to crash through to, if only it hadn’t lost the map.

l’eclisse (w&d antonioni, w. tonino guerra, w. elio bartolini, ottiero ottieri)

The third in Antonioni’s trilogy of Europeans on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In this case Vitti and Delon, paddling between the banality of love and the imminence of crisis. Scorsese, wiki informs, rates this as the boldest film of the trilogy, perhaps because it is the least definitive in terms of narrative. Essentially, Vitti, who leaves her older lover in the opening scene, tiptoes towards Delon, who seems as vacuous and arrogant as he is pretty, resisting his advances until she doesn’t. Not a great deal happens in the meantime. There’s a stock market crash, Vitti goes on a flight over Rome, she blacks up and dances a disconcerting ‘African’ routine, she hangs out with Delon in his parents’ posh gaffe. In narrative terms, it’s inconsequential and it builds towards the puzzling final sequence as the characters themselves drop out of the film and it lingers over random (or carefully selected) images of Roman life, a pared-back predecessor to the fireworks of Zabriskie Point. If anything, Antonioini seems to be using the medium as a meditative means of exploring the limits of freedom in a European woman’s life: social freedom, sexual freedom, the freedom to determine her own identity. The headline towards the end about threat of nuclear war suggests an altogether more existential cloud, hovering at the edge of the screen, and reminds us of how much the apocalypse was part of the post-war generation’s consciousness. 

the getaway. (d. peckinpah, w. walter hill, jim thompson)

Peckinpah’s film feels like the sort of film they don’t make anymore. A serious movie, even though it’s all car chases and shoot-outs. Counter-cultural antiheroes. A complex relationship. Gender wars. Effortless charisma which the lead actors actually have to make an effort to ruffle.

McQueen and MacGraw exude a kind of Iconic cool which can only exist because the narrative and direction construct the parameters within which this iconic cool is allowed to flourish. One thinks of Tarantino’s use of Pitt, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and everything about that feels contrived or tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps Travolta and Jackson came closer to the real thing in Pulp Fiction, but there’s a sense that these kind of iconic figures don’t really fit into contemporary narratives. Certainly, the gender politics feel as though they belong to another era, no matter how much the film seeks to emphasise that MacGraw is just as tough as McQueen. Perhaps surprisingly in a film with this title, she is the one who does the majority of the driving. She kills bad guys too, and they are a team, even if she’s also the one who fucks up at one point, putting everything at risk. The fact that she has traded her body for McQueen’s Doc’s release is part of the unstable gender politics, but if we believe that fifty years later we have gone beyond that kind of deal, surely we are living in a fantasy world. The female body remains a token of exchange amongst powerful men, even if it’s now less acceptable to recognise this in the movies. The other day someone told me that so many of the movies that they are watching have a gay protagonist, either male or female, and this might be a way to circumvent uncomfortable truths.

However, there is perhaps another reason that the film, and it’s nerveless cool, feels so alien to today’s culture. McQueen’s Doc is a felon, a representative of the anti-establishment, and his crooked antagonists belong to the establishment. The film occurs in the hangover shadow of the Vietnam War, when faith in the system was at a low point in the USA. The counter-culture, for want of a better phrase, was seeking, in the company of Pynchon, Coppola, Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith et al, another set of ethical paradigms to live by. In the intervening years, that counter-culture has been crushed, or at least co-opted, absorbed into the mainstream. It’s not so much that stepping outside the system is impossible, it’s that the moment someone goes there, their posture or pose is welcomed and monetised. So, like Pitt in Tarantino’s film, what’s left is a shell (or simulacrum) of the anti-establishment pose. By contrast McQueen and MacGraw inhabit a dirty hinterland, and are literally consigned to the rubbish dump; the only place their anti-systemic heroism can survive is across the border, in Mexico. 

french connection (w&d william friedkin, w. ernest tidyman, robin moore)

French Connection is a film that can’t stay still. Everyone is constantly on the move. In cars, in trains, in a boat, but more often than not, on foot.  Freidkin has a similar restless energy to early Godard. It feels as though he wants to devour every corner of the city and in many ways the film ends up being, as much as anything else, a portrait of New York. This is cinema as flaneur. The film moves from high end hotel district to Harlem to the riverside, and it crossed my mind whilst watching it to wonder how those cities I know well, London and Montevideo, might have looked had the film been set there. This capturing of the city helps to reaffirm the director’s desire to shoot the film with the realistic feel of a documentary, (there’s also a hint of Cassettes’ roaming NY camera), transporting the slightly generic thriller material into something harder-edged, straight off the streets. At times this makes for a film that has the feel of a whisky hangover: life is washed out, desperately needing sleep or the blackest of black coffee, struggling to stay alert, numbed by the inevitability of the next chase, the next frenetic declaration which will reassure the detectives, Gene Hackman, even you, the viewer, that we are not hovering at the edge of coma; we remain riotously alive. 

the third part of the night (w&d andrzej zuławski, w. mirosław zuławski)

Żuławski’s first film is a bewildering but brilliant mash-up. Set in wartime Poland, it combines the quest for a cure for typhus, which involves putting infected fleas in matchboxes to bite the skin of volunteers, with the Gestapo hunt for Michal, the charismatic lead. Żuławski’s camera darts around like a cat on a hot tin roof whilst the plot moves forward like one of the film’s jumping fleas, frequently hiding in remote corners before leaping into the light. Zuławski narrative uses leaps in time to wilfully disorientate and confuse the viewer. Michal’s wife and child are murdered by the invaders at the start of the film, and Michal’s dead son haunts him as he helps a woman who looks just like his dead wife give birth. The idea of the double permeates the film, lending it an existential flavour to go with the bio-thriller elements. It’s a film that feels at once modern and baffling, the work of a mad scientist, a visionary or an idiot. But what can also be said, without doubt, is that it’s a film that’s aggressively original. The same could of course be said for much of Polish cinema that emerged out of the communist era: a cinema perhaps compelled by censorship to say things in cryptic tongues, to hide meaning in suitcases or coffins, to use the camera to disorientate as much as it clarifies, throwing the dogs off the scent, allowing its secret messages to slip through the net. 

to live and die in LA. (w&d william friedkin; w. gerald petievich)

Friedkin’s frenetic film stars William Petersen as a character who can’t walk past an obstacle without jumping over it. A chair, a fence, a table. The energy is great but there’s always the danger that you’re going to trip and fall flat on your face. There’s probably no way of knowing whether Petersen and Friedkin purposefully built this in as a metaphor, but whether they did or not, it works, because the golden boy, Chance, (Petersen) is heading for a mighty fall, a fall that is in part the result of this propulsive energy. The great thing about this quintessentially 80s movie is that it has no qualms about jackknifing the script and character in directions you never quite expect. Whilst Chance’s mission seems to be one of virtuous vengeance, it turns into a clusterfuck, (which permits for a truly gripping car chase). Morality becomes an abstract idea which has no application to the plastic realities of the here and now. The director’s bravura use of soundtrack, palette and even costume feel like a brash fuck you to any arbiters of taste: in this city we do things faster, harder and louder than anywhere else. Which leads, inexorably, to the sense that there’s a second metaphor at work here: the arbitrary nature of ethics in policing reflecting the arbitrary nature of ethics in film-making, where being beautiful is something to be turned to your advantage, where stars live fast and die young, and life moves on without missing a beat. 

full metal jacket (w&d kubrick, w. michael herr, gustav hasford)

I spent much of the film thinking about Docklands. What it was and what it became. How does the barely-remembered Vietnam war map onto the barely remembered Docklands  (before it became the current megalopolis Docklands). For those who don’t know: Kubrick, who didn’t like leaving Britain, reconstructed Vietnam in the ruins of the part of London known as Docklands, once the maritime hub of the capital, which as Britain declined as a trading nation, was an area that had fallen into disuse. The same Docklands would soon become the site for the development of a new financial and commercial zone, Canary Wharf.

Is there a link between Kubrick’s retrospective vision and the neo-liberal explosion that was constructed on the charred relics of his fictional Vietnam? Does the defeat of the USA reverberate with the unleashing of capital that was to follow, an unleashing that has transformed the landscape on the other side of the Thames? I remember, living in Blackheath, watching from the window of the bedsit I was living in at the time, as Canary Wharf tower was being built, going up floor by floor, like some unlikely and unwanted donation from a New York billionaire. I can date that to 1990, because I watched Mandela being released from prison on a TV in that same bedsit. 32 years ago now. Kubrick’s film is set around the Tet Offensive, in 1968, only 22 years earlier. He filmed in 1985-86, only a few years before the area’s transformation. He was closer to the Vietnam war then than we are now to the birth of turbo-capitalism, which rose from the ashes of the USA’s defeat, rising on the land where he realised his fictional recreation of that defeat.

Weirdly, it’s hard not to mourn for that cinematic vision of the Vietnam war, a cinematic vision which produced material as rich as anything US cinema has produced since. Watching the likes of Barbie and Oppenheimer, popcorn movies, one step removed from the Marvel franchise, it’s hard not to yearn for the generation whose horizons were broadened by defeat, by the tarnishing of the dream. Full Metal Jacket feels more schematic than Apocalypse or Deer Hunter, but it is still a rigid, sceptical examination of history, one which permits the construction of anti-heroes, rather than heroes, of doubt rather than affirmation. What came in the wake of this doubt was the bombast of Dockands, a requirement to shroud weakness in steel, to obliviate it from our narratives. The only time that narrative was punctured, in 2001, it was met with the force of a militarised blowback which, in theory, would insure against another Vietnam, although in practice, the empire was still just as wobbly. only this time, no-one got to make films about it. There are no wastelands in our modern techno-cities to re-enact the catastrophes of Fallujah, or Kandahar. And where the will might exist, the interest has waned. What turbo-capitalism has done so effectively is to out-source trauma, even failure. It happens in another dimension, not ours. And should anyone start to question that narrative, the counter-narratives of Trump or Brexit or Milei or Bolsonaro are wheeled out, to say: you too could live in that shiny steel tower. You may live in the ashes and debris of a bombed-out society, which was once harmonious, but don’t despair. If you kill your inner gook, you too can construct a temple in the sky, draw the blinds, press play, and lose yourself in the virtual reality of other people’s wars. 

tierra de españa (d. joris ivens)

Ivens’ film is an unashamed propaganda piece for the Spanish republic during the Civil War. The film centres on a region to the East of Madrid and the capital itself. Of particular interest to this viewer were the scenes from the university city, where I stayed for a few cold weeks nearly twenty years ago, at what would have been the front line back in those days. Ivens’ film uses the voice of Hemingway as its narrator, and his magisterial tones suggest that despite all the difficulties, most significantly the German airforce, all will be well in the end. Of course, we know it wasn’t to be, and Ivens’ positive message turned out to be misleading. There is so much about a war we don’t know from the outside: why the republican cause faltered, what lead to eventual defeat. Was it due to strategic error; internal indiscipline, as Orwell suggests; the superior mercenary forces ranged against it, as the film suggests; or the will of the people, whatever that might be? Being a propaganda piece, Ivens’ film doesn’t offer much clarity on the subject, as its aim is to rally the troops. What did strike me, though, watching the film, double billed with Buñuel’s, is that this was such a key moment in history. The victory of the far right, a European far right, emboldened Hitler and his allies. The disinterest from the UK or the USA or other natural allies, and the mixed reaction of the USSR, suggested that an attitude of non-engagement was their priority. Where we in the UK are shown a heroic version of WW2, we are never confronted with the counter-narrative of the world as it might have been had that far right movement been confronted  earlier in the process, before it had the chance to become a messianic death cult. 

tierra sin pan (d. buñuel)

Buñuel’s early short film is a trip to a desolate corner of early 20th Spain, Las Hurdes, a mountainous region not that far from the Portuguese border. The film reveals a society steeped in poverty, which doesn’t look as though it has changed much since the Middle Ages or before. Children and adults go barefoot, the diet is impoverished, with the voiceover informing that very little grows in this region. The men go to seek work elsewhere, leaving the women to keep the villages alive. In a highly Buñuelesque touch, the film shows a donkey which has been attacked by bees and is on its last legs. At another point we are shown a sick baby and informed that it subsequently died three days after the filming. Coffins have to be carried across rivers, because the soil is too stony to dig. Everything is precarious and the similarities between standards of living in poorer areas of Latin America and Spain seem striking. Having said which I passed through Caceres, the nearest town, a few years ago, and the changes were remarkable: this is a society that has succeeded in more or less eliminating poverty, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the rural communities which Buñuel reveals in this 90 year old film.  

dead man (w&d jarmusch)

My friend, Mr P, has long lauded this film to me. I have seen stills and had it referenced many times. Somehow I had never got round to watching it. The screening in Cine Universitario, in the underwhelming Sala Chaplin, was 25 minutes late starting. I was almost tempted to give up. But I didn’t. And to be honest, I was quietly blown away by the lyrical beauty of Jarmusch’s elegant, oneiric movie. As is the case with the best of the auteur’s movies, very little actually happens. A few moments of violence, never overstated, punctuate William Blake’s journey to the other shore, which is where his spirit guide is leading him. Is Blake alive or dead? Does it matter? Perhaps he inhabits an in-between zone, that hazy space between the two supposedly separate states. The very fact that the viewer is compelled to muse upon these issues, rather than the more traditional fare of a western, is testament to the director’s transcendent vision, a vision which feels as though it might be rooted in traditions that pre-date the occidental worldview. 

l’été meurtrier (d. jean becker, w. sébastien japrisot)

Jean Becker is the son of Jacques Becker and the two of them were a spinal cord of French cinema for over half a century. The Beckers never achieved the level of global fame of the likes of the Nouvel Vague and subsequent directors like Audiard, Noe etcetera, although I remember Truffaut singing the father’s praises in his collection of reviews. L'Été meurtrier is a very gallic tale of revenge, featuring a femme fatale, (Isabelle Adjani), who spends most of the film wearing the skimpiest of outfits, and sets out to find the men who raped her mother, one of whom must be her father. In the course of her mission she seduces and then marries Alain, the son of one of the men she suspects, who is now dead. The tale is convoluted, and at over two hours long, relies heavily on the charms of Adjani to maintain interest. Perhaps the most intriguing element of the film is the way it looks at the legacy of the Second World War in provincial French culture, as the violent rape which is at the core of the film’s narrative happened in the wake of the war, at a more catastrophic moment in time than the charming village life of the late sixties which Eliane and Alain enjoy.

mccabe and mrs miller (w&d robert altman, w. brian mckay, edmund naughton)

There are a few Altman films I have always hoped to see on the big screen, and this is one of them. The anti-western western, by a master of the high Anglo-Saxon art of gentle satire. (The transformation of Gosforth Park into Downton Abbey represents everything that has gone wrong with Britain in the 21st century.) M&M is a typically baroque piece of work which opens with a lengthy, darkly lit sequence where Beatty’s McCabe visits a desultory tavern in a forlorn mining settlement which will one day become a thriving city. The sequence is shadowy, almost mysterious, as the locals ask themselves who this McCabe might be, mythologising him as a gunslinger (which he isn’t). It lasts for perhaps 15 minutes and sets out Altman’s stall to create immersive, confusing (as immersive procedures tend to be) and a novelistic kind of cinema, with Dickensian undertones. The narrative of M&M is underwhelming: Julie Christie’s opium smoking entrepreneur comes to town, in a strangely off-key sub-cockney performance, and goes into business with McCabe to set up the best whorehouse in town. The big players want to buy McCabe out, he arrogantly shrugs them off, with catastrophic albeit predictable results. The chemistry between Beatty and Christie, two luminous screen presences, never quite seems to flower and Christie’s role feels underwritten. The pacing is stately. Nevertheless, the world of the movie, this remote mountainous corner of the USA, is perfectly realised, and there’s an almost regal authority to Altman’s management of the grand set piece scenes, culminating in a final, glorious snow-bound shoot-out that is the equal of any Western that precedes it. This might not be his greatest movie, and the gender politics occasionally make one cringe, but, embossed with the hallmark of its humanist director, it is nevertheless a minor masterpiece. 

From Wikipedia:

Carpenters for the film were locals and young men from the United States, fleeing conscription into the Vietnam War; they were dressed in period costume and used tools of the period, so that they could go about their business in the background, while the plot advanced in the foreground.