JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for The Oregonian in 2014. 

Legendary avant-garde filmmaker Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad [review]) applies his experimental technique to time travel in the 1968 film Je t'aime, je t'aime.

After a failed suicide, a man (Claude Rich) is sent one year in the past for one minute to see what change he might bring about. A malfunction in the machine strands him, however, and he jumps around the timeline from memory to memory.

With each new moment relived, Resnais brings the story a little more into focus, ultimately revealing why the man took a gun to his head.

Je t'aime, je t'aime requires your full attention, but the effect is like watching a mural come together, each stroke of the brush bringing the tableau closer to life.

MURIEL, or THE TIME OF RETURN - #824

Time, time, time...see what you’ve done to me?

Time and its effects play an important role in the films of Alain Resnais. In Hiroshima mon amour, two lovers steal secret hours in order to forget the atrocities of war; in Last Year at Marienbad [review], the past emerges at a most inconvenient time for a couple guilty of infidelity--so inconvenient, they try to deny it. In both films, the past and present seem to run along parallel courses, sometimes converging, sometimes becoming jumbled.

All these things come to bear in Resnais’ 1963 film, Muriel, or The Time of Return, crystallizing what the filmmaker had done before in a dual narrative, depicting both the young and the old as victims of repetitious history. If Hiroshima was about the flames of early romance, then Muriel looks at a romance that has burnt out and sifts through the ashes.

Marienbad star Delphine Seyrig rejoins Resnais for Muriel, playing Hélène, a widow living in the costal town of Boulogne. She runs a furniture store specializing in vintage items, and the shop doubles as an apartment for her and her stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée). One could suggest that their home is essentially a storehouse of memories--though largely those of other people. Which isn’t to say they don’t harbor some of their own. Both have secret wounds that haunt them, and Hélène is about to bring some of her worst to the fore. She has invited her lost love, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien), to come visit. He is eager to rekindle their affair, but she is more interested in poring over what went wrong. You see, back in the day, Alphonse went off to North Africa to fight in WWII, breaking several promises to Hélène, and never returning to her arms.

As we go, we will learn more about why Alphonse did what he did, and also how Hélène was not exactly the faithful paramour she suggests she was. We will also learn what Alphonse hides now, including the true nature of the “niece” (Nita Klein) who travels with him, and how Hélène has a gambling problem. Meanwhile, running concurrent with these revelations is Bernard’s story. He is freshly returned from the war in Algiers, an experience that has changed him. He is now mostly idle, experimenting with art and film, but also in his own love affair. He evokes the name of Muriel when referring to the woman who has a lock on his heart, but that too is a ruse.

For Muriel, Resnais collaborated with writer Jean Cayrol, who also wrote the commentary for his documentary Night and Fog. Together they craft a tricky narrative, one that, in execution, plays with time in a literal fashion. In some scenes, we see two timelines at once. We may see a street at night, and then see a quick flash of how it appears in the day. We also see moments repeat, one on top of the other, compounding increments using slivers of the whole to suggest the complete action. In a similar manner, Resnais employs quick-cut montages to indicate the passage of time, though if one pays attention, it’s almost as if there is more happening than would be possible in the space allotted. As Alphonse’s overnight trip extends, it seems as if months go by; to listen to dialogue later in the film, it’s merely a week.

This makes sense in a world where Alphonse’s trauma from combat is as fresh as Bernard’s, even though decades separate their tours of duty. We are meant to see the two men as one and the same, Bernard is the young version of Alphonse, the future stands next to the past here in the present. Muriel is also Hélène, the woman left behind by a soldier. All is fair in love and war, but in this case, the latter has turned the former into a tragedy.

Yet, we can also see Bernard’s existential plight as a critique of Alphonse’s. What we learn about Bernard’s time in Algeria has more in common with what would go on in Vietnam over the next decade, a predictive of modern warfare. The horror and pain is real and fresh, and lacking the clean justification usually associated with WWII. By contrast, what we know of Alphonse’s time as a soldier sounds almost sanitized, as if it were fiction--which we can eventually argue maybe it was.

So, too, are all the love stories. They are passionate fictions, a clinging to something that never was. Hélène tells Alphonse that, “I loved you with no help from you.” This is true of all of our lovers. They are pursuing their own concerns in their relationships, and the other half of the equation is practically immaterial. This is why none of the versions of their shared stories line up. It’s not just a matter of perspective, but also participation.

As is to be expected, Seyrig carries the picture. As we would see years down the road in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles [review], she doesn’t really need anyone else on the screen with her--though her co-stars ably back her up. She is particularly good playing off of Thiérrée, whose wooden posture is reminiscent of Martin LaSalle’s meticulously choreographed turn in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. Thiérrée is more operational, while Seyrig is deep in each moment, each emotion. She plays older here, Hélène is middle-aged, but the make-up is casual and not overdone; Seyrig is excellent as the concerned and nervous mother-type. In the first scenes with Alphonse and his niece, when she brings them into her home and feeds them, she never stops moving, putting the needs of everyone else ahead of her own, and thus making her selfish addiction all the more shameful for her.

Eventually, truth outs everyone, and time catches up, and Resnais leaves us both hopeful and unsure. There may be options for a better tomorrow, but it may also just be that the past is repeating once more.

Muriel, or The Time of Return has been available on DVD before, but it’s been a decade or so since the last release, and the new Blu-ray was struck from a recent 4K restoration. The colors are vibrant and the picture is crisp, showcasing the beautiful photography of Resnais’ regular DP Sacha Vierney (who also shot Belle de jour [review]). The disc has several documentary and interview clips, including a 1969 piece with Seyrig and a 1963 chat with composer Hans Werner Henze (The Lost Honor of Katharine Blum [review]), whose ambient score sits in between classical composition and more modern textures, thus expressing the themes of the movie through sound.

Alain Resnais

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Blu-Ray) - #147

If I could go back in time and rejoin myself in a position just prior to having seen In the Mood for Love, I would do it in a heartbeat. Oh, to relive that first taste of love! To fall under the spell of Wong Kar-Wai's romantic tragedy as an innocent once more! Sure, In the Mood for Love gets deeper and more fulfilling the more often you watch it, but nothing will ever compare to that first blush of discovery, of experiencing its lush pleasures unaware.

In the Mood for Love takes place in Hong Kong in 1962. It begins as two couples, the Chows and the Chans, rent rooms in neighboring apartments. Tellingly, only one spouse from each couple is there to look at the rooms; their absent halves will be absent for most of the movie, and when they do appear, it's either just off screen or with their faces just out of frame. Mrs. Chan (played by Maggie Cheung Man-yuk, from Clean and Irma Vep) is renting a room from the elderly Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan), while Mr. Chow (Infernal Affairs star Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) takes the space next door with the Koos. The floor of their building is its own community. The older landlords regularly share meals and play mahjong late into the night.

For Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan, however, this welcoming environment soon becomes a place of deep loneliness. Their partners are increasingly absent, both apparently called away to work overseas in Japan. The husband and wife that remain eat take-out noodles in their rooms, passing each other in the hallway going to and from the restaurant, on their way out and coming back home from work. They share pleasantries, and discuss a mutual affection for martial arts stories. The connection between them is tenuous at first, but as time passes, they begin to notice they are alone at the same times. Other telltale clues emerge, and before long, they realize that their missing spouses are having an affair.

It's fitting that once the truth is revealed, we never see Mrs. Chow or Mr. Chan again. Their presence is felt, but for all intents and purposes, they are gone and not coming back. The pair they left behind becomes friends, bonding over their shared heartache, and eventually falling in love themselves. Except, the true heartbreak of In the Mood for Love is that these jilted romantics are both too good for their respective spouses and too committed to their marriage vows to follow through on their own feelings. They don't want to stoop to being cheaters themselves. Instead, they spend their time role playing, trying to imagine how Mr. Chan might have seduced Mrs. Chow, and vice versa. They rent a hotel room, but it's to lock themselves away, dreaming up martial arts serials together, imagining a more noble and passionate life than the one they share in the real world.

In the Mood for Love is the second part of a semi-official narrative trilogy that starts with Wong Kar-Wai's second feature Days of Being Wild and concludes with the more recent 2046 [review], which picks up with Mr. Chow years later, alone, a successful writer, broken-hearted. The film perhaps best exemplifies the writer/director's improvisational style, notable for having begun life as a comedy about food before morphing into the sad tale of love's failure. In the Mood for Love has its own unmistakable rhythm, something comparable to the duplication and growth in Alain Resnais' adultery drama Last Year at Marienbad [review], but more self-contained and grounded. You'll be amazed by how many times two people can walk up and down the same stairwell and how it can have a different meaning every time. Pain and disappointment compounds and self-replicates even as love blossoms, the repetition creating echoes that deepen the emotions rather than dull them. Additionally, Mark Galasso's music cues enhance the drama by signaling the different sentimental beats, working the audience to a point where our response to the familiar melodic strains becomes almost Pavlovian. The orchestration is like a glacier slowly blanketing the film in icy sorrow.

The reason so many romantic comedies don't work is the same reason that an untraditional, experimental film like In the Mood for Love does. It's because most romantics, the true ones, are actually cynics. They want to believe in love, but experience has taught them to be distrustful; at the same time, they staunchly defend their romantic ideals. Sure, it would be lovely to see a version of In the Mood for Love where Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow throw caution to the wind and succumb to their passions, but something would be lost as a result. Their love is purified by their pain. Ironically, they are more the married couple than the absent lovers. Their lives devolve into routine and familiarity. Perhaps the true secret of their maintaining their connection is that by denying their desires, those desires increase. As long as they are together, they have something more to look forward to.

In a better world, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung would be the biggest stars on the planet. What they do here is remarkable. The emotional core of In the Mood for Love relies on what isn't said. The communication is all in gesture and expression. Even when the two are speaking, more often than not they are pretending to be someone else. Their games fall apart because they can't fake being what they are not, and there is more honesty in these acts of pretend than you'll find in most performances in mainstream love stories. There is a scene 2/3 into In the Mood for Love when Mrs. Chan breaks down. The pressure of the gossip about her relationship with Chow and the inevitability that she will lose him is too much for her to bear. The actors go to two different places here: she is given to great heaving sobs, he must stand stalwart and resolute. Both portrayals are devastating. The true agony of a relationship ending is evident in how they hold themselves, how they look away from one another. The hurt vibrates through every fiber of their being.

For all the resonance of In the Mood for Love's narrative, what makes it even more special is how beautiful it is to look at. This is the kind of film you could just as easily put on mute and let it run in the background. Directors of photography Mark Li Pin-Bin and Christopher Doyle (Hero) and art director Man Lim-Chung work with Wong Kar-Wai to create a nearly surreal, painterly version of early-'60s Hong Kong. The urban landscapes appear inspired by Edward Hopper, with their solid colors and idyllic lighting, turning the cramped spaces into almost otherworldly, futuristic visions. (Indeed, in 2046, when the story leaps from the real past to an imagined science-fiction future, it's not much of a leap at all.) Part of our willingness to stick with the movie's reverberating storytelling pattern is our willingness to keep staring at all the lovely detail, be it the red-hot décor of the hotel getaway or the hypnotic patterns of Maggie Cheung's amazing wardrobe. In much the same way we revisit our favorite songs (indeed, even on the soundtrack itself, which uses Nat "King" Cole as part of Galasso's score), we also revisit our favorite images, like flipping through a book of photos and paintings.

It's like I said at the outset, In the Mood for Love is a movie you will want to revisit again and again. Your understanding and appreciation of it will only increase, even as you yearn to be as innocent as you were when your path and it first intersected. Because if you could somehow get back there, if Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan could always keep meeting for the first time, then they would never have to endure the anguish that will inevitably follow, and you might still believe that a better outcome is possible.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk. Images here were taken from Criterion's DVD edition (ca. 2002) and were not taken from the Blu-Ray under review.

BLAST FROM MY OWN PAST: LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD - #478

I am surprised this never made it over here from my Confessions of a Pop Fan blog, where I reviewed the film during its revival run. I think maybe when the Criterion was announced I intended to do a separate piece. I'd still like to one day, as I think one's impression of Resnais' masterpiece changes viewing to viewing, but in the meantime, here are my thoughts from April, 2008.

Last Year at Marienbad is a rumination on an affair. Twelve months before, X (Giorgio Albertazzi) met A (Delphine Seyrig) and the two had an affair--or so he says and so she denies. The "plot" of the film is X trying to get her to admit to what happened. They had made an agreement to meet after the year was up, so that she could remove herself from her husband, M (Sacha Pitoeff). The film is structured as a string of elliptical, poetic remembrances, the same event revisited in multiple ways, the setting and the circumstance changing. The director, Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Mon Amour), is attempting to replicate the variables of memory and the flickering flames of passion. A romance may be alive for the man in one way, but alive for the woman in a completely different way, and fear of the future will alter its existence even further.

So it goes, over and over, M's insistence, A's denial, an off-hand admittance, a retreat. All the while, M circles the room, looking like a holdover from Dr. Frankenstein's lab, luring other men, including X, into a card game they can never hope to win. The game is another series of patterns, a sequence of cards displayed the same way each time, removed in a different order, but always with the same result.

Some viewers are going to find Last Year at Marienbad maddening, particularly the first time they see it. The screenplay is by experimental French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose book Jealousy used similar tactics to show a suspicious husband driving himself insane, and I so hated it when it was assigned to me in my first semester of college I've never read another of the man's books. Marienbad will require less of your time, but the film almost demands more patience and concentration, because Resnais, working with director of photography Sacha Vierny and art director Jacques Saulnier, has created such a gorgeous film, it's hard not to stop paying attention to what is happening and just stare. (Special mention must also be given to editor Henri Colpi, because Marienbad is the kind of picture that most likely really came alive in the cutting room.)

Shot at various locations in Bavaria, the opulent estates and posh interiors used for X and A's wanderings are tremendous. More distracting, however, is Delphine Seyrig. Outfitted in gowns from Chanel, she is one of the most dazzling women to ever appear on a movie screen. In some scenes, she wears a dress made entirely of feathers that is to drool over. With her inky black hair and pale skin, Seyrig is practically otherworldly. Though on the surface she must portray a chilly demeanor, her lies are apparent in her face and tentative movements. There seems little debate that A is the woman X is looking for. If she's not, if he really is mistaken, then she surely wishes he wasn't. If his tale is invented, then the variations are merely bait in a fishing expedition. Concoct enough scenarios, and maybe she'll agree to one of them.

BED AND BOARD - (THE ADVENTURES OF ANTOINE DOINEL) - #187

It's in the third Antoine Doinel film, 1970's Bed and Board, that Francois Truffaut's series of films becomes a series proper. Now there is a set style and tone, the happenings vacillating between romantic drama and whimsical comedy, the loose narrative only reflecting traditional plot structure in an overarching sense. In relating the life of Antoine Doinel, small moments are equal to the big changes any individual encounters in his or her worldly progress.

Since Stolen Kisses [review], Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his girlfriend Christine (Claude Jade) have gotten married. They live in an apartment in an active building full of colorful characters--the opera singer and his Italian wife, the shut-in, the alleged strangler. There is a bar in the bottom story, and Antoine works in the courtyard, dying flowers for the shop around the corner. While he changes white carnations to red, Christine gives violin lessons upstairs. They are happy, existing is easy to do.

Truffaut and co-writers Bernard Rivon and Claude de Givray could have easily built Bed and Board into a multi-level comedy based out of this one building. The initial banter between the residents is light and airy, and the personalities are distinct enough to make each person interesting unto his or herself. As the movie progresses, however, these folks turn out to be merely colorful window dressing, the kind of distractions that provide a backdrop for newlywed life, but that soon get supplanted by more serious concerns. Growing up is about letting go of the frivolity and embracing serious responsibility.

In this case, when Antoine's ambition exceeds the limits of the flower stand, he gets a new job working for an American company specializing in hydraulics. His duty is to run the remote control boats that demonstrate the product. (I initially thought the scene of him at the miniature harbor looked like something out of the modern home demonstration in Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle; amusingly, a Tati lookalike shows up mid-movie for an all-too-brief Monsieur Hulot-esque cameo.) Not long after, Christine gets pregnant, and nine months later, the couple has a son. It's around this time that Antoine also takes a mistress, a Japanese woman he meets at work. Kyoto (Mademoiselle Hiroko) represents the new and the different, the kind of romantic adventure that Antoine would have pursued as a kid. When he is caught by Christine, his defense is that Kyoko is not another woman, she is “another world.” Indeed, the portrayal of this woman is rather shallow, she is like a cartoon of what Westerners imagined Japanese women to be. It's a surprisingly faulty facet of Bed and Board. Ironically, Truffaut appears as naïve about Kyoko's culture as his hero, and it bites both of them on the ass.

There is a randomness to Bed and Board that makes it come off as a less serious effort than its predecessors. The Doinel movies seem to be growing increasingly fanciful, almost as if Truffaut was taking on Jean-Luc Godard's penchant for jokey digressions right at the time his former colleague was abandoning “non-serious” cinema. How else does one explain the appearance by Hulot, or the animated flowers that spit out Kyoko's written messages when they bloom? Or Christine's geisha outfit? There's even a little self-reflexive humor. The faux strangler (Claude Véga) turns out to be a comedian, and the whole building sees him on TV doing an impression of Delphine Seyrig, quoting not just Last Year at Marienbad [review], but much to Antoine's horror, the bedroom talk from Stolen Kisses. Previous indiscretions are coming home to roost.

It's hard to say what someone just happening on Bed and Board randomly would make of it. While The 400 Blows [review] and Stolen Kisses can stand on their own independently of the other Doinel films, Bed and Board is nowhere near existing in a vacuum. There is an assumption that you know who Antoine is, and though Truffaut could have easily made a stand-alone film that relates the newly married experience in much the same way Stolen Kisses conveyed the travails of dating and early adulthood, he does less to establish Antoine and Christine as characters separate from what came before. This is a chapter for the initiated only, and is without a doubt lesser for it.

Nevertheless, the film's greatest success really is in how it portrays the ups and downs of being newlyweds. Antoine's growing pains are easy to identify with, though his screw-ups are all the more frustrating for seeing how loving he and Christine are, and how happy they are together, prior to having their son. It's not that Antoine is losing anything, it's just that he's having a hard time letting go, of shutting himself off to past freedoms in order to embrace all that lays before him.

Taking that into consideration, the way Truffaut straddles the fence between the serious relationship drama and the more reckless comedy makes more sense. Bed and Board represents the same transition. It's as if the whole series is maturing before our eyes, and the material is just getting real as we come to our conclusion. (Fittingly, Kyoko  is also finally getting real, or at least getting the last word, expressing a farewell sentiment that isn't an Asian cliché.) Thus, the absence of plot makes room for a true character arc, as Antoine Doinel stops acting like an irresponsible college kid and starts to be a man.

Though, with one more movie to go, it remains to be seen if he can actually hold it together.

NIGHT AND FOG - #197

If Memorial Day is about remembrance, then one should remember clearly and accurately. Maintaining a properly attuned record of history is the purpose of Alain Resnais’ 1955 documentary Night and Fog, a short but potent chronicle of the Nazi concentration camps, from construction to destruction. From the very opening, Resnais seeks to remind us that the atrocities perpetrated in WWII are not an example of extraordinary human circumstance, but born of something more common, more baseline, something primal within ourselves. Resnais states it from the very start: All roads lead to human cruelty, whether intentional or not, and we must be vigilant to make sure the worst paths are never obscured.

Night and Fog is built around what was, at the time, contemporary footage of the closed camps. The grass was growing over the rubble, the sun was shining on the wreckage as if nothing had ever happened. For all intents and purposes, the ruins could have been any working community that had been shut down--and using archival footage and photographs, Resnais shows us that, in their way, that’s exactly what the death camps were. The Nazis established their own normalcy. The imprisoned had structure. There was commerce, labor, and politics.

And there was also brutality and humiliation. Resnais eases us into the true horror. His narration is matter-of-fact, Hanns Eisler’s music is at times jaunty, underscoring the dark comedy of a death mask. “We must live with this, as we do everything else,” Night and Fog seems to say. “This is what was, and this is what is.” Clarity is essential.

Yet, as the film takes us deeper into the lifecycle of the concentration camp, the presentation ever so subtly shifts. There is no denying the gruesome facts. People died. They died horribly. The perpetrators presented an ordered front, but behind that were the worst things you could imagine. Resnais’ point seems to be that this is the easiest aspect to forget. As history becomes comfortable, as we get used to the past being the past, the mind glosses over the jagged edges. Two years prior to Night and Fog, there was Stalag 17--a good movie, but one that must have seemed unimaginable to many. A concentration camp comedy! And one with no Jews, no ovens, no mass graves! Night and Fog is the antidote to such flippancy.

Memorial Day can often give over to rah-rah sloganeering--which, let’s not get it wrong, it’s not the same thing as honoring the soldiers or paying tribute to a good fight and hard victories. Those things should be remembered, too, but not at the exclusion of the other side. We should consider the cost of war, the price paid by those who participated, be they soldier or civilian. You can watch a John Wayne movie, you can watch Saving Private Ryan, but you should also watch Night and Fog. Its chilly denouement will make the heroes of those other films seem all the more heroicyou’re your considering what their sacrifice was for. 

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 7/10

IN THEATRES...

* Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, another biopic of the French designer, this time with the gorgeous Anna Mouglalis as Chanel.

* The Complete Metropolis, the restored version of Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece. Opens this week at Cinema 21 in Portland.

* Dinner for Schmucks, a good comedy that could have been great had it not played it so safe. Great performances by Steve Carrel and Paul Rudd, though.

* The Girl Who Played with Fire, the disappointing second part of the Millennium Trilogy. Still worth it for Noomi Rapace, though.

* Inception, Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated mind bender really, really delivers.

* The Kids Are All Right, the funny and touching new family drama with Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. Yup, the moms are all right, too.

* The Killer Inside of Me, Michael Winterbottom's strange adaptation of Jim Thompson maybe plays it too straight, but Casey Affleck is riveting.

* Predators, the fun but flawed third installment in the sci-fi adventure franchise.

* Salt was the movie, I was the snail. Angelina Jolie is highly watchable, but the movie slips off a rung on its evolutionary ladder and falls down fast.

* South of the Border, Oliver Stone's documentary about South American leaders...and Oliver Stone.

* Wild Grass, the latest from master director Alain Resnais is pretty goddamn terrible. As I say in my review, it's like a parody of foreign films by someone whose never seen a foreign film.

ON DVD...

* Chicago: The Original 1927 Film Restored, the original adaptation of the story of Roxie Hart, with Cecil B. DeMille in charge.

* The City of Your Final Destination, the latest from Merchant Ivory never quite takes off.

* Date Night: Extended Edition: Steve Carrel is two for two this week for being in movies that he's better than. He and Tina Fey prove they can make even a mediocre production entertaining.

* Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 5, the Warner Bros. series returns, but with its weakest entry. A few good choices out of the eight movies here, but mostly middling.

* Vincere, Marco Bellocchio's bizarre love story of Mussolini and his mistress, with a knock-out performance from Giovanna Mezzogiorno. Mama mia, she's gorgeous!

* The Wind Journeys, a folkloric Colombian movie about accordion masters, including their wicked insult battles.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 06/09

IN THEATRES...

* Away We Go, the Sam Mendes-helmed comedy with John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph is mostly good, but the literary pretensions of authors Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida sometimes get in the way.

* Chéri, the lacklustre reteaming of Stephen Frears, Christopher Hampton, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

* Easy Virtue, Colin Firth rises high in this Noel Coward adaptation, but other problems get in the way of this simple pleasure.

* Food, Inc., an illuminating look at how food became big business and what's wrong with that development.

* The Hangover, a good, raunchy comedy made all the better by Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis.

* O' Horten, a quietly involving portrait of a changing life from Norwegian director Bent Hamer.

* Year One, Jack Black and Michael Cera starring in the worst movie of the year so far. Avoid at all costs.

Also, keep your eye out for more reviews of summer movies that are already in limited release. I should be posting my thoughts on the Oscar-winning Japanese film Departures, Moon, and Woody Allen's Whatever Works to DVDTalk.com this Thursday.

ON DVD...

* Au Bonheur des Dames, Julien Duvivier's 1930 silent adaptation of Emile Zola is visually stunning but a little weak in the end.

* Brief Encounter (1974), a BBC remake with Richard Burton and Sophia Loren that holds its own against the older David Lean version.

* Diary of a Suicide, a lost French film from the early 1970s that was better off not found. With Delphine Seyrig and Sami Frey.

* Eastbound & Down - The Complete First Season, the latest release from HBO's TV division is the perfect vehicle for comedian Danny McBride. Dirty, mean-spirited fun! Includes three episodes directed by David Gordon Green.

* Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth, an electrified portrait of the influential writer, a singular personality if ever there was one.

* Lonely are the Brave, a fantastic forgotten gem with Kirk Douglas as the last cowboy to stand against the modern world. With Gena Rowlands, Walter Matheau, and a script by Dalton Trumbo.

* Lookin' to Get Out: Extended Version, a little-known later work from Hal Ashby gets a new airing.

* Two more 1980s films from Alain Resnais, even more disappointing than the last two: Life is a Bed of Roses and I Want to Go Home, Resnais' flaccid collaboration with Jules Feiffer.

* Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, an incredible music documentary profiling an enigmatic performer.

* The Strange One, a 1950s drama penned by Calder Willingham and showing hazing at a military college. Features a stand-out performance by a young Ben Gazzara in his first film.

* The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, notable for being Paramount's first color picture, but a bit dull. With Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sidney, and Fred MacMurray; directed by Henry Hathaway.

* Une Femme Mariée, Godard's 1964 will-she-or-won't-she portrait of a married woman torn between husband and lover. Features a fantastic performance by Macha Méril.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 05/09

If you're looking for something to do this Thursday, come out and see the gallery show featuring artwork for my next book with Joëlle Jones, You Have Killed Me. Details here.

IN THEATRES...

* 12, a truly awful Russian remake of 12 Angry Men.

* The Brothers Bloom, the second film from Brick's Rian Johnson is the movie to see this weekend. The trailer only touches on it, it doesn't do it justice. With Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, and Rinko Kikuchi.

* Rudo y Cursi, a cute sports movie reuniting the stars of Y tu mama tambien.

* Star Trek--holy crap, this was really good! And I don't even like Star Trek! Who'd have thunk?!

* Terminator Salvation, a total letdown. The franchise is dead. But you're going to go see it anyway, so if nothing else, heed my advice and bring a neck pillow, because you're going to want to take a nap.

* Up! Oh, Pixar, how do you keep doing it? I love you so.

And don't forget Revanche, which has been playing in New York and has already been reviewed on this site.

ON DVD...

* 3 Seconds Before Explosion, a fun but formulaic 1960s crime movie from Japan that doesn't quite live up to the promise of its name.

* Alexandra, a hypnotizing portrait of the state of things by Alexander Sokurov.

* El Dorado - The Centennial Collection, a fun latter-day western from Howard Hawks, starring John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Caan.

* Enchanted April, an old Merchant Ivory wannabe. The magic is gone.

* Girl on a Motorcycle, wherein the 1960s drives up its own ass, taking Marianne Faithfull and Alain Delon with it.

* Just Another Love Story, an uneven crime film from Denmark.

* Man Hunt, Fritz Lang's 1941 thriller about a man who would've killed Hitler, but found himself on the run instead.

* Two 1980s films from Alain Resnais: Mélo, an emotionally powerful drama of infidelity, and Love Unto Death, which turns out to be overly intellectual and kind of dull.

* Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes' literary adaptation with Leonardo DiCaprio and the divine Kate Winslet is one of my favorite films from 2008.

* Wendy and Lucy, a quiet portrait of solitude and struggle with a stand-out performance from Michelle Williams.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 4/08

Given that I write more reviews than what you see here, below is a list of non-Criterion films I covered in the past month that may be of interest to Criterion fans.

I'm definitely going to get a review up before I go to Dallas this weekend for Free Comic Book Day. I hope, I hope. It would be my first week of no reviews if I fail. I've actually got both of May's Louis Malle releases to watch, so it will likely be one of those.

IN THEATRES...

* Last Year at Marienbad, the Alain Resnais classic is doing the revival rounds.

* My Blueberry Nights, Wong Kar-Wai's first English-language film gets overanalyzed yet again.

* Shine a Light, where Martin Scorsese meets the Rolling Stones to create an IMAX concert experience.

ON DVD...

* Dam Street, a Chinese film, directed by Li Yu, showing the stigma and long-lasting effects of Communism's strict moral code in the 1980s/90s on a teenage girl who becomes pregnant.

* The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, one of the best movies of last year. A tremendous achievement by Julian Schnabel.

* The Pied Piper of Hützovina, a documentary on Gogolo Bordello's Eugene Hutz returning to the Ukraine.

* Starting Out in the Evening, in which Frank Langella gives a tremendous performance as a writer at the tail end of his career and facing the outer edges of obscurity.

4 X AGNES VARDA (#418): LA POINTE COURTE - #419

"I came to make noise, but silence has won out."

Agnès Varda is one of the less celebrated directors working amidst the French New Wave, always seeming just a little bit outside of the irascible boys club that sprang out of Cahiers du cinema. I get the sense, though, that this may be how she wanted it to a degree. Though I haven't seen a ton of her films, the ones I have seem strike me as being more about observation, about a certain separateness. The director making the film likes to watch, to chronicle, and I imagine her as someone who was always there, maybe not as prolific as Truffaut or Godard, but never absent nonetheless.

Her first film, La Pointe Courte, part of the 4 X Agnès Varda boxed set, actually predates the Nouvelle Vague by many years. Made in 1954, one could argue for it as the clear link between the French troublemakers and the Italian Neorealists who inspired them. Though the film is sold on the relationship element, the troubled marriage that is the hook of the film--its two participants, Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret, are the faces on the DVD cover--it's about much more than that, and I wouldn't argue with you if you said Varda had used the couple as an excuse to shoot the La Pointe Courte fishing village, that it was the people working the lagoon that really interested her. Indeed, the credits even say as much, with the auteur sharing writing credit with the citizens of La Pointe.

In fact, it takes us a long time to see the husband and wife, and even when we do, they spend their first scene with their backs to the audience. The first several minutes of the movie instead are spent establishing the difficult conflict of the fishermen. Their waters have been semi-quarantined due to allegations of contamination. They know the shellfish they harvest are not bad enough to be causing bodies to pile up, so they go ahead and fish anyway, their survival taking precedence over the slowly unwinding red tape that is trying to sort out whatever the problem may be. The early scenes in the film show how three generations of one family live on the same land, in interconnecting houses, and work together to throw the government off of their seaside scent when Grandpa is spotted in forbidden waters.

Varda and cameramen Paul Soulignac and Louis Stein move freely through these buildings, uninhibited by walls or even their equipment, capturing a sleeping cat here, a pile of shells there. The look is documentary, but the way the cameras fly over the landscape is almost epic, a working man's David Lean shooting on DV. Like De Sica, Varda is seeking the visual poetry of real life. The burly fisherman and their equally burly wives and daughters, the single mother with seven children by multiple men, the trash and debris scattered around an impoverished homestead--these are meals gobbled up by the hungry lenses.

La Pointe Courte isn't just a random setting, however, it's also a metaphor for that footnote of a relationship. Just as some unknown rancor has tainted the waters, the marriage between Elle (Monfort) and Lui (Noiret) also has something rancid under the surface that they are trying to uncover. They know they are unhappy, but the tests haven't been run to pinpoint exactly what is making them so. Lui grew up at La Pointe, and so he has devised a plan to leave the hustle and bustle of Paris and get back to the simple life of his hometown. It's a forced nostalgia for supposedly better times, and maybe if he can recapture his childhood, he can also rediscover the salad days of early wedded life from five years before. There have also been five days that he has waited for Elle to join him there, every morning going to the train station to see if his spouse is a new arrival. It's a romantic gesture, but futile in its way, just fumbling in the dark.

The way the couple walks the countryside, discussing their fracture, reminds me of the early '60s films of Michelangelo Antonioni. There is also something of the endless discussions in Alain Resnais' breakthrough films, and not for nothing is Resnais one of the credited editors on La Pointe Courte. The way the mis-en-scene moves us through the rundown shacks of the village is like a Bizarro version of the similar tours of grand mansions in Last Year at Marienbad. The interesting contrast comes in the fact that for as natural as the footage of the fishermen feels, the stuff with the couple is stagy and heavily directed. They stare in the camera, framed by their surroundings and by the screen, speaking in poetic musings in direct juxtaposition to the less mannered dialogue of the workers. Even the subtitles reflect this, with dropped consonants and slang showing the less erudite speech patterns of the regular folks. In fact, the townspeople think their visitors' main problem is they talk too much, and listening to their conversation go in ever-widening circles until they finally exhaust themselves, this theory appears to not be entirely wrong. Likewise, Elle and Lui can't merely walk somewhere, they are always entering a landscape, always creating a shot. Note how many times a train of some kind forces them to wait to cross its tracks, cutting them off from their destination the way Elle's not-taken trip had separated them for the previous week, the way their falling out of love splits them now.

"Nature separates us," Elle says at one point. She means that if a man and a woman come together and they really aren't meant to be, the time and tide of life will push them apart, but she's really summing up everything about La Pointe Courte, isn't she? Style, fashion, the way of filming--this separates the couple from reality (just as it separated Hollywood convention from burgeoning international cinema). The pair couldn't be farther apart from the fishermen even when they are standing amongst them. It's this distance that has put the lovers where they are, they've lost sight of what's important. What are their petty problems next to the greater struggle for survival, the food chain, a dead child?

Yet, there is also hope to be had. Despite Lui and his lingering doubts, La Pointe works its charms on Elle. She finds peace in the unadorned existence of its people. The lesson she learns is that love is not about the passion of first romance, just as living isn't about the idylls of childhood or a day is not about the sunset that starts it. Sure, you can know that a better lagoon is just beyond a certain point, and that's where the best fish are, but just because you can't get there yet doesn't mean you shouldn't make do. Don't ever stop striving, but also don't strive at the expense of what is in front of you. Happiness isn't so easy to come by, and if it wasn't work, it wouldn't be worth it.