Adieu, Ingmar Bergman

I have spent one month without TV, without reading the paper and without a cellphone. This may be why I am feeling fresh as a morning dewdrop and as stressed as a rose. However, two friends informed me today of the passing of Ingmar Bergman. He had a long, incredibly creative life, so I'm not that saddened by his demise. He worked almost to the end and never stopped achieving excellence.
He left behind a unique and extraordinarily important contribution to the art of cinema (and theater). He was not for all tastes (you have to be in the mood) but he must have influenced absolutely everybody, whether they were conscious of it or not. His films were visually stunning and emotionally harrowing. So we will rent them out on Netflix to pay due homage.

Dirk Bogarde en Plein Air

They have free open air cinema at the Parc de la Villette pretty much everyday in the summer. They rent comfy lounge chairs or you can sit sur l'herbe like the famous peeps in the Manet painting. People bring a picnic, which in France means a gourmet feast, not Fanta and Cheetos. The screen is enormous. They wait until around 10:30 pm when it gets dark and voilá: The Servant, by Joseph Losey, screenplay by Harold Pinter, genius acting by Dirk Bogarde, in a pristine, gorgeous copy.
I hadn't seen it in ages. It is still visually stunning. It's still chillingly creepy and vicious, the humor poisonous, bless Harold Pinter. (I remember the elation some of us felt last year when we learned the news of his Nobel Prize. Go Harold!) And Dirk Bogarde is so unbelievably perverse and resentful and mean, it is sheer joy to see such excellence, such intelligence, such elegant command, such perfection. A master of the minimal. The undisputed genius of the unspoken. So evil. He rooooooocks in this movie.
And everybody else follows suit. James Fox is excellent and so is Sarah Miles. I was thinking that it's not easy to peg this movie down. If it is a condemnation of the absurdity of the British class system, the thorn on the side is that the servant is such a terrible bastard.
In a way, this must be the fear of the upper crust, The Revenge of the Serfs. The servants finally taking over and exacting their long awaited revenge. The beauty here is that the servant is a worse snob than the master and equally revolting. He acts out of a sense of setting things right yes, of getting his due but not out of justice or righteousness, let alone fairness or decency. It actually seems just bitter, mean and corrupt, like the system itself, which makes this quite a provocative film. You reap what you sow it seems to say. Raise a servant class and it will take your eyes out. I wonder if it was wishful thinking on the part of Harold Pinter. On the other hand, without the class politics, it is a great study on psychological manipulation. It is a bit over the top, but it works. And as Bea points out, must have influenced Roman Polanski greatly. I'm checking dates on the imdb, because I'm pretty sure Repulsion came after and there are many stylistic echoes between the two films.
Many people left during the movie because it was hard to read the subtitles and because the pacing is rather glacial and perhaps because the French may have little patience with the British stiff upper lip, which in this movie is stiffened to a gelid peak. Also, La Villette is a very working class area so it's not like you have a bunch of snobby eggheads in the park applauding the rise of the masses. Still, at the end, those who stayed actually applauded. That made my day. And then we all ran like maniacs to catch le dernier metro because service is interrupted weekdays at 1 am. That's how it is.

Dirk Bogarde en Plein Air

They have free open air cinema at the Parc de la Villette pretty much everyday in the summer. They rent comfy lounge chairs or you can sit sur l'herbe like the famous peeps in the Manet painting. People bring a picnic, which in France means a gourmet feast, not Fanta and Cheetos. The screen is enormous. They wait until around 10:30 pm when it gets dark and voilá: The Servant, by Joseph Losey, screenplay by Harold Pinter, genius acting by Dirk Bogarde, in a pristine, gorgeous copy.
I hadn't seen it in ages. It is still visually stunning. It's still chillingly creepy and vicious, the humor poisonous, bless Harold Pinter. (I remember the elation some of us felt last year when we learned the news of his Nobel Prize. Go Harold!) And Dirk Bogarde is so unbelievably perverse and resentful and mean, it is sheer joy to see such excellence, such intelligence, such elegant command, such perfection. A master of the minimal. The undisputed genius of the unspoken. So evil. He rooooooocks in this movie.
And everybody else follows suit. James Fox is excellent and so is Sarah Miles. I was thinking that it's not easy to peg this movie down. If it is a condemnation of the absurdity of the British class system, the thorn on the side is that the servant is such a terrible bastard.
In a way, this must be the fear of the upper crust, The Revenge of the Serfs. The servants finally taking over and exacting their long awaited revenge. The beauty here is that the servant is a worse snob than the master and equally revolting. He acts out of a sense of setting things right yes, of getting his due but not out of justice or righteousness, let alone fairness or decency. It actually seems just bitter, mean and corrupt, like the system itself, which makes this quite a provocative film. You reap what you sow it seems to say. Raise a servant class and it will take your eyes out. I wonder if it was wishful thinking on the part of Harold Pinter. On the other hand, without the class politics, it is a great study on psychological manipulation. It is a bit over the top, but it works. And as Bea points out, must have influenced Roman Polanski greatly. I'm checking dates on the imdb, because I'm pretty sure Repulsion came after and there are many stylistic echoes between the two films.
Many people left during the movie because it was hard to read the subtitles and because the pacing is rather glacial and perhaps because the French may have little patience with the British stiff upper lip, which in this movie is stiffened to a gelid peak. Also, La Villette is a very working class area so it's not like you have a bunch of snobby eggheads in the park applauding the rise of the masses. Still, at the end, those who stayed actually applauded. That made my day. And then we all ran like maniacs to catch le dernier metro because service is interrupted weekdays at 1 am. That's how it is.

Godard le Fou

There was a reason why I didn't stand in line to see Godard films but I had forgotten what it was. Until I went to see Pierrot Le Fou, playing at BAM. Then I remembered: the pretentiousness. The smugness.
I like some Godard films: Breathless and A Band Apart are lovely. I appreciate his enormous contribution to the evolution of cinema. The free, fluid camera, the spontaneity, the playfulness, the love of the medium. But 1. I much prefer his contemporaries Truffaut, Louis Malle, J. P. Melville; 2. the pretentiousness is hard to bear. You can give him brownie points for experimentation with a disjointed narrative. Fine. But Pierrot le Fou is maddening. Tries to be funny and is only in spurts. It seems, with all due respect, sophomoric. You can entertain yourself watching Godard's beautiful muse, the sprightly Anna Karina, who is lovingly shot and who is a master at charming gallic nonchalance. You can try to find the missing charm in Jean Paul Belmondo's completely indifferent performance as you marvel at his charisma and the geography of his face, complete with dangling cigarette at all times. You can try to forgive the cheap, stupid shots at Americans that befit a bad student film. If you have patience with auteurs whose motivation seems to be to epater le bourgeois, this may be an enjoyable movie for you. Not for me.

Persepolis

O Joy: At the Quai de Seine movie theaters they have a little boat that takes you from one side of the canal to the other, as the two cineplexes face each other across the lovely canal. Nothing could make me happier than to arrive at the cinema on a boat. Nothing.
We went to see Persepolis, the animated version of the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. Although we saw it in French sans subtitles, we loved it. Animated films usually do not withstand long narratives. This one is in black and white and lasts about an hour and forty minutes and it's never boring, because it tells a great story very intelligently and eloquently. It is beautifully animated, very funny and splendidly acted by the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, her mom Catherine Deneuve, and Danielle Darrieux, among others. I'm really happy I saw it because I am not a fan of graphic novels and I would have missed Persepolis if it weren't for the movie. Also a first: it is by a woman, with wonderful female central characters, who are smart and strong and complex in their humanity and thist is such a breath of fresh air, after all the boy-induced mayhem of animation, that you feel like you are breathing pure oxygen from the Swiss Alps, if you will forgive the awful metaphor.
Satrapi's style is extraordinarily simple, yet visually gorgeous and amazingly expressive; it has none of the useless bombast and pyrotechnics of the frantic animated craziness from Pixar and Disney, which is super well done, but disguises the lack of an interesting story with too much going on. Persepolis has done incredibly well in France for an animated film of this sort, which is not for children. I hope, though I doubt it, because of the subject matter and the subtlety, that it will do equally well in the States. However, in case this last statement gives our audiences a bad case of the rash, let me qualify it by saying the magic word that always soothes their fears: Persepolis is very entertaining. Voila! You can see it now.

Fou for Film

Every time you buy a movie ticket in France, it doesn't matter whether you are watching Shrek le Troisieme or the complete works of Tarkovsky or a French movie such as Je Deteste Les Enfantes Des Autres, the state takes 11% off the ticket price for the support of the French film industry. They finance their own films with that. That is why the state of cinema here is the best anywhere. The respect and love showered on film here is enormous.
So much so, that while I was visiting the Museé du Cinema at the Cinematheque Français, two visitors almost came to blows. Unfortunately, the reason shall remain a mystery. I only heard the screaming because at the precise moment of the melee, I was in the bathroom. Awful timing.
In any case, this is what every country should do to support their film industry, including the US, where given the monstrosity of the Hollywood juggernaut, the lack of public support for film is shocking and obscene. In fact, I think the state, any state, should tax Hollywood with a special tax for film support, conservation, education, etc. Let me know when you're done laughing.

Fou for Film II

The French will see anything. From the most obscure auteur to The Transformers, and they will do so with an equal spirit of curiosity and passion. They will deconstruct Tarkovsky with the same seriousness they will afford the Transformers, God love 'em (the French, not the 'formers).
They gave Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rourke a medal each. I rest my case.
I visited the Cinematheque Francais today. It has a Museum of Cinema that is charming, horribly signalized and limited but great fun. But what they really care about is the films themselves. The programming is typical. They have an homage to Preston Sturges, a retrospective of Terence Fisher, a British purveyor of grade z gothic schlock, I believe, and a retrospective of a Brazilian filmmaker I have never heard of. There is room for everyone! And this is not counting what they show in repertory which is basically everything ever put on film.
They are also showing a very interesting, brainy exhibition of Magnum photographers and the films that influenced them. It is very interesting, and as opposed to what I usually see in the States, bracingly idiosyncratic and strong minded. But this is what astounds me, the Cinematheque being a cultural institute run with state money. They show a highly explicit erotic film as part of the exhibition. They put a tiny little warning sign before you go in saying that due to the strong nature of some images, they RECOMMEND that this film is not suitable for children. Understatement of the century, where I come from. I can't imagine any public institution in the US showing this kind of material, which by the way was quite thought provoking, and sexy, yes. I haven't made up my mind whether it is really classy porn or erotic art, but I am tilting towards the second.